Crazy and Crazier

“Go crazy, folks! Go crazy!”

Jack Buck, 1985 NLCS

Old Jack nailed that one. In baseball, sometimes all it takes is people to go a little crazy.

Of course, he was talking to the Cardinal’s folks but, hey, who won the Series that year? Jack most likely didn’t mean it that way but it doesn’t hurt if the First Base Ump goes a little crazy and blinks at the right time, too. Going crazy can be a good thing for some people.

Hi. My name is Bamboo and I’m a KC Royals fan. It’s been 22 years since our last title. I’m not just crazy. I’ve been insane since the 21^st century began.

You see, most baseball folks are technically wrong in the way they pity poor small-market KC. They like to point out that the KC Royals have a ridiculously low payroll and lost 100 games or more in 4 of the last 5 seasons, suggesting that the team hasn’t been very good lately. When I read or hear stuff like that, I get this little nervous twitch in my left eye, my lips tremble and I start weakly stuttering too myself, “You-you, you don’t know the half of it, man!”

I know those paltry 94 losses in the ’03 season are the problem. That year is really misleading. It short-changes me and the average 17, 158 of my closest friends who attend these games which end before they begin, collectively numb in our disbelief of such certain and repetitive failure, insanely watching the long nights of the last few summers drift away from us at The K.

It’s only the end of February now but I’m sitting here with my old KC cap on my head. I’m wearing a tired Buck O’Neil Monarchs t-shirt. It’s easy to hide my disease here in the office but I know what will happen a month from now. I’ll be making midnight calls to compatriots in Denver and Tampa Bay just to feel better about myself. I will go around town on business wearing my cap, declaring my faith in the team with no chance while somber men and women will occasionally stop me, shake my hand, look directly in my reddened eyes and say, “Hang in there, pal, we’re with you.”

It’s so hard to maintain. We toyed with the 1915-1916 Phillies who lost 226 over two consecutive seasons. We respected the Mets’ 340-loss record over the three years from 1962-1964 but we’re not giving up on that lofty goal just yet. The truth is the KC club has lost a total of 681 games since we partied in Y2K. That’s an average of 97 losses per year over the last 7 years. Nobody knows what that feels like, man. The Royals haven’t been just bad recently; they’ve been historically bad for several years now. They’re so bad, in a crazy way they’re almost funny.

Just in this century we’ve seen 3 different managers, 2 GMs, and an annual parade of new pitching coaches. We’ve witnessed busted plays, foolish base running, routine fly balls dropped, and players hit in the back by thrown balls from the outfield. Our first baseman once injured himself by running into the rolled up infield tarp while chasing a short pop-up in foul territory. A starting pitcher was lost for the season due to “personal reasons.”

We moved the outfield walls in a few feet but we might move them back out before it’s all over. We had a manager who just quit one day and never came back. If any of our players ever get “good” then they suddenly turn into the MLB equivalent of Cuban boat people, escaping the oppressive failure and low pay of The K to go wherever the nights might be shorter, the days sunnier and brighter. I once watched Jermaine Dye, Johnny Damon and Carlos Beltran play in our outfield. Now, every time one if not all three of those guys are in a playoff game, vying for Series MVP in some other town’s uniform, I’m so confused I don’t’ know whether to cheer or cry.

We’ve grown accustomed to the madness now. We expect to lose and lose often. While quietly sitting in our standard seats in the left field corner of The K, the boys and I don’t expectantly replay scenes from “The Natural” in our mind. Instead, we’ve memorized the lines to “Major League”, that 1994 comedy about the hapless Cleveland Indians. When an opposing player blasts another home run, one of us will calmly say, “That’s too high” as the white blur arches into the night. “Yeah,” another will mutter dejectedly, “that’s way too high.”

Last year, a play that everyone saw as another contestant for “the only time I’ve ever seen that” category, our center fielder ran and leaped blindly against the outfield wall to make a Sports Center highlight homerun-stealing catch while we in the stands groaned to watch the batted fly ball land quietly and harmlessly in front of him, bouncing a few feet short of the warning track.

A few feet short of the warning track accurately describes the last seven years in KC.

Our starting pitchers are usually lucky to survive the first three innings. Our relievers can’t ease the pain or stop the bleeding. Before their new uniforms are soiled, even before the hopeful spring dew completely evaporates, The Baseball Season in KC is typically over now sometime around the middle of May.

We may not hold the record for the worst ever yet but it’s probably been at least a century since another team was quite as bad as the modern Royals at any given time.

Those crazy Cleveland Spiders had a magical year in 1899, losing 134 games while only winning 20. But it was different game back then. Balls hit into the stands counted as singles and the pitchers could approach the plate at acute angles taken from a wide box. That was when ball clubs often had two different guys nicknamed “Pop” on the roster, a center fielder called “Ginger” whose real first name was Clarence and an Irish right fielder nicknamed “Patsy”. That was the year that Jay Parker pitched in his only major league appearance for the Pirates, quickly pulled from the game after walking two who later scored, eternally left with a record-setting lifetime ERA notation of “infinite”.

Setting infinite records for ineptitude was easy back then. Those lucky days are long gone now.

Today, the Royals have to work at being lousy. The have a lot to overcome. They are entering Spring Training with a new GM and a 21^st century attitude that only comes from practicing in Surprise, Arizona. They won the Gil Meche sweepstakes during the off-season, signing a man who will by 2012 earn more than the entire team was paid last year. Beside the usual suspects, they’re also hosting a crazy crew of talented wannabes in Surprise this year. That kid Alex Gordon is expected to make a name for himself at the hot corner in ‘07. Zack Grienke, the remarkable kid from a couple years ago, seems to finally have his head on straight. Mike Sweeney’s back feels better than it’s felt in, er-umm, a long, long time.

In fact, the 2007 Royals have a lot more going for them than the old Cleveland Spiders ever had. One can’t deny that over the first seven seasons of this century the Royals did manage to win a lot more than 20 games per season. Even through the tough times, they somehow won an average of 64 games each year. I don’t remember how they did it but they even blew a few teams out here and there. When you witness something like that, then you know how insane this game really is. In spite of all this madness, in honor of their potential success or maybe assuming the worst is over, management is even raising ticket prices at The K for the ’07 season. Now that’s crazy.

And, on the only sane and promising note for the start of this season, Royals’ veteran radio broadcaster Denny Matthews recently earned the Baseball Hall of Fame’s Ford C. Frick award. I was 11 when Denny first started calling games for the brand new 1969 KC Royals. I grew up with him and I’m very happy to see him honored. When I hear his voice, I’m mostly reminded of the good times. Maybe Denny’s special recognition will spark an unusual and crazy fire under the lazy butts of this year’s team.

