Our intellectual future is in the best of hands.
Book cover for Erich Maria Remarque’s classic western suspense novel:
And let’s not ignore this classic, complete with forward by Senator Blutarski:
Pinky swear, I found the first one on Amazon once upon a time.
The second one needs no pinky swear.
It’s been 22 years since the 9/11 attacks. We have an entire generation, and are starting a second, that has no memory of the event.
Last year, or maybe in 2021, I despaired that the nation had not learned the necessary lessons from 9/11 – or, worse, had learned the wrong ones.
Or maybe our political class has succeeded in ignoring them. They were not, indeed, the ones that paid the price that morning in NYC, Washington or Pennsylvania, or in the two decades of war that followed.
Of course, entropy is real – especially when combined with a failing education system. Significant numbers of Americans don’t believe the Holocaust happened, to say nothing of having any serious knowledge about 9/11.
Either way – Barack Obama’s greatest triumph maty have been convincing a plurality of Americans that its greatest enemy was not from outside, but was America itself.
I’m going to recap something I wrote on this date 14 years ago, when the clear moral lens was fogged for different reasons.
Today is the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
You’ve heard a bit about it today, no doubt. You’ve read a bit about it on this blog over the years. Along with the fall of the Berlin Wall, it’s the single most pivotal event of my adult lifetime.
And, as my radio colleague/partner Ed Morrissey notes over at Hot Air today, his as well:
While New York City and Washington DC (and Shanksville, PA) are far removed from the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, that really only mattered in our sense of impotence as the towers collapsed and the Pentagon burned. We knew that the terrorists didn’t attack New York City for being New York City, or Washington DC for being Washington DC. They had attacked America for being America — and that made it all local and personal.
Which is something some Americans – on all sides of our political “aisle” – have forgotten since then. They didn’t attack cities, or coasts, or electoral blocs; they attacked America. And all of America responded.
And continues to.
For me? It wasn’t just an attack. It was the world sinking back into some very bad habits. I wrote this on March 11, 2002 – a month into this blog’s life, six months after the attacks.
I grew up in rural North Dakota, not far from the vast fields of Minuteman III missiles, close to the glide paths of the B-52 bombers,. all of which were on alert for my entire cognitive life. I was keenly aware of the presence of all of those first strike targets, forty miles away. And while I may have been one of a minority, growing up around all of that did affect me – there was a long-standing anxiety that my life and the entire world around me could be incinerated in seconds, or irradiated away, without warning.
The Berlin Wall fell about the time my oldest child was born. It would be easy and melodramatic to tell you that knowing my daughter would grow up in a world without that tension hanging over her was a wonderful, liberating sensation – but it’s the truth.
I was driving to work on September 11. I was on 394, by Xenia/Park Place. I’d just flipped over from KQRS’ interview with PJ O’Rourke to MPR’s live coverage of the attacks, without warning. And as the day wore on , and the shock sank in, that exhilaration – covered by the many other emotional layers of an adult’s life – sank away. The threat is different – but it’s still the same.So my kids are growing up in the same world I did, now. The threat is less omnipresent – I dont’ suspect the Twin Cities are high on any terrorist’s hit list – but more visceral. Maybe that’s a good thing – it’s harder for this threat to fade into the background of daily life.
Like Ed, I wanted to do something. But I was a 38 year old newly-minted single father with a bum knee and a bad eye – not the kind of person the military was going to be bidding for. I had no job skills the military needed, even as a civilian contractor (unless I got a PhD in usability and human factors – and that wasn’t going to happen).
The blog was as close as I got to something remotely useful. I started it five months after 9/11, the very day I learned what a “blog” was and how I could do one.
But I changed some other things. I’ve always loved shooting -and I got more diligent about it since 9/11. I’ve come to believe it’s the duty of a law-abiding citizen to have the knowledge and means to defend themselves, their families, their communities and their freedom. And while I don’t rationally believe there will be terrorists skulking through that shadows of Saint Paul, ever (even though “domestic terrorism” has bounced off the far corners of my life, once), the knowledge that I can pile a few of ’em up like cordwood if I need to helps with one of the most important things a human can do; replace fear with purpose. It doesn’t matter if evil wears a turban, s**tkickers or anything in between; the ability to shoot it in the face equalizes a lot. It’s not fear (I keep having to explain to lefties, who too often just don’t get it); it’s pre-empting fear.
I have also gotten more proactive about making sure government leads, follows or gets out of the way. In the wake of 9/11, before the blog, I asked my kid’s principals, adminsitrators and other school officials “What would you do if, say, a tank car of anhydrous ammonia blew up at the Empire Builder yard, and a cloud of poison were heading toward the school?” I was distinctly underwhelmed with their answers – but no moreso than those of the nameless bureaucrats at the World Trade Center who told everyone to stay in place. I’ve marveled – and found immense comfort – in the stories that showed that Americans do maintain our tradition of not needing authority and officialdom to react properly to events, in ways big (United Flight 93’s passengers’ counterattack) and small but profound (the people in the WTC who organized their own orderly evacuation, long before the firemen got there; absent the thousands of office-dwellers who thought for themselves and took care of each other, the death toll would have been vastly higher). And as best I can, I’ve tried to bring my kids up with the idea that this nation,l it’s ideals, its people and its history, is something exceptional – even more worth defending than it is worth attacking. Has it stuck? We’ll see, I’m sure.
