Waking the Monster Under the Bed in the Dawn's Early Light: A New Year's Revolution

A CALL FOR COMPASSION

Will Mother be home in time to take the kids to soccer?

Will I have enough time to get my taxes done?

Oh no. I missed my train.

There aren't enough hours in the day.

Junior's got too much homework.

Will the buses come and get me out on time?

The soldiers are late.

The police are sure taking a long time to get here.

What time does the food line start?

What time does the food line end?

Is his prison sentence over yet?

Did he get time off for good behavior?

Can he still walk?

Are his parents still alive? His wife? His children?

What is that acrid, ashen smell coming from my neighborhood, my town, my city?

Will he get home in time to see them?

Doesn't he know the government took his home?

Where will he sleep?

How can you?

The lumps against your back aren't because your mattress is failing; they're the buried truths of a suffering world rising up to wake you. You've been so comfortable for so long, you forget that the underpinnings of the life through which you sleepwalk are hidden under more than just the bed's dust ruffle. Heavy curtains and drapes hide horrible challenges over generations for some, while for others, life's suffering boils like magma behind a thin veil only moments old. Time, you see, does not heal wounds. It hides them.

It's time to wake up, America, and deal with our past. It's time to bow low to the whip - the slave trader's stock. It's time to feel the weight of our heavy hand at Wounded Knee and the Panama Canal. It's time to cry for the strikers who bled for industry barons and with the scarred little girls of Hiroshima who were forced to finish on their own what our bomb did not. It's time to apologize for My Lai and enabling Pinochet and the Shah and Saddam. It's time to deal with secret policies and secret wars.

What can we do about those things that were done in our name so long ago? Not much. Just be aware that it was there. But NOW, take that awareness and apply it NOW, to end suffering in Darfur and Somalia, in Iraq and in Palestine, in Iran, China and Saudi Arabia and Israel, in countries across the globe and on the street where you live.

Maybe we can make the early light of dawn in 2007 America, a promise to shine a light on all that is dark in the world, everywhere people are suffering. And look, the real power isn't going to come from me or anyone else telling you where the suffering is. Just take on easing humanity's pain as a commitment, and your course will be obvious. This is a request and an invitation for you to demonstrate your most basic compassion.

I ask that you be bold enough to share your commitment, and what it accomplishes, with other readers of Prose and Thorn. Please be bold, for there is only one time: now.

-PBG

When They Stand Up, We'll Stand Up...Again!

or
Pay As You Go: Balancing the Body Count

Sometime this week, Bush will share his "New Way Forward" with us, at least, as much as he is willing to. It's already known that he will order more troops into the melee for a free and independent Iraq, part of the overall Tumult on Terror, but according to this Sunday's New York Times, US troops "will be sent only if the Iraqis also increase their own forces."

So it's time for a little Orwellian revisionism. Let's put the phrase uttered by our concussive Commander-in-chief in 2004, "When they stand up...," into the the true-memory machine. I think he said - wait, I thought it was - geez! My head is spinning...can't think...ugh...seem to remember "...we'll stand down," but OW! The pressure to conform! My brain, my memory, somehow changing...and yes! It makes so much less sense to me now! I play the tape again, and I hear it clearly through the mud: "When they stand up," so far so good, "we'll stand up...AGAIN!"

Whew! So that's what a change in course looks like to our Yaley Cheerleader-in-Chief.

Let's follow this new course across to Nancy Pelosi's House. There, in the middle of a conversation about the "pay-as-you-go" budget proposals, "The New Way Forward" flies up the steps, fills the rotunda, and blows through the caucus conference. Nancy, Steny and the rest sway slightly in their seats while the breeze of this fresh Iraq policy scatters papers about the room and lifts their hair like a gale through a palm tree.

When the wind settles, the group, dishevelled but proud, in chorus boom from the Capitol, "You got your Iraq policy in our budget policy!"

And across the Mall, a whiny twang comes screaming from the White House portico, "Don't you go gettin' your budget policy in my Iraq policy. Heh. Heh."

But behold, someone in between the two, standing atop the Washington Monument, will respond with a triumphant poke at the sky, "That's it! Pay-as-you-go! The policy for fighting the budget and fighting the war! Yes," the guy who thinks he has the pulse on policy will exclaim, "we'll balance the budget with one and balance the body count with the other! It's genius!"

And then a god - who doesn't believe in beltway compromises that sound like they make more sense than they do and accomplish less than they sound like - will send a strategic bolt of lightning and crisp the finger poking fool.

Ahhh, to dream.

But seriously, escalating the war is not the way to elevate the lives of the people whose country and citizens our soldiers have destroyed and killed. We should be escalating the pace of withdrawal and elevating the notion of responsible leadership, but you can't teach a new government something your own government doesn't understand itself. It's so hard to tell these days which government could use a "New Way Forward" more, whatever that means. I guess it's better than the "Old Way Forward". At this point, I'd just settle for either a "New Way" or any "Way Forward."

