Heavy Mettle

"Don’t change barrels going over Niagara."
Attributed (satirically) to the Republican Party, 1932

Anybody who thinks that the two men running for the presidency of the United States in 2004 are insufficiently dissimilar in policies might consider character when casting a ballot come November. Lets face it; character is the thing that counts the most. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt.…what distinguishes these men from their peers? Spirit, energy, intellect, moral fiber, integrity…in a word, character. What kind of person are you deep down inside. How will you behave when the chips are down? Do you clean up after yourself? Are you gracious? Do you tip handsomely? Do you work hard? Are you charitable? Do you play by the rules? Do your friends know they can count on you to help them move?

The reason we spend so much time discussing "Washington and the Cherry tree" or Lincoln splitting rails and Roosevelt’s early struggle with Tuberculosis is because this ineffable thing we call character is developed over time from youth to young adulthood and remains as much an ineffaceable part of us later on as the color of our eyes. Character defines us.

For example, in talking about John Kerry and George Bush, lets go back to that time in life when the things we do, what we study and talk about, ambitions we express, and the friends we choose begin to mold the sort of person we will be for the rest of our lives. Interestingly enough, both George Bush and John Kerry went to Yale at nearly the same time; the early years of the Vietnam War and the growing Civil Rights Movement. John Kerry had a modestly noteworthy college career. He played JV Hockey and Lacrosse and Varsity Soccer (scoring a "hat trick" against Harvard). He belonged to the Debate Team and scored many wins against his peers from other Ivy schools (even his Republican peers at Yale agree that he was the best speaker in the Political Union). He became the youngest president of the Political Union (a big deal at Yale), he was invited into "Skull and Bones"(nothing to be proud of, but nevertheless, a big deal), he earned his pilot’s license and his academic performance (not cum laude) and political activism are remembered deferentially by his peers and former professors.

George Bush, like a lot of us back then, "cruised" through college and there is no crime in that. His geniality made him a good drinking buddy and he played intramural Rugby and Baseball. He too was inducted into "Skull and Bones." It is generally acknowledged that he got through with the "gentleman’s C" accorded "legacy" students. Normally, we would not care a rat’s ass about somebody’s collegiate career except that for some inscrutable reason Carl Rove and the Bush Camp gossip goons have chosen to deride John Kerry’s youthful ambitiousness as though it makes him unsuitable for Commander in Chief. It all suggests that the White Houses embraces the national penchant for mediocrity. A hale and hearty intramuralist who likes to "tip a few" is better suited than the varsity guy who wins debates with sober scholarship? Hmmmmmm. I find it all very embarrassing.

The Bush camp makes a big deal of Kerry’s "flip-flopping" and then they bring in Democrat double agent Zell Miller, a major-league flip-flopper if there ever was one, to give the keynote speech at the Republican Convention. Also rather embarrassing. Since when, by the way, is it a misdemeanor to change one’s mind? One of the reasons we study history is to discover that a great many of the "crimes, follies and misfortunes" of the past might well have been avoided or, at least, ameliorated by a change of heart among a few major players. What if King George had flip-flopped and not been so intransigent toward his colonies? What if Napoleon had turned back sooner before losing most of his army in a Russian winter? What if Jefferson Davis had flip-flopped and realized that slavery was abhorrent? Wouldn’t it have been lovely if Robert E. Lee had flip-flopped and stayed with the Union? Wouldn’t it have been interesting if, when Chamberlain stepped down off the plane in London, instead of intoning, "peace in our time," he had said, "You know, I was almost deceived over there in Munich. We’re gonna have to go to war and stop that bloody bastard."

Team Bush criticizes John Kerry’s "irregular" voting record on the Iraq War. Of course Kerry should have voted against a (pre-emptive) war against Iraq but, in the spirit of national outrage and despair, in addition to trusting what the White House was telling him, and us, about "weapons of mass destruction", he supported the President. "Ground Zero" was still smoldering when Bush asked for Congressional support to invade Iraq. To have opposed the Battle of Baghdad would have seemed, at that time, an affront to the three thousand plus people killed in Washington and lower Manhattan. But, and this is a huge caveat, anybody who does not think that we were shamelessly mis-led by the WMD and Niger nuculer connection con as well as the boogie duo of Bin and Sadaam must still believe in the tooth fairy. We had been attacked by Al Queda, a brilliant rogue terrorist organization with roots in Saudi Arabia and Cimmerian bases in Afghanistan. Of course Sadaam Hussein was a self-adulating pain-in-the-ass, but he was, nonetheless, the head of an autonomous nation-state. Yes, he had demonstrated a fondness for WMD and was doling out allowances to families of Arab kids who would blow themselves up, and, if left to his own ghastly devises, he probably would have built some nuclear "power plants." By 2002 however, Iraq was back in the community of independent countries and had a delegate with a name plate and a microphone in the UN global co-op! Maybe sanctions weren’t the ideal solution. Inspections, on the other hand, were clearly inconveniencing Sadaam and his sweetheart Dr. Germ. Wasn’t there enough on our plate after 9/11? Do we really need a two-front war? And, horror of horrors, remember when, after the cave hunts in Afghanistan and the Battle of Bagdahd there was talk of taking out North Korea? John F. Kennedy had a copy of The Guns of August by his bedside. Would that George W. Bush had a similar love of reading!

The whole world sympathized with our pain after 9/11 and was supportive of our cave hunts in Afghanistan and would have helped in keeping up the pressure against Sadaam, but to throw sand in their faces with specious talk of WMD, "imminent threats" and bogus alliances! Come on! Even if Sadaam did have WMD big enough for our U-2’s to see from 35, 000 feet, sitting there in the desert, we still would have been better off today if we had gone in there with a real UN coalition. Look at the coalition we’ve got: Macedonia, 25 guys, Moldavia, 12, Tonga, 45 and so forth. Nicaragua, The Dominican Republic and Honduras have already pulled their ten guys out along with Spain. The Philippines, Thailand, New Zealand and Norway are leaving soon. England has 7, 500 and Italy 3, 000, and meanwhile the United States has 140, 000. Hello? Did somebody say COALITION?

The fact remains: the bad guys were not from Iraq! Instead of invading Iraq we should have been sending more Dachshunds to Afghanistan to get those guys out of their caves. Remember what a lot of us said before our troops marched into Iraq, "Invading Iraq will create a million new "Bin Ladens". They scoffed. I suppose the next thing the White House will tell us is that all those guys pouring across the border from Iran and Pakistan are going to Baghdad to play soccer?

I am disgusted hearing (mostly) stupid people talk about change (flip-flopping) as if it were some kind of criminal recidivism. Change is good. Change (progress) is what Democrats do. We need change right now. We need better schools, better stewardship of our natural resources, universal health care, safe Social Security, a viable energy conservation policy, less racism, a gracious foreign policy and general national cheerfulness.

Changing one’s mind is one of the salient qualities of human intelligence. What is the best advise financial advisors give to clients who have sunk a lot of money in a bad stock? Get out and take your losses before losing any more. That’s what the United States Marines had to do in Korea fifty-five years ago. There are a lot of women who don’t change their minds soon enough and end up dead from abusive husbands. Athletic teams change their minds at the loss of a single game. Franklin Roosevelt campaigned on a platform of neutrality. Should he have held to that position after Pearl Harbor? Thank God Khrushchev changed his mind and pulled his missiles out of Cuba! You better change your mind and back off when you are on the West Ridge of Everest and you see a storm moving in. I am tired of hearing that changing one’s mind is aberrant!

Kerry’s big change of mind vis a vis Viet Nam, which is not unrelated to his deeply felt reflections regarding Iraq, is exactly the sort of transformation we should celebrate most vigorously. When John Kerry was in college he was well aware of Viet Nam’s struggle for independence. He knew that for more than a century Viet Nam had been occupied by the French and, at the very end of World War II had been more or less promised autonomy but then found itself having to drive the reneging French out by force of arms. In 1953, Ho Chi Min’s soldiers had finally defeated the French at Dienbienphu and that since then a corrupt and weak puppet government had been covertly supported by American money and increasing numbers of American troops. It was not an altogether easy situation to understand much less get enthused about. Our government was telling us that we had to stand up and fight the tide of Communism and yet, being revolutionists ourselves, how could we, in complete good conscience, deny others the same right to scramble out from under the heel of foreign colonialists?

Like millions of us, John Kerry was troubled by what he knew about Southeast Asia. He had doubts and fears about the war but he went anyway. Remember, this was not a war against a Stalin or Hitler or, for that matter, defense of our homeland. I don’t think the Vietcong had gotten to Tijuana when the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was passed. This was a horrifyingly dirty war in an alien part of the world with little chance of cultural enlightenment or hooking up with some nice "femme de’la resistance." Anybody who says he wasn’t scared shitless about the prospect of going to the jungles of Vietnam is either stupid or lying. The fact that so many American soldiers turned to drugs in Southeast Asia attests to the profound revulsion they felt for their (our) participation in that war.

Kerry saw firsthand what the war was about and when he came home he campaigned against the war. The fact is, today we know that that war was fought on false premises. Most wars are fought on false premises; to wit, most ignominiously in our own history, the Mexican War of 1844 and the Spanish American War of 1898…both fought for stupid, propagandistic, political reasons. And now; have we already forgotten how we got into the Viet Nam War? Yes, of course, there was some legitimacy to the alarm of Communistic expansionism but we now know that John Foster Dulles’s Domino Theory did not take fully into account regional independence movements. Today, Viet Nam is a unified, autonomous country with American factories. I have not read any reports of Chinese dominoes falling on Hanoi. I think that when people call Mr. Kerry a "flip flopper" they damn well better be able to discuss colonialism, revolution and intervention with an academically high degree of cogency.

And then, I experience quotidian melancholy that the Bush camp would even go near Kerry’s war record. Within months of graduating from college John Kerry enlisted in the United States Navy. Of course he was on a path of emulation of his idol, John F. Kennedy. Is there a problem with that? Some of us dream of and work toward a berth on an Olympic team, others, matriculation to medical school, others a seat on the Stock Exchange. I just can’t see where these Yahoos get off on criticizing a man for wanting to be president someday. He spent time on a Frigate (pretty safe duty during the Vietnam war considering the weaponry on the average Vietcong sampan) but then he applied for and got duty on a patrol boat in the Mekong Delta. In other words, he actually applied for duty, which would put him in "harm’s way". Do we need to repeat that? He actually applied for and got duty, which put him in "harm’s way." He could easily have stayed safely aboard the big ship far from the small arms fire of the VC and nobody would have blinked an eye. The malevolence of the Bush camp to besmirch Kerry’s medal collection makes one think they would go after Jesus Christ with the same vicious libel….."Mr. Christ has no war experience….he is soft on crime….he’s a tree-hugger…he will raise taxes for entitlements…and he changes his mind all the time (one day he tells us to love our enemies and the next day he says that if we don’t believe in Him we can go to hell)…a vote for Jesus will be a vote for the terrorists!"

Whether or not his wounds were exaggerated, whether or not there was actually a deadly hail of enemy fire, whether or not he acted with "Kennedyesque" brilliance out on patrol, the fact remains, John Kerry was in a battle zone. At any given moment you could fucking well die there. Maybe it wasn’t the hottest place in the war but it sure as hell was deep in "Charlie’s" backyard. The Bush people talk as though Kerry worked at a desk in Saigon and has made up a total fantasy-war about "Swift boats, fire-fights and rescues…"How many times must we say it: John Kerry did not go in the National Guard and disappear. He did not apply for and work behind a desk in Saigon and then come home and pretend that he had seen a lot of "action."Au contraire, he spent a good deal of time on a small boat in enemy waters and he did, in fact, pull another guy out of the water and apparently he did beach his boat and run down and shoot a Vietnamese whether or not the guy was armed, Vietcong or whatever. The fact remains, John Kerry at least was there! Meanwhile, his counterpart, the guy now associated with people censuring the legitimacy of his medals, was safely in the National Guard (which we all know was one of the legally acceptable ways of avoiding duty in Viet Nam – not that that was a bad thing), and even with that fortuitous assignment, apparently went AWOL. I mean, like Hello! You’ve got this great assignment flying jets around Texas and the Gulf of Mexico and you blow it off? What are people thinking, (or not thinking) when they allow this sort of twisted duplicity to persuade them? One man did his duty and the other didn’t. What part of two plus two don’t people understand?

