Skute had apparently caught some news somewhere, perhaps on somebody’s television since I found it difficult to picture him actually reading a paper or using a computer. Enon and I were discussing the situation in the Middle East, in particular the smufudgen they call a war in Iraq. Skute interrupted.

“What are these clusters that everybody is talking about, and why did the Israelis drop all those bombs on them?” he asked.

I had to think about it for a minute. Ahh, cluster bombs! I sidled over to him, rested my left arm across his shoulder, then sucker-punched him with a right to the belly. He sat down to catch his breath, and hopefully think for a minute about what he said. Enon was obliged to explain to him that cluster bombs were clusters of little bombs that spread out over a large area, designed primarily to kill indiscriminately large numbers of people. In older days, I imagine before the cluster bomb was ever introduced, (correct me if I’m wrong, please), these devices could have been very effective against a standing army. But the days of standing armies are long gone, and so too are the strategically viable reasons to use cluster bombs. The bombs just kill people, and in the Middle East, these people are 90% civilian, and about half of them are children.

Something about the cluster bombs is that they are notoriously unreliable, that a significant number of the little “bomb-lets” do not detonate when they are supposed to, so they lay around in the dirt like land mines waiting for kids and farmers to stumble across them months or even years after the fact.

International law, the Israelis claim, allows them to use these things. It is my understanding that my own U.S. military used these devices in both Afghanistan and Iraq. To fuck with international law, where the hell is your conscience? Might as well break out the gas canisters because they serve to the same exact end. Where, morally is the difference?

Once Skute caught his breath again, he asked another question: “How come the Israelis ended up looking so bad to everybody? I thought they were supposed to be the good guys,” he added.

“What about us?” Enon replied. “We use cluster bombs all the time. And we are supposed to be the good guys, too.”

“No wonder everybody over there hates us,” commented Skute.

“That’s one of the reasons,” Enon told him. “But only one of many.”

Skute looked quizzically at Enon, hoping to dig out a deeper explanation. When that didn’t happen, he shrugged his shoulders, then dug into his shirt pocket and pulled out a joint. After he had examined it for tears in the paper, he passed the number to Enon who lit it and inhaled deeply. It went around the circle several times, and the discussion turned to Kite, who was absent, and who all three of us have some kind of crush on.

"She's back on the methadone," Enon said.

"That's good," I replied honestly, but knowing in my heart that it would probably only last a few days.

The anniversary of the hurricane Katrina that destroyed New Orleans happened this week. There has been much hullabaloo about the recovery efforts, the heart-warming human interest stories surrounding the victims, all that crap. Truth be told, I know what it is like to be a hurricane survivor, and I also know what it is like to live through the aftermath of being forcibly removed from your demolished home, leaving everything you own behind. I know what the authorities do for you, that unless there is a shotgun to their heads, they will do as little as they can get by with.

FEMA was ill-prepared when hurricane Jean wrecked my home in Cape Canaveral the previous year. Sadly, in spite of knowing that every year without fail they will have to respond to at least one big storm related disaster, they were just as inept and incompetent when Katrina struck New Orleans. The only thing that FEMA responded to was public pressure, and when that finally happened, everybody started to realize that FEMA really didn’t know how to respond. Nobody ever told them that they would have to do more than write checks for $700 per homeless person. They still have trailer homes that were probably bought through some brother-in-law deal that have not been distributed to the people who need them.

The lesson I learned from hurricane Jean was to move the fuck away from anyplace that might ever stand even a remote chance of becoming a disaster site. And while my living situation has not improved since I lost my home in Cape Canaveral, at least I am reasonably assured that my camp site in Tucson will not be swallowed up by a 7.6 magnitude earthquake or washed away by violent tides and hundred-mile-per-hour winds.

Latest statistics in this great country of mine is that 13.3% of the population lives at or below the poverty level, a line drawn somewhat arbitrarily and artificially optimistically at somewhere around $7000 per year. This means that one-in-eight people here don’t even have enough money to rent a roach motel room, let alone afford a car payment and the mandatory insurance. And you know what? Nobody cares. That is until the spotlight focuses on a large number of these poor people stranded in places like New Orleans after Katrina wrecked what little they had of lives. And you know what else? Nobody would even care about that except for the other seven-of-eight people who had money yet still lost homes and businesses there, as it seems in all fairness that Katrina didn’t give a shit about whose homes she demolished.

