Sight Unseen

Subtraction: “The Earth is hungry to subtract” was the opening line of a poem I wrote in the mid-1990s after a series of earthquakes in the Americas, Anatolia, and Eurasia. The poem’s speculation involved the opening of fissures that would come to swallow up the whole of humanity as an aging Earth grown tired of the burden of its surface dwellers. But the subtraction I failed to take into consideration is molecular, viral, the sickness not below but on the surface, between human beings. For fifty years now, new viral strains, most carried by birds, bats, rodents, and simians, have begun contaminating humanity’s vulnerable inner fluids. Imagine, please, a coronavirus-like epidemic of Ebola, whose latest strain is menacing several African nations. The result might be more like what was imagined in the postapocalyptic film “28 Days Later.” At a more existential level, consider as well that Earth is aging and by all accounts has already lived about half its projected lifespan, 5 billion years, a lifetime that will ultimately come to a quietly cold end after the sun becomes a white dwarf. Unless the inhabitants of Earth find and colonize a new home, they will vanish. In a time when many debate whether climate change is real — few choosing to study the fate of dinosaurs or to meditate on ancient ice ages — the reality that the planet itself is entirely mortal dawns only on astronomers. And yet the real tick-tock is not a social media platform, but the sound of actual time passing, in the end bringing my poem’s prophecy of subtraction to fruition.

A Game of Drones: The war in Ukraine has entered a new and perilous phase. No longer does Russia possess the undisputed upper hand. Over the past year, its frontline troops have lost significant ground in the east of the country, the territory Moscow most covets. Despite the loss of most of its American backing, Ukraine has made brilliant use of NATO and European Union support, which has supplied the cash and means to create an imposing drone fleet. Lately, Ukraine’s drone “drivers,” by now well-schooled in video war, have learned to penetrate deep into Russia, for the first time repeatedly targeting Moscow itself as well as nearby and vital oil refineries. All this has enraged one Vladimir Putin, who can now indirectly claim Russia is no longer solely being targeted by Kiev but also by loathed NATO nations. Now more than ever, Putin reserves the right not only to stage his own massive drone and missile reprisals but also to potentially strike Europe, with the Baltic states most likely in his crosshairs. According to the EU, Putin has already directed his expert hackers to do everything in their power to reprogram Ukrainian drones so they encroach on NATO airspace, while also stepping up provocative cyberattacks throughout the continent, part and parcel of the new warfare. Any combination of these circumstances could plunge Europe into a major East-West crisis. While many are cheering Ukraine’s remarkable drone skills, buyer beware. The anger of a wounded Putin could at any time turn irrational, all the more so as America and Israel delight in their lawless military might. It is, to say the least, a volatile time, one in which all eyes need to remain wide open and focused.

Meat storms: The Battle of Stalingrad changed the course of World War II. The unspeakably brutal confrontation between invading Nazi forces and the Red Army lasted seven months, from August 1942 through the following February, culminating in a German retreat that, coupled with America’s entry in the war, turned the tide against Axis powers. It is still celebrated in Russia as the crowning achievement of what remains known as the Great Patriotic War. Glossed over is that many Red Army soldiers had no wish to fight. No wonder, since temperatures were often below zero and they had little food. But any troops that showed reluctance or tarried were summarily killed by the NKVD, Moscow’s doctrine police. In effect, you were dead if you fought and dead if you did not. In all, Stalingrad would claim between one and two million dead. I mention this because the BBC reported recently that it had interviewed former Russian soldiers who had fled the Ukraine conflict and they had said Russian officers at the front casually executed those who refused to march into enemy gunfire, so-called meat storms. The BBC report had the aroma of disbelief and disgust. Clearly, no one had read up on Russia’s recent military behavior and the Army’s traditional disinterest in casualties. In a wartime era largely dominated by drones and precision strikes, Russia still plays by old-school rules. Death at the front is a norm, as it is for Ukrainian troops. Both sides still reside in a dimension of battlefield horror the West can no longer fathom. Since neither side has the soldiers to overrun the other, the slaughter persists. For anyone interested in the legacy of trench warfare, here is its modern sibling, further proof, if any was needed, that enlightened battlefields are a lie.

My “war years”: The tools of war thrilled me as a boy. In the very early 1960s, I assembled model ships and planes and immersed myself in the comic-book adventures of Johnny “Flying” Cloud, an American fighter ace who saw the shapes of his Navajo ancestors in the sky while shooting down German Messerschmitts. My idealized view of war and warriors was much like that of this president, though the toys he commands are not toys at all. These “war years,” as I called them, lasted roughly from ages eight to 12 and ended not long after I visited an American air base in Spain where the commanding general, a friend of my father’s, allowed me to sit in the cockpit of an F-104 Starfighter. That same American general later organized a visit to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., in which his friend, a retired colonel who had flown hundreds of wartime missions, took me to a room that, as I remember, contained bound volumes imprinted with the words Lost Crews. They contained dozens of 8x10 photos of stunningly young American aviators standing or kneeling beside their B-17 bombers. “They’re all gone, son,” said the colonel, “so when you think of your model planes, think of these boys, and hope it never needs to be that way again.” If only the colonel were still alive to take this adolescent president to the lost crews room and lock him in.

“Welcome to Israel!” My mother was born into an affluent Warsaw family on Christmas Day 1921. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, her teenage life was turned on end. Her brother died fighting the Germans, her sister died after contracting typhus, and her father was detained by the Gestapo. In January 1940, she and her mother absconded to Rome using false papers. Only once did my mother speak of the three cruel months before her escape to Rome, an Axis “open city.” This came in 1978, after the election of a Polish pope brought her to tears. She told me that in the autumn of the Nazi invasion, her Warsaw district fell under the jurisdiction of an sadistic SS captain who from his jeep, using a megaphone, would shout at cowering civilians, “Welcome to the Reich. We are the masters here.” Many were arrested on the spot. Some were blindfolded and left to stumble before they were summarily executed. She never again spoke of that time, which she spent a lifetime hiding even from her closest friends. But now, some ninety years later, to my horror, I hear the same phrasing, this time spoken by a prominent Jewish government official. In a widely circulated video, national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, one of several extreme right figures in the Israeli cabinet, is heard berating detained activists from a flotilla attempting to bring aid to Gaza’s dispossessed, something Israel forbids. “Welcome to Israel; we are the masters here,” he proudly tells his captives in Hebrew. (Some have suggested the word “masters” should be translated as “landlords,” but under the circumstances, it makes little difference.) Though his remarks were roundly criticized in Israel and in Europe, he was not — and this is significant — compelled to apologize, nor was he asked to resign. He is only 50 and therefore may have the luxury of forgetting history. The awful truth is that Jewish extremism and that of the Reich can overlap. I can only be glad that my Catholic mother, a true admirer of a free world headed by a decent America as well as an admirer of Israel, died decades before cockroaches and their ilk returned to blacken the political landscape.

Puppeteers: In separate arenas, the White House is again reverting to blackmail and bullying to achieve desired goals. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban emigrants and a native Spanish speaker, has told his kin that America has nothing to do with the island’s suffering, this despite a months-long naval blockade that has starved Cuba of both fuel and medical supplies. The Communist regime was to blame for any suffering, he said, and the blockade was simply exacerbating age-old problems that only a political upheaval could repair. To make its point, the United States issued an arrest warrant for 94-year-old Raul Castro, who with his brother, Fidel, and others brought down a U.S.-backed dictatorship in 1959. In Europe, the president himself has said he will withdraw thousands of troops from NATO member states to punish the alliance for failing to embrace his war on Iran, a war he started, and join in a military plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Amid this crisis-like uncertainty, Russia and Belarus just completed three days of opportunistic nuclear drills, of the kind that once would have put NATO on high alert. On the domestic front, the threat of license revocation has forced venerable network CBS to divorce Stephen Colbert, a popular late-night satirist who refused to relent in his criticism of the White House. More such heavy-handed censorship is likely to follow. In bare bones terms, this president cannot distinguish between right and wrong and, with Israel, disdains all international law, undoing the political and social contract that in another era would likely have led to massive Washington street protests. But no such protests are in the wings, in part because the post-9/11 era, with its color-coded terrorist alerts and its draconian Patriot Act, created a “be very afraid” ethos that made citizens reluctant to challenge presidential authority. This is no longer Make America Great Again, but America, reinvented to suit a puppeteer whose global show some may criticize but all defer to.