Connecting New York and Afghanistan

Apologies for gap in blogging while my wife and I spent Easter in Tennessee, visiting our daughter (who is from Glens Falls) and son-in-law. They will soon be deploying to Afghanistan. It'll be the second tour there for both, but their first as members of the 101st Airborne Division -- which since its formation in 1942 has fought in Normandy, Holland, Bastogne and most other places where U.S. troops have been engaged.

We visited Nashville, where the Capitol is older than Albany's and also lacks a dome. (The city has another park with a full-scale replica of the Parthenon, near where a locomotive is displayed that was built in Schenectady.) There was a battle of Nashville in December 1864, and the victorious Union commander, George Thomas, has connections through his wife to Troy, NY, where he was married at St. Paul's Episcopal Church and is buried at Oakwood Cemetery. President Ulysses Grant, who also has a strong connection to the greater Capital Region of New York, came to Troy with his Cabinet for Thomas' funeral in 1870. Thomas was from Virginia, where his sisters disowned him for staying loyal to the Union. He remained stationed in Tennessee after the war, fighting the Ku Klux Klan. The Reconstruction state Legislature paid for a fine full-length portrait of him by George Dury, which no longer hangs in the Capitol but is in the Tennessee State Museum.

The Confederates abandoned Nashville in early 1862 after Grant's victory at Fort Donelson. Union gunboats went up the Cumberland River from Donelson toward Nashville, and two stopped on the way at Clarksville. An exhibit on the Riverwalk there records an outraged diary entry from a Tennessee girl about the "cowards" she imagined the sailors to be. The Union forces had no secure hold on west Tennessee, being plagued by guerrillas and irregulars during and after the war -- not so different from Afghanistan.

On the way back last night, at Reagan Airport in Washington, my wife recognized Henry Kissinger. He was being wheeled into the New York shuttle, and threw some trash at a container but missed. His distinguished-looking wife Nancy, following behind, picked it up and threw it away. Kissinger affably greeted a couple of kids who approached him in the brief interval he was kept waiting. I've never been a big fan of the guy, but it was somehow reassuring to see him taking a commercial flight in the company of ordinary Americans, a refutation of the conspiracy theory worldview which sees the United States as the Great Satan.

Comments

[Brian]

"it was somehow reassuring to see him taking a commercial flight in the company of ordinary Americans, a refutation of the conspiracy theory worldview which sees the United States as the Great Satan."

This cracked me up. There must be a giant non sequitur I'm missing.

[Johannah]

I don't know where to start. The American Civil War cannot be compared to the US invasion of Afghanistan. Kissinger's choice of transportation service doesn't refute anything. Theory and worldview are two different things. Criticism and/or resentment of USA behavior in the world cannot be dismissed summarily as conspiracy theory or religious insanity.

[Bob Conner]

I guess the point was Kissinger didn't look like a masters-of-the-universe James Bond-movie-villain, who would at least have had a private jet.