Sunrise With Schubert: February 10, 2018

Cleaning files on a rainy morning, I came across a photo Brenda took of a bunch of old men, the kind that annoy you at Walmart, the ones that hold up the line for a driver's license and then can't pass the eyesight test. In all likelihood, they are all dead now soon to be forgotten. They were young men, though, when they came ashore at Normandy on D-Day plus seven, and proceeded to fight their way across France, Belgium, and western Germany to a costly victory over fascism.

America loved them then.

The photo released any number of thoughts, some related, some not. They still whirl around inside me like a flock of blackbirds looking for a place to land.

It seems that, anymore, we don’t picture our veterans as proud men who came home from a war and took up their lives. Our image now is the pathetic figure of a man standing on the street corner with a sign proclaiming he is a homeless vet who needs help.

It would, no doubt, shock the unwary to learn how few of these men ever wore the uniform of our country. We believe them though, when they say they served, because the power of myth shreds reality like a tank crashing through a hedgerow, the type that those brave men of the 79^th Infantry Division had to fight through in their real war.

Back to the photograph. It made me think about men I knew as a young child. They weren’t old then. They were still young and proud. They had just whipped the asses of both Hitler and Hirohito and were reunited with those who loved them. It was time to get back to home and work.

Germany and Japan, both the deadly enemies in that forgotten war, are now friendly allies with our country. One wonders, however, how it all began. Theories abound, some more believable than others.

I thought about the country from which half of may ancestors came. What created the shame that resulted from Germany’s vision of the future? It’s easy to say that Hitler hated Jews and others and that he caused it all.

Recent history makes me wonder. I’m not sure that one man’s hatred could have caused the millions of deaths created by humankind’s venturing into a second planetary war. I can better understand now that Hitler was only the final ingredient that made the cauldron boil. Could he have just been the catalyst that energized a national psyche all primed and ready for aggression against anyone standing close and helpless? Psychopaths are very good at sensing anger and using it to suit their purposes.

Can a world be disrupted, now even destroyed, because the path to war is made, by individuals and groups of individuals, to seem like the “yellow brick road.” Can nefarious forces make a collective population believe that hatred of others is the philosophical equivalent of love for their country? Hitler and his cronies were very good at creating and spreading anger via the high-tech capabilities of their day.

Consider how easy it is, in time of the internet. With goading from a 24-hour propaganda machine posing as a news source, assistance from foreign enemies, and the lure of discord formed by social media, to foment hatred of identified targets. It is quite simple not only to create anger, but also to direct that anger at whomever we please, even innocent victims.

Could greed and love of power be transformed into violence directed toward others to the point where the world erupts again? If the men in the photo were young again, but knew what lay ahead, could they warn us away from the road to war? Or would we rush in again, feeding egos, serving the needs of foreign enemies posing as friends, and enriching the profiteers of warfare? Are we that angry?

The signs aren’t good.

They were young men when they
 crossed the Rhine into Germany

  

Morning Thoughts: February 9, 2018

We encountered an invitation yesterday to a feast of cognitive dissonance that would take the cake, so to speak. It produced such a boggling that the mind strained to get over it.

First, as we all know, or should, cognitive dissonance bespeaks the state, prevalent in homo sapiens, of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change.

In other words, we have perfected the ability not only to believe, but also to act upon, thoughts that are in exact opposition to one another. To wit:

- Reducing the main source of input into the budgetary process will result in an increase in revenue into that same process.

- A man who mocks those carrying a physical shortcoming through life, who demeans women, violates his marriage vows, and lies without regard for societal damage is a “good Christian man” who was sent by a benevolent deity to rescue America from the “original sin” of universal health care.

- That it is okay to pay some man $4 Million dollars a year to teach temporary college students to play a sandlot game, but it is not okay to teach the wondrous beauty of  expressive dance in our state-supported universities.

That’s the one I’m talking about.

