Tom Glenn's Blog, page 104

Injury Beyond Recovery

On Sunday, the Washington Post published the first of a series of editorials “on the damage President Trump has caused — and the danger he would pose in a second term.” It’s titled, “A second Trump term might injure the democratic experiment beyond recovery.”

The “democratic experiment” means the establishment of the American nation, the United States, by the founders to enshrine democracy and freedom of choice as its underlying principle. At the time of the U.S.’s creation, no other nation had ever been so formed. Would it work?

Abundant historical evidence shows that the experiment has worked very well if not perfectly. Complete fulfillment of the principle of democracy was undermined from the beginning by the nation’s acceptance of slavery. That ended with the civil war, but racial prejudice has continued to erode democracy and still does so today. With every decade, we make progress. The experiment has been working. Until now.

The Post editorial lists the worst of Trump’s crimes and condemns his Republican supporters for their failure to take action to stop him. The editorial concludes, “These are high crimes and misdemeanors, as the Framers of the Constitution understood the term. But this time it is up to us, the American people, to remove Mr. Trump from office.”

I believe that Biden will defeat Trump in November by historical margins. I pray that I am right. The organization Vote Vets, a group of American military veterans, regularly refers to the president as “Traitor Trump.” They’re right. Trump has betrayed us. My greatest concern is that he might refuse to leave the presidency when he is defeated in the election. He has expressed his unwillingness to say whether he would give up his power. His retention of the presidency would be fascism writ large.

And so we stand warned. Will the Republicans finally face up to Trump? Or will they contribute to their own destruction by going along with Trump’s crimes? The evidence I see in the Republican National Convention, now underway, is that they will continue their complicity. If they do, the GOP as we know it will cease to exist in 2021.

Rerun: Sleep Anytime, Anywhere (3)

Continuing my paean to myself as the unchallenged champion of sleep:

I read constantly when I’m not writing—I still love learning. My favorite spot for reading is a lounge chair in my sunroom. If sleep overcomes me, I allow myself a fifteen-minute nap. My brain somehow keeps track of the time and wakens me when my time is up.

I sleep every afternoon for an hour, and I usually get nine hours sleep every night. I luxuriate in a life that allows me to sleep as much as I want, whenever I want.

I don’t know anyone who enjoys sleep as much as I do. I don’t know anyone who is as good at it as I am. I may not be the master of my soul—Post-Traumatic Stress Injury from my time in combat in Vietnam prevents that—but I am the master of sleep. No one can outsleep me.

Rerun: Sleep Anytime, Anywhere (2)

The pace of my life took a toll over time. At the end of the last semester of my senior year of college, I collapsed from exhaustion. I was in Cowell Hospital at graduation time, close enough to the amphitheatre that I could hear the graduation ceremony. I graduated a semester late without a ceremony.

That was my first diagnosed bout of exhaustion.

In my thirties, I enrolled in graduate school at the George Washington University. I wanted to go on learning. The university admitted me provisionally because my undergraduate grades were poor. When I began taking classes, I found out I wasn’t so dumb after all. I outperformed all my fellow students, pulling down straight A’s all the way through to the dissertation and doctorate.

But I was working full time at the National Security Agency (NSA) and taking care of my family—eventually four children—and I overdid it. Doctors diagnosed me again with exhaustion.

The third case of exhaustion came during the fall of Saigon. I lost count of the days and nights my two communicators and I went without sleep and, toward the end, without food, before we were finally evacuated under fire. This time doctors told me I had amoebic dysentery, ear damage from the shelling, and pneumonia due to inadequate diet, insufficient sleep, and muscle fatigue.

So I learned to cherish sleep. I taught myself early to sleep every chance I got, even for fifteen minutes, even sitting up. As a friend gratuitously pointed out to me some time ago, I regularly fall asleep in the shower. Now that I am retired and a full-time author, I enjoy sleep more than I have at any other time of my life.

More tomorrow.

