Monthly Archives: October 2012

At Least Bismarck Labelled it Correctly

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When he called his attempts to suppress the Catholic Church and its related organizations a “Kulturkampf.”  Nowadays we simply require the Roman Church, through its affiliate entities, to underwrite abortion, abortifacients, and birth control, and we call its opposition to being required to vomit up its beliefs a “war on women.”

This op-ed’s references to 1870-80s Imperial Germany is very timely, and the connection between that time and today is one that is not nearly adequately appreciated. Progressivism’s — in fact, “liberalism’s” — roots in fact do lie in a time and place which is most popularly understood as representing the very antithesis of those ideologies’ guiding principles.

Yet it is even so.  As Hayek pointed out in The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944 for a British audience, the British public conversations about “planning,” by which everyone understood centralized planning of as much of the economy as could be comprehended by government mandate, eerily mirrored the precise conversations that were current in Germany a generation and more before.  Hayek wrote, so he pointed out, precisely to warn the British public against the dangers of following down the German path.

Closer to home here, in Liberal Fascism, a book which remains interesting today, the introductory chapters, especially on Woodrow Wilson’s actual articulated ideas of government and its proper role in life, are filled with citations to his works and papers and their German antecedents.  Wilson has been sanctified in American history teaching largely for his 14 Points, and for his League of Nations idea.  His 14 Points turned out to be at best pious hogwash and at worst ticking time-bombs (remember it was his principle of “self-determination” that allowed the British and French to hand over the Sudetenland to Hitler in 1938 with a smirk of rationalization).  His League of Nations foundered, we are told, because the U.S. didn’t join.  Forgive me but I can’t see that the U.N. has done much to gloat over.  What has kept the the world from immolating itself for the past 70 years has not been a bunch of guys in New York who won’t pay a parking ticket; it’s been the U.S. military.  But it’s when you move past the Wilson hagiography that you get to some positions that are just well beyond the pale.  A vigorous support for governmental eugenics is only one.  His totalitarian vision of the state and his frustrations with that nasty ol’ Constitution are even more sobering.

[As an aside, Liberal Fascism remains a quaint artifact because it was so obviously written against Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency, at a time when everyone just assumed she was the nominee.  I can’t recall that Dear Leader got much more than a collateral mention.]

Bismarck cynically used then-current theorizing about the state, its role, and the citizen’s role, combined with a ruthless divide-and-conquer strategy, for what seems to have been no greater ambition than to retain himself in power.  He threw bones to the socialists, in the form of social security, enacted in 1881, a full half-century-plus before the U.S.  He threw bones to the saber rattlers and imperialists in the form of huffing and shouting until Britain and France allowed Germany to take over a few thousand square miles of God-forsaken territory at the fringe of nowhere.  He threw bones to the officer class in the form of ever-increasing army appropriations.  He threw bones to the industrialists like Krupp in the form of buying up their armaments as fast as they could be produced.  But from a recent biography of him, the conclusion is pretty strong that for Bismarck it was about little more than fracturing the opposition to his personal dominance of European politics.

Bismarck even wrote the Imperial constitution to suit himself.  It was perfectly tailored for himself as Reichskanzler and the aged Wilhelm I, the soldier-king, as Kaiser.  In fact it worked, about as well as anything, while the two of them remained in place.  But it was precisely that point in which Bismarck revealed himself to be no statesman, but rather a megalomaniacal politician.  His constitution overlooked that one day he would no longer be Reichskanzler, and Wilhelm I no longer kaiser.  And sure enough, when his little puppy of a crown prince (whose warped view of the world and his place in it Bismarck had studiously fostered, back when it appeared that his father would be kaiser for a lengthy reign) ascended the throne, it wasn’t a decade before the system began to go off the rails.  Bismarck’s failure is in marked contrast to the wisdom of the men who sweated out the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia.  They wrote for the ages.  Over 225 years later their work endures, for exactly the reason that its strengths do not depend upon the strengths of any particular player, but rather are designed to check the failings of all potential players.

Back in the 1870s they called it an “Obrigkeitsstaat” — an authoritarian state.  Now we call it “hope” and “change.”  But the understanding of where we and our government fit into each other’s existence is vintage 1870s.  All of which highlights how close to the truth came the speaker (don’t have the book in front of me now and so I can’t give the name) who observed that America speaks in English, but it thinks in German.  It is no accident, no accident at all, that the same Dear Leader who on the one hand laments that America’s Founding Fathers didn’t draft a charter for expropriation and re-distribution also wholly accepts, so far as can be told from his actions and pronouncements, the Imperial German notions of the centrality of the state in society.

The Successful Applicant Will Have Made Payroll

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. . . from his own money.

If the true test of responsible adulthood is the ability to alter one’s thinking and positions based upon the facts one actually finds on the ground, then George McGovern, dead this past weekend, passed that test.  Americans’ memory of him is frozen in the amber of the 1972 presidential election, when he rode the crest of what for the time was a tidal wave of whacked-out lefties (ignore that most of McGovern’s most outrageous positions of 1972 became . . . well, almost tame over the 40 years since) to one of the biggest whippings ever.  That’s how we remember him: paragon of far-left causes.

McGovern lived, however, not quite exactly another 32 years after losing office, and this is Bloomberg’s final take on him:  Libertarian Hero.

There is an educational aspect to the process of paying the bills out of your own money which is just impossible fully to replicate when you’re paying with someone’s else’s money.  Even if the money is “private” money, say, and you’re the CEO of some gargantuan company, it’s still not really your money.  The money you’re paying out is just not coming from the same funds out of which you propose to pay next month’s light bill.

Dr. Johnson observed that nothing will focus a man’s mind like the knowledge that he is to be hanged in a fortnight.  I will suggest that nothing will bring home the economic realities of government intrusion into business pursuits like signing checks each one of which measurably reduces the money one has available to put food in front of one’s children.

George McGovern, bless his heart (you see, in the South you can say anything, absolutely anything, about someone if you only preface it with or append to it “bless his/her heart”) made a first career advocating for giving away others’ money.  Then he got to fit that shoe on the other foot.  Seems it pinched.  He sunk most of his post-Congressional savings into a motel in Connecticut that went belly up.  McGovern gave his erstwhile supporters a fit of the vapors with a 1992 letter to the Wall Street Journal (read into the Congressional Record here) detailing the effect on his venture of government regulation, including specifically some things that he personally had supported.  What I also find interesting is a 2008 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (link is to Reason, which has excerpts, the actual op-ed being behind a paywall), in which he defended subprime lending.  That was 28 years after he lost office in 1980.  He’d been first elected to Congressional office in 1963, which was 17 years before being beat.  So by the time he let loose with his 2008 eructation, he’d been paying the bills from his own pocket for quite a bit longer than he’d been paying them from others’.  Bless his heart, he’d learned.

