I had never, ever heard of this particularly daring and creative WWII operation, until I taped a TV mini-series about it all, off Star-Plus when I was in Korea… umm, about a decade ago. Chalk it up to cultural bias and isolationism, since I had always read more about the European side of it, and the bits that American forces were involved in, in the Pacific…still, I do regret that I had never heard much about this operation. Major/Colonel Lyon does come off as one of those who is indisputably mad, perhaps a little bit bad, and definitly dangerous— if not to know, then to follow him into the jaws of death or Singapore harbor under Japanese occupation in 1943-45.
(The miniseries is not, apparently, available via Amazon, although the book that it is based upon is.)
There’s a very cool photographic exhibit at the Library of Congress, portions of which are available online.
From 1935 to 1944, the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI) employed about a dozen professional photographers to wander the country and take pictures. What makes this collection notable is that the photographers were using the new KodaChrome slide film, as well as their standard black and white.
From the exhibit overview page:
The original goal of the government project was to record through documentary photographs the ravages of the Depression on America’s rural population and were intended to spur Congress and the American public to support government relief efforts. Over the years, with an improved economy, increased industrialization, and the onset of World War II, the photographs increasingly focused on an America that was productive, beautiful, and determined. The photographs originally intended to have a narrow focus developed into a noteworthy broader national record.
The LOC has put 70 of these color photos into an online exhibit for those of us who aren’t near the actual exhibit in DC. Those 70 photos are awesome enough, although titles of some pieces most likely do not reflect the photographer’s original labeling of the work (or did we use the term “African-American” in the late 1930s?). They run the gamut from American Gothic type shots to Rosie the Riveter, and then some.
And for those of us (like me) who think 70 pics just whet our appetite, the entire collection of over 171K black/white and color photographs (about 1600 color ones, I think) are also available for viewing online.
You can even view the uncompressed TIFF version of the images, if you have the bandwidth to spare.
This is one of my favorites, thus far. It’s different from most of the other “Rosie the Riveters” I’ve seen before.
This pic of a welder is another one I really like.
Give yourselves a visual treat. As a bare minimum, check out the 70 photo exhibit. It’s pretty impressive.
Granny Jessie, tiny and brutally practical, was not particularly given to fancy and fantasies. When she talked of old days and old ways, she talked of her girlhood on her fathers’ ancestral acres, a farm near Lionville, Chester County, Pennsylvania; of horse-drawn wagons, and cows and cats, and how pigs were cleverer than dogs. Of how she and her sister and brother would have to stop going down to the pig-pen early in the fall, lest they become too fond of an animal whose fate it was to be butchered for ham, and bacon, roasts and sausage and scrapple to last the winter through. Of how she played on the Lionville boys’ baseball team, since there were not enough boys, and she was a tomboy and skillful enough to play first-base, and how her grandfathers’ house was once a fall-back way-station on the Underground Railway. (It was the inn in Lionville itself was the main way-station, with a secret room and a concealed access to the woods, or so said Granny Jessie.) It was all very prosaic, very American, a breath away from the Little House books and so very familiar.
Granny Dodie’s stories, even if she did not have a spell-binding repertoire, were touched with fire and enchantment because of the very unfamiliarity of the venue… a row-house in Liverpools’ Merseyside, a few streets away from there the Beatles had come from, where Granny Dodie had grown up the youngest of a family of nine, sleeping three in a bed with her older sisters. “The one on the side is a golden bride, the one by the wall gets a golden ball, the one in the middle gets a golden fiddle, “she recited to me once. “Although all I ever got of it was the hot spot!” All her brothers were sailors or dockworkers, and her ancestors too, as far as memory went. Even her mothers’ family, surnamed Jago, and from Cornwall— even they were supposed to have grafted onto their family tree a shipwrecked Armada sailor. Granny Dodie insisted breathlessly there was proof of this in the darkly exotic good looks of one of her brothers. “He looked quite foreign, very Spanish!” she would say. We forbore to ruin the story by pointing out that according to all serious historic records, all the shipwrecked Spaniards cast up on English shores after the Armada disaster were quickly dispatched… and that there had been plenty of scope in Cornwall— with a long history of trans-channel adventure and commerce—to have acquired any number of foreign sons-in-law. She remembered Liverpool as it was in that long-ago Edwardian heyday, the time of the great trans-Atlantic steamers, and great white birds (liver-birds, which according to her gave the port it’s name) and cargo ships serving the commercial needs of a great empire, the docks all crowded and the shipways busy and prosperous.
One Christmas, she and my great-Aunt Nan discovered a pictue book— John S. Goodalls’ “An Edwardian Summer”, among my daughters’ presents, and the two of them immediately began waxing nostalgic about long-ago seaside holidays; that time when ladies wore swimsuits that were more like dresses, with stockings and hats. They recollected donkey-rides along the strand, the boardwalks and pleasure-piers full of carnival rides, those simpler pleasures for a slightly less over-stimulated age. But the one old tale that Granny Dodie told, the one that stayed my memory, especially when Pip and JP and I spent the summer of 1976 discovering (or re-discovering) our roots was this one:
“There are places,” she said, ” Out in the country, they are, where there are stone stairways in the hillsides, going down to doorways… but they are just the half the size they should be. They are all perfectly set and carved… but for the size of people half the size we are. And no one knows where they lead.”
Into the land of the Little People, the Fair Folk, living in the hollow hills, of course, and the half-sized stairways lead down into their world, a world fair and terrible, filled with faerie, the old gods, giants and monsters and the old ways, a world half-hidden, but always tantalizingly, just around the corner, or down the half-sized stairway into the hidden hills, and sometimes we mundane mortals could come close enough to brush against that unseen world of possibilities.
From my journal, an entry writ during the summer of 1976, when Pip and JP and I spent three months staying in youth hostels and riding busses and BritRail… and other means of transportation:
July 9- Inglesham
Today we started off to see the Uffington White Horse, that one cut into the hillside in what— the Bronze or Iron Age, I forget which. We started off thinking we could catch a bus and get off somewhere near it, but after trying quite a few bus stops (unmarked they are at least on one side of the road) we took to hitch-hiking and the first person took us all the way there. He was an employee of an auctioneering firm, I guess & I guess he wasn’t in a hurry because he asked where we were going (Swindon & then to the White Horse) & said he would take us all the way there. It was a lovely ride, out beyond Ashbury, and the best view of the horse is from the bottom, or perhaps an aero plane. It’s very windy up here, very strong and constantly- I think it must drive the grass right back into the ground, because it was very short & curly grass. We could see for miles, across the Vale, I guess they call it. After that we walked up to Uffington Castle, an Iron Age ring-embankment, & some people were trying to fly a kite-it’s a wonder it wasn’t torn to pieces.
We sat for a while, watching fields of wheat rippling like the ocean & cloud-shadows moving very slowly and deliberately across the multicolored patchwork.
The man who brought us out advised us to walk along the Ridgeway, an ancient track along the crest of the hill, and so we did. It was lovely and oh, so lonely. Nothing but the wheat fields on either side and looking as if they went on forever.
We looked at Wayland’s Smithy, a long stone barrow in a grove of trees & when we got to Ashford, we found the Rose & Crown pub and had lunch. It was practically empty, no one but an elderly couple and their dog, a lovely black & white sheepdog, very friendly. Then we set off to walk and hitch-hike back to Highworth, but we picked the two almost deserted roads in Oxfordshire to do it, because it took nearly forever to get two rides. One got us from Ashbury to (indecipherable) and the second directly into Highworth. Both were women, very kind and chatty; I wish I knew what impulse people have which make them pick up hitch-hikers. What I do know is that the loveliest sight is that of a car slowing down and the driver saying “Where are y’heading for?”
Thirty years later I remember how charmed we were by the people who gave us rides— the auctioneers assistant who was so taken in by my reasons for seeing the White Horse that he decided he had to see it himself, and the two women— both with cars full of children— who were either totally innocent of the ways of this soon-to-become-wicked-world, or had unerring snap-judgment in deciding to slow down and pick up three apparently innocent and apparent teenagers. (I was 22 but was frequently and embarrassingly informed that I looked younger than the 16 year-old Pip, and JP was 20, but also must have looked innocent, younger and harmless.)
With their assistance, we spent a lovely day, in the sun and wind, in the uplands along the Ridgeway, examining the form of a running horse, cut into the turf on a chalk hillside, an ancient fortress, a legendary dolman tomb, and an ancient highway along the backbone of Britain… always thinking that just around the next bend would be the stairway into the hollow hills, and the giants and fair folk of old… Adventure and peril just as Grannie Dodie said it would be in the lands of our ancestors… always just around the corner.
