war

John McCain said the mistake in Vietnam was that the U.S. didn't go all out, invading and bombing north Vietnam. Historians say that could have lead to massive casualties and war with China's huge army.

A fellow Vietnam POW said McCain's an unstable hot head:

McCain has also said (joked?) he wants to bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran:

McCain's VP choice Sarah Palin, an old heartbeat from the Presidency, implied the U.S. should go to war with Russia over tiny South Ossetia:

All of this has lead many to fear a McCain/Palin armageddon. But so far Obama has shied away from calls for tough ads on the issue. Here's the famous one that worked for Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War:

A peace-keeping wall in Belfast. Image courtesy of Scott Bollens.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog-only article about an urban planner and his lecture on divided cities. That planner was Scott Bollens, who spoke at the UO for the Savage Lecture series called "Cities in War, Struggle, and Peace: The Architecture of Memory and Life — Rebuilding Cities after War and Disaster" (long, true! But accurate ... and by the way, podcasts of the first year of lectures, which concentrated on creating memorials, are available for download here.)

Bollens had one of the more interesting topics (though frankly, I was fascinated with the entire series — and really, you probably could tell that from the fact that I wrote 6 articles on the series even though, frustratingly, most of them only appeared online): Sarajevo, Belfast, Jerusalem, Nicosia — the cities totally divided by ethnic or religious strife, hatred and destruction. I finally had a minute to email Scott Bollens my questions a few weeks ago, and he kindly took time from his (obviously busy) schedule to send thoughtful answers and photographs as well.

Here's Bollens' description of himself (a short bio, if you will):

Scott A. Bollens has interviewed over 220 urban professionals and community advocates in Jerusalem, Belfast, Johannesburg, Nicosia (Cyprus), Sarajevo and Mostar (Bosnia), and Barcelona and Basque cities (Spain) about the role of urban policy and city building amidst nationalistic ethnic conflict and political transitions. Recent books include Cities, Nationalism, and Democratization (2007, Routledge), On Narrow Ground (2000, State University of New York Press) and Urban Peace-Building in Divided Societies (1999, Westview Press). Prof. Bollens has written more than 35 journal articles and book chapters in leading venues over the past 20 years and has presented his international research on politically divided and contested cities at numerous public forums in the U.S. and throughout the world.

Want to read the rest? Trust me: Bollens has a strong sense of humor and outrage, a finely honed moral sense but an ability to look at his own actions that fully emerges even when he's talking about ethnic strife and planning for post-strife city rebuilding. Some of his answers come from his previous writings (that he put in the email to answer the questions), but they're still thought-provoking.

Go here to read the full interview.

Calendar editor-Chuck gets notices of all the happening in town (and apparently insults that rhyme with his name), Molly gets books and music, the Teditor gets EVERYTHING and me, well my inbox fills up with . . . well, a lot of stuff that’s not really related to environmental reporting. Like yesterday, when I got a promo from a company called “Darf.” Darf is selling “Funagle: a board game people play with their dogs.”

The goal of the game, I kid you not, is to get points for getting your dog to “do an activity.” Like the Moonwalk. That’s their example. Right. My dog can give me five, play dead and do basic math problems, but I can guarantee you, she can’t Moonwalk. And she especially can’t do the Moonwalk when trapped in a room with four other idiot dog owners forcing their dogs to play board games.

But the point is less that this game is silly, and more that I get silly things in my inbox.

Before I proceed with my kvetching, don’t let this discourage you, by the way, from sending me story ideas. I love story ideas. I met a guy last week at a party in Seattle, who mentioned his recent grand jury subpoena. When I was clearly intrigued, he asked “if that interesting for a news story?”

Yup. Grand juries often make a good news story.

Lately my email account seems to have been added to a list that promotes Christian books. Now, I find the Bible fascinating. But I draw the line at Christian pop-fiction. Maybe I’m a snob, but poorly written pop-culture books with Christian themes don’t do it for me. And more importantly, pop-culture Christian books do not make environmental news. Not unless you’re printing on some kind of ultra-cool recycled paper or creating toxic residues with your printing. . .

At any rate, I’m not really sure why someone out there thinks the enviro reporter for the Eugene Weekly wants to report on: When The Wedding Ring Comes Off by Percy D. Gorham, which lifts, “the reader's faith as he points each mind to the sublime Holy Spirit in such a way people may not have known was possible.”

Huh. You’d think a book about infidelity would be less about the holy and more about the bodily. . .

Well, anyway, I’m all for people finding the sublime. But the scariest press release I got this week was this one: Iraq in My Eye: Memoirs of a Navy SEAL in which Chuck Bravedy of Canton, Ohio proposes a new way to deal with prisoners in Iraq: “I see substantial ground being made if we pull all Korans out of the cells and replace them with Bibles,” he writes.

Bravedy was apparently disturbed by the way troops provided prisoners with the Koran (his spelling, I tend to go with Qur’an) when they could be “indoctrinating” (his word choice) them by providing Bibles. Silly troops giving those darn Muslims freedom of religion. What are they thinking?

To quote directly from his press release: “Bravedy's dream is to assemble a team and return to Iraq for a year to minister in military
prisons teaching the men there that there is more to life than killing Americans and eradicating western influence.”

What was that old bumper sticker about the Army?

That’s right: Join the Army: Travel to distant lands; meet exciting, unusual people and kill them.

Military bludgeoning with the Bible. Well, maybe there's a story in there after all.

Last night, I watched (for the first time since high school) Sir Laurence Olivier's Henry V.

It's a 1944 movie that actually made me tear up about WWII and the Battle of Britain a couple of times, all the while thinking about the much more anti-war overlay of Kenneth Branagh's Henry V of 1989.

One thinks about war, leadership and the differences between those who have courage and those who do not when watching Henry V. In the scene in Act IV in which King Henry walks through the camp, disguised in Sir Thomas Erpingham's cloak, I was much struck by the words of one of the soldiers, who's telling the king (without knowing it's the king) his views on the responsibilities of the king towards his men who die in battle.

WILLIAMS
But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath
a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and
arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join
together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at
such a place;' some swearing, some crying for a
surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind
them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their
children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die
well that die in a battle.

So. Is the cause good? Is it just?