Black Lightning

The Hotel Tacloban

Every time I think I've made a terrible mistake by not serving my country through military service, I come across a book like The Hotel Tacloban and realize how lucky I am. The book arrived yesterday, and I read the first 50 or 60 pages right away; couldn't put it down. I'll do a complete review when I finish, but off the bat I can relate that Douglas Valentine's father, Doug Valentine, was a WWII veteran of the Pacific, Papua New Guinea specifically; and after somehow surviving the war, and being a prisoner of war, Valentine Sr. returned to the States and disavowed the Army and his service for forty years. Over the course of those decades he had several heart attacks, strokes, and open heart surgeries. He was haunted with psychological problems. And near the end of his life, he finally sat down with Valentine Jr., and a tape recorder, to tell his story, which is now The Hotel Tacloban.

Some crucial themes that relate to other major issues in life are already apparent in the book, and I'd say the biggest of those is the theme of the "chain of command" vs. the best hands. (Recall from the Disclosure Project video, the statement relating to when Eisenhower lost control of the covert projects' reverse engineering of recovered crash materials -- to the detriment of civilian society, those classified projects were "not in the best hands.") In life, there are people in charge because the resume consciousness of the "chain of command" put them there (rank), and there are the people who are truly excellent; the ones who know exactly what to do, when to do it; masters from experience; the best hands (merit). And the problem in life is the "chain of command" is usually calling the shots while "the best hands" are marginalized off to the side somewhere. This is the crucial paradigm that needs to be reversed if civilization wants to advance on a path that doesn't drag every cursed soul through the "Hotel Tacloban" of their own life.

The "chain of command" metaphor tends to corroborate MLK's line, from "Dignity for Dollars" (ash Flow),



Compare that quote to these concluding paragraphs from The Hotel Tacloban:



It's insane to claim "blind obedience" as an exemption from "individual moral responsibility," but nonetheless this is precisely the problem our troubled society exhibits, in a sentence. Witness Katrina. The veneer of political authority too often trumps the substance of moral authority -- rank supersedes merit. I don't know why that conflict comes up so much, but it seems to be the root of all our problems today, as far as political paralysis enabling the status quo of unacknowledged self-destruction to fester. Plenty of individuals recognize the problem -- but they're marginalized as individuals; there's no media/human resources structure to give their consciousness a louder voice in the world, save what they scrape together among themselves. But why should people with a consciousness other than "resume consciousness" have to go uphill just to become even? Why was it up to one man, for example -- Fletcher Prouty -- to "even the playing field" for future historians? What if he had never existed? What would we do? And therein lies the problem. We're not taught since birth to be skeptical of political authority, but rather to embrace it blindly. Only a few key individuals who tell the truth seem to be able to overcome the obstacles thrown their way and be heard by others. And that thin layer of miraculousness is the only thing between us and the Hotel Tacloban. Does that seem right to you?

For other themes, the point I made the other day in the I. F. Stone thread (Eternal Flame) about "opportunity" making powerful elites powerful more so than "themselves" making themselves powerful, that comes up in Valentine's line,



of the chain of command. The disease of incumbency, if you will. Incumbency based on complacency rather than merit. Haphazard opportunity steering tomorrow's history, inevitably veering off course.

And the "chain of command"/"not in the best hands" theme comes up again in the introduction to Corso's book, The Day After Roswell, but that's another post . . . just suffice it to say for now that the "chain of command" mentality, as it existed in the "Cold War" U.S. military structure, was extremely closed-minded in its thought processes -- to the point of being incompetent. A few people on the inside, exposed to the fortuitous opportunity of recovering crashed technology, inadvertently changed the world for the worse and didn't even realize that that's what they were doing until decades later. Makes one wonder how the hell did they get their job when they had no consciousness of its broadest implications? How did such an out of control system get so entrenched -- idolized and protected?

Valentine continues,



And, again, therein lies the problem. Not that the "hot water" exists, but that it's being sent to the wrong target. That's how profoundly upside-down we are as a civilization. Rank supersedes merit, ignorance supersedes knowledge, war supersedes peace, suicide supersedes life. The Hotel Tacloban is the human condition. We ignore this truth at our own risk -- or we embrace it as our own salvation.

There are many ways to serve one's country. The military isn't the best one.

There was just a meeting of Winter Soldiers telling of their actions in Iraq. Sobering and heartbreaking.

http://ivaw.org/