In the summer of 1971, when the Girl Scout troop that I belonged to was doing a lovely and frivolous three-week excursion to the Hawaiian Islands, I talked to a man who said he was a Navy vet, and had been at Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. He was, he said, on Ford Island, on a bicycle and on his way to the mess hall for breakfast, when several sorts of heck broke out. And suddenly, everything changed… and nothing was ever quite the same again.
Pearl Harbor, December 7th , 1941….
(Turret of the Arizona, taken from the memorial, 1971)
My daughter says she has a new understanding of that… she was on her way to work, the morning of September 11, 2001, at Camp Pendleton, that the whole thing began to develop as she was waking up, in the shower, driving into work… and when she got there, the Marines at her unit were all in the parking lot, listening to their car radios. And that for two or three days, the base was weirdly, curiously quiet.
History… it’s the thing that is happening, when we are on our way to breakfast and have other plans.
It was a seasonal thing, the spring flu that hit in that particular year— everyone caught it, and almost everyone got better— the usual aches and temperature, headaches and lassitude. It didn’t seem much different from what strikes us every year; translating into a couple of days curled up at home in bed under the quilts, drinking hot liquids, sleeping a fevered and restless sleep and when awake, feeling rather feeble and wretched. These days— as then— only a relative handful of elderly and chronically ill see the usual flu turn into pneumonia, deadly, swift and terminal. The only curious thing noted in early accounts from Spain, in the northern resort city of San Sebastian, was that everyone exposed to the spring flu seemed to come down with it.
San Sebastian was (and still is) a charming, compact little city, built around an almost perfectly circular harbor. A generous pedestrian promenade runs nearly the entire circumference, adorned with elaborate light standards and a low balustrade along the edge, broken by shallow stairs descending to the beach level. The shortest way to commute across the downtown is in fact to walk along the beach; my daughter and I noticed many primly business-suited professional men walking home in the afternoon, carrying a briefcase and their shoes and socks, with their pant-legs turned up towards their knees, sloshing through the shallow water. The business commuters strolled by ladies of a certain, old-fashioned age, wearing modest one-piece bathing suits, and serious night-at-the-opera jewelry; an elaborate choker or paurure, long bracelets set with many stones, and cocktail rings.
San Sebastian was a place to be seen, gambling in the casinos, strolling along the circular promenade, even in 1918 while the last tattered glories of Belle Epoque Europe and all its old verities and optimistic assumptions were being smashed to microscopic fragments several hundred miles farther east. Spain was at peace, its’ newspapers uncensored, and although the city fathers of 1918 tried to downplay the spread of what otherwise seemed to be the usual three days of aches and fever— who wanted to come to a resort in the season, and spend ones’ holiday being sick— the spring flu struck across Europe. Government offices shut down, the British grand fleet couldn’t put out to sea in May because so many sailors were down sick, British and German ground offenses were put off, workers in vital war industries were unable to work- but then summer came, and the tide of illness— now termed the “Spanish flu” ebbed under the summer heat.
And then in August, the flu returned, crashing like a monstrous wave, nearly as communicable as it had been in the spring, but mutated during the interim— no one knows where by what means—into something deadly, something that killed large numbers of the young and otherwise healthy. It is estimated that in the United States alone, more than a quarter of the population caught the flu. Of those stricken, about twenty percent had a mild case and recovered without incident, but according to writer Gina Kolata, the rest became deathly ill. They died within days or even hours, delirious and gasping for air, their lungs filled with thin, bloody fluid.
Others, who seemed at first to have a manageable illness, would develop a deadly pneumonia, which if not fatal meant a protracted convalescence. And doctors and public health officials were all but helpless in the face of the deluge, a helplessness most particularly searing because the medical arts had just come off a seventy-year run of successes on all fronts. Miracles had seemingly been worked 2-a-penny: epidemic diseases like cholera, malaria, typhus had been banished or at least beaten back, anesthesia made complicated surgeries possible, antiseptics banished bacterial infection, childbirth made considerably less hazardous to the average Western woman, people no longer routinely died of appendicitis or a hundred other maladies that had kept human lives nasty, brutish and short. But the doctors were as helpless in 1918 as they had been a hundred years before; there was nothing they could do, as the strongest and fittest gasped out a last few agonizing breaths, their faces and extremities dark and congested from lack of oxygen. Hospitals filled up and up; as did the morgues and graveyards. Public health departments handed out gauze masks, and forbade spitting in public. Volunteers in places as far apart as Reading, England and El Paso, Texas set up temporary hospitals in schools and other public places.
I am fairly sure that my great-grandmother, Alice Page Hayes was one of those fearless and public-spirited women; according to her daughter, my adventurous Great-Aunt Nan (who did herself contract the flu), she had volunteered with the Red Cross and St. Johns’ Ambulance Service in Reading where she lived with her husband and daughter, all during the war. I have somewhere a tiny St. Johns’ Ambulance pin attesting to her service; of course, it was the done thing for middle and upper-class Englishwomen all during World War I. Alice Page Hayes, though, had an advantage over her peers, and that was that she had seriously trained as a nurse early in the 1880ies when it wasn’t quite the ladylike thing to do at all. Volunteer work made necessary by a war made it possible for her to continue with her calling, even though (as witness in her own copy of Mrs. Beatons’) nursing the sick was a particularly necessary part of ordinary household management, up until the day of inoculations and antibiotics. I am supposed to be like her, or so say a handful of family friends and connections acquainted with us both. Was she much like me? Managerial and confident, and just perhaps – one of those lucky people who never catch anything, or at very worst, a light case of whatever is going around?
One of the enduring puzzles of the 1918 pandemic was the mortality rate among the young and healthy, whereas the very young, the old and the chronically ill are the more usual victims. Some experts speculate that a previous flu in 1890 may have been just enough similar to the 1918 pandemic to afford immunity to those who had caught the earlier influenza variant – or that immunities acquired by those who were babies and small children at the time over-reacted with fatal results to the later epidemic. Nonetheless, I like to think of my great-grandmother, who had been exposed to and survived everything that the late 19th-century could throw at her, walking confidently into an emergency ward full of the desperately sick, knowing that she would do her best, that thanks to her work, some would live who otherwise would have died, that she would be OK, that she was one of the strong ones – and that I am one of her strong descendants.
In Dinant, Belgium, there is a cliff beside the River Meuse. At the base of the cliff is a cathedral, topped by an onion dome (onion domes abound in this town, for some reason). It is impossible to walk around the cathedral – the cliff forms its back wall. Atop the cliff, lining its edge, and at one point peering down on the cathedral dome, is a citadel.
If you go to Dinant today, and pay your few francs for the tour, you can either ride the cable car to the top of the cliff, climb the 408 stairs to the top of the cliff, or as I discovered on my final visit there, you can drive to the top of the cliff. I wish I’d known about the parking lot before climbing the stairs on my previous three visits.
As the tour guide leads you through the rooms, repeating himself in French, Dutch, German and English, depending on his audience, you learn that the Dutch occupied the citadel at one time, and that Napoleon stopped there, meeting his mistress who rode in a carriage from Paris. The carriage is on display in the citadel’s museum. You will traverse a catwalk, not visible in this photo, that takes you out over the cathedral. It’s larger than a catwalk, honestly – 2-3 people could walk abreast, but when you’re afraid of heights, it seems to be very narrow, and very fragile. My first visit, I stayed in the middle of it and scampered across as quickly as I could to reach the safety of the tunnel on the other side. Thank goodness I’m not claustrophobic, as well. By the time of my final visit, I had desensitized myself to where I could stand by the fenced edge, and take a picture looking *down* on the onion dome.
The citadel has been there since before Napoleon. The almost-twenty years that have passed since my visits there have dimmed my memory of its exact age. It has withstood countless attacks, and fallen to others. In 1915, with the town in flames from German bombs, it fell again.
It is a long citadel, as you can see in the picture. Inside there are many rooms, one after the other. Some paths lead you through rooms in a roundabout way bringing you back out into the center of the citadel, while others lead you into rooms that have no way out except to retrace your steps.
As you tour the citadel, the guide leads you through the rooms. In one, there is a display case showing mannequins with period uniforms/weapons of WWI. In the next room, there is a red plastic film over the window, to give the impression of the burning town. There is a diorama there, showing soldiers fighting. The soldiers are dressed like the mannequins in the previous room – this room represents 1915.
