Jello.

I’ve observed before that only creatures with backbone are able to be rigid. Jello isn’t rigid. That’s why it conforms to whatever mold it is poured into.

Fr. Dwight Longnecker

Honesty and suffering Wyoming.

I should note here that I'm cynical about politicians and politics once a person leaves the local realm.

Now, I don't feel that way about politicians at the local level.  The ones I've known personally were genuinely engaged and had entered into politics as they had real concerns about their communities, or schools, etc.

And, of the few state legislators I've known, most fit that same description.

Theodore Roosevelt, long before he ever ran for the Oval Office, once rebuked a reporter for suggesting that he might some day occupy it.  In doing so, he stated that a person must never tell a politician, which he already was, being in the New York Assembly, that he might some day be President as he'd quit being his natural self and alter positions so that he could obtain that goal.  

There's really something to that.

Harriet Hageman is in the category of politicians I've met and sort of once somewhat knew.  

During the recent race, I was frankly shocked by a lot of her conduct, which I at first attributed to her simply wanting to be in Congress. Since that time, I've come to wonder if in fact she may believe the positions she's taking, in which case that's scarier yet.  That would likely mean that of our three person Congressional delegation, she's the only true ideologue, and not in a good way.

Back in April, Harriet Hageman spoke in Powell and made this statement:

I’ve really got a dog in this hunt, I’m from Wyoming. My family’s from Wyoming … Wyoming is my passion. The way that I put it is that when Wyoming prospers, my family prospers. But when Wyoming suffers, my family suffers.¹

That's the very first thing I've seen attributed to Hageman which would give a person a reason to vote for her.  That same reasoning applied to the primary candidates who ran against Cheney when she first ran, and won, which of course means that a lot of the people who might find this view appealing now, apparently weren't all that worked up about it back when, including Hageman who at one time supported Cheney.  None of which means that it isn't a good point.

Mind you, there are a lot of reasons not to have voted for Hageman, although most Wyoming voters who participated in the off year election did. The big reason for that is that most Wyoming voters bought the Trump lie that didn't sell nationwide this election, that the election was stolen.  

Wyoming's voters, frankly, have been buying a lot of cheap fibs and obfuscations in recent years, so perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised.

So we should hope that Hageman really means what she says, and that she remains capable, as an attorney should be, of analyzing the facts.  Given her age and status, she won't be personally culpable for failing to do so.  I.e, if what she has been selling turns out to be a bill of goods, well she'll go on to retire and not bear the brunt of it.

Hageman says she has a dog in the "hunt" as she's from here and her family is too.  And she is from the Ft. Laramie region and her family is here, in agriculture, although unlike those of us who have kids who to worry about for the future decades hence, she has no children, so that's really worrying about her extended family.  I have no reason to believe that she doesn't genually bear them in her heart.

In any event, however, worrying about what happens when Wyoming suffers means, more than anything else, looking at the world honestly, and not at some romanticized past that never existed and which, to the extent it did, is evolving.

In 1960 Harold Macmillan, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, addressed the reality of the state of British colonialism to the South African parliament, stating:

The wind of change is blowing through this continent and, whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it. 

Macmillan was right, and there was no holding back the change those winds brought.  But he had a concern beyond that, and stated:

As I see it, the great issue in this second half of the twentieth century is whether the uncommitted peoples of Asia and Africa will swing to the East or to the West. Will they be drawn into the Communist camp? Or will the great experiments of self-government that are now being made in Asia and Africa, especially within the Commonwealth, prove so successful, and by their example so compelling, that the balance will come down in favour of freedom and order and justice?

Not everyone was willing to accept the storm that had arrived.  Ian Smith, the Prime Minister of Rhodesia, did not, and took his country out of the British Empire.

Rhodesia no longer exists. Zimbabwe, a wreck of a country, exists in its place.  Many of the departing African colonies have had terrible post-colonial histories, but Zimbabwe has one of the worst.  It's story is complicated, but in part that disaster can be put at Smith's feet.  MacMillan proved correct, Smith's actions gave strength to Marxist revolutionaries, who won, and who effectively destroyed the country's economy.

Elections have consequences, as they say, and so does ignoring reality.  Wyoming has a lot of going for it, but it doesn't control every trend in the United States or globe.  Every time somebody says "electric cars will never work here", they cast a vote for fantasy.  That's a minor example, but it's a relevant one.  Harriet Hageman claimed, back in April when she gave her speech in Powell, that her first act in Congress would be to introduce a bill requiring the United States to use American energy.

Well fine, pass that bill (it won't pass), but what she means is almost certainly petroleum oil and coal.  California, with a population dwarfing ours, is already legislatively phasing out the use of petroleum.  Congress isn't going to be able to mandate a change in course that's already been taken, and not just here, but all over the globe and in the hearts of minds of consumers.

Wyoming has a lot going for it economically, and a lot of that predates its oil and coal history.  But will it value it, or will it insist that we return to the 1980s and expect others to go along?  I fear the latter is almost certain.

In addition to that, when Hageman claimed nativist grounds for people to vote for her, she ironically pointed out something that's very much impacted our recent political history.  Yes, Cheney was not from Wyoming but John Barrasso isn't either.  Foster Freiss, whom the far right here adored, very much was not.

Nor are a host of Wyoming political figures, some of whom are angry relocates from points further east.

The point isn't that you have to be born here to win elections or to run, but rather this. We should be very careful about taking our political views from out of state imports, whose presence is usually temporary.  In recent years, particularly in the COVID era, we've received a lot of new people, but the backstory is a lot of them leave pretty quickly.  The myth of Wyoming is that "everyone is so friendly", which isn't really true.  It's easy to mistake politeness and curiosity for friendly.

