Category Archives: History

How would Jesus vote? Would he vote at all?

I see my latest posting has, much to my surprise, provoked a theological discussion. OK, I’ll jump in, and regret it later.

I just wish both sides would stop trying to enlist Jesus for their party platforms.

Jesus was pretty much indifferent to government, and for good reason. If he had been walking the Earth as a man today, he might have been more interested in politics than he was. In our representative democracy, we expect government to reflect our values, and then we fight over what those values should be. There is therefore room in the political arena for the kinds of things Jesus spoke of. But as a first-century Jew, the government he knew was about raw, exploitative power (the same thing libertarians think it’s about today, but they’re delusional), and it had no intention of bowing to the values of Judea or any other part of the empire. The Roman system was a plunder economy. There was no chance that any taxes one paid would ever be used to benefit you and your community. Yet despite that, he said go ahead and pay your taxes. He was sort of saying, if that’s Caesar’s trip, go along with it so he’ll leave you alone. But give God his due, which is something else altogether.

As for capitalism — well, I’ve always been struck by the way his parables seemed to uphold capitalist values. And that still challenges me, because he was totally against anyone being acquisitive. If you have two coats, give one away — that doesn’t sound like an affirmation of a consumer society to me. And yet the servant who buried his master’s money to keep it safe was castigated because he didn’t go out and risk it in an effort to make a profit. The servants who played the market were the good guys in the parable, but the one who refused to be a capitalist was the bad guy. (Of course, maybe his master wouldn’t have been so mad at him if he hadn’t indulged in all that Marxist rhetoric, calling the master an exploiter of the workers and such. That was sort of imprudent of him.)

So really, whether you think Jesus would have been for or against an activist government, or pro or con on capitalism, you can find something in the Gospels to support (or undermine) your conclusion. This might make Jesus seem contradictory, to the modern mind. But the thing was (I believe), he just didn’t care about the kinds of things we argue about in the public sphere today. If some Simon Zealot from either end of today’s political spectrum could sit down and try to enlist Him in the cause, I think he’d shrug and change the conversation to what HE deems to be important.

This is why, as a Catholic, I can’t root for either side in the political wars. I don’t think Jesus would, either. He would care about certain issues, standing up for justice and mercy, but he wouldn’t join a side. Both parties hold positions that are inimical to all that Rabbi Jesus taught.

Has America supported its wars?

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This really should be required reading for anyone out there laboring under the illusion that there is something uniquely awful and unAmerican about our involvement in Iraq — or in Vietnam, for that matter.

You think the American public is turning against the Iraq War in a big way? Well, get back to me when we’ve had a reaction as awful as the New York draft riots that Abe Lincoln had to deal with.

John Prine was not expressing such an unusual sentiment when he sang: "We lost Davy in the Korean war/And I still don’t know what for, don’t matter anymore."

Basically, it’s tough to maintain public opinion in favor of military operations in a democracy, even when they are necessary. The reasons why a war may be just and necessary are usually far too complex to keep before the electorate for an extended period of time. That’s why you see oversimplifications. All anyone who is now against the war seems to remember is "WMD," when it was and is much more complicated than that.

Anti-war activists almost always have the advantage, because their message is simple: Stop the killing. That’s why in the long term, opinion starts to sway their way. And that’s a serious problem when you engaged in something as extremely long-term as the War on Terror.

The BEST speech of Bush’s life?

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The New York Times opined yesterday that on the day before, "George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life …"

The speech was apparently the president’s attempt to empathize about the devastation wrought by Katrina, and the NYT reckoned it to be lame. Perhaps they were right. I don’t know, I neither read nor heard the address in question. Until now, that is. And I’m still not sure that it impresses me much either way.

But on the very day the Times delivered that judgment, Mr. Bush committed another public utterance that was nothing short of wonderful — nay, miraculous, considering the source. It’s Bushesclinton_1 something I’ve waited for an American president to say ever since World War II. Or rather, since 1953, since I wasn’t around eight years before that. OK, so I’ve mostly been waiting for an American president to say it since Sept. 11, 2001, but considering who the president was during the intervening period, I did not have high expectations. In fact, it’s doubtful that any U.S. president since Jimmy Carter would have responded in this fashion under similar circumstances, and maybe not even him. Certainly not Bill Clinton. He would have delivered a Katrina speech that would have knocked the Times‘ editorial socks off, because empathy was his specialty. But the guy who dipped into the strategic oil reserve to help Al "Earth in the Balance" Gore get elected despite rising gas prices probably wouldn’t have said this either.

