Kaddafy Killed

I guess that means we won.

What did we win?

Thoughts on Bin Laden

1. It's obviously true and totally irrelevant that Al Qaeda and the Taliban will continue just fine in his absence, just as Iraq continued bloodily after Saddam was caught and hung. It matters not. This man declared war on us, and now he is fodder for worms. The message is clear: you may run, and you may hide, and the long years may seem to stretch on, but one day you will turn around, and one of ours will be behind you, and he will put two in the back of your head, and we will take your gangly corpse and display it to the four corners of the realm. Sleep tight.
2. Teleprompter hiccups aside, Obama looked presidential last night. He's milking this win for his own political capital, and there's no reason he shouldn't. As he said, he gave the order, and it redounds to the Commander-in-Chief's credit. Democrats are going to use this as evidence that The Shadow Way, the Non-Invasion Way, is the better way to defeat terror. After all, Bush missed Bin Laden for eight years, and Obama got him in two. But there's no way we would have done so without the assets that Bush put in country. Obama relentlessly praised the men and women, military and intelligence, who made this happen. We should not pretend that they started in January 2009, whatever Double Secret Probation that the President ordered then.
3. On a religious note, I don't really care all that much about Bin Laden's Final Judgment. If he should be barking in Hell, so be it. If I should run into him in Purgatory, and we stare dumb-foundedly at one another as the last of our wickedness is scorched away from us, so be it. Bin Laden's death means that he is no longer a problem for me and my countrymen. That is enough. The Almighty has His own purposes.

I Guess It's Finally Over, Over There...

The Last Doughboy has rejoined the rest of his comrades. Frank Buckles was an ambulance driver in the Great War, and all of 16 years old in 1917. His fondest wish: to restore the DC War Memorial, get a monument for the AEF, and to be buried by General Pershing.

"It has long been my father's wish to be buried in Arlington, in the same cemetery that holds his beloved General Pershing," Flanagan wrote as she began to prepare for the inevitable in a letter she sent to home-state U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia.

Here's hoping the Defense Department can make that happen. He ended up involved the the second war as well.

Buckles, after World War I ended, took up a career as a ship's officer on merchant vessels. He was captured by the Japanese in the Philippines during World War II and held prisoner of war for more than three years before he was freed by U.S. troops.

That sounds like more than one's fair share of bloodshed and toil. RIP.

UPDATE: As of now, the only living veterans of WWI are subjects of Queen Elizabeth: a British Woman and an Australian Man.

I Don't Wanna Grow Up

Johnny Ramone, who spent his life dressed as a snot-nosed kid in a black leather jacket, has died of an old man's disease, prostate cancer. He was 55.


This is the third Ramone to drop dead in the past three years. Joey's death from lymphoma was Grandly Tragic; everyone who loved the Ramones was sad, and everyone paid tribute to him, and kids rode the albeit brief nostalgia wave to rediscover one of the great American bands. Dee Dee's overdose and death in 2002 was gratuitous and offensive, an act of nihilism that a man his age should have learned to grow beyond.


Today, I just feel empty and sad, for a fellow man's struggle against the grind that wears and wears and beats you down. I can't help feeling like maybe the struggle was doomed. The Ramones were gloriously, obstinately Rock n'Roll, a purity of three-chord-three-minute mojo that many have imitated but few have loved as truly. They battled for twenty years to conquer the Rock world, and could not do it. They inspired thousands, became underground icons, but moved the mainstream hardly at all.


I don't know where I'm going with this, except to say that something sucks about the fact that John Cummings slaved for years and years so that Kurt Cobain could feel bad about himself and become a sacrifice to an ideal ill-defined and breathtakingly juvenile. Somehow the simplicity that the Ramones cherished got turned into a scream at a wall. Maybe that was inevitable, given the times, maybe it's even a healthy forum for the venting of frustrations that otherwise cause the streets to bleed.


I can't tell you, other than I'm utterly frustrated with people's foolishness, and with my own. The longing of the soul for freedom and power, demonstrated so aptly in any Ramones song, seems at once necessary and laughably futile. All that we have, all that we build, one way or another, we eventually lose.


What do we gain?

Reagan

The earliest memory I have of No. 40 was social studies class in 3rd grade. We used to get those Kidz Pages papers with lots of graphics and very little information, but I read it thoroughly enough to know that the President was Ronald Reagan and his Vice-President was George Bush, and they were Republicans, and they were seeking re-election. Opposing them was former Vice-President Walter Mondale, the Democrat, with his running mate Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to be so nominated. Later that week we had an "election" in our school. We were lined up in front of a computer of the Apple II/Commodore 64 variety and invited to press a single letter to record our vote: "R" for Reagan or "M" for Mondale. Or it might have been "R" for Republican and "D" for Democrat; I don't remember, because I pushed "R".


As my third-grade brain reasoned, Reagan already was President, and the country seemed fine to me. We weren't at war, we weren't all poor, things were okay. Why change?

I got home from school that afternoon and told my parents about the election. My mother wanted to know who I'd voted for. I told her, breezily, not thinking much of the matter.


You'd have thought I'd said that I voted for Beelzebub. Furiously she demanded to know why I had done such a thing. Too late I realized that I'd failed to take into account my parent's opinion on the matter. Too late I discovered that they were both Democrats, and they had a profoundly low opinion of Reagan. For the first time I experienced the mania of a liberal scorned. My father, a far more died-in-the-wool Democrat that mother, calmed the situation down and asked to hear my reasons. I gave them, somewhat tearfully. Mother relaxed and they sat me down and told me about all the horrible things Reagan had done and why they were voting for Mondale. I apologized for my ignorant decision, and we let it go and later laughed about it.


