THE TRUTH

Inspired by a Jon Carroll column in the S.F. Chron:

If this blog is about anything it's about how we see the world.  This thinking-about-thinking, what we say is real, is the basis of Con-law.  Law, in our society, has to be based in reason.  Otherwise we call it "irrational" meaning crazy, not based on reality, therefore unconstitutional.  So we need to know what's real and what's not; what's rational, and what's not.  This isn't always easy to do.  Democrats think the GOP is nuts, and vice versa.

As it happens, I've just finished reading Max Hastings's "Retribution," about the war against Japan that began a year and a half after I "wuz borned," as a fellow StatNislandah likes to say.  That would be World War Two.  The reason I specify is that yesterday afternoon I popped into a place in the Marina District of San Francisco before heading home, hoping to have quiet beer.  This turned out to be impossible as the bartender, female, had a voice that would steer ships clear of rocks outside the Golden Gate, so I left, but not before being greeted by an old-timer, someone with more years on him than me.  He was the only other one in the place and was trying to start a conversation. "I only come in here around five," he said.  "I've been in during the evening when it's crowded but it's all young people," he said. "They don't even know what World War Two was."

It must be tough to outlive the main event of your life.

I have an attorney friend whose main event was that he got into Notre Dame on a baseball scholarship four decades ago and became a hero.  He's prosecuted murder cases and been in private practice handling heavy-duty stuff for years, since then.  In which of these activities has he had joy?  Playing baseball for Notre Dame.

Well, the reason for mentioning WWII is that the next book I'm reading is a biography of Japan's Emperor Hirohito.  He was emperor before,  during and after the war.  The war was fought by Japan in his name.  He okayed every initiative.  Nothing could happen without his okay.  He was God, after all, in Japan.

This makes him Gang-leader-in-chief, the Number One co-conspirator in any war-crime prosecution. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and Japanese civilians alike died in his name, as he embodied the state.  Hundreds of thousands more civilians throughout Japanese occupied Asia and the Pacific died as the result of Japanese invasion.

We didn't prosecute him, of course.  We needed him to control his defeated people and he needed us to keep his skin.

In Japan, politics and religion (Shinto) had become united.  The result was a war started by Japan and ended by the United States following the use of two atomic bomb blasts over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The two A-bombs are not necessarily what brought the Japanese military to its knees.  Japan's leaders didn't seem to care how many Japanese died, as long as they, especially the military leaders didn't lose face.  For them it was death before dishonor.  And die they did.

Hastings's thesis is that Japan wasn't listening.  They'd already lost the war in the Pacific for all practical purposes, their unsupplied island battalions starving to death in tunnels and caves.  Japan had endured the flattening of Tokyo and other cities by U.S. Army Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay's napalm-bomb dropping B-29 Super-Fortresses roaring over with air fleets a thousand strong at times and the promise of more to come.  They continued to rain down fire even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Yet Japan refused to deal with the U.S. to surrender.  It's ambassador in Russia tried to deal with Stalin, who, realizing that Japan was a leaf about to fall, invaded Japanese occupied Manchuria in order to share in the spoils of the soon to end war.

When Russia invaded Manchuria (then called by Japan, Manchukuo), north of Korea in China, Japan had a million men in China, devastating the place with their atrocities, Nanjing (formerly Nanking) being the most well known example.

Japan was in a state of near-collapse.  The Emperor, who willingly supported the military, finally, in a nod to reality, worked up the guts to cave in, over Army and Navy opposition.  They tried to stage a coup to prevent the surrender. 

Hirohito broadcast a recorded message, which the army tried to thwart from going out, advising his people that the war had ended "not necessarily to Japan's advantage." 

In other words, sorry guys, we lost, but you knew that was happening, didn't you, like from all of the burned out cities and your starvation. 

Japan was starving and homeless, it's industries halted, the nation blockaded and bombed flat.  The American attitude, which I shared, and still do, was that this couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of guys, who asked for it and had it coming. 

That was our attitude, anyone in the U.S., even kids, especially kids, who were around at the time, as I was, a little kid.  I remember sharing the nightmares of the Japanese with friends.  Theirs were as bad as mine, if not worse. 

That was a bad introduction to the Japanese.  Since then, as an adult, things have changed.  I've taught students from Japan, and Russia, and had German friends.  All my own enemies.  People are capable of adjusting attitudes, not assigning collective blame to people who weren't responsible.

