Memorial Day

For me, this is a weird “holiday.” “Memorial Day is a federal holiday in the United States for mourning the U.S. military personnel who have died while serving in the United States armed forces.” Or so says Google and Wikipedia. “Serving” in the US armed forces in the last 70 years has been an odd perversion of that word.

My father-in-law “served” in the Air Force between 1946 and 1966, enough to put in his 20 years and at a time when he mostly flew in a B52 from one US base to another pretending to be a “Cold Warrior,” but mostly drinking, partying, and making the most money he would earn in his lifetime plus a retirement salary that just kept growing until he died. My father served in the US Navy from 1942 to 1946 and saw more of WWII than he was ever willing to talk about and didn’t talk about it at all until he was in his 80s. He was mostly a confused small town kid being ferried from one end of the world to another on the credential of his college degree and officer status. He was an LST officer during both the North African and Italian invasions and saw a boat load of Marines he’d crossed the Atlantic with gunned down in the first few yards of the Normandy landing. He was never one of those guys who wore his WWII uniform or a hat full of medals and patches. When he ran into one of the guys who had spent a year with him on an LST, at a part-time summer job in the early 60s, they had nothing to say to each other.

Friends, some really good friends, were forced to “serve” in the Vietnam War and three of them did not come back and one came back so damaged that he was never functional again. That may not sound like a lot of people to you, but I have never had more than a half-dozen people I would call friends in my life. Losing four of them in a few years to a pointless foreign invasion was significant to me. Oddly and somewhat embarrassingly, I tried to join the Navy, like my father, when I was 18 in 1966 and thanks to a recruiter’s screwup I ended up being classified “1-Y” due to asthma and my Navy recruiter’s intense desire to stay out of combat.

The last two years have changed my perspective on who is serving who and who we should be memorializing. Covid hit the 1,000,000 US citizens killed mark in May of this year. “In some states, medical staff account for as many as 20% of known coronavirus cases.” The “Great Resignation” is loaded with men and women who have decided to leave the US healthcare industry because of the risk, the disrespect, and the fact that qualified and experienced doctors and nurses are more than capable of handling any job a business student might try to tackle. There is a lot more money in bullshit administration jobs than in healthcare. As of February, the estimate was that 1 in 5 healthcare workers have quit and at least one survey found that 1 in 3 plan to quit before the end of 2022. Most of this is due to crappy, over-paid and totally ruthless mismanagement. Hospitals, clinics, and insurance companies are mostly owned by large corporations with multi-millionaire CEOs and the rest of the totally useless “Cs” and while they publicly whine that they’re somehow worth the money they suck out of healthcare they are not. As a physician said in the Atlantic article, “We need to say to the next generation of doctors and nurses, ‘We got this wrong, and despite that, you’re willing to invest your lives in this career? What an incredible gift. We can’t look at that and change nothing.’” Will we? Probably not.

If Memorial Day were to mean something other than the flag-waving “moment of prayer” bullshit honoring the fools and occasional patriots who gave their lives for corporate profit and political maneuvering, we need to refocus on the word “serve” and give credit to those who gave their lives for a higher purpose and war is not that purpose. There was a brief moment, before Nixon abandoned the draft and the Vietnam War, when there was a lot of talk about expanding the concept of serving the country to everything from healthcare and public education to VISTA to the Peace Corps. Instead of only providing public service benefits to those who carried out the imperialistic plans of oil companies and the other international corporations our military has served to slavishly, the country would also honor and reward service to the country. In the 80s, California’s Alan Cranston was on a roll, trying to convince the country that broadening the range of service we honored with healthcare and education benefits when he managed to get himself tangled up in the Keating Five fiasco and prostate cancer (hard to tell which was worse) and decided to retire from politics.

For myself, Memorial Day is personal, not national. I try to remember the faces, the voices, the words, and they times with friends and family who are no longer among the living. At 74, my list is long and growing but there are term limits to how many I can lose before I’m lost. Sooner than later, I’ll be the one being remembered, if at all.

Something about Idaho

You might be confused reading about the domestic terrorists infesting Idaho: the fascists, the racists, and the proud swastika waving American Nazis. How can a place so overwhelmingly blessed with natural beauty, abundant resources, and spectacular weather be cursed with the scum of the European invasion? Read a little history and you’ll discover Idaho has been cursed with these human monsters almost from the moment silver was discovered in those mountains and giant, corrupt assholes like Rockefeller, Morgan, Mellon, Crocker, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and Hill mined Washington D.C. for free access to every penny that could be squeezed, crushed, dynamited, cut, or burned out of the western states. They did all of that damage with the help of exactly the kind of people who are waving treasonous Confederate and Nazi flags, carrying guns into public meetings, threatening “liberal” public officers, and generally crapping in the streets to demonstrate their general lawlessness and love of chaos. These are not a new sort of Idaho resident, although many of them are recent California immigrants, running from expensive California real estate and employment competition from actual human beings. Riverside County is puking up the kind of garbage people the place has been known for since it became the home of the KKK and American Nazi Party back in the Reagan years and Idaho and Texas appear to be catching the bulk of that faux-Christian vomit.

At the turn of the last century, Idaho and Montana were originally infested with exactly this kind of European immigrant. As Timothy Egan describes in The Big Burn, Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America,  a book about the early history of the under-resourced and disrespected U.S. Forestry Department, Taft, Idaho in the early 1900’s was “a town . . . with one prostitute for every three men and a murder rate higher than that of New York City . . . You could buy the basics in Taft: a woman, a man, a horse, a place at a card table or a spin of a roulette wheel, a fat steak for $1, a quart of whiskey for $1.25, a bunk for 25 cents. One nearby shot advertised ‘shoes, booze and screws,’ and they weren’t talking about hardware.” Those were the people imported to rape and plunder the forests, mountains, and water resources of Idaho in 1900 by the infamous robber barons. Before Teddy Roosevelt, the Republican Party (like today’s Republican Party) was convinced it’s primary duty was to provide free and easy access to the nation’s natural resources to the highest bidder in exchange for some dribble-down economics. Some of the robber barons, like some of today’s Congresscritters, took a more direct path and became Senators, in the days when U.S. Senators were appointed rather than elected, so they could pay themselves for the privilege of plundering the continent.

It’s not a stretch to imagine that the kind of people who would work for Anaconda Copper (aka “The big snake”) and the other mining giants, the railroad trusts (the biggest corporate welfare recipients in U.S. history), and the logging trusts would also be of low-to-non-existent moral character and easily fired up to maintain a constant level of instability and violence to keep the misdirection going and the money flowing into the smallest number of huge pockets possible. These are exactly the people Orwell was talking about with his “four legs are better than two” sheep chants.

Nothing has changed today, corporate con artists like Trump, the Bundys, Vandersloot, McGeachin, and a collection of fake news propagators are pumping up the Marching Morons to self-destruct themselves and the state they claim to love in the interests of outside profiteers. The Bundys made their fortune poaching grazing land from the public spaces and have turned poaching into a right wing “liberty” for the few who have the guns and political power to chase everyone else off of those spaces. You have to give them some credit for having the gall to pull that one off. If you can mobilize a pack of idiots to arm up and protect your “right” to steal from those same idiots, you are definitely some kind of salesman.

Trump regularly chanted that the rest of the world is laughing at us. He distracted that attention by claiming that it was because of our immigration policies. We wish. No, the intelligent people of the world are laughing at the USA because of the number of well-armed, easily-misled, insanely violent, and grotesquely entitled “citizens” this country has created and inspired to overthrow a political system that has provided them with more freedom, resources and opportunity, and space than any in human history. For the most part, these wingnut revolutionaries are doing the work for people, organizations, and states who have been labeled “enemies of the state” since before WWII and they’re actually even waving our enemies’ flags. Now that is salesmanship.

How Stupid Do You Think We Are?

I know, the title of this rant is pretty stupid. The answer is clear, “Practically infinitely stupid.” Listening to Republicans explain why an insurrection was just an ordinary protest, “Free speech at its finest,” and their beloved uneducated minions chant versions of “Four legs are better than two” has about done me in. My opinion of human intelligence is at an all time low, especially the kind of humans I’m surrounded by in the rural Midwest.

Most recently, in response to my comment that Republicans are hustling this attack on abortion rights as a racist distraction driven, as always, by power and money, some relatives claimed “I have half-black grandchildren” or “my daughter-in-law is Hispanic, how can I be racist?” They are, of course, ignoring the fact that their grandchildren have been trying to educate them about the consequences of their politics for years. The core to this argument is, “I can personal act fairly morally and convince myself I am not racist while I consistently vote for racists, traitors, and authoritarians.”

The fact that they imagine no one sees through all of that is a pretty strong statement of how stupid they think we are. Of course, it only works in their own, narcistic minds, but that is their entire world. Between their religion, their guns, and their entitlement they are convinced that the rest of us are fools or worse. What they perceive as reality is so clouded in superstition and unexamined belief that any kind of actual science or even simple news report gets perverted into nonsense by their distorted filters. And the beat goes on. Or, and so it goes, depending on which commentary on how “nothing ever changes” you pick.

A lot of people who have studied history and who watch the curve of US politics and political opinion are warning us that this is a turning point; for good or evil. An entire political party and their cult followers are bent on destroying any semblance of democracy and replacing it with a freaking combination of theocracy and fascism. We are watching history repeat itself, again. One of the more entertaining reminders of the world’s horrific past is the perverted claim that fascists are not the problem; “the Nazis were socialists.” In name, that is true: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP; National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazi Party). That workers’ political movement quickly turned into a coalition of fascists and conservative industrialists and the socialists left and created an actual socialist workers party; the anti-capitalist Schwarze Front (Black Front). In a similar manner, the fascists who have taken over the Republican Party are now calling the people who are traditional Republicans RINOs (Republican in name only). In 1934, Hitler ordered the murder of the founders of the Nazi Party and purged the party of anything resembling socialists. Just like Trump and his henchmen attempted to do on January 6, 2021.

If you are able to argue that the last 50 years of concentrated racism from the Republican Party is anything but that, you are an actor in the history the United States appears to be doomed to repeat.