Not teach dance? What a cold and sterile world we would face without dance and the other arts. Why, we might as well not teach a youth, who might be the next Dylan Thomas, Ralph Ellison, Cao Xueqin, Walt Whitman, Alice Walker, or Dante Alighieri, to make whole words out of mysterious symbols. We might as well discourage the girl or boy who might observe a starry sky and, with their gifted hands, produce a masterpiece that would inspire generations for centuries to come.

We should, by this standard, not recognize that the agonies of losing a loved one might be soothed by Bach’s Mass in B Minor.

We could go on forever. Let’s just say that we take a youth and teach that youth nothing but the harsh, cruel, image of a would not ennobled by the beauty of a sunset and only guided, mentally, by the avenues of the mind that lead to greed and personal power. What would we have as a reward for funding such education? If not a Vincent van Gogh, then what?

I don’t know. Maybe a conservative politician?

None of the arts. Just cipherin' for us.

Sunrise With Schubert: February 8, 2018

This idea that a person must stand and applaud a man, when they choose to exercise their First Amendment right not to, tickles me. Yeah, I know it’s not funny, but one can’t help laughing at times. It keeps the anxiety away, even if only for a while. They criticized Abraham Lincoln for using humor to soften the awful experience of visiting the Antietam battlefield site you know.

If Americans can’t find humor in the fact that a five-time draft dodger is suggesting a huge, North Korea-like military parade in his honor, Mark Twain must be spinning in his grave.

Yes, it is serious. Where, oh where on Earth, would our country be if a sitting president could demand and require our enthusiasm “on call” and punish us as traitors for disobedience?

It reminds me of a story they tell of the immortal TV personality Milton Berle. His show was taped and laugh-lines added to spice-up the final edition. Once, he liked a certain joke and insisted that the laugh-track be amplified and extended far beyond the wishes of his sound man.

When they viewed the final tape, and witnessed the out-of-balance laughter at the spot in question, Berle was reported to have turned to the sound man and said, “See, I told you that joke was funny.” If you will close your eyes for a moment and picture Donald Trump designing his own laugh track with his sycophants gathered round him , you'll chuckle. I promise. You can always cry afterwards.

I was out yesterday working for one of our state’s fine cities. A former mayor had requested a meeting with me on a contentious topic and I found myself a little apprehensive. Turns out, it was a most congenial and productive meeting. We were in a closed room just off the City Hall lobby. After the business was settled, war stories crept in and soon we were both guffawing loudly enough to be heard in the next block. We had both seen a great deal of life in municipal government. It is passing strange and funny at times.

Yesterday was like the scene in Local Hero when the Burt Lancaster character goes into the Beachcomber’s shack and shuts the entryway panel. Those outside can only listen to them having a merry time and wonder what is going on inside.

You should have seen the faces of the city staff when we walked out.

Yes, I know that Donald Trump is not a humorous phenomenon to a person who loves this country and has studied history, civics, economics, or the New Testament.

But, if humor helped get Abe Lincoln through the horrific period we call our Civil War, maybe it can help the modern generation survive its own particular reign of terror

Wow man. Now that's funny.

Morning Memories: February , 2018

Each branch of the service has its own way of communicating I suppose. I know the US Navy used to, some of it even repeatable.

I got the biggest kick out of a freshly-minted ensign while he was standing his first “Quarter Deck Watch,” on the old US Hunley, AS-31. They had sentenced me to a year and a half aboard her when I finished my tour “in-country.” I stood plenty of watches on the old quarterdeck, mindlessly ringing the ship’s bell and communicating orders via my bosun’s pipe to surly sailors still hung over from a night ashore.

You are aware, I suppose, of the phrase “red skies at night, sailor’s delight” and “red skies in the morning, sailors take warning.” It may surprise you to learn that it had more to do, in the old days, with whorehouse districts than with the weather. That’s a free tidbit.

Anyway, about that fresh young ensign, ready to make John Paul Jones proud, wherever his nautical bones rested. There was a little ordeal they put him through. The shipmates in the engine room would do it on purpose. To tell the truth, most anything a sailor does has a purpose, sometimes mired in antiquity and sometimes popping new and full blown from minds plagued with too much time available for breeding mischief.

It was done, usually on a slow weekend day. That’s when they let young ensigns rule the quarterdeck. The Navy of the late 1960s believed the commies were least likely to launch their mongrel hordes at us on a weekend. I’m not sure. They never did, though, so maybe it’s true.

Anyhow, the guys from below decks would send a squad “up and aft” to the fantail of our proud vessel and catch the fledgling officer in a moment of reverie. With a solemnity that would have made Bull Halsey shake his head in wonder, they would approach the unsuspecting officer, assume the position, salute and, in voice worthy of launching a nuclear attack, bellow, “Request permission to jack the shaft, … sir.”

The enlisted on duty, including myself, would suddenly find something that occupied every shred of attention in their being. Neither help nor solace was nigh for the self-imagined hero.

One thing they teach at “The Academy” is never to appear confused or bewildered in front of the enlisted. I think it started with the Phoenicians and filtered through history like a tenuous gene. Officers followed the rule the way a blackjack dealer follows the numbers.

But, “jack the shaft?”

It couldn’t be a nautical joke, perpetrated by the lower ranks. Officers didn’t rate such an honor. You never saw an officer being sent to fetch “six phantoms or waterline” or to stand “mail-buoy watch.” Perhaps they had their own pranks, the officers. I don’t know. They were a mirthless lot, so somehow I doubt it.

But, “jack the shaft?”

They had a way of asking it, those enginemen, that made it sound only slightly less important than a surgeon requesting a scalpel while removing a brain tumor.

It was always more fun to watch the episode if the officer in question had to pause and allow someone to walk past the quarterdeck in the middle of things. To come onto the ship, you had to salute the flag, salute the Officer of the Deck, and say “Request permission to come aboard, sir,” as if, on this great planet Earth, you had no other place to go. It was just the way the Navy did things.

While the ensign took care of this duty, the engineman in charge held his salute like a gunner’s mate waiting to order the first salvo at Normandy.

The decision as to how long to let a prank nurture and grow is a nautical skill of great respect. You never wanted to humiliate a young officer, you just want to bring him close to wetting his starched, white uniform. After all, he might be the one processing your discharge papers some day and, by then, may have mastered the use of the ancient Naval axiom that “payback is a motherf****r.”

So, before the tears started, the senior sailor present would explain what “jacking shaft” meant. (The explanation was confined to usage aboard ship and not to its more casual usage when used ashore in a bar).

It seems that, when a ship is at rest, the weight of the propeller causes a strain on the propeller shaft. Consequently, when our ship was moored, standing orders required both that it, the shaft, had to be rotated (jacked) periodically to even the strain, and that his precaution had to be approved by the Officer of the Deck.

As for the look on the ensign’s face when elucidation rushed in, like a band of Spartans to the rescue, it was just a little bit of fun in a boring and, otherwise, humorless existence. Protecting your freedoms is a lonely and mirthless task, requiring the garnering of any scrap of relief in sight.

Anchors aweigh, and all that.

Do these faces bespeak cruelty
of any sort whatsoever?

Sunrise With Schubert: February 5, 2018

Last evening, we watched “Victoria” on PBS and then I looked to see if anything else of interest was on TV. Was it ever. I flipped channels immediately.

Yep, Turner Classic Movies was about to screen one of the classic films of all times, Zorba the Greek. Oh, what a flood of memories. Although some of the themes would be viewed as sexist today, the acting by Anthony Quinn, Lila Kedrova, and Irene Papas, with Alan Bates as their foil, rated another look. The movie didn’t purport to portray a perfect man, just a man full of passion for life. I worry that cell phones and TV “news” are sucking that from our souls these days.

In the movie, the Bates character, an uptight Englishman, awakens such passion in himself through his association with Zorba. I have friends—I’m sure we all do—who have that effect on me. It’s one of life’s blessings.

