tombruscino

2011-07-08T13:48:00.002-05:00

Email from the wife:

Subject: Your children...

Have just devised a plan to resurrect the Titanic. They are going to divert a tornado to wash away all of the water, then there will be a giant canyon and they can just go get the Titanic - without the use of submarines or anything. Mari is worried about the sharks dying. Anthony has decided that the entire universe will be covered with water and he will call God down back to earth to help us.Okay, it has gotten out of control. Aliens have been brought in...

2011-06-02T09:52:00.002-05:00

In my younger years I maybe made the pronouncement that running long distances was the act of a crazy person. So, of course, I now run long distances on a regular basis. Probably means I'm crazy.

However, there are worse ways to give to charity, if you have the means, than to pay to participate in races in your area, see the sights, and get in a workout. For example, the one we did last week was the Amy Thompson Run for Brain Injury in south Kansas City. (For the record, I placed 11th in my age group and 120th overall.)

If you are interested in such things--there are walks and kid runs too--this is a pretty good page for finding races in your state.

2010-12-23T14:38:00.001-06:00

Of course the local reporter picked our kids out of the crowd at the airport. So now they have all been on TV:

Merry Christmas to you all.

2010-11-09T11:54:00.002-06:00

Anthonyisms, Part 7,682:

This past weekend all three of our children had their first sleepover at a friend's place. Our understanding is that the kids got a solid fifteen minutes of sleep, so all went well on that front.

In the morning, while the wife and I were making our way to pick them up, the kids went to a park near the house where they were staying. The park was at a church, and it had a ship or ark of some sort on the playground for the kids. The mast of the ship, of course, was a cross.

So Anthony, who goes to a Catholic preschool and is thus familiar with the key theological issues relating to Christianity, leans out one of the windows of the ship to talk to the adults standing nearby.

"Do you see that cross," he says.

"Yes," they reply.

"We killed Jesus," he says, "and took his pirate ship."

2010-08-10T21:17:00.002-05:00

A Once Upon a Time Story,

by Anthony

Once upon a time there was a rabbit inside a monkey cage, and there was a banana on the rabbit and the monkey wanted it and took the banana and ate it. Then the rabbit cried and the monkey went and looked for more bananas and the rabbit looked for carrots and couldn't find any carrots. The monkey found a big pile of bananas and ate all the bananas because he was hungry, and the rabbit didn't find the carrots because he was at the zoo. But there was a giraffe and it was eating leaves and the rabbit said that rabbits don't eat leaves, they eat carrots. But then the rabbit found the guy that worked at the zoo and the guy went and got the rabbit carrots.

Then the monkey was in his cave and ate all the bananas and he was very hungry so he had a big pile of mud. And there was a pig who went by the squirrel and they saw the mud but it wasn't really mud, it was water on top of the mud, and the monkey drank up all the water in his cave. But then the monkey ate all of the hair, all of the hair on the polar bears, but the polar bears didn't want the hair so they were very happy when the monkeys ate all of the hair. And then the monkeys climbed into their bunk beds and went to sleep.

The End.

2010-07-16T18:46:00.001-05:00

Heard at the table tonight:

Daddy: "Eat your sandwich."
Mari: "It's not my favorite!"

Anthony: "I ate my whole sandwich. I chewed it up into little bits and pieces. Like a hammerhead shark. Hammerhead sharks chew things up into little bits and pieces."

Anthony: "Mommy and Daddy, I'm going to eat all of the pudding cups in the whole entire world. Then keep buying them and bringing them home to me. Even 100,000. I mean all 10. That means keep buying them. And then when I eat all ten of them, I will feel a lot better."

Anthony: "Mommy, look what's on your head."
Mommy: "What's on my head?"
Anthony: "A Transformer."
Dominic: "April Fools!"
Anthony loudly hums soundtrack from Transformers 2.

Anthony: "Wet and sticky! That gives me an idea."

Book news. From now on, all book news will be on a page only for the book, which can be found here: A Nation Forged in War.

2010-04-18T16:10:00.006-05:00

The Book. For the time being, this is a running post for material on the book:

Thomas Bruscino, A Nation Forged in War: How World War II Taught Americans to Get Along (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2010).

Description

“Thomas Bruscino’s important study helps to demystify the experience of World War II in America by showing that the war fostered greater toleration among many white ethnic and religious groups in America but was also marked by continued racism and questionable moral practices on the part of the generation that fought.”
— John Bodnar, Chancellor’s Professor of History, Indiana University

World War II shaped the United States in profound ways, and this new book—the first in the Legacies of War series—explores one of the most significant changes it fostered: a dramatic increase in ethnic and religious tolerance. A Nation Forged in War is the first full-length study of how large-scale mobilization during the Second World War helped to dissolve long-standing differences among white soldiers of widely divergent backgrounds.

Never before or since have so many Americans served in the armed forces at one time: more than 15 million donned uniforms in the period from 1941 to 1945. Thomas Bruscino explores how these soldiers’ shared experiences—enduring basic training, living far from home, engaging in combat—transformed their views of other ethnic groups and religious traditions. He further examines how specific military policies and practices worked to counteract old prejudices, and he makes a persuasive case that throwing together men of different regions, ethnicities, religions, and classes not only fostered a greater sense of tolerance but also forged a new American identity. When soldiers returned home after the war with these new attitudes, they helped reorder what it meant to be white in America.

Using the presidential campaigns of Al Smith in 1928 and John F. Kennedy in 1960 as bookend events, Bruscino notes a key change in religious bias. Smith’s defeat came at the end of a campaign rife with anti-Catholic sentiment; Kennedy’s victory some three decades later proved that such religious bigotry was no longer an insurmountable obstacle. Despite such advances, Bruscino notes that the growing broad-mindedness produced by the war had limits: it did not extend to African Americans, whose own struggle for equality would dramatically mark the postwar decades.

Extensively documented, A Nation Forged in War is one of the few books on the social and cultural impact of the World War II years. Scholars and students of military, ethnic, social, and religious history will be fascinated by this groundbreaking new volume.

Thomas Bruscino is the author of Out of Bounds: Transnational Sanctuary in Irregular Warfare. His work has also been published in Military Review and War & Society. He is assistant professor of history at the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Here is the UT Press webpage.

The book is available for purchase at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

It has been noted online by Instapundit, at the Chronicle of Higher Education, HEPPAS Books, and Sir Read A Lot Reviews Books.

Here is a WorldCat page for it, to help track many of the libraries that have it.

It has also been featured at The Page 99 Test and in an article from Adams State College. On June 1, 2010, the book received the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Golden Pen Award.

On another note, I feel I must mention that my two and a half year old daughter has developed a new technique for trying to get what she wants. She will try to do something she is not supposed to, for example get into candy in a bowl on the counter. We will tell her no. She will then tell us "Don't see me!" and then try again.

Feel free to use that one at work.

2010-01-05T19:48:00.002-06:00

I cannot believe there is any doubt. Of course the Browns have to fire Eric Mangini and move on. Here's the deal, the Browns beat terrible Chiefs and Raiders teams. I went to the Chiefs game, and I can assure you that had the KC receivers not just blatantly dropped multiple passes, they would have won the game. And while I am giddy that the Browns finally beat the Squeelers and pleased that they beat the Jags, both those games were played in ridiculously cold conditions that greatly hindered the passing game. That didn't matter for the Browns, because they were so incompetant passing the ball that it was not an issue. Look, even the "discovery" of Jerome Harrison is actually an indication of incompetence--Harrison should have been handed the ball a long time ago, by Crennel and Mangini. It took injuries for them to realize that a guy who averages over 5 yards a carry and reminds me of Priest Holmes should get the ball 20 times a game. Even then, it was disgusting to watch the team waste Harrison's running by complete ineptitude in the passing game. As far as I know, they didn't even try a play action pass in those last four games. I know they didn't against the Chiefs.

But leaving all that aside, there's no way that an offensive guy like Holmgren is going to stand for the goat rope we had this year on the offensive side of the ball. So he is going to all but install an offense and/or name an offensive coordinator. How's that going to work? Will the new guy report to Holmgren or Mangini? We all know how it will seem, especially given how much control Mangini demanded and got this past year.

Which brings us to another issue that Mike cannot ignore: Mangini's reputation. The word is out, and very few players in the league want to play for a chubby non-football playing control freak who does not win consistently. Since good ole Eric went and traded away or alienated all the skilled Pro Bowl offensive players (Winslow, Edwards, Lewis) this past year, the Browns need to draw players in free agency, and they won't be competitive with Mangini as coach. Sorry, he's gotta go.

Now let's go get Gruden, keep Ryan as the DC, and turn this thing around.

A few years back, a fellow historian who I had met and befriended when we were on a conference panel together at the Society for Military History introduced me to a journalist friend of his who had some questions about historical issues relating to the U.S. Army. I helped him out as much as I could, although frankly he's a smart enough guy that he didn't need me much. As evidence, he now writes pretty regularly for the Atlantic Monthly. Here's his latest, "SimCity Baghdad." His name is Brian Mockenhaupt. I've mentioned him before, but look him up again (here's a recent sample). He's rapidly becoming the most fair, most informed, and simply the best journalist covering the military today.

Finally, it took a while, but I have finally come of age as a hobbit. Now I go eat ice cream cake.

2009-12-24T16:19:00.007-06:00

We started with an antipasti lunch, beginning with shrimp cocktail, with the cocktail sauce made from roasted tomatillos. Then we had red peppers stuffed with tuna (from a jar). We made baccala, of course. Next came fried calamari, which I had never tried at home before. We went with calamari fritti arrabiata, based loosely on the recipe at a restaurant called Paravicini's in Colorado Springs. Unbelievable. Even my wife liked it, and she does not eat seafood.

Tonight we're having linguini with clams and mussels, and also ricotta gnocchi--my wife's grandmother's recipe (kind of like this one), made with buffalo ricotta from Italy . We'll have our family red sauce with meatballs (beef, pork, lamb) and sausage, but the sauce this time got the addition of anchovies.

That's seven total, for the Feast of the Seven Fishes. We mixed it up some, but it's a traditional Italian American thing to do on this day. Cause it's snowing outside, my folks are in town, there are three very excited kids waiting for the big guy, and it is just such an important night.

Merry Christmas everyone.

2009-12-07T09:27:00.002-06:00

One from City Journal. Mark Riebling reviews Paul Johnson's new biography of Churchill. Riebling finds the book surprisingly lacking, but does a nice job himself of getting at the complexity of the twentieth century's essential man.

Two from City Journal. "Romantic Science," by Michael Knox Beran, a review of Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. Beran writes:

If Enlightenment thinkers built on the metaphor of the well-ordered machine, the Romantics sought to understand the spark that makes a thing live, whether it be a human being, a work of art, or a nation-state. The framers of the American Constitution were deeply influenced by the Enlightenment and labored to perfect a republican mechanics of checks and balances. Bismarck and Lincoln, by contrast, grew up reading the Romantic poets and conceived of their nations as organic growths. The German nation was for Bismarck a living thing, with a right “to exist, to breathe, to be united.” Lincoln, in the Gettysburg Address, described the foundation of the United States as a species of live birth: the republic was “conceived in liberty” and “brought forth” by the “fathers.” Like a human being, the nation was capable of undergoing a second, spiritual birth, “a new birth of freedom.”

The organic vitalism of the Romantics did something to correct what Cardinal Newman called the “dry and superficial” thinking of the eighteenth century. But the Romantic approach held its own dangers. It is one thing to seek the secret of life, another to dabble in diablerie. Romantic wonder is closely connected to Romantic nightmare. The literary monsters of Byron, Beckford, and Mary Shelley find a political counterpart in the monstrous qualities of Bismarck’s German Reich, and perhaps a scientific one in the temptations of today’s genetic technology. It’s easy to play God, but difficult to keep hold of one’s beast.

Reading this, it's almost as if he believes there was something like Western civilization. How dare he impose his narrative structures on the chaos of existence? What power structure is he trying to impose under the guise of "understanding"? How topical am I for questioning postmodernism a decade after the fact? How many rhetorical questions can I ask in a row before it becomes obnoxious?

Three from City Journal. Also from Beran, "Can the Polis Live Again?", an essay on public spaces through a critique of Hannah Arendt. I confess that I have not done my due diligence in reading Arendt, so this blurb stood out to me:

Studying Eichmann in the dock, Arendt concluded that he was not an evil genius but a fool: “Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster,’ but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.” He was “genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché,” Arendt wrote; in his aphasic helplessness, he could but repeat, in “officialese” (“my only language,” he said), the formulas he had learned to parrot. “The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected to his inability to think.”

Unfortunately, her description of Eichmann sounds all too familiar to me in my professional life. Before anyone panics out there, let's not go too far with the parallels. The U.S. military is not producing a bunch of Nazis--the banality of Eichmann's evil, not the evil itself, is at issue here. Arendt, had she a greater sense of humor--or art, as Beran points out--could have beaten Scott Adams to the punch. I don't work with the SS, our banalities are benign, but I am definitely in a Dilbert world, where the repetition of cliches replaces thinking all the time.

Finally, a reminder that the book will be out by the early spring. It's called A Nation Forged in War: How World War II Taught Americans to Get Along, and it's about how military service in World War II led to widespread tolerance among white ethnic and religious groups in the United States. Think I can get City Journal to review it?

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

2009-09-16T17:04:00.002-05:00

Conversations with children.

"Daddy."

"Yes son?"

"The bulldozer...Anthony and me...the pusher bulldozer...it's stuck."

"You mean Anthony and I...nevermind. Where is it stuck?"

"Under that...uh...long thing."

"Use your words."

"Under the...uh...the...coupon."

"You mean futon?"

"Yeah. It's under that."

2009-05-20T14:54:00.004-05:00

Captured at breakfast recently:

Reminder: He is three years old, and that is from memory, and he did it completely on his own.

In case you would like to check his accuracy, here's the speech from the movie:

Before time began, there was the Cube. We know not where it comes from, only that it holds the power to create worlds and fill them with life. That is how our race was born. For a time, we lived in harmony. But like all great power, some wanted it for good, others for evil. And so began the war. A war that ravaged our planet until it was consumed by death, and the Cube was lost to the far reaches of space. We scattered across the galaxy, hoping to find it and rebuild our home. Searching every star, every world. And just when all hope seemed lost, message of a new discovery drew us to an unknown planet called... Earth.

I guess we'll take him to see part two.

Just imagine if we used his powers for good.

2009-04-17T08:25:00.000-05:00

Random Stuff:

*I hate Pittsburgh. Seriously, I hate the frickin Steelers. Of course the hatred is fueled by the ineptness of my team, but we are going to turn it around any decade now, then maybe I won't hate the Steelers so much. Nah.

*We get it, the clydesdale's granddaddy came to America from Scotland, found his love, worked his way onto the Budweiser team, and then passed on the job to his progeny. Living the American dream. Very touching. So why did his grandson have a Scottish accent?

*My son Anthony is pretty sure mosquitos--he calls them "mocheetos"--are bad guys, which seems like a solid conclusion. He is also pretty sure that mocheetos live in caves with strangers (who are also bad guys), and that their greatest natural enemies are cows, because "Cows eat the mocheetos," which is why there are no mocheetos in winter.

*Anthony also thinks we should get coats for ladybugs, to keep them warm so they don't come in the house when it gets cold outside.

*A final note on the Anthony front: this morning, as his mother drove him to the store to pick up some mulch, fertilizer, and other springtime goodies, Anthoyn declared that it would be a good time for us to plant a cookie tree. His mother said, "Well, okay, but I don't know if the store will have any seeds for a cookie tree." To which he said, "That's okay, we'll just plant the crumbs."

*Dominic has a girlfriend at his preschool. Her name is Sydney, and she tells her parents all the time that she is going to marry Dominic because he is such a very nice boy. There is a lot of love there. So this morning Dominic made a proposal to his mother that we offer Mary to Sydney's parents in a trade for Sydney. Dominic is now the GM for Team Bruscino.

2009-03-24T15:23:00.002-05:00

The Boy (v. 1) at his first piano recital (with a visit from a very proud little sister):

2008-12-14T15:15:00.001-06:00

Forgive me. Sometimes I discover a classic, and then feel compelled to tell someone, something, that it is classic. Not very enlightening, I know, but this, from A Canticle for Leibowitz, seems so true that I had to write it down:

The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier for them to see that something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle's eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn.

2008-10-26T19:24:00.003-05:00

Just heard at the dinner table, from a soon-to-be 3 year old:

"Sometimes chickens die, and we eat them with our very dangerous teeth."

Ain't that the truth?

2008-08-24T11:43:00.001-05:00

"God Bless America," Lyrics by Four Year Old Son:

God Bless construction,
Snow plow and back hoe.
Construction dumptruck, and green crane,
Dumptruck forklift tractor trailer bulldozer.
From the 'struction, to the forklift,
Construction, Con-struc-tion
God bless America, 'struction construction.
God bless America, 'struction construction.

I'm not kidding. I could not have made that up.

2008-07-24T11:00:00.001-05:00

Dear diary: You are of course a diary now more than ever, because you exist only as a way for me to capture snippets of my life as it speeds by, and less to inform others what I find interesting. The capturing is so hard, because those snippets are so slippery. Because for me expression in writing takes so much effort. I wish that I could sit down and tap away unconsciously--be what my military colleagues call an "unconsciously competant" diarist--but, alas, I cannot. It is work, work I should, I know, I know, embrace, with the hope that it will get easier. But I can't help but think that even though there are infinite permutations in the way to arrange words to make sense in this and any other language, my scribbling is still a finite resource, and that I'll use it up in efforts such as these.

This is no paranoid delusion or false modesty. An example of my all too obvious shortcomings in this vein is painfully current. Your humbled diarist recently wrote in a book review that "Any attempts to democratize those who have no experience with democracy, particularly in the aftermath of war, are bound to yield glaring failures and quiet successes, the loss of traditions, good and bad, and the acquisition of habits, destructive and productive. All of this should sound familiar—-a cold comfort, perhaps, but a comfort nonetheless." Then came this these lines from a nearly contemporaneous essay: "That is not to say the American mind for war is amoral, but rather that morality, like so many other aspects of American thought, is pragmatic. If wars can be won by bombing military targets with as few casualties as possible, Americans will seize the chance. If wars can be won by capturing capital cities or winning decisive battles without involving civilians, wonderful. But if not, the American mind for war dictates that attacks grow steadily more devastating to enemy armies and then enemy populations until they have no choice but to give up the fight. The sooner the war ends in victory, the better--for everyone, but especially for us. It is brutal logic, but logical nevertheless." The words are not the same, but same enough nonetheless.

So I do not write everyday, a la Lileks, lest the writing well, already shallow, dry up completely. Still, the need to capture something pushes me from time to time to make the journey across the web to Blogger, to begin posts based on favored readings rather than my own musings. Perhaps recording what readings I fancied will fill in, in some way, for what I cannot write. Maybe I can get ahold of a few of those snippets, wily, sneaky, slippery bastards they might be.

The upshot of this meandering introduction is that I have any number of links and half-finished posts saved in emails and unpublished files, some of which provide glimpses into what I was thinking at the time. For example, last June (2007), I found this one:

Boys and girls, with a girl on the way. I find myself reading articles such as these with more scrutiny every day, as the Oracle at Ultrasoundia predicts a daughter in the near future. In praise of skinned knees. A modest rebellion makes me feel better.

Obviously, the Girl was born shortly thereafter, which by no means alleviated my feeling that boys can take more skinned knees and girls need more protection. I know, I know, I'm hopelessly hidebound and paternalistic. But then I am a conservative and a father, so I'm hidebound and paternalistic by definition. So there it is, I'm going to coddle my daughter more than my sons. I can't help it, and I'm not sure I want to. (The fact that she's the cutest thing ever made the daddy instinct kick in even more than I anticipated last summer. Seriously, look at this:

Who could possibly not want to coddle that?)

Of course not every link or series of links in my personal archives of failed posts and half thoughts are so directly personally relevant. Sometimes the links speak for themselves, but I did not get them out fast enough for them to be of much use. For example, back in April of this year I wrote that "two articles from the New Criterion are absolutely worth your time": "Shed No Tears," about the unquestioning worship of Native American cultures, and "Rudyard Kipling Unburdened," on the genius of the much-maligned writer. Both are behind subscriber walls, as is much of the New Criterion webpage now, but if there is access through the local library, they are very much worth any reader's time.

Then there are the old links and notes that no longer make much sense to me, if they ever did. For example, also back in April, I wrote "Why not, really? I get it. Journalists are obnoxious in so many ways," and had a link to this article about the monstrous Newseum in Washington D.C. The point? No idea. I think maybe I was going to make the case for the museum, but I'm really not sure why.

Where am I going with this? Nowhere, really. I went to Blogger today, saw some unpublished material, and could not help but ponder where I think I am in my engagement with this medium. Even as I have the chance to write more and more for more official outlets, there is still something to this place. Even for those of us who fear wasting our limited writing abilities on posts, and that we might have only fleeting relationships with our readers, these blogs, with the links to articles that we read and the small anecdotes that we pass on, feel like a record of something. And so I'll revisit them from time to time, when I feel like I have something I must record.

Which reminds of why I came here in the first place, small though it may seem. I found this article by Joseph Epstein about the decline of mainline Protestantism to be absolutely marvelous. I'm sure that says something about me, and I guess that's the point.

2008-05-30T15:08:00.002-05:00

This is somewhat ridiculous to do, but if folks want to comment directly to me, here is the text of an article I recently had published by the Claremont Institute:

Our American Mind for War
A review of The Echo of Battle: The Army’s Way of War, by Brian McAllister Linn

The success of the surge in Iraq was entirely predictable; so too are the tough times ahead. Should we choose to stay in that war-torn land, our professional military will face new and horrible challenges from the enemy, adjust and achieve new successes that will force the terrorists to changes their tactics again. We will defeat those too. So the process will continue, as Iraq moves in fits and starts toward its own version of democratic governance that, with our ongoing assistance, will be tolerably stable.

That has been the pattern from the beginning in Iraq, where our fighting men and women conquered a conventional force in the dizzyingly successful initial campaign, then were surprised by the part-criminal, part-ideological insurgency that followed. They adjusted and crushed the large-unit insurgents, faced a new threat from small-unit insurgents using booby traps, and adjusted again to limit the effectiveness of such attacks. Seeing the hostile elements turn toward localized attacks on civilian populations to try to foment civil war they adjusted once again with the surge to provide localized security for Iraqi civilians. And all this was done while training Iraqis to do the job themselves.

Our professional military has long been an adept at this move-countermove dance of small wars, be they on the Indian frontier or in distant lands like the Philippines, Afghanistan, or Iraq. But you wouldn't know that to follow the news over the past five years. You wouldn't even know it to listen to the professionals themselves, who are suffering through an ongoing existential crisis over their own perceived failings. So the questions need asking: from where does this knee-jerk self-criticism come? What is it about the American mind at war that leads to such a stunning lack of perspective?

* * *

In 1973, as the United States ended its participation in another unpopular war, Russell Weigley published an enormously influential study of American military history. The American Way of War had at its heart the captivating idea that Americans at war preferred above all else to annihilate their enemies through direct confrontation on the battlefield. It was a heritage originated by Ulysses S. Grant in the Civil War, and it reached its pinnacle in the blood-soaked clashes of World War II. Sure, there were other options—campaigns of maneuver, for example—but annihilation, that was the American way of war.

A concept like this, as historian Edmund S. Morgan has written, is a metaphor, one that resists empirical confirmation and instead draws its power from the author's ability to persuade the reader that it makes sense. Metaphors raise history above the level of trivia and allow it to provide explanation. The most powerful explanations become traditions, and those traditions set expectations and inform actions. So powerful was Weigley's metaphor that he unintentionally helped convince a generation of military leaders that annihilation was exactly how Americans fought wars in the past and, just as important, should fight wars in the future.

Not surprisingly, recent years have seen a spate of challenges to Weigley's thesis. U.S. Army War College professor Antulio Echevarria has maintained that what Weigley diagnosed, and what America practices, is only a way of battle, because Americans give very little attention to linking battlefield victories with strategic interests. The Savage Wars of Peace, Max Boot's study of America's small wars, posited that such conflicts had as much or more to do with an American way of war and rise to world power than Weigley's big conventional wars. Historian John Grenier looked further back into the pre-revolutionary era to the colonists' bloody and destructive campaigns of extirpation against the Indians, campaigns that constituted what he calls America's "first way of war." British iconoclast Jeremy Black has noted that there is nothing particularly unique in the Western world about the way Americans fight, denying altogether the existence of an exceptional American way of war.

Into this discussion steps Brian McAllister Linn with The Echo of Battle, a highly critical history of the U.S. Army's expectations and preparations for war since the Revolution. Agreeing with Echevarria that the American way of war was really a way of battle, and not satisfied with a single unified way in any case, Linn divides Army thinkers into three distinct groups: Guardians, Heroes, and Managers. Guardians enjoyed special preeminence in the 19th century with their focus on coastal defense supported by cutting edge technologies. They saw the primary goal of the military as deterring war. Heroes challenged the guardians by rejecting technological determinism and emphasizing the intangibles of conflict. They saw war as art rather than science, and thought individual genius and inspiring leadership from military officers the keys to victory in war. Managers rose to prominence in the 20th century as the purveyors of the belief that preparing for modern industrial war was essentially an organizational problem, and that only through efficiency in mobilization could the American military be effective on the battlefield. Although he favors the Heroes' emphasis on the human element in war, Linn excoriates all three schools for their repeated failures in forecasting future wars. Since his focus is on peacetime preparations and not the wars themselves, it is unclear how he thinks Americans managed to do so well for so long, but be that as it may, Linn's work is an essential addition to the debate.

Where does that leave us? Given this catalogue of interpretations, little wonder that some (like historian Michael Pearlman) have thrown their hands up and declared that the host of competing interest groups, ideologies, and personalities in our pluralist democracy inhibits coherent strategy-making, leaving us to muddle through, hoping for the best. And what has the Iraq war looked like but muddling through? The American way of war, the metaphor that once so ably explained our warmaking, has lost its power, and without that explanation we've gone adrift, cut loose from our anchor of tradition.

* * *

Or perhaps not. The ways of war, some of which seem to be diametrically opposed, are in fact linked by a common consideration. Professor Echevarria was not wrong in his critique; Weigley's way of war was only a description of how America fights, offering little consideration about why it fought that way. That is true for all the ways of war mentioned here. And this is where the metaphor fails, because the common consideration lies in the "why." Why did Grant seek to annihilate the rebel armies in the field? Why did the wars of the frontier so often turn into wars of extirpation? Why did the small wars for American power fly for so long under the radar? Why did Guardians believe they needed to protect the coasts first? Why did Heroes lean so heavily on charisma? Why did Managers feel compelled to organize and reorganize America's fighting forces?

The answer, at its root, is the same for all of these questions. American political and military leaders have long understood that they must contend with the inescapable and unique reality of the American democratic polity, a population that is collectively quick to anger though individually hesitant to go to war. Americans as a group have a way of life that they jealously defend, so much so that they cannot stand to see it diminished by real or imagined losses. That same way of life that is so worth defending makes the peacetime homefront an enormously attractive place. Americans have from the beginning distrusted standing armies because of the inherent threat such armies present to republican government, but even more so because standing armies require soldiers, and Americans are too caught up in their own lives to be soldiers. If Americans must take up arms to defend what they hold dear, they demand victory, and that it come soon. That consideration, more than any other, is at the core of the American mind for war.

Grant knew it, and he fought relentless campaigns because he understood that in a people's war there was no way to get himself and his men home short of annihilating the rebel armies, particularly Lee's army, in the field. The fighting men on the frontier turned to wiping out Indian villages when it became clear that the Indians would not stand and fight and accept the outcome of ordered battles, and certainly not on a schedule acceptable to farmer-militiamen who had to get back to their crops. Small overseas wars usually did not involve civilians, so Americans did not thoroughly concern themselves with the course of such conflicts, and generally forgot about them when they were over. Guardians saw coastal fortifications, an aggressive navy, and air power as the only available options for protecting America given the polity's aversion to service. Heroes hoped personal leadership and individual acumen could inspire troops mobilized for war, and thus overcome the citizen-soldiers' woeful lack of experience. And at least in the old days, Managers prepared to rapidly and effectively mobilize a society that did not want to prepare in peace and or stay at war for very long.

* * *

Because of this American mind for war, America's conflicts have fallen into two broad types: professional wars and citizen wars. Professional wars were small wars fought by the volunteer standing military, in which professionals were left alone to do their job. Citizen wars, on the other hand, drew in the American public—through conscription, mass voluntary enlistment, or direct attacks on the population—and thus had to be won quickly. That is not to say the American mind for war is amoral, but rather that morality, like so many other aspects of American thought, is pragmatic. If wars can be won by bombing military targets with as few casualties as possible, Americans will seize the chance. If wars can be won by capturing capital cities or winning decisive battles without involving civilians, wonderful. But if not, the American mind for war dictates that attacks grow steadily more devastating to enemy armies and then enemy populations until they have no choice but to give up the fight. The sooner the war ends in victory, the better-for everyone, but especially for us. It is brutal logic, but logical nevertheless.

If the circumstances of Vietnam and the current conflict have created disaffection among Americans, it is because they violated the American mind for war. The draft made Vietnam a citizen war, but the United States could not ramp up the brutality because of the threat of escalation to a conventional or nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The conundrum of Vietnam short-circuited the American mindset for warfare so totally that it sent spasms of discontent through American society and culture that can still be felt, well beyond even strategic after-effects like the Weinberger/Powell Doctrine and Vietnam Syndrome.

The current war is disconcerting in its own ways, because the precipitating incident on 9/11 did draw the civilian population into the war. Then the initial rhetoric from just about everyone about the Global War on Terrorism linked the conflict to great citizen wars of the past, and the American public became engaged emotionally. Yet the country did not mobilize in any meaningful way. Whatever their feelings about Afghanistan and Iraq, the citizenry never felt the pain of separating from their peacetime lives. The military has fought the war with the professional force that has kept the brutality to a minimum—probably even to the extent that it has hampered their fighting effectiveness. This feels like citizen war, but it is being fought like a professional war, which drives the American mind for war half-mad.

Of course this American mind for war is just another metaphor, meant to explain rather than guide. There is nothing about this explanation that should be interpreted as a step-by-step guide to war the American way. There are no easy answers. Rather, it is a warning that we have a mindset for conflict with which we must always grapple when we go to war. If we accept that reality then perhaps we can gain a much-needed sense of perspective. The alternative, as we know all too well from five years of petty rancor, is as ugly as it is unproductive.

2008-04-04T14:28:00.002-05:00

Some links I've been sitting on (upon which I've been sitting?):

This article captures something of what it is like teaching where I teach, only my students are older and have more experiences. Experiences like fighting terrorists and building friendly forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Amazing.

We teach a lot of topics where I work--too many, some could argue passively--but they all seem to come back to planning, since that is what graduates of the school tend to go and do in their next jobs. That leads to a lot of discussion on thinking about the future, but generally not this far or this dramatic. Bounce around the site some, and be sure to take a look at the Michael Chabon article from Details magazine. He writes:

I don’t know what happened to the Future. It’s as if we lost our ability, or our will, to envision anything beyond the next hundred years or so, as if we lacked the fundamental faith that there will in fact be any future at all beyond that not-too distant date. Or maybe we stopped talking about the Future around the time that, with its microchips and its twenty-four-hour news cycles, it arrived.

More and more I'm afraid that not enough people feel the loss in these three sentences. The future must not be a denizen for only science fiction fans. I get it, I'm the guy who has finally, happily, discovered the work of John Scalzi and has been eagerly awaiting the final season of Battlestar Galactica, but I think that bias is by and large correct. The incomparable Walter McDougall hit on a similar theme here.

Some quotations from recent readings that stood out to me, without commentary:

It’s just cause and effect. We can never sort them out. Science refuses to admit any cause except first cause—knock down one domino, the one next to it also falls. But when it comes to human beings, the only type of cause that matters is final cause, the purpose. What a person had in mind.

-Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead, p. 402.

The army’s inability to recognize the weaknesses of its intellectual traditions is manifest in its selective use of historical examples…[appealing] to a mythical past, sometimes contrasting golden eras such as the Civil War of World War II with the allegedly dark periods that followed them. At times, this historicism approaches the ludicrous. During the late 1990s, it was almost mandatory that any briefing by a senior officer would show a slide juxtaposing German tanks with the Maginot Line as warning of the dire fate that awaited should the nation not fund the army’s transformation program. The choice, the slide intimated, was between overwhelming victory and humiliating defeat—history proved it. That the blitzkrieg-Maginot analogy was of almost no relevance to the United States even in the 1930s, much less today, appeared to escape an entire generation of officers. In this case, as all too often, historical cherry-picking does the very thing that the study of history should guard against. Rather than encourage informed analysis and criticism, the army’s interpretation of the past serves to enforce complacency and the ‘comfortable vision of war.’

-Brian McAllister Linn, The Echo of Battle, p. 237

Although the universe we live in may be characterized by a 'dearth of meaning and lack of discernible purpose,' we build and arrange collections of books as if they could represent a universal order, or will one into being as if by sympathetic magic.

-Matthew Battles, "Reading in the Dark," Wilson Quarterly, Spring 2008, p. 95.

That's all for now. I'm on enough antihistimines to kill a medium-sized pack animal, so I can't seem to tie together any meaningful thoughts, let alone write them out.

Nevertheless, circumstances have changed enough that I should be around the blogs a bit more frequently, but "should" is a tricky word, isn't it?

2007-08-04T11:28:00.000-05:00

Some links that might interest you all:

Robert Kagan, "End of Dreams, Return of History," from Policy Review is first rate.

Thomas West and William Schambra, "The Progressive Movement and the Transformation of American Politics," is provocative.

The H-Diplo roundtable on Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin's Wars, has some great moments.

And this BBC interview with three American generals about Iraq is very interesting.

Finally, Richard Pells makes the argument that American historians are not familiar with and do not write about American high and pop culture. Two points here. First, Pells knows Charles Alexander, so it is silly that he does not mention Alexander's Here the Country Lies: Nationalism and the Arts in Twentieth Century America. Second, beyond Alexander, I'm struggling to figure out how Pells got it in his head that American historians do not know or write about culture. Give me an hour and I'll find you more than the 50 books by historians that deal with culture. For example, here is a sampling of titles from historians that deal with high and pop culture (usually relating to memory) from a quick perusal of the footnotes to a couple of things I've written (note that several of them are anthologies, meaning that multiple historians contributed to the work):

1. Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh, eds., The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture.
2. Jim Cullen, The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past
3. David Blight, Race and Reunion
4. G. Kurt Piehler, Remembering War the American Way
5. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life
6. Lary May's books (although he might technically be an American studies guy, he's pretty clearly a historian)
7. John Whiteclay Chambers II and David Culbert, eds., World War II, Film, and History
8. William C. Davis, The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy
9. John Bodnar, “Saving Private Ryan and Postwar Memory in America,” American Historical Review, 106 (June 2001), 805-817
10. Michael Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s

Like I say, this is just a partial list based on a quick look at some footnotes I already had. But it does indicate something: there are countless studies by historians that incorporate cultural issues into larger studies. For example, I know that Zane Grey and Edgar Rice Burroughs were two of the best-selling authors of the 1920s because of Glen Jeansonne, Transformation and Reaction, because my friend Derek used that book in writing a lecture he gave to a U.S. survey in the very first course I TA'ed for in grad school. That is not an indication of the weakness of the influence of cultural studies on the historical field, but rather that it has been fully accepted as relevant and important. Indeed, I had to cull my list down because many of the authors were technically in American studies departments or had American studies degrees, but if Pells is right, then it sure seems odd that I, a political and military historian, had the list in the first place.

Big surprise. On another note, due to circumstances that are mostly out of my control, I'm going to have to severely ramp down on the blogging for the forseeable future. I have the best intentions, but time is not on my side right now. So I will write where and when I can, but I can't promise anything solid or steady.

However. I do want to say thank you to everyone for their kind words of congratulations about the new addition to the family. That's right, on July 20, we welcomed another baby into the household, only this one is a bit different from the others. That's right folks, now I can say I make boys and girl(s)!

Say hello to Mariana Violet:

That's all for now. I'll be around from time to time. Later.

2007-06-26T08:48:00.000-05:00

First, some links, mostly stuff I have been forwarding on to other folks or have had forwarded to me over the last few weeks :

Azar Gat on The End of the End of History.

An article on Canadian superheroes that somehow doesn't mention Wolverine. Absurd.

A review from Claremont on the latest books from Max Boot and Frederisk Kagan.

And an oldie but goodie: Donald Rumsfeld orders breakfast at Denny's.

Second, I feel I must write something about not writing something. It's funny the way production can disappear, even as you work longer and harder. For most of the last six months, I worked well beyond the 40-hour week on a project for my old job. The project is not quite done, and I do not know if it will ever see the light of day, but I do not regret the time spent or the lessons learned in the process. (The subject covered was artillery and close air support as fire support in American military history.)

What bothers me is that the process itself seemed to consume me more than anything I've ever done. Days and weeks flew by with little or nothing to show for the very real work I was doing. And since my primary objective was not getting done at the pace I expected, guilt kept me from doing just about anything else. If I couldn't get the big job done, how could I justify working on the smaller stuff? I couldn't, so I didn't. You know the feeling--it became work, hard work, to click the friggin' button on the mouse and open a new window And here we are, nearing the end of June, on my eighth or ninth entry of the year.

Here's the thing, as they say: I handled it all wrong. The truth is that lack of productivity, any kind of productivity, begets lack of productivity. Blogging, diary writing, attempts at op-eds, book reviewing, short and long article writing, book submitting, lesson writing, building things, playing with the kids, taking loved ones on dates, taking care of the house and lawn, and so on, are all productivity. For me, anyway, engaging in blogging, diary writing, attempts at op-eds, book reviewing, short and long article writing, book submitting, lesson writing, building things, playing with the kids, taking loved ones on dates, taking care of the house and lawn, and so on, does not make me less productive, but rather kicks me into high gear. One leads to the other. And every successfully completed little project that gets a little feedback, makes me want to finish another one, and another one, and another one. And at the end of it all, there is something to show for it--a body of work that is, at very least, a catalogue of a time in my life and what I thought of issues big and small, personal and professional.

I think all of us lose sight of that from time to time. Some of us lose sight of it permanently, and decide that our big project is so much more important than everything else that everything else doesn't deserve our time. I lost sight of the big picture over the last six months, and I don't like where it led me, either personally or professionally. The new job, the giant deep breath that came when I let the other project go, has helped me see where I've been, and where I want to go.

So take from this what you will. This might all just be me. Whatever the case, expect to see more from me here, and, hopefully, elsewhere.

2007-05-22T09:20:00.000-05:00

First, a couple links. Tallyrand's a scumbag. Here's proof.

A bit far afield for me, but this book on the provenance of the Gospels sounds really interesting.

I'm torn on this article. It is a must-read, rest assured, but do I let it stand alone for all its admirable qualities? Do I pass it on and get out of the way? No, I must add something, and hope that my something does not detract.

We're busy. Americans have been busy, as a people, since at least 1831, when a young French sociologist named Alexis de Tocqueville visited the States and found himself impressed, bemused and slightly dismayed at the degree to which people were driven, to the exclusion of everything else, by hard work and the accumulation of wealth.

Is this an American thing? I don't know--it would be interesting to repeat the experiment in other areas around the country. Is it a big city thing? I don't know--my short time visiting Chicago was very different from Washington. People talked to each other on trains--there seemed to be some sort of community walking around the midwestern metropolis that was not there in D.C. This ability to ignore is particularly developed in the D.C. area, where the importance and perceived importance of everyday activities consume the locals like nowhere else I have lived. The self-importance and self-involvement there, though in some ways justified, was overwhelming.

The author should have finished with the kids--the children who tried to stop and listen, the children who do not know yet, and so know better.

Robinson was not alone. There has been lots of commemorating of the 60th aniversary of Jackie Robinson's first appearance in a major league game. It has been wonderful. It also prompted an absolute must-read post at First Things about a book on Branch Rickey.

And while we're at it, don't forget about Larry Doby--this year should belong to him every bit as much as Robinson.

I hate to sound like a homer (well, actually I don't), but it seems to me that some enterprising historian of black civil rights could find something interesting to say about Cleveland and the movement. Migration from the south, Chester K. Gillespie, Doby, Marion Motley and Bill Willis, Jim Brown, Frank Robinson, Hough Riots, Carl Stokes, busing, the school voucher system, etc. There's something there, right?

This one more time, that's it. The First Things blog entry includes this aside: "...schoolchildren in the Soviet Union were taught that the Second World War was a matter of the Red Army defeating the Wehrmacht, as if the American soldiers on the Western front made no serious difference...."

And the post-Michael Kelly demise of The Atlantic Monthly continues apace. The May issue stands out in this regard. First, there is no Mark Steyn obituary, because apparently Steyn and the magazine have had a falling out. Which means I have one less reason to read the thing.

Then there is the latest problem with the work of book review editor Benjamin Schwarz. I've commented on him before on what I've seen as weaknesses in interpretation. Only this time, he makes such an egregious mistake of fact that it is awfully hard to give him or his magazine the benefit of the doubt. The title of the review is "Stalin's Gift," and the theme, retreaded from time to time by folks who insist on not getting it, is that Stalin's gift to all of us was in doing the heavy lifting in defeating Nazi Germany. Fair enough in many ways. It is hard to ignore the overwhelming casualties absorbed and inflicted by the Red Army on the Eastern Front. That is the central point of several of the books Schwarz reviews in "Stalin's Gift," particularly Norman Davies, Europe at War, 1939-1945. Schwarz summarizes Davies thusly:

Although it seems to have been hastily and hotly written and contains too many embarrassing errors, it rearranges and juxtaposes facts and events in often unexpectedly illuminating ways. Most important, it's infused with irony and paradox, qualities essential to comprehending history but largely absent from the American view of the second World War.

Davies finds insufferable a perspective on the conflict that emphasizes El Alamein, the Normandy landings, and the Bulge, and he condemns the American moral narcissism that holds that, to quote Stephen Ambrose, it was U.S. soldiers who would "win the war against Nazi Germany," and that Americans "stopped Hitler." Rather, he contends that "two core issues"-"proportionality" and "criminality"- "provide the key" to properly grasping the war in Europe.

As for the first, he recognizes that the Eastern Front was without question the pivotal theater of the war: For four years, more than 400 Red Army and German divisions clashed in an unrelenting series of military operations over a front extending more than 1,000 miles. (At its most intense, the war in the West was fought between 15 Allied and 15 Wehrmacht divisions.) Eighty-eight percent of the German military dead fell there; in July 1943, in the decisive battle of the war, the Soviets permanently broke the Wehrmacht's capacity for large-scale attack at Kursk, "the one name," Davies properly asserts, "which all historians of the second World War should remember." He goes on to argue:

The Soviet war effort was so overwhelming that impartial historians of the future are unlikely to rate the British and American contribution to the European theatre as much more than a sound supporting role.
So (and this brings us to Davies's second point) the most odious criminal regime in Europe's history was defeated by an even more murderous regime, if numbers are the yardstick-which significantly tarnishes any notion of the "Good War."

In case you may have missed the theme about Americans and their historiography, let's return to the very first line of this article: "It's time for those (mostly male) readers interested in the second World War to put down that umpteenth account of D-Day and turn to the new crop of books on the most colossal conflict the world has ever seen: the German-Soviet clash on the Eastern Front."

Let's leave aside a debate over the main contention of the review and the books. No serious student of the Second World War should dismiss or downplay the Soviet contribution to victory over Nazi Germany. Of course no serious student should ignore or downplay the British and American contributions to defeating Nazi Germany. (Let alone the wars against Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan, to which the Soviets contributed next to nothing.) A serious historian of the war would weigh the relative contributions of all the Allies and go from there. The haughty sarcasm of Schwarz (and, to a lesser extent, Davies) is a poor substitute for thoughtful analysis.

Besides, it opens one up to a response in kind. Go back and read the quotation from Schwarz's review. Does anything in particular stand out? Well, something sure caught the eye of this male American who has read umpteen books on D-Day.

(At its most intense, the war in the West was fought between 15 Allied and 15 Wehrmacht divisions.)
I have read my fair share of books, magazines, journals, newspapers, online commentary, and so on, and I can say without reservation that that is the single most willfully ignorant sentence I have ever read in a serious publication.

Furthermore, such a mistake calls into question whether Schwarz actually read any of the books on the Allied effort in World War II about which he has commented and written reviews. I simply cannot believe that it is possible for anyone who had done even superficial reading on the Western front in the Second World War to write the line above.

Perhaps if Comrade Schwarz had read just one of the umpteen books on D-Day, he would know that elements of at least eleven (11) Allied (US, GB, Canada) infantry, armored, and airborne divisions landed in Normandy on June 6 alone. Perhaps he then would have then thought to himself that if the Western Allies landed eleven divisions against a defended territory and across a large body of water on a single day, maybe fifteen divisions is a rather low number for the maximum number of Allied divisions fighting in the West. Perhaps he could have taken off his shoes and got a friend and added those eleven D-Day divisions to the at least fifteen Allied (US, GB, New Zealand, Indian, Polish) divisions fighting in Italy on June 6, 1944.

Perhaps he could have picked up any general study of World War II or even a general military history survey and gotten in the neighborhood of the real numbers--like, perhaps, the U.S. Army Center of Military History's American Military History, which has this little helpful section:

As V-E Day came, Allied forces in Western Europe consisted of 4.5 million men, including 9 armies (5 of them American—1 of which, the Fifteenth, saw action only at the last), 23 corps, 91 divisions (61 of them American), 6 tactical air commands (4 American), and 2 strategic air forces (1 American). The Allies had 28,000 combat aircraft, of which 14,845 were American; and they had brought into Western Europe more than 970,000 vehicles and 18 million tons of supplies. At the same time they were achieving final victory in Italy with 18 divisions (7 of them American).

Perhaps if Schwarz had actually read Stephen Ambrose's (or any other U.S. in WWII) books, he would be familiar with the idea of the "90 Division Gamble," which might have indicated that the fifteen number was a tad off. Perhaps he would know that the Germans attacked into the Ardennes with 30 divisions in December 1944. Perhaps he would know that on more than one occasion--in the Argentan-Falaise pocket, in the Bulge, and in the Ruhr pocket--the western Allies destroyed at least fourteen German divisions in a single battle. Shall I go on?

I would be more charitable, except that Schwarz burned up all his charity with snide pontifications about 'moral narcissism', 'embarrassing errors', and 'proper assertions'. Whatever your position on the relative Allied contributions to victory in World War II, it is unforgivable to be so blinded by an agenda that you could seize on an absurdly incorrect statistic and cite it as fact.

What's more, all Schwarz did was prove his agenda wrong. If he and the crew of editors at a learned magazine like the Atlantic were so ignorant of the Allied contribution to World War II that they could let the fifteen division figure fly by untouched, then it's pretty damn clear that some Americans aren't reading enough about their country's efforts in World War II. Everyone on the staff of the Atlantic who had anything to do with that article needs get their asses to the nearest book store, pick up any of the histories of World War II, and actually read the thing.

As for Benjamin Schwarz, I'd rather he just shut the hell up about what he doesn't know.

When my latest subscription to the Atlantic runs out, so too shall my interest.

(cont.) Well... maybe not. Just when I think they can't get any worse, they totally redeem themselves, kind of. The June issue includes a first-rate article by Brian Mockenhaupt about training in the Army. (Full disclosure: I helped Brian, ever so slightly, with his research.) I still think the Atlantic has fallen off, but Mockenhaupt's piece is a reminder of how good they can be when they get it together.

2007-05-11T16:09:00.000-05:00

Stupid Americans. I'm not writing much here today, but readers might enjoy the discussion we've been having in this post at DCAT.

I express my recent activities through the majesty of film. Actually, this is more of a wildlife photo post, beginning with a couple of shots from my wife and kids visiting grandparents in Colorado.

While they were gone, I did a little project:

When they got back, we went to the Kansas City zoo, and I turned up the quality on the camera:

Have a nice weekend. (The announcement is still coming--I'm just waiting for one little piece of information to come through.)

2007-04-27T08:30:00.000-05:00

I'll let others speak on this one. First, from a Melanie Phillips article in The Spectator (hat tip to Arma Virumque):

It’s a fair bet that you have never heard of a guy called Dave Gaubatz. It’s also a fair bet that you think the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has found absolutely nothing, nada, zilch; and that therefore there never were any WMD programmes in Saddam’s Iraq to justify the war ostensibly waged to protect the world from Saddam’s use of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

Dave Gaubatz, however, says that you could not be more wrong. Saddam’s WMD did exist. He should know, because he found the sites where he is certain they were stored. And the reason you don’t know about this is that the American administration failed to act on his information, ‘lost’ his classified reports and is now doing everything it can to prevent disclosure of the terrible fact that, through its own incompetence, it allowed Saddam’s WMD to end up in the hands of the very terrorist states against whom it is so controversially at war.

You may be tempted to dismiss this as yet another dodgy claim from a warmongering lackey of the world Zionist neocon conspiracy giving credence to yet another crank pushing US propaganda. If so, perhaps you might pause before throwing this article at the cat. Mr Gaubatz is not some marginal figure. He’s pretty well as near to the horse’s mouth as you can get.

Having served for 12 years as an agent in the US Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations, Mr Gaubatz, a trained Arabic speaker, was hand-picked for postings in 2003, first in Saudi Arabia and then in Nasariyah in Iraq. His mission was to locate suspect WMD sites, discover threats against US forces in the area and find Saddam loyalists, and then send such intelligence to the Iraq Survey Group and other agencies.

