Personal Round-Up: a Distant Grief, a Dream and Preparation

Posted on March 29, 2014 | Leave a comment

This is a post which summarizes are rounds up the events and concerns in my life and sphere of activity in the last week or so. I used to do more of this type of thing but now I rarely post such things. But here is one which seemed worth posting.

The most significant thing that happened in my world this week in many ways did not affect me very much.  But it reminded me of how things could have affected me and of connections that have slipped away. That was the passing of Suzanne Bercier at forty from cancer. I had posted in this blog about her before in the end of a blog about more newsworthy events. On Facebook, I wrote a bit more but not all that much:

Suzanne Bercier has died. I posted the following update on March 17, 2014 and did hear from the Bercier family but nothing I felt the need to repeat in public. My prayer and thoughts are with Suzanne’s soul and her loved ones especially. I will leave it to all of you to inquire about arrangements through third parties or as seems proper. Here is the post from before:
” I understand that a dear friend of our family with whom I have long fallen out of touch is probably losing her long battle with a terminal disease tonight. I remember Suzanne as a sweet spirit and my thought and prayers go out to her family. I post this for anyone who may wish to know and may be able to support her loved ones in this time.

I am tagging three of her family members on my list: Edwin L. Bercier III, Edwin L. Bercier IV , and Anthony Bercier .”

However, I did not make the funeral. My mother did and blogged about it and you can find the post here. I have only just the chance to note her passing now and to say that that while she is a person I remember well, she does stand in for a whole group of people I remember — many of whom she never met. One wonders how life leads down the paths it does to the places it does.

I went to see my nephew Eli in the John Paul the Great Academy play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” last night. He played the “changeling child” with gifted pantomime and acting but there are no lines spoken by this character central to the plot. Eli is only in fifth grade. I brought a shrimp and diced tomato pizza to my sister Mary’s and a Coke to join with her pizzas and Cokes.  We had a nice meal and drove on to the play together.

I  have spent quite a bit of time in the lawn and garden every day of the last few weeks.  Burning out and digging up pests, clearing weeds out of desired plants, gathering up branches and raking leaves to join the weeds in the new compost bed and transplanting sod and turf patches  to replace the most distressed areas. This most distressed soil goes into the compost bed. These and other activities are all part of making this a house lot and not what it was.  In addition I have had some unforeseeable equipment repairs I may discuss later, have had to fill in the holes left in the pasture by the sod and turf I have dug out with horse manure.

Beyond that there is string-trimming and spraying stubborn  broadleaf weeds with Round-Up. I could work full time in this small place for months with the resources I have and the needs it has to get it into the shape I’d like.

In addition to all of these things I am trying to get my blog and other things into good order and that is no small thing. It is hard to say that I ever feel happy with what I am doing over all. But I am well aware that things are going to get worse because they are not getting better. I have decided to try to comply with Obama’s Affordable Healthcare Act. But so far have not been able to create a workable account. I have printed up many refusal screens but not accomplished much else.

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Beverly Miller Summers, Paul Jordan and Twenty-Five Years

Posted on March 26, 2014 | Leave a comment

This is a very busy kind of blog. It includes in quotation format an entire Facebook note which would have been its own blog post if it had happened later but it came out in March of 2009 and the blog you are reading began in August of 2009. So I never transferred most earlier posts. I do not reproduce here the generous comments made by friends on Facebook. That not alone makes this a fairly long blog post and it is really long if one goes to all the links.   It will be full of links which bring up words and some images to remember the past. Though the truth is that I cannot remember everything in my past I do remember some things clearly enough. My grandmother Beverly Miller Summers died two years ago today. I still miss her although I had been excluded ever more from her life in the few years leading up to her demise. We were very close over my lifetime at various times of relatively long duration. I remember many things about her which are better captured in the video indirectly linked and the  blog obituary directly linked above in this paragraph. I am also adding an UPDATE in the form of this link to my mother’s blog’s tribute to my grandmother which she wrote the day after this post originally came out in my blog. You can see that story here.

It is also the birthday of my late half-brother Paul Nicholas Jordan. My mother has chosen in her blog post today to remember this man who was such a huge part of defining her life. She does not mention me much if at all but I laid him in the ground at his funeral and I was the last in the family to see him.  I also have marked his passing here in this blog. Part of that memory has been related to the other fact which is remembered here in today’s post. I mentioned Paul when I was mentioning things, people and events in my post marking twenty years since my college graduation. This is a very challenging time of the year for my personal memories.  These notes and blog posts about the past are always crowded and complex and not so many people have been drawn to read them as those bout more recent events. Next is the text of what I put in Facebook when Paul died. Below that I have a few more thoughts about my approaching 25th anniversary of graduation form the University where I did my undergraduate degree.

Death, Lies, Truth, Loneliness and Time

March 6, 2009 at 3:10pm

My half-brother Paul Nicolas Jordan’s ashes are on a table on a stage in the great room in the big house at Big Woods. That is the house where I live and where I am writing this Facebook note. Last night we had a memorial service for him and I said the opening prayer. My mother asked me to do this with no warning or preliminary announcement and that is almost how Paul came into my life 17 years ago. I never knew she had given up a child for adoption until shortly before he became part of our lives. We ended the memorial service with a great meal and we all thought of how Paul loved to shop for food, loved to eat, loved to cook, loved to remember the restaurants where he worked and the ones he ran and owned with his ex-wife Patricia. Paul told lies, exagerated and colored stories a great deal. But because he was so well read, had so many experiences, knew so many people an honest person could seldom be sure what was an enhancement and what was the sober truth. Sometimes there seemed to be no rime or reason for when he stretched the truth and when he was painfully honest.

I told several people that I would never have predicted that I would be the last relative to see Paul alive and the first relative to know he was dead. I have more closure than I ever would have believed I would have. I long thought he would die without me having seen him for years. Many of our conversations over the years were strained and some were hostile. Almost all were telephonic.

Paul was baptized Catholic but many have told me that he was insistent that he not be buried Catholic. He left the church and much of his religion when his mother died of cancer and never came back. I have also been told by others that he claimed to have been molested by a priest as a child. I have heard these rumors for years and gave him the opportunity to talk about them but did not pry. Paul never discussed these things. Because Paul could be loose with the truth and often was there is a patina of doubt on all things related to him. But despite all this I have the feeling that his anguish over his mother’s death and the fact of his molestation were both real event s which caused him lasting pain. The both contributed in some way to his dying as an un-churched man who described himself to his last (non-relative) caregivers as a gay man who lucky to die in the home of a family who reminded him of the family he had had with his ex-wife. Both were made up of a divorced woman, a teenage older girl and younger boy. It was at there home that I saw Paul the last two time I saw him alive.PNj about the way he was when I met him.

PNj about the way he was when I met him.

