Category Archives: History

Is this what the end of a great civilization looks like?

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As a kid, I thought of societal collapse in terms of the fall of Rome.

As you know, I’ve been fascinated by history my whole life (and I still fail to understand why everyone else isn’t). Not as a profession, more of an avocation. I’m into it the way some people are into football. I earned a second major in it at Memphis State, completely by accident — I just took that many elective courses in the subject. (I had time for them for a number of reasons, including the fact that I didn’t go to football games.)

And ever since I was a kid, I’ve been somewhat morbidly interested in one of history’s most ominous questions: What would it be like to live in a great, thriving civilization that you deeply loved, and you were seeing it falling apart all around you?

I generally framed it in terms of Rome. It ruled the known world for centuries (despite a form of government that seems unstable at every point at which I’ve studied it), and then it was just gone. Suddenly, Rome is in the hands of barbarians, the last legion has pulled out of Britain, and all of Western Europe has sunk into chaotic darkness, ruled by local warlords of one sort or another.

But lately, I’ve gotten interested more in other collapses of great cultures, such as, say, the British Empire. It exceeded the Roman in geographic breadth and possibly global cultural hegemony (the adoption of English as the current lingua franca, for instance), so its collapse from what it was in Victoria’s day is pretty remarkable. But it still isn’t as complete or as crushing as the Roman fall (I was there last summer, and London still seemed to be thriving), and when I was in school my teachers didn’t cover it. Too recent, I suppose. And no barbarians have yet succeeded the Windsors.

At the moment, though, I’ve been fascinated by an earlier event on that sceptered isle. I’ve been listening to a wonderful (not only informative, but entertaining) podcast called The Rest is History, and I’ve been entralled by several episodes dealing with the events of 1066 (“the most important year in English history”), including what led up to it, and the details of the final erasure of real English (that is to say, Anglo-Saxon) rule. The last episode was the denouement, “The Battle of Hastings.” (But wait! I see there’s a fourth episode after that: “The Norman Conquest.” What joy. Unless, of course, you’re a Saxon.)

And remember last year when I suddenly discovered, to my great embarrassment, the Late Bronze Age Collapse? Well, I’m digging deeper into that now by reading a book about it, titled 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Not that all of it — the attacks of the Sea Peoples, havoc caused by global warming, etc. — happened in that one year. It took awhile. I’m simultaneously studying the same period, or a bit later, from a different angle through James Kugel’s How to Read the Bible. (Turns out those Philistines who keep coming up in the Old Testament were actually Sea People. Who knew?)

You’ll notice I’m looking into collapses a bit more intently recently. You can probably figure out why. I haven’t paid all that much attention lately to stuff that’s happened since about a millennium ago. And considering what’s happening now, I haven’t missed too much that would give me joy.

When I was a kid, past collapses were an idle interest, and not very threatening — compared to, say, nuclear annihilation. In the 1950s and ’60s, I was growing up in a country and a period that was more firmly stable than anything I could see in the past. We were at the peak of an arc that started, as many reckoned it, with the Magna Carta in 1215. Several centuries later the process soared to previously unknown heights with the drafting and adoption of the U.S. Constitution — which was almost immediately a success, but would go through another two centuries of gradual perfection, with particularly big leaps during the presidential tenures of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and yes, Lyndon Johnson. The strains and splits that emerged in the 1960s were to me dramatic demonstrations of how resilient this rational and humane rule of, by and for the people really was. We carried on, and saw our Cold War adversaries do the collapsing.

We didn’t have an empire in the usual historical sense (despite all that nattering you heard in the ’60s), but since 1945 our global influence — and responsibility (that thing that so many on both the left and right now spit upon) — exceeded that of any emperor who ever sat upon a throne. I continue to love those stories of the incomparable Royal Navy in the Napoleonic era, but Lords Nelson and Cochrane, and my fictional hero Jack Aubrey, would have had to cut and run in the face of the Service in which my father served.

I read a lot of Mad magazines in the mid-’60s, and that’s fitting. If anyone had mentioned societal collapse to me in 1965, I’d have said, “What, me worry?”

And now, this. All this stuff going on around us, in this beautiful country and throughout the West — in fact, throughout all the developed countries that a reasonable person might have wrongly, but reasonably, assumed were beyond such societal pratfalls as we read about in history books.

Do I have to detail all the evidence of collapse all around us as our liberal republican-democracy just goes “poof” in practically an instant? That shouldn’t be necessary. I take it most of you are paying more attention than I am to the daily nightmare.

Just last week, Donald the Unready destroyed $10 trillion in weath in this country and others, on an idiotic whim (idiotic whims being the only kind for which he possesses a certain genius). A lot of people had voted for him with one of the favorite slogans of people who understand neither government nor business on their lips: “Run Government Like a Business.” I saw a crack about that on social media in recent days. I can’t remember who said it, but it doesn’t matter, because the observation was so obvious that attribution seems unnecessary. (Actually, quite a few said it on Twitter.) Something like “They didn’t know he was going to run it like one of HIS businesses.” Of course, they had no excuse for not knowing, since they’d been warned a million times since 2016 — they just disregarded anyone who told them, because it didn’t fit within the fantasy in which they so fervently believed.

Of course, a few days back, Trump did his Emily Litella routine — “Never mind!” So everything’s OK, right? Well, no. There’s this thing that a functioning society needs leaders not only to project, but embody: stability. In the business world, “uncertainty” is a scary word. It keeps businesses from planning, growing, creating jobs, and all the rest.

Expect more surprise attacks on global financial growth and stability. Just as a garnish on top of his usual shtick of abandoning allies and hugging bad guys abroad, and pouring gasoline on ANY fire that serves to divide us at home.

Now let me pause to say what it’s always necessary to keep in mind, if we can stand to be that depressed: Trump isn’t the problem. The problem is that a majority of people in this country have so lost sight of what has always made America great (not just that — they’ve simply lost common sense) that they would actually vote for someone like that — repeatedly.

And just to make sure I tick off everybody, no one on the left should be nodding smugly at this point. If we had a Democratic Party capable of projecting an image of a strong, unified movement committed to principles and causes with broad appeal, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

I cite that book Sapiens a lot — not because I agree with everything Yuval Noah Harari says, but because when he’s right about something, he explains it well. And one thing he makes plain about what separates humans from other creatures and has enabled us to work together to advance to an extraordinary extent is the ability to coalesce around unifying ideas. We don’t have to all agree, but we need to embrace a consensus about certain basic principles. All successful human endeavors involving groups larger than, say, a troop of chimpanzees (somewhere between a couple of dozen individuals and a hundred) depends on that ability. It is in fact the one major thing that separates us from those other apes.

But quite suddenly, we have lost that special gift. Now we can’t even agree on what facts are, much less work together effectively to change and shape a commonly perceived reality.

(At this point, I should point out to you that I’ve been thinking about writing this post since sometime last summer but have not for a reason that should by now be evident to you: It just takes too much time, and too many words. After about 1,500 of them, I’m really just getting into the meat of the problem. And I’ve been writing it, in short bursts at a time, for two or three days. I’ll redouble my efforts to get to the end as quickly as possible…)

How do we pull out of this nose dive? I have no idea, which is one reason I haven’t written much on our current plight, and have spent more and more time on the distant past.

As elusive as solutions might be, it’s somewhat easier to diagnose the problem. I refer you back to every post I’ve written in the last couple of years that uses the term “Rabbit Hole.” You should probably start with this one.

Of course, now some of you are warming up your intense objections to the Rabbit Hole thesis. Some of your fave arguments are:

  • That I’m ignoring all the things that led up to the current situation. No, I’m not. I would never. The thing is, every major development has antecedents. The creators of those works I mention above touting 1177 B.C. and 1066, know full well that a great deal led up to those pivotal dates. For instance, England had been invaded successfully by non-Anglo Saxons exactly a half-century before 1066. (Check out King Cnut‘s big takeover in 1016.) But nothing so decisively changed the present and the entire future as what happened at Hastings in October 1066. And it was all quite sudden, as Harold Godwinson would tell you if he could. A similar book or podcast or whatever addressing what I’m talking about in this post would have “2016” in the title. That doesn’t mean a lot of it hadn’t already happened by that time, or that it isn’t still developing now. But that year was pivotal. It’s when some definitive disaster fell — a disaster that would have been impossible at any previous time in this one nation’s history. (Of course, this one nation isn’t the whole story of that year. Remember Brexit? The collapse of the Trans-Pacific Partnership? The election of Duterte in the Philippines?)
  • That Brad has a helluva nerve trying to tell you that the end of newspapers and its replacement by technology that could be (and pretty much always is) programmed to always tell you what you want to hear plays a huge role in the Decline of the West. Does he really think we’re too stupid to see the utter transparency of such self-interested pleading of a has-been career newspaper editor? No, he doesn’t. But he’s still confident in making that assertion, whether you accept it or not, precisely because of his extensive experience communicating all day every day in both eras.

