Philip Caputo's Blog, page 2

MEMORIAL DAY 2023

 

Memorial Day, 2023.

LCPL CARROLL FANKHAUSER, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 8/24/65
PFC ROBERT FERNANDEZ, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 6/20/65
CPL BRIAN GAUTHIER, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 7/11/65
LCPL REYNALDO GUZMAN, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines. 1/25/66
1STLT WALTER LEVY, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines. 9/18/65
PFC CURTIS LOCKHART, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 7/30/65
PFC PATRICK MANNING, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 7/30/65
LTCOL JOSEPH MUIR, 3d Battalion, 3d Marines. 9/11/65
PFC STEVEN PAGE, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines. 1/25/66
2DLT JAMES PARMALEE, 2d Battalion, 3d Marines. 7/14/65
1STLT FRANK REASONER,3d Reconnaissance Battalion. 7/12/65
LCPL KENNETH SEISSER, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 7/11/65
1STLT ADAM SIMPSON, 1st Battalion, 9th Marines. 10/3/65
PFC LONNIE SNOW, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 7/30/65
SGT HUGH SULLIVAN, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 6/5/65
1STLT BRUCE WARNER, 3d Tank Battalion. 2/3/66
SGT WILLIAM WEST, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines. 3/28/66.

Semper Fi, Brothers.

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #42

After outrunning it for two and a half years, Covid finally caught me about the middle of last month and clung to me for a solid two weeks. It affected me more seriously than the rest of my family (see previous post), as if it were venegful because I’d eluded it for so long. I woke up one night wheezing and coughing with such violence I thought I was ICU bound. The ICU being the last way station on the journey to the hereafter, I was scared enough by this fit to force myself to recover from it. If I had not been fully vaccinated, I’m pretty sure that I would have been hospitalized. Recovery takes a long time, I’ve discovered — anywhere from four to six weeks, and perhaps longer. A profound fatigue is the major symptom — you can sleep nine or ten hours a night and still feel tired when you wake up. Your brain feels fuzzy, your body like your wearing ankle weights when you walk. All in all, as we know, one nasty virus.

I have had time to get a lot of reading done, however. Ron Chernow’s biography of Ulysses Grant has been the major effort — at nearly 900 pages, it looks like a concrete block with a book cover. But Chernow’s prose is so fluid, so graceful, and his subject so fascinating that I (excuse the cliché) cannot put it down. I’ve reflected while reading it on a comment a friend, a retired professor, once made to me: that we experience two levels of happiness, which allows us to feel happy with our personal lives even while we are unhappy with the state of the world in general. I wake up almost every morning pleased to be alive and as functional, physically and mentally, as any 81-year-old can expect to be; morning sunlight on the autumn trees fills me with a quiet joy; yet I am less than cheerful about conditions in my own country as well as elsewhere. War in the Ukraine. An America as riven politically and culturally as it has ever been since the Civil War that Chernow’s book describes so vividly.

Nevertheless, his book has allowed me to entertain a certain wary optimism. His depiction of Reconstruction and its failures to grant full freedom and citizenship to former slaves, with Ku Klux Klan night riders committing atrocities and murders on a horrific scale, white southerners refusing to accept their defeat in the war, instead transforming it into a noble “lost cause,” reminded me that there was a time when the USA was more screwed up than it is today. But we recovered, pulled ourselves together, more or less, which leads me to hope that we will somehow muddle through our current miasma of rancor and divisiveness. We must; otherwise, the United States of America will become the Disunited States before this century out.

Finally, just to mention personal matters that resources of happiness: today is Leslie’s 69th birthday, and I will be forever grateful to heaven or fate or destiny or whatever directs our lives that I met and married her. Also, I’ve sold my latest novel, Memory and Desire, to Arcade Publishing, which will bring it out in September, 2023.It’s a story about love and the persistence of love, about desire and desire remembered, and the reunion of a fifty-year-old man with a son he fathered out of wedlock in his youth. The three central characters, Luke Blackburn, his brilliant but trouble wife, Maureen, and Luke’s former lover, Corinne Terrebonne, take the reader on a journey that leads to betrayals, painful discoveries, and eventually, to acceptance.

 

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CORRECTION

In the third paragraph of the recent post, JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #41, “sister and brother-in-law” should read “sister-in-law and brother-in-law.” My sister, Patricia Esralew is NOT ill with COVID. My apologies for the misunderstanding.

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #41

The Biden administration has come out with a couple of howlers in the past two weeks or so. 

The first was delivered by the Vice-President, responding to an interviewer’s question: “The border is secure.” The second, more recent chuckle-worthy comment was uttered by POTUS himself on television: “The pandemic is over.”

