Retirement Plans

An approach to retiement I plan to emulate:

Working people frequently ask retired people what they do to make their days
interesting. Well, for example, the other day my wife and I went into town and
went into a shop. We were only in there for about 5 minutes. When we came out,
there was a cop writing out a parking ticket. We went up to him and said, 'Come
on man, how about giving a senior citizen a break?'

He ignored us and continued writing the ticket. I called him a Nazi turd.. He glared at me and started writing another ticket for having worn tires. So my wife called him a shit-head. He finished the second ticket and put it on the windshield with the
first. Then he started writing a third ticket.

This went on for about 20 minutes. The more we abused him, the more tickets he wrote.

Personally, we didn't care. We came into town by bus and saw the car had a Bush sticker.

We try to have a little fun each day now that we're retired. It's important at our age.

Starting Again

I had a call yesterday from one of the very few regular contributors to this site (Left Coast Rob) wondering what had happened to me. Had I quit writing and if so why? He said (kindly) that he missed the posts.

Yes, I have (or at least had) quit. I have written a couple of posts that are still saved as "drafts" in Blogger, but the last actual post was almost exactly 3 months ago.

There are a host of reasons for this. Partly, it is hard work trying to find something interesting or useful to say on a regular basis. Partly it is becuase, toward the end, I had been writing primarily for Billy Bob, but learned that he could no longer get accesss to the site. Partly is was that, for the most part, it all felt like I was talking to myself: mental masturbation performed in public, as it were. (To complete the metaphor, I have continued to "massage my mind for my own amusement" over the last few months, but have done so mostly in private ;-)).

Mainly, though, I quit writing becuase I kept finding I had nothing new to say. A year or so of blogging has brought home to me, in a forceful way, how little things change even over the course of a year, to say nothing of day-to-day or week-to-week, which is the time frame for a blog. There is always new news, of course. We are bombarded by it. But the underlying issues and the things people say about them are always the same. Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine, the conflict with Islamo-facisim, social security, neo-conservatism, gay marriage/rights, stem cell reserach, religious fundamentalism,pollitics in general, etc. etc. I have written myself out on all of these issues. And, at least in the absence of dialogue, once you have said what you have to say on a given issue, what is the point of saying it again? After all, who wants to be as tiresomely repetitive as Maureen Dowd?

But recently, the urge to write has come upon me again, spurred in part by my wife who, though she hadn't been all that pleased with the amount of time I had been spending on the blog when I was doing it, has now concluded that it at least beats my spending the same amount of time (or more) playing spades on Yahoo or on-line poker -- which (in case anyone from NSA is checking)I am no longer playing by the way. So, the call from Rob caught me at a moment of weakeness, and I decided maybe I'd try again.

We'll see how it goes.

What Will They Remember?

I had an NPR "driveway moment" this afternoon. I can't find the link, but it was the last segment in "This Amercan Life" on Michigan Public Radio (the program entitled "Image Makers"). It was a truly touching account by a mother about the fading memories she and her young son have of the husband/father who died, and the problem of "keeping Dad alive" when all they have left are a few personal things (rings, watches, cufflinks, change in a jar, etc.) he kept close. It made me wonder: what will mine remember of me?

Tuning Out

Every month about this time, the NY Times e-mails me (and its other online subscribers) a list of the 10 most e-mailed articles for the last 30 days or so. This list always intrigues me, less becuase of an interest in the articles themselves (although I do occasionslly find something intriguing that I missed) than becuase of what the list seems to say about the interests of the (amittedly unrepresentative) on-line readership of the New York Times.

This month's list was peculiarly suggestive. There was not one article on Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, the Palestinians, Somalia, Iran or Korea. Nor were there any articles on spying, or immigration, or detainees, or military tribunals, or flag burning or "defense of marrriage" amendments, or any of the other subjects that so consume those in Washington and the blogosphere. There was also not one editorial or op-ed piece. The readers, in short, found almost nothing in the entire news or editorial sections of the NY Times to be worth sharing with others.
The four most popular articles were, in order:

1.What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage,

2.At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust,

3.Star Jones Reynolds's Departure From 'The View', and

4.Rogue Giants at Sea (a story about freak ocean waves).

