Monday, January 6, 1975. The Vietnam War resumes in earnest.

With fighting having resumed in 1974, and the North Vietnamese Army having taken Dong Xoai on December 26, the NVA took Phuoc Long city and the surrounding province. 

While a violation of the Paris Peace Accord, the US did nothing, which was not a surprise.

We probably need to expand on this a bit.

As the longtime readers of this blog know, we started tracking daily events of the past with the centennial of the Villista raid of Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916.  That fit right into the ostensible purpose of the blog.  We kept on keeping on with that, and now we're nearly a decade into centennial posts, given that we are now posting on daily events of 1925, when they see worth posting about.

Events fifty years in the past really got rolling here with 1968, an American Annus horribilius, and we've kept that up since then. There are, for example, eight posts to date that reference 1967, but sixty-six that reference 1968.

After 68, we dept tracking important events that were fifty years in the past, although they dropped way off, after 1968, up until 1973, when there were 110.  For 74, there were only seventy one.   There would have been more, if we'd more closely tracked the Vietnam War, which we should have done.

The Paris Peace Accords were signed on January 27, 1973.  The last US troops were gone by March 29, 1973.  The highly valued South Korean troops also left in March, 1973.  The last Australian troops were six embassy guards, who left, tellingly, on June 30, 1973 a telling withdrawal.  By January 4, 1974, the fighting had ramped back up to such an extent that South Vietnam declared them breached and the war ongoing, a declaration that fully reflected reality.  

March 1973 saw the end of a process that had begun in 1969, that of drawing down foreign troops in Vietnam.  It left the Army of the Republic of Vietnam without foreign troops in support of it in some fashion for the first time.*  North Vietnam and South Vietnam had come about due to the peace treaty that ended the French Indochinese War, but the election that was to have taken place in 1955 never occurred.  The ARVN theoretically dated to that year, but in reality it dated to 1949 when the French established the Vietnamese National Army for the State of Vietnam, which it created that same year and which had international recognition as part of the French Union at first, and then as an independent state starting in 1954.  In reality, therefore, the ARVN had never lacked foreign support dating all the way back to 1949.

Catholic North Vietnamese pulling alongside a French LST in 1954 when the country was partitioned.

US support for the State of Vietnam's successor state, the Republic of Vietnam, was somewhat halting at first, and looking back its amazing to realize that the US was ever in Vietnam.  The US had supplied reluctant support to the French in Indochina and carried that on with the State of Vietnam and the Republic of Vietnam, but it was reluctant.  The Eisenhower Administration was only halfheartedly a backer of the Republic of Vietnam, not accepting that its status was vital to US interest and also not supporting latent colonial efforts of France and the United Kingdom everywhere.  Indeed, Eisenhower proved to be against the much currently discussed "forever wars" more than any President after the Second World War, not being too keen on the French effort in Algeria, and opposed to the French, British and Israeli intervention over the Suez Canal.

Moreover, Eisenhower clashed with the personality of South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm. Diệm was an anti communist, but he was not really a democrat, being a person who, for lack of a better way to put it, was an early example of a National Conservative (J. D. Vance, R. R. Reno and Rod Dreher would have loved him).  He was a Catholic in a majority Buddhist country, albeit one were the influence of Buddhism was waning, and didn't really view Vietnam as a country that was subject to democratic rule, at least at the time.

Things changed with the Kennedy Administration, at least at first, which was much more willing to become involved spats around the world than the Eisenhower Administration was.  Kennedy caused the formation of a U.S. military unit, the Special Forced, specifically for this purpose.  With Kennedy, in spite of advice to the contrary from Eisenhower, the American involvement in Vietnam became more direct and deeper, with the US giving advice on major tactical oeprations for the first time.  The Army of the Republic of Vietnam, however, was not thrilled by the advice it was receiving, viewing its combat history as supporting the proposition that small unit actions in a low grade war, rather than material rich operations, were what best suited its operational environment.  It would ultimately be proven to be correct, but much too late.

Kenndy's administration saw Diệm assassinated in a manner which has been remembered much like Chile's Allende episode, which is to say inaccurately. The US was less involved than imagined, but aware enough that it could have taken steps to prevent it and the men on the ground basically knew it was likely to occur and vaguely indicated that the US wouldn't stanad in the way when the South Vietnamese military became discontent with Diệm and hinted that it could overthrow him. So it did, and Diệm was murdered in the resulting coup, something that hadn't been anticipated.

