9/11 at 25.

I've shared my thoughts on Patriot Day over the years in this blog. Basically, at this point it's obvious we did not dispatch enough of the sons of bitches in Afghanistan, going by the chaotic withdrawal from that blighted country under President Biden. As Kurt Schlichter wrote yesterday, "If there is one overriding failure in the war on terror, it is that we did not kill enough of the terrorists."

And that's my main thought at this late date. 

I asked a friend of mine, retired now from the New York City Fire Department, if he had any thoughts he would share. He said no; "I just try to forget it." He avoids anything on television that might show the World Trade Center on that day. I told him I understood. I do not know what to do with my anger when I go down that path. 

I saw a question raised online about why Hollywood has not done more by way of movies regarding the War on Terror and the September 11 attacks. I actually don't blame Hollywood for this. In World War II, war movies were popular, because we knew we were fighting nation states, and we would fight them until they suffered complete defeat. We can't do that with multinational death-cult adherents of a 1400-year-old religion. So our frustration and fury are unresolvable. Any film or TV show that takes on these topics will face a huge stumbling block right there. That's why I think the films we have had about the attacks and the war have not been successful. 

It's not because America does not love her heroes. You'd better believe we do.

We are now engaged in a war that began when our country and the West backstabbed the Shah of Iran and Jimmy Carter told France to let the Ayatollah go back to Iran (after the Ayatollah lied about how he had no beef against the USA). The birdies were always going to come home to roost, and they were either going to be vultures carrying nukes or eagles with lesser but highly effective arms. That's where we are in September 2026.

If you know anyone in the American armed forces, please make sure to tell them that we really do care, and we really do appreciate them. And if any more sons of bitches need killing, we trust them to do the job. 

God bless the United States of America. 

A YALE man?!?

Little known fact: A hundred years ago or so, Adolf Hitler was a student at Yale. 

Nah, just joshin'. Klara Schicklgruber's baby boy never set foot in the United States. This is just clipart from a collection of same from the 1910s through 1920s, when no one had heard of Adolf (and what a blissful state that is in retrospect). Back then so-called normal men might sport that whiskbroom mustache that has been thrown in the same trash heap as the swastika, and good riddance. 

Hitler may never have gone to Yale, but now it seems Yale and our other elite universities have come to Hitler. Yale didn't get in the same hot water as Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did recently for their tolerance of ferocious antisemitism and support of terrorism, but Yale's response was meager, and now the worst offender on the faculty is in line to become the new university president.

And the Ivies wonder why normal Americans hate them?

Of course, if we all just celebrated National Brotherhood Week in our hearts and year-round, none of this would have happened. 

The National Conference of Christians and Jews (now the National Conference for Community and Justice) was founded in 1927 to combat bias in America, and launched the first National Brotherhood Day in the 1930s. It was expanded to a whole week in 1936. Mostly it is remembered now for the parody by Harvard professor Tom Lehrer, as the whole concept of brotherhood had become irrelevant by the 2000s and the event no more. Because obviously we all love one another now. 

No, stop laughing. If they tried to relaunch National Brotherhood Week now, it would be condemned for being sexist and patriarchal. What about sisterhood? What about non-binary personhood? What about foreign nationals? What about non-binary foreign nationals?  

So, hate is humming right along these days. However, it no longer comes mostly from dumb bigots in rural America; it is much more common in the cities and in the ivy-covered halls of academia. 

What will it take to make our educated class stop being so full of hate? I don't know. Maybe the Harvard guys could try to stop hating those Elis for a start. And maybe our university students could try to stop hating their university founders and all of America. Not likely, though -- those kids just LOVE to hate. 

Ash Valentine.

I am informed that the last time Ash Wednesday fell on St. Valentine's Day was 1945. The following July we tested the first A-bomb and the world entered the age of nuclear war. 

COINCIDENCE? 

Talk about ashes to ashes

Well, the sad fact is, we're all going to die, but we hope not all at once. Life has been compared to a stream, a river, a race, but it's just a road. We merge into the lane with a peer group, but almost immediately some are taken off the road. As we continue, our cohort does all right, but the farther down the road we get the faster we lose members of our group. Then, one day, we each are diverted off the road ourselves. We hope to go somewhere better, somewhere where all roads end in joy. But most of us are not in a rush to get there. 

It does feel weird to have the day o' love coincide with the annual reminder by the church that we are going to die. But is it so weird? For goodness' sake, there are enough stories of people dying for love. Really, though, we ought to have more stories of people living for love -- devoting themselves through all the difficulties of life to serve those we love, and of course the God who made us from dust. Well, the universal drama of death always commands the audience's attention.

Enough of this death stuff. May your heart be gladdened on this Valentine's Day, and may you not get lousy candy. If you're gonna break a Lenten pledge right out of the starting gate, at least get some quality candy out of it. Good chocolate is da bomb! 

We've got a Godzilla for sale.

Thinkin' about Godzilla. 

I don't believe I've ever seen a full Godzilla movie. By the time I came along they had gotten pretty silly. The original 1954 Toho movie was pretty damn dark -- Godzilla's ruin of Tokyo would have revived some horrible memories for audiences who had lived through the real thing, with Allied firebombing less than ten years earlier. The Operation Meetinghouse bombing of March 9 through 10, 1945, "is the single most destructive bombing raid in human history," according to Dr. Wikipedia. And yet people packed the theaters in Tokyo to see Godzilla (or, as he was known then, Gojira) destroy the city all over again. 

I've written before how seeing the destruction of midtown Manhattan in The Avengers in 2012 was hardly entertaining to me, having been in midtown on September 11 while my wife was downtown. I wondered about all the non-player characters in all the buildings who were getting obliterated or crippled for life. Previous superhero movies had been all about preventing horrific damage to innocents; this one felt like it was reveling in it, and less than 11 years after the terrorist attacks. 