-PBG

Black Holes: No One Dies Alone

"Saddam Hussein's execution comes at the end of a difficult year for the Iraqi people and for our troops." W

How Does One Death End the Turmoil of Others?

It is as if a trio of black holes opens in the earth to swallow each, single soul, and the vast expanse of light and life in their influence is sucked in by their gravity. Now I stand over these hungry, dark funnels, holding on to the pieces of myself being stretched by the heavy pull of a dead Entertainer, a dead Ex-president and a dead Dictator.

In the universe of the Entertainer, there is joy in the loss because even those who slide into the gravity of his void hear his music echo all the way down. When he was laid out in a famous Harlem theatre, the Apollo, it seemed impossible that his repose was not just an act, that he would not just leap out of the box, the house lights go down and the kliegs light the stage as he shook off his slumber, and he would assure us that he feels good. We knew that he would.

Meanwhile, the strained, expanding funerary experience of the Ex-president kept growing to suck us in, like a sad reality show, even if we didn't want it to. Politics may know how to throw a party, but they really know how to throw a funeral. In all the platitudes of the week-long cortege, the one that sticks in my mind is my wife's. "He was the last, least scary Republican president," she said from the slick footing on the edge of the black hole where we stood before we too were sucked in by coverage that lasted almost as long as the man's term as president.

Finally, a quagmire has quickly become a black hole deeper into which we are drawn by the death of the Dictator. As if the field of black holes begun by the deaths of more than 3,000 American service men and women, and astronomical numbers of Iraqis and Afghans killed in the last five years wasn't enough, their universes have now converged to suck in the Dictator's noosed carcass like a snake eating a watermelon.

The problem is, though, that the black hole is even bigger than before, and unfortunately, it is poised to swallow even more bloody fodder the White House now proposes to feed it. We can only hope that Feeder-W (Fiddle-gee-doo) and Feeder-DC (Fiddle-dee-cee) stand so close to the edge as to succumb to the gravity in a pit of their own design.

And because of the expanded gravity created by the Dictator's death, Fiddle-gee-doo's claim that it marks the end of a terrible year unfortunately means it is the beginning of a worse one.

So you best secure all your values. Fiddle-gee-doo and Fiddle-dee-cee are claiming no responsibility for any loss or damage to your values due to the dark vortexes while your ass is parked in their country.

Nothing Fails Like Success

So the Baker-Hamilton Commission decided, among other things, that we must engage in direct talks with Iran and Syria. As loyal readers of this column may remember, we called for the Iraq Study Group to make just such a recommendation (Shaking Hands with Extremists: An Exit Strategy , 22 October, 2006). Since the report's release on Wednesday, this has become one of the commissions most controversial points.

In his press conference with Tony Blair yesterday, President Bush was adamant (shock!) that the United States will not talk to Iran until it steps back from its nuclear enrichment program. Nor will there be any discussions with the Syrians until they stop trying to "de-stabilize" Lebanon.

Not to include regional powers in talks aimed at stabilizing Iraq is stubborn and shortsighted (and not limited to the administration, but more about that later). It also indicates that this administration will only accept a "working" Iraq on its own terms, which, according to the ISG, are no longer attainable.

Still, Bush speaks of his consensus-less success as if it were still just around the corner. He does not admit that success became failure in Iraq years ago. "If we were to fail," he said yesterday, phrasing it as a hypothetical even though it has already happenned, "If we were to fail, that failed policy will come to hurt generations of Americans in the future."

Doesn't that sound like something that should have been said before March, 2003? It appears Bush is setting it up to look like failure will be the future's fault - a future Congress, a future president - and not his own, criminal stubbornness.

And while we await the immediate future Congress and what they will or won't do about Iraq, the Senate Armed Service's Committee questioned the members of the Iraq Study Group yesterday. They also had something to say about engaging Iran and Syria in the process. Not surprisingly, Senator Joseph Lieberman wondered aloud if Iran was willing to "help the United States succeed" in Iraq.

Joe misunderstands the same thing that many who cling to this entanglement do: we are not there for the benefit of the United States. We haven't benefitted at all since Saddam fell. Our goal now is to help the Iraqis succeed, not the U.S.

That is the point of the Baker-Hamilton / Iraq Study Group report: the United States has failed in the goal of stabilizing Iraq. There is no more succeeding. It's a done deal. The report begins with that brutal, honest assessment. That is why we must create a new regional consensus - so Iraq can succeed, in spite of us and the mess our president's policy has made.

If U.S. policy is to have the Iraqis stand up, we need regional cooperation to help hold them up while we crawl out from under their massacred bodies.

-PBG