1 Boring Old Man

After I read about the "sex scandal" in Northern Ireland last night involving the First Minister’s wife, Iris Robinson [so here’s to you Mrs. Robinson…], my mind was filled with memories of the conflicts in Northern Ireland. I arrived in the UK in August 1971 for a three years tour in the Air Force. We were on a base in East Anglia, a very rural part of England known as the Fens. On the very day we arrived, I picked up a London Times and read that on that day, the British had begun a program they called Internment in Northern Ireland. The violence between the Catholic I.R.A. and Protestants had been at a fever pitch. So Internment meant that the British Army was going to round up dissidents and I.R.A. members and put them in custody in Internment Camps. I guess it was their version of GITMO. At the time, I knew nothing of the age old conflicts in Ireland.

One thing I didn’t know was that Ireland had never ever been a unified country, being dominated by the larger Britain throughout its history. In the 1600s, settlers from Protestant England moved into Northern Ireland, and by 1800, Ireland became part of the UK under the rule of the Protestants. In the early 20th century, there was a revolution, and Ireland was split. Northern Ireland, predominantly Protestant, remained part of the UK. Southern Ireland, overwhelmingly Catholic, became the Irish Free State. The hostilities never stopped.Though there were few "battles," there were bombings – particularly pubs, in both parts of Ireland.

Internment didn’t work. The bloody bombings kept happening. The whole time we were there, the evening paper invariably has a report of some atrocity in Ireland. When we went to Ireland [a wonderful place], we stayed in the South because Northern Ireland wasn’t safe. One Sunday evening in Dublin, we went to a movie [we lived in a rural place, so when we traveled, we often went to movies]. About halfway through the movie, the usher announced that there was a bomb report, so we were marched out of the theater and that was that. Nobody seemed upset. That was just life in Ireland at the time.

I never understood it, the conflict in Ireland. It seemed like it was in their DNA to fight with each other, blow each other to smitherines. It’s just what they did. Here it is, forty years later. They’re in a process to hopefully come up with a functional unitary government no longer under England, and this affair by the First Minister’s wife threatens to snafu the whole plan. The violence is starting anew. Bombings. Remarkable…

And yet Ireland’s not the only version. In the 70s, we visited Yugoslavia, still under Communist Tito’s rule. I thought it was a country, inhabited by Yugoslavians. Well, when Tito died, we found out there were all kinds of ethnic groups there who then set out to exterminate each other. Throughout that vicious war, I never even really got straight about who was fighting who. Was it ethnicity? religion? The whole time they were fighting I kept trying to figure it out. How did they even know who to shoot at? Now it’s a bunch of different countries, all separated again under some ancient set of borders.

And then there was the U.S.S.R. that turned [back] into a bunch of different places after the great communist experiment went belly up twenty years ago – not to mention the Eastern European countries that were, for all intents and purposes, part of the U.S.S.R. [places like East Germany, Poland, Hungary, etc.]. The Iron Curtain was effective in one sense, only students of history knew much about the internal divisions of the Soviet Union. When it fell, all kinds of entities just seemed to pop up.

The region that sits on the front burner these days is the Middle East – which is a horse of a different color. For the most part, the borders in the Middle East at least approximate the borders from antiquity – Babylonia [Iraq], Persia [Iran], Arabia [Saudi Arabia], etc. But as we know in spades, there’s no lack of conflict there. These ancient kingdoms have been plagued with foreign rule for centuries – Ottoman Turks, English, each other. The region is united by religion [Islam] and divided by religion [Shiite, Sunni]. And then there’s Israel and the Palestinians locked into constant conflict since the dawn of time. What they seem to want is to be left alone. At this point, the rest of us might be glad to do that except for their control of the world’s oil and their propensity to want to make atomic bombs. What will happen? As our guides in Egypt and Jordan often said, "Only God knows."

It would seem that there should be some lesson from all these unstable governments that fragment into ethnic or religious semi-unities when left to their own devices. When it’s all said and done, our nation of mongrels seems to be doing as well as any with this kind of factional, racial, religious, regional heterogeneity [not to imply that we’re doing all that well]. But what is the overall message for the future? Is there a big story in all of this?