Did McGovern “flip-flop” on the issues?  Lincoln once explicitly allowed that he did not claim to have guided events so much as to have been guided by them, and that he held his positions until he was shown they were incorrect, at which point he changed his position.  McGovern found out, the hard way, the actual consequences of his earlier causes.  He found them out with his own money.  And he changed his position.

I accept that government decision makers should have some degree of background and experience in government work.  You can’t run a government like a business; you also can’t make business run like a government.  When a business runs short of money, it can’t just decree that it’s going to take more from its customers, or require that they buy more of whatever is being sold, or refuse permission to its competitors to operate.  The rest of the world is not going to put its plans on hold to wait for any business, however huge (ask GM about that).  Similarly, government decision-making is constrained by things not applicable to private enterprise.  Things like the 5th and 14th Amendments, for example, or the vastly-increased scope for play of the Law of Unintended Consequences.  So you don’t necessarily want “a businessman” to try running the government.  On the other hand, complete absence of private, personal business experience is or ought to be as close to an absolute disqualifier as anything this side of being convicted of a felony.

Man Alive! (pun intended) I’m Glad It Can’t Happen Here

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Here’s a little report on the British end-of-life cost-savings program.  It’s called, innocuously enough, the “Liverpool Pathway.”  See?  Doesn’t that just sound so . . . gentle, so dignified, so . . . DMV-like?

I’m sure we in the U.S. don’t need to worry about any of this happening here, because the Law of Supply and Demand works differently on this side of the water, right? And all our bureaucrats are and will always be (even the ones who haven’t been born yet) moral paragons. So we don’t need to worry about some desk jockey looking over the last three quarters’ numbers and realizing that if he can just get “participation” in this one li’l ol’ program up by, say, 20%, he can free up enough beds &c. &c. &c. Or he can show enough — how was it sold? — “bending of the cost curve” to justify his request for incentive bonuses for the coming budget cycle. And since his program will be operating on an accrual basis, he’ll be able to book the “savings” immediately he “enrolls” the patients in this “pathway” program. Anyone want to bet what’s going to come up at the next management staff meeting?

OK, let’s just assume that our present bureaucrats are moral paragons.  Let’s assume that all our present doctors and nurses are likewise so.  Let’s assume that they in fact do have the moral fiber to recoil at any or all of the above suggestions.  Let’s assume that, over the hundreds of thousands of currently active administrators, doctors, and nurses, the law of supply and demand (the dynamics of which obey the laws of very large numbers, by the way, and operates at the margins of behavior) will be ignored.  Our current crop of those folks has been raised in what will become a completely and utterly foreign moral frame of reference from that which will be the only thing the next generations of administrators, doctors, and nurses will know.  Their mother’s milk will not be the Hippocratic Oath; they will suckle at the teat of budget justification, of turf wars, of internecine agency power struggles.

I don’t make the above observations as an indictment of government workers.  They, like all humans, merely respond to the incentives which are presented to them.  Incentives work, even perverse incentives.  So when we present the thousands upon thousands of bureaucrats (and let’s be perfectly clear with ourselves and acknowledge that once you socialize medicine, your doctor is no longer the independent practitioner of a noble profession; he’s a government functionary who answers, ultimately, not to you or his conscience but to a chain of command the players in which he probably will never even know) with these incentives, over millions upon millions of distinct healthcare decision points, what is the likelihood that, at the margin, where change occurs, we will get more outcomes like those in Britain described, or fewer?

Once upon a time, I’ll bet, even mooting the suggestion of decision trees like those of the Liverpool Pathway would have been excoriated by every man jack of the British medical professions.  It’s taken them roughly 60 years to get from that point to this.  Sixty years is not quite two full generations of medical providers (if you figure that, allowing for training and other pipeline activities, you’ll get 30-40 years of practice per generation).  Given that morality also seems to follow a path of entropy, what are the chances of the British medical professions finding their way back?

But gee whiz, I’m sure glad that human nature, the law of supply and demand, and everything else works here so radically differently than it does in Britain that we don’t have to worry.  I’ll just take my soma and put my nose back to the grindstone.

GULag is Dead; Long Live GULag!!

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Someone do please call Sen. Durbin’s office.

The learned senator has equated the facility where we hold foreign irregular combatants, who have sworn enmity to the U.S. and who for the most part were captured either in the field or from intelligence developed from those captured in the field, to the GULag, that network of socialist re-forging enterprises run by the agency of which Dear Leader’s buddy Putin still considers himself identified, viz the KGB and its sundry predecessors, MGB, NKVD, GPU, OGPU, and Cheka.  He’s not the only member of Congress so to have publicly slimed his country.

Well, Sen. Durbin, this is how a modern, up-to-date GULag operates.  First, you have anyone who opposes you murdered, or disappeared, or charged with trumped-up criminal offenses.  Then when a bunch of young women have the temerity to protest what you do, you have them charged and convicted as well.  You then sentence them to several years in prison, and you ship them off to a labor camp.  The two remaining Pussy Riot singers (both under age 25, both with young children) have been removed, with no forewarning to their families, up to roughly 900 miles away.  The families first discovered the women had been removed when they attempted to send care packages to them at the Moscow prison where they’d been held.

Now let’s imagine you’re of an age to be married to a 25 year-old woman and have, say, a four year-old daughter.  Means you’re probably pretty young yourself.  Means you probably are a single parent now.  Or alternatively you’re a grandparent who’s just had the responsibility for a young grandchild dumped on you.  What is the likelihood that you’ll ever be able to afford to make a 900-mile trip to see your wife/child?  What’s the likelihood that that four year-old child will see her mother?

And just for the record, holding a prisoner in a cell sufficiently cold that he got the “shivers” is one thing.  Running Sukhanovka, a prison from which exactly one man is known to have emerged both alive and sane, is another.  For an inside look at Sukhanovka, written by that sole survivor, I refer the gentle reader to Alexander Dolgun, an American kid plucked in 1948, at age 20, from the streets of Moscow.  All that’s known right now is that the two Pussy Riot singers are somewhere in the Urals.

In the Urals, it gets down to -50 degrees Centigrade in the winter.

But Will He Call It “Peace in our Time”?

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Fars News Agency is reporting that Dear Leader has “recognized” Iran’s “nuclear rights.”  What precisely that’s supposed to mean is not terribly clear from the article.  The article cites only a “parliamentary” source for the statement, but then again coming from a place like Iran I’d have to imagine that parliamentarians don’t just go talking out of school.

What is also interesting is the route by which this recognition was conveyed.  Apparently we handed the message to the Swiss (who attend to such affairs in Iran as the U.S. has left), who then passed it on.

There was also the quickly-denied and quietly-air-brushed report that Dear Leader is making good on his campaign pledge to pursue direct talks with Iran, without pre-conditions.

What gives?  It’s impossible for anyone with even a nodding familiarity with the history of Europe in the 1930s not to see the parallels between this developing situation and 1938.  Once Chamberlain and the French had conceded legitimacy to Germany’s demand for the Sudeten Germans, the game was effectively over.  Ceding the Sudetenland to Germany not only gave away Czechoslovakia’s principal line of defense; in fact it made the balance of the country indefensible.  The Sudeten Germans had never, ever, lived under a “German” ruler, or in a “German” state.  They’d always belonged to the Bohemian crown.  Their claim that they wanted to go “heim ins Reich” was as transparent a fraud as has ever been made.

But the fraud was enough for Chamberlain, who was desperate to do something, anything, rather than face down Hitler.  The French were likewise eager to suffer any indignity rather than man up and defend a country which was their formal ally (France had an actual treaty with Czechoslovakia which obliged it to come the latter’s defense; at least Britain wasn’t selling out an actual ally).  Grasping back to Wilson’s alleged principle of “self-determination,” they cynically sold out the one country bordering Hitler’s Germany that could have put a whipping on him.

The key point was reached when they conceded any legitimacy at all to the German claim.  Once you admit that the other guy is right, you really don’t have much to stand on publicly, other than expedience, and if you’ve conditioned  your public to perceive surrender as expedient, you’ve come to the end of the game.

Let’s be honest where Dear Leader has put us.  We have conceded the moral right to Iran to pursue nuclear weapons.  I’m sure that paragon of candor, Susan Rice, will assure us that the “rights” extend only to “peaceful uses,” such as nuclear power, but there is absolutely zero indication that any of Iran’s nuclear program has ever been oriented towards peaceful purposes.  Having made that concession, how do we appear before the Security Council and demand even the continuance, let alone the increase, in any sanction against Iran?  How?

Iran has announced, repeatedly, its intention to obliterate the state of Israel from the map.  We have now admitted its right to do so.  When you validate a man’s possession of a tool, how do you deny him the use of it, especially the use he has announced as his principal intended use?

Tonight we will have another “debate” between Dear Leader and Mitt Romney.  I do trust that whoever it is that puts words in Dear Leader’s mouth for him will not think “Peace in our Time” is a good campaign slogan to take into the final days of the race.

Nothing Like Hiding in Plain Sight

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It’s remarkable, really, how up-front would-be totalitarians are about their goals.  Whatever can be said about its indigestibility as writing, Hitler was utterly frank in Mein Kampf about precisely what he intended to do.  He then went out and did it.  The Russian communists spelled out the terror they intended to unleash, and then did so.  And the Muslim Brotherhood, the outfit which occasions Dear Leader such “relief” that they’re finally in charge in Egypt, is equally forthcoming about where they’re headed.

From an article in yesterday’s The International, we read, “The MB is both a political and social movement that advocates moving away from secularism and toward a political and civil society that is organized by the principles outlined in the Qur’an, including the implementation of Shariah law.

“Louay M. Safi wrote an article for The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences in which he describes Shariah law as, ‘a comprehensive system encompassing the whole field of human experiences. It is not simply a legal system, but rather a composite system of law and morality.’

“Shariah law regulates and guides all aspects of life from politics and economics to personal issues of marriage, family, diet and hygiene and is meant to provide a guide for all things concerning morality.”

Got that?  It’s a “comprehensive system encompassing the whole field of human experiences.”  And “political and civil society” is to be “organized” according to its principles.  There’s a name for that, folks — totalitarianism.  I believe it was Solzhenitsyn who observed that in the Soviet Union even sleep became politicized.  Under Shariah, “all aspects of life from politics and economics to personal issues of marriage, family, diet and hygiene” are to be “regulated” by whatever someone else determines to be the law, based upon precepts articulated for a desert society of robber-shepherds 1,400 years ago.  Sandra Flake seems to believe that a third party refusing to pay for her birth control is just the World’s Most Intolerable Oppression of her and her lady parts; I’m sure she’d do so much better under Shariah.

We’re supposed to be reassured, though:  “Whilst emerging as a political force in the Islamic world, the Muslim Brotherhood has also actively engaged in a number of public works and charity projects. They have run banks, schools, hospitals, social clubs and facilities for the disabled, while at the same time adhering to principles of transparency and accountability.”  Repeat after me, chillerns:  Autobahnen; Kraft durch Freude; Winterhilfe; Bund deutscher Mädel, Hitlerjugend.  Shirer has an entire chapter on the nazification of everyday German life in the 1930s.  The Soviets likewise “engaged in a number of public works projects,” like the Baltic-White Sea Canal, a.k.a. Belomor, which cost only several hundred thousand lives, and no one could run banks, schools, hospitals, and social clubs quite like the NKVD.  Why, they even had an entire sub-system within Gulag for children, including children born in the camps.  Isn’t that heart-warming?

We’re also comforted to find out that the Brotherhood is committed to attaining power through the trappings of democratic processes.  We are not encouraged to recall that Hitler was the lawfully appointed and serving Reichskanzler, and the Ermächtigungsgesetz — the Enabling Act — which handed over more or less unbridled power to him, was a lawfully enacted statute, permitted by their constitution.  How’d that work out, again?

This is the outfit whose ascendancy our current administration applauds.  This is the outfit one of whose leading families has now placed a member — a family member who was actively engaged in the Brotherhood’s American propaganda arm — at the right hand of the Secretary of State.

But don’t worry, ladies.  This election is about how them Rethuglicans is a-comin’ after your lady parts.

Give Credit Where Due

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Among my more innocent pleasures is noting odd historical coincidences, such as Genl Burgoyne surrendering at Saratoga on this day in 1777, and Genl Cornwallis enjoying the same experience on the same day in 1781 at Yorktown.

What is interesting about the two campaigns is that Saratoga was a result of the British failure to achieve strategic coordination and concentration of forces, and Yorktown was the product of a truly amazing feat of coordination not only between widely separate forces, but also between allies as well as between branches of service – two separate fleets of the French navy, the Continental army, and the French army. 

Genl Burgoyne’s expedition from Canada to and down the Hudson came to grief because a three-prong offensive turned into a single-prong. The western branch of the offensive under Lt. Col. St. Leger, coming down the Mohawk, came to grief, fighting a bloody battle at Oriskany and then losing most of his Indian allies after fighting at Ft. Stanwix. The support that Burgoyne had anticipated coming upriver from New York City never materialized. And he was largely stranded in what was then still largely wilderness, with no adequate water transport. More to the point, while Burgoyne was hemorrhaging men through repeated skirmishing with the Americans, their strength was growing, as militia reinforcements continuously joined up. In the end Burgoyne was effectively pinned in place. He couldn’t go forward; he couldn’t go back; and he was running out of supplies. He had the distinction of being the first British commander to lose an entire army to the rebels. 

Fast forward four years. Cornwallis, the southern British commander, was on the Chesapeake after raiding, skirmishing, and plundering about Virginia. Clinton sends from New York orders to pick a deep-water port, fortify himself there, and send whatever troops he could spare north to New York. Washington is outside New York, with some French in company, and additional French in Newport, Rhode Island. He finds out he is going to have the support of the French fleet, which is headed north from the Caribbean. What if, he decides, he can steal a march on the British and get his army to Virginia before the British can either reinforce or slip away? If the French can hold off the Royal Navy long enough, and deny both relief and escape to Cornwallis, Washington can substantially lessen if not remove outright the British southern threat. 

In what has to be one of the lesser-known American strategic coups, Washington and the French make it work. Washington does the old march-through-the-countryside, shuck-n-jive routine to confuse Clinton about what he’s going to do. The French fleet from Newport loads up their troops and supplies and swings wide into the Atlantic and down to the Chesapeake. Washington and his army then hoof it from New York all the way down to Yorktown to join up with Lafayette and the French just arrived from Rhode Island. 

Cornwallis, in receipt of a letter from Clinton during the period that Washington is on the march and which promises reinforcements, stands pat, and does not attempt to fight his way out of Yorktown. 

The final nail in the coffin is driven home by the French fleet under the Comte de Grasse. He’d actually lost the race to the Chesapeake to Adm. Saml Hood. Hood got there first, found the place bereft of Frenchmen, and sailed on north to New York to join up with Adm. Graves. De Grasse arrives in Virginia a few days later, and sets up watch on the mouth of the bay. When Graves arrives, the French pull off one of their comparatively few fleet victories, and draw Graves ever farther out to sea. While the two combat fleets crawl away from shore, the French fleet from Newport arrives and debarks its troops. Washington arrives a few days later and the major southern British army is now bottled up, unable to fight its way out, with its back to deep water, and a hostile fleet commanding its sea lines of communication. There’s quite a bit of fighting, but without command of the sea approaches the British can do nothing to stave off the inevitable, and on October 17, 1781, four years to the day after Burgoyne’s surrender, Cornwallis asks for terms. The actual surrender takes place two days later. 

To put a bit of perspective on Washington’s achievement, even twenty years later a trip from New York to the Potomac was an agony of rutted wagon trails through woods, broken axles, overturned carriages, lodging little and mean. It took well over a week for a traveller in peacetime. Washington moved a poorly-fed, poorly-shod, poorly-paid army over the distance in a month. The strategic coordination occurred with no telecommunications and across hundreds of miles of wilderness and ocean. And every commander – at least on the American side – played his party just exactly right, doing precisely what was necessary under the circumstances of the moment to maximize the strategic position of the allies. It really is an amazing story. The American luck held just long enough, in just the right place, to snag a second British army. 

Yes, it was lucky (the French didn’t often best the Royal Navy), but in point of fact the strategic vision of it was largely Washington’s. He gets high marks for his never-say-die maintenance of the cause, but usually gets scouted as commanding general. With the Yorktown campaign he proved he had the strategic chops as well.

 

“Victors’ Justice”; But Was It?

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Today we celebrate – yes, “celebrate” is preciselythe word I want – the hanging of ten as wicked men as humanity has cast up on the shore in the past several hundred years.

They’d been riding high, these lawyers, engineers, architects, doctors of philosophy, journalists, when they had the lives of millions in their filthy hands. They’d erected elaborate administrative structures where memoranda silently wafted through the chancelleries, drifted across desks, being initialed, stamped, counter-signed, and on and on, before a background of towers of smoke belching from the ovens, day in and day out. And through it all the relentless clanking of cattle wagons coupling in the switching yard, the rhythmic beat of steel wheels over rails of even length, each clack! bearing the human cargo within that many meters closer to a yard where those marked for immediate death were sent to one side – the vast majority of them – and those to be preserved for a lingering, gnawing, terrified, starving, vermin-infested, beaten-bloody deathly labor were sent to the other.

These men and their underlings occupied blocks on hell’s own organizational chart, blocks labeled things like “Referat VIIa – Ausland” and similarly bland titles. What they did was set out to slaughter an entire people, to enslave an entire ethnic group, to purge by starvation vast territories that they might be settled by Volksgenossen – racial comrades. 

We caught them, we and our allies did. The big fish, the guys who did shit like decree that a conference would be held at some forgettable suburb called Wannsee to discuss the Endlösung der Judenfrage in Europa, the final solution to the Jewish question in Europe, we carted them to a place called Nuremberg, convened a body called the International Military Tribunal (to all the hyperventilators about Guantanamo Bay and the trials there: yes, Nuremberg was not a civilian tribunal). And we made them answer for what they’d done. At least we made some of them answer, to some extent; some got off with a fraction of what they’d deserved. Some of the most culpable got in effect a walk. The Allies’ objectives were three-fold: (i) to punish behavior which few outside the Soviet Union even understood that humans could be capable of (the Soviets understood it all too well, on which more later); (ii) to document for the world that all this really had happened; and (iii) to establish a principle that such behavior was once and forever more beyond that which civilized humanity was willing to tolerate. All of that was to be accomplished within a framework of law. 

Pretty high-falutin’ stuff, when you think about it. 

I want to poke a couple of holes in what happened at Nuremberg. Not in respect of the bastards we hanged; we should have hanged more of them. In fact, my standard response to the hand-wringers who moan that the death penalty is “inherently” cruel and unusual is to ask them if they are prepared to stand atop their dunghill and crow that the Nuremberg defendants ought to have lived. Ummmmm . . . silence. So shut up, please. Where I beg leave to depart from history, and from the tenets of what I do for a living, is in the effort to characterize what happened at Nuremberg as “justice” in any legal sense, and how mistaken it was to call it “law.” 

Allow me also to make absolutely clear up front that I draw a clear distinction between “justice” and “what happens in a court room.” Sometimes the latter results in the former, but generally not. It’s why I do not refer to “the justice system,” but rather to “the legal system.” It’s why I want to throw up in my mouth when I hear the Learned Colleagues or our judiciary bloviating about “administering justice.” Bullshit, with all due respect. Your task, if you’d bother reading the constitutional documents which create you, is to determine cases and controversies according to law. You can leave justice to those cosmic wheels which were grinding slowly before your grandfather’s grandfather was a gleam in his daddy’s eye. 

