The Vietnam War

 

The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novik

I have already mentioned in a couple of threads that I've been watching this documentary.

Given the focus here on the Punitive Expedition and, more recently, World War One, it might come as a surprise that I have a real interest in the Vietnam War, although I've written about it here before.  This will be, however, only the 30th post on the topic of the war since we started the blog.  Not a lot compared to the 613 on World War One (to date) or even the 182 on World War Two (to date).  Still, it has been for a very long time something I've been pretty interested in.

That's the case for a variety of reasons, one being that the war is within my living memory.  The war was ongoing when I was born in 1963 and it was something that I became increasingly aware of in my youth.  When the US pulled out of the war in 1973 I was ten and can well remember that, including various things that occurred in the war during the Nixon Administration period.  To my surprise, in fact, I can personally recall some things about the war much earlier than that.  When the North invaded in 1975 and the Republic of Vietnam collapsed I was only a couple of years older but that was something that I was very much aware of.  Indeed, at that time in my youth I thought I might want to opt for a military career and I followed the fading fortunes of South Vietnam carefully, even putting up a National Geographic map in my bedroom so I could follow the war as the NVA closed increasingly in on the doomed former ally of the United States.  The war was a topic of conversation in the house as I grew up, although probably not in the way you might figure.*  My father and mother thought the war was a mistake.  I, my youthful self, didn't.

Soon after that I started to try to find histories on the war and to this date I've frankly never been satisfied with any of them.  But I did learn quite a bit about the war.  Later on, when I joined the National Guard, I learned a different prospective yet as so many of the fellow Guardsmen I served within the 1980s were veterans of the war.  One of the first major essays I wrote in college was an exploration of the Tet Offensive of 1968. And so on.

So I was looking forward to the documentary, although holding back some reserve about that as well.  I like the Ken Burns documentaries I've seen quite a bit and I was worried this one wouldn't measure up, and that if it didn't it might make me question a bit his earlier documentaries that I do like.

So I'm glad to report that I think this documentary is okay.

Not spectacular, but not bad. And frankly, it's a really tough topic to take on.  If I were grading it, I think I'd give it a B-.

Burns and Novik worked on this for a decade.  At least one of the people interviewed for the documentary has passed away in that period.  In releasing it, Burns has stated that it was his view that only now, in the 2010s, can a documentary on the war be released and be objective.  I think that's likely correct, and I also think that we are now ready, perhaps for the first time, for a good objective treatment of war in the written form.  I'll hope for that.

The documentary is presented in ten episodes, some of which are 1.5 hours long but most of which are two hours long.  Not every episode is equal in quality to the others.  In my view, the documentary might have been better to have been seven episodes rather than ten, but that's a tough call for the doumentarian to make.  I'd guess they probably had enough material for twenty episodes had they chosen to go that long (which would have been a mistake).

The documentary is presented in the now standard Burns form.  We are introduced to a collection of speakers who speak in nearly every, but not every, episode.  Unlike The Civil War, or Baseball, these speakers tend to all have first hand experience with the topic being addressed, which does make it different from those well known documentaries (I haven't seen Burn's documentary on World War Two which may follow this form to a degree).

Because it's ten sequential episodes its a bit difficult to determine how to properly review it.  Reviewing each episode might be tedious, but on the other hand its hard not to do that in some sense.  Nonetheless I'm not going to strictly do that.  Indeed, I'm going to start off where I think the documentary falls short, which may be additional bad form.  Nonetheless. . .

The most significant failure of the documentary was the failure to really handle the story of French involvement in Vietnam adequately. This is a failure, however, that nearly every treatment of the Vietnam War makes. In fairness, this failure was less pronounced here than it often is.  There's always a temptation to treat the French Indochinese War as simply a minor prelude to the American war in Vietnam, but that's a fairly serious mistake.

It's a mistake as the French first became involved in Indochina, and more particularly in Vietnam in particular, in the early 1600s. That's correct.  French presence in Vietnam predates, by decades, American independence from the United Kingdom. The story of that early involvement, indeed how France came to be in Indochina at all, is exceedingly complicated and very difficult to understand.  It mirrors, however, to some degree the story of the British in India.  Basically, French interests of various types, not the French government, entered the area and that lead to conflict.  As the French interest expanded, the French government began to take an active role in what ws occurring.

 French naval infantry in Tonkin, ie., northern Vietnam, 1884.

This lead the French ultimately to directly intervene in Vietnam in 1858, an event which touched off thirty years of conflict with the indigenous people.  French dominion of the region, including Vietnam, lead to a sort of unitary geography that had never existed before so, as with India, while France didn't create the Vietnamese, in some ways it created Vietnam.

 French Indochina in 1930.  Note that the borders on the map heavily reflect the modern states in the region.

The French were so successful in "pacifying" Indochina that the region became the desired post for French Foreign Legionnaires, who dreamed of being posted there.  Nonetheless the Vietnamese never accepted French dominion of their heavily rural jungle land, even as they acquired bits of French culture. Again, this strongly recalls the British in India, who managed to stamp British culture on the existing Indian one as they formed an India out of a collection of regional states, while never really acquiring the loyalty of the people who lived in them.  Open rebellion in native troops broke out in 1930, signaling that all was not well.  By that time, as the documentary correctly and importantly notes, Ho Chi Minh was already a Communist seeking the liberty of the Vietnamese from the French

Of course, part of what came not to be well was Japan had different ideas for Asian people that didn't include liberty, even if it didn't include Europeans.  When the Pacific War broke out on December 7, 1941, France was already the anemic Vichy state that the Germans had left it and the Japanese basically simply walked into Indochina with the French accepting it.  The Vietnamese, however, did not and a guerilla war against Japan broke out.

Vichy propaganda poster showing unity between France and northern Vietnam, 1942.

Burns and Novik handle this history, but in a light form.  Like most treatments of the Vietnam War, the entire century plus long story of France in Indochina prior to the Japanese occupation is handled in a light form.  Vietnam had long been occupied by the French prior to the Japanese occupation. Why was there only one significant rebellion, prior to World War Two, by the Japanese?  How much had French culture impacted the Vietnamese?  Why did the rebels of mid 20th Century find refuge in Communism in Vietnam, as in so many other places. What about the other, and there were other, nationalist movements that sought to expel the French but didn't adhere to Communism?  This stuff would be nice to know.

And it would also be nice to know why the French ever wanted Vietnam.  It's an odd possession, quite frankly, for them, or anyone. For Europeans it was primitive and dangerously diseased ridden. Early French military missions fell by the droves to disease. What was it about the place?

