Friday, January 25, 2008

The local Draft Board ... should I serve?

Those of us who are “of an age” remember the influence of the Draft Board on the lives (and deaths) of us and our brethren.  Even if the closest we ever actually came to experiencing that influence was listening to Arlo sing about the Group W bench.

Several years ago, when speculation about the possibility of an Iraq War draft was rampant, there was talk in liberal circles of applying to join Selective Service local boards so that a less militaristic viewpoint might be represented.  Just to see what would happen, I submitted such an application.

This week, I received a response.  Here, in part, is that message:

Hi [N in Seattle],

I also left you a voicemail, but about 3 years ago you sent an application to the Selective Service System to become a Seattle Local Board Member.  Since we had no vacancy at that time, your application was held in my files, until now when a retirement of an active member has created an opportunity.  If you are still interested in this position, I would be glad to provide more details. ...

I can certainly fulfill the qualifications for becoming a Draft Board member—I’m an American citizen, (well) over 18 years old, neither active in nor retired from the military, live in Seattle, not employed in law enforcement, no criminal offenses.  Though I don’t yet know what the time commitment would be, I’m sure I could arrange it so that I could participate if I wanted to.

But do I really want to?  The draft was a fearsome institution to those of us who grew up during the Vietnam era.  I was in high school and college as the war heated up, so when I registered my classification was 2-S (student deferment).  In the December 1969 draft lottery, my birthday came up as #149.  Thus, I retained my deferment in 1970, when the draft took those with numbers up to 195.  When the 1971 draft reached only to #125, I dropped the deferment, was briefly a non-draftable 1-A, and then became a 1-H ... no longer subject to the draft.  I was fortunate, but even that not-so-close brush with Selective Service left a bad taste.

On the other hand, I doubt that there were any people with a story even remotely similar to mine on the Local Board in my New Jersey hometown.  I assume, without evidence, that that Board consisted entirely of people who were gung-ho to get as many kids into the Army as was humanly possible.  I assume, without evidence, that they would have made it extremely difficult for anyone who appealed for a hardship deferment or Conscientious Objector status.  I strongly believe that if the draft is ever reinstituted, a Draft Board that is truly representative of Seattle must include members whose view of military adventurism is, shall we say, skeptical.

I should also mention that there’s something of a personal interest involved here—my nephew, who turned 14 earlier this week, lives here in Seattle.  He’ll register with Selective Service four years from now.

I haven’t yet replied to the message I received from the local Selective Service representative.  I’m leaning toward doing so, if only to obtain further information about the time and effort that would be required of a Board member.  And, perhaps, to see whether Selective Service would seriously consider putting someone like me on the Board.

Finally, for your listening and viewing pleasure, here are a YouTube link to Arlo performing Alice’s Restaurant Massacree (embedding is disabled, since it runs nearly 20 minutes) and the trailer for the 1969 movie Alice’s Restaurant:

[Also posted as a diary on DailyKos.]

Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Wood or silverware

Five years ago tomorrow, I wrote Peace Tree Farm’s very first post (reproduced below).  Those readers wishing to commemorate the occasion might want to consult this webpage before deciding on an appropriate gift. 

Another year, another blog…

I can’t say what shape this enterprise will eventually take.  There are daily events worthy of comment and discussion, in a myriad of arenas, but the one or ones that inspire me to bat out a few words can’t be predicted.  It might be a political decision or it might be a baseball game; a piece of music or a magazine article; scientific research or a well-cooked meal. 

Whatever I happen to discuss, my viewpoint will be one of seeking rationality, of following the subject to its logical conclusion ... even if that logic sometimes takes us to a reductio ad absurdum.  It’s a viewpoint tempered by 50-some years of living, by two years residence in the Pacific Northwest after spending most of my days in the Northeast, by a career of research into healthcare and the quality thereof, by Woodstock and the assassinations, by close observation of governments in action, by Herman Melville and Bill James, by Bob Dylan and Dan Bern, and by much, much more.

As the title says, today is opening day.  Who’s pitching tomorrow???

You’ll have to be the judge of whether the 326 entries written since then have lived up to that original intent.  In that time span, my subject matter has been vastly more on politics than on baseball, music, or magazines.  A sign of the times, no doubt.  I’ve mentioned Woodstock three times; the death of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, or Martin Luther King Jr. six times; Herman Melville not at all; Bill James once; Dylan ten times (he’s been the topic of five posts); and Dan Bern once.

