No war left behind

On Veteran's Day, 2015. M*A*S*H's final episode aired. I only remember it once being shown since the original aired in 1983. It is said to be the best of any finale of any show and was watched by a record number in it's day. It is great, and heavy, so cerebral and leagues above finales of shows like Seinfeld and even Cheers. For me, the finale of M*A*S*H pushed the concept of “dramedy” too far. It was so orchestrated, so well done and telling of each character's psyche comedy was hard to approach. It was too big, too thinking for a twenty-minute show. The two hour plus finale was like another show. The formula changed and the war was over, but no one was laughing. They were just happy to go home, each in their individual way. Klinger got married. Hawkeye had to find his sanity. BJ had to go home and then come back. War is hell, so I've heard; some line of monologue I heard once or twice in the show's ten years.

If I had any criticism of M*A*S*H I want to say it got too preachy in the later seasons. That line between comedy and drama got unbalanced, and drama became the heavy. The loss and senselessness of war, its proclivity to degenerate, became a hackneyed line for scripts. The show, in the last seasons, I think too often pointed out the costs and deficiencies of war. Even the finale told how the life of each character was irrevocably changed. But that's war. That's hell—or at least purgatory—as Father Mulcahy says in the finale.

Cheaper by the yardage

M*A*S*H, conceived by the movie, was said to be about war in general. The series can only be about the Korean War. It was not interchangeable. That ambiguity the Robert Altman movie had was gone. The series had overt references to the Korean War—which lasted three years. By war time, this seems short. Colonel Potter refers to having fought in WWI, the Great War. Four years—1914 to 1918—is a little longer. Its death toll—over 9 million plus 7 million civilians—I guess is what earns the title. WWII—1939 to 1945—was greater in death toll terms, with 73 million combined by allied and axis forces. The Vietnam War officially lasted just under twenty years—1956 to 1975—but did not come close to the death tolls of world wars one and two.

War IS hell

In February of 1971 there was an investigation at a Detroit Howard Johnson. Veterans Against the Vietnam War convened to expose war crimes. Jane Fonda and John Kerry were among the tribunal called “the winter soldier investigation.” The young men who went to Vietnam when their country called, the ones who at the time thought it was the right thing to do, refused to b held accountable for their actions. Months on end they “humped” hills, searching for an enemy they called Charlie. In the case of the tiny village of May Lai the young men who reported at the conference were following orders of superiors. They followed blindly, grudgingly out of frustration. They were numb and mute with desperation. The winter soldiers reported that no one, neither lieutenants or captains were given any instruction in how to deal with the enemy. A long haired mutton-chopped grunt stated they'd been told what to do if the enemy captured them, but not if the opposite situation arose. They stated they were never instructed about what the Geneva Convention affords an enemy.

Serial War

Draftees make war worth fighting for. In the early days of M*A*S*H Hawkeye and Trapper made life difficult for Frank Burns. It was draftees versus gunge- ho Burns. In a handful of episodes during the series Hawkeye states his reluctance to carry or fire a gun. He is a resolute patriot. Hawkeye's a character of all those would-be draftees who went to Canada, college, or jail rather than have a gun stuck in their hands. Hawkeye was in Korea, but I don't think he was ever in the war. He was on the sidelines binding the wounded, fighting only to preserve life, and sometimes hating himself for being on “weapons repair.”

However great the war, whatever the terms of greatness are, the participants of war are the same. Every war had its conscientious objectors. Each had he draftees, unwilling participants who made fighting objectionable. All had its gunge-ho combatants, the glory seekers who fight regardless of the morality of the war. On Veterans Day I salute all off these groups. Without any one of these group war would be an imperfect hell

Playing the Trump Card

All the hype and Hispanic revolt fell on deaf ears. November 7, 2015 felt like October 11, 1975. SNL was new in that it was being hosted by a businessman turned politician who wants to apply business principles to “make America great” again. The unsupressed racist blurbs Trump is know for affronted America with the shock that first show in 1975. His monologue was interrupted when Larry David (who portrays Bernie Sanders) called “racist” from the back row of the audience.

