Revisiting the Line Between Good and Evil

More than three decades ago, I read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. This short book brought him out of obscurity. Soviet Premier Krushchev allowed the novel to be published. It quickly made its way around the world giving a bleak picture of the reality of Soviet Gulags.  

In the years that followed I read many of Solzhenitsyn's books including Gulag Archipelago and his novels about the revolution beginning with August 1914. Solzhenitsyn said, "The line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." I agreed. Until I didn't. 

The rise of Trump, especially after Charlottesville in 2017, moved the line from inside my heart to to outside my heart. The line was between Us and Them: between people who wanted American democracy and the Christian Nationalists, White Supremacists and their ilk who would trash democracy to make a Handmaid's Tale theocracy. 

It took me a while to realize the line had moved. I wrote about it here.

For the last few months I have been reading about forgiveness and recovering form unforgivable acts with a group at the Hannah Arendt Center. Germany had to move on after the Nazi era. The Balkan nations had to exist within European culture after the slaughter in the 1990s, as did Rwanda after the genocide. Societies have to deal with horror and the threat of violence and continue as societies.

On a political level, I will do whatever is necessary (and legal) to defeat Trump and everyone who supports him. But someday Trump will be gone and life will go on. We will all have to find a way to make a society after the attempted insurrection and its aftermath.  

Masha Gessen Wins 2023 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thinking

 

Masha Gessen at the annual conference of the 

Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College 

Activist and writer Masha Gessen has won the 2023 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thinking. I heard Gessen speak at the Hannah Arendt Center and at the University of Pennsylvania. I read her articles in the New Yorker. She has been a leading dissident voice in Russia for almost two decades, barely escaping Russia after criticizing Vladimir Putin.  She has been warning the world about Putin at the risk of her life. The official announcement follows:

Following the win last year by the Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan, the Hannah-Arendt Prize for Political Thinking in Germany today (August 4) has named journalist, author, translator, and activist Masha Gessen the winner of its 2023 Prize for Political Thought.
The formal presentation of the honor is set for December 15 in Bremen, and the award carries a purse of €10,000 (US$11,013), the accolade to be presented by the Hannah Arendt board, the Bremen senate, and board members of the Heinrich Böll Foundation. A round-table discussion with Gessen is scheduled for the following day, December 16, its focus to be “The Search for the State in Totalitarian and Autocratic Societies.”

In its announcement today, the program notes the sheer breadth of topical and thematic concern reflected in Gessen’s work, its rationale reading, “For years, Masha Gessen has been describing political tendencies and conflicts in American and Russian society.
“Gessen reports on power games and totalitarian tendencies as well as civil disobedience and the love of freedom. Masha Gessen writes about the arduous everyday life, cultural conflicts and the struggle for democratic self-determination.
“In a time characterized by autocratic erosion in the United States, war-ready totalitarianism in Russia, and serious conflicts between the great powers, understanding is becoming a civic duty. With books as well as essays in The New Yorker and a strong public presence, Gessen opens up new perspectives that help to understand a world in accelerated change.”

Museum of American Armor, Long Island, New York: Model Collection

 

In addition to the big collection of armored vehicles at the Museum of American Armor in Long Island, the museum has an impressive collection of scale models of World War II armor. Below are photos. 

Museum of American Armor, Bethpage, Long Island, New York

 

Thirty miles west of Manhattan on Long Island is the Museum of American Armor. This collection of mostly World War II armor and equipment is occasionally rolled out for convoys. Museum patrons can ride in halftracks, scout cars and other armored vehicles across fields in Long Island. 

Click on the web site above and you can learn about every vehicle in their collection.

Eternal Life in Very Different Novels

I just read the novel Eternal Life by Dara Horn. It is a dark, captivating beautiful story of a little girl in Jerusalem at the time Jesus of Nazareth walked the earth. The little girl falls in love and marries--but not to the same guy. She has a baby of uncertain paternity. The baby becomes fatally ill.  The guy she did not marry is the son of the Great Rabbi.  Together they make a vow that saves the life of the child but that condemns them to live eternally. They can't die. They can get married and break up over and over again. And oh the resentments that can fester over two millennia!!

The book tracks the pain and tragedy of eternal life, outlasting husbands, wives, lovers, kids: everybody.  It's a wonderful book.  Read it yourself to find out how Jews from ancient Jerusalem get along in modern America, and every major culture in between.

