Here is a copy of the original South Park. I hadn’t watched it in a long time. Still makes me laugh. If you are easily offended you may want to skip it. Click here to see it.
Archives for March 2005
Canada: No refuge for U.S. soldier
I have a number of comments to make about this story, but first here are a couple of sections that are noteworthy:
“TORONTO (AP) — The Canadian government has denied refugee status to former U.S. Army paratrooper Jeremy Hinzman, a major blow to a handful of U.S. military deserters who have fled to Canada rather than fight in a war they claim commits atrocities against civilians.”
Is there an example of a war in which civilians are not hurt, injured or maimed. Is there any time in which civilians are not placed at risk. This is not to say that it is right or good for them to be hurt. Civilians should be protected, but there is a difference between protection and intentional targeting of civilians.
“Pvt. 1st Class Joshua Key, 26, of Oklahoma City is the latest war resister to flee to Toronto, arriving two weeks ago with his wife and four children. He told the Toronto Star that he served in Iraq with the 43rd Combat Engineering Company, which was deployed in April 2003.
Key said he served eight months in Iraq before he left the military when he was on leave back at the 43rd’s base in Fort Carson, Colorado in December 2003.
“I was in combat the entire time I was there,” said Key. “I left for Iraq with a purpose, thinking this was another Hitler deal. But there were no weapons of mass destruction. They had no military whatsoever. And I started to wonder.”
Ok, so this soldier was over there and is familiar with the situation, but I don’t see anything here that suggests that there was intentional targeting of civilians. Combat is not nice, it is not supposed to be.
“The ruling, written by Immigration and Refugee Board member Brian Goodman, said Hinzman had not made a convincing argument that he would face persecution or cruel and unusual punishment if sent back to the United States.
Goodman said that while Hinzman may face some employment and social discrimination, “The treatment does not amount to a violation of a fundamental human right, and the harm is not serious.”
Hinzman’s attorney, Jeffry House, said his client would appeal the ruling and still believed that he would be granted refugee status in Canada.
“He is disappointed,” House told CBC TV. “We don’t believe that people should be imprisoned for doing what they believe is illegal.”
A couple more comments, working backwards. The attorney’s comments about not being imprsioned for doing something that you believe is illegal is just specious. I could make the same case about not paying income taxes.
But what irks me more than anything else is that these men enlisted voluntarily. They were not drafted, they signed up. And they should have understood the risks involved in signing up to be a part of the armed forces.
If they come out and say that our troops are engaging in intentional harm and destruction of civilians and civilian property I might have more sympathy, but that is not what I hear and even if they said it I would need more evidence to prove it.
War is not nice. It is not a good thing, it is not something that I welcome or think that we should routinely engage in. But sometimes it is necessary and we all have our roles to play. And when you choose to insert yourself by enlisting you need to take responsibility.
I wish our troops well and hope that they come home soon. I hope that they are safe and I hope that the innocents on all sides are kept safe too. But there is going to be a certain amount of tragedy and loss here and we just need to accept that, even though it may be distasteful.
The Ghost Ship That Ran Aground
There is a blog that I enjoy reading, although the truth be told I only hit it sporadically. It is called beFrank and it is written by a man who works as a cameraman for a news station here in Los Angeles.
He writes about his experiences and posts pictures of many different things and places that he encounters because of the job.
His post about the Ghost Ship attracted me because I thought that the pictures were kind of cool.
Additions to Fragments of Fiction
I have been working on some additions to Fragments of Fiction. I have a lot of work to do and am anxious to spend more time on it, but have been too busy to accomplish much.
I spent a little time writing more about Georgie and the relationship with the male protagonist. I haven’t decided if I am going to use the following 600 words as its own chapter or if I am going to work it in to one of the earlier bits about Georgie. Feel free to share your thoughts.
More About Georgie
If you were to ask me why I started hanging out with Georgie I wouldn’t be able to give you answer. I don’t know why. It is the kind of answer or should I say non-answer that used to infuriate my father. When I was a child I could never have gotten away with explaining that I didn’t know why I had done something. An answer like that would not have been acceptable to him.
Of course like most teenagers I had responded to most of his questions about what I did or didn’t do with the very thing I just mentioned. It is part of a rite of passage to try and irritate your parents and I was a master at it. One of my father’s favorite movies was Cool Hand Luke.
Maturity is a wonderful thing as it allows you to look back and see what a jerk you really were. All those times you thought you were being cool, all those moments when you thought that you were just like James Dean have a way of being colored by time to your advantage. But if you stop and think about it, if you are honest and truthful you find that most of the time you weren’t that cool and you might have even been a complete asshole. Maybe I am being too egocentric, but I suspect that I am not the only one who sees their past this way.
My father worked hard at trying to maintain a relationship with me. He tried to be my friend and to stay involved in my life. I hated it. The simple questions he asked me felt like an interrogation so I did my best to be difficult so that he would stop.
Often when he would try and speak with me I would quote Strother Martin’s famous line:
“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate. Some men you just can’t reach, so you get what we had here last week which is the way he wants it. Well, he gets it. And I don’t like it any more than you men.â€
After all if you are going to try and aggravate someone you might as well take something they love and twist it, offer it to them in some perverse distortion of itself. And it worked. After a while my father just stopped speaking with me. He gave up and I got angry. It is kind of silly because he was only doing what I wanted him to do, but all it did was piss me off.
Maybe that is what pushed me towards Georgie. I didn’t have any older siblings and without my father there was no longer any sort of male role model in my life. Not that Georgie was any older than I was, but he did have some life experiences that I didn’t have and he had a certain kind of charisma. I can’t explain it, won’t even try other than to say that he had a magnetic personality that attracted people.
And he was confident. Lord was he ever confident. Georgie walked like there was nothing in the world that could stop him from going wherever it was he was headed. He moved with an attitude that radiated from all sides of him. Mean, nasty, arrogant, cocky, bold and confident. He was all of those things and proud to be described that way.
If you asked Georgie if it was better to be feared or respected he would have picked feared without hesitation.
Georgie’s reputation for violence was earned and well deserved.
Fragments of Thought and Fantasy
I am dedicated to this blog. I think about it frequently because the words and I have a special relationship. There is a slow dance that we do around the room, it is the kind of thing where your partner just knows where to go, they move with you with little or no prompting.
At least that is how it feels most of the time, but every now and then it just doesn’t work. We step on each others toes, trip over our own feet and the dance loses the graceful presence it once had and disintegrates into some macabre spiral of death.
It is like watching a couple of marionnettes in a puppet show. You know that they are dancing, but not because of what you see from them. The reason is that there are elements surrounding them that make it obvious as to what they are supposed to be doing.
In my case that means that the words do not flow from my fingertips with any sort of ease. They show up because I have pounded them out of my skull, forced them out the way you squeeze the last bit of toothpaste out of the bottle. You squish, and squeeze, pound and push and inevitably you find that last little bit, but it didn’t come easily.
It makes me insane because I usually have a decent command of the language, but at moments like this it reminds me of moments when I have been in foreign countries where I only spoke a few words of the native tongue. The people I tried to communicate would look at me, smile like I was some kind of child as they tried to understand what I wanted. I am not a baby, I am not a toddler. I can communicate effectively, but when it is taken from me I feel like I am being punished.
It is a nasty, punitive measure that leaves me frustrated and sometimes flustered. It doesn’t happen too often, but when it does it leaves a mark.
I have tried to identify the reasons why this happens, looked for symptoms and signs so that I could be prepared for it and have failed each time.
My failure is frustrating, but it is not daunting. I am too stubborn, maybe even too arrogant to give up. I can’t accept it so I keep pounding away until the mental block is shattered and broken. I am relentless and I know from experience that I will get beyond it.
But the experience is never enjoyable.
