Whirl

Here my son Tom writes, very cogently, on the general state of hopelessness many of us feel about our political system in general. He closes by asking his young friends for something optimistic. On starting this entry, I’m not so sure I can reciprocate.

Nearly 16 years ago, when Tom was eight, I watched the election returns from a hotel room in Valdosta, Georgia. I was there on business, so to speak, meaning that I was there on temporary duty with the U.S. Air force. Liberals are rare enough in Georgia today. In 1992, on a US military base, in Valdosta, I felt we were part of an endangered species.

But I was jubilant! Partially because my man had won; partially because of home state pride; but mostly because I was hopeful for my county and for the military I was so proud of. Maybe now was the time for real social reform in America.

It was a short, jaded love.

A few months later I watched in dismay as president Clinton took a political cop-out and adopted the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. I felt he broke his faith with me when he did this. As a serviceman, I knew his action would be ineffective and would continue to force many of my friends and co-workers to live a double life. I also knew that as the commander and chief he had the right to just give the order—he did not need to negotiate with anyone. True, congress would likely have overridden him, but he would have held to an important principle and could have faced his constituency with integrity—having kept his campaign promise in a true and faithful manner. Instead it seemed he was already calculating for 1994 and the equation looked to be:

A win in 1994 = (straight votes > gay and lesbian votes) = take the gays for granted

After 12 years of republican rule, I was prepared for corruption, hypocrisy, and even this type of cold hard political calculation. I just didn’t expect see it coming from a democrat. Looking back, I’ve no idea why I was so naive.

It the last 16 years we’ve watched some pretty drastic changes of face, purely calculated for political gain. Instances where the candidate seems to move away from his or her personal convictions in order to push through a less effective compromise or just to pander to a segment of the electorate.

Clinton’s about faces became so common that I learned to accept them as an inherent part of both his political and personal self. Some of them I understood and others I despised, but I began to realize that I was witnessing a purely political (and apparently, a desperately horny) creature at work. Someone who would mold himself to be part of whatever political landscape he was in at the time. I believe he is a smart person who truly feels this is what we require in our system to get anything done. In the end, he did get a lot done in spite of being reviled by a good percentage of the population.

But he also re-enforced the strategic notion that winning office was a tactical goal which had to be accomplished at almost any cost. Even if it requires a near complete subjugation of the real values and empathies of the candidate or those he depends upon the most.

Thus to get through 1996, he gave up on letting Hillary lead a major social reform effort (health care) which the country desperately needed. Was the conservative lobby so powerful in the early 1990’s that it could not be beaten with pure common sense? Maybe so. It seemed that almost any message—even one as resonate and critical as universal health care for all—could be twisted and corrupted into fear with just a few sound bites and melodramatic TV spots.

The scary part to me is that we’ve created an environment where only Eagle scouts (or, apparently, idiots) can win and even then, they must repress anything resembling true passion.

Think not? Then think Howard Dean. Has a winning coach ever been fired for giving a victory yell (or squeal, as it were). Well we fired one in 2000.

That same year, John McCain lost a nomination running as himself. He spoke out against imprudent foreign and military policy. He even dared to confront the religious right. The new republican party couldn’t tolerate a thinking leader and tossed his ass out the door. Today, he runs as someone else—a person whom I doubt John himself even recognizes.

Are we, the electorate, so tainted we cannot tolerate a genuine person?

Maybe yes.

Look at Hillary’s tears from just a couple of weeks ago. To one crowd it was all a carefully planned act and to another it was a sign of weakness. And these are democrats I’m talking about. Everyone picks from a binary menu: black or white, red or blue? There is no room anymore for magenta; no room for humanity. Even the religious elements—the so called value driven voters—expect their leaders to be cold, hard, good and evil thinkers.

The transformation of Al Gore in 2000, shocked me the most. Here was a man I deeply respected, even though he had the stage presence of a wooden stick. Who cares? It was his discomfort on stage and his passion for our planet that I found endearing. It made him human, like me, like us all. Yet to win he felt a need to become someone else. He felt the need to speak to African-Americans in a sermon sing-song and worse, he became so quiet about the environment that he let Ralph Nader take my vote (no, I don’t live in Florida).

Now. Freed from this trap he has re-gained himself and inspired us again. He has allowed us to see that deep inside there is still the same idealistic soul who found his way to center stage because he believed in more than just taking it.

Tom. I think that is your element of hope.

The notion that within us all, even within our candidates, is some precious gem of humanity. For me, that level of humanity needs to outweigh his or her ambition.

Sorting it all out is nigh on impossible. Most of the messages are too packaged, too controlled, and far too contrived. To get to the core, we all need to look—not to the candidates—but into ourselves and vote with our heart.

We need to look past our jaded love and seek new ways, build new institutions, and maybe even new parties.

Your generation has a better shot at this than mine (but many of us haven’t given up). You are 90 million strong and coming fast. Start local, spend some time with the issues, live your values, and vote with your heart.

© 2007 by Rodney Gleghorn. All rights reserved.

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• ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Turns 15 [via Zemanta]

When you take an oath, you are taking the long view. Committing yourself to a standard of truthfulness or allegiance for a period of time—often years.