We can leave the border issue for another day. Right now, I’ll address the President’s premature obituary of COVID. On a national level, deaths from the virus are averaging  a little more than 400 per week as of September 30. That is way down from weekly averages of 3,000-plus in early 2021 and 2,600 in February of this year; but it’s still not nothing. 

On a personal level, my daughter-in-law and middle granddaughter came down with the disease this summer; both recovered after several miserable — and anxious — days. Just this past week, my niece, my sister and brother-in-law, and my wife have tested positive and are now in self-imposed quarantines. My 96-year-old mother-in-law and I are so far virus free, and trying hard to stay that way. It’s back to masking, back to social distancing from our infected family members. Also back to not making any plans beyond what to do today, tomorrow at the latest.

Leslie and I have to behave like a couple who don’t like each other very much, dining at the far ends of our 10-foot dining table, staying at least six feet apart when speaking to one another, washing our hands like obsessive-compulsives, and, of course, not sleeping in the same bed. 

All of us, by the way, have been fully vaccinated and boosted. I have an appointment this coming Monday, October 3, to receive a third booster, the one called bivalent for whatever new variant the fiendish virus has conjured from its bag of nasty tricks.

The good news is that contracting COVID is no longer tantamount to a death sentence or to prolonged incarceration in an ICU. My family, for the time being, are coping rather well, with relatively mild symptoms: coughs, slight fevers, fatigue. My hope, of course, is that everyone gets through it soon, though I keep in mind that a few of my wife’s friends have had recurrent bouts. So, I say to Joe Biden: It ain’t over till the fat lady sings, and she has yet to sing a note.

Leslie and I had some nervous moments when Hurricane Ian blasted into Florida this past week. Two sons, a daughter-in-law, and three granddaughters live in that state. Our biggest concern was for the elder of the boys, Geoff, who resides in St, Petersburg, which for a while was in the crosshairs of the monster storm. Its evil eye passed well to the south, sparing him and the house he has worked his heart out to fix up. But it was twenty-four hours before we heard from him that he and the house and the city had dodged the bullet. 

A cousin of mine and her husband own a vacation house in Fort Meyers, which did not dodge the bullet. Fortunately, they weren’t there when winds of 155 miles an hour and a biblical storm surge left much of it and Fort Meyers Beach looking like Ukraine after a Russian shelling. 

Ian will probably go down in history as the most destructive cyclone ever to strike Florida, a state that’s seen more than its share of ferocious storms. I vividly recall Miami after Hurricane Andrew ravaged south Florida in 1992. My younger son, Marc, had just started his freshman  year at the University of Miami, we had been unable to contact him for several days, and were much relieved when we learned that he had survived unhurt, if emotionally shaken by the destruction wrought by Andrew’s sustained winds — 165 mph. It was so pervasive that I did not recognize parts of Miami and almost got lost because familiar landmarks had been obliterated. 

But Andrew was a fast-moving storm. Ian was not, lingering on the coast, whirling, roaring, creating a tidal surge that resembled a major dam breaking. Compared with that, coping with COVID seems pretty tame.

Oh, yeah — Our word, hurricane, derives from a Taino Indian word, Hurukan, meaning “demon wind.” 

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #40

Anastasia, our middle granddaughter, tested positive for Covid last week, following an 8th-grade field trip, and was quarantined. To the great relief of her parents and grandparents, her symptoms — fever, cough, fatigue — were fairly mild. She’s now almost completely recovered. Leslie and I have had two close friends die of the virus, we’ve known others who have suffered from it; Ana’s infection was the first time it’s touched our family directly and came as a rude reminder that the pandemic, now in its 29th month, is not over. It often feels like it is, but it’s not. This resilient, clever bug, always changing form and figuring out ways to dodge vaccinations, will be with us for a long time to come. It’s something we will have to live with, to endure.

Another contagion has been raging in the U.S. for decades. Although it can be conquered, there is little hope, if any, that it will be. We will have to live with it as well.  That is the epidemic of gun violence that has claimed thousands of American lives and ruined thousands more. Most of us don’t pay much attention to it because the great majority of deaths by firearm are so routine that they rarely rate a prominent place in the news, when, that is, they are mentioned at all: the domestic dispute, the armed robbery, the drive-by shooting, the drug deal gone wrong. 

It’s only when a virulent outbreak occurs that our minds and souls are wrenched out of their complacency, as they have been in the past two weeks with the mass murders at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. The latter, which left nineteen children and two teachers dead, sent my thoughts reeling back thirty-three years, when Esquire magazine assigned me to cover a slaughter of innocents at the Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California. 