So, those objections having been dealt with, I’ll get back to my premise…

The thing is, evolution grinds slowly — very slowly. It took many tens of thousand of years after humans got clever before they settled down to farm life, which led to the development of cities, kingdoms, empires, money, and writing, along with a gazillion other things. That started about 12,000 years ago, and we haven’t fully adjusted well to the changes. This very recent development is a big reason obesity is such a problem. Any hunter-gatherer with initiative stuffed himself with as many calories as he could, whenever he could. He had to. Now that most folks in developed countries can gorge themselves on sweets and other carbs without limit, our brains still haven’t completely evoved to the point that we understand that we shouldn’t. (Other creatures have to mutate for big things to happen. It is both the great advantage and flaw of humans that we just go ahead and change, and don’t wait around for new hardware and software to be installed.)

So consider what happens if you live in a modern liberal democracy with a deliberative system built to allow people to engage in lively disagreements, but do so in a manner that still allows for, even encourages, effective, amicable solutions. And then, all of a sudden, practically no one seems to believe in the abstractions necessary to such a system — the rule of law, the peaceful transfer of power, pluralism, Voltaire’s “I disagree with what you say…” principle, liberal democracy itself, all of it. They’ve all suddenly gone “poof,” in what amounts to a microsecond in evolutionary terms. (Of course, despite the words that follow, it wasn’t just our beloved technology that did this to us. There’s the classic American attitude that history is, as Henry Ford said, bunk. We are not a grounded people, in terms of internalizing the most important principles we have inherited.)

The internet, and a decade later social media, made it possible for the first time in human history for a sad, maladjusted person (and there are millions who fit this description on the planet; it’s not just that one guy) to communicate instantaneously with thousands (out of billions, a statistical fact in which we once could take comfort) of other people just as deluded as he is, and he and they become instantly convinced that they must not be crazy, because so many people agree! He, and every one of those thousands, now possess greater power to publish their musings than anyone previously in the history of written communication — and to do so instantly, and to the entire planet at once.

Consider the case of RFK Jr. In previous decades, he would simply have been (and I suppose was, up until recently) the embarrassing secret of a great American family. But today, he can in short order find himself leading an army of anti-vaxxers, and eventually become United States Secretary of Health and Human Services. In what previous time, since the U.S. Constitution was drafted, was such a thing possible? (Sure, the sadly lacking, even demented, son of a prince might once have raised an army and taken the throne, but isn’t one of the main points of this country the fact that we’ve put that sort of thing behind us? We had, and now suddenly it’s back.)

As a people, we have by and large simply turned our backs on the great American experiment. We were not overrun by Sea Peoples or other enemies. No Vesuvius went off and buried our cities in ash. We did it as whimsically, and unnecessarily, as Trump erased that $10 trillion in market value. We didn’t even do it consciously, near as I can tell. We just did it. And to the extent we’re conscious of the damage wrought, we’ve blamed it on those other guys (who used to be our fellow Americans).

How long will it take for our species to find its way through this unforeseen shock? How long will it take us to adapt, if we do?

I do not know. When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, it was the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic. Europe would not see another republic for 1,000 years. And that didn’t involve a new technological development that outstripped the human capacity to think clearly.

Am I saying things are hopeless? Nope. I’m not giving up. It’s not in my nature. Remember, I’m the guy who set aside everything he was doing to try to unseat an incumbent white Republican in South Carolina in 2018 — two years after that ominous date mentioned above.

But at the moment, I’m sort of out of ideas as to how we pull out of this. I suppose I’ll come up with something — that is, we’ll come up with something. I’m just describing the situation: that technology and our weaker tendencies have already done something to our cognitive abilities that we were not ready for. And mind you, AI hasn’t even gotten warmed up. Anyway, that’s my diagnosis over the last few months. Beyond that, I’m hearing a paucity of ideas regarding effective remedies.

But I’ll keep listening. There are plenty of smart people out there, even though it’s often hard to tell at the moment. And if I think of something myself, I’ll give you a heads-up. You know me.

In the meantime, maybe some of y’all have an idea, one that has so far escaped notice, for how we can return to building a rational civilization together. But don’t waste your breaths, as some tend to do, telling me I’m wrong. I’m not. Boy, do I wish I were…

Here’s hoping you were among those viewers on Facebook

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Professor Johnston often said that if you didn’t know history, you didn’t  know anything. You were a leaf that didn’t know it was part of a tree.

— Timeline, by Michael Crichton

The book being quoted is no great work of literature. But I found the idea of a novel about historians who have the opportunity to go back in time irresistible, and I’ve read it more than once. And at least the book was way less lame than the movie it inspired.

But whatever the book’s shortcomings, that’s a great way of summarizing our nation’s greatest problem. Nothing could be truer than the idea being set forth with that analogy. Tragically, we live in a world densely crowded with such trees, bearing such leaves. And since the leaves have no idea they are part of a tree, they don’t have the slightest indication that the forest exists, or what maintains it and has caused it to flourish to this point.

Only in a world like this could a man like Donald Trump be taken seriously for any position. But whatever his shortcomings, his emergence as a perceived leader in the minds of millions points to the larger problem — the sickness of ignorance that has infested the whole tree. Because only people who have no notion of the origins of this country and the principles that made it great, people who have no idea how important this liberal democracy is to the entire world (and don’t care), could possibly turn this precious country over to him.

But don’t those of you on the “left” read that last paragraph with smugness in your hearts. You’ve got serious perceptive issues yourselves. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be just as eager as the Trumpistas to elect a majority plus one so you can cram your agenda down the throats of the despised other side. That’s because you’d understand that this is supposed to be a deliberative republic in which we sit down with people who disagree with us, speak and listen respectfully, and grow wiser as we work to achieve things together.

I learned about the faults of right and left during all those decades as a newspaper editor. Mike Burgess — remenber Mike from the last post? — learns it every day in an even harsher environment. And he’s pretty sick of being battered constantly by the left and right, both wanting history taught in ways that advance their agendas.

Our nation is dying because it is awash in ignorance and apathy. Mike’s trying to address that with all his might. When he’s not teaching the kids at River Bluff High School, he’s traveling around our state addressing adults on the subject he spoke on today at Richland Library. This would be an uphill fight even if everyone were required to attend and listen, and do that rare and magical thing: think.

Which is why I say in the headline, I hope you saw and heard the video. Our turnout today was respectable, but not what it needed to be. However, our videographer came up to me as the event ended and said something like 300 people had watched on Facebook Live.

That’s very good news. They couldn’t ask questions, which Mike had saved half his time to allow them to do — and the folks present took full advantage of that. But it’s still very good. I wasn’t sure I had heard the number right, because of my hearing problems, and the fact that the program was over and a lot of people were talking at the same time.

But I checked on Facebook, and it appears that at least part of it has been seen now by 596 people. I hope some of y’all were among them. If not, here’s your chance:

Mike Burgess, 3/14/2025

(The little clip you see at the top of this post just shows a couple of random moments when I happened to turn my phone to video. It’s not a highlight or anything like that; I just figured it was better than a still picture.)

If you prefer to read, here’s a version of his speech, which he gives regularly.

Watch, or read, and let’s discuss it…

This was right at the beginning; a few more folks came in after this.

A great free lecture at Richland Library on Friday

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History teacher Mike Burgess speaking at the museum last year.

What does Brad do when he’s not blogging? Well, lots of stuff. Some of it involves work for ADCO‘s clients, one of which is the Relic Room.

For the past year I’ve been particularly wrapped up in a project I particularly enjoy, which is arranging, coordinating and publicizing the frequent live programs on military history that we call Noon Debriefs (they used to be called “Lunch and Learns,” but there was no actual lunch, so it was changed).

They are free lectures featuring such speakers as veterans, historians and others about some aspect of military history bearing on South Carolina. This is one of my favorite things to work on, because I always learn from them. They’ve been a bit of a challenge, though, since last June, since the room usually used for lectures at the museum has been tied up by renovations.

But that’s been an opportunity to reach out to the wider community, and Richland Library has generously let us use the Theater room at their main location, which is a fantastic venue for such programs. To simplify the transition, we relied at first on museum staff as speakers, but we’ve recently resumed our usual practice of having quest speakers from outside. There, we’ve presented such lectures as:

  • Joe Long, curator of education at the museum, on American POWs at the Hanoi Hilton, stressing prisoners with South Carolina connections. Video.
  • Joe again, talking about “The Unpronounceable Patriot,” Thaddeus Kosciuszko, and his SC involvement during the Revolutionary War.
  • On this past Veterans Day, Fritz Hamer, former curator of history at the Relic Room, spoke about the Battle of Ia Drang at that time of year in 1965. That’s the battle that the film “We Were Soldiers” was about. Video.
  • Joe again on “Wade Hampton’s Great Beefsteak Raid” in 1864, which may have been the biggest cattle-rustling episode in American history.
  • Moss Blachman (the first at the library with a guest speaker) on his experiences as an Air Force intelligence officer in Vietnam in 1965-66. This was a return engagement after a presentation Moss made at the museum last year. Video.

We’ve got another great guest speaker tomorrow at noon. Mike Burgess, who has in recent years been dubbed the best history teacher in the state more than once, will talk about the increasing difficulty of teaching the subject in public schools amid America’s roaring political battles over our past.

Mike addresses the subject quite fearlessly, as I can tell you based on the similar lecture he gave at the museum last year. And the past year, of course, has only made his job more difficult, as the Kulturkampf flames have been fanned ever higher.

Anyway, since his topic is the very nature of history itself, and why it is essential in a functioning republic, I figured this would be a good time to give y’all a heads-up on these programs. I assure you it will be an informative one.

We’ll continue to present such fascinating programs at Richland Library in the coming months, and perhaps even after we get the Education Room at the museum back. And in May, we’ll branch out further, with a couple of programs at the Cayce/West Columbia Branch of Lexington County Libary.

If you want to learn, as I have been doing, come on out. Oh, and we’ve started offering something extra the last few times — a free tour of the Relic Room itself, following the program. If you haven’t been to the museum before, you should definitely take advantage of that. I particularly urge you to check out the Vietnam exhibit in the Cistern Gallery (which is one reason so many of our recent programs have emphasized the experiences of South Carolina veterans in the conflict)….

Moss Blachman spoke at the library Feb. 14 about serving as an intelligence officer in Vietnam.

I am so abysmally ignorant

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The Washington Post shared this, courtesy of the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

Would someone please give me a pile of money — that pile that Walter White gave to the Schwartzes should be enough — so I can support my family, but spend the rest of my life studying?

The thing is, I am so abysmally ignorant. I’m not talking about neo-Boolean math, or how to perform a bypass on a beating heart. I’m happy to leave those things to people who have devoted their lives to those areas. (And yes, I know someone right here in Columbia who can perform a bypass with the heart still beating. It leaves me in awe.) I’m thinking right now of something that has fascinated me, and drawn my energy and attention, for my whole life — history.

I’ve mentioned this a number of times, usually with regard to recent history. I constantly find that there are big, important things I don’t know about periods I’ve really concentrated on at various points — the early days of this young republic of ours, or even the Second World War.

But there are entire periods of history — things that had as much, or nearly as much, impact on the world as, say, the centuries of disorder in Europe after the collapse of Rome — about which I know nothing. Not just very little, but nothing.

And I’m not talking about ancient China, or anything that we westerners normally neglect. I’m talking about things that are fairly essential to understanding how Western civilization came about.

I’ve come to realize this more as my attention has drifted away from the headlines of the moment, and more to the overall sweep of human history. For instance, the lede story today in The Washington Post was about what polls say about the presidential election. Well, I didn’t read that. Y’all know how sick and tired I am of “journalists” trying vainly to predict the future — in great detail. They should devote their extremely limited resources to reporting and increasing understanding of what is happening and has happened, and if they are opinion writers, stick to trying to express what should happen, not what they think will happen…

But I don’t want to get off on that tangent. I want to talk about the story that did interest me — the one about that sword you see above. It’s pretty fascinating. An excerpt:

More than 3,000 years ago, a long bronze sword emblazoned with the insignia of Ancient Egypt’s Ramses II — the most powerful pharaoh of the era — was set down in a mud hut somewhere in the Nile Delta.

A team of archaeologists digging up an ancient fort in the area spotted the bronze blade and cleaned it, revealing this month they had found a shimmering blade with the intricacies of an ornamental cartouche — the personal emblem used by the pharoahs — still visible. It had not lost its reflective shine under the layers of rust and grime accumulated over millennia….

My first thought was to send out a tweet with a wisecrack like “I suppose those swords weren’t much help with the Red Sea crashing down upon the pharoah’s troops.” Because Ramses II was the pharoah Moses dealt with. I figured that even people as ignorant as I am would get that.

But I didn’t do that. Because the next second, I thought, “Bronze? Was the Bronze age still going on at the point?” So I started looking things up, mostly on Wikipedia (criticize Wikipedia all you want, but if you’re looking for basics — when and where, and a rough idea of how this fits into the overall human saga — it can’t be beat).

And I found that the lengthy reign of Ramses II was at the tail end of the Bronze Age. Reading on, I learned that that period ended more dramatically than with a technological development (iron). You have to look more broadly at something called the Late Bronze Age Collapse:

The Late Bronze Age collapse was a time of widespread societal collapse during the 12th century BC associated with environmental change, mass migration, and the destruction of cities. The collapse affected a large area of the Eastern Mediterranean (North Africa and Southeast Europe) and the Near East, in particular Egypt, eastern Libya, the Balkans, the Aegean, Anatolia, and, to a lesser degree, the Caucasus…

And I’m like, what the what? The next sentence confuses me more:

It was sudden, violent, and culturally disruptive for many Bronze Age civilizations, and it brought a sharp economic decline to regional powers, notably ushering in the Greek Dark Ages…

Nope. I had no idea the Greeks — the West’s ultimate trendsetters — just couldn’t wait for the rest of Europe, and went ahead and had their own Dark Ages about 1,700 years earlier.

I mean, I sort of knew that the Greeks’ heyday was in the past by the time the Romans took the baton, but I hadn’t ever thought about how that decline happened.

(Of course, of course, of course, when you click on that Greek Dark Ages link above, you find that “Currently, the term Greek Dark Ages is being abandoned.” You know that had to happen, right? That’s what experts do. Somehow they sense I’m about to learn and maybe even to some extent understand something, and decide that they’ll start calling it something else.)

So how did this Late Bronze Age Collapse happen? Well, there were a bunch of causes, such as the Sea Peoples. And here we are again. I had never heard of these Sea Peoples. And yet they were a major thorn in the side of the established order.

So who were they? Well, there the record is pretty scarce, and the “experts” don’t know exactly. I find this a bit reassuring. They set themselves up as the authorities on the Sea Peoples, and don’t know much more than I do.

But at least they’d heard of them. I really, really need to find more time to study…

Where’s the time for it, though? Human life is so absurdly short…

‘Historic?’ More of a footnote, but pretty interesting…

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Screenshot

From the bottom of page one of The Boston Globe today.

I dunno if it’s “historic,” though. That’s one of the more overused words we see in headlines these days, although not as overused as “iconic,” of course.

But it’s pretty fascinating. And nice work by the photog. Makes it looks like he’s magically changing uniforms in the middle of the same swing. Cool.

As history — well, it’s one for the record books, all right. But as history, it’s only maybe slightly bigger than Moonlight Graham’s major league career consisting of a brief appearance in one game in 1905. Which was interesting enough to appear in Ray Kinella’s book, and the movie based on it.

And I found today’s picture interesting enough to share…

How lieutenants and sergeants saved the day at Omaha

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If you’re a newspaper editor, you know that if you don’t say something about major historical events on their anniversaries, you will catch hell from some readers. And good for those readers; ignorance of history is one of the many things wrong with our country.

I don’t have to worry about that these days, but I hate to let June 6 pass without an acknowledgement. Some would call that day in 1944 the pivotal point in the past century. To some extent, that’s just Western-centrism. The Russians were keeping the Germans pretty busy on the other end of the continent. In fact, many of the “Germans” on those bluffs defending Normandy were from Ost battalions — conscripts from Eastern Europe forced into their conquerer’s service. But even Stalin had impatiently waited and nagged us to open our Second Front, because he expecte it to make a monumental difference. And it did.

But even if you set aside the huge strategic significance, it was an impressive feat. To put 175,000 men on the beach in one day (at least that was the plan, I’ve seen different numbers as to how many did land, but the lowest I’ve seen is 133,000). I’m no great scholar of military history, but I don’t think there’s anything in the annals to match it. Anyway, there was plenty of hard fighting ahead after that day, but the Germans were basically on the retreat from then on.

So I certainly wanted to say something. But it seemed corny to put up yet another clip from Band of Brothers, as much as I love that show.

Then I saw a tweet from Richard M. Nixon (one of my favorite feeds on what’s left of Twitter), and was moved to answer it, so I thought I’d share it here:

What Ike was talking about was the fact that all that planning that he and so many others labored over for two years was essential to winning Normandy. But the effort would have failed on that first day — at least on the one beach, which would have had a terrible effect on the overall operation — if not for the fact that American junior officers and non-coms could think, and act, for themselves.

Once the action starts, you can ball up the plan and toss it. Because not only does the enemy get a say in what happens from that point, but you have an uncountable number of other unpredictable factors that change the situation radically from moment to moment. You have to deal with those, not the events you had anticipated.

At Omaha, especially on Easy Red Sector, the defenses were just too strong for the plan. All those guns, presighted upon every square inch of sand. By midmorning, the landing was a shambles, our men were either lying dead at the water’s edge or cowering and confused behind any bit of cover they could find.

Out on the cruiser USS Augusta, Gen. Omar Bradley watched and listened in horror as the reports came in: “disaster,” he heard, along with “terrible casualties” and “chaos.” He began to consider, privately, withdrawal. But that would have been impractical, and perhaps impossible. “I agonized over the withdrawal decision, praying that our men could hang on,” he would later say.

The guys on the beach were stuck there, with death and confusion all around them. They knew their only way out was forward, and the lower-ranking leaders started giving commands based not on any plan, but on what they were facing. And their men got up and followed. A few at a time at first, they got off the beach and triumphed.

