Memorial Day Celebration

One thing you can count on, the department stores offer special sales. But if you’re going to visit the VA Hospital, leave your expectations in the car.

(This piece was also posted on Huffington Post.) 

Los Angeles, CA-- Smoke rises up in the neighborhood. Aromas of steaks on flaming gills perfume the air. The sounds of kids running around, laughing, playing, remind you of Memorial Day. Families get together. Guys drink beer and chat. Women talk about family and fashions. People go to the movies and talk about their goals. Memorial Day is all about these things.

Well, unless you’re remembering. And this might mean that you’ve resisted forgetting. A little something might chafe there, in the back of your mind. It’s so easy to forget. It’s healthy to avoid harmful, bad, ugly things.

What could be worse than war’s flesh ripping, bone smashing carnage?

This Memorial Day weekend I went to visit the wounded, the dying at the Veterans’ Hospital on Wilshire Boulevard. If you’re looking for it; it’s just where Wilshire passes under the 405, a huge complex of buildings, packed with broken, tired veterans from old wars like Korea or Vietnam and new ones, like Afghanistan and Iraq. Among the many large buildings, veterans from different wars are scattered and placed in wards depending on their wounds. Very few remain of World War II, and if you meet any of them, even fewer care to talk about it.

Even though I’ve been around veterans all my life, my naïve expectations were many about this complex of so many buildings. I had an agenda…and even an ulterior motive. I wanted to pass my new novel, Mojave Winds, to as many wounded soldiers from Iraq or Afghanistan as I could find. Today though, most of the staff took the day off to celebrate Memorial Day. So it became a challenge to find the wave of young, wounded soldiers from this new war. I had expected legions of visitors coming here today.

I envisioned hoards of those pious, religious folks here, especially those fundamentalists leaders who preach about how important staying the course is…and the surge…the surge. Maybe large groups of Jews, or Evangelicals, or Catholics, maybe Baptists… For some reason I expected them to come here in bus loads on Memorial Day to sacrifice their time, provide some comfort for these wounded men.

Roaming through the halls, I stumbled through a couple of doors opened to rooms. Young guys were lying in bed. Brian is 27 years old. He’s been here for months. Two years ago, he returned from Iraq with some strange disease that took hold of his body. Maybe it was the water. He’s lost a lot of weight. When I gave him a copy of my book, he formed a smile, though it didn’t last long. I stayed a while and watched the news on TV with him.

No cheerful faces, no energetic young guys, ready take on life, eager to embrace the future. Instead I learned things from them. When going to a VA Hospital, it’s best to readjust your sense of time. Slow down. No one is going anywhere fast. Living in a healthy, civilian life, you might have goals, schedules, and plans. Here, a lot of the guys take it one day at a time.

In a nearby room, Don was sitting on the side of his bed, trying to think about standing up. I sat in a chair. Together we watched the news on the TV for a while. Doubting that he had the strength to read a book, I didn’t dare offer him mine. In addition to the physical wounds, loneliness can weight heavy everywhere, in the air, in these gloomy rooms, out into the halls. As I walked out to the parking lot, I think of how each one of those guys could have been me. I could be one of them.

Then the twisted poetic metaphor came to mind, something about a “smoking gun turning into a mushroom cloud.” Was that all it took to get an entire nation of pious believers riled up for this crusade, a war that makes so many an anointed political leader and CEO extremely wealthy? Those who never carry a gun into battle all too often enjoy the luxury of making war a romantic and lucrative enterprise.

On Memorial Day, we might also remember the greatest of all Infidels to all religions, Walt Whitman, who visited the maimed, the mutilated, and lay down next to the dying.

But aside from these and the marts of wealth and the crowded promenade,

Admitting around me comrades close unseen by the rest and voiceless,

The slain elate and alive again, the dust and debris alive,

I chant this chant of my silent soul in the name of all dead soldiers.


Give me exhaustless, make me a fountain,

That I exhale love from me wherever I go like a moist perennial dew,

For the ashes of all dead soldiers South or North.

If you find the courage to visit the veterans, the wounded, my advice is to go without any expectations. I believed that by giving out my new novel I would help them to take their minds off their pain, their confinement. I learned, though, that just being there, the presence of another human being is sufficient to help the wounded to remember what it’s like to be whole and healthy. This is their Day to Remember that. You become the simple example of hope for their goal…to get out and join the rest of us in every day life.

Starstruck Cafe

A legal drug in America can wake us up and cure our delusions.

Venice Beach, CA -- This early in the morning only the seagulls keep me company. The air still holds sea mist. This coffee shop opens at daybreak. Though, nobody shows up until the seagulls have eaten up all the crumbs left on the street from the Saturday night pizza and beer parties.

Soon the regulars will arrive. The first of them is a lady who scoots around in a wheelchair, whispering to herself and asking for spare change so she can buy a cup of Starbuck’s strategically revived Pike’s Peek brand. Past her prime, she seems to use the wheelchair to keep her increasing weight off her feet. What she may not realize, though, the more she uses her wheelchair, the heavier she’ll become and eventually bound to it, entrapped by her own convenience.

