My Current Column, June 22, 2014

My Current Column

ED PALM | How about putting health and safety first?

By Ed Palm

Friday, June 6, 2014

I have some insight into two of the controversies currently swirling around us — one local and the other national.

In early April 2009, my better half triggered the red-light camera that Kitsap Sun reporter Josh Farley recently revealed to have been the city’s biggest “revenue” raiser (“Red Light Cameras Raising Red Flags,” May 17). That’s the red light camera in the southbound right-turn lane at 16th Street and Warren Avenue in Bremerton.

That right-turn lane, at the time, was the main entrance to Olympic College, where I was the Dean of Social Sciences and Humanities. My wife was coming to collect me for an appointment in Seattle.

My wife, I must say, missed her calling. She should have been a lawyer. At her mitigation hearing, she made a cogent case for being a victim of entrapment.

At that time, the right-hand turn lane required a full stop on red. That’s fine, my wife explained, except that Warren is a four-lane, 35-mph street at that point; a motorist coming over the bridge must merge into that turn lane, competing with traffic exiting the campus at the end of the north parking lot; and a high hedge blocks the view at the edge of the intersection. Also, she arrived around noon, when the intersection is busiest with car and pedestrian traffic.

As my wife was starting to merge into the right-turn lane, the light was green. Since she had been looking to her right to merge, she wasn’t aware that the light had gone from yellow to red while she was turning and couldn’t see the light.

Also, my wife informed the judge that the Institute of Traffic Engineers recommends a yellow-light duration of at least 3.6 seconds for a simple 35-mph intersection. She went back and timed the duration at 3 seconds — a significant disparity given that the intersection in question is not simple. The judge reduced the fine by a third and recommended that my wife take up the matter with the city council.

She didn’t press the issue that far, but someone must have. As Farley reported, the full-stop requirement has since given way to the flexibility of a yield sign, and the city is considering further changes to the program. What continues to rankle me, however, is what Mayor Lent said about any changes having to be “lucrative.” Shouldn’t traffic safety, and not revenue, be the paramount concern in whether or not to keep our red-light cameras?

Regarding that other issue, I must admit that I’ve had my ups and downs with the VA.
Like many Vietnam veterans, I was too close to too many explosions and wound up with a high-frequency hearing loss and tinnitus. Over the years, I found it increasingly difficult to hear and interact with students in the classroom.

Finally, on August 17, 2008, I applied online for VA compensation. The VA responded eight months later, on March 24, 2009, requesting documentation and that I report for a hearing evaluation on April 9 with QTC Medical Services in Port Orchard.

Frankly, I wasn’t bothered by that eight-month lag. I realized that the VA had more pressing claims to resolve.

I kept the appointment with QTC. Less than a month later, on May 4, 2009, I was rated as being 10 percent disabled.

What bothers me about my experience is what I have since learned from a retired VA official who shall remain nameless. He confided that, in an effort to improve their response rates, the rating specialists routinely “grab the low-hanging fruit first.” My case was well documented and easy to resolve. Hence, my claim was probably placed before older claims.

All well and good for me, but my better self believes that the VA should adopt a triage system, processing the most serious claims, and treating the most serious cases, first.
On the flip side, I’ve been concerned for some time that I may be feeling the effects of Agent Orange exposure. The area I served in had certainly been defoliated in places, and for over ten years now I’ve suffered occasional attacks of transient peripheral neuropathy. Hence, back in February, I thought I would finally try to get on the VA’s Agent Orange Registry.

The VA’s website indicated that I should contact the “Environmental Health Coordinator” for our region. I emailed this person, who promptly responded with an encrypted message I couldn’t open. I emailed her back, asking for an unclassified answer. She then responded in the clear, telling me that the registry coordinator is at the American Lake VA Hospital. About a week later, when I finally got through to this person, he referred me back to the person listed in the website.

So it goes these days with the VA. I’ve given up on the Agent Orange Registry — for now at least.