The story of the rising Communist/Nationalist struggle against the Japanese, and how it morphed into a struggle against the return of the French was also given a typical treatment and as usual it gives a light treatment to European dreams of restored colonial possessions and American opposition, at first, to that.  This could also have been treated more completely.  This is a complex story but of note the British, while not openly admitting it, had come to the reluctant conclusion that the sun was setting on empire everywhere and was acting accordingly.  India, the crown jewel of the British Empire, was granted independence in 1947.  The UK made a pretext of not granting independence to Israel voluntarily but in actuality simply withdrew from the region to let the contestants fight it out in the same year. The British were clearly going home.  They even worked to prevent the Dutch from restoring their presence in the Dutch East Indies, a rare example of one colonial power refusing to allow another to keep its colony while not trying to take it for its own. 

The French, however, seeking to restore France's position in the world following its defeat at the hands of the Germans in 1940 acted to try to hand on to, and restore, its empire.

The US, at first, opposed and would not cooperate with French efforts.  The Roosevelt Administration was not terribly alive to the threat of Communism anywhere and the Truman Administration, at first, was only slightly more concerned.  Given this, the administrations either actively opposed French colonial restorations or were not cooperative with them.  In 1949, however, the situation abruptly changed when China fell to the Chinese Red Army.  The prior year, 1948, the dangers of Soviet expansion became manifest when the Soviets blockaded Berlin.  The isolationist Republican Party became converted to active global opposition to Communism overnight and the heat then fell on Truman in a major way.  The North Korean invasion of South Korea cemented that and the US began to slowly, but actively, support the French effort on the thesis that it was an anti-communist effort, which was true, but only partially.

French Foreign Legion airborne artillery in Indochina during their war following World War Two.

Burns and Novik touch on part of this history, but not all.  I wish they'd dived into it more deeply.  They do a good job, however, with the French Indochinese War, although they failed to cover the request the French made for the US to deploy atomic weaponry at Dien Bien Phu, which is a significant oversight.

Following this, I think they do a good job with the story of American involvement in the war thereafter.  They do an excellent job revealing the political machinations that occurred behind the scenes.  Some of the revelations are startling and hard to grasp.  Kennedy comes out looking better than I'd generally credit him to be (I'm not a Kennedy fan).  Lydon Johnson comes across as shrewd and alert, but bizarrely inclined to keep wading deeper into the "Big Muddy" even though he was expressing absolute doubts about the entire project, privately.  Nixon comes across as an even bigger crook than we generally look back upon him to be, which is pretty horrifically exposed.  All of the Administrations come across as willing to lie and scheme against the presumed wishes of the American people.

 US Army advisers and Vietnamese Special Forces, Vietnam War.

Well, what of the portrayal of the American war itself?  I think it was well done, balancing events back home, politics and the war, quite well.  People with strongly vested views in the war will likely be unhappy that their side isn't more fully portrayed as correct.  Revisionist histories of the war, of which there are now several significant ones, are not given pride of place.  The arguments presented, and they are arguments even if they do not appear to be, given the conflict on interpretations of the war and how it was waged, and lost, are very well presented and hard to argue against. For those who can recall the war personally the end of the documentary is gut wrenching.  It must be leagues more so for those who experienced it in any fashion.

Boomers protesting the Vietnam War, from our thread Boomer, wake up. Generations, Part One of Three.  Of interest in this photo, only one of these young people have anything approaching a Hippie look even if they are protesting.

I was glad to see that the documentary went on after the fall of Saigon to briefly note Vietnam's following war in Cambodia, although I was disappointed that the fall of the non Communist regime in Cambodia was not dealt with itself, as I'd consider that to be part of the Vietnam War.  Indeed, the wars that occurred in Cambodia and Laos are part and parcel of the same story, so their omission was surprising.  A bit more on Vietnam's war with China, which occurred in the late 1970s, would also have been appreciated.

Pathet (Communist) Laotian troops, riding in an American 6x6 truck, in Vientiane in 1972.  The situation in Laos had been tense since the country had gained independence from France and it had teetered on the edge of falling to Communism for years.  Like South Vietnam, it fell in 1975.

Burns and Novik's history of the war is presented as an unresolved history by its own admission. The documentary makes the argument that the rift in American culture that we clearly see all around us know came about due to the war and that perhaps the documentary can be a step on the way towards healing that rift. That's a big claim, worth examining, and a big hope as well.

 

 Infantry in Vietnam.

There are indeed good reasons to look back on the Vietnam War as a major factor in the split in the countries culture into two cultures in a near cultural civil  war with one another.  Indeed, that's one of those arguments which fits under our You Hear It Hear First category as we've cited the rise of the Boomer left as a major element of this.  Given this, I'll credit this argument to a certain degree but I think it may be too simplistic to believe that no divide existed before the 1960s.  More accurately, the strong divide that had existed between right and left at various points prior to World War Two closed as a result of the war and while it rose again briefly after the war, the rise of Communism in the late 1940s closed it again. This is not to say that everyone saw everything the same way, as that would definitely not be true. But the big cultural divide we now have does indeed stem, at least to some degree, to a rift that developed during the war.

CH-54 landing in Saigon, April 30, 1975. At the time this photograph was taken, , as pointed out in an earlier thread, Hillary Clinton had already worked on the Nixon impeachment effort, Chuck Schumer was already in the New York Assembly, and Nancy Pelosi was already involved in California's Democratic Party.

Healing that rift is a big task and its unlikely that Burns' and Novik's documentary will achieve that, no matter how much that might be wished for. The split today isn't over the Vietnam War but rather over many other things.  Indeed the remaining rifts of the Vietnam War itself are more likely to be healed by the passing of that generation.  But that we can look back and see what occurred is a good thing, and perhaps that will contribute to the wider hope of recovering the middle that seems in recent years to have been lost, or at least recalling that there is a middle and where it is.

 Vietnamese refugees being evacuated from Saigon in 1975.

*A person shouldn't overemphasis this however.  In all of our households in that era, World War Two was the war that was "the war".

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De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh

"The National Guard didn't go to Vietnam. . . "

 The Vietnam War

Why. . .

did they bring back Fuller House?

Why?

Why?

Lex Anteinternet: Oh no. . . .

Lex Anteinternet: Oh no. . . .: Apple has come out with the Iphone 8.  . . and now there's a major update for the Iphone 7.

And an update fixing bugs already.

What a surprise.

"The National Guard didn't go to Vietnam. . . "

 Men of Company D (Ranger), 151st Infantry, Indiana Army National Guard, in Vietnam. These men are all wearing ARVN tiger stripe uniforms, a uniform that was common in the ARVN and popular with US special forces.

Well, actually it did.

It wasn't universally mobilized for the war, unlike it had been in prior wars.  The Army Reserve, which only existed in modern form following World War Two, wasn't either.