Comparisons

Donald has some crazy ideas. What better place to showcase them than a show that has a long history of exaggerating everything regardless of political correctness. Dana Carvey did a hilarious Ross Perot,another business man who was going to clean out the barn and cut the pork for the budget. Perot was recurring on SNL, although the man never hosted the show. He ran as a third party candidate, and therefore never was really considered as a viable contender by the electoral college. Trump is running as a Republican, but I think resonates with Conservatives hugely because he is rich, has built casinos, hotels, and golf courses, and say whatever he wants with no regard for how the media will interpret it. In short, he can afford to offend an entire ethnic group.

Mount Rushmore

Imagine the flap of a toupee in stone eking out of the Black Hills. Here is a man whose ego is so massive there might not be enough stone to finish a bust. In the opening sketch November 7 it was 2018, mid-way into Trump's first term. Every area that is said to be sorely in need of fixing now is perfect. At one point in the sketch the president of Mexico presents Trump with a check for the wall. He says it is too much, and an allusion is made to all the hotels and casinos he has built outside the wall in which Mexicans now work. The prosperity a wall between nations brings is extolled. And then the first negative of the sketch is told. An aid comes in frantic and says America is tired of winning. Trump gradually breaks from character, the overt premise that prosperity on his watch would be HUGE, and says how we must set the bar low. He dissed the sketch saying expectations must be kept low so there will be nowhere to go but up.

House of Cards

And a red hat leaking a wispy flap of hair shall lead them.... America great again. Alright, a laudable goal. Although, as one who grew up with DFL sensibilities, the greatness of America was never shoveled to me in Rushmore- sized scoops of rock. Yes, we are great, but so is Germany or Italy, in their respective histories. Is it worth wondering if maybe the reason we apparently became ungreat is because we were so great and constantly teaching our children America is number 1 no matter what?

The generation that came out of the Great Depression, those who beat back the axis powers of Hitler, Hirohito, and Mussolini, have been called “the Greatest Generation.” They were great, and deserve that title. They are responsible for much of the prosperity America enjoyed after 1940...... and then maybe we got cocky and began showing off the greatest military in the world to our neighbors, beginning with the Soviet Jonses across the Bering Strait. America began meddling in world conflicts that were really none of their business.

The 1950-'53 “police action” has—to date—never ceased to be policed. From my study, it is evident that the three-year conflict known as the Korean War war set the route for America to parade its military greatness around the world—through Southeast Asia and currently on parade in the middle east. Man, America's a tough act to follow. Maybe we feel because we built this city of greatness, of indomitably, of invincibility, sub-consciously we are compelled to march into situations that will either end in stalemate, or with America holding the bag—or both. I think it is a Trumpish compulsion. There is an unmitigated ego and hidden ulterior motives that have been at work, progressing at an acceptable, undetectable, classified pace since that “Greatest Generation.” Altruism becomes a relative term. America imbues nation building while its own slips from greatness (that first sketch assumed China was borrowing money from us). Decade by decade, everything the “Greatest Generation” did is being dismantled.

Righteous Motivators

What would a shrink say causes America to tick like a petulant, chronological time-bomb? How many individuals in America are going to shrinks in a quest to self-analyze the crap out of themselves? How many Americans are in need of a shoulder to bolster them, to listen to them and not just send them with a nice note though a bureaucratic labyrinth that ends in skid row? Could our flirtations with “eaves of destruction,” or endless quests to trample nations and build them up our way (or give them sustainable fuel to build it up their way) stem from those feisty puritans who landed here five centuries ago with a bible and a gun? Why does America insist on helping nations who, in some cases, do little to help themselves, or even resent us for trying so hard to “help” them? Is it a code of ethics that makes America extend itself, at epic costs, and wage undeclared wars when its own population may be crying out for some of that great nation building?

The last noble war

As I write this blog I anticipate readers thinking the writer is UN-American. I think how 65 years ago a blog post like this would put my name in a black list. But then 1950 did not warrant a blog post like this to be written. Funny how it works that way. Ah.....I go by the grace of god.

Woodrow Wilson was narrowly re-elected on the slogan “He kept us out of the war.” FDR did not jump at the chance to get involved in a conflict between nations. After the invasion of Poland by Hitler in 1939, it soon became obvious all of Europe was in danger. America's role was defensive—not offensive. We did not enter until we were directly attacked in 1941. FDR had congressional approval. He knew a president, alone, did not have the power to declare war. From all I've been taught, read, or deduced from WWII veterans gnawing my ear eagerly with war tails, that was the last great conflagration about which no one hesitates to talk. The Korean and Vietnam Wars were pretty much skimmed over in school. I don't know what is being taught about the two Iraq wars, or the dead horses Bush left on the White house steps.

But once every decade, a trump card is played. For better or worse a John Anderson, Pat Robertson, Jesse Jackson, Jesse Ventura, Sarah Palin or Ross Perot is played. Whether they choose to align themselves with the Donkey or the elephant in the room, or go progressively or independently, their elect-ability tests the limits of America's political sensibilities. Wild cards see their chance and take it, for better (Gene McCarthy) or worse (Palin), as the shrinks America thinks it is too great to need. Perhaps a parody of a wild card and a fantasy of how their presidency might be is all the self-analysis America can handle....small steps.

When smoke disipates

In a breath, the sigh before the feud begins, gun controllers butt heads. It goes nowhere fast, like bullets whiz out smoking chambers too hot to be heard. Americans love their guns, they want to die with their guns. They will die for the guns' right to be born and bore like crosses windmills chase. Since the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, MA in 1620 and shot a few turkeys, the vast majority of Americans have been in love with firearms and the dubious honor of owning them without being killed. More than a century later, an amendment graced the opening pages of the constitution... “a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” Why is it at the beginning? Amending it so soon? How come something...say... helpful to the African-American's pursuit of happiness wasn't written. Was owning a gun such a pressing issue in the 1780s? I doubt it. “Security of a free state.” Alright, seems logical in A DEOMOCARCY—a brand spanking new democracy—not anarchy, a monarchy, or oligarchy. So right away we are going to write something to arm the citizen, any slug-nutty who may be a booze hound, an adolescent crying for identity or attention, mentally unbalanced, or having a bone to pick with government—remember Guy Fawkes's 1605 failed gunpowder plot? Why right away remove the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness (that was written in the original paperwork) with a right that will give distant generations a right to pursue their own happiness stroking their warm gun while infringing on others' right to simply remain alive?

Amendments are AMENDING, changing things that the first draft overlooked and a need to add them arose. The right to bear arms is the second in ten amendments which we know as the Bill of Rights. The right and protection of the right, for a citizen to defend themselves is actually originated in the 1689 Bill of Rights passed by the English parliament. Yes, the country who now takes great pains to discourage gun ownership. We, after four centuries of gun violence, spawned from remnants of an amendment THEY conceived, do very little to discourage it and fight to the death to encourage it. After the Revolution, notables sketched out how our freshly won freedom will be proctored. The constitution is finished in the fall of 1788 with Mr. Madison anticipating amendments. He decides to first protect freedom of religion and speech, then the right to bear...(oh, maybe it is only for a well-regulated militia), then an amendment that protected you from having soldiers in your house. Isn't that interesting. Why does the exclusion of aforementioned militia come right after the right FOR THEM,most likely, to bear arms? Perhaps the minute man who graduates to the Continental Army and turns in his pitch fork for a musket is a descendant of Guy Fawkes

An affair of the heart

Chambers proliferate and make room for magazines until no gun is big enough. No gun can shoot rounds fast enough to match farmer Jones, the original minute man. Americans love their freedom. Splendid, we fought for it, embrace it. But, ask yourself, when the lights are out and the house is quiet, and your gun is gleaming in the hall closet hat box, is it freedom for all when someone, maybe a child, might bear the brunt of that gun.

Dear Hunters

Venerable mercenaries keep us safe from being overrun by bucks. God bless 'em, the hunters and gatherers, carrying on the rich tradition of those plucky pilgrims bagging wild turkey in 1620. It is a laudable recreation—being a sportsman or a hunter and gatherer. The right to shoot at unarmed bears should never be obstructed. But then how often do you hear of the delicacy or necessity of bear meat, or any other part of the bear. People poach animals; lions, tigers....and life goes on and PETA people ruffle like eagle feathers.