I suppose other reasons motivate her self-imposed slow ride into captivity. Wheeling around like that might make the charitable more inclined to hand her their spare change. She rolls into this coffee shop and out again at regular intervals, at least once every half hour. Passers-by rush to help her maneuver through the door, but they’re not regulars here. They haven’t seen her walking around on her own two feet, and they don’t know that she’s probably fallen into that habit just to attract attention. Her eyes flash like bright neon lights saying, “I’m lonely. Pay attention.”

That might also serve as a great sign for the bar down the street,”The Galley” one of Charles Bukowski’s old haunts. The heavy drinkers become who they are in noble attempts to escape their troubles. Not knowing that by drinking more heavily, it only gets worse. Eventually they, too, become bound to their own mental prisons. At the break of dawn, I ask a woman, sitting on a bench why she’s crying.

“I spent my whole week’s wages on booze,” she sobs. “I drank all night.”

By the time the wheelchair lady, no, I won’t tell you her name and, yes, I talk to her, has made enough to buy what Starbucks calls a coffee, the younger local Yuppie types show up. They were out at their usual pizza parties last night, blowing out on beer and pepperoni. Blow-out…a term Martin Amis uses in his novel “Money,” about how bad habits can ruin the best of us. I remember it from years ago. The term fits for how these young, college educated office workers toss off the frustrations of working in cube farms and for bosses who want to optimize returns on their backs. I know. You’re thinking that the term yuppie is so dated. Like, dude, who says that anymore?

Well, it just seems fitting. The “new” line of Yuppies, the Generation Xers or the Generation Yers. Their differences are only nuances apart, just a tattoo, video game, and a skateboard apart. Labels like these are useful mostly for marketing departments for consumer goods. The comfort zones apply from one generation to the next. You get stuck in a routine, you imprison yourself. You let your mind think the same way for too long, it’ll handicap you. Make you wheelchair bound, mentally or physically or both.

That’s the message I received this weekend. The nice thing about going to the movies in a city like LA, you get to step out of the same ‘ol same ‘ol of American movies. You know, the movies produced first from the perspective of careful psychographic and demographic research, the ones that break down the needs of market niches, like the Generation X, or Y… Independent movies, especially the European variety, tend to break those static rules taught in business schools. A good story is often the one that helps to break us out of our own comfort zones. They help us to see the world in new eyes.

“Reprise” is a chic flick with hip looking 20-something Norwegians who grew up in Oslo, hang out with the same circle of friends and maintain the same sort of dependencies in their comfortable relationships. Two or three of these buddies become famous for their first novels. It’s not until one of them discovers that, by going to a foreign country, he’s able to break out of the rut. This dissolves the old comfort zones through his old circle of friends. It shakes things up. His closest friend even learns to love a woman when she snips his mental chains by finally telling him, “Stop.”

“Roman de Gare”is a cool French movie. None of the fast action, flying in the sky comic book adventure as, say, “Iron Man”, but it does offer glimpses of human warmth and relationships, some that grow and thrive, others that whither. It’s only when the protagonist realizes he’s not the man everyone taught him to be that he discovers his own life and identity by stepping out of trails he’d beaten down throughout his life. A woman of a most unlikely occupation helps him to change his eye glasses and so too his perspectives.

In a similar story of recent American history, our anointed religious and saintly political leaders tend to want us to stay the course. From one miserably failed President to McCain, they want us to keep doing the same thing while expecting new results. Human spirit isn’t made for this type of mental absurdity and living, though. We naturally follow an instinct to break away from delusions once unveiled. It’s in our genetics. Drinking new brands of coffee is necessary for our survival.

Bush Visits His Only Friends

The Bush Administration celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Israeli nation this week.

W visited the one or two places in the Middle East where the entire population would not massively attempt to undo him. Israelis are the only people to give W a standing ovation, moving our grossly failed president to tears. It’s the only country where he feels welcome. Well, except maybe the US military during his usual speeches, but the soldiers are always on orders to stand.

In 1947, the United Nations approved the partition of the Mandate of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Arab League rejected the plan, but on May 14, 1948, the Jewish provisional government declared Israel's independence. Israel thus became the first Jewish state in the world, now with a population of just under 8 million. It’s about the size of greater Los Angeles and 85% Jewish.

Since the UN recognized this new nation, especially after the 1948 Israeli-Arab War, Israelis have pushed their borders east into Muslim territories. Israeli expansion has enflamed decades long fighting between Jews and Muslims with no resolution in sight. Emphasis on the differences in their religions has continually ignited hate on both sides of the battles.

Neither side is innocent in this ongoing war between Jews and Muslims. Despite the holy image of Israel that once warmed the hearts of many Americans, war has stained the saintly Israeli aura.

Israel remains the preeminent military power in the Middle East. It has nuclear weapons, strong conventional forces and the capability to strike at will, as it did in September when it destroyed what it believed to be a Syrian nuclear facility.

Last year, Israel signed a 10-year, $30 billion arms deal with Washington aimed at keeping that edge for years to come.

Given Israel’s massive military capabilities, is it any surprise that Iran does everything it can to protect itself? Once a close ally with the US, Iran is now forming alliances with China and Russia for its oil and weapons exchanges.

Given Israel’s US support and military might, is it really any surprise that Palestinians resort to terrorist reprisals and other such guerrilla war tactics? Of course, terrorism and guerrilla warfare is unacceptable, as should be all types of war. Yet, let’s also keep in mind that Israelis have not been innocent of their share of terrorist reprisals either.

For the US to grant Israel complete unconditional love is to take sides with one party in a war that has no innocent perpetrators.

Israelis roll out the red carpet for Bush mainly because W and his old neocon war mongers have loved Israel unconditionally...and waged war for them. Israel enjoys all the benefits as if the 51st US State and without the tax bill for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Many experts on Middle Eastern affairs have shown convincing evidence that W pushed the invasion and occupation of Iraq solely to serve Israeli interests to fortify its power in the region. As a fundamentalist Christian, Bush believes in the second coming of Jesus and, so prepares for Armageddon.

This means that neither oil or freedom or anything else motivated W more in his personal war against Iraq than religious ideology.

It was about the religious fervor that stirs the hearts of neocons like Bush, and now McCain who has gained endorsements and support from Israeli enthusiasts like Pastor Hagee and Preacher Pat Robertson. Those religious fanatics beguile the blind following of large swaths of gullible, uneducated American voters.

It stands to reason that without the interest in oil wealth of the region, the US would not support a war in those deserts for the sole sake of ousting a dictator. If this were the case, the US could easily invade North Korea, or China, or Zimbabwe…ruthless dictators run all of these and other countries.

When W first came to power, Israeli leaders like Sharon and now Olmert had long since urged the neocon fundamentalists in the US to invade and occupy Iraq and Iran. This has been the Likud's agenda for decades. Likud has in the past espoused hawkish policies towards the Palestinians, including opposition to Palestinian statehood and support of the Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Many prominent Israelis adhere to these goals, including Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu and Finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This is so publicly documented no references are needed, except for those in denial.

The bitter pill of Bush’s complete failure as a President, though, comes from how these Israeli leaders now voice disappointment in the US invasion of Iraq. Did I say “bitter?” Bush served the Israeli leaders faithfully like a choirboy serves the Catholic priest, in orthodox and unorthodox manners, bending over, assuming the position, and taking it all in deeply.

During the Bush admin, the US has granted Israel complete and utter unconditional love, sacrificing thousands of young American patriots and trillions of tax dollars.

"The sum total is that if you measure Israeli security at the beginning of this administration and at the end of the administration, based on things the president either could have done, should have done or failed to do, the report card is pretty negative," said Daniel C. Kurtzer, who served as Bush's first-term ambassador to Israel. (Washington Post, 14 May 2008)

Kurtzer has since switched political parties. He saw the light. He now advises Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Kurtzer sees Bush's neglect of the peace process for most of his seven years in office. Despite the president's optimism that he can achieve a Palestinian-Israeli deal in his final year, Kurtzer and many other analysts believe that Israel remains unwilling to negotiate peace with its neighbors. As is typical of Bush, he ignores the advise of non-religious, non-neocons. In his recent speech in Jerusalem, Bush claims that “Israel stands for peace.”

As a kick to the dead horse (Bush), the Israeli defense establishment voices second thoughts about Bush's decision to remove Saddam Hussein and the botched occupation of Iraq. Despite Israel’s urging the early Bush administration to invade Iraq, those policies, they now argue, have helped fuel the rise of Israel's nemesis, Iran, whose president has spoken openly of trying to wipe Israel off the map. The war has also threatened to destabilize neighboring Jordan with a flood of refugees.

Early on, the Iraq invasion "looked as if it would serve Israel's interest," said Shlomo Brom, a former director of strategic planning for the Israel Defense Forces. But "the way that it was implemented by this administration is eventually causing damage to Israel. It is strengthening the radical elements in the Middle East."

"People are mistaken,” says Brom, “to think that the most friendly president [to Israel] is also the best president that Israel has ever had."

And now to stave off further criticism from his Israeli masters, Bush pursues serious talks of invading Iran, and this even after various intelligence has proven that Iran has no nuclear capabilities. W and his neocons, like McCain, have not yet learned an obvious and simple lesson in leadership, namely, that to twist up CIA intelligence and to ignore common sense advise, can lead the US into military and financial catastrophe.

Like his neocon advisors, Bush wages his wars mainly motivated by religious ideology, ‘crusades’ as he calls them in speeches. We see the results.