Tag Archives: Austin American-Statesman

Palaima: Facing life’s end on the obituary pages

Posted on by

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/palaima-facing-lifes-end-on-the-obituary-pages-2080419.html

COMMENTARY
Palaima: Facing life’s end on the obituary pages

Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Thursday, January 5, 2012

‘I been meek
And hard like an oak
I seen pretty people disappear like smoke
Friends will arrive, friends will disappear.’

-Bob Dylan, ‘Buckets of Rain’

‘I see dead people. All the time. They’re everywhere.’

-Cole Sear, ‘The Sixth Sense’

In what we hope will be for us all a happy new year, more than 2 million Americans will die. The older we get, the more the odds turn against us of making it through another year. If we think about it, that’s the way we want the odds to work, even if we are beyond what used to be the standard retirement age of 55.

Human beings, since well before Herodotus reported the fateful death of the son of the Lydian king Croesus in early manhood, view the deaths of those who have not yet lived life fully as a tragic inversion of the natural order. But the deaths of those we know and love affect us deeply, no matter how old they are when they die.

We also feel the loss of public figures in many different arenas of our human experience. In 2011, we lamented the passing of actor Harry Morgan (96), movie star Elizabeth Taylor (79), literary critic and political commentator Christopher Hitchens (62), boxer “Smokin’_” Joe Frazier (67), television journalist Andy Rooney (92), computer visionary Steve Jobs (56), assisted suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian (83), and blues musicians David “Honeyboy” Edwards (96) and Joe Willie “Pinetop” Perkins (97). We may have noted wryly that living the blues can, if one is lucky, lead to a ripe old age. Even the deaths of infamous bogeymen like Osama bin Laden (54), Moammar Gadhafi (69) and Kim Jong Il (69) get us to reflect on the nature of our times here on Earth.

As we get older, we experience at a predictably increasing rate the loss of human beings who have intersected with our own lives enough to make us stop and take notice.

In 2011, my 60th year, I helped write memorial notices in January for my closest male friend in Austin and in December for a good friend from graduate school days whom I visited in October and my graduate school mentor and a kind of second father for 38 years, Emmett L. Bennett Jr. Emmett’s life achievements merited a half-page obituary in The New York Times on Jan. 1, 2012. These people were inextricably bound to my own life. Now they have disappeared. Yet they are still here as ghosts. They still affect me. They have magical powers to bring to life the person I was when I knew them.

If the deaths of young people are heart-breaking because of our need to have had a longer time with them, the loss of older friends makes us see who we were at different points in our lives and how we have come to be who we are now. Have you ever wondered where your life has gone while you have been living it?

I asked my friend Margalit Fox, an obituary writer since 2004 for The New York Times, how she deals with the daily task of making sense of death. She explained that it was something that had worried her when she took the position. But after seven years she sees professional obituary writing as crafting stories about how the recently deceased got from point A to point B in their lives and accomplished things worth the telling. She believes there is no better medium than the obituary for talking about what it means to be alive.

As Marilyn Johnson writes in her best seller about obituaries, The Dead Beat, “Obituaries are history as it is happening. Was he a success or a failure, lucky or doomed, older than I am or younger? Did she know how to live? I shake out the pages. Tell me the secret of a good life!”

That is what it comes down to: the secret of a good life. Obituaries are like prompts for essay questions about those who have died. Did she or he lead a “good life”? Why? Why not?

And the ghosts of the departed make sure we ask the same questions again and again about our own lives before we, too, become ghosts.

Not a bad New Year’s resolution for us all.

Palaima is professor of classics at the University of Texas at Austin: tpalaima@sbcglobal.net.

REPLY by classicist James Tatum

Letters Austin American-Statesman on-line January 9 print January 10, 2012

http://www.statesman.com/opinion/details-of-major-issues-teens-shooting-death-coal-2091780.html go to page 2

Memory of the dead

Re: Jan. 5 Tom Palaima commentary, “Facing life’s end on the obituary pages.”

I like Tom Palaima’s columns and his latest one especially. It made me remember a little epitaph that my grandmother Laura Frankie Harvey was fond of repeating to me. She was born in Paris, Texas, in December 1888, conceived, evidently, during the famous Blizzard of ’88, when it was said you could walk on the frozen bodies of cattle from Fort Worth to Kansas City.

