The Fromson File

BLAH BLAH! Lenny Bruce was as much a commentator on our mores and morals as a standup comic. Forty years ago, when he dared to use language that we can hear now every night on Comedy Central USA, the blue noses in New York had him convicted on a misdemeanor charge of obscenity. So Bruce fled to California. One night, he chose to perform a routine in Los Angeles in which he substituted the then obscene words with “Blah Blah and Blah,Blah.” Were he alive today, we can only imagine what he would have said to the pardon granted him by New York Governor George Pataki who linked his perfectly reasonable gesture in behalf of free speech to the war on terrorism. Sometimes, the nuttiness of political verbosity escapes even those of us who think we have heard it all on the stump during one campaign or another, on Capitol Hill or some state capitol. Words seem to have lost their meaning. That was Lenny’s real point. An increasing number of Americans today are coming to suspect that the truths they’ve been fed the past year are little more than Blah Blah. But what is unfolding at home and abroad today is no laughing matter. The lives and limbs of young Americans are being lost in a war that was justified by an enormous lie about weapons of mass destruction. That was the issue motivating the invasion of Iraq. Remember those weapons the laggardly inspectors in the United Nations could not find that we were going to expose for the world to see? Six months later, American inspectors are still looking and the White House has begun to spend less time on WMD than on fighting a guerilla war. President Bush’s assurances that the policy for Iraq is on the right track have been echoed by a cadre of ideologues and atrocious worms in the rightwing media, most of whom have never seen a shot fired in anger from their mahogany foxholes inside the Beltway. The death of one GI, the dismemberment of another may be dismissed by them as the tragedies of war and let it go at that. But in a nation that places so much store in the individual, these casualties are nothing less than obscenities. Unfortunately, the President says he does not read the newspapers. Hopefully Messrs. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and their neocon cheerleaders do and as much as it pains them to do so, we can only hope they read an article that began on the frontpage of the New York Times today (December 30) about Sgt. Jeremy Feldbusch. They should read it from beginning to end and then have the decency in this holiday season to go out to Blairsville, Pennsylvania and pay their respects to the young man and his parents. If you were looking for a model American, Feldbusch certainly would be your man. Jeremy went to war last February. Two months later he returned, a blind man forever. At 24, a proud Army Ranger, he had ambitions to become an officer. But his dreams were shattered in Iraq by a burning piece of artillery shrapnel that hit him in the face, unalterably changing his life and those of his parents. Jeremy’s mom, Charlene, stopped working to be at her son’s bedside around the clock. His father, a disabled coal miner, spoke proudly of his son to the Times reporter Jeffrey Gettelman, “an inspiration to me who has accomplished more at 24 than I have in a lifetime.” He ticked off his son’s accomplishments as an athlete and as a university graduate in biology from the University of Pittsburgh, the first member of his family to finish college. But it was reading Charlene Feldbusch’s account of a day at the Brooke Medical Center in San Antonio where her son was recovering from surgery that got to me. Gettelman described Ms. Feldbusch’s reaction when she saw “a young female soldier crawling past her in the corridor with no legs and her three year old son trailing behind. Ms. Feldbusch started to cry, but not for the woman. Do you know how many times I walked up and down those hallways and saw those people without arms or legs and thought ‘Why couldn’t this be my son? Why his eyes?’” she asked. That may seem cruel to most readers, but she reminded me of my days as a GI in occupied Japan just before I was re-assigned to Korea in 1951. I had volunteered at the Tokyo Army Hospital to read letters from home to soldiers blinded in combat. The distances were too great in those years for families to fly to the bedsides of their loved ones. So we fellow soldiers were asked to alleviate the endless cycle of despair in which these young men found themselves. It is impossible to do justice to this story by quoting from it any further. In these last hours of a troubling year, try to find and read Gettelman’s account. It’s an example of first class reporting.