Thursday, July 29, 2021

Happy Dependence Day

In reference to William J. Astore's Bracing Views Blog entry:

Why Can’t American Troops Just Leave Iraq?
https://bracingviews.com/2021/07/27/why-cant-american-troops-just-leave-iraq/

My comment in response to another comment by JerryS* https://bracingviews.com/2021/07/27/why-cant-american-troops-just-leave-iraq/comment-page-1/#comment-25429

I have to commend JerryS (July 27, 2021 at 9:30 PM) for calling “Bullshit!” on the word-like noise “training” as employed in the context of endless U.S. military adventurism in foreign lands far distant from any relationship to the security of the United States and its people. Bravo.

I can appreciate the common-sense frustration inherent in the comment, but the well-chosen and appropriate epithet, by itself, does not explicate what the purposefully confusing rhetoric means in practice. The American public mistakenly believes that “training” means teaching someone to perform an activity independently so that they no longer require further commentary, suggestions, or advice from anyone else. In other words: “training” results in the trained “standing on their own,” so to speak. This more or less works with American enlisted personnel trained by other Americans over several months of “Basic Training,” which, in essence, amounts to “Hurry up and Wait” and “Nobody cares what you think. If the Navy wants to know what you think, the Navy will tell you what you think.” That sort of thing.

But in actual practice with Americans training foreign vassal military forces, a sort of reverse Pavlov’s Conditioned Response takes place. Consider the following metaphorical illustration:

American military “Trainer”: If I ring this bell every time I feed this dog, the dog will learn to drool in anticipation of another meal.

Foreign “Trained” Dog: If I drool just a little bit, an American military trainer will supply me with a meal and some music to go along with it.

Also precisely relevant to the current disintegrating situation in Afghanistan (if not Iraq, too) Chris Hedges in his book Death of the Liberal Class (2010) explains the actual nature of this U.S. military “training” for the Afghan Army (ANA):

“The real purpose of American advisers assigned to ANA units, however, is not ultimately to train Afghans but rather to function as liaisons between Afghani units and American firepower and logistics. The ANA is unable to integrate ground units with artillery and air support. It has no functioning supply system. It depends on the U.S. military to do basic tasks. The United States even pays the bulk of ANA salaries.”

I hope this clears up some of the misunderstanding that results from the U.S. military (and its attendant corporate camp followers) using the word-like noise “training” in a deliberately deceptive manner so as to obscure the true nature of their actual — and woefully inept — activities and results.

Note *  comment reference

JerryS (

"I love how we always want to stay to provide “training” until our favored fighters can stand on their own. Decades of training but it is never enough. Who the hell is training the terrorists/insurgents/rebels? Every time I see footage of them, they are running around in Toyota pickups with RPGs and AK-47’s and a canvas bag full rice or beans or whatever. I know it is more complicated than that but this never ending training is just bullshit."


Monday, December 07, 2020

Home and Gone Again

At the end of January 1972, I came back to the US from an extended 18-month tour-of-dirty in the now defunct Republic of South Vietnam. I had agreed to serve an additional six months “at the request and for the convenience of the government.” In return, I got six months shaved off my penurious six year enlistment in Uncle Sam’s Canoe Club (a.k.a., the United States Navy) so that I could return to college in time for the Spring Semester. I had met (and fallen in lust with) a lovely Chinese lady in Taiwan while on R&R there; couldn’t wait to get back to her; and had a lot of Japanese and Mandarin Chinese credits to pile up in order to qualify for the Foreign Exchange Student program at California State University, Long Beach. One look at the political situation in the country of my birth only confirmed my eagerness to get the hell out of the asylum and back to civilization as soon as possible. “Why change Dicks in the middle of a screwing” seemed to explain the resigned, apathetic attitude.

