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(FYI: The term “intellectual” was unknown before 1813.)

German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche was a really smart guy and he was crazy. He wasn’t insane, mind you, just crazy. One of his pet themes was that human intelligence is “superflous” — that when you boil it all down, we humans are too smart by several orders of magnitude than we need to be. Not everybody, of course, just those with an IQ in the high two figures like your average washing machine repairman or members of Congress. Nietzsche was a brilliant pathologist of culture who called highly intelligent people too smart for their own britches. A lot of German philosophers were just like that.

Back in my university days, I had a good friend my dad’s age who had been a pilot during World War II, flying a Mitchell fighter-bomber in the Pacific. He was Bob Daffin, retired captain and a wise observer of the world.

He told me once that the reason the US won the air war over Europe was because American boys spent so much time under the hood of some car, tinkering with the engine while German boys were studying Hegel and learning to be philosophers.

“Knowing that kind of thing is fine,” he said, as long as you don’t have to climb up in a cockpit and fly off and shoot people or recognize what it means when your oil pressure drops or your prop starts making a weird noise. Philosophy won’t help you then.”

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*NOTE: Cherokee and Creek societies were matrilineal. Your father could be a white Scotsman but if your mother was a native Indian, that is what you were considered to be and you could actually become a tribal chief. Some did exactly that.

Every human on Earth is a descendant of an ancient tribe somewhere and, to some degree, we all still exhibit tribal emotions and tribal behaviors. A number of Scottish men who left clannish Scotland in the mid 1700’s, became fur traders in America and easily identified with the tribal Creek and Cherokee Indians. It was reciprocal.

Cherokee chiefs saw opportunity in the relationships with these brave, self-sufficient Scots and eagerly gave their daughters in marriage to them. It didn’t take long before Cherokees had Scottish last names and Scotsmen were Cherokee tribal chiefs.

This process began in earnest immediately after the horrible defeat of the Scots, at the blood-drenched Battle of Culloden on the dark morning of April 16, 1746.

Fighting with swords and spears on the open moor near Inverness, the ragtag Scots were slaughtered wholesale by a professional, well regimented British army with guns and bayonets. On that day the heart of Scotland was broken and the old ways of clan life were outlawed by the British and came to an abrupt end. Great numbers of Scotsmen left their homes forever and shipped out, many for America, some as cabin boys as young as twelve. Some of them wound up in the wilds of Appalachia, to make their livelihoods as fur trappers and traders in deer skins..

One of the Scots who would up living with the Cherokees was John Ross, son of a Cherokee woman. Ross became the principal chief of the Cherokees during the infamous Indian Removal and lobbied Congress opposing it, eventually becoming a Cherokee leader in Oklahoma.

The man who altered the Cherokee gene pool

It is believed that up to half of the Cherokee nation could be descendants of another Scotsman named Ludovic Grant, from Aberdeenshire. Grant was captured while fighting against England in 1715 and then shipped off to South Carolina, subsequently to work as a trader for the Cherokee people and then marrying into the tribe. He became father to a daughter who became ancestress to a huge proportion of Cherokees.

Shared Characteristics

The Scots who emigrated to America in the 1700’s already had much in common culturally with Native American tribes.

Each were indigenous people. Each had fought lengthy battles, stretching over centuries, both against one another and against invaders. The various Indian tribes of North America routinely warred against each other and their relations were manifestly hostile toward one another. This pattern also marked the history of the Scottish clans. Each had achieved partial, but by no means complete, success in fending off the invasions of other tribes.

Navajos and Apaches regularly attacked the Pueblos of the Southwest. The Huron despised the Iroquois, the Crow distrusted the Blackfeet, and the Sioux were disliked by all their neighbors. The image of supremely peaceful Indians, sitting around the fire with the peace pipe is a favored dream among pacifists but a misleading picture of tribal behavior. Tribal attacks and tribal vengeance both were extremely brutal.

Indeed, Scottish history, too, is fundamentally a constant round of violence and murder. No element of society was spared. Of the six Stuart sovereigns from James I to Mary Queen of Scots, for example, only one died a natural death. The ultimate symbolic event of this internecine warfare occurred in the valley of Glencoe, where, on February 13, 1692, the Campbells massacred the MacDonalds after enjoying their hospitality for several weeks!

This murderous rivalry re-appeared in the mountains of Appalachia with the protracted feud between the clannish Hatfields and the clannish McCoys and their numerous relatives. It went on for over 27 years, more or less epitomized by an “eye for an eye” mentality.

However, equally powerful among both Scottish Clans and Indian tribes is an almost overwhelming hospitality to friends and even select strangers, to the point that to decline it is proof of bad manners. In some ways, intertwining hospitality and hostility seem characteristically Celtic, as with the Cajuns of Louisiana and the rugged fishermen of Cornwall. If they like you, you are treated as family, otherwise try not to make eye contact in an Irish bar or an Ozark honkytonk if you’re a stranger.

Creek Indian Chief William McIntosh

Chief McIntosh, despite fervent opposition, and with a small group of Creek chiefs, negotiated the second Treaty of Indian Springs, in 1825, which gave virtually all Creek land remaining in the state of Georgia to the US, in exchange for a payment of $200,000. A controversial article in the treaty provided additional payment to McIntosh for the lands granted to him in the 1821 treaty. It cost him his life.

Just before dawn on April 30, 1825, Creek chief Menawa, accompanied by 200 Creek warriors, attacked McIntosh and set fire to his home and shot and stabbed him to death.

The Cherokee, the Creek and the Scots all shared being betrayed by powerful and wily authorities. Rich, English landlords kicked thousands of Scottish families out of their homes in what became known as “The Clearances”, in 1750 and again in 1860, while Creek and Cherokee families suffered hunger and death on the infamous “Trail of Tears”

“Is there an Indian in your woodpile?”

That was a question leveled at certain white people in the South generations ago, meant to imply that one’s family might have questionable ancestry. The fact is that, despite the “primitive” nature of early Creek, Cherokee and other tribes, biological overlap became inevitable across parts of the southern states once the dispossessed Scots moved into native territory.

In the process, both the Indians and the Europeans they adopted exchanged qualities which were and remain beneficial to each.

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“Three sheets to the wind”

This descriptive term refers to somebody who has had too much to drink and who exhibits an inability to navigate between the furniture or his fellow dinner guests and has trouble remembering where he left the car keys or, for that matter, the car.

It has nothing to do with laundry or wind but it’s a very descriptive term for the loss of control. The term is nautical, referring to sails on a boat, the lines of which which have become unsecured. Those lines are called “sheets” in sailor lingo and control the set of the sail to which they’re attached. When your sheets (lines) are flapping in the wind you’re no longer controlling the boat and when you fall forward at the table into a plate of spaghetti while trying to imitate Pavarotti you’re probably three sheets to the wind.

“Spittin’ image”

This is typically used to describe a child who closely resembles either father or mother or other relative but it’s incorrect. The proper phrase is “spirit and image” as in “that kid is the spirit and image of his grandfather.” Over time, people who heard the term and spoke it too fast thought it was “spittin’ image” and so that became fixed in the lexicon.

That phrase was often applied to me when I was a kid growing up because lot of people in our city knew my dad. “I don’t know you, young fella but your daddy is Bob Cotten.” I sometimes pause when I look in the mirror and see him looking back at me.

“Riding shotgun”

The first known use of this phrase probably occurred in the 1905 novel “Sunset Trail” by Alfred Henry Lewis, to describe the position next to the driver on a stagecoach which was subsequently featured in virtually every cowboy movie since then, played by some crusty old, tobacco-chewing codger who looked like Gabby Hayes and whose entire vocabulary was limited to “aw-shucks”, “tarnation” and “consarn it all”.

But the position was a real one in the real wild west and companies always used a “shotgun messenger” when transporting by stagecoach a strongbox containing money. If the coach carried only passengers or mail sacks, no one would be riding shotgun which became a tip off to robbers.

When Wyatt Earp first arrived in Tombstone in December 1879, he took a job as a stagecoach shotgun messenger for Wells Fargo, guarding shipments of silver bullion. When Earp was appointed Pima County Deputy Sheriff on July 27, 1881, his brother Morgan Earp took over his job.

Way, way, WAY back in high school, when my buddies and I would pile into one of our dad’s cars to aimlessly drive around town, we would compete for the front seat opposite the driver by shouting “SHOTGUN!”. We had no idea where that phrase came from but it was the place to be.

“Hair of the dog”

The whole phrase is “hair of the dog that bit you” and, believe it or not, it traces back several thousand years to the famous Greek playwright, Aristophanes and also Hippocrates and Pliny the Elder. So it’s old. In their day it referred to the common phrase; “like cures like” but in our time it means that you can cure a hangover by taking a shot of the same bust-head that disabled you the night before.

