Cannon Fodder

In the wee hours of the morning, back in the day when on the midnight shift on top of Devil's Mountain in Berlin, where we would go to listen in on the commies planning the takeover of the world, I would often find myself alone in the break room with an African-American sergeant pressing me to re-up. He would get points for every one of the troops under his command who re-enlisted. It was annoying, but even though I was still not out even to myself as a gay man, I was drawn to this very engaging soldier, for his looks and for his obvious intelligence, so I guess I appeared to him to be worth working on.

The army was the first place I got to know black Americans. There were one or two in my home town and one in my college class (he got chosen class president - we were nothing if not "liberal" back then), but I had never had any kind of close relationship with black people. New England was still pretty lily-white in those days.

I absolutely loathed being in the army. I volunteered, but only because I would have been drafted, and by volunteering I got to go to the Army Language School to study Russian. It was a good choice, and I managed to avoid the danger spots of Cuba and Vietnam by joining the Army Security Agency and spying on the Russians and the East Germans. During basic training I remember a time when we were taught how to fix bayonets onto our rifles and lunge at dummies. "What's the cry of the bayonet?" our trainer would call out. And we were supposed to shout - three times, at the top of our lungs - "Kill, Kill, Kill!"

As wet behind the ears as I still was in those days barely into my twenties, I still had a voice in my head that spoke to me, "You've got to be shitting me!" The idea of a career in the army would have made me roll on the floor if I could have generated a sense of humor about it. Instead, it called up a sense of fear, anger and confusion. No way this sergeant was going to get me to re-enlist.

It finally sank in to this man that he was barking up the wrong tree with me. He sat back, finally, and said, in sad resignation, "You and I come from different worlds. You're white. You can do anything you want. For me, the army saved my life. It gave me an education, it gives me a decent income, and I have a future here. I think there's probably no way for you to appreciate that."

This was an important moment for me, the first time I became familiar, through direct experience, with systematic racism in the United States, and its consequences. And the first time I understood the concept of cannon fodder.

I was listening this morning to a report on the toll the war in Ukraine is taking on Russian soldiers. What caught my attention was the mention in passing that many of the soldiers fighting on the Russian side are not ethnic Russians.

Dmitry Medvedev at a Buddhist temple
in Buryatia in 2009

A four-day train ride east of Moscow - or a six and a half hour plane ride if you've got the rubles for a plane ticket, lies the city of Ulan-Ude, the largest city - only large city, actually - in the Republic of Buryatia, on the eastern shore of Lake Baikal in South Central Siberia. Buryats are Russian speakers and members of the Russian federation, but one look at them and you know they are East Asians, Mongolians, not Caucasian people. Slavs now constitute about two-thirds of the population, but most of those live in urban areas. A bit under a third (27.4%) are Russian Orthodox, about 20% are Buddhists, and many country folk are either yellow shamanists (i.e., they wear yellow hats and are influenced by Buddhism) or black shamanists (no yellow hats; no Buddhism). 

More significantly, they tend to be poor. And that means they are in that category of folk most likely to be attracted to the military as a means of escape from poverty.  And increasing awareness of this fact seems to be coming to the attention of their brothers and sisters across the border in Mongolia, who are beginning to show signs of solidarity with Ukraine.

I hаve no way of measuring the degree to which these developments might affect Putin's effort to trash and subdue Ukraine, or how it might affect his possible future goals of moving on to Transnistria, or the Baltic States, but it's probably a piece of the larger puzzle worth paying attention to.

Note that Buryats abroad are already stepping up protests, clearly upset by the fact that, according to a Moscow Times article, although Buryats make up a mere 0.3% of the Russian population, they constitute 2.8% of the Russian army casualties in Ukraine. The sign carried by the guy on the far right in the photo at the left reads: "Buryats against Putin's criminal war."

The word's apparently getting around. Мaybe you saw these guys in front of San Francisco City Hall a couple weeks ago.

photo credits:

Medvedev

Buryats against the war

Tom and Mary

About 140 years ago, give or take, way over on the Eastern side of Nova Scotia there were two Nickerson sisters, Cordelia and Mary. Cordelia married William Johnston and Mary married William's brother, Thomas. Mary and Thomas had nine children. Clarence, their first, was born in 1886; Everett, their ninth, was born in 1911. Thomas died in 1935 at the ripe old age (i.e., the age I will become if I live another three weeks) of 82. Mary, who was fourteen years her husband's junior, lived on until November 1954, six months after I turned fourteen. I remember her well. She was my great-grandmother.