Army National Guard units mobilized and sent to Vietnam include:

Kentucky's 2nd Battalion, 138th Artillery;
Indiana's Company D (Ranger), 151st Infantry, a highly decorated unit;
Hawaii's 29th Infantry Brigade;
Kansas' 69th Infantry Brigade, supplemented with one infantry battalion from the Iowa Army National Guard;
California's 1st Squadron, 18th Armored Cavalry;
New Hampshire's 3rd Battalion, 197th Artillery;

In addition, numerous smaller engineer,  postal, medical and support units from the Guard were mobilized and went.  Unlike the Army Reserve, the Army National Guard is mostly combat arms.

The Air National Guard sent the following units, officially:

120th Colorado,
174th Iowa,
136th New York
188th New Mexico.

These were all fighter wings.  However, Air National Guard deployments are highly deceptive as the Air Guard units that were equipped with reconnaissance and transport aircraft flew a lot of missions in support of the Vietnam War while never being counted as deployed to it. This included the medical air transport unit of the Wyoming Air National Guard, which flew in and out of Vietnam, but which was never considered to be activated for the war.

Indeed, Air Guard deployments remain deceptive to this day, as the Air Guard can deploy a plane or two, rather than a unit, for support and come across as simply doing routine flying.

Army Reserve units also were mobilized for Vietnam following the 1968 Tet Offensive.  I don't know which units went, and frankly as they were support, it's harder to find information on them.

Added to these figures is the harder yet figure to arrive upon for individual Guardsmen and Reservists who were activated for the war by default or by their own volition.  There are always members of the Guard and Reserve who seek to have their individual reserve status changed to active and serve at any one time, including wartime.  I'm personally familiar with individuals doing that.  The service doesn't actually like reservists seeking activation and it seeks to discourage it in various ways, but it will accept them if they persist.  The reason they discourage it is that, from their prospective, having a fully manned active and reserve component is important, and they don't like taking a service member from one status to another on an individual basis.  I suspect, but don't know, that was easier to do during the Vietnam War however.

Also included in this group, fwiw, at that time were reservists who fell afoul of drill requirements for one reason or another.  Simply activating these men and making them serve as full timers has always been an option, although I never saw it done in the 1980s.  In the 1960s, however, when there was a need and a desire on the part of a lot of people (which we'll get to in a moment) to get into the reserves, they would.

I note that as the Ken Burns document on Vietnam correctly noted, as is so rarely the case, that while 30,000 Americans crossed into Canada to avoid service in the Vietnam War, 30,000 Canadians crossed the border to serve in the US Armed Forces during the war as well, balancing out the number (and not including Canadians who were residents of the US and liable for the draft, as was a cousin of mine who served in Vietnam as a drafted Canadian citizen).  We'll get to Vietnam War enlistment in the reserves in a moment, but I note that as while its surely the case that men entering the reserves in the hope of not being drafted for Vietnam did not balance out against those seeking deployment from the Guard and Reserve in the regular Army, that did occur.

Okay, so what's your point. There's cat videos to watch on YouTube after all and we can't linger here all day for no reason. . .

Well, just this.

I've been watching, as I noted here yesterday, Ken Burn's new documentary on the Vietnam War. I'll review it soon, but one impression a person might acquire, as with nearly any other documentary on the Vietnam War, is that the Guard of the era was a bunch of untrained college slackers avoiding the draft (and you'd hardly be aware that there was an Army Reserve at all).

Frankly, that impression isn't completely unfair, but its not fair either.

If you follow our posts here, which are generally centered on an early era, you'd know that the Guard was integral to our military efforts in the 1910 to 1920 time frame. We couldn't have fought World War One without it, even though some in the Army wished to, and the same is true of World War Two and Korea, IE., we couldn't have fought those wars without the Guard, and the Guard generally provided good units, often excellent units.

So what was up with the Vietnam War.

Well, as I've posted here before, I think that a lot of the history of the Vietnam War is not properly understood and certainly isn't well understood in context.  The war was a war, albeit an undeclared war (there wouldn't have been a sovereign to declare war upon) but it was also a campaign in the Cold War.  Korea was as well, but it came so early that it came during the period of time during which the Army was being rebuilt following the big dismantling of the Army following World War Two.  I.e, fighting the Korean War without the Guard, the Army Reserve, the Air Guard and Reserve and the Marine Corps Reserve would have been flat out impossible.

Not so for the Vietnam War which came at the height of our huge Cold War standing military.

The US deployed up to 500,000 men in Vietnam, but the Armed Forces were so large at the time that was possible to do without calling up the reserves. And the Johnson Administration didn't want to as it felt that would have made the war unpopular, at a time when it wasn't completely unpopular.  The thought was that taking a bunch of men out of a community would have been noticed more than individual draftees.  Perhaps that's right, but it was also frankly a bit disingenuous. But disengenuity was the hallmark of every American Administration during the Vietnam War.

Added to that, the nation still needed to retain a force to counter possible other threats, and there were plenty of them.  Real fears existed about Soviet actions in Europe, and the 1968 Czechoslovakian uprising added to them.  Korea remained a very hot part of the Cold War at the time, and indeed there were fears of a re-ignition of the Korean War following the 1968 North Korean seizure of the USS Pueblo.  The Middle East was a mess then just like now, although the character of the mess was considerably different.  In short, with significant (but not even 50%, we should note) of the regular strength of the military committed to Vietnam, committing much of the Guard and the Reserve would have been problematic as it is, after all, a reserve. 

Having said that, much of the decision was simply political.

The fear as that taking an entire group of men out of a single community, which is of course what happens when a Guard unit is activated, would spark discontent about the war.  Indeed, it was felt that this had happened with Truman had Federalized the Guard due to the Korean War. 

And the impact of doing that was greater at that time then it is now.   Now, with a much smaller Guard, the units are fewer and more concentrated.  Earlier, this wasn't the case.  In the 1930s, for example, Casper had an armory for a National Guard unit, but even tiny Glenrock actually had a Guard unit, something that's completely unimaginable today.  Indeed, as I travel around the state I pass old National Guard armories all the time for units that no longer exist, with those armories no longer serving that function.  Take a bunch of men out of a small town and, well, people notice.

Particularly, I'd add, if you send those men to a distant guerrilla war.  That had been done once before in American history in regards to the Philippine Insurrection, and it had proven to be massively unpopular.  There's just something about it, and you can easily see why.  Guardsmen just don't envision that when they sign up, and the local community doesn't really.  Or at least they didn't.  In  more recent times, this seems to be much less the case, and the deployment to Guard units to the guerrilla was in Afghanistan and Iraq have not caused protests in the streets.

This meant, as a byproduct, that the Guard and Reserves (remember the Reserves? They're part of this too) became a sort of unintentional haven for those who didn't want to be drafted and send, possibly, to Vietnam.  This definitely occurred, but at the same time it's important to remember that it was never the case, as so often seems to be assumed, that the Guard was entirely made up of men who took that route.  Far from it.

