Just 11 kids. Just 11 students at UC Davis, all unarmed, all engaged in a simple act of civil disobedience, just sitting on the ground. Just 11 against a force of well-armed, armored, jackbooted and visor-helmeted police, cans of military-grade pepper spray in hand.
I guess the idea that those mere 11 students represent is just too terrifying to the Republicans among us.
The police threatened to shoot the students if they didn’t move. In their warped form of logic, I suppose that all of us should be glad that they didn’t. After all, my generation of students had Kent State and Jackson State to remember. Stay tuned on that one. You know that the righties are itching for that one again. It’s what gets them hot. Porn for righties looks a lot like film of Tiananmen Square or tanks rolling into Prague.
Gingrich, O’Reilly, and the other usual suspects are hard at work on the dehumanizing strategy. The first tactic of fascists is to dehumanize your victim, propagandizing your public so the public won’t object when the fascist solution is at hand.
The Newts, Bill-Os, and other Archie Bunker types have called for baths. They tell the occupiers to take a shower and look for a job while their corporate masters call for moving all of the jobs out of America and push for putting flammable gas in the shower water. Congressman Walsh from Illinois, among others in Washington, even says occupiers are un-American and military vets who join them are socialists -- demeaning words to righties. This from a man who doesn’t pay his child support. To House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the occupiers are just a mob. Fox News shows their viewers what are obviously flu-shot syringes and talks about occupiers being just a bunch of drug addicts. To Hannity fans, they are thugs. First you dehumanize and degrade. You know what comes next.
Military-grade pepper spray is this decade’s high-pressure fire hose. The fire hoses of the 1960s didn’t stop an idea. Neither will the pepper spray that causes victims to vomit blood or causes nerve damage. What the conservative mind can never grasp is that their actions can cause a bigger opposite reaction. The image of storm troopers with spray cans will last and last. It will serve to rally the occupiers and increase their numbers. It’s a galvanizing image. The webpage of which a portion is reproduced at the top of this post has gone viral. (Here's the link again.) It’s already a part of pop culture, something the conservative mind has never understood and never will.
The cop who provided this galvanizing image, UC Davis campus security cop Lt. John Pike, has been put on paid leave for his "transgression." His boss has been placed on paid leave as well. The media presents this as some sort of punishment. In fact, it is a free, paid extended Thanksgiving vacation, a reward. What a farce! Yes, we have quite a system! It’s surreal. In Ohio and Wisconsin, good cops who do their jobs properly are fired by their governors.
All of this goes on while the Wall Streeters, politicians, and banksters, the true criminal element in our society, the people who have deliberately and malignantly caused such unfairness, inequality, and misery, walk free, un-arrested and un-pepper-sprayed. Such things are proof that we now officially live, fully immersed, in the Republican Bizarro World. Meanwhile, I guess Penn State is saying, “Thank you, UC Davis!” I can hardly wait till next week.
I didn't begin to encounter Richard Cohen's writing until he was a full-blown columnist. (Feel free to take "full-blown" in the most lurid sense you can imagine.) Every now and then you get a glimpse that someone you've known only as a gargoyle may not have always been as we see him now.
As a matter of fact, if I'd known that the column in question was in fact a Richard Cohen column, I doubt that I would have clicked through. But washingtonpost.com has this bizarre habit of circulating periodical e-newsletters touting it current crop of opinion pieces without identifying the author. As if an opinion can exist independent of the person who's expressing it. And so if there's a blurb in the e-newsletter that sounds like it might be interesting, you have to click through just to find out who wrote the damned piece.
Here's what got me in the "Today's Opinions: Afternoon Edition":
1) When words can kill On the right, hateful rhetoric is fired like bullets.
There must have been a morning edition of this e-newsletter in which I'd noticed this promo, and paused over it, principally wondering who might be writing on the subject. This time I decided to find out, and imagine my surprise to find that it's that obnoxious gasbag Richard Cohen.
He explains that in the course of his bicycling he has lately been hearing a good deal of Neil Young's "Ohio," and has to "repress a tear" when he hears the line "What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?"
"Ohio" has been around for 40 years, and I have heard it over and over again. It's about the 1970 killing of four students at Kent State University during a demonstration against the Vietnam War. The killers were the equally young men of the Ohio National Guard. I was in the National Guard myself once. How did this happen? "This summer I hear the drumming. Four dead in Ohio." . . .
The line about the woman dead on the ground hits with concussive force. I feel I knew her. One of the four killed was Allison Krause, and she went to school in the Washington area. Her father, Arthur Krause, sometimes called me. Arthur had devoted himself to seeking justice for his daughter. He should have known better. He was a Holocaust survivor.
Cohen was a reporter at the time of the Kent State killings, he tells us, and he coveted the story, which was obviously a huge one. But "the journalistic sluggers whooshed out of the newsroom, jumped a plane and wrote the story."
But it is a story no more and so, on the bike, the full horror of it came through: My God, American soldiers had shot American college students. This was not China, not Tiananmen Square, and not Iran and the pro-democracy rallies of last year -- not any of those places. . . .
He ran through his mind how it had happened.
Bullets had killed those kids, sure -- but they were fired, in a way, from the mouths of politicians.
The governor of Ohio, James Rhodes, demonized the war protesters. They were "worse than the Brownshirts and the communist element. . . . We will use whatever force necessary to drive them out of Kent."