Disarming intellect

A gun is only as smart as its owner. Key pad chips read fingerprints and rings worn on trigger fingers allow guns to fire. No gun peddler wants to carry this innovation on guns. They list situations in which technology can end up shooting us in the foot—or not. The dealers say the perspiration off a hand pushed to fire a gun may inhibit the chip from identifying its owner. “Come on, it's me, Jim...You remember me,” the man strokes his gun with a longing, psycho-pathetic passion, usually reserved for cars...or even, their wives. The gun dealer worries about sub-zero weather and the operation of the gun.

I will be the first to agree that technology is far from perfect and can quite often end up being counter-productive. While I can't fathom the mentality of someone who chooses to sell guns for a living (oxymoron), I guess I would not sell this technology. Although, who's to say a seat belt won't work, or an air bag won't deploy. In either case, gun features and car features, the owner's life is the bottom line. The 60 Minutes segment I watched began by pointing out the positives of smart gun technology. You kids are safe. It will reduce gun theft, what good is a gun if you can't shoot it. The smart gun is good for policemen; their guns will not be used against them.

Vicious Cycle

As sure as the bear head above the mantle the G.O.P. and the NRA will never die happy. Components of the gun debate die happy and innocent nearly every month in some corner of America. I just wonder, what would it take to have a chip in a gun dealers computer, either on the counter or in a back room, that simply puts up a red flag when a name is entered, some indicator that they can not sell a gun to this consumer. The reasons remain irrelevant to the dealer—all they need to know is they can not sell this individual any firearms, ammunition, or crossbow. It would be like a No-Fly list technology.

I agree that the lack of mental health attention is at the heart of the matter. But putting a gun in the hands of someone with a history of problems can be avoided. Yes, definitely pass legislation to assist the mentally disturbed, but in the meantime is it necessary that random shootings frequent our nations malls and theaters?

Life as a hoax

People may have spoken to highly (or lowly) of life in the past. They base they're existence on events that may not have even happened. I speculate, I postulate, that people either embellish life or dismiss that which they find unappealing as hokum. In the latter case events are cast as hoaxes, or legends, through centuries of generations that (I again speculate) grow increasingly dissatisfied with life's revelations as technology points them out to them. It is a gut instinct, something to unsettling that churns toxins in thee stomach walls so much that the mind refuses to accept it.

Concentrated evidence

The period 1940-1945 in Germany is an interesting example. It emptied the world of 6,000,000

people from select ethnic backgrounds. Its intended goal was to “cleanse the world of European Jewry.” Grotesque films were made by obsessive-compulsive narcissists. Hundreds visit Auschwitz and other notable death camps each year. Museums memorialize the onslaught around the world. Yet a minority remains that insists it never happened. The one I had the misfortune of meeting was in his sixties, old enough to have lived though it. However, as history tells, people in Germany, in locations proximal to the camps, did not really have a clue of what was occurring, or so it goes. So in America where, as history again reveals, the extent of atrocities in the European Theater was not known until our liberation of the camps in 1945, by an ample stretch of the imagination, perhaps some sympathy for the limitations of the human mind, I might accept that one can grow up contending that the 6,000,000 murders were made up. So you might ask what does a person, who seems to be intelligent in every other realm of life, have to gain by closing their mind to the most concentrated attempt to remove Jews since the Inquisition. It boggles the mind. Is it guilt, or the pre-disposition toward reciprocity? If it never happened what would the Gentile world owe the Jews? What would be the reason for a state of Israel? Maybe the man I met was a relation of a Nazi, or a sympathizer. Being Jewish myself the ignorance of this genocide in the light of overwhelming evidence and continuing memorization and instruction is particularly disturbing.

