12/2/23

 Saturday, December 2, 2023

In bed at 9 and up from lzb at 4:30, but awake much of the night with GERD and some BP, though nothing to drink yesterday but water and 1 cup of chamomile tea. Let Lilly out, 37° and high of 40°, cloudy all day, wind NE at 12 mph, 7-12/17.  O.25 rain in the last 24 hours, another 0.15 rain/snow in the next 24 hours.  Sunrise at 7:04, sunset at 4:17, 9+12.

Treadmill; pain  Very rough night behind me.  No apparent cause fo the GERD. Yeserday's food & drink: water + 1 cup of chamomile tea, CBH & basted eggs early, cotto salami & cheese sandwich midday, Kopps cheeseburger & vanilla malt at 5:30.  Today: water, leftover linguini & marinara for breakfast, stuffed chicken breast, baked potato, veggie for dinner. 00:00 & 0.00

I'm grateful today for being alive, still surrounded by many blessings.  I'm not always so grateful but I accept that as a part of being alive and having a conscience instilled in me mostly by my mother who stays atop my gratitude list.  I am grateful for recognizing when I am not grateful for being alive, the days when I assess life as not worth it, days of pain, days of despair for the country and the world, 'pity party' and "Mickey the Mope" days when Kitty would tell me to 'snap out of it,' and the days when I  recall the pain and suffering my mother endured to bring me into existence and to protect and nurture and educate me through difficult days, too delicate a description for what she endured in her short life, days when I am almost overcome with shame and guilt for not returning her love more fully.

Kristof on Kissinger in this morning's NYT:

“I can’t believe that a fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn’t have a breaking point,” Kissinger once said, so he amplified the bombing at a horrific human cost. He saw the world through a great-power prism and didn’t appreciate that Vietnam and Cambodia weren’t just dominoes and that the Vietcong were motivated not by orders from Moscow but by a deep yearning to take control of their own nation.

Kissinger made a similar mistake in Bangladesh during the 1971 war there, siding with Pakistan as it massacred Hindus and Bengalis alike. It was unsuccessful as well as unforgivable. Many hundreds of thousands died but Bangladesh still triumphed — humiliating the United States and weakening its position in South Asia.

Something similar happened in East Timor. And in the streets of East Timor or Bangladesh or Vietnam, Kissinger doesn’t look like a foreign policy genius, but like a bumbling American who never understood the lives of people he shrugged at slaughtering.

One of the greatest mistakes America has made in the post-World War II period has been the repeated failure to appreciate the force of nationalism — and Kissinger exemplified that. Our disasters in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and so many other places reflected in part our obliviousness to nationalist grievances. It’s an odd blind spot for a country like our own that emerged because Britain disregarded our own nascent nationalism.

For millenniums, military strength was virtually the only currency in international affairs. As Thucydides put it in describing a massacre by Athenians at Melos: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” That was Kissinger’s ecosystem, and he mastered it. . . . 

Kissinger’s indifference to human rights and democracy sometimes strengthened our hard power temporarily while compromising our soft power. 

His funeral will be a private one, probably in keeping with Jewish tradition, with a public memorial gathering TBA.   Again I wonder who will speak at his memorial and what will s/he say?  De mortuis nil nisi bonum?  Who will speak on behalf of the dead in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, & East Timor?  The dead,  'disappeared" and imprisoned in Chile? The problem is that Kissinger is  America.  His policies are America's policies.  He represented America's capitalist powerhouses, the big transnational corporations and smaller corporations who rely on foreign supply sources and friendly foreign markets.  His lauded "opening to China" was a prelude to American capitalist corporations shutting down plants in Milwaukee and across the nation and shipping their manufacturing jobs to China.  Cheap Chinese labor in Shenzhen or Guangzhou or Foshan or Shantou permits American manufacturers to maximize profits by closing plants in Milwaukee or Cincinnati or Birmingham with higher labor costs.  The bathrobe and underwear I am wearing are made in China.  When Kissinger left government he formed his own company and worked directly for those same companies on whose behalf he had exercised government power under Nixon and Ford.  Was he a psychopath?  Did he have any empathy or pangs of conscience for the millions of lives he permitted to be destroyed in America's "national interest"?  Did he think of the Bangladeshis as he wooed Candice Bergen, Shirley MacLaine, Marlo Thomas, and Jill St. John?  Did he lose any sleep over the 'lefties' in Chile the night before his dates with Diane Sawyer?  Did he take delight in his nickname as "the Playboy of the Western Wing?  Perhaps we should ask Hillary Clinton, who called him "her friend" and is a good bet to be one of those speaking at his memorial.

This is not who we are.  This is who we are.  The old and the new, ever the same.  Pares cum paribus congregantur.