Now, never mind that the American troops on the ground in Iraq have seen their mission turn from a standard military invasion force, a short term secure & hold operation, into a long term, apparently endless, police & pacification job, in a country where a lot of people hate them and nobody wears a sign saying ‘hi, I’m a crazy ass partisan determined to kill you by any means necessary’. And never mind that anyone with a functional cerebellum (like me and every other anti-war blogger) predicted for months leading up to the invasion of Iraq that it was going to turn into exactly what it has turned into… a sandy 21st Century version of Vietnam, in which the American military will be bogged down interminably in a conflict it can’t possibly win because in the thirty years or so that have passed since we pulled out of Saigon, we still haven’t retrained our forces significantly for the tasks of urban guerilla warfare.

But never mind that if a dimwit like me, who doesn’t get briefed by the most experienced soldiers in the American military twice a day on stuff like this, knew this was going to happen, then the lying opportunistic shitbags who engineered the invasion in the first place should also have known it was going to happen, and supplied the ground forces adequately to accomplish their tasks. Leave that aside. Forget about it.

What I want to know is, what bean counting policy-recommending deskbound idiot who has never carried a weapon in his or her life decided to save some tax dollars by only issuing two cut down M-16s and four handguns to a four person squad of U.S. soldiers?

This is, to my mind, very nearly criminal. Bad enough we’re sending kids out to kill other kids for reasons that turn out to be pretty much in their entirety lies. Now it turns out we’re saving money by not bothering to adequately arm about half of our soldiers when we send them into the field?

The story I quoted from above is actually about how U.S. soldiers are arming themselves with AK-47s recovered from Iraqi troops, to make up for the deficit in U.S. issued rifles, which of course they badly need now that they are patrolling much of Iraq on foot, or in jeeps, without the dubious protection of their tank's armor and armaments.

That U.S. soldiers in the year 2003 are still grabbing up AK-47sf from fallen enemies and enthusiastically deploying them is somewhat blackly amusing to anyone who knows anything about our recent military history. Mostly because U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, the first major deployment to use the brand new M-16, also grabbed up AK-47s, and in many cases, even Tommy guns (the weapons made famous by gangster films) to use in place of the brand spanking new American made assault weapon. Why? Because M-16s kind of suck. They are notoriously finicky weapons. They need constant cleaning and maintenance in the field to keep them from jamming. They are admittedly very accurate as long range sniper’s weapons, and they are well designed to be used with a bayonet on one end as a hand to hand weapon, but neither of these things are optimal to modern day troops in a modern day firefight. What such troops in such a situation need is a relatively light, trouble free weapon that will quickly fire a lot of rounds down range with acceptable accuracy when they want it to. And the Soviet made AK-47 has been delivering superior performance at that particular task for the last forty years.

Now fast forward from Vietnam, where American troops tossed their M-16s into the closest mudhole the very minute they could get their hands on anything better (which apparently wasn't at all difficult) to Iraq, where, apparently, a significant percentage of our troops weren’t issued assault weapons to begin with (for an indefinite term of service in an urban guerilla warscape, mind you), and those that were issued weapons are no doubt delighted to have the M-16 A3 weapon, or the M4, a cut down version of the M16 A3.

The M-16A3 is a weapon every bit as good as the one tossed away by the thousands in the jungles of Indonesia back in the 1960s, except for the fact that the M-16A1 rifle had a selector switch that allowed you to switch it from single shot (semi auto, for sniping) to fully automatic (on which, if you held the trigger down, the weapon would empty itself of a 15 or 30 round clip in a barely discernible amount of time… a few seconds at most). The A3 version has been ‘improved’… you can go single shot, or ‘automatic’, but the ‘automatic’ setting now fires a burst of three rounds.