On the morning of January 17, 1989, a disturbed loner and drifter named Patrick Purdy opened fire with an AK-47 assault rifle on the school playground during recess, killing five children and wounding twenty-nine others and a teacher. When the massacre ended, Purdy took his own life with a nine-millimeter pistol.

The 24-year-old had a history of alcoholism, drug-addiction, and psychological problems, along with an extensive rap sheet; but he was able to purchase his weapons legally, the rifle in out-of-state gun shop, the pistol in California. His crime, fairly rare then but disgustingly commonplace today, shocked the nation, leading to calls for stiffer gun laws and regulation of the sale of semi-automatic firearms designed for the battlefield. Time magazine editorialized: ”Why could Purdy, an alcoholic who had been arrested for such offenses as selling weapons and attempted robbery, walk into a gun shop in Sandy, Oregon, and leave with an AK-47 under his arm? The easy availability of weapons like this, which have no purpose other than killing human beings, can all too readily turn the delusions of sick gunmen into tragic nightmares.”

Sound familiar? But here’s a fact that will sound unfamiliar: Something was actually done about it! Well, sort of. Congress passed legislation banning the importation of assault weapons (Purdy’s had been manufactured in China); five years later, after much debate, legal challenges, and push-back from the gun lobby, the U.S. Senate, by a vote of 52-48, enacted the Federal Assault Weapons Act, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of assault rifles. 

Then, as now, the Senate was over-populated with craven individuals terrified of the National Rifle Association and Second Amendment purists. They built a sunset clause into the legislation, a kind of poison pill, specifying that the act would remain in effect for ten years, after which it would expire. Moreover, it did not apply to assault weapons already in private hands. A boatload of studies and reviews have since examined the law’s effect on gun crimes, with mixed results. Overall, it had a negligible impact on firearm homicides, because most murders are committed with handguns, not military-style long guns. But it did reduce the number and intensity of mass murders by as much as 70 percent, according a study completed in 2019. 

It did not eliminate these types of crimes — the Columbine massacre was perpetrated in Colorado in 1999 — but the terrible body count fell dramatically. Since then, the carnage has risen just as dramatically. There have been 900, yes, 900, school shootings in the past ten years. One of the most deadly was the slaughter by a a deranged gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School, not far from where I live in Connecticut. Twenty little kids and seven adults blasted out of existence in minutes. This does not count numerous incidents in other venues: the campus at Virginia Tech – 32 dead; a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado – 12 dead; the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida – 49 dead; the Las Vegas strip in Las Vegas, Nevada – 58 dead; the the Walmart in El Paso, Texas – 23 dead. The Tops supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y. – 10 dead. And that’s only a partial list.

A digression. Mass murder, defined as the killing of four or more people in a single incident, is a wholly different species of homicide, a soul-shaking horror, particularly when the victims are children. It isn’t only the number of victims that makes it so. There is a randomness about it. The killer — almost always a young male — strikes out of nowhere, at an unexpected hour in an unexpected place — a theater, a nightclub, a school, a supermarket. Some have easily identifiable motives, like racism or political terrorism; more often, the motives are opaque, if not unfathomable, which confers upon the perpetrator an inhuman aura. He seems a blind, conscienceless, unfeeling force, like a tornado or volcanic eruption, and yet he is human; and his humanness causes us to see him as demonic, the embodiment of pure evil. How else to explain what empowered the Uvalde killer, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, to coldly look through his rifle sights at the faces of ten-year-olds and pull the trigger again and again?

Law enforcement officers, psychiatrists, and ordinary citizens were asking the same question about Patrick Purdy. What Joseph Conrad had said of Mr. Kurtz — his mind was sane but his soul was mad — could be said of Ramos or any of the other butchers in tis country. By ascribing a reason for their atrocities, we hope to create a coherent narrative that will exorcise the dread they inflict on us all. Several theories were developed to account for Purdy’s crime: the Maniac Theory — Purdy was flat-out crazy; the Racist Theory — most of his victims were Asian; the Manchurian Candidate Theory — Purdy had associated with white supremacists, who brainwashed him; the Socio-Psychiatric Theory — somewhere in Purdy’s drab, ruptured life lay the clues to why he did what he did.

