Gusalmighty.com: A Leaded Perspective

Forget Fahrenheit: Go see Fog of War

I admit I haven't seen Fahrenheit 9/11 yet but it is well known to be a anti-war, anti-Bush, documentary cum propaganda film that is engaging the nation in dialogue about the war in Iraq, the course of our nation, and most importantly the leader who chose that course for us. It is also well known that the film is specifically crafted to bolster the effort to unelect the President and I feel safe in saying, even though I haven't seen it yet, that the film is less about the war in general than it is about the problems with the president. To those ends, the film deserves to be seen.

But Fog of War is a film that accomplishes so much more and stands on much firmer ground. Fog of War: 11 lessons from the life of Robert S. McNamara is a documentary in the true sense of the word: it documents McNamara's recollections of his life and perspectives following his involvement as Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies during the Vietnam War. McNamara has been demonized for his part in that saga but he surprised many by coming forward a few years back and "admitting" that Vietnam was a mistake.

Production on Fog of War began even before the attacks on 9/11 and the subsequent military excursions undertaken by the United States in the so-called War on Terror. It is not an anti-Bush or anti-American movie in any sense. But after watching it, it does have the effect of making the mistakes of the current U.S. administration stand out in glaring relief.

The movie is educational in exploring what was going on during the Vietnam War with McNamara and the presidents. I learned a lot about that chapter in our country. The main message of the film transcends Vietnam and seeks to redeem the mistakes made there by highlighting the educational opportunities provided by them. I've often mentioned that I don't have many regrets in life even though I've done my fair share of boneheaded maneuvers because some of the most important lessons I've learned and knowledge I've acquired came about as part of the mistake-making and recovery process.

Making mistakes gives us the experience of crossing the line and dealing with the pain of the aftermath; explicit knowledge of where those lines are, what the consequences of transgression are, and real world experience in charting a path to the edge and beyond (and thus knowledge about where not to go in the future) is priceless. Without such experiential reference, all we have are hypothetical arguments and thought experiments. These are useful and important, to be sure, but they are subject to subversion to our own self-interests; we tend to believe that the most likely outcomes are those that coincide with our desired course of action. Ultimately, it can prove worthless and obscures quality grounded decision making.

The lessons discussed by McNamara (the movie is primarily him, 85 years old at the time, talking, overlaid with film of the era) are so incredibly relevant that I was continually amazed at how elegantly they highlighted problems in the campaign in Iraq. It is tragic at the same time, since the whole purpose of McNamara's coming forward and of the film is to make those lesson explicit and help us to avoid making the same mistakes made during that debacle. Yet the points made by in the film were multiply violated in Iraq.

This is not a partisan film or partisan argument. I challenge anyone to dispute the lessons put forward by McNamara and the flim makers in general. Just try to argue that those are not accurate or suggest why they ought not be followed. I cannot imagine anyone would dissent with the message before 9/11 at all, which leads me to conclude that anyone who would do so now is more a victim of their desire to maintain their position in support of the President or in opposition to terrorists, as if avoiding the mistakes of the past would somehow make us more susceptible to destruction by terrorists.

See this movie. It is very very good. It is visually very beautiful as well, cinematically orchestrated with a haunting soundtrack that reminisces the Qatsi films in their unspoken commentary on the human condition. Highly recommended, as it is uncontroversial, relevant, and educational.

Feel free to comment on this post.

How do you keep your kids off drugs when you are on them?

I read this article at salon.com and it piqued my interest. Nothing particular shattering here but I am interested in how parents deal with the issue. Essentially I want to be honest but at the same time kids aren't really capable of dealing with information until they are a certain age. Does anyone have any experience with this, or any plans for dealing with it?

I remember asking my mom about it when I was in High School and she ducked the question in a rather adroit way. She said if she told me she didn't do anything when she was younger I wouldn't believe her but if she told me that she did i wouldn't be able to deal with it and likely misinterpret it. She did say that if I could find someone who didn't experiment with something here or there in the early 70s she only believe that I'd found someone who didn't actually live during that time. This answer wouldn't have the same effect on everyone that it did on me, of course, but it communicated to me that she had experimented but that she didn't want to get into specifics. This felt like an honest answer to me (I wouldn't have wanted to talk specifics with her either, even though I wasn't even drinking much less getting high at that time).