During the memorial service I gave one of the longer eulogies. I talked about the way we had gotten along badly most of the years since our meeting but how in the nine months he had lived with us and in the months since then we had talked of faith, movies, books, movies, food, movies and the research in nonfiction writing. His ex-wife was not there, his former stepchildren were not there. The openly gay writers and artists he told stories of having been good friends were not there either. My relatively flamboyantly homosexual cousin who had once been his closest friend in our area was not there and neither were any of his gay friends who draw a line between being openly gay and being discreet which is different in small town Cajun country than any where else in the world. It was a mix of people who knew him in these last 18 months and relatives and friends of family. None of the three people who were with me at the Shandong Institutute of Business and Technology and in Yantai, China were my students in the two classes where I did some AIDS education as part of an American Civilization background for my English classes. But in those classes I mentioned Paul as having AIDS. I said I did consider him family although we were not close. Nonetheless, Lu Ting ting has been a comfort to me because I always find her conversation comforting even if it is electronic and she knew of Paul through conversation and through my mother’s book “Go! You are Sent…” which features Paul prominently. I think that life is always full of mystery. It usually includes a fair amount of pain if you are are one of the unfortunate 98% of the human race for whom that is true. It is more obvious that there is such pain and it features more directly in one’s consciousness if one is honest with one’s self, of course there is not such a high percentage of honest people as of suffering people. Paul Nicolas Jordan has just died.Paul and I were not very close and we were not connected in the ways which leave a wrenching emotional wound when someone passes beyond this life. In addition I am not prone to great emotional expression in death. But Paul’s death was still a very significant thing in my life. Paul died of AIDS and AIDS is one of the great realities of my generation and time.When I first met Paul he came from California, San Francisco in fact and my mother had predicted that he had AIDS when she told me that she was trying to find the son she had given up for adoption. Perhaps she had already found out by the time she told me that she was looking for him. Our relationship has not always been typified by full disclosure. Paul was married at the time to a divorced woman with two children but there were always suggestions around me that he had been living an openly homosexual lifestyle at some point. He never told me “I’m gay” or “I’m homosexual” till the day he died. However, an openly homosexual cousin of mine implied that he was gay. I gave Paul a copy of the book “And the Band Played On” which describes the early days of the AIDS epidemic. He described meeting the author at a party and we often discussed issues life Christian sexual morality, homosexuality, polygamy, marriage, AIDS, fertility and related topics during the months when we both lived in my parents’ house about a year ago. He talked about writers he had known in California as homosexual among other qualities but he did not tell me in any of those conversations that he was gay and I never asked. After his death someone told me that he had told his last caregiver that he felt lucky that as a gay man he was able to die in a home with a single mother, a daughter and a son just as he had lived with his ex wife at one of the best times of his life. That along with all the other evidence causes me to write about him as a homosexual from San Francisco who died of AIDS in his middle age. In a world full of misinformation it is still true that I did not know him all that well but I knew him as someone labeled differently than that grouping of characteristics which is so common in the minds of many writers and readers of various contemporary media.I barely know James Duggan but we have many mutual friends and went to the one of the same schools. He is on my Facebook friends list and is also an editor of a magazine that caters to a primarily homosexual clientele. I have never seen the magazine but I can guess that I would find some of it offensive and not in the stereotypical ways liberal assume of someone like me. But my experience with Paul has caused me to redefine the lines of what I see as reasonable efforts of homosexuals to organize around that specific mutual interest. Which is odd in a way because at some levels I do not have enough evidence to know that he was “gay”. One of the first old friends that I reconnected with when I joined Facebook as a college friend who became a priest after I last saw him and is now living an openly gay lifestyle. He also claims to be very active in AIDS awareness and prevention. I assume that is true. Paul was looking for something it always seemed to me. Looking for roots, an Acadian identity, a chance to shine in social situations. For most of the seventeen years or so that I knew him he was fairly hostile and held back almost all personal information. For years we had very bad phone conversations and then we had nothing for many years. We disliked eachother most of the time. The last few years have been different. I am glad to have known him although it seems horrible in a way to want to know someone while they were as sick as he was every day that I knew him. Paul was a very well read person and was very knowledgeable about popular culture. For a few months we had great conversations about that sort of thing.But we both knew that we were dealing with something in which the years for actually becoming close friends had already passed. One thing that cam very late in our relationship was an awareness by Paul that I really like the show Big Love on HBO, know a lot about the Creole mistresses of Louisiana planters and their families, stay abreast of details about Mormons prosecuted for polygamy, read books and other sources that discuss the relationships of Christian kings and upper aristocracy with multiple regular titled families throughout Christian history and know a lot about Old Testament polygamy. I was in a very monogamous marriage when we met and he came across as very judgmental about me not understanding loves not recognized by law he was judgmental without being open. However, at the end he began to suddenly sense that I had my own group of persecuted friends around the world for whom I was always feeling some empathy. He also noticed that I had quite a few overlapping relationships that seemed kind of honest even though I frequently live like a bitter and resentful monk of the most celibate kind.I have not found much to like in the modern Gay rights movement of which Paul knew a great deal. I do not think legalizing gay marriage while polygamy is illegal is anything other than obscene. However, I do hope for better justice than has ever existed before. I do hope not for a world with no rules but for a world with a variety of regimes and in which many of them offer good domestic possibilities for a variety of people with their own salvation to work out. Paul is dead now and I have been let off the hook.A long struggle to communicate with a sensitive soul who was hungry a better life than he found has ended. He offended me and caused me pain. But he also helped me to know and learn more. We shared some spiritual awareness. He has passed beyond my reach and I hope that he is at peace. I hope that my friends will work hard on their families, relationships, sense of justice and understanding of social order. I do no think we will see a golden age of social harmony with the right mix of privacy and honesty. I am pretty sure that we will not find that. But we could try.Paul’s life and death have left me with no pat answers but I am lucky to have reached a place where I can say with all honesty that I am glad I did not miss the chance to know him. I tried but for most of the time I knew him I could not have said I was really glad overall to have him in my life. I call him my half-brother but I mean it as a kind of brother. He was my brother and I will bear his memory with me wherever I go. PNj about the way he was when I met him.

PNj about the way he was when I met him.

Well, my life goes on for now and in many ways it is a full life. But shrinking and filled with bitter memories more than sweet with ever diminishing hope more than optimism. I do not think it was ever likely to be different but I did try and now in a certain very limited sense I still do try. I graduated as Outstanding Graduate 25 years ago this May. I have not wasted the last half century and there is some fruit. But there is much loss and frustration as well.    I am not sure how to feel about my own life which is going on since Gammie, Paul and many others including my cousin Severin W. Summers III have died. But I am inclined to think about these things since my graduation anniversary is so very near.

I was not an athlete who played for USL. I took two physical education classes and  besides some love-play with a few female students I did little in terms of physical recreation on campus. Swimming and soccer for PE were the heights of a pretty low structure I built there for myself. But I did go to some games and have gone to some others since then. I should save this to post another day but my days are highly unpredictable. The Ragin’ Cajuns Athletics of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette are reigning Sun Belt Conference Football Champions with three consecutive victories in the New Orleans Bowl, reigning Sunbelt Conference Basketball Champions and have number of other athletes to watch this year, have had alumni Charles Tillman win the Walter Payton Award for NFL Man of the Year and now this: Baseball Powerhouse Play!

So things have changed at UL Lafayette since I graduated from USL which was its name twenty-five years ago. Of course Brandon Mitchell, Hollis Conway, Jake Delhomme, Brandon Stokely and many other formed part of our past glories. Some of them I have been fortunate enough to know. I think my own life has not turned out all that well. I am more drowning in self respect than in regret but it is an ugly, hardened and frustrated form of self-respect. The twenty-fifth will be bad and bleak and depressing like most of the anniversaries before. I could never complain enough to capture how badly I could feel if I let myself.

So I come to the end of this long note and another exercise in Nostalgia. I am busy and idle depending on how I choose to answer the questions about my life. Both sets of answers are based on facts. I remember a great deal with fond sadness. I also pray this Lent for hope, forgiveness and peace for me and for others. But I barely scratch the surface of things to remember and yet wish I felt more hopeful for the future.

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Malaysia Flight MH 370

Posted on March 25, 2014 | 7 comments

Three American citizens, 150 Chinese citizens and others are legally presumed dead as they were aboard Flight MH370 which has disappeared without a trace for about two weeks so far.  The official account does not fully satisfy for  many reasons. The grief, street protests and sorrows evident in Beijing are ongoing. The people involved cannot help but feel cheated of any resolution and the Chinese government is at least demanding access to the satellite telemetry used to reach Malaysia’s official conclusions.

I have posted about this before. I may do so  again.  I can only empathize with all those suffering. However, I also empathize with their paranoia. This is one of those stories that may be true and almost certainly will not be proven untrue — and yet is absurd. One is asked to believe that this plane escaped all detection and went without notice to the place where the wreck would be hardest to detect. It is on its face one of the most self-serving stories ever told. But a lot of people are buying into this story and that really does make it more credible.

No matter what happened the odds are very high that passengers are dead. If it is a supremely complex conspiracy they are probably dead, if they crashed or landed gently in the ocean they are also likely to be dead.  But this cannot be a story which brings a lot of closure to anyone.

I have posted about the struggle of other parents to rescue their daughter and find closure. This case is different in many ways but no less miserably confusing.  Today or last night a family friend Suzanne Bercier died of a long enduring disease and it was long anticipated. Yet there will be plenty of shock for the loss of a young woman. There will be second guessing and regrets.

Today is, for Catholics, the Feast of the Annunciation.  We remember the mysteries of the Incarnation and the origin of the words so familiar to us as “Hail Mary, Full of Grace! The Lord is with you.” This is from the first chapter of Luke’s Gospel and a bit later on at the Visitation  Mary’s cousin Elizabeth adds the next words of the familiar prayer “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb . . .”  I will say a Hail Mary for all the parents of the victims of Flight 370 and other family members. I will say one for the family of Suzanne and for the family of Danielle and others disappearing on the boat in the South Pacific. Mary is the parent the Gospels mention standing at the foot of the crucified Christ.  May her intercession ease the pain of all those suffering loss and terrible separation from loved ones.