So what did he say? I suppose this has been enough buildup, although it really was great. He said, and I am not making this up:

"Don’t buy gas if you don’t need it."

It was indeed, as The Washington Post noted today (in a news story, mind you, not an opinion piece), "a rare request for individual sacrifice." But it was all the sweeter for its rarity. And if you don’t believe it, you can listen to it if you’d like.

This gives me hope; it really does. If President George W. Bush can say that (and in fairness I’ll say he’s given a number of speeches since 9/11 in which he said many things that were just what a leader in wartime should say, with the huge exception that he has never asked us to sacrifice before), then isn’t that like the breaking of a levee? Could we not be about to see a flood of common sense about fossil fuels break out of its long imprisonment and wash across the land, cleansing us of our collective madness?

I mean, if he can say that, could we not see some serious CAFE standards soon? Could we treat Hummers in the same sensible fashion that we do fully automatic assault rifles, and ban them for all but military use? Could we — and forgive me, but I’m getting a little verklempt at the very thought — actually have ration books, the way we did the last time we were really serious about winning a war?

In other words, could we act like we really understand the strategic imperatives of our situation in the world? Could we do everything necessary to make ourselves independent of the regimes that finance the people who want to kill us all? I mean drill in Alaska, rebuild those rigs in the Gulf, conserve like crazy, ostracize fellow citizens who waste energy, build nuclear power plants, and kick efforts to develop the hydrogen economy into high gear.

OK, OK, I’m getting a little carried away, I know. But it really was great to hear him say it. That’s all I’m saying.

Friday column, with links

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Betsy experience in no way
prepared us for Katrina’s horrors
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
I THOUGHT I knew what to expect from Hurricane Katrina. Boy, was I wrong.
You see, I was there, at Ground Zero, for the last big blow to hit the Big Easy. That was Hurricane Betsy, 40 years ago.
In fact, that experience at such a young age — I was starting junior high — is probably why I have such a jaded attitude toward weather. Or at least did have.
I tended to sneer at people getting all worked up because a storm’s coming. And I definitely didn’t need those warnings that interrupt regular TV programming. Hey, I know when there’s going to be a thunderstorm — our remaining dog freaks out, yelping and demanding to come in. I did not share his attitude; as I saw it, the lawn could use the watering.
And when I saw folks evacuate in the path of a storm that may strike their domiciles, I sniffed in a superior manner and thought:
We didn’t run and hide back in ’65. We stood our ground — however untenable that ground may have been. We lived in an old barracks that had been converted into apartments for naval officers and their families — a big frame target that the Big Bad Wolf could probably have huffed and puffed away without trying too hard. It was located about a block from the Mississippi River levee, on a nearly defunct Navy base in Algiers, right across the river from the heart of New Orleans.
The base had most likely been a very busy place during in the war that had ended two decades earlier. But you sure couldn’t tell that at the time I lived there. The base’s vital purpose was a thing of the misty past, and of no interest to a preteen. The base I knew was mostly abandoned buildings (for exploring, if you could dodge the Shore Patrol) and huge, empty fields for playing ball.
My Dad was executive officer on the USS Hyman, DD-732, an old Sumner-class destroyer that was there to train reservists on weekends. That and an old diesel submarine were the only ships moored at the base.
The night Betsy hit, Dad was aboard his ship, firmly held in place in the river by cables fore, aft and amidships, and with the engines fired up and running. (There hadn’t been time to put out to sea.) He and the crew spent the night trying to avoid being hit by civilian craft that hadn’t taken such precautions. They still got hit a couple of times. He recalls the shock on the bridge as one freighter headed upriver at eight or nine knots — breakneck speed in that sharply meandering stretch — particularly when the watch realized it was being blown against the current, with no one at the helm.
My mother, brother and I spent the night in our rickety home with our flashlights and bathtubs full of water, listening to the wind tear and crack and howl around us. We experienced the eerie stillness of the eye passing over, then listened to the fury all over again, only in the opposite direction (at which point we closed windows that were now on the windward side, and opened the ones on the lee). I don’t recall being any more scared than I would have been on a ride at the Lake Ponchartrain amusement park. At my age, it was an adventure, and not to be missed.
The next day, we saw what the storm had done. Enormous, aromatic red cedar trees across the street in my best friend Tim Moorman’s yard — his dad was a captain, so they rated a big house — were snapped in two. (We pulled off big shards and put them in our closets.) The only damage our apartment sustained was a rip to the screen on our porch, although other apartments in the building suffered from holes in the roof.
I soon learned we had been among the lucky ones. Fifteen thousand civilian refugees — Ponchartrain spilled over that time, too — were housed for months in the base’s unused buildings and a mobile home village that filled the empty fields.
My Dad’s destroyer was for several days New Orleans’ only official communication link with the outside world. (We weren’t able to call folks in South Carolina to say we were OK for a week.) The ship was called upon to help find a barge full of chlorine that had been lost — which Dad remembers as the most fouled-up operation he ever took part in. After the ship’s sonar and divers had located about a hundred other barges sunk by the storm, the one they sought was found in the one place everyone assumed the civilians had already looked: Right where it had been moored. The chlorine containers were intact.
So all was well in the end. We had withstood nature’s worst (I thought), and life went on.
I had thought Katrina would be pretty much the same — especially with all the advance warning that modern technology provides. Sure, it was almost a Category 5 while Betsy was merely a 3, but the city only got brushed by the back side of the storm this time.
And yet, as we’ve tried to take in the scope of this disaster in the last few days — thousands dead, devastation of apocalyptic proportions across several states — it overwhelms the mind.
This has to be the worst disaster to hit the mainland United States in my lifetime. When was the last time a major city of this proportion had to be abandoned, possibly for months? And we still don’t fully know how bad things are in the less-populated areas that took the main brunt of this nightmare.
This horror is so wide and profound that I really don’t know where to grab hold of it for an editorial point. Certainly, we should all seize any opportunity we can identify to reach out and help the victims. Beyond that, I really don’t know what to say.
But from now on, I’m going to be less nonchalant about weather. Next time the dog starts yelping about a rising wind, rather than telling him to hush and calm down, I just may join him.