My blogging history has been one of diminishing returns.  I wrote 142 posts in PTF’s first year, over 43% of my entire output.  Year Two totaled 69 blog posts, followed by 47 in Year Three, 46 in Year Four, and just 23 (including this one) in Year Five.  It isn’t entirely that I have become less productive in that time period, though I must admit that sloth and outrage fatigue have played a not-insignificant role.  I’d prefer to believe that the largest portion of my decrease in blogging is a reflection of the numerous progressive blogs—both here in the PacNW and throughout the land—that have created such a vibrant netroots community.  I was here in blogtopia (y!sctp) ahead of the great majority of them, but it bothers me not in the slightest that I have been eclipsed by so many others.  With insightful, acute, talented, and prolific writers like Goldy and his HorsesAss colleagues, Dan Kirkdorffer at On The Road To 2008, Dave and Sara at Orcinus, and many others wielding influence in the Washington political scene, whatever I might come up with would be (at best) a “me too” afterthought.  And then there are the remarkable national progressive blogs like digby’s Hullabaloo and the immense orange community created by Markos Moulitsas Zuniga.

I still spend a lot of, probably too much, time reading the thoughts and ideas of those other lefty-bloggers.  And I’m a fairly regular, and very longtime, diarist and commenter on dKos.  So it’s not like I’ve completely stifled myself on the web.

Will the next year see more frequent posts here?  I won’t promise that, but I do hope I can find the inspiration within myself to create material worth your reading-time, and hopefully more such content than I’ve produced recently.  Even if I’m long-silent, though, I expect to be here in 366 days to mark my candy/iron blogiversary.

Sunday, December 30, 2007

My health

I rarely reveal much about the person behind the nom de blog “N in Seattle”.  Not my style, not my strength.  This post, then, is going to be a very unusual one for Peace Tree Farm, because I’m relating a rather scary experience I’ve undergone in the last month.

Actually, I think we need to go back a couple more months, to early October.  That’s when I came down with a very nasty cold.  It was so bad that I had to take a couple of sick days, and it never really went away, week after week.  I was constantly tired, slept even more poorly than usual, with post-nasal drip, congestion.  Even before coming down with that cold, I’d decided to get a flu shot—the first voluntary flu immunization of my life.  After putting up with the sequelae for far too long, I went to the doctor with complaints about my endless cold, but he didn’t find much of anything.  He suggested cough suppressant and nasal irrigation (yuck), which I tried for a week or so without apparent change.

So I made another appointment with the doctor just after Thanksgiving, this time laying out my entire collection of signs and symptoms.  Not just the still-lingering cold, but everything from brittle fingernails to depression to the occasional short bout of what I called heaviness or tightness in my chest.  This last item piqued the doc’s interest.  Hey, I’m an obese 57-year-old male being medicated for hypertension and hyperlipidemia, definitely at risk for coronary disease even though I’m a lifelong nonsmoker.  He did a brief EKG rhythm strip right then and there, and scheduled me for a stress test to be taken on Monday, December 10.

In the interim, I continued to feel just as lousy.  Then came the early morning of Thursday, December 6.

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Discovery Institute ... theft and lies

In talking about congestion pricing on my show Saturday night, I couldn’t contain a brief outburst over how our local media and political elite continue to take seriously the Discovery Institute’s transportation proposals in light of its embarrassing role in promoting Creationism Intelligent Design.  My frustration stems not simply from the fact that Intelligent Design is ridiculous anti-science, or that it is part of a well planned and executed multi-year campaign to undermine science education in the US at a time we face growing global economic competition ... but that it has been promoted in such a shamelessly dishonest manner.

The Discovery Institute has proven again and again that it makes no distinction between scholarship and propaganda, and that there is no ethical boundary it will not cross in the interest of foisting its Christianist agenda on the American people.  This blatant disregard for the most basic rigors of academia—or even fair play—was highlighted recently by a virologist/blogger who discovered that DI fellows had stolen and manipulated a Harvard University/XVIVO video for use in their own presentations, without attribution, permission or license.

Here is the original Harvard/XVIVO video The inner life of a cell, with its scientifically accurate narration intact:

And here is a clip from a Discovery Institute presentation that features an excerpt of the video, now redubbed and retitled The Cell as an Automated City.  Notice how the presenter describes the video as “state of the art computer animation”, implying that it is somehow the work of the institute:

As ERV points out in his her post, this isn’t just a naive case of copyright infringement.  The Discovery Institute has plenty of lawyers on staff and on retainer, so they sure as hell know that scrubbing the Harvard/XVIVO copyright and credits off the video is not only dishonest, but illegal.

Maybe they think it is “okay” because they gave the animation a new title (Inner life of a cell became The cell as an automated city) and an extraordinarily unprofessional new narration (alternate alternate title—Big Gay Al takes a tour of a cell!).  Harvard/XVIVOs narration, all of the science, is whisked away and replaced with a “surrealistic lilliputian realm”, “robots”, “manufacturing”, “circuitry”, “nano moters”, “UPS labels”.  Maybe they think it is “okay” because they turned all of Harvard’s science into “MAGIC!”.