That was the language of that time. And now it is the language of our time. It is the language of Glenn Beck, who fetishizes about liberals and calls Barack Obama a racist. It is the language of rage that fuels too much of the Tea Party and is the sum total of gubernatorial hopeful Carl Paladino's campaign message in New York. It is all this talk about "taking back America" (from whom?) and this inchoate fury at immigrants and, of course, this raw anger at Muslims, stoked by politicians such as Newt Gingrich and Rick Lazio, the latter having lost the GOP primary to Paladino for, among other things, not being sufficiently angry. "I'm going to take them out," Paladino vowed at a Tea Party rally in Ithaca, N.Y.
Oh, Mr. On-the-One-Hand, On-the-Other-Hand has to get in a jab at the Left. "Back in the Vietnam War era," he writes, "the left also used ugly language and resorted to violence." And this is certainly true, though kind of ripped out of context. Cohen has own "but," though, and it's a serious one:
But the right, as is its wont, stripped the antiwar movement of its citizenship. It turned dissent into treason, which, in a way, was the worst treason of all. It made dissidents into the storied "other" who had nothing in common with the rest of us. They were not opponents; they were the enemy: Fire!
On my bike, I recalled those days and wondered if they have not returned. Sticks and stones may break bones, but words -- that singsong rebuttal notwithstanding -- can kill. We lose presidents to words and civil rights leaders to words -- homosexuals and immigrants and abortion providers, too. Richard Nixon is named in the song because he was the president at the time and because his words were ugly. He was enthralled by toughness, violence.
I hear the song more clearly now than I ever did. It is a distant sound from our not-so-distant past, but a clear warning about our future. Four dead in Ohio. Not just a song. A lesson.
I'm not sure the point can be made much better than this.
SO IS IT POSSIBLE THAT DAVID BROOKS WAS ONCE . . . WELL, SOMETHING DIFFERENT?
Nah, I don't think so either. And you may well say that anyone who reads a David Brooks column deserves what he gets. Which is true enough, except that it doesn't deal with the faux credibility his blithering gains from appearing there on the op-ed pages of the New York Times print and Web editions. No matter how furiously the NYT folk work at debasing the brand, it still carries an implication of substance.
Today, in an especially egregious outing, "The Soft Side," our David is out to defend his friend Rahm Emanuel -- who used to phone him about stuff he'd written or might write apparently, if I remember right, about every 30 minutes -- from all the vicious things that are being said about him now that he's slithered out of the White House and his second-to-none access to the president. It's a piece that's wrong-headed in so many ways that one wouldn't know where to begin if one were of a mind to take it seriously.
I may yet write about the substance of today's column, if I can't get the bad taste out of my mouth.
SIDEBAR ON VILLAGE OBLIVIOUSNESS
I mean, really now, is it possible that none of the Village media hucksters have even the most rudimentary knowledge of what the health care faux-reform hullabaloo was about, or what happened in the course of it? After Mara Liasson's either incompetent or mendacious bungling about Master Rahm's "prescience," we have our David recallling how he "criticized the lack of cost control" in the package. I mean this literally: How is it possible for anyone with any interest in matters political not to know that nobody in the Western Hemisphere fought more tenaciously than Master Rahm against any cost-reducing proposal that would in any way have inconvenienced the megacorporate interests of Big Pharma and the health insurance giants?
(Corollary question: And how is it possible that such people draw paychecks from outfits like the NYT and NPR?)
Just for now let's play Villagers-for-a-day. That means, for one thing, that we're going to skip over the whole issue of being coopted by pols with agendas (hmm, that's redundant, isn't it?) and just focus on what our David thinks is the charge against his pal Rahm: that's he's impolite and bad-tempered.
Now, as longtime readers of DWT know only too well, Howie and I between us have written, ahem, a lot about Master Rahm, and while I'm sure that the subjects of his rudeness and ill temper have come up, and they're legitimate points, as symptoms of the kind of mind we're dealing with (genus: bully, species: wildly and unmeritedly self-assured), our issue is his ruthless whoring on behalf of the corporate masters who have so generously coopted him (ooh, that word again!).
If you've got a barf bag handy, try reading this:
Rahm has somehow managed to remain true to his whole and florid self. He’s managed to preserve the patois of Chicago, the earthy freneticism of his Augie March upbringing.
He made some big mistakes: Trying to use the financial crisis as an opportunity to do everything at once. He can sometimes be harsh. But he has generally lived up to his ample heart. He gave up the chance to be speaker of the House because of his affection for Obama. He gave up the chief of staff job and returned to Chicago because that city is in his bones.
I interview a lot of politicians. Rahm is unique. Flawed like all of us, he is a full human being, rich and fertile from the inside out.
Ah, so that's it. Our David's pal Rahm's one and only flaw, if we forget that occasional cussing, is that he's too deeply and sincerely committed to doing too much good too fast? Oh jeez, oh jeez. (Can't you just imagine what the Master says about that simpering simpleton Brooks behind his back?)
Now it's certainly possible for an authentic journalist to have, by virtue of sustained personal exposure possibly including personal contact, a special understanding of a public figure. The late Murray Kempton, the greatest columnist of them all, had (as I understand it from exposure rather than personal contact) a streak of sympathy for Richard Nixon on a personal level, and when it's Murray Kempton, if you're smart, you listen. (The mitigation he found was in some ways more damning than other commentators' fire-and-brimstone damnation.)
For the most part, though, this idea of journalists, even columnists, giving us deeper insight into public figures by virtue of personal relationships is, well, theoretical. In David B's case, since he spends his whole professional life showing how clueless he is about any substantive issue you can think of, or at least any that he can think of, it's not surprising that he has no clue as to why his pal Rahm is so reviled. Let's just say that no, Davy, it's not because he uses profanity. (Although, again, the way he uses profanity may be legitimately symptomatic of substantively objectionable qualities.)
I feel like a tremendous weight has been lifted off my shoulders. By May of 1970 I had been living outside the country for nearly a year. There was no internet and there were no cell phones back then. By that time I was living in Afghanistan. I depended on issues of somewhat dated issues of Time and the International Herald-Tribune for the "latest" news back "in the world." But these weren't really trustworthy sources, so when it came to the really big political news, it was week or two old letters that came from my friends to Poste Restante in Kabul-- when I was in Kabul. When I was way up north in the Hindu Kush, there was no news. Period. None. But when the Kent State massacre took place in early May of 1970 I was in Kabul. My friend Helen wrote me a letter that came about 10 days later. I don't have the letter any longer-- if I did there would have been no mystery all this time-- but below I'm going to spread out a few quotes from Rick Perlstein's Nixonland regarding the aftermath of the brutal massacre of American students, passersby, on their Ohio campus. First the one that goes directly to my own personal little solved mystery:
A National Economic Boycott Committee decided to boycott Coca-Cola and Philip Morris for "their dependency on the youth market for a large part of their sales."
That's the solution to a mystery? Oh, was it ever. I never smoked a cigarette in my life so forget Philip Morris but Coca-Cola? It's all I drank. Especially in places like Afghanistan, where the water was too polluted to drink. (The U.S. Embassy handed out a xerox sheet instructing travelers to bring water to a rapid boil. Shut it down and then bring it to a rapid boil again before drinking it. Everyone had the Kabul Runs all the time anyway.) All I drank was Coke. But I never took another sip of Coke, Pepsi, 7-Up or anything like that again since opening Helen's letter. I was off that stuff, cold turkey.
And thank God. Coke kills. Although I hadn't had any since May 15, 1970, my doctor pointed to it as a probably cause of cancer (along with recreational drugs, something else I had given up, although for different reasons, around the same time). If you ask ehow.com what makes Coca-Cola unhealthy you get, in part, this:
Coca-Cola has been deemed unhealthy for a number of reasons. One can of Coke can contain about 10 percent sugar. Large amounts of sugar in a person's diet are related to high stress levels, and while it doesn't directly cause diabetes, it can worsen a diabetic's situation. Sugar also contributes to weakening immune systems because yeast and bacteria in the body feed on sugar. It can even speed the aging process when it becomes attached to proteins, which causes a loss in elasticity. In diet drinks, the sugar is substituted with saccharin (or aspartame) to provide a sweetener, and has been researched as a possible cause of bladder cancer. There are also a small percentage of people who cannot physically metabolize the amino acid in aspartame, causing it to build up in the bloodstream. High-fructose corn syrup is metabolized differently in the human body than natural sugars because the corn syrup is a product of genetically altered plants. Nutritionists have scrutinized connections between obesity, diabetes and high-fructose corn syrup. The potassium benzoate used in Coke products harms DNA in mitochondria of cells in the body, inactivating their ability to produce energy. Another health issue is that the recurrent exposure of the acid added to Coca-Cola contributes to the probability of tooth decay because of its reaction with calcium in teeth. The phosphoric acid is dangerous for those with a pre-existing stomach ulcer. Coca-Cola is also known to be a highly caffeinated beverage, and substantial caffeine intake acts as a diuretic and has negative effects, including hyperactivity.
Glad to have it out of my life. Only Helen says she never heard of any boycott, let alone wrote to me about one. And everyone else I've asked from that period says they never did either. But there it was in Perlstein's book. Case closed. In the immortal words of Suicidal Tendencies, I'm not crazy.
So what did the students back then do after the Ken State massacre when they demanded the U.S. end the wars in Southeast Asia? OK, here's more Perlstein:
"The splintered left on the campuses has suddenly reunited," the Wall Street Journal concluded, quoting an electrician who worked at Case Western Reserve: "They figure they might just as well die here for something they believe in as to die in Vietnam." Case was one of the schools where students burned down the ROTC building. So were Kentucky, the University of Cincinnati, Ohio State, Ohio University, Miami of Ohio, Tulane, Washington University in St. Louis (their second) and St. Louis University. At Colorado State they torched Old Main, the original campus structure, erected in 1878. In farm-belt Carbondale, home of Southern Illinois, a center of military research, martial law was declared. At Syracuse nearly every window was smashed; UCLA students forced the entire Los Angeles police force onto tactical alert, and Governor Reagan subsequently shut down all twenty-seven state university campuses. Austin students were teargassed after charging the state capitol. They followed with the biggest march in Texas history (they chanted, "More pay for police!" to keep the cops at bay). At Malacaster College in St. Paul, students barricaded the offices of a new political science professor and demanded his resignation. But the professor, Hubert Humphrey, was away in Israel.
