The saying “May you live in interesting times” was passed off by British diplomats in the 1930s as an ancient Chinese curse, though no Chinese original has ever been produced. It survives as a cliché. When they want to sound informal, politicians sometimes use it as a curse, or as a warning that the curse has fallen.

We live in interesting times.

A real Chinese saying with a related idea can be found in Feng Menglong’s 1627 collection Stories to Awaken the World (Ming dynasty):

“Better to be a dog in times of peace than a human in times of chaos.”

The same judgment, minus the dog, appears often in Scripture. Closest to Feng Menglong is Ecclesiastes 4:6 (KJV):

“Better is an handful with quietness, than both the hands full with travail and vexation of spirit.”

As the midterm election approaches, such proverbs haunt my mind.

Many of us, at least those outside the large cities, would like to believe we live in the Tolkien-created Shire, in the company of Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee. Jake Barnes, a more sophisticated literary figure from The Sun Also Rises, would say only, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Instead, we live in Bree. And the streets are already full of men who have chosen the Dark Lord and mean to open the gates to the Ringwraiths in November—at least that is the way the Republicans see things.

Democrats have a different set of issues—a large set—some of them face 80 percent opposition from the general public.

Take the transgendering of children. Almost no leading Democrat has rejected the party’s view that this has positive social value, even though many states have outlawed it and the Supreme Court has upheld their right to do so.

Increasingly, the two parties seem to be operating in two different universes.

Midterm elections usually favor the party that does not hold the White House. This year that pattern has not produced a foregone conclusion. We can usually see a tide running one way or the other. Not now.

While the Left openly pushes Communism (which ought to be a total loser), the war with Iran is politically a gift to the Democrats. No one knows how large.

The war rested on intelligence that Iran was about to field operational nuclear weapons. Two or three would have been enough. Trump could have ignored it. If the bombs had appeared later, he could have said the intelligence was never clear enough to act. That course would have left Republicans better placed for a midterm surprise.

If the intelligence was solid—and intelligence officers are notoriously reluctant to call anything solid—then ignoring it would have made him a greater coward than any of his predecessors. (I say that having a year of experience transmitting the weekly intelligence situation report for 5th Special Forces Group.)

Trump is not a coward. Post-Venezuela hubris may have colored his decisions. Still, from the first day of the conflict he has been hammering at the problem, yet the war remains a deadlock.

We may be winning overwhelmingly. We also defeated the Tet Offensive in 1968 overwhelmingly. CBS News never got the memo, and the country spiritually abandoned the Vietnam War. I joined a peace demonstration, myself.

Iran is only part of the trouble. Midterm elections have long punished the party that holds the White House. Not since the year Lincoln was elected has the country been so thick with explosive pressure points. The Traveling Trump Magic Show is heading either for a climax unknown in American politics, or for a circus-train wreck with reality that releases the animals and most of the freak show upon the nation.

The midterms feel like they are swelling toward apocalypse. Even a sleepwalking Episcopal priest might begin to rave, no matter which side of the divide he stands on.

These are the interesting times I mentioned. When emotions start to run like tornadoes across the Oklahoma flatlands, we’re in deep trouble.

Neither party is treating a midterm defeat as the ordinary loss of an election. Both treat it as the collapse of a righteous crusade—much as the Confederacy experienced at Appomattox. The rest of us will have to pass through the passions that follow if we want a calmer republic on the other side.

Here is a story about chaos and personal failure.

On my first night in South Vietnam, in the Signal Company barracks of the 5th Special Forces Group at Nha Trang, men in their underwear packed the place, getting ready for bed. That year I learned the VC never hit anything near a headquarters until everyone was in their underwear.

It was the end of my first day. My rifle and gear were locked in my plywood wall locker with a combination lock I had bought that afternoon. Then a Russian machine gun cut loose nearby and sent a wall of green tracers down the gap between our barracks and the next.

The men froze. No one spoke. Someone killed the lights. Then they went for their weapons, almost without a sound.

I didn’t handle it well. I rushed to my wall locker and could not remember the combination. Green tracers streaked by on the other side of a frosted window next to my head. An open barracks door stood five feet behind me, beyond my bunk. I stayed at the locker, working the lock, until the machine gun finally went silent.

I sat on my bunk. I still could not remember the combination. I felt like a complete waste. It was buck fever. The locker was only plywood; I could have ripped the hasp out with my bare hands. Instead, I kept spinning random numbers.

I went to bed. The next morning, I found the combination in my fatigue pants. The rifle never went back in the wall locker. For the rest of the tour, it stayed on the floor with my pants.

We never talked about it in the barracks. Word went around that a Chinese Nung just across the wire, had gone crazy with a captured Russian machine gun. I had no interest in finding out.

The only thing I did right that night was to disregard probabilities—like an assault through the open door behind my back—and never to quit the attempt to reach my rifle. The effort was fruitless, but I made the effort.

Though I felt a brief rush of hysteria, I stood my ground. I did not run up and down the barracks shouting, “We’ll all be killed. We’ll all be killed.”

That refusal to break, even under terror, is the same quality that lets cultures last: they absorb fear and hold to the end.

During World War II, Britain, Germany, and Japan all took heavy urban civilian losses from prolonged air attack. Britain faced the Blitz and the V-1s and V-2s; Germany and Japan faced far heavier Allied bombing, including firestorms and, in Japan, two atomic bombs. About 60,000 British civilians were killed. German and Japanese deaths each ran into the hundreds of thousands.

Prewar air staffs expected city bombing to shatter morale and force a government to quit. Civilian will did not break in any of the three countries. Fear, fatigue, and war-weariness became nearly universal; the predicted popular collapse did not. People kept working and obeying. Britain’s own experience in 1940–41 had already shown that intensive bombing need not break a society’s will. Even so, British leaders made German civilian morale an aim of area bombing, and American leaders, especially against Japan, used the same justification for attacking cities.

We may never again witness the collective courage civilians showed in all three countries, though we live in hope. The lessons of the bombings are embodied in clichés: Stand your ground. Take it one day at a time. Never, never, never quit.

As for us facing this midterm melee: pray much, think much, stay calm. It is not the beginning of Christ’s millennial reign, and it is not the end of the world—no matter which side wins.

And we can say with Frodo and Gandalf, as they began to face their dark and dangerous road:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

NOTE:

MY NEW NOVELLA, THE DEATH OF SERGEANT YORK, IS AVAILABLE ON AMAZON NOW!

This Substack is edited by Titus Gee

My parents were classical liberals, born in the 1920s and graduating from high school at the end of the 1930s. Both grew up with firearms in the home. My mother’s father had been a free-roaming cowboy in the American West from 1910 to 1919, the year he married. He owned a Winchester Model 1894 carbine chambered for .30-30. My father was raised by his uncle—a cowboy and hunter—whose house was crowded with firearms leaning against the walls in every corner

The uncle enforced strict rules for children—including me. A child never touched a weapon. A child never owned a toy gun, such as a cowboy cap pistol. A child never formed a hand into a gun and pointed a finger at another person. A gun was meant to kill, and you never pointed one at anything unless you intended to kill it. I conformed completely to my uncle’s rules.

My father had no interest in his uncle’s arsenal or hunting. Instead he devoted himself to the violin, building crystal radios and homemade 78-rpm record players, and working as a projectionist in Seminole, Oklahoma’s five movie houses, where he absorbed, word for word and scene by scene, all the great films of the 1930s. White liberals from my parents’ childhood through the mid-1960s generally felt secure in their neighborhoods, wherever they lived in the United States—the police, sheriffs, state police, and FBI seemed to maintain order among a largely law-abiding population.

I was born in 1943 and lived in Norman, Oklahoma; Fort Worth, Texas; and Gary, Indiana. Until 1960 I never felt threatened in any public situation, including the magic kingdom of Chicago. 1960 was the first time in my life that two black youths approached me on the streets of Gary and threatened violence. In those earlier years, my parents—good liberals, as conscious of the public peace as I was—decreed that no guns would be kept in the house.

Of course, the day came when I ended up spending the night in a fishing shack on the Kankakee River with five boys and six .22 rifles—a disaster. No one died. No one was wounded. But I was as dangerous as a cowboy shooting up main street out of sheer drunken exuberance—and I did not even need to drink. At one level I knew how dangerous I was; at another, I experienced a kind of mania I never repeated.

The experience became the subject of a lifelong discussion between my mother and me where I basically scolded her for not anticipating the outcome of her ban on weapons. I had the argument; she had the ideals—but she hadn’t thought them through.

However, I would not be discussing firearms here based simply on my personal experience. I would have nothing to say in public on the subject were it not for the seemingly continuous slaughter brought to our televisions and other screens by an unending stream of troubled young men armed with the latest semi-automatic weapons.

The chief difference between modern slaughter and slaughter in the past is the targets.

In August 1863, Captain William Quantrill, a Confederate guerrilla leader during the American Civil War, led 300 to 450 men on a raid of the Kansas free-state town of Lawrence. The raiders, including Frank James and members of the Younger family, shot and killed 150 to 190 men—most in front of their families (who were not shot). When Wyatt Earp or Doc Holliday shot anyone, it was always an armed man.

Not so the modern killers. They hunt down women, children, and unarmed men in churches, schools, restaurants, and shopping centers. What was an exceedingly rare occurrence even in violent periods of history has presented itself to us as an epidemic of public evil like no one has seen or heard of before.

Those who try to explain the sudden appearance of this new class of fellow citizens sound like the failed mega-church preacher stammering to explain the presence of a dozen former mistresses on the front row of his morning service.

I’m not going to attempt an explanation. I will only say this: as a pastor I dealt with hundreds of people who began as Christians, arrived at some variety of Christian-flavored crypto-atheism, and were very happy with their landing. Their children don’t begin that journey with the same Christian baggage. They start with semi-moral atheism. Wherever they end up, it won’t be the place their parents settled.

I have spent my whole life trying to be a white knight whose life goal is to protect women, children and the helpless. As far as I can tell, that ambition has dominated most men throughout the history of Western civilization.

On the edge of puberty, I daydreamed of saving the lives of everyone in church; too many modern males, judging by the highly visible evidence, daydream of slaughtering everyone in church.

The repeated sight on our screens—even in censored form—of these mass killings in public places that ought to be considered safe is what finally breaks the social fabric.

In 1969, sitting on the rim at the Waco newspaper, I wrote roughly five headlines a night for two-inch stories on violent crime. For some reason most of the crimes took place in three stacked states: Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. A crime in Kansas had to be uniquely violent to make it into a Texas newspaper.

Though I had returned from the war two years earlier, I still carried the sheltered, bubble-wrapped attitudes of a 1950s upbringing. My wife and I lived over a garage near campus in an apartment that Better Homes and Gardens could have named the 1932 Young Married Couple’s Apartment of the Year. We rarely locked the door.

I had learned in the war that I never felt the weepy, trembly, wet-your-pants kind of fear Hollywood likes to show. All my life-in-danger-glands went to the red. My senses stretched beyond their max, and I reacted to sight and sound stimulus like a nervous cat. But when I had to write the headline on a family beheading in Kansas, I would feel real helpless fear.

My city editor was David McHam. At the end of a shift I shared my difficulties with him. His eyes brightened and he smiled:

“Jack, don’t you know how many millions of people live between you and a murderer in Kansas?”

The answer satisfied me, but we began locking the door.

Almost everyone in the nation can make the statement: “There are millions of people between me and the In-N-Out shooter”—the latest product of a sick culture who decided to shoot the unarmed, the young, and the female. He ran away and killed himself when two armed men returned his fire.

But when we see it in our living rooms—it might as well be happening right next door—and I am sure it stabbed much of the nation with fear. The great fall in national murder-rate statistics that began in 2023 (and continues to this day) faces the mindless fears of a panicked public. To quote Terry Pratchett’s line from his novel Jingo: “The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it.”

The Supreme Court has done away with many of the restrictions placed on gun ownership by various states—the most that remains from New York’s Sullivan law is that the state can still license gun ownership based on evidence of training and good behavior.

I came home from Vietnam hating guns—well-designed machines that exist only for the purpose of killing other human beings. As a soldier I was proficient with all the weapons assigned to my infantry MOS and shot Expert on the M-14 rifle (my grandson told me yesterday that he scored Expert in Marine Corps boot camp), but I followed my parents’ example and wouldn’t have any guns in the house.

When I pastored a church in Gary, Indiana—local reputation had it that Gary was the murder capital of the world— I was surprised that many of my co-pastors carried pistols when they went about the business of providing spiritual instruction and nurture. I said little, but I despised them—one poor example didn’t just carry a pistol; he was a fetishist who owned six concealable pistols.

My self-righteousness was boiling over.

