On 9/11, again

If NPR can do it, so can I: Herewith, an encore presentation of my post from 9/11/2011, a decade after terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and took thousands of lives. If anything, my sentiments intensified.

We are celebrating that moment today, and I don't use the verb lightly. My city today is honoring three young men, raised here, credited with thwarting an attack last month by an alleged gunman on a French train. Surely you read about it.

The men will have a parade and of course it is a fine thing, and as I hear so often and agree with, they should get a free drink in whatever watering hole they pass for as long as they live. The story given is that today is the only day the three lifelong friends could be in town together. OK.

Maybe we are trying to take back 9/11, to rise from it, to shake it off, to reclaim it. My late dad-in-law's birthday is today. I never asked, but I imagine he relinquished something on this day in 2001, as people on occasion might have said, "Wow, you're birthday is 9/11? That must be tough." "Nine eleven" itself, a phrase never before spoken until 2001.

That's the only way I can fathom the organized barbecues I'm reading about for today. Otherwise, celebrations of this day ring hollow and flat and out of touch.

This day is still harnessed and pulled and prodded for ideological purposes. Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush blames Obama, of course, for failures in Iraq and the Middle East, and leaves out what his brother wrought to exacerbate the terrible toll, the loss of trillions into somebodies' pockets and the desert sands, the deaths of tens of thousands, that his father started, on an ornate fabric of pretext and lies. Some of the engineers of that terrible toll serve among Jeb Bush's campaign advisers. And so it goes.

#neverforget means to me never forget the terrible cost wrought from that moment, that continues today in the long and terrible line of refugees from Iraq and Syria into Europe, the rotting bodies in a refrigerated truck trailer, the tiny bodies washed up onto Turkish beaches.

We are nation run more and more by ideology than substance and sense. We are, as critics said of George W. Bush, all hat and no cattle.

The rich get richer and the haves, to quote Eddie Vedder, have not a clue …

No superlatives can ever contain the horror and shock and sadness and disbelief of Sept. 11, 2001 — though we all will try in many and varied ways as the tenth anniversary approaches this weekend.

In the news media, the effort has already begun in earnest. News anchors introduce the myriad angles on the anniversary, their chins pointed slightly lower to their chests, their eyebrows arranged just so, conveying a calculated look of somber observation.

But we never truly grieved that impossible horror, never got a chance, even though the innumerable tributes under way say that we did. The Bush administration, helped by the mainstream media's lack of backbone, co-opted that day as a symbol to make us afraid of one another.

Our leaders used it to incite two protracted, misguided and ruinous wars we still wage against dubious enemies, begun on the basis of outright lies. Instead of having nothing to fear but fear itself, we have accepted the offer of fear by itself, which at first did frighten us but now has dulled and callused us, enabling the puppet masters of big oil, banking and military industry to profit mightily in our torpor.

Mission accomplished.

All the while, we still send women and men into the teeth of these wars — and will still, for years — yet barely receive them when they return damaged or dead, and the nation has fragmented.

The redemption and healing that should have followed those terrible events have been tainted by what followed instead. I can't consume any of the 9/11 remembrances and never-before-heard audiotapes, can't stop for a moment to regard that day for its own sake, without immediately linking it to the bloody horror of Iraq and Afghanistan. They are WTF? funhouse-mirror countermeasures in search of phantom WMDs. It's impossible to mourn because it's impossible not to be angry — at this absurd sequence of events, at myself for succumbing to indifference and impotence.

Those people who fell from the World Trade Center towers to their doom — such nightmarish visions! — might as well have disappeared into the desert sands around Fallujah, for all that we got to consider their horror and loss, to themselves, their families, their employers, their communities. They became fodder for what I still believe is George W. Bush's intent to salvage the legacy of his father.

Since 9/11/2001, we have become Lord of the Flies, reduced to our baser selves. Psychiatrist Justin Frank of Washington, D.C. holds a similar view, that we have become babies, viewing the world in black and white and Us versus Them.

Opposition to our nation's response — to war, to torture, to degradation, to community-endorsed hatred of Muslims, even to this strange semantic casting of ourselves as The Homeland — means being unpatriotic.