Wednesday column, with links

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Where have all the heroes gone?
Nowhere, actually
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
APPARENTLY, there are no war heroes any more. At least, there are none that America feels like lifting up as examples and celebrating. This was the premise of a piece in The New York Times’ Week in Review section Sunday that explained some things to me.
There are, of course, actual heroes in the war on terror. The Times piece gave the names of three of them.
The problem is, I hadn’t heard of them. You probably hadn’t, either. And the contrast between that ignorance on our part, and the way Sgt. Alvin York and Audie Murphy (whose picture, portraying himself in the autobiographical Hollywood movie, “To Hell and Back,” was the dominant feature of the section’s front page) were lionized during and after their wars, is striking — and shocking. And stupid, if, as the story suggests, it reflects a deliberate policy decision on the part of our government.
The three mentioned were:

Sgt. 1st Class Paul R. Smith, Congressional Medal of Honor. He fought off scores of elite Iraqi troops to save his outnumbered unit before he was killed.
Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester, Silver Star. She led a team that killed 27 insurgents who had attacked her convoy.
Sgt. Rafael Peralta received no medal that I’ve been able to trace. After sustaining multiple wounds to the chest and face during the November battle for Fallujah, he grabbed a live enemy grenade and tucked it under his body, sacrificing himself to save a roomful of fellow Marines.

