nancynall.com » Neidermeyer lives.
«
»

Neidermeyer lives.

Amer­i­can son:

(Born into an auto­mo­tive for­tune), Erik Prince, with three older sis­ters, was a hard­work­ing boy, an ath­lete whose straight-arrow ways amazed class­mates. Even at Hol­land Chris­t­ian High, he stood out. He nei­ther drank nor smoked. While friends flashed new-wave hair­cuts or mul­lets in the 1980s, he was one of two boys pic­tured in his senior year­book with a crew cut.

…After grad­u­at­ing, Prince headed to the U.S. Naval Acad­emy, only to quit after three semes­ters. He told friends he was dis­ap­pointed in the matu­rity and moral­ity of his fel­low midshipmen.

“I know when he got back, he said that he thought every­body at the acad­emy would just bleed red, white and blue like he did,” the for­mer coach, Heethuis said. “But he found out some peo­ple were just there for a free education.”

Prince landed an intern­ship in the early 1990s in the White House under then-President George Bush. Again, he was disappointed.

He later told the Grand Rapids Press: “I saw a lot of things I didn’t agree with — homo­sex­ual groups being invited in, the bud­get agree­ment, the Clean Air Act, those kinds of bills.”

I have a mantra that I use some­times; I devised it when I was liv­ing in Indi­ana, and had to keep a straight face when, for instance, my neigh­bor said he was mov­ing to the sub­urbs so his chil­dren wouldn’t be sub­jected to “outcome-based edu­ca­tion” in Fort Wayne schools. I’d say to myself: “Every­one trav­els a dif­fer­ent path to this moment in time. Peo­ple see dif­fer­ent things along the way, which may lead them to dif­fer­ent con­clu­sions about how the world works. Their path is not my path, and I respect their right to travel it and make up their own minds.”

Repeated inside one’s head, per­haps with a nod and smile, it makes for far smoother rela­tions in life than going with a knee-jerk, “God, you are so full of shit.” And the thing is, I really believe it. I know some of you who dis­agree with me might believe I tip a lit­tle too far into the you-are-so-full-of-shit direc­tion, but in my heart of hearts, I think this coun­try is big enough for all of us, and is, in fact, bet­ter for it. Viva diver­sity, all diver­sity. Hon­est: I don’t want to live in a world where every­one agrees with me.

Only some­times do I despair. The pro­file of Erik Prince quoted above was one such moment. I had to sit for a long time digest­ing it before I came up with some­thing good to say about this son of priv­i­lege who grew up to be some sort of patri­otic robo-monster, a boy who scorned his Naval Acad­emy class­mates for being there for “the free education” — It’s always the rich ones who don’t know what edu­ca­tion is worth, isn’t it? — who then went on to raise a mer­ce­nary army where the war­riors are paid in the neigh­bor­hood of $100K (but aren’t in it for the money, “just loyal Amer­i­cans who ‘bleed red, white and blue.’”). And it was this: Well, at least he didn’t go the George Bush route.

If Erik Prince’s pri­vate jet — I’m assum­ing Black­wa­ter has one — went down today, his obit­u­ar­ies would be respect­ful and, in some cir­cles any­way, even rev­er­ent. A son of priv­i­lege who nev­er­the­less worked hard, achieved much, gave much back, he’d be lion­ized as the best Amer­ica has to give to the world. Even though, for all his fine qual­i­ties, he seems to have devel­oped ideas that are noth­ing short of un-American.

Such as:

That Amer­ica should fight wars with sol­diers for hire, for starters. There’s a rea­son our pro­fes­sional sol­dier class is small, and works for respect and glory, not money. There’s a rea­son mer­ce­nar­ies get the same respect as pros­ti­tutes. There’s a rea­son “war prof­i­teer” isn’t a term of endearment.

That mak­ing pol­icy means get­ting your way, every time. I love these guys, the sorts who carry a copy of the Con­sti­tu­tion in their back pock­ets, and for­get what it took to write the thing, i.e., com­pro­mise. Then it meant fight­ing over a bicam­eral leg­is­la­ture. Today it means meet­ing with gay-rights groups and craft­ing bud­get deals. Same idea — con­sen­sus. Win­ning an elec­tion doesn’t mean ignor­ing the peo­ple in the coun­try who didn’t vote for your guy.

