If we keep lowering our Ethical Standards - the Moral Bar towards People, towards one another, we end up with this!

Not Hiroshima or Nagasaki but Berlin 1945

If we keep lowering our Moral Standards towards People, towards one another, we ultimately end up with this!

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Truman Grandson Lays Wreath at Hiroshima

Harry Truman, much credit to his humanity, had considered a trip to Hiroshima.

http://thisculturalchristian.blogspot.com/2009/08/our-lady-of-nagasaki-pray-for-us.html

But like so many things political in life, his visit to Hiroshima did not happen.

His grandson Clifton Truman Daniel has completed a link in the chain of life originating with his granddad.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hMOQv2oNWzaj9qSFeZCE5NvP61mg?docId=f976a563c53c4239a78c308acac1ac55

TOKYO (AP) — A grandson of ex-U.S. President Harry Truman, who ordered the atomic bombings of Japan during World War II, is in Hiroshima to attend a memorial service for the victims.

Clifton Truman Daniel visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park on Saturday and laid a wreath for the 140,000 people killed by the Aug. 6, 1945, bombing authorized by his grandfather. Another atomic blast in Nagasaki three days later killed 70,000 more.

"I think this cenotaph says it all — to honor the dead to not forget and to make sure that we never let this happen again," Daniel said after offering a silent prayer.

Daniel, 55, is in Japan to attend ceremonies next week in Hiroshima and Nagasaki marking the 67th anniversary of the bombings. His visit, the first by a member of the Truman family...

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Christopher Hitchens - Trashing the Dead or The New Necromancy

I know it an unsightly boorish thing to question the wit, the unquestioned wit of a Brit who helps the dumbed down American landscape elevate itself to new highs of undeserved grandeur.

Tea time, High Tea, cocktail party. When is it “appropriate to say fuck in public?”

Not over the body of a Japanese man who lived through two of the most tragic days thus far in Human Existence and in two of the most unfortunate places to witness our shared Human Tragedy – Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“WTF” is all the incredibly talented but constantly drunk and boorish Christopher Hitchens has to say about the sufferings of a 93 year old Japanese man.

O Lucky Man - Sometimes "WTF?" is the only rational response to a situation

The brute fact must also be faced that there is something approximately 30 percent farcical, even funny, about the whole tale. There's almost no point in not laughing about it. The late Alan Clark, Tory historian and amoral wit, once drew up a list of the occasions on which it is permissible to employ the word fuck in polite society. One of his examples was, "What the fuck was that?" as uttered by the mayor of Hiroshima. Add to this the mayor of Nagasaki exclaiming the same thing just as Yamaguchi stumbles onstage, and you can arguably build a bit of a routine around it. Unfeeling, you say? Not particularly. It isn't my idea that these capricious catastrophes strike the just and the unjust with such regularity, or that they are soothingly explained away by the pseudo-compassionate. Of all the great cosmic questions, WTF still strikes me as one of the most pressing, relevant, and ultimately humane.

I think it a bit disrespectful if not downright vulgar to have devoted a whole spiel – burlesque set up for a punch line at a cocktail party and to not mention the bits and pieces of suffering this Japanese man went through because he perhaps was lucky or unlucky to have survived after being at two very unfortunate events in human history.

The New York Times did as usual write an outstanding Obituary for Mister Tsutomu Yamaguchi.

Which brings me to the new necromancy of the cocktail party set and of the man who has trashed the dead before in the form of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. No doubt Mr. Hitchens will be writing soon about that new necromancy of the rich and elite with whom he most disdainfully must fraternize with because nobody else is as good or as smart or as brilliant as hisself.

On a macro history level, I agree that Truman had to drop the bomb to save American and Japanese casualties. I am talking grunts and soldiers here on both sides. I agree because I try to empathize with the little people on the ground in the micro part of that historic equation. Which makes me wonder if Mr. Hitchens has any empathy at all for mere people.

I have not read the writing part of Mr. Hitchens trashing of Mother Teresa but watched as all us little people can do - some YouTube – a three part documentary “Hell’s Angel” referring to Mother Teresa of Calcutta. His delivery is methodical and well spoken. He delivers script verbally as good as he writes it. As I said before he is an incredibly talented man now working to raise the American literary levels higher. The documentary is the best piece of propaganda I have ever seen. It’s polished Pravda like style delivers me back to those days of us against them in the cold war.

