DenisHorgan.com

With far less tragic consequences, certainly, George Bush’s disastrous War on Iraq and Hillary Clinton’s disastrous battle for the presidency have chilling similarities.

Each was launched with what might seem an arrogance and hubris that seemed rooted in overconfidence,  fantasizing some mad inevitability of success when history is a much tougher place than the pipe dreamers realize. Failure was not an option but became a reality but they did not prepare for it.

Each underestimated the opposition, with sad results. Drunk with their own self-image and swagger, they did not prepare for opponents who would dance around them, rewrite the rules, find support and resources beyond the traditional Big Power circles. They did not fathom that a new stragtegy was necessary because they were too captured with the rightness of their own place.

Bush’s bloody war stumbles on looking for an end because they had no plan on what to do when the initial battles ended. Clinton’s campaign lurches along towards conclusion, while the world no longer pays much attention — the campaign having effectively ended long ago. Clinton merely wastes money and time, bitterly seeking to destroy the party village to “save” it; Bush kills people.

Each actually believed their own miscalulations, manipulations and lies and listened to fawning courtiers alone. The truth that the battles were not going well do not arrive home to the principals. Old tactics and strategies were brought to new battlefields.

Each changed the mission, the rationale, the direction as one approach after another failed. With lives at stake, Bush slithered the intent for his war from topic to tiopic: Saddam, terrorism, democracy, Iran, whatever would hold on to a few of his dwindling supporters. Clinton transmuted herself hourly from The Sure Thing, The Underdog, The Wise Expert, The Expert Hater,  The Iron Lady, The Sensitive Weeper, The Steady 3 a.m. Rock, The last call Denizen of Moe’s Place, The Pioneer, The Throwback, The Candidate of All the People, The Candidate of the ”Good People” (whites) only. Etc.

George Bush the Father worried about “mission creep” in Iraq during his own successful war there. His son changed missions weekly, and weakly.

Senator Clinton and President Bush faulted their critics, the media, anyone with a different view while allying with unsavory sorts and unsavory tactics what, ultimately harmed them more than helped. Each imagined a “surge” of more fighting and cost would somehow mask the truth that the core effort had flopped so badly, beyond recall.

The world changes. Those not ready for it get left behind, and in some events, causing great harm in the dismal process.

Nuala O’Faolain has died, quickly swamped by cancer. Appropriately, the accounts of her life and work are rich with praise and appreciation of her writing and vision. Exactly so.

She was an excellent writer and observer, of course, and there’s not much I could add to the gentle credit she receives on that front. But my own contacts with her, fleetingly personal, remind me of the greater loss. She was such a nice person.

I used to run a big writers’ conference my paper held for many years. A while back, we somehow talked Nuala into joining us where, surprising nervous, she charmed and enlightened the crowd to a one. Trying to enlist her to take part in the event we became engaged in a lovely exchange of mail and messages each of which was marked by her caring and generosity of heart with a stranger.

Notably to me alone, probably, we talked a bit about my own writing at her insistence; she asked after my work and, in the most kind way, urged me to send along selections of what would become my essay collection, “Flotsam: A Life in Debris.” It matters tremendously to me that she liked what I did but much more so was the truth that she offered the most wonderful encouragement and guidance to someone she didn’t know at all. She asked for my essays, read them all and commented so sweetly, inspiring me at a passing bleak moment with her own story and advice.

It doesn’t matter at any level except to me exactly what she said so much as the truth that she said it. Soaring in her own acclaim and celebrity, she paused to help along a guy out of her own goodness. I am certain that I am hardly alone in receiving such graceful notice from Nuala O’Faolain.

In the years since we kept up the contact, as she wrote more books, covered the political scene, moved from the United States back to Ireland, experienced a series of professional and personal ups and downs. Always, the starshine of her caring for others, the modesty in her triumphs and resolve in her setbacks shone through. She seemed generally astonished, perhaps, in her successes and warily accepting when things took a different turn.

Throughout and always she was so nice. How sad that she is gone.

What’s a poor bigot to do?

There are people who simply despise blacks. And women. And old people. They will not take seriously women or blacks or mature neighbors who have accomplished so very much more than even their poisoned hearts will acknowledge. It takes so many forms, happily most not so blatant as in recent times. Very recent times.

It continues and we all know it does. We all know people, relatives, neighbors, friends who will not vote for a black person or a woman. There are those who patronize and demean the elderly as doddering old fools, simply big children. We see it every day still.

