Fall Potpourri

October 9th, 2009  |   

In the 17th century in France, fresh herbs and flowers were gathered throughout the spring and summer. Left to dry for a few days, the mix was then covered with course sea salt. It was then stirred occasionally so that it could ferment. In the fall, spices and scent preserving elements were added. The mixture then began to emit a delicious fragrance and was called potpourri. It would freshen a home with sweet, delicious smells.

The English word potpourri has since been used to describe any collection of articles. This issue of Notes is a collection of a few of my recent thoughts and observations—a fall potpourri sent to you from beneath my fig tree, as leaves and temperatures fall around us, leaving only summer memories and winter anticipations.

It’s Already Cold In Minneapolis And All The People Have A Fever

I’ve just returned from a week in Minneapolis where Judy and I visited our daughter Katherine, husband Bill, and our two grandchildren Eva and Jesse.

There is so much good to say about my family, Minneapolis, and our visit there, but this is no Christmas letter so I shall keep those thoughts and feelings to myself.

What I will tell you is that while the world frets over a swine flu epidemic, Minneapolis folks have their own epidemic. Everyone has come down with Brett Favre fever.

For readers who don’t follow football, Brett Favre is the 39 year old quarterback who has retired more than once and now has been picked up by the National Football League’s Minnesota Vikings and is presently leading the team like he was 22 years old.

Speaking of old guys, my grandson and I spent an evening at a local theater watching the movie “Up.” It’s an animated film which I heartedly recommend to my readers. Please rent this film and see this marvelous treatment of what it means to grow older and yet not lose a youthful spirit. Ed Asner, the voice of the elderly character in the film, was on hand to speak afterwards. Eighty year old Asner, is  known to many through his films and TV work on the Mary Tyler Moore and Lou Grant shows. But Asner is more than an actor. He’s been involved as an active public participant in a variety of social issues. He opposed the U.S. involvement in Central America and has been vigorously outspoken on environmental and racial issues. On top of that, as if to drive crazy the likes of Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and folks who think socialism is a dirty four letter word, he is a prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Brett Favre on the football field and Ed Asner on stage have me thinking about aging, particularly since I celebrated my seventy-fourth birthday while in Minneapolis.

An Encounter In West Virginia And Minneapolis With Lynndie England

One day during our visit, while reading the morning paper, I saw a notice for a play about Iraq being performed by the Frank Theater professional group. I couldn’t resist. Katherine and I trekked over to the theater and sat on the front row to drink in a very powerful performance of Canadian playwright Judith Thompson’s “Palace of the End.”

The play consists of three monologues. Each one is based on the life of a real person with a different perspective on the war in Iraq. One character is a young and pregnant U.S. soldier, Lynndie England, accused of abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Another is David Kelly, the British weapons inspector who exposed the lies about weapons of mass destruction, but only after his country went off to war. Plagued by guilt for not having spoken earlier, he eventually committed suicide. The third character is a middle-aged Iraqi mother, Nehrjas al Saffarh. She tells a harrowing tale of her family’s torture by Saddam’s secret police. She later died in an American bombing raid during the Gulf War.

It’s a bit interesting, don’t you think? I go to Minneapolis to see an actor perform the role of West Virginia native, Lynndie England, a woman I had met just before leaving Charleston. I feel compelled to tell you about that meeting.

Taylor Books, our local independent book store, hosted a visit by Lynndie England. It was her first book signing (the book—“Tortured: Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib”) and public question and answer session.

England is remembered for the terrible pictures from Abu Ghraib, prison in Baghdad. In one picture she holds an Iraqi prisoner on the end of a leash, as if he were a dog. Another photo shows her standing beside naked prisoners piled in a human pyramid. A particular offensive shot captures England pointing her finger at the penis of a naked Iraqi, among other men, all forced to masturbate in front of her and someone taking photos.

Lynndie England, as you may well remember, was tried and sentenced to three years in prison. She went off to prison pregnant, carrying the child of another soldier who was also a part of the Abu Ghraib torture sessions. Both of them were singled out for punishment as two of the seven “bad apples” involved in what the public was led to believe was rogue activity on the part of some misguided soldiers.

