A Tack on the North Coast (ca. 1985)

It was perhaps at the confluence of the Cuyahoga (Native American for crooked) and the now long dry Coggamaemi (Three Stooges for little wisdom) that Sam Domful (Spoonerist for unspecified, accursed dimwit), having wandered the Lake Erie shore in the Flats searching for place to relieve his beer-tormented bladder, cast a bleary-eyed glance at the watery horizon and first declared so many years ago: "As eyes can plainly see, this here's the North Coast."

Nearly 150 yellow pages listings later, new companies and other would be trendy-settlers continue scrambling to the banner birthed so discomfortably that fateful day. That a comparably inebriated and only slightly more myopic denizen of Newport, Kentucky, could have stared at the Queen City on a foggy day from the south bank of the Ohio River, and come to the same inaccurate conclusion with as much justification mattered not a whit. Uppermost was claiming the honor first.

For just as Mayor Johnson's sole surviving city daily had declared the town a plum while its critics catcalled it a prune or the pits, the street polloi hungered for final, unequivocal first class recognition and demanded for their city metropolitan parity with the great urban centers of the nation. If New York ruled the East coast and Los Angeles dominated the West coast, well by golly gee, Cleveland, they ventured, would be founding king of the North coast.

Sadly that pathetic scurry into bombast only trucked their delusions into full public scrutiny. Their only hope was to retrench even more quickly lest some national comic, perhaps their own Jimmy Brogan for instance, slip the North Coast albatross into a burning river/boy mayor burlesque.

What brought all this silliness so painfully into positive clarity for me at least was our family's trek a year ago camping at various locations around Lake Erie. One afternoon I found myself leisurely awash in the gentle waves on the leeward side of Canada's Point Pelee when the bubble of my unconsidered acceptance of the NC terminology finally burst.

As I floated amiably in the sun-warmed water a picture gradually took shape in the isolation chamber behind my closed eyelids of the Park Guide's description of the Point as Canada's Florida, the southernmost tip of the continental expanse. I rejected the notion outright. First the place was not overrun with retirees from the Garment District. Second everyone knew that Canada had no South. While tobacco grew the length of the Ontario shore, neither a belle, nor a mammy, nor a porticoed plantation mansion had we spied. 

Canada was all North, some parts Norther, and the extreme parts Northmost. With the growing weight of the realization that this side must be the North Coast, chagrined and drowning, I concluded our side must be the South coast. 

I called on all my thrashing skills to survive the eureka experience and hustled home for some elementary cartography. True enough the US had an east coast which ran with jagged but satisfactory continuity from Maine's northern shore to Florida's sputtering Keys.  The Pacific similarly baptized the western states. While Mexico implacably blocked a clear shot at full oceanside, we wisely sidestepped the issue and settled for a Gulf, not a South, coast.

As my eyes rose to the top of the maps my worst suspicions were quickly confirmed. One either conceded that the North coast belonged jointly to Alaskans and Canadians or one pulled a bag over his head. Even according the Great Lakes shoreline coastal status failed as its shores refused to consistently face any one compass point  E, W, N, or S.

But I'm not here just to poke holes in a lot of catchy titles or to deflate vaunting civic aspirations--norsireebob! I know how difficult traipsing aimlessly through trademark jungles for marketable grabbers can be. Since that day at Pelee I've devoted every spare minute to doing just that and I now find myself atop a stash of smasher subs for all those N-Coast misnomers.

For as little as $1K per rechristening plus the 5% kickback from my printer, who's got this terrific package for new business cards and office stationery, I expect to put each of my four munchkins through at least one year of the local poly-dollar tech. You can reach me at New Monnikers, Inc.,
216-555-3072. But if you'll excuse me, the prexy of North Coast Aardvarks is on the line right now.

c. 1985

[The author, eventually to be recognized as a brilliant sonneteer, takes a stab at the forgiveable foibles of his forever inferior native area. Why does he bite the hand he hopes will feed him? "Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment to pay off his gambling debts. I'd just like to make a dent in my Mastercharge."]

Feeling Cynical about American Christmas? Read On!

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20832-laneys-christmas

Love, Peace, and Hope,
James Manista

My Buddy the Tardigrade

Wrinkled old knapsack with a faucet spray face 

You frolic in the vacuum of outer space

Or dance in hyper-boiling heat

Go for decades without water or meat

Withstand the press of oceans deep

And can in killer radiation sleep

It seems if you’re a Tardigrade

In those respects you’ve got it made.

c. J.S.Manista 2013

(The link below explains just what kind of extremophile this is.)
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130306.html

For CHM

For whom I once wrote: "Still thinking about the downward bending trees, our pleasant wandering in Holden Arboretum, and the color of your eyes."

This tree is within 1/4 mile of my home along the nightly dog walk path.

 

Not every branch of every tree always

                Is upward bound except that central spike

                The primal sprout which climbs to claim first light

                Before its brother leaves. Of these some twin

                And rise as forks to share the summer rays.

