Hello again, dear blogging audience. Why did I not blog for a month? I'm not sure. But here we are again. Unfortunately for you, my return is not with a cute picture of and anecdote about the boys, which is of course why you check this site, but a rambly moralizing post by me :) But there will be lots of cute pictures coming, I promise.
When I was in first grade I had a favorite purple shirt that had on the front a picture of two panda bears hugging and surrounded by hearts. I was, however, too embarrased to wear this shirt to school, because I was worried that the kids would tease me that the panda bears were me and Timmy Springfield, the class "bad boy" who shocked us all with swear words on the playground, and who inexplicably had a crush on me, the insufferable class goody-two-shoes. It meant I always got picked to be on his soccer team during recess, which was good, but otherwise was pretty embarrasing for me. Anyway, I had an extremely elaborate fantasy worked out in my head that went like this. One day I would boldly wear this shirt to school, suffering some teasing about me and Timmy, until I had enough. I would then climb up onto the roof of our school during recess when everyone was outside and deliver an amazingly moving sermon about how we need to all get along and just be nice to each other. The sermon would be so impassioned and wonderful that by the end everyone would be crying and hugging each other. I would then lead the crowd in singing the song "Love Each Other," which I had composed myself, and everyone would throw their arms around eachother and sway to the music, and when we were done we would be forever changed and kind.
I bring all this up because I'm trying to ressurect the idea of somehow convincing everyone that we should all just be nice to each other and get along and not have any more wars. This after a week of re-reading Slaughterhouse Five, one of my very favorite books, and watching the documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the life of Robert McNamara, which was fabulous. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut is, of course, a book about the bombing of Dresden towards the end of WWII. Vonnegut really was there as a soldier, but the book is about a fictional man Billy Pilgrim and how he never really recovers from the horror of what he experienced there. In The Fog of War, McNamara discusses how he helped orchestrate the similarly devetating bombings of a sickeningly long list of Japanese cities, wiping out 50%-90% of the civilian populations there, all before the atomic bombs. In a stunning moment he states that if we had lost the war, he would probably have been tried as a war criminal. He also, of course, was the Secretary of Defense during the Cuban missile crisis and Vietnam. The most impactful moment for me is when he talks about a trip he made in 1995 back to Vietnam where he met with his counterpoint there during the war. Can you imagine, 30 years later, finally getting to just talk about how things could have been? Well, that was the purpose of his trip. And do you know what he found out? That it had all been sickening, tragic miscommunication and misunderstanding. That no matter how long and hard we had applied pressure, the Vietnamese would have fought to the last person. There was no way we would ever, ever make any progress there. They were fighting a civil war for their independence, not a front of the Cold War. Anyway, it's not really news that the whole thing was a mess, but I can't imagine the experience of being McNamara sitting down and actually talking with the person I had spent so much time guessing about and trying to outmaneuver, and probably hating, thirty years later when all the horrible tension had finally dissipated. It was a very good movie, and would be especially fascinating to anyone who had been around during his public life. I guess he came across as arrogant and irrationally self-assured at that time, and in these interviews he is jarringly not so. Sort of the equivalent of watching Bush in 30 years reflecting on Iraq and introspectively considering what led him to act as he did, and sitting with the consequences for a few decades.
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