BETWEEN THE LINES -- Byron de Arakal

I think I have post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s the only thing

that comes to mind to explain why I’ve found myself yelling at the

television lately. Grumbling with volume and contempt as I digest the

morning papers. I’m steamed. Ticked. Bent. This explains, I’m sure, why

my gracious and wonderful wife sends a drone out from under the covers

each morning -- in the form of a tentative query -- as a matter of

reconnaissance on my state of mind.

“How’s the bear doing this morning?” she’ll ask, half into her pillow

and half at me. On other days, she doesn’t bother asking because my

bombast and cursing are known to her and my neighbors before the first

eyelid cracks open. These are the days she’ll instruct the kids not to

“poke the bear.”

Here’s the problem. It’s the pacifists. The hand-wringers and the

pantywaists. The tie-dyed and finger-cymbaled poltroons all in a lather

over the roar of the American war machine in Afghanistan. Not eight weeks

after a flock of goons flew a few airplanes into the World Trade Center

towers and the Pentagon -- summarily executing some 5,000 innocent souls

-- the marshmallows have begun popping up around the fire and fury of our

nation’s war on terror.

So I’m thinking it’s time for a marshmallow roast over the flames of

war. The simmering began, near as my fogged head can recall, a few weeks

ago when Bill Maher -- the host of the television show “Politically

Incorrect” -- dished out some boneheaded claptrap about Mohammed Atta and

his boys having more courage than the American military. It takes more

guts, was his allusion, to fly a kamikaze mission into a couple of

skyscrapers than to launch cruise missiles at targets hundreds of miles

away.

Maher, rightfully and thankfully, took a knee to the midsection on

that one, which to my way of thinking was too kind.

Nevertheless, that’s when I first began to detect that old

club-em-with-Vietnam drivel. I was beginning to hear Joan Baez tunes in

my head. Timothy Leary would soon come back from the dead, I thought,

carrying a box of oddly colored sugar cubes and mumbling that old mantra

about tuning in, turning on and dropping out. And I wondered when the

marshmallows would trot out some twisted version of that old Woodstock

protest tune by Country Joe McDonald: “And it’s one, two, three, what are

we fighting for? Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn, next stop

Afghanistan.” Surely that would be their anthem to rail against arrogant

American imperialism. I was almost right.

Nine days after the United States began raining bombs on the home

field of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda terrorist network, the nation’s

bastion of peace and love and air kisses, Berkeley, Calif., felt

compelled to formally urge our nation to stop the bombing. To stand down.

Led by Councilwoman Dona Spring, the Berkeley City Council passed a

resolution calling for an end to the American bombing campaign “as soon

as possible,” while expressing a concern for the innocent people of

Afghanistan. It then took an obtuse poke at American foreign policy in

the Middle East by suggesting the United States end its dependence on not

just foreign oil, but oil altogether.

This was the exercise in idiocy that put me over the edge, that sent

me into a froth. Did these dolts understand that Sept. 11 represented the

worst attack in this nation’s history upon the sovereign territory of our

mainland? Did they contemplate the unspeakable horror lived by the dozens

and dozens who chose to plummet to their deaths from the highest floors

of the World Trade Center rather than burn to death? Did they at all

grasp that war had been declared on the United States on that September

day? Certainly the rest of the country had. For once the news media

planted its incisors into Berkeley’s plea for an end to the violence, the

city was bombed with angry letters and threats of boycott from coast to

coast. The reaction, I thought, would surely shake these relics out of

their Joplin-humming pacifism and into a recognition that our country is

engaged in a war it must win by whatever means necessary.

Not so. Instead the council members -- particularly Spring -- were all

in a dither as if someone had placed a box fan under their sun dresses.

“I never expected to be so misconstrued,” Spring said. And Berkeley Mayor

Shirley Dean worried aloud what economic effect a wave of boycotts would

have on her city, an ironic bit of capitalist thinking given the city’s

tradition of listing heavily to port.

Since then, the “coveted box” (my term of endearment for the

television) has been filled with boobs and yahoos insisting our military

campaign against terror is bogging down, that we’re at risk of a Vietnam

quagmire. Hogwash. This scrap’s just begun and has months and years to

go. Thousands more bombs will be dropped and rounds fired. People, both

bad and innocent, will die, including our own.

But that’s the nature of war, folks. We’d better be prepared to fight

it with every ounce that we have for as long as it takes. And for those

who don’t have the stomach for it, there’s always Berkeley. Or Canada.

* Byron de Arakal is a writer and communications consultant. He lives

in Costa Mesa. His column appears on Wednesdays. Readers can reach him

with news tips and comments via e-mail at o7 [email protected] .