So the Israelis never seem to disappoint. Not only have they violated their cease fire agreement in Lebanon, but they are back to arresting more of the Palestinian MP’s. They really don’t know when to leave well enough alone. I’m getting to where I really don’t like them much more than I like the Arabs. They can have each other.

I was anxious the other morning to see if the cease fire had been broken yet, but all I found on the cable news was 24-7 coverage of this moron in Bangkok who claims to have murdered that little Colorado girl some 10 years ago. Of course it didn’t take long for most of the news channels to get the idea that this guy was full of shit, but we get no apology from the cable channels for being so stupid. There was literally no news that day about anything but this pedophile nimrod and the Colorado girl.

What was unsaid in all this was that he had been arrested because of an investigation there in Bangkok, unknown what about but probably something related to the child sex tourism industry. (Look at all the places he’s visited over the past few years, and it is almost clear exactly what he’s been up to). The news channels played it up like he had been arrested at the request of the Boulder D.A., but in fact the law in Boulder had to grope for a legitimate reason to issue an arrest warrant. Apparently the Bangkok police were more than happy to hand him off, probably because of holes in their own investigation, that it was some kind of blessing in disguise when he started spouting off about this ten-year-old murder case. Who cares if he did it or not, just get rid of the psycho. Send him back to the country he was born in, and let the Americans deal with it.

I have to wonder where people get their money sometimes. It is not cheap to travel from country to country the way this fellow did, yet he was only ever marginally employed for very short periods of time. Is he independently wealthy or something? I’m unemployed, and I can’t afford to pay attention, let alone buy plane tickets and hotel rooms. Must be something I missed somewhere along the line. Maybe there is some place I can go to take lessons in becoming a well-off tramp. Nobody I know has a clue though, as is evidenced by all the panhandling and snipe hunting they do.

So the tentative truce between Hezbollah and the Israelis marches on, much to my own surprise. Rightly so, Hezbollah has begun cash compensation for Lebanese who had their homes destroyed. They ought to foot the bill for all the damaged infrastructure like bridges, roads, power plants, etc,..

The Israelis should help out too, but a cold day in hell before anything like that will ever happen. The Israelis ought to learn how to respond to terror with a little less force and a little more tact. Us Americans ought to learn the same. The old days of standing armies are gone, and the sooner people begin to realize that, the better for everybody in the world.

So let’s go somewhere else. We haven’t visited Iraq, primarily because it happens to be a sore spot for me. We are losing about 500 soldiers per year there, which seems like a lot until you compare it to 500 or so per week that the Iraqi civilians are suffering. The place is completely insane. The violence seems to be primarily focused between the Sunni and Shiite sects, with the Bin Laden group practicing the only thing they know, death and chaos and instability and yes, the T-word, terror to the extreme.

It’s hard to imagine such widespread lawlessness in a place that is supposed to be civilized. Kidnappings that serve no political purpose whatsoever. Anybody suspected of having any money is subject to being snatched and ransomed for cash. The bombings tend to be more political, striving to send the country into a full-fledged lines-drawn civil war. And all the murders, some for revenge, others for political reasons. Essentially nobody is safe there. For whatever reason, everybody is a potential target, and everybody is a potential victim.

I think the Bin Laden clan ought to re-think their plans there. They seem to be somewhat short-sighted, their goals appearing to be simply to create mass chaos in order to make the foreign invaders look impotent and incompetent. They should realize that starting a civil war with the Shiites is in essence starting a war with Iran. They will not win if they wind up in a war with the Iranians. The Iranians know how to fight fire with fire, and they are a lot better funded, better trained, and better equipped. If the Iranians chose to go after Bin Laden for whatever reason, I have little doubt that they would make quick business of it.

I listened to the 60 Minutes interview with the Iranian president last week. If you listen to the Bushites in Washington, you get a picture of a raving lunatic with nuclear aspirations, much like Kim in Korea. But I didn’t get that impression of the man at all. Extreme, perhaps, but certainly not crazy, and as far as I was able to discern, he was not necessarily interested in destabilizing any of his neighbors, in fact seemed more concerned about all the existing instability around, and the root causes of such, which happen to point mostly all the way back to Washington.

So we don’t ask ourselves why so many millions of people in the Middle East hate us so, instead blaming it all on bad publicity and religious extremism. But the Israelis made an excellent example of why when they trashed Lebanon over the kidnapping of two soldiers, which I might add, haven’t been returned home yet unless I missed the news about it somewhere. This heavy-handed approach is effective when it comes to toppling regimes, but serves no long or short term benefit in a limited exchange as was the case in Lebanon. The only thing that it served was to foster more hatred toward the Israelis and indirectly, us Americans.

