Traditional Historic American Values - Part 10: None Dare Call It Treason
18/November/2009 12:24 Filed in: Weekly
Column
Volume 11, Issue 45
>>PDF copy
>>Print view
After I finished Part 9, of this series a couple of weeks ago, I thought I was pretty much through with the concept of Traditional Historic American Values, at least in the journalistic, or even the blogosphere sense. The next day with the shootings at Ft. Hood, Texas, changed all of that. First of all it must be said that this was a guerilla attack not a terrorist attack. The only place I have found that reported properly is in James Taranto’s WSJ Best of the Web email. In that respect Major Hasan is to stand trial as a murderer and perhaps for treason. Furthermore I felt that the President’s response and later speech in Texas showed reluctance to address reality that even his best-prepared remarks could not hide.
I was still struggling with how to prepare this last article of the series for Veterans Day when Tuesday afternoon I received a call from my friend Jim, who accompanied me a little over a year ago, to pick up my motorhome in Texas. He stated that he felt so good after finishing Julia Duin’s book on “Quitting Church” that he just had to call and state it was nice to feel he was not alone.
A guerilla attack on American soil, American church leaders so out of touch that they think Christianity is primarily about making one feel good about a progressively psycho world, and we haven’t even gotten into some serious reality.
Hence between the two concepts and real life in general, I was pretty much at a loss on how to begin to finally conclude this ten part series on Traditional Historic American Values. In some perspective we have an American President who feels very comfortable in being everything to everyone, except the military’s Commander in Chief. This is contrasted with a long term Christian man, who for the now considers himself part of a community that has freed itself from the doctrinal sterility of American Evangelicalism. What are this world and this country coming to?
So the President took off for Asia, while his Attorney General took the heat for bringing the 9-11 true terrorists to New York City for a civilian trial. Don’t they understand that these thugs are not covered by the Geneva Convention? Why are they giving them special rights like, lobbyists, investment bankers, and other domestic terrorists?
In Asia he seems to have kissed away his second major goal, the cap and trade energy tax, in favor of his worst fandango, gross deficit spending, all the while continuing to dither on what to do with Afghanistan, a problem much too small to fit within the global concept of financially too big to fail. Perhaps it is that contrast between New York and Washington DC centered special rights – special interests, and Islamists, who believe that they, the too big to fail cronies, all are atheistic infidels, which forces the dithering reality about the consequences.
To use a constructive metaphor, the President seems to be continually trying to shoot himself in the foot, when the proper response would be just to take out his gun and take aim at the bad guys. The problem that he is finding out however, just as with Major Hasan, the President and his guerilla forces are a definite minority. Furthermore virtually all-successful guerilla wars first capture the countryside before moving to urban centers. In this guerilla war, Obama’s progressive base only hold portions of the right and left coasts and Chicago politics, and the great American fly-over is becoming increasingly agitated with what it sees as not just liberal, leftist, or socialist, but communist underpinnings of his social wealth redistribution plans.
Now shooting oneself in the foot is not a metaphor to be taken lightly or whimsically. For early in my senior year in high school such an incident happened to me. I was deer hunting with my uncle, and my dad. We were walking down a trail to go somewhere and I was in the middle. I was carrying my grandfather’s Model 94, 30-30 Winchester. There was a slight skiff of snow covering the ground, a moderate breeze, and everything was quite peaceful.
All of a sudden there was a huge explosion and I felt like my foot was pinned to the ground. When I looked down, around my boot was a radiating pattern of what looked to be carbon highlighted on the white snow. When I move the boot the pure white place where the boot had been, added a surreal contrast.
I walked and was helped to the car, which was not all that far away. I really felt no pain, but was intensely scared. From there it was a rapid trip to the hospital emergency room. Once everything began to flow back to reality, what had happened was the bullet somehow had miss fired and had gone down through the rubber overshoe and the leather shoe inside. The bullet itself had just taken off the skin on the outside of my little toe, nothing more. The doctor said that if the bullet had even grazed the bone in the toe itself the effect would have probably taken off at least half of my foot. It was a miracle.
