On the verge of extinction again July 5, 1985

  

Fleas, fleas, eating me alive!

I thought I got rid of them last week when I gave Spud a bath and a subsequent treatment. But alas, the little devils are not so easily tamed.

 Not even a roach bomb will completely void them. I do not like taking life indiscriminately, but these buggers are eating me alive.

I write this on the anniversary of Hiroshima, knowing that I launched two bombs of my own to free myself of this invasion.

It is easy to kill when you look at everything simply as their side and ours, and any excuse for murder will do.

We excused the bomb dropped 40 years ago by claiming they would ultimately save American lives, when in fact they established American hegemony in the Pacific and kept the nasty Ruskies from filling in Southeast Asia the way they did Eastern Europe.

But then, it is easy to make judgements about the past based on what we know four decades later, when we are still looking at Vietnam in the rearview mirror.

This is the reason I can’t condemn America for the Japanese internment camps – the way some of my professors do, understanding how little we knew back then about the threat, and who we could trust, and whether or not to expect other acts of terror.

We are in a different place today, much the way Germans were after World War I, being punished so severely for starting that war that it ultimately led to another more hideous regime and an even more ghastly war.

This is very similar to reconstruction after the American Civil War when the vicious victors decided to humiliate the south and led to Jim Crow and an even more hideous repression of former slaves.

The South remained defiant despite its defeat, and this irritated those who hoped to see former slave owners crawling and begging for mercy.

These days we live in the aftermath of Vietnam and find ourselves much in the same boat as the southerners, but instead of putting up statues to Confederate heroes, we create human statues in our media like Rambo – acting defiant in our humiliation.

Meanwhile, we are engaged in the same secret wars, having not learned our lessons from Cambodia, Laos or Vietnam, fighting a new proxy war against the Soviets in Central America – and perhaps in Afghanistan, too.

We never cease sending our stealth warriors to go battle in places where local civilians are most likely to be the ones to suffer, eventually escalating back to the point where we send B52 bombers. It is easy to see people as fleas from so many miles up.

Meanwhile, we arm locals to do our fighting for us, pretending that the soldiers we send as advisors, do not constitute a miliary action, while back home media turns a blind eye to our involvement.

Just how many countries bordering Russia and China are we doing this in, arming local residents, making them fight our war, forcing them to bleed blood we are too scared to bleed for ourselves after having bled so much in Vietnam?

And here I’m engaged in my own war with fleas, knowing that by letting my cats out into the yard, they bring back this unseen enemy I must later annihilate. I try to keep the cats contained, to not let them out, only to have them petition me for freedom, crying to be let out, and then once out and infested, crying to be let back in.

All this goes through my head as I hear about secret arms deals being made, and wonder at what point does it reach a breaking point, when does such actions – such as the shooting of some Prussian Duke lead us into a new world conflict – one in which we need a new Hiroshima but in New York, or Moscow or Paris? Are we so crazy as to push ourselves to the point where we can justify pushing the button to end the world?

And here I worry about killing fleas? Had I thought to purchase flea collars in the spring, I might have avoided this whole conflict.

Had someone thought to talk peace before arming our allies, we might have avoided coming to the brink of extinction.

Have we learning nothing from our experiences? Must we constantly repeat the same mistakes and come to the same bloody conclusion?

Do I like the cats out or in, knowing that ultimately, each action will lead to mass slaughter?

 

 1985 menu

 


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