The house that Thomas built to raise his family in was at the end of a long dirt road - dirt to this day, I believe - in a place called North Ogden. My grandmother (Thomas and Mary's third child) ended up living in the North Ogden house in the last years of her life, so I spent many hours there, always wondering how it managed to still be standing, and worrying that the rotten floor boards would give in at any moment from the weight of the modern refrigerator, which the kitchen was barely able to support. We couldn't use the two bedrooms on the second floor, because of the bats. How Tom and Mary were able to raise nine kids in that house is a mystery. No indoor plumbing. How did they all bathe? I wonder. How did they survive the winters? Uncle Clarence died a year before his mother, so that must have been rough. But not as rough as losing two of her children when they were still quite small, Lola at age two and Everett at age four. No 9-1-1 in those days, no dentists, no vaccines. I like to think I come from hardy folk. I base that on the fact that Clarence lived to 67, Cliff to 85, Mabel, my grandmother, to 83, my grandfather, Mabel's husband, to 94, Harold to 85, and Rollie to almost 85.

Because my grandmother left Canada and moved to Boston, I grew up with a New Englander identity, but the Nova Scotia identity occasionally overpowered it. The daughters of the American Revolution got hold of my grandmother's name somehow and came a-calling one day to invite her to join their organization. They left, tea half-drunk and cookies half-eaten when my grandmother informed them they were barking up the wrong tree. Her ancestors were not of Puritan stock, and had no intention of migrating to the New World in 1776. When they did, finally,  it was to Canada that they came, not to the U.S., and we grew up with photos of Queen Victoria on the walls of our bedrooms, the granddaughter of George III.

My father was never any good at expressing emotions, until he got old - and then he got quite sentimental. But it was clear that he lived for his summer vacations when we would all pile in the car and make the trek "down East" back to Nova Scotia. He loved his many aunts and uncles. Harold was his favorite. Grandma Mary, because she had so many kids to care for, decided to give one of them - Harold - to her sister. So Harold was raised by Aunt Cord and Uncle Will.

I developed a sense of affection for Harold, too. Didn't have the same degree of contact with Uncle Harold as my father did, but I loved his ability to tell stories. People in his generation didn't have much of a social life. No cinemas, no bars, no money to travel. So they memorized poetry and we never tired of another recitation of "The Cremation of Sam McGee."

He had a great sense of humor. When one of his sisters-in-law died, another sister-in-law carried on a bit too long in Harold's view. "What, oh what ever are we going to do now?" she sobbed.

"Bury her, I suppose," said Harold.

I don't know Harold's entire history, but I do know he had a crush on a woman named Geraldine when he was young. But he blew it and cheated on her, whereupon she upped and moved to Calgary, never, he thought, to be seen again. Harold then lived as a bachelor until he was fifty, when he married a sixty-year-old woman named Annie who intimidated the daylights out of me. She was the local postmistress and took her job - and life - quite seriously. I lived in fear of spilling something or saying the wrong thing. Couldn't get away fast enough when we would go visit her house - it was her house, not Uncle Harold's.

She died, eventually, and Geraldine - Gerry - learned Harold was now free and came back to Nova Scotia to see if they could pick up where they left off - half a century later. Things clicked, and they had a wonderful few years together before he passed on. When he did, Aunt Gerry continued to drive over from Isaac's Harbour to visit in her shiny new red Toyota, which she drove at breakneck speed well into her 90s. Each time she said good-bye, somebody chimed in with "How the hell does she manage to keep her license?"

I haven't been back to Nova Scotia in years, but when people ask me where I feel most at home, I tell people I have four homes: "Tokyo, Berlin, the San Francisco Bay Area, and rural Nova Scotia."

 

Cousin Betty - the daughter of Tom and Mary's eighth child - was given to Carrie, Tom and Mary's fourth child - to raise when her mother died and her father felt overwhelmed at the thought of raising three daughters on his own. Handing your children over to a sibling was clearly just one of those things you did when the going got rough. Betty raised five kids and is now grandmother and great-grandmother to a considerable number of others. She lives in Halifax. We are in close touch and spend a lot of time filling in the family tree. Just when you think you've heard all the tales, another one pops up.

This morning Betty sent me this photo of Thomas and Mary Johnston of North Ogden, her

grandparents, my great-grandparents. It was the first time I had seen what my great-grandfather looked like. I didn't know any photos existed.

Had to share...

