BLITZKRIEG TO FRITZKRIEG IN UKRAINE

A LETTER TO PUTIN

As German General Heinz Guderian (left) employed the new tactic of blitzkrieg when he successfully swept through Ukraine in 1941, Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a tactic that deserves to be called “Fritzkrieg,” has shown his army to be an inept paper bear.

Dear Vlad:

The whole world fears you, and rightly so. You possess nuclear weapons and what many perceive to be an unstable mind. That nervous-making combo has allowed you—up until now—to bluff your way to get whatever you want. And that is? Bringing back the USSR of old, apparently.

They say you’re a reader. That you read a lot of philosophy books…particularly ones that validate autocracy. Well, you’re reading the wrong stuff. If you’re going to engage in modern warfare, you’d better learn how it’s done. Put aside your KGB handbook on how to torture, interrogate, infiltrate, and assassinate; you may be skilled in killing journalists and poisoning political rivals, but you’ve never gone to war personally, and those KGB skills are not transferable. Start your reading with Carl von Clausewitz’s On War for an overview on “the fog of war”; then read General Helmuth von Moltke the Elder on military logistics…a crucial factor to winning wars that you seem to know very little of. Ja, da, I know they’re both dead krauts from the past, but both of them knew a hell of a lot more about waging war than you do.

You are offended. You know war. Look at your past successes. Yes, you bombed the hell out of Grozny in the Second Chechen War and kept that unruly Russian Republic in your grasp. Back in 2005 you “liberated” the “independent provinces” of South Ossetia and Abkhazia from the nation of Georgia and brought them back to where they belong…into the old Soviet orbit that no longer exists. You leveled the historic city of Aleppo for your Syrian buddy Assad in 2016, much to the dismay of the civilized world. You sent your anonymous “little green men” into Crimea in 2014 and “absorbed” that Ukrainian territory in quick-time…easy pickings. The world was outraged…a little bit.

Thus emboldened, you decided to promote yourself to the Martial Bigs and take a giant step toward fulfilling that feverish dream of yours—to restore the Soviet Union to its glorious former self under the Russian Federation name. You would start with Ukraine, where most folks were waiting with open arms for you to “liberate them” from their experiment with Western Democracy. (I imagine the guy who told you that whopper has by now “disappeared.”) You probably reasoned that it should be easy. After all, you were a nuclear superpower of 144 million subjects facing a young democracy of 44 million folks without nukes.

Now we both know how wrong you were. Your reputation as a “genius”—certainly in matters military—is no more. Just compare your invasion of Ukraine this year with Nazi Germany’s 1941 west-to-east lightning strike that resulted in a quick and total victory, taking distant Kiev in less than three months. Spearheading that success was German General Heinz Guderian, commander of the 2nd Panzer Group and putative father of Blitzkrieg…“lightning war.” His plan of battle was to first probe for a soft spot in the USSR’s defensive line, puncture it, then quickly pour much motorized armor through the gap, supported by infantry on the ground (of course!) and low-flying tactical aircraft (not the high-flying missiles and bombers that you are using to level Ukrainian cities). Once deep in “your” territory, he stopped and turned to face your retreating forces, who were stunned to find themselves surrounded and surrendered in great numbers.

By contrast, Vlad, your east-to-west slog of today has proved a lame, costly, and humiliating blunder for the whole world to see. David trounces Goliath. You have turned Blitzkrieg into Fritzkrieg—or FUBAR, as some would call it—and it will probably never become a course taught in military science.

What mistakes did you make? First of all you totally misjudged the mind and will of your Ukrainian neighbors. To make things worse, you decided to invade a large country from three sides, thus thinning your forces when you should have confined yourself to invading from the east only, where your “enemy” is weakest, you are strongest, and your supply line is shortest. That’s a segue into your biggest botch of all…your logistics. What a mess! Troops many hundred of miles from home without food or water or warm clothing, their morale in the crapper. Even worse, you ran out of ammunition and fuel for your vehicles, including the 40 miles of them stuck stationary for two weeks north of Kiev, lined up like sitting ducks for U.S. Javelin missiles and Turkish drones. As for command and control, you put antiquated communications equipment in the hands of poorly trained personnel. All in all, a “disaster” to use a favorite word of your friend and our former president whom you helped put into office.

So what do you do now, Vlad? Add to your war crimes on revolting display in Bucha? Do you, out of frustration, continue with your old reliable tactic of saturation bombing all Ukrainian cities into rubble? (You may even overtake the RAF’s “Bomber” Harris in the killing of civilians from above with conventional weapons. Something not to be proud of even in military circles.) 

In any case, there will be blowback, also known as unintended consequences. They are prodigious and certainly not what you wanted or expected. Paramount among them was unifying your arch-enemy NATO, a disintegrating defense pact that you, with the cooperation of the stooge you planted in our presidency, meant to get rid of once and for all. Instead, you put it back together in record time—stronger than ever! Hard to believe, but you did it.

More specifically, your invasion woke a napping Deutschland from its peaceful slumber of 77 years. New Chancellor Olaf Scholz instantly increased the anemic German military budget by a one-time hike of 100 billion Euros, with plans to spend 2% of the annual budget on defense in the future. (“Oh Grushenka, hold on to your babushka, the panzers will be back!”)

