Never wish for the impossible, and you, too, might make it to anniversary number #82.
Other tips? Marry young. And don’t forget the legs.
Cold feet about the eyes
For those of you who read this post a while back, you might be wondering how my laser eye surgery went.
Well, I postponed it. I got a second opinion, and was advised there is no rush at all with this. The actual words were, “If you were my wife, I’d tell you to wait.” So I decided to take my time.
Of course, I didn’t think to ask him what kind of relationship he has with his wife.
A Bush’s home is his castle: political family dynasties and dynamics
Hold the presses, I got a scoop from Pancho, who happens to hail from Midland, Texas, the home town of one George W. Bush. (Okay, maybe it’s not exactly a scoop, since all this information is in the public domain–but it was news to me.)
After reading the recent discussion here of GW’s life of “most extreme privilege,” Pancho kindly e-mailed me a couple of photos, along with an explanation of what they represent.
Take a look:
Bush Mansion 
According to my expert informant:
This is the Bush home on Ohio St in Midland that George “Dubya” grew up in. Actually it was the second home that the Bush family lived in, here in Midland. The first being even smaller and less palatial than this. This one, I suppose is at best 1200 s.f.
In another letter, Pancho mentions that, when George first returned to Midland after going East to school, he lived for a while in a garage studio apartment (which I assume is a garage converted to a one-room apartment). When he and Laura were first married they lived in a small townhouse. Pancho kindly sent me that photo, also, and it isn’t much, believe me (townhouse, not photo). I could use a tutorial on posting photos to my blog, however. Posting that first one took so much out of me, and was so headache-provoking, that I’m swearing off picture-posting for a while. So you’ll just have to imagine the fairly modest establishment in which the newlyweds resided.
Now I don’t for a moment think that this means George W. Bush hasn’t had a life of privilege. His grandfather was a wealthy banker and Senator, his father was in the oil business and then rose in the Republican Party to finally become President. If you Google words like “Bush family wealth privilege,” you will be led to a plethora of websites that describe the Bush family as its own little (or big) evil empire, a secret world power broker right up there with the Elders of the Protocols.
But even those writers who demonize the entire family tend to agree that, although wealthy and influential, the Bushes never possessed great and towering wealth like the Kennedys or Rockefellers. And certainly these photographs bear that out.
Clearly, the Bushes never had to worry about starving; there was definitely a family safety net of major proportions. But, as this article, written as part of the introduction to an admittedly sympathetic Bush family portrait, points out:
Prescott Bush [W’s Senator grandfather] was also proud of the fact that the Bush boys, unlike the Kennedys, were expected to go out and earn a living in the marketplace. Work was the great democratizer, an experience unfamiliar to the Kennedys.
Yes indeed, it is easier to earn your way when you know you’ll be bailed out if you fail. Not to mention how the fact of having deep and broad family connections among the powerful, and having the old-boy Yale/Harvard Business School network on which to draw, can help smooth the way.
But I don’t quite see this process as the essence of evil. I do believe it is one of the things that those who hate Bush are angry at him about (although I wonder how many of them would have failed to use such connections if they’d had access to them–or even how many of them do use such means to further their own careers).
Here’s a relevant quote from the same article (well worth reading in its entirety, by the way, particularly for some interesting family dynamics, although I’m sure many will see the article as a Bush puff piece):
The Bush hostility to the very notion of dynasty runs deep because it runs contrary to the myth that they are self-made. Although they are certainly more self-made than the Kennedys and have a strong drive to prove their worth, family members don’t think twice about going to family and friends in their climb to the top.
And the following seems to me to be a particularly telling passage. The contrast to the Kennedy clan is marked; although both families are wealthy political dynasties, the similarity stops there. The following depiction of the Bush family rings true with the photos of their Midland home and the descriptions of the other Bush residences there:
The young charges in the Bush clan are never told or pushed to run for office. George W. Bush is fundamentally, at his core, a rebel. His life before politics was guided in part by a deep vein of rebellion against his father and the expectations that he believed were weighing on him. Even during his rise to power, he often made decisions that his parents disagreed with. It is not too much to say that had George W. Bush followed the guidance of his parents, he might never have appeared on the national political stage. Once in the White House, he has continued in a manner to buck the family tradition. In a top-down dynasty, this political success would have been doubtful.
The Bushes are also unique in that, for this family, success needs to happen far from home in order to be seen as success. Fiercely and loudly competitive in sports, the family is also quietly competitive in the realm of business and career. Striking out on your own in a new land garners greater respect than staying close to home and inheriting the old man’s business. It is this impulse to establish themselves as self-made men that has led the last four generations of Bushes to stay clear of their father’s home and actively seek out opportunities elsewhere. Pres Bush left Ohio for Connecticut; George H. W. Bush left Connecticut for Texas; George W. and Jeb Bush stayed clear of Washington, D.C., where their father effectively lived from 1970 on.