If you don’t believe in miracles, stop for a moment, take off you shoes and socks and see how much meat is on your little toe, before it hits the bone. Then realize that that thin layer of skin was removed with a non-aimed 150 or more grain, 30 caliber bullet only inches from the rifle’s muzzle.
Now what I am beginning to see is that just has with my foot shooting experience, and President Obama’s continuing foot shooting experiences, is neither of us expected it/them to happen. The major difference, is mine was a once in a lifetime experience and it is over, the President doesn’t seem to understand the reality of the situation and there is nothing in his background that should give him a clue.
Despite all the spin that you hear today from both the conservative right and the progressive left, the first major causality for the fall of America’s world greatness was the decision to develop a professional military. If you look at the demise of all major empires, their fall began when they decided they were too good to fight their own wars. If you move that into a country that really is not all that interested in traditional empire building like the United States the case for a civilian military becomes even stronger.
If President Bush would have had to draft, or even had to call for volunteers to fight a war in Iraq, chances are the Iraq War would not have happened. Hence the current divisiveness, that makes Viet Nam look almost benign, might have not occurred.
This brings us to Afghanistan; the area that has ground would be conquerors to dust for centuries. The latest installment being the Russians, which may have had more to do with the fall of the Soviet Union than all of Ronald Reagan’s saber rattling.
Cleaning up the language of the Full Bird Colonel, who as a Lieutenant traveled across Europe in a WWII boxcar, and required all his junior officers to read not only the weekly Warsaw Pact Intelligence Summary, but also the same summary originating from Viet Nam, “It’s a lousy little war, but it is the only one we have.” In this we see the greatness of a truly professional military officer. However, that greatness also lacked the diversity of problem solving, beyond the scope of that is the way it has always been done, and that shall always continue.
The real problems began however when he retired and was replaced with an Ivy League prima donna that makes John Kerry’s Viet Nam exploits look like those of a Roman Catholic monk.
What all this means is during the Viet Nam era, we ROTC and OCS reluctant volunteers, in a few short years, learned more about ourselves, other people, leadership, reality, how the world really operates, than we could have learned in a lifetime of doing whatever, wherever.
Putting this in the context of where we are right now, wars are far too great a challenge to be fought by professional soldiers alone, and citizen soldiers, or at least civilians trained in the principles of military leadership are way to important to civil society to leave the running of civil society in the hands of politicians, bureaucrats, and special interest oligarchs.
Now if we are to look at the tragedy of Ft. Hood, Texas in context, a military court will rapidly convict an unfit officer of murder and probably take a pass on the treason count. But the real treason is forcing patriotic Americans to spend not only their youth, health, and psychic sanity in the service of their country, but treating their sacrifice as some sort of video game outcome.
I have gotten a number of emails asking how a military bases could be so unarmed when it came to an guerilla warfare attack. The grossly simple answer is that the base perimeter was penetrated by someone, that no one took seriously as a threat. However, Major Hasan was a severe threat as dignified by his primary chosen weapon of choice. That weapon’s total design was to seriously kill and maim human beings; it has virtually no value as a hunting or target shooting sidearm. Furthermore it makes the classic military 45 caliber sidearm look like a primitive slingshot.
The reason no one took the Major seriously is because he was a doctor. Doctors are officers in the military because they are Doctors; in the relationship they have with other officers it only relates to rank or pay grade, not any similarly recognized skill set. Any security clearance Major Hasan possessed was probably only a formality, and consequently received only a minimal background check and as has been pointed out in the news, virtually no follow up even when his behavior caused concern among his colleagues.
Military bases in non-combat areas are disarmed because other than professional medical staff, all the others have training in how to kill other people. In a place like Fort Hood, Texas, the best in the world at that skill set routinely pass through the facility. With our over worked and understaffed military, that includes multiple killing deployments. The reason many of them are alive, is that they have learned to react to situations rather than think about them. Hence in Ft. Hood and other such facilities, reactive situations must be kept to an absolute minimum.
During Viet Nam a draftee grunt served 365 days and a wakeup in the Viet Nam Theater. Most of those, with time left to serve, were recycled, drug problems, PTSD and all, through Europe. About twice a month in the garrisons around Augsburg, someone would break into or attempt to break into an arms room or ammo facility. That would require that every weapon and similar device would be inventoried as well as all ammunition down to the individual bullet. This chaos was routinely accomplished by a few people with just one short tour of duty in a combat zone. From this fact is it all that hard to understand why our home deployment centers must be as safe as can be humanly designed.
