Pride and Ignorance

For a long time, from the early 19th to the late 20th century, it was possible, common in fact, for the proudly ignorant American public to prosper economically. This was largely due to an industrial base whose success was made possible by the exploitation of resources in non-industrial countries whose people were also largely ignorant, but not proudly so. Those industries provided jobs for which ignorance was no impediment, much less pride.

Then that period ended. In order to prosper in the new economy, workers could not be ignorant. For the proudly ignorant, that was a devastating blow: to their prosperity, and to their pride. But because of their ignorance, they do not understand the source of their calamity. Because of their pride, they are receptive to promises to restore their prosperity without requiring them to address their ignorance. So now they have elected a president who says he will deliver employment for the proudly ignorant. He won’t. Because they are proudly ignorant they are unaware that it is no longer possible to exploit the resources of non-industrial countries. There are a lot of reasons for this of which they are ignorant. But the most important reason, the one that is thermodynamically irreversible, is that those resources no longer exist. That they are ignorant of this is a source of pride for them, but it doesn’t change the fact.

It is now necessary to be knowledgeable to prosper in the knowledge economy. The proudly ignorant are ignorant of this. In their ignorance, they cling to the hope that their prosperity can be restored without any inconvenience. The fact is, this shouldn’t be a surprise to us. This has been the American public since the Industrial Revolution. The proudly ignorant have been Us forever. That we can be surprised by their ignorance means, perhaps that we have also been ignorant, even if less proudly so.

Instead of killing wolves...

This is sad -- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/profanity-peak-gray-wolves_us_57be98e0e4b085c1ff27ca1c?section=&

Of the 90 or so wolves in the state of Washington, a pack of a dozen has been killing cattle so Fish and Wildlife is now going to kill the entire pack. I get it. That's really all the State can do, but surely the conservation groups could do, or better, could have done, something to forestall this "consummation devoutly NOT to be wished". Since this probably won't be the last time, I think someone, WWF or even hunting guides should start a fund. The money would come from donations but also "predator safaris" where tourists get to see wolves. I mean, if they're preying on cattle, how hard can they be to find?. Then the ranchers can be paid a fair price for their losses and the wolves can just go ahead and, you know, wolf it up.

This is all very easy to say, of course, from my distant perch in South Texas but I know that Yellowstone Park is always full of wolf tourists. Why not rural Washington, or Idaho, or wherever?

Why isn't the NRA up in arms about the killing of Philando Castile?

Philando Castile was shot and killed by a police officer in a St. Paul, Minnesota suburb. Mr. Castile had a permit to carry a concealed weapon (a 2nd amendment right) and was, in fact carrying. When asked to show his driver's license, Mr. Castile informed the officer, Jeronimo Yanez, that he had a license to carry and was carrying and that he was reaching for his wallet. Officer Yanez shot and killed Mr. Castile. In an article in the Huffington post, a report from NBC affiliate KARE was exerpted as follows:

Thomas Kelly, the attorney representing Yanez, confirmed to the Star Tribune that his client had stopped Castile for the broken taillight ― and also because Yanez believed Castile looked like the suspect in an armed robbery that had occurred a couple days earlier. 

“All he had to have was reasonable suspicion to pull him over,” Kelly said.

He added that Yanez shot Castile “after he reacted to the actions of Mr. Castile.”

“This has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with the presence of a gun,” Kelly added. “Deadly force would not have been used if not for the presence of a gun.”
[emphasis mine]

Not that I believe for a second that Mr. Castile would have been shot in the exact same circumstances save that he were white, but taken at face value, why isn't the NRA all over this? They claim to be so protective of all Americans' right to bear arms. Here was a US citizen, legally permitted to carry a gun and he was, by the murderer's own lawyer's admission, killed for exercising that right. Where is their outrage? They're quick enough to cry "tyranny" at the merest whiff of regulation. But execution for packing heat is OK? Does the NRA, perhaps, only care about the 2nd amendment rights of white Americans? Only people not in Minnesota? Only people driving without 4-year old children in the back seat?

The Right to Exist

Presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders stated the obvious in an interview and said that Benjamin Netanyahu (and by extension any Israeli leader) isn't always right. That this is considered bold and controversial is sad.

