173. Two minutes on the War--Saving Face

When I wrote of my fear that Putin, if hemmed in by economics and resisted successfully by Ukrainian forces for long enough, might lash out with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, a friend wrote back in agreement. And then said “We need to offer him something to save face.”

 

But is there an exit route, something that we can give him or he can take which will result in enough satisfaction that he will stop this horrendous invasion? 

 

Granted, Putin has stepped past many lines. Last night, on “Firing Line,” NYTimes photojournalist Lynsey Addario said that the Russians are now indiscriminately lobbing ordinance into population centers, and deliberately targeting civilians—women, children, old people—who are evacuating. Addario, who has “covered every major conflict and humanitarian crises of her generation, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Darfur, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, South Sudan, Somalia, and Congo,” says that Ukraine is the worst. It took years for three million refugees to flee Syria—and less than a month for that number from Ukraine. 

 

This puts Putin in the company of past bad dictators, including but not limited to Pinochet, Marcos, Khadafi, Saddam Hussein, Riza Shah, Idi Amin, and his own countryman, Josef Stalin. We needn’t get into discussions of who exiled more, who killed more, and who was more dangerous to neighboring countries. All of these men—yes, all men—are noted for their bad deeds. All gripped power and hung onto it by intrigue and corruption. All had cadres of supporters, sometimes idealists who thought, at the beginning, that they were following a man who would benefit their countries. Some fled—most famously Trotsky fleeing Stalin—but always a group stuck by the dictator and became complicit in everything he wanted and directed in his use of power and personal vision for the country. 

 

In retrospect, wealth seems only an adjunct to the crucial commodities of vision and power—restoration of past greatness a common thread from the Shah’s identification with the ancient Persian Peacock Throne to Putin’s Greater Russia. Most pundits discount the direct influence of oligarchs, the toadies who serve Putin but don’t influence him. They are not part of the inner circle, which includes Putin’s old KGB colleagues and others who’ve risen through military and intelligence ranks.

 

Looking at that roster of mostly twentieth century autocrats, their demise almost always came from within, from the inner circle itself, or from a still-standing religious or ethnic power center close-by. Marcos was toppled by a military faction; Idi Amin by exiled Ugandans and his failed war against a neighbor; the Shah by rising forces of democracy and religion; and Stalin died in a pool of his own urine when his guards feared waking him. 

 

All dictators come to their ends, and rarely is it a safe exit provided by outsiders. The outside can, as Ukraine and much of the world are doing now, stress the dictator’s rule, but the collapse comes from within. Look to the military and Kremlin intelligence—or his own health—for Putin’s end.  

172. One minute on the War

It’s true that more people die in plagues, pandemics, and the swarms of infectious diseases that swell and whither in their own times and places around the world than die in wars. A third of Europe died in the plague; fifty to ninety percent in indigenous American tribes fell to smallpox, measles, and other European diseases in the first years of colonization; and an estimated fifty million died world-wide in the 1917-18-19 Influenza epidemic. We’re now at eight million Covid deaths world-wide, and are approaching a million in the US alone. 

But Ukraine is heart-stopping. 

 

Diseases are car accidents and Ukraine is an airplane crash. More of us die in car accidents than in plane crashes, but we have levels of control on the highway that we, as passengers, don’t have on planes. With diseases, we vaccinate, mask, drink clean water and take care of ourselves—or we don’t. Our Covid Pandemic, a stealth invader, works its way through the crowds, picking off one and leaving the next. Most—though not all—of us who take precautions live on. 

 

In the War in Ukraine, personal choices—to flee or to stay, to go to this bomb shelter or that one—are small compared to the power and randomness of Russian artillery and bombs. War in Ukraine is, as one still surviving told a reporter yesterday, a daily lottery for its citizens.

 

Doctors and politicians differ, sometimes mightily, on dealing with the Pandemic, but they drive the buses and we are citizen passengers, mostly listening to their advice, sometimes screaming at them to make the other turn. Or we drive our own cars and disregard the warnings of experienced drivers completely. It might be an at times contentious world, but it is largely predictable.  

 

To stay with my analogy, Putin is the aggrieved pilot of a huge plane loaded with deadly weapons. He also has a yen for ancient glory. And looking at the pictures of Meriupol, the destroyed hospitals and refugee-filled theater, the blocks that were once apartment houses, and remembering the jihadist preparations before and the lottery-like outcomes after 9/11, I fear that his deadly combination of aggrievement and hubris will result in Putin flying his plane into a deadly explosion that will engulf us all.

 

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171. War and Pandemic 2

In four years of World War, from 1914-1918, over 5 million people were killed, 116,500 of them Americans. In basically two of those years, 1917-1918, some 50 million people world-wide, and 675,000 Americans, were killed by the Influenza. 

 

It’s true that the War and its aftermath—the celebration of the Armistice—coexisted with the Influenza, and that they intermingled, borrowed deaths and casualties from each other. Nevertheless, the differences in the numbers are shocking. 

 

But not as shocking as the photos and videos of bombed out cities in Ukraine, of apartment houses, hospitals, theaters, houses and neighborhoods reduced to eye-stopping rubble. Not as shocking as “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Gallipoli,” books and movies that dramatized World War I. 