As a Catholic, unwanted and banished by the bishops because I imagine to vote for Democrats, I wonder what on earth distinguishes Barack Obama from Hillary Clinton that would lead to Catholics rejecting him by amazing percentages. They stand for the same things, exactly. There is no difference in their policies. But then you look closer doesn’t it turn out to be ethnic Catholics, say, or Catholics of an age that does not feel comfortable with a change that changes the racial consistency of their own youth.  

There are people on the streets and on the air who simply refuse to believe that a woman can be considered an equal — and, heaven help them, their actual superior in accomplishment and capacity. That plays into the vote as surely as green apples grow on the trees.

This is not to say that Clinton is supported by bigots or that Obama is backed by women-haters. It is to say that bigots and women-haters exist and vote from that part of their spirit as much as anything else. Period. Well, maybe semicolon. Mrs.Clinton is working the race issue pretty hard, it appears.  No good can come of this; is there no shame left?

What will they do now, the bigots? They will likely have a black guy running against an old guy. There’s a woman guy who played a huge role in the campaigning so far and will have an effect on it for the foreseeable future — notably if she continues her sad, corrosive, destroy-this-party-to-save-it (for herself) strategy.

It may be hard to measure, beyond anecdotally, but is there anyone who doesn’t believe that there’s an element of racial attitudes in some of the concentrations of the anti-Obama vote? Not race as in the positive sense that African-Americans have in one of their own being on the ballot but the negative sense that loathes the idea that someone very much not of their own is there. Does anyone not believe that there is an element of misogyny in the reflexive opposition to Hillary Clinton — or any other woman daring to think about competing as an equal politically, socially or in the marketplace?   Do we imagine even for a second that it is policy alone that sparks the rage and hatred in the hearts of the Rush Limbaughs, with his wife-of-the-week faliures among women? And others?

And what disdain the elderly endure at every turn. Instead of being honored and revered enough for their astonishing contribution, so often they are discounted and quarantined as if they were merely a joke on society.

Tough luck, pals.

One way or the other, the ticket and the future will be full of people who are not all middle-aged white males . Exactly as it should be. It’s about time.

Theneo-con Barstool Rambos, Joe Lieberman and the other warmongers, who just can’t get enough of conflict (that someone else has to fight, of course, or which will be fought on behalf of someone else like, say, Israel), must be ecstatic. Looks like Russian and Georgia are near to war. It may not be much compared to the lust for war with Iran but it’ll have to do.

Seems like the new tsars in Moscow are not amused that Georgia would be in NATO so they are putting on their usual low grade threatening behavior, enough to inspire the Georgians to talk of imminent conflict.

The Russians may have enough of a problem on their hands: The hooligans are coming.

“MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia has waived entry visa requirements for fans with a valid
ticket for the May 21 Champions League Final in Moscow, a match organizer told
Reuters on Monday.

” ‘A fan can come without a visa and…enter Russia with a valid ticket,’ said Alexei
Sorokin, the Russian official coordinating preparations for the match. ‘It is an
unprecedented decision by the Russian government.’

“Tens of thousands of English fans are expected to travel to the match with
Manchester United and Chelsea facing each other in the final at the Luzhniki
Stadium.”

There are about six people left on the planet Earth who imagine England to be a delicate civilized place awash in Masterpiece Theater and the Bard — when it is Benny Hill and soccer violence that better characterizes the kingdom. Benny Hill is actually terrific but the hooligans are thugs and louts on a world class, even Russian, scale.

The idea that tens of thousands of English soccer fans are invading Russia does not bode well for the new government there. These fans can be so violent, so rude, so destructive as to classify as weapons of mass destruction.  Hailed Britannia has been banned from international competition because its fans are such a menace. Now Russia opens wide the doors to them. Good luck. 

Maybe they are Georgia’s secret weapon.

Like Roger Clemens, I apologize.

Like Roger, I offer a generic, one-size-fits-all apology and allow you to fill in the details to your own satisfaction. Or predilections.

If you want to think me guilty of arson or mayhem, jaywalking or expectorating, I apologize. If you guage me a blasphemer, pickpocket, mountebank, slacker, stumblebum, corner-cutter, procrastinator, anticrastinator, carouser, drug-addled tippler, toppler, tappler or winker, I apologize. Take your pick.

Actually my brilliant, stunning, dazzling book, “Flotsam: A Life in Debris,” has a chapter on apologies. And, while I apologize for the exuberant self-praise and then apologize again for the transparently bogus modesty, I recommend it.

