Sunday, May 27, 2012

Some Anti-War Thoughts on Memorial Day

I don't like Memorial Day. I hate all things military and to me, nationalistic holidays like that glorify people who are trained to be killers.

We call them heroes, speak of them as defending their country, and say that they sacrifice themselves.

Why do people enlist in the military? (Since the US has had no military draft, everyone who enters the service does so voluntarily, and I devote some thought to why they do so.) First, I'm pretty sure that no one who enlists in the armed services does so expecting to be harmed in any way. It's kind of like smoking: no one believes that he or she will develop lung cancer as the result of smoking. These things always happen to the other guy: This seems to be a chronic tendency in human thinking. I don't know whether it's optimism, denial. . . .

Furthermore, I am going to espouse the undoubtedly very unpopular idea that people who enlist in the military services are misguided. If they think they are doing a duty or otherwise a benefit for their country, I believe they have been misled--at least arguably so and/or sometimes. And sometimes they are just trying to be macho. (Can anyone deny that the Marines—the whole aura or mystique of the Marines—is other than machismo?)

Okay. let's examine recent US wars. If you look at Iraq, over the years since the US's second invasion of Iraq, it's become more and more clear that there was little or no justification for it. We were told that Saddam Hussein, then the ruler of Iraq, was developing "weapons of mass destruction" (and thus adding that term to our vocabulary); and that turned out to be incorrect. (I won't go into whether the mistake was well intentioned or a deliberate lie; it's evidently a complex question.)

More recently it's come to light that there was no discussion of whether to attack Iraq in the White House. Evidently it was a foregone conclusion. It looks as though (then president) George W. Bush wanted a war and no one was going to even argue with him.

It's always the politicians and military leaders who make the wars; and the young men—the common soldiers—who have to suffer. Not to mention innocent civilians who get killed (more about this later).

Now, the Afghanistan war. If the syllogism is as follows:
  • The United States was attacked on its own soil (9/11, that infamous day/event)
  • Al Quaida planned and organized the attack
  • There are important, or even main, al Quaida groups in Afghanistan
  • Therefore: for US security, and to prevent another such attack, we must try to wipe out al Quaida bases and personnel in Afghanistan

If, as I say, this is the rationale, then maybe US actions in Afghanistan have some reasonable rationale. On the other hand, a few thoughts, all of which probably have the tendency of showing that US objectives in Afghanistan are impossible to attain:
  • The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan before the US, was there for a number of years, and finally pulled out, more or less in frustration--perhaps very much like the experience of the French in Indo-China (later Viet Nam), who were there before the US and withdrew in failure. In our hubris, we did not learn from the French experience in Viet Nam and we did not learn from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan.
  • Afghanistan has a very weak and corrupt central government (which we are implicitly and materially backing and trying to prop up). A lot of the country is in the hands of war lords who gain their power from growing opium. The US has even armed some of these war lords—and, any efforts made (and I don't know if there have in fact been many or even any) to suppress the opium supply have not made much of a difference.
  • This is more or less a guerrilla war. Again we have not learned from the experience of Viet Nam. That was a guerrilla war and–though nobody wants to very bluntly say so—we lost that one.
  • Not to mention that the US presence in Afghanistan looks like American imperialism, just as the Soviets being there was Soviet imperialism. I don't recall that the Afghans invited us.

Okay, now back to war in general and high-ranking military officers. When the Soviet Union was collapsing, Mikhail Gorbachev's attempts at reform--which involved permitting the dissolution of the Soviet Union and a whole series of events including allowing the satellite countries to break away and the Berlin Wall to fall—had to be done in defiance of so-called hard-line military leaders. And what I would call "right" ideas and events and progress must always be done in defiance of military leaders. Whether they are on one side or on the other, these are people whose profession is war and they tend to like and want wars. Our Pentagon is full of grown-up boys who must have their toys; and their toys are ever-more destructive weapons capable of killing more and more people, more and more easily, more and more impersonally. (In the "progress" of our civilization we keep getting further and further away from the situation where your enemy had to be killed more or less face-to-face.)

Aside from the sacrifice that soldiers make—which means to them not only the end of their lives but grief to families and other loved ones, loss of childrens' fathers—I don't need to enumerate what has been said so eloquently, so often—think about the lot of civilians in modern wars. Again—ever since the advent of aerial bombing—we have moved "beyond" (I hate to use a word which might imply positive progress) war which involves only soldiers. As one example: In World War II, in March and again in May of 1945, Allied bombers rained incendiary bombs on Tokyo. One-quarter of Tokyo was burned and upwards of 1 million (estimates go as high as 1,200,000) people lost their homes and tens or hundreds of thousands were killed.