This sense of individual accomplishments is motivated in part by the simple fact that the Bushes lack the fabulous wealth of dynasties such as the Du Ponts and Kennedys. Were future generations of Bushes to stay at home and try to live off the family wealth, it would dissipate rather quickly. While the Bushes have over the course of the past century run in the social circles of the super-rich, their own wealth has been comparatively limited. Criticism that they are “out of touch” and living in an insular world simply does not ring true; their level of wealth doesn’t make such insulation possible.
It also should be noted that GW’s father’s personal political power and influence (as opposed to family power and influence) did not begin until GW was grown. If you do the math, Bush the elder’s first term in Congress began in 1966, when Dubya was twenty years old. Until then, GHW Bush had been a businessman, primarily in oil, as far as I can determine. His two terms in the House began in 1966, and were followed by an unsuccessful Senate run, and then a series of political appointments from Republican presidents: UN ambassador, head of Republican National Committee, head of CIA, and finally Vice President (and then, on his own, election as President). But all of this was not part of GW’s growing up years, although the family influence, money, and ethos were.
So it seems that these rather modest homes were part of a family tradition of going it on one’s own for a while, knowing that the connections and the back-up system were always available. Sounds fairly reasonable to me for a successful family, and not all that terribly unusual or extreme for the upper echelon of movers and shakers in this country. GW’s early history of business failures and bailouts from his family are very much in this tradition, but so are his rather modest early homes.
Whether this constitutes “extreme privilege” is in the eye of the beholder. I’d eliminate the “extreme” part myself; others will differ on that. But I have very little doubt that at least some of the hatred of Bush comes from simple raw envy.
ADDENDUM: I finally managed to post the other photo here.
Terra infirma in California
I lived in Los Angeles for a year in the 70s, and I still have a bunch of friends and relatives there that I visit there periodically. So when I read in the NY Times about the recent spate of small quakes there, I feel a bit of reminiscent fear and trembling myself.
There’s quite a lot of that going around in California. Can you blame them? If you’ve ever been in an earthquake (and I’ve been in several, fortunately relatively minor, although a couple of them didn’t feel that way at the time), you may understand the feeling. People are jittery and want to know what’s going to happen next.
Scientists don’t lack for opinions about what’s going on, but it’s hard (actually, impossible) to know who’s right:
Like those who visit the doctor when a familiar ailment acts up, Californians pained by earthquakes turned to seismologists on Friday for answers and a little comfort…But just as medicine can produce differing opinions, seismology is not always as precise as some might hope…Steve Walter, a seismologist, and Rufus Catchings, a research geophysicist, looked at data on one of this week’s earthquakes, a 4.9-magnitude temblor on Thursday in Yucaipa, and reached opposite conclusions about what it might mean for the San Andreas fault, the most notorious and dreaded in the state.
Mr. Walter said it was a good sign that the Yucaipa quake appeared to have struck closer to another fault, the Banning, because it indicated that the San Andreas, which has been more or less locked in place since the middle of the 19th century, remained inactive. “That’s good,” Mr. Walter said. “It’s not going to unlock gently.”
But Dr. Catchings shook his head with concern as he examined a map of fault lines, suggesting that it would have been better if the Yucaipa quake had struck closer to the San Andreas and allowed it to release some stress.
“That means stress is still building, building, building and building,” Dr. Catchings said. “And it’s overdue for a really big one.”….
Well, that’s what happens when you get a second opinion; it doesn’t always agree with the first. But there is agreement on one point:
The four quakes since Sunday, two off the northern coast and two in the southern desert, caused minor damage and no deaths. Scientists generally concurred that there was no relationship between those in the north and those in the south, which was one of the biggest worries.
As with so many things, people’s reactions depend partly on what they’re used to. Some seem blase:
Having lived in Los Angeles for more than four decades, Joe Malkin said he considered earthquakes as much a part of life as breathing. He felt the Yucaipa temblor on Thursday afternoon, but only for a couple of seconds.
“I couldn’t understand what all the hullabaloo was about,” said Mr. Malkin, 83, a retired computer programmer.
But those for whom a shaking earth is very much a novelty have a very different attitude:
Steve and Laura Dayan were visiting Santa Barbara this week from Chappaqua, N.Y., with their sons, Ari, 7, and Ian, 4. The family was watching a baseball game on television in a waterfront hotel when the tsunami warning flashed on the screen Tuesday night. “My mom was going berserk,” Ari said. “She kept saying, ‘We’ve got to get out of here!’ “
Nothing like a berserk mom. I went through a period when my son was very small when, several years in a row, we experienced a noticeable earthquake within twelve hours of our arrival in LA. The first time it happened, he was sleeping on a pullout couch in his grandparents’ house. There were shelves all around the room above the bed, laden with heavy books and even a life-sized plaster head of some sort, as well as a very large wall clock. When the quake began, at least half of these items tumbled down onto the bed, very fortunately missing my son’s tiny two-year old frame. Carefully hiding my considerable berserkness, I took every one of the remaining objects off those shelves, immediately.
