Showing posts with label 1980s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1980s. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 7, 2024

Thursday, Feburary 7, 1924. De la Huerta retreats and the M1911A1 is born.

Adolfo de la Huerta and his staff withdrew by boat to Mérida, Yucatán, after federal troops recaptured Veracruz.

Crowd going to the National Cathedral, under construction, where President Wilson had been laid to rest.

Italy recognized the Soviet Union.

Around this time, Colt began to ship what is called the "Colt Transition Model 1911", which were actually the first of the M1911A1s.


The Colt M1911 is a John Browning designed semi-automatic pistol that can legitimately be regarded s the greatest handgun ever made, although there are, or perhaps more accurately were, a few other contenders.  Other than the mostly John Browning Designed Hi Power, none of the other contenders remain in service somewhere however and the M1911 has by far the longest period of service.

Adopted by the U.S. on March 29, 1911, in 1923 the handgun received some minor modifications, the most significant of which is a curved spring housing which changed the profile of the grip.  The trigger was also shortened.  In 1924 the modified design started to ship, this month, from Colt.  The M1911A1 designation came in 1926.  

Large quantities of M1911s were made in World War One, and even larger quantities of M1911A1s were made during World War Two. So many were in fact made that no new orders were placed for M1911s through the rest of its primary service life, up to when the M9 Beretta 9mm handgun was ordered to replace it.

MEU(SOC) pistol.

The M9 actually failed to completely replace the M1911A1, although it nearly did so.  Some small quantities of M1911A1s that had been issued to officers remained in ongoing use.  In addition, the pistol never ceased being used by special troops, who favored it over the 9mm M9 due to its larger .45ACP cartridge.  The Marines nearly immediately resisted the change and adopted a reworked and custom-built M1911, with flat spring housing, as the MEU(SOC) pistol for close combat, taking in quantities of M9s at the same time.

Female Marine firing M45A1.

During the war in Afghanistan, the M1911 started to reappear in force, being rebuilt by service armorers and with some small numbers being once again purchased for special forces.  In 2012 the Marine Corps began to acquire modernized M1911s, with the flat spring housing, which were ultimately adopted as the Marine Corps service pistol with the designation M45. Theoretically, these passed out of service in 2022, but it's frankly unlikely that they fully did.  The pistol almost certain remains in use to some degree by the US.

The pistol, given all of this, has an incredibly long service life, likely the longest of any US weapon.  And the M1911 itself has rebounded in popularity and is as popular as a civilian handgun as ever, perhaps more popular than ever.  As a police weapon, it was used by the FBI for decades, and also in various cartridge chamberings by law enforcement agencies.  No handgun rivals it.

Related Threads:

Friday, February 2, 2024

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Questioner: "Why did you leave the Republican Party?"

George F Will: "The same reason I joined it. I am a conservative."



If I were to listen to people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, or some of the Freedom Caucus here in Wyoming, it would be go.

If I listen to lifelong residents here in the state, including some lifelong Republicans whom would currently be classified as RINO's by the newly populist Wyoming GOP, it would be stay.  Alan Simpson, who is an "anybody but Trump", former U.S. Senator, and who the Park County GOP tried to boot out as a elected precinct committeeman, is staying.

The problem ultimately is what time do you begin to smell like the crowd on the bus?

Konrad Adenauer of the Christian Democratic Union, West Germany's first post-war chancellor.  He worked towards compromise and ended denazification early, even though he'd speant the remaining months of World War Two in prison and barely survived.  By CDU - This file was provided to Wikimedia Commons by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, a German political foundation, as part of a cooperation project., CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16173747

To put it another way, I'd give an historical example.  It's often noted that quite a few Germans joined the Nazi Party as it was just a way to get by, or advance careers, etc., during the Third Reich period of German history.  When I was a kid, there was a lot of sympathy, oddly enough, for that view amongst those who were of the World War Two generation, although at the same time, there was a widely held belief that militarism, combined with radical nationalism, were something that was basically in the German DNA.  The US, as is well known, didn't even particularly worry about letting former Nazis into the country.

The Germans themselves pretty much turned a blind eye towards this, so many of them had been in the Nazi Party.  Even post-war German politicians who had spent the war in exile did, as it was the programmatic thing to do.

Since that time, however, that view has really changed.  It started to in 1968 when German students rioted and exposed former Nazis in the police.  Germans haven't really come to terms with it, but having been a member of the Nazi Party is a mark of shame, and it's become to be something despised everywhere, even if a person did it for practical reasons and wasn't really involved in the party.

And it should be a mark of shame.

Americans have been sanctimonious about that for a long time, but starting in the 1970s lots of Americans became ashamed, in varying degrees, of our own ancestors in regard to various things.  Ironically, the backlash to that, symbolized by Confederate battle flags, is part of what brings us to our current crisis.

Ed Herschler, former Marine Corps Raider, and Democratic lawyer, who was Wyoming's Governor from 1975 to 1987.  Herschler probably wouldn't have a home in today's Democratic Party in Wyoming.

I registered as a Republican the first time I was old enough to vote. The first Presidential Election I was old enough to vote in was the 1984 Presidential election, in which I voted for Ronald Reagan. The first election I was old enough to vote in was the 1982 off year election.  I honestly don't know who I voted for Senator.  Malcolm Wallop won, but I very well have voted for the Democrat.  Dick Cheney wont reelection that year against Ted Hommel, whom I don't recall at all.  I probably voted for Cheney.  I know that I voted for the reelection of Democratic Governor Ed Herschler, who was one of the state's great Governors. 

A split ticket.

Split tickets were no doubt common in my family.  My father would never reveal who he voted for in an election.  The first Presidential election I recall was the 1972 Election in which Nixon ran against McGovern, and I asked who he voted for when he came home. He wouldn't say, and I don't know to this day.  

I knew that my father registered Republican, but not everyone in my father's family did.  My grandmother, for one, registtered Demcrat,somethign I became aware of when we were visiting her, which we frequently did, at her retirement apartment here in town.  She was pretty clear that she was an unapologetic Democrat, which made sense given that she was 100% Irish by descent.  Most Irish Americans, at that time, were Democrats, and all real ones were Catholic.  Reagan, who claimed Irish ancestry, woudl have been regarded a a dual pretender for that reason by many of them.

My father's view, and it remains mine, that you voted for the person and what they stood for, not hte party.

But being in a party means something, and that has increasingly come to be the case.

I switched parties after that 1984 election.  I was, and remain, a conservative, but the GOP was drifting further from a conservative center in that period, and as I've noted, the election of Ronald Reagan paved the path for Donald Trump, although I won't say that was obvious then.  And also, Democrats were the party that cared about public lands, as they still do, and cared about rural and conservation issues that I cared about and still do. The GOP locally was becoming hostile to them. So I switched.

Campaign image for Mike Sullivan, Democratic Governor from 1987 to 1995.

I remained a Democrat probably from about 1984 until some time in the last fifteen years.  Being a Democrat in Wyoming meant that you were increasingly marginalized, but finally what pushed me out was that it meant being in the Party of Death.  The Democrats went from a party that, in 1973, allowed you to be middle of the road conservative and pro-life.  We had a Governor, Mike Sullivan, who was just that.  By the 2000s, however, that was becoming impossible.  Locally most of the old Democrats became Republicans, some running solid local campaigns as Republicans even though they had only been that briefly.  Even as late as the late 1990s, however, the Democrats ran some really serious candidates for Congress, with the races being surprisingly close in retrospect.  Close, as they say, only counts with hand grenades and horseshoes, but some of those races were quite close.  The GOP hold on those offices was not secure.

Dave Freudenthal, Democratic Governor from 2003 to 2011.