But no one else seemed to be bothered, so I guess I'm just a little delicate little lotus flower, too good for this world. I haven't bothered with any other superhero movies since the first Guardians of the Galaxy. Don't even mention the word Transformers to me.  

For high-body-count entertainment, though, Godzilla is king of the destroyers. When the children of the original Japanese audiences got older, Toho found that they loved Godzilla, and so movies got geared to younger viewers and it showed. Sure, cities and irreplaceable landmarks and presumably thousands of people got killed, but it was fun! There was even a promotion to design a robot for 1973's Godzilla vs, Megalon. The winning entry was Jet Jaguar! And you can't blame the kid who won for the name, because Jet Jaguar was the name the studio gave the robot. 

Come on, people now, smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now

I've never even seen the entire Mystery Science Theater episode that covered that picture. 

Some of my friends were big fans of the Godzilla and Godzilla-adjacent movies, which typically ran on ABC's famous 4:30 Movie, films for post-school kids cut in half and run over two days. ABC seemed to program for boys -- it would always be kaiju movies or the Planet of the Apes or low-budget horror films or the 1966 Batman movie or the like. I don't think I had the patience for movies in those days. I could sit through hours of TV, don't get me wrong, but in 30-minute segments, please. 

These days ol' Lizard Eye is back and bigger than ever. (A friend of mine in college always wanted to make a Godzilla movie where the Big G would go up against a bunch of hillbillies who called him "ol' Lizard Eye.") I'm told that in the new films from Legendary Pictures, the good humans want to find a way to coexist with all the giant monsters. Seems like a pretty tall order to me. Every time one of the damn things sneezes, a billion dollars of infrastructure goes up in flames. This is why we can't have nice things! 

I will say this for Godzilla -- he inspired a pretty great song by Blue Öyster Cult. With a riff reminiscent of Godzilla's scream, a thumping drum footstep, and verse hammered out in iambic tetrameter, it's irresistible. 

I just don't find fun in death and destruction. But there will always be those who love the Big G, and good for them. Just don't get stepped on.   

Southerners on Broadway.

Contrary to some people's reminiscences, our culture in the 1970s was not all America hating post-Vietnam Watergate-obsessed conspiracy theories.  

In fact, almost 50 years ago a musical hit the Broadway boards, based on a Civil War story and starring Southerners. It was called Shenandoah.

The musical was based on a 1965 Jimmy Stewart film, and written by Peter Udell, Philip Rose, and James Lee Barrett (who wrote the movie), with music by Gary Geld. It ran for more than a thousand performances. It told the story of a family of yeoman farmers in the Shanandoah valley, a large non-slave-owning family who wanted nothing to do with the burgeoning war but were caught up in the horror of it anyway. These were the kind of people who in real life caused West Virginia to split from the eastern side and join the Union. 

Shenandoah starred John Cullum -- familiar to many people today from his appearances on Law & Order. He had been blowing the doors off the 46th Street Theater as South Carolina's John Rutledge in 1776 a few years earlier -- a role he repeated in the 1972 film version -- and played a scheming playwright in Ira Levin's Deathtrap a few years later. A very versatile actor, who would win the Tony for Shenandoah. (It did not win Best Musical; that was the year of The Wiz. The book got Best Book of a Musical, though.) It was promoted heavily on local TV, something that didn't happen only at Christmastime in those days. 

Shenandoah was typical of the Americana that was in the air leading up to the Bicentennial. People who think of seventies culture as nothing but disco and pet rocks and cheesy sitcoms might be surprised how reflective the nation was in that era, and yet celebratory. This musical entered that spirit. The story is tough -- the large family suffers at the hands of Union soldiers and Confederate deserters, a dramatic example of Trotsky's line that “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” Moreover, the patriarch, Charlie, is a man whose faith in God has been wrecked before the play begins by the loss of his wife, and his is a spiritual journey as tragedy unfolds. I can't imagine a current musical even taking religion seriously enough to make it the dramatic center of the story. Audiences now would be yelling, like Job's wife, "Curse God and die!" 

And it's hard to imagine that a play about sympathetic Southerners, even those opposed to slavery and the War Between the States, would be a hit on Broadway. It would be panned as being a musical about "nice Nazis." Because people are stupid and know nothing and just want to shout. 

Shenandoah was revived in 2019, although not on Broadway. I'm not certain it could run on the Great White Way at all, not just because it takes place in the Confederacy. Broadway musicals are ridiculously expensive to produce, far more so than in 1974, and these days there has to be a built-in audience before the thing even opens or investors won't touch it. So a musical has to be constructed like a commodity around well-known pop songs (Jersey Boys, Smokey Joe's Café, MJ, Beautiful, and on and on) (and even then it can be a disaster) or be built around a movie that has a strong following (Elf, Legally Blonde, Back to the Future, all that Disney crap, and oh so much more). Foreign performance rights are also crucial to recouping investment, and a play based on a time in American history does not sound like a layup for audiences in Europe and Asia. While revivals of past hits are a good bet, Shenandoah never reached the rarified atmosphere of a few megahits like Oklahoma!, My Fair Lady, The Wiz, or Gypsy. Investors may take a flyer on something new, if it's woke enough, and take a bath on it, patting themselves on the back all the way to the tax write-off. 

As we gear up for our Semiquincentennial in 2026, I see no sign in the current culture of reflection or celebration. They revived 1776 with stunt casting -- an "All-Female, Transgender, and Non-Binary Broadway Revival," although the internal contradictions of that casting requirement will make your head spin. It makes one wonder if the John and Abigail Adams numbers are based on hot girl-on-girl action, because that's where our culture is now. Ahistorical, childish, and stupid. 

I doubt we're going to make it to the Tricentennial at this rate. 

Fun and hatred.

I've heard it attributed to Erma Bombeck -- though I can't track down the quote -- that one should never marry someone until they've played the board game Monopoly together, because that's how you can see the true person within. 

That's pretty good advice. Someone who is cruel and ruthless in meaningless things may be very cruel and very ruthless when it counts. Some women look for that in a man -- a guy who's a killer, who will protect and provide -- only to find out that he will cut them off at the legs when it suits him, too. On the other hand, some women want a nice guy who couldn't care less who wins or loses, and then get furious when he turns out to be a couch potato. 

Monopoly can be illuminating. 

Board games can teach us a lot. One of the reasons that people like myself who love words are so frustrated by Scrabble is that, as my wife noted, it's not really a word game. It's a math game. People with good vocabularies think they have an advantage going in, but the mathemagicians who know how to slay with an X on a triple letter score and always know how many of each letter tile are likely to still be in the bag are the ones who win. They can make up for their lack of words by -- completely within the rules -- hogging the official Scrabble dictionary while they scan their letters. They're not looking to get rid of that Z. They're looking for a way to get set up by you to dump it on the triple word score next time. Because it’s not the killer word that counts, it’s the killer score.

All this is very educational, but for those who really want to know how evil their friends and loved ones can be, I still say that you can't beat Avalon Hill's classic, Diplomacy. It is the king of bad relations. 

1976 edition

Forbes magazine called the game board "the map that ruined a thousand friendships," and I'd say that's being nice. The goal of the game, for up to seven players, each representing a pre-World War I nation, is to take over Europe, which means capturing eighteen of the thirty-four major cities (as supply centers). There are no dice, no cards, just moves and alliances. All moves are written in secret and played simultaneously.

I believe that it is impossible to win this game without screwing someone over. 

There's no way. You can only survive for any time by making alliances, and if your alliance vanquishes the other alliance(s), no one player will yet control enough of the map to win. Someone's gotta go down, and the best way to do it is a surprise attack, when you can mortally wound your former friend and he cannot stop you. We called the game Screw Your Buddy.

I've played the game many times, and it's ugly. It’s the only game I have ever seen end with someone's announced move being "I flip the game board." In this game it's routine. There are no good losers in Diplomacy. There are no good winners. Just sore losers and sore winners. No one's happy.  

It's amazing.

The last time I played, I started out with an ally who said we would experiment with the noble idea that we would be pals straight to the end. Blood oath to not attack each other. I took advantage and made an unusual early aggressive move on an opponent. He didn't like it -- basically, he didn't want me as an ally, he wanted to control my country -- so he immediately stabbed me in the back. I swore the game off after that. The hatred would have made Emperor Palpatine look like Tweety Bird.  

If you want a classic game that tests the mettle of up to seven people, try Diplomacy. Even people who are weak on strategy can do well if they're good on personality. Of course, you may never speak to one another again, but c'est la guerre. 

Family.

Maybe I've mentioned it before, but I don't know of a single member of my family on either side that died fighting for the United States of America. A lot us only got here recently -- like, in the last century or so -- and since then we've all been either too old or too young when a crisis broke out that was beyond the capacity of the standing forces. One of the men was 4-F with asthma, though he tried to enlist; another was old enough to join in World War II only as it was coming to a close; another did die while serving, but at home, in peacetime, of natural causes. 

The most recent miss was 9/11. But I was too old, too out of shape, and had absolutely no skills that the military would have deemed necessary enough to waive my lack of youth and vigor. Being able to translate English into... better English is not something they care that much about.

But I hope that I'm not presumptuous to claim a familial loyalty to those who loved America enough to put their lives in danger, to face the possibility of the ultimate sacrifice, although mine is a loyalty far less tested than theirs proved to be. I hope everyone who loves the United States and the principles upon which it was founded -- principles that we seem so far away from now, alas -- can find the feeling of brotherhood with those who died in service for all our benefit. 

We salute our honored dead on this Memorial Day weekend. We should not and shall not ever forget. The blood is far too strong. 

Mystopia.

When I was in college, I took an English class called Utopias and Dystopias. At that time the term dystopia wasn't nearly as well known as it is now; in fact, another English professor I had asked me to define the term when I mentioned the class. Utopia and dystopia as words are not natural antipodes; utopia came from Greek and just means no (ou) place (topos), where dystopia means bad place. 

But we all knew about dystopias, man. Everyone in the liberal arts majors was expecting the world to end, almost certainly in a shootout between the Americans and the Russians. And it'd be America's fault! And those fascists on the right would take over whatever was left! 

I was thinking about that after fellow Bleatnik Mark Ingram posted this meme on the comments of the Great Lileks's site: 

It made me think that sure, if we follow today's wickedness and stupidity to the end of the line, this satirical take is all too likely. But on the other hand, the future, for good or ill, never turns out the way we prophesy. Sometimes the projections even look silly in retrospect. I'm temped to call these miscues mystopias, kind of an eggcorn of a name, but why not.

It was not uncommon, for example, in the eighties to imagine a mallworld, in which all of humanity is reduced to nothing more than consumers and producers, and everyone is glued to the TV. In fact, Somtow Sucharitkul, who wrote a lot for Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in those days, did a whole series of stories published as a book called Mallworld. Sucharitkul is a terrific writer and is not to be faulted for failing to foresee that the malls would be closing and retailers panicking. 

This was similar to the consumerist hell future seen in Howard Chaykin's American Flagg! comic books and the short-lived Max Headroom TV series. Fortunately, the future's not what it used to be. However, one common thread is these works is that government and commercial enterprises are constantly conspiring to screw over the people. Maybe that bit isn't so far-fetched.

I think it says something about humanity that we have more fictional dystopias than utopias. It's always easier to imagine hell than heaven. So it's probably good that our predictions don't ever quite hit the coffin nail on the head.