The next year, we had arrived late the night before and he was in a small bed in the same room in which I was sleeping. The temblor hit at about 5 AM. I sprang out of bed and a sharp jolt threw me off balance, almost to the floor, so that I couldn’t seem to cross the room to get to my son. I still remember seeing his startled face, so near and yet so impossibly far, and the wordless, animal fear I felt as the quake went on and on, seeming to stop and then start again, even more violently, about twenty seconds of motion before it stopped for good.
Twenty seconds doesn’t sound like much, but it can be an exceptionally long time when you are across the room from your three-year-old son in an earthquake. It’s an overwhelming feeling of shock (they don’t call them “aftershocks” for nothing) and powerlessness. And, even though I knew that my visits had nothing to do with the forces by which eathquakes come to happen, the timing of it all very much spooked me.
(ADDENDUM: By the way, the ever-helpful Spellcheck wanted desperately for me to replace the word “Yucaipa” with the word “yeshiva.”)
On Bush-hatred and its causes
I recently received an e-mail expressing some thoughts about Bush that seem fairly representative of those who detest the man, and offering up a theory as to why:
Isn’t his shallow narcissism obvious every time he opens his mouth? After all, this is a guy who has always lived in a bubble of the most extreme privilege…I don’t think he’s ever doubted his right to privileged status, and I think there’s something pathological in that. I think this is why so many people hate him so.
Here is an edited and shortened version of my reply:
I’d rather have a President with what you describe as Bush’s “shallow narcissism” than Kerry’s extraordinarily deep narcissism any day. Just about all politicians are narcissists, as far as I can see—doesn’t it take narcissism to do what they do? Bush is a narcissist on that typical level, in my opinion—he just conceals it less well than most.
I think that many people hate Bush for stylistic reasons. The way he talks, the way he smirks, the frat-boy persona—he represents the kind of person they simply detested in high school and college (particularly if they were the intellectual or literary sort). They distrust and dislike him in a very visceral way.
I am old enough to remember the reaction among Democrats to Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy’s assassination. They detested him—his good ol’ boy accent, his picking up his dog by the ears, his showing off his surgical scars—man, they just hated him; he had no class. Kennedy was the absolute personification of smoothness and class, so witty and bright and charming, and that New England accent!
But, in the end, that’s all surface stuff. Was Kennedy’s actual record as President much better—or really all that much different—than Johnson’s? Of course, we can’t know whether Kennedy would have done any better with the Vietnam war than Johnson did, but from books such as The Best and the Brightest, I think the answer is at least “probably not.” Perhaps, though, he may have ultimately done better because he would have had a more friendly press.
FDR and Kennedy were also children of great privilege—as great, or greater, than Bush. But they had that Eastern style, and great personal magnetism, that he lacks. And, of course, many people hated them–but not the press, and not academics.
But at this point, I couldn’t care less what sort of style a President has. What I care about are his policies. It’s easy to find fault with Bush’s policies—and yes, the war is far from perfect; it’s all far from perfect. But I’m not interested in holding anyone up to some unrealistic ideal. Most of the arguments I’ve read on the left about what should have been done range from the pipedream (the UN, internationalism) to the extreme pipedream (the Iraqis should have risen up against Saddam themselves) to the ridiculous pipedream (everything should have been planned perfectly, as no doubt it would have been had they been in charge).
It’s easy to say, ex post facto, that it would have been better to have done…(fill in the blank). But that can be said of any enterprise. The hard part is to have the courage to do it in the first place, to make the inevitable mistakes, and to try to correct them as the events unfold in real time. I actually think the Bush administration has done that rather well, and I see no evidence that the opposition could have done anywhere near as well. Au contraire.
Reading about reading
OK, it’s book meme time. I figured it would get around to me sooner or later, like the flu–and, sure enough, it has.
The gracious and sagacious Dymphna of Gates of Vienna has passed me the baton, and who am I to say no? In writing of her own book-reading habits, she has managed to describe my relationship to books with an exactness and wit that leaves me wondering what more I could ever add. But add I must.