Wait! There’s more on the military front. Your colossal failure in Ukraine has shown to the world the Russian army is little more than a paper bear…now a torn paper bear… and a teddy bear at that. That’s the price you and Mother Russia pay for a corrupt autocracy where generals out of fear tell you what you want to hear, and pocket rubles meant to modernize your military forces. That makes it so much harder for you to play the bully on the world stage and intimidate your neighbors.

Then there are the economic sanctions imposed on your nation, stronger penalties than ever before, bringing even Sweden, Finland and—believe it or not!—Switzerland into the coalition of the disapproving. Yes, I know you have shrugged those sanctions off...you still have China and India to do business with. Only time will tell what effects, if any, the West’s sanctions will have on your economy. For now at least, they must be hurting your oligarch cronies who find their fortunes frozen. Another possible small silver lining for humankind in your reckless action: not being able to sell oil and gas to Europe might just wean it off fossil fuels for good, and thereby help our species survive the coming climate catastrophe. (OK. So I’m groping.)

Vlad, let’s put aside all talk of economics and climate. What your stupid war has done is bring world-wide opprobrium down on you and your country. Indeed, you have done the near impossible job of making Russia a pariah state throughout the world, left with only fellow outcast states—North Korea, Belarus, Syria, and Venezuela—as UN voting pals. You may have banned the word “war” in your country and euphemized it to “special military operation,” but thanks to modern communications the rest of the world has seen your dire deeds in Ukraine up close; whatever you want to call them, those visuals will not be easily erased from our collective memory.

You have a habit, Vlad, of telling the world, and lecturing us in the West, on how weak and corrupt our western democracies are, and how different Russia is, as though your model of autocracy wed to kleptocracy is the future of human governance. I know democracy is relatively rare and always fragile. But a prophecy of our demise coming from the leader of the eleventh-ranking economic power in the world, reliant on oil and gas to prop up even that modest showing—with your oligarchs choosing to store their ill-gotten gains in the corrupt western democracies (not to mention sending their privileged young to study there)—loses all credibility. It died in Ukraine.

How do you explain your failure there? You doubtlessly reasoned that it would be easy to absorb that fledgling democracy. After all, you were a nuclear power facing a young democracy that voluntarily gave them up. The word democracy made the difference. Ukrainians did not want to give up what they had only just won in 2014, and they showed the will and the way to shame you and your vaunted military on the battlefield. We shall see who buries whom.

In closing, Vlad, I’d like to ask you a two-part question that you may refuse to answer. But here goes anyway. My five years of military experience include the Korean War, which hardly makes me an expert on modern military matters. That said though, I am fascinated by a strange and inexplicable statistic emerging from your war on Ukraine. In the first month of combat you have had at least seven generals killed in action. Generals! That just doesn’t happen. Generals almost always stay behind the lines, removed from the bullets and slaughter. Generals don’t die until they write their memoirs. So how do you explain this confounding anomaly?

Question two: I sense you’re not worried about the thousands of conscript cannon fodder returning home in body bags. Those young men lived in small remote towns and farms where you are still respected and folks believe your propaganda that the war was really started by Ukraine. But what about the return of those generals’ bodies to Moscow and Saint Petersburg? Won’t there be outrage from important families who know the dirty truth about “Putin’s War”? Would love to know how you will handle that.

Sincerely

This Believer in Democracy

ALLUSIONS AND ILLUSIONS

CONSULTING CAMUS

Albert Camus, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, was widely regarded as the moral voice of his generation. Putin should read him now.

My son Kurt called me from school midday with a literary question. He teaches English at Irvine Valley College and asked, “What’s that ‘grand allusion’ from Albert Camus that you taught us in Journalism as Literature?” He referred to a course I taught at CSULB that he took from me more than 30 years ago.

So far back in time. My brain was a muddle.

“Wasn’t it about Hamlet and Siegfried?” he continued.

“Something like that,” I said, “though I think there were others. I do know it was from Camus’s Letters to a German Friend…and he wrote it in 1944 when the Germans still occupied Paris, and Camus was a hunted man writing for the French underground.”

I searched my ebbing memory for more. With meager results. “Weren’t Don Quixote and Faust in there too?” I asked.

He didn’t seem to know. An impasse. We both decided to search it out separately.

It took me a few minutes to retrieve a copy of the syllabus I hadn’t opened in three decades. But I soon found the quote we were after in Camus’s third of four letters he had written to an imaginary Nazi.