...A report from Madison, Wisconsin, noon, May 5: "Wide-scale rioting, burning, trashing, tear gas everywhere."
The next day: "One hundred arrested, school shut, National Guard, fires in street every night, fifty or sixty hurt, tear gas, 'open warfare.'" ... Within the week, in front of the burbling fountain on Revelle Plaza at UC-San Diego, George Winnie Jr., twenty-three, held up a cardboard sign reading, IN GOD'S NAME, END THIS WAR, struck a match, and went up in a burst of flame. That didn't make the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, or Chicago Tribune; a nationwide student tsunami had broken, too much drama to keep track of it all. By that time guardsmen were posted on 21 campuses in sixteen states, 488 universities and colleges were closed (three-quarters of the schools in Nevada, Massachusetts and Maryland), the entire public high school system in New York City was shut by order of the board of education, and Boston University informed Ted Kennedy not to show up to give the commencement speech because, in honor of the slain students, there wouldn't be any commencement... The National Republican Governors' Conference was canceled.
AfghaniNam-- Were Students Neutered By Abolishing The Draft?
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When you think about the iconic scenes in American history, a few that probably come to mind are Paul Revere's ride, the American insurgents at Lexington & Concord, George Washington crossing the Delaware, Mary Pickersgill stitching an American flag for Ft. McHenry, Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg-- dedicating our country, for the first time, "to the proposition that all men are created equal"-- FDR reassuring a nation freaked out by the Republican Depression in his first inaugural address that we had nothing to fear but fear itself, Americans landing on the moon... There are lots more, from Sherman's thrilling and triumphant March to the Sea to the Battle of Little Big Horn and our soldiers hoisting the flag over Iwo Jima to Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech. But one that that is fading into history, but which belong up there with the aforementioned, is the pictorial that describes the massacre at Kent State.
Rick Perlstein has one of the most moving-- if stubbornly unemotional-- descriptions of Kent State in his brilliant latest book, Nixonland, although I expect more people who know about the tragic incident know about it via CSN&Y. Here's an excerpt (from Nixonland, not "Ohio"):
On the Kent State campus there were bomb threats at fifteen-to-thirty-minute intervals. Eleven a.m. classes were cut short; the commotion outside was too great. The university radio station and intercoms announced, “All outdoor demonstrations and gatherings are banned by order of the governor. The National Guard has the power of arrest.” But when a class session let out on a major university campus, it looked all the world like a “gathering.” Only a fraction of students had heard the radio and intercom announcements anyway. University administrators could have told law enforcement that. But the governor had banned university administrators-- quislings-- from the operation’s planning.
Fifteen minutes to noon. Students made their way toward whatever it was they did on an ordinary Monday. A general saw what looked to him like a mob. Three minutes later, someone rang the Victory Bell and started rousing rabble for a noon rally. A minute after that, a campus police officer shouted the riot act into a bullhorn. He was standing by the ROTC rubble; now the military’s staging area, its ashes a constant reminder of what these students were capable of. Hardly anyone could hear the announcement.
A jeep made its way across the common: another hail of rocks.
At 11:55 guardsmen were ordered to load and lock their weapons and prepare to disperse gas. Two columns of troops moved out in a V, one directly east, another northeasterly. The eastbound company had to summit a steep hill south of Taylor Hall, a major campus building-- the kind of slope, on college campuses, useful for wintertime sledding on cafeteria trays. As they trudged, they dispensed tear gas from their M79 canister guns. The boldest demonstrators picked up the hot metal cans and threw them back. Under suffocating gas masks, their visibility limited, the guardsmen pressed forward, determined to push the students into retreat. The militants hustled beside Taylor Hall for cover. The soldiers were unaware that they had only about a hundred yards to go before they would run into a fence. The fence curled around to keep them from moving east or north; a gymnasium kept them from moving south. They were trapped, with nothing to do but turn around-- a retreat under fire, the most dangerous of military maneuvers. Sixty or seventy soldiers, trapped. What was it President Nixon had said about the “pitiful, helpless giant,” faced with “the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy”?
Lots of roofs: from which one would the sniping begin?
They were afraid they were out of tear gas. Radicals who thought their adversaries only armed with blanks shrieked insults, threw rocks, waved strange flags. “Pigs off campus! Pigs off campus! Pigs off campus!” The guardsmen couldn’t tell, but felt like they must have been surrounded. They looped around for their humiliating return journey.
Then, at 12:24 p.m., several guardsmen stopped, turned almost completely around, dropped to one knee, and took aim at a cluster of students far away in a parking lot beyond the fence.
Sixty-seven shots in thirteen seconds.
Thirteen students down, mostly bystanders.
One was paralyzed. Four were killed: Allison Krause, William Schroeder, Jeff Miller, and Sandra Lee Scheuer, ages nineteen, nineteen, twenty, and twenty. The Associated Press’s dispatch went out. The Dow dropped 3 percent in two hours-- the most dramatic dip since John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
Two Students, Two Guardsmen Dead, the local paper reported. Those two students had it coming, much of Kent decided.
A respected lawyer told an Akron paper, “Frankly, if I’d been faced with the same situation and had a submachine gun... there probably would have been 140 of them dead.” People expressed disappointment that the rabble-rousing professors-- the gurus-- had escaped: “The only mistake they made was not to shoot all the students and then start in on the faculty.”
