And so I saw Avatar.

( spoilery stuff )

I highly recommend this C-SPAN program that is a tour of Arlington National Cemetery. I've been several times--for a general's funeral detail, and conferences at the adjacent women's memorial--and still learned a lot. Particularly interesting stuff about the Civil War, the freedman's village adjoining the cemetery, and the history of DC in general.

Watch here

-Driving around today I spotted a Henri Dunant Way next to streets named after other random (except Clara Barton I guess) famous people...whoah Law of War class flashbacks. (Should have taken a picture for the Law of War teacher.) The ICRC has all kinds of cartoons involving Dunant. Who knew, El Paso? Officially impressed.

-Was bored and mixing palomas in my room after shopping with the old roommate from plebe year and calling family. Until I turned on C-SPAN (that desperate), which was airing a British House of Commons session that took place on Wednesday. Holy crap, it's like a play. I don't even know who these people are and I was fascinated. Also cool that the House leader was a woman who was doing very well with all the yelling people.

-A few days ago I was standing in line at a Ross behind a middle-aged hispanic man and his six or seven year old son. He was buying lots of frilly, colorful underwear for his wife, a Wizards of Waverly Place boardgame (Selena Gomez is a Tejana superstar now) for his daughter, and kept leaning over to kiss his son's cheek and forehead every twenty seconds. Sometimes I really love the people in this town...

-The new Noisettes album is addictive. Still shocked the PX had it.

-The trailer I saw for 9 or whatever the hell it's called announced prominently I think every actor in it excecpt Judi Dench. Dame Judi is the only reason I would think of seeing that. *harrumph*

-Was watching the end of the Wizard of Oz this afternoon. What fool said that the flying monkey suits resemble West Point uniforms? (Middies "woop" at us in dress gray.) Not at all...though the buttons on the guard suits are kind of like full dress coats, but obviously those don't go onto the back. Also, according to google, there will be a Wicked movie in a few years. Can it please be even more subtexty than the musical, which was even more subtexty than the book???

-Julia got into CUA!! (No word on the $$ yet.) I will seriously lend her a few k a year if it means her going somewhere that people think about the world and critically examine the church (women's ordination supporters both male and female have come from there) and not going to that batshit crazy school down in Florida Mom is pushing for--the law school of which is trying to claim ministerial immunity in a contracts dispute with professors. That's just the attitude to impart when training people for bar exams and a career in the American legal system...

-Was in the ER until late last night with a very sick classmate who may have had food poisoning. She went to school in downtown Baltimore, and is also a liberal ex-Catholic so we always have fun talking about the city and crazy parents.

-Home on the 23rd, and then up north to see some favorite people before leaving for Japan on 12 February!!

So today in class we watched a video of Iraqi scuds being shot down by a patriot battery during the initial invasion in 2003. Well, rather the launcher crews huddling in their bunker and then celebrating as the missiles on their trucks are fired (all engagements are remote from the van). This was a big deal and saved a lot of lives. I don't know what attack this video specifically references, but the battalion that saved the 101st got cases and cases of beer from them...


See it here

Launcher dawgs are not exactly known for their smarts, as you can probably guess. But still, I want soldiers JUST LIKE THIS.

Life is continuing to click along slowly here at the fort. I've had some good times getting Mexican food and going to movies and generally hanging out with classmates. I went to the farmer's market downtown on Saturday morning and got a huge, beautiful bunch of fresh basil, some greens, amazing pale-orange cherry tomatoes, and a watermelon, and bought some baked goods and a necklace for Grandmother.

The area outside of the fort is thoroughly depressing. The main road is Victory Drive, and it's littered with seedy surplus stores (and a few good ones), pawn shops, strip joints, bad car title credit dealers, run-down recruiting centers, liquor stores, etc. Many buildings are unoccupied, homes on side streets have unmowed lawns and structural problems. Downtown Columbus, which is a few miles north on Victory Drive, isn't much better, except for the business district and the yuppfied part near the university (where the farmer's market is). But the area immediately outside the gate is just really bad.

People in leadership positions in my company (the actual adults, not the students) like to tell the guys not to get into fights with the locals, saying they're just waiting to take some stupid soldier's money.  There's the perception across post that the city only exists because of the fort and should be more grateful, but instead feeds off of it and dupes soldiers.