Indeed, a Guard unit typically has an unusual concentration of older veteran soldiers in it, which is one of the things that makes it distinct from the Regular Army in some ways. There are, of course, always younger men in it in the lower enlisted and lower commissioned ranks, but there are always a lot of veteran solders as well.  Indeed, the Guard unit I was in during the 1980s had one soldiers whose service had started during World War Two. It had in addition other troops whose service dated  back to the late 1940s, or included the Korean War, and, perhaps ironically, a lot of Vietnam veterans.  There's no reason to believe that Guard units of the 1960s were any different.  Indeed, assuming the same range of service ages some Guard units in 1968 undoubtedly had men who had commenced their service in the late 1920s.

Which is not to say that men didn't join to try to avoid going to Vietnam. Some did.  I've known one fellow who joined the Guard for that reason (he was later a Guard officer and felt terribly about it) and one who joined the Army Reserve for that reason.  I don't regard that decision as illegitimate in any fashion. They were still serving. 

It does mean, however, that the Guard has been unfairly tainted for years as a haven for those seeking to avoid actual service.  This slam still existed in the 1980s when I was in the Guard although it was highly ironic as the unit I was in was full of Vietnam veterans.  Indeed, the unit was a hotbed, in a way, of discontent in regards to draft evaders as it was full of men who had not avoided the draft.  Even more ironically, some of the Guardsmen of that era held men who had joined the  Guard to avoid service in Vietnam, and then later gotten out of the Guard, with contempt.  In watching the recent Ken Burns documentary I think I've determined hat much of my view about men who went to Canada or avoided the draft during the war was formed when I was in the Guard, as I have a hard time looking at that objectively.

Well, in recent wars we've returned to patter, and the old "Weekend Warrior" taint of the 60s seems to have passed.  I'm glad that it has.

Should the Guard have been sent to Vietnam in the same fashion that it was to Korea?  That's a harder question.  I suspect that Johnson's concern was correct, and it would have made the war unpopular. . . which it became anyway.  But perhaps it should have, indeed, it should have, been deployed sooner and in somewhat greater numbers than it was.  That would have leavened the joining to avoid Vietnam gamble a bit, if not removed it.  And if that made the war more unpopular, quicker, well perhaps that would have been a positive development in unknown ways.

De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh

  Yes, this is the third time I've run this photo.  I just like it.  Two young couples.  Migrant farm workers in Louisiana and their children, 1939.  Candidates for "Mommy Makeovers" featuring huge boobs so they can wear nearly no clothes?  Definitely not, as I coincidentally noted earlier this exceedingly long week..  Why aren't they the standards of feminine beauty?  Well, Hugh Hefner has a lot to do with that. These gals aren't stupid sterile toys, pretty clearly, which Hefner portrayed all women to be.

The long 20th Century certainly had its share of despicable people who rose to influence.  Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Guevara, Sanger, and many others. Those watching PBS this week got a reminder of how one American President, Richard Nixon, seemed to have a slim grasp on moral conduct in regard to obtaining and acting in his office.

Amongst those whose actions did damage in untold ways and whose legacy is wholly negative is one figure who passed into the next world two days ago.  While his lifetime actions would suggest that he believed in nothing greater than his bank account, Christian charity would require prayers in hopes that some last moment or untold conversion, or some profound degree of invincible ignorance, would allow that his soul might still be saved.  But that same charity does not require people to adhere to the bromide that a person must not speak ill of the dead, particularly when the world is worse off due to him.

We speak, of course, of pornographer Hugh Hefner.

Hefner is of course well known and therefore probably requires no introduction. But over time the filth that he sold and pushed contributed, but did not lead, to the decay of the American and European view of women back to the chattel status it had been liberated from with the onset of Christianity in Europe in the 1st Century.  The damage his did work to women has been massive.  So massive that its extent can hardly be appreciated by younger generations who now grow up in a society that has largely accepted a perverted sexual chattel view of young women and which has gone on to seeing the world the way that Hefner argued for, defined by nothing more than a person's sex drive.

Hefner's genius, if we are to term it that, lay in being able to take what already existed, the distribution of sexualized nude images of women in print, in a glamourous form.  Beyond that, he managed, by doing that, to take those images away from what they clearly were, photographs of the extremely desperate and prostitutes, and rebrand them as prostituted images of the extremely busty girl next door.  In this he had the odd help of massive events of the time as coincident with him reaching adult status the world found itself engaged in a massive global war and such events always lead to a decay in moral standards. The change in the photographic prostitution of willing women was therefore already underway as wartime magazines like Esquire and Yank, pitching towards American youth now in uniform but not in the gutter, presented a cleaner and less obvious prostitution of their subjects than magazines otherwise sold on the edge of the law on the edge of the tracks.  An entire minor industry sprang up taking off from popular illustration styles that had been promoted in magazines like Country Gentleman and the The Saturday Evening Post of slice of life, often romanticized, images of American life but instead using the same illustration styles to portray nude or nearly nude young women with soldiers as the market.  That style spread all the way to the fuselages of American (but only American) aircraft, painted by soldier artists a long ways from the public eye back home. And of course thousands were exposed to real prostitution globally.

Hefner in fact worked for a magazine that was already taking that approach just after the war when he broke away to pimp on his own.  He saw, however, that what magazines like Esquire were doing somewhat on the sly could be done boldly in the open.  Not that he did not meet with some opposition in the beginning, he did.  And that opposition was not always from the obvious quarters.  It was widespread in a society that was more decent at the time. Even the print media found his actions inappropriate.  In one unusual example of that Life magazine saved the career of Marilyn Monroe when Hefner went to publish purchased nude photographs of her in 1953 (maybe its first issue).  Knowing that this would ruin Monroe, Life beat Playboy to the punch and published them in a smaller version first, as art photographs. The distinction is clearly thin, but the act done in charity, something we'd not see the press do today, saved Monroe's career from early destruction.

That Monroe went on to self destruct later is something that is perhaps telling.  It would be interesting to know how many of Playboy's subjects have gone down in destruction.  Starting of a young life by prostituting your image, which is what the centerfold of every issue is doing, isn't a good start to things.  It's known that at least one Playboy centerfold was murdered some time after she appeared in the magazine and its been said (but I don't know, and I'm not going to research it) that one of the still widely viewed subjects of decades ago committed suicide. 

Those events may have nothing to do with the magazine at all, of course.  But the treating of young women as nothing more than sexual objects who must put out does.   The spread of unnecessary surgery that does nothing more than to try match real women's images to those airbrushed images of the exceptional that appear as "playmates" does as well.  And, as things have spread to the internet, untold misery of every kind, including apparently pornography induced dysfunction of very young men, does as well (there's a lawsuit in there somewhere).

Everything about this body of work has been negative.  Hefner helped contributed and was very active in promoting a view of sex that was unnatural and has lead to confusion on its very nature at its essence. The negative results have ranged from societal disaster to surgically unnecessary, as noted above. The damage has been deep and lasting and there's no sign of any correction to it coming any time soon.

