Early America enjoyed, perhaps, a little more participatory local democracy than Britain, and had a slightly broader electorate and already the highest standard of living in the world. But the revolution so rapturously mythologized by Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry and others, was really, as Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison and Adams did not forget, a somewhat grubby contest over taxes.
In one of the greatest feats of statesmanship of all history, the Americans, and especially Benjamin Franklin, persuaded the British to expel the French from North America, and then persuaded the French to provide the margin of victory in evicting the British themselves. This precocious manipulation of the world’s two greatest powers by a group of colonists showed astounding finesse and precocity, made more piquant and ironic by the fact that their rebellion was against paying the colonies’ share of the cost of removing the French, and the French were recruited to save the Americans their proportionate share of the cost of their own eviction.
All countries swaddle themselves in myths, and the Americans aren’t more self-indulgent than others; only more successful and operating on the grand scale of a country that in two long lifetimes grew to possess completely unprecedented power and influence in the world.
Even without the great pre-eminence of America, the founders of the country possessed a presentational skill that vastly exceeded the procession of demagogues and lunatics that sent and followed each other to the guillotine in the French Revolution. And they were certainly more persuasive and sophisticated than the British spokesmen for constitutional monarchy.
But their unintended legacy of this gift for theatricality is the endless hyperbole and hucksterism of American materialism and individuality.
Conrad Black, “Send in the clowns”, National Post, 2010-03-09
March 9, 2010
QotD: Early America
March 1, 2010
Christopher Hitchens’ retrospective on the life of Alexander Haig
Christopher Hitchens does not come to praise (a would-be) Caesar, but to bury him . . . good and deep:
“Nobody has a higher opinion of General Alexander Haig than I do,” I once wrote. “And I think he is a homicidal buffoon.” I did not then realize that this view of mine was at least partly shared by so many senior figures on the American right.
When I moved to Washington in the very early years of Ronald Reagan’s tenure, I was pretty sure that Haig, then secretary of state, was delusional (and not even in a good way). What I would not have believed then was what has become apparent since — that his boss, Ronald Reagan, often felt the same way.
And this is the nice part of the biography. Go read the whole thing.
February 24, 2010
Roleplaying games, back-in-the-day
Jon, my former virtual landlord (and still host for my original blog archives), sent along a link to this article. Knowing Jon’s distaste for such things, he must have been grimacing when he clicked Send:
I was initiated into the mysteries of gaming via a grade school classmate’s copy of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set. A mysterious artifact, this red box contained a set of waxy, dull-edged dice and a couple of thin rulebooks. Designed to be played on its own or as an introduction to the complexities of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the Basic Set-or “Red Box” as it came to be known by gamers-became the key to an entire universe of adventure and magic. Little did I know at the time this would be the beginning of a lifelong love affair with gaming and fantasy in general.
With the news that D&D publishers Wizards of the Coast intends to release a new edition of the introductory rule set-in a red box no less-I thought it might be fun to ask a few writers about their own early experiences with the world’s best known fantasy role-playing game.
My first experience with the game was in high school, where a classmate found out that I was into wargames and wanted to “help me” by diverting me away from such evil warmongering stuff. His gaming methadone involved mass slaughter of beings and beasts in a “dungeon” he’d created. About a dozen of us were introduced to the game in the same session . . . let’s just say that it didn’t go terribly well. With no experienced players in the pack, we specialized in aggravating the Dungeon Master (the person running the game for us). After about an hour, the DM was deliberately killing us off as fast as he could.
I played several other role playing game systems after that, but never found one I was comfortable with. I ended up “rolling my own” by basing it on Metagaming’s Melee and Wizard games (both designs originally by the great Steve Jackson) for the combat and magic systems. I found this worked best for my occasional RPG sessions, as I hate-with-a-passion being in games with rules lawyers (the archetypical one has memorized all the rulebooks, tables, supplements, and so on). If I don’t explain why something is happening, they have to concentrate on what to do about it instead of getting into heated arguments about die roll modifiers and such.
In the early 1980’s, I ended up working at Mr. Gameway’s Ark in Toronto (which appears to be Google-proof . . . or doesn’t have more than occasional mentions in mailing list conversations), which was the largest independent game store in town. I got to read the rules of dozens of RPG systems, but perhaps I was spoiled for choice . . . I never did end up playing any.
Make up your minds!
American soldiers have been accused of being too “egg-headed” in their approach to war, with much being made about the constant upgrading of equipment with newer electronic and computerized gizmos. But it’s not what it seems — now a New York Times Idea of the Day blogger says the US military has a “fetish” for Wilhelmine and Hitlerian Germany:
“Why do people have a fixation with the German military when they haven’t won a war since 1871?”
