Space Oddity

an excerpt from a ny times sunday review op ed last year “The Female Pilots We Betrayed”
By the end of the war, 38 WASPs had died flying for their country. But the military took no responsibility for them.
The man who championed the WASPs was Army Air Forces Commanding General Henry Arnold, known as Hap. He built and led the greatest Air Force ever assembled. For this, he was revered, particularly by Congress, which gave him virtually anything he asked for.
But in June 1944, when he sought to officially designate the WASPS as members of the United States military, Congress declined. Disgruntled male pilots had complained to Congress that women were taking their jobs. The press took that up and ran with it. So the women remained civilians.
FOR many of those who died while flying, classmates or squadron mates chipped in to ship their bodies home. Some pilots escorted their close friends’ bodies on trains.

The WASPs were disbanded on Dec. 20, 1944, and sent home with no recognition. Victory was in sight, and the female pilots were expendable.
The result of this shameful failure to give WASPs their appropriate military classification: no medical care, no insurance benefits. No Gold Star in the family’s window if their daughter died flying for her country. No burial subsidy. And no flag on the coffin.
After a protracted fight, WASPs finally earned veteran status in 1977, thanks to a law signed by Jimmy Carter. And in 2002, the Army granted the WASPs military funeral honors — the playing of Taps, a rifle salute and an American flag to the family — and affirmed that they were eligible for inurnment at Arlington.
But last March, the secretary of the Army overturned that decision because of a technicality. The likely explanation is that Arlington expects to run out of room by 2030. And yet there are over 30,000 spaces left to store urns.
The Army that desperately needed female pilots in 1942 and then discarded them in 1944 has turned its back on them again.
Last month, the House and Senate introduced bills to make this right. Most of the 113 surviving WASPs are in their 90s now. There is not much time left to ensure that they get the honors they deserve.

david remnick in new Yorker:
American Dignity on the Fourth of July
Reading Frederick Douglass’s Independence Day address from 1852 may ease the despair caused by listening to the President.
More than three-quarters of a century after the delegates of the Second Continental Congress voted to quit the Kingdom of Great Britain and declared that “all men are created equal,” Frederick Douglass stepped up to the lectern at Corinthian Hall, in Rochester, New York, and, in an Independence Day address to the Ladies of the Rochester Anti-Slavery Sewing Society, made manifest the darkest ironies embedded in American history and in the national self-regard. “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” Douglass asked:

I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

The dissection of American reality, in all its complexity, is essential to political progress, and yet it rarely goes unpunished. One reason that the Republican right and its attendant media loathed Barack Obama is that his public rhetoric, while far more buoyant with post-civil-rights-era uplift than Douglass’s, was also an affront to reactionary pieties. Even as Obama tried to win votes, he did not paper over the duality of the American condition: its idealism and its injustices; its heroism in the fight against Fascism and its bloody misadventures before and after. His idea of a patriotic song was “America the Beautiful”—not in its sentimental ballpark versions but the way that Ray Charles sang it, as a blues, capturing the “fullness of the American experience, the view from the bottom as well as the top.”

[….continues with not so nice things to say about you know who for a few paragraphs….]

Frederick Douglass ended his Independence Day jeremiad in Rochester with steadfast optimism (“I do not despair of this country”). Read his closing lines, and what despair you might feel when listening to a President who abets ignorance, isolation, and cynicism is eased, at least somewhat. The “mental darkness” of earlier times is done, Douglass reminded his audience. “Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe.” There is yet hope for the “great principles” of the Declaration of Independence and “the genius of American Institutions.” There was reason for optimism then, as there is now. Donald Trump is not forever. Sometimes it just seems that way.

bink, hey, cut him some slack as our fearless leader just prior to election ultimately did post public support for hrc and I assume voted for her.  i’m more irritated at those who didn’t bother to show up at all to vote and at those who purposely voted for chaos, but now are grousing about the results or testily wanting all to bury heads in the sand, not face the consequences nor try to resolve the problem they caused.