Perhaps in a slight example of some justice operating in the temporal world, where we cannot and should not expect it, Playboy itself has fallen in hard times, the victim of competing purveyors of smut who often tried to take it back towards its original back alley origins, and the pornographication of the culture, which sees the nearly Playboy like portrayal of women in everything from television, to Sports Illustrated, to billboards.  Not being unique, there's been no reason to buy it.  The magazine has accordingly suffered.  Hefner himself apparently suffered a bit as well, according to one of his recent female roommates, in requiring the use of his product in order to complete the act it celebrates, something that isn't really too surprising.  The glamour that was once bizarrely attached to his enterprise wore off as well, and the clubs that once existed (and maybe still do) in Chicago, and the large parties that were once reported on at his mansion in California, faded from view.  Indeed, in perhaps a final ironic note one of the more legendary celebrated attendees of those parties, Bill Cosby, went from "America's Dad" to giant creep in the public's view in recent years only to see, bizarrely, Hefner abandon him in a "I didn't know" statement.  He likely didn't, but given what he sold, what possible difference could that have made?

Well, Hefner, like everyone, has passed on.  The money generated from the prostitution of young women by photographic means will not go on with him.  His legacy of smut here on Earth and the untold damage it has done are still with us.  The negative acts of real bastards just keep on keeping on.

National Coffee Day.

Today, dear reader, is National Coffee Day.

Truly.  How would we get buy without it?

Today In Wyoming's History: September 29. 1917: Electric lights installed in Cokeville businesses.

Today In Wyoming's History: September 29:

1917:  Electric lights installed in Cokeville businesses.

Roads to the Great War: Martin van Creveld on the Fall and Rise of History...

Roads to the Great War: Martin van Creveld on the Fall and Rise of History...: I discovered this article on the blog of provocative Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld. Yes, the same Dr. van Creveld who is t...

Thirteenth National Army Cantonment, Camp Dodge, Iowa, Infantry Brigades and Supply Trains

Camp Lewis, Tacoma, Washington, Sept. 28, 1917

Roads to the Great War: Louisiana and the Great War: Then and Now

Roads to the Great War: Louisiana and the Great War: Then and Now: From Know Louisiana World War I, known as the "Great War,” has long been acknowledged as a major turning point in Ameri...

Is anyone else here watching the Ken Burns Vietnam War documentary?

I have been, and I'll post my views on it when it is done, but I wondered if anyone else who stops in here has been catching it.

Mid Week At Work: Work teaser and coal funds?

 

The Tribune ran an article yesterday about a Workforce Initiative bill that Governor Mead apparently expects the legislature to pass this next session.  In discussing it, they stated:

Despite the state’s major funding shortfalls, Gov. Matt Mead said he expects Wyoming lawmakers to pass a workforce training package worth tens of millions of dollars when they meet this winter.

Mead said that while investing in workforce training, which is a key part of his economic diversity initiative, may be a tough sell, it is essential to helping the state’s economy recover and grow.

“There is a lot of things that look counterintuitive that will get us where we need,” Mead told a meeting of the Wyoming Community Development Agency Board on Monday in Casper.

But we never learned what kind of workforce training he was contemplating.  

That's a bit frustrating.

We've been down this road in some ways so many times its as circular as the Indianapolis 500, and just about as long.  We figure we need to diversify, and the state government needs to have a role in that, and then the energy industry picks up and we forget all about it.  Indeed, of note, one of the training facilities, a private one, that sprung up last go around was one that trained people to work on oil rigs.  That may have been a good thing, it'd be better to have people trained rather than not, but its interesting that this is where our training heart turned out to be. 

Of course, that's not completely fair.  The University, which is suffering from budget woes, and the community colleges, remain fantastic,and truly diverse, training grounds.

While it might not seem directly related, this morning readers of the Tribune were greeted by this headline:

Barrasso presses DOE nominee on committment to coal research

And yes, "commitment"  is misspelled in at least the on line original.  Not my blunder there, although I make plenty.

In that article we learn that Senator Barrasso is pressing the DOE nominee for Assistant Secretary of Energy for Fossil Energy, Steven Winberg, for that commitment.

Why should Mr. Winberg have to make such a commitment?  We're repeatedly told that our state is rigorously for free enterprise.  Wouldn't a perfectly rational comment from the nominee have been something like "Mr. Senator, we will rely upon the glory of the competitive market to meet the future energy demands of the United States and the world to provide abundant future energy. . . and if coal wants to be part of that, as it does, we are confident that it will invest the resources necessary to meet that goal. . ."

Well, he's not going to say that and Senator Barasso would have gasped if he had.  But there's something to that.

The state has been sinking money into "clean coal" even though at the same time many of the knowledgable people in the area have stated that it can't be done.  It clearly can't be done without the investment of enormous amounts of money, and that appears to be more, at least right now, than the industry itself has.  

Perhaps this investment by Wyoming, and maybe by the Federal government, is worthwhile.  The US has a lot of coal and it's a major employer in Wyoming.  The odds are against its success however, and that's quite clear.  It's also counter to a growing international trend away from coal, as well as the economic time line of the industry.  I'm not saying that trying to develop clean coal is completely pointless, but it is interesting that if we're willing, as a state, to spend money on the effort, and to have the Federal government do it as well.  That's a bit hypocritical if we don't feel that effort is likewise worthwhile elsewhere, and perhaps more particularly on things likely to have a more immediate impact.

Errata: National Anthem and Indian Actors

A correction of a couple of items.

Yesterday we ran an article called  Taking the Knee--Football, other sports, the National Anthem. What the heck is going on here? in which we noted that the National Anthem became routine in baseball games during World War One.

That was sort of correct, but not entirely.  It was more routinely introduced in the game during the Great War, but it didn't become standard for the game until 1942.  That is, during World War Two.

It became standard for football that same year, and at the end of the war the Commissioner of football made a statement that it should remain.  It became an NFL regulation some time later. That is, it must be played before every game.  The players didn't stand on the field for the National Anthem in football until after September 11, 2001, however.

Baseball is a much more international game than football, with players from many countries playing it, but it must be a bit awkward for players from other nations when the US National Anthem is played.  Baseball, of course, accommodates that, at least in the case of Canada, by playing the Canadian national anthem at Canadian games.

Secondly, in my review of Wind River I noted as one of my few complaints about the film that it could have had more Indian actors.  It turns out it did have more Indian actors.  So my complaint there was largely misplaced, for which I'm glad.

Taking the Knee--Football, other sports, the National Anthem. What the heck is going on here?

You can tell exactly how clueless I am about football by the fact that I did not know that we were having a big national crises (flap?) or something until after all the Sunday football games were over.

