SITREP, I

--Hogwarts Coat of Arms,
the new "E Pluribus Unum"?

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right,
Here I am, stuck in the middle with you
--Stuck in the Middle With You, 
Stealer's Wheel

Hope is a good breakfast but a bad supper
--William Rawley

It's a beautiful mornin'
I think I'll go outside a while,
And just smile.
--Beautiful morning,
The Rascals
______________________

America is like Disney World's Magic Kingdom. We have left Frontierland and Liberty Square, now residing squarely in Fantasyland. We live as though Harry Potter is real. We receive our tutelage at Hogworts (aka The Media News).

We believe in entertainment and alternate realities; we are saturated in it. In fact, we are so estranged from the daily requirements of life that we -- to include our leaders -- cannot define what our national health should look like. Much like "the leadership" stood agog before the dipping barometer in advance of 2005's devastating Category 5 storm Katrina, we see the wreckage ... we CREATE the wreckage ... yet the lack the ability to pull up the brakes, or to take another track.

Leaders which are primarily self-serving lack the ability to lead others. Our national policies are largely self-destructive, despite the inclusion of words like "care" and "defense". The rubes in the despised flyover states considered good by the these politicians only for the fodder of their party vote and photo ops have shown that they know the gig is up.

The day of the true Statesman is gone. The People now know that neither the Right nor the Left will improve their lots or protect them from their too-often dismal lives. "Hope" is the provenance of them that has, or at least, those that have access to mentors and tutelage, goods not often seen in the downward cycling hinterlands or the decayed inner cities.

Like almost all revolutions, we forged a nation in fire and blood. Liberal thought and action was played out on the field of battle.

Revolutions are not conservative events; the U.S. Revolution was no exception. All that is great about our nation sprang from liberal concepts. Sadly, for too many today, to be a liberal is an exclusionary thing.

Hypocritically, liberalism has become perverted to denote a creed sanctioning all behaviors, while concomitantly ostracizing those deemed not "liberal" enough. We have betrayed the great competition of ideas we once had between the Madisons and the Jeffersonians.

We use tinny words like "progressive" to describe thought and action which should rightly be called "liberal" but which we know is a term which has passed its "use by" date.

Politics has become an ego project. One is either enveloped in the "aren't we cool" fold of rube-baiting, or one is a rube. (Pick your side of the fence, and you will be facing the Other.)

There is a third group, however, and its members disdain the absurd theatre. It is remotely possible that our salvation may be there.

The military realm should be logical and linear, but that is not serving us well today, for the events that we call war are neither logical nor linear. The old paradigms do not plug into the new chaos.

Since our assumptions are illogical, our tactics and strategies cannot succeed. As said previously (Symbolic Targets), we fail because we insist on calling counter-terrorism "warfare". Nothing done militarily since 2003 has been warfare.

What is HAS been is the use of military might in an attempted suppression of an idea. Ideas are not defeated with either drones or foot soldiers.

Wars are opposing nation-states pitting their armies against one another with realistic military and political goals as their drivers.  Wars are based upon objective facts.


next: SITREP II

Ducks Trois Gras

 True peace is not a balance of opposing forces.
It is not a lovely facade which conceals conflicts and divisions.
Peace calls for daily commitment. 
--Urbi et Orbi, Pope Francis

What are you rebelling against?
What do you got? 
--The Wild One (1953)

 The program of the Two Minutes Hate
varied from day to day, but there was none
in which Goldstein was not the principal figure 
--1984, George Orwell 

That is just the way with some people.
They get down on a thing when they
don’t know nothing about it
 --Mark Twain, 
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
______________________

RangerAgainstWar is a military and political blog. However, to study the military involves more than surveying tactics and missions -- these actions occur in a gestalt. We believe that until the impulse to war is recognized as emanating from within man, we can expect continued strife, misery and destruction.

In this final Duck call, we ask: From whence this tempest-in-a-beer mug? Is it about something, or absolutely nothing? In Robert Reich's documentary, "Inequality For All", former Republican Senator (WY) Alan Simpson notes that in the near political past, we had "adversaries"; now we have "enemies". Reich observed this anger and polarization accompanies times of economic upheaval.

