Obama and Osama

Three years ago this month, a woman at a Presidential Debate in Tennessee asked Barack Obama whether he would pursue Al Qaeda leaders into Pakistan.

Although Pakistan was a sovereign nation and an ally, Obama replied that "If we have Osama bin Laden in our sights" and Pakistan would not act, "then I think we have to act. . . .we will kill bin Laden." Republican candidate John McCain called this answer "foolish."

I recalled that exchange when President Obama’s orders led to bin Laden’s death in Abbottabad, Pakistan – and, more recently, looking over the field of potential challengers to the President.

Obama was personally involved in key decisions regarding the raid. He didn’t meddle in logistical details; but at several moments when uncertainty prevailed, Obama had to make decisions. He made the right ones.
First, just a few months after taking office, Obama reviewed the programs for tracking bin Laden he’d inherited from the previous administration. He found them inadequate, and requested a more detailed plan and increased effort.

(On August 6, 2001, when Obama’s predecessor received a briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S," the family-newspaper version of his response was "All, right, you’ve covered your butt now." To be fair to Bush, the threat probably sounded somewhat unlikely; no one knows how a more "hands-on" President might have reacted; perhaps nothing could have prevented 9/11; but it was more clearly ominous than Bush’s advisors later claimed. The briefer said, "An Egyptian Islamic Jihad operative told an [redacted] service . . . that Bin Laden was planning to exploit the operative’s access to the U.S. to mount a terrorist strike," and mentioned many aspects of the strike that occurred five weeks later, including use of hijacked airliners.)

In the fall of 2010, analysts learned that bin Laden might be in a compound in Abbottabad. Observations strengthened their belief that he was.

They weren’t certain. As late as a week before the raid, according to a New Yorker article citing an unnamed counter-terrorism official, when a dozen CIA analysts were asked their levels of confidence bin Laden was really there, the answers ranged from 40% to more than 90%. Some officials urged Obama to wait for stronger confirmation – which would have risked a leak and the possibility that bin Laden might move again.

Obama’s military advisors also differed as to the best form of attack. The Washington Post called them "sharply divided." Several feared that an operation inside Pakistan was too risky. About six weeks before the raid, some wanted to await more intelligence, some wanted the helicopter raid, and some favored a B-2 bombing. Holdover Defense Secretary Robert Gates argued vigorously for an air strike, recalling the failed 1980 attempt to rescue hostages in Iran. Such a strike would have required a huge blast equivalent to an earthquake in Abbottabad. Obama rejected the plan, noting that it might flatten much of the city – and that it would leave uncertainty that bin Laden had really been killed.

Then Obama made a key adjustment when military planners briefed him on details of the planned raid: to the two Blackhawks that would go to bin Laden’s compound, he added four Chinooks. Forty-five minutes after the Blackhawks took off, the Chinooks followed. Two landed just before the border, in Afghanistan, ready to assist if needed; and two continued into Pakistan, loaded with SEALs, and one also carried extra gas in case the Blackhawks needed it.

The first Blackhawk, which was to hover above the compound while the SEAL’s fast-roped down to the ground, got caught in its own rotor wash. (Detailed simulations had used chain-link fencing to simulate the high walls of the compound, and the fences didn’t create the same kind of heat when the helicopter dropped down between them.)

The pilot made a sort of crash landing and the men rushed out into the compound. But the Blackhawk was destroyed. Had a Chinook not been waiting within range, and had there been no extra gas, it is questionable whether everyone would have returned safely to Afghanistan.

Obama consulted intelligently with the military, raised a couple of critical questions, made the necessary decisions, then left them alone to do their jobs, though he watched the entire raid as it happened. Maybe he was lucky, but he applied his considerable intelligence in a way that made a positive difference: amping up the search effort, not waiting for absolute certainty that bin Laden was there, choosing the helicopter raid over an air strike, and adding the Chinooks as a precaution. This doesn’t detract from one’s respect for the military officers who planned the details of the operation, practiced intensely, and carried it out. They did it skillfully and well, including many details other officers might easily have overlooked, and they deserve credit.

Afterward, Obama met with the SEALs, who gave him a detailed briefing and answered his questions – and expressed their appreciation. Obama, said to be "in awe of these guys," praised them and gave them medals. They gave him a framed flag from one of the Chinooks. As one observer put it, "They knew he had staked his Presidency on this. He knew they staked their lives on it."

When Obama learned a dog had been on board, and that the dog – muzzled – was in a nearby room, he insisted on meeting the dog, too. One of the SEALs joked that the President had better take some treats in with him. Cairo was kept muzzled. The President petted him, but there is no record of what, if anything, he said to the dog.
                                                                         -30-

[The column above appeared in the Las Cruces Sun-News today, Sunday, 16 October.]

        A more intellectually interesting column might discuss the legality of the killing of Osama bin Laden by the United States.  

I know how it feels.  It feels right, although some of the more excessive celebrations by folks here at home were pretty tasteless.   I have to feel that if someone killed a few of my cousins then hid out in someone else's house -- or, say, a church, claiming sanctuary -- while threatening to kill my sister and kids next week, I'd be right in going after him, whatever the law might say.  It ain't like Osama was denying responsibility for the attack, so there wouldn't have been much to try in court.  (I have a hard time envisioning him trying an insanity defense.)  And since he was still doing what he was doing, the killing wasn't merely punitive, but may have saved lives. 

But was it right as a matter of law?  That's something I'm curious about, but haven't gotten around to researching or reasoning out. 

Saturday Morning Coffee III

Interesting discussion recently about taking firearms into municipal buildings. What crossed my mind this morning is the reason that decisions are always mailed out in small claims court cases in San Francisco. They didn’t used to be. The change came after a defeated litigant bit the nose off the prevailing party. Think I’d at least ban guns in courthouses, even if they were allowed at city council meetings.

I pretty much loathe Facebook but check it out every week or two in case someone’s posted a good photo of Sunset at the North Pole or something, and I liked a couple of the images my former secretary posted recently:

A couple of years ago near San Francisco I ran into a former client whose company I had represented against, among others, folks from El Paso Electric Company. He was older than I, but we’d become friends.

Now, in the spring of 2008, I was glad to see that he and his wife were alive and well. As we talked, they told me about an incident when they’d lived in Hawaii, where he’d been with a big Hawaiian company. They were well off, of course, and their daughter attended Punahou. One evening her date for a big dance was to pick her up, and my friends were worried: their daughter’s date was a black kid, which was fine with them, but my friend’s mother was very conservative. They said nothing to her, but wondered how she’d take it. Eventually the young man came in, politely placed a lei around the neck of the girl’s mother and grandmother, and left for the dance. Afterward when my friend and his wife looked closely at Grandma, she just said, "Wasn’t that the sweetest young Hawaiian boy!" He was light-skinned. His name was Barack Obama.

The Republicans hammering Obama on the Economy is natural, but even more hypocritical than most politics. As we all know, Bush and his zealots got us into two wars, one of which bore no significant relationship to its purported causes and was sold to the nation and the world based on lies and on suppression of intelligence. Bush also championed the "Bush Tax Cuts" that made tax rates on rich folks among the lowest in the world and the lowest in the U.S. for at least a half-century. In short, with Republicans in control the country jacked up its expenditures astronomically and reduced its income. To blame Obama for not having rescued us from Bad Times in a couple of years in office reminds me of a guy running up hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit-card bills, switching from full-time to par-time work, then handing his wife the checkbook and blame her for not having got everything fixed within a couple of months.
That’s particularly so when the Bernanke, initially appointed by Bush to head the Fed, warns that drastic spending cuts in a recession could spell disaster – and Tea Party Republicans in Congress won’t hear of anything but spending cuts.

Monday Night Football opened a little differently last Monday, although since I have the sound down I wasn’t blown over by the difference: instead of the usual rowdy Hank Williams, Jr. song Mike Tirico was talking to us from a booth. Of course I learned the reason later, that he’d compared Obama to Hitler. Although I like Obama’s politics better than Williams’s or Hitler’s, Personally, I’m not outraged by the comparison. I don’t always speak as cautiously as I should, and I’m not even a famous singer.
But the funniest part was probably Williams’s lukewarm apology Tuesday, in which he said he objected to the heads of the country’s two parties "jukin and high given on a Golf course, while so many Families are Struggling to get by" – but if that made him "Boil over" then why doesn’t he Boil over at the strategies of the Republican Party to keep rich folks getting richer and avoid anything close to a fair deal for the folks "Struggling to get by"?

One of those folks, a 63-year-old Montana woman, reportedly penned a pretty neat comment. Wyoming U.S. Senator Alan Simpson, Co-Chair of Obama's deficit commission, had called senior citizens "the greediest generation" and compared Social Security to a milk cow with 310 million teats.

Patty Myers wrote back:

"Hey Alan, let's get a few things straight.

1. As a career politician, you have been on the public dole for FIFTY YEARS.

2. I have been paying Social Security taxes for 48 YEARS (since I was 15 years old. I am now 63).

3 My Social Security payments, and those of millions of other Americans, were safely tucked away in an interest bearing account for decades until you political pukes decided to raid the account and give OUR money to a bunch of zero ambition losers in return for votes, thus bankrupting the system and turning Social Security into a Ponzi scheme that would have made Bernie Madoff proud..

4. Recently, just like Lucy & Charlie Brown, you and your ilk pulled the proverbial football away from millions of American seniors nearing retirement and moved the goalposts for full retirement from age 65 to age 67. NOW, you and your shill commission are proposing to move the goalposts YET AGAIN.

5. I, and millions of other Americans, have been paying into Medicare from Day One, and now you morons propose to change the rules of the game. Why? Because you idiots mismanaged other parts of the economy to such an extent that you need to steal money from Medicare to pay the bills.

6. I, and millions of other Americans, have been paying income taxes our entire lives, and now you propose to increase our taxes yet again. Why? Because you incompetent bastards spent our money so profligately that you just kept on spending even after you ran out of money. Now, you come to the American taxpayers and say you need more to pay off YOUR debt. To add insult to injury, you label us "greedy" for calling "bullshit" on your incompetence."

She also asked him a few very pertinent questions:
"1. How much money have you earned from the American taxpayers during your pathetic 50-year political career?

2. At what age did you retire from your pathetic political career, and how much are you receiving in annual retirement benefits from the American taxpayers?

3. How much do you pay for YOUR government provided health insurance?

4. What cuts in YOUR retirement and healthcare benefits are you proposing
in your disgusting deficit reduction proposal, or, as usual, have you exempted yourself and your political cronies?

It is you, Captain Bullshit, and your political co-conspirators called Congress who are the "greedy" ones. It is you and your fellow nutcases who have bankrupted America and stolen the American dream from millions of loyal, patriotic taxpayers. And for what? Votes. That's right, sir. You and yours have bankrupted America for the sole purpose of advancing your pathetic political careers. You know it, we know it, and you know that we know it.

And you can take that to the bank, you miserable son of a bitch."


My favorite line of the week actually was uttered more than 40 years ago by a man I never met: a friend’s father, a mature man in the 1960's when son came to manhood. Far from being appalled by the growing protests, or the catch-phrase "Don’t Trust Anyone over 30!," my friend’s father remarked one day, "What they really ought to do is shoot us all [old folks]."

Sustainability and Defense

Is climate change a significant threat to our future, and already harming us? Or a scientific theory not yet supported by real evidence?

The Army and Navy say it’s real; and they’re working hard to minimize the harm it’s doing to our national defense.

"We’re not dealing with projections, we’re dealing with data," Admiral David Titley, director of the Navy’s Climate Change Task Force, told a conference in August. Army sustainability guru William Goran described "compelling data over the past thirty years" during his visit to Las Cruces last month.

In Alaska, where much Army training takes place, the trainers are losing ground rapidly – and literally. The earth up there is normally frozen most of the year. When it isn’t, vehicles can’t even move, and training is impossible. Recently, frozen-ground days have been declining in spring and fall. Valuable training can’t happen because of the change in climate. The Army also has to dig deeper just to anchor buildings in Alaska.
The Navy faces bigger difficulties.

The Arctic is opening up for navigation. Some say this could mean a new fleet.

Sea-levels are rising - which Goran calls "a significant risk" to the Navy. Most bases are at sea level.

The seas are growing more acidic. As Titley notes, "one billion people who today get their protein from the ocean may not be able to do that, and in the face of all the other challenges we have on land, as our population goes to about 9 billion, it will be a huge challenge for us, and will have tremendous national security implications."

These are not abstract ideas, but practical problems our military faces right now.

The military forces also recognize that the rise in sea-level could be a significant "stressor" on national governments. Particularly in nations where the government isn’t too popular or stable, this could help create conflicts our Army and Navy might have to deal with. "Climate change wouldn’t be the sole cause, but would contribute to conflict," Goran says.

Goran is a key member of the Defense Department’s team working on sustainability, which the local Sustainability Plan defines as "that which ‘ meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’" Sustainability presents complex set of problems in which climate change is one factor.

The push for sustainability isn’t designed just to save money or the environment. It saves lives. It saves U.S. soldiers’ lives.

For example, on average, every 22 times a convoy has to transport gasoline to the front, a soldier dies. If we can cut fuel needs by ten per cent, we probably save some of those soldiers, since fewer convoys will be required.

Batteries – for communications devices, lap-top computers, etc. – are the heaviest single item a soldier carries in his pack. If we could lighten that load – say, with a lightweight method to recharge batteries in the field – soldiers could carry more bullets or grenades or food or water, or just carry a lighter pack.

Soldiers are already carrying solar backpacks into the field. The backpack contains a lightweight solar array that can recharge batteries or run the lap-top in the field. Military officials say the solar backpacks are performing even better than anticipated. (Solar tents are also in the field "at a high technical-readiness level but not in mass production yet.")

The military also seeks to analyze use of resources such as electric power and fuel, to synch up distribution and increase efficiency. This involves matching supply and demand, often using a localized "smart grid."
Similarly, armies traditionally have a burn hole where they burn everything; but some of what they burn hurts the environment – and the health of citizens and soldiers. Now the army seeks to separate materials, and also to conduct burns in a way that the burning may generate steam or electricity. That’s a far more efficient, and easier on soldiers’ health.

More generally, the Army seeks "to reduce our boot-print" on the environment, for a host of reasons. Trying to help stem the tide of pollution and global warming is one. Saving money and preserving health are two. But a major reason is the military’s need to be as flexible as possible in responding to danger in the field.

Agility is a key military need to which sustainability contributes. DOD Director of Training Readiness & Strategy Frank DiGiovanni, an old Air Force fighter pilot, says that there’s never been an action by our adversaries that we were fully prepared for. There probably never can be, since we probably can never anticipate every new wrinkle or accidental event. However, we can increase our flexibility. Decreasing resource needs increases the Army’s capacity for adaptive, flexible responses to changing circumstances.

Climate change and dwindling resources are facts, not pseudo-scientific chatter. Sustainability is a key concept we all need to learn, as our military has, in trying to make the best of our world – and at least in the military context, it can save lives.

The City of Las Cruces also has a sustainability plan. (You can read the entire thing on the City’s web-site, www.las-cruces.org - click on Environment, then on "Sustainability Program" under "Conservation" in the chart that comes up.) It appears to be a very reasonable stop in the right direction, and – as in the Army plan – calls for care in balancing various factors so as not to do more harm than good. A later column will examine it.
                                                        -30-
[The column above appeared in the Las Cruces Sun-News today, Sunday, 2 October.]