But later, when we had six children and I pastored a church near Fort Wayne, I pondered my commitment to a gun-free house. I changed to this degree—I bought a pump action .22 and took the old enough children to a farm where we could shoot. I taught them gun safety, gun rules, how to use iron sights and how to shoot—I felt it was my duty.

I still hate the necessity of guns.

I suppose that if my readers were asked to justify the individual citizen’s right to own firearms, some could write a book. But most would write only a paragraph or two, no matter which side of the argument they favored.

Like so many tense discussions that dominate our culture, the root understanding is found in the word ‘freedom.’

Long ago, when I was still an undergraduate, I began to think about the proposition I had found in National Review—that capitalism was freedom. Being mired in liberalism, I rejected the notion but thought on it for years. Eventually I concluded that freedom was the operative word, not capitalism: freedom would automatically produce capitalism. Any other system would have to be imposed by violence.

In one sense, freedom has always been present. Throughout every civilization on earth, past or present, a group of men has been free—and that group’s prime directive must be to remain large enough and strong enough to maintain rule. Such rulers have relied on two primary methods to preserve their position: first, denying those below the free class the right to own weapons; second, forbidding their training in the arts of war. The same principle governed American slaveholders who refused to allow slaves to learn to read.

An armed population posed a real danger to ruling elites and other tyrants. Between 73 and 71 BC, Spartacus led a revolt of slaves—who made up roughly a quarter of Italy’s population—against Rome. In 1358 the Jacquerie, northern French commoners, rose against the nobility; they were slaughtered.

The English longbow offers the obvious example of this phenomenon. English laws not only allowed but required the yeomanry (small farmers who owned their own land) to master the longbow. This trusted freeholders with very powerful weapons and skills of war. They used those powers to slaughter the French at Crécy and Agincourt—creating a lasting predicament for French elites, who had no answering units at their disposal.

Yet the French chose to endure without the longbow. (A combination of English incompetence and the intervention of Joan of Arc ultimately delivered their victory.)

Had the French armed their commoners as the English armed the yeomanry, those free men would have turned the bow on their own nobility. Popular history has a habit of softening the past into a Walt Disney movie. The centuries of abuse inflicted on the French commoners by their overlords are best demonstrated by the French Revolution’s own horrors: across the country, peasants seized young nobles and tore them apart with their bare hands. The guillotine of the Terror was merely a sideshow in a far larger circus of vengeance.

In modern Western civilization (and having apparently learned nothing from their own history), the countries most restrictive of weapon ownership are England’s descendent, the United Kingdom, and those derived from it—Australia and New Zealand, along with much of Western and Northern Europe. The freest are the United States (a clear outlier), the Czech Republic, Switzerland, and Austria, along with Nordic countries that have strong hunting traditions.

America’s generous gun laws are based on the notion that a free man is an armed man, and vice versa.

That was Thomas Jefferson’s position. In the first draft of his proposed Virginia Constitution (1776), he wrote: “No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms.” The American long rifle must have been the primary weapon he had in mind—equal or superior to the best rifles of the day.

In other writings, Jefferson offered numerous reasons to own a gun, one being the possibility of rebellion.

In a letter to William Stephens Smith (November 13, 1787), written in the context of Shays’ Rebellion and the need for rulers to remain accountable, he wrote:
“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify [signifies] a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

The Iranian Islamic military (IRGC) still rules Iran because it had already disarmed the civilian population in the cities. And I have no confidence that Jefferson’s principles will continue to dominate in the United States. Between AI and the wickedness of men—how many men across the world would today gladly step into the shoes of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, or Mao Zedong? How many young men are on their knees right now praying, “Lord Satan, please make me the Antichrist?”—what chance do free men in the Jeffersonian sense have to survive in that universe?

I will die of old age before I find out. It will be a problem for my grandchildren to confront—and I must be an optimist, because I have twenty-eight of them. For the most part they are better educated about firearms than I was in that fishing shack surrounded by boys and .22 rifles. As mentioned, some of them are experts.

I still hate guns, and my description of them remains true. But I am no longer a young infantryman who thinks he can lick his weight in wildcats, nor a man in middle age who runs four miles a day. I am an old man for whom walking from the bedroom to the kitchen is more of an adventure than it should be. I also know that what the police do best is discover and photograph dead bodies—they’re still looking for Mrs. Guthrie.

I can’t equal Vice-President Vance’s grandmother with a pistol or weapon in every room of the house, but I come close. I pray I will never need them.

Even so, Come, Lord Jesus.

NOTE:

MY NEW NOVELLA, THE DEATH OF SERGEANT YORK, IS AVAILABLE ON AMAZON NOW!

This Substack is edited by Titus Gee

She was attacked because she is beautiful. If she had the face of a pantomime horse, she would have remained anonymous.

In ancient Athens the women stayed inside the house. Later, Muslims kept them there, tighter. Western women walk free. Natalie Harp pays the price.

She was doing her job— Special Assistant to the President and Executive Assistant to the President in the Trump White House. She is a constant presence at the president’s side. She handles tasks such as printing materials for him (earning the nickname “human printer”), helps with Truth Social posts, and travels with him. Her salary is reported at around $150,000.

In mid-August 2026, at a campaign rally in Atlanta, Ossoff said that Trump “doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”

The crowd exploded at the mention of Natalie’s name.

A woman does her job in a public place and that’s her reward—the sharp stiletto verbal thrust of a wannabe president of the United States, who would sincerely complain if some opponent tried to get political mileage out of his wealth or Jewishness.

President Trump likened him to Peewee Herman and dismissed him.

CNN went bonkers on coverage.

Is she, or isn’t she? Well, she certainly spends a lot of time with the president.

They even tracked down Harp’s estranged brother, Preston, for a five-minute-and-46-second interview on CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront.

No use going too deep into the interview: He thought his sister’s relationship with Trump was unhealthy, expressed regret over their estrangement, and wished her well. He wore a California Bud hat and spoke in the long, languorous speech patterns my pot-addicted brother has used since the late 60s.

The whole incident is regrettable, and I’m sure Ms. Harp can handle it. It’s what she signed up for. Within months of my signing up for the infantry, I was lying in a pool of ice-cold water night-firing an M-14. I decided I had asked for it and might as well enjoy it—I fired my turn and then took the turns of the three men behind me before I let another man shoot.

Here’s another personal story that brands me a guilty, oppressive male: when I was a pastor, I used a derogatory word to describe a young woman who looked ready to cause serious trouble for the family I was counseling.

To my shock, the room immediately froze. I did my best to extricate myself and later asked a wise older pastor what I had done wrong.
He said, “Don’t you know that you can never publicly say anything that attacks the reputation of a woman?”

I repented.

Senator Ossoff should do the same.

NOTE:

MY NEW NOVELLA, THE DEATH OF SERGEANT YORK, IS AVAILABLE ON AMAZON NOW!

This Substack is edited by Titus Gee

On his eighteenth birthday in 1908, my “Uncle Bill”—really my great-uncle, William Jefferson Martin—saddled his horse on the family’s Coke County, Texas, ranch and rode away. By then it was already tradition: his three older brothers had done the same on their eighteenth birthdays. Two years later my grandfather, Samuel Jackson Martin, the youngest son, followed them. The only difference was that his father, Samuel Jefferson Martin, walked beside the stirrup the full length of the lane to the wagon road—little more than two parallel tracks leading to Bronte, Texas—begging him to stay.

The family wore its commitment to Jacksonian Democrat politics in its middle names. The father had reluctantly fought for the South in the Civil War—he hated slavery yet could not bring himself to take up arms against his own blood.

The West Texas patriarchs of the nineteenth century ruled their ranches and families with near-absolute authority. I call such a man Papa. These Papas might have taken their cues from the Bible and softened their grip; the results would have been far better. The boys had rights and voted with their feet, riding away at eighteen. Papa, however, refused to let his six daughters marry. He owned a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun from the Civil War and carried it to meetings with would-be suitors—the girls were beautiful.

Family stories tell of wagons being slow walked from Bronte back to the ranch after festive occasions, a Martin girl on one side of the spring seat and a young man on the other. (The locals called them “play parties”; we would call them dances.) My grandfather played country fiddle and Uncle Bill played a six-fingered country piano—The Martins were short on men for these events, but long on good-looking women who used the limited freedom they had to flirt and dance with the young men.

The stories remain vague about the results of those meetings between Papa and any suitor, though none of the girls married in their youth, not even Maggie, the oldest. She eventually ran away from the ranch because of what the family called a back-fence romance—a fine love story, if only the marriage had held up.

As for the conversations Papa had with the young men, the expectation was always the same: they would leave the county.

Around World War I he lost the girls; they ran away from the ranch under the influence of my feminist maternal great-grandmother.

Yet that patriarch also founded the county’s first school taught by Maggie, filled the ranch house with books and musical instruments, and saw to it that the whole family attended church whenever the Methodist circuit rider came around. He raised an extremely competent set of thirteen children who spread across the globe but always returned to the ranch to see Papa and Mama. Every word I ever heard about him in my childhood reflected love and respect, though the family agreed it was right for the men to leave on their eighteenth birthday and that his treatment of the girls was just plain wrong.

My mother retained a clear memory of him on horseback from a visit to the ranch when she was a little girl and he was in his mid-eighties. She told me, “Jack, no one ever sat a horse better than your great-grandfather.”

There was one tragedy, though, in the family’s history. Based on the birthplace of his children, sometime between 1878 and 1880 my great-grandfather homesteaded a ranch in Brown County, Texas, near the town of Coleman. It was a Hill Country ranch with an annual rainfall of 28—30 inches.

Under the Homestead Act of 1862, a qualified claimant could enter up to 160 acres (one quarter-section) of surveyed public-domain land. The claimant filed an application at a federal land office and paid a small fee, then lived on and improved the land—typically by building a dwelling and cultivating it—for five continuous years. After submitting final proof of compliance, the claimant received a patent from the United States conveying full title.

In Brown County, Texas, the courthouse was destroyed by arson on 29 March 1880, wiping out land titles, tax rolls, and other records. Such fires were not uncommon and were sometimes used to eliminate evidence of land fraud or other crimes.

In the disordered years that followed, my great-grandfather—a careful man who made few mistakes in his life—lost a choice ranch. Family tradition has always held that the land was taken by “the courthouse gang.” With the records gone, the ordinary legal pathway available to local government was the property-tax system: assessment, lien for nonpayment (or inability to prove payment), court judgment, and sheriff’s sale. The destruction of the county’s files made it far easier for that process—or for competing claims that exploited the gaps—to result in the loss of the ranch through government-administered seizure and sale.

The family were not the sort of Christians who asked, “Where was Jesus when they stole our ranch?” They simply moved on.

The new ranch in Coke County was semi-arid, receiving only about 20 inches of rain a year. That made raising cattle more difficult, so the family turned to sheep. The loss of the earlier ranch left a psychic wound that passed down through the generations. Born more than fifty years after the events, I still despise the courthouse that took part in what was ostensibly legal theft—even though the people who work in the Brown County courthouse today are as innocent of that theft as I am of slavery.

Just as Papa took pleasure in his patriarchal rights as head of a large family, so the capitalists—called robber barons, plutocrats, or, in Theodore Roosevelt’s phrase, malefactors of great wealth—took pleasure in their power over vast corporations and armies of workers. Both largely forgot noblesse oblige, the obligation that accompanies privilege: those who have most must give most; fortune confers responsibility, not license; nobility is proven by what it owes, not by what it owns.

When I was quite young, my mother tried to teach me the concept. I think she said: “You have much, you owe much to others.”

Capitalism is freedom, and its faults are plain for all to see; yet to abandon it is to accept some measure of slavery. In Genesis, as the Egyptian famine deepened, Joseph required those who no longer had money to purchase grain with their own persons—they and their land became the property of Pharaoh in exchange for food and seed.

In 1908 my Uncle Bill rode off the ranch, traveled to California, and in a loose sense became a communist—though not a Marxist one, for the Russian Revolution had not yet occurred. He joined the Industrial Workers of the World and became a Wobbly. The union’s aim was the complete overthrow of capitalism: workers would take control of the means of production and run industry themselves.

The union preferred direct action—strikes, slowdowns, sabotage, and other workplace tactics—over political parties, elections, or traditional union contracts. Corporations under attack hired armed strikebreakers; union members as tough as my Uncle Bill picked up axe handles, and the war was on.

I once asked Uncle Bill what he did in California.
“I was a mucker,” he said.
“What’s a mucker?”
“They put you in a pit and you clean out the muck.” I pictured swamp mud. Only later did I learn the pit was in a mine, and the muck was broken rock.

He may have stayed on the West coast for as many as ten years, but in all his stories there was a gap of three years, and he never affirmed or denied the family suspicions that he had spent three years in prison.