                Others lower, late to branch, curve hornlike

                Outward, to clear the shades of leafy night.

                These strategies, science concludes, form rules

                Aright for branching in most plants and trees.

                But this branch gnarled back upon itself makes

                No defense of its wayward course. Not walls

                Nor ceilings blocked its trace. For all its bends

                Yet branch it is. Not ours to gripe. Its free

                Haphazard turns suffice for our delight.

Alone in the Doom Womb

"Dominating the Missile & Space Gallery are missiles and a space launch vehicle standing upright in the silo-like facility. The gallery is designed to give visitors a slight feeling of being in an underground silo. The vehicles represent American airmen's proud heritage of nuclear deterrence and the Air Force’s leadership in space.

"Since 1959, U.S. Air Force strategic nuclear-armed missiles and the airmen who operate and maintain them have been on constant alert, on duty 24 hours a day. The gallery features the service’s missiles that helped maintain peace between Cold War superpowers and have shaped the world's strategic balance for more than half a century.

"You will see Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles such as Jupiter or Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, commonly known as ICBMs, such as Titan and Peacekeeper. Today, with significant reductions in nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War, the modernized Minuteman III remains the U.S.'s only land-based ICBM." (National Museum of the U. S. Air Force, virtual tour)

"You're gonna blow your hands off, kid."

I played with rockets. Made 'em. Shot 'em off. Showed 'em off. Taught preadolescent friends and relatives how to make 'em and shoot 'em off--just like my much older brother showed me. Mom warned me, caught me, scolded me, punished me, forbade me, but I still made 'em. They were the most fascinating, dramatic, and easily available entertainment in those years before cable, video games, and down-loadable popular music.

And did I say cheap? In the '50s everybody smoked so even if you couldn't scrape together the few quarters for a box of Ohio Blue Tips you could always cop a book of matches from a fish fry Friday bar. A single paper match, a little foil wrapped around the head, a pin under the foil to shape a nozzle, and, voila! good enough for a six-foot flight if you angled it properly.

OK, so I'm still teaching the young to maim themselves with fire. Those single-match rockets were the easiest and cheapest for a brief thrill. Once you really got into it you made larger tubes by wrapping mailing tape around bolts or rods, sealing the head with strips of tape, filling the tube with match heads packed together--trimmed from paper matches--lower power but cheaper fuel, or if you had just received your allowance, of even more carefully razored blue tips from costlier wooden matches and one and only one match head emerging from the nozzle for ignition. Wire eyelets wrapped around the body and nozzle, a straight portion of coat hanger, and Cape Canaveral had moved to your backyard.

The aunts and uncles were upstairs in the kitchen playing pinochle and jawing about things pointless and uninteresting. Funny, though, how they quickly switched to Polish if we burst in on them unexpected. Below in the basement we were safe from prying eyes, forbidding tongues.

It was that last match head. My younger cousins were visiting. I had supplies. I broke out one of my prized homemade tubes about three inches long which I had already filled with choice blue tips. I held the cylinder in my hands and deftly pushed the last head into the nozzle--my three protoges wideyed as they watched, hanging on my every word. "You gotta be really careful here," I cautioned dead seriously--their jaws now dangling open with astonishment. I used a chemistry set pick to insert the ignitor when the needle slipped and scratched across the head.

Fortunately by this time in my boyhood I had already been bespectacled for extreme nearsightedness. The resulting billows of flame and smoke enveloped my face and head. The heat in my hands seared the tape folds to my unprotected palms and fingertips. The pyrotechnics lasted about three hour-long seconds. No explosion--pure thrust--it would have been a great flight, I thought later, once the pain in my hands and face had subsided to medium agony. To this day I have no idea what became of my cousins.

It was no time to fret about misbehavior, guilt, and flagrant transgression of parental edicts--time to check in with mom, the comforter of last resort. I ran upstairs scared and screaming and asked if I still had a face. "What the hell were you doing down there?" my father exclaimed. The rocket's exhaust had deposited a gray acrid powder over my neck, face, and hands, and I stank of burnt flesh and smoke. Once the sooted glasses slipped away I could tell my eyes still worked. My hearing was fine but my future bode ill as they got over the shock of my appearance and started talking about whether I had finally "learned a lesson."

I'm really glad my mom (who was not a nurse) never went into Burn Unit Care because the first thing she suggested was washing my face and hands. When I complained the match heads embedded in my skin were still hot to the touch, she moved into ointment mode. The dreaded Unguentine remained smeared across my kisser and under my mittened hands for close to a week of sixth grade.

Reputations are built one adventure at a time.

Along came Sputnik

Not more than two years after my adventure above the Soviet Union (always ominously referred to as the Russkies) pulled a fast one on the good ol' U-S-A by rocket launching a smidgeon of a satellite into orbit whose path wouncha know crossed overhead. At night an observer could easily see it traverse the sky shortly after sunset or shortly before sunrise. Or during the day one could detect its periodic beeping on short wave radio.