      Sustainability is a vague-sounding word that so far has drawn more hot words than careful study.  Locally,  the City's web-site contains the local Sustainability Plan, as noted in the column.   I've read it.  I've also read  Agenda 21 on the UN's Department of Economic and Social Affairs web-site.  Some people are screaming as hysterically about Agenda 21 as the women in old movies used to do when they jumped up on chairs at the news of a mouse in the same zip code.  Anyone who's curious -- or feels inclined to scream -- ought to read the thing.   Nothing in it is mandatory.  Both it and the City's Plan are somewhat generalized and high-sounding goals which sound pretty good; the real story will be in the nature of implementation.  Neither document makes for exciting reading and neither warrants fear or excitement.

      Climate change has drawn a great deal of careful study, and the serious scientists seem unanimous that it's a significant problem, that we may have lost the chance to prevent it, but that we may still have time to mitigate its effects somewhat.  The "science" opposing it begins to resemble the "science" of tobacco companies trying to show that maybe cigarette smoking was relatively harmless.  It's so much dung thrown against the wall, in the hope it'll stick long enough that big companeis can reap more profits before they have to start taking the kinds of corrective action that might make them less profitable.  If you have some honest doubt about climate change, you might be interested in some of the discussions by some of the military men quoted in the column, and others.   For example,
Admiral Titley, the Navy's Chief Oceanographer, was a skeptic about climate change.  So was
General Gordon Sullivan, former Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, who's featured in another video on the same web-site.

        The problem is that powerful corporate interests are against doing anything about pollution greenhouses gasses or climate change because it undermines profits in the short run.  Don't blame 'em.  Corporate managers have a single legal duty: to maximize profits for shareholders.   And shareholders are either rich folks who want to keep raking in the most-possible money or everyday folks who either want to maximize profits or, if they understand that foregoing part of the profit could be a better deal for them and their kids and grandkids in the long run, don't have enough knowledge or voting power to make anything happen.
Meanwhile the Far Right gets bankrolled by just those corporations and rich folks, and also has a penchant for unthinking responses as meaningful as "Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad" in Orwell's Animal Farm.  Government is bad.   Corporate freedom to maximize profits and urinate on our future is good.

        One of my favorite stories was told by James Woolsey, former CIA Director and former  Undersecretary of the Navy.  He had testified on the subject before the House of Representatives, and a "congressman was arguing with me because I’d presented some of the reasons I thought climate change was a significant problem, so I finally said, ‘Congressman, look: set aside climate change, do you realize 7 of the 9 things I’ve suggested will help us be a lot more resilient against terrorism or oil cutoffs - and he said, ‘Oh, well, if you do ‘em for that reason, it’s fine.’" 

        Woolsey also responds to the argument that there were variations in climate well before people were sufficiently numerous or sufficiently industrialized to affect the atmosphere much.  He says, essentially, "Yeah there was climate change before humans; and people got lung cancer before people smoked; and yes, we might get lucky and some of the extreme manifestations may not happen so quickly – and you may get lucky if you smoke five packs a day, and live to 95 and get shot by a jealous husband."

        All this and more is in videos on the web-site where Titley tells his story.

        To a small part of my mind, of course, it's unnatural to be seeing military folks making so much sense.  I came of age during the War in Viet Nam.  But even then, if you looked beneath the surface, blaming that war on the military wasn't fair.  It was a war that never should have been fought; and it was a war that couldn't be win except by, as one retired military man put it at the time, "Bombing the Vietnamese back to the Stone Age."  (We nearly did, and never came close to winning.)  Military officers didn't decide to fight that war.  Politicians did, for the same kinds of knee-jerk reasons some folks oppose looking rationally at climate change.  ("Gotta stop the Communists" blinded them to the real nature of the Vietnamese situation and to thousands of years of Vietnamese history.)  Then once we were in that quagmire, military analysts often pointed out the improbability of any good result; but politicians intercepted those analyses before they reached the public, and promised Victory. 

Saturday Morning Coffee II

Not long ago, after the long story about the massage parlor busts, there was a notice in the Sun-News asking any patrons of the place to call a certain number if they wanted to talk to police about their experiences there.
The notice sounded like something a stand-up comic would come up with. First of all, most guys who went there probably knew exactly why there were going and took along money to pay for it. If a few men went there uncertain about how far the massage might go, when the masseuse invited them to go further they probably didn’t object. Even legitimate masseuses in airports and farmers’ markets who offer no sexual services whatsoever but get leered at by half the men who pass.
What the men did was illegal, and many cities do arrest johns. Somehow I’m doubting they’re in a big rush to make a full report to the police. Or their wives and kids).

A candidate for city councilor here, who had touted his law-enforcement experience and his two years in the Navy, was arrested for drunken driving early one evening. Turned out (according to the authorities in Mesilla) that his law enforcement experience included (and perhaps was limited to) his brief stint as a trainee in the reserve Sheriff’s Department there. That ended after he was thrown out of El Patio after some sort of incident in which, again according to the authorities in Mesilla, he was inebriated. Probably not helpful to his campaign. He’d also talked up his Navy experience – and it then turned out that he’d had a liquor-and-automobile incident there too. Not an auspicious start to a campaign.