Of the other six "most popular" articles, two were about Ken Lay's death, one about the man who blew up his multi-million dollar NY townhouse rather than give it to his estranged wife, one about Google, and one about the bizarre end to the World Cup. Of the ten, the only one that might begin to qualify as "news" (at least as I define it) was this, coming in at number 7: Surprising Jump in Tax Revenues Is Curbing Deficit .

What do I make of this? Probably too much. But it does seem to suggest that people -- even the types that read the NY Times -- have simply tuned out. The purient and perverse (Ken Lay, the NY town house, Star Jones Reynolds, and the Zidane head-butt incident) will catch their interest, as will forces of nature (rogue waves and Google), the counter-intuitve (female dominance in college) and the simply bizarre (Shamu on marriage). But the only "news" readers see fit to share with others is the rare bit of good news (whoops! the deficit is coming down a bit). The rest is so unrelentingly bad that, even if it is read, forwarding it to people who may have had the good fortune to avoid it would be bad manners or worse: "Hey Joe. Just in case you didn't hear, there were 120 peoplke killed in Iraq yesterday. Have a nice day."

I find myself doing the same thing. I look at the headlines and flinch. I feel like it is "important," but I have to make myself read even a couple paragraphs. Mostly, I skip anything beyond the headline and go off ot look, usually fruitlessly, for something upbeat or new or surprising to actually read.

In part, at least, this is what lies behind my month-long hiatus in posting here. In particular, my enthusisam for "Billy Bob's Bulletins" had been considerably dampened. In posting the headlines about Iraq, or other events that might impact Billy Bob, I feel like a one-man morale buster. It is probably hard enough for someone in Billy Bob's position to stay positive without having someone like me making it even easier to see how f@%*ed up everything is right now.

There is lots going on, but it is all so damn depressing that the thought of "sharing" it with others makes my skin crawl.

The Hiatus

It's been nearly a month since I posted anything. For part of that time I was on vacation sans internet access, but I must confess as well to a bit of ennui. No one except Left Coast Rob seemed even to notice, so it didn't seem all that important. And besides, the news is so unrelentingly depressing that it's hard even to think about it much, let alone write about it.

But, Billy Bob seems now to have access again, so I transferred the last four days of Billy Bob's Bulletins I did (June 12 to 16) back here from the alternative site I had set up and decided to get my sorry ass back in gear again.

Just to work slowly back into it, here are some cartoons I have seen over the past few days that made me smile:













Also, I think the cover of this week's Economist is a hoot:

Billy Bob's Bulletins -- Has Moved

I took the weekend off to go see my oldest boy graudate, but when I got home I had the following e-mail from Billy Bob waiting for me under the caption "Uh Oh . . . "

There is some bad news here… the blog Nazis have blocked parentheticals. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get back on…several people mentioned some of their favorite sites recently disappeared. I don’t know that I’ll be able to work around it… Maybe you could periodically email me some of your posts that I might like to comment on? I’d love to stay involved in the conversation.

I must admit to have had an interesting mix of reactions to this. Mostly it was disgust at the silliness -- so much so, that I realized that it was most likely a mistake. SNAFU. But, I must also admit to feeling a bit . . . flattered. Could it be that what I write is actually important enough to have (a) gotten the attention of the DOD censors and (b) been considered "dangerous" enough to block?. Sheesh: Che, Ho, Mao and me. Who'd have thunk? There is a downside though. as I told BB in response, "I'll have to be on the lookout for black crown vics with two guys in bad suits, sunglasses and earpieces parked near my house."

Anyway, the simplest way to get around this (assuming they haven't blocked access to everything at blogspot.com) is to start another blog. The blogger software is so easy that I can start blogs a lot faster than they can block 'em. So, that is what I did. See Billy Bob's Bulletins at www.billybobsbulletins.blogspot.com.