Kurt called me back. He had also found the passage in question in the French Nobel Prize winner’s nonfiction collection of essays Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. He read it to me:

Remember, you said to me, one day when you were making fun of my outbursts: "Don Quixote is powerless if Faust feels like attacking him." I told you then that neither Faust nor Don Quixote was intended to attack the other and that art was not invented to bring evil into the world. You used to like exaggerated images and you continued your argument. According to you, there was a choice between Hamlet and Siegfried. At that time I didn't want to choose and, above all, it didn't seem to me that the West could exist except in the equilibrium between strength and knowledge. But you scorned knowledge and spoke only of strength. Today I know better what I mean and I know that even Faust will be of no use to you. For we have in fact accepted the idea that in certain cases choice is necessary. But our choice would be no more important than yours if we had not been aware that any choice was inhuman and that spiritual values could not be separated. Later on we shall be able to bring them together again, and this is some­ thing you have never been able to do. You see, it is still the same idea; we have seen death face to face. But we have paid dear enough for that idea to be justified in clinging to it. This urges me to say that your Europe is not the right one. There is nothing there to unite or inspire. Ours is a joint adventure that we shall continue to pursue, despite you, with the inspiration of intelli­gence.

“You could say the same thing today and it would be as true, ” Kurt added. “Just substitute Putin for the Nazis.”

“Right on,” I said. “And Europe is a battleground again.”

“It reminds me of Yeats’s lines from “The Second Coming,” Kurt said: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.”

“Nice allusion yourself,” I said to my son. “Putin certainly has the passion and intensity. Nix on the moral intelligence.”

“And why not have Zelenskyy pinch-hit for Camus?”

“For now, why not?”

NB: Journalist, novelist, playwright, and philosopher, Camus was widely considered the moral voice of his generation and known as a fierce opponent of totalitarianism. He died in an auto accident in January 1960 at age 47. He is known for his clear writing style in French that translates well into English. It is lyric, direct, short on figurative language, but does lean heavily on the use of allusion and its twin brother among literary devices, personification. The latter device is used here with four figures from great works of literature, and may challenge the casual reader’s knowledge of literature, history, and philosophy. Siegfried is the Norse and German warrior of ancient times, the man of action, a figure who slays a dragon and is an all-around culture hero. Hamlet, on the other hand, is the dithering intellectual with a conscience whose morality prevents him from taking decisive action. Faust, based on a German Renaissance figure become legend, is a dissatisfied scholar who barters his soul with the devil in exchange for unlimited knowledge and the power to enjoy all earthly pleasures. He is pitted against the daft romantic bungler, Don Quixote, who follows his impossible dream. Each is a personified metaphor for different approaches to life. The basic issue here is the collision between an energized and destructive nihilism intent on domination with a passive humanism concerned with moral values and spirituality. Kinda like Russia versus Ukraine today.

AND THE CHEAT GOES ON...

OUR SUPREME COURT TURNS A BLIND EYE TO GERRYMANDERING

Adam Zyglis for The Buffalo News.

Article III

Section 1.

The Judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain….

Remember that high school civics class when we were taught how wise it was to have an impartial, non-political third branch of government to keep our democratic nation on a fair and balanced course? A Supreme Court that would be above politics? An impartial body that would interpret the Constitution and check any attempted power grab or deviation from the dictates of that secular-sacred document by the Executive and Legislative branches? What a concept!

How’s that impartial third leg of our constitutional stool holding up? Is it still that non-political watchdog we were taught? We allow ten minutes of bitter laughter to die down…and for you to prepare for further bad news. In case you missed it, last week our unpopular, far-right-stacked, Federalist Society ridden, Opus Dei Catholic controlled Supreme Court struck another blow against voting rights and democracy. They refused to overturn Alabama’s latest gerrymander, which limits the state’s 27% Black population to one seat of seven in the nation’s House of Representatives, or 14% of the state’s representation.

As unfair as that may be, Alabama remains a distant also ran in the Red State Democracy Destruction Derby. The front-runners in the GOP gerrymandering race are Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia, though two days ago Florida made a late bid to be the biggest cheater of them all. That’s when Governor Ron DeSantis, the would-be Trump heir, rejected his state legislature’s congressional district map that already favored Republicans and injected his own redistricting plan. It calls for carving up Florida’s Black Fifth District and taking away an additional two seats from the Democrats and adding them to the Republican column. So the cheat goes on…and spreads.

Incidentally, that Supreme Court’s majority 5-4 opinion on Alabama’s case did say the justices would revisit their stay of a lower court decision that found the gerrymander violated the voting rights of Blacks—but it would have to be after this year’s crucial fall election because there wouldn’t be enough time before November. C’mon! You’re telling us it takes ten months to print new ballots?!

The Supreme Court’s recent hands-off policy toward righting the mounting wrongs of gerrymandering gives Red States the go-ahead to suppress further the voting rights of minorities. We should recognize today’s egregious legislative district-drawing for what it is: just another Republican tool to “dismantle the administrative state”—GOP-speak for destroying our democracy as we know it.

Exaggeration? Track SCOTUS’s recent rulings on abortion that restrict a woman’s half-century-old right to control her own body. Do the same for its recent rulings on gun laws, affirmative action, and minority voter suppression.

How did this happen to our highest court? While too few of us were paying attention, the Federalist Society (with all due stealth) packed the Supreme Court with its hand-picked “conservative” (read reactionary) judges. Three of them— Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—were appointed by Donald Trump during his mercifully brief reign.