While the town burned below them, the defenders fought the Germans in the citadel. But it was not their town – not their fortress. They did not know that some paths led through rooms to a dead end. Fighting furiously, being pushed back from room to room, they learned the hard way that there was no way out.
It is a quiet group that retraces its steps through those rooms, back to the central, open area of the citadel.
After the tour ends, you are free to wander the grounds. I found myself wandering the military cemetery there, looking at “the crosses, row on row,” and murmuring portions of “On Flanders Fields” to myself, even though I was in Wallonia, not Flanders. There were Germans and Canadians buried there, but also Americans, from both wars.
Dinant was and is my favorite Belgian town. I’ve toured the citadel either 4 or 5 times, because we would take new arrivals there, for something to do on a Saturday.
It’s been 17 years since I last toured the citadel, but I still remember that red-tinged room, and the hopeless valor of those gallant soldiers.
Cpl. Blondie, at the USMC Ball
Founded November 10th, 1775, still going strong, and smiting our enemies where’er they be found. Happy 230th Birthday, USMC.
(Yes, I know a bit of hair is over her collar. Her problem, not mine. Deal with it.)
Please note that this post ushers in a new category: Eat, Drink and be Merry: Foods, Beverages and the Joy of Breaking Bread. I think this is in order; we’ve done many posts on the subject to date. And, while it may just be the season, we seem to be doing more all the time.
I have just watched (with several interruptions) The Cultivated Life: Thomas Jefferson and Wine, on my local PBS station. To any lover of wine, or of history (and most know I am both), this should be considered a must see.
It is almost cliche that, here in California, wine is central to our culture. But, as I was reminded of with this comment from my dear friend, Jude, the same is true, to one degree or another, of many other regions of America. Indeed, wine grapes are grown in every state of the Union, save for Alaska and Wyoming.
But it wasn’t always that way. Grapes are not native to North America. Historians believe that what Leif Eriksson actually saw, when making landfall in Newfoundland, were cranberries – not grapes. And the early colonists found their attempts to introduce grapes quite frustrating. While Jefferson was a great lover of wine, and became quite the connoisseur during his time in France, he was never successful in his attempts to grow grapes at Monticello. I have been aware of the basics of this for some time, but I found the detail and color offered by this program quite enriching.
Update: As my readers have pointed out, I was incorrect in my statement that grapes are not native to North America. However, early Americans – on the east coast at least – did have difficulties growing wine grapes (PDF – 55 pgs.):
British settlers first attempted to plant Vitis vinifera in the U.S. in 1619, but were faced with difficult conditions and low yields. The poor growing climate of the east coast even prevented accomplished European growers brought over by the colonists from establishing any sort of sustainable venture. It was not until 1818 in York, Pennsylvania, that Thomas Eichelberger was able to become the first commercially successful grower. Still, production was rather small and wine drinkers had to rely mainly on European imports.229 The first permanent and extensive wine production came later in the 1830s with the establishment of Nicholas Longworth near Cincinnati, Ohio.230
At the same time, unbeknownst to the isolated east coast, a separate wine industry began to take root in the west. Jesuits from Spain moved north from Mexico around 1700 and began setting up missions throughout California. Father Juniper Serra set up twenty-one such missions, all of which had vineyards. Wine served a sacramental purpose for the missionaries, but had little outside use at the time. Thus, when the missions began to diminish in importance later in the century, the vineyards also fell into disrepair without any interested parties to care for them.231
The California wine industry remained on the fringe until the influx of settlers from the Gold Rush arrived in the mid-1800s. Finding mainly missionary grapes, the settlers called for something better. In 1860, Hungarian immigrant Agoston Haraszthy helped create the Viticultural Commission to oversee the development of the wine industry in California. Haraszthy brought back many vines from his travels in Europe and distributed them throughout California. When phylloxera swept through the world in the late 1800s, it was discovered that indigenous vines from the eastern U.S. were not susceptible to the disease. This led producers around the world to begin grafting western and European vines onto the roots of the eastern vines in hopes of preventing future outbreaks. Slowly producers and consumers alike began pushing for higher standards of quality, which led to the creation of the Board of Viticultural Commissioners and the State Agricultural Experiment Station to control the artistic, scientfic, and business aspects of the industry.232
Disaster struck the U.S. wine industry when the 18th Amendment was ratified in 1919 instituting Prohibition. Many vineyards were either abandoned or forced to survive on government permits to produce small amounts of medicinal, sacramental, or cooking wine.233 Other vineyards were torn up and planted with inferior grapes that were used for unfermented juices, jams, and jellies. Some wine production did go underground, however. Such homemade wines were often heavier and were fortified to have higher alcohol contents. In fact, after Prohibition ended, two-thirds of wine produced was over 20 alcohol.234 When Prohibition came to an end in 1933, the industry was in shambles. An estimated 1000 commercial wineries had been reduced to 150, many of those only having survived as a result of the government permits.
Producers also refused to replace the inferior vines that they had planted during Prohibition, claiming that replanting was too expensive and that their products had been selling adequately before.235 In 1935, the Wine Institute was created to oversee, stabilize, and monitor the regrowth of the industry.236 The Wine Institute also served as a government lobby and a publicity board for the fragmented industry, although it failed in its campaign to make Americans realize that wine should be drunk with food and not merely for intoxicating purposes. In fact, consumer preference for a higher alcohol content remained through World War II, when 75% of wine made in the U.S. was fortified. It was also around the time of World War II that the wine industry finally started to rebound.237
The 1940s marked a period of consolidation as large distillers began to buy up vineyards. Four companies Schenley, Hiram Walker, Seagram, and National, owned almost half the industry at the time. Consolidation also allowed for vast improvements in consistency and quality. By the 1970s, the rise of wine had begun, as many discovered table wine as an alternative to fortified wines. Finally, the 1980s marked another resurgence where wine became viewed as part of a healthy, civilized lifestyle, rather than a source of inebriation.238.
____________________________________________________229 Richard McGowan, Government Regulation of the Alcohol Industry 37 (1997).
230 Oxford Companion to Wine, supra note 10, at 726.
231 McGowan, supra note 229, at 37. California now accounts for 90% of U.S. wine production. Id at 99.
232 Id at 43-44.
233 Id at 49.
234 Paul Lukacs, American Vintage: The Rise of American Wine 100-02 (2000).
235 Id at 103-04.
236 McGowan, supra note 229, at 49.
237 Lukacs, supra note 234, at 103, 108.
238 Id at 110, 128, 188. Ironically, per capita wine consumption in the U.S. peaked at 2.43 gallons in 1985. The current level
is around 2.0 gallons. Id at 188.
Interestingly though, the area around Monticello is now a hub for winemaking.
A day or so after Thanksgiving of the year when I was in the seventh or eight grade, and hated gym class above all the other torments that junior high school offered in bounteous measure, I had a short conversation with another girl in my gym class. We were not particular friends, only that our lockers were adjacent, and we would be changing out of our school dress, into the black shorts and short-sleeved, snap-closure white blouse that Mt. Gleason Junior High dictated to be proper gym class attire. I don’t even remember her name, only that she was sturdy and somewhat stocky and like me, blue-eyed with dark-blond, brown-sugar colored hair and a fair complexion… and like me, not particularly enthusiastic about gym class, and all its’ works and all its’ ways. Both of us were of the devoutly un-athletic sort who picks a team position based on the likely chances of having little or nothing to do with the ball.
So, on this first day of gym after the Thanksgiving holiday, I struck up a conversation about it, about how my family Thanksgiving had gone— how all the constellation of great-aunts, great-uncles, and grandparents had gathered for the ritual feast. The family Hayes had gathered at either Grannie Jessie’s little white house on South Lotus, or Grannie Dodie and Grandpa Al’s house in Camarillo. I can’t recollect which, so unvarying was the rotation, so regular the attendance of the senior members and devout their interest in JP and I, Pippy and our new baby brother. Most of them being for one reason or another, childless, I lamented the lack of cousins, for it meant their concentration on the four of us as torch-bearers of a new generation was as focused as a laser-beam, and I assumed that the same was true of my gym-dressing room friend.
“Oh, no,” said she. ”It’s just my parents, and my brothers and sisters. We don’t have any cousins either. All of my parents’ families… they all died. We don’t have any cousins, either.”
“None of them? None at all?” I asked, in disbelief. No fond grandparents, no doting great-aunts, no eccentric great-uncles? None of them at all, nothing outside the usual parents and sibs at the dinner table, nothing special, relations-wise, about the holiday table, with roasted turkey, crackling-fat and richly stuffed with brown-bread dressing? About this time in life, my peers had begun to lose grandparents to the usual span of human mortality— I had lately lost one, Grandpa Jim, and thought myself lucky to still have three, all of them still healthy, cantankerous and good for another couple of decades. To have none at all, though… that went beyond misfortune. That was a catastrophe.
