If you weren't there, shut your mouth

I saw this bumper sticker on a minivan at the Vancouver VA, today. It made me smile, I'll admit, and of course - of course! - I get the sentiment. Greater still than the impulse Veterans who served in theater have to separate themselves from other Veterans (can't tell you how many times I've heard "I'm a combat Veteran," as though other Veterans are less for having better luck), is the need to reserve their war for only themselves and others who understand. This is, obviously, a common theme among Veterans, and it's incredibly stupid and dangerous.

Here's the thing about civil society that less and less people - especially military people - seem to get: we're all in this together. This is our country, and these wars are our wars. Vietnam Veterans don't hold a reserved privilege to discuss "their" war, just as I don't get to kick Bill Maher's teeth in for calling me a coward (your apology can suck it, Bill, you have no idea what you're talking about). We're in this together, and that means we all have skin in the game, be it money, prestige, philosophical angst, or actual fucking skin. We're in this together, and we all need to talk about the big stuff like taxes and education and the space program and, yeah, war, both current, future, and most especially past.  Because that's how we avoid making dumbassed mistakes like Vietnam.

Shutting down dissent and debate is what terrorists do. It's what people with no faith in their own beliefs do. People who can't stand toe-to-toe and deal with opposing views without letting their hands go or picking up a gun are cowards, to their core. They fear the possibility that their opinion or ideology or cosmology cannot withstand scrutiny. That's the impetus for those who commit violence over words and ideas, the motivation of those who insist that debate requires a shibboleth, and I'm not having it.

So, dear Vietnam Veteran with the minivan and the bumper sticker telling me to shut up, I just wanted to say, "No. I won't shut my mouth." Even if I hadn't "Served, Stood Tall, and Remained Proud" of service in my own conflict, I wouldn't shut my mouth. Because I'm an American, and the next unjustified war of aggression, the next corporate resource grab, the next time a halfwit in the White House decides to redeem himself in the eyes of his father, or whatever the real motivation for invading Iraq was, it's going to be my kid instead of me. And you'd better bet your ass I'll be flapping my gums as loudly and persistently as my strength, stamina, and eloquence will allow.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Here's the thing, I was just like you.  Some Vet would start talking about how they were having a hard time, and I'd kind of look off at an angle - not not looking at them, for sure, but not looking at them either.  I'd change the subject right quick, I'd do the thing it took to let them save their dignity.  I was a Vet, back then, but not really.  "Not Veteran enough syndrome," a friend of mine calls it.  I served.  Went to where the Persian Gulf War was happening, but nothing happened to me.  Right?

I came so close to getting my head blown off at the North Chicago Inn one empty spring night in 1991 that I can still feel the powder burn on my cheek and my left ear feels perpetually over-pressurized.  My ribs still ache from the gang stomping I got while I was on the ground just trying to cover up.  I still get the sweats.  Come even near to threatening me or mine and my eyes go in the direction of my gun safe, no matter how far from home I am.

"Give me our money or your friend is dead" said the black man in the back seat.  I was the friend.  The knife at my throat was all the convincing I needed that this guy probably wasn't playing.  When the Corpsman injected my finger with Novocain, it plumped up so much I could see the wriggly fat cells like dead maggots under my skin.  He'd tried to cut my jugular, but I pulled the knife away from my neck and all he got was my empty wallet and my Navy ID.  Sucker.

We lost power sitting off Kuwait City.  I was sitting at the CIWS control panel, right next to the Electronic Warfare specialist.  The last thing either of us saw before the CIC went black was a half-dozen Iranian surface-to-surface missile batteries radiating us.  We were sitting ducks for 20 minutes.  That's what I was told.  I don't remember any of it.

I used to be like you.  I used to try and let a Vet save their dignity when they started in talking about how they couldn't get right.  I used to turn away from them, get embarrassed for them.  Man, what a dick I was.  This shit?  This PTSD shit?  It's a bear, man.  It will eat you up.  There is no dealing with thing on your own, and the Veteran who's turning to you for help, she deserves better.

If you're still doing to that to Veterans when they express the need to talk about what they're struggling with, do me a favor, punch yourself in the face as hard as I would if I were there.  Keep in mind I'm a pretty big guy and I can rock a heavy bag.  Put some ass in it.  You deserve it, and so does the Veteran you're neglecting.

