You might think that the phrase ‘Yes We Can’ is fairly self explanatory. Apparently not! At least not in France, where the newspaper Liberation found it necessary to publish this article to try and explain the meaning and significance of this people-empowering concept to French leaders.

The article By Michael Foessel, Fracoise Gaillard and Myriam d’Allonnes says in part:

“‘Yes we can’ - that was the phrase. But in politics, saying the words is already to have commenced action. It’s the slogan that ignited America. So can it be exported? Let us decipher it for our politicians. … ‘Yes we can,’ is also a marketing slogan. Why not? If it reminds us that even a president cannot act alone - and that he can do nothing without us.”

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This is a clip of the opening of the pow wow at The Smithsonian … you will see some of my friends who are Veterans being the honored carriers of the United States flag. The veterans are most often in the front rows of the grand entry.

Then will come the veteran’s honor dance, one of many this night… honor truly, because they carry proudly the American flag under which their own ancestors were murdered and persecuted. Even so: The American flag is given prominence over all the Tribal and State flags. The past not forgotten, but America our country in our own way now, too. Honor.

Honor dancing; you see the opening dance as people file into the dance arena; they are doing a knee-bending dip-step that covers only a tiny amount of ground at a time. This dip-step shuffles forward, almost in place, and it makes everyone’s fringes sway, makes every last feather tremble, makes every metal jingle skirt sound like the wind over mesas, makes every set of rattles worn at knees sound like hard rain. In the storm. Dancing in the storm. Honor.

You see to the lower right in the film, the antelope, the deep, the crows, the eagles, and deer dancers and the bear spirits and more, dancing … beginning to dance, loosen up, returning to their pelts. Honor. To be so fully alive and instinctual. Honor.

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The Walking Wounded

What can be done for the literally quarter million homeless vets wandering the highways and byways of our country, those who often walk miles every day and who have feet that look like bleeding lumber?

The issue of homeless vets appears to be similar somehow to poverty in pockets of Appalachia, the poverty in the outback of the Navajo Reservation and up to Rosebud… the abject poverty through much of the tobacco belt in the South.

So much resource is thrown at it all. But, somehow, something is missing. Something, but what? For the issues persist. I don’t pretend to know the fix, but I do know some of the helps.

Us.

One help is vision correction. For, in some regard, we too often develop an accidental but severe case of ’see-through-ish,‘

…that is, we, the watcher-helpers of this poor old world, no longer see what stands right before us; we mentally erase the disheveled, the tattered sign-carrying, the addicted, the ill… as one of those chronic issues that ‘will always be with us.’

I can sometimes feel it coming over me as well, and I resist that idea of “the poor will always be with us,’ if instead of it being a clarion call to action, that phrase is used instead to put us to sleep, for the phrase can sound so peaceful a phrase, so tidy, so wise.

But, it’s not necessarily. That phrase can be, instead, a powerful and poisonous soporific.

Yet, taking on helping whatever stands right before us, within our reach, is the only mighty spell-breaker we have for our spells of see-through-ish.

Thus, four days ago, 60 working women and men veterans, including my husband ( 21 year USAF partially disabled veteran,) did just that– broke through see-through-ish. Again.

They got out their sinew and gut, their bandages and iron thread, revved up their pickup trucks and vans, and helped to mend the part of the world within their reach.

With the help of the VA, Vet’s groups, homeless shelters, churches, they went out into the streets and under the bridges and along the small forests on the Platte River, bringing homeless vets in from the cold, every last one they could find.

Some homeless vets came willingly; some had to be cajoled, some were angry– why now, why not long ago? Many were literally growing moss in their beards, some were loaded, some were mentally compromised, many had infections, some were so sick they had to be dead-man carried. He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother. Yes.

This is what happened next… It could easily be made to happen where you live, too… mending up the part of the world within our reach…

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Mata H. of BlogHer has a sensitive and poignant entry about the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht. I urge you to go read it there, but I’m grafting just a couple of things to share and adding a bit more. First, please listen to and watch this short clip:

One of the truths I’ve always known about has been the failure of the United States to intervene in the events as they unfolded in Europe and resulted in the death of more than 11 million people, 6 million of whom were Jews. However, it wasn’t until I saw a video clip at Yad Vashem this August that retells the story of a Polish resistance fighter and member of the Polish underground government during WWII who met with FDR in 1943 that this ability to rationalize away meaningful assistance hit me.

