I post this on my blog every Memorial Day to remember my two friends who died in the Vietnam War. SW

Today, I will again lift a pint of ale in memory of my two friends and their comrades who died in Vietnam.

I honor them without honoring the aggressive and unjust war in which they fought.

I don’t know what their reasons were for joining the military, maybe it was simply that the draft gave them no choice, but it really doesn’t matter now. What I do know is that their lives were unnecessarily cut short.

As a young peace activist in the late 60s, I probably didn’t always make a distinction between the soldiers fighting the war and the war itself. The soldier and the general were equally responsible as I saw it.

But I think differently now. I place the main responsibility for war on its architects in high places and a social system – capitalism – whose logic is to expand, dominate, and make war.

But I think differently now. I place the main responsibility for war on its architects in high places and a social system – capitalism – whose logic is to expand, dominate, and make war.

Ricky and Cotter — my two friends who lost their lives in Vietnam — were near the bottom of the food chain of war making, nothing but cannon fodder. They were working class kids whose lives didn’t count for much in our government’s war plans. Neither was born with a silver spoon in their mouths, which is why in no small measure they ended up with a gun in their hands so far away from where their hometowns.

I will always wonder what kind of lives they would have lived had they safely returned. With no hero’s welcome, no counseling waiting for them, no easy slide into a well paying job, I can’t help but if wonder if they would have had the internal resources and external support to come to terms with their war experience and live productive lives?

I easily (perhaps unfairly) doubt it, because each of them was not that different from me, and I have no confidence at all that I could have made that transition. It was hard enough to grow up at that time, even without the ghastly and up close bloodletting of Vietnam on my emotional resume.

I wish, though, that they had that chance. I wish that their lives hadn’t been cut short doing things that no one should do. I wish that they had the opportunity to live long and joyful lives.

I miss them. I celebrate them. They were “my buddies, my friends.” I wish they could join me at the Bronx Ale House today for a pint in their honor, although knowing them, I suspect, a single pint wouldn’t quite satisfy them, or me for that matter.

I also hope that we could toast to the millions in our generation who opposed the war as well as to their comrades who never made it back from Vietnam. Both deserve to be honored.

Finally, I like to think that the three of us could clink glasses to the people of Vietnam who suffered so much during and after the war, and who are now rebuilding their country in conditions of peace.

Maybe that would be too much to expect. Unfortunately, I will never know. They will join me only in memory this afternoon. I wish it were different, but I will treasure their memory anyway, as I wash down my pint of ale.

Like most everybody else, I’m hanging out and social distancing. The arrival of warm weather and its companion, a bright sunny day, helps the spirits as does cutting back on cable news where Trump is a constant presence. Still it is hard to shut him out entirely. He doesn’t let a day go by without saying or doing something that is stupid, dangerous, and evil.

It’s mind boggling that the deaths of nearly 100,000 people don’t seem to register with him. Not a bit. He’s indifferent. Empathy is absent. Comforting is something he doesn’t do. Even fake concern is nowhere it sight. What preoccupies him is his slipping polling numbers against Joe Biden. Nothing concentrates his mind and triggers wild conspiracy theories and bizarre behavior quite like they do. His latest invention in a long line is, no surprise, Obamagate.

Sorry Jerry, but he is “a long strange trip.”

All this would be more than enough to drag me down, if I let it. But I don’t. In no small measure because I see, sometimes up close, usually at a distance, so many acts of kindness, solidarity, and sacrifice from so many people. Some even giving their own lives as they help others. Deeply sad for sure, but noble and heroic too. It lifts my spirits, although if I could drink wine and/or beer without a hangover the next day, I could easily develop a drinking problem.

But I don’t, at least not every day. Instead, I keep busy in other ways. Write a little, exercise daily, rehabilitate my arm (I tore the tendon in my right arm and decided to do physical therapy instead of surgery; didn’t want to go into hospital in early April), read, including some books that I have been wanting to read for a long time, walk every morning, cook, clean (with a little urging), mow the grass (big yard), entertain my dog, and zoom weekly with family and friends. I’m sure I’m forgetting something. Ah, I did. It’s Netflix, and also I’m participating in a well coordinated voter registration and get out the vote campaign, using postcards.

