Monthly Archives: October 2012

Happy Navy Birthday!!

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Here’s the world’s oldest warship afloat, underway on her own:

I grew up using the 1928 edition of the Book of Common Prayer, and it still had a prayer for the Navy in it (they’ve since just lumped it all in to a prayer for the armed services):

“Eternal Lord God, who alone spreadest out the heavens, and rulest the raging of the sea; Vouchsafe to take into thy almighty and most gracious protection our country’s Navy, and all who serve therein. Preserve them from the dangers of the sea, and from the violence of the enemy; that they may be a safeguard unto the United States of America, and a security for such as pass on the seas upon their lawful occasions; that the inhabitants of our land may in peace and quietness serve thee our God, to the glory of thy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

Than which more need not be said.

Maybe There’s Hope for the Place, After All; or Not?

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The Telegraph reports that a proposal to outlaw blasphemy in the new Tunisian constitution has been dropped.

Tunisia was where the so-called Arab Spring started, in those starry-eyed months so long ago.  Now we’ve got Islamofascists running rampant in Libya and Egypt, Assad no nearer to being run out of town on a rail than ever, and Jordan showing signs of being undermined.  Sweet.  Depending on how one is keeping score, our diplomacy in that part of the world is one-for-not-much.

We still haven’t retaliated for what happened in Libya.  To some extent that’s understandable, and as difficult as it is to say, commendable.  There were, after all, more or less genuine demonstrations around the country against the militias who staged the movie review carefully-planned attack, demanding they be disarmed.  The problem in Libya seems to be that there is no real effective government that could do the disarming; contrast Tunisia where at least there seems to be some adults in charge.

Dear Leader has expressed “relief” that the Muslim Brotherhood is now in charge of Egypt.  At the same time we’re about to cut them a nice whacking great check.  At the same time the rumors are swirling that we’re going to release the man who masterminded the first WTC attacks in the 1990s.

Assad keeps slaughtering his own.  At least for the moment he’s got Turkey at his back door.  On the other hand, with Erdogan, who famously compared democracy to a streetcar that one exited at one’s stop, in charge of Turkey and sometimes gently, sometimes not so gently stoking fond memories of Ottoman glories, I’m not really comfortable that story has a good ending either.

Assad’s backers, the Iranians, are getting closer to nuclear weaponry by the week.  Only now, after nearly four years of sitting on our hands, they’ve managed to move their R&D and production facilities to places where we can’t get at them with anything other than boots on the ground.  Of course this tribe has long announced their intention to obliterate Israel from the map.  What doesn’t get nearly as wide play is how thoroughly they give the balance of the region the wind up.  They’re Persians, you see, not Arabs.  The “diversity” mavens of the U.S. academy notwithstanding, the rest of the world doesn’t operate that way.  They cordially despise each other and act accordingly.  And Iran’s only desirable product, hydrocarbons, aren’t going to save them from the cataclysm of going from 7 live births per female in 1979 to 1.6 today.

But at least Russia’s still going to hold to its nuclear disarmament treaties with the U.S., so we don’t have to worry about that specter in the room.  Oh, wait, never mind.  Now if this is the kind of “flexibility” that Dear Leader was promising Putin — not knowing he had a hot mic on him — that he would have “more” of than after the election, exactly what does Dear Leader have up his sleeve to give away?  He’s already sold out the Poles and the Czechs, two places in continental Europe where we were actually sort of well-liked.  In a high point for “smart diplomacy,” he chose to let the Poles know by a telephone call . . . on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet 1939 invasion.  For a street-level view of what happened next, after September 17, 1939, in Soviet-Polish relations, see Janusz Bardach’s Man is Wolf to Man; for the larger story, see, e.g. Allen Paul’s Katyn: The Untold Story of Stalin’s Polish Massacre.  Think this is all just ancient history, stuff no one outside Poland ought to care about?  Vladimir Putin, formerly of the KGB, f.k.a. the NKVD, still self-identifies among his buddies as a “Chekist.”

This is what I find worrying about all the above.  After 12 years of self-flagellation over Vietnam, years in which we Americans neglected and indeed vilified our military, a bunch of crazies in Tehran were able to storm our embassy and hold our citizens hostage for over a year (that is, by the way, still a payable on our books, so far as I’m concerned); our only serious effort to get them out turned into a Keystone Kops disaster.  In 1980 we tossed out the clown we had and elected Reagan, who (with the ironic exception of Dear Leader) has to be one of the most personally popular presidents of the past 40 years.  We borrowed ourselves silly to re-constitute our ability to protect ourselves and project our power abroad.  We managed it, but in the process we went from the world’s largest creditor nation to its largest debtor, pretty much within the space of Reagan’s presidency.  We’ve never come back.  We’re now in a world that is every bit as dangerous, every bit as hostile, with multiple loci of economic and military challenge which didn’t exist back in 1980 (I mean, seriously, who outside her immediate neighbors cared what China had to say? or India?).  As in the late 1970s, we’ve allowed our military strength to diminish, at least numerically and materially (in terms of quality of personnel we’re most likely close to the best we’ve ever had, and arguably the best anyone’s ever had).

The difference between 1980 and 2012 is this:  We’ve long since ground our seed corn, economically.  We owe $16 trillion.  Where are the resources going to come from if we are to crawl back now as we did then?

Genl Marshall, a truly extraordinary man, was extremely worried during the war.  He was not worried that we would lose it.  He was worried that it would go on so long that the derangements to American society and its economy would no longer be recoverable afterwards.  After some period of time, the massive spending, borrowing, intrusion of governments into the ordinary workings of American business and the substitution of its objectives for private persons’, diversion of men, money, and assets from peaceful and productive pursuits, and absence from the workforce of most of a generation of healthy males (the unhealthy ones weren’t in the military, recall), would so erode the channels of economic life that the U.S. would be economically defeated even though militarily victorious.  Perhaps he was thinking of the position that France found itself in the late 1780s.

I’m going to suggest that we may have arrived at the point Genl Marshall foresaw, but through largely non-warlike means.  Servicing a $16 trillion note will suck the oxygen from the air that American business needs to function.  The government spends a proportion of our GDP that is unmatched for any period since the war ended, and with the healthcare catastrophe it is proposing to take over, directly or otherwise, a full fifth of the economy.  The federal tax system is already pulling a proportion of the GDP that is pretty close to what it’s ever been able to raise (roughly 19-21%, as I recall), irrespective of the bracket structure in place at any point.  Over a third of all American working-age adults are simply no longer part of the workforce.  The collapse of the labor force is, by the way, a trend that goes back to 1950.  Somewhere I saw a chart that superimposed a graph-line of labor force participation over recessionary spells, going all the way back to 1950 or so.  What struck me was that with each recession, labor force participation plunges.  It then comes back as the economy comes out of recession . . . but it never again reaches the level it had just before the drop.