Wyoming is a hard place to live and work.  A lot of people flood in when the price of oil is high, and then hang for a while when it drops until they chase the dollar somewhere else. A lot of those people bring their views, often from the west of the Missippii, south of the Picket Wire region, and that temporarily impacts views here. Freiss, when he ran for office, had a campaign style that somewhat resembled something out of 1970s Alabama, for example.  When they leave, that view usually goes with them.

Likewise, Wyoming throughout its history has had influxes of outsiders, people born well outside the region, who prove to be temporary.  Nice summers are attractive at first, but long winters, no services, and the howling wind take their toll after a few years, and they move on. Something like 50% of people who move here just to move here move on in less than a year.

At the end of the day, Wyomingites, those born here who stayed, and those who moved here, mostly from neighboring states that have a lot of the same character, are invested in the state in ways that others aren't and want its character preserved. That means its entire character.  You can't be the Congressman from the Oil Industry, or the House member from Coal, or the Representative from farmers in Ft. Laramie.  It's the whole smash, and those who have lived and endured here, rather than those taking up temporary residence of a fictional Wyoming that exists only on Yellowstone or Longmire, do have opinions that matter more than those moving through.

That means being honest.  Honesty starts with being honest to yourself first, and then to everyone else.  It's a character trait that's really departed from national politics to a massive degree in recent years.

So, don't make Wyoming suffer, starts with being honest.

Footnotes

1. There's's a mixed metaphor at work here.  The dog/hunt line is usually "that dog doesn't hunt", which is a phrase given to dismiss an argument that doesn't work.  The other line, which Hageman must have been recalling, is "I don't have a dog in that fight", which means that you aren't betting on a dog in a dog fight.  I.e., you have no personal interest in the outcome.

Related Threads:

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Lex Anteinternet: Issues In the Wyoming Election. A Series. Issue No. 1 (d). The Economy again. . . Tourism. The fragile leg of the stool

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Dare we, and should we, Wyomingites that is, ponder a near term world in which coal and oil use decline? Part I.

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Saturday, November 28, 1942. Battle of Réunion and the Coconut Grove Fire.

The Coconut Grove nightclub in Boston caught fire, resulting in 492 people losing their lives.  It's the worst such disaster in American history.

The Léopard.

The Léopard landed Free French Troops at Réunion off of the east coast of Madagascar in order to take the island from Vichy, which rapidly occurred.

Enlightenment

Last fall, I received a letter from a student who said she would be “graciously appreciative” if I would tell her “just what enlightenment” I expected her to get from each of my stories. I suspect she had a paper to write. I wrote her back to forget about the enlightenment and just try to enjoy them.

Flannery O’Connor

Today In Wyoming's History: Sidebar: Confusing fiction for fact

Today In Wyoming's History: Sidebar: Confusing fiction for fact: 

Sidebar: Confusing fiction for fact

One of the things that's aggravating for students of history is the way that popular portrayals botch the depiction of the topic of their interest or interests.  Sometimes this is mildly irritating, and sometimes colossally aggravating.  This is just part of the nature of things, which doesn't make it any less aggravating, and this is just as true of Wyoming history and the depictions of Wyoming and its citizens as it is with any other topic.  I suspect that the residents or students of any one area could say the same thing.

Before I go further with this, however, I should also note that this blog is very far from perfect, and I don't mean to suggest otherwise. As a daily catalog of Wyoming's history it's doing okay, but even at that, it isn't anywhere near as complete as it should be, and with certain big events in Wyoming's history its grossly incomplete.  A blog of this type should allow a person to follow a developing story as it plays out, and so far, for the most part, this one doesn't do that, that well, yet.  It certainly isn't up to the same standard that the World War Two Day By Day Blog was before it sadly, and mysteriously, terminated on September 24, 2012.  It'll hopefully get better with time, and it's doing okay now, but it is an amateur effort done with very limited time, so it isn't as complete as it should be yet.  We can hope for better in the future, of course, and it is better this year as compared to last.  We can also hope that it gets more comments in the future, which would assist with making it more complete.

Anyhow, while noting that, it's still the case that there are a lot of aggravating errors and depictions out there.  Maybe this blog can correct a few of them, although with its low readership, that's pretty doubtful.  And people cherish myths, so that operates against this as well.

What motivated this is that I was doing a net search for an update of a recent entry here and hit, through the oddity of Google, a website devoted to the movie Brokeback Mountain, which I have not seen.  I'm surprised that there's a fan website devoted to the movie, which of course I have not seen, as I'm surprised by any fan movie site.  A movie has to be of massive greatness, in my view, before I can imagine anyone devoting a blog to it.  Say, Lawrence of Arabia, or a movie of equal greatness. There probably aren't a dozen movies that are that good.  

Anyhow, if a person wants to devote a blog to a movie they really like, but isn't one of the greatest movies of all time, that's their business, but there is a difference between fact and fiction. And the reason I note the site noted is that there's a page on the site the one I hit debating the location of the Brokeback Mountain. The blogger thought it was in one place, but cited author Larry McMurtry for another location.

Well, McMurtry notwithstanding, there is no Brokeback Mountain. The book and movie are fiction.  It makes no more sense to say that some mountain is Brokeback Mountain than it does to say that the Grand Tetons are Spencer's Mountain, unless the point was intended to be that some backdrop for a film was a certain identified location.  If that's the case, i.e., identifying an actual location, I get it, but that's not what they seemed to be debating.  I don't think the film was actually filmed in Wyoming, although I could be mistaken and perhaps some background scenes were (although I don't think so).  Of course, if I am in error, I'm in error, in which case they're trying to identify a location they saw in the film, and I'm off base.

Along these same lines, when the film Unforgiven came out, I went to see it.  The movie was getting a lot of press at the time, and it was hailed as great.  It isn't.  It's not really that good of a film frankly, and I didn't think it was at the time.  I think it was hailed as great as a major Western hadn't been released in quite some time, and it starred Clint Eastwood.  Eastwood has been in some fine movies to be sure, but he's been in some doggy Westerns also, and this one, while not a dog, wasn't great.