I said smidgeon because by today's standards it wouldn't be considered more than space junk. Back then it was compared to "the shot heard 'round the world." TV and newspapers announced nothing would ever be the same again. We of the younger set were enthralled that what had only the day before been foolishly romantic science fiction had become an undeniable reality of space adventure and exploration. We had seen farther than our fathers, and I wasn't the only kid who said, "I told you, Pop."

Perhaps because our immaturity (and our natural inclination to idealistic romance adventure) we did not see at first what the elders saw. The world had changed overnight. Early on October 4, 1957, we might have ducked and covered under our desks at school to protect ourselves from an atomic blast delivered by Russkie bombers. Or maybe not. Some of us had visited our local Nike (missile not shoe) sites, which were reputedly able to destroy oncoming bombers. They showed only films of successful interceptions.

How does it feel now that the shoe is on the other foot?

But on October 5, 1957, the elders began as a nation to worry in earnest that the bombs we feared in the bombers might one day come much more quickly via missiles, and we had nothing to intercept them--missiles like the one that sent Sputnik up to shake us in our boots. Our own satellite program, the Vanguard (which was designed to put a grapefruit-sized satellite into orbit compared to the medicine-ball Sputnik), just kept reliably blowing up on the launch pad. 

Worse, as if Sputnik were not enough of a shock, a month and a day later, those conniving Russkies successfully launched Sputnik II--better than eleven hundred pounds of instrumentation with a dog as doomed test pilot. Now this was getting close to nuclear weapon size. We, who had so long been so superior to the Russkies, might easily soon become victims like the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Who knew better than we, that if a nation had the bombs and the way to deliver them, it might just go ahead and use them?

After all, our country did not offer to demonstrate the power of the weapon on some worthless island so that no actual Japanese were vaporized, fried, or irradiated in the process. While I'm certain a demonstration would have terrorized them sufficiently to surrender I'm speculating. Such a "harmless" demo of the bomb, military advisors argued, wouldn't have given us the credibility actual use on people would have. We'll never know, will we? Besides, the dead would be their dead, not our dead. Gotta do what's politically feasible.

We weren't trying for the Nobel Peace Prize anyway. We'd become accustomed to firebombing cities in Germany and Japan and killed non-combatants in the hundreds of thousands with conventional weapons. With the atomic bomb we could accomplish the same numbers with just one bomber.

Actually two other specially constructed B-29s accompanied the Enola Gay on its hellish mission. One, which had no name on the crucial flight but was later called Necessary Evil, did the filming (never say die, Hollywood), while the other ironically called The Great Artiste, was equipped with scientific measuring instruments. If nothing else it showed Americans could be as macho and efficient in killing as the Germans, could be as scientifically accurate and technically involved with their weapons as the Germans, and could kill with as keen an eye to future heroic and horror filled propaganda as, well, the Germans. They and the Japanese were the heartless, soulless enemy, so what's your worry?

"I aim for the stars," (Wehrner von Braun); "but often hit London," (Mort Sahl)

So we, the idealistic, Peace Corps enthusiastic, space travel romantics, grew up watching the adventure unroll before our eyes. Late in 1958 in response to the Sputnik crisis President Eisenhower renamed the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and indicated that we were going a lot farther up than when the decade started.

Then the charismatic young President Kennedy, who had campaigned about a missile "gap" between us and the Russkies (a believable enough fear in the shadow of Sputnik which is not supported by post-Soviet revelations), pulled out all the stops economically and set a goal of getting men (presumably American men) on the moon before 1970.

Ever since Sputnik all the educational folks swung open every door for science students. Industrialists clamored for new engineers. The generation responded. Actually it wasn't NASA who was soaking up all this talent. It was the usual suspects in the military-industrial complex who were funneling a lot of dollars their way while the public was watching the NASA budget. Glamorous test pilots with "the right stuff" became the nation's new heroes.

But if you watched at all closely, every time they got into a vehicle headed for orbit, the vehicles looked a lot like Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles hotrodded with a capsule to carry human pilots who, if the truth be told, piloted damn little. Our first astronaut, Scott Carpenter, basically rode an American version of the German V-2. The Germans could have had one of their own fly to London during the war had they figured how to get him out with a parachute and survive as it came crashing back to earth. Our first orbiting astronaut, John Glenn, rode an early ICBM Atlas modified to bear the capsule Carpenter had tried suborbitally on the Redstone, originally designed to deliver a tactical nuclear weapon over the Soviet borders from NATO states. Gemini used the Titan ICBM.

What's the complaint? Only the military had the rockets. Use 'em, that's efficiency. And it was true that's all we had at the time. To get to the moon one needed rockets even larger than earthbound weapons. That's when the real space romance began. Although one easily guessed that as NASA developed new technical information it was promply shared with the military, and who knew how much of the military prowess still developing in the background wasn't shared with NASA.

Videos recording early launches had terrible optics. In short order the tracking cameras improved vastly. Could it have been that the U-2 cameras which read Russian license plates magically found a new home? Yeah, just don't talk about it.