That’s the Tom Clancy quote William J. Astore uses to begin this essay on TomDispatch (picked up by Mother Jones), renewing a critique of what some see as a Clausewitz cult among American military strategists.
Mr. Astore, a former Air Force Academy history instructor (and Wehrmacht buff as a boy), says “the American military’s fascination with German military methods and modes of thinking” is reflected outwardly in busts of Clausewitz on display American military academies, and more tangibly in echoes of the Blitzkrieg in the first and second Iraq wars:
In retrospect, what disturbs me most is that the military swallowed the Clausewitzian/German notion of war as a dialectical or creative art, one in which well-trained and highly motivated leaders can impose their will on events. In this notional construct, war became not destructive, but constructive. It became not the last resort of kings, but the preferred recourse of “creative” warlords who demonstrated their mastery of it by cultivating such qualities as flexibility, adaptability and quickness. One aimed to get inside the enemy’s “decision cycle” . . . while at the same time cultivating a “warrior ethos” within a tight-knit professional army that was to stand above, and also separate from, ordinary citizens.
There were lots of things that western armies could profitably learn after 1945 from German tactical and operational models. There was no intrinsic reason why small German units fought better and more effectively than their allied opponents, in spite of Nazi propaganda, there was no “racial” strength that made German soldiers better at their trade than other nations. Remember that a lot of “German” soldiers were Austrians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and other allied or conquered peoples.
German soldiers were better trained, and had much greater tactical autonomy, which gave them more flexibility and encouraged improvisation at all levels. Western armies were much more hierarchical and didn’t delegate decision-making to lower ranks. That alone made German battalions, companies, and platoons far more dangerous: when things didn’t go according to the detailed plan, they adapted and still tried to accomplish their assigned mission. British, French, and (especially) Soviet units were not rewarded for departing from their (inevitably) more detailed orders.
Non-military critics may easily assume that trying to learn anything from the Kaiser’s army or Hitler’s army carries a moral taint, but paradoxically, those soldiers — fighting for an authoritarian or dictatorial government — had more tactical freedom than Allied soldiers who could vote (and whose votes actually mattered).
February 23, 2010
Step aside, Stonehenge
Turkey is apparently the place to be for cutting-edge archaeological work:
Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago — a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture — the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember — the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.
Göbekli Tepe — the name in Turkish for “potbelly hill” — lays art and religion squarely at the start of that journey. After a dozen years of patient work, Schmidt has uncovered what he thinks is definitive proof that a huge ceremonial site flourished here, a “Rome of the Ice Age,” as he puts it, where hunter-gatherers met to build a complex religious community. Across the hill, he has found carved and polished circles of stone, with terrazzo flooring and double benches. All the circles feature massive T-shaped pillars that evoke the monoliths of Easter Island.
Though not as large as Stonehenge — the biggest circle is 30 yards across, the tallest pillars 17 feet high — the ruins are astonishing in number. Last year Schmidt found his third and fourth examples of the temples. Ground-penetrating radar indicates that another 15 to 20 such monumental ruins lie under the surface. Schmidt’s German-Turkish team has also uncovered some 50 of the huge pillars, including two found in his most recent dig season that are not just the biggest yet, but, according to carbon dating, are the oldest monumental artworks in the world.
February 20, 2010
Prohibition’s victims of US government poisoning
Deborah Blum talks about something I’d only heard a little bit about — the US government’s deliberate poisoning of illicit drinkers during Prohibition:
Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.
Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
Although mostly forgotten today, the “chemist’s war of Prohibition” remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was “our national experiment in extermination.”
The US government hasn’t shown that it learned (any of) the lessons of Prohibition, and there have been documented attempts by government agents to contaminate drugs on their way to American destinations. Perhaps the best known was the use of airborne spraying of the herbicide Paraquat to make Mexican marijuana more dangerous to consume. Rumours abound of other, more recent, attempts to poison other drugs on their way to the States.
February 19, 2010
Bosworth Field, real location now made public
As I mentioned back in October, archaeologists have located the actual site of the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Now that they’ve had time to do more research and examination, they’ve gone public with the location:
The true site of one of the most decisive battles in English history has been revealed.
Bosworth, fought in 1485, which saw the death of Richard III, was believed to have taken place on Ambion Hill, near Sutton Cheney in Leicestershire.
But a study of original documents and archaeological survey of the area has now pinpointed a site in fields more than a mile to the south west.
A new trail will lead from the current visitor centre to the new location.
[. . .]
The original announcement was made in October but the exact location was kept a secret until now to protect it from treasure hunters.
Researchers also believe they have identified the medieval marsh where Richard III was dragged from his horse and killed.
