THE DARK FIELDS

well-rounded bulbs

2009-02-11T00:56:00.002-05:00

this is for you sweet dark hair
in the world we deserve it's written in paris

you're sitting by the window
playing with a clever design

i just want you here next to me
on my left, pointing, explaining

down below, the whispered wandering streets,
normal, as ever, normal

but not for us, for us they
they are all pictures waiting to be taken.

a phantom fair

2009-02-10T00:33:00.004-05:00

I was walking west on thirty-second street
weaving grand histories in my head
Re-writing old chapters to once favored books,
No need to waste those smiles anymore.

The past is the hero's plaything,
light and malleable in his capable hands
whirring like the winter wind outside
the cracked sliver of my window.

And how the aching ages seem to melt and mold in my mind's discrimination
the dancing in this dizzy gut slows
with a warm whipped coat
and nothing cool to rock but a wayward keep to bear.

Up! Up now from your sacred foggy sleep
And fallen down upon this hero's burning stare
Dear girl, you look the same in every edition,
but your thighs, Oh my! they drip with moist affection.

Crater lakes with dark moon water
turning up and back at me with a misunderstanding.
I love you so and if I knew
the words,
the rhyme,
how time
folds and unfolds around us in the waking morning hours.

GAME REPORT// 'OLD MAN STRENGTH' PREVAILS ON FRATERNITY ROW

2005-11-09T16:54:00.001-05:00

November 9, 2005

College Park, MD—Senior quarterback Robert Kluge threw for two scores and completed seven passes to five different receivers this afternoon as the SAM Out-of-Hosers ripped the rival SAM In-House Binmen 21-0 in a heavily anticipated, but thoroughly one-sided affair.

Underneath a soaring Chapel spire and slowly expiring daylight, with the sounds of the Maryland Marching Band stirring the crisp autumn air, the Hosers' Terrible Triumvirate of Kluge, Dan Powers, and Jeff Fischer ran roughshod over an disorganized and frustrated Binmen defense.

"I don't count the bodies," Fischer said when asked to name the defensive back he leaped over—and then squashed on the way down—while making an acrobatic late touchdown grab.

It was probably better for the Binmen that he didn't, because the toll would have been too high.

"Every time I dropped back I knew we'd complete a pass, I knew someone would be open, " Rob Kluge said.

Kluge set the tone on the first drive of the game, deflecting away Binmen quarterback Kristian Rivera's first pass and wrapping up receiver Andy Sitomer after a third down catch for a short gain. The Hoser defense whooped and hooted while Marc Premselaar punted on fourth down.

After a touchback, Kluge went back to work, this time under center and behind a stout line of Jon Karlik, Dan Metzger, and Heath Shyman. Following an incomplete pass on first down, Kluge hit Adam "Raspberry Sauce" Yoslowitz down the left sideline for a 30-yard gain over hobbled cornerback Jake "the Jake" Kimmelman. Two plays later the Hosers were in the end zone, courtesy of a short pass from Kluge to Dan Powers.

Powers, a senior—or is it junior?—H-Back, caught the pass with his back to the goal line and rolled like a booted pumpkin into the end zone before leaping blindly toward no one in particular. As the most flamboyantly dressed player on the field, Powers set an upsetting standard for uniform style. At one point he seemed to be prancing the field in a "Slutty Football Player" Halloween costume.

"Is that spandex?" one fan asked.

"I think I'm going to be sick," wretched another.

Back on the field, the Binmen offense continued to bumble. Rivera would finish the game 5-14 on pass attempts with no touchdowns, and was repeatedly chased from the pocket when his offensive line faltered.

Unwilling to abandon the deep passing game despite routinely facing five-man defensive backfields, the Binmen never established a flow on offense, and were down two scores before notching a first down.

"Jake ["the Jake" Kimmelman] was saying their end zone was too small. Well, yeah, it seems small when there are like nine guys back there," Innie assistant coach Evan Kline sniped after the game. "We should've thrown the ball short but no one could agree on anything."

"No one listened to me," Brian Banschick, the losing side's head coach said earlier, " I have no comment."

Banschick, described by his team as a "player's coach" in the mold of a pre-USC Pete Carroll, lost his grip early. Facing fourth-and-long on just their second possession, Banschick, perhaps overwhelmed by the gravity of the game, begged his team to "Go for it!" He was ignored, and left to watch impotently as the Binmen unraveled.

If the In-House team went to battle with a downright Rumsfeldian plan for victory, then the Out-of-House brothers appeared to have spent months in preparation for the tilt. Shuffling personnel with a swift and flawless precision, the Hosers routinely exploited favorable match ups from the line of scrimmage on out into the secondary.

"Fuck them," Jeff Fischer noted.

Up two scores late, and with the late afternoon's sunlight bled into a faint red afterglow, Kluge cut loose the short passing game that he had so methodically executed all day—completing passes to Fischer, Powers, Yoslowitz, Jess Bellissimo, and Michael "the Flying Nipple" Bender—and aired one out to Bellissimo down the right sideline.

Two plays later Fischer was in the end zone with his second score of the game and the outcome had been settled. The young upstarts had been turned back and turned home, without scoring a single point.

****************************************************************
Notes and Quotes…

Jay Rosen, before the game, on his role: "Takin' a shit on the field."

He excelled in it.

Rosen did his best Tony Mandarich for the two snaps he played at left tackle.

The major pre-game brouhaha involved Christopher "C-Wood" Wood's eligibility as an Binman. Wood has lived out-of-4607 Knox since the first week of school.