War is the closest thing to hell on earth. Yet we seem to think of our military personnel as really cannon fodder, to use an archaic term. IED is probably a better fodder term. We term the veterans of WWII - The Greatest Generation. The combat veterans I have known from that era, have had continuing battles with war horror all their lives. Most who have successfully dealt with the problems have partitioned a segment of their mind into a war no mans land. They will reinforce the surrounding walls, but they never travel there, for any reason.
PTSD became a real disease or trauma during Viet Nam. Before that it was known as shell shock or combat fatigue. Just take a few drinks, a couple of aspirin, get a good night’s sleep and in the morning you will be fine. That in no way even addresses the true human aversion to catastrophic horror.
So what is going to happen to these veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, whether we preserve and succeed where no outside nation has succeeded before, or cut and run and eventually pay an even deeper physical price?
The answer is really no one in the so-called leadership of this country seems to care about this minor lousy problem. After all we need government-sponsored health insurance, government mandated clean energy, or no new energy at all. This of course is contrasted by greedy capitalist pigs, who control all the money, and if they don’t have enough, the Fed and the Treasury will print some more, and then guarantee to bail them out if they continue to over leverage the risk. As far as debt, they don’t believe in debt, at least as a problem, because if it were not for debt then they would have to share the wealth, if what is left can even be define as wealth.
I brought up the story about the miracle I experienced when I shot myself in the foot. It seems that if President Obama continues to shoot himself in the foot he might accomplish a miracle that no other American President could ever hope to accomplish. That miracle is to reestablish the United States again as designed by our Constitutional Founders.
We have pointed out in other articles that Barack Obama Senior was a failure as a Marxist in his native Kenya. Following the example that the sons do not fall too far from their father’s tree, the President of the United States seems to be following that same path. To walk that path successfully requires a continual reloading of shooting yourself in the foot opportunities. The United States of America is a diverse and a strong nation, a single bullet from a 30-30 grazing the skin on a little toe is just not going to do the job. But continual self-inflicted wounds on oneself, plus some errant unholstered shots at both adversaries as well as supporters, might just do the trick. That trick is the collapse of lingering enlightenment values the Founders constitutional design greatly suppressed, but never eradicated.
There remains the unanswered questions of design and the author of that design. Barack Obama Jr. might believe he will succeed in doing what his father failed in doing in Kenya, hence he will be shooting and reloading as long as God gives him strength.
The reality of a true miracle is quite different however; the results are ordered by God. That is true for a dumb high school kid that just wanted to play basketball that season, or a President of the United States that thinks he is smart enough to save the world from its own folly. There is only one savior of the world and it is not Barack Obama, nor is it Mohammed, nor any other self appointed religious messiah, or chosen political leader.
Just as in the tale where the emperor has no clothes, in a similar construct, the same is true of the would-be emperor continually shooting himself in the foot. There are a couple of rulers of ancient Babylon in the Old Testament Book of Daniel that may prove insightful to rulers in a modern Babylon. One king ended up eating grass like a cow for seven years; the other was overthrown by the writing on the wall:
“And this is the inscription that was written: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.
This is the interpretation of each word. MENE: God has numbered your kingdom, and finished it; TEKEL: You have been weighed in the balances, and found wanting; PERES: Your kingdom has been divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.” Then Belshazzar gave the command, and they clothed Daniel with purple and put a chain of gold around his neck, and made a proclamation concerning him that he should be the third ruler in the kingdom.
That very night Belshazzar, king of the Chaldeans, was slain. (Daniel 5:25-30)
When you read the story about the miracle that brought about the founding of the American Republic you understand that the United States was and is truly unique in all of human endeavors. What that meant in the past is clearly understood, what that means in the present is now quite jumbled, because, the future is in the hands of the Deity that used to be able to prescribe our prosperity. In God’s world and universe there is only One who is too big to fail. Man created human enterprises are just silly in comparison.
And All Traditional Historic American Values Citizens said: “Amen and Amen!”