Some fellow complained in the newspaper recently that he can’t dirt-bike the way he used to because of preservationists. I dirt-biked all around Las Cruces as much as anyone in the 1970's. I loved the desert solitude – and the physical challenge. So when I read his comment, I thought, yo, man, haven’t you noticed they’ve built about six thousand houses (including mine) in what used to be beautiful empty desert? I can’t dirt bike the way I used to because of all the ugly houses, not because someone’s trying to protect what’s left! I figured he was a little confused. Then I read that he’s only lived here about five years! He just doesn’t know better – and probably doesn’t own a dirt bike anyway.

After Clemson upset Auburn in football last Saturday, the Clemson coach (who had played and coached at Alabama, Auburn’s chief rival) said, "All praise goes to God." We’re used to that. (People who lose sports contests rarely mention God, somehow.) And we’ve wondered whether God might not have better things to do than determine winners in college football games. This coach, though, added. "He has quite a sense of humor, to make sure an Alabama grad was coaching the team that ended Auburn’s winning streak." Now he’s got me really wondering. He makes God sound like a 14-year-old nerd who can’t play sports too well but keeps track of all the obscure facts and stats. I think God has quite a sense of humor, too – he keeps sending us people who say things like that.

Mayoral candidate Michael Huerta told a funny story about a gentleman who approached him at the Farmers’ Market, where Michael spends a lot of time talking to vendors and customers about his political aspirations.
"Are you the fella running for mayor?" asked the gentleman, who wore a cowboy hat and a Tea Party pin. Huerta acknowledged that he was. According to him, the man said he’d heard a lot of good things about Huerta from the vendors, but also something that worried him.
"Are you a homosexual?"
Michael acknowledged that too.
"Well, I have one question. If you get elected, are you going to run this city like a homosexual?"
Michael says he has no idea where his answer came from, but he replied, "If you mean am I going to attend city council meetings in high heels, no."
He also says that as they talked, it became clear that the man had never, to his knowledge, really talked to anyone gay – and that after they talked for an hour or so the man said he’d vote for Michael, despite their differences.
I believe it, too.  Michael's a pretty engaging guy.

An elderly friend of mine, on his way in town to see the doctor Monday, managed to run over his dog and then get bitten by it, which was sad. And bloody. That news elicited a story from another old friend, who’d been about to take a pregnant dog to the doctor, many years ago; but when she went back into the house to get something, the dog jumped out of the car, unnoticed, and my friend backed over it. Immediately realizing what was happening, she also recalled something she’d read, that she should keep on rolling rather than jam on the brakes, and she did so, and the dog survived. But as she and her husband knelt looking at the dog and tried to check her out, their other dog, a male pit bull, walked over and peed on her. "He’d never done anything like that before, and was looking right at me the whole time, and all I could think was that he was saying, ‘You idiot,’ and I completely agreed."

The Poet

Today some Las Crucens will pay tribute to the town’s late poet laureate, Keith Wilson. Friends of the Library will gather at the Picacho Hills Country Club for their annual luncheon. County Commissioner William Garrett, who also writes poetry, will speak on Keith’s life and work.

The last time I saw Keith Wilson, he couldn’t speak.

Keith had a unique career path: born in New Mexico, he graduated from Annapolis, served during the Korean War, and then returned here as an anti-war poet and long-time NMSU professor.

For decades the kitchen table at the Wilsons’ home on Locust Street was the center of Las Cruces poetry, and familiar to the many nationally-known poets who visited and read here. I first sat at that table in the fall of 1969, when the Wilsons’ four kids were still kids. (Their son Kevin was eight, I think. When we moved back here recently, he was the realtor who showed us our new home.) Keith and Heloise were warm and welcoming.

Over the decades little changed at that table: kids were replaced by grandkids, a greater number of cats and dogs needed petting, and wine replaced coffee earlier in the day, but the laughter and poetry and stories still flowed freely.

Then the wordsmith began to lose his words. His mind was still sharp, but over the course of several years he was less and less capable of speaking. When I shot a videotaped interview with him several years ago, about his Korean War service and his poetry, his reading was uneven and the stories he told were sometimes interrupted by long silences in search of a word, while a cat wandered among the wine glasses and poetry books.

A year or two later, we couldn’t have shot such an interview. Keith could speak only a little, and rarely.
Where he had sometimes dominated conversations, he now sat silently at the table, following the conversation and punctuating it with glances, gestures, and facial expressions that seemed like those of a benevolent but mischievous imp. In mid-life, Keith had not always seemed as benevolent as he was. He was (in his words) a warrior and a shaman. He could be a little domineering at times, or jealous. Now, at twilight, he seemed to love life and us more freely.

On a visit in 2006, I was sitting in Joe and Jill Somoza’s backyard when Keith appeared. It was a short walk from Locust Street, and he still enjoyed it. He said little, if anything; but he beamed with joy. The joy was infectious. We all felt it.

The next time I saw him he could no longer speak. As we talked with Heloise, Keith still participated wittily with gestures and impish facial expressions. He also tried to read Dael a poem dedicated to Heloise from one of his books. The effort began with a few words and near words, continued with a sing-song, humming sort of sound, then sounded like the wordless but anguished howl of an animal.

At one point during our visit he disappeared. He walked out the front door, went into the converted garage that had been his study for decades, and eventually returned and handed me an old envelope, insisting I take it. It was addressed to him from Cinco Puntos Press in El Paso. From it I read out loud the poem he had scrawled there:

That sliver of a moon through the pines opens no pathway back to your side Hidden among the dark trees fox watches what we cannot see while some thing slips behind that darkness

The poem was strong, and succinct. Whatever he may have meant when he wrote it (some time after 12 December 1995, when the envelope was postmarked), the words "opens no pathway back to your side" were especially poignant now. His inability to speak was a frustrating barrier that imprisoned him alone on the other side. Too, he seemed likely to die soon, and I doubted he’d be able to find a path back.

