Hard Write Turn: Karen H. Pittman's Weblog

"Judge and Fury"

2010-04-01T09:34:00.003-04:00

"Women tell me EVERYTHING," he said.
They find me toothsome, good in bed;
I've a deep listener inside my head.
"Women tell me EVERYTHING," he said.

"Am not I a woman, too?" I ask.
Am I so "immoral," so not steadfast,
That he would rank my confession last?
"Am not I a woman, too?" I ask.

"I would not read it, but will it sell?"
For these verses you will burn in hell --
Though truly you do write them well!
"I would not read it, but will it sell?"

"At last, clarity!" I exclaim.
It will sell, so light the flame!
It will sell, so change my name!
"At last, clarity!" I exclaim.

Ashes to ashes, lust to lust.
Last night our love turned to rust
And all his whispered words to dust.
Ashes to ashes, lust to lust.

Though I may burn, I do not lust.

Karen Hathaway Pittman 2010

"Blue"

2010-03-30T16:05:00.004-04:00

love, unrequited
me, without you

Karen Hathaway Pittman 2010

And Heaven Wept

2009-09-14T08:05:00.049-04:00

By Karen Hathaway Pittman
© September 14, 2009

Down it pounded – a nerve-scalping war dance of rain, pummeling its drums and refusing to let up. Like a tribe of ghouls, the uninvited gusts howled around the pit. If, as the Native Americans believed, the wind really is an instrument through which the souls of the dead commune with the living, what, then, on this day of all days, was it trying so hard to say?

Friday marked the passing of the first anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks without George Bush. The man who for seven years stood strong as our graying father figure and Condoler-in-Chief was nowhere to be seen, though he was with us in spirit, to be sure.

And I don’t think it was just me. Surely it was obvious to anyone who was paying attention: something crucial to the ritual was missing. There was a palpable absence, a great gaping hole in the day, reminiscent of the holes left in the ground in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC. Throughout, the ghost of George Walker Bush hung like a pall over Barack Hussein Obama’s bony shoulders. It stalked him as he strode with chin held high onto the White House lawn, bowing his glistening head a hair too late; and it towered over him as he stepped up to the podium at the Pentagon to deliver his strangely tearless yet dripping eulogy. Afterwards it over-shadowed him as he shook survivors’ hands – smiling a mite too broadly for my taste.

Truth be told, we weren’t just missing the man: we were missing the feeling he brought with him. Tellingly, there was far more raw emotion and brio in Obama’s overwrought remembrance of the Lion of the Senate than in all his remarks about the more than 3,000 American lives wasted that day by Osama’s crazed cult of Islamic lunatics. Gone was the shower of empathy, evaporated were the choked-back tears. As with the man, the rain was a poor stand-in.

In his elegiac article, “Flight 93, the Crater and the Open Book”
(http://townhall.com/columnists/JerryBowyer/2009/09/11/flight_93,_the_crater_and_the_open_book?page=full&comments=true), Jerry Bowyer relays a little-told tale of a miraculous relic retrieved from the wreckage rammed deep into the Shanksville dirt.

Remarkably, not everything disintegrated: there was an open Bible in the middle of the field. Where steel had been shattered, a book remained intact. The first responders were not able to find any piece of metal larger than a pie plate, and yet they found a Bible. Where human flesh had been instantly cremated, paper was only slightly singed.

Bowyer’s account comes as eerily close to prophesy as you can get in this world. He goes on to note that the Bible recovered from that smoldering Somerset County field was found by the local Fire Chief lying opened to I Kings 12-16, a passage describing how Israel descends, after “a golden age,” into "a long period of oscillation between good and bad kings."

Sound familiar?

The story strikes this reader as salient less for its macabre overtones, however, than for the timing of its release, aimed by Bowyer to coincide with Friday’s proceedings – ceremonies jarringly different, both in tone and temperament, from those held in years past.

Consider: Friday marked the first year since 2001 that it actually rained on the day of 9/11, the sun being as elusive as George Bush’s tanned face. To add insult to injury, for the first time ever, the observances at Ground Zero were forced to carry on gamely with nary an appearance by the American President.

Instead, the otherwise-omnipresent Obama chose to keep himself scarce, for once, deigning to touch down only momentarily at the Pentagon Memorial, where his soulless speech offered slim comfort to the grief-soaked crowd. Given his outsized reputation as a stentorian orator, Cicero’s words were pat and patently unconvincing, grudgingly given, wet and yet dry, pinprickingly personal and yet soaringly aloof. (Rather like the man himself.)

But perhaps the single most jolting and uncanny thing about the entire day was not so much a difference as a foreboding likeness: on September 11, 2009, the DOW Jones Industrial Average closed at 9605 – exactly where it had closed eight years and one day earlier, on September 10, 2001.

I don’t know which is more chilling – that DOW number or that Bible flapping open in that smoking field.

What, if anything, I can’t help but wonder, do these bizarre planetary alignments mean? Could Heaven possibly have been crying with us, and was the DOW (of all things) speaking to us in tongues still more mysterious than the wind’s?

How in the world, would somebody please tell me, did that Bible eject itself from all that rubble in one piece? And why do we keep looking to conjure up some hidden import in all these vaguely portentous atmospherics, anyway? Are we still so vestigially superstitious that we really believe nature joins us in our bereavement? Can it actually reach out to us and warn us?

Or is the truth simply that some events in the history of a society are so utterly devastating that they forever sear themselves into the very air that the culture breathes?

So what do we do – just shrug off these oddities as coincidence? What are we to make of these niggling little occurrences – nothing?

On the one hand, if we weigh them as a whole, we are bound to be perplexed by them; indeed, even the most spartan rationalist could be pardoned for succumbing, in a moment of extreme visceral weakness, to an atavistic inkling that these things taken together may, just may, all point to some deeper subliminal significance, potentially even of cosmic proportions (beyond the superficially obvious and rather stupefying fact that they happened in the first place).

But on the other hand, these irksome quibbles may amount to much of nothing, besides a whole lot of fatalistic tommyrot. They may be nothing more than the randomly-shed fluff of fluke and chance – or else the fevered fantasies of fate-minded flakes over-inclined to read patterns in the tea leaves.

So. Do we just sit around with our backs up, vigilantly resisting the spine-tingling allure of all the myriad niggling little things that tug at the collective consciousness, all the more so because we are hell-bent on ignoring them? After all, conspiracy theories, even the naturalistic, epic ones, do die hard ... But can we afford to chance it? And do we do so at our peril?

If that's the case, I say we should err on the side of caution, giving our imaginations free rein to trace the shapes the leaves are taking. No matter how jingoistic and corny the effort seems, we should squeeze all the meaning we possibly can out of this philosophic cauldron of occult-like chaos – before it’s too late.

All right, then; in that vein, I’ll go first: are we not now, just like the DOW Jones Industrial Average, right back where we left off on the afternoon of September 10, 2001? Have we not forgotten our watch and fallen asleep at the wheel, slumping back into that twilight slumber? Are we not once again stuck in the mud of the pre-9/11 mindset?

And most ominous of all, are we not propping ourselves up, tower-like, for the next big fall?

It’s your turn to read the handwriting on the wall, America, and make of it what you will. But weep you must. Heaven did, if her Chosen One did not.▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is widely published on the web. She lives in London, England with her husband and cat. Her work is archived online at http://karenhpittman.blogspot.com. She receives email at karen.pittman@sky.com.

Britney Hussein Obama Spears

2008-07-30T00:26:00.056-04:00

By Karen Hathaway Pittman
© July 29, 2008

Oops, he did it again: fresh out of a tone-deaf rehab-session with the Democrat Congressional caucus, Britney Hussein Obama Spears is right now noisily sucking back all the available airtime on my TV, Pac-man-style, filling it up with his obscenely flapping face … and his fluffy meringue fillips.

That's right, baby, you got it: this nimble, deftly dancing juvenile performance artist extraordinaire has just finished hitting me over the head – one more time – with yet another throaty rendition of his number-one platinum remake, “Yes, We Can!” Followed (and preceded) by the obligatory uh.

Somebody please tell this guy the needle's stuck. I mean, how many more times can we stand to hear this same syllable being played over and over? In between raptly choreographed, rehearsed refrains, this flaccid-tongued phenom is st-st-stuttering his way, it would seem, into the White House.

Well, it beats rapping. And tottering over in the middle of your Vegas comeback act.

And the gimme-more media is just lapping it up!

And why not? He’s the MTV candidate, the potential Prez with pizzazz. Word to the wise: this fist-pumping mutha’s manufactured.

And what he offers would be truly toxic, if it had legs just half as sturdy as Ms. Spears’, even on her drunkest day.

What, pray tell, does this Woodstock wunderkind, this latter-day inside-out Mr. Mojo Risin’ shame-on-the-man shaman, deign to give us? Why, platitudes with an attitude. Behold: “We are poised on the brink of historic change.” “I was against the surge before I was for it.” “Hope is our only hope.” And lastly, the inimitable, “Yea verily, I am a citizen of the Milky Way.”

Gag me with a tune.

Messiuh-like, our staritz-starlet gives the phrase “boob tube” new life, and sets his starry-eyed Tsarinas swooning. The paparazzi press sings fawningly along. I keep waiting for Chris Matthews to plunk down a leg-thrilling record-smashing 14 mill for the first photographs of Brithussama’s twins – normally held in Hillary’s lockbox. If this guy gets any higher on his own fumes, I’m going to call in Mel Gibson for an intervention.

And if his suit gets any emptier, he’ll soon be the Invisible Man of Manchuria. Even when stoned, the Britstar has a few more syllables in her lexicon then he does on a dry day, and way more platforms in her closet to run on.

Our Rasputin of "The Real World" (and I’m talking the TV one) had no time in private to hang with the troops, but, when his AP handlers told him the cameras would be rolling – surprise, surprise, Sarjint! – he went out of his way to bang on the hoops! (It was for a good cause – his own.) Nice to know he’s got his priorities in order.

And that should make us all feel better. After all, feeling better is what it’s all about. I don’t know about you, but the next time Allah-whatever-Izod threatens to smack-down Israel, I’ll feel better knowing Dr. Feel Good has his finger on his sphincter. And when he calls in the Joint Chiefs of Staff to charge them with their next unconstitutional military task, they can all take a good long toke from the SONG BONG (think George Carlin here): "It’s a small world aaaaaafter all, it’s a small world aaaaaafter all, it’s a small world after aaaall, it’s a smaall smaall weeeeeeeeeerld. Uh."

Like Britney’s wild wild world post-breakdown, this would all be some big joke if it weren’t so serious. Time to sober up, girlfriend, and get real about what’s at stake: nothing less than your life, especially if you happen to live, like I do, in the all-inclusive international community of Terror Hills. (Lest you think I overstate my case, may I remind you of the way you felt on the morning of 9/12.)

This Teleprompter Titillater, this facile Phillip Marlowe of the Microphone, may be laughing all the way to the whorehouse, but (my clever quips aside) we shouldn’t be. Do we really want conservative talk radio silenced in favor of tired liberal retreads? Obama’s oldies-but-goldies can’t save us when he confiscates our guns. Reparations? Sure. Come Elvis, Martin Luther King, or Casey Kasem, this dark knight is out to prove he’s no Slave 4 Us. And the dysfunctional mess he promises to make of the Supreme Court makes Spears’ custody battle with Kevin Federline look like an especially endearing episode of "Leave It to Beaver."

So go ahead. Cast your Idol ballot for this year’s flash-in-the-pan, if you dare. Youth of America, don’t despair: at this rate, you’ll soon be able to just text in your vote. And hey – that rocks!

As for me, I’m sticking with my old soft shoe, my dependable if dowdy Tony Bennett, the one I know won’t skip in the clutch. I’m phoning in my vote for the one and only contestant who has actually cut a record in real life: John McCain.

But then … that’s my prerogative. ▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is widely featured on the web. She lives in London, England with her husband and cat. Her work is archived online here: http://karenhpittman.blogspot.com. You may email her at ltpkhp@aol.com.

"Glass"

2006-06-20T12:21:00.001-04:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 2006

for Aunt Mary

The first cut made barely a dent –
But after that the walls were bent.

At first her claws left only scratches –
Then the crazing came in cobwebbed patches.

It cracked like ice beneath her heat;
It broke, or melted, with every beat,

With each sharp word, each pointed deed –
Each aimed to burst the bubbling bead.

And now that the glass is finally shattered,
Only a fool would believe it had ever mattered.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing. You may contact her at ltpkhp@aol.com.

"My Name is Karen"

2006-06-06T16:01:00.000-04:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 2006

My name is Karen, not Kay.
Kay was that sheepish eight-year-old
Who always did as she was told.
But Karen is forty-four today
And sick of doing what others say.
So call me Karen, not Kay.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing. You may contact her at ltpkhp@aol.com.

The Paris Poems: "Pont de l'Alma"

2006-05-05T11:58:00.001-04:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 2006

In Memory of Princess Diana

You dissolved in the dead of August, eaten alive
by this dread, descending tunnel: you went in . . .
and never came out again.
But we keep looking for you on the other side . . . .

Hapless passenger, what happened?
After your love summer of ocean and sky,
the black tar kissed you goodbye.
(We swore we heard you sigh . . . . )

And so now, Diana, the golden flame
lights up the sky,
here at Pont de l'Alma, in your name,
and for your sake and ours we bring you
our tattered burthen. We lay them down –
these, the scattered pieces of our broken hearts: here
a bleeding note, there
a fractured rose, and deep down . . .
a shattered jewel rusting like a crown.

Princess of loneliness, you left us alone
and lonely like you, stranded
by the side of this dead-end road, empty-handed,
with nothing for our decaying hands to do
to observe these eternal hours without you
but strew our fraying flowers
and scribble illegible elegies
on the top of this concrete wall . . .
keeping us from you.

Holy mother, what could you do?
At the end, whose name did you call?

Across the water, the iron tower
stiffens her sparkling spine.

Sacred Lady, where did you go?
I stand on this bridge and stare down below,
praying for some sort of sign.
Notre dame! – your people flock to your final shrine.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing.

"Away"

2006-04-17T16:22:00.000-04:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 2006

I went away.
There in that shadeless land
no night pierced the glaring day,
and no friend held my hand.

I fell away.
A petal swaying, fraying around
the edges, I snapped away . . .
and drifted without ground.

I floated away . . .
till at last I hit rock
and broke the long curse of day.
And there I stopped.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing. You may contact her at ltpkhp@aol.com.

"Little Violin"

2006-04-15T10:40:00.000-04:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 2006

for my darling cat, Natasha

I play you and your pressed throat purrs.
Sweet puss, what do I hear?
A love song?
Little violin, laying music to my ear . . . .

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing. You may contact her at ltpkhp@aol.com.

"Agnostic"

2006-04-15T10:32:00.000-04:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 2006

The eternal question lingers on your lips:
You ask, but cannot answer.
What if, what if . . .
Your terminal doubt spreads like a cancer.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing. You may contact her at ltpkhp@aol.com.

"Atheist"

2006-04-13T12:49:00.000-04:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 2006

You diss god with gum in your mouth:
You spit them out.
I point it out –
But, Judas of the jaws, you deny it.

"What gum?"

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing. You may contact her at ltpkhp@aol.com.

"Proposal over Dinner"

2006-04-13T12:23:00.000-04:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 2006

I've caught you off-guard with my sour lemon.
It's too late now to take it back.
I watch the surprise invade your eyes:

Face wadding up, your mouth rejects it.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing. You may contact her at ltpkhp@aol.com.

The Paris Poems: "April at Republique"

2006-04-13T12:17:00.001-04:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 2006

Underground the revolution began . . .
and now this morning the wild youth blooms are carrying on all over the place!

Cruelly born, in unison,
they turn their red anger toward the Sun

King holding court in his bellicose sky,
where his thundering blue legions gather,

turnng their water cannons on the growing mob.
Beaten down by the hail,

the raw rioters rally,
their bloodied mouths protesting.

Then bodily the late bloomers storm the square
where the mad lady stabs her branch in the air.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing. You may contact her at ltpkhp@aol.com.

Haiku

2006-03-31T11:15:00.000-05:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 1985

flickering white lights
spiral up a cut blue spruce:
dust devil of snow

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing. You may contact her at ltpkhp@aol.com.

"Don Juan Gigolo"

2006-03-30T09:24:00.003-05:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 2006

He pockets her heart like a coin –
but it's really her booty he's out to purloin . . .

so he keeps his eyes on the prize,
figuring there's plenty to go round.

Cocksure, he hands her a package she can't resist,
and they seal their deal with a naked kiss . . . .

To keep him
hanging, she wraps his rented neck

in solid gold chains, and he lets her
string him along like the precious sack she thinks he is.

But all that glitters is dust . . . .

To keep from thinking, she lays him away
in her bed of bargains and unrequited lust.

He's her dirty little secret –
but will she keep him?

Don Juan keeps time like change,
but her store will soon be emptied.

She's counting down to zero,
for this wanted man is not about to be her hero.

Business-like, he turns and walks out the door,
because that's what you do when you're all paid for.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing. You may contact her at ltpkhp@aol.com.

"Pendleton King Park, My Twentieth Spring"

2006-03-20T11:32:00.000-05:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 1990

I remember clinging to the chainlink fence, feeding the ducks.
A tuning fork of March wind
was sounding out the season's new notes with a moan,
as my heart reverberated in sympathy.
It struck its plangent chord and held it long.
Wringing stinging whirlwinds out of the sand,
those late wintry furies raged, with wild palms slapping.
Even then I could not be swayed . . . .
I kept a niggardly watch over my flock
of orange charges below, matching squawk for squawk
those kids who carelessly played
in swarms in the nearby park.
Begging for crumbs, they took what they could get.
I was their Pied Piper;
they surged like water around a rock . . . . And yet,
inexplicably, I just let

go – those idling hands held nothing but time,
though I kept them working with my weird, wired worry.
And still the stale grains fell from nowhere, like confetti.
The icy, steel mesh smelled tinny and tasted of dirty money.

I had been here before, in the ninth grade,
with a bowl-skulled boy who had a crush on me . . . . Back then,
we walked on cushioned grass shaded like a zebra's skin,
as we dragged the tensed, waffled faces of our tennis rackets
down through the mud with our classmates' good names . . . .

He said psychosis was the sure diagnosis
for the infamous Son of Sam's ills.
I imagined I was the criminal –
and in my dazzled sick mind
I was already guilty of gruesomer crimes.
I could not have known it then, but my sin
was committed against no body but mine.

I clung to the fence as to a cold mother.
It was no use. She would not keep me.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing. You may contact her at ltpkhp@aol.com.

"The Diagnosis"

2006-03-20T11:10:00.001-05:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 1994

Desperate, my psycho-docs thumb their DSMs and land on bipolar,
but I know where I stand: locked down in this dungeon of dolor.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing. You may contact her at ltpkhp@aol.com.

"Epitaph for My Father"

2006-03-12T18:01:00.000-05:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 1994

In Memoriam: Elton Llewellyn Hathaway
May 18, 1923 - November 11, 1993

Here lies one man who ran out of time –
Who would have been, who could have been, who always will be –
Conjugating himself eternally
Inside this four-room school house of mine . . . .

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing.

"Samson, of Delilah"

2006-03-08T16:24:00.000-05:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 1994

Because those arms are quicksand
And that tongue a tongue of fire,
I let go of that slick hand –
Because those arms are quicksand.
Between those magic hands I cannot stand
But melt, as the fire licks higher . . .
Because those arms are quicksand
And that tongue a tongue of fire.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing. You may contact her at ltpkhp@aol.com.

"Rabbit"

2006-03-08T16:18:00.000-05:00

for Todd

Though your eyes aren't really brown,
And you aren't really spry as a rabbit:
Still, I'll keep you around,
And still, I'll call you Rabbit –
Out of love and out of habit.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing. You may contact her at ltpkhp@aol.com.

"Said the Poet to the Actor"

2006-03-08T16:09:00.000-05:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 1994

"You inhabit your skin, James Dean,
Like a worm inside a jumping bean."

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing. You may contact her at ltpkhp@aol.com.

"Mad"

2006-03-08T16:03:00.000-05:00

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing. You may contact her at ltpkhp@aol.com.

"Cheers"

2006-03-07T19:10:00.000-05:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 1990

A Toast to Blue Argo

“Poetry comes straight from the heart,” she said,
“that wound that always bleeds.
Like a glass of good wine, it weakens the knees.”

So here’s to you, Blue. I drain the red
goblet to the lees.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing. You may contact her at ltpkhp@aol.com.

In the Perfect Middle: A Review of Peter Spagnuolo's "One-Way Street"

2006-03-02T03:52:00.000-05:00

by Karen H. Pittman
© March 2, 2006

If Shakespeare was right (and he usually was), a man has maybe one good hour, if he’s lucky, to show the world what he’s made of, to strut his stuff on the stage of life in such a way that people will stand up and take notice. That’s the metaphorical equivalent, mind you, of sixty measly minutes in which to shine, to bask in the pregnant light of his prowess, even as he knows the meter is running and his time will soon expire. And when his allotted hour is up, his descent into decay is slippery, if not always steady and precipitous. His powers eventually suffer the same downhill slide as his person.

In the Winter 2006 issue of The Threepenny Review, Brooklyn-based poet Peter Spagnuolo has seized the stage during what must surely be his finest hour, and, with the publication of his pensive poem “One-Way Street” (http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/spagnuolo_w06.html), is keeping his equilibrium in the spotlight. Happily for us, Spagnuolo’s tale, signifying much, is full of more than mere sound and fury, and the bard himself shows no signs of eminent slippage.

Indeed, he knows this, for he quite self-consciously calls himself the man “in the perfect middle.” And so it is: his character, the unidentified protagonist who positions himself midway between the young girl and the elderly gentleman, conjoins the two extremes in a taut, precariously poised progress down the dicey one-way street of life. His poem is an icy paean to the seasons of man.

He begins his halting journey by taking first the girl’s hand, followed by the man’s. All along the way, Spagnuolo stops to remind us of the universality of his theme. Death imagery abounds. The old man’s “cracking, yellowed, horn-like nail” not only provides a raw slice of realistic detail, but also suggests the grave, from which his gritty hooks “claw” their “way up through the grain.”

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the young girl, an “arrow” poised to take aim “against the hazards she can't know” – hazards which the poet-seer foresees and vainly attempts to steer her around, but of which the old man has long since, perhaps blessedly, lost sight.

Spagnuolo’s subtle, unobtrusive use of rhyme constitutes the poem’s prime technical virtue. His deft pairing of “mincing” and “convincing” in the first stanza bears witness to his dexterity with the language. His keen imagination, his ability to transmute everyday events as mundane as a swift slip on the ice or the otherwise unremarkable ritual of eating dinner at the local diner into the stuff of high poetry, belies his genius. This latter, especially, is a gift, not a skill. Spagnuolo possesses in abundance what many post-modern critics call “the alienating insight." All true poets are both blessed with and cursed by this extrasensory power of divination and perception. This you do not acquire in the antique house of "Creative Writing." Only God and Nature endow you with it.

Besides its masterful technique, what distinguishes this poem, elevating it to the level of greatness, is the poet's poignant, symbolic treatment of the cycle of life, which he has chosen to represent in all its fullness in these three central figures, redolent of the definitive perfection, the Holy Trinity. Like Hamlet, the poem’s narrator is the pitiable, tortured soul caught between two opposing ends; too acutely aware for his own good, he alone remembers where he has been and knows where he is going, and to what sad and tragic outcome that last fall in the snow ultimately portends. (And, not to be too heavy-handed, their little tumble also kicks up the dust of original sin, taking the reader on a warp-speed trip through time to man's first big "fall.")

Reading this poem, one is reminded of Gerard Manley Hopkins' elegiac verse, "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child" (http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poem=187544). Like the writer of Margaret's poem, the writer of "One Way Street" shows us, by vivid example, that life itself is the road of no return down which all of us – young, old, and in-between alike – are headed, stumbling toward the same dead end; and he, too, "weep[s] and know[s] why." But unlike Margaret and the child and old man, the all-seeing "man in the middle" – the poet, the protagonist who “connects” youthful promise and infirmity, who is actively both “becoming and decaying” – knows only too well that he was born to mourn his own ungluing, one numb toe at a time, and it is this fatalistic awareness that gives the poem its dramatic tension.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet and essayist who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing. You may read her articles and poems online at http://karenhpittman.blogspot.com. She lives in the New York City metropolitan area with her husband, Todd, and her beloved cat, Natasha.

The Blame Game

2005-09-05T02:34:00.000-04:00

by Karen H. Pittman
© September 5, 2005

I have heard it all now. While illegally threatening the President of the United States with bodily harm on ABC's This Week, Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) accused him of visiting hurricane-decimated Louisiana merely in order to stage a "photo-op." She ranted and raved hysterically during her appearance on the televised news show last Sunday, at one point bursting into tears. No doubt about it — her levee broke, big(easy)-time.

It's always something. If President Bush works out, he exercises too much. It never occurs that perhaps this is his only means of relieving the enormous stress and pressure he's under. And now comes this latest antic fabrication, straight from the big brassy mouth of a bureaucratic bass caught in Katrina's rip current. If he tours the hurricane-ravaged coast, he's posing for a photo-op. If he stays away, he doesn't care, isn't "personally engaged," and is perpetrating nothing short of indirect "murder."

Sure, Mary, why not? Just pile on! Since George Bush is literally the most convenient scapegoat on the planet, why not blame him for the whole dam thing? For the love of jazz, did those levees not need shoring when Bill Clinton was President? By most estimates, any effective reinforcement of the canal system there would have taken at least a decade or two, probably more, to complete. How then could Bush have fixed the whole dam problem in a lousy five years, while waging war? Is it any wonder New Orleans is now a literal cesspool, considering it has been one figuratively for as long as anybody can remember?

Less absurd but more egregious is the charge being leveled at him by racist black demagogues like Al Sharpton. According to noted rapper-sociologist Kanye (Noyekant) West, "George Bush doesn't care about black people."

Well, maybe he does and maybe he doesn't. What he thinks matters less than what he does. As relentlessly as politicians pander to minority groups, the notion that any pol worth his weight in votes would purposely neglect a powerful constituency is patently absurd. Even if George Bush were a racist, he is no fool, and is far too wizened politically to commit so flagrant an act of self-destruction. The political consequences for such behavior would simply be too dire.

Or, to put it another way: If he refuses to seal the borders for fear of losing Latino support, why on earth would he knowingly encourage or permit the targeted genocide of impoverished African-Americans in New Orleans?

Furthermore, the Crescent City wasn't built in a day. How, then, can it be salvaged in one? If, with prior warning and advance planning, Mayor Nagin and other local and state officials couldn't figure out a way to evacuate their own city in three days, with all of its infrastructure intact, how can they reasonably expect the feds to rescue every last straggler, put out every raging fire, tamp down all the senseless looting and shooting, and seal nearly 1000 total feet of breached levee, with the city drowning and de-nerved, in less?

Nagin and local pols can't say they weren't warned. In a watershed article published in Risk & Insurance in December of 2000 by Lori Widmer (http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0BJK/is_15_11/ai_68642805), Shea Penland, geologist and professor at the University of New Orleans, reveals himself to be a veritable Cassandra: "When we get the big hurricane and there are 10,000 people dead, the city government's been relocated to the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain, refugee camps have been set up and there are $10 billion plus in losses, what then?" he queries. Penland laments the Francophile city's laissez faire attitude, which in the end proved fatal: "These are things I've been preaching for a number of years. This town has never planned ahead. They've always reacted and not pro-acted."

Notice what Penland does not do — blame the feds for a localized problem. Ultimately, there's no getting around the fact that New Orleans is responsible for itself. All across this country, cities and municipalities face their own peculiar exigencies, and must reckon with them themselves, with limited or no federal aid. San Francisco is at high risk for sustaining a major, devastating earthquake. If it does, will that act of God be magically rendered an act of George too? Should the federal government not also subsidize reinforcement of that city's buildings and infrastructure, and if so, to what extent? How much responsibility do state and local entities bear for their own disaster prevention, preparedness, and funding? I mean, my goodness, if you choose to live in Frisco, you'd better have quake insurance or learn to sleep soundly without it. You know that going in. And you learn very quickly to accept the grim reality that if the Big One does hit and you die, you die. You won't get time to evacuate.

The bottom line is, if the federal government subsidizes every high-risk community, it will go broke in no time. Just ponder for a moment all that has happened in the past half-decade alone: Coordinated terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, and now, after numerous severe storms in Florida that combined to wreak costly havoc, a calamitous hurricane on the Gulf Coast. When 9/11 occurred, armchair quarterbacks everywhere rose up from their easy chairs and demanded accountability. Why were we asleep at the wheel while this storm was brewing in the Afghan desert? Why were we unwilling to spare no expense to prevent it? And now that nature itself has dealt New Orleans a warrior's blow, the journalist-naysayers are whining and nagging, "Why was the federal government spending all its time, money, and energy fighting the war on terror when it knew all along that The Big Easy was doomed to drown?"

And is our choice as stark, really — as black-and-white (if you'll pardon the pun) — as Bush's most vehement critics would have us believe? Should we neglect to defend ourselves abroad so that we can amass enormous numbers of troops stateside, just in case a natural disaster happens? Should we not exert ourselves in the world so that we can have the ever-ready capability of instantly marshalling all of our resources in our own country in the event that a given outcome occurs? (And remember, this is slim comfort at best, since there is no such thing as perfect preparedness.) What happens if we are attacked? What — we don't avenge an act of aggression because we might be needed here? Like bag upon bag of sand deposited in the levee's breaches, disaster can always be piled upon disaster. Heck, for that matter, the terrorists could choose to kick us now, while we're down. Whose fault would that be? Must it be anyone's, other than theirs? As far as we're concerned, maybe it's just our own rotten luck or bad timing.

What all of the emergent criticism post-Katrina against this president's prosecution of the war on terror seems to suggest (with the added fillip of hindsight) is that — oops! — as it turns out, he should not have undertaken to defend us overseas, after all. Instead, he should have been more attuned to domestic problems and potential natural disasters and less preoccupied with international imbroglios. (Never mind the limited central role the federal government is supposed to play in this aggregate of empowered states we call a republic. The preeminence of state and local governments in their own affairs is conveniently forgotten by the advocates of socialism who fuel these diatribes.) In other words, he should have been more worried about a phantom problem over here than the very real one right in front of him. What choice did the man have, given the stakes and urgency of the moment? One has always to weigh the probabilities in life and make tough decisions based on what one can and cannot reasonably anticipate. And, while it is the federal government's job, and thus the president's, to ensure the safety of the republic, it is not its task, nor is it his, to make sure that every single state and local government is taking care of business and faithfully discharging its duties to its residents.

Given all this, then — given the choices and probabilities with which George W. Bush found himself confronted on the morning of September 12, 2001 — what do you think was uppermost in his mind: Standing up as Commander-in-Chief for all the people of these United States (of which Louisiana, last I looked, was but one) by doing all he could to prevent another terrorist attack, or playing Lifeguard-in-Chief by single-handedly saving New Orleans? (And one is tempted here to add, "from itself.") After all, what is more likely — that the terrorists who have killed us already will kill us again, if given the chance, or that a Category 5 hurricane will wipe out a solitary city that is but one of many along a coastline stretching for thousands and thousands of miles?

If the Big One strikes California tomorrow, you can bet that out of the smoke and rubble will rise the clarion complaint: "Where was George W. Bush while all this was getting ready to happen to us? While he was waging 'his war' against terror and drying out Bourbon Street, he was ignoring our need for the kind of infrastructure that would hold out against the worst Mother Nature can give."

On and on it goes. In Washington, the blame game is the only game in town.▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is widely featured on the web. You may read her articles and poems online at http://karenhpittman.blogspot.com. She lives with her husband and cat in the New York City metropolitan area.

City of the Dead

2005-09-04T16:56:00.002-04:00

by Karen H. Pittman
© September 4, 2005

Watching New Orleans sink, I can almost feel the wheels turning in my brain, churning like those massive paddle wheels of yore that — alas! — once roiled the murky waters of the Mighty Mississippi as they propelled those genteel steamboats of a still gentler era past poor but proud N'Awlins, nestled down and dirty in the muddy Delta mouth . . . .

But as to the chaos occurring there now, permit me to be bluntly prosaic: I can't help it, but I have an inherent antipathy towards that certain sub-species of human animal that is now commandeering the streets of that fetid city, truly a razed City of the Dead. I haven't the sufficiently impoverished vernacular to express just how thoroughly revolted I am by these mack daddies and gangstars and brazen bitches-with-FATitudes(-in-these-lowlife-latitudes) when I hear them squawking on-camera about how "ain't nobody did nuthin' fa us" — when they were told to leave! What else, in a forty-eight-hour window, could government do?

Not only did their officials ask them to leave; not only did they beg them to leave — they ordered them to leave. The vast majority of these ambulatory refugees were able-bodied and could have at the very least abandoned their low-lying neighborhoods, as they were repeatedly commanded to do. For those who would or could not evacuate, they were advised to go to the Superdome, not as an ordinary shelter, mind you, but as an UNPREFERRED, NON-RED-CROSS-SANCTIONED, NON-GOODHOUSEKEEPING-GOLDEN-SEAL-OF-APPROVAL SHELTER OF LAST RESORT.

Now, I know that to folks who are functionally (and factually) illiterate, or who are fluent, not in the King's English but in Ebonics, the words "last resort" have no meaning. But whose fault is that? (I know. It's ours. It's "da gubmint's.")

I say let the gangstars drown in their toxic soup. If they aren't killed by Guardsmen, and they aren't rescued, they will soon be dead of typhoid. So be it. They chose.

Then, when the responsible folk roll back into town in the vehicles they bought and paid for with the sweat of their brow and which they then used to FOLLOW DA GUBMINT'S ORDERS TO EVACUATE — yea, verily, when the flood waters recede and these self-same self-sufficient folk roll back into town TO DO THE WORK that it will inevitably take to reclaim that city from the sea, they then can rightfully reclaim their Rolexes from the fish-limp, waterlogged wrists of our desperately drowning heroes, our modern-day Mongols and Visigoths, the street thugs and swamp kings of New Orleans. (Ow ow ow ow — she'll put a smell on you . . . .)

The simple fact is: We have forgotten God and lost our healthy, innate fear of Nature. Man is not the measure of all things. Foolish men in particular are a gauge of their own vapidity and vanity only.

To be less sardonic, let me state unequivocally my "official position" on the matter: To the extent that prioritization of response in the midst of an unprecedented calamity was required, those buses and helicopters should have been dispatched first to rescue all the people who obeyed the orders and were truly stranded, through no fault of their own — i.e., those who gathered at the Superdome (the way they were supposed to) and those who had no alternative but to remain where they were, in the nursing facilities and hospitals. For these folks, I feel nothing but heartfelt anguish and sympathy.

But my pity for the others — those who could have fled their flood-prone parishes but elected to stay behind, for whatever reasons (none of which are justifiable, especially when small children are put in harm's way by their parents' complacency and dereliction) — is tempered by a peculiar kind of flummoxed indignation. For instance, I was shocked to learn of Fats Domino's close call, but again, he made a choice, and one that very nearly proved lethal: His wife and daughter would have been the ones to pay the price for it.

The point is, people have to take personal responsibility for their own welfare. How can we fairly compare this to the tsunami, when in our case we knew, we had warning? I daresay the folks in the Twin Towers would have appreciated being notified two days beforehand that those airborne jet-missiles were going to be plunged into them at approximately 8:45am on Tuesday, September the 11th, 2001. How about the catastrophe in Galveston in 1900 when 8000-12,000 people perished because they had no idea that a hurricane was even coming? I'll bet those sluiced masses in Sri Lanka would have listened to Max Mayfield!

The distorted public reaction to this tragedy, devastating as it is, tells you all you need to know about how and why our contemporary culture and our own brand of Bread and Circus have failed us. They have killed us from within, because they have spoiled the people's attitudes and thinking. They have made perpetual victims of them, and made them stop taking responsibility for themselves. They have enslaved them all over again, this time to the all-mighty, but now all-too-obviously fallible, State. And worst of all, this slow corrosive contagion is not only fatal; it's lethal.

The twisted reasoning goes roughly like this: You tell me to go, I stay. When I stay, and you don't (or can't) come get me, I blame you. It's your fault. You deliberately didn't do it on purpose. Whatever I did or didn't do, at least I didn't do it on purpose; I couldn't help myself. I always have an excuse or reason, a mitigating circumstance; you, however, never do. You see, it's never my fault. It's always somebody else's. Anybody's but mine.

Well, if that's the case, you're always going to be at somebody's mercy anyway, and there apparently isn't a damned thing you can do about it. You have no control over your own destiny, so you may as well be dead. ▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is widely featured on the web. You may read her articles and poems online at http://karenhpittman.blogspot.com/. She lives with her husband and cat in London, England.

Bulletin

2005-09-02T17:07:00.000-04:00

It has been determined by the MSNBC Katrina Fact-finding Commission, also known as KFC, that President George W. Bush is personally responsible for the thousands of citizens left dead in the wake of this week's catastrophe along the southern Gulf coast. By failing to sign Kyoto, he single-handedly made conditions ripe for the hurricane, and by underfunding the Corps of Engineers, he alone is accountable for the breach in the levee. He would not rest until the low-lying parishes of New Orleans were filled with poverty-stricken African-Americans, and he then left no stone unturned until they were all engulfed by the sea from whence they came. Furthermore, he, as (the first two-term Republican) President (since Ronald Reagan), is accountable for the feeding, clothing, funding, medicating, and otherwise comforting of every single victim in every single square inch of the more than 90,000 square miles of landscape devastated by this un-natural phenomenon.

For once, the commentator/commissioners, who could barely conceal their glee in the midst of so much tragedy, had no comment.

This just in . . . .

2005-09-02T17:06:00.000-04:00

Al Qaeda today claimed responsibility for Hurricane Katrina. Update at high noon.

Being Fonda Jane

2005-04-18T02:19:00.000-04:00

By Karen H. Pittman
© April 18, 2005

Well, if nothing else, one thing I’ve learned since writing “Kinda Fonda Jane” is that being Fonda Jane – even kinda – isn’t exactly a good thing to be. In fact, it’s almost as bad as Being John Malkovich (a fate truly to be despised).

Indeed, being Fonda Jane can be downright dangerous, and can lead, in its most benign form, to humorless, ill-considered name-calling. I’ve been dubbed a RINO (by people who've never read another word I've written, no less – which also puts me in the questionable company of John McCain, who likewise urges forgiveness), and I’ve been told that I deserve, for committing the unpardonable crime (an offense on par, surely, with Ms. Fonda’s original sin) of even suggesting that we move toward some sort of rapprochement with this radioactive woman, to go to the gallows with her and rot, right alongside her, in hell.

Phew. And well. That kinda takes the steam off your coffee. Kinda sorta.

And then there was this, the most tortured piece of logic I’ve been offered yet, by a Vietnam veteran, no less: “I spent eight years in the service so that [Jane Fonda] and her kind could bad mouth America. If I had my way, she would be shot.”

Which begged the reply:

“While I honor your service and thank you for it, I have to say: What was the point? Correct me if I'm wrong: But, with all due respect, what you are telling me is that you spent eight years of your life in the service for nothing – if, in fact, as you say, you served so Fonda and "her kind" (apparently to include me) could freely speak their peace. If, then, after Ms. Fonda has exercised her right to free speech, which you say you went to war to protect, you would then turn around and shoot her for it, for what, pray tell, were you fighting?"

I realize it isn’t as simple as that, of course. This man doesn’t really believe Jane Fonda should be shot just because she spoke her mind. He believes she should be shot because she spoke her mind on enemy terrain during war – because if nothing else, she was a willing mouthpiece for enemy propaganda.

One thing I’ve learned for sure is that this brouhaha has become less and less about Jane Fonda and more and more about me, about some readers’ (sometimes diabolically intense) need to force me to think and feel as they do about her, regardless of whether I truly do – in other words, I am being persistently pestered to conform to the groupthink on this one. I must banish all “fonda” Fonda fondness from my brain. So my great sin, it would seem, is not so much in bucking the system itself, as in “being Fonda Jane.” I mean, what kind of blame fool would be fond of Hanoi Jane?

The question itself is a landmine, one I must gingerly sidestep if I’m to avoid being blown to bits. The answer is: No kind, of course. After all, it isn’t “Hanoi Jane” I’m “fond of,” not even kind of; it’s the mature Jane, the one I meet between the pages of her book, My Life So Far, whose voice I find to be impressively authentic and serious.

It’s unfortunate, though understandable, that the whole of this woman’s extraordinary life has come to be defined by what she did during that fateful fortnight in Vietnam. Of course, she has only herself to blame for what she did. But by the same token, can we really condemn her for trying to shift the spotlight away from that one darkened two-week window onto her whole interior world? Isn’t it likely that “Hanoi Jane” is only one part of the many parts which make up Jane Fonda the complex woman, who is more than the sum of these parts, particularly of any one part wrenched out of context?

Much as we don’t want to hear it, there is a lot more to this oft-dehumanized human being than this. If you were too personally affected by what she did – if you are one of those who cannot forgive or forget, no matter what – then clearly you are closed to anything she might have to say of any substance or value because to open yourself up to it is to risk defeating your preconceived, myopic view of her: that she’s crass, self-serving, manipulative, facile, unstable, a dabbler, and (my favorite) an “actress” predisposed by her craft (which is a kind of witch-craft, after all) to shed “crocodile tears” on cue – an argument I find particularly disingenuous, since it suggests that no person can be a talented actor and still retain a shred of sincerity, integrity or credibility. What does this say about Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, I wonder?

And maybe she is all of these things, and more. I do not deny that she may be lying. But neither do I deny that maybe, just maybe, she may be telling the truth, as she knows it.

Where I part company with my conservative brethren is in my willingness to at least entertain the possibility that she is not quite as shallow as we have formerly believed her to be. In fact, I’m so willing to consider this possibility that I’ve been doing something this week that most of my critics will never even contemplate doing – I’m actually reading her book! (Gasp!) After all, for years I’ve been reading all the rotten things people have been saying about her, most of them admittedly justified; so, in the interest of fairness, should not impartiality and intellectual honesty demand that I give her a hearing too? After all, we have nothing to fear from the whole story – from the truth, insofar as it can be known.

Why do I dare believe Ms. Fonda, the Barbarella of yore, has substance? Because she has important things to say, especially to women, concerning topics other than her involvement in the anti-war movement. She is most effective, I think, when addressing the subject of female self-esteem, noting the necessity of framing one’s self-concept independent of men (a lesson she no doubt learned the hard way from her three disastrous marriages, during which she “twisted herself like a pretzel” in order to become whatever the man in her life at the moment “wanted her to be”).

She further urges us to avoid the trap of “perfection,” which is, it seems to me, an especially instructive lesson for the former Barbarella to hand down. In particular, she speaks to the topic of eating disorders and female reproductive health and responsibility. (And before I am wrongly accused of condoning Ms. Fonda’s pro-choice position, I must note, in my defense and hers, that the goal of her activism in this arena is to encourage adolescent reproductive health by stressing pregnancy prevention, not termination.)

One thing Jane Fonda and I probably share in common is this concern for women’s issues. While I’m a conservative, I’m also, at heart, a “feminist” (for want of a better word). No, I’m not a FemiNazi, but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe FemiNazis exist. I do. But I’m not one of them. (I do not take up radical feminist causes, for instance, nor do I support abortion on demand, nor do I favor same-sex unions. I do not use this word in its most polarizing form.)

So, as both a conservative and a feminist, I am presented with a peculiar dilemma when considering the controversial case of Jane Fonda. Fonda describes herself as a “feminist Christian” (admittedly an oxymoron, but no more of one, really, than a “conservative feminist”). The conservative in me wants to take her to task, while the feminist in me needs to understand her.

So, in my last article, “Kinda Fonda Jane,” I took a lot of heat for riding (rather too cavalierly, according to some) to her defense. Perhaps it was my tone of voice that got me in trouble – and I’m well aware that my propensity for punning can sometimes land me in hot water. The title, while witty and clever, was a little unfortunate, in hindsight, because it may have led some readers to believe I thought the whole thing was a joke.

I thought nothing of the kind. These are weighty issues that deserve to be considered, so this time I have made a concerted effort to dispense with the wit and proceed with the polemic.

There are those who have suggested that I propose to excuse Ms. Fonda’s radical actions during the war by arguing that she was a true-blue, dyed-in-the-wool believer. Because she believed is not the reason why I suggested we forgive her. It is, however, a reason which those who are so inclined can use to try and understand her. (Even Hitler begs understanding, lest we allow another like him to rise up.) For anyone to suggest that I have put forth anything other than her Christian faith as a road to redemption (as some critics have done) is to grossly oversimplify and twist my thesis.

And to those who would attempt to argue the empirical evidence with me, I can say only this: What is actually open to debate here is not so much what Jane Fonda did in Hanoi in July of 1972 (http://www.snopes.com/military/fonda.asp) as whether or not we should forgive her for it. This latter is strictly a subjective decision, one each of us must make in his or her own heart of hearts, and is therefore purely a matter of opinion and individual conscience (much as is whether to conscientiously object in wartime).

And to those who say that Ms. Fonda cannot possibly have repented of her Vietnam sins because she opposes the current war in Iraq, I am amazed that I find it necessary to point out what should be, prima facie, obvious to all fair-minded, educated people: That she need not embrace conservatism (or reject liberalism) in order to be forgiven or even to be given another chance. She need not reject out of hand her former renunciation of the Vietnam War in order to attain spiritual redemption, either. Doubtless even some Democrats and liberals go to heaven too. Probably even some of them who were wrong about Vietnam and Iraq occasionally manage to slip past Peter’s Velcro-covered fingers at the pearly gate.

Ms. Fonda’s detractors charge that she should “apologize,” which, truthfully, it seems to me, she has tried to do, on more than one occasion. But even this is not enough, for these folks in the main don’t like the way she has apologized. I guarantee you not even very public groveling and prostration would do the trick for most of them. They would still say her genuflections are fake and that she is only getting down on her hands and knees now to sell a few more lousy books. (The book is actually quite good, by the way.)

Is it just me, or does anyone else find it disconcerting and discomfiting that many of the critics appear to drop all the blame for the carnage (the killing fields of Cambodia) and the quagmire (Vietnam itself) at the feet of one (hysterical) woman? Is Jane Fonda really the Helen of the modern age?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it was JFK, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon – not Jane Fonda – who sent these good men to those mayhem-strangled jungles in the first place, was it not? Whatever else we can say about her motivations (including her adversarial ideological leanings at the time), Jane Fonda did at least want to stop the bombing and bring the soldiers home, whether she achieved that mission or not.

Even if Hanoi Jane was directly or indirectly responsible for many deaths, how many more young men were felled before she went? Do we really think she was trying to add to the number of the dead or to quit the killing on both sides? How many deaths, do we suppose, belong to the ghosts of Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon?