Remembering lunacy

I have a gut instinct of Apollo 11 landing on the moon. I was four-years old, but I remember seeing it. The more I think about it and recess my mind, try a bit of self-hypnosis, I can see the black & white static peppering the gray of the lunar surface. Was that a hoax, a legend I created, an image I postulated for forty-four years? I am faced, every so often, with the notion that the landing itself was a hoax. It is hailed as one of John F. Kennedy's crowning achievements, perhaps a testament to a president's delivery of a promise, even posthumously fulfilled. On significant years July 20 is noted by the media. Footage of the landing, Neil Armstrong's words of giant leaps, and Walter Cronkite's gentle pause in disbelief is aired. Was that a lie? Has a hoax (like most UFO's) been promulgated by history books and indulged by the media for decades? I doubt it. No one doubted the January 28 1986 Challenger disaster, the space shuttle that broke apart 73 seconds into flight that killed seven people.

I remember, I was in my dorm room during my sophomore year in college. The explosion over the Atlantic Ocean was played several times as I peered at my roommate's tiny portable television. Now that I think of it, I think that was black & white and certainly smaller than the set on which I watched Apollo 11 seventeen years earlier.

When one recalls 9/11 most people have a story. They have a point of reference to commiserate, they know where they were that day to put the relative epic disaster in perspective. I was at work listening the the radio September 11, 2001. At 7:46 AM (my time in Minnesota) and the program announcer broke away from his usual script. He paused and reported that a jet had hit one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. I remember being told we could go home if we wanted. I don't recall many leaving. Audio was replayed and replayed to the point where I think I turned the radio off. This happened in the twenty-first century, when most of the technology we now have existed. In 2014 I met a young man who was just a kid in 2001, young and impressionable with political bones not yet fused. He was the kind of disgruntled American who I could see living on a compound in Idaho. He prattled on about deceptions and vagaries of history. He told of the true motives of war, like how North Vietnam had boys hooked on drugs so they kept coming, or how Afghanistan was a pipeline for opium. And then he said it, not that it never happened, but that 9/11 had been an inside job. He postulated that the Bush Administration orchestrated the attack to justify invading Iraq. As a moderate Democrat, who does not think much of George W. Bush as a capable leader, I have a hard time grasping the idea that he (or Cheney) would cause such destruction to a nation they took oaths to defend. I doubt they did it, or told anyone in the vicinity of Iraq to do it.

“Cranberry sauce”

As a hoax, the September 2001 terrorist attacks don't hold water. The idea that the 1940-1945 Nazi attacks in Germany is a hoax is unfathomable. It is elusive what motivates hokum though time. Why was Paul McCartney's reported death in 1966 kept alive for so many years? One would think that the news of a Beatle's mortality might make the papers. Then in 1980 another Beatle was said to be dead. Technology had advanced since 1966 and so had death and its reality.

TPing treason

I see it as a compromise. The way the adequately nurtured human intellect filters out what might be a hoax from what can only be real. The 1986 Challenger disaster was real. Death can't easily be hidden. How NASA reported it at the time is another story. Governmental politics is fickle pot of herring. Decisions to dispense information depends on who's listening and changes with technology. Take the Vietnam War which relied primarily on television, newspapers, and radio to convey the war to America. It was highly classified, with much information not being public until the early '70s. I now know how information crossed the world via telephone throughout 1967.I know that Henry Kissinger was negotiating with North Vietnam. I have read of Anna Chennault, the young Asian American Nixon used as a liaison to N. Vietnam's president Thieu. The Republican nominee for president bartered in the first days of November 1967, after President Johnson's announcement on Halloween night that peace was at hand and the war was close to an end. Papers reported it,

“ATTACKS ON NORTH VIETNAM HALT TODAY. JOHNON SAYS WIDER TALKS BEGIN NOV. 6”

The November 1 headline of the New York Times I'm sure pleased most people in the world. Obviously Richard Nixon was not satisfied. He wanted to lead the nation to victory, and end the war with honor, so badly that he convinced Thieu the war would end better for him under his leadership and not Johnson's. On November 2 the Times headline read,

“U.S.-SAIGON RIFT ON TALKS WIDEN.”

