Wilderness

I kind of feel like I should comment on Gen. Petraeus and Amb. Crocker's testimony before Congress the other day, or on my thoughts on the surge, or on Republican sex scandals, or on any number of significant events that have occurred on the national scene on the past few weeks. But, I operate always on a limited energy budget, and so I'm not going to waste effort saying what so many have said so well already: there's a major crisis in leadership going on right now, and if someone doesn't step up to fix it, we're all screwed. Or maybe we're all screwed anyway.

Instead of going on about that, though, I wanted to write about the plants that are growing up through our deck. My husband and I are currently living in his grandmother's house while she is in assisted living, nominally so we can take care of the upkeep of the house but really because we're dirt poor and she's helping us out. It's a nice house, 3 bedrooms and a finished basement and a pool out back. Around this pool, there is a deck, with fencing to keep out small children and make the insurance happy. And since no one lived here for about a year before my husband and I moved in, there are plants growing up from underneath the decking, through the boards to where they can get sun. If it all was left alone, I imagine eventually they would swallow the deck, it would rot down to dirt like dead wood is supposed to, and you'd have a thicket of bushes. Instead of allowing that to happen, I've pulled out most of them (and by pulled out, I mean chopped off, as I don't have the muscle strength to actually pull roots out of the ground).

This one, though, I've allowed to stay.

I've told myself that I'll tear it out once the flowers are gone. I don't know if I will; its my job, sort of, it's part of what I've said I'll do in exchange for living here in a nice suburban house instead of a crappy inner city studio, but it breaks my heart to think of destroying something so beautiful.

I wish I knew what kind of flowers these are. I'm sure they have a name or two, and if I was educated I would know what it is. On the other hand, maybe knowing its name would take away from its beauty. This is a plant that grows where it isn't supposed to grow, life in defiance of order; a name would impose order on it. I think that in some ways, things are less alive when they're more orderly.

All my life until now, I've lived close to wild places. I grew up surrounded by mountains; we weren't that far into the sticks, but the sticks weren't that far from us either. The major attraction of the town I grew up in was the hiking; the next nearest town was famous for its waterfall. When I went to school in Seattle, the ocean was always close; Puget Sound is as domesticated as ocean gets, but that's not saying much. Even when I was in the Army in California, the ocean was right there, you could walk down to it, and hear the seals calling at night from all over the peninsula.

Now, in St Louis, I don't get that sense of wilderness anywhere I've been so far. It's all paved over, settled, obedient land. Even the river is brown and slow and tamed; maybe when there are floods, its different, but I have yet to see it. It doesn't feel right to walk, or, more accurately, drive, around the city, and not see a single thing that isn't firmly under human control. I can't help but think that living without wilderness is a kind of poverty.

I just finished reading Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, by Jon Krakauer, a history of Mormon fundamentalism leading up to the murder of Brenda Lafferty and her baby daughter Erica in Utah in 1984. Its a complex book, and has started me thinking on a variety of subjects, from the nature of religious belief, to my religious upbringing, to the priorities of human rights groups that condemn inhumane practices in other countries while our own government turns a blind eye to the sexual slavery of girls in polygamist communities in Arizona. Unfortunately, my mind works slowly enough that I don't have anything very coherent to say on these topics at the moment.

I will say, though, that this book reminded me that secular people who get hysterical about the Quiverfull movement, or who see it as some kind of right-wing conspiracy to take over the country by breeding little fundamentalists, are way overreacting.

I'm not saying that people who refuse to use birth-control because God Said to Have Kids aren't crazy; they are; they're also incorrect. If you're not allowed to use birth control to regulate pregnancy, you shouldn't be allowed to use vaccinations to regulate child deaths, or cars to regulate how your legs hurt when you walk ten miles. Trusting the Lord to decide the size of your family by doing nothing about it yourself makes no more sense than trusting the Lord to feed you when you refuse to raise your hand to work at growing food. The racism that proponents of these theories often spout is also disturbing. Hectoring white women to have more white babies to save the white race before little brown babies overrun the world is the stupidest reason to have a child that I've ever heard. And people who say things like "They don't believe in God, so they think we have to conserve what we have. But in my belief system, He's going to give us a new earth," to explain why overpopulation isn't a problem, are tragically detached from reality.

However, I've read the Bible, and I'm somewhat familiar with the history of the church, and it seems to me that the one thing you can count on about kids is that they're going to do things that you don't expect, particularly when it comes to religion. Great prophets throughout the Bible are shown again and again to have no control over what their children believe, say or do. Krakauer tells the history of numerous Mormons who decided that their leaders were wrong about essential doctrines, leading to more sects of Mormon fundamentalism than I think anyone has counted. He also tells the stories of girlchildren who grew up brainwashed to believe that they were supposed to be married off as a third or fourth wife at 13 or 14 in order to save their souls, but instead of cooperating talked back, called the cops, or ran off.

I guess what I'm saying is, if you're trying to produce a religious army, having children is a foolish way to do it. Children have a way of growing up and becoming their own people. It's no easier to convince your child that what you say is true than it is to convince anyone else; sometimes it's even more difficult, because children live with you, they grow up in your presence and they know all your mistakes and weaknesses and lies.

Here is no water but only rock

I'm reading this book, A Desert Dies, by Michael Asher, an Englishman, about his travels in northern Sudan in 1982-85. It's quite interesting, and puts me in mind of my earlier post about how humans preserve our habitats. I am beginning to think that Jane Jacobs is overly optimistic in (at least) two ways: she professes a belief that humans are able to preserve habitat in the long run, and she doesn't count genocide as one way we reduce pressure on our habitats.

Desertification is a huge problem in sub-Saharan regions, partly due to climate change but also because of human activity. I first really saw the impact of this when I visited Timbuktu, a city that once was one of the richest in Africa and now can barely sustain itself because the desert has crept down around it and buried it. Overgrazing, changes in plant species and other agricultural techniques, and climate phenomena such as drought or major erosion of topsoil work together to create desert out of fertile land. In Africa, the hardest hit area is the Sahel, the area between the barren sand-sea of the Sahara and the fertile jungles of the south, as shown on this map. The effect is even more clear on this satellite map of Sudan. The dry, yellow north blends into the soft, green south along a ragged border.

Interestingly, if you look at maps of the current genocidal conflict in Darfur, the areas of conflict neatly line up with the area where the desert meets arable land.

There are obviously more factors involved in the Darfur genocide than only the presence or lack of water. Religion is a powerful force in the region, as it is everywhere. The north of Sudan is primarily Muslim, while the south is a more diverse collection of animists and Christians, who are less fond of sharia law. There is a significant ethnic divide between the southern black African tribes and the northern Arab-African tribes. This ethnic divide has a long history: before European colonization, Arabs took black Africans as slaves, and Asher wonders whether the practice continues clandestinely. The party of Arabs with whom Asher traveled always refers to their non-Arab countrymen as 'slaves.' On top of that, the northerners are primarily nomadic herders, while the southerners are primarily farmers. This economic division may be the most severe.

Asher quotes one older member of the party:

I do not like this country. These slaves stop us watering our herds. They hold us back at the watering-place and say, "The wells are dry!" or they tell us, "Pay us money and we will let you water!" Curse their fathers! In the old days the Kababish would not come near this land of blacks! The grazing was good in the north then. .... The best ranges are gone and we come further south every year. ... Every day we remain here, we run the risk of losing stock [to theft]. Those [farmers] have no honor and they do not fear God.

This makes me think that no one division can be separated from the rest. If the racism were eliminated, the religious bias would remain. If the religious bias were eliminated, the economic bias would remain. If the economic bias were eliminated, the historical injustice would remain. And if all else were eliminated, still the desert would remain. It is entirely possible to view the situation as an environmental correction, as evidence that the current population cannot be supported on the failing land, and the pressure on the habitat is causing the culture to burst at the seams.

Which raises the question: should we try to stop the genocide? Can we even hope to stop it, try as we may? If desertification leads to war, should our efforts go to peace or to responsible stewardship of the land? Or perhaps, instead of trying to broker a peace deal so that all tribes can live peacefully together, should we forbid anyone from living in this area? If the pressure that causes conflict is so fundamental to the area, perhaps the only way to solve it is to remove everyone from the area until the land can recover. If our natural impulses that work to preserve the land are too horrific, maybe humanity as a community needs to approach the problem rationally instead of instinctively, and consider major changes to the way we deal with crises of all types.

The Storm

I remember once when I was 13 or 14, in the fall, there was a series of violent thunderstorms in the Valley, huge crashing storms, that felled trees and flooded ditches and roads. I was fascinated by them, as I've always been fascinated by storms, and one evening I slipped outside to go for a walk in the rain, without a jacket or umbrella. I was soaked through in seconds, the rain came down in sheets and blurred my glasses so I couldn't see, and the wind made it difficult to stand upright. It was glorious. The sheer energy of it was amazing, I could smell it in the air and feel it on my skin, and somehow it drew me outside in spite of the miserable cold and wet. That storm had an essence of wildness, of alien, other character. I stood in the middle of it and couldn't touch it, no human could tame it, it was purely out of mortal control.