It seems that the trick is to be honest and open without revealing too much too early. The way I'll have to deal with this is going to depend a lot on where I'm living. If we are in Japan, she'll grow up thinking that drugs are entirely evil and only degenerates do them and that to even consider it is tantamount to cognitive suicide. This idiotic approach is almost more difficult to deal with because I run the risk of seeming like a drug advocate (they really aren't that bad....) if I try to circumvent the lack of thought invovled therein. On the other hand, if I live in the States, I'll likely have to impress the dangers upon her more than trying to convince her that they aren't as bad as the uneducated say.

Time will tell, I suppose...

The article in in the extended entry and comments are welcome in the forum

uly 13, 2004 _|_ Twelve years ago, back when you could put things in the mail without a return address, my old college buddy Jim sent me a package. Opening the plain, brown box, I was surprised at its contents: the small purple bong he and I had put to very good use in the late '80s and early '90s. Along with this stained relic he had scribbled a note of explanation: "Getting married and planning to have children, so I guess I won't be needing this anymore." I wasn't sure what unnerved me more: his decision that "growing up" meant giving up something that he enjoyed without incident, or the implied idea that I was stuck in a hazy past while he moved on to an appropriate, adult future.

The second time I experienced In Loco Bongus I thought: This is getting weird (and also: What am I going to do with two bongs?). This time my co-worker walked into my office, closed the door, and sheepishly explained that while he and his glass two-footer had had some great times together, his son was getting older, he had a second on the way, and he didn't want anyone under 4 feet to stumble across it accidentally. "I don't want my boy to think it's OK to be a pothead," he explained. "Well, that's not true, I don't want him to think it's OK to be a full-blown hazed-out pothead." Which is why he switched to a much smaller, more easily stashed pipe.

According to the 2002 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, more than a third of Americans over the age of 12 have tried marijuana at some point in their life -- that's 80 million people who actually admit it, and I suspect there are a couple more who don't. Many of these millions can look at their offspring with a straight face and explain that while they once experimented with drugs during the folly of their youth, now they don't -- and neither should you, little man.

That must be nice for them. I don't know many of these people.

The people I have spent the last decade working and playing with have inhaled more than a few puffs and taken a variety of trips down Alice's rabbit hole. Yet some way, somehow they have turned into able and impressive members of the republic. These are people with good jobs, who engage in charitable pursuits and who rarely cut in line at Whole Foods. We've taken some of our old vices with us into adulthood without burning down the house or checking into rehab. We've done a good job prolonging our adolescence, but now we're facing adulthood's ultimate gut check: children. And when it comes to kids, we have a drug problem.

What to tell the children about past -- and, in many cases, current -- drug use ain't easy. Should we practice what we preach? Should we lie? Where do you draw the line between being a hypocrite and protecting your kids? Are we worse parents if we get high in front of our kids than if we have a couple of stiff drinks? How do we reconcile our own experiences with drugs -- ones that have been overwhelmingly positive -- with the very real possibility that our kids could run into trouble with what are in fact potent substances?

Before you write nasty letters to the editor denouncing my friends and me for advocating drug use, let's be clear: Scores of people have had their lives and the lives of those around them destroyed by drugs. No one I know believes that all drugs are good nor wishes a nation of junkies on anyone. Drugs are not for all people, all drugs are not for all drug users, and no illicit drugs are good for children. Among my close friends, there's a general feeling that there are "good" drugs and "bad" drugs. The good ones are empathetic and eye-opening (MDMA, marijuana, hallucinogens). The bad ones are ego-driven and destructive (coke, speed, heroin). Both types can destroy you -- it's just that they haven't in our case. In a topic that doesn't deal much in grays, this is a nuanced and certainly unpopular point of view. So it's no surprise, if a bit disappointing, that most of the people I talked to asked to have their names changed.

"I'm not nervous at all about talking to my sons about sex," says my friend Rob, a 32-year-old writer living in Brooklyn, N.Y., with his wife and two small boys, aged 1 and 5. "But I'm scared shitless to talk to them about drugs." Rob smokes as much as two to three times a week, but never when his children are awake. He thinks the worst thing for him to have heard when he was a kid would have been that smoking pot is acceptable. "I would have been off to the races," he says. That's why Rob is hesitant to be completely honest with his own children about his drug use. "I probably won't be fully open about my drug use until my sons are in their 20s, post-college maybe. I feel like I have to give him guidance before that, but I'm not going to tell him about the time I dropped two hits of E and two tabs of acid and had my brain melt while I watched the Breeders and the Beastie Boys at Lollapalooza. I can't say, 'Make sure you don't melt your brain like daddy!'"

