“The first casualty when war comes is truth.” So spoke Sen. Hiram W. Johnson to Congress in 1917. Johnson would die of old age on the very date of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. Or, at least we should think he died of old age. In light of a reading project beginning with Stephen Kinzer’s book, “Poisoner in Chief,” I no longer am sure there is such a thing as natural death.
The Trump administration is gearing up to overthrow the Maduro government in Venezuela, while the New York Times is investigating some of the strikes Trump has ordered against small boats in the Caribbean. No one should be deluded into thinking the obliteration of people will arrest the drug epidemic in our country. To begin to grasp the dimensions of that problem, one need only read ‘paper girl’ Beth Macy’s book, “Dopesick.” It echoes what I heard of heroin addicts’ behaviors many years ago as a child. When cravings are so severe as to drive a person to sell out their own grandmother, reducing the supply of drugs is not going to solve that problem.
And, of course, the 47th president wants to distract from his own difficulties. To be sure, reporting on the Epstein files might be unlikely to filter through to a man in Missouri who is going to lose his family farm on account of Trump’s policies; but, with the completion of Trump’s ballroom that is set to dwarf the size of the White House, it seems likely that Americans will get over the delusion that there is nothing to see, here.
Our nation’s bioweapons program was initially given equal priority with the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb. The goal was for policy makers to be able to control the behaviors of individual humans. The general outlook that supported such work was well represented in the C.I.A.’s approach to seeking answers after the attacks of 9/11/2001. As described in John Pomfret’s book, “From Warsaw with Love,” what our government did to Polish allies then, was, in a word, sick.
Mary H. Hall
South Hadley