If growth shot up to a sustained breakneck pace per year we might be able to grow our way back, if at the same time we hived off massive portions of federal outlays.  But chopping off that kind of spending, when so much of the economy has become dependent on that spending, is going to do what to our short-term growth?  And exactly how realistic is it to suppose that we can sustain that frenetic growth rate for long enough to get the bills paid?  If every generation or so the business cycle takes a downward turn, and if we need multiple generations’ worth of uninterrupted growth to work our way out of our position, how likely is it that we’ll pull it off?

We may have painted ourselves into a corner.  Will we be permitted the time to stand pat and wait for the paint to dry?

Don’t Worry Dad; That Won’t Happen to Me: Uninventing Government

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Which is the short version of the speech that pretty much every lead-footed teenager gives his parent when it is suggested that driving like a bat out of hell is a good way to end up on a slab.  I’m a better driver than those guys in the paper last week.

This is the same speech we’re getting from our political class, with its refusal to address the spending avalanche.  Right now the Fed is the purchaser for over 90% of new issues of long-term treasury debt.  Our left pocket is the only source of borrowed money for our right pocket, and our right pocket is shelling the stuff out as fast as the left pocket tops it off.  At that fund-raiser where dear ol’ Mittens was so crass as to suggest that having 47% of your adult population not paying any money into the game was not a good idea, he also observed out that when a government is buying over 90% of its own debt, “at that point you’re just making it up.”

Almost no one’s really picked up on that comment; certainly no one is making an issue of the fact that we’re just making up our economy.

We’re assured by all the Deep Thinkers that this is not really a problem.  The Fed will stop in time; the economy is just about really to take off.  We’re going to grow our way out of this mess.  No, really; we mean it, this time.  And again and again, the numbers keep coming back — unexpectedly!!, as Instapundit would drily note — short of anywhere near what they would need to be for that to occur.  And so we keep firing up the presses and printing off another run.

Math, of course, operates as it will, irrespective of person, party, or country.  That we’re the U.S., or that we’re so diverse a society, or that we have a flashy military, or lots of television shows, or whatever won’t insulate us.  That either party is in or out of power, or partly-in and partly-out won’t help.  All the Learned Cogitations of our judiciary won’t stop it.  The solemn assurances of our chattering classes (of which I am now to some degree a member, I suppose) that Everything Will Be OK can’t stave it off.  Two plus two will never equal anything other than four.

As long as the federal government continues to spend not only more money that it raises in tax revenue, but vastly more than it can ever raise in tax evenue, even by expropriating not just the “1%” but the next 49% as well, the avalanche will not pull up short.  It will reach the bottom of the hill, where we are standing, absorbed in the most recent doings of Big Bird, or the Kardashian sisters and their lady parts, or whatever “reality” show is currently up in the ratings.

This is what it looks like when the avalanche hits bottom.

Germany’s hyper-inflation destroyed its middle classes.  The poor were already poor and generally on some form of relief.  The wealthy either had their wealth in hard assets or abroad.  The middle class, the ones who got up in the morning, went to work, came home and played with the kids, or with the kids’ mommy, went to church, listened to concerts, and generally pursued that inward self-development that is summed up in the uniquely German concept of Bildung — they were wiped out.  For almost 150 years Germany had consciously, aggressively pursued the creation of a society based on Bildung, a notion that is quite a bit broader and deeper than what English-speakers would think of as “education,” or “learning,” or even “cultivation.”  It is, to be sure, all those, but it is also quite a bit more.  That segment of the society that Germany knew as the Bildungsbürgertum was its sea anchor.  It was what kept the ship pointing into the waves.

Within a matter of months the Bildungsbürgertum was largely wiped out, their inward Bildung unable to heat the apartment or even rent one.  The wealthy industrialists, merchant princes, bankers, and landed aristocracy took a lick, of course, but they survived.  The proletariat, the Pöbel, was not to be considered sortable.  And so the Bildungsbürgertum looked about them for a mode of existence, a form of organizing their world and their understanding of themselves in it, that would validate them, elevate them, show them a way forward.

Recently Peter Watson, an English author, published a book, The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century, a social, cultural, and intellectual history of German from 1750 to right about now.  His point in doing so was to demonstrate that there was a German culture before1933, and that to view Germany and its history exclusively through the prism of the Nazi era was not only to do it a disservice but also to abandon a rich trove of human insight.  I am of course over-simplifying his argument, but Watson identifies the shattered Bildungsbürgertum of the 1920s as forming a large constituent of the fertile soil where sprouted the plants whose fruits were the mountains of corpses shown on the newsreels of the camps’ liberation.

There is only one sure way to keep a teenager from driving to his own death.  You take away the keys.  There is only one sure way to take away the ability of the political class to drive us over the cliff.  You take away their power.  Kicking out Set A of them and replacing them, temporarily, with Set B will not do the trick.  We must get over the notion of “reinventing government” as a deus ex machina.  What is wanted is not “reinventing”; it is uninventing government that will save us, if we are to be saved.

Whither the Marines?

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As Instapundit would say, “Read the whole thing.” Follow some of the links as well, while you’re at it.

I was in the navy, on a steam-powered, automatic-nothing guided missile destroyer, of the Charles F. Adams (DDG-2) class; they were universally known in the fleet as “Adams cans,” the reference being to the destroyer type’s appellation of “tin can.” It fit, too; once an A-6 Intruder was practice bombing our wake with smoke bombs, about ten-pound chunks of inert metal with a smoke flare in the nose which was activated by contact with seawater. The idea being the plane would target our wake, but about 500 or so yards astern of us. This goof-ball dropped one clean through our ship. And when I say “clean through our ship,” that’s exactly what that little ten-pound chunk of inert metal did – it went in on one side of the ship, through an exterior bulkhead, blew apart a power panel for our missile fire control radars, went through a deck, through the weapons department office, out another external bulkhead, through another deck and a passageway, almost unburdening us of our chief boatswain’s mate, through the brand-new refrigerator in the chiefs’ mess, through another external bulkhead, and out onto the main deck where it finally hit something capable of bringing it to a halt, viz. the starboard boat davit, a rather massive chunk of steel, and bounced back into the scupper. 