"My push for parents is always to be open and honest," says Marsha Rosenbaum, who leads workshops for parents on how to handle drug use among their kids as director of the Safety First project of the Drug Policy Alliance. "Kids have amazing bullshit detectors and are probably going to know that we aren't telling the truth. To the parents who stopped using drugs, I say tell them your story and tell them the real story."

Drug story hour's a tough one, but many of my friends want to tell their children about all of their experiences -- the good and the bad and the hazy in betweens -- eventually. Knowing whom to tell what when is the hard part. Rob says he knows exactly what he'll say to his kids when they're 25; he just has no idea what to tell them when they're 10.

"My husband and I won't hide our pot use from our daughter because it's just such a natural part of our lives," says Carla, a 35-year-old communications specialist in Oakland, Calif., and mother of an 8-month-old girl. "But while she's growing up will we tell her Mommy and Daddy loved having sex on coke in a hotel room when she was staying with Grandma? Will we tell a teenage girl that the occasional line of K [Ketamine] is a blast? Absolutely not. The important thing is to explain that drugs are for adults who are old enough to handle them, and that they will have a chance to experiment soon enough in life if that's what they want to do."

Allie, a 33-year-old legal aid attorney in Washington, D.C., who has been known to enjoy a large cocktail of substances over the years, is planning a family now and suspects she'll take a somewhat less tolerant -- perhaps hypocritical -- approach. "I won't tell them about my own use until they're old enough not to be influenced by it, which I think is 16 to 18 depending on the kid, because I won't tolerate any drug use from them," she says. "It just seems like they'll have so many sources in their lives justifying drug use -- from friends to hormones to boredom to the Internet -- that they will also need to have something on the other side balancing it."

I myself don't have kids. I may very well someday, and as I get older I can increasingly understand the temptation to just out and out lie to them about a variety of parts of my life, especially my drug use. I mean, do I really want to tell Larry Jr. that daddy had a mind-altering moment on mushrooms at Joshua Tree when he was 23, but my dear, my dear boy, if I ever find mushrooms in your backpack you'll be grounded from now until your freshman year in college?

"I would be much more concerned if my kids thought I was a hypocrite than if they thought I was a pothead," says my friend Alan, a professor of English at Indiana University and soon-to-be father of twins. Alan's been thinking a lot about what he's going to tell his children about his daily pot use, a habit he suspects won't be so compatible with the daily rigors of daddyhood. "I'll tell them that I smoke, I like it, but that it's not for everyone," he says. "I will tell them that I did certain drugs for adventure and exploration, but never to counter self-esteem and an inability to tolerate reality. I will tell them if they decide to try drugs, I hope they tell me and I'll demand that they be safe."

Safe is actually less subjective than it may sound. "Just as you can't use a chain saw or drive until you are a certain age, you shouldn't use drugs until you are old enough to be able to handle it," says Mitch Earleywine, a professor at the University of Southern California and author of "Understanding Marijuana: A New Look at the Scientific Evidence." Earleywine says new studies reveal that cannabis can interfere with the brain's development before the age of 17. It stands to reason that a compelling case can be made for telling your kids to hold off until after high school graduation, even if you didn't.

A current Office of National Drug Control Policy anti-drug campaign seeks to help confused adults reconcile their past use with whatever version of "just say no" they're trying to work out as they raise kids. Called Hypocrite," it reads: "So you smoke pot. And now your kid's trying it and you feel like you can't say anything. Get over it. Smoking pot can affect the brain and lead to other risky behaviors. So you have to set the rules and expect your kid to live drug free no matter how hypocritical it makes you feel."

"In the focus groups we asked parents to identify some of the barriers that existed in talking to kids about drugs -- and their own experience with drugs came up as one of those barriers," says Jennifer DeVallance, a spokesperson for the ONDCP. "These ads are saying: You need to step up to the plate, regardless of what your experience was."

Unlike the folks in the government's focus group, most of my friends don't think their own past makes them hypocrites, but rather better informed parents. Jill, an interior designer who lives outside of Nashville, Tenn., with her teenage son, says that she's not so worried about her son's experimentation because she has so much experience with drugs herself. "If you never did drugs as a teen, or any other time in your life, I suspect all you can think about is your kid behaving like he or she is a character in 'Reefer Madness' or that he's going to become Robert Downey Jr.," she says. Jill has resigned herself to the fact that her son does drugs, but she is tough with him about his use. "We talked about what some people can handle and others can't." She explained to him that in her mind, pot is on par with alcohol: Both get you high, both should be taken in moderation and both can have devastating effects on your life if you overindulge. "Once I knew about his use, I told him what I had done," she says. "Not everything all at once. I didn't want my former experiments to encourage him, and it was more information than he needed at one sitting."

