Shell Shock, Battle Fatigue, PTSD - A Human Heart is Crying Out

"As if there is not enough that has gone tragically wrong in this era of endless warfare, the military is facing an epidemic of suicides. In the year that ended Sept. 30, 2009, 160 active duty soldiers took their own lives — a record for the Army. The Marines set their own tragic record in 2009 with 52 suicides. And this past June, another record was set — 32 military suicides in just one month. War is a meat grinder for service members and their families. It grinds people up without mercy, killing them and inflicting the worst kinds of wounds imaginable, physical and psychological . . . [a]nd the multiple deployments (four, five and six tours in the war zones) have jacked up stress levels to the point where many just can’t take it. "  Bob Herbert, The Lunatic's Manual, NYT  August 2, 2010

I'm thinking now of three men I've known whose lives were changed dramatically by war.  Their injuries weren't as much to blood and bones and sinew as they were to the heart and mind.  They were each in their own way shell-shocked.

My Great-uncle Leonard, quiet and dignified even as a young man, I'm told, fought in the First World War.  He came back silent and withdrawn and by his own words, not fit for society.  He had lost so much weight people in his hometown didn't recognize him.  His sister-in-law told me he could be seen at all hours walking and walking and walking.  His beard grew long, his clothes grew tattered, and after a while people stopped seeing him altogether.
He told me later, when he was in his late 80s and still robust, that he had to go into the wilderness to heal himself.  He built a rude cabin deep in the woods and lived there for three or four years, coming into town only for provisions, getting out again, quickly, stealthily.

He spent his time hunting and fishing, following a daily regimen of grueling calisthenics to strengthen his body, and studying the habits of the deer and other wildlife living with him in the surrounding forest.  A simple life that no doubt also included a coming-to-terms with what he had seen and done on the battlefield.  Events which he never talked about, and would only describe some 60 years later as "terrible".

My grandmother's step-son sustained some leg injuries and was shell-shocked during World War II.  He walked with a wobble but his major wounds were psychic and so deeply embedded he never got over them.  He came back with a monthly government disability pension that usually lasted no more than a week.  Alcohol was his solace, and his barmates were his closest friends--until the money ran out.  He was called "Rubberlegs" by nearly everyone, including the kids.  When my grandmother heard us say it, she called us in and told us what had happened to him.  "They never should have taken him," she said. "They should have seen that Wesley's soul was too kind for war."

My cousin's Uncle Bill was a soldier in World War II, as were two of his older brothers.  I remember how handsome he was, looking to me just like Dennis Morgan, the movie star.  As a silly teenager I had an enormous crush on him and found any excuse to be near him.  After the war, he was staying with my aunt and uncle for a while, and one day I found him sitting alone in the living room.  He had his head down, his hands covering his brow and I thought he had drifted off to sleep.  Then I saw his shoulders shaking and realized he was crying.  I backed out and went to tell my aunt.  "It's the war," she said.  "It won't let him forget it."

His two brothers made the adjustment back to civilian life without any outward signs of trouble, even though they had both been in fierce battles on the European front, but Bill had been a medic at the Battle of the Bulge.  The images of bodies and body parts would not go away.  He was a lost soul for many years, drowning his memories in a sea of alcohol.

We train our children at an early age to be considerate of other peoples' bodies and feelings.  We do not hit.  We do not call names.  We do not cause deliberate harm to humans or animals.  And then we take those still malleable young people and send them to war, expecting them not just to forget societal rules but to completely turn those rules on their asses and do the exact opposite.

Once inside the base gates they're taught that there is honor in war, even though the ultimate goal is to kill.    We use fancy terms like "collateral damage" to define the innocents who get caught in the crossfire.   It takes a strong will or a dulled mind to pretend those innocents, young and old, are unworthy human beings.   It's enough to cause any conscious mind to crash.

A while back, George Carlin put his own take on the emotional casualties of war and the euphemisms we choose to slot them:

 There's a condition in combat. Most people know about it. It's when a fighting person's nervous system has been stressed to it's absolute peak and maximum. Can't take anymore input. The nervous system has either (click) snapped or is about to snap.

In the first world war, that condition was called Shell Shock. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables, Shell Shock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves. That was seventy years ago.

Then a whole generation went by and the second world war came along and very same combat condition was called Battle Fatigue. Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn't seem to hurt as much. Fatigue is a nicer word than shock. Shell Shock! Battle Fatigue.

