The Saddest Sound

and Texas Messed With

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.” – Mark Twain

The Saddest Sound

I write in a rage.

Somewhere in Dallas, off Preston Road, or down at his Prairie Chapel Ranch, I wonder what George W. Bush is doing and thinking. Does he even have a conscience? How is he reacting to what happened at the airport in Kabul? Surely, even the most politically oblivious man to ever live in the White House must have some sense that there is blood on his hands, or has he rationalized away his guilt by blaming Joe Biden for a blundered withdrawal? Maybe W. is in his studio painting another childish watercolor of himself taking a shower, and not thinking at all, which always seemed to be his greatest skill.

Perhaps Bush is riding his mountain bike down through the cedar and limestone ledges outside Crawford. Sweat is running down into his eyes but he can still see the far horizon of the Edwards Plateau and the shadows on the hill country from summer clouds. The rise in the land is the Balcones Escarpment, which is where geologists say the South ends and the West begins, and it is beautiful. Bush does not deserve such beauty.

I was contemplating another president, too, when I heard the news that American service members died in a terrorist attack at Hamid Karzai International Airport. Jimmy Carter got accused of being a pacifist, often, but was willing to make the difficult decisions to protect his country. When he ordered rescue of the 52 Americans held captive at the US embassy in Teheran, and it failed because of a helicopter crash, his fate as a president was sealed. He understood, though, the nature of the country he was leading, and, no doubt, wondered what he might do about our military aggressiveness.

While President Biden was struggling to talk about what had happened at Kabul, a Jimmy Carter quote popped into one of my social media feeds. The former president asked, apparently of President Trump, “Since 1979, do you know how many times China has been at war with anybody? None. And we have stayed at war.” Carter said that in America’s 243-year history, the U.S. has enjoyed only 16 years of peace and that made us the “most warlike nation in the history of the world.”

“We have wasted,” he said, “I think, $3 trillion on military spending. China has not wasted a single penny on war, and that’s why they’re ahead of us. In almost every way.”

Consider Carter 95 percent accurate. China has been guilty of hammering at some borders with artillery, and since Trump and Biden took office, it has recently flexed military might off the coast of Taiwan, but without firing a shot in anger, and it has not been involved in absurd and futile entanglements like America. Carter suggested the US has spent $3 trillion on military but Brown University said that number was $5.9 trillion in 2018, which was the cost of waging war in Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Add in almost three more years at $300 million a day in Afghanistan, and you begin to talk about real money.

China does not need to take up arms to defeat this country; we are very capable and determined to destroy ourselves with foolishness and wanton spending. While we waste youth and treasure on war and munitions, China builds high-speed rail. Have you ever stepped onto a high-speed train in the US? The Acela doesn’t count. The train runs only in the Northeast Corridor between Washington, D.C., New York City, and Boston and is restricted to its maximum speed of 150 mph along a 35 mile stretch of track. Bullet trains in China rocket down the rails at 373 miles per hour, and there are 23,500 miles of track. The size of the network is amazing, but what’s even more striking is that China had no high-speed trains at the beginning of this century. However, while America was pissing away $300 million dollars a day in Afghanistan, the Chinese were building the largest high-speed rail network in the world, and they did not even begin work on the project until 2008.  

And Mr. Carter was wrong about the time without war. The US has had only five years of peace, which are 1976, the last year of Gerald Ford’s accidental presidency, and all of Carter’s term of office from 1977-80. We have bombed and invaded a ridiculous list of nations and have propped up almost every right wing dictator in the world from the cradle of civilization’s beginnings in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers to the shores of Tripoli.

While George W. issues statements about how saddened he is for Afghan women, Biden must stand before cameras and talk about the 13 service members who died and then listen to Republicans call for his resignation or removal under the 25th Amendment. Remember when criticism of a president was considered impolitic when the nation was at war? The Dixie Chicks were vilified on stage in London in 2003 for saying they were “ashamed the president was from Texas.” Hell, who wasn’t, and still isn’t? He invaded Iraq based on a lie to avenge his father and extract oil while bin Laden was being protected in Afghanistan by the Taliban. Natalie Maines, though, and the other Chicks were mostly banned from country radio because Americans tend to believe every bullshit lie they are told by our warring presidents.  

