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“I Have No Family To Say Farewell To”

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Chinese Soldiers Around Time of Tu Fu (8th Century)

Two of the greatest poets who have ever lived are Li Po and Tu Fu (a.k.a. Du Fu), who not only lived around the same time in China but who knew each other. Here is a heartbreaking poem by Tu Fu about coming back home after the wars to find his home has changed irrevocably.

A Homeless Man’s Departure

After the Rebellion of 755, all was silent wasteland,
gardens and cottages turned to grass and thorns.
My village had over a hundred households,
but the chaotic world scattered them east and west.
No information about the survivors;
the dead are dust and mud.
I, a humble soldier, was defeated in battle.
I ran back home to look for old roads
and walked a long time through the empty lanes.
The sun was thin, the air tragic and dismal.
I met only foxes and raccoons,
their hair on end as they snarled in rage.
Who remains in my neighborhood?
One or two old widows.
A returning bird loves its old branches,
how could I give up this poor nest?
In spring I carry my hoe all alone,
yet still water the land at sunset.
The county governor’s clerk heard I’d returned
and summoned me to practice the war-drum.
This military service won’t take me from my state.
I look around and have no one to worry about.
It’s just me alone and the journey is short,
but I will end up lost if I travel too far.
Since my village has been washed away,
near or far makes no difference.
I will forever feel pain for my long-sick mother.
I abandoned her in this valley five years ago.
She gave birth to me, yet I could not help her.
We cry sour sobs till our lives end.
In my life I have no family to say farewell to,
so how can I be called a human being?

Was I Ever a Hippie?

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You Won’t Find Me in This Picture

I arrived in Los Angeles at exactly the point when the Hippie movement was reaching its height. Many of my acquaintances looked much like the poseurs in the above photo. Oh, I had long hair all right, but nothing that was radical for the period. I went around dressed in chinos and a Jeans jacket, usually with a black cowboy hat which I bought at Disneyland.

In fact, I never really got close to any Hippies: I regarded them as not quite real, more like play actors.

There was another even more compelling reason I never became a Hippie: I had just undergone brain surgery for the removal of a pituitary tumor and had no desire to experiment with recreational drugs. In the late 1960s, I did not think I was long for this world. I had no desire to rush my exit from this life.

Though not drawn to the Hippies, I was something of a political radical. For a brief time, I attended meetings of the Progressive Labor Party at UCLA, but found studying Marx’s Surplus Theory of Value breathtakingly boring and the girls in the group heartbreakingly ill-favored.

Due to the influence of my late friend Norm Witty, I hung out for a while with The Resistance, which protested the Vietnam War by attempting to interfere with the draft process. In fact, I sent my draft card back to my draft board in Cleveland, fully expecting to be arrested for two felonies ([1] Returning my draft card and [2] Refusing to carry a draft card on my person) and sent to a Federal prison. It turns out that so many of my fellow students returned their draft cards that the Federal Government decided it was too expensive to prosecute and imprison the offenders.

When Alexander Got Tyred Out

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Ancient Tyre

I have been reading Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Discourses, in which he writes about governance and warfare in his day (around AD 1517). In Book II, he gives an anecdote about how not to negotiate with Alexander the Great:

When the whole East had been overrun by Alexander of Macedon, the citizens of Tyre (then at the height of its renown, and very strong from being built, like Venice, in the sea), recognizing his greatness, sent ambassadors to him to say that they desired to be his good servants, and to yield him all obedience, yet could not consent to receive either him or his soldiers within their walls. Whereupon, Alexander, displeased that a single city should venture to close its gates against him to whom all the rest of the world had thrown theirs open, repulsed the Tyrians, and rejecting their overtures set to work to besiege their town. But as it stood on the water, and was well stored with victual and all other munitions needed for its defence, after four months had gone, Alexander, perceiving that he was wasting more time in an inglorious attempt to reduce this one city than had sufficed for most of his other conquests, resolved to offer terms to the Tyrians, and to make them those concessions which they themselves had asked. But they, puffed up by their success, not merely refused the terms offered, but put to death the envoy sent to propose them. Enraged by this, Alexander renewed the siege, and with such vigour, that he took and destroyed the city, and either slew or made slaves of its inhabitants.

On Foot in Pinkville

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U.S. Troops in Vietnam

“Pinkville” is the name that the soldiers who fought on the ground gave to the villages around My Lai, site of the 1968 massacre in which hundreds of Vietnamese civilians were killed in 1968. It is an area well described by Tim O’Brien, whose books on the Vietnam War from the point of view of the troops on the ground are probably the best books to read about the war as it was fought.

O’Brien started in 1975 with his own experiences in the war, set forth in a book entitled If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. He asks “Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely from having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.”

And that’s exactly what O’Brien does. The stories are all true in his first book, with only the names of characters being changed.

Then, in 1978, he wrote Going After Cacciato, the first of two fictional works about the war. This was followed in 1990 by The Things They Carried, which is my favorite of his books.

Whether writing fiction or straight memoir, O’Brien is a powerful writer. In If I Die in a Combat Zone, there is a chapter entitled “Step Lightly” about the different kinds of land mines used by the Viet Cong. The most horrifying of these is the Bouncing Betty:

The Bouncing Betty is feared most. It is a common mine. It leaps out of its nest in the earth, and when it hits its apex, it explodes, reliable and deadly. If a fellow is lucky and if the mine is in an old emplacement, having been exposed to the rains, he may notice its three prongs sticking out of the clay. The prongs serve as the Bouncing Betty’s firing device. Step on them, and the unlucky soldier will hear a muffled explosion ; that’s the initial charge sending the mine on its one-yard leap into the sky. The fellow takes another step and begins the next and his backside is bleeding and he’s dead. We call it “ol’ step and a half.”

Yipes!

The Greatest Chart Ever Drawn

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Charles Minard’s Chart of Napoleon’s Russian Campaign 1812-1813

Never before has a military campaign been illustrated so completely as Charles Joseph Minard’s 1869 Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l’Armée Française dans la campagne de Russie 1812–1813. It shows the strength of Napoleon’s forces at every point in the campaign.

Compare the red band at the far left of the illustration showing Napoleon’s force of half a million men as they crossed into Russia in June 1812. Notice as the red band narrows until it reaches Moscow, particularly after the casualties of the Battle of Borodino.

The black band illustrates the retreat from Moscow as winter is beginning to set in. That band gets progressively narrower until the crossing of the Berezina River at Studienka, highlighted by a black smudge I made on the above chart. After Berezina, only 25,000 combatants and 30,000 non-combatants survived. You can see the black band narrow after Berezina.

That particular battle was frequently described in Honoré de Balzac’s stories. particularly “Adieu.” It market the catastrophic end to a catastrophic campaign, which led in short order to Napoleon’s first exile, on Elba.

On the lower part of Minard’s graph, the relative temperature at several selected points during the retreat from Moscow is shown. Note that it was it its lowest around the time the Berezina was crossed.

He Did It All Right!

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He Has Good Reason to Worry

Back in February 27, 2022, I submitted a blog post entitled Putin Screws the Pooch. In it, I wrote:

I cannot help but think that Vladimir Putin has made a serious misstep in his assumptions regarding Ukraine’s willingness to abide by his thuggish behavior. The Russians made the same assumptions that Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney made when we invaded Iraq in 2003: We were not in fact welcomed with flowers and candy, and, moreover, we are still there.

Now Putin is in a worse position politically than Nikita Khrushchev was in after the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Not only has Putin failed in his attempt to walk all over Ukraine, but he had to put down a quasi-coup by Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Group mercenaries.

When one is a totalitarian dictator, one cannot afford to look weak. And Vladimir Putin at this time looks a lot weaker than Khrushchev did in 1964 when Brezhnev and Kosygin replaced him as top dog of the Soviet Union.

And how can you be top dog when you’ve screwed the pooch like Putin has?

Victory Day?

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Gosh, I Hope No One Throws a Firecracker at Them

Monday, May 9, is the anniversary of Russia’s winning the Great Patriotic War—or, as we know it, World War Two. The news media have been speculating for weeks that Vladimir Putin will make some sort of announcement of victory tomorrow. Or, he just might decide to declare war on the “Neo-Nazis” that have been depriving his troops of anything approaching victory.

There will, of course, be a big military parade. But does Putin have enough working tanks and armored personnel carriers to impress the crowds on Red Square? I am eager to see what that madman plans to do for an encore.

I have young friends who for the first time in their lives are afraid of a nuclear confrontation. There may be one, but only on a small scale because it would cause widespread outrage around the world (but not in Russia). Perhaps Putin has more to fear than my young friends. His Ukraine invasion made the Rodina (Motherland) look not only bad, but downright cheesy. It would be no surprise if the FSB replaced Putin with a new stooge and put Vlady in a psychiatric nursing home “for his benefit.”

That’s the way things are done in Russia.

Pre-Columbian

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ancient The photo above is of a contemporary figurine of a Pre-Columbian idol on display in Quito’s Museo Mindalae. Although I doubt there was much trade between the ancient peoples of Ecuador and the Olmecs, Maya, and Aztecs of Mexico, there are clearly similarities in their religious iconography.

Before I began my travels to Latin America in 1975, I was puzzled by the images I saw of deities and demons from the more civilized portions of Meso-America. There were many similarities. But once one crossed the Rio Grande and visited where the Anasazi lived, the imagery is altogether different. And when I traveled in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile, I saw precious little suggesting an advanced ancient civilization (though, in all honesty, I never visited the Northwest of Argentina, which was part of the Inca empire).

Now look at the depiction of one of the Mayan Priest Kings of Yucatán from the Mérida Museum of Anthropology:

Note the elaborate headdress and the warlike demeanor. Do not expect mercy from either of these rigidly powerful figures. I remember a conversation that took place at a symposium at UCLA decades ago between two archeologists, Michael Coe and Nigel Davies, about whether they would prefer to be in captivity to the Mayans or the Aztecs. Both agreed that, although the Aztecs were an empire and the Mayans were a group of city states, they both feared being prisoners of the Maya.

Why? Take a look at this fresco from the ruins at Bonampak in Chiapas:

Here you see the victorious Maya of Bonampak with their prisoners captured in a war with another city state. The scene is described in the Sixth Edition of Robert J. Sharer’s The Ancient Maya:

The aftermath is presented on the north wall. Here the full-frontal figure holding his jaguar-pelted spear, again probably Chan Muwan, accompanied by his warrior allies and entourage, along with two women at the far right, stands on the summit of a platform to preside over the captives taken in the battle. The chief captive sits at Chan Muwan’s feet, while the rest of the unfortunate prisoners are displayed on the six steps of the platform, where they are tortured and bled from their fingernails, held and guarded by more victorious warriors. These are the captives that will be sacrificed; one sprawled figure may already be dead, and the severed head of another has already been placed on the steps.

What all these Meso-American peoples had in common was highly organized and ritualistic warfare. Reading the history of many of these city states based on commemorative stelae, paintings, and other media, one clearly gets the feeling that life for the common people was anything but fun.

The He-Man Woman-Haters Club

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Why Is That Guy on the Left Not Sporting a Beard and Turban?

Well, Kabul has gone Kaboom once again. The predictable happened: The U.S. started a war, lost interest in it, and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves waited for their opportunity to pounce, which they did. As in Viet Nam, the U.S. must evacuate thousands of Afghans who made the mistake of thinking we were in it for the long haul.

Note: The United States is never in it for the long haul. We are short-termers in just about everything we do.

The biggest losers, of course, will be the women of Afghanistan, who must resign themselves to a lifetime of drudgery, hidden behind ugly face-and-body-covering burkas. Naturally, women will no longer be able to go to school or work with men in jobs. Your hospital nurse will probably have a beard and turban as well as some kind of automatic weapon.

The Taliban remind me of the Cult of Hashashins in medieval Lebanon and the murderous Thuggees of India, who have given us two words in our English language: assassins and thugs.

Will the Taliban be as plug-ugly as they were in the lead-up to the 9/11 terrorist attacks? Or have they learned to be something other than cartoon villains resembling a 1930s Popeye cartoon based on the Ali Baba story? Only time will tell.

War All the Time

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Ball Court at Maya Ruins in Copán, Honduras

I have just finished reading Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path by David Freidel, Linda Schele, and Joy Parker. It was not an easy book to read, and it was a bit on the speculative side, but it brought forth a highly original interpretation of the fall of Classical Maya Civilization (approximately AD 250-800):

In their own way, the Maya thus acknowledged the terrible truth of war as statecraft: the authority of a small number of people over the many who must suffer and die in combat. But unlike our leaders, Maya rulers themselves went to war with the men they sent; and Maya kings and their noble vassals put not only their bodies but also their souls in jeopardy every time they clashed. It is no exaggeration to say that they lived for those moments of truth, those trials of the strength of their spirits. Every major political activity in their lives—the dedication of every public text, image, and building of royal and community importance—required the capture and sacrifice of rival peers. Only in this way could the proper rituals of sanctification be fulfilled, the gods nourished, and the portals of communication opened between the human and the divine.

When the Maya stopped inhabiting their ceremonial centers around AD 800, it wasn’t because they had disappeared: They found that there was too high a price to pay to maintain the god/kings in their position of rule. My personal belief was that certainly was one of the reasons why the Classical Civilization fell, but not the only reason

Macaw Markers from the Copán Ball Court

Intimately connected with the endless wars were a serious of gladiatorial combats in the form of … a ball game. Ball courts were scattered throughout Mesoamerica. At times, the games were friendly and/or ceremonial, but often they were played with the god/kings and nobles of other cities. The losing side was sacrificed to the gods. During the game, the ball could not be hit by the hands or feet: Only the thigh or hip could be used. The ball, made of rubber, was bounced against the sides of the ball court—but at no time was it allowed to touch the ground. If it did, game over—and lost.

Many a Maya god/king was sacrificed in this way, including the great 18 Rabbit of Copán, who was sacrificed at Quiriguá, which was a much smaller Maya polity.