Seven Years Gone

Looking back at last year's 9.11 post I recognize there are some things very much missing that I don't wish to omit this year:

Gratitude. Gratitude to George W. Bush and the military and intelligence agencies that have protected me and mine.

Pride. Pride in the fact that we took body and head (and wallet) shots and we stood up and took the fight to them. Pride that our young are so willing to sacrifice.

I also want to include a special shout out to class-mates Ingrid and Janet whom I've recently reconnected with after so many years. They were there--with me--in the first of the moments described below.

The following is an edited and updated repost from a year ago titled

Moments

Are these what have come to define my life?

No. Not just the attack of September 11, 2001.

November 22, 1963: It was two weeks to the day after my 9th birthday. The principal broke in on Mr. DiPietro's 4th grade classroom loudspeaker to announce an assembly--not in the auditorium/gymnasium but in the front courtyard. When the school had gathered with the flag overhead we were told that President Kennedy had been shot and later pronounced dead. The flag was lowered to half-staff and we had early dismissal. I walked the half-mile home in a childish state of bewilderment. Minutes later my sister, a senior in H.S., came home and burst into tears.

It was my first encounter with evil.
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The following 16 years saw me facing mostly the petty evils of childhood's transition to young adulthood. There were other assassinations--Dr. King followed by Robert Kennedy--and other far-away evils--the massacre at My Lai (all this in the first half of 1968, BTW) and the Munich Olympics massacre of 1972--but they were far-away events.

November 4, 1979: I was with Manny's band in a week long engagement at a supper club in Pennsylvania. I returned to my hotel room well-pleased after getting a fine deal on a pair of Nunn Bush dress loafers (PA has no sales tax on apparel) when I flipped on the TV to learn of the Embassy takeover.

I was just days away from attaining the quarter-century mark when 'students' attacked and captured the US embassy in Tehran. By this time I had shed the teenage liberalism inspired by the antiwar movement and understood better what was at stake. This was an act of war and that peanut farmer better do something and quickly.

But no. As the US fell deeper into our national malaise one failed rescue attempt was mounted but it would take an election to end the 444 days of nightmare.

In hindsight I wonder if the stated hatred of Carter for giving safe haven to the Shah had less to do with the timing of the hostages' release--Inauguration Day, 1981--than some less-than-veiled threats of the incoming administration's intentions.
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My "antennae of evil" is now well lit.

The following years see the outrages that define the last 25 years. From the airplane hijack related execution of my fellow Marylander Robert Stethem to the cruise ship hijack and subsequent murder by throwing overboard in his frikkin wheelchair of Leon Klinghoffer. Near simultaneous bombings at airports in Vienna, Austria and Rome, Italy.

The first Intifada as I begin my international career. Four years on and the first World Trade Center attack takes place on Friday (Muslim 'sabbath'), February 26, 1993. I don't learn of it until my ship reaches port in San Juan and I open the local paper at a Hooters while waiting for my wings order.
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The next years feature the debacle in Mogadishu ('93), Bosnia ('93-'96), Khobar Towers bombing ('96), embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya ('98) and the USS Cole in October, 2000.

Moments after moments.

Moments upon moments
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September 11, 2001, is still more vivid to me than the births of my children.

How fucking sick is that?

I roused before 7 A.M. and fixed breakfast (oatmeal) for the turnettes and turnson. The Queen of Seoul dropped the twins at kindergartren on her way to work and I was alone with our son. It was an absolutely glorious, cloudless late-summer day in the northeast.

8:51 A.M. My morning radio show reports an airplane has struck the WTC. I turn on the TV.

(I remember that a rather large military plane flew into the Empire State building in fog during WWII.)

I call Q of S at work and tell her to get close to a TV.

A fraction of an hour later witness the 2nd plane hitting the north tower.

This is now intentional. This is now an assault--a deliberate attack.

I can't sit. I pace the living room glancing at the TV. Thankfully the turnson is preoccupied with his toys as I fret.

Then the Pentagon and reports of the downing of United Flight 93. (Initial reports were that we, US assets, shot down that plane at Shanksville. I don't doubt those initial reports nor do I blame my government for the action or the subsequent spin. This informed opinion in no way diminishes the incredible respect and regard I hold for the heroes on that flight.)

My eyes are leaking. They're not tears of sadness. They are tears of unrequited rage. I want to strip down, to don the blue woad and give my war cry. I desperately want to hit something but I have to be responsible for my not-quite-2 year old son.

Then come the images on TV that forever burn on the internal screen of my permanently scarred psyche. This evil, this abomination that could make my brothers and sisters choose to fall rather than be cremated alive.



Local radio reports that parents are picking kids up from schools. So I pack the turnson into his stroller and walk the half-mile to the turnettes' elementary in an adult state of contemplation on the nature and scope of evil.

Terror is fearing for your own life. Horror is the very human response to witnessing other people's terror.

Six Seven years later I want to hit something. My eyes are still leaking tears of impotent rage. God help me.

TWO

In 61 days we will go to the polls and determine if Gramsci's long march has been successful.

We will learn whether the generations of our people educated since 1968 in moral relativism, political correctness, and multiculturalism have abandoned the principals and responsibilities of citizens in exchange for a new nomenclatura who have planned for this moment for a very long time.
We know now that the first CND (ban the bomb) groups were Soviet funded and the long march continued through the anti-war movement, the women's movement, the greens, et al.

We've allowed the chattering classes to continuously distract us and misdirect us and evade the issues.


We've allowed a good and honorable president to be vilified. His real record has been almost obliterated. Once there was a loyal opposition--no more.

The Anointed One of 2000's loss is the greatest gift to this year's Anointed One as it generated the famous BDS that has infected and is now mobilizing the susceptible to vote against anything remotely Bushesque. In point of fact, BDS is the only known syndrome that is contagious through TVs and computer monitors--it is also the only syndrome where the original target (G. W. Bush) of the condition can be retargeted in a matter of hours.

So now we witness The Maverick (I think that's a marketing ploy that McCain approves of) who in truth is The Moderate (very difficult term in this political climate) versus a far-left Progressive who has used issues of race and class (just look up community organizing) to rise to the national stage.

Symbols Matter

Maybe they think anyone old enough to recall the symbol portrayed here is in late-stage Alzheimers--a drooling old fool that can't connect two thoughts.

Maybe they thought no one would notice... or care.

In the world of politics and (inter)nationalism there has only ever been one meaning for this icon.

It is at the top of the 'artwork' decorating the outside of Pepsi Center for the Democratic National Convention.



No red, white and blue. No Stars and Stripes. No eagles or unfinished pyramids... No US icons at all.

Just that blood-red star.

Chicago Style

Do you believe our (US) Fourth Estate is somehow 'in the tank' for O? Some, even in the MSM, are reporting that it seems so.

Personally... I find it difficult to believe that all in mainstream media are in thrall to the Pied Piper of Hyde Park.

There are critics and mild exposes but it is mind boggling that the MSM refuses to report information that is so readily available. Is it possible that our Freedom of the Press could be bought, co-opted or coerced?

This question is, of course, rhetorical. The next is not.

Can there be any other explanation?


Allegedly fair and balanced Fox News Channel cast a special report on 18 August titled Presidential Character & Conduct 2008: Barack Obama. It skipped over a bit.

O's maternal grandparents were communists. His Kenyan father was a communist.

As a Nairobi bureaucrat, Barack Hussein Obama Sr., a Harvard-educated economist, grew to challenge the ruling pro-Western government for not being socialist enough. In an eight-page scholarly paper published in 1965, he argued for eliminating private farming and nationalizing businesses "owned by Asians and Europeans."
His ideas for communist-style expropriation didn't stop there. He also proposed massive taxes on the rich to "redistribute our economic gains to the benefit of all."

