Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a 2019 command portrait,. Photograph by Monica King, United States Army.
What do September, Labor Day, 9/11, tennis and Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have in common?
One word, one four-letter word — work.
Read MoreKabul International Airport, technically Hamid Karzai International Airport, in the winter of 2011, with the Afghan Air Force’s Sukhoi Su-22M-4 on display. Photograph by Peretz Partensky.
Success, it is said, has many parents, whereas failure is always an orphan. But in the case of Afghanistan, failure has four fathers. (I use the word “fathers” specifically as men have traditionally held power and so can be held accountable for most of the world’s ills to date.)
Read MoreKandahar — an Afghan city founded by and named for Alexander the Great — as seen from an aerial photograph taken by Karla Marshall for the United States Army Corps of Engineers.
Afghanistan has unraveled into a s—- show, and the only surprise is that anyone is surprised at all.
But then, as President George W. Bush, who first got us into Afghanistan, noted, “Americans aren’t very good at looking in the rearview mirror.” No, they aren’t, W. Our ignorance and fear — they go hand in hand — of science have made a muddle of our response to everything from Covid to climate change. And our disdain of history has sent us careening from one hotspot to another in which we never have any clue as to the place or the people we’re purportedly trying to help.
President Joe Biden might think Afghanistan is not another Vietnam, but as today’s heartbreaking reports prove Afghanistan is Vietnam right down to the whirring helicopters and those poor souls clinging to the wheels of the planes, desperate to flee the brutality that is already there. (I shudder to think what life is going to be like again under the Taliban in a country that the historian Michael Wood once described to me as “no place for a woman.”
Read MoreJohn Trumbull’s “Surrender of General Burgoyne” depicts the end of the Battle of Saratoga in 1777, the turning point of the American Revolution, in which New England and Hudson Valley militia, under the command of Gen. Horatio Gates, defeated the British, led by Gen. John Burgoyne. Saratoga paved the way for French assistance while demonstrating that you can’t win a war against a people you don’t understand. (The star of the day was brilliant field commander Benedict Arnold., who galvanized the Americans. Three years later, he would be America’s greatest traitor.)
The Americans have left Afghanistan and though President Joe Biden and the public are happy, many of us have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, at 20 years it was the United States’ longest war, and no one wants to fight a forever war. On the other hand, there is a sense of a mission unfulfilled, or perhaps one extended beyond its original purpose and thus unfulfilled.
Read MoreThe Ryanair Boeing 737 that was hijacked on May 23, seen in 2019 in Poland. Photograph by Andrzej Otrębski.
Though we should never court tragedy, we know our true selves really only in it. Catastrophe, adversity of any kind, reveals character. So what does the Belarusian hijacking of a Ryanair jet tell us about ourselves?
It tells us what we have known all along in our fractured age, what we have seen with the pandemic, which is that we can’t come together in a crisis, because we can’t think clearly about it.
Read MoreA man leaves flowers at a makeshift memorial for George Floyd on May 27, 2020, two days after he was murdered by then Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Photograph by Lori Shaull.
“A man has a choice. That’s what makes him different from an animal,” Raymond Massey’s Adam tells James Dean’s Cain-like Cal in the 1954 film of John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden.”
But some men choose to act like animals. Derek Chauvin made a choice to murder George Floyd in cold blood. He did it, because he could do it. Power: The English historian Lord Acton said, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But he had it backwards. Power doesn’t corrupt people. People corrupt power by the choices they make for selfishness and against responsibility and service.
Read MoreNancy Kwan on the set of “Flower Drum Song” (1961), in which her China doll character, showgirl Linda Low, sings “I Enjoy Being a Girl.” It’s hard to imagine the musical being revived today.
Pope Francis has blessed civil same-sex unions but says gays can’t be married in the church, because what they’re doing is a sin.
So gay people are good enough for the state but not good enough for the church. Good to know.
Whatever happened to religion’s famous “hate the sin but love the sinner”? That turns out to be an impossible needle to thread. For the sin is apparently inseparable from the sinner. Georgia’s Crapabble First Baptist Church has cut ties with Richard Aaron Long, who killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent., in the Atlanta massage parlor shootings because of what he described as a sexual addiction. (What is it with shooters and three names — Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth?) I make no excuses for this man, who belongs to the long list of the literature of rejection, filled with men, usually young and white, who have a sense of self-aggrandizement and a disproportionate rage at rejection or some other supposed grievance.
But perhaps if religion spent less time equating sexual pleasure with sin and guilt and more time concentrating on actual love for humanity, we would at least eliminate one motivating factor in Long’s hate crimes, for they are truly hate crimes in the deepest sense of the term — a hatred of self that he had to turn on others lest he implode.
Were his crimes, however, also racist?…
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