And patriots, as we know through the doublespeaky Patriot Act, willingly give up many of our freedoms in exchange for what we want to think is our comfort and safety. Air traveler with a Middle Eastern kinda name? Sure, haul him away without benefit of a doubt, just so long as I can stop feeling the fear you keep waving in front of me.

You can trace all of this to obvious outcomes, such as a divided, uncompromising Congress, and to the accepted notion now that compromise is bad (when in fact compromise is the nature of action in a representative government).

You can trace it to our economic crisis, to jobs lost at a bewildering rate, to the banks that took our money to stay in business despite being criminally bad at it, to us no longer having the money to teach our children well or keep our bridges up and pay people to do all of that.

Hand in glove, you can trace it to the artless propaganda that divides us. I'm not so naive as to believe propaganda hasn't always bedeviled us, but it used to be sophisticated. Now it's an open wound. Even before an idea rises into public view, haters of that idea create words to kill it and replace it with new ideas that make us afraid.

Propagandists repeat that simple anti-idea ad infinitum until the idea wilts in its dense shadow. So we have "Obamacare," "death panels," and the anti-ideas that President Obama is a "socialist" with designs to ruin this country, that he is Muslim (with the presumption that this is a bad thing), that he is not a citizen, that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, and on and on. Just shouted and bellowed over and over again, without regard to merit, until the shouts and bellows become the new normal.

Tell lies often enough, and they become the truth. 

If not for the path down the rabbit hole that we took after 9/11, we wouldn't have the Tea Party, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Fox News. Hey, you say, those are all right-leaning people and entities! Don't you like right-wingers? Love 'em, actually. We should be a people of diverse ideas working toward the pursuit of happiness. I hate that they exist solely because of the artless propaganda that the fallout from 9/11 made fashionable.

It has begotten the abysmal meanness in which our governments still deny and delay needed medical care to those who suffered from environmental toxins as they rescued the people from the World Trade Center collapse.

I trace it farther, to reality TV shows where we get to watch people re-enact Lord of the Flies in all manner of novel ways — on supposedly deserted islands, fashion runways, celebrity kitchens, New Jersey, wherever the Kardashians are.

I trace it even to last week's Fox Sports' idea of a funny bit in which a reporter interviewed only Asian students — preferably students still learning English — from USC (because that's the entire student body, right?) to have them give a "good old-fashioned, all-American" welcome to two universities that had joined the expanded Pac 12 football conference. They talk funny, get it? Some of them don't even know what the Pac 12 is — hilarious, right? Because all of us normal people do, or should. It's football, and that's American, see? Those people are different from Us, so we get to mock them.

Fox canceled that show, saying it resulted from a "breakdown in our internal processes," which I suspect is doublespeak for, "We couldn't possibly have envisioned, in the current cultural climate, this could be offensive." As is the custom in public apologies these days, Fox apologized only to those who found offense, rather than for its base cruelty.

I'm looking for signs — glimmers — that we still may truly heal from 9/11/2001. Maybe this show's cancellation is one glimmer, that time will come when all divisions cease, and our tragedy against ourselves and the world dim in memory.

When?

Democracy inaction

Dedicated readers often wish to hell they had something better to do know I'm a milquetoast American citizen.

Vote and grouse, that's my modus operandi — vote for the issue and person that tires me the least. Grouse in what amounts to shouts in the wind, small and weak and scattershot.

I am an April fool. For most other months too.

A couple of weeks ago, President Barack Obama wrote me back — typing two spaces after every period, which is the strange thing I noticed first.

Yes, I know he didn't write it. Yes, I know that citizens writing about certain topics get a crafted response from someone in the White House; I'm guessing it's the press office via the State Department re: "Talking points, Syria," pulled from a digital pigeon hole.

"Thank you for writing," President Obama wrote. "Three years into the Syrian conflict, we face a brutal and protracted civil war, which extremists are exploiting and which poses a threat to stability throughout the region. I am glad you took the time to share your concerns."

Mr. Obama capsulized for me the history of the current crisis in Syria, the causes — violent responses to peaceful protests against the Bashar al-Assad governent —and the outcome, more than 130,000 dead and millions finding bleak shelter in dead spaces in their ravaged country, and across ragged borders.