Rerun: Sleep Anytime, Anywhere

These days I’m sleeping more than usual. I often get nine hours of sleep at night and then take an hour’s nap in the afternoon. I’m sleeping a lot because I can. With the pandemic lockdown keeping me isolated at home, I have plenty of time for rest.

My enjoyment of sleep these days reminded me of a series of blog posts from several years ago. So I present them here as a rerun with only slight editing to bring them up to date:

I am the unchallenged master of sleep. I can sleep at any time of the day no matter where I am.

It started in my childhood. My mother was an alcoholic, my father in prison. Sometimes I had nothing to eat. By age eight, I was out earning money so that I could at least buy a candy bar or a dinner roll if there was no food at home. From then through the end of high school, I always had a job. I delivered newspapers, worked as a pharmacy delivery boy, stocked shelves in a department store. After I got my driver’s license at sixteen, I most often worked in gas stations, pumping gas, greasing cars, and cleaning. Sleep was a luxury I couldn’t always afford.

Then came college. The tuition at UC Berkeley in the 1950s was just short of sixty dollars a semester, an amount I was able to accumulate by fasting and hoarding. I worked twenty hours a week while attending classes to support myself. I usually found a job in restaurants. Sometimes I washed dishes; sometimes I waited tables; once in a while I acted as a chef’s helper. I specialized in restaurant work because I got free meals.

I had long since learned how to go without sleep. I had to attend classes, study, and work. I found I could push myself beyond what I thought were my limits. My undergraduate college grades were below average. That met my expectations. High school advisors had warned me that I wasn’t intelligent to go college. But I was determined to do it anyway. I loved learning, and I wanted to escape from poverty.

More tomorrow.

“It Is What It Is”

A friend just sent me a video titled “It is what it is.” Those words are used as the title of a song sung throughout the video. The words are set to the melody of the old Doris Day song, “Que sera, sera” (“Whatever will be, will be”).

“It is what it is” are the words of President Trump when asked about his reaction to the high death toll of the coronavirus pandemic. He had already proclaimed that he would not accept responsibility for pandemic and in fact has done nothing to combat it. As a result, while other nations have coped with the disease and brought down their death tolls, the U.S. has, as of this morning, suffered 5,713,776 infections and 177,834 deaths.

My understanding of the phrase, “It is what it is” is that it means “That’s how things are. There’s nothing you can do to change it.” That makes it the equivalent of the sentence GIs used during the Vietnam war, “There it is.” It’s the verbal way of throwing up your hands in despair.

But of course much could have been done to combat the pandemic. Had the federal government moved quickly to increase testing, require masks, insist on social distancing, and track the disease, by now the pandemic would be under control. Instead, new infection peaks are expected.

This is not a casual matter to me personally. As an older man with a history of lung cancer, I would likely die if I contacted the disease. To me, the refusal of Trump and his Republican backers to take action is a direct threat to my life.

So the video pinning guilt on Trump for his lack of action hit home. I hope it goes viral.

Racism and Slavery (3)

In the process of working through my own biases, I contemplated the profound evil of slavery. For the first time, I thought through what it means to treat another human being as inanimate property to be bought or sold. I reflected on the practice of taking a child away from its mother to be sold at auction. I considered that breaking up families for profit was normal and acceptable practice. And I came to understand for the first time that treating people as less than human—that is, race prejudice—had its roots in slavery.

What shocks me the most is the depth of the evil inherent in slavery. I’m beginning to understand that slavery is only possible when the enslavers refuse to see the humanity in the enslaved. And from that perception comes the racial bias that is still with us today.

We have serious work ahead of us to repair our nation.

Racism and Slavery (2)

After graduating from college, I enlisted in the army to go to language school to learn Chinese. A natural linguist, I had already taught myself French and Italian, studied Latin in high school, and taken German in college. Chinese fascinated me. But the army, in its wisdom, chose to teach me not Chinese but Vietnamese, a language I had never heard of. That choice shaped my life.

In the army and later as a National Security Agency (NSA) civilian in Vietnam, I worked as an equal with men of all races and backgrounds. I learned teamwork and the value of work partners. I came to understand that my Irish-English heritage made me different from but no better than anybody else. What counted was not race but ability and willingness to work hard.

Somehow along the way, I did manage to become inculcated with unconscious bias. Throughout my life, I was never aware that I was prejudiced until this year when racial bias became the focus of national attention. I was shocked to discover within myself hidden assumptions about blacks, Asians, and Hispanics. These people, I unconsciously imagined, were unlikely to be as intelligent or well-educated as I am. I made no such assumptions about whites. It turned out that my parents had achieved their goal of planting prejudice in my soul.

Fortunately, a bias discovered is a bias disarmed. I’m now able at the conscious level to root out false assumptions. It will take some work, but I’ll do it.

Racism and Slavery

Recent events in the U.S. have awakened me to the degree that racism is alive and well in our country. And they have caused me to reflect on the evil of slavery.

Until the death of George Floyd, I hadn’t realized that deaths at the hands of police are several times more likely for blacks than for whites. Research by the press in the days that followed gave ample evidence that racial prejudice is rampant in the U.S. I even discovered racial bias in myself.

The roots of my problem were in how I was raised. My mother was a southern belle born to enjoy mint juleps on the veranda while the darkies worked in the cotton fields. My father was an Irish lawyer who hated blacks, Jews, Asians, and Hispanics. They worked hard to teach me to hate, but I rebelled early. By the time I was six, I was regularly left on my own while my parents were out carousing. My father went to prison for embezzlement before I was twelve, and my mother continued to drink to excess. While my father was in jail, my mother and I lived in the slums of Oakland, California. My playmates on the streets were of every race and color. I couldn’t see that they were different from me.

In short, before I was six years old, I knew I was on my own. That meant, among other things, choosing values for living that were at odds with those of my parents.

When college time came, I enrolled in the University of California in Berkeley, a bus trip away from Oakland. I worked part-time to support myself. In my classes and to a greater degree in my work life, I was surrounded by people of every racial background and nationality. I spotted cultural differences between me and others. Those differences made us diverse but not unequal.

More tomorrow.

Public Calm in the Face of Disaster

Is there such a thing as disaster fatigue? Can one become so inured to catastrophe that one no longer reacts?

The coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. shows no signs of amelioration. Many indications suggest that things will get worse. As I write, the U.S. reports two and a half million cases and over 172,000 deaths. The largest segment of the dying are the most vulnerable—older people with physical disabilities. That means I am a prime target, an older man with a history of lung cancer.

And yet the news reports assume a matter-of-fact tone. Another day, another rise in the death toll. President Trump obviously isn’t concerned. Why should I be?

Because we’re talking about deaths. Deaths. I almost feel as though I want to remind people how serious death is. How can we remain so calm in the face of a threat to our lives?

I already know one person who has died from the pandemic. How many more will there be before the U.S. gets its act together and curbs the pandemic spread? Unlike the American public, I am not unruffled by tragedy.

Writing about Death During Combat

I admire novelists and short story writers who describe without flinching the damage combat inflicts on the human body. I’m currently reading Mel Carney’s Command at Dawn (Deeds Publishing, 2019). The book pulls no punches in depicting the hideous way people die in combat. The same was true of A Quiet Cadence by Mark Treanor (Naval Institute Press, 2020) (see my review at http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/a-quiet-cadence-a-novel).

I congratulate these writers for telling the truth about combat. As I have noted before in this blog, fewer than one percent of Americans now living have experienced combat. But it is important for us to know and understand the bestiality we are sending our young men and women to face when we send them to war. Our writers bear witness for us.

I am ashamed to confess that I cannot bear witness like my fellow writers. I have tried repeatedly and failed to depict in writing the deaths and woundings I observed on the battlefield. I just can’t do it. It’s not that I’ve forgotten. My nightmares, flashbacks, and panic attacks bring back the memories as if they were happening before my eyes. But I can’t bring myself to put words on paper about them.

Maybe that will change over time, but I doubt it. Just as the memories never fade, I assume that my enforced silence will remain. I’m deeply grateful that other writers are not so impaired.