Raymi the Minx

(Originally published Feb 21, ‘05)

minx: (mingks) n., a cheeky or mischievous girl
–The Oxford American Dictionary

And Raymi the Minx is all of that. While you’re at it, you can add irreverent, scatological, self-obsessed, insecure, arrogant, discumbobulated, opinionated, compassionate, intense, distant, exhibitionist, funny, hip and clueless, sometimes all at once. That will do for a start, but understand: it’s just a start. Raymi is one complicated individual, but then so aren’t we all, and isn’t that the point?

Raymi’s blog, which today is called either soon i will hit the ground and explode or when the peanuts wept (she changes the title several times a week and the title on the banner is often different from the title rendered by your browser), is a Mulligan’s Stew of stream-of-conscienceness patter that veers from the unexceptional to the trivial to the poetic, post-to-post. Raymi writes about everything and nothing in a semi-free-form ramble that sometimes sounds like Kerouac on crack and at other times like a whiny teenager afflicted with petty obsessions and neural diarrhea. That most of it is tongue-in-cheek, so to speak, saves the worst of it from maudlin excess and lifts the best of it into Walt Whitman/Charles Bukowski-Land, where it twinkles like a pearl necklace in a junkyard.

A View From A Broad: Don’t Mess With The Kid

Maybe my taste runs to the outrageous, to people who say what they mean the way they want to say it and let the chips fall where they may. A View From A Broad is exactly what the title implies, the views of a self-styled ‘broad’ who takes no shit–and no prisoners.

‘Ginmar’, a soldier serving in Iraq, is profane, witty, and profound by turns, sometimes all at once. She’s an unrepentant, uncompromising, unapologetic feminist, and proud of it. She rants, raves, sputters, snarls, snipes, and shivs many of her posts; she does not suffer fools gladly. Or at all. Instead, she makes them suffer, and is it ever fun to watch her do it.

(The following excerpts are all taken from the most recent page of AVFAB. Unfortunately, she’s at LiveJournal which doesn’t link separate posts. You’ll have to scroll down the page to find the rest of each entry, but that’s OK: on the way down you’ll find a lot of great stuff I can’t reprint.)

On the day her Top Sargeant had something to show her (a relatively mild one to begin with):

Sunday, October 3, 2004Top came and got me this morning and dragged me out into the courtyard. “Ginmar, cmere,” he said urgently.

“What?!”

“This is important. I gotta show you something.”

The something turned out to be a frog living near the pool. “Uh, yeah.” I looked at the frog. He looked at the frog. Then he looked at me significantly.

“It’s a frog,” he pointed out.

“I noticed that.”

“I’m afriad of frogs.”

So, to recap for those of you in the cheap seats, my 1st. Sgt., the cop from New Orleans, the guy who regularly does stupid and crazy shit and gets me to take his back while doing it, the guy who thrives in this environment, he’s afraid of an animal that weighs approximately two ounces and which makes politicians look attractive.

A Plan for Handling the Milblogs

Since CBFTW’s highly regarded (by me as well as others) blog MY WAR–Fear and Loathing in Iraq was shut down–by himself, it now appears–questions have been raised about how the military is handling milblogs. Are they being too heavy-handed? If OPSEC (Operational Security) is the issue, shouldn’t they just shut all the blogs down rather than take the risk of someone saying something that endangers troops or strategic goals? Eric Magnell, an Army lawyer stationed in Iraq, gives a pretty clear explanation of the difficulties at his blog, Dagger JAG.

[T]he information environment has changed so much and is so different than in any previous war or conflict. Here in Iraq we have access to so much new communications capabilities it really is mind-boggling when you think about it. When my father was in Vietnam he wrote letters and mailed home cassettes or reel to reel tapes to keep in touch with my mom and his family. Even thirteen years ago, during Desert Storm, the soldiers still wrote letters and had very, very few opportunities to call their families in the States. With these new capabilities come some very real concerns over operational security. Back in WWII they popularized the saying “loose lips sink ships” and they censored servicemembers letters back to the states. Now we have those same posters hanging in our internet cafes and above our phones. We know that our enemies are computer “savvy” and may have the ability to intercept emails or other communications over the internet. Every soldier has to be aware and concerned about saying or writing anything that could potentially give our enemies information. Even potentially innocent statements which, by themselves, mean nothing can provide intelligence for our opponents when matched with other innocuous open source information.

But OPSEC isn’t the only consideration. Yes, soldiers do lose some freedoms to say and do what they please when they enter the Army, but not all of them. And there is an irony for them in fighting a war to free the expression of a foreign people while at the same time having their own curtailed for sometimes mysterious reasons. ‘Combat Doc’ at Candle in the Dark sums it up this way:

The higher-ups have found that the unedited embedded reporter known as Joe is the best and the worst thing that has happened to this war. The best because if you’re like me you are all for this fight, others see things differently and voice it. The problem with speaking out is that you will be heard.

Some of the recent events have made me doubt their actions. When you silence a soldier who has done nothing out of reg’s you lend yourself to suspicion. Why are they silencing the voice of the people who can sell this war better than anybody. Again, as long as the soldier has violated no regulation, you’re golden. Has something been done that needs to be silenced, I doubt it. I think the highers feel the political preassure of Abu Gharib and Najaf bearing down so they fear any media coverage. It seems though as they don’t trust their own regulations to cover them.

The silencing of any humans voice, even when I can’t agree, will lead to the silencing of all dissenting opinions. Americans must show their openness to their own flaws and triumphs or else the lesson we are trying to teach and the peoples we are trying to free will, rightfully, tell us ALL to shut up and buy a black car.

(Thanks to CB for both those links.)

Finally, there is the issue I’ve already written about at length–the military’s need to control its image in the outside world.

My War–Update 2

CBFTW has another new post up, plus he has put back some of his archives–he calls it a Best Of–so we can re-read some of the old stuff we thought was lost (it wasn’t, thank god; just locked up). In the new post, ‘My War Continues…’, he says he won’t be writing his personal experiences any more and comes as close to telling us what happened as he can.

I am officially no longer writing about any of my personal experiences here in Iraq on this website.

For two reasons:

1.) For fear of any future punishment that could be handed down to me in regards to anything that I may write on this website that would prevent me from being with the members of my Platoon and doing the job that I love, which is being a Machine Gunner in the Infantry.

2.) Many Americans have fought and died for our Freedom of Speech, and I, personally, would prefer death over censorship of any form.

“The people keeping CB from posting are the same people that kept him from skating the Ralphs parking lot back in the day…

that is all you have to know about liberty and freedom, the politics of skateboarding”

-DL

Comment written by a reader

There’s also a rundown of links and media articles that mention either CB or his blog, and a couple of letters that readers sent him. Check it out.

In a day or so, I’m going to be posting a piece on how the military might conceivably handle the milblog issue based on suggestions that were sent to me by Chris Missick of A Line in the Sand. Chris is a milblogger who happens to specialize in communication, and I think his suggestions have merit–they could work.

See you then.

My War Update: New Post, Hurry Hurry Hurry!

CBFTW has just published his first post since his blog, MY WAR–Fear and Loathing in Iraq, was shut down, whether by himself or his military superiors is unknown at this point. Yesterday, the LA Times mentioned his blog in an article about milblogs without quoting from it. Today, CB corrects that oversight in a new post that adds what the LAT should have included. But you have to hurry–he says the post will only be up for 24 hours and then it’s back to ‘Over and Out’. (Look for ‘Combat Jack’ at the bottom of the post.)

Update: My War, Over and Out

Those of you who began reading this blog with my review of CBFTW’s My War–Fear and Loathing in Iraq (CBFTW is a Hunter Thompson fan) and got thoroughly hooked on it in the days and weeks afterward most likely already know this, but for those of you who may be tuning in late, My War has been shut down–maybe by CBFTW himself, but maybe by the Army, and for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. Ron Brynaert at Why Are We Back in Iraq? has done a nice job summarizing the story, some of which I didn’t know.

[O]ne day he posted a story which claimed that he just fought a battle with Al Qaeda…bad enough…but he also claimed (mostly based upon the word of one of his Commanding Officers) that the enemies were Al Qaeda that had come into Iraq from Iran.

