Combat Duty with Homeless Veterans, Senior NCOs and a Variety of Military
Note: This short piece ended up in the now once-a-week newspaper in the county in which I live, work and recreate. It’s just my effort to keep attempting to move the generalized political and empathetic needle over to the truly progressive side of things. It’s not an effort to get the general population here to dance around a bonfire and burn all those broken treaties, promises, histories and contracts that have for me defined this country: United States of Amnesia.
“Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale,” Gore Vidal lamented and an enormous part of his prodigious energy was spent railing against the hucksters, liars, cheats and thieves he saw assiduously dismantling all that was good in America, and replacing it with a system so corrupt it rivalled Rome at the moment of its precipitous decline. (“Lest we forget: Gore Vidal and the United States of Amnesia“)
This current epoch for me — and for so many socialists of the Michael Parenti variety — is a time of multiple implosions on so many fronts I at least had some sense I could be at least a minuscule positive part of to keep pushing the needle toward compassion, social justice and cultural sanity: education, journalism and environmental action.
The rapidity of decline in critical thinking in K12 and higher education is like a pathogen of immense proportions and replication. The unimaginable acceptance of AI-VR-AR and the digital panopticon has almost flummoxed me; right now, Chat GPT is an acceptable tool being utilized in higher education. And, the power of propaganda and the full-throttle PsyOps which had unfolded decades ago (centuries ago considering the power of the media control by oligarch starting in the ‘old’ Gilded Age) has unleashed a breed of humanity that has taken D.H. Lawrence’s comment to the tenth power:
In 1923, the British novelist D. H. Lawrence offered a grim assessment of America and Americans: “All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”
So I say on this July Fourth, let it rip. The decline of the empire of chaos, the empire of lies, the empire of predation, all managed by the parasites of capitalism, is like witnessing a fire in a crowded theater, with all the doors bolted shut, but still, we are able to hit up the Coke machine and grab all the free popcorn you want for the last hurrah of our lives, as the Marvel Comic movie plays on through the increasing smoky air.
In the 16th century, the Florentine philosopher and statesman Francesco Guicciardini warned that the process of imperial decline takes far longer than is often imagined.
“If you see a city beginning to decline, a government changing, a new empire expanding, or any such phenomenon — and these things are sometimes quite clearly visible to us — be careful not to misjudge the time they will take. To be mistaken in these matters can be very harmful to you,” he warned. “Be very careful, for it is a step on which people often stumble.” (Francesco Guicciardini: The Historian’s Craft, Mark Phillips, page 144)
This July 4 seems for me like a hollow time, or shallow, but certainly not hallowed ground.
All my work with military as a college teacher in various locales — El Paso, White Sands, Fort Huachuca, Biggs Fields, Sergeant’s Major Academy, Fairchild Air Force Base, McChord, and other places — was more or less appreciated by some pretty conservative students, albeit just a small swath really thought I was unpatriotic and un-American.
I was teaching them composition and literature and film classes. I designed special ones, too, including film and literature of the Vietnam War. Most of these young soldiers had no idea about the USA’s history of overthrowing governments, and of helping overthrow by proxy democratically elected governments not to USA’s liking. Nor did many 20-year veterans have this knowledge.
The value of my life is that my old man — in the Air Force and Army for 32 years — valued discussion. He was a CW5 at his separation from service. As a family, we were in many places because of his regular military status — Azores, Scotland, Maryland, Paris, Munich, Arizona, Washington, and I hitched some time in Saudi Arabia as an adult.
Shot in Korea and in Vietnam, my old man saw the value of higher education. He’d help me pay for books, tuition and field trips while in college, and he was proud that I was a graduate of the University of Arizona with two majors.
He was proud I was a graduate degree holder in El Paso, a college teacher, a journalist for both newspapers and even was interested in my protesting U.S. military incursions into Iraq, Kuwait and Panama.
My patriotism is steeped in open discussion, critical debate, fluid research and never accepting what authorities have been saying (lying) to us for several centuries.
So, my students, both civilian and military, were given a true liberal arts education, with ethics, history, political science, and rhetoric, as in utilizing the skills of true debate (not the dog and pony fourth grade display of those old TV presidential “debates”), as under girder.