Banks Prepare for Bigger Bonuses, and Public’s Wrath
New York Times
By LOUISE STORY and ERIC DASH
January 9, 2010

^{The bank bonus season, that annual rite of big money and bigger egos, begins in earnest this week, and it looks as if it will be one of the largest and most controversial blowouts the industry has ever seen. Bank executives are grappling with a question that exasperates, even infuriates, many recession-weary Americans: Just how big should their paydays be? Despite calls for restraint from Washington and a chafed public, resurgent banks are preparing to pay out bonuses that rival those of the boom years. The haul, in cash and stock, will run into many billions of dollars.}

^{Industry executives acknowledge that the numbers being tossed around — six-, seven- and even eight-figure sums for some chief executives and top producers — will probably stun the many Americans still hurting from the financial collapse and ensuing Great Recession. Goldman Sachs is expected to pay its employees an average of about $595,000 apiece for 2009, one of the most profitable years in its 141-year history. Workers in the investment bank of JPMorgan Chase stand to collect about $463,000 on average…}

Ordinary Americans lack the power to hurt the big banks
Washington Post
By Martha C. White
January 10, 2010

^{Arianna Huffington is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore – or doesn’t think you should. The woman behind the Huffington Post recently exhorted Americans to yank their money out of big banks and open accounts at community banks instead. She called out the Big Four – Bank of America, Citi, J.P. Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo – by name for their "slap in the face to taxpayers." The crusade includes a link to a new Web site called Move Your Money [http://www.moveyourmoney.info], which includes clips from "It’s a Wonderful Life" and a tool for finding a new bank courtesy of Institutional Risk Analytics.}

^{This is a great example of populist indignation made practical [HuffPo says it does its banking with a smaller bank that specializes in start-ups]. It’s also a great example of why populist indignation shouldn’t drive policy. We get the outrage: The banks did something bad, so let’s spank the banks. But let’s also do the math. Would it even be possible for the roughly 72 million American families with checking or savings accounts to appreciably diminish banks’ holdings just by closing their accounts?…}

^{Here’s one problem: The small banks rely on the big ones, as Ely points out. In fact, for foreign-currency exchanges and complex loan offerings, among other transactions, small banks regularly turn to their brawnier brethren. The small and medium-size institutions that Huffington lionizes depend on the industry’s behemoths for "correspondent banking," as it’s known in the industry. That would cushion any blow the big banks might feel. But Move Your Money’s biggest problem is that the average American bank account has only $4,000 in it, according to the American Bankers Association. To achieve that 5 percent reduction, you’d need to have roughly 2.6 million Big Four customers close their accounts…}

^{Huffington says the Big Four "are not too big to feel the impact of hundreds of thousands of people taking action to change a broken financial and political system." For her campaign to really have an impact, though, even hundreds of thousands wouldn’t be enough.}

^{Banks make their money in a lot of ways, says Bert Ely, owner of the bank consulting company Ely & Co. One such way is by collecting fees. For instance, banks are projected to collect $38.5 billion in overdraft fees this year, and about 90 percent of those fees come from only 10 percent of the customer base. While the new opt-in requirement for overdraft protection will probably lower this number in coming years, it’s safe to assume that banks will come up with other ways to extract their pound of flesh. A recent Bankrate study showed that many fees, including those for account maintenance and out-of-network ATM use, rose last year. Banks also make money from merchant fees paid by retailers every time someone swipes a credit or debit card. And a program just announced by the Federal Reserve, aimed at curbing inflation, will even pay banks interest to park their excess reserves in the equivalent of CDs at the central bank. There’s also investment banking, consulting fees and a host of other income streams, both in the United States and abroad.}

Ulster on brink over Iris Robinson sex scandal

No one does a government sex scandal like the British Isles. We colonists are rookies. So, right now, Northern Ireland is in the midst of a delicate process to form a government independent of England that contains the Catholic and Protestant elements that have been at war since men wore ruffled collars and carried swords. Northern Ireland’s First Minister representing the Protestants is Peter Robinson. His wife, Iris Robinson, is a 60 year old Lawyer who is an Irish MP [Member of Parliment] and an evangelical anti-Gay crusader.

