This could really make you cry:

He lost his arm serving his country in Iraq.

Now this wounded soldier is being discharged from his company in Fort Hood, Texas, without enough gas money to get home. In fact, the Army says 27-year-old Spc. Robert Loria owes it close to $2,000, and confiscated his last paycheck.

[snip]

Like many soldiers wounded in Iraq, Loria’s injuries were caused by a roadside bombing. It happened in February when his team from the 588th Battalion’s Bravo Company was going to help evacuate an area in Baqubah, a town 40 miles north of Baghdad. A bomb had just ripped off another soldier’s arm. Loria’s Humvee drove into an ambush.

When the second bomb exploded, it tore Loria’s left hand and forearm off, split his femur in two and shot shrapnel through the left side of his body. Months later, he was still recuperating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and just beginning to adjust to life without a hand, when he was released back to Fort Hood.

AFTER SEVERAL MORE MONTHS, the Army is releasing Loria. But “clearing Fort Hood,” as the troops say, takes paperwork. Lots of it.

Loria thought he’d done it all, and was getting ready to collect $4,486 in final Army pay.

Then he was hit with another bomb. The Army had another tally – of money it says Loria owed to his government.

A Separation Pay Worksheet given to Loria showed the numbers: $2,408.33 for 10 months of family separation pay that the Army erroneously paid Loria after he’d returned stateside, as a patient at Walter Reed; $2,204.25 that Loria received for travel expenses from Fort Hood back to Walter Reed for a follow-up visit, after the travel paperwork submitted by Loria never reached the correct desk. And $310 for missing items on his returned equipment inventory list.

“There was stuff lost in transportation, others damaged in the accident,” Loria said of the day he lost his hand. “When it went up the chain of command, the military denied coverage.”

[Via First Draft]

I read earlier today about the obscene amounts of money the Bush administration is soliciting for its inauguration. I can’t say exactly how it correlates to the tragedy described above — it just brought to mind the startling difference between the world of the architects of this war and those who are doing the fighting of it.

Mr. Bush’s inaugural committee, seeking to raise more than $40 million, a record, sent out hundreds of solicitations to the president’s biggest campaign contributors this week offering packages of party benefits and access to the president in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Even at a time of war when more than 138,000 American troops are serving in Iraq, the organizers say that the inaugural celebration at the end of the January will not be marked by any noticeable restraint and will cost more than any other in history.

That soldier lost his arm and can’t get home. And all this money — $40 million for a fucking party! — passing hands. I don’t know, something just seems off. Maybe it’s just me and my liberal conscience.

Still too burned out to post, but I wanted to share a most interesting article from The Economist on how China seeks to stifle its intellectual voices. I usually don’t snip entire articles, but you need to register for this, so here it is.

[Sidenote: I really, really, really don’t want this blog simply to be a chronology of malfeasances perpetrated by the CCP against its subjects. I had shifted away from that mode ever since I came home, focusing more on American politics and a broader view of things. I’ll try to limit my criticisms, which I am fully aware can be redundant and polemical. Now that my big work project is over, I’m going to try to get re-energized blogging about the sins of the Bush administration. Meanwhile, when I see interesting articles like this, I’ll keep sharing them.]

IN AN Orwellian obfuscation of its role, the Chinese Communist Party’s Propaganda Department prefers to translate its name these days as the Publicity Department. But one of its main tasks remains that of issuing secret directives to the state-controlled media telling them what not to report. And among its latest prohibitions is any encouragement for “public intellectuals” in China.

In recent years, the party had become more relaxed about intellectuals. Outspoken academics helped fuel the campus fervour that eventually erupted into mass protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. But the crackdown, followed a couple of years later by an economic boom, dampened demands for political change. The party began to worry more about unemployed workers and disgruntled peasants, and less about intellectuals—many of whom, anyway, were turning their attention to making money.

More recently, however, the rapid spread of the internet and the increasing commercialisation of the Chinese media have given intellectuals new avenues of expression. A few, including economists, social scientists and lawyers, have become well-known among the chattering classes for their critiques of social ills (though prudently, in most cases, not of the party itself). The term “public intellectuals” has crept into the media, encouraged not least by a Chinese translation last year of “Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline”, a book by an American judge, Richard Posner, examining the role of such commentators in America.

The Propaganda Department lost its patience after a magazine in Guangdong Province, Southern People Weekly, published a list of 50 Chinese public intellectuals in September. The market economy, said an accompanying commentary, had caused the rapid marginalisation of intellectuals. “But this is the time when China is facing the most problems in its unprecedented transformation, and when it most needs public intellectuals to be on the scene and to speak out.”