When it was established that none of the four victims were guardsmen, citizens greeted each other by flashing four fingers in the air (“The score is four / And next time more”). The Kent paper printed pages of letters for weeks, a community purgation: “Hurray! I shout for God and Country, recourse to justice under law, fifes, drums, marshal music, parades, ice cream cones—America—support it or leave it.” “Why do they allow these so-called educated punks, who apparently know only how to spell four-lettered words, to run loose on our campuses tearing down and destroying that which good men spent years building up? ...Signed by one who was taught that ‘to educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.’” “I extend appreciation and whole-hearted support of the Guard of every state for their fine efforts in protecting citizens like me and our property.” “When is the long-suffering silent majority going to rise up?”
It was the advance guard of a national mood. A Gallup poll found 58 percent blamed the Kent students for their own deaths. Only 11 percent blamed the National Guard.
A rumor spread in Kent that Jeff Miller, whose head was blown off, was such a dirty hippie that they had to keep the ambulance door open on the way to the hospital for the smell. Another rumor was that five hundred Black Panthers were on their way from elsewhere in Ohio to lead a real riot; and that Allison Krause was “the campus whore” and found with hand grenades on her.
Many recalled the State of Ohio’s original intention for the land upon which Kent State was built: a lunatic asylum. President White was flooded with letters saying it was his fault for letting Jerry Rubin speak on campus. Students started talking about the “Easy Rider syndrome,” after the Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda movie about hippies murdered by vigilantes. Townspeople picketed memorial services. “The Kent State Four!” they chanted. “Should have studied more!”
“Anyone who appears on the streets of a city like Kent with long hair, dirty clothes, or barefooted deserves to be shot,” a Kent resident told a researcher.
“Have I your permission to quote that?”
“You sure do. It would have been better if the Guard had shot the whole lot of them that morning.”
“But you had three sons there.”
“If they didn’t do what the Guards told them, they should have been mowed down.”
It was the end of the American war against Vietnam. It was all over but the evacuation after that. It was iconic. But it ended that war of aggression and buried the idea of a draft but it didn't end the idea of wars of aggression in general, not by a long shot. American corporate interests still needed to externalize costs in order to internalize profits in the form of security for their business and that's just what the U.S. military has been reduced to. Yesterday I read an essay by Michael Cohen in the New Republic, All Silent on the Lefty Front, subtitled, "Why haven’t progressives mounted more of a challenge to the war in Afghanistan?" As I interview Democratic challengers-- let alone incumbents-- I've found myself asking that over and over and over. And for every Bill Hedrick or Regina Thomas or Doug Tudor who understands why the occupation of Afghanistan is as futile and immoral as the occupation of Vietnam was, we have dozens of candidates-- Democratic ones-- who feel Obama knows best. Cohen, a Senior Fellow at the American Security Project:
Earlier this month, the Pentagon released a 152-page report outlining the increasingly grim situation in Afghanistan. The paper highlighted the Afghan government (and its security services) lack of capability; the enduring challenge of endemic corruption and poor governance; and the Taliban insurgency’s ability to maintain influence-- often via intimidation-- across broad swaths of the country. These challenges have already undermined U.S. military operations in Marjah, and could threaten the upcoming summer offensive planned for Kandahar, the heart of the Taliban insurgency.
The entire U.S. mission in Afghanistan, which is predicated on extending the legitimacy of a flawed Afghan government, bringing good governance to the country’s most insecure regions, and degrading the Taliban insurgency militarily to smooth the path for political negotiations is becoming eerily reminiscent of the flawed American strategy in Vietnam four decades ago.
While no one can be sure how escalation in Afghanistan will turn out, the warning signs are blinking red. Yet the reaction from many of the president’s liberal and left-of-center supporters has been acquiescence and even silence. The Pentagon report-- like much of the recent bad news out of Afghanistan-- caused barely a ripple on the left. It’s a familiar pattern. The American Prospect, along with Salon, has devoted enormous and laudable energy to covering civil liberties issues related to the U.S. war on terror, but has run only one major article on Afghanistan since Obama’s December speech at West Point... [W]hy are so many liberal voices muted? Why after so many liberals aggressively asserted themselves in criticizing the foreign policy conduct of the Bush administration-- and in particular the war in Iraq-- have they ignored the war in Afghanistan? Over the past several weeks I asked a number of prominent progressives why liberals have been so silent about the war in Afghanistan. Several themes emerged.
First, is the obvious information gap. There are fewer reporters in Afghanistan than in Iraq-- and little in the way of TV coverage. As a result, it is difficult to get a clear sense of what is happening on the ground and what is working and not working. It is for many liberal publications simply easier to write about the debate over health care reform or other domestic issues. Mark Schmitt, executive editor of the American Prospect told me that it is “tough to produce something well-informed on Afghanistan” because of financial constraints and the challenge in finding knowledgeable writers on the ground to do actual eporting.
Second, in contrast to the war in Iraq, liberals generally support the objectives of the war in Afghanistan-- and for a good part of the past seven years have been calling on the U.S. to devote more attention to the war there, rather than Iraq. They recall Afghanistan’s role in the planning of September 11 and are aware of the continued presence of al Qaeda in the region. And many fear that a precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan would subject Afghans, and in particular Afghan women, to a return of the human rights abuses that defined previous Taliban rule. That makes even those with serious misgivings about the Obama administration’s strategy more willing to give it the benefit of a doubt.