Before I re-registered as a Republican, I was an independent for a while.  Being an independent meant that primaries became nearly irrelevant to me, and increasingly, as the Democratic Party died and became a far left wing club, starting in the 2000s., it also meant that basically the election was decided in the primaries.  Like the other rehoming Democrats, however, we felt comfortable in a party that seemingly had given up its hostility to public lands.  And frankly, since the 1970s, the GOP in Wyoming had really been sui generis.  Conservative positions nationally, including ones I supported, routinely failed in the Republican legislature. Abortion is a good example.  The party nationally was against it, I'm against it personally, but bills to restrict it failed and got nowhere in a Republican legislature.

The Clinton era really impacted the Democratic Party here locally.  Wyomingites just didn't like him.  That really started off the process of the death of the Democratic Party here.  As center right Democrats abandoned the party in response, left wing Democrats were all that remained, and the party has become completely clueless on many things, making it all the more marginalized.  But just as Clinton had that impact on the Democrats, Trump has on the GOP.

Throughout the 70s and 80s it was the case that Wyoming tended to export a lot of its population, which it still does, and then take in transients briefly during booms.  In the last fifteen or so years, however, a lot of the transient population, together with others from disparate regions, have stayed.  They've brought their politics with them, and now in the era of Trump, those views have really taken over the GOP, save for about three pockets of the old party that dominate in Natrona, Albany and Laramie Counties.  A civil war has gone on in some counties, and is playing out right now in Park County.  In the legislature, the old party still has control, but the new party, branded as the Freedom Caucus, which likes to call its rival the UniParty, is rising.  The politics being advanced are, in tone, almost unrecognizable.

Like it or not, on social issues the old GOP's view was "I don't care what you do, just leave me alone". That attitude has really changed.  Given a bruising in the early 1990s due to a Southeastern Wyoming effort to privatize wildlife, the party became pro public lands for awhile. That's change.  The party was not libertarian.  That's changed.  

Money helped change it, which is a story that's really been missed.

Like the Democrats of the 90s, a lot of the old Republicans have started to abandon the party.  If there was another viable party to go to, floods would leave.  A viable third party might well prove to be the majority party in the state, or at least a close second to the GOP, if there was one.

There isn't.

So, what to do?

While it'll end up either being a pipe dream or an example of a dream deferred, there's still reason to believe that much of this will be transitory.  If Trump does not win the 2024 Presidential Election, and he may very well not, he's as done as the blue plate special at a roadside café as the GOP leader.  Somebody will emerge, but it's not really likely to be the Trump clone so widely expected.  And the relocated populists may very well not have that long of run in Wyoming.  Wyomingites, the real ones, also tend to have a subtle history of revenge against politicians who betray their interests.  Those riding hiding high on anti-public lands, anti-local interests, may come to regret it at the polls later on.

The Johnson County invaders of 1892. The Republican Party, whose politicians had been involved in the raid on Natrona and Johnson Counties, took a beating in the following elections.

Or maybe this process will continue, in which case even if Trump wins this year, the GOP will die.  By 2028, it won't be able to win anything and a new party will have to start to emerge.

We'll see.

None of which is comfortable for the State's real Republicans.

Tuesday, January 30, 2024

One more example of how Ronald Reagan made the United States worse.

I have a thread up about reassessing Reagan, whom conservatives worship (they also tend to worship Theodore Roosevelt, oddly, who was a radical liberal, but anyway).

I've never been particularly certain on my views on Reagan, as I've noted here before.  I am a conservative, but something about Reagan has made me long uncomfortable.  In part, it might frankly just be because he was an actor, and I find actors to be fake.  I never bought off on his persona, I guess.  

I've noted here several times that Ronald Reagan started the process that gave us Donald Trump.

The Guardian just ran an article on the psychology of our political times, starting off with this:

Many explanations are proposed for the continued rise of Donald Trump, and the steadfastness of his support, even as the outrages and criminal charges pile up. Some of these explanations are powerful. But there is one I have seen mentioned nowhere, which could, I believe, be the most important: Trump is king of the extrinsics.

Some psychologists believe our values tend to cluster around certain poles, described as “intrinsic” and “extrinsic”. People with a strong set of intrinsic values are inclined towards empathy, intimacy and self-acceptance. They tend to be open to challenge and change, interested in universal rights and equality, and protective of other people and the living world.

I'm not sure what I think of The Guardian either, which is a British left wing newspaper working hard to break into the US market.  But this article has some interesting points, starting with this generalization:

People at the extrinsic end of the spectrum are more attracted to prestige, status, image, fame, power and wealth. They are strongly motivated by the prospect of individual reward and praise. They are more likely to objectify and exploit other people, to behave rudely and aggressively and to dismiss social and environmental impacts. They have little interest in cooperation or community. People with a strong set of extrinsic values are more likely to suffer from frustration, dissatisfaction, stress, anxiety, anger and compulsive behaviour.

Interesting.  And:

Trump exemplifies extrinsic values. From the tower bearing his name in gold letters to his gross overstatements of his wealth; from his endless ranting about “winners” and “losers” to his reported habit of cheating at golf; from his extreme objectification of women, including his own daughter, to his obsession with the size of his hands; from his rejection of public service, human rights and environmental protection to his extreme dissatisfaction and fury, undiminished even when he was president of the United States, Trump, perhaps more than any other public figure in recent history, is a walking, talking monument to extrinsic values.

That is in part what has made the "left behinds" fanatic devotion to Trump so hard for me to grasp.  People declaring themselves average patriotic, Christian, middle class, Americans are fanatic in their devotion to somebody who expresses none of those values whatsoever.  This is so much the case, that extreme efforts have to be taken to project those onto Trump.

But here's where it gets really interesting: 

We are not born with our values. They are shaped by the cues and responses we receive from other people and the prevailing mores of our society. They are also moulded by the political environment we inhabit. If people live under a cruel and grasping political system, they tend to normalise and internalise it, absorbing its dominant claims and translating them into extrinsic values. This, in turn, permits an even crueller and more grasping political system to develop.

If, by contrast, people live in a country in which no one becomes destitute, in which social norms are characterised by kindness, empathy, community and freedom from want and fear, their values are likely to shift towards the intrinsic end. This process is known as policy feedback, or the “‘values ratchet”. The values ratchet operates at the societal and the individual level: a strong set of extrinsic values often develops as a result of insecurity and unfulfilled needs. These extrinsic values then generate further insecurity and unfulfilled needs.

I think there's a lot more that can be analyzed as to these statements, but at an elemental level, there's a large measure of truth to them.  Norwegians today are a kindly, non-threatening group.  That reflects a lot of things, but one of them is the Christianization of the country in the Middle Ages.  That took them from a brutal society where murdering your own children was accepted, to what we have today.

Continuing on with The Guardian

Ever since Ronald Reagan came to power, on a platform that ensured society became sharply divided into “winners” and “losers”, and ever more people, lacking public provision, were allowed to fall through the cracks, US politics has become fertile soil for extrinsic values. As Democratic presidents, following Reagan, embraced most of the principles of neoliberalism, the ratchet was scarcely reversed. The appeal to extrinsic values by the Democrats, Labour and other once-progressive parties is always self-defeating. Research shows that the further towards the extrinsic end of the spectrum people travel, the more likely they are to vote for a rightwing party.

That' is absolutely the case.

Most voters, and most conservatives alive today, don't recall the country before Reagan.  They don't even recall that George Bush, who urged a "kinder, gentler, conservatism" in the race he won for the Oval Office, ran against Reagan in the 1980 GOP contest.

Reagan had a charming smile and a personal "oh shucks" type of presentation.  He was running against a widely personally admired man, Jimmy Carter, whose policies had failed.  He was also running at a time at which the country was desperate on inflation, and trying to figure out what had happened in the 1960s, and how the Vietnam War had gone so wrong.  Hard hat Americans were losing their jobs to Japanese manufacturing. Southerners were grasping to figure out what had happened to the Old South.

It wasn't a really good time in the country.

From the election of 1912 all the way through the election of 1980, the county had been on a much different path. The three-way race of 1912 saw a Progressive (Roosevelt) dragging along a conservative (Taft) against another somewhat Progressive (Wilson).  Progressivism, which first really started to come into its own during Theodore Roosevelt's administration, was on the rise and in fact became ingrained in American politics.  The Harding, Coolidge and Hoover administrations really didn't change that, but the Franklin Roosevelt administration very much did, ramping it up enormously.  The setting on the dial that Roosevelt put the country on was only turned down a couple of notches post-war, and the difference between post-war Republican Administrations and Democratic ones was slight in regard to these issues for the most part, at least until Lyndon Johnson, who tried to set the dial back up.  Nixon may have set the dial back down, but by modern Republican standards, Richard Nixon was a liberal RINO.

Reagan started to pull the dial off the settings, much of it in a budget fashion.  The mentally disturbed were set out on the streets as state's lost funding from the Federal Government for them.  Support for education at the Federal level, a major feature of the World War Two/Cold War Federal governments, started to evaporate.

With this, a sort of fend for yourself individualism came in.  The promise is that everything would improve, and everyone's lives with it.  And because Reagan did tackle inflation, and he did face down the Soviet Union (which of course is more or less unrelated), things did improve.

But that's stopped.

The left deserves much of the blame as well, as it got goofy, frankly, and started to take on a universalism approach that doesn't appeal to hardly anyone, and which in fact is detrimental to the country.

But Reagan took us down a path that involved hating the government, and incorporated the disaffected into the party to be used, but not really supported.  Lots of people ended up being left behind.

There were signs.  His political career had been launched by his A Time For Choosing speech in favor of Barry Goldwater, who was in some ways an earlier version of the Anti Republican, Republican.  As Governor of California, he had been a proponent of tax cuts, and he cut the number of individuals in California's mental institutions.

But all that is forty years ago.  Hating the government has become institutionalized on the right, along with a belief that all those in government service are enemies of the people.  A Lord of the Flies type of view towards economics has been accepted.  The ignored are angry  An acceptance of politicians whose personal lives don't reflect their professed Christianity is now fully accepted, particularly by a public that claims to want to turn back the clock, but doesn't recall what the prior clock settings were.

Changing this requires an change on an existential level.  There's no reason to believe that any current Republican, save perhaps for Christie and Romeny, could affect the start of it.

Friday, January 26, 2024

The moment the fatal wounds were afflicted.

How did we end up with two ancient, disliked men being advanced by their parties?

Well, we ended up here as the Democrats quit believing in democracy, favoring rule by the courts, until the courts decided they believed in democracy, and because both parties lied to their rank and file, working class, constituents for a period of fifty years.

We've dealt with this before.

However, it can nearly be determined with precision.

The date of the wounds were:

  • January 22, 1973
That's the date the United States Supreme Court issued the Roe v. Wade decision, replacing its judgment for that of state legislatures. As the dissent noted:
I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court's judgment. The Court simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant women and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes. The upshot is that the people and the legislatures of the 50 States are constitutionally disentitled to weigh the relative importance of the continued existence and development of the fetus, on the one hand, against a spectrum of possible impacts on the woman, on the other hand. As an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to do what it does today; but, in my view, its judgment is an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.

And Democrats concluded they didn't really need to persuade voters anymore, the Courts would impose a new liberal regime on the besotted and benighted public without their participation.

And:

  • July 17, 1980.
That's the date that the GOP nominated Ronald Reagan for President. Reagan would go on to use the Southern Strategy to draw in Southern (and Rust Belt) Democrats who had lied to as the post World War Two economic prosperity collapsed. Thing is, the GOP didn't really listen to their concerns, just as the Democrats had quit doing. 

Seven years in which we went from two functioning political parties and put them on the path to being pure machines, breaking what they claimed to serve.

Tuesday, January 16, 2024

Whigs and the GOP. A timely lesson.

Log cabins and cider were the symbols of the Whigs.

The Whig party formed in 1833, making it just a few years younger than the Democratic Party.  It was a center left, anti-Masonic, anti Manifest Destiny, pro American System, party, although most articles will claim it was a "conservative" party.

It opposed populist Andrew Jackson, a Democratic populist.

William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachery Taylor and Millard Fillmore were members of the Whigs.

A lot of its policies were very reasonable in a modern conservative context. What it couldn't adjust to, however, was slavery, and the passage of the Kansas Nebraska Act, which nullified the Missouri Compromise, broke it up in 1856.  Those members of the party who came down as solidly anti-slavery formed the new Republican Party, which was also a center left, anti-Masonic, anti Manifest Destiny, pro American System, party, with anti-slavery added to it.


The GOP went from birth to the White House in just four years.

The Whigs drew from the Democratic Republican Party that preceded it, but it drew from other camps as well.  Not only did the old Democratic Republicans come into it, but Democrats did as well as that party became increasingly populist.

Note that.  

The Whigs were a major center left American political party.  The Democrats were a conservative, populist party.  The Whigs of the 1850s would have recognized the Republican Party of the 1950s as their successor.

Note what happened, and perhaps more importantly, how quickly it can happen.

The classic bromide of American politics is that third parties don't succeed.

Some do.

The Whigs came out of a prior political party's period of turmoil. They consolidated around solid, government backed, economics and a policy of what would amount to anti discrimination for the era.  As a result of that, it attracted businessmen, quasi liberals, and (immigrant) Catholics.  It won several elections before spectacularly breaking up.

The GOP has been around much longer, but at least in its early periods up to the Great Depression, and then again from 1950 on, up until Ronald Reagan, it was much like the Whig Party it had replaced, but with civil rights added as an element. Ronald Reagan, as much as he is admired by conservatives, began to dismantle that when the Democrats incorporated civil rights into its makeup starting in the 50s and 60s.  The Democrats had been struggling with its southern membership, which very much reflected the views of the traditional party, since the 1932 election of Franklin Roosevelt.  Southern Democrats stuck with the party as they had nowhere else to go, until Reagan cynically offered them one.

Now that element has taken over the party.


The GOP nearly cracked up in 1912 when the Theodore Roosevelt wing of the party, which wanted to take the party much to the left, and make it much more liberal/populist, bolted.  That same year, the Democratic Party began its evolution into a liberal party by running Woodrow Wilson, drawing in disaffected Republican populists.

Note that.

It took twenty years, but by 1932 TR's cousin FDR put the liberals in the Democratic Party permanently in control, Wilson's bid having transformed the party permanently.  It took roughly 30, but Ronald Reagan did the same thing with the Dixiecrats he incorporated into the GOP, that having also transformed the party permanently.  It took the Democrats 40 years to start shedding the Dixiecrats.  It took about 40 years for the Dixiecrats Reagan invited into the Republican Party to start a GOP civil war.

Conservatives gush about Reagan, and with some good reasons.  He was the country's one and only really conservative President.  Prior Republicans had fit more into the Whig mold.  Those who came after him sort of recalled it, like the first Bush, or fit into a new Neo Con mold that real conservatives tended to despise.  Reagan's Presidency was transformational, however, in that it inserted certain conservative strains of thought into government, while it never got a hold of the nation's budget, which has become increasingly out of whack due to the tax cuts he and Republican successors introduced.