President Obama reacted to the rushed appointment of conservative Amy Coney Barrett to the Court after liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s summer of 2020 death with more than justified eloquence:

Four and a half years ago, when Republicans refused to hold a hearing or an up-or-down vote on Merrick Garland, they invented the principle that the Senate shouldn’t fill an open seat on the Supreme Court before a new president was sworn in. A basic principle of the law—and of everyday fairness—is that we apply rules with consistency, and not based on what’s convenient or advantageous in the moment. The rule of law, the legitimacy of our courts, the fundamental workings of our democracy all depend on that basic principle.

Amen. Note that early voting for president was already underway in September 2020 when the GOP broke the “McConnell principle” (oxymoron) they had established and rushed Barrett through…just barely, with the vote along strict party lines, with no party crossovers for the first time in our history.

There’s another “first” for the Supreme Court. Its public approval has fallen to an all-time low of 40% in Gallup polling, so alarming to them that three far-right justices ventured out of their monastic seclusion to defend themselves from charges that they were “political.”

One of the trio was the longest-serving Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas, best remembered for his dubious role in the Anita Hill affair. For some time now Thomas has taken much heat for violating the Court’s unwritten law that you and your family stay out of politics. Addressing his Notre Dame audience (the university is widely thought to have the best conservative law school), Thomas defended his “above politics” station, and blamed the media for spreading the lie that he was a politician “in robes.” The denial would have fallen on deaf ears in DC’s social circles. There his wife Ginni Thomas for decades has been a loud and public voice for several far-right organizations, and was a vocal backer of the January 6 Insurrection. It is worth noting that Thomas was the lone nay in the 8-1 Supreme Court decision to reject former President Trump’s request that the House’s January 6 Committee be denied access to his papers; his wife Ginni protested that the committee itself was illegitimate.

More recently Justice Samuel Alito, slightly to the right of Charlemagne politically, told his own Notre Dame audience that he was there “to dispel some imaginary shadows.” Among them was that the current Court was “a dangerous cabal...deciding important issues in a novel, secretive, improper way, in the middle of the night, hidden from public view….” (Doth the justice protest too much?)

The third defense came from by the Court’s newest member, that far-right Notre Dame law professor Amy Coney Barrett. Her lecture, appropriately enough, was delivered at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center. (Yes, that McConnell, “Moscow” Mitch of the deft and dirty hand who got Amy her seat in mid-September 2020, while voting was underway that would make Joe Biden president.)

Barrett told her audience that the Court was not composed of “partisan hacks.” That we should all view the Court to be as non-political as she does. “Judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties.” So she says. Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of the UC Berkeley School of Law tersely countered for the majority of us. “I would challenge her to give a single instance where the conservative justices took positions that were at odds with the views of the Republican Party,” he wrote in the Los Angeles Times. Thomas and Alito should accept the challenge, too.

Isn’t about time we woke up to the fact that “our” Supreme Court is—consciously and ideologically—in league with the Trumpian GOP coup d’état in progress, and ready to deliver the coup de grâce to our democracy?

EXTRA! EXTRA! SHAME BANISHED IN D.C.!

SENATE DESCENDS INTO THE NINTH RING OF HELL

Martin Luther King Jr. would groan in his grave if he knew what villainy the Senate was up to Wednesday.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer promised to force a vote on the Democrats’ Voting Rights Bill by Martin Luther King Jr. Day.  The holiday has passed, the bill hasn’t.  Why?  Dino Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona wouldn’t dare violate the filibuster rule—a self-imposed hobble not called for in the Constitution—that protected “minority rights.”  Of course they did make an exception recently in raising the debt-ceiling…but hey!—that was about big bucks and the world economy, not some minor domestic quibble over voting rights.  (As Omar the rugmaker said, “…take the Cash, and let the Credit go, / Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!”)

Lending their whole-hearted support to the cynical pair were all 50* Party-of-Lincoln Republicans, many of whom nevertheless threw bouquets of verbal flowers on the memory of the slain civil rights martyr on his birthday.Here are a few of those choice Senate GOP “tributes” from Jan. 17:

Nearly 60 years since the March on Washington, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s message echoes as powerfully as it did that day. His legacy inspires us to celebrate and keep building upon the remarkable progress our great nation has made toward becoming a more perfect union.

—Mitch McConnell (R), KY

Dr. King was a true fighter for social justice who believed in the potential of America. His vision for our nation was best summed up by his quote—‘We may have all come on different ships but we’re in the same boat now.’

—Lindsey Graham (R), SC

We honor the life & legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He courageously called on his fellow Americans to ‘lift our nation from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.’ We remember the sacrifices he made to secure liberty for every American.

—Ted Cruz (R), TX

‘When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.’

Dr. Martin Luther King (1963)

—Marco Rubio (R), FL

Leave it to the GOP to turn mere hypocrisy into a vomit-inducing obscenity.  Moscow Mitch didn’t allow any of his 50 thralls to vote for the Freedom to Vote Act or the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, both of which were killed (52-48) in the Senate Wednesday.  When President Biden criticized the new voter suppression laws passed in Georgia, Lindsey Graham took out the tried and true Republican dog whistle and rebuked the president for “playing the race card.”  Tex Cruz, the less-than-courageous Cancún Clown, gave a much more effusive tribute to King back in 2015; be sure to take two antacid tablets before reading.  Marco Rubio’s quote is cut from MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech; you would never guess that Little Marco introduced legislation along with far-right senators Kevin Cramer (R), ND and Mike Braun (R), IN to “prohibit federal funding to promote divisive concepts, such as Critical Race Theory.” 