I only wish that Japan would own up to its past.  I don't know how else it can move on without outsiders bearing the suspicion that if there's been no acknowledgment, nothing's really changed, has it?

Well, the reason I go into this is because according to the biography of Hirohito by Herbert P. Bix, called Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (Perennial/Harper Collins, 2000), the previous emperor Meiji (Hirohito's grandfather)'s advisers had crafted and handed down, through Meiji, "an ideology of rule grounded in fusion, ever since antiquity, of religious awareness and state consciousness."  Hirohito's tutor, Prince Ito Hirobumi, had earlier written a commentary on the constitution of Japan, in 1889, "in which he had furnished the classic rhetoric for the theocratic emperor:"

"The Sacred Throne was established at the time when the heavens and earth became separated." (Kokiji)  The Emperor is Heaven Descended, divine, and sacred.  He is preeminent above all his subjects.  He must be reverenced and is inviolable.  He has indeed to pay due respect to the law, but the law has no power to hold him accountable to it....He shall not be made a topic of derogatory comment nor one of discussion.

The problem with this is that it is nonsense, even by Japanese standards, as Bix points out.  "Allegedly nonreligious "state Shinto" (as opposed to "sect Shinto") took shape during Meiji's reign directly from the belief that Japan was a holy realm (don't laugh, some Americans think that about us) protected by the Shinto deities and ruled by an emperor who was descended from the sun goddess (instead of say, the Founding Fathers or Jesus).  In 1890, Meiji issued an imperial rescript, a proclamation having the effect of law, on education, asserting that "emperors were the source of all morality."

Well, this is what Japan was filling the heads of its future emperor and its people with.  Not very real, was it.

We have a few beliefs of our own that may not hold up well to the light.  Americans believe in "Democracy," as though we have the God-given right to shove it down the throats of Muslims who don't want it.  Iraq, for example.  Big invasion.  When all the other good reasons to invade turned out to be lies, invasion to install Democracy on those who don't want it even when they find out what it is, turns out to be a good enough reason for us.  Who elected us?

What calls this to mind, apart from the fact that I'm reading about how beguiled by crazy notions other nations have shown themselves to be, is a column by Jon Carroll of the S.F. Chronicle, today, reprinted below.  He points out how difficult it is for the fish to see the water in which they swim.  After being hauled into the boat, they may be able to see the ocean, but not while it's all  around them.

Carroll's description of the difficulty of seeing reality while in it describes the problem experienced by the good people of Salem, Massachusetts who executed nineteen blameless citizens thought to be witches, on the accusation of children who were feeding off the paranoia of their parents and the town authorities, Christian ministers, our famous pilgrims, essentially, who believed that people could make agreements with the devil to harm the neighbors.  These bad neighbors (anyone you didn't like) bewitched children, causing them to fall into fits and accuse the bad, albeit innocent, neighbors.  Other neighbors found the bad neighbors guilty.  It was all perfectly crazy.

But the sad thing about being crazy is that the cure for craziness is not effected by telling the person afflicted "You're crazy!"  Try telling Pres. Bush that he's crazy.  He'll tell you why you're crazy.

I can tell you what I think the cure is, but it's not much of a cure.  Since we don't have international shrinks (We wouldn't listen... Would you listen to a French or a German critic?  You'd call him "just another politician" and ignore him, no matter how correct s/he is.) We have to rely on our own devices, just as the fishies do.  Sometimes they swim into the net, and sometimes they don't, but when they do, it's tuna salad sandwiches for lunch.

The last time we went to war, against Saddam's Iraq, we ignored European critics (our allies) but bowed to demands to go to the United Nations.  We sent Colin Powell, our former top general and then Secretary of State.  You and I were not shown the evidence that Saddam had WMD or was behind Al Qaeda and the WTC/Pentagon bring-down.  But Powell was.  He was allowed to pore over the evidence on which the Bush administration relied to take the country to war.  Powell pronounced it good.  It was bad, as in false.  Powell wanted to be member of the Bush team more than he wanted to be on America's team.  He either lied or was taken in.  In either case, he presented a pack of certified bogosity to the U.N. and off we went to war in 2003, five years ago.  Powell should be ashamed.  Bush should be ashamed.  We should be ashamed.  But here we are, up to here in a swamp teeming with alligators and we can't make a move in any direction, in or out, without getting eaten up.

