Pre Patriot Day

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Here’s the piece I promised last week, 

saying no one will read it,

as it’s too near Labour Day.

They say my city reminds people of Denver, in Colorado. Did you know that the biggest minority group of foreigners in my city is U.S. citizens? Many come to Calgary for white collar work in oil and natural gas. So on “Patriot Day”—Like most Canadians, my business calendar book is “made in the U.S.A.”— I could go into a downtown bar, between petroleum office towers, wearing my friendly flag lapel pin. Maybe get a free drink. On the other hand, how can I happily drink beer with “patriots” who are too lazy to have great regard for the words that fall out of their mouths? They say one grave thing, “War,” and do another. 

According to Psychology Today magazine there is a contract between innocent soldiers (many of them uneducated, too young to vote) and society, a society including the establishment, the older generation and lazy patriots. The servicemen: “I will do what you say, but you have to know what you are doing.”

The Psychology Today research indicated that massacres and mistreatment of prisoners will not happen if society holds up its end of the contract.

In a fortnight I will post an essay on Idealists Among Us. The essay will be abstract; meanwhile, here are some concrete specifics I deleted from that essay.… I was startled to suddenly realize this is my only week left to post before Patriot Day, on September Eleven.

A foolish nation at war

I am angry because, regarding congress, and the War on Terror, over in Iraq, I recently did a google search. I found individual congressmen going over there on speed tours, going “Gosh wow.” Fine. But I found no sign of a congressional committee ever going over there to soberly investigate. No time allotted, for a committee or those individuals, to get away from the elite in the little walled off Green Zone in the capital, no time to talk intently with common American soldiers and civilians, no time for common Iraqis.  The congressmen wasted their jet fuel.

Sadly, history repeats. You may recall from the old national best seller, The Ugly American, how experts from the U.S. hung around in Saigon with the Vietnamese elite, never getting out to the countryside, never asking the humble rice farmers, who were the vast majority, what it would take to win their “hearts and minds” away from choosing communism. 

(But Robert Kennedy knew: he wrote a clear, public domain, essay on Vietnam as part of his bid for the presidency, before he was assassinated) 

I have to shake my head at that, just as I shake my head when the mistakes of Vietnam are being repeat-repeat-repeated for the war on drugs. Plainly, there’s not enough informed idealists over here, today, to keep our boys over there, back then, from having died partly in vain.

With mistakes being repeated, no wonder Matt Damon starred in the movie Green Zone. (Four stars out of five by film reviewer Roger Ebert) Sure, there were smart people in the Pentagon and the White House—but apparently the generals and officials were only smart like a Ph.D. who can’t tie his own shoes. Blazing incompetence. 

Where were the congressmen? Where were the idealists? Where… while during the “occupation” of Iraq, the entire world outside the U.S. knew the occupation was a fiasco? Instil Democracy? Rebuild the country to Saddam Hussein pre-war levels? Or even, as a worst case scenario, merely “teach the theory” of democracy? Fiasco, fiasco and “fiasco.”

Back home, I respect the Dixie Chicks for never saying “I told you so.” They merely played Shut Up and Sing. 

Here’s a link to the Guardian article by the pigeon who outed them.

Side note: To put the Dixie Chicks in context: Incredibly MASSIVE anti-war demonstrations in Europe were simply not being reported on the U.S. TV news. The Chicks said a phrase or two to indicate support for such a demonstration by Londoners, then “Just so you know…,” preceding their sentence about the president being from their home state. But their haters and lazy patriots, of course, didn’t wish to know context. Here’s Roger Ebert’s (link) movie review of Shut Up and Sing

Speaking of U.S. newscasters not reporting the European protests, some days ago the BBC did a story (link) on a U.S. family that had two children involved in two separate mass school shootings: I was riveted! But the only things I find on google have links back to the BBC, and not to any American newspaper.

Sean Crawford

North America,

Alberta,

Next to Montana,

spring,

2018

Footnotes: 

~Perhaps the worst Yankee imperialism was when the Iraqis were creating their new constitution. Like the U.S. founding fathers before them, respectful of consensus, they needed some time. 

In the modern business world, any group facilitator can tell you the pitfalls of “rushing to completion,” or rushing to a vote, if this means that later the group won’t be confident in taking action on their vote. In other words, part-way through any Arab discussion a “vote” is merely a snapshot, frozen in time, of an opinion poll, a part-way opinion. But the Yankee occupiers arrogantly forced their “sacred vote” upon the Iraqis, as a decision maker. This when the Iraqis were almost finished discussing. “Close, but no cigar.”

For the quote below, “Bremer” refers to the U.S. leader (and ambassador) of the occupation; “this” refers to killing, chaos and civil disorder.

“If only Bremer had given us an extra day, none of this would have happened” he said ruefully. “We could have had the democratic government that the Americans promised us when they went to war.”

(Page 234) trade edition (Green Zone) with Matt Damon as a soldier on the cover, Imperial Life in the Emerald City subtitled “Inside Iraq’s Green Zone” by Rajiv Chandrasakaran.

~Link to Roger’s two thumbs up review of Green Zone.. 

~The first time on this blog I used the label “hubris” was for an essay that, after establishing terms and concepts, zeroes in on the White House and Iraq, Reality Checks, archived October 2010.