That’s what a small, inert piece of metal did. Had it penetrated not the superstructure three decks up, but rather main hull in a main engineering space, this is what would have happened: We ran on super-heated steam. If my memory is correct the outlet temperature of a boiler was 945 degrees Fahrenheit at 1,275 p.s.i. A pinhole leak of live steam will cut a human body in half (oddly it also cauterizes as it cuts, so you have two half-men, but comparatively little blood). A significant irruption of main steam will boil alive everyone in the space. The fuel oil running to the burner face was under something like 400 p.s.i. A tiny breach of a pressurized fuel line would produce a fine mist of fuel oil, which if – when is better – it hit a piece of exposed metal that had steam behind it, would flash into a fire ball that would consume the space. And everyone in it. That happened, in fact, to a sister-ship of ours, USS Conyngham (DDG-17). A fuel oil strainer had been overhauled in the yards, but the technical drawings were incorrect; they didn’t show a retainer pin going all the way through a shaft. The retainer pin vibrated loose and the pressure inside the strainer ejected the shaft, much like a projectile from a Nerf gun. The resulting quarter-inch or so geyser of fuel oil lit off. Conyngham burned for two days (miraculously only one man died). One of our squadron-mates had a main steam line rupture, shortly after we decommissioned. Cooked several people in the boiler room.  Modern non-nuclear combat vessels tend to be gas-turbine powered, and if anything the jet fuel they run is even more highly inflammable than our good ol’ DFM.

The ladders coming up out of the main engineering spaces are maybe eighteen or so inches wide, vertical or nearly so for a good part of its length, and at the top the egress is through a round scuttle not much wider than the average male body. That’s your route out of hell, and if you’ve had your legs cooked down to the bone, or a falling chunk of machinery has crushed a foot, or you’ve been knocked senseless off a platform down into the bilges twenty feet below, how you get out is your shipmates manhandle you up that ladder and out of the space. Failing which, you die. 

Isn’t it nice to know that your shipmates in that space, on whose upper-body strength your own survival depends, won’t be able to shift your body (try hauling around an unconscious person for a distance; try maneuvering that person, say, up an ordinary stairwell; you’ll get a good understanding for the expression “deadweight”) because the strongest 5% of them are only as strong as the bottom half of their male shipmates. 

My father-in-law served in World War II. He earnestly counseled his daughter to have any son circumcised. Not for any religious reason, you understand, but because the male foreskin is a vulnerable point of infection (I’m given to understand that one of the more effective non-medicinal AIDS preventives is circumcision; apparently that li’l ol’ flap of skin is just transparent to pathogens for some reasons). He related (without too much detail) how it was the uncircumcised men who were forever getting infections, in the inevitable dirt of active service. What would have happened if those sailors had, as a female friend of mine put it once, “an interior organ mounted on the outside of their body” beggars imagination. I refer the gentle reader to Eugene B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa for a physical description of the hygienic conditions attendant on prolonged combat operations in warmer climes. 

It is simply dishonest to pretend that the political decision to declare that no meaningful, material distinctions exist between the halves of the human species has no consequences for the lives of the Americans in uniform, of both sexes. What makes the facts behind this story so scandalous is that the people driving this are practicing intellectual dishonesty with the lives of the men (and women, too) they’ve sworn to protect.

For shame.

 

Dave Carter — Here They Are!

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The arts, that is.  Over at Ricochet, Dave Carter asks, “Whither the Arts?” in the context of his visit some years ago to the Kölner Dom (Cologne Cathedral) and in response to an article by Camille Paglia.  It seems as though he was quite simply gob-smacked, like many people when first confronted with the tangible evidence of a piety that we modern Americans have been . . . well, “indoctrinated” is about the only fitting word, to believe not only ought not exist but cannot exist in polite society.

Been there, done that; know exactly what he’s talking about.  Cologne was a city in Roman times.  It has always been important.  As impressive as the cathedral there is, and as true as is every word in Carter’s post, what has impressed me every bit as much, if not on a purely aesthetic level, is the same piety expressed in the churches in small towns all over Europe.  Cologne has been an archbishopric for centuries (you can tell because the cathedral has two spires; a mere bishop got only one, although sometimes when a bishopric got fleeted up while the cathedral was under construction, they left it with one, as with the Münster in Freiburg).  As an archbishopric it could access comparatively vast wealth.  Smaller towns, not so much.  The admittedly lesser artistic treasures to be found there came from the locals.

There are still craftsmen, and piety, and selfless devotion out there.  Oddly enough, so I read recently, church membership and attendance is highest in the former East Germany.  It’s as if, you know, having lived under religion’s sworn enemy for 45 years, they know to appreciate what the rest of us, in our oh-so-jaded worldly sophistication, view as being quaint at best, per sé offensive at worst.

In February, 1986 I visited Dresden in company with a passel of other college students.  They’d already re-built some of the baroque show-pieces, such as the Zwinger.  But the Frauenkirche was still a 40-odd foot tall pile of rubble, with two chunks of charred, gouged wall sticking up.

It had been built between 1726 and 1743, and at the time was the largest domed structure north of the Alps.  Its architect, George Bähr, was among the very first in the central European area to self-identify as an “architect.”  The church was built as a municipal church, by the city.  The court of August the Strong (sufficiently “strong” that he was rumored to have fathered some <ahem!> 300 children) was Roman Catholic, he having been elected King of Poland in 1697.  He warmly supported the church’s building, and granted concessions where he could afford them, but in the end it was the people of Dresden, through their city fathers, who built it.  It was considered the crown jewel of the city known as Florence on the Elbe.

We fire-bombed it during the night of 13-14 February, 1945.  No one really knows how many people, nearly all civilians and refugees from the Red Army’s onslaught, were incinerated.  The Frauenkirche was not actually destroyed by the bombs.  What brought her down was the heat of the flames, which caused the stones in the supporting columns to collapse under the 12,000 tons of the double-shell dome.  And there she lay for another 45 years.

Right around the time that East Germany was packing it in, a group of prominent citizens decided it was time to re-build, and to use as much original material as possible.  Being German, after all, they’d saved the plans.  And so as they unstacked the rubble, one stone at a time, they mapped out in 3-D exactly where they found each usable original stone, and used a computer program to determine as exactly as possible where in the original structure that stone came from.  And then, being German, they put it right back where it belonged.  They re-built the altar from over 2,000 separate pieces they dug out.  The result on the outside, by the way, is an intriguingly speckled appearance, the originals being stained nearly black with 200 years of soot as well as the residue of the 1945 fires, and the new stone being a light honey color.  Being German, they also decided to re-build it as exactly like the original as possible, using materials identical to the original as well.

The reconstruction cost roughly €180 million.  Approximately €100 million of it was raised through private subscription, from all over the world.  The largest individual donor was an American who won the Nobel for medicine and donated his entire prize money.  The British ponied up for the new cross, and by wonderful irony the smith who actually fashioned it was the son of one of Arthur Harris’s bomber pilots who flew that mission in 1945.  A survivor of the Polish resistance movement organized his town to sponsor one of the vase-and-flame thingies on a corner tower.  The local taxi drivers contributed through each fare they got called from central.  The organ builder was a French firm from Strasbourg.

And being German, they made an astounding documentary of it.  I stumbled across this on YouTube and ran the DVD to ground from the publisher in Leipzig.  Shipping, handling, and purchase price it cost me just over $50, but thanks to the wonders of PayPal she’s mine (the second disc in the set has a biographical documentary on Bähr, showing some of his other surviving works, mostly churches, including some in those tiny towns I described above). 

One needn’t understand a word of German to get this documentary, because there is zero narrative, and almost no question-and-answer.  It’s just the people doing what they’re doing, with camera men standing by.  Man-on-the-street commentary here and there, but by and large the work, and the workers, speak for themselves.  And of course baroque music as the score. Settle back; it’s just over three hours and twenty minutes, but it’s worth every moment of watching: 

So Dave Carter and Camille Paglia, here are your artists.  Here is your simple piety, expressed in stone.  They’re alive and well, just driven into a sort of quasi-hiding.

Which is It? You Decide; I Can’t

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I think that’s a fairly close paraphrase of an entry in Harry Truman’s diary, in which he agonized whether to overlook several thousands of dollars of fraudulent contracting in building the new courthouse . . . in order to save several tens of thousands of dollars in the overall project cost.  He couldn’t decide which to call it.

So also with one of the most famous photographs of the entire 20th Century, at least here in the U.S.  It’s the photograph of a sailor in Times Square when the surrender was announced.  Carried away by the euphoria of the moment, he reached for — well, we don’t know if she was the first he saw, or the most likely-appearing, or what it was that attracted his attention.  But she was a nurse, a total stranger, and like him she was in the streets when they announced the end of four years of killing and dying.  Who knows whether or if so how many wounded or maimed boys she had seen?  Maybe none.  Maybe some.  Maybe more than she’d ever known could exist.

And he grabbed her and laid on the Kiss of the Century.

This moment has lately become the subject of a bit of a fire storm.  The “feminists” of today, apparently with not enough to occupy their thoughts what with 750,000 more women unemployed now than in January, 2009, with small businesses collapsing wherever one looks — small businesses owned by husband-and-wife teams, or by single women who’ve got children to raise and can’t accommodate a 9-to-5, punch-the-man’s-clock job, or whatever — have decided that The Kiss was actually a sexual assault, possibly a rape, and the complete lack of public outrage (including by the “victim” herself, who stayed in touch with her “attacker” and even re-enacted the scene, publicly, with him decades later) evidence of a pervasive “rape culture.”

Crates and Ribbons (the subtitle of which is “In pursuit of gender equality”) weighs in.  Here’s the money quote: 

“The articles even give us Greta’s own words:

‘It wasn’t my choice to be kissed. The guy just came over and grabbed!’

‘I did not see him approaching, and before I knew it, I was in this vice grip. [sic]’

‘You don’t forget this guy grabbing you.’

‘That man was very strong. I wasn’t kissing him. He was kissing me.’

“It seems pretty clear, then, that what George had committed would be considered sexual assault by modern standards. Yet, in an amazing feat of willful blindness, none of the articles comment on this, even as they reproduce Greta’s words for us. Without a single acknowledgement of the problematic nature of the photo that her comments reveal, they continue to talk about the picture in a whimsical, reverent manner, ‘still mesmerized by his timeless kiss.’ George’s actions are romanticized and glorified; it is almost as if Greta had never spoken.

“In a way, I understand this. The end of war is a big deal, and the euphoria felt throughout the nation on that day is an important part of American history.”

And in the other corner, we have Victory Girls, whose wrap-up runs —

“So nowhere does Friedman actually call it assault. After the fact, she went back to work proclaiming that the war was over. And in the decades after that iconic moment, she repeatedly took the time to meet up with the sailor in the photograph.

“But the woman ‘assaulted’ doesn’t get to say whether or not she was assaulted, right? That’s up for the feminazis to decide, because clearly, women are too dumb to make those kinds of judgements for themselves.

“This photo wasn’t an example of sexual assault. It was an example of the exuberance of a nation exhausted by war, having millions of the best and brightest among them either be killed or injured. The photo captures that moment, the emotions behind it and the excitement, relief, and enthusiasm of the day, perfectly.”

 I think the key phrase in Crates and Ribbons is “by modern standards.”  The author is more than just a little bit falling into the same error as those who want to read the 14th Amendment back into the Pilgrims’ dealings with the locals they found in 1620.  People have not always dealt with each other the way we do now; they have not thought of each other in the same ways.  Things that we just laugh off now would have destroyed a person’s position in whatever society that person moved in — think Lydia’s escapade with Wickham.  Things we might view as at least questionable (such as grabbing a perfect stranger on the streets of New York in front of God and everybody and laying a lip-lock on her) or worse just don’t seem from the participants’ recollections and contemporaneous statements to have been that big a deal. 

Recall that all across Western Europe for the year-plus preceding this photo’s date, perfect strangers, both men and women, had been grabbing each other and kissing, as for them nearly six years of slaughter passed from their lives.  Maybe in the relief that they or their family members weren’t to be hauled in by the Gestapo after all, and “disappeared” into Nacht und Nebel (“night and fog”; the program involved snatching people, shipping them off for “Sonderbehandlung” — “special handling,” i.e., killing them — but denying their families all information of their fate; it was adopted specifically as a terror mechanism for the occupied countries), maybe, just perhaps, they overlooked the pervasiveness of the rape culture for a few moments.  Poor deluded Europeans; what a good thing Crates and Ribbons has come along, all these years later, to clear up the real issues for them.

The pictures from Europe had been in the papers, the newsreel footage splashed across screens everywhere there was a roof over the theater to run it in.  Is it remotely plausible to suppose that the people in Times Square that day had no idea what kind of celebrating took place at war’s end?

Context is not irrelevant.  Want to bet any strangers grabbed each other and kissed the night Dear Leader won the election?  Is this euphoria that, 54 years after Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas we elected president a fellow who, had he been alive then, would have been unwelcome at diners across the nation, and in certain areas would have risked a beating or worse had he defied the prevailing norms, irrelevant to what happened that night?  Say I’m minding my business on a sidewalk and without warning I’m dashed to the ground by a blind-side flying tackle from someone out-weighing me by 100 pounds (hard to imagine that; I’m what they call a “big ol’ boy” around here), breaking my arm in two places and maybe knocking out a tooth or two.  Now, all the elements of a battery are present: (i) intent to cause the contact; (ii) no consent to the contact; (iii) no reasonable belief that I have consented to the contact; (iv) an “objectively” offensive nature of the contact; and (v) actual physical injury resulting from the contact (actually, that last element is not strictly speaking necessary, except to prove up damages).  Now let’s say that I’m tackled because the chap who takes me down sees the runaway truck and sees that I don’t.  Is his benign — charitable, really — motive irrelevant to whether as a moral proposition I should be exercised about my broken arm and missing teeth?  Would I be a thankless wretch to be upset at him?

