Learning from 2006

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Hello Reader,

Got a queer view of the world?

Sometimes I am reminded this world is queerer than the painted-over flattened version I normally imagine…

I try not to get too offended at that May 2006 copy of The Atlantic magazine I wrote about back in October. It’s like how I get offended when I see photographs from our old western frontier days: complicated, messy, not like the simplified Hollywood narrative I am accustomed to. 

I even wince at modern Europe being complicated: Did you know there are six “micro states” that don’t show on political maps of Europe, or that the city of Vienna has three languages?

Here in Calgary I surprised a friend by teaching him that, contrary to popular belief, you can be Jewish and still be an atheist. (And he taught me things) Back west here, Jews are like homosexuals used to be: present in theory, but normally assumed to be off stage and out of mind. Out east, in contrast, from my reading of columnist Dear Abby, I think folks rattle off “church-or-temple” as easily as we say “parent-or-guardian.” Jewish holidays out there are public holidays, as documented in their University calendars, available at my local campus. A college teacher told me the traffic noises even change on those days—she said her friend had missed their long distance phone call because the friend had been using morning traffic as her alarm clock, and slept in. 

Yeah, sometimes we make our lives too complicated—Better to just set two clocks for getting up. Why two? Because for mine you have to set the time and set the alarm, pull out the pin, wind the main clock and wind the alarm bell: that’s five separate variables—at least I don’t need any snooze button, not if I put the time-delayed second clock over by the door.

From May of 2006 I see the U.S. is not, despite the American’s wishful gloss, a melting pot from sea to shining sea.

QUOTE (page 130, by Marc Cooper)

…The historic migration we are witnessing is radically remaking American culture, producing what some call, in a new twist on on old term, a “Los Angelization” of the country. More and more neighborhoods, even some entire towns, are now predominantly Spanish-speaking. Other areas are officially bilingual.

UNQUOTE

I am so offended from feeling, once again, “always the last to know.” To think I could have known back in May, years ago.

Getting heavy: What truly offends me? That all the shocked amputations and blasted guts of the Vietnam conflict did not inspire anyone to turn over a new leaf. You may recall the conspiracy by several U.S. government agencies to meet together to agree on a number, to tell the public and politicians, for Viet Cong troop strength. This after a lone C.I.A. operative, Samuel Adams, (yes, a descendant of the patriot, but not a brewery owner) “blew the whistle” internally to say that, scientifically, based on desertions alone, the Viet Cong should have already ceased to exist. I tell you, “conspiracy” is not too strong a word.

As writer Michael Crichton once said, “Science is not done by consensus.”

In Iraq, for the war on terror, the U.S. government was again trying to trick the public, this time by steadily refusing to count enemy dead. Call it War Without Windows. (book title) So two good citizens, O’Hanlon and Cordesman, had to glean their own count, and then they published enemy casualties covering a two year period.

Page 36 has a graph: O’Hanlon’s red line of the "cumulatively killed and imprisoned" goes up at a 45 degree angle, over a bar graph for the insurgent membership, month by month.

QUOTE

Despite steady progress in the killing or detention of Iraqi insurgents, the size of the insurgency seems not to have diminished, as new recruits have joined. 

UNQUOTE

QUOTE

(There were think-tank meetings at the Pentagon)

At one such meeting, a participant noted the large number of insurgents being killed or detained ( on O’Hanlon’s Iraq Index) and asked Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld whether this showed that the insurgency faced clear annihilation. “I asked him, ‘Don’t the numbers look pretty good?’” the participant says, “But he declined to make that claim. He was acknowledging that things weren’t quite as they appeared.”

UNQUOTE (Page 36-37, by Joshua Green)

He declined? Perhaps the lessons of Nam didn’t teach “the establishment” to stop hiding the truth, but merely to stop actively lying, from fear the truth might somehow come out. In Nam, as you know, the government got “in trouble,” getting not a tiny bit pregnant, but a tiny bit dishonored, a little bit exposed, by a great big thing called The (expletive deleted) Tet Offensive.

Some philosophy: While secret negotiations in Washington on declaring communist troop strength may take only a day or two, international negotiations can be like watching paint dry—one gets mighty impatient. A comic once offered these words of comfort… when world negotiations seem unbelievably long, let’s remember that back in the day, when a cold war chess tournament between a Russian and an American had all the front page drama of a Canada-Russia hockey series, how it took so very, very long merely to arrange that innocent chess game. The two masters played on neutral ground, Iceland, and we patriots still remember the match: Because Bobby Fischer beat Boris. (Yes, and “Canada” beat Russia)

I try not to forget, or gloss over, the competitiveness of those cold years.

I was acquainted with a boy—he would be in the background when I visited his parents—who was killed in action with the Canadians in Afghanistan.

I see on page 17, back in the day, that Britain was taking over from the U.S. in Afghanistan, and the Afghan president “…Hamid Karzai, confronted his Pakistani counterpart, Perves Musharraf, in February with evidence that insurgents are being trained, equipped and deployed from Pakistan…Karzai said his hope is that Musharraf will crack down and mitigate the attacks.” This in 2006. 

As you know, Pakistan steadily, year by year… as fresh paint aged, faded, peeled and had to be repainted… has refused to admit they are helping the Taliban by using Pakistan’s intelligence service. I guess these discussions take time. 

Last month, President Trump responded by cutting aid—300 million dollars worth. Change is up to the Pakistanis themselves—I refuse to help by flying over there to teach them what every American Muslim schoolchild would already know: “Islam means peace.”

On a comical note: Back in America, on the domestic front, women were “negotiating” in 2006. Someone soberly edited a serious essay collection called Mommy Wars: Stay-at-home and Career Moms Face Off On Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families. (Random House) 

The response in The Atlantic was an article (Page 110)by Sandra Tsing Loh called Rhymes With Rich subtitled one women’s conscientious objection to the “mommy wars”

QUOTE

Lying in bed the other night, cradling some seltzer water, my stomach gurgling, the word for my malaise suddenly came to me: “afflufemza,” wherein the problems of affluence are recast as the struggles of feminism, and you find yourself in a dreamlike state of reading first-person essays about it, over and over again.

UNQUOTE

What? Hey, I’m a feminist! And I’m an essayist! Oh man, I’m always the last to know if I’m being insulted. But I think I’m safe, in this case. Besides, I don’t mind being offended if someone is funny about it.

…Well, that’s all, dear reader, for 2006 when an issue of The Atlantic cost U.S. $5.95 …$6.95 in Newfoundland. Maybe I should go try a 2018 edition, but it would probably have a bigger price tag: I’m scared to go look. 

Sean Crawford

October

2018 Anno Domini

In the foothills of the Rocky Mountains

Footnotes… held back… maybe for another time 

Lastly, on a funny, happy note: From the city of the first Fringe Festival, here (link) are some fun artist-hacked street signs, reported by the BBC. Scroll on down.