Hiding from the Virus: Living the New Normal

No Peter South O, not great. Another person who should really have listened to what George Carlin was saying in his social commentary comedy skits. And read far more history from the likes of Howard Zinn and other eyes-open historians, not the censored government MIC versions so often taught to children to keep them uninformed and pliable.

Unlike my Uncle Kenny who wrote explicit letters home to his oldest sister my stepmom. The most intelligent and honestly brutal were sent from Bangkok or the Philippines etc on R&R so they weren’t heavily censored by the Army.

At least Donnie Taylor came home alive.
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Donnie Taylor: Proud to be an American and you fought in Viet Nam to ‘allow’ my freedoms? Well, that begs the question of just what part of being an American one should be proud of? It is such an open-ended undefined comment that it really doesn’t mean anything.

Can you give me specific instances that you are proud of? Since we’re all bored unable to do anything but yell at the cat, watch tv (which I haven’t owned or watched since 1993) or go paddle out at the Pier (or me go hiking for a bit of snowsurfing) due to this very scary and serious emergency Pandemic…as we watch our meager cash savings (if we had any) disappear like the fog off Southside of the Pier on a hot summer morning.

So to help relieve some of that boredom, if you’d care to write one you could post a reply to Peter from South O a list that we can all discuss.

I would suggest to delve deeper into the instances you put down before posting it, though. Look for blowback, government lies, military lies, stuff that will undermine your talking points on that list. And perhaps dig into what and how and who led up to those parts of this country’s history you are proud of? I find that always helps crystallize my thoughts on a subject I’m writing on. Context and background are important.

Hey, at least it isn’t tv and maybe as you write it you can go past the myths and see the underlying structure of the society we actually live in.

Just one suggested bit of reading before you start that list. My 15×18″ paperback copy is only 66 pages long, very short read, but it’s the one with a segment of ‘The Horror Of It’ published 1932 which is the ‘Camera records of War’s Gruesome Glories’ that was included to make the point after you finished the book below. Used it was $6 and shipping from Powells.com. Please read this before you reply.

Marine Brig. General Smedley D. Butler’s little book ‘War is a Racket’ pub. 1935.

I sent a bunch of them out for Winter Solstice presents in 2002 when Wbush was threatening to invade Iraq. Nobody was amused but that wasn’t my point anyway, and a couple actually got politically active after that which was the point.

My Uncle Kenny wrote all those letters before he got blown up in transport driving those huge trucks with a .30 on top running supplies. The only picture I have of him is standing in front of the one that hit the mine. He looks so young and scared. In those letters he talked about killing people, seeing his friends get blown up, having to pick up pieces to put in the bags… At least those letters not grabbed by the Army Censors. He did not want me to go over there for any reason and told his sister to get me to Canada if I got drafted which was in my future.

But I guess he was fighting for those freedoms…that were blatantly stolen from his big sister (my stepmom) and his other much-older siblings that were all born in San Francisco. US Citizens, educated in US schools. That was all before the US government decided that 120,000 American citizens were NOT covered by the Bill of Rights and kidnapped them from their homes and chucked them into US concentration camps in 1942.

Then the local government stole their house for non-payment of property taxes. Since they were in prison and unable to send a check I guess that was perfectly ‘legal’ to do, too. And the gov took their car. And their bank accounts. And everything else that was in the house except one suitcase of stuff they were allowed to take to prison. Then 4 1/2 years later they were tossed out on the street with NOTHING. A big fat F**K YOU was more like it. Those freedoms, yes?

Uncle Kenny was you, but his big sister never saw him again. So exactly who’s freedoms was Uncle Kenny fighting for? Certainly not his own since as an Asian POC he was drafted to go kill people who looked like the face he saw in the mirror. And had no choice in the matter whatsoever. Prison or military is NOT a choice.

History is so uncomfortable, isn’t it?