You can draw all the lessons you’d like about American initiative and ingenuity, and there would be a lot to that. American infantry troops are trained to think, and improvise as necessary. Not all armies train that way. And obviously, flexibility and initiative are not words you think of to describe Ost defenders standing at their guns with German sergeants pointing pistols at their heads to ensure they stayed at those posts and kept firing.

So “Nixon” was right in his tweet. And so was his old boss Dwight Eisenhower, all those years before…

And He did it with no mass (or social) communication

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If you’d come today
You could have reached a whole nation
Israel in 4 BC
Had no mass communication…

— Jesus Christ Superstar

After persusing the various papers I subscribe to this morning, and finding little to engage my interest, I turned to my daily (well, most days) Bible readings for the day, and this was in the Gospel:

“If I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is not true.
But there is another who testifies on my behalf,
and I know that the testimony he gives on my behalf is true.
You sent emissaries to John, and he testified to the truth.
I do not accept human testimony,
but I say this so that you may be saved.
He was a burning and shining lamp,
and for a while you were content to rejoice in his light.
But I have testimony greater than John’s….

And it occurred to me that it would be great to know a lot more than we do about John the Baptist. We know he was this highly countercultural dude who lived in the wilderness and wore camel fur and ate locusts and honey. And he baptized people, most famously Jesus himself. And he came to a horrible end on this Earth.

But that isn’t enough to fully explain how big a deal he was in his day. Or apparently was, anyway. To a lot of people who lived in that place and time, it seems like he was even a bigger deal than Jesus for awhile. I infer that from the fact that so often in the New Testament, Jesus is explained to people in terms of his relationship to John. There seems to be an assumption at times that the writer of the Gospel or epistle knows people knew about John, and uses him as a launching point. For instance, The Gospel of Mark starts with John.

It would be great to be able to read a biography of John that’s as in-depth and detailed as a modern book such as Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, or David McCullogh’s John Adams, or Edmund Morris’ Theodore Rex. And then go from there to fully grasping the foundation of Christianity.

But we can’t. The sources just don’t exist. And not just about John, but about any historical figure from before, say, Gutenberg came along. In fact, we should be grateful that we have more info on John that we do a lot of the more obscure Roman emperors.

Still, to a modern person, it’s frustrating. So we can all dig Judas’ complaint in “Superstar,” about Israel in 4 B.C. having no mass communication. Or even a printing press.

But you know what? That’s what makes Jesus more impressive. You don’t have to be a believer to grasp how awesome his achievement was. This rabbi from the boondocks took a local religion that was only embraced by this one tribe on the borders of an ancient empire, and made it into the dominant faith of the world (yes, Islam is big, but…). And he did it with word of mouth, for the first generation. That, and a few letters written by others.

Which, to me, is exactly the way God would do it. It’s more impressive (and certainly more dignified) than building a rep on “American Idol” and inspiring a billion tweets.

It’s sort of like the way I view evolution. I shake my head at all the arguments between creationists and Darwinists. Of COURSE evolution (and geology and cosmology and all that other stuff) is the way God would make the world. The abracadabra opening of Genesis is a great way to tell an allegory, but come on, people. Look at the sheer, gradual majesty of doing it through subtle changes over billions of years.

Anyway, that’s what I was thinking while doing today’s readings…

St. John the Baptist Preaching, c. 1665, by Mattia Preti

December 6: Any Martin Cruz Smith fans out there?

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Pearl Harbor on Dec. 6, 1941. Found this on the East Tennessee Veterans Honor Guard FB page.

Call this a sneak attack, coming on the eve of the date that will live in infamy.

I just had to write down today’s date for some reason, and it got me to thinking about Martin Cruz Smith. Well, specifically, one of his less-known novels, December 6. You ever read it? Here’s a synopsis from Wikipedia:

In late 1941, Harry Niles owns a bar for American and European expatriates, journalists, and diplomats, in Tokyo’s entertainment district, called the “Happy Paris”. With only 24 hours until Japanese fighters and bombers attack Pearl Harbor, Niles has to consult with the local US ambassador, break up with a desperate lover, evade the police, escape the vengeance of an aggrieved samurai officer and leave the island, the exit points from which are all closed. Having grown up in Tokyo, Niles is fluent in the Japanese language and culture, and is highly streetwise.[2][3]

In other words, he’s streetwise for a gaijin, which is a word that comes up frequently in the book as Japanese folk interact with him. But it’s been awhile since I read it. I’ve never reread it as often as I have Rose and some of his Arkady Renko stories, especially Red Square. Although the one that pulled me and so many others toward his work was his amazingly brilliant first Renko story, Gorky Park.

So — are any of y’all fans? I’d like to have a discussion about his stuff sometime. The dude can tell a story. His characters are a bit repetitive — it’s like the same people crop up in both 1870s Lancashire and 1980s Russia — but he makes it work. It’s actually kind of fun to see a familiar character, just with a different name, show up in an entirely different situation…

What’s your first political memory?

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I got a couple of ideas out of this week’s Matter of Opinion podcast from the NYT. I’ll write about the other later when I have more time, but at the moment I’ll just share this little interlude where they asked kids (ranging in age from about 17 to a vague “under 30”) to call in with their first political memories:

And we’re back. So we have something else up our sleeve this week, in lieu of a Hot Cold. We recently asked our younger listeners to send in their political awakenings. So let’s take a listen now….

And the callers weighed in with their thoughts on recent events (one first took note of the political world on Jan. 6, 2021) that to them seem to have happened quite some time ago.

Which got me to thinking back a bit further, although I wish they hadn’t used the word “awakenings.” It has a disturbing flavor of ideological orthodoxy, like asking “When did you get your mind right?” I would simply have asked them to recount their “first awareness,” or simply first memory, of politics. That interests me more.

What is yours? Mine was from 1960, at more or less the very moment when I reached the age of 7. I’ve told it here before, but can’t find it at the moment, so I’ll just tell it again. I watched the presidential debates, and I decided I was for Nixon. That was based on my immature assessment of what I perceived as Kennedy’s aggressive tone on the subject of foreign policy. I don’t recall now what he said about the Soviets, but he sounded a lot more like a guy willing to go to war. And not a cold one. Of course, he may have said nothing of the kind. But that’s the way I heard it.

Thinking back on the impression now, I assume — if I heard it right — he was trying to sound that way because he was very young and widely regarded as inexperienced in comparison to the vice president. Maybe he was pushing the tough talk a bit in an effort to create a visceral impression of being a strong leader. But I didn’t know about things like that. I just knew my father was a naval officer, and Kennedy sounded more like a guy who would send my Daddy off to war.

I was quite serious about it, and took the election result hard, and rather, well, childishly. My mother watched Kennedy’s inauguration on the black-and-white in our Woodbury, N.J., apartment, and I protested loudly that I wanted her to change the station to something else (not that there would have been anything else at that moment). She ignored my requests, so in protest I hid behind a chair where I couldn’t see the screen. My mother told me to stop being ridiculous, but I persisted. Basically, I acted like a Trump supporter, although I didn’t storm the U.S. Capitol.

Anyway, I got over it, just not that day.

Speaking of my Dad, his first political memory was of his own father arguing loudly with a neighbor out on the sidewalk in front of the family home in Kensington, Md. The subject? FDR. The neighbor thought he was great, and I gather from his vehemence (which embarrassed my grandmother and caused her to call out to tell my grandpa to stop and come into the house) that he thought Roosevelt would be the ruination of the country. I’m guessing there, because my Dad was too young to understand and couldn’t explain it to me. I’m guess this was early in FDR’s time in office, so… maybe mid-30s. My Dad was born at the end of 1928.

Anyway, what’s your first political memory?

Hey, alla you kids — get offa my century!

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This really cracked me up. Remember the anecdote I told about the conversation I overheard awhile back between two students? To keep you from clicking and reading through that long post again, here it is:

I’m reminded of a conversation I overheard on the USC campus back when I worked in an office, and took long daily walks around the campus and downtown area. These two boys were walking behind me, and one of them was bitching about having to take a course in stupid history — as if anybody cared about that.

His friend, however, protested that learning history was important to understanding our world, and he got the first kid to agree, reluctantly. I almost applauded, but in keeping with my lifelong habit of hanging back and observing, I didn’t (anyway, they may have found that a bit… condescending).

But then I heard the first kid say, “Yeah, OK. But this was, like, 500 years back! Who needs to know about that?”

The friend felt compelled to walk back his position: “Well, maybe not 500 years! Let’s not be ridiculous…”

I just kept walking…

Well, that kid who was willing to defend history — up to a point — was an absolute classical scholar compared to the one who wrote this note:

The 1900s! Had they developed writing that early?

I wonder what he would think about Paul’s 20th-century speakers? He’d probably confuse them with Cato the Elder, if he’s heard of him.

Ever since I read that, I’ve tried to reconstruct the train of thought that led to that question, but I haven’t arrived.

Did he think the prof would respond mockingly, saying something like “Hey, why dontcha cite the Magna Carta, or… I know!… the Code of Hammurabi!…”?