I'm still in love with storms. The smell of thunder on the air is one of my favorite smells; in all the world it is the only thing that makes me alive when I'm tired.

Serving Your Country

Sometimes, when I feel like making myself feel sick- you know, when my GERD/IBS isn't doing that for me already- I contemplate my outstanding disability claims.

It's been two years now since I was medically discharged from the Army. As soon as I got out, I put in a disability claim for the stomach problems I had pretty much the whole last year I was in (and which I still suffer from). Throwing up all the time, cramps, bloating, gas and heartburn aren't enough to make you totally disabled, of course (although the esophageal cancer GERD can cause will often actually kill you), but the VA, unlike Social Security, grades disability on a percentage scale, and will often give small payments for minor things. A retired Sergeant Major I used to know gets 10% disability for a tiny scar on his ear; visible scarring is considered disabling, even if you can barely tell it's there. So I had a legitimate hope that even though I was not a Sergeant Major, someone in power would think that I was entitled to something for my constant illness.

It's been two years, and I still haven't heard back from the VA about whether or not I am entitled to disability on this matter. First they told me that because I didn't have a clear diagnosis, I didn't actually have anything wrong with me. I was tempted to go and vomit on the desk of the person who made that decision, but instead just appealed it. They got my appeal paperwork and treated it like a brand new claim, telling me that I would have to prove that I'd had the condition since I was in the military. Never mind that all of my medical records are either military or VA, I had to request copies- from them- and then provide them with those copies.

I'm back in the waiting phase, again. I suppose sometime they will have to make a decision, and I assume that if they even glance at my medical records, they will see that I'm entitled to compensation, because I am. I joined the military in good faith and got wrecked while trying to serve my country, and I know that that's true no matter how many bureaucrats deny it.

When I'm not vomiting bile (ha!) over frustration with the system, I daydream about what I could buy with the back pay I would get if the VA found in my favor. I am fully disabled by my fibromyalgia and unable to obtain or keep employment, according to two government agencies and one non-profit tasked with helping disabled people find work, but VA regulation only allows a finding of 40% disability for fibromyalgia, so I live on $556 a month. A finding of only 20% disability for my GERD/IBS, just one step up from a tiny scar on your ear, would net me back pay of $5400 for the two years I've been waiting.

There are a lot of things I could spend $5400 on, but I think my highest priority is dental care. I daydream about getting my teeth cleaned; I could even get a few cavities filled before that money ran out! Screw new clothes and a tattoo and a haircut from someone other than my mother, dental care is my big dream.

Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like if I hadn't joined the Army. I probably would have finished university a couple years ago, maybe gone on to post-graduate work if I found something that I found more interesting than the rest of the world. Maybe I'd be working at a real job, with health insurance and so on. Maybe not. Maybe I would still worry about not being able to save my teeth, maybe I would still be disabled in some way. There is definitely enough doubt in me, though, that whenever I see ads enticing young people to join the military, it makes me see red.

Electronic Friendship

This morning I took two friends to the airport, to see them off. They'd been visiting us since last Friday, and I was still heart-sick to see them go. We actually had several other people over as well, but these two were the last to leave; and now I'm all alone again.

I have never been good at making friends. In fact, I've been so bad at it that I've wondered at times if I'm damaged somehow, if perhaps I have some subtle form of autism or something that prevents me from interacting normally even with people I like and want to get to know. The past couple of years have been something of a miracle for me, then, because I've made these friends, and they are real and dear to me. There are a lot of factors that made this possible, but the key ingredient, I believe, was World of Warcraft.

I played WoW from around January of 2005 until about a month ago. Unlike many people, the entire time I played, I hung with the same group of people. They started out as a group of strangers, only a couple of whom I knew and those only because my husband played EQ with them years ago. But over the course of time, I managed to get involved in the lives of people I never knew before. I joke sometimes that I don't have a social life outside of a computer, but the truth is, I've never really had a social life before at all. Now, with my fibro pain and fatigue dragging on me on top of my basic shy and unfriendly nature, I think I would be entirely alone were it not for the universe that rests at my fingertips here.

Unfortunately, for many of the people who played WoW from the beginning, the game is growing old and stale. A lot of people have quit playing just because they're so bored, and my friends have all tended in that direction, with an added dose of jobs and school and marriages preventing them from spending time online. So everyone quit, some earlier this year and some later, but it was a cumulative effect, and by the beginning of August the guild was disbanded and people's accounts were canceled. And I was all alone again. So, my husband and I invited anyone with vacation time to spend it at our house.

Its the strangest thing, meeting someone for the first time when you've been good friends for years. After I got over the shock of looking at people straight on, the strangest thing was figuring out what name to say. Because everyone there, except for Rob's wife AJ, who never played WoW with us but was welcome anyway, had at least two names. For some people it was easy: Ted, for example, has always been Ted, through multiple character names and since before WoW existed. Jard, on the other hand, has always been Jard, and not Don, because he doesn't even look like a Don and no one even knew that was his real name for the longest time.

Almost everyone called me by my real name, also, because when we all switched servers in the beginning of 2006, I had to change my character name and no one liked typing the new one, so the old one stuck for a while and then people just started calling me whatever they wanted. The only exception was Traffa, who called me Bottle, which hasn't been my character name in a year and a half, but I kept calling him Traffa and not Raymond, so I guess it's fair.

It was a wonderful time, and now they're gone again, and I don't know what I'm going to do. Muddle along as usual, I guess. These people live all over the country, so I think the only thing to hope for is that another interesting MMO comes out soon, so I can once again meet people in a world where the barriers to interaction are low enough for me to cross.

Science Fiction and the Other

I've been reading Pam's House Blend off and on the past week or so, and it's been making me think. Her section on hair styles, specifically the implications of straightening or not straightening your hair if you have African hair, is particularly fascinating. Apparently there are people in the world who make a moral distinction between straight and curly hair. This shocks me a little bit. The idea that respectable, thinking people still care about race, still categorize people based on skin tone is almost unbelievable.

Believe it or not, it wasn't clear to me until recently just how prevalent racism still is. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, about an hour out of Seattle, and although my parents in many ways are religious nuts, the only categorizing I ever heard either of them engage in was Christian v. non-Christian, and even then non-Christians weren't worth less as people, they were the focus of Christ's love. I used to think that this attitude was pretty much normal for educated, intelligent people. I was aware that in parts of the country there were still people who thought African-Americans were stupid and lazy, but I assumed that no one took these people seriously, because they were obviously cracked.

Some of this, I think, was the area I grew up in. There wasn't the residue of hate from ages of slavery to deal with, and the racial divisions were based on less vitriolic things. Instead of there being this line drawn between white and black, there were many lines, most of which were really blurry, between white, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Thai, Native of infinite varieties, etc. So the biggest historical racial inequity was the genocide of the Natives, and even that was mostly accidental, through the introduction of diseases white settlers didn't realize they were carrying and so on. I remember being taught in school the story of the Whitmans, missionaries who began a mission in western Washington and ended up slaughtered after the tribe they were supposed to be saving ended up mostly dead from measles, as a parable of European arrogance and stupidity. I don't know why it was easier to demonize white missionaries than white slave owners, but it was.

The other major influence on my thinking about race, however, was my love of science fiction. By the age of 16, I read almost every science fiction book in my local library, and often read an author's entire canon by ordering books from the county library system. I was fortunate that the county I lived in included Seattle, which meant a ton of money for artsy things like libraries. A lot of it is a blur by now, but I remember at one point, I must have been 12 or so, reading a short story in this huge grey book full of great short stories from the whole history of science fiction. This particular story was written in the 70s sometime, I think, as a reflection on the civil rights movement. It was very simple: aliens had made contact with Earth and wanted to see how regular people lived, so they went out to restaurants and things. I believe these aliens were tall and blue and quiet. The story was told from the point of view of a waitress at a restaurant one of these aliens visited, basically speculating on what he felt and how he reacted to the people he met treating him with disgust. The message was, what's so special about us that we feel we have some right to treat them as though they're dangerous and untrustworthy and evil?

It's difficult to read science fiction for years and still hold onto us v. them thinking. The whole genre explores the idea of the Other and the Different and the Strange, seeking to know what these things are like. And after all, to know is to love, is to hate, is to be, is to eat... just ask Mr. Heinlein.

Which is why it's so striking to me to live now in St Louis, which claims to be the Midwest but really looks like the South to me in many ways. People here who are educated and smart and liberal still believe that black people are fundamentally different than white people. It's not correct to claim that black people are stupid or lazy or can't swim or are prone to violence, not really, but they are still an Other group. Its ridiculous. It really bothers me that not only can I not say that I wish I had a classical North African bone structure so that I could shave my head and still look beautiful, people who actually have North African bone structure still feel pressured to imitate 'white' hairstyles so that they're socially acceptable. I wish I could do something to change things.

August 21

I often have trouble tracking time. I lose any sense of what time it is, or what day it is, along with my ability to tell the difference between what I've done recently and what I've thought about doing but haven't actually done. I often find myself panicking because I don't know whether my medical appointment is tomorrow or next week or next month, and on occasion I miss appointments because I forget that I haven't already gone, or I forget that they're not next week, or I forget about them entirely. In short, I am not much for anniversaries.

Which is why it's rather odd that I'm writing this today, considering that it's the 15th anniversary of the killings at Ruby Ridge. I think that perhaps these events are not common knowledge among the general population, so here's a summary. The Weaver family were religious nuts who believed, among other things, that the world was about to end in a gory Apocalypse, so they moved to a cabin in northern Idaho to separate themselves from the sinful world etc. They had a lot of guns and may or may not have been white supremecists. Regardless, they didn't hurt anybody. Randy Weaver was entrapped by an undercover cop into selling the guy two sawed off shotguns that may or may not have been illegal, and then was given the wrong court date to show up for a hearing.

When he missed the date, local law enforcement called in the FBI and the National Guard and something like 400 people descended on the Weaver's property. There was a standoff that lasted for something like two weeks, during which the government shot dead Sammy Weaver, age 14, in the back as he was running away and Vicki Weaver, while she was standing in the doorway of her house holding her infant daughter. Eventually it all went to court, Randy Weaver was convicted of not showing up for his court date, several FBI agents were reprimanded, and the surviving Weaver children got $1 million each on out of court settlements.

The reason I bring this up is the recent conviction of Jose Padilla for conspiracy to murder etc. Mr. Padilla in many ways is in a situation similar to the Weavers: he held beliefs that anyone would consider to be antisocial, but did not hurt anyone; he practiced his religion in an unconventionally serious way that removed him from regular society; the government took advantage of his position outside mainstream society to treat him as someone without the rights of an American citizen; he is permanently damaged.

There is no doubt that he was held without charge for years and treated in an inhumane manner. The more I learn about the techniques used on him, the more I am convinced that they constitute one of the most horrible torture systems known to man. Vicki Weaver may in some sense be less lucky than Mr. Padilla, but I am not so sure. There are fates worse than death, and the psychiatrist who interviewed Mr. Padilla for the defense thought that he may have been introduced to such a fate. Many people are, understandably, upset about this.

What puzzles me is the reaction, evident in this piece from Firedoglake as well as many other places in the 'liberal blogosphere', that says that because the government is currently Republican-controlled, in order to prevent this kind of thing happening in the future we ought to work very hard to elect Democrats. This kind of innocence about how power works reminds me of myself, when I was very young. I used to think that political upheaval would be useful; I even campaigned for a Libertarian one year in the belief that many of the problems with modern politics stem from the two-party system. And perhaps destabilizing the elite would have some interesting effects.

However, in my cynical old age (and oh, I am old these days) I have come to a different conclusion. Power is corrupting. This is a very simple idea that most people will agree with, but it's painful to follow it to the end. No matter how honorable your candidate for Congress is, in the end, electing new people to the same system of power will have zero effect on the level of corruption in the system. Maybe one person will hold onto their honor, maybe another will continue to believe in their ideals, but in the aggregate there will be no long-term positive effect of introducing new blood. It will only decay again into the same patterns, the patterns dictated by the system.

The only solution is to burn the system down and start again from the beginning.

A Little Story about Occupation

Suppose for a minute that you're living in an anarchist society, with no central governing authority. You have your family and hangers-on in a compound with barbed wire and dogs and so on, and then on down the street there are other people in their compounds and generally things are moderately peaceful because this is an old anarchy and people have realized that starting fights is a dumb idea when the other person is as heavily armed as you are. Most fights, in fact, are inside of compounds, which are mostly run in an autocratic manner by the head of household, when some youngling decides they don't want to obey anymore.

Now, imagine that you hear of a compound a ways away from yours, small and poor and run by a real asshole. And the rumor is, this guy is a real piece of work, abusing everyone he can get his paws on, from his own children to the beggars outside the back door of his kitchen. This guy is so bad that he rapes his daughters, castrates his servants' children, tortures his wives and slices the toes off his nieces and nephews. Being a wise, kind and good anarchist, this bothers you, and on top of that you think this guy might secretly support your worst enemy.

So you take your homies and go down the road a ways, climb their wall and drag their leader from his bed and put him up against the wall and shoot him. His kids and wives and servants are just as mean and shifty as he is, but you figure you really shouldn't shoot them because it wasn't their fault their leader was an asshole, and anyway you want to put them to work, for you. Because after all, someone has to pay for their liberation.

What you didn't count on was the fact that the old geezer kept control by turning everyone in his household against each other, which makes people real hostile once the controlling force is gone. So they fight amongst each other, and things get nasty and you kill a great number of them, feeling guilty all the while. But somehow killing more people never makes the rest of them like each other any better, and while they'll act properly cowed in front of you as soon as you turn your back they're at it again, and on top of that the neighbors are all really pissed off at you for turning the view from their bedroom windows into a messy war zone. You've got yourself into a position where you can't stay; it's expensive and not working and making everyone mad at you and anyway, being wise and kind and good, you don't really want to kill everyone in the house, which is what its going to take to make them stop fighting. You also can't leave; these people demonstrably will kill each other if you do, and you can't in good conscience allow it; anyway if you did allow it your reputation would suffer miserably and you'd lose a lot of money in all your other endeavours. You're stuck.

So lets back up. Instead of breaking into this place and shooting it up, you stand outside it, with lots of guns and a bullhorn. And you announce, everyone in this situation that we find so horrible: if you'd like to leave and become a part of our peaceful and prosperous commune, come along and commit to being peaceful and prosperous and we here with our guns will make sure you get out OK. We'll escort you back to our place and get you settled in, but be warned- if you fight among yourselves or with us, we'll kick you back out again.

Once you announce this, and all of your enemy's people have abandoned him, the situation still isn't perfect. But you've gained a collection of very grateful and enthusiastic new commune members, and your enemy has lost his infrastructure base, and you're not pouring your money into buying more guns to kill more people way down the street somewhere. Your liberal bleeding heart is satisfied and you haven't actually had to kill anyone, let alone get stuck in a situation you can't improve and can't end and can't leave.

This is why people who say we should stay in Iraq for the sake of the children, like this guy, quoting Ambassador Crocker (via Digby):

"How will we feel if the movie doesn't stop, even though we've pressed the 'stop' button? What if the movie just goes on? And gets even uglier? And even uglier after that? .... We're talking here about the possibility of thousands of deaths, about religious cleansing operations, we're talking here about the possibility that there could be no Sunnis left in Baghdad because they'll all have been murdered, driven out or expelled. Is this what we want? And who will explain that to Americans?"

are totally wrong. I guess my point is, we can't stop ethnic cleansing if a community is determined enough to want it in the first place. All we can do is try our best to get people out of the way of the beast. Occupation is a very bad way to accomplish this; so bad, that I don't think it will even allow us to accomplish anything.

The Crow

If I do get a tattoo of a bird (which is to say, if the VA ever gets me the back pay they owe me, the bastards), this is what it would look like.

Flight

Via Pam's House Blend, I found this 60 Minutes special, about homosexuality and gender. The most interesting clip I think is the one on the twins Adam and Jared, that claims that one of these 9-year old boys has a problem with his gender. The interviewer asks, if you were to tell a stranger what kind of person you are, what would you say? and Adam answers, "I would say.... I'm like.. a girl." and shrugs. It's evident that he's been told by adults in his life that he should think about himself in a certain way. The video includes a clip of his mother mentioning, with a very stressed affect, that she first noticed that something was 'different' when her son was 18 months old and he asked for Barbie dolls instead of GI Joe dolls. Other evidence that Adam has a problem: he plays with Neopets, stuffed animals, and likes pink and purple. Jared, on the other hand, is suitably male with firetrucks and toy soldiers and a Marines poster.

Now, its possible that this kid really is a homosexual and that his mother really did know that when he was 18 months old. I guess its a sign of social progress when a mother who suspects that her son is a homosexual buys him stuffed horses and Barbies instead of freaking out and beating him bloody, no matter how distressed she might be. I can't help but think that confining children to strict gender roles from very early ages isn't be all that beneficial, though. It's not as though a preference for firetrucks is something that is genetically male, or a preference for pink and purple is something that is genetically female. Firetrucks have only been around for 100 years or so, and back in the day purple was the color of privilege, more often worn by men than women. Forcing kids to think that they're stuck in the wrong body because of a "nontraditional" toy preference is something that comes very close to abuse, in my opinion.

Kids at play shouldn't have to fight these silly cultural battles. When I was nine, I wanted to be a knight errant. Not because I wanted to be male, but because I wanted to be a hero. I had read a lot of fairy tales, so I knew that knights got to do all the really neat stuff, like travel and be champion fighters and rescue people and make hugely important decisions about good and evil and so on. I did have some vague desire to be a princess as well, but my favorite princesses were the ones who rebelled against their pampered life, ran away dressed up as boys and became knights. My father made my brother and me swords out of wood scraps spray painted silver, and my mother made us stick horses out of broom handles and felt, and we ran around the yard hitting each other and no one ever told me that the joy I took in playing meant I was a lesbian.

