Author Archives: Countrylawyer

From the Dept. of Well, Isn’t This What You Wanted?

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A couple of weeks ago, a police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina pulled over a car for having a broken tail light.

The police car’s on-board camera shows the officer go to the driver’s window and retrieve the driver’s license.  While the officer is running the license and tags, the driver panics, gets out, and runs.  Chase ensues, followed by scuffle.  Driver then hoofs it again and the police officer squeezes off eight rounds at an unarmed fleeing man.  At least one round strikes the driver’s heart and he falls dead.

Why did the driver run in the first place?  We can guess at why he might have run the second, fatal time.  He’d just had a physical altercation with a police officer.  But why the first time?  The car wasn’t stolen.  He wasn’t driving without a valid license.  He wasn’t wanted for any sort of drug- or violence-related crime.  He was a gainfully employed father of four.  Why did he run?  Obviously we can’t ask him now.

What we do know is that there were outstanding warrants for his arrest.  For unpaid child support.

I have not seen the victim’s court files, of course, and so I cannot tell you whether he had been held in civil contempt of court for failure to pay, or in criminal contempt, or both.  I don’t practice domestic law in any event, and so I have no way of telling what sort of experience he had awaiting him if he had been successfully nabbed instead of shot down like an animal.

Cue the squawks about “debtor’s prison.”

By this is meant the imprisonment of people for failure to pay money.  Of course there’s a verbal sleight-of-hand going on when you hear the left-extremists use the expression.  Genuine debtors’ prisons were prisons where you were locked up for failure to pay your lawful debts . . . to private creditors.  With one exception, on which more later, what are now being referred to as “debtors’ prisons” by the left-extremists at shops like the Puffington Host are the mechanisms for the incarceration of people who have not paid the government money.  Usually — with that one exception — what we’re talking about are criminal fines, fees, and costs, the responsibility for which is imposed as a matter of law in connection with conviction of a criminal offense or a plea arrangement in which the inducement is avoiding either a conviction on one’s record or incarceration for a conviction.  In other words, these are not people who have to go borrow some money from a title-pawn outfit to pay for the week’s groceries, discover they can’t pay, and end up in jail on a revolving basis.  These are people who have been charged with a crime and, in order to avoid the risk of even longer incarceration they agree to some sort of arrangement, maybe but not necessarily involving a guilty plea, but nearly always involving some kind of probation, for a period of time.  And they promise to pay court costs, any criminal fines, as well as the fees and expenses of the probation process (not infrequently contracted to private service providers).

Let’s leave apart the question whether the state should be contracting any portion of what is, after all, inherently a function of sovereignty — the imposition of criminal penalties.  Let’s ignore for the sake of argument whether the crimes with which these people are charged even ought to be crimes in the first place.  In point of fact until the relevant statutes are repealed they are crimes, lawfully proscribed behavior as determined by elected representatives of the people.  The people caught in the toils of the system are in fact people whose behavior has been sufficiently objectionable as to come into contact with the criminal justice system.  [Aside:  We are also ignoring for the sake of argument the phenomenon of grotesque over-charging, so tellingly portrayed in Instapundit’s own “Ham Sandwich Nation,” a practice that reliably produces guilty or similar pleas by people who in fact may well be not guilty of the crime to which they plea — or even any crime at all — but who dare not risk the decade or more in hard time if they go to trial on all the litany of offenses they’ve been charged with.]

I will admit that it is perfectly within reason to debate the idea of whether how we finance our criminal justice system is a good idea or a bad idea.  Reasonable people can in good faith disagree on whether this fines-costs-fees hamster wheel that in practice seems to feed on itself, as criminal defendants/convicts can’t pay the freight, thereby getting re-arrested, with more costs, more fines, more fees, and so forth, is a net benefit to society or not.  I will also join ranks with those who execrate places like Ferguson, Missouri, where they in exactly so many words decided to use their municipal criminal court to pay for their city, instead of taxes.

But what about that exception?

Well, yes.  That exception is unpaid child support.  The reason why the victim in South Carolina had warrants for his arrest.  Those debts are in fact owed to a private party — usually the mother.  Of course, if the mother is receiving government benefits, then federal law requires the state to seek to recover those benefits from all persons who are liable for the support of the child for whom the benefits are being paid.  As a taxpayer I don’t have any problem with this at all.  Why should some useless slug force me to pay for his baby-momma while he hangs around on the street corner drinking out of a paper bag or shooting dice in a government-provided apartment’s kitchen?

Does Gentle Reader remember one of the most popular hand-writing causes of the 1980s and 1990s — the Deadbeat Dad?  Almost weekly if not more often we got to hear horror stories about women struggling to raise children whom the fathers simply refused to support.  The fathers just walked out and point-blank refused to chip in anything, whether or not they had the ability to pay.  And the courts were letting them deadbeat dads get away it!!  I can no longer recall anywhere near the sheer number of articles in the newspaper, in news magazines, on the television which I saw on how awful it was that The Law Wasn’t Making These Fathers Pay.

And you know what?  There was a tremendous amount of truth in those stories and the conclusions we were asked to draw about the system.  The court system was egregiously lax in forcing parents of otherwise indigent children to pay up, and most of those delinquent parents were fathers.  I could spit-ball any number of theories as to why that might have been so, but for whatever reason the System was doing it, the reality was that if you were a mother of a child to whose father you were not married, you had precious few effective remedies if that father told you to go pound sand, he wasn’t paying.

And you know what else?  The legislatures and the bench listened.  Special agencies were set up, or special task forces within existing agencies were set up, the sole mission of which was to pursue deadbeat dads — and all at taxpayer expense, not at the expense of the single mother, by the way — to go after the deadbeats.  Judges got measurably less forgiving.  I still recall one day sitting in court, waiting for my client’s case to be called.  Ahead of us on the docket was a child support matter.  The father was attempting to convince the judge that your honor I Just Can’t Pay This.  The judge looked at him and said, “You don’t have to work but a half a day, and I don’t care whether it’s the first twelve hours or the second twelve hours, but you’re going to support your child.  Do you understand me?”  Another judge around here was widely known at contempt hearings for adjourning a 9:00 a.m. hearing to the 1:00 p.m. docket, and telling the respondent parent, “We’re going to adjourn this hearing until one o’clock.  At one o’clock I want you back in front of me with one of two things:  A check for <however many dollars> or your toothbrush.  Do you understand me?”  And as that same judge was wont to observe, it’s amazing how many people managed to find a money stump between 10:15 a.m. and 1:00 p.m.

So it was the South Carolina legislature’s and bench’s response to what was a very real problem that provided the background for what happened in North Charleston the other day.  Without the aggressive enforcement of child support orders, that shooting victim would not have had arrest warrants outstanding, would likely not have fled from the police or got in a fight with the officer, and would be alive and well today.  On the other hand, he can be viewed as a regrettable casualty, collateral damage, so to speak, in a battle that is much larger than he is.  It is not unreasonable or heartless or cruel to suggest that the damage avoided by that same aggressive enforcement mechanism — the systematic economic neglect and abandonment of children — is of sufficient social importance that, while we must regret this man’s death, and while we must punish vigorously the officer who gunned down an unarmed fleeing man, we still must not allow the tragedy of his death to cloud our judgment of why he needed to have those arrest warrants out.

It is simply an unfortunate truth that most of us are no better than we need to be.  Without the knowledge that non-payment equals jail time, there are just too many fathers out there who will refuse to pitch in to house, clothe, and feed their own children.  If that fear of jail time expresses itself in some non-compliant fathers not in a willingness to pay but rather in decisions to engage in demonstrably foolish behavior, like running from a cop, getting into a fist fight with him, then running again, I humbly suggest that is a price that we as a society should be willing to pay.

[Update 10:35 a.m., 21 Apr 15]:  The New York Times weighs in with an article on the dynamics of effective enforcement of child support orders.  Perhaps unusually for the NYT, the headline actually captures the essence of the process:  “Skip Child Support.  Go to Jail.  Lose Job.  Repeat.”  That about says it.

The article gives some sense of the treadmill aspect of it.  Get behind on your support payments.  Get hauled into court.  If the court determines you have the ability to pay and didn’t, then you go to jail for some period of time.  While you are inside, your employer fires you, so that when you come out you have no income to catch back up on the support obligation, which continued to accrue while you were inside.  And so forth.

I’d like to press, however, on a couple of points brought out in the article.

The initial one is that the North Charleston shooting victim, Walter Scott, lost “the best job [he] ever had” over a failure to pay support, by getting locked up for failure to pay.  That “best job” was paying him $35,000 a year in Charleston, South Carolina in around 2001-02 (to judge by the time line stated in the article).  Listen up, chief:  I was living in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1991, making right around that same $35,000, and you could more than just get by on that income.  I strongly question whether that situation would have changed by 2002.  For that matter, $35,000 is to this day right around the national median household (not per capita) income for a family of four.  So what precisely was Walter Scott doing with his $35,000 per year other than supporting his four children?  I’m going to need some convincing that his stepping onto that treadmill was someone’s fault other than his own.

The second is a bit harsher on Comrade Scott.  Apparently the mother of his first two children (born out of wedlock; the latter pair were born to his wife, from whom he later separated) was on the public tit, and Scott resented it.  Well yes, I perfectly understand that.  But this isn’t a playground argument over who has got more time on the teeter-totter.  This is about an obligation — to support your children to the best of your ability — that exists independently of anyone else’s efforts.  Just like to point that out.

The final point in the article I’d like to weigh in on is this statement:  “But experts said problems could arise when such tactics were used against people who had little money, and the vast majority of unpaid child support is owed by the very poor.  A 2007 Urban Institute study child support debt in nine large states found that 70 percent of the arrears were owed by people who reported less than $10,000 a year in income.”  Here’s a link to the study; the relevant chart is on page 22.  People who “reported”; get it?  Make that “self-reported” and you get closer to the truth of the matter.  That study draws its data from child support numbers matched to national quarterly wage and unemployment insurance data.  As the study itself honestly points out:  “Although obligors may not have reported quarterly wages or unemployment insurance, it does not mean they do not have the ability to pay any child support. Some of these obligors may be employed in areas that are not covered by quarterly wage data, such as those who are self-employed or independent contractors. Others may be working in covered industries, but they are working under the table to avoid paying taxes or child support. Still others may be engaged in illegal activities.”  Working under the table precisely to avoid paying taxes and child support?  Gee whiz, Sherlock, what was your first clue?

I once saw pointed out, many years ago and in a different context, the basic fact that you simply cannot rely on reported income figures to obtain a meaningful picture of any aspect of life in modern America.  Among the more pernicious effects of byzantine tax and employment regulations is a black-market economy that is truly staggering in its scope.  No; if you want to find out how much Group X is making, you have to measure their spending, not their reported income.  Someone who regularly spends $3,000 a month and reports income of $400 a week is lying.  Thus the Urban Institute’s (and the NYT‘s) picture of the child support system unfairly standing on the neck of the down-trodden, locking up men who truly, genuinely cannot pay to support their children, needs to be taken with several heaping tablespoons of salt.

Every lawyer out there who has practiced domestic law for so much as three weeks is familiar with the deadbeat parent who shows up in a recently-purchased, very nicely appointed vehicle, whose iPhone 6 is clipped to his belt, whose Facebook page shows him off doing his hobby (fishing on his bass boat, golfing, at the beach with New Girlfriend, or otherwise doing things that undeniably cost money), whom you’ll see cutting his yard on his zero-turn mower (check out what even a used one of those costs), and so forth.  He’s working for cash, frequently in construction, landscaping, or some other hard-to-pin-down trade.  Oh! but he’s “disabled,” walking into court on a cane . . . right before he goes out to tune up his tree stand for deer season.  Cry me a river.

I suppose it’s easy to tell where I shake out on the sympathy spectrum in respect of Walter Scott and his peers.  He sure as hell didn’t deserve to get killed, and certainly not like he was killed, but he gets very, very points from me about the arrest warrants that appear to have triggered his flight from that police officer.  And by the way, if he exhibited as poor decision-making skills in respect of his child support obligations as he did in running from, fighting with, and then again running from a police officer, just how much of a surprise can it be that he got and remained side-ways with the system?

Things That Must be Repudiated

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Today is April 20.  On this day in 1889 Alois Hitler and his wife had a baby boy.  They named him Adolf.

Yes, it is downright weird to imagine a pudgy little bundle of smiles and drool, playing with mommy’s fingers as she feeds him and tries to get him to eat his vegetables (little Adolf of course grew up to become among history’s more prominent vegetarians).

Allow me to state that I don’t think anyone will ever know, in the sense of understanding at any meaningful level, how Hitler became Hitler (or how another Adolf — Eichmann — became Adolf Eichmann).  I sure as hell don’t think that anyone will ever understand how an entire people could so take leave of its senses as joyfully (and they did it joyfully) to follow the Nazis down the path they did.  I do not think the reasoning human mind is capable of understanding evil of that depth.  I’m not even sure the people who stood by the roadside, throwing up the Nazi salute and screaming themselves hoarse as the big open-top Mercedes crawled past with the brown-haired little man with the odd haircut and funny moustache standing in the back, returning their salutes, could explain it, even if only to themselves, afterward.

Godwin’s Law has become something of an insider’s reference in the internet.  Very briefly summarized, it holds that as the length of discussion of any topic increases, the probability approaches 1.0 that someone will make a comparison to Hitler and/or the Nazis.  As a rule of thumb, this is the point at which further discussion becomes pointless, and in fact marginal intellectual return on investment turns negative.  On the other hand, the historical fact of the Nazi party’s trajectory, and the sinister enigma at its center, in fact do spread a smorgasbord for meaningful moral comparison and reflection.  I mean, generally speaking, if you find yourself proposing a moral or political position which was propounded by the Nazis, you’re very likely doing something wrong.

There are other helpful Just Don’t Go There reference points out there in history.  The other day I got to listen to someone inveighing against abolishing the federal estate tax.  I pointed out to my interlocutor all the flaws, financial, legal, practical, and moral about keeping this idiotic tax in place.  And I finally observed that if your support for keeping an extortionate tax on gratuitous transfers is just to suppress some group of society (in this case, the successful, whether they built their success on their own or not), then you’re proposing to use the tax system to punish individuals and that’s no different from how Medieval Europe treated its Jewish population.  “As a general rule, if you find yourself supporting something that closely aligns with how the medieval Europeans treated the Jews, you’re doing something wrong.”

But the spectacle of perhaps the most over-educated, hyper-cultural, super-literate society on the planet (I once saw a comparison of literacy rates among the major combatants in World War I; the Germans were head and shoulders above everyone else) willingly embracing that system just provides such grotesqueries as to be unsurpassed as a source of admonitory comparison.  I mean, how likely are we here in the U.S. to be able to draw any useful inferences from Mao’s Great Leap Forward at any but the most abstract level?  American society has never looked like mid-20th Century China.  Ever.  Not even when Jamestown was starving to death in the early years.  The vicious, degraded, semi-savage settlements that Charles Woodmason visited, and about which he so scathingly wrote, didn’t resemble that China.  Even the Russia that became the Soviet Union is sufficiently far removed from what Western Civilization has ever been that it’s hard to understand the parallels even when we observe them.

But the Germans under Hitler?  The reason why those comparisons sting is that like it or not the Germans are us.  Something like 40% of the U.S. population claims some sort of German descent.  Our university system is patterned on the Prussian model.  The modern welfare state traces its origins to 1881 when Otto von Bismarck established the first comprehensive social security system.  The outdoors Sunday as a day of healthful recreation, including especially physical recreation, in the open air is a creature of German immigrants; until then the Scotch-Irish and English had decreed that Proper Folk glumly sat around all day, reading from the Bible or being hectored in church.  We herd our tiny tots into kindergarten. We instinctively reverence our professoriate, even when its constituents have long since forfeited any reasonable claim to that deference.  And so forth.

So here I’m going to violate Godwin’s Law.

Modern left-extremist America has joyfully embraced the notion of society not atomized into individuals who may freely combine to form (and yeah, I know this analogy is clumsy, but it’s valid) compounds whose properties are not only different from their individuals elements but wonderfully, usefully so, but rather compulsorily grouped into tribes of mutually repellent elements.  The left-extremists (and here I would remind Gentle Reader that all leftists are inherently extremist) not only postulate that everyone is the member of a tribe, but they vehemently deny that the tribes can ever belong together, or mix in mutually beneficial ways.  For that matter, “mutually beneficial” is a concept they do not recognize.  In their cosmology, for any tribe to advance necessarily implies the diminution of the other tribes.  The notion that your prosperity is no cause of my misfortune thus violates a fundamental premise.  The recent silliness at a convention of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs is — while thoroughly, thoroughly silly — still perfectly emblematic.  Likewise the White Privilege Conference (I thought it was a joke when I first came across reference to it, but it’s real . . . all too real).

Compare and contrast Point No. 4 of the Nazi party program, adopted on February 24, 1920:

“4. Staatsbürger kann nur sein, wer Volksgenosse ist. Volksgenosse kann nur sein, wer deutschen Blutes ist, ohne Rücksichtnahme auf Konfession. Kein Jude kann daher Volksgenosse sein.”

Here’s an English translation of the whole platform.  Point No. 4 is rendered: “4.  Only those who are our fellow countrymen can become citizens. Only those who have German blood, regardless of creed, can be our countrymen. Hence no Jew can be a countryman.”

The Nazis’ official position and the modern left-extremist position coincide beautifully.  The world is divided into groups who do not overlap, whose interests cannot overlap, who can never be each other’s fellows.  Each requires for its actualization the suppression of the other(s).