Well, why not? Who knows? Anything is possible, right? With a little help, with a little luck, maybe with a little lunacy thrown in between, maybe some of these new boys in Royal Blue shoot out of Surprise and end up turning a corner in history.

So, it’s still early but I know what you’re thinking. In the immortal words of Lloyd Christmas … you’re saying we have a chance.

I have to agree. I hate to say it. It’s a four-letter word that starts with “H” and I can’t believe I’m saying it. I can’t just conveniently forget every Royal blunder I’ve witnessed during the first seven years of this fresh century but I’m going to say it anyway.

Call me crazy, Jack, but I’m a KC baseball fan in spring and I have hope!

Cheers,
Mb

First Sense

"Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved is devoid of sensation, and that which is devoid of sensation is nothing to us.”

Now, that is something called a maxim of the man named Epicurus who lived sometime around the 4^th century BC. This man divided his philosophy into three parts, the Canon, the Physical and the Ethical. As Diogenes Laertius later wrote, in his Canon which can also be described as his Truth, Epicurus said that the criteria of truth are the senses, their preconceptions, and the passions.

The Canon and the Physical concern how nature works and his ethical concerns were choice and avoidance, the good in life. Epicurus wrote 37 treatises on natural philosophy and numerous letters regarding his other concerns.

The senses were everything to Epicurus.

His preconceptions told him what to call things based on his sense of them. He knew the difference between an ox and a horse by his senses, and felt he only knew what to call them through his preconceptions of them.

His passions were pleasure and pain.

This is our first encounter presented with gratitude to the Sophia Project …

Look, I came as close to the end as a man can get. It doesn’t really matter how or when, or why. Imagine the worst. Gun shot, train wreck, falling from a rooftop, it all applies. Think of the most horrible event you can think of and plug that in. Take yourself right up to the edge of the soul’s doorstep. That’s where I was and that’s what I endured.

Where you conscious of your situation?

I was aware of the changes happening around me; let me put it that way.

What? Are you saying you had one of those out of body experiences?

You may laugh but that is not far from the truth. I suppose for me, though, that I have never left my body. How would that be possible for me anyway?

Did it hurt?

I have felt every pain imaginable.

They say your life passes before your eyes.

Yeah, the whole rapture idea, right? The visions, the bright light and all that; is that what you want to hear? Well, there’s some truth to that as well.

You don’t sound all that certain.

Oh, I’m certain enough. I would just say now that our words and our senses always leave us in somewhat of a gray area. Once the senses decay then the clarity or the fogginess of it are really just choices we make after all. Whatever makes you comfortable, you know?

But our senses are everything. That’s what you said. How would we know anything without them? How could you describe your experience without your sensation of it?

Well, it’s been a while but let me ask you, how do you now the difference between an apple and a strawberry? If I blinded you and put both objects under your nose or in your mouth, would you smell or taste the difference?

Yes, of course.

If I blinded you and placed both in your hand, could you feel the difference between them?

I expect so.

If I blinded you and held them to your ear, would you hear their difference?

No, certainly not. I don’t think so.

Well, that doesn’t necessarily mean that your senses are untrustworthy or that there’s no difference in the sound of a strawberry and an apple but it does suggest that not all of your individual senses are appropriate for every situation. This I had to learn the hard way. And, remember, if you had never tasted a strawberry before I put one in your mouth, how would you know what to call it in the first place? Do you see what I mean?

No, not really. Why can’t you just answer the question? Is it that hard?

Well, yeah, as a matter of fact, it is kind of a hard question. I mean, before I can describe to you my understanding of the soul, I have to set some ground rules on the words and our senses, how I came to my conclusions and so forth. Look, I once wrote some 37 volumes on natural philosophy, had numerous pages devoted to my maxims and Canon and so on. I should at least get a few select words on the subject now. Unless you’re willing to suspend your belief in all that, I can’t say that you will understand my answer anyway.

I am not tethered to those old definitions.

Ok, then, you know modern science, long after I kicked the bucket, mapped out certain parts of the brain in an attempt to visualize how much of the brain is devoted to our five senses. It’s all very curious and I wish I had more time to study it. But I now realize that if we were to magically reverse that image, give the sense receivers in our body a proportion similar to the work which the brain devotes to them, then we would look very odd, indeed.

Umm-hmm.

Well, take young Jay, there for example. You know him well, maybe you’ve known him as long as he’s lived and you have a fairly good idea of the way he thinks and how he senses and responds to things. Tell me, based on what you know of him, which part of his body should be the largest based on the effort you believe his brain expends toward sensing it?

Jay? Are you kidding?

Well, maybe he’s not a good example.

Jay is a dog, man! If his penis was as big as he thinks it is, we couldn’t get in here, we’d have to sit outside in the rain right now.

Yes, yes, a dog, excellent choice of words there, definitely not a good example, I’m sorry. How about Ruby there?

Ah, Ruby, she’s, uh, she’s all touchy and everything, constantly hugging everyone and all that. I expect she’d have hands the size of toasters.

Yes, something like that, a toaster, yes, I think I know what you mean. In fact, most people would have very large hands. And that makes sense now, right? Think where we would be without that fine sense of our hands and fingers. We couldn’t use the tools we have invented. We wouldn’t really be human, we’d be something else. Our brains are really focused and committed to a detailed sense of our hands.

So, what does that tell us?

Here we go. Maybe we should order another drink. It took me a long time to get here, my friend, but now I know it’s not what it tells us but what it doesn’t tell us that matters.

How’s that?

Look at your eyes, not your hands. We blindfolded them earlier but we haven’t talked about your eyes lately. Did you notice that? The sense of sight is so highly complex and developed in your brain that it’s really very hard to describe or talk about. This is astounding to me but what if I told you that from clear sun light you could see all the colors in the rainbow? Would you believe that? And, let me ask you, how would you go about slicing one individual color from that rainbow? Have you ever tried to do that? I’ll wager you can’t say you have but, in truth, you do it all the time. What if I told you that when you see the color green your eyes are actually seeing every color but green, would you believe that? What if I told you that in the same way when you try to see your unique soul, a sense that your brain is only barely committed to actually sensing to begin with, that then you are really sensing everything but your soul, would you believe that?

Wow, you are one screwed up dude, man!

Yes, easy to say now, but you should have seen me 2,400 years ago.

Cheers,

Mb

Read My Joke ... please!

So, a monkey wearing a red hat walks into this bar and says…

A pal of mine recently wondered aloud, “Why do we write?”

I’m always mesmerized by such simple little questions. Those innocent bits of inquisition will send me wandering around in a daze for days.

In time, I think, I’ve come to believe that I write only to amuse myself. It’s an incredibly selfish pastime. Perhaps this is a self-defeating method for any amateur but it always seems to me that the practice of amusing others is not so much fun.