But what he also introduced, Dixiecrats and Rust Belt Democrats, infected the party and now has killed it.  The "Republican" Part of today is the Dixiecrat Party/Rust Belt Democrat Party in a very real sense.  It's populist, but not conservative.

There are holdout Republican elements within it, but they have no hope of taking it back.  The past three years have proven that. Trump Populists don't care that Trump tried to seize power illegally.  They see class enemies everywhere which justify their positions, something Democrats just don't grasp.  Democrats like Robert Reich run around wondering when they'll wake up, not realizing they're wide awake.

When the Whigs broke up, it took the GOP only a few years to become successful.  The Whig collapse in 1856 was followed by the Republican success of 1860.

That's lesson number 1.  New parties can succeed quickly when the old one dies.

Lesson number 2 is that opposing parties become complacent.  The Democratic Party after 1912 didn't worry about its southern base and allowed it to go into the Republican Party, which briefly helped the GOP, and then killed it.  The Whigs took not only from the collapsed Democratic Republicans but also from the Democrats themselves.

The current Democratic Party is the legacy of 1912 the same way that the GOP is the legacy of 1980.  Just as the GOP has gone Dixiecrat/Rust Belt Democrat, the Democratic Party has gone Ivy League Pink.  It's nearly as enfeebled as the GOP is right now, it's just not as obvious.

A new party must emerge to replace the GOP, and frankly it now will.  Conservatives have no home and need to find one.  Centrist, however, have no home as well.  People who believed in Reagan's social conservatism aren't the same people who vote for serial polygamist and icky Donald Trump.  Democrats that voted for a guy like Harry Truman aren't comfortable with Joe Biden, at least in the expression he's manifested himself.  49%, at least, of the electorate are independents who have already dumped the GOP or the Democratic Party.

The one, and only, thing the Democrats and the Republicans agree on is that you absolutely must not vote for a third party, as that helps the other guy. That thinking insures that the extremes of those two parties have a free ride.

Well, the party is over and on the GOP side, the people have gone home.  This election, or the next, a new center right party must form, and will form.

If it formed now, with a Manchin or Christie at its head.  It'd take the election, and the GOP would completely collapse.  Quite a bit of the Democratic Party would defect as well.

It should happen.

Monday, January 8, 2024

Tuesday, January 8, 1974. Suppressing dissent and the news.


South Korean President Park Chung-hee  issued an emergency decree making it illegal "to deny, oppose, misrepresent, or defame" the president's decisions.  The same decree prohibited reporting on dissent  "through broadcasting, reporting or publishing, or by any other means."

He must have been concerned about "fake news".

Park started his adult life as an army officer in the Japanese puppet Manchukuo Imperial Army.  After serving a little over two years in that entity during World War Two, he returned to the Korean Military Academy and joined the South Korean Army.  He was a figure in the 1961 military coup in South Korea.  After large scale protests in 1979 he was assassinated by  Kim Jae-gyu, the director of the KCIA, and a close friend of his after a banquet at a safe house in Gungjeong-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul. Kim Jae-gyu would be hanged the following year for the action.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association approved allowing amateur athletes to play as professionals in a second sport.



Wednesday, January 3, 2024

Super size it.

Lex Anteinternet: Tuesday, January 1, 1924. Receiving the New Year.:  




When I put this up on January 1, I also posted this calendar image on Reddit's 100 Years Ago sub.  Somebody came by and remarked on how tiny the glass the young woman is holding was.

And indeed it was.

Coca-Cola for years came in a 6.5 oz bottle, not 12.  It's interesting to reflect on as it really says something about proportions.

Coke's iconic bottle was a 6.5 oz bottle until 1955.  

Its competitor Pepsi started using 12 oz bottles in 1934.  In fact, that as one of its marketing devices, as it came in a 12 oz bottle, having a jingle that went
Pepsi-Cola hits the spot
Twelve full ounces, that's a lot!
Twice as much for a nickel, too
Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you.

It says something about the quality of Coke, or at least the original recipe of it, that people would in fact pay the same amount for half of what they'd get if they'd bought Pepsi instead.  It also says something about soda in general that it's so cheap to make, the added 6 oz of product really doesn't do anything to the economic bottom line.

In 1955, Coke switched to 10 oz bottles and 12 oz bottles and offered a  "Family" sized bottle of 26 oz.  The move was not without internal company controversy, however.  One company executive stated that  “bringing out another bottle was like being unfaithful to your wife.”

But that 55 10 or 12 oz bottle isn't gigantic.

When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, when you went to a fast food restaurant and got a soda, large was a 12 oz serving with ice.  Starting in the 80s, somehow, that doubled, with stores, particularly convenience stores, advertising what was essentially double that.  

24 oz of Coke is a lot.

And it went on from there.

McDonald's, when it was first getting up and running, served Coke in 7 oz cups. After Coke switched, it started serving it in 16 oz cups.  In 1980, 7-11 introduced the "Big Gulp" which weighed in at an absurd 32 oz.  In 86, 7-11 introduced the 44 oz Super Big Gulp, and everyone went down that road thereafter.

Indeed, now, getting a small or medium soda draught is really what a person should do, and on the rare occasions when I get fast food, I try to get that.  But most people don't.  Even little kids get the 55 gallon size soda drink.

And that's really not good for you.

Monday, December 4, 2023

Courthouses of the West: In Memoriam: Justice Sandra Day O'Connor

Courthouses of the West: In Memoriam: Justice Sandra Day O'Connor

In Memoriam: Justice Sandra Day O'Connor

I'm late in posting this and, frankly, so many things have been posted it would hardly be necessarily.


Justice O'Connor was the first woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court. Frankly, even though this came in relative terms, in 1981, fairly close to the pioneering appointment of an African American to the Supreme Court bench, it was later than it should have been. Having said that, like Nixon going to China, coming by way of a conservative, Ronald Reagan, perhaps it meant more in real terms than it would have had it come under an earlier President, such as Jimmy Carter.

O'Connor had been a member of the Arizona Court of Appeals at the time of her appointment. She was a Westerner by birth, having been raised on a 198,000 acre cattle ranch in that state.  She attended Stanford as an undergrad and as a law student, and oddly enough had received a proposal of marriage from William Rehnquist while still a student.

Her accomplishments cannot be denied, but frankly, like a lot that Reagan did, her appointment has a mixed record.  I frankly don't think she was as great of jurist as people now wish to recall, and like many of the "conservative" justice of her era, she was conservative only in a very reserved way.  True conservatives wouldn't really reappear on the Supreme Court for many years, none of which takes away from her personal accomplishments.

Wednesday, November 15, 2023

Monday, November 15, 1943. The Combat Infantry Badge.


One of the awards most respected by soldiers to be issued by the U.S. Army, the Combat Infantry Badge, was authorized.

Limited to infantrymen alone who have seen actual ground combat, the creation of the award acknowledged the particular horrors experienced by infantrymen in combat.  The World War Two awards were upgraded, which they likely should not have been as it cheapened the original awards, to Bronze Stars in the 1980s, reflecting the particular horrors of World War Two in which soldiers were not rotated home but served until severely injured, killed, or the end of the war.

It followed the authorization of the Expert Infantry Badge, which had been authorized on November 11, 1943.


Both awards remain enormously respected in the U.S. Army.

"Nomadic" Gypsies in the Soviet Union were reclassified by Germany to be in the same racial category as Jews and therefore subject to the death camps, whereas "sedentary" Romani were classified as citizens of the country they were in.

The order would ultimately extend beyond the occupied regions of the USSR and was another example of how, as Nazi Germany's fate became sealed, it became more homicidal.

Offensive actions by the U.S. Fifth Army were halted by Gen. Alexander.

Today In Wyoming's History: November 15: 1943 1943  Harmonica player Larry Adler played at the University of Wyoming.  Adler was a well known harmonica player.

Manuel L. Quezon was inaugurated as President of the Philippines, in exile. It was his third term.  In the Philippines a collaborationist government, not as disdained by the post-war Philippines as might be supposed, was in control, with the sanction of the Japanese.

The Cross Mountain, Colorado post office was closed, putting an end to the Moffat County town.

Tuesday, November 14, 2023

November 14, 1943. Torpedoing the President.

USS William D. Porter.

The USS William D. Porter accidentally fired a torpedo at the USS Iowa, which had President Franklin D. Roosevelt on board.

The Porter was supposed to be engaging in a target practice demonstration with an inert torpedo, but fired a live one.  A disaster was averted when the ship's radioman, detecting the sound of an armed torpedo, radioed the Iowa, which was able to avoid it.  The entire crew of the ship was placed under arrest at Bermuda and Torpedoman Lawton Dawson was sentenced to fourteen years hard labor.

President Roosevelt intervened and asked that Dawson not be punished.

The Porter was sunk on June 10, 1945 when a kamikaze attacked the ship, and missed, but ended up underneath it and exploded.  All hands were saved.

The Battle of Coconut Grove ended in an Allied victory.

The Italian Social Republic's Fascist party, which controlled northern Italy, as a German puppet state,  issued the Manifesto of Verona, providing:

Preamble

In announcing its own program of action, the Republican Fascist Party salutes you, Duce, the man who can save the Fatherland, realizing the Fascio of Italian energies for the second time.

In your arduous liberation it sees the providential auspices of what will be the liberation of all Italy. In your thought, and in your more than twenty years of historical work in Italy and in the world, it today finds the certainty and the very current of inspiration for the social ascent of the Italian people, now that the monarchy can finally be swept away from Italian life, together with all those dark, reactionary, compromising forces and their allies.

Under your guidance, through sacrifice and combat, it will bring back honour to Italy, its independence and its greatness.

In its first national assembly, the Republican Fascist Party:

Lifts its thoughts to those who have sacrificed their lives for Fascism on the battlefronts, in the piazzas of the cities and villages, in the limestone pits of Istria and Dalmatia, and who should be added to the ranks of the martyrs of our Revolution, and to the phalanx of all those men who have died for Italy.

It regards continuation of the war alongside Germany and Japan until final victory, and the speedy reconstruction of our Armed Forces which will serve alongside the valorous soldiers of the Fuhrer, as goals that tower above everything else in importance and urgency.

It takes note of the decrees instituting the Extraordinary Tribunals, whereby Party members will carry out their unbending determination to administer exemplary justice; and, inspired by Mussolini's stimulus and accomplishments, it enunciates the following programmatic directives for Party actions:

As concerns internal constitutional issues, we propose:

1. That a Constituent Assembly, whose sovereign power is popularly derived, be convened in order to declare the abolition of the monarchy, solemnly condemn the last treasonous and fugitive king, proclaim the Italian Social Republic, and appoint its Head.

2. That this Constituent Assembly be made up of representatives from all syndical associations and administrative districts and also include representatives from the occupied provinces in the form of delegations of evacuees and refugees residing in liberated territories.

This Constituent Assembly must also include representatives of servicemen, war prisoners (represented by those sent back due to disabilities), Italians abroad, the judiciary, universities, and any other body or institution whose participation contributes to designating this Constituent Assembly as a synthesis of the nation's values.

3. That this republican Constituent grant to citizens, be they soldiers, workers, or taxpayers, the right to audit and criticize the public administration's actions, so long as this right is exercised in a responsible manner.

Every fifth year citizens will be called upon to nominate the Head of the Republic.

No citizen will be held beyond seven days without a warrant from the judicial authorities irrespective of whether he was arrested in the act or detained for preventive reasons. A judicial warrant will also be required to carry out searches of homes, except in cases of flagrant delicto.

The judicial branch of government will operate with complete independence while carrying out its functions.

4. That an intermediate solution be adopted in the electoral domain given Italy's prior negative experiences with elections and its partially negative experiences with too rigidly hierarchical methods of appointment. A mixed system seems the most advisable—one, for example, that would combine popular election of deputies with appointments of ministers made by the Head of the Republic and government. Within the Party, it would probably be best for elections to be held on the Fascio level, with approvals for appointments to the National Directorate being made by the Duce.

5. That the organization responsible for politically educating the people be one. The Party, an order of fighters and believers, must become an organism of absolute political purity, worthy of being the guardian of a revolutionary idea.

Party membership will not be required for any job or position.

6. That the Republic's religion be the Roman Catholic Apostolic religion. Respect is assured for other cults so long as they do not oppose the law.

7. That those belonging to the Jewish race be considered foreigners. During this war they belong to an enemy nation.

As concerns foreign policy issues, we propose:

8. That the main goal of the Republic's foreign policy be the unity, independence, and territorial integrity of the Fatherland. The territory in question comprises the maritime and alpine borders marked in nature, as well as the borders consecrated by sacrifice of blood and by history. Both boundaries are now threatened by the invading enemy and by their promises to the governments that have sought refuge in London. A second essential goal will be to achieve recognition of the fact that a population of 45 million, living in an area insufficient to sustain it, has certain indispensable needs for vital space.

This foreign policy will also strive for the creation of a "European community" made up of all those nations that accept the following fundamental principles:

a) elimination from our continent the century-long British intrigues;

b) abolition of the internal capitalist system and combat against world plutocracies;

c) valourisation of Africa's natural resources for the benefit of Europeans as well as natives, with full respect for those peoples, particularly Muslim ones, who have already shaped themselves into civilized nations, such as Egypt.

As concerns social issues, we propose:

9. That the foundation and the main goal of the Italian Social Republic be work—manual, technical, intellectual—in all its manifestations;

10. That the State guarantee private property, which is the fruit of individual labour and savings as well as an extension of the human personality. Private property, however, must not be permitted to have a disintegrative effect on the physical and moral personality of other individuals by way of the exploitation of their labour.

11. That in the domain of the national economy, the State's sphere of action encompass everything that extends beyond the individual interests or within the domain of collective interests, whether due to scale or function.

Public services and, in most cases, armament industries, must be managed by the State through parastatal agencies.

12. That in every factory (whether industrial, private, government-controlled, or state-owned) representatives of technicians and workers must collaborate closely—to the point of having direct knowledge of the factory's management—in setting fair wages and in equitably distributing profits between reserve funds, stockholder dividends, and worker profit shares.

In some factories this measure will be implemented by expanding the powers of the existing factory commissions. In others, the current management will be substituted by a managing council made up of technicians, workers, and a state representative. In others still, a parasyndical cooperative will be set up.

13. That in the domain of agricultural production, landowner's private initiative shall be curbed whenever and wherever initiative itself is lacking.

Expropriations of uncultivated lands may lead to their being parceled out among farm workers (who thereby become farmer-landowners). Similarly, badly managed businesses may be transformed into parasyndical or parastatal cooperatives, depending upon the needs of the agricultural economy.

Since current laws already provide for these sorts of measures, the Party and various syndical organizations are now hard at work on their implementation.

14. That farmers, craftsmen, professionals, and artists be fully entitled to pursue their vocations individually, for their families or other nucleus. However, they are subject to legal obligations to deliver to the masses those quantities of produce that are set forth by the law and to regulation of fees for services.