Eternal life is also the underlying theme of a series of books I read near the end of my active-duty service in West Germany.  Before leaving the Army to go to college in 1980, I made several flights back and forth from West Germany to Pennsylvania on Air Force transport planes.  On several of those flights, I passed the time reading Casca: The Eternal Mercenary. 

Casca is a soldier in the squad in the Roman Legion in Jerusalem in 33A.D. assigned to crucify Jesus. Casca stabs Jesus with a spear while he hangs in the cross. A drop of blood runs down the spear and Casca cannot die. He has eternal life, but in the Army. Lots of armies. Every major army from Gaul to Vietnam.  I may have read a dozen of them.  I started college in January 1980. All my reading was assigned and I forgot about Casca until reading Horn.  

The writer of the Casca series is Barry Sadler. He is a novelist and a song writer and served as a Green Beret soldier in the Vietnam War.  His biggest hit was The Ballad of the Green Berets. The link goes to the YouTube version.  

In another irony of life, I started a project recently looking at the Vietnam War as the beginning of many of the deep divides that currently plague life in America. The divide could not be deeper between Sadler's song and "War" by Edwin Starr. 

Horn and Sadler have little in common, but in both books eternal life is eternal suffering. This year I reached the age consider a full life by the Psalmist in the Hebrew Bible:  

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; And if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, Yet is their strength labour and sorrow; For it is soon cut off, and we fly away. Psalm 90:10

Eternal life should not be in this life says Horn, Sadler and the Psalmist.

Teenager Escapes The Holocaust; Joins the US Army; Returns to Europe to Bring Nazis to Justice

 

Since 2016, I have read a lot of books and articles about The Holocaust, visited nine Nazi death camps and many Holocaust memorials. Last year I met Nina Wolff at a history of science conference in Brussels. She was doing research for another book and told me a book she wrote about her father's escape from the Holocaust followed by service in the U.S. Army during World War II.  But the first thing we talked about was Axl Rose.  That story is here. 

Someday You Will Understand: My Father's Private World War II is the story of Walter Wolff, Nina's father. He and his family escaped Nazi Germany, Belgium and France and made a harrowing journey on a terrible cargo ship finally getting to America in late 1940.  Walter was 17 years old when he arrived in America. 

In 1943 Walter enlisted in the U.S. Army. His fluency in four languages and competence in more eventually led him to Military Intelligence.  He became one of the "Ritchie Boys" named for Fort Ritchie, Maryland where multi-lingual men were trained for intelligence service in the war.  

By the time Walter finished his training the war was near its end. He arrived in Europe during the negotiation of the final surrender of Nazi Germany. In the rubble of post-war Europe Walter helped to find Nazis among prisoners of war and in the population of Germany and Austria. He also helped Jews in DP (Displaced Persons) camps organizing delivery of hundreds of packages of life-saving supplies from America.

At the end of his tour he was able to find and recover many of the possessions his family left behind in Belgium during their escape.  The story is told primarily in the hundreds of brilliant, witty letters Walter sent to his family in America.  Walter gave those letters to Nina near the end of his life. 

After reading so much about the millions of lives erased and crushed by the Holocaust, it made me happy to read about a teenage boy who eluded the Nazis across Europe, escaped to America, and then went back Europe before his 21st birthday to help bring the Nazis to justice.  

In grand histories, the defeat of the Nazis can seem like the work of great leaders: Presidents, Prime Ministers, Admirals and Generals.  But at the very tip of the spears thrown by great leaders are teenagers, careless of danger, risking their lives for a great cause. 

Walter volunteered for war at a time when the outcome was anything but certain after a series of harrowing escapes from death including sharing a crater with a dud bomb.  He joined the Army and went back to the countries who wanted him dead. He was one in spirit with teenage RAF Spitfire pilots who defended Britain during the Blitz; with teenage soldiers who stormed the beaches at Normandy, with resistance fighters across Europe and the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto who fought back against the Nazis in a hopeless battle.

Old people get us into wars.Young people like Walter win them. 

A Deplorable Comment

Trump worshippers adoring their despicable deity 

Most of the comments I get on blog posts are in emails or phone calls or texts or on Facebook when I repost blog entires there. The process of commenting on Blogger is enough hassle that most people don't do it.  

Last week I got a comment from "Deplorable Joe Voter." He was commenting on a post I wrote in 2015 about an Ancient Greek phrase that has become a mantra for gun lovers who believe themselves to be soldiers of freedom.

