Sect’y of Def. Jammed

One step, two steps, a misspeaking blogged all over the internet and you’re there. It’s almost time for the Secretary of Defense to scram.

The Abu Ghraib jam is a sword that must claim an Administration victim, and like the good captain, it could well be Rumsfeld. It might just be the big October Surprise and Kerry would be well advised to get ready to get what he wished, and just called, for.

These latest war-prisoner “atrocities” are most ironic, hovering between piquant and bittersweet, to all the old Vietnam protesters. It’s the week when the Right is about to attack Kerry, demanding that he own up to the terrible things he said to Congress, recounting the true stories he had been told of atrocities that took place in his war, as they do in all of them. Just as they do so today, in Iraq.

What would anyone expect of men and women put into a war zone? Not everyone, don’t be dim. But look on either side of you next time you’re on a bus or in a bar. Everyone there look like they’ll handle combat stress to you, bucko?

So the Swifties practice their denial of the weakness “all” flesh is heir to in combat passed, simultaneously with videotaped reality today (and the evidence for atrocities in Vietnam is there in dusty books should you want the real, not swiftly deceitful, truth). Truly a cognitive-dissonance whose pastiche tickles the tongue.

But enough of the review-speak. This is not a movie or a restaurant or a social event. This ghastly mess is about reality.

This is about whether the same old hypocrisy will get us that got the ones got stuck with the Empire before us. The hypocrisy of thinking that we can stem the ebb that follows empires flow any better than the last guys tried it. Xerxes commanding the incoming tide to halt (he was actually making the same point: that there was a limit to his power). Half-dozen Crusades. World Wars, ethnic slaughters.

Some were for nothing. Most, lamentably, were for causes that made sense, things having gotten to the state they had by that time. But how did this species, the “thinking one,” decide that this was the way to sort things out?

But to the present: Rumsfeld will take the fall. He was the gunsel, like in the Maltese Falcon. All tough, straight ahead, not a man capable of making a nice distinction. Captain of the ship. Last spot to stop the buck before it gets to the President.

We need someone who is tougher without a gun. The gumshoe-knight who can be hard, without being tough. Whose violence is a force that motivates others without degenerating into brutality, cruelty or even, most times, much physicality at all. Just tough talk, tough on the plan and how it’s best for everyone this way.

Or else…The velvet glove, we forgot it! Perhaps we were blinded to the whole glove thing because Michael has kinda made gloving so iconic for his celebrity brand.

Geopolitically, however, the glove around the fist is a far, far better way to be. Cheaper, too. The American way. Spare, direct, economical. Spoken softly.

And about that stick. Not spared, but used sparingly. You can spoil someone with too little. But beat a dog too much and you wind up with a junk-yard dog.

Which is fine if you want to run a junk yard. If you want to run a quiet, little, prosperous main street, mean dogs mean trouble. So it’s best not to train one, as they will maul someone eventually, unless you’re prepared to hunt, trap, catch and put them down.

Which is a lot of trouble. Plus, of course, plain mean and just wrong. Even a working dog deserves a life with some compassion.
¶ 6:15 AM

  Neo in the Matrix

neo con, neo lib. I want pragmatism. I am a neo-pragmatic, a neo-prag.

I am tired of ideology. Not mine, mind you. Yours. In my face...and in the law.

I want pragmatic non-ideological solutions from government. Ones that recognize the single great truth of our country and of freedom itself. Namely, that each of us lives surrounded by horses’ asses whose ideas are tragically wrong and will land them in hell. But, that aside, we are all here to get along by getting along, and leaving our cherished beliefs out of the common arenas of the Nation and the Law of the Land, whenever possible.

To achieve this peace through mutual distaste, our forefathers wisely separated church and state…In my heart I think they meant beliefs in general. We can agree to get along by leaving alone, and unpleasant as it is, that is how it must be…unless you want the streets of America to resemble the streets of Iraq.

And speaking of Iraq, how about religious war over the control of sacred sites…? Just imagine how that would play out here. Waco was bad enough. But take a pitched battle into a religious shrine? Don’t think so. Sure it’s awkward. But if there is any limit to government, it’s the front gate of a church. So how does a neo-prag address foreign affairs?

Recognize that the other guys know they are right just like you. However foolishly. Work for change, but through persuasion and control. When you have to push back with force, do so very temporarily. The news cycle and access to the means of information distribution (and distortion/interpretation/spin) make it important to manage the perception as well as the reality on the ground. In fact, in terms of sheer body count, today's battles don't measure up to the slaughter of full-sized battles. Pragmatically speaking that's good. But in place of astronomical body counts there are the public perceptions…and symbolism and the polls.

TV is a major reason why too many people dislike this country. We need to deal with that pragmatically. Bombing them will not make them happier with us. That’s a pre-information age 19th and 20th century idea of empire. We need to return to an older model, one where differing tribes can still agree to order, peace and trade, détente most often brought about by largely symbolic raids, rather than all-out war.

Today, the US has the manpower, but fails to understand that this enemy has values that are older than the old Russian bear. These tribalists see the bullet that martyrs them as a symbolic gesture. They will only be beat symbolically. To cut them down to the last man wins the battle but loses the media war...That's pragmatic too. Of course we need to defeat the forces of repression and oppression for moral and practical reasons. But what strategy?

Not the pure moral agnosticism and nihilism of real politick. But the neo-pragmatism that says that the means must also be the ends...when carnage is broadcast live.

Let’s next acknowledge, we brave neo-prags, that you can not spend more than you got forever. Fiscally conservative. Likewise, liberal: that you must spend enough on the worst off and the great bulge in the middle to keep civility in the public arena and desperation in check. Otherwise the revolution of rising expectations, or sinking economic capabilities, will overturn the delicately balanced social contract. Desperation, just like money, makes men do what they wouldn’t necessarily do otherwise.

As for the wallet, let’s take a page from the President’s playbook. Like he wants to do with Social Security, let’s privatized our tax code. Let’s create private “accounts” for foreign adventure, domestic welfare programs, corporate tax breaks and the like.

As I am a neo-prag and not a tax expert, I would suggest that a commission to privatize taxpaying should be able to come up with a plan where the American consumer can also “vote” on where the taxes they pay go. Usurping the rights of the Congress and the President, you say? I say, let’s be pragmatic. No one paid income tax when the founding fathers wrote the Constitution. So who really knows what they would have said about the idea?

Finally, we neo-prags need to be heard now. Nothing makes the need clearer than the present devolution of the political debate, courtesy the 527 fiasco. Specifically, the recent downturn in content in the modern multimedia forum where attack ads have equal time with serious public debate about the issues.

Whose fault, then, the present state of demagoguery and sloganeering? Not the stars, of media, politics or in the heavens. But ourselves. The information consumer is to blame. We need to assert the values of pragmatism in our votes and with our wallets. The platforms, the real issues of this campaign, are in peril of being overwhelmed by distortion and maneuvering unless neo-prags rise up to insist that real issues be addressed. The present course of the Presidential campaigns are a matched set of poster children for “Not pragmatic politics.”

And in the present world nothing could be more derelict, ideological and unpragmatic. While we foolishly waste time playing dirty, negative politics, there are real gorillas in the room no one is making plans to deal with.

And they are very pragmatic guerrillas indeed.
¶ 10:13 AM