All stuff I know from the daily osmosis of public radio.

Then Mr. Obama said what the United States is doing and how it helps — humanitarian assistance, negotiations for greater international aid, participating in negotiations between the Syrian government and its opposition, that sort of thing.

One thing I have said since the beginning is that I will not pursue an open‑ended military intervention in Syria,

Mr. Obama wrote.

Last year, when the Assad regime violated international law by using chemical weapons in an attack that killed over 1,000 Syrians, I was prepared to respond through narrow and targeted military action. But when a diplomatic option opened up, we took it—because I believe any chance to remove the threat of chemical weapons without the use of force is one we must pursue.

"Targeted military action" is why I wrote Mr. Obama, puffing out my dove feathers to urge the United States not to enter another protracted war. Some dove: Syrians are being slaughtered — literally, slaughtered! — with no one to help, and I told Mr. Obama: Don't let it be us!

I blogged about it — twice.

There you have it: My exercise in democracy, my stepping out of the rut of citizenship into the merest definition of activism. I tapped a letter like I'm tapping now, and pressed "send."

And the slaughter continued. And continues. The "diplomatic option" was Russia agreeing it would see to Syria's dismantling of chemical weapons, half of which have now been destroyed or made inert, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons reported last month. The United States, China, Denmark and Norway are reportedly contributing resources and expertise to remove and neutralize the weapons.

And in the months ahead, we will continue to work with the international community to usher in the future the Syrian people deserve—one free from dictatorship, terror, and fear,

Mr. Obama concluded, before thanking me and referring me to its Web page regarding policy issues with Syria.

Here's the thing:

• The Web page's last reference to the Syrian conflict is last Halloween, and

• I wrote President Obama in early September

Since then, the world has happened. Maybe it's no worse than many terrible ages of our time on earth, but it bears its own brand of impending collapse. Not the least of which is that Russia called in a major good-guy discount by helping de-horrify Syria (which is still a horror and which Russia still supports, which I don't get, but my country stands by some egregious world neighbors out of American interests, so pot, kettle; kettle, pot).

The discount makes Russia's sweep of the Crimean Peninsula, right into Ukraine's backyard, awkward for the United States, because Europe depends on Russian energy and doesn't want to poke the bear too hard, and President Obama really doesn't want to make more war and end his presidency where he came in. At least, that's what I suppose.

Better that President Obama — or his office — had not written back at all. I already knew how busy his administration is — how hellishly busy any administration is trying to balance our country's place and might — I did not expect a letter and I'd have felt better if every single person had better things to do than write me. Even if it was to click "send."

On the other hand, I did expect a letter would be exactly like this.

Syria chews away while we attend to the crisis in Ukraine. The world chews itself up. Corporations and monied interests seem more driven to chew away on us, our money, our children, or freedoms, because they can, because we let them, until we either get mad enough finally to move against them, or until no more is left.

All that's left to conclude from my blog posts is that I have not moved off my ambivalent, frustrated, grousing ass, looking for a way to make a difference and not remain a good man, doing nothing.

The Three (Hundred) Faces of Shawn

Somehow it happened. Three-hundred posts passed through this blog. This is No. 300.

My apologies for every single one.

Yet who am I to ignore this milestone?! Who but I would note it?! So I celebrate with faces and musings from 2013. Again, my apologies.

Unsure from the start what this blog was supposed to be, I reach this milestone still unclear. I think it was to be an easy way to showcase my art, but much of my art requires explanation so I wrote about it too. Some of my art defies explanation but that hasn't stopped me from trying.

Put me before a keyboard and you can't shut me up. I do my best talking out of my fingertips, with time and isolation and a handy dictionary and a delete key.

The face — that Opie pie face, the logo for my business — was born of innocence. It's my actual fifth grade class photo. You laugh, perhaps, but let me suggest the indignity of lugging a hoop around your head all day long at school; let me further note the prescience of eyeglasses, which I didn't need until high school (a blog post for another day). Maybe now you're impressed, or you feel bad for me.

It was a burgundy-and-white world back then.

The face became an easy tool for my rants and raves and low trivia. It's my big-nosed barometer, from which you can know my mood without all them wordy words.

From the look on my face, for example, you could tell the tragic arc of the San Francisco Giants, my team, as it lost Opening Day when Dodgers starting pitcher Clayton Kershaw hit the go-ahead home run.

Optimism held steady for a few months …

But then the Giants could do no right and my face lost its structure. As the Giants melted down the stretch, so did I. Finally I had to grieve and let go.

Among you faithful who read this blog, fewer faithful read the baseball posts. Maybe you're bored with baseball. Maybe you're not a Giants fan. Maybe you rightly know the waste of time and energy in caring so much about something that wastes so much time and energy and money.

More of you read when I spout off, without reason or right, about What the Hell's Wrong with Things.

About our government. About our place in the world. About our collective insanity or apathy.

About our helplessness.

Were I judged as a news reporter, I'd have fired myself by now: I rarely follow up my rants, rarely find closure.

When a young man shot up Sandy Hook Elementary School before Christmas last year, I shot my mouth off and literally painted my blog blood red with indignation, then again when I got mad at how nothing was being done.

Nothing is still being done and I've stopped writing about it. Nothing except people are still being shot and killed, and still at schools. A student allegedly shot three students leaving a high school in Pittsburgh, Pa., just yesterday.

Last month, a teenager brought a gun to school in Sparks, Nev., two hours away, and killed a teacher, wounded two students, then killed himself.

The killings go on, nothing gets done about it. My words didn't help.

The country spies on you and me and the rest of the world. I took many words to conclude, "Whatcha gonna do?" It ain't the country of our constitutional ideals. It ain't even our country. It's the country of who holds the money and the information. My words don't help.

Syria enraged me, as you can see. The death, destruction and displacement of Syria and its people is what should really be enraging me, but instead it was the possibility that our country would ensnare itself in yet another war following Syria's alleged use of chemical weapons.

Then a too-good-to-be-true thing happened, and Syria agreed to inspections and eventual dismantling of its chemical weapons supplies.

I had moved on already. Maybe good news creeps me out. Maybe I don't believe it. Maybe something else got my attention.

Like the government shutdown. I vented a good bit of patriotic rage over that, and defended the Affordable Care Act, the straw dog over which government services, research, care and recreation came to a halt.

It turns out the Affordable Care Act may in fact be made from
straw and suckage, stitched together with false promises and 20th Century technical know-how in a 21st Century world. The Web site's continuing to get better, the government keeps saying. Sometimes you can't keep your health care plan, the president is saying, even though he promised you could. (Breaking news, apparently: You can keep your old plan!)

Three coders working from four desks in San Francisco, meanwhile, just created a buy-your-plan Web site in three days.

I wrote about swimming or some such instead. Busy busy, you know.

The only real-world issue I followed through to the end was Scouting's relationship with gays in the ranks.

Scouting moved a massive millimeter this year, allowing Scouts who are gay to join, but barring adult leader who are gay. Because being gay is a youthful indiscretion that a 10-mile hike will sweat out of you? I dunno. I remain perplexed but prepared to trot my likeness out next time Scouting's glacier of decision nudges forward.

Three-hundred posts, all personal, many trivial, maybe a couple phoned in but the rest written with a shard of my soul. Each a welcome to my little world of illustration and side gigs and swimming and the stuff that's been part of me. Some days I simply shared something you might like.

Thank you — and condolences — for reading any and all.

A toast: To 300 more. I wonder what they'll be about.

Liam Turner photo

Trust us

It was ever thus … it will be ever …

So … Syria.

Down we go again.

Led by the bloodied nose. Led by lies again? Who knows?!

(I started writing this last Friday, thinking by now U.S. missiles would have struck classified targets in Damascus. Apparently they haven't, but again, who knows?

(This, more than most posts, is me just mulling through my fingers, the half-thoughts of a halfling — no military experience, poor participant in the practices of citizenship.  As always, you're welcome to ride along, maybe advise and consent.)

Let's resume our magical thinking. Where were we? Oh yes:

• Iraq would greet us as liberators. Our enemies, shocked and awed, would relent after a week of heavy bombing. Peace would bloom anew.

• Though decades of history confirm utter futility in anyone conquering Afghanistan, it'll be different for the United States and coalition forces. Just you wait and see!

