The Civil War was the first war to be extensively chronicled with photography. One would think that just that fact alone would have caused humanity to have chosen other ways to settle disputes. Looking at the dead Civil War soldier in this photograph, we can see no glory. In the picture we don’t see the vainglorious portraits that painters had portrayed war to be for centuries before. This photograph shows war as it is in all its finality, all its brutality, all of its reality.

You see, there is absolutely nothing glamorous about war. Somehow, after the honesty of the photographs of the Civil War, the new medium became the vehicle of obfuscation. From the Spanish-American War, through both World Wars, the powers that were decided that war must be romantic. Soldiers were all good-looking and brave. (We did have Willie and Joe by Bill Maudlin during WW II, but those were drawings and meant to be humorous). Photography, the ultimate truth-teller, was used to lie, to pervert, and to propagandise.

Then, along came the Vietnam War. One day a photographer caught the instant when a South Vietnamese officer blew the brains out of a suspected Viet Cong. The suspect’s hands are tied behind his back. He’s wearing a plaid shirt. It’s not the black pyjamas we were told the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong wore. It’s a very western shirt. To the left of the officer, there’s a South Vietnamese soldier in camies and a helmet. He’s looking at the head of the prisoner and smiling as the bullet finds its target. The officer looks scruffy. His uniform is dishevelled as is his hair. His right arm, the one holding the gun, is strong and his muscles are flexing as he pulls the trigger. We can’t see the bullet, but we know that it’s found its target. The prisoner’s face is twisted in a grimace and the hair on the right side of his head, the side were the bullet has entered, is blown sideways. We are witnessing a man at the instant of his death.

This is war. No niceties here. No civil rights. No attorney. No judge. No jury. Rough justice means a bullet to the brain and you’re dead. This was not John Wayne in the “The Green Berets,” a movie that came out that same year of 1968. Wayne was, of course, playing a caricature of himself by then. But real war and its photographs bore no resemble to Wayne in any of his World War II movies, either. This is the war that ‘they’ talk about when they say is that it’s hell.

This photograph started our 1968. That would be the year that the whole world went mad. Rough justice would be played out on the streets of every country in the industrialised west. There was another photograph, however, that also became emblematic of the war in Viet Nam: it was the image of a naked Vietnamese girl, burning from napalm, running down a country road screaming with other children from her village. Soldiers stand in the background. No one is attempting to help her, to cover her up. She is innocence laid bare to the world, stripped of all dignity in the name of war.

So, the truth could be told with photographs. Since then, no matter how hard the military and various administrations try to suppress it; the truth would manage to get out. At the end of the first Gulf War, we saw a photograph of a highway of death where fleeing Iraqis had been killed in their vehicles. One could almost smell the stench as we looked at the burnt corpses caught in mid-action trying to get out of their burning vehicles. Yes, there were some military vehicles, but there were many more Toyotas, Hondas, etc. These may have been commandeered by the Iraqi military. We’ll never know. Because this is war. This is what war is about. No niceties, no civil rights, no attorney, no judge, no jury.

On this Memorial Day, the 5th since George W. Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” on the deck of the aircraft carrier, Abraham Lincoln: let’s keep our volunteer soldiers in our thoughts and in our hearts. Let’s work to bring them home. Safe. Let’s also keep the Iraqi and Afghan civilians in our hearts and let’s work to be sure that they came get home. Safe.

Please give what you can to Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) and support Kiva.

And, of course

Let’s take this nice and slow. Say we’re both in charge of something, like a nation. We hold co-equal status according to our Constitution. I’m the President and you’re the Congress. Now, say I want to do something that you don’t want me to do. For argument’s sake, let’s say I want to continue a war that you don’t want me to continue.

It might seem easy, if I also hold the title ‘Commander-in-Chief.’ Aha! Well, when it comes to war, I would seem to have the trump card. But, also for the sake of argument, let’s say that I am just about the only person who wants to continue this war. Even my supporters aren’t all that thrilled about my war these days. Counter-balancing my power, you have control of the public purse. hmmmm . . . This is starting to get interesting.