The photo at the top is of Thomas and Mary Johnston of North Ogden, Nova Scotia, taken sometime (best guess) in the 1920s or early 1930s at the latest. The photo to the right is the house they raised their nine kids in. I've written about this part of the family history before, two postings in 2014 (here and here) and once in 2021.

Collateral damage

There is so much collateral damage that comes with the decision made by Putin and his generals to massacre their Ukrainian brothers and sisters, in addition to the cruelty of their deaths. There is the fact that thousands of young Russian lives are being ground up and thrown away, as kids who can't resist being drafted are pulled into this awful nightmare. Putin is murdering his own people as well as his neighbors.

And there is the fact that Ukrainians will now hate Russians for generations, people they had until now accepted as cousins and brothers and sisters.

And the fact that there will be no way to convince those who can't, or refuse to try to, tell the difference between politics and culture that they should not punish the average Russian for the harm done by their government.

I have been following the career of Alexander Malofeev since he was a small child. Adore the guy. And I use that word very sparingly. Watched him grow up. Watched him acquire English. Watched him develop from a child prodigy into a world-class concert pianist I'm always willing to stop what I'm doing to listen to, when a new YouTube video of his comes out. 

If you don't know him, set aside some time. Go to YouTube and start anywhere. Go back and forth between his early days and more recent times. Don't miss that wonderful Poulenc concert he plays with Georgian prodigy Sandro Nebieridze in 2018, where he's still wearing braces. How often do you see a teenager with braces so carried away by the music he is creating?

Don't miss him playing Gershwin. Liszt. Rachmaninoff. I'll stop here.

What got me going this morning on Alexander - Sasha - Malofeev was one of those automated pieces that are all the rage these days, news articles and other pieces spoken by robots who pause in all the wrong places and mispronounce things so badly (It's ma - lo - fay - yev, not ma - lo - FEEV rhymes with leave).

This one is about the fact that Sasha arrived in Canada - Montreal, I believe - just as Putin invaded Ukraine - and cut his tour short. For a while they were reporting that the Vancouver Concert would go on as planned, but today I read that that one too was cancelled.

The commentary is too hard on the concert producers, as if they were insulting this wonderful talent by shutting him down. They weren't. They were taking precautions. Disagree with the move, if you will. I accept their thinking that they want to avoid any chance some wacko in the audience will attack him for being Russian. The thought of that scares the bejeezuz out of me.

And for the record, here's Alexander Malofeev's take on the whole thing, lifted from his Facebook page:

I am contacted by journalists now who want me to make statements. I feel very uncomfortable about this and also think that it can affect my family in Russia.

I still believe Russian culture and music specifically should not be tarnished by the ongoing tragedy, though it is impossible to stay aside now.

Honestly, the only thing I can do now is to pray and cry.

But such is the state of affairs. Russians - the good guys - are taking it on the chin because this pischer Trump idol piece of inhumanity running the show in their country has decided he wants to be Czar of All Slavs.

Anyway, here's the news item, if you want to follow up on the story.

May we live till better times come around.

photo credit

Stateless - a film review

I just finished the sixth and final episode of Stateless, a new Netflix release of an Australian TV drama series made in 2020. I'd like to move on to other things, but I am too blown away by the story to do that just yet. It's a very powerful look at the plight of but a small handful of the world's 26 million refugees at latest count.

It is not an easy watch, and if you're the type who turns off the news when it comes to what's happening currently in Ukraine, or turns away from the debates surrounding government policies on dealing with Covid, this is probably not something you'll want to put yourself through. But it's based on a true story and if you see yourself as an informed citizen, it wouldn't hurt to have a look. You should also watch it to show respect for powerful story-telling.

There's a huge problem with the series, as far as I'm concerned. Instead of dealing with the problems refugees are faced with, the story centers on a mentally-ill Australian woman who got mixed in with the refugees and spent ten months in what is supposed to be a temporary detention center, but is for all intents and purposes a prison, where people fleeing rape, murder, starvation and all kinds of other human misery end up becoming abused by people who we put in place to provide them with shelter.

In the American context, immigration is said to involve the most convoluted set of inadequate bureaucratic policies, second only to the Treasury Department's Internal Revenue Service. If this film is any indication, Australia plays in the same ballpark.

Another thing that bugged me was the title. Most of the characters are not "stateless;" they are refugees running from failed states that the countries they try to get into often want to send them back to. They have passports.  But that's nit-picking. Sorry.

