365 Days in Vietnam

     "Vietnam was the wrong war, at the wrong time, in the wrong place and for the wrong cause."

We aren't fighting about Vietnam anymore. We are reflecting on it and feeling sad.

I am attending a college class reunion. The era of the late 1960s is on my mind. As a student, I had a draft "deferment." To maintain the deferment we needed to be making regular progress toward a degree. That mean no dropped classes and no "gap years." 

I was desperate not to be drawn into it. As I saw it, we were taking over the role of the failed French colonialists, a bad cause. To make things worse, General Westmorland announced a bad, shameful tactic in carrying out the war.  He tried to show measurable, quantifiable proof of our progress. He chose the body count method. Every night on the news there would be a report saying some high number of supposed Vietcong were killed compared with about a tenth that number of American soldiers. We were winning! See? So my service would be to die but take ten other people with me. It seemed so wrong.

Medford essayist Larry Slessler was ten years ahead of me at Medford High School. He served in Vietnam. I asked him to share his experience.

Larry Slessler

Guest Post by Larry Slessler

Show the number 365 to any Vietnam Vet and they will immediately know that as the number of days required for their completed Vietnam tour.

My 365 covered the period from mid-March 1965 to mid-March. 1966. I left my wife and two kids for a war I knew was a waste almost instantly upon my arrival in-country. Vietnam was the wrong war, at the wrong time, in the wrong place and for the wrong cause.

I quickly discovered we had no strategic goals. We had “Domino Theory (Just that a theory), “Win the hearts and minds” (A slogan), “Search and Destroy” (A tactic). Nowhere could I find an overall strategy to win the war. As an aside; search and destroy is not effective in “Winning hearts and minds.” Killing someone’s family and/or friends is a poor tactic in the winning of hearts and minds

Our enemy had a cause that he/she would willingly risk death for. My cause, and everyone I knew in Vietnam, was to do my/our 365, go home and never come back. I was never willing to lose my life for that war. Notice I did not sat “Give my life…” Lives in war are not given, they are ripped from you in horrific violent ways. Leaders like to honor the men and woman that “Gave” lives. It makes it seem so “Nobel” and honorable to the civilian population the leaders need to support the war effort.

I got to know a Canadian national that had lived in Vietnam since the mid 1930’s. He had been there under French Colonial rule, the Japanese occupation in WWII, the return of the French and the French Indo-China War and finally the American War. He told me in 1965; “You Americans will lose your/this war just like the French did. However it will take longer because America has more money than the French.” He called that exactly right.

For many years I had hope that my country had learned a lesson from Vietnam. That lesson was never enter a war without clear strategic goals. Our short well executed war for Kuwait in the 1990’s, under President Bush the elder, was a great example of strategic planning and execution. However, the US followed up with a 20 year war in Afghanistan that reverted to the Vietnam model.

After watching a 20 year war that made the same mistakes as “My” war, I lost any belief that Vietnam had any meaning for me. As I said to kick this off; “Wrong wars, wrong time’s, wrong places and wrong causes.” Maybe I should take solace that the “Merchants of Death” war profiting businesses, made a “Killing.” Yes this is a play on words. And no there is no solace.

In Defense of Woke

The word "woke" carries a heavy load of meaning.

The culture-war fight over wokeness--both its cultural meaning and the word itself--has obscured the word's roots...in music. Rick Millward is a singer, songwriter, and music producer living in Southern Oregon. He reminds us of the early history of the word.

Guest Post by Rick Millward

“...best stay woke, keep their eyes open"

The fact that Regressives are all in a tizzy over "woke," as are some otherwise Progressives as well, indicates that we have in this, a word, something that triggers a defensiveness far out of proportion to its meaning.

So what is “woke"?

Let’s start with Webster:

“woke : aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice.)”

I was surprised to learn the term has been around for a while, notably back in the early days of the civil rights movement. From VOX: 

". . . later, the phrase “stay woke” turned up as part of a spoken afterword in the 1938 song Scottsboro Boys, a protest song by Blues musician Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly. The song describes the 1931 saga of a group of nine Black teenagers in Scottsboro, Arkansas, who were accused of raping two White women. Lead Belly says at the end of an archival recording of the song that he’d met with the Scottsboro defendants’ lawyer who introduced him to the men themselves. “I made this little song about down there,” Lead Belly says. “So I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there — best stay woke, keep their eyes open."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrXfkPViFIE

Predictably, It was a musician who creatively brought the term into the vernacular and now the list of songs that include woke in their lyrics is long and growing. In that sense woke is in the same class as “hip” and “cool," words whose popular meaning transcends their dictionary entry. More recently the term #staywoke started appearing in social media as a catchall for being alert, or simply awake in a boring situation and then came into wider usage after the BLM protests as a rallying cry. The context shifted to one of social justice and specifically the policing of African Americans. This is about where Regressives started feeling uncomfortable with it.

