7/8/24

 Monday, July 8, 2024

In bed at 9 and up at 5:20 with the usual pain on the left side of my lower spine.  Let Lilly out and noticed how quiet it was but Merlin told me he heard cardinals, robins, wrens, sparrows, goldfinches, house finches, chickadees, a blue jay, and a crow!  I guess I need my hearing aids on.

Prednisone, day 57, 15 mg., day 21.  I see Dr. Ryzka at 2:30 this afternoon, probably to be cut down to 10 mgs. per day.  I took my 15 mgs. at 5:40 with some cottage cheese and berries. . . . Dr. Ryzka reduced my daily dosage to 10 mg. for 4 weeks starting tomorrow.  He will call to check on my supply of 10 mg. and 5 mg. pills and see me again in 2 months.  VA PB = 118/72!

I'm grateful that I probably don't have long to live though I know that sounds preposterous since I am also grateful to be alive here and now, but my personal future in my mid-80s and the nation's and the world's future looks so grim to me that I don't want to live in it.  I write this with a sense of shame and guilt because I fear for our children and grandchildren living in the world to come, an Artificial Intelligence world that threatens to become the worst of 1984, Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, and Lord of the Flies.  Being grateful that I'm old and on borrowed time gives me something like survivor's guilt for escaping the dies irae to come.  Indeed, the world is already careening inexorably toward global destruction and chaos from climate change.  The world to come is reflected perversely in the current political situation in the world's most powerful, arguably most educated and most literate, most interconnected, and most sophisticated nation, the U.S., which finds itself faced with the choice for leader between the neo-fascist, cult leader Trump, who enjoys the unwavering support of close to half of the electorate (48% in 2020) and the mumbling, stumbling, bumbling, superannuated overachiever Biden, desperately clinging onto power by his fingernails, much as Trump did 4 years previously.  Both candidates show evidence of age-related cognitive decline or even early dementia (remember Reagan?) and both refuse to undergo neurological or cognitive testing.  Ever-increasing concentrations of wealth with their concomitant increases in economic, social, political, and legal power leave the rest of us ever more ready to be controlled, manipulated by hidden and not-so-hidden persuaders.  There should be no doubt that the Right has been preparing for armed resistance to get its way.  It's been clear since at least the surge in gun sales after Obama's election in 2008.  Kevin Roberts, the president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation and sponsor of Project 2025 made it clear recently when he said: "“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless ― if the left allows it to be.”  (No surprise that Roberts is a reactionary, JPII-revering, right-wing Catholic.)   When have I felt worse about the world, in 1968?  in 1973 and 74?  during the Iraq fiasco with the Three Amigos?  Am I like Cassandra in Troy?  But I have been like this for almost a decade now, since 2015 and the ascendency of Trump.   All my daily text messages to Kitty bear witness to my pessimism, as do the last two years of daily journal entries.  Am I  perhaps just ordinarily depressed and cynical or am I in a mood swing from the prednisone?  Should I just delete this whole paragraph and take a nap?

My physical condition is deteriorating along with the State of the Union and of the world.  I'm increasingly using a cane indoors which is new.  Standing up from my chair I rely on supporting myslef on my walker which I have stationed next to the ottoman in front of the chair.  I just loaded "Judy," my lowboy rollator into the Honda to use when I get to the VA for my appointment with Dr. Ryzka this afternoon - a first.  I am chronically fatigued.  I'm unable to read the signs above the aisle at Sendik's telling me what kinds of items are found in each aisle. My vision has gone to hell, not just reading but far vision as well.  I need to renew my driver's license by my birthday next month but wonder whether I will have trouble with the vision test.  I have an appointment at the VA Eye Clinic on Wednesday which may provide me with some information.  My glucose readings from my continuous glucose monitor seem through the roof to me but I won't know until I speak with Jill Hansen or get an A1c reading, hopefully, from a blood draw this afternoon.  Should I be pleased or displeased about my creeping decrepitude?  Sad because it makes life so difficult to enjoy or glad because it may bring me closer to an end, to Poe's  'surcease of sorrow"?  Poor Jimmy A. just passed his 90th birthday at Silverado in Alexandria, unable to care for himself, confused, and hopeless.  I think of Aunt Mary Healy in the nursing home in Phoenix asking God "What's the problem?  I'm ready," wanting to die and be done with it.

