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Let's Face It: We Have an Epidemic of Sexual Harassment |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=42736"><span class="small">Belen Fernandez, Al Jazeera</span></a>
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Monday, 23 October 2017 13:27 |
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Fernandez writes: "Weinstein is merely the tip of the iceberg."
Harvey Weinstein. (photo: AP)
Let's Face It: We Have an Epidemic of Sexual Harassment
By Belen Fernandez, Al Jazeera
23 October 17
 very so often in the United States, a scandal erupts to temporarily demolish the country's marketed image as a pioneer in gender equality and related rights.
The name of the current scandal is, of course, Harvey Weinstein - the millionaire Hollywood film mogul accused of sexual assault by an ever-expanding number of women, as his decades-long impunity appears to be coming to an end.
Weinstein, however, is merely the tip of the iceberg. In a recent New Yorker piece titled All the Other Harvey Weinsteins, actress Molly Ringwald writes about her own history as a victim of sexual harassment in the film industry, noting, "I never talked about these things publicly because, as a woman, it has always felt like I may as well have been talking about the weather."
But at least meteorological discussions aren't generally met with the shame, recrimination, and victim-blaming that so often attend accusations of sexual assault in a society plagued by the phenomenon.
As for the fate awaiting the perpetrators of such misconduct, Ringwald remarks, "And the men? Well, if they're lucky, they might get elected President."
Cue the soundtrack of the current US president, who is known for - among other antics - his endearing observations about "grab[bing]" women "by the p****".
A long history
Sexual abuse and exploitation of women have long been interwoven with the very identity of the United States - and black women have often been particularly hard-hit, belonging as they do to not one but two categories deemed inferior by white male society.
Consider some lines from Harriet Ann Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861, "[In] my fifteenth year ... my master began to whisper foul words in my ear ... If I knelt by my mother's grave, his dark shadow fell on me even there."
Fast forward a century and a half, and there are still plenty of shadows. While straight-up slavery is of course no longer politically correct, the prevailing system of patriarchal capitalism continues to enable a commodification of women.
The toxic combination of money, egos, and power in male-dominated arenas like show business makes them natural settings for female objectification and the treatment of women as property.
And while Hollywood is by nature a spectacle, female oppression has also been normalised across other less-visible industries and in day-to-day societal dynamics.
Recent decades offer plenty of statistics from which to pick and choose. In 1979 and 1980, TIME Magazine tells us, "as many as 18 million American females were harassed sexually while at work."
In 2014, the Daily Beast outlined the results of a study revealing that "sexual harassment and abuse of women are alarmingly widespread in science, technology, engineering, and math" - also referencing a 1993 New England Journal of Medicine study according to which "three-quarters of women medical students were sexually harassed during their residency."
In an October dispatch for the New York Daily News, meanwhile, US attorney and academic Anita Hill writes that "45 percent of employees - mostly women - in the private workforce say they experience" sexual harassment. In Hill's view, the US is a place where "bias gets baked into our policies".
And she should know; in a much-publicised case in 1991, she stood up to then-US Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, whom she accused of sexual harassment. Thomas' justiceship was nonetheless confirmed - another ironic feat, perhaps, for US "justice".
Time to get civilised
As is becoming clearer by the day, the ongoing problem of sexual harassment in the US spans the spectrum of professions, workplaces, and societal spaces - from athletics to the media to Silicon Valley to academia to the service industry to government agencies and so on.
Glancing through my email archives, I am reminded of some of my own encounters with casual harassment. These range from the much-older US editor who messaged me while I was covering the Honduran coup in 2009 - "Do you think that if I came down to Honduras you might take me in your arms and begin a new level of relationship and collaboration?" - to the university professor in California who wrote, "I now look forward to sharing my own soulful renditions of 'suck it now' with you."
The latter was a charming reference to my remarks on New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's infamous claim that Iraqis needed to "suck on this", made shortly after the launch of the US war on Iraq in 2003.
Which brings us to another US institution associated with high rates of sexual violence: the US military, which is not only responsible for widespread rape in Vietnam, Iraq, and other battlefields but also serves as a forum for intra-military sexual attacks.