Those ancients thought it possible to prevent rabies by placing some hair from the offending animal directly onto the bloody wound. If this sounds to you like applied malpractice, it was.

A couple of years after Aristophanes, when we got to high school, it was believed that you could cure a hangover with a vodka and tomato juice concoction called a “Bloody Mary”. Sooner the moon be Roquefort cheese!

After one all-night house party in our senior year, a hungover friend wanted the Bloody Mary cure but couldn’t find any tomato juice so he just mixed a half bottle of ketchup with some Lea & Perrins and water and tossed it down prior to tossing it back up. Ah, youth!

The Bloody Mary cocktail was invented by bartender Fernand "Pete" Petiot at Harry's New York Bar in Paris in the early 1920s but Fernand probably didn’t mean it to be medicine. It’s not. Experience will tell you that hangovers are not cured, they are prevented and a bloody Mary will do neither.

Dashboard

This, as everybody knows, is the thing forward of the steering wheel in a car that tells you how much gas you have and how fast you’re going but it wasn’t always so. Back when roads were paved with mud and there weren’t any cars, all you had for transportation was a horse-drawn wagon, stagecoach or carriage, which on a rainy day meant that a lot of the road would be kicked up (“dashed”) onto you and the driver by horses. The solution was to place a barrier between the mud and the passengers and this was a wide board called the dashboard.

Nowadays, dashboards have moved up from wagons to cars to computer apps bearing no relation to the original or to mud.

“Knock on Wood”

Everybody knows that this action is taken to either prevent bad luck or to continue good luck but where did it come from?

Well, a few centuries ago, long before technology ruled the world, people thought that spirits lived inside trees and if you tapped on one after needing the intervention of some saving grace, you would be shielded from harm. Others thought that it referred to the wooden Cross of Christ and that you’d get a pass from being harmed of you knocked on any piece of wood as a proxy. Winston Churchill reportedly kept a piece of wood nearby in case.

In Cornwall, England, fishermen who encounter any potential for harm coming to them will say “touch wood”. This is common across Great Britain and may derive from the ancient Druids who worshiped oak trees.

The origins of words and phrases are more than mere curiosities. They also can reveal how we think the way we do and how our various cultures evolved.

So stay tuned.
Meanwhile, knock on wood and keep your sheets out of the wind.

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Please note: Due to a lengthy hospital stay in April, I missed two publication dates and promised paid subscribers that I would make up for that with two extra editions. This is the second of them.

(You’ve probably heard the name “Chisholm Trail” without knowing how it began or why it was important in the development of the west before railroads. It was important to the expanding agricultural economy of America. Many educators simply overlooked it. So, read on!)

The Scotsman who was a Cherokee Indian

As weird as it might seem, there are a lot of place names in the Indian lands of Oklahoma which have their origin in Scotland. The best known is probably Chisholm, the name from Inverness, Scotland, attached to the famous cattle trail that runs from south Texas up to Kansas. It was developed by Jesse Chisholm, a Cherokee fur trader and descendant of a Scotsman grandfather who married a Cherokee woman. Jesse upgraded an old Osage Indian trail for the purpose of connecting a number of his trading posts, northward from south Texas.

Born in 1805 in the Hiawassee region of Tennessee, Jesse was taken to Arkansas by his mother in 1810, as part of the relocation of Cherokee people from the Carolinas.

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Frederic Remington did as much as any artist to reveal the lifestyle and culture of the American far west, making him worthy of the scholastic study he seldom receives in American schools.

“Oh Give Me a Home …”

The saga of the American west was a dreamland of cowboys and Indians and cattle drives and shootouts and dusty saloons with roughnecks playing poker and some skinny piano player banging away on an old upright and flaming arrows setting fire to a homestead and greedy land barons hiring freelance gunfighters to shoo away settlers. You and I saw all this and more on double-feature Saturdays at the Homewood Theater.

Those old cowboy movies were based on the works of novelists and fanciful newspaper and magazine reports, many written by people in New York who were not cowboys but who so greatly enlarged upon the folklore that it captivated the imaginations of most Americans, including subsequent generations of film makers.

Frederic Remington brought the old west to life, years before the widespread acceptance of cameras. He was never a cowboy but he immersed himself in their culture to such a degree that he could almost have been one.

“Where the buffalo roam…”

In many ways, Remington was like another major American illustrator, N.C. Weyth, who went west from Massachusetts for the same reason 25 years later. Both men resisted formal education, and were so inspired by the American west that they had to experience firsthand the life of cavalry soldiers and cowboys and plains Indians. Fortunately, their keen artistic eye and remarkable talent captured the life of the west and dis so more vividly than cameras did a generation later.

Remington was born in Canton, New York, in 1861, to a prominent and well-to-do family (he was a cousin of Eliphalet Remington, founder of Remington Arms) and politely resisted formal education for the rest of his life, preferring to draw and paint without being instructed. He also hated hard work except for a boundless energy for drawing and painting and later, sculpture. Fortunately, his family encouraged his talent.

At the age of 19, he was so full of himself that he went out to Montana to buy his own cattle ranch and a mining operation but was denied both for lack of money. But while there he saw the American West with its vast open prairies, bison herds, cattle roaming without fences and, importantly, the last fights between the US Cavalry and and Indian tribes, scenes he had vividly imagined since early childhood which would later define his life as an artist.

On returning east, Remington was almost broke with only three dollars in his pocket. However, he had over 300 sketches and drawings of the rough and ready wild west and these began opening doors for him. Harpers Weekly purchased “The Apache War: Indian Scouts on Geronimo’s Trail” for the cover of their January, 1886 issue. It was the first published work under Remington’s name and the start of his remarkable career.

Remington was never the cowboy he dreamed of being. For one thing, he tended to be a bit lazy physically and for another, he was inordinately fond of good food and drink, resulting in his becoming portly and overweight.

But he seemed born with an amazing eye for detail and became adept at using it in his art. He could translate a memory of how moonlight appeared into very realistic, color scenes of subjects bathed in a moonlit environment. Colors normally are not prominent in actual moonlight but Remington could use them to an effect far greater than would be possible for any film camera.

In 1888, Remington was introduced to sculpture by Frederic Ruckstull, who was at work on a monument for the Pennsylvania State House. He had ignored this art form by choice, feeling it unworthy of his talent with brush and pen. But when he tried it, a whole new world of three-dimensional possibilities opened for him. His first piece of bronze sculpture was “The Bronco Buster” in 1895.

Remington’s sculptures quickly became sought-after works and today are sold at astronomically high prices and are featured in a number of museums.

In 1888, three years before he became President, Theodore Roosevelt asked Remington to illustrate his book; “Ranch Life and the Hunting Trails”. This formed the basis for a friendship which was to last the rest of the artist’s life.

In 1901, Remington became the first American sculptor to use the “lost wax” casting method, which dates to around 5,000 years ago. He virtually reintroduced sculptors to the process. His one and only monument is “The Cowboy” located in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park.

Frederic Remington died from complications of appendicitis the day after Christmas, 1909.

“The fast disappearing Indians and western cowboy should be put in enduring bronze, This should be done by the only man in America who can do it, what could be more appropriate for an American city?”

New York art editor Alexander W. Drake in a letter to Remington in 1899,

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The perennially infantile mainstream media, always a patsy for a good con, has recently been abuzz with hysterical musings about UFO’s, about how the military is hiding something (hiding something!) that the government doesn’t want us to know and wondering, always wondering, why the White House is mum on the subject of visitors from Outer Space and sort of, maybe, kinda suggesting that such visitors are already here perhaps disguised as Maxine Waters or Mike Pence.

It is good copy, after all, and it builds audience which builds money in the pockets of publishers and news network owners and shareholders and will remain good copy as long as it continues to satisfy the deep-seated human need for magical thinking, cheap fiction, dark conspiracies and hysteria.

This is not to suggest that we on Earth are the only smart beings in the Universe. No, not by a longshot. The Universe is too well-endowed with planets to think there aren’t billions and billions of them with smart beings, existing at different times, capable of producing snake oil, voter fraud and dandruff shampoo.

"If you dip a glass into the ocean, you're not going to come up with a fish. That doesn't mean there are no fish in the ocean." Astronomer Jill Tarter

Nobel Prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman, totally agrees with that while stating categorically that, because of the mind-boggling distances between stars, say nothing of galaxies, we on Earth are de facto completely alone in the whole Universe. Beings on other planets, which he asserts do actually exist, can never come here and beings here on Earth can never go there. And he means NEVER not in relative terms but as an absolute! And then he tells you why.

Gonna Need More Than One Fill Up, Ol’ Buddy!