Remember man that passeth by
As thou art now so once was I
As I am now so thou must be
Prepare thyself to follow me.

To which some wag appended,

To follow thee’s not my intent
Unless I know which way thee went.

Jim Tatum
Norwich, Vt.

What Military Recruiters Are Doing to Fill the Ranks

Posted on by

http://hnn.us/articles/8945.html

Monday, December 20, 2004

What Military Recruiters Are Doing to Fill the Ranks
Tom Palaima

Mr. Palaima, recipient of a MacArthur genius award, teaches war and violence studies and ancient history at the University of Texas at Austin. He thanks Mr. David Hill for the reference to “The Recruiting Sergeant.”

Good morning, good morning, the Sergeant he cried.
And the same to you, gentlemen, we did reply,
Intending no harm but meant to pass by,
For it bein’ on Christmas mornin’.

But, says he, My fine fellows, if you will enlist,
Ten guineas in gold I’ll stick to your fist,
And a crown in the bargain for to kick up the dust,
And drink the king’s health in the morning.

For a soldier, he leads a very fine life,
And he always is blessed with a charming young wife,
And he pays all his debts without sorrow or strife,
And he always lives pleasant and charmin’,

And a soldier, he always is decent and clean,
In the finest of clothing he’s constantly seen.
While other poor fellows go dirty and mean,
And sup on thin gruel in the morning.

Says Arthur, I wouldn’t be proud of your clothes,
For you’ve only the lend of them, as I suppose,
But you dare not change them one night, for you know
If you do, you’ll be flogged in the morning.

And we have no desire to take your advance,
All hazards and dangers we barter on chance,
For you’d have no scruples for to send us to France,
Where we would get shot without warning. (© Bob Dylan 1992)

The traditional Irish folk song”Arthur McBride” was written down in Limerick in 1840 and made popular again by Bob Dylan in 1992. In it, the young hero refutes and resists a military recruiter’s false promises.

In mid-19th-century Ireland, recruiting sergeants preyed upon poor Irish boys, promising them adventure, honor, fine clothes and romance instead of pre- and post-potato-famine destitution. Poverty and ignorance have always been the military recruiter’s best friends.

Irish recruits in the 1800’s had to serve as battlefield fodder in the British army for eightpence a day. They were subject to cruel discipline, receiving 25 to 1500 lashes with a cat-o-nine-tails for offenses like changing out of their uniforms. Still for many, military life was better than starvation.

Seventy-five years later, little had changed. The British were now recruiting in Ireland for the war to end all wars. This inspired another anti-recuiter ballad entitled”The Recruiting Sergeant” written by Seamus O’Farrell. It was covered recently by the Pogues:

As I was walking down the road a feeling fine and larky oh
A recruiting sergeant come up to me, says he”you’d like fine in khaki oh
For the King he is in need of men, come read this proclamation oh
A life in Flanders for you then, ‘t would be a fine vacation oh”

“That may be so” says I to him”but tell me Sergeant deary-oh
if I had a pack stuck upon me back would I look fine and cheery-oh
For they’d have you train and drill until they had you one of Frenchies
oh it may be warm in Flanders but it’s draughty in the trenches oh”

The sergeant smiled and winked his eye, his smile was most provoking oh
he twiddled and twirled his wee moustache, says he”You’re only joking oh
for the sandbags are so warm and high the wind you won’t feel blowing oh
well I winked at a caitlin passing by, says I,”What if it’s snowing oh”

Come rain or hail or wind or snow I’m not going out to Flanders oh
There’s fighting in Dublin to be done, let your sergeants and your commanders go
Let Englishmen fight English wars, it’s nearly time they started oh
I saluted the sergeant a very good night, there and then we parted oh

Recruiters nowadays use the same techniques, but with a new sophistication that aims at making their targets more pliant and susceptible to their sales pitches. The hard sell and the gaps between promises and realities are still there. And our national economic policies ensure a steady supply of young men for whom the military is the main route out of poverty.

So long as that supply line exists, disapproval of our foreign wars will never reach the intensity of the Vietnam War period. Back then, even wealthy young men like our current president had their lives affected by the universal draft.