© Creative Commons License 3.0, see website for details.
Podcast
>>PDF copy
>>Print view
After I finished Part 9, of this series a couple of weeks ago, I thought I was pretty much through with the concept of Traditional Historic American Values, at least in the journalistic, or even the blogosphere sense. The next day with the shootings at Ft. Hood, Texas, changed all of that. First of all it must be said that this was a guerilla attack not a terrorist attack. The only place I have found that reported properly is in James Taranto’s WSJ Best of the Web email. In that respect Major Hasan is to stand trial as a murderer and perhaps for treason. Furthermore I felt that the President’s response and later speech in Texas showed reluctance to address reality that even his best-prepared remarks could not hide.
I was still struggling with how to prepare this last article of the series for Veterans Day when Tuesday afternoon I received a call from my friend Jim, who accompanied me a little over a year ago, to pick up my motorhome in Texas. He stated that he felt so good after finishing Julia Duin’s book on “Quitting Church” that he just had to call and state it was nice to feel he was not alone.
A guerilla attack on American soil, American church leaders so out of touch that they think Christianity is primarily about making one feel good about a progressively psycho world, and we haven’t even gotten into some serious reality.
Hence between the two concepts and real life in general, I was pretty much at a loss on how to begin to finally conclude this ten part series on Traditional Historic American Values. In some perspective we have an American President who feels very comfortable in being everything to everyone, except the military’s Commander in Chief. This is contrasted with a long term Christian man, who for the now considers himself part of a community that has freed itself from the doctrinal sterility of American Evangelicalism. What are this world and this country coming to?
So the President took off for Asia, while his Attorney General took the heat for bringing the 9-11 true terrorists to New York City for a civilian trial. Don’t they understand that these thugs are not covered by the Geneva Convention? Why are they giving them special rights like, lobbyists, investment bankers, and other domestic terrorists?
In Asia he seems to have kissed away his second major goal, the cap and trade energy tax, in favor of his worst fandango, gross deficit spending, all the while continuing to dither on what to do with Afghanistan, a problem much too small to fit within the global concept of financially too big to fail. Perhaps it is that contrast between New York and Washington DC centered special rights – special interests, and Islamists, who believe that they, the too big to fail cronies, all are atheistic infidels, which forces the dithering reality about the consequences.
To use a constructive metaphor, the President seems to be continually trying to shoot himself in the foot, when the proper response would be just to take out his gun and take aim at the bad guys. The problem that he is finding out however, just as with Major Hasan, the President and his guerilla forces are a definite minority. Furthermore virtually all-successful guerilla wars first capture the countryside before moving to urban centers. In this guerilla war, Obama’s progressive base only hold portions of the right and left coasts and Chicago politics, and the great American fly-over is becoming increasingly agitated with what it sees as not just liberal, leftist, or socialist, but communist underpinnings of his social wealth redistribution plans.
Now shooting oneself in the foot is not a metaphor to be taken lightly or whimsically. For early in my senior year in high school such an incident happened to me. I was deer hunting with my uncle, and my dad. We were walking down a trail to go somewhere and I was in the middle. I was carrying my grandfather’s Model 94, 30-30 Winchester. There was a slight skiff of snow covering the ground, a moderate breeze, and everything was quite peaceful.
All of a sudden there was a huge explosion and I felt like my foot was pinned to the ground. When I looked down, around my boot was a radiating pattern of what looked to be carbon highlighted on the white snow. When I move the boot the pure white place where the boot had been, added a surreal contrast.
I walked and was helped to the car, which was not all that far away. I really felt no pain, but was intensely scared. From there it was a rapid trip to the hospital emergency room. Once everything began to flow back to reality, what had happened was the bullet somehow had miss fired and had gone down through the rubber overshoe and the leather shoe inside. The bullet itself had just taken off the skin on the outside of my little toe, nothing more. The doctor said that if the bullet had even grazed the bone in the toe itself the effect would have probably taken off at least half of my foot. It was a miracle.
If you don’t believe in miracles, stop for a moment, take off you shoes and socks and see how much meat is on your little toe, before it hits the bone. Then realize that that thin layer of skin was removed with a non-aimed 150 or more grain, 30 caliber bullet only inches from the rifle’s muzzle.
