Muddy Waters

This won't be a fun column. Jesse Macbeth has got my panties in a knot this week.


[Above: Not that Macbeth...]

I just lied. I don't wear panties. But, if I did, they'd be in a knot. If I did, they'd be knotted ALL THE TIME.

[Right: ... this one.]

Jesse Macbeth's lie is bigger. Jesse claimed to be a veteran of the current Iraq War. He appeared in videos and wrote stories online claiming that he'd witnessed and participated in atrocities there. His stories were picked up by various organizations opposed to the war and they circulated them further, believing them to be true.

How aggravating is Jesse Macbeth's lie? Let's add it up.

One way that Jesse's lie is aggravating (as in "aggravated assault") is that the anti-war movement has been discredited by accepting his claims.

Good intentions don't justify mass killings. We don't need to catch our military in deliberate malicious acts of murder to know that their presence in Iraq has given rise to needless carnage. But it is human nature to want to simplify a moral picture by finding clear villains.

The villains aren't individual soldiers pulling triggers. The villains are the politicians who put them there knowing that war is sloppy and always kills more civilians than anybody else. The villains are the super-majority of the American people who went along with the patent lies, which were far more obvious than Jesse's, and allowed the politicians to get away with starting this war, claiming the people's support. The guilt belongs to a couple hundred million cowards, each of whom only needs to bear a tiny bit of guilt to add up to one monstrous wad of shared guilt.

All of that is meaningless to a people who are so utterly ignorant that they STILL think 15 Saudi nationals, two citizens of the United Arab Emirates, one Lebanese, and one Egyptian, constitutes 19 Iraqis. How do you explain to people that crushingly stupid that discovering Jesse's lie shouldn't deter the anti-war movement?

I'm reminded of events in connection with the '84-'85 Ethiopian famine. Con artists toured America posing as Ethiopians, complete with fake African accents, pretending to be personal witnesses to the suffering who had survived, and who were now in America to raise funds to help their less fortunate brethren. Instead, they raised funds to help themselves. Irrespectively, the famine went on, and roughly a million Ethiopians died.

Irrespectively of Macbeth, the Iraq War continues to be unjust.

Jesse's lie also adds aggravation to the fake vet phenomena. The VA knows there are thousands of American vets who are homeless. But every time someone turns out to be scamming the system, falsely claiming to be a vet, it discredits the thousands more who aren't faking it.

If fewer than 1 out of a hundred of the people claiming to be homeless vets turned out to be lying, that would be enough to convince almost every American that they all are lying, because almost every American is too lazy to learn the difference between 1 and 100, or between 1,000 and 100,000.

[Below left: Fictional representation of a simple moral picture.]

Jesse Macbeth has personally aggravated me. He claims to have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Maybe he does. Just because he hasn't seen combat doesn't mean he can't have PTSD. I know this personally, because I have PTSD and I haven't seen combat. Only, I prefer not to call it Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I prefer to call it Post Traumatic Stress You Could Have Seen Coming, If You'd Been There And Experienced The Trauma Yourself.

When I have to tell people I have PTSYCHSC, IYBTAETTY, the question always comes back, "Oh, so you're a vet then." I'd love to be able to simplify the moral picture, and say yes, if it were true. It sucks having to say no, I'm not a vet, but I've got a story of repeated incestuous rape and vicious beatings that will put your lunch off.

Now, thanks to Jesse, I can expect the question to be, "Oh, so you're pretending to be a vet, then." Thanks loads, Jesse.

Old Fart Wises Off

Good news! Thanks to the Democratic Convention occupying the media, there has been no actual news lately.

This gives us here at Adventures in Poetry – meaning by us, me, Copyright Dr. Wes Browning – a chance to take stock of our life. A chance to sniff the winds of our change and dip our toes into the pools of our stagnation. To audit the account books of the psycho-social-biological records of our historic being. To see to whence we have arrived, and from whence we have departed. And to see who or what is all that in the cargo hold, and why is there a woman in our bed wanting something.

Well, first of all, we are old. We just did the dreaded calculation and discovered that our current incarnation has been breathing air for 20,000 days and a little more than an extra hundred. As a mathematician, let us put that number in perspective. That's one more than 19,999. If he saw 20,000 Republicans laid end to end, Rush Limbaugh wouldn't raise any moral objections. Jules Verne talked about 20,000 leagues, but we don't know what a league is, we're a mathematician, not a damn encyclopedia. If you saw 20,000 pigeons flying toward you, you'd wish you had an umbrella, etc.

We once saw a guy walk on the moon live on television. We saw the assassination of an assassin live on television. We saw several wars live on television, so many that we lost count, sometime around about Panama. Most of them we're unnecessary and a huge waste of lives, health, and money.

History used to happen in black and white, but now it's always in color. Conversely Red Square isn't red anymore. There's nothing left for conservatives to be better dead than, which must be disorienting for them.

We have lived to see the amazing Wolf Blitzer ask Jesse Jackson, in Jesse's capacity as a black spokesperson, why did Barack Obama, a black African immigrant running for the Senate, not speak before the Democratic Convention in Boston using the same kind of rhetoric as did Al Sharpton, a black African-American reverend who had been running for president. Why oh why, Jesse?

Just yesterday, after living a thought-filled and examined life for over 5 decades, we arrived for the first time ever at an adequate working philosophy. This was facilitated by the able conversation and intellectual assistance of our regular companion, the afore-mentioned wanting-something woman and person on whose kitchen floor we have sometimes slept, Anitra Freeman. With her help we came up with this: "Good things now, bad things later." When in doubt always refer to that formula. It's a plan of action that can't go wrong. For example, by using it, you will never force yourself to save dessert for after the asparagus again. You will know all the times that it would be better to be home in bed than. You will learn to appreciate the paper plates of life, and the other disposables. You will shower for the fun of it, not because you have to. There is the way of wisdom.

We have been homeless four times in our life. We mention this in part to fulfill our unwritten contract with Real Change and the Real Change Editorial Committee. Every column we write is required to make at least one mention of homelessness, directly or indirectly, or one local politician must be made fun of, or two national politicians, or we must directly advocate for at least two of the following: minority rights, free pizza for Real Change volunteers writers and "editors", free/more/better treatment for recovering [insert addiction here], cats.

Duck licking. Speaking of speaking of duck licking, every column should contain at least one non sequitur, and one abuse of logical accuracy, which may be the same. But that has nothing to do with the unwritten contract. We have digressed.

We have lived in the same subsidized housing for almost 7 years now, the same housing funded by the Housing Agency Formerly Known As Seattle Housing Authority, the housing that was granted after 14 months on a waiting list, the housing that was promised to me as being permanent, the housing that is now threatened by Bush Administration cuts in Section 8 funding, the housing that we will never move from until they haul my cold lifeless never-to-be-homeless-again body out of it. Or until they come up with something better. Like that'll happen.