Enough of your canned slop!  Put your vote where your mouth is, senators!  And listen to what the man you’re celebrating had to say, back in 1963, about your “legislative victory” Wednesday:

I think the tragedy is that we have a Congress with a Senate that has a minority of misguided senators who will use the filibuster to keep the majority of people from even voting. They won’t let the majority senators vote. And certainly they wouldn’t want the majority of people to vote, because they know they do not represent the majority of the American people. In fact, they represent, in their own states, a very small minority.

Take that you posturing naysayers who shame a legislative body that glories in being called “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”  Even in that grandiose self-description there’s a tiny irony to be savored.  That lofty description of our upper chamber comes from no less (and I do mean less) than James Buchanan, our fifteenth president, widely considered by historians to be the worst president we’ve ever had and frequently blamed for allowing our Civil War to happen.  And more to the point, he was a senator before that.  That amounts to self-praise you say?  Well, yes, but today’s senators need something to see them through those tedious, interminable days of doing nothing. 

*Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska did commit to vote “yes” on the John Lewis bill, but was spared the trouble because it never reached the floor for an up or down vote.

THE COMING YEAR OF FEAR

DEMOCRACY IN THE BALANCE

Yesterday I watched on TV the D.C. remembrance of last year’s January 6 insurrection.  I found the recollections, speeches, and prayers often moving and overall consistently sobering.  True, and to be regretted, it was a Democrats’ show; Liz Cheney and her father were the only Republicans to take part.

Throughout the somber proceedings, I sensed an undercurrent of fear in the speakers.  Fear?  Fear of what?  Fear that our democracy was at serious risk, and might be lost in the fast-closing future.            

Winston Churchill famously said that “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”  Few of us would disagree.  Democracy is a rara avis, as fragile as it is rare, subject to constant threats from within as well as without.  It is from within, from Trump and the Trumpers and the GOP elephant run amok, that come the threats to replace our weakened democracy with a nihilistic mix of autocracy and chaos.

Democracy makes demands on its citizens.  They must stay informed, participate in their governance and, above all, think critically.  To survive, a modern democracy—or a democratic republic as we have evolved to be—also requires that all participating parties and factions agree to abide by certain shared beliefs based upon a common set of facts preserved in a written document, a binding constitution.  Of course, in actual governance, unwritten norms and protocols evolve over time and are accepted as an integral part of the governing process.  And in the course of governing a nation in a world of ever-changing circumstances, its legislators will have to draft new laws—laws that adhere to the original agreed-upon principles. 

Disagreements are certain to come up in any democracy.  Ideally, they are discussed, debated, a compromise is reached, votes are taken by fairly elected representatives, and the majority decides the rules we live by.  The introduction of “alternate facts” are not a part of the deliberations; true facts override magical thinking in the real world.  And violence is never a solution to a disagreement.

How do we as a nation measure up to these demands?  Not very well.  That fear I heard yesterday in the spoken memories of January 6, 2021 was more than justified.  Our democracy is indeed in peril.

Benjamin Franklin was asked at the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 what kind of government the framers had come up with.  Franklin replied, “A republic…if you can keep it.”  Do we keep it?  There’s still a slim hope that we might.  But that means standing up and calling out the Trumpers for their unconstitutional power grab.  And, of course, voting this November as though it were your last chance to do so.

A MEMORY OF THAT INFAMOUS DAY

80 Years Later

My memory of December 7, 1941 is fixed forever in my mind, a series of black-and-white stills as clear to me today 80 years later as they are meaningful.  I was in Cleveland, Ohio, in front of Saint May’s church that Sunday morning, toward the rear of the restless line of all-white-clad kids—the girls in dresses and sheer veils, the boys twitching and uncomfortable in shirts, ties, and the strange white knickers.  It was the day of our First Communion, the second sacrament Catholics were supposed to receive in their structured religious journey through life.  We were about to receive Christ into our own body for the first time!

A quartet of nuns, dressed in black and white, tried to keep order in the fidgeting file of eight-year-olds with a gentle push here, a hushed rebuke there.  To little avail.  Sprits were soaring.

But not for all I soon noticed.  The nuns did not seem to share in the festive feelings such an occasion usually brought.  Instead they went about their herding with few words and nervous frowns as though their minds were elsewhere.  Why?  Something was not right.

I don’t remember a thing of my actual First Eucharist, and at the end of Mass I hurried home and confronted my father with the question, “What’s wrong?”

The tall, stern, and stoic man never shielded any of his four children from life’s harsh realities.  “The Japanese have bombed Hawaii,” he said matter-of-factly.  “We’re going to war.”