Rather than blame Jane Fonda strictly, for all of it, as so many of my correspondents seem to do, shouldn't we hold to account the system that drafted and pressed into service these impressionable young men in the first place? Whatever we may think of the current conflict in Iraq (which I, unlike Ms. Fonda, wholeheartedly support), at least our modern army is all-volunteer. Rumsfeld knows what he’s doing there.

Yes, there is no denying that Jane Fonda committed some sort of treason (though the extent of her aiding and abetting appears to have been confined to the promulgation of pro-Viet Cong propaganda). Less strictly speaking, John Kerry committed treason too, and so did quite a few others during that era. But we are kidding ourselves if we deny the real reason why neither she nor Kerry has been prosecuted for their crimes: There is simply no genuine consensus in this country which in any way indicates that a majority of Americans favor holding these "traitors" to account. Why? Because, frankly, too many of us are still too riddled with doubts and vexed with questions about Vietnam – what we were doing there, why we there in the first place.

Conversely, there is no such lack of consensus on the current war on terror, and so we, as a society, condone holding John Walker Linde's feet to the fire. And we had no trouble socking it to Axis Sally and Tokyo Rose during WWII either, another conflict which was undeniably morally clear.

And maybe we should have held Fonda's treacherous tootsies to the stove, too, long before now – but the statute of limitations has effectively run out. And that's precisely my point. It's time to fish or cut bait. Charge the woman or let her go.

And yes, treason should be a crime punishable by imprisonment, but it isn't, not always, for the collective will to prosecute in these cases too often depends on the prevailing popular sentiment about the worthiness of the cause. And even if it were, it should no more be a punishable offense for Fonda than for Kerry. And here it's worth noting: Whatever else we may say about Jane Fonda, we have to give her this much, at least – unlike John Kerry, whose every move was motivated by ambition and not conviction, Fonda's radical flame-throws were fueled by an actual ideology, however ill-conceived.

Furthermore, if treason really were a death-penalty crime, my guess is that Barbarella never would have parked her bulimic arse on that anti-aircraft battery to begin with.

We can hardly fault her for what we as a society aren't willing to stand up for, now, can we? More rigorous enforcement of the prohibitions against this kind of behavior would have doubtless served as a more powerful deterrent than all the enraged ravings of her detractors combined.

And finally, much as it might satisfy our psychological purposes to demand a scapegoat, our lust for one still does not justify the witchhunt. The truth is a louse: It is never easy to tease out. And when you finally do manage get your mits on it, it has an infuriating way of jumping around, so no matter how carefully you think you are handling it, you never really get a good grip.

And the real truth is this: There are many people and events, besides Jane Fonda and her anti-war activities, which, when taken together, formed the fulcrum upon which our failure in Vietnam turned.

But it's so much easier for Ms. Fonda’s most astringent, one-note critics to just let Jane take all the blame. Why not? It's been done before. Let the seditious actress play Eve to Nixon’s Adam: Let her be the lightning rod for the pols' bad choices. Let her be the repository for our collective guilt and confusion over this most mistake-strewn and murky period of our history.

And then, when you're tired of hearing her mouth off about it, tell her where to stuff her big fat apple. ▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is widely featured on the web. You may read her articles and poems online at http://karenhpittman.blogspot.com. She lives with her husband and cat in the New York City metropolitan area.

Kinda Fonda Jane

2005-04-08T14:28:00.000-04:00

By Karen H. Pittman
© April 7, 2005

Hey, guys, quick before you miss it, look up: I'm about to step out onto the ledge here and say something terribly controversial. I'm about to break ranks with my conservative brethren.

Yes, Jane Fonda did some horrible things in Hanoi. Yes, she was a wild child, an hysterical 60’s flower-power flouter of the first order. But that doesn’t change the fact that she herself may have changed. Whoever the girl was, the grown woman is now someone else entirely – a mature, thoroughly mellowed 67-year-old grandmother in need of artificial hips.

Try as I might, for the sake of the cause, I cannot despise her. For despite her faults, she brings one sterling quality to the table which your typical Hollywood socialite does not, and that is substance. Jane Fonda herself is silver-minted. And let's face it: No airhead would have dared perch her derriere atop an enemy anti-aircraft battery just for the sake of publicity.

Whatever we may think of Ms. Fonda's activism in Vietnam, we cannot seriously think she did all of that for attention. If nothing else, we must at least be intellectually and morally honest enough to admit that Jane Fonda, the girl, did the things she did for the same reasons we do – because she truly, acutely, radically believed (which is more than I can say for John Kerry). To assert anything less is to do ourselves and our cause a disservice, to say nothing of her and hers.

And if we, some thirty-five years later, still can’t get over it, that’s our problem. If more of us would just be willing to do what I'm trying to do in making the effort to look past this woman's tempestuous past – if we would all just chill out long enough to suspend judgment for five whole minutes and actually listen to what she has to say – we would happily discover, I believe, that much of what she says has merit. Her words are, at times, even profound.

Agree or disagree with her political ideology, embrace or disavow her evolving brand of Christianity, at least Jane Fonda is herself evolving, and is committed to some cause larger than her own. At least she is earnestly searching.

I mean, my God, if the Pope could forgive Mehmet Ali Agca ( http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7381043/), can't we forgive Jane Fonda?

That said, let me be crystal clear on one point: I do not expect veterans of her crazed, callow crusade to be so magnanimous. I do not expect that all those valiant Vietnam POWs, who were so brutally and viscerally betrayed, can or will or even should forgive her. For them, the injury was and is too deeply personal; for me, it was, and remains to this day, mostly a black and white photograph in a history book.

I was all of nine or ten years old when Ms. Fonda cozied up to the Viet Cong, and being a kid, I was riddled with the same ambivalent impressions of that conflict that all the kids were back then. That did not mean, however, that I expressly condoned what she was doing; truthfully, I knew too little about the whole affair to know how I felt. But it did mean that part of me understood and even empathized with what she was trying to do, because – in the context of that turbulent era, our turbulent era – she was merely aggressively following the dictates of her conscience, misleading as they were.

What a rabid disciple and proselytizer this woman would make!

And, at the end of the day, this is what we most need to take away from all this. If we are to achieve any kind of clarity in the midst of this hullabaloo, the one maypole around which we must wrap ourselves is the mortal recognition that people can and do change, especially as they age. They evolve. Only God and truth are unchanging, but we mercurial human beings tend either to develop or regress in terms of our ability to recognize and interpret them.

At least give the lady credit for developing! Okay, so she hasn’t fully renounced her stance on Vietnam. But she is clearly inching ever closer toward some sort of healthy, heartfelt finality on the matter. I mean, it’s not like she’s going backwards. For Ms. Fonda to even embrace Christianity at all, in any capacity, given her starting point, is itself a miracle of beatific proportions.

Certainly I would never have believed such a thing could happen when I was nine. But then again, statues of the Blessed Virgin have been known to weep actual tears and drip real drops of bilious blood.

When I lean back and let myself luxury-cruise right through Jane Fonda’s life so far as recounted in countless TV interviews, a remarkable thing occurs. I find I’m not on auto-pilot at all, for then I begin to remember why I bought into this feisty, spunky, energetic lady's charisma in the first place. This is the same allure that led me to buy her leg warmers and workout tapes by the armfuls in the late eighties.

I remember why I was drawn to her – because for one thing, she admitted to having daddy problems (read: authority problems), and for another, she had the good sense to realize that the real reason she was binging and purging was to sate a higher hunger, and, more importantly, the courage to acknowledge it.

Now she says that hunger is being fed, wholly and completely, by the body and blood of Christ. Who are we to say otherwise? It seems to me only Christ Himself can make that call.

In this week of Pope John Paul the Great's passing, we must at least try to give Jane Fonda the benefit of the doubt. Her newly professed faith and our desire to believe in its redemptive power encourage us to take her at her word. For those of us who aren’t veterans and weren’t mortally wounded by the grenades she threw in her reckless youth, it’s time to contemplate letting go.

And besides, I just can't help myself – I identify with her. Would that I would glide so gracefully into my sunset . . . .

Sorry, guys, but I just jumped. For me this story isn't about politics. It's about redemption and rapprochement. No matter what the girl did then, the grown woman, the grandmother, has me in her corner rooting for her now.

Call me crazy, but I'm kinda Fonda Jane. ▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is widely featured on the web. You may read her articles and poems online at http://karenhpittman.blogspot.com. She lives with her husband and cat in the New York City metropolitan area.

"Manic Depression: For Ted Roethke"

2005-04-06T15:47:00.000-04:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 1994

“I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.”

Every summer conceives its winter,
Every day reproduces its night;
Every tear distills from laughter,
Every misery from delight.

And under pleasure molders a cancer
Metastasizing to pain —
And the balanced brain breeds the tumor
That will make the man insane.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing.

"Good Night, Bill"

2005-04-05T19:38:00.000-04:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 1994

Mama believed she heard you, Papa; believed she heard you, at two;
Heard you hit – the thud! – then stole to your room at two-oh-two.
She heard your wheezing rattle, and mistaking it for your snore,
Rapped lightly on your door: “Bill, are you all right?”
And when she heard no more, tiptoed away, “Good night.”

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing.

Stealing Heaven's Fire

2005-03-28T16:10:00.000-05:00

By Karen H. Pittman
© March 28, 2005

As Terri Schindler-Schiavo lay drying out like a desert palm in a Pinellas Park nursing home, I am reminded of proud Prometheus, who once foolishly attempted to steal heaven’s fire. In return, the gods punished him for his arrogance and presumption by chaining him to a rock, where eagles daily devoured his continually regenerating flesh. In this way, the gods made sure he would never steal their fire again.

But today in Florida, Prometheus is once more on the prowl, and is even now filching the celestial flame. He is busy playing God, determining for us our appointed hour. Let loose by the guards who were sleeping at the gate, he shadows our every move, black-robed and insidious, a solemn statutory Grim Reaper.

Who now will step forth to bind him? Where is the man or institution with such courage? Where is Florida Governor Jeb Bush? Where is the state legislature? Where, for that matter, is the United States Congress, which issued a subpoena it had no intention of enforcing? When, if ever, will our executive and legislative branches learn to say, with one clarion voice, as Andrew Jackson did, "Let the judges enforce their decisions?"

Whatever happened, along the way, to separate but equal? While that standard rightfully no longer applies to public education, it does still rightfully apply to our system of governance.

Regardless of partisan attempts to cloud this issue by politicizing it, it isn’t grey and it isn’t political. If you don’t think so, just ask the Schindlers – they’ll tell you: It’s strictly black and white, a matter of life and death. A very real human being’s very real being hangs in the balance. When even Jesse Jackson is willing to step up to the plate and call a spade a spade, you know something in America has gone gravely awry!

Where, I wonder, do we draw the line, if not here? Is this not, as poor Bob Schindler laments, judicial homicide? When, if not now, will we take our government back?

If I hear yet one more talking head say yet one more time that Congress had no right to intervene in “a private family matter" (as if the Schindlers were not Terri’s real family, her blood relatives), I'm going to scream. Congress not only had a right to intervene, it had a duty. Why? Because we the people wanted it. Congress answers to us, and us alone.

Not so for these ethereal judges, who answer to no power higher than their own.

And if I hear just one more too-coldly-cerebral pundit pronounce this a precedent-setting Constitutional crisis, I’m going to wretch. This is one precedent that needs setting. As Mark Steyn observed, it’s hardly likely Congress will grow drunk on its newfound power in defense of you and me, your average “Joe Schmoes of 37 Elm Street.”

Despite the critics’ ravings to the contrary, there really is something stopping Congress from interfering with our personal affairs, and that’s us. The legislature, unlike the judiciary, cannot rule by fiat and is periodically held to account for what it does. We the people are the inherent check built into the system which keeps Congress from running amok. And make no mistake: The legislature acted on Terri’s Schiavo’s behalf not just out of politics or principle, but for a reason eminently more practical – because the people they represent demanded it. Don’t believe for one minute those skewed polls the media are force-feeding you. Had Congress remained silent, in a matter this dire, there would have been hell to pay at the polls come election day, as there may well yet be.

And let’s not forget, the legislative and executive branches are the checks and balances which are supposed to keep the judiciary from running amok. So much for that.

Furthermore, liberal cant aside, I don’t care who you are: You can’t separate politics from morality. If you have a strongly held belief, you are obligated to act on it politically, period. Do we really think George Felos is doing less?

If this is a “family decision,” as liberals are excessively fond of claiming, why then was Circuit Court Judge George Greer brought in on this in the first place? Why is it any more egregious for Congress and the executive branches to weigh in on the matter than for the judiciary to do so? They are all equally branches of government. Whichever side you come down on, government was bound to be involved, one way or the other, and indeed has been since 1993, when the cleft first opened between Michael Schiavo and the Schindlers.

In an increasingly litigious society, in a country consumed with the diurnal dramas of sensational courtroom cases, do we marvel that judges are revered as gods and held as sacrosanct? Are we stumped by their popular reputation as the inviolable last word on all mortal irreconcilable differences?

The truly disturbing thing about Terri's case, I think, is that few people believe she fell into her “vegetative” state naturally. Need I spell it out?

Okay, I will. The unspoken truth here – the elephant in the room – is that most of us who are pleading her cause really do suspect that Michael Schiavo may have been complicit in her collapse on that long-ago, fateful night in 1990, and that, if permitted to pull her tube, he will succeed not only in getting away with murder but also in destroying the evidence as well.

That is the real reason why emotions run so high in this extraordinary case.

Liberal ideologues, peculiarly, are curiously capable of showing more compassion for people in the abstract than in the particular. Thus Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, could opine with impunity on a recent episode of Scarborough Country that conservatives are way off base in worrying about this one single person when so many of the old folks in nursing homes have been left for dead by Medicaid and Social Security.

Katrina fails to see the symbolic significance of Terri Schindler-Schiavo’s court-ordained mercy killing: This is but the first step toward euthanizing all of society’s non-contributors, those selfsame, useless old folks, thereby making sure they never more burden the public coffers.

Sure, why not. Let the geriatrics withering in their nursing home beds be put out of their misery, by us, for us, for our convenience. Kill the cats we have de-clawed by depriving them of the nourishment they must receive, from us, their keepers, if they are to survive. Kill the babies who feed from our arms by pulling our arms away like the mechanical tubes they mimic. And if, unlike Terri, these least among us go on to outlast their infirmity, then, for the love of God, please, if nothing else, at least kill the ones who are maimed and afflicted, to end their agony. They, after all, have the right to die, with all the dignity and beauty bestowed by dehydration, an inalienable right which supercedes their right to live.

Sea changes in society have a way of creeping up, like pounds. We’ve all experienced this. At the holidays, for instance, you eat and eat for what seems like weeks on end without consequences, when all of a sudden you wake up one morning to realize you’ve turned into a tub of margarine. Voila! — the change is upon you, like that. It happened seemingly overnight, without your knowledge. It happened before you could do anything about it.

And by the time you realize it, it’s too late. You are already emulsified. Then begins the long, slow struggle to shed the excess.

Change in society comes to us "overnight" too, though there is nothing "sudden" about it. As it turns out, it was there all along, just like the glutton's metabolism ratcheting down, quietly simmering under the surface. This is precisely what judicial watchers and constitutional experts like Larry Klayman and Mark Levin have been warning against for years. They saw the change coming before we did.

For us, we woke this morning knowing not that Terri Schindler is going to die because God and nature ran their course, but because a barbaric judge refused to feed her, and because a feckless, impotent Congress and Governor stood by and did nothing – indeed, less than nothing: They failed to honor even their word. They failed to make good on their empty rhetoric.

3/18 is our cultural 9/11. The Schindler-Schiavo tragedy has shocked us into wakefulness, in the most violent and gut-wrenching of ways. We, like Terri, are trying hard to open our eyes.

Now is the time to rope Prometheus and restore him to his rock, for good. ■

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is regularly featured on numerous web journals, including Opinion Editorials, Intellectual Conservative, ChronWatch, Men’s News Daily, Renew America, American Daily, and The Rant. She lives with her husband and cat in the New York City metropolitan area.

To Do Big Things

2004-12-14T18:51:00.000-05:00

By Karen H. Pittman
© December 14, 2004

On December 8, 2004, something big happened. But it happened in a small way, quietly. Quietly The Washington Post announced it, burying it deep within its folds, on page A-13. Quietly the day came and went, ushering out one centuries-long era and in another, as yet untried.

On December 8, 2004, Afghanistan shed its wizened skin of totalitarianism, tribal rule, barbarism, and brutality. A beautiful butterfly was born out of a cocoon stamped flat by the steamroller of war, as Hamid Karzai was sworn in as Afghanistan's first democratically-elected leader.

And where was the mainstream American media when this momentous event occurred? Out to lunch, apparently. This hugely important ceremony got little formal attention. This triumphant saga was all but ignored by the big boiler-plate presses and the major network newsrooms.

The Washington Post may have shortchanged the inauguration of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, but history will not. The media went to lunch on the Afghan success story, not because it eschews good news, but because of whose good news it is. A resounding triumph of the first Bush administration, the democratization of Afghanistan bears witness to an American president determined to get things done, and, in a part of the world sorely wanting in progress, Bush's sense of urgency is not only understood but deeply felt. In a time when western intellectuals would rather fuss over the fretful formalities of correct political protocol, Bush's uncanny ability to skirt said protocol does more than merely yield results – it exposes the underlying hypocrisy of a left-wing establishment that is more content to complain about wrongs than to right them. And remember: George W. Bush is allowed no triumphs. Nada one.

Had Bill Clinton presided over this nothing-short-of-miraculous, three-year transformation from Taliban dictatorship to American-style democracy, he would have won the Nobel Peace Prize, to nauseatingly loud national and international acclaim. Even Clinton's failures wrought more coverage than Bush's successes. Bill Clinton's botched attempts to negotiate a Middle East peace accord merited more press than George Bush's implementation of democracy in the heart of that backward, benighted region.

That is how the media's bias insidiously corrupts our perception of events, and indeed, of history itself, even as it is made. Bias is conveyed not merely by the way in which the news is covered, but by which news is covered, in what order; by which material editors do and do not deem newsworthy; and by which stories do and do not make the front pages. Doubtless The Washington Post will tell you that its article on the Afghan inaugural is unbiased and "factual." But where the editors chose to position that story tells us as much about their regard for it as the way it is written. The Washington Post need not come out and say that the metamorphosis in Afghanistan is no big deal; all it must do to convey that impression is to submerge the story on page A-13 (a Freudian slip if ever there was one, since most of its editorial staff not-so-secretly wish any Bush endeavor bad luck).

But history, which is non-partisan and helped by hindsight, will take a different view. Whatever his momentary lapses, George Bush will go down as one of the greatest of the greats, for he perfectly embodies Peggy Noonan's characterization of Ronald Reagan, who, as she says, became President not "to be big," but "to do big things."

And so he was big. And it is no small feat to do big things. It takes a big man to do them. Clinton, on the other hand, became President to be big. And so he wound up, by comparison, looking small and, for want of a gentler word, downright petty – ridiculous even.

Bush, however, had no big ambitions when he took office. He was a simple man. Back then big things were few and far between, and growing ever more remote. The bubble had burst. The big things that first summer were all the color of blood, not money – in fact, it might well have been called the summer of blood. First there were the sharks, on the prowl in the warm August oceans, and then there was Gary Condit, a bloodthirsty little man who became big because we were bored and in search of a big subject.

Well, we got it in spades on 9/11. And the blood ran and ran. It ran in raging rivers down Church Street and Liberty, down Vesey and West. It ran in the green fields of Pennsylvania, and in twisted rivulets down the Pentagon's charred walls. Blood, sweat, and tears together formed torrents. The summer of blood bled into the fall of our fear.

And on September 14, 2001, George W. Bush, a simple man, sweaty and blear-eyed and utterly unafraid, stepped atop that bloody rubble in lower Manhattan and took the bullhorn of fate firmly in hand. He rose to his destiny. And he became great. And he did big things.

And history, which needs not The Washington Post, will record them. ▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is regularly featured on numerous web journals, including Opinion Editorials, Intellectual Conservative, ChronWatch, Men’s News Daily, Renew America, American Daily, and The Rant. She lives with her husband and cat in the New York City metropolitan area.

Character Counts – So Vote for It

2004-11-02T01:03:00.000-05:00

By Karen H. Pittman
© November 1, 2004

Author's Endorsement: If you believe as I do that President Bush has worked hard since 9/11 to defend you and your family, tell him so by voting for him. Recall the horror of that tragic day and reflect on this good man’s genuine travail . . . . Remember how we all feared the next attack was not only imminent but inevitable? Well, in three years, it never came. In large measure, we have George W. Bush to thank for that. If you are grateful for the remarkable character and tenacity this President has shown in the face of terror, send him a message. Thank him. Let him know you were out there, in the silent majority, rooting for him. Make your voice heard. On November 2nd, vote to return George W. Bush to the White House. Your future – your family’s future – may well depend on it.

Charles Krauthammer, in his latest column called “Kerry’s Afghan Amnesia,” laments the Massachusetts candidate’s regrettable tendency to second-guess, sardonically dubbing him “the retroactive genius.”

Kerry, ever the boastful king-of-the-playground-hill, regularly taunts the President on the campaign trail with his alleged failure as Commander-in-Chief to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora. This is precisely the kind of behavior you’d expect from an opportunistic braggart. He is, in effect, saying to Bush, long after the fact and well within the safe confines of an analytical comfort zone enjoyed by no one at the time of the Afghan war (least of all a know-it-all retro-whiz-kid who played hooky during most of his Senate Intelligence Committee meetings), “Seeeeeeee, I told you so.” Next I fully expect him to launch into a smarmy rendition of “Anything you can do I can do betterrrrrrrr, I can do anything better than you.”

Nanny-nanny-boo-boo.

Trouble is, he didn’t “tell him.” At the time our military conducted its Tora Bora operation, Kerry, already an all-but-official candidate for the White House, sensing the political headwinds, loudly lauded our Commander-in-Chief’s discretion thus: “I think we have been smart. I think the administration leadership has done it well, and we are right on track.”

And yet, on the stump, John Kerry the backward-looking wunderkind never overlooks a chance to remind us that he has been “saying for two years now” that our troops should have caught bin Laden. Very clever, Cicero. What this oily orator doesn’t tell you is what he was saying three years ago, when the Tora Bora campaign concluded. The coy chameleon told CNN on January 20, 2002: “I do think some people have asked some questions about how that particular component of the mission sort of played out. But the fact is that [Tora Bora] is a difficult place. [Osama bin Laden] is elusive. I think [the troops and the administration] are doing the maximum amount right now possible to try to track him down.”

You don’t say. Funny. Sunday on the trail, alluding to the military’s Tora Bora strategy, he huffed, bantam-like, “I would never have done that.” Yet his own comments reveal precisely the reverse – that, in fact, had John Kerry been Commander-in-Chief, at that time, he would have “done [just] that.” Here, after all, in his own words, is irrefutable proof that he expressly approved of the Pentagon’s plan to rely on Afghan warlords as surrogates for our ground troops (a maneuver he now calculatingly disparages as “outsourcing”), primarily in order to reduce American casualties and prevent a Soviet-like entrenchment.

I, I, I. This man is the Frito Bandito of political discourse. As Rich Lowry notes of the bin Laden brouhaha, “This controversy is only more evidence that what the senator will never miss is an opportunity to be opportunistic.”

As I see it, this election boils down to a fundamental choice, one which has less to do with issues of war and survival than with character, for it is the heart and soul of our Commander-in-Chief that ultimately determines how he defends us.

If you are still undecided, ask yourself this: In an uncertain world, would you feel safer casting your lot with a man who has demonstrated time and again that he will say and do anything to be President, or with a President who has shown by his actions that he will stop at nothing to protect you and your family, even if it means risking your vote?

In short: During war, would you rather be led by a man who is guided by principles or a politician who is steered by polls?