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Features Of this Blog: Part One, the Glossary

Posted on March 24, 2014 | 3 comments

I want to take today’s post to comment on and improve the accessibility of some of the features of this blog. I am not sure how logical that is as this post will be buried in posts more quickly than the features themselves but here we go. I will start my little tour:

I have a glossary which is important to the  subjects discussed in this blog. I have the first page linked  earlier and also three more pages . This glossary will define many terms and proper nouns which would not be familiar to most readers.

While the  glossary is only four blog pages it is as long as a booklet if printed out.  The formatting on this post is not the formatting used in the glossary. It differs in that I have used the quotes feature to expand the margins and thus lengthen the column. But otherwise this is directly lifted from the glossary. I hope to use two of the definitions as examples of what you might find there:

Zouaves  Here this almost always will refer to the Louisiana Zouaves of the War Between the States although the French Zouaves do enter a bit into the historical interests of this blog as well.  Zoavisme was a movement brought to Louisiana from France by an odd hybrid of military drill instructors and actors who toured Anglophone, Acadian and Creole regions of the State before the war. Yankee or Union Zouaves played a role in that great struggle and there were a significant number of of other Confederate Zouave units. But the Louisiana units are the most famous even in a history which often ignores Louisiana and are often called Louisiana Tigers by a variety of people . Unlike most Federal Zouave units, most Confederate Zouaves were not autonomous “regiments”: Louisiana followed this trend  or started it and these men  were often companies within larger units. The cognomen “Louisiana Tiger” is a venerable term  which dates from the Mexican War although Acadian fighters were sometimes known as gamecocks, crocodiles, alligators, Les Loups, and other animals Louisiana’s fighting animal was mostly the Tiger  and  the term refers to any Louisiana state trooper LSU athletic teams but all this has little to do with Zouaves. None of the Mexican War Louisiana “Tigers” were Zouaves for example.  The earliest, and most famous Louisiana Zouave unit was Confederate officer  White’s Company B (the “Tiger Rifles”) of Major Chatham Roberdeau Wheat’s First Special Battalion, Louisiana Volunteers, aka “Louisiana Tigers”.

This can be confusing because Lee’s Tigers is a term correctly applied to all Louisiana soldiers that served in the Army of Northern Virginia. These are not to be confused with the Louisiana Zouaves  who were the “Louisiana Tigers” or “Coppen’s Zouaves.” These names have been confused with “Louisiana Tigers at Gettysburg.” Coppen’s Zouaves were at Gettysburg, but they were not then known as “Louisiana Tigers” in any way related to the unit although they may have been called Tigers in a broader sense.  Captain White’s Company B, “Louisiana Tigers”, of Major Wheats’s First Special Battalion, were not at Gettysburg, having been disbanded after Wheat’s death at Gaines Mill in 1862. There are two other Zouave units of company size for which I have little documentation but believe existed for a small part of the war.

This one comes at the end of the alphabet and has its limitations and challenges that are unique to the word and its history. Here is another example from elsewhere in the glossary, in this case I have three definitions that fall in order here:

Post, here means Lauren C. Post This is the writer of an important little book on the edge of serious scholarship called Cajun Sketches. It has photographs and writings about the Acadian people of Louisiana.

 Pontalba, Madame Celestin Pontalba, Baronesse Micaela Almonester de Pontalba was the wealthy investor and patroness of architecture who helped her  architect to redesign the decaying Place de Armes in New Orleans into Jackson Square in the center of the old city and French Quarter. She was the successor to charitable, commercial and public building projects organized by her Almonester ancestors.  By the time she built The Pontalbas (as the whole project is known) she was bo longer the rather beautiful woman she had been she had one lung, a rotting finger and little left of the others on one hand and one of her breast was mostly a prosthesis. She also had metal fragments left in her chest. All these physical ailments came from being shot by her father-in-law the Baron Pontalba. While she and her husband later Celestin Barone De Pontalba seem to have ended life both separated and in love their marriage is a rather horrid tale of conflicts between the greater property rights enjoyed by women in Louisiana and the lesser (almost nonexistent ) rights of women to property among the European Nobility — in this case Napoleonic Imperial French Nobility. In the state she is rumored to have had an affair with Andrew Jackson for whom she named the Square. Except for naming the Square for him, them both being alive at the same time and capable of consideration in such matters and   her being rather independent and a Louisianian all things seem to be against this. All time lines seem wrong to me. Who knows what is possible but it does not seem possible they were together in the right ways and times.