This is to save rounds and I have no doubt that it does so, but the range sergeant who taught my training company to fire the M16 at Fort Benning said he was very happy he was too old to ever see combat again carrying something that, when you needed to rock and roll, would at most give you a stingy three round burst. He said that there had been times in his experience when the guy on the ground really badly needed to just fire off a lot of rounds to get out of the shit, and he did not enjoy the idea of giving up that option simply to please the bean counters back home who thought the ammo bill was too high. (It was. The price tag for losing a war is ALWAYS too high. Often the price tag for WINNING a war is too high, in my opinion, and hell, a lot of times it seems to me that the price tag for WAGING a war is too high going in. But what the hell do I know; I'm just a 41 year old pot bellied geek who never never never wants to have anyone shooting real bullets at him under any circumstances.)

The cut down M4 is, need I say it, just as good a weapon as the M-16A3, except that the barrel is shorter, eliminating most of its value as a long range sniper’s weapon.

Even thirty years later, the M-16A3 is still a fussy weapon requiring constant care to keep it from jamming. The AK-47, whose design has not significantly changed in 40 years, can be dropped from a low flying plane into water or onto concrete, and then run over with a jeep, and chances are, if you pick it up and load it, it will still fire properly.

This is the major reason why penniless stubble faced guerilla soldiers waging invasions, holding actions, insurrections, and jihads all over the world for the past forty years have preferred to the AK-47 to anything made by Mattel (the manufacturer that produced the original M-16s back during the Vietnam war; I don’t know if they still have the contract or not).

(Guerilla soldiers with a budget prefer the Israeli Uzi 9mm machine pistol to the AK-47 because it’s an even better weapon for urban warfare, but it’s also much much more expensive.)

The general inferiority of the M-16 as a modern light infantry assault weapon to nearly any other such ordinance in mass production for the past forty years is almost certainly a result of America’s nearly unique ‘low bidder’ process, whereby the government must, by law, accept the most inexpensive bid by a private contractor for any government supplies or procurement process. ‘Low bidder’ hardly ever makes any sense, especially when coupled with the insane frenzy for profit that has always driven the American capitalist economy. However, in the context of supplying the basic tools of the trade to our soldiery, the idea of getting them from the cheapest provider is more than just stupid, it’s insane… and probably borders on criminal negligence.

Taking that one step further, and not even issuing enough of our already inferior ordinance to properly arm our soldiers... honestly, somebody should get court martialed for that piece of policy. Or just put on patrol in downtown Baghdad with a 9mm pistol on their hip.

OVER THE RIVER AND THROUGH THE WOODS

I’ve probably mused on all this before, but if so, it was on a private blog page, so I’ll just do it all again here.

I’ve been a little startled to find how the emphasis of holidays, and what I bring to them, and what I get out of them, has changed over the course of my life.

When I was a kid… I imagine this is true for nearly everyone… Christmas, and maybe Halloween, were the only really worthwhile holidays. Okay, Easter was okay because you got candy, but it sucked because you had to go to church. (In my early childhood, before my mom got all Jesusy after marrying her second husband Bill, we almost never went to church except on Easter, and, well, it just made Easter a chore. Chocolate is wonderful but does not make up for being shoved into shiny uncomfortable clothes and dragged to church, especially when you’re not accustomed to the shit.)

The rest of the holidays… by which I guess I mean Thanksgiving, no other holiday really sticks out in my mind from my childhood; 4th of July wasn’t a biggie with my fam when I was a kid… always struck me as boring. Yet the weird thing was, I always noticed that the grown ups really seemed to enjoy Thanksgiving. I could never figure out why. Grownups don’t play at all (they just sit around and talk about boring shit and watch TV) and nobody gets loot on Thanksgiving, you just sit around and eat a ton and have to deal with your annoying cousins (my cousins were ALL annoying when I was a kid; I was the oldest in my entire generation so ALL my cousins were, basically, just extra versions of my younger brothers, and my younger brothers were aggravating as hell 24/7/365). I never could see the point of Thanksgiving; you got shoved into the car with your annoying brothers and drove for a long long time and then got herded into someone’s house, and various really old people would hug you and go ‘my GOD how did you get that big?’, which, to a kid who knows perfectly well that he’s ALWAYS been exactly this big and will always BE exactly this big, is about the stupidest thing in the world to have to hear even once, much less about thirty times in a half hour. Your brothers would immediately be sucked into the social swirl with all the cousins and rip around the place terrorizing everyone, and you’d just try to find a place to sit off to the side so you could read your new THREE INVESTIGATORS book, which was futile because other relatives would keep coming up and going “HOW did you get to be that BIG?”, and, frankly, it was a bore. Eventually you ate way too much stuff, some of which (squash) was deeply nasty, and then you got shoved back into the car (Thanksgiving was never an overnight holiday) and drove for a long, long time back home again. What, there was some POINT to all that?

So, big surprise… when I was a kid, holidays were all about what I got. If there weren’t presents, or at least some goddam candy, it was a bust as far as I was concerned.

(Thanksgiving was also a bust because in my reality tunnel, traditional Thanksgiving desserts suck prohibitively. Pumpkin pie? Oh please. Take all the goo out of a big gourd and make PIE out of it? Are you people INSANE?)

However, as I’ve… hmmm… to use a dreadful word… matured… I’ve come around to the grown up point of view. What makes a holiday work for me these days is simply the chance to sit around with members of my family I never see any other time and, well, do all that boring stuff I never could comprehend when I was a kid… mostly, talk. Just sit there and talk, to various uncles and aunts and cousins while, for the most part, trying to tolerate, while occasionally refereeing, the high velocity altercations taking place all around us between Tasmanian Devil lookalike nephews and nieces and second and third cousins, none of whom seem to, as yet, reached the age of 10.

Christmas has very much come to be all about just hanging out with family instead of getting stuff. Of course, mostly that’s because when you’re a grown up, you stop getting anything you really want at Christmas, except rarely, pretty much by accident. If you care at all about gifts, it’s about watching the reaction of your family members when they open the stuff you got them… and even there, I’m not a good gift giver; the stuff I give people, during the intermittent Christmases when I can afford to buy gifts, is only rarely anything they really want.

(I’m a good gift giver with girlfriends. This is because I occasionally let them take me shopping, excruciating though it always is, and when I do, I pay attention to what they buy, and more importantly, what they look wistfully at and then put back because it’s too expensive. But with family members, I’m often completely baffled, and that’s reflected in the crap I end up giving them. But it’s fun shopping and selecting and buying the stuff and wrapping it and putting it under the tree and watching people open it.)

I’ll also say this… a feast day is a very positive thing. Kids take good food for granted, but for me, all a holiday has to be about nowadays is serious comfort dining and I’m there. Whether it’s a traditional Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, or a 4th of July cook out/barbecue, if it’s all about somebody else providing the vittles and it’s stuff I can’t get out of a freezer case or at a fast food place, it’s a happy holiday as far as I’m concerned. Who the hell needs presents when you’ve got turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, sweet potatoes, dinner rolls, peas, and some hot apple pie with ice cream for dessert?

My holidays have slightly been marred the last few years by the sad but inescapable realization that I’ve become That Guy at the family gatherings… you know… the one relative everyone wishes they didn’t have to invite, but whom the inexorable laws of kinship require the inclusion of regardless. There’s little doubt I’m well on my way to becoming the Classic Family Boor, regardless of how hard I try not to offer any opinions on anything until and unless I’m asked, and how much I strive to make myself helpful while over at someone else’s house.

Still, I have never… not once in my life, not at any point I can remember, anyway… been charismatic or likable, not even within the confines of my own peculiar tribe, and that’s just how it is, and how it will remain, and that’s not what this is about, anyway.

What it’s about, I guess, is my ongoing realization that a holiday celebration doesn’t have to be about material stuff… well, no… the food’s a biggie. But it doesn’t have to be about loot, or the cash value of what you take home stuffed into your backpack.

Really, it’s just about hanging out for a while with people who don’t judge you harshly (at least, out loud and to your face)… people you enjoy being with, who illuminate your world at least slightly and reinforce your own sense of belonging… the folks who, when you show up on their doorsteps on a nationally recognized Day Off With Pay, they have to, however grudgingly, let you in and feed you.