For one thing, Feynman points out that any travel anywhere, by foot, by donkey, pickup truck, tricycle or rocket requires expenditure of energy and energy comes from fuel. In the case of space travel, that fuel has to be contained on board the thing you’re traveling in (such as a tricycle or an airplane) and that fuel requires even more energy simply to transport, which requires still more fuel in an exponential increase as distance and/or speed increases. This includes plasma fuel, too.

Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our sun, is 4.24 light years from here. The fastest human-made object is the Parker Solar Probe which moves at 500,000 miles per hour. To get to Proxima Centauri, the closest star! at that breakneck speed would take you 6,600 years and would require more fuel than the mass of the observable universe.

Back in the 1950’s, there were a number of sci-fi movies featuring Richard Carlson who at some point in the movie would always pause dramatically and hesitatingly utter the line “it’s like something … from another world”, indicating a sophistication too far advanced for us to figure out. Feynman would call that ‘hogwash’. Nature’s immutable laws of the universe don’t cut any slack for magic.

At any rate, your spaceship, besides needing to be the size of Canada, would also have to house and feed 166 human generations with on-board gardens and cows and chickens and by the time the third generation was out there, they would have long forgotten the reason their ancestors left in the first place (or even that they left anywhere at all) and they may even by the end have evolved into simpler life forms, maybe like reptiles or journalists. Plus if you freeze everybody they would simply wake up dead.

But let’s say you had a really spiffed up, exotic kind of fuel and real, knocked out, wacko engines that together could move you across space at, say, one-sixteenth the speed of light, you’d still need 265 years to get to Proxima Centauri or seven generations of humans and Einstein’s mathematics already proved that such a speed couldn’t happen in the universe. Remember, the universe has no choice but to obey the laws of Nature, which are the same no matter where you go. So we’re stuck here, folks.

Feynman called it a dead end

That same brick wall of distance, fuel, biology and timing applies to all those billions of civilizations looking for us as well, both now and in the past and in the future. They are constrained by those same universal laws of Nature. It makes sense that civilizations across the entire universe are coming and going all the time. Effervescing, like bubbles in a glass of beer! A million years here or there and it’s either on the way or long gone. The odds of finding any two or more existing at once are, as it were, astronomical.

This is why there is no such thing as “at once” in the universe.

Feynman compared the situation to fireflies blinking on different nights in a dark forest. They never see one another.

“The tragedy of the universe isn’t that it’s empty,” he mused. “It’s that the party guests are arriving at different times.”

The never-ending fascination with visitors from outer space may come from nothing more mysterious than the night sky and the seemingly infinite number of stars out there. We’re projecting populations similar to our own based upon an assumed probability and then scaring hell out of ourselves for the fun (and profit) of it.

Surely, we tell ourselves, there must be living beings among so many gazillions of stars out there and maybe they’re like us and maybe they have spaceships and maybe buzz our planet every now and then and hover above the pines and beam up guys in pickup trucks and probe them with medical devices.

Meanwhile, a few of us Earthlings are seriously plotting to setup shop on the moon and put condos on Mars and are busy sending out radio signals to any extraterrestrial beings who might be interested in paying us a friendly visit.

But then, according to Feynman:

“Don’t hold your breath.”

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A Firsthand Look At a Living Earth

Between 1971 and 1974, Project F.A.M.O.U.S became the first-ever exploration by deep-diving, manned submersibles of a separating, continental plate boundary. It was a big deal! Scientists, for the first time ever were able to descend to the sea floor, two miles straight down, to get a firsthand look at seafloor spreading in the Atlantic —- the process by which North America was moving away from Europe. The process is known as plate tectonics or “continental drift”. It was an historical first, comparable in scope to man’s first Moon landing.

I had been picked to accompany an American film crew and to write a 60-minute documentary film revealing the aims and accomplishments of the final phase of Project FAMOUS (French-American Mid-Ocean Undersea Study) featuring the Woods Hole submersible, “Alvin” and its French counterparts, “Cyana” and “Archimede”.

The three guys aboard the “Alvin” didn’t climb into a comfortable laboratory, mind you, but were cramped inside a titanium, 6-foot sphere surrounded by the ocean bottom’s total darkness, under a pressure of 1,450 pounds per square inch. That is enough to completely crush a typical submarine.

I was along as a lowly writer to cover the day-to-day work of these scientists and had been lodged with other journalists on the French schooner, Bel Espoir, donated for that purpose by the French Government. The three-masted, 120-foot wooden-hulled boat put out to sea that first night from the Port of Ponta Delgada in the Azores in August, 1974. I stood on deck in the darkness after sharing supper in the ship’s saloon, marveling at the brilliance of the stars and the sound of the bow waves rushing against the hull.

Our destination was an area of the Mid-Atlantic Ocean Ridge about 400 miles west of the Azores. There the crew put a sea anchor out a few hundred yards from the French Navy Ship, “Le Noroit” to monitor a dive by their own submersible, “Cyana”. We were taken to and from the ship in a cramped Zodiak inflatable, a process by which we got well soaked in sea spray, flying over the crests of waves, trying to keep camera equipment dry.

Yes. It’s no longer news

In fact, Project FAMOUS was not considered very newsworthy even as it happened. I believe this was due to the inability of journalists to comprehend its full significance and to focus instead on politics. Human beings, for the first time in history, were traveling miles down to the bottom of the ocean inside a metal sphere to verify, in person, a central dynamic of Planet Earth which was not even suspected until 1912 and was considered with skepticism long afterwards.

1912 was when the German scientist, Alfred Wegener, first proposed his theory that the continents rested on huge “plates” which were moving! We know now that North America and Europe are moving away from each other at the rate of 2.5 centimeters per year.

“Of course nobody can see this movement,” Dr. Robert Ballard told me, “but it’s like a butterfly resting on the bark of a sequoia. The butterfly’s whole life is measured in days. The sequoia’s in a thousand years. The butterfly can’t see that the tree is expanding as it continues growing. But that’s exactly what it’s doing.”

So, to us a mere 2.5 centimeters is hardly considerable but the fact is that Europe and North America were once part of the same land mass. Their plates, now separated by almost 4,000 miles, are still moving apart.

I stood with Dr. Ballard on the flying bridge of the Woods Hole research vessel “Knorr”, expressing my amazement that anybody would willingly get inside a submersible like “Alvin” and risk his life going all the way to the ocean floor and being subject to such enormous hazards.

“Because it’s worth it,” he told me. “Earth is geologically alive and its continents are moving in relation to one another. We should know what this means for the planet that is our home.”

Ballard’s opposite on the French side was Xavier LePichon, whose enthusiasm and passionate lectures aboard LeNoroit drove home to us the amazing facts of plate techtonics and the dynamics of a “living Earth.” I found him to be a warmly compelling individual. It was LePichon who called Ballard and first suggested a joint French-American scientific enterprise which Ballard enthusiastically embraced.

The science surrounding plate techtonics is complex but if you ever wonder why Newfoundland and the Scottish Highlands share some of the identical rock strata, that’s the answer to how that happened.

For me, one of the most memorable aspects of covering Project FAMOUS was going back in the evening to Bel Espoir (which means “beautiful hope”) and sharing with new friends the evening meal prepared by the “cooker”, Hubert Turquet (as a true Frenchman, he would not accept being called “chef”.) The crew were all young French men and women who had once been drug addicts and were learning to sail the ocean as part of their rehabilitation. Everybody else on board was either a scientist or a journalist. I and my crew of three were the only Americans, aside from Rupert Welch of Time Magazine.

Ex-French President, Jacques Chirac, once famously said: “Without anti-Americanism there would be no French foreign policy.” And indeed we tend to think of French people as snooty and disdainful, if not outright hostile to us Americans. But when you share limited space on a beautiful ship for a number of eventful days far out to sea, things change.

Alain Raymond, reporter for Agence France Presse, told me toward the end that he felt we were “all part of the same cell.”

It was my sentiment exactly.

Eat Your History is an ongoing collection of some truly fascinating things which occurred in the past and which are largely ignored by history courses. If you enjoy these weekly efforts please help me to continue creating them by becoming a paid subscriber.

Thank you.

Bob

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The deliberate confusion is the name itself

At the very outset, these words throw you off. They are meant to.

Both somehow sound good but disguise evil intent. “Socialism” is suspect because it has a shady reputation plus nobody really knows what it means. So it has to be given cover by the word “Democratic”, which has a long pedigree of of unquestioning acceptance, despite the fact that nobody really knows what it means, either.

So there you have two words which, when taken separately, have assumed meanings which nobody can accurately define but when joined appear to convey something positive.

Socialism can never be “democratic” because, while you might get an entire stadium full of people to chant “knuckle down Winsocki” in unison, you can’t have “the people” involved in deciding issues of governance. Put another way, it would be pandemonium for millions of beliefs and opinions and voices to form a consensus about how to make machines or cure illness or build cars much less how to set prices, make air travel safe, confiscate taxes, build a railway system and decide on which children get cancer care. Many governments are this way but socialist governments can only succeed by armed force, not by the will of the people.