Clemens’ apology is a Jason Giambi mu mu sort of thing, craftily manufactured to appear to cover all conditions and offenses while leaving it to the poor victim to determine what in blazes the apology might be for, out of so many opportunities.  (Giambi, an outsized hypocrite perfectly crafted for Big Apple work, has bloated his body and statistics, cheating with artificial substances and chemcials, and apologizes for doing things, which could only be steroids or HGH. But he declines to be specific. Then, to demonstrate that he has a sense of humor on steroids, he demands that Major League Baseball apologize because there has been steroids in the game — in the pluperfect forms of such as, well, Jason Giambi. What a fraud.) 

Politicians should glom onto this version. At the beginning of a campaign the candidate need only say, “I apologize for everything I’ve done wrong but for legal/family/whatever reasons I cannot go into details. Trust me, the apologizer.” Thereafter everything that he or she gets caught at can be fobbed off to the apology.

This is a distinct improvement, and time-saver, over the standard fare: Apologies that are phantoms, mirages, apologies that do not actually apologize. It is the common form to say, “I apologize if anyone’s feelings were hurt by my behavior or if anyone should take offense at my remarks.” Not that the person is apologizing for doing something but, in fact, apologizes for the victim’s response. The scoundrel is not saying, “I did the wrong thing.” She or he is saying, “I am sorry that you caught me doing the wrong thing.” Not the same.

Ah, but the baseball players have the better approach. The grand slam apology with no specifics, no details, no remorse, no consequence.

What a great game they play.

The problem with being cavalier about experts, as is Sen. Clinton, is that experts often know what they’re talking about. That’s why they’re called experts.

Experts told George Bush, and the Congress which rolled over for him, that his war on Iraq was bogus and would be  a disaster. The experts, and most of the rest of us, were right.

The experts tell us that the economy is in the (gas) tank, something that may be hard to swallow if you’re routinely making $20 million a year as are the Clintons and that the thing to do about it is not to make it worse with pathetic gimmicks. But the experts are dismissed by the multi-multi-millionaire candidate as “elitist.”

The experts tell us that we destroy the environment at our own peril  but the Republicans under their fearless leader, George Bush, have contempt  for the environment if it inconveniences the very rich industrialists. The experts have been losing that one under the Grand Old Party. That doesn’t make the experts wrong or elitist.

The experts have advised us that our bedrock liberties are not situational things to be discarded when they become bothersome to the Central Government. The experts had it right there, too; while the totalitarians of the right have it wrong.

Stick with the experts.

Mrs. Clinton may be annoyed that her pandering is exposed by people who actually may know what they’re talking about. But at this stage of her long career of such, she is not going to let the experts get in the way of her ambition.

Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton. Do you need to be an expert to find that  a pretty dismal prospect?

Don’t you just hate it when a boycott goes wrong? With somewhat less precision than they applied when they were crushing Tibet, Chinese “protesters” made a botch of their boycott of French stores — a protest made necessary because the French were seen to be rather rude to the passing-by Olympic torch in response to Chinese actually killing Tibetans. Disrespected torch. Dead Tibetans.

Maybe they should have just banned French fries.

China had hoped to punish those pesky French because some Tibetans in France weren’t amused that their countrymen, already conquered, suppressed and oppressed, were again being ground to powder under the Chinese heel. But, people being people, the Chinese marched out, yipped and yapped a bit and then went shopping. At the French store.

It’d be pretty funny, and you’d want to give an attaboy to the shopper-protesters for having the priorities in order, except that the Tibet issue is an ugly reminder of a brutal government at grim work in a most bloody way. The shopping protest may not have worked, but the official suppression and blodshed did. The idea that anyone would protest their kicking the stuffing out of the Tibetans seems to amaze China.

Small wonder, though, when the world, the United States at the forefront, is so in hock to the Chinese and in such thrall of their low-priced products made by low-paid workers at the expense of American and other workers that no one dares say “boo” to them. They can prop up the Burmese dictators, keep the mess of Darfur going, kill their own democracy protesters, imprison the harmless exercisers of Falun Gong and the world nervously whistles and wheedles, making excuses for the Beijing government.

It may well be that the Chinese government will unleash the power on its people but it’s hard to imagine that they’ll be able to keep them down forever — not when there’s neat goodies inside the stores they’ve been sent out to boycott. As usual, people are better than governments.

From Matthew’s opening “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ …” all the way through John’s closing “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen,” where might you find the smallest shred of support for ”Christians” like Jeremiah Wright or John Hagee?

Preaching hate and divison, scorn and contempt, such as these would have us believe that they reflect the Prince of Peace, who loved us all. If Mr. Wright wants to shoot off his yap about his mad theories and the hatred that infects his own heart, let him do so as an individual; if John Hagee wants to spew his venom and mad anger and poisonous views, let him do so an individual.

