Mom's Birthday

Mary Norma Healy was born 100 years ago today in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, at the south end of the Mesabi Iron Range.  1922 was the year that saw Hitler’s Brownshirts, the SA, becoming violent in the streets of Germany on their long march to power 10 years later.  It was the year that 30,000 of Mussolini’s Blackshirts marched on Rome and seized control over the Italian government.  Mary was born just a few months after Crown Prince Hirohito became Regent of Japan on his way to becoming Emperor of Japan in 1926 and just a few weeks before Frances Gumm, later to be better known as Judy Garland, was born in the same hospital as Mary.  Mary’s mother, Catherine O’Shea Healy, had two other children, Cornelius and Donald, and had had a third son, Daniel, who died at birth or in infancy, for Mary’s birth registry listed her as Catherine’s fourth child.  In 1928, when Mary was 6 years old, her mother died of pernicious anemia, an autoimmune deficiency causing non-absorption of vitamin B-12 needed for red blood cell production.  Her father never remarried and Mary grew up motherless.  Mary was 7 years old when the stock market crashed in 1929 and she lived most of her youth in the Great Depression.  She attended Catholic schools in Englewood on Chicago’s south side and on August 3, 1940, she married Charles Edward Clausen, a co-parishioner at St. Bernard’s Church.  She was 18 years old, he several weeks shy of his 20th birthday.  In August of 1941, she gave birth to her son Charles and 3 years later, to his beloved sister, Catherine, named after Mary’s mother, and always called by her nickname Kitty.  In 1944, her husband was drafted into the Marine Corps and sent off to kill or be killed by Emperor Hirohito’s soldiers on a small island called Iwo Jima.  Her brothers were likewise conscripted and sent off to kill or be killed by the soldiers of Hitler and Mussolini.  Charles survived the battle, unlike 6,800 other Americans and more than 20,000 Japanese who died on the island, but he returned to his young wife emotionally shattered, damaged in ways that lasted throughout his life.  In September, 1947, a 15 year old neighbor of Mary and Charles, broke into their basement apartment while Charles was at work, threatened Mary’s 6 year old son and 3 year old daughter with a knife, and  slashed and sexually assaulted Mary.  The investigating detective described the crime as ‘sexual torture.’ Mary survived the crime against her and her children and, though she suffered her own PTSD, she never allowed herself to become embittered by the many hurts and injuries she experienced in her life.  Like her mother, she died young, at age 51.  Her husband and her daughter are gone now too, and her son is in his 80s.  He remembers her today on what would be her 100th birthday for the love and kindness she shared with a world that so often abused and neglected her, for the love and loyalty she gave to family and friends, for the compassion she showed for all of ‘our fellow men,’ and for the strength and integrity and goodness with which she lived her too-short and too-hard life. Requiescat in pace, Mom.

Russian invasions and American invasions

 I suspect there may be some American veterans experiencing disquieting thoughts from Russia's invasion and massive bombing of a smaller, weaker nation whose political/economic system is displeasing to the more powerful Russian  government.  Some will recall that we dropped more than twice the tonnage of bombs on Vietnam than we did in both the European and Asian theaters of operation in World War II.  Some will remember our "Shock and Awe" boasting that preceded our invasion of Iraq to destroy non-existent "weapons of mass destruction."  I find myself remembering that on the very day I left the US to participate in our lethal intervention in Vietnam's civil war, President Lyndon B. Johnson spoke to our Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and said:   “. . . it’s going to be difficult for us to 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.”  That was on June 21, 1965, and of course Johnson was correct: they were never going to quit, but that didn't keep Johnson  and the next American president from continuing the carnage of Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian and American lives for years until Marine helicopters were called in to pluck desperate people off the roof of our embassy 10 years later.  What the Russians are doing is hideous, evil, and criminal, but it also ought prompt a national examination of conscience here.  As Donald Trump infamously told Bill O'Reilly when Reilly pointed out that Vladimir Putin "is a killer":  “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”