Between March and July 2003, he says, he was taken to four sites in southern Iraq — two within Nasariyah, one 20 miles south and one near Basra — which, he was told by numerous Iraqi sources, contained biological and chemical weapons, material for a nuclear programme and UN-proscribed missiles. He was, he says, in no doubt whatever that this was true.

This was, in the first place, because of the massive size of these sites and the extreme lengths to which the Iraqis had gone to conceal them. Three of them were bunkers buried 20 to 30 feet beneath the Euphrates. They had been constructed through building dams which were removed after the huge subterranean vaults had been excavated so that these were concealed beneath the river bed. The bunker walls were made of reinforced concrete five feet thick.

‘There was no doubt, with so much effort having gone into hiding these constructions, that something very important was buried there’, says Mr Gaubatz. By speaking to a wide range of Iraqis, some of whom risked their lives by talking to him and whose accounts were provided in ignorance of each other, he built up a picture of the nuclear, chemical and biological materials they said were buried underground.

‘They explained in detail why WMDs were in these areas and asked the US to remove them,’ says Mr Gaubatz. ‘Much of this material had been buried in the concrete bunkers and in the sewage pipe system. There were also missile imprints in the area and signs of chemical activity — gas masks, decontamination kits, atropine needles. The Iraqis and my team had no doubt at all that WMDs were hidden there.’

There was yet another significant piece of circumstantial corroboration. The medical records of Mr Gaubatz and his team showed that at these sites they had been exposed to high levels of radiation.

Mr Gaubatz verbally told the Iraq Study Group (ISG) of his findings, and asked them to come with heavy equipment to breach the concrete of the bunkers and uncover their sealed contents. But to his consternation, the ISG told him they didn’t have the manpower or equipment to do it and that it would be ‘unsafe’ to try.

‘The problem was that the ISG were concentrating their efforts in looking for WMD in northern Iraq and this was in the south,’ says Mr Gaubatz. ‘They were just swept up by reports of WMD in so many different locations. But we told them that if they didn’t excavate these sites, others would.’

That, he says, is precisely what happened. He subsequently learnt from Iraqi, CIA and British intelligence that the WMD buried in the four sites were excavated by Iraqis and Syrians, with help from the Russians, and moved to Syria. The location in Syria of this material, he says, is also known to these intelligence agencies. The worst-case scenario has now come about. Saddam’s nuclear, biological and chemical material is in the hands of a rogue terrorist state — and one with close links to Iran.

When Mr Gaubatz returned to the US, he tried to bring all this to light. Two congressmen, Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Curt Weldon, were keen to follow up his account. To his horror, however, when they tried to access his classified intelligence reports, they were told that all 60 of them — which, in the routine way, he had sent in 2003 to the computer clearing-house at a US airbase in Saudi Arabia — had mysteriously gone missing. These written reports had never even been seen by the ISG.

From an interview conducted by our friend Ren with Major Jason Kerr:

LL: Can you talk about some of the sensitive site surveys you took part in?

JK: Sure. Once we got to Baghdad, we received the mission to examine three sites. I was instructed to recon the sites and report. A sensitive site exploitation (SSE) team would be tasked to recon these sites and report back to higher headquarters without including the Marines in this process. Well, my commander did not find this a sensible approach to operations. If there was something in our AO, we wanted to be the first to know, so I was tasked to conduct the initial sensitive site exploitation of three possible sites within our AO. On the map here, along this intersection, there were these large mounds of dirt, and on top of them were artillery pieces. In this artillery firing position, we located several bunkers that
went underground. I believe that this site was considered a possible site for the storing and shooting of chemical munitions. However, there were no signs of chemical activity at this site. The second site was here behind a grain yard. There were these three strange stone structures that looked like big brick ovens in the middle of what appeared to be a junk yard. Again, there were no signs of chemical activity at this site. The third site, which proved to be the most interesting one, was right here south of Baghdad. This was the nuclear power facility. Using our radiac meter, we cautiously approached the plant and the radiac meter spiked dramatically. We
went to another building around the corner that the locals had asked us to secure because their kids were playing around it. Upon further examination, there were 55-gallon barrels in this warehouse and all this yellowcake sitting on the ground outside. I asked my first sergeant, “Is that what I think it is?” The first sergeant replied, “Sir, that’s exactly what you think it is. Let’s see how close we can get to it.” So we continued with the radiac meter and quickly spiked above five micrograys. Realizing that we had a hot site here, we backed off.

At another site in the CSSG AO, my 4/101 CM platoon leader utilized his Chemical Agent Detector Paper (M8) on some old rusted rounds. He put the paper in and saw that it matched up with G nerve. As a matter of fact, he got a great picture of it. We reported our information because we had chemical munitions here. Granted, I don’t believe anyone could fire these munitions because they were rusted over and leaking. There were probably only 10 or 12 of them in a little pile, but they were dangerous because they were just sitting there leaking into the ground.

LL: How close did you get to the yellowcake?

JK: It was actually shielded. From here to that wall – about 10 feet – it was inside this building and the door had been opened. You could look in there and see tons of this material. It looked like someone had been trying to take it out and had knocked some of it over. The little splotches on the ground you could get close to because they weren’t giving off a large reading, although you still didn’t want to touch it. We could get within about 10 feet of the opening of the warehouse and verified that high readings were emanating from that room. So we knew this was right up our alley and knew immediately that we must secure this site. Thus, we began by blocking off access to the area and tried to keep the kids from running in there.

There’s a local town beside this site to the southeast. All the nuclear scientists who worked at the nuclear facility lived there. We drove up and started talking to them. They were the ones who had initially brought this area to our attention. They knew there were leaks and were concerned because many of their children were playing around the hazardous area. So we asked them to help keep the kids away so we could take care of the problem. I asked them what they did and they said they were the engineers and scientists who worked at the plant. They all spoke English very well and said they were all educated in America. So this entire village was comprised of nothing but people who worked in the nuclear facility.

Inside the power plant complex, I was able to enter the library. I took digital pictures and video and took it all back to higher. But what ended up happening was that once higher heard about the yellowcake being there, they pulled us out and sent in an engineer company from the Marines. I didn’t know why they wanted to do that. We had the equipment, the people and the expertise to take care of this. We could start exploiting the site right away and doing everything we needed to do now that we had the site secured. Division Headquarters had a different plan. We were ordered to continue stability operations in our area.

...

LL: Did you ever hear any more about that site survey you did when you found all the yellowcake?

JK: No. The engineers took it over from us. I knew they were not equipped to do it and that they didn’t have the expertise or the experience to do it. It was one of the things I lobbied my battalion commander about. I knew I was the guy to deal with this. I had noncommissioned officers (NCOs) who had experience in dealing with that kind of stuff and I knew we could do it. We knew enough that we could get it started and whoever would take it over from us would be set up for success. He said, “I understand that, but get over the anger. You have another job to do.” That was the end of the conversation. The engineers took it over and I have no idea what happened after that.

LL: You hear in the news some self-proclaimed experts saying that our pre-war intelligence was wrong and that Iraq hadn’t been trying to get a hold of yellowcake and that type of thing. When you hear that kind of thing in the media, what’s your reaction?

JK: My reaction is that they’re wrong. I saw chemical munitions. I saw nuclear production facilities. How many more steps do you have to go through before you weaponize it? Just the fact alone that Saddam fired SCUDs into Kuwait and utilized chemical weapons in the past proves he intended to weaponize chemicals or nuclear munitions. Surely I believe he would have done it. Our intelligence was a bit mistaken in that we thought he was more advanced than he actually was in it and it looked like a lot of the UN sanctions were working, but a lot of them were not working.

And don't forget about this guy.

Pass the word.

Have a nice weekend.

2007-04-09T10:10:00.000-05:00

Entirely self-serving post. Here is what I have been up to:

Dancing with the stars. My dad took great pleasure in noting that my name is between Rich Brookhiser and William F. Buckley on the Claremont list of authors, but that is an alphabetic coincidence and no more. Likewise, while I am glad that I'm nestled in the covers of the Winter issue with the likes of Michael Barone and Christopher Hitchens, rest assured that your humble diarist could only dream of producing a line such as the one concluding Hitchens' review: "The remainder can stand as an instance of the weed-like spread of second-order media phenomena such as "truthiness," and as a warning to those who suppose that the profound can be deduced from an intense but myopic scrutiny of the superficial."

In any case, you can now read "No Soldier Left Behind," my review of Suzanne Mettler, Soldiers to Citizens. As an added bonus, Professor Mettler and I have a congenial exchange about the review in the editorial correspondence of the Spring issue, which you can read here.

Talking with heroes I have mentioned this publication somewhere on the web, but never talked about it in any detail. Just before the Chistmas holidays, the Combat Studies Institute press published In Contact! Case Studies from the Long War, an anthology of articles on battles and actions from Iraq and Afghanistan. I contributed to the publication with an article called the "Palm Sunday Ambush," about a short battle southeast of Baghdad in the spring of 2005.

That particular fight received a great deal of attention because of the actions of Sergeant Leigh Ann Hester, who fought very well and earned the first Silver Star for a woman in a combat situation since World War II. She and the members of her squad were from the Kentucky National Guard, and I had the good fortune to interview several of them in the course of my research. Not Hester, mind you--from what I understand she gets hundreds of requests a day for interviews, and my queries probably never made it through the noise. But I did talk to another woman who was in the battle, Specialist Ashley Pullen, and Hester's squad leader, Staff Sergeant Timothy Nein. Follow the link above to read all the interviews (they are the four at the bottom of the page).

Please do not get the wrong idea: although the battle became notable for the actions of Hester, she would be the first to tell you that this was not her battle. She was part of a larger team, a team that was led by Nein. And they were far from the only American participants in the fight. At least three other units with two truck convoys hit the spot of the ambush at the same time.

My article is far from perfect, but I did manage to talk, albeit briefly, about all the folks who played a role in the fight. And of all of the things I've written and published, this is the one about which I am the most proud, because it gives an honest hearing to American troops fighting our war for us. Please read it and the other articles in the anthology.

One confession, though: there is an error in the article. I wrote that Nein received the Silver Star for his actions that day. Recent events have made that incorrect. A few weeks ago, Nein got the Distinguished Service Cross, the second highest military decoration behind the Medal of Honor, and only the fifth awarded since Vietnam. I've never been happier to be made wrong.

Have a nice week.

2007-03-15T11:32:00.000-05:00

Funny, this lack of memory. I started a post back in October by inserting several pictures from a trip to Colorado the previous April. Here is what I had:

The first picture is of my wife's sister getting married in Manitou Springs. Then there is the older boy sharing a hat with a horse at the ranch across the road from my parents' place. Then there is me and the boy at the wedding. Finally, we have some snow on my parents' driveway.

The point of all that? I don't have the first clue. Perhaps it was part of my planned long post on the summer of love 2006. Never got around to that post, and now the moment is gone. Sorry. If you are desperate, I'll give you the short version: we went to lots of weddings and other events (bachelor parties, reunions)all over the country last summer. Very exciting.

So, a little entertainment commentary. If only because I've been to the theater more times in the last three weeks than in the previous two years, and because we watched this year's Best Picture on Saturday night.

The first was Smokin' Aces. We didn't plan on seeing Smokin' Aces, but Smokin' Aces it was. The wife and I had a date, an honest to God date. We got a babysitter and everything. The plan, as it was a Friday during Lent, was to go to a nice Italian restaurant for some seafoody pasta, and then go see a movie. But not just any movie, we were going to see Amazing Grace. Indeed, Amazing Grace was the whole point of the affair, we had planned it all just to see that movie on the night it opened. Well, perhaps we did not quite plan it all. Rather, we got a babysitter, and that was about all the planning we managed.

As it was a Friday night in a busy area, we deftly made no reservations for the restaurant, and the hour wait would have made us late for the movie. We went to the theater to pick up the tickets and saw that the movie started 20 minutes earlier than the webpage had said two days before, so we were even more strapped for time to eat. We bought the tickets and hustled over to Panera (yep) for dinner, then got back to the theater in time for the movie. There we discovered that they had put the film that was opening that day in one of the smallest theaters out of the 24 in the multiplex. So there were about seven seats left in the place, and 6.5 of them were in the very front row, about six feet from the base of a rather large screen.

To review: Plan: Nice Italian restaurant and Amazing Grace. Reality: Panera and Smokin' Aces.

The movie? We weren't really in the mood, to put it mildly, but it was well-acted, very violent, occasionally funny, and mostly entertaining--like Tarantino before he got weird (a phrase that makes no sense, until you think about it). Plus Ben Affleck doesn't last long, so that was nice.

He does have a Boston accent though, which was a reminder that he was a welcome omission from the ensemble cast of The Departed. A quick detour to a review I wrote but never posted of last year's Best Picture:

On Crash. I know lots of people loved the movie, so you can take or leave this quick review. The dialogue was well-written and well-delivered. Ludacris was good (much to Bill O'Reilly's dismay), like everyone I love Don Cheadle, and I'll join the chorus in declaring that Terrence Howard is well on his way to becoming one of our great actors. Matt Dillon almost made me forget that he is Johnny Drama's brother, and Brendan Fraser has jettisoned the preening self-importance of his younger years. They even found a perfect role for the increasingly shrill and severe-looking Sandra Bullock (if she gets her eyes pulled back any further they are going to touch in the back of her head).

I'm no fan of Los Angeles. I don't speak from personal experience--I haven't spent any real time there--but how nice can a place be when the people who live there make a habit (and their careers) out of explaining how terrible it is? True, entertainment dwells on the fringes, but after so many Training Day's and Boyz in the Hood's and Grand Canyon's and Born in East LA's and LA Confidential's and LA Story's one has to wonder why anyone in their right mind would live there. At least New Yorkers assuage they're own misery from living in that over-populated-and-dangerous-yet-impersonal-and-expensive box with the myth of their collective toughness (see Spiderman and 25th Hour). Heck, New Yorkers even write love stories to their hometown--You've Got Mail is one of many recent examples.

That said, Crash takes the Angelino self-flagellation to levels that even this midwestern rube can't buy. I'm not saying the hatred and stereotyping portrayed in the movie is made up. Indeed, the brilliance of the film is that it tapped into a very real phenonmenon. People do not get along in big cities, especially those cities on those coasts. Traffic is terrible and dangerous, service is unfriendly and indifferent, and everything is crowded. People shiver from the chill of everyday social relations. Everyone sucks. But saying everyone sucks is nowhere near as satisfying a release of frustration as breaking down the aggregate suckitude into smaller groups of allegedly more specific qualities of suckiness.

Race is an obvious and disturbingly satisfying way to break down those groups. In contemporary America there is a naughty but very real release to racial jokes, because now everyone knows they are wrong even if they seem right. That's the genius of Dave Chapelle. He makes us laugh at our own stereotypes and stereotyping because his jokes remind us that they are not true. White people don't hate black people because black people do black things, just like black people don't hate Asian people because they do Asian things, just like, well, you get the idea. Everybody hates (loves) everyone because they do people things. Hating (loving) everyone isn't really racism, is it?

Crash has it exactly backwards—it is a throwback to a time when everyone was outwardly racist because they didn't know it is wrong.

It wasn’t the Best Picture, it was a Chapelle Show skit that didn’t get the joke.

If I had to pick between Best Pictures, The Departed wins by a mile. It gets what it is and doesn't go past that. It is a thriller, a drama, and a bit of mystery, but let's be honest, it's not particularly exceptional as a thriller, drama, or mystery. Even the acting was pretty mediocre, with the exceptions of Mark Wahlberg and Alec Baldwin, who were great. We all know the Oscars were lifetime achievement awards for Scorsese. That's fine, it was the perfect year for it, since 2006 was the single worst year for movies that I can remember. The best movie I saw was Casino Royale, which was also the highest rated on Rotten Tomatoes from last year.

I have not seen everything, not by a mile, but over the last two years there have been very few movies that have stood out as good or great. One was Batman Begins, which was haunting and exciting and finally captured what is gripping about that story. I love that movie, but I do not think it was the best picture of the last two years.

That honor belongs to Star Wars, Episode III, Revenge of the Sith. That's right, I said it, Revenge of the Sith was the best movie of 2005 and a better than anything released in 2006, too. George Lucas burned up so much goodwill with the kiddie themes, overreliance on computer animation, bulky dialogue, and creaky plots of first two movies that it was hard to see the episode III for what it was when it came out. Nor did the terrible acting in episode II help, especially from the hopelessly creepy Hayden Christensen and the bloodless Natalie Portman. But upon further review, and with more than a little detachment from the first two episodes, it is clear that episode III was something very near great. Some of the dialogue is still awful, and Portman is still out of her Garden State element, but those flaws are only evident if you are really watching for them, if the viewer is listening for bad dialogue and intent on finding bad performances.

Revenge of the Sith had all the hallmarks of a great tragedy, careening along to John Williams' masterful score toward the inevitiable conclusion, while all the while we are hoping it doesn't come to that. Watch that movie again as a stand alone prequel to the original trilogy--forget pod races and stupid aliens and creepy romances. Just watch. Then tell me that movie isn't better--more entertaining and more compelling--than Crash or Brokeback Mountain or Little Miss Sunshine or The Departed or anything else that has been released over the last two years. (Not incidentally, it is nearly impossible to find a movie over the last two years that in some way does not try to comment on current politics, which I think lies near the root of the terrible spate of films in that time. Even the few lines of bad dialogue in episode III are bad precisely because of this tendency.)

Which brings us to 300, another movie in my recent theater-going extravaganza. There are plenty of reviews out there, but I think this one and a couple of comments from Victor Davis Hanson are pretty much on target. I wouldn't call it a great movie, but it is very good, in large part because despite all the ridiculous efforts by critics to drag the present into the plot, 300 is clearly not about now. It is an escape, a glorious escape, from the grinding relentlessness of 24 hour opinion and news (in that order). That, it seems to me, is why the movie has proven so popular. It deserves the popularity. Hopefully, the rest of Hollywood will get the message.

(Oh yeah, I said three movies. The third was Bridge to Terebithia. The wife had a woman-gathering at the house on Tuesday, so I made an escape with the boys and Uncle Ren. I mistakenly thought Bridge to Terebitha was a fantasy movie, because that's how they advertised it. It's not. It is a movie about kids in school and bullies and all that stuff, kind of like one of the non-smutty Judy Blume books. It's also set in some kind of 1970s + Today world, which is odd. The best way to describe it is as My Girl with just the tiniest sprinkling of The Chronicles of Narnia. All that said, it's actually pretty good, if a little sad and not right at all for keeping the attention of a one year old.)

Have a nice weekend. Go watch a movie or two.

2007-03-07T08:28:00.000-06:00

No apologies for the long time off. I've been busy, and this is, after all, my diary, and I've been no better at keeping the online version than any of the others I have tried in the past. Plus, I've been waiting for Claremont to make my latest book review available online for an entry about my recent publications. When that happens, I will pass along the word. Plus, I'm still trying to track down that family information to tell my little story.

No apologies; lots of excuses. Sigh.

This book might cause some controversy. Note that the first chapter is available for preview. It might be good to read along with First Into Nagasaki, which sounds fascinating.

Something about which to think. Here is a new one for me: this article is too practical. John Fonte's idea about civic conservatism is a pretty radical one among American conservatives, and it needs more explaining as a theory, and should not be defined by specific, present-minded, and ultimately ephemeral policy prescriptions. But that is a common problem among conservatives today. It is astounding how modern conservatives refuse to recognize any direct intellectual heritage to Americans before 1945--except for some important nodding at the founding generation. After the founders they almost universally go straight to the Cold War, leaning, I think, on George Nash's work to explain it all.

The idea of civic conservatism, which in some way incorporates nationalism and Americanism, would be a very useful one for tracking American conservatism from George Washington to Alexander Hamilton to John Quincy Adams to Abraham Lincoln to Ulysses Grant to Theodore Roosevelt to Dwight Eisenhower and so on. I wish someone would do that. Maybe Stephen and me should give it a shot. Stephen?

Two more links. First, for everyone who complains about cities and suburbs and the demise of this and the growth of that, James Lileks makes clear that it is all so much more complicated and so much simpler. A sample:

Are we to believe the suburbs are different? I've been listening to the spoiled children of Levittown all my life, yammering about their ticky-tacky houses their fathers busted his butt to buy so they could live in a potato field instead of a crumble-down cold-water walk-up, and I'm tired of it. Boring people live everywhere. Interesting people live everywhere. People have reasons for wanting to live in certain places, and if someone wants to live in the city, it's his business. If he wants to live in the burbs, it's his business. I could argue that people who confine themselves to the city are removing themselves from the experience of suburbia, which is actually more germaine to understanding America's future than experiencing some of the lousy blocks I drive through daily. But I won't; as I said, I'm the amateur here.

That is just a small taste--read the whole thing.

And for Derek, kind of: Greg Gutfield wrote an article for The American Spectator called "Looking Stupid," the main point of which is that more and more Americans would rather play it safe and look cool than take risks and perhaps look stupid. Here is the money graf for DCAT, because it is something that could have been lifted directly from any number of conversations we've had over the years:

After a few years of blogging, I've hit on one essential truth: there are millions of cowards willing to say things about you online that they'd never say to you in a bar. That's the baseline definition of snark: catty words spewed on a screen but never uttered to a face. Blogging has created a chorus line of cowards -- coin-throwers who would never take the stage or put themselves in the line of fire. The World Wide Web has revealed, sadly, that as a country we're losing the will to fight real wars, preferring instead to be nonproductive wusses, incapable of delivering anything more than a snide aside to the outside world, via the "send" button.

The reason the article is only kind of for Derek is that Gutfield mistakenly makes the blanket assertion about the left being more concerned with looking cool than looking stupid. There is plenty of that sentiment going around, and it need not be too politicized. In fact, I think it's generational more than political.

Gutfield's article struck me this morning because last night I saw something very similar. We were in Lawrence for dinner with a friend, and the weather was nice enough that after the meal we strolled for a while along Massachusetts Avenue, the main street in town. We had the boys with us, and the three year old was eating a piece of fudge and we were feeding the one year old a little ice cream.

I don't think I'm being to biased when I say that they were both looking exceptionally cute--the three year old clearly trying to be neat with the fudge; the one year old doing that walk/stumble and having a blast the whole time. Yet all the college age girls who walked by in groups pretended, badly, that they did not notice. I've noticed this behavior before: they walk by, start to smile, stifle the smile, and then look out of the corner of their eyes at the kids and pretend they are not looking. It is bizarre. At any other age, they are all over those kids. High school girls stop and say, for all to hear, "Awww! They are sooo cute!" Adult women wave and give them a direct smile. Older women tell us how beautiful our children are, and then give us the details about their toddler grandchildren.

College girls would rather pretend they don't care about kids than fawn over the boys. They would rather look cool than risk looking stupid. Which is, of course, stupid.

That sentiment used to make sense to me. It used to be cool to me. I grew out of it. The baby boomers never have, and probably never will. They would all rather look cool--well, "cool" as political leaders look cool--than take great chances and risk looking stupid. History will not treat them well.

We can all feel it. We are standing over the edge of something huge, a great new discovery or a great new cataclysm, and we are flailing for a purchase, for something to hold us back--grasping at pretty cultural vessels like cool that are empty and weightless and will not halt our momentum. But it is coming. History does not stop.

I hope we grow up in time.

2007-01-29T09:12:00.000-06:00

Again, family history will have to wait--I have to dig up some things first. So...

For you Supreme Court junkies out there. Yet more evidence that Clarence Thomas is his own man, and a much more important justice than many have assumed. Read the article along with this long Atlantic Monthly interview with Chief Justice John Roberts, who proves once again that he is staggeringly intelligent and just might be on his way to being one of the great chief justices. He has certainly chosen a good model.

One other note: Clarence Thomas is still only 58 years old. That doesn't even seem possible, as long as he's been in the public eye. Amazing.

Paging Lenny Kravitz. I'm not much of a pop music guy anymore. I went to grad school and stopped following the music scene. But sometimes a band manages to be so spectacularly terrible that I can't help but stand up and take notice. Canada's own Nickelback has a relatively new single called "If Everyone Cared," the lyrics of which I feel I must reproduce in full here:

From underneath the trees, we watch the sky
Confusing stars for satellites
I never dreamed that you'd be mine
But here we are, we're here tonight

Singing Amen, I'm I'm alive (I'm alive)
Singing Amen, I'm alive

[CHORUS]
If everyone cared and nobody cried
If everyone loved and nobody lied
If everyone shared and swallowed their pride
Then we'd see the day when nobody died

And I'm singing

Amen I, Amen I, I'm alive
Amen I,Amen I, Amen I, I'm alive

And in the air the fireflies
Our only light in paradise
We'll show the world they were wrong
And teach them all to sing along

Singing Amen I, I'm alive (I'm alive)
Singing Amen I, I'm alive

[CHORUS (x2)]

And as we lie beneath the stars
We realize how small we are
If they could love like you and me
Imagine what the world could be

If everyone cared and nobody cried
If everyone loved and nobody lied
If everyone shared and swallowed their pride
Then we'd see the day when nobody died
(x2)

We'd see the day, we'd see the day
When nobody died
We'd see the day, we'd see the day
When nobody died
We'd see the day when nobody died

Just the other day I was telling my three year old that every time he cries he kills six or seven people, and one of these days those people might be Mommy and Daddy. I just don't think I was getting through to him. But now that I have the majesty of song to hammer home the message, he'll be choking down those sobs like broccoli dipped in cough syrup.

