A Note From Marin County

(Aurthur is indeed still alive and busy subverting the dominant paradigm, or something. Here's a letter from the old fart just received at Bad Hat HQ. Note: the Ken Burns link was added by Bad Hat, not Arthur.)

Dear Ass Hat,

I hope everyone has taken the opportunity to watch Ken Burns' "War" series. Very tough watching because the sum of human misery from that war simply stretches the imagination. I am curious what Uncle Bob thinks of it overall. What struck me the most were the comments over and over again about the official blunders, miscommunications and screw-ups. Each of which cost thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of needless deaths. Stupid leaders are not unique to the Iraq War. We just are hearing more about it, more quickly, whereas a lot of decisions in WW II were glossed over at the time and people were so relieved to have the war end that I think there was little taste for revisiting past decisions.

What also stuck in my throat was the description of the intentional allied firebombing of cities in Europe and Japan. There seemed to be a calculated science involved in setting enormous areas of cities on fire by creating "firestorms". When you think about it, when a firestorm was able to cause a hundred thousand deaths in one night, mostly civilian, was it really such a great leap to decide to drop atomic bombs on cities? I doubt that anyone knew much about the subsequent deaths that would result from radiation exposure, so my assumption is that they just figured, "Hey, one bomb or five thousand incendiary bombs, either way a hundred thousand will die. What's the difference?"

And that is the terrible calculus of all-out war. Again, I would defer to Uncle Bob for his reaction and comments on how people viewed things at the time, but it very much seems as though many viewed it as "Us or them", by fair means or foul, and such an idea was not entirely unreasonable. Could we stumble into another war of such ferocity? Hard to say, but equally impossible to rule out.

It is a compelling argument for electing the right individual. I wish I knew what was going to happen in the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries. Florida is going to be early, too, and despite threats to not count their votes, they will. It all seems a messy and arbitrary system.

Arthur