What have been the cases for war? That's right:

• To clear the way for Desert Storm, we learned of newborn babies snatched out of incubators and left to die on the floors of Kuwaiti hospitals. Which turned out to be a fabrication whipped to froth by a global public relations firm on Kuwait's behalf.
• The second time 'round, of course, it was weapons of mass destruction. They gotta be around here somewhere! Oh well!
• Also, whoever destroyed the World Trade Center has to be Iraq itself, or hiding in its boundaries!
• Or maybe Afghanistan!

Now the case for war is evidence Syria's Assad government used sarin gas on its own people.

This conjures two thoughts, diametrically opposed:

1. Why should we trust our government anymore? We have marched our children again and again into long horrifying wars begun on lies, and we have barely received our children, our countrymen and women, broken in body and mind, from these wars.
   
   This news comes out of the mouth of John Kerry, secretary of state, who after fighting as a Navy officer during the Vietnam exhorted Congress to stop that senseless war. Incredible. Literally, incredible.
2. So what?

I am a callous monster, no better than the bat-shit crazies who gassed innocents. If the gas attack is true, I cannot modify the depravity with my words. It's pure evil, a "moral obscenity" on innocent children and women and men, as John Kerry called it, whoever the culprit.

But so is conventional warfare. So are bullets, bombs, mines, grenades, torture, rape — all of which go on throughout the world, killing and maiming hundreds of thousands. We do nothing, have done nothing, unless and until doing something suits our needs and national interests, depending on who "our" refers to at the moment.

(As to that — what's "our" interest? — I refer you to All the President's Men: Follow the money.)

I grew up thinking the United States, as the force of right, should be the world's big brother, battling inhumanity everywhere with our almighty might. Now I'm grown up and know the United States doesn't act that way, of course. My cynicism has callused over: When my government tells me we are fighting for good to triumph over evil, that we call heavily armed personnel "peacekeepers," that we have declared mission accomplished when really we have just begun to descend into hell — including U.S. white phosphorus attacks on Iraqi people — I barely raise my lips anymore in a knowing smile.

When we turn our backs on atrocities around the world, then express grim indignation at this or that certain savagery as if we have never heard of savageries — as if savageries have never been committed in our name — then I know what really is truth, justice and the American Way.

Now President Obama urges that we must respond to this chemical attack as a violation of the Geneva conventions against such use. And in our magical thinking we should expect:

• Other of the world's despots and tyrants will get the crystal-clear message: This airstrike against Syria is solely in response to the chemical attack on its citizens.
• So chastised, the despots and tyrants will refrain from using chemical weapons ever again. Mines, rocket-propelled grenades, machetes, machine guns, rape, yes, but not chemical weapons.
• Syria's government will reform, its lesson learned.
• Democracy will bloom.
• Syria's allies will do nothing in response.

President Obama wants Congress and us to know this response "is proportional, it is limited. it does not involve boots on the ground. This is not Iraq, this is not Afghanistan."

Until it does. Until it is.

So we will send weary warriors into another war, send them in again and again in our stead. One more war from which, if they return, they will have to fight their own government for the means to heal from the wounds they suffered in our stead.

We will wage more war with a military torn up from within, faced with its own atrocities of widespread sexual assault with impunity, of broken morale.

We will leverage war from the shaky ground of our broken economy, repairing too slowly for the gashes to close.

It's a schoolyard melodrama. President Obama said he would do something if Syria used chemical weapons, and now that it allegedly has, the other allies in the world's school yard, and bullies of his own clique, are calling "ba-GAWK! Chicken! Do something, or are you chicken?!"

We are made to believe that what few friends we had on the schoolyard will loose all ties of loyalty, will spit in our general direction, if we don't walk our talk. As supposedly happened to Great Britain when Parliament chose (even if for ulterior motives) not to help with any strike against Syria. Supposedly.

But — we are assured — whatever it is, it is not war.

Until it is.

For good men to do nothing

A funk permeates the week, for reasons concrete and ineffable.

One canary in my coalmine is this blog, for which ideas normally abound. This week it feels like blogging for blogging's sake, fulfilling nothing more than a small disciplined rite.