At any rate, while watching that film, I recall a young woman asked her date, several rows in front of me, where the town the film depicts, Big Whiskey, Wyoming, was located.  I thought surely he'd say "there isn't one," but, dutifully he identified its location, essentially morphing Whiskey Mountain, a mountain, into the fictional town.  Whiskey Mountain is a real place, but Big Whiskey, the town, is a complete fiction.  It doesn't even sound like the name of a 19th Century Wyoming town.  I don't know of any Wyoming town named after an alcoholic beverage, or even a beverage of any kind.  For that matter, I don't know of any named for anything edible or potable, save for Chugwater.  In the 19th Century, the founders of towns like to name towns after soldiers if they could, which gives us Casper, Sheridan, Rawlins, Lander and probably other locations.  

While on the topic of fictional towns, there's the fictional characters in them.  Big Whiskey, in the film, was ruled over by a well dressed tyrannical sheriff and a well dressed tyrannical Englishman, if I recall correctly.  Tyrannical sheriffs are popular figures in Western movies, and in recent years they're well dressed tyrants.  In quite a few films the tyrannical sheriff is the ally of a tyrannical (probably English) big rancher.

In actuality, sheriffs all stood for election in those days, just as now.  They often had a really rough idea of what law enforcement entailed, but they did not tend to be tyrannical.  They tended to be grossly overworked, covering huge expanses of territory.  They also probably didn't tend to be snappy dressers.  While some of them had been on both sides of the law, quite a few were Frontier types that fell into the job for one reason or another, like Johnson County's "Red" Angus or Park County's Jeremiah Johnson (the famed mountain man).  Sheriff's of that era tended to spend days and in the saddle without the assistance of anyone and often tended to resort to gun play, which average people did as well, but they did not tend to be agents of repression.  If they were, they would loose office pretty quickly.  Probably one of the better depictions of a Frontier lawman is the recent depiction of Marshall Cogburn in the Cohen Brothers version of True Grit.

The tyrannical local big rancher thing is way overdone as well.  The reason that there was a Johnson County War is that the old big landed interests were loosing control so rapidly, not because they were retaining it.  Films like Open Range, or Return to Lonesome Dove, which depict people straying into controlled territory are simply wrong.  The cattle war was more characterized by an ongoing struggle than Medieval fiefdoms.  There were some English and Scottish ranchers as well, but there were big interests that weren't either.  And the both sides in those struggles formed interests groups that involved lots of people, rather than one big entity against the little people, contrary to the image presented in Shane and so many other films.

As part of that, one thing that these period films never seem to get correct is that the West was a territory of vigorous democracy.  Yes, in Wyoming large cattle interests tried to squash the small ones in Johnson and Natrona Counties through a shocking armed invasion, but they also had to content with the ballot box. When things went badly for them in the Invasion, the legislature briefly turned Democratic and Populist.  Newspapers were political arms in those days as well, and they were often exceeding vocal in their opinions.  Their opinions could sometimes be shouted down, or crowded out, but the concept that some English Duke would rule over a vast swatch of territory unopposed is simply incorrect.  More likely his domain would be subject to constant carving up and the sheriff was less than likely to be in his pocket.

While on the topic of films, the way that characters are depicted, visually, is very often incorrect.  In terms of Westerns, to a large extent, films of the 30s and 40s depicted characters the way that film makers wanted them to look, films of the 50s the way that people thought the viewers wanted them to look, films of the 60s reflected the style of day, and so on.  It wasn't until the 1980s, with Lonesome Dove, that a serious effort was made to portray 19th Century Western figures the way they actually looked, with a few really rare exceptions.  Shane, which I otherwise do not like, did accurately portray the visual look of a couple of characters, the best example being the gun man portrayed by Jack Palance. Why they got that one correct, for the region, and few else, is a mystery.  The older film Will Penny did a good job in these regards.  The Culpepper Cattle Company is very well done..  In recent films, the film Tombstone was very accurate in terms of costume for the region it was set in, so much so that it received criticism for the odd dress styles it depicted, even though they were period and location correct.  Modern Westerns tend to botch this if set in Wyoming or the Northern Plains, and are almost never correct in these regards.

Hats get very odd treatment in this context.  From the 20s through the 30s, hats were fanciful in film, and didn't reflect what people actually wore.  In the 50s, the hats that were then in style were shown as being in style in the late 19th Century.  Only recently have historical films generally been correct, and they still hit and miss on films set in the present era.  A lot of movie makers can't tell the difference between Australian drover's hats and real cowboy hats, and would probably be stunned to find that a lot of cowboys look like they did over a century ago, to a large extent.

The expanse of territory is also routinely inaccurate in old and new depictions.  Film depictions of Wyoming either seem to think that Wyoming has the geographic expanse of Alaska or, alternatively, Rhode Island.  Distances seem to be rarely related to the period in which they are set, with some depictions set in the 19th Century seemingly thinking that a town was always nearby, while ones set now seemingly thinking there isn't one for a thousand miles.  Expanses in Wyoming are vast, but the state is not Alaska.  Conversely, ranch and farm geography isn't grasped at all, and frankly its forgotten by most Wyomingites, in a historic concept, now.  Up into the 1930s there were an increasing number of small homesteads, meaning the farm and ranch population, throughout the West, was much higher than it is now. 

