10/11/23

 Wednesday, October 11, 2023

In bed at 9:40, up at 7:30 with PGM lawn guys, 47°, mostly sunny, high of 59°, AQI=20, wind NW at 5 mph, 2-9/12.  The sun rose at 6:32 at 99°ESE and will set at 6:15 at 261°WSW, 11+15.   Noon alt.=40°

Collateral Damage: Children, Gaza

Herodotus: In peace, children bury their parents.  War reverses the order of nature and parents bury their children.

More on Israel, Hamas, Gaza, the Circles of Hate.

1.  From Tom Friedman's NYT column yesterday:

I have covered this conflict for almost 50 years, and I’ve seen Israelis and Palestinians do a lot of awful things to one another: Palestinian suicide bombers blowing up Israeli discos and buses; Israeli fighter jets hitting neighborhoods in Gaza that house Hamas fighters but also causing massive civilian casualties. But I’ve not seen something like what happened last weekend: individual Hamas fighters rounding up Israeli men, women and children, looking them in the eyes, gunning them down and, in one case, parading a naked woman around Gaza to shouts of “Allahu akbar.”

The last time I witnessed that level of face-to-face barbarism was the massacre of Palestinian men, women and children by Christian militiamen in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982, where the first victim I encountered was an older man with a white beard and a bullet hole in his temple.

2.  “Because we each bear within ourselves the whole of the human condition, in its worst and best aspects, any one of us might be capable of doing anything at all, or nothing, under the right — or rather the most horribly wrong — conditions.” — Alain de Botton 

3.  “Men hate each other because they fear each other, and they fear each other because they don’t know each other, and they don’t know each other because they are often separated from each other.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

4.  The Circle of Hate: Misunderstand→Fear→Hate→Separate→Misunderstand→Fear→Hate→→→

5.  “YOU’VE GOT TO BE CAREFULLY TAUGHT” from South Pacific.

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear, / You’ve got to be taught from year to year,

It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear— / You’ve got to be carefully taught!

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid / Of people whose eyes are oddly made,

And people whose skin is a different shade— / You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late, / Before you are six or seven or eight,

To hate all the people your relatives hate— / You’ve got to be carefully taught!

6.  "“We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them.” ― Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

6. The canary in our coalmine.  From WaPo article: The Hamas Horror is also a lesson the the price of populism.

No matter what one thinks of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the way populism corroded the Israeli state should serve as a warning to other democracies all over the world.

    The real explanation for Israel’s dysfunction is populism rather than any alleged immorality. For many years, Israel has been governed by a populist strongman, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is a public-relations genius but an incompetent prime minister. He has repeatedly preferred his personal interests over the national interest and has built his career on dividing the nation against itself. He has appointed people to key positions based on loyalty more than qualifications, took credit for every success while never taking responsibility for failures, and seemed to give little importance to either telling or hearing the truth.   Netanyahu’s current governing coalition has been by far the worst. It is an alliance of messianic zealots and shameless opportunists, who ignored Israel’s many problems — including the deteriorating security situation — and focused instead on grabbing unlimited power for themselves. In pursuit of this goal, they adopted extremely divisive policies, spread outrageous conspiracy theories about state institutions that oppose their policies, and labeled the country’s serving elites as “deep state” traitors.

Treadmill: 25: 0.6

T'is the season:  Geri is out with her cart collecting leaves for her path through her marginal garden in our back yard.

In war, the first casualty is Truth.  Some thoughts on truth and deceit I posted on FB on 10/11/21

"I listened this morning to an hour long discussion of Facebook on NPR’s “One A.” I also listened to much of the recent congressional testimony of Facebook ‘whistleblower’ Frances Haugen.  A  good part of the finger-pointing at  Facebook and its now infamous algorithms focuses on the fact that users tend to stay on Facebook longer and to interact more frequently (or “engage”) with postings, and thus to increase Facebooks profits, when what they see and read on Facebook  makes them discontented, or frustrated, or angry, ‘riled up.’   Online disinformation, about covid, or vaccination or facemasks on the one hand, or about political adversaries on the other, is often designed precisely to stir up these feelings of discontent, frustration, anger or resentment.  Thus, disinformation, specifically of a  type to get people feeling bad, tends to increase Facebook’s profit by increasing user “engagement.”  None of this is surprising but it does call to mind the notion that we live in an age and in a culture where the manipulation of information of one sort or another is all around us all the time.  Public relations and advertising firms specialize in it.  Half-truths, and too often lies, are the coin of the realm for politicians and 'spin doctors.'.  We see it most recently in the ubiquity among Republicans of “The Big Lie” about the 2020 election, but we know that Democratic politicians are hardly innocent when it comes to half-truths and lies.  We have long known that the government itself is chronically guilty of misrepresentation and concealment of truth.  Look at Vietnam, Afghanistan, “weapons of mass destruction,” “enhanced interrogation,” and on and on.  In my own profession, lawyering, attorneys are forbidden by their code of ethics from deceit and misrepresentation (no laughter, please), but does it surprise anyone that concealment of truth and creating false impressions may be consideered not only permisible for lawyers, but a matter of duty?  But perhaps the sector of our economy and corporatist and consumerist culture that is most designed to stir up personal discontent and frustration is media advertising, especially television advertising.  Most commercials effectively say “If you buy my product or service, you will be happier than you are now without it.  If you don’t eat my cereal, ingest my medication, or drive my car, you will be less happy than those who do.  Buy, spend, acquire, improve your lot like all these inanely smiling consumers or hucksters (Joe Namath for Medicare Advantage programs???) we have hired to influence your thoughts, emotions, and spending choices.”  So it can come as little surprise that Mark Zuckerberg and his acolytes follow the lead of our political and business leaders in taking advantage of the gullibility and the emotional and intellectual malleability of his fellow citizens to serve his own purposes.  And it comes as even less of a surprise that Congress has been so reluctant to try to regulate the manipulation of “truth” and “facts” and “disinformation” when such manipulation is part of the lifeblood of our political and economic culture."

. . . . . . . 

We will be in for a ton of minipulative information from all sides about the atrocities in Israel and the predictible atrocities in Gaza.  

Picked up Lizzie after rehearsal for Descendents at Bayside Middle School and dropped her off at home.  Watching the many kids leaving the school at 5:30 reminded me of the beheaded infants, toddlers, and children in Israel, and the hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza who are and forever will be haunted - if they survive - by what has happened, is happening, and will be happening.  Many by "the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air," others by all the indirect suffering that war causes, whenever and wherever it occurs.

My reaction to wars.  I often wonder if my emotional response(s) to war are unusual or 'normal.'  I can't forget living with my father when he returned from the Marines after World War II, with PTSD, the effects it had on me growing up and the effects it had on my little sister as she grew up.  I know about them because we talked about them frequently in our old age, the last 6 or so years of her life.  She remembered and I remember.  And we can only guess about the effects on my mother.    My father and I didn't become friends until he was 75 and I was 55.  My sister carried hurts from his emotional distance her entire life.  And I'm never far from guilt and shame over what we did in Vietnam and my pissant role in facilitating the bombing, the strafing, the napalming and white phosporusing, and the Agent Oranging of the human beings who had the misfortune to live 'in country' after we invaded.  As I write this I am remembering the "stranger in a strange land' feeling I had on returning to America after my year in Vietnam, Okinawa, and Japan.  I guess I still have that feeling.

A pencil drawing I did  from a photograph of Tanaka Kio, a mother of 3, nursing her 4 month old son the day after the bombing of Nagasaki.  Her son died a few days after the bomb fell, but Tanaka lived to age 91 and died in Nagasaki in 2006.  In the caption, I wrote the Herodotus quote about war reversing the law of Nature, parents burying their children instead on children burying their parents.  Also a quote for Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five about WWII being 'a Children's Crusade' because of the youth of the soldiers, and General Omar Bradley's assertion "“Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.” —