My own book habit has been a lifelong one. In childhood, my happiest day was library day–I’d always get the limit of six, and finish them within a day or two, and then read them all over again, savoring the great pleasure. My mother considered this a trial and a shame, although she was the one who took me to the library, and she spent many hours forcing me to go outside and “get some fresh air.” In adulthood, I’d often stay up all night to finish a book, a guilty pleasure that left me puffy-eyed and groggy the next day. And I have spent so much money in bookstores that I have finally had to limit myself to libraries and used books online, with only the occasional bookstore splurge. Cookbooks used to be my weakness, especially ones with pictures, especially of Mediterranean food on sunny Mediterranean isles.
The Questions:
Total Number Of Books Owned Ever: This is an absurdity. Do you ask someone how many cookies she’s eaten in her lifetime? It’s like guessing how many M&Ms are in the enormous jar, or how many pounds the prize squash at the fair weighs. The real answer is: I haven’t a clue. My pretend answer is: 10,000.
Last Book Bought: The Last Lion by William Manchester (Churchill biography, two volumes, hardcover, used)
Last Book I Read: Radical Son by David Horowitz (library, presently overdue–I rack up quite a few library fines, too).
Five Books That Mean A Lot To Me Oh, this is the hard, hard part.
1. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
I read it in childhood in a somewhat abridged version. I read it in my teens in the real version. I read it in adulthood. It burned its way into my brain. I loved Jane: loved her voice, her courage, her fears, her hopes, the intimacy she achieved with the reader. She was real to me. I read up on the Brontes and their amazingly creative and sad lives. I even forgave the movie (Orson Welles, John Fontaine) the liberties it took with the text, usually an unpardonable crime for me. This book still resonates in mysterious ways in my life.
2. The Last Lion by William Manchester.
The aforementioned two-volume Churchill biography, all 1729 pages of it. Churchill was one of the giants of our–or any–age, a figure not only of historical importance but also of protean talents, and an absolutely fascinating human being as well. As if that weren’t enough, these books are written in such a lively style that the reader feels the author’s zest for his subject fairly bursting off the pages. When I learned that Manchester was too ill to write the long-awaited third volume, and that it would never appear, I experienced a profound sense of loss.
3. Eleni by Nicholas Gage
A true story that will rip your heart out. A step-by-step depiction of the process by which movements beginning in idealistic fanaticism can end up destroying themselves and nearly everything in their paths, and an emotionally shattering but unforgettable story of the power of maternal love. After I read it, I was disoriented and upset for days. One suggestion: if you read it, do what I wish I’d done and write down a family tree of all the characters, so you can keep them straight.
4. Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi
Levi is simply astounding. This book reads as though a Holocaust victim in the throes of the most horrific experiences possible on this earth were at the same time a dispassionate scientist cooly analyzing the situation, and later writing about it in remarkably lucid and insightful prose. It is in my opinon the finest work ever written on the subject.
5. Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter
I cannot understand why this novella (or long short story, as Porter preferred to call it) is not on everyone’s list. The overused word “masterpiece” is appropriate. I have read this story time and again and each time it strikes me differently, but always with great depth and power. The setting is World War I and the great influenza epidemic, but that doesn’t even begin to describe it. I suspected from the start that, although this is fiction, it is based on Porter’s own experience, and it turned out this is so. Just read it; every word is poetry.
Now that I have listed five books, I realize that all but one of them, Jane Eyre, are about war. Strange.
Five Books You’ve Given to Someone
1. Crossword puzzle books
2. April 1865: the Month that Saved America by Jay Winik
3. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
4. Andy Goldsworthy: A Collaboration with Nature by Andy Goldsworthy
5. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
Well, now comes the time to tap five successors to carry the book meme torch. I have no idea who likes to do this sort of thing, nor do I have a clue who has already done this particular one (except, of course, for Dymphna). So if it amuses any of the following bloggers to carry it on, and you haven’t already done so, please feel free: Pancho, Clive, Mary, Callimachus, and ShrinkWrapped.
Reuters says “Yes, but…”
I know it’s tiresome to keep pointing this stuff out, but this was what met my eyes when I looked at my computer today, “US launches 2nd Iraq operation; 50 rebels dead.” Oh, that Reuters; oh, those “rebels”!
Despite the “rebel” tag, the first half of the article is a fairly straightforward description of the operation, including this telling detail: troops had also seized a school where lessons on one chalkboard taught insurgents how to make car bombs. But Reuters displays the parsimony that seems to be official press policy these days–that is, don’t ever, ever allow an article to be written about Iraq that limits itself to describing a US offensive, and especially a successful one. Always be sure to put all that other stuff in there about the bad things that are happening–balance, you know. Don’t bother to write a separate story about those things, because doing so would allow the more positive article to stand alone, and we can’t have that, can we?
So, which photo did Reuters choose to go with this article today? It’s captioned, “Iraqi children stand around a crater left by a roadside bomb that targeted a U.S. patrol in Baghdad 18 June 2005. There was no immediate information on casualties from the blast. (Ali Jasim/Reuters).”
