Tom Glenn's Blog, page 51

Republicans

As an American citizen, I am appalled that one of our two political parties, the Republicans, now espouses shrinking democracy in the U.S. The party has traditionally supported right-leaning ideologies of conservatism, social conservatism, and economic libertarianism. They say of themselves that they believe in liberty, economic prosperity, preserving American values and traditions, and restoring the American dream for every citizen of this great nation. But in fact, they have always represented the well-to-do and worked to maintain the privileges of the wealthy.

That was all before Donald Trump seized control of the party. Now, to be a good Republican, one must believe—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that the 2020 election was lost to Trump due to fraud. One must declare that Trump is the righteous president. As a result, 121 Republicans in the House of Representatives and seven Republican Senators helped Trump try to overthrow our democracy by voting against certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory. The evidence that Biden won fair and square was incontrovertible. And now a new national telephone and online survey by Rasmussen Reports and The National Pulse finds that as many as 50 percent of likely U.S. voters support the impeachment of Biden.

And good Republicans work to reduce voting. That’s because there are far more Democrats than Republicans in the U.S. On December 17, 2020, Gallup polling found that 31 percent of Americans identified as Democrats, 25 percent as Republican, and 41 percent as Independent. I couldn’t locate national population figures by political party, but every count I found showed Democrats outnumbering Republicans by a healthy margin.

To win elections, Republicans should offer candidates and policies that appeal to a majority. Since they are not able to do that, they have instead sought ways to suppress Democrats’ voting. According to the Washington Post, at least 250 new laws have been proposed in 43 states to limit mail, early in-person, and election day voting. Wikipedia reports that the GOP introduced 425 voter suppression bills in 2021 alone.

In short, what was once a respectable if questionable political party has now become an anti-democratic force determined to restore to power the defeated candidate, Donald Trump, despite his having unquestionably lost the election. The will of the people prevailed. Donald Trump didn’t. Republicans want to change that.

If the Republicans are successful in restoring Trump to power in the face of overwhelming evidence that he lost the election, fascism will prevail.

Let’s put a stop to it now.

Covid-19 and Me

I go to great lengths to protect myself from COVID-19. From the beginning, I have worn a mask, and I was one of the first vaccinated, then got a second shot and a booster. If the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends further boosters, I’ll be first in line.

Why? Because I’m such an obvious target for the pandemic to take down. Because of my age (I’ve already long since lived past the life expectancy for American males) and my history of lung cancer, the likelihood that COVID-19 would prove fatal are too great for me to take chances.

So I’ve been isolated except for buying groceries for almost two years. In the last few months, now that almost two-thirds of Americans are vaccinated, I’ve attended a few meetings, but I always try to sit at least six feet away from others. I try to avoid shaking hands and always wear a mask except when I know that everyone around me is vaccinated.

The pandemic has hit close to home. The families of two of my four children have been infected. Thank God, none of them became seriously ill.

I continue to be dumbfounded that some otherwise sensible people are refusing to wear a mask and be vaccinated. They claim that mask and vaccine mandates violate their freedom of choice. Nonsense. None of us have the right to make decisions that endanger the health and lives of others.

My sense is that as more people are vaccinated, the pandemic will dwindle. But for all I know, it’s possible that another COVID-19 variant impervious to the vaccine could appear. Then we’d be starting all over again.

Commonplace Name

I am blessed (or cursed) with very popular name, Tom Glenn. Thomas (or Tom) is the nineth most common forename in the U.S., and Glenn 573rd most popular surname—there are an estimated 49,740 people with the last name Glenn. There is even another published author by the name Tom Glenn. His book is P-47 Pilots: The Fighter Bomber Boys (MBI Publishing Company LLC, December 6, 2014). I am regularly credited with having written that book, and I’m sure he is just as often assumed to have written mine.

“Tom Glenn” is also as short as names get, a single syllable for both the forename and the surname. That means that it is more often misunderstood than multisyllable names like Christopher Abernathy and Mortimer Singletary. When someone asks my name, I almost always have to repeat it to be understood.

And all too often, people err and call me John Glenn. That was the name of the world-famous astronaut and senator who died in 2016 at age 95. And while I intend to outlive that famous man—my ambition is to live past my birthday of a hundred years—I am in every other respect inferior to him and honored to be addressed by his name.

Because I am a linguist and writer, the origin and underlying meaning of my name intrigue me. The name “Thomas” comes from the Hebrew word “ta’om,” meaning “twin.” Its shortened version, Tom, is famous because of the fictional character Tom Thumb, reputed to have been no bigger than his father’s thumb, and Mark Twain’s 1876 novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The surname Glenn is derived from the Irish name glean or perhaps from the Scottish equivalent. It means “valley.”