February 18, 2010
Civilization V? In development, apparently
I was a huge fan of the Civilization series of games, starting with the original game and running through the series, although as I mentioned back in 2005, I wasn’t enjoying the later releases as much as I had the earlier ones. To my surprise, there will be a follow-on Civilization V available later this year:
Funny story, I was musing about a Civilization sequel just yesterday while out for a run, and lo and behold, 2K Games says it’s in development as I’m typing this. What’s more — and I have to admit, somewhat unexpectedly — it’s still being developed for PC.
What’s Civilization? Surely you jest . . . but in case you’re serious, it’s pretty simple: One of the most important turn-based strategy video game in the history of the medium. Also: A pretty spot-on history simulator (in terms of history’s broad strokes and ideological angles, anyway). The general goal — to conquer the world by diplomatic or less-than-diplomatic means — hasn’t changed much since the original debuted in 1991, but as they say, the journey is all, and that journey’s generally improved by leaps and bounds with each installment.
Calling Civilization V’s new engine “astonishing,” 2K says the game has been rebuilt “from the ground-up” with a brand new combat engine, more sophisticated diplomacy, and expansions all around to existing features.
Here’s the web site for the upcoming game. Yeah, I’ll almost certainly buy it, even though it may be coming out around the same time as my current gaming addiction’s next release (Guild Wars 2).
February 12, 2010
Eric Raymond finally “gets” the Vikings
I’m just as happy that my area didn’t receive any of the snow that’s been blanketing areas to the south of us. Eric Raymond wasn’t as lucky:
Now I understand the Viking Era
So I’m sitting here, looking out my window at the 3-foot snow and the 5-foot icicles, reverting to ancestral type. Thinking:“Fuck this. Let’s go sack Miklagard.”
And Ken Burnside points out even more opportunity for enriching historical knowledge:
The reason why Minnesota and Wisconsin were settled by Norwege and Swenske isn’t because the other cultures couldn’t hack the winters.
It’s because compared to 19th century Norway and Sweden, Upper Minneosta and Upper Wisconsin are *paradise*.
“Look! Farmland! Lakes for fishing! Timber and lumber to build from! And no morass of petty aristocracy to tell you no. And, hey, it only snows for five whole months here! They won’t believe THAT back in the old country!”
The only reason there weren’t more of them was because a lot of Norski STILL remember the marketing flimflam that was Greenland. They had a completely justified 900 year old mistrust of ANYONE telling them about ‘great farmland, only snows for five months of the year, plenty of timber…’
Crash site of the USS Macon declared a National Historic Site
Like most people, I assumed that the crashes of various post-WW1 dirigibles had already ruined the future of lighter-than-air flight well before the Hindenburg caught fire. I had forgotten about the US Navy’s fleet, including the Akron, Shenandoah, and the Macon:
The US government has added the crash site of the most powerful flying aircraft carrier ever built to the National Register of Historic Places, 75 years after the event.
The airship USS Macon — comparable in size to the even more famous and equally doomed liner Titanic — suffered storm damage and crashed into the ocean off Point Sur, south of San Francisco, exactly 75 years ago yesterday. The huge dirigible’s remains and those of her embarked biplane fighters now lie 1500 feet below the waves in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. However, all but two of the 83 men aboard survived the crash and were rescued by responding waterborne ships.
“The USS Macon and its associated Sparrowhawk biplanes are not only historically significant to our nation’s history, but have unique ties to our local communities, where public museums highlight the airship’s history,” said Paul Michel, Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary superintendent. “The National Register listing highlights the importance of protecting the wreck site and its artifacts for further understanding our past.”
February 2, 2010
There’s more than one 3:54 length clip in Downfall?
Elsewhere, the Guardian wonders why the Hitler-in-the-bunker scene from Downfall has become such a popular meme.
January 29, 2010
High taxes/low taxes, it’s all relative
Lorne Gunter finds that what were once considered “intolerable” rates of taxation are microscopic compared to what we pay today:
The American colonists, by comparison, felt they were groaning under a crippling tax burden. Many of their staples, they felt, were onerously taxed while they received little from England in return and had no say in how large the levies against them would be.
[. . .]
So out of curiosity, I asked the historian what the level of taxation was in 1776 that caused the U.S. to declare its independence.
I will always recall his answer: “the equivalent today of about 5% to 7% of their income.”
What?
Today, in Canada, all levels of government, through all their taxes, can confiscate as much as half or more of a taxpayer’s income, in total. Income taxes, pension claw-backs, the GST, gasoline excise taxes, import duties and tariffs, estate taxes, property taxes, capital gains and on and on and on.