In an earlier age, Sgt. Hester would have been brought home and sent across the country to sell War Bonds. But we don’t do that today, and not only because there are no War Bonds. (Remember, in this war, the homefront is not being asked to sacrifice in any way whatsoever; instead, we have tax cuts and soaring deficits.)
The NYT piece gave the following, admittedly speculative, “reasons” for this: “(P)ublic opinion on the Iraq war is split, and drawing attention to it risks fueling opposition; the military is more reluctant than it was in the last century to promote the individual over the group; and the war itself is different, with fewer big battles and more and messier engagements involving smaller units of Americans. Then, too, there is a celebrity culture that seems skewed more to the victim than to the hero.”
Amen to that last. Who get portrayed as heroes? Jessica Lynch and football star Pat Tillman — both victims. One was wounded and captured, the other killed by friendly fire.
And we hear about the mostly unsung victims who are killed, without any chance to fight back, by roadside IEDs. The message we get from that? “There’s just no use in continuing to try.”
The actual heroes do get mentioned. President Bush spoke of Sgt. Peralta — a Mexican immigrant who enlisted the day after he got his “green card” — at the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast (surely you heard about it). And Sgt. Smith’s name pops up 154 times in the last two years in the news databases I searched. It’s sort of hard to keep the one Medal of Honor awarded in Iraq a complete secret, after all.
But compare Sgt. Smith’s name recognition to Brad Pitt’s. Or Sgt. Hester’s to Janet Jackson’s. Or Rafael Peralta’s to Rafael Palmeiro’s. See what we elevate as worthy of our attention?
Let’s confront another rationale the Times identified: Divided public opinion gives all the more reason to stress the nobility and achievements, not only of those who perform traditional acts of valor in combat, but of those who build schools, or train the new Iraqi army.
Our leaders fear to confront attitudes such as this one, expressed by one Kevin Canterbury in a letter to The Boston Globe:
“I am disgusted by the American media’s glorification of the blood sport we call war,” he begins. (What glorification? Has this guy seen the news?) “Truly sincere, honorable people like Sergeant Rafael Peralta, who make almost superhuman sacrifices to protect freedom and democracy in America, are used as props to personalize and humanize the big lie that the Iraq debacle is a just and noble endeavor.æ.æ.æ. There is nothing romantic about this war.”
No war was ever romantic. It is always an unbelievably horrible, nasty, bloody business. Society used to hide that, and do its best to romanticize combat. But to me, heroism means a lot more when depicted against the brutal reality: Are you more impressed by Audie Murphy in the sanitized battle scenes of “To Hell and Back,” or by the portrayal of Dick Winters’ deeds in HBO’s painfully realistic “Band of Brothers”?
Those of us who believe this war is necessary should not flinch from its horrors. We should hold up what heroes manage to accomplish in spite of it all. Are we squeamish about the fact that the heroism of Sgts. Smith and Hester involved killing the enemy? Yes, we are; even I am. But I think most Americans would appreciate what they’ve done, if they knew enough about them.
Confront directly the attitudes of those like Mr. Canterbury who take the untenable stance of “supporting the troops but not the war.”
As a political tactic, this is a smart improvement over the Vietnam-era practice of spitting (figuratively if not literally) on returning veterans. But when people say “support the troops by bringing them home,” I see it as spitting on the graves of the 1,800 who have already given their lives. That’s what abandoning Iraq would mean.
Soldiers kill. Soldiers get killed — and not in pretty ways, keeling over saying “They got me,” without a trace of blood. They get killed in the manner of Sgt. Peralta, whose remains could only be identified by a tattoo on his shoulder.
If we can’t face that, let’s give up on the whole thing. Let’s disband the military altogether, and just hope the rest of the world decides to show its gratitude by being nice to us from here on.
Or we can face a grim task, and openly respect those who distinguish themselves in performing that task for us while we sit on our broad behinds watching the Michael Jackson trial.
On the day after Sgt. Peralta died, his little brother received the first and last letter the Marine ever wrote to him. “Be proud of being an American,” he wrote. Young Ricardo Peralta should take that advice. And America, returning the favor, should be proud of his big brother.

Left meets right

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Who says left and right are polarized and will never get together? Not I.

Today I received copies of this same piece in The Independent from two very different people.

The first was Tom Turnipseed, whose anti-war views arise naturally from his leftist leanings (naturally to him, anyway — I continue to believe it’s ironic that "conservatives" support, and "liberals" oppose, what is a liberal war in the JFK mold).

Breaking my own rule about not responding to e-mail, but being in one of those moods in which I can’t help myself, I wrote back to Tom to say:

Well, that’s helpful. I suppose we should all go jump off a bridge or something, seeing as how everything is so hopeless.

What this writer misses is that it was already a Big War. I believe it was Tom Friedman who wondered, in the week after Sept. 11, 2001, whether we all realized that we were engaged in World War III. We were then (and had been for some time; it’s just that few Americans turned their attention to the jihadists until they pulled off something really big right here on our shores), and are now.

And it was never, ever going to be small or easy. And it’s going to go on for a long time.

Moments later, I received the exact same article from Rebekah Sutherland.

That’s quite a combo. Seeing as how "Reb" once informed me I was a socialist (and she was not joking), I wonder what she would call Tom?

If these two folks can be so in sync that they send me the same piece to read on the same day, there’s hope for more conventional "liberals" and "conservatives" a little closer to the center to get over their "red state/blue state" alienation and start interacting in a more civil manner.

And if there’s hope for that, there’s hope for all of us. I guess I won’t jump off that bridge just yet.

Refreshing intellectual honesty

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In a professional sense, there is nothing I admire more than intellectual honesty. It is one of the reasons why I rail against political parties and ideologies, because they encourage people to approach an issue or event thinking, "What’s in this for me and my side?" or "How do I spin this to support my preconceived notions?" instead of "What’s really going on here, and what are its true implications, regardless of what I want them to be, and what is the best course for the greater good?"