The honorable editors of the GH, of course, are not amused or pleased with the last few submissions. In fact, they are convinced that the author should be more focused on amusing our audience.

Our mission is to amuse not inform, they said.

Well, that would be fine, replied the cynical author, except for that fact that nobody reads anything anymore anyway. If you want, I’ll break the more tedious parts into bite sized chunks for easier digestion but, believe me, there’s nobody out there to amuse.

So, what’s the dea-uhl with all these French people, huh?

In a beautifully concise article published in the International Herald Tribune on 2/14/07, Stacy Schiff, author of "A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America", wrote about a completely different book titled “How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read” written by Professor Pierre Bayard.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/14/opinion/edschiff.php

Ms. Schiff delightfully points out that even though she is convinced we will not read the good Professor’s mysteriously titled book, not the least of reasons being it is written only in French, the exquisite double-irony is that we may still talk about it!

Mon Dieux! I tell ya, man, I like that a lot.

Hey, I tried to learn French once. I spent a whole month watching TV5 and even took short phrase-book lessons from a French-Moroccan barmaid for a while. (Until one day she forced me to eat boiled sea urchin, which is another story altogether …) I like the fact that the language is mumbled a lot but in the end found too many unvoiced syllables even for my taste. Besides, with vast experience on my side, I can order a beer, ask directions to the restroom, and say thank you in a half-dozen languages already.

When you think about it, what else does one really need to say?

But the primary reason we won’t read the good Professor’s book, according to Ms. Schiff, is that we do not read anything anymore anyway. With the advent of the internet, we have devolved into beings who replaced reading meandering context with searching for condensed content a long time ago.

She’s right and I know if any suntanned surfer read this far they probably didn’t click the link to her article so let me force upon you this critical little bit of what she wrote:

“Say what you will about Bayard, he forces us to confront a paradox of our age. By one estimate, 27 novels are published every day in America. A new blog is created every second. We would appear to be in the midst of a full- blown epidemic of graphomania. Surely we have never read, or written, so many words a day. Yet increasingly we deal in atomized bits of information, the hors d'oeuvres of education. We read not in continuous narratives but by linkage, the movable type of the 21st century. Our appetites are gargantuan, our attention spans anorectic. Small wonder that trivia is enjoying a renaissance. We are very good on questions like why men fall asleep after sex and why penguins' feet don't freeze.”

That’s a stab in the heart, ain’t it? I showed this excerpt to the honorable editors and they were just aghast, all screaming out loud, Oh, Lord, what have we done? Graphomania epidemic! Really? Yeah, I told ‘em, she nailed that description of “anorectic” attention spans, too.

So what did the farmer say when he lost his tractor?

It’s really a good thing that nobody’s paying attention or bothering to read this stuff on the GH, in my opinion. The truth is I was never very amusing to begin with and, for the life of me, I can never remember a good joke. That’s because through hard-earned experience I know my timing of the punch-line will always be off a hair or two.

And that’s what they all tell you in those public speaking courses, too, ya know, if you’re no good at telling jokes then you shouldn’t even try to be funny.

The Wife has a rather annoying way of reminding about that. When she has a close friend nearby, she will point at me and coldly demand, “Bamboo, tell your joke!”

I know she’s treating me like some kind of unsocial freak show exhibit when she does this. She knows that I only have one dry, lousy and uniquely unfunny joke that I’ve remembered throughout my whole entire life.

I’ll turn red in the face and say, no, man, I don’t wanna tell my joke and she’ll say, aw, c’mon, it’s funny, my friend wants to hear it, just say it, and I say, no, no, I can’t do that.

That goes back and forth for a while with her friend sitting there uncomfortably until reluctantly in my typical deadpan style I go ahead and I tell it just to shut her up.

Then she makes that face, a sort of knowing and pitiful forced smile, discretely pokes her friend with her elbow and whispers, “See? I told you so.”

Take my wife … please!

But the honorable editors are adamant about this. They want more amusing things, whatever those things may be. They like the idea of modern movie reviews or trivia contests, ya know, maybe inserting questions here and there about Celebrity Fashion Trends or something like that for the casual surfer to divert himself during one of my drier 4,000 word essays on the cultures of extinct tribal nations.

Perhaps, they suggested, a small joke every now and then would please the masses. How else, they yelled at me, will we be able to market this crap?

Hey! I try to do what I can but I can only do so much. And I’m not into marketing anyway. The GH is merely my personal workshop, a retreat for an intense study in the artistry of foolish words, where the exercise of questionable and even worthless content is always free.

Here you can watch the amateur author at work, you can have a browse, but you can’t buy.

If I somehow did spin in a bunch of blatant jokes in between the real stuff, who would I be poking fun at? Myself or the readers? That’s some dangerous juju, man. The GH is no practical joke and this not a verbal confrontation with the reader. I’m no Dirty Harry. I can’t chase readers down the streets of San Francisco, tackle them and force them to have fun at the end of my literary .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world.

Besides, as I tell everyone I know, that thing called fun is vastly overrated.

Common jokes are agonizingly weary clichés to mask the point, to hide the irony. I hate repeating clichés over and over and over again. I know what the readers are thinking and I can only hope that anyone who is daring enough to look inside the GH for context will be lucky enough to discover that before the end there was a middle and a beginning to the story line and then, when the inevitable questions arise after all the excitement is said and done, with all the screaming and shouting and writing and blathering on that even confuses me, then, then they can ask themselves do they really feel lucky?

Well, do ya, Punk?

Thank you, thank you, people; I hope you enjoyed the show … thank you and good night.

Cheers,
Mb

Macho American Minimalist Haiku

Love dogs


Hate cats

Remember We Were Wrong, Intro

Purposeful Americans once defiantly yelled “Remember the Alamo” and “Remember the Maine” to stir up national emotions. I wouldn’t be surprised if someday our children’s children yell “Remember Iraq” for similar reasons.

To me, the only question is what will they remember? What will we try hard to not let them forget?

I know it’s painful but we have to ask ourselves these questions now about Iraq. Whether mismanaged or misguided, the historical depth of the quagmire can’t be ignored. Because it has become such a brutal mess with no good end in sight most everyone now wants to hear that it was a mistake and that we were wrong to invade Iraq in the first place.

Maybe the honest answer is not correctly worded or maybe we just haven’t found a comfortable way to respond yet. We will leave Iraq behind us soon enough but maybe we need to better understand what happened before we pack up the tents so we will remember it properly.

I can not and will not speak for the world, an entire nation or much less the whole American military. In fact, I am the last person to claim any hidden insight or knowledge of modern political consensus. But with the aide of 20-20 hindsight, allow me to at least explain my lonely perspective as a citizen of this country and as a single member of the US armed forces at the time of the invasion of Iraq.