Hitchens’ “us” is atheism and the “them” are the would be saints like Teresa who kissed the asses of the rich, powerful and evil to fund her distribution of crumbs to the poor. I begin to understand the opera of the church and the role of a devil’s advocate in the production like process that makes an official saint of the RC church.

For a moment I almost believed the propaganda about what a monster Teresa is in the eyes of an atheist. Why do people do good things in the name of some abstract or unseen entity called G-d?

I begin to realize why I am uncomfortable with atheism and atheists. When they shed their allegiance to any belief system, many of them expose their lack of empathy towards humanity.

Treating Teresa on a macro level of history suits the author and propagandist and eliminates the little guy out of the equation. That perhaps belief in non-belief, atheism, as a belief and new religion is as totalitarian as any gone before it.

So too on one level of humanity, the rich and famous can make money, war and words of comfort from coffee table magazine writers. They cannot understand “why the other half live”. A troubled conscience perhaps?

I must thank Mister Tsutomu Yamaguchi for living his meager life full of suffering. I must thank him for his efforts late in life to join against nuclear proliferation. I must thank him for his suffering, of wearing bandages for fifteen years to heal the scars of man’s imposition of inhumanity onto humanity (macro onto micro).

I cannot apologize for the human condition and the need by the uncaring elite to wage war at the expense of the “other half” factored out of all present economic and political equations of all so called modern or post modern success.

Rest in peace Mister Yamaguchi. You have done much for human history by your much more than mere life and presence on this planet.

And thank you too Christopher for making me aware of why I believe in God but not religion.

Today, the human equation, and the light within, are still very real to me.

Our Lady of Nagasaki - Pray for us !

The whole purpose of the Cold War was to in some weird Dante like image way – to turn the planet into one big pile of bio-trash?

The August 6 anniversary of the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima is upon and again the MSM gets a free minute or two of airtime showing archive footage and an historic footnote gets mentioned but not analyzed. The Mayor of Hiroshima this year has words to repeat from the American President and a bold new concept for the ban of nuclear weapons from the planet. An unusual word, “Obamajority” refers to and represents the sentiment of the majority of the planet who agree with the concept.

Hiroshima mayor backs Obama's call for an end to nuclear weapons

Are we crawling to Bethlehem as the poet Yeats describes our progress toward the future? Is that crawling a good thing? Are we to be reborn into a better more efficient monkey package in terms of our evolutionary capacity to change - and hopefully for the better?

The Image of Hiroshima, burn victims, salt shadows (evaporated people) on the sidewalks and the naked raw image of the burned landscape - are eternal in humanity’s personal and historic scrapbook.

I am for nuclear disarmament.

As an American, I stand by President Truman and his command decision to use the bombs to save a million American military casualties. I had relatives in the Pacific theatre of war who would have been in a likely physical invasion of the Japanese mainland.

Truman had been in the trenches in World War One. His was a hands on decision based on experience. Right, wrong or indifferent, Harry Truman used the device of war to end war – an old formula.

To Truman’s credit, his humanity, his possible regret, he had a brief discussion with his biographer Merle Miller in which the topic of discussion was whether he would or could visit Hiroshima to lay a wreath. The old cantankerous man responded that he might do that, he might go to Japan but that he would not kiss their ass. Harry did have a way with words. Men in previous generations of western culture have not been allowed to be emotionally honest in so many ways. Truman dropped the bomb and now we have to live with the consequences of proliferation.

The other city that got hammered with science in 1945 was Nagasaki on August 9 with the second bomb, in our new age of non-reason related to nuclear arms. People don’t visit that city or remember it as much. Hiroshima is the premiere icon of nuclear destruction. Nagasaki is more a local domestic thing while Hiroshima is the icon of international focus.

I believe that a very bubble wrapped Japanese government in total denial about surrender looked at Nagasaki and drew a horrible conclusion about its destruction. In the Japanese mindset of race and blood, Nagasaki was not considered to be Japanese but European. The Japanese allowed one port city, set aside in the sixteenth century, and in conjunction with trade from Portugal. While on Japanese soil this city was virtually walled off in access and psychological reference from mainstream Japanese culture up until 1945.

The photo above is of a burned wooden image of the Virgin Mary from the Cathedral there in the European colony port of Nagasaki. The Japanese saw the destruction of a European city by the Americans and they did not understand the concept. Were the Americans ignorant of history or was the nuclear genie a madness that could not be contained?

Nagasaki cathedral chapel – Virgin Mary

Is the nuclear genie a madness that cannot be contained?

That is what anniversaries are for. To remember and to consider, reconsider the facts of the day in focus - August 6, 1945.