Wednesday, May 22, 2024
Dodged the bullet last night with the long, powerful squall line.
Prednisone, day 10. I had my oatmeal and prednisone at about 5 a.m., with some discomfort in my shoulders but feeling pretty good, as on the last two days.
More on Zionism in this morning's NYTimes. Bret Stephens has an op-ed on "Who's More Likely to Fail, Israel or Iran?" He wrote:
Like Iran, Israel still has profound domestic vulnerabilities, only some of which came to the fore in the months of protest over judicial reform that preceded Oct. 7. That’s to say nothing about right-wing extremism, the resistance of the ultra-Orthodox to fulfill their civic obligations or the ultimate question of an eventual Palestinian state. But none of those need put the deepest convictions of Zionism at stake: that Jews have the right to rule themselves as a sovereign state in their original homeland.
There is that claim again that Jews, as such, individually and/or collectively (?), have the right to rule themselves as a sovereign state in their original homeland. This raises again the questions (1) why the Jews and not other groupings of people with more characteristics in common that Jews share, and (2) what is the source of this claimed right that makes it binding on all others, including those who have lived for centuries in the claimed homeland, and (3) how is it that the claimed sovereign state is to be established in land occupied by non-Jews and not dominated by Jews for nearly two millennia?
Why don't the Kurds, the Yazidis, the Samaritans, the Ulster Catholics, the Scots, the Welsh,, any of the American aboriginal tribes, the Basques, the Catalonians, the Moravians and Silesians, and the Kashmiris have the same right to rule themselves in their original homelands? If the Canaanites were still around as a recognizable ethnic group, would they have a superior claim than the Jews to what is now Israel, as prior possessors for centuries? What is it about the Jews in the late 19th century that gave them this claimed right? By what legal and political authority were the Palestinian Arabs who had lived in what is now Israel for centuries required to submit to Jewish hegemony? Zionism, the colonial settlement of Israel, and the establishment of the state of Israel are the results not of a legal or natural right but rather of the enabling wealth of the Rothschilds, the duplicitous maneuverings of the British government during WWI, European and other persecution of Jews for centuries but especially during the Holocaust, and shame-guilt-and self-interest based maneuvering in the UN after the Holocaust. The Europeans committed mortal sins and the Palestinian Arabs were burdened with the penance.
The Holdoveers trigger memories of Vietnam and Willow Grove. We watched The Holdovers with one of our favorite actors,, Paul Giammati, last night. It is set in 1970 during the Vietnam War, and featured a mother of a young Black man killed in Vietnam. It triggered memories I put in my memoir.
As the PIO and the only officer with Vietnam experience, I was required to give speeches to local civic and fraternal groups from north Philadelphia up through Montgomery and Bucks counties. I spoke to Rotarians, Kiwanians, and others. I spoke about Vietnam, the war, and the Marines. I lied. I painted rosier pictures than any respect for truth would have permitted. Anyone listening to Captain Clausen would have thought that morale in Vietnam was good, that progress was being made in ‘winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people,’ that the racial tensions that were racking the United States, the peace movement and the drug culture had no repercussions within the Marine Corps. I was playing my role just as Lyndon Johnson was playing his role and Robert McNamara and William Westmoreland were playing theirs and none of us spoke with candor. Had I told the truth about how I felt in those luncheon addresses, I would have made the local evening news and probably been court-martialed or at least cashiered from the Marines. Marine captains are not to call the Commander-in-Chief, or the Secretary of Defense, or a combat theater commander liars or fools, although the Pentagon Papers made it abundantly clear that Americans were never told the truth about Vietnam by government officials. I played my little part and disliked myself for doing it.
My worst job, however, – the worst job I have ever had – came every 6 days when I was the Marine Corps’ Casualty Assistance Call Officer for the north side of Philadelphia and the northern suburbs. When a Marine was killed or seriously injured while on active duty, whether combat-related or not, an officer and a senior staff NCO delivered the news personally to the next-of-kin, almost always the wife or the parents. The information about the death or injury came into the Marine detachment at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. If the family member to be notified lived north of Market Street, one of the teams in my rotation got the call to tell the family. My team was myself and a staff sergeant who worked for me, a fellow named Schmidt from Antigo, Wisconsin. The call would first go to Pete Powell, our admin officer, who would call me or the other officer on CACO duty. I would call SSgt. Schmidt and pick him up at his home. I would stop at the hangar to pick up the paperwork and Schmidt and I would drive, usually silently, to the home. Each of us knew that if the circumstances were different, it could be his wife or parents receiving the Marine at the door. As soon as the person visited opened the door, or saw us approach, he, or usually she, knew why we were there. If the Marine was not dead, I would have to get that information out immediately. If I wasn’t yelling “he’s all right” or “he’s alive and being cared for” or some such statement, I didn’t have to tell the wife or mom that the Marine was dead. She knew it from my uninvited and dreaded presence in her doorway. If we didn’t have information already about church membership, I would stay with the family while SSgt. Schmidt went to get a priest or minister or at least a friend or neighbor who could stay with the bereaved after we had left. Such misery! Such suffering! How awful those encounters, how awful still the memories of them.
It was the memories of the mothers and wives that were with me as I watched George H. W. Bush gushing over the Gulf War in 1991. “The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian peninsula. . . It’s a proud day for America – and, by God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” I couldn’t help thinking: “What an asshole.” Those memories remained with me as I watched “H. W.’s” idiot son “W” and his band of neocon chickenhawks prove Daddy wrong in the desert sands of Mesopotamia. Bush and Cheney and Paul Wolfewitz and Richard Perle and almost all of their legion of neocon supporters never stood in a doorway in front of a shrieking, terror-stricken mother learning that her son is dead, never spoke with a young wife about the logistics of returning her husband’s body through the Philadelphia Navy Yard and of the need for funeral arrangements. While others were making these casualty calls in north Philadelphia and all across America, George W. Bush was getting inducted into Skull and Bones and enjoying his last year at Yale under his student deferment while Richard Bruce Cheney was on his fourth or fifth deferment, working in Madison for Governor Warren Knowles while working on a Ph.D. at the UW. Richard Perle was working on his master’s degree at Princeton afterwards attending the London School of Economics while Paul Wolfowitz was doing graduate work at the University of Chicago after graduating from Cornell. These men were all privileged. They were not the type to get their asses shot off in a messy war in Asia. They were not the type to let military service alter the trajectory of their privileged lives. Like the vice-chickenhawk-in-chief Cheney, they “had other priorities in the 60s than military service.” Very few of the Marines and soldiers and airmen and sailors who did serve came from such backgrounds. John Kerry was a notable exception. They came from backgrounds much like mine: blue collar, the so-called ‘working class.’ They did not have estates in Kennebunkport. Their homes were apartments and modest frame houses on small lots. Their list of educational attainments usually stopped at high school, boot camp and infantry training. These were the men the United States sent to kill and be killed, not the likes of Bush and Cheney, Wolfewitz and Perle. And it was the wives and children, the parents and siblings of such men who would live with the consequences of their service. For them, it wasn’t “the specter of Vietnam” that was “buried forever,” it was their son, their husband, their father, their brother. For them, the “Vietnam syndrome” has never ended, any more than World War II “syndrome” or the Korea “syndrome“ has ended for those who suffered the deepest losses. Below is a poem that the Bloody Bushes would have perhaps entitled “The Civil War Syndrome.” It is, to me, the saddest poem ever written.
Come Up From the Fields Father
Walt Whitman
Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete,
And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.
Lo, ‘tis autumn,
Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,
Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind,
Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis’d vines,
(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?
Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)
Above all, lo, the sky so calm, so transparent after the rain, and with wondrous clouds,
Below too, all calm, all vital and beautiful, and the farm prospers well.
Down in the field all prospers well,
But now from the fields come father, come at the daughter’s call.
And come to the entry mother, to the front door come right away.
Fast as she can she hurries, something ominous, her steps trembling,
She does not tarry to smooth her hair nor adjust her cap.
Open the envelope quickly,
O this is not our son’s writing, yet his name is sign’d,
O a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother’s soul!
All swims before her eyes, flashed with black, she catches the main words only,
Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital,
At present low, but will soon be better.
Ah now the single figure to me,
Amid all teeming and wealthy Ohio with all its cities and farms,
Sickly white in the face and dull in the head, very faint,
By the jamb of a door leans.
Grieve not, dear mother, (the just-grown daughter speaks through her sobs,
The little sisters huddle around speechless and dismay’d,)
See, dearest mother, the letter says Pete will soon be better.
Alas, poor boy, he will never be better, (nor may-be needs to be
better, that brave and simple soul,)
While they stand at home at the door he is dead already,
The only son is dead.
But the mother needs to be better,
She with thin form presently drest in black,
By day her meals untouch’d, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,
In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,
O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw,
To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.
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