This is human nature (in the sense that it is something that someone who wants to be a better person should strive to rise above). And the moment one declares a party affiliation or embraces an ideology, one has surrendered to the temptation to follow this easy path. That’s why I avoid doing those things (one reason, anyway). But am I immune to the pull of this corruption? Of course not. I make my living laying opinions out before the public, and it is in my nature as much as it is in anyone else’s to approach each issue or event wanting to find in it justification, rather than refutation, of the position that every reader knows I have taken. After all, a portion of my reputation, such as it is, depends upon my opinions holding up reasonably well to scrutiny. But my reputation is worthless if I’m not able to able to resist that temptation sufficiently to see things as they are.

Whether I succeed in that or not, I leave to others to judge over time. My purpose in this posting is to recognize such intellectual honesty in another writer.

I get so sick of both knee-jerk criticism and knee-jerk defense of what our nation is doing in Iraq, that when I see someone approach the issue in an open-eyed manner, it is refreshing, and renews my faith in the potential of the human race. So it is that I would like to bring this piece from The Washington Post to your attention. It is written by an expert (which I am not) who supports our mission in Iraq (as I do) and has done so since the start (as I have), but because he cares so much about the mission, is enormously frustrated with mistakes the Bush administration has made in this critical endeavor (as am I). So you might say I think this guy is intellectually honest because I agree with him (mostly, anyway). And you may be right.

But there’s one important way in which this writer is different from me — his son is a soldier, and "Before long he will fight in the war that I advocated…." That gives a particular urgency to Eliot A. Cohen’s soul searching. And his own display of honesty is all the more admirable because he has been identified, fairly or not, with a particular ideology. The piece is well worth the read.

Probably my favorite part appears at the very end. I include it here in case you have trouble getting to the link:

There is a lot of talk these days about shaky public support for the war. That is not really the issue. Nor should cheerleading, as opposed to truth-telling, be our leaders’ chief concern. If we fail in Iraq — and I don’t think we will — it won’t be because the American people lack heart, but because leaders and institutions have failed. Rather than fretting about support at home, let them show themselves dedicated to waging and winning a strange kind of war and describing it as it is, candidly and in detail. Then the American people will give them all the support they need. The scholar in me is not surprised when our leaders blunder, although the pundit in me is dismayed when they do. What the father in me expects from our leaders is, simply, the truth — an end to happy talk and denials of error, and a seriousness equal to that of the men and women our country sends into the fight.

Both the cheerleaders and those who are doing all they can to make public support for the war "shaky" should read this realistic assessment. Then they should drop their simplistic poses and think about how we proceed from here.

More on Westmoreland

Shame we must not forget

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This week we mark the 10th anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica, and I wonder what we have learned about evil and how we should respond to it. We’ve learned a lot of details about what happened, from testimony before the war-crimes tribunal in The Hague. We know that some of the monsters responsible for it, such as General Ratko Mladic himself, are still at large.

But then, he’s not the only one responsible, is he? How about all the nations that stood by and let it happen, even though Srebrenica had been declared a safe haven by the United Nations, supposedly under the protection of UN (specifically, Dutch) troops. I don’t really get a say in what monsters Srebrenica1 choose to do. But all of us who live in liberal democracies have a say in whether our nations act when they have the power to do so.

The awful thing is, Western democracies have tended to wait until the worst has already happened before acting. Consider the last part of The Economist‘s reflection on the subject last week:

Visiting the cemetery in September 2003, Bill Clinton also gave a remarkably blunt, and politically astute, analysis of the political effects of the massacre. "Srebrenica", he said, "was the beginning of the end of genocide in Europe. It enabled me to secure NATO support for the bombing that led to…peace." In other words, without Srebrenica, America could not have won the support of its European allies for a sharp switch to a war-fighting (and thus war-ending) strategy in Bosnia.

On this reading, at least, Srebrenica was a sort of genocide to end all genocides (in one part of the world, anyway). It was also a necessary prerequisite to the dropping of the "bombs for peace" — which, by triggering a final, vast wave of forced population movement, left Bosnia’s military balance, and above all its ethnic balance, in a state acceptable to the region’s power-brokers.

For the bereaved mothers and widows gathering at the cemetery this week, that surely raises a hard question: was the shock of a massacre the only thing that could make the western powers change policy, and settle their own differences? Was there no other way?

