3/2/24

 Saturday, March 2, 2024

In bed at 9, up to let Lilly out at 1:30, moved to BL and fell asleep under my warm, heavy, 17-year afghan, Geri let Lilly out for 2nd time at 3, moved back to bed and then to LZB under my SCOTUS throw, up at 4:50.  34°, clear skies, high of 51°, wind 5-12/22 mph.  Sunrise at 6:25, sunset at 5:43, 11+17.

Treadmill; pain.  Slight to moderate dull ache in shoulder & wrist during the night plus neuropathy pain in left heel.  The wrist has been OK during the day, as usual, but not the shoulder.   

I'm grateful for our collection of books, the ones we kept after giving away so many to the little Saukville Libray to avoid packing and moving them.  I'm reminded of the few books I had shipped to Japan in 1965 which ended up in Vietnam, mildewed and discarded.  I'm reminded too of the anesthesiologist asking me on Monday what my favorite book is and plucking Crime and Punishment and David Copperfield out of the air.  I might as well have come up with short stories like The Displaced Person by Flannery O'Connor or Boule de Suif by de Maupassant, or Moby Dick,  The Great Gatsby, Pere Goriot, Catch 22, or the epic sagas that I was into for a while, especially The Iliad.  It's easier to pick out favorite poems, Vacillation by Yeats, Come Up From the Fields, Father by Whitman, Ode to a Field Mouse by Burns, Prufrock by Eliot, Spoon River Anthology by Masters, Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen, The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner and Eighth Air Force by Randall Jarrell, Good Bones by Maggie Smith, Otherwise and Woman, Why Are You Weeping? by Jane Kenyon,  The Young Housewife by William Carlos Williams, others, what am I forgetting?  I'm not very well-read, unlike my dear brother-in-law Jimmy, and I regret it.  I was an omnivorous reader as a boy but I'm not sure whether it was because I was intellectually curious or because isolating in a corner with a volume of Grolier's Book of Knowledge encyclopedia was a quiet activity that didn't disturb my Dad with his PTSD and his need for quietude.  I never wondered until this very moment whether his hearing loss and need for hearing aids were attributable to the hellish noises on Iwo Jima.  How little we know of our own parents.  How little our children know of us and we of them.  But I am wandering as I so often do in old age.

Gunfire at Brown Deer Walmart & at a Roller Skating rink on Hy. 100.   There was a time when we White Folks smugly assumed we were safe from "inner city violence." Those days are long gone as crime, including violent, lethal crime, has spread throughout the city.  Both the shooting at the roller rink on the southwest side and the shooting at the Walmart parking lot on the northwest side stemmed from altercations of some sort involving disputants who left their homes "packing heat."  How many questions and thoughts bounce around in my mind thinking about why anyone would carry a loaded pistol to go roller skating or to go to Walmart.  

We ought not forget the situation in Israel & the occupied territories before October 7.  From the WaPo a year ago today:

The scenes of officers wrestling peaceful protesters to the ground came as police faced mounting criticism for not doing more to hold Israeli settlers accountable for a violent weekend rampage in the West Bank.  At one point, protesters in Tel Aviv chanted, “Where were you in Huwara?” — the Palestinian town where, after a Palestinian shot and killed two Israeli brothers, hundreds of Israeli settlers attacked civilians at random, burning cars, businesses and homes, many with children inside. One Palestinian man was killed by a settler who shot him in the abdomen, the man’s family said.  “The right to protest is not the right to commit anarchy,” National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir said about the use of force by police in Tel Aviv on Wednesday, after days of refusing to condemn the settlers’ attacks against Palestinians. . . . But many worry that violence by settlers will continue as long as they receive support — implicit or explicit — from the current government. Two of its most senior ministers, Bezalel Smotrich and Ben Gvir, responded to the killing of the Israeli brothers with promises of revenge. Smotrich called for the Israeli military to “strike at the Palestinian cities with tanks and helicopters, mercilessly, in a way that will send the message that the landlord has gone mad.”

Today we are still reading about the "flour carnage" in which IDF forces fired into a crowd of Gazan Palestinians, driven mad from hunger, surrounding humanitarian aid trucks loaded with flour sacks, killing an unknown number of them.  The soldiers claimed that some of the desperate crowd approached them and put the soldiers in such fear that they had to shoot many of them.   With the gunfire and the ensuing stampede, more than 100 Palestinians were killed and about 700 injured.