But to have these mopes somehow representing the Christian message as “pastors” and “ministers” certainly insults the ministry, actual Christians and, nearly, the message and its messenger.

It is a wise business to keep religion out of politics and politics out of religion.

The computer croaked on me. RIP, computer.

So I got a new one, with it’s scores of jacks and miles of wires and gadgets everywhere. Whistling up my sons, I got the thousands of pieces assembled.

But, oops, I do not have Microsoft Word, rather essential to what I do. Word being words to me, and all. So the crooks make me buy what ought to be a pretty much a give-away element of a word processor: Words. I get mahjong games for free but not words. I have to pay extra for the oxygen I breathe. But I have been bilked by better than Microsoft so I begrudge them the small fortune it takes to get Words — bundled into an expensive package of other programs I will never use in my entire life. OK.

Except I cannot open the package.

It is a neat plastic box, very pretty with a deftly smoothed corner on the periphery, a snowslope smoothness on another side. It’s a marvel to behold. But it cannot be opened. There is a slight paper tag which comes off when you pull it, sealing the thing even further in the fashion of what you hope will be the seal on radioactive chemicals dumped in the sea. There are what appear to be hinges but which do not hinge anything to open, or close. There are tabs that will break off your fingernails rather than come apart to reveal the treasures within. There are things that might be squeezed if you have fingers like pliers, and others that seem to offer the chance to twist away with a screwdriver — although your belly button seems to offer that chance, too, and, as you know, that doesn’t work.

I cannot get into the box to get at my … well, I don’t know what’s in it. If submarines were made like this, they’d never sink. The spaceshots would travel through eternity if they were sealed like this thing. I’d take a hammer to it except that I’d surely break what’s in it. Surely more engineering and packaging — infernal packaging — went into this box than the secrets inside.

The label advises me I must accept the enclosed license terms before I can use this software. But I cannot get to the enclosed license terms nevermind the software. It alerts me: The example events depicted herein are fictitious and no association or connection therewith is intended or should be inferred. What? I cannot get “herein.”

Somewhere, in Washington state or China or where ever these things are sealed like the Pharoah’s sarcophagus, they’re laughing at me.

SOS

In this, the 30th anniversary season of the legendary Boston-New York playoff game (”The Bucky Dent Game,” even though it was Reggie Jackson who hit the deciding homer), it is instructional to review history and demonstrate that the Red Sox won.

Never mind how the game has been played for a century and never mind the seeming results or the rules. You have to look inside the numbers, at the core support groups, at the demos. Just like in the primaries.

Using the Hillary Clinton rules-manipulation accounting method, the Beantowners won handily. The Red Sox got more total hits than did the Yankees, 11 to 8. Thus they can claim to win, using the slippery Clinton count rather than the trifling matter of total runs which the small-minded rest of the world uses to declare success.

Significant hitting blocs? Three Red Sox batters had two hits each while no Yankee did. Red Sox’ demos win.

The Red Sox scored in three innings while the poor Yankees only scored in two. Victory Boston, in statistics.

The Red Sox provided work for four pitchers, twice as many as Yankees who took the mound. The Sox get even more points for that from the extrapowerful scorekeepers on high, not in the game at all, winning the game which so many unimaginative sorts otherwise award to the Bronxers.

Who’s most ready to lead to victory? Boston! The Yankees struck out seven times while Boston batters whiffed only six times. The Red Sox earned three walks while the Yanks limped to only two. All the stats thus favor Boston. The establishment “super” stars of the Red Sox — Lynn, Rice and Yaz each had RBI’s. It was merely the upstart Dent and predictable old Jackson who delivered for New York. Clearly the power game favored Boston. The numbers are on their side. The Red Sox scored big runs late in the game, doing very well in the critical eighth inning. Big Mo shines on them.

The Yankees allowed a passed ball while the Red Sox did not, playing so well behind the plate. The Bostons has three doubles to merely two for the poor New Yorkers. The vast majority of fans in the Fenway stands that day were rooting for the Red Sox. All the evidence is that the Boston Red Sox won the game by a comfortable margin in every key area.

Oh, the persnickety might dwell on the truth that the Yankees scored five runs while the Bostons scored only four — but clearly, a la Clinton’s discounting the extended and ultimate results of the primaries and seeking to shatter the game the game itself in the process, the victory must go to the loser. And if anything else happens, it’s “I am Clinton, hear me rewrite the rules.”