Author Archives: Countrylawyer

Oh, Well, but Other Than That, Mrs. Lincoln

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What’s the play actually about, anyway?

Sometimes you come across something that, almost in passing, so glaringly reveals an underlying truth about its subject matter that it takes your breath away.

This week some random guys who adhere to no identifiable ideology or religion just randomly decided to light off a couple of bombs in Belgium.  It was a bad week for workplace violence, in other words.  And in other news, the president enjoyed yukking it up at the ballgame with a murderously oppressive regime.  But I digress.

In follow-up to the Brussels bombings, this article ran in USA Today.  The headline sort of tips the author’s hand:  “The Quran’s deadly role in inspiring Belgian slaughter,” by a fellow identified as Nabeel Qureshi.  From his self-description and how he relates his family background, he seems to be one of those adherents of the Religion of Peace that is being referred to on that silly “Coexist” bumper sticker.  His father spent a career in the U.S. Navy, starting as a seaman and retiring as a lieutenant commander (which, by the way, tells you his father must have been pretty hot stuff, to make it that far up from that far down).  “As a Muslim growing up in the United States, I was taught by my imams and the community around me that Islam is a religion of peace. My family modeled love for others and love for country, and not just by their words.”

All to the good.  I’d have no problem with him, or his family, for my next-door neighbors, any more than I’d object to any other American family.

But let’s let Comrade Qureshi tell it himself:

“As a young Muslim boy growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, it was impossible for me to look up a hadith unless I traveled to an Islamic library, something I would have never thought to do. For all intents and purposes, if I wanted to know about the traditions of Muhammad, I had to ask imams or elders in my tradition of Islam.”  That is, as he notes, no longer the case.  Just as the Bible’s translation into the vernacular enabled the masses to access for themselves just what exactly scripture has to say about any particular thing, without the interposition of the clerisy, so today’s Muslim masses can look it up for themselves.

And just what are they finding?  Why, they’re finding the same things that Qureshi did, once he no longer was reliant upon his elders and imams.  “Yet as I began to investigate the Quran and the traditions of Muhammad’s life for myself in college, I found to my genuine surprise that the pages of Islamic history are filled with violence.”

Do what?

“When everyday Muslims investigate the Quran and hadith for themselves, bypassing centuries of tradition and their imams’ interpretations, they are confronted with the reality of violent jihad in the very foundations of their faith.”  “The Quran itself reveals a trajectory of jihad reflected in the almost 23 years of Muhammad’s prophetic career. As I demonstrate carefully in my book, Answering Jihad: A Better Way Forward, starting with peaceful teachings and proclamations of monotheism, Muhammad’s message featured violence with increasing intensity, culminating in surah 9, chronologically the last major chapter of the Quran, and its most expansively violent teaching. Throughout history, Muslim theologians have understood and taught this progression, that the message of the Quran culminates in its ninth chapter.”  [N.b.  The foregoing quoted language has links in it over at the USA Today website.]

Qureshi then pulls a few chestnuts out:  “Surah 9 is a command to disavow all treaties with polytheists and to subjugate Jews and Christians (9.29) so that Islam may ‘prevail over all religions’ (9.33). It is fair to wonder whether any non-Muslims in the world are immune from being attacked, subdued or assimilated under this command. Muslims must fight, according to this final chapter of the Quran, and if they do not, then their faith is called into question and they are counted among the hypocrites (9.44-45). If they do fight, they are promised one of two rewards, either spoils of war or heaven through martyrdom. Allah has made a bargain with the mujahid who obeys: Kill or be killed in battle, and paradise awaits (9.111).”

According to Qureshi, the implications of Surah 9 are acknowledged by modern Muslim theologians.  “Muslim thought leaders agree that the Quran promotes such violence.”  And there’s the rub:  The most potent recruiting tool and mechanism for radicalization available to ISIS is . . . just quoting the foundational documents of their religion.  “With frequent references to the highest sources of authority in Islam, the Quran and hadith (the collection of the sayings of the prophet Muhammad), ISIL enjoins upon Muslims their duty to fight against the enemies of Islam and to emigrate to the Islamic State once it has been established.”

And that, folks, peels away quite a bit of bullshit that’s being peddled by self-loathing Westerners.  The “extremists” among the Muslims have the theologically better argument of their “moderate” or assimilated co-religionists.  That is the irreducible fact that stares us in the face over the shards of glass and spattered bits of airline customers.

Pity the Muslims don’t have the theological equivalent of modern U.S. Supreme Court jurists to explain to them that all those words simply don’t mean what they say.  No, when ISIS wants to convince a young Muslim man that his most solemn duty is to fight, kill, and maybe die in order to subjugate practitioners of any religion other than strict-form Islam, they perversely go out and just show him the actual words and have the temerity to suggest to him that they mean precisely what they say.

Deconstructionism, in other words, hasn’t made very deep inroads into Islam.

A couple of quick points.  Islam appears to be enjoying something of the same process that Christianity went through, at least in its early phases, with the Reformation.  There was a reason, after all, why for so long either translating the Bible into the vernacular, or even possession of a translated Bible was a capital offense.  Literally.  Get caught with a Wyclif Bible and they’d make short work of you.  Step 1 of the Reformation was therefore what is now known as “disintermediation.”  It’s really not much more than the same process as online commerce.  The internet has largely dissolved the barriers between the ordinary Joe on the “Islamic Street” and the authoritative pronouncements of his faith’s founding documents.  Generally disintermediation is a very good thing.  Anything which undercuts the ipse dixit hierarchy of any one group (priests, imams, broadcast network news shows, judges) over another, by providing the people that walked in darkness direct access to ultimate authority (Holy Scripture, the Koran, multiple independent news sources, or the actual words of constitutions and statutes) is to be praised on that ground alone.  I’ll state that as a categorical.

So what is to be done if the ultimate authority commands, in pretty plain language, behaviors such as we have seen in Brussels, Paris, New York, Madrid, London, and so forth?

I honestly don’t know.  It seems to me that the fellow quoted by Qureshi has a long, hard slog ahead of him, and whether the thing is to be done at all must be seen as wholly questionable:  “Maajid Nawaz, co-founder of the Quilliam Foundation in the United Kingdom, has said, ‘We Muslims must admit there are challenging Quranic passages that require reinterpretation today. … Only by rejecting vacuous literalism are we able to condemn, in principle, ISIS-style slavery, beheading, lashing, amputation & other medieval practices forever (all of which are in the Quran). … Reformers either win, and get religion-neutral politics, or lose, and get ISIL-style theocracy.’ In other words, Muslims must depart from the literal reading of the Quran in order to create a jihad-free Islamic world.”  By his own words he may well be chasing a will-o-the-wisp.  What Nawaz calls “vacuous literalism” the boys of ISIS can call “the words’ plain meaning,” without strained or sophistical reading.  And slavery, beheading, lashing, amputation, and “other medieval practices” are “all . . . in the Koran.”  Well, of course they are; that’s what makes it so straightforward to convince the jihadisti that they are commands of Allah. Just read the damned words, boy, and make up your mind for yourself.

And what is this about creating a “jihad-free Islamic world” in the first place?  If jihad is part of the central framework of Islamic existence in this world, then how can you excise it and still call what you’re left with “Islamic”?  I recall once, a number of years ago, this billboard alongside the interstate in a city near where I live.  It was from one of these First Church of What’s Happening Now, where Christianity is on offer as a practical therapeutic lifestyle option.  The billboard encouraged the wanderer to come discover “a non-religious path to God.”  That is an oxymoron plain and simple, folks.  It seems as though what Qureshi is positing is the same sort of oxymoron.

The Protestant movement’s most powerful arguments rested on the elemental fact that, once translated and accessible, Holy Scripture was seen not to provide authority for quite a bit of what had grown to encrust the Roman Catholic church as an institution.  The problem today is that what the ISIS recruiters are propounding can be seen to be very much in the Koran, in exactly as many words as they’re saying.

Islam is not, in other words, a Religion of Peace, not on its own terms, read in the ordinary sense of the words actually used, without contorting them into their opposites.

The situation outlined by Qureshi makes it doubtful whether anything like a Protestant Reformation can ever be in the cards for Islam.  Accomplishing that would require millions of Muslims all over the world to believe in the in-most recesses of their hearts that the ordinary words of the foundational texts just do not mean what they so obviously say.  How do you convince people of an argument the unspoken subtext of which is: “Mohammed didn’t know what he was talking about”?  My understanding of Islamic dogma is that the Koran’s words are not actually those of the prophet, but rather of Allah himself.  Quite different from even the most literalist Christian fundamentalist, believing every word in the King James Version to be divinely inspired.  To “interpret” the Koran in a way which would allow peaceful coexistence requires you to accept either that, to some extent, Mohammed was a false prophet because he failed accurately to transmit Allah’s pronouncements, or alternatively, that Allah knowingly allowed his words to be mis-transcribed.  How can either of those suggestions be acceptable to a devout Muslim?

Not all problems have solutions.  I very greatly fear that Islam is among the problems that don’t.

And This, Dear Children, is Why You Must Travel

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Or at least read about different places, times, and peoples.

Here is a chart published over at The Washington Post.  It breaks down alcohol consumption by adult Americans into deciles, according to “number of drinks per week.”  It’s an interesting chart, not only for the reasons obviously being pushed by the newspaper (“if you do much more than sniff a cork, you’re a drunk”), but for several others.

For starts, it demonstrates pretty well what the article refers to as the “Pareto Law.”  I’ve not heard that particular expression, although I am familiar with the concept of “Pareto efficiency.”  I have heard of the concept before, expressed as the “long tail” effect, which applies not only in purchases of consumer goods but across pretty much all human activity.  According to the Pareto Law, it seems, the top 20% of purchasers of a particular class of consumer goods generally account for 80% of all sales of those goods.  Do you have a friend who’s got not just one or some, but all the most recent versions of Apple’s i-this-that-and-the-other? He’s the guy they’re talking about.  The article presents this pattern in the alcoholic beverage industry as being of peculiar concern, because if you drink that much (so as to get into the 80th percentile or higher) “you almost certainly have a drinking problem.”

By the way, I love that expression: “a drinking problem.”  According to what standard?  Different people’s bodies tolerate different levels of alcohol consumption.  Different other life behaviors affect how well your body tolerates different levels of alcohol consumption.  Different patterns of alcohol consumption affect what alcohol does to your body.  All of those factors also affect in profoundly different ways how your consumption of alcohol affects your life, your work, your patterns of friendship, how you perceive and deal with the world you move through.  And on and on.  But for some reasons Americans just love them the notion of “a drinking problem.”  I know someone who is, with a few pretty glaring exceptions, of unusual discernment and reasoning capacity.  And yet this person parrots without batting an eye the old saw that “if you have more than four drinks ‘at one sitting,’ that’s ‘binge drinking.'”  To which the only possible response is, “Bullshit!”  What’s “a sitting,” for starts?  Is it without getting up from the same table?  Is it at the same event?  Or does it mean just sitting down to watch a football game and drinking four beers over the course of the three or so hours it takes for a professional football game on television?  And is four Miller Lite “beers” the same as four George Dickels?  Anyone who asserts they are equivalent is not entitled to be taken seriously on the subject.