Ask the Bushites and you get the answer that we are fighting against an ideology. But if it is our intention to force our ideas on the people over there, be it with bombs or diplomats, then the Arabs are fighting against the same thing. It is really nothing more than a clash of cultures. Our behavior over the past several decades has created what we are dealing with now. You can grant that terror is not right in any case, but when bombs fall indiscriminately from Israeli planes over Lebanon, you can hardly say that the Lebanese civilian population was not terrorized. So what’s the difference?

And the truce be told. Enon did not win our informal lottery. There was no prize anyhow, so it was just for fun. I myself actually thought the cease fire would not hold this long.

“But it’s only been a day,” said Kite. “You gotta give ‘em more credit than that.”

“Yeah, right,” spouted Enon. “These people want to fight. This cease fire is akin to a child’s ‘time out’.”

I imagined two dirty little nasty boys, one watchful eye on the sitter, and one disdainful eye on each other, waiting behind their respective wooden scissor gates for the opportunity to resume hostilities. I looked around and saw how nicely the other kids were playing together as long as these two offenders were kept locked up. I imagined how pleasant it would be to take those two little nasty boys and paddle their little asses, but everybody knows you can’t hit kids these days.

George Bush proclaimed that the Israelis won this war, while at the same time, the Arabs insist that Hezbollah were the winners. I don’t really see it either way. I know who lost though, and it was the Lebanese people. If anybody got spanked here, it was them. I don’t feel for the Lebanese government because they are ultimately responsible for what happens within their borders, and whether they were impotent, unable, or unwilling to deal with a militia like Hezbollah, the simple fact is that they did nothing for years, essentially allowing Hezbollah to grow and strengthen to the point they are at now, where even the Israelis can find them to be a formidable opponent.

That’s kind of the point I think in Hezbollah declaring victory. The simple truth is that a conventional army is ineffectual against the style of fighting that presented itself in Lebanon over the past month. In a public relations war, which is essentially what this became, the numbers of dead Lebanese civilians became more important than anything.

And the Israelis never seem to get it. They haven’t got it in Gaza either, and they’ve been killing Palestinian civilians for decades there. It doesn’t weaken their opposition, but only strengthens their opposition’s resolve. Using a helicopter gunship to fire a missile at a car, whether or not they succeed in the objective of killing a militant fighter is lost in the noise of all the nearby civilians who were also killed by the explosion. Likewise, in Lebanon, it doesn’t seem rational to drop a 500-pound bomb on an apartment building just because one of the tenants might be the enemy. All you succeed in doing is making more enemies.

Like it or not, the Israelis are in for a long haul if they don't start spending to effort on getting people to like them.

The quasi-truce between the Israelis and militants in Lebanon takes effect this morning, and so far things seem to going reasonably well. We had a kind of unofficial lottery going at camp over how long the semi-peaceful situation will last. Enon, by far the most well read of all, is also the most skeptical, giving the end to quiet at no later than tomorrow morning.

“Somebody’s going to get antsy”, he said, but declining to speculate on which side will break the cease fire first.

The rest of us were about evenly divided between the Arabs and Jews. Kite suggested it would be ambiguous whenever it happened, with nobody being the clear violator. That to me was a safe opinion, but also a very good one as far as I was concerned. I myself imagined a scenario where the Arabs shoot first, but the Israelis “defend” themselves by killing a bunch more civilians, thereby prompting a resumption of rocket attacks into northern Israel, to which the Israelis will respond ten-fold. And on and on.

As usual, Skute had no valid opinion whatsoever. “We should just send a bunch of troops over there and kick *everybody’s* ass,” he said, as he dug around in his belongings, no doubt in search of something to get high on. I slapped him. He rubbed his cheek, looked at me briefly, and then resumed his search. Enon scolded me with his eyes. Kite giggled. Skute never had anything to get high on, and his display of desperate longing was merely a ploy to prompt somebody else to offer him some of their drugs. He would do this long enough for everybody to notice, and then wander off for another day of pan-handling quarters downtown where, conveniently, all the drugs happen to be. Skute took one last look around hoping somebody had something to offer, then headed off.

