In Memorium III ; the last ...

It’s a little bittersweet, coming to the end of the Memorial Day Weekend. There was so much divisiveness on social media that we left and worked on the farm all afternoon. It seems that, instead of relying upon the sadness of previous wars to steer us from another, they are drawing us inexorably into another Middle East quagmire. They say that US military spending for FY 2020 will reach $989 billion once you add components hidden in other budgets. That’s nearing a trillion dollars, people.

Perhaps when you spend that much money on something, it makes you want to use it.

We ended the weekend revisiting some stories from the 79^th Infantry Division, Brenda’s dad’s unit. The first wasn’t a story he told. Rather, it was something that she read this week that he never mentioned at all. It seems that the 79^th was one of the units that discovered a Nazi concentration camp. According to the piece she found, they made the entire division view it.

As I say, he never mentioned it. He did tell about a squad of American soldiers taking a group of men claiming to be “Polski, nicht German,” behind a building and shooting them. War can make your children do things you never imagined, sometimes to other people’s children. There’s sad scene in one of the documentaries about the fine sunny morning that the United States of America began dropping bombs on the people of Baghdad. There’s a snippet where a man runs across a plaza between explosions carrying a son of maybe 11 or 12 years of age. The child has wet himself through fear, his backside revealing it to the camera. In all likelihood, he’s not an American ally today.

The other incident we discussed yesterday was one that her dad did relate. It happened during the last few days of WWII in Europe. The 79^th was encamped at some resort area in Germany, awaiting the Armistice. German forces still occupied the nearby hills and were laconically, it seems, getting rid of their artillery. They were lobbing shells in with no apparent tactic in mind in the general direction of the spa. A squad of Americans, including B’s dad, were lined up for chow. A random shell hit nearby and took the off the head of a soldier standing in line. It was the unit’s last casualty.

Julius would always end this story with, “And he was the shortest guy in the squad.”

War is a terrible, unpredictable, inexplicable thing. Why, after once losing more than 58,000 of our country’s best in its idiocy, we would let it all happen again is beyond me. Dick Cheney, in his grotesque and twisted “logic,” hit a nerve when he tried to justify an all-volunteer army. “Why send men to war who don’t want to go to war when you can pay men to go who do want to go to war?

Only a Dick Cheney could fail to miss such a point as lay nested therein. If only Lysistrata and her comrades were here, they might could explain it.

Shall we say "lo, look what
our hands hath wrought?

Sailing to Oblivium: March 23, 2018

It seems I spend a good part of my time irritating my friends, a good part trying not to irritate my friends, and much time saying “What the hell?”

I guess that causes one to ask the primal question, who am I?

Well here goes.

A lifelong Democrat, I certainly don’t agree with all that the party has historically represented. For example, I believe that Orval Faubus, governor of my state during my formative years, was an evil man by the standards of his time. He nearly destroyed my state, but would be a highly respected conservative senator these days, probably considered a moderate Republican.

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t grow up hating people who supported the opposition party. I still don’t. I respect any rational reasonable person, no matter what their politics. I’m wondering, though, how some may feel about a party led my Donald Trump.

In my lifetime, I think Dwight Eisenhower was a fine leader and a not harmful president. I was bemused to learn that Lyndon Johnson, as Senate Majority Leader, often helped Ike more than Ike’s own party in achieving some of his goals.

That’s how political life in America used to be.

I think, in my state, Winthrop Rockefeller was the most inspiring governor of my times, and we’ve had some good ones since. I stopped in Arkansas, when the Navy had paid my way all the way back to San Francisco because I had read about the things Rockefeller was trying to do. Am I glad I stayed? Well, I met my future wife here and have no particular penchant for computers, so yes. Arkansas isn’t as poor and ignorant as much as it thinks poor and ignorant.

I voted once for a member of the opposition party. It was a time when a crossover vote in the primaries enabled Arkansans to rid the state of a particularly icky politician. I have no regrets over that vote.

The rest of the time, though, I’ve remained a “Blue Dog.” The candidates haven’t been perfect—both parties must share blame for Vietnam—but they’ve been successful and, other than a case of an overactive libido, haven’t been a national embarrassment. We’ve even produced a statesman or two. And, although a firm believer in the First Amendment, I do use the Sermon on the Mount in making political decisions. Therefore, I think Jimmy Carter was the finest person we’ve had as president in my time, though he made many mistakes while having “a hard row to hoe.”