Which is probably a good thing, because if I couldn't be a knight, what I wanted most was to be a dragon. Dragons had all the positives of knights- they were strong and wise, they featured prominently in interesting adventures, they sometimes even had magical powers- and on top of that, they could fly. Flight has always fascinated me, the pure freedom of it. When I gave up on being a dragon, because after all dragons are completely imaginary in a way that knights and princesses aren't, I decided that I wanted to be a bird. I daydreamed about it, about being small and light and flying over the tops of everything, able to go anywhere and see anything. I even went to the library and checked out those topical illustrated encyclopedias they make for children, to learn about flight and birds' skeletal structure and muscle systems and feathers. For a while I was mildly obsessed.

I managed to make it to adulthood without thinking that I'm a bird, though. I can't honestly say I love my body, but that probably has more to do with the relentless grinding pain and defeating exhaustion I've carried for the past four years than with any sort of body dysmorphia. I did get a tattoo of a dragon on my hip as soon as I turned 18, and I've been considering getting a tattoo of a crow if I ever have the money for it. It took me longer to give up on my dream of being a knight; I joined the Army with the intent of becoming a warrior, and there is still a part of me that hungers for it in spite of everything. I do think I'm lucky to have had parents who encouraged me to be whatever I could dream of instead of telling me who I was. It makes me sad for poor Adam, that there are no adults in his life willing to accept that he can be gentle and creative and still find his own way as the person he is.

The Preservation of Human Habitat

From The Nature of Economies, by Jane Jacobs:

Think about habitats people have dwelled in and altered but haven't destroyed. Ask yourself, 'Why haven't they?' After all, people could have destroyed them...

And yet in most places, most of the time, people have managed to avoid destroying their habitats, including many they've occupied long and continuously. What could possibly have restrained our species? Something did, or else much of the earth, long, long since, would have been laid waste, then laid waste again as fast as it recovered- when it did recover. I'm speculating that our evolutionary endowments, like those of the great cats, elephants, bonobos, chimps, and others, must include traits that check habitat destruction.

Jacobs lists several possible human traits that could contribute to our failure to destroy the world (so far), including "the capacity for aesthetic appreciation," "fear of retribution for transgression" which she says covers both primitive superstition and modern scientific fear, and the propensity to engage in alternate occupations that don't affect the environment, such as talking or having recreational sex - she compares us to bonobos and chimps with their habit for sitting around grooming socially instead of eating everything in sight. She also includes "our inborn capacity to tinker and contrive" which I am less persuaded by. If human tinkering has in some cases relieved stress on the environment, it has certainly increased environmental stress in as many or more situations.

It's an interesting idea, that humans may in some ways be evolutionarily predisposed not to destroy environments when we have so much evidence that in fact, humans destroy environments. I only have to look out my back window and see the little rabbit that lives in my neighborhood making its way from one perfectly manicured lawn to another, for as far as the eye can see, and imagine the prairie that rabbit ought to be living in to understand that. And yet... the world is not a barren wasteland, devoid of all but cockroaches. Humanity certainly has the power to make the world a wasteland, or worse: with the nuclear weapons the United States owns, we could reduce the Earth from a planet to a large and mobile asteroid belt. And we haven't, yet. Obviously there are reasons why, and Jacobs has started me thinking about the idea, and what possible characteristics might be humanity's salvation here.

An ability to engage in long-term thinking seems to me to be right up there with aesthetic appreciation for why we don't destroy our own habitats. Even societies whose habitat modification only extends to domestication of herd animals know that allowing your sheep to eat every damn piece of grass in the field means next year you won't have any sheep. Long-term thinking plus basic self-interest means stewardship of the land, not raping it. But on the other hand, things don't always work out that way; Jacobs gives the example of cod fishing in Newfoundland, where scarceness of cod drove cod prices up, inciting cod fishermen to actually invest in cod-catching boats and such, leading to complete devastation of the ocean in that area in the early 1990s.

Earlier today a post I read on Balloon Juice made me consider another human quality that might act to preserve the environment. It was this post, comment #17, and it says, speculating on possible reasons for the invasion of Iraq, "It is a fairly safe assumption that they didn’t give a fuck about the various factions in Iraq. Some days I even doubt they care all that much about the oil and suspect they were just in a mood to trash a country. From a safe distance of course."

Whatever you think about the war, and whether it was begun over oil or family pride or foolish, misplaced idealism, consider that no one would read that and think, "But it's just not possible for someone to want to trash a country for no reason! People don't like to destroy things unless they really have to! Violence is something that you can only force into human discourse as a means to a good end!" Fact is, people do in fact like to destroy things, particularly other human things. And by things I mean people. Human history can be pretty accurately described as a series of violent atrocities committed by one group of humans on another, for a multitude of reasons, for as far back as we have records. It is still, in this enlightened age, somewhat counter-cultural to posit that war may be inherently evil.

The human desire to kill and/or disenfranchise large groups of other humans may not be a shoo-in for a characteristic that strongly defends the environment. War does have a nasty tendency to damage the air, water and land as well as those living on it. However, as Malthus said so long ago, war is a key check on human population, along with disease and 'immorality' like homosexuality and contraception. The bloodiness of the 20th century has surely reduced world population by large amounts. Anything that curbs human population growth, I would think, has some benefit to the rest of the environment.

Writing this, I am aware that it sounds morbid and cold, and it is. I am not even sure if its true or useful to view the situation this way. Fortunately, I'm not someone who has to worry about whether what I say is true or useful before I think out loud- or in type. Besides, I'm certainly not the first person who has ventured this opinion.

There will come soft rain and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire.

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly.

And Spring herself when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

- Sara Teasdale, 1922

Success in Iraq

Several days ago, digby posted something along these lines: people who talk about how 'the president lost the Iraq war' or 'the democrats lost the Iraq war' or 'the media lost the Iraq war' are completely missing the truth, which is that from the beginning the war was doomed, being hubristic, illegal, insane, etc. I initially had a very strong response to this, which I have since reconsidered.

At first, my thought was that the concept of an aggressive war was illegal, and unjustified, and the intelligence used to promote it was fatally flawed, but the military plan could have been made to work. I remember when I was watching the TV coverage of the invasion, how they made this huge deal about how we had a revolutionary new way of waging war, officially dubbed 'Shock and Awe.' And as juvenile as that name is, it follows from the basic principle that we learned from Vietnam, which is if you're going to fight, use overwhelming force to crush the enemy as fast and decisively as possible. Don't pussyfoot around with slow escalations, and don't restrict the number of soldiers you bring in for political reasons. The way to win militarily is to use overwhelming force. Incidentally, this strategy can also help minimize infrastructure damage and civilian deaths, in theory; it's not guaranteed, but a short sharp battle has a chance of doing less damage than a prolonged campaign.

Looking at it now, it seems dreadfully ironic that the initial war, the one that was supposed to be over in just a few months, was planned with this strategy in mind, because obviously the occupation took zero notice of the information we took from Vietnam. In order to crush and hold a country the size of Iraq, if we wanted to follow the policy of overwhelming force, we needed something like 500,000 soldiers on the ground. If I recall correctly, proper counterinsurgency requires something like 1 soldier per 10 occupied civilians. What we had was much much less than that. Our invasion actually left a fair amount of Iraqi infrastructure- roads, electric grids, museums- intact, but it was destroyed in the aftermath when we eliminated the Iraqi government without replacing it with anything. The looting, as everyone knows, was horrific, and the state of lawlessness has continued to this day.

So when I first read digby's post, my thought was that if we had put as much thought into the occupation as we put into the invasion, if we had had 500,000+ troops and a high percentage of the soldiers on the ground were trained in the appropriate languages, if we had run the rebuilding efforts properly instead of corruptly, if we had policed the country instead of letting it fall into anarchy, if we had kept people secure from the beginning until there was a stable Iraqi government that could keep them secure, maybe we could have headed off the insurgency. If we had lived up to our rhetoric, maybe things would have turned out differently. But we didn't, and I guess we'll never know just how bad it didn't have to be.

After a lot of thought, though, I'm not so sure that anything we could have done would have made things turn out differently. Probably making and keeping the entire country safe, protecting people's ability to raise their kids and run their businesses and basically not turning the country into a wasteland would have made things somewhat better than they are... but I don't know that even that would be something that anyone could call a success.

I'm reading Tom Paine's Common Sense, and this quote struck me as rather appropriate:

I ask, hath your house been burnt? Hath your property been destroyed before your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands, and you yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then you are not the judge of those who have. But if you have, and can still shake hands with the murderers, then you are unworthy the name husband, father, friend or lover, and whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the heart of a coward, and the spirit of a sycophant.

So I think that if I can see how right Mr. Paine is when he says this about British abuse in the colonies, how can I expect the citizens of any country to love the United States when we come into their country and kill even one person and expect them to roll over and take it?

Peak Oil

Crooks and Liars has an interesting post today about peak oil. It's quite alarmist and panicky and includes the sentence "An apple will cost $7" as well as the phrase "post-industrial stone age." It almost sounds whacked out enough to make me think that it was written so as to make people disbelieve it. Although why something like that would be published on Crooks and Liars, I don't know.

Anyway. The comments thread is actually more informative than the actual article, as it contains these two excellent links, one to a National Geographic article on peak oil and one to this agriculture-something article. Also this slightly less excellent but funnier link to a British comedian I've never heard of, who actually has quite a bit to say.

Peak oil seems to me to be a no-brainer. The question is not whether its going to happen, but when; people who refuse to believe that the oil will eventually run out, after a long decline in our ability to process it out of the ground, are on the same level as people who refuse to believe that humans cause the extinction of other species or that human industrialization could possibly change the climate. Maybe when you've spent your entire life in the suburbs, it seems like suburbs are your natural habitat and nothing could ever have been different and nothing could possibly change, but really that isn't true. Its like the Discovery Channel special on the world before the dinosaurs: when fern-trees were the massively dominant species on land, they changed the air to the point that it was literally not breathable by modern humans, and there was so much oxygen that lightning didn't just light trees on fire, it made forests explode. It seems very obvious to me that a species that covers such huge percentages of the total land on this Earth is going to change the basic nature of the planet in very dramatic ways.

The one important question other than 'when?' is how bad this is going to be, specifically how fast the drop off is going to happen. The Crooks and Liars post makes it sound like everything is going to be going along all nice and easy and then the bottom is going to drop out, in the matter of just a few years going from $3/gal for gas to not being able to buy gas anywhere. But I think it will be softer than that, many decades before we're completely out; even the American fields that peaked in the 70s are still in production, some of them. As the National Geographic article points out, there are still lots of options for extracting oil from the earth, its just that the options that are left are quite a bit more difficult. But honestly, things might go very badly if thats the way the politics plays. The government controls our economy in this country to the extent that they could make this very difficult for us. If our politicians decide its politically expedient to live in denial, I imagine they could spin out our economy for years into the decline.

Even then, though, I don't think we're going back to the stone age. There are a lot of good options out there to replace oil; none of them are nearly as massive industries as oil currently is, obviously, and if all the oil in the world disappeared tomorrow, we would absolutely not be able to depend on solar, wind, hydroelectric, nuclear, tidal, ethanol or biomass power. But just because things aren't that way today doesn't mean they can't be that way even, say, ten years from now. People say they can't imagine the changes that would have to be made in order for us not to be dependent on oil, but imagine a world where every cute little suburban house comes with solar panels all over the roof, that supplement the power you get from the power company's windmill fields. Imagine a world where you plug in your car every evening and then go to work in the morning as usual, maybe even buy yourself a little ethanol at the pump to supplement your electric-hybrid engine. Imagine a world where you don't have a lawn, you have a garden, because imported food is too goddamn expensive. Would the fundamental lifestyle changes really be so unimaginably great?

I'm not trying to pretend that it's going to be easy or smooth or anything, but I think it's going to be possible. It might be the end of American hegemony, but I don't think it's going to be the end of the human race.

Our shells simply cannot hold our insides in

Been sick the past couple of days- took 100mg of gabapentin for five days starting last Wednesday and by Sunday it finally caught up to me. That plus way overdoing it on Saturday- I was foolish enough to both go looking at wedding dresses with my cousin-in-law and go sit and watch a baseball game on the same day, I should have known I wouldn't have the energy- and I slept most of Sunday and Monday, with alternating periods of piercing headaches and nausea. I guess I should glad to know that yet another medication doesn't do jack shit but make me sick.

So I missed all sorts of things, including Gonzales' horrible Senate testimony and this interesting news about the corruption of the Oil for Food program in the lead up to the Iraq war, unfortunately implicating some of the most vocal anti-war politicians in Europe. I wish I could say I was surprised. People who practice politics for a living seem to turn out to be the worst sort of people, no matter what positions they espouse. I suspect its all the money floating around, not that I have it in me to be glad that I was never offered hundreds of thousands of dollars just to give my opinion to news cameras. Christ, I could use that kind of money.

What actually inspired me to post was this article in the the Weekly Standard, though. What a load of bullshit, it makes me want to punch the author in the face. The last thing the military needs is some smug columnist making up history and then pretending that the minority of soldiers who are conned by the administration's propaganda are somehow role models for us all. Fuck him. What we really need is someone- or preferably lots of someones- to get outraged about how Americas sons and daughters have been used as pawns, manipulated and then betrayed to their deaths by a man who has no idea what leadership is about.

Impending Doom

This kind of worries me. From what I've seen, which isn't all that much, the reactions of the people who know about it have been rather extreme. I guess that isn't all that surprising seeing how the other big news lately is that the Under-Secretary of Defense thinks that Sen. Clinton and anyone else who talks about anything to do with ever withdrawing from Iraq, or mentions anything critical of the war, is basically committing treason. Some people, including the guy I got the original link from, a poster at CrooksandLiars.com, think the Bush administration is laying out the groundwork for freezing the assets of people who dare to disagree with them in public. The more paranoid who responded compared these actions to the takeover of Germany by the Nazis in the 1930s.

I would be more skeptical if Glenn Greenwald hadn't just outlined for me the way the President and his cronies have been setting up a legal doctrine that prohibits prosecution of anyone in the executive branch, ever. Executive privilege is turning into a pretty scary beast pretty damn quickly.

So just in case the betrayal of the American Revolution is right around the corner, I'd like to say a few things.

President George W. Bush has betrayed the American people, and most particularly the American military, with his incompetence. He started a war that he should have known was a damned stupid idea, and he not only continued that war out of stiff necked pride and willful blindness, but he condemned America to a hugely wasteful disaster through his inability to run a practical operation. There were a lot of people pulling for this war, some of them for very bad reasons, and there is enough blame to tar the multitudes who had a hand in this farce. Certainly people like Cheney, Wolfowitz and so on are not blameless. But the ultimate responsibility lies with George W. Bush.

When you become Commander in Chief, Bush is fond of claiming, it means you can do any damn thing you want to. And that's true, in a limited arena. You have the power of life and death over every soldier the US can put on the field. Soldiers take a solemn oath to obey your commands, an oath hundreds of thousands of them would rather die than betray. President Bush has seen that as a liberating condition; he has claimed the power those oaths give as an absolute power, that frees him to do whatever the hell he pleases. What he has missed is the terrible responsibility that comes with that power. When you can order a good man to his death, you absolutely must be right. Your decisions must be perfect. Any mistake, even a well intentioned and carefully thought out mistake, damns you. The oath of every American soldier requires the President to take serious and sober responsibility for his orders. Not only must he try hard to get things right, he must also get them fucking right. And really, he hasn't done either.

More eloquent and accurate people than myself have outlined the case against Bush, so let me just say that I support it. He ought to be impeached; there are a dozen things to impeach him for, every one of them more significant and serious than the last impeachment our country undertook. This administration is so corrupt, so rotten and foul that no one who has ever worked for our current President should be allowed to work in a government position ever again. The stench of Bush's betrayal of my beloved country must be washed out.

I believe this because I believe in America. Not the swaggering Texan version of America that is nothing more than a group of people who are 'my' group of people just because they are, just because they live next to me and look like me and talk like me and I'm unable to grasp concepts larger than basic primitive tribalism. My America is an idea. An idea about a government that can be fair and just and designed for the benefit of every citizen, not just those few who happen to be rich and powerful. My America is place where there are no royalty, there are no kings, and the country is held together not by some personality cult but by a rational system of law. In my America, thought is not dangerous. Punishment is not meted out before a crime is committed, there is no state of emergency that can justify indefinite imprisonment and torture of those who have been convicted of no crime. In my America, you can speak without fear and be secure in your freedom.

some thoughts on relating to pain

So I'm preparing to get in with a new doctor in the VA system here, since I moved across the country. I've been putting it off; it should have been one of my first priorities once we arrived, since I have a disability claim pending that needs a mental health evaluation done, and it's my responsibility to set that up since I canceled the one they set up for me in Oregon. They scheduled it for three weeks after I was supposed to move here, but still. But I've been putting it off, because of the enormous amounts of paperwork, and waiting around, and unnecessary doctor's visits, and driving into an unfamiliar downtown area to meet new doctors who don't believe there's anything wrong with me, that's involved in getting into a new medical system. I really really hate going to the doctor.

Not that VA medical care has been anything but quality. Really, all the doctors I've seen have been good doctors. Its just that my medical reality is so far removed from what normal people go through. Most of the time that doesn't bother me, because I don't live as someone else, I just live as me, so it doesn't really matter what other people go through. But going to the doctor means trying to describe what my life is like, and that brings certain things into focus.

The VA has a standard procedure for checking people in before a doctor's appointment. You're seen by a medical assistant who takes you through a list of questions, mostly pretty standard things, like, do you smoke? do you drink? when was your last menstrual period? are you pregnant/trying to get pregnant? what health issue are you here for? And they take your blood pressure and temperature and so on. One thing that they always ask you is to rate your pain on a scale of 1-10, and I can see how this is supposed to be helpful to them. I mean, clearly you can't tell how someone is doing just by looking at them, and they're trying to set a standardized scale for pain just like for anything else, so that they can deal with it consistently.