This is a problem that exists outside almost every major U.S. military base, one that has been exacerbated by BRAC--the Base Realignment and Closure Act. In the late-80s some neo-cons in Congress decided to save money by closing military bases in urban or suburban areas, and in the northeast, mid-atlantic, and central regions. Fort Devens closed in Massachusetts, Fort Ritchie closed in Maryland, Fort Bejamin Harrison closed in Indianapolis, Fort Ord closed in California. (Those are the ones I can think of off of the top of my head--hundreds of armories and smaller forts closed.) Most military bases are now "superbases" that hold many brigades and are located in rural, generally southern areas, where training land is plentiful and cheap. The consequences to this are an increasing civil-military gap in many parts of the country, stiffer competition for spouses seeking jobs on-post, a diminished sense of community, and difficulty finding decent work off-post. There have also been studies that have shown the geographic (and political, racial, class, etc.) diversity of the Army has decreased as people are more likely to join when they live near a major fort. These installations are generally at least an hour from a major city, and the local areas are often depressed, although figuring whether that was before or after the fort swelled up is kind of chicken-egg.

BRAC definitely saved money, but the sociological implications are pretty profound.

So I was driving along Victory Drive today, wondering just what the victory was for and thinking how all the "leaders" on post completely miss the point in blaming the locals for the decay outside the fort, and in not taking on any responsibility for what happens outside the gate. We all know that many Joes will drink half of their paycheck, use the other half to buy unneeded tactical gear, frequent strip clubs and/or bars and get into drunken fights with locals, and then take out a title loan to get rims, an improved stereo, and a light set for their tricked-out 1997 Honda Accord. Many Joes will do this if left unattended. Joe is 18-21 years old, probably comes from a working class background, and is shocked that EVERY MONTH he's getting direct deposited into his checking account what feels like a LARGE SUM of money--which in reality will only barely keep him above the poverty line if he has any dependents (which is fairly likely, given how people marry during war). Low level leaders can point Joe to debt counseling services on post, help him find stable friends, help his wife find a job, and generally make things a little better, if they can be inclined to care. And maybe the demand for some of the crap immediately outside the gate can go down. Given the macho attitude of many of the infantry people on Benning (this is where all "Foot Soldiers" have their basic and mid-level training), even admitting that this lifestyle is problematic takes some doing. What is truly problematic is that married junior enlisted soldiers can't live in the barracks, don't have enough seniority to get housing on post, don't have enough money to live in a good area well north of post--and thus often wind up in a broken down house immediately outside the gate where they have the additional burden of paying utilities.

But the problem is that changing the environment really requires a) admitting there's a problem b) admitting the military's complicity in it c) committing time and resources. Of all the money being pumped into Benning right now, from the improved highway leading into the fort complete with some soldier monument, to increasing the number of units on-post and building more barracks, to Saxby Chambliss's speeches about all the money he's bringing to the area during his recent visit--I haven't seen anything aimed at revitalizing or renovating the area outside the fort and making it a place people want to go. And that's a shame, because if the commanding general decided to cooperate with the local government, listen to some creative ideas, and lobby for some attention to the civilian population, the area would be better all around, incomes would rise, and tensions would be less. Fort Bragg is apparently doing some great things with Fayetteville right now, and everyone is happier.

And maybe I'm just overreacting here and thinking about gentrifying an area that is actually fine for what it is. And maybe this is inevitable (it's certainly like this in Korea, even worse, really). I just want to be the kind of leader who doesn't pawn off my responsibility for what happens to the community that's tied to me.  

Date:	2009-08-13 20:49
Subject:
Security:	Public
Mood:	cranky
Music:	Amy Ray - Out On The Farm

This has been one of the worst weeks I've had in a very long time. The cadre members here don't care about our time at all and are extremely disorganized.
 

At the beach. I find it telling that I have better internet access here, on reasonably remote Hatteras Island, than I do at home--because the cable company is so bad and Mom was cheap and didn't want it anyway we gave up on trying to get access and just steal our neighbor's wireless, which is always going in and out.  (The computer is stacked on a barstool on the sunporch.) The sisters and I had a great time in the surf today until it started raining, at which point Julia demanded outlet shopping after a few minutes listening to Mom and Grandmother do their usual rambling inside the house. And so I bought more clothes I don't really need. Yay Eddie Bauer and their perpetual (and unadvertised) 10% military discount.

This is hilarious.

I need to be at Benning by the morning of 22 July. Hopefully this week will be good.

So I am home and graduated, which is nice. There will be pictures and such later.