Playing for the In-House boys anyway, Wood was repeatedly left to waste away on the O-line (to block, uhh, Metzger?) despite looking like Jim Brown and Jackie Joyner Kersee's love child on his three rush attempts.

Andy Sitomer, better suited to a third-down back role, got the early carries, and played well on both sides of the ball. A bright spot for his club.

Michael "The Flying Nipple" Bender delivered a vicious "truck-stick" shoulder into Sitomer's craw. Bender ran him over, but he was slowed enough that Rivera could come across for the tackle on a key third down.

Kristian Rivera goes sideline-to-sideline like Jon Vilma. He lined up over the left tackle to start one goal line defensive play and ended it by stacking up Big Dan Powers at the right pylon.

Josh Dean, on his expectation as a spectator: "I just wanna see somebody get laid out, anybody really. Maybe Cherry."

"Dan Powers looks like a…?"

"…fat black prostitute with her gut hanging out of her shirt,"

- Josh Cohen

******************************************************************************************
FINAL BOX SCORE
Possession By Possession:
BINMEN 0 0 0 0 0 0
HOSERS 7 0 7 0 7 0

HOSERS

Passing:
Kluge, 7-13, 2 TD
Rushing:
Fischer, 2 carries, First Down, TD
Kluge, 2 carries
Powers, 2 carries
Bellissimo, 1 carry

Receiving:
Yoslowitz, 2 recepts, First Down
Bender, 2 recepts
Fischer, 1 recept, TD
Powers, 1 recept, TD
Bellissimo, 1 recept, First Down

INNIES:

Passing:
Rivera, 5-14
Sitomer, 0-1

Rushing:
Wood, 3 carries, First Down
Sitomer, 2 carries
Rivera, 1 carry, First Down

Receiving:
Wood, 2 recepts
Sitomer, 2 recepts
Premselaar, 1 recept

-GREG J. KRIEG

SPORTS// GOD KNOWS ALL

2005-11-09T16:01:00.000-05:00

11/9

In religion, there are sub-divisions within the larger faith that denote the level of dedication and adherence to doctrine that followers are expected to display. Jewish people, for example, generally can be broken down into three major categories.

First, there are Reform Jews. These guys play fast and loose with religion. “Are we going to temple tomorrow morning?” they ask. “Well, we’ll see how the weather is.” At the other end of the spectrum are the Orthodox, no-nonsense Jews. When they enter a house of worship, men and women are made to separate and anyone who dares break the silent communal bond of prayer is removed, by force if necessary, from the premises. When it comes to God, the Orthodox mean business.

Somewhere in the middle, in a gray space only colored by the comings and goings of transitory souls, lie the Conservatives. Three days each year-- two for Rosh Hashonuh, one for Yom Kippur-- a Conservative will do and say all the things an Orthodox Jew might. The other 363 are less certain. If things are going good and maybe the Rabbi’s really been stroking his sermons lately, they’ll be in temple every weekend. When he’s been drinking too much scotch and slurs his tropes, they’ll stay home and read The Da Vinci Code.

Sports fans adhere to a similar code, and if the analogy hasn’t already begun to take shape in your head, I will herein seek to craft it out.

Like being Jewish, following or rooting for a team in any one of America’s four major professional sports (that includes hockey, you hater) is an act that instructs the most basic definition of “who you are.” Because lists are simple, in contrast to the skillful abstractions above, we’ll do this that way…

Reform fans are the scourge of all true believers. Reform and Conservative fans enjoy a relationship, from an ideological standpoint, along the lines of the Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq. It’s unkind.

You know this guy, you can smell him from miles away. When the team’s losing, he won’t watch the games. Or read the articles. But he will know what’s going on with his bets… Because he’s checking other scores when “his” team’s in the process of engineering a 4th quarter comeback.
Also, the Reform fan gets drunk during the game. Now, unless the game is being played in sub-zero temperatures (or it’s one of those rare, impact games, when it would be unhealthy to watch without some angle of sedation), there is no viable excuse for drinking heavily during your team’s contest. If the ebb and flow of the action isn’t entertainment enough, then you don’t really care. Stop pretending. Infidel.

Conservative fans...
This is most people. It should be all parents and people over 40 years old. Unless you’re over 40 and live with your parents. Then you’d belong in the next group...but this first.

Healthy is the way most would describe the Conservative fan. Roots for his team when they’re playing, goes to work when they aren’t. Win or lose, he reads the articles the day after the game, though not necessarily all the off-day, feature pieces. Friends like him and co-workers respect him.

It’s a swell scenario. You might think, “Hey, that’s me, that’s what I am, well-balanced, a sportsman in the truest sense. I only own jerseys for my teams.” And you might be right, for now. But no one stays Conservative forever. It is fleeting and anyone who says otherwise is probably a spy or deviant or both. In the course of a life, most fans will float between this and one of the two other distinctions, though rarely will one person run the gamut.

That’s because Orthodox fans are the sickest of the bunch. Mostly they’re comprised of 12-year-olds and the unemployed--a larger segment of society than one might imagine. Orthodox fans are physically affected by the games. So the team lost? Day’s ruined. That simple.
It can be a burden, but it’s the life they choose, a life of strict adherence. The Orthodox own only t-shirts, hats, and jerseys with the home club’s logo. No exceptions. Game’s on TV? Like the religious equivalent, women must be separated.

You know all the people discussed on this page. They live amongst us, visibly normal, decent citizens. I am one, though I won’t specify. What are you?

THE FIELDS// HAVE YA SEEN THIS? HAVE YA HEARD ABOUT THIS?