So, just between you and me comrade, there has to be a very limited ruling class of decision makers inventing what all these things are and then how to manage them, which puts the bold lie directly on the word “democratic” and leaves the word “socialist” to be determined by the ruling class. Communists call this ruling class “dictatorship of the proletariat”.

But, no, It is not. It is the dictatorship of the dictators!

The great American economist, Thomas Sowell once pointed out that a farmer can know thousands of actual things which make a farm produce goods but not a committee of strangers. A baker understands exactly how to create various breads and so on across the economic spectrum of hundreds of thousands of different market forces. No group of people can possibly comprehend even a tiny part of that spectrum. That you can, however, is the first principle of socialist theories. Which is exactly why they can’t work.

Thomas Sowell: “Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”

Lets take a peek behind that (iron) curtain

The term “democratic socialism” is actually a contradiction in terms, a self-contained oxymoron because, as everybody knows, it’s a sly cover for communism which is neither. If you look at communist rulers and oligarchs anywhere, you’ll notice that somehow they all have enormous wealth and privileges that “the people” do not.

Why is that?

A few examples

Communist dictator Joseph Stalin had a dacha on the Black Sea coast, filled with the finest food, furnishings and perks. He engineered the famine in 1932-34 in which 4 million of “the people” in Ukraine were starved to death. Meaning they had no food. Soldiers had ransacked their homes to destroy every ounce of food and grain they had hidden under the floorboards out of fear. But the world praised Stalin.

The evidence

Communist boss, Vladimir Putin today enjoys a mansion overlooking the Black Sea. It contains luxuries beyond comprehending by “the People” including a pool, a casino and a dimly lit club with a pole for dancing strippers. It is valued at one billion dollars and is only one of numerous palaces Putin enjoys, along with an enormous yacht worth $700 million. Meanwhile he can order millions of Russians to be rounded up off the streets (yes, off the streets) and sent to be killed in Ukraine. But, of course, the people are proud of Putin.

Communist dictator, Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s short, fat “Dear Leader” enjoys not one palace but several, four of which are pictured below. He is fearful of air travel so he has all to himself an entire, custom-built train filled with luxurious appointments for his comfort, while the whole country does without. And the people worship Kim as if he’s god.

Cuban communist dictator, Fidel Castro, claimed that he lived in a fisherman’s hut but, ah-ha, it turned out to be a lavish, well-appointed little castle. Imagine!

Venezuela’s Communist boss, Hugo Chavez, confiscated enough wealth to buy Miami but always maintained the story that he was just a common citizen.

Communist New York Mayor, Mamdani, tells eight million people to set their thermostats at 78 during a 104-degree heat wave while he sits comfortably in an air-conditioned office and an air-conditioned home.

“And”, as Kurt Vonnegut famously wrote, “so it goes.”

Communism, putting it mildly, is a cynical con game in which the victims of the con continue to be victims by choice. It is driven by cunning people with excessive wealth who want even more money. Yes. Money!

Do the communist rulers really want equality or social justice or freedom from poverty or well-being for the masses? No. They want money. Just look at the evidence.

Communism is supported by self-described, know-nothing intellectuals, snobby, coffee house Bolsheviks and other true believers who are convinced to fight and sacrifice their money (and yours) for “social justice” on behalf of the poor and downtrodden.

Useful Idiocy

Lenin called these people “useful idiots”. They speak the news to us every evening on TV, they run our universities, they make our movies, they teach our kids in school. They thrive among us by the millions, often creating street riots and causing death. Their goal is the end of Western Civilization, starting with the end of America.

I maintain that “useful idiocy” is exactly the desired end result of today’s American schools and universities, where bearded intellectuals in Birkenstock sandals, tweed jackets and ragged jeans teach impressionable minds that wealth is bad, that God doesn’t exist, that learning is ignorance, that freedom is because of slavery, that capitalism is evil and that Communism is the answer.

Meanwhile, comfortably seated in their enormous yachts and seaside mansions with stolen money, goods and property, the rulers of the useful idiots are passing the caviar and champagne and laughing up their sleeves at the poor, stupid, doers of good who vote to keep them in power.

Eat Your History is an ongoing collection of some truly fascinating things which occurred in the past and which are largely ignored by history courses. If you enjoy these weekly efforts please help me to continue creating them and funding them by becoming a paid subscriber.

Thank you.

Bob

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It’s not possible for any American living today to comprehend the danger a handful of brave English colonists faced when they told the world they would no longer be ruled by mighty England. They were signing their own death warrants and they fully well knew it. Their act was high treason against the Crown which mandated the death penalty. No plea bargaining. No escape.

King George III and the British government had brought rebellion upon themselves by increasing tyrannical rule over the their subjects. It got worse year after year until at last it was no longer tolerable. They broke with the king and he angrily promised to hang them all. He meant it and they understood that he meant it and would soon be coming for them with all the might of the Empire.

How would you feel if the most powerful government on the planet had taken out a warrant for your execution if you dared to sign such a document and then would be sending their army and navy to find you and carry it out if you did? Reflect on that. Would you actually put your name on such a thing? Fifty-six men did not hesitate to do it.

You should know that these signers represented a group which was less than half of the colonial population. They were opposed by their neighbors and even family members who remained loyal to the Crown. These two factions fought against each other in the war that followed the Declaration. In fact, many well-respected Americans simply didn’t want to take sides, fearing mob rule and being unsure if the new nation could even defend itself.

England had always been home to all American colonists. For generations, they had sung “God Save the King” with the same fervor as their rulers and now they faced permanent separation from that home. Their home!

One of these Loyalists was William Franklin, son of leading Patriot Benjamin Franklin, with whom he had a close relationship. Like other loyalists, he hated what the Crown was doing and thought it was wrong, but, as the Governor of New Jersey, he didn’t disagree enough to warrant outright revolution. Instead, he vigorously fought against it.

When his state chose that course, William was confined to house arrest for his loyalist views, then shipped to a prison in Connecticut, where he was caught communicating and plotting with other loyalists. Franklin was thrown into solitary confinement then released as part of a prisoner exchange in 1778. He became a loyalist leader in British-controlled New York and even organized guerilla attacks on patriot forces. He fled to London at the war’s end and never reconciled with his father.

It was a very dirty business

In one of the few battles between American patriots and American loyalists, the loyalists were brutally defeated on October 17, 1780 at the Battle of Kings Mountain, SC. This defeat seriously compromised the efforts of British General Lord Cornwallis, who eventually would be forced to surrender the British troops at Yorktown a year later. America’s Revolution against England was also a civil war pitting Americans against each other.

We tend to think of that period as a tapestry of benign images … of fatherly old Ben Franklin and Jefferson and Washington and the Liberty Bell and the frolicking Boston Tea Party but it was a dangerous time to be alive in this country. Thousands on both sides were killed or had their homes burned to the ground.

A ragtag and ill-equipped American militia, going up against mighty England back then would be like any high school football team today taking on the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks and then surprising themselves and the world by winning the Super Bowl!

The Declaration of Independence was the spark that ignited that war between America and England. It consisted of 165 significant battles and seven major campaigns on land and sea and lasted through eight long years or American sacrifice.

Most Americans today know very little about the Declaration. Just an old piece of parchment. The 4th of July has become a fun day for fireworks and grilling hot dogs and tossing bean bags and drinking beer while parts of the country burn in civil strife and hatred over politics and we proceed relatively unconcerned and purposely misinformed.

America faces a different tyranny today but it is not waged by armies from abroad. Socialism and communism, both born inside the joyless black heart of envy, have cunningly appealed to the very college-educated middle class it seeks to destroy. And they are the main ones voting for it!

The press, always a champion of collectivism, giddily reports socialist political victories in New York City, Seattle, Jersey City and Minneapolis while yet another Marxist in Colorado wins a seat in the US House of Representatives. Communist, Bernie Sanders is gleefully forecasting a communist revolution in America while prehistoric tribalism goes on calling itself “progressive.”

And so you have to ask yourself, do we beer-drinking, fireworks-popping, bean bag-tossing, hot dog grilling Forth of July celebrants still have an inspired patriot class who know what we’re up against and have the courage to step up and defeat it?

During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Elizabeth Willing Powel asked the 81 year old Benjamin Franklin a key question:

“Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”

His answer rings today as clear as a Liberty Bell:

“A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

Eat Your History is an ongoing collection of some truly fascinating things which occurred in the past and which are largely ignored by history courses. If you enjoy these weekly efforts please help me to continue creating them and funding them by becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you. Bob

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Many long years ago, before personal telephones, before color TV, before tacos and margaritas and jet planes, before the pyramids before indoor plumbing and the light bulb and the conquest of Mexico, I was struggling with the awful reality of having to attend grade school and to suffer the indignities of arithmetic, the perfume of teachers, stinky school lunches and the abiding panic of not having done the homework.