The obvious problem is that not everyone has the same reference points for pain. They tell you that 10 is supposed to be the worst pain that you're ever felt, but what if you've never felt severe pain? Not everyone has broken bones, or been burned, or gone through childbirth. So the scale is fundamentally flawed, and they acknowledge that, but want you to answer anyway. I tend to answer based on how my pain is affecting my functionality; my '5' is the tipping point of function, anything less and I'm in pain but coping, anything more and I really need to go lie down. This usually satisfies them, and I think that most of the time it conveys what I'm feeling pretty well.

The thing is, though, that my relationship with pain is so very different from someone who has pain only occasionally, that the whole concept of a scale fails to convey the things about my pain that are most important. I mentioned this to my therapist on one of my last visits to see her, and she immediately assumed that I meant that I just got used to being in pain, that I could deal better with higher levels of pain than other people because I was used to it.

This is true to a certain extent. There are a lot of little aches and pains that I ignore basically because I'm bored of paying attention to them. For example, sitting here at my computer typing, I don't register the aches in my finger bones, the nerve pain in my left shoulder, the twinge in my back, the stabbing at the base of my skull, unless I think about it on purpose- or I move in some way that highlights the pain. When I stand up to walk around the room, my feet burst into pain but it's not an event that I remember once I sit back down. I think that if you felt exactly the way I do now, after not feeling this way your whole life, you would notice. You would think, 'oh, I'm sick', or 'I must have hurt myself without realizing it'. You would call your doctor so you could see if you had arthritis in your hands, or a bulging disk in your back, or migraine headaches. But when you know that your pain is meaningless, that it doesn't herald some damage to your body, you get used to it. It becomes familiar, a non-event.

On the other hand, when pain is your constant companion, it is necessary to control it whenever possible for the sake of your sanity. Some lucky sufferers are able to do this with chemicals, but I am not. My only tool for controlling pain is my behavior. If the way I sit hurts my back, I change chairs, or stand up, or lay down. If the clothes I wear irritate my skin, I change them. If typing hurts my fingers, I stop. If standing hurts my hips and feet and knees, I find some place to sit down. This means I have to pay attention to what my body can tolerate, and react as soon as I can to pains that seem like they might grow. If you're walking down the street, and you stub your toe, it will probably hurt a lot, and you'll jump around holding your foot and make faces and curse. But then the pain will subside and you'll keep walking, and five hours later you won't even remember that you stubbed your toe at all.

If I walk down the street, with every step I take my pain increases just a little bit. By the time it gets to hurt even half as much as your stubbed toe did, I know I better quit, because if I don't it will have consequences for the rest of the day. My pain doesn't go away. I have to pay attention to it, manage it, even when it doesn't hurt as bad as its possible to hurt, because if I don't it will make me pay attention to it. Because pain is capable of making you a slave, drooling and whimpering, incapable of rational thought or memory.

American Atrocity: War Crime at My Lai and Abu Ghraib

On March 16, 1968, Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, Americal Division, staged an offensive on the Vietnamese village of My Lai. The company had encountered several booby traps, bombs and minefields in the previous weeks, and had lost a number of their company without actually seeing the enemy; although little information was available about the movement of the Viet Cong, the US command believed the VC had gone to ground with sympathizers in the four hamlets that made up the village of My Lai. In the pre-mission briefing, many soldiers claimed later, Cpt. Medina, the commander of Charlie Company, told the company, “Well, boys, this is your chance to get revenge on these people… it’s open season. When we leave, nothing’s going to be living.” (Hersh My Lai 41)

When the day was over, up to 504 Vietnamese villagers, out of a previous population of about 700, were dead. Charlie Company had not encountered the massive VC resistance they were expecting; only 3 weapons were captured, and the only American casualty was a soldier who shot himself in the foot. Although reports from after the war reveal that there were in fact Viet Cong soldiers in the area, they had not set up a base in the village, and when the American soldiers entered the village expecting a firefight, they found only women, children and the elderly, many of them calmly cooking breakfast over outdoor fires. The villagers knew that American forces routinely assumed that anyone running or hiding must be VC, so they docilely cooperated when rounded up in the village square. Those who came to the square were shot en masse, while soldiers went around and destroyed every home and their inhabitants. Many of the Vietnamese who survived the massacre describe hiding under the bodies of the slain in order to escape detection. Anecdotes and photographs of the event, taken by the official Army reporter who accompanied Charlie Company, clearly show that very young children were among those killed.

Almost a year after the massacre at My Lai, a soldier wrote his congressman with what he knew of the incident, and investigations began. Although 26 soldiers were indicted, the only person to stand trial was Lt. Calley, the platoon leader of Charlie Company’s first platoon. He was convicted of murdering or causing those under his command to murder 22 civilians and sentenced to life in prison. He served three and half years under house arrest before he was pardoned.

Thirty-five years later, American soldiers were again embroiled in events that shocked the public. Army investigations confirmed 44 specific incidents from 20 September 2003 to 13 December 2003 of detainee abuse by American guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Detainees were physically abused, terrorized with dogs, subjected to degrading treatment such as being stripped naked and forced to perform simulated sex acts, kept in isolation and photographed for the amusement of the guards. Those photographs were passed on to military authorities and eventually published in the American and international press, sparking widespread outrage.

Nine military police, all of them of low enlisted rank, were charged with abuse of detainees and tried. Not all of them received prison sentences; the harshest sentence went to the man considered by many to be the ringleader of the group, Charles Graner, a Reservist who worked as a prison guard in civilian life. He was sentenced to ten years, which he is currently serving at Fort Leavenworth, for physical abuse of detainees. Many other American personnel have not been brought up on charges. In several of the most severe incidents of abuse, including the death of a detainee during an interrogation, and allegations of sexual abuse and rape of several male and female detainees by soldiers and civilian contractors, no one has been charged (Fay 10).

These incidents raise a number of questions about the conduct of American soldiers and the effects of American policy in wartime. It is not known whether or not these two heavily publicized cases are representative of the behavior of American soldiers, or whether they are, as our leaders have claimed, the work of aberrant sociopaths. Our soldiers have committed other atrocities, but an accurate and complete accounting of American war crimes is either nonexistent or has been kept secret. However, in these two cases the authorities publicly admitted that American soldiers had acted improperly, and trials were held openly. Attempts at covering up what happened failed, and at least on a limited basis, justice was done. What set these two cases apart and forced the hand of the American military? What caused these soldiers to be prosecuted in open courts of law?

The American military has systems in place to prosecute war crime within the military legal system. The press also acts as a watchdog, regulating behavior and exposing misconduct in the military like it does in other branches of government. Although they played a significant part, these institutions were not sufficient to guarantee the public trial of American soldiers. At both My Lai and Abu Ghraib, it was the actions of individual people that changed the course of history.


The Role of the Chain of Command

Traditionally, misconduct is dealt with by the chain of command. International law, as codified in the Yamashita decision post-WWII, dictates that commanders who do not control their troops and either do not prevent war crimes from occurring or do not punish and suppress war crimes after they have occurred are legally culpable of the same crimes if the commander “knew or should have known” that crimes were committed (Smidt 184). United States Army Field Manual 27-10 also states that commanders may be held legally responsible for war crimes committed by their troops:

Such a responsibility arises directly when the acts in question have been committed in pursuance of an order of the commander concerned. The commander is also responsible if he has actual knowledge, or should have knowledge, through reports received by him or through other means, that troops or other persons subject to his control are about to commit or have committed a war crime and he fails to take the necessary and reasonable steps to insure compliance with the law of war or to punish violators thereof. (FM 27-10, para. 501)

Clearly, the chains of command of the 11th Brigade and the 320th MP Battalion should have stopped the crimes that were committed and followed the appropriate procedures at the time to punish the perpetrators. However, they did not. In Vietnam, there is evidence that the chain of command willfully covered up the crime; 12 officers were court-martialed on charges relating to a cover-up, but none were convicted. In Iraq, many elements of the chain of command were either incompetent or intentionally looked the other way when abuse was reported. Why?

In Vietnam, the US could have declared itself not bound by the Geneva Conventions; the treaties allow this when fighting a force that has not signed the Conventions, and North Vietnam had not. The US chose instead to declare that it was bound and acting according to Geneva. In Iraq and the War on Terror, President Bush has declared that the US is not bound by Geneva because our opponents are not signatories and are not a conventional army. However, American forces are to treat prisoners and “unlawful combatants” humanely and in accordance with Geneva. All political posturing aside, the US did not keep to the Geneva Conventions in Vietnam, and it has not in Iraq. This failure to abide by the law of war on a policy level made it almost impossible for commanders to control their troops.

In his book Nuremburg and Vietnam: an American Tragedy, Telford Taylor, and American general and the chief prosecutor at the Nuremburg war crimes trials, outlines several instances in which the United States clearly violated the Geneva Conventions in Vietnam. He lists forcible transfer of civilians, bombing in an effort to kill individual people, transferring prisoners to a regime that is known to use torture, and the shooting of prisoners both on the battlefield and in captivity. All of these are violations of Geneva.