It was the IMT’s tragic flaw that it conflated “justice” with “law.” The main trial defendants were charged with four counts, for each of which the penalty of death was sought: 

(i) engaging in a common plan or conspiracy to commit a crime against peace; 

(ii) planning, initiating, and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace; 

(iii) war crimes; and, 

(iv) crimes against humanity. 

We had in the dock everyone from the guy who ran the Reichsbank until he was fired well before war ever broke out (Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht; he ended the war in a concentration camp himself) to the guy whose voice sounded sufficiently like Joseph Goebbels’s that he was used as a radio stand-in (Hans Fritzsche) to the guy who ran the Hitlerjugend (Baldur von Schirach). We had Fritz Sauckel, who was the Germans’ chief slave-catcher, and Albert Speer, who allocated the slaves so caught among the manpower-starved war industries, and Robert Ley, who was in actual charge of employing the slaves allocated. We had Joachim von Ribbentrop, the foreign minister who flew to Moscow on a warm summer evening in August, 1939 and with his Soviet counterpart Molotov carved up Poland and consigned Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania to decades of Soviet depredation and slaughter. We had Wilhelm Keitel, the “nodding donkey” as he was known around the Führer’s headquarters, who had signed the Kommissarbefehl, under which party commissars attached to every Red Army unit were to be summarily shot upon capture – and were; we had Alfred Jodl, under whose command that order was implemented. We also had men of almost truly psychotic sadism, such as Julius Streicher, who stalked his bailiwick literally carrying a riding whip in his hand, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who ran the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) of the SS, to the lunatic fringe element like Alfred Rosenberg, the national socialist chief ideologue, to the actually driveling lunatic, like Rudolf Heß, once the Number 2 man in the party, but who’d been pretty much emasculated as a power player well before fighting broke out. We had Admiral Erich Raeder, commanding admiral of the bastard step-sister of the German military, and his immediate subordinate, Karl Dönitz, who came within an ace of starving a country into submission, then got fleeted up to command the navy and eventually, in the mad-hatter days of May, 1945 succeeded his dead-and-burned Führer.

 The problem, from a purely legalistic stand-point, is that what these men were accused of doing had never been defined as a crime. Now, from the Soviet stand-point that was no hindrance at all. If they thought you needed to be shot, why, they’d just march you down to the execution cellar (or out to a trench in the woods, as they did with 14,000-odd Polish officers, during that period when they were the Nazis’ allies). But the Americans and British had this curious tradition that without a pre-defined crime there could be no criminal offense. 

When had there ever been a “crime against humanity?” When had there ever been something like the Holocaust? Oh, well, other than the Holodomor, which netted seven million Ukrainians in less than two years, versus six million Jews in twelve; and other than the Red Terror, when anyone with more than two shoelaces was likely to be denounced to a Chekist troika, hauled in by sundown and dead with a bullet hole in the base of the skull by morning; and other than the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class,” during which hundreds of thousands of “special exiles” were given as little as ten minutes to be gone from their villages with what they could carry in their hands, and then dumped out without any tools, seeds, or shelter north of the Arctic circle. 

“War crimes” was a concept at least not completely foreign to the people in that courtroom. Of course, if by “war crime” you mean the wholesale shooting of prisoners . . . well, you’ve still got that Soviet problem. If you mean the wanton destruction of cities, with no effort even mildly to target genuinely “military” objectives within them, then the fly in your particular ointment is Air Marshall Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, who set out to “de-house” the German civilian population. If you mean systematically starving entire peoples, as was done on the Eastern front, well, you’ve got several hundred thousand emaciated corpses from 1914-18 in Germany, victims of a highly successful blockade the principal intent and effect of which was to starve Germany into defeat. Furthermore, the slaughter of civilians in consequence of direct military action was accepted practice as late as the Duke of Wellington’s Peninsular War. 

“Conspiring to wage aggressive war”? Huh? Since when was war something that a nation just sort of ambled into, without any planning or coordination among the various officials within its government? Well into the 1930s the United States maintained plans or at least the outlines of plans to invade pretty much every single possible country we might get to, including Britain and western Europe. Were we “conspiring to wage aggressive war?” France in 1914 went to war with Germany because of her treaty obligations with Russia. Germany went to war with Russia because of her treaty obligations with Austria-Hungary. Britain went to war in 1914 because of an 75-odd year-old treaty about Belgium, one of the signatories to which was Prussia. In 1939 Britain and France went to war with Germany by reason of unilateral guaranty given to Poland by those countries, which Poland had not asked for. Was that a “conspiracy” to wage “aggressive war”? In any of the foregoing I am not arguing the morality or immorality of what the belligerents did. What I am doing is pointing out how empty of meaning “conspiring to wage aggressive war” is as a specifically legal concept. For that matter, how do you define “aggressive” war? If the answer is that the “people who started the war” are necessarily the “aggressors,” do try to recall that from August, 1914 to this date historians still argue over “who started the war,” or whose “fault” was it that Europe exploded. I’m going to suggest that, again, as a legal concept, something that open to good-faith disagreement cannot form the basis for the definition of a crime, at least not consistently with any Anglo-American legal tradition.

A “crime against peace”? When the hell exactly did “peace” become something injurable by an individual’s action? A crime against peace must necessarily occur during peace, for during war there is no peace which may be disturbed. How do you know when a particular act of state crosses the line from recourse to violence, which so far as I’m aware no sovereign state has ever abjured in any enforceable sense, to a “crime against peace”? Either a sovereign reserves to itself every mechanism of compulsion on which it can lay hands, or it does not. War is of course the ultimate mechanism of compulsion. The United States had recourse to it in 1846 to enforce a somewhat dubious claim, inherited from Texas, to a boundary located on the Rio Grande. Britain had recourse to it in the 1820s when it desired that Turkey should no longer rule Greece. Prussia had recourse to it in 1866 when it desired to exclude Austria-Hungary from further involvement in northern European German politics. Russia had recourse when the Ottomans were alleged to have misbehaved themselves in Jerusalem, a place which then lay within their domains. Were all these “crimes against peace”? The situations from which they grew sure as billy-o had no implications for the several nations’ national security or other vital interests. 

All of which is to illustrate a principle that is fairly well-established in Anglo-American law, viz. unless you can plainly point to a specific behavior and say up front whether that is or is not within the scope of a criminal proscription, then you cannot, consistently with due process of law, make a crime of that behavior. Every person is entitled to know whether his conduct in any particular respect does or does not constitute a crime; ergo, the constitutional bar on ex post facto criminal laws. 