  © 2014 Scripps Newspaper Group — Online

My Current Column

ED PALM | Slouching toward intolerance

By Ed Palm

Friday, May 23, 2014

The Supreme Court giveth and the Supreme Court taketh away. That’s how I view their two most recent rulings.

The April 22 decision upholding the right of states, Washington included, to bar the use of affirmative action in college admissions, as I see it, was a boon. Ensuring that the students and faculty of our colleges and universities reflect the diversity of our nation is a legitimate goal, and there was a time when giving preferential treatment to underrepresented minorities was warranted. The problem is that our colleges and universities have gone too far, making a veritable fetish of diversity.

What Western Washington University’s President Bruce Shepard recently said about his university being “too white” is a case in point. Shepard went on to characterize the lack of diversity on college campuses as a “national crisis.”

According to the U.S. Census website, in 2013, 11.7 percent of Washington residents were Hispanic, 7.7 Asian, 3.9 African-American, and 1.8 Native American — totaling 25.1 percent. In the “Quick Facts” section of its own website, WWU reports that 22 percent of its students are “students of color.” The university is only 3 or 4 percentage points from our state demographic.

Also, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics, in 2012, among the 18-to-24 age group, 59.8 percent of Asians, 36.4 of African-Americans, 37.5 of Hispanics, and 27.8 percent of Native Americans enrolled in college — compared to 42.1 percent of the white student population. How does this qualify as a “national crisis”?

Clearly, Shepard believes that hyperbole in defense of affirmative action is no vice.

Having gone around in academic circles myself — pun intended — I have learned that academics are no more open-minded than anyone else. They’re just better at articulating and defending their prejudices. The communist political officers of old, who were charged with ferreting out incorrect thought, would envy the orthodoxy found on today’s liberal college campuses. Professors who want tenure, and administrators who want to keep their jobs, have to guard against expressing politically incorrect attitudes and opinions. Shepard is pandering to the liberal ideologues who predominate in academia today.

Two arguments I’ve heard in support of affirmative action are that African-Americans and Hispanics are still lagging behind in academic and professional achievement and that legal segregation has given way to voluntary segregation. We do indeed still have a racial divide in this country, but affirmative action won’t bridge it. Giving people of color preferential treatment breeds resentment and reinforces racist attitudes, the worst of which is the presumption that a deserving person of color would not have gotten into an elite college or a prestigious profession but for affirmative action.

As for that other Supreme Court decision, clearing the way for government agencies to open meetings with a prayer, I affirmed it before in these pages, and I’ll affirm it again: What truly set this country apart was the decision to erect a wall of separation between church and state. Those who believe that our founding fathers intended no such thing would remind us that our currency is inscribed with “In God we trust.” True, but that’s a sacrilege. Christians should demand that the inscription be removed. It was a coin, after all, that Jesus used in commanding his followers to “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” I can’t think of a better endorsement of the separation of church and state.

I’m also aware that not all our founding fathers were deists. Some were Christians. But I imagine that, like me when I’m visiting my mother-in-law, they could set aside their personal convictions for the greater good. My mother-in-law says grace aloud before every meal. While I don’t believe that ours is a personal God we can appeal to, I bow my head respectfully until my mother-in-law is finished. I do so because I’m in her home, and she gets to display her convictions in her home.

A government meeting, however, is a public and a secular forum. It should set a fully inclusive tone, one reflecting the diversity of our nation. No religious viewpoint should be privileged over another. Everyone in attendance should feel welcome and respected — Christian, Jew, Muslim, atheist, agnostic, Wiccans, and whatever. No one should be made to feel like an “other.” This is why, as I’ve written before, I respect and admire France’s uncompromising commitment to keeping religion a private and not a public matter. The French believe that a true commitment to “liberty, equality, and fraternity” requires that all citizens set aside their personal convictions in public and that they meet as equals on a secular plane.

We took an important step in that direction when we banned prayer in public schools. Now, thanks to the Supreme Court, we’re backsliding toward intolerance.

