Where Do We Go From Here?

Where do we stand? It’s the last day of Trinity (the Christian season that begins in June with Pentecost Sunday, celebrating specifically the coming of the Holy Spirit); tomorrow begins the season of Advent—looking forward to Christmas. Macys feels that the Christmas shopping season has begun well; “Black Friday” will last two days this season.
Do your patriotic duty—spend! (Didn’t George W. Bush say that?) England has begun a Parliamentary inquiry into how British troops somehow wound up in Iraq back in 2003. Tony Blair, who got England there, is not likely ever going to be head of the European Union.
House foreclosures are expected to rise well into next year—but prices are stabilizing and some newly built homes are beginning to sell. Warren Buffet thinks Ben Bernanke at the Fed deserves an “A”, but Congress is mumbling about clipping the agency’s wings.
The agency has been independent of both Congress and the President since its founding in 1913, but Congress feels it is at least a bit at fault for last year’s financial debacle and wants to be able to stick its own thumb in the pie. Bernanke says, “Please, no”.
Next Tuesday, the first of December, Obama promises to give us some firm numbers about how many more troops he will airlift into landlocked Afghanistan. It costs a million dollars to keep one man there for one year. Everything, from his toilet paper to his bullets and fuel, has to come in by air transport. That’s expensive.
Every time a look at a map of Afghanistan, I still get a nervous feeling. I look at maps ever since I wrote a high school impassioned letter to the five star diplomat who was pretty much in charge during the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Why, I demanded to know, had we done nothing to help the Hungarians against the Soviets?!?
He wrote a nice letter back. It boiled down to, “Look at a map”. I got one out. There was absolutely no feasible way we could have assisted them without walking over somebody else’s property—and probably starting World War III right there.
That’s why we didn’t help. We couldn’t. Now look at Afghanistan. The long western border is with Iran. Not likely any American supplies are going through there. The eastern border is with Pakistan. Are you willing to guarantee me there will still be a remotely friendly Pakistani government in power a year or two or three from now? That would cut off that route.
To the north lie two former Soviet republics, now nominally independent. We fly much of our stuff through there. What if the political winds shift there—perhaps a little Russian pressure or, since they are Muslim states, some radical pressure.
It isn’t fantasy to think these reverses could occur. In that part of the globe we are pretty much at the farthest reach of our influence. If our avenues got shut down, the boys in Afghanistan would face a similar situation to that of the boys on Bataan in 1942.
They could surrender or we could send a few hundred thousand more troops and try to blast our way through nuclear armed Pakistan. We’d have to draft and train them first.
Health Care Reform looks like it’s about shut down for this calendar year. I just don’t see them reconciling the two bills between now and Christmas Vacation. Next year is an election year, and that brings a whole new set of political calculations. Then, the year after, comes a whole new Congress with possibly different priorities. Ah well … .
Promises, promises, promises—all through the election season. Then comes reality. I don’t really know where we can or will go from here, but I can tell you where we are right now—smack dab in the middle of the world as it really is.
Machiavelli wrote: There are two ways to deal with the world—as though it were as it ought to be or as though it were as it really is. Those who choose to deal with the world as though it were as it ought to be do so to their own destruction.
Christ would not have argued with that.

Thanksgiving Retrospective

Thanksgiving (A.K.A. Turkey Day) has come and is fast slipping away. A thirty mile trip to an in-law’s home, surrounded by half-remembered (“Whose kid is that?” “Did she used to have red hair?” Is that the one who moved to Denver?”) In-laws, relatives and acquaintances.
Dry turkey breast (what else can it be when it was force-fed to the point where it could not take a step?), two kinds of stuffing, three kinds of potatoes, corn, cranberry sauce and a more than decent pumpkin pie baked by a niece. Then on to football.
WHY do they allow the Lions to dominate the fourth Thursday in November? They set an NFL record last year by winning NO games at all. This year they’ve actually won two—the last by a single point. But today was not one of their better performances. Sheer on field ineptitude led to the usual spate of comparisons between how the Lions are managed and how Ford Motor Company is run— the same people own both. Someone remembered that the Lions had actually won championships before the Ford people bought them.
Which led, of course, to general commentary on the condition of the auto industry and the State of Michigan. A Republican expressed pity for Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm who walked into the state house just when the roof fell in.
Our host pointed out that even though he was receiving neither a free turkey nor a bonus this year (from an auto parts manufacturer), the pay cuts seemed to have stopped and it looked like the company was stabilizing. “A lot of that,” he suggested, “was due to the ‘Cash for clunkers’ program’”. He admitted to trepidation as to how long this uptick might last.
He was, he told us, doing twice the work now for less money—replacing a lot of other engineers who were no longer among the employed. His sister who works in the medical field said the same was true for her—both were thankful just to have a steady paycheck.
Home again to a television that was streaming every James Bond and Godfather flick ever made. So the boys turned to “Myth Busters” whose mission this evening seemed to be to prove that we really did land on the moon forty years ago. (The myth being that all the landings were actually filmed in a terrestrial studio—20% of Americans supposedly believe this.)
We did catch a few moments of the Macy’s Parade before we left this morning. It’s nice to be reassured that Herald Square is still there, that there still is a Santa Claus on 34th Street. Hannah Montana had the wit to stay home; she sent her co-star who warbled manfully.
At some point this past afternoon I related the experience my wife had when she went to Sam’s Club to buy a turkey of our own. She went on Monday before the holiday. Sam’s was out. Not a bird in the store. She asked a clerk what had happened.
“We were out by Saturday,” he told her. “All kinds of business ordered turkeys for their employees. Some orders were so large we had to special order turkeys from the warehouse. By Saturday there simply weren’t any more to sell.”
My host and I agreed that this meant there were a whole lot of West Michigan employees who were getting a turkey this year in lieu of a raise or a bonus. Consolation prize? Or a subtle hint that they should be happy to still be working?
Christian writ commands followers of Christ to be “thankful in all things”. Sometimes it is difficult to keep a touch of the sardonic out of one’s voice when being so. We’ve been spoiled in this state (it was so rich it don’t bother to tax most pensions, for instance). Now the party seems to be breaking up—if it isn’t completely over yet.
The words of an ancient prayer come to mind, “Give us this day our daily bread”. In other words all we can reasonably ask for is today’s food. Not tomorrow’s or next month’s. Just today’s. And we should be thankful to have it.

