August 5, 2019 Yet again we are hard upon the anniversary of the most successful arms treaty, certainly of the 20th century, and so far, of the 21st century.

August 5, 2019

Yet again we are hard upon the anniversary of the most successful arms treaty, certainly of the 20^th century, and so far, of the 21^st century.

[As an aside, my son Sean, now wears the dog tags issued to his maternal grandfather, Lt. Cdr. Walter I. Chapman, MD. Despite the Washington Naval Arms Limitation Treaty and the Kellogg-Briand Pact, plus a slew of Nobel Prizes and a world-wide warm and fuzzy feeling, the Japanese Navy and the German Navy tried for 2 years and in 2 oceans to sink his ship, the USS Marblehead [CV12] They failed.]

3 days of intense negotiations, including face to face jaw-boning, were begun by a single United States emissary above the skies of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. 3 days later, August 9, 1945, the codicils were added at Nagasaki. It ended on the foredeck of the USS Missouri [BB63] when General Douglas MacArthur pronounced, in a voice straight from the right hand of God, said “These proceedings are closed.”

There was none of the nonsense connected with 11/11/18. That was the day the Germans stopped fighting in the war to end all wars. Not a single foreign soldier had put one boot on German soil and it could and would be said that Germany had not been beaten. Vide Carthage in146 B.C. the French at Waterloo in 1815, the States in rebellion at Appomattox in1865, and, finally, the Japanese in Tokyo Harbor on September 2, 1945.

There were no mulligans in those wars. Platea? Tours? Lepanto? Vienna?

Speaking of conflating particulars and universals, the Dayton shooter was an avid fan of Senator Lieawatha Warren. Does that mean she is responsible for those deaths? The Gilroy Garlic killer appears to have been a Muslim. Does that mean that they no longer are a peace-loving people? If Trump can turn rat into a 4-letter racist hate word would not Logic dictate that all things are possible? 

Would it brand me as an incorrigible, irredeemable deplorable if I were to remind the world that Solzhenitsyn said, in 1945, at the end of one war and the beginning of another, “this all happened when man turned away from God?”

I first went to the “dives on 52^nd street” when Auden said, “we must love another.” It is never too late to “come out of the cave and look up and see the stars.”

In one of those quirks that History delights in confronting us with, General Leslie Groves, the GC, the head honcho who put “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” together, also worked on the design of the Japanese Internment camps. Since it is an act of moral superiority to paint over a mural of George Washington in San Francisco, a city where people are encouraged to take their pants down and shit in the streets – If it’s OK to paint over Washington does that make it OK, retroactively, for the Taliban to blow up the statues of Buddha? – should we, retroactively, undo his work on the Manhattan Project and let the Nazis build the bomb, win the war, and kill all the Jews?

Also, I read tonight where it was minus 2 degrees Fahrenheit in Tallahassee in 1899. It is fashionable to blame Trump for everything but this one can’t be dumped on his exiting the Paris Climate Accord. How did that happen? More importantly, what unscrupulous businessman made it happen?

Get back to me,

Meanwhile, Peace, ain’t it wonderful?.

Kevin Smith

WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUOTH.NET

PS – I am trying get my hands on my favorite ‘70s bumper sticker, the one that said

NUKE THE WHALES!

PS – Do you remember when that gnomish Chinaman introduced America to a new word 35/40 years ago? I was an OCD NYT puzzle doer then but I never heard of hegemony. Then this cute, inscrutable Mandarin was at every Chamber of Commerce social function, wearing a cowboy hat like his real name was Hopalong friggin’ Cassidy and to Hell with the Injuns, we had to worry about the Russkies. Everybody, even Clemenza, says we should have stopped Hitler. Who has the will, the chops, to stop or even check China? Maps don’t change by themselves. They have announced what they want to do. They have even announced how and when they will do it. We ignore them at our own peril. “The Gods pf the Copybook Headings” have opened a new ledger.