August 26th, 2009 6:45 pm
[If you'd like to watch this article in all it's Afterburnery video glory, you can find it here.]
I’d like to take just a few moments to talk about the power of Iconography. If you happen to be a high-level Republican strategist, you’re probably saying, “the power of Ica-what-now?” If you’re a high-level Democratic strategist, you might be thinking, “Aw, crap! He’s onto us!”
See this lovely steak dinner? Appetizing, isn’t it? Of course, if you put this in a blender and hit Puree, it comes out looking like this…
Exact same content. Different packaging. I believe the conservative message is, on balance, the most nutritious philosophical meal ever devised. But the packaging of that message has been an unmitigated disaster.
Here’s the stage from last year’s Republican National Convention. Wow. It probably took a good half hour to design, an maybe double that to build. It’s a giant square plank poking you right in the eye. Now look at last years DNC stage…
It looks like the entrance to Tomorrowland at Disney World. Look at how it’s lit! Look at those curving screens, leading the eye right up to heaven. It’s inviting, it’s warm, it’s new and exciting. If you don’t think this matters, I’m sorry to say you’re wrong. All of these elements have a profound impact on how people perceive the message. Even the choice of colors.
Now let’s just look at the power of simple shapes. Let’s take the tale of two classically simple pieces of iconography.
One line drawing conjures up a completely different set of emotions and expectations than the other one does… doesn’t it? Look at these two masterpieces of iconography. Look how simple they are. Can you begin to see how something this simple can conjure up so many images and feelings from your own childhood? The power of an icon is in its ability to evoke a subconscious emotional response. Advertising has a term for this. It’s called branding.
During the campaign season, it’s common to try and get an icon to stand for a candidate. George W. Bush used the “W” in his two presidential runs… the W off-setting him from his father’s same-name presidency. It’s not bad. But the application of it was strictly on lawn signs and bumper-stickers. Amateur hour, by today’s standards.
Now we come to the gold standard. From a pure design standpoint, I’ve always found this to be a little infantile. But the fact is, it’s a classic: plowed fields of grain, under the sunrise of a new tomorrow… all in the shpe of the “O.” “O” for Obama, of course. But also “O” for The One. The circle. Complete and self-contained. Sunrise and prosperity within the circle of life, and outside it nothing but barren emptiness. In terms of what it evokes it is a masterpiece, and the way the Obama team used it, and continues to use it, is absolutely brilliant.
Look at this image. It’s from the official Obama website. Notice how all of the traditional American iconography – the eagle, the stars, the flag, the motto: “e PLURIBUS UNUM – all are slowly fading out into a diffuse, heavenly glow, receding into the mists of memory, leaving only the glowing sun, the “O” pulling your eye into the future. And there are some very subtle and disturbing things here, as well. The American eagle isn’t perched, to remain here forever, but rather seems to be on the verge of flying away. The flag is falling. The stars are dissipating into the void. Our national motto: E PLURIBUS UNUM – “Out of many, One” is virtually unreadable.. . more like letters stamped in soft sand.
The only thing that is sharp and well-defined is the circle, the One, the “O.” That is what is permanent and immovable. Everything else is fading away. You think this is an accident? Think again.
Now when George Bush was elected, the W logo was put away for four years until it was dragged out again for his second campaign. But the Obama logo is still with us. At MyBarackObama dot com, we see images of a diverse group of citizens being called to “Organize for America.” Men and women of various ages and ethnicities.
What do they have in common? Go look carefully for yourself: they’re branded.
Mybarackobama.com is run by the Democratic National Committee. The new Democratic party logo is this:
…which is great by the way, dynamic and energetic, and a far cry from this stodgy, uninspired, static, child-like thing:
But this – pardon the expression – “kickin’” Democratic party logo appears nowhere on Mybarackobama.com. However, the Obama logo is everywhere. Everywhere.
It’s everywhere. They even tell you flat out it’s everywhere:
To the best of my knowledge, this is – again, pardon the expression – unprecedented. I believe it is unique in the American experience to brand an individual leader. The President of the United States has a logo. Here it is:
It’s a pretty exclusive club:. Barack Obama is one of only 43 people in the history of the world authorized to use this logo. (Grover Cleveland technically being both President number 22 and 24).
The fact that we see the Obama logo attached to health care proposals means that we are seeing an individual brand – that of Barack Obama – being used alongside and in many cases in place of the logo of the President of the United States. That is interesting and I don’t like it.
The man won the election and the right to use the Seal of the President of the United States. The fact that we continue to see the Obama logo used by the Democratic National Committee tells me that this is a perpetual campaign and that what they are branding is in fact an ideology centered around a Cult of Personality. We have seen in the past the dangers of branding an ideology with an icon. The two great totalitarian ideologies of the early 20th century both used powerful icons to represent their ideas. I will not show those here because it would be obscene to compare them and the horror they generated – 150 million dead, no less – to what is going on here, today. That was mass murder. This is merely advertising. We’ve just never seen this kind of thing before, in America.
The Obama logo has been powerful, but there is a weakness imbedded in that power of identity. If this logo is shorthand for all of the positives President Obama wants to project, then it can also be used as a shorthand for his negatives as well.
Lately, there has been an avalanche of anti-Obama merchandise…. Most of it centering around the ubiquitous “O”. Here in Los Angeles we have for years seen an iconic image by an artist named Shepard Fairey. A charming guy, one of whom’s collections is entitled E PLURIBUS VENOM.
We’ve seen his famous “OBEY” poster plastered all over LA for many years. The face is based on the wrestler Andre the Giant. It’s a powerful image. Shepard’s latest work is, of course, this:
…which is so striking that it immediately became the unofficial Barack Obama poster and rapidly produced any number of parodies.
But the worm is turning. Here’s Fairey’s work turned on itself. Not bad work.
And this has been getting a lot of attention lately:
It appeared pasted on a remote pillar in essentially the middle of nowhere. Of course, LA Weekly called it an abomination, a call to a lynching, adding “all that’s missing is the noose.”
However, this image, published in Vanity Fair – not on a remote overpass by some unknown street artist, but rather by the editor of a major national magazine – was, on the other hand, hailed as brilliant satire and a remarkable statement on the sad state of American affairs.
The Obama/Joker is an excellent photoshop job, but as propaganda it could use some work. The Joker’s signature line was “Why so serious?” If you had done this…
… you would have had a masterpiece. This image works because of the fake smile hiding sinister intent. Many people are starting to get that impression of this President. This image has real power.
People obsessed with their own image expect some opposition. But there is one thing the true narcissist cannot tolerate…
This is the killer ap. I wouldn’t worry about the Joker poster so much, Mr. President. But if this catches on, and your policies are reduced to three-letter ridicule… well, sir, then you are in real trouble.
[If you would rather hear and see this (and it's better with some vocal steam and supporting pictures), you can view the Afterburner version for free, here.]
Well, Sarah Palin has stepped down as Governor of Alaska. Fighting a seemingly endless string of harassment lawsuits has taken pretty much all of her time and $500,000 of her money. That’s real money to the Palins. That’s real money to me, and probably to you too.
At least fifteen ethics complaints had been leveled against Governor Palin, and all of them have been dismissed as baseless. But that’s beside the point, isn’t it? Decent people, like most of you out there, probably don’t appreciate just how easy it is to destroy someone of integrity if you have no integrity of your own.
Here’s how it works. Fifteen assorted bloggers and miscreants of various stripes launch unsubstantiated ethics complaints against the Governor of Alaska, who, because of Alaska state law, is not immune from having to fight them. Fifteen charges of corruption – no matter whether they are true or not – means that the public hears nothing but the words “Palin” and “Corruption” being solemnly reported by the press. Even the phrase “cleared of corruption charges” makes that subconscious connection.
And that’s all it takes: false accusations. Consider this:
Bill Clinton spent every second of his Presidency – every second – knowing exactly what to say if the words “Paula Jones” or “Gennifer Flowers” or “Monica Lewinski” came up in conversation, or at a press conference, or even in the middle of deep sleep. If Hillary just whispered the words:
“Monica Lewinski”
…Bill would bolt upright in bed and sputter: “I did not have sex with that woman! Whichever one you mentioned!”
He’s ready for accusations because he knows he’s guilty. That’s what guilty people do all day: work on the explanation and the alibi. But an innocent person, when charged with corruption or lying or worse – well, it shakes them to the core, the same way it would shake you to your core if you were accused of some heinous act you did not commit. And if these false accusations came at you again and again and again, how many times would it take before you said, to hell with this. Who needs this? This is destroying my family. A guilty person has that factored going in; it’s part of their mental equation. But it’s enough to drive an innocent person out, and that was the goal. Wasn’t it?
There’s a reason the word Satan means “the Accuser” in Hebrew, and why “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” is one of the Ten Commandments. A false accusation against an innocent person is often more effective than a real accusation is against a guilty one.
Now to simply say that Democrats had to attack this Republican is to miss the savagery of the assault, a viciousness that was evidenced on the first day of her announcement as John McCain’s running mate and which continued unabated long after the election. The example of Sarah Palin, you see, is fatal to the liberal worldview.
For forty years now Liberals have defined feminism in a binary way. You simply could not be a feminist – and by implication you could not really demand the opportunities that modern feminism promised – unless you categorically came down on the side of “choice.” You could go out into a man’s world, dress like a man, act like a man, achieve all the wealth and power of a man, perhaps even have a boutique single child — or two, if you could afford a decent nanny.
But Sarah Palin’s decision to see her Down’s Syndrome child to term was an act of such blinding moral clarity that it tore down the drapes and flung open the windows of Miss Havisham’s fetid little parlor. To see Trig Palin being held in his sister’s arms reminded the entire country that this choice has consequences. And furthermore, it showed that you could be Mayor, or Governor, or potentially President of the United States, and still have a big family, dress and talk like a woman, and get there with a mate who was nothing more or less than a good man and loving husband and commercial fisherman, and not ride to power on the coattails of a billionaire businessman, or media mogul, or political superstar.
By choosing life – a flawed life, some would say – Sarah Palin effortlessly displayed what once was the universal maternal instinct… and that put her way, way off the reservation. To present such a clear example of competence, achievement and respect while at the same time running full in the face of the liberal feminist first (and only) commandment, Sarah Palin earned the kind of hatred from the left that is only well and truly reserved for those people who so effortlessly put the lie to their entire philosophy. This is the kind of hate reserved for black Americans like Thomas Sowell or my own friend Alfonzo Rachel, who become traitors to their race as Palin became a traitor to her sex, for having the audacity – the gall, the unmitigated nerve – to have their own thoughts, and make up their own minds, and free themselves from the rigid – and racist and sexist – roles that have been cut out for them by the liberal establishment that perpetually shrieks that it is only working in their best interest out of a rarefied moral superiority.
And there’s another side of the Democratic Party’s mythical image of itself that she stole from under their feet: the Palin’s are working people, the kind of people the Democratic Party once claimed proudly as their irreducible base before they became the Limousine Leftists we see today. She comes home and makes dinner for the family while Todd – the now-former First Dude – is out in the garage releasing some of the tensions of a hard day at work by tricking out his snow machine for racing season.
No wonder Democrats and Liberals feared her so. And now we get to the heart of the matter. Because it was not just Democrats and Liberals who so fervently wished to see her destroyed. Many Republicans felt the same way. The LA Times reports:
“I am of the strong opinion that, at present day, she is not ready to be the leading voice of the GOP,” said Todd Harris, a party strategist who likened Palin to the hopelessly dated “Miami Vice” — something once cool that people regard years later with puzzlement and laughter.” The Times then goes on to quote one Stuart K. Spencer, who has been advising GOP candidates for more than 40 years, who says, “I can’t tell you one thing she brought to the ticket.”
Mr. Harris and Mr. Spencer, I’m not a GOP strategist, so unfortunately I am not able to associate myself with the glory and success that people like you have led the Republican Party to in these last several election cycles.. Here’s what I can tell you, though: as a person of small reputation in little backwater pools on the internet, I spent months – months – defending John McCain as the Republican nominee. Not because he was my first choice, or my second choice, or my third choice… because he wasn’t.
I did it because I felt I had some idea of what this Obama tsunami was going to bring. And I saw, with my own eyes – pay attention now, professional GOP strategists — untold numbers of life-long conservatives saying they were going to sit this one out…just stay at home on Election Day.
Then Sarah Palin came along, and those same people – those exact same people! – wrote about sending in hundreds of dollars and asking for lawn signs, because for the first time in years they felt there was someone who understood what their lives were like: someone who went hunting and fishing, someone who worked hard for a living, someone who had fought corruption where they found it, regardless of the personal cost, someone who had a son fighting in Iraq, someone who knew how to handle a gun and actually owned one! Someone who unabashedly loved America, someone who could be tough and decisive and still be feminine, someone who put family above politics and who was doing a job with quiet competence and who by most accounts did not spent every living day of her life maneuvering and plotting and kissing ass because she had some defective political gene that drove her to want to become President from the age of three.
Sarah Palin — clinging with an incandescent lack of bitterness to her guns and her religion — energized the base of this party in a way I have never witnessed before. Now, of course, I need to again remind you that I am not a GOP strategist. But just between me and actual Republican strategist Stuart K. Spencer, who does not know what she brought to the ticket, I’ll tell you right now. I’ll clue you in.
She brought just about every vote that the Republicans got.
Those people – those actual conservatives that went out and voted – don’t think Sarah Palin cost John McCain the election. They think John McCain cost Sarah Palin the election. It was John McCain’s elitist genius advisors that buried her for two weeks after her knockout GOP acceptance speech – the one that put the McCain / Palin ticket up 7-15 points in the very week after Barack Obama’s Temple Coronation – and then hid her in a basement trying to polish her up to midtown Manhattan standards of sophistication and erudition before they walked her into back-to-back ambush interviews. It was these elitist “campaign staffers” that decided to buy $150,000 of high-end clothes for a woman who always looks best when she is dressed as who she is: a regular working person. And, of course, those clothes went on to become another of the “corruption” and “Diva” charges they leaked against her to protect their own miserable, cowardly asses so that they can continue to advise future campaigns into the dustbin of history.