Here’s what happened:

I asked our guide about whether the museum presented any information on a professor I’d had in college, Jan Karski. Karski is well-known to people familiar with the concept of righteous gentiles. There is even a statue of him in New York City:

Jan Karski (real name: Kozielewski) was born in 1914 into a Catholic family in ?ód?. After graduating in law, he began work in diplomacy. During the Second World War, as an emissary of the Home Army to the Polish Government in Exile, he gave the Allies a detailed account of the extermination of Jews in Poland. In the US, he among others met with President F.D. Roosevelt, who did not, however, believe his reports on the Holocaust.

During a later courier mission, Karski (his wartime underground pseudonym) was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo. So as not to breakdown – he tried to commit suicide by cutting his veins. Taken to hospital, he managed to escape with the aid of Poles working there.

To corroborate his reports on the Holocaust, Karski twice entered the Warsaw ghetto in disguise with the aid of “?egota” (the Council of Aid for Jews) and Irena Sendlerowa, who saved 2,500 Jewish children by transporting them out of the ghetto.

In 1994, the 80th anniversary of Karski’s birthday, he was given honorary citizenship of Israel. He also received the Righteous Among the Nations title from the Yad Vashem Institute.

In Claude Lanzmann’s 1984 nine-hour film, Shoah, Karski walks off during the interview (I watched the entire nine hours when it first came out; I’d just returned from a year doing volunteer work in Israel; I will never forget the experience of being in a theater over two nights watching it) though eventually returns to continue helping Lanzmann’s efforts. You can read a transcript of the interview here and see on page 12 and 32 where it is that Karski tries to stop. I cry just reading. He says that he cannot go on, though he does, and repeats multiple times that he understands the reason that Lanzmann wants to have this documentation. Read the rest of this entry »

As far as people in the ‘Old Continent’ are concerned, part of the narrative behind the U.S. election campaign is about how an Obama victory is likely to trigger a sea change in the the way Europeans address the race issue - and perhaps more importantly - its burgeoning immigrant population.

For Italy’s La Stampa, Barbara Spinelli writes in part:

“What happens in the U.S. on November 4 is all-important. If Barack Obama were to win, many things would change in those European countries which are tempted to close themselves off to foreigners, not only in the realm of politics but in terms of the habits and conversations of average citizens. The debate about the mixing of cultures will inevitably incorporate the shock from across the Atlantic. … Isolating classes of foreign children or segregating Gypsies are emotional reactions that are not only dangerous, they are futile. … The speech on race that Obama gave in Philadelphia on March 18 was decisive for Italy.”

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Is the current financial crisis the latest bit of evidence that the final collapse of American power is at hand? If these weren’t the fears of Joschka Fischer, a former German foreign minister that knows the debt that Europeans owe the United States, one could perhaps more easily dismiss these sentiments as ‘schadenfreude‘ [taking pleasure in the pain of others].

For Germany’s Die Zeit, Fischer writes ominously:

“In a few weeks, it’ll be the 19th anniversary of the night that the Wall came down and the Cold War came to an end. In the following years, the United States stood alone at the summit of global power. Today, just 19 years later, we are witnessing the decline of American power. This decline can be traced essentially to a mixture of arrogance and blindness. … The grave crisis in the American financial system is a provisional climax in this decline in power, which can be compared in its magnitude only to the global crisis of 1929.”

Reflecting the exasperation of much of the world with the Bush White House, Fischer writes:

“Certainly, this process didn’t begin with the election of George W. Bush as 43rd President of the United States. But since he took over in 2000 - and with him the neoconservatives of the Republican Party - the U.S. government has been headed rapidly into decline. … Under the banner of a “New American Century,” Bush and the neoconservatives chose a policy based on sole American predominance. The results are now clear to be seen:

Due to Guantanamo and torture, America has lost her moral credibility; Thanks to the Iraq War, Iran has achieved regional supremacy in the Middle East; American military power has become overstretched due to a wrong and unnecessary war; Bush inherited a balanced budget from Clinton and has since acquired a huge mountain of debt; China is now America’s largest creditor; the dollar’s role as the dominant global reserve currency is seriously endangered; the American financial system is threatened with collapse; and the only answer to this crisis, an existential threat to the entire global economy, is nationalization by Washington’s Republican government!”