I’m thinking about quoting the sages William “Bill” S. Preston, Esq., and Ted “Theodore” Logan here, but that would take us all the way back to 1989…

A Lyric Just in Time

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I had a fun little exchange on Twitter with a friend a couple of weeks back, when he posted this quote:


Hey, it’s always fun when people start quoting Elvis Costello. For me, anyway.

So I listened to the song several times, and got to thinking about how that one line is more than just fun:

He stands to be insulted and he pays for the privilege

You know how I frequently make the point that it’s harder and harder to get the kind of people who ought to run for elective office to run anymore? Reading those books from the late 19th century lately has driven home the point so much more painfully. Why do we almost never see the likes of Teddy Roosevelt or James Garfield — or, to reach higher, Abraham Lincoln — step forward any more? Or for that matter, the extraordinary men who served under them, in key positions — John Hay, Elihu Root, Henry Cabot Lodge?

Well, I know why — because of 24/7 TV “news,” and more recently and intensely, social media. Things that climb all over you and mobs that can’t wait to cancel you for the most trivial things. Consequently, instead of people who set brilliant careers aside to give back to the country by sitting down with other serious people and working out the country’s real problems, you get people who don’t give a damn about any of that. They don’t want to work out problems with anybody. They just want to posture for their respective bases.

And to gain the “privilege” of doing this, they spend every moment between elections raising the money to pay for it.

I even felt a moment of gratitude today when I heard the House GOP had gone behind closed doors to nominate a new speaker. No strutting or posturing for the mob. And they came out with Scalise, which I think is better, or at least not as horrible, as the alternative. Which isn’t much to celebrate, of course.

Anyway, Elvis said it better than I have:

He stands to be insulted and he pays for the privilege…

I’ll close with the video:

ANOTHER witch in the family! Allegedly, I mean…

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“We have a witch in the family. Isn’t it wonderful?”
— Aunt Petunia

I’ve told you before about my wife’s ancestress, Elspeth Craich — one of many, many characters I’ve found who make building a family tree fascinating (to me, anyway). She lived in Scotland from 1631 to at least 1656.

And she was a witch. Allegedly — although she confessed for reasons unknown. I very much hope the reason wasn’t that it was tortured out of her. I like to think she was being crafty. And the record says she “voluntarlie confesst” (for what that’s worth).

This isn’t family legend, by the way. I found documentation, here and here. As it happens, she was fortunate enough to be charged during a time in which Cromwell (Oliver, not Thomas) had banned the execution of witches. (Actually, other sources I glanced at were vague on this, but he was no fan of witch-hunting. He seems not to have believed in witches.)

This put the local authorities in a fix. They had her locked up, but didn’t know what to do with her. Finally, they had to just let her go. Why? Well, she apparently was eating too much. The record complains of “the great trouble that hath been susteaned be the inhabitants of this burgh in watching of Eppie Craich, witch, within thaire tolbuthe this quarter of this year bygane, and the great expens that this burgh is at for the present in susteanyng and interteanyng her in bread and drink and vther necessaris, and finding it to be expedient to dismis hir.”

You’ll notice they kept her in the “tolbuthe,” which is to say, toll booth. Made me think the town, Culross, had an inadequate tax base. They couldn’t afford to feed Elspeth, they couldn’t afford to send her to Edinburgh and let them deal with her, and they couldn’t even afford a jail. (But seriously, folks, that’s what they called a jail in those days. It was apparently a sort of multipurpose public building, like Andy Taylor’s courthouse, where Otis would sleep.)

Anyway, I’ve told you about her before.

Over the weekend, we discovered another such family “scandal.” And this time, it’s on my side of the family.

My grandchildren take varying levels of interest in the family tree, but one of them is into it enough to enjoy sitting by me as I rummage through our thousands of forebears. With her watching, I was poking around in the branch occupied by my great-great-great grandmother Isabella Telford. I actually have a photo of her — which is unusual with people back that far, which is why I went to that part of the tree to show it to my granddaughter. But I knew little about her, beyond the fact that she lived in New York state, making her one of very few ancestors I have who hailed from the North. I had her, and maybe a generation or two of her Telford antecedents.

I saw I had some “hints” from Ancestry on those people, so I decided to show my granddaughter how to add someone to the tree. I was looking through the hints for Isabella’s grandmother (and my 5th-great grandmother) Margaret McCaulay (who married a Tilford, a variant spelling). Ancestry had more than a dozen such clues to offer with regard to Margaret, who for some reason was nicknamed “Betty.” I was skimming down to see if she had a Findagrave page, as those are almost always helpful, when my granddaughter made me stop and go back to another hint I had skipped. “It said ‘witch’!” she told me.

So, you know, here we go again.

I went back and grabbed that document, and resumed searching. A moment later, I saw she did have a Findagrave page, and in place of the customary obituary, it displayed… the story of the witchcraft charge.

Mind you, this wasn’t in far-off Culross, Scotland, in the benighted 1600s. This was more than a century later, in the land of the free, during the American Revolution. And it happened in Salem! No, not Massachusetts — it was Salem, NY.

“It began when Archy Livingston’s cows began producing cream that couldn’t be churned into butter.” Ol’ Arch, a neighbor of the Tilfords, or Telfords, figured he needed some expert advice. Lacking a university-based agricultural extension service, he went to see a shady character named Joel Dibble, who “told people’s fortunes by cutting cards.” Wouldn’t you, under the circumstances?

Dibble worked his magic with the cards, and then broke the bad news to Archy — either the milk or the cows were bewitched. And being the oracle that he was, he could describe the witch: “a short, thick, black-haired woman who had a red-haired daughter.”

This described Margaret Telford to a T. Archy promptly shared the shocking news with everyone he knew, and the community was in an uproar. They were all like “We’re in the middle of a war, and now this!”

Archy’s father-in-law stuck up for the Telfords, and apparently gave Arch a piece of his mind for listening to a “malevolent designing scoundrel” like Dibble. But not everyone agreed:

However, others began to shun the Telfords. Some parents forbade their children to associate with the Telford children. The local magistrate refused to get involved. Or perhaps he was not asked — the Presbyterians might have thought that would have violated the separation of church and state. Because both families were members of Dr. Clark’s church, they agreed that the church was the proper authority to decide the matter.

The Presbyterian pastor initiated a formal investigation, and witnesses were called. Fellow church members testified that Margaret “was an upstanding Christian woman and her moral character was exemplary.” Nevertheless, Rev. Clark called expert witness Dibble:

During the examination, Dibble said he had learned his art in French Canada, and had paid good money for his lessons. He defended the art of cutting of cards on the grounds that, like any other art or trade, it had rules. He said he wasn’t naming any names. He just followed the rules of the cards and, through them, learned indications. With that, Clark cut off the examination, saying there was “nothing tangible here for the church to take hold of.” In Robert Blake’s account, he indicates simply that “the matter was still before the Church and undecided when Dr. Clark moved away.”

The matter was never resolved, and as one chronicler said, over the course of four or five years, “the subject was prudently dropped.”

I’d like to end the narrative on that encouraging note. But sadly,

Even after “the excitement died away,” Margaret continued to suffer from having been accused of being a witch. Many neighbors made life difficult for the family. The young Telford folks were shunned from many parties and merry-makings. When George and Margaret ‘s son John became engaged to Sarah Rowan, many of her friends and relatives opposed the match.

Nevertheless, Margaret and her husband George stuck it out in that community, and soldiered on, and from what I can tell, folks generally respected them for that. And in the end:

George and Margaret are buried in the “Old Cemetery” in Salem, so they must have remained members in good standing of the church that the Rev. Dr. Clark founded.

Of course, it might have helped if the minister had stood up and loudly denounced the nonsense, but I guess he felt he was in over his head. Or something. Sorry I don’t have a totally happy ending there for you (and for that portion of my family I’d never heard of before building my tree). But I think you can see what I mean about family history being interesting.

If you want to know what actually caused the problem with Archy’s cows, don’t look at me. We Telfords had nothing to do with it…

So what do we call THIS era?

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I’d always liked Sargent’s “El Jaleo,” and was greatly surprised to find it suddenly before me in Boston last year…

You can only know so much about history. Life is short, and in truth one can never have total knowledge and understanding even of the periods we focus in upon most obsessively.

And in my life, I’ve bounced around from one intense interest to another. When I was a kid, it was the Second World War. It was the thing that loomed over the world in which I grew up, and made that world I knew seem uninteresting in comparison. After I started taking Latin in high school, I got into ancient Rome — or at least, the end of the republic and the first few emperors. When I was in college, I was riveted by the early days of our own republic — not so much the Revolution, but what came after: The Constitutional Convention, leading through the administrations of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and Quincy Adams (before the standard dropped so sharply with Old Hickory). I used to go around saying I would love to go back and live in that time of brilliant ideas, if only they’d had more indoor plumbing — yes, an undergraduate’s notion of wit.

Lately, though, I find myself living vicariously in the Gilded Age, bleeding over a bit into the Progressive Era.