For the moment, all I have put up an the new site are the "bulletins" about mideast and related domestic news that I have been posting here for a while. I can't decide what I will do with the rest of the stuff. Maybe I'll just co-post everything at both places. It's just copy and paste, after all.

I'm Gonna Try To Lighten Up

The discussions here over the past couple weeks have been so damn depressing that I have promised myself to make a concerted effort to lighten things up. This idea springs partly from the Ray Bradbury poem linked here and partly from a comment Left Coast Rob made in response to my rantings on Iran. In an as yet not entirely successful effort to bring me back to my senses, Rob wrote one of the most eloquent testimonies to the essential goodness of the American people that I have read in a long while, a quote that has been banging around in may head ever since:

I don't think we have it in us as a people to drive an enemy to its knees, then simply walk away with the promise to do it again if they don't get it right next time. That is partly driven by a genuine kindness that I'm convinced is an aspect of the American character. The rest is driven by the sincere belief that we simply know how to it better (being it governing, or building refineries, or saving women from their abusive, fundementalist husbands/fathers/uncles/whatever. We can't help ourselves in that regard...we simply have to do it.

He's right. And, while that "kindness-mixed-with-confidence" may yet be our undoing, I for one admire both attributes.

But the idea of trying to find some thing happy to write about actually crystallized yesterday. After a spectacular April, we have had an incredibly cold and rainy May (where is global warming when you need it?), but yesterday dawnwed absolutely beautiful, just in time for the wedding Judy and I were (more or less) obligated to attend. It was a wedding of the daughter of some friends we know primarily through a professional association between Judy and the bride's mother, so for me at least, it was boring as only a wedding where you know almost none of the attendees can be. But the day was so beautiful, and the people so gay that it tuned out to be fun in a quiet sort of way: dressier ceratinly that your average large family picnic, but with the same sort of relaxed, carefree atmosphere. I met some interesting people at dinner, and we talked for about an hour or so without once mentioning any of the topics on which I have been so obsessed here. The whole thing reminded me that despite its outrage and polarization, life in America is pretty damn good, and that a large part of our problems stem from a failure to keep that in mind. As Ray Bradubry said, "We are the dream that others dream."

So, when I sat down with the papers this morning, I decieded to try to find something to write about that was happy or funny or at least not depressing.

I failed.

Iraq? Some potentially good news there, but as always, it is accompanied by so much bad news that you find it hard to be hopeful, much less happy about anything going on in that poor country.

Iran? No good news of any sort there.

Isreal/Palestine? Ditto.

The US? It is a little like Iraq. Sure there are tidbits of good news, but they are overwhelmed by the seeminbg endless number of ideological struggles in which we are currently involved. Even this -- Religious Liberals Gain New Visibility: A Different List Of Moral Issues -- which I initially took as good news, gains its newsworthiness only from the fact (or hope) that is countervailing voice in America's kulturkampf.

Sports? Well there is this: The Detroit Tigers(!) have ths best record in baseball: 28-14 (.667)! (Ok, Ok. They're tied by the Chisox, but it's still the best record in baseball). But for those who have suffered with the Tigers for the last decde or so, even that is tinged with the conviction that it is a fluke and can't last. And besides, the sports news today is dominated by Barbaro's broken leg (an unmitigated tragedy) and Barry Bonds' 714th home run (a source of very mixed emotions).

Movies? There are some good ones around. I saw one the other night -- Paradise Now -- that I would recommend, but it is hardly a "good news" sort of movie. Perhaps the best news in movies this summer is that both MI3 and Da Vinci code are bombing. There is little I would like more than to see a lot less of Tom Cruise and hear a lot less about the Da Vinci code. So, perhaps that is good news. But it is good only in a pervers sort of way: I like it only becuase it discomfits things/people I have grown to despise.

So, I for now will take solace in the little things. It's another speactacularly beautiful day. Judy is busily planting fowers. I am about the start watching the 7th game of the Detroit/Cleveland NBA playoff game. So far as I know, everyone I care about is well and reasonably happy. And, despite it all, I really do remian pretty optimistic about the future both for myself and my family and friends.

Hope that is not too mawkish.

Some Correspondence With Billy Bob

Below is an exchange of e-mails I have had with Billy Bob from Iraq over the last couple of days.
From Billy Bob:

Hi Bill,

Good to hear from you! Things are going pretty well here, and I can actually tell you quite a bit more now that we're all here and rolling. I'm working on an update to send out, but here's the quick version...

We're at a base with many names . . . North of Baghdad, and near Falluja. Our mission is varied, but primarily focuses on logistics - escorting "log" convoys around the country. My particular piece of the pie, in addition to the basic promotion of our troops back home through the website, newsletters, and videos, is to work with our Civil Military Operations Team. The CMO team works with the local population around the base to maintain relations and security. A lot of our work is with local Sheiks, helping them integrate into the new Iraqi government (primarily through contracting for redevelopment projects...they caught right on to capitalism, not so quickly to the regulations that go with it). We also do humanitarian aid (clothing, school supplies, etc.) drops at local villages and provide medical assistance programs on occasion. I primarily work on the base, but I expect to be "outside the wire" once or twice a week.

The base provides a pretty high standard of living, especially considering where we're at. We live in trailers, which are broken into three two-man rooms. We have real beds, a locker, and a little night stand. It's pretty Spartan, but each room has its own AC unit and sleeping on a real mattress is heaven after months on cots. We walk everywhere, it's a little under a mile from our living area to work, with the chow hall somewhere in between. Biking is also an option, I managed to pick up two bikes for $10 and $5 each off of outgoing soldiers, but right now I'm walking while it's still cool enough to be outside for a half hour at a stretch. The chow hall is fantastic, with two salad bars, a desert bar, sandwich bar, four main-lines, two short-order lines, and plenty to drink from juice to Gatorade to NA beer.

The job's keeping me busy, partly by choice, which is making time fly. The routine is comforting. I also have a good friend here, Paul, from my skiing days. He's a Major with the CMO team, so we work together quite a bit. (He's the one on the cover of the attached newsletter.) The newsletter's been my latest project...the version I inherited from my predecessor was pretty bland and I'd never changed the format until this issue. I dreaded working on it each month, as did the contributors, so I
decided to spice it up. My hope was that making it a great product would inspire everyone (including me) to put more time into it. So far, so good. We'll see if it lasts.

OK, I have to work on my general update so I can share my first month in Iraq with everyone. So good to hear from you. Hope the Spring's treating you well, and thanks again for the updates on Parentheticals....that reminds me...one more story... The wife of our Battalion Commander heads the Family Readiness Groups back in MN. She's been sharing my DVD with every General in the State, and I've actually had some pretty positive feedback. She was recently invited to meet with the VP (Dick) to discuss military family issues, so she'll be in his office on Monday. I was on a conference call with her last night and she said that she's going to give him the DVD. Our Chaplain, who is perhaps the most conservative man I know, said, "You
know Bill, pretty soon you'll be making videos for the Republican National Committee!" Needless to say, there are a few things about me he does not yet know. :)

OK, I'm really going this time. I'll be sure to include you in the update distro. Take care!

-Bill

To Billy Bob:

Bill --

Your newsletter is really cool. [For anyone who is interested you can see the newsletter here]. How often do you publish this? It is obviously a lot of work, but it sure seems worth it. I read both of your pieces, but the one that intrigues me most obviously is the "outside the wire: piece. It's hard for any of us to relate to that.

The question I keep wanting an answer to is whether there is enough hope to warrant staying the course. That's obviously not an issue you can address in the newsletter, and it may not even be something you can address in e-mail. But, apart from keeping track of what you are doing, that is the one issue I'd like to know more about. The stakes are so damn high. What do the "boots on the ground" think about all of this?