Vox, October 2020

(Sidebar: If you’re wondering what is meant by Regressive in this context I’d suggest to ask Mr. Google, but here’s a quick definition: "One who is so conservative, they wish to move things backward in time instead of merely keeping things the same/progressing forward.” Examples abound, for instance book banning, though I should point out these efforts balk at actual book burning so I guess that’s progress in a way.)

In the intervening time woke has morphed to include meaning a heightened awareness of the circumstances of other marginalized groups, one might say all marginalized groups. Progressives have been acutely aware of social justice inequities going back the early days of suffrage and the civil rights struggles that followed. Regressives now throw the term back with contempt, asserting that it unfairly targets them as being guilty of past racism and bigotry. It’s not that, it’s simply pointing out that many Americans are living in a dream, one that conveniently puts those unlike themselves, lacking their advantages, not the least of which is skin color, on the sidelines of society, and in fact, history. For example  they chafe against, for them, new and confusing restrictions on speech and behaviors that imply insensitivity.

The elevation of woke as a controversial term certainly illustrates the power of words to evoke emotion. It scares right wing types over the suggestion that the horrors of slavery, Jim Crow and the subsequent marginalization of African Americans have yet to be corrected, as are those against Native Americans, women, and the LGBTQ community. Woke suggests that the America they cherish as White, Christian and prosperous may not be quite the utopia of their dreams.

                                                          --- ---

Rick Millward was part of the Music City songwriter community, collaborating with other artists and producing over 30 projects including two EMMY nominated soundtracks. His new record “Loveland” is available on Spotify and other streaming platforms and his new album, “Astronomy”, will be released soon.

F. U.

     "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; The worst are full of passionate intensity."

'Let's go, Brandon," was the cleaned up version.

It is hard to know whether we are seeing genuine anger. Maybe it is simply strategy. People want attention, so they use shocking, in-your-face language to get it. These are fighting words intended to show disrespect. We win, you lose. The angriest words aren't everywhere, but they are around--especially in rural areas and on pickup trucks. 

I received the commentary below from an Ashland, Oregon resident who has not yet been hardened into the new reality of political language. "Don't use my name," he said. He had an up-close experience. He wanted to describe his feelings, but he doesn't want to fight about it.

Guest Post by Anonymous

A few days ago, I drove into Medford to visit a friend. As I turned onto Crater Lake Highway from the I-5 off-ramp, I noticed this bumper sticker plastered across the rear window of the Acura SUV in front of me. In big bold letters it read:

                         FUCK YOUR VACCINES
                         FUCK YOUR FEELINGS

The driver was a middle-aged woman with tattoos on her arms. Living in Ashland, I don’t get to see this type of thing very often. I know I live in a bubble. I jokingly refer to my town as “The People’s Republic of Cosmic Healing.”

The bumper sticker had what I suspect was its intended effect – I was shocked. It reminded me of how insular my world has become. I had worked in a conservative industry before retiring – financial services. Most of the people I dealt with were Republicans, as you might expect in that field. Most were good people, folks you would want as your neighbors – responsible, polite, intelligent. Most, I suspect, voted Republican for economic reasons – low taxes and minimal regulation. Some were strongly anti-abortion. But we were all in business together and needed to get along and respect one another.

I had a very good client, Dave, who was very well read. He idolized Ronald Reagan. He would periodically send me links to conservative thinkers. It never occurred to me to similarly send him the works of progressive writers. The desire to proselytize was a one-way street. In 2008 things began to change. He started sending me more vitriolic emails, aimed at his new target, Barack Obama. The vitriol got more and more wicked. It never crossed into overtly racist, but I found it very off-putting. I didn’t respond to them – I deleted them.

Once. Dave and I got together for dinner with our wives. As he steered the conversation to politics, my wife said: “Dave, we know that if your family had an emergency, we would be there for you (in fact, we had been), and we know that you would be there for us. Let’s agree to disagree about politics and nurture our friendship.” But Dave could not let it go and the political emails continued.

So, in 2016 when Trump was elected, I thought – Well, what’s good for the goose….. – and sent him a political cartoon lampooning Trump. His reaction was over the top angry and defensive. The psychological term is “over-determined response.” I realized that I had hit a nerve – not just about politics. Since then, I get annual birthday emails, no doubt generated by his sales software, but for all intents and purposes, our friendship is over. He was my last conservative friend.

Our society is becoming more and more fragmented into two tribes – Conservative and Progressive: Republican and Democrat. My personal experience verifies this for me. I know that unless we can find common ground and talk to one another respectfully the bifurcation will not heal.

But I am at a loss. And although I know that I “should” feel empathy for people who are so angry, or perhaps, so threatened by our changing society that they feel the need to plaster their cars or front yards with “FUCK BIDEN” or “FUCK KATE BROWN” or the like, I’m finding it difficult to generate that empathy. The anger on the other side is palpable and threatening.

The best I can do most days is to feel sadness, but even that, as honest and compassionate as it might be, is eschewed by the angry right, for to paraphrase the bumper sticker, which put it so concisely:

                         FUCK MY FEELINGS

The right not to publish

Freedom of speech is more than the right to say things. 

It is the right not to be forced to say things you don't want to say.

Freedom of speech is at risk.

Three Supreme Court justices--Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas--voted to uphold a Texas law that would prohibit large social media companies from refusing to publish material they thought dangerous or offensive. Alito's opinion stated that Texas's law "does not require social media platforms to host any particular message but only to refrain from discrimination against a user’s speech on the basis of 'viewpoint.'”

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/21a720_6536.pdf

Protecting an entity's right to express a viewpoint is the whole point of the First Amendment. The rule works in the opposite direction as well. A newspaper or other publisher need not create or distribute words, images, or ideas they consider objectionable. That is telling some private party what they must speak. 

The Texas law does not apply to me and this blog. The Texas law applies to social media platforms with 50 million or more customers--way more than this blog. But the principle is the same, so there is risk to everyone's freedom, and to the viability of publishers everywhere. 

Let me reveal a sad little secret about the "comment" sections of any social media site. There are weird, crazy, angry people out there. I need to moderate comments to keep the blog from becoming a cesspool and legal liability for me. Moderating comments is a time consuming nuisance, but absolutely necessary. Many political sites have given up and stopped allowing comments. Keeping out the crazies is too much work.

This blog gets malware spam comments. I delete them before they are published. This blog gets plagiarized news articles that would introduce copyright problems for me. I delete those, too. This blog gets obscene, threatening comments generally directed at me personally, sometimes others. I delete those, although I collect them and send them to local law enforcement which has a growing file. More dangerous to the political environment, this blog gets proposed comments purporting to be from well-known local and national political figures. It attributes words and ideas to them, and they have their own reputations to protect. I delete those. Also dangerous are other  comments--some obscene, some not--written by a well-known local resident which makes libelous assertions about Medford-area people. That local troll is beyond the reach of public shame, but I am not beyond the reach of a lawsuit for having published his assertions. I delete those, too, and collect them for law enforcement's files.

International social media companies have scale that makes them a potential danger to our democracy. They can spread conspiracies and misinformation that leads to insurrections. Texas law targeted Facebook and Twitter. They have the right to protect themselves from trolls, spammers, and viewpoints they don't like, and they are smart to do so. 

Fox News has a right to editorial control of their product. If Fox does not want to air commentators critical of Republicans, it is their right to control their message. Shepard Smith, Carl Cameron, and Chris Wallace are off the air. They weren't "on message." They presented news that contradicted the opinions voiced by the more-popular opinion hosts. Fox has a point of view. They have freedom of speech and the press. 

Facebook and Twitter should have it, too. Who says? The Bill of Rights.

Melon-planting season

To everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
And a time to every purpose, under heaven

A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap

                Turn. Turn. Turn. The Byrds, 1965 

It is planting time for melons in Southern Oregon. 

We had a cool, wet May. No use planting melons when the soil is cold. It finally warmed up with temperatures in the mid-80s. 

I am not growing many melons this year. There is no money in melons, not when grown by a 72-year-old guy whose back gets sore. The effort doesn't come from bending down and picking up a three-pound melon. That is good exercise. The problem is that after picking up the second, third and tenth melon, a tub has 30-plus pounds of them, and I carry them to the end of the row. Then do it again and again. Then stack the tubs into the back of a truck to take to the washstand. Then I wash them, pack them into 45-pound boxes, re-stack the boxes into the truck, drive them to the back door of a supermarket, unload them, and then sell them as 40-pounds of melons. I give "good weight." 

Melons now sell in commercial markets for exactly what I sold them for in 1966, less than 20-cents a pound. There are a couple of local boutique places I could sell my melons for a little more, but they want me to tell them they are organic, and I can't do that. Melons are part of the cucurbit family of plants, along with cucumbers, pumpkins, and squash. Cucumber beetles attack and eat the stems and leaves of the very young cucurbits.

Cucumber beetle, about the size of a ladybug

I need to control for that with an insecticide--Sevin--that is safe enough that the label says one can put it on tomatoes three days before harvest. I put it on very young melon plants, like these below, long before fruit has formed. 

Just emerged, about 9 days after planting

About 30 days after planting

 I consider this perfectly safe, but since I use Sevin, they aren't organic. 

Without the protection from the cucumber beetle the plants get a virus and become weak and sickly. I cannot ethically sell them as organic. It might be foolish, but I stick to my position: "Do you want perfect vine ripe melons off of a healthy vine, or ones off a sick, diseased vine?"  Some people prefer to stick to their position, wanting organic.

I was amused to see melons for sale at a Whole Foods Market in Charlestown neighborhood of Boston a few summers ago.  They were selling these:

See the stem. The melon didn't "slip," which is the term for the melon making a clean separation of the stem from the melon, which happens when the melon is ripe. This isn't even a partial slip or a pretense of a slip, cleaned up with a finger nail. The melon was picked very green, then packed and sent to Boston. If the grower got 60% of the retail cost of the melon, that would be about $2.00--three times what I would get.

I would never sell a melon picked that green. The consumer paid top dollar, but the melon is deeply flawed. The taste in a melon comes in the last few days on the vine, when the sugar content rises to push the stem off the vine. Those melons will look good and cut nicely into cubes that display well on a fruit platter, but the melon is inevitably going to be insipid in taste, at best. It wouldn't have the multiple flavor notes of a vine-ripe melon. 

Door panel of my pickup truck

But notice that I am complaining from the outside. Some grower has a commercial business, and I don't. My complaint isn't really jealousy. I mourn the passage of time. Back when I was in college, I hauled 50-pound boxes of melons all day long, effortlessly. I earned and saved $1,000-$1,200 per summer from the melon crop alone. That was half of a Harvard tuition (now about $60,000 a year.) Today, even if I sold my melons for $2.00 each, the cost of production would mean my profit off an acre of melons would be negligible. My back would kill me. 

I grow melons now to give away and to show off to visitors with what I call "melon tourism." I will do a blog post on that shortly. 

Kids like dropping melons and eating them in the field. Adults, too.

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Oil companies are doing great.

Be careful what you wish for. You might get your wish. 

Wall Street Journal, Feb 1, 2022:

     "In addition to the austerity pledges companies have made to shareholders, oil companies are under pressure from climate activists and environmentally-minded investors to invest less in production."

Of course gasoline prices are high. Oil prices are high. 

Democrats concerned about greenhouse gases ought to be thrilled gasoline prices are high. The best signal to Americans to conserve on transportation fuels is to make them more expensive. People will drive less, bicycle, use mass transit, and buy more fuel efficient vehicles.

Some university endowments announced divestments from fossil fuel companies, a public gesture of disapproval. Some climate activists took the opposite tack and used their ownership of oil companies shares to get board seats and make change from the inside. Exxon now has three board seats controlled by an activist hedge fund. They urge Exxon to reduce exploration and redirect itself toward renewables. 

Oil companies hear the political signals: Don't explore and produce so much. Meanwhile they are getting a similar signal from financial markets. Use "capital discipline," i.e. cut exploration expenses. U.S. drill rig counts are a third of what they were eight years ago. Wall Street investors are wary that oil companies will once again overcommit to production. 

So now, demand is up as the world's economy rebounds out of the COVID austerity. Then take Russian oil out of the mix. Prices are up and so are profits. 

There is oil available here in the USA. Our country can be energy independent, if we want to be. In the 1970s our foreign policy and economy was deeply distorted by our dependence on foreign oil from the Middle East. We are reminded of that peril by watching European countries trying to unwind their dependence on Russian oil. We have significant deposits of oil in Alaska and throughout mid-America. We have been drilling oil in the Permian Basin for a century and keep finding more there.

I mention this not to praise fossil fuels nor to minimize their effect on CO2 levels and climate. My purpose is to acknowledge that Americans are making a choice. We have the oil. High gasoline prices don't "just happen." They are the result of a mixture of intentions and policy, including those made by the people who are likely to pay the highest political price for their decisions: Democrats.

High energy costs are a significant factor in the cost of everything. The inflation of the 1970s came when OPEC raised oil prices. The low inflation of the recent past was helped by the unusually low price of oil. Low prices sent a signal to American consumers to relax their worry about gas mileage. All this was good for the economy generally and bad for oil companies. It made consumers happy, but it hurt the environment. Now the world has turned.