Now, I don't follow football at all, which is partially why I missed the whole story. And I was really busy last week and over the weekend.  Still, I should have noticed something was going on.  I didn't until I saw some Facebook feed or something and I had to ask my wife, who does follow football, what was up. Even at that I was a bit confused until then if their going to their knee in the National Anthem was intended as a sign of respect (which it could be) or of protest.

Protest, I gather.

I didn't know the full dimensions of it (assuming I do now) until I listened to the weekend news shows on my way up to a distant town for work, and back. 

Now I'm more or less up to speed, I guess, even if I still feel sort of oddly out of it.

To add to the surreal feeling, I've been watching Ken Burns The Vietnam War and therefore I'm getting a dose of 1960s protests at the same time.  Last night's episode death with the 1968 Democratic Convention riots, amongst others, and so there's an odd eerie sense, in some ways, of having been here before.  I was only ten years old when the United States pulled its last combat troops out of Vietnam, but I can actually remember some of the events now being described from 1968.  Frankly, the late 1960s were awful.  Indeed, the whole 1960s were awful, and the 1970s weren't much better.  But I digress.

So apparently, this all started off last year when a football player named Colin Kaepernick, about whom I know nothing whatsoever, took the knee, or perhaps sat down, during the National Anthem at some point during the 2016 season in protest of racism in the United States. At the time he was quoted as saying:

I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder

This followed all the police shooting incidents prior to that.

From that, the protests spread and since the election of President Trump they've apparently spread further.  I had no idea, really, as I don't follow football and protests in football games have to be pretty darned big in order for me to notice them. Anyhow, Kaepernick's actions come in that context. It's worth noting that something like 70% of the football players in the NFL are black.  He's no longer in the NFL, however, as he became a free agent last year and nobody picked him up, this event widely being believed to be the reason for that.  If so, he's paying a personal penalty for his actions, which is the risk of any such action, while it neither justifies it or condemns it.

Since then, in his extremely odd way, Donald Trump made a comment about the protests recently in a speech, which have spread, to the effect that the owners should fire the SOBs (his words, although I've abbreviated it here) who do this. That caused, in predictable fashion, the protest to spread very widely, apparently, over the weekend.  Trump, in Trump fashion, backed up his comment in Tweet form.

So here we are.

This raises a number of interesting questions.

The first, and most obvious, is why oh why does Trump feel that any moronic concept that wonders through his brain must be spouted out?  It's not dignified.  And if he must spout off, why did he spout off in this fashion?

It makes him look like an idiot, and quite often what he says is not only not dignified, its not smart, or doesn't appear to be.  It's bizarre. Any other President, left or right, would have just not said anything at all or would have said something neutral along the lines of its an honor to live in a country where protests aren't punished.  Indeed, a polished public speaker could have made quiet a bit of political hay out of this by not condemning it and somewhat praising it.  Instead, he throws out something that sounds like it should have come from an all white blue collar urban bar in 1966.  Sort of like what we'd expect some guy to stand up and blurt in South Boston fifty years ago or something.

Which makes me wonder if that's is what he's shooting for, and I'm not alone. That is, the hard core of his base is of the "fire the bums" variety and maybe he's shoring that up, knowing that everyone else weighs the results against the statements and he's not going to gain anyone else's love or admiration anyhow.  If that's right, interpreting it as racist would be incorrect, but interpreting it as sort of an old style, blue collar, crack their heads sort of statement sort of is.  And that's the base he's been tacking to, basically, and they are in both parties, no matter what both parties think of that fact.

If that's the case, he's making a longterm mistake, as he's never going to get the Democrats support on anything much. As a commentator on one of the weekend shows said last week right now the Democrats are held by the "loony left" and that's the case. They're too anemic from their all vegan, gender free, diet to really amount to much but an obstacle.  But the GOP isn't really coming into his corner much either.  It's nearly like a third party, or rather he is, right now.  But how big is that group?  No matter how big it may be, does saying something like this help him that much in that base?

But, I suppose, if "independent" is the nation's biggest political party, and the independents went for Trump in some numbers. . . well maybe I'm wrong.

Well, what about this protest in general?

Frankly, I hardly care.  I feel like I should, but I have a hard time mustering that up.  That's because the appeal of football is so lost on me.

Well, let's start with this. Do they have a right to protest in this fashion?

Technically, probably not.  Or maybe they do.  Everyone has a right to free speech, but they're actually protesting at work, which you really don't have a right to do.  I can't go out front in my office, for example, and protest on company time about something.

This sets this apart, in in my mind, from protests like that of the Black 14 at the University of Wyoming.  That 1969 protest came at a state funded school in a state owned stadium.

 

Memorial  at the University of Wyoming to the Black 14, the fourteen black football players who wore black armbands to a BYU football game in protest of the LDS policy on blacks in clerical roles. They lost their spots on the team.

It also, in my mind, makes it stand apart from the 1968 black power salute protest delivered by Tommie Smith and John Carlos in their medal ceremony, given as that was in a highly public venue and they were there with public funding.

Or maybe it doesn't.

A lot of football stadiums here and there are in fact partially publicly funded. So maybe they are public venues.

Which doesn't mean that the protests are to be celebrated, or the opposite of that.

Does that mean that, if they deemed it in appropriate, they owners could not follow Trump's admonition to fire them.  Well, they aren't public employees so they could. That doesn't mean that they should be.  The exception to this, I'd note, would be players for Green Bay. The city does own that team so they're presumably public employees.  That doesn't mean that they can't be fired either, but it is a different type of deal in that case.

So are these protests wise and valid?

That's in the eyes of the beholder, to be sure.

One thing worth noting, but which rarely is presently, is that a lot has changed since 1968 when Smith and Carlos delivered their radical salute and lost their medals as a result.  That doesn't mean their act was proper (I don't think it was, the Black Power Salute was a lot more than a knee during the National Anthem in the message it conveyed and was derived from an informal salute used by street Communists).  This does not mean that the US has conquered racism.  It hasn't.  Indeed, ironically, we live in an era when much more questionable movements have co-opted the former methods and language of the Civil Rights era of the 1960s which arguably makes it harder for American blacks to easily draw attention to the racism that remains.  But there definitely is some, and shootings of urban blacks are, in spite of what some would claim, a definite problem that needs to be addressed. 

But let's not fool ourselves, it's nothing like ti was in the 30s, 40s, 50s or 60s.  A huge amount of progress has been made, even if more needs to be made.

So am I saying that the protests should be condemned?  No, I'm not.  Once again, I feel so out of it in this context I have a hard time coming to an opinion.  I guess I come to down to this. While I wouldn't do it, and while I feel its over dramatic, I'm not going to get all upset at those who do.  After all, football is, as noted above, a sport in which 70s% of the players are black.