Hmm.  From my point of view, as a virologist and former teaching assistant, this isn’t just copyright infringement.  This is theft and plagiarism.  Taking someone else’s work without their consent, manipulating it without their consent, pretending it supports ID Creationists’ distorted views of reality, and presenting it as DI’s work.

ERV further points out that if the DI fellows responsible for this were at his her university, they would be expelled for their plagiarism.

But this is just business as usual at the Discovery Institute, and it raises a question:  if the Discovery Institute can’t be trusted to produce independent academic scholarship on its signature issue, Intelligent Design, how can its Cascadia Center be trusted to produce independent academic scholarship on regional transportation planning?  Of course, it can’t, and the media, business and political elites who ignore the institute’s established track record of distorting scholarship and science in the single-minded pursuit of its own private agenda, are little more than willful dupes.

Our region’s transportation planning is too important to be trusted to a faux “think tank” with such a shameful and embarrassing record, and every time one of our local media outlets unskeptically cites one of its reports or recommendations, it grants the Discovery Institute credibility it simply does not deserve.  Unlike a real think tank, the Discovery Institute produces “scholarship” to support its existing agenda, not the other way around, and thus it cannot and should not be considered a trusted partner in planning our region’s transportation future.

Sunday, November 11, 2007

On Veterans Day

We “officially” mark Veterans Day tomorrow, by taking a Monday holiday.  But the event on which we base this commemoration occurred exactly 89 years ago right now—the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month—the 1918 armistice agreement that ended hostilities in the Great War.  French Marshal Ferdinand Foch, commander-in-chief of the Allied forces, and German government representative Matthias Erzberger signed the armistice documents at 5am that day, in a railroad car in the Compiègne Forest, some 50 or 60 miles north of Paris.

Veterans Day honors those who served in the military ... and returned.  That last phrase is what differentiates it from Memorial Day.  The end-of-May holiday is designated to remember those who made the ultimate military sacrifice, those who died while fighting in the armed forces of the United States.

This occasion is all the more poignant in times like these, when events are adding large numbers of men and women to the rolls of Veterans Day and Memorial Day honorees.  In this case, tragically, it’s almost entirely the fault of delusional neocons whose bullying arrogance cares not a whit about the lives they are ruining and the deaths they are causing.

As the Iraq/Afghanistan fubar continues on and on and on, with little evidence of abating and ever less prospect for a non-horrendous outcome, real honest-to-god support for our veterans (whether new ones or those who served long ago) is often difficult to find.  Lost in the cynical flag-waving of politicians who callously ruin the VA healthcare, benefits, pension, and education systems, lost in those who unfeelingly decimate the military reserve and the National Guard, lost in the huge corporate profits accompanying privatization of military functions, lost in the wasteful and deadly (and, of course, highly profitable) mis-equipping of the troops ... there are a few public officials who truly honor and support the troops and the veterans.

One of those heroes is the senior Senator from Washington.  It’s not just that Patty Murray is the #3 Democrat on the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, or that she serves on the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs, Defense, and Homeland Security Subcommittees of the Appropriations Committee.  As the daughter of a disabled World War II veteran—her father earned a Purple Heart during the Okinawa landing—she has seen throughout her entire life how veterans are and can be treated by the federal government.  In addition, as a student at Washington State during the Vietnam War, she interned as a volunteer at a nearby VA hospital.  Her interest in the topic, then, is clearly deeply held and intensive.  In just the last few days, for example, Senator Murray has acted to support veterans in both the rational scientific research arena and at the level of emotional caring and rhetoric.

On Thursday, she and her Senate colleague Robert Menendez (D-New Jersey), in collaboration with Physicians for Social Responsibility, announced the release of Shock and Awe Hits Home, a study demonstrating that the cost of dealing with the mental and social trauma—just for the American victims of Bush’s War—may exceed the combat price tag of Iraq and Afghanistan.  In their press release, Senator Murray had this to say about the PSR report:

For five long years there has been a cost of this war that the Administration not only has ignored, but has simply refused to talk about - that’s the cost of caring for our veterans when they come home.  Today, we are learning exactly what it will cost America to keep our promise to those who have served. Thanks to the diligent efforts of Physicians for Social Responsibility we now have a price tag of up to $660 billion to provide the medical care and disability benefits that our veterans both need and deserve.

That same day, Senator Murray took to the Senate floor to offer her thoughts as we celebrate Veterans Day.  Herewith, extended excerpts from Patty’s November 8 speech:

Sunday is Veterans Day – a day designated for us to thank our nation’s heroes for their service to our country.

It’s also a time to ask whether our country has done enough to repay our veterans for all they have given to secure our safety.  As thousands return home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – some from their fifth tour of duty – I wish I could say the answer to this question is, ‘Yes.’

