The Peace Pragmatist (My First DKos Diary)

I've never made a very good voyeur, and everyone knows I never know when to STFU, but with all the hullabaloo out here, I simply could not resist digging up this old piece: My First Dkos Diary, (August, 2005), posted under the nom de guerre "Starkravinglunaticradical"--originally titled:

Visualize War! Hometown Hippy Responds to Markus Moulitsas

Good Morning America, this is Chicago!

Wow. I woke up this morning feeling like a visitor from another planet.

As a starkravinglunaticradical who has always been opposed to violence of any kind-be it domestic or foreign-I suspect that, in the world according to Kos, I'd be lumped together with the "touchy-feely hippy types," some of whom, we must never fail to note, have since "grown-up" to earn PhDs, JD s, MD s, etc. and currently lead productive (though not necessarily prosperous) lives disguised as "professionals" in various sectors running the gamut from university positions to corporate management and the legal profession.

Reading DailyKos has been the most pleasurable part of my morning routine for about the last year. This morning, Markus Moulitsas-that is, the great Kos himself-posted the following statements on his liberal blog:

I'm not anti-war. As I've said before, I'm a military hawk. I supported the Afghanistan War and I supported the Bosna and Kosovo interventions. I'm not one of these touchy-feely hippy types that thinks war is inherently bad. I laugh at people who think they can "visualize peace".

Unlike most people reading this, I grew up in a country at war.

The War Pragmatists
by Marginalized Margarine Queen

Never mind that the "touchy feely hippy types" likely comprise a large portion of the constituency that has allowed DailyKos to become the primary source of income for Markus Moulitsas as Kosmic Kingpin of the highest-trafficked political blog in the `Sphere, ranking, according to Blogstreet, in the top-5 of all weblogs in popularity, in the top-10 according to Technorati.

Here's the statement that blew me away and forced me to ask just who is further divorced from reality: Kos, or the rest of Americans born on or after 7 December, 1941.

"Unlike most people reading this, I grew up in a country at war."

WTF? I was born in the United States of America, it is where I grew up. In 1984, with the re-election of Ronald Reagan, I left the country in search of political asylum from a population stupid enough to put Darth Vader in a cowboy hat at the reign for a second term. I remained in exile until 1992, when I returned to my homeland just in time to vote for Ross Perot.

So, there's an almost decade-long "memory hole" in my cultural consciousness as an American, perhaps best illustrated by such memorable moments as the time I asked someone if there was a copy shop nearby, to which a friendly stranger replied, "There's a Kinko's down the street," and I had to ask, "Kinko's? What's Kinko's?" or the time I lost any shred of credibility while addressing a group of 5th graders on the south side of Chicago when they said, "Hey, you's wearin' MC Hammer pants!" and I said, "Who's MC Hammer?" (I was clad in the traditional garb of the Malinke people of Guinea, West Africa, a place I visited often in my nearly decade-long period of self-imposed exile from the country of my birth).

Upon reading this statement, I had to ask myself: did I miss something truly relevant in my absence? Did the "touchy-feely hippy types" actually manage not only to "visualize peace" sometime between the mid-80s and the early 90s which the European press failed to report? Did I happen to blink and miss a brief moment of PEACE? Was there actually a day or two somewhere in there when my country was not dropping bombs on someone somewhere in the world?

It only took one google-hit to confirm that I had in fact missed nothing of the sort: the country I grew up in (i.e., the US) has been engaged in some form of military intervention ever since the day I was born in 1961 see here. Nope, not a single moment of peace had been sucked down my memory hole.

OK, what Kos is saying is that, unlike most of his readers, he actually grew up in a country where war was not displaced to some distant land way beyond the wild blue yonder, some neverneverland where its citizens would never contend with the consequences of their wars on a daily basis, but instead watch their wars from afar--as a mere abstraction, a minor distraction, a defense budget infraction and media attraction. Kos grew up in a country where war was staged on his doorstep, in his own backyard.

Unlike many of us here I did at least have the opportunity to see my defense-budget tax dollars in action while living in Germany during the $13.1 trillion-abstraction that was the "cold war"-even if that amounted to passing cruise missiles at 120 mph while racing up and down Hitler's Highway-otherwise known as the "Autobahn"-in my late-model Citroen.

I even had the amusing "pleasure" of once having a minor fender-bender with a US military vehicle: so distracted was I by the US-military convoys clogging traffic in the small northern German town of Neumünster during one of those exercises in insanity staged annually every fall, when NATO troops dressed up in full military garb, hauled out their trucks, tanks and toys and played "war" not on a video screen, but in the fields and forests of Germany, that I once rear-ended a US military VW-bug, put a dent in the fender and paid for it dearly in the subsequent 6-week long bureaucratic nightmare resulting from military personnel's refusal to accept my generous offer of 50 bucks to pick up the tab for the bumper, insisting instead that even this little fender bender would be handled strictly by the book.

Those NATO maneuvers really used to piss me off because they always caught me off guard: I'd go out for a peaceful walk in the woods, only to find myself surrounded by British and American boys all dressed up in fatigues with nowhere to go but my little patch of wood. In my absolute disgust for what the US had become since 1941, I suppose just hearing a word of English was enough to set me off because it reminded me of just how ugly my country had since become. I never imagined that barely a decade would pass before I'd be sitting here again in Chicago, thinking ugly fucking Americans, man!! No, even worse. We Ugly Americans have since become hideous. Obscene.

As Winona LaDuke recently stated, speaking last spring at the University of Illinois-Chicago, there is barely a shred of decency left in this country. And I could not agree more.

OK, my personal politics, as a "touchy-feely hippy type" (who happens to have a PhD in German, and thus a convenient "disguise" that allows me to pass for something more "legitimate"--respectable, even!) aside: the point is "LIKE MOST PEOPLE READING THIS, I GREW UP IN A COUNTRY AT WAR"-a country too busy "visualizing peace" to take time out to "visualize war" and thus understand the consequences of perpetual military intervention.

For the record: this country has been at war since 1941. Conveniently, many of us prefer to "visualize peace"-and in this, we act very much in accord with the US government, which is doing everything in its power to prevent us from "visualizing war."

So, today, my fellow Americans--doves, hawks, pragmatists and peaceniks alike--I invite you to VISUALIZE WAR, and offer this stunning audio-visual tool as just one step in that direction. For the more faint at heart, might I suggest the following alternative:.

And, lest we forget, the most hideous
of them all.

I say, to hell with Peace, VISUALIZE WAR.