Diệm was killed on November 2, 1963 and Kennedy twenty days later.  Kennedy was horrified by Diệm's murder but his administration had been reckless in regard to Diệm, foreign policy, and Vietnam.  It seems that Kennedy was at the point where he was inclined to reduce US support for the nation, which was frankly unnatural as it was, but failed to convey this to Lyndon Johnson who felt honor bound to carry on what Kennedy had started.

The increased US participation in Vietnam at the time was due to the urging of Australia, which has largely conveniently forgotten that it was the single most important factor to the US becoming involved.  France resented US involvement and hadn't really wished for it to occur. But Australia was so desperate for it to occur that it seriously considered taking on the project for its own.

Australia, with its location on the globe, and its small population, had always depended on another Western power for its protecdtion.  It still does.  Prior to 1941, that foreign power had been the United Kingdom, and it had been a loyal, if grumpy, member of the British Empire.  It had sent troops to the Boer War and World War One, and of course to the effort in World War Two when it came.

For that reason, when the Japanese attacked in the Pacific on December 7 & 8, 1941, Australia was ill prepared to face the crisis.  It's troops were fighting in North Africa.  It asked for them back, and the British declined.  The British, for that matter, soon proved to be totally unable to face the new Japanese threat and began to lose ground everywhere in the Far East.  Soon the crown jewel of the British Empire, India, was itself in jeopardy, with Japanese troops advancing into Thailand from Vietnam, which it had taken over after the French defeat in 1940, although not right away, and then on into Brurma.

As the war closed out, Franklin Roosevelt took a dim view of France and the United Kingdom returning to their empires.  Roosevelt was an anti colonial.  The British and the French were well aware of this, but the British had a massive military force in the field.  The US forces in the war had not exceeded the number of British forces in action until late 1944, and in spite of losing a massive amount of ground to the Japanese in 1942, but 1943 it was back in action in a major way.  The French situation was distinctly different, however, as its army had been reconstituted during the war, and in North Africa and Europe, and frankly was badly stressed in its makeup between conservative French republicans, French communists, and French North Africans.  Roosevelt frankly hadn't planned on helping the French after the war at all.

On March 9, 1945 Japan launched a coup d'etat against what was left of French independence in Vietnam out of fear that French forces would rise up and displace the Japanese, as had happened in North Africa.  Roosevelt made it clear that the French were not to reacquire Vietnam, showing a fare amount of naiveity about who woudl come out in the region, and about the communists in general. He died, however on April 12, 1945.  

Like Kennedy, Roosevelt had very little contact with his Vice President and Truman came into office without really knowing that Roosevelt had wanted to do.  Unlike Johnson, however, Truman didn't really worry about that and made up his own mind on things.  He very rapidly came under the influence of the British and French and didn't take the anti colonial view that Roosevelt had.  So France, after a brief period of British occupation, in which Japanese troops were used for garrison duties, came back to Indochina.

Ho Chi Minh, the communist leader of the Viet Minh, persuaded French backed Emperor Bảo Đại to abdicate in his favour, on September 2, 1945.  Follong theis, Ho Chi Minh declared independence for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, with hit having to be taken for granted that "Democratic", in the communist context, was a fraud. Vientamese communistm would indeed prove to be just as bloody as communism anywhere else had been.  British, Free French, and impressed Japanese troops soon restored French control.  Ho Chi Minh agreed to negotiate, but the negotiations failed.

Fighting soon broke out.  In 1948 France recognized Indochinese independence with a new State of Vietnam created and Emperor Bảo Đại restored to power. Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia became associated states of the French Union and were granted more autonomy.  The communist war against the situation continued on, with the communist being unable to accept any rule other than their own.

The French Indochinese War was fought hte way that Donald Trump would have Ukraine fight, with a poverty of resources. The US did help France, but not to the degree the French would have liked and not to the degree that the French were ever more than fighting the Viet Minh on a more or less equal footing.  The French defeat at Dien Bien Phu was only part of a string of such slow losses that doomed their efforts in the region.

As noted, a new political reality that nobody woudl really adhere to emerged in 1954.  South Vietnam came about as a republic but not a really well functioning one.  North Vietnam became a communist dictatorship bent on taking over the south.  The war that had commenced during hte Japanese occupation of the country never really ceased.

It was a low grade war, for the most part, however.  Be that as it may, it was serious enough to worry Australia, which saw South Vietnam falling to the North and a new communist nation emerging to its north.  Australia, for its part, had its own problems after the war in spite of being a stalwart western ally.  Communism in Australia had been strong in the 1930s and emerged strong from World War Two.  Conservative forces in Australia came to rely heavily on the Catholic Church and the Irish Catholic population to hold off what was a very real slide on the continent into the far left.  Australian communists nearly took the nation into the Soviet bloc.

While that was occurring the Australian government sided with the United Kingdom in regional conflicts against Communist forces, the most notable being the Malaysian Emergency in which Australian troops served.  Very successfully waged on a military and political basis, it, along with the early post World War Two American efforts against the Huk Rebellion showed what could be done.

Australia looked at the post Indochinese War sitaution with gravec concern.  Indochina seemed to be to Australia what the Japanese expansion of 1942 had been, a stepping stone into Australia itself, where it already was dealing with an extreme left wing movement as it was.  World War Two had taught Australia that the United Kingdom was no longer a dependable world power, and duiring hte war it had switched its dependency upon the United States.  Accordingly, it agitated iwth the US to become involved, which the Eisenhower Adminisration did on a small scale, and the Kennedy Administration did on a larger one.

By the time of Kennedy's death in 1963 the US was chaning its mind.  The ARVN was reluctant in its acceptance of US advice, seening small scale actions with limited recources, like those it had fought with the French, as being what better suited its needs.  It was planning for a long police action, in essence, rather than a definitive victory in the field.  However, as France could no longer supply the ARVN's needs, which ironially had always depended on US aid in any event, it had little choice.

The US came, Diệm fell, and the war expanded.  

As the US tends to do, when the US entered the war, as odd as it was for the US, it did so with great enthusiasm, but a few years later was tired of it.  In the mean time, the US commitment to the war had become massive.  The level of US participation was in fact destroying the communist effort, proving, in a way, that American advisors had been right.  The Tet Offensive of 1968 was a communist last gasp that destroyed the South Vietnamese communist militia, the Viet Cong, and ruined the North Vietnamese Army.  Nonetheless, it was a massive propaganda victory for North Vietnam, to its huge surprise, and helped commit the US to a withdrawal from then unpopular war.

Chinese Type 59 tank taken by the ARVN.

At the same time, however, it was undeniable that the NVA had been wrecked.  The foolishly launched 1972 Easter Offensive was turned back by the ARVN, which leant credence to the thesis that the then ongoing American withdrawal from the country made sense.  Even now you can find those who maintain that the "Vietnamization" of the war made perfect strategic sense and was Nixon's plan.

In reality, the Nixon Administration had calculated that South Vietnam was doomed and basically forced the Republic of Vietnam into the peace that the Paris Peace Accords produced.  The plan was to give the US enough time to leave the country before what Nixon thought would be an ultimate South Vietnamese collapse to provide plausible deniability to the US for the South Vietnamese defeat.

The peace never really broke out, which resulted in the South Vietnamese negotiator to refuse to accept the Nobel Peace Prize that Kissinger accepted.  By 1974 a North Vietnamese offensive, although slow moving, was back on, showing the willingness of Communist regimes to kill their population readily.  Things were beginning, as today's entry shows, to pick up speed.

Wheel of Fortune, hosted by Chuck Woolery and Susan Stafford, premiered.

Last edition:

Sunday, January 5, 1975. Ed Herschler inaugurated.

Labels: 1970s, 1975, Angola, Australia, Colonialism, Democratic Party, Disaster, law, Politics, Portuguese Empire, Wyoming

*Some French support remained until 1956 by which time US support had already started.

A 2020 Holiday Reflection. Part 1 of 2, . . . or 3, maybe. The Annus Horribilius Edition

No one can doubt that 2020 has been an awful year for humanity.  And 2021 is going to start off that way too.  Just rolling over from December 31 to January 1 doesn't make things suddenly better. 

March, they say, comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. . .but this year. . . 

Which is not to say that years don't have their own characters or that 2021 will not turn out better than 2020.  It almost certainly will. By this time next year COVID 19 should largely be beaten and, it if isn't, it'll be something that we will start receiving annual vaccinations for, or at least a lot of us will.

Back to 2020.

2020 has been the year in which the entire world was put to a stress test and the United States and its citizens particularly were.  There's been a lot of personal tragedy and disappointment, with some disappointment measuring towards tragedy.  

By and large the United States hasn't come out of this looking good. But then a lot of the Western world hasn't come out of it looking very good either.

2020 was always going to be a stressful year for Americans as something has gone wrong with the American body politic, and moreover American culture, that really started to fester within the last twelve years.  In future years historians are going to debate about the point at which what we just went through became inevitable, just as they debate the point at which the Civil War, the last somewhat analogous American event became inevitable.  I have my own theories about this, but suffice it to say, something really went off the rails in our culture and its politics during this time frame.

It had been going off the rails, in all honesty, for some time well before that, like a lot of things, it can be tracked back to the mid 20th Century.  Whatever else we surmise the culture started to experience some serious decay following the Second World War and pretty quickly at that. A cynic might say that the culture went from hypocrisy, on some things, to libertinism, and we could debate which is worse, and they'd be at least partially correct.  But at any rate cracks in the culture formed during the Second World War and began to widen considerably in the 1950s.  They really started to split in the 1960s when the Baby Boom generation came into their own.

That generation is still "in its own" and its fighting out a lot of its fights right now, even as its members increasingly reach advanced old age.  Be that as it may, in the 1980s a shift started to occur that was a reaction to much of what had occurred in the 1960s.

As that occurred, the cultural left in the country moved increasingly far to the left and following them, but some time behind them in terms of the trend, the cultural right did as well, with reaction to the left being a strong part of the latter, and a sense of inevitable triumph and superiority being a feature of the former.  At the same time, the long post war economic dominance of American industry faded and ultimately industry, to a large degree, simply left the United States.  Economic globalism and cultural globalism came in, fueling a sense of abandonment in a large middle demographic in the country whose cultural, political and religious values had been celebrated as defining those of the nation and who were now told that none of that was true.  Reactions from the right to this became increasingly strident as did the policies of the left, with none of it really helping that large American class that tended to define in the past who Americans were supposed to be.  To make it worse, some of the reaction on the right made erosions into advancements that had served that American middle demographic, particularly in education.  Science education and solid history education took a pounding in the late 1980s and the level of science education that was common prior to those years has never returned to average Americans.  

By the time of Barack Obama's election in 2008 there were a lot of Americans who were prepared to accept arguments that Obama, who was a centrist candidate if ever there was one, was a radical leftist, with accusations of "Socialist" and even "Marxist" being leveled against him.  As we've noted before here, up until the last two years of his term about the most Obama could be accused of was being largely ineffectual, a reflection of his policy making style, but perhaps simply despairing of acceptance he took a diversion to the left at that point.

In 2016 the Democrats made the bizarre choice of running Hillary Clinton for the Oval Office when she was one of the most despised individual politicians in the United States.  That year the middle revolved in the form of support for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, with the Democrats essentially fixing their primary system so that Sanders couldn't possibly win.  That left Trump the natural candidate for the dispossessed middle.

Not really appreciated at the time, the choice of that demographic to back Trump also meant that traditional Republican conservatives were either pushed aside or even out of the GOP.   The GOP rapidly became Trump's party, with a rearguard of the traditional GOP backing him but for their own purposes.  Trump embraced the concerns and radicalized beliefs of his "base", which included a long festering view that the left was the cultural enemy of the country.  The Democrats managed to feed this feeling through ineptness, choosing to oppose Trump at ever turn.  When that failed, they chose to attempt to impeach him, an effort that was doomed before it started.  All of this fueled an increasingly radicalized Trump base in the belief that Trump was a hero standing against what has been practically portrayed as a Marxist tide, when in reality it was the old Boomer left trying to retain its gains, including significant gains made in the last two years of the Obama Presidency.

None of which is to say that the middle doesn't have a set of legitimate complaints.  And not just in the US, but seemingly all over the world.  Politics over the globe have increasingly come to resemble the United States's recent politics to a much greater degree than the American press might imagine.  Parties based on populism and traditionalism, some of which are highly radical, have made progress all over Europe, and not just there. The trend has been global.