In a time of terror, this is the one and only litmus test a candidate must pass. Character counts.

No one can honestly deny that President George W. Bush has doggedly defended us. This decent man deserves to be rewarded for his steadfast determination. He has earned not only our gratitude, but our approbation as well. Repay him by voting for him. You will be doing yourself and your country, which is at a crossroads, a crucial service. ▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is regularly featured on numerous web journals, including Opinion Editorials, Intellectual Conservative, ChronWatch, Men’s News Daily, Renew America, American Daily, and The Rant. She lives with her husband and cat in the New York City metropolitan area.

In the Eye of the Storm: Riding it Out with Dan Rather

2004-09-17T22:56:00.000-04:00

By Karen H. Pittman
© September 17, 2004

No matter what those celluloid talking heads say, I doubt Dan Rather and CBS got “snookered,” as Bill O'Reilly, the biggest blubbering head of all, bloviatingly opined. I doubt they got “had,” as those babbling TV brains claim. Rather, I am persuaded they were at least in some measure in on the whole wretched hoax. I say it’s more likely than not that Dan Rather and CBS were complicit in airing those forged documents whose sole purpose was to show that George W. Bush received preferential treatment while serving in the Texas Air National Guard.

That's not to say they authored the memos. That's not even to say they know who did. They do know who their source is, however, and whether or not he or she is reliable. They know, for instance, whether their informant is a Kerry operative.

But that is to say that Dan Rather and CBS likely realized they were gambling when they ran their story on 60 Minutes II. They likely realized those papers they exhibited as evidence were likely falsified (who could not?), but they just as likely didn’t give a damn. Discrediting President Bush at the crucial hour was more important. Discrediting the president trumped journalistic integrity; it trumped reputation and ratings; and most disquieting of all, it trumped the truth.

Who’s discredited now?

After all, Rather and his cohorts at CBS were in search of a bigger kind of truth. They were in search of a more noble, lofty, Platonic Idea of Truth, which, in their morally relative, relatively immoral philosophical alter-universe, apparently trumps the plain old Aristotelian Truth any day.

In other words, Dan Rather and CBS were only too eager to contaminate the pre-election well with these four dubious, strategically-leaked, drab poison-processor drips – so eager, in fact, that they gave themselves unprecedented journalistic license, sufficient even unto undoing due diligence. They, in their enthusiasm, in their greed, rushed to judgment – and then to put their sloppy segment in the can. And because the needs of the candidate they sought to serve were infinitely more urgent in their minds than their sense of obligation to create clarity in a cloudy clime, they willfully disregarded their cautionary instincts.

And in airing, they erred.

And now that the Eye has blinked and finds itself staring squarely into another kind of eye, a much angrier kind, it is unbelievably slow to open up.

Dan Rather and CBS are only now, some six days after going to press on September 10, distancing themselves from the controversial documents, even as they swear the story itself is accurate. Only now is CBS writing its own CYA memos. In so doing, the anchorman and the network are arbitrarily, and far too long after the fact, dismissing the significance of the very credentials they themselves touted in the first place – papers purporting to prove the validity of a tale whose truth they now contend no longer requires the support of a carbon-copy buttress (also known as “a lying buttress”).

What self-serving, circular reasoning! Why should the astute viewer be any more inclined to accept this latest CBS spin as gospel than he was willing to accept those fabricated documents as fact? Why should he do as Dan wants and credit his underlying thesis as credible, when the only putatively irrefutable corroboration of that thesis the network has to date proffered is clearly neither clearly credible nor irrefutable? If CBS fudged to advance its anti-Bush agenda, then surely it would fudge to save face. Its fallback position would inevitably be to stick to its story that even if the memos are fake, the portrait they paint of the young, callow, silver coke spoon-fed George Walker Bush is undeniably a true-to-life John Singer Sargent original.

But the question remains: What portrait? If there is no legitimate, confirmed artist, how then can there be a legitimate, confirmed work of art?

Well, on second thought, I take that back. What we have here, folks, is a genu-whine work of art, all right – courtesy of the copiers at Kinko’s.

Besides, even if the narrative on which these sham memoranda are based is true, CBS stupidly fails to comprehend that its broadcasting of these bogus documents is itself a bigger story, with broader implications for the country as a whole and for this election in particular, than the matter of George Bush's military record some thirty-odd years ago in the National Guard is, has been, or ever will be.

So what if CBS says the substance of their story is true? How can the network know that? Because Marian Knox and Ben Barnes say so? Knox is known to have anti-war leanings and Barnes is often called a criminal. And anyway, their statements are rank hearsay, and, as such, would never bear up in a court of law – and so consequently should never be permitted to stand as the last words underpinning a serious news piece.

Furthermore, in the wake of this hurricane, how can the public whose interests CBS is supposed to serve henceforth place any credence in anything the Eye professes to see? If these documents, which the network vetted as its only tangible, admissible proof of the allegations it leveled against President Bush, are demonstrably false, then CBS has no evidence, period. After all, Lie-utenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian is twenty years dead. And his survivors either refute the network’s charges or largely contradict one another. And the testimony of both Barnes and Knox is nullified by their bias.

Besides, you can’t just buy the truth at your corner copy mart for quarters. You can’t reproduce it on a Xerox.

Face it, Dan Rather and CBS: It’s wrong to tell a story. Those documents were the story. And without them, you don’t have a story.

Now, instead, you’re the story. ▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is regularly featured on numerous web journals, including Opinion Editorials, Intellectual Conservative, ChronWatch, Men’s News Daily, Renew America, American Daily, and The Rant. She lives with her husband and cat in the New York City metropolitan area.

Kerry, Kerry, Quite Contrary

2004-08-30T19:05:00.000-04:00

By Karen H. Pittman
© August 30, 2004

Kerry, Kerry, quite contrary,
How do your coffers grow?
With 527s and 501s,
And ugly little Soros’s dough.

For the junior senator from Massachusetts, there’s no escaping the fact that August was one long, hot month. (Hum. Maybe that’s why he spent so much of it windsurfing.) And the rest of the season could shape up to be even more inclement for John F. Kerry.

My jingle notwithstanding, the candidate has good reason to be contrary: No matter how rapidly his coffers have grown, his political fortunes are now shrinking at an alarming rate. If this downward trend continues, I forecast disaster. After last week’s resoundingly triumphant Republican National Convention, it would now seem that even Soros’s treasured billions are going to be inadequate to the task of staving off John Kerry’s own personal Hurricane George.

Among the chattering classes, most of the pontificators seem to blame Kerry’s plummeting prospects on those ill-spirited, pesky Swiftees, who keep pummeling the embattled Democrat nominee with all manner of negative weather; whereas still others blame the less-than-convincing presidential contestant himself for the sudden turn in the tide of his affairs. After all, he has remained stoically – and, some charge, stupefyingly – mum in the face of the most scurrilous attack of all, an all-out assault upon the very citadel of his honor.

And some . . . well, some blame it on the weather.

I blame Terry McAullife and the too-clever-by-half strategists who put Kerry in this untenable position in the first place. Regardless of the talking points the paid party rationalizers lay down, the core problem for the Democrats precedes the Swiftees; it precedes climatic conditions; and for that matter, it precedes the candidate himself. The fatal blunder was made the day the party selected John Kerry as its presumptive nominee – period. Dean the Screamer would have been a better choice. And it now appears that the regrettably lackluster Joe Lieberman, who gained the least traction of any Democrat on the primary trail, would have been debatably the best choice of all.

Why? Because, for one thing, the Democrat leadership’s arch preference for Kerry now seems in hindsight to have been either over- or under-contrived, depending on how you look at it. This man’s personal landscape is fraught with mines, yet no one at the DNC seems to have made any honest effort to defuse them in advance. As a presidential contender, Kerry, the little-known senator and erstwhile controversial war hero turned protestor, is caught in one hell of a Catch-22, a classic humdinger that would make even Joseph Heller think twice: Snagged between the horns of Vietnam and his apathetic Senate record, he has nothing in his arsenal that is unequivocally redemptive to run on.

Also, a Dean ticket would have been much more intellectually and morally forthright, crystallizing the clear-cut philosophical divide in the national debate, by setting the anti-war flank firmly at odds with its pro-war opposition. As Tony Blankley, editor of The Washington Times, observed, pitting two nominally pro-war candidates against one another represents the height of tactical madness. And that absurd, doomed stratagem may well result in political suicide for the Democrats.

On the other hand, Lieberman, who was widely dismissed and even scoffed at by the more rabid left-leaning constituency which now dominates his party, rightly divined the strategic reality to which their partisan hatred has all but blinded them: That in this election, the war on terror is the overriding issue, and that, to prevail, the Democrat contender must be strong, consistent, and ethically credible enough to persuade the undecided among us that he can not only command our troops in a manner befitting their chief but also govern in a fashion more sensitive to social and fiscal concerns. (It’s worth noting: This is the same hardcore constituency of hate that drove “mad as hell” Zell Miller scowling into Manhattan.)

In other words, our average Joe saw what their sophisticated Terry did not: When it comes to the war on terror, Americans are not divided. Our collective reaction to 9/11 proved that beyond all reasonable doubt. And counter to official DNC cant, most Americans do not actively differentiate the war in Iraq from the larger assault on civilization which we call “terrorism.” As to the absolute necessity of routing this insane fanaticism in all its pernicious forms, Americans are of one mind, one heart, one purpose. Americans remain united in their determination to decimate deranged militants who plow planes into buildings and gun down defenseless children as they run. And now that the war in Iraq is all but over, who can truthfully say, in retrospect, that the world isn’t better off with Saddam Hussein behind bars while some 25 million of his former subjects now live in freedom?

And all this is owing almost entirely to the hurricane-force strength of one man, George W. Bush.

Because of his resolve, that deal is done, and the Middle East now has egalitarianism within its long-range reach. And egalitarianism will bring, trailing in its protracted wake, peace; and peace will bring civility, and civility an end to this senseless reign of terror.

Of the Presidential candidates for 2004, only one adjudges this to be the elevated and noble calling of generations, not the scattershot, rickety creation of a few months’ combat. Only George W. Bush is willing to make the lasting commitment of resources that redrawing the world’s ideological map requires. And if the president’s consistency is arguably his greatest virtue, then the senator’s inconsistency is doubtlessly his biggest vice.

It remains to be seen whether a very contrary Kerry, whose midnight off-color tirade fades aside his rival’s soaring primetime rhetoric, can pull his swiftly beaching hull out of the ground. Frankly, I think this old soldier’s gone soft. True, a lot can happen between now and November, but I’m willing to go out on a plank: I predict the Democratic challenger will take a bath.

And as far as I can see, all the 527 and 501 spongy dough the other George can deliver will be insufficient to resuscitate this drowning man’s hopes, nor will it match the real George’s authentic high seriousness. I now pronounce the Kerry candidacy DOA – though, in truth, it never lived.

Although no one could have foreseen it at the time, the idea of John Forbes Kerry as president went down finally and forever with his supremely hapless brethren some 35 years ago in that murky Mekong Delta.▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is regularly featured on numerous web journals, including Opinion Editorials, Intellectual Conservative, ChronWatch, Men’s News Daily, Renew America, American Daily, and The Rant. She lives with her husband and cat in the New York City metropolitan area.

I Believe John Kerry

2004-08-24T19:00:00.000-04:00

By Karen H. Pittman
© August 24, 2004

Note: The writer of this column wishes to acknowledge her debt to the late journalist Michael Kelly, whose 1998 essay, “I Believe,” served as her template. Anyone desiring to read the original, which the author highly recommends, will find it archived at http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/washingtonpost/search.html, copyright The Washington Post Company, February 4, 1998.

I believe the senator. I have always believed him. I believed him when he said he supported the war in Iraq, and I believe him now when he says he was against it. I believed him when he said he would take care of our troops regardless, and I believe him now when he says he was only showing them just how much he cares by voting to cut off their funding when the going got rough. I believed him when he said he was caught in the crossfire in Cambodia in 1968 and I believe him now, when he reportedly admits he wasn't.

I believed the senator when he said every last detail of that blue Cambodian Christmas was “seared” into his brain, and I believe him now when he says he’s not quite sure if his recollection of that blessed event is solid. And I most certainly believed him when he testified before the transparently non-partisan Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971, swearing America made him commit horrific but strategically needful acts, like hunting down cattle and dogs for sport. I believe the senator and his fellow Vietnam Veterans Against the War were motivated by nothing but patriotism and love for their vile country.

I believe the senator’s totally unsolicited television appearance on the Dick Cavett show in April 1971 was in truth doctored, even then, by the radical right-wing Carlyle cabal, operating in concert with the Saudi royal family, the CIA, and the reactionary conservative media conglomerate, News Corp. I believe in a secret, subterranean, centralized corporate authority.

I believe in the Kerry standard of adherence to the First Amendment, enunciated by the senator in his formal complaint to the FCC accusing the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and the Bush campaign of illegally conspiring to discredit him – a standard which holds that censorship is okay so long as it acts to suppress speech in instances where there exists "overwhelming evidence [of] coordination with the Bush campaign." I note with appreciation the senator’s use of the word “overwhelming.” I believe the senator when he says there is no evidence of any similar coordination between his own campaign and MoveOn.org.

I believe the senator when he says Bush’s attorney, Benjamin Ginsberg, is clearly in bed with special interests, and I believe him when he says his own lawyer, Joe Sandler, clearly is not. I believe counselors like Ginsberg who represent campaigns, parties, and soft groups simultaneously are all acting illegally, even though the law and the FEC declare they aren’t. I agree with the senator that all lawyers working in conjunction with the Bush reelection team and the SBVT are automatically suspect, and I agree with him, too, that counselors representing the DNC and their sludge funds are by default not even remotely fishy.

I believe the senator has the right to criticize his country, just as I believe VVAW had the right to criticize it, too. And I believe the senator now has the right to force John O’Neill to abrogate his right to criticize the senator, just as I believe the SBVT should be forced to abrogate its right to criticize the senator, too. I believe those sixty-some-odd veterans who signed affidavits are all lying, just as I believe the senator and his massive army of eight are the only ones telling the truth.

I believe the senator is being sincere when he lauds Michael Moore, whom he thinks should never be censored, and I believe he’s being sincere, too, when he denounces Paul Galanti, whom he thinks must be. I believe the senator is being sincere when he condemns as illicit the $17 million in 527 and 501 soft money the Bush campaign has raised thus far, and I believe he’s being sincere when he condones the $186 million his own campaign has to date accumulated by these same unquestionably above-board means.

I believe the senator when he says he favors a strong national defense, and I believe he was in fact actively strengthening our nation’s defenses throughout the 1990s by systematically hacking military and intelligence budgets to bits, and by voting to slay every single major weapons system that ever dared lumber across the Senate floor.

I see nothing suspicious in the report that the senator was awarded the Purple Heart for sustaining mortal scratches etched by whizzing bullets on December 2, 1968, even though he wrote in his journal a full nine days later, on December 11, that he and his crew in the Viet Cong had not yet “been shot at.” I believe the Purple Heart was similarly bestowed upon every rice-paddy warrior, who, like John Forbes Kerry, suffered self-inflicted, practically lethal nicks, cuts, and bruises, and I believe, too, that the Bronze Star and other medals of valor are routinely granted for knee scrapes.

I believe the terror threat was first invented and then exaggerated by the Cheney administration in order to build a pipeline in Afghanistan and seize Iraq’s vast oil reserves on behalf of Hallow-burton. I believe George W. Bush is personally responsible for every single plight the world has known since 9/11 and for every single individual grievance, too. I believe Michael Moore, Al Gore, Howard Dean, Paul Krugman, Jim Hightower, Jeff Rense and Janet Jackson are all part of a vast left-wing anti-conspiracy truth squad called Bush-Busters. Especially Janet Jackson. ▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is regularly featured on numerous web journals, including Opinion Editorials, Intellectual Conservative, ChronWatch, Men’s News Daily, Renew America, American Daily, and The Rant. She lives with her husband and cat in the New York City metropolitan area.

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire: Why Scott Peterson Deserves to Frey

2004-08-15T01:12:00.000-04:00

By Karen H. Pittman
© August 14, 2004

On one point at least, the pundits have it right: We all know Scott Peterson’s breeches were burning, long before now. We all know he was hot as a firecracker for Amber Frey. We all know he’s a heinous creep, a complete and total cad, a dirty no-good double-dealing rake.

But what we don’t all know, the lone remaining riddle tied tight like a Gordian Knot at the heart of this whole rotten affair, is the inconceivable dark truth this mum bum ain’t about to tell, known solely to him. The only mystery lingering in the wake of last week’s much-publicized courtroom “Amber Alert” lurks behind the one question left hanging on everyone’s lips: Is our covetous cad a killer? Is this all-too-human man really an inhuman monster capable of murdering his wife and kid?

On this point, the pundits have it wrong, and here’s why. Never mind all the talk about how Scott burned to be with Amber. Amber wasn’t the thing putting the sting in Scott’s crotch. What really fired Scott up was Conner, whose unlucky arrival would soon turn his chronic, babe-happy cod-burn into all-night fits of baby burping and heart-burn. Scott was getting the baby blues. And Romeo’s crib of fibs was about to be rocked, all right – by reality, the kind that stinks like crap.

As regards Scott’s motives, the prosecution is missing the point. Pretty-boy Peterson, being a player, had apparently worked himself into such a libidinous lather he could hardly stomach another single night of not being single. With each passing day, he was running an ever-increasing risk of missing out big-time on the big time. Our pathetic Scott had gotten himself into a pregnant pickle that was now growing every bit as large as Laci’s stretched, marked belly. As the hour of blessed deliverance drew nigh, our unhappy pappy grew desperate – for real deliverance. Contrary to the prosecution’s theory that Peterson was sniffing around Frey in order to hunker down with her, our horny dog Scottie, who had already strayed, was now hankering to prowl. He had tasted menstrual blood, that virginal delicacy which had not tinged his palate for eight long months, and now he was hard on the scent.

So the only thing Scott’s rabid XXX-mas fling with the Amber-dexterous blonde accomplished was to whet his blood-thirsty chops. Thus excessively fomented, thus frustrated in the extreme, he woke one fine December morning to find himself caught between a rock and a soft place, between Brooks Island and the shore. How else was a poor, tied-down, dissolute Don Juan to unctuously slip past the surly bonds of birth?

Scott likely made the fatal calculation to kill the moment he realized life had handed him a window. But this window was rapidly closing, and once shut, would never, ever, open again. Conner was the sill. Conner was closure, his birth the death of prospects.

Whether Scott began working on this complicated moral calculus one month or one week prior to the night of December 23rd is irrelevant. Exactly when and how he killed Laci are irrelevant. The point is, he made his choice, and he acted on it. At some moment in time not long after hooking up with his therapeutic lady love, he resolved to permanently cast off his heavy burdens, one large and one small, sacrificing their two lesser lives for his greater one – which may or may not have included room for Amber Frey.

Amber, then, was something else. She of the magic massaging hands was mere foreplay. Doubtless a tangy appetizer, this fresh tart from Fresno, this juicy hors d'oeuvre from down south, was just the side dish to arouse Scott’s craving for the main course. Thanks to her, Peterson’s tongue, amply titillated, was now training toward the larger smorgasbord to come.

And make no mistake: Scott’s real lust was for the wild life, not for Amber, and it was in this context that Conner presented a huge, seemingly insoluble problem. After all, who is more encumbered than a man endowed with both wife and child? Peterson’s penchant for roses, wine, and all things fine was sharply at odds with his truth as a married man poised on fatherhood’s verge.

So, his dalliance with Amber was now careening headlong toward tragedy. He would soon find himself caught in a tight spot from which he could see no right way out. What had begun as an innocent enough taste for chicks on the side had now evolved into an advanced predilection, an evil, sinister hunger, spawned by the lecherous beast raging inside him. This awful colossus of longing kept getting bigger and bigger until it could only be fed with one object, and one alone – his wife’s weighty bulk.

From then on, it was just a matter of time. Laci and her precious cargo would shortly be taking a steep, deep leap. She and her bundle of boy had turned into a real drag, and if Scott was going to keep his head, hers would have to go. What alternative had he? It was either get the bitch off his back by dropping her like an anchor into that bracing bay, or else.

And it was the “or else” he couldn’t bring himself to contemplate.

As for Amber’s daughter, Ayianna, she was at worst a minor annoyance, a mosquito whose prick he could easily sidestep by walking away. Scott, like all dalliers, was free at any time to flee that young girl’s sweet, resilient bondage, knowing full well he would never really be forced to snap back against his will. Bound neither by mammon nor love, tethered neither by the hard persistent tugging of purse strings nor by the softer elastic wrenching of heart strings, Scott Peterson with Amber Frey would be, for all intents and purposes, a free man. This also perfectly clarifies why he was apparently backpedaling from the idea of marrying his puff-voiced paramour, who sounds strangely as if she’d just inhaled helium.

But Scott knew what every man who sires children must know: Blood daddies don’t slide by so effortlessly. They don’t get off Scott free, the way paper daddies do. Deadbeat dads are regularly hell-hounded with all the fury of their countless women scorned. With Laci alive, he’d be on the hook for at least 18 years. And in the Peterson household, money, like the shadow noose closing round Laci’s painfully raw, stuck-out neck, was tight, and getting tighter all the time.

The irony is, of course, his yen for freedom ultimately caged him, and his yearning for the high life may yet wind up killing him.

If nothing else, Scott’s own time line should do him in. As California native Charlotte Baker, who has pried this case apart with surgical steel tongs, notes, “The most important fact in the entire Peterson story is the known time of his departure from the house on December 24th.” She goes on to explain, “[The accused] puts himself still in the house at 9:48 AM” – the very moment when Martha Stewart fluffed her first “meringue” on TV. Cell phone records suggest Scott was still “either in the house or very close to it at 10:08.” At that time, says Peterson, Laci, who was then dressed in “black pants and a white shirt,” was “mopping the kitchen floor.” But, as Baker points out, by 10:18, “The dog was already back at the house, muddy and dragging its leash!”

According to Baker: “This means it is utterly impossible that Laci finished mopping the floor, changed into the clothing in which her body was ultimately found, leashed up the dog, [then] went out walking toward the park with no jacket (in 50-degree weather), no keys, no purse . . . and was captured and dragged off by unknown assailants--[all within a span of] ten minutes!”

She also offers a theory as to how and when Scott killed his wife. Insisting Peterson waited to commit his “deadly deed” until after Laci started undressing for bed on the evening of the 23rd, she draws a harrowing picture of premeditated cowardice, noting Laci’s torso was recovered without her shirt but with her bra and the tattered remains of the beige pants her half-sister remembers seeing her dressed in earlier that evening. Yet the blouse she was sporting that night was discovered the next day by investigators stuffed inside a bedroom dresser drawer. Baker cogently argues that the physical “evidence” the experts deny exists is buried within this “otherwise negligible detail” – that Laci was not wearing her shirt when searchers fished her out of the bay.

Why is this one tidbit so damning? Because it suggests an approximate time and method. Because it suggests that Scott slithered up behind his wife and strangled her while she was pulling her top up over her head. Because it suggests that Laci, swallowing mouthfuls of fabric, fought for her very life – and it was this pitched battle that produced those cuts and abrasions on Scott’s hands for which no account is rendered. Death in this manner, by asphyxiation, also explains why only Scott’s blood pervaded the scene.

Her advice for the prosecution? Distaso and team would do well to remember her mantra, “It all rests on those ten minutes!” Add to that the “coincidence” of Laci’s and Conner’s bodies both washing up separately “one mile from Brooks Island, where [Scott] told everybody in the world he was fishing,” and we have a case that really should be “the slam dunk” the DA said it was.