My gym-friend shrugged.
“My parents met after the war, in a DP camp. They were just kids. It turned out they were both the only survivors of their families. They got married and came here. There was nothing for them to go back for, anyway.”
Nothing to go back for, anyway, in Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Ukraine… somewhere in Middle-Europe, wherever her family trees had sprung up and been pruned with brutal finality of all but two last little shoots. Transplanted, new-rooted in America, but haunted forever by a ghostly range of empty chairs around the table at those family gatherings so universally assumed to me multi-generational.
The genocide against European Jews is as much of a challenge today to get ones’ sensible American head around as it was sixty years ago. Us Indian-massacring (sorry, Native American massacring!) slavery-enabling, Negro-lynching (Sorry— Persons of Color lynching!) religion-addled, brutally-capitalist, petty-small-town minded uncultured Jacksonians are forever being lectured about our shortcomings by those cultured Europeans. Europe was, after all, the place where they did everything better than us… more cultured, more tolerant, and oh-so-much-better in every civilized way. And yet, pogroms never happened here. Social prejudice, country-club anti-Semitism, distrust of the “other”— oh yeah, all of that…but never pogroms. Russian and Polish Jews came here to get away from pogroms, ungrateful and unappreciative of the cultural advantages to living in Europe.
The clamor of the lectures by our so-called moral superiors pretty much swamps the observation that the Native American and Black American communities still exist in a far more vibrant state than, say, the Jewish communities of Poland… and that Paris, the city of Light has a suburb torn for the fourth night running by what we, in our uncouth American way, used to call race riots. Ah, well, Europe— they do things with so much more style, over there. Sixty years ago, under German occupation, ordinary Europeans watched their neighbors, their friends, coworkers, classmates, employers and employees, their doctors, and cleaning women rounded up and marched away to oblivion. Some eagerly assisted; some benefited from participating, most watched and turned away and did nothing, not wishing to risk what might happen to them, should they be too open in objection. A very few righteous, possessed of a fiercely refined moral sense, and courage of the sort usually termed “crazy-brave” did what they could… that there was anything left of European Jewry by 1945 was a sort of miracle in itself. On a national level, only the Danes can be credited for behaving in a way that we hope we could ourselves be equal to, given the same situation. They refused, categorically, firmly, and in a manner most breathtakingly effective, to turn over Danish citizens of the Jewish faith to the occupying German authorities… of course, the Germans had gone easily on the Danes, hoping to win them over to the benefits of the Thousand-year Reich… but still, and all… German blandishments did not tempt them to sell out their fellow citizens.
So, during a week in which the elected leader of Iran, which has done everything it can to acquire or develop nuclear weapons, has publicly and in terms quite straightforward and understandable, vowed an intention to wipe Israel off the map… a small and pesky nation formed in no small part from the survivors of the European-wide holocaust. What would a single nuclear hit do to a tiny and democratic survivor-state? Nothing good, that should go without saying. So, what will Europe do, this time? How stalwart will be European resolve be to intervene, given that Israel was referred to as “that shitty little country” by a French diplomat at an English dinner party, that anti-Semitism (now charmingly called anti-Zionism) is at a revoltingly open, all-time high? No matter what they call it, it’s still used for the same old purpose, to kill Jews, or at least, justify their murder by a third party. How nice. How amusing, that European hands would be kept clean of the murder of Jews. This time, anyway.
Oh, yeah… if I were a Jew, I’d think twice before depending on Europe to keep my ass safe… especially given how effective they were, overall, about that the last time.
The eastern world, it is explodin’.
Violence flarin’, bullets loadin’
You’re old enough to kill, but not for votin’
You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re totin’
And even the Jordan River has bodies floatin’But you tell me
Over and over and over again, my friend
Ah, you don’t believe
We’re on the eve
of destruction.Don’t you understand what I’m tryin’ to say
Can’t you feel the fears I’m feelin’ today?
If the button is pushed, there’s no runnin’ away
There’ll be no one to save, with the world in a grave
Take a look around you boy
It’s bound to scare you boyAnd you tell me
Over and over and over again, my friend
Ah, you don’t believe
We’re on the eve
of destruction.
I just saw some crap on The History Channel: What the Victorians Gave Us, where the idiot historian/presenter claimed that King Camp Gillette was the first to give us a “disposable consumer product” with his razor blade in 1895. Well, besides the fact that Gillette was an AMERICAN, I say it was Peter Durand, with his canned food process (the can being disposable) in 1810, not Gillette.
But I could be (and likely am) wrong. If you have an earlier example of a disposable consumer product – please post up.
Sometime around the middle of the time my daughter and I lived in Athens, the Greek television network broadcast the whole series of “Jewel in the Crown”, and like public broadcasting in many places— strictly rationing their available funds— they did as they usually did with many worthy imported programs. Which is to say, not dubbed into Greek— which was expensive and time-consuming— but with Greek subtitles merely supered over the scenes. My English neighbor, Kyria Penny and I very much wanted to watch this miniseries, which had been played up in the English and American entertainment media, and so she gave me a standing invitation to come over to hers and Georgios’ apartment every Tuesday evening, so we could all watch it, and extract the maximum enjoyment thereby. We could perhaps also make headway with our explanation to Kyrie Georgios on why Sergeant Perron was a gentleman, although an enlisted man, but Colonel Merrick emphatically was not.
On occasion, the Greek broadcasting network screwed up, and the next episode of “Jewel” didn’t air. Penny and I would talk for a while, and Georgios would encourage my daughter to all sorts of rough-housing; pillow fights, mostly. (Blessed with two sons, the Greek ideal, Georgios rather regretted that he and Penny didn’t have a daughter as well.) On those Tuesday nights when “Jewel in the Crown” didn’t air, the Greek network most often substituted something appropriately high-toned, classical and in English. Brought out from their library and dusted off, most likely— the Royal Shakespeare Company, in all their thespian glory. And Penny and Georgios and all I noticed on one of those warm spring evenings, that Blondie was sitting on a cushion on the floor, totally absorbed, wrapped up in one of the Bard’s duller history plays. She was then about four years old— but she was enchanted, bound by a spell of brocaded velvet words, swirling cloaks and slashing swords, glued to the television while we sat talking about other things, drawn in by a spell grown even more lightening-potent over the last 400 years. And it happened, the next time that “Jewel” was pre-empted… it was the RSC again, and Blondie was glued to the television, her concentration adamantine, and almost chillingly adult. I was quite sure she had never seen anything of the sort before, I wasn’t one of those frenetically over-achieving mothers, stuffing culture down the kidlets’ throat. I barely had time and energy enough to be an achieving mother: we hardly watched TV at home, VCRs were barely on the market and her favored bedtime reading was “Asterix and Obelix”, although we had branched out as far as the “Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings”. No, it was not anything I had done… it must have been something innate in Shakespeare, a spell that has been cast, and drawn them in since Shakespeare himself was a working actor and playwright.
I have recently gotten this book— it’s a book club bennie— and gone as far as the first three or four chapters. It’s a good book, a speculative book by necessity, since we know so very, very little for certain of the real William Shakespeare. The author is dependent on speculation and imagination, much given to assuming that if such and such were happening in the neighborhood of Stratford-upon-Avon in the lifetime of the glove-maker’s son, then he possibly would have known about it, and might have reason to weave it into one of his spell-plays. Did he have a good education… or not? Might he have been a school-teacher? A soldier? A clerk? Might he have been a Catholic sympathizer? Might his marriage been unhappy, his father a drinker… we have no way to know for sure, in ways that would satisfy the strict accountants of history. In fact, many have been the symposia, the experts, the finely honed intellectual authorities who have insisted over the years that the Shakespeare who was the actor, the manager and entrepreneur, the son of a provincial petty-bourgeois, simply could not have written the works attributed to him. Such expert knowledge of statecraft, of law, of international polity, of soldiering and the doings of kings and nobles… no, the tenured experts cry… this could not be the work of any less than an intellectual, highly placed and noble, gifted with the best education, and extensive mileage racked up in the corridors of power! Any number of candidates, better suited in the eyes of these experts to have written the works attributed to Wm. Shakespeare of Stratford are advanced, with any number of imaginative stratagems to account for it all… but every one of them I have read, leaves out the power of imagination itself.
