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By Michael F. Duggan

Americans love a parade and they love a military hero. I know, my father was one. Forty-five U.S. presidents were veterans and twelve generals became Commander in Chief. Until fairly recently, military service was virtually a requirement for national elective office.

Years ago a friend of mine who worked at a veterans memorial, was asked by some visitors what they could do to contribute (meaning volunteering in a conspicuous way at a symbolic site). He asked them if they had ever considered volunteering at a V.A. hospital. It wasn’t the answer they wanted to hear. Americans love yellow ribbons and bumperstickers supporting the troops, but we frequently lose interest after the parade.

We celebrate our veterans on Armed Forces Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Veterans Day. We celebrate their service and sacrifice. But if we really appreciated the cost of war to veterans, their families, and the country, wouldn’t there be a day set side to reflect on the causes of war and the reasons why we mortgage the lives of young American men and women? If you wish to celebrate the sacrifice of American servicemen and service women, take off one day every year and quietly reflect on the reasons why in recent years the country has gone to war. Whenever you hear or read about U.S. servicemen or servicewomen killed abroad, ask yourself about the wisdom of the policy that put them in harm’s way and if it is worth such sacrifice.

Such meditation might also provide a basis for precluding bad policies. And it is the very least a citizen can do to honor our soldiers, sailors, airmen/women, and marines. Of course we’d have to come up with a catchier name than Policy Meditation Day,

Please check out my new article in the European journal Symposion at: http://symposion.acadiasi.ro/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/2023.10.2.3.duggan-1.pdf

Errata: The parenthetical in the sentence “The mild eleven-thousand year summer – the Holocene (alternatively, Eremozoic) – that permitted and nurtured human civilization and allowed our numbers to grow will likely be done-in by our species in the not-too-distant future,” at the bottom of page 216, is incorrect and should be stricken.  Eremozoic is not a synonym for Holocene, but may be used as an alternative for Anthropocene. The terms Eremozoic and Anthropocene are accurately characterized in footnote 5 at the bottom of page 217.

By Michael F. Duggan

Henry Kissinger died yesterday at 100. George Kennan died in 2005 at 101. I can’t help thinking that there is a metaphor here.

By Michael F. Duggan

The first thing you have to realize is that the giant panda is an absurdity of natural selection.¹ It is a carnivore reverse-engineered into a clawed-and-fanged herbivore with a dietary niche limited to bamboo, a staple so nutritionally desolate, that the creature is reduced to spending its days on its back, stripping and eating leaves.

But the panda has one overwhelming advantage over so many other endangered animals: it is what is called a “charismatic” species. In other words, it is a fluffy, photogenic, teddybear-like animal that appeals—panders (sorry)—to a deeply-rooted human instinct for cute things. To be fair, with 1,500 to 3,000 individuals in the wild, the giant panda is not a robust species, and is listed as “vulnerable.” Because of habitat destruction, its range is limited to the bamboo mountain forests of the Chinese provinces of Gansu, Shaanxi, and Sichuan. They are a precious rarity (they are so valuable, that whenever there was a public relations “panda naming” contest, I favored the moniker “Cha-Ching”). It’s just a shame that the Yangtze dolphin and turtle, now both likely extinct, were apparently not charismatic enough to be diplomatically valuable species, the former falling victim to, among other things, the Three Gorges Dam.² So much for bio-altruism.

But back to the Chinese teddybears. All of this, the rarity of the panda, its universally-acknowledged adorability, and its uniqueness to China, all made it a natural for zoological diplomacy. The original exchange pandas were brought to the United States in 1972, just as U.S.-China relations were thawing. Although the returning of Mei Xiang, Tian Tian, and Xiao Qi Ji  to China is due to the expiration of the exchange lease, what can we infer from it more generally in diplomatic terms? And what does panda diplomacy hold for the future?

Notes
1. See Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb.
2. https://news.mongabay.com/2007/08/extinction-of-the-yangtze-river-dolphin-is-confirmed/

By Michael F. Duggan

Who would have thought that Hezbollah would the voice of reason in the Middle East? For while Hassan Nasrallah threw out a lot of predictable red meat to the crowd today, he did not call for a wider war.

Beyond the bluster, and reading between the lines, Nasrallah is giving Israel, the United States, and the world a chance to pull back from the brink. It was a warning, but it is also a window, an expression of restraint that should be met with an equal measure of sanity and realism. It is a signal from the other side, like Khrushchev’s message of October 26, 1962 to Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. By not calling for an expanded war against Israel, a war that would set the Middle East and the rest of the world on fire, Nasrallah has provided an opportunity for deescalation.

I suspect that nobody in the Israeli government reads this blog. But if they did, I would advise them to look at the bigger picture, the long game, and to stop taking the bait. There is no plausible military solution to this crisis, and the killing of civilians in Gaza and sending IDF troops into this Stalingrad on the Mediterranean is exactly what Hamas wants Israel to do.

By Michael F. Duggan

Forty years ago, at little past 7:00 on the rainy evening of October 23, 1983, Jessica Savitch left the Chez Odette restaurant in New Hope, Pennsylvania, with Martin Fischbein, vice president of the New York Post. Fischbein was driving and exited the wrong way out of the parking lot and down the towpath of the Pennsylvania Canal on the Delaware River. There were no guardrails along the canal and the car flipped over the edge, falling 15 feet upside-down into four or five feet of water. Sinking in the mud, the car doors of were effectively sealed. Unable to get out, Fischbein (who was knocked unconscious), Savitch, and her Siberian husky, Chewy, drowned.

Savitch had been NBC’s “Golden Girl”—the gold standard for the female broadcast news reporter of the late 1970s and early eighties and one of the first women to anchor a nightly network news program. On the air, she projected charm, competence, and confidence and was unflappable. But stories abounded of a private life in turmoil, including a failed marriage, drug use, and the suicide of her second husband, Dr. Ronald Payne. There were also stories that she was a perfectionist who was difficult to work with. In spite of the stories of substance abuse, the autopsies showed that Fishbein and Savitch had had no more than a single glass of wine between them at dinner.

During a live 60-second top-of-the-hour news update on October 3, 1983, she slurred her words and was clearly off her game. This led to speculation that her career was in crisis and perhaps over at NBC (even though she had supposedly signed a contract for another year at the network and was also hosting the new PBS news magazine Frontline). She would do a flawless news spot later than night and then over the coming days and weeks.

There is something especially somber about people now long gone but who live in memory as living memory recedes. It is as if they will be soon forever lost even there. Perhaps this is the natural course of things. Eventually we will all be forgotten. Except for a couple of tell-all books and a movie based on one of them, Savitch seems mostly forgotten these days. The killing of 241 Marines in Beirut on the same day, followed by the invasion of Grenada, all but wiped the news of her death off of the headlines. Rather than sympathy, the tragedy and sorrow of her life became ammunition for resentful stories.

I couldn’t care less about the gossip, rumors, or even the truth about Savitch’s private life and personal problems. Insofar as memory persists, she deserves to be remembered as a pioneer of a generation of women reporters, now retired or late into their careers, that include Linda Ellerbee and Judy Woodruff.

Savitch and Chewy were cremated together and their ashes were scattered into the ocean at Atlantic City. She has no headstone.

By Michael F. Duggan

“The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
-Jake Sullivan, September 29, 2023

The Hamas attacks in Israel this weekend are as shocking in their scale, scope, sophistication, and operational success as they are horrifying in terms of civilian losses. Israel appears to have been caught off guard in what looks like a Middle Eastern version of the Tet Offensive, the coordinated nationwide attacks in South Vietnam during the Lunar New Year holiday in January 1968. Many hundreds of people have been killed and wounded on both sides. Scores of Israeli civilians were taken hostage.