Then we had the war in Korea, 1950. Madison avenue was riding high by that time, and the very same combat condition was called Operational Exhaustion. Hey, we're up to eight syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase. It's totally sterile now. Operational exhaustion. Sounds like something that might happen to your car.

Then of course, came the war in Viet Nam, which has only been over for about sixteen or seventeen years, and thanks to the lies and deceits surrounding that war, I guess it's no surprise that the very same condition was called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Still eight syllables, but we've added a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I'll bet you if we'd of still been calling it Shell Shock, some of those Viet Nam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time. I'll betcha. I'll betcha."

And I'll bet if we had a no-escape draft open to the sons and daughters of rich and poor alike, wars (if there were any) would be short and to the point.  Then we might not have to resort to euphemisms in order to get around the fact that as evolved human beings we're no longer built for war.

Ramona

The Lunatic Fringe is No Longer Amusing. Let's get Serious.

The collapse of the economy in the Great Recession gave us the starkest, most painful evidence imaginable of the failure of laissez-faire economics and the destructive force of the alliance of big business and government against the interests of ordinary Americans. Radical change was called for. (One thinks of Franklin Roosevelt raging against the “economic royalists” and asserting that “we need to correct, by drastic means if necessary, the faults in our economic system from which we now suffer.”)

But there has been no radical change, only caution and timidity and more of the same. The royalists remain triumphant and working people are absorbing blow after devastating blow.

Bob Herbert, "When Greatness Slips Away",  NYT, 6/21/10

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Bob Herbert has been my favorite doom-sayer for a while now.  Every bit of doom and gloom coming off of his little portion of the paper confirms and solidifies my own feelings of the permanence of America's rack and ruin.  Together we wallow in our weariness and grief, but we don't enjoy it.  Not even a little bit.  That's about the only positive thing I can say about it.

We're also not alone by any means.  I can say that positively, too.  There are a lot of us who recognize a river of no return when we see one, and there are some of us who might even know how to turn this sorry ship around, but our voices are being drowned out by the lunatic fringe shouting crazily for another exciting ride down the rapids.

There's no getting around the fact that we're being hijacked by a loud-mouthed group of know-nothings and evil-doers.  They really, truly want to get us back to the dark days of Bush/Cheney.  They want to give what's left of what we laughingly call a "government" over to the Private Interests, making it a total surrender, and they want to make it happen now.

The crazy thing is some of them don't even know that's the plan.  They get out there and shout for Obama's head and for the destruction of all things liberal/progressive/socialist/communist/Marxist/Leninist/Rooseveltist/
Steinbeckist/MLKingist/WalterReutherist/FlorenceNightingalist/GoldenRulist and think they're doing their part to save the country!
 
They listen to people like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin and Dick Armey (who know they're talking nutty but like reaping the rewards), and Michelle Bachmann (who apparently doesn't, but reaps anyway), gathering their assigned weapons of anger and hatred, heading out to the battleground without ever recognizing that the real enemies of the state are the generals at their backs.
 
 

 
We're hearing well-paid Republican men and women in powerful governmental positions telling 15 million out-of-work folks that the solution to their problems is to get off the unemployment dole and go get a job.  Some of those same out-of work folks, even the ones who know there ARE no jobs, march with the tea partiers and vote Republican.  In some circles that's called masochism.   I wouldn't care if it was strictly their problem--even masochists need a crazy kind of love--but their actions are affecting us all.  We don't want to have to feel their pain.
 
Unrepressed anger and the attendant vicious stabs at any kind of remedies are hallmarks of the rest of them.  It's the Gong Show/Jerry Springer mentality, except this is real reality, with consequences. 
 
Chris Hedges, in a scary-fascinating piece on the "American Psychosis", writes:

  "Our culture of flagrant self-exaltation, hardwired in the American character, permits the humiliation of all those who oppose us. We believe, after all, that because we have the capacity to wage war we have a right to wage war. Those who lose deserve to be erased. Those who fail, those who are deemed ugly, ignorant or poor, should be belittled and mocked. Human beings are used and discarded like Styrofoam boxes that held junk food. And the numbers of superfluous human beings are swelling the unemployment offices, the prisons and the soup kitchens. 


It is the cult of self that is killing the United States. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt."