Among other things.

I notice the Freep reader com­ments quickly turned up a you-can’t-HANDLE-the-truth con­tin­gent, which may be about the only defense of this out­fit one can make. Dream of an Amer­ica that takes its war­mak­ing seri­ously enough to ask sac­ri­fice from every­one, of one that doesn’t tor­ture or tol­er­ate civil­ian “con­trac­tors” who shoot civil­ians, and you get a sneer and a wave-off.

Every­one trav­els a dif­fer­ent path to this moment in time. Peo­ple see dif­fer­ent things along the way, which may lead them to dif­fer­ent con­clu­sions about how the world works. Their path is not my path, and I respect their right to travel it and make up their own minds.

Eh. It was that kind of morn­ing. The Prince story was the first thing I read. The sec­ond was on Page One of the NYT, about the puz­zling, seem­ingly inex­plic­a­ble rise of rape as a weapon of ter­ror in east­ern Congo. Warn­ing: Do not read after a recent break­fast. And why is it hap­pen­ing? Well, shit hap­pens, and then it hap­pens again:

Many Con­golese aid work­ers denied that the prob­lem was cul­tural and insisted that the wide­spread rapes were not the prod­uct of some­thing ingrained in the way men treated women in Con­golese soci­ety. “If that were the case, this would have showed up long ago,” said Wil­helmine Ntake­buka, who coor­di­nates a sex­ual vio­lence pro­gram in Bukavu.

Instead, she said, the epi­demic of rapes seems to have started in the mid-1990s. That coin­cides with the waves of Hutu mili­ti­a­men who escaped into Congo’s forests after exter­mi­nat­ing 800,000 Tut­sis and mod­er­ate Hutus dur­ing Rwanda’s geno­cide 13 years ago.

Mr. Holmes said that while gov­ern­ment troops might have raped thou­sands of women, the most vicious attacks had been car­ried out by Hutu militias.

“These are peo­ple who were involved with the geno­cide and have been psy­cho­log­i­cally destroyed by it,” he said.

Mr. Bourque called this phe­nom­e­non “reversed val­ues” and said it could develop in heav­ily trau­ma­tized areas that had been steeped in con­flict for many years, like east­ern Congo.

After this, I was tempted to go back to bed. But then I read this story, which made me no more opti­mistic about the state of the world, but at least had an ele­ment of grim humor in it. Only in Ann Arbor:

Last month, about 1,100 mem­bers of the (People’s Food Co-op) voted on a pro­posal that, if approved, would ban the store from sell­ing goods from Israel. The results are to be released Thurs­day after a year of debate across metro Detroit. The co-op has many mem­bers in the tri-country area who have closely fol­lowed the controversy.

I love Ann Arbor, I loved liv­ing there, it’s the only place I’ve lived where I felt really and truly at home, at one with my peo­ple. But even I have my lim­its, and I think it’s right around the Pales­tine: Peace not Cous­cous zone:

The con­tro­versy started when a shop­per got upset after see­ing that the store was sell­ing Israeli cous­cous. A peti­tion drive was launched, and a group called Boy­cott Israeli Goods gar­nered enough sig­na­tures to get a bal­lot pro­posal on which the co-op’s roughly 6,000 mem­bers could vote. Two pre­vi­ous co-op boy­cotts involved tuna that harmed dol­phins and grapes, in sup­port of farm work­ers. Both boy­cotts ended years ago.

Last month, mem­bers cast bal­lots on the Israeli-products boy­cott. At times, the argu­ments involved anti-Semitic sen­ti­ments. Some boy­cott sup­port­ers held up Nazi swastikas out­side the store, con­cern­ing many shoppers.

OK, anti-Semitism and swastikas = not funny. I did indi­cate the humor was grim.