Third, is the hangover from Iraq. According to Michael W. Hanna, a fellow at the Century Foundation, progressives “have yet to come to grips with the dominant surge narrative, which suggests that it was largely responsible for turning the tide in Iraq.” Hanna noted the factors that brought stability to Iraq were largely indigenous to Iraqi society and were only partially the result of President Bush’s decision to increase troop levels. But the misunderstood “success” of the surge has led many progressives to now “feel chastened about speaking out against Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan.” Many seem to feel that if they were wrong about escalation in Iraq then, perhaps they are wrong about escalation in Afghanistan today.
Behind all these factors, however, are the familiar (and very tricky) questions that have bedeviled progressive foreign policy thinkers for years-- namely, how do you balance humanitarian aspirations with actual U.S. capabilities and interests, and how and when should the United States utilize military force? Liberals are discovering that it was relatively easy to criticize an unpopular, incompetent war in Iraq and a foreign policy agenda that promiscuously squandered U.S. power and goodwill. But finding a solution for Afghanistan or a national security strategy that moves the country away from the post 9/11 “war on terror” narrative is far more difficult.
In fact, the lack of good alternatives for Afghanistan seems to be a major stumbling block for progressives. Many told me that it was difficult to criticize the president’s strategy without a clear sense of what should be done differently. But for the left to argue that there are still no good alternatives on Afghanistan is an implicit indictment of their own failure to come up with one.
Members of left-leaning, DC-based think tanks and advocacy organizations have either tacitly supported the Afghanistan strategy or offered tactical suggestions to improve a policy that some privately believe is irredeemable. These are the groups that should be providing the policy ammunition for liberals to speak more authoritatively on Afghanistan.
There are a few congressmembers who are speaking up-- basically the 30 or so Democrats who opposed Obama's supplemental war budget last June and a small handful of Republicans (very small). Barney Frank, as Chair of the House Financial Services Committee, has taken an interesting approach.
A panel commissioned by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) is recommending nearly $1 trillion in cuts to the Pentagon’s budget during the next 10 years.
The Sustainable Defense Task Force, a commission of scholars from a broad ideological spectrum appointed by Frank, the House Financial Services Committee chairman, laid out actions the government could take that could save as much as $960 billion between 2011 and 2020.
...Frank on Friday warned that if he can’t convince Congress to act in the “general direction” of the task force recommendation, “then every other issue will suffer.” Not cutting the Pentagon's budget could lead to higher taxes and spending cuts detrimental to the environment, housing and highway construction.
The acceptance of the recommendations would depend on a “philosophical change" and a “redefinition of the strategy,” Frank said at press conference on Capitol Hill.
He said the creation of the deficit reduction commission offers the best opportunity for the reduction recommendations. Frank wants to convince his colleagues to write to the deficit reduction commission and warn that they would not approve any of the plans suggested by the commission unless reduction of military spending is included.
Annals of American Ingenuity: Term-limited memorials -- for when we get tired of remembering!
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Tired of remembering, you know, lots of old stuff that just takes up space in your brain and you didn't really care about that much to begin with? College of DuPage (COD) could be just the place for you!
by Ken
Just last week we were remembering the slaughter of students protest the American incursion into Cambodia at Kent State University by panicked (and carelessly -- or worse -- commanded) National Guardsmen on May 4, 1970. Our friend Bil has called attention to a wonderful little substory, from the suburban Chicago Daily Herald, with this note:
COD, College of Dupage in Illinois is arguably the largest junior college on the planet (Jim Belushi attended here) and they just CUT DOWN 4 trees planted as Kent State Memorials to MAKE WAY for a $225 million new project/building for "Homeland Security Training." CREEPY. They say the trees were "sickly" from some previous underground work, I don't believe it. And I suggest that aging trees were PERFECT MEMORIALS to the 4 who were cut down.
By Jake Griffin | Daily Herald StaffContact writer Published: 5/11/2010 11:22 AM
Four trees planted 40 years ago at the College of DuPage to honor students killed by National Guard troops at Kent State University in Ohio were recently removed.
College officials said the silver maples were dying and will be replaced. They were located next to where the college's new Homeland Security Education Center is being constructed, but college officials said Tuesday the trees' removal were not necessitated by the construction.
"Our landscaping team had found previous underground work had damaged their root structure," said Joe Moore, COD's associate vice president of external relations.
The college removed the trees three days after the 40th anniversary of the shootings that galvanized the country.
The trees were about 20 inches in diameter at the time they were cut down, Moore said. The homeland security building is the first phase of a proposed $225 million complex intended to make COD a public safety training hub.
Moore said COD President Robert Breuder met with three art faculty members to discuss using the trees to create a more permanent memorial. Moore added the college has committed $10,000 to pay for the creation of a new memorial and will match up to $5,000 more as well as plant four new trees to memorialize the May 4, 1970 tragedy.
The trees were planted on the western edge of the college's Glen Ellyn campus by COD faculty members following the shooting deaths of four unarmed Kent State students protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam War. The Ohio National Guard also wounded nine others after being called in to quell the campus unrest by then-Gov. James Rhodes, according to the university's website. More than 60 bullets were fired in a 13-second period. Kent State students Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, Williams Schroeder and Sandra Scheuer were slain.