Austin American-Statesman reader Vic Blackburn (1LT, 82nd Airborne Division, 1968-1970) recently reminded me of Col. (ret.) David Hackworth’s views on this subject:”Most recruits in the All Volunteer Force come from non-vocal, working-class families–a disproportionate number from the poor and from minority groups–while more privileged Americans are conspicuous by their absence.” Soldiers drawn from a universal draft”keep all our citizens more closely involved and invested; they are our bottom-line deterrent to war.”

While most parents of teenagers worry about sex, drugs, alcohol and music, parents in certain neighborhoods and school districts also worry about recruiters.

Army Adventure Vans: They’re Flashy. They’re Dangerous. They’re Targeting 500,000 students. They’re Coming To A School Near You. Marguerite Jones of Austin, Texas does. She called me about the sleek, two-million-dollar 18-wheeler military Cinema Van that pulled up outside Travis High School around Veteran’s Day. In a scene resembling playground drug-pushing, her son William and his freshman peers were lured on board and offered free access to the most sophisticated high-tech battle-simulation computer games. All they had to do was give the recruiters their personal information. The kids were told by their school that they had to sign up to get credit for PE class. Meanwhile the recruiters said they needed the information to prove to their superiors that they had been doing their jobs. Indeed.

The U.S. Army sponsored game”America’s Army” and Kuma Reality Games use military battle simulation and retired military consultants to transport their targeted youth audience of 12- to 15-year-olds right into the Battle of Fallujah, Operation Anaconda, and Uday and Qusay’s Last Stand. These games are exciting and ultra-realistic, except in representing the real finality if the American soldier avatar should get himself killed or severely wounded.

At a recent week-long conference I attended at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, a video-game expert spoke of playing the Battle of Fallujah online while watching Marines on CNN do battle on the exact same streets. The video game Full Spectrum Warrior asks youths,”Do you think you have what it takes to become a nationally renowned squad leader?” (Note: How many squad leaders from Iraq or Afghanistan do you think the average American can name?) It also touts the fact that it is based on a game commissioned by the U.S. Army.

The web sites that offer such games for a $9.99 monthly fee have direct links to military recruiting web sites. Imagine the lure of the plush van and sophisticated equipment for kids from homes that cannot afford computers.

Students in targeted schools are further invited to join Junior ROTC. Austin has Air Force Junior ROTC at Reagan, Akins, Westwood, Bowie and McNeil high schools, i.e., the lower-income, predominantly minority schools. The same pattern holds true acros the state, with Junior ROTC’s in traditionally minority regions or areas of urban and rural economic stagnation.

The Army Junior ROTC web site calls its version a”Character and Leadership Development Program.” We might wonder why affluent suburban high schools like non-minority urban high schools do not need to develop these same civic virtues.

Further preying upon teenage insecurity and parental anxiety about their children’s future, the military has devised the Delayed Entry Program. Seventeen year-old kids can sign up for military service, ostensibly to gain credit towards higher rank in the year or more before graduation and basic training. There are a number of specified reasons that legally permit these teenagers later to opt out, but recruiters have been known to misrepresent and high-pressure reluctant graduates or non-graduates into”living up to their commitment.”

Military recruiting then starts with underprivileged twelve year-olds and never lets up. It is supported by money-making video-game manufacturers and schools that are obliged to allow recruiters access to students and student information or lose funding under the provisions of the federal No Child Left behind Act.

I proposed in another recent essay that stop-loss orders and veteran call-backs, while perfectly lawful, were immoral. Austin American-Statesman reader Vic Blackburn disagrees. He calls them and current recruiting practices criminal. What do you think?

A shorter version of this essay appeared in the Austin American-Statesman (12-15-04).

Palaima: Shootings in Afghanistan have roots in our history

Posted on by

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/shootings-in-afghanistan-have-roots-in-our-history-2248005.html

COMMENTARY
Palaima: Shootings in Afghanistan have roots in our history

Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Monday, March 19, 2012

If you live long enough, one sure fact of life is that history will repeat itself and pose questions about who we are and try to be as civilized human beings.

Earlier this month, in southern Afghanistan, a 38-year-old U.S. sergeant with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, a veteran of three tours of duty in Iraq, slipped off base and into two villages and killed at least 16 fellow human beings in three homes. Among the dead were nine children and three women. He set 11 bodies on fire. He apparently acted alone and surrendered upon returning to his base.

Reactions bring a sense of déjà vu to anyone familiar with the wars American soldiers have fought in the past 50 years. Even guarded official responses are in their own ways sincere and true.