While many fictional dystopias are terrible societies (as in We, 1984, The Man in the High Castle, and so on) some are just dead. Yes, good ol' apocalypse, where straggling humans try to survive in the wasteland of the world. I think of these as thanatopias, or death worlds. Back in the day you could rely on World War III to provide the mass deaths, although alien invasion was a good standby. Artificial intelligence has also moved up the ranks as our computers have gotten smarter. Ecological disaster has marched right up to the front. Disease, especially man-made disease, was another good one. In fact, we have just seen a man-made disease jump the lab and kill millions, so it's hard to not find that as the most plausible means of annihilation going at the moment.

Meanwhile, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has moved the atomic deathwatch clock ten seconds up, closer to the midnight doom time than ever before. Despite Russia's failure in the battlefield and desperation to win at all costs, and the saber-rattling of China, and Iran's desperation to get the bomb, I find it hard to believe that we're closer to nuclear war now than we were at the height of the Cold War. I think the Bulletin is just getting lonely for attention since Chinese Death Virus stole all the headlines. I certainly hope so, anyway.

Screeeeech....

I don't want to startle people, but we're all gonna die.

Plus, we're going to have an enormous economic crash.

How do I know this? It's not that I have any great economic knowledge; I just know what everyone ought to know. 

I was reminded recently, though, that not everyone does have such knowledge. A highly intelligent friend, an accomplished young man for whom I have tremendous respect and whose company I enjoy, said that he couldn't blame Trump for anything good or bad on the economy, and similarly Biden shouldn't get blame for inflation or gas prices. Presidents can't control that stuff. 

He is, of course, a Trump hater and is a liberal Democrat. So I was faced with the choice of explaining how inflation works when money is not tied to anything hard -- that every dollar printed is borrowed by the government, and makes every other dollar worth a little bit less, and how supply and demand affect fuel prices, especially when the government adopts anti-supply policies, and how fuel prices raise the price of everything else -- or enjoy dinner. So for a change I kept my mouth shut. (Trump was a spendthrift in office too, of course, so he didn't help in that regard either, even if he was not at anything like Biden levels.)

Thus even smart people don't understand why the current picture is as bad as it is, and fated to get worse. But that only matters tertiarily to my prediction of economic doom. And no, my prediction is not based on the fact that the Phillies are in position to win the World Series, and the Wall Street Journal claims that every time a team from the City of Brotherly Love wins a championship, the nation goes into a recession.

My prediction is based on my observation that so many things around look like the Internet boom of the 90's, only without the concurrent economic flourishing. What I mean by that is, there is an absolute torrent of software startups out there -- all founded by "disrupters" and "innovators," of course -- who are based in expensive cities and whose main success so far lies in getting rounds of funding. As in the 90's, half of them can't explain what they actually do in 5,000 words or less. 

What I'm not seeing, unlike the 90's, is everyone rushing straight to the stock market for an IPO. A bunch of worthless stocks from startups like TwoGuysAndAParrot.Com (not real) helped cause an avalanche of losses spread widely among investors. If companies are flush with cash from funding rounds A through Triple H, only the big-money guys are on the hook if these startups go under. 

However, that's still a problem. For one reason, your savings may be linked to funds that invest in these companies, looking to strike gold. For another, the big-money guys can go on a profit-taking spree to make up for investment losses, which could easily lead to a big fun selloff pile-on that further squishes your 401(k), which is already losing value faster than a herd of cattle diagnosed with Mad Cow Disease. 

What to do? Well, naturally, I recommend putting all your cash into Fredcoin, the Favorite Cryptocurrency of Guys Who Live in My House!

Its value is still solid!
1 Fredcoin = 1 Fredcoin!

Buy now and use your Fredcoin to help fund your new backyard fallout shelter. Call today and our pals at Stiiv's Friendly Bunkers will schedule you for an estimate. 

Act fast! That "market correction" could be here any day now!

Midvale's world.

One of the most famous -- maybe the most famous -- of Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons is the Midvale School for the Gifted. 

I must have seen this a thousand times and it's still funny. 

What's not funny is that we now live in Midvale's world. We live in an era in which our elites are stuffed with self-confidence but are demonstrably incompetent. They seem to think that all their problems can be solved if they just believe in themselves, and when they fail anyway, it was all the fault of those bastards on the other side, just as the Soviet Union blamed masses of saboteurs and hoarders when their miserable plans came to nothing. The idea that our elites know nothing but charge in like blundering clowns anyway never occurs to them. How could they fail? They always did so well in school!

As Nathanael Blake wrote in January: 

The American ruling class thus faces an ancient problem: how do political, cultural, and economic winners convince everyone else to accept the system; how do elites secure the consent of non-elites? Members of our ruling class cannot appeal to religion or immemorial custom to justify their place. Indeed, they cannot appeal to much of anything beyond their own supposed merits, both personal (they earned their place) and as a class (they believe themselves to be wise and leading us well).

But the superlative merits of our ruling class are less obvious to the rest of us.

You can say that again, brother. Also: 

This combination of arrogance, incompetence, and malice undermines the legitimacy of elite power. A prudent ruling class would be self-aware enough to realize this vulnerability. It would be wise for them to be less culturally aggressive, economically greedy, and politically domineering, but our elites lack the coherence and self-restraint to do so.

There's that word: Incompetence. Since the Kennedy Administration's "best and brightest" led us into a war in Vietnam that by structure and fear of World War III we could not win, our country has been led by dumbbells who have the utmost confidence in their mental superiority. It was bad enough in the sixties; later, the institutionalization of these morons in permanent government agencies made them completely unaccountable. They can perform like idiots, completely screw up their assignments, lie, lash out at the little people, break the law, deny everything when their policies ruin and kill people, and pay no price -- even be hailed as heroes by their companions in the inner circle. Nothing matters to them as long as they remain in the inner circle. 