Thank you Nickelback. Thank you.

At the opposite end of the spectrum. Advance word is that Amazing Grace, the new movie about William Wilberforce's campaign to outlaw the slave trade, and the glorious song that helped the cause, is magnificent. The trailer is certainly effective. And Lord knows the soundtrack has at least one winner.

Later. (Family history soon, I promise.)

2007-01-16T09:43:00.000-06:00

Family history has to wait a few days, so let's jump into some other issues:

Just say you made a mistake. The Atlantic Monthly's book review editor is Benjamin Schwarz. He is a smart, well-read guy, and generally very good at what he does, but not always. The last time I dealt with Mr. Schwarz, he was, in my estimation, stomping on Stephen Ambrose's grave.

In the October issue, Schwarz favorably reviewed the latest volume in the Oxford History of England--Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, & Dangerous People--and concluded with the following statement:

Finally, alas, this book's publication provokes an indictment of American academic historians: the same publisher's projected eleven-volume series, the Oxford History of the United States, was inaugurated more than forty years ago, but so far only five volumes have been published, and not one of the titles will have been written by the historian to whom it was originally assigned. What's worse, not only are the Americans unconscionably tardy; their entries conspicuously lack the intellectual refinement, analytical sharpness, and stylistic verve characteristic of the English series. Compared with Hilton's or Langford's workor, say, the volumes by Robert Bartlett, Gerald Harriss, Michael Prestwich, or K. Theodore Hoppen--the books in the American series are, with two exceptions (James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom and, most notably, Robert Middlekauff's Glorious Cause), bloated and intellectually flabby.

In the latest issue (the link requires a subscription), an editor from Oxford responded, explaining some of the problems that have led to the delays in publication. Most importantly, she finishes with this paragraph:

Book reviews are invariably a matter of personal opinion. But the committees of the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the Parkman Prize, and well as a great many readers, might disagree with Schwarz's characterization of [David] Kennedy's Freedom from Fear and James Patterson's Grand Expectations, among other titles, as "bloated and intellectually flabby."

Schwarz replied, "...I stand by my verdict of intellectually mushy storytelling regarding the two titles Susan Ferber mentions (and I'd use the same words to describe Restless Giant, James Patterson's other volume in the series)."

That a way to come with the evidence. The editor from Oxford points out that, combined, Freedom from Fear and Grand Expectations win all of the major awards for history writing in America, and Schwarz provides no examples of "intellectually mushy storytelling" but stands by his verdict. Enlightening.

Let me do his job for him. I have not read Restless Giant, so I will reserve judgment except to say that I would rather they had completed some of the earlier titles before tackling the last three decades. I do think for all its merits, Grand Expectations puts the cart before the horse by starting with social and cultural history before setting any sort of broad context. That, to me, is poor storytelling, although the book is still very good.

But by any standard, the criticism of Kennedy's book is ridiculous. Besides rightfully winning all those awards, there is another feature to Freedom from Fear that is an excellent commentary on its quality: the second half of the book, the section on the war, is without a doubt the best single volume history of the United States in World War II. And it is by far the weaker half. The portion on the depression is a mastery of synthesis, writing, and judgment. As someone who has read a book or two on the past, I'm of the opinion that Freedom from Fear is one of the greatest history books ever written, every bit as good as Battle Cry of Freedom or another one of my new classics, Washington's Crossing. Schwarz is simply wrong.

That said, and if we agree that Schwarz is right about Middlekauff (most military historians think Donald Higginbotham's more narrowly focused War of American Independence is the best single volume on the war), then that means that of the five volumes published, two (McPherson and Kennedy) are magnificent, one (Middlekauff) is great, one (Grand Expectations) is at least very good, and one (Restless Giant) is probably too contemporary to please anyone. Four of the five are the definitive single volumes on their eras, and that includes Grand Expectations and Restless Giant, whatever their faults.

Not a bad track record. And I know that the series has been all about unfulfilled promise from day one, but keep in mind that the forthcoming volumes include authors like Fred Anderson, whose Crucible of War is also in my all-time top ten, and some guy named Gordon Wood, who has won a few awards for his work.

I haven't read the British series, but if they truly are of "far higher intellectual and stylistic quality" than the Oxford History of the United States, then they simply must be the greatest history books ever written. Somehow, I doubt even Schwarz would say that. But he stands by his verdict, so that's nice.

(For the status of the Oxford series, see this nice article from the Boston Globe. Hat tip to DCAT.)

You want to go up to Haahvaad? F&*% with some smaaht kids? The always controversial Charles Murray has a three part essay on OpinionJournal about intelligence, education, and citizenship. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Even though there are some issues with parts one and two (see the discussion at the Corner triggered by this post, this article from TCS Daily), read them for background. It's part three that most interests me.

Whatever we think of the idea of IQ and its importance in determining where people end up in life, it is a fact that schools do a pretty terrible job of teaching to smart kids. There was a time in American history when educators made a concerted effort to identify and train the best and brightest, so that they could contribute to the good of the country. Sure, that time was the Cold War, and the contribution to be got from smart people seemed to focus on weapon-making, but at least the bright ones were challenged. At least they had some idea that they had a duty to use their intelligence for something important. It would not be a bad thing if we got back to that sort of thinking.

On being smart. Uncultured swine that I am, I have heard of Samuel Johnson, but I do not know enough about him. This Theodore Dalrymple essay helps tremendously, and has even got me looking for a copy of Boswell's bio and some of Johnson's own writings. Take a look.

Hey, I know these guys. Jeffrey Herf won the National Jewish Book Award for studies on the Holocaust for his latest book, The Jewish Enemy. That's how a sociologist does history.

Speaking of former professors, Kevin Mattson used Jonah Goldberg as an example in a recent article, and Goldberg took exception. Hilarity ensues. Also, Norm Goda's Tales from Spandau is now available. Here is a nice review. Buy it. Read it.

And Richard Vedder has a new article up at National Review, a new think tank he started called the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, and a new blog to spread the word (which also dealt with the Murray articles). Enjoy.

Fact-checkers at Page 2? Editors? The wide-ranging Gregg Easterbrook is a writer for the New Republic, he covers all sorts of issues, and he writes a weekly column during the football season for ESPN Page 2 called "Tuesday Morning Quarterback." A lot of people love TMQ, and that's fine. I've never been a huge fan--he leans too heavily on stats, which tends to be boring, and he's far too concerned about cheerleaders and uniform designs for my taste. But I read today's version for some reason, until I was slowed down by this:

The New Orleans season was a huge success, in part because of good coaching, yet TMQ left the game puzzled by numerous Saints' decisions. For kickoffs, New Orleans lined up with Bush on the kicking team's right and beer man Michael Lewis on its left; each time Chicago deliberately kicked left to Lewis, who had seven kickoff returns for a measly 18.9-yard average. Seeing that the Bears were kicking to Lewis, why didn't the Saints' coaches have Bush and Lewis switch places as the Chicago kicker approached the ball? Footing was bad despite the high-tech heated new field at Soldier Field. (The whole new stadium arrived in a flying saucer, so you know it's high-tech.) Bad footing usually favors the offense, because the offensive player knows where he's going; on bad footing, crossing patterns drive defensive backs crazy because it's so hard to get through the pick. Yet the Saints called few crossing patterns or double-receiver sets -- playing indoors seems to have made them forget outdoor tactics. The long touchdown to Bush was a crossing pattern -- he cut under a pick by Marques Colston. But otherwise crossing patterns were few for the Saints.

So given the bad footing, Bush and Lewis were supposed to cross the field as the Chicago kicker approached the ball? I've heard that 60% of the time, that works all the time. Nope, it's probably not a real good idea to have your kick returners sprinting across a slick field just to catch the ball.

But more importantly, someone needs to tell TMQ that a "crossing pattern" is when a player crosses the field, not when players cross each other. A crossing pattern is usually an extended square-in route, or a pretty rare pattern we called a "COL--come open late," when the receiver lined up wide, cut like he was running a post, and then cut again to cross the field. Crossing patterns are tough to defend on slick fields because the reciever knows where he is going, the cut is drastic, and the footwork to defend the pattern is aggressive. Pick routes (when two players cross paths) are hard to defend all the time because they are illegal and refs rarely call the penalty.

Reggie Bush ran a wheel route on the touchdown, which is a long looping pattern with barely any cuts.

Then there is the next paragraph:

Meanwhile the New Orleans offensive line, one of the best in the league this season, had an unimpressive outing. Left tackle Jammal Brown, who made the Pro Bowl on hype -- all four other New Orleans offensive linemen are better than he is -- was often out of position,or needed guard help. Game scoreless, New Orleans facing third-and-4, Brees was sacked and fumbled; the Saints recovered for a 25-yard loss. On the play, Brown lines up across from Chicago right defensive end Mark Anderson, and in pretty much all blocking schemes known to man, the left tackle takes the right defensive end. But Brown just let Anderson go -- never so much as touched him -- and Anderson sprinted straight to Brees unhindered, and caused the fumble. Watching the replay gave me a sick feeling. The New Orleans left tackle, left guard and center triple-teamed the Chicago right defensive tackle, while none of these three even glanced at the guy who went unblocked to the quarterback.

Now I was at a batchelor party in Las Vegas, and I might have had a beer or seven by that point in the game, but if by "pretty much all blocking schemes known to man, the left tackle takes the right defensive end" Easterbrook means "pretty much all blocking schemes known to man, except the blocking scheme on the play in question, and quite a few others," then he is exactly right.

On that play, the left tackle blocked down to pick up the blitz, and the left guard was supposed to peel back and pick up the end. I can't remember, but the running back was probably supposed to help or chip on the end, too. The reason I know this is because they ran the exact same scheme later in the game, and Fox even showed it from that nifty end zone camera angle. I've seen blocking schemes where the center pulls out to block the right end, and even the right guard, but you see those less in the pros because the guys are so fast (which is partially mitigated on a slick field, giving the lineman time to get there, like, oh I don't know, Sunday in Chicago). There are also schemes where tight ends block the ends, assisted by running backs, or sometimes the running backs do the duty themselves (which usually ends badly for the quarterback). Heck, there are even schemes where the defensive end is unaccounted for, because the defense is bringing so many people up the middle that everyone blocks down, since, you know, it takes longer to get to the quarteback from farther away. On those plays, it's best if the quarterback does that thing called "reading the defense," and he and the center call out the blocking scheme, and then the receiver recognizes the blitz and breaks off the pattern in a hot-route. On the play in question, the guard hesitated for a bit too long before peeling back because the Bears brought an extra player to his area. Stupid scheme, you say? Maybe, but I seem to remember the Saints having a pretty good offense this year.

And it's verifiably insane to say that Jeff Faine is better than Jammal Brown.

But Easterbrook is really just a big fan, he says lots of smart stuff, and his expertise is in other fields. So here is from the next section:

The new movie "300," extremely very loosely based on accounts of the 300 Spartans who held off a the entire Persian army at the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., depicts the infantry of the invading Perisan king Xerxes as so vast and numerous the men stretch to the horizons -- at least tens of thousands of soldiers. This is nonsense. Ancient population estimates are notoriously vague, but in 480 B.C., there probably were no more than 100 million people in the entire world: No nation was able to field an army of vast numbers. Most scholars believe the first city with a population of one million did not exist until the 8th century A.D., more than a thousand years after the events depicted in "300." (The first city with a population of one million is believed to have been Baghdad.) "Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An Historical Census," by Tertius Chandler, estimates that the largest city in the world at the time depicted in the movie "300" was Babylon, with 300,000 to 400,000 residents. Babylon was the Persian capital, but it is close to inconceivable a city of that size could have sent the army depicted in "300," since perhaps one resident in five could be a healthy military-age male, and if all the men in the city had gone off to invade Greece, they would have returned to find Babylon invaded by somebody else!

Ahh, history--good stuff and generally right about ancient numbers being exaggerated. Except there are those details.

In random order: Babylon became a regional capital of Persia after it was conquered, but it was not the capital of ancient Persia. Persepolis was the official and symbolic capital, and Susa was the most important economic center. So there are three cities from which Xerxes could draw his army, and we could add all the population of just about the farthest extent of the empire, which included at that time Egypt, Asia Minor, most of the Middle East, and much of Central Asia--so pretty much all of the major population centers of the time besides China and a few parts of India. All of the historical sources agree that Xerxes was drawing on people from all over the empire, including some Greek states, to fill his army for the invasion.

Even if we are extremely conservative in our figures, and say that the Persians only controlled five percent of the world population that Easterbrook has at 100 million, then that is 5 million people. He says only one in five residents could be military age males, but let's cut that down to one in ten. That is an army of 500,000. Say Xerxes left half of them home, and we are still talking about 250,000 troops. Cut that in half twice more, to subtract guys for the navy and just for the fun of it, and Xerxes still would have had over 60,000 soldiers: the "tens of thousands of soldiers" that Easterbrook calls "nonsense."

Oh well, that's enough Easterbrook to last a long time.

Update: To get a feel for how conservative my figures really are, check out the first paragraph of this Victor Davis Hanson review. I would also add that when it came to logistics, the historical record also indicates that Xerxes' army was massive. What I mean is that they had to hug the coastline for their entire campaign, so that they could be supplied by sea. That is the very reason why they had to go through the pass along the coast at Thermopylae, rather than invade Greece farther inland. All of which suggests that the army was far too big to live off the land. And just so Easterbrook knows (because he is obviously reading my blog) the general consensus among historians is that the Persian army consisted of at least 150,000 troops--see, for example, Chester Starr, A History of the Ancient World--although many put the number at at least 200,000.

Besides, I'm invested in the story. Over the Vegas weekend, I read Steven Pressfield's novelization of Thermopylae, Gates of Fire. It is legitimately one of the greatest books I have ever read. Magnificent. I don't even know what else to say except that I read it over a Vegas weekend.

That'll probably do for today. Thanks for reading.

2007-01-10T10:00:00.000-06:00

Christmas, continued. So it snowed this Christmas in Colorado, even more at the in-laws' place in Divide near Pike's Peak. Indeed, here is a view of the north side of the famous mountain from right around the corner from their house.

Here are some deer from their front door, a very common experience--along with the occasional mountain lion and bear.

Like I said earlier, we could hardly let the snow opportunity pass for the older boy, who had seen snowmen on the television, but never a real live Frosty. We solved that problem (even if the snow was too fine to make a massive snow monster).

More importantly, his grandfather has perfected the crafting of a sledding track down the side of the driveway.

And despite some initial jitters, I've never seen the boy quite so happy about an outdoor adventure. At one point, he apparently tired of the slow pace of his pack animal (me) in dragging him up the hill on his tube, so he refused the help and went up and down himself...about 30 times...at 9,500 feet. I'd say that was an indication of the fun he was having.

Ready?

Ready!

Weeee!

(I know, I'm sucking wind like, well, a fat guy at 9,500 feet who has been dragging kids up a hill. Sorry, but it was so bright I had to look through the eye scope on the digital camera, which put my suck hole right by the mike. Weee!)

Done yet? Hardly.

The older boy's birthday is two days after Christmas, which, he will come to discover, is terrible. But at the time it was just another chance to open more frickin' presents--this time at a Mexican restaurant in Woodland Park that had the heat set so high that an old lady at the table next to us burst into flames. We had Dominic blow her out and make a wish, then he opened more gifts and cut the cake.

(Just so you know, we had yet another birthday party for him last weekend, so he could get more frickin' presents from his friends in Kansas. His mother made him a train cake.

I made him a train table.

And yes, those are train pajamas. I told you.)

Anyway, I decided to pull out the camera for the ride home, just in case anything cool happened.

Nothing exciting: Lockheed welcomed home the troops, the kids watched movies in the backseat.

And then, on the plains, by cows even:

I suppose this picture speaks for itself:

My favorite part was when she thanked him for the ticket. Gotta love her.

(He was very polite.)

The sun set, I took over the driving, and we continued on our way home.

***

I suppose I could say something to wrap it all up, to emphasize the spirit of the season or the ending of one year and the beginning of another. I could complain about what a pain it all was while making an allusion to how great it all is.

Instead, I'll just let you know that she's pregnant again.

Wonders never cease.

Here's that sunset, taken from a car on the plains, going the speed limit.

(Up next: one more family tale from Christmas, but not about my family or Christmas.)

2007-01-05T13:12:00.000-06:00

Those Holidays. We had a White Christmas, just like the ones I used to know. Treetops kind of glistened. Children more or less listened. We even slid into the snow.

But not initially. No, my mother, who really should have some sort of Weather Channel delivery device implanted in her skull lest she miss a second of the action when she goes to work or nods off for the night, was tracking winter storms like some sort of enraged hound dog chasing a fox across an English moor. At 12:33, Tuesday, December 19, I received the email. She was following a winter storm warning, and it did not look good for our planned Wednesday drive across western Kansas and eastern Colorado to the parents' abode west of Colorado Springs. The phone call from her weather assistant (Dad) followed. The parents suggested we leave early, to get ahead of the storm.

I called the wife with the news. I should note that she is of German derivation, which might have something to do with the fact that though we had planned to drive out Wednesday, she had already sorted, bagged, and alphabetized all that needed packing for the trip. Informed that the Prussian General Staff had plans available for an early invasion of the west, I made the command decision to go, despite the rain/freezing rain front that preceded the promised blizzard.

I left work, and we drove into said front shortly after nightfall. I can say with all honesty that I've driven in all kinds of conditions. My first car was a 1973 VW Beetle, with an engine in the rear to help accelerate the spin on ice. To avoid legal troubles with the people who owned the lawn right at the bend of my old street, let's just say I've done my fair share of sliding. But I've never been quite as scared behind the wheel as I was that night as we crossed the Kansas - Colorado border. The entire front of my car was covered with an inch thick clear coat of ice. The rain froze to the wind shield wipers and made them bow and become useless. The entire highway became black ice, even as snow plows dumped sand and salt on the roads in preparation for the blizzard. After we slid into the gas station in Burlington, Colorado, the end of the driver's side wiper blade broke clean off as I tried to knock off the ice. I bought a replacement blade, which helped enormously, but forgot to remove the three inch broken piece from the hood of the car. For about a ten mile stretch of Interstate 70, we saw no less than ten accidents, a semi on its side, a flipped SUV, three ambulances, and a dozen police cars. I told my wife that if it didn't clear up, we were driving to my sister's place just south of Denver.

It did clear up; we did get through the front by the time we turned southwest on Highway 24 at Limon, Colorado. It was clear sailing from then on out, at least until we arrived at Ute Pass in Divide, Colorado, where the snow started to fall.

And fall it did, all that night, and all through the next day. We arrived at my parents' place at three in the morning, slept in a bit, and weathered the storm inside. It sounds strange, but the snow wasn't as bad up in the mountains as it was down on the front range. Still, we woke up Thursday with 10 or 12 inches on the ground, the sun shining, and with that piece of the windshield wiper still frozen to the hood.

From my parents' driveway:

Believe it or not, this was the first significant snow we had seen since the elder boy has been upright and mobile--we split last winter between Virginia and Kansas and got no white stuff--and we were not going to let this opportunity pass. We looked up "s" for snow gear in our luggage, bundled up the boy, and sent him outside with his Papa.

But wait, that's not it, not only was there snow, but Papa went and got himself a tractor. A John Deere tractor. With a blade like a bulldozer. To move the snow.

Heaven.

Unlike the then 2 year old, I was not allowed to drive the tractor. And it was too cold for the 1 year old, so I shoveled the driveway while he watched from inside. A wonderful time was had by all.

But that was not why we were there. We were there to celebrate the majesty of the birth of Christ by teaching children at least four of the seven deadly sins. My dad took his FJ Cruiser to Denver to pick up my sister and her three kids, just because her minivan couldn't get over the two feet of snow piled on her street and driveway. My brother-in-law, who had wisely flown to Dallas just before the storm, had to rent a car and drive back to have any chance of making it for the holiday.

Everyone arrived, I'm happy to say, and the gift unwrapping orgy began. I won't bore you with all the details, and nor will I post any more pictures than this one, but suffice it to say that over the course of our trip, we took nigh on 500 pictures, and the five kids unwrapped presents like tazmanian devils on crack for 45 minutes straight. It was pandemonium.

Were we done? Ha.

On Christmas Eve we drove back to Divide to the wife's parents' place, also in the mountains, even higher, and with several feet of snow all around. Along the way, we managed to glide into a ditch on my parents' road, wherein the snow only went up to the passenger side window. So there I was, in tennis shoes, attempting to dig out the front of the car with a window scraper. No cell signal. Altitude: 9,000 feet. 9:00 PM. Two year old saying "Uh oh Mommy."

Then two angels in a Ford pickup came rumbling down the road. They had a shovel, and they had a chain, and they had the know how to pull an idiot out of a ditch. They only had one request, which I pass on to you--if you ever see any cattle loose on County Road 77 or in the Lake George area, give the Gilley's a call. They are good people.

Most importantly, we got to the in-laws' place, so the kids could open a few hundred more gifts.

The older boy now has a fleet of Tonka vehicles, or he would if the last of the seven (7) packages we shipped home because they wouldn't fit the car had arrived yet.

He's rather fond of those vehicles, as you might gather.

To be continued...

2007-01-04T14:34:00.000-06:00

Thursday, January 4, 2007. Back from the holiday adventure. Details to follow.

For now, to ring in the New Year on a happy note, and as I wait for a massive pdf file to download from the Air Force Historical Studies Office, please be aware of the passing of two intellectual giants. Elizabeth Fox Genovese you have probably heard about, and this article and this blog post are fine tributes to the late historian. Seymour Martin Lipset, the political sociologist, also passed away this week, and we all are worse off with him gone.

The best tribute we can offer to luminaries is to continue engaging their work and passing on their lessons to the future. The future might not care yet--they are otherwise occupied--but they will get there.

Like I said, details to follow...

2006-12-13T08:19:00.000-06:00

Researchers rejoice. I feel compelled to write something up for all the folks out there who are into doing historical research, for whatever reason. In case anyone has missed this trend, over the last couple of years, the resources available online are becoming absolutely amazing. I know historians live in archives, but everyone doing serious research really should spend months exhausting the online possibilities before ever leaving their office. Newspapers, which used to be meat and potatoes for historians, are getting huge coverage from a variety of services.

Accessing these databases might be easier than you would think. Increasingly, public libraries are buying into the programs. You can get a free library card if you live nearby, and if you don't, you can often pay a pretty reasonoable fee to become a member. For example, I spent $20 for a year-long membership to the Mid-Continent Public Libary system over the river in Missouri. Between that system and the databases at my work, I'm doing pretty darn well.

Here are just a few sources that are available through institutions or for personal subscription: JSTOR (which you all already know about); ProQuest Historical Newspapers; Proquest American Periodical Series; Newspaper Archive.com; Gale Group InfoTrac Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers; and Newsbank, including their Genealogy section that has scans of thousands of newspapers.

Which reminds me. A belated congratulations to good friend Mark, who recently passed his comprehensive exams at Ohio State and is now a Ph.D. candidate who needs to write his dissertation. Way to go Mark--now put those online resources to good use.

Speaking of Mark. The last three Netflix movies were United 93, The Family Stone, and the second Pirates of the Caribbean. Nothing to say about United 93, because it was just a reminder of all that once was, and all that should have been. Pirates of the Caribbean was what it was, only longer. Dear God, two and a half hours rambling about and they still didn't finish the damn story. At least they did their best to make Keira Knightley look like a boy, which works out well because Orlando Bloom looks like a girl. At the rate we are going, in ten years every movie and television show is going to feature a bunch of 105 lbs. hairless androgynes running around in smooth white unitards listening to weird techno music on their color coordinated MP3 players. Turn on your tv, the commercials are already in this bright future.

The Family Stone was a decent if slightly depressing Christmas movie starring Dermot Mulroney and Nelsonville's own Sarah Jessica Parker. The two standouts in the movie are Craig T. Nelson and Luke Wilson. Imagine it, Coach and Frank Vitchard, carrying the show. Two points about this one: first, I've never seen a movie check as many boxes in so short a time as the scene when son Thad Stone walks into the his parents' home. Within about five seconds we find out that Thad is deaf, Thad is gay, and Thad brought his longtime black partner home for the holidays. All Thad needed was a hard-working blind parapalegic Asian midget assistant with a hare lip and a spicy attitude.

Second, the plot revolves around the successful Mulroney bringing the successful Parker home to meet the family for the first time--the latter is hyper nervous and the former is trying to figure out whether he loves her and what he wants from life. Fine, but for one thing, in real life (and pretty much on screen) Mulroney is 43 and Parker is 41. Even if we are to assume they are in their thirties--even Christmas charity can't put those two in their twenties--what thirty year old successful people don't know how to handle themselves when meeting new people? I know some adults with some severe confidence issues, and even they have come up with mechanisms for dealing with challenging social interactions. It was like he was a teenager bringing his date to meet his parents before going out to the Homecoming Dance. You have to be remarkably shallow or incredibly stupid to be thirty something and be so lacking in self awareness and basic social skills.

But that is an indication of a growing Peter Pan mindset in this country. College students make no pretense at acting like they should be adults when they leave school, and video game companies target adults every bit as much as kids. My generation has avoided the Baby Boomer penchant for taking themselves way too seriously, but perhaps at the cost of not taking themselves seriously enough.

On a related note, the campaign to enjoy youth even when youth is over has led to a lot of older single people and couples choosing to put off marriage and having children until it is too late or almost so. I can't help but think of that when never-married forty year olds are acting like teenagers in movies like The Family Stone. Please, if you are older and single or older and do not have children, do not take offense at these comments, because none is meant. I understand that everyone has their own issues, their own reasons for making the choices they make. I just have trouble relating, especially to such movies, because I have made some very different choices, and I am reminded of the results of those choices, relentlessly--and, lucky for me, mostly happily.

Christmas in a new city. NB: I apologize that what follows is going to be the slideshow from hell, but, hey, it is my diary, after all.... (Mark well: NB stands for "nota bene," a Latin phrase used by pointy headed academics to tell people to pay attention to something, and I'm pretty much a pretentious jackass for using it in a blog diary post about taking the kids to into the city for Christmas. Just so you know.)

So we took the kids into the city for Christmas.

The focus of the trip was Kansas City's Union Station, which is connected to hotel/mall complex called Crown Center plaza. (And is across the street from an old World War I memorial and the brand new National World War I museum, about which I will have more at a later date.) The station and the plaza are literally connected--the enclosed walkway goes over a bridge and offers a nice view of the city:

I also took this picture from the walkway, which, if it were in Fargo or Minneapolis, James Lileks would tell you the building's whole history:

Oh hell, fine, I'll look it up, wait a second.... Here we go: Western Auto was a company started in 1909 by George Pepperdine, the guy who founded the university in California, and the building in KC was a headquarters, built in 1915. It started as the Coca Cola building, and obviously did not have the sign then.

Hold on... oh my, there's even a postcard:

Western Auto bought the building in 1951, and the current sign went up the next year. Western Auto put the building up for sale in 1999, and a few years ago it was converted into condominiums. They kept the sign, and I took the picture. Happy?

The same kind history, some real, some manufactured, is everywhere at Union Station, which is a grand edifice, the likes of which we do not seem inclined to build anymore. Here is a shot that unfortunately came out a bit blurry, but gives a sense of the scale of the place:

At one end, where people used to sit and wait for their trains, they've installed a diner to look like what it used to look like when people used to sit and wait for trains, only it didn't look like that. But it could have.

We found jolly Saint Nick, and, unlike the terrified child who preceded us in line, the boys performed with perfect aplomb in the face of the hefty red-clad hirsute elf.

Crown Center and Union Station, knowing how to draw crowds of frothing choo choo-obsessed 2-5 year olds, parents in tow, had about 650 different trains and train displays. A high school choir, boys in tuxes and girls in formal dresses, sang in the lobby, while we visited the displays of trains and gingerbread houses and trains and whole cities and trains and trees and lights and mirth and all that.

The last picture came from outside, and if the boy doesn't look cold, it's because he wasn't. Not at all. The warm weather robbed some of the Christmas atmosphere, but it sure made it easier to go outside with the kids, and take pictures of the ice skating rink and tree, fountain, and obligatory train.

It was so warm even that the younger boy decided to sit on the ground outside to get a little rest, and we didn't mind.

We didn't mind at all, this Christmas in one small part of our new city, a city every bit as nice this season as DC was last year. In some ways, the important ways, better, and not just because the boys made it so, but because the people in the city were better: friendly and polite in the stores, holding doors for each other, smiling as they circled the rink, free from the weight of the worries of the capital and the sad distrust for fellow man that hangs over the District.

Yet they call them rubes of flyover country, these people who live with the peace of a sense of common decency and joy for life. Call them rubes. Call us rubes, as long as ever it is so.

Merry Christmas.

2006-12-07T10:12:00.000-06:00

I'm fighting an illness. I'm not a physician or anything, but it's probably something cool like the black plague or ebola. Sore throat and the occasional chills--classic symptoms of black plague or ebola. Oooooh, maybe it's typhus--not to be confused with typhoid fever, which is just nasty. Typhus is a good one.

The good Hornblower contracted typhus near the end of Commodore Hornblower and barely survived the ordeal. When Hornblower wakes from the prolonged fever and is informed of what ailed him, he thinks, "The typhus. Gaol fever. The scourge of armies and fleets."

In my sojourn through the Hornblower saga, I've happily ignored all the extra u's and misplaced s's, but I just can't get around the British spelling of "jail." Look at it: Gaol. I see Neanderthals roaming the French countryside. Or maybe some sort of Celtic god of head colds. But never "jail." Not for the first few seconds, anyway--the time it takes to catch myself sounding out "ga-owl." Like an idiot.

On tyranny. Fans of Hornblower will recognize that I am nearing the end of the line now. Commodore Hornblower is the third to last in the series, and I finished the penultimate volume, Lord Hornblower, last night. Only Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies remains, but that one belongs to a different era. The first ten books span the Napoleonic Wars, as Hornblower goes from a young seasick midshipman to a famous commodore commanding fleets.

There is much to recommend in the Hornblower books. Most obviously, the writing, history, and nautical science are all first-rate. But that is not all. The books are in so many ways a conscious primer on leadership--how to maintain discipline and how to inspire, how to keep distance and when to let them in close. Some of those lessons are not well-suited to the American mindset, especially in the relationships with servants and the focus on titles. But overall, I imagine that astute aspiring business leaders could get more out of reading Horatio Hornblower than can be gleened out of the thousands of remainder-rack-fodder books on leadership and four years of the standard business degree combined.

From the historian's perspective, Hornblower provides something else: a long view of the tyranny unleashed on the western world by Napoleon. Ten books give a taste, a small taste, of what it must have felt like to be in almost constant war for over twenty years. Even for those who survived, whole lives were lost in campaigns and battles, marches and bivouacs. Men grew old in uniform. They forgot what peace felt like. They forgot what victory felt like. They forgot what hoping for victory felt like.

Imagine the fortitude it took to resist a great tyrant and military genius for an entire generation--to suffer setback after setback, to see heroes fall, and to lose great battles and win great battles and see none of it bring the end any nearer.

Two centuries later, and our war is yet so small. A Napoleon has not emerged from the cauldron of hatred our enemies stir. Maybe it will stay that way. Maybe the war will remain small, and maybe no new tyrant darkens the future. Then we can stay happy and dumb, living our lives as we are, while pundits and officials play politics with our small wars.

Or maybe what seems small now really isn't. Maybe it's just the beginning.

I honestly don't know. But I can't miss the gray peeking through. Gray that wasn't there when whatever this is began. Gray that wasn't there when the plane hit the tower.

An odd entry, as I look back. Sorry for the mood swings. Blame it on the typhus. Time to sleep it off, and prepare for the low-level disaster that will be the game tonight on NFL Network.

Most likely that's it for the week. Have a nice weekend, and watch out for stray gaols.

2006-11-29T10:12:00.000-06:00

Family pride. I can't believe I haven't mentioned this yet: my cousin Nikki is a freshman soccer player at Mount Vernon Nazarene University, and on November 20 the Cougars won the National Christian College National Championship. Here is the story (Nikki is the one in the shorts on the left). I hear she played well in the tournament, especially in the semifinals.

This one time in college, I remember, we won a football game, so I know just how she feels. Or maybe not.

Way to go little cousin. That is frickin' cool.

I can't help it. Every night, when we put the oldest boy to bed, I read to him out of a chapter book of some sort. So far we have read him Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book; Jean Fritz, Why Not Lafayette?; the entire Chronicles of Narnia; Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone; and some of the original Grimm's Tales. We cut off the last because there was a little too much head chopping off, hanging, and cannibalism for two-year-olds--although I'm told that a fully accredited Ph.D. historian from a school you've heard of says scary stories help repress childrens' burgeoning sexuality. Which is awesome.

Anyway, we've been reading Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and all the little British children are always running around eating treacle tarts and treacle fudges, and treacle this and treacle that. Not knowing what treacle was, but noticing that Derek keeps talking about things having "treacle" or being "treacly"--do a "search this blog" on DCAT, it's excellent--I figured I ought to look it up.

Turns out "treacle" means "cloying sentiment," and is what Brits call molasses. So that solves that little mystery. But in the course of my research, I ran across a little matter of local history from New England. Apparantly, I'm not making this up, in January 1919, there occured the Boston Molasses Disaster, known also as the Great Molasses Flood, when a large molasses tank burst and flooded a section of town, killing 21 and injuring 150. There is even a book about it, called Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919.

I can't help it--I find all that really, really funny.

Have a nice weekend, if you can stand the terror.

2006-11-27T08:17:00.000-06:00

Thanksgiving went well. My folks came out from Colorado, as did my sister, brother-in-law, and their three kids. They arrived for dinner on Wednesday, and we treated them to some fine Kansas City German potato sausages from a German meat market called Werner's Specialty Foods. We also made potato pancakes--the key is to puree them in a food processor--and baked apples.

Standard stuff on the big day: turkey, ham, sausage stuffing, mashed potatoes, plus bourbon creamed corn, white cheddar scalloped squash, and cheddar rolls. The wife found a great recipe for turkey and ham Cuban sandwiches on ciabatta bread for Friday night, and on Saturday we made pita bread pizzas so the kids could participate.

Through it all the children watched movies and ran around screaming in anger and joy, adults drank bloody marys, wine, and Irish whiskey while playing dominoes, and everyone had a grand time. None of it was stressful--indeed Terrie and I finished just about every little project we had planned before everyone arrived, including refinishing some old kitchen chairs so they matched the table and touching up the paint around the house. We also completed a 2000 piece old-style gold world map puzzle and I made a frame for it out of molding. It is now hanging it what will be the library.

The library. Sigh. The library, now some 2,300 volumes worth, is still mostly in boxes, even as we approach a year in our new home. The reason is that we are building the shelves, and building the shelves means that we have to go to a friend's house in Topeka to have the right tools, and going to a friend's house in Topeka requires having planning and motivation, and having planning and motivation will eternally be a shortcoming of this particular diarist. That said, the process has begun: wood has been bought for the first three shelves, said wood has been cut, and now the pieces must together be put--hopefully in the next week. On it goes.

What I'm reading. Based in large part on my friend JD's recommendation, I just finished reading Gerhard Weinberg's excellent Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders. I won't get into the details of the book, but I found one part of the section on Franklin Roosevelt especially interesting. Weinberg is first a historian of Germany, and so he brings a slightly different perspective to the vision and policies of FDR for the war. This paragraph, from pages 203-204, stood out:

There were, however, critical differences in Roosevelt's view of Japan and his view of Germany. He registered the dissimilarity between and German public that had turned to National Socialism and had become increasingly enthusiastic about it, on the one hand, and the series of coups, assassinations, and provoked incidents be which the militarists had shot their way to power in Japan, on the other. While Japan, therefore, was to lose all imperial acquisitions gained since its war with China in 1894-95, there is not the slightest indication that Roosevelt ever contemplated for Japan the sort of territorial amputations imposed on Germany--at least to a considerable extent with his approval. Similarly, Roosevelt at no time considered dividing Japan into several separate states, a strategy very much part of his thinking about the future of Germany. The literature that attributes all manner of racist sentiments to American leadership in World War II has conveniently and consistently ignored the fundamentally positive view of Japan held by Roosevelt and his advisors as compared with their perspective on Germany.

Roosevelt probably underestimated the extent to which the Japanese people bought into the militarists' program--see, for one small example, Brian Daizen Victoria, Zen at War--but that's the point, isn't it? He gave the Japanese people the benefit of the doubt, and gave the supposedly superior Germans nothing.

Of course the folks who see racism as the driving force will say that FDR looked at the Japanese people as mindless sheep who could more easily be driven than the intelligent Germans who chose to embrace Nazism. Because everything had a racist motive. Because they'll never be satisfied that racism was but one factor in fighting the Pacific war, and on the American side nowhere near the most important one.

What else I'm reading. Looking for some first-rate fiction, and inspired by the folks in Topeka with all the tools, I'm now reading C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower saga. Hornblower, as most know because of the television series, was Master and Commander long before Russell Crowe put on Jack Aubrey's stockings.

The Hornblower books--which I'm reading in order of the sailor's career, not the order of publication (maybe a mistake, like watching episodes 1-3 before 4-6 or reading The Magician's Nephew before The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe)--are fascinating and exciting and well-worth the effort. I've just finished the three books that make up Captain Horatio Hornblower, and at the end of the third book, Flying Colours, Hornblower has become a national hero for his exploits against Napoleonic France, and he is not too happy about it.

Forester writes:

Prospect, and not possession, was what gave pleasure, and his cross-grainedness would deprive him, now that he had made that discovery, even of the pleasure of prospect.

A common lesson, but put well.

Now back to work--completed books and bookshelves beckon. Happy prospects, those.

2006-11-22T10:13:00.000-06:00

Our lovely press. Yesterday we had a bit of a dust-up here at my work, as a result of a Thomas Ricks article in the Washington Post on the American advisory effort in Iraq. It seems Mr. Ricks, or at least a researcher named Julie Tate, discovered the long-available interviews run by the Operational Leadership Experiences team at the U.S. Army's Combat Studies Institute in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Good for them. The interviews are an invaluable source on the current conflict, and a wonderful record of the experiences of hundreds of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I heartily recommend that you do some exploring on their webpage, which is here.

Unfortunately, Ricks and Tate chose to use the interviews to cherry-pick quotations that supported a seriously flawed, opinionated, and out of date news story. So, with no humility whatsoever, I helped Mr. Ricks with a rewrite that more accurately reflects the content of the interviews and the latest information on the training effort in Iraq. The original column is in blue, my rewrites are in black.

Flaws Cited in Effort To Train Iraqi Forces
U.S. Officers Roundly Criticize Program

Effort To Train Iraqi Forces Constantly Evolving
U.S. Officers Recount Difficulties, Successes

The U.S. military's effort to train Iraqi forces has been rife with problems, from officers being sent in with poor preparation to a lack of basic necessities such as interpreters and office materials, according to internal Army documents.

The U.S. military’s effort to train Iraqi forces has overcome innumerable obstacles, including early shortcomings in training and shortages in interpreters, according to Army documents.

The shortcomings have plagued a program that is central to the U.S. strategy in Iraq and is growing in importance. A Pentagon effort to rethink policies in Iraq is likely to suggest placing less emphasis on combat and more on training and advising, sources say.

The adjustments and flexibility of the advising program have been central to the U.S. strategy in Iraq and continue to be important. Ever since the end of major combat operations in the spring of 2003, the Pentagon has shifted its focus from combat to training and advising, sources say.

In dozens of official interviews compiled by the Army for its oral history archives, officers who had been involved in training and advising Iraqis bluntly criticized almost every aspect of the effort. Some officers thought that team members were often selected poorly. Others fretted that the soldiers who prepared them had never served in Iraq and lacked understanding of the tasks of training and advising. Many said they felt insufficiently supported by the Army while in Iraq, with intermittent shipments of supplies and interpreters who often did not seem to understand English.

In hundreds of official interviews compiled by the Army for its public history program, officers who had been involved in the early training and advising of Iraqis frankly discussed the difficulties of the effort. Not surprisingly, some team members were not suited to the task. In addition, the soldiers who prepared the advisors had to work from scratch, since Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a closed society and they could not foresee all of the problems with training and advising an entirely new Iraqi military. Many advisors also added that they could have used more and better interpreters.

The Iraqi officers interviewed by an Army team also had complaints; the top one was that they were being advised by officers far junior to them who had never seen combat. Some of the American officers even faulted their own lack of understanding of the task. "If I had to do it again, I know I'd do it completely different," reported Maj. Mike Sullivan, who advised an Iraqi army battalion in 2004. "I went there with the wrong attitude and I thought I understood Iraq and the history because I had seen PowerPoint slides, but I really didn't."

The Iraqi officers interviewed by an Army team also complained that they were being advised by officers junior to them who had never seen combat. The Americans also recognized the problems of working with Saddam’s former soldiers. “A lot of the officers had previous Iraqi Army experience and nothing I saw of the old Iraqi Army was a good thing,” said Maj. Mike Sullivan. “While we think we’re there to better the welfare of the troops and train the troops, the Iraqi officers I dealt with felt that the troops were there to better their welfare.”

Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top U.S. military commander for the Middle East, told Congress last week that he plans to shift increasing numbers of troops from combat roles to training and advisory duties. Insiders familiar with the bipartisan Iraq Study Group say that next month the panel will probably recommend further boosts to the training effort. Pentagon officials are considering whether the number of Iraqi security forces needs to be far larger than the current target of about 325,000, which would require thousands more U.S. trainers.

Gen. John P. Abazaid, the top U.S. military commander for the Middle East, told Congress last week that he plans to continue shifting troops from combat roles to training and advisory duties. Insiders familiar with the bipartisan Iraq Study Group say that next month the panel will probably back this ongoing effort. Pentagon officials are considering whether the number of Iraqi security forces needs to be larger than the current target of about 325,000, which would reinforce the importance of the training program.

Most recently, a closely guarded military review being done for the Joint Chiefs of Staff laid out three options for Iraq. It appears to be favoring a version of one option called "Go Long" that would temporarily boost the U.S. troop level -- currently about 140,000 -- but over time would cut combat presence in favor of training and advising. The training effort could take five to 10 years.

Most recently, a military review being done for the Joint Chiefs of Staff laid out three options for Iraq. It appears to be favoring a version of one option called “Go Long” that would increase the number of troops dedicated to training and advising, while slowly reducing the combat presence. This training effort could take five to 10 years.

Despite its central role in Iraq, the training and advisory program is not well understood outside narrow military circles. Congress has hardly examined it, and training efforts lie outside the purview of the special inspector general on Iraq reconstruction. The Army has done some studies but has not released them. Even basic information, such as how many of the 5,000 U.S. military personnel involved are from the National Guard and Reserves, is unusually difficult to obtain.

Despite its central role in Iraq, outside observers have done a poor job in trying to understand the training and advisory program. Congress and the media have hardly looked into the effort, including ignoring publicly available Army interviews and studies.

But the previously unreported transcripts of interviews conducted by the Army's Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., offer a view into the program, covering a time from shortly after the 2003 invasion until earlier this year.

But the readily accessible transcripts of interviews conducted by the Army’s Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., offer a view into the early program, covering a time from shortly after the 2003 invasion until earlier this year.

One of the most common complaints of the Army officers interviewed was that the military did a poor job of preparing them. "You're supposed to be able to shoot, move and communicate," said Lt. Col. Paul Ciesinski, who was an adviser in northern Iraq last year and this year. "Well, when we got to Iraq we could hardly shoot, we could hardly move and we could hardly communicate, because we hadn't been trained on how to do these things." The training was outdated and lackadaisical, he said, adding sarcastically: "They packed 30 days' training into 84 days."

One of the most common issues of the Army officers interviewed was that they had to adjust their limited training experience to the unique conditions in Iraq. Bolstered by the success of advisory efforts in Kosovo, and unaware of the extent that Saddam’s tyranny had degraded Iraqi institutions, the military at first underestimated the language and cultural barriers to the advising effort. According to Lt. Col. Paul Ciesinski, who was an advisor in northern Iraq beginning in early 2005, the initial training was outdated and incomplete. He added sarcastically, “They packed 30 days’ training into 84 days.”

Sullivan, who advised three infantry companies in the Iraqi army, called the U.S. Army's instruction for the mission "very disappointing."

Sullivan, who advised three infantry companies in the Iraqi army, called the U.S. Army’s initial instruction for the mission “very disappointing.”

Nor were the officers impressed by some of their peers. Maj. Jeffrey Allen, an active-duty soldier, noted that all other members of his team were from the National Guard, and that his team was supposed to have 10 members but was given only five. He described his team as "weak . . . in particular the brigade team chief."

A separate internal review this year by the military's Center for Army Lessons Learned, based on 152 interviews with soldiers involved in the training and advisory program, found that there was "no standardized guideline" for preparing advisers and that such instruction was needed because "a majority of advisors have little to no previous experience or training."

An internal review by the Army’s Center for Army Lessons Learned, based on 152 interviews with soldiers involved in the early training and advisory program, found that "a majority of advisors have little to no previous experience or training."

Lt. Col. Michael Negard, a spokesman for the Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq, the headquarters for training, said he has not seen the Lessons Learned report and so does not know whether the training has been improved or standardized since that report was issued.

After arriving in Iraq, advisers said, they often were shocked to find that the interpreters assigned to them were of little use. Ciesinski reported that at his base in western Nineveh province, "They couldn't speak English and we would have to fire them."

Nor were there enough interpreters to go around, said Sullivan. "It was a real juggling act" with interpreters, he said, noting that he would run from the headquarters to a company "to borrow an interpreter, run him over to say something, and then send him back."

But he was better off than Maj. Robert Dixon, who reported that during his tour in 2004, "We had no interpreters at the time."

The Center for Army Lessons Learned study, whose contents were first reported by the Wall Street Journal, found one unit that learned after 10 frustrating months that its interpreters were "substandard" and had been translating the advisers' instructions so poorly that their Iraqi pupils had difficulty understanding the concepts being taught.

Trainers and advisers also reported major problems with the Army supply chain. "As an adviser, I got the impression that there was an 'us' and 'them' " divide between the advisers and regular U.S. forces, said Maj. Pete Fedak, an adviser near Fallujah in 2004. "In other words, there was an American camp and then, outside, there was a bermed area for the Iraqis, of which we were part."

Advisers also recalled difficulties with interpreters. Ciesinski reported that at his base some interpreters, “couldn't speak English and we would have to fire them.”

Nor were there enough interpreters to go around, said Sullivan. "It was a real juggling act" with interpreters, he said, noting that he would run from the headquarters to a company "to borrow an interpreter, run him over to say something, and then send him back."

Maj. Robert Dixon, reported that at the beginning of his tour in 2004, "We had no interpreters," so they had to use a lot of volunteers in the Iraqi army, “who could speak English pretty well.”

The Center for Army Lessons Learned study found one unit that learned that its interpreters were "substandard" and had been translating the advisers' instructions so poorly that their Iraqi pupils had difficulty understanding the concepts being taught.

Despite these initial problems, most advisers had positive recollections of their interpreters. They “were our lifeblood,” Sullivan said. “When we finally got these guys, we developed real good relationships with them.” Col. Joseph Buche, who commanded a battalion from the 101st Airborne Division in northern Iraq in 2003, agreed. “One of our great strengths is that we had more than one interpreter per platoon in our [area of operations] up north.”

Replacing basic office materials was one of the toughest problems advisers reported. "Guys would come under fire so they could get computer supplies, paper and things like that," Sullivan said. "It was a surreal experience."

Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, a staff officer with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq in 2005 and 2006 who worked with Iraqi units, came away thinking that the Army fundamentally is not geared to the task of helping the advisory effort.

"The thing the Army institutionally is still struggling to learn is that the most important thing we do in counterinsurgency is building host-nation institutions," he told the interviewers, "yet all our organizations are designed around the least important line of operations: combat operations."

Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, a staff officer with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq in 2005 and 2006 who worked with Iraqi units, thought part of the problem came from institutional lag within the Army. “The thing the Army institutionally is still struggling to learn is that the most important thing we do in counterinsurgency is building host-nation institutions," he told the interviewers, "yet all our organizations are designed around the least important line of [counterinsurgency] operations: combat operations." But, he added, “Eventually the institutional Army will catch up.”

There are indications that the catching up has already begun. Dixon says of the new training teams headed to Iraq, “They went through a month’s train up of very standardized training, so what we came up with and what they’re going through now is a lot different.” Advisers need to “know how to do training, training management, understand training, those types of things,” said Maj. Jeffrey Allen. “That being said, most of that is done now.”

Advisers found that the capabilities of Iraqi forces "ran the gamut from atrocious to excellent," as it was put by Lt. Col. Kevin Farrell, who commanded an armored unit in east Baghdad last year and this year.

Many worried that the Iraqi units being advised contained insurgents. An Iraqi National Guard battalion "was infiltrated by the enemy," said Maj. Michael Monti, a Marine who was an adviser in the Upper Euphrates Valley in 2004 and 2005.

Some advisers reported being personally targeted by infiltrators. "We had insurgents that we detected and arrested in the battalion that were planning an operation against me and my team," Allen said.