We have to stop pretending that what is happening in our country is a cyclical blip in our journey toward  glory.  We're being destroyed from the inside by our own citizens, and our real enemies couldn't be happier.  They don't have to lift a finger.  All it takes for them is patience.

Our goal is a government working toward the common good, and a free press that recognizes their role in achieving it.  Our responsibilities as citizens and voters is to make sure our government works for us.  We do that by taking our voting rights seriously and choosing our leaders judiciously. 

If it's true that senatorial-candidate-from-nowhere Alvin Greene got 60 percent of the primary vote in South Carolina simply because people didn't know who they were voting for, then lord help us, we're doomed.  Something tells me we're not in the '30s anymore.  We actually do have something to fear besides fear itself.

Ramona

It All Comes Down to Loyalty

For a nation that can’t stop bragging about how great and powerful it is, we’ve become shockingly helpless in the face of the many challenges confronting us. Our can-do spirit was put on hold many moons ago, and here we are now unable to defeat the Taliban, or rein in the likes of BP and the biggest banks, or stop the oil gushing furiously from the bowels of earth like a warning from Hades about the hubris and ignorance that is threatening to destroy us.    Bob Herbert, NYT, 5/31/10

  Just as we saw in Wall Street's devastating economic disaster and in Massey Energy's murderous explosion inside its Upper Big Branch coal mine, the nastiness in the gulf is baring an ugly truth that We the People must finally face: We are living under de facto corporate rule that has rendered our government impotent.

Thirty years of laissez-faire, ideological nonsense (pushed upon us with a vengeance in the past decade) has transformed government into a subsidiary of corporate power. Wall Street, Massey, BP and its partners — all were allowed to become their own "regulators" and officially encouraged to put their short-term profit interests over the public interest.    Jim Hightower, Alternet, 6/2/10

There was a time when America was known for its greatness.  We were a prosperous country with an upper class that put its riches back into the American economy.  Our middle class, our vast majority, was vibrant and full of life.  Our poor were always with us, but our homeless and hungry weren't so overwhelming in numbers that our shelters and our food banks couldn't keep up.

There was a time when anyone who wanted a job could find one.  Fathers could earn enough to take care of an entire family, and mothers, if they chose, could stay home and care for them.

There was a time when we built factories on American soil and produced goods and made steel and planted crops in such abundance that we not only sustained ourselves, we were actually able to export the remainder.

There was a time when, if we could have looked ahead, we would have had enough sense to be ashamed of what we have become.

What a waste.  All that hard work, all those years of working together to build an America we could all be proud of, and look where we are.

Every day in every way I resent the hell out of the people who put us here.  I've lived through the good times and I've lived through the bad times.  I've watched as greed and selfishness and yes--disloyalty--have eroded  a workable system that had been in place since the aftermath of the Great Depression, and is now plummeting us back into a reprise of those same dark days.

Big business is running our country into the ground.  Big business doesn't care because big business is global now.  If they lose here, they'll gain somewhere else.  Big business has no shame and they have no sense of loyalty.  They live big here because they can.  They can because there are enough Americans who will watch their backs and circle the wagons whenever they think big business is being attacked.  Since the days of their most exalted hero, Ronald Reagan, capitalism at all costs has been hammered into their pointy little heads.  (Never mind that, thanks in large part to the bleatings of their most exalted hero and his most vociferous followers, a good number of their capitalist pals have taken their booty offshore and have completely abandoned ship.)

The Republicans, the Tea Partiers, PalinCorp, Fox "News", the Right Wing pundits, and certain of the DINOs are working hard to distract us from the increasingly obvious truth:  Big business has run amuck and is destroying us.

Why those people feel the need to defend those Terminators is beyond me, but they're apparently going to defend them to the death of us. The mainstream media, either by intent or shortsightedness or fear of ratings, is big into aiding and abetting the Destroyers of All Things American.  Even C-Span, the seeming last bastion of objectivity, is turning right just when we need them to stay focused.  More and more, they highlight the rightward-leaning, and seem to delight in covering everything Tea Party as if they were an actual political party and not simply an angry mob whose only solution to this mess is to pump up the anger.

Defending the status-quo encourages the undermining of our economy.  There is something decidedly ludicrous about that claim to want to "take our country back". The only ones who want to go back to that are the ones who made (and are still making) obscene bundles of cash off of our collective misery.

If they really wanted to take our country back they would be fighting against the disloyal, dishonorable corporations that chose to build factories outside America using foreign slave labor in corrupt, unregulated countries rather than  live by the necessary rules and pay decent wages and benefits.

They wouldn't be waving the American flag while chanting "Drill, baby, drill".

They wouldn't be buying into the corporate lie that all things public, including health care, Social Security and schools, should be privatized so that corporate interests can have the control and keep the profits.

They wouldn't be so bent on electing people who despise the very idea of good, all-encompassing government but wouldn't mind collecting a paycheck while they're attempting to destroy it.

If those people had any sense of loyalty toward this country, they would, instead, be climbing out of that comfy bed they've made with the worst of Big Business and think twice about railing against anyone wanting to put a stop to the most destructive, out-of-control business practices this country has seen since we let this same thing happen in the 1920s.

It all comes down to loyalty.  Do we privatize or do we keep "a government of the people, by the people, and for the people".  Every member of Congress pledges this Oath of Office:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) 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; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

 Every time we say the Pledge of Allegiance we pledge loyalty to these United States.

Some of us actually mean it.

Ramona
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Fear and Loathing - The New American Vision

At some point, we have to decide as a country that we just can’t have this: We can’t allow ourselves to remain silent as foaming-at-the-mouth protesters scream the vilest of epithets at members of Congress — epithets that The Times will not allow me to repeat here.
It is 2010, which means it is way past time for decent Americans to rise up against this kind of garbage, to fight it aggressively wherever it appears. And it is time for every American of good will to hold the Republican Party accountable for its role in tolerating, shielding and encouraging foul, mean-spirited and bigoted behavior in its ranks and among its strongest supporters.    


Bob Herbert, NYT, 3/23/10

 Honestly, unless you've been monitoring the ticking time bomb that is the far-right media in recent days, you probably don't appreciate how frighteningly possible that cultish scenario has become, as the GOP Noise Machine, led by Fox News, publicly suffers a nervous breakdown. It's a mental and emotional collapse that's been advertised in recent days as cablers, radio talkers, and right-wing bloggers have reached for increasingly hysterical, often blood-curdling rhetoric to describe the irreversible atrocity -- an incurable, metastasizing malignancy!! -- that's about to seize and destroy the United States in the form of a bill to expand health care coverage.


Eric Boehlert, Media Matters, 3/23/10

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Okay, I'm getting scared now.  I've been a political junkie ever since Adlai Stevenson lost to Ike for the second time in a row.  I wasn't even old enough to vote, but I cried my eyes out as much as if I'd been watching my best friend go down for the count.  I've followed politics all my adult life, sometimes rabidly, sometimes just out of the corner of my eye, but I can safely say I have never seen anything like this monumental 15-month temper tantrum egged on and cheered on by the Republican party and, yes, the mainstream media.

Are the crazies really in the majority?  Are they so powerful these days that what we're seeing--the vicious, frothing attacks on care for the poor and the sick, on blacks, on gays, on disabled protesters, on 11-year-old grieving kids--is now the American norm?

From the coverage bombarding us, it would seem that way.  The rabid crazies are being fed their favorite dish--publicity--and, gluttons that they are, they're eating it up and going after more.  They understand how it works--in order to get more they have to give more, which means that each time they're out there in front of the cameras they have to step up the action.  More hate!  More fear!  Louder!  Louder!

This is what the media have never understood--their complicity in all of this.  They're feeding these monsters, goading them, energizing them, when the way to starve them out of existence is to simply ignore their cries for more. 

Where are the signs of support for real reform in this country?  Nowhere to be seen.  The SEIU (Service Employees International Union), on their Labor's Lens page, highlights numerous demonstrations, protests and vigils by union members and supporters.  I had to go to their pages to find them. I didn't see them anywhere else.

As I write this, President Obama is signing into law the beginnings of health care reform.  With our help, he'll be able to strengthen it and give it some real teeth.  Our patience is at the limit because the need is so urgent, but there is urgency in putting our support behind our leaders now.  It's the only way to counter the factions so desperate to take down this president they're willing to destroy any chance for millions of Americans to receive adequate health care.

If we're ever going to bring our vision of America back, we have to vanquish those who are standing in the way of repairing and nurturing our country.  We have the power to do that by exposing them for what they are.  They do not represent our America--not now, now ever.