Imagination, which takes us out of ourselves, and into someone else— the common thing all these great experts disregard, as if it were something already cast into disrepute, something useless, of no regard…but it is the major part of the actors’ craft and entirely the part of the writers… that part that is not given up to intelligent research. All those great experts seemed to be saying, when they credit other than Shakespeare, the actor and bourgeois householder of Stratford and London… is that imagination is worthless, null, of no account or aid. It is impossible for a writer to imagine himself, or herself into anything other than what he or she is. One cannot imagine oneself convincingly into another time or place, gender or role in life. Imagination is dead… you are stuck with writing about what you are. How sterile, and how horrible. How pointless and boring—
but that is what the highly-educated would have of us. We must not, under pain of what the academicians judge, imagine what it would be like that it is to be whatever we were born to be.
When I was about 17, or so, I wrote a story for a high school English creative writing class, incorporating an account of a historic event which I couldn’t possibly have witnessed— because I had been born fifteen years after the events I described. But I had done research, and even at 17 I was pretty good at writing description… and I had the imagination. It creeped the hell out of the creative writing teacher. He knew of the events that I had written about, and I had gotten it pretty well right. So, imagining again; what would have prevented a young actor from sloping up to a friend of his, in a tavern someplace, a friend who was a soldier, or a law clerk, a priest or servant in the house of a noble, and saying “Say, I’ve got this thing I’m working on… what d’you say about it? What do you think, how would it work, really?”
Which was the creepy, magical part, the part that academicians and writing teachers cannot fathom… which is how far the intelligent and well-researched imagination can take us. To insist that Shakespeare couldn’t have written Shakespeare, is to deny the power and authority… and even the authenticity of imagination.
Which may explain the relative shittiness of novels written by all but the most deviant of academics. Education— all very nice, but nothing will take a writer farther than imagination and some good contacts in other fields. Imagination… it’s what we have that separates us from the beasts. Never underestimate it, use it what you must. Especially when it’s necessary to get out of what you are, and see through the eyes of someone else.
I’m watching some stupid travel film on one of my local PBS stations – I thought it was going to be about trains – but it is about train routes – eek!!!!. Anyway, they are talking about Chicago. And, like all these idiotic things, they say, [you can put any number of things in place of this] “Chicago owes its greatness to the fact that it is in the very heart of the corn-belt” [I know; this one was particularly stupid].
It’s always something different- it’s beef, or it’s coal, or who knows what! Why can’t these idiots EVER get it right? Chicago owes not only its (somewhat questionable) greatness, BUT ITS VERY EXISTENCE to the fact that it is along the shortest portage route between Lake Michigan and the Des Plaines River (and then on to the Mississippi). This should be elementary American history.
I can certainly say this has added to my quality of life:
The harried bartenders at Mariano’s couldn’t squeeze enough limes or blend the drinks fast enough to keep up with demand, though. Customers complained – the signature drink was inconsistent, and it wasn’t even cold.
“I saw my dream evaporating,” Mr. Martinez said. “This was my one shot at being somebody.”
A pit stop at a 7-Eleven proved inspiring. Mr. Martinez spotted a Slurpee machine and knew he’d found the answer. He acquired a soft-serve ice cream machine and started mixing.
“The challenge was to make each drink taste like a blender margarita,” he said. “We kept experimenting – and tasting.”
Once Mr. Martinez hit upon the right recipe – sugar was the secret ingredient, he said – he moved the machine to the bar.
“It became an instant success,” he said. “We didn’t have to sell it.”
Mr. Martinez never got a patent for his margarita machine, so copycats quickly surfaced. Soon, other bars and restaurants were pouring frozen margaritas, and a few claimed to have acquired “Mariano’s secret recipe.”
Ole! 🙂
Hat Tip: Virginia Postrel
A very interesting piece from James C. Bennett at UPI
The interesting thing to me was the complete absence of anything representing the United States. This was not a coincidence. Columbus, and the holiday celebrating his landing in the New World, are seen throughout the Spanish-speaking world as having to do primarily with the extension of Spanish-speaking, Catholic civilization to the New World and the creation, through a conflicted encounter, of a new culture. It is, to coin a phrase, the creation of the Hispanosphere that is commemorated.
[…]
Although Cabot’s voyage to Newfoundland was undoubtedly spurred by news of Columbus’s voyages, the expanding English maritime enterprise would sooner or later have recapitulated the Viking achievements in the North Atlantic. There are interesting conjectures about prior voyages from the British Isles to North America before Columbus, from Bristol fishermen working the Grand Banks (not unlikely) to other, more speculative theories, such as Farley Mowat’s ideas about voyagers from the Orkneys preceding the Vikings in the Dark Ages.
Whatever the realities of these theories, it is the expansion of the cultures and traditions that form the template on which today’s societies in the U.S. and English Canada that we should commemorate. Columbus, whatever his merits and demerits may be, is in this regard beside the point. If Americans of Italian descent wish to point with pride to a predecessor in discovery, perhaps we should look at Giovanni Caboto, another Italian navigator. Moving to England, he adopted the English style of his name and became known to history as the discoverer … John Cabot.
Not only did Cabot’s discoveries spark the great stream of human migration that became the English-speaking New World, he was himself a precursor of the millions of Italians who crossed the Atlantic to North America and became part of the English-speaking world, to its and their own enrichment.
Read the whole thing.
Hat Tip: InstaPundit
It’s not that the news media were ever that shining, impartial, unbiased city on a hill, in days of yore— in the 19th century, American newspapers were as partisan as they come, and open enough about it to put their political affiliation on the masthead. And the usual run of partisan political abuse was venomous enough to make the various Something-gate ruckuses of the late 20th century look like the local Lutheran church general membership meeting in comparison. Early in the decades of this last century, the term “yellow journalism”— inflammatory, partisan, selective with facts— was practically a synonym for the Hearst chain. It goes without saying that Hearst’s newspapers were widely read, enormously popular, and innovative; sort of the Ted Turner and CNN news of the day. (Although Ted Turner has not yet to build an enormous fairy-tale castle filled with art and architectural salvage on top of a mountain in California. Yet, anyway.)
The newspaper magnates of that day, and their reporters were not without bias, or a taste for the sensational, either; mark the Lindberg kidnapping and resulting trial, or the New York Times’ Walter Duranty’s predilection for trimming his reportorial sails to suit the winds of Soviet Stalinism. But if there could ever be said to have been a golden age of print and broadcast journalism in America, though, it would have had to have been the thirty years between WWII and Watergate, and it’s presiding saint was Edward R. Murrow, present or in the memory of those who worked with him, or followed after. He set the standard, and a high one at that; fearless, principled, observant, and willing to go beyond the merely superficial, telling his listeners not just what they wanted to know, but what they ought to know, in order to make sense of it all. He was not the first to do this, but is the individual that we think of first when we try to think of someone who exemplifies the gold standard of news. Whether trivial or of import, readers and listeners operated from the assumption of credibility during that era.
Reporters might be mistaken, might not have the whole story right away, sources might be lying through their teeth, but we assumed that reporters were setting their personal biases aside (whatever those biases might be) and telling us what they saw before their own eyes. What we saw on TV, or read in the better sort of non-tabloid newspaper, or serious magazine, our assumption was that it was accurate, as the reporter saw it. A long, sad slow series of events began shredding this assumption, beginning long before the blogosphere, long before 9/11, degrading the value of the news currency. The gold coinage of the Murrow era was slowly replaced with pot metal, and the worst of it was, the media did it to themselves, for what seemed to be the best, but short-term reasons at the time.
People have always wanted to know about crime, bad weather, celebrity travails and disasters near and far; this does not change from age to age or country to country. It sells newspapers and advertising, after all, and it’s easy to write about. As early as 1988 Peter Boyer ( in “Who Killed CBS”) was chiding CBS news for consciously emphasizing the visual, the superficial, the emotional image of news events, for having fallen from the high standards set by America’s “Tiffany” network, from being serious news to merely entertainment. Boyer singled out for especial disapproval Van Gordon Sauter and Dan Rather. Other commenters, some of them to this blog, have dated the rot to have been in the wake of Watergate, when budding young journalism students were fired with the lure of being investigative reporters like Woodward and Bernstein (who got a movie, with Robert Redford, and Dustin Hoffman playing them!) and not incidentally, brought down a president. A decade after Boyer, James Fallows (“Breaking the News”) put the blame on a reportorial establishment that framed itself as well-paid elite, magisterial and above the fray. Fallows hoped for the rise of public journalism, of reporters being truly involved as citizens; what he hoped for came to pass, and I can’t help wondering how he feels these days, of ordinary citizens and bloggers empowered to report and editorialize. Citizens’ journalism with a vengeance, as it were and about time.