In 1910 my grandfather left the ranch and spent the next ten years knocking around the West as a cowboy. The biggest jobs he had were three large cattle drives out of Chihuahua, Mexico—one of which, at least, ended in Carlsbad, New Mexico. Late one dark night on that drive, he arrived near the famous Carlsbad Caverns. He knew this large hole in the ground was somewhere nearby, but not exactly where, so he stopped, dropped onto the rocky earth, and fell asleep. At dawn he discovered he had slept just yards from the mouth of that bottomless cave.

The Martin boys and girls were run-of-the-mill Scotch-Irish—wiry and lanky. Not my grandfather. His mother was born a Lee and came from freed-slave stock; in her DNA was a huge field hand who could have played defensive tackle in the NFL. My grandmother was five-two; my grandfather was six-three, with giant hands, broad shoulders, a long waist, and long arms. After he died in 1952 we were at Notre Dame when the football team walked across campus for fall training. My grandmother said to me, “Jack, this is the first time in my life I have seen several men together who were as large as your grandfather.”

When he reached his full stature and strength as a teenager, it turned out he could also fight. The fights were more grappling than hitting and were organized along the lines of the Clint Eastwood film Every Which Way but Loose, only they took place after church on the church grounds. With Uncle Bill as his manager, grandfather soon became a regional hero who never lacked challengers. My grandmother told me that his fighting career ended when he picked up an opponent over his head and tore his meniscus, slightly laming his left leg.

But more than a torn meniscus was working against him. His family had lived off the dynamics of the Western frontier for more than a hundred years. The frontier was dead. Cowboying and large cattle drives were dead. Homesteading was no longer possible.

Marrying my grandmother was a plus and they had five children, but they were rapidly sliding down the social ladder. He left cowboying behind as a dying industry and became expert in blacksmithing—another dying profession. In the early twenties the couple lived on a tenant farm in Runnels County near Balinger, Texas.

There is a statue of the man who owned the tenant farm and ran the county government in the courthouse square of Balinger. In his role as town boss, the landlord also hired my grandfather as one of the intermittent county road workers—My grandmother told me the pay was fifty cents a day, sun to sun. In 1919 a special law for Runnels County itself had capped pay for road hands at $2.00 per day (10-hour day) . . . That was a maximum; actual rates set by the commissioners court could be—and often were—much lower when county funds were tight—like fifty cents a day for my grandfather.

The farm supplied the family with pinto beans every day and enough chickens for a regular Sunday dinner. Turkeys were raised primarily for sale, though two were always kept for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Grandmother canned large quantities of vegetables and fruit in Mason jars. Each year a pig was slaughtered, then salted and smoked to provide a full year’s supply of pork; beef was more often eaten fresh, cooked and canned for later use, or sold at the local marketplace.

Anything that needed building, my grandfather could build. Money, though, was almost nonexistent. This was my mother’s childhood. She told me that the scene in the movie The Grapes of Wrath—of the children wanting to buy penny candy from a jar in a gas station on the road to California—offended her. “I didn’t see a nickel for more than four years during the Depression,” she said.

So, throughout the thirties the money was nonexistent, the food plentiful but plain, the clothes homemade—they were the poorest-dressed students in the local school system—their Christian faith was fundamentalist Baptist, the politics Roosevelt Democrat, and the hopes of the young girls unattainable.

Meanwhile the richest man in the county was both a skinflint employer and landlord. His crop expectations were not unfair—unlike a communist quota or a sales quota, which often are—but his share always came off the top. My mother and her two sisters lived out their public lives on the liberal side of the Democrat Party and through all the founding woes and triumphs of the American Federation of Teachers. The two boys, whom the girls did not consider particularly bright (there was a grain of truth in the opinion, though brightness is not the measure by which they should be judged), both became Baptist pastors and voted Republican.

My grandfather grieved all his life that he had been unable to support his children’s hopes and dreams, yet he must have done something right—all five earned degrees from major universities and built professional careers. World War II, as it did for so much of the nation, saved him from grinding poverty. Because of his skills as a blacksmith and his general handiness with metalworking, the Convair plant in Fort Worth hired him for its Experimental Department, where he worked until his death in 1952.

My mother was the oldest; Mary was the next sister. Both had fiery spirits, but my mother found quieter landing places. Mary couldn’t discuss the richest man in Runnels County without snarling. I’m sure his own family loved him and considered him a loving father and husband. But to Mary he was simply a capitalist oppressor—and she wasn’t accepting any pie-in-the-sky “Heaven will be better” answers.

My Uncle Bill was a proto-communist, and I am sure he voted Democrat or favored the Democrat in every election of his long life. One of the striking, still under-examined phenomena of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the widespread abandonment of traditional Christianity—and often of formal religion altogether—among many educated young men. Read the memoirs: Lincoln Steffens and William Shirer both began as functioning church members and, as young adults, found they could live without the conventional God concept. Ernest Hemingway and T.E. Lawrence, for their part, had taught or led Bible classes and worked in Sunday school in their youth in churches of the kind I could have attended.

For many of these intellectuals—Steffens is the only one on record among those named above—the communist revolution in Russia was like catnip. If you didn’t care for Russian literature, music, and ballet, there was little reason to respect or admire the nation itself—and the Jews of the Pale, the world of Fiddler on the Roof, had the strongest reasons of all to hate the old regime.

Young men across the globe were swept up by a doctrine that seemed to supply the personal, human touch that capitalism neglected. I know it sounds almost silly to say this now, especially considering the universal record of tyranny and murder in every communist experiment, but that was the emotional appeal.

It is difficult for moderns to understand the indifferent savagery of earlier American capitalism.

For instance, I worked at U.S. Steel’s Gary Works in the summers of 1962 and 1963. The older men—those who had started in the early 1930s—made sure we rookies understood that the hard hats on our heads, the gloves on our hands, and the metatarsal-guard shoes on our feet (to keep them from being crushed by a falling ingot) had all been won as rights through savage union strikes. So had the shower rooms and the right to a thirty-minute lunch break even on a high-pressure shift.

People want the right to make money and keep it, but they also want to think that someone cares about their basic needs—the king, the lord of the manor, the president, the legislators.

The left wing of the Democratic Party calls for food, clothing, medical care, reliable education, and low prices for all. These demands sound unobjectionable—until one asks how they would be delivered and who would pay.

My Aunt Mary spent her life working on issues of this kind and said little about communism. Once, describing the Soviet Union, she did say: “Where they do things right,” and she would hear no criticism of Stalin as a mass murderer—or any other communist, for that matter.

I attended a family holiday meal at her house. She met me in the front room wearing a quite fancy Soviet badge on her blouse. I staggered and muttered, “The only bullets fired at me in Vietnam came from a Chinese machine gun” (I had been pinned to a wall watching the green tracers go by). There was silence all around. A little later she reappeared without the badge, and I followed her to the dining table. Nothing was said. As usual the gathering was a wonderful family experience. I loved my Aunt Mary very much.

Winston Churchill notes in his World War I memoirs that in 1911 the spirit between Germany and Great Britain changed. The spirit in the United States has changed as well.

In 1969 I worked for the Waco newspaper; the Christmas bonus was a week’s pay. In 1988 I worked for the Gannett paper in Iowa City; the Christmas bonus was a small canned Polish ham that was inedible. Communist revolutions have started over lesser provocations.

Today, on the left coast of the modern Democrat Party a great tectonic plate of communism is grinding its way over the softer remnants of the party’s left wing. On the right coast a great beach of sand is being washed away daily into the Donald Trump construct known as MAGA.

Once again, the cry of the socialist for “justice” and “compassion” and “punishing the heartless overlords” rings in the ears and touches the hearts of people who otherwise would never openly support tyranny. The street-level message always sounds good, especially to anyone who is more likely to receive government support than they are to pay a forty percent tax rate.

Unfortunately, much that socialists wish for cannot be achieved without making slaves of everyone, as Joseph did in Egypt.

NOTE:

MY NEW NOVELLA, THE DEATH OF SERGEANT YORK, IS AVAILABLE ON AMAZON NOW!

This Substack is edited by Titus Gee

In my experience as a journalist, the slow days of August were sometimes called the “silly season.” With legislatures, courts, and much of officialdom on recess, little of real consequence tends to happen—and the stories that do surface often seem frivolous or off-the-wall.

What has happened this silly season may seem as frivolous as every other August in my memory—but it isn’t.

What is unfolding looks like a series of sideshows, yet two matters are deadly serious: a U.S.-Iran war locked in the tar-baby pattern of intermittent strikes, fragile pauses, and expanding costs with no clean exit; and the Democratic Party’s accelerating turn toward collectivist premises and maximalist demands whose idealistic packaging has, historically, repeatedly produced the opposite of the liberation it promised.

Whether he wins the tar baby war or not, it’s Trump’s problem, not mine.

The Democrat party shift—people compiling a pure wish list without the underlying structure or discipline of a coherent ideology—is the silliest turn in American political history.

Both could be genuine disasters and should be reported and reacted to as such, but they occurred in the silly season, and most people would just prefer to look the other way.

But the Dr. Anthony Fauci hearings last week, chaired by Senator Rand Paul, were genuine silly season theater. I couldn’t ask for better.

I thought Senator Rand Paul would give us sanctimonious righteousness—Hotspur’s man who would “cavil on a hair.” Meanwhile, Dr. Anthony Fauci would affect frosty intellectual and professional superiority, the chief pilot still standing amid the smoking ruins of a vast bureaucratic disaster. This promised great entertainment value.

The hearings didn’t deliver. Fauci took ‘the Fifth’ more than a hundred times—and wouldn’t even answer a question about his own tie. Not his finest hour. Meanwhile Rand Paul tore at him the whole time like a terrier frantic to reach a rat hiding behind a pane of glass.

I wanted to join J.K. Simmons at the end of Burn After Reading in asking: “What did we learn . . .?”

No one knew then. And I still don’t know what we learned from these hearings.

I do know they leave real questions about America’s supposed elites, which has been Fauci’s actual vocation since he was a child—that is, to be both ‘elite’ and very questionable.

Fauci graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1962 with a B.A. in classics on a pre-med track. I entered Baylor University in Texas that fall. We overlapped as college-age contemporaries in the early 1960s. He studied at a traditional all-male Jesuit college that still required jacket and tie for evening meals and that centered its curriculum on Greek, Latin, and philosophy, alongside the sciences needed for medical school—thereby cultivating habits of formality and a liberal-arts education deliberately continuous with the classical and medieval tradition. It set out to produce nothing less than the best and the brightest

For most of my life I have believed American education reached its absolute peak in 1962. Anthony Fauci, who graduated first in his class from Cornell University Medical College four years later, is a pure product of that high-water mark. After Vietnam, however, the phrase “the best and the brightest” acquired an ironic edge, applied to the elite architects of disaster; Fauci belongs among the nation’s “best and brightest” in precisely that expanded, cautionary sense.

To my students I always described the decline of cultures as a vast river with an irresistible current that no individual can overcome—yet the individual struggle against it is all we have to offer. Whatever we do, we are all carried downstream at the same speed.

To give you an example: when I entered the university in 1962, substantial numbers of students still read outside the curriculum. I overheard sophomores in the dorm discussing two essays—Albert Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus” and Sir Isaiah Berlin’s “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” I tracked the pieces down and read them. Camus’s essay was vivid and unforgettable; Berlin’s advanced a clear, memorable thesis—the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing—yet proved lengthy and rather tedious.

Two years later I was amused when I met a gifted freshman who told me he wanted to be the first sophomore on campus to have read the complete works of Dostoevsky.

After a long break from education I entered graduate school in English literature. I had to take the GRE and learned that, because students no longer read outside the curriculum—if it wasn’t assigned, they didn’t read it—the exam had eliminated questions on Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2.

What makes the decline interesting is the sharp divergence within it: while literary and historical understanding of our culture has collapsed, the technological achievements of our civilization have soared to heights once confined to imagination—computers, the internet, smartphones, artificial intelligence, medical breakthroughs, space exploration, and genetic engineering.

Massive numbers of modern Americans have abandoned their religion, their history, and nearly every social convention inherited from the past. In that climate it has become possible for radical progressive organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America to advance a national platform that calls for abolishing the Electoral College and the Senate, and for replacing the President and the Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to the House of Representatives.

Fauci flows in the same river we all do, and when he landed the role of Lord High Everything Else (Pooh Bah’s blanket authority in The Mikado)—the single indispensable expert whose brief seemed to expand across science, policy, media, and presidential advising—he immediately turned to totalitarian solutions that both failed and persecuted Americans in every aspect.

And like Pooh-Bah, Fauci reveled in the fact that all the wise, the famous, and the important sought his august presence.

Fauci’s private diary records contacts with a long roster of celebrities, including an April 2020 Zoom organized by Kim Kardashian that featured Katy Perry, Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato, Chris Rock, Usher, and Michael Jordan; repeated exchanges with Barbra Streisand (including a call in which he explained Alexa and discussed vaccines); warm conversations with Bono; interactions with Julia Roberts, whom he described as “absolutely fabulous”; and mentions of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Leonardo DiCaprio, Francis Ford Coppola, George Clooney, Alan Alda, Alec Baldwin, Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher, Orlando Bloom, Amy Poehler, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Magic Johnson, Steph Curry, Venus Williams, Steve Buscemi, Tyra Banks, Stanley Tucci, Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Matt Damon, Lil Wayne, Eddie Vedder, Olivia Rodrigo, Joan Baez, Dion DiMucci (who wrote and sang a song for him), Isabella Rossellini, Marisa Tomei, John Turturro, Neil Sedaka, Ava DuVernay, José Andrés, Clive Davis, Kelly Ripa, Trevor Noah, and Anna Wintour.

The pandemic most comparable to Covid was the 1918 influenza pandemic. It interested me because of how often it turns up in literature—for instance, T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) lost his father to the epidemic in 1919. Both parents of the author Mary McCarthy contracted the flu on a train from Seattle to Minneapolis and died there when she was a little girl. No one on any side of my family died—none even claimed they had had the flu.

Below is a comparison in the US between the 1918 flu epidemic and Covid-19:

In 1918, the federal government took almost no action, and local governments chose between full-fledged intervention and benign neglect—the areas that went full on fighting the flu had fewer per capita deaths. There might have been local and individual panic, but not much national disturbance.

In contrast, during Covid I had to listen to distant friends of my own age shrieking on the telephone because Florida refused to follow the federal guidelines—a national panic that Fauci himself nurtured and promoted. (Compare his public statements with his private writings.) Because of my age I went along: I took the shots and obeyed the directives from on high. I was surprised to learn that, apart from my schoolteacher children (who had to take them or be fired), my other adult children refused. We suddenly became a nation of Karens berating diners for eating without masks. And we soon learned that the great Pooh-Bah and all the world’s lesser Pooh-Bahs had no intention of following the quarantine rules themselves.

I asked Grok (built by xAI) to name three literary figures who most resemble Fauci. Grok immediately supplied the following:

These are not flattering comparisons, nor are they charges of cartoon villainy. They are literary portraits that accurately capture what Fauci is: an over-promoted impostor for whom our personal freedom does not exist; a man prepared to act the dictator and to impose on the rest of us burdens he would never bear himself; a fourteen-year-old girl who writes in her diary that Amanda spoke to her today and she is so thrilled.

NOTE:

MY NEW NOVELLA, THE DEATH OF SERGEANT YORK, IS AVAILABLE ON AMAZON NOW!

This Substack is edited by Titus Gee

There is a surreal quality to the experience of war that almost no veteran ever discusses.

Never in my life—before or after—was I more concentrated on the existential moment than when I was in Vietnam—and never did I know less.

Part One: The Mission

I served with 5^th Special Forces in Vietnam from September 1966 to September 1967. When I arrived in Vietnam, the personnel sergeant informed me that I would be a radio-teletype operator. I told the sergeant that I had never seen a radio-teletype—that I was a graduate of Special Warfare School, that I had an 11B MOS (infantry), and 05B radio MOS for the Special Forces AN/GRC-109 Morse code transmitter – a descendant of the OSS suitcase radio of WWII.

He told me to go to hell.

I challenged the assignment up the chain of command, and my reward was to be identified as a troublemaker in need of special attention.

It turns out the army made no mistake making me a radio teletype operator: I could type, spell, master the dark sorcery necessary to find workable frequencies during catastrophic sunspot periods, and keep radio traffic flowing for an entire ten-hour shift.

The fact that I had to master my third MOS on the fly made no difference to the army. As far as the army was concerned, it was my duty, and I had better get to it.

There were several stages a soldier in Vietnam had to go through as his tour progressed. First a soldier had to learn that the war was nonsense—not the reasons for our involvement, but the idiocy of our strategic approach. Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr., U.S. Army (retired) carefully explained the idiocy when he wrote On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Presidio Press, 1982). The book was criticized on picky professional points, but never refuted as to its central thesis.

(In short, he pointed out that the U.S. failed in Vietnam because of a complete lack of unified war planning and over-reliance on tactical military approaches while neglecting the broader strategic principles outlined by Carl von Clausewitz. It’s worth looking up if you are unfamiliar.)

The scales fell from my eyes the first time I transmitted messages ordering and detailing the Next Big Push and said out loud to my empty radio cubicle: “Hell! We did that three months ago.” Before I returned home, I nailed it down firmly that the action cycles lasted about three months and then repeated. Everything we did, we had already done in the previous quarter, and we would do it all again in three months’ time.

I decided (perhaps ignorantly, but I don’t believe so) that the goal of each operation was to turn the attack zone into a gigantic shooting gallery, pile up a super large number of kills among the enemy, while taking a manageable number of kills on our side (eventually more than 55,000), call it a win, and wait for Hanoi to cry uncle—similar to what we are now waiting for in Iran.

The problem is we cried uncle first—and North Vietnam won.

I went to Vietnam following in the footsteps of my father, my grandfather, and other family members who had gone to war in World Wars I and II. But it wasn’t the same. Those wars were worthy of sacrifice. Within a very short time I found myself standing with my nose almost touching the wall in a completely silent radio room at three a.m. and saying, “There is nothing worth dying for in this country.”

Many of us who served in the war’s early years reached the same hard conclusion: the oath bound us to duty regardless of circumstances, though that duty still left room, of course, for the soldier’s ancient privilege of dodging fatigue details whenever possible. Later cohorts, I believe, drew different conclusions. To my continuing surprise, I was still writing headlines about the war in 1971.

I had declined a top-secret clearance—I wanted to stay as far from headquarters as possible, and I received my wish. I was assigned to the Fourth Corps’ C-Team in the Mekong Delta, located at the military airport outside the capital city of Can Tho.

Special Forces advisors worked with indigenous units—a handful of Americans amid a sea of Vietnamese. The LLDB (Lực Lượng Đặc Biệt), Army of the Republic of Vietnam’s (AVRN) official Special Forces, had been the favored regime-protection and internal-security force of South Vietnam’s first president, Ngô Đình Diệm, and his brother, Ngô Đình Nhu—more a dumping ground for favorites than a frontline unit. The 1963 deaths of the two leaders changed nothing.

The 4th Corps headquarters where we lived and worked stood across the street from an airfield dominated by Air America (CIA) planes. To the street it presented the face of a Western fort, yet much of its back wall was missing—the gap opened onto a sprawling encampment of the wives and children of the Vietnamese soldiers who served there.

The Vietnamese colonel and his mistress lived in an apartment in the back left corner of the fort. There must be a school that supplies mistresses to colonels: over-endowed like Jayne Mansfield, with a classic face that seemed intelligent and hinted at depression. She showed herself daily when she fed the pigeons in the courtyard.

Toward the front of the courtyard, the junior officers played endless games of volleyball while there was daylight.

I showed up in the radio room at 7 a.m. An American major I liked was already at his desk by 6 a.m. The Vietnamese officers strolled in at 9 a.m., and by 3 p.m. you would see them in the hallway wearing towels as they headed for the showers. The major would still be at his desk at 6 p.m.

The outstanding piece of evidence supporting my growing thesis of South Vietnamese decadence was the unit’s intelligence officer. His father was a Saigon general. He was as fat as Buddha—you do not know how shocking it is to see a fat Vietnamese. He ran the public torture sessions of Viet Cong prisoners—called interrogation by the locals—that brought every woman and child in the compound to watch.

You may be reacting to my opinions, and I will confess that where cultural issues are concerned, I am readily judgmental. But short workdays during a war? I worked at least ten hours a day, seven days a week, and the major outworked me. Officers playing nonstop volleyball games?—Officers train their troops. And a well-born gargantuan captain trying to play Falstaff?

Years later, mid-tirade in a college classroom, one of my sharper students cut in: “Dr. Simons, wouldn’t it be better if you just told us which cultures you actually like?”

I was stunned. I didn’t have an answer, and I mumbled something.

My observations, however, pointed to a cultural thesis: South Vietnam’s ruling class consisted mainly of Roman Catholic Francophiles trying to govern a largely Buddhist population and followers of other Asian faiths. They were not merely Francophiles; they were French-colonial Francophiles—which accounted for the short workdays and the premium on personal indulgence.

Part Two: The Battle

Daily messages made clear we were building toward a major offensive. I pictured senior officers across the Delta imagining a broad line of American and Vietnamese troops sweeping the width of the region and driving the Viet Cong into Cambodia—probably just a junior enlisted man’s fantasy, but whatever they planned, it was going to be big. The tempo rose every day. The briefing room beside the radio shack filled with officers from both armies. Map boards stayed covered with cloth; I often passed the open door and saw their backs bent over, taking notes from the briefer.

Even the South Vietnamese officers had a quickened step.

The day before D-Day I worked the four-to-twelve shift. The C-Team’s radio room was a steel-doored vault of twelve-inch reinforced concrete; once inside, the outside world vanished. I left to go to supper and walked onto a courtyard thronged like a New Orleans Mardi Gras street—wall-to-wall 5^th Special Forces soldiers—many of them oversized, overweight senior NCOs—it was a party fueled by the expectation of war without the aid of alcohol. Shoving through to the chow hall and back was like fighting through a mob at a football ticket booth.

I knew people and questioned them about the senior sergeants.

Special Forces had attached a combat jump to the operation. Don’t ask me how, or where? —I do know why. I doubt that the jump had heavy strategic justification, but socially it was a winner. Large numbers of mature sergeants (and some officers) had made hundreds of military jumps, but because of lack of opportunity they had never made a combat jump. They desired as the final reward of their career a bronze star placed on their jump wings signifying they had made a combat jump.

Senior NCOs from all over the country showed up—a one-time, hastily assembled bunch of sergeants who could hold a defensive line and jump from airplanes. Formed as a blocking force, they were dropped into a rice paddy close enough to the expected fight to count as a combat jump, ready to cut off any VC fleeing their way. I assume they jumped with an airborne unit of the LLDB and earned the bronze star on their wings. I never heard of them again.

Since this was a major sweep, the 5th Group’s combat photographer showed up with two Nikons around his neck. It stung me to see him. While he was still stateside learning to be a photographer, I’d begged for the job on the strength of my camera work and print developing—the sergeant wasn’t impressed and had turned me down.

That photographer had everything I wanted. He knew most of the Americans participating in the assault in the morning and shared the community excitement generated by the coming battle. Most importantly he was in the field, and I worked inside a bank vault.

The next morning, before I had eaten breakfast, a Russian machine gun cut him in half. The assault battalion had walked into a perfect ambush. The VC knew everything: the route along a wide distributary of the Mekong River, and the time. They set up a wall of 12.7 mm heavy machine guns and lesser machine guns across the river. The ground they chose to fire into was as flat as a pool table. The ambush included the usual mine fields surrounding the kill zone, so the battalion was slaughtered—the river blocked a charge toward the ambush (the best way to defeat it), and all other exits were sealed off by the land mines.

There isn’t much else to say about the battle. Later that day, carrying a message to S4 (supply), I ran a football drill—the high-step through a row of tires—over hundreds of dead and dying South Vietnamese troops. The gate and entryway to our compound had become the nearest point for triage of the wounded from the battlefield.

Later that week I transmitted the after-action reporting seven hundred casualties from the ambush. As far as I knew, every American caught in the ambush had been killed. Stories abounded of Vietnamese panic and the Americans’ attempts to control them as they rushed the helicopters.

There is no question a VC spy had sat through every planning meeting and fed the details to his handlers. I thought briefly about the pressures the alliances with the Vietnamese put on senior officers—among them the major I admired—but that was not my concern. I focused on my own problems.

Our fight was part of the larger actions of 19–21 June 1967 during Operation Concordia, sometimes called the Battle of the Mekong. Contemporary newspaper accounts highlighted U.S. Navy PBRs (patrol boats) and South Vietnamese forces. Parallel fighting that day included a major Mobile Riverine Force operation (elements of the U.S. Army 9th Infantry Division and Navy Task Force 117) near Ap Bac in the Rach Gia area.

I had to construct that last sentence from research. To this day I have no idea where Ap Bac or the Rach Gia area lies in the Mekong Delta. Remember, I worked in a bank vault and transmitted words.

The Special Forces/LLDB battle along that branch of the Mekong was the tree that fell in the forest—no one heard it, so it never existed.

Part Three: The Consequences

But I had other issues. I was melting away like a pile of sand in a rainstorm—from what I later learned was pernicious dysentery. Typically, I didn’t see a medic. The loss was significant: I had arrived in-country weighing 165 pounds and stepped on my mother’s scale the day I returned home at 123.

And I did not know I was as sick in my soul as I was in body. A year of war, whatever one’s role, is irredeemably destructive to spirit, mind, and body. I had seen enough action to be pinned down by green Chinese tracers from a VC machine gun. In fact, I had seen nearly everything a war can show: dead bodies; infantry helicopter assaults; service as an extra gun on a rescue force to the Cambodian border; a two a.m. North Vietnamese sapper attack on our helicopters in Nha Trang (I alone saw a sapper); C-47 gunship battles with VC forces returning fire from the ground. I had landed in a C-123 or C-130 at nearly every key airstrip in Vietnam, including Khe Sanh. And like Captain Nixon in Band of Brothers, I had never fired my rifle except to make sure it worked—because I never had a target.

One other time I had begged for a job and the person who kept it was killed:

This occurred on the day the personnel sergeant told me I was going to signal company. I walked out of personnel in Nha Trang and ran into a classmate from Special Forces training who was a radio operator on an A-Team in I Corp (near North Vietnam) and told him my predicament.

He was spooky—red-skinned, bloodshot eyes—as he described spent bullets slowly cartwheeling toward him across the tops of sandbags. He blurted out: “You can have my job. I’ll take your job.” We went back to the personnel sergeant and told him our solution to our mutual problems. In a louder voice this time, he told us to go to hell.

My classmate was killed a couple of weeks later.

Little was left for me to do after the big battle. I was promoted to sergeant. I practiced all military courtesy with the Falstaff intelligence captain, but I never had good control over my eyes and facial expressions. It must have been obvious I despised him. He drove a jeep down the road in front of the compound, I saluted him, and he deliberately swerved to hit me.

I leaped aside, but I didn’t give him the finger, and he didn’t look back.

The next major event was the South Vietnamese presidential election of 3 September 1967. That day the colonel assembled the Vietnamese personnel on the compound and instructed them to vote for the Thiệu–Kỳ military ticket—the slate that would govern South Vietnam until the fall of Saigon in 1975.

On the night of 3 September 1967—the day of the presidential election—the Viet Cong in our area staged what looked like a full-scale rehearsal for the Tet Offensive that would launch 149 days later, 30 January 1968.

The rehearsal was impressive to watch. All the airport lights were on, creating a bowl of light in the surrounding darkness. I stood on the airfield and watched the show: at the four points of the compass, close enough that I could hear the buzzsaw sound of their miniguns, four Spooky AC-47 gunships circled the airport, pouring what looked like red-beamed death rays toward the ground. Surprisingly, the usual anti-aircraft machine-gun streams tried to reach them but fell short—they simply lacked the range. I watched for a while, then went to bed.

Later I was rousted out, fully armed, and found myself in a trench facing the south end of the runway. I asked the sergeant beside me where they were going to come from. He pointed south. They never came.

Three days later, wearing a dress uniform that hung on my 123-pound frame, I was on an airplane headed for Oakland, California.

I should mention one unintended consequence of the roughly 700 casualties we took in late June. The people back in Nha Trang had decided that 4th Corps was a slaughterhouse. A replacement finally showed up for the radio-teletype section—a small, decent guy from North Carolina. He was quiet and strangely surly. When the time came for him to work a shift alone at midnight, he botched it so badly that he was gone by 6 a.m. the next morning.

It took me decades to figure out that he was frightened to death.

Even more strikingly, the day I shipped out of Cần Thơ I passed my replacement in the short tunnel that served as our front gate. I had known him in Panama and thought him a real creep, yet he had been in the Army long enough that he should have been a solid radio-teletype operator.

He couldn’t walk. He was weeping openly; one arm draped over the shoulders of a senior sergeant who had been called out to the airport to pull him off the tarmac. He had collapsed in tears the moment he stepped off the plane. Behind them walked another sergeant carrying his duffel bag, a look of pure disgust on his face.

I didn’t laugh, but it struck me as human comedy.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the soldier too frightened to walk from the airfield to the C-Team headquarters across the street was not a coward but a prophet. In a few months everything around us would be overrun and burned to the ground in the tidal wave called Tet.

NOTE:

MY NEW NOVELLA, THE DEATH OF SERGEANT YORK, IS AVAILABLE ON AMAZON NOW!

This Substack is edited by Titus Gee

My mother—bedridden for the last five years of her life and completely cared for by my father—was what passed for a feminist in the 1940s and 1950s.

Along with my grandmother, three aunts, and a fierce quartet of maternal great-aunts, she was among the only females I knew—I had younger brothers but no sisters. Without rejecting any of those women, I early and completely identified with the male sex and felt no desire to know or be near girls my own age. That did not mean I was unkind to them or believed I had any right to bully them; I simply wanted nothing to do with them.

In 1948 I attended a free preschool for the children of University of Oklahoma students. On a blustery fall day during recess I stood with a group of young boys trying to talk about Oklahoma football even though our only knowledge came from the OU games we had seen at Owen Field. Outside our circle loomed a girl not much older than we were, but considerably larger; without invitation she tried to correct our ignorance of the game.

My feelings matched those of the whole group. Who was she to tell us about football? Who was she even to know anything about the game? She was clearly talking down to us because of our ignorance.
If I had been a cat, I would have hissed; instead, I stared at her in disbelief. Looking back after more than seventy years, I think she was the daughter of an assistant coach, repeating what her father had taught her. But in my eyes at the time, she didn’t have the right to know anything about the game, let alone hold an opinion.

My parents owned James Thurber’s 1943 collection Men, Women and Dogs. It concludes with a sequence of seventeen cartoons called “The War Between Men and Women.”

I couldn’t read, but I could follow the linear story told in pictures, and you can’t imagine the relief I felt when the women surrendered in the final cartoon.

My own experiences offer clear examples of the difficulties women face across a lifetime. Remember, my mother was a feminist and treated my education in all of life’s facets as a religious commitment.

I had arrived at my attitudes so early you might as well say I was born with them. My mother spoke to me and taught me as though I were an adult (see my essay: “Homage to a Great Woman: 10 Lessons from My Mother”). My young father played roughly with his sons, told us the plots of Laurel and Hardy shorts and Poe stories such as “The Gold Bug,” and played Beethoven and Brahms symphonies on the homemade record player.

When it came to discipline, my parents split cleanly along gender lines. Once provoked, my mother shrieked like a banshee, chasing me through the house while screaming and clawing. My father was the opposite: a black-robed hanging judge with a slow, timpani beat in the background—crime, judgment, punishment, usually two swings of the belt.

My mother was tall, intelligent, and beautiful. She was also an aggressive thinker who had suffered the privations of being poor and from a wrong-side-of-the-tracks family through high school—and we weren’t rich by any means. Yet a couple attending the University of Oklahoma from 1946 to 1950 was the equivalent of young aristocrats living in the castle of a great king.

She had two basic issues that strained her youthful marriage. She was unhappy to be a woman (just as I was happy to be a male), and she knew the Bible taught that she should submit to her husband—something she resented fiercely. She thought of herself as an intellectual, though a New York City Jewish intellectual would have graded her a striving middlebrow woman who had grown up on a Texas tenant farm.

When I was in high school, she told me that one day in 1947 she had packed her bags, dressed herself, my brother, and me in our best clothes, and sat on the couch staring at us. She intended to walk us to the bus station and return to her parents. She said, “I asked myself, ‘what would happen to you?’”

Then she rose, unpacked the bags, changed back into a housedress, put us in our play clothes, cooked supper, applied fresh lipstick, and stood at the door like a young bride to kiss my father when he returned from class.

Because of the quiet power held by the women in my life, I have watched them closely since early childhood. The best example came during our visits to my grandparents in Fort Worth. The women—my mother, grandmother, and two aunts—would be ironing and doing household tasks in the front room. I knew they would talk among themselves, exchanging family gossip and airing their issues. Still young enough to be regarded as a baby, I would play on the floor with my small cars, back turned to them, as close as I could get.

They ignored me and talked openly. I listened closely and never indicated my intent, keeping what I heard to myself and trying to blend it into my growing store of understanding. I have never stopped studying women and trying to think about their difficulties. Many of my prejudices remain unchanged, but I would not call the way I react to women a prejudice.

In boyhood I kept females at a distance, but they voluntarily kept their distance from males, as well. By the sixth grade the girls had changed and began a flurry of activity among themselves, writing notes and passing them in class to the boys, asking leading questions. This led to trouble with one girl’s mother, who assaulted a friend and me after school, shouting angry epithets at us that we couldn’t understand as we tried to walk home.

One day a young nurse showed up at school and the boys were released to the playground while the girls were kept in the auditorium. After the meeting, I saw a female student with a stressed face and made some ignorant joke (nowhere near the subject of the meeting, because I had no idea what it was about). She spurned me with the slightest gesture and turned away.

I remained in ignorance, but by keeping my distance I generally gave females no trouble. The one female I couldn’t escape was my mother. I have already described her as volatile, direct, and intelligent. My father had high standards for public behavior and required obedience, but my mother had a broader range of concerns and intervened quickly and with vigor.

Inevitably, we had many confrontations. She was often roused and fierce. One night after supper she came after me. I froze in place and listened to the crime, the punishment, and left the interview swearing to myself that I would hate my mother for the rest of my life. I was nine.

The next day, I began practicing my vow by avoiding my mother. After school I went straight to my bedroom and stayed there, coming out only for supper before disappearing again. I lay on my bed nurturing hatred, and this continued for more than a week. Finally, while lying there thinking hateful thoughts, my mind cleared and I said to myself, “This is stupid.”

I got up, found my mother in the kitchen, and apologized. When she asked why, I said I had been avoiding her and that I was wrong. She replied with something like, “I had noticed some changes,” and seemed to accept the apology.

We became close. I trusted her insights and recommendations implicitly and sought them out for the rest of my life. Yet in arguments or stressful social situations I also hurt her more deeply than any of her other children by strongly attacking her reasoning or exposing her to public embarrassment. On the Fourth of July, 1957, we stood on an extremely crowded beach at a lake in Indiana. I had her at a complete disadvantage—she was overweight and in a bathing suit. I sassed her, and she immediately slapped me. I was ashamed.

On another occasion, while I was still in high school, I found her in bed and carefully explained that she had ruined my life and failed as a mother.

It was her greatest moment. Without stress in her voice she said, “Well, son, I may have been a bad mother and failed you numerous times, but I want you to know that every step of the way I did the best I knew how to do.”

Shame slapped me in the face.

So far it must seem that I am the “Brutal Reality” every woman must face. If you take me as standing for all men, I accept the label—because the brutal reality that confronts all women is men.

Both sexes quote the paradox: “You can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them.”

Puberty had confused me greatly. What had earlier been avoided at all costs was suddenly both frightening and irresistible. One night early in 1957, a sixth-grade girl two pews ahead of me in church suddenly turned and smiled at me. I melted on the spot, and we spent the next nine years in an on-again, off-again relationship that ended when she sent me a Dear John letter in January, 1965 while I was in basic training.

My mother tracked me closely through all this. Early in my struggles she detected some of my underlying attitudes toward women and blurted out, “Women are human, too.”

That was a eureka! moment for me (please don’t make fun). Because of the difference between the sexes, I had never thought of women as human—not in the way I considered men human. A lot of obscuring cobwebs were swept from my head.

But my new-found sympathy for women didn’t make me a feminist.

In the culture’s recent freedom from God, we have also lost touch with the purpose of basic design. A woman carries within her all the capabilities of humanity, yet she is specifically designed to bear children—and only a woman knows exactly how specific that design is.

The basic designer is either God or evolution. There is no third choice. What we see is what we get. No matter how hard we try, we cannot eliminate the necessities imposed by that design. The fog of nonsense that hangs over current discussions of sexual difference never touches the underlying reality.

Whatever we are doing to address our issues between the sexes, it’s not working.

The only civilized nation on earth with an above-replacement birthrate is Israel. According to Grok, it is the only country considered high-income, developed “(‘civilized’ by standard economic, technological, and institutional measures) whose total fertility rate (TFR) remains consistently above the replacement level of roughly 2.1 children per woman.”

That statistic, combined with the relentless pressures of mass immigration, means Western civilization is locked in a self-imposed spiral of cultural suicide. Neither this essay nor anything said or done in any of the civilized countries of the world can change it.

“Why?” is an unanswerable question. The sexual free-for-all was bad enough in 1962, and I can only guess how much more extreme it is today, where the operative word is hook-up—a meeting of the meat without commitment, lasting connection, or emotional content.

What the Bible calls becoming one flesh, today’s generation treats as a visit to a gas station.

On a university newspaper, I once shared the editor’s rim with a young woman who was tough, intelligent, beautiful—and my boss. We struggled every night to get the paper out error-free and on time. I respected every aspect of her character except one. She seemed to have a revolving-door sex life that never intruded on the workplace but defined the way she lived.