Needs Moar Beauty

Flash mobs as a phenomenon, I think, have faded in popularity a bit.  The once unique and even stupendous displays of crowdsourced performance art were everywhere, or seemed to be.  The fact is, they still are, but now are passe and even quaint.  So it seems to me.  But one specific kind of flash mob still catches me off-guard when I encounter it on YouTube and once in downtown Portland during my commute: the classical music flash mob.

Strictly speaking, these aren't probably flash mob qua flash mob.  I think it's safe to say a fully symphony orchestra meeting in casual clothes to play a public space might more properly be called a "free concert."  And I'm sure much of the impetus behind world-class organizations like Opera Philadelphia performing their roving "Random Acts of Culture" across the cityscape is the result of the YouTube epiphany of some hip middle-aged marketing maven who saw delighted audiences in some of Improv Everywhere's uploads and thought, "Hey, that could maybe put butts in seats...."

However it comes to be, I love these videos.  I love them to death and back to life again.  They're beautiful and powerful, and seeing the people standing right in the middle of powerful, professional performances like the Copenhagen Phil's rendering of Bolero in the passenger concourse at Copehnagen Central Station makes me happy.  So maybe it makes you happy.

Here are my five favorites.

1.  Ravel at the Copenhagen Central Station

2. A friggin' BANK COMMERCIAL, Ode to Joy

3. Icelandic hymn, Hear Heaven's Carpenter in Wuppertal Hauptbahnhof, Wuppertal, Germany

4. Handel's Hallelujah chorus in the Philadelphia Central City Macy's

5. The Vienna People's Opera (Volksoper Wien) Playing Carmina Burana at...yup...a train station.

Concern Troll, David Brooks, Is Concerned

If you don't know David Brook's history, if you haven't come across multiple instances of his naked cynicism and unrepentant partisan hackery, you might have felt something approaching shock, or at least the frisson of surreality overcoming your senses as you listened to the final seconds of NPR's All Things Considered "Week in Politics" segment.  The New York Times columnist and what passes for a big brain in conservative circles tossed off a doozy of a false equivalency between George W. Bush's response to the massive loss of life and property caused by Hurricane Katrina and the forcing of some 5% of the healthcare buying public off their not-really-insurance health insurance plans for better and usually cheaper plans off the healthcare exchanges.

"They both have administrative failures, which is Katrina and Obamacare," said Brooks, tossing this line off at the 6:14 mark of the program as though nobody could ever find it controversial.  Yes, even the smart conservatives have trouble remembering all 7 syllables in "The Affordable Care Act."  Also, ZOMG THIS IDIOT COMPARED PEOPLE DYING OVER A PERIOD OF 4 DAYS WHILE BUSH SHRUGGED TO FREELOADERS HAVING TO PAY FOR THEIR OWN HEALTHCARE!!!

So, that happened.

Thing is, this is unremarkable in Brooks' sordid career.  The man's capacity for mendacity is surpassed only by his unearned arrogance.  Taking this cheap and stupid low-road-of-low-roads shot at the president for what it's worth, I can forgive Brooks.  He's a member of a dying party whose best options for the short term are all long term suicide.  So this idiot lashes out.  This guy writes a moderate conservative column in the New York Times.  Nobody cares what he says.  But neither the longtime segment host, Audie Cornish, nor Washington Post resident librul columnist, EJ Dionne, challenged it.  And that, I have a problem with.

It's a phenomenon I'd never before encountered, comparing The Affordable Care Act to the various failings of our last, hopelessly incompetent, belligerently incurious president.  Apparently, this is a real thing conservatives and their dumb brothers in the Tea Party do.  They take something from the messy and complicated rollout of the law, and they amplify the ever-loving shit out of it for political gain.  Like, comparing President Obama's accurate but oversimplified citation of a complicated clause in the ACA (You CAN keep your plan if you like it...if your insurance company wants to keep offering it, and hasn't changed it since 2010) to Bush's terrible lies leading up to invading a sovereign nation for fun and profit and proxy murdering an estimated 190,000 human beings.  Murder and forcing people to get healthcare insurance that won't dump them when they get sick?  Not the same thing.

But nobody expects much out of the Tea Party, they're idiots.  That's not even up for debate.  And Brooks?  Like I said, the man's a liar with a long documented past full of similar obvious lies.  What I want to know is, where the hell is the press?  Where are the Democrats?  Where is the outrage that the very large and very evil misdeeds of the Bush Administration are being compared on even footing with technical burps and misstatements that don't even rise to the level of white lie?  Is there nobody with a national audience looking for answers who might take 5 minutes to call a hail and hearty BULLSHIT when such incredible lies are told by people who, by the way, have been wrong about everything from tax policy to diplomacy to equal rights for all under the law for the past 58 years?

I want my own land 

Take my hand and come with me 

It's not too late for you 

It's not too late for me 

To find my homeland 

Where a man can stand by another man 

Without an ego flying 

With no man lying 

'n' no one dying by an earthly hand

- Captain Beefheart, "Frownland"

What Veterans Day Means to This Veteran

Whereas the 11th of November 1918, marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed

- Congressional Declaration of Armistice, June 4, 1926 

I hate the patriotic holidays.  Have done since shortly after my Navy discharge in 1996.  They make me want to hide in dark places.  I want nothing more than to be with myself, to ignore the day entirely, or to sit with other Veterans and talk of matters entirely unrelated to the occasion.  It took me a long time to figure out why.  When I did, it took me even longer to process it.  In fact, like a lot of Veterans, I'm still trying to figure it out and make my peace.

Like about half of all who serve, I come from a family that considers soldiering to be a rite of passage.  Grandpa's ancestors came over from County Cork and immediately earned two Medals of Honor, one at Pickett's Charge, the other at Little Big Horn.  Grandma's people have been here since before the beginning, and one of her great-great-great whatever uncles was a make-believe Mohawk one frigid, hotheaded, stupid night in Boston.  Service is a major component of who and what I want to believe I can be.  Service is what I ran away from for a decade and a half when it turned out enlistments have consequences.

I saw no action in my war.  I was present, accounted for, diligent in my services, and utterly, ultimately, idle.  I wasn't called on to fire a shot, nor was I fired upon.  The most traumatic event I endured was a total loss of ship's power while moored in Kuwait harbor, the last tactical information being that a battery of Iranian surface-to-surface missiles had painted us and we were totally vulnerable.  Nothing came of this, and I left the Gulf unscathed (I thought) and feeling very much not-at-all like a combat Veteran.

It wasn't until halfway through my enlistment that I knew something was off.  I was in my early 20s, pretty fit, and yet I was in constant, unremitting pain.  It felt like my joints were full of sand from that Arabian desert.  My muscles cramped and sometimes tore from no proximal cause.  The bottoms of my feet peeled and burned constantly.  My head hurt, I had implacable insomnia, and sometimes I had a hard time focusing because my sight went all wonky and my balance abandoned me.  I got fat because I couldn't maintain a steady regimen of exercise.  And in 1996, just after receiving my discharge, I told my civilian doctor I thought maybe I had Gulf War Syndrome.

Of course, in those days, claiming you were suffering from the variety of unexplained symptoms that was a quick way to earn contemptuous dismissal, at best, and a psych eval at most likely.  My concerns and comments were noted in my Kaiser Permanente medical record, and no followup was recommended or pursued.  Another nutball Veteran looking for a handout or attention.  I never even considered going to the VA; those places were for real Veterans, guys who had their legs blown off, not guys like me who just had whiny little complaints about imaginary "syndromes."  I soldiered on.  What else could I do?

Over the ensuing 15 years, I worked through the pain.  I overdid the ibuprofen and the aspirin because my skill set provided no other options than manual labor.  I tried stretching, drinking gallons of water a day on a schedule (because that's another weird thing, I no longer have a sense of thirst, which complicates things), I hit the gym and bulked up to the point I could bench nearly 400 pounds and could squat press a Volkswagen.  But the cramps continued, the aches alternated between dull annoyance and life-crushing impingement, I still couldn't sleep, I was still often incapacitated by spells that I now know are a special type of migraine, and the VA was still busily dismissing the growing pile of evidence that something unforeseen had affected about a third of all the troops sent into the combat zone during the Gulf War.  And every year I was reminded with rows of flags and jet fighter flyovers that I wasn't a real Veteran, because real Veterans had visible scars, not "Medically Unexplained Illnesses."

So the patriotic holidays for the past 17 years have been nothing to me but a thrice annual reminder that despite the fact that I signed up at the earliest opportunity, despite the fact that I meant every word of my oath of service, and despite the fact that I willingly and readily accepted my deployment to a war zone, I'm not a Veteran.  Not a real Veteran.  At least, that's how it seems to me, and I suspect how it feels to a lot of guys who can't understand their health problems and the Pentagon's response to same.  And I don't suspect anything will ever change this sense of isolation and betrayal.

At least there aren't any fireworks on Veteran's day.  There's that much to be thankful for.