Article 47 of the fourth Convention prohibits “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory” unless “ security of the population or imperative military reasons so demand” and those evacuated must be “transferred back to their homes as soon as hostilities in the area in question have ceased.”(Taylor 146) A key American strategy in Vietnam was to remove entire countryside populations of South Vietnamese to refugee camps and then destroy their homes, in an effort to smoke out the Viet Cong or at least remove their rural base of support. This strategy not only required the forcible transfer of large numbers of people for a strategic, non-emergency military plan, but it destroyed their ability to return to their homes, a clear Geneva violation.

Bombing of Vietnamese villages in retaliation for harboring VC or in an effort to kill individual guerrillas suspected to be hiding inside, he says, is morally comparable to what happened at My Lai, yet it is an accepted and common practice. Taylor asks, “Is there any significant difference between killing a babe-in-arms by a bomb dropped from a high-flying aircraft, or by an infantryman’s point-blank gunfire?” (Taylor 142).

Article 12 of the third Convention requires signatories to determine that an ally will treat prisoners in accordance with the Convention before transferring prisoners to the ally’s custody. If it is discovered that the ally is not following the Convention, the signatory must make all efforts to re-obtain custody of any prisoners that were transferred. However, the United States was aware that the South Vietnamese regularly and extensively tortured prisoners in their custody, but still regularly transferred prisoners of war to the Vietnamese (Taylor 150).

The most egregious violation of the laws of war that Taylor references is the killing of prisoners, not only the denial of quarter in the heat of battle, but also during interrogations and in prisons. During the trial of US Army Lt. Duffy for the murder of an unarmed prisoner, “four other lieutenants from the same battalion testified that their instructions were to take no prisoners in combat, and that their superiors laid primary stress on the body count.” (Taylor 151)

Taylor argues that the American failure to follow the Geneva Conventions created an environment in which soldiers were encouraged to do what it took to get the job done whether or not it was legal by international standards. This atmosphere made it impossible for the chain of command to take proper steps to prosecute war crimes. If soldiers were brought to trial by their commanders as Army regulations require, the commanders who gave the orders would be brought to the attention of the legal system as well. Military leaders who prosecuted soldiers for acting in an environment they created would either find themselves also prosecuted, or would find that they had undermined their own authority to the point that military discipline would break down. The policy and strategic failures of the chain of command in Vietnam made effective prosecution impossible.

The situation at Abu Ghraib was somewhat different. Significantly, the United States has announced that in the War on Terror many of the people captured by the US are not prisoners of war, they are “unlawful combatants,” and therefore the United States is not bound by the Geneva Conventions in its dealings with these prisoners. Also, although many of the policies and directives of the US Army command on the ground in Iraq were in accordance with international law, the 372nd MP Company at Abu Ghraib had a singularly dysfunctional and incompetent chain of command, which greatly contributed to the abuses and played a role in how the perpetrators were caught, investigated and punished.

On February 7th, 2002, President Bush issued a memo stating that the Geneva Conventions did not apply in the war with Al-Qaeda, but that prisoners should be treated humanely, in accordance with the principles of the Conventions. From that point to mid-2003 specific interrogation tactics were authorized, banned, re-authorized and re-banned across the theater of operations. Different tactics were authorized in Guantanamo and Afghanistan than in Iraq, but the personnel cycled from one place to another, spreading techniques. According to the Final Report of the Independent Panel to Review Department of Defense Detention Operations, “the existence of confusing and inconsistent interrogation technique policies contributed to the belief that additional interrogation techniques were condoned.” (Schlesinger 13)

The soldiers who have been prosecuted for the abuses at Abu Ghraib themselves have testified that they were doing their jobs as they understood it. SGT Davis told investigators that everything was done at the direction of military intelligence, and that when Graner and Frederick abused prisoners, they got compliments from MI on a job well done. Spc. Harmon, who appears in some of the pictures, said that many of the abuses were an attempt to keep detainees awake as part of a sleep deprivation strategy. “MI wanted to get them to talk. It is Graner and Frederick’s job to do things for MI and OGA to get these people to talk” she said (Hersh Chain of Command 30). OGA is a reference to other government agencies, including the CIA, who were operating in Abu Ghraib in the high-value target section where the abuses occurred.

Professor Alfred McCoy, an expert on interrogation technique and the effects of torture, wrote an article for the Boston Globe analyzing the pictures from Abu Ghraib. He makes the argument that the images from Abu Ghraib fit into the CIA interrogation paradigm. The most effective interrogation technique discovered by the CIA consists of sensory deprivation and disorientation, which can include sleep deprivation and psycho-social disorientation such as sexual humiliation, combined with “self-inflicted” pain such as forcing a prisoner to stand with his arms outstretched for long periods of time. Such techniques are more effective for interrogation than traditional torture because they put the prisoner in an unstable state of mind and reduce his mental defenses. In Professor McCoy’s view, the photographs he has seen are evidence that the soldiers at Abu Ghraib were following instructions from the CIA and other government agencies which were conducting interrogations in the prison. (McCoy)

This climate greatly hindered the effort to punish abuses at Abu Ghraib. According to the Independent Panel, “the weak and ineffectual leadership of [the commanders at Abu Ghraib] allowed the abuses” and “the commanders of both brigades either knew, or should have known, abuses were taking place.” (Schlesinger 47). According the investigation conducted by Maj. Gen. George Fay, “Leaders in key positions failed to properly supervise the interrogation operations… systemic problems and issues also contributed… [these] include inadequate interrogation doctrine and training, an acute shortage of MP and MI soldiers, the lack of clear lines of responsibility between the MP and MI chains of command, the lack of clear interrogation policy for the Iraq Campaign, and intense pressure felt by the personnel on the ground to produce actionable intelligence” (Fay 42). The leadership failures allowed the abuses to continue for several months before any action was taken.

The Influence of Publicity

Shortly after the story of the abuses at Abu Ghraib was broken in the press, the New York Times published an article by Susan Sontag, author and intellectual. The article was titled “Regarding the Torture of Others,” and it discussed the abuses in light of the photographs that had been published. Sontag, who has written extensively on photography and the effects photographs have in modern society, makes the argument that it is quite possible that the abuses would never have been prosecuted if the photos had not been published. “It seems [the pictures] were necessary to get our leaders to acknowledge that they had a problem on their hands,” she writes, making the claim that “it seems doubtful that [humanitarian] reports were read by President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or Condoleezza Rice or Rumsfeld. Apparently it took the photographs to get their attention… it was the photographs that made all this “real” to Bush and his associates” (Sontag).

Sontag goes on to quote Senator John Warner, R-Virginia, as suggesting that all photographs taken by soldiers should be censored. Much of the political reaction to the Abu Ghraib photos that Sontag describes treats the photographs as the problem instead of the actual abuses; politicians suggest that publishing photographs critical of the war is a disservice to America and could endanger American servicemen overseas. She quotes Rumsfeld demanding that the photographs be sequestered as evidence in criminal cases, claiming that publishing them could endanger the prosecution of the very abuses they depict.

Sontag shows a poor understanding of the events at Abu Ghraib and the course of the prosecution; she seems to be unclear about what exactly happened at the prison, and swallows whole the idea that the abuses were committed by individual soldiers acting out perverted fantasies against the wishes of their chain of command. However, it is difficult to argue that publicity, particularly vivid publicity like the photographs from Abu Ghraib, has no effect whatsoever on decisions made by military and civilians leaders in the course of a war crimes trial. Seymour Hersh, in his book on the events at My Lai 4, also notes suspicious timing in the establishment of a Pentagon investigation into the massacre and the subsequent cover-up by the battalion. “It came eleven days after the world first learned of the tragedy at My Lai 4,” he notes, suggesting that before receiving such massive publicity, the Pentagon was content to prosecute only low level soldiers, not make institutional changes (Hersh My Lai, 170).

While it seems reasonable to suggest that images of war crimes will inflame public opinion and motivate lawmakers to set up investigative panels, in neither the case of the My Lai massacre nor the Abu Ghraib abuses was publicity a major impetus for the prosecutions. In fact, in both cases, formal criminal investigations began before the crimes were made public.

As Sontag would have it, photographs of an event make it real in the eyes of the public, but the facts don‘t hold up that interpretation. There were photographs of the My Lai massacre available: Ronald Haeberle worked as a photographer for the Army and was attached to the 11th Brigade. He accompanied Charlie Company to My Lai and took several rolls of film, both in black-and-white for the Army and in color with his own camera. When he was discharged, he developed and showed his photos in a slideshow that he played for anyone who would watch. Haeberle was disturbed by what he had seen and wanted it to be made public, but as he said in his interview with Hersh, “[The pictures] caused no commotion. Nobody believed it. They said Americans wouldn’t do this.” (Hersh My Lai 121) The national press didn’t pick up the story until November 12th, 1969, almost seven months after the criminal investigation began.

Photographs may have had more influence in the Abu Ghraib case. When criminal investigations began, no photographs had been made public, but investigators were aware of the possibility that the photographs might be leaked. It is impossible to say whether or not the Pentagon was motivated by a desire to correct the problem as a way to limit the damage that might be done by eventual publication of the photos; certainly when people outside the military first saw the photos, there was an uproar.