The movie took me all the way back to the Fayetteville, Arkansas of the mid-1960s. It was a quieter time there, not without its shortcomings, but a time offering a life of learning, new experiences, and the promise of raw adventure. It hadn’t been long since architect Edward D. Stone had described the Fayetteville he knew as “a hotbed of tranquility.” Things would change, that’s for sure. They always do, whether we want them to or not.

I couldn’t help recalling that I had once done a paper on the Nikos Kazantzakis novel, The Life and Times of Alexis Zorba, for the immortal Dr. Ben Kimpel of the U of A English Department. The “A” he so graciously awarded me is still one of my life’s great achievements.

The place of women in the world, as expressed by the character of Zorba, would certainly be suspect today. I haven’t the right to judge, only contemplate and try to learn. His views on life and the need to accommodate it, sometimes through anger, sometimes through laughter, sometimes by earthy sensuality, and finally through dancing, are timeless, though.

Perhaps the most contentious line in the movie occurs when Zorba bangs a table and says, “God has a very big heart but there is one sin he will not forgive. If a woman calls a man to her bed and he will not go. I know because a very wise old Turk told me.” As Zorba learned from the Greeks’ mortal enemies, the Turks, we can learn from others, even flawed ones.

In the book, he even pointed out that he had once self-amputated a finger because it prevented him from playing his beloved “santuri” as he wished. The man who taught him to play the santuri, incidentally, was a Turk, again, the deadly enemies of the Greeks. The lesson is that not only must one sacrifice for art, one must transcend societal hatreds as well.

Oh hell, enough of introspection and analysis. As Zorba would point out, if we can’t answer the questions to life’s most horrific questions, what’s the use of all our damn books?

Let’s all go out today, and take some of his advice to heart, and be willing to learn to dance.

Growing Up Southern: February 4, 2018

We had a small stock pond on our place when I was growing up. It wasn’t as big as a city block. They dug it to get fill dirt for a Jr. high school. There wasn’t much to it—the pond that is—but square foot for square foot, it furnished about as much enjoyment as any site you could find anywhere.

There were fish in it. Fish galore: bream, sunfish, catfish, and, later, bass. We never fished it out, but oh lord did we try. There were snakes and turtles, as well. We only swam in it once, and that was when no one was watching, My mother told the story about how, when I could barely walk, I had seen some people swimming in a pool, and, I reckon I was impressed because, alerted by our family dog “Bob,” she caught me next morning “just a high-steppin’ toward the pond.”

My Sainted grandmother would laugh and talk about how she had taken me there a little later and showed me how to bait a hook and toss it out. She created a monster, I guess, for she said all I wanted to do thereafter was to go and “pish” some more. I don’t know if kids have that much fun with their grandmothers these days.

There are so many lessons one can learn from a small, postage-stamp, place like that. For one, the cork from a bottle of Garrett Snuff makes an ideal “bobber.” Bouncing it up and down is supposed to attract fish. And something that Della Nathaniel taught me, you must spit on your bait if you want to catch the really good ones. Of course, she dipped snuff, so her spit was much more potent and effective than mine.

She sought, once, to even the playing field by offering me a dip. I tied, but decided I’d rather not catch fish than live through that ordeal again. Bless her heart, she moved to Oakland California later and found equality of sorts, I’m sure. I’ll bet she missed that old pond, though, from time to time.

Sometimes, when I was older, and the Hester boys lived close by the pond, we’d start out on Friday after school and fish until Saturday afternoon. Then the mothers who lived nearby would come over with the “fixin’s” and fry our catch for the whole neighborhood.

I still recall the day my dad and I went out one Sunday morning and cut a nice gum tree that we dragged into the pond for a fish refuge. I think the hooks I lost therein outnumbered the fish I caught from it, but since Sunday was his only day off, it most wonderful that we spent the time doing it.

Today, the average teenager has a cell phone that probably cost more than my father paid for that little spot where the pond was. I’ll match memories with any of them, though.

