Thankful At Last / Apologies

The post I wrote yesterday could have been read in a very different way than it was intended, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of my readers took it the wrong way.

It was a Thursday, and I woke up in the usual bad mood. My first thought was: "We're all still complicit in the most horrible crimes. And they're still going on." Then I shuffled off to the bathroom.

Then I realized it was Thanksgiving, and that I had to work all day and teach in the evening. Beautiful.

I was (am) ticked about Obama choosing to leave Bob Gates in charge of the Pentagon. I was (am) ticked about how many people are still in denial about who Barack Obama is, and what he wants, and who he's working for -- even though he has told us as clearly as possible, over and over. I was (am) stunned about the Mumbai attacks, and I was pressed for time. But the blog needed something new.

I was thinking: "Happy Thanksgiving? Thanks for what? Thanks for nothing!" And I wrote a post to that effect.

I didn't realize until much later, after a long burst of hard work and a series of errands, that I do have a large number of things to be thankful for. But they all seem hollow because they aren't shared blessings.

I'm thankful to still have a home. I'm thankful to have a mostly-functional family. Not everyone can say either of these things, let alone both.

I'm thankful to still have a job. Not everyone can say that.

I'm especially thankful to have a job that engages my mind to such a degree that I can occasionally forget, for a moment or two, that we're all still complicit in the most horrible crimes. Not everyone can say that, either.

I'm thankful that my emotions still work. Sad news and sad songs still make me cry -- like a little kid, sometimes. That's rare in adults. But I still have it, along with my thinning gray hair.

I'm thankful to play music. Somehow I left all my guitars in the closet for almost 20 years, but I've got them out again now, and I play them all as often as I can. Last night I practiced acoustic and steel, and taught electric and bass. My classical guitar is in the shop. I am thankful to have all these different guitars, and to be able to play them all. I'm even thankful for the intolerable old man who drilled music theory into my head, against my will, for six long years.

But these are all private blessings. I can't share them with my friends, or my neighbors; some of them I can't even share with my family. And it feels rude -- unconscionably selfish -- to be thankful for so many things that so many other people don't have, and that I can't give them.

After figuring all this out, and settling down a bit, and overcoming some of my anger, I began to realize that I had left something off the list -- something I do share with my friends; something I can share with anyone who wants some.

I'm talking now about my blog, and our community blog, and the group of people, from all over the world, who have congregated around them. It's not the largest group that ever gathered around a blog; and it's not the largest blog either -- so what?

I am thankful to have readers who come back; who care about people they have never even met; who have valuable insights and questions about the world and who value my opinions about it; who leave me comments and send me email and tell me things I never would have thought of myself, some of which make me think, learn, and weep.

Without you, the rest of it would be intolerable. And if my angry post yesterday gave you a different idea, I apologize.

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

Clueless By Design

In the New York Times, Peter Baker and Thom Shanker report:

President-elect Barack Obama has decided to keep Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in his post [...] Democrats close to the transition said Tuesday.

They note that this

will be the first time a Pentagon chief has been carried over from a president of a different party[.]

How audacious!

Is this Change you can Believe in? Or Change you can Hope for?

As an aid to understanding this non-transition, the NYT piece quotes Loren B. Thompson, Chief Operating Officer of the Lexington Institute.

According to Thompson's biography, he

holds doctoral and masters degrees in government from Georgetown University and a bachelor of science degree in political science from Northeastern University.

As Source Watch has noted, Thompson has been quoted in major media, downplaying atrocities committed in Iraq by American troops.

He told the Christian Science Monitor:

You could probably construct an empirical case that US forces are exhibiting more restraint in their treatment of Iraqi civilians than has ever been seen in past wars of similar scale and duration. Almost all of the atrocities that have been alleged involve small units deliberately disobeying rules of engagement and the orders of senior officers.

We know this is not true.

He told the San Francisco Chronicle:

When you look at the circumstances of whom we send and what we expect them to do, it's surprising we don't have more of those cases.

If this is true, it's a powerful indictment. War apologists like to say, in one way or another:

It's a war: What do you expect? Wars inevitably produce atrocities. Get over it.

On the other hand, if all wars produce atrocities, then they shouldn't be waged casually, or on false pretenses, should they?

Regarding the Obama team's decision to keep Robert Gates in charge of the Pentagon, Loren B. Thompson told the New York Times:

I really can’t begin to understand from a political point of view how Barack Obama, a person who got the nomination because he ran against the Iraq war, can keep around the guy who’s been in charge of it for the last two years.

