The Trauma Hero: From Wilfred Owen to “Redeployment” and “American Sniper”
January 25, 2015 • By Roy Scranton
EVERY TRUE WAR STORY is a story of trauma and recovery. A boy goes to war, his head full of romantic visions of glory, courage, and sacrifice, his heart yearning to achieve heroic deeds, but on the field of battle he finds only death and horror. He sees, suffers, and causes brutal and brutalizing violence. Such violence wounds the soldier’s very soul.
After the war the boy, now a veteran and a man, returns to the world of peace haunted by his experience, wracked by the central compulsion of trauma and atrocity: the struggle between the need to bear witness to his shattering encounter with violence, and the compulsion to repress it. The veteran tries to make sense of his memory but finds it all but impossible. Most people don’t want to hear the awful truths that war has taught him, the political powers that be want to cover up the shocking reality of war, and anybody who wasn’t there simply can’t understand what it was like.
The truth of war, the veteran comes to learn, is a truth beyond words, a truth that can only be known by having been there, an unspeakable truth he must bear for society.
So goes the myth of the trauma hero.
This myth informs our politics, shapes our news reports, and underwrites our history. It dominates critical and scholarly interpretation of war literature, war movies, and the visual culture of war. It shapes how we understand Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and World War II, and it affects whom we vote for. Like all myths, this story frames and filters our perceptions of reality through a set of recognizable and comforting conventions. It works to convince us that war is a special kind of experience that offers a special kind of truth, a truth that gives those who have been there a special kind of authority.
The trauma hero myth also serves a scapegoat function, discharging national bloodguilt by substituting the victim of trauma, the soldier, for the victim of violence, the enemy. Take Clint Eastwood’s recent adaptation of Chris Kyle’s memoir, American Sniper. The story, as everyone knows, is of the life and death of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, who as a shooter in Iraq racked up more confirmed kills than any other sniper in American military history. Kyle served four tours in Iraq as a trigger-puller, then retired and began to work with disabled and traumatized veterans. One day one of these veterans shot him.
The opening scene sets the moral stakes: Our hero, played all lockjaw, thousand-yard stare, and darting eyes by Bradley Cooper, must decide whether or not to shoot an Iraqi child whose mother gave him a grenade to throw at an American convoy. Never mind the tired Vietnam-era trope of the bomb-wielding child, a fiction that Eastwood grafted onto Kyle’s less sensational autobiographical account of shooting a woman. What’s important here is that we’re being shown what extremes of psychological torment our hero must endure — and this is only the beginning. Such suffering is the upshot of the whole narrative, which is an account of Kyle’s increasing combat stress and the toll that takes on his family, layered over with a simplistic dueling snipers plot, both of which culminate in a climactic rooftop battle scene.
In this scene, Kyle draws on his years of training and warrior wisdom to make an “impossible” shot, killing the sniper “Mustafa.” As a gibbering horde of Iraqi insurgents descends upon our American heroes, Kyle calls his wife by satellite phone and tells her he’s ready to come home. A dust storm envelops the battle and the Americans fight their way out, barely escaping, in a visually striking chaos that serves as a symbolic baptism: Kyle is sucked into the whirlwind and only barely makes it out, leaving his weapon and his lucky Bible behind him. He has been reborn.
The last scenes of the film intimate Kyle’s recuperation. Cooper loses his thousand-yard stare and lets his jaw relax, revealing a man who has learned how to turn the lessons of war into the lessons of peace. Instead of helping endangered soldiers by killing Iraqis, he has learned to help wounded soldiers by talking with them and mentoring them in shooting-range therapy. The final scene, before the documentary footage of Kyle’s flag-bedecked funeral, is of Kyle as father and husband, warm, joking, engaged with his wife and children.
American Sniper focuses in tight on one man’s story of trauma, leaving out the complex questions of why Kyle was in Iraq being traumatized in the first place. The Iraqis in the film are villains, caricatures, and targets, and the only real opinion on them the film offers is Kyle’s. The Iraqis are all “savages” who threaten American lives and need to be killed. There’s some truth in this representation, insofar as this is how a lot of American soldiers thought. Yet the film obviates the questions of why any American soldiers were in Iraq, why they stayed there for eight years, why they had to kill thousands upon thousands of Iraqi civilians, and how we are to understand the long and ongoing bloodbath once called the “war on terror.” It does that precisely by turning a killer into a victim, a war hero into a trauma hero.
The myth of the trauma hero, like all great myths, has a history. It goes back to the birth of Romanticism in the 18th century, and is first seen taking shape in Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma and Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The myth achieved its mature form in 20th-century war literature, and is often now read as the very definition of war literature itself, even though as the 20th century has worn on, the myth has become increasingly conventional and increasingly self-referential. Tracking this myth through the poetry of Wilfred Owen, the prose of Ernest Hemingway and Tim O’Brien, and Kevin Powers’s Iraq war novel The Yellow Birds can help us see how the myth works, how it has been used by writers eager to capitalize on the moral authority it offers, and how it has turned from being a frame for understanding reality into a mirroring surface that reflects back only our own expectations.
In June 1917, while recuperating from shellshock at Craiglockhart War Hospital, British Lieutenant Wilfred Owen wrote the first draft of a bitter poem describing the death of a fellow soldier in a gas attack. This draft was dedicated “To Jessie Pope,” a widely published female civilian poet known for her patriotic poems. Owen’s dedication, later amended “To a certain poetess,” was as facetious as the poem’s now-famous ending is ironic: the vividly depicted horror of a comrade’s choking death was intended to chasten pro-war civilians like Pope and repudiate the “old Lie” that “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”
Owen begins his poem in the perspective of marching soldiers, identifying a speaking “we” that shifts between subjective sensation and close description of physical suffering: “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, / Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge […]” Vivid images strike a scene as if out of Bosch, and details such as the caliber of the artillery rounds help establish the narrator’s authority. The men come under gas attack, and we, with our narrator, helplessly watch one die choking, drowning in air. We see through the narrator’s eyes, through the “misty” lenses of his gas mask. This shift via perceptual detail into the narrator’s subjectivity is pushed further in the next stanza’s free-standing couplet, where the death recurs as a traumatic repetition within the narrator’s dreams: “In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.”
In the final stanza, the narrator turns from his dream to the reader’s, indicting the one who doesn’t know the experience of war: “If in some smothering dreams you too could pace / Behind the wagon that we flung him in […]” The details press on, one after the other, but now instead of describing the scene itself, or even its memory, Owen describes the dream that you, the reader, would be tortured by — if you’d seen what he’d seen and felt what he felt. If you could see, the narrator tells Jessie Pope, if you knew what it was really like, then you wouldn’t write poems supporting the war.
The Latin tag ending the poem, from Horace’s Carmina III.2, translates roughly as “It is dear and honorable to die for one’s nation.” This tag stands for what Owen is aiming to attack, to dispel, to silence: the “old Lie” taught in English schoolbooks and put forth by civilian poets. I know the truth, Owen claims, not because I read about it in Horace, but because I’ve seen it, heard it, and felt it. Owen means to malign war, but according to his logic, it is his very experience of war that gives him privileged access to moral truth beyond anything civilians like Jessie Pope can ever hope to achieve. Owen asserts that war’s truth is the truth of the soldier’s experience, which puts the issue of war beyond debate.
The Israeli military historian Yuval Harari has argued that the practice of hallowing the experience of war as trauma grows out of a larger historical shift from recording external deeds as evidence of valor to recording internal experiences as evidence of developing sensibility. Revolutions in military technology and organization in the early 17th century created the conditions for detaching personal glory from military experience. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the growth of sensationalism, the cult of sensibility, and Romanticism combined with increasing literacy and a more professionalized and middle-class officer corps to make “war-as-revelation” the predominant frame for interpreting the individual experience of war in the West. Once a field of accomplishment, war became a kind of sentimental education.
In the US, this interpretive frame has led to contradictory attitudes about war. On the one hand, Americans denounce war as something uncivilized and exceptional, something only other countries do, something America only does under duress. On the other hand, Americans indulge in what historian David Bell has described as “an unabated fascination with war, considering it a test of their society’s worth. They treat members of the armed forces with respect verging on reverence and take for granted that no one who has not been in combat can ever really understand ‘what it is like’ or how it changes a person.”