Pass it on.

Ramona

We are the Ordinary People of Our Time

"[Howard Zinn's] fame and popularity came from helping us see America from the ground up - as ordinary people struggling to gain and hold their place in it. When no history book told that story as it should be told, he wrote the book himself -- A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. It became a perennial best seller."

Bill Moyers Journal, 1/29/10

Think of those who joined in — and in many cases became leaders of — the abolitionist movement, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the feminist revolution, the gay rights movement, and so on.  Think of what this country would have been like if those ordinary people had never bothered to fight and sometimes die for what they believed in.

Bob Herbert, "A Radical Treasure",  1/29/10

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As the woes of this country escalate instead of dissipate, as millions of us go to bed each night knowing that we won't stop thinking about tomorrow, it's a pretty safe bet we're eventually going to work up to, and beyond, the point of just edgy. (I think we saw it in Massachusetts last week.  Yes, Martha Coakley had to be dragged kicking and screaming onto the campaign trail, and probably deserved to lose, but why was she the candidate in the first place?  That was the best the Massachusetts Dems could do?)

In millions and millions and MILLIONS of households, every day is a new calamity.  Some if not most of these calamities are fixable with a little help from Those who Have--including the government, whose holdings are largely OURS anyway.  If they were seriously working on the jobs situation--creating them, bringing them back to America, being honest about what constitutes a livable wage--people would be seriously working.

If people were working, they would be living in their homes, not standing on the outside looking in. They would be buying groceries and trying on clothes and sitting for family portraits again.  They might even be turning up their thermostats.

If banks were making low-, or even reasonable-interest loans, the people with jobs would be purchasers again, entrepreneurs would be building small businesses again, and all who were honest enough would be paying their fair share of taxes again.

If some of those billionaires would stop worrying about how they'd survive if they suddenly became millionaires again, and see themselves less as the privileged few and more as the instigators of this mess, we might get out of this mess quicker.

If the U.S (as in United States) Chamber of Commerce became less the foul foreign-interest chamber pot and more the cheerleaders for true American commerce, those meaningless slogans about "jobs, jobs, jobs" might actually morph into jobs, jobs, American-made jobs.

But so far, none of those things are happening, and we're left with a conundrum:  How do we--that's WE, as in we, the citizens, the hoi polloi, the common people,  the teeming masses, the heedless multitudes--build up the strength to fix this?

The truth is, I don't know.  I've spent months thinking about this, ever since Barack Obama became president, and it all comes down to--I don't know.  So if you're still with me and you're waiting breathlessly for an answer, you might as well exhale. I'm just one lone person here, same as you, thinking hard, talking my head off, working up the energy to march to and against and for. . .without even a hint of a plan taking shape.

Frank Rich gave me a real eye-opener on Sunday when he wrote:  "The historian Alan Brinkley has observed that we will soon enter the fourth decade in which Congress — and therefore government as a whole — has failed to deal with any major national problem, from infrastructure to education. The gridlock isn’t only a function of polarized politics and special interests. There’s also been a gaping leadership deficit."

It's true.  The Democrats, my party for better or. . .dammit. . .bounce between lethargy and stupidity.  Harry "public option is too HARD" Reid was so riled up over what's happening around here, he merely yawned during the SOTU speech but didn't actually fall asleep.  Nancy Pelosi seems to think that grinning is the solution to everything.  And the Blue Dog Democrats take pride in being the infiltrators from the enemy camp.  The few who actually see some urgency in saving the country--damn the torpedoes--say all the right things but in voices so weak everybody gets away with pretending they can't hear them.
 
If you count the 535 house and senate members in Congress, plus the president, the vice president and the entire West Wing, plus the deputies and the assistants to the deputies, plus a whole slew of pundits who claim to know everything, that's a lot of people wandering around in a fog looking for answers to what ails us.

So a year later, here they are, bragging about unemployment numbers in the tens of thousands per month instead of hundreds of thousands,  still without a WPA-like emergency jobs program that would immediately put people to work rebuilding America, still without any hope of a health care reform bill that first and foremost addresses health.  And those are just the big things.

Obama gave his State of the Union speech early last week and then, a few days later, went to see the Republicans at what was laughingly called their "retreat" (they don't "retreat", we do).   I'm always looking for signs, it's true, but last week I might have seen the first signs of a leader ready to fight.
 Some words from our president that gave me hope:

"In this new decade, it's time the American people get a government that matches their decency, that embodies their strength.