The list of media dishonor goes on, and on: the Peter Arnett “Tailwind” disaster, CNN’s much-vaunted Baghdad bureau pulling their reportorial punches in return for continued access, the fraud of Jenin and Mohammed-el-Dura, (and the dependence upon Palestinian stringers for reportage in the West Bank and Gaza generally), the whole Rather/TANG memos thing, the Katrina/New Orleans disaster, and the willingness of various media to repeat without any sort of reservation or quick-double-checking any number of sensational stories…. Well, any comprehensive list would be about three pages longer, and tax my ability to provide links after two glasses of Chablis.
Slightly buzzed, or completely sober, my conclusion is pretty much the same. The major media is debased coinage. I can’t take it as a given any more, that what I see, or read, or hear from them is true. My assumption is, that they have their own agenda, I will have to do a bit of fact-checking, and wait for a while before I can come to any sort of conclusion about what I have had put in front of me— make allowances, tease out the implications, come to my own conclusions from the jig-saw assembly provided to me.
It all kind of reminds me, in a minor way, of what people in the former Soviet Union had to do— and that is a sad comment on what the major media has become. Eager young journalism majors used to burble that they wanted to be reporters so they could make a difference. So they have… but not a good difference.
A long time ago, when currency in the West of the world was in the form of coins and monetary policy was an infant science, the most-valued coins in the marketplaces were those minted of precious or semi-precious metals, each coin valued approximately to the content of the metal and based on that relationship of content to the official value stamped upon it—or so is my understanding of the grim science of economics, given that I was an English major, and given to interpret these things from a literary worldview.
Changes, variations and plain old criminal fiddles upset this tidy understanding almost immediately by the creatively larcenous. Thieves shaved minute scrapings of precious metal of gold and silver coins— did you know that the milled edge was an innovation designed to defeat this criminal stratagem? And of course, out-right counterfeiters did their ingenious worst. It got to the point where clever merchants had to be as careful of coins as modern retail establishments are with large-denomination notes, since there was always the chance of the bad penny turning up, and being a distinct loss to a commercial establishment. In those early days, coinage crossed borders freely, mostly because the currency distributed by a well run, prosperous, and fiscally sound state, city or kingdom could be assured of being worth its assigned value. (Bonus trivia note: certain coins later assumed to be equal to a dollar were cut into eight pieces, to make change in the American colonies; this is the origination of the slang “bits”, as in the use of “two bits” for a quarter, or 25 cents. And the word “dollar” itself is drawn from the German “thaler” coin… )
OK, enough trivia, back to the point: I do have one, honestly. The general use of currency implies an act of trust. We trust that the coin or bill is worth what it is supposed to be, as true now as it was two hundred, four hundred, or two or four millennia ago, and in the brutal financial meritocracy prevalent in the hurly-burly of interesting historical times, some coinage was always counted as more valuable than others. There were always established states, or kingdoms whose rulers fell to the temptation of short-lived gains earned by fiddling with the coinage… who took the short way out of economic problems by shorting the quantity of good metal in their coins, for what they viewed as the best of short-term reasons.
But short-term expedients have long term consequences, and the major media lords who control imperfectly, that appears in print, on the radio, and most importantly, on TV, may yet discover this at first hand. They have taken a good, solid coinage, a trusted, solid precious-metal coinage— at least, that which existed at the mid-point of this last century— and for immediate, short term gain, chosen to substitute dross for value.
(To be Continued)
OK, Ok, I probably will go to see Serenity, and maybe The Corpse Bride, in the near future, should I have a couple of free days between temp assignments. (Yes, still job-hunting, still temping— this month at a corporate behemoth so huge that it has— I kid you not— a Starbucks concession at each end of the building. It’s even more boring than the overnight TV boardshift, and the daily commute is a killer; I hate it already, thanks for asking – but it is a paycheck)
With Hollywood on this graphic novel/nostalgia/action flick/remake kick, I continue to be ever more amazed that the great adventure comic strip, Terry and the Pirates hasn’t gone all big-screen on us in the last couple of years. Sure, sure, there was a brief movie-serial version, as well as a radio show, at the very height of it’s popularity during WWII, but I’ve always believed that Terry had the potential to knock the socks off Indiana Jones as far as cliff-hanging, non-stop adventure in exotic places, featuring a studly two-fisted hero, and gorgeous, strong-minded women of occasionally ambivalent moral principles. Throw in the bright teen-aged kid sidekick— the Terry of name, and add lashings of lost gold mines, Chinese warlords and freedom fighters, mercenaries of every nationality, colonial officialdom whiling away the afternoon on the verandah with a gin sling and the ceiling fan whirring overhead, pilots and sailors, thieves and bratty kidnapped children, freelance relief workers, glamorous globe-trotting debutants, and the distant rumble of Japanese expansionism across the Far East – oh, what Stephen Spielberg could make of this, if he hadn’t gone all high-toned and meaningful on us, to lofty to meddle with good-humored intrigue, glamour and adventure.
That was always Milton Caniffs’ thing; that and a drop-dead wonderful artistic sensibility. I remember that Steve Canyon, his follow-on strip to Terry & The Pirates was still being carried by the LA Times when I was in grade school. The sheer visual style of that strip, meticulously detailed, complex, almost cinematic, was artistically the most eye-catching thing in the color supplements on Sunday, even though I couldn’t force myself to be interested in the characters and plots. It wasn’t a kid’s comic, I sensed— it was something for grownups— and by the time I would have taken an interest in it, Steve Canyon was gone from the papers. The hero was a military pilot, and like the original GI Joe doll, and like much else military and of the cold-war era, fell out of general favor during the Vietnam War.
I can’t say I discovered Caniff’s most famous cartoon predecessor to Steve Canyon when doing historical research in the CSUN newspaper archives, since I already knew of it: Mom had been a fan, like just about every kid in the late Thirties, and there were excerpts in various books about the comics, or media that I had run across, one way or the other, but when I started my history project, I had a chance to read the whole run of Terry, over a decade’s worth of daily newspapers, starting in 1935. It was cartoonish and kind of sketchy, early on, but in about 1938 or so, Caniff hit an artistic stride and it just got better and better. The Dragon Lady, the beautiful Eurasian gang-leader turned freedom fighter— was she an ally? Sometimes she was, and there was this love-hate thing she had going on with the ostensible hero, soldier of fortune Pat Ryan. And then there was the mysterious torch singer, Burma, a blond bombshell and fugitive from the law — for what was never made quite clear, but her signature tune was the St. Louis Blues. Then there was the lovely Normandie, hounded by bossy relatives into marrying someone other than Pat, and the dashing Raven Sherman, fearless doer of good deeds in the dark world of war-torn China. Raven earned a small footnote in the history of the comics for being a major character and dying in the line of duty, thrown off the back of a truck during a hairbreadth escape. (The daily panel of this is entirely wordless.) Fans turned east for a moment of silence and mourned, and Caniff got black-edged notes on the anniversary for years afterwards.
The death of a fictional character occurred a bare two months before an event in real time that shook up the real, and the created world— the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. Curiously enough, Terry had fans in Japan during the 1930ies, and in deference to American neutrality, Japanese forces were referred to only as “the invaders” up until that point, even though Caniff’s natural sympathies were with the long-suffering Chinese nationals. After Pearl Harbor, all neutralities were off. The character of Pat Ryan shifted off-screen; Mom always said that Caniff had written him into Singapore in early 1942, and the real-life fall of the city put Pat into a corner, while Terry— the kid who had grown up over the last six years of the series— joined the Army Air Corps and took center stage as far as adventure and romance was concerned. Caniff had always done a lot of research for the strip, and with a military angle, he acquired even more. Like a proto-blogger, he took tips, suggestions and corrections, and carefully read what news coverage of the Far East generally was available. One account has it that he was questioned once by the FBI, because a story-line he had concocted for the Terry strip— suggested by a mention in an obscure newspaper story— came altogether too close to an actual classified wartime operation.
The difficulty of doing a proper Terry movie is— aside from the intellectual rights to it all— is the one that would send the PC set screaming in the opposite direction. That is, the fact that some of the major Chinese characters, besides the Dragon Lady herself, would just not past muster today, not without changing them beyond recognition or eliminating them entirely. Big Stoop, the mute and fearless giant might be able to pass muster, but the comic relief, fractured- English-speaking cook and houseboy Connie – oh, dear, how to turn that 1930ies pigs’ ear stereotype into a proper 21st century politically correct silk purse? That would be a challenge to whoever would want to take it on – and seeing how Hollywood is doing with portraying our enemies in this war, I would assume it is one they are not up to accepting.
