KAL PENN AND CASKETS, WHAT?
President Obama secretly landed in Baghdad today to visit the troops. I love how the media treats it like a surprise, which is kind of silly, because they don’t like to announce for security reasons when the President visits a war zone, but to think that he would be that close to Iraq and not visit would have been the real surprise. I applaud his visit because it is always a great moral boost to meet and see the Commander-in-Chief as a member of the arm forces even if you didn’t vote for him. When I was in the US Navy I got the opportunity to meet with President Bush (the first one who is much smarter and taller) on my ship along with many of my fellow mates, even after 20 years it is still a memory as fresh as any in my mind, because it isn’t often in life we get an opportunity to meet the leader of our nation, I didn’t vote for him but at the moment I shook his hand and a Secret Service member took my camera and photographed me and President Bush I was giddy with excitement and thankful too have had the opportunity.
This vain of thought takes me to my second concern this morning and that is of the caskets of our war dead and should they be photographed when they come home. I agree with the decision to lift the ban, and am ok with leaving it up the families of the dead to decide if they are ok with the caskets being photographed, it is not something we should hide, the people of the nation must see what the consequences of war are and that dead young men and women are the result of our military actions. I don’t believe in sanitizing things for the mass audience because doing so removes to moral decision making from the citizenry in an "if they don’t see it they don’t care" sort of way. For me it is just like Capitol Punishment, which I am opposed to, and that if we are going to keep this barbaric practice then it is time this country see the faces of those it kills. We do all the killing behind closed doors and nobody has to feel bad or be forced to see the consequences of the decision to take a persons life, but we are all responsible for each and every death because it is we the people that are sentencing these prisoners to death, so if an innocent man is put to death then it is all of us who are guilty of his murder because we allow capitol punishment to continue unchecked.
I read today where Kal Penn form Harold and Kumar and House is leaving his cushy acting gig to take a job at the White House. I read the article in the Huffington Post if you want to read more about it. Penn was active in the Obama campaign and is now taking a position as a liaison at the White House, I want to give him a thumbs up and thank him for his service to his nation, he is certainly taking a huge pay cut, something you don’t usually see from most people, at least not without a reward down the line.
Finally we come to the PHILOSOPHER OF THE WEEK, and as I said yesterday we are staying with Karl Marx who wrote, The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs. He also wrote, Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form. I just love that quote, and I hope you all are enjoying your Tuesday, and until tomorrow goodbye....