Probably the single worst depiction of modern geography, geography in general and ranch geography, is the horribly bad film Bad Lands, a fictionalized account of a series of events that actually mostly took place in the Mid West but which ended in Wyoming, in reality.  In that film the teenage murderers are shown driving across the prairie and there's actually an absurd line about being able to see the lights of Cheyenne in the distance in one direction and some extremely far off feature to the north.  In reality, you can not drive a car, any car, across the prairie as the prairie is rough and cut with gullies, ravines, gopher holes, etc.  And there's a lot of barbed wire fences.  The thought, as the movie has it, of driving dozens and dozens of miles straight across the prairie is absurd.  Not quite as absurd as being able to see Cheyenne's lights from a safe vast distance away, however.  Cheyenne sits in a bit of a bowl in the prairie, and if you see its lights, you are pretty close, and if you are driving across the prairie, pretty soon you're going to be entering some ranch yard or F. E. Warren Air Force Base.

One of the best depictions of geography, however, comes in McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, which does get it basically correct, and which the film gets basically correct.  In the film, the cattle are driven across arid eastern Wyoming, which is actually correctly depicted as arid.  Film makers like to show Wyoming as being Jackson's Hole.  Jackson's Hole is Jackson's Hole, and while it is very beautiful, and in Wyoming, it's darned near in Idaho and most of the state doesn't look like that.

On the topic of land, a really goofball idea depicted in many, many, current depictions of Wyoming and Montana is that you can go there and buy a ranch. No, you cannot.  Well, if you have a huge amount of money you can, but otherwise, you are not going to.  In spite of this, films all the time have the idea that people will just go there and buy a ranch.  One episode of Army Wives, for example, had an episode where a Specialist E4 was going to leave the Army and buy a ranch.  Baloney.  Buying any amount of agricultural land actually sufficient to make a living on in the United States is extremely expensive, and you aren't going to do it on Army enlisted pay.  Specialist E4 pay wouldn't buy a house in a lot of Wyoming.  Part of this delusion is based on the fact that in Western conditions the amount of land needed to make a living on is quite large and Eastern standards, which most people have in mind, bear no relationship to this in the West.  Out of state advertisers sometimes take advantage of this ignorance by suggesting that people can buy a "ranch" in some area of Wyoming, by which they mean something like 20 to 40 acres.  That isn't a ranch in the working sense of the words by any means in that there's no earthly way a person could make a living ranching it ,or farming it, or even come anywhere close to making a fraction of a living wage.  I've run into, however, people on odd occasion who live very far from here but believe that they own a ranch, as they bought something of this type site unseen.  In one such instance a person seriously thought he would bring 100 cattle into a small acreage that was dry, and wouldn't even support one.  This, I guess, is an example of where a mis-impression can actually be dangerous to somebody.

On ranching, another common depiction is that it seems to be devoid of work.  People are ranchers, but they seem to have self feeding, self administering, cattle, if a modern ranch is depicted.  Ranching is actually very hard work and a person has to know what they are doing.  Even if a person could purchase all the ranch land and all the cattle they needed to start a ranch (ie., they were super wealthy), unless they had a degree in agriculture and had been exposed to it locally, or they had grown up doing it and therefore had the functional equivalent of a doctorate in agriculture, they'd fail.  This, in fact, is also the case with 19th Century and early 20th Century homesteads, the overwhelming majority of which failed.  People who had agricultural knowledge from further East couldn't apply all of it here, and often had to pull up stakes and move on.  And, often missed, it took a lot of stuff to get started.  One account of a successful Wyoming 19th Century start up homestead I read related how the homesteader had served in Wyoming in the Army for years, specifically saving up his NCO pay and buying equipment years before he filed his homestead, and he still spent a year back east presumably working before he came back and filed.  J. B. Okie, a huge success in the Wyoming sheep industry, worked briefly as a sheepherder, in spite of being vastly wealthy, prior to coming out well funded to start up.  Many of the most successful homesteaders, but certainly not all, had prior exposure to sheep or cattle prior to trying to file a homestead.

On erroneous depictions, one particularly aggravating one is when films attempt to depict what they think the regional accent is.  There is a bit of a regional speech pattern, i.e, an accent, but it's so rarely done accurately that it shouldn't be tried.  For the most part, native Wyomingites have the standard American Mid Western accent, but they tend to mumble it a bit.  That sounds insulting, but it isn't meant to be, and Wyomingites are so attuned to it, as are rural Coloradans and Montanans, that they generally cannot perceive it.  I'm from here, and no doubt I exhibit that accent.  Most people don't recognize an accent at all, and it takes a pretty attuned ear to be able to place it, although some people very definitely can.  I can recall my father having told me of that having occurred to him on a train in the 50s, and I've had it happen once in the 1980s.  In my father's case, the commenter noted that he must be from one of the Rocky Mountain states.  In mine, I was specifically asked by a fellow who had worked for the Park Service for decades if I was from the West Slope of Colorado, as many park rangers were and I had the same accent.  Most Wyomingites, at some point, probably get a puzzled question from somebody about where they are from that's accent based, but the questioner never reveals that.  It's a regional accent, so the best a person can do is tell that you are from rural Colorado, Wyoming, or Montana if they know what the accent entails, or that there even is one.  Film makers, who must be aware that there is an accent, occasionally try to insert one in a modern Western, but when they try it they present a bizarre laughable accent that doesn't occur anywhere on the planet.  Years ago, for example, there were advertisements on television here for the Laramie Project, which is another film I haven't seen, and which I couldn't have watched due to the horribly bad efforts an accent that the filmmakers were attempting. We do not drawl.  We speak more like Tom Brokaw, but perhaps with a bit of mumbling that we don't recognize as mumbling. 

I've read that Irishmen find American attempts at an Irish accent hilarious.  Some English attempts at an American Mid Western accent are really bad.  Our accent here is fairly rare, and there's no way that they're going to get it right, and they ought not try.  By not trying, they're closer to the mark.

Friday, November 27, 1942. Vichy Scuttles its Fleet, Jimi Hendrix born.

The Vichy French scuttled their own ships in harbor in Toulon to keep them out of German hands.  It was a brave act by Vichy, perhaps the most admirable thing it did during the war.  Operation Lila, the German offensive operation to seize the French Navy, had in fact commenced on November 19.

Three battleships, seven cruisers, fifteen destroyers, twelve submarines and thirteen torpedo boats of the French Navy went down at French hands.

Admirable though it was, it was not as admirable as what the Italian Navy would do the next year, which was to bolt to the sea so that it could join the Allies.  Indeed, in retrospect, or even at the time, the decision not to break out can be questioned, but Vichy was still making pretenses to being the de jure French government at the time, even though it was rapidly losing that status, and in fact already had.

Venezuela broke off relations with Vichy.

James ("Jimi) Marshal Hendrix, the greatest guitar player who ever lived, was born in Seattle, Washington.

Self-taught, and unable to read music, Hendrix came out of a blues saturated background and crossed over into Rock & Roll during its greatest era.  Nobody played the guitar like he did before him, and nobody has surpassed his abilities since.  Amazingly, Hendrix did not take up the guitar until he was 15.

A master of distortion at a time in which using it had not yet been figured out, Hendrix became a full time musician following his discharge from the Army in 1962.  Entering the music scene in the turmoil of the 1960s, Hendrix was unfortunately drawn to the drug culture of the era, which ended up taking his life in 1970 at age 27.  In his short musical career he established a body of music which stands out to this day.

Hendrix was just learning how to read music at the time of his death, and interestingly enough, was learning how to play wind instruments in addition to the guitar and bass that he already knew how to play.  Given that 80 years of age isn't an uncommon one, had drugs not taken his life, he could still be living today, and the music scene would have undoubtedly developed much differently than it did since 1970.

Monday, November 27, 1922. Safety in D.C., Change of government in Greece.

Streetcar decorated with safety slogans. Washington, D.C., Nov. 27, 1922

Lt. Gen. Stylianos Gonatas became the Prime Minister of Greece following the bloody shakeup in the prior Greek government.

Southern Rockies Nature Blog: Thunder without Tears: The Passing of Tom McIntyre

Southern Rockies Nature Blog: Thunder without Tears: The Passing of Tom McIntyre: 1987 was the worst year of my life. A dream job of working on an outdoor magazine was falling apart (with the publication itself), leaving M...

Tom McIntyre's death has been mentioned here twice before;

The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.

In Memoriam: Thomas McIntyre.

I'm struck by how this brings up the old adage that it is a small world.  At least, our circle of associates can be amazingly small.  You wouldn't think that it'd be the case that two blogs I follow are authored by people who met Mr. McIntyre, which I had not, but he had become a frequent commenter on my blog.  

I'll miss his presence here.

Truly, it is a small world.

The entries on the two blogs noted, by the way, are very much worth reading and will give you a much better idea of who Tom was than anything I've written here.

No people can be great who have ceased to be virtuous.

No people can be great who have ceased to be virtuous.

Samuel Johnson

The Best Posts of the Week of November 20, 2022

The best posts of the week of November 20, 2022.

The 2023 Wyoming Legislative Session. The Waking Up Edition (Vol 1).

Evidence for the cooking of fish 780,000 years ago at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel

 

Much ado about Twitter.

Musing for Conservatives from a real (well mostly, sometimes, 50/50 anyway) Conservative.

Lex Anteinternet: Evidence for the cooking of fish 780,000 years ago...A few observations.

In Memoriam: Thomas McIntyre.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist XL. Panem et circenses.

Quiet Quitting? Is it real, and if so, why?

Wars and Rumors of War, 2022. The Russo Ukrainian War Edition, Part Nine. Rout

The 2022 Election Part XIV. The Results.

There is such a thing as a free lunch. Was, Lex Anteinternet: Quiet Quitting? Is it real, and if so, why?

The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.

A Thankgiving Day pondering.

Small Business Saturday: Remembering Quadragesimo Anno.

Sunday, November 26, 1922. Peanuts, Colorado's, and Gallipoli.

Prisoners of Myth I. The Russians in the war with Ukraine

Thursday, November 26, 1942. Casablanca premiers, Battle of Brisbane

Thursday, November 26, 1942. Casablanca premiers, Battle of Brisbane

When I first posted this (written yesterday, went up early this morning) I failed to appreciate that this was Thanksgiving Day for 1942.

Now, of course, most of the day is gone.

Usually when something like this comes up, I ponder on what that must have meant for my family at the time, so I've added that below.

The legendary film Casablanca, truly one of the best movies ever filmed, premiered at the Hollywood Theater in New York in advance of its general release.

The movie is a fantastic film that holds up today.  Amazingly, the film as we know it barely came together, with casting changes and the like.  Paul Henreid proved aloof during the film, regarding the other actors as lessors, and the film was overall one that shouldn't have worked out as well as it truly did.

It's one of my favorite films.

Today In Wyoming's History: November 26: 1942  Lusk announces they will forgo outdoor Christmas lights in accordance with a request from the War Production Board.  Attribution.  Wyoming History Calendar.

Riots broke out in Brisbane, Australia, between US servicemen and Australian servicemen.

This was not a minor incident, and one Australian serviceman was killed.  While generally Americans and Australians got along well, the disproportionately high pay of American serviceman was a source of problems all over the world, as merchants would cater to them, and it gave them an advantage with local women.  American soldiers were also freer with physical affection towards Australian women which offended Australians even though, ironically, the culture was much more libertine in the same arena behind closed doors.  

Additionally, Americans were dismissive of Australian soldiers in general, even though at the time they were all volunteer and had served in the war since 1939.  Australians were disdainful in turn of Americans who had, right up until about this time, a record of defeat.

The whole thing came to a head, resulting in two days of riots, the news of which was later suppressed.