Plans for the permanent Kent State memorial at COD are in the "initial planning stages," said art professor Chuck Boone.
Boone and others were asked to find an artist to create the memorial that will use the wood from the silver maples. They will also help decide where the new memorial will be displayed. Boone said this is the first time the college has commissioned a sculpture or art piece with requirements on what material is to be used. Creation of the memorial is expected to begin in the fall.
Boone said the memorial itself will be a teaching tool.
"It's important to remember what happened at Kent State, not just the four people's lives that were lost, but what brought us to that shooting," he said. "That shooting was based partly on fear of dissent and that's something we need to teach to."
We humans aren't really all that good at remembering, nor are we by and large all that keen to remember. The COD people are pioneers here. Just think how this might resonate through history.
"Remember the Maine -- for a while"
"December 7, 1941, a date that will live in infamy, leastwise for a few years"
"Never forget . . . uh, what were we talking about?"
From Kent State to Dien Bien Phu (OK, so that's backwards -- sue me)
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DIEN BIEN PHU 3 days/2 nights by plane:This trip enables you to enjoy the beautiful scenery and popular hill town of Dien Bien close to the Laos border. The trip includes a visit to the historic battlefield of Dien Bien Phu, where the French, after nearly 100 years of colonization and nine years of war, were defeated in 1954 by the Viet Minh, lead by Ho Chi Minh. Also included are the hill tribe villages of the Tai, Thai and H'mong peoples.
by Ken
Of course "From Kent State to Dien Bien Phu" is backwards. Do we Americans know any other way of looking at history?
But the anniversary (40) of the massacre of students Kent State University in northeastern Ohio happened Tuesday, while the anniversary (56) of the defeat of the French by the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu in northwestern Vietnam is today.
OOPS, SEEMS WE CAN'T SAY "MASSACRE"
Oh wait, I see in Wikipedia that apparently we're not supposed to refer to what happened at Kent State as a "massacre." "Kent State shootings" is apparently the acceptable term. After all, no less a figure than the Ohio National Guard's adjutant general "told reporters that a sniper had fired on the guardsmen."
Wikipedia adds, "[This] remains a debated allegation." I gather than "debated allegation" is a fancy way of saying "fairy tale," or "lie."
The following sentence in Wikipedia is: "Many guardsmen later testified that they were in fear for their lives, which was questioned partly because of the distance between them and the students killed or wounded." And then as now, there are many Americans whose hearts went/go out only to the fraidy-scared National Guardsmen -- you know, the guys with the guns, as opposed to the DFHs (fairly well-scrubbed DFHs, but then, this was northeastern Ohio) protesting the Vietnam War.
I was rightly chided for letting the Kent State anniversary pass unnoticed. All I could say in my defense was that it's not an anniversary I've got on my regular holiday schedule. The defeat at Dien Bien Phu either, except that I heard was quite a long report this morning on NPR's Morning Edition. Featured in the report was Ted Morgan, who has written a book on the subject, Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War.This is good news, because Morgan not only is an excellent author-reporter but once upon a time was Sanche de Gramont, and presumably brings to the project a French-educated historical awareness of his native country's involvement in Southeast Asia, a perspective that most of us Americans conspicuously lack.
Dien Bien Phu may be only a name now, but for Americans it was pretty much only a name when we were getting sucked into that pointless hell of a war. My understanding is that President Eisenhower, after all a trained military man, indeed had some sense of the hopelessness of the French colonial position, and was appropriately wary of an American military commitment in Vietnam. And then came, in David Halberstam's immortal phrase, "the best and the brightest" who advised Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
Making it just a matter of time before Richard Nixon came along, claiming to have a secret plan to get us out out of Vietnam, which he couldn't share because then it wouldn't be secret, and of course he couldn't share his real secret: that he was ensuring that no peace accord could be reached before he could be elected. It wasn't the crimes he was committing that he was so shy about. It's more likely that he thought his election prospects might have been adversely affected if voters knew that he was actively conspiring to prolong the war.
Is it any wonder that Nixon died in disgrace in prison? (What? You mean he didn't? You're kidding me.)
Since Tuesday I've been asking myself what I would have written if I had written something about Kent State. And it always comes back to the same one story: It was the horror that turned my parents against the war in Vietnam.
At the time I was, if I recollect correctly, still a prime draft-eligible college graduate, having graduated from student-deferred draft status the previous June. And I knew that my mother in particular had two seemingly incompatible attitudes toward the war. On the one hand, as an ordinary American, she supported the foreign policy of the president, even if the president was the reviled Nixon. (And, I should add, as long as that foreign policy was sufficiently pro-Israel.) However, when it came to the subject of my personal participation in that war, she was an absolutist: uh-uh, no way. (This is, of course, why the war enthusiasts who like taking the country into undeclared wars will never allow reinstatement of the draft. Voters whose offspring are on the war profiteers' chopping block tend to be less pliable on the subject.)
And then on the evening news she had to watch uniformed Americans shooting and killing and injuring American students. Quite rightly, she allowed no mitigation. This was an America she had no possibility of recognizing or acknowledging.
And so began Richard Nixon's inexorable march to disgrace and prison.