So, was the recent liberal attack on the t.v. Duck clan just another iteration of this generalized agitation? It is certainly not rational for citizens in a democracy to attack a fellow for his religious beliefs or expression of his life experiences, no matter how wrong-headed or foolish one may find them to be. Freedom of religion is sacrosanct (unless you're a Branch Davidian, but that's another matter.)

Part of the problem is the odd confluence of Reality Programming (which is not) and entertainment "news" meeting the simulacrum of ourselves on our social networking platforms. The smash-up is not pretty. Both are constructed realities, and like Narcissus we are so enamored of our reflections both in our choice of programming and our constructed antipodes that we are now living this "Second Life" AS IF -- as if it were real, as if it mattered, as if we can slake off our fears of irrelevance via the ire that we project into cyberspace.

The Duck brew-ha-ha revealed that we are a people who watch (non) reality programs and entertainment masquerading as news who then regurgitate our emotions about these fluffy things onto our created social platforms, our ersatz selves. Is Facebook and our blog villages to be our "event horizon"?

 Well, for me, this is blogtopia's Jump the Shark moment. We started the blog with an idea that intelligent, open-minded people would find Ranger, like a watering hole in an oasis, and there would be an efflorescence of democracy here. Instead, I find myself defending the utterances of a t.v. show family against the madding throng, the liberal intelligentsia that proves itself wanting on the issues of free speech. One does not grow up to think one might have to do such a thing.  

In our hyperreality, people think if they have a reaction to something, it merits being tweeted and read, emotion becoming an itch needing to be scratched versus something to be pondered. We seek "followers" who "like" and "friend" us, a clannish project if it ever was one.

So the evolved non-theists among us find themselves in the perverse position of seeking praise for crucifying a redneck for sins he did not commit, because his beliefs indict the primitive in us all. This is laughable, were it not tragic. This is Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery", 2014-style. It is Greek ostracism, and there is no place for this insularity under cover of Progressivism in a robust society.

As gay feminist Camile Paglia says, “In a democratic country, people have the right to be homophobic as well as they have the right to support homosexuality — as I one hundred percent do. If people are basing their views against gays on the Bible, again they have a right of religious freedom there.”

Paglia calls the public lashing out at the Ducks (besides being laughable) "punitive PC, utterly fascist, utterly Stalinist that my liberal colleagues in the Democratic Party and on college campuses have supported and promoted over the last several decades. This is the whole legacy of free speech 1960’s that have been lost by my own party.”

“I think that this intolerance by gay activists toward the full spectrum of human beliefs is a sign of immaturity, juvenility. This is not the mark of a true intellectual life. This is why there is no cultural life now in the U.S. Why nothing is of interest coming from the major media in terms of cultural criticism. Why the graduates of the Ivy League with their A, A, A+ grades are complete cultural illiterates, etc. is because they are not being educated in any way to give respect to opposing view points.”

Was Mr. Duck being "UnChristian" in paraphrasing Christian doctrine? Christianity qua Christianity is "unChristian"! It is a sort of absurd Mobius strip for liberals who argue for inclusivity to exclude a believer.

What we have with Mr. Duck is Christians, atheists and others flushing Mr. Duck out for being Christian, and giving his program publicity they could not buy. Do you want gays and blacks to have equal civil rights in your society? Then you better be willing to allow Mr. Duck his, for he is no less than or greater than any other man.

Instead, we clan-up in  virtual "flash mob" in a moment's notice to crucify the outcast du jour. We develop a template for doing so, handily ejecting the last cause celebre for the next, in perpetuity, like a house of mirrors. It has become imperative to participate in Orwell's "Two Minute Hate" as self-definition, to show we care. The subject is fungible, and the best of us are falling prey to facile dichotomies, leaving nuance behind in the service of immediacy.

All who participate in the social network have become citizen journalists, sans the necessary disinterest to report the data factually. The online commentariat demands instantaneous response. In a perversion of the Cartesian imperative to be reflective, it is now, "I am read, therefore, I exist."

Perhaps the phenomenon of instantaneous anger towards someone like the Ducks was described by Sasha Issenberg's takedown of New York Times editorialist David Brooks:

Blue Americans have heard so much about Red America, and they've always wanted to see it. But Blue Americans don't take vacations to places like Galveston and Dubuque. They like to watch TV shows like The Simpsons and Roseanne, where Red America is mocked by either cartoon characters or Red Americans themselves, so Blue Americans don't need to feel guilty of condescension. Blue Americans are above redneck jokes, but they will listen if a sociologist attests to the high density of lawnbound-appliances-per-capita in flyover country. They need someone to show them how the other half lives, because there is nothing like sympathy for backwardness to feed elitism. A wrong turn in Red America can be dangerous: They might accidentally find Jesus or be hit by an 18-wheeler. It seems reasonable to seek out a smart-looking fellow who seems to know the way and has a witty line at every point. Blue Americans always travel with a guide (Booboos in Paradise).

The hatred and disdain rained down upon the Duck character's utterances on his religion and his experience working with black people was ridiculous. It does, however, show the intolerant ridge runner in so many of us. We are learned bilious people who have traded blunderbusses for the keypad. If we do not understand the absurdity and incorrectness of such tirades, we have little hope of concilience on any grander topics that affect us, much less any hope of reaching a concord with anyone anywhere else.

The Duck's Christianity is nothing new. See Chris Hitchen's God is Not Great for the scope of the problem: he sought true believers, but people pick and choose, which is not what believing is all about. But inasmuch as people do believe (and we are the most believing developed nation), Mr. Duck was spouting a stock take on Christianity. He has the right of freedom of religion. Believe or not; listen or not. That is all. Full stop.


{Just because we're here, I will do my personal Duck riff soon, sure to raise some hackles.}

Zimmerman Lynch Mob

--this cartoon shows the 
 typical facile liberal perception

Ahm seventeen. Almost a man.
He strode, feeling his long loose-jointed limbs 
--Almos' A Man, Richard Wright

I am looking for a human 
--Diogenes of Sinope

How could they see anything but the shadows
if they were never allowed to move their heads? 
--Allegory of the Cave, Plato
_________________

I opened my news on a muggy North Florida Sunday to read the verdict of the Zimmerman trial: "Not guilty". I have faith in the jury system, and believe jurors -- my peers -- largely get it right, when provided the relevant data.

The form in which the news came to me was via a liberal news service which ran the Yahoo news article by Liz Goodwin. The lede begins,

"Zimmerman, 29, was charged with second-degree murder in the death of Martin, a 17 year old black boy ..."

"Black boy" -- evocative, no? My passing acquaintance with UPI and AP press manuals would suggest, "young man / adolescent / juvenile / or teenager" as fair descriptors, but "boy"?  BOY? Not for a 17-year-old young man, and especially not a young black man. It seems so uncouth as to be risible. It is derogatory, emasculating and humiliating.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit decided in a judgement last year that the use of the term "boy" towards a black man showed evidence of racial discrimination (Ash vs. Tyson Foods).  A retired judge commenting on the case was quoted in the New York Times as saying “It’s the same as calling him a nigger.”

Were Ms. Goodwin to describe a young black man thusly in our neck o' the woods, she would be liable to be jumped. Especially you, Liz-miss-white-person. No sir. Snoop Lion may say "boy" or "niggaz" ("fo shizzle my nizzle"), but certainly not you. Using a non-evocative, non-pejorative adjective is Journo 101, and it is sad when a national news service cannot get that right.

Our press is riddled through with bias at every slice. This should be the story of a trial and its findings, not an effort whip up some after-the-fact angst.

In addition to the offensive coverage, the comments from my fellow liberals following the story were atrocious, hideous, beginning with the suggestion that a black person now kill Z. The following is the comment I left:

"Why does the writer use the phrase, "17 year old black boy"? "Black boy" is the phraseology of the Jim Crow South; at 17, Martin was a teen. 

Oh, I get it, the liberals are just as disingenuous as the conservatives, and use anything in their arsenal, without regard to bias; in fact, intentionally with the intent of biasing. Disgusting, really. 

Some of the readers here call for the murder of Zimmerman by a black man ... most of you people here are nuts. Any hopes I had that this might be a truly liberal community are gone -- if this is liberalism in 2013 America, you can have it."

Ah, but a "boy" was killed, and we are gulled into believing that it was precisely because he was a "boy" (=young black man.) Don't give me that hokum. As Ranger says, when a 17-year-old young man earns the Medal of Honor dying in battle for his country, we do not call him a "boy". Trayvon falls short of that mark, but his age is commensurate; "young man", not "boy".

What passes for "news" and reportage today bores me. That people accept it is scary and disgusting.

Watching the Wheels

--Ernie and Burt, Jack Hunter 

Time was not passing...
it was turning in a circle 
--100 years of solitude, 
Gabriel Garcia Marquez 

I think I'm dumb 
Maybe just happy 
I think I'm just happy 
--Dumb, Nirvana 

Things they do look awful cold
I hope I die before I get old 
--My Generation, The Who
 ____________________

I blame Marlo Thomas.

Her 1960's agitprop album, "Free to Be ... You and Me" was the incipient kernel for the misbegotten plant we call "gender-neutrality", one aimed at the obliteration of our very real differing gender orientations, a castration in the best liberal sense which tells you that it is for your own good, or better, someone else's good who has been oppressed by someone who is not you. But you will pay for their oppression through a disseminated socialized and internalized guilt and enforced genuflection.

Not that there weren't other actors besides Thomas on the social engineering stage -- an army of them. This week's The New Yorker cover brilliantly depicts the outcome of 50 years of The Message, the Supreme Court caught like deer before the t.v. lights having been railroaded like the rest of us into its recent decision on DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act).

Mr. Potato Head was part of it -- what was he? Ostensibly a "he", the spud came with with handlebar mustache, cherry red stick-on lips and high heels. He was transgendered, before genetic-engineering was even cool. Then there was the Playskool bus, with pop-out, gender-neutral passengers, all having round peg bottoms to fit into the same seats. No one "belonged" in the front or back, you see?

I have been raised amidst this vast experiment, yet in neither racial nor gender relations have we achieved harmony. Oh, but the message was hammered into our subconscious diligently and incessantly, until we started college and were told how to free ourselves from the bondage of our biology and rail against a stifling patriarchy and see homosexuality in Huck Finn and every Shakespeare play. If we could contort our minds to follow Lacan and Foucault, our lives would be superior to those that went before.

Only, it didn't turn out that way. The problem is, our animal impulses did not change because of the French structuralists, and those who claimed to integrate the messages did not create a more functional symbiosis with their partners; often, quite the opposite.

Despite our shortfalls we call it progress, and would now feign to export what we do not know. Three Cups of Tea assures us we are raising the status of women in our current war zones. Although movement is not always progress, one risks being called "Old School" if one questions change -- the most damning label of all in our youth-besotted culture.

If not caught up in the Twittermania over the changes -- any changes -- one risks becoming seen as the sort of person who watches the Delltones on Public Television fund-drives -- hopelessly mired in the ever-receding yesterday. Fustain, and worse, a person who uses the word "fustian" (Like, TOTALLY uncool.)

Social media demands an ever-present "now"; publish several Tweets a day or perish. Even the blog, which aspires to analysis -- though to the daily news treadmill -- is becoming passe. Ephemerality is the future, as we devolve into twitchy, itchy paramecia skittering hither and thither at the latest update, eliciting a concomitant quick reaction (shock/praise/disgust...)

Maybe we are limning down to just three emotions, to align with our truncated verb tenses: happy / mad or sad, for a past/present or future. Nuance is lost, and everyone wants to be an instant wit, but we have few Dorothy Parkers or Oscar Wildes amongst us. Mostly, we have harridans who scold with more or less finesse, to the march of the incessant news feed.

We mainline our news from outlets that deliver what we like to hear. When the New York Times recently ran an expose of the abuses of the federal Pigford farm giveaway program -- a subject which the late conservative blogger Breitbart had correctly heralded -- liberal mouthpieces were aghast. How could the NYT betray its liberality by presenting ... The Facts? News has become partisan, and if it favors a conservative position, it will be buried by the liberal press, and of course, vice versa. Not that there wasn't Yellow Journalism before, but the demands of the the immediate news feed makes anything approaching thoughtful insight less and less possible.

We are seeing the fruit of Thomas's plant in recent motions like the rescinding of DOMA and the move for women in the Rangers and the SEALs and the Combat Arms, in general. This is the new social frontier we are told and as such, we must reach it.

We derive value from championing the designated underdog, and it matters not whether this favoritism is for the greater good. In Syria, our sympathy is for the rebels (we like rebels, unless they are rebelling against us); in DOMA, we must allow for gay marriage, and in the military, women must gain a false parity with fighting men.

"The Disempowered" are our modern Golden Calf, and the liberals feel very smart when they worship at their feet. The engineers lay in their agenda like a stealth missile. Gay marriage is inevitable; after all, we have been watching media depictions of gay couples for well over a decade, so even if we do not live on the Coasts, the behavior seems de rigeuer and the institutionalization of it, a foregone conclusion. Our men have become metrosexuals and emo boys before our eyes.

We are barraged by studies of falling marriage rates and rising out of wedlock births. We are told that soon, the XY chromosome will become passe, and women will no longer need men -- the crowning achievement of the feminist project. While imbibing these messages, the groundwork was being laid for same-sex marriage: If no one else is getting married, well, at least homosexuals who wish to marry will fill in the void.

Before you label me a meanie -- of course gay couples should be allowed to marry. Married couples have more stake in their neighborhoods and communities. If you want stability and safety, nurturing stable households would be a good start.

If we were reasonable people we would recognize the biological imperative that a certain percentage of people will be homosexual and some will wish to marry, so it would be mean and primitive to disallow such committed partnerships from enjoying all of the benefits which accrue to a hetero married couple.  However, that end could be achieved by a civil marriage, without impinging upon church doctrine. We would construct a legal partnership bestowing rights of inheritance, shared work benefits, and every other thing a hetero married couple enjoys. And if you find a religious doctrine that sanctions homosexual marriage, go to that church. Case closed.

But for the government at the state or federal level to coerce churches to marry gay couples is patently absurd. If the church dogma sees homosexual pairings as disordered behavior, why would gay people cleave to a myth which does not recognize them? They will not be validated by invalidating the scripture. Further, such coercion would be a violation of the Church and State divide.

So that is a gloss on how we went from G.I. Joe to this No Man's Land. Did our tinkering with gender identification influence the current calls for total gender integration in the military? Certainly, and we will pick up the final "women in combat" installment soon.

[On a personal note: as I have recently stood back from the incessant tirade that is today's news cycle, I'm feeling a new fondness for Voltaire's simple dictum to tend to our own gardens. More thoughts on that later.]

Word Games

Ooo and it's alright and it's comin' 'long
We got to get right back to where we started from
Love is good, love can be strong
We got to get right back to where we started from
--Right Back Where We Started From,
Maxine Nightingale

I can read in red.
I can read in blue.
I can read in pickle color too
--Dr. Seuss
_________________

Words must matter or else we would still be grunting and pointing at things with dirty, jammy fingers and meat tofu would be a distant dream, since mastodon would be the kill du jour.

Words. They sometimes come hard for Ranger, but when they do, they mean something. Let's look at two which are saddled with all manner of baggage: Liberal and Conservative.

Proud and haughty are the conservatives, in a regressive sort of way. If they were dancing Disco, it would be to a spirited version of Ms. Nightingale's "Get Right Back" tune. No wobbly tofu -- not even Seitan -- for them; no mincing words. They stand behind the concept, right or wrong. Right is always right.

Lacking such surety, liberals are afraid of their title, kind of like a dachshund who might find his designation onerous should he see his full name written out. Liberals hide behind names like "Progressive", as if this will change their spots. A liberal is a liberal whatever you do, and calling oneself anything else is just deceptive and self-loathing. (In Florida last year we had a Democratic contender who called himself a "moderate progressive" -- what sort of griffin is that?) Liberals would probably dance to a dour "Private Dancer".

Liberal is a once-proud word that has been side-lined and shouted down in the din of political life. Yet, all that is fine and everything exceptional in American life is based in liberal thought; this seems lost on all involved. In comparison, one would have to search to discover any great conservative legislation that has added anything of substance to our democracy.

Why do liberals hide behind weasel words like progressive? Why do liberal cloak their true colors, which are red, white and blue?

Somewhere inside of every conservative there is a liberal that is a sellout and and traitor to the truth. The truth is that all conservatives serve a master that is not of, by or for the people.

That is a self-evident truth.