Top Five All Time Worst Excuses for Domestic and/or International Conflicts

1) He/She/Iraq Started it! ("No, they didn't." "Yes, they did!" "No-they-didn't!")

2) She/He/France Never Listens! ("I'm sorry, what was that?")

3) He/She Won't Stop Making Faces at Me/Nasty Remarks about Israel! ("Just ignore her, honey.")

4) She/He Poked me with the Purple Pencil/Imprisoned one of our Journalists! ("That really hurt!")

5) He/She took the Last Cookie/Is an Infidel! ("I said, just ignore her!")

Hey Hollywood!

What's with all the movies about the War on Terror and Iraq and Afghanistan FBI CIA torture and patriotism? Lions for Lambs Redacted Rendition In the Land Of Elah the Kingdom etc.etc.? Can't you studio execs stop having the same idea over and over again and then hearing that someone else has the same idea and then rushing your project into production because of it?
Hey American media, what's with Hollywood touching stories you never have? Why is it that the new Brian DePalma film sounds like it deals with the subject of atrocities committed by American soldiers in the Middle East in much more depth that the combined embedded reportage from five years of mainstream "coverage" of the shit in Afghanistan-Iraq-Gitmo etc?
Hey Senator Clinton, how come you don't speak out against these nightmares any more than the American slick paper media?
Hey#*!@##!*!

Sturm and Twang

Vienna being about three to six months behind the US in movie premieres(and fifty to 100 years behind in manners), I've only just recently seen two movies that my friends in America probably saw ages ago. Two documentaries about two musical phenomenons so unrelated as to seem to belong to two different planets: Joe Strummer, of the Clash, and the Dixie Chicks.

Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten is a one-dimensional love letter, featuring, um, campfire testimonials, and cameos by people like Johnny Depp, who appears in full Pirates of the Carribean drag, using the sort of wack hyperbole that gets rock critcs burned at the stake. It manages to turn Strummer, the driving force behind a super influential, maybe even important band, into a barely compelling poseur. Thirty years later, it made me wonder why everyone made such a fuss about the Clash. I remember a guy in my hometown named Polar Bear--he always said the Clash were phoneys.

On the other hand, as far as I can tell, The Dixie Chicks don't matter at all. But Shut Up and Sing: The Dixie Chicks, by the master documentary director Barbara Kopple, turns the band into heroines. Flawed, occasionally bitchy, and smart, chicks who spoke out against the invasion of Iraq, and paid a price for it. It juxtaposes scenes of Donald Rumsfeld lying through his teeth with scenes of three women who, clever as they are, still can't quite believe how unpopular some opinions can be. Four years later, it made me wonder again how that big-eared monkey from Crawford, TX, managed to con the nation into the disaster we call the Iraq war. And it made me wonder, again,
What's really going on in the US of A?

LaVena

As a father, I do my best to take care of my little girl. I try to teach her the good stuff, try to be there if she falls down on the sidewalk, and I talk to her. But her mother and I can't take care of her all the time, and there's a short list of people we trust to watch over Adinah when we're not around. Our babysitter Rosa. Our friend Micha. The women and men at our Kindergarten.

As she gets older, our daughter will have to learn to take care of herself. I may find this a difficult process, but Adinah is gonna be just fine, I know. At the same time, she will entrust herself, first to her friends, and then to various institutions--we all do this as we become little league baseball players, university students, parents and responsible citizens of the place we call home.

We all want to be able to trust our institutions--our society--to take care of our children. But what if they don't?

This is a photograph of LaVena Johnson. She grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri. She was an honor roll student at Hazelwood Central High School who played the violin in her spare time and volunteered for the American Heart Association. When LaVena finished school, she joined the Army. They sent her to Iraq. She died there on July 19, 2005. She was nineteen years old.

Army representatives initially told LaVena's parents that she died from "self-inflicted, non-combat injuries" but that she had not committed suicide. After an investigation, they changed their story and insisted LaVena had killed herself. But the Army also sent investigation photos and documents home to the Johnsons, and these documents suggest that LaVena was murdered. The evidence of foul play includes the disappearance of LaVena's debit card, lab results that indicate she may not have even touched the rifle she was said to have shot herself with, and indications that someone tried to set her body on fire. Despite these findings, the Army has declared the case closed and refused to make any further comment.

Last week, the St. Louis CBS-TV affiliate KMOV broadcast a report about LaVena's death. I learned about her from posts by Waveflux, Shakespeare's Sister and an Angry Black Bitch. As far as I can tell, there has been little media attention otherwise. That leaves LaVena's father, Dr. John Johnson, all alone in a fight to find out what really happened to his little girl.

As a father and a man who is living a long ways from home, I want to believe that people over there in the US are trying to do the right thing. And as Americans, we have to be able to trust our Army to take care of us and our children. But what if they don't?

In this case, it's possible that Army investigators really did try to discover the truth about LaVena's death in her tent in Iraq. If that is so, our message to them is simple: Try harder.



(PS: Waveflux suggests, as do we here at Euro Like Me, that anyone who cares about this case contact their US Senator, particularly if that Senator is on the Armed Services Committee. That Committee's membership is listed here:

Democrats
Carl Levin, Chairman (Michigan)
Claire McCaskill (Missouri)
Edward M. Kennedy (Massachusetts)
Robert C. Byrd (West Virginia)
Joseph I. Lieberman (Connecticut)
Jack Reed (Rhode Island)
Daniel K. Akaka (Hawaii)
Bill Nelson (Florida)
E. Benjamin Nelson (Nebraska)
Evan Bayh (Indiana)
Hillary Rodham Clinton (New York)
Mark L. Pryor (Arkansas)
Jim Webb (Virginia)

Republicans
John McCain, Ranking Member (Arizona)
John W. Warner (Virginia)
James M. Inhofe (Oklahoma)
Jeff Sessions (Alabama)
Susan M. Collins (Maine)
John Ensign (Nevada)
Saxby Chambliss (Georgia)
Lindsey O. Graham (South Carolina)
Elizabeth Dole (North Carolina)
John Cornyn (Texas)
John Thune (South Dakota)
Mel Martinez (Florida))

Domestic Violence

One of the more disquieting aspects of living in Europe has been trying to reconcile my love for America with my loathing for the people currently running it. George W. Bush is a liar and a cheat, and saying that he is not impeachable for his crimes is nearly as fatheaded as saying the situation in Iraq "verges on civil war." We didn't move here because I #!*#@!! hate the man, but his administration's utter disregard for the hearts and minds of the American people certainly made it easier to leave home. After the 2004 election, I felt jilted, as if my country had left me for an asshole who was just gonna break her heart.

Today, as he pushes ahead to needlessly send more Americans and Iraqis to their deaths, despite the wishes of most Americans, it looks like the President's relationship to the USA has become even more abusive. Some of the Republicans in the Senate have blocked debate on Iraq-- they have taken the role of the neighbors who don't report a man who is beating his wife or child.

It's a rainy day here in Vienna, and as I stand at our window, watching fifty-year-old streetcars rumbling past signs I can't read, nothing makes me feel farther from home than my inability to understand why we continue to allow this President and his accomplices to batter and bruise us.