Was it really necessary for 8,000 men and boys to be murdered in cold blood right under the noses of the troops of advanced Western nations for civilization to rouse itself from its torpor and confront evil? And if so, how long does that inoculation against fecklessness and indifference last? Must we keep on getting booster shots — in Rwanda, in the Sudan, and yes, in New York and Washington on Srebrenica2 9/11 for us to be willing to confront the menace. And how long does each of those updates last? Seldom long enough.

Today’s column, with links

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You want fear? Outrage? Londoners won’t give you the satisfaction

THE MAN arrived at Queen Alexandra’s House, right next to the Royal Albert Hall, just as expected Thursday.
   “I’m here to deliver the carpet,” he said. “Isn’t this a mess?” He then went about his business delivering the carpet.
   “This,” of course, was the bombings that struck the London Underground and one of the city’s emblematic double-decker buses, killing dozens of Britons in a few moments that shook the world.
But aside from those immediately involved, it didn’t shake up Britons all that much. The above anecdote was related to me by our own Randle Christian, whose fuller account of her impressions appears on the facing page.
   You will also find there the observations of Phil Lader, former ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. He wrote the piece on his Blackberry Friday while riding from London, through the Chunnel and on to Paris. To Mr. Lader, who wears more hats with more prestigious firms here and over there than I have ball caps in my closet, this is not an atypical day.
   We sort of played phone and e-mail tag throughout his journey, and finally made voice contact as he arrived in Paris.
With apologies — which I assured him were quite unnecessary, as I knew exactly what he meant — he suggested that watching American TV news Thursday night from London, he was struck by how the tone and emphasis of it was a bit… off.
   You’d have thought from the U.S. telly that there was pandemonium throughout the city, and Britain6 terror the length and breadth of Britain. Hardly. There was “no sign of panic,” he said, even in areas close to the actual incidents.
   There had been much more excitement on Wednesday, when Britons were literally dancing in the streets over having snatched the 2012 Olympics away from Paris. When I observed that such behavior as that didn’t sound much like the British (even with the added sweetener of having stolen a march on their neighbors across the channel), he ascribed it to the fact that “The pubs did a very good business” that day.
   They did all right on Thursday as well. Andrew Sullivan’s blog quotes one Londoner this way: “Work’s over but there’s little chance of getting home right now. Most of us are just going to go to the pub until the traffic has died down. It’s not callousness or indifference to carry on as normal, it’s quiet defiance.”
   Or as Mr. Sullivan quoted from a site called “The London News Review:” “What the (expletive) do you think you’re doing? This is London. We’ve dealt with your sort before. You don’t try and pull this on us….”
   In describing this unflappability, Mr. Lader worried, “You risk dismissing the human tragedy.” But the thing is, the Brits just don’t lose their cool about this sort of thing. In America, the nation weeps, mourns and shakes its fist in avenging rage. Even allowing for the significant gap in magnitude between 9/11/01 and 7/7/05, our reaction was qualitatively different, not just quantitatively. Perhaps terrorism on our shores shattered the sense of invulnerability that two oceans gave us for most of our history, whereas the British populace has coped much more directly and much more often with attacks, ranging from Hitler to the IRA.
   Even when the English get worked up enough to fight about it, they don’t let it interfere with their routines. In 1944, Americans were frequently flabbergasted when they had the Germans on the run, and the Yanks were all hot to press the advantage, and their British allies would stop, build fires and have their tea (Note: Search that page for the word, "brew"). If there had been a pub handy, they likely would have stopped for a pint. Lacking that, they made do (once again, search for "brew"). It wasn’t for lack of courage; British pluck is just different from its gung-ho American cousin.
   Mr. Lader had his own anecdote from that war: He told of German pilots using the Greenwich monument that marks the spot where the world begins its system of telling time as a navigational landmark for their bombing runs. Greenwich civilians would look up, see the Heinkel and Junkers bombers making their turns overhead, and then go on about their business, though fully aware of the aircrafts’ purposes.
   It was those people’s children and grandchildren that Mr. Lader’s daughter Mary-Catherine went to work with at Reuters on Friday, the day after the attacks. If not for people casually relating their inconvenience stories from the previous day — the Tube was tied up, after all — he said you wouldn’t have known anything had happened. I pictured workers speaking in the same tones characters in the BBC’s “The Office” used to moan about how many pints they’d had the night before.
   Mr. Lader spoke of the “resolve” and “determination” he saw among Lon
doners, which he thinks Prime Minister Tony Blair’s public comments on Thursday perfectly captured.
   But, I asked, resolve and determination to do what? To address the sources and causes of terrorism, or simply to go on about daily life (which actually, except for our volunteer armed forces, is pretty much what we’ve ultimately done over here — carry on as though nothing happened)?
   Mr. Lader didn’t know. He expected that some who have been furious at the PM will “have to look at Blair’s decisions in a different light.” But was this a “tipping point” in either British attitudes or Tonygeorge the resolve of advanced nations to address terrorism aggressively, from fighting poverty to waging war? “Not necessarily.”
   While there might be some new “momentum” toward renewing the viability of the Western alliance, “It’s going to take more than that” — his “that” being the same as the carpet man’s “this.”
   The world, unfortunately, has become somewhat inured to such horrific incidents.
   So who knows what happens next. But one thing is clear: You don’t (same expletive again) with the Brits and hope to accomplish anything. You won’t get fear, or surrender (as in Spain) or even the polarizing hatred that Osama bin Laden hopes to sow between Mideast and West. The lads in the pub are just not going to give you the satisfaction.