In May of this year, Reuters specified that "the US military received a record number of sexual assault reports in 2016" - a statistic the Pentagon had apparently managed to spin as "a sign of service members' trust in the system."
Obviously, there should be no trusting a system that ransacks countries, cultures, and human bodies - including domestic ones - in an arrangement that ultimately serves the financial interests of an elite male minority. (Of course, nobler alibis are regularly invoked for military destruction, among them the "liberation of women".)
In pondering the current panorama, it's perhaps useful to reflect on a passage from late US historian Howard Zinn's acclaimed book, A People's History of the United States, in which he discusses Native American tribes and other entities:
"Earlier societies - in America and elsewhere - in which property was held in common and families were extensive and complicated, with aunts and uncles and grandmothers and grandfathers all living together, seemed to treat women more as equals than did the white societies that later overran them, bringing 'civilisation' and private property."
Given that capitalism itself has no place for human equality - predicated as it is on divisions between exploiters and exploited - it seems that the current question of how to fix the sexual harassment epidemic in the US will require some extensive out-of-the-box thinking.
Enough with the patriarchy. It's time to get civilised.
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FOCUS: Harvey Weinstein and the Impunity of Powerful Men |
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Monday, 23 October 2017 11:58 |
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Tolentino writes: "For women speaking up about their
experiences with harassment and assault, being heard is one kind of
power, and being free is another."
Harvey Weinstein. (image: Slate/Thinkstock/Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images)
Harvey Weinstein and the Impunity of Powerful Men
By Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker
23 October 17
For women speaking up about their experiences with harassment and assault, being heard is one kind of power, and being free is another.
 n 2015, in a hotel hallway in New York, the movie producer Harvey Weinstein insisted that an Italian model named Ambra Battilana Gutierrez come into his room. Gutierrez protested. The previous day, Weinstein had groped her aggressively, and she had returned to see him wearing an N.Y.P.D. wire. “Now you’re embarrassing me,” Weinstein says impatiently on the recording. Men who routinely humiliate women are easily embarrassed. When their targets assert even a sliver of personhood, it registers as a flustering, impermissible offense.
Since the story finally broke—first in the Times and then in a piece by Ronan Farrow, for this magazine—that Weinstein had buried decades of assault and harassment allegations, with the help of settlements and legal threats, more than fifty women have come forward to accuse him of similar acts. In Farrow’s piece, three women allege that they were raped. (Weinstein has acknowledged misbehavior but denied allegations of non-consensual sex.) The once invulnerable producer has been fired from his own company and abandoned by members of his high-profile legal team; his wife is leaving him; the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has rescinded his membership. The N.Y.P.D. has begun an investigation, and women will continue to come forward: the attorney Gloria Allred, who represents one of Weinstein’s accusers, recently described receiving a “tsunami” of calls from women, many of them speaking through tears. Weinstein has been embarrassed again, this time comprehensively.
For years—for centuries—the economic, physical, and cultural subjugation of women has registered as something like white noise. Lately, it appears that we’re starting to hear the tune. What had been a backdrop is now in the foreground; it has become a story with rotating protagonists which never seems to leave the news. In the past few years, women have accused Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, and Donald Trump of serial sexual misconduct. Thanks to the advent of mainstream feminism, these women have been supported, to an unprecedented degree, by much of the media and the public. At the same time, political backlash insures hard limits for this support. Cosby’s reputation was ruined, and Ailes and O’Reilly were pushed out of Fox News; Trump was elected President. The increasing narrative clarity about male power does not always translate to progress. For women, it feels, all at once, shockingly possible, suddenly mandatory, and unusually frustrating to speak up.