It seems that Iris had an affair with 19 year old Kirk McCambley, and that she borrowed £50,000 from two Developers and gave it to him to start a business. All of this became public when Iris made a suicide attempt. So the Minister’s job is compromised, the formation of the coalition government is up in the air, Iris is resigning her post in the Parliment, and Kirk McCambley’s business is thriving.

Thomas Wolfe spent his literary life wandering in Europe and the U.S., but his novels remained focused on his boyhood home in Asheville, North Carolina – his mother’s boarding house [now a tourist destination surrounded by modern buildings]. His novels stand with Proust’s Rememberance of Things Past as a testimony to our longing and nostalgia for an earlier time of life when the world, though complex and confusing, is fresh and open for discovery. But as Wolfe says, You Can’t Go Home Again.

And he didn’t. He wrote his books in Europe, finally coming home for good in 1936 [fleeing the rise of the Nazis]. He died from tuberculosis in 1938. One wonders if some of his poignant longing didn’t have something to do with the state of the world during his brief adulthood. I mention Wolfe because I’ve been thinking about my parents and their stories. Both were fine story-tellers with somewhat idealized yarns about their earlier lives. Both grew up in families hard-hit by the Great Depression – coal mining immigrants in Ohio and vaudevillians in rural Georgia. I always wondered about that. The Depression and World War II spanned their adolescence and young adulthood, but their stories were about people and adventures, not the hardships. They had the same bittersweet nostalgic attachments to their coming of age years as Wolfe. But I always wondered what it would’ve been like to grow up in those years with that kind of hardship. One thing about history, it’s not in real time. It’s presented to us with its meaning and outcome already somewhat known – stripped of the emotion and uncertainty that accompanied it when it was "the present." Pearl Harbor looked a lot different on December 8, 1941 than it looks now. Even September 11, 2001 is an aging memory – now more a turning point than the cataclysm that’s still hard to get one’s mind around.

After the Stock Market tanked in September 2008, like many I pored over the events of 1929 and the period afterward. There was so much that was similar, so many lessons to be learned about how we let it happen again, about how we finally recovered back then, about the mistakes before and after. But there was one major difference. The 1929 Crash happened in the early days of a Presidency – a presidency that was an extension of one that came before it. Herbert Hoover was a well meaning guy, but he was a Conservative Republican who couldn’t let himself intervene in a massive way, and the country fell apart in front of his eyes, in spite of his efforts. FDR was able to make radical changes. We’d suffered enough and were willing to do what it took. I doubt that Hoover could’ve brought it off. Pain is a great motivator and it took 3+ years of pain with unemployment at 25% for us to act. Even at that, after 4 years, FDR backed off too soon with disastrous results. People just wanted it to go back to how it was.

This time around, I’m not sure we’ve suffered enough. We’re still hanging on to the idea that it can go back to how it was a couple of years ago, but You Can’t Go Home Again. This was a fundamental crash like 1929, not part of the business cycle of capitalism. People who realize this are mad that Obama hasn’t made sweeping changes, definitive reform. People who haven’t realized this are furious at the small changes he has made and are pissed off that we’re not living 2006 lives. When FDR came along, people had four years of misery under their belts. We’ve barely got a year. So we look at these numbers as disappointing.

Bubbles and the Banks
New York Times
By PAUL KRUGMAN
January 7, 2010

^{… the risks created by the housing bubble were strongly concentrated in the financial sector. As a result, the collapse of the housing bubble threatened to bring down the nation’s banks. And banks play a special role in the economy. If they can’t function, the wheels of commerce as a whole grind to a halt. Why did the bankers take on so much risk? Because it was in their self-interest to do so. By increasing leverage — that is, by making risky investments with borrowed money — banks could increase their short-term profits. And these short-term profits, in turn, were reflected in immense personal bonuses. If the concentration of risk in the banking sector increased the danger of a systemwide financial crisis, well, that wasn’t the bankers’ problem.}

^{Of course, that conflict of interest is the reason we have bank regulation. But in the years before the crisis, the rules were relaxed — and, even more important, regulators failed to expand the rules to cover the growing “shadow” banking system, consisting of institutions like Lehman Brothers that performed banklike functions even though they didn’t offer conventional bank deposits. The result was a financial industry that was hugely profitable as long as housing prices were going up — finance accounted for more than a third of total U.S. profits as the bubble was inflating — but was brought to the edge of collapse once the bubble burst. It took government aid on an immense scale, and the promise of even more aid if needed, to pull the industry back from the brink.}