"If you didn't think your drug use was a big mistake, don't tell them that it was a big mistake, which is what the government wants you to say," says Rosenbaum. "Tell them that they were probably attracted to it for the same reasons that you were. And if you quit, tell them why."

Delia, a 47-year-old physical therapist in Manhattan with a 13-year-old daughter, agrees. "I will tell her drugs were fun and seductive," she says, "but ultimately they were a mistake." Knowing that Delia had a pretty wild ride in the late '60s and '70s, I ask her if she plans to tell her daughter the whole story. Her answer is an unflinching no. "I can't ever tell her everything I did, especially that I tried heroin," she says. "I tried it once and liked it so much that I knew it could destroy me. A survival instinct kicked in, one I don't know would kick in for her. But I can't tell her the entire truth of my use because I don't want to influence her."

And there's the riddle: There's no more influential person in a child's life than a parent. Therefore, in one way or another, every parent I talked to felt that to a certain degree they had to lie to their kids about drugs. Yet almost in the same breath, few want to mask what for at least a certain period in their life was a very real, important and joyful part of who they were and are as people.

"My goal as a parent," says Carla, "is to give her the tools to know what she can handle and what's too much. I don't want her to say no to drugs, because they can be freakin' fun. It's not a popular perspective, but it's true. Fun is a big part of my life, and drugs are a part of fun."

"But you know what?" she says with a pregnant pause, "my perspective today could change a lot in 10 years."

If so, I fear I'll be getting another bong in the mail.

I really wish I could vote for John Kerry

"Anybody But Bush"

What a load of crap.

When I first heard of the Anybody But Bush bumper sticker, I smiled and thought it was pretty sharp as far as political commentary on a bumper sticker goes. But even at that time, I personally wasn't willing to adopt such a philosophy. Yeah, Bush is bad and needs to go, but let's not get carried away with it. Decisions made in the heat of passion can come back to bite us and basing our votes on a such a premise is highly dangerous and counterproductive at best.

President Bush is bad, yes, but he isn't a dictator. He has Congressional support, but he didn't always have it. And even in spite of that, opposition leaders could still have voiced said opposition even in the face of defeat. Instead we had a bunch of spineless chumps lacking in any sort of coherent believe system or ideological integrity at all. There were some, of course, like Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean.

But what about everyone else? And yes, I mean *everyone* else. President Bush got his blank check to go to war from a Senate that was not dominated by Republicans at the time. John Kerry, Vietnam vet and anti-war activist, Democratic presidential candidate currently campaigning on a platform against the war, voted for it!! Hilary Clinton, NY Senator who's name is bandied about as the potential first female president of the U.S. gave a doublethink speech right before she voted in support of the war where she essentially said "war is bad, we shouldn't go to war, it isn't the right thing to do, so I will vote for it." Whisky, Tango, Foxtrot!!!!

And then the democratic electorate failed us. Howard Dean was a man of principle and passion. He had his faults, as does every candidate and every platform. But voters got cold feet in the primaries and bought into the mass media sound bytes about some amorphous notion of "electability", whatever the hell that is. No one really knows, other than Howard Dean was judged not to have it and John Kerry had more of it than anyone else.

So in the end we rejected a man of ideological integrity and a consistent message that was highly popular and instead chose a man who was a supporter of Bush, who enabled the current President to operate unimpeded and recklessly. John Kerry is part of the problem we are enduring right now and I fail to see how he can thus be part of the solution. The only thing he has going for him is that he isn't George W. Bush.

So here we see what is wrong with Anybody But Bush thinking. We were so focused on the anti-Bush part that we really did base our entire selection criteria solely on the "electability" of the contender. If Mr. Ed the horse had enough charisma and a PR department that effectively convinced us of his electability, I'm sure we'd have voted for him too.

But what do we end up getting? All we get is exactly what we were looking for, anybody but Bush. Pay no mind to the quality of that anybody or the history of that anybody as being part of the problem that Bush represents.

I want to be able to vote for a candidate to replace President Bush, I really really do. Bush is a horrible man for the job and he is causing great damage to the world and civilization and my country. But I cannot vote for Anybody But Bush, I just can't. I need to vote for someone that is actually going to do something to make things better. John Kerry is nothing but a stopgap and is really part of the problem. It's too bad that we weren't able to produce a real alternative to Bush, someone Better Than Bush, rather than just Anyone But Bush.

Your comments are always welcome