The annoying part is that I am back with nutcases for right now. The family is all in a hubub about Obama's Supreme Court pick. Mom is buying everything talk radio is putting out about this and thinks Sotomayor is a "diaster." She gets the Wall Street Journal, and I shit you not, in some "reactions" box this morning, there was a quote from John Yoo saying that with Sotomayor's pick,"empathy has won out over excellence." Really. This from the guy who tried to rewrite the most important and ratified treaties ever into not applying to what was clearly an international armed conflict and who sought to define torture as only anything that caused organ failure, against years of customary law and our own prosecutions of foreign war criminals, and who may be disbarred for sucking so much. My. God. Who asked him? I made the mistake of venturing over to Drudge to see what the nutcases were saying, and there was some headline there that she's been reversed by the Supreme Court 60% of the time. Well, yes, the three or four times out of hundreds that the Supreme Court decides to take a case, that generally means that they're thinking about reversing it. Also, my Environmental Law teacher is involved in that Riverkeeper case being talked about now, and I don't see how the Supreme Court could have ruled like it did (reversing Sotomayor), as the "best available technology" statute clearly aims to force innovation.

It's refreshing to see someone who is proud of being a minority, admits that such a status is important and matters, and doesn't try and say "me getting this job doesn't matter because I am just like everyone else." (You see different approaches to "firsts" by women in the military, many of them like that.) And it's not like I have a fondness for brassy, wisecracking women lawyers of Hispanic descent who grew up in difficult situations in New York City and are Bad Catholics and feminists. (Oh wait, that would be COL R exactly...)

And now some cleaning...

My friend Anthony and I edited the literary magazine together for the past three years. He is pretty into cadet life. Most of you probably won't get half of what's in the video below, but it's hilarious. He's the first guy introduced.

I really, really tried (multiple times) to actually read this book for a review for Armed Forces & Society, due tomorrow. See if the first chapter, available here, puts you to sleep, too.

*Cue frantic strategic skimming*

Another instance of PR!Fail here. This lady is quite nice and is in Michelle's book club. As for her husband, he works on the Supe's planning staff and has absolutely no contact with cadets. I don't even know his last name, but it isn't hers. Colonel Flowers is shooting himself in the foot, unsurprisingly. He always enjoyed cutting edgy things from the lit magazine.

So my computer is down, and making thesis writing really hard. Sitting here in the library, I checked on the website. They have a list of all of my repairs. Damn, I think I'm counting three hard drives!!

Tue Apr 18, 2006	Wed Apr 19, 2006	Repaired	Screen will not display properly--images are blurred, screen is white, flickers, goes other colors. Also, cd drive has recently stopped reading discs, and the left speaker is cracked from where I accidentially dropped it--sound is crackly.
Wed Oct 18, 2006	Wed Oct 18, 2006	Repaired	Screen is broken, too dark to read anything. Also, missing G key.
Mon Mar 05, 2007	Tue Mar 06, 2007	Repaired	Spilled water on keyboard. Computer will not recognize hard drive.
Mon Sep 24, 2007	Mon Sep 24, 2007	Repaired	Disk drive reads cds but not dvds. Replacing with a friends drive works for reading dvds. Also have loose keys on the keyboard.
Thu Jan 31, 2008	Thu Jan 31, 2008	Repaired	I was notified via email that I have a worm and must bring my computer in to be reimaged.
Thu Aug 28, 2008	Thu Aug 28, 2008	Repaired	Told to get my computer reimaged.
Tue Jan 06, 2009	Wed Jan 21, 2009	Repaired	Printer doesnt draw paper--paper always goes sideways, also ink catridge holder may get stuck underneath the casing and not move on the rail properly.
Mon Apr 20, 2009	N/A	Not Started	Both mouse and touchpad get out of my control and disappear to the right top corner of the screen or right by the start button frequently. I lose all control of the computer. This happens frequently, sometimes for several hours. Restarting sometimes helps, as does plugging the mouse back in and quickly opening what I need before I lose control again. But the problem always comes back and it is hard to get work done.

My department is currently putting on the most bad-ass conference ever. (And as a consequence I have a very nice Coast Guard person camped out in my room, who has been doing homework for two hours straight. That is a strange amount of dedication for a senior anywhere!) The attorney general and Mary Robinson today, Dan Rather and Queen Noor tomorrow with a focus on law and gender and children and war. I didn't get to go today because I can only miss so much class (especially after the trip to France, with said awesome department), but tomorrow I am free to go.

Shit like this pisses me off.

If anybody has earned the "right" to be photographed on post and not treated like garbage by handlers, it's an '80 grad woman and a spec ops commander.

I hope PAO gets reamed out by higher.

This is my last-ditch procrastination attempt before settling in to fix/produce 25 pages of my thesis tonight. The good news is that I already have 18 pages written, they just kind of suck.

Two days of spring leave were spent trolling around the Library of Congress (Law Library, Main Reading Room) getting information about my god-forsaken topic. They do not make that place easy to navigate, which is, I'm certain, not accidental. A few more were spent trying to write this crap.