So I watched from afar in November of 1972 as Tricky Dick Nixon and Henry “Der Bomber” Kissinger — the two sons-of-bitches who sent me to Vietnam two years previously — blew away the hapless George McGovern, their campaign promising “Peace is at Hand.” Naturally, once re-elected they bombed the living shit out of North Vietnam on Christmas Day. The entire world erupted in revulsion; some petty burglary and cover-up activities began to receive legal investigation; and The Mother Of All “-gates” (Watergate) began the inexorable process of running, first, VP Spiro Agnew, and then President Tricky Dick Nixon out of town one step ahead of impeachment and conviction.

Throughout his scurrilous red-baiting career, people had warned Dick Nixon: “Be careful whom you kick in the face on your climb up the greasy pole because you will encounter the same people again on the slide back down again.” Obviously, no one has ever dared to relate this timeless wisdom to Donald Trump. From the “unhelpful” activities of John McCain’s daughter and the Bush Clan this election season, it still seems operative to me. As Khan Noonian Singh said to his nemesis James T. Kirk: “Do you know the Klingon proverb that says Revenge is a dish best served cold?

Trump didn’t create the rabid, bible-thumping religious cult that now calls itself the Republican party, but he did ruthlessly exploit its cultural grievances and Messianic longings when it served his own ambitions. Many political commentators now caution that ex-President Donald Trump will take The Trump Show back out into cable-tv land where he first learned to profit from America’s lowest entertainment “standards.” Perhaps he even expects tons of free media attention like he got in 2016. Many Republican politicians fear the political mayhem he might inflict on the two hopelessly corrupt right-wing factions jockeying for jobs in the inept U.S. “government” bureaucracy. Perhaps he can even get back to flogging conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s “missing” birth certificate. It worked for him before.

Personally, I think Gotterdammerung II: The Twilight of the Girls will prove far more horror-show “entertaining” as the doddering Siegfried, Joe Biden, finds himself surrounded by BroomHillary and the Vicious, Venal Valkyries eager to show they can bomb the shit out of foreign peasants even more viciously than the “men” ever could.

Pardon the “misogynist” in an old swab-jockey, but I can already hear echoes of 1972 four years from now: “Why change “damsels” in the middle of a “distress”?

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*Note: Also posted as a comment to the Bracing Views blog comment thread "Black and Blue in America" on November 9, 2020 at 4:53 PM

Sunday, June 24, 2012

When Jaundice Comes Marching Home

When Jaundice comes marching home once more,
Guffaw! Guffaw!
We’ll know what its masters have in store,
Guffaw! Guffaw!
A shiver of terror to run up the spine,
At the thought of what’s next if we don’t fall in line
Oh they’d like us scared when
Jaundice comes marching home

When Jaundice comes snarling home this time
Guffaw! Guffaw!
We’ll spit in its face with a jeering rhyme
Guffaw! Guffaw!
Our leaders who screwed up and shot our wad
Will tell us they did it for country and GAWD
But we’ll know they lie when
Jaundice comes snarling home

When Jaundice comes limping home to hate
Guffaw! Guffaw!
The wars that it lost and the shit on its plate
Guffaw! Guffaw!
The ones who deployed it to bomb and kill
Now find that they’ve used up the easy thrill
So they’ll have to hide when
Jaundice comes limping home

When Jaundice has marched in its last parade
Guffaw! Guffaw!
And laid down to sleep in the endless shade
Guffaw! Guffaw!
We’ll have us a wake for the late deceased
From whose awful clutches we’re now released
How we’ll all breathe free when
Jaundice has died at home

Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright 2012

Friday, June 15, 2012

The Boobies of Fernando Po


(The inaugural episode of Fernando Po, U.S.A., America’s post-literate retreat to Plato’s Cave)

The Island of Fernando Po
Once knew a fleeting fame
As home to aborigines
The Boobies were their name
Who -- legend has it -- only spoke
By light of fire's flame

Their basic primate language showed
That Boobies had devolved:
Whatever they had figured out
They also had unsolved,
Reverting to forgetfulness
And culture long dissolved