Baker also seconds my notions about Conner. “You have it exactly right [when you say] Conner was what had to be gotten rid of – and [Scott] certainly couldn’t wait until the boy was born.” Instead, he chose “to kill both birds with one stone, [since] Laci had [already] become the proverbial albatross anyway, with or without Conner.” But, as Baker somberly reminds us, “Conner was the triggering element.”

The mundane, moronic talking points of TV panelists notwithstanding, Scott Peterson’s lies are probative. They do go to the question of guilt. They show us something besides the obvious. They paint an unflattering portrait of an incredibly self-obsessed, unbelievably unbelievable man. In Peterson we see a pathological liar, the time-honored unscrupulous sociopath. And yes, this blameworthy cad is precisely the kind of man-ster who is capable of killing his wife and kid.

So no, a liar does not a murderer make. But a philandering liar who incriminates himself with his own trumped-up time line is no less a murderer for either his deceitfulness or his folly. Scott’s pants should be on fire, courtesy of the California Department of Corrections. Burn, baby-killer, burn. Scott Peterson is one lying mother-chucker who deserves to frey.▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is regularly featured on numerous web journals, including Opinion Editorials, Intellectual Conservative, ChronWatch, Men’s News Daily, Renew America, American Daily, and The Rant. She lives with her husband and cat in the New York City metropolitan area.

From Ann's Can to Your Website

2004-08-11T01:28:00.000-04:00

By Karen H. Pittman
© August 10, 2004

Regarding David Peng’s “From the Garbage Can to Your Website,” July 13, 2004 (http://www.blogger.com/): Yes, Mr. Peng – “Sometimes, the columns at OpinionEditorials.com [do] argue [emphasis mine] clearly for actions or ideals.” And sometimes they don’t “argue” at all – they just observe. Sometimes all they do is comment, wryly and satirically, on the day’s peculiar newsbytes and factoids. Sometimes, they’re just verbiage.

Peng should recognize “bad writing” when he sees it, since his own lacks editorial luster. Even as he refuses to proofread (“a grip” of child labor?), he accuses the editors of this website of ignoring “quality and content” in their selection of material. (Hum. Apparently they made no exception to this rule when selecting his.)

Now before my estimable critic takes me to task for nit-picking and being childish (or as he would say, “puerile”), let me make note of the fact that it was he who insisted I literally meant to imply that it’s okay for conservatives to be rich, but not for liberals. How simplistic is that? Peng’s clearly smart enough to know better.

David Peng is that kind of dehydrated, smug intellectual on whom all attempts at humor or irony are lost. David’s World is an arid, gray waste bin chemically stripped of wit. He conveniently ignores the black-and-white paradox which underpins my satire – i.e., that Kerry and Edwards, two obscenely rich men who self-consciously tout themselves as guardians of the working class in particular, have the gall to simultaneously impugn as decadently “rich” two respectably rich men, Bush and Cheney, who do not self-consciously tout themselves as guardians of the working class in particular.

The politically incorrect truth furtively lurking between the lines of my critic’s boldly timid screed is that Kerry and Edwards draw their appeal largely from the middle-to-lower classes, whereas Bush and Cheney siphon theirs primarily from the middle-to-upper classes. Yet Kerry and Edwards, together with their right-hand man Michael Moore, have deliberately lampooned Bush and Cheney as grotesque, cartoon-like snobs and class-warriors. This two-faced, bare-faced behavior, smacking as it does of an utter aversion to self-scrutiny, insults the potential voter’s intelligence. (Maybe that’s the real reason all those “poor people” David laments “vote Democrat.”) Accusations of class-mongering ring awfully hollow when you yourself are busy cutting America in-two, at a time when She most needs mending. This takes nerve – the kind of colossal nerve Mr. Peng shows in calling me a “bad” writer. If there’s one thing, Peng, I’m not, it’s a bad writer.

“Positions?” I didn’t know I was doing Yoga here – or better yet, the Kama Sutra. Dopey me. Here I thought I was writing a brief point-of-view piece – a piece with an edge, an angle – not a dissertation for the Harvard School of Business. (I stole that one straight out of Ann’s can.)

What “tagline,” pray tell, does this dude think political south-paw Michael Moore’s bogus “arguments” (which are really just agit-prop posing as rhetoric) boil down to – “She’s a poor conservative, so you can trust her?” Peng’s tired take on my tart take on this testy topic proves nothing – except the obvious: Which side of the aisle you’re sitting on shapes the way you see what’s in front of you.

As one who proudly parks her posterior on the right side, I, being an avowed opinion editorialist, being an averred conservative commentator, see no logical inconsistency in the bald “fact” that I (gleefully and blithely) make no “arguments” whatsoever, “inane” or otherwise. Pittman calls it as she sees it. And that’s that.

Does Peng just not appreciate that irony speaks with a forked tongue? Is his mind – which is obviously clever, albeit a bit on the stale, mechanical side – incapable of delighting in language and incongruity? Can it be that he really reads my wry remarks as some sort of bizarre (coming from me) concession that Bush and Cheney aren’t in truth, in their own supply-side, privatized way, looking out for the “American worker?” (“Pittman admits” no such thing.) Hell, next thing I know, he’ll be saying I literally support Herr Moore’s premise that Bush, Cheney, and the Carlyle junta are really looking out for bin Laden instead. Yes, and I guess he thinks Jonathan Swift really devoured his kids for dinner, too.

Here’s the thing, Peng: I make a decent living just like you do – and also like you, I am nowhere near the top 1%. Yet I pay less in taxes under Bush and Cheney than I did under Clinton and Gore – and I guarantee you I would pay less under Bush and Cheney than I could reasonably expect to pay under Kerry and Edwards, should (God forfend) their ticket prevail. And still you fail to resolve the biggest conundrum of all – why tax-happy Kerry and Edwards, who are so mortally worried about the rest of us, aren’t already donating more than 3% of their income to the public coffers (as Kerry can elect to do in his home state of Massachusetts). Why don’t they just give back Bush’s tax cuts, since they abhor them so? Why should I “volunteer my vote” to them – which is in fact a vote for higher taxes – when they aren’t in fact volunteering their tax dollars to me? After all, they expect me to surrender my tax cuts if they win.

Damn right I’m “picky” about which two men, be they made of straw or clay, I support. Damn right I’m “very picky” about who gets my vote. And damn right, when I’m pointing out hypocrisy, I’m going after the most hypocritical of the crowd. And that, as I see it, puts Kerry and Edwards – not Bush and Cheney – squarely in my scope hairs.

I’ll tell you precisely what Pittman believes, not what she “seems to believe” or “apparently believes.” Pittman believes that if Peng wants “something insightful” to read, he will not find it by ingesting his own poor excuse for a polemic. If his heart’s desire is to read “arguments for and against each candidate,” then why doesn’t he shut up and write them.

And honestly, in this day and age, I can’t imagine an informed, educated American (as Peng evidently is) still being undecided. I can’t imagine Peng really needs my rote recitation of “facts” to help him make up his mind. Indeed, I’d say he’s already made it up, as evidenced by his revulsion to my and “the Evanses’” toe-deep “substanceless commentary.” (Need I remind him that the root word of commentary is “comment,” which implies no “argument” either way?) Whether or not this website is “completely worthless” depends, I guess, on whether the reader thinks David Peng has, by swinging a mean jawbone in my direction, redeemed it from the likes of my landfill fodder.

Oddly enough, for all the “facts” Peng pongs around in that long paragraph about Warren Buffet (whose mere mention is meant to put a breathless end, finally and forever, to all debate on the subject – though the author himself altogether sets aside the one aspect of Reaganomics which is not only most controversial but also key to its explication, the all-important “trickle down” aspect), I’m not in the least persuaded. Every one of his “facts” can be contradicted with counter-“facts,” spun to the reverse texture. And besides, the purpose of an op-ed is to sway, not to summarily inform. Who really wants to read 750 dull words’-worth of dry stats and percentages?

“Apparently,” David Peng!

There is none so blind as he who will not see. Ever the disaffected academic, Peng flatly contradicts himself, assuring us on the one hand that “historical fact” points to “the existence of a grip [group?] of child labor, environmental protection, anti-trust, equal protection, and sexual discrimination laws” designed to protect “the average American worker,” while with the next breath importuning, importantly and earnestly, “where are all the laws that protect the [average] American worker?”

Perhaps Mr. Peng, whose yen is for forensics, has never heard of an opinion editorial. Perhaps he thinks this site is called factcheck.org, not opeds.com. I’ll tell you why OpinionEditorials.com runs my opinion editorials, Mr. Peng: Because people like you read (and by your own admission, re-read) them.

And so, I close in kind: It would seem David Peng really does have nothing better to do than strain other people’s garbage, since he keeps “repeated[ly]” reading (and did I say re-reading?) my “tripe.” Unless, of course, he preoccupies himself with penning pompous rebuttals to pointless articles that aren’t worth reading, let alone writing about.

Time to put this one in the can. Sorry, Peng, but you’ve just been ponged. Straight from Ann’s can to mine. ▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is regularly featured on numerous web journals, including Opinion Editorials, Intellectual Conservative, ChronWatch, Men’s News Daily, Renew America, American Daily, and The Rant. She lives with her husband and cat in the New York City metropolitan area.

Poor Little Rich Boys

2004-07-13T01:20:00.000-04:00

By Karen H. Pittman
© July 12, 2004

Well, I guess the Bush/Cheney/Carlyle Cartel dreamed up that pipeline in Afghanistan and "invaded" Iraq because they were trailing their richer liberal counterparts: Together the President and Vice President are worth less than would-be VP John Edwards – and they are worth many times less than John Kerry (he who would be P). Kerry – who has mysteriously shed his Vietnam-era boarding-school accent – is worth several times more than all three put together.

In point of fact, excluding Ross Perot’s failed candidacy, the Kerry/Edwards ticket is the richest American Presidential ticket ever. And it's supported by some of the richest and most influential people, too – like the Titans of Tinseltown, for instance.

Here's how the dollars break down:

Kerry's estimated net worth – are you ready for this? – comes to an apparently incalculable $800 million - $1 billion. (Yes, you read it right. As Dr. Evil would say: One biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiillion dollars!)

Edwards' net worth is less impressive, at $70 million.

Cheney's net worth lags at approximately $50 million.

And Bush, that “venal” man? (How do we know he’s venal? Because Chevy Chase, the stand-up who made vacation a vocation, stood up and said so.) Well, the Prez is a fiscal lightweight, weighing in at a mere $15 million. Heck, before ya know it, even Michael Moore – that other “poor man of the people" – will be richer than GWB.

I guess Cheney had better start looking beyond Afghanistan to dig . . . UAE, perhaps? I mean, it's not like the guy can just jab a shovel into Saudi Arabia – what with his friends there, and all.

I hate to be so straightforward – after all, it's much less challenging than talking with my tongue stuck in my cheek – but I do have to ask: Who is more gullible, a man who refuses to swallow without question the questionable "premises" of Fahrenheit 9/11, or a man who thinks these two ultra-rich elitists, Kerry and Edwards, are (really) looking out for him?

At least Bush and Cheney don't pretend they're looking out for him. They just pretend they aren't looking out for bin Laden.

Edwards represents the little people, like you and me . . . or people who are even littler, like mill workers . . . . At least, that's the way he made his money, representing the little people . . . so he must be one of them, right?

There's an old, wise saying: Cater to the classes, dine with the masses; cater to the masses, dine with the classes.

Liberal Democrats like Kerry and Kennedy learned this truth long ago. And so did Edwards. And that's why they're richer than Cheney and Bush will ever be. It also helps if you marry a Ketchup Kween instead of a teacher, your daddy's a bootlegger instead of a former President of the United States, and you sue the pants off every doctor who gets within five feet of you (except your own, of course).

And believe me, these guys know which way their brioche is buttered. The difference is: They pay to have it buttered, then tell the butter-bearer how much they care. Cry me an emulsified river.

And so it goes: America’s butterers beg for Colonial – while her poor little rich boys binge on hot air. ▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is regularly featured on numerous web journals, including Opinion Editorials, Intellectual Conservative, ChronWatch, Men’s News Daily, Renew America, American Daily, and The Rant. She lives with her husband and cat in the New York City metropolitan area.

The CIA's Plaster Disaster: How Kerry Crippled Intelligence

2004-07-10T01:45:00.000-04:00

By Karen H. Pittman
© July 9, 2004

Victims. That's what we've become. A society of victims.

But when we wallow in victimhood, we deny natural law. We shun nature. We reject the simple truth of cause and effect. But we do so at our peril.

Consider the current brouhaha over the intelligence failures preceding 9/11 and leading up to the war in Iraq. (Case in point: If we blame the CIA, we – we who voted the CIA-degraders into office – cleverly sidestep taking responsibility. Thus we anoint ourselves victims. How convenient. How conscience-salving.)

Here's how the tortuous illogic goes:

First, we strip the CIA buck-naked, then say, "Why weren't you wearing your clothes?"

Next, we build a wall between the CIA and FBI, then say, "Why weren't you guys talking?"

And when the CIA is embarrassed by its nakedness; when the FBI is caught hunkering down behind that wall; when those inevitable chickens come home to roost, whom do we blame?

Do we blame ourselves? Do we blame the people who took the CIA's clothes off and who laid that wall brick by brick in the first place? Do we blame the legislators, like John Kerry, who – in the nineties, under Clinton – hamstrung the CIA by eviscerating its human intelligence-gathering capabilities, which now must be painfully and painstakingly rebuilt, even as the wall between that agency and the FBI is being loudly torn down?

No. We blame the people who were working on the day when the system – which the strippers and separators by their actions flawed – "failed."

Let's say you're a craftsman and your specialty is plaster. Let's say, for whatever reasons, you can only get your plaster from one source – and that source has decided to water down your product. The manufacturer says it's cheaper, more profitable, and possibly more humane to the production workers because the process requires fewer chemicals.

The point is: When you water down plaster, you get mud. Your plaster is now undeniably weak. It ain't what it used to be. It might now make a hut, whereas in the past it would have made a castle.

But you don’t have any choice: It’s all you’ve got to work with. So you dab it on anyway, hoping against hope nobody will notice. And the whole time your hands are tied because you can’t get the kind of plaster you really need to do the job right. Nobody makes it. You aren’t allowed to use it. It’s illegal. (Remember, it contains “potentially” harmful additives. It might give offense.)

And so you apply your flimsy film, layer by layer. But over time the cracks begin to show. The cheap plaster degrades and starts to craze. Eventually, the entire structure crumbles.

Now, who's responsible, you or the plaster manufacturer? Whom do you think John Edwards would hold accountable in a court of law – you, "the little plaster worker," or the big corporate mill who decided for you how the plaster would be made, and which (not irrelevantly) had a monopoly on its design and manufacture? Whom do you think he would sue for those huge horty-torty damages?

I rest my case.

The question before us is simple: Having made obviously wrong choices in the nineties, will we make them again, in 2004? Having seen close-up the consequences of those choices, are we brazen – are we foolish – enough to take the chance?

And if we are, and if those choices turn out to be wrong – dead wrong, yet again – will all the excuses and defenses in our psychic arsenal ever be enough to grease our collective guilt? Will any commission or panel answer the fury of grief? Will our victimhood help us then?

Knowing all we now know, are we really going to vote the very man who was one of the principal drafters of the CIA’s Plaster Disaster into this nation’s highest office on November the 2nd?

If we do, then we had better not wail in five, ten, or twenty years when the sticky, stinky stuff hits the fan. We had better not whine about how "miserably" the CIA and FBI "failed." It is we who failed. We failed ourselves – miserably. And for God's sake, whatever we do, we've got some nerve if we blame the poor stiff who happens to be on watch, as President, when the big one strikes.

Please. The people who work for the CIA aren't idiots. They didn't "fail." They weren't allowed to succeed! Their tools were taken away! Their plaster was watered down.

By whom? By the idiots in Congress, that's who. Idiots like John Kerry.

I'm tempted to say the people who elected these idiots are idiots, too. But they can be forgiven for their transgressions – if they don’t repeat them. Anybody can make a mistake or misjudgment once. But if you make the same mistake twice . . . well, you're the one at fault, then. You get the government you deserve. The next time the planes hit, don't act shocked and appalled. Don't caterwaul to the heavens as if you hadn't a clue, "How on earth did this happen? Why do they hate us?"

If the American electorate does it again – if it votes Democrat while talking Republican ("We need a strong defense and reliable intelligence!") – then this time it can't be forgiven. And – in the face of such naked inanity – we as a people will have no choice: We’ll have to call a spade a spade. We’ll have to admit we’re idiots.

Michael Moore knows this. He knows we're gullible. (Actually, his word for it is "stupid.") He knows he can make us believe a silk purse is a sow's ear – just by saying so, often enough and loud enough, on film. (Ah, you see, for the unwashed rabble, the image is the key: Put it on [M]TV!)

Well, when you get what you wanted all along, don't bitch about it when it turns out not to be everything you thought it was going to be!

Today we're suffering the consequences of poor governance. On 9/11 we paid in blood for the bad choices made under Carter and Clinton, with their encouragement. Kerry personally yanked the pants off the CIA. And now he wants you to absolve him. He wants you to pretend you didn't see him do it. He wants you to believe it was Bush who undid the belt. No: He wants more than that. He wants you to make believe it was Bush who undid the belt – even if you know better (as does he, as does Edwards, as does Moore).

And he wants you to get rid of Bush, who is outfitting the CIA as never before, so he can yank its pants off all over again! But he will do this only after a respectable period of time has passed. You see, he must first make you believe he really wants the CIA fully clothed. Then, when your defenses are down, when you aren't looking, down come the pants again, too!

People, get a clue! In a democracy, the government you get is the one you earn. If we go back on Bush now, we go back to the era that brought us 9/11. We then set in motion the next 9/11.

Actions have consequences. No matter how good a trial lawyer you are, no matter how persuasive your argument, you cannot alter this immutable law of nature. As night follows day, effect follows cause. You vote for Clinton and Kerry, you get a stripped-down CIA. You get a stripped-down CIA, you get 9/11. You get 9/11, you get exaggerated data about WMD. You water down plaster, you get mud. Go figure.

We are not victims. We make choices, and then we live – or die – with the consequences of those choices.

You have a choice to make. You can, if you choose, choose change. Or you can choose the path of least resistance. You can choose stasis. You can choose to take us back down the same dead-end road that got us here.

It's up to you. All I can say is: If you get in Kerry's car and you end up upside-down in a ditch, don’t say I didn’t warn you. And this time, you've forfeited your right to whine. ▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is regularly featured on numerous web journals, including Opinion Editorials, Intellectual Conservative, ChronWatch, Men’s News Daily, Renew America, American Daily, and The Rant. She lives with her husband and cat in the New York City metropolitan area.

Nick Berg, The Kennedy Quack Pack, and the Psychology of Squeamishness

2004-05-16T01:56:00.000-04:00

By Karen Hathaway Pittman
© May 15, 2004

One of my pet peeves: A reader emails, carps, then blocks my reply. (Ref. “Off with Their Heads: Avenging Nick Berg,” May 13, 2004.) When this happened again today – when my proud reply bounced back, wounded – I was dashed. Here I had taken the time to craft a well-reasoned, detailed retort – and now my razor-tongued reader was nowhere in sight. He had exiled himself, apparently, to the GAG – the Gagged Agitators’ Gulag, that Archipelago of Animus to which all apoplectic, ineffectually enraged movers-on sooner or later move on. (Their poster-goons, Gore and Dean, moved on so far they finally moved over . . . and now madden the AA mobs for Kerry and Edwards.)

So I thought, why not out-fox the fox instead? Why not expose my commentary to a wider audience by sharing this too-acrid-to-waste wisecracker with the readers of Opinion Editorials? Could there possibly be a more appropriate audience for my crisp kiss-off?

If there is, I can’t think of one.

Here, then, is the bulk of the exchange. Though no spatial symbolism is implied by the material’s arrangement, you’ll find the reader's remarks raging on top, while my poor, rebuffed reply pouts on bottom.

Reader: “I don't know how anybody can be to blame for this act other than the madman wielding the knife.

Do you blame Bush for taking us to war? Or the Military Police for holding Berg? Or Berg himself for wandering naively into the war zone? Or anybody in America who ever had anything to do with the war? I know the terrorists said it was a response to Abu Ghraib, but do you really think people like that actually need any excuse to kill Americans in their sick minds? Don't you think these committed terrorists were already fairly intent on killing Americans? I mean, using your kind of logic, I think we could speculatively blame any one of a great number of people for Nick's tragic death.

Can't you let the man rest in piece [yes, he really spelled it that way] rather than use his death to score cheap points? A human being is dead, for God's sake, and it does not help anyone when you try to blame Kennedy. I may even sympathize with you about Kennedy as a politician, but it won't do your case any good to announce he is an accessory to murder who hates America.

Please open your heart for one minute to the possibility that this kind of wrangling and name pointing serves only our enemies and diminishes us.”*

KHP: “Please re-read my first sentence. That should set the tone for the entire piece. I said 'if.' And I further prevaricated by bracketing 'caused' in quotation marks. Of course I don't literally, directly hold Kennedy accountable for Nick Berg’s death. Of course I blame the knife-wielder himself. (Hello?) It was not my intention to ‘speculatively blame’ those people and groups you mentioned; it was my intention to decisively blame Kennedy and his kind. What goes around comes around. (Alas, I had not ‘world enough and time’ to lay ‘speculative blame’ at every door, as you’ve done, Mr. P.; but now that you mention it, yes – you can more or less 'blame' every thing and body you cited in your litany of potentially responsible parties.)

But back to my point: There does seem to be an awful lot of highhanded “name”-pointing going around these days . . . so, using this masochistic compulsion to blame ourselves, not the terrorists, as a rhetorical starting point, I said that IF we are going to play that game, IF we are intent on blaming somebody within our own ranks for everything that goes awry in the war zone, as we seem hell-bent on doing, then we may as well blame Kennedy and his cronies. They do bear culpability, as I see it. Certainly they are at least as much to blame for creating an internal ‘culture of Anti-American suspicion’ as is the DOD for creating a military ‘culture of condonation.’

Mr. P., my larger point went to the greater danger of political posturing on Capitol Hill – i.e., ‘crass politicking’ – in wartime. It is hardly equally poisonous to posture politically on Opinion Editorials.com. As I said, such posturing on the part of our elected officials is not only dangerous; it's deadly.

Please don't take everything I said literally. Nowhere did I ‘announce [that Kennedy] is an accessory to murder who hates America.’ (Is anybody home?) I do think he's a crafty, cagey, seasoned, smart, corrupt, paradoxically naive old salt. But I don't really think he hates his country. That doesn't mean, however, I don't think he does his country the occasional, and even frequent, disservice.

And in my defense, I must stress that I'm the last person who would set out, deliberately or otherwise, to ‘use Mr. Berg's death to score points.’ I've no points to score, for one thing. I don't get paid to write these opinion pieces, Mr. P. I am nobody's mouthpiece but my own. Horrible and tragic as it was, though, Mr. Berg's execution can still teach us something – and not just about the terrorists, either, but about ourselves. Congress used Abu to score points, and that I deplore. This is war. And yes, you've made my point for me: This is bigger and more important than politics. And that's exactly what I was trying to say.

And yet, come November 2nd, we will need to remind ourselves of who did what when, because who we elect is going to decide how we finish this business (regardless of how it got started). We live in an age of terror. What happened to Nick Berg was terrible. But if you so scorn politics you take the tack I can't criticize our politicians – who help make the policy which ultimately affects whether or not other 'Nick Bergs' live or die – simply because this is a delicate time, then you're giving the terrorists exactly what they want. You're playing into their hands. You're caving in to the squeamishness they seek to incite in you. And if this squeamishness so clouds and offends our sensibilities we refrain from passing judgment, then the terrorists have, in effect, 'cut US off at the head,' emblematically, by 'decapitating' our entire political process. (Isn't that what they just did, after all, in Spain?)

