Ukraine Thing

 So that Ukraine Thing continues to fester like a huge open sore that can't heal. It shouldn't have happened to begin with, and once it did, it should have been quickly closed and heavy doses of antiseptic applied, but that's not what we're getting. Just the opposite, mostly. Let's see how much bigger the wound can get, eh?

Sure. Why not? Our rulers must be bored with themselves.

I've said here and in other fora that Russia has their reasons for the invasion of Ukraine and for going Grozny on the neo-Nazi resistance thereunto. I don't like what the Russians did and are doing, and I think they should stop and leave. But that's not going to happen as long as Ukies (oh dear, insults so soon?) are being supplied and re-supplied by the USandNato with mercenaries and materiel to keep the conflict going indefinitely -- and with an increasingly bloodthirsty urge to take the battle all the way to Moscow, burn the Kremlin and hang Putin no matter the risks or consequences to the whole wide world.

Whoever is running this thing, if anyone, doesn't care what happens to the rest of us. Certainly they don't care about the Ukrainians, so many of whom have fled the country so as not to "get caught in the crossfire."

I read a statistic that the population of Ukraine had fallen some 30% since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with the advent of the war, another 20-25% had fled, many of whom will not be returning but will scatter and serve as a boost to the declining population of the rest of White Europe. Oh what a tangled web is woven.

It may be that Ukraine is headed to extinction as a viable state. In some ways it goes with the long-term depopulation of the American Heartland. It drives me nuts that so many of the hot-shot observers of American politics have no idea at all what's going on outside their fancy urban and suburban bubbles and could even begin to hypothesize that "rural America" elected Trump. Then do the diner tour to "prove" (ha) what they already believed. 

People. There simply aren't enough people in "rural America" (definition lacking) to elect anyone to national office, let alone a President. I believe the statistic now is that the population is 89% urban and 10% and change "rural." They think the election of 2016 was "so close."No it wasn't. Hillary won the popular vote in a veritable landslide, but she lost the election because of the Electoral College which awards votes by state. By this means, "rural America" won the presidency for Trump. But even that's not true. No, it wasn't "rural America." It was largely a matter of suburban votes for Trump and voter suppression in places like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. But so what?

The point is that Rural America is largely depopulated, and depopulation seems to be the prime objective of the Ukraine War -- on both sides. The Ukrainian state ceases to exist except as an appendage to one or the other Sides. The Ukrainian people are left to flounder, suffer, and be exploited no matter who marches in the Victory Day Parade -- if there is one.

The risk of course is that this whole Thing is gonna blow up. It's getting very close, and it looks like the double-dog daring  stage has been reached, and half the world is on tenterhooks wondering how much longer it will be before the Nukes start flying.

Our Rulers clearly want that outcome. 

They are playing a very, very sick game.

And there's not a good gottdammed thing we can do about it.

Deplorable.

Books

I've written about our household library before, I'm sure. It's still growing. As Ms Che was collecting her MFA in creative writing she bought dozens of books of poetry, but since they don't take up a lot of room, the bulk of them hardly groans on a single shelf in "her office." The rest of the books, numbering several thousand (I'd say 3.25) are scattered around the house, and some are still in the boxes we transported them in from California. They're in the garage and a couple of storage buildings in the back of the property.

As I've watched some of the renovation shows on TeeVee and looked at magazines and the internet for renovation ideas (our house is crying out for another do over, and we're getting the debt down so we can) I see that books are often used as "decor", props. They're turned spine to the wall, so you only see the page edges. They're covered with pastel colored paper, wall paper, white paper, cream paper, and they're arranged by color on otherwise bare shelves. Or on shelves with scattered bits of pottery or other collections. You don't see titles. There aren't any titles. Books made to be there but do nothing except take up space. They're not to be read, not to be browsed; they're to be looked at, glanced at, blankly stared at.