 ". . .And to encourage these and other businesses to stay within our borders, it is time to finally slash the tax breaks for companies that ship our jobs overseas and give those tax breaks to companies that create jobs right here in the United States of America.

". . .So tonight, we set a new goal: We will double our exports over the next five years, an increase that will support 2 million jobs in America.

". . .I took on health care because of the stories I've heard, from Americans with pre-existing conditions whose lives depend on getting coverage, patients who've been denied coverage, families, even those with insurance, who are just one illness away from financial ruin.
After nearly a century of trying -- Democratic administrations, Republican administrations -- we are closer than ever to bringing more security to the lives of so many Americans.
The approach we've taken would protect every American from the worst practices of the insurance industry.  (This worries me.  What about the least worst practices?)

"...To Democrats, I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades and the people expect us to solve problems, not run for the hills.

"...And if the Republican leadership is going to insist that 60 votes in the Senate are required to do any business at all in this town, a supermajority, then the responsibility to govern is now yours, as well. Just saying no to everything may be good short-term politics, but it's not leadership. We were sent here to serve our citizens, not our ambitions.  So let's show the American people that we can do it together."

Near the end of his speech, he said,  "I don't quit.  We can't quit."   I loved hearing that.  It sounded as if we had started. 

At the Republican Retreat in Baltimore, Obama did a little hand-smacking:  (He did a lot of brown-nosing, too, but I expected that.)

"I'm not suggesting that we're going to agree on everything, whether it's on health care or energy or what have you, but if the way these issues are being presented by the Republicans is that this is some wild-eyed plot to impose huge government in every aspect of our lives, what happens is you guys then don't have a lot of room to negotiate with me.

"I mean, the fact of the matter is, is that many of you, if you voted with the administration on something, are politically vulnerable in your own base, in your own party. You've given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion because what you've been telling your constituents is, this guy is doing all kinds of crazy stuff that's going to destroy America."

 Well, that was on Friday, so on Monday morning I tuned in to "Morning Joe" to hear Joe and bunch's take on the dressing-down in Baltimore.   When I got there, Mika was in the middle of reading a couple of paragraphs fromWSJ about Obama's detached style and his perceived lack of irony.  Joe latched onto it and every time someone said something favorable about either the SOTU speech or the Baltimore Q&A, Joe said, in effect, "Yes, but is he ironic?"

It came from this piece entitled, "The Obama Spell is Broken", by Fouad Ajami:
"We have had stylish presidents, none more so than JFK. But Kennedy was an ironist and never fell for his own mystique. Mr. Obama's self-regard comes without irony—he himself now owns up to the "remoteness and detachment" of his governing style. We don't have in this republic the technocratic model of the European states, where a bureaucratic elite disposes of public policy with scant regard for the popular will. Mr. Obama was smitten with his own specialness.
In this extraordinary tale of hubris undone, the Europeans—more even than the people in Islamic lands—can be assigned no small share of blame. They overdid the enthusiasm for the star who had risen in America."

It takes some bodacious, mendacious audacity to write in the Wall Street Journal about hubris or ". . .a bureaucratic elite [that] disposes of public policy with scant regard for the popular will" after those not-so-long-ago (but really, really long) Bush years, but if anybody can pull it off, it's the WSJ.   Their audience has the most to lose if Obama wins his battles.

It's the ordinary people (that's us) who need to keep Obama where he is.   Underneath the "uniter" facade is a street fighter.  "Community organizer" is on his resume.  He knows what it's like to be ordinary.  So he might not have the answers, and I might not have the answers, and I might not know exactly where we're going (and he might not, either), but I'm picking sides.  That's something.

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Signs that I'm getting way too immersed in this "saving the country" business:  I saw this internet bumper sticker the other day and I immediately thought of congress:  "I'm not really slapping you, I'm just high-fiving your face."

Another Requiem for Detroit

Detroit was the arsenal of democracy in World War II and the incubator of the American middle class. It was the city that taught mass production to the rest of the world. It was a place that made cars, trucks and other tangible products, not derivatives. And it was the architect of the quintessentially American idea of putting people to work and paying them a decent wage. It’s frightening to think seriously about what we’ve allowed to happen to this city and what is now happening to the middle class and the American economy as a whole.
                   Bob Herbert, An American Catastrophe, NYT, 11/21/09

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The ghost town known as Detroit is where I spent my life from infancy in 1937 until 1952, when we moved to the suburbs.  Even then, Detroit's northern border was only four miles from our home.  I could take a bus to Royal Oak, transfer to an express bus, and be whisked downtown in no time.  After I married, we still lived no more than a half-hour's drive from the center of the city.  I loved Detroit.  I was not one to stay away.

When I was young and lived in Detroit the Cultural Center was my playground and I never got over the fact that I could walk into those gorgeous buildings--the Detroit Public Library, The Institute of Arts, The Historical Museum--as freely as I could walk down my street.

In later years our writers' group, Detroit Women Writers (now Detroit Working Writers), met at the DPL. After our meetings, I often took the long way back to the parking lot in order to take in the atmosphere of that stately old repository.  In one wing, there is the Burton Historical Collection, where we've spent hours and hours researching local and family histories (for free.  I see they now charge non-residents).  The library is near the campus of Wayne State University and students fill the spaces and keep it busy.

From the library, it is a quick walk straight across Woodward Ave. to the Detroit Institute of Arts, where mummies lie, where a secret, winding staircase takes you down to the cafeteria, where Rembrandts visit and small Picassos reside, and where Fredric Edwin Church's huge wall-length Cotopaxi, when it was in residence,  just blew me away.  But, of course, the main event at the DIA is a visit to Diego Rivera's Industrial Murals.

 

 You don't have to wander far to see it.  It is a straight walk from the main entry.  Kids are thrilled by the suits of armor lining the hallway before it, and are usually bored by the murals.  Little do they know how very near the murals came to being smashed to bits and swept away--like much of current-day Detroit.  I  wrote an article about them in 1986, when two of Diego's assistants, Lucienne Bloch and Stephen Dimitroff, came back to the DIA to participate in an anniversary celebration. As many times as I had seen those walls  (glanced at might be a better description), I didn't realize that the story they told was my story, our story.

Detroit was the seat of industry during America's modern years, a city on the move.  The census rolls show that Detroit held the "fourth largest city" spot from 1920 to 1950, when Los Angeles pushed it to fifth place.  The 1950s were peak years for Detroit, with a population averaging 2.8 million.  Fifty years later, as of 2006, Detroit was the only city in the United States to have a population grow beyond 1 million and then fall below 1 million.  Now it rests uneasily at 871,000 (2008 figures).

(It didn't get past me that my family was one of many thousands that moved out of Detroit in 1952.  By that time, my dad, an upholsterer, had moved away from the auto industry and was working for a furniture maker based at Detroit's northern limits. They found an affordable little house in the suburbs, and all I can say is if they hadn't, my kids and grandkids, in their present form, wouldn't be here.  My future husband lived just up the street.)

Bob Herbert took a tour of Detroit's ruins and wrote an important piece about what he saw, but I hope he goes back sometime soon to take a look at the beauty of Detroit.  There is still much to be said for that battered, bloodied but not totally bowed town.

I would have sent him first to take a look at some of the glorious architectural structures built early in the 20th century by industrialists who saw a future there.  Until about two months ago, I might not have believed there was a chance in hell for that city, either, but an important meeting forced me down into the bowels, to the Penobscot building.

I was as stunned by its beauty as Bob Herbert was by the devastation he saw.  I wandered the halls and felt like I was in a museum again.  Signs of hard times were there--empty store fronts and very few people--but the Art Deco artwork, the gorgeous wood parquetry, the intricately tiled floors, the stately columns were all intact, all preserved, all spit-shined to a dazzling glow.  I hadn't been moved by the sight of a building in a long time, but standing there, I felt as if the dark clouds hanging over Detroit had lifted for just a moment, and the sun was about to shine through.

When I was a kid, my father would take me to the McGregor Library in Highland Park and wait patiently, reading newspapers, while I wandered around that beautiful Beaux Arts building, where I could breathe in the quiet and almost believe I belonged there, where I could gather books in my arms and actually take them home.

There is talk that the McGregor will reopen soon.  When and if it does, I want to be there.

My Detroit, when I was a kid, was a beautiful lady. Now she is our Grizabella.  To be remembered, to be pitied, but not counted out.  Look closely and you will understand what happiness was.