That opinion of the man now eulogized in the press as the Great Communicator was ubiquitous in my house and in the media when I was growing up. Reagan wasn't the Great Communicator then, he was the Vile Halfwit, a man too heartless to accept the obvious morality of the liberal outlook, and too stupid to realize it. He was old, he was out of touch, he believed in (gasp) capitalism, he was a (double gasp) Cold Warrior, who didn't care if the German Green Party didn't like him. He'd won two terms in the White House by tapping into the ignorant opinions of farmers and union guys and southerners and other people who were too provincial to live in New York or California. He didn't leap to the forefront and demand that we socialize medecine when a bizarre new disease popped up among the gay community. He was the beginning of the American Reich. This was self-evident.


One of the great surprises when I was in college was discovering how highly historians rated Dwight Eisenhower amont our Presidents. He was at No. 9 or thereabouts, the last I heard of him. This is in spite of the fact that Ike spent the 50's being mocked by the intelligensia as a golf-playing do-nothing brinkmanshipper. My political science professor informed our class that Presidents always look better in hindsight, and that history will judge them better than their contemporaries. He informed us that this was already becoming true of Reagan, and that it would become true, despite what we might wish to the contrary, of Clinton.


Extrapolate this how you will.

Johnny Cash

It doesn't seem all that sad to me. The old boy was 71 when he died early this morning. He's lived a life full of success and good works, a man admired, despite his shortcomings, by many music fans. Sure, it's rotten luck that he died just as he was breaking through to a new generation of fans (I had 15-year-olds saddened by the loss today), but the man's already hung on well past the prime and time of all those other Sun Records cats, flashes-in-the-pan like Jerry Lee Lewis and that Elvis chap. What wierded me out more today was hearing that John Ritter dropped dead of a heart condition that no one even knew about. That to me is truly creepy. One minute you're happily working on the set of your new hit show, the next minute, you're worm food. Poor guy.

But Ritter will always be Jack Tripper, a harmless but otherwise forgettable character. Cash will always be the Man in Black, a Walking Contradiction. He was as religious a man as one might find, and sang heartfelt songs about Peace in the Valley, but he has also gone through years and years of drug abuse. He bowed to no man in love of his country, and presumably all the good old-fashioned ideals it was founded on, yet he would routinely play prisons and sing songs to the prisoners that suggested that putting people in prison was not the smartest idea. I have a copy of his performance at San Quentin Prison in California, and he sings a song to riotous cheers that condemns San Quentine and, implicitly, the entire penal system as designed in hell and belonging back there. Then, he sings it again. When Eminem grows the cojones to try anything like that, lemme know.

I'd go on, but folk with a more extensive appreciation of the man's recordings have already sounded off (here's one example). I've only really discovered him recently, based on the strenght of two LP's I bought. He is to me, as he is I suspect to many others, the Miles Davis of country music: the one guy from a genre you don't like that you can listen to and enjoy.

My problem with country isn't that it's redneck music. Credence Clearwater Revival were the biggest rednecks that ever walked the earth, and I can listen to them all day. Same with Lewis, Elvis, or any of those guys. Nor am I hung up on the insistent Christianity and patriotism of the genre. I am Christian and patriotic myself. No, my problem is that what gets called country music, especially the Nashville scene, is boring, gutless, garish redneck music, all sparkle and sequins and hoots (I'm not touching the "pop-country" guys who dress like Nirvana or Britney but still play banjos. Everybody but the teenagers seems to agree they're poseurs).

It's just not my scene, the songs, like the people, are too duded-up. I sat through some Country Music Awards show and saw with my own eyes, some pompadoured dingbat in a tourquoise suit make fun of the newer garage-rock bands, in a snide little song with appropriately wussy riffs called "The Next Big Thing." Had I the power, I would have lept through the screen and strangled him with his guitar strap, and not a jury in the world would have convicted me (provided I managed to get the trial staged in one of those counties on the coast that voted for Gore; in Nashville they'd probably lynch me before I finish the job). Fortunately, I was distracted by my mother proclaiming in her most serious voice that country music was the only form of rock n' roll left. I rolled my eyes so hard I could see the back of my skull and left the room (I later pressed on her some of my Vines and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion CD's; she never listened to them).

The point is, Johnny Cash was above such petty antics. For him, country music was about laying down the roots of white rural music, with it's fiddlin' and hummin, it's frontier fear and bravado, and never about getting "Yee-haws!" at the Grand ol' Opry. He was an artist in the best sense of the world, rendering creation that reflected experience; as genuinely concerned with prisoner's rights as he was with praising God and America. None of it was phony; none of it was show-biz. You can argue in the post-grunge world that being "not show-biz" is every bit as big a ploy as being "show-biz", but Cash didn't come from the post-grunge world. He came from the time where dressing in black all day was frowned upon. That middle finger he took out in a newspapers after he won his Grammy, aimed right at Nashville, wasn't a media splash to sell records. It was Johnny Cash saying "Fuck you," as loud as he possibly could.

So fare well, Johnny. Here's hopin' you got enough points to escape that ring of fire that seemed to worry you so much.