And so we did.  It was a war I followed closely as a boy by newspaper and radio and maps my father gave me right up to its bitter close.  I shared the world’s joy over its end, personally thankful I did not have to fight in the great slaughter.  Peace at last!

A decade after that First Communion Sunday morning—1951—I enlisted in the United States Air Force at age 18.  Korea beckoned.  Life goes on.

MAKE OR BREAK WEEK?

ABORTION, REBELLION, SECESSION

This is how the “Disunited States” might look if it broke up into distinct culture blocs.

This will be, may be, or could be the week that determines whether the nation stays together…or breaks in two or more pieces.  The Supreme Court is said to be taking up the Texas abortion law, though Mississippi’s tougher anti-abortion law is scheduled for a December hearing.  A ban on abortion from either case would shake the nation to its creaky foundations.

Also said to be on tap is Senate passage of President Biden’s Build Back Better bill—perhaps by Thanksgiving.  Really?  Has Nancy Pelosi really converted hold-outs Manchin and Sinema to the Democratic Party?  Or are the Dems just hitting the bong again?  In any case, failure to pass it will doom the Democrats in next year’s elections, according to our pundits in Washington.  That outcome would also end the House investigation into the January 6 Insurrection, likely pushing us to the brink of breaking up into angry, sectional culture blocs, probably attended by bloodshed or full-out civil war.

Surely we can all agree that such violence should be avoided at all costs.  We should also agree that culture gaps that separate us have widened to chasms since 2000, when the Supreme Court “settled” Bush vs. Gore and Justice Antonin Scalia told us to “get over it.”  We haven’t gotten over it… not out on the deep blue Pacific Coast.  California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii haven’t registered a single Red electoral vote for president since 1988.  (That’s the year laggard California joined the other three on the Blue bandwagon and the Left Coast became solidly Democratic, politically and culturally.)  Ever since, we’ve been the political weight that has kept the so-called “union” centered…or is that paralyzed, dysfunctional?  It’s past time that the Pacific states break away and try to save democracy on their own.  Frankly, we are tired of being dealt four cards in a game of five-card stud.

Contrary to the beliefs of many liberals, the impetus for breaking up has come primarily from the Republican party, which believes in power but not in governing, which claims to want small government unless they can have their own autocracy, which believes in “Anglo-Saxon” values (read “superiority”), not democracy.  A Bright Line Watch/YouGov poll conducted this June found that 66% of southern Republicans favor secession, as do 58% of Texans and 55% of Californians.  The alarming trend is confirmed by the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball; in a July poll of 2012 voters he found “deep, wide and dangerous divides” between Trump and Biden voters.  Some 52% of Trump voters wanted out to hook up with other Red states.  Among Democrats, 41% wished to be with their own kind.

For recent signs of the times and the breadth of our cultural divide, consider the results of the three gubernatorial elections of incumbent Democrats this year: in Virginia Republicans took over by a 51-49 margin; in deep blue New Jersey a popular Democrat hung on to win by a 51-48 margin; by contrast California’s Newsom thrashed his red rival by a 62-38 margin—a 24 point margin rather typical on the Pacific blue Left Coast.  (Compare California spreads in our last two presidential contests: 2020—Biden 63, Trump 34; 2016—Clinton 62, Trump 32.)

We are worlds apart, culturally and politically, from the rest of the U.S.  Quiz West Coasters on where their affinities lie and they are likely to tell you they have more in common with a Canadian to the north or a Mexican to the south than they have with someone from, say, Alabama or West Virginia.  (Coincidentally, California, the world’s fifth-largest economy, has Canada and Mexico as the top two on its export list.)

So get ready for a week that could decide our future.  Then again, it is Washington D.C., where cans are kicked down the road as frequently as Trump tells lies.

LITTLE PINK LIES

AND THE SENATOR WHO TELLS THEM

“We’re a center—if not center-right country.”  So said Joe Manchin III, senior senator of West “Almost Purgatory” Virginia some ten days ago.  He said it to justify his ongoing obstruction to the passage of President Biden’s Build Back Better bill.  He’s wrong.  We are not center or center-right…unless you spread out a map of the U.S. and compare the size of the red and blue areas. 

But that’s not how we decide our political colors.  We base them on the numbers of people who vote, and Joe should know that six out of the last seven presidential elections Democrats have received more popular votes than Republicans.  That would make us a center-left blue country if anything, but so slightly blue that we remain stuck in the nation’s present purple bog of turbulent stasis.

Of course politicians must tell little fibs every now and then just to keep their seats.  Joe, though, must know this a whopper, and if perpetuated it will flush Democrats from power next year.  In which case Joe can always switch parties and make his state’s coal barons even happier.  But what will we do here on the blue West Coast?  We sure don’t fit in the Trumpian autocracy now a-building “Down South” and “Back East.”

Here’s an idea!  Deep blue California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii secede from the failing union and walk with our 78 electoral votes (there have been no red votes since California’s in 1988) and bond together to keep democracy alive and well on the blue Pacific Coast; we could even call our new nation Pacifica.  In doing so we’ll make Joe Manchin an honest man and give him the deep-red country he apparently prefers.  

With California having the fifth largest economy in the world, and the other three Pacific states sharing with us similar political views and a common culture, there should be no doubts about our new democracy’s viability. 

Do I hear a second for secession?

ONCE IN A BASEBALL LOVER’S LIFETIME

A SEASON TO REMEMBER

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In my 80-plus years as a lover of baseball, I never saw a finish like Sunday’s closing day. Imagine, on the last day of the regular season, nine cities—Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, New York, Atlanta, Houston, Milwaukee, Toronto—still had a shot at the World Series Championship. Unheard of! Talk about a pig-out! A fan like me could channel surf away the day from the comfort of his Lazy Geezer.

It’s a sign of the quality of the teams that elimination day lessened the number of contenders by only two—that being the wild card Seattle Mariners, who lost to the also-ran Angels, and the Blue Jays who pecked the wingless Orioles to death, but still finished a game behind the Yankees and Red Sox in the wild card race.

That quality—or call it parity if you will—unsettles me, having promised to give you my winning picks for the playoffs and assuring you of a handsome retirement income. And guaranteeing it, moreover. It forces me to fall back on the wisdom of baseball catcher and dugout philosopher Yogi Berra, who once said “it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” How wise he was.

Anyway, here goes. Though my heart’s still with the Dodgers, who finished the regular season dramatically with seven straight wins and humbled the Brewers in Sunday’s wild card game, they didn’t catch the winning Giants. On Wednesday they will eliminate the Cardinals in a close wild card game against that ageless wonder Adam Wainwright, but Sunday’s elbow injury to Dodgers clutch hitter Max Muncy really tips the scale San Francisco’s way in the NLDS. The Giants, winner of an amazing 107 regular season contests, seem destined to be crowned world champion, taking it all from the very sound Tampa Bay Rays in the World Series seventh game. Atlanta will dispatch the fading Brewers in the NLDS, only to bow to the Giants in the NLCS.

In the American League Wild Card, the Red Sox will edge their longtime enemy the Yankees, only to collapse again when meeting everybody’s nemesis, the Tampa Bay Rays, in the ALDS. The Astros will breeze by the White Sox in the ALDS, then lose in a tough tussle with the Rays in the ALCS.

Repeating my endgame, Giants over the Rays in seven. Enjoy!

This year our motto is Get Rich Cautiously. May I suggest a ten-dollar parlay?

LESSONS LEARNED

THE TWO-WEEK-AFTER REPORT

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Now that the dust has settled from the recent recall dustup, what have we learned?  That the 276 million-plus dollar cost was wasted on what could have been better spent on climate-fire abatement, homes for the homeless, and building much-needed affordable housing.

We also learned that aging right-wing radio talk show mavens with aging audiences make more noise than sense. 

We also relearned that California is a deep blue state politically, and getting bluer every year…as our West Coast neighbors, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii.  Newsom won by more than three million votes, 62.2% to 37.8%.  You can call that margin more than decisive.  No need to call in the Cyber Ninja Turtles for an audit.

We’ve further learned that the Trumpenprole faction are in firm possession of California’s Republican Party, whose numbers continue to plummet…now 24% of registered voters.  GOP leaders are in a funk; all they lack are ideas that make sense and credible candidates that can sell them. 

But what we learned of most value is that we must change our recall law.  No longer should the petition require the signatures of just 12% of last election’s total voters for the targeted state executive offices to initiate a recall.  (For state legislative offices and judges that required number of signatures rises to 20% of the last election’s totals.)  Why not raise both to 25%?  That would deter scammers who mean to prosper off the expensive recall process, or fringe groups acting out their parochial hissy fits on our time and at our expense.

One expected outcome of the recall vote is a continuation of the steady stream of Californians leaving the Golden State.  Where to?  Oregon and Washington are in the top five destinations; understandable, more living space but still within our liberal family.  But at the very top is Red Republican Texas, where there is no state income tax, the cost of living is much lower, and the services and politics are…well….

Suppress your cruel laughter.  As good neighbors we should help them pack.  As good Christians, we should pray for them.

NEWSOM IN A BREEZE

WHEN WILL THEY EVER LEARN?

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Baseball catcher and dugout philosopher Yogi Berra once said “it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”  How wise he was. That caution notwithstanding, here’s my no-surprise prediction on tomorrow’s recall election for Governor: Newsom will win by anywhere from between 15 and 20 points; if I had to be precise, I’d say make it the incumbent by 18.  No sweat, Dems.

I’ll admit that a month ago when I heard that the race was a toss-up, I was disbelieving.  Could a state that had voted against Trump 62-33 less than a year ago back a right-wing radio blabbermouth (who once called Trump’s election “divine intervention”), turning the tables in less than a year?  No way!  I thought someone had to poke the California bear and wake him up!  Someone must have done just that, and he came out of his cave angry, with his claws painted blue.

So what did we learn from this waste of taxpayer money?  That California’s Recall Law needs some repair work done.  That radio’s right-wing blowhards are not enlarging their audiences.  That the majority of Californians are rational and have positive feelings toward science.  That we will no doubt be reading and hearing soon about more disgruntled Republicans moving out of state. 

