12/25/2025

 Thursday, December 25, 2025

Christmas 2025

1957 Ed Gein was found not guilty by reason of insanity for murders in Plainfield

1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered a halt to bombing operations in North Vietnam, hoping to spur peace talks

1968 NASA Apollo 8 crew broadcast while orbiting the moon and read passages from the Bible to celebrate Christmas

1977 Prime Minister Menachem Begin met President Anwar Sadat in Egypt

1979 Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan to prop up the Communist government, beginning a disastrous and failed ten-year war

1989 Trial of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena on charges of genocide and personal enrichment; the couple is found guilty and executed by firing squad the same day.

1999 Pope John Paul II personally opened the Holy Doors of St. John Lateran in Rome to mark the Jubilee

In bed at 9, up a 5:20.  34°,  w/c 19°, high 37°, low 33°, windy.  

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 10 a.m.   

I love Kitty's Hummels, but they give me a little heartache

A Christman Grinch.   I try to remember the last time I truly looked forward to Christmas, but I can't remember.  It must have been when Sarah and Andy were little, and all the world seemed brighter despite Vietnam, Nixon, Watergate, etc.  I have long hated the commercialism of the season.  Bob Friebert used to call Christmas "my people's favorite holy day" because of all the buying and selling.  Has there ever been a time in my life when the purported religious significance of the Nativity and the Incarnation, the Word made flesh, God so loving the world that He sent his only begotten Son, and all that, was more important than the money-making?  Maybe in the days before radio and television, mass communication meaning mass advertising, mass want-creating, meaning mass stress.  I am indeed a Grinch, with my soul pinched, unable to feel "joy to the world, the Lord has come, let earth receive her King " and "He rules the world with Truth and Grace".  So much mythology, so much falsehood, starting with the conflicting accounts in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, and all of it, in any case, make-believe, made up.  Call me Scrooge.  Alas.  My loss.

    Speaking of mythologies and falsehoods, I note the anniversary of Pope John Paul II's calling a Jubilee Year or Holy Year back in 1999/2000.  It was a year when Catholics could supposedly obtain a Plenary Indulgence by traveling to Rome, visiting the four major churches, and fulfilling several other requirements, thereby having all their sins forgiven and their time in Purgatory reduced.  Good grief.  2025 has been another Jubilee Year, declared by Pope Francis back in 2024.  What Bs, or as we used to say in Vietnam, happy horseshit.  We'll be home by Christmas, and all that. 

It's also the anniversary of LBJ announcing the Christmas bombing pause in 1965, when my young butt was living in a tent on the airbase outside Danang and working in the Tactical Air Control Center of the headquarters of the 1st Marine Air Wing.  The bombing pause applied only to North Vietnam; close air support and other aviation operations continued as normal in the South.  It was the second bombing pause.  There was an earlier one in May, intended to show Hanoi that the U.S. was willing to negotiate; it lasted only a week.  The Christmas pause lasted more than a month.  Both were unsuccessful; the war continued, and no negotiations occurred.  I remember almost nothing of my Christmas in Vietnam.  By the time of the Christmas bombing pause, Johnson and McNamara already knew the war was unwinnable.  From my memoir:

When I arrived in Vietnam in July, 1965, the conflict there was not yet a full-fledged American war.  The mission of American combat forces was limited and essentially defensive.  It all changed two weeks after my arrival when President Johnson made the decision to grant General Westmoreland’s request for a massive infusion of American forces in 1965 and more in 1966.   He granted the request for the very reasons that should have caused him to deny it - because he knew that the South Vietnamese government was incapable of effectively governing the country and the South Vietnamese military was incapable of defending it.  That decision on that date for those reasons turned the war into an American war.  The whole world knew of the fecklessness and corruption of the Vietnamese government in Saigon and of the powerlessness of the South Vietnamese military and of the determination of the VC/NVA forces and we Marines knew it too.  In Robert McNamara’s In Retrospect, he acknowledges the mistake of not pulling out of Vietnam early.  He wrote:

By [the early or mid 1960s] it should have become apparent that the two conditions underlying President Kennedy’s decision to send military advisors to South Vietnam were not being met and, indeed, could not be met: political stability did not exist and was unlikely ever to be achieved; and the South Vietnamese, even with our training assistance and logistical support, were incapable of defending themselves.