But Iraqi officers may have had even more to fear, because their families were also vulnerable. "I went through seven battalion commanders in eight weeks," Allen noted. Dixon reported that in Samarra both his battalion commander and intelligence officer deserted just before a major operation.

Iraqis also had some complaints about their U.S. advisers, most notably that junior U.S. officers who had never seen combat were counseling senior Iraqi officers who had fought in several wars. "Numerous teams have lieutenants . . . to fill the role of advisor to an Iraqi colonel counterpart," the Lessons Learned report stated.

Farrell, the officer in east Baghdad, said some advisers were literally "phoning in" their work. Some would not leave the forward operating base "more than one or two days out of the week -- instead they would just call the Iraqis on cellphones," he said.

Dixon was grim about the experience. "Would I want to go back and do it again?" he asked. His unambiguous answer: "No."

Yingling came to a broader conclusion. He recommended an entirely different orientation in Iraq, both for trainers and for regular U.S. units. "Don't train on finding the enemy," he said. "Train on finding your friends, and they will help you find your enemy. . . . Once you find your friends, finding the enemy is easy."

In 2004 and 2005, however, the advisers on the ground had to lead the way, despite the difficulties. Ciesinski said, “The biggest thing I can take out of my year there was overcoming the bad start we had and the lack of training we received.”

According to the latest reports, over 320,000 Iraqi security forces have been trained and equipped – 134,000 in the military and 188,000 in the police forces. True, many of the trained units have done poorly; Lt. Col. Kevin Farrell, who commanded an armored unit in east Baghdad last year and this year, said they “ran the gamut from atrocious to excellent.”

But the raw numbers have had an effect as the Iraqis have become increasingly responsible for their own security over the last two years. And even the early advisers were uniformly proud of the successes of their units, despite the rough start.

“I think we did the best we could under the circumstances,” recalled Dixon. “Our battalion did relatively well.”

When asked if his training team was successful, Allen gave an unambiguous answer, “Oh, absolutely.” He added, “I was glad that I was down in the weeds, living, eating and fighting with the Iraqi soldiers. That was the most rewarding experience that I can possibly think of, being in Iraq.”

...

Have a Happy Thanksgiving. I'll see you next week.

2006-11-16T13:31:00.000-06:00

Where I've been. Well, there's only one thing a man can do when he's suffering from a spiritual and existential funk, and it's not going to the zoo to flip off the monkeys. Although that is fun. And rewarding. Stupid monkeys.

No, the only thing a man can do is blog. Blog like the wind. Blog until his whole heart and soul is on the world wide web for everyone to see.

I'm not really in a funk--I've just been busy and preoccupied. I've been following the post-election fallout with a heavy heart--not because the Republicans lost, but because these elections don't mean anything anymore. Trying times are supposed to bring out the greatness in people, especially, I hope, Americans. But I haven't seen any greatness, except at the mid to lower levels of our military.

So a little William Wallace seems appropriate as advice to our leaders:

Men don't follow titles, they follow courage. Now our people know you. Noble, and common, they respect you. And if you would just lead them to freedom, they'd follow you. And so would I.

True, true, true.

But enough of that, we know down which path these thoughts take us. I don't want to buy any more suits.

This world provides distractions. For example, in regards to our friend Mel Gibson, a thought occurs to me about his drunken anti-Semitism "sugar-tits" rant of earlier this year. A lot of people weighed in on both sides about what the precious, delicious alcohol does to an individual when consumed in large quantities. Some say it makes an individual rant incoherent about stuff they don't actually think or believe. Others say the booze releases inhibitions, and allows people to say what they actually think.

There's merit and truth on both sides. I've noticed that some people who have imbibed a few grow more, let's say, friendly than usual. I've noticed that on one or two occasions I've drank one or two gin and tonics and decided that I'm Dean Martin, only to be told later that Barney from the Simpsons was closer to the mark. Everyone knows that liquor changes the equation at bars and clubs, or else some genius would not have invented the phrase "beer-goggles."

Then again, one time when I had a couple gin and tonics and the missus was quite pregnant with our first boy, I informed her, in all seriousness, that our child would be the first black president. So there's that.

I don't have the first clue what Mel was thinking that night.

Another example of distractions. Ohio State vs. Michigan, about which I have nothing to say except that I hope the Buckeyes win, I wish they would win big so it won't be so damned stressful, but I know the game will be close to torture me and everyone else as much as possible. Which is exactly how it should be.

The Game, as it should be known, will follow a party. Not coincide, mind you, but follow. Because the party's not about the game, but rather a little matter of the first birthday of the little brother to the first black president.

How is that for time flying? As of today, my youngest son is now one year old.

What that also means. We are approaching the one year anniversary of moving to Kansas. One year ago, my son Anthony was born in Northern Virginia. Within a week, my parents were in town. Mom and my wife were watching the newborn, and I drove my dad and my oldest into the capital to go to the Air and Space Museum. As we crossed the 14th Street Bridge, I got the phone call offering the job--if I could start within the next few weeks.

I said I didn't think we could do it, what with the new baby and all. When we got home, I told my wife, and she had me call them back. A few weeks later I started the new job. We moved right after Christmas.

And here we are, one year later, days and nights tumbling one after another. Life continuing. Another election, another big game, a first birthday. Days and nights. Nights and days.

At least the view ain't bad.

Go Buckeyes.

2006-11-08T09:12:00.000-06:00

I, for one, welcome our new Islamicist overlords. I've always thought sharia law was the way to go. No doubting what's important in that system. Keeps one grounded, it does.

Kidding, of course. I am very heartened to see that the center held, to see so many good ole' conservative Blue Dog Democrats are making the trip back to Washington. Good for the Jim Webb's, Heath Shuler's, and Nancy Boyda's. Good for the country. Too bad about Harold Ford, though. A good man running with the wrong name in the wrong state for the wrong party. Switch to Republican Mr. Ford, you'll win in a heartbeat, even as a Ford in Tennessee.

I am also very heartened to see that this election has already shaken Republicans out of their lazy complacency. The removal of Donald Rumsfeld had to happen--he had become too much of a lightning rod for every minor setback in the war in Iraq, including from the prowar and military side, which was most important. He did it to himself by insisting on maintaining prewar levels of funding and prewar conceptions of transforming the military, even when September 11 and the situation on the ground in the war had made it perfectly clear that some of these ideas had to change and that we needed to funnel more money into the military. As a result, everytime anything, no matter how small in historical terms, went wrong in Iraq, Rumsfeld was to blame.

I continue to maintain that the war in Iraq has been a success in all historical terms--we've removed Saddam, set up a fledgling democracy, killed lots of fundamentalists, taken remarkably few casualties--and I wonder if the erstwhile critics of the war will notice, or at least have the criticisms blunted, without Rumsfeld to kick around. Hey, it's not that farfetched: how often have we heard about the Patriot Act since Ashcroft stepped down?

Anyway, it will be most interesting to see how Democrats handle the war now that they have some control. They've said they have better ideas and better tactics, more nuance and more tact--now we'll find out. Something tells me that they will be as useless with the reins of Congressional power as the Republicans have been, and they'll blame the president and his obstruction and the Republicans will blame them back and we'll have another election that will swing back and so on and so forth, as it ever has been in times of peace.

Because it's clear that as a nation we do not believe we are at war.

As for me, I'm unconvinced that the "Stick our Fingers in Our Ears and Yell LALALALALALA Doctrine" will work in this fight.

But I do hear that the new season of "Lost" is fantastic and that Britney and K-Fed are hanging it up, so everything should be fine. Really.

Update: I just found a handy little graphic:

Read the chart. Let it sink in. Wonder, like me, how it is even possible that not a single prominent politician in this country has used these figures to question our commitment to fighting this war. Not one.

If there has ever been a more stark example of how the baby boomers have failed in the face of their generation's greatest test, I haven't seen it.

I'm told we're now to refer to K-Fed as "Fed-Ex." Ha Ha.

2006-11-06T09:48:00.000-06:00

Some things you should note. A new issue of The New Criterion is available online. Read whatever you can, but take special note of Victor Davis Hanson's review of Mark Steyn's new book and Paul Johnson's article, "The human race: success or failure?"

The November issue of Commentary is available online. Read the whole thing--they are getting serious about Iran. (Unfortunately, we seem to live in a profoundly unserious country anymore, at least when it comes to defending ourselves from a clear and present danger.)

A new issue of the City Journal is partially online. Be sure to read Victor Davis Hanson's "My Bizarre Libyan Holiday."

More articles from the fall issue of the Claremont Review of Books are now available online. Peter Schramm's wonderful, "Born American, but in the Wrong Place," was included for all to read.

Finally, the latest issue of Doublethink is now available online. I immodestly recommend Tom Bruscino's "George W. Bush, the T.R. of Today." The blabbering author goes on and on, but if any of you have the fortitude to make it through, I would love to hear any comments.

It's not Athens, but it's certainly something. My friend J.D.--the spinach dip guy--found a Sports Illustrated profile of Halloween in Athens, Ohio that pretty much captures the experience. Although I seem to remember a little more nudity and quite a few more profane costumes than SI mentions.

Alas, my Halloweening in Athens days are long gone--I can't believe it's already been two years--so now I'm one of those dad-types who takes his wee ones around to gather candy from neighbors and strangers. My wife, aka "The Talented One," has always been a superstar when it comes to designing and making costumes for Halloween. In the past we've been William Wallace and Murron, a rodeo clown and a red devil, Maximus and Lucilla, Bam Bam and Peebles, a caterpillar and butterfly, and a shotgun wedding (when she was pregnant with the Dominator).

With Dominic outside of his womby prison, the focus turned to the kiddos. We weren't very original at first, even if the boy was cute. Year one saw Dominic as a mini-Braveheart to my full-sized (over-sized) (okay...fat) one. Year two saw Dominic as a mini-caterpillar to my full-sized (okay...fat) one.

But now the boy has developed some personality, even some preferences, and since he's bigger and slightly more vocal than little brother Anthony--who, I might add, we call Mad Dog because he foams at the mouth and has absolutely no sense of self-preservation--the Dominator gets to dictate which way the costumes are going. Since he is enamored of, nay, obsessed with, trains in all forms, what better to be than a train engineer? And take the little brother along for the ride?

Of course, any engineer worth his salt is going to need a train, and given my well-established record as a fat William Wallace and fat caterpillar, the lovely wife thought I would make a good engine. She was right, of course.

It was pretty nippy that night, so the boys were well-bundled.

We shuffled around in full costume to ten or twelve houses, until Mad Dog passed out in the passenger car. We took him home so he could help his mother and a then-homeless former Marine pass out candy, I deboarded the engine (which downgraded my costume to "Fat Burglar"), and Dominic and me joined some other kids and dads to hit up a few more houses for free goodies.

The other dads were all students at the Command and General Staff School, and, as always, friendly, thoughtful, and well-spoken. They are all a few years older than me, but as we were making Beavis and Butthead jokes, it occured to me that I have about a ten-year window here in Leavenworth when the students will be from my quarter-generation, when we will be able to talk in late 1980s to early 2000s lingo without missing a beat. I am glad for that--it's always good to be able to tell someone that you used to grab bearclaws two at a time and get them lodged right...about...here, and have the listener understand.

Anyway, the Dominator played up the whole I'm-just-two-year-old-and-I-need-help thing to the fullest, and, as he was getting free candy, also got an older lady to hold his hand along the way. He's a genius.

It's not Athens, but it's something. Something better.

And I can't wait till next year, when my wife crams my tubby butt into a scale model of the Titanic.

2006-11-01T07:48:00.000-06:00

For the record. I think Senator Kerry was attempting to tell a joke about the president. That he, of all people, should try to resuscitate the "Bush is a dummy" meme is ridiculous. But there it is: I think Kerry was telling a poorly worded and not funny joke about the president.

Here's the interesting part: it doesn't matter, that line has already become an infamous slur on the military. Three reasons for that--two you already know, one will be my little contribution to the story. The first is that the Republicans are selling the hell out of it as an insult to the troops. The second is that Kerry, despite his service, just doesn't have any credibility when it comes to supporting the troops. As you all well know, he burned up the good will earned with his service when he went before Congress and called American soldiers rapists and murderers. Then he followed that up with his comments about our troops terrorizing women and children in Iraq. He's got a long antimilitary record, so it is awfully hard to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The third point is most interesting and most important. Kerry's silly joke as a slur on the military was, to use the silly phrase, fake but accurate. He may not have been making a crack about the intelligence and education of our servicemen, but it is pretty clear that he and his ilk believe that the enlisted men and women in the U.S. military joined because they are poor, uneducated, underprivileged, and out of options.

It's been the same story throughout American history--the military as a profession has been looked down upon by large sections of American society, even as Americans have respected and rewarded military valor. Congress cut funding for the professional military every chance it has gotten. In the 1840s, Ulysses S. Grant had a street urchin make fun of him in his uniform after he graduated from West Point. By the late nineteenth century, new immigrants were overrepresented in the military because native Americans eschewed soldier work. World War I was supposedly a rich man's war but poor man's fight, and World War II was simply a job to do until the war ended and everyone could get out of the service. Vietnam became in popular imagination yet another poor (and black) man's fight, even though it wasn't.

For a short time, the post-Vietnam, post-draft military had all kinds of problems with recruiting and testing and criminals and all that. The idea had become embedded in some circles that people only joined the military because they are victims with no other choice, and no amount of evidence to the contrary seems to change minds (see below).

Kerry's gaffe will have legs not because of the Republicans or his own shady record with dealing with the military, but because some vocal Democrats are already saying that even if the senator didn't say what we think he said, if he had said it, he would be right. Got that?

For the record II. (In regard to the educational attainment of American soldiers.) I put these links, comments, and numbers in the discussion at Big Tent, but I'm afraid they might be buried, so they are reproduced here for easy reference.

According to a report by the Heritage Foundation:

"The percentage of recruits from the poorest American neighborhoods (with one-fifth of the U.S. population) declined from 18 percent in 1999 to 14.6 percent in 2003, 14.1 percent in 2004, and 13.7 percent in 2005."

"By assigning each recruit the median 1999 household income for his hometown ZIP code as determined from Census 2000, the mean income for 2004 recruits was $43,122 (in 1999 dollars). For 2005 recruits, it was $43,238 (in 1999 dollars). These are increases over the mean incomes for the 1999 cohort ($41,141) and 2003 cohort ($42,822). The national median published in Census 2000 was $41,994. This indicates that, on average, the 2004 and 2005 recruit populations come from even wealthier areas than their peers who enlisted in 1999 and 2003.

When comparing these wartime recruits (2003-2005) to the resident population ages 18-24 (as recorded in Census 2000), areas with median household income levels between $35,000 and $79,999 were overrepresented, along with income categories between $85,000 and $94,999."

"Additionally, in the most recent edition of Population Representation in the Military Services, the Department of Defense reported that the mean reading level of 2004 recruits is a full grade level higher than that of the comparable youth population."

College graduates are not underrepresented among enlistees who become enlisted men and women, because the overwhelming majority of those people are 18-21. Almost no one in that age range is a college graduate, so they are exactly proportionate to the general population. But in that age range, roughly 75% of the general population are high school grads, while 98-99% of those in the military have high school diplomas--meaning they are on average smarter and better educated than the general population.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2005, 25.3% of veterans 25 years and older have at least a bachelor's degree, as opposed to 27.2% of the general population.

Over 33% of veterans over 25 have some college or associate degrees, while 26.6% of the general population does. And the number of veterans enrolled in programs towards college degrees is increasing.

Even accounting for no other factors like career choice, the proportion of veterans with at least bachelor's degrees is almost exactly the same as the proportion of the general population. So in no way are college graduates underrepresented in our military--many of them have just put off their education until later.

Oh, and individual veterans make a median income of $33,973 a year, a full $10,000 more than the average nonveteran.

Someone page John Kerry, Michael Moore, Daily Kos, and all the other people I linked above who want to paint our servicemen and women as poor unwitting victims of a distant elite.

They've got it all wrong. Our servicemen and women are the elite.

2006-10-25T09:00:00.000-05:00

Defense on offense. The Department of Defense has a new webpage that is kind of bloggy in nature called "For the Record." The page's mission seems to be disputing factual and opinion claims from the larger media about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Good for the Defense Department. Whatever we might think of the war or the way it is being waged, it is a good thing for there to be a place where those who are waging the war can respond openly and clearly to criticisms.

Spread the word, and let's hope they keep it up.

What I've been reading. Among the books I've been reading is a collection of fantasy short stories by Robert Heinlein. Included among those stories is "--And He Built a Crooked House," which originally appeared in print in 1940. The story begins thusly:

Americans are considered crazy anywhere in the world.

They will usually concede a basis for the accusation but point to California as the focus of the infection.

A reminder of an ever growing tradition, lest our friends on the west coast get too excited about their dairy proficiency.

I'm just getting started on Heinlein--in addition to this collection, I've also read The Green Hills of Earth and the fantastic Starship Troopers--and I have already learned that Heinlein had a relentlessly creative mind. But more than that, he was an excellent writer, which is not always the case for science fiction and fantasy.
One "how times have changed" observation from his work: he can't get away from smoking. Just about all of his stories are set in the future from the mid-twentieth century, and no matter how far forward he goes, the people smoke. They smoke indoors, they smoke in spaceships, there is even a story that directly talks about disgarding ashes in a weightless environment. For Heinlein, smoking is almost a writing tick that he can't help but use in describing a scene.

A blogger sat at his desk, hidden among stacks of books and loose papers, a cigarette smoldering in a metal ashtray next to the keyboard. He took a drag and pretended he could write fiction.

I wonder what little things are accepted parts of our everyday life, but will be gone or very different in fifty years.

Another example. Yesterday Ren and I watched football all afternoon on the DIRECTV NFL Ticket. We also ate about three pounds of glorious spinach dip.

Last week, when I wrote my entry about the chili party, I was grasping for some description of the size and shape of the possum in the cornbread. I eventually concluded that the critter was about the size of a pumpernickel round. Which, inevitably, got me thinking about eating pumpernickel, which got me thinking about using the pumpernickel to scoop up some sort of tasty sauce or dip. Which got me thinking about my friend JD's spinach dip, a staple at many gatherings in Athens, Ohio. But ever since a couple years ago when JD moved to the northwest to run around in the rain and get chased by Big Foot, I haven't had the spinach dip.

Later that day, JD sent me an email to congratulate my work on Cleveland '64 that clearly convinced the Browns to get rid of Offensive Coordinator Maurice Carthon. JD also let me know that the hard copies of my little book--which had previously been available electronically online, but now are available for purchase from the Government Printing Office, Amazon, or for free to government or education addresses at this webpage--had arrived at his work.

I took the opportunity to ask JD by email for his spinach dip recipe, and he kindly obliged. And Ren and I watched football all afternoon yesterday and ate about three pounds of dip out of a possum-sized pumpernickel round.

Now did any science fiction writer predict the internet and the way it would change all our lives?

Finally, this has no redeeming qualities. It is profane, disgusting, offensive, and terrible. So of course I pass it on to you, my dear friends. (Thanks to Cliopatria for the tip.)

See you later.

2006-10-23T12:43:00.000-05:00

Columns and articles that I found interesting recently.

Victor Davis Hanson, "The Wonders of Hindsight," tells us to suck it up and finish the job. A useful antidote to the "woe is me" stuff coming from all corners about the Iraq war over the last few weeks.

Mark Steyn, "Fear of too many babies is hard to bear," celebrates the birth of the 300 millionth living American the other day. His concluding graph brings this lovely line of truth: "The reality is that in a Western world ever more wizened and barren the 300 millionth American is the most basic example of American exceptionalism."

In Monday's Bleat, James Lileks talked to his dad, did an internet search, and found an incredible story about his great-grandfather's night outside the perimeter on Hoth.

David Brooks, "Where the Right Went Wrong," is a review of Andrew Sullivan's new book on conservatism. More than just a reminder of what we all miss now that the Times hides Brooks behind their noxious firewall, Brooks has once again tapped into a fundamental truth about Americans:

As for Sullivan’s conservatism of doubt, I’m sympathetic. I know only two self-confessed Oakeshottians in Washington — Sullivan and me. And yet Oakeshott’s modesty can never be the main strain in one’s thinking, though it should always be the warning voice in the back of your mind.

Sullivan notes that Oakeshott “couldn’t care less about politics as such, who wins and loses, what is now vulgarly called ‘the battle of ideas.’ ” His thought was poetic, not programmatic.

Well, if you want to sit in a cottage and bet on horses, fine. But if you actually want to govern, such thinking is of limited use. It doesn’t make sense to ask how an Oakeshottian would govern because an Oakeshottian could never get elected in a democracy and could never use the levers of power if somehow he did. Doubt is not a political platform. Hope is.

Oakeshott was wise, but Oakeshottian conservatism can never prevail in America because the United States was not founded on the basis of custom, but by the assertion of a universal truth — that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain rights. The United States is a creedal nation, and almost every significant movement in American history has been led by people calling upon us to live up to our creed. In many cases, the people making those calls were religious leaders. From Jonathan Edwards to the abolitionists to the civil rights leaders to the people fighting AIDS and genocide in Africa today, religiously motivated people have been active in public life. They have been, in their certainty and their willingness to apply divine truths, fundamentalists — if we want to use Sullivan’s categories. You take those people out of American politics and you don’t have a country left.

And finally, Joseph Epstein, "Ugly, Thorny Things," about how facts have outpaced ideas in the modern world.

The point should look very familiar to historians who constantly hear the lament that we need more big idea synthetic narrative accounts and then watch big idea synthetic narrative accounts get torn apart by specialists with all the facts and none of the perspective.

Ideas matter. Big ideas matter bigger. The big idea that is America matters biggest of all. Read these five articles together and see what that means. Read on to see what it means to me.

Gather up everyone. This past weekend we had our annual Chilifest--an event of stupendous proportions, frequented by all the most important players, featuring the greatest colllection of chili and people ever gathered in my garage.

Most of the neighborhood turned out, despite the grinding poverty caused by rising housing costs in the midwest. Carlos from across the street--he's of Puerto Rican descent and a guard at the federal prison--contributed a couple of eight foot tables. Dave and Kelly are also from across the street, but they are from Texas (A&M fans) and he's a student at the Command and General Staff College and she's a social worker. They brought an amazing bacon cheese cornbread and these little bite sized orange blossum muffins. Jim and Kelli (surveyor and elementary school teacher), Kansas natives who live kind of next door to us, brought sausages and a pumpkin roll. Eric does development for Baker University and Lisa is a physician and they came up from the Overland Park area with their infant son and brought Eric's venison chili and sweet potatoe pie. Robin, an editor and master map maker from my work, brought cinnamon rolls. About thirty-five people in all showed up, coming from near and far, bringing various contributions to the party.

I made four pots of chili, and we borrowed a few crock pots from the neighbors to set up a serving table in the garage. Saturday was cold and blustery all day--perfect for chili. Everyone ate their fill while the kids ran around and climbed on the as yet unpacked boxes of books in our someday library. The Kansas natives drank beer and discussed the collapse of the Jayhawks at the hands of lowly Baylor and wondered aloud when basketball season started. I talked fantasy football with our real estate agent's husband, who also happens to be the local fire chief.

Later, when all but Dave and Kelly had left, we half cleaned up and sat around drinking beer and playing dominoes, while their youngest daughter and our oldest boy watched Chicken Little on the TV downstairs. My mom called to see how everything went, and my wife went out to the garage to talk to her on the phone. The wife called us out to the garage, and lo and behold we discovered that a possum, roughly the size of a large round of pumpernickel, was sitting on top of a table in the middle of Kelly's cast iron skillet of cornbread, munching away. Kelly, who is from Texas but has family in Arkansas, announced that she was from the South, and proceeded to try to push the critter off the skillet with a paper plate. The possum, apparently in some sort of bacon-chees-cornbread catatonic state, just looked at her. I grabbed a broom and tried smacking the thing on the ass to get it off the table, but, having found the motherload, it wouldn't budge, and Kelly declared there was no need to hurt the rodent, "cause it wasn't hissing or anything." (She also informed us and it that if it was hissing, she would have put it in a pot and made a stew out of it.) So Kelly grabs the handle of the skillet, flips it over, and starts shaking it, all while the possum is hanging on to its precious corn bread for dear life. Finally, it let go and waddled out of the garage--and then most likely passed out in my lawn like grandpa on the couch at Thanksgiving. We wondered if any of the corn bread could be saved, but the hair and possum droppings were too much for even the Southerner, and we had to sacrifice the rest of the pan to the corn bread gods.

After braving the native fauna, and after closing the garage door, we went back to the beer and dominoes. I lost (because my wife cheats), we put the boy down (well after his bedtime), the neighbors headed home (to put down their own delirious child), and the wife and I hit the sack (to settle into our own chili-cornbread comas). A good day.

In the meantime, the people who used to gather at our Chilifests were once again circled around the pit, or rather pits, as in barbeque pits, at the Ohio Smoked Meat Festival and Competition down in Nelsonville, Ohio. Our friend Robert sent a picture, and all looked well.

