I had no idea. I bet you didn't, either.
I just read a book called The Mosquito Bowl, by Buzz Bissinger. He's also the author of Friday Night Lights, written as a warning to us about how high school football, such as in upstate Texas, can get out of control. More than 30 years later, he's been proven right.
In The Mosquito Bowl, he has unearthed research that shines devastating light upon one of the great battles of World War II, Okinawa--one that the U.S. had to win, but paid an incredible price to do so. It's history written the way it should be: Unsparing and thorough in its detail, unbiased about those who made it. Facts can be devastating written straightforwardly, especially if it shatters previously established myths that we've managed to gloss over in the name of heroism.
We associate Vietnam, for instance, with the use of napalm against enemies and civilians on the wrong side. But its first use was against Tokyo in the great firebombing of March, 1945. Nothing I've ever read, and I've read plenty on World War II, describes the horror of those upon whom napalm has been spread. That we even considered it against Vietnamese people, already knowing what it can do, says plenty about our inhumanity, about our coldness, about the sociopathic consideration of inflicting maximum pain upon others. Four years after we withdrew from Vietnam, someone finally grew a conscience and banned napalm.
In the meantime, though, we used it against Japanese soldiers dug into tunnels and concrete bunkers. There was no other way to get at them in their hidden enclaves, so maybe that justifies it. Those Americans who survived remembered their screams. You mean to tell me there was no PTSD in this war? Try sleeping with that. But it saved some American lives, since surrender was beyond consideration for an overwhelming majority all of Japan's defenders.
Those defenders fought hard and well. They knew their fate. They knew it would be the last place they would exist. Some ten thousand actually surrendered, though--far beyond the numbers of others on other Japanese-held islands that Americans had to root out, one at a time, like Saipan.
But denizens of Okinawa also suffered. They were propagandized that Americans would torture them, so many committed suicide, some after murdering their families. Thing is, some of the Marines on Okinawa were good to that promise.
Yup. Some of them raped women, writes Bizzinger. Some willfully shot children. You can put this in the slot that defines the inhumanity that war often foments, and you'd be right, of course. But you then also have to dismiss the myth of American exceptionalism--that we've always been, somehow, a touch above "normal" human beings.
"War is cruelty and you cannot refine it," said General William Sherman, and he should know. On his army's "march through Georgia," he directed the utter destruction of the South's entire willingness to resist, destroying properties as well as troops to reduce the Confederacy's base of production. Fire enveloped acres of farmland. Livestock was devastated.
Somehow, this has been lost amidst the South's Lost Cause. The image of a gentile culture stubbornly survived. But that's not what happened. Slavery wasn't the only thing that was wrecked; an entire way of life got ruined by Sherman, Grant and others.
If you tell history straight, if you want people to understand, you have to deliver the bad news as well as the good. This is the danger of what Ron DeSantis. governor of one of those Confederate states, wants. He wants America to look pristine and well-preserved when in fact it is still constructing itself to overcome myths and nonsense.
He'd rather not face that and would rather our children not face it, either. If it's not broke, there's no need to fix it. If it can be made to look like it didn't happen or can be categorized as inconsequential, there's no need to spend time on it. He wants to enforce that kind of thinking in Florida and he thinks he can do it within the whole United States by banning books and guiding universities away from "woke" thinking as he defines it. Having infested Florida with that thinking, he now wants to try that on all of us as our president, as if we can gain something important from it.
He seems to think that democracy can continue with those bannings, to stop people he doesn't like from thinking in ways he'd rather not support. It can't. He can't maintain the roles of victim and perpetrator. He can't fake being tortured by publication of things he'd rather not concern himself with. He can condemn a society that features such things, but getting at them by ending free speech destroys speech he might be able to utilize. That he can't figure this out should be an enormous red flag for the rest of us, all of whom would rather live and let live, the real theme of the Bill of Rights of which the First Amendment is perhaps the most important part.
He's one of those who's afraid of the facts, afraid of more of them, afraid of the ones that make him uncomfortable. If that guarantee's so vital, if what he wants us to think is so superior, let me ask this: Is his state, Florida, free of poverty? Of underfunded, overcrowded schools? Of people who died from Covid? Of racism? Only someone in complete denial would answer yes to those questions or deny their significance.
Denial: It's the central theme of what we must strive against. It is the underlying backbone of those who ban books. Facing problems is the first hurdle toward fixing them, not walking past them. And that is defeated by knowing what our history offers, to encourage historians and other writers to continue to investigate them. Our history must be faced straight on. Fact-finding should be encouraged, not smoothed over. Its results must be delivered with creative honesty to make it attractive to be absorbed and acted upon.
Above all, it must overcome authoritarians like Ron DeSantis (and his major opponent for his party's nomination, our awful ex-president) who believe in their control above all others. Not everything that is in print should be, but the exceptions are far outweighed by the majority of those who write and draw and paint and sculpt and sing and make statements about humanity for the rest of us to consider and comment upon. Yes, kids should be protected against pornography and obscenity, but parents, not government, should do the overwhelming bulk of that protection.
If we allow too many to have guns to protect those who have a few (a supposition to which I object but I'll allow its discussion), so too we have to have things in print that some of us find objectionable to allow those who have something more constructive to say. It only makes sense. Buzz Bissinger gave us that reminder in his newly researched account of the horrors of Okinawa. Maybe, someday, we'll utilize that information to stop those battles altogether. Wouldn't that be constructive?
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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