Now what I am beginning to see is that just has with my foot shooting experience, and President Obama’s continuing foot shooting experiences, is neither of us expected it/them to happen. The major difference, is mine was a once in a lifetime experience and it is over, the President doesn’t seem to understand the reality of the situation and there is nothing in his background that should give him a clue.
Despite all the spin that you hear today from both the conservative right and the progressive left, the first major causality for the fall of America’s world greatness was the decision to develop a professional military. If you look at the demise of all major empires, their fall began when they decided they were too good to fight their own wars. If you move that into a country that really is not all that interested in traditional empire building like the United States the case for a civilian military becomes even stronger.
If President Bush would have had to draft, or even had to call for volunteers to fight a war in Iraq, chances are the Iraq War would not have happened. Hence the current divisiveness, that makes Viet Nam look almost benign, might have not occurred.
This brings us to Afghanistan; the area that has ground would be conquerors to dust for centuries. The latest installment being the Russians, which may have had more to do with the fall of the Soviet Union than all of Ronald Reagan’s saber rattling.
Cleaning up the language of the Full Bird Colonel, who as a Lieutenant traveled across Europe in a WWII boxcar, and required all his junior officers to read not only the weekly Warsaw Pact Intelligence Summary, but also the same summary originating from Viet Nam, “It’s a lousy little war, but it is the only one we have.” In this we see the greatness of a truly professional military officer. However, that greatness also lacked the diversity of problem solving, beyond the scope of that is the way it has always been done, and that shall always continue.
The real problems began however when he retired and was replaced with an Ivy League prima donna that makes John Kerry’s Viet Nam exploits look like those of a Roman Catholic monk.
What all this means is during the Viet Nam era, we ROTC and OCS reluctant volunteers, in a few short years, learned more about ourselves, other people, leadership, reality, how the world really operates, than we could have learned in a lifetime of doing whatever, wherever.
Putting this in the context of where we are right now, wars are far too great a challenge to be fought by professional soldiers alone, and citizen soldiers, or at least civilians trained in the principles of military leadership are way to important to civil society to leave the running of civil society in the hands of politicians, bureaucrats, and special interest oligarchs.
Now if we are to look at the tragedy of Ft. Hood, Texas in context, a military court will rapidly convict an unfit officer of murder and probably take a pass on the treason count. But the real treason is forcing patriotic Americans to spend not only their youth, health, and psychic sanity in the service of their country, but treating their sacrifice as some sort of video game outcome.
I have gotten a number of emails asking how a military bases could be so unarmed when it came to an guerilla warfare attack. The grossly simple answer is that the base perimeter was penetrated by someone, that no one took seriously as a threat. However, Major Hasan was a severe threat as dignified by his primary chosen weapon of choice. That weapon’s total design was to seriously kill and maim human beings; it has virtually no value as a hunting or target shooting sidearm. Furthermore it makes the classic military 45 caliber sidearm look like a primitive slingshot.
The reason no one took the Major seriously is because he was a doctor. Doctors are officers in the military because they are Doctors; in the relationship they have with other officers it only relates to rank or pay grade, not any similarly recognized skill set. Any security clearance Major Hasan possessed was probably only a formality, and consequently received only a minimal background check and as has been pointed out in the news, virtually no follow up even when his behavior caused concern among his colleagues.
Military bases in non-combat areas are disarmed because other than professional medical staff, all the others have training in how to kill other people. In a place like Fort Hood, Texas, the best in the world at that skill set routinely pass through the facility. With our over worked and understaffed military, that includes multiple killing deployments. The reason many of them are alive, is that they have learned to react to situations rather than think about them. Hence in Ft. Hood and other such facilities, reactive situations must be kept to an absolute minimum.
During Viet Nam a draftee grunt served 365 days and a wakeup in the Viet Nam Theater. Most of those, with time left to serve, were recycled, drug problems, PTSD and all, through Europe. About twice a month in the garrisons around Augsburg, someone would break into or attempt to break into an arms room or ammo facility. That would require that every weapon and similar device would be inventoried as well as all ammunition down to the individual bullet. This chaos was routinely accomplished by a few people with just one short tour of duty in a combat zone. From this fact is it all that hard to understand why our home deployment centers must be as safe as can be humanly designed.