We should have taken more pictures at the Chilifest, especially of that damn possum, but our digital camera has finally called "uncle." Not that I'm mad at it, it did fine work for nearly seven years. It even had the charming feature of storing the pictures on 3.5 inch disks--useful once, long ago, when USB ports were still a mysterious portal requiring 750 different drivers and an R2 unit to make them work. Now they don't even put 3.5 inch drives on new computers unless by request, and the kids think the disks are some sort of cheap coaster designed to fit in the front pockets of the flannel shirts of 1990s grungeheads. Damn whippersnappers, with their XBox12s and video IPods and automated parallel parking Lexuses. They don't know how tough we had it back in the day.

So sorry, no possum. But the other picture we didn't take was one of everyone together--that fine tradition of gathering friends at an occasion to remember what you did and who was there. Think of all those pictures, from team photos and family gatherings to parties with friends and posing in front of landmarks on vacation. In my work I've noticed how often our troops gather to take photos to commemorate an operation or campaign. I have many such pictures saved in my computer--pictures full of faces with names known only to those who were there. But that's the point: for those who were there to remember the faces and names and all the times they gathered with friends and family, wherever they might be, on good days and bad.

The Chilifest 2006 has no such picture, but we'll find other ways to remember that good day. And we'll look forward, ever forward, to the next one.

Oh yeah, one more thing. He went back one more time to gorge himself on the free meat (and miss the Chilifest), but one of the friends from Ohio is moving out here to Kansas as of, well, later today.

That's right, as part of my evil plan to move everyone I know to Kansas so we can build a Corleone-esque compound from which to rule the state (or at least eat lots of barbeque), our friend Ren is moving to town to work with the team at the Combat Studies Institute. We couldn't be more excited.

And of course I have a better picture of Ren, but zooming in a putting a circle around his face has a "Hitler in Munich"...

...or "John Wilkes Booth at Lincoln's Second Inaugural"...

...kind of feel. Not that Ren is Hitler or Booth.

Or is he? After all, it is my evil plan.

2006-10-16T09:04:00.000-05:00

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a big fan of traditional art. So of course I was drawn to the article in the recent Smithsonian Magazine called "The Painter Who Hated Picasso." I don't know about all that--I like a lot of Picasso--but Sir Alfred Munnings had it more right than wrong when he said:

I find myself a president of a body of men who are what I call shilly-shallying. They feel there is something in this so-called modern art....Well, I myself would rather have—excuse me, my Lord Archbishop—a damned bad failure, a bad, muddy old picture where somebody has tried...to set down what they have seen than all this affected juggling....Not so long ago I spoke in this room to the students, and....I said to those students, 'if you paint a tree, for God's sake try and make it look like a tree, and if you paint a sky, try and make it look like a sky....'

[and]

"What are pictures for?" To fill a man's soul with admiration and sheer joy, not to bewilder and daze him."

Unfortunately, the linked article has no images, so here is the Google Image search for "Alfred Munnings." There is much to enjoy there, but this is pretty representative of his landscape work:

As usual, but by coincidence, James Lileks sums up the issue nicely with his riff on the new Denver Art Museum at the end of this Bleat.

Also from that Smithsonian, a short funny article by an intelligent person dealing with a conspiracy theorist. The conspiracy this time was the classic "Oh, everybody knows the moon landings were faked."

What is interesting, from my perspective, about the author's response is that he comes at it from a scientific perspective. Check out his account of the give and take:

"The pictures are all perfect," he said.

"Because there is no air," I replied. "Which means no dust, so that distant objects on the moon still appear crisp."

"But they're perfectly focused."

"The published ones are perfectly focused, sure. Nobody wants to see the astronaut's thumb."

His eyes narrowed. "The flag is flapping. How is that possible when there's no wind?"

"It's not flapping," I said. "It's unfurling. Well, not unfurling, but that's the point—it was folded during the flight, and it didn't unfold fully even after they hung from the flagpole."

"OK, maybe. But those supposed moon rocks"—he did that annoying curly-finger quote thing—"could have easily been faked in a lab somewhere on earth."

"There's no water in them," I said. "Nor do they have compositions that are commonly found on earth."

"But you could make them," he insisted. "In a lab."

I clenched my teeth. "It would take less research to just go get them from the actual moon!"

His nostrils flared. He was coming in for the kill now. "What about...radiation! People can't go through the Van Halen belts. They’d be fried."

"Van Allen belts."

"Whatever."

"The Apollo traveled through the Van Allen belts in less than an hour. It would take far longer than that for the exposure to affect them."

I launched into a lecture on relative dosage, my area of expertise. But I didn't stop there. In my fury, my three semesters of college physics resurfaced. I shoved the snack plates out of the way and positioned an olive centrally in the cleared space.

"This is earth," I growled. I snatched four cheese puffs, to represent the inner and outer Van Allen radiation belts, then grabbed some Twizzlers and modeled the solar wind and the earth's magnetosphere and the bow shock region.

I started spewing mathematical formulas, not because it was crucial to my argument but to intimidate. "Do you understand?" I finally demanded.

All of the scientific arguments are, or course, correct, but I never would have gone about convincing the conspiracy theorist that way. As a historian, I'm a subject of the humanities, so my thinking on matters such as these leans toward the fallability and inconsistencies of the human condition. Faking the moon landings (and 9/11) would have required a conspiracy so complex, involving so many people operating in absolute secrecy, and run with search perfect competance that it really is beyond the abilities of mankind. Put it this way: faking the moon landings would require more skill than actually landing on the moon.

It seems I'm not alone in thinking this way. Note what finally gives the conspiracy theorist pause in the article:

Finally, my coup de grâce: "The Russians."

He knit his brow.

"They had the first satellite, the first man in space, the first spacewalk," I said. "Then America gets the first man on the moon? That's like getting tripped by the other team's mascot. But have the Russians ever said the moon landing was a hoax?"

From now on I will start with this question. He backed away, admitting that perhaps—just maybe—I had a point.

I must say that it is fascinating that this doubter did not believe the American government and the thousands of Americans who worked on the space program, but the Soviet government, long noted for its honesty, seems to get the benefit of the doubt. But leaving that aside, the point of Russian silence on the issue is a very human one. And course, that point has just been added to any argument I have to make at cocktail parties against faking the moon landings.

Not that I go to any cocktail parties. No time for such trifles in a busy life of seeing to the maintenance and cleanup of two high-speed sustenance conversion devices. Time-consumers of all-time, they are. Especially this last weekend, when the cycle of feed-clean-up, activity-clean-up, expunge-clean-up was punctuated by new teeth/developing cold whining and moaning and not sleeping from both machines.

Note to the uninitiated: you know you're in for a long night when the two-year-old points to his right ear and says "Boo boo."

But what amazes me is what troopers they are--when they want to have fun and play, they don't care how sick they feel, they just go have fun and play. In part it is toughness--on Saturday night, the neighbors' daughter (who is two weeks younger than my 11 month old but has been walking for two months already) decided to try to challenge my younger boy's massive melon with a vicious headbutt. It was classic, he was just sitting there while we were talking about his gigantic gourd, and she walks up, cocks her head back, and headbutts him right on the top of the head. And he just looks up, like hey, what was that? All the adults gasped, which made him get scared, and the girl stumbled over to her mom with a large red mark in the middle of her forehead. And that was it--no crying, no complaining, not a mark on the boy. He's got a head like a coconut and he's extremely tough--which is useful because he has absolutely no self-preservation instinct and tries to hurt himself at every opportunity.

But part of the kids playing while they are sick is that they refuse not to play. They might get tired quicker, but dammit, they are going to play. Mind over matter.

I never missed a football game for a cold, whether it be strep throat, the flu, or a sinus infection. I wanted to play the games that bad. Which is approximately half as much as my kids want to play with toy trucks even when they have ear infections. Amazing little machines, they are. I don't miss the cocktail parties at all.

(Besides, I can save my moon landings argument for late on the weekends, when we drink beers around the fire pit in the backyard.)

2006-10-10T10:34:00.001-05:00

Love it. Like anyone, I hate telemarketers. Actually, I take that back, I hate telemarketing. The telemarketers are poor saps who somehow got into a soul-sucking job. I don't hate them--unless they do not understand what the word "no" means, then they feel the full wrath of me hanging up by pressing the "talk" button on my cordless phone with much vigor. At such times, I pine for the days when we could slam down the receiver on old corded phones, causing the bell inside to issue a long angry solitary peel--the one you imagine the people on the other end can hear (because in the movies that person always jerks his head away, as if someone just set off an air horn in his ear), when the truth is the line just goes dead for them. Yet I'd still rather slam the phone, because no matter how hard I press that button, it still gives me the same old heartless beep when it cuts off the call.

(Note to Battlestar Galactica fans, there's the difference between humans and cylons--a human would know, intuitively, why slamming an old phone is better than hanging up a new cordless.)

Where was I going with all this? Oh yeah, a guy named Tom Mabe has made a little career out of messing with telemarketers. Go to this page and listen to a recent example of how he handled a call he got from a satellite company (which, apropos of nothing, I'm 95% sure is Dish Network [EchoStar], because they are based in the Littleton, Colorado area, right by where I went to high school.) I laughed out loud.

Reading update. Here's the first of a semi-regular feature on something I have read recently.

I am more than halfway through this version of The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle. That means I've read the Adventures and the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, but I have not yet read The Hound of the Baskervilles or the Return of Sherlock Holmes. I'm in an operational pause, and I wish I had The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, but I can say that they are every bit as good as advertised. A very pleasant surprise is that beyond being good stories, the adventures of Holmes often provide little insights into turn of the century Anglo-American society and culture. Two examples stand out in this regard, particularly for their American connections: "The Five Orange Pips," which is a reminder of a time when the Ku Klux Klan had not yet had its second and third incarnations, and was still a mysterious and frightening secret society. And "The Yellow Face," which if I explained why it is interesting, it would give away the story. The links above are to the full stories, so read them at your pleasure.

Sentence I will never write again: Yesterday morning, as I was getting coffee in the downstairs of the office section of Eisenhower Hall, an Armenian army major asked me for a light.

That's what happens when you work where I work.

PAY ATTENTION. What also happens at my work is that we get access to some of the greatest stories you will ever hear. One such story comes from Staff Sergeant David Bellavia, who did some serious fighting in Iraq. His tale is so remarkable that he has now sold his memoir for a tidy sum. Good for him, he has most assuredly earned it. The book should be out sometime next year.

In the meantime, you can get a preview of his experiences from an interview he did with a friend of mine. Here is the abstract to the interview:

The leader of 2nd Squad, 3rd Platoon, Alpha Company, Task Force 2-2 Infantry in Fallujah during Operation Phantom Fury (Al Fajr), Staff Sergeant David Bellavia was recommended for the Medal of Honor, nominated for the Distinguished Service Cross and received the Silver Star for his actions on 10 November 2004 in which he "single handedly saved three squads of his platoon that night, risking his own life by allowing them to break contact and reorganize. He then entered and cleared an insurgent strongpoint, killing four insurgents and mortally wounding another." In this interview, focusing on the entirety of his Phantom Fury experiences and on the intense room-to-room, at times hand-to-hand, combat that characterized that one night in particular, Bellavia offers the ultimate on-the-ground insider's story of this seminal urban operation, which culminated, he said, in Task Force 2-2 combining to put "a lot of pure evil permanently out of business." As perceptive and introspective as it is raw and action-packed, Bellavia's account touches on everything from doctrinal, training and technology recommendations to his warm recollections of his 2-2 comrades: from the battalion commander who, "if you beat in the face with a shovel his expression wouldn't change," and the company commander who was "the most honorable man I have ever met in my life," to the countless soldiers and NCOs who helped make his service "the greatest experience in my life." "War is horrific and ghastly," Bellavia readily admitted. "There are ghoulish images that we all endure and it's impossible to not be changed forever. But only in the midst of the worst mankind can produce can you truly see the beauty of human nature: self sacrifice, true honor, unprecedented loyalty - all the Army values displayed in person. When you have the chance to serve your nation with men and women you trust and love; when leaders two tax brackets above your pay grade carry rifles on the field next to you; and when you see your peers take bullets for you - that environment," he concluded, "would motivate the most ardent anti-victory opponent of this conflict."

Go to the link above, click on "Access this item," read the whole thing, and be thankful that we have people like David Bellavia protecting our country. I know I am.

2006-10-05T09:00:00.000-05:00

Conspiracy theories explained.

Conspiracy theorists allege that the events of 9/11 are not adequately explained by the "official story" fingering Osama bin Laden and his network as the culprits. What really needs explaining, though, is not 9/11, but the existence of such conspiracy theorists themselves, whose by now well-known speculations about what "really happened" that day are - not to put too fine a point on it - so mind-numbingly stupid that it is mystifying how anyone with a functioning cerebrum could take them seriously even for a moment.

Hmmm... I wonder how he really feels. This lead (lede) paragraph comes from Edward Feser, writing at TCS Daily on conspiracy theories.

Be sure to read the whole thing, and follow the links, one of which got me to James Franklin, "The Renaissance Myth"--an interesting look at the Middle Ages and the origins of the Renaissance idea, which he obviously thinks is a myth, at least in its most popular form. In his conclusion, Franklin, an Australian mathematician, wonders why historians have continued to buy into that myth:

No psychological insight is needed to guess Petrarch's motives in pretending that a thousand years of darkness had ended with himself. But there is something of a puzzle as to why later historians continued to accept the exaggerated account the Renaissance gave of itself. A few, especially the Encyclopedists of eighteenth-century France, had ideological motives, since they wanted to condemn the churches of their own time by attributing to them the alleged obscurantism of the Middle Ages. Something similar holds for Michelet's wish to represent the Renaissance world view as a forerunner of the opinions of the liberal political faction to which he adhered. But most historians have not had any particular reason for agreeing with any of this. Speculations on what may have been common to most historians over a period of centuries cannot be certain, but there are a few things it seems fair to assert. The writers who gave us our view of the past, from the authors of massive Histoires de France to the average text book hacks, were basically not interested in the history of ideas. In most cases, their primary concerns were political, military and economic. On opening an average history of the Renaissance, we can expect to find keen debate on whether Lorenzo de Medici's Milanese policy was well advised or not. But we can rely on being assured without argument that his court was brilliant. Courts of successful princes are always brilliant. And brilliant courts are of necessity adorned by great poets and profound philosophers. The training of historians, and their natural bent, fit them to evaluate politics and literature better than science and philosophy. For success in the field of history, and especially popular history, depends more on the humanistic arts of rhetoric and grammar than on scientific and logical skills. Good men, most historians, but innumerate. Since in addition science, mathematics and medieval philosophy are of their nature harder to understand than Renaissance belles lettres and narrative painting, it would be surprising if the tradition of history did not praise the Renaissance.

We, though, are at liberty to be more sceptical.

Gosh. I'd be the last to dispute his claim about historians not being great at science and math. Still, this seems a bit gratuitous. Not to get into a pissing contest here, but I haven't run into too many mathmaticians and scientists with especially strong knowledge or understanding of intellectual development over time, especially as it relates to political culture and philosophy. Franklin might want to dismiss language and arts as "rhetoric and grammar," but that serves only to show the limitations of scientific and logical skills in understanding history. How about a combination? Is that such a strange idea?

Interesting how links are made. The Franklin article above originally appeared in Quadrant Magazine, which was a new title to me. So I looked it up and discovered that it is now a fifty year old Australian journal of literature and ideas. The latest edition has available online an article by Ross Terrill called "Mao's Battle with Freedom." (Terrill is no Mao apologist, but he tries to bring a little balance to the discussion--which I think is a mistake, but read his very good article anyway.)

And that's how I bounce around the internet.

In entertainment news. The Departed, Martin Scorsese's new Boston Irish gang pic (as opposed to his old New York Irish gang pic) is getting great reviews--95% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes. You know what that means? I'm going to think really hard about seeing it in the theaters. I might even look up showtimes and ask my neighbor Jim if he wants to go. Then I'll remember that I have two young kids, Jim will remember that he has an infant daughter, and we'll both have other things going on--usually involving work around the house. I might still go, but the odds are 50-50 at best.

That's alright, I thoroughly enjoy working around the house, and I'm rather fond of the kids, too. But there was a time when I wouldn't miss seeing any reasonably well-reviewed big budget movie in the theater, let alone a show like The Departed. Now I'm happy if I can stay awake past 9:30 to watch a third episode of Battlestar Galactica on DVD.

[ALERT: Cheesiest transition ever.]

Speaking of... season 3 of Battlestar Galactica begins tonight on the SciFi Network. I don't know how to put this gently, so here goes: if you watch television at all, and do not watch this show, you are an idiot. It is the best show on television. It will change your life. It will align the planets and bring peace and prosperity to all humanity, just like Bill and Ted's music.

I understand the hesitation in getting involved in the show. I'm with you. Science fiction has been tarnished by Star Trek and Star Trek fandom. Sci-fi and fantasy fans are ridiculous with their dressing up as characters and laying out diagrams of ships and all that. Galaxy Quest nailed it perfectly, and so did the Entourage episode where the gang goes to Comic-Con and Johnny Drama is a living legend for his role on the fictional Viking Quest. I liked Star Trek, but the campiness of those shows, the original Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, Babylon 5, and almost everything else on this list, make it awfully tough to take science fiction seriously.

But Battlestar Galactica is a serious show that just happens to be set in a science fiction setting. It is much more political, psychological, religious, and philosophical than science fiction-y. There are no transporters or lasers or phasers or proton torpedos. The ship never comes up on a large alien life form, gets threatened, and then comes up with a cool technological solution to get around the alien. In fact, there are no aliens at all on the show.

Here is the basic premise: All humans began on a single planet, but they left that planet and colonized 12 planets (and maybe a thirteenth called Earth, but that is a legend on the show). The humans created robots with artificial intelligence, and the robots rebelled, starting a war. A peace was struck, and the robots disappeared--until the start of the show, when they returned, this time with models that look exactly like humans, and launched a massive nucleur attack on all 12 planets that killed 20 billion people.

Approximately 50,000 humans survived the attack, mostly because they were in ships away from the planet, and they came together in a fleet led by the Battlestar Galactica (which is basically like a giant aircraft carrier and battleship combined). The commander of the Galactica is played by Edward James Olmos. The only political leader of the twelve colonies to survive was the secretary of education, and she became the president. She is played by Mary McDonnell (the white woman from Dances With Wolves). The fleet is running from the robots and looking for a new home, perhaps Earth.

It gets extremely complex from there, but if you haven't watched it you can still catch up. Go to the Battlestar Galactica webpage. The geniuses who produce the show have created a webpage that is a primer for the show, including a 44 minute online episode called "The Story So Far" (which is also on SciFi at 5:00 PM Eastern today).

Truth is, if I had to choose between the new season of Battlestar Galactica and The Departed, it's not even a competition. I'll be at home at 8:00 Central time, glued to the TV. You should be, too.

2006-10-02T08:29:00.000-05:00

Losing it. On the outside of an envelope in the mail today:

It's come to this:
Renew it. Or Lose it.

I don't know about anyone else, but that sounds like a threat to me.

Note to Sports Illustrated marketing and subscription people: if you would like me to continue paying you to mail me your magazine, it really isn't a good idea to use a threat to let me know that my subscription is almost up. I'm not sure what they are teaching in college marketing classes these days, but you seem to be confused: I'm the customer. In this case--and this is very important, so pay attention--I am a current and potential future customer of form of entertainment. Sports Illustrated is not a life necessity. It is not electricity or gas or water for my home.

Therefore, the idea is to entice customers with a good and unique product, offered at a reasonable price, and presented with a customer service that is at the very least unoffensive.

Let's take those one at a time: Sports Illustrated is a competant sports weekly that offers some very good longer pieces on issues and figures from the sports world. But it also includes two columnists in Steve Rushin and Rick Reilly who I cannot stand. Rushin is a hack who substitutes playing with people's names for actually saying anything in his column, and Reilly has become a shrill deliverer of politically charged declarations from on high. I can't flip those two pages in the magazine fast enough. So Sports Illustrated is a solid, sometimes good, but rarely great magazine, that serves the purpose of covering some of the sports news for the week.

But it is certainly not unique. There are plenty of other sports magazines in print, and even more sports news and commentary available online. For local sports news, I spend most of my time reading the Orange and Brown Report, Cleveland.com, and the Akron Beacon Journal Sports page online. For national sports news and commentary--which is always well behind when it comes to the local stuff that I most care about--I read ESPN.com, Fox Sports, and SI.com. For anyone who knows me, it hardly bears repeating that I would rather read Bill Simmons on ESPN.com than any other national columnist. Heck, even the best Sports Illustrated column for my money is only online--Peter King's Monday Morning Quarterback (and even he is starting to bother me with his political asides).

As far as price goes, Sports Illustrated is not particularly expensive, but it's not particularly cheap either. Put it this way: it costs enough that everytime I renew it, I pause to think about it. That pause only got longer this time, when nine words on the front of that envelope were offensive enough to make me question why I would spend my money on a magazine like Sports Illustrated.

At the end of all this, the answer is that I won't anymore. And contrary to the threat on the envelope, I will not have lost a thing. But Sports Illustrated has lost a customer, which is why they exist in the first place. And all they had to do was send me a polite reminder that my subscription runs out in November. Marketing for Dummies.

Then there is Bill Buford writing about the Food Network in the latest New Yorker. I hate the sentence I just wrote; it reeks of pretension. The New Yorker, magazine for the supposed demigods of the coasts and the wannabes from the rest of the country. The New Yorker, magazine of the world's capital, a city that makes up for the almost unbearable crush of people with lots of crime, terrible traffic, high taxes, green space confined to a large park, and surprisingly little history. But at least it's expensive. New York City, home to all the smartest people.

Sour grapes, meet Big Apple. Truth is that you would never see me turning down any offers to write for the New Yorker. But if I were to pen a story, I certainly would take great pains not to sound as obnoxious as Buford. Nary a paragraph goes by that is not sarcastic or dismissive or snobby or condescending or all four. A sampling of one-liners:

I don’t want to sound harsh—this wasn’t the History Channel—but, on the evidence, there was a surprisingly strong affinity between preparing food and talking baby talk.
...

The point is to get very close to what you are filming, so close that you can see an ingredient’s “pores” (“You should believe the dish is in your living room”), which then triggers some kind of Neanderthal reflex.
...

I’d watched him before, during a taping of “Emeril Live,” starring Emeril Lagasse, the portly Portuguese baker from Fall River, Massachusetts, who was probably more naturally an evangelist than a natural chef....
...

“You should talk to Hugh,” Al said, pointing to a burly man with a handheld camera. “Hugh Walsh is the beauty specialist.”

Hugh was filming a carrot.
...
...apart from Emeril Lagasse, the loud, abrasive Everyman (“Hey! Look at me! Christ, if I can do this, you can, too!”), there weren’t many obvious food talents looking for work.
...
Giada De Laurentiis, of “Everyday Italian,” is not a chef, although she has culinary expertise—she was trained at the Cordon Bleu and worked as a private cook for a wealthy Los Angeles family. She is also the granddaughter of a famous filmmaker, grew up in Beverly Hills, and is lithe and young and pretty, a prettiness that no Food Network executive is going to allow her to hide behind an apron.
...
What quality does Ray have that, say, one of the Molotovs doesn’t? It is probably more apparent in the early broadcasts. A series on perfect burgers filmed during Ray’s first year (the Food Network has done two hundred and fourteen shows on how to make a hamburger) includes a characteristic menu: a “no-muss-and-no-fuss” salad, like coleslaw (Ray has thirteen slaw recipes), followed by some meat dish—during my extended viewing, these tended to include bacon and blue cheese (Ray has eighteen blue-cheese recipes, among them a blue-cheese spaghetti, with a sauce, probably unique in the history of pasta, made from bacon fat, butter, olive oil, chicken stock, and cream swirled together, smothered with blue cheese, and then sprinkled with bacon bits: an intensely flavored creation, even if a little alarming to look at—a viscous dull yellow). On this occasion, many of the ingredients, typically, had been prepared at the supermarket and included sealed bags of pre-sliced cabbage, to facilitate getting everything done before the thirty-minute deadline. The coleslaw would be dressed with soy sauce (“It’s kinda like balsamic vinegar is to red-wine vinegar—it’s a little bit thicker”), but not before Ray had turned on a burner to heat an oven-top grill: this was for her “awesome” turkey patties (“Yummy!”). Heating the oven-top grill beforehand was a tip. So, too, was the use of a garbage bowl—kept on the counter to save trips to the trash—for vegetable trimmings. In fact, the garbage-bowl tip was offered three times. In between, you heard about Ray’s mom (“She watches news a lot—maybe too much”) and her baby brother, who had just turned twenty-seven (“which is just not possible”). There was also her dog, her dad, a theory about cabbage and cancer, some giggles—an effortless patter that, for all its lack of weight, was not without a goofy charm.