And then came COVID 19.

COVID 19 entered the world in a way that no plague has, ever.  The Spanish Flu may have entered during a World War, but the Germans didn't blame it on the Allies and the Allies didn't blame it on the Central Powers.  It just was.  Prior pandemics haven't been attributed to political actors.  But in the heated political scene of 2020, views on the virus and what it meant rapidly took on a bizarre political atmosphere and a "with us or against us" type of character.  Donald Trump took action fairly quickly, but then he cast doubt on the danger of the disease, which took off to the point that by mid 2020 there were those who were arguing the entire matter was a Chinese conspiracy.  Support for or against measures to counter the disease came to signal political points of view.  This carried on to views about the vaccine, with people making medical decisions based upon their politics or even worse based upon wild rumors that were developed by the most extreme members of the camps and given life by an anti scientific movement symbolized best by the prostilzatons for it by Jenny McCarty, a boob model twit who came to fame by prostituting her mammary glands for cash and who would not be taken seriously on anything else in any other era of humanity.

That McCarthy would be taken seriously enough, before the pandemic, to give rise to a line of thought prevalent mid crisis, says a lot about the decline of American education in some fields and its politicization.  But that's only one stick thrown on a fire that's gone from smoldering in the last twelve years to raging.  

Coming out of World War Two the United States was not only an industrial titan, but no nation rivaled it.  Together with Canada, Australian and New Zealand, the US possessed the world's only major economies that didn't feature largescale firsthand devastation of its infrastructure during the war.  America's position in the global economy had less to do with American genius, although that was certainly an aspect of it, than it did with being the only giant economy which was not bombed during the war.  That fortunate positioning was sufficient to keep us going for thirty years before other industrial nations began to catch back up, and catching back up was what they were doing.  Naively secure in our new position, we not only failed to guard against what was occurring, we actively encouraged it, such that by the 1970s up and coming Asian economies began to seriously erode the American economic position.  Nothing has been done since then to address it, with one single exception.

That erosion meant that while the United States came out of the gigantic post Vietnam War recession of the 1970s, it did so as a nation that was shipping its industry overseas wholescale and which was creating no new jobs to replace those being lost. At the same time it became apparent that a country which had been a petroleum exporter, in the Oil Age, was now an oil importer, and had been for some time.  The first blue collar losses helped bring Ronald Reagan to power, to make a course correction, but it was already clear at that point that the nation was dividing sharply into two sections and people realigning accordingly.  New England liberals whose liberalism had been based on the views of Episcopal and Methodist preachers going back to colonial times began to base their views instead on those like Chomsky and his fellow travelers.  Mid state blue collar Democrats who had backed politicians like Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy now saw their fates aligned with prewar radical right wing Republicans who had opposed FDR.  Southern Democrats abandoned the GOP wholescale, brining with them a set of views that were formed in the 18th and 19th Centuries and which had never changed, driving out the first batch of Republicans who were fiscal conservatives but more moderate elsewhere, and whose Republicanism was based on a conservative economic model more than anything else.  With the drive still invested from the fall out of the Vietnam War, in spite of the success of eight years of Ronald Reagan, "progressives" in the Democratic Party, who shared nothing in common with the Progressives of the Republican Party from early in the 20th Century, began to seriously imagine remaking the United States from a solidly centered (small d) democratic nation based on a Protestant world view combined with a radical democratic impulse into one that had its religious and cultural origins expelled and instead based on a court enforced cultural secularization and collectivisation which was generally alien to American culture.  In this they were aided not only by the fallout of the Vietnam War but also by the pornification of the culture by the Sexual Revolution and the destruction of the industrial economy.

Already by the 1990s these divides were becoming sharp, if not fully obvious to all.  The rise of a new right lead by individuals like Newt Gingrich foreshadowed what was coming even as the last of the old left found new voice in the GOP through the Neo Conservatives.  The election of solidly middle ground Bill Clinton sparked a massive radicalized and fairly anti democratic effort in the GOP to expel the President through an impeachment, an effort that never ever should have been attempted.  The second George Bush and his first rival Al Gore were throwbacks to earlier calmer times, but in Barack Obama those on the left read in hope for a radical change even if Obama himself did not hold such radical views.  This in turn took the lid off of the rust belt centered populism that was mistaken for conservatism in that branch of the GOP.