His mother seems to have been... a rebellious young woman.

Who, while being raised by his grandparents in Hawaii, steered a 13-14 year old boy into the mentorship of CPUSA (Communist Party USA) member Frank Marshall Davis--A man who had fled Chicago in 1954 for the then US territory before being caught in an FBI gauntlet? O spent 1975--1979 absorbing this man's poetry and thought.

Upon graduation from that bastion of clear thought Columbia University (the school that hosted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last September) O went to work as a 'community organizer' in Chicago for one of the shakedown gangs advocacy groups founded by communist Saul Alinsky. There's an awful lot to read about Alinsky if one knows where to look including Hillary Rodham Clinton's Wellesley thesis.

Off to Boston to get a bit more than street cred O gets to be editor of the Harvard Law Review without ever publishing a single paper of his own.

Then back to Chitown with a prestigious degree for more... organizing. Let me be very clear--organizing means getting wealth from them that has to them that don't. He worked for the Woods Fund from '93--'01. Business, industry and government taxpayers are the source of money to fund Jeremiah Wright's Trinity school and Rezko's urban housing projects (condemned on completion).

O went on to head the Chicago Annenberg Challenge along with Pentagon bomber William Ayers. The records of that foundation are in the University of Illinois at Chicago library but have not been released for study. As these papers are the only record of O ever running anything there are people who believe they have a right to examine them.

But when the shoe is on the other foot... Republican candidate for the open US senate seat in 2004 Jack Ryan had made public the divorce records with ex-wife actress Jeri Ryan but the custody records were sealed by request of both parties. In June of that year the Chicago Tribune and WLS TV requested that the custody records be released and a willing judge overturned what had been a settled case. The details were sufficiently sordid that Ryan dropped his candidacy and... well... O was a shoe-in.

If literally hundreds--maybe thousands--of us on the blogs can ferret out the words and associations and intent of O why is the MSM mute? In 1996 details of illegal Chinese and Indonesian donations to the Clinton campaign were readily reported. In 1998 Drudge broke the story of the blue dress and it was all over network news.

Now the silence is deafening.

Common Sense--the Video

A video pamphlet


Well said.

I would have included a bit about the transnational insanity of the global warmish nutballs but this does hit the nail.

Why is 20 July not a national day of remembrance?

Today will pass, like many other summer Sundays, unmarked and unobserved for the date it represents. And yet it is, perhaps, a date that should be remembered as humankind's most marked achievement.

We rightly honor our fallen who carried out their duty on Memorial Day. We salute those who served on Veterans Day.

But July 20th is hardly noticed.

The following was first posted 28 September 2007.

We did it.

Quick trip to the market and back to try and eke some more brain music out of this Steinway.

Mundane. Not blogworthy.

So...something must be percolating--I mean, I think I have an idea of what's compelling and what's not.

Sometimes you see and don't notice. Sometimes you do.

What I noticed was that handicap parking spots are proliferating. The ones threatening fines if you park there without the special license plates or the rear-view mirror hangie thing. I'm pretty sure there would be no more than two for that size store 25 years ago. There are easily a dozen today (filled btw). Ten or fifteen years from now...?

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Have you ever had the experience of standing on line at a movie box office and finding that, except for one other parent with a child, every person was 50 or older. I never had before. Add in that it's rated PG and there was no advertising budget yet the majority of seats were filled for a matinee on a glorious first day of autumn.

Turnson will be eight next week. I wanted a father-son day. The twin tween turnettes are soon to be twelve, and I have become a great big doofus (only slightly less retarded than their little brother) in their eyes.

I had planned to take him fishing with his brand new Ugly Stik. But Saturday evening I heard about a film on a weekend radio chat show that changed my plans--especially because it was playing in only one venue and only until Thursday. It was Sunday or wait for the video release. And it was playing in the sole surviving movie palace in the region.