Single-handed, in a day Nixon had prolonged the war five years. Saboteurs like Richard Nixon and Benedict Arnold are the stuff hokum is made of. History is compelled to gloss over or abridge sad facts, colossal mistakes, and things that seem to condone dragging an enormous ego into the White House. Hubert Humphrey, the nice Minnesota liberal who orated so loudly in the early days of civil rights, wanted the presidency passionately. He wanted it so badly he was willing to hide his true feelings about the war (which sounded closer to Eugene McCarthy's) and knuckle under to Lyndon Johnson's paranoid delusions of the Communist menace.

Plots, schemes, conspiracy theories all are fodder for what eventually fizzles out to be a hoax. Whether people can't handle the truth, if they distort he truth, or put a personal spin on the facts, in time the world's cataclysmic and isolated events are held up to history's yardstick. Humans can't deny their true feelings; joy, envy, guilt, resentment, anger, arrogance, hope. They choose to believe what they want to believe and make it up if it never happened.

falling fast

Consenting to Rhythm

By Michael P. Amram

©2015

Colors yellow infuse my eyes,

with change they

confuse me to compromise

my instincts

but I let summer go around

the world once,

permit its spin on axial

earthbound stays

I'll allow the sun to take

sabbatical

from gravitational pulls

that made me smile

I'll forgo days of summer

nights to be here

with you to linger long for

miles of winter

weekend lines:Sunday, August 16

Toe prints in August

(1977)

Carvings stretched like pennies

Imbedded in their walks,

Wooded with splintered scents;

Town’s people dared to gawk

As I read ancient names—

I’d swivel my head back

Around again to see;

Street names last history

shuffled feet toe—I nursed

it there to know its line;

We left Mantorville when

Those planks shattered the night

And sun repressed our time—

Mom and I passed Mayo;

Ten minutes out of town

The radio got quiet;

A man delivered news—

He told us Elvis died

Then silence followed us;

Eighty miles the wheat fields

Waved singing “I’m all shook up”

And I cried to mute them;

I felt my toe again—

To ease me from my pain

My foot toed the dash;

I was no Elvis fan—

Of his famous lines to see

On Memphis’s gracious lands;

“My mama always told me…”

He said in a song once—

Knowing as mothers can be;

His name was trod to stain peels

In Mantorville’s street lights glean

Then they’d bow dolefully;

The “king” was dead and my

Toe would always know the

Pain etched my memory.

Captain Salty's Dissertation

Poems from Captain Salty’s uses metaphors, rhyme schemes, and word-play to mask a deeper meaning. A few are overt, and comment on issues the world needs to or has made great strides to amend. Allegories, parodies, and miscalculated tapestries imbue Salty’s pages with realism. Its poems are rarely fantastical and tend to comment on legends or crumbles from the mythical properties of history.

My narrative poetry comes to light in this book. I frequently depart from the metrical and lyrical sound boards that were cells to me so long. It is truly a departure for me. There are both obvious and subtle double entendres. The poems are bold and stir the pots of diversity; they call kettles black and skim lines of perversity—just enough to simmer. They stew issues as varied as racism and women’s strides toward equality. Salty’s poems ponder isolation and disparity, how society has come together and how it has just as easily grown apart. His poems often confess how individuals meet briefly to compare notes from the heart.

Life slowed things down for me in 2012. I like to say I retired from America. I quite gratefully left the game much of America plays where the dollar waits patiently at the end of every bank of cubicles, where CEOs get fat watching cogs oil their chairs so they swivel. I retired from one of the many incarnations of "the American dream." I decided to follow my dream, the one that begins to realize itself when that dollar is replaced with a FOR RENT sign at the end of cubicles. At mid-way in life, money is not everything. In fact, it was never really anything to me except a means to a tenuous life of the odd extravagance. Peace of mind, enjoying life, and living far, far off anyone’s time continuum can last at least thirty years. Now, in 2015, that pendulous life I fed for years is remembered more as a nightmare. I savor life, I favor it and see it for what it is— or was.

Captain Salty is a metaphor. He’s a sailor, a fisherman, a— salt of the earth. He is a repentant pirate, a retired buccaneer watching sea squalls and albatrosses beneath a beard. To him, life’s a puzzle, and his has been lived piece-meal. He’s seen America at its best, its worst, and the odd peace between the two states.