My point is not that it’s not possible to drink indisputably too much, too frequently.  It’s certainly not that doing so over any length of time is going to harm the drinker and very likely those around him, in some physical or moral manner.  My point is that all this pseudo-scientific “measurement” nonsense is exactly that: pure bullshit, from start to finish (here’s a link to a National Institute of Health article, in which much is made of exceeding the “recommended limit” on drinking”; on what scientifically defensible basis is that “recommended limit” based?).  It’s like the notion of a “best college.”  Are there colleges that are undeniably better than others by most relevant standards?  Of course.  But is there a “best college”?  Anyone who asserts there is such an animal and he knows which one either is lying to you, or he is so foolish that you are within your rights to question whether he’s smart enough to judge a college in any event.  As Thomas Sowell pointed out decades ago, the question to investigate (and it does take digging; a lot of digging to find the answer, because the education industry goes to outrageous lengths to hide such information) is not, “Which is the best college?” but rather, “Which is the best college for this student?”  The same with “a drinking problem.”  You simply cannot answer the question whether someone drinks too much by reference to counting the “number of drinks” per day, or per week, or per month, relative to some manufactured-from-whole-cloth “recommended limit,” and then declaring that if that number is greater than X, he has “a drinking problem.”  You have to ask whether that person drinks too much for his own life.  But that doesn’t make for very large research grants, does it, or for splashy headlines, or invitations to let an opinion in a 30-second spot on the evening news show?

So just what does this chart show?

It shows how little Americans drink, most of all.  Fully 30% of American adults drink exactly nothing alcoholic during the course of a week.  Go find another Western country in which that is the case.  Remember, “nothing” is a pretty stiff standard to meet.

Another 30% of adults drink (on average) less than one “drink” per week.  That’s per week, Gentle Reader.  So if you have a single glass of wine on Friday night with your wife, congratulations!  You drink more than 50% of the American adult population.  If you on top of that have one (count it! one) beer at the turn, and then — O! the dissipation!! — a second beer at the 19th hole on Sunday afternoon, that makes three “drinks” per week, and you are north of the 60th percentile.

Now let’s suppose each day during the week you have a single glass of wine with your supper each evening (you know, like the damned doctors tell you is good for you), then a single beer while watching television over the balance of the evening.  That’s ten “drinks” per week; you’re above the 70th percentile.  And now let’s add those two (you lush!!) beers at your Sunday golf round (up to twelve now), or maybe while bowling on Saturday evening, or perhaps after working outside all day long.  And now let’s add in, at some point during the 168 hours comprising that week, another four random Miller Lite “beers.”  That’s sixteen “drinks” in the course of a week.  You may well never have had, depending on whether you were eating at the time, any measurable blood alcohol content at all.  But you’re above the 80th percentile now.  You drink more than 80% of all other American adults.

I spent two full years living in Germany as an exchange student, among Germans.  I have travelled there in the interim.  I have also travelled, although much less, in a not unrespectable portion of the balance of Europe.  And I read, and have read, copiously about other places, peoples, and times.  And I’m here to tell you, three “drinks” per week doesn’t even get you in the gates in the vast majority of other cultures, other places, other times.  Fifteen “drinks” per week likewise won’t raise an eyebrow, particularly not if it’s in the form of beer, “in the manner of a Christian” (to borrow one of my favorite Charles Sibthorp expressions).  At least as of 25 years ago breweries in Germany still either by law or custom were obliged to provide their employees with a liter or two of beer per day, which had to be consumed on premises and during working hours (back in the day the draft horses delivering the barrels also got a daily ration).  And how about France, where a half-bottle of wine with lunch is neither more nor less than what any civilized man would expect?  Or Italy?  How about Eastern Europe, where alcohol consumption is more skewed towards hard liquor (and beer, of course, as well)?

And let’s go back in time, Gentle Reader, to a time when only a fool would drink the water anywhere outside a pristine forest.  Wine and beer were what you drank because the water would kill you.  Literally.

I categorically refuse to recognize behavior at levels indulged in by hundreds of millions of people all over the world, places which are highly civilized, pretty damned prosperous by any historical measure, and overall desirable places to live as being either aberrational or objectionable.  Period.  I likewise refuse to consider those levels of behavior, when indulged in across centuries of civilized culture, as being objectionable.  Period.

Let’s look at that 90th percentile and up, the tenth decile.  It’s hard to imagine consuming ten “drinks” per day, on average.  On the other hand, there’s a huge difference between the 15.28 “drinks” per week averaged within that ninth decile (80th to 89th percentiles) and the 73.85 of the tenth decile.  It’s almost a factor of five, in fact.  Which suggests to me that there is a curve hiding in there somewhere.  I’d be mighty curious to see the numbers of the constituent percentiles of that last, highest decile.  Because if the pattern of the long tail still holds within that last decile, then the bulk of that 73.85 “drinks” per week is accounted for by the very top-most percentiles.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, as of this writing the U.S. population is just over 323.1 million.  As of 2014, the gross U.S. population was estimated at 318,857,056, of which 82,135,602 were ages 19 and down, leaving 236,721,454 ages 20 and up, which I’m going to suggest is a usable proxy for “adults” in that drinking study.  Ten percent of that is 23.672 million people, a lot of people.  But if my hunch is correct that we’re looking at long tail pattern, then maybe only about 3% of the people are still accounting for the vast majority of whatever it is we’re interested in looking at, in this case alcohol consumption.  Three percent of “adults” still works out to 7.1 million people, which is a lot of people to round up.

On the other hand, if my hunch is right (and I’d be very surprised if I’m all that far wrong) it means that 97% of “adults” are consuming “drinks” at a rate which, except in the fevered imaginations of the National Institute of Health, The Washington Post, and this breathless fellow who wrote the book referenced in the WaPo article, just aren’t and have never been viewed as being at all out of the ordinary in the balance of the world, either now or at any point in recorded human history.

Perhaps what this chart and its attendant newspaper article are really telling us is that in a population of 323.1 million people, even a pretty large number of people with undeniably destructive behaviors still works out to be a fart in a hurricane as far as the societal scope of the problem represented.  But that the huckster and the demagogue can easily make it out otherwise.  And that we as citizens and voters would be very well-advised to examine very closely all such sermons and exhortations.

 

Verdun

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One hundred years ago this past Sunday, in the early morning hours, hundreds of German artillery pieces, ranging in size from field guns to enormous siege guns, cut loose on the forts protecting the French town of Verdun.

The objective of the German army was, in the words of the chief of the General Staff, to “bleed France white.” In other words, as originally conceived, it wasn’t really so much designed to capture the town of Verdun – the Germans really had no pressing need for it – as to draw as many French soldiers as possible into a massive killing zone. Because Verdun was much more important to the French not to lose than it was to the Germans to take, it introduced a fundamental asymmetry into each side’s calculations. At least that was Falkenhayn’s plan originally.

Without boring Gentle Reader with a recitation of all the back-and-forth which reduced the landscape around Verdun to a pock-marked wasteland where the very soil itself was poisoned by the chemical residue of all the explosives, to say nothing of being an enormous bone yard, let us just say that Falkenhayn lost sight of his initial strategic insight, which was to break one of two Western Front opponents, by inflicting on it casualties it was unable to bear, enabling him then to defeat the other. Had he stuck to his original concept of the battle he might well have accomplished just that. The French were willing to squander any amount of their soldiers’ lives to hold that place, and had the Germans sat back and shelled them into oblivion while keeping just enough ground pressure to bear to make sure the French remained engaged, they might well have inflicted the kind of grossly disproportionate casualties necessary to make it all work. Recall that while Germany outnumbered the British or the French separately, they never between fall 1914 and March 1918 had overall numeric superiority over both together. Hence the idea of crushing one and then the other (this wasn’t especially original; Napoleon tried the same gambit in the Waterloo campaign, Jackson illustrated it masterfully in the Valley Campaign in 1862, and Ludendorff tried it in the spring, 1918 offensives).

But Falkenhayn, encouraged by the amount of ground and the number of forts his troops in fact did capture in the battle’s early phases, changed his objective. Instead of contenting himself with slaughtering Frenchmen at a highly disproportionate rate, he decided he’d grasp the territory. He of course managed to kill enough Frenchmen that, by the time the battle was over in late 1916, the French army had only one offensive left in it (the Nivelle offensive of 1917), after which time it mutinied and was more or less finished as an offensive force. But he also managed to slaughter a vast number of his own troops trying to take a place he’d initially had enough sense to realize he didn’t need to take. And in doing so he finished the German army in the west as an offensive weapon until it was reinforced with the troops from the Eastern front released by the Soviet surrender in 1918. The difference, as we now know, was that the horrific French losses, and the terrible British losses on the Somme in 1916 (which offensive was launched in no small measure precisely to take the pressure off of Verdun) were to be made good by hordes of American doughboys. Germany’s every loss was a soldier who wasn’t going to get replaced.

Put a bit metaphorically, Falkenhayn originally conceived the notion of tossing a hand grenade between his enemy’s legs from a distance, but then decided he’d just as well hand-carry the same to its target. With predictable results.  The battle blunted the offensive power of the western Germany armies and cost Falkenhayn his job.  As his replacement the kaiser ushered in the team of Ludendorff and Hindenburg to the top of the German command structure.  Once there they dug themselves in, so to speak, and so consolidated their control over Germany and its war effort that by the end of the war the kaiser was no more than a cipher, rubber-stamping decisions handed to him, passing out medals to the survivors, and going for rides in the countryside around headquarters.

With Hindenburg and Ludendorff in place, the last chance for a conclusion of the war other than one through collapse (by one side or the other) vanished.  Those two were true believers in ultimate victory; they believed their army could do anything.  It was the army which assured the kaiser that it could win the war before American troops arrived in large enough numbers to make a difference, leading directly to the approval for resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in February, 1917.  It was the army which propped up Austria-Hungary as that nation collapsed in on itself after the Brusilov offensive in summer 1916. And in the end it was Hindenburg’s statement that he could no longer guarantee the loyalty of the army which induced the kaiser to slip across the border to the Netherlands on November 9, 1918.

On the French side, the “victory” at Verdun became one of the — I’m tempted to say “founding myths,” but really it wasn’t a myth — loci of inter-war French politics and society.  It’s no accident that it was the victor of Verdun, Marshall Petain, who was dragged out of retirement to head the Vichy government.  For a good treatment of the battle and what it meant to the France of 1916 and the France that survived the war, you can do much worse than this.