This is a period I had mostly ignored in the past — it was after The Recent Unpleasantness, and before the more relatable politics of the 20th, both of which had always seemed more interesting. I just saw it as a time of boring prosperity in the North, and postwar trauma in the South (the rise and fall of Reconstruction, Tillmanism, rich Yankees coming down and buying up plantations as hunting estates, etc.). It was always kind of a blur.

But lately, over the last year or so, I’ve found myself drawn back to it over and over. My recent reading has included:

  • Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, by Candice Millard. My elder son gave me this last year — he had assigned himself the task of going through one book about each president in our history, in chronological order, and this had been his favorite. It was about James Garfield, about whom I knew pretty much nothing, which was shameful on my part. It painted a picture of an extraordinary man who was like a dream POTUS — a brilliant self-made scholar and war hero who turned to politics. When he showed up at the Republican national convention to nominate another man in 1880, he ended up being nominated himself, unanimously, but against his own wishes. He then won the election, but his administration had hardly begun when a lunatic (a nobody who outlandishly imagined that Garfield should have named him ambassador to France) shot him. He would have survived, except for the stunningly, inexcusably bad medical care he received. Along the way, the story encompassed other major figures of the period (including Alexander Graham Bell, playing an important role in trying to save Garfield), painting amid the tragedy a bright picture of a country on its way up.
  • Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill. Also by Candice Millard, because I’d liked the Garfield book so much. This was also very enjoyable and enlightening, although not quite as much so, since I had recently seen the 1972 film “Young Winston,” which for a movie did a pretty good job of covering the same portion of Churchill’s life. It’s available on Prime if you want to watch it. But I still definitely recommend the book.
  • Artists of the period. Our trip to Boston last year — specifically, our visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum — intensified an already-growing interest in such artists as Isabella’s friend John Singer Sargent, and similar painters such as Anders Zorn — who painted an arresting portrait of Isabella, which I initially mistook for the work of Sargent. Both of them were definitely chroniclers of the Gilded Age, painting famous portraits of heiresses (here’s my favorite, which I like even better than Madame X.) From them, I’ve started branching out to other, similar artists such as George William Joy, whose painting of omnibus passengers I liked better than Zorn’s. It reminded me of the kinds of photos I sneak of fellow passengers on subways — the pictures one of my granddaughters insisted I stop taking. She’s right, but I find the habit hard to shake.
  • Theodore Rex — Still making my way — my slow and steady way — through this, the second book in Edmund Morris’ trilogy about Teddy. It’s pretty awesome. He breaks down Roosevelt’s time as president almost day by day, and in rich detail, and it never gets dull or tiresome (TR wouldn’t have allowed that). Extra bonus: The portrait on the cover is, of course, by John Singer Sargent. I’ve mentioned it a couple of times lately, and will no doubt mention it even more as I proceed. It’s great nourishment for the mind to see issues of actual importance discussed with an intelligence that should make us all envious as we are bombarded by the Kulturkampf of left and right in our own day. And then see them acted upon effectively. We were a nation of such promise then, with a political system that worked.

For all that, I didn’t seek this stuff out on purpose in a deliberate effort to study the period. I just wandered from one to another, and only realized quite recently how wrapped up I had become in this time.

We’ve had a number of prominently named historical periods since the Progressive, such as:

And now, finally, I get to my point, which is that after the heady days of the ’90s, things got kind of fuzzy.

I mean, what do we call THESE times? And does it involve words that can be used on a blog that observes the conventions of what we used to call a “family newspaper”?

For that matter, with the atomization of society due to the profusion of media, is it even possible to make any sort of coherent, widely acceptable generalization about a world that is divided into so many camps that see the world so differently?

I’ll offer one possibility: The Schizophrenic Era. I’m not making a clinical diagnosis here, so don’t correct me with a bunch of quotes from the DSM. I’m thinking in terms of the Greek etymology of the term, meaning “splitting of the mind”… because that fragmentation explains our period as much as any.

I’m not going to suggest any other terms right now, because mainly, I’m curious as to what y’all would call it…

James Garfield, a potentially great president, was shot by one idiot and treated by another…

Wikipedia on the Thirteen Colonies

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Sure, Alexandria had a nice library, but that was peanuts next to Wikipedia…

A lot of people criticize Wikipedia. Ironically, if you’d like to know what they say about it, the most convenient thing to do is to read the “Criticism of Wikipedia” article on, of course, Wikipedia. It begins:

Most criticism of Wikipedia has been directed toward its content, community of established users, and processes. Critics have questioned its factual reliability, the readability and organization of the articles, the lack of methodical fact-checking, and its political bias….

And so forth. The article goes on and on.

But I appreciate it, greatly. That’s why I responded positively to one of the service’s periodic fund-raising appeals several years back, and that’s why $3.10 flows out of my credit union account monthly. It is, quite plainly, the least I can do.

First, this is the greatest reference work in the history of humanity. I remember that on “Cosmos,” Carl Sagan used to go on and on about the burning of the library in Alexandria in antiquity, which was surprising for a show that was about science, not history. He seemed to regard it as the worst thing that had happened, ever. And no doubt it would have been better if someone had had a fire extinguisher handy. But while I have no way of quantifying this for you number people, I suspect that the library’s store of knowledge was peanuts compared to what you find on Wikipedia.

I LOVED these…

Do you always find everything you wanted? No. That’s impossible. But it gives me what I’m looking for far more reliably than any other reference work I’ve ever encountered. And I’m a long-time connoisseur. I used to pore through encyclopedias before I could read — and when my parents purchased the Golden Book Encyclopedia for me when I was 6 (as I recall, a grocery store had a promotion going that sold them on a sort of subscription basis, and you got another volume each week), I was engrossed, reading and rereading what I imagined to be the compendium of all knowledge. To me, this was fun.

Later, after I started working at The State, I wrote the “South Carolina” articles each year for the yearbooks of a grown-up encyclopedia. I’d tell you the name of the encyclopedia, but I don’t recall, and don’t see them around me on my bookshelves, because why would I need them now?

Let’s face it: Encyclos were pathetic compared to Wiki — as flat and dead and limited as a folded-up, tattered map from the gas station in 1957, compared to Google Maps.

Generally, I rely on it mainly for the most basic bits of routine, objective information — say, if I’m trying to remember who Adlai Stevenson’s running mate was in 1956 (just now, I was thinking “Estes Kefauver,” and I’m glad to see I was right), or the details regarding that miraculous Wednesday night in 1965 when “Lost in Space,” “Green Acres” and “I Spy” all premiered (a big deal to an 11-year-old). For the most part, I guess, I use it to look up things I think I know to make sure I know them, before I make a fool of myself by writing the wrong thing.

And while there are many sites that provide medical info, if a doctor prescribes me a new medication, I find Wiki far more helpful in giving me an overview of key information such as chemical makeup, what it’s for, contraindications and side effects. Needless to say, I haven’t consulted a PDR in many years. It tells me everything I’m looking for in a structure that makes it all eminently accessible.

Anyway, what got me onto this subject? Just a routine lookup this morning. I don’t remember now what got me thinking about it, but I wanted to check and make sure my memory of which states were among the original 13 colonies was correct (I was thinking, everything on the Eastern Seaboard except Maine and Florida, plus some of those sad little landlocked New England states). I was for some reason doubting myself on Maine, but was quickly reassured.

But I found something a little unusual. I only needed a list of the 13, but what I found was an article, “Thirteen Colonies,” that had something else I love, but seldom seek from Wikipedia: wholeness. This might not strike you when you read it, but it hit me rather forcefully.

I’m not saying this was elegant, novel-style story-telling, but it tied things together in ways that would lend understanding to the reader, not just a hodgepodge of facts. There were some facts I didn’t know, but not that many. What impressed me was that whoever was involved in putting it together, he or she (sure, it could have been any number of people, but there was a unity to it that suggested a single mind) helped the reader grok the big picture, in the way it briefly told the stories of the 13 colonies and how they became the 13 states.

Since what I’m trying to describe here is something holistic, it’s hard for me to give you quotes demonstrating what I mean. But take a look at this graf about how the French and Indian War was simultaneously a unifying experience, but at the same time led to loyal British colonists deciding to declare independence in a remarkably short time:

The British and colonists triumphed jointly over a common foe. The colonists’ loyalty to the mother country was stronger than ever before. However, disunity was beginning to form. British Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder had decided to wage the war in the colonies with the use of troops from the colonies and tax funds from Britain itself. This was a successful wartime strategy but, after the war was over, each side believed that it had borne a greater burden than the other. The British elite, the most heavily taxed of any in Europe, pointed out angrily that the colonists paid little to the royal coffers. The colonists replied that their sons had fought and died in a war that served European interests more than their own. This dispute was a link in the chain of events that soon brought about the American Revolution.

Among other things, you’ll notice how well and simply the piece sets out the paradoxes. How could it be both a unifying and supremely divisive experience? Well, here’s how, in few words. And it’s very understandable. Or I think so, anyway.

By now, if you got this far, you’re going, what the hell am I reading? This topic isn’t just out of left field, it’s beyond the bleachers, and apparently originated in a cow pasture a couple of miles from the ballpark.

But I just was impressed by this small, obscure thing, and thought I’d say, “Way to go, Wikipedia!”

