4-Day Weekend

I decided to take a day off on Friday to give myself a 4-day span of staying away from my office. It's not that I don't like my 'home away from home' (just moved to an office along the outside wall of our building--now I have a window!). It's just that I have procrastinated on several projects at the homestead and I need to complete or at least claw a little closer than I am now.

The most pressing of these is clearing out our two-car garage that we currently have to park both of our cars outside of out on the driveway. Since we have a small house, we must rely upon that area to store our "want to keep but can't find room for it" items or out-of-season clothing that is rotated every six months. At its best, the garage has only been able to yield enough space to park one car during our ownership. Since mine is newer, I've had the privlege of parking inside ever since I purchased it a little over two years ago. For the past few months, however, both vehicles have been exiled to the driveway because of a long-standing effort to finally go through all of our collected worldly possessions and determine which ones will be kept and which others will be thrown away/recycled/donated. This initiative started with earnest but has waned somewhat due to the summer heat. With the recent break in temperatures, I feel it is now time to complete this task (or at least clear off the parking 'half') to allow me to bring my car back inside and avoid the pending weather-induced tasks of scraping off the windshield or brushing off snowfall accumulations. Two trips to the local donation center have returned approximately half of that desired space to us but there is a lot more work ahead.

After one of my deliveries, I stopped in on base to check out the latest offerings at the base exchange (known as the BX in the heavily acronymized military). As a military retiree, I am still able to shop at this and other facilities normally the exclusive domain of the active-duty community and their family members; however, I rarely do. I'm not sure if it's because of the inconvenience (entry to the installation can be time-consuming, especially during exercises or contingencies) or the realization that I can now afford to shop out 'on the economy' (monthly retirement pension supplements my current bi-weekly paychecks) and don't need the base's economic assistance (no sales tax, subsidized pricing) anymore.

Another subtle reason might be that I don't want to delve into its partisan political atmosphere that permeates it and other military faclities these days. I guess it isn't a modern phenomenon (I do remember the Lee Greenwood, chest-thumping bravado during the Reagan years) but it has become much more obvious since the 2000 election and has mestastitized itself due to our nation's transition to a 'post 9/11' world. Prior to 1998, I kept my political views to myself (in accordance with regulations that still exist today). I was stationed in Washington, DC during the Clinton impeachment and it served as the 'topic du jour' for many water cooler bull sessions. My uniformed coworkers were simply unable to see past their own take on him and his policies to recognize that his 'transgressions' were purely of a personal and political nature. Clinton had issues with the military throughout his entire presidency (he introduced his 'don't ask, don't tell' plan shortly after taking office) and the impeachment was a befitting end many of my uniformed compatriots wanted to see for their commander-in-chief. This hatred ran so deep that several acquaintences of mine (to include a very high-ranking officer) refused to accept a presidential certificate of appreciation solely because it was signed by Clinton. They chose to wait until the new version with our current president's signature was issued before making their official requests--even though they retired prior to Bush being sworn in as president. When I retired in 2004, I held no such notions of waiting until after fall election to ask for one with (hopefully) Kerry's signature. I accepted my tangible token of appreciation from my Constitutionally mandated commander-in-chief, as I routinely remind the others, "like a man."

When you walk into the BX, the first thing you notice is the sound of the Fox News Channel. In these days of cheap televisions, you can hardly avoid their glow in many public facilities (airports, restaurants, even bathrooms) and the exchange is no different. Just like the White House's own policy, sets near the main checkout counters make it almost impossible to ignore the blather and bias of their selected station. It gets worse when you walk back to the electronics department and are faced with a 'wall' of Shepard Smiths or Brit Humes parroting the administration's positive spin on its latest embarassment or failure. Luckily, the store closes at 9PM or else I might fall under the hypnotic spell of a dozen or so Sean Hannitys tearing down the remaining shreds of my own reality to replace it with his own.

