Another Circle Around the Sun

Did Emerson really say this? If he didn't, he should  have.

Once upon a time there was a five-year-old boy who spent summers on his grandparents’ farm. When he got older, he’d help with chores, but when he was young, he had the whole day to toss a rubber ball against the shed wall and pretend to be a baseball player. When he got tired on that activity he’d lie in the grass and imagine shapes in the clouds. Once he asked his grandma how old he’d be in the year 2000 and she told him he’d be close to 50. He returned to lying on the grass to contemplate being 50, but he couldn’t. He concluded that no one was actually that old.

A fairy tale? Nope. I was that little boy and when 2000 came around it seemed unfathomable that my grandparents had been dead for many years and I actually had only a few years until I reached the half century mark. I’ve heard it said that time speeds up as one gets older. Intellectually I know that’s not true. A day is still 24 hours and it still takes 365 ¼ of them to add up to a year. Yet, before I knew it, I was 60, then 70. I remember turning 40 because I was a high school teacher monitoring a study hall, a task akin to telling dogs not to chase squirrels.  A funny, delightful 8^th grade sprite named Julie bounded up to my desk and asked me if I knew that Paul McCartney “was in a band before Wings.” Tremulously I asked, “Do you mean The Beatles?” Her answer stunned me: “Yeah, that’s the one. Ever hear of them?” I was gobsmacked and told her to return to her seat, that I was depressed and would explain the next day, but I just couldn’t that moment. I felt ancient.

That’s the only reason I can remember 40, but if you ask me what happened on other birthdays, things get hazy. I recall thinking of my grandma at 50, but I haven’t the slightest idea about 60 or 70. Those blanks have nothing to do with being older per se–though it does freak me out to think of myself as a bona fide “senior citizen”–it’s that I’ve reached that awkward time in which my mental outlook is out of whack with my body’s age. I see myself as 28, until I try to grab a word or a name that’s not perched on the tip of my tongue, lift something heavier than a baguette, or try to keep pace with my speed-walking wife. I even took a memory test and pretty much aced verbal recall. (I was hopeless with shapes and drawing, but that didn’t faze me as I was always a person you’d never trust with a building or art project.) For the most part, all the knowledge I’ve acquired is still somewhere in my brain, though it takes me longer to retrieve things. A common phrase I use these days is, “I’ll think of the answer five minutes into my drive home,” and it’s usually the case.

But I can’t pretend that my body hasn’t changed. I try not to whinge about that as there are lots of people who have it worse than I–friends with cancer, heart problems, or Parkinson’s, those who’ve lost spouses, or have died. Another of my running jokes is that I awake each morning and check my pulse to make sure I’m still here. I try my best to deny it, but the reality is that my future is behind me. Another reality is that the 70s often hurt. I have a terrible back that aches all the time unless I’m too distracted to cry “ouch!” Compacted discs have robbed me of over two inches of height and I have neuropathy in my right leg resultant of having had only a partially successful laminectomy. Once I tripped over a tree root and smacked face down on the sidewalk with blood coming from my mouth. I feared I would lose my front teeth, though luckily, I had only a condition I had never heard of: sprained teeth. I also had a brain bleed a decade ago that, luckily again, was not an aneurysm or stroke. But enough with the organ recital. Again, many people have suffered more. I can’t recover my 28-year-old body, but I can be grateful for each new day.

Today is another birthday. It doesn’t end in five or zero, so it’s not a birthday that gets labeled “a Big One.” I’ll have my free Herrell’s sundae, a meal of my choice, and a slice of my favorite birthday dessert: carrot cake. Please hold the jokes that begin, “Wow! That’s a lot of sugar for an old dude like you.” Hold them because the other thing that will happen today is that many of you will send me fond birthday wishes. The best thing of being in my 70s is that I have collected a lot of friends, former students who still say in touch, and professional associates who like me. And that, my friends, is the best birthday gift anyone my age could ever wish to have.

Peace,

Rob

 

 

Trump is Courting Disaster

I planned to post this earlier but my first draft was as long as War and Peace. It’s still wordy, but it’s abridged.

Donald Trump’s ratings are in the dump, and you don’t need to be a genius to figure out that he’s not one! The war against Iran gives him a stage to play hero. It is, though, it’s a tragic comedy. He and I share one thing in common: Neither of us served in the U.S. military. Too bad the Orange Snollygoster didn’t study history; he’d know that reviews of his farce will not be good.

