Brain Dump

That's what this is on any given day, but especially now, when I can't fall asleep. I gotta unload the last couple of days.

Saw Collateral yesterday (while Jenn was helping give a friend's baby shower), and it's still in my head. Tom Cruise is a mean sunofabitch in that movie, and he and Jamie Foxx both chew up the scenery. Tight.

This morning we had brunch at The Beach House in Cardiff with a friend who's just back from Iraq (along with his wife and 11-month-old son and a couple of other friends). He's a Marine chopper pilot and flight instructor who did over a decade of active duty, retired, got a great civilian job, then got called up to reserve duty for this shit. From the day he got there (six months ago) until the day he left (less than two weeks ago) his choppers were getting shot at every time he flew to cover the convoys we send out. And while the insurgents shot at him and he shot back, a few tens of yards away would be a house with an Iraqi family sitting on their porch watching the action, or there'd be kids throwing rocks at his chopper. He'd come back with a dozen or more holes in his rig every time, and now he's back, not to go home to his good job, but to go back to work at Camp Pendleton and possibly get deployed again.

He told us a lot about what he and his unit and the armed forces in general are going through over there, and the bottom line is that they're not being allowed to finish the job in the most efficient way possible. Yes, I know (as does he and everyone there and many of the people who'll read this) that that translates to "they're not being allowed to kill as many people as possible." But we are at war, after all, and that's what war is. Unfortunately, for various reasons, there are people (higher up the chain of command than my friend, the major) who don't want to get the job done as quickly as possible. Here I thought that sending our men and women into harm's way was a last resort, and that once we got to that point, it behooved the person who made that ultimate decision (read: The Commander in Chief and his support staff in and out of uniform) to give the troops the resources and orders they needed to finish the job and get back home ASAP. Silly, idealistic, naive me.

And then tonight I went to the the-a-ter. The last show on our season tickets, Thoroughly Modern Millie. Very nice and fun musical set in the 1920s. The last show we saw was Hairspray, and earlier in the season we saw Chicago and 42nd Street. It struck me tonight that Broadway and Hollywood have seen a huge run of retro (but REALLY retro, not 70s or 80s) entertainment, and I wondered if that was because the real world we're living in is so fucked up that we want to escape in the most complete way possible, not just into fiction, but into an idealized past that didn't include terrorism, where black and white people got along, and when crack was still the space on the sidewalk you tried to avoid stepping on.

Dichotomy. This is my life. I laugh at clever commercials, and cry at weepy movies (The Notebook, last week [be careful, this is a high bandwidth site and the trailer starts automatically]) just like my wife sitting next to me (sometimes more). I advocate peace in the Middle East through negotiation, but support targeted assassinations like the killings of Ahmed Yassin and Aziz Abd el Rantisi. I can't stand the conditions under which our military was sent into Iraq, but I want them given a freer hand to secure the place and get the hell out.

For now, that's the way it is. I have links and more things to talk about... later.