It’s this heat that’s mak­ing me crabby. I went to a high-school foot­ball game Fri­day — half of it, any­way — and sat in the stands in sheer mis­ery, feel­ing my styling prod­ucts melt down my neck in a slimy trail. We raked leaves on Sat­ur­day at the lake cot­tage in shorts and T-shirts, and the fire after­ward, always a pleas­ant rit­ual of fall, was sheer mis­ery. You read about the Chicago Marathon, surely. And yes­ter­day I did the unthink­able — turned on the air con­di­tion­ing. In October.

Well, by Wednes­day the tem­per­a­ture will be back into the 50s, and I’ll have some­thing new to bitch about.

Have a groovy Monday.

Posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 7:20 am
in Current events.

Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

27 responses to
“Neidermeyer lives.”

  1. Connie said on October 8th, 2007 at 8:14 am

    While you were turn­ing the air on I was swim­ming in our pool. In October!

    Eric Prince’s father and my father were room mates for a year in grad school. (At a quasi fra­ter­nity known as Dutch House, orig­i­nally founded to pro­vide a safe Chris­t­ian house for Dutch boys head­ing to Ann Arbor from the Holland/Grand Rapids area. It’s still there.)

    My Dad still talks about run­ning into Ed Prince in a Hol­land restau­rant some years ago, and how excited he was to be intro­duced to Prince’s com­pan­ion, Dr. James Dob­son. Yup, that’s my Dad.

  2. brian stouder said on October 8th, 2007 at 8:44 am

    Inter­est­ing arti­cle on the Black­wa­ter guy.

    Did any of the Freep com­menters draw a par­al­lel between this straight-arrow, black-and-white, raise an army and go fight, scion of a wealthy fam­ily, and Teddy Roosevelt?

    Prince strikes me as noth­ing so much as an anachronism

    (edit: btw, if I recall the end-credits cor­rectly, Nei­der­meyer went to Viet­nam, where his col­leagues promptly fragged him!)

  3. Laura said on October 8th, 2007 at 9:13 am

    (edit: btw, if I recall the end-credits cor­rectly, Nei­der­meyer went to Viet­nam, where his col­leagues promptly fragged him!)

    Yes, but if you were lis­ten­ing closely in The Twi­light Zone movie, you’d know that his troops later regret­ted off­ing him.

  4. LA mary said on October 8th, 2007 at 11:04 am

    If Erik Prince is like a few wealthy Dutch Reformed church types I’ve known, he truly believes what he is doing is right, and that not only does he deserve the rewards he’s get­ting, the fact he’s get­ting rewarded proves he’s right.

  5. Robert Rouse said on October 8th, 2007 at 11:25 am

    Okay, Nancy, you nailed it with the title of the post. Erik Prince IS Neidermeyer.

  6. nancy said on October 8th, 2007 at 11:58 am

    You can just hear him say­ing, “Respect­fully sub­mit­ted, Dou­glas C. Nei­der­meyer, sergeant at arms.”

  7. ashley said on October 8th, 2007 at 1:22 pm

    Unfor­tu­nately, I can also hear him say­ing “We now con­se­crate the bond of obedience”.

  8. beb said on October 8th, 2007 at 1:32 pm

    When I read that Erik Prince was the brother of Betsy DeVos my jaw dropped. My god, I thought, he _IS_ the son of satan!

  9. brian stouder said on October 8th, 2007 at 1:38 pm

    Eric Prince of Darkness?

    (I guess it dove­tails with ‘Blackwater’…from Revelation’s lake, no doubt!)

  10. nancy said on October 8th, 2007 at 1:44 pm

    Actu­ally, I think Black­wa­ter comes from their orig­i­nal facil­ity, which was adja­cent to a swamp, hence.

  11. Dave B. said on October 8th, 2007 at 2:33 pm

    Prince seems to have the same mind­set as Oliver North did back dur­ing the Iran/Contra scandal.

  12. ashley said on October 8th, 2007 at 2:39 pm

    I thought they just really liked the Doo­bie Brothers.

  13. brian stouder said on October 8th, 2007 at 2:45 pm

    ol’ Miss­sis­sippi, she’s call­ing my name

  14. Jolene said on October 8th, 2007 at 2:58 pm

    Hadn’t heard of Betsy DeVos before, so I looked her up. Pretty amaz­ing story.

