1/2/25

 Thursday, January 2, 2025

D+58

1905 Conference of 23 industrial trade unionists in Chicago issued the "Industrial Union Manifesto," calling for a convention to be held in June, laying the groundwork for the formation of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)

1999 A brutal snowstorm caused 14 inches of snow in Milwaukee and 19 inches in Chicago, where temperatures plunged to -13°F; 68 deaths were reported

2018 US Senator Al Franken resigned

2021 President Donald Trump said to Georgia's Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger "I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have” 

2023 Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin collapsed in cardiac arrest and was revived by CPR on the field in an NFL game against the Bengals in Cincinnati

In bed at 9, awake around 3, and up around 3:30, thinking about Daniel Gordis and Michelle Fraenkel on Eighteen Questions, 40 Israeli Thinkers speaking faster than I could follow.  I lit a log in the fireplace and my Kitty candle thinking of loneliness and age-related vulnerabilities.  Dozed off at some point and woke up near 8. 

Prednisone, day 233, 7.5 mg., day 48.   Prednisone at 4:45 with some pretzels.   Other meds at 10 a.m. 

Alice Munro's Passive Voice is a very long essay by Rachel Aviv in the December 23, 2024, online edition of The New Yorker and in the December 30, 2024, and January 6, 2025, print edition. The title in the print edition is You Won't Get Free Of It.  I listened to it online because of my decreasing ability to read print, even with adjustable font size on my laptop, and read along parts of it.  It has knocked me for a bit of a loop because it describes the sexual abuse of Alice Munro's then-9-year-old daughter Andrea and reminds me of my having learned late in life of the childhood sexual abuse of someone dear to me.  She had also been subject in her childhood to other forms of emotional abuse and neglect.  She never told her mother of the sexual molestation by a relative for many reasons.  She was very young.  She didn't know how.  She was frightened and confused.  She knew her mother loved the molesting relative and didn't want to hurt her mother.  All the abuse and neglect in her childhood had an effect on her personality development and thus she carried the effects of it throughout her life.  Despite the damage done to her, she became a good and loving person, a blessing to all around her. How many women have been sexually abused or somehow traumatized in childhood?  How little we know of the formative experiences in the lives of others, even those close to us.  How little men know of women's lives.  A year or more ago at a family gathering, I mentioned feeling vulnerable walking to or getting into my car in a supermarket parking lot and a young female in-law said "Now you know what it's like being a woman."  Women are so much more vulnerable than men because most predators are men and they prey on those who are vulnerable.  The strong do what they will; the weak suffer what they must.  Who is weaker than a child, especially a female child preyed upon by a powerful and sometimes trusted adult?  Hard thoughts to think in the predawn darkness.

Phil Klay, Pete Hegseth, J.D. Vance, Suckers & Losers.  Phil Klay was a Marine officer in the invasion of Iraq.  In 2004, after graduating from Dartmouth, he went through Officer Candidate School in Quantico, or what was called Training & Test Regiment or T&T when I went through it  42 years before him.  After his discharge from the Marines, Klay wrote two award-winning books, Redeployment, a collection of short stories, and Missionaries, a novel.  In this morning's NY Times, he has an op-ed titled "Trump, Hegseth and the Honor of the American Military."  Excerpts;

In September 2016 I went to a televised forum with the two leading presidential candidates and asked Donald Trump about military policy in Iraq, where I’d served with the Marine Corps several years earlier. He told me America should “take the oil.” Then he said it again: “Take the oil.” . . . A few years later, explaining our military presence in Syria, Mr. Trump said he was keeping troops there “only for the oil.” What a thing to ask soldiers to fight for.

When it comes to articulating a vision of American warfare, Donald Trump is the least hypocritical president of my adult life. He does not promise to spread democracy, or human rights, or a liberal, international rules-based order. He does not claim we’re a shining city on a hill. “We’ve got a lot of killers,” he’s said instead. “What? You think our country’s so innocent?” 

But [Trump's] sort of amoral pragmatism, especially in matters of war, has its limits and dangers. It will inevitably run up against a core belief in America’s identity as a nation, the belief in the moral obligation to strive to conduct and fight wars honorably. It’s a belief I still hold, and that millions of Americans do, too. 