They had the means of making noise
As all rude peoples do
And yet just like the deaf and mute
They had to see words, too,
Or else they could not cogitate
Or any thoughts construe

The Boobies of Fernando Po
Could neither read nor write,
Instead, they “acted out” their speech,
“Performing” it despite
Unconsciousness of language arts
Of which they’d long lost sight

Their spoken tongue made little use
Of sentences and words,
Thus they communicated like
A flock of chirping birds
Or else like fatted cows content
To graze within their herds

Dependence on the visual
Constrained their use of sound
To something less than merely noise
Unorganized and bound
To grotesque facial grimaces
And gestures unprofound

They'd slap their foreheads; roll their eyes;
In slack-jawed pantomime
Of something they'd done yesterday
While only killing time
In mindless mimicry that had
No reason and no rhyme

"I'm all like going 'duh'," they'd say,
Which usage left aghast
Their teachers who had worked so hard
But realized at last
That Boobies couldn't separate
The present from the past

In cultures that have languages
Like Chinese, French, and Basque
Linguistic tools like verbs and nouns
Perform the needed task
Of formulating answers to
The questions Boobies ask

But Boobies need their hands and feet
To illustrate their themes
They “point” and “walk” and “pose” because
They've no semantic memes
To pass among themselves for use
As metaphoric schemes

They live imprisoned in the Now,
All Boobies preordained
To do the things their parents did,
Each generation chained
To labor on a treadmill
Giving up what they had gained

The rooster crowed; the sun came up
Which taught them quite a lot
The cows came home; the sun went down
Which didn't teach them squat
At sunrise they began to learn
At sundown they forgot

They could not tell this day from that
They had no memory
Each moment died at birth and left
No known posterity
The Boobies had no ancestors,
No living history

They could not tell where they had been
They knew not where they went
As far as they could figure out
Each thought came to them sent
Prefabricated "up above"
From "Heaven's" firmament

This made them existentialists
A philosophic breed
Who dealt in isolated facts
And never saw the need
To add their observations up
Into a larger creed

Yet starting at the other end
As Plato chose to do
With abstract "essences" and spooks
And "gods" not real or few
Would only have made matters worse
By proving falsehood true

The Boobies just threw up their hands
And thought whichever way
Which made it easy for the priest
To hold them in his sway
Performing magic rites that made
The sun come up each day

The Boobies let their children grow
As they themselves had done
By joining dots with crayon lines
And having lots of fun
While limiting arithmetic
To just the number one

"It's all the same!" the Boobies cried;
And they believed it, too;
Which made their basic monism
So easy to imbue.
"If everything is One," they said
"Who needs the number `two'?"

And so the Boobies on this isle
Endured the Dumb disease:
A simple, savage livelihood
That mainly served to please
The tribal chief and witch doctor
In their concerted ease

Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright 2006, 2009

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Felonious Military Age Muslims

In America, "military age" for "males" officially extends from 17 to 62.

In Muslim countries occupied and/or bombed by the U.S. Military, "military age" extends from "old enough to throw a rock at your oppressors" to "not dead yet."

In America, "military age" males can own a gun and not serve in the military and yet not find themselves indefinitely imprisoned without charge or trial or summarily murdered by the President of the United States acting arbitrarily and in secret. 

In Muslim countries occupied and/or bombed by the U.S. Military, simply "being" of "military age" constitutes a crime against the United States of America, which "crime of being" then forces the President of the United States, despite his "deep moral reserve" and frequent contemplation of Thomas Aquinas and "Just War Theory", to summarily murder or indefinitely incarcerate without charge or trial any such male of any such age -- even American citizens -- or anyone else within a blast radius of them on the grounds that they might someday harbor unkind thoughts about the United States and how it behaves towards Muslim countries.