Facts supporting each of these narratives were presented to me in interviews; but other facts undermined them, inspiring me to advance my own explanation. Call it the Mind as Black Hole Theory. This is what I wrote in Esquire’s December 1989 issue:

In theoretical physics, there is a concept called a ‘singularity’ — the center of a black hole, a collapsed star. At he point of singularity, the star’s imploded matter achieves infinite density; hence, gravity becomes infinitely powerful, allowing not even light to escape its pull and causing all known laws of Newtonian and Einsteinian physics to break down. Nothing can be seen, nothing can be predicted, and anything becomes possible. Purdy, I continued, was at psychological singularity when he fired into the crowd of children at recess, his mind a black hole in which all the moral laws and codes that govern humankind have broken down.

I knew then, as I know today, that that explanation is as inadequate as the others. That’s the point — there is no satisfactory way to predict who will commit murder, mass or otherwise. Which is why I think current proposals to tighten red-flag laws — identifying individuals at risk of harming others or themselves and prohibiting them from obtaining firearms — will have only a marginal effect on our homicide rate. If we are serious, and I doubt we are, about staunching the flow of blood on our streets and in our schools and all our public spaces, we must drastically reduce our arsenal of assault rifles, semi-automatic handguns, and high-capacity magazines, while making it almost impossible, through universal background checks, for people with a criminal record or psychiatric problems to buy any kind of gun.

The experiences of other developed nations prove that the stale arguments against gun restrictions (guns don’t kill people, people kill people, etc.) are wrong. Australia, Canada, and Great Britain all have strict firearms controls in place; their homicide rates are a small fraction of ours. I’ve been to those countries and can assure you that their citizens are not less free than we are. 

In addition to expanded background checks, I propose the following policies:

* Reinstate the Federal Assault Weapons Act, closing its loopholes.

* Require all gun owners to be licensed by the state they live in. If you need a license to drive a car, surely you should need one to own a firearm. 

* Raise the minimum age for purchasing an assault weapon or high-capacity, semiautomatic handgun from 18 to 21. 

* Mandate owners of such weapons to 1) Register with the  BATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Tax and Firearms) and 2) Be certified for a Federal Firearms License. This has applied to gun dealers, collectors, and people who possess fully automatic weapons, like machine guns, since 1968.

* Offer a buy-back option to them if they are unwilling to go through the background checks and tests for a firearms license.

If you’ve been following the endless and fruitless debates on gun control, you know that none of this, with the possible exception of universal background checks, has even a slim chance of happening. 

Approximately 45,000 Americans will die from gun-related homicides, suicides, and accidents this year. Some of them will be children, whom we can look upon as sacrifices to the absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment, which holds that there must be almost no regulations on firearms.

Incidentally, I am a gun owner, a hunter and trap and skeet shooter. While watching CNN last week, I saw an interview with the father of a ten-year-old girl killed in the Uvalde attack. He was choking and sobbing so violently that I thought he was going to turn himself inside out as he cried about the senseless loss of his “baby.” I couldn’t help but think of my three granddaughters and began to weep with him. I’m tempted to say that I found his grief unimaginable; but we have created a society so marinated in violence, paranoia and hyper-partisanship on issues like gun control that the unspeakable has become speakable, the unthinkable thinkable, and the unimaginable imaginable. 

  

 

 

 

 

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #39

Yesterday, we marked the second anniversary of Karen Marcus’s passing; her death from Covid in May, 2020, motivated me to start writing these periodic dispatches from the pandemic front. It’s strange how, in times crowded with events, your perception of time itself dilates. It feels more like a decade since leslie and I heard the awful news from Karen’s brother.

So much has happened since then aside from the pandemic: The fraught 2020 presidential election, the January 6 insurrection, wildfires consuming half the west, hurricanes of unprecedented ferocity, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and now the leak (also unprecedented) of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. Come to think of it, this entire century so far has been overfilled with events: 9/11, wars in Iraqi, Afghanistan, and Syria, the financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed, the chaotic and bloody withdrawal of U.S.forces from Kabul. I’ve probably missed a few lesser catastrophes. Of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse,  War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death, the only one who hasn’t ridden through since Jan. 1, 2000 has been famine. The bright spots, like the election of our first black president, have not been sufficiently bright to lighten this dark record. Looking back, the 1990s seem like a halcyon period in distant history.

Some random musings and observations:

Although the pandemic appears to be fading at last, it is still claiming lives (total of 6.25 million worldwide, 1,023,952 in the U.S). We just learned that our niece’s boyfriend caught the virus, but recovered in three days. Still, it made us anxious for a while, and drove home the necessity to take precautions no matter how comparatively “normal” life appears to have become. Here in Connecticut, mask mandates remain in effect in hospitals, doctor’s offices, pharmacies, and in some restaurants and businesses. I suppose residents in Arizona, our second home, would regard us as blue state pansies and fussbudgets. Our country, our society has become so hopelessly partisan that not wearing a mask or getting vaccinated are political acts, badges of  a perverse honor.

