RantsCounterRants: The Perfect Plan -- vive la difference!

After thinking about it for a bit, this is a perfect plan.  Highly workable, it gets the US away from the leading edge of the fray, puts France and Germany in the drivers’ seat – all the while forcing Iraqi compliance under the terms of UN Resolution 1441 without firing a shot. 

Mr. de Villepin's counteroffer, while it ignores the issue of UN resolve being laughably irresolute, may nonetheless be an opening for an agreement among council members - an agreement that still could allow President Bush to topple Saddam Hussein's regime, but do so peacefully.

France's idea of an ever-expanding "capacity" for inspections could, at some point, lead to an effective UN occupation, led by US troops as guards or even inspectors.

The Hussein regime would be both boxed in physically and humiliated in the eyes of Iraqis and other Arabs. Either Hussein would fall or pick a fight he would lose.

Damn.  This could actually work.  The buzz is already starting in the press; let’s hope Rummy and Dubya get smart and save themselves some face by not letting the press get too far ahead of them.  As of today, they were still struggling with getting a clue.

If they act quickly, Rummy could save himself another scolding from Joschka Fischer, too. (It doesn’t appear to be mentioned in the article linked, but seeing it on NBC evening news was amusing!)

7:08:21 PM    comment []

Pandora’s Box…

My last post inadvertently opened up Pandora’s Box, in a round about way, through comments left behind. Christopher Key’s war poem jogged a couple of memories that I’d kept buried. 

The first: my uncle’s return from ‘Nam.  He went early in the war; he was there only a couple of years.  I don’t even remember with which branch of the Armed Forces he served; I don’t think I want to ask too many questions even for the purposes of refreshing my memory.

He was my favorite buddy, the kind of uncle who represented fun incarnate.  We’d squeal and giggle non-stop when he arrived at the house to visit.  I remember vaguely being disturbed about him leaving to go somewhere; I remember preparing and sending reel-to-reel tapes with birthday and Christmas greetings for him to play wherever he was.  It made little sense to a child less than five years old, each action filed in isolation, discontinuous.

He came back in the mid-Sixties, to stay with us on return for a while.  That first day, while unpacking his clothes, I sat on my haunches next to his suitcase watching as he slowly put his things in the closet.  For some reason, he stopped, he stared at me as if I was someone else – there was something enigmatic and panicky in his eyes.  I was immediately scared for some unknown reason.  He asked me not to sit that way; he looked away.  I had the impression he was going to cry.  Mom came into the room about that time; there were a few quick words, the gist of which I couldn’t catch but disturbing enough that I left the room quickly.

Mom tried to explain later that I reminded him of children he saw while he was away; that’s why my uncle was upset.  It made sense, being part Asian and brown-skinned as a child; most of the kids in my California neighborhood were dark haired and brown-skinned, weren’t all kids that way?  It wasn’t until years later that the implications of this made any sense.

My uncle has since gotten married, had children, is now preparing to retire.  But I’ve always had the feeling that he’s never been the same happy-go-lucky uncle I knew as a little one, that some part of him didn’t come back from ‘Nam.  He’s never seemed entirely happy since, always a bit of him unengaged, a bit distant and hanging back.  Some who've only known him since 'Nam may not be aware of it, but there have been little pieces of debris to remind the rest of us that he's not complete.  

I know before he left he’d been a fine artist – only a few small pieces remain to remind us of that young and highly promising talent.  Since 1966, there’s been nothing, not one chicken scratch.  That part of him didn’t make it back.

I still don’t know what it was all about, and I’m not certain I want to know.  I do know I don’t want to see a generation of people come back and live this way, haunted, somehow here yet missing in action.

The second memory was not quite a decade after the last troops came home from ‘Nam.  I was a very young adult in one of my first jobs.  Our secretary-bookkeeper for this small business was married to a man who always seemed a bit quiet and reticent, yet terse; I knew him to be a Viet Nam vet from chats with his wife at lunch hours.  After more than a year of knowing this guy, seeing him pick up his wife daily, I cannot remember us talking much.  Just polite greetings, nods of the head, acknowledgments. 

Something about the schedule was different one day; I can’t recall the details of how or why we conversed, she and I and her husband John.  Maybe we were talking about his new American-made pickup truck, I don’t remember.  For some reason, the subject of Viet Nam came up, intertwined irrationally with Japanese automakers.  John went off on a rant about shooting them all, killing them, he’d gladly do it. Gawddamned gooks, all of them, should have killed them all in ‘Nam…

He was sweating, little beads on his upper lip, his eyes shiny, jaw tense.  More words and emotion than I’d ever seen from him, packed into one brief exchange.  Perhaps his wife must have sensed my distress; she had to calm him down, shoo him out the door.  We never talked about it afterwards.

It took me all evening to calm the sick-sensation I had in my stomach.  Never had I heard an adult mouth the word “gook” in my life; even when written it was somehow less malevolent than it was when uttered mid-diatribe.  The Asian part of me curled up inside, fearfully hiding as knot in my belly.  I never talked with him again, not even to make nice at Christmas parties.  I couldn’t look him in the eye again, not even when making polite greetings.  I reassured myself at the time that it wasn’t his fault, cannot be held responsible any more than a dog can be blamed for contracting rabies…

Every once in a great while, I wonder where she is, if her daughter has grown and gone to college.  I’ve tried not to think about John at all.  Until today.

Now I’m wondering if a generation of people will come back infected with a new kind of rabies.  I wonder what scars will appear on the souls of family members who serve now, waiting for deployment.

Now that I've looked at this, will I be able to stuff all this back into the box?

4:08:44 PM    comment []

Poetry and war: what do you think?

Occasionally I read BookReporter.com’s newsletter; it doesn’t offer a lot to provoke thought, but it does serve as a reminder to me to check out new books and re-read books I’ve not touched in a while.

This month’s issue has a column by Jesse Kornbluth on Poetry and war which is more stimulating; it also solicits feedback:

• What kind of poem would you like to read now: pro-war or anti-war?
• Do you agree that all poems, regardless of their subject, have a political point-of-view?
• When you see that a poem (or a song lyric) has a political message, does that please you -- or turn you off?
• Was the White House naive to think it could invite writers to Washington and have them talk only about the non-political aspects of poetry?
• Have you written a poem about war? If so, may we read it?

This could be a good opportunity, both to be heard and to hear what others are thinking about war.  What do you think?

1:59:32 PM    comment []

What else was in that message?  (besides a hint that Secret Service is slacking on the job...)

10:20:01 AM    comment []