THE WORLD AT WAR

As you know the first in the trilogy of Bob Woodward books was called "Bush as War". Who would have guessed that designation would apply not only to the entirety of Bush' eight years but also years into the following President's term? Last night on 28 they had a thing called "California at War". It's sometimes hard to remember that World War II only lasted three years and just over eight months from start to finish. The way people talk about it you'd think it went on for twenty years or something. Basically three years and eight months is nothing in today's time reconing. That's less time than it took to bring Phil Specter to justice after the murder. Windows 95 came out and the bugs in it wern't fixed till Windows 98. There's three years. But at the time there were tremendous invoations in military attack strategy and the aircraft that were used and vast improvements in aeronautic dezign. Of course at Berkley they were working on the Bomb. You had all these blacks coming to California and they say the black population increased 300 percent during the time of the war as Blacks sought a better life out here. Of course the army was segregated. There was still all sorts of racial bigotry in the air. They used Blacks to load the most dangerous explosives. One day there was a horrible explosion in Richmond that killed three hundred. There were the zoot suit riots as chicanos were routinely beaten up by sailors stationed here. They were saying how subversive bee-bop and jazz were and hos it led to marijuana usage and illicit sex. There was that roomer that marijuana gave Blacks the courage to stair down a White man, and this was unacceptable. You had persecution of Italian Americans, even Joe DiMaggio's parents living here. And you had the Japanese internment camps in the Owens valley and elsewhere. The government would only allow to be shown pictures of Japanese smiling. J. Edger Hoover with his reputation for paranoia didn't come up with this scheme. That was a home grown idea right here in California, home of the bigot. I always thought any reports of Japanese subs sinking ships off shore around here were just wild roomers but apparently it really happened. They even had "Black-outs" and one night there was the Battle of LA where they shot off all this amunition at nothing. It kind of makes police prohibitions against firing guns on new years eve seem rather silly compared with the stuff they must have fired that night. You had the Hollywood propaganda industry gearing up to appeal to racist sentaments. But at least even in a segregated military a Black or a Chicano could "feel like a man" of equal value to a White during the short time of the war. Women got a major boost in self estteem. According to the thing last night health car and day care got started at that time. But all in all it wasn't a good time for so many racial minorities. I think I would have gone nuts living in that era with all the propaganda blairing everywhere. I would have thought I was in North Korea or some place like that. In that Clark Gable movie "The Misfits" there was a line about what sort of activities are "acceptable" now in today's society to prove yourself a man. In those days all you had to do is join up upon graduation from high school, be handed a gun and start wasting the enemy. They tought math cources for the guys so they would know how to plot missile trajectories for bombs and aircraft navigation and stuff, and of course in high school all the woman took cources on first aid and tending to wounds. But apparently the bars stayed open all night and you could get drunk any time you wanted.

Now we jump to the present. You still have "stuff" going on today. Yesterday congress took the time to vote on condeming and add about general Petrayas put out by Move-on.org. O Bama wisely said he wasn't going to dignify the move with a vote. Hillary apparently voted not to condemn the add. George Bush condemned the add in his press conference I didn't even know he had yesterday. It would seem proving you're "Patriotic" still is important today. People might draw inferences about your patriotism if you voted the wrong way on that issue. We could well have the whole World at war soon. George Bush talked about some deal between North Korea and Syria where Syria would obtain all of North Korea's nuclear technology. We don't know what kind of deals were made and Bush regarded the topic as Top Secret and not to be commented upon. And we hear Israel has been making raids into Syria that are hush hush. And you can add to this witch's brew the feeling everybody has that we are about to bomb Iran and expand and inflame the war over there. But if we do bomb Iran- - we don't know whether the whole Shiite block of nations- - Iran, Syria and the PLO might not declare war on us. Also Russia, who is somewhat allied or sympathetic to Iran, has this thing called the "vacuum bomb". This is a device for making a nuclear sized explosion without the radiation. The Russians might decide to use it because it's a "clean" bomb. There are reports the bomb may be a dud, but there are also other reports. The bomb uses ultra-sonic shock waves to generate first a small explosion, which in turn sets off a much bigger explosion. Extraordenary heat is generated and the interaction actually sucks all the air out of the area making things even worse. It kind of reminds me of that Star Trek device where Captain Piccard had the option of using this device to burn or melt away some of the excess gas on a planet that was blocking the sun and driving down temperatures, but if there was an even minor error, every bit of atnosphere on the planet would be burned up. I don't know how much of this technology parrells the "vacuum bomb". People seem to think that the United States has no enemies today worth worrying about and this really isn't the case. Many people want to relive World War II because of the fantastic progress we made on so many fronts back then and the gigantic boost in self esteem people had back then. Back then war was "wonderful" and "glorious" and all that stuff. War made a man out of you. I'm reminded of that incident on "The Cain Mutiny" where Captain Queeg was talking about his crusade in 1939 to recover some stolen cheese aboard ship, and someone had made a key to the refrigerator and stolen the cheese, and Queeg exposed them and got a comendation for it. It would seem everybody is for some "Crusade" by this nation against the Moslem world is seeking to "relive the cheese incident" in Captain Queeg's life. Personally I wish we made the sort of space progress we did in the sixties where we set a goal and stuck to it. Back during WW II times for building a battleship were dramatically reduced as the War progressed and we got more efficient. Today it seems R & D takes longer and longer. To release even a new version of Windows takes years and years of testing. Back then we just didn't HAVE "years and years" to waste piddeling around. We got things done. I guess what our next American President has to do is let us regain a sense of moving foreward. I think liberalism today is in trouble is because people look at men like Roosevelt and Churchill and then look at John Kerry and John Edwards, and these men just don't measure up in their eyes. Too much of liberalism is telling us we CAN'T do things, and I think we need to change our message.