So what is Europe to do?:

“Considering the negative consequences of declining American power, one must hope that it’s only a temporary phase of weakness and not the beginning of America’s final downfall. However, we Europeans must finally wake up and unite politically and responsibly to prepare for tougher times and greater responsibility.”

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On 60 Minutes Sunday night, he evoked another man who came to office promising to end an unpopular war and to restore confidence after the tenure of a president with abysmal approval ratings.

“I am a practical person,” Barack Obama said, channeling the Dwight Eisenhower of more than half a century ago. “One of the things I’m good at is getting people in a room with …different ideas who sometimes violently-disagree with each other and finding common ground, and a sense of common direction. And that’s the kind of approach that I think prevents you from making some of the enormous mistakes that we’ve seen over the last eight years.”

Looking back at his two terms in the 1950s, Ike had taken pride in bringing together the vehemently-opinionated and reasoning them into agreement, as he had done in World War II with such military divas as Gen. George Patton and Britain’s Viscount Bernard Law Montgomery.

“Extremes to the right and left of any political dispute are always wrong,” Eisenhower would say. “The middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes are in the gutters.”

Despite his own mantra of change and Republican efforts to tar him as a wild-eyed radical, Obama is temperamentally akin to Eisenhower in his reliance on persuasion and conciliation. If elected, he will face a much-more-divided America, but his instinct will be like Ike’s–to reason and heal.

Maybe it goes back to their common childhood roots in Kansas.

Cross-posted from my blog.

I didn’t think I had it in me, but I have just finished yet another book about World War II, probably the hundredth or so that I have read in a lifetime of interest in the myriad angles, intricacies and strategies of that great conflict fought by my parents’ generation. I am glad that I did what with the dust-up in Georgia and a war in Iraq that has lasted considerably longer than the time between the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and their unconditional surrender.

Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45, published in March, focuses on the closing years of the war in the Pacific and among the lessons it offers is that the politicians who are starting wars these days like Bush and Putin, as well as pundits like Kristol and Kagan who are constantly agitating for even more wars, are a bunch of cocked hats by comparison.

I doubt that Max Hastings, the esteemed journalist-historian and author of Retribution, would say as much. In fact, Hastings has pretty much been in the neocon camp on Iraq.

That doesn’t diminish a provocative book full of fresh insights that acknowledges Japanese brutality was returned in kind by the Americans, and to pretend that race had nothing to do with that tit-for-tat is to ignore the historic record. But Hastings writes that neither should it be ignored that Japanese sadism and disregard for the lives of their own infantrymen, fliers and subjugates invited the Yankee payback.

As Hastings notes in the introduction:

“For students of history . . . the manner in which the Second World War ended is even more fascinating than that in which it began. Giants of their respective nations, or rather mortal men cast into giants’ roles, resolved the great issues of the twentieth century on battlefields in three dimensions, and in the war rooms of their capitals. Some of the most populous societies on earth teemed in flux. Technology displayed a terrifying maturity. . . . For millions, 1944-45 brought liberation, the banishment of privation, fear and oppression; but air attacks during those years killed larger numbers of people than in the rest of the conflict put together. Posterity knows that the war ended in August 1945. However, it would have provided scant comfort to the men who risked their lives in the Pacific island battles, as well as in the other bloody campaigns of that spring and summer, to be assured that the tumult would soon be stilled. Soldiers may accept a need to be the first to die in a war, but there is often an unseemly scramble to avoid becoming the last.”

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.

Before there was a CIA, during World War II, there was the OSS and now more than half a century later the National Archives is releasing files on almost 24,000 Americans who worked for the agency, including Julia Child.

Although she will be mentioned in the same breath as Valerie Plame, there was nothing covert about Julia, with whom I worked for more than a decade and whose only secretive moment came on camera when she dropped food on the kitchen floor, picked it up and confided to viewers, “Don’t forget. If you’re alone in the kitchen, no one will know.”

The OSS revelations won’t come as news to anyone who knew her, since she reveled in telling about her most dramatic exploit, helping to cook up a shark repellent to coat underwater explosives and keep them away from devices meant to blow up German U-boats.

The newly released list is a reminder of that innocent time when secretly working for your country was a source of pride for people like historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who later worked in JFK’s White House as well as two sons of Theodore Roosevelt and Sterling Hayden, the actor now immortalized as Al Pacino’s first murder victim in “The Godfather.”

Nobody had to worry about the likes of Scooter Libby blabbing their names.

Cross-posted from my blog.

Interesting article about all of th