^{And here’s the thing: Since that aid came with few strings — in particular, no major banks were nationalized even though some clearly wouldn’t have survived without government help — there’s every incentive for bankers to engage in a repeat performance. After all, it’s now clear that they’re living in a heads-they-win, tails-taxpayers-lose world. The test for reform, then, is whether it reduces bankers’ incentives and ability to concentrate risk going forward.}

^{Transparency is part of the answer. Before the crisis, hardly anyone realized just how much risk the banks were taking on. More disclosure, especially with regard to complex financial derivatives, would clearly help. Beyond that, an important aspect of reform should be new rules limiting bank leverage. I’ll be delving into proposed legislation in future columns, but here’s what I can say about the financial reform bill the House passed — with zero Republican votes — last month: Its limits on leverage look O.K. Not great, but O.K. It would, however, be all too easy for those rules to get weakened to the point where they wouldn’t do the job. A few tweaks in the fine print and banks would be free to play the same game all over again. And reform really should take on the financial industry’s compensation practices. If Congress can’t legislate away the financial rewards for excessive risk-taking, it can at least try to tax them.}

Let me conclude with a political note. The main reason for reform is to serve the nation. If we don’t get major financial reform now, we’re laying the foundations for the next crisis. But there are also political reasons to act. For there’s a populist rage building in this country, and President Obama’s kid-gloves treatment of the bankers has put Democrats on the wrong side of this rage. If Congressional Democrats don’t take a tough line with the banks in the months ahead, they will pay a big price in November.

in⋅dus⋅try [in-duh-stree]
–noun, plural in⋅dus⋅tries for 1, 2, 7
1.	the aggregate of manufacturing or technically productive enterprises in a particular field, often named after its principal product: the automobile industry; the steel industry.
2.	any general business activity; commercial enterprise: the Italian tourist industry.
3.	trade or manufacture in general: the rise of industry in Africa.
4.	the ownership and management of companies, factories, etc.: friction between labor and industry.
5.	systematic work or labor.
6.	energetic, devoted activity at any work or task; diligence: Her teacher praised her industry.
7.	the aggregate of work, scholarship, and ancillary activity in a particular field, often named after its principal subject: the Mozart industry.
8.	Archaeology. an assemblage of artifacts regarded as unmistakably the work of a single prehistoric group.

Geithner’s Fed tried to keep sweet deal for banks a secret: Issa
Raw Story
By Daniel Tencer
January 7, 2010

The controversy surrounding Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s role in the 2008 Wall Street bailouts was ramped up Thursday with the revelation of emails that show the New York Federal Reserve – then run by Geithner – pressured insurance giant AIG to withhold information about payments the company made to its creditors. Rep. Darrell Issa [R-CA] obtained emails between AIG employees showing that the company had planned to disclose in its filings to the SEC that it had paid 100 cents on the dollar to creditors like Goldman Sachs and other banks, but "the New York Fed crossed out the reference," Bloomberg News reports.

AIG has received $183 billion in taxpayer relief. The news that the New York Fed attempted to keep from the public how that money was spent will likely increase political opposition to Geithner’s appointment as Treasury Secretary. As Shahien Nasiripour notes at the Huffington Post, a report [PDF] last fall from the inspector general for the TARP bailout found that the New York Fed pressured AIG into paying creditors like Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Wachovia 100 cents on the dollar for failed insurance agreements known as credit default swaps, even though AIG was actively negotiating with those banks to pay them less. If AIG had had its way, it would have saved taxpayers money. But the Fed’s intervention ensured taxpayers would be on the hook for all of AIG’s bad debts.

The report therefore appeared to be definitive evidence that the Federal Reserve was far more concerned with the well-being of Wall Street than the well-being of the taxpayers bailing out Wall Street firms. The emails obtained by Rep. Issa show that AIG was aware that the New York Fed’s insistence on hiding the debt payments was questionable. Huffington Post reports:

In a March 12, 2009, e-mail, Kathleen Shannon, an AIG in-house lawyer and senior vice president, told AIG executives that the firm needed to come up with a reason, per the New York Fed, for why it wasn’t going to publicly disclose details regarding payments to counterparties. "In order to make only the disclosure that the Fed wants us to make…we need to have a reasonable basis for believing and arguing to the SEC that the information we are seeking to protect is not already publicly available," Shannon wrote in an e-mail sent at 10:55 p.m. on March 12.