Dear Mr. P., I've got news for you: Lots of people are dead. And lots more are going to die, too – especially if we don't decide what we're doing over there and quit caviling amongst ourselves. I'm not the one grilling Rumsfeld in front of the whole world, foes and all, to make a political point. Kennedy is. He needs to stop it, now.

You end by saying exactly what I was saying: Last week's witch-hunt in Congress only served our enemies and diminished us. The difference is: I very much doubt al Qaeda is reading my articles. But I'll guarantee you they were watching the hounding on TV last week.

Our military has a job to do. I say let them do it. But for God's sake, please: Let them come home first – before the Kennedy Quack Pack starts pecking them all to pieces.”

*Attribution withheld to protect the author's privacy. ▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is regularly featured on numerous web journals, including Opinion Editorials, Intellectual Conservative, ChronWatch, Men’s News Daily, Renew America, American Daily, and The Rant. She lives with her husband and cat in the New York City metropolitan area.

Off with Their Heads: Avenging Nick Berg

2004-05-14T20:15:00.000-04:00

By Karen H. Pittman
© May 14, 2003

If anyone in America “caused” the beheading of Nick Berg, it was those few sanctimonious, cynical Congressmen, like Teddy Kennedy, who were looking to “decapitate” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers – they are the ones with blood on their hands. Why, in time of war, could they not just accept the General’s plausible assertion that he sought to delay, not obstruct, the release of those photos from Abu Ghraib precisely in order to prevent such a “retaliatory” riposte?

Well, for one thing, that kind of responsible, forward-thinking behavior just isn't masochistic and self-flogging enough for these ruthless politicos forever stuck “in Saigon.” The ethos of suspicion they unwisely continue to embrace demands they never (so long as one of their own isn't Commander-in-Chief) trust their military; never attribute reasonable, just motives to the actions of U.S. military leaders; and never let slide an opportunity to undermine their political opposition.

They still don't get it – 9/11 has receded too far from memory, and 11/2 is drawing nigh. Crass politicking in time of war is not only dangerous: It's deadly. And as Rumsfeld has so astutely observed, "Weakness is provocative, not strength." Our public groveling is interpreted by our enemies as frailty. And so the grovelers, in truth, are far more to blame for "provoking" the death of Nick Berg than all the miscreants at Abu Ghraib put together.

And honestly, war is war: It’s ugly and brutal. In this age of watered-down, sanitized conflict, how conveniently we forget that war always carries with it the potential for warping the warrior. How else did the jihadists get that way? Their society has fully immersed itself in an orthodoxy of war: The blood bath has become a kind of bizarre cultural bubble bath, at once grotesquely celebratory and defiant. (Join us in the Jihad Jacuzzi!) Centuries of conflict, meshed with their ideology of hatred, have not only desensitized the Jihad warriors – they’ve dehumanized them, as well.

Those of us who refuse to cow-tow to the PC Brigade do not pretend to be surprised, however, that such things happen in the heat of battle. These “incidents” are as old as war itself. Who wouldn’t expect prison guards to succumb to the ever-present temptation to behave like animals, especially since the detainees they guard (in this case, terrorists) routinely behave like beasts? Is it any wonder, then, that those guards mimed acts of domestication and humiliation? Do those acts not symbolically suggest that those captives, those dogs, wanted taming? Should the leashes astonish us, really?

But we endlessly apoplectic, apologetic Americans aren’t supposed to say this. We’re supposed to feign amazement; we’re supposed to act appalled even when we’re not. After what we witnessed on 9/11, can these pictures really shock us? Does their gruesomeness rival, let alone exceed, the ghoulish imagery of splattered carcasses, with entrails smoldering, piled up outside the WTC, like so much fleshy refuse outside a slaughterhouse? Shouldn’t we be showing those photos, too? Shouldn’t we show the video of Nick Berg’s beheading? In a more fair, equitable world – a world less distorted by double standards – we would. But Teddy Kennedy and his cronies would have you believe that a grandiose, hysterical display of public outrage constitutes the only fit, politically correct way to respond to such “institutionalized” American “savagery.”

Not me. I’m discomfited, to be sure – but outraged? Not for a millisecond. After calling for Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s head, literally, I’m calling for Kennedy's, figuratively. The melodramatic tableau of American masochism he helped stage in Congress last week is even more sickening – and yes, outrageous – to my mind than all the “offensive” images gurgitating from that prison combined.

Is it masochistic of me to suggest we metaphorically behead the bad Congressional stewardship that brought us to the barbarity of Nick Berg’s death? Hardly. Without handicapping its fifth column during war, no embattled country can prevail. When the peace has been won, then there will be time aplenty, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, for endless revisions and re-revisions. But that glorious day will never dawn if we follow Kennedy’s cue and send J. Alfred Prufrock in to do Richard B. Myers’ job. After all, it is our soldiers, the men of action among us, men like Rumsfeld and Myers – not men like Kennedy – who make Prufrock’s peacetime ruminations possible.

And as for those who would connect the dots between Abu and Berg? Any casuistic attempt to do so is destined to fail, relying, as it does, on the silken thread of sophistry.

And as for the purple-throated pundits who roundly decry our “interrogation methods,” who extrapolate from this war-time incident an entire “culture” of condonation promulgated by the Department of Defense – a culture which not only condones, but facilitates and encourages Abu Ghraib? To these people, I say: Watch, if you can, the Ansar video. It’s worth all the words a falsely livid, holier-than-thou Teddy Kennedy can muster.

If it’s yourself you would know, in time of war, know first your enemy. If you don’t, all your golden conscientious objections will go unheard, and your silver self-scrutiny come to naught.

Remember: The Grim Reaper’s got a knife in his hands – and he’s plunging toward your jugular.▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is regularly featured on numerous web journals, including Opinion Editorials, Intellectual Conservative, ChronWatch, Men’s News Daily, Renew America, American Daily, and The Rant. She lives with her husband and cat in the New York City metropolitan area.

Conquering Clintonalgia

2004-04-02T19:21:00.000-05:00

By Karen H. Pittman
© April 2, 2004

Email . . . . Click, there it is: Instant propaganda served up on a platitude – somebody else’s (always somebody else’s) soupy thinking twice warmed over. Today's Baloney Du Jour arrives predictably canned and processed: Here in my micro(wave)chipped Inbox sits a refried dish "fresh" from Canada, telling me, a lawful American citizen, how I should vote “come election day.” It sours and stales as I read. I am duly informed that “President Bush’s economy” is a bust – the implication being, of course, that “Clinton’s” was a boom.

Ah, the poor benighted masses . . . so many ignorant folk who can't put two and two together to make four! When did our economic malaise begin? When did the recession begin? And what single spectacular event dramatically worsened that recession? Who sat on his thumbs (doing God-knows-what) for eight long years, thus allowing bin Laden to squirrel away and 9/11 to occur?

Partisan, passed-over Richard Clarke has nobody in the know fooled. What matters is not who failed to do what when, but who succeeds at doing what needs to be done now. We who live in this country who have good sense are not deceived. We endured eight inglorious years of Clintonia, and we know only too well when and how our problems began. We do not suffer from Clintonalgia (rabid and irrational nostalgia for the Clinton Years). (Frankly, that whole decade leaves a nasty taste in my mouth. It reeks of me-ism.) Those of us who were sober and not partying hardy in the nineties remember . . . and those of us who lost our savings in Bill's fraudulent bubble, his era of phony good feeling and "peace and prosperity" – well, we are not deluded into believing our troubles lay at the feet of one GWB (or anybody else, for that matter).

Do those who blame the Bush administration for our woes know nothing of history? Do they just not understand how governments and economies work? Do they think one president – any president – can just snap his fingers or twitch his nose and make jobs magically appear or disappear? Please. It’s enough to make you want to reply to those misguided senders with the following note attached: Engage me in serious dialogue and defend your fuzzy thinking if you dare – but say it out of your own mouth and with your own words and do your own darned math, thank you.

And what I want to ask them is this: Do they view each presidency in a vacuum, as if, standing alone, it is an island unto itself, capable of creating its own weather? Do they think today’s drought here bears no causal relation to yesterday’s flood there? Do they think the entire economy stops and starts anew every time Somebody Different takes the oath of office? Do they think those dark, nefarious plots hatched over five years ago deep in those dry Afghan caves suddenly withered into vague ineptitude because Somebody Else got elected? Do they think those terrorist training camps just folded up their tents and left town? Do they forget that before 9/11 there was 2/26/93, when the World Trade Center was first bombed?

Do they not know that before Fallujah there was Mogadishu?

Get real. It’s time we put our thinking caps on. This isn’t playtime anymore. In case these deluded old-timers still suffering from Clintonesia (cloudy recollection of the way things were, way back then, in the “good old days”) didn't notice, the bell rang loud and clear on 9/11. Recess is over. No, we are not all going to become techno-millionaires overnight, and planes really do drop out of the sky. Yes, people really do lose their jobs, and life, like Hillary, is a bitch. Get over it. Quit looking for Some Big Authority Figure to blame all your personal, individual misfortunes on. Everybody's got a sad story – and that's the hard truth.

But people are afraid of the truth. They'd rather nourish the lie. It's more comforting. Better to pay lip service to Bill Clinton's smooth blandishments than swallow George Bush's harsh medicinal dose of reality. If Clinton was a pacifier, then Bush is a paddle. Waaaah, waaaah. The truth hurts.

And, as we learned on the morning of 9/11, life is real, life is earnest – and wishing won’t make it so.

Just as Reagan paved the way for the prosperity of the nineties, so Clinton – by doing nothing and squandering that prosperity – paved a rough road for us all to walk in the new millennium. And GWB is walking it tall. He is paving the way for future generations of Americans who refuse to live in fear of falling towers and toppling stock markets, who've been around long enough to know the good times really don't roll forever, and who understand that nothing worth having comes easy. When Bush enters the Oval Office, he enters to work. Clinton entered to enter, to play.

Love him or loathe him, this President has at least restored the dignity long ago lost to that office. Clinton, on the other hand, diddled while the Twin Towers burned in Osama bin Laden's fevered brain.

To answer Reagan’s immortal question: Yes, I am better off than I was four years ago. My feet are firmly planted on terra firma, and for the first time in ages my eyes are open wide. My new house is made, not of glass, but of stone, bunker-style. Yet it’s my own piece of paradise, and no fools are allowed. Nowadays, I'm more apt to be engaged by FoxNews than chained to CNBC; I’m less interested in the sure picks on the stock market than in the weekly specials at the supermarket; and I’m no longer the NASDAQ's slave. Nor do I harbor the ludicrous hope that Technology is the Answer, that somehow computers make us immune to problems, that we can fix everything with a quick click of the mouse, and that all our boo-boos can be magically kissed away by the keyboard.

I trust the recovery precisely because it isn't a boom. Never again will I believe in excess. If it's too good to be true, it's a lie.

And that just about sums up the Clinton administration.

But . . . people will be weasels and cling to their lies. Like those huggie pillows we cuddle in bed, our warm-bodied tricks of self-deception make us feel snuggly and secure. And besides, the hot soft lie is so much sexier and whispers so much easier in the ear than the cold hard truth. Trouble is, the damned thing’s too mushy – it’s all fluff and hot air and down (if you're lucky). It won't put nearly as much solid distance between you and al Qaeda as an F-16.

You just can’t cuddle an F-16. ▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is regularly featured on numerous web journals, including Opinion Editorials, Intellectual Conservative, ChronWatch, Men’s News Daily, Renew America, American Daily, and The Rant. She lives with her husband and cat in the New York City metropolitan area.

I Believe: In Remembrance of Michael Kelly

2003-04-10T19:35:00.000-04:00

By Karen H. Pittman
© April 10, 2003

I am no one. I have nothing whatsoever to do with wars, with cataclysms, with apocalypse. I have never tread on desert soil, never traveled with the1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, never witnessed the massive American army rumbling. I have never watched an old man fall to his misshapen end. Yet the passing of Michael Kelly profoundly moves me.

In his last column posted from Iraq on April 3, 2003, the same day he was killed in a Humvee accident, the syndicated Washington Post columnist, editor-at-large of The Atlantic Monthly, and veteran correspondent of two Gulf Wars contemplated the jarring anonymity of death. Having come upon the “twisted” carcass of an “old man,” an Iraqi irregular, he clashed head-on with the meaninglessness of life in the dead dustbowl that is the desert. The corpse, with “his blood-matted gray hair . . . was lying on his back,” near the rapidly charring hull of one of Saddam Hussein’s many makeshift tanks, a truck’s “burning skeleton.”

Clearly, smoke wasn’t the only thing getting in Michael Kelly’s eyes . . . and the chalky odor that I imagine must have calcified his nostrils would in the end turn out to be just the ordinary, dry, nihilistic stink of death—not only the obvious death of the sad, sacked straggler he noted, but his own top secret one, lying in wait to ambush him just around the bend. I find his preternatural lingering over that lone soldier’s blood-smeared remains poignantly prescient. Not long after filing this terminal report, Kelly literally took a wrong turn—and wound up similarly undone in a Baghdad canal.

His journalistic reputation he sealed when things were livelier, way back in 1998, in a more cynical yet complacent time—a time when the national psyche was obsessed with nothing more urgent than an incumbent president’s sex drive (which was “urgent”—and obsessive—in the extreme) and whether or not the wild stock-market acceleration of the nineties would ultimately shape up to be a prickly “bubble” blown in a collective pique of “irrational exuberance.” Indeed, this was an era when Money only was Holy—and when, according to the administration’s (anything-but-) divine materialistic scheme, a secular trinity emerged, whereby Alan Greenspan was the all-knowing God; Bill Clinton a secondary, unfairly-crucified, admittedly flawed Christ-figure; and Ken Starr the oft-blasphemed Paraclete of Conscience.

Into this swollen blasmosphere (blasphemous atmosphere) Michael Kelly injected his ironic wit and savage moral grace. With one tiny but hugely influential column called “I Believe,” Kelly showed us the absurdity of the Clintonian creed. This he achieved by cleverly taking the president at his (literal) word. He wrote, in a plain-spoken style (which, oddly enough, anticipated George W. Bush’s) drenching with sarcasm, “I believe the president. I have always believed him. I believed him when he said he had never been drafted in the Vietnam War and I believed him when he said he had forgotten to mention that he had been drafted in the Vietnam War. I believed him when he said he hadn’t had sex with Gennifer Flowers and I believe him now, when he reportedly says he did.”

In “I Believe,” Michael rehabilitated us with his simple but powerful gospel, impossible to refute. “I believe the president has lived up to his promise to preside over the most ethical administration in American history. . . . I believe that The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, U.S. News & World Report, ABC, CBS, CNN, PBS and NPR are all part of a vast right-wing conspiracy. Especially NPR.”

Kelly’s writing hand was double-jointed; depending on the mood and the occasion, he could flex it in one of two opposing directions, by doing either the artful tango of poetry or the Funky Chicken of straight-talk. He could shuck-and-jive with the best of them.

Despite his elastic intelligence, however, he never allowed the curve of his polemic to arch too far over our heads. Even when straining for lyrical effect, he deliberately kept his rhetoric within reach. The same man who tartly and ironically labeled Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Monica Lewinsky “cheap tramp[s]” also told us of the Spartan aesthetic of war. Listen to the loveliness of this line, one of his last: “The tanks and Bradleys and Humvees [one of which—again ironically—would transport Michael Kelly to his death] and bulldozers and rocket launchers, and all the rest of the massive stuff that makes up the American army on the march, rumbled past him, pushing on.” It has a clean, spare, existential beauty.

Michael Kelly understood the army would march on without him, much as the Iraqi army marched on without that ragtag old soldier. He understood, too, that for as long as human history is writ, wars and rumors of wars will rumble on, pushing past antediluvian warriors upended in the desert, past the primed young reporters paused to gawk at them, and past marvelous Humvees absurdly drowned. War knows an inhuman, piston-like propulsion all its own.

In an April 5 tribute to his cut-down colleague, The Washington Post’s Ken Ringle beautifully mourned the character of the man whose written voice made us shiver: “In a professional universe too often peopled by shark-minded careerists with too many credentials and too little humanity, he was in many ways a kind of throwback to his father's generation of Irish-Catholic blue-collar newspapering. He delighted in journalism not for any illusion of status, but for the joy of language, the adventure of experiences and the chance to prod people into thinking.”

Amen, Ken. Thank God for Michael Kelly. Because of him, and others like him, ours is a less disillusioned, narcissistic age. I, like Michael Kelly—like Ken Ringle, like the countless people proselytized by Kelly’s pure prose—believe.

I believe in the man in the trenches, in the reporter who scraps for the story. I believe in the truthful journalist who believes in the truth. I believe in the foot soldier who believes in his cause, who toils in truth's trenches, and who is willing to die for what he believes. I believe in Michael Kelly.

Though I am no one, I offer my small, faraway sorrow. I offer my gratitude. I offer my prayers for all who have fallen—for those whose shimmering bylines we have known, like Michael Kelly’s . . . and for those whose names will go untold, who have silently died, in a world made loud with grief.▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is regularly featured on numerous web journals, including Opinion Editorials, Intellectual Conservative, ChronWatch, Men’s News Daily, Renew America, American Daily, and The Rant. She lives with her husband and cat in the New York City metropolitan area.

Wolf Men Don't Die

2003-04-09T19:43:00.000-04:00

By Karen H. Pittman
© April 9, 2003

Way back when, when I was a naïve, dreamy child of ten, my favorite song was John Lennon’s "Imagine." Weekends I would play that groovy, far-out record like crazy, singing at the top of my lungs. And I wasn’t just paying lip service, either – I was an obedient disciple, a true-blue dyed-in-the-wool believer who stood ready when the spirit moved to share the gospel according to John. Many were the times I held my eldest niece hostage to the good news, driving her nuts with my tone-deaf, teary repetitions . . . . Round and round I would go, matching revolution for dizzy revolution my staticky ultra-seventies’-style turntable.

Trouble is, unlike Lennon, I was the only one. My flair for running in circles aside, to my way of thinking it was my niece who was loopy, not me. What was the matter with her, anyway – and with all those matter-of-fact grown-ups who kept peering into my bedroom and squinting like I had two heads? Didn’t they get it? This guru-god with the goofy round gold-rimmed glasses knew the way. He was the (sha)man, man, the definitive hippy. Woman was the world’s slave – and peace? Well, everybody knew she was just a poor kid who couldn’t get a break.

Back then I was serious. I couldn’t understand why all those mad grown-ups running round loose in the world didn’t see what I saw. Of course war was bad. Were they insane? I mean, wasn’t it obvious? Did we really need to spell it out? Shouldn’t they be taking it for granted people aren’t supposed to go running around massacring each other? What in the world was wrong with them?

But then a funny thing happened on the way to eighteen: My body rebelled. I grew up, too. The metamorphosis didn’t take place overnight – I didn’t suddenly become a monster the way the Wolf Man did. I didn’t go to bed one evening a human being, then wake up the next morning flat on my back with cockroach-legs flailing. Instead, I watched in helpless horror as little by little, day by day, inch by inch, I turned into the enemy: I became my mother.

But that’s what growing up is, isn’t it – a slow, methodical, ruthless strangling of innocence. With each new disappointment, each fresh failure, each unresolved conflict, I learned the hard way that life is loss – from the moment we’re born the dying begins. I tried hard to imagine the world being the way I wanted, but it kept on being the way it was – it kept on doing the same old things it always did, and grown-ups kept on acting like grown-ups. The more time I spent daydreaming, the more time the world spent doing. I found precious little in common between Lennon’s imaginary world and the real one I lived in. Against my will, I learned the meanings of adult words like existential and angst, and Kierkegaard became God – not just another dopey grown-up with an impossible last name.

And some of those adults were insane. The “real” world was every bit as full of the same megalomaniacs and head-cases as the rendered one I read about in literature. In that lofty alter-world, Hamlet drove himself crazy with second-guessing, Othello fell for Iago’s line, and Oedipus, after committing parricide, gouged out his eyes. And then there were the outright villains, like Medea who murdered her babies, and those whose orotund names clashed at the crossroads of history and myth, like Cassius and Brutus, immortalized by Shakespeare for their brutal betrayal of Julius.

Studying the great tragedies taught me, to a degree life could not, how to accommodate misfortune – how to weave into my worldview a healthy skepticism such that hope, buoyed by cautious optimism, could still survive. By this adjustment, I avoided despair and the paralysis that goes with it. In a world where high expectations meet untimely and devastating ends, literary tragedy schooled me in the politics of reality. And this realpolitik is as old as tragedy itself, as ancient as civilization. One must either adapt to the human dilemma or go daffy. And no one – not peaceniks, not well-intentioned “human shields,” not well-heeled schoolgirls with wishing pennies wedged smilingly into their loafers – can escape the primal human need to make this uneasy appeasement with the way things are.

Hamlet is the archetype who most speaks to the twentieth-century mindset, to its predilection for severe and incapacitating “analysis paralysis.” He fathered the contemporary hand-wringing and pathological self-doubt that inform much of modern moral relativism. He was, above all, a man of reflection, not of action. But by thinking too long, he fretted away his hour on the stage – and when at last he took arms, it was too late: Everybody including his beloved Gertrude joined him in a jacuzzi of blood.

So, in a weird, roundabout way, every time I see those protesters waving their buoyant placards and chanting, “Give peace a chance,” I’m reminded of Hamlet and Othello and poor blind Oedipus. I remember Medea and Cassius and Brutus and Julius, too. I imagine Hamlet having his happy ending, Othello taking Desdemona’s word for it, and Oedipus getting that long-overdue radial keratotomy. I imagine John Lennon unfazed by Mark David Chapman’s bullet.

And I imagine I’m the Queen of England, too, or at the very least, the new Di. (Sigh.)

Here’s the thing: I wish there were no bogeymen in the world, I really do – the same way I wished there were no monsters and no Wolf Men. But Wolf Men really do exist – and worse still, they don’t die: they have to be destroyed. I really didn’t want those hard-headed cops to shoot Lawrence Talbot (and to this day I recoil when they do) – he was, after all, just another hapless grown-up who had begun life innocently enough, as a good kid with bad luck. But the common weal, the preservation of peace, exacted his particular death as its price. Talbot had to die, so others could live. And not just live, but live free – free of fear, free of terror, free of horror. It took horror to end horror. Peace was purchased with pain.

And good, sadly, is all too often born out of bad.

We can’t just sit back and let the Larry Talbots of this world run amuck. We, like those mad Brit Bobbies, have to do something, before it’s too late.

Even Henry Hull, The Werewolf of London, knew there was no getting around this. As he lay dying, he acknowledged his killers’ wisdom: “Thanks for the bullet; it was the only way.” ▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is regularly featured on numerous web journals, including Opinion Editorials, Intellectual Conservative, ChronWatch, Men’s News Daily, Renew America, American Daily, and The Rant. She lives with her husband and cat in the New York City metropolitan area.

Skewering Natalie Maines

2003-04-05T02:10:00.000-05:00

By Karen Hathaway Pittman
© April 4, 2003

I had no idea when I published my e-ssay “Goodbye Natalie: Dixie Chick Eats Crow,” I would be starting an e-storm. My Inbox got drenched! It seems most folks had serious trouble swallowing our drear Natalie’s chicken-little harangue against President Bush. Far and away, a majority of my readers disapproved. Many wrote to thank me for saying, saucily and succinctly, what they themselves could not. I received emails from people from all over the country, not just from the south; and sophisticates and blokes alike from as far away as Continental Europe (location unspecified) and Australia stopped to throw me an e-bone. One humorous writer even paused to tell me my “wordsmithing was so effective [he] was now allergic to poultry!”