Let’s go even farther: let’s say that all the reasons I gave you for going to war in the first place were wrong. We’re not going to get into whether I lied to you or was given bad intelligence. We’ll just leave it at all the reasons I gave have evaporated into the fog of war. There supposed to be weapons of mass destruction (read: atomic). There were none. There were supposed to be biological weapons. There were none. There supposed to be Al Qaeda training camps run by Saddam Hussein. There were none. There was supposed to be contact between the Iraqis and Mohammed Atta. There was none. There was supposed to be an Al Qaeda presence in Saddam’s Iraq. There was none then, there is one now. The only place where foreign insurgents were known to be before the war was in the north of Iraq, an area controlled by our good friends, the Kurds. (more…)

In Book 7 of Plato’s Republic, Socrates relates the allegory of the cave. In the cave, men are forced to look at what the rulers want them to see. The men can neither move their heads nor avert their eyes. What they do see are shadows projected on the walls in front of them by the unseen people in charge. They never see reality or even who is creating this illusion. However, if the men were allowed out of the cave; they might be blinded by the brightness and mightn’t see the reality in front of them.

This allegory also applies to people living in post-industrialized, technologically-advanced countries today. That would be all of the so-called 1st world nations. I say ‘so-called’ because there are many ways in which we, who do live in 1st world nations, are no better off than those who live in countries that we derogatorily refer to as 3rd world. But more on that another time.

Here’s the conundrum: do we put up with the force-fed shadows on the wall of the cave or do we risk being blinded by the light of the truth outside the cave? Do we fight the shadows in our ‘cave’ in order to find the truth? The only reality we know are the shadows we are allowed to see. It’s not as simple as a politicised press (either liberal or conservative). It’s not as simple as a culture of corruption in D.C. It’s about a system that started as corrupt and can’t seem to get out of its own way. (more…)

What can you say when people, who are obviously intelligent, do truly stupid things? The easy thing to say is that they’re mad, insane; but that isn’t the answer. Life is far more complicated than that.

Let’s go back in time, over 30 years ago. No one ever accused Richard Nixon of being stupid; yet he did what seemed to be an incredibly stupid thing: he did not destroy the secret audio tapes he had made of his conversations in the White House. At the time amateur psychologists of every stripe tried to understand this truly bizarre behaviour. Why would you hold on to the “bloody knife”? Without the tapes it would have been John Dean’s word against Nixon, H.R. (Bob) Haldemann and John Ehrlichman. Most people did not believe that Dean had a photographic memory. Then a Mr. Butterfield came before the committee and admitted a system of taping had been put in place and used by Nixon. Much sturm und drang followed with the Supreme Court finally ordering that the tapes be turned over. (more…)

I’ve been away for a few weeks. I was in Vienna (Wien) and then Florence (Firenze). I had always said that I wouldn’t go to Austria as long as Jörge Haider was still drawing a breath, but I had a need to see Klimt and Schiele. So, off I went to Wien.

Wien was decimated during the Second World War (see: The Third Man) and it didn’t profit by its reconstruction. There are rows upon rows of ugly concrete apartment blocks. As I looked out of my hotel window, I realized once again that many people don’t care where they live. Or perhaps it’s that they can’t afford to care. We don’t all have a real choice as to our living arrangements.

Wien has its charms. Stadt Park and the Hofburg Quarter are two. It certainly has good food and lots of it. It has some of the most dramatic skies in the world. It’s exciting to watch the weather move through. Yet, somehow I kept thinking of that saying, “How clever those Austrians, they’ve made the world think that Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler was German.”

There is a lively art scene in Wien, and the museums are top notch; but I kept wanting to stop old men and ask them what they did in the war. I had this same desire in Spain every time I saw an old man wearing a beret. “Whose side were you on?” In Spain no one would ever own up to having heard of Franco, so I couldn’t engage anyone in a discussion about him. This is why I should never go to places like Austria, Germany, Poland, or anyplace that capitulated or conspired with the Nazis. Of course, that would put most of Europe off limits for me. So, it’s best I don’t think about it. (more…)

I once had the good fortune to work for a while in Hawaii. Of course when you get a job in an exotic place every relative and friend finds a way to visit with you. As a matter of fact, you find that you have more relatives and friends than you ever knew.

