Memorial Day Readings

Read Juan Cole.

Read Steve Benen.

Read Andrew J. Bracevich.


(End of post)

Andrew Bacevich asks a question

What kind of democracy is this, when the people do speak, and the people's voice is unambiguous, but nothing happens?

Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army officer who served in Vietnam and has become a noted conservative critic of the war in Iraq, talks about his son Andrew, who was killed in Iraq. Andrew was a first lieutenant. He died on Mother's Day in a suicide bombing north of Baghdad.

Listen on NPR.

It's two and a half minutes that will break your heart.

In Memoriam, Jerry Falwell

Anthem

It's not Bethlehem on an ass
I do. It's not the eye
upon the sparrow
I know.

The long history of man and god
from castle keep to carpet bomb
is not my battle hymn.
My eyes have not seen the glory.

Say
can you see
the way the prophet
jerks like a marionette.
No strings attached.

First published in My Will and Testament Is on the Desk (FootHills Publishing)

A Standing Woman

In the days before Mother's Day this year, Standing Women sent out the following request:

Please stand with us for five minutes of silence at 1 p.m. your local time on May 13, 2007, in your local park, school yard, gathering place, or any place you deem appropriate, to signify your agreement with the statement [above]. We ask you to invite the men who you care about to join you.

Being a solitary, a poet, and a country woman, I decided that I would stand, not in a park or school yard, as those places are not natural to me, but on the front stoop of our house in rural Bourbon County, Kentucky. My husband stood by me, as he has done for 35 years now, and so did our son. It was on this stoop that we kept our candlelight vigil four years ago, on the eve of the War in Iraq. It seemed appropriate.

It was very quiet in Kentucky at 1 p.m. on May 13. For most of the time, the only sound was that of the wind in the trees and the birds fussing at their nest-building. Later on, we heard the noise of a jet in the distance.

The sky was a cloudless blue, the sunlight butter yellow. The grass and the trees wore their shiniest springtime green. The wind moved in waves through the tall pasture grass. The black locust was just beginning to show its white, sweet-smelling bloom.

The male oriole, flitting from locust to locust in his gorgeous orange-and-black and singing his simple but elegant song, was like a Renaissance courtier, a Donne, perhaps a Sir Walter Raleigh. The robin with his puffed rose-colored vest was more a country cleric out of an Austin novel.

What a beautiful place I live in. How privileged is my family to have this quiet safe haven, to share a place with these beautiful creatures.

I mourned (and still mourn) that there are children in the world who cannot experience some version of this quiet and simple beauty. This is the world I would dream for them now and for seven generations to come.

Yet I was also strongly comforted by the thought that women were standing, as I was standing, in simple, eloquent protest, standing up in ranks as the world turned.

Other women are sharing their stories at the link.

Perpetual Hatred by Sherry Chandler

I have been a mother for nearly three decades.

Those three decades have been a time of constant war: civil wars in South America, civil wars in Africa, ethnic wars in Eastern Europe, religious and ethnic wars in the Middle East, disappearances, genocides, rape camps. And always, as I have experienced the joys and sorrows of watching my sons grow, and learn, and struggle the struggles of American children, there has been the constant larger sorrow of knowing that in other places children were taken for warriors, children were raised to hate.

Of all the atrocities humankind has committed in my lifetime, that seems to me the greatest — to taint the hearts of children with hatred.

In his book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning (Public Affairs, 2002), Chris Hedges tells of visiting the Palestinean refugee camp Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip and how, from the Israeli side of the perimeter fence, an electric fence that separated the Palestineans from an Israeli settlement, soldiers in a Jeep called out insults over a loudspeaker. Called out insults in Arabic: “Come on, dogs. Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis?” “Son of a bitch!” “Son of a whore!” “Your mother’s c*nt!”

Goaded thus, the boys of the camp rushed the fence to throw rocks at the armor-plated jeep on the other side. And then the soldiers shot the boys with M-16s.

I had seen children shot in other conflicts I have covered—death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo—but I had never watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport. (p. 94)

But that is not all of the story. That is not all of the horror.

Because dead, these boys become martyrs for the cause, their very funerals, their wounded bodies, turned into propaganda tools by the militant Islamists. We have all seen these funerals on our televisions.

Hedges quotes the mother of one of these boys, a thirteen-year-old not killed, but wounded and lying in hospital.

“The children are fed this hatred of the Jews from the day they are born,” she said. “All they hear is that we have to get rid of the Jewish enemy. The call to fight is pumped out over the radio and the television. The trucks go through the streets of the camp praising the new martyrs and calling for more. The posters of the martyrs are everywhere. And the kids see their fathers, helpless against the Israelis, out of work, and admire the militants with guns. They want to fight.” (p.98)

I pick out this incident, not to demonize Israeli soldiers (Hedges says those soldiers may have been Lebanese Christian mercenaries, people with a long enmity with Palestine) and not to demonize Palestinean militants. Demonizing the other is a tool of war; it is the tool used to teach hatred and I don’t want to use it.

I pick out this incident because it is the most vivid and succinct illustration of what is becoming of our children.

The other night Bill Moyers asked Jon Stewart, “Have you lost your innocence?” And Stewart answered, in paraphrase, you lose your innocence when you have children. It’s then that you see the world as it is and it’s then that you realize that every human is some one’s child.

Hatred perpetuates itself in the children and I have no idea how to stop the pattern. I can’t even perform the futile act of writing poetry about it. I’ve tried. What I’ve written has been angry and anguished and sincere. But sincerity does not make poetry.

One thing, I’m pretty sure the right step is not to send in more invading armies. Children are being used as human shields in Iraq. Their families are being ripped apart, their schools destroyed.

Maybe the first step is to see it and mourn it. Maybe if enough of us mourn for the children, if enough of us mourn enough to just do something like stand in the park for 15 minutes on Mother’s Day, remembering that every human being is some mother’s child. Maybe that will be a start.


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Please visit Sherry Chandler.com

The Border

Introducing a friend of Peace, Sherry, of Sherry Chandler.com.

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Here is an observation by Gary J. Bass in his review Everybody Everywhere:

"When one's loyalties extend to all of humanity, one has reached the climax, and perhaps the limits, of moral sympathy. Humanity, after all, is as much an abstraction as a reality. How concrete must ethical obligations be? Is a species too vast to be a meaningful moral object? Or is it the other way around: are our commitments in the particular premised on the possibility of universalism? These are also political questions, of course. The greatest dividing lines in today's world are certainly the ones on the map: I mean state borders. Orwell, trying to understand why Germans were bombing him in World War II, argued, "One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty." Patriotism -- loyalty to the state -- is the doctrine that on this side of the line, you should care intensely, and on that side, you should not at all.

This review of Lynn Avery Hunt's Inventing Human Rights: A History originally appeared in The New Republic and is currently available from Powells.com.

Here is what our border with Mexico is looking like these days.

Is this our way of drawing the line that marks out who is human and who is not? Is this ugly, wild-life destroying thing really what we want to see when we look south? Are we this frightened of our neighbors?

Reagan, bad as he was, tore down walls. In the Bush years, we're building more and more, walling "the good guys" into enclaves in Israel, in Baghdad, and now in the United States.

Emma Lazarus must be spinning in her grave.

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Please visit Sherry Chandler's website.