And yet, like the abused spouse rushing back to an abuser, many Canadians continue to sing the praises of ever bigger and bigger government. They rush to it in any crisis looking to be saved, whether through “free” health care during times of personal crisis or through auto company bailouts that demonstrate solidarity with distant workers in distant communities during times of global crisis.
The problem has been that Canadians expect the government (at all levels) to do something any time there’s a real or perceived crisis. Governments are happy to oblige by (at least appearing) to do something. Inevitably, the scope of what the government does increases every year. As “Steve the Pundit” wrote in the comments to the original article:
It’s true that Canadians have become far too dependent on government to save us from any crisis, large or small, much in the same way that the citizens of Metropolis continually looked to “Superman” to save them from all of their ills, whether it be an irradiated mutant bent on mass destruction … or a purse snatcher. Any crisis, it seems, “… look(ed) like a job for Superman!”
Exactly.
January 26, 2010
“Involvement in counter-espionage cases induces in some a form of paranoia”
Gordon Corera briefly looks at the KGB penetration of Britain’s intelligence agencies:
For 30 years Stephen De Mowbray has maintained a self-imposed silence on a career that once took him to the heart of one of British intelligence’s most controversial episodes.
In 1979 he quit his job with the Secret Service (MI5) because he believed officials had failed to take seriously the claim that British intelligence had been further penetrated by its enemy — the Soviet Union’s KGB.
A number of spies had been discovered in the 1960s but De Mowbray believed there were more. But he found no-one at the top willing to listen.
“People thought I was either mad or bad because I was trying to do something,” he says of that time.
Three decades later, De Mowbray decided to tell his side of the story after reading the authorised history of the Security Service, published last October.
I’m currently reading Christopher Andrew’s Defence of the Realm and just got to the start of the relevant section the other night. Between De Mowbray’s concerns and the careful concealment of “The Laundry”1 in the coverage so far, it’s a wonder they managed to find enough that was considered safe to release to the public.
If you’re interested, MI5 discusses their policies on information disclosure here.
1 I kid, I kid. “The Laundry” is the fictional department of British intelligence in The Atrocity Archive and The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross.
January 22, 2010
London in the 1960s
I’m not from London, but the England I grew up in looked very similar to the typical street scenes here (except I grew up in Middlesbrough, so imagine looking at these scenes through a dark gray filter): Wasleso’s London 1960s slideshow.
January 19, 2010
The evolution of music
In spite of the portentious title, this is just an excuse to post an old James Lileks quote from a few years back talking about the difference between popular music of the early 20th century with the worst excesses of the 60’s (the “60’s” being defined for convenience as running from about 1965-1974):
Every note is simple and obvious but it still seems remarkable that no one had thought to arrange them in that particular order. It’s the countertheme, to invent a musical term, that gives it spice, and the middle section has a lovely expansive quality that makes you think of Frank Sinatra peeing off a balcony in Vegas. And of course the beat: bum / bum / bum / bumbum bum / bum / bum / bum / bumbum bum.
The name of the show was a callback to an old song from the early part of the 20th century — “I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair.” I’ve only heard the first few bars, sung by Bugs Bunny with appropriate alterations: “I dream of Jeannie, she’s a light brown hare.” Old as the song was, audiences in the forties got the joke, just as people today recognize a reference to a song from the 60s.
The difference, of course, is that the 60s aren’t seen as The Past; the 60s are a Timeless Vault of Cultural Touchstones, the apotheosis of Western Civ. Sigh. Well. One of the future Diners will take place in the 60s — don’t ask why, it’ll be explained — and I will use many of the gutbustingly dreadful “psychedelic” records I have collected. It’s obvious from Note One that everyone involved in the effort had so much THC in their system you could dry-cure their phlegm and get a buzz off the resin, but instead of having the loose happy ho-di-hi-dee-ho cheer of a Cab Calloway reefer number, the songs are soaked with Art and Importance and Meaning. You can imagine the band members sitting down to hash out (sorry) the overarching themes of the album, how it should like start with Total Chaos man because those are the times in which we live with like war from the sky, okay, and then we’ll have flutes because flutes are peaceful like doves and my old lady can play that part because she like studied flute, man, in high school. The lyrics are all the same: AND THE KING OF QUEENS SAID TO THE EARTH THE HEIROPHANT SHALL NOW GIVE BIRTH / THE HOODED PRIESTS IN CHAMBERED LAIRS LEERED DOWN UPON THE LADIES FAIR / NEWWWW DAAAAY DAWNNNING!
Five years later it was obsolete. The Jeannie theme, however, will make toes tap in 2476 AD.
There’s more than enough evidence to support James in this notion . . . pick up a random 60’s Psychedelic album and this is what the lyrics are like.