15. That home ownership be treated not just as an extension of property rights but also as a right. The Party's platform proposes the creation of a national agency for popular housing that will absorb the existing institute and greatly enhance its effectiveness. Its aim will be to make home ownership available to families of all categories of workers via the construction of new homes or the gradual repurchase of existing ones. To this end, the general principle that rent payments ought to go towards purchase of a home, once capital has been paid off in full, must be adopted.

The first duty of this agency will be to address the war's detrimental effects on housing by expropriating and distributing empty buildings and by erecting temporary structures.

16. That workers automatically become members of the syndicate regulating the category to which they belong, but that this membership must not preclude transfer to another syndicate if all requirements are met. All the trade syndicates are gathered together under the umbrella of a single confederation comprising all workers, technicians, and professionals (but excluding landlords, who are neither managers nor technicians). This umbrella organization will be named the General Confederation of Labour, Technology, and Arts.

Like other workers, employees of state-controlled industries or public services are integrated into syndicates as a function of their category.

The imposing complex of social welfare institutions created by the Fascist regime over the past twenty years remains intact. Consecrated by the 1927 Charter of Labour, its spirit will inform all future developments.

17. That the Party considers a salary adjustment for all workers an urgent necessity. This can be effected by adopting a nationwide minimum wage (with prompt regional adjustments). The need is particularly great among lower-echelon and middle-echelon workers, both in the public and private sectors. Part of the salary should be paid in foodstuffs (at official prices) so that this measure not prove ineffective or harmful for all parties concerned. This can be accomplished by means of cooperatives and factory stores, by expanding the "Provvida's" responsibilities, and by expropriating stores that have broken the law and placing them under state or cooperative management. This is the best way to contribute to the stabilization of prices and the lira's value as well as to the market's recovery. As concerns the black market, speculators must be placed under the authority of special courts and made subject to the death penalty, just like traitors and defeatists.

18. That with this preamble to the Constituent Assembly, the Party offers proof that it is not only reaching out toward the people but also is one with the people.

On the other hand, the Italian people must realize that it only has one way to defend its past, present, and future achievements: to reject the enslaving invasion of the Anglo-American plutocracies whose sole aim, confirmed by a thousand precise signs, is to make the lives of Italians more cramped and miserable.

There is only one way for us to accomplish all our social goals: to fight, to work, to triumph.

Bulgaria was bombed by the Allies for the first time when B-25s hit the railyards at Sofia.

Bulgaria was in a strange position during the war.  It was an Axis Power, but it had not declared war on the Soviet Union, perhaps judging the likelihood of a Soviet victory in the war more accurately than other German allies.  Its hesitancy did not save it from being invaded by the Red Army in September 1944 at which time it switched sides and declared war on Germany.  Following a leftist coup that resulted due to the Soviet invasion, it was a Communist country from 1946 until about 1990, at which time it became a parliamentary democracy.  The country has been undergoing a demographic collapse since the 1980s.

Saturday, November 11, 2023

A few Veterans Day Comments.

Somewhere in Korea.

I wasn't going to post on Veterans Day at all, in part because the overblown hero worship that's been attached to it for some time is really starting to bug me. But then, I've been owly recently anyhow.  

But, as predictable (every year the number of posts on this site goes up, this year no exception, which is why I’m considering not posting at all in December) I changed my mind.  A few random comments.

Were you in the Army?

My new associate asked me this the other day, as I have the photograph of my basic training platoon up on my office wall.

Funny, I'm so used to it being there, I never notice it.

Military service, regular and reserve, was routine when I was young. Not everyone had it by any means, but lots of people do.

And this was even more so for my parents.  My father was in the Air Force, his brother in the Army.  My other uncles in the World War Two Navy and Canadian Army, and post-war Navy.  The guys my father ate lunch with every day had all been in the service.

Not so much anymore.

November 7, 1983: Able Archer 83, a Close Call


An item from Uncle Mike's fine blog.

I was in the National Guard at the time. Little did we realize how close we'd come to serving in a short, sharp, and probably nuclear war.

As odd as it may sound, I actually had predicted a war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact at about this time, a predication that didn't come true, but my reasoning was sound.

Reagan became President in 1981 and as soon as his first military budgets started to take effect, things really were noticeable in the Guard.  New equipment, better field training, etc.  The Warsaw Pact took note of that and started building up to counter it.

Able Archer, like Team Spirit, and Reforger were all part of the training regime of the time.  It was no secret that the Warsaw Pact was trying to respond to it all.  In the end, that spending brought them down. They couldn't afford it.

A lesson there to a country that's spending like crazy right now and just got economically downgraded.

Anyhow, my prediction nearly came true with Able Archer, but not for the reason I thought this would happen. I thought it would happen as the Warsaw Pact, or rather the USSR, would reason that it only had so much time while it had military superiority in which to act.

This was a view, I'd note, that was reinforced by playing the military hex and counter war games based on a NATO/Warsaw Pact war.  It was pretty clear that it was really hard for NATO to win a conventional one.

Or so it seemed.

We vastly overrated the Red Army and Soviet military equipment, as the war in Ukraine has demonstrated.

Funny, at the same time I recall being assigned A Republic of Grass in college which suggested we surrender to the Soviets before a war broke out.

A note on Reagan

When Reagan was President, I wasn't sure what to make of him.  As a Guardsman, we were all grateful for the new equipment and attitude.  Carter's military had been a sad sort of thing, as exemplified, perhaps, by the failed attempt to mount a raid to free the Iranian embassy hostages.

But it seemed like we were messing around in Central America an awful lot, which I wasn't sure what to make of. In retrospect, it's clear that the Cold War was being played out there in proxy.

When Reagan was president, I was a university student.  It seems to be forgotten now, but most university students weren't big Reagan fans.  As noted, I wasn't an opponent, but I wasn't a fan.  My father was convinced that Reagan had Alzheimer's which, in fact, he did.

On Reagan and Carter, it's interesting to note that Carter was an Annapolis graduate. Reagan had more of a military career than his opponents claimed, having been a pre-war cavalry reserve officer, but his wartime role was in the branch of the military that made films. That was honorable enough, but Reagan introduced the snappy salute to servicemen which stuck after that, and which I don't like.  Presidents saluting servicemen seems really odd, particularly when we get Presidents who've never been in the military.

Anyhow, most of my conservative friends love and admire Reagan.  I still am not so sure about him.  I can see where he made course corrections at the time which were vital.  It was under Reagan, really, that the country got back on its feet after the Vietnam War.  And Reagan introduced the brief period of Buckleyite conservatism, which I like, to the government.

He also, however, started the populist smudge which is now a roaring flame by using the Southern Strategy to win, and that's having dire effects.  And frankly, I'm not impressed with the starving of the government economically that came in at that time.

On this Veterans Day, don't thank those who served, but ponder those who didn't.

This sounds harsh, but I'm not kidding.

Most veterans don't really want to be thanked for serving.  Truth be known, a lot of us served for reasons that weren't all that noble or were mixed.  Paying for university was in my mind, for example.

Having said that, in my adult years I've known a few people who avoided serving in the military when there was a time of need. Some of them have real reason of conscience and can and do defend it, on the rare occasions it comes up.

In contrast, we have people who sort of hero worship the military, or who are public figures thanking it, about whom there are real questions.

Donald Trump sent out his thanks today, but he avoided the Vietnam draft on a medical profile.  That's never been adequately answered, and in private comments he disdains those who served in the military, which fits right in with his epic level of being self impressed.  Biden had draft deferments too, I'd note.

There are real reasons for deferments, but what gets me here is the co-opting of valor, or the bestowing of it on people who don't deserve it.  People don't claim that Biden is some sort of hero. But you can find completely absurd illustrations of Trump as a military figure.  I don't really see Trump voluntarily serving in any war at any time, and had he lived during the Revolution, I sure don't see him as some sort of Continental Army officer.

So, while it's rude, for at least some thanking veterans "for their service", an appropriate response is "why didn't you serve?".

The real purpose of the day

The real purpose of this day is to remember the dead and badly wounded.  That's about it.

Lots of people serve during time of peace in one way or another. We don't deserve your thanks.  Yes, I'm sure that I'm personally responsible for keeping the Red Horde at bay, but I didn't get hurt serving.  Truth be known, I benefitted from it personally in all sorts of ways, a lot of which are deeply personal.  The service formed a lot of my psychology on certain things in a permanent way, all of which are ways in which I'm glad that it did. 

A lot goes into a person's personality, some of it more significant than others, and I do have more significant ones. The service was, however, a significant one.  Hindsight being 20/20, I wish I had not gotten out of the Guard when I did, also for a selection of personal reasons.

So I owe the service thanks. The country doesn't really owe me any. But people whose lives were permanently altered or last? Well, that's a different matter.

Sunday, November 5, 2023

More observations on the Hamas Israeli War. A sort of primer, war aims, and campaign aims. Part I.

War Aims.

A lot of reporting on the Hamas Israeli War, indeed nearly all of it, is devoid of discussion on war aims.  Some of it vaguely discusses Israeli campaign aims.  None of it so far that I've seen has discussed Hamas campaign aims.  Given that, a lot of the reporting is sort of naive.

Hamas, having started the campaign, will be discussed first.

Hamas was formed in 1987 (probably considerably more recently than many suppose.  Hamas controls Gaza, Fatah, the political arm of what had been the Palestinian Liberation Organization, controls the West Bank.  The two entities have actually fought each other.  Hamas started off with the goal of pushing Jews out of the boundaries of what had been the 1948 Palestinian borders, but earlier in the 2000s seemed to lessen its demands.

It seems to have returned to them.  As far as can be told, its war aims are to remove the Jews from Israel, dead or alive, and of any age, and create an Arab Palestinian, and seemingly Islamic (not all Palestinians are Muslims) state in its wake.  That's what's summed up in the phrase "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free", which like a lot of slogans is catchy but doesn't really convey the full meaning of what it seeks.

Those are the war aims.

Without abandoning them, Hamas cannot back down, and Israel cannot unilaterally realistically convert the current war into a large scale punitive action at this point.  War aims can change, but Hamas shows no desire at all to do so.  A limited raid that was not aimed at civilians could have been undertaken if it has some other goal, but it didn't.

The campaign aims are much more difficult to discern.  Perhaps it was to spark a wider war in the belief that it could be won, or perhaps it was just a gross act of terrorism in furtherance of its remote, unobtainable goal.

Of course, discerning campaign aims, is often tricky in regard to an entity like Hamas, or even large entities.  In spite of long knowledge to the contrary, they may have thought that their raid, if that is what it was intended to be, would scare Israel into submission.  Hitting civilians never does that.  The British didn't surrender after the Blitz, and the air raids on civilian populations in Germany and Japan, perhaps if we exclude the atomic bomb, didn't cause them to surrender either.  Air raids on military targets in North Vietnam which inflicted civilian deaths didn't cause North Vietnam to give up.  9/11 only made Americans mad, it didn't achieve whatever it was that Al Queda thought it would, which seems to have been a hoped for general economic collapse.

Israel's war aims are also simple.  Its goal is to destroy Hamas as it views it, correctly, as irreconcilably opposed to its existence and genocidal in nature.  Its campaign aims seem to be to occupy Gaza, or perhaps the northern portion of the Gaza Strip, trap Hamas, and destroy it and its infrastructure.

Outright destroying an underground organization, however, is very difficult to do. The US basically did it in Afghanistan, however, so it can be done.

Nobody is talking at all about what's going to become of the Palestinians.  Israel isn't addressing it. The Arabs aren't either.  Hamas is simply using their own people as human shields and for propoganda.

A cultural existential difference, or Why can't everyone get along?

Cultures play a part in wars, which people in the West are oddly inclined to forget.  Jimmy Carter famously absent-mindedly quipped that the problems between the Israeli's and Palestinians would go away if they all started acting "like good Christians", but of course neither group is predominantly Christian.

I've taken some criticism on a more stretched observation in this area recently, so I'll explain a bit what I mean.

This question posed above is really a Western one, filtered through our eyes, which are the eyes of heavy Christian influence.  As a South American atheist friend of mine once stated, culturally, "we're all Catholics", even if we often don't behave like it.  That's why we're shocked when people don't behave accordingly.  

Historically and culturally, that's not necessarily the default human norm at all, which doesn't mean that every non-Christian culture (including the two in question) default to bad behavior.   But, as Genghis Khan supposedly noted (often filtered in our culture through Conan the Barbarian in a modified form):

The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.

We don't think that way, and we don't want others thinking that way.

Back to this war, the fact of the matter is that these two groups of people aren't going to get along.  The Western concept that somehow they can be made to is simply in error at this point.

It might have been true a couple of times.  One was in 1948, just before the first Arab Israeli War broke out, although that's pretty debatable. The second time was when the 1993 and 1995 Palestinian Accords were reached. The big problem is that both times, large numbers of Palestinians simply rejected a future which included Jews within the 1948 Palestinian boundaries.

The 1948 rejection was accompanied by voting with their feet by the Palestinians, a logical choice but one that was taken advantage of by Israel in that it offered the opportunity to truly make the country principally Jewish.  Nobody can fault somebody for fleeing fighting, but the fact that it occured meant that a large Arab population removed itself.  If it had not, demographics alone would have repeated what in fact occured in Lebanon, where a majority Christian population at that time is now 32% of the population.

Instead of taking that route, the Palestinians first relied on Arab hostility to take the country back for them, and then for the PLO, which ultimately compromised on that, to do so.  Now, a certain percentage are relying on Hamas.

Regarding that calculation, relying on it in the 1950s, and even into the 1960s, wasn't irrational.  After that, it really started to be. At some point, the land belongs to those who live there.  It was Zapata who stated; “The land belongs to those who work it with their own hands”, which is how it should be (and how it's increasingly ceasing to be in the United States)  That same analogy pertains to revolutions.  It instinctively makes sense for the people ruled by another people to rebel, but not so much a people that had once lived in a land where the majority of the population isn't yours, and the majority of your population wasn't born in that land.  Indeed, the fact that the initial Jewish war for independence sort of violated that tenant is part of the reason that many nations around the globe were quite hesitant about supporting Israel early on, combined with the fact that it appeared they'd lose.

Beyond that, as an essay in Minding The Campus has related:

(Professor Mordechai) Kedar, a former officer in the Israeli Defense Forces, has spent his academic life studying Islamic and Arab history and society. He explains that the animus of Palestinians, Arabs, and Islamists against the Jewish state is based on the consensus of Islamic religious thought that believes that Jews as a religion, people, or nation are never to be the equals of Muslims, and so their independent state, Israel, must be “struck down.”

While that can be debated, there's at least something to it, or there has come to be.   For the most part, since World War Two, Middle Eastern Islam, which is its cradle, has become increasingly more "conservative", if that is the correct term, and militant over the decades.  That was always there, and indeed Saudi Arabia was founded due to the Saud family's alliance with a group so conservative it was regarded as heretical.  Islam does not have a real coexistence ethos as we'd understand it towards other religions.  It's often noted that it has allowances for "People of the Book", meaning both Jews and Christians, but that tolerance is limited and provides that they are to be second class citizens.