The Cuban Missile Crisis, The Moon Landing, etc.

Jump forward to the present. We diplomatically got our ass out of WWIII by saving Russian face and our own and by agreeing to step back from the brink and retire some obsolete missiles in Turkey. We got to the moon with computers that haven't a millionth of the computing power in an average PC. The Soviet Union dissolved from causes having nothing to do with President Reagan's blustering. We got in a bunch of wars and won none of them unless you count Grenada. And we took a horrible punch in the snoot from some guys wearing turbans and worshipping some other God.

Now if we fear anything from Russian missiles it is that these new enemies will get enough fissile material to make a "bomb in a suitcase" or a shipping container and treat us to a taste of what we did to the Japanese.

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to visit the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. Just as I've confessed to my love affair with rockets, I'll confess I have a similar one with  airplanes. And not the commercial ones. No, as a peace advocate I'm somewhat embarassed to admit my fascination with warplanes, even though now I look at them very differently than I did as a child. It's one thing to be a pilot and another to be a target. Now I identify more with the target.

It was a habit formed in our youth. In 1948 after watching serials of cowboys dispatching Indians on early black and white TV, we watched the new knights of our own age acing the Nip and the Hun in gun camera films from WWII fighters. It's really the same stuff you see in the Star Wars series--fighters swooping (motions physically impossible in space) and the sounds of weapons (in space there is no sound). George Lucas will admit his inspiration was the fighter footage. So I'm not alone in this delirium.

Toward the end of my visit I wandered alone into the room described below the photograph. I'll confess another thing. Surprise! I'm wildly imagination driven. The room did seem to me as a real missile silo (like I know a real missile silo from my Aunt Zelda)--dark (from the black paint) solitary (in the real thing the only people you'll meet are in the bunkers pretty far away) and cold and dank (as you might feel in a deep concrete container on a wintry day at an Air Force Base in Minot, North Dakota). 

And I know the missiles on display are gutless, weaponless shells, which couldn't hurt anybody unless they broke free of their secure mounts and fell on someone. Only one on display was still in actual readiness--the Minuteman III (one of the relatively smaller missiles painted in white, gold, black, and green). Across the Great Plains states 450 of the Minuteman III are ready in silos to do some high tech killing whenever the word comes down. The sites are "hardened" so as to survive a thermonuclear strike and still pose a realistic threat of retaliation, by actually retaliating.

In my gut it was all too real

Somewhere, out west if not right here before me, was the real killing device so many scientists and engineers had for so many years labored over, tested, written equations I couldn't begin to describe. It wasn't only rocket science, it was nuclear physics too. Another mystery. Then think of the tax dollars enabling all these efforts. What was the goal of all this effort? 

It wasn't to get to the moon. It wasn't to thrill us on a Fourth of July night. These 450 beasts were to travel to the appropriate spots (how could any spot be appropriate?) on the earth to vaporize, fry, and irradiate as quickly as possible as many people as possible for the fewest dollars.

In an earlier iteration the Minuteman III was equipped with MIRVs (multiple, independently targetable, re-entry vehicles, as many as three bombs) which could be released early enough in the trajectory to strike a variety of targets (populated cities) within a given range. OK, maybe one would take out a dam, another an air base, and another a DQ. Sure. You need a city-sized nuke to take out all that concrete block and the picnic tables.

Due, however, to the occasional rationality which possesses some human intellects (a SALT Treaty) the US and the Russians agreed to dismantle their MIRV capacities and settled for a new balance which would allow either one now to blow up the world only 50 instead of 100 times. 

Further this wasn't all of it. We still had bombers which could be used if needed. Our main force was probably located aboard a fleet of roaming nuclear submarines which could deliver perhaps an even more crushing apocalypse. But the submarines and the bombers were not stone cold real in front of me just beyond my reach.

You know, if you don't use 'em it's just been a horrible waste. Not much of a deterrent if you say you're never going to use 'em. The balance works only if each side poses a credible threat. Truth is Herman Kahn wasted a lot of our money and energy thinking about the unthinkable. So much for trusting the warriors. 

I don't believe population bombing ever weakened, much less broke, any nation's will to resist. It certainly had the opposite effect on Great Britain. The strategic bombing of factories, dams, and oil facilities in Europe did have an effect even though the enemy proved remarkably inventive in hiding productive resources and securing alternative energy. But maimed and dead enraged many only to fight harder.

When the new B-29s were shown to be ineffective and imprecise in targeting strategic sites at high levels the generals switched to what they could do--firebomb whole areas--cities just as they had over Germany in Dresden most notably and elswhere. By that time the bloodlust of war had settled in and destruction of cities by fire  seemed as natural as napalm on smaller targets. The pilots didn't see anything from their perch just the flames. 

And we know many tried not to think what was happening on the ground. If they did they thought again of their comrades who had been shot down or sunk by torpedoes, or if all else failed, Pearl Harbor. They started it. It's what worked on the playground when they were a few years younger. Or they came home and just never talked about it. War is doing evil. You'd rather they do it to us?           

