Members of the Royal Irish Rifles, first day on the Somme. Look at them staring at us from a century ago…
It’s been a century now since the badly labeled War to End All Wars began, and 96 years to the day (to the hour, as I write this) since it ended in an unsatisfactory manner that helped lead inexorably to the next conflagration.
If you’d like to reflect on that, this would be a good day for it.
Here are some other possible topics:
- I see Cindi Scoppe has written my usual post-election column on our endorsees and how they fared. As I did after each election, she does it to deep-six the nonsense about our endorsement being the “kiss of death.” This time, the board went 9-2, slightly better than the usual 75 percent or so winners. Of course, endorsements are not predictions of who will win, but statements about who should win, and more importantly, why they should win. But one does get tired of people saying untrue things about one, hence this tradition that I started about a decade ago.
- Haley picks the dollar-a-year guy to run $7 billion agency — The career of Christian Soura, since he first came to SC to work for the governor, has mystified me. He started work here at a dollar a year, explaining that he was living in part off his government pension from Pennsylvania — even though he was only 32. Later, he became deputy chief of staff at the somewhat more substantial compensation of $128,698. Now, he’ll be making $154,879. And no, he has no experience running a Medicaid agency. Tony Keck, whom he replaces, had. Guess we know who just won an election. Note the picture at the link. Keck looks like he could be Soura’s father. (He even looks like a baby next to Nikki, as youthful as she is.)
- The Hummer is back. Blame falling oil prices. Sheesh.
Or, whatever you’d like to bring up.
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It’s unfortunate that many in the US won’t take note of the centennial of the Great War until 2017, when the 100th anniversary of official American involvement takes place. Compared to the major European powers, we got out of the First World War pretty easy. Considering the impact the conflict had on the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st, we here in the US would do well to study it along with the rest of the world, rather than opt to take notice on the centennial of our decision to jump into the fray.
As I commented on The State, the percentage of winners selected is really meaningless. A) Because most of the races that were endorsed were a foregone conclusion and B) there is the misguided notion that The State’s opinion is either “right” or influencing voters because the winning percentage is high. It’s neither. It’s an opinion.
As I also said on The State comments, after four years of hammering Haley and pumping up Sheheen by The State, he did much worse than last time — indicating that the influence of the endorsement is negligible at the very best.
This is another one of those cases where people throw numbers around as if they have some meaning – when it is just a number. It’s A divided by B. It doesn’t measure anything EXCEPT that The State often endorses politicians (mostly incumbents) who get re-elected in non-competitive races. The only two races that really matter in terms of endorsements are President and Governor. The Senate will always go to a Republican. What’s the winning percentage on those races over the past twenty years?
My winning percentage for picking which day will be colder between Christmas and Fourth of July is 100%. That must mean I have a strong understanding of weather patterns.
When I suggest wearing a parka and mittens (Sheheen) on Labor Day (Haley) then I don’t seem so smart.
Doug, you are entirely missing the point, in two ways.
The accusation is that people we endorse lose, and lose BECAUSE we endorse them. Yes, that’s an idiotic thing to say, but people say it to us ALL THE TIME. It’s the one comment we are most likely to hear from anyone if the subject of endorsements come up.
Well, they DON’T lose, and they certainly don’t lose because we endorsed them. And that’s the point of writing a piece pointing out the obvious.
Secondly, there is no claim that The State got it “right” because its endorsees won. It’s not about making predictions. They can’t be either “right” or “wrong.”
There’s a secondary point in pointing these things out — there’s an accusation that we get that’s related to the other one, specifically, that the paper is “out of touch” with its community, that the endorsements reflect a value system badly out of sync with that of the community.
Which is obviously not the case. Which brings me to another error you make — thinking that it’s some important point that many of these people were in safe seats. That means nothing, in terms of the purpose in writing such a piece. The point is that we prefer candidates A, B and C, and obviously the voters do, too. Both the points that I, and now Cindi, have tried to make in these pieces — that our candidates seldom lose, and (secondarily) that the community has the tendency to look at it much the way we do — are entirely supported.
The points that you seem to THINK we’re trying to make are immaterial.
Finally, let me address this since you bring it up so often — we have never at any time claimed that endorsements have an appreciable impact on outcomes. At least, not one that would be so simple and obvious as, “We endorse A, and A gets elected, in spite of the fact he was expected not to.”
No, the point is to express our opinion, consistent with all the opinions we state on issues in the times between elections, about which person would be better, and most importantly, WHY we think so. The point is to make readers think about these reasons before voting. The voter may reject the reasoning, but at least he has to take a moment of discernment to make that decision. It’s about getting the voter to stop a moment and THINK about the choice (the opposite situation from pulling a party lever), whatever decision he or she may make in the end.