I wasn’t Greta.  For that matter neither were the authors at Crates and Ribbons or Victory Girls.  Me, I’m going to reserve judgment, which means that I’m not going to get either all misty-eyed about it, or pop-veined splenetic either.  Once upon a time the Reverend Mr. Brontë (Charlotte’s and Emily’s daddy; he’d changed his name in honor of Lord Nelson, whose Sicilian title, bestowed after his victory at Aboukir Bay in 1798, was Duke of Brontë) sent the Duke of Wellington some drawings of what he believed to be an improved musket lock for the British infantryman.  The reverend was an amateur inventor and the Iron Duke the Master of Ordnance at the time.  The Duke returned, “FM the Duke of Wellington presents his compliments to Mr. Brontë.  The Duke believes it to be his duty to refrain from interfering in duties over which he has no controul.  Much time would be saved if others were to follow the Duke’s example.” (emphasis mine)

 Much time would be saved if the well-meaning folks at Crates and Ribbons would refrain from involving themselves in duties over which they have no controul.

In closing, however, I must also take exception to the condescension that oozes from the Crates and Ribbons comment that, “In a way, I understand this. The end of war is a big deal, and the euphoria felt throughout the nation on that day is an important part of American history.”  Very respectfully, and with all possible charity and Christian love for you as a fellow pilgrim, you don’t understand one f*****g thing about that picture’s background, or the world which those two people had just escaped.  Not.  One.  F*****g.  Thing.

Let’s hear, just for contrast, from someone who did understand it.  Paul Fussell was an infantry lieutenant who’d been wounded in Europe.  He stopped a shell splinter with his leg.  The sergeant lying in arm’s-reach beside him that day . . . ummmm . . . he’s still in France.  I hear they mow the grass over his head real nice every so often.  Still, Fussell had been patched up and was on his way to Olympic, the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands.  And then we dropped the bombs.  In his 1981 essay “Thank God for the Atom Bomb,” he recounts what it was like to be a young male, in the ground forces of the combat branches, and alive when Hirohito put his foot down and said enough was enough, finally:

“But even if my leg buckled and I fell to the ground whenever I jumped out of the back of a truck, and even if the very idea of more combat made me breathe in gasps and shake all over, my condition was held to be adequate for the next act. When the atom bombs were dropped and news began to circulate that ‘Operation Olympic’ would not, after all, be necessary, when we learned to our astonishment that we would not be obliged in a few months to rush up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being machine-gunned, mortared, and shelled, for all the practiced phlegm of our tough facades we broke down and cried with relief and joy. We were going to live. We were going to grow to adulthood after all. The killing was all going to be over, and peace was actually going to be the state of things.”

I tell you what, Crates and Ribbons:  Go find you a jury box of twelve gold-star mothers (or their daughters, if you please) from World War II, or any other American war since then, and see if you get you a conviction of the man who kissed Greta, that summer day in 1945.

If not, go save some time.

What did JFK Have to say About the Future?

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That he’d seen it in Germany, and “it works,” if memory serves. 

Well, ol’ JFK certainly got the first half of it right.  If by “future” he meant a universe in which the state asserts and is conceded the right and power to control every last little penny-ante detail of the citizen’s life.  In Germany of course the party then in power simply asserted that it was going to do so, and then did.  Here in the U.S. we’ve arrived at a point where the government just taxes you to death if you don’t do what the government can’t constitutionally force you to do directly.  Tomato, tomahto.  Whatever.

But here’s the point of this post.  In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung we read an article over a forthcoming new law and accompanying regulations which are going, allegedly, to accelerate the Germans’ drive towards “minimum energy buildings.”  The first such round of Fiat Lux! legislation came in 2009, apparently.  The next two steps are mandated for 2014 and 2016 respectively, and they’re supposed to reduce energy consumption per newly-built structure by 12.5% per step.

Tellingly the statute and regulations are proposed in order to implement an EU policy.

Oh sure, one may qualify for an exemption from the new standards, if one can demonstrate that the cost-benefit analysis over the expected life span of the new building produces a negative number.  Of course, every time one looks up from one’s breakfast burrito it turns out that the “renewable energy,” which Germany has embraced with a faith so touching one is tempted to overlook how closely it comes to problems with the First Commandment, is going to get vastly more expensive — unexpectedly! — as Instapundit is fond of observing; the most recent numbers quoted show increases by 50% more than previously estimated.  So all we have to do is artificially crank up the cost of the energy one is saving and hey presto! the cost-benefit analysis goes positive.  Right now they estimate (and let’s not forget how unfailingly accurate government estimates of cost are) the extra costs for the 2014 step-up at €1.2 billion per year over the construction industry; the 2016 mandates will (sure you can take this to the bank) come in at only €2.5 billion per year.

The government estimates that each percent of consumption reduction will add 1.7% to the cost of building.  The article unfortunately does not mention whether the novel concept of diminishing marginal returns has been taken into account in calculating that number.  Anyone want to bet it hasn’t?  Anyone want to bet that the last 5% reduction in energy consumption will cost exactly what the first 5% cost? 

Let’s run this through the Countrylawyer Patented Economic Translation Machine.  I bought my house back in the mid 1990s for roughly $180,000 (yeah, I over-paid, and yes, I understand that what I paid wasn’t the builder’s cost, and the German numbers are builder’s cost figures).  Let’s just assume though that my builder made $45,000 on the sale, for a GP% of 25%.  The BLS shows a cumulative consumer price index increase from my month of purchase to now of 45.25%, so that makes my builder’s cost to build my house right now $196,000.  Each percentage of that cost works out to be $1,960.  We have gas heat and hot water, and electric everything else.  Over the past twelve months we spent $604.90 on gas (I keep the thermostat on 61 during the winter) and $2,254.08 on electricity, or $184.84 per month average.  Our local utilities in fact do charge on a linear scale above the monthly minimum bill, so each percent total energy reduction will net me out $22.54 per annum savings.  Let’s get real optimistic and assume that my house has a useful service life of 75 years.  Per Revenue Ruling 2012-28, the § 7520 interest rate for October, 2012 is 1.2%.  An extra $22.54 per year, ignoring inflation and at a 1.2% discount rate, will be worth $1,110.56 over the house’s 75 year useful life span.  That is, of course, if I were paying cash for the house and expected to live in it for the full 75 years.  But my service life in this house, as of now, is more in the range of 30 years (if that).  In contrast I’m paying the full cost of the percentage reduction in consumption up front, and I have no way of ensuring that I will get my money back out of the house (it will experience economic depreciation and functional obsolescence over time).  Recall also that we’re ignoring the additional cost of energy-efficient maintenance and repair as well.  My net present value of that extra $2,254 over 30 years is $565.03, for which I would be paying $1,960.  I’m upside down to the extent of 71% of the out-of-pocket cash cost of each additional 1% efficiency.

But here’s where the Germans have really gone off the rails.  It has to do with New York City, and the lethal combination of insane building codes and rent control.  The expense of upgrading to new building codes, and the restricted ability to pass along those increasing costs to renters, has ensured a steadily diminishing stock of housing in the city, with the result that costs for halfway decent housing have skyrocketed and the city is crowded with places like Bedford-Stuyvesant.  If you remove the economic incentive to keep the place up, the owner has no incentive to do so, at the risk of pointing out the obvious.  If you force him to upgrade what happens is you run capital out of the housing market.  Who will pump his money into a place where he’s exposed to unknowable future expense which he can be reasonably assured he won’t be able to pass on to his customer?  The only option left is housing projects, which coincidentally sprawl all over the city.  For a description of what public housing looks like, I refer you to P. J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores.

The new law in Germany exempts existing buildings from the new statute and regulations.  So let’s see where that leaves us:  We’ve made new construction vastly more expensive and less economically attractive.  We’ve built in an incentive to go with the old existing building.  Although for the moment there are no upgrade mandates, we can’t be sure of that, so we trade the possibility of expense with the old building for the guaranty of expense with the new.  They’ve also written in a mandate for sellers and landlords to document their building’s energy consumption (O! for a plaintiffs’ bar in Germany).  And finally, this being Germany, after all, they’re looking at establishing an Energiepolizei.  Yep, you heard right:  Around here you hear lines like, “What are you gonna do?  Call the energy police on me?”  See, that’s a joke here. 

The premise of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom was that the path Germany had followed to get where it was in 1944 was the same road that Britain was on, only with a 20-30 year time-lag.  He observes in the book’s opening that that is precisely the point of his concern for his adoptive country.  Where Germany had been, Britain was; where Germany was, Britain was heading.

I can’t recall the number of times that I’ve been reading a narrative by someone who survived 1933-45 Germany, in which a person’s having to travel from Point A to B is referenced.  And almost invariably the phrase will come up that the narrator, or the traveller, or the prospective traveller has “excellent papers.”  You see, without “excellent papers” you might be detained underway and invited in to chat with your friendly neighborhood Staatspolizei official.  I guess soon we’ll hear people talking about their house or apartment, and how so-and-so had “ausgezeichnete Papiere” for the place.

So in a very real sense dear ol’ JFK in fact had seen the future.  My question concern is, are we still seeing the future in Germany?

Boondoggles, Hidden Giveaways, and “The Chicago Way”

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Everyone remembers the fall of 2008, when Everything More or Less Came Unstuck, right? When the chickens began coming home to roost, and everyone standing under the tree branches found out what was in them? What isn’t as widely known, but ought to be, is how a technical feature of the Internal Revenue Code was the subject of a sordid sequence of jiggery-pokery, resulting in a $16 billion give-away to the new president’s supporters. It’s also the story of how a crew of Wall Streeters just decided to hook up their own, bugger all to what the law says, and how that decision got validated by the same bunch who then spent the next four years excoriating all them fat cats.

But first, a bit of background. Taxpayers which have an operating loss that exceeds their income are said to have a “net operating loss” – an “NOL” – for that year. Section 172 of the Revenue Code permits them to apply that unused NOL against up to two preceding years of the taxpayer’s positive net operating income (it’s called an “NOL carry-back” in that case and involves filing an amended tax return for the years), or alternatively carrying it forward for up to 20 years (an “NOL carryforward”). The idea is to permit taxpayers to level out their taxable income and therefore their tax obligations over a period of years. Makes sense, certainly from a tax planning perspective but even more importantly from an entrepreneurial perspective. In early years of a start-up’s life it is likely to have little but net operating losses as it builds itself. Permitting those net losses to be carried forward and applied against a year with positive income advances the point in time at which the enterprise gets off the ground. 

For a taxpayer that is not a “pass-through” taxpayer – one that pays its own taxes at the entity level – that accumulated ability to offset future years’ income is an economic asset. Since an entity can be sold (unlike Aunt Sally), having a built-up ability to offset future years’ income makes that taxpayer a much more attractive object of a suitor’s affections. And sure enough, companies in the market to acquire other companies were powerfully attracted by such assets. Until 1986 so long as the loss company either maintained its legal identity or underwent a tax-free reorganization, the acquiring corporation could derive the benefit of its target’s prior accumulated NOLs. 

Well. Heaven forfend that anyone salvage some benefit from prior misfortune. Apparently there grew the thought that the “policy” (whence the logic supporting it derives is not terribly clear) of Section 172 is only to permit losses and income to offset each other when it’s the same taxpayer realizing both. There is of course no inherent such policy. The Deep Thinkers overlooked the fact that a target corporation with a significant accumulated NOL carryforward has accumulated it for a reason – it has been losing significant money for some period of time – and one of the many other implications of that reason is that the corporation is not likely to survive. It will generally either collapse or get sold. In either event it will be sold at fire-sale prices, the shareholders will take a bath, the employees will lose their jobs, the vendors will take it on the chin, and in short the potential wealth represented by that enterprise will vanish. The notion that the increased price an acquirer could pay and still make money on the deal (boo! hiss!) if it could enjoy the benefit of that NOL carryforward is in fact a benefit flowing to the taxpayer who has accumulated the loss, apparently did not make too deep an impression on the Deep Thinkers. They would rather preserve the purity of their Tax Policy than see an economic enterprise survive (private people making money=bad; drawing a government check for “public service”=good). 

Thus came to pass (pun intended) Section 382, which severely limits the acquiring taxpayer’s ability to recognize its target’s built-up NOL carryforward. Subsection 382(m) grants the Secretary of the Treasury the authority to make such regulations as may be necessary to implement the purposes of Section 382. 

2008. Comes the crash. Banks are failing; banks are tottering; thanks to the intertwinedness of the financial system, their losses are mounting rapidly, and spreading as fast as socially awkward pathogens among a crowd of high schoolers. The “healthy” banks had a problem, though: Why on earth should they pony up the money to buy a bunch of losses they could never derive any benefit from; why should they pay “sticker” price for such turkeys? More to the point, how could the boards of the healthy banks justify to their shareholders pouring sand down those rat-holes of banks when no one – literally no one – could be sure what the value of the targets’ paper was? 