We should pay attention to the dynamics that make this progress irregular: not all abusers meet with consequences, and not all women can attain firm ground. Men are still more often held to a standard of consistency than of morality. The liberal Weinstein, the moralizing Cosby, and the family-values-promoting Fox News men were disgraced, in part, because of their hypocrisy; men who never pretended to see women as equals or as worthy of respect can generally just keep on as they were. This is why, a month before the 2016 election, the “Access Hollywood” tape didn’t sink Trump’s candidacy: pussy-grabbing did not conflict with the image of a Presidential candidate who stalked his female opponent on the debate stage, and who once reportedly said of women, “You have to treat ’em like shit.” Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon was charged in 1996 with spousal abuse, and that didn’t pose much of a problem for him, either; anyone drawn to Bannon’s brand of brutal dominance politics is perhaps unlikely to disown him for grabbing his wife’s neck and pulling her into a car, as she alleged. (The case was later dismissed.)
Other forms of recourse may be possible: after Trump called his accusers liars, one of them, Summer Zervos, a former “Apprentice” contestant, sued him for defamation, with Allred’s help. As part of that suit, Zervos’s lawyers recently subpoenaed the Trump campaign for a wide range of documents relating to his treatment of women. But there are significant constituencies in America who are not yet interested in holding men accountable for abusive behavior. And there are still huge swaths of women—the poor, the queer, the undocumented—who can’t count on the security that feminism has conferred on its wealthier, whiter adherents, or trust that their victimization would even become news.
Nevertheless, the hunger for and possibility of solidarity among women beckons. In the past week, women have been posting their experiences of assault and harassment on social media with the hashtag #MeToo. We might listen to and lament the horrific stories being shared, and also wonder: Whom, exactly, are we reminding that women are treated as second class? Meanwhile, symbolic advancement often obscures real losses. The recent cultural gains of popular feminism were won just when male politicians were rolling back reproductive rights across the country. The overdue rush of sympathy for women’s ordinary encumbrances comes shortly after the Department of Education reversed Obama-era guidelines on college sexual-assault investigations, and Congress allowed the Children’s Health Insurance Program to expire. On October 3rd, the House passed a ban on abortion after twenty weeks. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said that “virtually all” Republicans in the Senate support the legislation.
Being heard is one kind of power, and being free is another. We have undervalued women’s speech for so long that we run the risk of overburdening it. Speech, right now, is just the flag that marks the battle. The gains won by women are limited to those who can demand them. Individual takedowns and #MeToo stories will likely affect the workings of circles that pay lip service to the cause of gender equality, but they do not yet threaten the structural impunity of powerful men as a group.
In 2014, after the death of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement helped make the long-festering problem of police violence against black Americans, already highly visible to a part of the population, an urgent matter for many who hadn’t been forced to pay attention before. But the country as a whole divided along predictable lines, and progress on the issue is, three years later, difficult to discern. On one side, the moral weight is crushing, the energy vital and sincere. On the other side, there is disavowal and retrenchment. Between those poles are plenty of people who would rather we just talked about something else. This type of problem always narrows to an unavoidable point. The exploitation of power does not stop once we consolidate the narrative of exploitation. A genuine challenge to the hierarchy of power will have to come from those who have it.
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FOCUS: Concerned About 'Identity Extremists?' There's One in the White House |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=32158"><span class="small">Steven W. Thrasher, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Monday, 23 October 2017 10:37 |
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Thrasher writes: "The FBI claims to be worried about
'premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence' from protest groups. What
about the danger posed by the president?"
Donald Trump listens during a meeting with Governor Ricardo Rosselló of Puerto Rico in the Oval Office. (photo: Evan Vucci/AP)
Concerned About 'Identity Extremists?' There's One in the White House
By Steven W. Thrasher, Guardian UK
23 October 17
The FBI claims to be worried about ‘premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence’ from protest groups. What about the danger posed by the president?
 ight now in the United States, there is the threat (and actuality) of racial identity extremism leading to extreme violence. But it is not coming from the so-called “black identity extremists”, an absurd made-up term Trump’s FBI has created to whip up hysteria about black people.
The FBI claims to be worried that “Black Identity Extremist (BIE) perceptions of police brutality against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement and will very likely serve as justification for such violence.” This is just hyperbolic speculation from the US government meant to undermine the movement – just as the FBI tried to undermine Martin Luther King and the Black Panthers decades ago.
The real threat of racial extremism is coming from the White Identity Extremist-in-Chief in the White House – and his name is Donald Trump.
The so-called “black identity extremists” are no threat to democracy. Like the Panthers, MLK, Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer, and so many other black people in the mid-20th century, the brave Black Lives Matter organizers and street protesters in St Louis, Baltimore and elsewhere being called “black identity extremists” are being unfairly maligned.
Instead of a danger to society, these groups are standing up to increasing economic racial violence, the routine killing of black people by police, and gross miscarriages of justice – such as when white supremacists in Charlottesville who beat up black people were allowed to go free while two black men trying to defend their very lives were arrested.
If you want to see seething racial animus that is causing actual racial violence and terrorism in the world, look no further than the White Identity Extremist-in-Chief. who routinely uses his bully pulpit to bully people of color while defending white nationalism.
The White Identity Extremist-in-Chief cut funds for fighting rightwing white nationalist groups, just weeks before white supremacists gathered to riot in Charlottesville, leading to the killing of one woman and the death of two police officers on duty. He further gave these white nationalists succor by saying there were “some very fine people” among them.
As she tried to keep her city from sliding into starvation, the White Identity Extremist-in-Chief beat up the mayor of San Juan on Twitter. And, after pledging to help Texas and Florida for the long haul in their hurricane recovery efforts, Trump tweeted that he won’t help Puerto “forever”. When so much of the island is still without power and water, this puts countless lives at risk.
The White Identity Extremist-in-Chief is beating up on the free speech rights of black men in the NFL like Colin Kaepernick – who have valiantly taken a knee to protest police killings – and on black women like Jemele Hill, who has been suspended from her job as a sports anchor. The White Identity Extremist-in-Chief’s message is clear to black Americans: use your first amendment right to speak out against injustice and you will be destroyed.
The White Identity Extremist-in-Chief told police officers that, when they are arresting suspects who have been legally convicted of nothing, “When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddywagon, you just see them thrown in, rough, I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice.’”
He routinely threatens to “totally destroy” all North Koreans. And he’s now using hundreds of thousands of young “Dreamers” as a bargaining chip to try to get his racist, unnecessary and divisive border wall built.
But like many manifestations of white supremacy, the White Identity Extremist-in-Chief is stoking white resentment with actions that will actually harm poor white people while consolidating money and power for rich white people.
His desperate plot to destroy Obamacare by any means necessary – just so he can dismantle the legacy of the black president he believed was Kenyan – will harm the white people in the states that voted for Trump.
His denial of freedom of expression to Jemele Hill will harm white journalists, too. White people need to drink the water and breathe the air that his administration is polluting. He will say and do nothing about a white man trying to bomb an airport. And the poll taxes and felony disenfranchisement policies his party promotes, aimed at limiting black electoral power, affect white people from Wisconsin to Alabama.
So whenever you hear about the so-called “black identity extremists”, remember they are the ones trying to save the world from the megalomaniac White Identity Extremist-in-Chief. who is hellbent on turning the US and the world into an authoritarian, unlivable, nuclear wasteland.
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Marine General Shreds Integrity Image in Defense of Trump |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 23 October 2017 08:40 |
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Boardman writes: "What motivated White House Chief of
Staff John Kelly to bring himself to the White House briefing room
October 19, only to perform something like a self-immolation?"
White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. (photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
Marine General Shreds Integrity Image in Defense of Trump
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
23 October 17
John Kelly backs president with lies, evasions, irrelevancies — not truth
 hat motivated White House Chief of Staff John Kelly to bring himself to the White House briefing room October 19, only to perform something like a self-immolation?
He began with abrupt fuzziness:
Well, thanks a lot. And it is a more serious note, so I just wanted to perhaps make more of a statement than an — give more of an explanation in what amounts to be a traditional press interaction.
OK, not clear what that might mean, reporters understood that he was there to defend President Trump’s handling of his suddenly infamous phone call to Sgt. La David Johnson’s widow and mother of three, comforting her with “your guy … must have known what he signed up for.” Kelly is not in the habit of engaging with reporters, but he had been a witness to the call. So the next thing he said was:
Most Americans don’t know what happens when we lose one of soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, our Coast Guardsmen in combat. So let me tell you what happens….
Wait, this is not relevant to Trump’s tone-deaf effort at empathy. Nobody’s asking what happens to the fallen in combat. That’s easily found out by the curious. Why is he leading with this red herring? He goes on with his explanation:
Their buddies wrap them up in whatever passes as a shroud, puts them on a helicopter as a routine, and sends them home. Their first stop along the way is when they’re packed in ice, typically at the airhead. And then they’re flown to….
Kelly is telling us what’s supposed to happen. He probably telling us what often happens. He is absolutely not telling us what happened to Sgt. Johnson. Kelly had just said, “when we lose one of our soldiers.” That was a tipoff, consciously or otherwise. During the ambush, Sgt. Johnson and several Nigerien soldiers were literally lost. No one knew where they were for a couple of days. We don’t know who found Sgt. Johnson, or how. We don’t know if anyone wrapped his body in ice. We do know that his body was so decomposed that an open casket was not appropriate. Kelly’s recitation of by-the-book treatment of military casualties was not only irrelevant, it was misleading. And in the midst of this distraction, Kelly tossed in another deceptive aside:
A very, very good movie to watch, if you haven’t ever seen it, is “Taking Chance,” where this is done in a movie — HBO setting. Chance Phelps was killed under my command right next to me, and it’s worth seeing that if you’ve never seen it.
All of a sudden the White House chief of staff is doing a promo for a mediocre, maudlin HBO movie from 2009. What’s his point? See, Widow Johnson, maybe there’s a movie deal in your future? So what wrong with this? For starters, the movie is about the feelings of the colonel (Kevin Bacon) who delivers Private Phelps home to Wyoming in 2004, complete with fawning media coverage at the time. Sgt. Johnson got different treatment.
But then there’s this weird sentence from Kelly: “Chance Phelps was killed under my command right next to me, and it’s worth seeing that if you’ve never seen it.” Syntactically, Kelly seems to be saying that it’s worth seeing Phelps, 19, getting killed right next to Kelly, in the heat of combat — what Kelly apparently means is that it’s worth seeing the movie. But still, what is that “killed under my command right next to me” all about? It’s all about a sort of true thing that Kelly distorts into falsehood. Phelps was in a unit guarding a convoy that came under fire. Gen. Kelly was somewhere in the convoy. The official story is that Phelps was wounded while defending the convoy as it got away; somehow he dies later. Another story came from US Naval Hospital. Corpsman Doc Peabody: “I am the corpsman who was sitting next to PFC Phelps when we got hit on April 9th 2004. I was sitting right next to Phelps in the vehicle as the enemy initiated the ambush. I am convinced that Chance died instantly but his head was in my lap and cradled in my arms just seconds after he was hit.”
There’s not much of a story in that, and this was 2004, when the Bush administration desperately needed heroes to keep selling its travesty of a war in Iraq and PBS was happy to help. And so was HBO. “Taking Chance” is a reverent look at idealized treatment of military dead, and generals have been grateful for the sycophancy ever since. Kelly’s long-winded recitation of “what happens when we lose” a soldier is an idealized echo of a Hollywood fantasy sponsored by the Pentagon.
In the midst of these layered diversions from what actually happened to Sgt. Johnson in Niger, Kelly adds the irrelevancy of how he felt when his son was killed and his son’s buddies called him. He abruptly segued into his half-baked non-defense defense of Trump:
If you elect to call a family like this, it is about the most difficult thing you could imagine. There’s no perfect way to make that phone call. When I took this job and talked to President Trump about how to do it, my first recommendation was he not do it, because it’s not the phone call that parents, family members are looking forward to. It’s nice to do, in my opinion, in any event.