Thanksgiving

Tomorrow—Thanksgiving. To whom? Ah, now there’s a politically incorrect question. Anyway it’s the day that supposedly dates all the way back to the Pilgrims. Two hundred and forty years later Lincoln called for a national day of Thanksgiving (he had no doubt as to whom).
During the Depression, FDR moved the day backward to the fourth Thursday in November to give retailers more time to sell their wares. But his pronouncements, both here and during the war, left one in no doubt as to whom he was thanking.
Virginia may well have held a “thanksgiving” a year or so before, but the one at Plymouth Colony gets the credit for being the remembered one.
An interesting colony, Plymouth, and an interesting sequence of events that kept it alive to celebrate.
First of all, Pilgrims are not Puritans. Puritans—who arrived in Boston ten years after the Pilgrims—believed the Church of England could be purified. They came to America with the idea of practicing up and returning to England to purify the Anglican Church.
Pilgrims felt it was too far gone to be purified, and the only thing to do was go far away—thus the name “pilgrim”. They first went to Holland—but when Holland threatened to end their twenty year truce with Spain and go back to war—the Pilgrims got out of Holland. They were looking for a place to stay.
They planned to join the new colony in Virginia, founded thirteen years before. They were blown off course and wound up at Cape Cod. It was a hellish first winter. Half of them died. The only reason any survived was that the captain of the Mayflower stayed with them until spring, supplying them with what food he could. That couldn't last.
In spring, he had to sail back to England—leaving behind a sickly little band of city folk with no idea how to make food or what there was in this weird new world fit to eat. At that point a Wampanoag Indian walked into their camp.
To their astonishment he spoke perfect English. Not only that but he had grown up on the site they now occupied. He could tell them when the fish would run in the spring—and how to catch them. He showed them what to hunt and how. He taught them how to plant corn. In short, he kept them alive—along with any hope for future New England colonial development.
He also explained that the tribe he came from had been wiped out by a plague (probably small pox) a few years earlier. By dumb luck—providence if you will—the Pilgrims had landed on the one piece of real estate for a thousand miles in either direction that no one else claimed. No enemy would try to wrest it from them.
And just how had that Indian—Squanto we call him—come to rescue them? Years before he had been kidnapped by an English sea captain and shipped to Europe to be sold as a slave. Some monks had rescued him and helped him get to England. But he missed the plague.
He had worked there for years, mastering the language and customs. Finally he had made passage back to his home world—only to find everyone dead of the pox. He had a complete nervous breakdown, and a neighboring tribe took pity on him and cared for him.
As he recovered, the Pilgrims arrived. Scouts reported they were starving and dying like flies. The chief who had pitied him suggested Squanto return to his old home, now Plymouth, and help out these poor helpless newcomers. So he did.
So the Pilgrims weren’t just being thankful for a decent harvest. They were out of Holland; they had survived a starving winter; they were on free and clear land; they had been taught how to make food by someone who knew the terrain.
Just incidentally, their survival had ensured the creation of something called the United States—and its governmental forms. That they survived at all we can be thankful for.

A Whack Job's Sppeculation--What If?

What if—it’s an interesting game to play. A variant of it came to mind today when I happened to listen to a conservative televangelist this morning who preached that America was facing judgment. Such pronouncements lead to one of two reactions: a “whack job religion” as “Newsweek” put it this week or “what if?”
What if a Christian took his faith as seriously as a Muslim is expected to—or the Dalai Lama? That would, of course, be reprehensible conduct—ranging from politically incorrect to downright illegal. But suppose someone did?
That would presuppose a deity who 1) believes in absolute good and evil, 2) who hates evil so much he had to allow his enemy to inflict a hideous death on his own son in order to satisfy the terms of a contract under which evil will eventually be banished from this universe.
3) And who pours his anger out on evil and those who refuse to choose the good—as he sees it—and judges evil far more ruthlessly than any human criminal court judge. That’s pretty much the core of Christianity.
Now, if you go further and accept the notion that this deity views abortion and homosexual behavior as evil—and takes personal offense at being tossed out of American schools, courts and politics—then why, under Christian rules shouldn’t he judge America?
We have told him to go away, that he’s not welcome. Those who talk about him too publicly or claim to believe what is found written very clearly in Judeo-Christian scriptures are labeled “whack jobs” and even sued or faced with criminal action.
What if he really exists? What if he really is annoyed at some of the “post Christian” shenanigans he sees going on in this nation? Might he violate all rules of civilized conduct and become judgmental? Is there any evidence that such a thing could happen?
Would he rain down thunderbolts and hail stones like cannon balls? He wouldn’t have to, would he? He could just withdraw some of the favor he has showed this nation since its inception and allow our own foolishness to run its course. After all, we’ve asked him to butt out—and he is a gentleman. He won’t stay where he is not wanted.
Recent studies (of tree rings and other measurable phenomena) suggest that the Twentieth Century has been the wettest century on this continent over the past thousand years or so. What if water flow and rain fall merely went back to normal?
Where would Phoenix, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, a half dozen other southwestern cities and farms get their water? We’ve packed millions of people into deserts. Just a few inches less rain and you have catastrophe beyond measure or imagination on your hands all over the high plains and deserts of the American southwest—which, just incidentally, are dotted with the remains of previous civilizations that disintegrated in the face of prolonged drought.
Are we winning in Afghanistan? Have we really won in Iraq? Have those who actively plot to blow our cities up stopped plotting? Would a Divine Hand need do more than step back an inch or two to let a tactical nuke through?
Has our banking system really been restored? Is the rising stock market another bubble? What is holding many of our states and cities out of bankruptcy? Will we really see enough growth in our economy to pay back the multi-trillion dollar debt we owe?
Where are the workers that will support Social Security and Medicare for the aging Boomers? (Did we abort 40 million of them?) It wouldn’t take bolts of divine thunder to bring things down. Just a bit less of this or a step back there would do terribly well.
What if? --No! No! Only a whack job could think such things. Right?

Obesity--Sometimes a Function of Money

Nearly twenty years ago I sat in a young physician’s office and listened to him lecture me on my obesity. (I’m no way as slim as was when I smoked and made higher salaries.) I also no longer enjoy the higher salary I once did.
My mouth watered as he described the foods I ought to be eating. After a few moments, I stopped him and asked if he had any idea what the diet he advocated would cost—fresh meat, fresh fruits, fresh veggies. He looked startled for a moment. Then he thought.
No, he admitted. He had no idea. “My wife,” he said, “never considers costs when she shops. I never thought about it before, either.” Nice to be an affluent young doc, in a thriving medical practice—where you don’t have to check your wallet before you shop.
Not so nice to assume your patients are as affluent as you are—and make recommendations that take no account of cost. The pre-printed diets from large and reputable medical organizations also seemed to take no account of the cost of groceries either.
It matters when you’ve got two young kids to feed. It matters when they are in college or senior high school, still eating at home. (The money they get does not toward food at home; try auto insurance, maintenance—one commutes miles to a university—gas, tuition and text books, and so forth, and so forth.)
When it comes to food, they are the farthest thing from revenue neutral. When we can (rarely) afford food that’s not cooked at home, it’s pretty much pizza and burgers. Food for four adult sized appetites at a real restaurant can knock an awful hole in a century note.
I got a heads up on this back in 1968. I was living in Washington and working a couple of weeks in New York City. I figured out that the cheapest and nearly fastest way to go was either by train or Gray Hound—both of which had terminals near my home.
On one bus trip I got to chatting with an admittedly chubby young British girl. She had, she told me taken off for a year-long trip around the world. She had come through Europe, the Near and Middle East. She’d stayed in then peaceful Kabul and floated down the Mekong River. She had arrived in this country only a month or two before.
“Look at me,” she gestured at her extra poundage, “I didn’t gain a pound until I landed in San Francisco. The only thing I can afford to eat in this country is your fast foods—and they are FATTENING!” She was both puzzled and unhappy at this phenomenon.
She described the luscious fruits and fresh meat she had consumed on all the rest of her trip. It had all been well within her limited budget. But in no way could her budget stretch to eat as healthily in America as she had on a large raft in the Mekong River.
My wife is desperate to lose weight—but the high protein, fresh food diet that works for her is way too expensive for all four of us to eat. Pasta, rice, bread, cereal—not sugared ones!), potatoes, peanut butter and cheese have to fill in some of the gap. We almost never eat desert—but, in warm weather we bring half-gallons of ice cream home.
It’s fattening, I admit. But it’s affordable. (Yes, we could give up fast food—but when all four of us have spent hours raking the lawn and winterizing the place and darkness comes, no one really wants to go into the kitchen and make a nice healthy meal. Someone goes out to McDonald’s or Burger King and no one has to cook or wash up. That’s just exhaustion.)
Obesity is no doubt going to prove a very expensive medical problem for this country. Serious consideration might also be given to making all the things that might prevent obesity more affordable. NO ONE is going to want to think about that.

Obama, War and Trust

Last night ABC News itemized some ludicrous items in the White House data about the stimulus money. Two more items reported tonight: Nine pairs of shoes were counted as nine jobs in one real District. A onetime raise for 300 employees scored as 300 new jobs. The local people said the White House ordered them to report this way.
This doesn’t terribly surprise me. In 1964, as a government peon, I was pulled off my regular duties and told to start going through all the magazine reprints and publications in the Diabetes Program of the US Public Health Service. Anything we hadn’t used, sent out or was more than fifteen years old was to be tossed—and the throwaways counted and listed with the ORIGINAL COST.
I came up with about 300 for perhaps the same amount of dollars and gave the total to my boss. He passed it on up the chain. Apparently there were lots of peons doing just what I had done. About a month later the White House issued a press release proclaiming that the President had just saved tax payers huge bucks by eliminating unnecessary publications.
It is a source of wry satisfaction to me that I contributed to that fictitious savings. So why shouldn’t Obama do the same? But here’s something else to think about.
THREE TIMES in the Twentieth Century Democratic candidates found themselves running for president with a war looming over them. Each candidate proclaimed his Republican competitor to be a war monger and promised HE would keep up out of war.
In 1916, Woodrow Wilson ran under the slogan, “He kept us out of war!” (WWI) and accused Republican Charles Evans Hughes of wanting to join the fighting. Wilson won, was sworn in on March 4, 1917, and in April declared war on Germany.
In 1940, Franklin Roosevelt ran the same line against Republican Wendell Wilkie. When people pointed out that he had just created our first peace time draft, he vowed NEVER to send those boys overseas to fight. He won his third term on a “peace plank”.
He was inaugurated on January, 20, 1941. Within months he had declared most of the Atlantic to be a killing zone where US ships were authorized to open up on German U-boats. He had B-17 bombers flying bombing missions over Germany to test their capabilities.
He was giving England all sorts of war materials—at no cost. He had moved the Pacific Fleet out from its home base at San Diego to Pearl Harbor to attack the Japanese Fleet. He denied Japan any fuel, steel, iron, copper and a full list of one hundred items needed to maintain a society above the level of a Stone Age society. He also froze all their assets in New York.
He refused to meet with the Japanese emperor to negotiate some sort of truce and finally goaded the hot heads in Tokyo (who recognized they had only eighteen months of oil left) to attack us later that same year—which took care of any need to declare war on the Axis, since they obliged by declaring war on us. Never mind that he had been working with the British on joint war plans since the fall of 1939 while he promised to keep the peace in 1940.
Then came 1964—while I was in Washington. Lyndon Johnson ran against Barry Goldwater, whom he depicted as a thoroughly scary and irresponsible pro-war militant. His peace plank worked so well he won by the largest land-slide in American history.
Never mind that in August of that year he tricked Congress into passing the Tonkin Gulf Resolution—which gave him carte blanch for nine more years of war. He was sworn in on January 20, 1965, and two months later American combat troops were in action in Vietnam.
Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson—and now Obama? Last year Mr. Obama made pacific enough noises about our wars in the Middle East to convince most of his supporters that he planned to cut back those wars (unlike that war monger McCain).
Want to place a side bet?

