If I mention the date February 24, 2022 to you,  you’ll likely note it as the day on which Russian forces invaded Ukraine. Whether that date will remain carved in stone in your memory probably depends on where things go from here, nearly a year later, with the war in what looks like stalemate but all sides continually threatening escalation and promising resolution.

Humans tend to latch onto this or that “date which will live in infamy,” as FDR dubbed December 7, 1941 — the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the US fully into World War Two.

Most Americans who were alive and aware can tell you where they were on November 22, 1963 when they heard that JFK had been assassinated, or on September 11, 2001 when the World Trade Center went down.

Those dates feel like “turning points” in history, but they really aren’t. They’re just convenient, explosive markers that we use to organize our understanding of the continuum of history.

Pearl Harbor followed years of US sanctions on, and confrontations with, Japan, as well as two years of material support for the war against Hitler in Europe.

The bullets that killed JFK, under almost any theory of who fired them and why, were part and parcel of the US national security state’s ongoing war with “world communism.”

The 9/11 attacks followed a decade of US military intervention in the Middle East, multiple warnings to cease that intervention, and several prior attacks to drive the warning home (a previous attack on the World Trade Center, the bombing of the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia,  and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, to name three).

The Russian invasion of Ukraine followed eight years of “frozen conflict” in seceded provinces from that country’s eastern edge, after a US-sponsored coup in 2014 to install an “anti-Russian” regime.

And, like Korea, Vietnam, the 1979-89 war in Afghanistan, and numerous smaller conflicts, the Russo-Ukrainian war  is really just one more “proxy war” of the kind the US and Russia have conducted against each other since the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — two more “days which will live in infamy” — brought World War Two to a formal close.

With all the nuclear saber-rattling lately, many fear that we’re on the cusp of World War Three.

In actuality, that war has raged for 78 years now, if such markers make any sense at all (we could just as reasonably posit a single war starting between some primordial Cain and Abel).

For 78 years, two big questions have loomed over us: Will the US-Russia confrontation become direct, and will the nukes come out again?

The survival of humanity likely hangs on those questions.

And the only answer that can save us is finding a way to end war. Not this war — war itself.

I’d like to believe that can be done, but the evidence says otherwise. Humans seem to have conflict engraved in our cultural DNA. It’s central to our history, our religion, and our politics.

But we should keep trying.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

There’s no nice way to put this, so I’ll cut right to the chase: Last night, my brother Mike collapsed and, as a result of a massive brain bleed, died hours later.

For obvious reasons, I considered taking a day off from my writing schedule.

For other obvious reasons I considered writing a eulogy about the man who was my idol from childhood — among other things, a star athlete, a career Marine, and my constant competition in a contest to see who could be the family’s blackest sheep. He was a good man, he was my brother, and he was almost certainly the best friend I’ve ever had or will have in this world.

But like me, he was also a curmudgeon who did not suffer a great deal of nonsense, and I think he’d want me to write what I’m about to write.

No sooner had I mentioned Mike’s death on Facebook than the condolences began coming in from friends and acquaintances. And, scattered among them:

“Was it the jab? Could it have been the jab? I bet it was the jab. He shouldn’t have got the jab!”

My carefully considered response: “What the [expletive] is wrong with you people? Are you throwing this garbage at his widow, too?”

I’m thick-skinned by nature. My feelings aren’t hurt because, as anyone who knows me will tell you, I don’t have feelings. And I’m capable of considering insensitive questions/theories and trying to offer rational answers. Like this:

My brother collapsed with a brain aneurysm for the first time in the 1990s. That happened after he retired from the Marine Corps and while he was attending a police academy. He recovered, graduated, and eventually retired a second time as a cop.

A few years ago, while looking at or for something else, doctors discovered and treated several aortic aneurysms.

For more information, consult the dictionary entry for “predisposition.” If I’d had to bet money on how my brother would die, I’d have bet on him dying exactly how he did.

Due to injuries sustained over the years, he became less mobile and gained weight. He had high blood pressure. He smoked, he ate what he pleased, and he professed to be neither in any hurry to die nor in any great fear of dying, only hoping he’d go quickly and with minimal pain, which seems to have been the case.

His vaccination status? I’m pretty sure he was vaccinated early (as a disabled veteran he was in the early wave of eligibility). I don’t know that he got any boosters. It’s not IMPOSSIBLE that the COVID-19 vaccination had something to do with his death, but it seems unlikely.

Suppose that it was likely, though. Does throwing your pet theories at bereaved families offer any clarity or closure? Does it make anything better?

I may not have feelings to hurt, but others do. Please be kind to them. Or, if you can’t be kind, shut your trap and go be unkind somewhere else.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Former US president Donald Trump supposedly absconded from the White House with reams of classified documents, stored them at his Mar-a-Lago home, responded first lackadaisically then combatively when called upon to hand them back over, finally resorting to weird claims about having declassified those documents by “thinking about it.”

Former US vice-president (now president) Joe Biden supposedly absconded from his official residence at the US Naval Observatory with reams of classified documents, which ended up in a closet at a private office, in a garage at one of his homes, and possibly elsewhere. He began returning them of his own volition, but apparently discovered them before, and waited to mention them until after, the 2022 midterm elections.

Either situation would constitute marvelous grist for the scandal mill;. In combination the effect is exponential. Most of that grist has to do with double standards:

First, why do presidents and vice-presidents get to just walk around (and, apparently, out) with classified information when members of Congress have to look at it in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) and hand it back over immediately?

Second, why are presidents and vice-presidents who apparently drive away moving vans full of the stuff treated more leniently than lowly government employees who (possibly unintentionally) take single classified documents home from work in their briefcases?

I’ve written before about a third, non-grist category of scandal: Why do we let the government treat much, or for that matter any, information as secret in the first place?

But here, I’d like to focus on a fourth question: What does this whole thing tell us about the quality of management in the managerial state?

Running back to the first two paragraphs, we should probably understand how unlikely it is that either Trump or Biden personally walked away with those documents. They’ve got staff members to take care of such things. Neither of them has ever been lauded as intellectually curious or an avid reader. Heck, they may not have KNOWN they had the documents until they were told.

The president is the “chief executive” of the federal government. Strip away the pomp, circumstance, and ceremony, and he’s just a manager. He supervises a boatload of employees. Most decisions he makes really amount to signing off on other people’s recommendations.

Two presidents in a row have proven they can’t even impress upon their underlings the importance of not abandoning the nuclear launch codes in a garage or on the floor of a resort.

Would you trust someone with such poor management skills to run a convenience store or coffee shop?

If not, why on earth would you trust him to run the largest, wealthiest, most powerful, and most dangerous organization in history?

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY