The Greek New Democracy Party won the first Greek parliamentary election since 1964 and the first since the fall of the Greek military junta.
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The news of the election hit the papers.
The former Emperor of China, Puyi, was expelled from the Forbidden City by Gen. Feng Yuxiang who unilaterally revoked the Articles of Favourable Treatment of the Great Qing Emperor after His Abdication
Puyi lived a tragic life, having been born into the anachronism of the Chinese Empire at a time it was collapsing. He'd go on to be Emperor of Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state in Manchuria, a prisoner of the Soviet Union, a prisoner of the Red Chinese, and finally, a gardener. He died in 1967 at age 61.
President Coolidge made a Thanksgiving proclamation:
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Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
The government issued the Warren Report concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone and that Kennedy had been inadequately protected during his November 22, 1963, visit to Dallas.
US troops rescued sixty Vietnamese hostages and seized the main camp of Montagnard rebels operating at Buon Sar Pa.
The Beach Boys appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show.
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Gilligan's Island premiered on CBS.
UPI critic Rick Dubrow commented: "It is impossible that a more inept, moronic or humorless show has ever appeared on the home tube."
As a kid, I'd often watch the show, already in syndication, when I got home from school.
Rebels in the Congo rounded up of all foreigners trapped in Stanleyville and Paulis.
The "High National Council" was installed to function as the legislature for South Vietnam.
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Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. premiered on CBS.
Somehow, Pvt. Pyle managed never to be deployed to Vietnam, and seemingly, with the exception of one single episode I can think of, remain in the Pre Vietnam War era entirely.
President Johnson and Mexican President López Mateos shook hands on the International Bridge at El Paso. Later that day President Johnson flew to Oklahoma for the dedication of the new Eufaula Dam and spoke about the Vietnam War, stating: "There are those that say you ought to go north and drop bombs, to try to wipe out the supply lines, and they think that would escalate the war. We don't want our American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys."
FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique) launched the Mozambican War of Independence.
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The youth hostel movement was born when a group of hikers lead by Richard Schirrmann found shelter in a school in a thunderstorm.
Schirrmann was a teacher as well as an outdoorsman. During World War One he served in the German Army, participating the 1915 Christmas truce, something that lingered in his area for quite some time after Christmas. He founded the Youth Hostel Association in 1919 and founded the children's village "Staumühle" on a former military training ground near Paderborn, where my German ancestors hail from. HE served as the President of the International Youth Hostelling Associating until the Nazis forced him to resign and put the control of the hostels under the Hitler Youth in 1936. He rebuilt the association after the war. He married late, in 1942, but had six children with his wife before dying in 1961 at age 87.
The SS Cartago telegraphed a report of a hurricane near the Yucatan, the first radio warning of a tropical storm.
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William J. Calley, who was convicted for his commanding role in the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War, has died at age 80.
Calley only served three years under house arrest at his military apartment for the crime, before being released and cashiered from the Army. About 500 Vietnamese civilians were killed before a helicopter pilot heroically intervened, with some ground troops assisting him. Calley was convicted on 22 counts of murder, having been originally charged with about 100, but only served three days behind bars before President Nixon confined him to house arrest.
He kept to himself after release, but maintained the classic "only following orders" defense, which is no defense at all. He became a successful businessman in Columbus Georgia. In later years he admitted to friends that he'd committed the acts charged with. In 2009 he issued a public apology, stating:
There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai. I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.
He was in some ways an interesting example of the officer corps at the time, in that he had gone to, but failed to complete, college. He entered the Army due to poverty in 1966.
Four solders were charged with crimes due to the massacre, but only Calley went forward to conviction. There was at the time some reason to believe his "following orders" story, but in a general, rather than specific, sense.
Oddly, on this day, I'm drinking Vietnamese coffee. I have some baseball type "patrol" caps from Australia around here that were made in Vietnam. Vietnam is courted by the US as an ally against the country's traditional enemy, China, even though it remains a Communist state controlled country and economy. A vast amount of the shrimp served on American tables comes from Vietnamese waters. The country has become a tourist destination for Americans, and there is, bizarrely given the build of the Vietnamese, a Victoria's Secret in Hanoi.
Most Americans, and Most Vietnamese, were born after his conviction in 1973.
The world moved on, save for those whose lives ended that day, or were impacted by those events over 50 years ago. Calley, at 80, was a member, however, of the generation which is only now beginning to lose its grip on power. Joe Biden is just about the same age. Donald Trump, who was not impoverished, is two years younger and obtained four student draft deferments while being deemed fit for military service. In 1968, the year of My Lai, he was classified as eligible to serve but later that same year he was classified 1-Y, a conditional medical deferment, and in 1972, as the draft was winding down, he was reclassified 4-F due to bone spurs. No combat veteran of the Vietnam War has been elected President and none every will be, as they begin to pass on. Al Gore, agre 76, who served in the country as a photographer, was a Vietnam Veteran, however, and George Bush II, age 78, was an Air National Guard pilot who did volunteer for service in the country, but who did not receive it.
Calley's generation, which is now rapidly passing, was the most influential in American history, and in many ways which were not good ones, which is not to say that there weren't ways in which they were positive influences. They'll soon be a memory, like the generation that fought World War One became some twenty or so years ago, and the generation that fought World War Two basically has been.
Calley's death serves as a reminder and a reflection of a lot of things.
Argentinian police and ranchers killed 400 indigenous people of the Toba and Mocoví native groups following heighted tensions between the native groups and ranchers which had lead to livestock killing.
Democratic Senator Burton K. Wheeler was chosen as the VP candidate for the Progressive Party.
Stan Hathaway, Governor of Wyoming from 1967 to 1975,and briefly Secretary of the Interior, was born in Osceola, Nebraska.
Hathaway, whom I saw argue in front of the Wyoming Supreme Court many years ago, was the fifth of six children born to Lily (Koehler) and Robert C. Knapp. He was raised and adopted by a cousin and her husband, Velma and Frank Hathaway, following his mother's death, on their farm near Huntley Wyoming. He served on a B-17 in World War Two as a radioman, and was shot down over occupied France where he avoided capture with the crew through the assistance of the French Resistance. He term of Governor was marked by the passage of environmental laws and the enactment of the first mineral severance tax in Wyoming and the creation of the Trust Fund from the same.
He was a great Governor who would no doubt be constantly attacked as being a RINO by populist who think they're Republicans today.
Hathaway was an Episcopalian for most of his life, but late in life, converted to Catholicism.
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The Boy Scouts of America is changing its name to Scouting America
Boy Scouts of America has announced it will rebrand as Scouting America, which, if media impressions are any measure, is a very big deal. Within days of the announcement, the collective online impressions of the news surpassed 14 million, according to the organization — a staggering figure that underscores the institution’s widespread influence.
Article in the Tribune.
Does it really suggest the "institution's widespread influence", or its tragic decline from what had been that influence?
I teed this up quite a while back and since that time the Southern Rockies Nature Blog, which is linked in here, has a really nice and personal blog entries on this item, entitled Bye Bye Boy Scouts. I can't really say goodbye to the Scouts that way, as I never was much of a Scout.
Usually I say I was never a Boy Scout, but that's not true. I was briefly. Probably around when I was in 6th Grade, or at whatever point it is when a person goes from Cub Scout to Boy Scout, when there were Boy Scouts. I didn't really last long in it, and it's hard to say exactly why. Part of it was, I think, as they group I was in, while they did do things, was slow to get around to doing them. The several merit badges I earned while I was in, I just picked out and did by myself. That "by myself" thing probably had a lot to do with it also, as by this time my lifelong introvert nature was firmly set in, and unless compelled by external forces or acclimated by long exposure to a group, you'll feel uncomfortable in a group. Usually I say that I'm "not much of a joiner", with this being, I think, part of it.
Another part may simply be that I'm highly rural and was then.
We don't tend to think of it this way, but Scouting was an urban movement.1 Aware of the inadequacy of young British men in the Boer War, Lord Baden-Powell, who after the war became the British Army's Chief of Cavalry, founded the Boy Scouts. The idea was twofold, those being 1) British boys had become a bunch of anemic unskilled wimps who needed some manning up from nature, and 2) British boys had become a bunch of anemic unskilled reprobates who needed some Muscular Christianity.
The original organization had no place for girls. Girls wanted to participate in things, and soon had their own organizations. The two didn't mix.
And frankly it didn't mix for good reason There are such things as manly, and womanly virtues. Much of what the original Boy Scouts sought to address was spot on in its observations, and Scouting did a really good job of addressing them. Often affiliated with churches, Scouting groups were successful in teaching boys a lot of valuable outdoor skills that often stuck with them for life, and they were benefitted in that goal by the absence of girls, who at a bare minimum are extremely distracting to boys and young men. Given their natures, young women are usually, although not always, much less distracted by young men.
There's been a lot written on the decline of the Boy Scouts, and there are various theories about it. One of the blogs linked in here, The Southern Rockies Nature Blog, has an article about it that's worth checking out. Whatever it was that brought it to its current state, it was still a pretty strong organization in the 1970s, when I had my brief association with it. At that time, even in the rural West, a lot of boys were part of it, and for that matter quite a few of their fathers had a strong association with it. Being in the Boy Scouts (which my father never was), was part of a multi generational thing.
Signs of decline were there even then. Of my good friends, only one was a Boy Scout, which his father had been. Another had a father who had a strong history of Scouting, but my friend wasn't in it. I was in a youth organization in my early teens, but it was the Civil Air Patrol, which with its martial aviation theme was a completely different type of organization. Rural kids, of whom I knew a lot, tended to be in the FFA, which had direct practical application to them.
I wish I could pinpoint what was going on, but I really can't. I've tried to do so here before, and probably haven't been successful. Looking at the topics addressed in this thread, however, I think part of it may have been that in the post World War Two era that went into the 1970s, the retained gaze upon the rural really faded. Even television reflected that as programming went from the rural focused on the 1960s, such as The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverley Hillbillies, and Green Acres, the last two of which anticipated the change, to urban centric dramas such as Newhart, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, WKRP In Cincinnati, etc. Americans had been moving into the cities for a long time, but suddenly they quit looking outside of them. Even a gritty urban environment depicted in something like The French Connection was celebrated in a way. It's notable that a figure like Clint Eastwood, who had come up in westerns, started appearing as Dirty Harry in urban California at the same time, and Dirty Harry, like Popeye Doyle, wasn't portrayed as any sort of Boy Scout.
The atmosphere of the late 60s also brought in destructive forces that we're still dealing with. The resolute male admired and celebrated from the era of The Strenuous Life on to the Ballad of the Green Berets suddenly, in the Strauss Howe fashion, yielded to the feminized and marginalized male, at least in the dominant WASP culture. It's never really recovered, and we can see some of the reactions to that playing out in society now.
In that atmosphere, Scouting attempted to adapt, but that's part of the problem. The campaign hat went out, and the red beret came in.2 Out with the old, and in with the new. The institution already had, however, its close association with Christianity and a sort of "goody two shoes" reputation. It probably should have just doubled down on that and its rural focus, but it tried to adapt instead.
Like other institutions that were heavily male and which had become somewhat soft, it also began to be plagued, apparenlty, with male on male sexual conduct.
People hate to discuss this part, so the realities of this should be noted. One of the byproducts of keeping boys and girls separate in Scouting is that it not only allowed boys to focus, but it kept boys and girls out of close proximity to each other. Scouting involves teenagers. No matter how focused or watched, when male and female teenagers are together, some of them will misbehave in ways that create life changing byproducts. A person only has to look at the expansion of the role of women in the military in order to appreciate this.3
We already know that the largest group of abusers of teenagers in this fashion are teachers. The decline in personal morality brought about by the Sexual Revolution helped unleash this, and I'd wager that a person could easily find a story of a teacher engaging in this conduct with a teenaged charge nearly every month. I ran across one just last week, in which the assailant was a female teacher and the victim something like a mere 13 years old. If this happens in an institution in which being discovered will result in the end of a career and jail time, and in which getting caught is highly likely, it's going to happen in situations in which this is much less discoverable.
Put bluntly, as the Muscular Christianity focus waned, the Sexual Revolution came on, and an overall feminization of society advanced, predatory homosexuality in the Boy Scouts became inevitable to some degree, and it had probably always been there at least to some extent. It's customary at this point to note that not all homosexuals are predatory, and that only a minority are, which is absolutely true, but it happened. That some people would let their behavior go in an all male setting shouldn't be any more surprising than those instances of male coaches preying on young teenage female athletes. It's reprehensible, but without additional external controls, it was going to occur.
This helped cause Scouting's popularity to drop off massively, and not surprisingly. Parents quit encouraging their children to be Scouts. Not really knowing what to do about it in the context of the culture, Scouting opened its doors to girls. This predictably hasn't helped, and it won't. Scouting will, I'd guess, be largely taken over by girls, but it won't be an organization that Boy Scouts prior to the 1970s would recognize.
There's something to all male bonds between conventionally oriented males that is unalterably different from ones with women. Probably our biology has a lot to do with it. The mateship that exists in military units, for example, which are all male, is completely different from an organization that has even one female in it.
The larger tragedy is that the very thing that Scouting was created to address in the first place, in large measure, is probably need as much now as it was then. The source of the problem is large the same, the urbanization of the country and the corrupting influence of urban life, combined with the absence of male roles, something that existed in the very early 20th Century and something that exists now, albeit for different reasons. Scouting, by having gone first soft, and then semi feminized, is no longer the organization that it was, that addressed that.
Footnotes:
1. Recently I read Doug Crowe's book A Growing Season, which is extremely off color, but extremely interesting. The back of the book, where the short review is, terms it a novel, but it isn't. The figures in it are all real, I either know of them or actually knew some of them.
It occured to me in posting this that part of the reason that the Boy Scouts lost its appeal to me here is that in a highly rural setting the first purpose of scouting, to introduce the outdoors, will be taken up by those who have a strong affinity towards it, which most young men do, all on their own. Going to Scouting events actually retards a person's ability to go outdoors and do what you want, with your young male associates, once somebody is of driving age, or at least it did then. As soon as somebody was 16, we were pretty much loose in the world.
As noted, not surprisingly, our companions in these forays were all male. I can't recall going on an outdoor adventure of any kind with a female of my own age until I was at the University of Wyoming. Nature segregates us in that fashion, even if society doesn't want us to. As A Growing Season demonstrates, that certainly gives rise to opportunities to engage in vice, although did not in any serious fashion, and the few of my fellows who really fell into it did so, notably, in town.
2. Only if troops adopted it, however.
3. Without putting too fine a point on it, two women I know of who were justifiably very proud of their military service, and neither of which might be regarded as libertine, had early discharges from the service for this very reason, followed by the birth of their oldest child not long after. The service with the biggest problem, seemingly, is the Navy, where close proxmity on ships has caused an alaraming pregnancy rate in some instances.
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