In a quiet way, it was one of the most moving experiences of my life. Whether by chance or by completely lucid intention, he had fished out this particular poem and handed it to me at this particular moment. We had been discussing the forthcoming publication of his collected poems, which would feature the photograph I’d taken of him in Joe and Jill’s backyard. By handing me this poem, which had never been published and was not among the poems to be "collected," he saved it from oblivion. We all felt not only that it should appear in the book but that a photocopy of the envelope ought to be included. In a sense, this was his last poem – and as apt as any of the Death Poems written by Japanese Buddhist monks.

That was early January 2009. At the end of February we attended his memorial.

Heloise and two of the Wilsons’ children, and several grandchildren, still live in Las Cruces; and the book, Shaman of the Desert: the Collected Poems, very finely printed, is worth a read, particularly if you like poetry or New Mexico, or knew Keith. [Anyone interested in buying a copy should call Heloise at (575) 5622 8389.]
                                                                        -30-
[The above appeared as a column in the Las Cruces Sun-News this morning.]

September 12th

  Ten years ago I happened to be in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., doing some research.  (Plug: if you have never been there, I should tell you the Library of Congress may be the most beautiful accomplishment our country boasts.  It's a marvelous place to do research -- or sit staring up at the ceiling when one ought to be doing research.) 

  On the morning of September 11 someone spoke, and announced that we all had to leave -- just an hour into our work.  We did, with some dim idea that something was going on.  I've never seen quite a traffic jam of people trying to get out of downtown D.C.  If I hadn't had a motorcycle, I might still be trying to get back up to my house.  For days, helicopters were over head constantly.

   The Library is connected by tunnels with the U.S. Congress.  If a plane had hit the Capitol Building, I'd probably still be alive, but I'd have felt the impact and smelled the burning gasoline.   I've always felt a personal gratitude to the heroes of Flight 93, because at least some early reports were uncertain whether that plane was headed for the Capitol or the White House. 

    At supper that night we could see the Pentagon buring.  For days helicopters roared overhead above my house, at all hours, as if it were a war zone.
   
    I take pictures, as you may have noticed.   So early the next morning, September 12th, I went out to do that.  The streets were deserted, of course.  Near the monuments, soldiers and tanks were everywhere.  I  had to park a good ways from the Lincoln Memorial.   Once there, though, I was able to take a photograph in the dawn light that could only have been taken that day, when pretty much anyone who had a choice stayed home:

   Soon afterward, contemplating the janitor at work in the photograph, I wrote this to accompany the print:

His step looks almost jaunty. One might even imagine defiance in it. More eloquently, more sincerely, and perhaps at more personal risk, he says what the suits and ties in the White House say: let’s live our damned lives, and the hell with some fundamentalist in a cave, with his threats and suicidal dupes.
No one else is on these steps. No runners jog up them before turning toward home. No tourists stand around with guidebooks and polaroids. I am snapping pictures, not thinking. Later I will contemplate Lincoln’s wonderfully reflective posture and expression, the figure of a firm and strong man who dares to think and act outside the box, a man who sat many, many mornings alone working on the Emancipation Proclamation and watching the spiders building their webs above the borrowed desk where he went to work on it. 
If I were Osama bin Laden, I would destroy this statue, because Lincoln symbolizes our humanist freedom of thought. If I were George W. Bush, I would help destroy it, because the more people recall Lincoln, with his ability to contemplate deeply, think independently, and treat enemies with a wise mixture of the firm and the humane, the more "W" looks like a comical child in a chair so big that his feet dangled short of the ground.


Ten years have passed.  Osama and "W" have left the stage.   A century and a half from now, no one will write best-selling books about either of them, as they do about Lincoln.   One can only hope the world will also have forgotten by then the kind of narrow-minded religious fundamentalism that let Osama slaughter thousands without losing sleep over it. 

Why Does the Idea of Marriage Between Gays Bother People So Much?

El Paso’s current back-and-forth concerning municipal employee benefits for unmarried partners reminds me of a question I’ve never quite gotten a clear answer to: why do some heterosexual married folks argue that permitting "gay marriage" would somehow diminish the beauty or meaning of their own marriages?

For a long time I tended to agree with the Law and Order detective, Lennie, who shrugged and said "Why shouldn’t gays be just as miserable as the rest of us?" Then I came to love a woman enough that we wanted to marry. We did marry; but before we did, what troubled us was not that gays might be allowed to marry but that they could not.

If Blacks or Jews or Chinese, or Mexican-Americans or Anglos, were banned from eating at a particular restaurant, I’d avoid the place. Similarly, the fact that other folks who felt that they loved each other deeply, and wished to commit to each other for the rest of their lives, were not permitted to do so seemed to undermine the beauty of marriage. (I’ve recently learned that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie feel the same way, but that questions from their kids may trump that feeling.)

Everyone may not feel that strongly about equality. Fine. But what does it say about the fragility of a love relationship if that relationship can be threatened by the existence of other love relationships? If a man and a woman love each other so deeply that they wish to make a life together, how can that love be cheapened by the fact that other folks pair off feeling the same way about each other?