One night I mentioned to her that, as far as I could judge, men who were promiscuous hated women. She shot back without hesitation: “It’s the same with women.”

The subject remained unexplored.

Later I became an editor at the local newspaper. I would look at the unmarried women in the newsroom and consider how we differed. At the end of the shift, exhausted, drained, and ready for rest, we would all prepare to leave. Then I would think about the difference in our destinations: I was going home to my wife and children and what could only be described as much joy; they were going home to a studio apartment.

I was tempted to address the newsroom and say the most sexist thing I could imagine: “Well, gals, how’s that great career turning out?”
I never did. But surely I have now established my bona fides as a male monster.

This is my mea culpa: When God wants to destroy a civilization, the first place he attacks is the relationship between men and women. Divide the sexes and destroy the world.

The argument for patriarchy is at a low ebb now. The patriarchs of the nineteenth century largely sacrificed their credibility with the catastrophe of World War I. The old claim that women in control would mess everything up went out the window with that disaster—how could women, in any combination of circumstances, have gotten the world into a worse situation than men achieved with the First World War?

In the modern world, Exhibit A against patriarchy is the Muslim world, which ought to be a clinching argument.

Today many women have, in effect, transferred the traditional expectations of protection and provision from individual men to the state—metaphorically marrying the government and demanding that it act as husband. That arrangement is unlikely to prove stable, because the underlying capacity to create, fund, and enforce the rules still rests with men.

The male in most conspicuous mammal species must often violently contend with other males for the right to mate. The female stands still for the mating and then faces a long road of responsibility. The general goal of every farmer is to keep intact males to the minimum required for reproduction in his flocks, herds, and barnyard. It’s done for good reasons—their meat is gamey and tough, and they are basically uncontrollable.

Our prisons are full to the brim and growing in population daily because large numbers of males have decided they don’t give a damn—do your worst. A man can freeze at his core and walk away from all he knows—humming some version of “I am a rock; I am an island”—and disappear from civilized society forever.

History’s militaristic and ideological death cults—groups that systematically glorify self-sacrifice, martyrdom, or ritualized violence unto death in service of a cause (such as the Imperial Japanese military’s kamikaze and banzai ethos, or the medieval Nizari Assassins)—have been exclusively or overwhelmingly male in leadership, membership, and operational structure.

Original sin is shared equally by male and female—boys are much worse than “nails and snails and puppy dog tails,” and girls are not “sugar and spice, and everything nice.”

It’s the men who launch chaos, and it’s a man who died on the cross. The males have the most power to change the cultural atmospherics, whichever way it goes. The women will adjust to whatever world the men decide to offer them and do their best to improve the situation.

As I matured, I became aware that too many young men saw themselves as gunners and women as targets in a sexual shooting gallery. I still struggle to see how a woman is expected to endure in that kind of environment.

While I was a pastor, I heard two horror stories from the ongoing war on women. In each case a college girl’s boyfriend got her pregnant—the sex was a male triumph; the child was treated as a female mistake. He demanded she abort the baby, and she complied. The same sequence—sex, pregnancy, abortion—repeated two more times. Then each boyfriend abandoned his girlfriend.

In the atheist universe, the same oblivion that awaited Adolf Hitler when he committed suicide awaits these men. But in God’s universe they cannot escape: He will hunt them down and decree the judgment they deserve.

These problems are as old as Adam and will never be fully solved under the continuing human condition. Yet men can make the effort to improve their behavior against a moral template. When enough men do so, women—being adjustive—will respond, and our shared culture can move in a better direction.

Men should accept that women are human, too, and make it their business to give the women in their lives both what they deserve—full respect—and what they desire—love and leadership.

NOTE:

MY NEW NOVELLA, THE DEATH OF SERGEANT YORK, IS AVAILABLE ON AMAZON NOW!

This Substack is edited by Titus Gee

This is a painful essay to write. But necessary. Necessary, because I believe the present era most resembles the pre-Civil War era in United States history. The Democrats were certainly villains at that time. Southern Democrats wanted to destroy the United States.

After Fort Sumter, the Democrats of the North initially resisted secession and rallied behind the Union war effort. That early consensus soon fractured, however, as a vocal anti-war faction known as the Peace Democrats (or Copperheads) emerged. They drew their strongest support in the Midwest, particularly Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.

In 1864 the Democrat Party nominated former Union General George B. McClellan for president. Although McClellan favored vigorous prosecution of the war to restore the Union, he opposed emancipation as a war aim and was open to a negotiated peace that would preserve slavery where it already existed. He lost decisively in the Electoral College but captured a respectable 44.96% of the popular vote.

A McClellan victory would have allowed slavery to survive in the South as a continuing institution.

Keep in mind that at the time, firearms were nearly universally owned, mastered, and used—even the Quakers kept guns for hunting.

My Southern family—staunch Democrats—openly rejoiced that the Confederacy lost the Civil War. They despised the planter aristocracy not merely out of personal grudge, but because they rejected the idea that a small elite of wealthy slave owners should dominate politics, the economy, and social life at the expense of ordinary people. Born in 1943, I heard the genuine satisfaction in their voices whenever the topic arose, even though family patriarchs had drawn Confederate War pensions from the state of Texas.

But as the Democrat Party shed its traditional Christian anchors and worldview, our family—and I—found ourselves pushed out. When my agnostic uncle returned from the 1963 March on Washington, I asked him what he thought of the event. He said it had been great, then with a dismissive wave of his hand and a pointed forefinger upward, he indicated that there had been far too much emphasis on the spiritual.

Having left the Democrat Party, I focused on raising a family and building a career. I treated politics the way I treated the Fourth of July—something worthy of attention, but not something that consumed my daily life. Abortion was the law of the land, and President Bill Clinton famously said it should be “safe, legal, and rare.”

I appreciated Clinton’s “rare” sentiment, but no prominent Democrat I know of has echoed it since. Today, the United States sees more than 3,000 abortions per day. Though much of our wrongdoing in God’s sight is hidden in the heart or metaphysical in nature, abortion is radically different—it is the shedding of innocent blood, an act committed against victims who could not possibly be more innocent.

Many people search for proof of God’s existence or non-existence. I believe I can offer one: if God does not judge and punish us for this daily slaughter, then God does not exist.

While living in California, I awakened to the modern electoral reality: in many Democrat precincts, a straight election seemed impossible. The methods were opaque—smoke and mirrors, repeat voting, dubious machines—but the results rarely surprised. My gerrymandered district was a perfect example. I backed the Republican congressional candidate and noticed something bizarre: throughout the campaign I never saw one Democrat poster or television ad. The Republican won by fewer than ten votes. When I asked his campaign leader if Democrats had cheated, the man laughed and said, “Yes—they just didn’t cheat enough.” The next cycle proved the point: days after Election Day, late-counted ballots poured in for the Democrat, who won comfortably. In California, the rule that late votes break heavily Democrat has become more dependable than the Ten Commandments.

Now, near the end of my life, I have tried to rediscover what my once-beloved party stands for in these latter days. What I find is a platform of lofty platitudes reminiscent of 1960s beauty-pageant contestants promising “world peace” and vague, feel-good generalizations like universal healthcare, economic justice, equity for all, climate action now, student debt forgiveness, and defunding the police—that carefully sidestep the hard realities of the actual world: trade-offs (you cannot expand entitlements while slashing revenue without consequences), incentives (subsidies and mandates often discourage work, production, and responsibility), costs (someone must ultimately pay for “free” goods and services), probability and necessity (resources are finite and uncertain events like energy shortages or fiscal crises cannot be ignored), and unintended consequences (rent controls create shortages, aggressive policing reductions can spike crime, and rapid energy transitions without backups can harm the poor the most).

I survey the horizon and wherever or whenever the Democrats have the power I see only chaos:

Government Shutdowns: Democrats have shut down the federal government by tying funding bills to policy demands (e.g., protections for certain programs, immigration provisions, or opposition to specific spending). Senate Democrats under Senator Chuck Schumer rejected “clean” continuing resolutions in order to protect programs like the Affordable Care Act, leading to furloughs, delayed services for veterans/troops, and economic costs.

Border Policies: Under President Joe Biden, much of the federal government functioned as a unified public relations machine—his own Mouth of Sauron—insisting that the southern border was secure even as record numbers of migrants poured across it. Officials fell over one another denying a crisis while U.S. Customs and Border Protection logged more than 2 million encounters in fiscal year 2022 alone, with totals remaining extraordinarily high for years.

The spectacle was staggering—vast caravans, overwhelmed agents, and cities strained by sudden arrivals. This was no ordinary migration. On a crowded planet, the United States exerts an immense magnetic pull. Estimates suggest hundreds of millions worldwide would choose to come here if borders were effectively open—seeking opportunity, safety, or simply a better life—yet no nation can absorb unlimited inflows without consequences. Communist regimes have long built walls to keep their people in. Free societies, to remain free and prosperous, must control who comes in. A physical barrier—steel, concrete, sensors, or layered enforcement with personnel—is a basic tool of sovereignty. It is not cruelty; it is realism.

Uncontrolled borders invite chaos: strained resources, security risks, fentanyl deaths, and eroded rule of law. Civilization depends on boundaries. Foreign cultures who won’t blend or adopt and obey our principles are worse than an unrestrained cancer.

Nations that forget these risks are doomed to complete destruction.

“Defund the Police” and Public Safety: After George Floyd’s death, many Democrats and progressives embraced ‘defund the police’ rhetoric and Black Lives Matter protests. The Democratic Socialists of America call for abolishing policing and prisons altogether.

Public safety and peace are the fundamental roles of government. Yet there is scarcely a Democrat-run city in America today that feels safe to navigate. I remember a time, as a young boy, when I could wander alone without fear through any neighborhood in Fort Worth, Texas; Gary, Indiana; or Chicago, Illinois — all longtime Democrat strongholds. Back then I knew words like ‘witch,’ ‘bitch,’ and ‘snitch,’ but I wouldn’t have had the slightest idea what a ‘pedophile’ was. In fact, I didn’t encounter and understand the term until graduate school at the University of Iowa. The loss of innocence that began in the Garden of Eden continues even to this day.

I can’t help thinking that my calls for Democrat reform are ultimately just a voice crying in the wilderness. Expecting the Democrat Party—the true Lords of Chaos—to reform and tell the truth is like having a heart-to-heart with your promiscuous daughter while she’s working her way through the varsity roster. She will look you dead in the eye and solemnly insist that virginity is wonderful.

NOTE:

MY NEW NOVELLA, THE DEATH OF SERGEANT YORK, IS AVAILABLE ON AMAZON NOW!

This Substack is edited by Titus Gee

There are 112 days until the election on November 3. On virtually every front, the outlook feels ominous.

President Donald Trump has authorized renewed U.S. strikes on Iran, arguing that the action advanced American national security interests. However, a prolonged conflict risks becoming a growing political liability for Republican candidates ahead of the 2026 midterms.

This back-and-forth between peace talks and bombings cannot continue. Iran’s military is too beaten and outmatched to mount any serious response to whatever Trump decides to drop. The Iranians lack the ability to deliver mines effectively into the Strait of Hormuz, their drone and missile stocks are critically low, and we will detect and destroy their launchers—either before they fire or right after.

Trump knows—and everyone else does, too—that he should seize the islands that control the shipping bottleneck. That single move would wall Iran off from controlling the Strait of Hormuz. But it would also end our current low-risk, computer-game war—which has already been brutal for them—and shift to a bloody infantry fight, clearing their soldiers out of one hidey-hole after another. In other words, it would mean the dreaded “boots on the ground.”

Trump’s seizures should include the largest island—Qeshm. Iran’s forward positions there enable its most effective threats to the Strait of Hormuz. Removing them physically destroys key launch sites, underground facilities, radars, and staging areas.

Iran could still snipe at American forces with scattered mainland assets and remaining munitions, but it lacks the mass and sustainability to destroy shipping lanes or U.S. forces in the face of superior U.S. firepower—We destroy their capability; they harass at the margins.

This shifts the conflict from persistent disruption to decisive denial. Follow through with armed escorts for oil tankers, precision strikes on surviving Iranian offensive nodes, and intensified sanctions to exploit Tehran’s depleted reserves.

Half measures have produced no lasting results. High risk is acceptable when the alternative is ceding initiative and watching oil flows remain hostage to the terrorists.

Iran cannot match U.S. destructive power. Island seizures target the chokepoint’s most vulnerable areas of leverage. The hedging in prior responses reflects real military cautions (mainland redundancy, occupation costs), but the strategic logic favors action over prolonged management when the goal is breaking Iran’s Hormuz veto.