2005-11-07T15:56:00.001-05:00

11/7/05

Someone in the Armed Forces public relations office announced on Monday that the 2000th American soldier had been killed in Iraq. It was treated as breaking news on CNN that morning when “Daybreak” anchor Carol Costello got the information in her earpiece.

It wasn’t, obviously, really a “breaking” story in the technical sense though, as the death of the 1,995th soldier days earlier served as a bold foreshadowing. The news upset me, but as I went through my day-- sleeping till three, deciding not to go to my one class, and then drinking cheap vodka until I passed out around 2 a.m.-- it also got me to thinking.
Now, before we progress here, a quick disclaimer. I’m an anit-war guy, and I might even own a Buck Fush t-shirt or some clever stuff like that. I’ve even protested and engaged in assorted messes of impotent dissent. But my theme here is universal and simple, free from the astounding complexities that surround this war and terrorism.

So I have some questions for you. Yeah, you. Put down the Chick-Filet you fat slob and read.

When you heard the news, about the dead soldiers, if you heard it all, how did you feel? I don’t care if you support The War or not; if you’re a vegan pacifist or a smug College Republican.

Did it hurt you?

Did it ruin your meal or upset your stomach?

Did it burn like when you got drunk at lunch and fell asleep in the sun last Spring Break? Like when there was no amount of aloe that could cool your skin and you started to sweat and shiver?

When you read the newspaper that morning (The Washington Post or Times, not the Diamondback, because, naturally, dead American teenagers is not a “campus issue”) did you notice the average age of the dead soldiers? If you’re a junior or senior, how did you feel when you saw that you were older than most of them?

If you are a supporter of the war, if you think that a nascent democracy in the middle east will serve as a catalyst for peace in the region, were you, like, vaguely embarrassed that you were in College Park and not Basra.

Were you ashamed that some kid like you, more than 1,000 of them more accurately, will never again get to do whatever it is you do? He can’t get stoned and giggle and watch Chappelle, or sleep with an ugly girl and then laugh about with his friends in the morning.

How did that feel? Did it feel like anything?

THE FIELDS// PARTY TIME IN THE CAPITAL

2005-09-28T17:15:00.000-04:00

September 28, 2005

Casey Sheehan is dead. If you are looking for indisputable truth, there's a good place to start. One-hundred thousand people marched on Washington, D.C. this Saturday with that understanding, though they may not have been able to agree on much else.

Such crisp and stifling reality has that effect on The People; it makes them restless and liable to be shaken, if only for a late summer weekend, from a normally docile existence. In the swirling throngs—the direction of the march often a mystery—there was a freak show of socialists, communists, labor activists, Falun Gong, College Democrats, Anarchists, and pimply high school and college kids. There were few beautiful people, in the traditional sense, in attendance on Saturday, a fact that stood as a testament to the event's dreadful genesis.

This is not to say that Cindy Sheehan is ugly. From a face-structure and body-frame standpoint, she nears good-looking-older-woman potential. But the past two years have weathered her, so from up-close her skin is leathery and her color-treated blonde hair looks burnt yellow. Saturday's pallid, mournful sky did nothing to gleam over the wrinkles. Her life is a fucking misery, and it shows.

The speech? Not much better. Sheehan's background is clear when she talks. The voice of a suburban housewife does not jive well with microphones and loudspeakers. A high-pitched, perhaps cute voice can sound shrill and whiny. Any heightening of emotion in the course of the speech will makes the words almost impossible to absorb without a cringe. If you came here for soulful rhetoric, it'd be best to sit out Cindy's talk. Maybe wait for Jesse Jackson, he's here, somewhere.

It's easy to knock Sheehan, and Republican slag teams wasted no time in enlisting even her relatives to join the party. But her occasionally clumsy and bitter public commentary only strengthen her position. This is not a politician.

To the part of the Peace Movement that would only dream of being characterized as its radical fringe element, the emergence of Sheehan is a godsend. She is shockingly regular considering the hubbub that has surrounded her recent prominence. If you are an 18- to 24-year-old male and want to know what your mother would like and how she would act with 200 media vultures poking microphones in her face, just watch Sheehan. When one college-age man asked the Peace Movement's heroine out for a couple drinks, she rolled her eyes and chirped wildly, "Yeah, we'll go out for a couple brewskies." Then she shadow-chugged a cold one for the crowd.

As the month of August unfolded among the dirt, heat, and uncleared brush of President Bush's Crawford, Texas, ranch, the story that was "Camp Casey" steadily gained momentum as a point of political contention. Slain soldier Casey's mother, with the help of a now well-developed operation stepped to the forefront of the Anti-war movement.

Two years earlier, a demonstration on a similar scale to Saturday's that preceded the "Shock and Awe" phase of the second Iraq War went by barely noticed by the mainstream press, which was tangled up in the process of determining the coolest units with whom to embed. By the middle of August, 2005, though, these same press wizards had set up a Jackson Trial-worthy tent city beside Sheehan's roadside ditch encampment.

The development marked a "sea change" for already active elements of the Anti-war lobby, like self-proclaimed "Badassed Commie Schoolmarm" Heather Cottin, who helped organize buses from Long Island, New York, for the trip south. It's an apt title for Cottin, 62 years old and now teaching a pointed take on American History at Queens College in New York City, whose squeaky, small voice doesn't hide for long her dogmatic, seething and occasionally optimistic worldview.