Along comes the Treasury department. On September 30, 2008, it issues Notice 2008-83, which exempted financial institutions from the constraints of Section 382. What?? For starts, a “notice” is not a “regulation”; the process for adoption of the twain are quite distinct. Second, how can the purpose of Section 382 – limiting taxpayers’ ability to buy and then use someone else’s accumulated NOLs – be implemented by an ad hoc exemption from the section’s provisions? Finally, precisely what authority is there in the Revenue Code for exempting some corporate taxpayers but not others from black-and-white provisions of the Revenue Code which apply to all corporate taxpayers equally? The long and short was that Notice 2008-83 was illegal as hell. Pretty much everyone knew it (but wait, it gets better, as it usually does in Washington). 

To get an idea of just how big a boondoggle this was, before Notice 2008-83 was issued Wachovia was looking seriously at an offer from Citibank for $2.16 billion. After the notice? Well, after Wachovia’s losses got put on the table, Wachovia sold to Wells Fargo for $16 billion, a nearly 700% increase in value. Wachovia’s $70+ billion in losses will, if fully used to offset its purchaser’s subsequent income, generate a $25± billion boost to the bottom line (over up to 20 years, of course, and one needs to work the present value of that to get a more relevant number). By the way, I refer the gentle reader to my point made above that this additional almost $14 billion in fact does represent the recapture on the back end by the loss-maker. 

Congress – you may remember them: they’re the folks who decided Section 382 was the law of the land subject, apparently, to whatever the hell the Secretary of the Treasury feels like doing on any particular day – immediately leapt in to cut Treasury off at the knees by legislatively repealing Notice 2008-83. Which it did, in February, 2009, by which time of course we had a new administration in the White House, backed by massive legislative majorities in both houses. Standing up for fairness, the little guy, and punishing them dam’ fat cats on Wall Street, Congress showed the world that carving out exceptions from the law to favor pet constituencies who had dumped untold money in to polluting the political process (well, we won’t mention that Wall Street backed by an overwhelming margin the fellow who Won and his party; that doesn’t fit what the media calls “the narrative” these days) was not the American way any more. No; the open hand to the oligarchs of the counting house was withdrawn, and Congress broke it off in Treasury . . . prospectively only. The repeal not only was made not retroactive to September 30, 2008; it was not made applicable to any bank merger that occurred before that date (and of course those banks cannot claim to have relied on an illegal notice – which their inside and outside counsel would have in any event told them was flagrantly illegal in the first place – that had not been put out yet). Congress and the White House, in other words, made a Great Big Show of slamming the barn door shut, long after all the big horses had marched out of the barn, caparisoned, groomed, and starving to browse at the public fisc. Way to look out for the little guy, fellers!! 

It gets better (didn’t I promise you that?): Congress in the same enactment – the $780+ billion Porkulus Bill – created what is known in the land of tax-geekdom as a “rifle shot.” A rifle shot is a provision that is shoved in to a tax law on the sly and that is so narrowly crafted that, while blandly neutral on its face, it applies and can apply to exactly a single taxpayer. As one might think from the fact that the practice has a nickname in the first place, they’ve been around a while. But most of them were penny-ante things, bought of famously corrupt legislators like John Murtha and Robert Byrd. But this rifle shot was . . . well, let’s just say that the main battery on the Iowa-class battleships is generally described as 16″/50-caliber “naval rifles” (by the way, for bore diameter >1″, “caliber” is an expression of barrel length as a multiple of bore; thus each of Iowa’s nine main guns are 50 times a 1.33-foot bore, or roughly – I’m doin’ this math in my head, folks – 66 feet long; they’ll toss a shell that weighs over 2,300 pounds over 20 miles, and put in on a target measured in square yards). If we include those tubes o’ doom in the definition of “rifle,” why then yes, my chickabiddies, Section 382(n) was a “rifle shot.” 

What Section 382(n) did was exempt from the provisions of the rest of the section one and only one taxpayer: General Motors, by that time known as “Government Motors,” a large chunk of which was owned by Uncle Sugar himself, but another large chunk of which was owned by the labor union which had donated millions of dollars in cash to the recent congressional and presidential candidates of a specific political party, and whose members had donated further millions upon millions of dollars of man-hours to canvassing for them (anyone want to bet whether any of those man-hours in fact showed up on someone’s time card as having been spent at work? anyone? Bueller? anyone?). The tax-forgiveness value to “New” GM of being able to use “Old” GM’s accumulated NOLs? Roughly $16 billion. That’s $16 billion that GM will be able to use, if and when it makes it. Ford won’t have that round in the magazine, nor will Toyota, Nissan, Volkswagen, BMW, or Mercedes.  All those corporations have U.S. based manufacturing subsidiaries, employ U.S. citizens. The only difference is that they’re not owned by a labor union and its bed-mates. 

What happened with the NOL rules between fall, 2008 and February, 2009 is wrong on so many levels it’s hard to keep them all straight in one’s head. The easy part is the sheer unfairness of it. How many companies haven’t been bought out in the last four years because their purchasers couldn’t use the accumulated NOLs? How many families are now on food stamps because the parents’ employers didn’t have the suck to get their very own Notice 2008-83 or Section 382(n)? How much wealth has simply been destroyed that might have been salvaged, even at pennies on the dollar? But now it’s gone. Hey!! At least our Tax Policy is once again pure, though. I can sleep at night, now, I suppose. 

The worse part is the transparent buying and selling not only of legislators – that’s been going on since, in round numbers, 1789 – but also of one of the statutes which forms the framework on which hangs the rest of our society and economy. Go as far back as you please in history and you’ll find oppressive, unfair tax laws as the tinder boxes which set societies alight. Preferential tax policy – from the latifundia enjoying tax benefits denied to the peasant farmer down the valley to aristocratic tax exemption to Established Churches owning enormous swathes of nations and paying no tax – has been at the core of every failed society, collapsed nation, vanished culture in Western civilization. 

Once a people begins engaging in tax corruption on this scale, a corner has been turned. It’s no longer unspeakable. Someone once asked Twain whether he “believed in infant baptism.” “Believe in it? I’ve seen it done!” was his response. When will the next batch of political contributors decide that (i) they’d like the government to hand them someone else’s company, and (ii) while they’re at it, they’d like to play by majorly distinct tax laws that give them a leg up on their fellows? 

Michael Barone I believe it was used the expression “gangster government” to describe how this administration does business. He’s right, of course; this troupe has proudly flaunted that it does business “the Chicago Way.” But the fact remains that the above squalid tale involves (i) a Republican treasury secretary; (ii) two Congresses, both dominated by Democrats; (iii) a lame-duck Republican administration; and, (iv) a new Democrat administration that has demonstrated nothing if not its commitment to reward – handsomely – its donors, and punish severely its “enemies.” 