Trump is torn. He hates war and would rather lead the world into a capitalist golden age of peace, booming manufacturing, and vibrant trade. But the world’s greatest salesman has finally met his match in 7th-century Shia theology. They will not be sold peace at any price except total surrender by the United States.

The president can quit, come home, and face a confused electorate in November — or he can lean in as a committed wartime president, owning the inevitable surge in casualties. The choice is either to go all in or to fold and withdraw.

Here’s the clincher, though: no matter what Trump decides on Iran, Democrats will insist it’s the wrong move. And if they retake the House of Representatives in November, they’ll launch impeachment efforts at least once a week.

The rest of us are mere spectators until then—voters in November, bystanders the rest of the year—watching a grim double feature: a shooting war in the Middle East and a bitter war over ballots at home, both reeking of apocalypse.

And what has happened to the Democrats? Who are they now? They certainly aren’t the same party I knew in my family, or the Democrats I palled around with in college and the military.

Democrat Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the New York icon who retired in 2000, always represented in my lifetime the height of Democrat spirit and intellect. A Harvard professor turned senator, he combined rigorous social science with unapologetic American patriotism. He warned against “defining deviancy down,” pushed welfare reform when it was unpopular in his party, and as UN ambassador stood up to anti-American tyranny with memorable defiance. In an era of soundbites and purity tests, Moynihan reminds us what a serious, intellectually confident Democrat Party used to look like.

No senator in today’s Democrat Party comes close to him. Only a small choir of Republicans could stand with him as equals.

The modern Democrat Party feels like a once-brilliant television series that has run too long, depleted its original ideas, and lost its creative compass—much like Monty Python’s tired fourth season. No John Cleese, just the remaining cast trying to keep it alive. I can’t make it through a single episode from that year.

A political party that seemed bursting with ideas and worthy goals in 1960 has, by 2026, become the party of… well, do you want me to make the list? Everyone who supports the Democrats knows what’s on it, and everyone who opposes the party knows, too. I find the whole thing disgusting.

I’ve seen this firsthand. In 1968, one year after coming home from Vietnam, still a wrecked young veteran, I wandered around campus warning weed-addled undergraduates that if they didn’t vote for Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon would be the next president. They just stared back at me with glassy eyes and mumbled short, incomprehensible phrases.

Nixon won. But to my surprise, by the next presidential election in 1972—sometime that July—I had concluded that George McGovern had no brakes and no boundaries. Not even the basic consideration voiced by a character in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, reflecting on people destroying trees: “There is a God.”

I lapsed into silence and didn’t vote. I sat out the next election. Then, after I had a wife, six children, and lived on the modest fixed salary of a country Baptist pastor, Jimmy Carter’s stagflation hit—stagnant wages, crushing inflation. The president spoke to us in that mousy Southern-preacher voice, telling Americans we had too much wealth and shouldn’t complain.

I snapped. A weekly trip to Kroger’s became a panic inducing shock. Buying McDonald’s hamburgers for the family felt like an impossibility. I swore I would never vote Democrat again.

With great reluctance but stronger conviction, I cast my first Republican vote for Ronald Reagan. I haven’t deviated since. Yet I still cast every Republican presidential vote with a nostalgic sorrow for the party that left me — the one that wandered off into the wilderness.

And how has that worked out? In the decades since, the party has fled the center and tried to rule from ever-deeper reaches of the Left. Harry Truman and hundreds of other storied Democrat leaders now have no place in it at all.

The present party carries a metastasized socialist tumor the size of a watermelon in its gut. That tumor demands total obedience as it works to destroy whatever remains of the body that still clings to a not-so-distant past.

Apart from John Fetterman—a despised rock that turned out to be solid gold—the socialist Bernie Sanders stands out as the most intelligent Democrat in the Senate. That’s not high praise; he simply towers over what may be the most incompetent collection of lawmakers I’ve seen in my lifetime.

The House is harder to judge because so many members remain anonymous. But those we do see and hear from could easily win contests for strangest-looking person in the room or most obnoxious speaker.

And here is the worst of it: they have no plan and offer no real support for the nation. The entire party is worse than the Roman senator Cato, who ended every speech with “Carthage must be destroyed.” At least Cato made a speech. Democrats have reduced themselves to a single mantra: “Trump must be destroyed.”

Sure, they float ideas from their socialist Sugar Rock Candy Mountain—promising endless free stuff—but those fantasies ignore reason, logic, the iron laws of economics, the dignity of the free individual, and the core principles of Western civilization.

And in their long descent into this mind-destroying fever, they have emptied the party of nearly all its talent.

If you need proof, here is Mark Halperin’s latest list of his top eight potential Democrat candidates for president in 2028:

The only person on the above list that might attract voters from the nation’s political center is Josh Shapiro, but he is Jewish and stands no chance to be nominated.

Apart from Shapiro, I would not want any of them in my fox hole.

Below is a list of possible Republican candidates in 2028. As nearly everyone has noted the GOP has a deep bench:

1. JD Vance (Vice President of the United States)

2. Marco Rubio (Secretary of State)

3. Ron DeSantis (Florida Governor)

4. Nikki Haley (Former South Carolina Governor & UN Ambassador)

5. Tim Scott (South Carolina Senator)

6. Vivek Ramaswamy (Entrepreneur & Former 2024 Candidate)

7. Byron Donalds (Florida Congressman)

8. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (Arkansas Governor)

9. Elise Stefanik (New York Congresswoman, House Republican Conference Chair).

10. Greg Abbott (Texas Governor)
    
    

And finally, the only goal of the Democrat party in the 2026 election is to gain control of the House and make sure that the nation is ungovernable—”Trump bad. Chaos good.” Pure chaos has become the universally visible signature of the party that was my first love.

NOTE:

MY NEW NOVELLA, THE DEATH OF SERGEANT YORK, IS AVAILABLE ON AMAZON NOW!

This Substack is edited by Titus Gee

During World War II my father was a chief warrant officer in the Army Air Forces Training Command in Fort Worth, Texas, where he served as the head cryptographer.

In 1938, he had graduated from Seminole High School in Seminole, Oklahoma.

My father joined the Army Air Corps in 1940 with cryptography as his goal. He learned the word as a ten-year-old while reading Edgar Allan Poe’s The Gold-Bug. When I asked why he had enlisted so early, he simply replied, “The war was coming,” and never said more. He kept pictures of his boyhood friend Andy Templeton and would describe how the two of them had built radios in the early 1930s and studied Morse code together. Then he would add that Andy had joined the Canadian merchant marine as a radio operator in 1939 and had been killed in the North Atlantic on his first voyage—and say nothing more.

My parents attended the University of Oklahoma from 1946 to 1950. Many of their male friends were veterans who had served all over the world, most in highly technical roles—radar specialists, translators, and pilots. One of them, our grouchy next-door neighbor, had flown medium bombers in the European theater and made no secret of his dislike for kids underfoot.

Our patriotism was never in question. We were Democrats, and we were going to fix the world—all in red, white, and blue. God himself seemed to approve: Truman’s upset victory over Dewey in the 1948 election felt like a divine benediction in my parent’s house.

Patriotism came as naturally to us as a bowl of breakfast corn flakes—which, come to think of it, isn’t natural at all. So much changed in the 1950s. Reading was quietly supplanted by television, though hardly anyone noticed at the time; the older generation still dominated the culture.

My own generation arrived dressed in the clothes of yesterday. We were electrified by ideas that felt thrillingly new, though in truth they were ancient and rotten: drugs of every kind, guilt-free sex, and a wholesale rejection of God.

I told my roommate at Baylor University in early November, 1962 that if what they were teaching us in the Bible courses was true, we never had to go to church again.

The old WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) establishment, which long dominated American elite institutions, largely faded after World War II. It was partly supplanted in the mid-20th century by a cohort of New York Jewish intellectuals—many from Eastern European immigrant backgrounds—who brought formidable energy to literature, criticism, and political thought. In turn, that influence gave way to a more fragmented landscape: insular academic social science orthodoxies and a cosmopolitan mix of foreign-derived theories that often garnered greater prestige in elite circles than indigenous American traditions.

I grew up with a genuine commitment to the customs and ideals of this republic. Yet that foundation was coated with a thick layer of “the times they are a-changin” thinking. For instance, I never doubted that the Founding Fathers possessed a deeper understanding of principle and a sharper practical wisdom than any generation that followed—Abraham Lincoln being, in my mind, the last and greatest embodiment of those original ideals.

Coming of age in the ’60s meant everything had to be funny or ironic. So I pulled stunts like making up nonsense words while singing The Star-Spangled Banner. The joke was private—no one could understand what I was saying—but I savored it all the same.

Patriotism was the equivalent of cultural surfing. Intellectually we knew how lucky we were to be Americans. But feeling lucky was not the same as feeling grateful. And our new-found cultural grounding in no restrictions hedonism gave us license to criticize all.

Then, while wrestling personally with the collapse of everything in American culture, I fled to the Army—signing up for the infantry and the airborne with the hope of making it to Special Forces.

War in Vietnam taught me that a dead comrade was news, a pang, and a memory to be temporarily discarded. The war was everything. I returned home injured in every possible way without shedding a drop of blood.

I went to a football game. They played The Star-Spangled Banner. I had returned as emotionless as a zombie, but the national anthem now broke me emotionally. I hid it to the best of my ability. But the flag for the first time in my life had been dipped in blood—blood I had known, and the flag meant something it had never meant before.

NOTE:

MY NEW NOVELLA, THE DEATH OF SERGEANT YORK, IS AVAILABLE ON AMAZON NOW!

This Substack is edited by Titus Gee

Although there are thought to be more than 300,000 so called “Sovereign Citizens” currently living in the United States (one in every thousand people) and clogging the court system with their nonsense—and their videos seem to dominate my YouTube feed—neither my wife, nor my editor had ever heard of the phenomenon. The Almighty Algorithm at work, perhaps.

For those who remain blessedly uninitiated, rather than try to present a clear summary of a garbled ideology, I include the following, an AI generated encounter between a judge and a Sovereign Citizen plaintiff.

Having watched too many of these videos, I can attest that this fictional encounter demonstrates how they operate:

Believe it or not, such scenes have become increasingly common in courtrooms across all 50 states. We might dismiss them—childish crackpots—and with good cause, but I watch these videos and see a sign—a symptom of the mounting forces bearing down on our society.

When the hidden struggles of countless individuals grow and fester in tandem, a culture reaches critical mass. The signs and portents are unmistakable.

Every previous age of humanity believed in portents, and both history and literature abound with them. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Casca recounts a terrifying night of thunder and lightning filled with unnatural prodigies: a common slave’s left hand that burned like twenty torches joined together yet remained unscorched; a lion stalking the Capitol; men walking the streets aflame; and an owl shrieking at noon. Such signs, he concludes, are no mere natural events but portentous warnings of doom for the Roman state.

What portents do we see today?

• Riots that burn down neighborhoods and businesses while being solemnly described as “mostly peaceful.”

• The complete abandonment of reasonable discourse, with political opponents instantly branded as Nazis, fascists, racists, or traitors.

• Once-safe city streets now plagued by brazen theft, random violence, and open-air drug markets.

• A fentanyl-driven overdose crisis killing more than 100,000 Americans in a single year and fueling a black-market industry worth hundreds of billions annually.

• Roughly 3,000 abortions every day.

• A first-marriage divorce rate of 40–50% (significantly higher for subsequent marriages), leaving generations of fractured families.

• The widespread rejection of transcendent spiritual truth in favor of ever-shifting social pseudo-science, identity politics, and therapeutic moralism.

Additional deepening maladies:

• Historic levels of polarization have turned neighbors, families, and coworkers into enemies.

• Collapsing public trust in every major institution — government, media, academia, and the church.

• Record declines in marriage and birth rates, accompanied by epidemic childlessness and loneliness.

• An education system that increasingly prioritizes ideology over competence, leaving many students functionally illiterate.

• The normalization of sexual confusion and medical interventions on minors.

• Surging mental health crises among the young, with exploding rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide.

These signs reveal a deep sickness in the body politic and provide the conditions for worse to follow. In Europe, the Black Death’s aftermath, recurring epidemics, famine, poverty, wars, social upheaval, and religious anxiety created fertile conditions for the dancing manias that erupted from the 14th to the 16th centuries.

Across parts of mainland Europe, primarily in the Holy Roman Empire (modern-day Germany, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands), one of the largest and earliest major outbreaks erupted on June 24, 1374, in Aachen and the Rhineland. Hundreds or thousands of people poured into the streets, dancing, leaping, and convulsing uncontrollably for days or weeks. The mania spread along the Rhine and Moselle rivers to Cologne, Strasbourg, Metz, and onward into the Low Countries and Italy.

Nothing comparable has arisen in its place, yet modern Western society remains far from free of delusion. One of the most enduring of these is Marxist communism—a creed I have watched and lived with from my earliest years to the present day.