The party that demanded fealty to a sitting Republican president during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is now calling for the head of the president who inherited the mess created in Afghanistan by his two Republican predecessors. A congressman from El Paso, a Republican, of course, is demanding resignations by Biden’s staff and using the tragedy to increase political noise about the border with Mexico by suggesting terrorists are now bound for America’s shores.

“Suicide bombs in Kabul today, suicide bombs in the U.S. tomorrow. Biden must immediately secure our southern border before it’s too late!” Rep. Tony Gonzales tweeted.

The tweet reminded me of another goober Texas congressman (frequently a redundant phrase, I know), from the Dallas area named Jim Collins, who spent almost a decade in public office. Collins was a low-intellect and he wanted Americans to be fearful of what was happening in Nicaragua’s civil war. President Carter, who did not want to closely ally himself with the socialists attempting to overthrow the right-wing dictator Anastasio Somoza, was promoting human rights, a notion that annoyed Collins. In one of his reelection campaigns, he tried to frighten Texans by telling them that Nicaragua and its socialists were only a two day’s drive from the Rio Grande Valley. (I know a lot of those roads. Even stopping to pee only once every four hours, you might be looking at a week’s journey).

Collins’ rap was the “Domino Theory” in microcosm. The real issue, though, is all about attempts to frighten voters into casting a ballot for you. After 9/11, the worst of presidents (See also: George W), could have convinced his constituents in the land of the allegedly free that they had to be eternally vigilant because there were terrorists on the prowl. Sadly, the “security president” wasted so much time in Baghdad waiting for the Iraq Survey Group to find weapons of mass destruction that Osama bin Laden was able to slip away out of Afghanistan and into Pakistan, a nation that gets more than $6 billion in aid from American taxpayers. Does anyone think that none of that money went to al Qaeda and even the Taliban as they moved back and forth across borders and tried to reconstitute their efforts to fight America?

There is not a much sadder sound than a democratic republic consuming itself with partisanship. During crisis, we concentrate on blame, not solutions, which makes Donald Trump the most recent progenitor of what happened in Kabul. Even after US taxpayers gave their trillions and family members to serve in Afghanistan and create a government, Trump negotiated only with the Taliban when he arranged our departure from the country. By essentially ignoring the Afghan leadership we had fought to put in place, and providing a time-certain date for our complete departure, why wouldn’t the Taliban be emboldened by his concessions, especially when they also included the release of 5000 of their prisoners?

Biden’s choices were limited. The agreement from Doha could be renegotiated but it would almost certainly mean we would go back into the country with more troops to fight the Taliban. The other, saner option was to simply end what appeared to be a war without end. When Afghan soldiers discovered their own government had been almost de-legitimized by Trump’s deal with the Taliban, they were not likely to offer much resistance. The troops that we had trained went to the Taliban leaders in their villages and towns and told them they would not offer a fight when the terrorists came to assert control. If there were any miscalculation on the part of the American president, his military advisors and intel officers, it had to do with how quickly our Afghan allies in whom we were so deeply invested would throw up their hands in surrender.

Bush, whose intransigence created our latest quagmire, could have ended the war, too, and very quickly. In fact, he and his defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, turned down the opportunity for peace. Less than two months after 9/11, the US military had defeated the Taliban, mostly with bombing runs from B-52s, and they were suing for peace. Rumsfeld, however, and Bush were convinced they had the power to wipe out the Taliban and make them disappear. Ever the warmonger, Rumsfeld said, “The United States is not inclined to negotiate surrenders.” Of course not, war is more our thing. The mullahs were not giving up bin Laden and the Taliban melted away into the mountains and over to Pakistan to revivify their resistance, getting aid and comfort from a nation we were supporting with foreign aid.

The president will survive the domestic griping about getting us out of Afghanistan because we are past due to make an exit, and American voters generally don’t consider our overseas conflicts on Election Days as much as they do their pocketbooks, unless those wars are endlessly deadly. Part of the reason Afghanistan has lingered is the lack of exposure the war has gotten from American media. There are no nightly body counts on the TV news as there were during Vietnam, and the Department of Defense does not help facilitate much journalism, unless it is fawning profiles of generals. Republicans can be expected to make much of the tragedy at the airport in Kabul, but Biden and his administration have just overseen the largest airlift of refugees and US citizens in American history.

Plus, there might be a previous example to offer some guidance on where this goes. Ronald Reagan had not even been in office ten months when a suicide bomber drove into the Marine barracks in Beirut and killed 241 US military personnel. They were in Lebanon as part of a peacekeeping force, and for political reasons, had not been allowed to establish a secure perimeter. Reagan vowed to avenge the loss and keep America’s military engaged in the effort to end the fighting between various factions, but four months later he ordered their withdrawal. Was that a defeat? The public had long forgotten the disaster by Election Day and Republicans are still singing hosannahs to the B-actor from Illinois. Of course, there was no Internet in 1983 and cable news was just then aborning.

The war in Afghanistan still won’t be over any time soon, though. We are now obligated to find and destroy ISIS-K, the perpetrators of the airport bombing. The splinter group, which has also been at war with the Taliban for not being sufficiently extreme in its beliefs, will not be easy to track. Their numbers are estimated to be only around 3000 fighters and attacking them will require intel on the ground, though it seems unlikely the US will station troops in the country to carry out any assault. The more probable approach will be to identify targets and send drones on bombing runs. As the political will to maintain in-country forces in Mideastern nations has diminished, the US has dramatically increased drone warfare. Trump approved an average of 73 daily bombings during his term, which was up from the three Obama authorized every 24 hours. It’s not hard, therefore, to see what is about to happen in Afghanistan.

It's still a war without end, and George W. Bush remains a rank amateur painter.

Texas Messed With

I got a note from a reader last week with an interesting question: “What kind of man has a tree fall on him, paralyze him, and then just becomes a monster?” This seems to be the central question of Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s life that confounds many a Texan, who, by nature, are, in my view, considerate and thoughtful people. Of course, it prompts a further inquiry into how such a congenial folk elected our current leader.

While Abbott was fighting schools and counties and cities over mask and vaccine mandates, he was diagnosed with Covid. The governor had been vaccinated and he reportedly got a booster and was immediately treated with Regeneron’s monoclonal antibodies. He returned a negative test after only a matter of days. That’s how science and medicine work.

There may have been some irresponsibility involved in Abbott’s contraction of the disease. The day before he was diagnosed, he spoke to a large crowd of people who were not wearing masks, which was a fundraiser for him in Collin County in North Texas. Why he would take such a risk is unknown. Numerous studies have shown paraplegics with reduced immune system protections caused by a suppression of adaptive and innate immune responses after their injuries. The governor’s injury was decades ago, and this may not be as acute an issue as immediately after his trauma, but why he might take such a chance at exposure is unknown. There is certainly no consolation in his willingness to risk his own health while he is adding danger to the lives of the people that he represents with his irrational policies on Covid.  

Being infected has certainly not impacted his politics. Abbott started slinging more executive orders on the virus even before he tested negative and every one of them played to the conservative base that he needs to win his primary against two other GOP opponents farther out on his right flank. Democrats fervently hope that with each edict Abbott writes that he is alienating an increasing portion of more moderate Republicans who are sending their children to schools or dealing with government institutions that cannot require masks because of Abbott’s orders.

There is an issue over his authority to stop local jurisdictions like schools from ordering masks for attendance. The legal fight is not centered on whether masks can be required but instead on if local officials have the right to make those decisions instead of the governor. Abbott has promulgated mandates using his authority declared under a disaster declaration he signed to deal with Covid. The irony does not escape those of us who cannot abide his ignorance that he is using a disaster declaration to make a disaster worse. Progressives are not expecting a helpful ruling from the state’s Supreme Court. All nine of the sitting justices are Republicans and five of them were appointed by Abbott. The only course of action may ultimately be for good people to disobey bad laws.

While the court contemplates and Abbott politically preens, people are dying. No state or nation has likely ever seen such a virulent disease and government ought to be taking every step available to mitigate its spread instead of issuing statements talking about freedom of choice. There is no choice; you are either protecting yourself and others or you risk death, yours, and theirs. The city where the Texas governor lives is being overwhelmed by the virus and his policies are a significant part of the causation. Austin Public Health said on Friday that the 200 bed ICU capacity for the city was fully occupied and there were 39 other critical cases that were being treated in facilities that were not designed for that type of care. The eleven counties in Central Texas, which are home to an estimated 2.4 million people, have, on a daily basis, an availability of ICU beds that has ranged from 2 to 11, according to the Austonia. Alternative care sites like tents are needed but there is apparently not enough health care workers to provide the assistance.

Travis County’s Friday update on Covid indicated that all but one of the ICU patients at Seton Ascension was unvaccinated. The Delta variant is considerably less discriminatory as a disease and infections at Seton are being reported in ages ranging from 19 to 74. The most difficult factor to accept as an observer is that probably every person infected and each one who dies has likely been vaccinated for many other diseases from the time they were born. Their arms almost certainly bear a chickenpox vaccination scar, and they have been protected from polio by eating a single sugar cube, and measles, mumps, and rubella by simple injections received before they were ten, to be enabled to go walk safely in a dangerous world of diseases before deciding to not get protected against a virus so powerful it spans the globe and is now endangering every soul onboard our “pale, blue dot.”

Vaccines are one of the greatest developments in human history. When I was a boy, the greatest scourge scaring people around the world was polio, a virus that attacked the central nervous system and left people paralyzed, partially disabled, and even killed some victims. Researchers and scientists had been searching for decades to find a process to cure or stop the disease until 1955 when Jonas Salk announced a vaccine that worked. Instead of calling it secret science or doubting its efficacy and resisting getting the shot, people around the world celebrated.

David Oshinsky, a professor at New York University who ran the school’s Division of Medical Humanities, was quoted by NPR regarding public response to Dr. Salk’s great medical achievement.

“Word that the vaccine was successful set off one of the greatest celebrations in modern American history," Oshinsky said. "The date was April 12, 1955, the announcement came from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Church bells tolled, factory whistles blew. People ran into the streets weeping. President Eisenhower invited Jonas Salk to the White House, where he choked up while thanking Salk for saving the world's children, an iconic moment, the height of America's faith in research and science. Vaccines became a natural part of pediatric care."

There was no one on TV telling people to resist getting the vaccine. Newspapers did not publish reports and interviews with self-styled experts saying it was government plot or an experiment. Science was celebrated. Children did not have to worry about getting infected at swimming pools or while sitting through Saturday matinees at the theater.

A boy I played little league baseball with always talked about how fast he could run before he got polio. Coaches accommodated him by letting him pitch and bat and have someone run in his place when he hit the ball. His leg was withered and thin and he walked with a limp. He had got the virus a few years before the oral vaccine, a sugar cube that was distributed to children through schools. We all lined up, excitedly, to swallow the cube that was to set us free.

How, then, do we, as a country with a vast educational system and significant scientific achievements, get to a point where one of our military veterans dies of a curable condition because he could not get into a Covid overwhelmed hospital in Houston, which is one of the largest medical complexes in the world? Daniel Wilkinson, who was profiled by CBS News, lived in Bellville, not far from Houston, and was dealing with a gallstone. Fluid began to build up and his pancreas became inflamed, but even after his doctor sent emails and calls around the state seeking a critical care bed for emergency surgery, nothing was available.

Eventually, an ICU bed opened in Houston and a helicopter flew the Army veteran for an emergency procedure. Doctors, however, discovered air pockets in his bowels and were unable to do the operation. His mother had him disconnected from life support. A 46-year-old soldier, who had served his country with two tours of duty in Afghanistan, had died because the nation he had defended could not deliver him simple health care.

Maybe our culture is to blame, but that might be different with less craven leadership among conservatives. Republicans are continuing their search for people and groups to blame instead of looking into the mirror. The Texas governor, always adept at avoiding responsibility, found an easy scapegoat in immigrants crossing over from Mexico. His complaint did not have sustainability since experts insist the infection rate among immigrants is precisely the same as it is in various cohorts of American citizens. Abbott, of course, is keeping alive a conservative tradition of “othering” immigrants and accusing them of bringing diseases to America, a political practice that harmed ethnic groups ranging from the Irish to Chinese railroad workers. Abbott’s allegations are blown up, also, by the fact his state’s border counties have the highest vaccination and lowest infection rates.   

Well, who the hell we gonna blame now?

The Texas Lieutenant Governor stepped into the breach with his theory that the virus was being spread by African Americans, who he suggested vote 90 percent Democratic. The damn Democrats need to get those Black folk under control and make them get vaccinated, even though Patrick and Abbott are against vaccine mandates. Because African Americans are one of the smallest population groups in Texas, the raw numbers of their unvaccinated are considerably smaller when compared to Whites. The 6.3 million un-vaxxed White Texans is about double the number of Blacks who have not gotten the jab.

The old news is that whether you are an R or a D or black or white or brown or smart or old or young or big or small, you can get infected. The virus just doesn’t care who you are. But Texas political leadership apparently does.

And that puts everyone in danger.