C.S. Lewis learned about what he called the "inner ring" at boarding school and beyond. He knew how hard it was to be an outsider, but also the horrible and perilous temptation to be an insider. As he wrote: "Of all passions the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things." He considered it one of the most deadly temptations: 

I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.

But this is Midvale's world, where it's even worse, because not only are those in the inner circle flirting with damnation, but also their stupidity and entirely unearned confidence is killing the rest of us. 

We shouldn't send these dummies to the Pull door. We should send them to the Exit door, and fast. 

Razzle-dazzle.

This dude's got him some razzle-dazzle. 

By that I don't mean the first definition of razzle-dazzle from Merriam-Webster, that being "a state of confusion or hilarity," which dates back to 1885. I'm thinking of the second definition, "a complex maneuver (as in sports) designed to confuse an opponent," or the third, "a confusing or colorful often gaudy action or display." That's because this crickety fellow shares a tactic that was developed by the United Kingdom and the United States during World War I, which was called razzle-dazzle, or the dazzle system.

The April 1919 issue of Popular Science Monthly noted:

When the German U-boats began their depredations, it became desperately necessary to provide some protective coloration for transport, food-ships, and the hundreds of vessels that were carrying munitions to Europe. 

Battleship gray had been devised to help ships blend into the sky and sea, but as the article notes, it had "proved utterly useless". What the artists came up with instead was the dazzle system, a means of painting ships not to render them invisible, but to use odd patterns of stripes to make it difficult for a U-boat to tell which way a ship was facing and at what speed it was traveling. The class of the ship (battleship, cargo, etc.) would be more difficult for the enemy to pinpoint as well. 

More than 2,000 ships got the dazzle treatment, but I don't know if it's possible to say how effective it was. Since U-boats would not act and betray their position unless they were positive of a hit, there's no telling how many shots they didn't take because of the dazzle system. 

The illustrations from the Popular Science article certainly make it seem impressive:

However, there's at least one sailor's story that questions its effectiveness:  

It was quiet sometimes and sometimes you were… once or twice we lost a couple of merchant ships. I can remember I was on watch one afternoon and we were coming up the east coast and I said to the signalman, ‘Hey, I said, look at that ship over yonder.’ And I says, it was the first ship we saw with the dazzle paint on. And lo and behold, not a couple minutes after, we heard a bang and a flash and we look across and it was this ship that was dazzled – sunk.

I guess by the time the Big One, WWII, broke out, they decided just to go back to battleship gray because you couldn't dazzle the enemy with just visual tricks anymore. Airplanes would not be fooled by stripes, and unlike in the First Big One, airplanes were used heavily in sea combat. 

Anyway, that's a thought for today, brought up by the bug. I'll have more to write on battleship gray tomorrow. 

In the trenches.

 

Where was George?

As we all know, July the Fourth is the official date of proclamation of the Declaration of Independence, although delegates from the colonies signed on different dates. Getting all the colonies to agree in the face of massive British reprisal was a triumph of diplomacy. The outcome of the Declaration was not assured until Lord Cornwallis had the band play "The World Turned Upside Down,"*  and even decades after it seemed like the whole American experiment was going to go down the cesspool at any time.

I got to wondering where exactly George Washington was on July 4, 1776. Obviously he himself was not in Congress, being in the field with the under-trained, underfunded, undermanned army, as he had been for just over a year. So what was he up to on that date?

According to the Library of Congress, Washington had left Massachusetts following the British surrender of Boston, and had set up in Manhattan by April 14. He is not too happy with the situation there, a feeling many people would have on arriving in New York to this day. The Library of Congress says, "New York has not yet come down decisively on the side of independence, and merchants and government officials are supplying the British ships still in the harbor. Washington, angry at the continued communication with the enemy, asks the Committee if the evidence about them does not suggest that the former Colonies and Great Britain are now at war. He insists that such communications should cease."

Washington's war preparations continued in New York, and he would have his hands full. On June 21 he would fifty miles upstate by today's West Point, calling for the construction of the Great Chain to block a British fleet coming down the Hudson.** 

So I'm not sure what exactly the great man was doing on the Fourth of July, which fell on a Thursday that year. But on June 29th, General William Howe and his brother Little Dickie (nah, his brother was Admiral Richard Howe) arrived in New York Harbor, so Washington was undoubtedly preparing for the British to attack. That would not occur for some time, as the British first wanted to talk George into giving up.*** 

The British would concentrate their forces on Staten Island, which was sparsely populated and completely unable to prevent the British landing. In fact, on September 11, 1776, John Adams, Ben Franklin, and Edward Rutledge would meet with Richard Howe at what is now called the Conference House on Staten Island to try to prevent the war. By then the British had already chased the American forces out of Long Island (where the colonists were saved from destruction by retreating under cover of fog), and would later chase them around the rest of the city. New York very nearly was Washington's Waterloo, almost four decades before Napoleon had the actual Waterloo.**** 

But that was all yet to come.*****  

On Tuesday, July 9, however, Washington got a copy of the Declaration and declared a celebration. He read it to his troops, and had copies sent to the other generals in the Continental Army. To General Artemas Ward he wrote, "The enclosed Declaration will show you that Congress at length, impelled by necessity, have dissolved the connection between the American Colonies of Great Britain and declared them free, independent states, and in compliance with their order I am to request you will cause this Declaration to be immediately proclaimed at the head of the Continental Regiments in the Massachusetts Bay." 

I do not believe the quote on this T-shirt is legitimate.  

Maybe in spirit, if not in actual words. 

Mentioning the Conference House reminded me of a great little bit from the film (and play) 1776; the film is fifty years old now. In the scene, John Adams, played by the brilliant William Daniels, complains about his fate in posterity:

Adams: I'll not appear in the history books anyway. Only you. Franklin did this and Franklin did that, and Franklin did some other damned thing. Franklin smote the ground, and out sprang George Washington, fully grown and on his horse. Franklin then electrified him with his miraculous lightning rod; then the three of them -- Franklin, Washington, and the horse -- conducted the entire revolution all by themselves.