H. L. Mencken on War Propaganda and Public Opinion

 Each time one of the networks shows videos from the Russian ‘Defense’ Ministry I sense my stomach churning and my spirit sinking.  The videos are propaganda, like similar videos produced by the U.S. ‘Defense’ Department.  They remind viewers of the mission of all military forces, i.e., killing people and destroying stuff.  The soldiers with their rifles, grenades, rocket launchers, mortars, and flame throwers, the tanks, artillery pieces, ships, and aircraft loaded with high explosive weapons – all are intended to kill people and destroy stuff.  The plain message is ‘cross me and risk death and destruction.’  This is true of the Russian military.  This is true of the American military.  We’re all in the Death and Destruction business.  For smaller nations, their military forces may accurately be said to be defensive, at least in terms of perceived external threats.  For imperial nations, i.e., Russia, China, and the U.S., their military forces are ‘defense forces’ only in the sense that they are maintained to ‘defend’ whatever the national leaders want to accomplish with them, which may include aggression against weaker adversaries.  Nothing has changed since Thucydides observed the “the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must.”  In all of this, we wonder how much it matters what any of us thinks about the pendency of yet another European war that one way or another inevitably involves the U.S.  

 On May 9, 1939, a few months before Nazi Germany invaded Poland, H. L. Mencken wrote a piece in the Baltimore Sun, that seems a bit prescient:

    "The fact that all the polls run heavily against American participation in the threatening European war is not to be taken seriously.  A secret poll taken in any of the counties principally concerned would show the same result precisely.  The overwhelming majority of Englishmen don’t want war, and hope that it will never come again, and the same thing is true of the majority of Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Poles, Russians, Romanians and Serbs.  It was true of the same people down to August 2, 1914 and of Americans down to April 6, 1917.

    But wars are not made by common folk, scratching for livings in the heat of the day; they are made by demagogues infesting palaces. . .

    A few weeks of razzle-dazzle will suffice to convert most people to the war and to intimidate and silence the stray recalcitrants who hold out . . . Thus the job of demagogy is completed and a brave and united people confronts a craven and ignominious foe.  It is not until long afterward that anyone ventures to inquire into the matter more particularly, and it is then too late to do anything about it.  The dead are still dead, the fellows who lost legs still lack them, war widows go on suffering the orneriness of their second husbands, and taxpayers continue to pay, pay, pay.  In the schools children are taught that the war was fought for freedom, the home, and God."

    Right now Vladimir Putin is the demogogue in the driver’s seat and there is no telling whether the coalition of opponents threatening sanctions will deter him from crossing the Ukrainian border meting out Death and Destruction.  What we can be sure of is the ubiquity of his government’s razzle-dazzle justifying the Death and Destruction, the innocent suffering what they must, and the whole sordid exercise being justified on all sides as a defense of “freedom, the home, and God.”

Ash Wednesday

 On Ash Wednesday, 2003, the eve of America's invasion of Iraq, I wrote in one of my quarterly letters to the supporters of the House of Peace, where I then worked:

"Fifty-eight years ago today, my father was a 24 year old Marine private on Iwo Jima.  In a battle that lasted little more than a month on an island about 1/3rd the area of Manhattan, almost 7,000 Americans and more than 21,000 Japanese were killed.  It remains the bloodiest, costliest battle in Marine Corps history.

Thirty-seven years ago today, I was a 24 year old Marine first lieutenant stationed in Vietnam.  The following year brought harder duty, as ‘CACO’ or Casualties Assistance Calls Officer in the Philadelphia area.  Vietnam was not my sternest test; it was Philadelphia, for every six days I was on call to notify next-of-kins, usually poor or working class people, that their son or husband, father or brother, had been killed or wounded in Vietnam.  A national mission that had started out in March, 1965, as fending off invading North Vietnamese shifted to “winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people,” and ended – unsuccessfully – as simply trying to avoid military and political defeat by a Third World opponent.  At the end of America’s longest war, there were 47,378 American KIAs (plus almost 11,000 non-hostile deaths), 304,704 WIAs and 2,338 MIAs.  The numbers of Vietnamese men, women, and children killed, wounded, and missing were many times higher.

My father returned from Iwo Jima and I returned from Vietnam with campaign ribbons, but no Purple Hearts.  We are not listed among the casualties of World War II or Vietnam.  Nonetheless, my Dad knows and I know that our lives, like those of millions of others who don’t show up in casualty statistics, were forever affected by the war experience.  Wartime casualty statistics always lie; the suffering and devastation wrought by the unimaginable violence of war can never be accurately measured: not only for the vanquished, but also for the victors; not only for the combatants, but also for their families.