What's this DVD thing? I haven't heard about that. Where can I get it? And a (virtual) audience with Darth Cheney, eh? Your life is filled with irony, isn't it? Still getting your name in front of Cheney is not a bad thing either now or in the future. Halliburton and KBR hire a lot of Chem. Es.

Fallujah. Ugh. That place (and anywhere close to it) has a baaaad rep over here. Stay safe man.

Parentheticals has suffered from its author's boredom recently. Glad to know it's serving some prupose other than my own navel gazing. Maybe that will inspire me to get back to it again.

Write whenever you can.

Bill

From Billy Bob:

The DVD... I put together a training video for our battalion, and it's been pretty well received. I don't have any spare copies right now, but when I do the next run I'll make sure to get a copy for you. Wayne and Pam have one, and I think there are a few other copies floating around up North der, eh.

The newsletter... I publish it every three weeks on a Monday. Next one's due out the 27th. I'm glad you like it. It is a lot of work, but it's not bad work by any means.

And the not so easy question...staying the course. It's such a tough call from where I sit. Overall, I've seen the troops fall into three categories:

1. Don't care about politics at all - let's just focus on the mission.

2. Flag-waving, elephant-worshiping, fox-praising, CNN and NPR-bashing, blind faith to the great W conservatives - let's just focus on the mission and how righteous we are.

3. Closet liberals...and conservatives, who read books, watch several different channels, think for themselves, and hate the dominance of group #2 in the military.

Luckily, I've found a few friends in group #3. The hard part is how quiet we need to be. I truly feel that my obligation to the soldiers around me is far more important, at least while we're here, than any feelings I have about politics, the war, and all other things far above my pay grade. That wouldn't cut it for the 2's, however. Any questions about the motives of this administration is equivalent to treason. (By the way, before I forget...reading Paul Krugman's "The Great Unraveling" Interesting stuff. Have you read it?)

I have to digress for a moment about how much some of the 2's drive me nuts. During our departure ceremony weekend, a reporter from MPR was down, Mark Zdechlik (sp?). Our chaplain asked me about who we had for visiting press, and I mentioned a few names, then Mark. Chaplain, "Wow, I didn't know they covered the military!" "He's actually done some great stuff of our soldiers, brigade was psyched to have him back, and he seems excited to be here." "The reporters from MPR would be excited to see their own shadow." I dropped it. It disappointed me that he held his stereotypes about public radio above the fact that this guy had already done several incredibly positive on our soldiers. So it goes...

Ok, I'm being random and avoiding the question (it's a slow morning and this is therapeutic...thanks for listening). Our mission is very focused on sustaining the coalition forces here, so we don't see much of the "progress on the ground." What I have seen is a bit more of the culture and how localized their circles of trust are. That will be part of the problem...the much, much bigger problem is poverty. It's unbelievable.

There seems to be a strong enough sense of community among the tribes in our rural area to keep people (read: young men) on track, but I can only imagine what it's like in urban areas. (I, thankfully, have not seen or plan to see any of urban Iraq.)
Trying to look at the big picture, I just don't see this going well on any time-scale we, as a nation, will tolerate. (Random thought...partially influenced by Krugman's book...why is it that they're calling for patience and endurance in this war, yet fiscal policy has a four year horizon?) The other side of the time-scale coin is how much damage will be done by our being here. It's the usually laundry list of concerns we both know too well...shrinking recruitment, not being able to fight a more important fight should it arise (when it arises?), cost, etc. So many people (the 2s) yell about the schools being built, elections had, and all the other wonderful things that are happening. But I want to see a pro-con list, chart, whatever, comparing schools built to cost - both is $ and in lives. I'm guessing they're pretty spendy schools, which could be built for less if we weren't here hiring Halliburton to do it. As far as democracy goes, I have had a few insights here. The locals understand that there's a new system, yet even officials will openly ask us to help them short-circuit the process. It seems no more than a new system to undermine. And elections...in the rural area I've seen, it would be impossible to devise an electoral system even remotely as effective as their patriarchal system of Sheiks.