Sanders also said something to the effect that Israel has a right to exist. I suppose that's true, but only, as is the case with any and all countries, because it does exist. That is, countries, the United States, Israel, Botswana, Mongolia, each and every one has a right to exist solely as a fait accompli. There is no divinely providential reason that countries should exist, even Israel, even the United States. They do exist. And so they have a right to exist. No more. No less.

However, what if we ask if Great Britain had a right, in 1945 (or whenever it was) to give away someone else's land (as opposed to, say, Sussex) to a bunch of Europeans who, well, wanted it? I think the answer is "no". But they did. And now Israel exists. And so it has a right to exist.

But Japan has a right to exist, clearly, and had that same right to exist in 1945. But the United States decided that it no longer had the right to maintain the political and social structure that it had developed over a thousand years. And so the United States changed that structure. Japan did not cease to exist, but they had forfeited the right to determine in what configuration they would continue to exist. That forfeiture was the result of mischief and calumny in the region and the world.

Israel is clearly guilty of regional mischief and calumny. I don't expect any presidential candidate or president to say it, but I think it's clear none the less that Israel is incapable of responsible self-determination, as it was clear that Imperial Japan was incapable of responsible self-determination, and the time has come for the world community (starting with Great Britain, as indeed the whole mess did start with Great Britain!) to acknowledge that. At the very least, we need to stop paying them to behave so execrably.

Aardvark Eggs (because "Armadillo Eggs" is taken)

This is another in the category of "I can't believe I wasted so many years not knowing this": squash leaves are edible! You know how a squash plant (zucchini or otherwise) can take over a whole garden? Great big leaves everywhere? Well guess what? That's just fine.

I planted some butternut squash seeds along the back of 2-foot bed. I planted some chard toward the front. I wanted the greens. Well I don't know if the squash killed the chard but the chard never came up. But boy-howdy did the squash ever! I also had some peppers and nasturtiums in there and I was afraid the squash leaves were going to take all the light. Then it occurred to me that "what if those great big leaves were edible". A short internet search later and "yes they are"! They need to be rubbed pretty well to get the fuzz off but that's easy enough. I put a bunch of them in a big pot of soup, along with the stems. Excellent.

Speaking of the stems, wash and rub them real well and cut them into 2-inch pieces and they're just like ziti.

So anyway, I came up with a recipe for a sort of dolmadakia or tamales made with these leaves:  https://flic.kr/s/aHsktvJSFn

boil some sweet potatoes
saute some onions and raisins (or sweetened dried cranberries)
mash the sweet potatoes and onions and raisins
add cinnamon to taste
chop up some Mexican crumbling cheese
wash and rub the squash leaves
cut the leaves in half
steam or boil the leaves just lightly*
put a dollop of potato/raisin on the leaf
sprinkle cheese on top
roll the leaf up
fry the rolled concoction in oil


*I steamed them too much and they fell apart, not at all and they're too chewy

Paranoia-I (there will no doubt be more)

Why do we call the language spoken for centuries by European Jews “Yiddish”? The word, “Yiddish”, means, in that language, “Jewish”. My grandfather, who spoke English poorly despite having lived in the US for around 30 years when I met him, referred to his native language as “Jewish” when speaking English. “Go to the mailbox and get me Jewish newspaper”. “Why can’t you ever learn to speak Jewish?”

We don’t refer to the language spoken in Germany as “Deutch”, although curiously we do refer to the language spoken in the Netherlands as “Dutch”, go figure. We don’t refer to the language spoken in Japan as “Nihongo”. We don’t even refer to the second most widely spoken language in the US as “Español”. We have words in English that serve to name those languages. But we say “Yiddish” when speaking English, to name the language of European Jews. Even Jewish people do this. Even people who speak Jewish do this. Why?

I have decided to believe that it is rooted in antisemitism and shame. To say “Jewish” connotes that, more than the language itself, the speaker is, in fact, a Jew. And further, that this is a bad or shameful thing. Much like people accusing President Obama of being a “secret” Muslim. It’s an insult although there’s nothing insulting about it. I reject this. I am not ashamed that I’m Jewish. I don’t subscribe to the mythology, or if you prefer, religion, and I don’t even speak the language (or the other one). But I’m Jewish enough for jazz and I don’t see anything shameful or embarrassing about that.

