News, notes, and observations from the James River Valley in northern South Dakota with special attention to reviewing the performance of the media--old and new.
E-Mail to MinneKota@gmail.com
Spurred by an administration he believes to be guilty of numerous transgressions, self-described American patriot Kyle Mortensen, 47, is a vehement defender of ideas he seems to think are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and principles that brave men have fought and died for solely in his head.
That is the lede in one of those great send-ups on American foolery that The Onion does so well.
On one hand with all the histrionics and cries of paranoia filling the air, one can celebrate the First Amendment and the fact that freedom of expression is taking place without restraint. On the other hand, it is disconcerting when free expression reveals how many people out there are absolutely bonkers. Or whose launchers of verbal missiles are powered by such paltry brain cells.
I keep asking just what part of the Constitution is being violated by Obama, Congress, and the gov-mint in general. The only answer I have seen so far that is specific is the Second Amendment, because Obama plans to come in the night with his troops and confiscate all firearms.
There are law suits being mounted against the healthcare reform act on the grounds that it is unconstitutional. The argument goes that the Constitution prohibits the gov-mint from forcing people to buy health care insurance. The states seem to have no problems forcing drivers to buy auto insurance, but that does not seem to violate the Constitution anywhere.
I guess our founders realized that someday the world would need a great, big Rohrschach blot on which the good people could project their fears and fantasies.
Our commanders and government have apologized and promised extensive investigations. We have become obsessed with apologies, which do nothing to assuage the anger at the forces who are killing innocent Afghan people, particularly when those forces claim to be protecting those people by combating Taliban forces from which we are trying to free the people. The Afghan people have to decide who is the real enemy. The Taliban or NATO? Or both?
It's quite simple. The enemy is whoever kills you,
The Taliban is responsible for more civilian deaths in Afghanistan. They like to kill with bombs--car bombs, suicide bombs, anything that works. The NATO forces kill with drones sometimes, which can't tell a wedding party from some dude jigging into a suicide bomb harness. Sometimes innocent civilians are in the way when our forces are opening fire on what they think is Taliban fighters. Other times, like on Monday, they open fire on what they think might be some kind of bomb coming at them, this time in a bus.
U.S. troops are being asked to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. That is a lot of responsibility to heap on a bunch of grunts. It might be in the command's mind to cast the soldiers as saviors, but it is hard to fill that role convincingly while killing those who are supposed to be saved. But in Afghanistan it is impossible at times to discern the enemy from the innocent civilians. That is because what appear to be "civilians" may not be so innocent.
The problem is defined by the country's President Kharzai. At this point, who knows what side he is on? He has threatened recently that in the face of the NATO-led occupation and assaults on his people, he may join forces with the Taliban.
Kharzai represents the status of Afghanistan. He is making America very nervous. President Obama made his surprise trip to Afghanistan largely to try to get Kharzai to affirm his support of the U.S. in Afghanistan. A few weeks ago, Kharzai hosted a visit by Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who is a dipshit, but he is the president of the country. At that visit Ahmadinejad unleashed his usual vitriol against America, but he asked what may be one of the few coherent things he has ever said. He asked, in words translated for the blogosphere, WTF are American troops doing in Afghanistan? What is their purpose for being there?
Within days President Obama made his sudden flight to Afghanistan to meet with Kharzai. He extracted some commitments to cooperation from Kharzai, but within days of his leaving Kharzai made his threat to join up with the Taliban. Now President Obama may himself ask WTF are American troops doing Afghanistan with full comprehension of the situation.
Benjamin R. Barber breaks the question down into the fifteen salient points that suggest the answer:
1. There is no " Afghanistan," only an inchoate collection of warring tribes, factions and clans.
2. To the extent there is an "Afghanistan," its government is deeply corrupt and unable to control its own divided country.
3. President Kharzai, our "ally" and the official representative of the "state" on whose behalf we fight, would prefer that we leave -- at least when it comes to what he says for internal consumption.
4. Not that it matters what he thinks since the President of Afghanistan is for all practical purposes little more than the Mayor of Kabul -- and that's on good days.
5. The only thing that unites this otherwise disintegral non-state is that the fractious tribes that despise one another hate foreigners even more.
6. Foreign forces, whatever their intentions, will always be seen as occupiers and hence, the enemy.
7. Ghengis Khan, the British and the Russians all tried to "win" in Afghanistan, and they all failed; it would be an exaggeration to say their futile attempts brought down three empires.... or would it?