With all possible condemnation of the depravity of what the Nuremberg defendants (and millions more like them, every one of whom likewise deserved to hang) did, the charges of the IMT were brazenly ex post facto. And hopelessly vague. And let’s not forget that little matter of hypocrisy. The elephant in the room in that respect was of course the Soviet Union, which had waged absolutely unprovoked, undeniably aggressive wars of conquest against Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Finland. In the former Baltic republics they immediately upon winning them embarked on their trademark bloodshed, in exactly the same fashion as Stalin had attempted to decapitate Polish society from September, 1939 through June, 1941. But it gets better. We charged Karl Dönitz with war crimes for waging unrestricted submarine warfare. Which he had. But then he offered the affidavit of Fleet Admiral Nimitz, who informed the IMT that the U.S. submarine fleet had operated under orders substantially identical to those of the U-boats. Oh. We convicted him anyway. 

I must say that I’m certainly not the first person to notice the above “discrepancies,” as Twain would call them. No less a personage than the then chief justice of the United States, Harlan Fiske Stone, termed the IMT proceedings a “high-grade lynching party.” “I don’t mind what he [chief U.S. prosecutor Robert Jackson, a colleague on the Supreme Court] does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas.”  Jackson himself observed to Truman in 1945 that the Allies “have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them. We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practicing it. We say aggressive war is a crime and one of our allies asserts sovereignty over the Baltic States based on no title except conquest.” 

But here’s where things really went off the rails with the whole concept of legalistic punishment for what Nazi Germany did, and why I say it was above all a mistake to call it “law”: We stopped. Way too soon. Every hack of a district attorney general knows that you either enforce a law whenever someone breaks it, or that law in fact does not exist, and everyone knows it. There were trials after the major war criminals’ trial. There were trials of the concentration camp doctors and commandants. There were trials of military commanders. There was a mish-mash of a trial starring Ernst von Weiszäcker and a couple of others from the Foreign Office, and a gaggle of other functionaries. The later trials were catch-as-catch-can affairs in large measure because the prosecution by that time was pretty much starved for staff and resources. They even had trouble rustling up enough judges to hear the later cases. 

The inevitable result was that in the western zones at least, trials subsequent to the main IMT trial became farcical in their outcomes. Just for example, we tried the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen and their immediate subordinates, the commanders of the Einsatzkommandos. There were four Gruppen, lettered A through D. Each Gruppe had several Kommandos beneath it. They were roving death squads. They were what the Germans did before they hit on the notion of the gas chambers. They killed retail, by gunfire, which means that a specific person had to point a tangible object – a muzzle – at each individual, and squeeze the trigger. Thousands upon thousands of times. At Babi Yar outside Kiev, from September 29-30, 1941, they shot not quite 34,000 Jews in this fashion. Other Aktionen were smaller, but likewise just as individualized. 

The Soviets, bless their blood-thirsty little hearts, shot everyone they could find who had anything to do with the Einsatzgruppen. The western Allies had a separate trial; no defendant was more junior than commander of an Einsatzkommando. Apparently all those guns went off at the command of some officer but without other human intervention. There were fourteen death sentences handed down (not even every defendant got one). Only four actually danced at the rope’s end. The others all had their sentences commuted in 1951 to terms of varying lengths. By 1958 all had been released. Let’s be absolutely clear about this: This were the bastards who actually gave orders to aim and shoot at mothers holding their infant children, cooing to them so their last moments on earth would not be fearful, to see one last time their baby’s smile just before the machine guns barked. And by 13 years after the war they were all free. All. 

The Foreign Office was hip-deep in the Final Solution. Its emissaries, ambassadors, and bureaucrats knew what was going on, volunteered to assist the SS, the SD, and the military authorities, and enthusiastically pitched in when it came to compiling the lists of places from which deportations were to be made and the people to be deported. They hectored, cajoled, and threatened nominal allies, nominal neutrals, and of course the authorities of whatever stripe existed in occupied lands. In Das Amt und die Vergangenheit: Deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und in der Bundesrepublik, a book written and published in 2010 pursuant to a 2004 mandate from the German government, the history of the ideological penetration of the Amt before the war and its seamier activities during the war are spelled out in painstaking detail. But most of the book deals with the largely successful whitewashing operation of the post-war period. Numerous – I mean numerous – men with blood up to their shoulders retired, with full pensions, honors, and dignities. Oh sure, there were certain places where certain officials could not be posted, but that was a comparatively small inconvenience. 

Which is to say that for the most part, the bastards got away with it. Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, better known just as Alfried Krupp, so abused his slave laborers in Essen that even the SS complained about it. William Manchester’s damning book, The Arms of Krupp, contain descriptions of Krupp’s activities during the war that are beyond sickening. We attempted to try his father, Gustav, at the main IMT trial, but by that time daddy was too gibbering even by comparison with Heß. The only problem is that as of 1943 little Alfried was the legal owner of the whole cheese and been in actual command of running it for some time before then. He was the one who ought to have stood in the dock with Fritz Sauckel, Robert Ley, and Albert Speer. Oh, we tried him, eventually, and even nominally took all his property away. That lasted until the mid-1950s, by which time we needed him and his cannons again, and so by 1957 Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach was once again free as the wind and the wealthiest private person in Europe. 

By trying to shoe-horn “justice” into “law,” all we did was make a mockery of both. We hadn’t the time, the people, the money, or the psychic energy left to dispense justice to all who needed it through the mechanism of legalistic procedures. So we laid down and let them get away with it. Churchill had wanted simply to shoot them as and when found. That would have been more honest, and less morally ambiguous. Certainly, we could have and ought to have put them in a setting in which we could spread before the world the documentary, film, and living evidence of their actions. And then taken them out and hanged them, not bothering to characterize what they did as a “crime” against anything. We would have saved ourselves having to go through the repeated theatrics of the subsequent trials. Tie the prisoner to actions x, y, and z, and if the supervising officer finds it has been done, stretch that boy’s neck a few inches for him. 

In the end we come back to the point that if you march a column of defenseless people, including literally babies in arms, to the edge of a trench in the forest, and give or follow the order to fire, you deserve to die of a broken neck occasioned by your plummeting from a scaffold with a rope knotted about it. Basta! 

Nuremberg’s unfortunate precedent endures to this day, with International Courts for this-that-and-the-other dotting the landscape, none of them capable of dealing with a monster. Will anyone dance on a rope for what happened in the Balkans in the 1990s? For all those mass graves, which they’re still digging up from time to time? Nope. How about the Iraqis who worked for Saddam? They’re still alive, most of them. For the men who organized the genocide in Rwanda in 1994? Don’t count on it. For the Khmer Rouge? Not a chance; Pol Pot himself died peacefully in bed, decades after he killed almost 25% of the population of his country. An impartial observer is entitled to ask exactly what the hell good is law if it cannot mete out any sort of “punishment” other that confinement in pleasant conditions, with “three hots and a cot,” and that only after decades of grinding procedure? If law is not feared, it is not worthy of respect. If it is unworthy of respect, it is not respected, in small things as well as large. We did the law no favor at all when we so over-tasked it at Nuremberg in 1946.

And this is where I depart from the tenets of my occupation: There are potentialities for wickedness, for depravity, for barbarity, within the human heart and mind and which are simply beyond the law’s ability to define them, to address them, to bound them with comprehensible intellectual frameworks, and to achieve justice commensurate with their nature. Those actions – so monstrous that their only claim to human status is that humans commit them – are in every meaningful sense outside the law. Those who actualize those potentialities place themselves beyond the law’s protection. They make themselves enemies of the human race, as pirates were once recognized to be, and liable to public justice upon sight. So ought the Allies have proceeded after the war. It would have entailed many thousands of executions, but in the end justice might have been done, and the commanding officers of the Einsatzkommandos would not have died free men.

 

Dept. of Be Careful What You Wish For

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In which connection we find the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reporting that Scotland is going to have a referendum about independence.

Guys, this is a country in which 90% of the population is, on a benefits-net-of-taxes basis, living off the government in some respect.  Nine of every ten Scots is drawing on the public teat.  Where, precisely, is the money to come from if Scotland can’t tap into whatever wealth is left south of the border?  The national government in Westminster and the national parliament in Edinburgh have agreed to a referendum in roughly two years’ time, which will be open to all Scots ages . . . 16 and older.  Yep.  Children of 16, who except in the rarest (and most unfortunate of circumstances) have not even had the chance to understand what it means to pay one’s own bills from one’s own means — and among whom the “independence” movement seems to be particularly popular — will have the chance to over-ride their elders.  Isn’t that reassuring?

In the unlikely event that the referendum passes (only something like 30% support it at the moment), Scotland might turn into a test case of what happens when everyone wishes to live off of everyone else.  Oh sure, we’re seeing something like it in Greece, but then that’s just Greece, whose unfortunate population really hasn’t had much of a good day since the 1820s, if then.  Scotland has been at the forefront of society before (once upon a time if you wanted to be taken seriously as a doctor, you studied in Scotland; Scottish engineers worked all over and were highly prized; you don’t have to get quite as misty-eyed as How the Scots Invented the Modern World to accept that for a time Scotland could show its face anywhere without shame).  Perhaps they’ll be at the forefront of society again.

Maybe what is happening is that we’re are going to be afforded what navigators describe as a three-point fix.  You see, if you have a single celestial or visual line of bearing from an object of a known location, all you know is that you are somewhere along that line.  Get a second, intersecting line of bearing and there is geometrically speaking only one spot on the face of the globe which can simultaneously satisfy the conditions “I am somewhere along Line A and somewhere along Line B.”  Now if you get a third line of bearing from an independent fixed object, and if that line of bearing intersects at the same spot as the other two, the chances that you are not at that point become vanishingly small.  You are there; you have fixed your position; you have a “fix.”

You see, we have one line of bearing from Greece, a Mediterranean country that has embraced the notion that the government can provide all for everyone at no cost to anyone.  Greece has no industrial tradition (save for shipping), no traditions in the last several centuries (as in within the last millennium-plus) of educational attainment, cultural attainment, or refinement of any sort.  As was said of the United States in the early 1800s, who now reads a Greek novel, or performs a Greek play, or sings a Greek song?  Who looks to Greece for guidance in how to do anything right?  Anything at all?  Its politics since the Turks were run off nearly 200 years ago have been a devil’s cauldron of blood and back-stabbing, banditry, and comic-opera farce.  So that’s one line of bearing, taken from a country that’s been bitched up in one or more respects for centuries.

We have a second line of bearing from California, in which we see how socialism can take a nation’s most blessed region, from natural, demographic, and climatological perspectives, which has rich and vibrant traditions of cutting edge standard-bearing in industry, in husbandry, in learning, and (yes) in culture as well, and within two generations turn it into the kind of place Victor David Hanson portrays with sorrow over at his blog.  California is not a place that has to worry about paying for its own defense, or for controlling its own border, or for maintaining a foreign exchange, or for embassies, or for any of the other tasks that the modern nation-state must reckon its cross to bear.  California is sovereign, but within a federal system in which it is firmly embedded.  So that’s a second line of bearing.

And Scotland is set to provide us, perhaps, with that third line of bearing, from a nation and people who for centuries have been a by-word for vigor, for vision, for frugality, for self-reliance, stoicism, and courage.  There’s a reason that the 42nd Highland have since their organization in the 1740s been among the king’s most feared soldiers.  For three centuries Scotland has been a culturally distinct place within a larger kingdom, but not itself sovereign, either on its own (like Greece) or within a true federal system (like California).  Let’s be honest, folks: what Scotland will look like with 90% of the population net takers from the system ain’t exactly the stuff from which “Scots Wha’ Hae wi’ Wallace Bled” is written.  Welcome to your gory bed, or to victory the hand-out line down at the local ministry office indeed.

If Scotland is so cock-eyed raving mad as to think she’ll go it alone under these circumstances, we’ll have that third line of bearing, and when it intersects perfectly with the two from Greece and California, I think we can take it as settled that irrespective of culture, political structure, or history, if you pursue socialism you will drive yourself and your state squarely on the damned rocks.  Socialsim is therefore a course to be avoided.  The U.S. finds itself on a lee shore with the wind rising and the glass falling; it is high time to tack into the wind.

The Birthday of Laughter

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On which date in 1881 the Master, i.e., Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, was born.

Some years ago a well-intentioned but hopelessly over-reaching person undertook to make films, movie shorts, of several of P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves novels. I saw a few of them, and thought them uniformly unsuccessful. Can’t recall the name of the fellow who played Jeeves, but I very distinctly recall a scene in which he raises an eyebrow.

Wodehouse fanatics (and to know him is to be one) will easily recognize this as alarmingly over-acted. Jeeves would never indulge such a vulgarity as a raised eyebrow. Oh, he might flicker one by just a hair or two, but certainly not so blatantly, as did this actor, as well as to wink at the viewer. 

So what is it about Wodehouse that makes his best work so hard to stage? At least as to the Jeeves stories it’s not the first-person voice of the original. I can think of at least two other such narratives – Graves’s Claudius novels and Mortimer’s Rumpole stories – in which the filmed versions are every bit as effective as the underlying written texts. Nor is it the structure of the stories themselves; they do, after all, read almost as if written for the stage, in terms of dramatic entries and exits, each scene with its own internal dramatic development, crisis point, and resolution (which of course serves in the overall structure as a device to heighten the dramatic conflict of the main plot). In fact quite a few of his novels originally appeared serialized, and so you would think they’d be if anything even better suited to dramatization than would otherwise be the case. 