There was a period not too long ago when people with too much money and not much sense bought old leatherbound books by the yard, books in foreign languages that had beautiful bindings, books with no content just beautiful bindings, books ancient and decrepit that couldn't be read because the pages were falling apart, but the bindings were beautiful, and they filled their shelves with them. And then there was the fashion for hanging wall paper with images of full bookshelves instead of having the books on shelves take up valuable room. 

They say books aren't being published, sold, or read any more. "Almost all content is delivered electronically, digitally." That may be true. I don't know. I pulled out my somewhat tattered copy of Lost Horizon the other day and quoted from it on these (digital) pages. I did a quick digital search before doing so, and I could not find the quote I used from the preface of the 1936 edition. There were a couple of truncated versions, but none that gave the whole quote -- which is itself condensed (by the author) from a rather longer conversation between the main character Connolly and the High Lama of Shangri La. Consequently I reconfirmed the notion that the printed book continues to have value above and beyond whatever appears digitally in its place.

A lot of our books are old and not in the best of condition -- somewhat like we are! -- and some I know, like a 19th century Dickens collection, are almost unreadable because the pages have become so brittle. There are some Tom Swift novels in similar condition, as well as a bunch of Horatio Alger books that literally flake to pieces when you open them. It's possible, though I can't be sure, that most or even all of these works are available electronically. The physical book has a presence, a reason for being, but if it can't be read because it is disintegrating, what good is it, really?

Our oldest books, though, books of poetry from 1801 and 1802, are in surprisingly good condition (the pages anyway, the leather bindings not so much.) The pages are rag paper, crisp but not delicate, and the printing is handset and sure. These books will last long enough for the poetry style they present to come back into fashion, say another couple of hundred years.

We have a lot of art books, some of them becoming sought after like early Andy Warhol and David Hockney books. I've been watching The Andy Warhol Diaries on Netflix and oh my, talk about temps perdu. It had never occurred to me that Andy had become such a historical rather than contemporary character. The book of his works I'm thinking of (can't find it right now but I know we brought it here) is from the mid-'60s and contains images of much of his work up till then, including the advertising illustrations he did in the '50s and some of his "dirty movies" in the '60s. Acquaintances of ours in Sacramento owned a number of his works, including the famous Marilyn and Elizabeth Taylor silk screens, as well as other less well known Warhols. I don't remember now exactly how they acquired them. Some were from a gallery in New York, I think, but I remember vague references to direct dealings with the artist. It may have been in reference to some other artist though.

Many of our books will never be read again, I'm sure, and most of them, I have little doubt, will be discarded after we leave here. Maybe some will be used for "decor", cut up and used for wall paper, or as might need be, burned for warmth. 

Books are said to be out of favor. Unnecessary burdens on modern life. Well, if that's the case.... we might do well to question, again, the value of "modern life."

Lost Horizons

I thought I'd just drop this here.  

 James Hilton condensed a conversation between Connolly and the High Lama (about the war to come) in his novel Lost Horizon, 1933, and put it in the Preface to the 1936 edition: 

"It will be such a storm as the world has not seen before. There will be no safety by arms,, no help from authority, no answer in science. It will rage till every flower of culture is trampled, and all human things are leveled in a vast chaos... The Dark Ages that are to come will cover the whole world in a single pall; there will be neither escape nor sanctuary, save such as are too secret to be found or too humble to be noticed ..."

 

How much happier one would be to dismiss all this as thoroughly out-of-date, than to admit, as one must, that in 1936 it has become more terrifyingly up-to-date than ever! 

 

The War to Come did come, of course, soon enough, and it was worse, much worse, than the previous world war, and yet most people survived, most of "civilization" endured, most of the ruins were cleared, most of the earth recovered more or less well, and we carried on. Hilton's vision was shared by many others at the time. They knew or sensed that the Great War had concluded nothing, that another round of the fight would be coming, and no matter the efforts to forestall it, the world would be plunged into darkness for the duration yet again. 