That phrase is Μολων Λαβε--attributed to King Leonidas leader of the 300 Spartans who faced 100,000 Greeks at Thermopylae. The claim is rubbish.  I wrote about the phrase and its right-wing popularity here in 2015.

The post has had more than 1,700 views, one of the more popular posts I have written. Deplorable Joe Voter commented:  

It's interesting that you feel the need to prove to the world that you're a moron. Job well done. 

Since Joe self labelled with "deplorable" I looked it up:  

Deplorable comes from the French word déplorer meaning "to give up as hopeless," meaning something is so bad, there is no hope of improvement. 

That would be my view of anyone who would worship Trump. But it is surprising that someone would own a label bestowed by Hillary Clinton in 2016 nearly a decade later.  

Thomas Jefferson: The First Draft of History

 

Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence

In 1776 Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of a new history of the world. In that document, later revised by the Continental Congress, Jefferson called for the abolition of slavery. Here is the first draft. 

Jefferson's call for the end of slavery did not survive the revisions by the delegates, but it was clear to Jefferson and many, if not enough, of the founders that the end of slavery was necessary to truly throw off tyranny.  

Last year I read  Jon Meacham's biography of Jefferson. If you are interested in the life of the second President, Meacham's biography is excellent.  It includes this cheeky quote from our 35th President:

In a famous toast at a White House dinner in honor of 49 Nobel Prize winners, President John F. Kennedy said, 

“I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” 

I wrote more about Meacham's biography here.

Reading about Jefferson was part of trying to understand how the country began and how we got to the place we are now in on the 247th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

I also read First Principles by Thomas Ricks about what the founders learned  from Ancient Greek and Roman cultures about government and how they used it to shape America. 

David McCullough's amazing book 1776 was also part of my reading about Jefferson and the founders.  It could be a novel it is so fast paced. It is the best history book I have read in a long time. 

When a friend asked what five people in all of history I would want to have dinner with, Jefferson was on the list.

The cultural critic Neil Postman wrote about the effect the American founders have had on world culture since 1776.  There is a long quote from the book in this post about the symbols of revolution in the late 20th Century.  When the Soviet empire fell apart, the words of the Declaration of Independence were heard across Eastern Europe.

As we approach the 250th  anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I am hoping the spirit and brilliance of the founders can hold us together despite so many millions of Americans clamoring for tyranny.  One Nation Under God, for as long as we can keep it.

Water Buffaloes: Army and Flintstones at Conflicting Conferences

A protester talking to Gabe Gutierrez of NBC News outside the Marriott Philadelphia

This morning I was at a protest at the Marriott Hotel between City Hall and the Convention Center in Philadelphia.  The entrance was surrounded fencing to keep the protesters away.  The Moms for Liberty conference we were protesting was not the only event at the hotel this weekend.   

In adjoining ballrooms with just a partition separating them in some cases, The Federation of Jewish Men's Clubs is holding its annual meeting.  Somehow the 650 Moms for Liberty attendees and the 400 FJMC conference goers got booked at the same time. The FJMC was not pleased. The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote a feature article today about the conferences booked together with opposing politics.  Here is the article.

A Moms for Liberty chapter recently apologized for quoting Hitler in a newsletter. That story is here. The FJMC has Holocaust survivors among its members.  

Late this morning I was at the fence near the entrance and saw Dave (above) and asked about his shirt.  I asked him if he had ever drank from an Army water buffalo. The trailers that haul water for soldiers to war zones. 

Dave said he never drank from a water buffalo, his shirt was for the Water Buffalo Lodge from the Flintstones.

 

Dave and I laughed about the conference planners and the hotel booking these two groups on the same weekend in the same conference space and not seeing a problem.  these two groups, we agreed, are as different as Army water buffaloes and the Water Buffalo Lodge.

Dave was very good natured about the security hassles in and out of the hotel. "These meetings can be kind of dull," he said. "It's much more exciting with cops around the entrance and protesters chanting every day."   

 

Protesting an Anti-Abortion Rally on Independence Mall

 

On June 24 on Independence Mall in Philadelphia, a Catholic Group celebrated the one-year anniversary of their victory in overturning Roe v. Wade. Every week since the decision, Republican legislatures across the country have made abortion more difficult or illegal.  

I joined the group protesting the rally. 