So, that’s how it happened on a Sunday that an aged relative was visiting and had gone with the children and the babysitter to the beach. Being tired, I decided to stay at the house and read the funnies and relax (I was working 6 days a week). As I was reading the funnies there was an earthquake. Having lived around the ring of fire all of my life, I was used to earthquakes. I thought that it might be a good time to go down to the beach. So off I went. (more…)

Many years ago, when I was in my gap year, I went to work in a shop fairly far from home. Having only a bicycle, I had to take several buses to get to work. I had no idea what I wanted to do in life, and the year off gave me a bit of break from thinking constantly about my future. It also got me out of the house and my mother’s constant thinking about what I was going to do with my life. The long bus ride to work afforded me the opportunity to read, or observe or just let my mind wander. Work started around mid-morning and ended at a decent hour. But as summer stretched in fall and then winter, it was dark by the time I left for home. (more…)

This is for everyone who had the courage to stand up and protest today.
Support our troops –

bring them home:

Magnetic Yellow Ribbon on My S-U-V
(sung to the tune of, “Tie a yellow ribbon ‘round the old oak tree”)

I’m staying home, won’t go to war.
You can fight
for my right
to guzzle gas some more.

There ain’t no rhyme or reason
to put my butt at risk.

In the dollar we trust
you’ll never see us
across the deep blue sea
Magnetic yellow ribbon on my S-U-V

Magnetic yellow ribbon on my S-U-V
Means you go to war
But no, not me.

You can stay on the bus
Forget about us
I won’t be an amputee
Magnetic yellow ribbon on my S-U-V

You go to war, I’m stayin’ home.
You can fight,
For my right,
To guzzle gas some more.

Magnetic yellow ribbon on my S-U-V
Means you stay on that bus,
Forget about us,
You can have that old Humvee.

Magnetic yellow ribbon on my S-U-V

*Absolutely nothing!

Family is an interesting concept. There is the nuclear family, the extended family, all sorts of family. Then, there is the family from hell. We all have family of one sort or another. Some of us even feel that we have the family from hell. Shall we define just one of things that constitute being in a family from hell?

“Hefty bagging,” is a sure sign of being in the family from hell. “What is ‘hefty bagging’?” you ask. Well, I’m here to let you in on this sure sign of Hade-ious behaviour.

You may call them garbage bags, or bin liners or Hefty Bags; but they’re all for holding garbage. However, when you turn them into verbs they’re insidious manipulative devices that work best if the ‘Bagger’ is a close relative. Also,to ‘Hefty Bag’ someone you have to hold on to every grievance you perceive that person has perpetrated against you.

Here’s how it works: say sis forgot your birthday once 15 years ago. You make a note to yourself in perpetual ink (it’s made of blood and lasts far longer than permanent ink) and slip it into the Hefty Bag. On every occasion that seems appropriate (Dad’s birthday, Mother’s Day, New Year’s Eve, Arbour Day) you reach into your Hefty Bag and pull out an old gem. “I can still feel the pain when you forgot my birthday in 1980.” Usually, it’s done in a passive/aggressive way (I see you always remember Bro’s birthday, not like you forgot mine in 1990.”). But, after a bit of alcohol, you can really let it rip (You bitch, you always hated me. You turned Mum against me!”).

Hefty Bagging is usually a solitary avocation and there’s a good reason why. Remember that you’re filling that bag up with garbage. It’s your garbage, but it’s still garbage. After a while, 2 things happen: it gets real heavy, and it starts to stink.

So, because it’s heavy the ‘Bagger’ wants help carrying the bag. Occasionally you can dupe someone into helping, but the closer the ‘dupee’ gets to the bag the more he/she notices the stink.

The ‘Bagger’ will go through serial friendships/relationships. You know the type: you run into them a few years later and you don’t recognise anyone in their lives. They go through friends like other people go through toilet paper. Yes, that is an apt comparison.

So, here’s to letting go. Drop the bag. Walk away from it. ‘Cause the bag gets heavy and it stinks.