5/19/23

 Friday, May 19, 2023

Geri returns from Urbana

In bed at 11, awake at 5, and up at 5:10 thinking of Arethra Franklin's opening lyric in R-E-S-P-E-C-T, out of nowhere. 57℉, high of 64℉, light rain,  SW wind at 9 mph, 8 to 15 mph during the day and gusts up to 23 mph, day's total rainfall may be .15".  Sunrise at 5:24, sunset at 8:12, 14+46.  

The Homesman.  I watched this Tommy Lee Jones opus starring him and Hillary Swank last night.  I thought it was excellent, an homage to the women who settled (or didn't settle) the West in the years before the Civil War.  The story is set in central Nebraska Territory in the 1850s.  In a small agricultural community, 3 women have become deranged after a harsh year in which crops failed and the desolation of living on the treeless, flat grasslands of Nebraska coupled with other factors take a terrible toll on the minds of the women.  One of the women became near-catatonic after her 3 babies died from diphtheria.  Another was sexually and emotionally abused by her husband and became despondent and violent when her dead mother couldn't be buried because of the frozen soil so her 'stinking' corpse was discarded outdoors by her husband.  The third woman, deranged, tosses her infant child through the hole in the seat of the outhouse.  Women losing their minds in harsh, desolate, frontier rural Nebraska was apparently not unusual and a custom has developed of sending them back to 'civilization' in western Iowa, across the Missouri River.  The person who transported the women was known as a "homesman" and was normally a man, but through the luck of a draw in this narrative it turned out to be Mary Bee Cuddy, a 31 year old spinster who farmed her own land while unsucessfully trying to attract a husband to help her survive loneliness and the rigors of frontier life.  She rescuesd George Briggs, a ne'er-do-well claim jumper and Army deserter from a lynching and extracted his agreement to accompany her and the the 3 crazy ladies to Iowa.  Mary Bee is a Christian lady, a prayful believer; Briggs is out only for himself.  As they traveled eastward they became not exactly friends but effective teammates and Mary Bee proposed marriage to Briggs who flatly refused.  Nonetheless she stripped naked that night and persuaded Briggs to have sex with her.  The next morning, Briggs found her lifeless body hanging from a tree.  He tried to ditch the crazy ladies, leaving them tied up to the paddy wagon they had travelled in, but the ladies somehow freed themselves and followed him, causing him to change his mind and escort them to their goal of Hebron, IA, and the Methodist Church that cared for women mentally and emotionally broken by frontier living.  Then Briggs returned to Nebraska and his old irresponsible lifestyle before his temporary redemption by Mary Bee and the crazy ladies.  The bleakness of the film reminds me of another favorite movie, Meek's Cutoff, starring Michelle Williams.  Both movies give a much more realistic account of frontier living than the John Ford and other Westerns I grew up watching,  The White settlers and frontiersmen are not heroic in these movies.  Mary Bee on the other hand is heroic, but pathetic, not in a pejorative sense but rather as evoking sympathy or pity.  She had the courage to leave New York State to acquire and farm by herself land in Nebraska.  She had the courage to put herself in the lottery to determine who would accompany the crazy ladies to Iowa.  She had the courage to propose marriage to lowlife men who wouldn't accept her.  She is as decent and civilized as Briggs is the opposite.  But she is lonely.  She yearns for companionship and a partner in facing life's struggle on the frontier.  She misses trees and music and family and ultimately commits suicide when even stumblebum George Briggs rejects her and she has to near-force him to have sex with her.

I liked the film very much.  It brought back memories of several driving trips alone or with my Dad across Nebraska on I-80 and of reading Willa Cather novels years ago.  .  The Homesman is distinctive much as Godless is by focusing on resourceful women in the Westward expansion of the U.S., fulfilling the nation's 'Manifest Destiny.'

Biden, G7 in Hiroshima.  Memories of Hiroshima from my memoir:

     One day, the woman who owned or at least managed the bar we frequented took us on a commuter train to Hiroshima to see the Peace Memorial Museum at the original Ground Zero.  The twentieth anniversary of the bombing of the city was only several weeks away.  I was – stupidly – struck by how new and modern the city was as I emerged from the train station.  Walking to and through the Peace Memorial Museum was a searing experience.  The “Atomic Bomb Dome” building was still standing.  The bomb had detonated almost directly above that building and a few others that were still standing.  The force of the blast was downward, blowing away roofs and floors and everything in between but leaving the steel-reinforced exterior walls standing.

I was solemn the whole time I was in Hiroshima, but the atmosphere in the city’s downtown area and even around the Peace Memorial was busy, bustling, like New York or Chicago.  There were a great many people, including families with children, at the Peace Memorial and their demeanors seemed not all that different from people going into the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago or the Metropolitan Museum in New York, kind of semi-festive.  The Japanese adults ignored my friend Ron Kendall and me but little children stared at us.  For many of them, I suspect we were the first Americans or Europeans that they had seen in person and up close, or perhaps they stared because of the Marine Corps ‘whitewall’ haircuts that we had.  I was a freak in the eyes of the children.

    It was hard not to feel some responsibility, even guilt.  I was (forgive the expression) blown away by the photographs and artifacts and the realization of where I was.  I was a couple weeks shy of my 4th birthday when the bomb was dropped, but I am connected with Hiroshima by the fact that I am American.  By the fact that my father shared a killing field with Japanese soldiers.  By the fact that the justification for dropping the bomb was to obviate the necessity of invading the home islands, an invasion my father had been in line for.  By the fact that I was a Marine on my way to another Asian killing field.  By shared humanity.   The Japanese government would have resisted invasion to the bitter end, as the Germans had, and the cost in lives would have been appalling.  There doesn’t seem to be much doubt about that.  Indeed, the battles on Iwo Jima and Okinawa had been ‘designed’ to make it clear to the Americans how high the cost of invasion of the home islands would be.  But was it necessary to bomb the city?  Two cities?  Could the power of the Bomb have been shown by dropping it atop Mount Fuji or in Tokyo Bay or on the big naval base at Yokusoka?  The U. S. had inflicted perhaps hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties by the fire bombing of Tokyo, Yokohama, Kawasaki, Kobe, Nagoya, and Osaka starting in March of 1945 while the battle was raging on Iwo Jima, and then on Okinawa.  The destruction already inflicted on the home islands narrowed the choice of ‘suitable’ targets for the A-bombs but I believe it is naïve to think that Truman and the generals and the American public did not wish to inflict maximum civilian casualties.  The firebombing raids proved otherwise.  The feeling had to have been widespread that, as the song said, ‘we’re going to have to slap the dirty little Jap, and Uncle Sam’s the guy who can do it.” 

I couldn’t know it at the time, of course, but visiting the Peace Memorial and seeing evidence of the devastation wrought by American bombing was a fitting introduction to my impending work in Vietnam.  The Japanese suffered hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties from American strategic bombing, mostly from B-29 missions from late 1944 through the August, 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The human toll in Vietnam was to be worse.

The day I left Cleveland for Japan and Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson spoke with Robert McNamara about the situation in Vietnam:

“. . . it’s going to be difficult for us to very long prosecute effectively a war that far away from home with the [political] divisions we have here and particularly the potential divisions.  And it’s really had me concerned for a month and I’m very depressed about it because I see no program from either Defense or State that gives me much hope of doing anything except just praying and grasping to hold on during [the] monsoon [season] and hope they’ll quit.  And I don’t believe they’re ever goin’ to quit.  And I don’t see that we have any plan for victory militarily or diplomatically.”

How prescient."

Throne Room Reading.  I moved a Franklin Library collection of short stories from the tv room bookshelves to the bathroom for some private reading.  I just finished Anatole France's The Procurator of Judea, a bit of fiction about Pontius Pilate which ends with him unable to remember some provincial guy from Galilee he had executed, one of multitudes of troublesome Jews he had condemned.  I didn't particularly enjoy the story, which was a bit dense, but read it because of its author, who also wrote one of my favorite quotes: "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread."  Le Lys Rouge [The Red Lily] (1894), ch. 7.  Also: "You think you are dying for your country; you die for the industrialists."  L'Humanité (18 July 1922)  To like effect, Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, USMC, after whom the BOQ at MCS Quantico Basic School is named: "I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General.  And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. . . . War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. . .  . . . I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested." Smedley Butler, War is a Racket, 1935.

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