Pity— Terry and the Pirates would make a very nice movie. I’d pay money and go to it in the theater, which is more than I can say for most of the drek out there, these days.
To: Karen Hughes
From: Sgt. Mom
Re: The Modern Version of “Why We Fight”
1. It is a pity that explaining ourselves to the outside world in this current war has to be left to the government, but there you go. You fight the war with what you have, not what you wish you had. Hollywood this time is too incestuously self-involved, too out of touch with everything outside it’s tight little bicoastal enclaves of wealth, ease, and depravity to bother much with the rubes of flyover country – and too afraid, al la Rushdie and van Gogh, to risk a fatwa, a knife in a public street, a car bomb in Morton’s, or a representative from CAIR parked in their outer office. Pity about that— and a pretty sorry showing on the part of those who usually preen themselves on their audacity in “speaking truth to power.” It all depends on the power addressed, I guess.
2. I also gather that Charlotte Beers’ “softly, softly” series of advertisements featuring American Muslims singing the joys of life in the good old US of A went over like the proverbial lead balloon in the Muslim world. Well, if they were anything like the spots that used to air on AFRTS which expanded upon the joys of living in the country we served— well, we were left pretty much rolling our eyes and heading for the latrine, so I can’t see that Ms. Beers whould have been surprised. It’s a tough audience, which requires a tough sell. At this point, it may be necessary to take off the tidy white Madison Avenue gloves, and punch from the gut. Hard.
3. Frank Capra’s “Why We Fight” series, from the Second World War might prove to be an instructive guide, editing together our enemies’ propaganda and newsreel film— turning their own words, deeds— and by implication their own hypocrisies against them, giving an audience an unvarnished look at the intentions and actions of our enemies. Skip the pretty pictures of nice American Moslems in their suburban 2-car garage lives; go straight to the point, and turn the video images of the Islamic Jihad, of Al Jazeera, and the Al-Quada websites right back at the Moslem world in every gory, stomach-churning detail.
4. Show the head-choppings, the murders and the executions, with blade and stone and shot to the head— of Moslems and Westerners alike. Show the jihadis blowing up busloads of schoolchildren and murdering election workers. Show them shouting “Allah Akbar!” as they saw the heads off live people, replay their every murder, boast and claim of responsibility- and give the credit for the source of the video. Show the video of Osama chuckling to his guests as he describes how the Towers collapsed. Include the ferocious, hate-filled rants of those bearded, spittle-beflecked Imams – those in the mosques of the West and the East, too; all those who don’t think anyone but their own congregations are listening.
5. Show too, the aftermath of their work— again, giving credit to the TV media of the Moslem world; show the blood, the body parts strewn all over, the wrecked lives of innocents. Show it all, and choke with blood and shame, anyone who still will try and claim that this version of Islam is a religion of peace. Show every instance of Islamic terrorism’s lies, hypocrisy, and bloodshed – especially the blood shed amongst Moslems by their coreligionists…
6. And finally, show us and the Islamic world as a footnote, the remains of dead jihadis, bits and pieces of their gruesome dead bodies, all mixed in with bits of metal from suicide bombs, dead in the dirt like so much garbage, or shot down like a dog by an American sniper. . . Show how clear and inglorious is the modern jihad, shoveled into an unmarked, un-mourned grave. Throw it all back in their faces— credited, and exhaustively footnoted— every ugly boast, word and deed.
7. Considering that most of the nastier stuff has been common video currency in the radical Islamic world, this might accomplish nothing more than a sort of “greatest jihad hits” highlights video – but it might also grab the attention of that so greatly hoped-for moderate Moslem demographic; those that might be greatly horrified about what has been perpetrated in their name and to their alleged benefit. And of course, the mainstream media-consuming American audience might also be enlightened.
8. At least, think about this public affairs outreach option. It’s not like there’s anything worse that hasn’t been done already.
Sincerely
Sgt Mom
We bumptious Americans are always being reminded by everyone from Henry James on, that things in Europe are old, historic, and ancient. We are told that some places are piled thick in layers of events, famous people and great art, like some sort of historical sachertorte… and to a student of history, certain places in Europe are exactly that sort of treat. What they hardly ever mention is that most usually, the most ancient bits of it are pretty sadly battered by the time we come trotting around with our Blue Guide, and what there is left is just the merest small remnant of what there once was. The sanctuary at Delphi once was adorned with statues of gold, silver, bronze… and they were the first to be looted and melted down (all but one, the great bronze Charioteer) leaving us with the least and cheapest stone, sadly chipped, battered and scarred. (My daughter at the age of three and a bit, looking at a pair of archaic nudes in the Delphi museum asked loudly “Mommy, why are their wieners all broken off?”) The great Athenian Akropolis itself was half-ruined, many of the blocks of which it was constructed scattered across the hillside like gargantuan marble legos. In Rome, most of the ancient buildings had been stripped long ago of the marble and stone facings, leaving only the battered concrete and tile core to hint at what splendor had once been… and again, only the smallest portion left to us to admire, the smallest, cheapest portion, or that hidden away by chance.
But there was one place, just one place where the last few artistic relics of the classical world looked as fresh, as unmarred as if they had just been installed the day before, in the little provincial town of Ravenna, where the VEV needed a new air hose and some other essential innards, and fortuitously mushed to a halt right in front of the very garage capable of providing it, although the junior mechanic had to rush off on his Vespa to fetch the essential parts from another source. I was driving to Spain from Greece, having taken the car ferry from Patras to Brindisi three weeks before, in a bright orange Volvo sedan with AFG plates and all of my daughters’ and my luggage crammed into the trunk and the back seat.
We had just come from the grand artistic buffet that was Florence, crowded with tourists and tour guides, and touts, enormous motor-coaches everywhere, and everywhere the grasping hand, wanting a substantial payment to see this or that. It was actually a relief to get to Ravenna, which in contrast seemed like a graciously hospitable place, proud in a casual sort of way about the monuments and churches with their splendid late classical mosaics, imbedded into their pretty little town like raisins in a loaf of raisin bread. The Arian Baptistery was, if I remember correctly, down a little side street in back of a large chain drug store. Most of the other places that drew tourists were in similarly modest locations; no crowds, no touts, no being nickeled and lire’d to death. Local residents just seemed enormously pleased that people came all the way to Ravenna to marvel at their lovely, historical chapels and churches, and some smaller sites asked nothing more of the tourists than to feed come coins into a meter that would turn on the spotlights in the Mausoleum of Galla Placida, so we could better admire the mosaics in the ceiling.
There was no need for the meters and lights in the New Church of St. Appollinaire, with it’s splendid procession of saints and martyrs along the nave. Windows allowed the autumn sunlight to spill into the church, and outside when the winds rippled the tree leaves, the whole wall seemed to shimmer, in a blaze of gold and rich colors. Much of the mosaic was made of glass, tiny squares and slips of jewel-colored glass, or clear glass backed with gold-leaf. In San Vitale, Justinian and Theodora looked down from amidst their courtiers, generals, priests and ladies, and in the old sanctuary of St. Appollinaire-in-Classe (Classe, which had once Ravenna’s port on the Adriatic) the Savior was enthroned in a lush green garden, amid a flock of sheep under a golden sky full of angels… all of it as jewel-bright, new, and unchipped by time, as if the artists, and tile-cutters and plasterers had just finished the work last week, not twelve hundred years ago, a last splendid blaze at the end of the Roman Empire in western Europe. For a very brief time, this out of the way little provincial town had been the capital of the Western Roman Empire, the last flickering light of civilization in a darkening world, rent by war and barbarian invasion, and the memory of times when things had been much, much better.
When these mosaics were being installed, the dark ages were already falling, the Legions gone from Britain, the roads and forts and harbors falling derelict without the skill and direction to keep such massive works functioning. There was no one left to see to the waterworks, to protect the essential trade and communication which was the lifeblood of the Empire. Science and literacy were useless luxuries in the face of the brute barbarian tide, and the stifling hand of religious orthodoxy. The remnant of the Empire remained for a little while in the east, in Byzantium which was renamed Constantinople, the city of Constantine, but all it’s battles after that were defensive; static and scholeric looking to the past, to the way things had always been done. There is a sadness and resignation to the mosaics of Ravenna, as if those who were pictured, and those who did the work already knew their world was in twilight, and not much could be done to hold back the night, but it didn’t matter, because the next world would be a better one.