The early films of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki made as the first American troops entered Japan were deemed so horrific they were not made available for showing to the American public until decades later. No sense in needlessly stirring up moral outrage. The war had ended.

Bomb, bomb, bomb, . . . bomb, bomb Iran . . Oh, Bomb Ira-a-an

In my lifetime there's just been so much crazy talk about how the US is a superpower, how its might is unchallengeable, how its armed forces are the finest and unbeatable, how we are exceptional and lead by example. But the record of military involvement doesn't support the chatter. Except for a couple of banana republic incursions we have not achieved the promise of "peace through strength."

The tragically too-soon deceased young comic Bill Hicks based a bit of his routine on some of the military publicity promoting the first Iraq war. After depicting a "smart" bomb being directed precisely into a stairwell in Iraq, he flipped the imagery to our feeding starving people in famine-stricken Africa: "Do ya think they could use that technology to pop a banana into some guy standing in the desert with his mouth open?" He motioned his hand as if it was the incoming banana and dove it directly into his mouth.

As crazy as the notion was it made you think: what could we have done had the war money been spent on the troubles that cause wars instead of the threatening and killing that promote wars? Wouldn't that be an effective military? Wouldn't that be leading by example? Wouldn't that be exceptional? 

No, no, no, they'd scream. That would be taking a terrible risk. We're not a nation of gamblers!

We are a nation of gamblers. But we're not paying any attention to the gamble. We've got these very real weapons with very real people trained and dedicated to use them and very real politicians who are gambling with their mouths every day they talk about our military might. The chips are our tax dollars, our lives and those of our children, and the lives of billions over the planet.

You want to keep on gambling on war and death? Personally I favor gambling on peace and life.


[As if in response:http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20747-missile-launching-in-the-dark]

Notes from the Front (ca. 03/26/2011)

stopthesewars.org

Exactly how I happened on the stopthesewars.org website is lost in the shallows of my aging memory. It probably branched from something like truthout.org when it first came to my attention that our country actually had a vital war protest movement dedicated to nonviolent resistance. Veterans for Peace, an organization of veterans mostly of Vietnam, but also the Gulf and current actions, were proposing a nonviolent gathering and civil resistance action for December 16, 2010, at the White House fence in front of Lafayette Park.

As a young man of the '60s [babe of the '40s] I expected some coverage in anticipation of the march, as well as national coverage on the day. What naiveté. Not a hint of rumblings. The weekend came and went with barely a line of attention on NPR, much less CNN and the mainstream media. I had to go back to the website to find out what really happened.

One hundred and thirty-one American citizens, mostly military, got arrested at the White House fence and none of the major media even took notice. I couldn't believe it. OK, it's not a million man march. It's not Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, or even Glenn Beck in numbers [who that previous summer had well attended public turnouts on the mall]. But American veterans got arrested by their own government, by the same government for whom they had placed themselves in harm's way. Someone should have noticed. Either an antiwar sentiment was awakening [or my own awareness was finally developing] and this was a small beginning or the antiwar forces had dribbled down to these last few.

Something's happening here, but the media ain't making it clear

The only answer I thought satisfactory was this failure of the news was willful denial of coverage. I'm no conspiracy theorist. I find conspiracy theories--like we never went to the moon--always involve stretches of the imagination that snap the rubber bands between theory and reality, such as requiring us to believe the thousands of people working on the lunar landings were all "in on it" and no two of those thousands of lips ever slipped.

Were people so tired of hearing about the wars they wouldn't care about a protest by the soldiers themselves? or did the media require larger trigger numbers before they'd muster a remote van for a four hour event? I decided then to join the Veterans for Peace in their next effort whether it was local or out of town.

Birth(?) of an activist

I beat the bushes but wasn't able to find anything on the local scene--defective search on my part, poor publicity by those active, or maybe the moon was in the wrong house.  I opted against individual protest and settled on joining with the VfP for their next national action in the capitol on March 19.

As the date approached I asked the Presbytery of the Western Reserve for help in drumming up a peace advocate to accompany me on the drive. Maybe I asked too late. Presbyterians are notorious for scheduling months ahead--some even unable to squeeze in timee for their own deaths. Two days prior to departure I heard from a Ms Peggy Kacerek who related she had participated in the December 16 action and had been intending to take part again on March 19. Although she deferred on the driving she said she could help keep me awake along the way.

I was grateful. I knew I could get to DC without a map but would need help navigating the city. I welcomed her familiarity with the area since she had been at the last event. Likewise I looked forward to being filled in on the details that would make the difference between seeming a neophyte and seeming experienced.

I proposed we leave early enough on Friday to scout up a place for the night to get some sleep and be ready for the information session the next morning at St. Stephen's Church, Newton and 16th N, which was 'way north of the White House and where others arriving with sleeping bags were to crash for the night. All my family sleeping bags had been sold at garage sales or given to the children as they left for college. Peggy took on the task of getting us a place within walking distance of Lafayette Park.