“What’s on the menu today?” I asked him as he was leaving. He scratched his head, further mussing his already unkempt hairdo. I could tell he was thinking that I expected him to bring us all lunch or something, and he was going over excuses in his mind about why he couldn’t do that. Actually he *could*, if he wanted, but was planning on engaging himself in the pursuit of illegal narcotics for most of the day, and would not have time to deliver lunch.

"Never mind," I told him, rolling my eyes.

I was only really curious about what kind of drugs he was looking for. Unlike most, Skute seemed to have no particular preference. Others tend to be a bit more specific, crack, crank, meth, synthetics, everybody seemed to have their favorites. But not skute. Anything will do, the stronger the better, the more the merrier.

“Pathetic,” I commented as he disappeared down the trail. Of course, I am no angel in that respect, having indulged in just about everything in the past. But the difference is that in my case, it is all in the past. Except pot. I like to smoke pot.

Kite is one of a handful of methadone junkies that I know. I try my best to keep her honest, but the truth of the matter is that methadone is really no better than heroin. You still stay just as addicted, the difference being that you are plugged into the system where I suppose the admins in the government think they have some kind of handle on your behavior. “Liquid handcuffs,” Kite calls it. Sad but true. She literally can’t go anywhere that takes her too far from her twice daily dose at the methadone clinic downtown. Otherwise she is back on the real stuff again, just that quick. And while there is some effort on the part of the clinic to treat the addiction by slowly reducing the dosages over time, I have personally never met a “former” junkie. I’m sure they exist somewhere. But not where I hang out. Nobody I know has any intention of quitting anything. Kite does the methadone because it’s free. Otherwise she would be panhandling and hooking for her drugs.

Enon is an anomaly in his own right. He prefers to drink, and on occasion will smoke a joint with me. Cheap whiskey is his poison. However he is somewhat settled about drinking, preferring to keep it in camp, rather than making a fool of himself in public places. Both Enon and I despise the public drunks. Especially the ones who make asses of themselves on the bus lines. They seem to be all over, expecting everybody to pardon them for being stupid and clumsy and appreciate them for the festive spirit they are in. Fat chance. They too are panhandlers, always bumming quarters for malt liquor.

They also spend an inordinate amount of time in jail, since it is not such an easy thing to play strait in public after you’ve downed two or three forties. Also, since the vast majority of them are homeless, they have no place to go where it is legal to drink. So they loiter in parks and at bus stops, stealing swigs from bottles cleverly disguised as brown paper bags. They have no clue what they look like, and probably wouldn’t care if they did.

The typical line the panhandlers use is for food. You are supposed to feel sorry for these guys because they haven’t eaten. Or bus fare. They have to be somewhere important. Both of those excuses seem real enough, except for the fact that both free food and bus passes are available, and everybody knows where to go to get that stuff. Of course, you have to be sober or you’ll just get the boot.

I myself would prefer it if all the panhandlers were just honest. “I’m trying to raise enough money to buy a forty of Old English 800.” I could almost appreciate that, though I still probably wouldn’t give them any money. Enon will ask me for money to buy whiskey, and I often give it to him because I know he will share it with me once he gets back to camp.

Our informal lottery went on to the condition we all expected Skute to be in when he returned later.

“Downers,” said Enon. “Really mellow, and then he’ll pass out.”

“Crystal,” said Kite. She stood up and imitated a series of spastic convulsions, wild-eyed and slapping herself in the head.

“Crack,” I speculated. "He’ll hang out for about five minutes the go back out looking for more."

I wondered about Skute, what kind of person he was before he got so screwed up on all those drugs, whether his apparent idiocy was a result of his years of drug abuse, or if he was always just a plain idiot. He certainly looked like an idiot, no matter what he did. Try as I might, I just couldn’t imagine him any other way. Did he *ever* have a regular job? A career? A family? No telling. And while I am somewhat curious, I am not curious enough to ask him. Likely I wouldn’t get a strait answer if I did ask.

I rolled a joint and handed it to Kite. She lit it, then we passed it around as we resumed our discussion on the Israelis and Arabs.

Anonymous Comments

Even blogs are not immune to spammers. Somebody keeps putting comments on these pages that point, by way of a rather lengthy line of indirection, to somebody who wants to sell something. If you read these blogs, do not follow any links provided by the comments. I don't even know if these links are safe, that is to say that somewhere in all the indirection it is entirely likely to pick up a virus, worm, trojan horse, whatever else these ass-holes do when they are not spanking their monkeys in their mother's bathrooms.