The whole point of the editorial page is to make people a little smarter about the issues and people in the news. The reader doesn’t have to agree with us, but if he or she reads the editorial, that takes his or her mental processing of the matter beyond what it would be from reading a news story alone.
It’s about goading people to cogitate, ruminate, discern. Giving them some fodder to chew on mentally.
We’d LIKE them to agree with us. But even if they chew it over and then spit it out, something positive is achieved.
Notice how much trouble I have with tenses and with possessive pronouns in writing about something like this?
I KNOW I’m not at the paper any more. But I can’t stop thinking of the editorial board, and/or the newspaper industry, as “we.” Especially since Cindi and Warren have not, in any way, deviated to the path we followed when I was there. They are carrying out policy we arrived at when I was their editor. The continuity is such that I feel ownership of what they’re doing — especially in an instance such as this, when Cindi is writing, almost word for word, a column I always wrote after elections when I was there.
It’s like I’m a little unhinged in time. Or, you may prefer to say, just a little unhinged…
I think I made it pretty clear that the endorsements don’t impact voting in any way, win or lose.
My beef is with presenting a percentage of winners number as having some meaning. It doesn’t mean a thing. It’s just a number. My business is understanding numbers and key performance indicators (KPI’s) and that one doesn’t pass the sniff test of having any value.
Explain to me in simple terms what the number MEANS. If the number was higher, what would that MEAN? If the number was lower, what would that MEAN?
The editorial board expressed an opinion on which candidate was better. That’s it’s job. Great. But there is no metric to measure the VALUE of that opinion — at least not one Cindi or you have attempted to present. Just say “we endorsed people who won”. Don’t attempt to quantify the unquantifiable.
If you want me to come up with an actual metric to measure the impact of The State’s endorsements, let’s do that. But you’d need polling data prior to and immediately after the endorsement and a sample population that only included people who read the paper.
My paternal grandfather served in France during WW1: in Co. C and, later, the Machine Gun Co. of the 118th Rgt., 30th Infantry Division, composed largely of former national guard units from SC, NC and TN, filled out with new recruits from other parts of the country. The 30th, together with the 27th Division (which included the so-called “Silk Stocking” regiment of well-to-do New Yorkers), were the only two American divisions to serve alongside the British and Australians, first at Ypres and then in the Somme, rather than with the bulk of US forces further east in the Meuse-Argonne. I was still in diapers when he died, so I never knew him. But I later became the only member of my family to travel to the places in Belgium and in Picardy where he served.
I’m told he seldom spoke about the war.
My father-in-law, who died last December, was born the day after the Armistice, and was the only relative until I get to uncles who also served (but saw no combat) in World War II, the last war that had a cross-section of society to serve. Despite having no qualifications other than degrees in English literature, the first Professor Fenner was made an officer in the Navy, and commanded a ship off the coast of Alaska! Class mattered then…. He managed to get the anchor chain fused to the propeller with a bone-headed “too-clever-by-half” maneuver, the day his commission expired….
A first cousin joined the Marines in the 60s to get an education. That’s it for veterans in my Yankee family. My dad got a deferment because he worked for the Savannah River Laboratory, “fighting” the Cold War.
My Dad fought the Cold War from the bridges of various ships — and on river patrol boats and in helicopters in the mangrove swamps of the Rung Sat Special Zone, a.k.a., the Forest of Assassins.
The closest he came to not coming home was when a Huey he was on was trying to land on platform towed by a PBR up the river. The pilot decided his approach was bad and started to pull up and bank away, when suddenly he veered over and the chopper went on its side straight into the river and immediately sank to the bottom. Just before going under, my Dad yelled to everyone not to get out until the rotors had stopped turning. After it hit the bottom, he had to struggle a moment to untangle himself from his seat belt. When he got to the surface, he was by far the last man out. The pilot’s body was never found. By the way they had keeled over, it was thought he was hit by enemy fire from the bank.
My Dad was bleeding from both ears. This is believed to be related to his hearing problems today.
My late father-in-law, several years older than my Dad, was a member of the ill-fated 106 Infantry Division. Like his comrades, he was overrun and captured at the Battle of the Bulge, and spent the rest of the war in a German Stalag.
I’ve told these stories before, but this seems like a good day to repeat them.
Oh, and the only connection I know that I have to the First War is that one of my maternal grandmother’s brothers was gassed while Over There, and he never fully recovered. He died long before I was born…
My father’s uncle fought under Kaiser Wilhelm II , long before he was Kaiser. Had the spiked helmet, and wore it to the corner tavern regularly. During and after WW I, they converted the popular “Germany Day”–in this completely German area of Buffalo, NY, to Austria Day…then during WW II, had to make it Switzerland Day.
but no one was interned. #whiteprivilege
And because they weren’t, some of them were able to answer the Fatherland’s call and go home to serve the Third Reich.
None of your relatives, of course. But there were German-Americans who did that…
Which is my way of saying that, as horribly unfair as the Japanese internment was, as much crazy paranoia there was in this country after Pearl Harbor, and as completely unjust as it was to individual Japanese-Americans, there actually WAS a logical reason for it. An overblown concern, perhaps, but it wasn’t irrational. We didn’t go, “Let’s lock up Japanese people just because they don’t have round eyes like ours.” Which is the way some people tend to represent it.
I wish we hadn’t done it. And yeah, racism — the “otherness” of the interned — made it easier. But I don’t accept “racism” as a sufficient rationale for explaining it.
Brad, anti-Asian racism on the West Coast in that era – since the Gold Rush days – was nearly as bad as the racism and Jim Crow laws of the South. No one was afraid entire families of children, parents and grandparents were going to go to Japan to fight. That’s just nonsense. Whether people feared “fifth column” action is another thing – but one proven to have been entirely in the head’s of the fearful, and greedy, whites. These American citizens were interned – and their property often seized – simply out of racist fear/exploitive opportunity.
How about the soldiers who volunteered to fight in Europe while their families were interned in camps? Those soldiers deserve to be remembered today by this country.
It amazes me the way that people go around blythely disparaging others without any apparent awareness that they are doing it (or care, frankly). This isn’t a personal observation – we were just talking about this very same impulse about the denigration of the responsibilities, and rights, of fatherhood.
The First War remains a big mystery to me.
I feel such an affinity with the WWII generation, even though it was long before I was born and my parents were too young to serve. I understand that world. When I read about it or see a well-done movie about it, I feel at home. I can identify with those people, and I get what’s happening and why.
The First War, though, just seems alien. It was the time when the modern world, the 20th century, sort of got started, but it hadn’t taken a recognizable form yet, and it replaced something quite alien to me. It was a confused time, with the last cavalry charges going up against machine guns. It’s like even the people involved were confused about what century they were in.
I’ve never really read an entire history book on that conflict, and need to. But several years ago, when I tried reading John Keegan’s overview, I lost interest after a few chapters. Just too many people and institutions I was unfamiliar with; I found it hard to find a place to grab ahold of it.
Strange — I don’t have that trouble so much with the Civil War, or the Napoleonic Wars. But the Great War just seems so befuddled. I have trouble answering the “why we fight” question for anyone involved…
I studied the causes of WW I extensively in an honors class taught by the amazing John Scott Wilson at USC. I did not care about the causes of any war, but he made everything so fascinating, I took every course he offered, and earned a double major accidentally. Great teachers are worth it.
Wish I could have taken the course.
I, too, got a second major in history, and quite inadvertently.
I tested out of so many requirements — foreign language (because of my Spanish) and math — that I had lots of room for electives, and I loaded up on history, political science, and (to a lesser extent) English and American literature courses.
When I was just over a semester away from graduating, I realized I was two 3-hour courses away from a history major. So I took U.S. Social and Intellectual History after 1865, and then its companion course (before 1865) over the summer before I graduated in August. Two of my favorite courses ever…
By the way, one of MY favorite courses — U.S. Social and Intellectual History before 1865 — was also taught by a Prof. Wilson.
Major Wilson. No, not an Army rank. That was his name. Like Major Major in Catch-22.
He was great — a learned man with a thick Arkansas accent, who engaged his subject with gusto.
He would pose a rhetorical question to us and pause, watching us for a few seconds while the tension built, before crying out “per contra!”
Which was particularly wonderful because of his accent. The Latin phrase came out “pair CONE- truh”…
I took that in a sort of Maymester course between the spring semester and the summer sessions. We had three hours of lecture every day for three weeks, with a heavy load of reading between lectures.
THAT’S the way to study something. No distractions. Total focus on the subject…
Have you read The Guns of August?
I’ve a handful of books on WWI, but that one stands above all the rest.
No.
And yeah, the problem may have been Keegan’s approach or style.
I never finished reading his “Intelligence in War,” either. I read the parts about the British Navy tracking Napoleon’s fleet to the Nile, and Stonewall Jackson making textbook use of local knowledge to run the Yankees ragged in western Virginia, but never finished it.
I read and enjoyed the first book of his I read, “A History of Warfare.” But I haven’t finished one of his books since…
I suspect the reason for our greater sense of affinity for WW2 has to do with the many movies made about America and Americans in that war and how often they’ve been shown over the years. Not so with WW1 — about which just a bare handful have been made (the most recent, I believe, being The Lost Battalion, from 2001). Then, too, our participation in WW1 was comparatively brief (really only about half a year of active fighting), not the long bleeding it was for the other major players.
I have to say, however, that I’ve grown to feel much closer to the WW1 generation than most, in part because of my interest in that paternal grandfather and my travel to the battlefields in France as well as through all the reading I’ve done in recent years — mainly for a book I’ve been working on (finished, actually, but not published). But despite all my reading (or maybe because of it), I still don’t have a single volume I could recommend. I, too, found Keegan’s book a bit of a dud. Martin Gilbert’s The First World War, A Complete History is somewhat better. But it’s difficult to point to any one thing — especially one that might give a succinct answer to the question, “why we fight”. Gordon Corrigan’s Mud, Blood and Poppycock and Samuel Hynes’s A War Imagined take up the issue of how the war was and is remembered — arguably for us now one of the most interesting aspects of the event.
Movies played a role, but there’s more to it than that. WWII formed the world I grew up in. It drew the lines for the Cold War. It set the stage for the Civil Rights movement.
I got the reasons why everyone was fighting; I could see why it was happening (in some ways more clearly than those fighting it, since I had the advantage of hindsight).
Movies often led us astray (so many WWII movies in the 60s seemed designed to make the war seem like great FUN), but I had plenty of other influences to help set me straight. I was a big reader of fiction in my youth, and for a period when I was in high school, every novel I read was about the war, or set during the war. I just felt a part of it.
We have come to view the First World War as an endless bloody slog through a pit of grim horrors — Passchendaele writ large. And it was that. But reading what was written at the time by those who took part in it makes it clear that the experience was more multifaceted than that. For some it did indeed include elements of fun. While for the vast majority it was like most military experiences: long periods of tedium and silly routine broken by flashes of existential epiphany.
Of course, there would be as many different perspectives on the war as there were people involved in it — and their individual perceptions would vary from moment to moment.
I was impressed by a quote I read once about D-Day… the battle was so intense, so concentrated, and there was so much going on, with thousands of men trying to struggle their way out of the water and across a beach that had been presighted, every square inch of it, with artillery, mortars and machine guns, a man desperately hugging the ground in one spot experienced a completely different battle from another man 50 feet away. It was a shared experience, but also something intensely personal and isolated, with each man surrounded by his own cocoon of noise, activity, blood, confusion and terror…
My grandfather was in WWI and I inherited his medals,unit history, papers, and souviniers he brought back. His unit held active reunions with original members until the mid-1980’s. For me WWI was the “big one.” My dad’s cousins and my great uncles fought in WWII. They were everywhere. The WWI vets were vanishing. The reunions were held on a mountain in Pennsylvania. Cabins had calender pinups from the 1920’s, papers from France, and working (but rusty) monitor top refrigerators. There was a big, old handpump that dispensed icy, iron water into an ancient bathtub outside. They even had a beat up old victrola in the mess hall. The war was distant put still palpable. We had to steel ourselves to run inside the sagging creosoted building to fetch the fuse cartridges for the powerbox when we got there. I remember during one reunion around 1985 a skunk walked into the building at 2 a.m. illuminated by yellow bug lights as the members and guests played cards and yelled under the shanty. He ate from the sandwich meat spread outon the counter. They were giants.
My dad’s hearing problems are probably related to his service, too. All that bridge-playing at lunch in the corner of the lab. Rough duty.
Thank your father for his service for me!
I have family members that have served in every branch but the Coast Guard. My late father was in the Army and then National Guard for over 30 years. My great-uncle was a Marine, and one of the Chosin Few. Wounded three times. Cousins were in the first Gulf War in the Navy and Airborne, and one has been deployed with the National Guard five times.
The poppy display at the Tower of London really epitomizes the impact WWI had on the British psyche, as opposed to minimal remembrance here. http://poppies.hrp.org.uk/about-the-installation
It’s a stunning display.
When we lived in Maine, I played in several bands, who would play the Armed Forces Salute at every remotely opportune concert. It is a medley of all the songs of the various branches of service, and every service person or widow(er) of one was encouraged to stand during the playing of their branch’s song. The vast majority of Mainers appeared to have served in the Coast Guard (Semper Paratis)
I saw the poppy display on an elevator video screen. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was London. It was pretty powerful. Learning its meaning was kind of heart-breaking, even after all these years.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Back when I taught ELA, this poem was always part of my Veterans Day lesson plans (along with Dulce et Decorum Est). Great for not only teaching about WWI and why we celebrate Veterans Day, but for teaching poetic voice–there were always a few kids who visibly reacted when they realized it was the Dead who were talking.