I do have to say that the atmosphere has changed somewhat since our global 'war' on terror started. I was assigned to a somewhat-remote overseas base shortly after the 9/11 attacks (I was on a plane flying to that location when the towers were struck and was forced into a 3-day unplanned delay while we waited for our flight to be allowed to continue on to its intended destinations). With that installation's exchange the most convenient location to purchase goods (buying on the local economy was somewhat expensive and a language challenge), residents of that base were at the mercy of the military's stateside purchasing corporation and the added issues with shipping goods halfway across the globe. We never went without the necessities but selection was somewhat limited. This was especially true in two distinct entertainment mainstays: books and movies.

The exchange's book store carried a wide variety of stateside and local offerings; however, almost all the non-periodical offerings seemed to be 'slanted' towards a pro-administration, Christian customer base. Items in the 'newly arrived' and 'most popular' displays mirrored its already large 'spirituality' section. It was a rare find to see Michael Moore's "Stupid White Men" or Al Franken's "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right" among the many copies of Ann Coulter's "Slander" and "Treason" or Sean Hannity's "Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism" available for purchase. Luckily for me, the Internet and online booksellers allowed me to avoid the exchange's censorship panel and obtain offerings counter to the prevailing political dogma.

Movies on similar subjects, either for purchase or for mass viewing, didn't fair much better. When "Bowling for Columbine" was released on DVD in the summer of 2003, copies of this Academy Award-winning documentary never appeared on our local retail shelves nor did it run in our local movie theater (neither did 'Fahrenheit 9/11' the following year but I had already departed for Ohio). Contrast that to Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ." The film opened on Ash Wednesday 2004 stateside and was shown on our base on Easter weekend--that's less than a 6-week delay! In AAFES' defense, other less-controvertial 'blockbusters' ("Star Wars Episode II", "Spiderman II") also experienced 'Passion-like' speed to the entertainment-starved 'hinterlands' but their wholesale refusal not to show this commercially successful movie in overseas' theaters during the run-up to the 2004 presidential election could be seen as informal partisanship or blatant censorship.

Back to the present...when I visited the local BX this weekend, I perused through the books and magazines area. While still heavily populated with family-oriented, religious or pro-military items, I did happen to see a few books that caught my eye. One was James Risen's current bestseller "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration". This author, the NY Times reporter that broke the recent stories on NSA communications eavesdropping and monitoring of terrorist-linked finances, would expect to have his head mounted on a pike outside any military installation, now has his book displayed alongside the 'usual suspects' of Bill O'Reilly, Bill Bennett and other right-wing pundits. Another book was Chalmers Johnson's "The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic." I had recently seen him in the documentary "Why We Fight" (which was also available in the DVD section) and decided to purchase his softcover edition for my library.

The real tangible sign of 'conservative hangover' was seen in the September 4th edition of Air Force Times, a unofficial commercial trade weekly available for anyone willing to pay $2.75 to get a slightly unvarnished look at today's USAF. I used to subscribe to it when I was in uniform but let it lapse in retirement. Many of my then-contemporaries despised this paper for providing a forum for 'disgruntled troops' to vent about their superiors or policies or for simply exposing the Air Force as an imperfect organization (a variety of Public Affaris-approved choices are circulated throughout the force). One area of that periodical that has usually held staunchly against dissenting views has been their opinion columnist pages. I must say I was rather impressed that this week's issue featured a commentary by the president and founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (his column "Christianity in Combat" is available via this link). The other columnist, Robert F. Dorr, provides his take on the apparent 'mission creep' of our current vice-president into the military chain of command (as his column stated, there is no 'vice commander-in-chief' as one AF unit so proudly displayed in their headquarters until corrected--the Constitution draws the line of command directly from the president to the Secretary of Defense). He also highlights a very telling fact about Mr. Cheney's involvement in the government by stating that he has 15 military and national security advisers on his staff--his predecessor, Al Gore, had only one!

Although such facts have been available to those of us who choose to look for them, the matter of publishing such dissenting views/opinions for ready consumption by a wide military audience (the Christianity column was also printed in this week's Navy Times and Army Times) is a remarkable departure from repeating the latest offerings from Bush-Iraq 'echo chamber' and could be seen as a sign that our uniformed citizens (and voters) are losing faith in the 'democracy experiment' that their leaders and commanders are risking their lives for.