Very appropriate photo for this particular article, no? Actually, yes–because the article goes on to mention a few of the latest attacks on US troops and Iraqi civilians, and ends with this highly relevant and on-topic item:
The rising toll of U.S. troops, now at least 1,718 since the start of the war, may be one of the reasons behind increasing concern in the United States over the war and the role President Bush has played. A New York Times/CBS News poll showed 42 percent of respondents approved of the way Bush was handling his job, down from 51 percent support after the November election.
By the way, this was my take back in February on the MSM’s use of expressions such “rising toll” and “escalating violence.” It includes a link to an excellent article by Belmont Club on the subject.
PC medicine?
It’s a well-documented fact that Afro-Americans in this country suffer disproportionately from cardiovascular illness, and that when they do they are often less responsive to medication and other standard treatments. There have been many studies that attempt to determine why this is, and the majority of them indicate it’s the usual combination of heredity and environment, including health care delivery concerns and behavioral factors such as the prevalence of obesity, as well as a relative dearth of treatment outcome studies that focus on Afro-Americans. In addition, there seems to be something physiologically different in the way these illnesses operate in many blacks, at least on average. It’s been difficult (and controversial) to try to tease out which factors have been the most influential.
So when I saw the NY Times headline, “F.D.A. panel approves heart medication for blacks” I thought, “Great!”
A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel recommended the approval of a heart-failure drug specifically for African-Americans yesterday, after a discussion about race, genetics and medicine….In a study of the drug last year sponsored by the manufacturer, 1,050 African-American heart-failure patients showed a 43 percent reduction in mortality.
So it appears that this study was specifically geared to the Afro-American population, and this medication seems to hold promise for that especially difficult-to-treat group. But see this:
The panel’s unanimous decision to recommend the drug came despite reservations from two members who said they were worried about moving toward racially specific medications without a sound scientific basis. Dr. Vivian Ota Wang, a geneticist at the National Institutes of Health who served on the panel, called race a “social and political construct” that should not be used as a substitute for genomic medicine. “What I’m hearing is that we’re using race as a surrogate for a biological process,” Dr. Wang said, adding: “I think that inconsistency gives us a false notion that race has a biological basis, when that isn’t supported.” In her vote to approve the drug, Dr. Wang said she thought it should be available to patients of all races…
Fortunately, Dr. Wang didn’t go so far as to vote against the drug on the basis that it wasn’t PC to approve it just for Afro-Americans. She just wanted inclusion for everyone, even though there is no evidence as yet that the drug is effective on any group other than Afro-Americans, since the study was limited to them.
Strange, isn’t it? Here’s something that I would think the PC crowd could get behind–a treatment targetted at a group that’s often gotten short shrift both in medical research and in medical treatment. But no, theory seems to trump practicality for some people. No racial profiling in medicine!
Actually, in this case, I am in complete agreement with Dr. Wang that race is a social and political construct. But race is not just a social construct; it is also based on the statistical frequencies by which a series of physical traits occur in any given population–for example, skin color, hair type, and blood type. It might be more accurate to say that race is a construct based on a host of factors, including personal history and self-identification, as well as groupings of physical traits that occur more frequently in members of that race than in other groups. There are no hard biological boundaries between the races; what biological diffferences that exist are prevalences only. But there is no reason to doubt that certain medications might, statistically speaking, be more effective in certain races (the same is true for the sexes–certain pain drugs work differently in men and women, for example).
It would be tragic if PC considerations ever ended up hindering the sort of research that led to the development of this drug, although I can see that happening some day.
Where have all the flowers gone?
One of my readers, and Michael Totten, have called my attention to this interesting interview with the always witty, sometimes spot on, sometimes infuriating Christopher Hitchens (well, at least I can be thankful I’m not his brother).
Hitchens was asked about the resentment of the Iraqi people towards the Americans. In his answer, he refers to seeing with his own eyes the famous “sweets and flowers” (either actual or metaphorical) with which the troops were welcomed, and which others contend were nonexistent and an example of the Bush administration’s stupidity (although for some reason, in the transcript as given, “sweets” is spelled “suites”–hmmm, I bet there were some of those, too!):
Peter Robinson: Explain to me the psychological state on the ground which Americans–which I–find so difficult to understand. The population did indeed hate Saddam Hussein. Nobody doubts that. Correct? And the population at the very minimum is intensely resentful of Americans. True? True? Explain that conundrum.
Christopher Hitchens: The welcome that I’ve seen American and British forces get in parts of Iraq is something I want to start–I want to mention first because there are people who say that that never happened. It is commonly said by political philosophers like Maureen Dowd say that the–where were the suites[sic] and where were the flowers. Well I saw it happen with my own eyes and no one’s going to tell me that I didn’t. I saw it with–months after the invasion, people still lining the roads, especially in the south.