When Russian forces poured into Ukraine on Feb. 24, I thought it would take them a week at most to subdue the country.  I’ve read that a number of military experts thought along the same lines, so I wasn’t alone. How it pleases me, and, I’m sure, them, to be proven very, very wrong by the fighting skills and spirit of the Ukrainian army, and the Ukrainian people. As of this writing, the Asov Brigade is still holding out in Mariupol, fighting at close quarters in the giant steel factory that’s become a Ukrainian Alamo.  If they can keep it up through he weekend, they will have denied Putin the triumph he so desperately wants when Moscow celebrates victory in WW II this coming Monday with displays of military might. This event, celebrated every year, is both a martial parade and a kind of quasi-religious procession. Forty-five years ago, in May, 1977, I and other members of the foreign press corps watched it from viewing stands in the Kremlin. It was an awe-inspiring sight — squadrons of self-propelled artillery and tanks and missile carriers, thousands of troops marching by in stern formations, jet fighters streaking overhead. When the troops halted and faced the Politburo high up in a reviewing stand in Red Square, they  bellowed a drawn-out “Hoorah!” that rippled from battalion to battalion.It sounded not like massed human voices but like a roaring wind, and I recall telling a colleague, “Hope to God we never have to fight these guys.”

That memory was the reason I’d believed the Ukrainians could offer no more than a token resistance when Putin’s legions crossed the border, 190,000 strong. But it appears that the Russian army is a Potemkin army, plagued by woeful logistics, low morale, and poor leadership. It’s one great strength is its firepower, which, as we have all seen on the news, has pulverized Ukrainian towns and cities. Mariupol has effectively been wiped off the face of the earth.So while I hope Ukraine will prevail in the end, I temper that hope with the Parable of the Eleventh Russian (mentioned in my previous post).

 

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR # 38

This entry could be titled THE ELEVENTH RUSSIAN. Here’s why:

A long time ago, when I was a foreign correspondent assigned to the Chicago Tribune’s Moscow bureau, I met a Finlander at a diplomatic reception. During our conversation, he mentioned that he had fought in the Winter War of 1939-40, which pitted Finland against the Soviet Union. The veteran told me, ‘We used to say that one Finnish soldier was better than ten Russians, and we were right. The trouble was, there was always the eleventh Russian”

In the first three months of the conflict, the small but well-trained, well-led, and disciplined Finnish army held its own against overwhelming odds, fending off repeated onslaughts by the poorly-led, poorly-trained, and undisciplined Russian army. However, it was only a matter of time before the tide turned in the Russians’ favor.

The Red army (as it was then called) was reorganized and re-equipped, its command structure and tactics were improved, and it came back powerfully, After another three months of fighting the Finnish army was exhausted, its defenses overrun by the sheer mass of its enemy’s offensive. On March 12, 1940, Finland was forced to sign the Treaty of Moscow, which ceded more than ten percent of its territory to Russia.

The parallels with the war in Ukraine, 50 days old as of this writing, are obvious. The question is, Will the parallels hold for next 50 days? Defeated in its campaign to seize Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv,, its Black Sea flagship, the Moskva, sunk by a Ukrainian missile strike, its rampaging soldiers committing atrocities as they retreated, the Russian military has been astonishing in its incompetence and lack of discipline. But it is now refitting, rearming, and reorganizing, with a formidable general in overcall command, Alexander Dvornikov, aka “The Butcher of Syria.” He earned that moniker for the utter brutality with which he crushed Syrian insurgents during that country’s civil war.

As most of you have heard or read, the next phase of the conflict in Ukraine will take place in the east of the country, where its army has been fighting a low-intensity war against Russian separatists, supported by the Russian military, since 2014. Its best troops, some ten brigades altogether, are entrenched along a 300-mile front from north to south. The betting is that Dvornikov will launch a double envelopment, i.e. a pincers movement; large Russian forces will advance from both directions, hook up, surround the Ukrainian defenders, cut off their lines of resupply and communication, and then pummel them into submission with heavy artillery and air and missile strikes,

That would leave Russia in control of, roughly, the eastern third of the country, providing a land bridge to the Crimea and its ports on the Black Sea. Will President Putin be satisfied with that? Will he then compel the Ukrainian government to sign a treaty, ceding that territory to Russia? Or will he use it as a launch pad — if not now, then later — for a campaign to seize all of Ukraine? Those questions are unanswerable at the moment. Personally, I think the latter is more likely, a judgment I make based on what I learned about the Russian character during my two-year assignment in Moscow.