I have to wonder, in some odd way, if that's an example of racism itself.  It seems to me, I'd note, distinctly different from baseball which has a fairly international flavor in regards to its talent (although the protests apparently spread, over the weekend, into baseball with a single baseball player taking the knee).  Football is a brutal sport and the college expression of it is, in some real ways, nothing more than a set of farm teams for the NFL.  Brutal sports have traditionally been the domain of the underprivileged in the United States.  It's no accident that there were so many black, Irish, Italian and Jewish boxers at one time.  People don't take up a sport like that, as a rule, if other less violent career options are open to them.

Or maybe some do.

Still, it makes me wonder if the really weird way in which football players are recruited, by passing them through universities in a fashion which really discredits universities, sort of is subtly racist in ways that are almost impossible for people to appreciate.  Not universally so by any means, but in some subtle fashion.

Well, anyway, taking the knee isn't the most radical protest going, and its better than sitting, which does seem more disrespectful.  Indeed, in some context, taking a knee could easily be mistaken for being very respectful, even though that isn't what is exactly intended.

What isn't respectful, to his office, is the President commenting on it in the fashion he did.  He ought to knock that off. But we all know that he won't.

On one nearly final note, why do we play the National Anthem before games anyway?  That's rather odd, if a person ponders it.  We didn't always do this.  It started in baseball during World War One, although the Star Spangled Banner wasn't yet the National Anthem at the time (and the weekend commentator who stated that the Anthem is itself racist is full of it).  It became the National Anthem in 1931 and spread to football  during World War Two.  Well, okay, but the nation was at war during those periods of adoption.  There's no real reason to keep on playing the National Anthem at sports now.  Indeed, it creates a bizarre sort of patriotic association between the game and the country which perhaps shouldn't really be there.

And on a final note, Trump, no matter what he accomplishes (and things like this deter him from getting things accomplished, and make it hard to see the accomplishments he has made) will not be President forever.  He's not the first outspoken populist President we've ever had. But its hard not to see how the approach he has frequently taken in regards to public speaking and the like won't have damaged the office by the time he's left.  That's going to be something that will not necessarily be easily to repair.  If he won't desist for his own sake, it'd be nice if he'd consider that.

Blog Mirror: Spending Other People's Money

Spending Other People's Money Spending Other People's Money 

By Tom PurcellI can't blame them, really. It's human nature to want something for nothing.

I'm going to post, or hope to post, an item here about the interesting philosophical aspects of  government funded healthcare (which may, or may not, go where you think it'll go) but in the mean time, here's an article, more serious than usual, from Tom Purcell that touches on an aspect of the topic.

Single Payer? Should we consider Fifty One Payers (more or less).

As anyone following the news knows, Senator Bernie Sanders once again introduced a bill (he's done it once before) which would make Medicare the national health care single payer for everyone, extending the idea that if its a nice gift for the elderly, heck, its' nice for everyone.  Democrats, looking for an issue that doesn't sound like it comes from the Daily Worker or the Department of Scary Ideas from the University of California At Berkeley, have been signing on to the idea if they hope to run for the Presidency in 2020, the thesis being that "this time, they'll like it!"

Republicans, who have been busy with "um. . . you know we didn't really mean that whole "repeal Obmacare" thing, right? are once again attempting to do just that, although the chances of that passing appear to be pretty poor, right now.

Here's a thought.

How about . . . now stay with me. . . we repeal the Affordable Health Car Act, entirely, and suggest to the states, perhaps legislatively, that they take on health care. The Feds, for their part, can take on health care for United States territories and the District of Columbia (an interesting dynamic which, I predict, would squelch all talk of making D.C. a state, by residents of D. C., and which would suddenly cover the Republicans into ardent supporters of statehood for Puerto Rico.

What!  Are You Insane!

No.  Well maybe, but this isn't a symptom of that.

Let's think this through for a moment.

Supporters of a national single payer, i.e., the Federal Government, are found of saying that we're the only nation in the world without a single payer system and look how well they all work. The problem with that is that the nations the comparisons are made to are nothing whatsoever like the United States.

Take the example we hear about the most, Canada.

And in doing that, toss out the extremes.  People who claim that Canadians are in despair about their system and are ready to march on Toronto and hurl herring at Justin Trudeau are just flat out wrong.  But then people who claim that there's nothing negative about the system at all are also wrong.  By and large, however, most Canadians like it.

And, and here's the point, the population of Canada is about the same as . . . California.

Or take the British National Health Care system. Again, over here, you'll hear the claim that the British hate the system, and are ready to march on Toronto and hurl herring at Justin Trudeau (they can't do that in the UK as herring are banned as small arms in the UK. . . um, well anyway).  No, they like it.  And whatever its pluses or minuses the UK's population is about double that of California's.

And so on.  What's notable about these systems are that they all apply to smaller, and frankly more homogeneous, populations.

Indeed, in order to really look at a national system analogous to the that which would apply to the United States, we'd have to look at a country like India, or perhaps Russia. These aren't exactly analogous by any means, however, and therefore that wouldn't tell us very much.  And people would be quick to note that population wise they aren't even analogous.

The entire European Union would be, but that gets us back to the fact that the EU doesn't have one single payer but a bunch of national ones, so that doesn't tell us much.

Or maybe it does.

Why not have a separate states systems?

Well the biggest reason not to have separate state systems is that we quit thinking that way some time ago and think it odd. But that's no reason not to do it.  In fact, we already partially do as we have fifty-one Workers Compensation systems, just like I'm proposing for national health care.  If you have an injury in Wyoming, you are under the Wyoming system.  If you have an injury in Texas, you are under that state's system.

And these systems, while they all largely work (yes, there's complaints about them, but they generally work), are all individual.

Oh my, the critics will claim, we can't have that they'd be different from each other.

So what.  They may be, but that's working for Workers Compensation, and every single objection you can find to fifty state national health care system exists for that and it works anyway.  People move from employer to employer and state to state, and yet it works.

So why do this?

Well, much of the objection to single payer is that you inevitably get a single payer system that isn't paid for, and which pays for everything, whether it should be paid for or not.

That is, we all know that the Federal Government, if single payers is adopted, isn't going to pay for it.  It's just going to borrow for it. That's how it deals with every expenditure.

Some states would take that approach as well, if they adopted a state payer system, but other states are much more careful with their expenditures.  I'd guess we'd see California, for example, bankruptcy itself with such a system. But I doubt its neighbors would go bankrupt with their state systems.

Another reason is that it allows the people of a state to tailor a system that they're comfortable with. Some states, such as California, would almost certainly become the payer for their state.  Others would rely upon private insurance or a mix between private insurance and the state as the payer of last resort.  Most states have that latter system for their Workers Comp system.

States would also be free, with the system as I"m imagining it, to determine how much they cover.  Covering basic health, including catastrophic injury, would have to be a given.  Hospitalization for such things, medicine, dental, glasses, etc.