War is the closest thing to hell on earth. Yet we seem to think of our military personnel as really cannon fodder, to use an archaic term. IED is probably a better fodder term. We term the veterans of WWII - The Greatest Generation. The combat veterans I have known from that era, have had continuing battles with war horror all their lives. Most who have successfully dealt with the problems have partitioned a segment of their mind into a war no mans land. They will reinforce the surrounding walls, but they never travel there, for any reason.
PTSD became a real disease or trauma during Viet Nam. Before that it was known as shell shock or combat fatigue. Just take a few drinks, a couple of aspirin, get a good night’s sleep and in the morning you will be fine. That in no way even addresses the true human aversion to catastrophic horror.
So what is going to happen to these veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, whether we preserve and succeed where no outside nation has succeeded before, or cut and run and eventually pay an even deeper physical price?
The answer is really no one in the so-called leadership of this country seems to care about this minor lousy problem. After all we need government-sponsored health insurance, government mandated clean energy, or no new energy at all. This of course is contrasted by greedy capitalist pigs, who control all the money, and if they don’t have enough, the Fed and the Treasury will print some more, and then guarantee to bail them out if they continue to over leverage the risk. As far as debt, they don’t believe in debt, at least as a problem, because if it were not for debt then they would have to share the wealth, if what is left can even be define as wealth.
I brought up the story about the miracle I experienced when I shot myself in the foot. It seems that if President Obama continues to shoot himself in the foot he might accomplish a miracle that no other American President could ever hope to accomplish. That miracle is to reestablish the United States again as designed by our Constitutional Founders.
We have pointed out in other articles that Barack Obama Senior was a failure as a Marxist in his native Kenya. Following the example that the sons do not fall too far from their father’s tree, the President of the United States seems to be following that same path. To walk that path successfully requires a continual reloading of shooting yourself in the foot opportunities. The United States of America is a diverse and a strong nation, a single bullet from a 30-30 grazing the skin on a little toe is just not going to do the job. But continual self-inflicted wounds on oneself, plus some errant unholstered shots at both adversaries as well as supporters, might just do the trick. That trick is the collapse of lingering enlightenment values the Founders constitutional design greatly suppressed, but never eradicated.
There remains the unanswered questions of design and the author of that design. Barack Obama Jr. might believe he will succeed in doing what his father failed in doing in Kenya, hence he will be shooting and reloading as long as God gives him strength.
The reality of a true miracle is quite different however; the results are ordered by God. That is true for a dumb high school kid that just wanted to play basketball that season, or a President of the United States that thinks he is smart enough to save the world from its own folly. There is only one savior of the world and it is not Barack Obama, nor is it Mohammed, nor any other self appointed religious messiah, or chosen political leader.
Just as in the tale where the emperor has no clothes, in a similar construct, the same is true of the would-be emperor continually shooting himself in the foot. There are a couple of rulers of ancient Babylon in the Old Testament Book of Daniel that may prove insightful to rulers in a modern Babylon. One king ended up eating grass like a cow for seven years; the other was overthrown by the writing on the wall:
“And this is the inscription that was written: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.
This is the interpretation of each word. MENE: God has numbered your kingdom, and finished it; TEKEL: You have been weighed in the balances, and found wanting; PERES: Your kingdom has been divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.” Then Belshazzar gave the command, and they clothed Daniel with purple and put a chain of gold around his neck, and made a proclamation concerning him that he should be the third ruler in the kingdom.
That very night Belshazzar, king of the Chaldeans, was slain. (Daniel 5:25-30)
When you read the story about the miracle that brought about the founding of the American Republic you understand that the United States was and is truly unique in all of human endeavors. What that meant in the past is clearly understood, what that means in the present is now quite jumbled, because, the future is in the hands of the Deity that used to be able to prescribe our prosperity. In God’s world and universe there is only One who is too big to fail. Man created human enterprises are just silly in comparison.
And All Traditional Historic American Values Citizens said: “Amen and Amen!”
© Creative Commons License 3.0, see website for details.
Podcast