My journal entry a year ago, worth repeating, and not entirely unrelated to the above:

What am I, nuts?  A common expression from my youth - what are you, nuts?  I wonder whether it applies to me and the guilt, anger, embarrassment, and shame  I feel for my participation in the American invasion of Vietnam.  It was a long time ago, and I didn't know any better, just doing my duty and all that, a flyspeck in the overall picture, what with the big decisions being made in Washington and more than 8,700,000 Americans having served in Vietnam.  Get over it, snap out of it!  But I do feel guilt, especially about how stupid I was eating up all the bullshit that was fed us out of Washington and Saigon.  I'm sure it's amplified by Andy having married into a large, wonderful Vietnamese family who left their country after the communist victory but I experienced embarrassment and shame and guilt over the war long before Andy had met Anh and before I got to know the members of her large and lovely family.  I guess those feelings were what I was experiencing in the years after I was back in the States and the war was still going on in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos though my emotions were fairly subdued in those years, defensively.  

In any event, yesterday I serendipitously came across an article by Jane Yett Kiely from the New York Review  of Books, in the December 14, 1972 issue called "If the Fighting Had Taken Place Here."  It included the following:

"The ratio of the South Vietnamese population to the US population is 1:11.3. Thus for every South Vietnamese killed or wounded or made a refugee, 11.3 Americans are projected into the corresponding categories, in order to reflect accurately the impact of the war on a smaller population. We have shown this on the map by referring to the population of distinct groups of American states. [The map she refered to is not reproduced in the archived article, just the text.]

The land ratio is 1:55. That is, for every acre of land defoliated in South Vietnam, 55 acres are projected onto the United States map.

Here are the statistics:

The total number of South Vietnamese killed during the war is conservatively estimated at 569,000 (US equivalent, 6.4 million); the total number wounded, 1,326,000 (US equivalent, 15 million). Forty thousand civilians were executed without trial under the Phoenix program (US equivalent, 452,000). Other Saigon executions are not included. At least eight million South Vietnamese have been made refugees (US equivalent, 90.4 million). These are all South Vietnamese government figures and may be low.

The Stanford Biology Group reports that over 5 million acres—12 percent—of South Vietnam have been sprayed with defoliating chemicals (US equivalent, 275 million acres).

A few qualifications should be added. The map does not represent a realistic picture of the war. In Vietnam itself the forms of destruction would overlap and many additional statistics would have to be added—the children orphaned, cities destroyed, diseases spread, soldiers captured and tortured, among other effects.

In addition, it must be remembered that the data do not include the war’s effect on the other peoples of Indochina, nor does it reflect the losses of the US and other countries involved in the war."

. . . . . . . 

The enormity of the crime, the sin, and the suffering we inflicted on the people of Vietnam can't be overstated.  The comparative statistics in the NYRB article help, if only superficially.  What is painful to remember is how blasé we were, how indifferent, at least where and when I served.  While our fellow Marines were flying missions day and night that dropped high explosives, napalm, white phosphorous, cluster bombs, Agent Orange, and other toxins. we were keeping track of our departure dates, counting the days till we could return to the States, hoping for PCS orders to Hawaii or California, drinking premium booze at dirt-cheap prices at the Officers Club, and generally oblivious of our complicity in a massive war crime.  Insouciance, indifference, callousness, hard-heartedness, White superiority, racism, American exceptionalism.  All these thoughts were rekindled by the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 2/24/22.  "“Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”― Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War.

A photo I took in 1965, two little boys on the

"Dogpatch" side of the barbed wire we

surrounded ourselves with