Neither Christianity nor Judaism have something similar towards other religions, which doesn't mean that individual Christian or Jewish societies are de facto tolerant.  People tend to generally be intolerant of any group that's different from themselves.

Interestingly, early Middle Eastern governments didn't have this feature to them, or at least not to the same extent.  Turkey just celebrated its 100th founding as a modern state, and that state was founded as a secular one.  Atatürk suppressed Islam in his country.  Jordan has always been a Muslim state, but the Hashemite family that rules it, and once controlled Mecca, has tended towards moderation consistently.  The Baath movement that controls most of Syria and once controlled Iraq was a fascist movement early on that included Muslim and Christian Arabs and which sought a secular state in the Middle East.  The PLO was a secular organization that leaned heavily on Communist thought.  There was at one time a strong sense amongst Arab nationalist that Islam had to be suppressed or, if not outright suppressed, the state's had to be secular. That really began to fall way with the Iranian revolution, and there's been a good deal of retreat from it since that time.

Which takes us to the current highly conservative (again, if that is the right word) Israeli government.

The current Israeli government is the most conservative, again if that's the word, one ever.  It follows part of the global drift towards far right populism.  Prior to the Hamas attack, it was receiving a good deal of pushback from Western nations and internally, in no small part due to an effort to subordinate the Israeli supreme court to the Knesset.  In the irony that all such conflicts create, that's all been forgotten now.  At any rate, a sharp turn to the right by Israel made it pretty clear that any current Israeli desires to really find a mutual solution to the problems now being fought over just weren't there.

All of which leaves us with this.

Hamas has attacked and made it clear that it thinks it can murder its way towards achieving its goals, a sort of accelerated variant of the 1939-1945 lebensraum at this point.  Israel can't allow that to happen.

There are paths to a lasting peace here, but nobody involved, or even with influence, is going to try to bring them about, so the question is whether the warring parties, or more precisely Israel, can bring it about by force.

Friday, August 11, 2023

Saturday, August 11, 1973. American Graffitti

American Graffiti was released on this day in 1973.  It's on our Movies In History list, which discusses it here:

American Graffiti

Like The Wonder Years, I've made frequent reference to this film recently.  I was surprised when I started doing that, that I'd never reviewed it.

American Graffiti takes place on a single night in Modesto California in 1962.  It's the late summer and the subject, all teenagers, are about to head back to school or already have, depending upon whether they're going to high school or college. Some are going to work or already working.  They're spending the summer night cruising the town.  That's used as a vehicle to get them into dramatic situations.

The story lines, and there are more than one, in the film are really simple.  One character, played by Richard Dreyfus, is about to leave for college and develops a mad crush, in a single night, for a young woman driving a T-bird played by a young Suzanne Summers.  Another plot involves a young couple, played by Ron Howard and Cindy Williams, who are struggling with his plan to leave for college while she has one more year of school.  Another involves an already graduated figure whose life is dedicated to cars, even though its apparent that he knows that dedication can't last forever.  The cast, as some of these names would indicate, was excellent, with many actors and actresses making their first really notable appearances in the film.

What's of interest here is the films' portrayal of the automobile culture of American youth after World War Two. This has really passed now, but it's accurately portrayed in the film.  Gasoline was relatively cheap and access to automobiles was pretty wide, which created a culture in which adolescents spent a lot of time doing just what is depicted in this movie, driving around fairly aimlessly, with the opposite sex on their minds, on Friday and Saturday nights.  This really existed in the 1960s, when this film takes place, it dated back at least to the 1950s, and it continued on into the very early 1980s. At some point after that, gasoline prices, and car prices, basically forced it out of existence.

For those growing up in the era, this was a feature of Fridays and Saturdays either to their amusement or irritation.  As a kid, coming into town on a Friday or Saturday evening from anything was bizarre and irritating, with racing automobiles packed with teenagers pretty much everywhere.  Grocery store parking lots were packed with parked cars belonging to them as well.  "Cruising" was a major feature of teenage life, and nearly every teenager participated in it at least a little big, even if they disavowed doing it.  While they did this, in later years they listened to FM radio somewhat, but more likely probably cassette tape players installed after market in their cars.  In the mid 1970s it was 8 track tape players.  In the 50s and 60s, it was the radio.

So, as odd as it may seem to later generations, this movie is pretty accurate in terms of what it displays historically.  And, given that the film was released in 1973, a mere decade after the era it depicts, it should be.  The amazing thing here is that by 1973 American culture had changed so much that a 1973 film looking back on 1962 could actually invoke a sense of nostalgia and an era long past.

The music and clothing are certainly correct, as is the cruising culture.  I somewhat question the automobiles in the movie, as most of those driven by the protagonists are late 1950s cars that wouldn't have been terribly old at the time the movie portrays, but a person knowledgeable on that topic informed me once that vehicles wore out so fast at the time that people replaced them fairly rapidly, which meant that younger people were driving fairly recent models.  Indeed, looking back on myself, I was driving early 1970s vintage vehicles in the late 1970s.

The music, which is a big feature of the movie, is also correct, which ironically often causes people to view this as a movie about the 1950s, rather than the early 1960s.  The music of the early 60s was the same as that of the late 50s, and music from the 50s was still current in the early 1960s, so this too is correct.

This movie was a huge hit, and it remained very popular for a very long time.  It's justifiably regarded as a classic.  More than that, however, it's one of the few movies that influences its own times.

Already by the 1970s there was some nostalgia regarding the 1950s.  Sha Na Na, the 50s reprisal do wop band, actually preformed at Woodstock, as amazing as that seems now.  By the late 1960s seems felt like such a mess that people were looking back towards an earlier era which they regarded as safer, ignoring its problems.  American Graffiti tapped into that feeling intentionally, although it has some subtle dark elements suggesting that not all is right with the world it portrays (the film clearly hints that a returned college graduate student is involved with his teenage female students).  George Lucas, when he made the film, couldn't have guess however that it would fuel a nostalgia boom for the 1950s like none other.

From our entry:

Movies In History: American Graffiti, and other filmed portrayals of the Cultural 1950s (1954-1965).

One of the really remarkable things about this film, well worth noting, is that it depicted a night in 1962.  That means, of course, that it was depicting, with nostalgia, something that had happened only ten years prior and yet already seemed like an earlier era.

Do we feel that way about 2013?  I doubt it.

This demonstrates that our perception of the decades not only depends upon years, and the years we've lived but also on events and eras.  What made the 1962 seem like history in 1973?

Well, probably quite a lot.  The US entered the Vietnam War and had just left the country in defeat, although the collapse of South Vietnam was yet to come.  The US had landed men on the moon more than once.  The Great Society had come and gone.  A U.S. president had died violently.  Inflation was racking the nation.

And 1968, which is to say "the 60s" had come, and was just leaving, although that was not apparent.

By the 80s, those who had "experienced the 60s" were looking back on some of it fondly, although they weren't looking back on the Vietnam War fondly.  So the process slightly repeated itself. But by 1973 people were really aware that the post World War Two world had really passed.  It wasn't as carefree as depictions of the 1950s would have it, not by a long shot.  But a lamenting of what had been lost was starting, and in some ways, has very much returned.

Looking forward, it was on this day that "hip hop", or "rap" was born when Jamaican born Olive Campbell introduced the form under the stage name DJ Kool Herc at a party organized by Campbell and his sister, that being the Bronx, New York, Back To School Jam.

The Soviet Union sentenced for men to death and three to prisoner terms for collaboration with the Germans while they were members of the Red Army during World War Two.

The Icelandic Coast Guard ship  ICGV Óðinn rammed the Royal Navy's HMS Andromeda off the Icelandic coast in a violent exchange in the Cod Wars.