Progressive globalization

It's nearly the end of another long weekend -- at least for some of you. Me, there are no holidays in the news biz. I'm lucky to have weekends off from the daily grind of the newsroom. So I'll be heading back there tomorrow, where the latest installment of We Love the Troops Day will finally be winding down.

Now don't get me wrong. I certainly support our troops -- where they serve honorably, ethically and morally, as I suspect most are.

But there are, as we've been told, a few "bad apples" in the bunch who stink up the place and cast a really bad pall on everybody else. And that goes for some of the lower ranked troops they command as well.

Ha. You thought I was talking about the non-coms, didncha? I certainly coulda been. We've seen plenty of Article 31 hearings and courts martial -- some of which actually ended in convictions but most of which let the accused off with little more than a slap on the wrist, if anything -- and even a murder trial for a former soldier now convicted of raping and killing an Iraqi teenaged girl and killing most of her family.

But nah. I'm much more concerned about the guys who give the orders, who set the tone for the troops who fight and work under them. No, I'm not letting the little guys off either -- a soldier has a duty to question illegal orders. But the real culprits, the ones who never seem to suffer the consequences of their actions, are the officers. The high ranking officers, and their civilian masters.

Take Abu Ghraib, for example. And handful of bad apple soldiers were convicted, and a couple of officers got minor disciplinary actions. Except for the general in command of Abu Ghraib at the time, one Janis Karpinski. You will notice that she is not the typical male general. However, a typical male general -- Geoff Miller, who set the tone at Guantanamo before coming to Abu Ghraib -- was working the interrogations at the notorious prison. But it was Karpinski who got busted.

Miller? The guy who trained soldiers in torture techniques retired a major general. To be fair, Congress delayed his retirement because they thought he wasn't completely truthful with them about torture, but they eventually relented. If GW were still president, he'd probably get a Medal of Freedom. As it was, he did get a Distinguished Service Medal.

Karpinski was forced to retire as a colonel although she told the truth. How convenient to have a woman scapegoat available.

And the civilians. Well, we already know that not even Barack Obama is gonna hold their feet to the fire. He's letting the Dick and Liz show set the tone, and it's working like a charm. Americans are absolutely convinced now that torture is a pretty bad thing, but it's necessary to keep America safe from the evil Muslims. I mean terrorists.

Meanwhile, our friendly neighborhood Congressional Democrats are busy doing what they do best -- fuck up the best chance of having an actual liberal government with liberal policies and liberal outcomes that serve the greater good rather than do good for the greater wealth of this country.

And the Republicans. Oh my god, the Republicans. They seem to get more out of sync with the universe every day, while my colleagues fall all over themselves to make sure their every utterance is broadcast to the world as if it were the words of someone who actually understands the world, you know, like, Gandhi or somebody.

And yet ... and yet ... for all the surface sameness we're seeing these first few months of the Obama presidency -- and there is quite a bit -- there's quite a bit different as well. Hell, just having a Democrat in office makes it quite a bit different from the last eight years. And really, do you think Darth Cheney would have come out from whatever dark hole he lives in and put himself all over our televisions if he weren't worried that Obama was gonna fuck up everything he worked so hard for? Hell no, he wouldn't.

But the biggest difference isn't playing out on television. It's not even on the radio or in the newspapers. You see a little of it at some of the Big Blogs, but those places are so infected with the virus of popularity now that they, too, have lost touch with the common ground.

But places like this, well, this is the common ground. I've spent the last several days preparing for A World of Progress' upcoming redesign (oops, Publisher Lady, was I not sposed to mention that yet?), and as part of that I've actually had a look at just about every post on the site, from calls to action to personal stories to hints on making a compost pile to political rants.

And in each and every post I found the same thing -- a yearning to learn, to improve, to help others along this long and difficult path. To progress beyond both the petty and the personal and to redefine the way we look at globalization, heretofore viewed as some nefarious plot for the wealthy to secure their hold on us by both the right and the left.

But that's just the obvious part, carried out by obvious people in pursuit of their obvious enrichment. The real acts of globalization are taking place right here, where an American man living in Mumbai reads a post by a journalist in one of the media capitals of the United States and wants to publish it in an online magazine he writes for published by a woman in the Appalachian Mountains.

That worked out pretty well, so soon the journalist is fully on board, along with an historian with degrees in U.S. and Middle Eastern history, a lesbian on the West Coast, an environmentalist in Texas and a whole bunch of contributors who make A World of Progress one of the most exciting spots on this thing we call Internet.

I knew that, but going through the whole history of the place really made it very, very clear. And I'm not just saying that to curry favor with the boss. The puppy, well, that's another matter altogether.

I like it here so much, in fact, that I'll soon be shutting down my other blogs and posting exclusively here. OK, I'm already posting exclusively here, but soon I'll shut down the other blogs.

But my point, and I do have one, is that it is our leaders who set the tone, who make it clear what's acceptable and not acceptable, who point out the direction we underlings -- no matter how much peer level we actually have -- should be moving.

That's certainly true at dank Iraqi prisons where generals teach torture and walk away with their rank intact. And it's true in places like this where the right people come together at the right time to create something unique and powerful.

Either way, the troops get the message and respond accordingly. The difference plays out across the globe, for better or worse.

But here, unlike at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and who knows how many secret facilities around the world, the good guys win. And when we do, the world benefits.



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Peace Y'all