OK. Show of hands. How many of you have heard or read about In the Shadow of the Moon? The Ron Howard film...the winner of the 2007 People's Choice Award at Sundance...the film that documents mankind's greatest technological achievement?

So in a fit of nostalgia for myself and for the sake of Turnson's understanding of our family we leave the beautiful sunshine to sit in a dark place for 90 minutes. Because my living father was there in early days at Canaveral doing engineering work--telemetry and guidance.

Dad is typically taciturn; much of his long life holds memories that don't bear saying out loud--the kind of memories of an impoverished southern family with too many children and too much responsibilty shouldered by the older boys. He's the only surviving male. When he speaks about the past it's more often about running 'shine to the mills or terrapin hunting with his father. Turnson won't get the story of the fisrt decade of the Space Program from his Grampa.

The curtains drew (yeah! curtains) and Turnson asked if this was going to be a play.

Wait for it, son.

The show started with a piece of film archived for 45 years by this movie house--turns out JFK made a short subject for limited distribution to select theaters on the Bill of Rights. He would be the last president to address the nation on film.

In the Shadow of the Moon begins with narration. It's the simple narrative of the living men that went there, did that, and got a patch instead of a t-shirt. Told in their words and nothing but real images and clips, the story unfolds at its own pace.

The Soviets beat us to get to space first, of course. Gagarin was undoubtedly a hero. But four weeks later we shot Alan Shephard into space for fifteen minutes. That's what we called them then--space shots.

The race was on

JFK challenges the US to land a man on the moon before the decade was out. Because we could. But also because one of the oldest military doctrines is take and hold the high ground.

Little of the film relates the Mercury and Gemini missions. This is the story of Apollo, specifically Apollo 8-17. Apollo 8-10 reached lunar orbit. Told by the men that did it.

from ABC.com-

In all of time, only 24 human beings have flown to or around the moon, looked back, and seen Earth as a small blue sphere in the blackness of space.

Their numbers are dwindling. Of the 12 who walked on the moon's surface, only nine are alive today, and the youngest is 71.

Yeah, baby--we're definately aging when the young heroes of Apollo are seniors. It means lots more handicap parking.

See this movie. Buy it when the DVD is released. Apollo 11 launched 15 July 1969 from what was by then called Cape Kennedy. Thousands watched from the ground but tens of millions watched on live TV.

Here's a taste.

My September 11 post Moments described how sometimes I view my life by those evil events--going all the way back to JFK's assassination when I was nine.

Well...September 11 tends to be a black day of the soul for me and I wasn't really thinking about some of the great events that have also marked me.

1969

A wild ride, indeed. Summer, especially so. August had the most. Manson Family, Chappaquiddick, Woodstock.

On the evening of July 20, my local rock band opened a concert at the big civic center (no matter how big the headline act was, it always started with a local band). Delaney, Bonnie and Friends (with Traffic's Dave Mason) performed and then it was time for the headliner--Blind Faith.

Backstage was a bit oif a madhouse. Roadcrews and performers waiting their turn.

I was fourteen.

A few minutes into Blind Faith's performance there was an announcement. It was decided that Delaney, Bonnie et al would fill in while the headliners broke for something special.

I was still backstage and a makeshift table with a rabbit-eared 13 inch set was placed in front of the concrete stairs. Way better than crowding around--it was 'stadium seating' on the fly.

When the images began I had the urge to fiddle with the antennae, but the picture was as good as it was going to get. Next to me sat Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker was directly behind him. Try to understand--these musicians were heroes to me--this was the most exciting night of my life so far. Sharing this moment of pride in the US accomplishment with superstars from the UK was bliss. I said to myself, "We did it."

When the weight of those first words spoken from the surface of another celestial body were understood everyone erupted in handshaking and backslapping. There was a chorus of American and North of England accents shouting, "WE DID IT!", and I kept the thought to myself that, "No Eric--we, the US, did in fact DO IT."

Juvenile, huh? Yah, well, 14... not much perspective.

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Near the end of In the Shadow of the Moon the narrative relates that on the world tour of the Apollo 11 crew that wherever they went--Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia--they heard over and over those words, not "Congratulation, men, you did it.", but rather, "We did it."

After all, Neil Armstrong did say, "...One giant leap for mankind."

On the short walk to the car, Turnson asks, "Why haven't we ever gone back?"

Is Set

Flashpoint was the beginning. Or maybe what seemed to be the beginning.

It is now a year and a half since the incident that sparked weeks of civil disobedience. In the weeks following, the National Guard had been called upon to restore order. And order was restored. But not without deep resentment by the Guardsmen and women.

It is now January of 2011. The northern tier of the country is suffering more deaths from cold than in many decades and the winter is still young. Poor nutrition adds to the mortality rate. Children and the elderly are hit hardest.
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Of those, in the past, that believed in a second American Revolution most were committed to a Marxist ideal.

Those have fallen by the wayside. The new rebels intend a return to the recent past--affordable energy and abundant food. And decent jobs.

The new rebels are a small minority. Just like the first one.

The vast majority hold protests for increased food-stamps, health care and Section 8 housing.

The public's dependence on government has never been so urgent.

The government, since the last election cycle, has taken over responsibility for most services previously held by the private sector. Food, fuel and medical distribution lies solely in the hands of the authorities with the exception of the few that can barter for them. Print and broadcast media have been co-opted. TV and radio programming is a mix of English and Spanish.

Food stamps and TV have become the 'bread and circuses' that the new empire uses to keep the populace placated and 'in line'.

The prisons have been emptied of those jailed for their crimes and refilled with a new class of criminal--those that have spoken or acted against the New State.

The internet is now heavily monitored. Pornography--especially 'gay' porn--is readily available but dissenting opinion is... not so much.

As written in Isaiah 11.11 there will arise a remnant from scattered places.

The remnant--those who are willing to sacrifice for a return to the values of America v.1-- use the O.T. from Genesis to Malachi for the codes to communicate on the monitored internet. Their number is unknown but is estimated to be just a few hundred thousand.

They are the latter day Essenes--perhaps doomed to die out but whose message may, one bright day, prevail.
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Eighteen years earlier, in 1993, young Army and Air Force officers, none higher than captain; young Navy and Marine officers had begun talking and emailing with concerns over the direction the armed forces were headed in the wake of the so-called Peace Dividend and the clear lack of commitment from the new administration.

Mostly concerned with their individual and shared futures they committed to toeing the politically correct lines to all but each other. Their sole focus was to advance through the ranks so that they could eventually make a difference.

This was in no way blind ambition. This was to be a bulwark for freedom and the protection of the nation if ever one was needed.

Their ranks swelled after 9/11. In the crucible of Afghanistan and Iraq more came to be trusted and it was in these places that sergeants were first recruited.

After the elections of '06 and the governmental failures on immigration and energy their traffic and their focus changed. Most had participated in war gaming and adapted the urban fighting skills honed in Iraq to an imaginary nation that looks a lot like the US.

They had come to an extraordinary conclusion--that the most likely outcome of past and predicted future events was either anarchy or virtual dictatorship.

Not all of the original 93ers are still in uniform. Some have made the ultimate sacrifice in distant lands, some the penultimate and now wear prostheses and appliances. Some have simply left the military. These living veterans have become some of the most important people in the struggle as they live it now. These provide the liaison to the rebel citizens. These taught the instruments of tradecraft and how to develop the simple but effective codes that the rebels now use.

Some have entered law enforcement and using the same 'go along to get along' methods earlier perfected in uniform while still performing their duties in exemplary fashion they have advanced to high positions.

Some have taken skills they learned while serving to advance in other fields--most notably telecommunications. Telecom is the high ground in this coup.

Of the original 93ers, none hold a rank below full Colonel or Navy Captain. There are more than a few Generals and an Admiral. All the ranks below are newer recruits and all have been thoroughly vetted.