These were not soldiers. These were not politicians. These were not the people who had made the war. It's impossible to know how many of them did or did not favor the war that was going on; but there is no doubt that they suffered. Imagine just one woman grieving over the loss of a father, a child, a sister—and multiply that scene a hundred thousand times. (And, by the way--to get back to Afghanistan--we've been killing civilians in Afghanistan. Not calculated to gain good will toward the US in the Islamic world--apart from the inherent evil and human tragedy of it.)

I don't want to argue here the question of whether the US had to fight in World War II. Whether Germany and/or Japan had to be "stopped." But even, if you take that as a given, I think that quite another question to think about is the morality of raining incendiary bombs down on civilian populations. Or atomic bombs.

I think that some WWII airmen regret their role in what occurred. It's clear that many do not. And that may be due to how, in time of war, we brainwash soldiers and civilians alike with a dehumanizing, demonizing view of the enemy. (I've talked about this before.)

Update.
Additions made May 27 and May 28, 2012.

Update,
May 31, 2012
I don't want to imply for a moment that I don't have any feeling for our soldiers. It is very saddening to me when one is lost. And it makes me, if anything, even sadder to think about those who come home scarred or maimed, physically or psychologically--all the more so because I'm not totally convinced that these tragedies are necessary.



Copyright © 2012

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Some (More) Recollections of Real Old Times

This is another one of my "In the old days, as I can remember. . . " postings.

I got an email from a friend with an anecdote in which an older customer in a store replied to a (perhaps rather smart-ass and certainly smug) young man in the store who is putting down the customer for not being "green" and bringing her own bag to carry home her purchases in.

The woman replies by saying (among other things) that in "her day" we had glass bottles that you'd return to the store and they'd be re-used. (Yeah, soda bottles might carry a deposit so that you'd have an incentive to return the bottle to the store. Some states these days require deposits on various kinds of glass bottles.)

So this prompted some thoughts and recollections on my part. First: There actually is a dairy in the Chicago area that still sells milk in glass bottles, but only big ones. They are sold in stores but I think they (or someone else) offers home delivery of milk like in the old days.

Thinking about home delivery reminds me that when I was a kid, not only was milk delivered to your home but also the butcher and the dry cleaner came to our house! Housewives didn't need to have a car, and my mother didn't. She didn't drive until she finally learned to drive when I was a teenager.

You have to be my age or older to remember street vendors. In my early days in this area (the end of the Sixties and even well into the Seventies), scissors grinders and rag pickers still wove their way through the streets of residential areas. When I was a kid in Scranton, a "gypsy woman" came around with a galvanized wash tub on her head, calling out "Huckleberries!" You'd stick your head out the window and yell back, "How much?"

In Washington DC, when I spent a summer there—this was 1958--they had horse-drawn watermelon wagons in the black section that I had to walk through.

Copyright © 2012

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Funny Things We Do with (English) Words

There has been a tendency in English to drop the noun from a phrase consisting of a noun-plus adjective, and then the adjective becomes a noun.

Some examples: a transistor radio came to be called a transistor. (We don't hear that term anymore because any radio is going to be transistorized, or solid-state; plus, not many people carry radios in this age of the iPod.)

A microwave oven is now universally called a microwave, and we don't even think anything about it—although a microwave ought to be a kind of wave and not a kind of oven.

A pickup truck is a pickup. Laminate flooring becomes laminate—particularly if you're a flooring dealer. I've even heard Venetian blinds called venetians and I think I've seen real-estate listings in which the kitchens are described as having stainless steel and granite.

On the other hand, there's what seems to me a directly opposite trend, to add a word which is in some sense redundant. Examples: pita bread (pita is a kind of bread so you could just say pita); similarly challah bread. Garbanzo beans; bouillabaise stew; London broil steak. I have even heard salsa sauce, but that could only come from someone unaware that salsa is Spanish for 'sauce'. I have even seen, on a restaurant menu, "with au jus gravy"—never mind that au jus is French for 'with juice' (or gravy). So both with and gravy are redundant.

Not just foods: you hear panda bear and koala bear. Now, there's been argument among zoologists as to whether pandas really are or are not bears, but koalas are definitely not bears.

Here in Chicago, you often hear the word Chicagoland. Supposedly this word was coined to designate the Chicago area--the city and its suburbs. Yet I hear "the Chicagoland area," "Chicagoland and suburbs," and even "the greater Chicagoland area"!

I recently heard the US Attorney for Northern Illinois talk about a "sting" operation used to entrap suspected corrupt politicians, and he talked about "an undercover." Well, it's a strength of English that words can change their part of speech and thus an adjective becomes a noun.