Which leads to thoughts in verse concerning:

“Felonious Military Age Muslims”

You’ve reached the age of sixteen years
Or maybe eighty-five
This makes of you a “militant”
So why are you alive?

Our president can kill you now
His list contains your name.
Intended, or if by mistake,
He’ll kill you just the same

The bomb will kill the one it hits,
As well as those nearby
Who had no business being born
Unless it was to die.

A free-fire-zone we called this dodge,
All over Vietnam,
Which meant to shoot just anywhere.
Who gives a bloody damn?

Obama’s body counts reveal
Upon his magic map
Some “progress” after decades spent
Repeating this same crap.

But Democrats now think him “tough”
And cheer at each new kill.
Republicans, of course, do not,
And never ever will.

And so the country lurches right
As scapegoat Muslims fall,
And fascist brownshirts thrill to see
Obama “standing tall.”

Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright 2012

Friday, April 20, 2012

The Inflated Style as Euphemism

“I think no commander ever is going to come out and say ‘I’m confidant that we can do this.’ I think we say you assess, we believe this is, you know, a reasonable prospect.” — General David Petraeus, Commander of the International Security Assistance Forces in Afghanistan (since promoted to head of the CIA), regarding his mission objectives and his prospects for achieving them.

“The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism.” George Orwell, Politics and the English Language.

Which leads to thoughts in verse regarding:

“The Inflated Style as Euphemism”

The general has started talking funny
Like, never stating what we can achieve.
Instead, he babbles jargon for the money
Which means he never plans for us to leave.

We’ve been there now so long that few remember
How many times we’ve heard the same old song.
Our plans, those scruffy foreigners dismember
While we proclaim that we’ve done nothing wrong.

The president has donned his bomber jacket
To have his picture taken with the troops:
For conquerors, cheap tools that serve the racket;
For statesmen, simple patriotic dupes.

Our presidents and generals have blundered
And now can only stall for yet more time
While citizens back home whom they have plundered
Refuse to see the nature of the crime.

We went to “war” with tax cuts for the wealthy
And exhortations to consume and spend.
Now broke and begging from the thieving stealthy,
Our leaders promise this will never end.

Our presidents and generals stage dramas
And wave the bloody shirt while spouting gas
To keep us safe from peasants in pajamas
And poppy farmers smoking hash and grass.

We did this once before in Southeast Asia
As names upon a granite wall attest.
The country, though, prefers its euthanasia:
The laying of all memory to rest.

So let us listen raptly to the latest
Inflated euphemism coined to quell
The slightest thought that we might be the greatest
Bullshitters of whom history can tell.

Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright 2010

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Thursday, April 19, 2012

Hanoi Haiku

Written on the occasion of President George W. Bush finally making the trip to Vietnam on November 17, 2006, decades after better American men -- and a better American woman, Jane Fonda -- made the trip in his place. Three and half years into his own Vietnam-style debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, disasters that he would bequeath to his successor two years later, Dubya the Dimwit proved to the world that what he didn't learn from Vietnam he wouldn't learn about the Middle East, either. Hence:

Hanoi Haiku

In Hanoi at last
Red-carpet in return for
Our carpet-bombing

The words no one heard,
Due so many years after:
"We apologize"

Deputy Dubya
Sheriff Cheney's Barney Fife
Lost in Mayberry

Gullible Goofy
The boy who cried Wolfowitz
Far too many times

Emerald City
Naked ruler's brand new clothes
Viewed through glasses green

Mission Accomplished!
A cakewalk in its last throes
Now a glacier race

Four Years an "instant"
Nothing happens right away
What did you expect?

Broken-egg omelets
George Orwell's Catastrophic
Gradualism

Shop till the troops drop
Buy a plane ticket or two
Your part in the "war"

Rob the future now
They will never break our will
Those grandkids of ours

Lecture the victors
About their First and Second
Indochina Wars

Where did we get him?
How come we can't do better?
We look so stupid

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006