CSotD: Thanks, that doesn’t help
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I could almost run that headline over today's xkcd and be done, but I'll expand on it a little.
As part of a sort of Peter Pan Generation, the idea of being "old" is greeted with a lot of denial, but, while there's no need to grow old in the sense of withdrawing from life, there's also no reason to refuse to feel that maybe having made a few trips around the barn has taught you something.
I've mentioned this cartoon before, and I wish I could find it, but I had a cartoon on my dorm room door in 1968, set in a pre-industrial looking Vietnamese village in which people gathered around a very old man, saying, "Tell us, old one, what peace was like?"
And today, as Randall Munroe notes, we have a new set of voters who have always been at war with Westasia or Oceana or somebody, though they seem curiously uncurious about it, and seem blandly sure that this is how the world was meant to be.
You can't say that of the Vietnamese, a generation ago, whose experience of being forever at war was very real.
It's not that everyone was dedicated to one side or the other, but, rather, that everyone had, at the very least, seen rice paddies that had been tended for generations disrupted by tank treads, if not by bombs.
Most had seen far more.
For today's Americans, only a small number are actually inconvenienced by war. We don't even plant Liberty Gardens, much less ration gas or meat.
On Memorial Day, it is sufficient to glance at a cartoon of a small child saluting a gravestone (Thank you for your service! Can I have some more, please?) and then head out to the beach.
I'm not grousing over the Millennials and their impatience with the older generation so much as I am grousing over a lack of perspective in general.
I don't expect everyone to gather and ask what peace was like, but I guess I expect them to know there was such a thing.
And I can't really explain why they should. They live in the world they've been given.
The president's trip this week is evidence enough of that world:
His visit to Hiroshima, while it went off with dignity, was greeted at least in this country with a lot of revisionist talk about Truman's decision, some of which seems predicated on the idea that he was the only person who thought it was a good idea, and even more of which makes it seem that Japan was trying desperately to surrender at the time.
Whatever else can be argued, he wasn't the only person in favor and Japan's feelers were, at best, a willingness to not be bombed anymore but not to be held accountable for anything that had happened up to that point. Yes, there were government officials prepared to actually surrender but to suggest they were dominant is, well, perhaps hindsight.
"What might have been" is a game.
War is not.
I like Obama's public statements: We have to not let this ever happen again.
And that calls for frankness on both sides. My father always suspected that we let the Germans off more easily than we did the Japanese because they looked like "us."
However, his opinion was naturally swayed by both what he had seen and what he had not seen.
He was prepared to ship out for the invasion of Japan when the war suddenly ended, so his experience ended at Dachau, where he helped sort out the displaced people of that adventure. He never saw Nanking or Bataan, and I'm not sure there were many people who saw all three.
And I'm not sure we'll ever get a more complete perspective than that we need to not let this ever happen again. The question is, where do you step in to stop it?
The easing of relations with Vietnam shows a different approach, and seems to be an example of why the Allies insisted, in both theaters of WWII, on unconditional surrender.
The First World War ended in an Armistice in which the actual "surrender" took months of negotiations so embued with politics and justification and revenge that the Second World War in Europe seems a natural outcome, and it is my understanding that the demand for total surrender in the next generation was predicated on the need to avoid that sort of indeterminate non-ending ending.
By contrast, we have debated the conclusion of our misadventure in Vietnam in a way that brings to mind the revisionism of post-WWI Germany, where issues of who won and who lost and who sold out and what would have happened if Congress or the hippies or the press or the liberals or the conservatives had not interfered …
Which brings to the forefront a minority of those who have not come to terms with the experience, as if their experience were not only the typical experience, but the only valid experience.
The idea that anyone has been "betrayed" because we're revising our relationship with Hanoi after some 40 years is a contrast with how we treated both Germany and Japan in the wake of those uncondititional surrenders (Hello, George Marshall!) and not enough of a contrast with the more compassionate but indeterminate end to our own Civil War (Hello, Jim Crow!).
I'm not old enough to remember World War II, much less World War I and certainly not the Civil War.
But I'm old enough to remember when history mattered, and to have seen what happens when it is ignored.
My cartoon of the old man in the Vietnamese village was one of two that hung on my door.
The other, also from Punch, showed a uniformed, multi-ribboned general at a cocktail party, saying to a circle of suburbanite civilians, "I say bomb them back to the Stone Age. It's the only language I understand."
It's not a cliche if it's true:
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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