Not only did George Bush never get close to Viet Nam, neither did , Dick Cheney or Paul Wolfowitz. So, here is the varsity Bush Battle Team and not a one went anywhere near Vietnam and yet they have the temerity to nit-pick Kerry’s stash of medals? For crying out loud, before these shirkers came along any normal person would have respected the hell out of a guy who earned just a single Purple Heart. Here is a guy with three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star and a Bronze Star and this team of "deferrers" questions his military service? This team of shirkers slanders Kerry’s mettle and yet they call themselves war leaders. If this is the way they treat soldiers and the citations they get then every single man and woman in uniform should be horror-struck. Does anybody really think that you can just walk into the Athletic Department office and get a Varsity letter? Do some people really think that you can just arrange to graduate Cum Laude? Do people really think you just buy your way into Who’s Who? Does anybody really think that you apply for and get some medals from the Navy? Like, Hello? Is anybody home? Exceptionalness is earned, not bought.

Why is it that this is the first presidency during which we have thoughts of Germany between the wars? We search Hesse and Mann for answers to our doubts and fears. My God, what a horrifying reflection! Of course we are not comparing Mr. Bush to Hitler but we cannot avoid noticing some of the same sorts of things happening….an entire platform based on scapegoating…accompanied by an erosion of civil liberties… in the name of fighting terror; an erosion of natural resources… in the name of fighting…terror, an elimination of our financial reserves… in the name of fighting terror, a paucity of federal assistance (to schools, infrastructure and emergency services)… in the name of fighting terror. This administration is a textbook of all the things we learned in school about corrupt governments. When things are bad at home go to war, and blame, blame, blame somebody else. And, scare the shit out of everybody. Make people afraid and they will support you (against the Muslims, the terrorists, the Communists or the Boogeyman). The "masses" are stupid so lie, and lie extravagantly enough and you can get away with anything.

I mean, those of us who are white, have jobs and obey the law have little reason to personally care about the fine print in the "Patriot Act". But, make no mistake about it, some of our freedom has been abridged in this "war on terror." Those of us who own nice homes and take vacations in Europe might care less about some tundra in Alaska but, make no mistake about it, wilderness will never be the same after this administration is through with its lumber, mining and drilling give-aways on our public lands. Those of us approaching the end of our lives might care less about the fact that global warming is indisputably on the rise thanks to a myriad of pollutants and emissions and that the United States walked out of the largest, most comprehensive summit to curb greenhouse gasses. Those of us without children might not care that "No Child Left Behind" is another Bush smoke and mirrors act. Those of us who live on an island or a ranch in Montana might care less that the United States has abandoned the United Nations and snubbed several of its most ardent allies. Those who are wealthy could probably care less that the Bush administration is taking us down a road of dept so huge (already several trillion dollars) as to threaten the very economic existence of our republic and threaten entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare. Personally, at sixty years old, earning nine dollars an hour, with uncertain health and looking forward to my $800 a month Social Security check and Medicare benefits, I am horrified about the character of this administration and where it is taking us.

Beneath the sand of Iraq lie the largest oil pools on earth. Most of the men in the White House are oilmen. Is there a connection? After 9/11, when all commercial and private planes were grounded, the United States Government allowed Bin Laden’s family to fly home to Saudi Arabia. Is there a connection? Say what? Bin Laden’s family was here in the United States in September of 2001? And the White House let them fly away after their nephew, brother or whatever the fuck he is, just blew up the lower end of Manhattan killing three thousand innocent Americans!!!??? If you don’t think there might be a connection then I suspect that you might still think God created this place in six days and it’s still flat.

I mean, let’s back up a minute. George Bush becomes President of the United States with a minority (a fact which, no matter what, we should never forget) of popular votes. That, and the behavior of the Supreme Court in giving him the keys to the White House, was highly unusual, to say the least, both of which however, would suggest modesty on his part. And, in fact it seemed as though he was happy to relax and let Dick Cheney run things, until 9/11. I don’t blame him for sitting there in that grammar school classroom for ten minutes after being told that the United States had just been attacked. Time to shit and get off the pot.