Because we believed in wrong things.

Wisdom, as a wise man said, is knowing what not to believe.

Powell, our designated wise man, flopped.

Check out Carroll, below and see whether you have a better description of the problem of seeing what ails us while we're ailing, not decades afterwards, when it's too late.

 

REVEALED TRUTH from sfgate.com

Jon Carroll

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

It was interesting this week to watch New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt do a delicate little minuet around "the difference between a news story and a column of opinion." There's also "analysis" and "point of view" to throw into the mix, and an attempt to discern the subtle distinctions among these labels.

With regard to "opinion" and "point of view," he can't see the difference, and neither can I. Maybe an "opinion" can be more sarcastic than a point of view and can contain references to unproven canards. I don't know.

But the assumption in Hoyt's article is that there is some sort of continuum, with "news stories" on one end and "opinion pieces" on the other. A good news story presents the facts in a balanced and nuanced way. Both sides (or all five sides, or whatever) of the story are examined. Historical context is provided. If the reporter is doing a good job, the readers cannot tell how the reporter personally feels about the issue.

This is the ideal, although everyone acknowledges that the ideal is not always achieved. It is believed that scrupulous reporters and scrupulous editors can get close. And my point is: No, they can't. And the reason they can't has nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans, nothing to do with ideology or bias.

What I'm talking about is a problem that cannot be solved. The media will always reflect the consensus view of reality. It will always be bound by its culture. That's a little hard to see right now because there are dueling agendas everywhere, but look back 80 years and it becomes self-evident.

In the 1930s, the majority of newspapers did not address the issue of total equality for African Americans. They did not address the stereotyping of African Americans in movies, on radio and even in their own pages. Black men were sometimes called "boys." The idea that swimming pools and department store dressing rooms should be integrated was considered radical and vaguely disgusting.

In the South, of course, there was overtly racist rhetoric. In the North, there was the pretense that racism went away with slavery. It's not that these issues were unknown or not discussed - the black newspapers were full of them - but they were not part of the national dialogue. Newspapers did not write editorials; politicians did not make stump speeches.

Cultural blindness that pervasive is not the result of any plot. It's the result of history. We are all prisoners of history. What are we blind to now? We can't know, of course, although many people have ideas. We do know that we are blind, however, because it has always been thus.

Think of the history of gays and lesbians. Whenever their existence was acknowledged, which wasn't often, it was in terms of derision. Prejudice against them was considered simply common sense. By and large, not even gays themselves thought of their plight in political or legal terms. They were not underground fighters; they were merely underground.

This rather large social phenomenon went essentially unnoticed in mass-media outlets. Even artists had trouble dealing with it, even gay artists.

There's a good movie in town just now (catch it before it goes away) called "Hollywood Chinese." It's about the portrayal of Chinese people by Chinese and non-Chinese actors in American movies. It's filled with stuff you didn't know, as well as amazing clips from dozens of movies. And, as far as I know, the debates that raged in the Chinese community about "The Good Earth" and Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu were not reflected in mainstream newspapers. It was a story; it was just not a story the editors could see.

The 20th century was a melting-pot century, when everybody got to come out of the closet and wave and say who they really were. It was a time that savored diversity. It also created a significant backlash, but all that was known, all that was reported. Prejudice is not at an end, but blindness about prejudice has been much reduced.

But that's only one aspect of the news. Right now we are seeing (in my opinion) a dawning realization by Washington reporters that they were badly conned. They thought they could estimate the level of cynicism in government, and they were wrong. It was worse than they thought. Some people would like to believe that a Democratic administration will change that, but I doubt it. The permanent government, like the Dude, abides. It protects itself.

So maybe that's the next course correction; maybe that's the next way in which reporting the news will change. But there are always stories buried beneath the rubble of cultural assumptions. Some people already think they know what they are, and some of those people are right, but some of them are just folks with wild hairs. How do you tell them apart? How would I know?

Hurry take me to the Mardi Gras in the city of my dreams; you can legalize your lows, you can wear your summer clothes in New Orleans; and I will lay my burden down, rest my head upon jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

   

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/16/DDNP1059CG.DTL

This article appeared on page E - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle