Category Archives: History

Give Credit Where Due

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

“Victors’ Justice”; But Was It?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(iii) war crimes; and, 

(iv) crimes against humanity. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Dept. of Be Careful What You Wish For

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dave Carter — Here They Are!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which is It? You Decide; I Can’t

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If not, go save some time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

329 Jahre deutscher Einwanderung

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Heute feiert man in Germantown, Pennsylvania Gründungstag.  Obwohl sich die ersten Siedler (z.T. Mennoniter auch aus deutschem Raum) schon 1681 dort niederlassen hatten, wurde an diesem Tag in 1683 die Stadt durch deutsche Einwanderer gegründet.  Damit haben eine riesige Bevölkerungswelle und eine kulturreiche Tradition angefangen, deren Vorteile man in den USA bis heute noch genießt.  Noch in den 1980er Jahren war gut 40% der amerikanischen Bevölkerung mindestens teilweise deutscher Abstammung.  Reist man in Bundestaate wie Indiana bzw. Wisconsin, so sieht man woimmer auch man schaut das Schwarz-Rot-Gold der Ahnen; es blicken dem Pilger lauter Adler auf Schildern, Ladenfenstern, usw. entgegen.

Meine Mutter, deren Familie aus Mutterstadt westlich von Ludwigshafen am Rhein etwa 1845 eingewandert ist, ist in südöstlichem Indiana geboren und aufgewachsen.  Die Landschaft ist von Dörfern, Bauernhöfen, Kirchen (immer mit Friedhof, normalerweise auf der anderen Seite der Straße), aber vor allem sich weiterstreckenden Ackerfeldern (d.h. hektarenmäßig groß) geprägt.  Sommer 1985 hat sie, als Englischlehrerin, sechs Wochen an einem Seminar im Norden ihres Heimatstaates teilgenommen.  Sie ist mit einem anderen Lehrer aus dieser Gegend (also ihrem heutigen Lebensort) dorthin gefahren; ich habe sie am Ende abgeholt.  Sie hat sich ein paar Tage auf der Heimfahrt gegönnt, um wieder einmal die Orte ihrer Vorfahren und Kindheit zu besuchen.  Ihre Eltern waren schon längst verstorben, ihre Geschwister in andere Bundestaate hingezogen, und sie konnte es gar nicht mehr annehmen, wieder einmal Anlaß dazu zu haben.

Eines, worauf sie mich während unsrer Reise aufmerksam gemacht hat, waren die Bauernhäuser, die riesig aus den Ackerfeldern ragen.  Hölzern gebaut, mit vielen und auch großen Fenstern (3 bis 5 Quadratmeter Umfang, auch im Obergeschoß, ist gar nicht außerordentlich) versehen, sie sind wo möglich auf kleinen Hügeln gebaut worden, die über das von dem Gutsinhaber mit eigenen Händen gepflegten Land Blick bieten. 

Obwohl sie seit fast 60 Jahren im Süden lebt, hat meine Mutter nie ihren Stolz auf ihren Geburtsstaat und dessen Volk vergessen.  Diese Häuser seien keine Ehrenmale auf Sklavenarbeit, wies sie darauf hin; sie seien dem selben Schweiß entsprungen, der buchstäblich von den Gesichtern der Bauernfamilie auf die Erde unter ihren Füßen gefallen ist, und womit sie sich ein neues Leben in einer neuen Welt geschaffen haben.  Deswegen ist man hierhergeflohen, egal ob vor oder nach 1848.

Man möge auch nicht vergessen, daß es im Bürgerkrieg ganze Regimenter Deutsche gegeben hat, die — nicht einmal schon Bundesbürger zum größten Teil — der Sklavenmacht ins Feld gezogen sind, und sich mit Herz und Leib für die Freiheit auch in ihrer neuen Heimat eingesetzt haben.  Ihre Toten Ruhen noch heute in stillen Soldatenfriedhöfen, die an ihnen vorher unvorstellbaren Orten liegen, die fremde Namen wie Shiloh, Chickamauga, und Vicksburg aufweisen.

Im Südwesten von Illinois, entlang dem Mississippi-Fluß, zieht sich eine Reihe Dörfer hin, mit Namen wie New Baden usw.  Fast ausnahmslos steht am Rand des Dorfes mindestens eine Schule, die meist schon älter aussieht, aber doch wohlbehalten wirkt.  Es ist noch dem gelegentlichen Reisenden ohne Zweifel klar, man ist stolz auf “seine” Schule, nimmt Anteil daran, was drin vor sich geht.  In dem Dorf steht auch eine Kirche, mal katholisch, mal evangelisch, je nach dem Auswanderungsort der ursprünglichen Siedler.  Bis vor einem Jahrzehnt ist es in etlichen der Kirchen noch ein Gottesdienst bzw. Messe auf deutsch abgehalten worden.

Wenn man bei uns “Diversität” zu feiern angibt, heißt das zumeist, daß gefordert wird, mehr Geld, mehr Arbeitsstellen usw. anderen zu schenken, ohne daß man Gegenleistung bzw. Tatkraft vorher gezeigt hat, und nur um die Voraussetzung, sie sehen dem jeweiligen Sprecher ähnlich aus.  Dabei verletzt man aber die Erinnerung derer, die eigentlich diejenige Gesellschaft erschaffen haben, von der jetzt gefordert wird, die angeblichen Reichtümer neu “umzuverteilen,” als ob es solche aus Obstbäumen einfach zu pflücken gegegen hätte.

Also:  Hoch auf die Diversität, und zwar für diesen Tag auf deutsch!!

Happy Birthday Jenny Lind

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One of the things I like about old music is that it seems (I may be just imagining it, but then maybe not) to give a glimpse into worlds gone by.  It’s one of the reasons I enjoy Sweelinck’s music, especially played on the sorts of instruments it would have been played on back in the day, e.g. the virginals or a chest organ.  Ditto Buxtehude.  Music has always had the power to move people powerfully and for reasons that the hearer doesn’t even necessarily understand.  It just soaks in and makes us want to do.  Even music without words will do the trick.

We can read the books, the pamphlets, the sermons that were written in any particular period to see what got folks all in a twitter back then.  But those are all more-or-less intentionally didactic exercises, thought out, tried out, very frequently written for a specific occasion or in address to a specific audience.  And of course in a world in which huge chunks of the people were illiterate or nearly so, even of the middling orders, the written word as a statistically valid sample (to use a metaphor a bit out of place) has to be questioned.  So I humbly submit that if we want to place our hands as closely as possible — if unavoidably imperfectly, since we hear with different ears than they would, just as we read with different eyes — we need to listen to their music.  To borrow a phrase someone once used about Bach, “we must follow him to the organ.”

And so, from way back in the day when famous people had songs, marches, quick-steps, dances, etc. written in their honor, we reach out to touch the Jenny Lind Polka, written to honor the Swedish Nightingale, born on this day in 1820:

Once upon a time I had a cassette recording including this tune, done on mountain dulcimer, which really works excellently.  The mountain dulcimer is by the way one of the better-kept secrets of American music, I suggest.  You ought to hear “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott” on it; I bet Luther himself would observe, “Ja, das ist das echte Zeug!”

Monty Python and Modern Memory

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In which one of history’s greatest comedy troupes is firmly anchored in the mud of the Western Front.

Today marks the anniversary of the first broadcast, in 1969, of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, an exercise in farce, irony, absurdity, word-play, and slap-stick which over forty years on remains a benchmark. The world divides neatly into two groups, those who get the Pythons and those whose lives are barren wastelands. Even now in certain circles all one need do is announce, “I wish to register a complaint!” and be perfectly understood. To describe someone as being a Mr. Creosote conjures up vivid pictures in the minds of millions all over the world (I’ve always wondered, however, how one would translate the Pythons into another language, so much of the humor being bound up in the play of English words, their pronunciations and meanings).

In the best traditions of English humor poking fun at religion and ecclesiastics forms a large element in the Python canon, e.g. “The Bishop,” or the interjections of the Spanish Inquisition – which no one expects – or the street preacher scene from Life of Brian. For an earlier illustration of the exercise one can do no better than Mr. Collins from Pride and Prejudice, in which character Jane Austen perfectly captured the unctuous insincerity of the used car dealer nearly a full century before his creation. But taking swings at preachers, howe’er so skillfully done, really comes more under the category of shooting fish in a barrel. 

What I’m after here is a fundamental structure, a pattern of organizing the canvas of Python-land that is so closely woven into its fabric that you really don’t notice it’s there, necessarily, unless you look for it. One refers to grotesque irony, all the way from the anarcho-syndicalists scraping about in the mud to the Queen Victoria Handicap to crowds worshipping a sandal to a waiter who kills himself over a poorly-washed piece of cutlery to an actual government bureau for exaggeratedly silly gaits. Depictions of the grotesque are nothing new, either in English, continental, or American popular entertainment. I mean, think of the circus freak-show, or the vaudeville act featuring the Amazing Man With No Skeleton, and so forth. Nor had the humorous possibilities of Things Not Being as They Are Presented escaped English-language writers, as witness Pudd’nhead Wilson and The Importance of Being Earnest. Nor is farce anything new to the landscape of modern humor; P. G. Wodehouse’s first Blandings novel, Something Fresh, was published in 1915 (in America, by the way, as witness the constant conversational references among English characters to U.S. monetary units). And of course sophisticated comedy goes back to Shakespeare and before. 

But irony, especially irony taken to a level of grotesque juxtaposition of What Is and What Ought to Be (“The Architect Sketch,” anyone?), understood as something specifically amusing, does strike me as something not widely encountered prior to a certain point. That certain point is World War I. Without repeating the argument in too great detail (besides, I’ve slept since last re-reading it), Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory could well be subtitled something along the lines of “; or, Irony Sweeps the Field.” A large portion of Fussell’s thesis is that British authors finding themselves tossed into the troglodyte world of the Western Front were confronted with contrasts, sickening beyond all former human points of reference, between farm, woodland, stream, wildlife, integration, stability, and sense on the one hand, and gore, fear, violence, uncertainty, randomness, wantonness, and degradation on the other. The authors, steeped as they were in pastoral traditions (there’s a reason that within recent times the largest group of members in the principal British garden club were retired senior army and navy officers), found themselves forced into irony as the principal framework and method of expressing the horror, the enormity of what was happening. And of course the more extreme the contrast, the greater the irony. 

Fussell lauds Isaac Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches” as the best and in many ways the quintessential Great War Poem, precisely for its understated irony, and likewise Blunden’s Undertones of War for its recurring theme of the pastoral violated (in case you haven’t Got It by then, his final sentence describes himself as a simple shepherd-boy in a military greatcoat). By contrast Fussell “breaks on the wheel” the “butterfly” of McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” largely because of its entirely unironical treatment of the dead and their address to the living. [N.b. I have to say that I diverge from Fussell’s opinion, at least to the extent that he excoriates the poem as “stupid” and brutal. The author was a doctor serving with the front-line artillery, who wrote the poem to the sounds of the guns and while sitting in the back of an ambulance . He wrote the day after a dear friend of his had been killed; McCrae had performed his funeral. So implying that the poem’s imprecations from the dead to the living to take up the fight against Germany is somehow the cheap moral equivalent of the women who went around London shoving white feathers (the symbol of cowardice, then) on every male not in uniform is a bit unjust.] 

Where Fussell’s book takes the second half of its title is what he identifies as the enduring quality of the shift in vision, in understanding, that the authors brought home with them. Irony is now not just a way of highlighting a particular point to be made in the narrative; irony is now the principal mode of understanding and expression, whether in a serious vein or humorous. Laughter has long been recognized as a coping mechanism; Lincoln once answered the question why he told humorous stories during the war by observing that he laughed in order that he might not cry. Pointing out absurd contrasts between the Purported and the Actual, not so much to illuminate any characteristic about either element of the contrast but rather in order to make the larger point that Our World is Absurd, Makes, and Can Make no Sense, is according to Fussell very much a post-Great War phenomenon. Fussell points to the mockery that attended the Empire Exposition, at Wembley in the 1930s, citing specifically its appearance as a plot device in a P. G. Wodehouse novel (I won’t spoil the plot, but it involves Roderick and Honoria Glossop, Bertie Wooster, and of course Jeeves, and is well worth the read) and observing that treating The Empire in this fashion simply would not have occurred in public discourse before the War, or been widely understood to be either funny or even permissible. 

And the Pythons are thoroughly in that post-war tradition. Why is it that the “Dead Parrot Sketch” is so funny? It’s not just the cross-talk or the slippery pet shop-keeper. What makes it funny is the customer’s recitation of every greeting-card euphemism for death he can think of while returning a dead bird, itself of an ironic, non-existent species – a Norwegian parrot? really? – to a shop-keeper who insists that it’s just “pinin’ for the fjords.” The pseudo-elevated yet blandly commercialized language grafted onto an ordinary consumer fraud transaction is the engine that makes the sketch work. The sketch isn’t “about” pet shops, or crooked merchants, or the vicissitudes of consumer relations. The sketch is “about,” if anything, the absurdity of the world in which it takes place, a world whose essential absurdity has been a central theme of English language and literature since the days of Sassoon’s “Suicide in the Trenches,” or Owens’s “Dulce et Decorum Est.” And in fact what could be more viciously ironic than Owens’s parents receiving, quite literally while the village bells were pealing to celebrate the Armistice on November 11, 1918, the telegram informing them that their boy had been killed a week before, leading his men across some torpid, poisoned canal in France? 

Think this has no relevance to American literature and arts? The same technique is what makes Raising Arizona or O Brother! Where Art Thou? such hilarious movies. Ed’s insides “were a bare and rocky place where my seed could find no purchase,” as spoken by the multi-loser convenience market robber H. I. McDonough is a line that I will submit would not have been written before July 1, 1916.