 Later, Klay assesses Trump's nomination of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense which is:

most notable to me because it strikes at the core of the honor of the American military, is his signature achievement as a political advocate — helping persuade Mr. Trump to intervene in the cases of three men accused or convicted of war crimes. Afterward, Mr. Trump publicly heralded the men as “great warriors,” and later invited two of them, including Clint Lorance, onstage at a private fund-raiser.

Here’s how Mr. Lorance earned that invitation.

In 2012, he was sent as a new commander without combat experience to lead a platoon of young soldiers deployed to Afghanistan with the largely hopeless mission of defeating the local Taliban and winning over the local population. One day he threatened to kill a farmer and his son, a 3- or 4-year-old boy, and a day later ordered his men to shoot within inches of unarmed villagers, including near children. “It’s funny watching” the villagers “dance,” he said. Mr. Lorance’s men, combat veterans, eventually balked at his orders, and refused his instructions to make a false report about taking fire from the village. The next day he ordered fire on unarmed Afghans over a hundred yards away from the platoon, killing them, and radioed a false report claiming the bodies couldn’t be searched.

And here the difference between an idealistic and an amoral vision of America becomes concrete. Because those soldiers, who’d seen combat and watched their friends suffer terrible wounds, turned Mr. Lorance in that same evening, 14 of them eventually offering testimony against him in the court-martial that found him guilty of second-degree murder.

That testimony meant nothing to the elite media personalities like Sean Hannity and Mr. Hegseth who took up Mr. Lorance’s cause, though. Mr. Trump’s pardon of their former leader was a final betrayal for the troops who served in that platoon.

When I was in Vietnam I heard stories of American soldiers and Marines collecting body parts of dead VC, mostly noses and ears.  I heard rumors of captured VC being taken up in helicopters and pushed overboard if they wouldn't provide information sought by ARVN intelligence agents.  I had no way of knowing what was true and what may have been fanciful 'scuttlebutt,' bullshit.  One thing I know for sure is that we Americans have committed war crimes in every major conflict in which we have participated.  Some of the crimes have been prosecuted by military courts; most have not.  See the article in The New Yorker, "The War Crimes That the Military Buried" by Parker Yesko in its series "In The Dark," Series 3.  I also know for sure that the United States has refused to submit itself to the International Criminal Court where war crimes are prosecuted by an international tribunal.  Five other countries are not members: Russia, China, Israel, Libya, and Qatar.  I also know that Trump and Hegseth by their actions have virtually encouraged the commission of war crimes by American combatants.

One of the Eighteen Questions for Forty Israeli Thinkers is "Is the IDF the most moral army in the world?"  The responses I have heard so far though only from a small minority of the 40 thinkers,  have been intelligent and thoughtful.  I can't summarize them but I suspect that, if the same question were put to most Americans, their immediate inclination would be to answer affirmatively.  In a real sense, the question isn't a serious one, but rather one that invites other questions.  It's hard to think of any organization whose primary purpose to to kill people and destroy stuff as 'moral' but that's the world we live in, one in which nations must maintain such organizations.  In any event, we Americans are brought up to think of our military as comprised of heroes, guys (mostly) who protect us from evildoers who would steal our wealth, destroy our freedoms, violate our women, and corrupt our children, not as guys who kill and destroy to protect the major economic interests in the country.  They wouldn't agree with Marine Medal of Honor winner General Smedley Butler who wrote that "War is a Racket" designed to protect Wall Street and corporate America.  I note that while Israel has seized and occupied land immediately adjacent to the 1948 UN-created borders of Israel, they have not sent the IDF to lands thousands of miles away from Israel proper.  Over 156,000 active-duty US troops were serving overseas as of March 2024.

"Thoughts and prayers"  Many, perhaps most, of the political and law enforcement officials who have spoken at press conferences about the terrorist slaughter in New Orleans have uttered what has become the trite words "Our hearts go out to the families" and "our thoughts and prayers" are with the victims and their families.   The words have become clichés, worse than clichés.