During the protest, I talked to some of the people at the anti-abortion rally who came over to our protest.  The first guy I talked to was a Augustinian monk who was handing out literature.  

He asked why I was in favor of abortion. I told him that growing up in a Catholic town made me pro-choice before abortion was legal. I remembered the Catholic boys and their elaborate plans to seduce girls. When they were successful, the girls became sluts. And if a girl got pregnant she either had an illegal abortion or went into seclusion to have the baby and give it up for adoption.  

The monk agreed it was very sad that men are supposed to be in charge of everything in life, and yet women are supposed to be responsible for male virtue.

Next I talked to two 16-year-old boys from a Catholic school who were at the rally.  They asked why I was pro-abortion. I told them the same thing. Both believed that Hookup culture was the cause of abortions. They did not seem to know that married women have abortions because they don't want more children. 

The taller one, Nick, asked if I did not think the country would be better if we all obeyed the Ten Commandments. I asked him if he wanted compliance to be compelled.  Did he want something like Sharia Law? Who did he imagine would enforce the ten commandments.  When Moses came down the mountain the commandments were supposed to be voluntary--God's people obeying God's law.  

And then I could remind them that when Moses showed up, 3,000 children of Israel were hooking up around a golden calf.  

When I can, I like to talk with the other side.  Maybe it made some difference. 

"Living," a Movie About Dying Written by Kazuo Ishiguro

Is there a better short story in the world than Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych?  If there is, I never read it.  

When my favorite living writer, Kazuo Ishiguro, wrote the screenplay for a retelling of Ivan Ilych, I very much wanted to see it. 

Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature

The beginning of the movie Living was wonderful. I could not think of a better way to portray the character of a middle manager in an endless bureaucracy than the character Rodney Williams. He shuffles paperwork at the head of a circle of desks where his half-dozen minions do the same.

When that complacent middle manager confronts mortality, his attempts at actually living life are charming failures.  

At the end of the movie, after Williams dies, the movie is even more deliciously perfect, portraying how the bureaucracy swallows the souls of those who fill in the space left in the hierarchy.  

Between every beginning and end is a middle. The middle left me vaguely unhappy. Then I talked to two of the most insightful people I know and they were of opposite minds about the main character's actions in the months before his death.  

Then I was more unhappy. Could both be right? 

One says, "Yes, Williams actions make sense. He tried to live life outside his work. Then he decided to do something good in the world he knew best." 

The other, a modern stoic, says, "He was selfish and avoided involvement for all of his life. Our habits define us. He would, like Ivan Ilych, simply become more self-involved when he received the terminal diagnosis."

In the middle of the movie, Williams decides to help three women build a playground in an area wrecked by bombing in World War II. The movie is set in London in 1953. Williams takes the folder from his "Hold" basket and navigates the paper through the labyrinth of approvals necessary to get the project underway. When another bureaucrat says he will look into the matter, Williams sits in the middle of the office and says he will wait as long as necessary.  

Williams wins. The playground is built. The community loves and honors him. But the world is unchanged. Watch the movie to see how deliciously the bureaucracy reasserts its inherent inertia.

If you do watch the movie, read the novella The Death of Ivan Ilych. If I have any coherent views about the moment of death and the afterlife, I got them from this story and from The Great Divorce, a novella by C.S.Lewis. 

  

Blackberry: The Movie--A Nerd Fest and Tragedy

 In 2001 my career moved from the corporate world to non-profits. Had I remained in corporate, I would have had a Blackberry--the smartphone with a keyboard that dominated the market from 2003 to the introduction of the iPhone in 2008. 

Then it was gone.  

"Blackberry" tells the story of the rise of a group of nerds in debt for a million dollars to dominance in the billion-dollar cell phone industry and then crashing back to earth.

The movie opens in 1996 with the two friends who lead Research in Motion, the company that made Blackberry devices, pitching their idea.  They failed.  Their nerdiness jumps from the screen.

The picture above is how they were dressed to pitch the guy who would become their CEO.  He is every stereotype of corporate shark, and more.  

The characters are so over the top they are fun to watch. The nerds behind the development of the Blackberry are the most fun to watch.  It's a great movie.

 

After watching "Succession" on HBO, I watched "Generation Kill" for maybe the third or fourth time since it debuted in 2008.  In Succession, Alexander Skarsgard (left) was a villain. In Generation Kill he is the moral center of the drama.   