Let’s wrap this up by getting to brass tacks here.
This isn’t a fight between Democrats and Republicans, or even between Liberals and Conservatives. This is a fight to the death between the populists and the elites.
Sarah Palin is the anti-Obama. He is urban; she is rural. He preaches dependency on the government and she leads a life of independence. He consistently apologizes for the sins of the country he was elected to lead, and she is unabashedly proud of it. He opposes the war in Iraq; she has skin in the game. And on and on.
And that is why she had to be destroyed, by the Democratic Party, by the New York media elites, and by many of the inside-the-beltway voices of various and sundry GOP “strategists.”
She needs to be destroyed because the one thing that can never be allowed to happen is this: you cannot have a voice in this political debate. You know who I mean. You rubes, you hicks out there in flyover country. Your job is pay taxes, vote for who they have decided over cocktails makes them feel better about themselves, and occasionally provide your inbred idiot sons and daughters for the army or police force or whatever you people without Ivy League educations do with your tawdry little lives.
Meanwhile, the Harvard-educated elitist geniuses will run the country according to their infinitely brighter intellectual and moral lights.
And whatever happens, do not be distracted by inconvenient facts that you might stumble upon as you listen to Faux News, or your hate-filled talk radio, or right-wing nutjob blogs. Pay no attention to the fact that small banks, run by hayseeds like yourselves, were in no financial troubles at all lending money and writing mortgages to people who could afford to pay it back, but who are now are being forced to pay for the failure of genius-level Harvard Business School ideas like Collateralized Debt Obligations which essentially brought down the greatest economy the world has ever seen.
And remember, it’s just a coincidence that Harvard grads John F. Kennedy and Robert S McNamara not only got us into the Vietnam war, they also determined the genius-level rules of engagement that caused inbound Naval aviators to look down at, but not attack, the surface-to-air missiles being unloaded at Haiphong Harbor. They’d see those same missiles again in a few weeks when they were shot down and killed by them.
That’s genius-level, Harvard-quality thinking. Not like that simpering idiot, that commonplace dolt Ronald Reagan. I mean, the man went to Eureka College, for God’s sake! Who’s even heard of Eureka College? The fact that he defied forty years of Harvard-educated State Department officials and defeated the Soviet Union with plain speaking and common sense and some antiquated, embarrassing and– one might say tacky – belief in his country and its people… well, that’s surely coincidence as well.
Here’s a final, quick little thought for you.
Saul Alinski wrote a book called Rules for Radicals. Hillary Clinton wrote about it in her senior’s thesis. And if Hillary Clinton learned from it, Barack Obama taught from it: the term community organizer was coined by Alinski and was the centerpiece of his theory that the socialization of America could best be accomplished from within the system since Americans were alert to revolutions forced upon them from the outside.
One of the Rules for Radicals is Make the enemy live up to his/her own book of rules. Think about the genius of that. Just let that sink in. When a Republican has an ethics scandal, it’s “hypocrisy” and “double standards” and all the rest. But when a Clinton or a Pelosi or a Charley Rangel or a Chris Dodd or a Barney Frank or a William Jefferson has an ethics scandal, no one bats an eye. Why? Because of course they’re immoral! They’re Democrats.
Alinski could see that moral people have to be held to moral standards when immoral people do not. We’d better learn a lesson from this, right quick. Here’s an example of the kind of lesson good and decent people must learn about people like Saul Alinski and his followers:
The Battle of Guadalcanal was the first real test of the US Marine Corps in World War II. There was real anger toward the Japanese after Pearl Harbor and the atrocities they had committed in China and to American prisoners at Bataan, but the Marines had not yet dealt with them face to face and still reserved a professional soldier’s decency towards surrendering troops.
A Marine recon unit reported seeing Japanese troops flying a white flag on an isolated spit of land near Guadalcanal, and so A Marine named Frank Goettge asked for volunteers to help rescue these surrendering Japanese soldiers. 25 men stepped forward, and when they reached the beach the Marines warily went ashore to help the trapped Japanese. Once they were all within range, the Japanese opened fire with machine guns, and after hours of fighting only one Marine was able to escape. As he swam away he looked over his shoulder, and saw the flashing Samurai swords of the Japanese officers as they hacked at and beheaded the survivors. When reinforcements returned they found that their buddies had been mutilated and dismembered, and any Marine corps tattoos had been hacked off their arms and stuffed into their mouths.
The Marines never treated the Japense the same way after that.
Alinski and his followers want you to believe that if you fight dirty in response to people fighting dirty with you, then you have lost your morals and in fact your identity. But that’s a lie.
We are in a political fight to the death with people who will stop at nothing – and I’m not talking about your average decent Democrat, but rather these Alinski radicals. And if we don’t face the same realization as those Marines on Guadalcanal and give back as brutally as we have taken, then we will lose.
Which is what they want. And if we do lose to these kind of tactics, there will be no more decent people left in politics. As of today, we’re one short already.
One of the things I was most looking forward to in coming to PJTV was bringing my experience producing and editing editing television for places like THE HISTORY CHANNEL and DISCOVERY NETWORK to bear on some issues I have always wanted to cover.
Right now the internet is in a strange place: it’s passed the point of dial-up modems where streaming video was simply out of the question, and it’s still considerably short of what is clearly coming: the merging of what we know as “the internet” and “cable television” into the same creature. So what I have tried to do with A SOLDIER’S STORY and my recent special on XCOR AEROSPACE is to put cable television on the internet. I’m not sure how well it works. They’re longer than “internet videos” and because they look like cable television they are much more labor intensive. Right now they don’t seem to be getting the hits needed to justify their production time, but thankfully PJTV is a forward-looking company and we still have time to play.
So here’s the link to my adventure in Private Space Exploration:
LunarPalooza Part 1: The Future of Space Exploration Is In Your Hands
LunarPalooza Part 2: Private Enterprise Goes Where No Man Has Gone Before
And I’m proud to say that part two of the first A SOLDIER’S STORY is now online. Leon Cooper finished his nightmare at Tarawa, came home for some R&R, and then shipped out to a little vacation beach called Iwo Jima. We also get his views on the dropping of the atomic bombs, and find that discussing the people that have second-guessed the whole things provides Leon Cooper and Bill Whittle with a common adjective.
Leon Cooper, Part 2: Escaping Death, Iwo Jima & The Atomic Bomb
Also, I am trying to get on a much more predictable schedule regarding output, since A SOLDIER STORY and the LUNARPALOOZA took so much of my time. I hope to have a new Afterburner segment up every Monday morning, and since I plan to record it on the previous Wednesday, I mean to post it here by Friday night so you regular stalwarts get the scoop. Look for Sarah Palin very shortly in print here at E3, and then the video version on the PJTV AFTERBURNER page early Monday.
