Geoff_Kennedy's blog

On the old M.A.S.H. television sitcom, Radar O’Reilly exemplified a military mind-set when he referred to an exorcism performed by a local Korean as removing “unauthorized” spirits. We laugh at Radar’s absurd assuming spiritual matters follow a military chain of command.

I’m glad I waited almost 30 years to see the movie, “Red Dawn.”

For years, I’ve been curious about Hollywood’s treatment of vintage 1980s Cold War paranoia. In the movie, reds from Russia, Cuba and Nicaragua conduct a conventional blitzkrieg-like invasion of the United States. The Russkies attack across the Bering Straits, invade Alaska, we’re told, and cut off the pipeline from the rest of the US. Meanwhile, Cubans and Nicaraguans slip across the border as illegal aliens to infiltrate our country and enable invasion north from Mexico.

I’m repeating an anecdote from a recent commentary because it illustrates another idea.

My friend Hajj sparked a maelstrom of angry responses a while back simply by welcoming into the world his Muslim grandchild. Go figure.

I decided to have some fun with a matching quiz to start my 2012 essays.
Your mission, should you choose it, is to match the blamers with the blamees.
Time Magazine, rightly, I think, chose the protester as the person of the year for 2011. The biggest story of the year was the worldwide movement of individuals against the corruption and injustices perpetrated by their governments and the governments’ and their supporters’ attempts to discredit their critics. So let’s see how many readers can match the governments and their supporters with the people they try to discredit:

The Occupy movement in the US reminds me somewhat of the Occupy Iraq and Occupy Afghanistan movements.

While Occupy movement here in Anchorage and most of the rest of the country has been essentially non-violent, some in the movement engage in civil disobedience and occupy territory without consent of local authorities.

One of my favorite sit-coms was the 1960s “Get Smart” spoof of the then-trendy secret agent movies and television shows. Sometimes, the show spoofed the whole cold war.

In one memorable scene, the chief tells Maxwell Smart he has a weapon that will put the bad guys, CHAOS, out of business once and for all. Max then wonders what will happen to their jobs if there are no more bad guys to fight. He ponders the possibility for a few seconds and then proposes keeping CHAOS operating by lending them money.

When I hear politicians refer to raising taxes on billionaires as “class warfare,” I feel like wringing their necks. I have committed myself to a non-violent lifestyle, but being an imperfect human being, I know it’s better to avoid temptation by keeping as far from such politicians as I can.

But that doesn’t stop me from bringing to their attention some real class warfare like the slaughter of at least 767 villagers—at least nine of them reportedly pregnant women--of El Mozote and several surrounding hamlets 30 years ago today.

Today, I plead guilty of “looking backwards at history,” whatever that means.

I mean it’s hard to look forwards at history, since history is in the past and not in the future.

How should we characterize last week’s “Occupy Walmart” fracas? After various reports of violence breaking out during Black Friday in shopping malls around the country, including the one where one woman pepper-sprayed other shoppers in a Walmart, do we accuse all shoppers of being violent jobless lawbreakers or do we limit the accusationonly to Black Friday shoppers? Last Friday 15 minutes before closing time, I entered Fred Meyer’s to buy some cabbage, carrots and celery. Does that qualify me as a violent lawbreaker? Should the Freddie employees have told me to get a job?

The Municipal Assembly Tuesday night demonstrated my point.

The labels “liberal” and “leftist” may have made some sense in the 1960s and 1970s, but not in 2011.

On the first Saturday in March and the Fourth of July Iditarod fans and demonstrators occupy downtown Anchorage. The folks occupying Anchorage impede auto traffic downtown and the Iditarod start blocks the sidewalks and leaves streets strewn with disgusting fecal matter. Oddly enough, the city police do not arrest those who create such nuisances. In fact, the police help create the nuisances.

One of my long-standing gripes has been investing our permanent fund in tobacco companies, corporate polluters and apartheid. But I recognize and respect consistency. The PFD board has for decades maintained the policy of basing investments solely on fiscal matters, regardless of their social and political implications.

While at lunch in Bethel some 18 years ago, John, an evangelical Christian, told me Oliver North had done nothing wrong when he lied during investigation of the Iran-Contra scandal. North, John explained, was obeying a higher power. Since the higher power uses the Eighth Commandment to forbid bearing false witness, I asked John, which power he considered higher than God. John backed off.

The incident reminds me of a certain mind-set in our country. People show great respect for laws when individuals break them but considerable flexibility when government officials break them.

One of my coffee-drinking companions likes the principle enunciated, he says, by the Australian prime minister: If you want to live in Australia, you should speak English there.

Turns out my companion not only spends winters in Arizona, where lots of people speak Spanish as their primary language, but also in Mexico. So, silly me, I asked if Americans in Mexico there should speak Spanish.

Not a problem, he said, lots of people speak English.

In one of my favorite cartoons, a little boy and a little girl stand in front of a treehouse with a sign reading “ No girlz aloud.” The little girl extends her hands in a gesture of frustration while the little boy holds his hands on his hips in a gesture of defiance and says something like “Haven’t you ever heard of the double standard?”

There’s a lot of truth in that cartoon. Our society is full of double standards so ingrained in our customs that we take them for granted instead of challenging their validity.

Over the years, I have encountered accusations that Palestinian fighters have been using “human shields” against those invading and occupying Palestinian land. The expression "human shields" has turned up on these cyberpages as well.

Apparently, some people didn’t get the message that the Cold War ended more than 20 years ago. Last week, I saw a comment by Bill O’Reilly who called a protester at an Occupy Wall Street rally a “communist sympathizer.”

When folks resort to mindless name-calling and absurd accusations, you know they’re on the run. You can smell ad hominem arguments a mile away, particularly when they’ve been rotting since the Cold War ended.

Let’s have a show of hands: How many see the arrest of the “Christian” survivalist who called himself Papa Pilgrim for, among other things, raping his daughters, as an attack on Christian family values?

May I guess not too many hands are in the air as you read this?

Then maybe you can understand my skepticism at comments from politicians like Herman Cain and pundits like Paul Jenkins that folks like me are blaming my problems on people who make money on Wall Street, want to destroy all Wall Street banks and want to “punish” people for being successful.

Last week I heard considerable complaint about the “Farmageddon” movie that played Thursday night. Were the filmmakers champions of small farmers devoted to environmentally sustainable practices or simply shills for extreme libertarians?

The film profiled the travails of small farmers dedicated to providing organic foods, including raw milk, and their conflicts with government bureaucrats.