I am sympathetic to the Palestinian people and know of their plight and despair. But this wave of attacks by Hamas will only initiate another round of insanity in the region. Could that be the goal? The attacks seem as self-destructive as they were murderous. Now Israel will bring down a ferocious wrath upon them—a payback for a payback—and more civilians will die.

The Gaza will bear the brunt of the initial retaliation even though there are Israeli hostages being held there. An overreaction is what Hamas wants. What are the prospects of an Israeli victory if they invade a city with a population greater than Baltimore (more than 590,000 in Gaza City with a total of more than 2 million in the Gaza Strip) with infantry, and what will happen to the hostages if they do? One can only wonder how they will respond on the West Bank. The impact of the new war on the power structure and relations of the Middle East can only be guessed at. What is the possibility of a wider regional war? Will Hezbollah get involved? Will Syria? Iran? And all at a time when relations between Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia appeared to be heading in the right direction. It has also pushed Ukraine out of the headlines.

The Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group is on its way to the eastern Mediterranean.

Although the nature of existence is poorly understood, I tend toward Karl Popper’s “Three Worlds” model, postulating the realms of the physical, the cognitive, and the ideational.¹ Consciousness arises from physical (electrochemical) processes, and we can consciously interact with ideas. The questions is whether the physical or ideational is primal or if they require each other. The fact that the physical world runs on what seem to be finely-calibrated relationships and laws is striking, although possibly an accident via cosmological natural selection.²

Whenever I feel that there might be a “mathematician” behind the laws and “just six numbers” that make the cosmos work, I think of what a friend of mine observed about pi, the fact that the ratio behind the beauty and simplicity of a circle is a repeating, irrational number, a number that goes on forever.

Notes
¹²

1. Karl Popper, “Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject,” Objective Knowledge, 1972 (1968), 106-152. ↩︎
2. See generally, Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos. ↩︎

By Michael F. Duggan

With twenty battle stars, the USS Enterprise is the most highly decorated U.S. warship of the Second World War. Many, perhaps most, Americans associate its name with a fictional spaceship. Between 57 million and 97 million people are estimated to have died in the World Wars, and yet many, perhaps most, Americans associate the term stormtrooper with fictional, anonymous soldiers from the Star Wars franchise. Rocky Marciano was the only undefeated world heavyweight boxing champion winning 49 out of 49 fights, 43 by knockout, and was never fought to a draw. And yet most Americans associate the name with a fictional fighter played by Sylvester Stallone.

Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael were among the front row of Renaissance painters. Except for art and art history majors, a generation or two of Americans associate these names with anthropomorphized cartoon turtles. In terms of volume, the Amazon is the largest river on Earth and its basin is the most biologically diverse region of the planet. And yet a simple Google search of “Amazon” did not provide a single result for the river and its basin among the top 20 hits. The river came in at 21.

I will let these observations speak for themselves.

By Michael F. Duggan

In an essay titled “Fog of War brought Down to Life” (September 4), Gilbert Doctorow suggests that even the most informed of us—a category to which I do not include myself—really have little idea of what is happening on the front lines in Ukraine. At least that is how I read it.

Western news sources point out Russian mistakes and miscalculations, poor equipment, bad morale, and incompetent leadership, and yet they devised a defensive line in depth that stopped the Ukrainian summer counteroffensive. Some independent, realist, and pro-Russian sources predicted the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, huge casualty rates, shortages of Ukrainian reserves and artillery shells, and a grinding Russian counter-counteroffensive leading to victory in late summer or fall. And yet is late summer and Ukraine is still punching hard and fighting back with great intensity.

Scott Ritter stands by his prediction of a Russian strategic victory over the coming month or two, and Western media sources are heartened by the apparent breakthrough by Ukrainian forces in the area around Robotyne and Verbove. What seems certain is that something will give, somewhere. The alternative is an “ugly” Russian victory and/or a never-ending frozen conflict that is like a larger and more active version of the demilitarized zone between the Koreas. Ukraine may end up as “Korea West” in the new Cold War.