Now released from prison, she has come home to her small town of Fort Ashby, West Virginia to live with her parents and, as a single mother, to raise her son Carter.

Recently in Charleston, South Carolina over 1000 people flocked to a book store to stand in line to have Pat Conroy sign copies of his new book. Only about 15 people were in attendance for England’s book signing, about the same number of people who attended the play in Minneapolis. Lynndie England is no Pat Conroy, nor is she a matinee idol capable of drawing broadway-size crowds at the theater. In fact, since she was a child she has been teased as an ugly girl—a girl desperately in need of male affirmation.

Lynndie England is a pariah by anyone’s definition—a despised and rejected person. She is a member of one of the lowest rungs in America’s caste system. She belongs to that group of military personnel stigmatized with a dishonorable discharge. She has been cut off from any veteran’s benefits, and no one is willing to hire her on for any job. She is the modern day equivalent of an ancient leper, isolated as unclean and forced to keep at a distance from others.  

So why, on a Saturday afternoon, just hours before I performed a summer wedding, did I take time to question and talk with this woman who was, by her own admission, guilty of a despicable crime?

A Curiosity In Search Of Discernment
 
My answer to that question is connected to Christian baptism.

When I perform a baptism—a child or an adult—the congregation prays that the person being baptized will have “an inquiring and discerning heart.” Those words call forth a curiosity—a critical element in human development. A human being without curiosity will inevitably be denied relationships with others, particularly people who do not share their skin, their experiences, or the unfamiliar world outside their own  incubation. To be baptized is to be welcomed into a community of curious people in search of discernment.

Speaking personally, this spirit-driven curiosity is what has energized me to cross so many boundaries. As a heterosexual young male it moved me toward girls and eventually to a commitment in marriage that has stood strong now for fifty-one years.

This spirit-driven curiosity has moved me to know more about the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.

This spirit-driven curiosity is responsible for my curiosity about people from different nations, races, cultures, and people from different ethnic and religious backgrounds.

This spirit-driven curiosity has enlarged my neighborhood.

But there is more to my answer than this. At the heart of my Christian faith is the figure of Jesus who got close to all the people who were considered leprous by his society’s standards. He led his disciples to cross the divide between those considered clean and those considered to be unclean. Jesus not only prized despised and rejected people, he became one himself for having defied the prejudicial standards of his society.

In my own life, I have been curious about people who are seen as second class citizens, even those who have broken the law and are incarcerated in prison—some waiting to eat that last meal before walking into an execution chamber. Forty-five years of ordained Christian ministry has only deepened and enriched that curiosity.

Moving closer to my own death, I’m curious about what lies on the other side of life here on earth. Those who claim to have it all figured out—the terrain and population of heaven and hell—seem to me to have been robbed of their curiosity in their desire for certitude.

I am curious about the despised and rejected Lynndie England for another reason. She seems to me to be a scapegoat—a person singled out to bear the weight of crimes which involve a larger cast of guilty participants, who for one reason or another have escaped trial and punishment. 

It’s Enough To Make You Believe In Reincarnation

A news article in the morning edition of the Minneapolis Star Tribune catches my attention while I eat eggs and bacon cooked for me by daughter Katherine.

The article is about General Stanley A. McChrystal—the Commander of Troops in Afghanistan. In a speech before the Institute of International and Strategic Studies in London he has said we will not win in Afghanistan if President Obama does not give him an additional 40,000 troops to fight there. His comments indicate that a continued appraisal of our mission there will only delay and harm that mission.

As I read this article I felt like I was witnessing a reincarnation of General Douglas MccArthur back in the days when he challenged President Truman and was relieved of his command by Truman. It also felt like a reincarnation of General Westmoreland who had a voracious appetite for more and more troops back during the Vietnam War.

Since returning home, there are cries for President Obama to relieve General McChrystal from his post for having gone public at a time when he is meant to be involved with closed-door counsel with Commander in Chief Obama. That was my thought when I read the article in Minneapolis. General McChrystal should be relieved of his duties, In fact, I think he should never have been given the job in the first place.

And here is where PFC. Lynndie England enters the picture. Speaking of pictures, she told me that in the picture of her holding the Iraqi man on a leash one of the men who had urged her on had been cropped out of the picture. In my mind a host of people were cropped out of the picture.

Reed Brody, from Human Rights Watch, has written about some of those people who have been cropped out of the big picture of torture: “If the United States is to wipe away the stain of Abu Ghraib, it needs to investigate those at the top who ordered or condoned abuse and come clean on what the president has authorized. Washington must repudiate, once and for all, the mistreatment of detainees in the name of the war on terror.”

And here’s where General McChrystal enters the picture.

The Empire Relies On Photo Ops 

Talking with Lynndie England, I discovered that she has never met Jessica Lynch. Both West Virginians, they have a lot in common and should some day have the opportunity to meet and talk. Perhaps some talented playwright will produce a script that will allow them to meet on stage.

Lynch, was the young woman who was involved in a fire fight, wounded severely and later rescued by U.S. Troops from a hospital. We now know that the rescue was a photo op for U.S. propaganda—a staged event to make our troops out to be heroic, with Lynch depicted as an American Hero—a good apple as opposed to a bad apple, if you will.

England turned out to be a necessary government photo op, portrayed as a rogue soldier, the bad apple. In fact she was just one of many people involved in torture—people who escaped an appointed time in the dock before a judge. General McChrystal is one of those characters who never wound up on an Internet photo, but should have.

McChrystal was in charge of Camp Nama in Baghdad—that place where Iraqi prisoners were tortured. McChrystal knew the ugly truth about the torture there, in fact gave orders for torture, and refused to allow the Red Cross to inspect the facility. 

Here the name of Pat Tillman should be mentioned. Tillman was a star professional football player with the Arizona Cardinals who turned down a contract offer of $3.6 million from the Cardinals to enlist in the U.S. Army because he wanted to serve his country. It should also be noted that England joined the military because she had always had the dream of serving her country.

Tillman was killed in Afghanistan near the Pakistan border by what is called “friendly fire,” military fire mistakenly aimed at a unit’s own troops. The government covered up the facts surrounding Tillman’s death with a lie. The military said he was killed by the enemy in a firefight.  Tillman was called a hero—a good apple—and awarded a Silver Star. When the facts were later revealed, General McChrystal was seen as the person involved in the cover up and in the awarding of the medal.

Republicans and Democrats have rushed to heap praise on McChrystal. Of interest is the fact that John McCain, who spoke at Tillman’s funeral, later pledged his support to the Tillman family to expose the truth about his death. Since then, according to Tillman’s mother, “He (McCain) definitely eased out of the situation. He didn’t blatantly say he wouldn’t help us, it’s just that it became clear that he kind of drifted away.”

Tillman’s father has said: “After it happened, all the people in positions of authority went out of their way to script this. They purposely interfered with the investigation; they covered it up. I think they thought they could control it, and they realized that their recruiting efforts were going to go to hell in a hand basket if the truth about his death got out. They blew up their poster boy.”

Empires need designated good apples—boys and girls like Tillman and Lynch. They serve to justify war. Empires also need designated bad apples, like Lynndie England. They serve as scapegoats for war’s atrocities, and provide cover for those who authorize war’s atrocities.

What’s On And Off The Table

I note that the Obama Administration is now saying that withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan is not an option on the president’s table. I find that interesting. When it comes to conflict with other nations our political leaders are always quick to say that war is always an option on the table, even the use of nuclear weapons.

It seems clear to me that President Obama will, in some fashion, follow General McChrystal’s recommendation. As citizens of this nation, when our president is listening to General McCrystal, and now a John McCain who supports McCrystal’s plan, what are we to do?  Voice our protest, of course, and most importantly we must advise our young people to refuse enlistment into this mistaken war. Every family and organization, particularly the religious ones, must be challenged to find ways to ignite that spirit of curiosity among the young so that they in turn may discern the folly of war as an acceptable answer to the problems we face as a nation.

Muhammad Ali As A Hero Worthy Of Emulation

Pat Tillman was cast as a hero for giving up a lucrative football career to go to war. Before dying he wrote home about the folly of this war in Afghanistan. Perhaps we should teach the young about Muhammed Ali, a talented athlete who, gave up his lucrative boxing career by going to jail rather than be sent to fight in Vietnam.

Entry Filed under: Fig Tree Notes Archives