NCR's Colman McCarthy reviews BORDERLINE

from National Catholic Reporter, June 19-July 2, 2015

Pacifism, feminism - and Catholicism

Former soldier's essays reveal a truth-seeker

Reviewed by Colman McCarthy

Borderline - Reflections on War, Sex, and Church
by Stan Goff
Published by Cascade Books

In his pre-Christian past, which is most of his life, Stan Goff was a career soldier who stoutly carried out American foreign policy by obeying orders to inflict violence on human beings in Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Somalia, Haiti, and other combat zones.  In two Army tours between 1970 and 1996, the San Diego native was a paratrooper who leapt from planes more than 400 times, a sniper; and a member of Airborne Ranger  and Special forces groups.

Rorschach

This morning I did an interview with WBAI at 6:30 AM.  I will not to that again.  I am not awfully bright about a lot of things at any time of the day; but I am pretty dim about most things at 6:30 AM.

The interview was about my book, Borderline, and I had some notes with which to summarize the book itself - a Good Thing - but when it came to answering questions, I was processing things pretty ... haltingly?

Woodchuck

or groundhog... depends on where you were raised, I guess.

This is a brief post about an ear-worm.  Backstory:  I am building a community garden in an open field; and yesterday I saw a woodchuck - a teenager (yes, they are called that when the pups are about the size of a pug and begin to seek out their own spots to build burrows).  The pup was no more than twenty feet from where I was working, laying in paths and mulching beds.  The garden won't be open for business until about mid-June, but seeing a juvenile woodchuck - while charming (little, furry things are charming) - is not a good sign for a garden.  These little charmers eat like pigs (ergo, the term ground-HOG), and they love the same things we like to grow in vegetable gardens.

Top 20 & other uproots

Today my facebook feed sent me an article entitled, "Top 20 Places to Retire."

Based on what?

Statistics.

Pastor Fride and his idol

On Palm Sunday of this year, Reverend Edward Fride, of Christ the King parish in Ann Arbor, Michigan, made himself temporarily famous by announcing during the Mass that the parish would be conducting qualifying classes for parishioners to carry concealed firearms. This announcement was met with some resistance from parishioners, to which Fr. Ed responded with a longish letter explaining his position. That letter exploded across the internet, with titles like, “Priest tells flock to pack heat.” This dust-up, in turn, compelled the Bishop of Lansing to issue a (sensible, in my view) cease-and-desist directive to Fr. Ed on gun training in the parish.

Hondo Hillary - 10

The Colonial Surrogates

If you want to understand who is the true power behind the Honduran coup, you need to find out who is paying Lanny Davis.

-Robert White, former US Ambassador to El Salvador

If you begin with the military sector, the Honduran coup makers can be sub-divided generally by tasks: military tasks, financial tasks, political tasks, and media tasks. The old “send guns, money, and lawyers” trope. Just add, “send well-heeled media.”

Hondo Hillary - 9

The Coup in Tegucigalpa

There’s a lot of work to do for a coup to be consolidated.

The consolidation phase had failed in Venezuela – in large part through the strategic error of listening to a few bought Generals telling the coup-makers the armed forces would follow the leader. It didn’t hurt that this is what the coup-makers wanted to believe. The young officers and the rank-and-file stood by the new popular Constitution, and one of the three legs to the coup collapsed.
It’s formulaic in the extreme to break coups down this way, so I’ll declaim early.

The three-leg theory of coup-making is necessary but certainly not sufficient to explain this highly complex enterprise. Those three legs are the three dimensions of destabilization: economic disruption and imposed scarcity, political turmoil, and the willing participation of the most powerful military/security institutions.