Hope you are doing ok and staying safe too.

NYT oped writer Michele Goldberg writes that a Joe Biden’s presidency could well surprise many and I believe she is right. Progressives and people on the left should know by now that the trajectory of a presidency depends on much more than the past positions of a presidential hopeful. And yet it seems the lesson has to be learned again and again. Who would have guessed that Lincoln or Roosevelt or, in some ways, LBJ would usher in transformative changes? It’s never good to put people (and in this case, presidents) in tightly constructed categories that allow no space for them (or us) to change. More than a few abolitionists were disappointed when Lincoln won the Republican Party presidential nomination instead of their guy. And it took a while for them to change their attitude toward him, despite ample reason to do so, as Lincoln rose to the challenges of leading the country in a bloody and long civil war. Here’s another aspect of politics where MLK has much to teach us.

In the course of this pandemic, I’ve heard political commentators mention that good leaders express empathy in moments of national trial. When I first heard this, I didn’t attach much significance to the observation. It seemed soft, moralistic, a little fuzzy. But as the pandemic gathered force and spread death and destruction across the country, my thinking shifted. I began to think that a sense of empathy on the part of our leaders is more than a feel good thing; it’s political and consequential.

Here’s how, albeit in a negative sense.

In Trump, we have a president who lacks empathy. In fact, his tank is empty. He sees himself as a “tough” guy, as he understands the term. As a result, someone who is supposed to lead the country is emotionally detached from the suffering, despair, and deaths that millions of families are experiencing during this pandemic. Others hardship and pain simply don’t register in any sort of felt way with him. Thus he’s unable, and we see it daily, to provide even an ounce of solace to grieving families and a grieving country.

But it doesn’t end here. It’s not the only reason, but it also figures into his utter inability, and we see this daily too, to feel any sense of urgency to unite the country in a common, science grounded effort to beat this pandemic. His focus is elsewhere. On blaming others, in sowing division, shopping conspiracy theories and dismissing experts, in taking care of his wealthy friends and gaining political advantage over his rivals and critics, and, above all, in winning reelection in November, even it means issuing a death sentence to untold number of people, old especially, but also others in the early and prime years of their lives.

If you expected that this outrageous narcissistic behavior would find no support beyond the White House, you would be wrong. Not only does it find support, but the support is fawning and substantial. It includes the Republican Party, more than a sliver of billionaires and corporations, most evangelicals, and a white, majority male, grievance driven, mass base.

In their eyes, he’s not a wayward son, not politically and psychologically aberrant. He’s their guy, they’re clean up hitter, someone who’s ready to do their dirty work when it needs to be done. He may have a few rough edges for some, but they are hardly disqualifying and come in handy at times.

If we extend the lens out a bit, Trump appears not as a fluke, not as as an inexplicable contingency of history, not as an immoral, unfeeling misfit. He’s, instead, the logical result of the rise, growth, and consolidation of right wing, white-nationalist, misogynist, anti-working class, anti-democratic authoritarian power at a time when the reproduction of capitalism and the way that “life used to be” is fraught with challenges and challengers. Or said differently, a revanchist movement, born in the aftermath of the Civil Rights struggles and the surge of movements that followed, finds in Trump a prodigal son whose mission is to complete the institutionalization of extreme right wing authoritarianism for years to come, albeit in a highly personalized form.

Is it any wonder that the November elections are so suffused with urgency for all of us who believe in a kinder, egalitarian, democratic, just, and sustainable world?

Marx once said something like capitalism comes into the world “dripping with blood from every pore.” That drip continued, at times turning into a cascade of bloodletting, as capitalism moved to its mature and then late stage. I suspect its latest iteration engineered on the part of Trump and his Republican acolytes — the forced reopening of the country without adequate testing and tracing and the inevitable spike in obituaries that will result  — wouldn’t surprise him in the least. It’s no exaggeration to say that this motley crew are “merchants of death.”