Cottin credits Cindy Sheehan for channeling the growing, though seemingly clichéd phenomenon of "mounting public discontent" (Pop News's term, not hers) with American foreign policy and this war.
"Sheehan got to them," Cottin says, them being the mothers that filled her buses for the trip to D.C., "and taught us not to be afraid, that courage is a rare and human thing, worthy of emulation. To be a worthwhile human, one needs to be brave, and if one is not one is hypocritical."

It's a stirring image the lady paints; the idea of an often vague and inwardly contentious movement coalescing around the mother of a dead soldier. The populist undertones are important as well, especially for a social and political group that is often rejected as wonks and elitists.
But through her optimism, Cottin still noted the fractures in the movement. "I think everyone had their own march," she said late Sunday night, "I only saw a lot of mostly white people, except in my Katrina Contingent."

Her assessment—honest, not bitter—seemed to be emblematic of the willingness of the Far Left to meet more cautious, but well-intentioned people with a less leery eye. In the context of a country that re-elected its trigger-happy president less than a year earlier, it is entirely necessary. Lefties are notorious in-fighters—the Leninists and Trotskyites of the Fifties' Greenwich Village were known to bloody each other regularly—so any preliterate, shared drive is important, and uncommon. Sheehan's story provides this.

Squirming through the hordes at the intersection 15th Street NW and Constitution Avenue on Saturday, though, the course was harder to make out. It was impossible to see for more than a couple feet in any direction. Still, the scene managed to stay oddly tranquil considering the dynamic pace and flow of the march. And at any moment a drumbeat would materialize from somewhere and the crowd would begin to roll up the street only to be halted or de-railed by the stalling packs ahead. The noon-time speakers, mostly tactless congressional types, spoke from a stage on the infield, but their faces were obscured by countless large, often clever signs.

THE FIELDS// A HISTORY...

2005-07-05T23:26:00.000-04:00

July 5, 2005

For centuries it was understood that history is written by the victors, and that all the ghoulish details of the battle could swept away in favor of a clear and morally succinct narrative. But things have changed.

In a fragmented, post-modern, Internet society there is no longer a barrier between the present and the future. Media has expanded to the point that there now is enough paper, hardware, software and microchips to record and preserve almost every point of view and version of past events.

Though it is popular to perceive this shift as a sudden result of the information age, the nature of “history” has been changing for almost 100 years. The roots, of course, are based in technology, but not that of the computer. It was, instead, the machine gun that set off this chain reaction.

To fit this space, allow me a vast over-simplification… In the wake of the Great War, a conflict in which 100,000 men were killed in a single battle, a baby was born. The child, who grew up, had children of his own, and now, like an old man in a hospice, has reverted to his less pervasive beginnings, was Irony. Ironically, the concept first appeared in the form of a dead baby, or multiple dead babies, in Ernest Hemingway’s “On the Quai at Smyrna.”

In telling his stories about World War I throughout "In Our Time," "The Sun Also Rises," and "A Farewell to Arms," Hemingway offered a parallel history of the era. But to be fair, Hemingway was an American and we won that war. The transition was incomplete.

Same for World War II, the Great Good War of the century, a clash so stark that irony was almost non-existent. That is, everything was as it appeared. But in the cartoons of Bill Mauldin, a flicker of sincerity and humor pierced the dark and Hemingway’s child survived those rough post-adolescent years. Survival was key, and by the time Michael Herr’s obscene and nightmarish “Dispatches” were received by the American public, pop history, which is to Irony what Sting’s solo career is to The Police, was invented.

Pop history, like pop music, is not always well-constructed, but it is made to satisfy an audience, an in contemporary culture it is the whim of the audience that rules the day. This is what we contend with in the Middle East today, a place that spits on Britney Spears’ sexuality, but thrives in the same banality and fickle violence of their own pop history.

The great swing though, came in the transition between World War II and Vietnam. No two wars have provided such a clear-cut and compelling divergence in the way they were chronicled. Although microfilms of day-to-day combat coverage in the Japanese jungle might not differ too heavily from the Vietnamese jungle, the literary archetypes of each conflict are almost irreconcilable.

When Richard Tregaskis landed with U.S. Marines on Guadalcanal in the summer of 1942, the war was far from being won. There would be three more years of brutal carpet bombing and firefights before Hiroshima was scorched on Aug. 6, 1945, the last hurrah as far as American military action goes.

Tregaskis’s account of the battle on Guadalcanal, which he experienced with the soldiers, is simple. On the cover of the book, Time magazine praises the writer for “good reporting-- fidelity and detail.” The first synonym for “fidelity” listed on dictionary.com is “allegiance,” and the text underscores this. Tregaskis is there as an American, writing about the war for Americans to read and, someday, remember. The “Japs” might as well be the slimy alien creatures from “Independence Day.” And as much as the writing attains a Hemingway-esque simplicity, it has no couched narrative.

Tregaskis frames his literary photograph of the event with a tightly focused frame and a single light source-- whereas Herr, soon to be discussed, tailored his picture with a panoramic camera and a head full of acid. Today such a closed worldview would be considered unhealthy, or even reactionary, but in the time “Guadalcanal Diary” was written it was simply a fact of life.

Limited media offered limited consciousness so it would be impossible to expect the grunts on the ground, Tregaskis among them, to measure, or recount their experience in a broader context. But even beyond that, “Diary” also offers a glimmer of the romantic war conception that Hemingway chipped away at and Herr would melt with napalm.
“The colonel set his helmet on the ground,” Tregaskis writes, “sat himself on it, and unfolded a map, while his staff, gathered around for the day’s orders, watched. ‘I’ll tell you what I know and then you’ll know as much as I do,’ he said. He pointed his finger to a spot on the map. ‘Here’s where we are,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to work down there and get to the Tenaru. Probably we’ll wade around the moth of the river.’ He went into the details of our plans…”

This passage offers a concise explanation of a small moment in a huge chain of events, but the scene is still instructive. The image of a determined and honest leader spelling out the mission ahead is quietly inspiring. The concept of “fragging” is yet to emerge to the forefront of war lingo, and everything is as it should be.

Composed in the same era as Tregaskis’s book is “Up Front,” a collection of cartoons written and illustrated by Bill Mauldin. Mauldin was a cartoonist, and satirist, for Stars and Stripes, the Army’s in-house news weekly. His work was not revolutionary, but rather evolutionary, and it represented a step forward from some of Tregaskis’s more classic accounts.

The soldiers in Mauldin’s cartoons were unshaven and miserable, but resigned to their duty. They don’t complain to one another about geo-politics, instead grumbling about the uncomfortable nature of their predicament and the ineptitude of the field generals.

In one cartoon, two G.I.’s are seen driving away from a urban neighborhood, perhaps somewhere in Italy or North Africa, deciding that the front might compare favorably to the strictly cordoned-off “Officers Only” city-scene. Prints like these were subversive enough to rankle military men like George Patton, and many others stand up, even today, as searing condemnations of the inanity of war. But in a collective sense, Mauldin’s cartoons are best described as “War Dilbert,“ more likely to have inspired Scott Adams than David Rees.

In his 1936 essay, “The Crack-Up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “Of course all life is a process of breaking down,” and that within this progression there is a “sort of blow that comes from within-- that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick-- the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.”

This statement, taken in the proper context, can be extended into a metaphor to describe the experience and aftermath of the Vietnam War in America. The Quagmire was the American Crack-Up. It is the “second kind” because it crept up on us (September 11th could be categorized as the first type, or one of “the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come from outside-- the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about…”).

As much as the public remembers Vietnam now as LBJ and Nixon’s war, anyone with an inkling knows that it was just as much the responsibility of Eisenhower and Kennedy. But the realization of the profound stupidity of the war came slow, and even today there are those who lay the American defeat on pacifists and the era’s loud but hollow counterculture. President Bush’s hustlers in Texas did a brilliant job of exposing the still spacious divide in the population with their damaging “Swift Boat Veterans” ads during the past campaign.

Never is the madness of Vietnam more viscerally recounted than in Michael Herr’s “Dispatches.” The language is bizarre and trippy-- not an easy sensation to “put to paper”-- and frequently leaves the reader upset. His descriptions of soldiers’ “morale” are shocking, even by today’s standards. It’s not an easy book to read, and Herr wouldn’t have it any other way; it is, in many opinions, the defining novel of the war.

“Fuck the lieutenant,” one of the real-life subjects of Herr’s novel says during the siege of Khe Sanh, an American military base in Vietnam and setting for some of the book’s choicest delirium. This scene, juxtaposed against that of the fatherly commanders plotting out the battle of Guadalcanal, indicates the degree to which Vietnam shattered certain illusions, and even some realities, about the morality of combat and the military.

The greatest casualty of the war though, in Herr’s implicit estimation, was the cheapening of the Truth. In the sessions of what he called “psychotic vaudeville” with military spokesmen and commanders, the press was told, and often reported, statements many of reporters had literally seen to be false earlier in the day. These scenes, as we saw in “Control Room,” continue to play out today in the desert surrounding Baghdad.

In "A Farewell to Arms," Hemingway’s character, Lieutenant Henry, openly questions whether or not his fight will be another Hundred Years’ War. It’s a chilling consideration and it speaks toward the unknowing that defines modern warfare.

Today, the leaders of the free world have determined that the only way to preserve our way of life is to fight endlessly. It is a dark argument to make, and grows even darker considering the relative lack of effect war seems to have on the civilian population.

The cuts, and the crack-up, though, will show eventually, and it will be forlorn writers and besieged journalists-- not pundits and partisans-- who will emerge from the shit to present the mirror. And what that mirror reveals, in a world where light now shines on everyone everywhere will not be shaped by any one group or interest, winner or champion; instead, it will be a bitterly honest reflection of who we are.

TAKE THE GARDENS TOUR

2005-06-28T16:20:00.000-04:00

June 28, 2005

Heat comes easily to Washington on a late June afternoon. The air is thick like in a steamy shower, but there’s no curtain to pull back and the nearest street vendor is selling bottled water at ballpark rates.

The scene in the quarter mile radius that holds the city’s three major war memorials looks more like a theme park than a spiritual center. Young parents strain to track their zig-zagging kiddies through the swarms, while older gentleman, many in the dress of war veterans-- khakis, neatly tucked shirt, navy and gold cap-- walk two strides ahead of their wives and grown children. Their thoughts are thousands of miles and decades behind us in weird places that must make this pageant seem like their sweetest dream of heaven.

Although we’re only blocks away from K Street and the Capitol, you won’t find too many shirtsleeves on the corner of 17th and Constitution. And it’s not just because of the weather, though there isn’t a dry back in sight. It’s vacation season in America, you see, and families from all across the dark fields have made the trek to the capital. It’s vacation, so the dress is informal. But a trip like this is not made strictly for leisure, and the State Fair atmosphere is quieted by a chorus of sour faces made in the direction of anyone who forgets it.

