I Did See Fort Sumter, Fort Moultrie and Much Else This Day of Memory

It being Memorial Day, with the numberless U.S. flags all around us here in militarylandia at half mast and the humans heading to the many beaches all around us here, enjoying their water craft all around us here, reunionizing and touristing too, black soldiers were much in the forefront of my mind this long weekend.

There are many black soldiers all around us here, doing everything everybody else was doing doing, like all the other military personnel all around us here, and like everybody else these soldiers were in civies this weekend, because they had leave of one kind or another.  That they are in the military though, shows through -- young, fit, upright, meeting and greeting each other in the streets, whether in groups (all of those groups were mixed) or with their families (a lot of these families are mixed race) or solitary.  But whenever any military fellow (and I did not see a single obviously military woman this whole time) met up with another fellow military, they seemed to know each other, pummeled and high fived and otherwise indicated solidarity and confrere status.

So military.  Members of the military are trained to use all kinds of weapons from those they fly in the air to those they carry at their sides or on their shoulders or over their backs.  They weren't wearing any today as far as could be told -- as their clothing was generally light it would have been hard to conceal concealed carry.  There certainly was no open carry anywhere around us ....

I could not help think about the days of the Civil War, with the CSA getting whupped, running out of weapons and ammo and manpower both.  Once again it was brought up in the CSA house and senate: What about we draft Our Negroes and give them guns and have them kill Yankees?  That got shot down by the same power elite that moved and shook the slave holding south into seceding and fighting a war on their behalf.  You CANNOT arm a nigrah.  You CANNOT. Shades of San Domingue and Nat Turner, YOU CANNOT.

So, there was a terrific irony there are African American men now, roaming freely the city of Charleston, in the very beating heart of the slave holding aristocratic CSA, all highly qualified in handling all kinds of deadly weapons, and today, they were being honored.  In Charleston.

It was a long, long, long time coming.

This all came to mind along with that episode from the soap opera series, Army Wives, set on an imaginary army base outside Charleston (there is no army base here, but a naval one, and that's located on a former air force base; location shots are on the naval base, formerly an air force base which quite tickles me as to the rivalry of the military service branches ....).  It is a time travel episode, which examines what our protagonists would be like on the same base during WWII instead of now.  Class and sexual conflicts are the same. The present-day general and his wife, generationally army are at the top of the heap in WWII too. The poor white trash couple are finding the army life to be a good career move into upward mobility and opportunity for their kids just as they do in the present. The couple who has trouble with gender roles -- still in that condition but in a very different way as the Colonel has been badly wounded and is no longer in the military but runs a bar-restaurant, and his wife is deeply dissatisfied -- in present day she's a physician and her husband hated her practicing.  She was to stay home and take care of him and domestic things.  Then there is the black couple.  In present day Joan is a commanding officer of a combat platoon.  Her husband is a psychologist who is also the house husband and does much of the care of their child.  But back in WWII he was a draftee and Joan?  She was a cleaner in Frank's restaurant-bar.  He gets jumped by a bunch of racist yahoos who don't think he should be in Frank's restaurant.  All our regular characters gather around to beat the yahoos off.  Because this is a soap opera and all must feel good by the end. But still.  This was a fascinating episode that tried very hard to show how much the army's changed since WWII.

But now it's facing a hurdle even higher than that of racism: the millennia ingrained  conviction that the right of military man is to rape women.  Even women who are their sisters in combat.  It breaks the heart.

One victim of long-time, repeated assault by her commanding officer testified in tears a couple of weeks ago that she now believes the only reason the military began accepting women as regular soldiers is to be 'comfort women,' as the Japanese did to the Korean women in WWII.  When our military got stationed in locations where women were off-limits due to the culture, and even prostitution, unlike Vietnam, is nearly impossible among the locals, women were allowed in.  And that's their real function -- to be sexual outlets for Our Boys Who Are Entitled to Sexual Satisfaction Whenever With Whoever.  Her heart was broken, and so much else.

So steps ahead -- black men who know weapons can roam at will in Charleston.  Women, well, maybe not so much.

Radical Ideas Concerning This Nation's Culture

Given space in The New York Times, no less.

First, Bob Herbert expresses clearly what has been terribly obvious for decades, that the foundation culture of this nation is violence, the cornerstone of it is hatred of women and girls, sexual and violent assault is committed against women and girls, statistically every two minutes.

We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.

The mainstream culture is filled with the most gruesome forms of misogyny, and pornography is now a multibillion-dollar industry — much of it controlled by mainstream U.S. corporations. . . .

Life in the United States is mind-bogglingly violent. But we should take particular notice of the staggering amounts of violence brought down on the nation’s women and girls each and every day for no other reason than who they are. They are attacked because they are female.

A girl or woman somewhere in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count.

There were so many sexual attacks against women in the armed forces that the Defense Department had to revise its entire approach to the problem.

One of the striking things about mass killings in the U.S. is how consistently we find that the killers were riddled with shame and sexual humiliation, which they inevitably blamed on women and girls. The answer to their feelings of inadequacy was to get their hands on a gun (or guns) and begin blowing people away.

Second, Rocco Landesman, the new head of the National Endowment for the Arts addresses the anger, contempt and hostility with which so many in this nation regard art and artists (not to mention authentic intellectual endeavor -- which has been warred upon by the neocon think tanks and other institutions set up to war up authentic intellectural and artististic work).

Mr. Landesman, 62, made clear that he has little patience for the disdain with which some politicians still seem to view the endowment, more than a decade after the culture wars that nearly destroyed it.

He was particularly angered, he said, by parts of the debate over whether to include $50 million for the agency in the federal stimulus bill, citing the comment by Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts, on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in February, that arts money did not belong in the bill. That kind of thinking suggests that “artists don’t have kids to send to college,” Mr. Landesman said, “or food to put on the table, or medical bills to pay.”

In American politics generally, he added: “The arts are a little bit of a target. The subtext is that it is elitist, left wing, maybe even a little gay. . . .”

“We need to have a seat at the big table with the grown-ups. Art should be part of the plans to come out of this recession.”

“If we’re going to have any traction at all,” he added, “there has to be a place for us in domestic policy.”

He was less clear about the details of this ambitious agenda, though he talked about starting a program that he called “Our Town,” which would provide home equity loans and rent subsidies for living and working spaces to encourage artists to move to downtown areas.

“When you bring artists into a town, it changes the character, attracts economic development, makes it more attractive to live in and renews the economics of that town,” he said. “There are ways to draw artists into the center of things that will attract other people. . . .”

“Someone who works in the arts is every bit as gainfully employed as someone who works in an auto plant or a steel mill,” Mr. Landesman said. “We’re going to make the point till people are tired of hearing it.”

Speaking of art, tonight at 7:30 sharp, The Crimson Grail kicks off in Lincoln Center's Damrosch Park Band Shell. Vaquero's one of the conductors. He formally studied conducting as an undergrad with under a fine Viennese conductor, the late Kurt Frederick, a former pupil of Webern who escaped from the Nazis to Albuquerque. He loves conducting, though he doesn't get to do it very often because of the musical styles he works in.

I'm looking forward to this. From the reports Vaquero has provided out of rehearsals this is going to be a performance of very great beauty of sound.