So on this eighth anniversary? It’s a good time to remember.
And head to the range. And send the world’s scumbags a message.
Actually a box of messages.
Reports of genocide against native children in Canada appear to be at least for now greatly exaggerated:
Four weeks of excavation work at a residential school in Canada reportedly failed to turn up evidence of mass unmarked burial sites, raising questions over the claims of widespread indigenous graves across the country.
Minegoziibe Anishinabe, an indigenous group also known as Pine Creek First Nation, has excavated 14 sites in the basement of a Catholic church near the former Pine Creek Residential School in Manitoba over four weeks this summer, but has yet to uncover bodies at the sites that were suspected of being possible burial locations of indigenous children, according to a report from Global News.
The work comes after ground-penetrating radar used at the sites detected what were described as “anomalies” at 14 locations in the basement of the church, part of a series of discoveries over the last two years in Canada that were reported to be “mass graves” of children who had attended the country’s residential schools.
There’s a significant part of the western left that’s disappointed.
To: Ben and Jerry’s
From: Mitch Berg, obstreporous peasant
Re: Performative Garment Rending Would Be A Great Flavor Name
Ben and Jerry,
You produce yet another product I’ve never bought, and being fairly strict keto, will not be buying any time soon, politics notwithstanding, so this note is of no real consequenes to either of us.
Sort of like the tweet below, in which you join the academic-nonprofit/industrial complex in its latest round of performative consequence-free virtue-signaling:
Then f***ing do it.
Liquidate your business. Give it back to the Abenaki tribe, the people who are indigenous to be area around Burlington, Vermont. All of it, down to the last dime.
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenberg? Yep – back to Europe with you, where you can argue about who’s stolen what land dating back to the Romans and before, and be alarmed at how unconcerned anyone in Europe seems to be about the millennia of land-theft behind all the modern states.
After you move to Canada, of course. Which is also “stolen”, come to think of it…
Anyway – until you’ve done that, shut up. Seriously.
That is all.
I was a kid during the Bicentennial, 47 years ago today. Even so, I had some awareness of what was going on in the world – and it wasn’t great.
You didn’t need to be of voting age to know that the US and the West had been on a losing streak.
And so I pretty keenly remember how weird it felt, seeing the news break on this story – which I’d been following as closely as I could, given that I was limited to TV and newspapers. That unaccustomed feeling that the good guys won one .
This happened:
How do you explain this to someone under 40, who didn’t have to wonder if they were going to get vaporized if some colonel in some bunker somewhere had a bad day?
It’s become a fad among “progressive” circles to “acknowledge”, at the beginning of a meeting or gathering, that the meeting is “occurring on land stolen from…” the various tribes indigenous to Minnesota.
The meeting, run almost invariably run by plush-bottom laptop-class academic/non-profit/government complex yoohoos, then continues with no land, dignity or status returned to the tribes.
I strongly suspect this bit of theatrical institutional rending of theatrical garments is more of the same: the U of M is “acknowledging” its theft from the tribes.
DAN KRAKER: The TRUTH report released today delves into the details of how the university profited off of Native land and people. It concludes that the U’s founding board of regents, quote, “committed genocide and ethnic cleansing of Indigenous peoples for financial gain.”
And it shows how millions of in revenue derived from timber, minerals, and other resources from Native land were invested in municipalities around the state, but not in tribal communities. Shannon Geshick is executive director of the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council. She says it’s the first report in which a major university critically examines its history with Native people.
SHANNON GESHICK: One part of me is really appreciative of the– I guess– courage of the university. But also the other part of me is like, it’s time. It’s important that other voices are heard, not only the dominant voice. The TRUTH project kind of just rips that open and really reveals a narrative I think that a lot of people just don’t know.
And what will this lead to (emphasis added)?
In recent years, the University has committed to acknowledging the past and doing the necessary work to begin rebuilding and strengthening relationships with tribal nations and Native people. Openly receiving this report is another step toward honoring that commitment. While documenting the past, the TRUTH report also provides guidance as to how the University can solidify lasting relationships with tribes and Indigenous peoples built on respect, open communication, and action. As we engage in the important discussions that will now follow, that guidance will be invaluable.”
Translation to English: Expect more lip service – and, of course, more taxpayer money transferred to the academic/non-profit/government complex, “Native Division”.
In 1940, France had by most measures the most powerful military in the world.
More combat divisions, more (and by some standards better) tanks, more aircraft than its competition, including the Germans.