 

Wars have heroes and villains, display boldness and cowardice. Zelensky is a hero, Fauci is not.  Putin is a villain, the gaggle of anti-vaxxers and Covid minimizers pathetic, but not, in most minds, the embodiment of evil. And it’s true that in war one side’s heroes might be the other sides’ villains, but history often shines light that is bright enough for each side to discover its own heroes and villains after the war is done. 

 

War is history’s sharp turns, when new nations emerge—as they did after WW I—and new and sometimes surprising alliances grow—as those of the US and Japan, the US and Germany did after WW II. 

 

Disease is history’s slogs, the long hauls that depopulate and weaken peoples and nations, and allow others to emerge stronger. The patterns of changes that The Plague wrought on Europe, or the impacts of the Influenza on the post WW I World are fodder for academic treatises, but not clear enough to teach in the standard history texts. Rarely and only briefly best-sellers.

 

Our time is like this. We don’t know what the outcome of Russia’s war on Ukraine will have—but we already have our heroes and villains, with more to come. 

 

And we don’t know where Covid 19 will go, how it will seep across nations and continents, but do know that it already has stolen more lives than the last decades of regional wars. It’s heroes are quiet ones, dressed in lab coats and hospital smocks, but we are too busy embracing “normal” life’s return to pay them much mind. Their stories will eventually be told in books, but not best sellers. 

 

War will always top the best-seller charts. 

  

170. The Pill

The Pandemic has become a light and almost refreshing diversion from the horrors of war. Yes, people are still getting sick—and some are even dying. But the numbers are down so far and went down so fast that people across the country are breathing more freely again. And breathing without masks and trepidation at not wearing masks.

 

I think it was buried somewhere in President Biden’s speech, but  that free testing will now be accompanied by a free pill to those who test positive. The new Pfizer pill is apparently successful at warding off the worst impacts of the virus. This is the clincher. Even if I get the disease, there is now an easy way out.

 

That pill reminded me of another, of “the pill” that came into the world in 1960. It was an apex moment in contraception. Other methods of birth control, which had been common, especially among wealthier Americans, were prohibited by a series of “Comstock laws” beginning in the 1870s. They gradually loosened, and in the 1940s Planned Parenthood emerged as a vocal advocate for family planning, and in the 1950s, the Rockefeller founded “Population Council” started preaching the gospel world-wide as an antidote to overpopulation. 

 

It seemed that the pill had arrived just in time to solve problems, from family poverty to international resource scarcity. In the bargain, it would make another oft-practiced but increasingly distained and prohibited practice, abortion, unnecessary. 

 

Not quite. The pill came in 1960, but the purity movement stubbornly hung on. In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled that government could not stop married couples from practicing birth control. It wasn’t until the 1970s that restrictions for unmarried women were lifted. 

 

The liberalizing movement continued with the fight for abortion rights—the pill had apparently not fixed the birth control problem completely—and in 1973 the Supreme Court ruled that a woman had the right to control her body, including the right to abortion. 

 

Purity movements continue to fight abortion rights, and to advocate for specific definitions of family, the world’s population continues to grow, and starvation and wars beset us at this historic moment. It is doubtful that the Covid pill will completely stave off a virus that continues to weave its way around the world, continues to impact health care systems and local and national governments, and the lives of millions of ordinary people. 

 

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169. Pictures of War--and of Covid

Pictures of war are always dramatic—even the sad ones. They run the full range of emotions, from the battered and beaten bodies, the maimed and the dead, to the triumphant entries of American tanks into Paris and Baghdad. In between are the slogs of war, the muddy battlefields, forced marches, the rests in foxholes and cigarettes lit with Zippo lighters. 

In the past it was all men; women were in the nursing corps, dancing with soldiers at USO parties, handing out donuts to the troop trains. Beginning, in my memory, with the Israelis, women warriors have been part war. And here I should mention that long before women were allowed or encouraged to help make war, they were recording it in words and pictures. Margaret Bourke-White’s WW II photo-journalism opened doors that have led to our time, when we accept women war correspondents from Kabul to Kyiv. Jane Ferguson’s reports from Afghanistan during and after the evacuation were stunning. 

Pandemics are not so picturesque. There were early dramatic photos and video of EMTs hauling Covid-dead bodies out of New York apartments, and some sad footage of folks saying farewells to loved ones through hospital and nursing home windows. And then the pandemic pictures drifted off to interviews with Fauci and with overworked doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators. Like a droning white noise in the background.

Until last night, the closest thing to triumphal photos of the current pandemic were the flag-waving Canadian truckers, and theirs was divisive work meant to further divide, not to rally a broad public against a common enemy. 

Last night Joe Biden took the podium for his State of the Union speech without a mask, Vice-President Kamala Harris and Speaker Nancy Pelosi flanking and behind him. They too were maskless. The room was full, a different picture than what we have been seeing for the last two years. Most of the Senators and Congressmen and women, the staffers and dignitaries, were maskless and smiling. I caught sight of my friend Pramila Jayapal smiling up close with the President—and remembered the TV cameras catching her hiding in fear in the balcony on January 6, 2021. 

We weren’t all happy with everything Joe Biden said—from left or right. But we all seemed to embrace the moment, to somehow realize that the worst of Covid-19 might be behind us, and that what most of us have done to ward it off—with masks, distancing, isolation, and vaccination—has been worth the effort. It was, somehow, a reassuring picture. 

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