Franklin: I like it.

That's probably what they are teaching now in history, if they still teach anything good about any dead white men (and horses). But we will know what our Founding Fathers did, and we will tell the stories while we have strength to tell them. 

🦅🦅🦅

*Or did he?

**Longtime readers -- you handsome devils -- will recall my visit to West Point and the remainder of the Chain in 2018.

***Spoiler: He didn't.

****Napoleon himself was six years old on July 4, 1776, and had already reached his full height. (Just kidding about that last bit.)

*****Summarized by William Bryk in a fascinating little piece here.

Duck and cover.

Yes, it looks like it's the return of Duck & Cover!

🦆+📔 

No, not the act that killed vaudeville, nor the world's worst law firm, nor even my excellent duck-centric novel available in serial form on Amazon.

I am of course referring to the classic rules for survival in the event of a nuclear blast, to duck down and take cover. I had a science teacher in high school who, during what we called "shelter drills," said sarcastically that this would protect us from the nuclear holocaust. He was right, in a way, especially since being in New York City, I figured we'd go up like a Roman candle in the first breath of a nuclear exchange. Duck and cover wasn't a bad idea, if we still were dealing with A-bombs; in the bombing of Hiroshima, 30 percent of the immediate deaths were caused by falling debris. But by the time I was a kid we had ICBMs with H-bombs, so we were all going to be crispy critters, as they used to say. 

Which brings us to this, for which I wish I could take credit, or at least thank the person responsible:

Well, it's spring now, but that's all right. Missiles don't care.

I don't think we're going to get into a Fun With Nukes situation, despite provocative news (possibly disinformation) that Russian leadership is chilling in the bunker like aging steaks. Besides, the American ruling class hates its own people so much, they might be perfectly happy to let a couple of cities go and sue for peace. As long as they're in Texas or Florida, anyway. 

I guess I'm in a crappy mood to start this Thursday. Got any good news?

Great pullets in history.

Little known fact: Hannibal of Carthage never went into battle without his faithful warrior chicken, Hortense the Ferocious, close at hand. 

Fred's Book Club: Mine, Mine, Mine!

Greetings, ladies and gentlemen and book lovers of all ages! This week on the Hump Day book feature known as the Humpback Writers (get it? ha ha) we have a classic adventure novel, one of the world's most famous, a novel that has set the tone for hundreds of imitators on page and screen, and so is likely to be shoved down the memory hole as soon as someone under age thirty realizes it ever existed. 

H. Rider Haggard was a classic Brit of his time, who spent years working in Britain's African colonies before beginning a career as a writer of adventure fiction. King Solomon's Mines, published in 1885, introduced his famous hero, hunter, and adventurer Allan Quatermain to the world. I think the words "hunter" and "colonies" are enough to explain why Haggard will one day be on the SJW chopping block.

But he shouldn't be. King Solomon's Mines is an extraordinary adventure, and a great yarn. It begins with Quatermain, who meets with one Sir Henry Curtis and a Captain Good. Sir Henry has been looking for his brother, who has gone missing in a supposed quest for the titular treasure. Quatermain has some information on that from a man he met named José Silvestre, and he shares the story:

“Then he groped in his shirt and brought out what I thought was a Boer tobacco pouch made of the skin of the Swart-vet-pens or sable antelope. It was fastened with a little strip of hide, what we call a rimpi, and this he tried to loose, but could not. He handed it to me. ‘Untie it,’ he said. I did so, and extracted a bit of torn yellow linen on which something was written in rusty letters. Inside this rag was a paper.

“Then he went on feebly, for he was growing weak: ‘The paper has all that is on the linen. It took me years to read. Listen: my ancestor, a political refugee from Lisbon, and one of the first Portuguese who landed on these shores, wrote that when he was dying on those mountains which no white foot ever pressed before or since. His name was José da Silvestra, and he lived three hundred years ago. His slave, who waited for him on this side of the mountains, found him dead, and brought the writing home to Delagoa. It has been in the family ever since, but none have cared to read it, till at last I did. And I have lost my life over it, but another may succeed, and become the richest man in the world—the richest man in the world. Only give it to no one, señor; go yourself!’

“Then he began to wander again, and in an hour it was all over.

“God rest him! he died very quietly, and I buried him deep, with big boulders on his breast; so I do not think that the jackals can have dug him up. And then I came away.”

“Ay, but the document?” said Sir Henry, in a tone of deep interest.

“Yes, the document; what was in it?” added the captain.

“Well, gentlemen, if you like I will tell you. I have never showed it to anybody yet except to a drunken old Portuguese trader who translated it for me, and had forgotten all about it by the next morning. The original rag is at my home in Durban, together with poor Dom José’s translation, but I have the English rendering in my pocket-book, and a facsimile of the map, if it can be called a map. Here it is.”

The map, of course, supposedly can lead one to the fabled mines of King Solomon himself, source of endless diamonds -- if one can survive. They arrange an expedition, one that requires crossing a desert. In the biggest gut-check I think I've ever seen in fiction, the expedition realizes that if the one source of water shown on the 300-year-old map is not active, or not there, or not exactly where the poor map says it will be, they will be doomed to a horrible death; they cannot carry enough water to make a round trip. And they are aware that no known expedition has ever survive this quest. 

People looking for racism in the book will find it easily enough. Some natives behave strangely when Captain Good removes his false teeth -- which to the isolated people would be like me seeing a guy pull off his head: 

“What does that beggar say?” asked Good.

“He says we are going to be killed,” I answered grimly.

“Oh, Lord!” groaned Good; and, as was his way when perplexed, he put his hand to his false teeth, dragging the top set down and allowing them to fly back to his jaw with a snap. It was a most fortunate move, for next second the dignified crowd of Kukuanas uttered a simultaneous yell of horror, and bolted back some yards.