So the failure of Germany at Verdun has a claim to be among the most momentous results of the Great War, not so much for the tactical decision obtained (the French kept the town and what was left of the surrounding forts) as for the changes it wrought in the overall complexion of the war.

Verdun is now firmly established as part of that infamous group of battles in which the commanders blindly fed men into a meat grinder on the supposition that if they stuffed enough in, fast enough, eventually they’d jam the works and bring it to a stop. Loos, the Somme, Passchendaele, Verdun, Gallipoli, the Nivelle offensive: Their very names have become bywords for callous disregard of the human lives entrusted to one. The commanders who kept those offensives going for weeks and months after it was abundantly clear that there was no prospect of victory on any basis justifying the slaughter have rightly been damned by posterity.

And this gets me to a quibble about what I suggest is the historical revisionism of General Grant’s talents as a strategist and/or a tactician. Once upon a time Grant was viewed as a plodding butcher, a Douglas Haig with a cigar sticking out of his face. That view arose chiefly as a result of his campaign in Virginia from 1864 through the end of the war. That’s not the fashionable view of him, these days. More recent books tend towards a much more hagiographical approach to his conduct of the war in the East. I freely concede his resolution of the Vicksburg campaign was every bit as audaciously brilliant as it has ever been made out to be. But of his signal victories other than Vicksburg – Ft. Donelson, Shiloh, and Chattanooga – the first was a siege where he was ferried to within a few miles of his objective by the navy; the second was a “victory” only in the sense that he didn’t get his ass run backwards into the Tennessee River by the end of the first day, and then when he was reinforced overnight outnumbered the Confederates by a sufficient margin that they weren’t able to remain on the field; the third wasn’t really his doing anyway (or any other general’s, for that matter), but rather that of the private soldiers in the Army of the Cumberland (which hadn’t been Grant’s army in any event) who, at Missionary Ridge, decided they’d had enough of looking at the Rebels on that damned ridge and took matters into their own hands, driving them from the field in disarray. [N.b. The only two times in the entire war that a Confederate army was driven from the field in disorder – Chattanooga and Nashville – it was the Army of the Cumberland both times, under the command of General George Thomas, whose talents Grant apparently went out of his way to disparage, unfairly in the opinion of at least one biographer of Thomas.]

I will also give Grant full credit for understanding that the war was not so much about conquering territory as it was about destroying the South’s ability to continue resistance. This was an insight which seems largely to have escaped the powers running the war in the East. I won’t excoriate the commanding generals alone, because they were working under the intrusive gaze of the entire Washington power establishment. It might well be that, although any one or the other of them had it figured out, the geo-political reality of the relative situations of Richmond and Washington effectively prevented any such general from transforming that strategic insight into operational plans. Or maybe not. Sherman in the West also understood the war in that sense, but he then took that comprehension to the next level after Atlanta. Neutralizing Atlanta as a transportation, supply, and communications hub effectively destroyed the Confederacy as a going concern west of the mountains. Sherman’s sequel, the March to the Sea, was nothing else than a conclusive demonstration to the people of the South, in the most immediate manner possible, that their country had lost the ability to keep a massive army from strolling across an entire state, taking its sweet time to do so, and burning and plundering everything in its path. Any Southerner who did not, by the time Sherman reached Savannah at Christmas 1864, understand the war was lost had to have been singularly obtuse.

So how did Grant go about realizing his strategic insight on the battlefield? Well, at some point during the year, more or less, that Grant was in the East, someone pointed out to him that his army and Lee’s were like the Kilkenny Cats, who fought so viciously that each ate the other up. Grant famously observed, “My cat has the longer tail,” meaning, of course, that he could consume Lee’s army and still have some of his at the end of the day. And that is exactly what he set out to do. He was entirely willing to accept horrendous casualties (by spring, 1865 the Army of the Potomac had suffered over a 100% casualty rate) on the only condition that his soldiers in dying kept killing Confederates. Which they did.

And in the end, the longer tail of Grant’s army won out.

Were there other ways to have accomplished the destruction of Lee’s army without grinding his own into a bloody pulp? There must have been; there almost always is. Grant’s preferred method to keep Lee too busy hemorrhaging soldiers to get up to mischief was to keep him engaged, day after day, week after week. Sure, that works. But you can tear an army to pieces by keeping it on the move and denying it any opportunity of rest and re-supply.

Much of Lee’s strategic maneuvering in 1862 and 1863 had been a direct response to his inability to supply his army without continual fresh territory to plunder. He couldn’t stay in one place more than a brief spell because his men would strip the countryside bare, and the Confederate government had no way to provide him the supplies which would have permitted him to live other than off the immediate vicinity. By 1864 nearly all Virginia was stripped bare. Grant had the men to move on sufficiently broad and widely dispersed fronts that there is no way Lee could have responded to all of them and protected his supply base at Richmond (which was, in addition to being the capital, a major center of what little industrial capacity the South enjoyed). Grant also had the massive transport and supply systems of the North at his back. Is it so unthinkable that by launching offensives on enough different fronts he could have leveraged Lee out, away from the Richmond-Petersburg line, and forced him so to divide his forces that, even with Lee’s famous defensive capacities, his army would have collapsed by division, and all the while trying to live off land that had repeatedly been plucked clean during the war up until then?

Such a strategy of maneuver would have taken a great deal of shoe-leather, and not a few trains and wagons. But by that time the North was cranking out such things in quantities never before seen in human history. No. Grant chose the simple method of making Lee out-bleed him. In contrast, after Kennesaw Mountain (for a good working description of what that fight was like, read Ambrose Bierce’s description), Sherman never again launched his men in a frontal assault.

All of which is to say that I don’t buy the recent praise for Grant’s abilities as a field commander. As a strategist, yes. As an organizer of the movement of some of the largest field forces in history (I think Napoleon’s Grand Army that invaded Russia in 1812 may have been larger than the U.S. Army in the East, but not by much), certainly. But as a commander who understood how to accomplish his purposes by other means than drowning his opponent in his own men’s blood, not so much.

A good friend of mine went, a number of years ago, to the battlefield at Verdun. Large areas of the countryside are still pock-marked by interlocking shell craters. It’s grown up now, but there are still places where the soil is too contaminated to till. My friend went to the ossuary they built. As you might imagine in a battle in which so much of the action consisted of massive artillery bombardment, huge numbers of the dead were so blow to shreds that there is no way ever to sort them out. In many case of course there wouldn’t even have been enough for a burial. So they brought all the miscellaneous bones together and built a large hall over them. There are windows, through which you can peer at the remains of some 130,000 unidentified French and German soldiers.  As more bones are discovered each year, they are added to the pile.

My friend described the ossuary at Verdun as being the most eery place he’d ever been. I can image; it is not in many places in the world, or at many times, that such massive collective evidence in presented of the horrors of which mankind is capable. The liberated Nazi concentration camps would have been such places. The killing fields in Cambodia might have been. Verdun is another.

And so we pass another grim anniversary date.

Neptune’s Inferno; or, “If You Get Hit, Where Are You?”

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I finished reading this morning, while camped out in front of the (closed) Turkish Airlines counter at Dulles (they have one single flight out of here, at 11:10 p.m., and they don’t open their counter for check-in until 7:20 p.m., and you can’t get through security without a boarding pass, which you can’t get without check-in, and did I mention that all the restaurants in Dulles are on the far side of security and I’ve been here since 4:00 a.m?), a book given to me for Christmas, Neptune’s Inferno, by James D. Hornfischer, a history of the naval battle for Guadalcanal, from early August through the end of 1942.

This is the third book of Hornfischer’s which I’ve read. I have his Ship of Ghosts, about the survivors of USS Houston. She was part of the ABDA fleet which was annihilated in the opening weeks of the war. She survived the first few battles only to come to grief in the Sunda Strait. She, in company with HMAS Perth, stumbled across the entire Japanese invasion fleet coming ashore in Java, including a destroyer force and squadron of heavy cruisers covering the transports. Both Allied ships were sunk, each taking roughly half her crew with her. Both captains were killed in the action, Houston’s by taking a shell splinter that just about eviscerated him. Houston’s survivors ended up in no small part working on the Burma-Siam railroad line the construction of which forms the setting for Bridge on the River Kwai. The thing about the battle was that it was so sudden – the Allied ships hadn’t expected to come across hostiles – and occurred in the middle of the night, that Houston and her consort effectively just disappeared, as far as Allied high command could tell. It wasn’t until the end of the war that it was known anyone had survived, and who.

A couple of vignettes from that book.

One of the eventual survivors from Houston had his battle station in the mast top, manning a heavy machine gun with a Marine sergeant. As the ship was heeling over, on her death ride and with the order to abandon ship having been given, the sailor was getting ready to drop into the water (by that point the top was well out over the water), and he noticed the Marine wasn’t. Come on, let’s go, was the thrust of his observations. The Marine just pointed out that he couldn’t swim. So over the sailor goes, striking out with might and main to avoid the suction when the ship went down. He later recalled that among his last glimpses of Houston was the sight of tracers still pouring forth from the mast top, as the Marine fought his station to the very last. You can’t teach that kind of tough.

The other vignette speaks volumes about how the Dutch (who owned Java as of the war’s beginning) were viewed by the locals, and how the Japanese were viewed (at least as of that time). Houston sank so close to the beach that many of the sailors who got off in time were able without too much trouble to swim ashore. The current in Sunda Strait is pretty ferocious, but since the swimmers were swimming perpendicular to it, those who weren’t swept out into the open ocean were able to make shore. To a man they were turned in to the invaders by the local villagers who found them hiding in the woods, and it wasn’t out of fear of the Japanese. The Dutch had behaved in the East Indies much as the Belgians had in the Congo, and with very similar results, in terms of how the native population reacted when they had the chance for regime change. In short, the Japanese Greater Southeast Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was very much not looked upon as being a cynical euphemism by its purported beneficiaries.

The third book of Hornfischer’s I have is The Last Stand of the Tin-Can Sailors, the story of the destroyers and destroyer escorts screening the light carriers whose job it was, during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, to cover the landing forces. and provide in-shore close air support.  Admiral Halsey having been snookered into taking all his fleet carriers and all his heavy screening forces (he flew his flag in New Jersey, sporting nine 16″/50-cal guns) to chase — far to the north, well away from the critical focus of Halsey’s actual mission — Japanese carriers who weren’t carrying any planes – in other words, they were suicide decoys – all that was left to guard the San Bernardino Strait was a group of escort carriers, whose magazines were full of anti-personnel and other “soft” (in other words, not armor-piercing) ordnance), along with a squadron of destroyers and one of even smaller destroyer escorts. And here comes Admiral Kurita with the Center Force, consisting of the bulk of the remaining Imperial Japanese Navy heavies. Battleships and heavy cruisers. It actually took them two tries to get through the strait; it was on the first effort that Musashi was sunk (her sister, Yamato, didn’t go on her own death ride until later). Kurita had turned back but then reversed course after all and on the morning of October 25, 1944 (metaphor alert: this was the anniversary of Agincourt in 1415, when a badly-out-numbered Henry V opened a can of whip-ass and flat smeared it all over the French – we few, we happy few, we band of brothers, anyone?) all that stood between him and the helpless American invasion fleet at anchor, frantically unloading the invasion force, were a dozen or so tin cans, with the escort carriers several miles further off.

Hornfischer uses the story of USS Johnston (DD-557), commanded by Commander Ernest E. Evans, to construct the narrative framework of the story. He was from Oklahoma, half-Indian (and so of course his Academy nickname was “Chief”). When he took command of Johnston, he offered any man in the crew who wanted off a transfer, no questions asked.

On that October morning, by chance Evans happened to be the closest ship in the formation to the Japanese battle line as it came out of the strait. Without waiting for orders, he turned his destroyer to engage a line of battleships and cruisers. Maneuvering at flank speed, he engaged with such of his 5″ mounts as could be brought to bear, chasing the Japanese shell splashes (on the theory that your enemy will have corrected his fire control solution away from that spot so he won’t hit there again) and trying to get close enough to launch his torpedoes. Chasing shell splashes only works if your enemy doesn’t figure out what you’re doing, and if there are enough people shooting at you, then you’re out of luck in any event; there’s no place to dodge to where someone’s not likely to drop a 14″ round onto your unarmored deck. Which is what happened to Johnston. She started taking large-caliber shell hits.

Evans gave the order to launch the torpedoes and then turned away to open the range. By that time all Johnston’s 5″ mounts were out of commission, the ship had been badly holed, was on fire, and was losing speed. As she steamed away from the Japanese, she came upon the other small boys, likewise riding hell-for-leather to engage the enemy battleships with their destroyers and destroyer escorts. Notwithstanding he had nothing left to fire at the Japanese, Evans turned Johnston around and went back into the fight. After all, Kurita had no way of telling she was a sitting duck; every turret that fired at Johnston was a turret not firing at a ship still capable of action. When last seen, Evans was standing on Johnston’s fantail, severely wounded (as I recall, among other things, he had a hand shot off by that point), shouting rudder orders down a hatch into the rudder room where crewmembers were manhandling the rudder, all other steering control having been shot away.

Evans received a posthumous Medal of Honor. And the small-ship Navy acquired an immortal example of gallantry.

They’re called “tin cans,” by the way, because that’s how easily they open up. When I was on an Adams-class guided missile destroyer back in the day, we had an A-6 that was supposedly bombing our wake for practice put a practice bomb onto us instead. The idea is they drop these dummy bomblets that have a saltwater-activated smoke flare in the nose into your wake, 500 yards or so astern of you. They’re aiming at the centerline of your wake and it’s easy to see how good their aim is. Well, this ass-hat, in the words of the JAGMAN investigating officer’s report – which I saw – “released his bomb with a friendly ship filling his windscreen.” This practice bomb weighed less than 10 pounds and, except for the smoke flare in the nose, was completely inert. A chunk of metal, no more and no less. It went completely though our ship. It penetrated a bulkhead on the O-2 level, blew up the Mk-51 fire control radar’s power panel, penetrated the O-2 level deck in that space, crossed the small office space beneath that and went through the far bulkhead out into the open air, penetrated the O-1 level deck, went across the main passageway (almost taking out our chief boatswain’s mate), penetrated the inboard bulkhead of the chief petty officer’s mess, ripped up their refrigerator, penetrated the far bulkhead back into open air, and would have kept right on going over the side except it hit the inboard side of one of the davits for the captain’s gig, and bounced back into the scuppers.

Neptune’s Inferno, as mentioned, deals with the specifically naval engagements of the Guadalcanal campaign. The Marines ashore make an appearance only to the extent of their interaction with the navy, consisting mostly of their outrage when, two days after the Marines splashed ashore, Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher (most recently seen relinquishing command of the American carriers to Raymond A. Spruance half-way through the Battle of Midway back in early June, 1942 , when his flagship, Yorktown, was put out of action and eventually sunk) took the carriers, which were pretty much all the flat tops the Navy had in August, 1942, away from the battle in order not to risk them against Japanese aircraft. It was a decision Admiral Earnest King never forgave him for (and for which he was relieved). From a strategic perspective it was the right choice. If those carriers had been put out of action at that point, the Navy’s operations in that entire portion of the Pacific would have been crippled. You can always get some reinforcements ashore, get some more supplies ashore. In fact the Japanese did more or less exactly that with the night-time runs of the “Tokyo Express”; because of the Marines’ Henderson Field on the island, and the back-up of the American carriers just out of reach of their land-based aircraft flying from Rabaul, they couldn’t make day-time landings or even use slower transport ships because they couldn’t get in, un-load, and be gone from the danger zone before the American aircraft would be back in the air the next morning. So they used destroyers . . . and managed to put well over 20,000 troops ashore, together with artillery and related supplies.

The Marines came to forgive the Navy, more less, when the light surface forces (destroyers and the new anti-aircraft cruisers, bristling with 5″ rapid-firing guns) showed a gleeful willingness to plow up great swathes of Japanese-bearing tropical jungle. They’d literally hose out corridors through the undergrowth with their gunfire. No less than Lt. Col. Lewis D. “Chesty” Puller expressed his gratitude after having observed the fun from one of the firing ships. The sub-title of this post is his reply to his host’s reaction when, just prior to going back ashore, he observed to the captain that he, Puller, wouldn’t have captain’s job for anything.  The captain was amazed; surely wouldn’t he prefer to have a shower and a bed when the day’s work was done?  Puller asked him when he got hit, where was he, and then pointed out, “When I get hit, I know where I am.”

And then after the night-time surface actions all the bodies would wash ashore.

In the end, for every Marine who died defending Guadalcanal dirt, three sailors died defending its waters. USS Juneau, her keel already broken by a torpedo strike and shot all to hell, was limping away the morning after the Night Cruiser Action, on November 14, 1942, when a submarine found her. She literally disappeared in a single flash of explosion. Out of her crew of almost exactly 700, all of ten men survived. Among the dead were the five Sullivan brothers, of Waterloo, Iowa.

For all the valor of the surface navy – and the naval fight was overwhelmingly a surface fight; the airplanes were mostly consumed (and they were consumed, as well) defending Henderson Field – the senior leadership really comes across as bumbling, in Hornfischer’s telling. Most of the action went down at night, an environment the Japanese had spent years aggressively training to own. And they did, even without the benefit of search or fire-control radar, both of which the Americans had in abundance, and which all but one of the OTCs (officer in tactical command: the guy out on the water who’s actually ordering the formation, steaming directions, and controlling – supposedly – the action) studiously ignored. It started with the Battle of Savo Island (a gob of island several miles to the northwest of Guadalcanal proper), when a fast-moving Japanese cruiser squadron got the jump on not one, but two American formations of cruisers and destroyers, and sent four out of five Allied cruisers (USS Quincy, USS Vincennes, USS Astoria, and HMAS Canberra) to the bottom in a maelstrom of fire lasting barely an hour from start to finish.

The eventual verdict on Savo Island (the waters between it and Guadalcanal acquired the nickname “Ironbottom Sound” by the time it was all over) was that the Americans simply had not been ready for combat, eight months after Pearl Harbor. They just didn’t know their craft. The Americans got a little of their own back off Cape Esperance when Rear Admiral Norman Scott was put in charge of a scraped-together force to challenge the night-time deliveries of the Tokyo Express. But for all of his drilling his ships in gunnery exercises (including off-set firing at each other, where two ships would shoot at each other’s wakes, or at target sleds towed by each other, much like that A-6 pilot was supposed to have done to my ship 40-odd years later), and all his aggressive instincts, even he couldn’t quite get it all in one sock, when it came to a real, live, shoot-em-up night action. He bungled some maneuvering signals, put his flag in a ship which did not have the 10-cm search radar (a vast improvement over its predecessor; it was actually useful for running a naval fight, as was later demonstrated), and before anyone knew it, what should have been a smoothly unfolding fight turned into a chaotic slug-fest, with individual commanders more or less picking their targets of opportunity and seeing how many rounds they could pump into them. Scott’s forces did manage sufficiently to cripple the sole Japanese battleship that she was scuttled. But it was otherwise an opportunity mostly lost.

Then the mistakes got worse. Rear Admiral Dan Callaghan, a real swell guy but a desk admiral, was put in charge of the cruisers, over Norman Scott, who – even if he’d stumbled a bit his first time out of the gate – at least had spent countless hours pondering the dynamics of modern naval action. There is not much indication that Callaghan did. He owed much of his advancement to senior rank to his connections, not least with FDR himself. During the Night Cruiser Action of November 13, 1942, he made an absolute pig’s breakfast of his formation, his handling of it, and his conducts of the battle. But he did have the decency to get killed that night, along with all but one of his staff and his flag captain (Cassin Young, who had won his own Medal of Honor at Pearl Harbor). Norman Scott was also killed that night. But the Americans bagged one of the two battleships the Japanese had sent.

In the aftermath of the Night Cruiser Action, the Americans had so few heavy surface forces left that Halsey finally decided to pull his two battleships – Washington and South Dakota – away from escorting carriers and transports, and shove them into Iron Bottom Sound. And not a moment too soon. Admiral Yamamoto had decided to try one final all-out push to destroy Henderson Field through naval gunfire (they’d made a pretty good run at back in September). This time the American commander, Rear Admiral Willis Lee, was a radar geek who knew exactly what use his radar could be. The Americans shot them all to hell and gone, saving Henderson Field and thereby guaranteeing that the Japanese simply could not maintain their forces on the island.

By the time the Japanese evacuated, many of their units had only a handful of men left who were not so starved or sick or both as to be completely out of action.

What I found, other than the very well-written narration, interesting about the book is the portrayal of William Halsey. In Last Stand, Halsey comes off as a blustering buffoon, who was so gung-ho to Get Him Some Carrier Scalp that he abandoned what was actually his principal strategic function – safeguarding the Leyte Gulf invasion – and but for the courage of the small boys could have cost the Americans an enormous loss. Gentle Reader will also not overlook that it was also during this time and shortly thereafter that Halsey came within an ace of losing not one but two battle groups to typhoons, by reason of his mismanagement of refueling. In Neptune’s Inferno he comes across being something of a naval cross between Nathan Bedford Forrest and Omar Bradley. Perhaps it’s the difference between 1942 and 1944. By the time of Leyte Halsey had worn four stars for almost two years and was a fleet commander. Perhaps with Leyte he had risen to his level of incompetence.