Also, as I’ve no doubt mentioned before, I believe that gross ignorance of history is possibly the greatest problem facing this country and endangering its future. I’m not talking dates and names and facts — I’m talking about real understanding of history, how it all fits together and what it means.

And I thought if I can get one person out there to stumble across this and read that Wikipedia article, that would be one person who would better understand this nation’s origin story…

Another way to look at our loss of the Garden of Eden

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Hey, Michelangelo: I thought they were wearing fig suits when they left the garden…

The Gospel reading at Mass yesterday got me to thinking about ancient agriculture:

“A sower went out to sow.
And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path,
and birds came and ate it up.
Some fell on rocky ground, where it had little soil.
It sprang up at once because the soil was not deep,
and when the sun rose it was scorched,
and it withered for lack of roots.
Some seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it.
But some seed fell on rich soil, and produced fruit,
a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.

Back in those days, it seems, farming was kind of haphazard. Seed was scattered in ways that today would seem quite haphazard. Whenever I read that passage, I think, why didn’t they put the seed IN the ground? Had the dibble not been invented, or what?

Which reminded me of my theory of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

It suddenly hit me as I was reading one of those books about the history of our species, from hunter-gatherer days until now — which as y’all know I frequently mention. I don’t remember whether it was Sapiens, or Guns, Germs and Steel, or what. But it was one in which the idea that the big move to agriculture was a decidedly mixed blessing.

Oh, it afforded advantages to the cultures that embraced it, in a competitive sense. As Jared Diamond stressed, the peoples who moved the earliest, and the most successfully, to food and fiber production dominate the world today. That’s how Pizarro conquered the Incan Empire with a handful of Spanish soldiers. He not only had the guns and the steel, but smallpox had spread ahead of the Conquistadores and had hit the Incas pretty hard just before he arrived. More than that, he had writing — not him personally, but the scribes he had along. He knew how Cortez had taken down the Aztecs, and followed suit. Emperor Atahualpa hadn’t known either the Spanish or the Aztecs existed.

It’s why Maori conquered and wiped out the Moriori — former Maoris whose forebears had moved away and gone back to hunter-gathering — on Chatham Island. You may not have heard about that, though, since the Maoris themselves were eventually dominated by European newcomers.

But that’s not my point. The point is that some of these things I’ve been reading make the argument that the big advantage that farming offered had a steep price. Basically, the farming life sucked compared to hunting and gathering. Before agriculture, people worked less each day, and on the whole ate better. They went about and gathered what they needed, and had plenty of time to chill after that. They didn’t think about the future. They didn’t worry about their land, or the weather over the coming months, or the price of cotton. They weren’t the slaves of the farms they worked day and night to keep going.

I was thinking about that, and suddenly it hit me — that’s what the first chapters of Genesis were about. In the Garden, Adam and Eve could just stroll around naked and eat their meals off the bounty of their property, and life was good. Then they fouled up — they couldn’t obey one simple rule — and got booted out. And then they were cursed with farming, in no uncertain terms:

Cursed is the ground because of you!
In toil you shall eat its yield
all the days of your life.

Thorns and thistles it shall bear for you,
and you shall eat the grass of the field.

By the sweat of your brow
you shall eat bread,
Until you return to the ground,
from which you were taken;
For you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.

Which certainly sounds like a raw deal to me.

And it hit me: The people who composed the story of Adam and Eve — and later wrote it down — were on some level remembering the switch to agriculture, and saw it pretty much as Yuval Noah Harari did, thousands of years before he wrote that “the Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.” And they saw it as the ultimate human fall from natural grace.

So did I make some great discovery? No way. This was too obvious, and had been too obvious for ages. Search for “garden of eden hunter-gathering,” and you’ll see this idea all over the place. I liked this summary:

Apparently, the trauma of this transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers had a huge and lasting impact on humanity. We’ve never forgotten it. It’s burned into our consciousness. And, that’s why it’s the subject of the Bible’s foundational story. The Torah tells us that when humans were first created, we lived in the Garden of Eden, where we ate the fruit that God provided for us. We didn’t have to work hard or grow anything on our own. In other words, we were hunter-gatherers….

I don’t know where I was when everybody else was talking about it. All I can say in my own behalf is that I realized it on my own. All the talking that people do about Adam and Eve — usually, unfortunately, in the silly arguments between biblical literalists and those who think a story about the Earth being created in six days means all faith is bunk (both sides seem to have trouble grasping the concept of allegory) — and I’d never heard a reference to this.

And it sort of blew my mind. I love it when I see connections to things I had not previously seen as connected — such as the Bible’s foundational story of life on Earth, and the findings of secular scientists and philosophers in our own age — and this was the Mother of All Connections. It tied everything about the origins of humanity and our world together.

And the most amazing thing is that it appears as though the originators of the Eden story had some memory — consciously or unconsciously — about what had happened to people ages earlier, long before writing, before Abraham, much less before anthropology, archaeology, DNA testing or carbon-14 dating.

I marvel at it…

When did people get here, and how?

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You know, it’s hard to find accurate pictures of those earliest boats. So I went with this one…

I’m making a point of reading new books these days — by which I mean books I haven’t read before. For instance, right now I’m reading Theodore Rex, the second volume in Edmund Morris’ trilogy on TR, released in 2001. I’m getting to it about a decade after reading the first book, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. But I guess that’s OK, since it took Morris way longer to get to writing it; the first book came out in 1979. I’m very much enjoying it, but at a leisurely pace.

That doesn’t mean I no longer indulge in my favorite way to waste time — reading the same books, over and over. And lately I’ve been drawn back to books about homo sapiens and how the species and our world developed. Right now, Guns, Germs and Steel is sitting on the kitchen table, and I thumb through it while eating (something I wasn’t allowed to do as a kid, but I’ve made up for that lost time).

And that got me onto this subject. I was reading a passage about the settlement of this continent, and Jared Diamond made a brief reference to archaeological discoveries that place humans here way before the Clovis culture came along. You see, the conventional thinking as he was writing was that people got here in about 11,000 B.C. Meanwhile, we have sites, including right here in South Carolina, that show indications of human presence as early as tens of thousands of years before that.

Diamond, writing in 1997 — well before some of the more startling claims about Topper — was sort of dismissive of these kinds of sites:

I wondered whether Diamond would be any more impressed by these more-recent claims. But I don’t know Diamond, and I don’t have his mobile number. So I reached out to the only archaeologist I know around here, our own Lynn Teague. I went over to her Twitter feed, and changed the subject by asking about what was on my mind. Looking back, I suppose I could have shown a little more interest in what she was writing about, but you know, the number count is limited on tweets. Lynn answered right away:

Yeah, just what I was thinkin’, Lynn. But I went on to ask…

Lynn’s answer satisfied me as much as one can be satisfied with regard to this question. Of course, that’s a minimal level of satisfaction. If I ever get a time machine, one thing I’d like to use it for would be to take a bunch of Dick and Jane books to the first modern humans just as they prepared started to break out of Africa and into Eurasia — long before they got here, by anyone’s reckoning — so that they could take up reading and writing and leave us some records.

I figure that by now, their books would be available in paperback, and maybe even free on Kindle…

Some opportunities to learn some history, TODAY

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This isn’t the tunnel rat who will be speaking, but another guy who did the same thing, and it captures the essence…

Before I get to my work today, I need to post one more quick thing. Or two or three quick things, since Paul has reminded me that today is June 30…

Lately, my attention has focused less on the things that seem to get folks stirred up today, and more on history. And that’s made me take even more interest in the communications work I do for the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum. And in the next few days, they have several really interesting things going on — and two of them are happening today…

  • First, at noon today, there is a free lecture by a guy who is a real-life Tunnel Rat — or was a real-life Tunnel Rat, back during the war in Vietnam. That means he made a regular practice of doing something I cannot imagine myself ever doing — plunge deep down into a hole in the ground, alone, with nothing but a flashlight and .45-cal. pistol, to search for the Viet Cong who (equally unbelievably) lived down there. He gave this same talk a couple of years back, and as I recall, he got somewhat into having a less-than-positive self-concept in those days that at least in part led to such self-destructive behavior. But the fact that anybody did it, for any reason under any circumstances, is what blows my mind. Anyway, you can hear him speak in just a little over an hour from now. Here’s the release I wrote about it…
  • Something else is happening today that you have more time to take in. A new exhibit is opening, and the remarkable thing about it is contained in the headline of the release I wrote: “Actual photos of Revolutionary War soldiers!” It’s no joke, and there’s no time machine involved. Or maybe, in a way, there is. It’s the display of some remarkable, high-quality daguerreotypes of men in their 90s who had fought in the Revolution when they were in their teens, or at most their 20s. This one particularly grabbed me because I’m fascinated not only by military history, but by early photography. I just love it that someone thought to take, and preserved, these photos of these men at the very ends of their long lives, and the very beginning of photography — two things that barely overlapped for a very few years.

There’s another one I want to tell you about, but it’s a few days off, and I’ve gotta get to work…

Here’s one of those early photos from the impressive collection of W.C. Smith III.

