Honoring our vets?

Memorial Day. Another holiday for 90% of Joe Taxpayers that we journalists have to work through anyhow. The Missus and Man Cub are home today, usually an irritation on a day when I have to work and NO ONE ELSE DOES! but this year, since I’m still reeling from Woody’s loss, I’m happy to have all the family around me I possibly can.

Anyhow, I know from vets. My dad was a vet. My nephew ships off for basic training in two weeks. (They actually offered to throw some extra cash at him to leave immediately, he tells me, but he chose to spend his last few weeks of freedom, you know, free. Personally, I’m convinced the “opening” that “happened to come up” was the military’s S.O.P. regarding new recruits – get ’em in a barracks behind barbed wire before somebody has time to talk them out of it, or the hangover wears off.)

I called him up, finally, and leaned on him as hard as I thought I could to make me an email correspondent once he’s over there, even if he ends up in a realtively cush gig like at Rammstein in Germany, or anywhere in Japan. I expect he’ll have something to say, and I for one would like to hear it.

As I type this, amazon.com sends me an email, telling me that an item I pre-ordered and forgot about has shipped. That’s weird because it’s Sunday night, and new product drops on Tuesdays, but I guess when Monday is a national holiday (except for the cops, firemen and newspapermen of your town, city or hamlet) amazon ships their shit after midnight on Sunday. Maybe I should pre-order stuff more often. I’m always afraid I won’t have any money in my account when the item’s release date hits and I’ll get a red mark from amazon, my bestest online shopping friends in the whole world (stop it, ebay, you know I hate it when you pout!).

I had ordered up a copy of “Holocaust,” the epic ’70s miniseries starring miniseries vets like Fritz Weaver and Michael Moriarty and Peter Strauss, too, I think – he was also in “Rich Man, Poor Man” which was huge at the time – not to mention a couple of fresh young faces by the names of Meryl Streep and James Woods, along with a cast of thousands. This release serves as a timely reminder in this era of bullshit, prevaricated wars of aggression launched by the U.S. (formerly the reluctant heroes in the Wars of Aggression canon), that at other times, our military has been charged with a greater mission, one truer to the noblest instincts that I was taught our country stood for. I hope the film holds up to my fond memories of it. I might have to watch it some day with The Man Cub (same with “Roots” and “1776”. Choreographed, harmonizing founding fathers will probably take even more parental explanation than parsing America’s former participation in the practice of human slavery).

Anyhow, that took a long time to say nothing. I’m getting good at this.

I’m writing tonight because I just read on the NYTimes online that Still-President Bush (as Jon Stewart calls him) has just vetoed a boost in the G.I. Bill of Rights (fuck it, let me cut & paste): President Bush opposes a new G.I. Bill of Rights. He worries that if the traditional path to college for service members since World War II is improved and expanded for the post-9/11 generation, too many people will take it. … He does this on the ground that the bill is too generous and may discourage re-enlistment, further weakening the military he has done so much to break.

(Okay, in terms of rhetoric, they weaken the Oomph of their facts by finishing with a bit of knee-jerk left-wing sniping at the tail end that is better left to irresponsible, anaccountable blogger assholes like me. That last little flourish certainly feels excellent to write and admittedly is fun to read, but it weakens the impact, by calling into question their impartiality, of what they had just asserted as fact. That’s just a little style tip from me to the editorial board at the New York Times.)

Style issues aside, it kinda pisses me off that this kind of political skullduggery is going on all the time, while pundits everywhere are hashing and re-hashing the minutiae of the eighteenth month of the damned Democratic race. Stuff that matters goes on behind closed doors, while every “mainstream media” outlet (except the back pages of the editorial section) focuses all their resources on the two donkeys still throwing feces at each other. Unless there’s a baby in a well, or a swell car chase to follow.

Again, back to the NTimes: They have seized on a prediction by the Congressional Budget Office that new, better benefits would decrease re-enlistments by 16 percent, which sounds ominous if you are trying — as Mr. Bush and Mr. McCain are — to defend a never-ending war at a time when extended tours of duty have sapped morale and strained recruiting to the breaking point.

Here’s the whole piece. It’s short.

According to the columnist, there is enough Congressional support to overturn President Dickbrain’s expected veto. But it also reports that Sen. John McCain is siding with Bush on this one, too. Oddly, this makes me almost as sad as the ongoing Demo pissing match. Maybe the explanation is that as 3rd or 4th or 10th generation military, whatever he is, Sen. McCain was never counting to having to avail himself of the G.I. Bill of Rights when his hitch was up, so he doesn’t “get” how truly important it is to our returning kids. But for fellows like my nephew, who join up because our society has failed them so completely there actually is no better option available than being taught the best ways to kill people, then being sent half-way around the world to kill them or be killed. Think about it for a minute – that’s your BEST option. … Brother, that is one fucked up society, and that’s the one this kid was handed. He’s got every deck stacked against him, except for the alleged pot of gold waiting for him at the other end of his tour-of-duty rainbow. Can you imagine how much more McCain will have to gut the G.I. Bill (for starters) to be able to afford to continue our presence in Iraq in perpetuity if he gets elected? My poor nephew could get out in six years to a hand-shake, a slap on the back and a bus ticket back to Nowheresville, Baby, Arizona.

Bush and McCain are like evil Lucy Van Pelt leprechauns, promising these kids the moon to get their fannies to boot camp, then yanking away the pot of gold just at the last minute, with the predictable result: Veterans fall down on and go boom. Ha ha, very funny motherfucker.

It’s getting harder and harder to even play with the idea of voting for McCain if Hillary snitches the Dem nom away from Obama. I’d say impossible. Ugh. What’s left? Ralph Nadir? Bob Barr, for fuck’s sake? Maybe if I was still drinking… I wonder who NORML is running this year…?