A mother is reported to have opened the flowered blanket in which her 2-year-old daughter’s dead body was wrapped and asked, “Was this child Taliban?” Of course, she wasn’t. The woman’s daughter’s death is unholy. It offends our moral and religious codes, our deep-rooted instincts to protect the young and innocent.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai said the killings were “acts of terror and unforgivable.” Of course, they look like acts of terror to people who know firsthand what terrible acts terrorists commit. Forgiveness should be sought from the hearts of those who loved the victims.

President Barack Obama issued a statement that mostly rings true, “This incident is tragic and shocking, and does not represent the exceptional character of our military and the respect that the people of the United States has for the people of Afghanistan.”

Of course, mass killing of defenseless innocents by an experienced soldier is beyond tragedy.

There is no question that American soldiers are well-trained and learn rules of engagement to follow even in environments where the enemy is hard to identify. Most Americans do not lack respect for the people of Afghanistan, even if few of us have personal ties with Afghans or can even locate their country on a map.

The deputy commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Adrian Bradshaw, declared, “I cannot explain the motivation behind such callous acts.” He probably cannot. But I bet he could begin a list of factors that would lead an experienced soldier, a married father of two, to do what he did on that morning.

Online, opinions are varied and less guarded, as we also might expect. Many see the killings as understandable, though not condonable – a product of the stresses our volunteer soldiers now face in the formally undeclared wars we are now fighting. They point out that our soldiers serve too many tours of duty and that veteran suicides have reached record rates. They call for us to pull our troops out of Afghanistan and not send them anywhere else. They wonder how soldiers operating under constant strain can hold themselves together while overseas and return as psychologically healthy human beings.

One spouse of a Special Forces veteran writes eloquently that this kind of brutal murder “is not what (Special Forces) soldiers are trained to do. The Special Forces code is ‘free the oppressed’ and that is what they are trying to do. The danger that they put themselves in to bring freedom for these people.”

Indeed, Obama stresses, “In no way is this representative of the enormous sacrifices that our men and women have made in Afghanistan.”

Finally, Obama was asked point-blank whether this incident in Afghanistan was comparable to the My Lai massacre that took place, uncannily, five calendar days later, March 16, 1968. He dismissed the comparison, saying in Afghanistan “you had a lone gunman who acted on his own.” But we should remember that, controversially, only Lt. William J. Calley was convicted on the charge that he did “with premeditation murder Oriental human beings, whose names and sex are unknown, by shooting them with a rifle.” Yet more than 500 women, children and old men were killed on that single day.

Seymour Hersh, who won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking the My Lai story in November 1969, will deliver a public lecture on Thursday at the University of Texas.

Make an effort to come to listen to what he thinks about the history he has lived through and sees now. History, unfortunately, will just not go away.

Palaima is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin: tpalaima@sbcglobal.net.

Learn more

Seymour Hersh speaks at 7 p.m. Thursday at UT’s AT&T conference center. Information: www.utexas.edu/know/events.

Addendum

The initial charge against Calley as reported by Mr. Hersh was as reported here with the total number dead adding up to 109.

In the event, Calley was charged with four specifications alleging premeditated murder in violation of Article 118 of Uniform Code of Military Justice:

Art. 118. Murder

Any person subject to this chapter who without justification or excuse, unlawfully kills a human being when he– 1) has a premeditated design to kill; 2) intends to kill or inflict great bodily harm; 3) is engaged in an act which is inherently dangerous to others and evinces a wanton disregard of human life; or 4) is engaged in perpetration or attempted perpetration of burglary, sodomy, rape, robbery, or aggravated arson; is guilty of murder, and shall suffer such punishment as a court-martial trial may direct.

The specifications:

Specification 1: In that First Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr. …did, at My Lai 4, Quang Ngai Province, Republic of South Viet-Nam, on or about 16 March 1968, with premeditation, murder an unknown number, not less than thirty, Oriental human beings, males and females of various ages, whose names are unknown, occupants of the village of My Lai 4, by means of shooting them with a rifle.

Specification 2: In that First Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr…did, at My Lai 4, Quang Ngai Province, Republic of South Viet-Nam, on or about 16 March 1968, with premeditation, murder an unknown number, not less than seventy, Oriental human beings, males and females of various ages, whose names are unknown, occupants of the village of My Lai 4, by means of shooting them with a rifle.

