Killing Japanese didn’t bother me very much at that time… I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Curtis LeMay

(Should I say: Warning, plot spoilers for GOT ahead, or is this enough time?)

Last Sunday, waiting for Game of Thrones to start, I started thinking about how Daenerys Stormborn of the House Targaryen trashing King’s Landing with her dragon, Dragon, had set up the final episode. We watched from ground level as she spread terror, killing helpless women and children from a distance, by airpower. Her biggest backers, Tyrion Lannister, and Aegon Targaryen – previously known as John Snow, when he was still happy being her lover – were shown as dismayed at the pointless carnage. The episode was designed to make it hard to keep rooting for Daney, as she turned into her father, The Mad King. Going into the last episode, I assumed, and we are set up to assume, that, in the end, Daney would not be the winner of the game. For seven season, I’ve rooted for Daney and now I was hoping she abdicated or committed suicide.

I read somewhere that David Benioff and D. B. Weiss were thinking of the Allied bombing of Dresden when they did Game of Thrones 8.5. It made me wonder how our bombing of Dresden was not considered a war crime and how we came to do it in the first place. It seems that, in the 1930s, as the major Western powers plus Japan were making decisions about updating their military equipment, especially their respective air forces, Britain and the United States bet that strategic bombing could win a war (or, at least, substantially help to win it). Germany and the USSR bet that the best use of airpower was tactical and did not invest in heavy bombers. When Germany started the actual war, their use of tactical air support was a major factor in their early, lightning quick, victories, but, as the war went on, it became the only way the US and Britan could strike back and both Britain’s and the United States’ past decisions colored their thinking on how to win the war. They continued to believe that bombing German production facilities would weaken the German war machine (and, later, the Japanese war machine). Eventually, they were bombing German production facilities around the clock even though it didn’t really work as advertised. Out of frustration as much as anything, we sorted of drifted into strategic bombing to terrorize the civilian population, just like Daenerys Stormborn. That terror bombing campaign peaked in the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan, killing somewhere between 130,000 to 225,000 Japanese civilians (depending on who is counting).

But dropping the atomic bombs, as destructive as it was, killed fewer people than our March 9, 1945 attack on Tokyo when we killed more people at one time than ever before, or after (so far). In one 24 hour period, we used 334 B29 bombers to drop 1,665 tons of bombs, first using high explosive bombs to turn large areas of Tokyo into kindling and then using incendiary bombs to set the city afire, killing over one hundred thousand people, mostly women and children, and making over one million people homeless.

The third, or so, scene of Game of Thrones has Ned Stark beheading a deserter himself because the person who gives a death sentence should have to bear the burden of carrying it out. He is the moral pole in this world and we are on his side. But in our world, the real world, the Mad Kings of Al-Qaeda behead people up close and personal and the good guys, us, kill from the air, passionless. That does not make me comfortable.

I think a relationship is like a shark. It has to constantly move forward or it dies. Woody Allen

Our friend, and my Little Brother Edwin’s mom, Martha Silva became a Citizen yesterday and Michele and I were lucky enough to be at the Paramount Theater in Oakland to see it. I left feeling great about America, our America. The American that welcomes immigrants, the America that has demonstrated diverse opinions result in a stronger, more resilient, county, the America that knows that, what we used to call the melting pot, is why we have prospered.

An organization starts dying when it worries more about keeping people out than it worries about trying to get more people in. That is a sure sign that the organization no longer wants to move forward, that it wants to stay in the past, slowly atrophying. I read the papers or hear Trump on the radio and I worry that we have changed into a country that wants to go back to the past, I worry that we now are trying to keep people out, then I look at Facebook or Twitter and that worry is amped way up; to fear, barely covered by rage. But in a very real way, all that is fake news, yes, all the bad news we read about has happened but that wasn’t all that happened. It is not even most of what happened. Last year, 754,700 immigrants became citizens up from 291,800 in 2010.

This morning, I watched 726 more people become new citizens. Of that 726 people, the largest subgroup was about 150 from Mexico, followed by The Philipines – which was a surprise – then China and India. These new citizens came from 82 different countries ranging alphabetically from Afghanistan to Yemen. When we left, the afternoon group was already starting to line up. Also, when we left, Martha had already applied for a passport and registered to vote. And we know that she is going to vote.

You can do jazz, classical, blues, opera, country until you’re 150, but rap and rock and roll are really a way for young people to get that anger out, it’s silly to perform a song that has no relevance to the present or expresses feelings you no longer have. Grace Slick

We went to see Big Brother and the Holding Company and The Jefferson Starship the other night. They were billed as being part of the fifty-year celebration of Woodstock (although when we got there the announcer said it was part of a Women in Music series). It was fun and I’m glad we went, but it was also sort of strange. When Michele mentioned it, I said: “Uh, OK.” not really thinking it through. About halfway through the first set, it occurred to me that most of the band was younger than they should be. Obviously, the lead singer was new – it turns out that, over the years, nineteen different women have sung Joplin’s part? role? including a woman, Shiho Ochi, from the Japanese band Superfly – and this Joplin looked to be under forty. The band should be my age, maybe even a year or two older – and two were, the drummer, Dave Getz and the bass player, Pete Albin – but most of these performers seemed younger than me, way younger. Still, the music sounded pretty much the same. OK, I was much more aware of how bluesy it was but I think that is because I’ve listened to so much blues in the interim and there was an electric violinist, Kate Ruso, who was terrific. Still, sitting there, I began to realize that I was watching a kind of Möbius performance wherein a cover band named Big Brother and the Holding Company playing music from the original Big Brother and the Holding Company.

It sort of makes me wonder, What is Big Brother and the Holding Company? What is any big name band? Is it just a branding company? I vaguely knew that old swing bands like the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra continued playing the same sound with a variety of players but it never occurred to me that rock bands were doing the same thing.

The feature act was The Jefferson Starship and I went through the same process, thinking at first that the Grace Slick part was played by Grace Slick but, of course, the singer was only channeling Grace Slick. Her name is Cathy Richardson, she was quite good, and she really seemed to carry the band, just like Grace Slick used to do. The strange thing that I found out when I got home is that Cathy Richardson sometimes plays the Janis Joplin parts for Big Brother and the Holding Company. There was one original Starship player, David Freiberg – with the white hair and grey sweatsuit in Michele’s picture above – who had returned after being away for twenty years.

The concert and I don’t know what else to call it, was in the Marin Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium and we sat in typical theater seats (pleasantly clapping after good solos). These were two outlaw bands, they came into being during the “don’t trust anybody over 30” 60s and they almost defined the counterculture. But this was almost like going to a Classical concert, nobody was dancing in the aisles and the youngest attendees were very close to 60. It was surreal, but surreal in a fun way.

About an hour ago, I was walking out of my office for the day.

There was a man what I believe was his teenage son hanging a small sign they made outside my office (we let people leave well wishes on our wall).

Astonishingly, his sign read: “Trump supporters for Ocasio-Cortez.” pic.twitter.com/IjVKbvetEI

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 10, 2019

I’m not running “from the left.” I’m running from the bottom. I’m running in fierce advocacy of working class Americans. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez