Beneath a Tattered Flag

“For the tragedy of our world is precisely that nothing any longer is capable of rousing it from its lethargy.” Anais Nin

Another Memorial Day to honor our war dead.

We remain at war – preemptive war, continuous war, perpetual war, and shadow war. Pious words will be uttered today by the president and others -- they will talk about heroes and sacrifice and bravery and freedom. We are still killing Afghans and Pakistanis and Yemenis, and inside our own borders another kind of war is being waged, equally continuous and perpetual – the war against the poor, against workers, against students, against the elderly and the sick, against the environment. 

We continue to operate our own version of the Gulag Archipelago – the prison at Guantanamo, where most of the inmates are on a hunger strike to protest years of detention without charges or trial. President Obama says he wants to close Guantanamo but that Congress won’t let him. This doesn’t wash. It’s politics, again. If Obama were to release those inmates who the Department of Defense has determined are not a threat, and one or more of them were to become involved in a plot or actual attack on American interests, the political fallout would be severe. Obama has the authority; he just lacks the guts to issue the order.

American flags will fly today, flutter in the breeze, and Air Force or Navy fighter jets will scream over baseball stadiums, and Major League Baseball will trot out some of our wounded veterans for the obligatory standing ovation, and everyone can feel proud and patriotic while CIA drones swoop low over the frontier in Pakistan, and another car bomb explodes in Baghdad.

Everyone can feel proud and patriotic while income inequality grows and democracy shrivels on the vine, and more people are excluded from college or priced out of gentrified neighborhoods. America the Beautiful. Life is grand up on the hill, surrounded by wrought-iron fences and stone walls, at the end of a private road patrolled by private security forces; the nearest school is private, too, and free of brown or black faces. All the segregation money can buy. Life is grand on Wall Street too, and in the executive suite, and at the country club.

The wealthy send the poor to fight and die in places like Iraq and Afghanistan; the wealthy say that war is moral but helping the needy at home immoral because it makes the needy dependent on the fruits of the producers. This is said without irony.

The flag is flying, red, white and blue, but the country in its shadow isn’t the same. We invade other countries, we kidnap people we suspect, we detain and torture, we kill without due process, and we mock the rule of law. I suppose we have always committed these sorts of crimes and transgressions, but now it’s simply more blatant.

For twelve years the most powerful military force on the planet has chased the Taliban and al-Qaeda across and around Afghanistan. Where has this got us? What has been gained? Twelve Memorial Days have come and gone, and we are still “training” the Afghans to police and protect themselves. How many years of training does it take before we can lower the stars and stripes and close up shop?

War All the Time

I keep thinking my country has hit the nadir and must begin to rebound, but almost every day more evidence pops up to prove the empire is on the down slope and flailing like an elephant on roller skates.

The Senate held a hearing the other day about the Authorization for Use of Military Force or AUMF as it’s known, passed with bipartisan congressional support and patriotic fervor immediately after the 9/11 attacks. The AUMF gave then President George W. Bush and his henchman, Vice President Dick Cheney, unprecedented latitude to take the War on Terror to terrorists, wherever in the world they happened to operate. The president could prosecute the War on Terror any way he deemed fit without consulting much with Congress.

We’re thirteen years from 9/11 and still fighting the War on Terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia and other locales in Africa, and the AUMF is alive and well, and if some of the senators and generals who spoke at the hearing are to be believed, may continue another twenty years. 

In his second inaugural address, Obama claimed the era of perpetual war was over, but that was just a line in a speech designed to appease the base, not meant to be taken literally.

Perpetual war is still US policy.

The Obama Administration also uses the AUMF as legal cover for its targeted killing program. Every Tuesday, according to investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, a list of names is presented to President Obama, and the leader of the free world decides who dies and who lives. Terror Tuesday is what the national security and intelligence apparatus calls it. Without due process of any kind, the president hands down a death sentence to be carried out by drone strike or by one of America’s proxies. Quite often innocent people are killed either with the suspected terrorist or instead of the terrorist, but we don’t lose any sleep over our mistakes. 

The U.S. also carries out pre-emptive “signature strikes,” guilt-by-association strikes, aimed at creating terror in a group of people of a certain age and with certain habits of movement and congregation. The military and its allies in the mainstream propaganda industry tell the American public that these strikes are clinical, surgical, precise, carefully designed to limit civilian casualties; they spin other fables for us as well.

When it comes to bending the Constitution, Obama is no better than Bush was and in many ways worse. His depredations against the Constitution, the sovereign territory of other nations, and basic human rights are many.

Basically, the U.S. has adopted Israeli operating procedures when it comes to protecting the homeland from terrorists: we assert the right to kill anyone, anywhere, at any time; we shoot first and mop up the mess later; we kidnap, render, and torture. It’s incomprehensible to me that this country maintains kill lists, and that the Executive branch has usurped so much war making power from the Legislative branch. When we finally and fatally become a fascist nation – and there are many disquieting indications that that day is approaching – we will look back at the AUMF and rue the day it became law.

How many more terrorists will we birth during another twenty years of extrajudicial killings and signature strikes and shadow warfare? One thing is for sure, because of the secrecy surrounding these operations, and the viciousness with which the current administration prosecutes whistleblowers and honest journalists, it will be a long time before we understand the full extent of the crimes committed in the name of freedom and security.

History shows that empires cannot sustain perpetual wars. U.S. policy makers will not outsmart or outrun history. The day when our proverbial birds come home to roost will be very dark and very cold.

Poem - Chains

Chains of exploitation encircle the planet

Strong exploit weak

Rich exploit poor

Literate exploit illiterate

White exploit black

and brown

Men exploit women

and children and animals

Land

and

Water

and

Trees

and

Mountains

and

Rocks

Bangor to Bangalore

Dallas to Dushanbe

Riga to Rabat

Across ocean and desert

Valley and rain forest

Drill

Chop

Slash

Burn

Pulverize

Melt

Will we rise up,

Break these rusty chains

Before it’s too late

Or

Is it already too

Late?

Poem - Light

The light is fading

turning silver

slipping through the trees

Another evening on the north end of Milpas

in SB

the Platinum Coast

home to billionaires and film stars

chic and suave

red tile heaven

The old poet sits and thinks of the places he’s lived,

other evenings like this one

sitting

watching the light fade from the sky

Tokyo, Honolulu, Seattle, Irvine

and the long trek

back to SB with his dog and a few

possessions

Home to a city of memories and ghosts,

the streets turned foreign

full of strangers

and the vacant lots he played in as a boy

long gone, paved over, built upon

lost forever

Nothing stays the same

except this early evening light

it falls from the trees

into his outstretched

palm,

lingers a moment

then disappears

Poem - The Big Tipper

I didn’t learn much from my father

Because he didn’t have much to teach

But one thing he taught me was to never

Stiff a decent waitress

When his gambling was going well and he was flush

My father tipped big

Often leaving more for the tip than the cost of the meal

He’d pay the bill in cash, placing one twenty

On top of another

“Keep the change, darling,” he’d say to the waitress

Never stiff a waitress

Never fear to throw the dice

Cut the cards

Trust a horse with the rent

And you might wind up just like me

Broke

Liver gone

Lungs black as tar

Dead at 57