We don’t do that very often. Our lives tend to revolve around short term promises and objectives.
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Seriously, how many times in your life have you taken an oath? I don’t mean the tiny little promises you make as part of your normal day: finish the report by Friday, pick up the kids; help someone move. Those are certainly important, but how often is it that you have taken a real, no shit, honest to god oath?
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Unless you are OJ Simpson’s witness-for-hire, you probably will only take such an oath a few times in your life–usually when you make a commitment to the person you love.
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There are groups of people who, as a requisite to their chosen occupation, take oaths upon embarking down that path. Usually these are vows to serve or protect the rest of us. Examples include: police officers, firefighters, physicians, and the primary subject of this essay, those who enter military service.
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Here is the enlisted oath of office for the U.S. military:
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“I … do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.”
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This is a no shit serious oath. The men and women who take this vow are committing themselves to go wherever ordered; to voluntarily relinquish many of the freedoms we enjoy; to fight and possibly, to die.
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What are they dying for?
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In the oath, they have pledged their lives to the defense of a concept, an ideal, a noble experiment. That is what our constitution embodies—a noble experiment in humanity.
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Here’s another, no shit, honest to god, oath:
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“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
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So, the president’s oath is almost identical to the lowly enlisted person serving under him. With a few exceptions:
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First, the president gets a mulligan. It comes with the phrase: “…to the best of my ability…“. I call this the idiot’s clause. As in: “If I screw this job up and rob you of your freedom and security, that’s ok, cause I did the best I could”.
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If the enlisted person is a moron, he or she may end up in Leavenworth. On the other hand, our president will likely get a $20 Million dollar book deal (about $5,000 per word, or $4,750 per syllable), and also spend few lucrative years on the evangelical speech circuit. Nice gig.
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Back to the enlisted oath: “…I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me…”

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I call this the “do whatever the moron tells you” clause.
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It’s necessary. You can’t have a debate on tactics at the bottom of a foxhole. Someone has to be in charge. Perhaps the founding fathers never anticipated we would elect a total dunce to be commander in chief. They probably marked inbreeding off the list when they ditched the royal family.
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Look, I know that oaths are mostly symbolic—with little binding force of law. Like a flag, the oaths of office serve to ceremoniously reinforce the central notion of our republic: we are devoted to a concept of key individual rights and a government which, based on its’ structure, is limited from infringing upon those rights.
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But the constitution is only as strong as the interpretation of those who execute it. When the document was ratified, only white men could vote and thousands of people were held in slavery. Yet many of the very men who wrote and signed the document interpreted those conditions to be just hunky-dory. Few American citizens would agree with them today, and many feel we have much further to go.
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This is the power of the concept – our collective understanding of freedom has grown. Even though many of the men who conceived the idea and put it into action were unable to see where we were headed.
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And where are we headed now?
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We send brave men and women overseas to die. In the process we engender hate that will span generations and place our children in greater mortal danger than ever before. More importantly, we turn a blind eye to our own hypocrisy oversees and allow our fear to degrade our freedom at home.
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I was privileged to serve my country as an enlisted serviceman and I took that duty seriously. Were I were under that oath today, I would obey my orders and go were told to go. The fact is, unless told to storm the U.S. Capital, the average U.S. serviceman will not have the luxury of deciding the constitutional implications of the order he or she has just received. That is up to the President to determine. By invading Iraq, our president has betrayed the men and women he leads by sending them on a mission which degrades the very concept he and they are sworn to uphold—freedom. He has broken his oath and tarnished theirs.

© 2007 by Rodney Gleghorn. All rights reserved.

This was originally published as a letter to the editor of a local (now defunct) alternative paper in November of 2001. I still stand behind it , in fact after our subsequent invasion of Iraq, I find it more relevant - rlg:

I awoke Friday morning to the story of a five year old Afghani boy. On October 22, 2001, this child lost his parents to an American bomb. According the Sarah Chayes, the NPR reporter, the boy suffered wounds to his head, and “A potato-sized chunk of flesh is missing from his buttock”.

Tell me America, is this our pound of flesh?

Politicians and other military men will call this kind of tragedy unavoidable, they will label it “collateral damage” and move on. For me, the term is too immediate to reflect the horror this child has endured, or the anguish he will carry with him into adulthood.

Where will this child be in ten years? Learning to rebuild his shattered nation, or learning to build a bomb?

Will we still call it “collateral damage” when he drives a truck into a shopping mall, or releases a deadly plague into our subway system? If this chooses a peaceful path, will we then call it “collateral damage” when he teaches his children to mistrust and hate America?

For us, the bombing was accidental, an unavoidable statistic of war. Both sides will continue to exchange semantics over the legitimacy of the target. But this verbal exchange is not meant for, and will not reach, the children of Afghanistan. This child will be told but one thing, “the bomb was American”. The justness of our cause will not ease his pain, nor temper the hate we have cultured in his soul.

As a US Air Force retiree, I can directly attest to the accuracy, and the fallibility of our technology. I also stand proud and support the men and women who are risking their lives to execute the orders of our elected leaders. However, the use of military force, particularity air power, is not always the answer. It remains a blunt tool that is not well suited to every situation.

I believe, it is time for us to re-think our approach to this threat. It is time to learn from the history of this conflict, and break this cycle of pointless violence. It is time to practice our own ideals on a global scale; to restrain ourselves now, with an eye towards the future. It is time to save the lives of untold Afghani children, and perhaps the future of our own children as well.

Saturday, November 03, 2001

© 2001, 2007 by Rodney Gleghorn, All rights reserved.