That seems to have been the beginning of his difficulties (although Ron mentions that right-wing commenters had begun using My War as a platform for supporting the SGW and attacking anyone who didn’t or whose support was less than enthusiastic), though why it should have been is a mystery. The battle was reported in the press, as was the participation of AQ which came straight from official Army statements; C was merely repeating what we already knew. The Army also didn’t seem to have a problem with it since they left it up. They did, however, decide that from then on they wanted to see what he wrote before he posted it. And they wanted some changes.

The first noticable change was that the title was shortened to “My War.” I guess the Military don’t do irony. Then he started to become annoyed with the myriad of posters on his blog. He was trying to sanitize his site for the brass…but posters were copy-and-pasting and resubmitting some of his posts.

No, Ron, the military doesn’t do ‘irony’. They don’t know what it is but they’re pretty sure it must be a way of making fun of them.

Nonsense Verse: Very Little Verse But Some Inspired Nonsense

Jennifer Balderama is a professional journalist on the business beat, but she’s also a real writer. Real writers are rarely satisfied with developing only a single aspect of their talent, which is why I assume this one created Nonsense Verse–to have a place to ply her comic skills. They don’t give you much chance to be funny in business journalism, and Jennifer is a very funny writer when she wants to be, although she is more likely to provoke sly, behind-the-hand chuckles of recognition than outright belly-laughs. Not that she won’t get those too, but Jennifer–or ‘J’, as she refers to herself–specializes in a kind of humor we might call ‘oblique’.

To get belly-laughs, you usually have to come straight at your reader, like Wodehouse or Fafblog. Jennifer doesn’t often do that. Her humor comes more from the odd angle, the surprising POV. It’s almost like she’s sneaking up on it–and you–from behind some trees, and if she doesn’t play it soft she’ll scare you both away. That approach requires a lot of understatement, and understatement is usually the enemy of B-L’s. B-L’s come from slapstick, from overstatement (but not too over–a fine line), from direct confrontation. Jennifer’s style is not to confront but to slip up on her subject when it’s not looking. Like this:

That’s ‘The Boy’, as Jennifer unfailingly refers to her Significant Other, caught at a moment he would probably rather not have been. There you have a graphic depiction of Jennifer’s thang–Do what they’re not expecting, and do it when they’re not expecting it. In the matter of the cicadas, for instance.

Cyclopatra: Milking the Moment

Cyclopatra is one of those blogs where everything is on the table, from family news to complaints about her work to politics to philosophy to– Well, you get the idea. I’ve seen dozens like this but rarely are they as well-written, as honest, as funny, or as perceptive as this one.

Cyclopatra (the blogger’s handle is the same as the name of her site) is a free-lance programmer with a client-list that is from Hell, and some of my favorite posts are the ones where she vents on this or that management style/technique/ploy designed to drive her nuts and give them an excuse for not paying her at the same time. Perhaps that’s because it warms the cockles of my working-class heart to know that these bozos don’t treat the professionals they deal with any better than they treat us, but it might also be because Cyclopatra is rarely in better form than when she’s ripping their entrails out by the roots and stomping all over them.

He disapproved of my database design, despite not knowing what it is or how to design a database, and despite my assurances that I could report on the data therein in any format he pleased, if he would only deign to whisper that format to my eager ears. He rejected one almost-invisbly-changed screen as too ugly, despite the fact that he designed it himself and demanded the change that I made. And he accused me of not testing my code (for the 15 millionth time; you would think this man had never enountered Windows before, considering his expectation that he should never encounter so much as a hiccup in his software usage, even of beta software) without ever describing a single bug he had enountered – apparently I was too breezy in my description of moving new code to the beta site. Now, I’ll grant that ‘let’s hope nothing explodes’ was a fanciful construction, and that my intended joshing tone was probably not adequately conveyed by the too, too stark screen-text that it was printed in, but is it too much to ask that he wait until he actually finds a bug before he excoriates me for failing to test the code that I write?

Sarcasm as beautifully placed as the knife of an expert between the fourth and fifth ribs at an upward angle is always a pleasure to read, let’s face it; we can dream about saying such things to our own private Nemesis and watching them wilt. It’s as satisfying as a hot fudge sundae on a hot summer day, and one settles into the fantasy with a long, happy sigh. ‘If only I could say that and get away with it….’

But her talent and her interests go further than slicing her enemies up in pieces so small you could feed them to Japanese tourists on a bed of brown rice, pleasant as that is to behold. She is remarkably candid in discussing her life and relationships, even for an anonymous blog.