And here we are again on the precipice of darkness, chaos and annihilation of civilization. Many of us share the vision of absent future, destroyed by the vanities of the powerful and not very clever few who rule over us. They cannot seem to stop themselves. War-fever and bloodlust have spread so widely now that I don't see any way for the ruling classes to back away from the brink. 

Let's hope they do, but how many people hoped the same in 1914, 1939, and on and on and on. Only occasionally -- and almost accidentally -- did wiser heads prevail. This time around, I'm not seeing any wiser heads atop the rulers.

How Close Are We to Nuclear Annihilation?

I'm seeing more and more commentary opining that we are well and truly into WWIII, the War some were claiming Hillary was going to start with her no-fly zone suggestion over Syria c. 2016.

She explained, perhaps inartfully, that a no-fly zone over Syria would only happen via negotiation with Russia, and she was not proposing a unilateral declaration. But of course, as is the way with political campaigns, her clarification was ignored, as was, interestingly, Trump's proposal for a refugee "safety-zone" -- essentially a no-fly zone by another name. Oh well, water under the bridge.

The point, I think, about Hillary was that she was belligerent toward Russia. Trump was anything but.

Anti-Russia belligerence was part of US government foreign policy from way back, at least tracing to the depths of the Cold War, intensifying rather remarkably during the Obama regime. It was painfully obvious that Obama and Putin did not get along, but why was never entirely clear. At times it seemed like there was a deep seated racist component, one I may have noticed and written about at the time but I'm too lazy to look it up right now. 

For what it's worth, there has long been a foreign policy outline that involves the dismemberment of the Russian Federation -- already much smaller and weaker than the Soviet Union -- and essentially remaking the parts into Western satrapies for easy exploitation and control. Russia has resources, after all, and according to our rulers or those who rule our rulers, those resources are "ours."

An independent Russia must be destroyed. 

China would be next.

This plan goes back decades, and you can bet the Kremlin has been well aware of it. 

It wasn't implemented -- at least not fully -- because Russia is armed with nuclear weapons and was believed to be skilled and ready to use them if the Motherland was existentially threatened.

Well here we are.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February was quite a surprise to practically everyone. Many simply didn't think Putin was that stupid. Even Zelensky and his backers in Kiev didn't think it would happen, and when it did, they were caught on the back foot. That's putting it mildly.

I said at the outset that either Kiev would capitulate quickly, or Russia would "go Grozny" on their asses. Grozny is the Chechen capital that was leveled and its defenders annihilated by Russia in two Chechen Wars in the '90s. Tens of thousands are said to have perished. 

Kiev did not capitulate but become even more belligerent as the invasion proceeded. There is considerable evidence that Russia has experienced significant losses while inflicting considerable damage on Ukrainian targets. Large parts of several cities have been reduced to ruin, mullions have been displaced -- about 10% of the population has become refugees in other parts of Europe -- and in essence, the Ukrainian economy, which wasn't much to begin with except for the looting by Ukrainian oligarchs, has ground to a halt.

Nuclear saber rattling has been going on since the outset of the invasion; threats from Moscow, retaliatory threats from the US and Nato. 

Of course those of us who remember the history of Cold War saber rattling are aware that we came very close to nuclear war with the Soviet Union several times during the era, and the whole routine of preparing for and (possibly) surviving if the button should be pushed was part of conditioning the population "just in case." I still have a Civil Defense pamphlet, "Surviving Nuclear War," and there are a couple of old radios around the place with CONELRAD emblems ("tune to 640 or 1240 on your AM radio dial for news and information in the event of an emergency..."). Together with Duck and Cover drills, air raid siren tests, and the location of public shelters and the building of backyard shelters this was what people of a Certain Age lived with for decades of their childhood and adolescence. 

I remember calculating how far from likely Bomb targets I lived, and it was never more than a few miles. 

Most of that conditioning faded as the Cold War ended -- or we thought it did. 

The various invasions and attacks since 2001, however, revived some of the terrifying images of the past, and the relentless marches to war the US and Nato have engaged in against enemies real and imagined, far and near have been deeply troubling to many of us.