Hatch-choo! Gesundheit.

Speaking of which . . . of the four or five negative e-rants I received, one was truly sautéed. Ominously titled “Goering,” it was blunt yet sharpened to epigrammatic point:

"I read your mindless puerile tirade against the Dixie Chick who erroneously labors under the misconception that she lives in a country where freedom of speech is actually practiced. Sieg Heil!"

And of course, in typical terrorist fashion, it delivered its deadly ammo anonymously.

In fact, those few antagonistic replies I drew all shared in common the same tenuous thread: That in exercising my right to free speech by ribbing Natalie Maines I was somehow robbing her of her right to free speech. In other words: It was perfectly okay for this unpatriotic pullet to flap her lips about President Bush—but not okay for me to flap mine about her.

Sorry, but that bird won’t fly. And here’s why:

Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences. The minute I open my mouth to declare an opinion on a controversial or divisive issue, I risk putting my foot in it—not because I live in a totalitarian state where all dissent is stubbed by a steel-toed boot—but because I live in a libertarian state where everyone is equally free to speak his mind. To put it plainly, freedom of speech does not mean freedom from criticism. Far from it: Freedom of speech draws, and by definition encourages, criticism.

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If my words invited scorn, Natalie’s invited ridicule. Surely she’s smart enough to know disparaging our president from a foreign podium is courting calumny. She had to realize she was risking financial loss, too, by ticking off her fan base, which disproportionately sees the world through George W. Bush’s red-white-and-blue prism. Word to the wise: Stepping into the political war zone is dangerous business, and anybody who dares trod that mine-strewn battlefield had best be prepared for the fallout.

Yours Truly included. And my broiling “Goering” fanatic as well (who, interestingly, heils—I mean, hails—not from the United States, but from Canada).

Disregarding altogether the singularly pertinent fact that Ms. Maines’ half-baked comments were not made in this country, I, of course, could resist skinning my poor correspondent alive no more than I could Natalie:

"By the way, you need a reality check. I suggest you take a week at Camp Saddam. Then you’d understand what true fascism is all about. You and your peace-at-all-costs comrades are the spoiled, ungrateful beneficiaries of true peace, which is always bought with someone else’s blood."

His Nazi slap is hard to miss. And so is his animus. Things aren’t going his way—so what does he do? Why, the politically permissible thing, of course: He skewers me because I skewered Natalie. He hectors me into not hectoring her.

I have a word for people like him, for these fascist pacifists—“fascifists.”

It’s not freedom of speech our would-be fascifist-patrolmen want—no: It’s freedom from censure. They want a bland, unegalitarian heaven which turns away conservatives at the gate. Here, official policy correctly exempts anti-American diatribes from judgment, whereas all rhetoric trafficking in frank patriotism is summarily condemned and dismissed derisively as red-neck-state "jingoism."

The fascifists want a Godless fairy-tale deep-fat fryer of a cosmos wherein the hawk, the dove, George Bush, Saddam Hussein, the writer, and the chicken all stew in one pot. But buyer beware—this pressure cooker heats unevenly: The hawk, George, and the writer are the only bits allowed to burn. ▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is regularly featured on numerous web journals, including Opinion Editorials, Intellectual Conservative, ChronWatch, Men’s News Daily, Renew America, American Daily, and The Rant. She lives with her husband and cat in the New York City metropolitan area.

Peter Panders

2003-04-03T22:09:00.000-05:00

By Karen H. Pittman
© April 3, 2003

Suddenly, it’s Never Never Land all over again: Fey war correspondent Peter Arnett magically appears on our TV screens, in medium bellum, waving his enchanted microphone and dispensing a lethal sprinkling of propaganda dust. Determined never to grow up, he conjures his own reverse reality and dream-weaves it with his hosts’, reminding us that, in this current Gulf conflict, as in the last, the United States is the conquering Captain Hook and the irrepressible Iraqi “insurgents” are the longsuffering but defiant Darling brood.

And he, Peter the (Great) Panderer, has come to save them from the plundering pirates of American Imperialism (and all that PC-jazz).

“The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance,” he declared Sunday on that selfsame embattled nation’s own state-run and military-muzzled TV.

Mouth fluttering more furiously than a pixie’s wings, he had still more talcum powder with which to dazzle us, claiming that “the American war planners” were postponing military action and “rewriting the war plan.” With a self-satisfied elfin hauteur, he played Puck to the Pentagon’s high-minded strategists, heaping a heaving oil-cloud of silica in their all-seeing eyes: “The . . . planners misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces,” he opined, causing the war-gamers to begin “reappraising the battlefield.”

Still another plume erupted from his sparking lips when he insisted that a “challenge to President Bush about the conduct of the war and . . . opposition to the war” was mounting here at home.

Well, I’ve got news for the news-man. Tinkerbell would have to sew my eyes with some serious desert sand for me to buy that bag of camel manure. All the nimble-mouthed fairies floating over San Francisco couldn’t make that dirt-clod stick.

Basically, all he was doing was writing the foe’s war plan for him, according to the rote but recognizable formula: Rope the US War Machine with the cobwebs of conscience by aggressively steering it toward civilian targets. Then gather the aggrieved mob round the mutilated Muslim dead (with a mosque in the background for added measure) to chant the charming incantatory rune, the product of simple incantatory minds: “Those dirty Zionist dogs and infidels, those evil American invaders.” As Mona Charen lamented, this folly alone merits him this week’s Most Useful Idiot Award. So, to the extent that he succeeded in crediting Iraq’s quintessential strategic M.O., Peter Arnett did once again “aid and abet the enemy.”

Frankly, I countered Arnett’s comments with—gasp!—not a gasp—but a long drawn-out yawn. Anyone who was even halfway awake during coverage of the first Gulf War knows the by-now-familiar Arnett litany: Accuse America, excuse Iraq. If nothing else, he should be booted out of the country for boring us to death. And for barefacedly glorifying himself.

Is Arnett a patriot? Certainly not. Is he a traitor, a Peter Arnold or Benedict Arnett? Probably not. The truth is, Peter “Benedict Arnold” Arnett’s only loyalty is to himself. His love is one, not of country or creed, but of career and greed. He comes from the Clinton school of shameless self-promotion and profession pandering.

Should anyone doubt Peter was simply pandering, let the mischief-making sprite speak for himself: “I’d like to say from the beginning that the twelve years I’ve been coming here, I’ve met unfailing courtesy and cooperation from your people and cooperation from the Ministry of Information.” He went on to add that Iraq has graciously granted him and other journalists “a degree of freedom which we appreciate.” Never mind that until Tuesday two reporters from New York-based Newsday were incarcerated (and fearful of imminent torture) by those selfsame liberal-minded information-loving Iraqis, and that countless others had been expelled. And one has to wonder: Why grovel in gratitude for their “cooperation,” let alone be dismayed by it, when he himself has done nothing but endorse their cause? Such blatant unctuousness is at the very least unseemly.

No one should question his ideology either, which runs, notwithstanding his fanciful cant to the contrary, firmly counter-war: “President Bush says he is concerned about the Iraqi people, but if Iraqi people are dying in numbers, then American policy will be challenged very strongly.” And here he made his most persuasive pro-Iraq case yet: “Our reports about civilian casualties here, about the resistance of the Iraqi forces, are going back to the United States. It helps those who oppose the war when you challenge the policy to develop their arguments.”

Please. This is just a tired retread of the same old 1991 yellow journalism. And if his statement about contesting US policy is true, then he has effectively boxed himself into his own anti-war corner.

And if anyone wonders whether personal politics plays a role in any of this, let him wonder no more. Arnett settled that score forevermore when he announced in the April 5 issue of TV Guide, “I was furious with [CNN founder] Ted Turner and [then-CNN chairman] Tom Johnson when they threw me to the wolves after I made them billions risking my life to cover the first Gulf War.” He piped his one worn tune: “Now they [Turner and Johnson] are gone, the Iraqis have thrown the CNN crew out of Baghdad, and I'm still here. Any satisfaction in that? Ha, ha, ha, ha.”

But alas, that “satisfaction,” like fairyland, was not long lived. Peter has been swatted out of Never Never Land for pandering. Ha, ha, ha, ha.

To its credit, despite initially defending him, MSNBC quickly did an about-face and canned him—canned him like the bad re-run he is. To which Arnett responded, in “true” turncoat-style, by offering this floury-fine but make-believe apology: “I want to apologize to the American people for clearly making a misjudgment by giving an interview to Iraqi television.” Notice what he didn’t say. Notice he didn’t say he was sorry for what he said—he said he was sorry for where he said it, on Iraqi satellite TV. Notice he characterizes his decision to grant the interview as a “misjudgment”—yet he dares not question his own analysis of the campaign. In plain Peter Panders-speak: He’s not sorry he reached into the cookie jar—he’s just sorry he got caught.

And what-do-you-know but the very next day, when an anti-war London tabloid tagged him to be its propaganda mouthpiece, he proved himself a fickle imp indeed, by reversing his fantastic course mid-flight: “I report the truth of what is happening here in Baghdad and will not apologize for it.”

His latest employer, The Daily Mirror of London, quipped, “Fired by America for telling the truth.” Wrong. Fired by America for incensing Americans by the millions—and more to the point, fired by MSNBC for alienating its audience (which, not incidentally, pays his bills). Would this be the same penchant for “truth” that got him axed by CNN in 1998 for falsely accusing the U.S. military of sarin-gassing its own deserters in ca. 1970 Laos? Would this be the same penchant for “truth” that in 1991 prodded him to accuse the Gulf War coalition of deliberately targeting a civilian facility by bombing a baby milk factory?

Canadian commentator John McKay most succinctly summed up the firestorm surrounding Arnett’s actions as “the media equivalent of a friendly-fire incident.” He then mourned the veteran correspondent as the “first casualty” of the subterranean war brewing between the media and the military.

Arnett swears he cut his journalistic teeth on the dirty truth. He swears he’s only telling the tonsured head of the American monster what it doesn’t want to hear about its unshorn underbelly. Well, now, the great (unwashed) maw of America has told him. Maybe the native New Zealander will renounce his U.S. citizenship and move to Iraq. But if the country which has repudiated him proceeds to “occupy” and then liberate that mythic nation of united “freedom fighters,” resolute in its love of Saddam, then he’ll have no choice but to settle for second-best—ChIraq . . . er, um, France.

Or better yet, Never Never Land. ▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is regularly featured on numerous web journals, including Opinion Editorials, Intellectual Conservative, ChronWatch, Men’s News Daily, Renew America, American Daily, and The Rant. She lives with her husband and cat in the New York City metropolitan area.

Booing for Columbine

2003-03-27T20:05:00.000-05:00

By Karen H. Pittman
© March 27, 2003

Opinions. They’re like assholes—everybody’s got one. But fortunately, not everybody is one. And not everybody gets to flaunt his in front of the cameras, either. Not every asshole gets to air his opinions before a worldwide audience.

Not so for f(l)atulent Hollywood director Michael Moore, who made a colossal bung-hole out of himself Sunday night at the Oscar’s. Boo. Shame on you—Michael Moore.

On the same day Iraqi television and Al Jazeera trotted out their titillating images of our soldiers’ bodies heaped like butchered cattle in a makeshift morgue, Mr. Moore, the creator of Bowling for Columbine, stepped to the storied podium and rolled his audience a hook ball, calling the Commander-in-Chief the hawker of a “fictitious war.”

Tell that to the troops boiling in the desert. Tell that to the POWs shackled and beaten. Tell that to the next of kin. Tell that to our brave boys stockpiled in their own spoor.

Michael Moore should know, since he inhabits his own fictitious universe—since fiction, masquerading under the banner of “non-fiction,” is his shock-in-trade. Moore dwells in that dim, ominous alley between his ears, where everybody’s bowling for coup d'état. In Mike’s (Warped) World, nobody but Charleton Heston put those guns in Eric Harris’ and Dillon Clebold’s hands. In Mike’s (Wacked-out) World, the Empire of the United States is just arrogant enough and imperialistic enough and evil enough and corrupt enough and stupid enough and self-serving enough to bomb the smithereens out of the Middle East, simply because it can—and here is where it gets really sinister—because (are you ready for this?) oil greases “Mr. Bush’s” greed. (Troops amass on the horizon, in the manner of Leni Riefenstahl. Enter bovine director, who, with bush-y brows furrowed, lows, “Fade to black, the color of crude . . . .”)

What’s truly amazing is Moore’s idiotic presumption that one stupid white man named George (not to be confused with one stupid white man named Mike) could hoodwink more than half a nation into following his fiction. And how in the world this one stupid man could ever convince, through arguably “failed” diplomacy, the leaders of some forty-odd nations to collude with him in his cozy conceit is beyond me—and apparently beyond feeble-minded Mike, too. How they all managed to keep it under wraps “Mr. Moore” never stoops to explain.

Indeed, his remarks trade on the paranoid conspiracy-theory mentality patented in celluloid by Oliver Stone. That somehow this activist-auteur could, in his wildest Hollywood dreams, delude himself (let alone us) into thinking this war is an elaborate falsehood some 75 percent of the American public is gullible enough to buy exceeds this commentator’s powers of comprehension. Oil, you dumb herd, oil. It’s all about oil. That—and a “fictitious election.”

The only thing that’s fictitious here is Moore’s wobbly interpretation of reality. What it’s really all about, for him, is revenge. He rolled his one straight ball of the night when he brought up the 2000 election debacle—the sheer mention of which, given its mammoth irrelevance, belied his true intent: To avenge Al Gore. Vengeance is mine, saith Michael Moore. Vengeance will be mine in 2004.

However, not even Herr Moore’s antics could keep the event from degenerating into a massive bore. The boos were by far the best part, even better than the booze I was chortling to get me through. (Hate to break it to you, Mike, but there were more than “five loud” voices in that chorus. And “the hall” wasn’t even remotely “split,” since it overwhelmingly rejected you.) Those jeers ringing in The Kodak Theatre were anything but fictitious, as was the generic sentiment, post-show, that Michael Moore should have kept his fat trap shut. I guess all that Columbine-hoopla and Hollywood-hype gave him the big head. Flush with his own trumped-up victory, he lost touch with the reality around him: Namely, that nobody, even the solid constituents of the Los Angeles Left, when blinded by the smog of war, really gives a damn what the Director of Diddly says. Next to those corpses rotting in Baghdad, even he looked petty.

So, his most salient achievement of the evening was no small feat: He actually managed to make himself look small—very small indeed.

And his borderline behavior begs the cliché—he made a gigantic fool of himself. He way overshot his mark. And meanwhile, clutched in his fatted, gesticulating hand, Oscar wept infinitesimal red, white, and blue tears.

I suppose we should congratulate ourselves that no one was paying any attention whatsoever to his attire. Still, some of his compatriots (and I use the word ironically) injudiciously persisted in their sartorial vanity. It’s high time Moore and his rarified set unpinched their bronzed schnozzes and inhaled something not white for a change, like cow dung. They should stop and smell the carnations rotting on all those caskets in New York, Washington, and Shanksville. In this all-too-real post-911 world (would that September 11 were a “fiction” worthy of Spielberg), their superficiality, like last year’s hemline, is worse than démodé—it’s downright immodest.

In the season of war, who cares what Nicole Kidman wore? Camouflage is in. Cardin is out.

And Moore is far out.

Let’s just see if he can pull this ball out of the gutter. In the meantime, we want him to know we’re keeping score. ▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is regularly featured on numerous web journals, including Opinion Editorials, Intellectual Conservative, ChronWatch, Men’s News Daily, Renew America, American Daily, and The Rant. She lives with her husband and cat in the New York City metropolitan area.

Shock-and-Awe: No Summer Camp in Maine

2003-03-24T02:18:00.000-05:00

By Karen H. Pittman
© March 23, 2003

It was a terrible beauty—a global fireworks display gone haywire, a surfeit designed to daze. It was, in the words of Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Charles Krauthammer, an “immaculate destruction.” It was beautiful and terrible, friendly and hostile, passive and aggressive, peaceful and brutal. It was horrible—but it was also, in its own way, humane.

As humane as war ever can be.

Shock-and-awe is the 21st-century American military’s answer to the world’s call to conscience. It’s the proving ground where technology marries psychology—where resistance dissolves, in a flash, to surrender. And, in an era of sanitized conflict, it’s the “feel-good” way to wage war. Crudely put, it’s the bomb.

Think about it: In a blink, an ancient, atavistic, third-world antagonism combusts before our very eyes—smack-dab in the middle of our super-powered living rooms! In one night, a centuries-old conflagration goes up in smoke. The coffin collides with the cradle; the end converges with the beginning; and the death of civilization smolders in the very valley where civilization was born.

Democracy detonates totalitarianism deep in the desert's doldrums.

Put simply: This is the TV generation’s rendition of Greek tragedy. From our easy chairs, far removed, we watch the drama as it unfurls in bursting red-orange infernos; we recoil, and yet – battered masochists! – we keep coming back for more. We can't look away. We feel threatened but somehow safe – secure and comfortable in the knowledge that this abject horror which touches us cannot actually hurt us. And this is what suckers us in.

Shock-and-awe is a gigantic, carefully orchestrated automobile wreck, a colossal spectacle intended to teach. We are both drawn to and repelled by it. And in spite of its inherent contradictions, we cope. We manage, no matter how awful the awesomeness of the shocks, to tolerate them, because they seem to us to constitute both a credible, acceptable response to despotism and an anodyne to guilt.

With shock-and-awe, we've finally found a way to confront terrorism without tempting remorse. We can wake to peace tomorrow, having slept soundly through tonight.

And we can exercise our military muscle – without harming anyone, really. We can purge ourselves of our pent-up, percolating, post-9/11 rage without at the same time becoming the bullies we abhor. We can defeat our foe without falling into his psychological trap by turning into him. We get to play like the bad guys without really being the bad guys.

And this just plain makes us feel better.

And let’s face it: all wars, even just ones, carry with them the huge emotional price tag of guilt. And it’s guilt that makes us fear our own might. It’s guilt that makes America grovel. It’s guilt that greases the anti-war machine.

But guilt has no place in foreign policy. It paralyzes the intellect and freezes the will. It prevents the kind of bold, authoritative decision making that leadership, in times of crisis, requires. And it ends, ultimately, in suicide.

So, with that first day of shock-and-awe, President Bush and his war council doubtless made at least a few converts out of those many skeptics who had been sitting silently on the sidelines, watching intently for proof of our fault. The military achieved its mission on two fronts: In the particular war against Saddam Hussein, and also in the wider-ranging war for the hearts and minds of the undecided.

We were shocked. We were awed. We were humbled.

And most importantly, we were persuaded, at least a little—by a lot. ▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is regularly featured on numerous web journals, including Opinion Editorials, Intellectual Conservative, ChronWatch, Men’s News Daily, Renew America, American Daily, and The Rant. She lives with her husband and cat in the New York City metropolitan area.

Goodbye Natalie: Dixie Chick Eats Crow

2003-03-20T19:58:00.000-05:00

By Karen H. Pittman
© March 20, 2003

If children and chicken must always be pickin’, then I suppose Natalie Maines’ remarks before a London audience last week should come as no surprise. The ditsy blonde centerpiece of the country music trio known as The Dixie Chicks lambasted President Bush by shamelessly pandering to the anti-war crowd, “Just so you know [wink, wink; nudge, nudge], we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas."

Well, Ms. Maines, we’re ashamed you’re from America! And Texas is very, very ashamed of you.

As if on cue, these comments sent feathers flying in the country-music coop, prompting the offending Chick to post a clarification “statement” (chicken-squawk for “apology”) on her website: “As a concerned American citizen, I apologize to President Bush because my remark was disrespectful. I feel that whoever holds that office should be treated with the utmost respect.”

Mad as a wet hen, Ms. Maines went on to observe, too late, “We are currently in Europe and witnessing a huge anti-American sentiment as a result of the perceived [emphasis mine] rush to war . . . . I love my country. I am a proud American.”

Well, maybe so—but is adding to that anti-American sentiment the proper way for a “proud American” to address it? With all due respect, her behavior on that London stage was neither proud nor American.

Apology or no, the furor, rightly, rages. Country music great Travis Tritt had his own bone to pick with this particular Dixie Chick: "I think the comments were made primarily because it was in front of an audience that agreed with them. But I think if you make those statements over there versus over here it is sort of cowardly and I think it was a cheap shot."

And Tritt astutely adjudged the popular sentiment prevailing stateside about such celebrity “punditry”—i.e., that, by going off half-cocked, these beaky, half-baked entertainers only end up embarrassing themselves (and us) by giving the impression, rightly or wrongly, that they are in fact anti-American. And worse still, their treacly chicken-bock trickle persuades foreigners we all feel the way they do. And nothing could be further from the truth.

Tritt also advises us on how to get even: "The best way to get an entertainer's attention is to hit them in their pocketbooks," he said. Cha-ching.

And so, in tandem with Tritt’s truism, it would seem the chickens are indeed coming home to roost: Dixie’s no longer whistling along! Country music radio stations throughout the Bubba Belt are plucking The Chicks’ songs, one by one, from their playlists; and, in Ms. Maines’ shame-stricken home state, a defiant mob, some 200-strong, brazenly took to the streets—faces red with anger, not with humiliation—to riot, tractordozing the trio’s CDs.

Alas: This chicken is now getting her axe in the backside—right where her wallet goes. Our fowl-mouthed Ms. Natalie (that’s French, isn’t it?) would do well to remember: the pockets from whence she feeds are filled with more than mere chicken-corn. Take away these rich grains and—Voila!—we have this dippy chick rather suddenly, and alarmingly, crying, “Fowl!”

The bottom line: Natalie Maines of The Dixie Chicks got too big for her tarty Tex-ass britches. She reckoned she had outgrown the humble brood that just three years ago laid her like a platinum egg. This created a false sense of security in her, and it was this twiggy conceit that tweaked her into turning her back on the very people who had made her European podium available to her in the first place. She chose, foolishly, to ally herself with the losing team—the tony, fair-weather West End set, for whom chicks are golden geese.

Wrong choice. And now, with her popularity going to seed, Ms. Maines is learning, first-claw, what Saddam Hussein soon will: That payback, like war, is hell—and it respects no living things, be they gods, generals, tyrants, or chick-taters!

The newly-contrite chickadee offered this scratchy defense: “I feel the President is ignoring the opinions of many in the U.S. and alienating the rest of the world.” Funny. That’s just what she did. She ignored the opinions of many in the U.S. (principally in the southern U.S.), and worse, she alienated her own audience—all in someone else’s sandbox!

Clearly, hard-core country music fans, themselves hard-core patriots with deep roots in Texas soil, don’t want to hear another peep out of this squeaky biddy.

And into this muck-raked dirt I dare, devoid of any shame whatsoever, scratch my name and plant my kernel: Stupid clucking (c)hick. She should stick to what she knows—rednecks named Earl.

Goodbye . . . Natalie. (Or should that be “adieu?”) ▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is regularly featured on numerous web journals, including Opinion Editorials, Intellectual Conservative, ChronWatch, Men’s News Daily, Renew America, American Daily, and The Rant. She lives with her husband and cat in the New York City metropolitan area.

Je Suis Américain

2003-03-19T02:23:00.000-05:00

By Karen H. Pittman
© March 18, 2003

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

- John McCrae

In one of many memorable scenes from the 1962 World War II film classic The Longest Day, Red Buttons’ affable American GI is shown waiting to be deployed from an Allied military transport plane. Contemplating the French hornets’ nest now almost directly below him, he clings to his parachute as if for dear life, chanting out loud, “Je suis américain, je suis américain.” He wields his nationhood as a warrior’s shield and portent of his noble purpose: “Je suis américain”—“I come in peace; my fire is friendly.”