  © 2014 Scripps Newspaper Group — Online

My Current Column

ED PALM | Echo back to the Old West

By Ed Palm

Friday, May 9, 2014

Let’s face it. With the advent of Georgia’s new “guns everywhere law,” the NRA is poised for final victory. That being the case, Washington might as well jump over to the side that’s winning. We’re already fellow travelers. No permit is required to carry a gun openly in our state, and our concealed carry permits require no firearms safety training whatsoever. What I’m proposing, therefore, is that we curry favor with the NRA by reaffirming that mythic code of the Old West.

If any number of movies and television programs are to be believed, that code allowed two gun-toting men to face off in leather-slapping, quick-draw duels-to-the-death with no legal repercussions. Think of how we could free up our overcrowded civil-court dockets if people were allowed to resolve their disputes in this fashion.

To be sure, this would occasion some collateral damage. Innocent bystanders might be injured or killed in the crossfire or by ricochets. And the human body does not always stop a high-velocity bullet. But we could take our cue from those Air Force public affairs officers who still field complaints about sonic booms and routine jet noise. It’s the price of freedom!

Those who have any qualms about this modest proposal of mine should consider how we’re almost there now.

In 1992, on Halloween, a Michigan homeowner shot and killed a Japanese exchange student who had mistakenly come to his door in search of a party. That homeowner was acquitted.
Last fall, again in Michigan, a homeowner shot and killed a drunken 19-year-old woman for being on his porch.

In Florida, in 2012, George Zimmerman walked after killing Travon Martin.

Also, in Florida, a man was recently shot to death during an argument over texting in a movie theater, and a teenager was shot and killed for playing loud music at a gas station.

And just last month, a man in Montana killed a German exchange student he found in his garage. The shooter, who had twice been burglarized, was reportedly staying up nights hoping to shoot the burglar.

This last case does raise a possible objection. I am reminded of something the popularizer of military history Gwynne Dyer once said: “Countries that prepare for war inevitably get it.” There is a kind of person who purchases a gun just looking for an excuse to use it. Some of these people will inevitably overreact, resorting to gunfire for light and transient reasons. But we’ll all benefit in the long run. Family and friends will be able to avenge unjustified killings. Weak and timid people are likely to lose their gun battles, thereby improving the gene pool. With so many people taking the law into their own hands, we’ll be able to lay off a lot of police officers. That will help lower our tax bills and help get big government off our backs.

The only other objection I can anticipate is the tired old argument that guns are better left in the hands of those who have been properly trained to use them.But when I was foolish enough to advance this argument in the past, one reader put me in my place by affirming that the Second Amendment is absolute and that the government has no right to require us to get concealed carry permits.

Finally, think how much more exciting life will be once we’re all gun-toting rugged individualists living under the code of the Old West.

New topic: You had to have been living under a rock over the past two weeks to have missed the controversy stirred up by the racist comments of Nevada cattle rancher Clive Bundy and NBA Clippers owner Donald Sterling.

Just the other week, however, my 86-year-old white mother-in-law, Amelia Muelenaer — who lives in Roanoke, Virginia, and who was born in that same state — had an experience suggesting that the racial divide in this country is not quite as wide as the pundits would have us believe.
She was checking out several items at Walmart when she noticed that a young black man behind her was buying only a pair of flip-flops. “If that’s all you have,” she said, “please go on ahead of me.”
He demurred at first but did accept her offer.

As the young man was leaving the checkout line, Amelia happened to look down and found a $20 bill lying on her purse. She tried to give it back, but the young man wouldn’t hear of it. He kept walking, except to turn around and blow her a kiss.

Amelia intends to pay it forward, giving the bill to a Walmart shopper who seems to need it.
Make no mistake about it: Slavery was our original sin in America. But if people in the South can get past it, so can the rest of us.

  © 2014 Scripps Newspaper Group — Online

New Born Fawn, Olympic Game Farm, Sequim, WA, June 27, 2010

(I'm posting this now in order to make it available through Google Images.)