The only answer people seem able to muster is that their (mostly Christian) god wouldn’t like it.

First of all, that isn’t so clear, particularly if we expand the definition of "the Bible" beyond Matthew, Luke, Mark, and John to include Thomas and "Secret Mark." Even in the four gospels the Catholic Church chose to accept, Jesus repeatedly says that "God is Love." He says nothing of homosexuality one way or the other. He says of injustice that "Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you have done unto me." He beseeches us to "judge not, that ye be not judged." Generally, he seems to say quite often that while he (and presumably his heavenly father) may not approve what certain people do, such as prostitutes, this disapproval doesn’t disqualify those people from love and respect and equal treatment. Jesus also makes it pretty clear that whatever his and his father’s preferences, Christians should render to the state what belonged to the state – which presumably includes conceding the state’s right to decide who may legally marry whom in that state.

Secondly, the framers of our Constitution took great pains to prevent any religion from having undue influence over our government. I have a right to my religious beliefs, but neither I nor a village or state of like-minded folks can require others to guide their lives by those beliefs.

They also believed strongly that all men were created equal; and although practical politics in 1787 kept them from including darker-skinned folks in that precept, their successors certainly did so in the 1860's. Too, although they didn’t seriously consider allowing women to vote, the document they wrote was live and flexible enough to encompass sexual equality when our country matured enough to accept that idea.

Marriage equality will come. This year for the first time a majority of Gallup Poll respondents favored it. For years, poll results have indicated that whatever we old folks may think, the vast majority of younger folks don’t get why everyone cares so much about other people’s emotional lives. Most young people have a sibling or close friend whose sexual preference is unconventional. (Just this week, a new analysis of census figures shows that New Mexico has the fifth highest percentage of same-sex households in the nation, an increase of more than 73 per cent in a decade, from 4,900 to 7,800. Nearly one of every 100 households here is headed by a same-sex couple, with the majority of them in the North.)

The more interesting question remains, why do so many people give a damn? So long as the state doesn’t require churches to conduct marriages that go against their tenets, devout Christianity provides little excuse for excitement over the issue. Maybe the real sources of strong anti-gay-marriage feelings lie deeper inside the individuals who feel that way.

Gay man often assert that an aggressively anti-gay man is a closet homosexual trying to hide from his own nature. I’ve seen some cases where that seemed to be true. But it’s also true that most of us, particularly those of us getting long in the tooth, grew up in a culture that said gays were disgusting. Not all of us grew up.

Whatever Pastor Brown’s motivation, he has no right to use a tax-exempt religious organization to promote political positions such as the recall of the three officials or the election of his wife to the city council. He calls the current complaints "harassment and persecution," but they aren’t. Political donations are not tax-deductible. Donations to churches are. He’d have screamed loudly enough if a different church group were using tax-deductible donations to back the candidate who opposed his wife in her unsuccessful run.

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[The column above appeared in today's Las Cruces Sun-News.  For those who haven’t followed the El Paso story: in November, voters in El Paso approved a ballot initiative to stop gay and unmarried partners of city employees from receiving city health benefits. The measure (said to have been crafted by a local pastor, Tom Brown) was worded vaguely, denying benefits to all who were not city employees. Thus, a retired city employee or a present city council member, for example, would no longer receive benefits. A judge so ruled. (He also hinted that if the only persons stripped of health benefits were gays and live-in lovers, the law might be unconstitutional.) In May, the council voted to revive the pre-referendum benefits law, despite threats from Pastor Brown that he’d mount a drive to recall them. Brown, whose wife had run unsuccessfully for the city council, has since initiated an effort to recall the mayor and two council members. Various authorities are investigating complaints concerning his possible violations of tax and election laws.]

Further thoughts:

　

1.Brown may still be fighting over his wife’s failed run for the council; he may simply be embarrassed that his inept drafting of the ballot initiative; but in comparing himself to Martin Luther King, as he apparently did during a TV appearance, he seems more than a little confused. King went to jail (and was eventually martyred) trying to end the majority’s denial of a minority’s civil rights, not to perpetuate it.

2.

During decades away, I returned often to Las Cruces.

On one such visit, I ran into a fellow I’d met fairly soon after I arrived here in August 1969.

I’d been highly involved in advocating civil rights, an end to the war in Viet Nam, and other changes that weren’t yet popular. So had he. We weren't close, but we were friends.  We lost touch somewhat after I became a full-time newspaper reporter. He remained a student, then a teacher, at NMSU.

When we ran into each other again, he told me now that he’d been miserable during those years and that I’d contributed to it: we’d be at some event and I’d always be with some girl friend, often demonstrably affectionate, and he could not be that way with his lover, because he was gay. Holding hands on the grass outside of Corbett Center would probably have meant a beating at the hands of fellows who weren’t real cowboys but had the hats. It hurt even more that he felt that we, his allies on various political issues, would have rejected him.

I tried to recall those times, and him.  He'd been alternately timid (almost ashamed of himself) and petulant.  If I thought about it at all back then, I assumed it had to do with his allergies. He bicycled everywhere, and was angry at people’s blindness to the pollution we were all contributing to, and its effects, which he felt more keenly than most.