Obama--TwoToo Many Tall Tales

What in the world is going on here? I think anyone who has read my blog over the past year knows, that as much as any Republican can, I have tried to give Obama the benefit of the doubt—and even to defend him against what seemed to be rabid assaults from my party’s conservative right wing. But I have seen two things recently that make me ready to quit playing nice.
One—a week or two ago I saw Obama at a press conference vow that he would veto any health bill that was not “revenue neutral”. Whoa. Any decent health bill that does the job that needs to be done in this nation will be like going from a stripped down Chevy to a Cadillac.
You can’t do that without spending more money. A Caddy simply costs more than a Chevy. It costs more to license it, to buy tires for it, to service and repair it. Health care for an additional 40 to 50 million UNINSURED Americans is just plain GOING to cost more than insuring the number we are insuring now.
It’s like auto insurance. It costs more to insure four cars than it does to insure three. There’s no way you can expand your car insurance coverage and come out “revenue neutral”. Unless of course, you cut the coverage for everybody (Medicare, Medicaid) way, way back.
Medicare doesn’t do all that adequate a job now. George Bush admitted as much by creating a prescription drug plan three years ago. Anyone who has Medicare and can afford supplemental insurance, BUYS IT!
Then let’s talk about bringing decent coverage to many thousands or millions of Americans who are covered minimally by very inadequate private health insurance plans—with ludicrously high co-pays and ridiculously low maximums.
That’s increasing coverage on the existing three cars. (Try doing without casualty—accident—insurance on a car a bank holds a mortgage on! You’ll put casualty insurance on that vehicle very quickly!)
So we’re going to improve wretched coverage and increase the population covered by a third—and Obama says he won’t do it unless it’s revenue neutral. One is left with very little choice but to think the man is a fool or a liar. Or he thinks we are all fools.
Today I heard something fascinating about the Stimulus Money. The White House has finally released a list of places where good things happened and jobs were created. (The exit polls at the elections two weeks ago seem to have made an impression on Obama’s people.)
ABC network news read some tidbits off that list tonight. Included were such claims to beneficence as forty-two jobs created in Arizona’s 43rd Congressional District. Another item raved about several more jobs created in Arizona’s 99th District.
Oh, oops. Arizona only has EIGHT Congressional Districts. Connecticut was credited with a couple dozen more Districts than it has, as well. Charlie Gibson explained that the White House had responded with some petulance that these were minor clerical errors.
After all, it suggested to ABC, it is possible that many recipients of stimulus largesse had no idea in which Congressional District they actually lived. It might seem churlish of me, but shouldn’t somebody who is receiving Federal gift money take the time to figure out where he lives, in which district, before anybody signs off on a cheque?
Either there has been gross carelessness in the distribution of this money or there’s been considerable fraud or somebody’s lying about something. And somebody thinks that most of us are remarkably thick witted.
We have a President who touted himself as an agent of CHANGE who is following the policies of George Bush in war, and the laissez faire policies of the most conservative Republicans on Wall Street, and now he’s going to insure millions more Americans—while being “revenue neutral”.
Maybe “liar” wasn’t polite—how about “Nuts”.

Detroit: It's Not About Size--It's QUALITY!

One hears a lot of chatter these days about how Detroit needs to buckle down and build cars that “America wants to buy”. I agree that’s a good idea—I just have real problems with the standard interpretation of what a car “I want to buy” means.
Conventional wisdom says that this will be a small car. When I was in my twenties, I drove a classic VW Beetle. In my thirties I drove a Toyota station wagon with “a wheel base smaller than a VW”. Today my wife drives a Dodge mini-van and I drive a smallish Buick Skylark.
I confess if I went out and bought a new car tomorrow it would very possibly be a full size Ford or Mercury. It might even be an SUV. I can hear the gasps now—I am betraying all that is holy in the realm of Al Gore and his greenies.
Simple answer: I am an aging American. This means two things, vis-à-vis an automobile. One) I now creak more than my Skylark when I try to get in it. Two) as part of my national heritage, I am no longer as thin and trim as I was in Volkswagen days. (Understatement.)
Even a lot of thin Americans are large people. Stand next to some of the tiny people who come from other parts of the planet. Let them drive the little bitty cars so in vogue now. Even a 5’2” mommy would rather load three small kids into a mini-van or an SUV—along with soccer gear, coolers, folding chairs, and the occasional bag of balls—than a Toyota sedan.
Your burly construction worker really doesn’t prefer to drive a Fusion onto the construction site—especially if he is expected to run out and buy a couple of extra sheets of 4’x8’ plywood or a new water heater. People who do serious hauling call the little Japanese pickups, “Truckettes”.
I’ve carried long 2’x4’s in a VW. I angled them in—but they stuck out so far that I felt like King Arthur riding into the tilt yard. A lot of us substantial citizens, aging citizens and citizens who work out of their vehicles really aren’t calling for much smaller cars and trucks.
Those who try them are liable to switch back to something bigger as soon gas drops a dime or two. People like Al Gore who insist we should go for small can probably afford to have everything delivered to the door by people who drive really BIG trucks.
The two big foreign cars in the late ‘50s were the VW and the Volvo. We drove VW’s because they were so cute and so counterculture. (We could and did sneer at all those philistines who drove Chevys and Oldsmobiles—that was before we had kids, strollers and groceries to haul.)
Volvos were popular because they were built to last for years and years. That was back in the days when no one but a fool attempted to drive an American car past 100,000 miles—when the tight fit and reliability of foreign cars amazed those of us used to the glitches and incessant rattles in any US built vehicle.
Detroit responded to these foreign invaders—in all the wrong ways. When it went VW small, it built cars so unreliable that Ralph Nader correctly labeled them “unsafe at any speed”. General Motors reduced the size and width of its entire line in 1959 (except for the “wide track” Pontiac which simply stayed at its 1958 size). They did nothing for quality.
Lee Iacocca came out with the Mustang—a sales hit that, typically, avoided any hint of quality. And, then, look what he built at Chrysler. Oh my. Does anyone know ANYBODY who bought a second K car? He was typical of Detroit thinking.
I’m afraid when I hear Detroit talking about downsizing again. Size is NOT why their cars do not sell. Germans and Japanese beat Detroit not on size (the Ford F-150 goes marching on), but on QUALITY and RELIABITY. I’d LOVE another (bigger) Buick or Mercury that had the quality and reliability of my 1961 Volkswagen Bug. Am I dreaming?

Afghanistan/Vietnam--What Cost "Winning"?

“Newsweek Magazine” this week ran the headline “How We [could have] Won In Vietnam”. The article inside, on page 34, is essentially a review of a recent book by a retired Lieutenant Colonial, Lewis Sorley, who penned A BETTER WAR to show how we could have won in Vietnam.
His recipe: more bombing earlier and/or staying the course in the early seventies—if only Congress hadn’t cut off the funds—or if LBJ hadn’t been afraid of a wider war (ala Korea with China). But the line that caught my eye in “Newsweek” was, that Sorley’s notion that we could have won in Vietnam is “is contrary to the conventional wisdom. ,,,”
The comparison is being made to our present “quagmire” in Afghanistan—which some are also calling an unwinnable war. Please, ladies and gentlemen, admirals and generals, historians and policy makers—the issue was never if we COULD have won—either place. The real question is: can we afford to?
I’m sure neither Khrushchev, Mao, Ho Chi Minh nor Castro ever doubted that we COULD win in Vietnam. The only question was whether it was worth what it would take to do it. How many bombs did we want to drop on Haiphong harbor (how many Russian ships did we want to sink)?
How many troops did we really want to commit? Here’s a dirty little secret I’ve been told by men who were there, while half a million G.I.s sounds impressive on paper, as much as 90% functioned as non-combatant “tail”. That’s drivers, engineers, supply corps, cooks, etc. etc.
I remember asking a recruiting sergeant in liberal, anti-war Massachusetts how he got recruits. “Simple,” he grinned. “I tell kids they can wait to be drafted, get handed a rifle and lose an arm or a leg—or they can enlist and become a company clerk or cook. Given that option, a lot of them enlist. I meet my quota.”
What if we had turned things around—like European armies? Twenty or 30%--or less—as tail and the bulk of that half million as full time combat troops? That would seem to have made victory far more possible. But even that would not have been enough.
We were battling a determined enemy who were ready to die to throw what they saw as foreign tyranny out of their country. They had already fought the Japanese to a standstill and whipped the French. They were fighting (much more fanatically than we did in 1776) for their own independence, their own nation.
We had about two million Catholic French colons reliably on our side. The other 15 million SOUTH Vietnamese were at least secretly on the side of the man most of them saw as the George Washington of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh.
Could we have beaten Ho? Yes, we owned more resources than Japan and France combined. But we would have had to use vastly more of them than would have been politically palatable to the most determined Washington hawk. We would have had to use them with the totality and ruthlessness we had not shown since the Civil War or World War II.
Was Vietnam worth that? We certainly had the raw power and weaponry to kill anything and any one that tried to defy us. Did we have the will? Were we willing to spend that many or our own boys and cash to do it? That’s the issue Sorley misses.
The conventional wisdom against which he writes is in a sense correct: We could not win in Vietnam with the resources we were willing to commit—and with only a half-hearted ruthlessness. We weren’t willing (wisely, I believe) to pay what it would have required. And, thus, we should have stayed out of a war we weren’t willing to fight to win. (Not being willing is NOT the same as cowardice—sometimes it’s simply being wise.)
Now, how about Afghanistan? What’s it worth? How ruthless are we willing to be? Genghis Khan butchered whole cities full of civilians to pacify the Afghans. He’s the only one who ever did—are we willing to be like him? Are we willing to send enough men and firepower to do the job?
These are the questions Obama faces. I’m glad I don’t have to.

Job Security--An Oxymoron?

I scanned through an article last week that purported to assure young job seekers as to which trades and professions were likely to be secure in the coming work life. Several were in fields about which I claim no expertise as to their possible longevity. Two, however, stood out.
Teaching and medicine. Someone may tell me that what I know about these two fields is only true for Western Michigan. Somehow I doubt that. I know this—when you get established enough in the teaching profession to earn substantially more money than the starting wage, administrations will begin to move heaven and earth to get you to retire, replaced by someone much cheaper.
One teacher acquaintance of mine, who is eligible to retire—but his wife is seriously ill and needs to stay under the medical plan for the still employed, tells me that he barely steps out of his room without having the principal asking, “What can I do to convince you to retire?”
That’s not true security. A math/computer teacher I know (and really like) who is a true nerd—but knows how to teach his high schoolers to build competitive robots—just got bumped out of his job and considers himself fortune to be teaching math to first and second graders. (He, of course, bumped another teacher out of her job.)
School librarians have become a rarer species around here than Tyrannosaurus Rex. Some school libraries are closed permanently except for the occasional individual teacher who borrows the key and brings a class in for a specific project.
Others are still open but run by low-paid and untrained para-pros. I had a long talk with one such person—originally hired to tend challenged kids with physical needs. She said, “I can check out books and reshelve them, but I know nothing of ordering them or directing a student to what resources he might need.” Many high school libraries around here run this way.
I talked to the professional librarian who still runs our district’s high school library last night. She also maintains much of the computer systems throughout the school, so she’s busy and useful. She seriously doesn’t think she’ll have that job next year.
They’ll put in a much cheaper para-professional and let her bump some other English major out of a job. She has enough seniority that she’ll survive, but she LIKES being a librarian. She has a graduate degree in library science. You know and I know the next cuts will be teachers.
If you want to talk about the proverbial cloud “no bigger than a man’s hand”, what happens when some of these districts figure out that a computer on every desk with lessons taught on line might just be cheaper than paying all those salaries and benefits?
Tale about the joys of being a buggy whip maker! If I can think that thought (already some courses are being taught on line), so can the people who write the cheques and select the curricula. This may happen all that many years from now.
Let’s take a quick look at the medical business. In Muskegon and Grand Rapids, the two major hospitals in both cities have consolidated in the past few years. (Consolidation often means two people vying for one job. It has around here! Of course, one leaves.) In both cases the hospitals were in financial trouble—and consolidation kept them open. All of which suggests that maybe—health care reform or no—this country cannot afford as many health care professionals. (Watch what’s happening in the once untouchable auto industry.)
The only house around here that I am aware of being sold because of job loss belonged to a young, competent health care professional. He was a physical therapist. They didn’t fire him; they just cut his hours back and back … and back. (That also means no benefits.)
A lot of people who made and tended horse carriages a little over a century ago thought their jobs were secure too. So did American shoe makers and TV manufacturers. My unhappy thought is, NOTHING out there is secure. Too much change, too little money.

Islam, Fort Hood, and All of US

Last week a Muslim major walked into a roomful of unarmed troops at Fort Hood and opened fire to lethal effect. He was a United States Army major. The people he was killing were fellow members of that same army, brothers in arms.

Therefore let those fight in the way of Allah,
Who sells the world’s life for the hereafter,
And whoever fights in the way of Allah, be he
slain or be he victorious, we shall grant him a
mighty reward. The Woman: 4.74
The Koran

The major wasn’t immediately lucky enough to go to his mighty reward. A mere woman (from a Muslim point of view) cut him down with four bullets even after he wounded her. Both are in the hospital; she to loud acclaim; he, neither victorious nor slain.

Colleagues of the major recall him protesting against being posted to Iraq—where, as he said, men in his uniform were killing Muslims. One again refers to the Koran to see how heinous a crime this had to be in the major’s mind.

Allah only forbids you [to make friends] respecting those
who made war upon you on account of [your] religion,and
drove you forth from your homes …. Whoever makes friends
with them, these are the unjust. The Examined One: 60.9
Allah does not love the unjust. The Elephant: 105.2
The Koran

It might not take a great stretch for a devout Muslim to see our attack on Iraq as a war on Islam and, certainly, thousands of Iraqis have been driven forth from their homes—to Jordan, Syria and even as far as the United States. To the devout, who take it seriously, that would mean simply wearing an American uniform would make one the “unjust”, unloved of Allah.
For the devout Muslim who takes the above passage from the Koran literally, that would make friendship with Americans completely impossible. One can only imagine how conflicted this officer, who by all accounts was a believing Muslim, felt wearing an American uniform—and being on the verge of a posting to a war in Iraq that an American president had called a “crusade”.
The Imam at the mosque he attended suggests that in his conversation the major made this confliction disturbingly clear. I doubt very much whether Major Hassan is alone in his feeling that by close association with America he was becoming unloved by Allah.
For over a decade the news has been full of stories of young American Muslims who traveled to Pakistan (or possibly other Muslim nations) to be trained to kill what we would prefer to go on thinking were after all their fellow Americans.
An army wife at Fort Hood put this sentiment clearly as she face a TV camera, “I just wish his name were Smith.” It would be easier to believe an American “Christian” simply went berserk rather than having to believe a fellow soldier was moved by his faith to kill us.
If the latter were true, whom then can we trust? At what point might any Muslim’s faith become real to him and, like the major, might he suddenly choose not to be among the unloved of Allah? A desire not to be on the bad side of one’s deity is understandable—and if you take the verse seriously--actually quite rational.
Christians are expected to be ready to die for their faith. Why not Muslims? Unbearable thought to the bereaved in Fort Hood? Perhaps we should be a little more willing to think it.

How About a Bigger, More Useful Army?

I read something the other day—that as many as 75% of America’s kids are ineligible for military service. Reasons: poor education, overweight, criminal records. They simply cannot pass the pre-induction tests that the military requires before you put on the uniform.
That brought back to memory several kids I knew in my teens who simply weren’t making it all that well in school or in life. In a case or two, a judge gave a kid a choice: army or jail. I recall a chap who opted for the marines rather than having to admit to paternity.
For these guys, the military was a haven of last resort (there were no wars while I was in high school or college). Some of them turned out quite well after a three year tour of peeling potatoes and standing guard duty. The army didn’t feel it was being hurt, either.
Apparently that option is gone today for a lot of kids who could really use it. As I was thinking about it, an idea I had way back then came back to me. Why not make military service universal, for fat and skinny, for poor students and good ones, for non-violent criminals in lieu of a life of crime, which they would be taught by spending time in prison?
This idea came to me while I was dodging the draft—an exercise that was perfectly legal under the 1948-1973 draft law; it merely required a few side steps and a little calculation. For much of that time the monthly draft call was only about 3,000 kids a month.
Everybody knew that his “Greetings from Uncle Sam” were due about precisely two months after one’s twenty-second birthday. After that you had to rely on being in grad school, holding certain jobs (like teaching) or getting married and having a child.
I did all of those things—like some kind of two-step dance. It limited your freedom of action—none of this touring the world after college. “You’re in the army now… .” No staying single while you established a career or just enjoyed yourself. “You’re in the army … .”
One of my friends got a little careless with his grad school application and spent two years in Alaska peeling potatoes. He was just dumb—but he felt so bitter over being one of the few who came up “it” that he never really got over it.
Going in the military was a matter volunteering when you had no better option or being inept enough to get caught. Until Vietnam heated up, draftees were just guys who missed deadlines and couldn’t keep their dates straight. It wasn’t hard to stay out.
At the same time, we had a nation full of kids in poor health, poorly educated, or slipping into a habit of B&E’s, criminal rowdiness and so forth. “What,” I thought, “would be wrong with drafting EVERYBODY (like they do in some European nations), male AND FEMALE (the way they do in Israel)”?
Nobody would feel screwed just because he happened to get tagged. It was part of living; you expected it like you did driver’s training or at least two years of high school. What a marvelous opportunity to get your hands on every kid in the country—and not let him or her go until their health problems were dealt with, until they could read and write, until they had their heads knocked hard enough that they finally realized certain criminal behaviors were simply unacceptable!
We spend billions on the military—and they spend years training men and women to do everything from run computer systems to shooting huge cannon. Why not use some of those billions to overcome deficiencies caused by poor education, bad hygiene and lousy choices?
That could make our military—at war and peace—worth any money we spent on it! Why not! (I’m aware that many officers and non-coms would sputter at the mere thought of taking on what they saw as a babysitting job—but is training raw civilians to become proficient killers on land, sea and air any easier?) Again, why not?
Anybody got a better idea for the millions of kids who are too fat, too uneducated, or who already have criminal records?

School Days In Recession

Last May the school district in which we live held an election to see if it could keep the mileage it had gotten passed years before. They pointed out that the computer technology they were using to teach with was at least eight years old. That’s an eon in computer generations.
They also said they needed to replace some fifteen year old furniture and to buy some new texts. They lost by 67 votes. With the reduced mileage, they went into major economy mode—some classrooms lacked the paper necessary to print enough spring exams.
Halls are darker. Teachers’ work stations in the faculty area have cut back on so many light bulbs it is honestly a bit hard to see if you are marking papers or reading. The award winning choirs are working with very old sheet music, madly erasing notations after each concert.
This past Tuesday the district set up the machines and called for a second vote on the same millage. It passed. A second proposal (new millage) for improving athletic fields and facilities went down to defeat. Hard pressed suburban parents were willing to keep what the schools had going—but drew the line at a dime of new money.
This is not an inner city district. This is a district that is proud of its schools, its musical organizations, its athletic teams. It was willing to put up millions little more than a decade ago to build an entire new high school building—with probably the finest theatre facilities in Western Michigan.
A few years after that, they built a brand new football stadium and turned the old one into a soccer field. Normally these people are willing to spend money on their school—a goodly percentage of their kids are college bound, lots of AP classes (which give college credit).
Now each teacher has a list of all the devices and lights (and window blinds) that must be shut down or turned off at the end of the day. This year they’ve reduced the miles run by school buses—crowds of kids walk to main intersections instead of being picked up in front of their houses.
(In case some of my fellow geezers have lost track, it has been deemed immoral and unconstitutional to make any child walk half-a-mile or so to get to school. I think we’re headed back to the distances we walked when we were kids. High gas prices, fewer drivers to pay … .)
(Obviously, when they consolidated districts like this in the 1960s and began busing students for miles each way, no one was imagining a day when we might no longer be able to afford all the buses, all the drivers and all the gas… .)
Another little economy—about four years ago the high school stopped offering Michigan’s mandatory driver’s training at a reduced rate. Now you take it from private instructors for about twice what the school used to charge—now, well over $300 dollars.
A number of kids are no longer driving at sixteen—making buses all that more necessary, since both parents often work. Mom and dad haven’t got the $300 for training. They make the kids wait until eighteen, when they no longer need to take the course. A necessary economy, but what does it do for driving safety?
Reports like the one that came out today—that unemployment has reached 10.2%--cannot make anyone feel that the day when money is no object in American education is liable to return any time soon. Faculty will go on turning out lights, kids will walk ever farther, and fewer and fewer kids will have a textbook available for them to take home and study.
It’s little facts like these that tell you the recession is still biting hard.

Nuremberg Strikes Again

An Italian court has just convicted—in absentia—twenty-three American diplomatic and military personnel for kidnapping a suspected terrorist just a month before we invaded Iraq—February 17, 2003. The terrorist suspect was a chap with the wonderful name of Osma Moustafa Hassan Nasr. The court found the Americans guilty of kidnapping the man and handing him over to the Egyptians for a little serious interrogation.
Such kidnappings are called “extraordinary renditions”. The modus operandi is simple. You see a man you think is a terrorist walking down the street of a city where he feels safe (Milan) and you grab him, ship him off to a US base and from there to someone who will try to convince him to talk, in this case, Egypt.
To Italian eyes this appears to be simple kidnapping, and it violates their law. The fact that the Italians were working up a case of their own against Nasr—or that lots of Italians were working with the 23 Americans—or that Egypt still finds him troublesome enough that they would not let him out of the country to attend the Italian trial—mattered not.
Most of the Italians were acquitted. Two were convicted. The CIA station chief, who masterminded the operation with Italian help, was acquitted on grounds of diplomatic immunity. At least one of the other 23 is suing the State Department because she wasn’t granted diplomatic immunity.
So the convicted Americans are liable to have international warrants outstanding for them—and have been advised not to leave the country. Human rights groups from all over are delighted to finally have a conviction against American citizens for one of the extraordinary renditions—which our current CIA chief has testified will continue as needed.
Whether it was politically astute to kidnap a man we had reason to believe was out to do us real mischief is one thing. Whether we should have placed the umbrella of diplomatic immunity over our operatives at the outset is another issue.
But the real issue here, it seems to me, is that this conviction falls into the same category as Obama’s Peace Prize. It’s a way of slapping America’s face because purely because they dislike one facet or another of American foreign policy.
They slap George W. Bush’s face by giving his successor an award he has done nothing to earn. They give Bush another slap by convicting American operatives that their own police forces were working with at the time. The question of whether Nasr is actually guilty—or actually was tortured by Egyptian jailors—is left completely unproven. It is irrelevant.
The real target of the trial was never the 23 perpetrators. It was the policy of the American government—which scares the living daylights out of Europeans because of their own huge Muslim populations. Anything America might do to rock the dangerously overloaded boat must be slapped down at once!
(How ironic that only days after the conviction an American Muslim, a major in our own army, opens fire and kills a dozen GIs at Fort Hood in Texas. Begin to see why the Italians, the French, the Germans, with their huge Muslim population are so frightened?)
The supreme irony lies in the fact that we have given us the moral and legal weapon to flagellate us for almost anything we may now do to defend ourselves and our interests—the Nuremberg precedent. We created a court in 1945 that had no standing in law, whose judgments would have been tossed out in any American appellate court—since the injured parties acted as judge and jury.
Quite aside from Nazi brutality and horror, that is a precedent that is liable to come back to bite us over and over and over. In war, almost nothing is ever done that isn’t illegal in someone’s jurisdiction. The Nazis were unbelievably vicious, but it should startle and worry us to see American officials convicted for defending their country from what they believed was a credible threat on similar grounds that the Nazis were convicted for.
Precedent can be a two edged sword.