If the 50 had been loyal party stooges, all might have been forgiven. But among them were several who are decidedly not, including Zhang Sizhi, a defence lawyer who has argued in the trials of some of China’s best known dissidents; Cui Jian, a rock singer whose irreverence has irritated the authorities since his heyday in the Tiananmen era; Bei Dao, a poet who has been forced to live in exile since the 1989 unrest; and Wang Ruoshui (who died in 2002), a senior journalist and member of the party’s inner circle who turned dissident. A scathing commentary on the list, published last month by a Shanghai newspaper and republished by the party’s main mouthpiece, People’s Daily, said that promoting the idea of “public intellectuals” was really aimed at “driving a wedge between intellectuals and the party.” The window for free debate that opened a crack over the past couple of years, as China’s leadership shifted to the “fourth generation” of leaders, is closing again.

Oddly, perhaps, given the supposed indifference of urbanites to politics, two of the bestselling books in China this year have been about the “anti-rightist” campaign of 1957, during which half a million of the party’s intellectual critics were persecuted. One of the books, “Past Events Have Not Vanished Like Smoke”, was banned by the Propaganda Department. The other, “Inside Secrets of 1957: The Sacrificial Altar of Suffering”, is still for sale. Though probably not for long.

Brainysmurf has shut down; Gweilo Diaries seems to have vanished; Living in China is gone; Joseph hardly ever posts anymore; and my own blog is going to hell in a handbasket because I’m just too busy to work on it nowadays (and so depressed about American politics that I don’t even want to think about it). Is there something going around??

I enjoyed this article in the NY Times that looks at how history is being taught to Chinese high school students.

Most Chinese students finish high school convinced that their country has fought wars only in self-defense, never aggressively or in conquest, despite the People’s Liberation Army’s invasion of Tibet in 1950 and the ill-fated war with Vietnam in 1979, to take two examples.

Similarly, many believe that Japan was defeated largely as a result of Chinese resistance, not by the United States.

“The fundamental reason for the victory is that the Chinese Communist Party became the core power that united the nation,” says one widely used textbook, referring to World War II.

No one learns that perhaps 30 million people died from famine because of catastrophic decisions made in the 1950’s, during the Great Leap Forward, by the founder of Communist China, Mao Zedong.

Similar elisions occur in everything from the start of the Korean War, with an invasion of South Korea by China’s ally, North Korea, to the history of Taiwan, which Beijing claims as an irrevocable part of China.

“The Anti-Japanese War finally succeeded, and Taiwan came back to the motherland,” another leading textbook states, referring to Japan’s defeat in World War II and the loss of its colonial hold on Taiwan.

Read the article, which starts with a rather precious description of an actual lecture on World War II to Shanghai high schoolers.

Of course, if my own country keeps heading in its current direction and starts teaching Creationism as an alternative theory to how man came to be, then I won’t be able to complain much….

The CS Monitor has a wonderful account of a reporter’s trip to North Korea, the Axis of Evil’s most notorious member. For some odd reason, I too, like the reporter, wish I could go there, if only to be able to say I actually experienced life in the world’s most peculiar place. But I can’t say it sounds like a very fun trip — quite different from a weekend in Bangkok or even Shanghai.

There are a hundred other stories I’m hoping to blog about, and thanks for the ideas some of you sent me in email today. This is the busiest week of the year for my company, so I probably won’t get back into full gear before the weekend. Please stay tuned.

….or if you’re teaching there now, you will want to read a new masterpiece from Hank on the trials and tribulations of being a Laowai teacher in China. It’s funny, it’s maddening, it’s angry and loving and totally great. One thing’s for sure — his heart was in every syllable. Hank, there’s a book inside of you just waiting to be written. I’ll buy the very first copy.

A massive spam comment attack brought down my server last week and I’ve been unable to post for four days. Thanks to Stacy’s help at Sekimori I’m now back but not fully recovered (at least not emotionally). At one point, all my comments vanished and I thought they were gone forever. That was a very unhappy moment for me, as the comment threads are my favorite part of this blog. Stacy helped me recover the comments and upgrade to the newest version of MT complete with a very powerful version of MT Blacklist, and I think it may actually solve the spam nightmare for good. My only complaint is that MT’s interface shows up strangely with Firefox (though at least it now has operating HTML buttons for blockquoting, links and type formatting). So I may have to use IE for posting, distasteful as that is. Now I’ve got to get out of my siege mentality of the past week and back into blogger mentality. What a nightmare.

I’m in such a bad mood tonight (strictly due to a crushing workweek) I know I won’t post anything to be proud of. But I can’t let this go: If you can read only one article today, make it this one. Kristoff is at his best and his most angry, concluding the article with a brillliant coda:

China now dazzles visitors with luxury skyscrapers, five-star hotels and modern freeways. This boom is real and spectacular, but for China to be an advanced nation it needs not only spaceships, but also freedom.

Otherwise, all that dazzle is just a mirage. The Chinese leaders might recall an old peasant expression, “Lu fen dan’r, biaomian’r guang.” It means, “On the outside, even donkey droppings gleam.”

Read the whole thing, and I mean it.

UPDATE: Due to a technical problem, I have lost all the comments to this post. Some were really good, too. Sorry about that.