An advisor to Genghis Khan once said, “… one can conquer [China] on horseback, but one cannot govern it on horseback.” In modern terms this sagacious aphorism means that armed forces can conquer, but they cannot build stable nations. Victory parades–real or manufactured – are feel-good moments, but boots on the ground should march home once wars are over. Rebuilding is the work of financiers, planners, diplomats, and–above all else–honest indigenous leaders. An oft-repeated narrative holds that the United State “rebuilt” Europe and Japan after World War II. If you mean American dollars, yes. If you mean much beyond that, no! Don’t confuse what was made possible with American dollars and what was implemented by leaders and institutions.

The American government embraced men like Atlee and Churchill in Britain, General de Gaulle in France, Adenauer in West Germany, Nehru in India, and a chastened Hirohito in Japan. They were needed to execute postwar initiatives such the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the gold standard, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, and the United Nations. Democracy? The United States has long been inconsistent on that score. We even smuggled ex-Nazis out of Europe to work on military projects. Some erstwhile leaders were weak, plutocrats, or unsavory tyrants: the Saud family in Arabia, the Shah in Iran, the Hashemites in Iraq, Ben-Gurion in Israel, Chiang Kai-Shek in China, King Sihanouk in Cambodia, Syngman Rhee in Korea, Fulgencio Baptista in Cuba….

With the exceptions of Britain and Japan, most of those mentioned above proved to be intransigent or catastrophic. China quickly fell to Mao Zedong, who became a communist after the U.S. refused to support him; ditto Fidel Castro! Charles de Gaulle quarreled with virtually everyone and demanded that Vietnam be returned as a colonial possession; Nehru insisted India would follow a Third Way that was neither Western nor communist; and Germany was cut in half. Others made no pretense at being democratic: Baptista, antisemitic Palestinians, Ben-Gurion’s perpetual warfare policies in Israel, the robber baron mentality of the Saudis and Hashemites, radical nationalists in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Korea was the first mess. Rhee was an authoritarian leader who bilked South Korea after the wartime trusteeship dissolved. North Korea became communist and the Korean War (1950-53) saw a loss of over 730,000 Korean and 36,500 American lives. It took until 1987 for U.S. ally South Korea to cast off authoritarian rule.

Modern scholars view Korea as a dress rehearsal for the disastrous Vietnam War (1955-75). It collapsed the French government and wasted billions of U.S. dollars and left three million Vietnamese and over 58,000 Americans dead. The U.S. tried to remake the South in its image, including relocating 4.3 million Vietnamese into “strategic hamlets” provisioned with US goods. The war tore apart U.S. society and ended when communists overran South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Whatever the U.S. was selling was soundly rejected.

Since the end of World War II Korea and Vietnam have been the template for force-feeding democracy and the American Way of Life. The bulk of U.S. military interventions have been utter failures. We’ve sent troops to Africa–especially Liberia, Niger, Nigeria, and Somalia–dozens of times. I’m not seeing any democracies popping off that list. If we move to the Middle East, we’ve sent combat troops to Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, and Yemen. Afghanistan holds the dubious distinction of being America’s longest war. Before we went there the Taliban ruled. After the dust of 20 years of warfare settled, the Taliban rules. Does anyone remember Arab Spring, which was supposed to be a flowering of liberal democracy? Where?

Maybe you’ve read about the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 or the 1973 removal of the elected Allende in Chile in favor of the despot General Pinochet. But did you know we’ve sent combat soldiers to Central and South America 41 times. We’ve taken out leaders in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, not because they threatened American shores, but because, like Allende, we didn’t like their politics. Tell me what good it has done for the DR or basket-case Haiti. Did you know we’ve been in Peru, Brazil, Lebanon, and Venezuela three times? Yet, the only conflict the U.S. military has “won” in terms of improving standards of living is Grenada, though the Massachusetts State Police could have taken Grenada.

Donald Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize; that’s unlikely given his meddling in the Gulf of “America,” threats to Denmark over Greenland (!), the war against Iran, his incursion into Venezuela, and bombings of Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Somalia, and Yemen. Since the end of World War II, approximately 105,000 U.S. personnel have died overseas. Yes, 90% perished in Korea and Vietnam, but what’s the final toll of lives lost (including suicides), PTSD cases, and money spent for counterproductive results? Is it any wonder that the United States has slipped to #14 in global quality of life ratings? But you know that when you go to the grocery store or fill your gas tank!