If this is an educational excursion, then it might be interesting to consider what is being taught in and around the “Constitution Gardens.“ And if these questions are asked, and measured properly, the answers might be instructive-- not only as to the meaning or intentions of the memorials, but as to how Americans comprehend their violent history.

“Constitution Gardens”…the words won’t be heard rolling off the tongues of even the worst, immodest tourist. Most people know this rolling plot as the staging area for the Armies of the Night, or the site of Martin Luther King’s most fondly remembered speech (and, lest we forget, the place where Forrest cut short his speech and waded through the Reflecting Pool to reach Jenny). Less than a half mile straight south from the heavily fortified outskirts of the White House lawn is the head of the “Gardens” and, where King once mounted a stage to speak, sits the first, in one of two chronological considerations, of the three war memorials.

The World War II Memorial was opened to the public on April 29, 2004. It is a large and triumphantly designed spectacle. It is also, despite the howls of critics, the most comfortably arranged of the three memorials. At opposite poles of the coliseum-like enclosure are tributes to the soldiers of the Pacific and European fronts. Like the banners that line a baseball stadium, the names of each of the 50 states are engraved on smaller arches that circle the bowl. In the center is a large pool that visitors can dip their feet into on a searing hot day like today. One woman has fallen asleep on the edge of the water. With fountains surrounding the pool, it is a serene scene, but by no means somber.

World War II is the one war that Americans don’t have to apologize for. Not to other countries, not to hippies and pacifists, and not to their children. The monument and the people that pass through it are emblematic of this; the guilt that poisons the air only 400 yards away is clean as a whistle over here. The elegant phrases of the era’s political leaders, carved sporadically on the walls, stand as only vague reminders of the human cost of the war.

The memorials to commemorate World War II, Korea, and Vietnam were each completed in the last two decades, though in an order that contradicts their historical sequence.

The Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial was, like the writer, born in the latter half of 1984, though its gestation period was slightly longer. The two years it took to translate Maya Lin’s dark vision into black granite reality were wrought with controversy, a fact not entirely disconnected from the idea that this, of all wars, was not the one to remember first. But it was, and today it remains the country’s most compelling war shrine, literally digging itself into hallowed ground.

You can’t quite see, even on the clearest of days, either of the other two locations from the almost subterranean topography of the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial. Dug into the center of two acres of crisp, green grass, “the wall” is almost 250 feet long and cuts an obtuse “V” when viewed from overhead. On the ground, the first, inch-high panels begin at foot level and stay there while the parallel walkway descends more than 10 feet before rising back up from the nadir.

On the wall is a list, written in the order by which, one day at a time, 58,000 American boy and men soldiers were killed during the war. It is a staggering number of dead, one that my father once described to me, in the only terms I could fathom at the time, as being enough to fill up Shea Stadium for a playoff game. Many years later, the volume of names engraved on the wall is still shocking, but for different reasons.

The names, and it’s hard to catch more than one-or-two per panel if you want to keep a slow pace, seem familiar today, more so than I when I first and last beheld them about five years ago. Baldwin, Ballard, and Banda are three names on the wall. And in my view they seem a stark representation of who fights the wars for this country today. They fit each of the arch stereotypes. “Kermit” Baldwin, the brother. “Cesar” Banda, the ese. “Carrol” Ballard, the seventh generation American, though he grew up poor. No, you can’t quite see the World War II Memorial from here, but its legacy lingers in air.

The cruel relationship between the two pivotal wars of the Republic’s modern history is never so clearly played out as in the “Constitution Gardens.” The soaring arches of one monument give way to the buried ignominy of another. In between lies the Korean War Memorial, a tribute as murky as the war it remembers. Scattered on the plot are sculptures of forlorn looking soldiers; None seem to be looking in the same direction. From a strictly interpretive standpoint, this memorial has the most to say about the state of modern war. The enemy flashes in and out of the shadows and the objective of the fight is blurred or unknown. The only honor is in surviving and, I imagine, remembering as few of the details as possible. A difficult task for the soldiers, but not so for civilians and politicians. Not at all difficult, in fact. Americans are gladly prone to forget.

It’s hard to not think, as you make the walk back to the subway, that some time in the not-to-distant future this carnival will gain another attraction. On the Constitution Avenue side of the Reflecting Pool lies a piece of virginal land that almost begs for marking. But this time, perhaps, we’ll do it differently…

Let’s dedicate a monument to the con-men and gluttons that make places like this necessary; to the men who make beautiful words meaningless. The ones who bequeath only frustration and anxiety to coming generations-- all in a lust to expire from their natural lives in the same spasm of mythical glory they claim to bestow on the dead American soldier.

2005-06-24T15:52:00.000-04:00

June 24, 2005

A respectful note to Congress: Please, noble men of the Hill, write a law to ban Flag Burning.

If the House of Representatives follows through on this bold initiative, a great victory will be won for the decent people of this country. I can think of no more valuable a manner in which to fill the unending hours of this legislative season. The less pressing issues of our time will be pushed to the backburner, where they may be best resolved. Gay men will be free to hump with wedding bands on, guaranteeing an eternity of well-deserved hellfire; the site of the next, and most “splendid little war” will be hashed out in the boardroom of Exxon, rather than the backrooms of Congress (we all know private industries are more efficient). The natural order of things will be restored.

As a man of great national pride, and a proud member of the growing Neo-Fascist Libertarian movement, I believe that every American should be free to never, ever see the flag being desecrated. Remember this: The only things worth burning squeal when they catch, and anyone who doesn’t agree is not worth their weight in napalm.