8. You can't win wars when you're killing civilians, yet in Afghanistan where the boundary between combatants and civilians is blurred you necessarily are killing a great many civilians a lot of the time.
9. Occupying places where Muslims live (and where they die at your hand) will always been seen as a war against Islam rather than a war against terrorism.
10. You can't make people free at the barrel of a gun.
11. There is no better way to create terrorists than to make war on Muslims in the name of fighting wars against terrorism.
12. America can't save the world, and risks losing what is best in America when it tries.
13. Military force and overwhelming firepower applied from the outside are more likely to undermine than sustain the development of democracy inside a developing country.
14. Al Qaeda is not Afghanistan and it is not the Taliban either; it is a malevolent NGO, and winning Afghanistan or defeating the Taliban cannot vanquish al Qaeda.
15. We can't pay for questionable wars abroad and afford justice and economic recovery at home, and trying to do so is likely to lead to losing the war and undermining justice.
One of the first U.S. Army units to be assigned to Fort Sissseton to work on its construction in 1864 was composed Confederate prisoners of ware who joined the Union Army.
Dr. Blanchard and I have both commented on the Virginia Governor’s proclamation declaring April Confederate History Month without mentioning slavery. Re-enactors concentrate on the battle field operations, but there is much more to know and understand about the War and the people involved in it. My son and I are in the miiddle of the drill line in the photo above as part of Company F, 1st U.S. Volunteer Infantry, who we portray. The infirmities of age and arthritis have limited what I can do (I can’t do the reverse arms carry anymore), and whereas once we won trophies during the shooting matches, the rifling of the bores of our Japanese replica Springfield muskets is so worn that the the balls do loopty-loops on their way in the direction of the targets.
The group we portray was recruited at the Point Lookout military prison in Maryland from Confederate soldiers who had been captured and confined there. After President Lincoln and General Grant gave the matter much thought, they approved an initiative to allow the prisoners to sign an oath of allegiance to the Union in exchange for which they would be allowed to enlist in the Union Army. They were called Galvanized Yankees. They were assured that they would not been put into battle against their Confederate friends and relatives, but would be sent to the West to man forts on the frontier. The 1st U.S. Volunteers was sent to the Dakota Territory where they were deployed at forts along the Minnesota-Dakota border and at forts on the Upper Missouri River.
At the time Fort Sisseton was named Fort Wadsworth. The name was changed in 1868 when an eastern fort claimed the Wadsw0rth name. The fort was designated to be built at Aberdeen. But there was no timber or masonry materials in the vicinity to be used in contructi0n, and there was doubt about potable water. The officers in charge of the project found a nice site on the coteaus above the lakes , where there was timber, rock outcroppings, and clay for making bricks. And a lot of fresh water.
Conpany F arrived at the Fort in August 1864 and left about a year later. They did the initial construction of the Fort. After the Civil War ended, companies of the 1st U.S. Volunteers were mustered out but others were redeployed to guard stage routes in Kansas.
Men from the Confederate states did the early construction at Fort Sisseton.
Although the Fort was built to deal with the Sioux uprising that occurred at the same time as the Civil War, no troops at Fort Sisseton were ever involved in any battles or major operations. That is because, the Fort commanders recruited among the Sisseton-Wahpeton people a company of scouts that maintained camps in the areas outlying the Fort. The scouts took care of any hostiles that ventured into the area. The biggest burden the troops complained of was boredom. And those Southern boys were not terribly impressed with the winter.
So, the establishment of South Dakota began with a big boost from the Confederacy. And this all illustrates what a complex time it was. Many of the men had been forced to enlist in the Confederate Army and did not share the political motives of their leadership. Others saw the futility of war and came to believe that as long as there were slaves, they could be enslaved.
The President of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust, has written a whole series of books on the history of the South during the time of the Civil War. Her work is a good place to begin to understand the Confederacy.
If you want to dabble in a little history of the Confederates in South Dakota, come to the Fort Sisseton Historical Festival June 4-6.