In any event, Neptune’s Inferno is a tremendous read. Hornfischer does an excellent job of narrating surface naval action. This is more complicated than it sounds, I suggest. If you’re describing the Battle of Shiloh, for example, or the First Marne, you can hook your narrative onto place names that can easily be shown on a map in geographic relationship to each other. Not every author has this talent. The first time I tried to read August 1914 I gave up because Solzhenitsyn’s description of the run-up to Tannenberg is nearly unintelligible without a map to refer to (and then some time later I discovered that – in the very back of the book, exactly where you would not look for it – his publisher had put just such a map; made all the difference in the world). In describing a naval surface action, however, all you’re left with is “port” and “starboard,” and it’s very difficult even to draw it out on a map because the relative positions of the ships to each other at any specific moment is of such critical importance. I think Hornfischer does as good a job of conveying the actual movements of the ships over the trackless water as well as anyone I’ve ever run across.

Can’t recommend too highly, in round numbers.

Unplanned Interlude

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Oh, where to begin? If what serves me for memory these days is reliable, the last time I put any up on this ‘umble blog was just about exactly two months ago today.

This is being typed in the Pittsburgh airport. I had not intended to travel to Pittsburgh. Not that I have anything against the city or its state. It’s just that I had intended to be somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean at this exact moment, on my way to Germany by way of Constantinople. [Digression: The place was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire for just over 1,100 years, from 330-something to 1453. It was Constantinople all that time. Even once the Turk conquered it, the place stayed Constantinople until the 1920s. When the Turk has held the place as long as the Romans did, I’ll call it whatever they want me to. So call me back in 500-odd years.]

I am flying to Germany for the first time in almost exactly five years. In fact, other than a nine-day trip with my youngest boy in the summer of 2013 (nine days, eight nights in a tent, 2,512.4 miles, six states, five battlefields, two museums, a national parkway, and a mountain, and although he was one month past his seventh birthday, he never once complained about being hot, thirsty, hungry, tired, or bored . . . and the whole trip was for the 150th anniversary of Gettysburg), it’s my first vacation since then. I’d like to say I’ve earned it, but that wouldn’t be the case. Suffice it to say that the opportunity came my way, and that was that.

I’ll be spending most of my time in southwest Germany, rednecking around with an old law skool buddy of mine. But weekend after this coming one, I’ll be heading to Dresden for a few days. I’ll be there on the anniversary of the bombing. Every year on that night everyone turns out in downtown, down by the Frauenkirche, mostly, with candles. At exactly the moment when the first bombs began to fall, every church bell in town lights off. Here’s a YouTube video of it. Pretty impressive.

On a side note, one of the things I miss most about Germany is the sound of church bells. Real church bells, not the anemic tinklings of American churches, or – even worse – the electronic carillons you run into in places as incongruous as the county seat of my tiny little county.

So there we were, heading for Washington International, and the nice pilot comes over the intercom to allow that the weather’s closed in at Dulles and we’re getting diverted to Pittsburgh. We were supposed to arrive at Dulles at 9:15 p.m; my connecting flight (on Turkish Airlines) was to leave at 11:10 p.m. At the risk of understatement, I did not make my connecting flight. So my choices came down to either throwing away all the money I’ve put into this trip so far, or paying several thousand dollars for an alternative connection to somewhere in Germany, or just buy another ticket for the same flight tomorrow night (Turkish has only a single flight each day from Dulles). I went for Option C, and so now, once United finally puts this flight on the ground in Washington, whenever that happens, I’ll get to spend until not quite 24 hours from now mooning about an airport.

I do propose to blog from Germany.  I also propose maybe to catch up on at least some of the posting that’s been cracking about in my skull.  We’ll have to see.

A Difficult Season

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I am, as mentioned, a small-town lawyer.

This is the Christmas season in a small town.  It is the time of year when people — clients, neighbors, business associates, and others — go flitting about town delivering plates of delightfully decadent snacks.  Most of it falls under the heading of Death by Sugar and Cholesterol, but sometimes it will actually have nutritional value (those veer towards Death by Sodium).

What I’m getting at, here, is that it’s all insanely good food, made personally by people you know, and by the end of the season you can easily find yourself carrying another 10-15 pounds you didn’t have the day before Thanksgiving.

Unless, of course, you’re wearing your Invisalign trays, and it’s just too much of a pain in the wazzoo to pop them out, snarf down a chunk or two of peanut butter fudge (with walnuts) . . . and then have to go through the whole ritual* of flossing, scrubbing, and brushing.  In that case you moon about the table in the office kitchen, speculating on whether it would be (damned subjunctive mood) more enjoyable to get outside some country ham biscuits, or the peanut butter fudge aforesaid, or the home-made brittle, or the fruitcake, or the oatmeal raisin cookies, or the . . . . stop it! leave me alone! I can’t take it any more!!!

But none of it is for thee, O Wearer of Invisaligns.  You must wander on, past open doors with your co-workers wading into the goodies and chit-chatting back and forth on how they just love it when Mrs. So-and-So breaks out the cookie sheets and get the wind properly in her sails.

I  can tell it’s going to be a long Christmas season.

*[The other evening, as I was ruefully scrubbing the trays for what felt like the 157th time that day, I realized that what I most felt like was a monk, wearily chanting away at the liturgical hours, 24/7/365.  Matins, lauds, prime, sext, none, vespers, compline, and so forth, endlessly, in a loop.  I don’t know if they were into orthodontia at Cluny, but for eternal dreariness I’ll back Invisaligns against the Rule of St. Benedict any day.]

Braces and Me

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This will be the introductory and title post on a brand-new category on this blog.

I am, unless I turn out to defy all reasonable mortality expectations, emphatically on the wrong side of the halfway mark in my life.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve been — with good reason — embarrassed by my smile, to the point that I generally try not to smile, especially not when there is a camera in operation.  My teeth are widely and irregularly spaced, are not terribly straight, and by this point in life are pretty well-stained by years of propping up a good portion of the world’s coffee growers.  Some time ago, on Instapundit, I ran across a link to an article about a study that some researchers did on what, exactly, people first notice when they meet a stranger, with a specific view towards what prompts a favorable versus an unfavorable reaction in them.  The results were broken down by male and female.  I can’t remember much about the article at this point (and a half-hearted attempt to find it just now came up dry), but what I do recall is that both men and women responded that the top thing they noticed, both favorable and unfavorable, were the teeth.  Not the eyes, not — for women — the breasts, not the butt or the legs or the hair (unless perhaps hairy legs?), but the teeth.

My pediatric dentist repeatedly advised my parents back in the day not to put braces on our teeth “until our heads quit growing,” his point being, I guess, that it doesn’t really do much good to align the teeth in a skull the dimensional relationships in which are still changing.  Can’t argue with that as a proposition of theory.  On the other hand, the world is full of adult people running around with beautiful smiles and who had braces slapped on them at age 14 or so.  As well, back then I don’t think my parents could have afforded braces in any event, so perhaps his recommendation, however ill-advised, was superfluous.  I will say this much about this dentist’s competence:  He never once did bite wings on my brother or me, with the result that when I went for my DODMERB (Dept. of Defense Medical Examination Review Board) physical, in connection with applications to the service academies and NROTC, and that dentist actually did shoot my mouth, he looked at me and said (I still vividly recall this), “Kid, you’re going to lose some teeth if you don’t get some fillings ASAP.”  Sure enough, several of my teeth had enamel that hadn’t properly joined up in the cusp, thereby exposing the softer material underlying to a decade or more of abuse.  The cavities had penetrated down and hollowed them out, with the result that one is now a crown and the other — or rather, its remains, as that crown came off years ago and I didn’t have the money to replace it — is just the stumps of roots surrounding the post of the root canal.  It will have to be pulled and an implant — which I also can’t really afford — stuck in its place.  So much for my pediatric dentist’s competence.

And then I was grown and in the Navy and then law skool and then came marriage and three children and suddenly here I am on the back side of life and still embarrassed to smile at strangers.  So for my birthday, recently, my wife and my mother cooked up the notion of getting me braces.  The wife is from California, where a perfectly-aligned blazing white smile is an article of faith right up there with “global warming” and the benefits of regulating capitalistic enterprise out of existence, and so all three of my boys have not only been dragged to a very nice Jewish dentist but also a very nice Jewish orthodontist for years now.  [Lest Gentle Reader task me with ethnic animosity for that last remark, I’ll pass along that where the wife grew up, most of her neighbors and playmates were Jewish, they all went to Jewish orthodontists and dentists (as did the (Roman Catholic) wife and her 137 sisters), and they all had perfect teeth.  The idea that the guy hammering away at her and the kids’ teeth is Jewish is in the nature of medical comfort food for her; I’m not sure she’d trust a goy to Get It Right.  I say that in all seriousness; her own life experiences have imprinted in her psyche the notion that if you want the job done right, the first time, with no bullshit or tap-dancing, all else being equal you go find a Jewish guy to do it.]

And so several weeks ago I too made the trek.  I’d figured I was going to get me a “grill,” as I’m told such things are now called.  Hadn’t made up my mind how I was going to respond to people’s commenting on what someone my age is doing wearing a teenager’s dental devices.  Sometimes the truth is the simplest, after all:  These are a birthday present from my wife and parents.  But lo! when I got there I found that what was proposed was not the zareba of steel (festooned with pieces of the wearer’s last meal) that we all knew and loved as children, but rather something calling itself “Invisaligns” (cute name; get it? “invisible” and “align”).  They’re clear (mostly) plastic brackets (“trays” is what the manufacturer calls them) that are custom-manufactured to clamp in a progressive series over the wearer’s teeth and slowly jerk them from where they are to where they ought to be.

The process starts with shoving a tiny camera — I think it’s a laser beam — in to image the patient’s mouth in a series of probably 40 or more separate shots, front sides, back sides, and tops.  The computer collates all the individual shots taken and produces a fully-rotatable, three-dimensional image of exactly what each tooth looks like, where it is in relation to the others, and how it is aligned relative to the jaw.  It’s pretty neat to see, to be truthful, when you’re looking from the inside of your jaw out at the backsides of all your teeth, a tongue’s-eye view, so to speak.  Very much a what’ll-they-think-of-next sort of sensation.  The orthodontist then takes that computer imagery and uses it to design a program of “trays” which will, in the proper sequence and at the proper speed, move the patient’s teeth into their proper locations.  At least for the present, each set of “trays” is worn for two weeks.  The orthodontist can scroll you through your planned progression right there on the screen, so that you can, in a quasi-time-lapse sequence, see exactly how your teeth are going to be moving.  Or at least that’s the idea.

After about six weeks or so you receive your first sets of trays.  They just snap over your teeth and that’s that.  Unless someone’s looking very carefully they really are not obtrusive to the observer.  You can’t fully close your teeth with them in, of course, because the thickness of the plastic encases the entire exposed surface of every tooth.  So if you try to put your teeth together and grin it looks a bit like you’re snarling.

You have to wear them at least 22 hours a day.  You can’t eat with them in.  You can’t drink anything hot (like coffee, tea, or soup) because of the risk of the plastic softening.  You’re not advised to drink anything, like red wine, that would stain them.  About the only thing they allow you can consume without taking them out is water.  After eating you have to floss, brush your teeth, and clean your “trays”; you of course have to do so upon rising and before going to bed.  What this works out to is that if you’re at all diligent you’re going to end up brushing and flossing anywhere from four to six times a day.  It also means you’re going to lose weight during the process.  It’s such a pain in the butt to eat that you pretty rapidly get to the point where it’s just not worth it.  Since I can start to miss a meal or 20, that’s not really a bug but a feature for me.

In terms of cleaning, my orthodontist adjured me to avoid brushing with tooth-whitening toothpaste (risk of scratching and compromising transparency) or denture cleaners (too harsh).  In fact, the product specifically recommended to me was regular old Dawn dishwashing liquid (the blue kind; not sure why but the color was specifically part of the recommendation).  So now at the office and at home I have a cup and a small bottle of Dawn.  Before I eat (if at home), or while I’m flossing and brushing (if at the office), I’ll pop my “trays” into a cup of lukewarm water with a tiny dollop of Dawn in it.  Then after brushing I’ll rinse the Dawn off under running water and use a tiny bit of toothpaste to scrub them down.  I figure even if the plastic gets a little scarred, at the worst I’ll be done with that set in another ten or so days and what’s it to me.

How to track how long you’ve had your trays out?  I hit upon the notion of setting the timer on my phone at two hours each morning.  Then, when I pop them out to eat or drink, I start the timer counting down.  When I put them back in I pause the timer and I have exactly how much time for that day is left.  I find that I generally am left with 45 or so minutes at the end of each day, and that’s with eating my meals quickly but not bolting (I trained in Germany and so eat pretty fast in any event, although nowhere near as fast as the Germans can).

Discomfort?  I had a sense of movement for about two or three days with the first set of trays, and then it went away.  I just started the second set on Thanksgiving Day, and I have to say I really didn’t notice much movement at all, and what little I did has already vanished.  I don’t know whether it’s that I’m just fortunate enough not to be bothered by the process — just as some people experience extreme pain with traditional braces and others little or none, so also with Invisaligns — or whether my teeth, being mounted in a bone jaw that is several decades older and more brittle than what these things were designed to deal with, are simply successfully resisting the trays’ plastic and so in effect moving the plastic, instead of the other way around, but I’ve experienced so far nothing that I can describe as discomfort.  That may change, of course.  With the next set they’re going to glue tiny spuds onto my teeth at various places — the precise number and location varies with the specific patient — the better to jerk things around.  That may start the circus; maybe not.

I will say that having a set of large foreign objects in the mouth is disconcerting.  I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to that.  The plastic’s coefficient of friction is noticeably different from that of your teeth’s surfaces, and so the insides of your lips feel like they’re sticking to your teeth as you try to speak.  Additionally, because the plastic fully encloses the teeth’s surfaces, you cannot force air between your teeth while wearing your trays, which alters your pronunciation of certain vocables like “f” and “th”.  I also have the sensation of dryness in the mouth, largely as a result of the tongue’s wanting to “stick” to the back sides of the teeth.

Some days ago I was planning on drinking me a beer or twelve.  One thing I’d not seen was any warning on whether the alcohol in alcoholic beverages has any deleterious effect on the plastic, either visually or structurally.  So I Googled it, and came up with a raft of blogs about Invisaligns (apparently I’m not the only person who likes to drink me some beer, trays or no trays), including this one.  The poor ol’ gal who runs the linked blog has had, to judge from her posts, what must be in a very close running for Very Worst Orthodontic and Periodontic Experience, Ever.  In addition to needing her teeth straightened, her natural smile showed an extent of upper gum which she found embarrassing.  In all truth, how her smile used to look (she posted some pictures) didn’t seem unattractively extreme, but then it’s not my smile.  It’s hers.  The long and short is that she’s spent quite a bit of time, and more than a little money, as well as some pretty significant pain, and for whatever reason her mouth isn’t cooperating.  Teeth that won’t stay in place (after 955 days of Invisaligns . . . I was told about 18 months), a failed surgery to correct how much upper gum is exposed when smiling (together with a visible surgical scar across the smile).  The heart goes out to her.  I’ve been humiliated to see a picture of my own smile for getting on for 40 years.  Don’t give up, I guess I’d say to her; not yet.

The answer, the by way, is that you most certainly can drink beer with your trays in.  Your mouth will feel like the non-slip tile floor in a Burger King’s men’s room, of course, and from comments I’ve run across it seems the breath matches.  But then again, drinking beer in any significant quantity (as I like to do when with my friends) leaves your mouth feeling like that tile floor in any event, and who can forget Kurt Vonnegut’s description of breath that smells “like mustard gas and roses”?  Besides, when I’m drinking me some beer it’s not like I’m trying to pick up girls.  Too old, too out of shape, too behind the times for that.  Oh yeah, and I’m married, too.  All of which is to say that at least in my own Life Condition, the watchword is “splice the mainbrace” and enjoy.

I will vouchsafe Gentle Reader further updates from time to time.

Oh Boy! We’re Famous!!

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For me, June, 1987 was a bittersweet month.  Without going into too great detail, a relationship which I thought had wonderful potential got side-tracked, although it took it another three years and even greater heartbreak to die.  Looking back from 25 years on, I have to admit that not only did she make the right decision for her — as was her absolute right — but also more likely than not for me as well.  But that doesn’t mean that it didn’t hurt as badly as it did at the time, or that it took any less time for the wounds to heal.  But heal they did, eventually, and although the might-have-been is always tantalizing (call it emotional rubber-necking:  I drive slowly past the memories, looking at the wreckage, and wondering what the hell happened to wad things up like that), it no longer has the power to tear the old scars wide open.

June, 1987 was also the month of the Last Show on A Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor’s radio show, which was — up until the point that he discovered left-wing politics — wonderful.  It was funny, creative, poignant, well-done yet quaintly informal.  I’d bought tickets for the March 20, 1987, show for a friend and myself, and about two weeks after placing my order Keillor announced on the air that he was killing the show at the end of June.  After which point tickets became unobtainable.  My friend and I ended up driving for what seemed like six months past forever (although familiar with the map of the U.S. for years, it really hadn’t soaked in until I physically experienced it just how huge a place the Upper Midwest actually is; there were places where for more than an hour we couldn’t get FM radio on the interstate), but made the trip in good time, successfully, and had a wonderful time at the show.

That summer I was underway on my ship the night of the Last Show, and so my mother taped it for me, right off the air.  [Aside:  The video of that show, or what was purported to be that show, which came out a couple of years later, was, to put it mildly, fraudulent.  The show that was aired, and was taped by my mother live as it aired, simply does not match the performance on the VHS tape, in several material respects.  Interestingly, the CD of that show, which came out many years later and which I also have, matches the show that my mother taped.]  It was wonderful.  I didn’t have time to listen to the tapes (as I recall it took two) until some time later.  And this is the tie-in to the first paragraph of this post, above:  I listened to that show as I was driving across Canada, then through New York, and then the Massachusetts Turnpike (by way of utter irrelevance, the turnpike runs right past Stockbridge, Mass., and there was a small sign beside the road that I noticed to the effect that the fine for littering was still $50), on my way from visiting this young lady to a Navy station on the coast.  For whatever messed-up reason the two recollections — of listening to that Last Show and feeling my heart slowly tear out, mile by mile — got all twined together, with the result that it was the better part of twelve or so years before I could listen to those tapes again and not immediately experience the emotional trauma of that earlier time.

In any event, among the other things they did on that Last Show, aside from the last installment of News From Lake Wobegon, was wrap up one of their long-running series, The Adventures of Buster the Show-Dog, starring Timmy, the Sad Rich Teenage Boy, Sheila the Christian Jungle Girl, Father Finian, and of course the eponymous Buster.  The questing heroes finally make it back to St. Paul after wandering the world and decide, before parting ways, that they’ve just got to get a group photo.  So off they go to the corner drugstore, where a crooked clerk intentionally trips the alarm system and makes off with $100,000 from the till, leaving the five (including the cabbie who drove them there; they’d insisted he get in the picture as well) to face the music alone.  This all dawns on them the next morning, as they sit around the empty boxcar down at the CB&Q rail-yard, where they’d found refuge from the police the night before.  Father Finian comes back with some donuts, coffee, and a morning paper.  There on the front page are their pictures, identified as the perps in “$100,000 Drug Heist.”  They’re now wanted, fugitives.

But the point of it all is that Timmy’s reaction to reading the paper is the exclamation (he says it twice, in fact, as I recall), “Oh boy!  We’re famous!!”

So what does a radio show broadcast 28 years ago have to do with anything?

As the ‘umble proprietor of this ‘umble blog, I do pay attention — embarrassing though it generally is — to the site statistics so helpfully compiled by the lads at WordPress for my enjoyment.  It’s how I know to address things to my reader.  No, seriously, tossing posts up here is half a jump from what must have gone through Field Marshal Haig’s mind as he dispatched the troops over the top at Third Ypres.  Splendid ranks and all, and well-equipped, but you don’t really expect to see them living again.

But there is one post that I put up last year about this time, here, about cooking chitlins.  That single post has probably garnered more views than the entire rest of the blog combined.  Over the past three or four weeks it’s out-stripped by a factor of fifteen or more (I’m not making this up) every other post, new or old.  The search terms that have brought people to that post have run a pretty decent gamut of the questions that people have about the preparation, cooking, seasoning of the guts.  I really don’t quite know what to make of it.  Here I’ve spent three-plus years now putting up all manner of “heavy” stuff on this site, and yet the solitary item that routinely fetches ’em (cf. Twain: “If that don’t fetch ’em, I don’t know Arkansaw.”) is a post on cooking hog guts.

So I’m constantly reminded of Timmy’s line from that Last Show:  Oh boy!  We’re famous!!

I suppose I ought to count my blessings and go home.  If it’s true, as Oscar Wilde observed, that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, then being the go-to guy on the internet on how to boil up a nice vat of hog’s intestines beats nothing at all.

Will They Play With Fire, Again?

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The Supreme Court at least in its present composition has an extremely mixed track record in upholding the basic building-block notions of the U.S. Constitution.  Its two most egregious, and potentially most damaging, cases thus far have both concerned the “Affordable” Care Act.

Gentle Reader will recall those two cases:  This first decision ruled that Congress can in fact exercise powers plainly not granted to it by any article, section, clause, phrase, or word of the document, nor which can be squeezed from the document by even the most strained reasoning, if (wait for it), Congress could have enacted a penalty on the failure to abide by that illegal power grab and called the penalty a “tax.”  Get that?  The ACA imposes a penalty on people who fail to buy insurance from private insurance companies.  Congress obliges individuals to engage in commerce, in other words, rather than merely contenting itself to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes,” which is what Article I Section 8, Clause 3 actually authorizes it to do, in respect of people who are engaging in those sorts of commerce.

Not even the clowns on this court could get five votes in favor of a power to oblige people to buy a new car every three years in order to support the personal transportation industry in America.  Remember, the industry which provides the means for individual Americans to live anywhere outside the most densely populated parts of the Northeast Corridor is one the fruits of which are of much greater importance to many more people on a much more frequent basis than the activities of health insurance companies, doctors, or hospitals.  Such an enactment would avoid the “free rider problem” of people who insist that their beat-up ol’ bangers (my 2000 Chrysler Concorde, which I picked up 16 years ago yesterday with 6 miles on the odometer, rolled 235,000 miles yesterday evening) are sufficient for their needs.  We folks who persist in driving a car until the wheels fall off by doing so deprive the automobile manufacturers of the cash flows necessary to fund their research and development to comply with ever-more-stringent CAFE standards because global warming climate change.

O! but let us not lose faith in the creativity, the revolutionary consciousness (cf. Solzhenitsyn’s chapter on “The Law as a Child,” in Vol. I of his Gulag Archipelago) Solomon-like wisdom  of our judiciary.  Congress cannot make you engage in activity.  But it can tax your failure to do so (according to the RevTrib Supreme Court), and if you don’t pay the tax it can imprison you for that failure.  And here’s where Chief Justice Krylenko Roberts really extended the known boundaries of American jurisprudence.  You see, Congress didn’t call the penalty for failure to buy health insurance a tax.  The administration and its lapdogs in Congress, in lying selling to the American public this abortion of a statute, repeatedly and explicitly disclaimed that it was a tax.  But Krylenko Roberts held that Congress could have called it a tax, and because it could have called it a tax and relied upon its taxing power to exercise indirectly a substantive power denied to it by the document itself, therefore it was a tax and therefore the individual mandate is constitutional.

Wow.  I mean, just wow.  Think of all the meaningless formalities which we can, under the Krylenko Roberts Doctrine now dispense with.  The senate refuses to ratify a treaty?  No problem:  It could have ratified the treaty, and therefore it did, and therefore that treaty, “constructively ratified,” we may call it, is now under the Supremacy Clause part and parcel of the highest law of the land.  Congress refuses to fund a program — oh, say, handing money to the baby cadaver salesmen at “Planned Parenthood”?  No problem:  Congress could have called that appropriation an expenditure for “public health,” and therefore the administration can keep shelling out tens of millions of taxpayers’ dollars.

But it gets even better:  Remember, the substance of the Krylenko Roberts Doctrine is that what matters in terms of the question, “Did Congress have the constitutional power to enact this provision?” is not, you know, whether the document actually or necessarily by implication grants that power, but rather whether Congress might have chosen to slap a monetary penalty (which the RevTrib Supreme Court can then call a “tax”) on a person’s conduct inconsistent with the desired behavior.  Let’s think of this in terms of the Fifth Amendment.  Oh no:  We’re not forcing a criminal defendant to testify against himself.  We’re just making him pay the additional expenses of proving his guilt without his cooperation.  I mean, can you say “externality”?  It costs money, dammit, good money that has to come from the public fisc to prove up a crime without a confession (hence, as Solzhenitsyn points out, the organs’ single-minded focus on obtaining those confessions, by means he and others (see, e.g: Dolgun) have described in detail).  So you don’t have to testify; oh no, you’re perfectly at liberty to sit there mute in the courtroom.  But by God we’re going to make you pony up for getting all those eyewitnesses in, all the forensic proof, the DNA testing, and all that.  And the beauty is that because it’s a tax (remember the Krylenko Roberts Doctrine, dear children), its imposition is utterly independent of our defendant’s actual guilt.  I mean, the money had to be spent, after all, and if the defendant is innocent, then there’s no reason he shouldn’t have testified to that effect, right?

Similarly, we’re not forcing you, Gentle Reader, to march in support of Dear Leader’s non-public deals to hand nuclear weapons to Iran.  But because the rest of the world, and especially Israel, will be much likelier to accept that deal if it knows that the entire American population is behind it, and the costs of ramming Israel’s physical destruction down its throat are much greater in the face of its opposition, we’re going to impose a money penalty (oh, we might have called it a tax, and therefore it is a tax, and therefore Congress had the power to impose it) on your failure to turn out for the scheduled Mass Demonstration demanding death for Zinoviev and Kamenev, the Trotskyite dogs and imperialist stooges immediate implementation of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.  By like token, we’re not forcing you to enroll your children in the Young Pioneers, or the Bund deutscher Mädel, or the Red Guards, but your unreasoning refusal to enroll them means that the school system must spend that much more time and greater resources educating them in Mao Thoughts the Führer’s Will the precepts of the Great Helmsman’s Short Course their civic duties in respect of the “Affordable” Care Act, and therefore a money penalty, which we might have called a tax but didn’t, is obviously constitutionally proper.

See how much can be accomplished through the Krylenko Roberts Doctrine?

The second case which Gentle Reader might recall is the insurance exchange case.  You’ll remember that, in order to compel the states to establish their own insurance exchanges under the “Affordable” Care Act, the availability of financial subsidy for the (now wildly-escalating) premiums was very carefully limited to those who purchased policies through exchanges established by “states,” which the statute very carefully defined to mean, you know, the 50 states of the union (and, I recall, territories and possessions as well).  All of those actors are, at the risk of pointing out the obvious, geopolitical entities, with physically-described borders.  They are not agencies or instrumentalities of anyone, like, for example, the federal Department of Health and Human Services.  Well, most of the states had better sense than to pour money down that rat-hole, and so Dear Leader’s administration set up a federal insurance exchange for people in those states, and then — here’s the flagrantly illegal part — began doling out money for policies purchased on that exchange.

The RevTrib Supreme Court upheld the illegal expenditure of public funds for an unauthorized purpose, because, well, Congress might have said “federal government,” or even “department,” and it was really important for this statute to work so we’re just going to act as if Congress actually had done what it didn’t do at all, namely include HHS within the definition of “state,” or alternatively just go ahead and authorize subsidy payments for policies bought through the HHS-run insurance exchange.  And lo! the outlay of billions of dollars is magically validated.

We may call this the “Statutory Error Doctrine”.  You see, when Congress has, through oversight (obviously it must have been just a drafting error, because reasonable minds simply cannot disagree on something so important, after all, as whether to plonk down billions of dollars on socialized health care, much in the same fashion as all sensible men being, per Disraeli, all of the same faith), omitted to authorize the administration to take Action X, whatever that may be, then the RevTrib Supreme Court will correct that li’l ol’ drafting error, and will supply what Congress plainly meant to have said, were it fully mindful of its duty to the Party.

Dear Leader’s administration is now advocating what we might call the “Statutory Omission Doctrine,” in which the RevTrib Supreme Court may supply, not merely a missing or obviously incomplete definition, but an entire statute which plainly Congress would have enacted, but for its truancy in obeying the Holy Writ of the Light Bringer.  You see, Congress, which under Article I, Section 8, Clause 4 has the power to “an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” and has done so.  Those rules provide for deportation and other nastiness for folks who come here illegally.  Congress has not chosen to exempt from those rules the parents of children who are, pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment, citizens of the United States by right of birth.  Very awkward, by God! as the Duke of Wellington observed about William IV’s rant at the Duchess of Kent.

Some stupid redneck dirt lawyer might suppose that Congress, realizing it cannot deport minor children who are, by constitutional right, citizens and thus have a right to stay here, determined to leave in place the disincentive of family separation to discourage parents from creating such “anchor babies” in the first place.  Fine:  Your child can stay here because she’s a citizen, but your country ass is getting shipped back to Guadalajara, lady.  You’re perfectly free to take your citizen-child with you or leave her here.  If you leave her here we’ll provide for her, but you’re leaving.  Speaking as a father of three wonderful boys, I can tell you that is one powerful disincentive.  It puts, after all, the most painful burden on the only decision-maker (the pregnant woman) capable of preventing the situation from arising.  The infant cannot decide for herself, after all.  The father in fact cannot really decide.  So we’re going to make that woman wager the most sacred of human bonds against her desire to violate United States law.

Dear Leader does not like this.  He does not like this because those parents are reliable sources of money and political support.  The ones who eventually are able to vote (e.g. the anchor baby herself when she turns 18) reliably and extremely heavily vote Democrat.  So he has decided to exempt from the operation of the “uniform Rule of Naturalization” the parents of those anchor babies.  On a blanket basis.  He’s decided that the importance of keeping in place a permanent dependent class of Democrat electoral cash and support is more important than his own constitutional duty under Article II Section 3 that, “he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed[.]”

Thus far he’s gone zero-for-however-many on injunctions preventing his administration from implementing this illegal program, which he calls, of course misleadingly, “Deferred Action for Parents of Americans”.  It’s not “deferred” action, but the permanent abandonment of action, and is widely known to be such.  Well, now the RevTrib Supreme Court has agreed to hear the administration’s appeal of the most recent such injunction.

We’ll have to see what Krylenko Roberts and his colleagues do.  I firmly disagree with the linked article that, “There are reasons to be sympathetic to President Obama’s efforts to overhaul America’s immigration laws. The system has been broken for decades, and political elites have proven unable or unwilling to fix it.”  It is no such thing.  It has not been enforced for decades, and this has created a painful and in many cases tragic set of facts on the ground.  But that is not the fault of either Congress or the law itself.  It is, rather, the logical outcome of hundreds of millions of politicized decisions by the ought-to-be-enforcers of the immigration laws.  Imagine if hundreds of millions of people and institutions simply refused to comply with the Internal Revenue Code.  Imagine if banks refused to produce and keep the financial records necessary to track taxpayers’ transactions; imagine if employers simply destroyed their payroll records after each pay period, and refused to remit income or payroll taxes.  Imagine if everyone simply stopped filing returns.  Imagine if all this went on, not for a season or two, but for decades.  Imagine that all this went on with the active connivance of the Internal Revenue Service.  Now, would it be intellectually or morally defensible to say that the Internal Revenue Code “has been broken for decades”?  Bullshit!  And the same response is due the claim that the immigration system is “broken,” unless by “broken,” you mean that the laws have been openly, flagrantly, and with the encouragement of government broken.  Well, yes, the immigration laws have been broken.  And for years the Fifteenth Amendment, prohibiting the denial of voting rights based upon the color of one’s skin, was openly and with the active cooperation of government “broken.”  Where is the principled argument that we should have, in the 1960s, and in lieu of adopting and ferociously enforcing the Voting Rights Act, just rolled over and allowed the South to continue on as before?