Barack Obama's Presidency drug up a lot in both parties, much of which hampered his Presidency and made it fairly ineffectual.  By the last two years of his time in office he'd accommodated himself to being the presumed head of the liberal wing of the party and began to accordingly give some voice to that wing, although it was really the court, in the form of the Obergefell decision, that sparked a revived radical left in the Democratic Party. That same decision  helped ignite the already shouldering populism in the GOP as individuals who, as noted above, had defined Americanism culturally were informed that htey not longer did, and that their views were no longer really wanted.

During the same time, as already noted, the industrial base of the country did not recover at all.  On the fringes of the Midwest, that being the West, times were good in that the high prices of fossil fuels sparked economic booms that made the rugged region a success.  As that occurred, however, some areas began a population influx of those from the coasts, such as Colorado, that changed their cultural and political natures permanently.  The collapse of the fossil fuels in  the 2010s, however, brought the economic grief of the Rust Belt to the Far West, which was already conservative in its views.  The impact, however, of a large influx of migrants for economic reasons from other areas of the country had begun to change the region's political views from radical libertarianism to math the insurgent populism that was already at work in the GOP elsewhere.

And that brought us to the election of Donald Trump.

Whatever Trump himself may stand for, for his supporters he has come to symbolize the stand of a "real" America against an insurgent "foreign' one.  Democrats have reciprocated in a way by urging their supporters to "resist" Trump, recalling the "resistance" of World War Two, something which is unfortunate in a way as the resistance itself of that era was heavily left wing and which is moreover unfortunate in that it suggests that those engaging in the "resistance" are "resisting" an illegitimate power.

It was that view that took us in a little over three years from heated polarization to outright intellectual battle lines.  Populists in the GOP already regarded the Clintons as criminal and Obama as a socialist.  Democrats seemingly confirmed that by immediately resorting to words recalling the struggle against fascism of the 1940s and informing the Republicans that they basically would not work with the elected President.  They then confirmed that through a dedicated effort to remove him. That effort in turn convinced the GOP populist that the Democrats were in fact an enemy, something made very easy by a section of the Democratic Party already having declared itself to be just that.

With that view, the politicization of everything became easy, just as it tends to in times of real extreme tension.  And then that extreme tension arrived in the form of SARS-CoV-2, or as it is commonly called, COVID 19.

All through the election there were those who called for extremism.  Old symbols of radicalism came out and were demonstrated. Then George Floyd was killed by police in Minnesota and that in turn was used by various groups as a basis to demonstrate against the government and the times.  In far off areas which saw themselves as removed from the Minnesota event, this seemed like a thinly veiled excuse to attack the nation. And the pandemic became worse and worse.

All of which leads us to where we now are.

And where we are at is not good.

The middle of the nation in ever sense has voted for Joe Biden in what can truly be regarded as a vote to return to normalcy.  This means that most of the electorate has not bought off on the arguments of the populist and it doesn't seem the country as engaged in a war against a foreign alien radical ideology. They have also indicated, through their vote, that they don't want to radically remake the American nation and they basically share a lot more in common with the cultural ideal of the populist than they do with the radical democrats. They've basically decided to elect an old, JFK style, middle of the road imperfect Catholic, rather than a fire breathing radial of any stripe.  That probably tells us where we need to go, and how we want to get there, but it also tells us that there's an element of the nation that wants none of it.

On the right, right now, there's a very strong populist element that has become anti democratic, but doesn't recognize itself as such.  It's defining whose vote is legitimate to an extent by their politics, and its also given way to conspiracy theories that demonize their opponents to the point where it can be believed, in spite of all evidence, that they lost the election due to fraud.  Inherent in that belief is the belief that real Americans would have voted only one way.

At the same time, there are those who are already discontented with the new Democratic President as he shows no signs of equally extreme radicalism, but in the other direction. This body, accustomed to rule through the courts, would have the new President pack the Courts with jurists who would disregard the Constitution, even though those very jurists are the ones who saved the election from being overturned.  Following that, they'd force the remaking of society in their progressive image, a world devoid of gender, faith and connection with reality.

This is a road that we started on somewhere during the last seventy years, or at least the last fifty.  We're going to have to get off of it, or the nation won't survive.  Finding the off ramp wont' be easy, but it also means that if we don't do it, we're headed for disaster.