Specification 3: In that First Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr…did, at My Lai 4, Quang Ngai Province, Republic of South Viet-Nam, on or about 16 March 1968, with premeditation, murder one Oriental male human being, whose name and age is unknown, by shooting him with a rifle.

Specification 4: In that First Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr…did, at My Lai 4, Quang Ngai Province, Republic of South Viet-Nam, on or about 16 March 1968, with premeditation, murder one Oriental human being, an occupant of the village of My Lai 4, approximately two years old, by shooting him with a rifle.

Palaima: The wonder of our own handwriting

Posted on by

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/the-wonder-of-our-own-handwriting-2201336.html

COMMENTARY
Palaima: The wonder of our own handwriting

Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Monday, February 27, 2012

The Common Core States Standards Initiative in U.S. education, now being implemented across the country, does not require the teaching of handwriting. Many states, including New Mexico, have passed measures expressly eliminating the teaching of the skill of cursive writing.

The general reasoning is that other subjects are more important and people in the future will be communicating via keyboards and screens. In addition to the unacknowledged socio-economic problems of reaching this imagined future where everyone has ready access to electronic communication, learning cursive is important for developing an individual identity, artistic hand-motor skills, and the analytical processing required to identify standard forms from a range of personal variants.

More than that, this educational reform will make the primary handwritten documents of history inaccessible to all but specialists and will strip us of a key facet of our individuality. Perhaps you think that the reform will not make an iota’s difference. I ask you to consider your own lives and what personal handwriting has meant and still means to you.

One of my earliest memories – given credibility by a black-and-white photograph that shows me as a toddler pointing in wonder at the blank, round screen of my parents’ first television set, a solid piece of polished, brown wooden furniture much bigger than I was in 1954 – is of watching a local program in Cleveland called “Captain Penny.” Captain Penny was offering young boys and girls our very own railroad engineer’s hat if we would send our names and addresses into the address for WJW-TV that appeared on the screen.

As in old movies from the 1930s well into the ’50s, anything that viewers had to read was kept on the screen for what now seems a very long time. Immigrant Americans and the general population, for whom a high school education was still an achievement no one took for granted, needed ample time to read even simple messages. Nonetheless, for me the time was too short. I had not yet learned to write. I sat with a pencil and pad each day copying the shapes of the next few letters or numbers without knowing what they meant. Whether I eventually got the whole address or my hat as a member of Captain Penny’s funny-fun-fun train I do not remember. But I was introduced to the magic of writing by hand and to the importance of knowing how to read, write and use words and numbers.

I hope I am not alone in my fascination. Think of how we value anything written by people to whom we attach importance. Think of what their writing styles tell us about them. Among my memorabilia are autographs from musicians such as Johnny Winter, Pinetop Perkins, Albert Collins, Willie Nelson, Richard Jessee, Jimmy LaFave, Mike Flanigin, and even a $20 bill signed by the late, great Clifford Antone, a fond memory of our first lunch together.

Books on my shelves are signed by Tobias Wolff, Charles Neider, Wallace Terry, Joe Paterno, Joe Nick Patoski, Bill Broyles, Chuck Patterson and Paul Woodruff. Their signatures convey strong memories of who they are or were as human beings and what the books say about their hearts and minds. In Paterno’s case, I remember us talking about a mutual friend who was an inspirational high school teacher of Joe Pa’s and later a Jesuit colleague of mine at Fordham University: Father Tom Bermingham, S.J., a truly saintly man, worldly wise. Holding that book in my hands at the height of the Penn State Jerry Sandusky scandal that led to Paterno’s firing, well …

Deeper memories are evoked by my mother’s first communion prayer book from 1928, with a holy card praising her signed by a nun who taught her; by letters from my uncle Joey written to my mother not long after he fought with the U.S. Marines in the Battle of Iwo Jima; love letters my dad, in the First Cavalry, sent to my mom from other areas in the Pacific; and the first Golden Book of Walt Disney’s cartoon chipmunks Chip and Dale. On the inside cover, my name is written in blue ink in my mother’s beautiful looping cursive script. She signed the Golden Book for me about the time I was pointing at our family’s first TV set.

Still not convinced that handwriting is a big deal? Imagine a world in which a future Mack Brown or Darrell K. Royal cannot sign a football.

Palaima is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin; Palaima@sbcglobal.net.