President Franklin Roosevelt ordered gasoline rationing expanded to include the entire United States, effective December 1.

Speaking of a situation that involved the use of fuel, German 6th Army Commander Paulus, trapped at Stalingrad with his troops, wrote to his superior, Von Manstein, as follows:

For the past thirty-six hours I had received no orders or information from a higher level. In a few hours I was liable to be confronted with the following situation:

(a) Either I must remain in position on my western and northern fronts and very soon see the army front rolled up from behind (in which case I should formally be complying with the orders issued to me), or else

(b) I must make the only possible decision and turn with all my might on the enemy who was about to stab the army from behind. In the latter event, clearly, the eastern and northem fronts can no longer be held and it an only be a matter of breaking through to the south-west.

In case of (b) I should admittedly be doing justice to the situation but should also - for the second time - be guilty of disobeying an order.

(3) In this difficult situation I sent the Fuhrer a signal asking for freedom to take such a final decision if it should become necessary. I wanted to have this authority in order to guard against issuing the only possible order in that situation too late.

...

The airlift of the last three days has brought only a fraction of the calculated minimum requirement (600 tons = 300 Ju daily). In the very next few days supplies can lead to a crisis of the utmost gravity.

I still believe, however, that the army can hold out for a time. On the other hand - even if anything like a corridor is cut through to me - it is still not possible to tell whether the daily increasing weakness of the army, combined with the lack of accommodation and wood for constructional and heating purposes, will allow the area around Stalingrad to be held for any length of time.

While Paulus was asking for freedom of action, in Von Manstein's view the 6th Army lacked sufficient fuel to accomplish even minor movements, making a breakout by the 6th Army impossible.

As noted, this was Thanksgiving Day for 1942.

That is, US Thanksgiving Day.

Unlike Americans seem to think, most countries have a Thanksgiving of some sort.  It's very common for Christian countries. The U.S. can't really claim to have had "the first Thanksgiving", although we do.

However, not all countries have Thanksgiving on the same day by any means, so this was the holiday date for the U.S. in 1942.

On this day I know my father's family would have gathered for a Thanksgiving Dinner and it would have been the traditional type, turkey, etc.  It likely would have been, however, just my father's immediate family, but which I mean his parents and siblings.  No aunts or uncles lived nearby, they were living in Scotsbluff, and the grandparents were in Denver and Iowa respectively.

My father and his siblings would have been on a holiday break from school of course.  It was the first Thanksgiving of the war, but none of them were old enough to really be directly impacted by it yet.

Prisoners of Myth I. The Russians in the war with Ukraine

How the Soviets,  and by extension the Russians, came to see themselves.  In reality the wool in the uniform may have come from the US, the steel nad munitions that supported his artillery did as well, when those jack boots wore out he may have worn service shoes, and he definately dug into SPAM for rations from time to time.

The danger of believing myths is that some become ahistorical.  

Not all, but some.

Which points out while studying history is so important.

Myth itself is something that's not existentially bad.  Cultures create myths for a reason, with that reason stretching back into antiquity.  The earliest human beings created myths, as their entire historical memory was oral.  Current events were reduced to stories, and the stories remembered through telling, with them evolving into myths over time.  For that reason, myths are often surprisingly accurate. There really was a Troy that the Greeks waged war upon. . . the Apaches and the Navajo had really once lived in a region where there were great white bears, you get the point.

The problem becomes that myth making can become a coping mechanism for a culture as well.  And that can become enormously dangerous to that culture in some instances.  The Germans adopting the theory that they hadn't been defeated on the battlefield in World War One, which they had been, lead them to adopt a "stabbed in the back" theory that lead directly to World War Two.  The myth of the "Lost Cause" resulted in rank and file Southerners forgetting that they'd gone to war over slavery and had been outright defeated on the battlefield with a huge percentage of Southern soldiers deserting before the war's end, resulting partially in the preservation of formal institutional racism well into the second half of the 20th Century.  The myth of the Stolen Election is corrupting American Conservatism and the Republican Party right now.

Russia, likewise, went into Ukraine believing in a set of myths, with one overarching myth, and its paying the price for it.

Modern Russia and the Myth of World War Two.

• The basic myth.

At some point during World War Two itself the Soviet Union started telling the myth that the USSR, alone in its fight against Nazi Germany, and supported only weakly by two untrustworthy and cowardly allies, the US and the UK defeated the Germans.

Not hardly.

But this myth, or versions of it, became all pervasive in the USSR and are still believed in Russia today.  Indeed, amazingly enough, versions of this myth became relatively common, in a different form, in the West.

It's simply not true.

Now eighty years after the fact, the history of the Second World War is starting to be more accurately told, stripped away of many of its myths, including this one.  Let's flatly state the truth of the matter here.

The Soviet Union, following its own self interests, was an occasional defacto Axis ally from 1939 until the spring of 1941.  In that capacity, it helped the Germans subjugate continental Western Europe, but the Germans were unable to defeat the British.  Unable to do just that, Germany turned its eye on Soviet resources, which the USSR was well aware it was going, and the two nations bargained on greater German access to them.  Stalin overplayed his hand and sought a post-war position from Germany, at the expense of the British Empire, which was too much for the German's to agree to, and the Germans, contemptuous of the Slavs in any event, were ready to break off the effort and go to war with the USSR, the heir to Imperial Russia, which the Germans had defeated in 1917.

The German invasion came in June 1941.  The Red Army made some heroic stands in the summer and fall of 1941, but by and large it was thrown back in defeat.  The real Soviet achievement in 41 was not being outright defeated, but it was thrown back again, on a massive scale, in 1942.  Only in the winter of 1942 did the Soviet fortunes turn, but it would take titanic efforts and massive loss of life in order for the Germans to be pushed back and ultimately defeated.