Given these facts – and they are facts – I believe we could and should have withdrawn from South Vietnam either in late 1963 amid the turmoil following Điem’s assassination or in late 1964 or early 1965 in the face of increasing political and military weakness in South Vietnam.  

So it goes.  In late 64 or early 65,  the U.S. had 23,300 advisors in RVN and 'only' 225 Americans killed in action.  By the end of the war, more than 58,000 Americans were KIAs, more than 153,000 were WIAs, and another 1,566 MIAs, including my friend 'Moon' Mullen, shot down in his A4 Skyhawk over Laos and never found.    What are we to think of this, even 60 years later?  even after Afghanistan,  and now with Trump's buildup in the Caribbean off Venezuela?  I note that today is also the anniversary of the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan.  What did they learn from that?  What did we learn from that?  Merry Christmas, He rules the world, with Truth and Grace.

From the current issue of Harper's Magazine, Turning Point:How the GOP consensus on Israel cracked, by Andrew Cockburn.  Excerpt:

For decades, Zionist political organizations like AIPAC and a media industry concentrated in a few reliably sympathetic hands protected the narrative that Israel is the sole democracy in the Middle East, permanently imperiled by genocidal foes, from serious challenge—even as Israel populated the occupied West Bank with illegal settlements and kept the fenced-off population of Gaza in a state of near malnutrition with a total military blockade starting in 2007. But over the past two years, Israel has thrown the doors to debate wide open with its actions in Gaza: killing civilians by the tens of thousands, burying many alive under the rubble of their homes, destroying hospitals, sniping children with drones, and starving young and old alike. And the world has watched it happen. Predictably, traditional media outlets such as the New York Times and CNN have offered sanitized reports on the slaughter. But thanks to social media, it has become impossible to control the flow of information. By 2025, according to a Pew Research Center survey, one in five Americans was getting their news from TikTok, where a stream of powerful images from Gaza depicted what was really happening there. The figure rose to 43 percent among those under thirty.

This was a dire turn of events for Israel’s American supporters. Early in the war, Jonathan Greenblatt, current head of the ADL, noted the effects of the images from Gaza. “We have a major, major, major generational problem,” Greenblatt can be heard lamenting in a leaked recording of a November 2023 call. “All the polling I’ve seen,” he says, “suggests this is not a left–right gap, folks . . . it’s young and old. . . . We really have a TikTok problem, a Gen Z problem.”

He was right about the polls. Israel’s standing with the American public, according to numerous surveys, has been plummeting across the board. A New York Times/Siena College poll in September revealed that more Americans supported the Palestinians than Israel, and 40 percent believed that Israel was deliberately killing civilians. But the gap is most pronounced among young people. A Pew survey published in April revealed that the portion of young Democrats with an unfavorable view of Israel increased from 62 percent in 2022 to 71 percent in 2025. More alarmingly for the Trump Administration, among Republicans under the age of fifty, a demographic that includes Kirk’s followers, disaffection with Israel jumped from 35 percent to 50 percent. Public polls revealing the country’s shrinking popularity among conservatives have been confirmed by internal Republican research. 

I don't dispute the author's view that the slide in approval of the State of Israel is largely due to the world's moral revulsion over its war on Gaza, though my longer-term disapproval is based on the behavior of its settlers, in Gaza (until Ariel Sharon ousted them in 2005) but mostly in the West Bank.  From all that I have read, the Israel Defense Force and other components of the Israeli government have for years worked hand in hand with the settlers to dispossess Palestinians of their land and otherwise to make life unlivable for them.  It's been a case of slow-moving ethnic cleansing accelerating rapidly after October 7th.  Israel has gotten away with it for decades, but the chickens are coming home to roost.  The movement is led by young people, sickened by Israel's behavior, but it includes plenty of old folks like me.  

Steve and Nikki left for Chicago after Geri's dinner of mushroom and onion stuffed tenderloin this afternoon.