Peter Robinson: In the south?
Christopher Hitchens: Especially in the south–still lining the roads and waving and the children waving which is always the sign because if the parents don’t want them to, they don’t. For miles, it was like going–it was like this is the nearest I’ll get to taking part in the liberation of the country, to ride in with the liberating army. I’ll never forget, you know, I will not allow it not to be said that that did not happen. And in the marshes too–the marsh area of the country which was drained and burned out by poison by Saddam Hussein. Again, almost hysterical welcome and in Kurdistan in the north. So extraordinary. But remember when you said the population hating Saddam Hussein, that’s true, really true. But more than anything, they feared him. They were terrified of him. These are people who not just forced to obey under terrible and believable threat but made to applaud, made to participate, made to come out and vote, made to come out and demonstrate that they loved him, made to applaud when their relatives were executed…
It’s hard to argue with someone who was there–although I have very little doubt that many will do just that.
The funny thing is, I’ve never understood the “so, where have all the flowers (and sweets) gone?” people. Unless my memory is deceiving me, I remember seeing a fair amount of waving and cheering myself, on TV (if not flowers, exactly)–and marveling that there was anyone at all in Iraq who would be brave enough to venture out and risk doing so at the time.
But then I started to wonder about the origin of the “flowers” quote, or sometimes it was the “flowers and sweets” quote. If you Google it, you’ll find countless references to it, but many of them simply assert that it was predicted by the Bush administration, without giving an attribution or link. I started to think that perhaps it was one of those urban (or media) myths that never really had happened, but that had become legendary nevertheless.
However, for what its worth, I think I’ve tracked down its origin. It seems to rest on a combination of two interrelated statements. One was by Dick Cheney on March 16, 2003, on “Meet the Press,” and involves his prediction that US forces will be greeted as “liberators.” He never mentions sweets (or even suites) or flowers. But he does mention one Kanan Makiya, a Brandeis professor who is an Iraqi ex-pat:
NARRATOR: Another assumption was that Iraqis would greet the Americans as liberators, an assurance they got from the INC.
Vice Pres. DICK CHENEY: [“Meet the Press,” March 16, 2003] I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators. I’ve talked with a lot of Iraqis in the last several months myself, had them to the White House. The president and I have met with various groups and individuals, people who’ve devoted their lives from the outside to trying to change things inside Iraq, men like Kanan Makiya, who’s a professor at Brandeis, but an Iraqi. He’s written great books about the subject, knows the country intimately, is a part of the democratic opposition and resistance. The read we get on the people of Iraq is there’s no question but what they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that…
The very next day, there was a seminar on Iraq that featured Richard Perle and said Kanan Makiya, held at the National Press Club in Washington. Here’s part of the transcript:
(QUESTIONER): Vice President Cheney yesterday said that he expects that American forces will be greeted as liberators and I wonder if you could tell us if you agree with that and how you think they’ll be greeted and also what you meant you said before that some Iraqi opposition groups might be in Baghdad even before American forces?
KANAN MAKIYA: I most certainly do agree with that. As I told the President on January 10th, I think they will be greeted with sweets and flowers in the first months and simply have very, very little doubts that that is the case.
So, there you have it. It seems it was Makiya who told it to the administration, back in January. It doesn’t appear that anyone in the administration actually used those words, although Cheney definitely made the more general prediction about being greeted as liberators.
And indeed, as Hitchens makes clear, some did greet the Americans as liberators, although fear was rampant–fear of retaliation if, as in the first Gulf War, the Americans left prematurely, and fear of the occupation itself. Both were valid and understandable fears, I might add.
How naive was the Bush administration, and how unprepared? I don’t think there’s any doubt there were many miscalculations and errors. No war plan–and probably no peace plan, either–survives the first battle, right? Only with hindsight are we able to figure things out (and even then, not everything), and only the opposition is absolutely certain it could have done so very very much better.
Neo-neocon’s handy guide to northern New Englanders
Here are some lesser-known facts about folks who live in New England. And by “New England,” I mean the part I know best, northern New England–that is, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Maine.
Actually, I’m not so sure about Vermont any more. Vermont seems to be populated these days mostly by outsiders such as myself (I’ve only lived in New England since 1969, after all). Connecticut? It ain’t New England. Any state that is composed half of Yankee rather than Red Sox fans is not New England. Sorry. Massachusetts? Borderline. Rhode Island? What’s that? (Just a joke, folks, please don’t send me angry e-mails–but you have to admit it is rather small).
Fact A: New Englanders don’t use umbrellas.
These last few days it’s been back to the cold-and-rainy-Seattle-in-winter scenario, weatherwise. Yesterday at the supermarket I reluctantly got out of my car, pushed the button on my umbrella that automatically opens it (love that thing!) and huddled under it as I raced in to do my shopping, when I noticed that I was the only person around using an umbrella.
It’s not the first time I’ve noticed this. New Englanders are hardy; they laugh at the weather. They scorn people “from away” who feel they will melt if a little rain falls on them, even if it’s 48 degrees and windy and the rain chills them to the bone.
Fact B: New Englanders don’t use garages.
Actually, I want to amend that–they use them, just not for cars. When I first lived here, people would often say something like this to me, “We went by your house the other day and were going to stop by, but we figured you weren’t home because your car wasn’t in the driveway.” I found this puzzling–my car was usually in the garage, I’d say–and they looked back at me equally puzzled. Car? In a garage?
No, garages in New England are for storage. Even during the five or so months a year that we get a great deal of snow, and leaving a car in a garage would just seem to make sense, people here prefer to leave them out and dig around them. And it’s not that the homes lack storage, either–most have large attics and deep basements and a storage shed or two on the property. So the garage thing remains a mystery, but I think it must be connected to the umbrella thing.
Fact C: If you weren’t born here, forget about it.
It’s not that people won’t be cordial. But you’ll always be somewhat of a stranger.
Fact D: Women mow the lawns.
It’s not an absolute rule, but it’s pretty much the case. Years ago a relative was visiting from California and pointed this out to me (I’d never noticed it before, but after that I noticed it often). Actually, what he said one day when we were driving around sightseeing, was this, “I’m going to move here. The men don’t have to mow the lawns.”
Fact E: New Englanders love ice cream.
So what, you say. Doesn’t everybody? Well, New Englanders love it more, and they have less reason to, because we have more cold weather (see this by authorities Ben and Jerry on the subject, as well as this: New England is known for its high ice cream consumption, no matter what the season…).
I try to be part of this important New England tradition, especially if the ice cream is ginger (I know, I know–I’ll probably take a lot of flak for admitting that. But, have you ever tried it?) Ice cream stands dot the land, and although they close for the winter, they define “winter” somewhat narrowly. They tend to reopen when the weather is still very cold, and you can see stalwart souls standing out there in near-blizzard conditions, indulging in the long-awaited pleasures of their favorite cones. Very hardy folk indeed.
Coming home: Vietnam (and other) vets
“Coming Home”–it was the title of a 1978 movie about returning Vietnam vets, starring (of all people, adding insult to injury) Jane Fonda. I saw it and don’t remember it very well, but I thought of it when I heard of the following event: Operation Homecoming, a large celebration in honor of Vietnam vets that will be happening this week in Branson, Missouri (hat tip: Michelle Malkin and Third Wave Dave). The “Operation Homecoming” website refers to the event as, “The homecoming you never received.”
I was recently watching some TV footage of the celebratory homecomings of several Iraq war veterans, and I was struck by the differences between their experiences and those of returning Vietnam vets. I certainly remember the latter, from my own personal history–I greeted my boyfriend alone, with no fanfare, and he came on a regular commercial flight. Of course, this wasn’t his initial return flight from Vietnam, the details of which I don’t know (it occurred base-to-base), but that certainly wasn’t a public event, either, and family were not present. If a band was on hand, I didn’t hear about it.
Why the difference? I’m not an expert on this, but one explanation that readily comes to mind is that there were far fewer National Guard members fighting in Vietnam than in Iraq. National Guard units are, by their very nature, geographic, and they usually stay together as they serve. They leave in units and they return in units, so the families tend to know each other and to live nearby and form a sort of support group. Obviously, in that situation, the homecoming can be unified, and it most certainly will involve a ceremony of some kind.
I think it’s similar with the regular military in today’s all-volunteer army. There is a great deal of solidarity compared to the typical Vietnam vet, although in the case of the regular military of today (as opposed to the Guard of today) it’s not initially geographic–they come from different areas rather than a single one. However, there are a larger number of men and women with spouses and children who live near the base, and who know each other; and the return tends to also be in a unit, to that same base.
In Vietnam it was different for the draftees, who constituted a huge portion of those who served. As best I can recall, they were drafted one by one, trained with people they didn’t know, and were then plugged into fighting units that already existed when they went to Vietnam. Service there was time-limited: one year, virtually to the day. There was a revolving crew of people in a unit, all (or at least most) with different beginning and ending dates for their own personal tour of duty.
If you could survive that year intact, it was over for you–you went home and you were safe. Of course, there were people who flew with you on the transport plane back to the States, but they weren’t necessarily those you had known you and served with you. You came back to a base (as I recall, usually in California–Fort Ord perhaps?) to be debriefed. Then you were given leave to see your parents and other relatives and friends. Usually there were only a few months left of your service–my boyfriend spent them training new draftees.
