I'm Famous!!! (Edited to add op-ed piece)

Katherine Brengle

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Wed Mar-22-06 01:00 AM
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I'm Famous!!! (Edited to add op-ed piece)

Edited on Wed Mar-22-06 01:14 AM by Katherine Brengle

Well, not really, but I do have an interesting tid-bit to share.

I was talking to my husband tonight about his homecoming in a couple of weeks and just generally chatting, and as usual, some kind of political discussion arose.

Now, in order to explain clearly the next part of the story, I will have to throw out a little background. Long before I joined DU, last summer, my husband found out that he was being deployed to Iraq (he's a Marine Corps reservist). He was going to be leaving three weeks before our planned wedding, so we had to can the whole thing and have a quickie ceremony in his grandmother's back yard, which is pretty irrelevant, but it pissed me off and this is about anger, lol.

I was against the war from the beginning, and as time went by, my (then fiance) husband's opinion was swaying to the negative as well, so this was a very unwelcome development to us.

But we did what we had to do, and he left in June.

I was very, very angry. Understandably so. At the time, I was keeping a lame blog on AOL, just jotting down thoughts as they came to me every day. So, I was in a real rage one day soon after he left, and I wrote a very short entry in my blog about how mad I was that he had been deployed. No names, no locations, no security issues, just "Fuck You! To all of you willfully ignorant voters who put this maniacal ass in office, etc..." kind of thing.

A month or so later, when my hubby was actually in Iraq, he called me and told me that one of his superiors had ordered him to call and tell me to erase it.

He was clearly rattled, which made me feel bad, but more than this, I was extremely concerned that they had even seen it--it was a very low-trafficked, unknown little weblog. Not Daily Kos.

So, I didn't erase it, but I did black out all of the sections that specified my relationship to the person I was talking about (my husband) and all pronouns (he, him, his), and I put a disclaimer at the end of the post saying "This post has been censored by the United States Military" or something to that effect.

The next day, I wrote a brief op-ed about it called "Big Brother" and I let it lie at that.

Well, today I am talking to my hubby and he told me that I am famous among the guys over there with him--THEY ALL KNOW WHO I AM NOW! Apparently the story made its way around, and they have internet access on the base there, etc... And even better, most of them think highly of me for standing my ground, which makes me really happy.

So, in conclusion, our guys in Iraq might be watching Faux News by order of the White House, but they are not in the dark.

(Edit: Adding Op-Ed piece)

September 20, 2005
Big Brother
An open letter to readers and to the United States government
by Katherine Brengle

http://www.opednews.com

As many of my old readers know, I haven't contributed anything to the progressive dialogue in months. What many surely do not know is that I have been on hiatus because my husband was preparing to deploy to the Middle East, where he finally landed today.

I have been understandably angry, depressed, and unfocused over the past three months. For someone in my position, someone who writes about the evils of war and critically about the direction in which our country is moving, someone who stands in snow and rain and under the hot sun trying to reach out to ordinary Americans and open their eyes to these very issues, this is an even harder than usual situation to be in.

In light of all this, soon after we found out that my husband had been activated and would soon be deployed, I needed to lash out without hurting anyone. I turned to an old online journal I hadn't been using much, and posted a brief, vague, very angry message expressing my general rage at what was happening to my family.

End of story.

Until this morning. This morning I was informed that someone in the military had stumbled across my speck of a diatribe and was quite agitated. I was asked to remove it.

I'm all for homeland security (although I find the phrase itself more than a little creepy), so I double checked to make sure I hadn't inadvertently, in my anger, given out sensitive information about my husband or his location. I had not.

Now, I may be young, but I am not naive.

No one "stumbled" across my angry scribbling. In the case that anyone did happen to find it, purely by accident, my last name is not my husband's last name, and there would have been no reason for the reader to look further into me.

The sad truth is, someone probably saw my husband addressing a letter or asked him my name, recognized it (wow, I'm famous) or Googled it, and came up with some stuff he didn't agree with.

It's not easy being a liberal, antiwar writer with a military man for a husband, but it also isn't a free pass for the government, or any portion of it, to demand that I keep quiet or censor myself.

I was and am fully within my Constitutional rights to speak out against this war, and any other action of my government that I find objectionable, regardless of who I am married to. In fact, I believe that I am obligated to do so.

End of story.