So, first Mr. Bush scorns the Kyoto Environment Summit, then he spurns the Global Aids summit and then we are hit with 9/11. Lucky him. Suddenly the world forgets our truculence and loves us for our tragedy. However, instead of working with, and taking advantage of global sympathies after 9/11 Mr. Bush opts for the Smith and Wesson style and snubs the United Nations and two of our keenest allies in Europe. In the flourish of a Stetson this president has thrown away a century of carefully crafted diplomacy. He’s gonna ride into town like Shane and clean the place out all by himself. We cannot go it alone. Of course, George Bush thought he could crush Iraq, set up a little puppet government amidst the bouquets of Baghdad and start the drilling. He forgot about Israel, Arafat, Jihad and autonomy not to mention Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea and Pakistan. And now, eighteen months later, all hell breaking loose and a 1000 Americans dead he is asking for UN and European assistance …like the brat who abuses his parents all year but come Christmas and ski season he suddenly metamorphoses into an angel – talk about flip-flopping!

There is no easy way out of Iraq now. We have opened Pandora’s box and we’re in it for the long haul. Machiavelli himself would be hard-pressed to come up with a sure-fire plan to extricate ourselves from those hostile, shifting sands. What we can hope John Kerry will do however, is, first of all, realize that we are at war with an ideological foe who thinks much deeper than to simply hate us because we are "free". Never before has the United States been so despised around the world. I think John Kerry will go to great lengths to heal the myriad sores, which foster both contumely and terror. Every day, Al Jazeera shows 1.2 billion Muslims around the world American tanks killing Muslims in Iraq. Is it any wonder guerilla fighters and suicide bombers are flooding into Baghdad? Mr. Kerry might even go so far as to apologize for the way we treated prisoners at Abu Guraib. (I know he will not gladly tolerate a Vice President who tells congressional leaders to "fuck off"). Secondly, Mr. Kerry might be able to re-establish comity among all the major players and together work toward building a bona fide anti-terror coalition, which is to say, a global effort to stabilize Iraq and stem the tide of suicidal shock and awe.

Thirdly, Mr. Kerry will affirm the fact that we are at war. Where is the evidence of Homeland Security (an agency Mr. Bush was loath to create)? Okay, so there is a highway patrolman guarding the Golden Gate Bridge. Water supplies, power lines, ports, stadiums, subways, schools…forget it. Where is the omnipresent national war effort? If we are going to send boys and girls off to die in the sands of Iraq I think we owe it to them for all of us to be making an effort here at home just like we all did during WW II, from rationing to surveillance. Most importantly, we need a national energy conservation policy so that we are no longer ignominiously, disgustingly dependent on oil from people we don’t really like and who certainly don’t like us. The majority of guys on those death planes were from Saudi Arabia. Hello! Do we really want to be dependent on those people? We are at war; lets behave as though we are at war. Waste should be a crime. Gas-hog SUV’s and muscle cars should be garaged. All natural resources should be used with utmost discretion. Corporate greed should be deemed treasonous.

I think that Mr. Kerry would bring some modesty to the White House. The truculent, evangelistic posturing of the Bush administration has alienated even our closest friends around the world. We need a president who will have the courage and humility to ask questions , to reflect on causes, and feel chagrin that people entertain such contumely toward us. No body is perfect. No nation is perfect; certainly not this one. What are the root causes of contempt, despair and terrorism? John Kerry might even ruminate on the fact that "The Crusades" a thousand years ago did not bode well for the European community. Hunting down the "Islamo-fascists" might not be the only way out of the quagmire we have gotten ourselves into. As Rachel Carson informed us that all things biological are interconnected, so too all things social and political are interconnected. It ain’t as simple as "they hate us because we are free." Mr. Kerry’s solutions to Iraq will be largely based on an intellectual weltlpolitik rather than a glandular petropolitik. If peace is ever to be achieved in Iraq, France, Germany and Russia, in addition to Great Britain, China and Japan, will have to be our full-fledged partners through the agency of the United Nations. As long as the future of Iraq is tied to decisions made in the Haliburton boardroom, peace and prosperity will be chimerical.

"It’s a long road that hath no turning." (Old English proverb)