We have serious problems on every front. We are in a severe recession that is edging away from falling over the brink into full-scale depression. A huge number of Americans cannot find work, and while attempts are being made to create jobs, the fact is that the production base of the American economy has been dismantled and sent to China and other countries in the Pacific Rim. There are few productive jobs left in American to re-stimulate into being. We are in two economy-depleting wars. While extricating ourselves from the death-dealing and economy-trashing debacle in Iraq, we find that the Karzai government which we have propped up for eight years in Iran is making overtures to Iran and the Taliban. And there is the drug-driven revolution in Mexico.To say nothing of a crisis in health care which an alarming number of people don't think another alarming number of people do not deserve. There are deficits to confront, faltering schools to bolster, and banks to examine before they break us even more. To say nothing of dangers posted by world factions who would like to go nuclear-mad.
So, what is the response? Friday, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens announced his retirement. By the end of the day, the Republicans mounted a coordinated effort to shout they are mad as hell and they are going to do everything they can to obstruct, impede, and destroy, if possible, any nominations that the President might have the temerity to make that might be anything like Justice Stevens.
Inspiring. Ain't it? Watching juveniles bully and throw temper tantrums.
When Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell signed a proclamation declaring April Confederate History Month without any reference to slavery, it was much more than a failure to acknowledge something in history that is part of America's holocaust. (The other part is the systematic genocide against the aboriginal people.) The economy and culture of the Confederacy derived almost totally from slavery. Most of what the Confederacy was is covered in February--Black History Month. It would seem impossible to celebrate the pageantry and elegance of life in the Confederate states without citing what made it possible and on whose backs the economy and culture was built.
Gov. McDonnell apologized profusely for his negligence, but that negligence is a characteristic of our time among certain factions. The celebration of the ignorant and belligerent is practiced by some who are regarded as leaders, political stars. It is impossible to dismiss the Governor's oversight as merely a slip of mind: it was declared in the same month as Lincoln's assassination. It is more in line with the mounting attacks on any criticism of America's history and present courses of action as anti-American.
The view that confrontations of America's faults are a betrayal, are unpatriotic, and anti-American represents a resurgence of mindless boosterism and and jingoism from those who resent knowledge and informed criticism. The insistence that America is fundamentally a Christian nation is done in oblivion to the fact that its most influential founders were Deists. That is not to say that the teachings of Christ in the New Testament did not become part of the American psyche, and that the New Law was embraced because it was democratic law, which espoused equality, freedom, and justice based upon those conditions.
What makes America America is its willingness to confront the depredations and violence of the past and to seek redemption through a principled assurance that human evils are eliminated in the present and the future. America did not have a pristine virgin birth that knew none of the degradations of humankind. It began with people who conceived in democracy the basis of a tolerable and honorable existence, but who fought and killed and labored and sweated, often involving atrocities, to forge the country we dream of. As Henry David Thoreau said, "The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine." Nor in the dreams of people who thought it their Christian calling to kill Indians, hold blacks in bondage, and subject women.
A huge part of American history is reflected the reconciliation and healing that took place after the Civil War and extends up to our time. When Gen. Grant framed the terms of surrender with Gen. Lee, he did not insist that all Confederates give up their arms and present themselves to huge prison camps. Rather, he let them return to their homes with the horses and firearms needed to resume the productive pursuits of their lives. That can be studied and celebrated, but not without acknowledging the malignant history of slavery as central to what happened.
It would be better to declare a Walt Whitman month. Although anti-slavery, he refused to adopt a hostile attitude toward the South. Instead, he dedicated himself to maintaining a benign acknowledgment of slave-holders as humans and he treated wounded Confederates along with Union soldiers in field hospitals and he spoke and sung of their mutual humanity and the act of reconciliation.
He did not, however, spare his readers the imagery of slavery:
I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs,
Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,
I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn'd with the ooze of my skin,
I fall on the weeds and stones,
The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,
Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with whip-stocks.
Agonies are one of my changes of garments, I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person, My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.
For many, America's purpose is to acknowledge the atrocities in American history so that we can rise above and beyond them. But there are those who prefer to hold them in their hearts with fondness.
American dreams of aspiration are beset with nightmares of hatred and injustice and kept alive in those dark rooms of ignorance and intolerance and bad will. The struggle is never-ending and the outcome is never certain.
Between the U.S. and Russia, we have about 20,000 nuclear warheads. That’s enough to pulverize the earth many times over, vaporize the moon, turn Venus and Mars to ashes, and get a pretty good start on the sun. That way, we could deter any attacks planned on the U.S., at least by anyone in this solar system.