Risky business

While I drove she asked if I intended to get arrested, as she did not last time nor would she this time. I said I had considered it and would likely volunteer when the time came. Of course I was free to make up my mind. No one would judge another's dedication based on whether they did or did not participate in the civil resistance.

It was the first (but not the last) time I had qualms about the wisdom of having a 68 year old man with a chancy lower alimentary canal get dragged across the pavement and pitched unceremoniously into a paddy wagon. Little compares with the feeling of heroism trickling down your leg.

International hostelling with the youthful hordes

I wasn't feeling all that many years until a young clerk at the hostel said, "Excuse me, sir," as he passed me at the elevator. I looked quizzically at him and asked, "Do I really look that old?"  He replied with a gentle friendly smile that seemed to say, "You make my middle-aged teachers look young." We laughed and I headed up to my room.

It was 11 PM and none of the ten bunks in my room was yet occupied I discovered after working up the courage to turn on the light. My bed, number ten, was an upper, close to the door and the bathroom (thank God). I would need to remember my key card to get back in. With my usual traveling foresight I had only the clothes on my back. Getting ready for bed was completed by shedding my tennies.

The young people were young but neither brash nor loud. Various non-American style clothes revealed their foreignness as did their speaking languages other than English. They were quiet and brief in using the light and it wasn't long before I awoke actually having slept some part of the night.

At breakfast we met some VsfP--Tom recognized by his tee shirt and Richard who approached us later. We rode together in my car to the meeting at St. Stephen's.

What did you go to the desert to see?

Not quite certain what as to what I expected--men in formal military dress, older, dignified in bearing, authoritative in experience, no, nor not exactly hippies either. They were a variety from ragtag to casual, all ages, both sexes, gray hairs and shaved heads, here and there some military garments, camouflage pants or jackets with the names clipped to the pockets. Lots of VfP tee shirts. I bought one to cover the black Red Cross tee I had thought to wear as a sombre note. After a few general questions came the inevitable, "Raise your hands if you're willing to get arrested." Hesitantly I raised my hand.

"No one will think you are any less committed to the cause if you decide against getting arrested," stated Elliott Adams, President of Veterans for Peace, as he stood on the stage barefoot. "But there are some things you need to know beforehand." he explained. At the December 16th event Adams had used a bicycle lock around his neck to secure himself to the White House fence. The Park Police had been very careful about removing the lock and had generally treated those arrested with dignity and respect, but Adams agreed to their suggestion that he should not use that tactic again. The permit allowed us to gather and to parade but not to refuse to move when ordered.

If we did refuse, he explained, we'd be handcuffed and taken by bus to the Anacostia jail for booking--mugshots, fingerprints, and the usual bureaucratic delay before release. And though they had been genteel the last time, Adams clarified, there were no guarantees they'd be so again. Should they slip up and be antagonistic, abrupt, or worse, we were to remember our commitment to nonviolence.

After processing we would likely be offered an opportunity to pay a fine and waive the offense--very like paying for a parking ticket--$100 cash and we would be released. Other Veterans for Peace would be waiting outside to take us back to DC. Failure or refusal to fork over the fine and we'd be assigned a court date for arraignment and maybe be released that same day, or more often, the next.

So the maximum for civil resistance was anywhere from a Franklin to considerably more for return trips and trial--if it ever came to that. For the December refusers all charges were dropped by court order on January 4, 2011. Again nothing was guaranteed. I leaned over to Ms. Kacerek and whispered, "I don't think I'll be getting arrested after all." Probably a wise choice for a neophyte activist, I thought, but I really started to feel like a schmuck.

In the end I approached Adams about how badly I felt about deciding against getting arrested. He  graciously reassured me how that was a decision only the person affected could make.

I also asked about the curious absence of Black veterans in this group. Nobody's excluded, he said, and there distinctly are organizations of Black veterans. They have no obligations to join with us. If we wanted an integrated demonstration, it would be wiser for us to join them. Curious explanation I thought but I remembered I'm just a beginner, and shut my mouth.

A perfect day for a hanging or worse

Brisk but getting warmer, the day was marked with a clear blue sky and the promise of moderate temperature. I told Peggy how much the weather reminded me of September 11th and of my daughter's narrow escape from disaster in lower Manhattan that day.

Emily worked in a building adjacent to the World Trade Center. She was ascending from the subway a little late for work when she saw one of the towers in flames high above. Noting the spectacularly clear skies she concluded that an airplane striking it was probably not an accident. Not a good day for work either, she thought as she began running away from the area with the rest of the crowd.

Some of the victims had already jumped from the windows. A few people on the street stopped to buy cheap disposable cameras to take historic pictures as they fled.

Then the second plane hit and the ground shook below them as they ran screaming. Still trying to outrace the dust thrown up by the towers' collapse eventually she reached a friend's office in midtown. She told me later that she was unable to sleep for about two weeks after.

Remarkable, I thought, not every horror occurs in darkness and wintry gloom. I had no idea what to expect.

Not every heartfelt cry is eloquent

True to the protocols of organizational behavior the addresses scheduled for noon began at 12:20--not at all bad as these things go. I thought the crowd thin for a national level complaint. I estimated about two thousand at the most--the website later pegged it at 1,500.

Each speaker identified themselves, the group represented, and how the wars affected them particularly. CodePink, a women's protest movement, stressed how the wars were draining money from the nation's critical needs for schools, families, and children. Veterans from VfP and other veteran groups appealed to stop the unwarranted killing and dying and urged bringing the soldiers home now.

Some called out stridently to the White House, this weekend serendipitously vacant, and placed the blame for the wars' continuation on the Obama administration. (Ms. Kacerek pointed out that because the Obamas were not at home during this protest the White House rooftop was free of sharpshooters who had been stationed there during the December resistance). Initiated by the Bush-Cheney lies, the wars had been too easily adopted by President Obama who, despite his campaign rhetoric, had done a sorry job of pulling out of Iraq and had left thousands of technical and contractual workers who continued to fight and die. No one raised the issue of Candidate Obama's campaign promises to revive the fight in Afghanistan.

Several spoke in defense of Bradley Manning and likened him to patriots like Nathan Hale who was labelled a traitor by the British.

I must ask the reader to forgive my inability to cite statements accurately to each speaker in turn. While I listened to the words I was visually distracted by the numerous petition appeals circulating among the crowd, along with miming clowns, lefties of every stripe--Revolutionary American Communists to Libertarian Ron Paul devotees passing out handbills--and audibly distracted by children behaving as they would at a picnic, and others who, like those irritating folks at the movies who think they're in their own living rooms, chatter continuously through the entire production. And by lots of people (FBI, maybe?) who wandered amongst us recording faces with their cellphones and video cams.

What few were ready to hear

Ralph Nader attributed the war to corporate domince of politics and to the virtual destruction of our democracy. Surprisingly for me he counseled that the solution lay not in demonstrations before the imperial White House but rather in defunding the wars through convincing another 150+ congressmen to vote as 67% of the citizens think as shown in recent polls--that these wars are not worth it. He suggested antiwar groups pattern themselves after "the most effective lobbying group in the country--AIPAC," the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

They were in the congressional offices in DC and their local offices back home. They were at their dinners and all over their mail, email, and phones. The message was the same everywhere: "You, honorable congressperson--could soon not be in your vaunted office without the votes we can deliver or withhold." Compliant representatives would reply, "Sure, I'll vote as you wish. Just get off my back."

While sufficiently  cheering and appreciative of the effort before him, Nader told us we've got it all wrong. This isn't about ethics, or good judgment, or reasonable foreign policy, or the blood shed in vain by our sons and daughters, or the crimes against the victims, or the right or wrong of war. It's about making politicians shake in their boots about their vanity. Corporations can offer them endless campaign dollars, but only real grass roots organizations can give them the votes they need to stay in office.

I knew enough about community organizing to know what a tough slog it is to muster up a block of votes and see they get up off their butts to face the rain on election day--or even just to complete absentee ballots. Heroism replaced by tedium. The wars might just be over by the time the momentum's built. And that's just the election. We'd have to hold their feet to the fire to get a defunding vote in the majority.

Maybe the Tunisian was right. Maybe it would require somebody flammable.

Where were the churches?

I've admired Chris Hedges' writing since I first read War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning several years ago. I felt he would be a powerful and eloquent voice for this event.  While the noisy in the crowd squealed like swine before pearls, the rest of us were taken again by Hedges' proclamation of the power of hope against the madness of war.

For me his speech this time stressed the notable absence of the churches' opinions and efforts against the crushing, enduring evil of the wars, the horror they have inflicted and continue to inflict in the victim countries. "Far more deserving of respect, reverence even," Hedges went on to say, "were the soldiers who stand up to say, 'Stop! No more! Not in our name!' today and every day until the killing ceases. Every resistance counts toward that day whether note is taken or not. Good will call unto good until hope, so often unreasonable on its face, succeeds and evil succumbs."

I saw one lady in a collar. Maybe a few pastors were there in plainclothes. As for today's Mertons and Berrigans? Nowhere to be seen.

Solemnly we stroll along

Then we were instructed to line up in ranks of four and to proceed solemnly to the beat of a single drum and to follow the parade route--Pennsylvania to 17th to I Street to 15th and back to Pennsylvania where those to be arrested would separate from the rest of us and take positions along the fence.

Peggy and I were too far back to hear the drum but we tried to keep in fours and silent. Police barricades kept the traffic away. Again the noxious cameras and cellphones proliferated--but not one shoulder cam with an NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, or PBS logo emblazoned on its side.  Willful denial of coverage?

I watched the teenagers ahead of us reverse-kick each other as they walked and talked. Could they define solemn? I thought and realized what an old fart I had become.  American kids couldn't understand. Their house had never been broken into in the night by soldiers who shot up their family. Pray God it should never happen. Their little brothers were in no danger of being killed from a helicopter while picking up firewood for their mom's campfire. Pray God it never happens. But it does. Miles away. Does it matter how many miles away if your father or brother or son is the one with his finger on the trigger or even if just your tax dollars are paying for him to be there?

The young men who do the shooting come home. Some of the best witnesses to the madness and the horror come home in body bags, and we can only speculate what they'd say of how they died or what they'd seen or what they'd done. Some of the others come back with their brains mashed against the inside of their skulls so powerfully and so often by IEDs that they will never be as before they first left home.

Still others come back and say the wars are pointless. No one listens to them because their left breasts are not bannered with brass and ribbons of every hue and stars do not limn their epaulets. They are the ones marching ahead of us and why I kept silent.

Anticlimax

We separated at the fence. I thought, "Wheat to the right. Chaff to the left." The police adjusted barricades to enclose those who did not move fast enough. For a moment it was hard to tell which side you were on, but if we asked they calmly told us. The mounted police moved in. Horses--God love 'em--did their horsey thing, and although I had great affection for horses, this was the first time I experienced the fear their bearing down on a crowd could rouse.

Why do police uniforms always have to make them look like Mussolini? These guys weren't Bobbies. They had guns and batons. Guns in holsters, yes, but they had them. We had signs. What kind of threat did signs pose? Some crudely hand drawn, some printed by union  printers, and many not even stapled to sticks. They were wire-tied to light cardboard tubes. Preteen boys might slap each other like clowns with the weapons we carried.

Who was so threatening? The CodePink ladies with gray hair? The old guys clearly too tired from the march to put up any kind of fight? The singing protestors? For this crowd you needed guns? Well, you never know. Nobody misbehaved. A few slumped on being touched who had to be dragged to the incarce-mobiles. Was it resistance? No, it was gravity and just not helping police get them to the buses. 

By now the afternoon sun was quite direct and warm and I could feel its energy on my face. I was feeling wobbly. I really didn't want to be at any scene where my pusillanimity could be documented. I suggested to Peggy we could leave before the last of the volunteers was arrested. Then we could be home by 11 and sleep at last in our own beds.

On Monday the 21st I found the count of those arrested at the White House fence: 113. There had also been on Sunday a demonstration at Quantico in support of Bradley Manning; arrested there: 31. None of this was in the papers or on the major channels. Democracy Now! had its story ready to go that Monday. Stopthesewars.com had the facts on its website the same day.

I thought a lot about the significance of the policy of willful denial of coverage. What kind of event would force the American public's nose into the truth about our wars? Maybe if we got Charlie Sheen to immolate himself in Tahrir Square?  Maybe.

Love, Peace, and Hope,

James Manista

[Post-note: Looking back on these comments today, November 27, 2013, it's quite apparent just how naive I was. This was after all my first adult, public act as a war resister, and it's hardly a document of heroism.

In college I had read a lot about the immorality of our use of population bombing in World War II even before we dropped the atomic bombs. I couldn't accept the justifications given for killing non-combatants, not just because it breached the niceties of the rules of war, but because it could never be anything other than needless, vengeful slaughter. Remember, I was often cautioned, nothing in war can be moral. Every rule must be set aside until you finally triumph. Then you could safely go back to all your queasy morality.

A couple of years later I had to appear for the draft for the war in Vietnam. I prepared to make a case for conscientious objection not to war in its entirety but to what I maintained were again morally unacceptable methods which were known to be in wide use--free fire zones and torture. As described, the case would not qualify for CO status and I'd have to go to jail. At my medical exam, though, they "weighed my glasses" and found me unfit to be given any sort of weapon until the enemy came to my house.

My relative pacifism had become moot procedurally without any suffering on my part. I turned to making my life and staying away from the politics of war and peace until after my wife had died and my children had all moved on.

My hope today is that it is never too late to work against war.]

A Day Late and Several Billion Dollars Short

I guess, like so many of us, I can't be blamed since it was the first one. But before I get into the topic--What do 1 billion of the world's humans do that bears do? That's right--Poop in the woods--more properly called "open defecation."

Certainly you've seen film clips about people living in slums, ramshackle hovels with corrugated tin roofs and cardboard for walls. Have you ever wondered why the background description always comments that the streets are "running sewers"? What do you think those people have in those two-rooms (if they're lucky two rooms) the finest sparkling Kohlers, Totos, or American Standards? And if they did, do you seriously think they'd be connected to running water--or the proper schedule piping to drain the stuff away?

It's only been a surprising few centuries that we of the First World stopped heaving shit by the bucketsful out of second story windows into the streets below. Even though we got a handle on the outhouse our streets were still festooned with horse droppings for another century.

Yesterday was the first UN World Toilet Day. When you stop laughing, think again how lucky you are to be living in a place where basic subsistence permits your pooping safely:

http://truth-out.org/news/item/20089-world-toilet-day-no-joke-for-billions-without-sanitation

Love, Peace, and Hope,
James Manista