Kelly went on to say that President Obama had not called him, but that “was not a criticism.” Then he said, “I don’t believe President Obama called.” Kelly did not mention that Obama invited him to a dinner at the White House. Finally Kelly got to the calls to next of kin of the four soldiers killed in Niger on October 4, again drifting into details of military protocol. And when Kelly finally addressed the substance of the calls, he said he advised Trump to use the insensitive formulation that makes emotional sense only to a deeply militarized mindset. Kelly said to tell the dead soldier’s survivors that:
… he was doing exactly what he wanted when he was killed. He knew what he was getting into by joining that 1 percent. He knew what the possibilities were because we’re at war. And when he died, in the four cases we’re talking about, Niger, and my son’s case in Afghanistan — when he died, he was surrounded by the best men on this Earth: his friends.
So a mind-numbed former general advised his insensitive president to go with a hard truth laced with a self-deception, most likely a lie. Kelly just lays it out there: the four dead in Niger are just like his son in Afghanistan. How many ways is that just not true? The US has been at war in Afghanistan since 2001; the US war in Niger has come as a surprise to most people. Kelly’s son was the child of a general serving his third tour of duty. Sgt. Johnson joined the Army in 2014. He had a wife and family at home, and a congresswoman who had known him as a child.
It is a common delusional fantasy to suggest that “he was doing exactly what he wanted to do when he was killed.” No, when he was killed he was trying to survive. The greater glory is all in someone else’s head. In the metaphorical sense, perhaps a career soldier like Kelly’s son was doing what he wanted that got him killed, but was that true of any of the sergeants killed in Niger? And how would anyone know? Sgt. Johnson hadn’t joined the one percent like Kelly’s son, and he had not signed up for a still mysterious mission that got him killed thanks to decisions made higher up the chain of command, which has been engaged in a butt-covering exercise in finger-pointing ever since. Kelly really doesn’t want to talk about what happened, or why the Pentagon won’t say what happened, or why the Pentagon and Niger military have different versions of what happened, or who was responsible for four dead Americans and uncounted (by the US) Nigerien soldiers, all travelling in unarmored non-military vehicles.
Contrary to Kelly’s kneejerk rainbow patriotism, Sgt. Johnson did not die “surrounded by the best men on this Earth: his friends.” Sgt. Johnson died surrounded by Nigeriens he hardly knew. He had no friends nearby when he died. He was left on the battlefield for two days without being reported missing, and when he was found, Nigeriens found him. Kelly may even believe the military mythology he spouts, but that hardly makes it true or relevant or even decent in relation to Sgt. Johnson. But Kelly doubled down on the shibboleths of coercive patriotism as applied to Sgt. Johnson:
… he knew what he was getting himself into because he enlisted. There’s no reason to enlist; he enlisted. And he was where he wanted to be, exactly where he wanted to be, with exactly the people he wanted to be with when his life was taken.
That is the language of emotional numbness, that is the lie that lets generals live with themselves, and that is a widespread self-delusion that enables the US to go on and on and on killing people in most of the other countries in the world. “There is no reason to enlist,” says Kelly, clearly contradicting his own rhetoric about service and duty. Maybe his sons felt that way, or maybe they had an obdurate general for a father. But even in a volunteer army, most soldiers are there because they have no better choice to bring hope to their lives. That’s not a good thing, that’s a sad thing — a raw indictment of American culture.
Then Kelly launched into his vituperative and wholly dishonest attack on Rep. Frederica Wilson of Florida. Kelly flatly misrepresented the Congresswoman’s appearance at the dedication of an FBI building in 2015. Kelly was there; he was a witness to what happened. Four years later, his version of what happened was wrong. What he remembered, or said he remembered, was not what the videotape of the event showed. Not even close. So does Kelly have memory problems of some sort? Does he not have enough integrity to vet his opinions against reality? Did he just lie and carry out a deliberate political smear? He gave us a clue to his state of mind:
It stuns me that a member of Congress would have listened in on that conversation. Absolutely stuns me. And I thought at least that was sacred. You know, when I was a kid growing up, a lot of things were sacred in our country. Women were sacred, looked upon with great honor. That’s obviously not the case anymore as we see from recent cases. Life — the dignity of life — is sacred. That’s gone. Religion, that seems to be gone as well.
A good psychiatrist could unpack that passage for years. Why does Kelly think a widow can’t have anyone she wants to comfort her, especially during a cold call from her president? Why does Kelly suggest something sneaky — “listened in” — when the congresswoman was clearly invited to be present and the call was heard on speakerphone by five or six people? Kelly says he is “stunned.” He said that frequently in this appearance. Is this a measure of his insulation from the real world, that he expects everyone to live by some unspoken military code?
And then there’s the bombshell about being a kid growing up and things being sacred. He grew up in Boston, where one of the demonstrably sacred things was white racism. Kelly doesn’t mention that. He starts with the male chauvinist classic: “Women were sacred.” Right, especially Catholic women for whom autonomy was all but a venal sin. Kelly turned 10 in 1960 and was apparently stunned to see his sacred cows challenged: women’s rights, civil rights, human rights, and peace activism. Ironically, Kelly’s life in the sixties was remarkably freewheeling, including hitchhiking cross-country, riding freight trains back, and joining the Merchant Marine, where his first overseas trip was taking beer to Vietnam. He even chose to avoid the draft — but it was by joining the Marines.
And now here he is saying that women are no longer “looked upon with great honor … as we see from recent cases.” He names no one, but this skates stunningly close to his pussy-grabbing boss. He laments the loss of “the dignity of life,” by which he presumably means a woman’s right to make her own medical decisions. A broader meaning of ”the dignity of life” is hardly possible for a man whose career depends on killing people. Kelly’s career is prima facie evidence of his complicity in torture and other war crimes, including the use of depleted uranium weapons, white phosphorous, and the indiscriminate killing of civilians. All those are virtually sacred to the military mentality. Kelly laments the loss of religion, but that’s his religion and it’s far from gone.
Answering a few questions after his statement, Kelly bobbed and weaved about the Niger mission that got Sgt. Johnson killed. Kelly keeps saying how wonderful our soldiers are doing what they do. He offers not a shred of apparent regret at their deaths. As Kelly sees it, with stunning incoherence and self-contradiction, American soldiers:
… put on the uniform, go to where we send them to protect our country. Sometimes they go in large numbers to invade Iraq and invade Afghanistan. Sometimes they’re working in small units, working with our partners in Africa, Asia, Latin America, helping them be better…. That’s why they’re out there, whether it’s Niger, Iraq, or whatever. We don’t want to send tens of thousands of American soldiers and Marines, in particular, to go fight.
So why do we send them to fight anyway, to fight and die in wars that never end, wars that never should have begun? Why do we threaten new wars with North Korea or Iran or even Russia? How does that “protect our country” exactly? Kelly’s “patriotic” delusions are widely held. They’ve been driving national policy for decades, and on steroids since 9/11. But like Kelly’s appearance in the press room, the expression of these delusions never makes sense; they always come down to a question of faith, preferably blind faith. And with that, as we see in Kelly, goes a sense of priesthood, a sense of superiority masked by disingenuous false humility:
We don’t look down upon those of you who that haven’t served. In fact, in a way we’re a little bit sorry because you’ll have never have experienced the wonderful joy you get in your heart when you do the kinds of things our service men and women do — not for any other reason than they love this country. So just think of that.
Yes, think of that. Think of what our service men and women do not only in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria, but also in less closely observed places like Okinawa, El Salvador, or Yemen. The kinds of things our service men and women do, following orders from men like Kelly, are not particularly appreciated in the countries they destroy. Local elites may appreciate our torturing or assassinating their political enemies, but only the most inhumane among them can really appreciate the war crimes that devastate their home countries. Ex-general Kelly imagines a military full of starry-eyed heroes doing wonderful things, and expects the rest of us to believe that, too. The reality on the ground is that sexual assault within the military has reached record levels, the military serves in part as a training ground for white supremacists and other militants, and the capacity of the American military to promote positive change anywhere in the world is pretty much nil. Hip deep in the Big Muddy, John Kelly says to push on.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience
in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20
years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers
Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life
magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television
Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for
this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a
link back to Reader Supported News.
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