My Grandpa Elmer was one of the absolute best people I've ever known. He was also hands-down the funniest. I still have a difficult time talking about him. He gave most of the things that have brought me joy in life - my love of music, my singing voice, my sense of humor, my smile... less excitingly my eyebrows and chin... and interestingly an extra ridge in my ear no one else in the family got. He also gave me his father's songs - at least the clean ones - from Vaudeville.
So, yeah... Grandpa was a pretty interesting guy. He rode on the rails, hobo-style, during the depression - went town to town looking for work until Roosevelt opened up the CCC Camps. Grandpa Elmer went to work as a mess cook in the camps, which helped build the national park system throughout the country. After that, he and his family moved in a trailer from Oklahoma to California. The Grapes of Wrath is like the family bible (except that half of that side of the family are born-again, so I'm probably committing blasphemy right now). He was a miner in Livermore when he met my Grandma June at an orange stand shaped like an orange in Castro Valley. Love at first sight. Grandma June made him quit mining in the middle of the Great Depression and find another if he wanted to date her - she couldn't go with a miner; it was too dangerous. So Grandpa Elmer quit and married her 3 months later.
As cool as the dude was, it was his service in the military during WWII that made me think of him today.
Grandpa drew a... well, I wouldn't call it a good or a bad card in terms of military assignments during the war. He was assigned to cook on an ocean-going tug boat for the Navy. His two younger brothers also enlisted in the Navy, and all three of them were assigned to different ships in the Pacific. (This was not an accident - their father, Elmer I, an army infantryman in WWI, marched the soles off his boots crossing Europe. He made sure his boys signed up for the navy - marching was for the birds.) Miraculously, all three boys made it home.
Grandpa was never going to be on the front-lines. His tug boat was assigned to retrieve disabled vehicles after major battles throughout the South Pacific. This meant that his ship showed up to pull boats and bodies out of the water after Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, etc.
I don't know about you, but I don't think you could pay me to do that.
Additionally, even if his ship somehow got caught in the crossfire, he wasn't one of the guys that was going to man the guns. Now, Grandpa Elmer's brother Emory got his boat blown out from under him 3 times during the war, but he made it out. Either way, Grandpa's exposure to the front-lines was simultaneously direct and indirect. He saw the aftermath of the battles. He pulled the bodies out of the water. He had brothers that were fighting on the front-lines. He had a wife back home that was building the ships that were carrying his fellow sailors across the sea. He had a son in a West Coast port town he had to protect from naval threat from Japan. The fight was personal for him. It was personal for America.
You couldn't pay me to do it, but get me pissed off and scared enough, and I might volunteer.
We've been in Iraq in one form or another for pretty much all my life. I remember having friends whose fathers fought in the First Gulf War when I was in elementary school. I remember the dawning of CNN's 24-hour news cycle, with night vision-tinted bombs streaking across the screen. I remember getting the letter from one of my best friends from high school saying that he was going over to Afghanistan. I remember the protests on Berkeley's campuses when we went into Afghanistan, and I remember going into San Francisco for the protests when we went into Iraq. They almost had me on board for Afghanistan, but they really lost me at Iraq.
I remember having a Barbara Lee Speaks For Me bumper-sticker on my truck. I remember the old hippy who held up a sign with a tube of KY Liquid and a picture of George Bush, which read "Fuck Bush - Use No Lubricants". Another man held one with a picture of Donald Rumsfeld with a large piece of duct tape over his mouth, which read "DUCT TAPE SAVES LIVES".
I had several friends in Afghanistan, and a few of the same in Iraq. One of my best friends from high school and I wrote each other through his first and second deployments, so I got to read the way his tone changed over time. He believed in it when it was about making sure 9/11 never happened again. As it became less about that, it became more difficult for him to tell me about how he felt - or anyway, he did it less often. That friend still isn't the same - he never will be... Though as an upside he's one of the few friends that can empathize with my PTSD symptoms.
So when I saw that a journalist had been beheaded AGAIN in the Middle East, anger doesn't really begin to describe what I felt. It is personal.
I am what you could call a dove, and it strikes me as fitting that my Grandpa Elmer's people were Quaker and Dutch. This means that they always spoke out about war and slavery (the people invented the phrase "Speak Truth to Power"), and understood what it meant to be a persecuted religious minority. The family came to New Amsterdam around 1620 - a few generations later, other members of his family would come with William Penn to Pennsylvania.
My dove status notwithstanding, I will happily write a very large check to help pay for the bombs that eradicate that journalist's murderers off the face of the planet. It is personal.
Grandpa Elmer taught me a lot of songs. His father had been a performer in a minstrel show in Vaudeville in the years before he met Grandpa Elmer's mother. Yes... My great-grandfather was a comic in blackface. I'm not going to defend it.
That said, I learned a lot of songs as a result. Grandpa Elmer's father had a beautiful voice, which Gramps and I inherited. When I was a baby, Grandpa would walk over to my house everyday and sing to me while Mom took a shower and ran errands. I don't even remember learning the songs - I just always knew them.
One of them went something like this:
High in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia
Lived two mountain billy goats
Old Bill had eaten some fresh dynamite
Thinking it was Quaker Oats
Before too long as I expected
The bills got in a fight
Well one did not know Old Bill was loaded
Til he hit that dynamite
High through the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia
Old Bill sailed up through the forest pines
His front legs came down in New York Town
The Carolinas got the whiskers of Bill
His hind-legs, they are missing still
They found his horns in the Mountains of Virginia
And his tail up in a lonesome pine.
I don't really care how we get rid of these ISIL characters, but in my mind they just got into a fight with Old Bill. Don't ram the billy goat that's full of dynamite, you unbelievable pricks, or expect to be blown across hell and creation. And today the President authorized more airstrikes.
And the Congress has to vote to continue military operations. It's a Constitutional imperative if military operations are to continue more than 60 days. And as much as I would have loved it if, as Cheney had predicted when we went to war with Iraq more than 10 years ago, the war had only lasted a few weeks... I don't think anyone is that optimistic this time around.
And Congress is going to have to vote on something. Holy Hell. They're going to vote on something?...
I certainly hope so. James Foley deserves a vote. His parents and friends and family deserve a vote. America deserves a vote.
It is personal. And whatever the outcome, I'm pleading - please let the legislative process work. A journalist committed to helping people in other countries just died trying to let the world know what's happening in the Middle East. That, in my mind, is the epitome of what makes America great. We encourage, or at least used to encourage, professions that exposed human catastrophe in the world and abuses of power at home and abroad. We used to encourage soldiers and journalists and peacekeepers... Maybe we still encourage it, but there are equally encouraged voices that are calling for legislative gridlock, or too readily calling to send our soldiers into harm's way, or militarize local police forces as if that will help them keep the peace in local communities - it's a daily mockery of the vision of our Founders.
I am not an advocate for war, but I'm also not for allowing people to murder our best and brightest citizens. People are being killed for the crime of being American.
Hey Congress, are you listening now?
Grandpa Elmer always picked the Funny Papers out of the newspaper and read them to me. Somehow, we got a habit of saying goodbye to each other by one saying "See you in the funny papers," and the other responding "On the monkeys' side".
The monkeys' side of the funny papers is seeming less and less entertaining to me as I age. I'm reading op eds accosting Twitter for blocking the more graphic images of Foley's beheading, as if showing some basic concern for the families of those still held by ISIL and those who've been killed isn't enough of a reason to show a little restraint. I'm seeing hosts on the news screaming about showing footage of Ferguson, MO during their discussions of Foley's killing. While I absolutely understand the frustration - Foley's death should be a topic of individual concern - his death is no more concerning to me than that of Michael Brown. Both are indicative of systemic failures in foreign and domestic policies. Both men are American. And both men's memories should be fought for.
My problem is that the funny papers are trying to treat them differently, cover them differently. Don't worry about the kid that got shot in Ferguson, we've got a REAL problem over in Iraq. A white Christian dude was killed for being American. He was BEHEADED.
OK, you're right, that is a total tragedy. It's personal for me too. I'm pissed.
But Michael Brown was kind of beheaded too, and the guy that did it was sworn to protect him and kids like him. The officer that killed him seems to have shown about as much regard for Michael's life as the ISIL terrorist had for James Foley's. Neither man's sacrifice should go unexamined, nor should either situation lack extreme consequences for the perpetrators. Both are tragedies, and news outlets should be covering both as such.
Old Bill's opponent could be ISIL in this case, but it could be militarized police forces as well... In my opinion, both are walking around with a belly full of dynamite, and both are picking a fight with the wrong people. We may not yet be able to help in the ISIL situation from home, but we can certainly work to change domestic policy at the ballot box. Whatever your opinion on a solution, find a candidate who shares your view, and vote for them. Vote. There are too many people who've sacrificed way too much for us to feel like voting is an imposition. As a country, America is only loaded with dynamite when its citizens participate.
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