Below is a review of the series from The Guardian newspaper (UK) from 2008.  

Generation Kill is a narrow view of the war itself, following one platoon. But it is a universal view of American soldiers since the end of the draft--the small all-volunteer slice of the country who serve in military.

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Generation Kill: An Iraq drama with a difference from the makers of The Wire

There's been no shortage of films and TV dramas depicting the horror of the 'war on terror' - with varying degrees of success. Generation Kill, which debuts in the UK in the new year, promises to tell it like it is

Sarah Hughes

Wed 23 Jul 2008

Is it possible to make a believable TV series about the Iraq war that people will want to tune in to?

In the case of Generation Kill, the new seven-part mini-series, the mere fact that is was penned by the co-creators of The Wire, David Simon and Ed Burns, will surely help.

The drama, which comes to the UK early next year on FX, has received largely positive reviews in the US in addition to garnering respectable, if not overwhelming, ratings.

Assassin, the platoon commander

We have been here before, of course. In 2005, the award-winning writer and producer, Steven Bochco, gave us Over There, which pulled few punches in its depiction of the casual horror of war but which was also criticised for a narrow vision, one which rarely lifted its focus away from the gun and the hands that held it.

Tony Marchant's 2007 British drama The Mark Of Cain was more interesting than Over There, but arguably more flawed. Marchant's tale of squaddies gone wrong in the Iraqi badlands was a ripped-from-the-headlines story of abuse and the corruption of power, which, despite some excellent acting and a strong script, rather collapsed in on itself after a torrid 90 minutes, when we found out that, as ever, the posh men at the top of the heap were ultimately to blame.

Godfather, the battalion commander

Nor has the ongoing conflict fared much better on film. In the past couple of years, audiences have largely chosen not to see the worthy Rendition, the dull Lions for Lambs, the self-important In The Valley of Elah, the polemical Redacted and the flawed-albeit-interesting Stop-Loss.

So can Generation Kill challenge convention and give us a good Iraq war drama or is it the case, as Bochco has argued, that this war is too immediate, its wounds too raw and recent, for anyone to want to watch?

Ray Person, the clown

The answer is complicated. On the one hand, Generation Kill is, to my mind anyway, the best Iraq war drama by some distance. On the other, that still might not be enough to convince people to tune in.

War, and this war in particular, remains a hard sell and it's doubtful that Generation Kill can challenge that wisdom. Which is a shame, because to miss out on this is to miss out one of the year's most powerful dramas.

As they did in The Wire, Simon and Burns thrust us instantly into a detailed, flawed world with its own immaculately realised customs, codes and language. It is a world where the soldiers are not simply heroes, but nor are they, as many both here and the US might have it, merely villains. Instead we are shown their day-to-day lives, their actions and arguments and asked to make our own judgment.

It's grown-up television that, in contrast to The Mark of Cain or Redacted doesn't shove its message down the audience's throat all the while screaming: "See, see, do you appreciate the awfulness of what's happening here?"

Yes, there are echoes of other dramas, including hints of Jarhead and Three Kings in the marines' dislocation, in the sense that for some of them this is war by way of Grand Theft Auto, flash, fast and furious. There are echoes too of the finest post-Vietnam drama of them all, Peter Kosminsky and Leigh Jackson's harrowing Warriors from 1999, which showed the terrible fallout of war on a British platoon working as peacekeepers in the former Yugoslavia.

Generation Kill, so far at least, lacks the unflinching vision that so marked Warriors out, but it has something that may yet turn out to be more interesting going for it - unlike almost every other war drama there is no particular sense that Generation Kill is building towards anything.

Instead, Simon and Burns (and by extension Evan Wright, whose Rolling Stone columns and book it is adapted from) appear to be saying this is a job; this is what these people do; this is how they act; there will be good days and bad days; terrible things may well happen but, then again, they may not. Some people do, after all, get through wars without much more than a scratch.

There will be those who complain that, by taking this attitude, the writers are ignoring the wider implications of Iraq, of everything that happened before and has happened since. But Simon and Burns are not attempting to lecture us, or even particularly to entertain us (although one of Generation Kill's biggest plusses is that it is frequently hysterically, darkly, funny). Instead, they seem intent on showing us, as they did with inner city Baltimore, that this is life, this is how people are living, look at it, think about it and later, when alone, make up your own mind where you stand.