Ever notice how things
get less fun as they
get more elaborate?

Sunrise With Schubert: February 3, 2018

Had you been in the Vietnamese city of Hue 50 years ago today things would probably have been different for you. Much different.

If you were a member of the three battalions of North Vietnamese regulars, Viet Cong guerrillas, and local Communist militia, you would feel great, having just infiltrated and captured a major city under the very noses of the American “brass.”

If you were a private citizen of the city, you would be terrified beyond comprehension.

If you were a member a small ARVN group in the north of the city, or a small MACV unit in the south, you would feel cut off and abandoned, not envisioning the 24-day ordeal involved in retaking the city.

If you were the senior American military leaders, generals William Westmoreland and Foster LaHue, you would be miles and miles away in a safe place, completely befuddled, denying that it was all happening.

In the south of the city,  as a member of the Second Battalion, Fifth Regiment, of the United States Marines, you would be facing a long journey of betrayal, abandonment, horror, honor, and glory.

The two generals mentioned above refused to believe that three battalions of Vietnamese held the city. They had “pre-decided” that, if the North Vietnamese were to launch a major attack, it would be at Khe Sahn and not Hue. American generals couldn’t be wrong, could they? Americans were supposed to kill the enemy and count their bodies, not defend cities. When we had counted enough bodies, the North Vietnamese would quit and go home, leaving the Viet Cong to fade from sight. We were almost there.

Everyone agreed. Right? Never mind if body counts were manufactured or inflated. Never mind if multiple human parts were each counted as a body. Never mind if many "counts" were innocent civilians. Never mind if two American officers got into a physical confrontation over ownership of a severed arm. General Giap was counting his losses and on the verge of giving up, right then, in early 1968. Any American "grunt" officer wishing to advance had better, by God, report some body counts for America and for victory. "USA! … USA! … USA!"

Meanwhile, Westmoreland and LaHue decided to solve the minor irritation in Hue by ordering companies of Marines to clear out the embedded battalions of the enemy. Company after company stormed across a bridge leading into the city and were slaughtered. Westmoreland steadfastly believed they were only encountering a small band of Viet Cong sappers. He blamed the Marines’ lack of success on inexperience and unwillingness to fight. The bodies of brave Americans piled higher and higher as the generals persisted in their beliefs. Westmoreland was later to comment on the glorious sacrifice of the Marines:

“… the military professionalism of the Marines falls far short of the standards that should be demanded by our armed forces. Indeed they are brave and proud, but their standards, tactics, and lack of command supervision throughout their ranks requires improvement in the national interest.”

Fortunately, America canned Westmoreland, by kicking him upstairs of course, but kept the Marines. They, and their ARVN brothers eventually cleared the city, leaving a leveled hell of dead and rotting bodies as Americans back home watched on TV. Before the battle was over, countless civilians lay dead or maimed, classified by that modern and horrifically callous term, “collateral damage.” Thousands and thousands of others were simply executed by Communist troops while the battle was raging. For more, read Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam by Mark Bowden

It was a great victory for the brave band of warriors who stayed and defended the city. It was a great loss for American morale. Tragically, the general affair known as the Tet Offensive created a moment when Americans quit trusting their leaders. Westmoreland had been assuring them that his strategy of “body-count warfare” was working just fine and the enemy was about finished.

Naturally, that assertion came as a hell of a surprise to the troops stationed far away in that sad land and to their families back home viewing the carnage each evening.

In my opinion, that festering sore of distrust has led us to the predicament we find ourselves in today, in which America is being governed more like a professional wrestling match on television than as the moral leader of the world. That’s just my opinion and mine alone. Feel free to form your own. Those brave men who died at Hue would have wanted it that way.

Stars and Stripes photographer John Olson

captured this image of A.B. Grantham,

a Marine who had been shot in the chest at Hue.

It is on display at the Newseum to mark the

50th anniversary of the Tet offensive.

Grantham lived to tell his story.