FACT: The War on Viet Nam was a disgrace. It was a War Crime as defined by the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg Principles. Period. But powerful countries never pay attention to those little documents anyway. Viet Nam was a completely lie from start to finish which is why JFK was talking about withdrawing troops in 1963. Just before he got assassinated by…persons on the grassy knoll.

I’m sorry that you were sent there. There was nothing I could do to change that as I was just a bit too young and had no political power whatsoever. Sort of like now I guess except for the young part! As you said, our three major contenders for the puppet throne election in November…

That country you were sent to was fighting the occupier/colonial power France when the Japanese invaded in WWII, so the Vietnamese fought the Japanese by themselves the entire war. If they hadn’t fought them there would have been tens of thousands more frontline Japanese troops in the Pacific to kill far more US soldiers; my grandfathers.

Viet Nam’s gov ASKED the US government for assistance in writing a Constitution based on our own at the end of WWII because they beat the Japanese and were one people again. And what did our proud government do? Turned them down and helped France re-occupy the country right back to pretty much slave owners on plantations level. War of liberation re-commenced. I cannot be proud of that. Impossible.

Donnie, you really need to watch some of George Carlin. His writing was so spot-on it was scary. It is too accurate. The skit I’m thinking of is the one where he talks about people crying about their rights, the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. Maybe the ‘Life is Worth Living’ and ‘You Are All Diseased’ HBO specials would be good for you. And really listen and process the words/meanings he speaks of. He was a writer who performed his own words.

Those freedoms, using the example of 1942, are only a Bill of Temporary Privileges because they can be taken away at any moment by any capricious government that wants to.

Have you actually read any of the so-called PATRIOT Act of Cheney’s signed into law by the grandson of a WWII Nazi supporter our illustrious Wbush? Don’t feel bad, neither did any of our so-called Congressmen before they voted on it! Pretty much the German ‘Enabling Act’ in content. Have you read Wbush’s Military Commissions Act of 2006? Have you read into the provisions hidden in neoliberal Democrat Obama’s National Defense Authorization Act? Did you ever read Bill Clinton’s Effective Death Penalty & Terrorism act of…1996(I think)?

We United States’ers don’t like to think about the babies still being born diseased and deformed from Agent Orange, or the denuded blown-up and poisoned dead zones of Viet Nam. Nor do we worry ourselves with thinking about how the US corporations have invaded with sweatshops in that country now. 4 million dead Vietnamese and 50,000 US soldiers one of which was my uncle. Yeah Capitalism, looks like we won that war after all. Or at least the corporations did. Which was the entire point, wealth & power. Not for you, not for them. Just certain people deserve to ‘win.’

Nor do we think about all the babies still being born diseased and deformed from all the highly radioactive Depleted Uranium dumped all over Iraq. Has anybody else looked this up? The pictures are gruesome. We don’t remember Wbush saying on television that “god told me to invade Iraq.” We don’t pay attention to Obama when he says that he “admires” Ronald Reagan and proudly proclaims himself the father of the new explosion in oil drilling and new pipelines crisscrossing in the US. Forty freaking years of browbeating propaganda dumped on the US population and, to generalize, we are even more ignorant than we ever have been before in our own history. But everybody has cell phones and look what new APP they got today… What are the three branches of government? Why is there a delegate count that supersedes the vote of the people effectively negating it completely? Why can’t we just have ONE house of Congress to deal with? Why is Wyoming, with 250,000 total population, even a State when Puerto Rico isn’t? Oh my hell.

Nor do we remember Reagan for all the horrible acts of violence and death that he perpetuated around the world and here in this country, the raids and police violence, and the insanity of public announcements of “trees cause air pollution” because he had Alzheimer’s dontyaknow, but he had no business holding car keys much less being president. Just like Dementia-affected ‘Sleepy’ Joe Biden and Dementia-affected ‘raging violent 3 yr old’ Donald Trump.

Trump is nothing more than the end result of Ronald Reaganism. This is the…tenth Reagan administration in a row by my counting. Especially considering the Military Empire-style foreign policy and economics that always favor the wealthy who own the corporations. Ain’t voting grand? Of course we only get to vote for whomever the wealthy powerful neoliberal Dems and wealthy powerful neocon Repubs put up as our ‘choices.’ How can they say they hate each other so much when a majority of their policies are so alike? Maybe to confuse the situation perhaps? A few identity politics aside, they are far more alike than not. Horribly so.

Big sigh. There are things that I am proud of that this country has done. But I cannot in good conscience throw a blanket over all the incredibly horrible violence and awful crap that the rulers of this country have done in 200 years both political/military/business. Done to all of us and the rest of the world. It boggles the mind how many wars we have started, influenced, or armed across the world. Unelected-selected by SCOTUS president Wbush has caused the death of well over a million people in Iraq since 2003, and they are still dying. And his Defense Sec Rumsfeld had his picture taken shaking hands with Saddam that he wished had never been found and published. How’s all this go again? Oh wait, Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld were BOTH in Richard Nixon’s government. Richard Nixon, you remember him I’m sure.

Tangled webs the powerful spin no doubt, eh?

And Donnie, I consider myself extremely lucky because my parents didn’t have sex until early 1954…so when that ‘report for physical’ notice showed up I of course had already moved after being forced to sign up for the draft at the threat of being jailed if I didn’t… How’s that freedom thing go again? But then the draft ended in 1973 before they found me again and I could breathe a huge sigh of relief and never had to go for that physical which I’m sure would have shown me in tip-top surfer shape, prime IA meat for the grinder.

I had older surfer friends that went since surfers were generally in very good shape and couldn’t fail the physicals unlike Mr. Bone Spurs, and they came back like my Grandpa Merle did in 1919 from the trenches of WWI France. Shell-shocked. Grandpa M lived through the Pandemic of 1918-1920, too, by the way, trying to care for his dying friends coughing their lungs out in the trenches and hospitals after the war ended because he had immunity. They finally sent him home in 1919 to marry my granny. I still have her 1919 engagement ring which is an odd thing. Diamonds on a gold band.

Both my other step-grandpops were in the Pacific in WWII, Dewey a combat Army Sgt. and Harold in the Seabee building airstrips, both in the front line through the entire war not coming home in 365 that the military invented for the next bunch of wars. Anybody wonder why the US military did that? I suspect their reasoning…

And both those grandpas stayed shell-shocked the rest of their lives, Grandpa Harold much worse than Dewey, though. Just like Grandpa Merle from WWI.

But, as George Carlin put so succinctly, for those two it was called ‘Combat Fatigue.’ Doesn’t sound so bad, just a little tired is all. My father was Army in the Korean War, Cpl., and he pretty much drank himself to death, too, with ‘Operational Exhaustion.’ Those Viet Nam vet friends? They all had the same symptoms but it’s been called ‘Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome’ after Korea and many used a lot of heroin and alcohol both. Same difference.

100 years of modern, technological, industrial-size wars, and four new names for exactly the same result in the soldier-survivors. And those ultimately in charge (and responsible) still don’t care. Obviously, because the rulers keep doing the same thing over and over.

I took all of my Uncle Kenny’s letters that my stepmom let me read to heart, Donnie Taylor. She didn’t let me read all of them, and some were too intensely personal for a young teen most likely. My stepmom was a SDSU student activist in the Peace & Freedom Party back then, against the War on Viet Nam where her brother died.

Every ‘Nam vet I know around here, and there are a lot that migrated to these mountains long ago I found out when I moved here, all pretty much say the same thing that my friends that came home to OB and MB said back in the late 60/70s said. Though some still use the words you replied with, they all said that they fought for the guys next to them. I imagine, I hope, that’s what you are proud of. Of keeping some of those people around you alive when they never should have been there in the first place.

Regards,

sealintheSelkirks

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