However, there are indications that the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, or CID, treated the photos as evidence rather than a publicity disaster. Spc. Darby gave the photos to his local CID division on Jan 13th, 2004, and within hours CID agents were investigating. “It began with a knock on [SSG Frederick’s] door by agents of the Army C.I.D. at two-thirty in the morning of January 14th” and within two weeks, Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba was conducting an exhaustive review of events and policies at Abu Ghraib prison (Hersh Chain of Command 25-26). Article 32 proceedings, the preliminary to a court-martial, were begun for seven soldiers in early April, 2004. The first public broadcast of the photos was not until 28 April 2004, on CBS’s 60 Minutes II; they were published in The New Yorker several days later.

The Power of the Whistleblower

In the days after the My Lai massacre, several Charlie Company soldiers spoke with their commanders about what they had seen; the radio control officer had a tape of the radio communications from the day and the tape was heard by many in battalion headquarters. Col. Oran Henderson, commanding officer of the 11th Brigade, and Lt. Col. Barker, the Task Force commander, both interviewed soldiers about specific incidents; Col. Henderson conducted an informal investigation. Both officers concluded that no misconduct had occurred, and Col. Henderson reported his investigation and findings to his superior, General Koster, at Americal Division. In May 1968 Col. Henderson was ordered by Gen. Koster to conduct a formal inquiry into Vietnamese reports of civilian killings. This inquiry produced a paper that acknowledged that several civilians had been killed but cleared anyone of legal violations.

The issue rested there until Ronald Ridenhour, an enlisted soldier who was not a part of Charlie Company but had heard about the massacre from Charlie Company soldiers with whom he had served, decided to do something with the information he had. In March 1969, a year after the massacre, he wrote a letter and mailed 30 copies to various political figures: President Nixon, sixteen Senators and several Congressmen, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Pentagon, and the chaplains of the Senate and the House of Representatives. Rep. Morris Udall of Arizona, Ridenhour’s congressman, took a personal interest in the letter. He pulled in favors to enlist the help of senior party members, and put political pressure on the Army to investigate the matter.

In early April, the Secretary of Defense also recommended that the Army begin an investigation, and on April 23 the case was turned over to the Inspector General’s office. The IG assigned Col. Wilson to investigate the case, and on September 5th Lt. Calley was charged with premeditated murder of 109 Vietnamese. Ridenhour did what the 11th Brigade chain of command and the international media could not do: he broke open the case of My Lai and began the chain of events that led to the trial of Lt. Calley for war crimes. Without his letters, the support of Congressman Udall, and the conscientious work of Col. Wilson, it is possible that no one would ever have been charged with a crime for the My Lai massacre.

The chronology of the investigation into the Abu Ghraib abuses was remarkably similar. Soon after the 320th MP Co was assigned to Abu Ghaib, human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and the International Committee of the Red Cross, complained about the treatment of prisoners in US detention facilities across Iraq. In response, Army Maj. Gen. Donald Ryder was directed to carry out a study of military detention operations. His report was sharply critical of Abu Ghraib, but it fell short of recommending changes in policy or the punishment of individuals. His investigation covered Abu Ghraib while some of the abuses were occurring, and according to Seymour Hersh, it was “at best a failure and at worst a cover-up” (Hersh Chain of Command 29). No procedural or disciplinary action was taken as a result of Gen. Ryder’s report.

That might have been the end of the matter, but Spc. Joseph Darby, an associate of Staff Sergeant Frederick, discovered the now infamous pictures on a CD he borrowed from SSG Frederick, and gave a copy of the CD to Army CID investigators, along with a sworn statement. The provision of the pictures spurred swift action by CID, and they immediately began an intensive inquiry into the Cell Block 1 night shift crew featured in the pictures. Six days later, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of US military forces in Iraq, ordered an investigation into the abuses. Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba headed that investigation, revealing what Gen. Ryder did not. Gen. Taguba’s conclusions resulted in the prosecution of nine soldiers for prisoner abuse.

Once the evidence traveled beyond the immediate chain of command at Abu Ghraib, the Army was much more willing to prosecute misconduct, but the actions of Spc. Darby and Gen. Taguba were nonetheless essential to the course of prosecution. Without the information volunteered by Spc. Darby, at the very least the abuses would have been undiscovered for a longer period of time, possibly forever; without the honesty in investigation by Gen. Taguba the abuses may have been swept under the rug.

Conclusion

Historically in the American military, conditions have been unfavorable for acknowledging war crimes. Often, the media is unable to expose crimes because newsmen aren’t on the front lines, or are held back by a sense that it is not patriotic to criticize the war effort. Military commanders may feel that the crimes were justified or that it would be better for the Army to take care of the matter quietly, or they may be worried about their own careers. Whatever the reasons may be, the systems in place to ensure the prosecution of war crimes are susceptible to failure.

However, it is possible to ensure that a crime is prosecuted. In both these two famous cases, it was the actions taken by individual witnesses that brought down American war criminals. Ronald Ridenhour and Joseph Darby were not men of power, they were not newspapermen or generals, but they spoke up for what they knew was right, and that made all the difference.

This is not an answer that is very satisfactory on a political or policy level. Certainly there are things that could be done to improve the way the military reacts to war crime. Approved strategy and tactics should not encourage violations of the law of war; this would not only reduce the number of war crimes committed but would also create an environment in which commanders are not forced to choose between upholding the authority of the Department of Defense and prosecuting war crime. Officers and enlisted soldiers should be trained in both the laws of war and the history of war crime in modern warfare to prepare them for what they might face. The Uniform Code of Military Justice requires that any soldier who is given an illegal order must disobey it, and any soldier who witnesses a war crime must report it; these policies must be emphasized both in training and on the battlefield.

The American military has always been a bastion of idealism. America, more than any other nation, is a concept, not just a group of people, and American wars, whatever their motivations, have always been fought under the banner of truth and justice. If America is to attain the ideal of being a power that is about freedom and equality and the rule of law not personality, American military might must be based in the law of war. Each individual soldier must be educated in his responsibility to this goal if we are to have a chance of achieving it.

How to Take Over the World

I remember when I was in high school, in my American Government class in the back with all the kids who didn't particularly want to be there. I wanted to be there, I thought it was interesting, but you can learn plenty from the back and the other kids don't hate you for being so smart if they think you're angry and antisocial and get bad grades. You don't have to actually get bad grades, just tell people that you do; I learned that when I was six years old.

Anyway, American Government was a decent class, our teacher was really into history and how great America is, and enthusiastic teachers are always better than drones, but I spent most of my time passing notes with this angry pothead guy so it didn't look like I was learning. This was back in 1999 or 2000, if I remember correctly- before 9/11, but after the Oklahoma City bombing and the conviction of Tim McVeigh. As it was a government class, we got to talking about how, theoretically, one would take over the American government, were one so inclined.

The guy I sat next to- I don't even remember his name- started out talking about needing soldiers and secret police and all that, assassinating the president and holding DC hostage with a nuclear weapon, typical doomsday movie scenarios. But I really thought that the best way to begin taking over the United States would be to start a terrorist organization, parallel to a successful political career. You'd have to have a small group of people to help you, of course, and you'd have to have the politician kept strictly separate from any ties to the terrorist group. In fact, you'd want the politician in operation for several years before any sort of terrorist activity was apparent.

So you'd have a politician, male and handsome and with a team of intelligent people of a moderate political bent, and you'd get him elected, perhaps to the Senate. And then once he'd made a name for himself as a uniter, not a divider, you'd want to get him made something like Secretary of Defense, or of State or something along those lines- powerful but not too prominent. Secretary of State would be best, because then he's in line for the Presidency. And then once he's ensconced in power, you start up with the terrorist group, which by this point should be spread across the country and should have a good amount of supplies and connections.

This terrorist network would not be much like al Qaida; it would be domestic, probably extremely religious, composed of white men in crewcuts who believe the time has come to get rid of the federal government via the Second Amendment. These people would be crazy fanatical and would bomb several locations across the country, killing as many people as possible, preferrably, for our purposes, children or the elderly.

This then is where the two elements of the plan tie together: the politician steps up to save the country from the terrorists by exerting control over public meetings, broadcasting, trade, etc. If possible, he gets it declared a state of emergency. If people protest, you get the terrorists to blow up a Walmart and a day care and so forth; if the danger seems real and local, I don't think you'd even have to pay journalists to support you- plenty of people would do it on their own.

Once you have the country in a state of emergency, your politician, who isn't the President, needs to become the President. If he's Secretary of State, all you need to do is bump off the President and VP. If he's not, it's more complicated, but the key is that he needs to be in control of the country when things are maximally broken down. From there it's just a matter of making certain changes to laws, not hard to do with executive power in a time of war, and you have a pretty solid hold on America.

My friend and I considered trying this, but really it would take a lot of money, and you'd need someone to be the politician and we didn't have anyone, and he objected to the idea of blowing up day care centers anyway. I guess I don't really blame him.