I suppose there is some humor in taking gratuitous shots at television chefs and the people who film them, but the humor is pretty limited, especially if you don't include them in the joke. Does Buford honestly think that Rachel Ray and Emeril Lagasse don't know how silly some of this stuff is? Better yet, why didn't he ask them?

Even more important, what was the point of this snotty article? The incoherent conclusion offers few clues on the matter:

Ours is a different audience from the one that watched Julia Child. In 1962, “microwave oven” and “fast food” hadn’t entered the national lexicon. And restaurants were more expensive. Tim Zagat, the publisher of Zagat Guides, points out that for more than two decades the cost of going to restaurants or getting takeout has risen less than the annual rate of inflation—that it’s much less expensive today than at any other moment in our history to pay other people to prepare our dinner. Never in our history as a species have we been so ignorant about our food. And it is revealing about our culture that, in the face of such widespread ignorance about a human being’s most essential function—the ability to feed itself—there is now a network broadcasting into ninety million American homes, entertaining people with shows about making coleslaw.

Get it? It's cheaper to go out to eat, which means humans (presumably humans on the Upper West Side) are ignorant about food. I'm not saying that humans aren't partially ignorant about our food, at least as it relates to the actual farming of crops or the raising of livestock, but Buford provides zero evidence to that effect. Indeed, and maybe I need to overcome a reading disorder here, the evidence he presents actually makes the opposite case. Food Network, which seems to be about food, is broadcast into ninety million homes.

Maybe he thinks these sentences suffice: "I couldn’t recall very many potatoes with dirt on them, or beets with ragged greens, or carrots with soil in their creases, or pieces of meat remotely reminiscent of the animals they were butchered from—hardly anything, it seemed, from the planet Earth. There were hamburgers and bacon, but scarcely any other red animal tissue except skirt steak, probably, it occurs to me now, because of its two unique qualities: its texture and its name."

Oh, Food Network is not about real food, because they prepped the products before cooking them (the comment about red meat is just stupid--go to Food Network's webpage and do a recipe search for "steak" and see what happens). In the Buford home we eat real food. None of those fake namby-pamby cleaned potatoes, leafless vegetables, or branchless fruits. Everyone knows you're not eatin' if you're not eatin' the soil. That's where the real nutrients are. Next thing you know those ninnies at the Food Network will be serving chicken without feathers and beef without the hide.

At the end of his seventy-two hour Food Network-watching marathon--which, by the way, makes absolutely no sense--Buford comes to exactly the wrong conclusion. Food Network and its audience are the people who, on average, know the most about food and eat the best in America. The average income of Food Network viewers is a pretty robust $75,000 a year. My understanding--and if the New Yorker wants to pay me a dollar or two a word for an article, I will look it up--is that the average income for people and families that frequently get their meals at fast food restaurants is significantly lower than $75,000 a year, which goes a long way toward explaining why our poor are so fat. Even the fattest recipes on Food Network, like Rachel Ray's cheesy pasta, are more healthy than (and just as affordable as) the crud served at McDonald's or Burger King. Sounds to me like there is absolutely nothing wrong with Food Network, except that not enough people watch it.

The funny thing about all this is that I rarely watch Food Network. I get my recipes from elsewhere. But, memo to Bill Buford, I would never conflate a pseudo-farmer populist virtue with that choice. Egads, the New Yorker can be obnoxious.

2006-09-29T09:23:00.000-05:00

Still no photo essay. But it's coming, I promise. There are too many good stories from this summer--I have to get them down (for posterity!) before they get lost among the random bits of flotsam and jetsam floating around in my dome.

Watched Domino the other night. I'm still twitching. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new archetype of the commercial as movie, with the flashing images and dramatic volume swings. Wait, "swings" is the wrong word. Swinging denotes a graceful path from one extreme to another. There are many words that can be uttered about Domino, but graceful certainly isn't one of them. Dramatic volume jumps: quiet, LOUD, quiet, LOUD, quiet, LOUD. LOUD. LOUD. LOUD.

I'm pretty sure it was about a pretty girl who became a bounty hunter. And I'm relatively certain that we got to see Keira Knightley topless, but it might have been a car accident caused by a goat in a blender that dropped out of a 747 flying six inches off the ground. One or the other.

Oh, how far Tony Scott has come since the days of Maverick and Goose, Cole Trickle and Robert Duvall, Denzel and Gene. We saw it coming. How could you miss it (unless you didn't see it, and most of you didn't), watching the promisingly frenetic Man on Fire? In Man on Fire Scott's new dementia worked, or at least it worked as much as the plot would let it. The girl should have stayed dead--it was a much better movie when the man was actually figuratively on fire.

But with Domino it looks like the dementia is just Tony's way of standing out next to big brother Ridley, he who has made many good and some very good (and one very great) films. Tony struggles by comparison, but then he toils under a Colosseum-sized shadow.

Get it? Colosseum-sized? Like the Colosseum in Rome? Where Gladiators played? You can't get that kind of wit just anywhere, people. And it's free! Now check this segue:

Speaking of disappointing Scott brothers movies. We, by which I mean my family, have Kingdom of Heaven saved on our DVR, where it's been hiding for months now.

I was thinking about the plans for the weekend. The wife and I can't do much because our children ruin everything. (I think it's best for kids to grow up in an environment of seething bitterness born of resentment for what could have been if they hadn't been born.) Unless we go through the whole rigmarole of a babysitter, the movie theater is out, late dinners do not work, and we can't even think of going to evening events like comedy shows or theater. Even with babysitters we can't go tie one on like the old days. Stupid kids, ruining all those hangovers with their unbearable cuteness, undying love, and boundless joy.

It used to be that renting a movie was a nice substitute for a night on the town. You could pop some popcorn, get some candy, and snuggle up on the couch to watch a movie. You could pretend it was an event. Then came DVRs and Netflix. Now we get movies all the time, watch them any evening we please, pause them and pick them up later. It's not an event anymore. Stupid modern conveniences making our lives so convenient.

By the way, I know Kingdom of Heaven is disappointing because I saw it in the theater with my friend Robert--actually, it was at the Athena in uptown Athens, Ohio. We went to the eternal Tony's afterwards to drink beer.

Side note. This may be the first time in my life that I actually remember where and with whom I saw a movie. I have a serious mental block in this matter: on several occasions in high school I remember telling my friend Chad about some movie I had just seen, only to have Chad remind me that he drove me to the theater and sat next to me in the movie I was describing. However, I could guess that we went to Bowles Crossing to see said movie, because that was probably our favorite theater in those days.

Which reminds me of the time that I went to a movie with my friends Ryan and Brandon at Bowles Crossing--no idea of the movie--the summer before our senior year. It just so happened that the guy who was the quarterback of our biggest rivals in football (Douglas County High School, the Purple Pansies) was at the theater that night. After the movie, Ryan goes to the bathroom, and who is in the can but this quarterback (who also played linebacker, lest you get the wrong image). Ryan steps up to the only open urinal, which happens to be next to the guy, whose name was Reed something or other. So they are there handling their business, and all of a sudden Reed leans forward, and with the arm nearest Ryan, kind of punches the wall with the side of his fist, leaves his fist and forearm against the wall, and flexes his biceps. Ryan was laughing so hard when he came out of the bathroom that I thought we were going to have to call an ambulance. Classic.

(We beat Douglas County that year to get a share of the conference championship and make a trip to the state playoffs. We stopped them on a two-point conversion that would have tied the game with time running out. Two of the other teams in our conference were at the game and cheering us on. Our crowd came out of the stands and rushed the field. Top ten moment in my life.)

Side note to the side note. My friend Chad had this amazing habit of taking jobs--waiter at a restaurant, cook at a fast food joint, stocker at a grocery store, etc.--and being the best employee the place had ever had. For about six months. I'm not kidding, he was awesome--he would show up early, leave late, work like a dog until his bosses were trying to make him into an assistant manager. Then he would drop off. He'd start calling in sick or, better yet, he would claim his fresh new set grandparents were dying one by one so he could miss work. Oftentimes, he would give massive amounts of freebies to his friends--not me, never me, I'd never accept something like that, never--and start borrowing things himself. By about six months, he get fired, usually with some threat about never returning or the police would be involved.

Last summer I heard that Chad had come out of the closet. My friends and me were thinking about sending a warning out to the gay community, letting them know that that for about six months Chad was going to be the greatest gay man ever. After that, he would stop showing up, start stealing things, and have to be fired. Which is pretty funny, if you think about it.

Second side note to the side note. I dated a girl in high school who had gone to Platte Canyon. The last time I went to Colorado, I had breakfast with my Dad at a restaurant in Bailey, which is on the way to my parents' house.

What made me think of that right now is that you can just about throw a rock from Bowles Crossing and hit Columbine High School. We played Columbine in football my senior year (we lost). I played with guys from Columbine in college. April 20, 1999 was my soon-to-be wife's twenty-first birthday. Not a good day in Colorado to have a 21st birthday, but we went ahead with the festivities. Around midnight, my friend Ryan (same one from high school), my soon-to-be wife, and me were at the Purple Pig, having a few cocktails. The phone rang at the bar. We were friends with the bar's owners, and they gave the phone to Ryan. His soon-to-be step sister never came out of the high school.

Her name was Rachel Scott. Look her up. A terrible loss, but there's some hope there, and hopefully there will be some hope to come out of Platte Canyon, too.

Have a nice weekend. As for me, since watching a movie is out, I guess we'll grab some neighbors and play Mexican train. Anyone know what kind of game that is? You betcha.

(See how it all ties together?)

Later.

2006-09-26T08:53:00.000-05:00

Apologies. A spike in the workload will keep me from offering any large updates this week, and keep me from explaining the mysterious post from the end of last week. No more secrets, fair readers, in the next week or so I will be writing a long photo essay describing what can only be called "The Summer of Love." We went to forty-seven weddings, bachelor parties, and cancelled reunions this summer, and engaged in all sorts of crazy hijinks.

The result of all that will be a series of posts here at tombruscino that will no doubt become an interminable slideshow for people who love to be bored. So hold onto your seats. It's coming.

In the meantime. I have the distinct pleasure of sharing a few links, and one, especially, gives me much joy. Here they are:

Someone talking about Clausewitz and the war and his usefulness to the war, again. Long, boring, but I guess I'm obligated to point it out anyway.

Victor Davis Hanson saying "fascist" is a perfect way to describe our Islamist enemies. I don't know that I agree, but at least he makes an argument with evidence.

You ever skim through an article and pick up a wayward phrase that catches your attention? Check out this one: "As further evidence of my fecal ice-cream thesis..." For some reason I felt compelled to read that Mark Steyn column a little closer.

A reminder to read the Bleat every day, but especially this one, if you are interested in seeing the entrails of the evicerated Keith Olberman spread around like so much raw umber in a Jackson Pollack studio.

In the 'I might have mentioned this once or twice or three times (thrice!) category', John Miller has an excellent article on the decline of military history in the academy.

Finally, my source of joy: Larry Miller wrote another column for the Weekly Standard's Daily Standard, which is nice enough news, but the links at the bottom of the article reveal that dear Mr. Miller is now keeping his own webpage, complete with his very own blog. Grand. Just grand.

Alright, to work. I have to write a 20-30 page article by the end of the week. It's called "Clearing the Jihad Superbowl."

And now you have seen all I have written so far.

I gotta go.

If I don't check in, or even if I do, have a nice week.

2006-09-21T07:43:00.000-05:00

Be back next week to explain.

(The first three entries to this diary blog can be found in the September archive on the right side of the page.)

2006-09-18T10:34:00.000-05:00

The power of photographs. Look at this:

It is one of fifteen photos from the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection at the Brown University library. The portrait above is of one Monsieur Loria of the 24th Mounted Chasseur Regiment and a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. Monsieur Loria and all of the other individuals on the Brown page were veterans of Napoleon's armies. The pictures were taken sometime in the 1850s. Take a look, but try not to get lost imagining what those old soldiers had seen.

I'm obviously not breaking new ground here, but I am consistently surprised at the power of photographs, especially portraits, to bring to life figures of the past. It is such a pleasant surprise to find pictures like these--connections to the time just before photography became a reality; but also tantalizing reminders that if Napoleon or George Washington had lived just a bit longer, we might be able to see them a bit clearer.

Sometimes we are lucky. In his third person autobiography, Henry Adams tells a wonderful story about an incident involving his grandfather John Quincy Adams:

All the more singular it seemed afterwards to him that his first serious contact with the President should have been a struggle of will, in which the old man almost necessarily defeated the boy, but instead of leaving, as usual in such defeats, a lifelong sting, left rather an impression of as fair treatment as could be expected from a natural enemy. The boy met seldom with such restraint. He could not have been much more than six years old at the time,—seven at the utmost—and his mother had taken him to Quincy for a long stay with the President during the summer. What became of the rest of the family he quite forgot; but he distinctly remembered standing at the house door one summer-morning in a passionate outburst of rebellion against going to school. Naturally his mother was the immediate victim of his rage; that is what mothers are for, and boys also; but in this case the boy had his mother at unfair disadvantage, for she was a guest, and had no means of enforcing obedience. Henry showed a certain tactical ability by refusing to start, and he met all efforts at compulsion by successful, though too vehement protest. He was in fair way to win, and was holding his own, with sufficient energy, at the bottom of the long staircase which led up to the door of the President’s library, when the door opened, and the old man slowly came down. Putting on his hat, he took the boy’s hand without a word, and walked with him, paralysed by awe, up the road to the town. After the first moments of consternation at this interference in a domestic dispute, the boy reflected that an old gentleman close on eighty would never trouble himself to walk near a mile on a hot summer morning over a shadeless road to take a boy to school, and that it would be strange if a lad imbued with the passion of freedom could not find a corner to dodge around, somewhere before reaching the school-door. Then and always, the boy insisted that this reasoning justified his apparent submission; but the old man did not stop, and the boy saw all his strategical points turned, one after another, until he found himself seated inside the school, and obviously the centre of curious if not malevolent criticism. Not till then did the President release his hand and depart.

The point was that this act, contrary to the inalienable rights of boys, and nullifying the social compact, ought to have made him dislike his grandfather for life. He could not recall that it had this effect even for a moment. With a certain maturity of mind, the child must have recognised that the President, though a tool of tyranny, had done his disreputable work with a certain intelligence. He had shown no temper, no irritation, no personal feeling, and had made no display of force. Above all, he had held his tongue. During their long walk he had said nothing; he had uttered no syllable of revolting cant about the duty of obedience and the wickedness of resistance to law; he had shown no concern in the matter; hardly even a consciousness of the boy’s existence. Probably his mind at that moment was actually troubling itself little about his grandson’s iniquities, and much about the iniquities of President Polk, but the boy could scarcely at that age feel the whole satisfaction of thinking that President Polk was to be the vicarious victim of his own sins, and he gave his grandfather credit for intelligent silence. For this forbearance he felt instinctive respect. He admitted force as a form of right; he admitted even temper, under protest; but the seeds of a moral education would at that moment have fallen on the stoniest soil in Quincy, which is, as every one knows, the stoniest glacial and tidal drift known in any Puritan land.

Now take the time to look at this daguerreotype* of the aged John Quincy Adams (click on the picture for a closer view):

Look closely. Look at his eyes. That daguerreotype shows something that cannot be found on the written page alone. There, in the picture, is the John Quincy Adams who took his stubborn grandson by the hand and led him to school in silence. There, for all of his writing and all of his great works, is the son, the brother, the husband, the father, the grandfather. There is the man, not lost to history, but there for all to see.

...

Maybe we don't want to lost to history ourselves, even if that means within our own family history. And so in this digital age we take photographs by the thousands. We still sit for portraits to preserve something of ourselves. We take our children, always the children, to studios to capture who they were before they become who they will be.

My sons.

I look at these photos and wonder if someday, someone will gaze into them, looking for insight into the men they became. Do the eyes in these pictures reveal something I should know? Something about who they are?

I don't know, but I look forward to finding out. And I'll take plenty of pictures, too.

_______

* This daguerreotype comes from the frontispiece of Paul C. Nagel, John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, A Private Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998). This is the first time it has appeared online, to my knowledge.

Nagel writes of the picture: "This profile of John Quincy Adams, age 75, was made on March 8, 1843, in a Washington daguerreotype studio. Much intrigued by the new technique, he sat for three exposures (of which only this one is known to survive), and found it "incomprehensible" that each required only thirty seconds. Lost until recently, the daguerreotype appears here by courtesy of Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, to which it was given by William Macbeth Gallery in New York City."

On March 8, 1843, Henry Adams had just turned five years old.

2006-09-15T11:09:00.000-05:00

It's official, he's overrated. I watched Rashomon the other night. About a month ago I saw Kagemusha. Sometime in the last two years, my friend Robert and me watched Ran. Sometime before that, I got around to seeing Seven Samurai. I liked Seven Samurai.

By no means does this viewing extravaganza make me an expert on Kurosawa--he's still got another fifty movies out there I haven't seen. But I don't think I'm going to bother. Sure, it's neat to see where George Lucas got the inspiration for C-3PO and R2-D2 and the idea to do diagonal wipes between scenes, but is that really a reason to watch a the full film library of a guy who is batting, by my estimation, .250? Nah. I'm done.

I know my general dislike for Kurosawa movies is because I'm an uninitiated barbarian westerner. At least that's Robert Altman's theory, who announced in one of the DVD extras that American audiences probably wouldn't understand Kurosawa's work. Guilty as charged. I don't understand the nuances of Japanese culture, especially if they include being bored to tears while it's raining on screen, or while a guy wanders through the woods, or while a woman with bizarre eyebrows wails uncontrollably.

Honestly, I don't get some of the cultural messages in the recent spate of popular Chinese movies (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Hero; House of Flying Daggers; Kung Fu Hustle). Maybe I was missing something, but I was scared as hell that the Chinese might really buy into the horrifying message in Hero that thousands must die to create a greater China. But I still enjoy the movies. They are still beautiful and exciting and interesting and moving and funny. I'm looking forward to Curse of the Golden Flower and Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles. I just don't have much use for Kurosawa. Sorry.

Soldiers and school update. My friend Rob, known also as Marine II, noticed an article in VFW magazine about veterans going to college. Read the whole article, but the Veterans Administration claims that "some 328,578 students on the nation's campuses received GI Bill benefits as of June 2006." Looks like those disadvantaged aren't staying disadvantaged, if you think going to college is necessarily an advantage, which I don't necessarily think, necessarily. But you get the point.

Speaking of Soldiers. Add this to the "I have the coolest job in the world" category. We are working on case studies of actions and operations from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They should be published in an anthology and be available online later this fall. We should all hope so, because there are so many great and important stories from this war that have been misreported, gone unreported, or gone underreported. I've written one already, and if my meager retelling gets by the bosses, it's a humdinger. Trust me, it's a great story.

I'm doing the research for my second article, and while it's not as focused and intense as the first one (sorry about being so vague, I don't want to ruin the effect if and when these come out), it is much broader in scope and involved many more participants. It is a complex series of operations with lots of moving parts.

Those moving parts are people--soldiers in the United States Army who have been on the front lines of the war in Iraq. In the course of writing both of these case studies, I have had the honor and pleasure to email, talk to, and interview dozens of American soldiers, male and female, from Specialist to Colonel, and it has been a remarkable and enlightening experience. These folks are every bit as intelligent, thoughtful, conscientious, and American as you could ever hope.

For example, last night I interviewed Master Sergeant Daniel Hendrex. MSG Hendrex is a bit of a celebrity because he was the First Sergeant of a tank company that had a 12 year old Iraqi boy wander into their post and become a key informant. The boy, whom they nicknamed Steve-o, pointed out a number of important weapons caches and insurgent cells. He also gave up one of the main insurgent leaders in the local city, a man who happened to be his father. You can read all about Hendrex and Steve-o in Hendrex's book, A Soldier's Promise, and I highly recommend that you do just that.

Hendrex told me that going into combat is the hardest thing he's ever had to do, but that writing the book was only a couple of notches lower. Believe me, I wish that writing a book was in any way equivalent to laying your life on the line for your country and comrades, because it would sure make me feel better about my contribution to this world. But I don't think so.

I'm an okay American, but everyday I get to talk to great Americans. And that's a huge part of why I have the coolest job in the world.

2006-09-13T09:30:00.000-05:00

Religion and the West. I've mentioned before that I am a fan in general of Rodney Stark's book, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. Now it looks like Robert Royal has a similar work out called The God That Did Not Fail: How Religion Built and Sustains the West At First Things, Richard John Neuhaus writes about Royal:

I am struck by a review of the book in the New York Sun by Brooke Allen.

She writes: "Mr. Royal's belief that religion has acted as a restraint on human cruelty rather than an instigation to it addresses a question that probably will never be settled satisfactorily. He points out, as others have, that anti-religious regimes like Mao's and Stalin's murdered many more people than religious persecutions ever did. While this is certainly true, Mr. Royal does not take into account the fact that ideology functions as a sort of religion in its own right, offerings its acolytes the feeling of transcendence normally associated with faith, and the sublimation of the ego in a larger cause."

This is part of a very old word game. If you say anti-religious ideologies are more destructive than religion, it is only because anti-religious ideologies are, in fact, religion in another guise.

Neuhaus points out that it is also a silly word game. Send the memo to Bill Maher, who insists on repeating the nonsense that 'more people have been killed in the name of religion then any other cause' to yet another round of adoring applause from a crowd that would applaud their arms off before they could clap one time for every person who was slaughtered in the name of anti-religious causes in the 20th century alone.

Add to the meaningless statistic category. The latest Atlantic Monthly has Stanford historian David Kennedy musing on the threat of our militaristic society. His main concern, it seems, is that we can go to war too easily in part because we can field a lethal military without straining our economy hardly at all. True enough. But then he adds this bizarre point: "In the general population in the eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old cohort, nearly 50 percent of people ... have had some exposure to college education. In that same cohort in the U.S. military today ... the percentage of people who've had some kind [of] exposure to college education is 6.5 percent." Well, yeah, no kidding. People who join the military out of high school do not go to college (until, in many cases, after they get out of the military). Thanks for the update.

On the other hand, what do you suppose the statistic is for military officers' exposure to college? Oh yeah, 100%. And that's not just exposure, mind you, that is 100% college graduates.

What's even more interesting, to me anyway, is that it is possible that none of this matters as much as Kennedy seems to let on. Indeed, this Atlantic seems to have elite = college education on the brain. Witness Richard Florida's article on the concentration of college graduates in a few specific cities and regions. Florida explains this concentration: "Some of the reasons for it are essentially aesthetic--many of the means metros are beautiful, energizing, and fun to live in. But there is another reason, rooted in economics: increasingly, the most talented and ambitious people need to live in a means metro in order to realize their full economic value."

What does that mean? To me it reinforces what Matthew Crawford talks about in his article on shop class and manual labor. Office jobs, the types of jobs that college graduates do, are becoming more and more like factory work. Those jobs, with their TPS reports and PC Load Letter, are not as intellectually stimulating as advertised, but they pay reasonably well. Besides, those jobs are really all that people with the generic, useless, and ubiquitous business degree can do. So, like Florida pointed out, these elite college graduates flock to the business factory towns and work in cubicles at places like the Denver Tech Center along the always happily congested I-25.

If only our soldiers had more exposure to colleges that boost enrollment and increase revenue by offering mindless degrees to pump out white collar workers, then our military would no longer be exploiting the most disadvantaged in the country.

Look, if I learned anything from my ten years of college, it's that contrary to the airy expectations of high-minded educators, the overwhelming majority of students see higher education as, oh, let's call it "social training." They see their degree as a box to check on a job application. This is the dark side of American pragmatism--learning for the sake of learning, intellectually challenging yourself, learning to better oneself does not offer a readily apparent pecuniary benefit, so we don't do it.

A college degree used to mean something. It used to be an indication of some sort of intellectual elite status. Then it became just a key to better jobs. Now that might not even be the case. Being able to afford a college education probably indicates to one degree or another having somewhat more money to begin with, which is an advantage. But the college education itself is becoming less of an advantage with every passing year, and that's something none of these statistics are taking into account.

Note on the end of summer. The family went for a long walk on Monday night (Sept 11--I don't want to talk about that), and the fall chill has most assuredly arrived. The streetlights were on by the time we got home, another reminder that the days are getting shorter. I dread the switch to standard time, with it's evil premature sunsets forcing us to spend the better part of our evenings under artificial lights. The dimming daylight the other night was a sad reminder of the excitement of the spring, when the days get longer and you can stay outside and not even realize how late it's gotten.

But for all that, the cool weather, overcast skies, and approaching darkness felt right on Monday night. Long, hot days are great for working outside and having barbeques and washing cars and drinking beer on the porch into the wee hours, but by the end of the summer I always feel a little too stretched out. Summer provides opportunity, becomes busy, and ends up frantic. I need the weather to remind me to go inside and pick up a book.

Long way of saying thank goodness for the seasons.

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And that's the sort of blogging that you'll probably see from me for the next little while. Hope you like it.