lissaht's blog

There are a whole lot of reasons we need to get out of Afghanistan, but I can't help but be terribly concerned about the plight of Afghani women left to the Taliban’s devices. Last week Time Magazine’s cover picture was of an eighteen year old girl whose nose had been cut off not to spite her face, but for running away from abusive in-laws. How bad women’s lives have been under the Taliban, indeed, how bad they are in any of the places where harsh Sharia law applies, is hardly hot news. On the other hand, I’ve never seen someone whose nose has been cut off. It’s sobering.

I used to rail a good deal against religion because of the many bad things that are done in its name. Then I read Niall Ferguson’s The War of the World and realized that it’s people who do bad things and, if they don’t justify it by religion, they will justify it by some other means. Or not. Maybe St. Augustine was right. Maybe we’re just bad.

Or maybe it’s the men who are bad.

In the previous century we watched Europe self-destruct twice, then clamber out of the ruins and put itself back together again, sort of like the Scarecrow after his near death experience at the hands of the Wicked Witch of the West, reconstituting himself with fresh straw. Of course it was painful; of course it took time. But not that much time. Not really.

Why is that?

My mother, Martha Nell Hardy, was a transcendently beautiful woman who, as she aged, began to trade more on wisdom and an increasingly folksy humor than her looks. It was her way of aging gracefully and still having a rapt and appreciative audience. My father, novelist and playwright Bill Hardy, is a wonderful writer, but, for peculiar turns of phrase, it was Mom who took the proverbial cake. Perhaps it was because her father was from Altamont, a small town in Texas whose newspaper featured a Puny Column, wherein all indisposed citizens were identified and their ailments detailed, or the fact that her Great Aunt used to inform her sister that her Puerto Rican date had arrived by hollering, “Mary Elizabeth! That half-breed’s here!”

My dopamine is down a pint; I’m having what Dan Carlin calls a Black Dog Day. I’m not sure why. Generally I’m relentlessly cheerful, but today . . . today not so much.

Speaking of Dan Carlin, he of Common Sense and Hardcore History, it’s partially his fault, him and all the other podcast pundits I listen to on an ongoing basis: MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, Jack Clark of Blast the Right, Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks, the New Yorker’s Political Scene, every podcast Slate does except the sports one, (because, as I have long maintained, I don’t do balls); The Nation and Washington Week in Review and PBS Newshour and The Daily Show and The Economist and Bill Maher’s Real Time and Time Magazine, always and for decades, cover to cover.

You get the picture.

What a difference nine (and counting) years make. Sort of like stepping through the proverbial looking glass: it turns out that nothing is as it seems. Good wars turn out to be bad ones; a righteous cause is revealed to be baseless; we sacrifice on the altar of our presumption the very people whom we say we are trying to save, whose hearts and minds we say we aspire to win. Oh, we swear up and down that they matter, but they don’t. Not really. Otherwise we would have probably made a greater effort to stop killing what the now disgraced General McChrystal characterized as an “amazing” number of them.

When asked by PBS Newshour what General Stanley McChrystal could have been thinking when he mouthed off to Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings, retired generals Dan McNeill and Merrill McPeak appeared genuinely baffled. They alluded to McChrystal’s no-nonsense, gruff and blunt manner and pointed out that he had evidently spent insufficient time in situations requiring tact and diplomacy. However, it was pretty clear that they were not convinced that this was the whole story. McPeak, who appeared stunned throughout, referred to McChrystal twice as a “Warrior,” hesitating a moment before he uttered the word as though he wasn’t sure how that word, so loaded, would play in the modern world outside gaming circles.

I have no doubt that McChrystal is a Warrior . . . one with a capital W. Joe Klein describes him as an extraordinary soldier, but one who is pathologically incapable of not speaking his mind. However, I’m not sure McChrystal . . . or it . . . is that simple.