My Current Column

ED PALM | Perhaps not noble, but not ashamed

By Ed Palm

Sunday, April 27, 2014

In an especially resonant scene in Tim O’Brien’s surrealistic novel “Going After Cacciato,” a squad of hitchhiking soldiers who had walked away from the war in Vietnam are picked up by a member of the counterculture, a San Diego State dropout, driving a VW van. The soldiers are actually on a mission to bring back the deserter Cacciato, but she assumes they are taking a principled stand against what she characterizes as “The Evil”: “Children getting toasted, the orphans, atrocities,” as she characterizes it. “God, the guilt must be awful,” she concludes. After stealing her van and leaving the girl by the roadside, one of the soldiers concedes that “sometimes I feel a little guilt.”

That scene encapsulates what to my mind was the most troubling aspect of the anti-war movement. Forget the myth of the spat-upon Vietnam veteran. Sociologist Jerry Lembcke, in his 1998 book “The Spitting Image,” argues that there is no documentary evidence that returning veterans were literally spat upon. To the contrary, it has been established that pro-war demonstrators spat on anti-war demonstrators. Personally, I don’t doubt that, in isolated cases, it may have happened, but it never happened to me. What I did experience, however, was the pretentious moral empathy of those who, like O’Brien’s San Diego State dropout, presumed they understood what we had been through and how we should feel about it.

In my last column, I recounted some of the reasons why President Reagan was wrong in affirming that “ours was a noble cause” in Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh was, first and foremost, a nationalist who had expected us to dissuade France from reclaiming her former colony after World War II. The division of Vietnam following the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 was never meant to be permanent, and the Republic of Vietnam in the south was our creation. As Daniel Ellsberg — who leaked the secret history of our involvement in Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers — once put it, “We didn’t intervene on the wrong side; we were the wrong side.” What’s worse, the means we employed were all out of proportion to the ends we sought in Vietnam. At times, we seemed intent on destroying the country in order to save it.

So how then should those of us who served in Vietnam feel about our service? Should we feel guilty?

The fact of the matter is that our cause was not “noble,” but it wasn’t “evil” either. As former Marine Phillip Caputo puts it in his Vietnam memoir, “A Rumor of War,” in our day-to-day conduct of the war we may have resembled “those bullying redcoats” of our own revolution. But history is not likely to rank us among the German Wehrmacht, much less the SS, in World War II or even the Army of the Confederacy during our own Civil War. We were not out to subjugate or enslave the Vietnamese. We just thought we knew what was best for them.

Also, like many of us who went to Vietnam, some who fought on behalf of the Third Reich or the Confederacy may have questioned whether their cause was just. But, from time immemorial, soldiers haven’t fought for the cause so much as for one another. As a character in another Vietnam novel puts it, “You look out for me, I’ll look out for you, and we’ll both go home.”

Like O’Brien’s San Diego State dropout, the ideological purists of my generation — most of whom were risking nothing — would argue that “you’ve just got to separate yourself off from evil.” But, like another of O’Brien’s characters, we would have asked, “What’s evil?” And having grown up where and when we did, for most of us, it was unthinkable to turn our backs on the country that had nurtured us and where we still hoped to make a good life.

The answer, it seems to me, comes from a Marine veteran of the war in Iraq, Phil Klay, who has published a collection of stories inspired by his experiences titled “Redeployment.” In one of the stories, “Prayer in the Furnace,” a chaplain has an epiphany about what the Marines he has counseled are going through in Iraq. Despite the insanity and the horrors of the war, he senses that “this place is holier than back home. Gluttonous, fat, oversexed, overconsuming, materialistic home, where we’re too lazy to see our own faults.”

While so many of our contemporaries sat in self-indulgent safety and comfort, we put ourselves on the line.

Some of us went in believing. Others suspended judgment or, like O’Brien, even went in against their better judgment. But the great majority of us served honorably and proved ourselves to be better than the muddle-headed politicians who had sent us. That’s something to be proud of.

  © 2014 Scripps Newspaper Group — Online

My Current Column

ED PALM | Vietnam's anniversary and modern memory

By Ed Palm

Saturday, April 12, 2014

Back in the mid-eighties, an Army officer of my acquaintance succinctly summed up the mood of the post-Vietnam military: “It’s OK to be a Vietnam veteran in today’s military,” he observed, “so long as you don’t dwell on it or refer back to it.” He was right. He had intuited the largely unspoken but widely understood politically correct attitude toward our humiliating defeat. Vietnam had been an aberration, the kind of war we would never fight again. And the less said about it, the better.

Ironically, this same spirit of denial and revision has spread to American society in general in recent years. It’s OK to be a Vietnam veteran in today’s America, so long as you remember that war the way Reagan portrayed it, as a “noble crusade,” and so long as you profess utter admiration for our Armed Forces and unwavering support for our current crusades.

April being the month in which Saigon finally fell, marking the end of our Vietnam misadventure, I’m devoting this column to the Vietnam War I remember. It was anything but a “noble crusade.” It was a profoundly existential experience. Survival was the only moral touchstone and getting through to our rotation tour dates the only goal we cared about. All the Marines I knew “in country” were profoundly skeptical of the official rationales for why we were there and increasingly embittered by the reluctance of the South Vietnamese to fight their own war.

My fellow Vietnam veterans seem to have forgotten how traumatized we were about all this. We have been co-opted, bought off with belated handshakes and glib expressions of gratitude. We have forgotten what really occasioned all the bitterness and fueled the post-traumatic stress of our generation.

It wasn’t that the country failed to welcome us home or to honor our service with parades. It was the discovery that our leaders had lied to us about the nature and the necessity of the war and that the conduct of the war put the lie to the ideals and values in which we had all been raised to believe.
Would that we all knew then what we know now. Ho Chi Minh was first and foremost a nationalist. Early on, he had appealed to us to help dissuade France from reclaiming its former colony at the end of World War II. But we needed France’s help in blocking communist expansion in Europe, and the ensuing Cold War clouded our judgment. We feared falling dominoes. By 1950, we were mired in Korea and bankrolling France’s Indochina War. With the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, we took over. We sent in intelligence operatives to subvert the Geneva Accords, especially the plebiscite that would have reunited North and South Vietnam under whichever government the majority chose. Having defeated the French, Ho Chi Minh was the hands-down favorite to win. The South Vietnamese president we had installed, Ngo Dinh Diem, was almost as alien to his own people as we were. Ho Chi Minh had cornered the market on Vietnamese nationalism, and out in the countryside, most of the people seemed to want no part in what we were selling.

What’s worse, once we had taken over in our own right, we began to take that indifference personally. Contrary to popular belief, we weren’t forced to fight with one hand tied behind our back. We unleashed a greater tonnage of bombs on Vietnam than we did in all of World War II. We declared free-fire zones. We defoliated large areas with Agent Orange. We made liberal use of close air-support and indirect fire weapons with little regard for the so-called “collateral damage” such weapons inevitably inflict. Racists that we were, we dehumanized the Vietnamese as “gooks” and “slopes.” Unable to distinguish friend from foe, we viewed them all as potential threats. Hence, the worst atrocity of the war — the My Lai Massacre. Hell hath no fury like a country scorned, especially one that considers itself to be exceptional and eminently deserving of admiration and emulation.

This not to say that, because we were wrong, the other side was wholly righteous. They resorted to terror. They mistreated our POWs. They were hardly magnanimous in victory. But the irony is that we seem to have won after all.

Vietnam today is what we had tried to make it — a free market consumer society. The tragedy of it is that over 50,000 Americans and some 2 million Vietnamese had to die just so that Vietnam could get there on its own timetable rather than ours.

So how then should those of us who served in Vietnam feel about participating in such an unnecessary and misguided war? And how should our country feel about us? Stay tuned. I hope to answer those questions in my next column.

  © 2014 Scripps Newspaper Group — Online