Even before I was hired at PJTV in September, I had wanted to do a series of interviews with veterans. And now, finally, I am very proud to announce the first episode of A SOLDIER’S STORY.
Leon Cooper was 22 years old when he commanded a wave of Higgins boats in the shallow waters off of Tarawa. Due to one of the most tragic miscalculations of the war, the tidal information was incorrect and the first waves of boats could not clear the reefs… leaving hundreds of teen-aged Marines 700 yards offshore, wading through waist-deep water wearing 100 pound packs, into the teeth of 8 inch naval guns, mortars, machine guns and small arms fire.
Leon Cooper saw the whole thing. And after surviving his first trip into that bloody nightmare, he had to turn around, head back out to the troop ship, and bring fresh young men into the meatgrinder. Again and again.
That would be enough for any 22 year old. But after surviving Tarawa, Leon began training to do it again — which he did, at a tiny speck in the Pacific called Iwo Jima.
Part I of Leon Cooper’s Soldier Story — Tarawa – can be found here. Part 2 will deal with Iwo Jima and the Atomic Bombs, and Part 3 will follow his Return to Tarawato discover a battlefield covered in garbage and human waste, and the unspeakable disgrace of having hundreds of fallen American heroes — including a man posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor — buried under parking lots and septic tanks.
There are somewhat graphic images, and a few moments of salty language — but this is something I would encourage you to watch with your families, simply because it is so heartbreaking. If we do not often remember the cost of our freedoms, we will surely lose them. Listening to what these boys did for us — and that’s what they were: teen-aged boys, for the most part – brought home to me the debt we owe these remarkable men. It is the very least we can do to listen to their stories. They are amazing stories, funny and tragic and full of wisdom, and I mean to tell as many of them as I can, from World War 2 up through the present.
But to do that, I will need your help. If you feel as strongly about these segments as I do, would you help us get them seen by emailing as many people as you can, by copying and pasting the following link:
http://www.pjtv.com/video/A_Soldier%27s_Story%2C_Hosted_by_Bill_Whittle/Leon_Cooper%2C_Part_1%3A_The_Battle_for_Tarawa/2149/
I would never ask this for myself, but I am asking you now for Leon and for all of the millions of other heroes that surround us in line at the grocery store or sitting in the next car on the highway. Their greatest quality is their almost universal humility, which is what I admire most about them even as I realize it is the reason we hear so little of their enormous sacrifice. My ability to continue this series — which is very labor- and time-intensive on my part — will depend on the segements getting enough views to make the game worth the candle.
And if any of you would care to leave coments for Leon in the comment section, I will collect and forward them to him as a small token of the gratitude you will certainly feel once you hear his amazing story.
BW
[Awfully late in posting the text to this one. You can see the original Howieburner here, for free. ]
Ladies and Gentlemen, in the immortal words of Tony Montana, “say hello to my little friend…”
This is Howie. I’ve been taking care of him for almost a week now, and during that time Howie has taught me a lot of things.
A few years ago, Dana and I bought an airplane: this little beauty right here. It’s called a Sky Arrow:
Last Sunday, after several weeks of being grounded for various reasons, we decided to go flying, and during the preflight inspection I noticed something buried deep in the engine cowling. It was a bird’s nest. And when I pulled it out… there was Howie.
Now, as it turns out, Howie and I have a lot in common. Like most fledglings, Howie went through an awkward stage. Even four days ago, he wasn’t the handsome little dude you see here today.
He’s not the only one. Many of us flyers start out just a tiny bit dorky and slowly, over time, manage to grow into our feathers.
When Howie first came home, I couldn’t get him to eat anything. Howie refused to take food and spent the day pressing up against the bars of his cage, pushing to find a way to get out. But over time – just a few days, really – something has changed.
Howie is starting to lose his inborn drive to be free. He is starting to become dependent. And I wonder if this isn’t what’s happening to all of us, as a country.
Those of us who see the dangers in the nanny state often think of the growth of government into more and more areas of our lives as an intentional, and ultimately evil thing – because we can foresee the consequences. But I had none of those motivations when I started feeding Howie. I just wanted him to be as strong as he could be so when he’s old enough to set free he’ll have the odds on his side.
What I have learned from Howie is that we are bleeding freedoms not because people want to enslave us but because they genuinely want to help and protect us. There are predators out there, and parasites, and it’s cold and wet, and there’s no guarantee he’ll find food or shelter and I don’t want to risk any of that because I’ve been hand feeding him and I’m responsible for him and I just love this little guy.
I no longer want to make him strong so I can release him. I want to keep him. I want to watch out for him and make sure he’s a safe and fat little bird. Even if it means he can only hear the birds outside and never join them, only flap his wings from sunrise to sunset and flutter around in this little cage, and not become a bird at all – which is what he is supposed to be – but become, in the end, nothing more than my toy because when it is all said and done I was too selfish and too afraid to let him be what he wants to be, and needs to be, and was made to be.
When we feed and clothe and make dependent people who – unlike this little fledgling – are perfectly capable of feeding and clothing themselves and being free and independent as they were meant to be… when we do those things we construct our own cages, step into the warm, comfortable, downy softness and pull the door closed behind us.
The Book of Matthew it says that not a sparrow falls without God knowing it. For most of my adult life I’ve believed that all that we see is all that there is: just bone and skin and feathers. I believe absolutely that little Howie’s perfect form is the result of millions of years of evolution and natural selection… in fact, millions of years ago, Howie’s ancestors were three times my height and mine were about his size. Bottom rail on top now, huh Howie?
Howie’s brain – charitably – is about the size of a pea. Mine’s about the size of a cantaloupe. Sitting here, right now Howie’s only aware that he’s safe and warm and that this monstrous huge hairless primate attached to a plastic tube is his mommy.
That’s all Howie is capable of, given the pea. What we, with the cantaloupes perceive is that what you are seeing is an image focused by a cleverly shaped piece of glass onto microscopic pieces of silicon, which generate the most impossibly small little pulses of lightning. These pulses travel at the speed of light to an air-conditioned room where they are written to magnetic disks spinning at 150 revolutions per second, and from there they travel on beams of coherent light circling the world five times in the blink of an eye, so that someone in Hawaii, or Singapore, or New York can see a picture of a little bird – not just now, but for months, or years, or maybe even centuries into the future.
Now obviously, Howie is aware of none of this. Because he just has the little pea to work with, you see? But if there’s that much difference between a pea and a cantaloupe, how is it that I once believed that there is nothing beyond the perception of a cantaloupe made of grey jelly?
Mathematics and logic make a compelling case for this being an eleven-dimensional universe, of which we directly experience three as we drift along the fourth, which we perceive as “time.” The universe has been expanding for 15 billion years. Expanding into what? And what was there before the Big Bang?
See? Now we’re reaching the limit of the cantaloupe. Perhaps if I had a watermelon I’d know the answers to those questions!