But tragically, this issue has not been a priority for this Administration.  We have too often failed to provide the care our heroes have earned.  From the shameful conditions at Walter Reed and VA facilities around the country, to a lack of mental health counselors, to a benefit claims backlog of months and sometimes years, our veterans have had to struggle to get basic care.  Mr. President, fighting overseas takes a tremendous toll on the lives of our troops and their families.  It is simply unacceptable that our heroes have had to fight their own government for treatment they need.

Mr. President, I know from personal experience how military service affects veterans and their families – and how the wounds veterans suffer from their military service can shape their lives forever.

As a volunteer at the VA, I learned how some veterans can slip through the cracks.  But the experience also taught me that the doctors and nurses there are dedicated to caring for their patients.  It convinced me that the VA system – not private medicine – is where our veterans can get the best care.  Our VA system is uniquely positioned to recognize and treat the specialized injuries, medical conditions, and mental health challenges caused by combat and military missions.

Private medicine doesn’t always have the knowledge base or resources to deal with these unique problems.  It’s one reason I will continue to fight for better access to the VA that allows our veterans to get the care they need without endless waits and red tape.  Rather than kicking our veterans into yet another maze of processing and paperwork, we should work to provide better access to one of the best health care systems in the country.

I also know from experience in my own family that veterans are sometimes reluctant to seek care or attention.  My father was one of the first G.I.s to land on Okinawa during World War II.  He earned the Purple Heart and returned home disabled.

My family is enormously proud of my dad and his service.  But like many of his generation, he didn’t talk about his experiences.  In fact, we only really learned his story by reading his journals after he passed away.  Mr. President, these two experiences in my life also illustrate a larger lesson that applies to many veterans.  Often, they don’t want to call attention to their service.  And sometimes, they are suffering so much, they can’t even ask for the help they need.  That’s why we need a VA system ready and able to care for veterans of all wars.

Mr. President, the physical wounds our veterans have suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan are horrible.  But I have worked especially hard as a member of the Veterans’ Affairs Committee to shine a light on the mental wounds our veterans are suffering in this war.  These wounds run just as deep – and can be just as devastating – as physical injuries.  And this problem just isn’t getting the attention it deserves from the Administration.

Our troops are under great strain.  In the past, we were always able to give our service members a break to allow them to recover from physical, psychological, and emotional demands.  Now, some are serving for their third, fourth, and even fifth tours of duty.  All of this increases the likelihood they will suffer Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and other mental health conditions.  According to the VA’s own numbers, fully one-third of all returning Iraq veterans will suffer from a mental health condition.  That’s an astounding statistic.  But it’s also probably too low because many veterans are still afraid to seek care.  Earlier this year, I spoke with National Guard members at Camp Murray who told me that they don’t want to be labeled with PTSD or Traumatic Brain Injury because they are afraid it would hurt their careers.  One soldier told me that to be labeled with mental trauma, “jeopardizes their lives outside of the service.”

So, Mr. President, how do we overcome these problems?  Fortunately, there are three clear areas where we can improve:

• First, we must ensure that the mental health needs of veterans are met.  The VA needs to raise awareness about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and combat-related stresses.  It also must hire more counselors to help treat everyone – from the 20-year-old veteran returning from Iraq, to the Vietnam veteran still struggling with the legacy of war.
• Next, the VA must clear the backlog of claims so that veterans can get care in a timely – and fair – way.  The President needs to sign legislation to ensure that the Department of Defense and the VA are working with the same disability rating system and that records aren’t lost between the two systems.
• And most importantly, we must provide enough money so that our veterans get the quality care they deserve.

The Senate has approved a bill that provides almost $4 billion above the President’s request that would take important steps to improve care.  It would:

• Improve conditions at VA facilities across the country.
• Invest in new ways to treat military ailments like PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury,
• And it would fund better prosthetics for thousands of troops who have lost limbs in battle.

The Administration has ignored these problems for too long.  But the Democratic-controlled Congress has taken action.

Mr. President, our men and women in uniform have answered the President’s call to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan without hesitation or complaint.  They have left loved ones for years and put their lives on the line.  Some have come home without limbs.  Others have returned with mental scars.  Many – thankfully – have escaped without injury.  But all of them have earned our respect and the best care possible when they come home.

And if we don’t care for our service members now, we risk weakening our military for decades to come.  President Bush has been more than willing to use our veterans as props as he argues in favor of his misguided war policies.  Now it’s time to turn that lip service into reality and give our veterans the care they need and deserve.  We owe it to our country to ensure that we are there to support our service members, our veterans, and their families every step of the way.  They are a cost of war that we simply can’t ignore.

Patty Murray shows the kind of compassionate support, and American support, for our military veterans that is sorely lacking among the sociopaths who have so tragically ruined our nation’s good name.  On this Veterans Day 2007, let us celebrate a true champion for those brave and patriotic women and men who served in America’s military, Senator Patty Murray, Democrat from Washington.