Israel and its supporters engage in a lot of  understandable 'whataboutism." What about the outrages on October 7th?  What about Palestinian attacks on Israelis?  What about the intifadas, the bus bombings, the other suicide bombings, and the murder of Israeli Olympians in Munich?  What about the passenger liner Achille Lauro and Leon Klinghoffer?  What about the Allied terror bombing of German cities in WWII, the firebombing of Japanese cities, and the nuclear bombing of not one but two cities in Japan?  What about the invasion and prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?  Homo hominis lupus est?  We all do it?  The hand-wringers and pearl-clutchers are all hypocrites?  Are the U.S. and we Americans the worst hypocrites of all?   There can be little doubt that there is a lot of hypocrisy in the world when it comes to warfare's cruelty and indifference to suffering and a lot of double standards and Israel is subject to all of that.  Nonetheless, as Nicholas Kristoff points out in this morning's NYTimes, 

Consider that in the first 18 months of Russia’s current war in Ukraine, at least 545 children were killed. Or that in 2022, by a United Nations count, 2,985 children were killed in all wars worldwide. In contrast, in less than five months of Israel’s current war in Gaza, the health authorities there report more than 12,500 children killed.  Among them were 250 infants less than 1 year old.

Under what moral, ethical, or political theory are we to consider this just, righteous, or in any way acceptable?  I wonder how many children and babies we Americans killed in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Tokyo firebombing.  How many children and babies were killed in Dresden and Berlin?  More personally,  I well remember the protesters against the Vietnam War chanting "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"  I was a part of that killing.  I think of the moral bluntness of Randall Jarrell's Eighth Air Force in which he calls himself and the airmen he served with murderers.

If, in an odd angle of the hutment,

A puppy laps the water from a can

Of flowers, and the drunk sergeant shaving

Whistles O Paradiso!—shall I say that man

Is not as men have said: a wolf to man?

 

The other murderers troop in yawning;

Three of them play Pitch, one sleeps, and one

Lies counting missions, lies there sweating

Till even his heart beats: One; One; One.

O murderers! . . . Still, this is how it’s done:

 

This is a war . . . 

I wonder at times whether we weren't more culpable for what we did in Vietnam than the Israelis are for what they are doing in Gaza.  We did not have a Pearl Harbor, a 9/11, or an October 7th that precipitated us into Vietnam.  And our government kept our troops killing people, destroying stuff, and poisoning the land long after it was clear that the war was unwinnable.  Indeed, it was unwinnable from the start.  From my memoir:

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.

Ten years later, Marine helicopters were lifting desperate people off rooftops in Saigon.  

U. Mass. Professor Gunther Lewy in 1978 estimated 1,353,000 total deaths in North and South Vietnam during the period 1965–1974 in which the U.S. was most engaged in the war. Lewy reduced the number of Viet Cong (VC) and People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) battle deaths claimed by the U.S. by 30 percent (in accordance with the opinion of United States Department of Defense officials), and assumed that one-third of the reported battle deaths of the PAVN/VC may have actually been civilians. He estimates that between 30 and 46% of the total war deaths were civilians. His estimate of total deaths:

US and allied military deaths 282,000

PAVN/VC military deaths 444,000–666,000

Civilian deaths (North and South Vietnam) 405,000–627,000

Total deaths 1,353,000

A 1995 demographic study in Population and Development Review calculated 791,000–1,141,000 war-related Vietnamese deaths, both soldiers and civilians, for all of Vietnam from 1965–75. The study came up with a most likely Vietnamese death toll of 882,000, which included 655,000 adult males (above 15 years of age), 143,000 adult females, and 84,000 children. Those totals include only Vietnamese deaths and do not include American and other allied military deaths which amounted to about 64,000.

How many children and other civilians did we kill, wound, displace, or permanently traumatize in Iraq in pursuit of imaginary "weapons of mass destruction"?  How many in Afghanistan for 20 years?  Could it be that our American government is not harsher in its criticism of Israel in Gaza simply out of its own shame?  Nah, we never admit we were deeply blameworthy.

 Lilly has the trots again and is on a 24-hour fast.  We don't want to eat dinner in front of her so we're going out for burgers tonight.