I’m the first male on my father’s side not to be in the Army (and be deployed) since at least going back to WWI. Every so often, I feel a twinge of regret in breaking the chain.
Basically, I’m Lt. Dan from Forrest Gump, if Lt. Dan had decided to go to law school instead of join the Army.
Dammit, Gump, I TOLD you to leave me there! But you disobeyed orders and carried me to law school, so I didn’t achieve my DESTINY!…
My Pa was in WW2. My dad was in the Army Reserves for 22 years.
Both continually discouraged me from going into the military- and I followed their advice.
An interesting response from John McCain in a new interview published on Salon.com:
On the topic of immigration reform…
“Would you be OK, then, with the plan David Axelrod recently floated — the president gives Congress a deadline to send him a bill and then does the executive order, if need be, after that?”
McCain: Frankly, whether I happen to like it or not, that would give a significant, I think, advantage to the president, P.R.-wise.
Digest that response for a minute. He won’t answer the question because of the P.R. impact to Obama.
We are SOOOO lucky he picked Palin and screwed the pooch on the election in 2004.
http://www.salon.com/2014/11/11/exclusive_john_mccain_unloads_to_salon_on_ted_cruz_isis_and_repealing_obamacare/
My Grandfather died a couple of years ago. He was a Navy medic in WWII. He used the GI Bill to get his college degree after the war then obtained a commission in the newly formed USAF. He flew in Korea and Vietnam. We knew how he was trapped behind Chinese lines on the Yalu River when they entered the war ( he was part of a new unit called the Mosquitos who conducted forward air control). It was not until after his death that we found diaries detailing how many times he went ashore at Normandy to give aid and retrieve wounded from the beaches. He was an amazing man and I am proud that I followed his example as a career military member as well.
Thanks for sharing, Jeff! But FYI, remember that while the Army called them “medics,” in the Navy they were “corpsmen”… Since I grew up in the Navy, I grew up thinking that’s just what you called male medical personnel who weren’t doctors…
My paternal grandfather died a few years before I was born. He had severe rheumatoid arthritis when he returned from fighting in France in World War I. An Emory medical school grad, he always maintained that his RA was the result of something contracted in the trenches during the war. He was told that was nonsense, that RA was not a disease caused by an organism. He persisted in his belief, saying that the timing and nature of the onset of symptoms left no doubt in his mind of the connection. The current Mayo Clinic on-line statement on the disease: “Doctors don’t know what starts this process, although a genetic component appears likely. While your genes don’t actually cause rheumatoid arthritis, they can make you more susceptible to environmental factors — such as infection with certain viruses and bacteria — that may trigger the disease.” So, now the prevailing theory is that he was basically right. I don’t think that would have consoled him much.
A Soldier’s Things-Tom Waits
Brad, go down to the Richland County Library and check out the audiobook “World War l: The Great War and the World It Made,” by British historian John Ramsden. Ramsden does a wonderful job of putting the war and its impact on the 20th century in perspective, and is full of anecdotes and remembrances that bring the war to life. I’ve read or listened to a number of works on World War I and it remains among my favorites.
Ah, if only I COULD check things out from Richland County Library…
Have you been banished?
Not banished. Never admitted. Because I live in Lexington County.
It’s completely inconvenient for me ever to use the branches of the LexCo library, whereas I pass by the main RichCo library a couple of times every day, and as you know, it’s across the street from my church.
I wish the two counties would work out a deal whereby the taxes I pay for libraries in my county would transfer across the river so that I could use the library that is most available to me.
I used to gripe about this arrangement, about the arbitrary divisions in this politically fragmented community and how they kept me from using what ought to be MY library, to the point that on my 50th birthday, the editorial staff chipped in and bought me one of those guest memberships for a year. They did this to be nice, for sure, but even more to shut me up. That was when I started reading O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels, the ones I love so much, checking them out one by one from Richland Library.
That was nice. For a year…
You have family members who live in county. Would they not lend you their card?
Before we put this topic behind us, I’ll share two more things:
First, this reflection by the late Christopher Hitchens on Rudyard Kipling and the ambiguous sacrifice of war.
Second, this picture of my father-in-law in uniform, posted on Facebook by his youngest son, a few months before he was captured in the Ardennes…