Prince Camille de Polignac This man was a French Prince and Confederate General who fought in Acadiana during the War Between the States. Since that time Liaison a la Maison de Polignac has been an office in the Maison de le Roialso seated in the Tout et Rien. This person is supposed to a De Polignac.

I am always correcting some typefaces, improving spelling and getting translations more accurate. There are no footnotes and I do check websites of place I have worked, Wikipedia and my own files regularly without being perfectly professional in the use of those sources. For these and many other reasons I call this a Glossary of Terms Casually Defined. But I think it may have some helpful information.  Check it out, it may be a bit better than these quote the next time you look at it.

 

 

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Some Days are for Thinking About Other Days

Posted on March 23, 2014 | Leave a comment

There are days when almost anyone can feel the need for  a little more reflection on life. Some days are suited to thinking about other days more than for standing on their own and competing with other days.  Today is probably one of those days. It is not that there are no events happening but simply that memory is the stronger draw for me today. Of course I tend to think of the historical context and of my own past more than most people,

So it is with today’s events. killed one of quite a few snakes I have killed out here in the many years I have been here. It is quite different than hunting as it does not improve the larder or menu. It just presents itself to machete, shovel, string trimmer of brier-hook wielding me. Four I have killed with my walking stick –I do not recommend that as it is a little too fair and equal of a combat. Today I saw the snake and chose to kill it in about a second (sort of like living in the Cold War stand-off’s worst fantasies and fears but for much smaller stakes). While doing more of the endless lawn and garden work out here where there was no lawn or garden and no vast transformation such as leveling, re-soiling and seeding was done — that was when the herpetocide occurred.I try to leave most snakes alone and even in the house lot I care for there are two species I avoid killing. Nonetheless, I deliberately ferret out and kill cotton mouths, water moccasins, copperheads and a couple of other species once they appear in any part of the common grounds in the past or near me or on the house lot or playground today. Then in gardening I sometimes have to kill a snake too quickly to identify it and will kill many I would not kill elsewhere.

I am just resting now and thinking of the past. I may have quite a bit to do in time but I will  not be as fully engaged as on some days. I am getting to the end of my resources in ever new ways. The world as I know it seems to become more remote and yet more intrusive with each year. So I simply take a day sometimes to remeber when life held more promise.

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Crimea is Annexed: What is Next and How did We Get Here?

Posted on March 20, 2014 | 1 comment

With issues like those raised by the events that have been unfolding in Ukraine and Russia in the last month one can ask how to evaluate the relative importance of these events to the United States of America, the European Union and the West.  Crimea has been annexed by the Russian Federation and that happened far from me and though I know people almost everywhere there are people Ukraine is far from any center of my network. Even more so one could ask what these events as political facts have to do with me.  There are always connections of course and those will not always be revealed here.  I who blog and most of you who read perhaps live and act mostly very far from Ukraine. My television reception out here in the countryside  probably prevented me really following the Olympics in Russia very well and that was the most significant connection to Russia that most of us have had in a while. The Sochi Olympic and Paralympic Games have been somewhat overshadowed by geopolitics. Last time Russia hosted the Olympics the USA boycotted the games.  It is in that context that these  events unfold.

I am typing this on the first day of spring in my hemisphere.  I have been busy trying to get the lawn and garden into order. Tonight I plan to hear my sister speak at the cathedral of the diocese in which I live. There is always a great deal going on in this world and certainly in the many small worlds which share the geography.  I myself may well be in as bad a situation in terms of the cross section of health, well-being and financial prosperity as I could ever have wished to or feared experiencing when all the overall factors are weighed. Yet the total significance of the Ukraine and Crimea crisis is great enough to get me blogging about it repeatedly.

http://franksummers3ba.com/2014/03/04/crimea-and-the-moment/

 

That is not my only post nor even particularly close to my only post on the topic.  Not only have I included it with other topics but I have blogged about it directly a few times. Here and there in previous posts a reader will find what I have to say about it. But it is important for us to be aware of the tensions that run through the world.

I have no doubt that the future is going to be a future in which defining exactly what the USA will need in terms of assets, what it can afford and how they should be deployed will be more challenging to determine.

I support the brave people seeking their way forward in Ukraine. I am sure that it must be a painful thing to lose Crimea. However, it is a hard road to complete the transition to national autonomy and they will have to make adjustments. Hopefully the US and Europe and other players will find ways to invest in their future.  They can play a valuable role in the further development of the larger region.