In fact, examine very closely all of the specific demands of that 25-point program.  How many of them would or would not be applauded at an Elizabeth Warren rally?  At an Occupy gathering?  At a conclave of Dear Leader’s closest advisers in the Oval Office?

I’m afraid I just busted Godwin’s Law all over the floor.  My apologies.  But the fact remains:  If you agree with the Nazis, you’re very likely doing something wrong.

More Evidence, as if Needed

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That, as Instapundit has observed on many occasions, incentives work, even perverse incentives.

One of the many reasons I enjoy reading the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (other than in order to slow the atrophy of my language skills) is because from time to time they’ll have an article or series of articles on issues which we have to contend with here in the U.S.  Only here in the U.S., and especially since the advent of Dear Leader on the scene, you can’t discuss much of anything without the toxin of “race” being injected into the conversation.  Unless your position is to crank open the money spigots without condition and without consideration for the future — societal, financial, political — you’re a racist.  So it’s nice to eavesdrop on a conversation where “race” doesn’t render the substance of the debate into something like the the bastard child (no pun intended) of a fraud and a farce.  [Of course, in Germany they have, instead of “race,” the “immigration” issue that is increasingly accomplishing much the same corruption of logic.]

In Germany the national equivalent of America’s federal welfare system is referred to as “Hartz IV,” referring presumably to . . . well, whatever it refers to.  As near as I can make it out, it encompasses the whole panoply of direct transfer payments, subsidies of services, and in-kind benefits.  If I understand correctly (this may not be correct, so don’t hold me to it) it was a consolidation and rationalization of multiple formerly independently administered programs, and may have been an outgrowth of the same considerations and meta-policy decisions which produced the liberalization of the German labor and the tightening of the retirement laws back towards the beginning of the century.  Those were the economic reforms which enabled Germany to weather the 2008 melt-down much better than America, an experience which only cemented the predominance of the German economy in the EU.  Interestingly, perhaps ironically, those reforms were initiated by the SPD government then in power, a government in which several key players had been involved — some very prominently — in the 1968 student protests, which were of course explicitly Marxist in inspiration and goals.

Reality is powerful medicine indeed, even if some societies, e.g. Greece, seem to have built up immunity to it.

In any event, the FAZ recently ran a very short article to the effect that more children under the age of 15 are living off of Hartz IV than at any point in the last five years, and that fully half of them are children of single parents.  Specifically, 1.6 million under the age of 15 now derive their subsistence from the state.

Five years ago was of course 2010, in the depths of the crash.  Germany didn’t escape it, but thanks to Angela Merkel’s refusal to follow Dear Leader down the path of limitless borrowing and pouring sand down rat-holes of “shovel-ready projects” (remember them, Gentle Reader?), it didn’t hit there with anything like the ferocity it did here.  Of course, Germany also didn’t have Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac consciously inflating a fraudulent housing boom, either.  In any event Germany came out of it much faster, much stronger, and the long-term effects of it seem to be much less than here.

So why has the number of children completely dependent on the state mushroomed?

Maybe it’s something as simple as when you offer people money to do things that are actually self-destructive, things they might under other circumstances avoid doing or at least defer doing — you know, like having a child out of wed-lock, or before you acquire a trade, or before you have any financial cushion built up — you get more of that behavior across the overall population than you used to.  Maybe.  Although in any particular instance you might point to any number of specific motivations, Gentle Reader must keep in mind that we’re talking about the laws of very large numbers.  Anecdote and pattern are different things; it’s why we use different words for them.

The comments to the article run from the predictable on one end to the predictable on the other.  It’s all capitalism’s fault.  It’s welfare queens.  It’s all the indigent immigrants we’re letting in with their swarms of indigent children.  It’s the dead-beat dads.  It’s our need for cheap oil (ergo: it’s fossil fuel’s fault, and therefore . . . Koch Brothers!!).  And so forth.

Articles like this one, and discussions like the one intimated in the comments, are helpful to keep in mind as we think through the same issues in the U.S.  Here’s the apparent paradox:  Increasingly generous benefits for poor children and their unmarried parents, combined with a shrinking population and repeated lamentations by industry that they can’t find good help seem to exist side-by-side with increasing and record numbers of poor children and unmarried parents.  And all without “the legacy of slavery” or the disintegration of the Black Family or “structural racism” to blame it on.  Perhaps something else is going on?  Like maybe incentives work?  Who’da thunk it?

Human nature is, after all, universal, a reality which not seldom escapes even otherwise unusually perceptive people.

Bang the Tin Drum Slowly, Ch. 2: Some Answers, Some Questions

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I’d thought of doing this as an update to my earlier post on the death of Günter Grass, but as it turned out longer than I’d planned, I figured I’ll just do it as a separate post.

The question about whether Grass’ Waffen-SS unit engaged in war crimes is not an idle one.  In today’s FAZ we have a report on an appearance at the University of Frankfurt by one Robert Hébras, who was among the very few survivors of the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane in Limousin.  On June 10, 1944 units of the Waffen-SS armored division Das Reich rolled into town, herded the townspeople into the square, separated the men from the women and children, and then proceeded to massacre 642 innocent civilians.  The men were shot in the lower body after being crowded into in a barn, which was then set on fire over their heads.  The women and children were burned alive in a church (and shot if they tried to escape the flames).  Here’s the Wikipedia write-up on the event; it does not mention a single hanging among the perps.  Shameful.  Did Grass have anything remotely like this on his conscience?  Even a random civilian bicyclist stood against a tree and gunned down?  Maybe a gang-rape of one of the eastern Untermenschen?

It appears that at least someone in fact has attempted to figure out just what the 10th SS Armored Division (“Frundsberg,” named after a famous 16th Century commander who directed his cavalry to get off their horses and fight on foot, after the fashion of the Swiss) was up to.  It was formed in 1943, with the bulk of its recruits coming from the Reichsarbeitdienst, the labor organization into which Grass was drafted.  So that would seem to bolster rather than cast doubt on his claim he was a draftee into the Waffen-SS.

We do know something of the division’s next-to-last commander (up until May 1, 1944, in other words well before Grass would have joined the unit):  Karl von Treuenfeld was a material participant in the 1942 retaliatory crimes against the Czechs for the killing of Reinhard (“Hangman”) Heydrich (q.v: Lidice).  After getting cross-ways with the Gestapo later, he was transferred to the Waffen-SS.  Eventually he was captured by the Americans in Italy, and committed suicide in 1946.  Men with clean consciences had nothing to fear from the Americans in 1946, although it isn’t clear whether what suggested to him avoiding too narrow an inquiry into his war-time deeds was on the one hand his participation in massacring Czechs or on the other his actions in command of the armored unit, or both.

In early summer 1944 the division had been transferred from the Eastern Front to northern France, where among other jobs it was involved in resolving the Falaise Pocket battles.  How it behaved itself in northern France is at least hinted at by its last commander’s receipt, in 1984, of a commemorative medal from the city of Bayeux (of the tapestry) “in the spirit of Franco-German reconciliation.”  It is difficult to think that a French city would so honor the commander of any enemy unit which had earned the reputation for serious misbehavior towards the civilian population.

In December, 1944 the unit participated in defeating Operation Market Garden, its commander receiving swords to go with his earlier award of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross.

We next see the division around Colmar in January-February, 1945, fighting against the U.S. 6th Army in the Colmar Pocket.  Grass may well have been with the unit by this point.

After that the unit was transferred to the area of Cottbus, in the far east of what became the Soviet Occupation Zone East Germany, where its peculiar job was to stand by to mount a rescue operation to Berlin to grab Hitler out from in front of the Soviets, a mission which never came to pass.

About the only thing that can be said with certainty is that during the time when we know Grass would have been with his unit, it was stationed in Germany or in areas which Germany viewed as its own (e.g. Colmar).  Thus there would have been much diminished opportunity for doings such as Oradour-sur-Glane.  On the other hand in the late winter and spring of 1945, as Nazi Germany was coming apart at the seams, with hostile armies over-running its borders east and west, we must bear in mind it was awash in slave laborers, prisoners of war held in slavery, and political prisoners and offenders (as tyrannies circle the toilet bowl they if anything step up their repressive measures against their own populations).  This was a time in Germany when you could find yourself shot more or less summarily for “defeatism” if you observed that the “Final Victory” seemed somewhat less likely now that your town, well inside Germany proper, was within ear-shot of the Soviet artillery barrage.  It was a time in which prisoner camps were liquidated, the inmates shot and burned and the facilities razed; in which factories were destroyed to deny them to the enemy (and their slave labor forces likewise either marched off barefoot in the dead of winter or shot outright).  There would, in other words, have been ample opportunity for Grass to have participated in atrocities, atrocities which have never seen the light of day.

Complicating things is that there is no extant official war diary for the unit.  For the internal workings of the unit and its constituent units we’re more or less cast upon third-party sources or the veterans’ own narratives.  History is not only written by the victors; it’s written by the survivors generally. Anyone want to bet how many surviving veterans of the Frundsberg Division there were in 2006, when Grass finally poked his head up out of his biographical burrow?   How much of the Frundsbergers’ history has been written out of existence by its survivors?  You have to assume that the men in the unit, to the extent that they privately recorded any misdeeds, would have found it expedient for those written records to disappear after the war.  Likewise they would have joined the German national omerta about their war-time activities, and so not be eager to mention too loudly their personal recollections (like Grass, in other words).

How many potential third-party witnesses would there have been in 2006?  Where prisoners and slaves were liquidated there would be no survivors to tell the tale.  In areas where the civilian population had, to the extent possible, already fled there would be correspondingly fewer civilian witnesses to survive.

In the end we are left with only a concrete data point, and an inference, and a question.  Data:  For over 60 years Günter Grass repeatedly spoke and wrote about the Nazi years in Germany and Europe, without once fully and accurately describing his own participation in the events of those years.  Inference:  He had some positive reason to desire that story not be told.  Question:  What was that reason?

Unless some soldier’s diary surfaces, or that of a civilian, or a box of documents gets discovered in a barn somewhere, we may never know the answer.

 

 

Once Every 35 or so Years Won’t Spoil Me

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I have to suppose that I’ll weather the challenge to what’s left of my virtue.

Back in the 1960s, right about the time my little then-nearly-completely rural county was desegregating its schools (the last graduating class of the “colored” high school was 1964, I think), they built a new high school in the largest of the county’s five incorporated towns.  Back then the county had three high schools in different areas of the county, and each high school was very much an integral part of the social peculiarity of the part of the county it served.  My home county isn’t all that big — the only interstate highway through it has exits that happen almost exactly to coincide with its opposite borders, and those exit numbers are 19 miles apart — but for generations each part of the county was, if you were so inclined, a world unto itself.  People tended to marry within the geography; they went to church near where they lived; for decades the county was dotted with tiny one-room school houses (some of which still exist, forlornly out in the weeds); they worked in “their” part of the county, and that’s where you’ll find them buried.  There are nearly 300 family cemeteries in my tiny little county.

In the early 1970s they consolidated all of the high schools into one rather large facility located in the largest town, and the three former high schools became junior high schools, running 7th through 9th grades.  When I came through that high school in the very early 1980s there was still quite a bit of the initial culture — I don’t know if it’s the right word, really — shock aspect when each year’s 10th graders got to the county high school and suddenly there you were in class with a bunch of strangers, people whose frames of reference were to places and activities you were largely unfamiliar with.

You have to understand that back then children around these parts were, while largely “free range” within their own part of the county (in the summer time I’d vanish into the woods or wherever after breakfast and I’d be back for supper), also largely immobile in terms of other parts of the county.  If you lived up in the “north end,” there were certain creeks where you went swimming or fishing; you went on hay rides with certain families; you rode your horse on certain lands; you went hunting in specific woods and fields.  If you had a paying job, it would have been on someone’s land or in someone’s business you could ride your bike to, or bum a ride with an older sibling or neighbor (usually in the back of a pick-up truck).  Ditto in the south end, the middle, or over towards “the river.”  So in addition to never having been in school before with all these strange people, you had had very little interaction with any of them outside school.  By the time I came along the acculturation process went pretty rapidly and by the end of the second or third week of school we were all one seething mass of pimples and hormones.

All three of the former high school buildings are still school board property, and two of them in use as middle schools.  The third houses what my generation knew as the “jail school” for disciplinary hard cases, the ones a thoughtfully administered three of the best out in the hallway couldn’t adequately tune up.  The parents hated it when you got sent there because the school bus didn’t stop at that school.  The parents had to carry you there, and if your parent worked in the next large city, 45 miles in the opposite direction, that was a pain in the butt. And so it goes.

The former high school, then junior high, now middle school in the central, largest town is typically hideous late-1950s/early-1960s institutional architecture.  Looking at it you take some convincing that at one point this joint was considered sleek.  In that next city over, there are numerous much older school buildings still in use and almost without exception they exude a character that the architecture of that period just seems to lack.  It is architecture that looks like it was made — predestined from the deepest recesses of all time — to be painted institutional green.  My mother taught in that school for 142 years, and it must have been soul-crushing.

Back when it was new, however, back when boyfriends carried their girlfriends’ books, when those girlfriends would get their butt sent home if they showed up at school with a skirt above their knees and the boyfriend likewise if he showed up in a t-shirt, someone built a tiny little burger joint right across the street from it.  It was called The Frosty Jug, or simply “The Jug.”  [Aside:  Perhaps someone will as an exercise in dredging up useless trivia calculate how many hundred thousand burger-and-coke joints there are out there with that name.]  They had curb service, still, even when I was in what was by then the junior high school.  It was where those kids who didn’t have after-school jobs or chores back on the farm could congregate, poke their noses under each other’s hoods to admire the new Holly four-barrel or the breather cover, gossip, and do what teenagers back then did.  I imagine it must have looked more than a little like something from a story-board from a Happy Days script.

When they consolidated the high schools The Jug entered a decline from which it’s never really salvaged itself.  Junior high school kids seldom had jobs and therefore spending money, and so the market for The Jug dried up.  You could still go and get a greasy burger, ditto fries, a flat coke, buy a can of “dip” (i.e. “smokeless” tobacco such as Copenhagen (“Cope”) or Skoal), or play pinball on one of their beat-up machines.

By the time I was in junior high The Jug had acquired a further function, as the venue (behind the building, where you weren’t so visible from the street) for the kinds of vicious fights that would get all participants and most of the spectators thrown out of school, had they been staged on school property.  I still remember one day seeing this thug named Mike G. walking back towards the school building, his face an absolute mass of blood.  He’d been over at The Jug, where he had fought another thug, John F., and at some point John had applied his belt buckle (this was the heyday of the redneck belt buckle as big as a small hubcap) with energy and dexterity to Mike’s face.  John F. later went on to distinguish himself by getting sent to one of those teenager Gulag facilities where the parents have to sign over legal custody of the child to the jailers.  While there ol’ John made a name for himself as one of their hardest cases, ever; last I heard Mike G. was in prison somewhere.  Right, in other words, where the rest of us need him to be.

The Jug closed completely shortly after I left high school.  It was vacant for a good period, then it was any number of equally forgettable things, most recently a barber shop.

Within the past year or so someone bought the building and has re-opened it as a burger-and-coke operation.  Much smaller scale than it was, because middle schoolers have even less disposable money than junior high kids, and besides, nowadays as soon as school’s out the remorseless grind of “activity” starts, with grim-faced parents and hapless children dragooned to a never-ending series of practices, recitals, games, tournaments, exercises, and so forth.

Today, for the first time since about 1978 I think, I had a hamburger and fries at The Frosty Jug.  It was pretty good, I have to say; I’ll be back.

I must confess that before I left I crept behind the building to check.  I’m pleased to report that the ghost of John F. does not haunt The Jug.

14 April 1865

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I suppose the temptation to weigh in at least a little bit on Lincoln’s assassination, 150 years ago today, is just too great.

Even the Europeans, who can find little good to say about the U.S. except for the fact that we elected Dear Leader twice — but perversely refuse to close ranks behind him and gratefully bow our heads beneath his yoke (a continent of atheists and agnostic whispers in our ear: “His yoke is easy, and His burden is light”; have they no sense of irony?) — relax their rules about envy and scorn, for example, here, under the headline “Death of a Savior“.

Among the numerous navel-gazing questions about Lincoln and his life, the question of what would have happened to his reputation had he lived remains right up there with the most popular.  The City Point conference, between Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and Porter formed the basis for both Grant’s surrender terms to Lee and Sherman’s to Johnston.  Grant’s have been — rightly, as I think — hailed as the first step towards restoring the U.S. to a single country.  Sherman’s, which were repudiated immediately upon their becoming known, were and remain condemned as handing the farm back over to the foxes.  In truth Sherman’s terms, at least to the extent that they addressed themselves to the political reconstitution of the nation, were beyond what he was authorized to offer.

So why did Sherman, who according to a recent biography was self-admittedly most comfortable in the No. 2 Role, even when that No. 2 Role involved vast, largely-independently-exercised authority, go so far into what he must have known was forbidden territory?  Well, between Grant on April 9 and Sherman on April 18 Lincoln had been shot.

While Sherman must have known he was exceeding his authority, let us not, 150 years after the fact, and with the experiences of all that has come during that time to inform our thinking, be too eager to excoriate Sherman.  The simple fact is that in April, 1865 everyone was facing a universe of facts that had never in recorded human history converged.  For the first time — ever — a republic had successfully weathered a full-blown civil war.  The Roman republic weathered a slave insurrection, but its civil war shattered it, and in fact the next successful republic of any size, Venice, did not arise for another thousand-odd years.  The next geographically extensive republic did not arise until 1789, with the United States.

No one knew in April, 1865 how the Union was to be restored, or even whether it would be in its former form.  Certainly there were not a few voices in the North who vocally opposed re-admission of the Southern states, on any terms.  When I wrote “successfully” in the paragraph above, I said that in the sense that there was still a republic in its pre-war form . . . in the North.  That republic had not been destroyed, but no one had ever re-grafted geographically-defined rebels back onto the body politic of a subsisting republic.  The war was also “successful” in the sense that the rebellious areas had been recovered; they would not form any part of a foreign country.  But beyond that much, no one knew or could know when or if we could once again have a United States of America, covering the continent and constituted as it had been.

Moreover, we’d just shot a president.  That had never happened before, either.  The Army of Northern Virginia had laid down its arms and was in the process of disbanding.  But there were still large numbers of armed Southerners out there.  Sherman must have viewed as among his very highest priorities transforming them into formerly-armed Southerners.  Was it so unreasonable to fear that Lincoln’s killing might be used as the occasion for renewed combat, either by Southerners thinking they were back in the game or by Northerners seeking the kind of scorched-earth victory urged by dimwits like the author over at The New Republic whose article I excoriated the other day?

In any event, Sherman’s terms were rejected by the new administration and by Congress, as doubtless they would have been by Lincoln had he not been shot (of course, in that event it’s unlikely that Sherman would have offered the terms in the first place).

There are two schools of thought about how, in terms of reconstruction, a second Lincoln administration would have played out.  The first takes the saintly view that Lincoln would have multiplied the fishes and loaves and all would have come aright, with nine million illiterate, unskilled, destitute former slaves seamlessly integrated as full participants in the socio-political fabric of a society in which they’d been, a very few years before, the chattel property of the majority group.  This is a species of the same thinking that ordinary Germans and Soviets, caught up in the grinding mechanisms of their respective hells on earth, used to exclaim at the most recent outrage observed or experienced by them:  “If only the Führer knew!”  “If only Stalin knew!”

The second view — more realistic, I think — holds that Lincoln would have run aground on the shoals of a Congress which was packed with people who wanted vengeance, neither more nor less.  While the North had not experienced the demographic devastation the South did — fully one-quarter of all Southern males of military service age were dead or wounded, many maimed with arms and/or legs missing, eyes shot out, festering abscesses where bullets remained lodged in their bodies — there were full many towns across the North who could engrave the names of a large proportion of their sons on the monument out on courthouse square.  The North had to pay for its war as well, and that can’t have sat very well with the electorate.  What kind of chance would Lincoln’s overall notion to “let ’em up easy” have stood in that Congress?  Recall that Lincoln was emphatically not viewed at the time with any kind of the same reverence we hold for him.  For many people he was just another politician temporarily holding office.  Everyone who counted in the North knew that on March 4, 1869, Abe Lincoln was going back to Springfield.  In contrast, the political machine run by Simon Cameron, Lincoln’s first secretary of war and a man of whom it was said that the only thing he wouldn’t steal was a red-hot stove, lasted for years and years after the war, longer than reconstruction itself.

For that matter, how would Lincoln have reacted when his overtures toward the South were rejected, when his generosity was abused?  What would he have made of the Black Codes that swept across the landscape in the war’s aftermath?  We know for a fact that Lincoln could be, when he saw the need, just as brutal a politician as anyone who’s ever practiced the craft.  Witness how Maryland got treated at the war’s outset.  Lincoln wasn’t about to take a chance on having Washington isolated by enemy territory from the rest of the country, and so Maryland got to feel the weight of Lincoln’s boot on its neck.  Lincoln also fully approved of Sherman’s march to the sea, the sole objective of which was the civilian population and its means of support.  Is there any reason to suppose that a victorious Lincoln, having let ’em up easy only to get kicked smartly in his shins for his trouble, would have reacted with any greater forbearance towards those who kicked him?  It’s not at all inconceivable that, so far from burning his political capital to ram-rod a gentle settlement down the Congressional throat, Lincoln would have in response to the South’s continued resistance embraced every last single measure of what we know today as Reconstruction.

But John Wilkes Booth saw to it that we were spared the spectacle of a tarnished hero.  Every society must have its saints; it is an illusion to suppose that humans can do without figures of divinity.  We already had Washington, but Washington belongs to another world, a world in which the U.S. was a feeble string of recent colonies whose very existence as a nation the rest of the world wasn’t going to accept and didn’t accept fully until 1815.  Washington is also tainted by the very sin — slavery — which Lincoln excised.  Lincoln, struck down in the hour of his triumph, a figure unmarred by the inevitable filth of having to pick up pieces and re-assemble them, is a figure so dramatic that if he hadn’t actually existed, we would still be seeking to invent him.

One more set of thoughts on Lincoln.  It is fashionable these days — from a remove of 150 years, of course, and from people who will bear neither moral nor political responsibility for having been wrong — to execrate Lincoln for not coming to office pledged to do whatever it took to end slavery.  The argument goes something like this:  Slavery was recognized as a wickedness by wide segments of the population.  There was and could be no good-faith disagreement whether it must end.  So to say that Lincoln approached it with the attitude of his time is a bullshit cop-out excuse.  He should have made the extirpation of slavery the center-point of his administration from the first day and never deviated from it in the slightest degree.  That he didn’t is justly an indictment of him.

How trite.  People whose putative, hypothetical choices — 150 years later — can carry no moral responsibility for the blood, horrors, and death of civil war, for the destruction of the world’s only functioning republic (which was the first truly representative republic in, you know, fucking forever), for the splintering and crashing to rubble of what actually then was “the last, best hope of the earth,” can safely sit upon their moral thrones and hurl scorn at the man whose real-world choices would and did bear that responsibility.  People today can build into their “well I would have done thus-and-such” proclamations the unspoken knowledge that the country did survive, that government of the people, by the people, and for the people did not perish from the earth. The people whose decisions would make the difference between survival and destruction of that nation had no such luxury.  They had no idea whether a republic could survive a civil war.  Remember that the entire knock on republics as a form of government was that they must inevitably fly apart, riven by faction.  It’s why everyone, from Washington on down, described the United States as an experiment.

Today’s moralizers overlook that the most crucial outcome of the war was not the abolition of slavery, but rather the once-and-for-all-time determination that the United States was a permanent union.  If the answer had been anything other than that, then abolition would never have happened.  The Civil War amendments to the constitutions, with the possible exception of the 13th, would never have come about.  Instead of the world’s most vibrant, flexible, potent economy ready and willing to act as the arsenal of democracy, we’d have squabbling little penny-ante states, all divided by mutual suspicion and seeking nothing so much as their neighbors’ undermining.

Lincoln anticipated as much in his House Divided speech.  He was right: A house divided against itself cannot stand.  He did not expect the house to fall, but he did expect it to cease to be divided; it would become all one thing or all the other.  What happened over the course of 1862 is that Lincoln came to the conclusion that the abolition of slavery had become necessary to save the union now, without which saving the eventual abolition of slavery would have been a vanished hope (at least for his time).  Without saving the union now — in 1862 — none of the reasons for which the union’s preservation was sought — including the abolition of slavery — could be hoped for.  Once the union was lost, it could never be re-established, north or south.  And so in the crucible of war the eventual political objective — destruction of slavery — became a political predicate for its own enabling circumstance — union.  A result truly “fundamental and astounding,” to borrow Lincoln’s own words.

And those people who claim that Lincoln should have campaigned in 1860 and come to office in 1861 on a platform of immediate abolition?  They demonstrate only their own foolishness, and their own cavalier disregard for what remains the last, best hope of the earth.

Thus today we observe the passing of our only unblemished secular saint.  It is intriguing, but ultimately unproductive, to speculate on what would have happened had he not died when he did.  It is morally contemptible to damn him for not acting as we — safely removed from responsibility and with the solid rock of indissoluble union beneath our feet — in our moral purity claim he should have.

Although his Gettysburg Address is the more widely quoted (in fact it is, by a wide margin, the longest single entry in my mother’s 1953 edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, and the only speech given in full), I have long felt much more deeply moved by the peroration of his Second Inaugural:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

More than which cannot be said, and better than which has never been said.

 

Bang the Tin Drum Slowly

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Günter Grass has died, at the age of 87.

Not quite 30 years ago I read The Tin Drum (in the original).  Haven’t read it since, but the ol’ boy’s death suggests I might ought to re-read it.  I also saw the film version a number of years ago, but in all honesty I can’t say I recall much about the movie.

The Tin Drum is set in and around Danzig (as it then was), a city whose 20th Century past was, to put it mildly, troublous.  That part of Europe — where what had been Poland for centuries was finally partitioned out of existence in 1795 — had long been a mish-mash of ethnicities, and Danzig was no exception.  The novel begins before the war and ends after the war, in an insane asylum in what had by that time become West Germany.

Grass’ own life arc mirrored the turbulent history of his home town.  Born too late to serve in the Wehrmacht during its triumphant years, by the time he was subject to compulsory service the war had irretrievably turned against Germany.  His first, unsuccessful brush, with military service was when he attempted to volunteer for the U-boat service in 1944.  He was turned down, most likely because of his age (he’d just turned 17), thereby setting himself up to survive the war.  Had he been accepted for U-boat service there is a strong likelihood he would not have lived; of the 40,000-odd men who served aboard the boats, almost exactly 30,000 never came home.  By 1943 Germany had lost the Battle of the Atlantic.  In March, 1943, the Allies sunk over 40 U-boats in one month.  Doenitz withdrew them from the North Atlantic patrol after that and from then through the end they were hunted beasts; many boats didn’t even complete a single patrol before their destruction.

Shortly after being turned down for the U-boat service he was drafted into the Waffen-SS, where he served in an armored unit from February, 1945 until his wounding on April 20.  He was captured by the Americans (again a fortuitous circumstance: most of the Germans captured by the Soviets were sent to their deaths in the Gulag) and eventually released a year or so after the war.  By then Danzig had become Gdansk and the Poles, to whom it was turned over, had ejected all ethnic Germans (in fairness, the Soviets had ejected the Poles from the 150 or so miles of Poland that Stalin took as part of the post-war Great Carve-Up).  Grass fetched up in the Ruhr district, where for a time he worked in a mine and later did an apprentice as a stonemason.  He began writing in the 1950s; The Tin Drum was published in 1959.

For years he was a reliably left-wing voice, although he did speak against the most radical elements, at least in terms of their aim of immediate socialist revolution.

In 2006 the facts about his service in the Waffen-SS came to light.  In all his prior and very public statements he’d never mentioned it.  Not a few people took him to task for it, precisely because he had been such a prominent critic of Germany’s engagement with its Nazi past.  In truth he ought to have known better than to let something like that lie fallow for so long.  If he actually was drafted, and unless he did things in uniform he’d just as leave we didn’t know about, then there was no reason to have buried his past.  If anything you’d think it would have made him a more credible, more effective advocate for his public positions.

Was Grass a volunteer or a draftee?  I have no way of knowing whether any draft papers or other illuminating documents would have survived this long.  What did his unit do while he was on active service with it?  If it was on the Eastern Front it most likely spent most of its time getting shot to pieces by overwhelming Soviet forces.  But was it involved in massacring a few civilians on its way out of town?  I haven’t seen anything one way or the other.  You’d think that, given how Grass suppressed a biographical phase that the ordinary viewer would see as highly significant — one way or the other — someone would have taken the time to dig up the facts.  That is, after all, how Kurt Waldheim came to grief.  His unit was known to have been in the Balkans during his service and it was easily discovered what it had been up to during that period.  It didn’t bear the light of day very well.  [Aside: I still remember seeing Waldheim’s campaign posters from 1986 in Vienna, when he was running for president:  “An Austrian the World Trusts”.  Cue Inspector Clouseau:  Not any more.]  I may be entirely wrong:  That investigation may already have been undertaken and discovered that there’s a whole lot of absolutely nothing at all to see.  If that’s the case, however, then why did he bury his past so long?

Grass expressed some trepidation about German reunification, a sentiment in which he was hardly alone, either in the world at large or even within Germany itself.  Konrad Adenauer was far from the last German not entirely to trust his countrymen with their own power.  Among Americans, I still recall a professor of mine, who’d fought in the U.S. Army during the war, laconically observing that he got “a very peaceful feeling” when he contemplated the existence of a forcibly divided Germany.

Nonetheless, the collapse of the international communist experiment and the unwinding even of large aspects of the European social democracy model left Grass, like many on the left, casting about for some point of relevance.  In the U.S. we see the left-extremists clustering around two overall approaches to the problem:  The first is to embrace the descent into irrelevance, as with the “social justice,” “micro-aggression” would-be thought police.  The other is doubling down on the 1930s-vintage neo-communist expansion of the state, as with the EPA’s nascent attempt to regulate your back-yard hamburger grill.  In Europe it’s taken, and is taking, the form of collaborating in the Islamization of the continent, and its hand-maiden, hatred of Israel.

In April, 2012, Grass published “Was gesagt warden muß,” (“What must be said”) a so-called “prose poem” in which he takes issue with Germany’s delivery of a nuclear-capable submarine to Israel.  He claims to fear that Israel may assert a right to an alpha strike on Iran, in order to prevent its development of nuclear capability.  He asserts that a nuclear-capable Israel endangers a fragile world peace.  He claims to speak now, because he is tired of the hypocrisy of the West.  And so forth.  The piece is short; here’s a translation of it in The Guardian.  Read it all.

Left unsaid by Grass is any mention that of the two states he specifically names, one — Iran — has adopted for its formal policy the extermination of the other, its “wiping from the map,” and the killing of as many of its citizens as possible; the other — Israel —  for whom Iran has such sanguinary and explicit intentions, has adopted no such policy in respect of any other nation or people.  One of the two nations — Iran — at that time was, and remains today, a known sponsor of some of the most bloodthirsty islamo-fascist terror groups in the world, almost all of whom expressly address their violence against the United States and its interests.  The other is not a sponsor of international terrorist groups.  One of the two nations — Iran — hangs homosexuals from construction cranes, stones adulteresses to death, and regularly practices torture on its own population.  The other — Israel — does not.  One of the two nations — Iran — sentences Christians to prison or death for practicing or preaching their faith.  The other — Israel — has in its parliament political parties representing its minority ethnic populations.  One of the two states Grass mentions gives every reason to fear its possession of any weapon of mass destruction.  The other has never.  One state — Iran — has never been the object of an attack by its united neighbors with the intent of eradicating it.  The other — Israel — has repeatedly weathered these attacks.

There is no other way to characterize Grass’ point:  Iran and Israel are morally equivalent quantities.  The attack of either on the other would be equally worthy of condemnation.  The attack of either on the other is equally to be feared (although, you know, Israel has, you know, never actually, you know . . . attacked Iran).  The world, presumably, would be equally injured by the extinction of either.  The attack on Iran by an Israel fearful that the mullahs mean precisely what they say about wiping Israel from the map, and Germany’s having enabled any of that attack, would splash a further taint of guilt on an already guilty-ridden land which could never be washed clean.

At the risk of understatement:  I am profoundly uninterested in any person, in any ideology, in any theology which cannot tell any material difference between the Iran of the mullahs and Israel, the only functioning democracy in that entire area of the globe.

Maybe his poem was nothing more than a desperate grasp for relevance in a world in which his chosen politics has been refuted pretty thoroughly by the march of time.  Certainly his later bleat in favor of Greece, and how awful it is that the rest of Europe, and Germany in particular, are just being such meanie-pokers to decline to shovel sand down a rat hole indefinitely, argues in favor of that hypothesis.  Or maybe it could be something more sinister.  Maybe it has something to do with why Grass chose for some 60 years to cover up his service in the SS.

In any event, we have lost another anti-Western voice from the world’s babble.  Whatever his talents as a writer may have once been, he won’t be missed.

Layers of Editors and Factcheckers, Perhaps

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Logic checkers, not so much.

Yesterday, when I launched the All-New (Now Featuring Moxie!) post category of Them Awful Southerners, I hadn’t suspected I might be putting out a great big ol’ jar of honey to catch me some bees.  No, I thought it would just be something I could occasionally have recourse to, sort of like Teutschtümelei (an expression I picked up 30-plus years ago from a play by either Lessing or Schiller, I forget which; it doesn’t translate very well, but if you imagine a strident form of hoaky, kitschy Americana, that would be about our modern equivalent) for stuff pertaining specifically to Germany (as opposed to just using German sources for a post on a topic of more general interest).

I may have under-estimated my powers of seduction.  No sooner do I launch Them Awful Southerners than sure enough, here comes today’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung with its lead, above-the-electronic-fold headline:  “Erschossen im Herzland der Sklaverei“; “Shot in the Heartland of Slavery”.  For starts, oughtn’t it read “Shot in the Former Heartland of Slavery”?  I mean, if South Carolina is the “heartland of slavery,” does that not imply that, you know, slavery is still practiced there?  I haven’t been to South Carolina since 2005, but when last there I don’t recall that being the case.

But let us not bust too hard on the reporter; he probably didn’t write his own headline.  Just because the FAZ wants to run the equivalent of “Fun Times in the Heartland of Nazism” over a report on the 2015 Oktoberfest in Munich, it’s not his fault, is it?

The text of the article must, however, be laid at the author’s feet, and he required to answer for it.  The author — who is based in New York City, which may fully explain the whole thing (here’s his c.v. on the paper’s website; he certainly appears to be someone who ought to know better than to publish bullshit like this) — has actually written two articles.  The first article is about a police officer who conducted a perfectly normal traffic stop until the driver panicked and ran, after which (i) the officer shot him down like a dog, and then (ii) attempted to falsify a crime scene.  The second article is one more tired-ass installment of Them Awful Southerners, and how we’re just lyin’ in wait for the next unsuspecting darky to happen along so’s we can lynch ‘im.  The two articles are separated by a helpful bridge in which the author lets us know everything we need to about him and his ability to think or to report honestly.

The incident happened one week ago today.  The beginning and the end of the confrontation are shown on two separate videos from two independent sources.  The first part, the stop, the request for license, registration, and proof of insurance (just like I got asked for when stopped for my last speeding ticket) all went by the book and are captured on video by the police cruiser’s on-board camera.  Significantly, the audio originates from a microphone on the officer’s shirt.  You can hear the officer indicate that he’s pulled the driver over for a broken tail-light, and then ask for license, registration, and proof of insurance.  The driver tells the cop he doesn’t have registration because he’s still in the process of buying the vehicle, at which point the cop returns to his car, presumably to run the plates.  At that point the driver gets out of the car and the cop asks him to get back in.  Which the driver does.  Then the driver panics.  He gets out and runs.

The cop and the driver are now out of frame for the cruiser’s on-board camera, but you can hear confused words and rustling, apparently as something was disturbing the officer’s body microphone.  You can hear the officer tell the driver he proposes to use his taser on him.  Which he does, without the desired effect.

At this point the second video, captured by an aware hair-dresser on her way to work, picks up.  You can see the taser’s wires deployed.  You see the driver running away and the police officer pickle off eight (!) rounds at a fleeing man.  The driver was struck five times, at least once through the heart.  He falls dead.

And this is where the officer, having already ended one life and screwed up his own, damns himself as a liar.  The by-stander’s video captures him as he turns away from his victim, goes back to where they’d been standing a few seconds before, picks something up out of the grass, and then take it over and drops it beside the corpse.  It was his taser gun.

It seems that in his initial report and his post-event write-up he alleged that the driver had seized his taser, and that he had attempted first-responder life-saving on his victim.  Neither happened.

Within a matter of a couple of days the officer was fired (not placed on “administrative leave,” with or without pay, which is the common administrative proceeding in use-of-deadly-force occurrences, until the facts are straightened out), and formally charged with murder by the district attorney general’s office.  Tellingly, as soon as the officer’s lawyer got the by-stander’s video to examine in detail, he requested and was granted leave to withdraw.

Now, every lawyer in the United States knows what happened.  The client swore up and down to his lawyer that he’d Told it Just Like it Happened in his report.  And then the lawyer takes a look at the video evidence that shows him his client just lied to him about the central fact of his defense.

To this point the FAZ has done a good job of summarizing the actual facts as they can be shown to be.

So much for the allegro of this little concerto grosso.  There then follows an adagio of a few paragraphs, consisting of the obligatory Ferguson comparison.  Although the author is finally forced to observe that the forensic evidence in Ferguson can’t be squared with the pro-criminal version of events, and contradicts the supporters of a violent felon who was shot down in the middle of attacking, for a second time, a police officer, you can tell from the author’s remaining observations that he’d just as leave not have to admit it.  Our Author states that Wilson, after the publicity exploded (which is to say, after the witch hunt started), “submerged, but found sympathizers who spread his version” of the events.  In the end, he was “believed not only by his fellow citizens on the Grand Jury,” which was “directed by the state’s attorney” (grand juries are not so directed, by the way), but also the investigators from the DOJ who “found that the credible witnesses confirmed Wilson’s representations.”  In last Saturday’s events in North Charleston, there is no video of what happened between the time the shooter, officer Scott, and his victim step out of frame in the police car’s video and when the by-stander’s video picks up.  In Ferguson, our New York City author is glumly forced to admit that officer Wilson’s claim that the thug he shot attacked him through the window of his police cruiser was “supported” (notice he didn’t say “confirmed”) by the forensic evidence. [This word choice is what poker players call a “tell.”  It allows you to read what’s going on the other guy’s mind.  Our New York City author won’t say Wilson was “confirmed” by the forensic evidence, even though (i) Darren Wilson had orbital fractures of his skull surrounding his eye, (ii) the thug’s blood was found on the inside of Wilson’s vehicle door, and (iii) all of the ballistic evidence demonstrates that the perp’s hands were not raised, but rather were lowered, and he was charging Wilson with his head down when struck by the fatal round. You know, exactly like Wilson said it happened.]  In fact the DOJ didn’t so much rely on “credible witnesses” which it “believed” over the criminal’s buddies when it formally agreed with Wilson’s “version” of events as “spread” by his “sympathizers,” but rather on the physical evidence, which was specifically cited by Dear Leader’s own U.S. Attorney General.  You’d never suspect that from reading this author’s words.  It’s very considerate for this author to provide us with such rich indication of his journalistic ethics, and in fact, his basic honesty.

In the final movement, we suddenly find ourselves 250-300 years ago in South Carolina.

This sentence made it into print in a major European newspaper:  “South Carolina is the heartland of North American slavery.”  Present tense.  “Here lived more slaves than free persons.”  At least the author got the right tense on that one.

The police forces in South Carolina “developed from patrols for catching runaway slaves.”  Wrong.  Slave patrols and the few law enforcement forces of the times were entirely different.  Slave patrols were manned — on a compulsory basis, by the way — by ordinary free whites, in much the same way that in many places way back when every able-bodied free male had to work on the public roads a certain number of days each year.  These slave patrols had no judicial functions at all, in contrast to the sheriff and his deputies, who served warrants, who levied executions on personal and real property, who ran the jail, dragged the town drunks in for a beating every so often, and otherwise did what little law enforcement went on back then.

Having conflated the historical antecedents of today’s police forces with runaway slave patrols, our author then tosses a few observations about how such patrols operated.  Whippings and the death penalty for “ringleaders” were authorized.  Of course, our author doesn’t point out that the slave patrols didn’t do the whipping or impose the death penalty.  Generally, it was the owners, post-return, who did the whipping, or for those too squeamish, turned their slave over to a public facility for that purpose (there was such a place in Charleston, and another in New Orleans, and I’m sure most every larger Southern town similarly catered to those too cowardly to look their own victim in the face).  Death penalties for ringleaders of slave resistance were imposed by trial courts (however cursory the trial may have been, it was nonetheless a formal judicial proceeding).  Although the owner was supposed to receive his property back undamaged from the slave patrol, “wanted dead or alive” was not an unusual term of capture for repeaters.

Our author then slips up and gives us another “tell” about where he got his information.  He informs us that Indians were used as auxiliary patrollers.  This comes from a misinterpretation (willful? hard to say) of the Wikipedia.org write-up on the Stono Rebellion — of 1710.  It’s less well known than Nat Turner’s of 1835, but until Turner, the Stono revolt had been by a wide margin the bloodiest slave insurrection in North America.  Here’s the author’s source quotation:  “The lieutenant governor hired Chickasaw and Catawba Indians and other slaves to track down and capture the Africans who had escaped from the battle.”  The quotation is referring to the aftermath of the more-or-less pitched battle in which the slaves were defeated (after having killed 44 whites in action against their own losses of 25).  The Indians were pretty much run out of the Carolinas by a few years after the Revolution, a point our author isn’t familiar with, and so he just assumes that Indians regularly made up such auxiliary forces.  And by the way, as the Wikipedia.org article makes plain, the participating slaves were not defeated or caught by slave patrols, but by a raised-for-the-purpose militia.  If our author knew his ass from a hole in the ground he’d understand that militias in both colonial and post-colonial eras were filled by the entire able-bodied male population capable of bearing arms.  So once more, we’re not talking about either functional or organizational precursors of the North Charleston police department.

Did we mention that Stono happened in 1710, a brief 305 years ago and a scant 40 years after Carolina Colony was first settled?  Our author’s remaining data points intended to draw a straight line between the slave patrollers and local South Carolina police forces come from . . . 1739 and 1772.  Here, I’ll draw you a picture, doofus:  In 1772 South Carolina was a loyal colony of the British Crown.  Municipal law enforcement in South Carolina has existed as long as there have been municipalities.  South Carolina’s city police departments are no more descendants of the slave patrols than is the New York Police Department, which has even today its own set of problems with its black citizenry.  New York City until the 1820s had slavery and therefore slave catchers; here’s a basic history for you to read.

The Deutsche Arbeiterpartei was founded in Munich in 1919.  Hitler, at the time working for the army, was detailed off to attend a meeting to see what sort of subversion was going on there.  He came, he saw, he took the operation over.  After a time it became the Nationalsozialistische deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the NSdAP.  It took it a while to spread from Munich, but it did, and the world knows its blood-soaked history as that of Nazi Germany.

By the editorial and reportorial standards of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, we should refer to Bavaria as “the heartland of the Nazi party” and to Berlin as “the capital of Nazi Germany.”  In the present tense.