“What’s up?” said I.

“It’s his teeth,” whispered Sir Henry excitedly. “He moved them. Take them out, Good, take them out!”

He obeyed, slipping the set into the sleeve of his flannel shirt.

In another second curiosity had overcome fear, and the men advanced slowly. Apparently they had now forgotten their amiable intention of killing us.

But the most determined, courageous, and clever character in the book is a black African. Moreover, Quatermain is tired of hunting, sick of the damage being done to his beloved Africa. So if you ask me, Haggard was well ahead of his time in many regards. 

The story leads to a tremendous battle scene, and boy oh boy does it look in my mind's eye like a classic Hollywood cast-of-thousands fight. And of course, there's a death-defying descent into the earth to find the treasures concealed within. 

I say, if you want a taste of old-fashioned thrills and chills, you can hardly do better than King Solomon's Mines, unless it's one of Haggard's other novels, like She or Ayesha. I read this Dover edition, but you can check it out for free thanks to Mongo and our other friends at Project Gutenberg. The book is foundational for the "Lost World" type of story, and set a blueprint for high adventure that persisted for a hundred years. 

The patron saint of the canceled.

Yesterday was the feast of St. John of God, a Portuguese born in 1495, of whom many interesting stories are told. By some accounts he went to war in the army of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, fighting the French and later the Turks. He fell away from his childhood piety and lost his moral bearing. Eventually he decided to mend his ways, and went all in for the Lord, devoting himself to helping the poor and the sick. 

There was one story about him that made me think he would be a wonderful patron saint for those facing public cancellation in these strange and wicked times. We are supposed to be a society of the free, but as you well know, making a public statement of a sort that everyone believed a decade ago (such as, riots are bad, men can't be women just by wearing a dress, all lives are important) can get you fired from your job, blackballed from your industry, doxxed, attacked at your home, blacklisted from "social" media, and if some asshat is feeling particularly asinine, maybe SWATted while you sleep. 

My use of the term "blackballed" just now might be enough to do me in, but fortunately I'm a nobody and I don't use Twitter. If I were to get the attention of the social justice orcs, I would know better than to apologize -- apologies are never accepted by the mob, and just motivate them to keep burning and pitchforking.

Modern mob justice has no interest if its victim even really did anything wrong. It just likes to collect heads. If I offend in this blog, it's probably a joke, and if they don't like it, the humorless dweebs should try telling a joke themselves; if I say something true that they don't like, I'm not apologizing for the truth. Of course, we know for the mob, truth is never a defense. 

According to the Catholic News Agency, John of God did not make a secret of his often disreputable past: 

The Bishop of Granada approved his work, and gave him the name “John of God.” A group of volunteers came to accompany him in his work, many of whom had first come to him while in dire need themselves.

      Others, who resented his work, assaulted John's reputation by focusing on his past sins – but John, unfazed in his humility, would acknowledge the truth of what was said, as a testament to God's grace in his life. He once offered to pay a woman to tell the entire city what she had been saying about him in private.

And that's why I suggest John of God would be a good patron for those who have come under attack by Internet mobs. He was repentant of his past, and he did not apologize to those who tried to ruin his reputation. He had already repented to the One who mattered, so he knew the truth wouldn't hurt him. If others attacked him anyway, he was humble enough to take it and man enough to see it through.

St. John of God, pray for us! The whole world's gone batty and everything is upside down. Help us be humble and faithful enough to endure, help us be brave, and help us not to apologize for telling the truth. 

War is... HeLLO!!

 

Fred's Book Club: The Great Man Speaks.

Good day, fine folks, and welcome back to the Humpback Writers, the book feature that falls on Wednesdays, known in some disreputable corners as Hump Day. The writers don't actually have humps, or at least we have not found any, and we've looked. And the subject of today's book was way too tall to have had any bend to the spine -- otherwise his legs might not have been long enough to reach the ground. His birthday is this Friday, February 12.

Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America is a remarkable account of Lincoln's most famous speech, given at the dedication of the soldiers' cemetery at the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863. This book is the first Pulitzer Prize winner I've profiled, because an awful lot of books that win that prestigious prize are lousy, but not this one. Wills's account is a compelling and scholarly lesson in history and oration. It may seem that a speech of 272 words, like the famous address, would hardly remake an afternoon let alone a nation, but Wills makes his case with enormous detail and intriguing historical research.

The book's not long -- 189 pages with another 115 pages of backmatter in my edition -- but it packs a lot in. Wills's comparison of the Gettysburg Address to the orations of Pericles are startling, or were to me. You may admire Lincoln all day without guessing how steeped this autodidact of a president was in classical forms:

The compactness is not merely a matter of length. There is a suppression of particulars in the idealizing art of Lincoln, as in the Greek orations. This restraint produces the aesthetic paradox that makes these works oddly moving despite their impersonal air. The Greek orator does not refer to himself except as answering the city's ordinance. Most often, he uses the plural "we" (hemeis) of all the citizenry -- as Lincoln does. Nor are the Greek dead referred to by name (except in one late example). The fallen are usually just "these (men)" (hoide) -- as Lincoln speaks of "what they did here" or of "these dead." The Epitaphios, as Loraux puts it, is "an oration that ignores individuals." Restraint deepens passion by refusing to give it easy vent.

As Wills points out, Lincoln's address doesn't mention slavery, or even Gettysburg by name. There's no mention of the Confederacy or a reference to the enemy combatants.    

Part of the perfection of Lincoln's prose is his use of reversals, which sets a pattern of birth-death-rebirth. 

The survivors at Gettysburg draw life from death, as their forefathers had sown life in the earth of this continent. The survivors take "increased devotion," even though the fallen men gave "the last full measure of devotion." The increase is not only over what the survivors felt before; it is something that goes beyond the ultimate of what the fallen gave. 

It's a beautiful examination of Lincoln's text, which in subsequent chapters Wills shows in context of the "culture of death" throughout the West at the time. Later he makes his case that this address, more than any other Lincoln speech, sets the tone for a new federal-centered vision of the nation rather than the states-centered vision that led to this war. Here I suspect the liberal Wills oversells -- not that the Civil War did not lead to greater federal prominence, but that the address was of a piece with Lincoln's entire career, and can't carry the whole weight on its own.

For me, one of the best things about the book was its serious examination of a lot of myths about the speech. Lincoln did not wing it; he did not write it on the back of an envelope, or on the train from Washington. Lincoln worked hard on his remarks, and may have consulted Secretary of State William Seward on them the night before the ceremony. Seward had helped him with the First Inaugural. 

Further, the audience didn't get furious because Lincoln's speech was so short. Lincoln was not supposed to be the principal speaker of the day -- former secretary of state Edward Everett, president of Harvard, considered one of the finest speakers of the time, had that honor, and he spoke for more than two hours. I'd have been grateful if the next speaker was brief after that.

I was amazed to discover that Abraham Lincoln did not have a rich, earthy, sonorous voice like that of Almighty God, or at least Raymond Massey, as his height and mournful face would suggest. Actually:

Everett's voice was sweet and expertly moderated; Lincoln's was high to the point of shrillness, and his Kentucky accent offended some Eastern sensibilities. But Lincoln derived an advantage from his high tenor voice -- carrying power. If there is an agreement on any one aspect of Lincoln's delivery, at Gettysburg and elsewhere, it is his audibility. 

We'll end here with the Gettysburg Address itself, and let you read it through in honor of our great president's birthday this week. And as you do, remember that this is the man that is not considered good enough for the sneering jackals who run San Francisco's public schools.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate--we can not consecrate--we can not hallow-- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Fred's Book Club: Hopelessness and Survival.

It's Wednesday once again, which means Hump Day, which means it's time for the Humpback Writers, our stupidly named book feature that looks at books. We often like to look at the lesser known works of famous writers, or more obscure writers and books, but today we have an author and book that are quite famous, and for very good reason. We're featuring them today because January 27 is the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust, as decreed by the United Nations. And the book is Man's Search for Meaning, by Holocaust survivor Viktor E. Frankl. 

When you're in the publishing business you read an awful lot of books and articles on how to have a good life, but this is the only one I know of that was written by a man who spent three years in Nazi concentration camps. You're supposed to go to a spa in India and talk to a guru and then climb a mountain and stuff, right? Nope. There's a reason why those kinds of quests go many places but never get anywhere.

Dr. Frankl was a brilliant young psychiatrist when the Nazis rounded him up. In a very short time he lost family, career, and all the work he had done on a massive philosophical and psychological thesis. As for his friends:

It was the first selection, the first verdict made on our existence or non-existence. For the great majority of our transport, about 90 per cent, it meant death. Their sentence was carried out within the next few hours. Those who were sent to the left were marched from the station straight to the crematorium. This building, I was told by someone who worked there, had the word "bath" written over its doors in several European languages. On entering, each prisoner was handed a piece of soap, and then----but mercifully I do not need to describe the events which followed. Many accounts have been written about this horror. 
     We who were saved, the minority of our transport, found out the truth in the evening. I inquired from prisoners who had been there for some time where my colleague and friend P--- had been sent.
     "Was he sent to the left side?" 
     "Yes," I replied.
     "Then you can see him there," I was told. 
     "Where?" A hand pointed to the chimney a few hundred yards off, which was sending a column of flame up into the grey sky of Poland. It dissolved into a sinister cloud of smoke.

Long before reading this book I'd read Leon Uris's Exodus, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and other books about the Holocaust and brutal prison (and death camp) conditions. The thing that is so amazing about Frankl's book, that still intrigues me, is that he combines his horrifying personal story with clinical observation, all of which will go to the making of the book's conclusion about purpose and human life.

Seeing himself and others as subjects, he looks at the phases of psychological change in the camps. The first phase is shock, shock at the terrible thing that has happened, with thoughts of escape by any means, even suicide. Eventually would come the second phase:

Apathy, the main symptom of the second phase, was a necessary mechanism for self-defense. Reality dimmed, and all efforts and all emotions were centered on one task: preserving one's own life and that of the other fellow.... It can be readily understood that such a state of strain, coupled with the constant necessity of concentrating on the task of staying alive, forced the prisoner's inner life down to a primitive level. 

Frankl would find himself numb to the suffering of others, suffering that would have caused a horrified reaction at any other time in his life.

With the inescapable presence of suffering and death and injustice, Frankl got to see what kind of men survived and what kind did not. The ones who were smoking their meager cigarette ration instead of trading cigarettes for food or clothes were ones who had given up. The ones who believed they would be free by Christmas would lose hope and die when the day came and went. ("The death rate in the week between Christmas, 1944, and New Year's, 1945, increased in camp beyond all previous experience" -- an observation later echoed by Commander James Stockdale.) Ultimately the survivors were ones who had found meaning in their lives, something that made the unendurable endurable:

A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."

And how does a man find this meaning? That was the subject of the rest of the book, his other books, and his career.

All I can offer here is a brief overview of this book, which itself is not long -- my Washington Square Press paperback runs just 179 pages, not including the extensive bibliography. It is very readable, though in parts shocking even to those of us who have read other accounts of the Holocaust, and ultimately very sensible. 

Frankl, who died in 1997, hoped that his hard-won lessons might enlighten mankind to avoid anymore such genocides, and even prevent nuclear war. In that, he admitted he could be overoptimistic, but one can never say he and his work were without meaning. I recommend this book unconditionally to anyone.