The distance between Howie and me – between the pea and the cantaloupe – may not be much less than the distance between myself and a greater being who’s perceptions and powers are as far beyond me as mine are beyond Howie’s, and who may in fact note the fall of every sparrow. And if he does, I hope he takes special note of this one. I hope he will lift him – and all of us, too – up and out of the four dimensions of space and time the way I first lifted Howie out of his broken nest, and for the same unlikely reason that this hairless primate cares for this little bird: because he can.
And perhaps you can find a way to go out and do intentionally what we did by accident: go do one small, good thing. You may have a future family member sitting alone in a steel cage at an animal shelter right now, shivering in fear. You can’t do much about the economy or Iran or any of the rest of it, but you can go out – right now – and save a little life. If events in the world have been getting you down, saving one small life that would not have been saved without you… well, that’s the cure, right there.
I have to go now. We have to set little Howie free. I’m gonna miss him. This little guy taught me a lot.
(Epilogue: The day after I wrote this, Dana and I took Howie to the California Wildlife Center. He’ll spend a week or so indoors getting weaned and learning Finch from other little finches, then he’ll spend two weeks in an outdoor aviary getting his flight training before being released with his entire cohort into the scenic birdie paradise of Malibu Canyon. I couldn’t see a thing on the drive home, I was so upset. It’s funny, isn’t it. how things can come from deep left field and move you in ways you didn’t even know you could be moved. Damn, how we miss that little bird.)
[As usual, there are many visual and audio elements in the video that I can't reproduce on the page. The editorial is free, and does not require subscription or registration (although we always appreciate either). You can watch it here.]
For the video impaired… here’s the transcript:
As if we’re not already overextended enough financially, the issue of National Health Care is now on the table once more vote. Here’s some perspective you might find interesting.
Now back in 1927 an American socialist, Norman Thomas, six times candidate for president on the Socialist Party ticket, said the American people would never vote for socialism. But he said under the name of liberalism the American people will adopt every fragment of the socialist program.
One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.
Now, the American people, if you put it to them about socialized medicine and gave them a chance to choose, would unhesitatingly vote against it. We had an example of this. Under the Truman administration it was proposed that we have a compulsory health insurance program for all people in the United States, and, of course, the American people unhesitatingly rejected this.
Let’s take a look at social security itself. Again, very few of us disagree with the original premise that there should be some form of savings that would keep destitution from following unemployment by reason of death, disability or old age. And to this end, social security was adopted, but it was never intended to supplant private savings, private insurance, pension programs of unions and industries.
Now in our country under our free enterprise system we have seen medicine reach the greatest heights that it has in any country in the world. Today, the relationship between patient and doctor in this country is something to be envied any place. The privacy, the care that is given to a person, the right to chose a doctor, the right to go from one doctor to the other.
But let’s also look from the other side, at the freedom the doctor loses. A doctor would be reluctant to say this. Well, like you, I am only a patient, so I can say it in his behalf. The doctor begins to lose freedoms; it’s like telling a lie, and one leads to another. First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then the doctors aren’t equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him you can’t live in that town, they already have enough doctors. You have to go some place else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go.
This is a freedom that I wonder whether any of us have the right to take from any human being. All of us can see what happens once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man’s working place and his working methods, determine his employment. From here it is a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay and pretty soon your children won’t decide when they’re in school where they will go or what they will do for a living. They will wait for the government to tell them where they will go to work and what they will do.
What can we do about this? Well, you and I can do a great deal. We can write to our congressmen and our senators. We can say right now that we want no further encroachment on these individual liberties and freedoms. And at the moment, the key issue is, we do not want socialized medicine.
Former Representative Halleck of Indiana has said, “When the American people want something from Congress, regardless of its political complexion, if they make their wants known, Congress does what the people want.”
So write, and if your representative writes back to you and tells you that he or she too is for free enterprise, that we have these great services and so forth, that must be performed by government, don’t let them get away with it. Show that you have not been convinced. Write a letter right back and tell them that you believe ingovernment economy and fiscal responsibility; that you know governments don’t tax to get the money the need; governments will always find a need for the money they get and that you demand the continuation of our free enterprise system. You and I can do this. The only way we can do it is by writing to our congressmen even we believe that he is on our side to begin with. Write to strengthen his hand. Give him the ability to stand before his colleagues in Congress and say “I have heard from my constituents and this is what they want.”
Write those letters now; call your friends and them to write them. If you don’t, this program I promise you, will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow, and behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country.
* * * * *
With the exception of the first two sentences, nothing you just heard was written by me. I was simply repeating, verbatim, the words of another American thinker and philosopher – although slightly edited to remove the references to the time in which these words were first spoken.
That time was 1961, and the philosopher who had such an astute grasp of the dangers of that impending socialism was a B-list Hollywood actor named Ronald Reagan.
Of course, most liberals would just as soon forget Reagan and all that he represented. The disturbing thing is that many high-level Republicans are calling for exactly the same thing. But those of us who continue to revere Ronald Reagan do so not out of a sense of nostalgia, or from an Obama-like Cult of personality, but rather because he clearly and unashamedly sets forth not policy positions but rather fundamental moral and ethical standards.
I will never “get over” Ronald Reagan because Ronald Reagan expressed with perfect clarity the values of discipline, optimism and individuality that my country and my moral code is based upon. That’s non-negotiable for me. Like Reagan, I was not born into this philosophy. Like Reagan, I came to these conservative core principles only after much study and deep reflection.
And I know that many of you feel the same way: that calls to abandon these principles from people ostensibly sharing our same conservative position is not a “hopeful, forward-looking re-branding,” but rather a retreat and surrender to the forces and philosophies we should be fighting tooth and nail, not emulating and accommodating.
You know, a Gallup poll taken just a few days ago revealed that 40% of the electorate identified themselves as “conservative,” compared to 35% who call themselves “moderate” and only 21% who identify as “liberal.”
Here’s Reagan’s electoral map from 1984:
Maybe if we started running again as actual conservatives, we might win some elections. That’s just a crazy little thought that I had.
I spoke Reagan’s words for him simply to get you to hear them fresh again. Go listen to the original; it’s a far, far better speech than I will ever be able to give. But not for an instant would I presume to be able to close it they way he did. So here it is… and we turn our back on this voice and this wisdom at our mortal peril:
Write those letters now; call your friends and them to write them. If you don’t, this program I promise you, will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow, and behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country. Until, one day, as Normal Thomas said we will awake to find that we have socialism. And if you don’t do this and if I don’t do it, one of these days we are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.
Well, here it is: THE DOWD CONUNDRUM
It took a MASSIVE amount of work to do something like this; if I had any idea at the outset I wouldn’t have done it since it tied up so much of my time and resources. But the fact is, it was a lot of fun and I had a blast.
Certainly not my deepest work, but there is an important point in there, regarding the dangers of elitist and intellectual thinking. I’d never really gotten to the bottom of why these smart people are so consistently correct and brilliant in their chosen fields and yet so spectacularly wrong almost all of the time when it comes to politics.
It’s funny, isn’t it — where you decide to draw the line? After I got the idea to do this piece, I decided to see the new Star Trek movie again so I caught a late show. I was driving home over Sepulveda pass after it was over – this would be at about 1:30 am — mumbling to myself: “The Left took Hollywood, music, late night comedy, universities, high schools, the news media and just about every other damn thing away from us… but they are not getting Star Trek, God damn them! I am not surrendering the Enterprise! Not without a fight!”
So there is some brain food in there, but the fact is, it just gave me a chance to do two things that have overwhelming power over me: 1.) Put on a custom-made gold velour jersey, and 2.) work with my buddy Maurice LaMarche. He’s the voice of The Brain in Pinky and the Brain, portrays Morbo, Calculon, Kiff and Hedonismbot (among an hundred-odd others) on Futurama and who can teach you — yes, YOU! — how to Talk Like William Shatner by going straight here.
Here are some screen grabs to whet your appetite.
PJTV has once again been kind enough to post this without needing either a subscription or even registration. They can’t keep doing this forever, so if you like it and want to see more coming, needless to say a subscription — even registration, which is free — would help convince my Insect Overlords that this is moving in the right direction.
I’ll post the transcript as an essay in about a week (because more than than anything else I’ve done, this needs to be seen rather than read.)
Up Next: I’m going to try something a little different. I’m going to try to concentrate on two things now: AFTERBURNERS like the Atomic Bomb segments: well researched, factual and exhaustive; and a new series which I am going to call The Common Sense Resistance, which I want to be a series that examines the philosophical underpinnings of what is today known as “Conservative” thought but which is really just Common Sense: that shared wisdom built into society over hundreds of years of trial and error.
I’ll start with a look at Thomas Sowell’s brilliant — and I mean BRILLIANT — analysis of the two schools of modern Western thought. Unless some liberal pundit steps on another land mine, next up will be THE TRAGEDY OF THE UNCONSTRAINED VISION. It’s going to look and feel very different and I’m really excited about it. Until then, I hope you enjoy watching THE DOWD CONUNDRUM as much as I enjoyed making it.
Hi everyone.
First, my apologies to those people whose comments had been withheld for approval this past week. I only now got to them. I have no idea why WordPress holds some comments and releases most of the others, but I can tell you what a torrent of spam I have to deal with daily, and I’m afraid some legitimate comments were held for far too long. Again, my apologies.
I’ve been absolutely consumed this week and last with my next Afterburner subject. It will not be the deepest thing I have done yet, but it might be the most fun and WITHOUT QUESTION it is the most technically challenging. It will have a cast (I think) and I can ALMOST promise that it will feature one of my celebrity friends — whose face you may not know but whose work you probably do. The only two hints you get are: 1.) Costumes are being fitted, and 2.) go to YouTube and search for “International Talk Like William Shatner Day.”
Downstream, after this next Afterburner I am hoping to convince my Insect Overlords to try a new-format video. If I succeed, I hope to do an entire book as a series of video essays, with the book as a hard-copy transcript. More on that after I finish Epic Costume Afterburner.
Many have asked about links to the old Silent America essays. I am working on that as well. So much to do! But they will be back and have their own sidebar, and I’ll get to that as soon as I finish the more pressing stuff.
I have about a third of THE REPUBLIC OF EMOTION finished. That, and the Global Warming essay, will be the final installments of my second book, which I am calling SEEING THE UNSEEN: ADVENTURES IN CRITICAL THINKING. The Boyd and Hiroshima essays will be included, as will WAR OF THE BUMPER STICKERS, the SEEING THE UNSEEN essays (obviously) and several other smaller works including THE UNDEFENDED CITY that originally appeared on National Review Online. I hope to have that finished by the middle of summer.
And now I will format THE TRUTH ABOUT THE ATOMIC BOMBS. I’ll back-date that so it appears beneath this entry.
I have VERY high hopes for the next Afterburner. Don’t expect anything epic on the scale of the last one, but I do think you’ll get a kick out of it. Even if you don’t, I CERTAINLY will get a kick out of it.
More soon, and thanks, as always, for your patience and especially the very, very kind words, both in the comments and in your emails.
(This is the script of an Afterburner video that ran on May 1st, 2009. Some very minor changes have been made in the print version.)
Recently, a friend and colleague of mine – Cliff May, President of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, who I work with weekly at PJTV – made an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Cliff and Mr. Stewart were having a heated argument on the subject of what constitutes torture and what is merely coercion. Here’s how the conversation unfolded:
Cliff May: Do you think that in World War Two we did not inflict pain and suffering on suspects in Europe and Japan–.
Jon Stewart: –I would hope we didn’t waterboard people. I would hope we–.
Cliff May: –We did do Hiroshima. Do you think Truman is a war criminal for that?
Jon Stewart: (pause) Yeah.
Cliff May: You do?
Jon Stewart: Yeah.
This view, expressed by Jon Stewart* and shared by millions, is becoming ever more widely held the farther from the event we become. Stewart and others maintain that the atomic bombings were criminal acts, claiming that the targeted cities received no warning, that they were of no military value, that Japanese resistance was crumbling and their use was unnecessary, and that Japan was trying to surrender at the time of the bombings which were therefore nothing but an unjustified and brutal signal sent merely to show the Soviets who’s boss.
None of these positions stand up to facts.
Let’s come back to the moral issue in a moment. But let’s begin with the historical facts.
Here’s what Stewart himself says about warnings:
Jon Stewart: Here’s what I think on the atom bombs. If you dropped an atom bomb fifteen miles offshore, and you said the next one is coming to hit you, then I would think it’s okay. To drop one on a city, and kill a hundred thousand people…
Cliff May: …You think that would–.
Jon Stewart: I think that’s criminal.
So Jon Stewart’s main point is that if the Japanese had been warned, quote, “then I would think it’s okay.” But the Japanese were warned. After 6 six minutes of grueling research, I was able to discover this leaflet:
This is a photograph of the front side of Office of War Information notice #2106, dubbed the “LeMay bombing leaflet.” Over 1 million of these were dropped over Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and 33 other Japanese cities on 1 August 1945 – five days before the Hiroshima bombing. The Japanese text on the reverse side of the leaflet carried the following warning:
“Read this carefully as it may save your life or the life of a relative or friend. In the next few days, some or all of the cities named on the reverse side will be destroyed by American bombs. These cities contain military installations and workshops or factories which produce military goods. We are determined to destroy all of the tools of the military clique which they are using to prolong this useless war. But, unfortunately, bombs have no eyes. So, in accordance with America’s humanitarian policies, the American Air Force, which does not wish to injure innocent people, now gives you warning to evacuate the cities named and save your lives. America is not fighting the Japanese people but is fighting the military clique which has enslaved the Japanese people. The peace which America will bring will free the people from the oppression of the military clique and mean the emergence of a new and better Japan. You can restore peace by demanding new and good leaders who will end the war. We cannot promise that only these cities will be among those attacked but some or all of them will be, so heed this warning and evacuate these cities immediately”
Now that’s certainly more warning than our sailors got on the morning of December 7th, 1941. But was that enough? Jon Stewart suggests that the appropriate thing to do would have been to drop the first bomb out at sea as a demonstration. Well, let’s follow Mr. Stewart’s line of reasoning.
The effort to develop the atomic bomb was codenamed the Manhattan Project. It was spectacularly expensive. To give you some idea of the scale of it, the small town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee – where the fissionable materials were produced – consumed one-sixth of all of the electricity generated in the entire United States! The Manhattan Project – alone – likely used more electricity than the entire nation of Japan.
After many years this mighty effort produced four bombs. The world’s first nuclear weapon – a plutonium device code-named “Gadget” — was detonated over the United States of America, just before 5:30 am on July 16th, 1945 at White Sands, New Mexico, in a test firing called “Trinity.”
The Trinity bomb was extremely delicate and its reliability very much in question. It used an exquisitely timed series of conventional explosives to implode a plutonium core and reach criticality. Bomb #3 – Fat Man – was of exactly this type, as I believe was the unnamed and unused Bomb 4. So the Manhattan Project scientists essentially wasted 25% of the total arsenal – the Gadget bomb, in the Trinity test – to be certain that bombs #3 and 4 would actually work. The second bomb – called Little Boy – was a Uranium bullet-type bomb: less efficient, but judged reliable enough so that it would not need testing.
So let’s pick up Jon Stewarts suggestion. We’ve bet the entire farm – all of our best scientists, almost 30 billion in today’s dollars for the bombs and almost that much for the B-29’s to carry them – and we’ve already detonated 25% of the results on a test. We dropped millions of warning leaflets in the days before the attacks. But Jon Stewart says he would only be satisfied if we had demonstrated the weapon. Such a demonstration would have reduced the results of the Manhattan Project by half: four bombs built, two used as demonstrations.
Presumably, following Mr. Stewart’s suggestion, we would send a message to the Imperial High command that says, essentially, “Hey guys, how’s it going? Listen, we’ve got this super-weapon we’ve been working on for two years, and even though you’ve killed hundreds of thousands of our sons and fathers ever since you sneak attacked us without warning back at Pearl Habor, we wanted to show you what it can do. So next Sunday morning, set up some lawn chairs looking out of the ocean – we’ll tell you exactly where – and then right at noon precisely we’ll send one of these bombers out there to drop one of these wonder weapons… but no fair trying to shoot it down, just because you know exactly where and when and what to look for! Because when you see the kind of splash this thing makes, well, you’ll either give up on the spot or you’ll somehow suddenly deserve what’s coming to you when you wouldn’t have deserved it if we hadn’t dropped one in the bay. If this is a little morally confusing, don’t worry: some snarky narcissistic comedian will explain how that works sixty-four years from now.”
But the whole point is moot, and Jon Stewart knows it’s moot. We know for a fact that dropping an atomic bomb 15 miles out at sea would not have caused the Japanese to surrender in order to avoid that fate. How do we know? Because we dropped one on an actual city, and they still did not surrender.
Nor were they about to, contrary to what many would have you believe. As the U.S. Navy and Marines approached the Japanese mainland, resistance and casualties increased, not decreased. In six grinding months, from August of ’42 to February of ’43, the Allies lost about 1,500 killed at Guadalcanal. The first battle on Japanese soil – an uninhabited speck called Iwo Jima – killed 7,000 not in six months but in five brutal weeks. Four days after the official end to the carnage on Iwo, Americans went ashore at Okinawa – even closer to the sacred soil. In 82 days almost 13,000 allied soldiers were killed. The US Navy lost 34 ships – many of them to the new kamikaze attacks, which caused the United States Navy to lose more men in that one engagement than in all of America’s previous wars combined. Japanese resistance was not fading. It was becoming ever more fanatical.
After Okinawa, and before the Atomic Bombings, the father of the Kamikaze attacks, Admiral Takijiro Onishi declared:
“If we are prepared to sacrifice 20 million lives in kamikaze effort, victory will be ours!” 20 million people is one hundred times the number killed in the Atomic attacks.
This isn’t an assertion and this isn’t speculation. These are the words directly from the military clique that ruled Imperial Japan. Their battle plan was called Ketsu-Go – it translates roughly as “decisive operation.” On June 8th, 1945 – a little less than one month before the first atomic bomb was dropped, Emperor Hirohito declared Ketsu-Go would be, quote, “The fundamental policy to be followed henceforth in the conduct of the war.” It proclaimed that “Japan must fight to the finish and choose extinction rather than surrender.” Again, we’re not talking about the assertions of a comedy show host, but official policy statements from the God-Emperor of Japan. Special attack weapons were sanctioned, including additional kamikaze air and submarine attacks. Children were being trained to carry backpacks of explosives and throw themselves under American tanks. Admiral Onishi went on to say that 32 million civilians were being trained in the use of “primitive weapons” – that would be bamboo spears – in order to make a heroic last stand.
Opposing Ketsu-Go was the American plan for the invasion of the Japanese Home Islands: Operation Downfall. Phase one – Operation Olympic – would be an amphibious assault on the southern island of Kyushu with over 767,000 American troops: more than four times as many as were used in the D-Day invasion of Normandy in Europe. The core of the Japanese defense against Operation Olympic would come from the Imperial Army troops stationed in position to defend Kyushu. That army of 43,000 men was crowded in with various military installations, manufacturing facilities, and 280,000 civilians at the army headquarters, located in the heart of a modest city named Hiroshima. The bomb detonated directly over that army’s parade grounds. Hiroshima was not, as some will tell you, a purely civilian target. Like all Japanese manufacturing centers, the munitions factories, weapons depots, troop barracks and other military targets were dispersed among the civilian population.
At 8:16 am on the morning of August 6th, 1945, a B-29 named Enola Gay dropped bomb number two – Little Boy – which exploded with the force of about 15 thousand tons of TNT. We’ve grown up under the shadow of hydrogen weapons – H-Bombs – but these are thousands of times more powerful than the fission bomb dropped on Hiroshima. If you detonated the Little Boy Hiroshima bomb in the center of Los Angeles Airport, the fatal blast radius remains inside the airport property.
But it produced horrific damage to these wood and rice paper structures. 70,000 were killed almost immediately, and perhaps another seventy thousand would later succumb to burns, injuries and radiation.
The Japanese did not surrender. August 7th passed with no word from the Imperial High Command, as did August 8th. American B-29s continued their firebombing of Japanese targets.
Then on the morning of August 9th, another B-29, Bock’s Car, took off with Fat Man, bomb #3 – a higher-yield, less-reliable plutonium bomb like Gadget. The Japanese city of Kokura was the primary target, but clouds obscured that city so Bock’s Car diverted to the secondary, Nagasaki. It too was overcast, but a brief hole in the cloud cover was enough to give the bombardier an aim point. Fat Man exploded with a force equal to about 22 thousand tons of TNT – about half again that of Little Boy – detonating precisely halfway between the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works, a munitions plant, and the Mitsubishi-Urakami Ordnance Works, which manufactured torpedoes for the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Total deaths a Nagasaki were lower, but about 80,000 people would die from either immediate or long-term effects.
Still the Japanese did not surrender, and still the conventional bombings continued. August 9th passed. August 10th. August 11th. The fourth bomb was being readied, and it started to appear that the air force would have to begin conserving atomic bombs for use during the invasion. You see, even after the second bomb was dropped, Emperor Hirohito was hearing from his advisors that Japan still had 32 million people prepared to give their lives for their emperor.
“With luck, we will repel the invaders before they land,” said General Yoshijiro Umezu, with the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still smoldering.
Japan would have eventually surrendered without the atomic bombs. It might have taken an invasion, with perhaps a million American soldiers killed or wounded, and three, or five, or seven, or twenty million Japanese civilians as well. A post-war American bombing survey concluded that Japan probably would have capitulated by November or December, prior to an invasion – but that was only because the firebombings would have continued for another three months, or four, or six. Before the atomic bombings, 40% of the much, much larger city of Tokyo had been flattened as effectively as ground zero at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Kobe, the size of Baltimore, had been 55% scoured – wiped clean off the map – by conventional bombs. Osaka, with a population about equal to Chicago, had been 35% destroyed; almost sixty percent of Yokohama – about the size of Cleveland – had gone up in flames in conventional bombing raids… None of this devastation had brought Japan to its knees. But the Atomic Bombs did.
And the idea that had we not dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, their populations would have been spared is also fallacious. Had they not been victims of the atomic attacks, those populations would have been subjected to firebombings as had the above named cities and scores of other industrial centers. The death toll from conventional bombing may have been somewhat higher, or somewhat lower, but there is no believable scenario that does not result in the deaths of tens of thousands in these cities, even had the atomic bombs been withheld.
On August 12th, three days after Nagasaki, Hirohito was asked by a relative if the war should continue if surrender meant the loss of the Imperial family and their social structure. He replied, “Of course.” August 13th passed. Then, on August 14th, the Emperor relented. As he was traveling to the radio station to announce the surrender of his empire, he narrowly escaped by kidnapped by Imperial Japanese officers determined not to let even the God-King end the war.
But he did end it. And when he finally ended it, he said why he ended it:
“The enemy now possesses a new and terrible weapon with the power to destroy many innocent lives and do incalculable damage. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization… This is the reason why We have ordered the acceptance of the provisions of the Joint Declaration of the Powers.”
Japanese pilot Mitsuo Fuchida led the air attack against Pearl Harbor. After the war, he told Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay, quote: “you did the right thing. You know the Japanese attitude of that time, how fanatic they were. They’d die for the Emperor. Every man, woman and child would have resisted the invasion with sticks and stones if necessary. “
The use of the atomic bombs saved – at minimum — hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives from continued conventional bombing. If the invasion had been necessary – and no one at the time had any reason to think it would not be necessary, given the pattern of resistance – then millions more Japanese would die holding bamboo spears and wearing explosive backpacks. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers would have been killed. Perhaps including this one:
I got to know this man over the course of my life. He was just a regular Army 2nd Lieutenant who got to Germany just as the war there was ending. He and all of his friends knew where they were headed next, and having watched the Marines fight and die for every inch of sand they took, they frankly did not think they were going to come home.
When the word came of the Japanese surrender, they were stunned. The Marines were stunned. Navy pilots – tough, battle-hardened men who had seen horror Jon Stewart and I will never be able to imagine, thanks to them – those men burst into tears at the news. They were going to live. They were going to go home, because of the decision that Harry Truman made that day.
This man would go home and marry this woman:
They’d have four children, and some of those children would have children.
The oldest one would play some little league baseball, then go to high school, then make movies, and finally that little boy would write this essay, because Harry Truman gave his father a chance to come home.
Jon Stewart wants to call Harry Truman a war criminal? If Harry Truman is a war criminal for the atomic bombings, then Roosevelt is one for the fire bombings of Tokyo and Dresden. And if Roosevelt is a war criminal for causing the fiery deaths of civilians, then Abraham Lincoln – whose Union armies burned Atlanta and Columbia to the ground in order to end that war – well he must be one too.
And if, by the snowy standards of these liberal’s Olympian intellect and morality… if Harry Truman is essentially the same creature as Adolph Hitler – war criminals – then these people, the actual victims of real war criminals become a little less to worry about. Don’t they?
Mr. Stewart, you do no exist on some superior intellectual plane – and most certainly not on a moral one. You can slander the men who have given you a life where the toughest decision you have to make is what to have your assistant get you for lunch. But those people who came home as a result of Harry Truman’s courage deserve a hell of a lot better than to be told that their lives are worth less than your moral discomfort. And the de facto “voice of a generation” should be someone not quite as self-centered as you.
*Shortly after he called Harry Truman a “war criminal,” Mr. Stewart apologized for the comment.
(A great deal of the background material of this essay was found in a remarkable book called Flyboys, written by Flags of our Fathers author James Bradley. While it deals primarily with the capture and brutal execution of American Naval Aviators on Chi Chi Jima, it is exhaustively researched and examines both the conventional and atomic bombings of Japan in great detail. I cannot recommend this book highly enough, although I will say the details of the Japanese treatment of Amrrican POW’s and Chinese civilians is not for the weak stomached. )
A couple of nights ago, Jon Stewart said that Harry Truman was a “War Criminal” for dropping the atomic bombs on Japan.
From the moment I saw that clip I have dropped everything I was doing in order to research, write, shoot, edit and post a reponse. It’s a story I already knew well. I think this is very good work, and I will update the post when I have had some sleep. For now, if you have 16 minutes of free time, I think you’ll find this one rewarding.
It’s free, with Flash player, here.
More later.
[UPDATE]
Well, Jon Stewart apologized for calling Truman “a War Criminal,” and good for him. Everyone says things they regret, but not everyone is big enough to step up and admit they were wrong. And the following is meant in no way to diminish his apology, but the fact is, after he called Truman a War Criminal, he explained in some detail why he thought the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act. I saw nothing in the apology that led me to believe he changed his mind about the atomic attacks, and to be honest, if you honestly do believe that they were in fact criminal acts, its hard to see how you could not consider Truman a war criminal. But as someone who has had words put in his mouth, I certainly do not wish to do that to Mr. Stewart. I can’t undo the references to what he said, just as he can’t unsay what he did in fact say, but I am glad that he apologized to Truman if nothing else and I certainly think more highly of him for it.
With all of that said, hundreds of millions do in fact consider the bombings a criminal act, and to that degree the video is as timely and necessary as ever.
Sometime this week, I hope, I will provide the text of the video. There are a great many visual elements in the piece, and I hope to include as many of those as I can in the body of the text. But I really do feel that the video format is powerful under certain circumstances, and more of this kind of thing is coming. If you’d like to support this work in the future, my insect overlords would be thrilled — simply thrilled — if those of you that liked the piece would go to PJTV and simply register. It’s fast, it’s free, and your email address will not be used for any other purpose that notifying you of our content, including continuing commentaries such as this one. We’re capitalists here. These things cost money, and if people simply register because of them they will take that as a good sign and give me the means to keep them coming.
Thanks for the support, and good for you, Jon Stewart.