I wish I could do more than think about them but I do think about them most of all. It seems we will possibly progress from the status quo as it is now. I think that is probably the reasonable supposition.  But I will be watching and will post here when my views and level of information may have changed.

Crimea has been annexed by the Russian Federation. The questions the world will face now that Crimea has been annexed by the Russian Federation cannot be answered without remembering the transfer from Russia to Ukraine was made when they shared one United nations representative.  In the coming days, months and years we will have to support Poland, the Baltic states and others and we cannot let the fact that Crimea which is a vital naval asset for Russia and populated mostly by people who feel Russian,  speak Russian and want to be part of Russia has been annexed by the Russian Federation.  Crimea raises larger issues but it is also unique and we must remember that even as regional issues  continue to come into focus.

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Malaysia Airlines and the 777 which Means Something

Posted on March 15, 2014 | 1 comment

Malaysia is among the most tolerant and diverse Muslim majority countries in the world. It is one of the countries with whom Christians and others could be fully sane and conscious and wish for peace.

Given those facts it is natural that people have been reluctant to cry “Islamic Terrorism and Atrocities!” when the Malaysia Airlines flight on the 777 disappeared. But we now believe the following to be facts:
1. There were devout Muslim pilots in command.
2. Two Iranian Muslims were on board with stolen passports.
3. The Chinese Martyrs Brigade, a Muslim Autonomy Subversives Group and tied to Islamist terrorists has taken responsibility.
4. Most passengers were not Muslims and many were Chinese — with Americans on board as well.
5.There were two separate communications instruments were turned off deliberately at separate times.
6. The plane changed headings and was flown for hours thereafter.

My heart goes out in emotion to all those who have almost certainly lost loved ones on this flight. If in fact this was a terrorist act did they contact someone who refused to negotiate or even report the conversation or is this slow and silent killing a new mask of terror?

Whatever happens Islamist terror in China is on the rise and partly this may be due to the changes in geopolitics. Even as I look at the Crimean crisis I remember that the themes of the last twenty years continue to evolve. One can imagine how the Cold War and the Global Jihad/ Worldwide War on Terror may share billing on the world stage in the coming decade.

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Spring Continues in Acadiana

Posted on March 14, 2014 | Leave a comment

I can and do feel some of the ecstasy and magic of Spring around me. It does not matter what the human conditions of my life may be. I feel the Spring. I have chosen a few small images to represent a larger reality. Spring is all around us here. Yet despite the beauty of these times it is more around me than in me and of me.

a closeup not in tight focus still tells a tale.

a closeup not in tight focus still tells a tale. The redbud has survived the winter

I have already done one post on the coming of spring or the more emphatic “Spring”. Primavera the Spanish world calls it — the first greening for those who play with words in that language. There are springs when one’s own life is full of hope and promise and then those where one feels less in tune with the events of the year’s part in which one lives. The redbud has been through a very tough first full winter with us and I am able to empathize with its survival.

There is a ways to go before we reach luxuriance

There is a ways to go before we reach luxuriance

 

This season finds me feeling the cold of winter in my soul and darkening days in my mind. It finds me with the autumn weariness of long efforts making for weariness and the heat of Summer-like discomfort with the results of exertion. But in all this it is spring at leas and really looks like  “Spring!” already in many places around me and I am working around nature’s renewal. I would like to hope and renew myself. But I am not sure I would find such an effort authentic.

 

Perhaps it is in the precarious and somewhat doomed existence of the wildflowers in the emerging lawn that I find my partner for this season. I hope not for although I admire them as well I am not much like them.

Some flowers truly fade quickly and yet are lovely.

Some flowers truly fade quickly and yet are lovely.

I wish all my readers a happy and worthy Spring may spring into your lives and souls in more ways than one. I will try to find one myself.

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Crimea, Ukraine, Russia and the West

Posted on March 14, 2014 | 3 comments

There is a referendum on the sixteenth of March to determine what the voters of Crimea prefer for their future. Of course it appears Russia has control of the site of these elections and likely will interfere in their elections. It is also likely many Russians in Crimea would vote to become part of Russia anyway. It is even more likely they would want to have some autonomy from any somewhat anti-Russian government in Ukraine.