What I would write feels even more trivial. I'm temporarily tired of talking about open-water swimming (as tired as you may be of reading about it) this week, and even tired of swimming open water (or tired from it). Though I hold a trove of drawings, and await a time soon in which I can show-and-tell new work, I don't see the value this week in posting them.

I've been thinking, and that's dangerous.

Thinking that this week, among many, the government of Syria is bombarding its city of Homs,  News sources whom I judge credible cite sources who say government agents are detaining and torturing children as part of its campaign to suppress opposition to President Bashar al-Assad. That's in addition to relentlessly shelling the city against any and all. Just sheer, plain, open (as close as the news media can get) bloody repression.

You could rightly ask, "Where ya been?" Atrocities go on all the time, in the Congo, in Iran, in Egypt, Pakistan. Where was I during the ethnic cleansing by Bosnian Serb forces against Bosnian Muslims, you could ask? Probably where I am now, at my desk, letting the news trickle in and out my ears.

This week, for some reason, it jolted me to stupefaction.

This week, an investigator for the United Nations reported that Sacramento violates the human rights of its homeless, restricting access to water and public restrooms. Of course, open urination and defecation is a crime; so the city forces homeless to add to the complex nefarious factors that render them homeless, the daily undignified crime of evacuating their bowels. And I in stupefaction and indifference, let it go on.

One TV news station interviewed a homeless woman who said she goes to the bathroom in plastic grocery shopping bags, and tosses the filled bags into trash bins. She looks matter-of-factly at the reporter as she says this, with just a hint of hesitation, gathering up what dignity is still hers to tell an unseen public what she must do to get through her day.

Up to that moment, I had not even thought of her indignity. It's so easy for me to choose not to. I know children live on the banks of the American River, without a place to call home; I know that each morning a van for the Mustard Seed School drives on the levee roads, calling out to the hidden encampments that school will soon start and would you be able to come today? I've known it for years. I choose to forget.

This week, a reason to celebrate a freedom still hangs under threat. A U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that California's Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage, is unconstitutional.

"Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples," wrote a judge in the majority opinion. Clear as day.

Gay marriage is still banned, the court decided, citing the inevitable court appeal to come, and the expected hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court.

My congressional representative, Republican Dan Lungren, advanced Prop. 8's basic argument, that the people have spoken and marriage should remain only between a man and a woman. The elusory beauty of our system of government is that it's designed to save us from ourselves: True, the majority of people could also vote that Islam should be outlawed or that redheads should be interned or that some children for this or that reason should receive an education, but that wouldn't make it right.

We have legally oppressed our citizens by the color of their skin, country of origin, gender, and sexual orientation. We are beginning anew the oppression of citizens by their religion. Yet our rule of law has painfully, slowly turned on itself to erode those oppressions.

Dan Lungren does not represent all whom he is duly sworn to represent, and by extension, does not represent me.

And what, for god's sake, is so much better about marriage being between a man and a woman? The evidence for its hypocrisy is piled high, and a society made richer and more complex by a myriad of family dynamics, good and bad, turns the argument for tradition into cheese cloth.

I still can't fathom the harm gay marriage does to anything or anyone, except by the creation of vitriol in those who have decided all of us should live in their mold and fashion. It does not interfere with traditional marriage. It instead accords rights already inherent, that law up to now has denied.

I offer no solution for any of this. It vexes and perplexes, and I am impotent in my apoplexy. What little I was doing to help anyone else's unease has given way to a weird worklife lately. Excuses, excuses. But somehow I have the energy for semi-public self-flagellation? Hmm.

One of my favorite cartoonists, Art Spiegelman, who laid bare his own barely bearable guilt when he created the Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, a Survivor's Tale, said "Perhaps guilt is a useful civilizing agent that keeps people from behaving worse than they otherwise might. Guilt can be an explosive thing to live with, but it may be the price we humans must pay for civilization while trying to learn true Empathy."

The hell of it is, for reasons plain and impenetrable, my funk will lift and I'll examine the totems of my life with new vigor. And children will still scream in torment in Syria and elsewhere at the hands of those who see them as weapons. A woman mere miles from my warm home will find no other choice but to shit in a bag and throw it in a Dumpster™©. Gay and lesbian couples will still truly wonder if their day of acceptance will come.

Where ya been?