I was writing from personal knowledge.  The Battle of Iwo Jima horribly wounded my father and, through my father, it injured his wife and his children.  To the extent that I developed bad coping behaviors in dealing with him and his condition after the war, it impacted me and, through me, my family.  Thus, in a very real sense, wounds from that battle 60 years ago are still felt in our family.

In March of this year [2003],  I drove to Florida to visit my Aunt Monica and my Dad who was visiting her.  Both are now dead.  On the way, I listened to a ‘book on tape’ by Farley Mowat entitled “And No Birds Sang.”   The book describes the author’s service in the Canadian Army in the Italian campaign of World War II.  In it, he quoted a letter he received during the war from his father, himself a World War I veteran:

'Keep it in mind during the days ahead that war does inexplicable things to people and no man can guess how it is going to affect him until he has had a really stiff dose of it.  The most unfortunate ones after any war are not those with missing limbs.   They’re the ones who have had their spiritual feet knocked out from under them.  The beer halls and gutters are still full of such poor bastards from my war and nobody understands or cares what happened to them.  I remember two striking examples of two men from my old company in the 4th Battalion, both damn fine fellows yet both committed suicide in the lines.  They did not shoot themselves.  They let the Germans do it because they had reached the end of the tether.  They never knew what was the matter with them.  They had become empty husks, were spiritually depleted, were burned out."

In another book, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Modris Eksteins discusses Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, or more accurately, Remarque’s psychological and spiritual condition after the War to End All Wars.  He describes Remarque as

". . . a deeply disconsolate man, searching for an explanation for his dissatisfaction.  And in his search, Remarque eventually hit upon the Kriegserleben, the war experience. . .  “All of us were”, he said of himself and his friends in an interview in 1929, “and still are, restless, aimless, sometimes excited, sometimes indifferent, and essentially unhappy.”"

  . . .

Remarque himself stated the purpose of All Quiet in a brief and forceful prefatory comment:

"This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure . . . It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war."

On this Ash Wednesday in 2022, as Vladimir Putin's patriotic troops march on Ukraine to kill, and maim, and terrify Ukraine's patriotic troops and civilians, I think of other Ash Wednesdays, and of Iwo Jima, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and all the wars the great powers have waged.  I think of all the children who will suffer, all the parents, the wives (and husbands,) all the others who will suffer along with the Ukrainians and, yes, the Russian soldiers who are Putin's pawns.  I think of ashes smeared on foreheads and of the reminder "Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris."   And I think that wars are never truly "over."  The awful effects carry on in the lives of the survivors on all sides of the evil exercises, from generation to generation, in saecula saeculorum.

Catholic hypocrisy

 Lest we forget.  Those of us who participated in the American invasion of Vietnam, especially we of Catholic heritage, may be reminded of the unChristian bellicosity of a Francis Cardinal Spellman, archbishop of New York and official Apostolic Vicar for the American Military (officially the 'Military Ordinariate of the United States.')  Thus, as a young Catholic Marine, Spellman was my bishop.  Spellman was hugely instrumental in getting Roman Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem placed as the president of largely Buddhist South Vietnam.  Diem was a resident of Maryknoll, the Catholic seminary outside New York and his brother was the Catholic bishop of Saigon and regularly sought political support for the American war from his fellow hierarch Spellman.  While Pope Paul VI was persistently working toward peace negotiations and an end to the lethal hostilities, Cardinal Spellman visited the troops in country and urged them to  fight on to "total victory."  Celebrated as a fervent anti-Communist, Spellman was also a powerful and unrepentant warmonger notoriously at odds with his pontiff and others who sought to end the bloodletting in Vietnam.  In December, 1966, Spellman came to DaNang, where I had been stationed, and told the American troops that they were "holy Crusaders" engaged in "Christ's war against the Vietcong and the people of North Vietnam."  On Christmas Day, Spellman said Mass at a simple wooden table facing thousands of troops, telling them that "This war in Vietnam is, I believe, a war for civilization," and that their calling was "the defense, protection, and salvation not only of our country, but, I believe, of civilization itself."  As is too often the case, leaders like Patriarch Kirill and Vladimir Putin, can  find some American precedents for their rhetorical and religious propaganda.  Oh, and by the way, when Cardinal Spellman was promoting "total victory" and opposing efforts to limit or end the war, Americans killed in action in Vietnam numbered 6,350.  After Spellman's 1966 encouragement for "total victory" in "Christ's war," another 51, 870 Americans died in Vietnam and untold thousands of Vietnamese people.   Lest we forget.