We’ve seen it done, folks. In the phrasing of Billy Yank and Johnny Reb, who had been eager to see combat for the first time, we’ve “seen the elephant.” We’re likely to see him again. Who gets trampled next time? 

I am, by the way, more than just a bit indebted in the above to a Comment by Matthew Cline in The Tax Lawyer, Vol. 65 No. 2 (Winter 2012), “The Economics and Politics of Tax Loss Carryforwards in the Great Recession: Why GM Gets a $16 Billion Subsidy”. His analysis of the technicalities, history, and legal/theoretical framework of the story is excellent. I’d known of the existence of the GM “rifle shot” for some time, but had not been aware of the, shall we say? peculiarities of Notice 2008-83, and could not have written this post without large reliance on Mr. Cline’s heavy lifting.

Update (08 Oct 12):  This doesn’t exactly have to do with the Section 382 giveaway to the UAW GM, but it does have to do with what appears to be a very real risk of the entire bail-out flying apart.  It seems that Dear Leader’s administration and his car czar might have been less than entirely candid with the judge they duped into approving the deal.  And judges, no less than Mother Nature, don’t enjoy finding out they’ve been lied to.

 

This is What Giving Back Looks Like, if You’re Interested

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Once upon a time there was a phrase commonly understood. It was a “feat of arms.” For someone to have performed one meant that he had done something not just exceptionally brave (such as single-handedly rescuing his comrades), but specifically something triumphant, something involving pitting his weapons and spirit – preferably unsupported – against those of the enemy. And beating them. “Feats of arms” did not include defeats.

On this date in 1918 the U.S. got a feat of arms from the unlikeliest source. A fellow who’d made every run he could to be a conscientious objector, which it appears that he legitimately was. Oh sure, he’d been a hell-raiser as a youth and young man, drunker than Cooter Brown and always ready for a fight. And then he found God, or God found him; it all worked out to the same thing. He foreswore liquor and his wild ways, settled down and was on track to become a pillar of his community. His community, I would observe, still has every bit of two roads into it, on one of which you can’t get out of third gear for miles at a stretch, and the other of which this man caused to be built later (but I’m getting ahead of the story). On a cold day in February you can, as I did a number of years ago, stand at his grave and hear nothing but a gentle rustle of wind across naked branches, and the occasional snap or crackle that the flag above makes. 

The U.S. Army wasn’t of a mind to accept any bunch of b.s. from some ol’ redneck that Jesus had meant that stuff about not killin’ one’s fellow-man. What would have become of him had he a different commanding officer than he did, we’ll never know. Another commander might well have sent him off to Leavenworth, Kansas, there to join other young men who couldn’t square making the world safe for democracy with what they read, heard, and preached on Sunday and throughout the week in the quiet, rural, self-contained lives they and their families lead. But his commander sent him home to “study on it,” as they say. Which he did, alone with his land, his God, and his conscience. And he came back to camp an infantryman. 

On October 8, 1918, he – then a corporal – was detailed off with a squad into the bush to silence some German machine guns which had the Americans on that little corner of hell’s own half-acre pinned down. They took some casualties on the trip up (it’s how he ended up in charge), but eventually they worked their way into a position where if they could just get a clean shot, they might get some work done. And so this ol’ boy, who’d been renowned back home as a marksman, began to call to them. Not in German, of course you see, but turkey calls. And as each machine gunner would stick his head up to see whence the bird, Alvin Cullum York would “jes’ tetch him off.” He was firing from a sitting position, by the way, which is very difficult, especially with a weapon as heavy as the M-1, and he took them all out with single head-shots. They were, by the way, returning fire. The Germans sent a patrol out to correct the problem, and Alvin took them out too, starting with the last in line (another turkey hunting trick; shoot the first and the others will see him fall and they’ll spook; start at the back and the others will just keep marching right onto your sights). He ran out of rifle ammunition but, being a non-comm, had a 1911-model .45-cal., and so he took them out with that. 

At which point the Germans figured, “Ach! Es hol’ der Teufel das alles!” or words of a less parlor-ready tenor, and raised the white flag. When they got back to American lines Alvin and his squad-mates had 132 Germans in tow, leaving Alvin’s 25 kills on the field behind them. 

By the time he got back to New York in 1919, he was the most highly-decorated Allied soldier of the war. He was offered massive amounts of money for his story, for the movie rights, to endorse this-that-or-the-other, etc. He turned it all down. All of it. He went back to his home, in the Valley of the Three Forks of the Wolf River, and gratefully accepting the farm that the State of Tennessee bought him, taken to farming. He also taken to “advocating,” as we’d call it now, for his people and their condition. He raised quite a bit of money and eventually started a school which for many years was the only privately-funded county public school system in the state. He agitated to get that highway (U.S. Highway 127) built down into the valley. He helped raise (as in helped tote the boards and sink the nails with his own hands) the church which still stands, just down the road from his grave. He married Gracie, the girl he’d been making the running for when he’d been drafted. 

Alvin finally consented to permit his story to be used in 1940, for Sergeant York, when the Army told him they needed it to help them recruit a new generation of American boys to go kick the snot out of another bunch of Germans who’d done jumped the traces again. He insisted, apparently, that the combat scenes be done as correctly as then-current cinematic technique permitted. He also initially objected to Gary Cooper playing him in the movie. Why? Not because Cooper wasn’t a good actor. No: Gary Cooper smoked. 

Some years ago I stumbled across his home valley. We stopped in at his farm house for the tour. Our tour guide was his last surviving child. We went to see his grave. There’s a flag over it, and a little flush enclosure (gravel within) around it. His and his wife’s stones lie flat. Alvin’s of course recites the fact of his Medal of Honor, but is otherwise bereft of self-congratulation. If memory serves there’s a stone bench, and an upright cross. And it was deathly quiet, except for the wind, and the occasional motion of the flag. This man who performed one of the magnificent Feats of Arms of the Great War, who then spurned the advances of a jaded and sinful world, went back home to put his arms, his back, and his fame to work for those from whom he came. Here he lies among them, at peace in his land and in his Savior’s bosom. 

So I’ve visited Alvin York. I know his story (and now you do too, dear reader). I’ve seen the community he sweated to build. After he “could have had it all.” And every time I see or hear of a Kardashian, or a Trump, or some tattoo-defaced, pierced, dyed-hair Gawd-help-us of a “professional” athlete . . . I want to throw up in my mouth, just a little. When I hear some perjured wretch like TurboTax Tim Geithner describe himself as “public servant,” I want to shout at him, “You lie (again)! I can show you a public servant; he’s buried over in Pall Mall and you couldn’t squeeze the sweat from his balls out of his jock strap if you stood on top of it with an arm-load of firewood!” 

Let us praise famous men. Let us celebrate their feats of arms. And let us speak their names with gratitude, and humility.