There is a kind of nationalistic mysticism in it, some vague yet compelling sense that Russia is destined to rule not only its own vast territory but the lands around it as well — a drive toward empire. It is among the major reasons why democracy as westerners conceive of it has never taken root in Russia, and probably never will. The strong man, the man on horseback, the autocrat, whether a Tsar, a Commissar, or someone who calls himself a president, has been looked to as the only one who can harness this drive. Joseph Conrad expressed it like this in his 1910 novel, Under Western Eyes:   

But absolute power should be preserved — the tool ready for the man — for the great autocrat of the future…The logic of history made him unavoidable. The state of the people demanded him. “What else?” he asked himself ardently, “could move all this mass in one direction? Nothing could. Nothing but a single will.”

Vladimir Putin views himself as that man, that single will in possession of absolute power. Which is why, in my opinion, he will not quit this war he started, will not accept a negotiated settlement that leaves him with a third of the country he covets. Nor will General Dvornikov. They will keep throwing bombs and shells and missiles and tanks and the bodies of their soldiers at the Ukrainians in a supreme effort to win it all at all costs.

For Ukraine to win, it will need to do more than figuratively or literally kill ten of its enemy for everyone one of its soldiers it loses. It will need the skills and the weapons and the courage to kill the eleventh Russian — who will be coming, you can be sure of that. 

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR # 37

Thought for the day as we embark on Year Three of the pandemic: Even if the Bee could explain to the Fly why pollen is better than shit, the Fly would not understand. 

The people to whom it applies should be obvious,

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #36

Today’s journal entry will not be about Covid; it will address the question of whether the United States is on the brink of a second civil war, as some scholars and political commentators believe.

Civil war, once unmentionable in our political discourse, has recently become a fashionable topic among academics and pundits. The anniversary of the insurrection or, if you prefer, the riot, in the nation’s capital last Jan. 6 has been the conversational ice-breaker, assisted by the publication of two new books: How Civil Wars Start, by political scientist Barbara Walter, and The Next Civil War: Dispatches From the American Future, by Stephen Marche, a Canadian novelist and journalist. Both have inspired spirited essays by heavyweights like The New Yorker‘s David Remnick and The New York Times‘s Michelle Goldberg, who tend to agree with Walter and Marche’s theory — the U.S. is swiftly heading toward the abyss. Other writers, among them John Harris, the founder of Politico, and Ross Douthat, also of the Times, have pushed back, characterizing such forecasts as alarmist hyperbole. There has even been pushback to the pushback. Charlie Warzel, who writes a newsletter for The Atlantic, recently criticized Harris for portraying people “worried about insurgent violence as hysterical neurotics.”

All this is not sound and fury signifying nothing. The mere fact that the chance of civil war, considered unthinkable just a few years ago, is now being discussed signifies plenty. The columns and reportage I’ve been reading lately have got me thinking about two things from my own past.

The first is the cross-continental road trip my wife and I took from the Florida Keys to the Arctic Ocean in 2010. We were seeking adventure but also our fellow citizens’ views on what holds a country as vast and diverse as the United States together. In The Longest Road, the book I wrote about our journey, I noted that American society was beginning to resemble a shattered windshield still in its frame. It had been fractured by, among other things, the Great Recession, which threw millions out of work as foreclosures evicted them from their homes, by protracted wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and by ever-widening inequality, with the Haves getting more while the Have-Nots got less. People were justifiably angry. Crowds at a political rally in Texas called on their then governor to secede from the Union; a candidate for the U.S, Senate in Nevada warned that if conservatives like herself didn’t get their way they might resort to armed insurrection; in Arizona, the state senate was considering legislation to empower Arizona to invalidate any federal law it deemed unconstitutional  — a notion with disturbing echoes of the Nullification doctrine promoted by southern politicians like John Calhoun prior to the Civil War.

The rage, smoldering for a decade, fanned by President Trump and his disciples, accelerated by disinformation and propaganda on social media, burst into flame one year and ten days ago in the nation’s capital. It was as if that Nevada candidate’s threat had come to pass. I can’t say that I was shocked or even surprised, I wondered then (as I do now) if the insurrection was a harbinger of a real shooting war, something like John Brown’s raid on the Harper’s Ferry arsenal in 1859. 

The second thing goes further back in time: the civil war that raged in Lebanon from 1975 to 1990, a conflict I covered for the Chicago Tribune, and in which I was seriously wounded.