There are plenty of political observers who do understand it, of course, and some who saw it coming a long time ago. But the New York Times cannot possibly quote any of them --- any of us.

Why not? Because we're not part of the established order? Because we might tell too much of the truth?

~~~

Heather Wokusch, at Atlantic Free Press, writes an open letter to the president-elect:

To be honest, Obama, you lost me when you voted for the PATRIOT Act reauthorization in 2006. You lost me again when you voted for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) amendment in 2008. And you lost me every single time you voted for yet more war funding.

Don't even get me started on your vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout.

I cast a ballot for you in November ...

And so did millions of others.

And now we will all get what they deserve.

~~~

In honor of the cluelessness around us, and in recognition of the day when we celebrate our genocide against the people who lived in North America before it was "discovered", I've made a list of all the things that we -- as Americans and as citizens of the world -- have to be thankful for today:

1.
2.
3.

Our so-called enemies may have a shorter list.

To comment on this post, please click here and join the Winter Patriot community.

Two Conspiracies, No Theories

We're rapidly approaching the 44th anniversary of the JFK assassination.

Some people still think about that, and I'm one of them.

JFK's death changed my life forever, in many ways -- "some forever, not for better" as the Beatles sang.

And it chills me to see the anniversary fall on Thanksgiving, but here it comes.

Although I rarely write about it, I probably know more about the murder of John F. Kennedy than I do about any other historical event.

And it's difficult for me not to notice the parallels between that national tragedy and the other one, the more recent one.

Noticing these parallels makes me a multiple-conspiracy theorist, a moonbat lunatard leftwit nutball and so on, according to the keepers of the imperial gates. So be it.

Nobody in his right mind would write about such things. But nobody in his right mind would read this blog. So we should be ok.

Perhaps we can talk more about the assassination itself in another post; for now I have a few simple points to make.

That the assassination was the result of a conspiracy is beyond doubt. Some people suspected as much in the immediate wake of the crime, and many more joined them in the ensuing years. These people have been consistently derided in the mainstream media -- but they have been right all along.

To understand the scope and depth of the plan to kill the President, it's best to think of the murder and the ensuing coverup not as a single conspiracy, but as two separate conspiracies.

These two conspiracies certainly overlapped, but they were very different in many ways, including size and duration.

The conspiracy to kill the president involved relatively few people and was relatively short. Nobody knows exactly when the planning began, although some researchers suggest it began in 1959. Clearly the conspiracy to kill the President came to "fruition" on November 22, 1963, and then it was over.

But the conspiracy to hide the crime has involved many more people and continues to this day.

It is not correct to say (as some do) that the conspiracy to hide the crime began on the day of the assassination, or even (as some believe) two days later, when Jack Ruby killed the suspected assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.

On the contrary, the seeds of the coverup were carefully prepared along with the murder itself, and they came to life when the President died.

The shooters, the men who actually killed Kennedy, had little or nothing to do with the coverup.

Some people think of "coverup" and "conspiracy" interchangeably, but there's an important difference: Many of the people who were involved in the coverup were not part of the conspiracy.

And some of them played their parts without knowing there was anything wrong with what they were doing.

For instance, Walter Cronkite, America's most trusted newsman, told the country the official story of the JFK assassination from his anchor desk at CBS News.

"Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy," he told us. "The killer was a communist."

"He acted alone."

"Jack Ruby killed Oswald for the good of the country."

"He wanted to spare the President's widow the trouble of testifying against the shooter."

Walter Cronkite was part of the coverup. And we believed his every word.

Was Cronkite part of the conspiracy? I don't think so. He was just reading the news. But he was getting bad information.

A lot of people were getting bad information.

Some of the people actually involved in the assassination, especially those actively involved in the coverup, were getting bad information as well, and others were taking orders.

It's not necessary to bring people into "the conspiracy" if you can fool them, or if you can give them orders.

In fact, if you can give them orders, it's not necessary to give them any information at all.

Many of the people who participated in the JFK coverup did so willingly but unwittingly.

They happily did what they were told, and they never suspected that anything was amiss.

Others sensed that they were involved in covering up something, but they didn't know what it was.

They were following orders, and sworn to secrecy -- even though they didn't know what was going on.

Some "debunkers" have suggested that a huge and elaborate conspiracy would have been needed "to kill the President and get away with it".

To "prove" their point, they hypothesize huge interconnected conspiracies, where everybody knows everything everybody else knows.

And they say "If there's this great conspiracy, why hasn't anybody talked?" But the answers are obvious.

Two Turkeys For Thanksgiving