The 2018 Summer of Discontent

Manafort's trial is in full swing and those in the know say you can read his indictment as you would a spy novel. If it isn't thrilling enough by itself, then Gates's testimony definitely adds spark to it. Just as you begin to get bored with that story, you learn about Wilbur Ross and that reminds you of Pruitt..... If you live overseas and these names mean nothing to you, all you need to know is that people behind them have been accused of amassing large amounts of money, in one case $120 million, in illegal ways. More importantly, they are all linked to the current U.S. administration.

Commentator Steve Chapman recently wrote: "Since Jan. 20, 2017, Americans have seen an endless torrent of corruption beyond anything previously imagined. No president has ever had a surer instinct than Donald Trump for finding and empowering scam artists, spongers and thugs."

Others have said worse things about our president and his administration. But Trump's support base is unwavering. T-shirts with the logo "I'd rather be a Russian than a Democrat" are for sale online, and photos of people wearing them are posted on social media.

Prints of the painting below, priced at $30 to $750 depending on the size, are almost sold out.

Crossing the Swamp by John McNaughton, 2018

And just to clarify the significance, here is the original the above painting is based on.

George Washington's crossing of the Delaware River by Emmanuel Leutze, 1851 

Some "insiders" claim that Trump is nervous, concerned, agitated...but in this case I would agree with the president that this is fake news. He has nothing to worry about and he knows it. Didn't he famously say: "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters".

While we are entertained by real life stories inspired by spy novels, other news fall through the cracks.  Another forest fire in California? The biggest one ever? The deadliest fire in Greece? The hottest summer in Japan, Britain, Germany? The Swiss Army having to air drop water for cattle in some farming areas? Oh, yeah? Ho-hum.

A joint study by Australian, Danish and other institutions, published last week, has found that even if signatories of the Paris 2015 Climate Agreement adhere to the decision to limit the rise in temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius, global warming will continue because of processes already in motion, such as ice melting in the polar regions. Scientists are talking about 4 to 5 degrees rise, which will make some parts of the world uninhabitable.

Meanwhile, plans are underway for an attempt to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an island of plastic and debris the size of Texas, floating half-way between California and Hawaii.  (The U-shaped tube is designed by 23-year-old Dutch college dropout Boyan Slat, which is most interesting for the United States where colleges are unaffordable and possibly useless.) There are concerns that the first-of-the-kind cleaning device could cause further environmental damage without serving its purpose.

New contraption to be launched September 8 to scoop garbage from the Pacific Ocean

But environment is such a boring topic. To get away from depressing news, I choose to read (long overdue) Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughter House-Five, about World War Two devastation of Dresden. I've been meaning to read it for a long time, ever since I interviewed Vonnegut on the occasion of a Dresden bombing anniversary, a few years before his death. It was a phone interview but a memorable one. He seemed such a nice guy. In the book, he called himself "an old fart." We need more of such humility today.  But perhaps it's not possible without getting as close to death as Vonnegut did.

"The old fart" must have whispered in my ear from the other world because what do I find in one of the first few pages in the book but his memory of an American soldier who had been arrested and executed for taking a teapot from the ruins of the incinerated city. "Poor old Edgar Derby", wrote Vonnegut, "a whole city gets burned down, and thousands and thousands of people are killed. And then this one American foot soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot." It turned out that many other soldiers had picked up "souvenirs" in Dresden, but had gotten away with them, including someone absconding with a bunch of rubies, emeralds and diamonds taken from dead people in the cellars of Dresden.

"And so it goes," says Vonnegut. Indeed it does. Some people get away with embezzling $120 million, I pay hundreds of dollars in fines for parking tickets and for every time a red-light camera captures the tail end of my car.

Another catchy detail from Slaughter House-Five: someone asks Vonnegut to write an anti-glacier book instead of an anti-war book, meaning that there will always be wars and there will always be glaciers. Well, I am thinking, since glaciers are now shrinking, can we hope that perhaps ...? Maybe it will be too hot to fight. Except verbally, on social media. I have already done that with friends who suggest that their right to own a gun is more important than other people's right to live and those who claim that poor people are poor because they don't work hard enough.

I think back on all the books I have read and liked by Erich Fromm, whose ideas are obsolete today, but who has made an important observation - normal, healthy and well meaning people often choose to live in an insane society.

Dresden: 70th Anniversary of World War II Air Raids

On the night of February 13 and 14, 1945, allied forces bombed the historic German city of Dresden in what became the most destructive air raid in World War II.  Britain and other allies have sent their representatives to attend the 70th anniversary ceremonies in Dresden this week.  But there will be no official commemoration of  the bombings outside Germany.  Even there, the focus on human tragedy resulting from the raids is relatively recent and coming from a new generation of Germans.

Dresden after February 1945 bombing campaign

The February 1945 firestorm in Dresden killed some 25,000 people, mostly civilians, and destroyed about 75,000 homes. American novelist Kurt Vonnegut witnessed the bombing as a prisoner of war in Germany. His anti-war novel Slaughterhouse Five is based on that experience, which he described to me in a telephone call in 2005, just two years before he died. 

"It was an art treasure. It was a wedding cake. It was a beautiful thing," he said about Dresden before the air raid.

Together with about a hundred other captured Americans, Kurt Vonnegut was working in a Dresden food plant when the raids took place. "It turned out we had a swell air-raid shelter because we were quartered in a slaughterhouse. And there was this wonderful, very deep cellar under there, where they hung meat, where it was cool, and so that's why we survived," said Vonnegut.

Thousands of others were not so lucky in a city that was not prepared for air raids. Among those killed were not only Dresden residents but also many refugees. The fires reduced the city, known as Florence on the Elbe, to rubble.

During World War II the allies dropped about 1,5 million tons of bombs on Germany, killing more than 600,000 civilians, including about 80,000 children and turning hundreds of cities to rubble.

"It was a war of masses, a war in which mass numbers, mass vehicles, mass civilian participation in the factories was vital," said Dennis Showalter, a historian at Colorado College. He said large-scale bombings had a dual purpose.

"I think World War Two was unique because it developed a strategy of attritional-conventional bombing that was designed to destroy or cripple the industry supporting a high-tech modern war and by extension the civilian morale, the civilian effectiveness, that in an environment of total war was considered as important as the fighting men."

The early failures of the British Royal Air Force led to the development of a tactic called area bombing, said Showalter. Instead of trying to hit a strategic target and risk losing a bomber to the German air defense, planes would fly at a higher altitude and drop heavy loads of bombs to destroy the entire area around targets, including railway stations, factories and mines. The British also developed incendiary bombs, which continued their destruction long after their initial explosion.

But for decades after the war, Germans did not dwell on their losses. Jackson Janes, director of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, said the most obvious reason was the enormous pain Nazi Germany caused other people. So, Germans focused on reconstruction and establishing their country as a western democracy.

"That required an enormous distancing from what the Nazis had done. So I think that there was just simply no real national interest in digging this up except for the pockets of activity and the groups that did."

But in recent years, the media, books and public forums have focused more attention on the human tragedy of the massive air raids. Janes said one reason for the current interest in the allied bombing of Germany is the curiosity of the new generation of Germans, free of the guilt their grandparents might have felt.

"And maybe some German people who do have this sense of, 'We didn't really talk about that dimension ever openly because it was not politically correct.' And now they are beginning to say, 'Is it not politically correct to talk about 50-, 60-, 70-thousand people who were killed in the bombing raids?'"

The problem is that such talk encourages new German nationalists. On the 60th anniversary of Dresden bombing, members of the far-right National Democratic Party denied German guilt and described the allied attack as mass murder and Dresden's Holocaust of bombs.

Showalter said that German losses must be studied in the context of Nazi aggression, which resulted in the allied bombing of German cities. He said that Germans are right to re-examine their history, as long as they do it objectively.

But new voices in other World War II allied countries also ask that the raids be re-examined more objectively.  Britain's daily The Guardian said in an editorial this week:

"New generations have a responsibility to ask how the Dresden raids or events like them can be justified and to reflect on what they tell us about today. None of this is easy. What is not right is to quietly write a difficult episode out of the heroic wartime narrative that we prefer to pass on to future generations."

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/11/guardian-view-second-world-war-commemorations-dont-leave-dresden-out-of-story