"It appears that the New York Fed deliberately pressured AIG to restrict and delay the disclosure of important information to the SEC," Issa said in a statement, as quoted at Bloomberg and Huffington Post. "The American taxpayers, who own approximately 80% of AIG, deserve full and complete disclosure under our nation’s securities laws, not the withholding of politically inconvenient information…

People have been saying that the biggest decision of Obama’s first term would be about the troop levels in Afghanistan. I don’t think that’s right. I think it’s about his economic team, as he likes to refer to his advisers. It’s the most important one because it represents a mistake – Geithner was a bad choice from the start. He’s not in trouble because of Republican name-calling or divisive partisanship. He’s in trouble because he lacks talent, vision, and his priorities are way off the mark.

Humam al-Balawi, Double Agent Who Killed Seven CIA Operatives in Afghanistan
ABC News
By BRIAN ROSS and NASSER ATTA
Jan. 6, 2010

Al-Balawi, a 32-year-old Jordanian doctor, had convinced the Americans that his jihadist postings on the web were only part of his cover identity. He lured 13 CIA operatives and his handler to a meeting at Camp Chapman, an American forward operating base in Afghanistan, by saying he had just met with al Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri and had information to share.

The photo comes from a Jordanian identification card… Al Balawi was born in Kuwait in 1977, raised in Jordan and attended medical school in Turkey. He had been arrested by Jordan’s intelligence agency, the General Intelligence Directorate, more than a year ago. Believing they had flipped al Balawi and made him a double agent, the Jordanians released him from prison and sent him to Afghanistan to penetrate al Qaeda by pretending to be an aspiring foreign jihadi.

In his early life al-Balawi lived in a refugee camp near Zarqa, Jordan, the same town that spawned infamous insurgent leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi. Al-Balawi studied medicine in Turkey at the expense of the Jordanian government and was a straight-A student, sources said. Al-Balawi, who worked at a clinic in a Palestinian refugee camp near Zarqa, was extremely active online and in jihadist chat rooms and was arrested several times by the Jordanian authorities.

The Jordanian intelligence officer who handled al-Balawi, Sharif Ali bin Zeid, was a member of the royal family. He was buried with a royal funeral that was attended by the king and queen of Jordan. While the U.S. and Jordan mourned their deaths, a Web site from al-Balawi’s tribe described him today as a hero and said it was the most devastating attack against the CIA in the last 30 years.

The religion is simple enough. There is one God, Allah. Mohamed was his last Prophet. Since the word of God is infallible, the message of God given to Abraham, Moses, Joseph, and Jesus must’ve been the same as that given to Mohamed. The reason to have another Prophet was that the message given to the others was distorted by translation. There are two books – the Quran and the Haddith – the word of God revealed to Mohamed and the sayings and stories of Mohamed respectively. Islamic scholarship and jurisprudence are involved in making sure that the words of Mohamed are undistorted – in a direct line to Mohamed.

Historically, Islam arose to unite the Arabs who at the time had many gods – so a lot of the religion is about this uniting. There are three groups of people – other Muslims [A+], "people of the book" [Jews and Christians][C+], and everyone else[F]. That brings us to the question of Jihad – what does it mean? The people we talked to about this went out of their way to tell us that Jihad means "striving in the way of Allah" and that it refers to a personal spiritual struggle. They go on to say that the references in the Quran to armed struggles with Infidels meant the enemies of Islam in Mohamed’s time, not now. They uniformly referred to Terrorists as "Extremists." I think they believed what they said to us, often quoting lines from the Haddith where Mohamed is preaching kindness and non-violence.

For the Muslims we know as jihadists [jihadi, mujahid, mujahideen], it’s an entirely different story. They read the writings of the Prophet as jihad of the sword. In their understanding, they are told by the Prophet to protect the Muslim Arab lands from the Infidels who defile their holy places by their presence. The Quran mentions that such jihadi are beloved by Allah. It would be presumptuous and foolhardy of me to enter the controversy about what Mohamed really meant in verses like this: Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, [even if they are] of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued. Suffice it to say that to the jihadi, this kind of holy war is the highest good, and martyrdom is the highest homage to Allah.

So here’s Humam al-Balawi – a young doctor who grew up in a refugee camp in Jordan, arrested for his passionate involvement with the jihadi. The Jordanians think he has "turned" and the C.I.A. thinks they have developed a "mole." Balawi subsequently assembles the Infidel C.I.A. types and blows them  [and himself] to smitherines. That’s jihad of the sword, repeated every time some kid straps on explosives and becomes a human bomb. It’s Islam, it’s Arab, it’s done by people who have committed themselves to a higher calling. They’re fighting for a Muslim Arab land, a Caliphate. That’s what Mohamed wanted, and that’s what actually existed at other times in history.

^{He was a proud man, humble in the Muslim way, but very sure of himself. Somehow, he got to talking about the Crusades and pointed out that the Christian Crusaders were ingenuous. "It wasn’t about religion. It was greed and conquest." He went on. "On the first day, the Crusaders killed 70,000 in Jerusalem. The streets ran with blood up to the horses knees." Well, I sure didn’t know that. Later he was talking about the  wonders of the Quran. "There’s a chapter that tells of the moon being two pieces that came together. Recently, scientists have confirmed that there’s a rift on the moon where the pieces joined." Later "There’s a chapter in the Quran that tells us that iron comes to earth in the rain. Recently, scientists have confirmed that rainwater contains traces of iron, just as the Prophet said." His knowing smile was a bit hard to return…}

In the Bush Wars, we’ve had an all volunteer Army – and have used National Guardsmen to fill the ranks [essentially destroying the idea of a "National" "Guard"]. Many of us suspect that they used the Guard and multiple deployments to avoid having to reinstitute the Draft, keeping the War out of the living rooms of Americans who might object.

Multiple Deployments Lead to Major Increase in PTSD Cases
t·r·u·t·h·o·u·t
by: Mary Susan Littlepage
05 January 2010

^{Soldiers with multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan are more than three times as likely as soldiers with no previous deployments to screen positive for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and major depression, according to a new study published by the American Journal for Public Health. Additionally, soldiers with multiple deployments are more than twice as likely to report chronic pain and more than 90 percent more likely to score below the general population norm on physical functioning…}

^{"Those experiencing multiple deployments are most at risk, with the Office of the US Army Surgeon General reporting mental health problems in 11.9 percent of those with one deployment, 18.5 percent with two deployments and 27.2 percent with three or four deployments," the report stated… "What we’re seeing is a people who are having more serious PTSD when they’re called up for an additional deployment, and that triggers a lot of mental health issues – in fact, suicidal action in some cases," Fairweather said. "But it’s also mixed with a lot of conflicting feelings of guilt" in that if people have PTSD, they are a danger toward other people, but Fairweather said they may think, "Who am I to try to get out of this? Who am I to complain?" when fellow soldiers are going through the same hell…}

^{Although the health consequences of soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan have focused attention on the medical needs of returning veterans, the report stated, "Concern has also centered on the military readiness of our fighting force, given the unprecedented pattern of repeat deployments unique to this particular conflict." Of all the soldiers deployed to Iraq since the war began in March 2003, about 38 percent of soldiers have been deployed more than once and 10 percent have been deployed three times or more, the report stated… Fairweather said, "The deployments are so stressful and different than what we’ve seen in previous conflicts. There are no front lines, and it’s 24/7 combat.""There is no clear standard for what constitutes a medically fit fighting force (having PTSD, for example, does not disqualify someone from military service), and symptom reporting on screening instruments does not substitute for a diagnostic assessment by a medical professional," the report read.}

^{In any case, the Pentagon’s data indicate that between 2003 and 2008, 43,000 troops "deemed medically unfit for active duty by their physicians were deployed to Iraq," the report stated. Also, the report stated that the Office of the US Army Surgeon General found that "multiple deployments have adverse effects on work performance during deployment, with multiple deployed soldiers being more likely than are others to report limitations in their ability to work effectively"…}

^{In conclusion, the report stated, "Our findings suggest that repeated deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan adversely affect the physical and mental functioning of New Jersey National Guard troops. The implications of these findings for the health of all active-duty forces recalled to [Iraq and Afghanistan] combat require further investigation."}

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. I will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.

That was the war that taught us about P.T.S.D. What it was. What caused it. Anyone reading the literature from those days could’ve easily predicted the results of this study, but we sent them into the situation anyway. And if this war is like the ones before it, the incidence of war related mental illness is way under-reported by the soldiers themselves. So we’ll learn that the problems will get worse over time. The soldier’s parents know, and their wives know, and their children will figure it out in their own psychotherapy years later. Tragedy is bad enough. To have lived a tragedy and to know it was not necessary is much worse. In my last post, I was proposing that America is in a state of Lamentation. What we’ve done to our soldiers is , at least for me, part of that Lament…

¹⁷_{The LORD hath done that which he had devised; he hath fulfilled his word that he had commanded in the days of old: he hath thrown down, and hath not pitied: and he hath caused thine enemy to rejoice over thee, he hath set up the horn of thine adversaries…}
¹⁹_{Arise, cry out in the night: in the beginning of the watches pour out thine heart like water before the face of the LORD: lift up thy hands toward him for the life of thy young children, that faint for hunger in the top of every street.}
²⁰_{Behold, O LORD, and consider to whom thou hast done this. Shall the women eat their fruit, and children of a span long? shall the priest and the prophet be slain in the sanctuary of the Lord?}
²¹_{The young and the old lie on the ground in the streets: my virgins and my young men are fallen by the sword; thou hast slain them in the day of thine anger; thou hast killed, and not pitied.}
²²_{Thou hast called as in a solemn day my terrors round about, so that in the day of the LORD’s anger none escaped nor remained: those that I have swaddled and brought up hath mine enemy consumed.}

⁸_{Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I, even I, am against thee, and will execute judgments in the midst of thee in the sight of the nations.}
⁹_{And I will do in thee that which I have not done, and whereunto I will not do any more the like, because of all thine abominations.}
¹⁰_{Therefore the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee, and the sons shall eat their fathers; and I will execute judgments in thee, and the whole remnant of thee will I scatter into all the winds.}
¹¹_{Wherefore, as I live, saith the Lord GOD; Surely, because thou hast defiled my sanctuary with all thy detestable things, and with all thine abominations, therefore will I also diminish thee; neither shall mine eye spare, neither will I have any pity.}
¹²_{A third part of thee shall die with the pestilence, and with famine shall they be consumed in the midst of thee: and a third part shall fall by the sword round about thee; and I will scatter a third part into all the winds, and I will draw out a sword after them.}
¹³_{Thus shall mine anger be accomplished, and I will cause my fury to rest upon them, and I will be comforted: and they shall know that I the LORD have spoken it in my zeal, when I have accomplished my fury in them.}

• Denial: the early period where the loss is denied.
• Depression: the painful, sad emptiness that comes when the loss "sinks in."
• Anger: anger at the loss – at the lost object for being gone, or anything else that’s handy.
• Working through: rebuilding a life in the absence of the lost loved one.

.

2009 felt like a period of Lamentation to me – an angry lament. That’s neither what I expected nor what I wished for, it’s just how it has played out. Looking back on things, it makes perfect sense. But I didn’t see it coming. As much as we’ve ranted about it, I don’t think we still have any idea how much we lost in the last decade in every dimension. And that’s not just from the perspective of a Liberal. Everyone lost – Conservatives, Christians, all of us. We lost our position in the world, untold wealth, the lives of Americans, jobs, salaries, industry, human rights, every corner of our lives has a hole in it. There’s a part of Jeremiah in every one of us – praying for some relief.

And we’re mad as hell, almost all of us – Conservatives, Liberals, Indifferents. We don’t talk about it, but all of us are grieving over our losses – anger sitting just under the surface. The Conservatives rave that Obama is taking America away from us – and show nostalgic "Mean Joe Green" commercials. The Liberals rant that Bush and Cheney already took  everything away from us. But I expect that if most of us looked closely inside, we’d feel like the ancient Hebrew Prophets Jeremiah and Ezekeil, or the long-suffering Job, wondering what we did wrong, why we’re being punished. And 9/11 sits in the background of all of it.