Remember Orison Whipple Hungerford Jr.?

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This is how time gets wasted. And consequently, why I post so seldom, among other derelictions of duty.

The other day I had an earworm, and I was trying to figure out what it was. You know how those torment me. Rather than a pop song, it was an instrumental piece, of the grandiose sort. I decided it was the theme music from one of those blockbuster war movies from the 1960s or ’70s, with every actor from the A list, but apparently no writers, and no directors capable of demanding decent acting. You know, like “The Longest Day.”

But it wasn’t that one. No play on Beethoven’s 5th. For a moment, I reached into the ’70s, deciding it might be “A Bridge Too Far.” I went to YouTube to check the theory, but before the first notes sounded, I stopped the video. I had realized it was from “The Battle of the Bulge.” And, as I clicked around trying to confirm, I became unsure it was actually the theme. It was an instrumental version of the “Panzerlied” — which does crop up in the theme, briefly (go to the 29-second mark in this), and is the only memorable tune that emerges. It’s the song those young officers sing while stamping their feet to prove to Robert Shaw vat gut little Nazis zey all vere.

That made me start thinking about what an abominably disappointing film it was. It wasn’t quite the greatest insult Hollywood has ever flung at my late father-in-law’s war service. That distinction belongs to “Hogan’s Heroes.” (My father-in-law was captured in the Ardennes, and spent the rest of the war in a German POW camp. A real one. There was nothing cute or amusing about it.)

But it was pretty bad. I got to pondering what made it so bad. Was it Henry Fonda? Of course not. How could I be critical of Mister Roberts (although don’t get me started on how he was more than 20 years too old for that role)? Although the prig colonel played by Dana Andrews, whose job it was to scoff at Henry’s premonitions, was pretty insufferable. Telly Savalas? Well, the cuteness of the black marketeer’s relationship with the impossibly pretty Belgian girl (yeah, like she’d go for Kojak) was utterly absurd. Both he and Robert Ryan were more fun in “The Dirty Dozen” (of course, as much as I loved that one as a kid, I assure you it didn’t hold up well over the years, either).

As I ran through the cast, trying to thing of the scene or role or actor that best exemplified how little the filmmakers cared, I settled on the guy who played the leader of one of Otto Skorzeny’s units of German soldiers disguised as Americans during the battle. The guy who looked like he’d be equally at home playing one of the non-speaking surfers standing behind Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello in one of those beach movies with Eric Von Zipper. I seemed to recall the same guy appearing in “P.T. 109,” with his hair dyed blond, as JFK’s XO Leonard Thom.

Yep. Ty Hardin. He had also starred in one of the less-well-remembered Warner Brothers TV westerns. To check this (as I do everything, all day long), I looked to Wikipedia. Yep, he starred in “Bronco.”

But that’s not the good part of what I read in Wikipedia. The good part was that his real name (you already realize it wasn’t really “Ty Hardin,” of course) was Orison Whipple Hungerford Jr.

No, not making it up.

I’ve always taken something of a dim view of people changing their names, which I see as sort of disrespectful to their parents — especially if they are “juniors.”

But I think I might give ol’ Ty a pass on this one. He had a career to think of, such as it was.

OK, I’ll go do some work now…

I’d forgotten Adolf Hitler was ‘woke’

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McMaster et al applauding the Scout deal. Photo from Henry’s Twitter feed.

If I ever knew it, that is. Guess I need to go back and read my history some more, after reading this this morning:

Gov. Henry McMaster on Monday defended South Carolina’s $1.3 billion incentive deal with Volkswagen subsidiary Scout Motors after a group of conservative lawmakers this month criticized the company as “woke.”

Woke? Scout Motors? The subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group? Here’s how that company got started:

Volkswagen (meaning ‘People’s car’ in German) was founded in Berlin as the Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagens mbH (‘Limited Liability Company for the preparation of the German People’s Car’, abbreviated to Gezuvor) by the National Socialist Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labour Front) and incorporated on 28 May 1937.[14][15][16] The purpose of the company was to manufacture the Volkswagen car, originally referred to as the Porsche Type 60, then the Volkswagen Type 1, and commonly called the Volkswagen Beetle.[17] This vehicle was designed by Ferdinand Porsche‘s consulting firm, and the company was backed by the support of Adolf Hitler.[18]

Whatever der Führer‘s role (and see the photo below), if you say a company got started in Berlin in 1937, the last word I think of is “woke.” Although there was, to be sure, an element of populism in the production of an affordable “People’s Car.” But as we all know, populism is a persistent feature of both the left and the right.

Folks, I can think of reasons to oppose this Scout deal, if you press me. But I can also think of a number of reasons to support it, and I suppose those win out.

But this “woke” business?

You learn something new every day. Or at least  I do…

1938: Hitler lays the foundation stone of the first Volkswagen plant…

Are we about to send ‘advisers’ to Ukraine? Seem familiar?

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I guess we’ll have to repaint them first — some none-desert color.

The Ukrainians need heavy tanks to fend off the increasingly desperate efforts by Vladimir Putin to crush their country.

I’m glad they’re about to get them. And I hope and pray that a peaceful solution can soon be found — not the kind of “peaceful solution” Putin would like, in which Ukraine is under his thumb and the world trembles in fear of him, but one in which it is a safe, self-governed nation, living next to a Russia that will never do this again.

But right now, they need the tanks. So it is a good thing that the Germans are going to provide Leopard 2s, and allow other European nations to share theirs. But they refused to do it if we weren’t in it with them, so we have decided to hand over some Abrams main battle tanks.

The Pentagon had been unwilling to do this, “citing concerns about how Ukraine would maintain the advanced tanks, which require extensive training and servicing.” By contrast, the Leopards are relatively simple to maintain and operate, or so I read.

But since the Germans wouldn’t agree without our participation, we’ll be sending the M1s. They mostly likely won’t arrive until the fall, but that’s not the point. The Leopards are what is needed to help resist the expected spring onslaught. They’re a gesture of solidarity. To the Germans, this gives them the ability to say to Putin, “Hey, don’t just blame us…” That’s the point of all this.

Assuming, though, that we follow through, and assuming also that they are impossible to keep running without having a bunch of experienced people maintaining them, it seems highly likely that we’ll soon have “advisers” in Ukraine. They may just be maintenance crews for the most part, but it will be a presence we don’t have now.

(Mind you, I’m no expert on tank operations and maintenance. I couldn’t change the oil on an Abrams any more than I could repair a television. And maybe we can teach the Ukrainians everything they need to know before the tanks arrive there. But it doesn’t sound like the brass over here think that can be done. At least, they didn’t think so last week. It’s one thing to teach people to drive the tank and fight with it. It’s another to keep complex machinery going once it’s deployed, and that doesn’t sound to me like a long-distance procedure.)

There have been Americans in uniform there before now. But this will be different. It won’t be combat troops, but it will be people who are essential to the war effort, even if mainly in a political and diplomatic sense. Meanwhile, we have elements of the 101st Airborne Division right next door in Romania. And soon the 10th Mountain Division will also have a presence there.

Is this the moment that historians will look back on, 50 years from now, as the one that the “Ukraine Quagmire” began? Assuming historians still exist then. I mean, assuming this (or something else) doesn’t lead to the nuclear exchange that we worked so hard — and successfully — to avoid during the Cold War. Which is what enables us to sit around and argue now about how that was accomplished.

Will this be like when JFK sent the 500 advisers in 1961, to reinforce the 700 Ike had sent in 1955? (A sort of follow-up to the ones Truman sent in 1950 to help the French, but the French ignored the advice.) By the end of 1963, there would be 11,000 Americans in-country.

Today, the consensus is that boy, we really screwed that up. Correct me if this is not what you would say, but I can imagine most Americans saying, “We just kept sending more of our boys over there to a place where we had no business being.”

And Americans tsk-tsk about the foolishness, and worse, wickedness of it all. And they’re so sure they’re right, and that they are so much wiser then the Best and Brightest who got us into Vietnam, and couldn’t get us out. Or refused to get us out, until Nixon came along and saved the day by abandoning Saigon.

Myself, I can — with the benefit of hindsight — point to a truckload of mistakes and miscalculations made that got us deeper and deeper into a conflict that was simply not going to turn out our way. But I also look back and see how every mistake was made, and how it didn’t look like a mistake to those making it.

A lot of people around me think they know better. I guess I’m writing this to make sure they’re noting this as it happens — assuming I’m reading it right, and something similar, or at least analogous, is occurring. Yes, the situations are different in a thousand ways. But what I’m pondering here is the bits that seem familiar.

It would be great if we, as a country, could have foresight that is half as perfect and accurate as everyone’s hindsight is regarding Vietnam. That would lead inevitably to a happy ending in which Ukraine and the rest of Europe are safe, and Russia has learned the lesson we’d like it to learn.

But we don’t have that, and right now — in light of this and that and the other thing in the real world we’re looking at — it seems right to send the Abrams tanks. I hope and pray — yep, I’m repeating myself — that it is…

This is what a Leopard 2 looks like. This one was just a prototype, but it was the only image I could find in the public domain.