And isn’t that just heartwarming.

RED ZONE TREPIDATION

Sometimes it bothers me that I’m now a football fan.

Oh, it isn’t because I know Mike Norton, if he continues to read my blog, shakes his head in exasperation whenever I bring up the Bux and regards me in the same manner as I would regard a former agnostic who went and got Jesus in a big way. I understand where Mike is coming from; I was a big sports hater for a long time myself. But it’s a dangerous thing going out your front door; if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no telling where you might be swept off to. And I enjoyed football growing up as a kid outside Buffalo, in the Bills’ first glory years, with Joe Ferguson and Jim Braxton and the Dreaded Simpson on the team. And it’s nice to have a winning season for your guys behind you, and to look forward to another one, and hear all the announcers talking in tones of hushed awe about your team.

And yet, it still troubles me, and there may ultimately be no point to this entry, but I find that setting stuff down in writing helps me clarify my thoughts and feelings sometimes.

The first reason it troubles me is, admittedly, intellectual snobbery. Professional athletes, at least, in the more physically confrontational big money media-driven sports like basketball and football, strike me as being for the most part a lot of musclebound swaggering bullies… exactly the kind of guys who made my childhood hell during school hours. I look at someone like Michael Billingley or Warren Sapp… or, hell, even at someone like Brad Johnson or Phil Simms… and I can’t help but feel that if for some reason I got a job working for the Bux and had to walk by their training table at some point, they’d knock my lunch tray out of my hands and laugh at me and call me a nerd.

I hope that’s not true… after all, we’re talking about adults, not high school alpha and beta males always eager to create a threat/aggression/dominance display in front of the females of the tribe. Yet I can’t help but have an instinctive mistrust for those guys, and when I read about the kind of hazing the rookies are put through, well, I just wonder how adult these guys really are.

It bothers me, also, how badly some of these guys behave off the field. Look, I’ve always said there’s no reason in the world people should expect athletes, or, for that matter, movie stars, to be role models. That’s not what they make the big bucks for, and if the public gets disappointed and enraged every time a heavy hitter or an Academy Award winner gets caught being a human being, well, the public is crazy to impose those kind of expectations on people who, after all, as human as anyone else. So when Kim Delaney gets caught driving drunk, or the Bush daughters get caught drinking with a fake ID, well, I’m inclined to just shrug and say “Kim Delaney is a very hot woman and a very talented actress, but she ain’t a saint and doesn’t claim to be, so shut up. The Bush kids aren’t anything special; all they’re doing is the same shit most of you people did when you were undergrads at college, so shut up.”

Yet when professional athletes get on the news in a negative sense, it’s often not for simple little infractions. Michael Pittman seems to be someone with dangerously little control over his violent impulses, and if you’ve seen the size of his upper arms, you have to find that a little scary. Warren Sapp’s infidelity strikes me as rather troublesome, but far worse is his utterly callous attitude towards his byblows. Sending someone else to stand in for you at a court ordered DNA test is simply reprehensible; I won’t say he should be in jail for that (he can’t earn money for his kids in jail) but I think he should certainly have been fined, say, $3 million dollars for it (a million going to each kid).

Yet, I’m aware that the Sapps and Pittmans and, yes, the Kobes, aren’t the whole story. You’ve also got pro athletes like Warrick Dunn, who buys houses for poor single moms because he remembers his own childhood growing up with a poor, struggling single mom. Nobody makes him do that, it’s just something he does because he’s a cool guy, and he can. And there are other pro athletes who do similar stuff, who work within their communities with kids and the poor, and certainly not all of them do it just for the publicity, or to get community service credits after their latest domestic violence bust.

And honestly, it falls on me to wonder how I’d behave if I had this kind of celebrity shoved onto me all of a sudden… if women started throwing themselves at me, if kids started looking up to me as some kind of hyperinflated deity figure, if my goddam signature on a goddam piece of paper was worth a couple of thousand dollars on E-Bay. Maybe I’d get a big head. Maybe I’d turn into a jerk… well, more of a jerk than I already am. Maybe, if I had to spend all my time offseason training to stay in shape, and get in better shape, for the next season, I wouldn’t have time to read. Maybe, if I had been in constant pain since early adolescence due to the chronic injuries I’d received over the course of my extremely violent career, I’d be a bit of a prick. Maybe if I knew I had ten or fifteen years, at most (assuming I’m not Jerry Rice) to make enough money to support myself and my family for the rest of my life… maybe if I were always worried about that next tackle that might end my career, or even cripple me for life… maybe if I had to spend all my time studying to master an extremely complex offensive or defensive system… maybe if I went out onto a field 16 or 18 or 20 times a year to trade body blows with the most powerful men on the planet… maybe if I could never tell the truth about how I felt to my team physician because I’d lose my job if I did… maybe then I wouldn’t be the paragon of wonderfulness that I am.

But still. Even trying to be as understanding as I can, I’m yet uneasy about finding myself a football fan. In many ways, professional football… professional sports, the way we do it here in our star-driven, celebrity-crazed, money-grabbing culture… exemplifies everything I’m deeply against. John Brunner tells us evil is nothing more or less than treating a human being as chattel, and if professional sports doesn’t turn individual human excellence into a brand name, well marketed product, I don’t know what does. Our system encourages, even requires its active participants to ruin their own health permanently in order to compete and excel… and if that’s not the very essence of human degradation, I don’t know what is. Yeah, the athletes, even the ones who don’t excel, make a lot of money (an obscene amount, by nearly everyone else’s standards… sportscasters admire Shaun King for taking the veteran minimum to stay on the Tampa squad as back up QB for another year, and you have to feel sorry for the guy, who is only bringing home half a million dollars this year)… but they kill themselves for that money; they shorten their lifespans and pretty much toss their quality of life out the window for that money. They’re going to deal with constant pain for as long as they live, and that’s if they’re lucky. What kind of game is worth that… and how much culpability do I, as a football fan, bear for it?

I’m enjoying being a football fan. I’m really getting into plunking down in front of the TV for a Bux game, screaming at the screen when the refs make an idiot call or Keyshawn Johnson drops a ball in the end zone. I enjoy the fact that it gives me something to talk about with most of my family members, that I can now read the sports pages like all the other guys in the world (or most of them, anyway).

But still, it troubles me. The athletes, the coaches… these are not members of my tribe. These are not guys I’d want to hang around with, that I could ever adulate or idolize no matter how well they throw or catch or carry a football. And the system itself… the more I learn about it, the more I loathe it. Professional sports in our culture is, in a lot of ways, a blot and a carcinoma… it’s actually shameful that various wealthy team owners spend billions on winning a trophy every year, when there are thousands of people… thousands of CHILDREN… who don’t have food or shelter or adequate clothing or school supplies or classroom space within a hundred mile radius of the shiny stadiums bought for them by taxpayer dollars. And we sports fans are by no means off that hook; we spend billions a year on sports related crap while stepping smartly over a homeless guy sprawled across the sidewalk in front of the memorabilia shop.

I suppose the best thing for me to do is console myself with the thought that I cannot imagine myself ever becoming one of these nutball memorabilia collectors. (Hey, I bought a set of the Toy Biz Silver Age Avengers collectible figures, but they were REALLY COOL, and Stan Lee and Jack Kirby are people I’m perfectly willing to idolize, not to mention Thor and Iron Man and Giant Man and the Wasp… the Hulk, okay, not so much, but hey, the set included both a Giant-Man figure AND a separate Ant-Man figure, and the Iron Man figure had a removable helmet, and Thor’s hammer had the authentic inscription on it from the origin story, and, well, they’re AWESOME, so shut up.)

I should also keep telling myself that, hey, a professional football game is wonderful opportunity to see all those guys that beat me up in high school pound each other senseless.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.