Most Americans seem to believe that war can only be known through direct, physical, sensory experience on the battlefield, such as the moment of vision Owen describes in “Dulce et Decorum Est.” Ernest Hemingway, who in contrast to Owen’s long front-line service lasted only a few weeks as a noncombatant before being wounded and returning to the US, stands in American letters as the high priest of combat gnosticism. In Hemingway’s work, the emphasis on physicality, embodiment, and materiality we see in Owen’s representations of the soldier’s truth opens into a metaphysical bias against representation itself. In Hemingway’s novel of World War I, A Farewell to Arms, Lieutenant Frederic Henry delivers a famous denunciation of martial ideals and abstract language, founded in the moral authority of his earlier wounding, that makes this point explicit.
During a conversation between Lieutenant Henry and an Italian ambulance driver named Gino, in an area of the front that had recently been taken back, Gino comments that the summer fighting “cannot have been done in vain.” Lieutenant Henry silently disdains not just Gino’s patriotism, but the very words he uses:
I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
For Hemingway’s Lieutenant Henry, the soldier’s truth becomes a formal truth: it determines not only who can speak, but what words can be spoken. Gino, after all, has seen as much or more war than Lieutenant Henry has. The difference between them is in their sensibility. For Hemingway, Gino is a crude nationalist who thinks and speaks in clichés, while Lieutenant Henry is a refined and sensitive soul who knows the true words for war. Those words must be concrete, sensory, metonymic: place names, regimental numbers, and dates must stand in for the battles that were fought there. Any recognition of social value, any judgment of character or worth, Hemingway finds repugnant. War and combat can only be properly addressed by invoking the temporal and geographic markers by which those who were present will remember them.
Upping the literary stakes, Tim O’Brien’s influential collection of linked stories The Things They Carried pushes beyond Hemingway’s repudiation of idealism and abstraction to a repudiation of civic discourse and truth as such. Where Hemingway still allows invocation to retain the dignity of battlefield presence, O’Brien refuses any connection at all between social norms and combat. Where Hemingway insists on the concrete, O’Brien avows the obscene. “A true war story,” he writes in The Things They Carried, “is never moral.”
It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.
The Things They Carried is presented as a series of reminiscences, partly fictionalized, ambiguously true, from O’Brien’s time as an infantryman in Vietnam. In “How to Tell a True War Story,” much as in Owen’s poem, O’Brien offers the voyeuristic drama of watching a fellow soldier die as evidence against “a very old and terrible lie.” On patrol in the jungle, two infantrymen, Rat Kiley and Curt Lemon, are playing catch with a smoke grenade, when Lemon steps on a booby trap and gets blown up. Like Owen, O’Brien revisits the moment of death again and again. Where Owen’s choking soldier comes back first as a dream, then as the reader’s dream, O’Brien’s exploding Curt Lemon comes back and back and back in a fictional model of traumatic repetition.
What O’Brien ultimately works toward, in this story and throughout The Things They Carried, is the assertion of an encounter with truth that transcends communicability — not only for his characters, but for the writer. The knowledge Tim O’Brien claims to have experienced in Vietnam can’t be understood or even discussed, but only felt.
For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel — the spiritual texture — of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can’t tell where you are, or why you’re there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity. In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.
For O’Brien, a true war story is about the failure of language to communicate experience altogether, which is an assertion that the soldier’s truth is a mystic truth. Illumination here takes the form of negative theology, apophatically denying that the experience of war can be described, thereby denying both the truth of prior descriptions and the possibility that the experience can ever be communicated at all.
Confronting O’Brien’s total negation of language, Kevin Powers’s 2012 Iraq war novel The Yellow Birds flips the script by representing war trauma as the font of poetic transcendence: instead of negating language, the experience of war inspires it. Through flashbacks, The Yellow Birds tells of Privates John Bartle and Daniel Murphy, a wartime George and Lennie who deploy to Iraq under the tyrannical rule of one Sergeant Sterling. While downrange, Murphy loses his mind and goes AWOL; Bartle and Sterling eventually find his mutilated corpse. In the novel’s present, Bartle has returned to the US, struggles with PTSD, and is wrongly imprisoned by the military’s Criminal Investigation Division for his alleged involvement in an atrocity committed by Sergeant Sterling, who has in the meantime committed suicide. What redeems Bartle in the end is the novel itself, his story, his voice: the novel dramatizes the transformation of Bartle’s trauma into Powers’s poetry.
Powers’s literary ambitions are signaled in the novel’s first lines, a lyrical meditation on war that builds metaphor upon metaphor into a surreal montage of sensation beyond meaning, and extends from its tortuously elaborate sentences through its melodramatic plot to its hyper-conscious symbolism of hyacinths. Private Bartle’s narration is a perpetual cry of pain, a constant ache of swollen language that breaks into traumatic revelation when he commits violence:
I moved to the edge of the bridge and began firing at anything moving. I saw one man fall in a heap near the bank of the river among the bulrushes and green fields on its edges. In that moment, I disowned the waters of my youth. My memories of them became a useless luxury, their names as foreign as any that could be found in Nineveh: the Tigris or the Chesapeake, the James or the Shatt al Arab farther to the south, all belonged to someone else, and perhaps had never really been my own. I was an intruder, at best a visitor, and would be even in my home, in my misremembered history, until the glow of phosphorescence in the Chesapeake I had longed to swim inside again someday became a taunt against my insignificance, a cruel trick of light that had always made me think of stars. No more. I gave up longing, because I was sure that anything seen at such a scale would reveal the universe as cast aside and drowned, and if I ever floated there again, out where the level of the water reached my neck, and my feet lost contact with its muddy bottom, I might realize that to understand the world, one’s place in it, is to be always at the risk of drowning.
Noctiluca, I thought, Ceratium, as the tracers began to show themselves in the sifted twilight […]
Powers ascends from description to meditation, from simple declarations to disordered hyperbaton, from the concrete names of rivers now turned foreign to the abstract stymying of pluperfect desires (“until the glow of phosphorescence in the Chesapeake I had longed to swim inside again someday became a taunt against my insignificance”), and finally to esoteric Latin terms deployed in a telling inversion of Owen’s rhetorical move ending “Dulce et Decorum Est.” Where Owen marshals sense data to controvert the authority of Latinate literariness, Powers takes flight from materiality into literature. Where Owen inscribes a vision, Powers poetizes: “Noctiluca, I thought, Ceratium […]”
For Powers, the conventional tropes of war lit are not a means of conveying truth, but the truth of war itself. The transformation of experience into literature is here characterized as a dissociation from one’s own embodied memory (“I disowned the water of my youth”), a process of evacuation in which concrete facts, Hemingway’s “names of rivers,” become not only interchangeable but also alienated, pure signs operating in a closed economy of literary signification in which Powers (or Bartle) is an interloper (they “all belonged to someone else, and perhaps had never really been my own”) — an economy we might read as the system of MFA programs and New York publishing circles that shaped The Yellow Birds and its reception. Powers’s climactic turn from experience to literature rather than the other way around suggests that the conventions of traumatic revelation have become purely formal expectations of an audience more interested in war as myth than in war as reality, or even as literature.
In one of the most substantial recent articles on contemporary war lit, George Packer in The New Yorker reads the genre as a set of variations on the trauma hero myth, focusing on the Owen-Hemingway-O’Brien lineage while ignoring works that don’t fit that frame, such as John Dos Passos’s epic U.S.A. trilogy, James Jones’s masterful combat novel The Thin Red Line, John Horne Burns’s acidic portrait of American-occupied Naples, The Gallery, or Stephen Wright’s surreal, elusive novel about media and surveillance in Vietnam, Meditations in Green. Shoehorning more recent war lit from Iraq and Afghanistan into his narrow rubric, Packer extends his interpretation from the literature of those wars to the wars themselves, writing: “The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fully meet [Paul] Fussell’s description of the ironic: they were worse than expected. Both began with hubris and false victories, turned into prolonged stalemates, and finally deserved the bitter name of defeat.” This is, we should note, a partial view. Packer was one of the liberal hawks calling for an American invasion of Iraq in 2002 and 2003, against the advice of State Department officials, Middle East experts, UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, and the US Army Chief of Staff. Only after spending time on the ground in Baghdad, “seeing what it was really like” and realizing that wars are messy, bloody, dumb, and wasteful, did Packer recant his earlier jingoism.
In light of his own experience, as understood through the lens of Fussell’s canonical reading of World War I poetry in The Great War and Modern Memory, Packer sees the novels, poems, and stories coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan as bearing the truth of a traumatic and disillusioning revelation. He reads Kevin Powers’s rather banal poetry as “meditative and convalescent,” evincing “the poet’s mind reopening after a great shock,” and finds “one of the best distillations of combat” he’d ever read in a dull comparison The Yellow Birds makes between combat and a car accident. Packer interprets Benjamin Busch’s lyrical memoir Dust to Dust as the formal embodiment of PTSD, writing, “Fragments are perhaps the most honest literary form available to writers who fought so recently.” It’s difficult to know what it would mean for a literary form to be “honest,” unless you are predisposed to understand experience as having a certain shape. Brian Turner, the pre-eminent American poet of the Iraq War, fits rather more easily into Packer’s trauma hero reading, since Turner’s poetry is already deeply Romantic in sensibility. For Turner, poetry itself is already experience-as-revelation; the fact that he is a war poet is practically accidental, except insofar as we seem to expect our war poets to write precisely that kind of poem. Packer ends his essay by considering Phil Klay’s award-winning short story collection Redeployment, lauding the book as a paragon not of literary sophistication and suspended judgment, which it is, but of “rigorous honesty” and, of course, irony. Klay’s virtues are, for Packer, the essential virtues of war literature: not art, but experience. This itself is ironic, considering Klay spent his war behind a desk as a Public Affairs Officer — what the military calls a publicist.
By focusing strictly on writers who happen to be veterans, Packer misses not only some of the most interesting novels published so far about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain, The Watch, by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, and They Dragged Them Through the Streets, by Hilary Plum, but also essential work in translation by Iraqi writers, such as Sinan Antoon’s elegiac novel The Corpse Washer and Hassan Blasim’s devastating, surreal short stories in The Corpse Exhibition. What’s more, Packer ignores veteran writers who don’t fit the conventions of the trauma hero myth. A stirring diversity of short stories, novels, poems, essays, and memoirs by a growing community of writers are effaced and reduced to a handful of works that conform to expected conventions.
Where Packer missteps most precipitously, however, is where he considers war literature in its historical and political contexts.
Journalists and historians have to distort war. In order to find the plot — causation, sequence, meaning — they make war more intelligible than it really is. In the literature by veterans, there are virtually no politics or polemics, in stark contrast to the tendentious way in which most Americans, especially those farthest removed from the fighting, discussed Iraq. This new writing takes the war, though not its terrible cost, as a given.
This isn’t just wrong, it’s dangerous. It presumes that journalists and historians adhere to conventions of understanding (“causation, sequence, meaning”) whereas novelists and poets do not, which not only offers a patently nonsensical way of approaching literature but also makes extravagant demands upon it: how could a writer possibly communicate any experience without making it “more intelligible than it really is”? Making experience intelligible is just what language does. Further, Packer makes the specious assumption that ignoring the causes, background, and motivating forces for a war represents an absence of politics, rather than seeing it for what it is, which is a kind of politics — namely, a politics of forgetting that actively elides the question of what US soldiers were fighting for and the bigger problem of who they were killing, in favor of the more narrow and manageable question of “what it was like.”
Packer’s tendentious argument highlights the most troubling consequence of our faith in the revelatory truth of combat experience and our sanctification of the trauma hero: that by focusing so insistently on the psychological trauma American soldiers have had to endure, we allow ourselves to forget the death and destruction those very soldiers are responsible for. Consider the title story of Phil Klay’s Redeployment. Klay’s collection opens with a US marine reflecting on his experience in Iraq as he returns home, declaring: “We shot dogs.” This short, powerful sentence, while factually true, offers readers a comforting moral lie. “We shot dogs” is as accurate as “We built schools” or “We brought democracy,” and works much the way we seem to want our war literature to function: by foregrounding a peripheral detail, it obscures much more significant big-picture realities. By focusing on how “We shot dogs,” Klay allows American readers to ignore the unpleasant fact that we shot people.
The story “Redeployment” tells is of a traumatized marine veteran, Sgt. Price, who returns home from Iraq to his wife, Cheryl, and his dog, Vicar. Vicar, he finds, is terminally ill. As Sgt. Price adjusts to peacetime life and processes his experience of the war, he is troubled by Vicar’s worsening condition, and eventually decides to take the dog out to the river and shoot him.
Klay’s Old Yeller narrative of masculine hardening is layered over with a deliberate conflation between Iraqis and dogs. It is telling that Sgt. Price’s dog is named “Vicar.” A vicar is a representative or substitute, as the Pope is the Vicar of Christ, and in “Redeployment,” the tumorous Vicar is a substitute for the narrator’s trauma and guilt. Yet Vicar also stands in as a substitute for the thousands of Iraqis killed during the American occupation. The comparison is made explicit at the story’s end, as Sgt. Price is preparing to shoot his dog, when he remembers his marines killing an insurgent in Fallujah. The insurgent had been found in a cesspool, “hiding beneath the liquid and only coming up for air. […] like a fish rising up to grab a fly.” The insurgent has no face, no name, no body: he is no more than a mouth breaking the surface of a fetid pool.
The sad fact Klay plays on is that most American readers will care more about a dead dog than they will about a dead Iraqi, and in this way “Redeployment” opens up an emotional conduit for those readers to feel the pang of grief that can come with killing, but without having to connect that feeling to the political reality of the war in Iraq. Whereas an Iraqi victim would have to be reckoned with as a fellow human being, with all the complexity that entails, a dog can simply be pitied and his killer simply empathized with. This moral simplification comes at a cost.
Klay, embodying the moral authority of a veteran, assures American readers that a dead Iraqi needn’t trouble them any more than a dead dog would. And since most of us already feel that way, his story provides a much-desired release, freeing us from the worry that we ought to feel guilty about the havoc the American military unleashed and the blood American soldiers and marines spilled. Sgt. Price is our trauma hero — he pays the “price” for our bloodguilt. Rather than forcing us to face our collective complicity in a brutal war of aggression that has left thousands upon thousands dead, Klay asks us to feel bad for how much psychological pain one sensitive marine has suffered doing what had to be done.
Read in the context of Klay’s other stories in Redeployment, or with the other stories it was published alongside in the collection I co-edited with Matt Gallagher, Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War, Klay’s trauma hero narrative can be read productively and provocatively as one perspective among many. Yet when the trauma hero myth is taken as representing the ultimate truth of more than a decade of global aggression, as with American Sniper, we allow the psychological suffering endured by those we sent to kill for us displace and erase the innocents killed in our name. As in Klay’s story, the real victims of American political violence disappear under a load of shit.
The Yellow Birds, “Redeployment,” and American Sniper may portray a loss of innocence that makes the dirty war in Iraq palatable as an individual tragedy, but they only do so by obscuring the connection between American audiences and the millions of Iraqi lives destroyed or shattered since 2003. Focusing on the suffering of Private Bartle, Sergeant Price, or Chief Petty Officer Kyle allows us to forget the suffering of the very people whose land was occupied in our name. There are almost no Iraqis in The Yellow Birds or Redeployment at all, and where they do appear, they are caricatures. If the point of literature is to help us “recognize [our] own suffering in the stories of others,” as George Packer sententiously asserts, rather than soothing our troubled consciences with precisely the stories we want to hear, then novels such as The Yellow Birds and stories such as “Redeployment” are gross moral and literary failures. But the failure does not belong to the writers. It belongs to all the readers and citizens who expect veterans to play out for them the ritual fort-da of trauma and recovery, and to carry for them the collective guilt of war.
Such an expectation is the privilege of those who can afford to have others do their killing for them. Off-loading the problem of war onto the figure of the traumatized veteran, however, has long-term costs we have yet to reckon. The imperative to see war clearly is persistent, and as urgent today as ever, as US military forces return to Iraq and a new kettle of hawks cry for war in Ukraine and Syria. Understanding the problem of American political violence demands recognizing soldiers as agents of national power, and understanding what kind of work the trauma hero is doing when he comes bearing witness in his bloody fatigues.