For those that argue that such a law would only encourage outside agitators, anarchists and insurgents by making the action a legal taboo, I add this: Bring ‘Em On! This legislation would cast the bait into the water and we’d have nothing more to do than sit back and wait for the bastards to bite. Every dollar drained into the legal defense fund is one less for the Sierra Club. “Death by a thousand cuts” is the expression, but it is not the “machine” of the First Amendment that needs killing, it is the “ghost” within. This law would deal the craggily old ghoul a severe blow.

And the public will love it.

Yes, the best aspect of this law would be its immense popularity, and not just among cultural conservatives. Those snarky liberal geeks would hit the streets the hour MoveOn posts the news. There’d be a run on fuel in the Northeast and Southern California. Burning flags and John Fogerty on morning television? Stocks in the Rage Industry would skyrocket, Scarborough Country would explode… the Democrats will wriggle and we will stomp them.

And, oh!, to see the New York Times on that blessed morning. We could deposit a daisy cutter in downtown Tehran and no one would think twice. They’d be chained to the pillars of the Supreme Court building where, as far as I know, there is no wireless Internet.

But we should resist the temptation to rush the process. Sources in the healthcare industry tell me Rehnquist will be dead by President’s Day, clearing the way for Alberto Gonzales to gain a nomination. The confirmation process might be long, but, if we are patient, the “Chinese Water Torture” clause those bulldogs in the South are quietly pushing for could make the final draft.

As for the opposition, it will be there, but it will be meek. How many divisions has the Washington Post? None. And their circulation is dwindling, too. By the time they figure out how the game gets played these days, we’ll have thrown half of Massachusetts into the sea.
The line, my friends, it is drawn. The curse it is cast. It is now in the hands of House to follow through and seal the deal. A wise man once said that “action moves away from the center,” and recent history indicates that a majority of the country will move in ours.

A DAY AT THE HOLOCAUST MUSEUM

2005-06-19T16:29:00.000-04:00

June 19, 2005

The lady that greets you at the elevator says that it would take two full days of your concentrated attention to ingest this whole place, so pay attention. “Never Again,” is the catchphrase here, and the importance of remembering is always at the forefront. It’s a dark place too, built with bare steel and copper-colored beams. There are no distractions. There’s nothing in Washington, D.C.’s Holocaust Museum to divert the visitor from his objective… Behold before you-- a stately but humanistic monument to the most focused bloodletting in known history.

Sitting to write this small, and perhaps ill-conceived account of my visit to the museum I am struck with how indistinctly I’ve measured my visit. I feel dirty writing about it, about my lack of feeling. Growing up in a Jewish community, the Holocaust Museum is the setting for many tales of cultural awakening and soulful reconnection to past generations. It is a monument not just to the millions killed by the Third Reich, but a reminder of the countless other less successful attempts to wipe out the Jewish race. It is, finally, a defiant symbol to Jews across the world of hatred and tragedy defeated.

But when I walked through the building itself-- starting at the top, third floor on down-- and passed by accounts of the early years of Nazi Germany, then into a room where home videos showed shattered concentration camp prisoners, triumph was the last thing coursing through my body. Instead, I only felt a little shame.

Let me explain with a sports analogy.

The Detroit Pistons won two NBA championships in 1989 and 1990. But the road to basketball’s so-called Promised Land was not easy for Detroit, and they suffered numerous gut-wrenching defeats on their way to glory. Defeat came in the seventh and deciding game of the ‘88 Finals against Los Angeles when A.C. Green’s running hook shot extended the Lakers lead with time winding down. As the ball fell through the cylinder, crazed Los Angelinos stormed their home court in rabid celebration of the team’s imminent victory. The referees, overwhelmed by the mob, could do nothing to provide the visiting Pistons with the three seconds, and the opportunity to tie, that the game clock indicated they were owed. The Lakers were crowned Champions once again, and the losing club had nothing to do except fly home. To Detroit.

That game, and even much of the season that preceded it, has often, in the past 10 or 15 years, been the subject of interviews conducted with Pistons stars Joe Dumars and Isiah Thomas. But it is not hard-hearted sportscasters or abrasive writers who can be counted on to broach the topic. It is, and with an almost bizarre consistency, the players who like to talk about the game. Isiah Thomas, on numerous occasions, has said that in the off-season that preceded the 1989 basketball season, one in which his team would finally prevail, he watched tape of the past season’s last game over and over again. He wanted to make sure, he says, that such a thing could never happen again. It wasn’t the madness of the final moments that tormented Isiah, but the fact that he allowed his team into a situation where such a disastrous outcome was possible.

“Unfortunate, but necessary,” a Pistons fan might say today as he casually glances over a replay of the ‘88 game. He is able to watch with a smile only because he knows that in the following years his team would correct the mistakes of ‘88 and move on to a brighter, glorious future.

And so I am today, the human, the Jew, in place of the Piston fan, left to look over the relics of a most crushing defeat. But for humanity, unlike the Detroit basketball supporter, there has been no redemption. You can be confident Isiah would be reluctant to bring up the ’88 failure if it hadn’t been for subsequent successes. If the Pistons had gone on to lose in Los Angeles again and then in Portland there would be no one so bold as to say the ’88 season was the most important, the “building block” and the “rite of passage.” There would be no façade of elegance built to surround the pain, because no greater good could be called its offspring. It would have been just another sad episode in a prolonged tale of human suffering. Much like the Holocaust.