He didn't? Are you absolutely sure? How can that be? What I'm being told is that in fact Nixon went right on with his "secret" plan to end the war, which seemed to consist of getting us in deeper and deeper. By the time he did leave office in disgrace, owing to his being not only evil but insanely paranoid, he was able to hand the war off proudly to his successor, Jerry Ford, leaving it to poor Jerry to preside over the turning of American tail that Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon had worked so hard to make inevitable.
So the lessons of Kent State remain deeply confused. Whereas the lessons of Dien Bien Phu we continue to do everything we can -- as in Afghanistan -- to ignore. "Know what you're getting into before you get into it" doesn't sound like a controversial proposition. However, it's apparently deeply un-American.
TODAY IS THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE 1970 KENT STATE MASSACRE
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My friend Thrasher runs the world's best Neil Young fan site. Since today is the anniversary of the Kent State shootings, he decided to ponder the question of why students today aren't protesting the Iraq war. Is it because there is no draft? Or is it because they're afraid that Bush will have them murdered the same way Nixon did?
OHIO: WHY TODAY'S STUDENTS DON'T PROTEST THE IRAQ WAR
-by Thrasher
Is this why today's students don't protest the Iraq war?
On Monday, May 4, 1970 at 12:24 PM, twenty-eight Ohio National Guardsmen began shooting into a crowd of student anti-war protesters at Kent State University. In thirteen seconds, the guardsmen had fired sixty-seven rounds and four students lay dead.
Immediately after the Kent State shooting (sometimes referred to as the "Kent State Massacre"), Neil Young composed the song "Ohio" after looking at photos appearing in Life magazine. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young went to the studio and recorded the song which was released to radio stations shortly after the killings. Soon, the lyrics "Four dead in Ohio" became an anthem to a generation.
In the liner notes of the Decade album, Neil wrote:
"It's still hard to believe I had to write this song. It's ironic that I capitalized on the death of these American students. Probably the most important lesson ever learned at an American place of learning. David Crosby cried after this take."
The four killed and nine wounded were all full-time students.
Over the years, Thrasher's Wheat has received more mail and comments on this song than almost any other Young song. Comments like this from Jodi:
"I just would like to say that I am a 23 old student and I am doing a speech on CSNY during the protest era, mainly the song 'Ohio'. I would have to say that this song has touched me and it has become one of my favorite songs. It is tragic what happened to the students, especially when I read two of those who died were just walking to their next class. This song puts me in a time I was never in and I appreciate the music as well as the students."
Students and National Guard Clash at Kent State, Ohio
The events of May 4, 1970 have been extensively detailed since that day and there still remain many unresolved inconsistencies surrounding the activities of the Guardsmen and students.
"Gotta get down to it Soldiers are cutting us down Should have been done long ago."
Jimmy McDonough writes in the Neil Young biography Shakey about the song "Ohio": "In ten lines, Young captured the fear, frustration and anger felt by the youth across the country and set it to a lumbering D-modal death march that hammered home the dread."
"Tin Soldiers" & President Nixon
Crosby once said that Young calling Nixon's name out in the lyrics was 'the bravest thing I ever heard.' Crosby noted that at the time, it seemed like those who stood up to Nixon, like those at Kent State, were shot. Neil Young did not seemed scared at all.
When asked about releasing the song "Ohio", Graham Nash respnded:
"Four young men and women had their lives taken from them while lawfully protesting this outrageous government action. We are going back to keep awareness alive in the minds of all students, not only in America, but worldwide…to be vigilant and ready to stand and be counted… and to make sure that the powers of the politicians do not take precedent over the right of lawful protest."
A video collage of still images commemorating the 36th Anniversary of the killing of four college students by National Guardsman at Kent State in 1970
Start and end sequence of a 1 hour documentary special by Germany's WDR-TV. Coverage originating from major U.S. networks. TV Teams of NBC, ABC and CBS had been present.
YouTube video- In 1970, in response to Nixon's widening of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, students throughout the US protested. Nixon sent the National Guard to restore order to the Kent State campus. The resulting consequences changed the course of the war.
Student video project of the Kent State Massacre May 4, 1970.
You can click to enlarge this portion of the webpage. Onsite, each of the images can be enlarged. (See below.)
The Newts, Bill-Os, and other Archie Bunker types have called for baths. They tell the occupiers to take a shower and look for a job while their corporate masters call for moving all of the jobs out of America and push for putting flammable gas in the shower water. Congressman Walsh from Illinois, among others in Washington, even says occupiers are un-American and military vets who join them are socialists -- demeaning words to righties. This from a man who doesn’t pay his child support. To House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the occupiers are just a mob. Fox News shows their viewers what are obviously flu-shot syringes and talks about occupiers being just a bunch of drug addicts. To Hannity fans, they are thugs. First you dehumanize and degrade. You know what comes next.
The cop who provided this galvanizing image, UC Davis campus security cop Lt. John Pike, has been put on paid leave for his "transgression." His boss has been placed on paid leave as well. The media presents this as some sort of punishment. In fact, it is a free, paid extended Thanksgiving vacation, a reward. What a farce! Yes, we have quite a system! It’s surreal. In Ohio and Wisconsin, good cops who do their jobs properly are fired by their governors.
This is good news, because Morgan not only is an excellent author-reporter but once upon a time was Sanche de Gramont, and presumably brings to the project a French-educated historical awareness of his native country's involvement in Southeast Asia, a perspective that most of us Americans conspicuously lack.