    An excerpt: “I know a lit­tle some­thing about soft money, as my fam­ily is the largest sin­gle con­trib­u­tor of soft money to the national Repub­li­can Party,” Betsy DeVos wrote in an op-ed for the Capi­tol Hill news­pa­per Roll Call. “I have decided, how­ever, to stop tak­ing offense at the sug­ges­tion that we are buy­ing influ­ence. Now I sim­ply con­cede the point. They are right. We do expect some things in return.

    What they expect, of course, is good clean gov­ern­ment that cre­ates tax loop­holes espe­cially for their busi­ness, oh, and “a con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ing phi­los­o­phy con­sist­ing of lim­ited gov­ern­ment and respect for tra­di­tional Amer­i­can virtues”.

  15. Jolene said on October 8th, 2007 at 3:01 pm

    A fun col­umn on Eric Prince’s con­gres­sional tes­ti­mony by Dana Mil­bank, WaPo’s Chief of Snark.

  16. LA mary said on October 8th, 2007 at 5:27 pm

    What Dana Mil­bank showed, and what I was most offended by in what I saw of Eric’s tes­ti­mony, was his smug­ness. How eff­ing offen­sive. His inher­ently nasty com­pany has never lost some­one they were pro­tect­ing. They have killed a cou­ple hun­dred peo­ple who may or may not have been threat­en­ing, and one of them had a few too many at a Christ­mas party and killed the VP’s body guard, but they’ve never lost some­one in their charge. Jeez. Ric­o­chets? Gotta watch out for those ricochets.

  17. USNA Ancient said on October 8th, 2007 at 6:46 pm

    hmmm … I won­der –if at for­mal occa­sions for the Black­wa­ter “fam­ily”- if the pre­scribed uni­form is black and sil­ver with light­ning bolt “s” and death’s head insignias and jack­boots and mas­ter prince is greeted with “sieg heils” ? I imag­ine Hitler and Torque­mada both truly believed in their mis­sions in life as well !

    This is one really scary dude … and I won­der about the long-range [or maybe not so long-range] aims of this reli­gious fanatic and his mer­ce­nary army and wannabe air force inso­far as a home based coup is con­cerned … shades of Aaron Burr with reli­gion on the side ?

    I would be really inter­ested in hear­ing more from those that knew him at the Acad­emy … seems entirely pos­si­ble that he got there and found that he was not the demi-god he pic­tured him­self to be and which he has now done all in his power and money to make him­self appear.

    How appro­pri­ate for the Hal­loween sea­son ! … if only it wasn’t real !

  18. brian stouder said on October 9th, 2007 at 7:30 am

    Well, we can move from pon­der­ing the metic­u­lous mer­ce­nary, to con­sid­er­ing Fort Wayne’s kooky can­di­date for mayor

    http://​www​.jour​nal​gazette​.net/​a​p​p​s​/​p​b​c​s​.​d​l​l​/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​?​A​I​D​=​/​2​0​0​7​1​0​0​9​/​L​O​C​A​L​/​7​1​0​090345

    In this account of stu­pid­ity within the Kelty cam­paign, the best quote was “This isn’t a race for stu­dent coun­cil.” And the Journal-Gazette reaches more peo­ple than the South Side Times (a high school news­pa­per), and Kelty’s cake got the front page above the fold!

    (it’s too easy to say that this lat­est turn of events ‘takes the cake’, but cer­tainly it pro­vides more icing for it)

  19. Kim said on October 9th, 2007 at 8:09 am

    I’d direct any­one intrigued/appalled by Erik Prince’s story to this Virginian-Pilot series from 2006, which was a well-deserved Pulitzer final­ist for explana­tory reporting.

    http://​con​tent​.hamp​ton​roads​.com/​s​t​o​r​y​.​c​f​m​?​s​t​o​r​y​=​1​0​8​1​0​6​&​a​m​p​;​r​a​n​=​202193

    Nei­der­meyer is bril­liant! And, yes, Nance, you are right (again) about the ori­gin of the Black­wa­ter name. Btw, I see these guys all the time, and they are right scary, even in the good old U.S. of A.