But will the RevTrib Supreme Court formally rule that, gosh darn it, this is Just So Important, and when Something is So Important, the president has the inherent power to put in place whatever program he deems expedient?  I’ll remind Gentle Reader that James II’s blanket exemptions from the religious disability laws were a principal reason (although not the final: that was the birth of a male heir) for the erosion of support which ended in the Glorious Revolution.  But will we have formally announced, with all the gravity that can be mustered by an institution which has so far beclowned itself as to rule that homosexual “marriage” is a fundamental right guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, that when the president deems something sufficiently important, the allocation of “all” (not some, most, or “generally”) “legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States” is no longer operative?

We might call such a notion the “Constitutional Omission Doctrine,” and set it forth as follows:  “If the president shall deem an issue sufficiently important, and if the Congress shall refuse to enact such legislation as the president shall deem necessary or expedient to address such issue, then the president may act in such fashion as the president shall deem appropriate, and such action shall have the force of law.”  That is pretty much the position taken by Dear Leader and his supporters.  We have an “immigration crisis,” with a “system that is broken,” and Congress refuses to act because of “partisan gridlock,” and therefore the president has the inherent “authority to act when Congress won’t.”  Because obviously the constitution’s drafters must never have imagined that Congress and the president might disagree on a matter of significant policy.  It’s just plain as day that they never intended that the federal government might be unable to act as a president thinks it ought to act because Congress has decided an issue contrary to the president’s desires.  And if they never intended that situation to come to pass, then the conclusion is inescapable that they obviously meant to include a provision in the constitution granting the president that authority, and the fact that the drafters included no such provision is merely an oversight, a mistake.  Like defining “state” such that you can’t shoe-horn “Department of Health and Human Services” into it.  Since we have a “living document” on our hands (all those silly little words about how the document may be amended are merely illustrative of one alternative method among many, after all), the fact that a fail-safe clause is nowhere to be found in the words the drafters actually used is no impediment to our now, 226 years later, recognizing that the president in fact has such a power.

I would caution the RevTrib Supreme Court against recognizing any such authority.  Once you recognize the ability of one branch to bypass another and exercise legally binding power over an issue or set of issues which the document on its face places squarely within the remit of another branch, what is then to prevent the doctrine’s application to the RevTrib Supreme Court itself?  Obviously, after all, the drafters never intended to create a situation in which a number of unelected, unaccountable nincompoops would usurp the expressed policy decisions of the legislative and executive branches.  I mean, the whole point of freeing ourselves from a monarchy, an prohibiting titles of nobility, was precisely to ensure we never became the playthings of a court and court party.

For example, consider the Defense of Marriage Act.  Passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and enthusiastically signed by a president from the party not in control of Congress, the RevTrib Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional.  We ignore the argument over whether the statute was a good idea in the first place.  Reasonable minds can differ in good faith as to whether the federal government needs to get into the business of deciding who is married and who is not, at least for purposes of federal laws where the marital status of an individual is a relevant determination.  Reasonable minds can differ in good faith as to whether marriage-is-what-you-call-it is a good policy position (I think it’s a bad policy position).  But the reasonableness and good faith of people on either side of those sorts of arguments played no part in the RevTrib Supreme Court decision.  According to it, the American people, acting through their lawfully elected representatives and approved by their lawfully elected president, did not have the right to decide the issue as they did, because the constitution does not permit that substantive outcome.

But hist!  Let us now apply the Constitutional Omission Doctrine to this dispute.  Congress determines that the RevTrib Supreme Court got its decision on the Defense of Marriage Act wrong, and because the drafters obviously intended to grant Congress the power to correct flagrantly bad court decisions (really? can it be that the drafters desired that a decision once blown should remain blown for all time, until the very institution that buggered it up climbs down and admits as much?), be it and it hereby is declared that the decision in this-that-or-the-other-case is reversed, set aside, and for naught held.  See how simple that was?  About as simple as the Democrat-controlled Congress in the late 1950s or early 1960s just un-doing Brown v. Board of Education.  Woo-hoo!  Plessy is once again the law of the land.  Gentle Reader can come of with just about any number of parade-of-horribles decisions that might fall prey to the doctrine, to the consternation of whatever group(s) or interest(s).

But Gentle Reader will tax me with hyperventilation.  Of course no Congress would ever do such a thing!  It would be politically impossible!  Never come to pass.  People would never stand for it!  And so forth.  And no administration would ignore the repeated cries for help of its overseas ambassadors, then stand by idly while an American ambassador was slaughtered like a dog and literally dragged through the streets, then send multiple representatives to lie repeatedly to the American public about why it happened.  No administration would ever weaponize the federal tax gathering apparatus to shut down the political affiliations of its political opponents, then instruct its senior administrators to destroy evidence and lie to Congress about its destruction.  We’d never have an administration concoct an attack on two U.S. warships — when no opposing forces were ever in the area on the night in question — and use that non-existent attack to obtain an authorization to wage years of undeclared but very much real war halfway around the globe.  [I’m referring, by the way, to the Gulf of Tonkin “Incident,” the non-existence of the second “attack” of which is related by no less personage than Vice Adm. Stockdale, who was in the air over the Maddox and Turner Joy that night, and in whose book he unambiguously states that the second “attack,” used by LBJ to get the Tonkin Gulf Resolution passed, never happened.  He had been named in the European edition (but not, significantly, the Pacific edition) of Stars and Stripes as having been present on the scene, and he spent the entirety of his long captivity terrified that his captors would get hold of a copy of that edition, see his name, and torture out of him his recollections of that night.  But they never did.]

Who are we to say what some future president and Congress may or may not do?

The last sentence in the last book of the last volume of The Gulag Archipelago reads:  “There is no law.”  The present administration, aided joyfully by the present constellation of the RevTrib Supreme Court, have marched us a good way down that same path.  Here’s hoping they have the minimal integrity not to take us that last step.

Carousel of History?

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We may hope not.

Over at Instapundit, a link, via Ed Driscoll, to a piece by one of my favorite linkees (is that a word, even?), viz. Victor Davis Hanson, “A Tale of Two Shootings“.

[N.b.  Hanson, whom I’m mostly familiar with via the internet, is a very accomplished classical historian, with a heavy sideline in military history.  I recently read — it was borrowed, so I had to return it, much to my chagrin — his The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny, a comparative history of Epimanondas’s conquest of Sparta, Sherman’s march through Georgia, and Patton’s march through France in 1944.  Fascinating stuff.]

Be all that as it may, Hanson looks at two shootings:  the first, in 2014 of the violent criminal Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, and the second of Kathryn Steinle, in San Francisco.  Brown was black; Steinle was white.  Brown had just committed a robbery; Steinle was walking down a pier with her father.  Brown had just attacked and attempted to seize the weapon of the police officer who had matched him to a minutes-old radio alert of the robbery, and was shot dead in his tracks , from the front, while charging the officer.  Steinle was shot dead in the back while . . . well, while walking with her father, minding her own business.  Brown was shot by a police officer; Steinle was shot by a multiple-convicted felon whose very presence in the United States constituted a crime.  The police officer who shot Brown was white; the convicted felon who shot Steinle was Mexican, an illegal alien.

After Brown was killed in the midst of his attempted third felony of that day (first: robbery; second: attacking and attempting to steal weapon from law enforcement officer; third: second attempt to attack and steal weapon from same), Dear Leader’s administration and his political allies very carefully stoked the fires of racial hatred, and Ferguson burned.  After Steinle was shot dead by the felon who was very intentionally released by the City of San Francisco in spite of a request by federal authorities that they hold him until he could be deported (this would have been his sixth deportation), there were . . . crickets.

Hanson has the temerity once more to point out the very different treatment of the two killings, one indisputably justified (Brown’s), and the other (Steinle’s) indisputably an abomination, all but engineered by the left-extremists in the San Francisco city government.

Maybe VDH didn’t want to violate Godwin’s Law, which holds that the longer an internet discussion goes on, the closer to 1.0 approaches the probability that someone will make an explicit comparison to the Nazi era.  But since Hanson put up his post yesterday, and today is November 9, I’m going to do the belly-flop for him.

On November 9, 1938, Germany exploded.  Well, to be more precise, a segment of Germany exploded.  That segment was the segment represented by synagogues and Jewish businesses.  They were torched, their owners and congregants beaten, in many cases beaten to death.  There was so much broken glass in the streets from smashed windows that the Germans knew it as “Kristallnacht,” or “crystal night.”  Here’s the Wikipedia entry, for those curious.

Why did Victor Davis Hanson’s post on the political reaction, and the carefully orchestrated violence, in response to Michael Brown’s death put me in mind of November 9, 1938?  Because Kristallnacht too was a highly orchestrated orgy of violence in response to a single killing.  Ernst vom Rath was a German diplomat stationed in Paris.  On the morning of November 7, 1938, a Polish Jew then living in Paris a teenager, Herschel Grynszpan (he had fled Germany in 1936; after his arrest he stated that he acted to avenge the news that his parents were being deported from Germany back to Poland), shot him five times.  Rath died on November 9, by which time the Nazi powers had had time to organize “spontaneous” demonstrations of outrage inside Germany.

The destruction of November 9, 1938, was no less “spontaneous” than the observances surrounding the announcement that officer Darren Wilson, the police officer who successfully defended himself from Michael Brown, would not be indicted for any criminal offense.

Carousels are circular.  Stand in one place long enough and everything you’ve seen before you’ll see again.  Sort of makes you wonder, doesn’t it, what else from the 1930s and 40s we’re going to see again in the coming years?  Holodomor?  Molotov-Ribbentrop?  Munich? (Dear Leader sure made a run at that last by handing the Iranian mullahs a green light for nuclear weaponry.)  Greater Southeast Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere?

Sobering thinking, it is.

[N.b.  I don’t know whether I’ve pointed it out before on this ‘umble blog, but November 9 is a date pregnant with significance in German history.  In 1918, the German republic was proclaimed and the Kaiser abdicated; in 1923, the Beer Hall Putsch failed; in 1938, they put on Kristallnacht; in 1940, Neville Chamberlain, the man who more than any other enabled Hitler to become the continental-scale monster he did, finally died; and, in 1989, the Berlin Wall, the physical embodiment of the war’s outcome, came down.  Can’t make this stuff up.]