We had a good talk when I ran into him. I felt sad that he had been forced to live his life under such a blanket of fear and uncertainty. I guessed he was right about the probable beating if he’d been more open. I thought he was wrong about us, his friends. I thought we’d have been a good deal more tolerant than he supposed.  I don’t remember being too concerned about what other folks did, so long as it didn’t hurt anyone. But I wasn’t sure. It was a long time ago. Without it being a major concern, I was traveling a long road from probably loathing gays as a youth (though I didn’t know any, so far as I was aware, except a couple of teachers who were believed to be homosexual and whom I liked well enough) through tolerant indifference to what other folks did, to a positive, if not terribly active, sympathy with the movement for gay rights. Who knows how far I’d traveled by then? I think by college age I’d outgrown that prejudice, but perhaps vestiges still lingered.

I didn’t see him for maybe another twenty years.  Then, shortly before Dael and I moved to Las Cruces, a mutual friend mentioned that he'd moved to San Francisco. We had lunch with him, and I read some of his short stories and the like, on-line.

Of course, he couldn’t imagine why we were moving to Las Cruces. Or, rather, he understood, but we laughed at our different directions.   To Dael and me, though we loved the Bay Area, Las Cruces was tremendously inviting, for a variety of reasons. He had just escaped Las Cruces, after years of struggling to get the University to pay more attention to issues such as gay-bashing, and San Francisco was a haven and a heaven.

What was interesting was the difference in him. Age tends to accentuate our physical flaws and create new ones. But he seemed to be flowering. Where many aging bodies grow bent and stiff, he stood straight – an eloquent contrast to my image of him in youth, when he had seemed somehow to cringe, like a child or dog that has experienced beatings and expects another.  He was a far more attractive person than he’d been forty years ago, which few of us can say.  He was at home with himself, as perhaps he hadn't been in those days.

He’s part of why I do feel strongly about the issue. I have seen our culture bend too many minds and hearts out of shape by judging them: black kids I worked with, in Harlem and in the Mississippi Delta, who had learned from the world around them that they weren’t as good as other folks for some reason; girls of my generation told that the only suitable role for them was wife-and-mother, and that they should always (as Michelle Bachman still says) obey their husbands, or who suffered physical or emotional abuse from which they couldn’t escape; people whose sexual interests, or lack of sexuality, didn’t fit "the norm" and whose psyches, like my friend’s, were a constant interior battleground where stubborn individualism and the internalized voice of society fought over whether to be proud or ashamed.

I was lucky. I never had much of that. The usual sense that I wasn’t very attractive as a kid, and a sense of inferiority next to guys who were bigger and stronger and hit the ball over the fence all the time. But that’s pretty superficial. What prejudice I did suffer as a civil rights worker in the South or an early anti-war activist in the North was different: wrong-headed as I felt it was, it was a reaction to my own conscious choices and actions, as a young adult, and couldn’t create that terrible inner battle that has scarred so many people I’ve known.

I just don’t see why gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry. It’s something the State offers its citizens, and they’re citizens. True, it wasn’t permitted years ago; but whites and blacks still couldn’t marry each other in about 23 states before the Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia in 1967; cities could still put whites in one school and blacks in another until 1953, and even into the 1960's folks got beaten up or jailed (or, in my own case, just threatened and chased on the roads, and harassed in small ways by the police) for integrating restaurants and such; and at least one veterinary school repeatedly rejected a woman I knew, telling her that women could not become veterinarians.  It wasn't natural.  (Eventually that school did accept her, and she graduated and became Socorro’s veterinarian – and tough enough to go out and vaccinate a hundred cows the same day she’d given birth to one of her children.).

Nor is there any reason gays shouldn’t raise children. In San Francisco I met some couples, both male, who had adopted children; and at gatherings no one could miss the strength (and, yes, purity), of their love for those children. Given all the studies that show the importance of love to any infant or child’s ability to develop in a healthy way, I can’t see how anyone can question that it’s better to be loved by adoptive gay parents than to be left without love. I’ve yet to read anything suggesting that gay parents are more likely to abuse their kids than other parents are, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were less likely to do so. In any case, sexual abuse of kids by the folks they trust -- parents, uncles, priests, teachers – is so frequent that it’s difficult to listen to folks suggest that children are endangered by letting gay couples adopt.

 

 

3. As I think about it, too, I'd criticize my own column for perhaps buying into a we-they concept that is probably outmoded.  There isn't one box labeled "Heterosexuals" and another labeled "Homosexuals."   Rather, there's a colorful continuum: at one end are folks who, so far as they can recall, have never had a homosexual impulse or awakened confused from a dream in which they'd been fondling or kissing a person of their own sex; at the other are people who never felt the least attraction to the opposite sex or the least date that they preferred their own sex. Somewhere in the middle are bisexuals; men like a former co-worker of mine who was thoroughly homosexual in his mature life but had fathered a child with a woman at some point earlier; women like my sister and my first wife, who had a female lover or two while young, but have been with only men since; or a woman who was married for decades, with two sons, but long after her divorce told me that the new love of her life was a woman who was an old friend; or a friend I practiced law with for two decades, who had a wife and kids, but who determined in his fifties (or finally admitted to himself) that he preferred sex with men, and now lives with a male lover.  Talking with young folks, I get the sense that for many of them there's no big deal.  They wonder why adults tend to draw such a sharp line between people.