Updates, May 26, 2012, June 22, 2012, June 29, 2012, July 29, 2012. More examples added.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Of Twelve, and Ten, and Twenty, and Forty--Counting Systems

An email penpal and I were talking (or writing, maybe I should say) about whether it was significant that Christ had 12 apostles and there were 12 Tribes of Israel. I claimed that by Christ's time there were no longer 12 tribes because one of the two kingdoms of Israelites--I think the northern one--had disappeared along with its 10 tribes--which came to be called the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.That led to my commenting on the number 12--and then on other "round" numbers frequently appearing in the Bible. He (said friend) thought what I'd written sounded like a blog posting and suggested I post it; so here it is:

Twelve is sort of a "round number" (more about which later). The Bible is full of round numbers, e.g. 40. The Israelites, after leaving Egypt, wandered in the desert of Sinai for 40 years. Noah's flood was when it rained 40 days and nights. And I think Christ spent 40 days in the desert. I think armies are often specified as 40,000 strong, in the Bible. Just as a few examples; I am sure there are others.

A grad school chum, a resident in psychiatry, explained all this to me and said the reason is that 40 weeks is the length of human gestation.

Now, 12: As natural as it seems to us, not all systems of counting are based on 10. 10 is the number of fingers, but 12 is the fingers plus two fists, and 20 is the fingers and toes.

English has some vestiges of a system of counting by 12's. We have the special word dozen (though etymologically dozen comes from words for 10 and two--which may undermine my argument here). And how many make up a jury? Look at our numbers above ten. Starting with thirteen, they go x + 10 (thirteen--the word, not just the number--is three + ten, and similarly with all the other "teen" numbers)..... but eleven and twelve are different.

French has vestiges of a system of 20's. The word in French for 80 is quatre-vingt, i.e., 'four twenties'.

And we still have a relic of a system of 60 which we inherited from the Sumerians of some 5000 years ago: 60 seconds in a minute (of either time or angle/arc), 60 minutes in an hour or degree. Sixty perhaps comes from 5 x 12 (again 12 is our ten fingers plus two fists).

So (back to the original issue)--considering that twelve is sort of a "round number," it's conceivable to me that there may not have actually been 12 Disciples. I guess the 12 Tribes are all named so maybe we want to accept that. But yes, both numbering 12 may have been coincidence or maybe things were so ordained in both cases because someone liked the number 12 because it's a "round number."

So, as I said, there were not still 12 Tribes of Israel by the time of Christ. At one time there were two kingdoms, Israel and Judea. The northern kingdom was wiped out and 10 of the tribes disappeared, and I believe this was considerably before Christ's time.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Richard Stein



Tuesday, May 15, 2012

A Bird in the Mind Is Worth. . . (or, Bein' Silly)

The other day I woke up, opened the blinds, and saw a bird out there. I said to him, "Bonjour, Monsieur le Oiseau." Why talk to the bird in French? Am I wrong to think it was a French-speaking bird? Well, maybe. Of course if it had been a goose, that would have been a more reasonable presumption: The geese we've got are Canada geese and, being from Canada, may well be French-English bilingual.

Another thought on birds: Why does a bird hop or walk when he could fly? My guess is that maybe he has used up his frequent-flyer miles.

Okay, a little bit more seriously: So many dogs and cats are famous. We've had famous dogs in the movies (Lassie and Rin-Tin-Tin, for anyone who can remember them, and, I'm sure, some more recent ones). And famous, if fictional, cats like Sylvester, Garfield, and Felix the Cat. And even animated-movie fish. But where are the famous birds? Maybe one of the most notable birds of history was Noah's dove, but that was long ago and you never hear about him anymore. I can think of two modern birds from the Warner Bros. cartoons, The Roadrunner and Tweety Bird (always a favorite). Can you think of any other famous birds? If I am right, there is some nefarious neglect, not to say prejudice, going on here.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Richard Stein

Sunday, May 13, 2012

Feminists (and PC-ers), Leave the Language Alone

It’s not that often, these days, that we hear the word feminism or feminist. We do, though, hear a lot of talk about political correctness; and I think that many feminist ideas are included nowadays in what we call political correctness.

At one time I had the misfortune to work for a woman who was a pretty strong feminist. She criticized me, one time, for referring to one of my community-college students as a "girl." "If she's over 16," this woman asserted, "she's a woman, and you shouldn't call her a girl."

Yet adult males are sometimes referred to as "boys": "the boys in the band"; "a night out with the boys."

Not only are the feminists wrong in this particular case, I think they are so bent on cultivating the idea that women are persecuted in our society that they try to make out that even the language is against them.

I can graciously accept saying "letter carrier" instead of mailman; or "fire fighter" instead of fireman. Yet I feel that an insight into our English language and its history shows that the assumption that underlies this linguistic policing is incorrect.

The feminist/PC assertion is that, every time you see –man as part of a word, there is the implicit assumption that the word denotes a male, or implies that the person to whom the word is attached is assumed to be male.

Let's look at the word woman. It descends from the Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) wifman. That is, wif (meaning 'woman' and giving us the modern word wife) + man, meaning 'person'. Thus woman means 'woman-person', or, if you will, 'female person'. And man, when not qualified, just means 'person'—that is, a human of either, or of unspecified, gender. So –man, as it exists in all our compound words, does not, as the feminists insist, mean that we are sexistly asserting that the person is or is assumed to be male.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

Sunday, May 6, 2012

Is It Really All Obama's Fault?

I just heard a woman on the radio (frankly I don't know who she was but she must have been a political candidate or someone in a party committee or something such). She claimed that (1) we have never had such a protracted period with the unemployment rate over 8%; and (2) that the price of gasoline is 110% higher now than when Obama took office.

All this led to a pitch for Mitt Romney as better qualified to be President.

Let's look at these claims and examine whether they are to be blamed on Obama. First, the price of gas. It's been stated many times that one reason that gas prices have risen is that world demand for oil, led by increasing living standards in China and India, has been rising. Everybody has heard of the law of supply and demand: with greater demand, the price is going to rise.

Second, Obama has been guiding the US back to economic health after a worldwide near-meltdown of the economy and the banking system in 2008—before he took office. The economy is still not robust and thus employment has been improving only gradually. It probably would take New Deal–style programs to make a big difference in that—programs which the Republicans definitely would fight tooth-and-nail and almost certainly would successfully block.

I heard someone talking about the power of the President. The bottom line was that the president does not have as much power as people tend to think. Our government is divided into three branches—the so-called Separation of Powers, which has shown itself to be a wise provision of those who established our form of government. So the Executive Branch (the President and his cabinet departments) can't do everything on their own.

Where government departments and agencies can influence the economy, we have (again) Conservatives and Republicans crying out that the government has too much power and advocating for little or no regulation—the "free market" philosophy which, as they'd like us to forget, is what caused the economic mess in the first place.

So it looks like they (the Conservatives and Republicans) want to blame Obama for any and all problems the country is experiencing, but at the same time they want to negate or thwart any power he or his cabinet departments might actually have to affect those same problems.

Looks to me like they just want to blame.

Updated May 13, 2012

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Dangerous Dealings on Wall Street (and Whose Fault It Is)

Conservatives frequently blame President Obama for the economic situation of the last three years: high unemployment, slow economic growth, many people losing their homes to foreclosure, etc. They have conveniently short memories because they are forgetting that the problems began in 2008, before Obama was inaugurated and in fact a few months before he was elected.

If you are looking for someone to blame, perhaps former President Bill Clinton should be a candidate. He signed a law repealing the Glass-Steagall Act. Glass-Steagall was a Depression-era (1933) law enacted to address some of the abuses of the banking industry that had led to the stock market crash of 1929 which in turn was the trigger for the Great Depression. The Glass-Steagall Act prohibited both regular (or "retail") banking and investment banking from being performed by the same company. With the Act's repeal, now the large banks trade in securities and thus act in their own interest, often to the detriment of their own clients, not to mention the detriment of the national and even the world economy. Thus the banking industry now is much less regulated than it  had been for six decades. This is a bad thing. It led to the financial crisis of 2008 – 2009, and the freewheeling of the banking industry continues--despite the enactment of some new legislation, which does too weak a job of regulating Wall Street and thus courts the danger of further troubles.

A four-episode program in the PBS' (the US's Public Broadcasting System) "Frontline" series entitled "Money, Power, and Wall Street" profiled three or four young people who went into Wall Street jobs upon graduating college. These people had degrees in mathematics and computer science, and began work in the highly sophisticated and automated trading of complex securities at the big Wall Street banks. Such jobs carried very attractive starting salaries of $150,000—perhaps three times what an average college graduate would earn—and could in a short time lead to incomes 10 and even 100 times that amount.

Yet these young people left their jobs because they had concerns that what they were doing in their jobs was harmful. These derivatives, swaps and other innovative financial instruments were being sold to individuals, cities, counties, and even convents of nuns in the US and even to national governments such as Greece. The risks of investing in these securities were usually very poorly understood by those who bought them. They went bad (to put it extremely simply), and this caused (just as a couple of examples) the bankruptcy of  Jefferson County, Alabama, and the financial troubles of Greece.

There are at the very least 1000 examples of buyers of these very risky investments; no one actually knows how many people or entities bought them.

And, for every individual like the three or four who spoke to "Frontline"'s cameras to testify to the harmfulness of their former employers' securities dealings, there are no doubt 1000 or 10,000 or many more who continue to do this work. Greed often trumps people's consciences. And the problem is not, of course, just the front-line troops who sit all day at their computers but the heads of these banks.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein