(Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris visits a monument in Hanoi, Republic of Vietnam. It depicts the landing spot of an American pilot shot down in a raid on what was then the capital of a divided nation. It was not publicized that way. The pilot depicted hanging in the straps of his parachute was the son of the Pacific Commander of the war, and later Senator from Arizona, John McCain. We have no idea what the Vice President was thinking).

It was a Bad Day yesterday. Not at The Farm, but it was a day for a recurrent visit to our Nurse Practitioner, a dedicated professional who has suffered the long pandemic with poise and the optimism that gives us confidence in her advice and recommendations. These periodic look-ins also give us a chance to look at what the medical crisis has done to medicine, and to those who make a living in the trade intended to keep us in the same state. Alive.

Her recommendations seem to work. We feel pretty good. We stay mostly on the property, within the fence lines. The lack of broadband connectivity is an irritant, naturally, but three commercial firms have installed, with proper social distancing, some small dishes adjacent to the septic field. Although inadequate for streaming Netflix content, we have not dropped contact with our various networks.

It might be worth accounting what the impact of the plague has been on our social mores. We have accepted unshaven and unshorn correspondents from all over, broadcasting from their basements. Some are not wearing cosmetics. The Writer’s Section is OK with that, and we have adapted to the lack of tonsorial support by shearing one another at suitable intervals. We may not look our best, but we assure each other that we convey a certain rugged professional demeanor suitable to our field or afloat experience years ago. Or at least our small group permits each other some flexibility.

So there is that reality, cloaked in the Piedmont’s sultry August. Or one reality. Our Vice President was in Hanoi, now the capital of the unified Republic of Vietnam, a place we lost some 54,000 American soldiers. The cost to the Vietnamese people was much, much more severe. Some estimate, from their side, are a half million or so.

Since most of what we see are not news, per se, but image and optics intended to support things called “memes” or “narratives.” The VP is deliberately far away from the news here. She got an unexpectedly cool reception in Singapore, the vibrant city state on the passage between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. The problem with rule by committee is some unfortunate confusion. Yesterday we saw the picture of her visit to the moneument in Hanoi that marks the place former Senator John McCain landed in the decorative pond when he was shot down as a Navy pilot in that war long ago.

We took a vote on that. About half thought she considered the monument some sort of tribute to Senator McCain’s later maverick service in the legislative branch, instead of what it was. A mark of triumph against the will of the mighty. I had something some of the rest of the group did not. We ensured we got a good image of Senator McCain’s image:

(It was 1995. We were smiling back then. We knew what the monument signified. We were hoping to normalize relations twenty years after the conflict ended. It is a curious sort of confluence between past, present and future).

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
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