Today at the Editor’s glance: Weather: Mostly cloudy in the morning then becoming partly cloudy. A 50 percent chance of showers. Highs in the upper 60s. Northwest winds 5 to 10 mph. Sunday Night: Colder. Mostly clear. Lows in the mid 30s. Northwest winds 5 to 10 mph.
Cold Weather Shelter opens tonight: The Sheltering Tree will open The Flagler County Cold Weather Shelter this Super Bowl Sunday. The weather is forecast to be below 40 degrees in Bunnell, according to The National Weather Service. The cold weather shelter will open at Church on the Rock at 2200 North State Street in Bunnell. The shelter will open at 5:30 p.m. and close at 8 a.m. the following day. If you are in need of shelter, or have no heat at home or are living in your car, join us at Church on the Rock. Call 386-437-3258, extension 105 for more information. Flagler County Transportation offers free bus rides from pick up points in the county, starting at 3 p.m.
Daytona Playhouse: “Calendar Girls.” “Ladies of a certain age decide to sort of bare all for a worthy cause. A small act of kindness goes a long way. Based on a true story this show will tickle your heart and funny bones.” 2 p.m. at the Daytona Playhouse, 100 Jessamine Blvd., Daytona Beach. Book here.
Notably: Today is the anniversary of the firebombing of Dresden, one of the great war crimes of World War II, when some 1,400 Bomber Command planes, American and British, dropped 3,400 tons of explosives on the city, the capital of the German state of Saxony. The tonnage included 650,000 incendiary bombs. “The firestorm that ensued was visible two hundred miles away,” Richard Rhodes wrote in The Making of the Atomic Bomb. The next day, 1,350 American planes returned but the cloud and smoke cover forced them to drop their bombs over a broader area. They encountered no flak. Just six planes were lost in the two days. The bombing was ordered by Winston Churchill, who once, without irony, because he had no sense of it, referred to “the moral rot of war.” Dresden was undefended. It had until then been spared. It had no military value. It was a trove of art and architecture, and of course of unsuspecting human beings, thousands of them refugees fleeing the Russian assault to the east. The bombing ignited a firestorm and killing some 25,000 people. Kurt Vonnegut was one of 26,000 Allied prisoners in and around Dresden. He was bunkered in a basement. He turned the experience into Slaughterhouse Five. The triple-decker headline in The New York Times the next day was not about Dresden, but about the Soviet capture of Budapest “at a cost of 159,000 to foe,” about Patton’s continuing push and the approaching end of the Manila campaign. Dresden was mentioned on the front page–but again, not the bombing. It was mentioned only in connection with an offensive push “within 70 miles of Dresden.” Dresden stood 110 mile south of Berlin. Even the daily war summary on the front page did not mention the bombing, though an article noted that troops would be getting more cigarettes, reducing supplies for civilians. American journalism has always known its priorities. To find any approximation of reporting on the bombing, you have to read deep–well, to the very last paragraph of the more than half-page report of “The Day’s Communiques on the Fighting in Various War Zones.” The paragraph reads, with surprising candor and unsurprising vagueness: “Last night British terror planes dropped bombs on Stuttgart and at random on several rural communities in southern and southwestern Germany as well as in northwestern Germany.” Vonnegut in an interview with Richard Rhodes had compared the city to Paris, “full of statues and zoos.” The prisoners were held in a slaughterhouse, “a nice new cement-block hog barn.” They were made to produce malt syrup. They’d hear other cities get bombed. “We never expected to get it. They were very few air-raid shelters in town and no war industries, just cigarette factories, hospitals, clarinet factories. Then a siren went off–it was February 13, 1945–and we went down two stories under the pavement into a big meat locker. It was cool there, with cadavers hanging all around. When we came up the city was gone….The attack didn’t sound like a hell of a lot either. Whump. They went over with high explosives first to loosen things up, and then scattered incendiaries… They burn the whole damn town down.” Vonnegut and other prisoners then spend days bringing out the dead and burning them in pyres set up by the Germans, and after that, as Jens Bjorneboe wrote in his little-known “Moment of Freedom” (1966), “people could be poured right into the sewers, where there were any sewers left.”
Americans Love the NFL, But Change Is Looming, from Statista’s Daily Infographics: “According to recent findings from Statista’s Global Consumer Survey, the NFL remains the number 1 among major professional sports leagues in the U.S., at least for now. While 52 percent of self-declared sports fans follow the National Football League, compared to 42 percent for the NBA and 31 percent who follow the MLB, looking at the youngest group of respondents reveals a worrying trend for NFL executives. Among 16- to 25-year-olds, the NFL only plays second fiddle to the NBA, with just 33 percent of young sports fans following the league. The NBA reaches 40 percent of Gen X fans, who are overall less likely to follow any professional sports leagues than their older compatriots.”
Now this:
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“I suppose I should be ashamed to say that I take the Western view of the Indian [he said in the course of a lecture which he delivered in New York, during January, 1886]. I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian. Turn three hundred low families of New York into New Jersey, support them for fifty years in vicious idleness, and you will have some idea of what the Indians are. Reckless, revengeful, fiendishly cruel, they rob and murder, not the cowboys, who can take care of themselves, but the defenseless, lone settlers on the plains. As for the soldiers, an Indian chief once asked Sheridan for a cannon. “What! Do you want to kill my soldiers with it?” asked the general. “No,” replied the chief, “want to kill the cowboy; kill soldier with a club.””
–Theodore Roosevelt, cited in “Roosevelt in the Badlands.”
Pogo says
@Lest we forget
“…Notably: Today is the anniversary of the firebombing of Dresden…”
This brought to mind so many terrible things of a kind, e.g., Aleppo…
https://www.google.com/search?q=allepo
Even now, Putin may be about to increase his terrible toll beyond comprehension.
Russia/Syria: War Crimes in Month of Bombing Aleppo
UN General Assembly Should Organize Emergency Special Session
“(New York) – The Russian-Syrian coalition committed war crimes during a month-long aerial bombing campaign of opposition-controlled territory in Aleppo in September and October 2016…”
https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/12/01/russia/syria-war-crimes-month-bombing-aleppo#
And so it goes.
Ray W. says
Thank you, Pogo.