Roy Scranton is the author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (City Lights, Fall 2015) and co-editor of Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War (Da Capo, 2013).
Roy Scranton
Roy Scranton is the author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization and the novel War Porn. He teaches at the University of Notre Dame.
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Given-Wilson, Patrick
Patrick Given-Wilson (Singapore, 1947) took his first degree in Classics and Classical Philosophy at Cambridge University, England, and later took an MBA at Stanford University, California. He worked as an investment banker in London for seven years, and emigrated to Australia in 1978.
He and his wife Ginnie took their first Vipassana course with S.N. Goenka in 1977, and were appointed Vipassana teachers in 1984. As Vipassana teachers they serve for Dhamma Bhumi and Dhamma Pasada, as well as for South East Australia. They have two children and live in Sydney. Patrick has also conducted courses in New Zealand, England, Spain, Switzerland, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, China, Russia and Israel. His articles have been published in Vipassana newsletters, his art in the Pariyatti Journal, and he has recorded an interesting series of eight video talks exploring the lives and teachings of the lineage of Vipassana Meditation Teachers in our tradition, the lineage that led to the Vipassana courses as taught by S.N. Goenka.
The talks touch on the setbacks and challenges the different teachers faced, and the ways in which they presented and taught Vipassana to suit the different times, audiences and cultures that they encountered—while always maintaining its essence and pristine purity. The talks show how, as a result, the teaching of Vipassana—which for generations was only limited available to a few monks in Burma—was able to spread to so many people throughout the world today. The series covers Ashoka, who first sent monks to Burma, Ledi Sayadaw, Saya Thet, Webu Sayadaw, Sayagyi U Ba Khin, and S.N. Goenka. The talks are offered to explain the history and origins of this noble tradition, and above all to inspire Vipassana meditators.
Patrick Given-Wilson will be the guest at the Pariyatti Presents... online event on February 19, 2023 (February 20 in Australia)
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The Importance of Friendship, Harmony and Right Speech
(Download and Streaming Audio)
S.N. Goenka: a talk by Patrick Given-Wilson, Part 3 (Video Streaming and Download)
Vipassana Meditation Talk by Patrick Given-Wilson (Video Streaming and Download)
Ashoka: An Ideal Ruler by Patrick Given-Wilson (Video Streaming and Download)
Sayagyi U Ba Khin: a talk by Patrick Given-Wilson (Video Streaming and Download)
Now with Japanese subtitles!
Saya Thetgyi: a talk by Patrick Given-Wilson (Video Streaming and Download)
Ven. Ledi Sayadaw: a talk by Patrick Given-Wilson (Video Streaming and Download)
Ven. Webu Sayadaw: a talk by Patrick Given-Wilson (Video Streaming and Download)


Commentary January 26, 2009
The key topic of this double issue of Diplomaatia is terrorism.
In the opening article, Mart Nutt, a member of the Estonian Parliament, gives an overview of the history of terrorism. “Broadly speaking, if we treated terrorism as a form of illegal political violence, we could claim that terrorism is as old as politics and that the first act of terrorism – the killing of Abel by Cain – was described in the Bible,” claims Nutt. He is convinced that there is no standard definition for terrorism; the more so that the line between freedom-fighting and terrorism is but vague – what some see as freedom-fighting is terrorism for others and vice versa.
Rein Tammsaar, an official of the General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union, writes about the ‘war on terrorism’ as it has become known after September 11, 2001. “One of the mistakes made in the launching of the war on terrorism was that the long-term negative impact of the achievement of short-term military objectives – the substantial radicalisation of great masses of people – was not taken into account. By now, radicalisation at local level has reached a global scale,” claims Tammsaar.
In addition, the foreign policy of the United States was almost completely subjected to the goals of the war on terrorism. However, diplomacy usually recedes when military force starts to gain dominance. “Anyway, compared to military force, diplomacy is complicated, arduous, expensive and, more importantly, it does not yield quick and tangible results. Alas, the old saying used on the other side of the big pond – when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail – is quite accurate. This is why its strong military component could, paradoxically, be the main weakness of the war on terrorism, as it sows the seeds of anger and desperation.”
Thirdly, the gravest miscalculation concerning the US-led global war on terrorism was using simple black-and-white logic: if you are not with us, you must be against us. However, value-based foreign policy can play only a marginal role in a black-and-white world.
Tomas Jermalavicius, a researcher at the International Centre for Defence Studies, agrees with Tammsaar that terrorism cannot be solved by using only military means. “Bringing soldiers into the streets can be as frightening as it can be assuring. It may serve the purpose of underlining the desperation of a government that is unable to manage the situation with ordinary means of law enforcement,” writes Jermalavicius. “Armed forces often find it difficult to culturally adapt themselves to quite different imperatives of combating terrorism, compared to fighting conventional wars. Firstly, the military like to think in terms of clear objectives and end-states, which are observable and measurable. This is not something one may always expect in a complex and muddled psychological game of suasion and counter-suasion, or shaping of perceptions of relevant audiences, that terrorists and governments play. Secondly, the military usually are predisposed to delivering quick, decisive and tough solutions. This kind of mentality is often at odds with drawn-out anti-terrorist campaigns lasting for years or even decades, during which exercising self-restraint and careful calibration of the use of force are dominant requirements for the behaviour of governments and their agencies. So, it is no wonder that poorly thought through and hasty use of military tools in combating terrorism may come to resemble the use of a cannon to hunt mosquitoes – it makes a lot of noise and causes destruction, but has little impact on tormentors.”
Indrek Elling, a researcher at the International Centre for Defence Studies, analyses the progress made in rebuilding the Afghan army and police force – if these do not operate effectively, the coalition forces cannot leave Afghanistan. Elling asserts that even though the conditions in Afghanistan will probably not become similar to those in Europe in the coming decades, there is no reason to be too pessimistic and to underestimate Afghanistan’s positive achievements.
Peeter Oissar, a security police officer, claims that Estonia is also vulnerable to attacks by Islamist terrorists. “On the one hand, Estonia could became a target for Islamist terrorists because we as a NATO member state participate in the US-led coalition forces in Iraq and in Afghanistan, whereas in addition to military operations we have taken part in anti-terrorist operations in both of these countries. On the other hand, there are many Muslims from Europe who fight the US-led and other coalition forces. These fighters will return to their homes, having acquired new skills and contacts in the conflict regions, which is why they will become a serious security threat. Although there are no domestic Islamist groups in Estonia, various foreign Muslim organisations showed an interest in the Estonian Muslim community in 2008. The Security Police has reasons to believe that some of these organisations or their single members who visited Estonia have supported radical Islamists. Their interest in the Estonian Muslim community was expressed in the form of making visits to Estonia and offering financial support. In addition, local Muslims have been invited to various events in foreign countries,” asserts Oissar.
Riina Kaljurand, a researcher at the International Centre for Defence Studies, describes the situation in Northern Ireland where terrorism is now practically non-existent, despite the fact that until recently the region was a classic example of the ‘older generation’ terrorism that was pursued in the name of clear political objectives.
Literary researcher Mihhail Lotman writes about the history of terrorism in Russia and the reputation of terrorists in Russia at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century. “The intellectual elite in Russia became convinced that an act of terrorism did indeed involve monsters and innocent martyrs: the targets were the monsters and the perpetrators were the victims. Terrorists were surrounded with the halo of martyrdom or even holiness: they sacrificed their lives for the nation,” writes Lotman.
Journalist Andrei Soldatov gives an overview of the current activities of Russian security services in their war on terrorism and journalist Jaanus Piirsalu describes the situation in the Northern Caucasus after the Chechen Wars.
Lastly, Maria Mälksoo, a researcher at the International Centre for Defence Studies, pays tribute to Samuel Huntington who died in December. In addition, this issue includes the bibliography for 2008.
Filed under: CommentaryTagged with: Nr 65/66 • Jaanuar/Veebruar 2009


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Crossroads Sports®
Arlington Christian Church (ACC) began with a group of 40 people meeting in Mrs. Schaffer's school to worship and dream about doing big things for God.
After 8 years, the congregation had outgrown their school meeting place and ACC moved into their new home in the facility they built at 5200 Bowen Road.
The Elders at ACC brought Barry Cameron and his family from Florida and he became the new Lead Pastor, bringing with him a vision for continued growth and discipleship.
Having once again outgrown their worship space, ACC added the Family Life Center to the building at Bowen Road, enabling them to make new spaces for worship, Bible studies and kid's classes.
As more and more room was needed to reach the kids in the surrounding community, the Castle was built for the Children's Ministry and the Student Life Center soon followed, giving the Youth Ministry a space of their own.
ACC had expanded as much as the bounds of the Bowen Road location would allow, and so the Elders took a step of faith and purchased a 150-acre plot of land off of South Highway 360 at the crossroads of Arlington, Mansfield and Grand Prairie.
Arlington Christian Church officially became Crossroads Christian Church as they moved into their brand-new facility and celebrated all that God had done for them and all He was still planning to do.
The congregation at Crossroads celebrated together as they had followed God's financial guidance and were officially debt free!
Construction of the SportCenter was completed bringing an indoor gymnasium, outdoor volleyball courts, soccer fields and tennis courts to the developing campus, allowing the newly formed Sports Ministry to reach even more children and adults in the surrounding community.
The new Children's Building opened allowing kids from Kindergarten through 6th grade to have their own unique space to sing, dance, play and celebrate being a child of God. Opening an additional building also gave Crossroads the opportunity to host events like Night to Shine and CIY SuperStart in a new and exciting way!
The next step in expanding the Kingdom and reaching the lost came with the opening of the Youth Building, a place specifically designed with teens in mind to come and gather and find community.
Crossroads' mission is Connecting People To God And To One Another and this starts with a clear, biblical foundation.
Crossroads is led by a board of Elders, a leadership team, and a dedicated staff who are committed to exemplifying God and carrying out the mission He has given Crossroads here in the Dallas - Fort Worth metroplex.
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FILE – The logo for chemical and consumer products maker 3M appears on a screen above the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 24, 2017.…
FILE – The logo for chemical and consumer products maker 3M appears on a screen above the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 24, 2017. The company said Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2022, that it will phase out manufacturing of “forever chemicals” and try to get them out of all their products by the end of 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)
Spurred by regulators, 3M to phase out “forever chemicals”
by: MATT OTT, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — 3M will phase out the manufacturing of so-called “forever chemicals” and try to get them out of all their products within two years, the chemical and consumer products maker said Tuesday.
The decision announced Tuesday arrives after U.S. environmental regulators designated the chemicals — used in nonstick frying pans, water-repellent sports gear, stain-resistant rugs, cosmetics and countless other consumer products since the 1940s – as hazardous substances under the Superfund law.
While the designation is not an outright ban, polyfluoroalkyl substances, better known as PFAS, require a report to federal, state or tribal officials if the amount released into soil or water meet or exceed a certain level. The Environmental Protection Agency could then require cleanups to protect public health and recover cleanup costs.
PFAS have been voluntarily phased out by U.S. manufacturers but are still in limited use and remain in the environment because they do not degrade over time.
3M said its decision was based on multiple factors, including “accelerating regulatory trends focused on reducing or eliminating the presence” of the chemicals in the environment.
The chemicals can accumulate and persist in the human body for long periods of time, and evidence from animal and human studies indicates that exposure to PFAS may lead to cancer or other health problems, including damage to organs including the liver, kidneys and thyroid gland.
3M, based in Saint Paul, Minnesota, said it will exit all PFAS manufacturing and “work to discontinue use of PFAS” in all its products by the end of 2025.
3M makes a broad range of consumer products, including Post-it notes, Scotch Brite cleaning supplies, adhesives and personal protective equipment.
Chemical and other industrial companies have been sued frequently in recent years for downplaying the dangers of the chemicals.
In a November lawsuit, the state of California accused 3M, Dupont and 16 smaller companies of covering up the harm caused to the environment and the public from chemicals manufactured by the firms that have over decades found their way into waterways and human bloodstreams.
Last year, the Biden administration launched a broad strategy to regulate the toxic industrial compounds that the EPA said are increasingly turning up in public drinking water systems, private wells and even food.
The Defense Department, Food and Drug Administration and Agriculture Department were all tapped to join the effort intended to restrict PFAS from being released into the environment and accelerate cleanup.


Justia Dockets & Filings Second Circuit New York Northern District Mitchell v. SUNY Upstate Medical University et al Filing 8
Mitchell v. SUNY Upstate Medical University et al
ORDER adopting Report and Recommendations re 5 Report and Recommendations: The Court hereby ORDERS that Magistrate Judge Baxter's Order and Report-Recommendation is ADOPTED in its entirety for the reasons stated therein; and the Court further ORDERS that this matter is referred to Magistrate Judge Baxter for review of the amended complaint and application for leave to proceed in forma pauperis. Signed by U.S. District Judge Mae A. D'Agostino on 6/22/2017. (Copy served via regular mail)(ban)
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT NORTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK ____________________________________________ ROBBIE O. MITCHELL, Plaintiff, vs. 5:17-CV-546 (MAD/ATB) SUNY UPSTATE MEDICAL UNIVERSITY; BRIAN C. REED, Materials Management Admin; and LINDA A. MAZZONE, Leave Coordinator, Defendants. ____________________________________________ APPEARANCES: OF COUNSEL: ROBBIE O. MITCHELL 1924 E. Genesee Street, Apt. 4 Syracuse, New York 13210 Plaintiff pro se Mae A. D'Agostino, U.S. District Judge: ORDER Plaintiff commenced this action on May 18, 2017, alleging employment discrimination in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act ("ADA"), 42 U.S.C. § 12101 et seq. See Dkt. No. 1. In an Order and Report-Recommendation dated May 22, 2017, Magistrate Judge Baxter recommended that the Court dismiss with prejudice the claims against Defendants Reed and Mazzone because individuals cannot be held liable under the ADA. See Dkt. No. 5 at 4. As to Defendant SUNY Upstate, Magistrate Judge Baxter recommended that the complaint be dismissed without prejudice since it is not clear that amendment would be futile. See id. at 7-8. Although Plaintiff did not object to the Order and Report-Recommendation, on June 15, 2017, Plaintiff filed an amended complaint. See Dkt. No. 6. Currently before the Court is Magistrate Judge Baxter's Order and Report-Recommendation. When a party files specific objections to a magistrate judge's report-recommendation, the district court makes a "de novo determination of those portions of the report or specified proposed findings or recommendations to which objection is made." 28 U.S.C. § 636(b)(1). However, when a party files "[g]eneral or conclusory objections or objections which merely recite the same arguments [that he presented] to the magistrate judge," the court reviews those recommendations for clear error. O'Diah v. Mawhir, No. 9:08-CV-322, 2011 WL 933846, *1 (N.D.N.Y. Mar. 16, 2011) (citations and footnote omitted). After the appropriate review, "the court may accept, reject, or modify, in whole or in part, the findings or recommendations made by the magistrate judge." 28 U.S.C. § 636(b)(1). Having reviewed the May 22, 2017 Order and Report-Recommendation, the Court finds that Magistrate Judge Baxter correctly determined that the claims against the individual Defendants should be dismissed with prejudice and that the claims against Defendant SUNY Upstate should be dismissed without prejudice. Since Plaintiff has since filed an amended complaint and renewed application for leave to proceed in forma pauperis, the Court will refer this matter to Magistrate Judge Baxter for review of those filings. Accordingly, the Court hereby ORDERS that Magistrate Judge Baxter's Order and Report-Recommendation is ADOPTED in its entirety for the reasons stated therein; and the Court further ORDERS that this matter is referred to Magistrate Judge Baxter for review of the amended complaint and application for leave to proceed in forma pauperis. IT IS SO ORDERED. Dated: June 22, 2017 Albany, New York 2


Tag: king crimson
REVIEW: MARYLYNN GILLASPIE- SECRET LANGUAGE
Colorado is known for world class jazz, strange as that might sound. Colorado is also known historically for world class vocal jazz. Denver native Dianne Reeves has earned five Grammy Awards and an honorary Doctorate from Julliard for her work in that genre.
Boulder based Rare Silk earned two Grammy nominations for their vocalese / vocal jazz in the early ’80s, and Lannie Garrett blessed area stages into the 21st century with her torch and big band jazz stylizations.
MaryLynn Gillaspie started out with Rare Silk, a vocal quartet that she, her sister Gaile and Marguerite Juneman formed in the late seventies as a trio to sing songs influenced by and in the style of swing-era acts like the Andrews Sisters. Their debut, New Weave, was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Jazz Vocal–Duo or Group category. Rare Silk ended their run in 1988.
MaryLynn Gillaspie wouldn’t be heard from again until 2012, when she began showing up with local Boulder/Denver musicians, sitting in for a song or two. That gave her the confidence to step into the studio, twenty-five years after Rare Silk ended.
Here’s a collection of songs MaryLynn has recorded since re-emerging in the scene a decade ago.
Secret Language (2022)
To be honest, with the exception of the standards, Dolphin Dance and Fly Me to the Moon, I knew almost nothing about the rest of the songs on the album. They could have all been self-penned for all I knew before opening it up and reading about it.
Fortunately, I listened without any real bias that way – it was a clean listen. And then I looked to see who wrote what.
It’s a shame really that I can’t find any liner notes. It would be nice to see who played what on each track. Based on the bits and pieces I have been able to collect, the notes read like a who’s who of Denver/Boulder talent, produced by Grammy winning Boulder composer and producer Kip Keupper at Coupe Studios.
Dophin Dance is a genuine joy. MaryLynn took the Herbie Hancock tune and wrote an original set of lyrics and a vocal melody for it. She also penned an original set of lyrics to Pat Metheny‘s (It’s Just) Talk. Not limited to being inspired by and influenced by jazz (old or new), MaryLynn turned to King Crimson‘s 1981 album Discipline for an utterly original retelling of Matte Kudasai.
As it stands now, on May 15 2022, MaryLynn’s return to full length “vinyl” (euphemistically speaking) is the stand out jazz album of the year from Colorado. It’s great to hear that voice again after more than THIRTY-FIVE years.
Author goatPosted on May 15, 2022 June 1, 2022 Categories ReviewsTags Boulder music, Colorado jazz, Colorado music, Coupe Studios, herbie hancock, jazz, Keupper, king crimson, Kip Keupper, pat methenyLeave a comment on REVIEW: MARYLYNN GILLASPIE- SECRET LANGUAGE


The Best Looking 911 Won The 24 Hours Of Le Mans As Porsche Owns Both GT Classes
Stef Schrader
Porsche celebrated its 70th anniversary this year with utter domination of both GT classes at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Porsche’s beloved “pink pig” livery finally redeemed itself with a commanding win of LMGTE Pro, and that’s on top of the No. 77 Dempsey-Proton Racing Porsche 911 RSR winning the LMGTE Am class.
The original Pink Pig Porsche 917/20—the visually unappealing product of aerodynamic research that was redeemed by a cutesy pink and red diagram of pork parts overlaid on it—wasn’t very successful, crashing out of the 1971 race. But this year, the cute lil’ piggie livery was revived for the No. 92 Porsche 911 RSR, which finished well ahead of its fellow retro-liveried No. 91 Porsche 911 RSR after maintaining this position for much of the race.
Porsche brought a total of four 911 RSRs in the LMGTE Pro to celebrate its seventieth anniversary, but the two cars it painted up in retro liveries became instant fan favorites, especially when a cute stuffed pig from Ikea was whipped out to enjoy the race with the team. Porsche was all-in on tossing delicious pork to us fans, even going so far as to calling the No. 92's pit stops “pigstops”—which were illuminated with pink headlamps in place of the usual white as soon as the car turned on its pit speed limiter.
Meanwhile, in LMGTE Am, it seemed as though the No. 77 Dempsey-Proton Racing car was untouchable—and it cruised home to an easy win with a one-lap lead over the second place No. 54 Spirit of Race Ferrari 488 GTE.
Full results are available here. In the meantime, enjoy a few more good shots of the winning 911s, courtesy of our man on the ground Kurt Bradley.


Creeping China
Posted on December 3, 2013 by Chellaney
By Brahma Chellaney
A Project Syndicate column internationally syndicated
Brahma Chellaney picks apart China’s self-described “cabbage” strategy, designed to secure hegemony in Asia.
China’s growing geopolitical heft is emboldening its territorial creep in Asia. After laying claim formally to more than 80% of the South China Sea, it has just established a so-called air defense identification zone in the East China Sea, raising the odds of armed conflict with Japan and threatening the principle of freedom of navigation of the seas and skies. Meanwhile, the People’s Republic continues to nibble furtively at territory across the long, disputed Himalayan border with India.
Few seem to fathom the logic behind China’s readiness to take on several neighbors simultaneously. China is seeking to alter the status quo gradually as part of a high-stakes effort to extend its control to strategic areas and resources. President Xi Jinping’s promise of national greatness — embodied in the catchphrase “China dream” — is tied as much to achieving regional hegemony as to internal progress.
China’s approach reflects what the Chinese general Zhang Zhaozhong this year called a “cabbage” strategy: assert a territorial claim and gradually surround the area with multiple layers of security, thus denying access to a rival. The strategy relies on a steady progression of steps to outwit opponents and create new facts on the ground.
This approach severely limits rival states’ options by confounding their deterrence plans and making it difficult for them to devise proportionate or effective counter-measures. This is partly because the strategy — while bearing all the hallmarks of modern Chinese brinkmanship, including reliance on stealth, surprise, and a disregard for the risks of military escalation — seeks to ensure that the initiative remains with China.
The pattern has become familiar: construct a dispute, initiate a jurisdictional claim through periodic incursions, and then increase the frequency and duration of such intrusions, thereby establishing a military presence or pressuring a rival to cut a deal on China’s terms. What is ours is ours, the Chinese invariably claim, and what is yours is negotiable. For example, China says “no foundation for dialogue” with Japan exists unless the Japanese accept the existence of a territorial dispute over the uninhabited Senkaku Islands.
Here, as elsewhere, China has painted its rival as the obstructionist party. As Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi put it, “Japan needs to recognize that there is such a dispute. The whole world knows that there is a dispute.” But there is a dispute only because China has succeeded in shaking the status quo in recent years by popularizing the islands’ Chinese name (“Diaoyu”) and staging incursions into their territorial waters and airspace.
After steadily increasing the frequency of those incursions since September 2012, China has recently begun increasing their duration. The establishment of a new air defense identification zone extending over the islands is its latest cabbage-style security “layer” — a unilateral power grab that US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel quickly branded “a destabilizing attempt to alter the status quo in the region.” The zone even covers the sky over the Leodo (Suyan) Reef, a submerged rock that both South Korea and China claim. As China escalates its campaign of attrition against a resolute Japan, it increases the risk of armed conflict, whether by accident or miscalculation.
China’s strategy has had more success — without provoking serious risks — against the weaker Philippines. This is apparent from China’s effective seizure last year of Scarborough Shoal, located well within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone, and the controlling presence of Chinese vessels this year around the Second Thomas Shoal, part of the disputed Spratly Islands. China has not yet tried to evict the eight Filipino marines still living on the Second Thomas Shoal, but Zhang has included this shoal in the country’s “series of achievements” in the South China Sea.
China is not aiming for control of just a few shoals or other tiny outcroppings; it seeks to dominate the South and East China Seas strategically and corner maritime resources, including seabed minerals. The combined land area of the Senkaku and Spratly Islands amounts to barely 11 square kilometers; but the islands are surrounded by rich hydrocarbon reserves. While seeking to enlarge incrementally its military footprint in the more than 80% of the South China Sea that it claims, China’s aim in the East China Sea is to break out of the so-called “first island chain,” a string of archipelagos along the East Asian coast that includes the Senkaku Islands and Taiwan.
By contrast, vast tracts of disputed land are at stake in the resource-rich Himalayan region. Here, too, China’s incursions, after increasing in frequency, are now being staged intermittently for longer periods.
Make no mistake: China’s territorial creep is contributing to Asian insecurity, fueling political tension, and turning the world’s economically most vibrant continent into a potentially global hot spot.
To be sure, China is careful to avoid any dramatic action that could become a casus belli by itself. Indeed, it has repeatedly shown a knack for disaggregating its strategy into multiple parts and then pursuing each element separately in such a manner as to allow the different pieces to fall into place with minimal resistance.
This shrewdness not only keeps opponents off balance; it also undercuts the relevance of US security assurances to allies and the value of building countervailing strategic partnerships in Asia. In fact, by camouflaging offense as defense, China casts the burden of starting a war on an opponent, while it seeks to lay the foundation — brick by brick — of a hegemonic Middle Kingdom. Chinese leaders’ stated desire to resolve territorial disputes peacefully simply means achieving a position strong enough to get their way without having to fire a shot.
Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of Asian Juggernaut; Water: Asia’s New Battleground; and Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis.
(c) Project Syndicate, 2013.
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Don McLean with Judy Collins at NYCB Theatre at Westbury
Don McLean with Judy Collins Tickets
NYCB Theatre at Westbury | Westbury, NY
When he proclaimed ‘the day the music died’, it struck an emotional chord with music fans. Since then, music afficionados have looked-up to him as reverent music icon capable of stirring deep emotions and comforting the soul. Master story-teller, legendary singer-songwriter, Don McLean, will be hitting the live concert route once again. Experience the magic of music nostalgia as Don McLean dishes out his anthemic hits “American Pie”, “Vincent”, “And I Love You So”, and many more…, happening on the 13th of July 2013, at the Westbury Music Fair, Westbury, New York. Don McLean is joined by a featured performance by fellow folk-pop-standards singer-songwriter, Judy Collins.
For the record, Don McLean was rejected 72 times by music labels. This did not deter the young singer-songwriter from writing and pursuing his flair for writing melodies with folk-pop-rock sensibilities. Slowly but surely, McLean’s album charted two years after its release; yet to this day, more than 42 years after it topped the charts, we still hear radio airwaves and voices echo with the epic strains of “American Pie”. In 1991, “American Pie” was re-issued as a single in the UK, and still charted at the Top 20. In 2002, he was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame; and in 2004, the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame inaugurated him into their fold and cited his body of work, stating: “Don McLean: his work, like the man himself, is very deep and very compassionate. His pop anthem ‘American Pie’ is a cultural phenomenon”.
Fans of NYCB Theatre at Westbury
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April 23rd, 2019 By Andy Kuhn
New school constructs are the appetizer portion
It’s exciting to attend a ground breaking of a new school, apparently around here it is also quite rare.
A conversation with a few in attendance gave rise to the question, “When was the last groundbreaking for a new school construction in Washington County?”
We aren’t talking renovation, or new addition on existing, but a genuine ground breaking for new construct. Near as any of us could surmise, we put it at least 40 years. Here was our best estimate…..
Original Warren High School 1959
Belpre High and Belpre Elementary 1949 give or take a couple years
Fort Frye High and Middle 1958?
Frontier High and Middle ?
Waterford Middle ?
Marietta High on Davis Drive
In any event, the building boom of schools coincided with the baby boom itself post WW2, and much to the chagrin of residents over the last 30 years, the schools have long exceeded their shelf life.
So let’s usher in the next era of school construction that sees our education center’s improved for the next 40 years………………but let’s also consider where Education improvements exist on our economic continuum.
In the larger mechanism education is a vital component, but it is a service of larger components namely; economic development, housing, and social and community supports. In the grand scheme, social and community supports have no price tag because they cannot be bought, but they are essential to the growth and stability of our communities. The supports are built and used through a stable housing stock, health services, recreation activities, and mores elements like religious institutions. Having all of these serving an active role in the development of citizens allow our efforts in regard to economic development, educational attainment, and transportation enhancement the opportunity to be successful.
Which is why the education construct is so vital to community enhancement efforts……………
Education is an arms race, so is most everything else on this framework. Education improvements without site development to house new businesses that will employ those graduates is a lost opportunity. Education improvements without housing stock improvements to entice persons to start and grow their families to inhabit those schools, is a lost opportunity. Education improvements without a focused effort to maximize the potential of a newly educated and skilled workforce into the community through business pathway partnerships is a poor investment.
Our area leaders need to continue to push forward with reforms and innovative partnerships to ensure we not only attract outsiders to our new facilities, but retain the existing talent we are investing in and keep our community cycling education and wealth.
There’s a lot still left to do, but I can assure you having new and modern education facilities in the community makes everything an easier sell.
To read more about the new construction at Warren Local, take a look at their website. It is impressive
http://www.warrenlocal.org/content/Building_Project
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Campbell, John W(ood), Jr. All Study Guides Homework Help Lesson Plans
Campbell, John W(ood), Jr.
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Last Updated on June 7, 2022, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 700
In the pantheon of magazine science fiction there is no more complex and puzzling figure than that of John Campbell, and certainly none odder. Under his own name,… he wrote gadgety, fast-moving, cosmic-scaled science fiction in the E. E. Smith tradition, and became, after Smith himself, its acknowledged master; as "Don A. Stuart," he began a one-man literary revival which eventually made that tradition obsolete. As editor of Astounding, he forced the magazine through a series of metamorphoses…. More clearly than anyone, Campbell saw that the field was growing up and would only be handicapped by the symbols of its pulpwood infancy; he deliberately built up a readership among practicing scientists and technicians; he made himself the apostle of genuine science in science fiction…. (pp. 34-5)
In the hasty, ill-composed and ill-considered introduction to … Who Goes There?, Campbell says of the first Don A. Stuart story, "Twilight," that "it was entirely different from any science fiction that had appeared before." He ought to have added, "in Gernsback's Amazing Stories or any of its successors"; so qualified, the statement would have fallen at least somewhere near the truth.
"Twilight" is what Campbell says it is, a pure mood story—and as such is the lineal descendant of H. G. Wells' "The Time Machine," Rudyard Kipling's "A Matter of Fact" (both circa 1890), Stephen Vincent Benét's "By the Waters of Babylon" and many others. By the late thirties,… magazine science fiction was fast settling towards a dismal status as just another variety of pulp; Campbell's great achievement was to rescue it from its own overspecialized preoccupations and start it back toward the mainstream of literature. Although he later tried to nudge the pendulum the other way, the movement has continued; the revolution is a success.
The second Campbell-Stuart collection, Cloak of Aesir, contains seven stories that justify the author's cheerful boast: every one is a landmark in science fiction history. The germs of countless later stories are in them; indeed, it seems reasonable to doubt that the field ever could have developed as it has if they had not been written.
All these stories belong to what might be called the "Oh, yeah?" school of science fiction, though they are so cloaked in the Stuart mood-writing and in what still seems to me, in some of them, a real beauty, that probably few people realized it till Campbell himself pointed it out.
"Forgetfulness," for instance, is nothing at bottom but an irreverent iconoclast's-eye view of the proposition, "Machine civilization represents progress." So is "The Machine"; and "The Invaders" takes a similar look at "It would be awful if the Earth were conquered from outer space." "The Escape" is a "tragic" love story with a happy ending—and Campbell defies you to prove it isn't.
Campbell, a capable writer, never has been a stylist, and he didn't alter his natural prose style, with its short, blurted, agrammatical sentences, for the purpose of creating "Don A. Stuart." What makes the difference is partly the tone—a kind of high-pitched sing-song—and partly the point of view, a subtle thing that resists exact definition. The visual quality of every writer's work differs somewhat from every other's; probably it also differs, at least as widely, between one reader and the next, so that if I say that the Don A. Stuart quality, to me, is like a series of images shifting in and out of focus through a pearl-gray haze, nobody else is likely to sit up and say, "That's exactly it," least of all the author; readers who aren't visually oriented will not even know what I'm talking about. But the quality does exist and, I should think, is capable of being detected in some form by almost everybody; it's an important factor in making these stories what they are.
Clearly enough, the Don A. Stuart stories were only one experiment among many to Campbell; but modern readers may find in these two volumes [Who Goes There? and Cloak of Aesir] his most important and lasting contribution to the literature. (pp. 35-6)
Damon Knight, "Campbell and His Decade," in his In Search of Wonder: Essays on Modern Science Fiction, revised edition, Advent: Publishers, 1967, pp. 34-46.
