10/26/2006

The Luxury of Vietnam

“Iraqi Prime Minister Lambastes U.S.,” read the headline in Wednesday afternoon’s online edition of the Washington Post. Nouri al-Maliki was “lashing out” at U.S. policymakers for suggesting they might be working on a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq.

Mr. Maliki said such timetables were the product of stateside Republican electioneering and had nothing to do with reality on the ground in Iraq. He might be right; a story posted earlier Wednesday quoted Gen. George Casey, the top American commander in Iraq. Gen. Westmorl, er, Casey, in a nod toward the White House, said he could foresee U.S. forces withdrawing on a 12-18 month timeline, but nodding toward Baghdad, said that he might request more soldiers be deployed to Iraq in the meantime.

Another story in the Post said there’s a petition circulating in the military, asking Congress to support a “prompt withdrawal” of all troops from Iraq. At the top of the front page of Monday’s New York Times was a story labeled “Military Analysis.” The headline read, “To Stand or Fall in Baghdad” and the subhead said, “For American Commanders, This Is It: Securing the Capital Is the Key to Their Mission.”

Three and a half years and 140,000 American troops into this war and we have stories about how we cannot control the capital city. Three and a half years into World War II, we were accepting Germany’s surrender. “We’ll have this thing fixed soon, but for now we might need more troops” is Vietnam talk.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)
10/19/2006

The Lies We Tell Ourselves

The seventh and deciding game of the National League Championship Series is tonight. It’s hard for me not to be a baseball fan at this time of year, but my enthusiasm throughout the summer is not as sharp as it once was and the reason is steroids.

Baseball players (and other athletes) have been using performance-enhancing drugs for over 30 years. Jim Bouton wrote all this down in 1969, but we pretended to ignore it; the ballpark was a place to get away from our troubles, not add to them.

The players, the owners, the fans all pretended the problem didn’t exist, so it got worse. We all wanted more home runs, more no-hitters, more stolen bases, more broken records and we didn’t care too much about asking how they happened. For the players and owners, all this meant more money and fame. Who would want to face the facts when turning one’s head away was so easy and so profitable?

So, here I am, a middle-aged baseball fan whose sport has turned to ashes in my mouth, because I – and everyone else – spent too many years not wanting to know the truth, or act on it. So what? Big deal, there are worse things in life. That’s exactly the point.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Global Warming | Tagged | Comments (0)
10/12/2006

Still Falling

I began writing these commentaries 10 years and one week ago. These were originally audio files posted at soapbox.org and after five years morphed into what you see today, but that’s another story. I wasn’t going to note the passing of the decade, as I generally find anniversary journalism unedifying, but I started reading through some old pieces and found one that might be worth updating.

Ten years ago this week, my commentary was called, “The Sky Falls in Pieces.” ( http://markfloegel.org/index.php?s=sky+falls+in+pieces&submit.x=0&submit.y=0&submit=Search) The topic was suggested by a conversation I had with a journalist who complained that too often environmentalists claim “the sky is falling” when, in fact, it is not.

My response was that the sky falls in pieces, that when a species goes extinct or a virgin forest is clear cut, then a piece of sky has fallen there. When your community is poisoned by toxic chemicals or your child is diagnosed with cancer or you learn you can’t have children, then the sky has fallen on you.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)
10/05/2006

The Big Schlep (Glossary Included)

Monday was Yom Kippur, the annual Jewish day of repentance. A Jewish friend once told me, “Catholics are lucky. You can go to confession and get absolved of your sins any time you want. Jews only get the chance once a year. It’s a big schlep.” (Schlep: verb, to carry, lug – Yiddish.) I responded that maybe Catholic absolution is too available, because many Catholics -mea culpa – don’t take the opportunity to get things off our chests as often as we should. (Mea culpa: phrase, my fault – Latin.)

Saturday, a friend confessed that he has been indulging in schadenfreude. (Schadenfreude: noun, to take pleasure in another’s misfortune – German.) “I know it’s wrong, but I can’t help enjoying watching the Republicans self-destruct.” He’s right; it’s wrong. I’ve indulged the same guilty pleasure – mea culpa redux.

It’s wrong to take pleasure in the wreckage strewn across the American landscape by the people running the country, because it is our country that’s being ruined. It is, however, important that these moral and ethical failings come to light now, before the election, because voters need to know about them and act on that knowledge when the curtain closes on the voting booth.
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By floegel | Posted in Catholicism, Commentary | Comments (0)
09/28/2006

The Road to Hell

People often speak of the pavement on the road to hell, rarely about the traffic. These days, that particular avenue is gridlocked with American cars. Big, stupid, gas-guzzling American cars.

Global warming, a terrestrial version of hell 150 years in the making, is sore upon us. Here in the nation that contributes more to global warming – and does less about it – than any other, half our greenhouse gas emissions come from the transportation sector.

The solution is easy: stop using so much gas. The thing that has prevented us from doing exactly that has been the bad intentions of the people who run the American auto companies. They used to be called “the big three,” but they’re no so big anymore. General Motors is, for now, still the biggest car company in the world, but Toyota is number two and moving into the passing lane.

There’s a reason for that. General Motors and Ford and Daimler-Chrysler have placed their bets for the past 25 years, on big vehicles, first mini-vans, then SUVs, then light trucks, then asinine “concept cars” like the PT Cruiser. It was great short-term thinking, because the cars were cheap to make and sold for a hefty profit. Instead of using that quarter-century of profits to cut their middle-management bloat and prepare for the future, the executives who run American auto companies figured they’d be retired before the future got here and to hell with everyone else.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Economy, Energy, Global Warming, Oil | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)
09/21/2006

Equinox in the Balance

Happy equinox. Right on schedule, the temperature dipped in Vermont last night. One of the sugar maples in my back yard is turning bright orange, either as a sign of the season or a reaction to stress from global warming. Is the tree half green or half orange?

Autumn in Vermont is a season of contrast – reds, oranges and yellows competing with each other and the greens of the leaves not turned and the deep greens of the conifers. The contrast evokes feelings of change in our own lives; maybe that’s why leaf-peeping tours are so popular with senior citizens, grappling with the tendency years have to pass before we’re ready.

The word “contrast” jumped off the screen the other day. An article in Salon noted that in his weekly radio address for 29 March 2003, a few weeks after U.S. forces invaded Iraq, George W. Bush said, “The contrast could not be greater between the honorable conduct of our liberating force and the criminal acts of the enemy.”

What upsets me most about that statement – especially given what we now know has happened in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere and what Mr. Bush and his aides would like Congress to allow to continue to happen – is that I think Mr. Bush actually believed the words he said and if confronted with them today, would still think they’re true.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)
09/14/2006

Sorry About the Numbers

I’d like to apologize up front for all the numbers that follow, for two reasons. One, because I try to keep these commentaries are more entertaining than a math problem and two, because the message they carry is so depressing.

The numbers are from an article in the 21 Aug edition of Oil and Gas Journal, an oil industry trade magazine. The piece was written by Kjell Alekett, a professor of physics at Uppsala University in Sweden. Ready? Here we go:

In 2005, oil-exporting nations shipped, on average, 48 million barrels of oil every day. The biggest single importer was the U.S., which claimed 29 percent of the oil; Japan claimed 11 percent and China, seven percent. (These countries represent five, two and 21 percent of the world’s population, respectively.)

As a nation’s economy grows, its oil consumption grows with it. Oil consumption in the U.S and Japan (like other industrialized countries) has been growing at about one and a half percent a year, but in China, for period 2000-2005, oil consumption grew by eight and a half percent per year. Those numbers look dull on the screen, but both economists and oil industry professionals are struck dumb by the rate of growth in China’s oil consumption.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)