Tom Glenn's Blog, page 49

New Book Review Up

My most recent review, of Tom Young’s Red Burning Sky, is now available online at https://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/red-burning-sky-a-wwii-novel-inspired-by-the-greatest-aviation-rescue-in-history

Take a look and let me know what you think.

My Mugs

For reasons I don’t understand, organizations and businesses keep giving me writing pens—ballpoints, rollerball, ink, you name it. As a result, I have more pens than I know what to do with. So I keep them in coffee mugs I’ve collected over the years from a variety of sources. The mugs tell their own story.

Two of the mugs have words on the side about writing. One says, “I like big books and I cannot lie.” The other says “I write . . . because it is my purpose.” A third mug has a picture of one of my grandchildren as a toddler. Then there’s one labelled “American Embassy Hanoi Vietnam.” Two mugs are from organizations I belonged to, FIRN, that is, Foreign-Born Information and Referral Network, and WIW, Washington Independent Writers. The last two mugs are from businesses I dealt with.

The mugs, in short, tell an awful lot about my personal history as a writer, grandfather, and veteran. They are among the keepsakes that my descendants will inherit from which they will learn about the wild life I have lived as a soldier, spy, father, and writer.

I hope my children and grandchildren will enjoy the mugs as much as I have.

Laughter

Over the past few weeks, I’ve posted blogs on involuntary human body functions, the yawn and the sneeze. Here’s another one: the laugh.

Like the yawn and the sneeze, defining laughter is at best difficult. According to the web site Bitesize, laughter is a total-body, physiological response to humor. “Similar to aerobic exercise, a hearty laugh involves contraction and relaxation of facial, chest, abdominal and skeletal muscles, easing muscle tension and spasms that create chronic pain.” Scientists don’t agree on what organs are involved in laughter, but some believe that the frontal lobe at the very front of the brain, which determines our emotional responses, plays a part, along with the limbic system. And laughter is contagious. That’s why laughter tracks are placed in TV sitcoms—so that we’ll chuckle along with the unseen audience.

All that begs the question: what is humor and how do we respond to it? Scientists still struggle to explain exactly what makes people laugh. According to Scientific American, “People laugh at the juxtaposition of incompatible concepts and at defiance of their expectations—that is, at the incongruity between expectations and reality. According to a variant of the theory known as resolution of incongruity, laughter results when a person discovers an unexpected solution to an apparent incongruity, such as when an individual grasps a double meaning in a statement and thus sees the statement in a completely new light.”

If you find all that unsatisfying, you’re not alone. I conclude that laughter and what causes it are at best poorly understood. I’m inclined to include humor and its result, laughter, among the incorporeal functions that we understand least and depend on most. Thinking is the most prominent of these. It involves the use of the brain, but the brain doesn’t think; the mind does. And the mind, like thinking, has no material form. It’s intangible, immaterial.

Once again, I’m struck with how little we know or understand about the phenomenal human race. Fortunately, that doesn’t stop me from enjoying a good and hearty laugh.

Liars and Lying

I can remember a time, not very long ago, when we Americans felt duty-bound to tell each other the truth. Indications are that, when Donald Trump came on the scene, all that changed. Trump’s false or misleading statements totaled 30,573 over his four years as president. His lying seems to have freed his Republican supporters from any sense of obligation to tell the truth. These days, to be a good Republican, one has to give credence to the Big Lie, that Trump really won the 2020 election and that Joe Biden’s victory was a fraud—despite overwhelming and irrefutable evidence that the election Biden won was free and fair.

GOP falsehood has reached unprecedented levels and became an insurrection. On January 6, 2021, Trump’s Republicans stormed the Capitol and tried to overturn the election by force. As many as ten people died as a result of the violence, and many more were injured. The cost of repairing damages from the attack on the U.S. Capitol and related security expenses have already topped $30 million and will keep rising, Architect of the Capitol J. Brett Blanton told lawmakers. The GOP has now censured its members who approved the election. And most recently, it has termed its January 6 violence as “legitimate political discourse.”

Has truth lost all relevance for the Republicans? Violent insurrection that kills people is now “legitimate political discourse”? If violence can overturn a legitimate election, democracy ceases to function. Put differently, if the Republicans had succeeded in seizing power on January 6, 2021, the U.S.A. would have become a fascist state.

Let’s work together to restore a devotion to the truth. And, while we’re about it, to democracy.

The Sound of Silence (2)

Continuing from yesterday, the words from the song, “The Sound of Silence”:

And in the naked light, I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never shared
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

“Fools” said I, “You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you”
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
Then the sign said, “The words on the prophets are written on the subway walls
In tenement halls”
And whispered in the sound of silence

The Sound of Silence

A friend recently sent to me and others a video of those serving in the military accompanied by the Simon and Garfunkel song, “The Sound of Silence,” originally recorded by the duo in 1964. As readers of this blog know, I spent many years as a civilian operating under cover as military and supporting our troops on the battlefield with signals intelligence. I experienced the greatest love I have ever known, the bond between two men who fight side by side. So the video moved me to the core.

To me, the sound of silence is the unbearable grief one suffers when a buddy dies, as happened to me so often on the battlefield. So I offer you here the words to the song along with my tears:

Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence

In restless dreams, I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
‘Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence

More tomorrow.

Pro-Trump Death Toll

Republicans who support Donald Trump are in danger. According to National Public Radio (NPR), people living in counties that voted heavily for Donald Trump during the last presidential election are nearly three times as likely to die from COVID-19 as those who live in areas that went for now-President Biden. Also, the stronger a state’s Trump support in the 2020 presidential election, the higher the number of residents suffering a COVID-19 infection. And according to the New York Times, a total of 25 out of every 100,000 residents in counties that voted for Donald Trump died of COVID last October, compared with the 7.8 per 100,000 in counties that voted heavily for Biden.

Why? Because Trump and his Republican supporters have downplayed the COVID-19 threat, refused to wear masks, and discouraged followers from getting vaccinated. The death toll from COVID-19 is much higher among those who rebuff masks and vaccination.

Those who decline masks and vaccination often give one of two reasons: that their leader, Trump, pooh-poohed the danger of COVID-19, and that in refusing to wear a mask or be vaccinated, they are exercising their freedom of choice. The first reason is invalid on its face. Trump’s false or misleading statements totaled 30,573 over his four years in office. According to the Washington Post, “When The Washington Post Fact Checker team first started cataloguing President Donald Trump’s false or misleading claims, we recorded 492 suspect claims in the first 100 days of his presidency. On Nov. 2 alone, the day before the 2020 vote, Trump made 503 false or misleading claims as he barnstormed across the country in a desperate effort to win reelection.” Trump, in short, is, to put it mildly, not a trustworthy source.

The second reason could be considered valid if the danger was limited to that affecting those who refuse to wear a mask or be vaccinated. But those refusers also endanger others because they can infect them. None of us have the right to endanger our neighbor.

It is, therefore, completely valid to hold Donald Trump responsible for the deaths of thousands of his followers. These days, to be a Republican is dangerous to one’s health.

Immigrants Are Good

I am currently reading for review Patrick Strickland’s The Marauders: Standing Up to Vigilantes in the American Borderlands (Melville House, 2022), due to be published later this month. The book brings home in startling terms the political right’s anti-immigrant actions. The “nativists,” to use Strickland’s term, who oppose the presence of all foreigners in the U.S., are unmistakably racist White supremacists. They tend to be conservative, well-heeled, and Republican. Their chosen leader is Donald Trump.

I find antipathy to immigrants surprising, since we are all descendants of immigrants. The only exceptions are American Indians and Alaska Natives who account for barely one percent of our population. My own heritage is English-Irish-Welsh-Scottish; my ancestors were all immigrants from the British Isles. Nary a native American among them. That description applies to all Americans I know or have ever known. Our ancestors, without exception, all came here from abroad.