A nation’s blood offering

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I mentioned in my column today about visiting Gettysburg. That was a week ago today, and of course, today is the 142nd anniversary of the last day of the battle. After the news of his death came between that day and this, a friend mentioned that Shelby Foote had maintained that one should always visit Civil War battlefields at the same time of year of the battle — partly so you’ll have similar weather, but also so that the foliage will be the same, so you can see things as the participants saw them.

Well, I did that, unintentionally. And I sincerely hope that it wasn’t as hot this day 142 years ago in that spot as it was last week. (One night last weekend, well after dark, my rental car informed me it was still over 90 outside — in Pennsylvania.) The men who were there suffered enough as it was. It was pretty rough strolling around there in a T-shirt; I can’t imagine fighting even in tattered butternut homespun, much less in a heavy wool dark blue military blouse.

As uncomfortable as it was for me, I have to praise the selflessness of my wife and youngest daughter for accompanying me. Touring battlefields is obviously not everyone’s cup of tea, and they really wanted to get over to Amish country the other side of Lancaster (given Amish pacifism, about as sharp a contrast with battles as one can find).

Being semi-sensitive to their wishes (we DID get to see some beautiful Amish farms before dark, just as the folks who own them were riding home in their buggies or taking their Sunday rest clad in 026_23a plain finery, in perfect gardens and alongside covered bridges), I decided to take a hit-and-run approach to the site.

I determined that I would find the spot on Little Round Top where, on the second day, a professor of theology named Joshua Chamberlain and his understrength Maine regiment acted with unparalleled courage in one desperate moment and saved the United States of America. (Yes, I realized that’s debatable, but if he had not stopped the Alabama troops who were trying desperately to outflank the Union line, this pivotal battle could have pivoted the other way.) I just wanted to stand in the place where history had stood on a cusp and was decided by sheer, suicidal determination. I expected to feel the power of the place. I didn’t realize that I would be even more awed by another spot altogether.

021_18a The ranger in the main building could hardly believe that was the only place I wanted to go. Still, she patiently showed me on the map the best way to get there, bypassing most of the carefully laid-out tour. When she asked if I was sure that’s the only place I wanted to go, I felt bad enough (her manner seemed to imply that my hurried approach showed insufficient respect to the dead whose final resting place Abraham Lincoln had dedicated only about 100 yards from where we stood.

So I added, "Where’s Cemetery Ridge?" "We’re standing on it," she said. "So where’s the stone wall?" "Right over there, the other side of that building." OK, then. I’ll check that out, too.

That was the thing, as it happened, that blew me away. I knew that the Federals had taken the high ground before the battle even started, and that Pickett’s Charge (as well as the advance of other elements of Longstreet’s corps) had been doomed from the start as a result. But to stand on that high ground, and look out at the perfectly clear fields of fire that looked down on the completely open plain upon which the Virginians advanced — not a scrap of cover to speak of; the trees they emerged from looking to be close to two miles away — I could feel what it must have been like to keep marching into certain death. The men who landed on Omaha Beach had a better tactical advantage than those Rebels did. And still they marched on. Could there have been one of them who expected to live through the next hour, much less prevail? And yet still they advanced.

No movie, no book — no matter how it tried to dramatize what happened — could capture the sheer futility of that situation the way I perceived it standing there and looking down upon the place where it happened. This photograph doesn’t do it. You have to stand there and let your eyes wander from 018_15a_1 the stone wall to those trees so far away, to the flatness below, to the markers behind and around you telling how many batteries of Union artillery poured lead and fire down upon the Southerners.