It was all very quiet and individual. Returning vets usually wore their uniforms to fly (they got huge discounts if they did), but they flew on commercial aircraft, and they flew alone. I met my returning boyfriend in New York at Kennedy Airport (or was it still Idylwild back then?) in July of 1969, almost exactly thirty-six years ago. Our reunion was emotional, but it was solitary. No brass bands–not that, at the time, we wanted any, and I didn’t even notice their absence. After all, by that time the war was considered a tragic mistake, nothing to be proud of. My personal experience does not include anyone making rude remarks or gestures to us, but I remember getting some funny looks in the airport as we walked through it with my boyfriend in his uniform.
But he was only too happy to take off that uniform, both physically and metaphorically–although, in a larger sense, he never did take it off completely; the experience affected him greatly, probably for the rest of his life. He didn’t want to talk about it, either. We broke up some months later over different issues, and we never really did talk much about his Vietnam experiences, expect for a few incidents he described to me. But I know that, at the time, the lack of a big celebratory homecoming didn’t seem worthy of note to either of us.
World War II was different from Vietnam, too, as were other previous wars. These were wars in which the military, including the draftees, were in “for the duration” unless they were wounded or shell-shocked. There were many people who returned as virtual strangers to their families, because of the length of the separation as well as the terrible and intense experiences they’d had.
Today’s volunteer and career military have far more contact with their families while overseas, as do the Guard (e-mail, for example, rather than the terribly inefficient–although more easily saved–snail-mail of yesteryear). Tours of duty are no longer for the duration ( I believe the turning point was Vietnam in this respect). They are long, but not endless. But the “for the duration” rule had an important aspect that affected homecomings–it meant that, when homecomings did occur, they occurred all at once, and in the context of a celebration: VE Day, general jubilation. No lack of brass bands on that day!
So, these present-day homecoming celebrations for Iraq vets are a way to redress what is now recognized as a huge and unique problem (one of many) that occurred in the conduct of the Vietnam War and the treatment of its returning veterans. In a conscious effort, people are trying to recognize the sacrifice of the troops who served in Iraq, even though the war isn’t over and we’re not celebrating the equivalent of VE Day. That’s what the proliferation of yellow ribbons and car decals and all those “Support Our Troops” signs are about. Even though some of it may seem self-serving and hypocritical–especially coming from those who are strongly against the war and who may even seem at times to be doing everything in their power to sabotage it–I think it comes from a good impulse, and that impulse originates in the memories of those strangely muted Vietnam vet homecomings.
“Operation Homecoming” is an even greater attempt to redress the absence of a homecoming celebration for Vietnam vets. It may be too little, too late; but it is something nevertheless. Ever since the 2004 Presidential campaign and the nomination of John Kerry, we seem destined to rehash these old battles. Perhaps this time we’ll get it right–and, if so, it’s something we can actually thank him for. The wheels of justice may indeed grind slow, but they grind exceedingly fine.
More from Radical Son
I’ve just finished Radical Son. Those who recommended it to me were correct; it’s a fascinating account of one of the biggest political “changers” of recent times. David Horowitz was way to the left of me in his “before” shot, but we seem to have ended up somewhat in the same place now.
Horowitz’s book is filled with quotable quotes. From time to time I will post a few. Here he is in 1986, addressing a pro-Sandinista crowd at Berkeley (in the belly of the beast, as it were):
Twenty-five years ago, as one of the founders of the New Left, I was an organizer of the first political demonstrations on this Berkeley campus–and indeed on any campus–to protest our government’s anti-Communist policies in Cuba and Vietnam. Tonight I come before you as a man I used to tell myself I would never be: a supporter of President Reagan, a committed opponent of Communist rule in Nicaragua.
I make no apologies for my present position. It was what I thought was the humanity of the Marxist idea that made me what I was then; it is the inhumanity of what I have seen to be the Marxist reality that has made me what I am now. If my former colleagues who support the Sandinista cause were to pause for a moment and then plunge their busy political minds into the human legacies of their activist pasts, they would instantly drown in an ocean of blood.
When confronted by a reality he couldn’t deny, Horowitz refused to retreat into the world of pretty ideas. He finally faced up to the reality of the carnage created by Communism (and enabled by its “useful idiots” on the left) during the course of the 20th century, from Stalin’s murders to Vietnam and Cambodia after the US pullout. History proved him right on the Sandinistas, too, although I wonder how many in that Berkeley crowd ended up taking note of that fact.
“They would instantly drown in an ocean of blood”…yes. Horowitz didn’t pull his punches when he spoke for the left, and he certainly doesn’t do so now that he’s on the right. That, at least, has not changed.