If nothing else, by writing these words, I can get it off my mind for a while.

Armed only with a thin shred of credibility, I confess I am no general, no politician, and no celebrity. My only platform is that I am an average nobody. You need not listen to my opinion and you are free to have your own. As a certified nobody, the linguistic demon I’m about to publicly wrestle with is something called “wrong”. I hope you agree that its best we leave the deep discussion of what truly defines “wrong” and its antithesis for another day. For the purposes of my meandering opinion which follows, let’s accept a common understanding of this word and just assume that there really is such a thing.

Regarding events in Iraq today, there is no question about IF we were wrong. If we open our eyes, we can see the proof in the devastating scene before us, a devastation that did not exist before we began this affair. The important question now is WHY were we wrong?

I don’t think we can simply blame Bush and Cheney for this tragedy in Iraq. The votes of our elected representatives in favor or against were mere reflections of our own confused opinions. As citizens, we all must accept our responsibility. You and I are just as much to blame as anyone else. There’s plenty of blame for everyone. Whether actively or passively, by vocal demonstration or tacit agreement, most of us allowed this war to happen. That is the essence of a democratic republic and most of us agreed to it even if we did pray for a far better result.

Individual American citizens, generally speaking, did not choose to go to war with Iraq. Even our elected representatives in Congress can all honestly say they did not choose this war. In the beginning, only my brothers and sisters in the military had a clear and defining choice to make. Practically every one of them chose the path of honor and integrity rather than jail time. The vast majority chose to follow the lawful orders of their Commander in Chief.

As Americans, we were all led or ordered into it by the Bush administration. I remain convinced the members of the Bush administration allowed themselves to be led into it by the endless recalcitrant threats of Saddam Hussein.

With all the best intentions but still the question lingers. Why were we so wrong?

We must remember this. Before 1998, it was not the slippery policy quest of America to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Long before 1998, it was Saddam Hussein’s stubborn policy to one day make America and her allies pay dearly for misjudging him.

Between 1992 and 2002, the American public and their leaders did not openly panic about Hussein’s threat. It seemed as though we had beaten him once and we could beat him again if necessary. Some of us waited patiently for our chance to do exactly that. I admit, during that long decade, I was anxious for the cards to play out.

Even though he spoke the pragmatic truth, I recall once I was most disappointed to hear Prime Minister Blair use the phrase “containment policy” in reference to Iraq. I felt we were really not resolving anything that way, only pushing the inevitable confrontation off for a later date. But, honestly, after hearing Blair speak, I reluctantly felt I could live my entire life without that confrontation ever taking place if that’s what everyone wanted.

I believe our British allies up until 2001, although I can offer no direct proof of this, were most insistent that Iraq remain contained instead of directly confronted in a prolonged way in spite of Hussein’s determined attempts to subvert that policy. Perhaps the British leaders didn’t think their public would be as easily convinced as their American cousins. However justified, American leaders at the time seemed to agree while I and those like me were stuck in a forgettable revolving door of miserable deployments to Saudi Arabia and Turkey, trying to contain Hussein.

I understood the reasons. Containing Iraq with relatively little funding and manpower year after year made it easy for American and British citizens alike to live a normal life, forget Hussein’s threat or to assume that it had been effectively eliminated.

But the governments of America and her allies could not forget because our armies faced this persistent menace every day for years. He tested our patience and our restraint constantly during this time. Even if seriously hampered, rumors and insinuation continued to swirl across the oceans suggesting Hussein still intended to someday make good on his threat.

It’s tempting to say all that changed after the events of 9/11/01 unfolded. It’s tempting to say that on that day we tragically realized the urgency of Hussein’s threat too late.

But that isn’t true.

On the contrary, in spite of official arguments, without unveiling a single damn thing you don’t already know, I can confidently confirm to you that Hussein’s threat remained as determined, viable and unfinished on 9/12/01 as it was on 9/10/01 and our reasonably accurate awareness of that danger remained constant the whole time.

So what did change?

The only changes that I could see occurring as a result of 9/11 were our government’s response to it and the heightened fear or willingness of our citizens which allowed them to respond in the panicked and vengeful way that they did.

We all know what happened next. First, we allowed the speedy cleansing of Afghanistan and the violent search for Osama bin Laden’s head in the mountains of Tora Bora. Then, instead of just containing Iraq, we all allowed our government to unleash our military forces on Saddam Hussein in a display of shock and awe. And we allowed them to do this unilaterally, with only the slightest nod towards the diplomatic concerns of other nations around the world.

We may now say and prove how we were misled but I know how many Americans felt. I can tell you during that time I was supervising part of the effort to train, equip and organize manpower for some of these operations. When Afghanistan started, I had no shortage of motivated volunteers. I even had retired service members calling me, begging me to overlook the standard administrative and physical requirements so they could squeeze back into a flight suit and join the battle.

We were all pissed off and rightfully so. We found some quick if uneasy comfort in the fact that those who had directly harbored bin Laden, the peasants of Afghanistan, the foolish and the wise, the guilty and the innocent alike, all paid the price for our anger.

But, if we were any way right about Afghanistan, why were we wrong about Iraq?

Before I finish this, let me say that I do not accept the inside-job conspiracy theories that abound on the internet. If you search for such fodder, then you might as well get off the bus now. I have nothing for you.

I think it’s proven that members of the fresh 2001 Bush administration had long been on board with the concept of forced regime change in Iraq. Still today, I’ve seen no evidence to suggest they had a correct understanding of what it would take to actually push that idea through to the end. I also think it’s clear, based on their inept and bumbling activities in the months leading up to 9/11, that they were in those days uniquely incapable of mounting an effective attack much less convincing a wary public of the need to do so.

In fact, they were only later deemed worthy in that last area of propaganda exploitation.

I think it’s also reasonable to assume that these folks in the White House had some warning that something bad was about to happen although they were not sure of when, or where, or how. Regardless of the details, they certainly guessed the correct result of a 9/11-style event long before it happened. They knew their world would be turned upside down if it did happen and their precious political skins would be judged, rightfully or wrongfully, by their immediate response to it.

As far as their ability to secretly initiate the issue, do the detailed thought and planning necessary to force anyone’s hand and then carefully cover their tracks, I see no evidence before, during or after 9/11 to suggest they were even remotely capable of any of that.

In my opinion, we hired the wrong folks to be at the wrong place at the wrong time and that's something we should definitely remember.

On to the Beginning ...

Remember We Were Wrong, Beginning

For our children’s children, please remember that our attack on Afghanistan wasn’t about one man. Yes, bin Laden was the head we wished to snare and detach but it was the organization, Al Qaeda, that we wanted to squash and kill. The proof of that idea lies in the fact that once we had them scattered and scurrying for the hills, the urgency of the Osama: Dead or Alive mission instantly waned.

Afghanistan was the first strike in the unglamorous and so-called Global War on Terrorism, code words for the dirty fight against a dangerous network of men driven by their fanatical ideology and violent hatred of Western materialism. They did and they do threaten the entire Western world with their insanity.

That struggle goes on as I write but Iraq was not about that.

Our government tried to convince us that Iraq was about terrorism but it was not. Our government tried to convince us it was about Weapons of Mass Destruction but it was not. When all else failed to convince us, adding to the list of things that Iraq was not, they tried to make us believe that it was about democracy and freedom. It wasn’t even about the Iraqi people harboring a dangerous threat to the world. To many of us at the time, none of those deceptions mattered.

It was, in the end, about Saddam Hussein, a devious man who held a divided nation and a turbulent spot on the world at gunpoint, eternally hostage to his ruthless plans.

Would he carry out his threat? Given the opportunity, I have no doubt he or his sons would have.

Could he carry out his threat? Probably not without significant help from others; I believe we had him effectively cornered.

But he was there in that corner and he had worried us for a long time. Iraq was all about this one man.

In his book, Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke wrote that during his years as the “terrorism expert” in the White House he had found no Al Qaeda connection in Iraq. He wrote that in a cabinet meeting shortly after 9/11 he curiously listened to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld openly advocate bombing Iraq and then had President Bush ardently urge him behind closed doors to find the Iraq connection. The White House maintains that no record of such pressure exists.

I have no evidence of my secret urges at that time, either. But I will admit this to you without offering any further proof.

Only minutes after the smoke began to billow from Ground Zero, I thought to myself that here was our golden opportunity to finally straighten out a host of messes in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world. I thought this was our chance to fix our mistake of 1991. To be more specific, I hoped … I actually hoped that an Iraq connection to this tragedy would be discovered. I really wanted 9/11 to signal our response to the world that the patient approach to Saddam Hussein was over.

I was in no position to make such a determination. I was just an average peon following orders. But I can’t imagine I was alone in those thoughts. I did not hear it spoken but I believe there were many who felt like I did on that horrific day.

In retrospect, the facts did not support those angered thoughts. Anyone who thought like I did during those first few fearful moments was wrong. In our defense, we were so mad we couldn’t rationally predict the outcome of our revenge; we couldn’t fathom the consequences of our actions.

I was wrong to think that way so quickly and I admit that now.

But, even after we were disappointed by the facts of the matter, I think anyone who had those first thoughts and then says those secret urges didn’t linger would be a liar. There were many who wanted that connection to be real regardless of the facts. It is reasonable for me to assume that is at least in part why we so readily glossed over the deceptive justifications.

There is one other complex and expedient aspect of our decision to attack Saddam Hussein for which I can offer no direct support except the sum of my recollections.

Part of Osama bin Laden’s argument, if you will, against America and her allies was that our infidel troops engaged in containing Hussein were defiling holy Muslim land by their very presence in Saudi Arabia. To my understanding, bin Laden later graciously granted this same consideration to the land of other Muslim nations on the peninsula as well.

I remember this because delivering our troops out of the sweltering Arabian desert was perhaps the only thing that Osama bin Laden and I both regularly prayed for.

There seemed obvious and infinite diplomatic concerns with carrying out an attack on Baghdad from bases in Saudi Arabia. There seemed a strange urgency in the timing of relocating our forces out of Saudi Arabia while concurrently coordinating the attack. There seemed an understandable worry about how to continue containing Iraq from somewhere other than where we were had grown accustomed, even if uncomfortably so. The expeditious nature of all these moves lent an air of now-or-never desperation to the events which, looking back now, only adds more fuel to my belief that we did this for all the wrong reasons.

On to the Finale ...

Remember We Were Wrong, Finale

Remember we were wrong about Iraq because we gave our panicked administration an unlimited license to kill one man. Even the strongest nation on earth, frenzied as it may be, should not consider going after one foreign man even if to liberate the people of his country from his despotic rule or free its own citizens from the fear of his threat.

It’s not that we can’t do it. We’ve proven a superpower can. But it is wrong.

This is a difficult hill to climb but our government and much of our media made blatant attempts to compare Hussein to Hitler in the days leading up to the attack. The purpose, I suppose, was to rationalize our planned action against Hussein under the dark cloak of fear that still envelopes Hitler’s memory. No civilized people on this earth want to be the ones to ignore or tolerate another Hitler.

Like the calculated depiction of “evil doers”, the ghost of Hitler was conjured up to scare us.

Maybe it’s a matter of scope, maybe it’s just too insane to compare such brutal men, but that comparison never made any sense to me. While there were frightening similarities, both men were charismatic leaders capable of galvanizing their followers to do the most unthinkable things, the differences were just too profound.

Even if it was not a popular notion in Washington, Hussein’s track record up to 2002 seemed far more similar to Panama’s Noriega. Certainly, Washington’s reaction to Hussein was more like the reaction to Noriega than it was to Hitler. Looking back now, even the initial result of the Iraq invasion was far more Panama than it was Germany.

For reasons that have been well documented in the last 60 years, we couldn’t just waltz into Berlin by ourselves and steal Hitler from his bunker. Of course, the US wasn’t the world’s only superpower in 1940.

In 2003, we blew into Baghdad, plucked a demented Hussein from his hiding hole and put him on trial. In 1989, the US invaded the sovereign nation of Panama, captured the greasy dictator Noriega, whisked him off in the middle of the night and locked him in jail.

Obviously, Noriega wasn’t summarily hanged like Hussein. Had we left him in Panama to face the court of our choosing, he may have been. And he still may hang. As of this writing, Noriega is due to be released from jail in September, 2007. He is expected to return to Panama to face murder charges among other things. His ordeal is not over yet.

But, in fact, there are more similarities between 1989 and 2003 than we may want to remember.

It is said Washington once considered both Noriega and Hussein allies of the US. Our tax dollars supported them both at one time. The same can be said for bin Laden. For the conspiracy nuts who are surprisingly still on the bus, yes, all of these men faced off with an American President named Bush who needed to prove to somebody that he wasn’t just a cautious and inept wimp afraid to take on the bullies of the world.

Over the last century or so, our government has done more than just bravely bankroll despots like these men. We constantly sent conflicting signals to a host of others like them around the world. We sometimes congratulated them, sometimes ignored them, and other times scolded them. For years we gave them money and weapons and power then, at some point, politely asked them to not use any of it.

We didn’t create another Hitler in Iraq, we just bought another Noriega.

I was not directly involved in Panama in 1989 but as I recall it was another efficient blitzkrieg-style production, a textbook example of overwhelming force advocated by Colin Powell, who just happened to be along for the ride in 2003 as well. The only tactical critique I’ve ever heard about Panama was that the screws of the operation were turned by a D.C. screwdriver that was at least 1,000 miles too long. The good news was it was over very quickly.

Unlike Iraq, Panama is in our own backyard. The US had military forces already based in Panama in 1989. We knew much more about Noriega than we ever knew about Hussein because we had trained him. We could install another puppet of our choosing in Panama without any lengthy or irritating public anarchy. If Noriega was lucky at all, he was lucky to be 1989 instead of 2003, when he would have been surely and instantly vaporized by the initial cruise missile attack.

In our own backyard or half way around the world, others in our community observe that we and our government act like we own these countries. We act like foreign leaders can be bought and sold, propped up and cast aside at the time of our choosing. This is how we defile our own consecrated land, how we ruin our legacy as good neighbors and how we lose credibility as defenders of freedom and justice.

There must be something wrong with that. And if we were wrong in Panama then we were wrong in Iraq.

The reason this is all wrong is because with every despot we sustain and with the murder of every tyrant we once propped up, we purchase a grave and enduring burden. We end up owning all the troubles of all the people who were stepped on, troubles that the one selfish dictator encouraged but some select troubles that we paid for and that we may have not even completely resolved in our own home, troubles that we can’t claim to be experts in resolving. That’s not fair to us or anyone else.

We should attempt to contain, we should blockade and economically choke, but we should never again allow the elimination of one cruel man as a cause worthy of our military force. We can’t credibly do that as long as we continue to support every ham-fisted dictator in the world for our own expedient purposes.

We should pay attention to all threats and defend ourselves from them as if they are real. Preemptive attacks, however, are wrong if not fundamentally un-American because they are only justified by fear. Fear, as we now know it, can be molded and fomented like table cheese, bought and sold in any market around the globe. In America, we learned a long time ago that we have nothing to fear, that working together we can overcome fear and that fear alone is not worth the sacrifice of our children’s lives.

Somehow with Iraq, perhaps due to its mischievous design, we seemed to forget that all too easily.

Protecting freedom and democracy within our borders is our just cause. Caring for our own people should be our first cause. Caring for and protecting our nation includes not leading our people into a battle they shouldn’t fight or a battle they can’t win.

Urging freedom and democracy around the world is in the best interests of everyone. But we must remember enforcing freedom and democracy for every country in the world is not yet the sole mission of the United States of America.

We know from our own history that one nation can not be forced to resemble another. Democracy building is not just the premeditated gamble of social scientists, it is a huge mistake and an incredibly ironic blunder for a nation that prides itself as a democratic republic of free people, a nation that flatly refuses to allow any other nation to tell us what to do.

Before the attack on Iraq began, some members of the Bush administration ruminated on the possibility of dancing Iraqi citizens greeting our invading, liberating troops with flowers and adulation. If we’d paid attention to the lessons of our own history, we would have known we were wrong to believe that hogwash for even a moment, too.

During the run down of the invasion, around the time of the infamous “Mission Accomplished” spectacle, I took note of several stories in the press about how the USA had helped if not single-handedly rebuilt Germany and Japan after World War II. The hopeful theme was that if we did it once we could do it again.

The theme only indirectly reminded us that to the victor goes the cost of rebuilding.

That theme also conveniently overlooked a significant truth about modern Germany and Japan which are definitely not Little Americas. Yes, the USA did contribute a great deal to guide the development and rebuild the infrastructure of those nations after the war was over, as it was in our best interests and our logical obligation to do. But their magical rise from the ashes didn’t happen overnight nor was it purely the result of the USA’s enlightened and benevolent oversight.

We must never belittle the contributions that honest, industrious German and Japanese citizens made for themselves. We must always honor them for the hardships that they overcame. We must never forget, and this is very important, that over a long period of time they healed themselves for themselves. They swallowed a lot of pride and endured profound anguish and shame for the atrocities that were committed in the name of their countries. Together they chose a stronger way and today they are better nations because of their diligence in working towards peaceful goals.

If there ever was a hopeful theme that what was once done might be done again, I think that is it.

It takes a very enlightened nation to realize that the people of Iraq, like all other nations of the world, must get what they need the same way we all did. They must at some point collectively decide what democracy and freedom is worth to them. As we surely remember by our own battle cries, there is a distinct and painful price for all that but they must determine the price for themselves. No single well-intentioned nation outside their borders can establish that price for them.

When a single ambitious man extends his despotic rule beyond his borders, when the cause is not just to liberate his own country but to prevent him from dominating other peoples outside his country or the entire world, then we can claim proper justification for such forceful tactics. Then we can and should put everything we own behind that effort even if we remain unsure of our ability to do it or uncertain of the end result.

At those crucial points in history, when the freedom of our whole community is at stake, as founding members of the nations of free people, we must be willing to sacrifice in a grand strategic way for that cause. The fight against hegemony and world domination is an all or nothing cause all freedom-loving people must share, even if that struggle is against hegemony pursued by our own self-righteous government.

That is the lesson we remember of Adolf Hitler not Saddam Hussein.

I hope you understand I shed no tear for Saddam Hussein, his family or his henchmen. I don’t think his downfall was wrong. I think he was a monumental brute who earned all that he received.

But I do believe we did not properly consider the consequences of our actions and we were ultimately wrong from the beginning for the poor, panicked and desperate reasons we offered ourselves and the world for why we had to do it. And if we had rationally considered our obligation and the ensuing turmoil before ever buying into him, I doubt we would have let it happen the way we did. At the very least, we should have overcome our fears and secret urges to logically debate it a bit more thoroughly.

The proof, as they say, is in the pudding and in this case the abhorrent pudding is anarchy in a miserable corner of the world.

Saddam Hussein was a man who lived and died by his own sword. He forced his self-destructive will on his own people. He bottled them up, ignored them and mistreated them as it pleased him. We know how people react when they are mistreated.

We blasted the top off that bottle in a fit of anger, distracted and unaware of what calamity was inside, forgetting it was a calamity that we had once helped brew. We can be blamed for that. But for Hussein’s chronically domineering rule, he still carries to his grave much of the blame for infecting his socially diseased nation, a nation mad with itself and mad with world, viscously tearing at its own seams.

I hope that is the national emotion our children’s children won’t forget about Iraq.

Cheers,
Mb

No Change

This photo is not a paid promotional advertisement for beer, bottled water, stale Fritos, cigarettes or Alka Seltzer ... but for the right price it could be.

Some things never change. Some things will never change. Some things will remain the same forever.

I realize I just wrote the same thing about some things only in three different ways.

Some days I get tired of all the imprecise things in this world and on those days I find myself searching for an absolute to satisfy me. Sometimes I wish I could write that all things will change.

But I can’t.

Some things won’t.

Some things resist, some things endure and some things flat out defy my desires.

This stubborn refusal of some things toward change is sometimes the only absolute that exists.

OK, I admit, I was still a tad bit drinky-winky, only momentarily suffering a fit of strange sobriety when I wrote that unqualified and curious journal passage above. Still, I think there’s an overt poetic truth to it.

You see, when I penned those words I was once again sitting in a small wooden hut on a giant frozen lake in the tribal land of the honorable Ojibwe. I was joined by three trusted companions, each of whom made their own winter’s journey to meet me at our annual rendezvous on ice.

Quickly, after the common greetings and typical boasting of men had subsided, we had settled down in our respective corners of the hut and conformed to our now familiar ritual of drinking beer, silent contemplation and personal search for the illusive walleye.

It comes to mind that ice fishing is an intensely lonely obsession. Although companionship is valued to some degree, each individual angler is forced to conserve energy and the conversation is generally limited to primitive grunts and pointed observations which directly impact the focus of the hunt.

Separated and alone with my thoughts as I was, 3 miles from shore and civilization, at some uncertain point all I had to console me was the muted sound of my own heartbeat, the hiss of propane lanterns, and the constant rumble of shifting ice below my feet.

There on the slick surface, my thoughts naturally skated toward comparing the vague stubbornness of some things with the lethargic futility of ice fishing.

Early Sunday morning, before the sun rose, while my augered-out hole showed the lake water still colored a bottomless black, a deep boom in the ice emerged at an unknown distance from our location. As a massive crack in the ice twisted and turned its loud progress towards us, we temporarily called off our comm-out procedures and all eyes met in the middle as we wordlessly contemplated our fate together.

Even with a surface layer of ice at 18 to 24 inches thick, it's comforting to know that the cold water below still maintains its fluid dynamics. A heavy truck driving across the surface from miles away could push a growing wave underneath which eventually would cause the ice to heave. Winter anglers are familiar with this effect of changing ice formations and learn to casually disregard the constant boom and crunch of the ice all around them.

But this time the crack came right at us. There was an odd echo to it, instantly merging the frightening sound of a meandering lightning bolt with that of a run-away freight train.

The crack ran along a line very near us, lifting our hut as it approached and giving us all a rude shake as it passed. Being the selfish persons we are, each of the trusted companions awoke to check the status of their own possessions, beer, fishing lines, and tackle boxes, before finally speaking out.

“Whoa!” groaned companion number One.

“That was special,” added companion Two dryly.

“Are our trucks still out there?” companion Three inquired.

Companion Two stood up and brushed the frost off the inside of the plastic window with his hand, peeking outside to inspect the potential damage before quickly sitting back down.

“Yeah,” he replied nonchalantly, “we’re good.”

I nodded, silently confirming that in spite of a painful hangover we were still good from my position as well.

Companion One reached down to his portable fish finder which he had thrust down a nearby hole and punched a few noisy buttons on the untrustworthy device. All eyes were on him as he leaned back on his bench and crunched his mouth down in disbelief.

“Damn,” said One, “this thing says we went from 21 to 22 feet.”

Rattle reels instantly chimed in as each of us adjusted our lines for the new depth report.

Seeing the ice was broken and we were already wet with urgent conversation, Companion Three decided to agitate the waters further with a comment of earlier concern.

“You know,” Three began, “I thought about it but I still can’t figure it out.”

One, Two and I all nervously looked at each other, reluctantly acknowledging that our silence was now over.

“Why?” Three asked. “Why did he just take MY tackle box?”

“That’s a good question,” replied One. “I mean, I left my tackle and my poles out here, too. If the guy needed tackle, why didn’t he want an extra pole or two?”

“He probably just grabbed what he could hold,” summarized number Two.

“Yeah,” I said. “He was obviously drunk, too, since he didn’t even steal our beer.”

We all agreed a thief had entered our hut sometime between 8 the night before and 2 in the morning while we were leisurely engaged at the Twin Pines bar near the lake. We usually took everything with us when we left the hut but that night we had rushed to the bar on an urgent whim and errantly concluded that no fool would be foolish enough to suffer the sub-zero temperature on the lake that night to steal us blind. Upon returning early that morning, some of our number finding the diversion to Twin Pines more beneficial than others, Companion Number Three discovered his prized tackle box was missing.

“Hard to believe, though,” continued One, “why would a guy come all the way out here, 3 miles out on a frozen lake, just to steal one lousy tackle box?”

“You can’t trust anybody and crime happens everywhere, man,” concluded number Two.

“I fuckin’ told you,” Three adamantly declared.

One, Two and I smiled at each other and nodded approvingly.

Ever since our first annual ice fishing event many moons ago, the phrase “I fuckin’ told you” had earned a special place in our conversations. When this particular admonishment was brandished on ice, we knew that the typical politeness of bland human interaction had been officially washed from our collective beings. The unique conditions of men commonly trapped on a deserted frozen lake had taken its full effect. It was an indication that teamwork had suddenly been replaced by individual egos and the selfishness of human survival was now of primary interest. When that annoying phrase was uttered, we were not considering the concerns of others but truly speaking our unvarnished thoughts at that precise moment.

“I fuckin’ told you,” Three said, “we are at 2 point 7 miles out, not 3. I checked it.”

Companion One considered that trivial fact then calmly replied.

“I don’t think that’s a big difference,” he said. “It was 5 below last night, 20 below with the wind chill. Three-tenths of a mile wouldn’t have stopped this guy; he just wanted to steal something.”

“Well, you all know why he took MY box,” Three said defiantly.

Two looked at me and grinned, “No … we don’t. Why don’t you tell us?”

“You know why!” Three said while standing up. “I had the red worm with the propeller in that box. You know how powerful that lure was. That thief took one look at that and knew he had to have it!”

“Oh, geez,” sighed One.

“You can’t be serious,” I said.

“Oh, yeah, I’m serious,” replied Three aggressively. “I saw you guys admiring that one. You can’t deny that was a very attractive lure.”

Two stood up, turned to One and said, “I don’t have a red worm with a propeller in my tackle box. One, have you ever in your life had a red worm with a propeller? Who the hell would use a red worm with a propeller for ice fishing and where the hell did that come from anyway? Everybody knows the Swedish Pimple is the lure of choice this time of year.”

Companion One first shook his head that he didn’t own a red worm with propeller then arose from his bench and smiled, nodding in agreement with number Two.

I lighted a ciggy and stood up too, grabbing my coffee cup from the top of the card table placed in the middle of the hut.

“Honestly, I’ve never seen such an ugly lure and I doubt any self-respecting Ojibwe would want it. You know, in accordance with the Treaty of 1837, they are allowed to net their fish, anyway. Besides,” I added, “in my tackle box I have a brand new red and black Wally Diver that is probably worth more than everything you had mangled together in that old box of yours, number Three.”

“Bullshit!” huffed Three.

We all stood in front of our corners, each pondering the next move around the card table.

“From what I’ve seen,” number One went on, “you never caught a walleye with that thing. Come to think of it, you’ve never even caught anything up here except some puny perch … not counting Minnesota Sally’s phone number at the bar, of course.”

Number Three ignored the bait and turned to the plastic window, squinting his eyes to spy on another hut about a half mile off in the frosty white distance.

“I don’t think it was no Ojibwe,” Three said grimly. “I’ll bet it was one of those guys in that hut over there. They probably saw us leave and snuck in here, found the red worm with propeller and then took off with it. I think I’ll go back to Twin Pines tonight and check on those guys with Dumb Bobby.”

“Dumb Bobby wouldn’t know. He’s the worst bartender I’ve ever seen,” said Two.

“Yeah,” laughed number One, “Dumb Bobby can’t even remember your name, number Two.”

“Well,” Three whispered in a conspiratorial tone, “if I go back in there and hear about somebody catching walleye with a red worm and propeller, then I’ll know who stole it.”

The wind gusted and blew powdery snow outside, temporarily blinding Companion Three’s view and pushing a blast of chilled air up from the ice holes through the squared cut-outs in the floor of the hut.

“Only one problem with that clue, professor,” I said taking a long drag from my ciggy.

“What’s that?” asked Three.

“I fuckin’ told you,” I replied with an exhaust of smoke. “There ain’t no fish in this lake.”

Even Companion Three had to smile at that comment.

“Hmm, I don’t know about that,” laughed One, pointing to the squat fishing pole behind number Three. “But, Three, you might want to check on that one there.”

We all suddenly focused on Three’s pole dancing lightly, quietly over his hole. The tip of the pole shivered then bounced with subtle temptation.

Number Two gushed with excitement, “It must be the 5 o’clock rush! Is that a Pimple?”

“Nah,” answered Three quickly, “orange jig with a shiner head at 15 feet.”

We returned immediately to our corners and retreated to our silent pursuits, One with a cautious eye on the shifting and dishonest fish finder, Two with a deft finger caressing his line, Three with a suspicious glance outside the frozen plastic window.

I looked at my motionless pole and dropped my still burning ciggy into an empty beer can as the deep echo of rumbling surface ice popped and churned miles from our hut.

With satisfying content, I thought, “I hope nothing ever changes.”

Cheers,

Mb

Grace

Ya know, I should probably be dedicated to the kind encouragement of Robin Adair Sherwood and others like her. I should probably honor the hope that the content of my thoughts someday reaches the quality of style which she and other more qualifying types appreciate. Then again, I could just stay on this rocky course, bouncing over the cute and the ridiculous, the pleasant and the unpleasant, with equal suspicion. Mb

There are people in this world who are born with a natural and simple grace. Those lucky people seem to learn very early in life the proper way to share with others and say thank you to another person. They easily gather the clues on how to be considerate to other people and seem to have an innate sense of good timing.

We can argue how this happens. Maybe there’s an academy, hidden somewhere in a deep forest, instructing young people how to be kind to each other. Maybe this kind of knowledge just flows around us or forms like the morning dew, clinging tightly along select branches of our tall hereditary tree.

We may believe that such grace only comes from a life guided by sunny thoughts or the privilege of success. It might be easier for many folks to accept and give muted credit when the going is good, when things magically fall into place, rather than when they don’t.

But for some beautiful people, this modest quality manifests itself even when things go horribly wrong.

If you heard any of the consolation talk of Harold Ford, Jr, who lost the Tennessee senate race last year, then you know of these kinds of graceful people. You heard how a man can admit his own disappointment while confidently looking forward and acknowledging the kindness of those who helped him open the door however slightly.

You’ve witnessed, then, how someone can say thank you for the opportunity to succeed and remain humble even in the face of failure.

Rather than ancient family fortunes, we are primarily led to believe this charming human condition of grace arises from within those who are blessed with golden self-assurance. We suppose or reasonably assume people learn through a proper and loving upbringing to extend the same benefits which they themselves may have once enjoyed.

We’ve come to expect this result since when the opposite happens, when the early benefits of a privileged life are less valuable or obvious, then a different kind of person often emerges from the trees.

Such strange, lonely creatures often experience difficulty in the art of human expression. In spite of their wealth, education or blood lines, these individuals may initially be prone to certain impediments, bashfulness and odd self-consuming indulgence. Their uncertainty about themselves leads to uncertainty about everyone else. Having never struck the proper balance, their moods may swing violently from the extremes of furious rage against their enemies to unquestioning love for their most loyal friends. They are left with very little grace or compassion for anything or anyone in between.

We know these kinds of people by their defensive reaction to confrontation. They tend to blame their personal difficulties on others. Their signature adorns no compromise, their deceit is contagious and their stubbornness has no limit. A concession to their own failures, admitting the mistakes committed by their own hands, the simple acknowledgements which regular people do with grace each and every day, are impossible tasks.

And if they are in positions of leadership, then they obstinately take everyone down with them.

This, then, is the lesson of Charles I. This was the immature man who was blessed to be King of England yet earned the grace of neither man nor God. This was the man who pushed his countrymen into failed war after failed war always for the pettiest of reasons. This was the man who claimed the Divine Right of Kings while his distinct inability to negotiate his personal failures led him to a natural inability to negotiate the failure of his rule.

As we know from the fantastic portrayals on BBC history, when challenged with confrontation Charles I would close his circle and lash out. When his policies faced the rejection of his people and his parliament, he would only more loudly repeat his demand that they obey him. And when the deliberate confrontation and rejection refused to cease, he cavalierly ignored them.

Thus, unable to bargain with such impudence by any graceful manner, guided only by his historic lack of self-confidence, he would escape behind a masquerade.

The masque was a charade designed to hide his insecurity. On the outside, it displayed unswerving confidence in the powers of the King to force all opposing minds into accord with his own. The costumed bit players in the charade would trot out on stage and urge faith in the brilliance of the King to bring all chaos into order. But behind it all, the masque of authority disguised a timid man who had no idea how to humble himself before his people in real life.

Dr. Richard Crust at the University of Birmingham reminds us in the closing scene of the final masquerade for Charles I, the chorus from the Salmacida Spolia of 1640 sang:

All that are harsh, all that are rude,

Are by your harmony subdued;

Yet so into obedience wrought,

As if not forc'd to it but taught.

Charles I did not know how to reach out or to teach. He couldn’t share or make concessions. Having been subdued by his own anxiety, he only knew how to subdue others. He knew no other way. He knew no grace. As a result, he lost his crown and his head.

Cheers,

Mb