Little Round Top, when I went there later and saw where Col. Strong Vincent told Col. Chamberlain to "hold this ground at all costs" was every bit as inspiring as I expected it to be. But it didn’t have the emotional kick of standing at the High-Water Mark of the Confederacy and seeing where it left its stain on the magnificent countryside of Pennsylvania.

What was Lee really thinking, attacking the Union center so pointlessly after two days of other, wiser tactics failing? Was it a sort of ennui? A gesture of fatalism? Was he just fed up after three years of mostly successful campaigning? Did he just want an end to it either way — either break the Union Army completely right there in that moment, or suffer a defeat so crippling that it would hasten the inevitable end? (I’m sure there are many reading this who are far better-read than I about Lee’s motives, but who can really know?)

As glad that I am that the Confederate cause failed, I mourn those Southerners who gave their lives so uselessly. If I watch the movie version of this battle, I want to shout at the screen, "Listen to Gen. Longstreet, Marse Robert! Sometimes we South Carolinians know best!" I want his men to live.

But maybe that couldn’t be. Maybe the cliche that the sin of slavery could only be washed away with oceans of blood, both Northern and Southern, is the pure and simple truth. (And please, neo-Confederates, don’t start on the "it wasn’t about slavery" kick. Almost every political interaction between North and South since the beginning of the nation, from the Constitutional Convention through Bleeding Kansas, had in one way or another been about that one issue. Talk about tariffs and such all day, and you can’t get around the fact that one of the two economic systems involved in the debates was founded on slavery, which gave the land its economic value. Talk, as George Bush’s critics do today, about how the Republican president kept changing his stated rationale for the war as it wore on. None of that changes what is obvious to anyone who is not just bound and determined to rationalize that which cannot be justified. Read what the South Carolinians who made the decision to secede said to explain themselves — and don’t forget to do a search to see how many times "slave" occurs in the document. It just doesn’t matter that most Southern soldiers didn’t own slaves; that fact just makes them the victims of those who did.)

Maybe the fact that both North and South had winked at the problem for four score and seven years, tiptoeing around the issue in flawed compromise after compromise in an effort to keep the young nation together, meant there had to be such a titanic holocaust offered on the altar of fratricidal war. You can read that thought in books, but it just doesn’t have the same force as standing there, sweating and weary and ready to go home, upon the altar itself.

The Longest Day

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Today is the day of days — at least it was, 61 years ago. Our modern-day Agincourt, when men who lay a-bed in America might hold their manhoods cheap in later years, for not having been there to launch the assault on Hitler’s Fortress Europa.

Of course, the men who were there would have snorted at such flowery, high-flown rhetoric. They were just there to do a job that they didn’t want to have to do, and were pretty ticked off at the Germans for keeping them from being able to lay a-bed back home.

And unlike at Agincourt, there were plenty of men on our side that day. About 175,000 were flung into the headlong, all-or-nothing effort — on that first day alone. The war in the West, and and perhaps in the East as well, depended on the establishment of a beachhead on this day, in spite of everything Field Marshall Erwin Rommel had done to make it impossible. And he had done all he could.

By this time of day, the battle was well joined. Paratroopers had been on the ground since midnight — early evening on June 5 back home. They had been scattered all over the place by C-47 pilots who had been totally unprepared for the volume of anti-aircraft fire they had flown into — dropped too fast, too low and almost always in the wrong locations. Plenty else had gone wrong. So many things had gone wrong that Iraq looks seamless by comparison. At midmorning, Omaha had looked hopeless — to the generals. But individual sergeants and lieutenants here and there didn’t know that, and went ahead to get the job done.

How, I don’t know. It’s hard to imagine. All any of us who were born later can know is what we read in books and see in films. Steven Spielberg has done his best to try to depict the experience, in one epic film and on television, and for many of us, that constitutes our entire understanding of that momentous day.

To help connect us a little more to the reality, I provide links to sites dedicated to two of the real men who were there — Bill Guarnere and David Kenyon Webster. One of them still lives, the other is long gone. Their names — particularly Sgt. Guarnere’s — are well known to those who watched Mr. Spielberg’s "Band of Brothers." Both were members of Company E of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. Mr. Webster’s letters home (he was an aspiring writer who had left Harvard to join the Airborne) were a critical source for Stephen Ambrose when he wrote the book upon which the series was based.

Go to the sites. Mr. Guarnere’s is worth it for the intro alone. Mr. Webster’s contains excerpts from his letters. Their words provide a better, and more fitting, tribute to what they and so many thousands of others accomplished than anything further I could say.

bradwarthen.com

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