And these days it is the immigrants, not the natives, who fuel our economy. Sixty percent of our most valued tech companies were co-founded by first- or second-generation immigrants. Among them were Steve Jobs, a second-generation Syrian immigrant, and Sergey Brin, the Russian immigrant who co-founded Google. And 25 percent of all our companies are founded by immigrants. More than 40 percent of businesses on the U.S. Fortune 500 List were launched by immigrants or children of immigrants. And yet immigrants account for only about 13 percent of our population. Moreover, when immigrants enter the labor force, they increase the productive capacity of the economy and raise GDP.

Immigrants, in short, are far more dynamic than natives in starting and running businesses. The more immigrants the better. We need them. It’s long since time we Americans recognized the contribution of our immigrant population and honored those new to our shores.

Rugged Individualism

We Americans pride ourselves on our “rugged individualism” which Merriam-Webster defines as “the practice or advocacy of individualism in social and economic relations emphasizing personal liberty and independence, self-reliance, resourcefulness, self-direction of the individual, and free competition in enterprise.” The emphasis, in other words, is on what’s-in-it-for-me, that is, selfism, defined as concentration on one’s own interests, self-centeredness, or self-absorption. Selfism upholds explicitly selfish principles as being desirable. It is the hallmark of capitalism.

The opposing philosophy is collectivism—defined as the practice or principle of giving a group priority over each individual in it—or socialism, which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

An argument I often hear is that rugged individualism lies at the heart of American greatness. By encouraging each of us to look out for number one and to disregard the needs of the community, the American model has led to amazing achievements. My answer to such claims is to agree but to point out that rugged individualism has also led to overwhelming inequities in American culture. The top 1 percent of earners in the United States account for about 20 percent of the country’s total income annually. Meanwhile, the lowest-earning quarter of Americans account for just 3.7 percent of income every year. That has led to severe political inequality. As Robert Reich points out, “As early as 2012, more than 40 percent of all money spent in US federal elections came from the wealthiest of the wealthiest—not the top one percent or even the top tenth of the one percent, but from the top one percent of the one percent.” As a result, Republicans, representing the well-to-do minority, often dominate our governing structures.

My sense is that it’s well past time to even out the playing field and find ways to allocate our wealth more equally. Let’s temper our individualism with a splash of loving our neighbor as ourselves. We can start with taxation. Billionaires in the U.S., for example, pay only 8.2 percent of their income in taxes, whereas the rest of us pay 25.4 percent. It’s time to change that.

The sooner we start, the better.

Ronald Regan (2)

These days, Regan is mostly remembered for the Iran-Contra scandal. Here’s the story as told by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training: “One of the biggest foreign policy scandals of the last half-century was the Iran-Contra affair, in which the Reagan Administration, prodded by CIA Director William Casey and NSC Advisor Oliver North, secretly arranged for an arms-for-hostage deal with one of its bitterest enemies in the Middle East. Put simply, Israel would sell weapons from the U.S. to Iran, which had been designated a State Sponsor of Terrorism in 1984 and the subject of an arms embargo, in exchange for the release of American hostages held by Hezbollah, Iran’s ally, in Lebanon.

“North and Casey then doubled down, funneling the profits from the arms sales into yet another illegal venture, a secret plan to support the Contras, the militants in Nicaragua which opposed the communist Sandinistas. This was in direct contravention of the Boland Amendments, which Congress had passed from 1982-84, specifically prohibiting U.S. support of the Contras.”

The scandal indelibly stained Regan and his supporters for their obvious disregard for the law. I have no idea whether the illegal operation I refused to fund ever went forward. After my return to NSA, I was no longer cleared for information on that undertaking.

I used the story of my assignment and banishment as the basis for the plot in my 2020 novel, Secretocracy. But I set the story during the Trump administration because Trump was infamous for having fired intelligence budgeteers who would not do his illegal bidding. He shared with Regan a willingness to put himself above the law. Both presidents have been roundly condemned for their illegal acts but neither was ever indicted. Maybe that will change for Trump over time.