A Writing Program for Marines

I’ve been roundly criticized for treating blogs written by soldiers from Iraq as if they were writing exercises. The responses ranged from a kind of motherly concern (‘Don’t you know what they’ve been going through? We don’t care how well they write! We’re just glad to hear from them.’) to freeper-style attacks (‘You disgust me. You’re a traitor to your country and I hope your server crashes.’)

Most of this criticism arose from a review I did of a blog called A Line in the Sand (good title, by the way; I didn’t say that before but it is) which, having a healthy suspicion of the internet, I suspected from the way it was written was an Army PR stunt. It wouldn’t be unprecedented. Not long ago I ran across a website run by an Air Force major that was aimed at getting adolescent boys interested in aviation. It was a charming site in many ways, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with engaging the enthusiasm of kids in a career, but in order to do that without setting up the wall that would inevitably be built between him and his audience if they knew what he was, the major pretends that he’s a 13-year-old boy (and does a pretty good job of it, too).

Well, A Line in the Sand turned out NOT to be a PR stunt but a genuine blog written by a Sgt Chris Missick, who wrote an amusing, tongue-in-cheek rebuttal to my suspicions. I answered by apologizing for the mistake and trying to explain why I had made it: that he relied on pat phrases and PR-style cliches to such a degree that the genuine point he was making was largely lost in a blizzard of standardized slogans. I also praised him for the passion and conviction in his writing and suggested it was much more persuasive on its own when he left out the sloganeering.

The response to that was bewildering. His defenders were far angrier than he was, and seemed to confuse a criticism of his writing style with a criticism of his service. I tried to make the point in my replies that these blogs were providing a real service, and that if their authors had the time and the inclination, getting better as writers would serve their cause and their purpose in writing their blogs. Sgt Missick, for example, had some excellent points to make in the post I criticized about the media charge that the people who go into the military do so because they have no other options open to them, saying, rather, that many have chosen their service deliberately despite the dangers and the disruption to their careers and home lives. But he had buried that important observation under a mountain of slogans and cliches that made the post hard to read and his point hard to get at.

There can be, if the authors want to pursue it, a much higher purpose for military writing than simply letting your friends and family know what’s going on where you are and how you’re doing. Sgt Missick had clearly aimed his blog at one of those higher purposes. There’s nothing wrong with using blogs as a sort of ‘letter home’ (see A Sailor’s Journey for a neat example of such a blog) but they have other uses: bringing a wider audience closer to their actual experiences, giving us a clearer understanding of the war from ground level, explaining for us what’s actually happening as opposed to what the media feeds us. MY WAR, for instance, takes us into the heart of what it’s like to serve in Iraq in a combat zone, while Iraq calling shows us the day-to-day details of military life in a war zone. Both are valuable if for different reasons, and both are well-written. Those are not separate values: they would each be less valuable if they were badly written.

The military, it would seem, agrees. The Marines, with the help of the National Endowment for the Arts, has begun sponsoring writing seminars at Camp Lejeune.

Sgt Missick’s Rebuttal

On Sunday, I reviewed three blogs by soldiers from Iraq, including one written by a Sgt Chris Missick called A Line in the Sand which I suspected wasn’t legitimate because of the way it read. It would seem I have done Sgt Missick a gross injustice.

Much of the following was written tongue in cheek.1. To address Mr. Arren’s fist fallacious statement, that I am “a PR flack for the military,” I have this to say: I am a 31 Romeo, a multi-channel systems transmission operator/maintainer. I am currently working with Army phone and internet networks, administrating them to ensure they run properly. Unfortunately I can not go too much further into my daily job descriptions because of something the military refers to OPSEC, Operational Security, and I can not breach that trust. I have never admitted to being on the frontlines on a daily basis and have always made quite clear that I am simply proud to be a cog in the wheel that is the machine of the US Army. Mr. Arren, you may just be receiving a confirmation from my lieutenant after he reads this, he’s a good man and can verify that my word is good. I do have PR experience in my civilian career, but when I am in uniform, I simply a soldier with a blogging hobby.

That isn’t necessary, Sgt Missick. I believe you. That was Charge No 1. Charge dismissed.