One thing already noted here is that, demographically, the country, and indeed the entire Western world, is headed towards a more conservative, and more educated, future.  The character of the up and coming demographics doesn't resemble those in control and those in the streets very closely.  So maybe we'll be saved from ourselves by our future selves.  

Anyway you look at it, the fall out of things that rose up since 1945 are plaguing us in the extreme right now, with a genuine failure to really deal with a plague as part of that.  Lincoln called on the better angels of our mercy in the 1860s, we don't seem to be calling upon them in 2020 very much.

All of which is helping to make 2020 not only an an annus horribilius, but probably a watershed as well.  The question of whether its a good one, or we're just going off a cliff, isn't evident yet.

"You are out of your mind"

Wyoming elk hunter, 1904.

So declared long suffering spouse.

On Wednesday I posted this item about my recent oral surgery:

An Insult to the Body

Yesterday was the first day I tried to avoid taking pain killers, which in this case means heavy duty Tylenol.  I'm weird about painkillers in general and very rarely take them.  I don't resort to them except as a last resort and I knew, even when they were prescribed, I'd never take them for the full period I could.  I just don't.  I don't take anything for headaches, which I rarely get, and even if I have an injury of some sort, I don't think them unless its really painful.

I'm not sure where I picked up this personal trait.  Unlike some in our current society, I'm not a medical advice skeptic except when it comes to painkillers.  I've always been this way, so its not a new thing.  For much of my single life you'd have been unable to find any of the conventional pain killers that most people keep routinely in a place I was living.  I wasn't going to use them, so I didn't buy them.

Occupationally I've become more skeptical, even paranoid, about them.  I've seen too many addicts who are slaves to painkillers.  I represented a guy a few years ago in a car accident matter who died last year from an overdose of them.  I think they're overprescribed.  

An added to that, I'm allergic to the heavy duty ones, which doesn't bother me, as I'm not going to take them anyway.

I note all of this as I didn't take them, so by late yesterday afternoon I felt pretty rough at work. Not as in I was enduring a terrible pain, but just rough.  And old friend called to visit at work and asked how I was doing, after he learned of the procedure earlier in the week, and I just noted mostly being extremely tired, to which he replied "that's because you're getting old". 

That might be right, but it might be more than that as well, in this instance.

Anyhow, this brings me around to long suffering spouses comment.

I didn't draw a deer tag this year.

I didn't draw any tags, in fact, and I'm not too happy about it.  I'll post more on that later.

Given as I didn't draw a deer, or elk, tag, the season crept up on me with me being unprepared for the general season.  I got out over the weekend and zeroed my daughter's rifle and took care of my son's, but that's about as far as I got.  In thinking it over, I just figured that I wouldn't be going out opening day anyway, so I'd take are of things, like zeroing my own rifle, this week. 

I haven't gotten that done.

But as my two kids are in university and I am not, it started to really bother me, and it still is, that I just figured I'd go on the weekend.  When I was first a lawyer, I'd go on opening day.  I don't anymore as I'm busy. 

Which gets me to this comment I made yesterday.

It is pretty amazing to me in a way as when I was a student I always promised myself that there were things I'd never let work get in the way of.  I know that you are probably thinking I'm going to say "family and friends", but what I'm really thinking of is hunting and the outdoors.  Well, I have let it get in the way of that and I still do. And more and more so as time has gone on.

In fact, tomorrow is the opening day for general deer season around here and I'm unlikely to get out for opening day.  When I was a younger lawyer, I always did. Now I have a harder time doing that simply as my weeks are so hectic that I don't conceive of myself having the week days to take off, and besides that I'm tired enough that getting ready for something outside the routine isn't easy.  We'll see, although this year that would additionally meaning shooting a rifle just a few days out of oral surgery, which might not be smart.

We'll see.

Well last night, I asked son, who has been here due to the pandemic, "you have school tomorrow, right?"

Right away, long suffering spouse knew what I was thinking.

I received a spousal rebuke, indeed a lecture, and she's right.  I had to end up taking the Tylenol last night in spite of myself, and my extracted teeth were on my right side, which means that part of my jaw would be against the stock.  I had trouble stopping the bleeding in the first place.

2020. 

The Annus Horribilius.