Hence my all-too-common name. Its ordinariness has not prevented me from achieving some notoriety for my wartime adventures and my six books. I am reminded of Shakespeare’s Juliet who says, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” The problem is that certain other unmentionables, called by any other name, would still stink.

U.S. Inequality

I have written here before about income inequality in the U.S. as one of the national flaws we must address. The U.S. has the highest level of income inequality among modern western states. The disparity of income invalidates forever Ronald Reagan’s “trickle-down” economic policies that slashed taxes on wealthy Americans with the promise that this extra money would go to the middle class. It didn’t then and hasn’t since.

But the wealthy still pay taxes at lower rates than the rest of us. America’s 400 wealthiest families paid an average federal individual income tax rate of 8.2 percent on $1.8 trillion of income over the period 2010–2018. The rest of us paid 13.29 percent in 2019, the most recent year for which I could find complete figures.

And the wealthiest Americans have far more money that the rest of us. In 2019, according to the Los Angeles Times, compensation for corporate CEOs was 278 times greater than for ordinary workers. The same year, the top 10 percent of households held 70 percent of the country’s wealth, while the bottom 50 percent held 2 percent. America’s middle class now holds a smaller share of U.S. wealth than the top 1 percent. Put differently, the average person in the top 1 percent earns an income roughly 40 times that of someone in the bottom 90 percent.

How many of us are living in poverty? In 2020, the most recent year for which I could find figures, there were 37.2 million Americans in poverty, approximately 3.3 million more than in 2019. The definition of poverty in the U.S. is an individual with income less than $36 per day or a family of four with income less than $72 per day.

The unfairness of our income distribution is patently obvious. As a democracy, it is long since past time for us to take steps to reduce the unfairness that shapes our nation.

The Yawn

As mentioned several times earlier in this log, I am an expert at sleeping. I got so good at it during my years on the battlefield when opportunities for rest were rare and brief. I learned to grab whatever sleep I could in moments of safety along with the ability to spring back to alertness instantly if danger appeared. As a result, yawning, usually described as a mostly involuntary action, became for me an intentional act designed to bring on sleep.

 Yawning is defined as the opening of the mouth and breathing in deeply, filling the lungs with air. It’s normally triggered by sleepiness or fatigue. Some yawns are short, and some last for several seconds before an open-mouthed exhale.

I’m as good at squelching a yawn as I am at inducing one. These days, now that I am an old man, I often sleep nine or ten hours each night and take a nap each afternoon. So when I am deprived of my habitual sleep, I am constantly threatened with insulting others by yawning in the middle of social interactions. I have trained myself to remain alert for an oncoming yawn and stopping it in its tracks.

I am justifiably proud of my history of assisting friendly troops on the battlefield. I take pride in my six published books and my ability to spellbind an audience with my presentations and readings. Not included among my accomplishments in which I take pleasure is my ability to suppress yawns. In fact, I try to keep that achievement a secret.

I trust that my readership will assist me in suppressing observations of that bit of behavior.

World War II (2)

My father was too old to be drafted, but two of my mother’s four brothers served in the military during the war. My memory is that they were both sent abroad, but they both got back safely.

Thus my fragmented recollections. I had no understanding of the enormity of the war or the huge numbers killed. The U.S. suffered 418,500 military and civilians killed, but the worldwide total was estimated to be 70–85 million, about 3 percent of the 1940 world population (estimated to have been. 2.3 billion). Deaths directly caused by the war (including military and civilian fatalities) are estimated to have been 50–56 million, with an additional 19–28 million deaths from war-related disease and famine.

Even today we Americans have little sense of the monstrousness of war. My innocent and shallow memories are typical of what we understand. And only a tiny fraction of a percent of us has ever experienced the grisly catastrophe of combat. No wonder we are so willing to go to war.

World War II

I am almost unique these days in that I remember World War II. Granted, I was a small child, but some of the memories are vivid even today.

My earliest memory is of the beginning of the war. A group of adults was gathered in my grandmother’s living room in her second-story apartment just off a busy street in Mullens, West Virginia. The grownups were anxious and kept shushing me as they listened to the radio. All I remember from the broadcast was an announcer reading a long list of countries which had declared war.

Early in the war, my mother and father were reconciled after the death of my sister, two years older than me, from polio. My mother and I moved to Oakland, California to live with my father. All the talk those days was about the war. After the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941, tensions of those living on the west coast went up—would we be next?

Shortages were severe. Gasoline, butter, sugar, canned milk, automobiles, tires, gasoline, fuel oil, coal, firewood, nylon, silk, and shoes all became scarce. The Office of Price Administration (OPA) rationed many items. My parents had to use OPA ration stamps to fuel my mother’s 1936 Chrysler Imperial coupé and my father’s 1939 Chevrolet sedan.

All the talk among adults was when the “duration” of the war would end. I remember that during the summer of 1945, I was away in summer camp when some news about the war came—I don’t remember what—that led to a wild celebration among the boys. For reasons I don’t recall, throwing dirt in the air was the way we celebrated.

More next time.

U.S Gun Ownership and Deaths

More press reports about firearm killings in the U.S. forces me back, at the risk of repeating myself, to the subject of our pride in gun ownership and the consequent mortality rates we tolerate. The numbers I was able to come up with are from a variety of years starting in 2017, but I have no evidence that the statistics on gun ownership and gun deaths have declined.

Nearly half of the 875 million civilian-owned guns in the world are in the U.S. which has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world. And we have a total rate of firearm deaths fifty to a hundred times greater than that of similarly wealthy nations such as Japan, the U.K., and South Korea who have enacted strict gun control laws. The ratio between gun ownership and gun deaths tends to be constant throughout the world—the larger the number of guns in the hands of the people the larger the number of gun deaths. In 2020, the most recent year for which I was able to find complete numbers, the U.S. had 120.5 guns per 100 people[TG1] —more guns than people—and 38,390 deaths by firearms.

This is a problem almost unique to the U.S. We are the only western democracy to suffer such huge gun death rates. That is because we are the only modern nation to allow and even encourage a firearms culture which fosters gun ownership. I suspect that part of the reason for our fondness of guns comes from the fact that we have had no war on our own territory within the memory of any living American. And the number of combat veterans still living among us amounts to a fraction of a percent. As a people, in other words, we are ignorant of grisly effects firearms inflict on the human body. I’m among the tiny number of Americans still surviving who have seen up close and personal the gore bullets produce when they penetrate. I know what it’s like to be hit by the body parts and blood when the man fighting next to me is shot to death on the battlefield and there’s not enough left of him to put in a body bag.

So this is our challenge, a curse that’s almost solely American. We must ween ourselves away from our attachment to firearms and reduce the number of guns we own to save lives and deserve to be called a civilized nation. Let’s start today.

Pandemic Resistance

I keep reading in the press about people who refuse to wear masks and be vaccinated against covid-19 because they feel mask and vaccination mandates are a violation of their freedom of choice. If only their own lives were at stake, I would agree with them. But their refusal endangers others. None of us have that right.

The purpose of mask and vaccination mandates is to maintain public health. The mandates are in the same category as road safety laws and firearm restrictions. Without the mandates, pandemic deaths would skyrocket. Their purpose, in other words, is not to limit personal freedom but to save lives.

The pandemic has become politicized. Despite what the Washington Post describes as “the worst public health disaster in a century,” millions of Republicans see downplaying covid-19 as core to their identity as conservatives. Their skepticism of vaccines means that the virus is killing many more Republicans than Democrats.

This is irrationality writ large. I lay much of the blame for Republican death rates at the feet of Donald Trump. He consistently downplayed the danger of the coronavirus, disbanded the White House pandemic response team, repeatedly assured the nation that covid-19 posed no threat. In effect, he made ignoring the virus and refusing masks and vaccinations a requirement of fealty from his followers. In the process thousands died.

Trump may have no conscience. But the rest of us do. Let’s put aside loyalty to a failed leader and do what’s right for the good of others. Mask up and get vaccinated!

Music Periods (2)

Most of the composers we listen to today wrote during the Romantic period which began around 1830. The move away from intellectual musical content, predominant during the Baroque period, toward emotional writing became the prevailing trend. Programmatic writing was widespread; nature, literature, legends, national identity, and other non-musical stimuli captured musical imagination. Opera, a leading musical form first during the Classical period, became a prevailing force with the arrival of Richard Wagner on the scene. Emotional music became standard.

Next came the Modern period, beginning in 1900 and lasting through today. Composers experimented with musical systems other than tonality. As I reported earlier, the atonal composers, those of the “Second Viennese School,” principally Alban Berg, Arnold Schönberg, and Anton Webern, constructed “tone rows” in which the twelve tones of an octave were laid out in an order that was then used as the basis for composing a piece. Equally famous was Béla Bartók (1881 to 1945), a Hungarian composer who experimented with folk music characteristics in his compositions, including alterations of the standard scale.

Other modern composers, too numerous to name, have explored the possibilities of systems other than tonality, but most have returned to the fold. In the process, they have tested the limits of dissonance and harmonic invention, but they have, for the most part, stayed within the bounds of tonal thinking. Intellectual music rebounded, but emotional appeal held its own.  

So here we are, centuries after the tonal system first became dominant, still creating tonal music. And we have achieved something like balance between the intellectual and emotional. I’ll be curious to see where we go next.