    NN EDIT: Kim, your link is redi­rect­ing to the home page. Is this story the one you wanted to call our atten­tion to?

  20. Kim said on October 9th, 2007 at 8:47 am

    Nope — some­thing is weird as I try to link it. Go to http://​www​.pilo​ton​line​.com, click on the news bar and go to spe­cial reports. The series titled “Black­wa­ter: Inside America’s Pri­vate Army” is at the bot­tom. Sorry, but it’s really worth the trouble.

  21. Dorothy said on October 9th, 2007 at 8:48 am

    http://​con​tent​.hamp​ton​roads​.com/​s​t​o​r​y​.​c​f​m​?​s​t​o​r​y​=​1​0​8​1​0​6​&​a​m​p​;​r​a​n​=​202193

    This is the link, I think, that Kim intended. Not sure why it was link­ing back to the home page — I hope this one doesn’t do that.

    My daugh­ter was a copy edi­tor for this project! She was quite excited to be part of a Pulitzer-nominated team in her 2nd year at the paper!

    (edited to add — I clicked on both links — mine and Kim’s — and they both worked.)

  22. nancy said on October 9th, 2007 at 8:54 am

    Thanks, Kim and Dorothy. The chap­ter on Black­wa­ter in New Orleans post-K was dis­gust­ing. I hope Ash­ley sees it. Those soul­less, gut­less pricks.

  23. Kim said on October 9th, 2007 at 9:08 am

    Dorothy, I’ll have to intro­duce myself to your daugh­ter next time I am over at the Pilot. My for­mer writ­ing partner/friend for life at a dif­fer­ent paper was one of the reporters on that series. Small, small world.

  24. Dorothy said on October 9th, 2007 at 12:33 pm

    Very cool, Kim. Her name is Laura. She’s 5’11″ so you prob­a­bly won’t miss her!

  25. ashley said on October 9th, 2007 at 3:52 pm

    Black­wa­ter was hired as pri­vate secu­rity every­where around New Orleans. The rich fuck­mooks of Audubon Place had them guard­ing their man­sions while peo­ple died of thirst. Scott Cowen had full time guards while Vera was floating.

    They were dri­ving SUVs with night vision down St. Charles avenue at 70 MPH in the mid­dle of the night.

    I per­son­ally saw them almost break a guy’s arm, for no appar­ent rea­son. He also put a Tonfa in the guy’s throat. The case didn’t go to court, or I would have been able to tes­tify against them. Damn.

    I say they’re crim­i­nal mer­ce­nar­ies, and should be shot on sight. As Nance knows, there was only one good mer­ce­nary, and he was headless.

  26. basset said on October 9th, 2007 at 11:33 pm

    Mean­while, on the Israel front…

    http://​www​.belfast​tele​graph​.co​.uk/​f​e​a​t​u​r​e​s​/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​3​0​4​1​6​24.ece

  27. brian stouder said on October 10th, 2007 at 7:00 am

    Inter­est­ing arti­cle, Bas­set. This pas­sage seems to cap­ture the essence -

    Last week, police arrested two 13-year-old boys on sus­pi­cion of daub­ing swastikas and naked women on the door of a Haifa syn­a­gogue. A 19-year-old was charged with set­ting fire to a booth where Haifa’s reli­gious Jews cel­e­brated the Sukkot fes­ti­val. In Bnei Brak, a pre­dom­i­nantly Ortho­dox town near Tel Aviv, some­one painted “Heil Hitler” on a syn­a­gogue wall.

    So if you’re a devel­op­men­tally stunted kiddo who wants to be as out­ra­geous as pos­si­ble, and you live in Israel — paint­ing swastikas and naked women(!) onto the wall of a syn­a­gogue is what you do.

    Sounds like a more vir­u­lent impulse of the sort that dri­ves some peo­ple to be ‘goth’ or to pierce their fore­heads and color their hair green, and pro­claim their strik­ing non-conformance with the world around them.….as they stand around with noth­ing to do

«
»