I was forced to go to church both Sundays I was home, and the six days I was at home produced some classic Mom Is A Wingnut moments about how I need to read the Wall Street Journal, if McCain made a gaffe about the disabled we'd never hear the end of it, why am I reading feminist legal theory, why I should never drink hard liquor, "Bill Moyers is a commie", unmarried people living together is "tragic", etc.

Thursday afternoon I leave for Evian-les-Bains and this weeklong International Humanitarian Law (that's the more correct, modern term for Law of War or Law of Armed Conflict) competition a team of three of us are taking part in. Competing against LAW STUDENTS from EUROPE. We're going to get our shit rocked. Pretty much every other team (except the Air Force Academy) is civilian, so for everyone else there we represent the evil fascist contingents of two really effed up wars. That's going to be a ton of fun...

I'm supposed to be our group's refugee law expert. Naturally, there are like two treaties on this, the rest is customary and extremely hard to categorize, and I haven't learned any of it previously.

I have to make ahead three large tests before I leave...

Will. Be. Fine.

This place really shouldn't be able to surprise me anymore with its capacity for stupid ideas, but it still does. Recently, two suicides and a bunch of attempts have made everyone even more edgy and miserable than they usually are in the winter.

There was this fabulous rumor going around that the Friday of President's Day weekend would be a mental health day and we would get a four day weekend. That was completely untrue...Instead we got these ACE cards with little playing card aces on them that spell out some kind of acronym about assisting your buddy...I don't know where mine is. Some people have taped them on their doors and others have taken to sardonically asking "where's your ACE card?"

And so the word from on high is that the "stand-down" on Monday will consist of having breakfast formation at 0545, an hour earlier than usual, compressing classes, and having company Respect officers--those highly-trained and sincere cadets everyone adores, who do so well mediating gender and race issues--give a bunch of separate briefings (probably in powerpoint format) to each class. This will take an hour per class. And this will probably be followed by further, larger briefings given by key leaders later in the day.

And by compressing the schedule, reducing study time, adding things to do, and giving slide shows, we're improving mental health?  

For the first time in a very long time, I've actually finished a book for a class. For military sociology we read Invisible Women, which is actually a RAND report (in short book format) about junior enlisted spouses researched in the late 90s and published in 2000. Although a lot of the bureaucratic issues have been addressed in the past decade, and the lower enlisted base pay has increased a lot, and these are fairly extreme stories, a lot of it rings true from things I've heard. (Plus, this was before deployments got crazy and constant.)

You can read it free in PDF format here, on RAND's website.

And so I'll be living here for two years starting in February of next year, where according to Yahoo Widgets it's currently 63 degrees--in the early morning.

What really sold me on Japan was a) Living on a U.S. airbase where the life is good b) Hearing about the amazing weather, beaches, and scuba diving c) Learning that ADA peeps think Japan's operational mission is just as important as a deployment to the Middle East.

I made this mix a few months ago for long car rides and never got around to posting it. It's designed to have some ultimate pop songs and some other songs that are a little more reflective. And given that I could really use some cheering up right now, it's good that I finally unearthed the cd as my external is being a pain.

download a zip here: http://www.sendspace.com/file/2cwd8m

1. I Won't Disagree-Kate Voegele 
2. Summer of '69-Bryan Adams 
3. Desperately Wanting-Better Than Ezra 
4. In The Night-Basia Bulat 
5. Heartbeat -Annie 
6. The Sign-Ace Of Base 
7. I Kissed A Girl-Katy Perry 
8. Cant Get You Out Of My Head (Greg Kurstin Remix)-Kylie Minogue
9. Tu Es Comme Ça-Marilou et Garou
10. Open Wider-Bird York 
11. One Monkey Don't Stop No Show -The Honey Cone 
12. Black Horse and the Cherry Tree-KT Tunstall 
13. 100 Round The Bends-Missy Higgins 
14. Maneater-Nelly Furtado 
15. Because It's Not Love (But It's Still A Feeling)-The Pipettes
16. Cars And Guitars-Tori Amos
17. Every Story is a Love Story, Fortune Favors the Brave-Aida
18. The Cheap and Evil Girl-Bree Sharp 
19. Better Days-Bruce Springsteen 
20. He Thinks He'll Keep Her-Mary Chapin Carpenter 

This article is one of the first I've seen in a mainstream publication that actively talks about how military women negotiate uniforms and femininity. It also has amazing pictures of different soldiers and others at the ball--the one of the lieutenant colonel in the wheelchair is particularly moving. Definitely good stuff. Also more here.