"Campbell, John W(ood), Jr. - Damon Knight" Contemporary Literary Criticism Ed. Jean C. Stine. Vol. 32. Gale Cengage 1985 eNotes.com 27 Jan. 2023 <https://www.enotes.com/topics/campbell-john-w-ood-jr/critical-essays/damon-knight>
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DNREC Announces Delaware’s 2015/16 Deer Harvest as All-Time High
Ammoland Inc.https://www.ammoland.com/ Posted on February 25, 2016 by DeltaOperatorMan
Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC)
Dover, DE -(AmmoLand.com)- Delaware hunters harvested 14,681 deer during the 2015/16 season – the highest number since the state’s first modern-day deer season was held in 1954 and harvest record-keeping began, DNREC’s Division of Fish & Wildlife announced today.
The total number of deer taken in Delaware this season topped the previous record of 14,669 set in 2004/05, and also eclipsed last season’s harvest of 14,269 deer which had been the second-highest on record.
“We anticipated that hunters would have a successful season this year due to overall favorable hunting conditions experienced during most of the season,” said Joe Rogerson, Division of Fish & Wildlife biologist.
During the 2015/16 season, hunters harvested more females than males, with 54.3 percent does (7,975) and 45.7 percent bucks (6,706) taken, he said. Antlerless deer – does, juvenile bucks without antlers known as button bucks, antlered bucks with antlers measuring less than three inches, and bucks that had already shed their antlers when harvested – represented 71.3 percent of the total harvest.
In addition to the new harvest record for Delaware, hunters helped establish several other harvest records during the past season:
Sussex County: 7,960 deer harvested (Though not record-setting, New Castle County’s harvest totaled 2,548 while Kent County’s deer harvest was 4,173.)
Adult does harvested in a single season: 6,869
Antlered bucks taken: 4,218
“Many hunters enjoyed success this year as indicated by the total harvest as well as several other new records set, and we fully expect hunters to continue to enjoy Delaware’s deer hunting opportunities for years to come due to the sustainable deer population,” said Wildlife Section Administrator Rob Hossler. “As we continue to analyze the harvest data, we anticipate finding other harvest records that were broken this past season and will share those on our website when they become available.”
For more information about the Delaware deer harvest or any other deer-related issue, please contact Joe Rogerson at 302-735-3600, or visit the Division of Fish & Wildlife’s Delaware Deer Information webpage.
Follow the Division of Fish & Wildlife on Facebook, www.facebook.com/DelawareFishWildlife.
About the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC):
DNREC is committed to preserving the quality of Delaware’s environment, maintaining the health and safety of its residents, and protecting the natural systems upon which life depends. DNREC’s Division of Fish and Wildlife’s mission is to ensure that the freshwater, marine and wildlife resources of the State of Delaware will be conserved and managed for equitable and sustainable use.
For more information, visit: www.dnrec.delaware.gov.


Tag: Who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance
Donald Trump’s Basket of Deplorable Loyalists verses the Never Trump Patriots
Never Trump Patriots are ahead of the Always Trump Loyalists by more than 21-million registered voters.
crime, crime fraud scams, federal government, God and Scripture, Lloyd Lofthouse, media news, politics, propaganda, The United States of America
How can Donald Trump win the 2020 election, What is more important The Pledge of Allegiance or The Oath of Office, What is the difference between a patriot and a loyalist, what is the most important thing to Donald Trump, When Donald Trump accuses someone of treason what does he really mean, Who wrote the Oath of Office, Who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, Why do Trump loyalists think god wanted Trump to be president of the United States
The U.S. Pledge of Allegiance or The Oath of Office
I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
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How many Americans are required to recite the Oath of Office, What does the United States Oath of Office mean, When was the first Oath of Office recited and who recited it, Who recited the first Oath of Office, Who wrote and approved the Oath of Office used by the United States, Who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance


IPS Academy, IBMR Indore gets an A++ grade by NAAC
Indore (Madhya Pradesh) [India], August 18: Once again, in the field of Higher Education, Madhya Pradesh has outshined in the Nation. IPS Academy, Institute of Business Management and Research, Indore, is now on the list of the country’s elite colleges with the highest NATIONAL ASSESSMENT AND ACCREDITATION COUNCIL (NAAC) grading. The NAAC team visited the institute on the 28th & 29th of July 2022; The Executive Committee constituted a further standing committee to examine the peer team reports and declare the Accreditation Result on 10th Aug. 2022; the institution has been accredited with a CGPA of 3.53 on a seven-point scale at A++ Grade.
The President of IPSA Group of Institution, Architect Achal K. Choudhary, congratulated Director Dr. Vivek Singh Kushwaha, IQAC Coordinator Dr. C.K. Goyal, Dr. Kali Charan Modak and Dr. Shailesh S. Thakur and the team for achieving this milestone, he also mentioned that this achievement would bring the institute closer in attaining autonomous status.
Dr. V.S. Kushwaha was pleased to inform that the institute has become the first private college in the state to get the highest grade in the first cycle of NAAC with CGPA among the private management Institute.
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Consciousness (disambiguation)
Consciousness (Pat Martino album)
Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is. As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: "Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives."
Western philosophers, since the time of Descartes and Locke, have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness and pin down its essential properties. Issues of concern in the philosophy of consciousness include whether the concept is fundamentally coherent; whether consciousness can ever be explained mechanistically; whether non-human consciousness exists and if so how can it be recognized; how consciousness relates to language; whether consciousness can be understood in a way that does not require a dualistic distinction between mental and physical states or properties; and whether it may ever be possible for computing machines like computers or robots to be conscious, a topic studied in the field of artificial intelligence.
This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - https://wn.com/Consciousness
Consciousness may refer to:
The process of cognition, i.e. the focus of cognitive science.
The opposite of unconsciousness, i.e. the opposite of a comatose state or coma.
The process of awareness as in "I was not conscious of the wind blowing."
Consciousness! (Eric Kloss album), 1970
Consciousness (Pat Martino album), 1974
This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - https://wn.com/Consciousness_(disambiguation)
Consciousness is an album by guitarist Pat Martino which was recorded in 1974 and first released on the Muse label.
In his review on Allmusic, Michael G. Nastos notes that this is "Martino on the way up. Mostly quartet recordings for the brilliant guitarist... Guitar students should study this one."
All compositions by Pat Martino except as indicated
"Impressions" (John Coltrane) - 4:33
"Consciousness" (Danny Depaolo, Eric Kloss) - 11:48
"Passata on Guitar" - 2:48
"Along Came Betty" (Benny Golson) - 5:22
"Willow" - 6:09
"On the Stairs" - 5:29
"Both Sides, Now" (Joni Mitchell) - 2:06
"Along Came Betty" [Alternate Take] (Golson) - 5:16 Bonus track on CD reissue
Pat Martino - guitar
Eddie Green - electric piano, percussion
Tyrone Brown - electric bass
Sherman Ferguson - drums, percussion
This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - https://wn.com/Consciousness_(Pat_Martino_album)
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sunday scene with noor ale
Sunday Scene with Noor Alé
Sun Sep 11 2022
The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery
Sunday Scene
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We are inviting you for a Sunday Scene with Noor Alé, The Power Plant’s Associate Curator who will examine Meriem Bennani’s viral video piece ‘2 Lizards’. Narrated by two animated lizards living in New York City during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the film unpacks the unsettling, mundane, and humorous realities of living in confinement, a time marked by global protests and community organizing in response to economic, racial, and social inequities.
Alé will speak about activist movements that gained momentum through social networks during the pandemic. Although these acts of solidarity predated this moment, their emergence in this age of precarity strengthened a resolve toward a more just society, resonating from cultural institutions and their reckoning with systemic racism to homeless encampments and their violent removal from the parks of Toronto.
Noor Alé is a curator, writer, and art historian. Her curatorial practice examines the intersections of contemporary art with geopolitics, decolonization, and social justice in the Global South. She has contributed to curatorial research, exhibition management, and public programmes at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; and Art Dubai.
Meriem Bennani was born in Rabat, Morocco. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Biennial, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery is excited to present two moving image works by Bennani as part of the Toronto International Film Festival’s Wavelengths. On view daily between September 9 and 18, The Power Plant invites the public to experience the Canadian premiere of Bennani’s works!