But beyond that, not so much.

Again, some states would likely opt to cover everything.  I could see California opting to pay for everything from hooter enhancement to veterinary care for gerbils.  Chances are states like Wyoming and Utah would cover basic health and nothing else. And frankly that's fine.  A Federal single payer system is inevitably going to be massive, massively inefficient, and massively over broad.  In the end, working folks like myself who object to paying for people's birth control pills and gender reassignment surgery are going to get taxed for it, on a Federal single payer system.  On a 51 payer system, however, I'd guess that people will have to think about this more, as they really will be paying for it, and its more up close and personal.  If residents of Utah figure you ought to pay for your own sex and sexual identity, that's their right.

Can we be certain this would work?

No, but if it will work on a national level, it will almost certainly work on a state level.  That is, if Canada can make it work there, at least California, New York and Texas should be able to make it work.  If Ireland can make it work, nearly any US state should be able to make it work.

Would it be prefect?

Of course not. We're talking about health.  If we're talking about that, we're already in the realm of the imperfect.

So how do we get there.

Well, we'd have to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act, but probably on a long target date to give states time to come up with their plan, as well as giving states and folks who wanted a really big national plan time to complain, whine and howl.

And that repeal would have to be total.

But the same act would have to provide, under the guise of the Commerce Clause and withholding various Federal fundings, that the states must come up with a health care plan for their residents that covers basic needs; ie., routine health and catastrophic injury, by the expiration period.  If they chose to go with conventional insurance, there would need to be some tweaking (cross state insurance competition for one thing).  And the system would have to cover everyone, which means as a practical matter the state is probably the payer of last resort.

Would this be better than what we have now?  Who knows? Would it be better than the old system?  Who knows. Would it be better than a Federal single payer?  Who knows.

But chances are that it would be more palatable, and on the getting it paid for end, more realistic than a giant Medicare, which would turn into a giant "let's borrow from the unborn to pay for the Baby Boomers and some others' program.

It's worth looking at.

Even if we are not going to.

Lex Anteinternet: Oh no. . . .

 Yes!  Just as disappointing as expected!

Lex Anteinternet: Oh no. . . .: Apple has come out with the Iphone 8.  . . and now there's a major update for the Iphone 7.

Oh no. . . .

Apple has come out with the Iphone 8.  . .

and now there's a major update for the Iphone 7.

Roads to the Great War: Beginning a New Series: Doughboy Basics — The Thi...

Roads to the Great War: Beginning a New Series: Doughboy Basics — The Thi...: For the next 12 Sundays, I am going to present some essential information on the American effort in the Great War. I've spent 25 year...

Sunday Morning Absurdity

Readers of the Casper Star Tribune who get the Sunday paper, widely and correctly regarded as the best issue of the week, will be greeted this morning by a large advertisement by a Colorado plastic surgery concern advertising a "Mommy Makeover" seminar with the topic "My Breasts, My Body". the thesis apparently being that if you've given birth you may need to have a plastic surgeon overhaul your physical appearance, with special attention given to your boobs.

Just say no.

Madame Le Brun and her daughter

Plastic surgery has been one of the great blessings of the modern age.  In its infancy during World War One, the field advanced rapidly in the 20th Century, I suspect, but don't know, in part because of horrific wars, to a point where its very advanced today, even though it certainly cannot address every terrible physical trauma.  It has, however, gotten better and better over the century.

 Pvt Joseph Harvey, Co. C, 149th New York Volunteers, who received horrible facial wounds that never really recovered, even with what little could be done at the time, and who accordingly died in from his 1863 wounds in 1868. By World War One techniques, while still primitive, would be much improved.  And all the more so with each following decade.

At some point, however, its logical original focus, addressing malformities, abnormalities, and injuries, seems to have yielded to a different concern. Boobs.

Well not just boobs, but all sorts of perceptions that women are somehow hideous, or at least imperfect, if they don't meet some plastic Playboy model/Sports Illustrated swimsuit standard. This is wrong.

 Two young couples.  Migrant farm workers in Louisiana and their children, 1939.  Candidates for "Mommy Makeovers"?  Definitely not.  Off topic, note nice example of newsboy cap on man in center.

And if fairness, if an entire mythologized concept of the female form has become a significant target of this industry, breasts certainly are a big part of it. As we noted just about a year ago, we've seen a "Think Big" plastic surgery campaign in this neighborhood focusing, literally and figuratively, I suppose, on boobs.  We criticized that at the time:

Think Big? Nah. . . just think natural. You are fine, the way you are.

 Our earlier thread discouraging big thinking 

Perhaps we said it well enough then, so we'll repeat what we said, in part, by quoting it:

Think Big, means, big boobs.  The price is between $5,000 and $6,000 (I didn't catch it). And there's at least two of these billboards up.
Well, miss, don't think big. Think natural.
Your boobs are just the size their supposed to be.  Nobody needs surgery to make them any bigger.  It's unnatural and its weird.
Think natural.
Why would a person go under the metaphorical knife for this? For goodness sake, its unnecessary and its vain.
Just say no.
You are fine, just the way you are.
And that applies to your rear and your nose as well.  Just don't. And what's that say about us? A society so wealthy, and vain, that people would undergo surgery for this? 

.

 

Granted, mothers have always been the target of some advice that leave us a bit startled, we'd note.

We're not opposed to the entire field of plastic surgery.  Far from it. But there's something particularly odd about a society which is treating normal physical forms with surgery.  Yes, not all women look like Kate Upton, or like some self deluded model prostituting her image in Playboy, but most people look the way that nature and experience would have it, and that's not bad.  Small breasts are not a defect.  Bubble butts confer no natural advantage.  And some people will bear the marks of motherhood, while others will not, for their entire life.

Legendary Depression Era photograph of mother with her children. Tragic, but surgery wouldn't be what she needs.

And in a society that's gone infantile, obsessive, and amoral with the topic of sex and the female form, suggesting that mothers need makeovers, and putting up the real image of some young woman with child who has done just that, puts pressure where it is hardly needed.  This society is blisteringly confused on these topics as it is and can hardly tell at this point that there are two genders.  It's not helping young women to suggest that having a child renders them potential candidates for surgery. But then, it isn't helpful to suggest that the default standard for women means having Katie Perry's boobs and a Khardashian's butt either.  

Proud Indian woman and child, late 19th Century.

And what does it say about a society that has so much spare cash that it can be spent in this fashion? Something about that is disturbing as well.

All of which is not to say that some folks don't need to pay some attention to their physical appearance.  Sure they might.  But nature and careful attention have the answers for that. What you eat, what you do in a day, etc., all can address that. Perhaps that's not as easy as surgery, but its what nature would have.

And if at the end of the day you don't look like Kate Upton, well so be it. For that matter, for all you know, Kate Upton without makeup doesn't look like Kate Upton either.