Why this constant drumbeat of War and More War?

And why war against Russia?

Of course, it's been the Plan All Along. One day it had to happen. 

And here it is.

So how close are we to nuclear annihilation? I'd say very.

The war in Europe is creeping beyond Ukraine, and there are growing calls for Ukraine to attack and march to Moscow, burn the Kremlin, hang Putin, blah, blah, blah. It's not likely, but war-fever does strange things to people, and there is some intense war-fever among certain political interests. Ukraine and Zelensky are way over the edge. Bloodlust seems to be their sole animating force these days.

As they say, this can't end well.

We live considerably farther from likely targets now, so there's that, but the prevailing winds will still blow, and we are still downwind. Oh well!

No is no perceptible anti-war/anti-nuke movement today. I think people are just weary of... everything. The pandemic, increasing precarity, inflation, war and rumors of war, climate catastrophe. There seems no end to it all, and no escape either. 

So what's to be done? 

I've said that the nuclear trigger won't necessarily be pulled by either the US and Nato or by Russia. There are other nuclear players in the world, and some of them are getting antsy. If, say, Israel or North Korea (among other players) decide the time is ripe to rock and roll with nukes, how will the major players respond? 

We think of ourselves as the center of the Universe, but things can happen at the margins (the butterfly effect) that can change everything in a twinkling. The US and Nato are playing with fire and gasoline in their proxy war with Russia in the Ukraine, but something might well happen elsewhere that could trigger a global war of annihilation that would actually result in a longed for (by some) population drop. And then...?

This roller coaster ride we've been on may be nearing the end. 

The 1950 Census

So I looked up my infant self in the 1950 census. At first I was frustrated because the address I checked was listed as "No one home" and had a note: "see pg 70" or something and there were only 31 pages in the tract. Hm.

So I checked all the pages, and indeed I found the address and the listing on page 70-something -- which was one of the 31 pages. But at the address where I thought I'd lived I found another family. Husband, wife and 16 year old son. Oh. Well... how could that be? Unless I didn't live there in 1950, and my memory of where I lived was faulty. Wouldn't be the first time.

But there had to be a record somewhere. So I checked all the pages, and eventually I found my mother, sister and myself living at a different address just down the street. Hm.

So I did the Google thing, and sure enough, this was a little house a few doors down from the duplex where I thought I lived. And this little house was strong in my memory. I knew I had lived in a little house on this street, or thought I had lived there, but all the pictures I could find showed us living in the duplex. But then it occurred to me. Those pictures were all taken in 1951. So in 1950 I really was living in the little house I remembered. But I wasn't any older than two when we lived there. Where do these ancient memories come from?

I have a vague memory of a move around that time, but the move I am thinking of was to a different house in another part of town -- from the duplex to the other house. Or was it? Was the move from the little house to the duplex down the street, and then, a year or so later to the other house? A scrambled memory?

I remember the appearance of the interior and exterior of the little house. The duplex not so much, though the exterior resembled the little house (I assume they were built about the same time, c. 1930). I remember the exterior of the other house we moved to, but nothing of the interior. Which is odd because I do remember the interior of the house next door quite well. 

I've written before about how memories are tricky things, whether they are long ago childhood memories or more recent ones. I don't know how it works, but I was really surprised to find that for the census of 1950 my sister, mother and I were living in the little house where I thought, until I found pictures showing us living in the duplex down the street that resembled the little house. 

Well, well, well...

And ultimately, the question is how memories work and don't work, what we recall and don't recall and why. I don't know how I have retained so many childhood memories, some of them from Iowa when I was no more than a few months old. Other, more recent memories are just gone. Every now and then, Ms Che will ask: "Do you remember X, Y, or Z?" naming a person, incident or place that we had known or experienced. Sometimes my answer is yes, but often -- I think too often -- my answer is no. 

Where do those memories go? And why is her memory of these things and people so much sharper than mine? On the other hand, I have much sharper memories of my early childhood than she has of hers.

It's a mystery...