You might ask as I did, where do these refugees go?  Turns out some go to Oregon and some to Washington…understandable.  But most are moving to Texas.  Texas?  Why?  Two main reasons are given.  The first: housing is much less expensive.  But do those houses come with electricity?  And the departing “conservatives” don’t like the Golden State’s liberal politics.  

I for one won’t miss them; I’ll even help them pack .  And we won’t miss their money either.  We’ll get that when they come back for their abortions, and when they send their kids here for their college educations, and when they are flown here for their ICU beds.

Envoi!

THE FIRE THIS TIME

AND THEY CALL THE WIND MARIA

Trees burning in Kirkwood, photo credit New York Times.

Trees burning in Kirkwood, photo credit New York Times.

Chalk it up to depression…or my reluctance to bring you bad news you already know.  That and a week’s vacation my family took explains my absence from my blog the past two weeks.  About that vacation…it was meant to be a week of camping in our beloved Sierra Nevada, but had to be canceled at the last moment: wind-driven forest fires and much wind-driven smoke.  (I can’t even remember the name of the fire…there have been so many this summer.)

So we gave up on the high country and drove west where we rented a house on Dillon Beach facing Tomales Bay, not a long swim from where the North American Plate grinds against the Pacific Plate along the submerged San Andreas Fault.  The Pacific was its usual rolling blue majestic self, but even here ash from the forest fires stained the normally azure sky. 

Back home yesterday, I read that the 204,000-acre Caldor Fire has crested the Sierra Nevada and is threatening Lake Tahoe, that cobalt jewel long celebrated for the purity of its waters; and three days ago the Forest Service temporarily closed all 18 of the state’s national forests due to fire danger.  Yes, our California—indeed the entire American West—is getting hotter and drier and windier.  Too few of us too late recognized the interconnectedness of all things on this planet, living and not.  Now, all it takes is a spark to drive the lesson home.  Year to date stats (thru Sept. 2): 7,003 fires consuming 1,926,123 acres of the Golden State.

Kathleen Johnson, a paleo-climatologist at the University of California Irvine, is very concerned.  “This current drought is potentially on track to become the worst that we’ve seen in at least 1,200 years.  And the reason is linked directly to human-caused climate change.”

Scientists have been warning us of this awful truth of climate change for decades.  And most of us have put it off for future consideration.  How many times have you heard a politician answer when asked if he believed in global warming or climate change, “I don’t know, I’m not a scientist!”  Our follow-up question should have been  “Then why the hell do you hold your office?  Can’t you ask a scientist?”  If he did, he would discover that 97% of those in that field of science will say “yes, it’s an existential threat;” the other three percent are in the employ of fossil fuel industry.

Our political failures aside, climate change, assisted mightily by we featherless bipeds, has arrived, and is not to denied.  Time to pay the tab, and we are going to pay dearly.  Our paradise, this miracle of nature, our California, will never be the same in our lifetimes.

I am not a climate scientist nor a meteorologist.  But I’m familiar with the basics of the science.  Back in 1951, as a new volunteer in the United States Air Force, I was sent to weather school at Chanute Air Force Base in southern Illinois, where I attended an eight-hour-a-day, six-month course in meteorology.  Even back then we were taught about global warming that was rising along with atmospheric pollution triggered by the Industrial Revolution.  Thereafter I worked the next four years in six Air Force weather stations sending balloons aloft—from Japan to Greece—before being discharged.

But that was not the end of my involvement with weather and climate.  Remember Los Angeles smog in the 1950s and 1960s?  When a choking mix of chemicals and particulate matter trapped under a temperature inversion burnt your eyes and assaulted your lungs?  LA became infamous for its “smog,” and locals demanded an end to it.

A journalist by then, I received an assignment from Westways magazine to do a series of articles on the subject, which was prompted by a Cal Tech Professor of bio-organic chemistry, Dr. A. J. Haagen-Smit, who was doing some ground-breaking research on the cause of our smog.  Professor Haagen-Smit called it “photochemical smog.”  As he explained it, the emission of unburnt hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen emitted by autos rose into the atmosphere, only to be trapped near ground level by the temperature inversion, and in the presence of sunlight changed into ozone and formaldehyde and other eye-stinging pollutants.  Ironically, the same stratified stable air that had drawn the infant aircraft industry to the Los Angeles Basin back in the early 1900s was an accessory to the crime of polluting the air we breathe.  And the chief culprit?  The automobile.

Eureka!  Always resourceful and forward-thinking Californians, bucking Detroit’s foot-dragging, required catalytic converters on automobiles sold in the state and rubber grommets around gasoline pump nozzles, and our air returned to breathable.

That win was minor league.  With climate change/global warming now the opponent, we’re late to the game and decidedly overmatched.  And only we are to blame.  Why are we so dismissive of science?  Is it that difficult to understand how nature works?  We certainly welcome every incidental gadget and luxury science brings with new discoveries, but we are deaf to warnings of its misuse.

As a species we seem to be remarkably creative, but ignorant of how to cope with our own creations.  Does this signal the arrival of “End Times?”  No, try the Sixth Mass Extinction.