I think the push and pull of opposing parties creates a sound government. I would never wish for one-party rule.

Although I still weep at times over the fact that a Supreme Court that included Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia elected George W. Bush president, I’m not sure he was a bad man. I am sure that his primary handlers, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were. The stain of their bloody hands will mar America forever.

And speaking of such, look now at the man whose bloody hands will point young Americans into a land war, if past performance is any indicator of future behavior. If there is now a deranged and dangerous man in American politics, it is John Bolton. Ask the spirits of the perhaps more than a million dead from the Iraq War he helped orchestrate, creating in the process an unstable Middle East. His coming sins will only be surpassed by our shame.

As for the current state of America, the sounds of the Old Testament, in Samuel One Chapter 19, ring in my ears: "Your glory, O Israel, lies slain on your heights. How the mighty have fallen!”

It is my personal opinion that America’s greatness is being slain upon the heights of greed and avarice.

It further appears to me that insidious forces are at work in my beloved country. I fear that the cable TV show “Fox News” is destroying the cognitive ability of a vast segment of American society, for a reason that is as inexplicable as it is alarming. The fact that its major owners are an Australian and a Saudi Arabian may suggest a lust for global power, accompanied by a lack of concern, account for the reason more than any organized game plan.

As America witnessed the “Doomsday Clock” bound forward a notch yesterday, and as parents and grandparents ponder how they might keep loved ones out of a ground war such as the one that mauled those of my generation, the days ahead look dark to me.

This is my opinion. I’ll never support a government that would punish anyone for having a different one.

Unlike many though, I’ll be the happiest person in America if future events prove me wrong.

Damnation

There are things one has read dozens of times that suddenly pierce like lightning on a late evening reading. From the ending of “Heart of Darkness,” Marlow lies to Kurtz’s lover about the details of Kurtz's death:

"I was on the point of crying at her, 'Don't you hear them?' The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. 'The horror! The horror!'

"'His last word—to live with,' she murmured. 'Don't you understand I loved him—I loved him—I loved him!'

"I pulled myself together and spoke slowly.

"'The last word he pronounced was—your name.'

"I heard a light sigh, and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short by an exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable pain. 'I knew it—I was sure!' . . . She knew. She was sure. I heard her weeping; she had hidden her face in her hands. It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn't he said he wanted only justice? But I couldn't. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark—too dark altogether. . . "

 It dawned on me to compare that passage to the immortal one from Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” in which Huck makes the (soul-damning) decision not to send a letter turning the slave Jim in, as he is legally and, by the code of the times, morally, bound to do.

“I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

"All right, then, I'll go to hell"—and tore it up. It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn't. And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.”

 So, one wonders, how would Conrad and Twain feel about tormenting young immigrant children? Would it free our soul from damnation or, would we find comfort in believing that, “The heavens do not fall for such a trifle?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See also: www.wattensawpress.com   www.cwblogsite.com

Torture

Before shipping out for overseas duty in 1968 (gosh it sounds so much more pleasant when you say it that way), I was sent to Survival Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training. Part of it involved a mock POW camp where trained “captors” had the authority to beat the hell out of you if you crossed them. I didn’t, but still got slapped around, thrown naked into a pile of dead tree limbs, had paper from the floor of a latrine stuffed in my mouth and was kicked in the ribs after being knocked down. I was pretty lucky. They were mean to some of those guys.

I didn’t protest when they locked me into a “potato-bin” looking thing just large enough to hold me while on my knees with my body folded over as far as it would go. I knew if I showed any fear or concern they would leave me in longer. So I waited them out and listened to some of the other guys yelling to be let out. Kinda scary. I decided then and there I didn't want really to be captured.

We all made it through except two. One was a known malingerer, maybe a plant. The other was this tough-talking warrant officer who babbled constantly about eating rattlesnake and how he looked forward to killing “natzies,” oops, so sorry … “gooks.” He fell apart when they started telling him what his wife was doing while he was gone. Must have hit a nerve. Anyway, they led him away and we never saw him again. They let the malingerer stick around and help guard us.

So when someone says we should torture prisoners, I’d sorta like to see them go through SERE training first. It still wouldn’t give them the right but it might sober them up a bit. It's funny how the only conservative senator against torture is the only one who has ever been tortured, isn't it?

 

Reckon whether he would
"soldier up" or squeal like a pig?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See also: www.wattensawpress.com