Yet the people who talk about the “Yiddish theater” of the ‘30s and ‘40s, or Yiddish music, whether gentile or Jew, must feel that calling it “Jewish” theater or music carries baggage that imputes in some way the otherwise worthwhile attributes of the cultural experience. Bullshit! Bubbamaise!, if you prefer. There is nothing pejorative about calling the language “Jewish” and to avoid that appellation is to be complicit in the tacit understanding that “Jewish” is, indeed, undesirable.

My Vietnam War

It has become fashionable to recall the Vietnam War with nostalgia and not a little revisionism. We want to remember it as a Good War. But it wasn’t. We want to remember it as a could have been a good war if only… But it wasn’t that either. It wasn’t a Good War. It was only Our War. 

But we want to forget that it wasn’t a Good War. That’s understandable. The country was riven at the time and the poor guys coming home felt projected onto them, at best, ambiguity, at worst, hostility as the manifestation of the national disarray. We wanted to forget about the war, forget about them. Of course they did not deserve that. But equally clear is that they did not deserve to be sent into hostilities of such dubious national interest, such international calumny, such utter wretchedness.

For my generation of men, boys then, the war was the Sword of Damocles. I was in the last cohort where the draft was the so-called quota system. By then of course, and I’m talking 1968, the quota was infinite and the system was lethally efficient. Everyone in my high school, the boys that is, saw the future in terms of the war. Either they had some sort of plan for deferment or the plan was laid out for them. Around 80% of the boys in my class went in. Way too many didn’t come out.

We like to forget now, and we Americans love to forget, that Vietnam was sold to a nation that had created its narrative in WW2. Our fathers defeated Hitler. Our fathers saved the Jews, and the Slavs, and the Gypsies, and all the little countries of Europe. Our fathers had liberated the slave labor camps of Southeast Asia and had driven the Japanese to abandon their imperialist aspirations. Our fathers had fought a Good War.

Then the story became a little less convenient when our uncles and cousins fought the Red Chinese to a stalemate in Korea. That wasn’t such a Good War and we didn’t win and even if we had, the side we saved from the commies wasn’t really any better than the nazis.

Then it was our turn. For most of us, it started slowly, almost imperceptibly. At least for me, when the French were bloodied in their colony somewhere south of everywhere, I was really too young to know what was happening other than to latch onto the music of the name on the evening news: Dien Bien Phu. When Kennedy sent “advisors”, I was mostly trying to get the better of long division. Then, as I became more aware of the world, the world had some new words for me: Domino Effect, escalation, napalm, and of course, body count. And even before the internet, we had access to information. We could know, if we chose to look, that Nguyen, and Ngo, and Minh, and all the other tin-pot autocrats were corrupt dictators and if we saved their bacon their people would continue to be oppressed. We could know, if only we chose not to ignore it, that the only American interests in Southeast Asia were tin, and rubber, and oil. We weren’t called to liberate the downtrodden. We weren’t called to contain the imperialist aspirations of Ho Chi Min. He had none. No. We were called to keep the dominoes from falling, whatever that means. We were called to make the world safe for Alcoa. As it turned out, the sons of families with no money were called to make sure the families with lots of money would get to keep it.

So the Vietnam War didn’t fit the narrative we had learned to tell ourselves. It wasn’t a Good War. It was a decidedly crappy war. We weren’t the Greatest Generation. We weren’t even the Beat Generation. We were the Vietnam War Generation. What a load of crap!

So, yeah, let’s remember the Vietnam War. And let’s remember that it wasn’t the fault of any of those kids that their war was a travesty built on a shit-pile of lies. But that’s what it was. They are no more responsible for that horror show than our fathers were for their Good War. You see, unlike the current lies we’re used to telling ourselves, the US Military is NOT responsible for “defending our liberties”. The last time that was true of an armed force it was the continental militias. The US Military, like the US Foreign Service, and US AID and who knows who else, executes policy as directed by the civilian government. Sometimes, and not really all that often and NEVER in my lifetime, that policy is directly concerned with defending at least somebody’s liberty. In Vietnam, the policy sucked. And so the war sucked. And it still sucks.