Repeat after me, class:  Not everything in the South has to do with slavery.  Just like not everything in the Federal Republic of Germany has to do with the Holocaust.  You’d think that of all places and papers, a major newspaper in Germany would know better than to try to draw straight lines between present-day misbehavior and long-ago atrocities visited upon an oppressed group.  Apparently that’s too much to expect of today’s left-extremists.

Final take-away:  The more you strain to make connections between unrelated phenomena, the more you beclown yourself.

[Update 13 Apr 15]:  For some reason the FAZ has closed comments on the linked article.  Yesterday when I came across it, there were no comments.  This morning there are maybe 12-15 total.  This is a much lower count than many articles garner.  Why shut off comments now?  I would hope that it’s because the editors realize they published what was, in its main point (the Them Awful Southerners parts, as opposed to the purely factual recount of what happened last week) a made-up piece of garbage by someone who hadn’t the slightest notion of what he was talking about and out of shame they don’t want to call any more attention to it.  On the other hand, we’re talking about a newspaper that’s already started its cheerleading for Chairman Hillary, so the more likely explanation, alas, is that having been caught out peddling bullshit, they’re reacting in the time-honored left-extremist fashion: shut down the debate when the other side starts to win.

Most of the comments are on the lines of what you’d expect from Europeans engaging in long-distance psychoanalysis of Americans, or condemning what a materially awful place the U.S. is to live because free health care! or something.  Several of the comments, however, come from Germans who claim extensive personal experience of the U.S., not only through their own travels here but also through their relatives and friends who live here and whom they visit.  Interestingly, every one of those commenters who has actually experienced America at close range calls bullshit on the white-cop-gunnin’-for-Uncle-Tom-the-runaway-slave-everyone-living-in-fear-of-being-gunned-down-while-walking-the-streets theme of the story.  Finally, I’m pleased to note that at least one of the commenters, who also claims personal experience of Charleston, points out the bogus present tense of the heartland-of-slavery claim.

One more point:  One of the commenters claims that the hair-dresser who shot the second video has stated that the officer and the victim engaged in a physical scuffle on the ground, before the video picks up.  I haven’t taken the time to track that down to see if it’s in fact the case, but it seems like it may be plausible.  Something caused her to reach for her cell phone and starting recording.  How likely is that to have been seeing a simple shoving match between a cop and a pedestrian on the one hand versus, on the other, a cop and a citizen on the ground pummeling each other?  If it’s true, it certainly puts a slightly less sinister sheen on the events.  But, and this is The Salient Point:  This officer shot eight times at an unarmed man who was in full flight away from him, and at least some of those shots were at his center of mass, which is to say potentially fatal.  The man at whom he was shooting was known to him (the officer would already have his driver’s license from the first portion of the stop), and how much harder could it have been to obtain a second warrant for his arrest?  Whether the cop was shooting in anger, or out of lack of training (or, who knows? perhaps he was acting from racialist motives), he still acted in an inexcusable fashion, and sufficiently out of line with his training and established procedures that the police department (remember they’d have taken the hair-dresser’s statement as well) fired him in a matter of hours.

So I suppose the intermediate take-away on the actual event is stand by to stand by.

Questions With Easy Answers

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Prof. Ann Althouse (whose surname I want to spell Althaus, just because) asks what will sex education look like when the government decides it’s time to encourage young women to get pregnant.  She links to a NYT article about birth rates in Europe.

The linked NYT article does discuss a few initiatives that are government-sponsored, such as in Putin’s Russia, but most seem to be from the private sector: magazines, pop culture, even churches.  There’s the obligatory pointing out that as the population ages, lavish public spending will become increasing hard to maintain, although the pollyannish NYT writer decrees that “productivity gains over time” will make up for the fact that the number of people across whom your tax base must fit is shrinking relative to the number of people drawing from that tax base.  As you would expect from anyone whose understanding of economic activity is on a par with that of a South Seas Islander devotee of a cargo cult, she doesn’t explore how productivity, which requires massive, long-term, continuous investment in both human and material capital, is going to keep going up as ever-larger slices of its returns get hoovered up by an ever-more voracious government in the form of taxation.

[Aside:  This glib assumption that productivity will continue to grow irrespective of how much flesh is carved from the body economic in taxes and regulation seems to be a blind spot of the left-extremists.  They’re perfectly able to understand that tax policies and regulation drive behavior, as with so-called “green energy” tax breaks, or other tax-based hand-outs to their favored constituencies, or the individual mandate of the “Affordable” Care Act.  But they never seem to grasp that non-targeted tax policies, such as generally higher or generally lower taxes on productivity, or generally more or less onerous regulation, also drive behavior.  Similarly, they do not seem to grasp (maybe they do; I just have never been exposed to any statement or proposal from which that grasp is apparent) that even unpredictability in these matters drives behavior.  Capital investment has very long time horizons.  In thinking about whether to spend time and money now and for the next few years on Project X, I have to achieve some measure of comfort not only about what the economic landscape looks like today, but also I have to achieve some comfort level with my assumptions about what it will look like five or ten years down the line, when I hope finally to be reaping the rewards of my investment.  The devastatingly simple truth is that you cannot keep cranking up taxes and regulatory burdens on the productive members of society without seeing massive loss — some measurable, some not: how do you measure innovations that never happen because you’ve made it not worthwhile to put in the time and money? — in the society’s aggregate well-being.  It’s the phenomenon that Amity Schlaes calls a “capital strike.”  I’ve yet to hear a leftist come right out and acknowledge that.]

Althouse asks what we can think of as the next question implicit in that NYT article:  Government looks around, realizes it has to do something about its tax base, and decides to get into the business of encouraging pregnancy among young women, that it needs to “do something.”  What does that “something” look like?

This being America, of course, we have that pesky li’l 14th Amendment which requires that what is done for one must be done for all, and so here we’ve also got issues about deciding which young women we want to encourage to get pregnant, and how we direct our efforts to them with minimal effect on non-desired target groups.  At the risk of belching in church, we do not want unmarried, unskilled teenagers getting pregnant.  We do not want unmarried, unskilled, unemployed women already on public assistance to get pregnant.

The problem of course is that short of coerced insemination everything that government can do must fall under the category of persuasion.  Almost everything that might persuade a woman whom we would like to see reproduce will also be very persuasive to a woman whom we’d just as leave not.  There are very few criteria that you could grasp by way of selection that would hold up under the 14th Amendment.  Age would be one, but that’s very, very imperfect, because of how long a woman’s child-bearing years last.  Most of the “bad” demographic indicators — above all unmarried first birth while a teenager — are strong predictors of social pathologies even for that same woman’s children born at any time in her later years.  In other words, if you’re a 21-year-old with three children, all born out of wedlock, statistically it doesn’t much matter if your next child is not born until you’re 31:  That child is nearly as likely to experience bad life outcomes as those first three.  Harsh to contemplate, but those are the numbers.

A further thought suggests itself:  Once government gets into the business of encouraging pregnancy, you cannot avoid the issue of thinking about whom do you encourage.  This is because the answer to the question will vary depending on the political objectives of who is asking the question.  For some people, it is precisely those women who are the least likely to be able successfully and independently to raise productive members of society that will be the most-favored target group.  Think I’m talking through my hat?  As long ago as 1966, two professors writing in The Nation advocated specifically the recruitment of a government-dependent permanent underclass for the explicit purpose of forging electoral alliances to back radical-leftist political ends.  As the Blogfather would say, read it all here.  Think I’m over-stating their cynicism?  The article specifically advocates fighting against programs the effect of which would be to give the government-dependent the life skills necessary to escape that dependency.  Seriously, you have to read it to believe it.  Not since Stalin starved Russia’s peasants of their own food in order to subsidize the rapid industrialization of the cities has anyone called for such callous exploitation of an entire segment of society for one’s own political purposes.

A final thought intrudes, on the lines of there being nothing new in the world.  At least here in the United States we have a large portion of the political spectrum which joyfully reaches for the nostrums of the 1930s to address the tumults of the 21st Century.  Sure enough, it turns out that the 1930s provide us a blueprint of how to encourage not only fertility, but “public service” among the young women of society.  It was called the “Bund deutscher Mädel,” and it was the sister organization to the Hitlerjugend.  Both groups were herded apart from their parents, against whom they were encouraged to rebel, and on whom they were encouraged to inform, and were consciously thrown together, all while being constantly reminded of the duty to produce more little soldiers for the Führer.  There is a vignette in William L. Shirer where he recalls seeing the joyful romps through field and forest by the broadly smiling, lusty (not to say lustful) youth of Germany.  Members of both groups had to do a period of what we would now refer to as “public service” in some menial capacity.

None of the above thoughts provides any comfort for someone thinking about the answer to Prof. Althouse’s question.  Maybe the question is not what such efforts would look like, but whether government needs to get into that business in the first place.

But the actual answer to Prof. Althouse’s question is pretty easy, I suggest:  It would look something like Cloward-Piven, with generous borrowings from the organizational manuals of the Nazi party.