None of the little girls in our class minded the insult of learning long division nor of being forced to study a language they already spoke and were willing to fully accept the nonsense of pedagogy to win the approval of those prison guards we called teachers. Roughly three quarters of the boys were as indifferent as I was. The other quarter were admired by the girls.

Most of the thinking I did back then was limited to the establishment of moon bases by Flash Gordon or cowboy shootouts or how great it would be to just float out the open window and drift above the treetops all the way to our favorite swimming hole and get submerged in cold water. Then “WHAM” the prison guard’s steel ruler would slam down on the desk, jarring me back from my imagined escape to a sentence I couldn’t diagram along with the stern admonition to “pay attention!”

But the attention I was demanded to pay was more than my pre-occupied mind could afford and it didn’t take long before I was back in the saddle again, riding the range and rounding up strays in the storied clouds outside my third grade window. Yippee-ty-ti-yay!

When your eyes are supposed to concentrate on the doughnut, mine were drawn to the hole.

Years later, high school football became not just a sport to be played but a means attracting the charms of Phyllis Wilson. Yes. Being a gridiron hero would soon have her arms around my neck and she would sob if I rode off on another cattle drive up to Wyoming but I forgot one essential element of football and that was you had to have a coach and the coach wanted me to tackle guys that weighed 300 pounds and the very first attempt at doing that resulted in me being knocked soundly into the ground and seeing stars for ten minutes. Adios, Coach. Farewell, Phyllis.

When you consider the past culture of North America’s native Indians, it becomes obvious that their little boys and little girls learned most of what they knew in life by tagging along behind the grown ups and learning from them … how to make an arrowhead, build a fire, skin an animal and make rawhide, and sew a moccasin and what plants you can eat and which ones are poisonous, how to find your way across the wilderness, how to hunt, how to be a human being and how to be self sufficient and build a teepee that is warm on the coldest nights and so on. It was an organic process.

It is also universally human …

… In which five and six year olds anywhere will eavesdrop on the adults among them or, better yet, mingle with them in the kitchen as they drink and bartend and swap grownup stories. Nature intends this to happen and it is most evident in small towns. In places like Ville Platte, and Mamou Louisiana, it’s rare to find lively dance hall or a large bar with no little kids running around or infants wrapped in blankets asleep among the beer bottles on a table top while Mama and Daddy drink and dance and tell grownup stories. Everybody’s included.

In most cases today everybody knows this process is no longer organic. It is contrived and fabricated by “educators” who, in their wisdom, have sifted and selected from the endless body of knowledge in the Universe a tiny collection of what they imagine to be and what they determine to be stuff worth learning.

The word “education” derives from a French word meaning “to raise up”, as in raising children. I don’t mean to be unduly critical of the process as we know it today. It’s just that no child being taught in school today is actually being “raised up” but rather is being informed by a system which assumes to have answers. We are being “IN-FORMED” by that system rather than being “IN-SPIRED” (in-spirited) to think.

I believe it’s even far worse today than back in the Jurassic Period when we were in Mrs Hale’s third-grade class, staring out the window and thinking when we were supposed to be listening. We’ve all seen the TV interviews of young people who think Canada is the capitol of Sacramento and that the guy on the one-dollar bill is George Bush and we laugh for a second or two before realizing what this sort of ignorance means for the country. And it ain’t good!

The notion that you can “educate” kids in school has an honest pedigree but the fact is that you can’t impart enough to get them to think. One of the early polluters of schooling was the American intellectual, John Dewey, a radical progressive who rejected the belief that education could foster virtue, morals and skilled capability and that traditional values were stupid and oppressive. His influence greatly accelerated the decline in thinking and his followers are making sure it gets worse. They are succeeding.

Mark Twain famously said “I never let my schooling interfere with my education”. I am almost certain that he, like myself, suffered Chronic Student Malfunction Disorder but I observe and maintain that he was never any worse for having suffered it.

Lord help me, I feel the same way.

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Two giants of America’s industrial age; one a humorist author and the other the richest man in the world, would not have warmly esteemed one another had they ever met but separately both excelled in mutual loathing. Ironically, each man started his career on the waterways of America —- Vanderbilt as sole proprietor of small ferry service from Staten Island to Manhattan and Twain as a trainee pilot on a paddle wheel steamship plying the Mississippi River.

The difference between them was that Twain had a romantic mind and a compassionate approach to the poor and Vanderbilt’s mind was like a steel trap who cared for nothing but money and to hell with the poor or, for that matter, anyone else.

Young Cornelius quit school when he was 11 years old to work on his father’s ferry in New York Harbor. Five years later he started his own ferry service with a modest, two-masted sail boat exhibiting such aggressive business energy that other ferry captains started calling him “The Commodore”, jesting that he was a high-ranking Naval officer. The nickname stuck for the rest of his life. He was never in the Navy, by the way, nor any other branch of the service.

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Twain also longed for wealth. He tried to get it repeatedly in schemes ranging from silver mining out west to investing in promising business ventures but his romantic streak kept making due diligence impossible for him. The final blow to his ambitions was turning down an initial investment in Alexander Graham Bell’s new invention … the telephone! He assumed it would just be another failed venture. Finally, nearly broke and getting desperate, he wrote the last of his acclaimed travel books, “Following the Equator” (which I highly recommend).

Meanwhile, the teenage “Commodore” having grown up amassing the biggest fortune in America, had cemented his reputation as a greedy and ruthless business magnate with a long trail of businesses that he destroyed for more money.

His combative greed was painfully evident when he was trying to buy New York Central railroad. The company resisted, so he retaliated. He no longer allowed their passengers or freight to board his own rail lines! This meant that they were not able to connect to cities out west. New York Central was thus forced to give him controlling interest. He was a major player in the early years of America’s booming railroad industry, pushing ethics to the legal limit and enjoying profit from the destruction of struggling businesses.

His wife had to badger him to donate $1 million to create Vanderbilt University, which he finally did with extreme reluctance.

Twain, having become deeply annoyed at the fawning and slavish newspaper coverage given to Vanderbilt, published an assessment of his character in the papers of the day. It remains a classic.

An excerpt from the “letter”

“Poor Vanderbilt! How I pity you: and this is honest. You are an old man, and ought to have some rest, and yet you have to struggle, and deny yourself, and rob yourself of restful sleep and peace of mind, because you need money so badly. I always feel for a man who is so poverty ridden as you… It isn’t what a man has that constitutes wealth.

No–it is to be satisfied with what one has; that is wealth. As long as one sorely needs a certain additional amount, that man isn’t rich. Seventy times seventy millions can’t make him rich, as long as his poor heart is breaking for more. I am just about rich enough to buy the least valuable horse in your stable, perhaps, but I cannot sincerely and honestly take an oath that I need any more now.

And so I am rich. But you, you have got seventy millions and you need five hundred millions, and are really suffering for it. Your poverty is something appalling. I tell you truly that I do not believe I could live twenty-four hours with the awful weight of four hundred and thirty millions of abject want crushing down upon me. I should die under it.

My soul is so wrought upon by your helpless pauperism that if you came to me now, I would freely put ten cents in your tin cup, if you carry one, and say, “God pity you, poor unfortunate.”

Vanderbilt was not amused, calling Twain and his letter “a crock of sh—t”.

“Mark my words,” he said. “He cares about money a lot. I mean a lot. Or he wouldn’t care so much about me. One day this Mark Twain guy is going to go broke. I’m telling you, Twain is going to make crazy money decisions, mark my words.”

Twain’s list of money losers

An opportunity avoided

After a string of failed investments, Mark Twain, already a famous American author, was approached by Alexander Graham Bell who offered to sell him stock in his new invention, the telephone. Twain, doing no due diligence whatsoever, refused out of fear and took his family on vacation in Europe. By the time he returned, Bell’s invention had already made millionaires out of delivery boys and bellhops.

His invention flopped

He poured most of the money he had into developing a typesetting machine called the Paige Typesetter but it had too many moving parts to function adequately and only two of them were ever made. Then came the Linotype machine and rendered the Paige obsolete.

Cornelius Vanderbilt was a heartless robber baron who could never have equaled Mark Twain’s creative genius. For his part, Twain was (and remains) America’s foremost novelist who could never have matched the cunning and financial talent of Vanderbilt.

Wouldn’t you just love to sit at the bar between these two guys and buy each a whiskey and be entertained for an hour or two?

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“This land is your land” etc., etc., etc.

The plains Indian tribes of north America resorted to terror against white settlers because they believed it to be their best weapon against the insane idea that humans could actually own land. Land! If the terror was ghastly enough maybe the crazy settlers would stop assuming ownership of what everybody in their right mind understood to be a commonly shared thing. That would be the earth. Nobody can “own” Earth! What in the world were they thinking?

The notion that a human being could claim any portion of Mother Earth as his own property was, to the plains Indians, not only insane and absurd, it was not even real. You just couldn’t do it. Who, exactly, would you obtain it from in the first place? It was never “owned”. By what authority did you claim it?

The Indians were totally dumbfounded by this impossibility and they resisted it with brutal, excessive, horror, hoping it would somehow go away.

That sense of outrage over the insane expropriation of land is what I feel today at the sight of a 30-story condominium, on what until recently was a pristine sand dune overlooking the ocean … a shifting range of hills shaped by winds and tides that recently was home to, raccoons, bobcats, palmettos, sea oats, dune turtles, rabbits, lizards and bird nests and which only felt the presence of humans a generation ago. Who committed this atrocity? What in the world were they thinking?

My sweet mother was irritatingly persistent in stating that “you can’t stop progress.” Well, no need to hedge that bet. Progress has repeatedly and consistently proven unstoppable ever since real estate developers found out how to build 30-story condominiums on sand.

We know there are people who actually enjoy spending vacations watching television in refrigerated containers stacked 300 feet above the ground and riding elevators to get up there because the developers wouldn’t thrive without such people.

But, like most private property, it comes at a cost. That cost questions the whole reason for going to the coast in the first place. Maybe it’s just me, I don’t know. But Florida is gone.

*Yogi Berra gets credit for the phrase “Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.” Indeed, it’s often painful to see the cherished past disappear to “progress” but the sweet memories remain as in the following reflection:

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**(Today’s edition is for free and paid subscribers. Next week’s is for paid. Become a paid subscriber and never miss anything and help me to keep doing this. Read on to find out how one man and his clunky little boats helped win World War 2.)

June 6, 1944

It’s hard to imagine anything more terrifying than approaching a fortified beach under heavy machine gun fire in an open boat. but that’s exactly what thousands of G.I.’s had to endure in World War 2. Fortunately, the boats that took them to those beaches were built to actually land at the water’s edge with a drop-down ramp for rapid forward exit. It wasn’t always the case.

Before the war began, soldiers landing on a hostile beach had would have been forced to clamber over the sides of small landing boats often into chest-deep water a fearful distance offshore where they had to wade onto the beach under enemy fire. The boats weren’t able to get up close to the beach because they wouldn’t be able to turn around. Propellers on landing craft should have been shielded in tunnels under the hull enabling the boats to run directly up onto the beach. From there they could back out into deeper water.

That innovation would have to wait until just before the start of the war and its acceptance was due to a single, tough, bull-headed man, hauling logs in the bayous west of New Orleans.

One man alone saw that problem and how to fix it and was able to accomplish the fix through sheer strength of will, gritty determination and a considerable amount of good old American bourbon. His name became almost legendary during the war. He was Andrew Jackson Higgins, New Orleans boat building entrepreneur and logging businessman from Nebraska, who went up against entrenched US Navy bureaucrats, ultimately to build more boats for the war effort than any other shipbuilder in America.

In 1926, Higgins was harvesting trees from the swamps of south Louisiana and hauling them on water to mills to be made into lumber. He used shallow-draft boats for this purpose because they could move heavy loads through the shallow waters of swamps and bayous. A key element of these boats was a hollow tunnel under the deck which protected the prop from sunken trees and sandbars.

What he was up against

As the clouds of war grew darker during the 1930’s, Higgins saw that his specially designed boats could have a military application and he offered it to the Navy. They turned him down flatly and firmly, not caring about his clunky boat, not willing even to consider the idea of a Louisiana swamp hick; an outsider who had no familiarity with Navy protocol or the traditional shipyards and preferred vendors the Navy had always relied on. Who did this upstart think he was kidding?

But Andrew was not kidding. He knew for certain that a lot of soldiers and Marines would be killed before they reached the beach in the standard, Navy-approved landing craft of the day. He persisted.

Finally, in 1938, he was offered $5,200 to design a prototype landing craft and allowed to compete against three other designs. Higgins’ actual construction cost was $12,500 … $7,000 of which came out of his own pocket. In addition, he had to pay transshipment and unloading costs to Norfolk, Virginia. But Higgins saw his chance, and he took it.

Weeks later, Higgins got a call from the Navy that they and the Marines would be coming to New Orleans to test his ramped boats and Higgins should also prepare to discuss a craft capable of landing armored vehicles and tanks. Higgins informed the Navy that instead of a plan he would have a workable boat. “It can’t be done,” the Navy told him; “The Hell it can’t,” replied Higgins, “you just be here in three days”. Higgins got the boat built in 61 hours.

I can see in my mind, old Andrew hanging up the phone, removing a bottle of whiskey and a glass from a desk drawer and pouring himself a congratulatory drink. It must have been a very rewarding afternoon for Higgins, knowing he might have a chance to greatly expand his operation and also save the lives of many thousands of soldiers and Marines who otherwise would have to invade shorelines exposed in unwieldy surfboats under enemy fire with no trace of a harbor.

Sharply contrasting with the prior Navy response, Marine General Howland (“Howlin’ Mad”) Smith, saw Higgin’s boat as the answer to a Marine prayer and it was an answer that came just in the nick of time before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The Navy accepted Higgins’ clunky but supremely efficient landing craft.

Navy brass, unable to eat such a large portion of crow, threw one more obstacle at Higgins. US Navy ships had always been equipped with boat-lowering davits measuring 30-feet in order to offload boats of that length. So, too bad, Mr. Higgins, your 36-foot boats simply won’t do.

“Hell,” Higgins said, “just change the spacing in the damned davits and it’ll work.” And so they did. And it did.

Andrew’s father died when he was seven years old and it may have inspired him to knuckle down and be a winner. At the age of nine and with only a sickle he began a grass cutting business. He soon purchased a lawn mower, eventually expanding until he had seventeen mowers and was hiring older boys to do the work while he managed the business. He was frequently at odds with school authorities and got expelled before graduating.

Andrew’s boat building expertise developed after he moved to the marshy wetlands of south Louisiana and adapted what he learned to the business of servicing oil rigs and selling cut timber.

By 1943, his company had over 20,000 people on the payroll, making it one of the largest boat builders in the world and the work force included both sexes and all races. “If you can do the work, you’re hired”.

Higgins died in New Orleans on 1 August 1952.

He was like the boat that bore his name: straightforward, tough and reliable. Neither was sophisticated, they just got the job done. He deserves to be remembered much more than he is.

“Andrew Higgins … is the man who won the war for us. … If Higgins had not designed and built those boats we never could have landed over an open beach. The whole strategy of the war would have been different.”

General Dwight Eisenhower, Allied Supreme Commander

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*NOTE: You may have wondered, as I have, why anyone would turn down a really good deal or a splendid gift or any recompense which far outweighs the required payment —- all of which are common and constant in past negotiations between Israel and the many proxies of Iran and the Palestinians across the Middle East. The answer is simply that appeasement never works. So, after years of being puzzled by this, I was amazed to find out why this primitive emotion is still so powerfully with us.

A fat lot of good that did!

The term ”appeasement” usually calls to mind the sacrifice of Neville Chamberlain to Adolph Hitler, in 1938, in which the British Prime Minister agreed to let Hitler take over that part of Czechoslovakia called “Sudetenland”. He believed that making nice-nice to Hitler would end the threat of war but instead Hitler saw it as surrender and felt safe to invade Poland thus kicking off World War 2.

We’re all too familiar with the failed policy of Israel over the past 50 years in which it continually caves to Palestinian demands for more land or some other concession only to be thwarted in “negotiations” or “peace talks” and getting nothing in return. This is the failure of appeasement on full display.

There is a reason for this and it is far from obvious.

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The unlikely man with the plan

Did you find out about this guy in school? I didn’t either.

Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben was a Prussian army officer who played a leading role in the American Revolutionary War by personally reforming the Continental Army into a disciplined and professional fighting force. His contributions marked a huge improvement in the performance of U.S. troops, and today, after the passing of 249 years, he is still considered one of the major fathers of the United States Army. A Prussian!

Mid-winter, Valley Forge, Pennsylvania,

So, here you are in the deep freeze of 1777, freezing your tail off with rotten shoes and patchy clothing, encamped at Valley Forge, supposedly getting ready to fight, who? what? good lord! YES! the British Army!, the deadliest fighting force in the whole world, firmly believing that your bayonet is for roasting squirrel over an open fire and having not a clue of how to move in formation or why it’s necessary. You’re not even sure how to re-load your musket or why you should use a latrine instead of the open ground. You know you and your buddies are woefully unprepared but what’s to be done?

The answer to that dilemma came in the form of a professional military officer who had made his way from the northern European Kingdom of Prussia to what today is known as “King of Prussia”, Pennsylvania, specifically that part of it called Valley Forge, not far from the capitol at Philadelphia.

F.W. von Steuben, product of a prominent military family in Prussia, finding himself unemployed after years of successfully fighting in European wars, chummed it up with Benjamin Franklin in Paris and more or less asked for a job. Franklin was impressed and recommended him in letters to George Washington, who was at the time frantic for any help he could get in the war against England.

In a desperate 1777 letter to the President of the Congress, Washington absolutely begs for clothing, shoes, gunpowder, flour and meat for his woebegone army. It really saddened me to read this letter and to realize the terrible extremity that Washington faced and how fragile his ill-trained troops were while camped out in that frozen terrain. Von Steuben’s arrival was like a ray of hope. He immediately saw the problems and was given the authority to solve them. He did that. Washington subsequently made him Inspector General of the whole US Army.

What he saw

The men were defecating wherever they happened to be so von Steuben ordered Latrines constructed downhill from field kitchens, saving many from disease. A lot of the soldiers had no idea how to fire and reload a musket, which when you think about it, would have been a pretty indelicate circumstance in combat. Plus every state militia had its own way of conducting drills which meant the army as a whole didn’t know “tuther from which” concerning maneuvers so the Baron whipped the entire army into shape and had them moving in unison. They had become unified! They were a force!

The motley American soldiers may have enjoyed a chuckle or two over Von Steuben’s peculiar ways and emphatic language but they respected him for forcing them to learn how to survive war. To one soldier, he seemed to be the god of Mars incarnate, larger than life in his resplendent uniform, bedecked with medals. They knew he was the real deal and they knew they only had less than two months before facing the British in open combat. TWO MONTHS! So they were highly motivated. By the same token, von Steuben learned to appreciate the fierce, independent nature of the Americans.

These are his own words:

“In Europe, you say to your soldier. ‘Do this!’ and he does it. But I am obliged to say to the American: ‘This is why you ought to do this and then he does it.”

Bayonet Training

On March 19, 1778, von Steuben began training his first “model company” of 100 picked soldiers. Each of these would then return to their units and train the men in he knowledge they had gained. They were taught to march at 75 steps per minute, then speed up to 120, while von Steuben shouted orders and profanity in German and French, interspersed with abundant, flowery curses, including a string of “goddams” thrown in for good measure.

Most importantly, most of these soldiers had never used the bayonet and were very reluctant to face a bayonet-wielding enemy, especially the British enemy. Von Steuben drilled them exhaustively in bayonet techniques so that they became adept in its use and would eventually face down British troops with only bayonets.

As obstreperous and foul-mouthed as he may have been, Von Steuben was widely respected among the young Americans he trained in the arts of war. He was also an example in combat and showed his nerve and competence at the Battle of Monmouth in New Jersey.

The professional conduct of American troops during this battle was widely noted by the British. Washington was able to present the battle as a triumph, and he was voted a formal thanks by Congress to honor "the important victory over the British grand army." His position as commander-in-chief became unassailable. He was lauded for the first time as the father of his country, and his detractors were silenced.

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It’s a standard theme of horror movies that somebody is being pursued by evil forces but just barely manages to escape. The reason it’s a theme is because most of us have had that same creepy experience.

Many years ago, four of us boys were splashing around in our favorite swimming hole, oblivious to any distractions and far from civilization. Suddenly we could make out voices in the deep woods. VOICES! They were loud voices and they were laughing and cursing but worst of all you could tell that they were approaching! We suspected they might be Nelson Tucker and his bunch of cat-killing, rock-throwing vandals —- guys a lot older than we were —- and so we took off, half-clothed through the woods and the thorn bushes to avoid getting beat up. In haste, I left one of my shoes behind.

I’ve wondered what must have gone through Thomas Jefferson’s mind as he high-tailled it in the Virginia woods, saddlebags packed with important government papers, fearful of capture by British soldiers who were close on his heels with the intent of ending the American Revolutionary War victoriously, with him as a trophy. It had to be pretty intense.

* It may be the closest escape of the whole Revolutionary War, thanks to the midnight ride of a guy you never heard of before. Find out how Thomas Jefferson got away from capture by the British by becoming a paid subscriber today and never missing anything. Ever. (Free and paid subscriptions alternate every other week. Don’t miss out.)

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“In Flanders Fields” …

“In Flanders fields the poppies blow,
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields…”

(Canadian Lt. Colonel, Dr. John McRae, on the death of his friend, Lt. Alexis Helmer at Ypres, May 2, 1915)

World War I began 112 years ago, on July 28, 1914, when virtually the whole of Western Civilization threw its so-called sanity to the wind. It started as a convoluted amalgam of antiquated treaties, alliances, loyalties, grudges, jealousies and insults divided into two opposing forces . The spark that set it off was the assassination of Austria-Hungary’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand on a boulevard in Sarajevo, in Serbia. Yes. That.

But to the young men who would go out and slaughter one another, it was, in the opening days, a grand game of valiant, smartly uniformed warriors, martial band music and flowers tossed into the streets by pretty young ladies. Almost none of them knew or cared who the the archduke of Austria-Hungary was or whether Ottoman Turkish politicians would send soldiers to fight with soldiers mustered by Italian politicians against soldiers volunteering in England. And volunteer they did.

Fervent sermons were preached across Great Britain every Sunday, extolling the patriotic virtues of heroism and sacrifice. The newspapers ran calls to war and glory and politicians fanned the flames.

Great Britain is the fountainhead of our Western culture and, perhaps more than any other nation, the birthplace of its hallowed institutions —- the notion of liberties as derived from the Magna Carta, impartiality of the law and the spread of freedom across much of the world. This influence combined rugged individual responsibility with a deeply abiding love of country and a shared commitment to duty and honor. Britain had her faults, certainly, but they were far outweighed by the effects of her institutions over many generations.

But none of these institutions and values are guaranteed to be permanent. They can be eroded by the collapse of governments or by the willful acts of governments and the effects of greed, dishonesty and envy. World War 1 resulted in the wholesale elimination of the very young men in Britain, Germany, France and Italy most capable of advancing wise governance. It was almost as if the civilized nations were deliberately killing their sons for the sake of tenuous alliances between their heads of state and the self-serving underlings who would do their bidding.

The Ultimate Price

France lost 1,385,300 men killed in that war, Russia sacrificed 1,700,000, Germany lost 1,611,104, Austria-Hungary 800,000 and the British Empire saw 692,065 of it young men killed. The United States lost 67,813 combatants. The world’s total killed between 1914 and 1918 numbered 7,782,806 dead. It is estimated that the overall number of humans killed in the war is almost 20,000,000.

And most of the soldiers who died did so within close range of their enemies, in the cold mud of trenches and by truly ghastly means. The war period saw the first use of tanks, machine guns and poison gas, elements designed to slaughter masses of men in wholesale fashion. Gas would later be sanctioned but the machinery of mass killing was quickly improved upon for subsequent wars. It was the deadliest event of our history.

Wars don’t stop at simply killing soldiers and civilians but extend their malignancy into the future by depriving nations and cultures of their best and brightest. The strong young English and German and French and Russian men who could have guided subsequent generations by their wisdom and their example were snatched away from their homelands, leaving them to be governed by lesser men.

Today we see all too clearly the cost of the First World War in the almost total collapse of Europe’s greatest cities. Berlin, Paris, Rome and London all being turned into hell holes by hordes of ignorant, hostile foreigners, filled with hatred and arrogance and bent on the destruction of their magnanimous hosts.

Here is an excerpt from Lars Moller, writing in the American Spectator on Saturday:

“By 2063, Britain will not be recognizably British. Its cathedrals may stand, but the values that built them will be relics. The tolerant society that once exported liberty will import the very intolerance that it once overcame. Demographic destiny, absent radical reversal, ensures that the eclipse is total. The light that illuminated the West will flicker out in the land of its birth, leaving a darker, more divided realm where ideological totalitarianism reigns and the discriminated—women, homosexuals, religious minorities—pay the price of elite folly. History is unlikely to record this as enrichment; it is a civilian conquest terminating a civilization.”

Germany, Italy, France and mighty England —- where are your men?

Well, if you must know … many are here:

Canadian Lt. John McCrae, who wrote “In Flanders Fields” during World War 1. The poppy, thanks to his poem, has since become the flower of remembrance of those who died in war.

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• NOTE: This edition appeared earlier, and has been significantly changed. Original material will once again be here as soon as the ribs heal. Thank you for your patience.)

“Grand Theft Auto”

On June 7, 2003, an 18-year old kid with no criminal record, named Devin Moore, was arrested for stealing a car in the small town of Fayette, Alabama. At the police station he was cooperative with officers initially but suddenly snapped, snatched the .40 caliber Glock pistol from the holster of officer Arnold Strickland and shot him twice, once in the head, killing him instantly. Officer James Crump, hearing the shots, came running. Moore, carrying Strickland’s sidearm, met Officer Crump in the hallway, firing three bullets into him, one in the head, killing him.

Moore kept walking down the hallway towards the door of the emergency dispatcher. There, he turned and fired five shots into Ace Mealer. Again, one of those shots was in the head. Along the way, Moore had grabbed a set of car keys. He went out the door to the parking lot, jumped into a police cruiser, and took off. It all took less than a minute, and three officers were dead.

Every single part of that horrific sequence was featured in a video game called “Grand Theft Auto” which Devin Moore had watched hundreds of times. It graphically depicted the murder of police officers, over and over. Moore admitted that he learned what he had done from the video.

“It’s like a video game,” Moore told the cops; “Life is like a video game. Everybody’s got to die sometime.”

Moore died two years later of a lethal injection in prison. Impressionable?

No, no, of course not.

Ignoring the Evidence

Here are five major medical and psychological associations that agree violent video games cause an increase in aggressive behavior and violence. They issued a joint statement to Congress in 2000 after 30 plus years of research had proved a causal link between video games and violence.

Psychologists are now begging for the debate to move beyond the question of whether there is a link between violent video games and aggression and onto the question of why people continue to ignore the evidence of this fact!

Are people ignoring the evidence of this fact?

“What fact? Are you serious? No, of course not,” say the newspapers, the TV pundits, the professors, the entertainers and the politicians.

“Everybody knows watching violence on TV and in movies can’t cause people to be violent. Case closed!”

A relevant case in point

There was a time not too long ago when nobody knew what caused malaria. The best anybody could come up with was “bad air”. “Bad air” caused the disease. Well, in Latin “Mal” plus “Aria” translates to “bad air”, so everybody settled on bad air as the cause of malaria and that’s why we call it that today. No one even imagined that mosquitoes could be the real culprit. This was a universal assumption based upon an error and it had real consequences.

By the same token, the universal assumption that watching mayhem and murder projected on a screen can’t possibly make people imitate what they see is an error with real consequences. Like real people, suffering real death.

Now the question is …

… Does the constant branding of politicians or Supreme Court justices or cultural figures as “Nazis”, “fascists” or “Hitler” incite impressionable minds to harass them or even to assassinate them?

The glib response is always “no, of course not”. Or “it’s free speech.” Or “don’t be ridiculous” or “you sound like a fascist.”

The more highly educated you are, the more likely it will be that you are open to “anything goes”, especially if it opposes the religion, art, music, literature, dress codes and morality of the middle classes … as was solidly the case in both the French and Russian revolutions, each being led by intellectuals.

Against common sense but still lawful

Debate has continued for many years between the medical profession and media commentators and intellectuals over whether exposure to violence depicted in the media causes violent behavior in day-to-day life. Typically, the response is “there is no proof of that” or simply “of course not.”

The problem is that proof demands concrete evidence. Something physical, tangible and demonstrably obvious. And you can’t produce any hard evidence that media exposure instigates bad behavior. And so, lacking proof, we have lost the common sense reality that watching violent behavior does, actually, increase its likelihood and that we need to do something stop this deadly and de-stabilizing influence.

If you stick a paper clip into an electric outlet you will learn not to do it again. No proof needed. You already know instinctively to avoid a rattlesnake. Proof is superfluous.

And if our minds were not impressionable there would be no advertising, no romance, no education, no improvement in our lives and no reason for common sense to guide us away from danger.

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***(NOTE: This edition is a rewrite from 2022 with substantial changes. Due to a recent injury and subsequently 17 days in the hospital, I have been furloughed from active duty at the keyboard. For the next few weeks I promise my best efforts to get it all back on track. Meanwhile, please bear with me. Bob)

The Long Overcoming

Mrs. Hemingway put her son in frilly dresses like a little girl for the first 3 years of his life, complete with lengthy curls and dainty ribbons. She pretended that he was “Ernestine” and she called him that and pretended that his older sister was his twin. Common sense tells you this is one thing you never do to a male kid. Martha Gelhorn, one of Ernest’s ex-wives, said he spent the rest of his life compensating for his childhood and resenting his mother. He made little effort to conceal the hatred he felt for her.

Later, Ernest’s father committed suicide. It may be that Earnest’s invention of the macho self he became demanded that he live it out: boxing, big game hunting, immersing himself in two world wars, fishing and swashbuckling in Cuba and drinking everybody under the table was, for him, not merely fuel to ignite the fires of creativity but necessary to keep them burning.

It is little wonder. then, that Ernest found solace fishing and hunting in the wilderness as a young boy. No longer a captive to his mother’s bizarre feminine expectations, he experienced his own sense of empowerment by dominating wildlife. He would spend the rest of his life with a need to dominate not merely huge game fish in the Gulf Stream or water Buffalo in Africa but the people around him and the circumstances and events they shared a well.

In his time Hemingway became the guy that every man wanted to be: successful writer of books, deep-sea fisherman, U-Boat chaser, ladies man, war correspondent, world traveler and indefatigable drinker who could hold his own in a bar or a boxing ring and who was admired everywhere as the king of swashbucklers. A man’s man, unafraid of danger and talented above his peers. He seemed larger than life. A whole lot larger in the minds of many. He became his own myth.

And it could turn ugly …

When asked by an interviewer what he thought of Hemingway, the late CBS journalist, Andy Rooney (R.I.P) replied: “I found out what a jerk he was.” This was based on an incident that occurred in a small hotel Hemingway and other newsmen shared in Rambouillet, about 30 miles southwest of Paris, during World War 2. It depicted a boozy, swaggering Hemingway inviting another newsman out to a fist-fight when the latter had complained that Hemingway unceremoniously commandeered over eight rooms for himself and a band of Free French resistance fighters, leaving few rooms left for the other journalists. It seemed to be classic Hemingway. It was also classic Rooney.

Behind the facade, Ernest also was a man who gently loved cats and took simple, ordinary men and women into his circle right along with movie stars, famous bullfighters, heads of state, big time editors and renowned authors. If you had courage, could hold your liquor and were honest, your social rank didn’t matter.

Writing Books and Having Fun

He placed writing books and having fun as the two top priorities of life. Not many have been able to push the envelope as he did, say nothing of getting away with it. He also had a lifelong addiction to strong drink, extolling its contribution to his well-being ever since age 15.

And he got away with it as long as he was able to keep at bay the reality that his brand was not the same as his identity. Those two things became mutually exclusive as he declined both mentally and physically in his fifties. Doctors forced him to cutback drastically on alcohol, his sexual performance waned and he found it almost impossible to write anymore. At the Mayo Clinic he was given electroshock treatments which destroyed much of his ability to remember anything. Finally, depressed and no longer willing to be so diminished, he put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He was 61.

He Invented Himself …

Ernest created for himself a writing style which cut straight to the bone, using the simplest words possible to structure sentences which revealed much while saying little. He was no friend to adjectives. If the water was cold it didn’t need to be very cold or freezing cold. If the sky was blue, he wouldn’t call it intensely blue or cerulean blue.

He re-wrote the ending to “A Farewell to Arms” 37 times until he believed it had reached perfection. Many think it is his best novel; a gripping, semi-autobiographical story of love and war, likely inspired by his service in the Spanish Civil War and his love affair with the nurse who helped him recover from serious wounds suffered in that conflict. He re-wrote “The Old Man and the Sea” many times before he sent it off for publication.

“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.”

He typically wrote on yellow legal pads, using lead pencils which he sharpened, carefully brushing the wood flakes off the page into a cupped hand. He labored to get the exact words needed, often rewriting a fragment dozens of times.

In Spain, in 1923, when Ernest was a mere 24 years old, he started calling himself “Papa” and demanding that everyone else call him that, too. The name stuck, not least because he insisted that it had to. To many it seemed to tip his hand as a phony. In any case, it became part of his brand.

…Then He Invented Drinking

Maybe the most storied daiquiri in the world is the one invented in Havana, in 1932, by the combined genius of legendary bartender Constantino Ribalaigua and his best-known customer, Papa Hemingway. The bar was the “Floridita” which Ribalaigua also owned. Hemingway named the drink, “El Floridita Number Three” because the first two trials didn’t measure up but the third one was a smash hit.

Ernest Hemingway undoubtedly was one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century. His unique style of “cut to the bone” writing influenced novelists, news journalists and storytellers around he world and still has an impact on published works everywhere. He won the Nobel Prize for literature for his novel “The Old Man and the Sea”, in 1954.

It’s nearly impossible to consider the impact of Hemingway’s writing without acknowledging the malign influence of his mother upon his first years. He fought to overcome that influence for the rest of his life and I humbly submit that one of the tools he used in doing that was a writing talent strong enough to leave its mark on the world.

And, while it lasted, it sure was fun!

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