I didn't vote for my Dad, but he still ran things, and Grandpa was in charge at his cabin...is it such a bad thing? On the bigger scale, none of these people know or care. If they do, it's only because they know who they have influence with. And with a literacy rate only slightly above the single digits, how many people are voting for themselves? (I'm talking about Iraq, not Texas.)

OK, I've rambled too long. Thanks for sticking with me. Overall I feel about the same as before I got here. I just feel a little more informed of the situation and a lot more justified in my bitching. I pity the first Fox-praising-couch-jockey who crosses me on this after I get home.
:)

Other than my usual disgust with the powers that be, I'm doing well. A few very close friends to keep me sane and enough cordial friends (when we avoid politics) to enjoy the days. Hope all is well!

Enjoy the day,

-Bill

PS: One more thought, inspired by a reading of the day's news...

In my humble opinion, saying the Iraqi Forces are ready to take over from the US is like saying your local high school football team is ready to take over for the Vikings. Will they show up for the first game? Sure. Will the last the season, even the first game? Not a chance. And every pro team in the league will want to play against the kids...even in their home stadium.

To Billy Bob:

That (the Vikings analogy) is bleak! The only saving grace, perhaps, is that the league they are playing in is not the NFL. It's not even a good high school league. If the military history of the middle east over the past 75 years proves anything it is that militarily the Muslims are a joke. I suspect that it has a lot to do with the fact that the Muslim world is still essentially feudal. The loyalties are -- as you note -- all to the tribe, and the internecine rivalries between these tribes make anything like a modern military command and control system impossible. It was not better arms that let the Israelis kick the shit out of the Arab armies again and again. It was better organization.

The problem, though, is that Muslims do make good insurgents. They can't do anything in a conventional military sense, but their passion makes them ultimately unconquerable and probably ungovernable as well.

More broadly, I tend to think that Iraq is not long for this world. Either de facto or de jure it's going to end up looking a lot like the former Yugoslavia or the former Soviet Union. And maybe that is not all that bad. It never was a nation to begin with. But the process of breaking up is going to be long and painful -- made all the more so I suspect but our efforts to prevent that from happening.

Krugman. No, I haven't read The Great Unraveling or any of his other books either. I get just about all I can take of Krugman on the NYT Op-Ed page. I have actually been trying to figure out why he rubs me the wrong way, because, in principle at least, I tend to agree with him on a lot of things. But he's just so damn ANGRY. He seems like the mirror image of Bill O'Reilly. What's missing in both is any sense of nuance, any sense that things are complicated and that there are no easy answers to anything that is worth thinking or writing about. I just finished "Acts of Faith" by Philip Caputo. It is a novel, ostensibly about aid workers in southern Sudan, people driven by a desire -- a need in fact -- to help others. But what it is really about is the traps created by "true belief," about how efforts to do good so often end up producing great evil. To my mind, the scourge of our time (perhaps all times) is deep conviction. It's a theme I suspect will run through a lot of what you see over the next year or so.

So elections in Iraq have yet to sweep away the indigenous political culture, huh? Shocked, I say. Just shocked. We need to get over the idea that we can remake Iraq or the middle east in our image. Not only is it hopeless, the process of trying to do it actually makes things worse. "Acts of Faith" again.

In hindsight, I think what we should have done, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, is take down the government, capture or kill the leaders and then leave. The message we send is that "We can't build your nation, but we sure as hell can destroy it. And, we are going to do that every time you attack us or someone important to us. Once we get done with that task we will leave and you can build your own damn country. Fight amongst yourselves to your hearts' content. Just leave us and our friends out of it. And, if you don't, we'll be back and give you another clean slate on which to try to write your own destiny. It may take a few times, but sooner or later you'll get it right."

Not very idealistic, but we are proving to ourselves that it is about all we can actually do. Reality bites.

Bill

To be continued . . .