Politics and history were areas my students researched for their essays. We also looked at many of the great speeches by our country’s leading minds and voices. For example, Frederick Douglass: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.
“To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.” (Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852)
This opinion piece is being written in a time of what many of the clueless elites call an era of nuclear implosion for independent writers/authors and for workers in general, who will be out of work by the millions because of Artificial Intelligence. These “geniuses” love being “disrupters.”
I’m also writing this with background noise of our country, far and wide, killing debate, even in higher education: Stopping robust research into alternative (maybe more truthful) frames/narratives around corporatism, oligarchy, military, science, technology, and government.
I am no longer in higher education because Lincoln County is not hiring folk with my college experience. I know from so many other friends around the country and in other countries, however, how challenging it is to teach in a hyper-hostile landscape, from students now called customers, and then to all the administrative and so-called support positions blocking real teaching.
Here’s what I brought up in my classes: I was in Vietnam in the 1990s, and I spent time with people who were bombed by guys like John McCain. I was in the jail cell he was held in just to “see, feel, imagine.” I saw photos of dead children at an orphanage his Navy cadre bombed.
McCain flew 23 missions in Operation Rolling Thunder, ordered by Lyndon B. Johnson whose General Curtis LeMay vowed to bomb Vietnam “back into the Stone Age.” A German journalist who met McCain when he was a POW described how on Oct. 14, 1967, one of the bombing runs over Hanoi killed 76 people, destroying a whole neighborhood. Unfortunately, McCain received a commendation medal for bombing the Haiphong shipyard on Oct. 18. Then, one week later, McCain’s A4E Skyhawk was shot down on a bombing run against a civilian light-bulb factory in Hanoi.
For this July 4, I will be thinking of those on the USS Liberty: On June 8, 1967, while patrolling in international waters in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, USS Liberty was savagely attacked without warning or justification by air and naval forces of the state of Israel.
Many of my military students did not know of this war crime: 34 killed in action and 173 were wounded. Researching the cover-up and lack of action taken by USA against Israel, my students critiqued different perspectives on our/their relationship to Israel.
What does the Fourth of July mean to me? Critiquing America’s history does not make you un-American, unpatriotic, communist, socialist or Marxist. It makes you empathetic, open-minded, curious, and imaginative enough to say: enough is enough.
+–+
Further reading to bring you up to speed would take pages and pages, scrolling down, here, and years to catch up. But, here, for July Fourth, a few, and then, since USA is ready for war with China, an internet accessed article:
In Killing Hope ( Zed Books, 2014), William Blum aims to provide a comprehensive account of America’s covert and overt military actions in the world, all the way from China in the 1940s to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and – in this updated edition – beyond.
William Keylor’s A World of Nations: The International Order Since 1945.
At the end of WWII writes William Blum, “The ink on the Japanese surrender treaty was hardly dry when the United States began to use the Japanese soldiers still in China alongside American troops in a joint effort against the Chinese communists.” (The CIA: a forgotten history, Zed Books Ltd. (London and New Jersey) 1986, p.15.)
In October 1942…Prescott Bush was managing partner of Brown Brothers Harriman. His 18-year-old son George, the future U.S. President, had just begun training to become a naval pilot. On Oct. 20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of Nazi German banking operations in New York City which were being conducted by Prescott Bush. Under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the government took over the Union Banking Corporation, in which Bush was a director. The U.S. Alien Property Custodian seized Union Banking Corp.’s stock shares, all of which were owned by Prescott Bush, E. Roland “Bunny” Harriman, three Nazi executives, and two other associates of Bush.
Tarpley and Chaitkin add the following:
President Bush’s family had already played a central role in financing and arming Adolf Hitler for his takeover of Germany…By deciding that Prescott Bush and the other directors of the Union Banking Corp. were legally front men for the Nazis, the government avoided the more important historical issue: In what way were Hitler’s Nazis themselves hired, armed and instructed by the New York and London clique of which Prescott Bush was an executive manager? (NATO’s Nazi Beginnings: How the West implemented Hitler’s goals by Robert S. Rodvik)
Enjoy some free reading on a beach with a mojito or mescal:
Paul Haeder, Author 