Democrats have a problem. People are unhappy about inflation generally and higher gasoline prices in particular.  Democrats made a policy and messaging choice. Democrats urge a rapid switch away from fossil fuels, and that message came faster than has development of price-competitive alternatives. "Drill, baby drill," is a Republican chant, not a Democratic one. Democrats are conspicuous for stopping pipelines, ending drilling on federal land, and attempting to outlaw fracking. 

The parties made their choices. Choices have consequences. High gasoline prices may help to save the planet but voters aren't connecting the dots between gasoline and hurricanes, droughts, forest fires, and smoke. They see the price of gasoline and blame Democrats. A Democrat who can make the oratorical case for sacrifice now for a better climate tomorrow may be able to reduce the political cost. It may be impossible. People want things cheap and we want it now. JFK said Americans would

 "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty."

That may not be who Americans are anymore. 

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Oregon Governor Candidate: Goldilocks.

Oregon will have a fabulously well-funded third-party candidate, Betsy Johnson.

She is the Goldilocks candidate. Not too Democratic. Not too Republican. She is just right. 

Or maybe just wrong.

She jokingly refers to herself as an equal-opportunity pisser-offer. She makes a virtue of it. 

She will appeal to voters frustrated with the status quo of Democrats pushing an agenda that seems too progressive and Portland-centric for many, and frustrated that Republicans dealt with that by walking out and leaving the state. Gridlock. Can't we all get along?

Betsy Johnson

I have some hard litmus-test requirements for a person to get my vote. I insist a candidate support personal and sexual privacy. That means the suite of rights that developed in the 1960s and then evolved to include homosexuals. This means the right to interracial marriage, to use contraception, and the right of a woman to choose abortion, at least until the viability of the fetus, the Roe standard. A second litmus test is that a candidate must oppose Trump's Big Lie. I won't support someone who justifies stealing the election or someone who enables and excuses people who support it. 

Betsy Johnson passes those those litmus tests. She supports sexual privacy and abortion and she says that Biden won the election. Bingo!

By passing my litmus tests she risks being unacceptable to Republicans. Maybe some Republicans have tired of sore-loser-Trump, so they might accept someone who acknowledges that Biden won. Abortion, though, is probably a hard "no" for most Republicans.

Betsy Johnson has a mix-and-match brand, with something for everyone to like and dislike. She had been a Joe Manchin-type Democrat. She opposed the $15 minimum wage. She opposes the Democrats' carbon cap-and-trade bills. She is a strong supporter of the agriculture and timber industries which positions her against some environmentalists. 

She projects a rough, casual rural/country vibe, not a Portland metro vibe. That could cut either way. There are Democrats who are frustrated and impatient with the homeless camps and street violence in Portland and who see Johnson as a protest vote. She is aggressively, unapologetically un-woke and politically incorrect. That, too, could both help and hurt.

A new complication arose. She is pro-gun and just spoke at a gun event, right in the midst of another mass shooting. It is an in-your-face gesture, for which Johnson is famous. Guns are an unmistakable partisan signal linking her to the GOP. The gun issue may tip Democrats away from her. They may decide she isn't a happy independent, after all. She is a fellow-traveler with the guns-at-any-cost people.

GOP Congressman's Christmas greeting

I expect an unusually ugly campaign season of negative ads. The sensible strategy for both Democrats and Republicans is the same: Make Betsy Johnson unacceptable. The party that has the least leakage over to Johnson will likely win the governorship. It will be a wolf-in-sheep's-clothing barrage. Republican messaging will be that she is a pro-abortion baby-killer. Democrats may mention the minimum wage and forest policy and liken her to Joe Manchin, but their strongest argument is guns. "Guns" is a one-word symbol of Republican extremism and political intransigence. 

I suspect that the abortion issue is more salient than the gun issue. That helps Republicans. But Betsy Johnson looks and sounds like a rural Republican--even more so than does the GOP candidate herself. Moreover, the fact that she will be getting attacked by Democrats for guns may drive downstate Republicans to see her as one of theirs.

Betsy Johnson could win. Oregonians may get sick of all the partisan negative advertising and decide they hate both parties. A pox on both houses. Johnson may seem like the compromise choice. 

Early morning update! 

Four days after being all-in on guns, Johnson is walking back her gun position: She told the Willamette Week newspaper: 

“My willingness to support new [gun] laws reflects my belief that, as governor, I need to represent the views and concerns of all Oregonians, and not merely my own, If I am asking others to compromise, I must lead by example and practice what I preach.”

Johnson is flexible and politically astute. She understood her problem and reacted quickly. This is trouble for Democrats. 

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