Obama--A Year Of Little Consequence

Okay, so the Democrats lost in New Jersey and Virginia. (They only won in the Congressional race in upstate New York because the Republicans were silly enough to chase away the one Republican who could have won for them.
Which is to say, regardless of Obama’s other problems and anything else I have to say today, the Republicans retain an infinite capacity to cast away victory for defeat. Ideological purity may satisfy the virulent, but it won’t win elections—say, in 2010.)
There is no question—even if the exit polls couldn’t get people to admit out loud that they are unhappy with Obama—that people are becoming disappointed. Compare his year as elected president (he won overwhelmingly a year ago today) with FDR’s.
First of all Roosevelt kept his mouth SHUT between election day and inauguration day. He not only said “there is only one President at a time”, he acted like it. Obama seemed to be trying to be co-president from November 4 onward. He almost appeared to be an unappointed member of Bush’s cabinet. A little silence then could benefit him today—by talking too much he made this recession his baby two months before he took the oath.
When Roosevelt did take office, he landed running. Some of the things he did didn’t really help all that much, but his style was such a contrast to Hoover’s and his speeches so much better, people actually felt like there really was some change going on.
What has Obama done about the economy (number one issue in exit polls) that Bush didn’t do first—with Obama sitting co-pilot? The American people simply have not seen the change that Obama the candidate talked about so often.
I really don’t think the American people had any idea who or what they were actually electing. They missed a very obvious fact. Think back on every speech you’ve ever heard Obama make—they are absolutely passionless.
Electing Obama was a bit like being attracted to a handsome fellow, well educated with an interesting resume’ and then finding out that in bed he was cold, lifeless and without any obvious feeling. His speeches are larded with stammers and hesitations.
They have all the fluency of a man who thinks and thinks and thinks—to whom action is an alien and uncomfortable mode. He is the very caricature of a professor rather than a man of action—either in court or business or politics.
Exit polls suggest persons who’ve been married for year, haven’t seen anything yet of what they thought they were getting married for—but are not yet willing to admit a mistake and ask themselves, what on earth am I doing with this chap or lady?
So the voters in Virginia and New Jersey (that’s especially the young and the independent) either stayed away from the voting booths or they voted, “Phooey”. These two groups were Obama’s strength a year ago—not yesterday.
People want at least something of what they got from Franklin Roosevelt—speed, decisiveness and action. Obama doesn’t sound or act like a man to whom any of that comes naturally.
He’s smarter than FDR—no question. No one would EVER say of Obama, “Second class intellect; first class temperament.” Maybe that’s one of his big problems. By the time unimpassioned thinkers get to acting, the problem has either gone away or overwhelmed them.
Now if the Republicans can just gag people like Palin and Limbaugh, they have a decent chance next year. That is, however, such a huge if. It may be the Democrats only real hope.

Hillary--Too Much Mouth?

Hillary said it out loud. What she said about Pakistan was absolutely true. They have backed off from taking strong action against the tribal and Taliban strongholds on the Afghanistan frontier. The only question is: when is it better not to tell the truth?
The Pakistani no doubt had good reasons. They are not a politically stable nation. Military coups and even assassinations play too big a part in their political life. No Pakistani government has felt strong enough to show the utter ruthlessness Abraham Lincoln showed to his political enemies (in the North) during our own Civil War.
Lincoln, as we recall, suspended Habeas Corpus (and as much of the rest of the Constitution as he felt the need to) and slapped anybody in prison who was even suspected of whispering, “Go Rebels.” Pakistan hasn’t had the nerve to treat its radical Muslim radicals the same way.
Since those same radicals are making a fetish out of killing American soldiers in Afghanistan and jumping back across the border to safety, understandably an American Secretary of State would feel the way Hillary spoke. Was she constructive?
Unstable itself, Pakistan may well have had at least four good reasons not to mix it up too fiercely in the past. 1) Better the radicals fight and get shot by Americans than by Pakistani troops—after all these are people who can drag out a blood feud for generations.
2) The mountains around there—as Americans who fight in similar terrain across the border can tell you-- are just about impassable. The inhabitants of those hills have given bloody and good account of themselves against everybody from Alexander to Genghis Khan to the British Empire and the Soviets. It’s not a fight you willingly pick.
3) These guys may well be more dangerous fighters than the troops in Pakistan’s army. In other words, take them on and run the real risk of losing. Lose and then how long does your government last? Had I been a Pakistani leader recently, I might not have taken the risk either.
4) These Muslim radicals are handy proxy forces to turn loose on India over Kashmir every so often. Then the Pakistani government can honestly say, “Who, us?” and watch India get shaken up as bombs blow up in the streets and all that sort of fun.
But, recently, (perhaps for internal reasons we know little about) the Pakistani army HAS taken on some of these radicals—with decent success for the moment. We still depend on them as a supply line into land-locked Afghanistan. And every militant shooting at a Pakistani soldier isn’t shooting at us. That’s a nice relief, if only for the moment.
So why did Hillary pick this time, right now when Pakistan is actually shooting, to remind them—quite insultingly—of their shortcomings? What she said, a lot of American officials have wanted to say for the better part of a decade, no doubt. But, why NOW, when they’re actually doing at least a bit of what we’ve always hoped they would do?
I’ve thought about this for a week or so, and I’ve finally come to a possible conclusion. For all of her smarts (and she has them in spades AND no trump), Hillary may be a bit of a loose cannon. Useful at times as a cabinet officer, but no one you’d want in full charge.
I’ve had that sense for years. Look at the baggage she brought in to the White House back in 1993—the investments she had made, a mysterious suicide, some of her contacts and allies. There is always a hint of bad judgment to her.
I’m not an O’bama fan, but we may be a lot better off having him hold the actual reins of power than having his rival, Hillary, in the Oval Office. He at least, perhaps to a fault, tends to reflect before he speaks. (One way to look statesmanlike is to pick subordinates to have the loose lips.)
Again, just a thought.