It’s got to be the language, by which I do not mean so much the dialogue as the narrative in which the dialogue occurs.  Although Wodehouse’s dialogue is priceless by any measure, and some of his settings of Clarence, Ninth Earl of Emsworth are as good as any vaudeville cross-talk act ever, for me what makes Wodehouse work is the attendant language. Just by way of example, in Chapter 3 of Heavy Weather occurs the following excerpt of conversation between Clarence and his sister, Lady Constance Keeble, concerning the imminent arrival of another sister, Lady Julia Fish. Let’s read it straight through, without input from the narrator: 

Constance: “While we are on the subject of Miss Brown, I forgot to tell you that I had a letter from Julia this morning.” 

Clarence: “Did you? Capital, capital. Who is Julia?” 

Now let’s see how it reads with Wodehouse’s setting: 

“‘While we are on the subject of Miss Brown,’ said Lady Constance, speaking the name as she always did with her teeth rather lightly clenched and a stony look in her eyes, ‘I forgot to tell you that I had a letter from Julia this morning.’ 

“‘Did you?’ said Lord Emsworth, giving the matter some two-fifty-sevenths of his attention. ‘Capital, capital. Who,’ he asked politely, ‘is Julia?'” 

What takes that brief exchange – an ordinary misunderstanding, such as might occur to anyone speaking to a wooly-minded peer with a large income and good digestion – and makes it into comic gold are the three words “he asked politely.” How do you capture that on film? 

And then of course there are Wodehouse’s descriptions, such as painting an extremely angry person as looking like “a tomato striving for self-expression,” or a heavily-mustachioed man with eyeglasses as looking “like a motorcar coming through a haystack.” Various of the female blisters who troop through the Wodehousian world have laughs like a squadron of cavalry crossing a tin bridge. “Ice formed on the butler’s upper slopes” is not something you’re going to capture with a camera. “The Metropolitan Touch,” in which Bingo Little decides to bring the West End to Twing village, just wouldn’t work without Bertie’s descriptions, such as an orange – “a dashed great hunk of pips and mildew” – hitting him in the face. Or try to imagine Gussie Fink-Nottle’s prize-giving at the grammar school as it might appear on film. 

For that matter, having recourse again to the Blandings Castle saga, we find Beach the butler giving Ashe Marson the gen. about the forthcoming house party at Blandings: 

“‘We are expecting,’ said Mr. Beach, ‘a Number of Guests. We shall in all probability sit down thirty or more to dinner.’ 

“‘A responsibility for you,’ said Ashe ingratiatingly, well pleased to be quit of the feet topic. 

“Mr. Beach nodded. 

“‘You are right, Mr. Marson. Few persons realize the responsibilities of a man in my position. Sometimes, I can assure you, it preys upon my mind, and I Suffer From Nervous Headaches.’ 

“Ashe began to feel like a man trying to put out a fire which, as fast as he checks it at one point, breaks out at another. 

“‘Sometimes, when I come off duty, everything gets Blurred. The outlines of objects grow misty. I have to sit down in a chair. The Pain is Excruciating.’ 

“‘But it helps you to forget the pain in your feet.’ 

“‘No. No. I Suffer From My Feet simultaneously.'” 

Beach goes on to observe that the Lining Of My Stomach is not what he might wish the Lining Of My Stomach to be. 

How do you stage that capitalization of Beach’s? On paper it works perfectly; on the screen, flat. 

Once I looked up a list of Wodehouse’s novels, and printed it off. There were eighty-odd titles listed, and I was proud to find that I had over seventy of them, ranging from his school stories, copyright beginning 1903 I think, to one whose copyright date was 1970 (again, if memory serves; I’ve slept since then). When we drove my first-born off the lot, so to speak, the very first thing he ever had read to him was “The Purity of the Turf.” He couldn’t have been three days old when I balanced him on my chest and read to him of Bertie and Jeeves, of Rupert Steggles, Claude, and Eustace, of little Prudence, egg-and-spoon defending champion, and of the difficulty of “estimating form.”  I’d like to think that early exposure had a tiny bit to do with his teaching himself to read by the time he was six.

In “Without the Option,” Bertie and Oliver Sipperly are pinched on Boat Race Night while unburdening a bobby of his helmet, and Sippy has the presence of mind to give the court a false name. “‘The case of the prisoner Leon Trotzky – which,’ he said, giving Sippy the eye again, ‘I am strongly inclined to think an assumed and fictitious name – is more serious.'” In homage to that line, whenever I am accosted at the check-out line to give an extra dollar to this-that-or-the-other, or importuned by some charitable beggar on the same errand (they usually catch you while you are standing in line, confident you will be unwilling to surrender your place in order to exterminate them), against the promise that my name shall appear on a shamrock, or stylized baby bootie, or little flag, or whatever – as I say, whenever so approached, I invariably give a name such as Leon Trotzky, or Vyacheslav Molotov, or Pavlik Morozov.  Or Galahad Threepwood or Roderick Spode.  I like to think that by so doing I am perhaps spreading a little sweetness and light into the day of some stranger who happens to discover that Bukharin has given a dollar to Toys for Cross-Eyed Dogs or whatever it was, much as Frederick of Ickenham might have done on a “pleasant and instructive afternoon.” 

I am also pleased to note that Wodehouse resonates in the culture beyond confessed misfits such as myself.  In 1999, if the reader will recall, we were inundated with lists of the 100 greatest thingummies of the 20th Century.  On a list of the so many greatest novels I was tickled to find Only a Factory Girl, by Rosie M. Banks.  Rosie of course is the novelist who marries Richard “Bingo” Little, the impresario of Twing, as above mentioned.  During John Roberts’s confirmation hearing for chief justice, he was asked who was his favorite writer.  He gave Wodehouse, an answer upon hearing of which I thought this fellow may not be all that bad after all.

Wodehouse remains my lifeline in many ways, my way back to sanity when nothing in the world makes sense any more, when the thought of picking up a history or a biography, with their litanies of crimes and follies, just seems unbearable, and fiction with its swarms of characters who want to do something, who want you to do something, is equally insupportable, and news of current events strongly suggests recourse to strong drink. A dive into Wodehouse is then a plunge into crystalline purity of human existence untainted by crisis or ill-will beyond a desire to nobble the neighbor’s pig. One thinks wistfully of Galahad Threepwood, who looked as if he’d never been to bed until age fifty, and still gave the impression of being just about to raise a foot in search of a brass rail. One looks for the Earl of Ickenham’s assistant Walkinshaw, who applies the anesthetic. One longs for the somnolent peacefulness of an English country parish, scented of Sunday best and farmer, and the gentle drone of the Reverend Mr. Heppenstall’s sermon on Certain Popular Superstitions. 

And one makes one’s way back to shore.