Duck Soup!

Having an opinion makes it hard to be a people pleaser. In my not too distant past, pleasing people was my main job in life.

If one friend said it’s green, and another friend said it’s red, I made sure to agree with my green friend while my red friend wasn’t looking or listening, and conversely, agreed with my red friend while my green friend was occupied elsewhere. 

It all came so easily to me in part because of my desperate childhood attempts to be loved and also because I was a professional actress. I have acted my way on and off stage to keep audiences and friends pleased and pleasing.

I’m not saying I still don’t want you to like me. However, as my green and red friends began to leave the planet and my own body began showing signs of wear and tear, and most importantly, discovering love is an inside job, people pleasing has been dropped from my profile. 

As usual, I have taken the longest, most circuitous path to my point.  (it’s in my DNA)  Don’t look for my point.  I haven’t made one yet. Never make a point quickly if you can prolong the journey.  Sometimes by putting my listener to sleep, I can make my point without argument. Maybe that’s why I love history.  Historians are making points all the time that they have to revisit and revise.  If I was alive before or just after our Revolutionary War or the Napoleonic Wars or the Civil Wars of any nation and reading history books of those events, I would be reading victor propaganda, not facts. Read histories of the same wars twenty-five or fifty years after the event, and you will be getting closer to what really happened. Why?  Some of the prominent actors are dead. Hidden papers are found.  Administrations and governments have changed, altering perspectives of the war.  

My latest history reading is Judgement at Tokyo: The Japanese War Crimes Trials by Tim Maga.  

What about this event made me want to buy the book?   I was barely aware that there was a Japanese War Criminal Trial.  I was aware of the Nuremberg war trials for the Nazis. Books and books and books and movies and movies and later television shows brought those trials into the world and my consciousness. What Japanese war trials was Mr. Maga talking about?  

How could I hold myself out to be the amateur historian I pretend to be if I didn’t buy and read this book?  Another more hidden agenda was to take myself away from present-day war zones. Let me read about a war that at least had a clear villain and a clear hero.  

Oh, ye of simple mind. In war, there is no clear villain or hero.

Never mind. I looked to this well-lauded book to take me away from today into the past. 

Timothy Maga began the book with a background history of the war in the Pacific a few months before the Japanese surrender.   His description of the Marines' battle for Okinawa took me out of the past and back into the present, where I didn’t want to be… Gaza. 

This is what he wrote.

In April 1945, in preparation for a landing assault on the Japanese mainland, American marines landed on a Japanese-entrenched Okinawa Island, 350 miles from Tokyo. 

82 days later, the Marines succeeded in capturing Okinawa.  The cost:
Americans: 12,510 lives lost
Japanese: 70,000 lives lost
Okinawan civilians: 100,000 lives lost

An American general wrote this to his wife:
“It is pitiful to see what modern weapons do to civilian communities harboring enemy defenses.  But it is necessary to shoot the enemy out of whatever position they hold.”

Damn! I was back in Gaza today.

In April of 1945, Franklin Delano Roosevelt died before World War II ended.  American politicians, cabinet secretaries, generals, and admirals, led by President Harry S. Truman made difficult decisions that were deemed justified to end the war.   By May of 1945, Germany had unconditionally surrendered.  The above cast of characters would go to any lengths to end the war in the Pacific. This included firebombing Japanese cities and dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

More civilians died than soldiers of either army.  The road to peace was paved with civilian deaths. In 1945,  Americans in power exclaimed these deaths were the necessary price of war.  

Does anyone want to ask what the difference is between yesterday and today?  Don’t look at me, I just did.

In July of 1945, Truman met with Churchill and Stalin in Potsdam, Germany.  A “friendly” conference to tie up the loose ends of the European conflict; victory-speak for divvying up the spoils of war.  As Truman drove through the rubble of the streets of Potsdam, viewing the results of Allied aerial bombardments that leveled the city, killing thousands of civilians, he later wrote in his diary: 

“I hope for some kind of peace - but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries.  We are only termites on a planet, and maybe when we bore too deeply into the planet, there’ll be a reckoning - who knows?”

Well, I think it’s safe to say we know a little more now than we knew then, but that and a token will get you a ride on the subway.

Of course, no one asked me, but that never stopped me from having an opinion. Here is my Talmudic waffle. 

ON THE ONE HAND, I have a very good friend, John, who would shout his thanks and gratitude for the dropping of the atomic bomb to anyone who would listen.  He was a GI about to be transferred from Germany to the Pacific in preparation for the invasion of Japan.  In August of 1945, after dropping the second atomic bomb, Japan surrendered.  My friend, John, was mustered out of the Army.  There but for the Grace of God…

ON THE OTHER HAND, dropping the atomic bomb and using Artificial Inelligence today opened Pandora’s Box. Just in case you aren’t familiar with the meaning of Pandora’s Box: unwise interference in problems previously unknown.  I have lost count of the many Pandora boxes I have opened in my life, but the world didn’t stop spinning because I made a stupid decision.  Thinking about dropping the atomic bomb or bringing Arificial Intelligence I into the world of community and communications, creates sleepless nights for me.  I am fortunate to have had many years without the internet, iPhones, and iPads.  All of which, by the way, I am now permanently addicted to.  As neurotic as I am, life before the machine takeover was definitely simpler… not easier… simpler.  

There are days when I feel as if I am being buried alive under mountains of information and misinformation, mostly hearsay, by media pundits and the like.
In the past, before the internet, was it easier for the powers to be to make decisions during wartime?  Most probably.  I think It might be easier to make a decision without the world listening in and weighing in with all the bias and prejudice we humans bring to the table.  Today it’s impossible to have a war without the media and its machines' ceaseless constant battering.  

And here is the point… phew…

When you come right down to it, yesterday, today, tomorrow, before the internet, after the internet, we are all part of the human condition.  

Voltaire, a very dear, very close, very dear friend, said it better than anyone:
History never repeats itself.  Man always does.

Where are the Marx Brothers when you need them?