Before the first shots were fired, Lebanon did not seem ripe for fratricidal bloodshed. It was a democracy of sorts. Its capital, Beirut, was a sophisticated, pleasure-loving city, touted as “the Paris of the Near East” in tourist brochures and promotional videos. But after living there a while, one sensed tensions underlying the cosmopolitan ambience — ethnic, religious, and economic tensions among Sunni and Shiite Muslims, Maronite and Orthodox Christians, Druze Arabs and Armenians and Palestinians. Some of these groups, distrustful of the government’s ability to protect them, maintained heavily armed militias. Governing the country was a delicate balancing act, with political power carefully apportioned among the various sects. The causes of the war were complex and multifaceted, but they can be summed up as a “crisis of insecurity.” As the Muslim population grew, members of the Christian elite, led by the Maronites, began to view their majority status as imperiled. On April 13, 1975, gunmen belonging to a Maronite militia, the Phalange, ambushed a bus transporting Palestinians to a refugee camp. That was to the Lebanese Civil War as the firing on Fort Sumter was to ours. It went on for 15 years, resulting in 100,000 deaths and billions of dollars in destroyed property and infrastructure.

If you are still with me, I’d like to make three observations: One, that war was not a clash of ideologies but of identities. Lebanese Christians saw themselves as Christians first, Lebanese second; ditto for Lebanese Muslims. Two, although all sides in the conflict felt threatened, the Christians were the most insecure, viewing their dominant position as under siege by the growing numbers of Muslims. Three, the presence of armed militias, pledging allegiance to their ethnic or religious leaders rather than to the state, transformed what could have been, and should have been, a parliamentary argument into a ghastly conflict.

Today’s America is not remotely what Lebanon was then; but there are parallels worth considering. Politico’s Harris argues that civil war in the U.S. is highly unlikely because there is no real, concrete cause, like slavery, underlying our current divisions. He’s right in one sense: there is no cause ideologically; however, that doesn’t mean there is no cause whatsoever. As Ben Rhodes, a national security advisor in the Obama administration, points out in his somber, incisive book, After the Fall, 21st-century politics center on identity, more specifically on national identity.

And so to Point One: The people who stormed the Capitol last January did what they did because they believe that their American identity is being lost to minorities and immigrants, legal and illegal, as well as to liberal elites. Some grievances of the working class do have merit. Since the turn of the century, median income has all but stagnated, and skilled, well-paid jobs have been lost to automation and globalization, resulting not only in a decline in wages for blue-collar workers but a decline in their sense of self-worth. Many of the insurrectionists were not working class, however; but almost all were white.

Hence, Point Two: That demographic is beset by feelings of insecurity, of a diminishment of status. They fear that they will soon by living in a country they no longer recognize. It is estimated the people of color will be a majority in America by mid-century. Progressives and left-wing activists, by the way, are not off the hook in creating polarization.They practically invented identity politics, alienating white Americans by urging minorities to think of themselves strictly in racial terms, and as victims hopelessly oppressed by the majority. Iconoclasm, toppling statues of revered historical figures like Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt, have further undermined faith in the nation’s foundations. It should come as no surprise, then, that millions of white Americans have been encouraged to view themselves as a distinct racial group, defending America from internal enemies. In the end, however, the right takes the lion’s share of blame, stoking the fires of distrust and resentment. Demagogues like Trump — an elitist if ever there was one — have convinced a large percentage of Americans that progressive Democrats, blacks, and hispanics despise them and are out to rob them of what little they have left.

Add to identity and insecurity Point Three: the presence of armed, anti-government militias. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which keeps track of far-right groups, estimates that there are at least 165  militias in the U.S. Three of the largest, and also the best armed, best trained, and best organized, are the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, and the Proud Boys, all of whom were in the forefront of the 1/6/21 insurrection. The Oath Keeper’s leader, Stewart Rhodes (a Yale Law graduate, incidentally), has been charged with seditious conspiracy. 

These paramilitary groups would be frontline troops in a second American civil war, should that dreadful possibility become reality. Consequently, it will bear no resemblance at all to the first one. You won’t see the Red State and Blue State armies facing each other on some misty battlefield as dawn breaks, because the ruptures in this country lack geographical coherence. There are Blue enclaves in the Red States and vice-versa. The conflict, in all likelihood, will look more like Lebanon’s in the last century, or Syria’s today — localized insurgencies waged all over the country, bombings, assassinations, random acts of terrorism. Whatever form it takes, it will result in the final disuniting of the United States

One final point: the influence of social media, which exploits human ignorance and gullibility. In her book, Ms. Walter cites how the voices of Buddhist extremists in Myanmar were amplified by Facebook. In 2015, their dire warnings about the dangers posed by Muslim Rohingyas reached a wide audience almost instantly, inciting murderous panic The Rohingyas suffered genocide, and Myanmar is now engulfed in a civil war. Walter also describes how legacy media like television contribute to a descent into internal strife. When the former Yugoslavia broke apart, she writes, Serbian TV broadcast stories about Croatians feeding Serbian children to lions in the Sarajevo zoo.

Sound familiar? If not, I’ll remind you of the QAnon conspiracy theory that went viral in 2016: Hilary Clinton and her campaign manager were running a child pornography and sex-trafficking ring from the backroom of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. Thousands of Americans bought into that wild fiction; one of them, Edgar Welch, traveled to Washington from North Carolina and burst into the restaurant wielding an assault rifle. His personal mission was to break up the ring. He was arrested before he could shoot anyone.

I recalled that incident as I read the conclusion of a review of Walter’s book in The Economist: “Ms. Walter mentions only fleetingly why today’s America is not like the former Yugoslavia or other imploding states. No country as sophisticated, modern, liberal and democratic as contemporary America has ever descended into civil war.”

In other words, it can’t happen here. Well, it probably won’t, but that doesn’t mean it can’t.

 

 

 

 

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR # 35

After a four-day drive across this great and troubled republic, we landed in Arizona on Dec. 6, and found that our county here, Santa Cruz,  geographically the smallest in the state at 1,238 square miles, has the second-highest vaccination rate for one dose — 89 percent. This compares with 66 percent for the entire state (56 percent for fully vaccinated). The anti-vaccination tribe is strong here, but I’ve observed that the spread of Omicron seems to have persuaded a lot of people to mask up and for businesses, churches, and other venues to issue mask mandates. Governor Ducey has tried to prohibit such requirements, but the virus’s spread has made his pronouncements irrelevant, like the fulminating of a daft king whose subjects have stopped listening.

After a couple of weeks in our small town of Patagonia, we traveled to Phoenix to spend the Christmas holidays with my sister and younger son Marc, daughter-in-law, Erin, and grandchildren Livia, Ana, and Sofia. They flew in from their home in Florida. We all had a fine time, climbing Camelback Mountain, visiting the aquarium, riding horses in the Tonto National Forest; however, Covid hovered over us. On the day before Christmas, Livia, who is 18, woke up feeling headachy and feverish, classic symptoms. We scoured the neighborhood for a testing site, found one that couldn’t give us results for four or five days due to the holiday, and then went on a pilgrimage for a home test kit and a thermometer. The latter was easily obtained, but the former required trips to three pharmacies before one was found. Livia’s temperature was normal, and she tested negative for the virus. Crisis averted.

The pandemic is approaching its 2d anniversary. Two years is of course not a long time, yet the days before the pandemic struck now seem to belong to a distant era. Like many people, I’ve wearied of it and grown fatalistic — if I get Covid, I’ll get it, so I’ll just try to carry on, hoping for the best. Meanwhile, despite 800,000 deaths in this country alone, members of the GAM (Great American Moron) tribe continue to refuse getting vaccinated, and to believe that the pandemic is some sort of hoax perpetrated by a U.S. government intent on depriving them of their sacred liberties. This evidences a different kind of virus — a disease of stubborn ignorance infecting not only the uneducated but people who ought to know better. Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, in a fund-raising email to his supporters, called for Anthony Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser, to be thrown in jail. And, mirabile dictu, the supreme GAM leader, Donald Trump, was booed by tribal members when he urged them to get vaccinated.

I was reflecting on this phenomenon after waking up at 5 am to watch the launch of the James Webb SpaceTelescope on Christmas morning. A French-built rocket roared aloft from the launch site in French Guiana, carrying the scope from “a tropical rainforest to the edge of time” in the words of a NASA announcer. The JWST, up to 100 times more powerful than the Hubble, will voyage to a point in space one million miles from Earth, from which it will peer back 13.6 billion years to the birth of the first stars and galaxies. The scope is an incredibly complex engineering marvel, 20 years in the making, and a testament to the human drive to  probe the deepest mysteries of the universe. Although its construction was a collaborative effort by NASA and the European and Canadian Space agencies, it was mostly a U.S. project. Watching the Ariane rocket soar into the overcast skies, I pondered a terrestrial mystery: How could a society that produces engineers, technicians, and scientists capable of designing and building such an instrument also produce millions of idiots who defy commonsense measures like vaccinations, who think the 2020 elections were rigged, and who believe in conspiracy theories so outlandish a nine-year-old would laugh at them.

 

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