I remember discussing the film version of Alan Paton's magnificent novel of apartheid South Africa, Cry the Beloved Country, when it came out back in the 1950s. It was the first time I became aware that white people, when they tell the story of black people, usually prefer to have a white hero coming to their aid. I thought of that while watching Statehood. How much easier it is for white Australians to relate to one of their own kind being caught up in injustice and bumbling government policy than third world figures. I am less adamant these days that the goal in story telling should be perfect balance. I'm ready to accept that anybody trying to call attention to a social or cultural problem probably needs to get the largest possible audience any way they can. But it is nonetheless disappointing that so many of the refugees' stories didn't get told at all because so much time was taken up with the story of an unfortunate local girl.

It isn't just about her, though. Also central to the story is the fate of an Afghan family. I won't give spoilers here. I'll just say if the story doesn't move you, you need a heart transplant.

Six episodes. Spotty in parts. Frustrating and infuriating, especially having to watch the kind of people who often get hired to work as guards who really ought not be allowed to leave their front door.

Definitely a film of great value. Cate Blanchett plays a minor role. Evidently she lent her fame to the undertaking out of a strong personal interest in the plight of refugees in Australia. For which she deserves our gratitude.

Don't expect to find solutions. The question of what to do about the fact that millions of people want to leave unbearably awful places when the places they go to don't have room for them, or can at least make pretty convincing arguments for why that is so, is one of the great human vexations of the age we live in.

photo credit

Still struggling over the Thuy Linh Tu article...

 I'm not sure how well I expressed my confusion, my doubts in my blog posting yesterday.  I probably should have waited to post until I had given it more thought. What I tried to say is that while I agree to a large extent with what Thuy Linh Tu had to say about the sad irony of her father's fate - running from American bombs only to end up making them himself - I fear that as we tell our stories of outrage and disillusionment with America and the state of the world in general, we way too often slant things so badly that we distort them. That we need more nuanced thinking, in other words. That we should make greater efforts to tell both sides of the story (if there are two - and often there are not) and that clarity is important and cannot be achieved without the time it takes to make those efforts.

I watched the Zelenskyy interview on 60 Minutes last night in tears. I don't remember a time when I felt more torn by a moral dilemma. The Realpolitiker in me wants to go along with those who advise the Ukrainians to surrender, to live to fight another day. Putin is a bully of the worst kind. He is on a par with Hitler in his ability to kill masses of people without batting an eye. If there were a god in heaven the world would rise up and stop him. But there is no god. We are on our own. (OK, maybe there is a god and he has a purpose in all this, but let's not get distracted.)

 

And when somebody sticks a gun in your face, you give them your wallet. You don't sacrifice yourself for honor, in my book.

But then I listen to Zelenskyy and the part of me that I value the most, the part I think of as my better self, my moral self, the part that contains dignity and a sense of justice, feels the tears coming. Thank God (note the capital G this time) I got to live in the time of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. I got to experience heroes in action.

When I listen to Zelenskyy and to other Ukrainians begging the world to step up and help them resist the Russian invader I find myself wanting to go to war. I don't like the argument that war is wrong, plain and simple, ever and always. I think the world was wrong not to step in and stop the Holocaust. And I agree with most people that Chamberlain was played for a fool in Munich. And I think that if you saw what happened in Bucha and still argue against war you probably need a heart transplant. Heart acquisition operation, rather.

That's what I was trying to get at. Thuy Linh is a soulmate. She grew up in my hometown. She sees American imperialism for what it is and she is right to call out the United States as a warmongering state. I'd like to meet her and shake her hand.

But what am I to do about the part of me that not only still loves the U.S. on some level, especially when it engages in the pursuit of democracy, as it does when it doesn't let the Ted Cruzes and the Lindsey Grahams and the Marjorie Taylor Greens run the show but tries to patch together a more equitable state and extend rights and extend a democratic consciousness to ever more of its citizens. That America is still there and can not and should not be dismissed.  

What am I to do about the desire to support heroes in the fight for democracy and not simply toss a little cash and a billion or two dollars worth of armaments their way and say, "Best I can do. From here you're on your own, kid..."

Hope you make it?  Seriously?

Anyone who wants to read the original NY Times article that started me down this path can find it here. They may require a subscription, and if so, sorry about that. 

Fathers and the war machine

 On the back page of today's New York Times Sunday Review Section is an article by Thuy Linh Tu, entitled "An American Dream Built on Warfare."  Thuy Linh Tu is professor of Asian American Studies at NYU. The opinion piece is a melancholy reflection on the life of Dr. Tu's father and the place she grew up when he left Vietnam and the family found their way to Torrington, Connecticut in 1980, five years after the fall of Saigon. Or "Liberation of Saigon," if you view it through the eyes of the winners of the Vietnam War.

The story of how, after living through the bombs America dropped on the heads of him, his wife, and his countrymen and women, Tu's father ended up in a small New England town making bomb parts for his adopted country to drop on other people touched me deeply. Not just for the pathos of Tu's father's destiny, but for the fact that Torrington is the town where I was born. My father, too, worked in one of its many small factories. I am a product of the world she writes about, the scores of small New England towns that grew out of the industrial revolution to become the engine of the American war machine. Towns that provided a decent living for its inhabitants, which included a large number of immigrants. Thuy Linh went off to become a university professor on the salary her father made working with aluminum, the metal that "lets jets soar, makes tanks lighter, keeps canteens from rusting." 

My father worked at the American Brass Mill, on Water Street, just a few blocks up from the center of town. Both the Brass Mill and Tu's Torrington Company are long gone, washed out by the migration of American manufacturing to places with cheaper labor costs - and places without unions where it is less likely people like Tu and my father can today afford to educate their children and allow them to become university professors.

Tu left the Torrington Company at some point and began working at Howmet, another company that manufactures parts for the war machine. Thuy Linh doesn't identify the location other than to say it is "a few miles away" from Torrington. I take that to mean she is referring to the plant in Winsted, which is the town in which I grew up, nine miles north of Torrington. An even closer connection to the story, in other words.

I'm trying to get my head around Thuy Linh's conclusion that her father ended up working for America's war machine and the irony of it all. Her final sentence is "the warfare state always has its winners and losers. Sometimes, it's hard to know which one you are."  Part of me - the lefty anti-imperialist part of me - wants to shout, "Right on, girl! Give 'em hell!" That depends on which American narrative you choose to tell. If you tell the tale of American imperialism - a very real and very ugly story - which includes not only Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, but brutal misadventures in Central and South America and other parts of the Middle East - it's easy to conclude, as I have done many times, that Stalin's genocide in Ukraine and Hitler's Holocaust are to a degree matched by America's genocidal near elimination of the North American Indian, its history of slavery and segregation, and you-name-it other examples of human wretchedness. Jingoist Americans like to think we're the good guys, but it ain't necessarily so.

But there's another part of me, the part that wants to tell the counter-narrative, and maybe start with the fact that The Torrington Company also made sewing machine needles for Singer Sewing Machine, ball bearings for bicycle pedals and other useful products which had nothing to do with war, and, unless I'm badly mistaken, you can't have a brass band without manufactured brass. And also wants to remember that part of the story was the defeat of Hitler. And these days providing the Ukrainians with the stuff it takes to keep Putin from turning his "there's no such country as Ukraine" narrative into a reality. The American dream has motivated no small number of good guys as well.

Two things seems certain. One is that what one chooses to learn from history is arbitrary and very much depends on how grounded your moral system is in basic ethics - which I take to mean the commitment to avoid violence and deceit. And the other is that what makes sense today may not make sense tomorrow and there's truth to the warning that hell is paved with good intentions. We simply cannot know the answers to the big questions with any certainty. Is Germany doing the right thing in arguing that they can't stop giving Putin billions for his oil, which he is then free to turn into bombs and artillery for use in Ukraine? Were Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik and Angela Merkel's efforts to keep close ties with Putin a mistake? Are we repeating Chamberlin's appeasement in Munich in holding back from going all out against Putin? Is war the answer, after all?

How are we to know?

Short of greater efforts to understand what's going on, on the part of every one of us in the democratic world, greater efforts to engage with policy makers, greater commitment to rational, non-ideological approaches to problem-solving, I don't know if Thuy Linh's question about whether Torrington, Connecticut can survive, and if so how, has an answer. I doubt it. And whether her conclusion, that the American dream was built on warfare, is justified. I think the whole story needs to be told, in all its complexity.

Faith is a bad word in my vocabulary. I prefer things like responsibility, effort, watching for opportunities to do good, and reason. But in this case, I have to admit that I have faith that engagement is the answer, and not worry. Call it an American weakness, this belief that all problems can be solved if we just roll up our sleeves and get to work. And to that I have to add the Lutheran admonition: "Be sure you're right; then go ahead!"

But it's the cultural heritage I've been given to work with, and until I see something better, I'm going with it.