Added to that, much of the Red Army was simply never very good.  Materially, the Soviets were unable to supply their own army adequately, and that fell to the UK and the US in large part.  Only 55 to 60 percent of the Red Army was Russian, with the balance being made up of other ethnicities, including large numbers of Ukrainians, 7,000,000 of whom served in the Red Army. At no point whatsoever did the Soviets ever fight, moreover, alone.  There was always a "second" or even third and fourth front which was manned by other Western Allies alone.

• The actual truth

It's odd to think of the myth of the invincibility of the Red Army when it's also so commonly known that the Soviet state spent so much time destroying it after the Civil War.

Contrary to the way we came to imagine it, the USSR did not spend a lot of time trying to become a military titan before World War Two.  The Reds, not without good reason, somewhat feared what an effective standing army would mean to its political leadership.  People have often been mystified by the purges of the Red Army, but in context they made sense.  After the fighting of the civil war had ended, the only powers powerful enough to challenge the Communists core running the country were in the Red Army, or in other established Communists.  Both took a pounding during the purges.  Indeed, while it hardly justifies murder, it's far to ask if Stalin would have been able to remain in control of the country if political opponents like Trotsky had run around unaddressed, or if powerful military leaders had not been done away with.

Added to that, the Russian armies, and it's fair to use the plural, that we have as examples in the 1900 to 1941 time period were bad.  The Japanese had defeated the Imperial Russian Army in 1905, the same army in World War One did not turn in a stellar performance.  The Whites and the Reds did fight each other tooth and nail during the Civil War, but all civil wars tend to work that way.  The Soviets did well in some of the Russo Polish War but were ultimately defeated, and thereafter they lived in mortal fear of hte Poles, and the Romanians, even though logic would dictate that neither country was capable of being a serious military threat to the Soviet Union.

And, of note, it's clear that the Russians still fear the Poles today.

The USSR was fought to a standstill in the Winter War with Finland just before World War Two. And only in the final months leading up to June, 1941, did the Soviets undertake a real effort to build a capable modern army.  It had some raw elements of that, including some good armor and aircraft designs, but it also had a weakened military institution with no NCO corps and a murdered officer corps.  It realy wasn't able to fix this, and nobody would be, prior to the German invasion.

What the Soviets did have was a  massive amount of territory and a leader in singular control.  

What it also had on 1941 was a British Empire that was already fighting the Germans, with ground combat having been going on in North Africa since June 1940.  The German invasion of the USSR was the second front, or the third if the Battle of the Atlantic is considered.

The UK was already receiving substantial US material, and frankly military, support well before Barbarossa, but the British were a major military materials producer itself.  Both the US and the UK immediately started to offer the Soviets material support.  It would take months before it really began to arrive, but of note, it took months as well for the Red Army to become really effective.

During the war, that aid would become enormous.  The US supplied 400,000 vehicles to the Soviets, changing what had been a horse-drawn army into a mostly vehicle transport one.  Studebaker's 6x6 trucks were for all practical purposes a dedicated Soviet truck, not even entering the US military in substantial numbers.  14,000 aircraft were supplied to the Soviets, including some, like Studebaker trucks, that were essentially models dedicated to Soviet use.  13,000 US tanks were supplied, with additional numbers of British tanks also being supplied.

15,000,000 pairs of Army service shoes, the legendary U.S. Munson Last boot, were supplied to the Red Army. If you see a photo of a Soviet soldier wearing lace up boots, those are almost certainly US made ones.

107,000 tons of cotton went to the USSR for their use.  2,700,000 tons of petroleum products.  4,500,000 tons of food were supplied.

An entire Ford tire factor was supplied.

80% of the copper used by the USSR during the war came from the US and UK.  55% of the aluminum.  

Immediately after the war, before the myth really set in, Soviet sources outright admitted that the USSR could not have fought without lend lease supplies. As late as 1963 a Soviet marshal was known to have stated the same.

The Western Allies, of course, provided this for their own purposes.  It was not charity.  The Soviets were always reticent to some degree to really acknowledge it at that.  But its important to note that the option not to provide it existed.

That would have been risky, which is in part why the leaders of the Western Allies were so ready to engage in it.  The Soviets were a known potential enemy, but the Germans were a present actual enemy.  Prior to June 1941, the British had gone it alone, but they had been fighting a defensive war the entire time.  It was possible to imagine a Germany, particularly one that made some sort of accommodation to the Soviet Union, consolidating gains in Europe to the point where it would have been impossible for the British to ever dislodge them.  Even after December 7, 1941, that remained a possibility.  The Western Allies needed the Soviets in the fight, just as the Soviets needed the Western Allies in order to fight.  The Patrick Buchanan view that the Western Allies should have allowed the USSR and Nazi Germany to destroy each other is wrongheaded, as chances are good that the Germans would have forced the Soviets into a peace of some sort that secured southern Russian materials and left Germany in a position basically impossible to deal with.  Having said that, at the same time, it's not impossible either to imagine the Soviets getting to that point.

It was, after all, the Russians who had given up in the Russo Japanese War and who had collapsed in World War One. And the Soviets, who had been defeated by the Poles after the Great War. And the Soviets, who had accommodated in the Winter War, after invading Finland.  Throughout World War Two, Stalin worried about the Western Allies reaching a separate peace, but that may have really  revealed more about Soviet thinking than anything else.  The Western Allies had fought the Germans to the bitter end in 1914-1918, which the Russians had not.

Moreover, for all its self-congratulatory propaganda.

Additionally, or all its self-congratulatory propaganda, the Soviet casualty list does not suggest what it might.  Massive Red Army losses in World War Two were in no small part self-inflicted, reflecting a poorly formed army that was badly trained and lacking a NCO corps.  It also reflected a leadership that was completely immune to concern over human losses, truly viewing Soviet soldiers as cannon fodder.  The German view as quite similar.  The fighting on the Eastern Front was in part savage, as the two armies engaged had leadership which didn't really care about high losses as long as goals seemed obtainable.  The Western Allies did not fight this way as, being from democratic societies, they could not contemplate using their citizenry in such a callous fashion.

Additionally, and seemingly completely missed by Soviet propaganda, the Western Allies went int alone on the seas, with the Soviet Navy being largely irrelevant the entire war.  While the Soviet Union had a navy, it didn't really matter, which effectively means that in a war fought on the land, air, and sea, the Soviets only fought on two out of the three.

And, as earlier noted, the Soviets were latecomers to the war and, in fact, had been on the other side early on.  If the US and UK did not take such massive losses, it was because, as noted, that they didn't fight that way.  They were, however, fighting, and fighting in more areas than the USSR was.  They were not, of course, fighting on their own ground, however, which does make a real difference.

And it goes beyond that.

Over 7,000,000 Red Army troops were Ukrainians, as noted, with indigenous Poles, Turkic peoples, and others filling the Red Army ranks.  But around 1,000,000 Soviet citizens provided aid to the Germans during the war as well.

This is a complicated story, as that aid varied in nature substantially.  The most pronounced anti-Soviet variants of it might be found in Cossack elements that went over wholesale to the Germans and who served on the Eastern Front, the Western Front, and in the Balkans.  But they were not alone.  Other Soviet citizens willingly took up arms with the Germans and fought against the Moscow.  Others, particularly in Ukraine, fought against the Soviets and the Germans, reprising the odd role of the Ukrainian Greens of the Russian Civil War who fought against the Reds and the Whites. Large numbers of Red Army POWs joined Vlasov's White Russian Army, but probably did so out of a desire simply to survive the ordeal of being a German POW.  

Soviet civilians aided the Germans in varying ways as well.  The examples are too numerous not to take note of, with Soviet civilians providing all sorts of minor aid and comfort to the Germans in spite of the fact that the Germans were barbaric towards Soviet citizens, visiting death and rape upon them at a scale that was too large not to be regarded as institutionally sanctioned.  Indeed, early on Russians and Belorussians greeted the Germans as liberators, with their view largely changing due to German barbarism.  Ukrainians greeted the Germans with bread and salt, a traditional Ukrainian greeting.  They, too, came to change their views under German repression.

• Bringing the myth forward.

After the war, and even by its late stages, the Soviets were developing a myth that they had won World War Two basically on their own.  Their leadership knew better, which showed itself even as late as the 1980s, when the Soviets lived in real fear of a NATO attack upon the Soviet Union.  But the myth has solidified, and it's showing itself now.

The logical question would be why such a myth would have been developed and fostered.  There are, however, a series of reasons for that.

All nations have foundational myths that are central to their identify in a way.  The American one dates back essentially to the Revolution, and was redefined by the Civil War, giving the country the foundational story of rising up against tyranny, which isn't really true, to form a self-governing democratic republic with a unique mission in the world. The Australian one involves a history of mistreatment by the British culminating in the disaster of Gallipoli, which in truth the Australians were only one nation involved in a much larger Allied effort. Other examples could be given.

The Soviet Union going into World War Two already had the Russian Revolution, but the imposition of Communism on the Russian Empire had not been universally accepted by any means, and various peoples struggled against it into the 1930s.  The USSR had only been saved from defeat by the support of Western, capitalist, nations during World War Two, after it had first conspired with the fascist Nazi Germany, for its own reasons.  During the war, large percentages of its population, in spite of massive Nazi barbarism, had sided with the Germans, and resistance movements went on in the country until the late 1940s.  A myth of a Great Patriotic War, as the Soviets came to call it, served to counter all of that.

The modern Russian Army is not the Red Army.  For one thing, it lacks the huge number of Ukrainians that the Red Army had.  But the Red Army, without the West, was never all that good.  It was bad going into World War Two, and it survived World War Two thanks to the West.  After the war, it continued to rely on Western technology for a time, in the form of purchased Western material, and in the form of acquired German knowledge, but over the decades it had to go over to simply acquiring it however they could, and often they simply did not.

The current Russian Army retains all the vices of the old, plus one more.  Its equipment is antiquated and poor.  Its leadership is bad.  

And it believes that it was invincible during World War Two, forgetting that it wasn't defeated due to Western support, the very thing Ukraine is getting now.

Sunday, November 26, 1922. Peanuts, Colorado's, and Gallipoli.

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Charles Schultz, the great cartoonist.

Schultz was born in Minneapolis and grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota.  He was an only child that loved drawing from the beginning.  He was conscripted in 1943 and served as an infantryman, narrowly avoiding killing a German soldier towards the end of t he war as he fogot to load the  M2HB machine gun he was assigned to.

After the war, he first worked for the Catholic comic magazine Timeless Topix.  Peanuts had its first appearance, of sorts, in 1947.

I don't have a clue what this photograph is supposed to depict, and only know that it was taken on this day in 1922.

Opera singer Beniamino Gigli and Paul Longone, general manager of the Chicago City Opera Company.

The first popular election for the position of President of Uruguay was held.  José Serrato of the Colorado (Red) Party won.

Red would indicate, of course, it's left wing ideology, which it holds.  That's because red is the color of the left everywhere in the world, except the US.

Well, it wasn't always that way.  When John Birchers used to state "better dead than red" they didn't mean "better dead than a member of the Republican Party".  But later, some pinhead reversed the colors in the US as an example of moronic American Exceptionalism.  That individual should be sentenced to read Mao's Little Red Book every day for the rest of his life.

Anyhow. . . 

The United Kingdom turned control of the Gallipoli peninsula over to the Turks.

Dr. Jack premiered.

It was one of the most popular films of 1922.