And yet when the German invasion came in 1940, the country collapsed in six weeks.
American conservative wags, often almost badly taught enough in history to pass as Democrats, chuckle and call them “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”. It’s wrong; the French at their best fought fiercely; the German after-action reports in the advance on Dunkirk gave them high marks for courage and skill.
American pseudo-intellectuals blame a “Maginot Mentality”, believing the French idea was to hide behind a line of fortifications that they didn’t yet know had been made obsolete by the Stuka and the Panzerkampfwagen. This, too, is myopic; the Maginot Line was built as a reaction to France’s horrific losses in World War I. The theory was, a line of elaborate fortifications backed by an artillery arm that had emerged from World War I as the best in the world, could enable a relatively small force of middle-aged reservists to hold most of the French frontier, including defending the French industrial heartland that’d been ravaged in 1914-1918, while the younger troops formed a mobile army that in theory had not much less progressive a doctrine than the Germans.
On paper, France should have been able to repel a German attack. Oh, there were problems; the French Army preferred the security of telephones and couriers to the flexibility of radio. Most French tanks had tiny crews – 2-3 men – featuring turrets where one man had a workload that German, British and American tank designer gave to two and eventually three men. There were problems.
But the biggest problem? France was physically and demographically exhausted. With catastrophic casualties among the generation generation that came of age during World War I, the birth rate had crashed. France staffed that large army by drafting nearly everyone and keeping them in the reserves for a long, long time. And yet the baby bust among men in their twenties was a major problem.
Perhaps worse? France was morally exhausted. The war had sapped the nation’s institutions, enervated its culture, left it roiling in two decades of internal political bloodletting – call it cultural depression, maybe the beginnings of slow cultural suicide.
That was exacerbated by near civil-war between Communists and the Right – strife that led much of France to put poxes on both houses (much as Germans did in 1933, when a strongman came along to make politics just go away and let them get along with their lives).
When the Germans attacked in June, 1940, many French soldiers fought ferociously. Not a single German soldier leaked through the Maginot line – only one small outpost fell. The few French tanks using modern doctrine held the Germans to a draw in head-to-head combat.
But the German breakthrough at Sedan, which hinged on many French weaknesses (couriers getting lost, telephone lines breaking) led dizzyingly rapidly to the fall of a France that was, behind the front lines, just not in the mood to fight for itself.
Viewed materialistically, France had everything it needed to resist Germany.
Morally, it collapsed so fast it still shocks the world.
It took four years of occupation, a national reckoning, and a couple of decades of the Francocentric influence of Charles De Gaulle to right the French cultural ship, at least as close to “righted” as France ever gets.
The parallels with America today are a little sobering.
More next week.
“What if someone built a restaurant named ‘Swastika’?”
It wasn’t a question I ever got to ask the owner of Uptown’s late, lamented (?) Soviet-themed restaurant. I wasn’t going to ask the waitstaff or the bartender; they’re working stiffs and they don’t need to care one way or the other. But when friends asked me to meet there, I was a little uncomfortable; nobody would attend, much less open, a restaurant named “Swastikas”. You could probably sneak a few themes through: Blutwurst und Boden, or maybe Ein Fork, Ein Stein, Ein Menu.
But Hammer and Sickle? A direct reference to the emblem of one of the three most lethal regimes in history?
I went – long story. Great selection of vodka, and the best piroshki I’ve had since the Vomit Comet killed off the late, great “Russian Tea House” on University Avenue. It wasn’t my party, didn’t need to make a fuss…
…but I wasn’t especially pained to see that the concept has apparently gone to the great restaurant Lubyanka in the sky.
But when one door closes, a window opens. Maybe.
Another new restaurant, this time on the East Side of Saint Paul, gets into funky historical and cultural turf – maybe.
Juche is the official ideology of the North Korean regime. It’s Stalinism with a Korean accent. In terms of cultural and historical overtones, it’s a simple word that, viewed through a Nork lens, is as loaded as Lebenraum or Wrecker.
Not viewed through a Nork lens, it’s not entirely unlike the idiomatic and unobjectionable-to-admirable Finnish maxim of Sisu – self-reliance, grit, determination, stoicism.
And I’d love to figure it out. So, long story short, I guess I know where I’m eating next weekend.
The culture war is fought and lost or won in a million little nooks and crannies in our society.
The collective perception of historical ephemera that tumble-dries together to form “the public consciousness” is one of those collections of crannies.
And somewhere in that perception floats the collective dog’s breakfast of ideas and ideals that form the cultural idea of what is and was good, and what isn’t and wasn’t.
You ask most Americans “who was the worst president in American history”, you will get many answers. Conservatives and progressives may differ – Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush likely trend toward the top for both, respectively. There are some consensus picks; Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan and a few others.
But among the eternal parade of cultural skirmishes that could stand some winning, the left’s rewriting of history re Woodrow Wilson needs to be turned around and pointed back toward history’s lower colon, where it belongs.
A national consensus on hating Wilson is long overdue. It is the patriotic duty of every decent American. While conservatives have particular reasons to detest Wilson, and all his works, and all his empty promises, there is more than enough in his record for moderates, liberals, progressives, libertarians, and socialists to join us in this great and unifying cause.
The roll call of the worst presidents in American history includes some consensus top choices. James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce both contributed mightily to the nation’s slide into the Civil War, and Andrew Johnson did enduring harm to Reconstruction in the war’s aftermath. But all three of those men were repudiated by the end of their single term in office. They left no heirs who would acknowledge their influence, no fleet of academic hagiographers who could see themselves reflected in those presidencies.
Wilson, by contrast, served two full and consequential terms. He was the only Democrat re-elected to the job during the century between 1832 and 1936. He was lionized by liberals and progressives in academia and the media for most of the century after he left office in 1921. In my youth, and perhaps yours, Wilson was presented in history books as a tragic hero whom the unthinking American people didn’t deserve. He was often placed highly on academics’ rankings of the presidents. Princeton University named its school of international relations for him. Even in rescinding that honor in June 2020, the university’s press release declared: “Though scholars disagree about how to assess Wilson’s tenure as president of the United States, many rank him among the nation’s greatest leaders and credit him with visionary ideas that shaped the world for the better.”
Nah. Wilson was a human pile of flaming trash. He was a bad man who made the country and the world worse. His name should be an obscenity, his image an effigy. Hating him is a wholesome obligation of citizenship.
Let us count the ways:
Read the whole thing if you can.
Whatever other missions I have in life,extinguishing any lingering ignorance about the loathsomeness of Woodrow Wilson is going on the list.
I’ve spent a fair chunk of the past 20 years telling people “there was a lot more to the 1980s than Flock of Seagulls hair and Members Only jackets and kitsch”.
“Cobra Kai“, the Karate Kid sequel, has been pretty brilliant at showing how those of us who grew up in the ’80s feel like fish out of water today – comically, often brilliantly.
But there was more to it than watching yesterday’s background noise turn into today’s “microaggressions”.
I could work at it for years more, and never nail it as well as this article, by Mark “Not Mike” Judge.
Its observations about how people were, and how kids grew up back then, puts a serious spin on “Cobra Kai’s” comic take. But it wasn’t all laughs. The whole thing is worth a read.
I could have pullquoted most of the article – but this bit here stuck out for me (with some bits and pieces of emphasis added):
“There were novels and short stories that were more literature than pulp fiction—The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Lonesome Dove, Love in the Time of Cholera, Neuromancer, the stories of Ann Beattie. There were films like “Wings of Desire,” “Cinema Paradiso,” “A Room with a View,” “Babette’s Feast,” and “Round Midnight.” Better known but no less intoxicating was the music: New Order, the Replacements, the Pixies, Public Enemy, the Smiths, U2, Suede, Talking Heads. Talk Talk began the decade as a synth-pop group and ended it with two art rock masterpieces, 1988’s “Spirit of Eden” and 1991’s “Laughing Stock.””
“In his book Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, Simon Reynolds notes that to be alive and young and culturally aware in those years was to have a bracing antipathy to nostalgia. We didn’t care about the hippies of the 1960s. The 1970s were there to make jokes about bad clothes and tacky disco. The idea of going back 20 or even 30 years to ape the styles of earlier generations would have been considered demented and embarrassing. We had our own thing. When director Spike Lee was about to release a film or the Blue Nile a new record, nobody had any interest in the big pot cloud that had hovered over Woodstock.”
The whole article is worth a read.
See, Millennials and Zeeps? You *weren’t* the first ones to get annoyed by Baby Boomers.
It was 43 years ago today that this happened:
It was one of a short series of events that blasted the US out of its post-Vietnam, Watergate-era funk, and played a role, at least psychologically, in ushering in one of the greatest eras in American history.
To paraphrase Sydney Greenstreet in that other great American moment, Casablanca, “It’ll take a miracle to bring the USA back, and Big Left has outlawed miracles”.
Which is all the more reason to believe.
No single book has shaped not just my understanding of modern history, but my own journey from adolescent leftist to conservative more than Modern Times, Paul Johnson’s epic history of the world from 1918 to about 1980 (and, in a revised edition, through the 1990s.
It wouldn’t be a great exaggeration to say that Johnson was the most important modern historian, thinker and writer in my life – not least because he, in starting out on the left before seeing the light and becoming a libertarian-conservative, more or less as I was doing at the time. He went from being an editor at the New Statesman to an adviser to Margaret Thatcher and leading public intellectual of the right, bringing his intellectual and historical gravitas with him.
And few books explain the debt modern society pays to a brief period in history, from 1815 to the mid-1840s, when self-educated men laid the groundwork for most of what makes modern society modern (from the steam engine and electric communication to the popular vote and pants) than Johnson’s Birth of the Modern .
And on, and on. through dozens of books. I still have 40 to go.
Johnson passed away last week at 94.
Modern Times shaped a generation and more of people who had studied history as interpreted by the Left. His explanation of the Great Depression drew greatly on the works of libertarian economists and provided a strong antidote to the conventional wisdom that FDR has saved capitalism from itself…A culture that produced Paul Johnson and others like him explains why British literary writing and journalism, on the whole, is so much better than most of what is produced in America. As Stephen Glover of Britain’s Daily Mail explains: “Even readers who thought they might disagree with him looked forward to his next offering. He never penned a dull sentence or had a dull thought.”
This blog, in its own way, started out as my little way of trying to repay my debt to Johnson .
He’d certainly be canceled with extreme prejudice, were he in his prime today.
“Woke” culture piddles on most of what Martin Luther King stood for.
Which is, alone, a great reason to post the original version of this, one of his greatest speeches, today:
I graze a bit on NPR, mostly to find material. Let’s just say it’s a “target rich environment”.
The network has a couple of shows – chock full of vaguely-black sounding accents and topics, slathered over the same progressivized-for-your-protection content they provide the other 162 hours a week, shows like “It’s Been a Minute” and “The Takeaway”, that seem to try to address, not so much the “black” audience, but NPR’s huge, relentlessly white progressive audience, apparently to make them feel, if not “more authentic”, at least a little less guilty.
But I’m here to bring the guilt back.
In recent months, I’ve heard 2-3 shows on the relentlessly woke networks – interviewing the stars of the movie “The Woman King”, an “afrocentric feminist” story about a sub-Saharan kingdom’s unit of female warriors.
The movie – and the gushy, smarmy, self-congratulatory interviews – gabble and prate on and on about female power and empowerment and inspiration and enough word salad to unstop a cement colon.
What doesn’t get mentioned? The real life “warrior women’s” main military and economic justification; procuring slaves to sell. They were a revenue-generation tool for the Dahomey monarchy.
Go ahead. Tell me where the slavery talk is. I’ll wait.
National Review’s Armond White – one of modern media’s most intellectually consistent and rigorous film critics, and incidentally a black man – was not amused:
Historical fraudulence is a problem, but the reasons behind it are what cause alarm. Director Gina Prince-Bythewood and screenwriters Dana Stevens and Maria Bello gainsay Dahomey’s role in the slave trade, trivializing the complications of that original sin. Instead, they offer another Millennial gender-flip, conceived to further sexual confusion via racial frustration and feminist anger.
This approach cannot be taken seriously because, like Black Panther and The Lion King, The Woman King is juvenile. The film’s comic-book premise treats black audiences like children. That adolescent kick over hair-pulling catfights is extended into an almost laughable, pseudo-political history lesson pitting women against men…Thus, she gives us Dahomey as Wakanda, a made-up history for uninformed viewers who feel so “unseen” that they can be robbed and conned again.
But let’s not bury the lede here.
NPR, and Hollywood.
Erasing Slavery.
It’d be so cool if NPR engaged with the proles. I’ve got so many questions.
Driving home from a Christmas party, I flipped over to national public radio and listened to the networks most explicit Christmas tradition – the inevitable airing of the insipid David Sedaris story about being a Santas elf at Macy’s back in the 1970s.
I listened to it, so you don’t have to. but here it is anyway.
It’s a Christmas story for people who hate Christmas. Feel free not to listen. I certainly couldn’t -. I flipped it off after about five minutes. God only knows how many times I’ve sat through the whole thing. 20? No – twice.
Anyway, it filled me with an urge to hear a Christmas story that didn’t fill me with rage.
So I thought I would switch to a different, much better Christmas story.
I’ve written about it in the space before; the dark, scary winter of 1981, when the communists shut down the Solidarity, labor movement in Poland. Poland’s ambassador, a lifelong communist atheist converted to Catholicism by his devout wife, had an attack of conscience and patriotism, just before Christmas of 1981, and defected to the United States.
One hesitates to think how the Biden administration would react.
But the president was Ronald Reagan. And his reaction was one for the ages.
I was still a couple years away from being a conservative. But I remember Reagan’s speech that night.
Since NPR will never replay it – mustn’t divert airtime from David F****ng Sedaris – I will:
Anyway, – Christmas greetings, from a time when the president was on America’s side.
I flipped on NPR last night to catch a (large) part of a Terry Gross interview with historian Adam Hochschild, on his new book about the grave threats to democracy during World War 1.
And it was a dismal time indeed. “Sedition”, defined broadly, threw thousands in jail. The Department of Justice deputized people to enforce government speech codes and arrest people for suspicion of, basically, thought-crime; it was the first time in history that federal institutions had enough power and budget to get weaponized, and that is exactly what happened. Jim Crow was, by the way, federalized.
But here’s the thing; while Hochschild calls the repression “Trump-y” at one point, and Gross makes a raft of her usual Kaelian innuendos, you can listen to the piece all the way through…
…in vain for a reference to the fact that Woodrow Wilson, the father of modern “progressivism”, and an enthusiastic actual white supremacist to boot, drove all of this from the ground up.
“He who controls the past, controls the future. He who controls the present, controls the past”.
I was listening to MPR last week (so you don’t have to), and almost had to pull the car over when I heard this interview – with Beverly Gage, historian and author of “G-Man – J Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century”.
And I almost pulled off the road because the generic female NPR host got sooooo close to realizing “giving big governent unlimited, unaccountable power can have bad unintended consequences”…
,,,but just couldn’t quite say it.
20 years ago, this blog observed the Pearl Harbor anniversary by noting the annual gathering of hundreds of survivors – and the time, men in their late 70s on up – and noted the jarring statistic that at that time, the generation of World War 2 veterans was passing on at a rate of about 300 per day. This blog observed the demise of the last known World War 1 veteran – a man who’d enlisted as an ambulance driver after lying about being 14 years old – probably 3-4 years after it started, half a generation ago. .
Today, perhaps a dozen doughty, well-nigh indestructible centenarians will have made the trip to Hawaii. Today, the death rate has slowed, if only because, according to VA statistics, about 98.5% of those who served have died.
And, unconscionably, much of the knowledge that the Greatest Generation had seems to be passing with them.
War is hell.
Some things are worth fighting for.
Mankind is not inherently good, but is in fact capable of horrors beyond human comprehension that are simultaneously utterly banal and commonplace.
Some things are worse than fighting – but not many.
Sometimes, you need to get past the things that divide us to survive and prevail.
I fear our nation – really, the whole of Western Civilization – has Santayana’d itself; forgotten its history, and thus condemned itself to repeat it.
UPDATE: I’m not going to say the Millennial and Z Generations don’t have people like this.
I’m saying the zeitgeist is not favorable for creating a lot of them.
Reading this piece by John Phelan at the Center of the American Experiment about the rise and fall of Hubert Humphrey, it’s a little bit amazing how little, in someways, has changed over the past 60 years:
“We’re not going to let the political philosophy of the DFL be dictated from the Kremlin,” Humphrey said. “You can be a liberal without being a Communist, and you can be a progressive without being a communist sympathizer, and we’re a liberal progressive party out here. We’re not going to let this left-wing communist ideology be the prevailing force because the people of this state won’t accept it, and what’s more, it’s wrong.” His Republican opponent in Minnesota’s 1948 senate race had voted against the Marshall Plan for European aid, and Humphrey charged that “if American policy had been decided by the vote of the senior Senator from Minnesota, we might be negotiating with the Russians now in London instead of Berlin.”
Especially regarding the behavior of the left’s vanguard elite (emphasis added):
Whatever the motivation, Humphrey was now in the front line of an increasingly bitter civil war in the Democratic Party. Many young activists, drawn into politics and the party by the struggle for civil rights, were bitterly opposed to the Vietnam war. Known as the New Left, as distinct from the old left of Rauh’s coalition, their opposition escalated along with the war. Wherever Humphrey went, he was met with abuse from anti-war protestors. At Stanford in March 1967, for example, demonstrators mobbed his car screaming, “War criminal!” “Murderer!” and “Burn, Baby, Burn!” Several tried to break through the police cordon, and a can of urine was thrown over one of Humphrey’s Secret Service men. Humphrey had little affinity for the student radicals. Recalling his time as a student at the University of Minnesota in the 1930s, he said, “I didn’t have much time to join a protest movement, I was concerned about being able to earn enough to eat.” He compared the protestors’ “foul language and physical violence” to “Hitler youth breaking up meetings in Germany.” In 1966, referring to his battle with the DFL Communists, he told reporters “I fought those bastards then and I’m going to fight them now.”
Of course, that was at a time when “the greatest generation“ were still in their prime working years, and the degenerate radical left was a relatively new abscess. Today’s “new, new left“ is the children, grandchildren and indoctrinees of the hippies Humphrey was talking about.
Democrats like to bleat that Ronald Reagan couldn’t be elected in today’s GOP.
It’s rubbish – watch “A Time For Choosing” and ask what he’d have to change today – but I’d answer in response that Paul Wellstone would either have trouble getting endorsed in today’s DFL, or would have to displace hard to the left to stay viable.
It’s exceptionally hard to believe that it was 20 years ago today Wellstone died:
The crash – which DFLers of my acquaintance spent years was a hit job carried out by an RNC sniper – handed the election to Norm Coleman.
The Coleman/Wellstone race was, in fact, what put this blog on the map (checks notes) twenty freaking years ago: covering the DFL’s bizarre, often antisemitic attacks on Coleman, and another prominent Minnesotan’s clod-footed assault on Coleman, got me the Instalanches that launched this blog from 5 hits a day into the 3-4 digit range.
The pastoral calm of the Warndt Forest in the Rhine Valley had been broken on September 7th, 1939; the soothing sounds of nature quickly replaced with the creak of tank tracks, the roar of trucks, and the stomping of men on the march. Only three days earlier, Germany’s western frontier had become a potential battlefield as Britain and France had declared war over Berlin’s invasion of Poland. For the second time in a generation, the Franco-German border would be a scene of intense conflict.
But the soldiers on the move were not members of the Wehrmacht. Most of Germany’s border towns had been cleared of both soldiers and civilians with the coming of a Second World War. These men were members of the French Second Army Group, part of 11 divisions and the opening wave of a planned 44 division invasion of Germany that would pull enemy forces away from a beleaguered Poland and dive deep into Germany’s industrial core. In all, the Allies had an estimated 110 divisions they could turn against Germany while the Nazis had, at most, 22 undermanned divisions to repel any such attack.
A week into the Second War World, France was in German territory. The outcome of the conflict rested on Paris and London’s willingness to stay on the offensive.
A French soldier inspects a German poster in the Saarland during the French invasion of Germany
In some respects, September 7th, 1939 was a date that France had planned on for 20 years.
Since the end of the Great War, military and political leaders in both France and Britain had sought to emulate an “Entente-lite” coalition to box in Germany in the event of a future conflict. While an alliance of new, smaller nations like Czechoslovakia and Poland could hardly match the industrial output and manpower of a Tsarist-era Russia, any tangible military threat in the east would ensure that if another conflict began, Germany would again find itself gored on the horns of a two-front war. To cement such a position, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia would form the “Little Entente” with French oversight, while Paris signed a direct defensive alliance with Poland in 1921. The French-Polish Treaty assumed that France would take offensive action against Germany within three days of starting mobilization while launching a full-scale assault within 15 days, presumably while Poland would fight any rearguard action to buy time. Continue reading
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, died yesterday at 91.
The media has been eulogizing him as the person who led the way in ending the Cold War – the coverage lists Reagan almost as an afterthought.
A quick remiinder:
In 1980, literally nobody was predicting the fall of the USSR. Everyone claiming in 1992 that they knew all along it was inevitable was full of s**t. The Left thought Reagan in particular was insane for believing it could fall.
Gorbachev was not selected by the Politburo to dismantle the Soviet Union. He was brought in to preserve and update it – think “China”. It didn’t work.
Or, to put it in a pithier vibe:
Still and all, it could have been much worse. The disintegration of the USSR could have been a bigger disaster than it’s actually been (and that’s been bad enough).
RIP, Mikhail Gorbachev.
It finally happened; I’m at an age when I get to spend time correcting younger people about the misconceptions some older people are giving them about “my” time.
Maybe it’s just me – but I’ve been noting a little surge of questions – and revisionist answers – about the 1980s, lately.
I’ll stick with the question:
I’ll take a run at that.
No, Mr. McGeoch and anyone else with the question – they were even better than most people today credit them for.
Do yourself a favor and watch the movie the movie “Miracle”; the opening montage *brilliantly* shows how depressing US life was in the ’70s.
Here it is.
If you are of a certain age, you can almost feel the depression of that era – the malaise that plagued us for that miserable decade – creeping over you.
We know how the movie – and the game whose story it related – ended; a two hour movie about a one hour game boiling down to one of the most memorable minutes in the history of television:
The decade took a little longer, and was a lot more suspenseful.
It wasn’t just that we bounced back from the economic malaise of the ’70s, and the ’82 recession (as bad as 2008) in a way that seems *miraculous* today. Although to a guy getting out into the world at the time, that was pretty good timing.
No – it was much bigger.
In the ’70s, Communism – the bloodiest dictatorships in history – was at its peak. And while the success of Ronald Reagan’s goal of extincting the USSR has a thousand fathers today, in 1980 literally nobody thought they were going away.
People today think of the Cold War as a cultural punch line – but it was no joke, kids.
I grew up in missile country, during the height of the cold war, between two SAC bases. I grew up very aware the world could get incinerated in minutes if some colonel in Moscow or Colorado Springs had a bad day.
I was *never* going to have kids in a world like that. This was something I knew when I graduated from college. Why bring someone into the world, just to have them die with you, and the rest of civilization? What was the point?
And over the course of that decade, the USSR – the most murderous regime in history – went from being the “other” superpower to…gone.
The threat hanging over all of us and everything we did…
..vanished.
In 1980, the entire American intelligentsia said the Communist world was here to stay. Anyone who says that they didn’t think so is lying.
And yet:
Even his own staff thought it was too reckless. The Democrats? Forget about it.
And even though I was living in the middle of it at the time, I didn’t quite believe it. Even as the Berlin Wall fell…:
…I couldn’t quite believe it.
I’ve cited Miracle; I’m going to drop the other pop culture bomb. Things still hadn’t sunk in for me when I was working at at Top 40 station. This song came out:
It’s “Right Here, Right Now” by Jesus Jones. They’re a trite, flash in the pan British post-new-wave band. But it was the only song (other than the Scorptions Wind of Change) about that bit of history. I can’t think of a whole lot of pop culture artifacts about “watching the world wake up from history”.
It’s a trite bit of new wave pop – and I get a catch in my threat when I listen to it, to this day.
Because it came out about the time that the USAF, which had kept nuclear bombers on alert 24/7 for literally 40 years…stopped. Hundreds of missiles got retired.
And it was like someone lifted a steamer trunk full of bowling balls off my chest. I have no idea how to relate that to someone who wasn’t there.
Bob Dylan didn’t have this to sing about
You know it feels good to be alive
Other than perhaps to hope one gets the significance that my oldest was born a year later – into a world that was safe enough to think about it. And for all the jabbering about “revolution” that the generation before mine had inflicted on the world, this? This was revolutionary.
All because of what happened in the ’80s.
I saw the decade in, when it seemed the world could change with the blink of an eye.
And it didn’t end there. With the end of the Cold War, a tidal wave of defense effort turned to civilian uses. All that American ingenuity that had spent the ’70s and ’80s helping tanks hit their targets while driving at 40mph, detecting Soviet submarines hundreds of miles away, went into civilian goods. The GPS in your smart phone started out in smart bombs. Your car’s airbag’s origin story was in the fire detector in M1 Abrams tanks. This blog comes to you via ancient Department of Defense project eventually called the Internet.
It was the “peace dividend”. Bill Clinton (with the invaluable assistance of the last actually conservative GOP Congress forcing him to the right) got to cash it. The economy went on the longest boom in history.
It would not have happened without the events of the 1980s.
That’s the fun, nostalgic part. I spent my late teens and early 20s watching the world wake up from history.
But as another song put it, nothing good ever lasts: Mr. McGeoch’s entire generation grew up knowing little about the era but what they’ve been told by the people who write the memes, who shoot the TikTok videos, write the cultural punch lines – while at the same time benefitting from its results as no previous generation in human history. Two generations have grown up thinking that the world that started in 1989 was the natural order – or, simultaneously better and worse, not having to think about it all that hard.
It’s not. Mankind’s natural state is for the strong to dominate the weak; for those with the will to power to control those without. The moral arc of history is long, but almost always – but for this past 200-odd years – bends toward tyranny and barbarism.
And it can all go away like *that*.
“I saw the world change in the blink of an eye” when I was 26.
I’m seeing it change back in a long, slow, masochistic drip drip drip.
Like the seventies – only much more serious, this time. Perhaps because I’m old enough and well-read enough to know the consequences. Perhaps because the people driving us toward what appears to be an even deeper, grayer nadir are not comic book villains in tanks, but people in our own country, with PhDs and blue checkmarks.
It’s game-time…
…against ourselves.
Hope that answers the question.
Thousands of curious spectators had gathered along the Rue du Rhône in Geneva at 11am, watching in earnest as the Swiss Federal Council and the State Council of the Canton of Geneva marched in slow procession, escorted by a small military contingent. At their forefront, Swiss President Giuseppe Motta basked in the adoration of the crowd as the parade of Swiss dignitaries entered the giant Salle de la Réformation event center.
Inside, a collection of 241 delegates from 41 member nations (minus Honduras, whose delegation was still traveling), waited for Motta to take his seat as a honorary chairman at the dais. The Acting President of the Assembly, Belgian politician Paul Hymans, rang a bell at 11:16am and declared the meeting open – the first official meeting of the League of Nations had begun on November 15th, 1920.
It had been a long and circuitous path to get to this day and the League’s first moments in formal existence (technically, the body had been organized in January of 1920 and had met in it’s proto form), exposed the flaws in it’s creation. As League drafted a message of thanks to American President Woodrow Wilson, stating that they had gathered on this day at the American’s request, the United States was absent from the proceedings, as well as the Soviet Union, Germany and roughly another 44 sovereign nations that had either been excluded or had chosen to bypass the organization. And the debates of the first day proved how fragile the newfound League could be, as France threatened to withdraw within hours when the subject of Germany’s admission was discussed.
In the air of the combative and disorganized proceedings, the ultimately prophetic words of Woodrow Wilson to the assembly could be heard: “I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it.”
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The first meeting of the League of Nations – deep divides on policy could be seen from the literal first minutes of the organization
Depending upon one’s historical perspective, the events of November 15th, 1920 in Geneva either represented the end of a nearly 150 year path of diplomatic and small ‘r’ republican political progress or a revolutionary jump from nation states, to competing alliances, to finally a burgeoning sense of global, collective action. The difference in historical narrative would eventually define those who chose to participate versus those who didn’t, and color the very notion of the purpose and powers of the League of Nations. Continue reading