And in the United Nations last Friday French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin flouted that immense American good will. He made a mockery of the Normandy dead, whose bones cry aloud to be moved to more hospitable soil.

Congress is now considering appropriating funds to do just that: To bring these brave lost souls back home, where they belong. I hope our legislature will follow through. Radical as this gesture may prima fascia seem, it would nonetheless go a long way toward showing France we haven’t forgotten, if she has.

I’m guessing Monsieur de Villepin was little more than a snot-nosed enfant terrible when our anonymous American solider, as portrayed by Buttons, got his para-pants caught on that jagged French spire. And I’m guessing, too, that many, if not most, of those Frenchmen roiling dans les rues de Paris for peace-by-propitiation have all but forgotten how their kinsmen rolled over when the panzers rolled in. And I’m pretty sure Jacques ChIraq is thoroughly blasé about the whole affair.

But liberty is long if gratitude is short, and Monsieur de Villepin’s stunningly poor turn at the UN round table was bought and paid for with American servicemen’s blood. It was purchased by the seat of some Unknown Yank’s pants. And, as one email I received this week reminded me, it was met with an avalanche—a virtual “earthquake” occasioned by “the 56,681 dead American soldiers buried in French soil rolling over in their graves.”

I doubt even the Richter scale could register fully the formless outrage that some Americans—particularly veterans of the last Great War and those of us who, in these dark days of dying diplomacy, can’t help wearing our big hearts a shade too obviously on our gingham sleeves—feel toward our “oldest ally,” France.

But I am here to give words to that feeling, shape to that rage, and voice to that silenced GI. I am the wounded soul of America. Je suis américain. Shame on you, Dominique de Villepin.

So oui, Monsieur le Ministre, I am that airborne American soldier. I am your half-remembered father, your ill-requited scout. I am your freedom fighter.

I stormed your beaches so your fellows could frolic there; I seized your bridges so they could freely cross. Je suis américain, Monsieur de Villepin.

I lie in Normandy so you can lie in your UN easy chair. Je suis américain, Monsieur de Villepin.

I come—when I come—fortified with peace. I come, not to occupy, but to set free. Je suis américain, Monsieur de Villepin.

I made your perfidy possible. I shall never forget. Je suis américain, Monsieur de Villepin . . . je suis américain. ▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is regularly featured on numerous web journals, including Opinion Editorials, Intellectual Conservative, ChronWatch, Men’s News Daily, Renew America, American Daily, and The Rant. She lives with her husband and cat in the New York City metropolitan area.

The Garafalo Fallacy

2003-02-24T02:27:00.000-05:00

By Karen H. Pittman
© February 23, 2003

Janeane Garofalo, the by-now well-known comedienne, principal spokesperson for Win Without War, and heretofore-unknown foreign policy wunderkind, declares, “There is no evidence that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.” Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst, that most articulate of anti-war pundits, emotes, “I wish this war would go away!” (Word to Durst: I wish Saddam Hussein, like poverty and hunger, would “go away,” too—but he won’t.)

Let’s see now . . . let’s see if I’ve got this straight. The frontperson for WWW says we needn’t worry about Saddam’s WMD (since he has none). The lead singer for an alternative rock band who scored big a few years back with “Nookie” states the obvious: That war is undesirable.

Hum. Well—I don’t know about you, but that’s enough for me: I’m sold. The troops can turn around now. Colin Powell, who need no longer tote the weary diplomatic load, can rest his pipes. Bush can shrink back into his pre-9/11 unimpressive self. Ms. Garofalo has spoken. Mr. Durst has emoted. The threat is nil. War is an unnecessary bugbear we can beat back with hope. Everything is ebony-and-ivory and really, really simple—so simple even celebrities can understand it. If we will just heed their words of wisdom, then all will be, if it isn’t already, well with the world. Kumbaya.

Not.

In a bizarre intersection of Hollywood and Alexandria, as if in a surreal episode of “Valley Girl Meets CIA Analyst,” Ms. Garofalo contends that “lots of countries” are “going nuclear”—while simultaneously implying that Saddam can be trusted not to do the same. (Remember, according to JG, SH has no WMD—let alone NW. One can’t help but wonder if, in Ms. Garofalo’s linguistic universe, “going nuclear” is anything like “going ballistic.”) And Durst dares stump on a platform no one gave him. In his low-level lingo, I ask, “Whut up wid dis?”

“Dis” is, at best, willful perverse wishfulness on the part of the Hollywood contingent. And “dis” is, at worst, political obstructionism of an unusually contrary hue. “Dis” is more about George Bush than Saddam Hussein; "dis" is more about Democratic Hollywood’s deep-rooted resentment of the newly-empowered Republican electorate than about its ideological aversion to war. “Dis” is still about Florida, 2000. And “dis” is definitely about 2004.

Small wonder Ms. Garofalo wears glasses; indeed, her worldview, as expressed in her controversial interview with the Fox News Channel’s Brian Kilmeade, is as myopic as her attitude is defensive. Even cursory examination of Win Without War’s thesis points to appalling polemical deficiencies. Ms. Garofalo would have us believe that she and her WWW cronies have figured out what the best minds in all the Washington think tanks combined these past dozen years could not: How to win this “war” without a war! The star of The Truth About Cats and Dogs claims we can outfox the fox by continuing with sanctions and inspections. (Maybe that’s why she confused “Operation Desert Storm” with “Operation Desert Fox.”) If so, then why is Saddam still slobbering over his bone of weapons caches?

I tell you, it’s enough to make a thinking person go postal. Get real, Janeane: You cannot teach an old dog new tricks—and besides, it’s not like we haven’t been down this road, like, seventeen or eighteen times already. (Duh.)

No, I, for one, am not swallowing Ms. Garofalo’s “give peace a chance” pabulum. Peace has had its chances. And judging from her glib back-handed defense of Saddam, this “activist” actress, together with her media-savvy co-conspirator Dan Rather (who needs a ratings boost as badly as Janeane needs a hit film), is neatly tucked away in Saddam’s dirty back pocket.

And, as if that weren’t bad enough, she’s missing the most obvious point: The surest way to "win without war" is for Saddam to step down! (Maybe she should whisper that sweet nothing in his ear next time.) By even suggesting we give this career recidivist another “chance” to backslide, she’s serving his purpose—the same way Western liberals did Lenin’s when they argued his cause for him unawares. Wittingly or not, intelligent or not, this movie-poster-child for the pro-Iraq peace movement is offering herself up as a very “useful idiot” indeed. (Maybe, if we’re lucky, Saddam will choke on one of his stogies while he’s chortling.) And as far as I can tell, if Ms. Garo knows she’s Hussein’s hussy, she doesn’t give a damn; in Durst-speak, she’s “down wid it!”

In truth, the fallacy upon which Win Without War’s strategy is predicated is this: When all is said and done, Ms. G and her crusading PC-cohorts believe—not because the evidence suggests they should, but because they want to—that victory can be achieved at little or no cost, either in terms of casualties or sacrifice. But winning without war is like succeeding without work (a notion Hollywood would understandably cherish)—and when the stakes are this high, it cannot be done. Ms. Garofalo would have us forget that human blood was spilled when those jets divebombed into those Towers. And she would hoodwink us into hoping that a just retribution can be “won” without peril, without human loss.

Indeed, this fallacy informs much of the current anti-war unrest. Decades of floundering in a philosophical quagmire of moral relativism and political correctness have lulled us into the complacent notion that nothing in this world is worth fighting and dying for—not even the human rights of a brutally repressed Iraqi people, or, for that matter, the lives of 3,099 innocents, of divers nationalities, who were slaughtered in the 9/11 massacre.

But ours is a pivotal epoch, and the tide of human history may well turn on our readiness to act now, before it’s too late. Indeed, it is difficult to overstate just how important the decisions we make today will loom tomorrow. As Mark Twain wisely observed, “In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be brave.”

I do not marvel, then, that Mr. Bush, who in this hour of grave change has shown admirable bravery, is scorned and even hated in some circles. Nor does the irony escape me that Ms. Garofalo and Mr. Durst exercise their right to publicly scorn him at a cost of nothing to themselves. But defending their privilege to do so will soon cost precious American service men and women their lives.

We are now in the midst of just such a sea change as Twain described. The events of 9/11 altered forever the fabric of foreign affairs. The prior geopolitical norms of containment and deterrence are dead. Those who, like Ms. Garofalo and Mr. Durst, refuse to recognize this change risk idling, however freely, along the periphery of history. And those who, like President Bush and Colin Powell, not only recognize it, but embrace it, will make history.

I, for one—with no apologies to Hollywood—will do my part to help make it. ▪

Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is regularly featured on numerous web journals, including Opinion Editorials, Intellectual Conservative, ChronWatch, Men’s News Daily, Renew America, American Daily, and The Rant. She lives with her husband and cat in the New York City metropolitan area.

"Donor"

2001-10-18T01:42:00.000-04:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 1994

To be good,
You must be willing to donate your blood.

Without it, your poem will die;
The lines will shrivel up and dry . . .

Quieting that tired yacker's flimflam
That hacks and hacks: I am, I am.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing.

"HuaDe"*

2001-04-28T20:47:00.000-04:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 2001

Thought he could walk on water;

He believed his money had bought her;
But she learned, just in time, that HuaDe

Never really could walk on water.

* Author’s Note: “HuaDe,” pronounced “who-wad-a,” means “water” in Chinese.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing.

"The Flight of the Diva"

2001-04-08T01:40:00.000-04:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 2001

Hitting the high note, you
Solo with warbling wings.
O how the heaven sings!
The instrumental blue

Arias of the stars
Pipe soprano in bars.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing.

"Since You Came"

2001-04-06T01:56:00.000-04:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 2001

The sun shines a little brighter;
The birds tweet a little sweeter;
I walk a little lighter;
I hum a neater meter.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing. You may contact her at ltpkhp@aol.com.

"How to Be a Writer"

2001-04-06T01:54:00.000-04:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 2001

You just . . .
Lay your ear to the sound and listen . . . .

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing.

"Lithobid 300"

1997-03-24T01:36:00.000-05:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 1997

It was my rite in those days to take – a bit
tastelessly, I must admit –
a pinch of pink salt
with each of my three
with each of my three
with each of my three
sodium-cured feasts
(I must feed the moody beast):

whereupon wave after wave of nausea
soon would suck me under;
it was as if
Parkinson's had palsied my hands,
they shook so –
and I grew still,
lethargic,
and fat as a cat
after the kill.
I slept the sleep of the dead
in my sweat-sopped bed:
my sheets and pillowcases reeked of salt.
My head
ached as if clamped in a vise,
and my hot temples flared.
Sick and tired, I dozed
whole weeks away . . .
while the eyes of the blind
in my window
never opened,
never once
in all that slowed-down time
saw the light of day.

Nightly then I rose
from my unmade tomb, a zombie:
mouth-gate swinging wide, I ate my way
through ennui
and stayed almost as thirsty
as a sot in a liquor store.
I could not catch my breath.

When I couldn't take it anymore . . .
I uncorked my small beer
and drank myself to death.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing. You may contact her at ltpkhp@aol.com.

"Alcoholic"

1997-03-04T23:05:00.000-05:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 1994

Thirsty . . . I am always thirsty . . .
Not for want of love or water,
But for something else the matter . . .
To slake my dried-out marrow maybe . . . .

Take last Saturday night:
In the loud pub, I fidgeted, sober and afraid;
Like kids on swings, the goblets swayed,
As the brass-plated T-back
Of the beer dispenser staggered,
Drunk, in the grey-black
Intoxicating mirror . . . .

For no love of my face, I hid,
Seeing but unseen,
Behind the hunched shoulders of the cash machine,
As the bartender slid
A soaked tankard buzzing by me –

Then . . . trembling, my delirious fingers strayed
To that blushing, fleshy bottle of oblivion
I’d warred all night to resist –
Oh, lust! It was useless!
Shamelessly I pawed it . . .
Then, like a fool, I went and bought it.

Under the influence
Of that three-sheeted wind whipping under me,
I floated high and free . . .
And when I stood up to walk,
I wasn’t the same,
But some
Sylph, hewing a drunken chalk!
Oh, I felt immensely taller and lighter
And wore my napkin like a miter.

I toppled, a tad too tipsy,
Then tipped the bartender a fifty.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing. You may contact her at ltpkhp@aol.com.

"Channeling Lord Byron"

1997-01-29T20:19:00.007-05:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 1997

Lord of the Fleas,
I'll be damned if I can tell
My way out of this ripening hell,

This spittle in the middle of no-man’s land, this Me-So-Lonely.
How in God's name did I end up like this? – fagged-out in this fruity mucous –
A lame lord of a mosquito-manor, where nobody loves me but Loukas ...

Back then, a player in London's House of Hordes, I learned
The hard way just how savage those nobles could be:
At first, pretending not to see

My infirmity or hear my curses,
Those hoary old biddies
And over-ranked sons of bitches

In their gilt closets burned
For my outcast, bad-boy verses;
And lolling in the Childe's song,

For one fleet, sweet season, I could do no wrong.
But that whole affair did not last long.
My old Lady saw to it: she went and ruined it for me,

By finally getting wise: a woman spurned,
She dared to air my decomposing bones for all the world to see.
And that was when they burned me, to the third degree.

After they exposed me, funny
How not even one of them invited me to tea:
From behind barred doors, they glared stony-eyed at me . . .

Until finally, weary of the scrutiny,
A bored Lord of the Lies, I couldn't help sneering –
They were all a bunch of God-damned brown-nosed buggers, leering,

And still, when they thought no one was looking, they wolfed me dry.
They were the real animals. Aye,
Not I. But . . . when I was young and spry,

My fruit was ripe and blue,
My heart a prune,
Raw and red, a never-healing combat wound.

After many wrong years,
On Lake Geneva, I tried my warped tune
In the echoing chamber of Percy's pure,

Perfectly-pitched ear,
While in private poor,
Queer

Polidori*, the dear,
Nursed my raw club and poulticed my constantly oozing tears.
My wits I long ago ditched in Persia,

Where I foolishly allowed one vain, urbane, determined,
Tyrant with a serpentine turban**
To have his bloody way:

Never really believing he would stray that way,
I dared not turn my hard, heartless host away –
And he wasted me, all right, and to this day I rue that.

Still, night after night, there I would be . . .
Stretched out on his splayed, spotted cat . . .
Appalled that I could do that . . . .

And then I up and left my heart in Missolonghi,
Buried under a tree.
The rest belongs to St. Mary.***

* Byron's effete personal physician and poetaster, who formed part of his entourage.

** Ali Pasha, the cruel military ruler of the Ottoman Empire, whom the poet visited by invitation in 1809, while writing Childe Harold: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Pasha.

*** According to legend, Byron's heart was buried under a tree in Missolonghi, Greece, where he died of fever in the revolt of the Turks. His remains, turned away by Westminster Abbey, were then interred at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottingham.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning writer who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing. You may contact her at ltpkhp@aol.com.

"Hook, Line and Sinker"

1994-11-11T17:55:00.006-05:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 1994

for my father, a fisherman

You sank so deep I'll never find you.
When you dropped out of sight like a thrown stone,
You left a score of songs behind you:

“Boop-boop-diddum-daddum-waddum-choo,
Three little fishies and the mama fish too” –
But Papa, need I remind you?

Those fishes and their mama are missing you.
Who with his hooks baited lured you?
Singing “catch me if you can,” you

Tackled the deep blue sea
For mama, sissy, bubba, me . . . .
Now your dead skin drops like scales in the sink.

Now you lie in that covered tin and stink.
Growing up, I copied you with every stroke and squirm.
Must I, too, gulp that worm?

The night you went down, I saw it all:
Swimming in circles,
I stared out my drowning eye,

Casting about as I watched you die.
Gasping for breath, you jumped and jumped.
Into that creel you were finally dumped.

Whose rod reeled you into this jam?
The water rose over your head and you swam
And you swam right over that goddamned dam.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing. You may contact her at ltpkhp@aol.com.

"Redtips: A Triolet"

1994-10-14T02:38:00.000-04:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 1994

The fence is on fire with redtips,
And sadly, there’s no sign of rain.
I cry as the willow tree’s head dips,
“The fence is on fire with redtips!”
A sirocco is rolling its hot hips
And fanning those barreling flames.
The fence is on fire with redtips,
And sadly, there’s no sign of rain.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing.

"Jet"

1994-10-08T18:43:00.000-04:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 1994

for Sylvia Plath

“The blood jet is poetry . . . .”

At last . . .
The snipped red bud opens:
Cut to the quick, my skipping pulse
Scribbles an uneven line –
O “there is no
Stopping it” –
“Straight from the heart,” the hot jet
Thins my cooling blood:
Out for it,
Those muses, those quacks, leech me.

On a curb of the writer’s block
I waited, dumbstruck . . . .
They had to revive me mouth-to-mouth
By the time they found me.

Just when I’d given up,
I slit my thick throat
And out gushed

Poetry in a red rush!

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing.

"swan song"

1994-10-05T21:10:00.000-04:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 1994

an old flame I carry a torch for
a cousin I wait on the porch for

tug-of-war I’m destined to lose
no matter which side I choose

a stoop where my father sits, waiting
an end to this endless debating

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing.

"The Dropout"

1994-10-05T21:01:00.000-04:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 1994

I watch the world
through warped lenses –
yet my mirrors are truer
than theirs.
They do not know
how these white gods
speak to me,
and I
to them (intimately),
as I lie
on my made
plank-board bed,
confessing my truancies, my sins,
their wide, open eyes
spilling light onto my darkness below. The wise
fatherly One nods His wispy goatee.
Mornings He anoints me with holy water . . . .

He tells me I’ve been chosen
to know the terrible truths
those busy men never could:
how the varnishing sun
shifts at four-oh-one
in the afternoon –
how the stunned
body's own breath, caught,
escapes in smoke-rings in the stubbled cold . . .
how – just for me –
a conspiracy
of dust motes
embroiders an elaborate lace shroud,
through which my diminishing prospect floats,
white and bearded as a cloud!

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing.

"Good Morning: School of Business Administration"

1992-02-28T18:13:00.002-05:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 1992

I am a February tree:
Nobody notices me
Quietly blooming.
Whited out, I trouble no one;
When they push my button,
I click on, I click off, a mouse.

Snowed under, my desk
Is not mine, but some “home base” –
From this brown mound
They circulate me like a memo.
All day they dictate to me.
Dutifully, I run round:
A draft in their doorways, I blow in –
Bearing paper, bearing pen,
Bearing coffee, baring skin.
Adjudged unfit
But for the wastebasket,
I am wadded up and thrown away.

To the copy machine I stray
At least a dozen times each day
To run copies –
To run copies –
To run copies –
For able-bodied men
Who could run them themselves.

Short-handed, a pro at Quatro,
Furtively I shovel the snow around me
In my search for the word perfected –
A word just, fluid, corrected –
A word I’m sure they’ve never heard.

He hands me letters, meanwhile;
He hands me files.
He gives me orders;
He gives me smiles.
(Such phony parenthetical smiles!)

Full of hot air, a balloon
Towering in the timid air,
He drifts like an ivory moon
Down the hall and on the stair.

He calls me “Karen.”
I call him “Doctor.” The given
Name is a rose
He plucks from me without asking:
In exchange
He will not give me his;
He guards his bud
Like his sex instead
And mistakes my stare
For some sign I care.

O the ego’s a potent thing!
Friday makes the Girl sing!

Professors of Nothing, guard your backs.
Aiming for the brain with a poisoned pen,
I’m gaining again –
A letter opener stashed in my slacks!

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing. You may contact her at karen.pittman@sky.com.

"Embrace"

1990-04-06T02:57:00.000-04:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 1983

Your hair is a river of muddy water: I dare
To wash my face there.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing.

"Elderly Man Remembers a Lover"

1990-04-06T02:13:00.005-04:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 1990

(Listen to my dreams . . . . )

Even with its two left feet, my heart still figures out a way
To go through the motions every day,
Dully doing its mandatory two-step –
Though lately, the bum ticker can barely keep time.
Lucky for me – or so they say –
The old stomping ground inside my chest
Is too damned set in its ways to shut its door:
It keeps croaking and throbbing like a dance hall floor . . . .

And yet I tire of this gawky slow tango.
I lie down and dream, and when I dream,
I drift
Through a limp, reversing darkness,
Whose swift, sweet tide sweeps me back

To you! – the light at the end.
A man on fire, I row backward,
Down the blind canal of years,
A pirate plunging to dredge up
The buried pleasure of your face,
Lost as Atlantis
Under the water of time . . . .

Floating on the slim
Spar of my dim
Memory, you swim
Back to me . . .
One, two, three . . . .

Stubbornly, I cock my ear to hear
Your voice, like the effervescing voice
Of my childhood friend, who called out to me
As he wavered under the water, his lips letting go
Of the clear balloons . . . .

In my wet dreams I can still feel
Your tongue tapping the leaking cask,
Going down for the last –

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing.

"The Shadow"

1990-04-06T01:59:00.001-04:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 1988

Not for love,
or for money,
but for the world,
you walk, Papa, at five a.m.,
across our bleached lawn,
a big man in your brown overcoat and black
sombrero, your gray breath
going up like H-bombs in the rigorous air:
a behemoth beating your steel-toed boots
into the salt dust, into the loose drifts,
at five o'clock in the morning, only to get

the whole world in your hands!
Oh, Papa, I’m afraid it's all bad news! Still . . .
you move, it seems, in a blue dream,
the dawn bluing and purpling, swelling
like a drowned man’s face.
I hold my breath . . . .

Your bootsteps impress footprints in the crumbling snow, the snow
blackens, the icicles weep,
and those grave notes you struck
stiffen in your sobering wake.
Papa, you dig down deep
to reap
your buried pleasure,
raising it from the dead.
You let the damned thing dangle
from your fingers
like a doomed fish–

or a tombstone,
black in the bone light.
O father of finitude, your dark shadow lengthens!
It leans my way.
Who is this grim man, Papa,
haunting your journey like a jagged ghost?

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing.

"This Morning"

1990-04-05T22:58:00.000-04:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 1985

A little girl, her golden hair
glinting in the gilded sun,
walks with absent-minded swagger
in the meadow.
She stoops
to pick pesky, persistent spurs
from the ruffle of her Sunday socks,
white as Easter lilies.
A pink ribbon dangles from her hair.

No unsacred thing dares desecrate the great, holy
Ghostliness of this girl’s glad going.
The hot grass, gently moving, moves in sweet
sympathy with her. Even the pious
pines, terrifying, gray,
bow to adore this blessed child’s play.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing.

"Anniversaries"

1990-04-05T21:42:00.000-04:00

© Karen Hathaway Pittman 1990

Going stir-crazy, my red-faced prisoner
pounds on the walls to keep me awake. He makes my blood boil.
Soon, the spry spring will spring up on me,
and I, a certifiable born-again lass, will pass
the anniversary of my first year from Bedlam.

Things here are very queer. One year,
too late, he gave me a ring with twenty-eight
diamonds studded round it like stars. A constellation of spilt tears.
There are no rings or crowns to commemorate the anniversaries of the mind.
Nevertheless, solitary, confined, I’ll celebrate in bars

till I’m drunk with the memory: In Memoriam, here lies
the cured brain of one who died yet lived to tell about it,
Anno Domini, the year of no lord, nineteen-ninety.
Christ, it could happen again, but I doubt it.
Like Thomas, I have to. That’s the only way I see them through.

Karen Hathaway Pittman is an award-winning poet who is currently compiling her first book-length collection of poems, The Awful Colossus of Longing.