And addressing this problem for us is the man termed the world’s biggest knucklehead and the worst U.S. president in history. If Obama is all these things, you can’t say he hasn’t been busy. Most of us have been too busy to notice the accomplishments. We’ve been tied up watching the news to see if there is any woman in the U.S. who has not claimed to have puttered a round or two with Tiger Woods. There is plenty of commentary about Obama’s performance, but none about Woods’.
And to think our nuclear future is being toyed with by the likes of Obama. He is about to sign another nuclear reduction treaty. Who does he think he is? Ronald Reagan?
We all know he is going get us all blown away. At least, Fox News does:
Some folks are in great agitation about Obama’s nuclear plans. What really has tightened the knickers, knotted the thongs, and breached a union suit or two is his promise not to use nukes on any country that attacks us with chemical or biological weapons. Iran and North Korea are exempted, but this proposal makes the nellies really nervous. How, they squeal, can you deter any attacks if you promise not to use nukes on the attackers? What’s to worry? They claim Obama has still to keep a promise. But they cite the old Cold War Logic. Well, actually the Cold War logic was WTF are we doing with 20,000 war heads that can (to complete this sentence, see the first paragraph above).
But an idea floating around during the Cold War was that we had to keep making nukes to deter anyone from attacking us.
I know. I was there. On the front lines. During the Cold War. In West Germany. Our, meaning the troops I was there with, job was to track everything that flew out of the Soviet bloc and shoot it down. At the time, what could fly out of the Soviet bloc was airplanes and a few birds looking for asylum. If the aircraft did not have permission to fly into the West and did not have a Friend-or-Foe-Indicator broadcasting away, we would have shot it down with our guided missiles. They were Nike Ajaxes. They had conventional warheads.
Within months of our deployment, the U.S. and Russia began deploying new carriers of nuclear warheads, Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. What better to shoot down a nuke-loaded ICBM with than a Nike with a nuke warhead? So, while we stood guard with our Nike Ajaxes, the ordnance for the second generation Nikes, the Hercules, started coming in. The base I was on had a super-secure ordnance storage area, and the new ordnance was being stockpiled there. We were not supposed to know it, but some of the warheads were nukes. We knew it because we started being trained into how to handle and arm missiles with nukes.
There was one problem. The European countries did not want us to bring nukes onto their soil. They feared that the Soviets would be provoked into unleashing preemptive nuclear strikes on them if they learned we had nukes there. There was an awful lot of frantic diplomatic fussing around, but the Hercules were three times as fast, had three times the range as the Ajax, and could take out ICBMs. By the time I had served my term of active duty, all the air defense missile batteries were being converted into the Hercules generation. The Hercules could also be equipped with conventional warheads of tremendous explosive power.
As the troops were prepared for the transition to Hercules, there was a nagging question to be answered. Aside from the European countries’ objections to nuclear materials, there was a logistical matter to confront. Blowing something out of the sky with a nuke is like standing in front of a wind tunnel with diarrhea. It is messy. The nuclear materials blow back on you. You might take out the bomb carrier, but you will probably lose a lot of civilians and some of your own personnel. Nuclear warfare is very effective. It tends to kill everybody.
And so, while we were upgrading missile defenses and putting ICBMs all over the Dakotas, among other places, talks were starting on limiting and reducing the deployment of nuclear weapons. And that brings us up to Obama.
Everybody who is acquainted with nuclear warfare knows that if it is used, everybody eventually dies. Answering an attack by chemical or biological weapons with nukes will trigger a nuclear holocaust, It won’t take many bombs to go off to make the earth uninhabitable. So, Obama is putting the U.S. in leadership to assure the world that a terrorist attack with chemical and biological agents will not cause us to unleash a response that will destroy everybody.
Back in the Cold War, we developed Nike warheads that were as effective as the nuclear ones. That development has continued.
Even without the stated policy, if we were attacked with chemical or biological agents, we probably would not use nuclear warheads anyway. It is a matter of not being decimated by our own weapons. We have weapons that can do what nuclear bombs can do with more precision, controlled effect, and less danger to the world.
Obama is trying to reassure the world that we are not as rabidly nuts as the jihadists.
If the worry worts want to really have something to fuss about, it is the danger of cyber attacks. Our domestic infrastructure, our military delivery systems, and our ability to communicate with other countries can be demolished in an instant.
The idea that we can deter aggression only by the capability of blowing the planet right out of the sky has been discussed, and analyzed, and that is why we have nuclear limitation and reduction treaties. And hope we will have more.
Our biggest threat is the idiots who see nukes as the only deterrent.