I have blogged a bit about this evolving situation.  Here are some links to my posts earlier on throughout this crisis:

http://franksummers3ba.com/2014/03/09/strength-security-and-the-future/

http://franksummers3ba.com/2014/03/04/crimea-and-the-moment/

Russian troops are on the Russian borderlands just off of Ukraine’s Eastern border and North of the Crimean Peninsula. What role they will play under every set of circumstances is not clear. There are also many reports of increasing violence in the protests in Eastern Ukraine. So it is in that context that I am posting this:

It may be time for a new point of view. For me some things have not changed, America does have an interest in preserving international law –  but that seldom is less clear and compelling over other interests than it is here. The Ukraine government is becoming legitimate but it is not clearly legitimate and was less so when the crisis started so its legal rights are less clear. In addition, Crimea is vital to Russian interest and the natural gas pipelines are vital to Russia, Ukraine and the European Union. So people are not inclined to be held back when real arguments can be made that they are not under valid restrictions.

Things have evolved since I began posting. The strategies employed by all so far seem to have prevented war thus far. But as specified above Russian tanks and troops are at the border of Ukraine and Crimea is voting in a referendum on its status vis-a-vis Russia and Ukraine on the 16th. What will happen next?

The West and Russia have generally denounced each of the two claiming heads of government and regimes as not legitimate. The USA seems to insist on Russian withdrawal from Crimea and denounces the referendum. However, the US Congress has stalled even the billion dollars in aid to Ukraine. We have deployed resources in the region but I neither condemn nor endorse that use of resources. I also understand the reticence of Congress. This is not an easy situation.

I recently wrote eslewhere that “One useful mental exercise for any crisis is to imagine what one might do, urge and agitate for if one were a pure dictator over a country such as has never existed perhaps and could truly do what ever one wishes.” I think that is right, and one often sees that there are no easy solutions.

In that case and acting for your country what might you do? For many of us around the world we could leave this to Russia and Ukraine. But is that realistic for the EU or even for the USA?

In that abstract sense of a mental exercise  I believe I would have decided long ago that Russia must keep Crimea if Ukraine goes free of her real authority and the Crimean majority supports it. I don’t think we can move troops into the region but perhaps we could bend a few rules to help the populist militia feel and be more authentic even helping lots of hunters flying into Ukraine from the west and leaving their weapons behind.  Ukraine will have to offer Russia very generous pipeline concession, in the short term at least. I thin we should urge them to extend  full pardon for regime members choosing to go into Russia and whom Russia accepts. I would urge Ukraine to set up a relocation authority for Ukrainians in Crimea to come North and Russians in Ukraine to go to Crimea if they choose. I would support Poland and Romania in creating treaties, trade assurances and cultural missions. I would seek to explain how the law is full of messy issues in this case.

Somehow the US seems to be  in a position where it must assure top level Russian officials that invasion of the rest of Ukraine would provoke serious repercussions over time and I would increase military aid to countries West and South of Ukraine. Would that work out well? I cannot be sure.

It may be that what is happening now is better. However, it does not feel good. Pushing Ukraine to harsh rhetoric, calling for Russia to quit breaking the law with no explanation of the complexities and not getting Ukraine aid are all depressingly undesirable to my view. Would you care to discuss some options? Do you believe war is possible — and can it spread — and when?

I feel far from where I would like to see things going right now. Blog posts like this by private parties are risky and thankless enough. But there is no reason to pretend that our system does not rely on such media. These discussions have always gone on. In a sense they are a political dead-end for someone in my position more often than not. But they do provide a a part of the public discourse for which the USA has always been known. So I feel compelled to blog here. I also hope for a bteer result than can be reasonably expected.

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State of the Blog

Posted on March 13, 2014 | Leave a comment

The time has come when all of the work of a lifetime is at least a little connected to this blog. The traffic here is not what it was at its peak nor is it currently as slow as it has ever been. Instead it is a suitable temporary fall-back position for much of the rest of my life’s work. I am able to urge those who visit the blog to read the text box near the top right hand of this total screen. That set of paragraphs has lots of useful instructions for navigating the blog.

It is probably more than unreasonable that I am planning to deactivate my Facebook presence or destroy it. Perhaps it is yet more unreasonable to keep this blog going which has about a third of the traffic it once had. But I am trying to find my way amid the remnants of my hopes. Should things change I might restore what can be done elsewhere was well as improving this blog. However, I do feel pretty good about the functionality of the blog at this moment in time.

That functionality is what makes the blog sustainable for now. It was lost function which made me cut back on it use use and promotion so much at one time.

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