So that’s it, my grandmother, somewhere, is shivering. I’ve compared the Holocaust to the Pistons. And I’m a Nets fan. My point though, as I machete my way through this thick narrative brush, is not to demean the importance or criminal insanity of the Nazi’s Final Solution, but to point out the disingenuous shadow that looms over the monument built, supposedly, with the purpose of guaranteeing that such a horror should happen Never Again.

The hypocrisy poisons the air on all three floors. What is gained in beholding these images, some 60 years old, when similar situations are in play today, across the globe as the Janjaweed sweep through the Sudan? Or consider the deafening silence of the “civilized world” as 800,000 Rwandans were killed by their own countrymen in 1994. Was it was the same President Clinton, and I draw from the startling juxtaposition offered by Peter Maass in "Love thy Neighbor," who gave the speech now tatooed on the wall of the building while playing diplomatic hopscotch with Milosevic and his crazed Serbian death squads?

It’s a sordid mess of guilt and frustration at 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, and in that vein the building offers a more striking monument than most would like to imagine. The museum, in its material impotence, speaks to a generation that thought the dark days were behind, scattered in equal parts between the dense woods of Poland and our own Deep South. But more than ten years after President Clinton took the voice of his mentor and promised the youth that something better was at hand if only we worked hard and “remembered,” it is clear that little has changed, just the names and places. Bergen-Belsen is Srebrenica. Srebrenica is Darfur is Baghdad is Lower Manhattan.

WHY JUDITH MILLER AND MATTHEW COOPER ARE OZ-BOUND

2005-06-06T16:49:00.000-04:00

June 6, 2005

So W. Mark Felt was back in the news this week.

It had been a long hiatus for “the man they used to call Deep Throat,” and his re-entry into the public domain as a half lucid and apparently broke old man did little to recall the vengeful/righteous character that helped reporters Woodward and Bernstein torpedo the last truly inept presidential administration. Spurred in 1972 by the news that a Nixon flunky had surpassed him as the heir to J. Edgar Hoover’s purple robe (and panties), Felt called on his ambitious pal at the Washington Post and established himself as the most influential “unnamed source” in American political history.

But he also helped to set off an ugly chain reaction across the world of modern news reporting. By the time Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman released their stylized 1976 version of “Woodstein’s” travails, campus’s would-be stars and partisans had found a new means to an old end.

Almost 30 years later, society regards most journalists with a disdain once reserved for lawyers or street hustlers. The daily scandal as touted by media ranging from major newsmagazines to Undercover Joe on the Channel 11 Nightly News has cheapened even the most exhaustively reported story. The dire result, as Jon Stewart pointed out on his Daily Show, is not that the media has lost its luster, though it has, it’s that even the truth now lacks credibility.

And this is bad news for journalists who want to bust balls in Washington.

Laws, even those set into stone centuries ago, do not exist in a vacuum. As much as the judiciary is supposed operate outside of public opinion, it is an organic body and responds to its environment. So when two reporters from “respected” publications like the New York Times and Time magazine are threatened with jail time for refusing to divulge their sources, the lack of public concern should not be surprising. And it’s not because people don’t understand the First Amendment, they just happen to view it in a similar context to “the Fifth”; a necessary, but thoroughly unconvincing means of defense.

Journalists Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper, of the Times and Time, respectively, have been ordered by ascending levels of the judiciary to reveal the White House source that criminally disclosed the name of a covert CIA operative. Now, the subservient hack who actually slithered his way to the phone and said the words “Valerie” and “Plame” to the reporters seems to be the only real criminal (in the going-to-jail sense) here, but his identity is being protected by the reporters’ semi-integrity; a qualification necessary when you consider the track-record of high-end media. Thus, a hungry Law must eat, and Proud Journalists are featured on today’s menu.

Cooper and Miller will soon argue to more judges-- and eventually in the books they write after leaving prison (unless Son of Sam laws apply?)-- that being forced to reveal their source will discourage future sources from coming forward, and thus impugn upon First Amendment rights. This may be entirely accurate, and in an America where Earl Warren is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court this case probably never unfolds the way it has, but the last thing the public perceives these days is an infringement on free speech. How do we know this? Because almost everyone who shares that opinion is inclined to express it on their personal web log.

But more of a problem for Miller and Cooper is the fact that the grassroots people that should be chaining themselves to Robert Novak’s hooves in the reporters’ defense-- like say, journalism students-- can’t quite swallow, with an as yet un-prostituted soul, the whole of their story. Miller and Cooper are not protecting an otherwise powerless whistleblower who, through an act of personal courage, is looking to expose government corruption. The way this sad story plays out, they are simply protecting their careers, and a partisan brat whose vile existence is validated only by a role in the beltway drama known as “a source in the White House…”

When the three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals D.C. Circuit upheld a lower court’s decision that prosecutors were acting lawfully to “compel” Miller and Cooper to reveal their source, New York Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. issued a statement condemning the decision.

“"We are deeply dismayed at the U.S. Court of Appeals decision to affirm holding Judith Miller in contempt, and at what it means for the American public's right to know,” he said, adding that “The protection of confidential sources was critically important to many groundbreaking stories, such as Watergate, the health-threatening practices of the tobacco industry and police corruption…”

It is a legally and historically sound argument that Sulzberger makes, but his words are again more evidence of the disconnect between Big Media and the public it swears by defending. In the wake of Watergate the profession of journalism was put on a pedestal and its “star reporters” were elevated to place of American Heroes. But things have changed in the past three decades, and in a postmodern society that is as fragmented as ever before, there is no place for the lone defender of the good.

Hey Now!

2005-03-17T21:37:00.000-05:00

It's alive.