There was no confidence left in their society, no belief in their ability to make things better; all they had was a determination to hold on to what they had, to put off acceptance of the inevitable as long as possible. In the end, Constantinople would fall as well, and the last of the Roman Empire would be gone forever, but the mosaics of Ravenna remain. For now, anyway.
Complete the following:
“A _______ for SAC Is a __________ for freedom.”
“You call, We _____” is one of the mottoes of ________ units.
The U-6A, formerly designated the ________ is a __________ type aircraft,
powered by a ___________ engine, and was manufactured by the
__________ Aircraft Company.
The B-52 was first flown in _______, and is affectionately (until you skin your
knuckles working on one) known as a __________. )Please, the “nice” version!
What was the most common method of calling home from bases in the far east
during the Vietnam conflict war?
Try these, and I’ll see if I can come up with a few more goodies. Kevin, you
probably know all the answers!
The ancient building at the heart of Cordova’s old quarter breathed quiet, and the cool dimness of an old-growth forest, that kind of forest where the straight trunks of ancient trees spring from the leaf-mast, moss or bracken fronds at their feet. There is no intermediate brush, no smaller trees clogging the sightlines between the tree trunks, which go on forever in every direction. Shafts of sunshine sometimes find a break in the green canopy overhead, and in the morning, wisps of fog tangle around the tree-trunks like tatters of silk scarf. There was no early morning fog here, no bracken or grass at our feet, only the ancient floor paving, undulating slightly with twelve hundred years of wear and settlement.
My daughter and I blinked, coming in from the dazzle outside— pillared groves of orange trees in the courtyard outside, under a brilliant blue sky, magenta bougainvillea flaming against whitewash and the rose-honey color of weathered terracotta tiles.
(Blondie, in the Court of the Oranges, Cordova, 1990. That is the roof of the cathedral, over the roof of the mosque)
It was like a forest, a forest of stone columns in every direction, a forest of columns holding up an endless series of horseshoe arches striped in rust and cream-color, a maze without walls that went on and on, and on… at least until one got to the ungainly cathedral plunked into the very center of it, like a horsefly imbedded in a perfect piece of amber. The monarch who had bidden it to be built was said to have chided the architects afterwards, saying “You have built here what can be built anywhere else, but you have destroyed what was unique in the world.”
The great mosque of Cordova had this in common with other venerable ecclesiastical structures— so large as to be able to absorb great numbers of people, yet still seem hushed, near to empty, as if to raise a loud voice; to make any sort of noise would be a sacrilege. It was holy, beautiful, and alien… the high-water mark of Moorish Spain, the third largest mosque in the world. It was built in the 8th century, when Cordova was probably the most urbane, cultured and tolerant city in Western Europe, all the markings of high civilization as we know it… although given the standard of sanitation, literacy and religious toleration prevalent elsewhere in Europe, not a hard mark to surpass. The Cordova Caliphate disintegrated into warring mini-states, and the Reconquista painfully and over six centuries clawed back every kingdom, city, and acre. The Moors vanished from Spain like mist in the morning, leaving their marvelous palaces, mosques and cities behind, adorned with jeweled tiles, intricate plasterwork, and cool water fountains; such marvelous buildings that set the architectural tone of Spain and by extension, the Spanish Colonial and Beaux-Arts buildings run up by the homesick or nostalgic in the Southwestern United States.
Plaster walls, colonnades overgrown with brilliant bougainvillea, horseshoe arches, and geometric tile, terracotta tiles and orange trees, distilled over centuries into something worn and familiar, something I know as well as the street I live on… but at the core of it, that alien, hostile something, the niggling worm of militant Islam. They would have Al-Andalus back, and rip out that silly, ill-considered cathedral, take back all that was lost. And more. Or so they say, if you take them at their word.
This from the Biloxi Sun-Herald:
Despite massive storm damage, the historic Beauvoir House is structurally sound and can be restored, with time and money, according to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
[…]
Beauvoir’s elegant porches, recently refurbished, are gone. So is the graceful front staircase. Entrance doors, each with nine oval glass panes, were destroyed. A corner of the roof is missing. Original windows have been broken. Louvered green shutters are badly damaged.
Another antique postcard of Old New Orleans— this is the old prison courtyard. The wry comment about Louisiana is that it’s half under water and half under indictment. In the old days, this is where the half under indictment in New Orleans would have been held.
Reporters and historians may disagree over wether it was more or less comfortable than the Superdome.
So the anniversary rolls around again, fainter yet and fainter as we put distance between ourselves, and a brilliant September day. A work-day then, a Sunday now, but still the great crack across our world-view, our basic assumptions, and for the families of some 3,000 a great jagged break in their lives. People set off for work, or to Disneyland, or headed home… grabbing a last cup of coffee, stuffing things into briefcases, focused on a day of travel, or at their desk, teleconferencing, checking out a suspected gas leak in the street, or pretending to pay attention to a cabin attendant going through the required safety brief. They were setting appointments, eating breakfast at their desk on the 102nd floor… and then the day stopped being ordinary, and everyone remembers where they were, and what they were doing.
Of course, some of us caught on faster than others; at mid-afternoon on the 11th, I was gently trying to explain to my employer why no one wanted to take calls, or come into the office to talk about their invention, that this whole planes-crashing-into-the-WTC-and-Pentagon thing was huge, unimaginably huge, and the repercussions would be enormous, and unforeseeable. (One of them being eventually the death of the enterprise I was employed by, but that is another story.) The planes being grounded— that’s what brought it home to him. The office in the Mercantile building had a gorgeous, unobstructed of downtown San Antonio, and the final flight-path of airliners coming in for a landing at the airport, sliding past our windows like beads on a string every few minutes… and then the sky was empty, and things were never quite the same again.
Reactions to 9/11 varied according to an infinite number of variables; how close to New York or the Pentagon, how connected to financial markets, or the media, or emergency services, or what kind of interest one had in politics, history, military, current events… but not always predictably. A fair number of people who had always been comfortably settled somewhere along the liberal segment along the range of political thought suddenly discovered their inner Jacksonian, moving abruptly and sometimes painfully into the conservative segment. Others, including many public intellectuals, moved farther along the range, and not a few toppled off the edge entirely… either that, or the spectrum itself lurched in the Jacksonian direction, leaving some like Lewis Lapham and Gore Vidal hanging from their fingertips and bleating about their own relevancy. And a clown like Ward Churchill could, thanks to weblogs and the internet, suddenly become all the more visible, and considerably less amusing to a national audience. The main-line news sources; newspapers, television, radio— they all have been stirred up, shaken out, questioned and dissected mercilessly by bloggers over the last four years, and in a couple of cases, actually driven to cover stories that ordinarily would have been passed over as irrelevant.
But it has been four years since that Tuesday morning. Children who were babies on that day are starting kindergarten this month. Children who were in the first or second grade that day, barely aware of anything more complicated than the alphabet, are on the verge of being teenagers in a world where the towers have never been, save in movies and history lessons. The reality of them, the solidity of steel and concrete fades and dissipates like smoke, shock and grief overlaid with time and the business of living in the world day to day. It is just something that has always been, and will go on for the forseeable future.
Indeed, the edges of my own memories are now blurred around the edges: in the last four years, my daughter deployed to the Middle East twice, my parents’ house burned to the ground, I have repainted and rehabbed my own kitchen, and gone to other employment , and taken over management of this weblog. We have gone through a bruising presidential election and a war on two fronts, we continue to face the threat of terrorism by international Islamic radical elements, and a slew of rotten Hollywood movies based on comic books and old TV shows. We have seen revolution in Lebanon, a tsunami in Thailand and Indonesia, terrorism in Bali, Beslan and London… and a hurricane wrecking one of our major cities and a swath of coastal lowlands the size of most European countries. Yes, the world does move on…
But today, we remember.
The city that once was, and may yet be again… at least the old-timers had the sense to build on the highest bit of low ground around.
(I feel a rightous rant coming on, in addition to a strong desire to slap Governor Blanco silly— sweetie, it’s not in your job description to cry in front of the cameras, leave that to the newly named Miss America, m’kay?
Strong women in high office, and positions of responsibility do not cry in public. Ever. It’s just not done. Butch up, and carry on.)
Another from my collection of antique postcards… an image of the city that was, the city of memories, of the good times rolling.
It may yet be again.
(The concerted rescue effort is rolling into town this afternoon. Four days, people. We cannot collapse the space-time continuum— it will always take about four days, as much as everyone wishes otherwise.)
Later: Additional for Mayor Nagin— what about the busses, then?!!