(Click here for the Fabulous Ruins of Detroit Tour and here for the Detroit Rises Tour.)

Ramona

Here We Go Again. . .

"We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. ... Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me. And I welcome their hatred!"
FDR, Madison Square Garden, October 31, 1936
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"The bear market would no doubt have magically turned around by now, and those failing geniuses at the helm of our flat-lined megacorporations would no doubt be busy manufacturing new profits and putting people back to work — if only Mr. Obama had solved the banking crisis, had lowered taxes on the rich, had refused to consider running up those giant deficits (a difficult thing to do at the same time that you are saving banks and lowering taxes), and had abandoned any inclination that he might have had to reform health care and make it a little easier for ordinary American kids to get a better education."
Bob Herbert, NYT, March 7, 2009
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"Americans all over this country hope for change. They hope the corruption, earmarking and pork-barrel practices will stop. What are we giving them? We are giving them a slap in the face, that is what we are giving them ... So much for the promise of change."
John McCain, Senate floor, March 2, 2009
(41 days after Obama's Inauguration)
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Oh, that Grand Old Party. . .don't you just love them? Is there a former regime anywhere in the world more under-appreciated than they are? Why won't we listen?? Yeah, they've done some things in the past--some things that might have caused a tiny bit of the problems we're facing today--but if we just give them one more chance they promise to change their ways. Because, after all, they are the party of change. . .

Before we turn all those billionaires into mere millionaires, and before we do something as drastic as create jobs for the great unwashed, and before we make the whole damned country healthy, could we please, please just listen to what they have to say??

You know, there was a time when I might have indulged them--a very long, long time ago--but you give an inch with those people and they'll take a mile. I'm listening again to FDR's famous Madison Square Gardens speech, given in October 1936, and it sickens me that it's the same speech Barack Obama should be giving today.



How have we come to this again? Where was everybody? Oh, there were voices raised against the current Right Wing machine--many millions of them--but again, for way too long, we were treated as quaint, foolish Chicken Littles: "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"

So now that the sky has fallen, can we please get back to reality? Can we not give another moment's breath to the GOP's pompous hate mongers, their selfish twits, their holier-than-thous? If President Obama ever wants to get us on the right track again, he has to turn against them in order to be for us. That's his job. Hold him to it.


As Bob Herbert said today, in yet another smack dab, right on column, "I don’t know whether President Obama’s ultimate rescue plan for the financial industry will work. He is a thoughtful man running a thoughtful administration and the plan, a staggeringly complex and difficult work in progress, hasn’t been revealed yet.

What I know is that the renegade clowns who ruined this economy, the Republican right in alliance with big business and a fair number of feckless Democrats — all working in opposition to the interests of working families — have no credible basis for waging war against serious efforts to get us out of their mess."

Ramona

Two Little Boys, Sittin' in the Mud. . .

There's nothing Chris Matthews likes better than a good fight. That's not my observation alone-- every now and then he has to laugh at himself when he slyly admits that he loves a good verbal battle so much he's been known to instigate one just to keep his addiction going.

Maybe that's why he didn't come to classy, smart Joan Walsh's defense last night when that crude, boorish anachronism known as Dick Armey went after her--I guess for being so far ahead of him he couldn't keep up.

Watch Dick Armey as Joan Walsh speaks, but watch Matthews, too. They're like two little boys listening to the smart lady who's talking way over their heads. They squirm, they wiggle, they grin. . .Matthews because he's sitting right across from Armey, watching his every move, and he knows there's going to be fireworks when Walsh stops.

But keep watching, because toward the end you'll see Bob Herbert stop "Hardball" dead in it's tracks in order to say what Matthews himself should have said the second Armey launched his nutty, sexist attack. (I'm crazy about Bob Herbert, and this is just one reason why.)

And, finally, watch as Matthews realizes that he should have been the grownup there, and only after Bob Herbert brings it to his attention does he then reluctantly admit that Armey was out of line.



I haven't forgotten Matthews' goofy explanation of why Hillary Clinton got where she was. But in case you have, here it is:



Let's face it, "Hardball" is a train wreck and Chris Matthews is the man-child engineer. My only excuse for watching it is. . .that I have no excuse.

But if Joan Walsh and Bob Herbert can stomach him long enough to spend a few minutes on his show, the least I can do is watch.

Ramona