0804

August 4, 2022

Down around 10, up around 6, 3 or 4 pss, 1 and 1/2 glass of red.

    Feeling listless, useless, this morning.  By mid-afternoon, largely a wasted day of existence.  Washed and replaced my bedding.  Washed my body in the shower but no replacement was available.  Started to watch a South Korean film called "Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East," about a trio of monks in a remote mountain monastery.  One old and preparing to die, one very young, one in the middle.  I watched half of it, relishing the Korean setting, stunning rocks, pools, streams, and small waterfalls, but understanding nothing.  Semi-brain fog all day.

0803

August 3, 2022

 Down at 10, up at 6, 4 pss, snifter of cognac before bed.

    Kansas voters rejected, by a 19 or so point margin a constitutional change that would have permitted its Republican legislature to ban or sharply limit abortion.  A lot of Trump-supported fascists won their primaries, and some lost.

    I fell this morning, or did I?  In moving between my chair and the ottoman in front of it, I did some awkward move toward the Venetian blinds on the window, lost my balance, and fell into my chair.  Does this count as a fall?  I think it does.  Loss of balance, and unintended movement from standing to sitting, even though it was into the comfort of my regular chair.  

    I watched a documentary the other night titled "Germans and Jews."  It focused on the relationship between Germans and Jews since the Holocaust.  At the very beginning of the film, a Jewish man says "My father told me there were only two kinds of people in the world, Jews and Nazis."  I thought at the time that the statement properly understood was correct, that the world can be divided between the exploiters/oppressors and the exploited/oppressed.  I think of it now though along with the statement by Alexandre Solzhenitzen that 'the battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.' There are times and circumstances when I fill the role of the Nazi, and times when I am the Jew.  I think about this now because I have become so conscious of my complicity in so much badness throughout my long life.  It must be why for so long I have considered as my 'favorite' (a bad choice of words) bit of poetry are Yeats' lines in "Vacillation":

Responsibility so weighs me down.

Things said or done long years ago,

Or things I did not do or say

But thought that I might say or do,

Weigh me down, and not a day

But something is recalled,

My conscience or my vanity appalled.

As I think these thoughts I am reminded of a theory I heard some years ago about the Last Judgment, i.e., that the Judgment will not consist of  God or Christ weighing our deeds and separating the sheep from the goats as in Matthew 25: 31-46, but rather simply facing a mirror which reveals each of us as we were and are, no ignoring or hiding from the truth of our sins, our faults, our failings, our cruelties, our indifference to the suffering of others, just in living a life in a Consumer Culture, an America First nation.  L'enfer, c'est les autres et l'enfer, c'est moi.  We have met the enemy and he is us.  A jumble of thoughts in an old mind.

   I filled two pages of my current Canson watercolor paper booklet Chronicle.  One is a tracing and drawing of Alfred E. Neuman, and the facing page is a list of distressing current headlines regarding 1/6 coverups, gun culture, climate change, and the pandemic.  What, me worry?

    Nancy Pelosi stopped in Taiwan today with what? to gain and potentially so much to lose.  Feet of clay.

    I watched another documentary on OVID, "Wifi Howls from Happiness," about the Iranian artist/painter/sculptor Bahman Mohasses, released in 2014.  Excerpt from his conversation/monologue with the director: "I am a human rights prisoner.  A worm has the right to crawl the earth, but I don't have that right.  So when they say, democracy or dictatorship, it's all the same to me.  Democracy is just as rotten as a dictatorship.  One loses one's faith."  Reminded me, but by way of contrast, with the op-ed in this morning's NYTimes "The Violent Fantasies of Blake Masters" by Sam Adler-Bell about Masters, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, and (unmentioned) Ayn Rand.