In my youth, communism functioned as a fully formed secular religion built on the writings of Karl Marx. Debating a committed communist meant preparing to confront a comprehensive philosophy known as dialectical materialism. This rested on Hegel’s three-part dialectic—thesis, antithesis, synthesis (which itself becomes the new thesis). Marx inverted Hegel’s idealism, replacing it with materialism and thereby creating the secular determinism known as dialectical materialism.

This is nothing more than biblical predestination with God removed—events marching unalterably forward on materialist railroad tracks. The phrase “on the right side of history” comes directly from this outlook — it is the Marxist dialectic in reductionist form.

I can still remember watching a film clip of Vanessa Redgrave lecturing a movie production crew, her eyes shining with a glazed intensity and her delivery rote and mechanical, as she expounded on the dialectic.

All of that has vanished. Communism has failed utterly. No one today spouts philosophy or theology with any conviction — in fact, the leading figures in both disciplines no longer even believe in the possibility of genuine philosophy or theology.

The communism of today amounts to little more than slogans mouthed by the unemployed or underemployed—people who paid a fortune for their education only to receive four years of platitudinous woke aphorisms. They have no job, no realistic hope, and nothing left but the pursuit of drugs and casual sex.

Number one on the new communist platform is to strip the rich of their wealth and property and redistribute it — to whom? History shows that in every communist nation the wealth has ended up in the hands of the commissars. The poor remain on the party banners, but it is the commissars who count the cash in the treasure houses and live in the confiscated capitalist mansions.

Number two: Open the borders to the millions who dream of living in the land of free grocery stores and hope they vote your way for a few generations. The mayor of New York City belongs to one of the many large groups eager to get a piece of that action.

Number three: Children as young as six months old should be professionally evaluated to determine their true gender identity, with all medical costs borne by the state.

But enough. We are in the worst kind of trouble. Yet there is hope.

For God has raised up a company of prophets, examples—both men and women—and sent them as a body to the courthouses of the land to act out before our eyes the Day of Final Judgment.

We know they are from God, because nothing comparable to the Sovereign Citizen movement has arisen in Western civilization, or in any other civilization in history.

Sovereign Citizens most often make their stand over something as mundane as a traffic ticket. In their minds, that single ticket becomes provocation enough to challenge the legitimacy of the entire social order. And they somehow imagine they can overturn that order simply by saying the right words.

The individuals involved almost always choose to represent themselves in court—just as each of us will one day stand alone before God on Judgment Day. It is also fitting that they tend to come from the lower end of the educational spectrum, speaking a highly ritualized, almost liturgical language that often renders their actual objectives nearly incomprehensible. (After all, anyone still walking the earth who hungers and thirsts to argue with God clearly hasn’t thought it through.)

I don’t know what anyone would say before God—I mean if one were truly standing there. Many have written arguments and prepared plans on earth, but anyone who has fought in a war or stepped into a boxing ring knows what happens to even the best-laid plans.

The strongest off-hand argument I’ve ever heard came from the smartest woman I ever studied under (naming her would be shameless name-dropping). She said, “He made us to fail and then condemns us for failing.” It sounds persuasive here, but what about there—when every knee bows and every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord?

Sovereign Citizen individuals emerge from the broader currents of national life and turn themselves into public emblems of our shared pathologies. They treat words as incantations, substituting “Travel” for “Driving” as if the new term would swing open the East Door of Moria. They deliver grandiloquent arguments—woven from strange vocabulary and labyrinthine sentences—to human judges as if addressing God Himself through them.

For the brief span of a YouTube video, they can imagine they matter. They plead for ultimate salvation before the camera, only to lose every case on the merits.

Yet in their defiance they speak for all of us who will one day stand before God without a lawyer and hear our final judgment. What is more striking is that the judges themselves will one day stand speechless in those same shoes—mute before the majesty of the Final Judge—and so will we all.

If anyone dares actually to raise his voices on that day, the clever lines and arguments he spent a lifetime reciting to this friends will sound exactly like the babblings of a Sovereign Citizen before that final gavel falls.

NOTE:

MY NEW NOVELLA, THE DEATH OF SERGEANT YORK, IS AVAILABLE ON AMAZON NOW!

This Substack is edited by Titus Gee

In 1863, during the Civil War, my widowed great-great-grandmother, Talitha Cumi Martin, loaded an oxcart full of all her worldly possessions. With her four surviving children, she set out on foot from the Mississippi River, heading for Coryell County, Texas, in search of her husband’s surviving relatives.

As they neared the end of their long journey, one of the children asked, “How will we know the Martins?”

Their mother replied without hesitation, “Well, the Martins have big ears.”

Sure enough, in Gatesville, Texas, they spotted a boy with notably big ears riding bareback on a mule. They followed him home and approached the ranch house.

“Are you Martins?” they asked.

They were Martins.

My great-grandfather was with his mother that day. I have big ears.

Observing that “Martins have big ears” might be dismissed as crude stereotyping if applied broadly to their Scotch-Irish ancestry. Yet physical appearance remains the single most powerful clue by which humans instinctively sort one another. Cultural markers—language, food, dress, habits—add comfort and context, but the first and fastest discriminator is what a person looks like.

In old New York City, Irish boys didn’t invade Italian neighborhoods—they would be instantly recognized and punished for the errors of their ways.

The roots of human division — and what we came to call racism — trace back to the confusion of languages at Babel, when God scattered the people to prevent them from being unified in rebellion against Him.

Whether one interprets this as a literal divine act or as the natural divergence of languages and populations over millennia, the outcome was the same: scattered groups first sorted themselves by language and custom. Over time, as distinctive genetic differences emerged in hair, facial features, and skin color, they began to identify themselves — and others — by physical appearance. These visible markers proved a quick and reliable way to distinguish friends from foe.

We don’t need to explain the physical differences between races. Most people identify with a dominant race and identify others the same way and no one needs to explain it to us.

I have come to accept that I will never truly understand what it means to live in dark skin—to wake each day and know oneself as Black, to be read by every stranger as having African origins. It simply isn’t possible.

My father was dark complected, yet his features were unmistakably European and aristocratic, his eyes a vivid, striking blue. My brother was just as dark, but his face sat farther from that European template. All his life, strangers have identified him, immediately and without question, as African.

My father never once spoke of his skin color—not even in passing. He wore the cultural armor of a Methodist aristocrat: rigorous training in public and private manners, proficiency at the piano and violin, wide familiarity with middlebrow literature, and a deep knowledge of every movie made between 1927 and 1940. His mother, the daughter of a Methodist bishop, had him late in life and carefully trained him to fit that mold. Within it, he became a great man—intelligent, sophisticated, and wonderfully entertaining.

Yet when he retired from teaching stringed instruments in the Gary, Indiana public schools, he quietly gathered a group of Black women and taught them the full family of bowed string instruments. I knew nothing about it. Only at his funeral did a quartet of those women appear, playing the music in his honor.

My father’s quiet act illustrates my central thesis: race is the identifier, but culture is the ruler. We wage war over color and features when the real differences—and the real possibilities—lie in habit, language, discipline, and cultural practices.

Race does matter—yet in the modern world it is often treated as a dangerous or forbidden idea. This reaction is understandable. Throughout history, race (or proto-racial categories) has too often been invoked as the ultimate determinant of who lives and who dies, who is enslaved and who is free. The recoil is rooted in very real atrocities.

In today’s race debates, the most explosive battlefield is that of African intelligence. The field is poisoned by rhetoric from both sides—probably because the stakes feel existential. There is no doubt what the IQ tests show—Well, the tests are wrong.
There is no doubt what the school records show—Well, the teachers can’t teach.
It’s too complicated to understand—Well, everything is complicated, yet we have solved many other puzzles.

My mother taught Black students for thirty-six years in Calumet Township, Lake County, Indiana. After she retired, I asked her directly whether Black underperformance in education was rooted in genes or culture. She paused, then answered firmly: “It’s culture.”

Culture is the water the fish swims in, unaware. Each of us is a genetic vessel, programmed by culture like a computer. Culture is the armor we wear and come to love.

If I had moved as a young adult to Shanghai, I swear I would have assimilated to the best of my ability. Yet deep down, at the core of my being, I would still be the Texas boy raised in Gary, Indiana.

When I was a child in Texas, I went barefoot every summer. Each Spring, I was a tenderfoot for a couple of weeks until the soles of my feet toughened. By the end of summer, the bottoms of my feet were as tough as shoe leather. Then, inevitably, came the melancholy day when I had to put shoes on for winter. When I learned to read, I rejoiced at this sentence about Huckleberry Finn in Tom Sawyer: “He was always the first boy that went barefoot in the spring and the last to resume leather in the fall.”

Even after we moved to Gary, Indiana, I kept going barefoot. But I sensed that my friends’ mothers disapproved, and I reluctantly began to wear shoes.

I always assumed I went barefoot simply because I lived in the South and that was what Southern boys did. Years later, I discovered Samuel Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775). There, Johnson observed: “The numbers that go barefoot are still sufficient to shew that shoes may be spared: They are not yet considered as necessaries of life; for tall boys, not otherwise meanly dressed, run without them in the streets; and in the islands the sons of gentlemen pass several of their first years with naked feet.”

I went barefoot because my Scotch-Irish ancestors had done the same for millennia.

Culture effects every aspect of life. We know this. We know the countries where the trains run on time. We know the nations where they do not. Mussolini gained fame because he made the Italian trains run on time. Currently, Italian trains don’t run on time, but German trains seem to run to the second—I know from personal experience.

My much-loved Scotch-Irish ancestors lived with a more relaxed, frontier-style culture than my German ancestors, and I personally find the easygoing approach appealing. My German forebears in Texas were thorough and orderly people, shaped by their European traditions.

But consider what that cultural difference meant in practice. A classic anecdote from the American backcountry tells of a Scotch-Irish settlement in North Carolina whose residents were long content to wade across the local creek. When German families joined the community, they built a bridge. The Scotch-Irish settlers readily used it.

Frederick Law Olmsted (He later designed Central Park in New York City) in his anti-slavery journal called A Journey Through Texas (1857) frequently contrasts the tidy, industrious German settlements—especially around New Braunfels and in San Antonio—with the more haphazard Anglo-American (often Scotch-Irish or Southern) homesteads in other parts of Texas.

He describes the German Quarter of San Antonio: “. . . the houses were evidently German, of fresh square-cut blocks of creamy white limestone, mostly of a single story and humble proportions, but neat, and thoroughly roofed and finished. Some were furnished with the luxury of little bow-windows or balconies.”

Below is a picture of the 1883 homestead ranch house where my grandfather was born in 1892. I spent a night there myself in 1951. In all those decades, not a lick of paint was ever spread on that house from the day it was built until it finally disappeared. The Martin boys were expert cowboys, self-taught country musicians, and lifelong readers. Their ranch library even included H.G. Wells’ The Outline of History (1920).

Cultures are the engines that drive their adherents to success or ruin in competition with other cultures. Successful cultures borrow without shame. The fastest moving cultural ideas and artifacts in world history are weapons and methods of war.

An example from history of one culture trying to embargo useful military knowledge from another culture: 1 Samuel 13:19 (KJV) “Now there was no smith found throughout all the land of Israel: for the Philistines said, Lest the Hebrews make them swords or spears.”

In the ancient world, Hellenistic (Greek) culture spread like catnip throughout the Mediterranean. Its language, philosophy, art, and customs proved so attractive that, by the time of the New Testament, there were entire communities of Jews known as Hellenists — Greek-speaking and culturally influenced Jews — distinct from the more traditional Hebrew-speaking Jews.

Western civilization is an amalgam of Jewish, Greek, and Roman cultures, adopted and adapted by my European ancestors — people who still painted their faces blue with woad when Christ walked the earth. In fact, nearly every stricture in my makeup (except my fondness for going barefoot) traces back to that rich cultural blend.

Many of the students I attended high school with in Gary, Indiana, were the grandchildren of Eastern European immigrants who arrived in the United States before World War II. Their grandparents were 100% Serbian, Italian, Croatian, Macedonian, Polish, and so on. By the time we sat in class together, those grandchildren were 100% American. We called it the melting pot.

But cultures can fall into mortal deadlocks with one another. The weaker one often refuses to yield, even at the cost of widespread destruction.

Every baby is born ignorant of all that came before and the modern American education system has done little to remedy that state. As a result, too many Americans remain unaware of the deep, enduring bitterness the Irish have long felt toward the English.

We need not rehearse their list of grievances here; the piles of Irish dead across centuries bear witness enough. The Irish were simply tough and resilient enough to keep fighting back, adding to the body count on both sides.

That was classic culture war. One of the clearest markers of cultural resistance is the refusal to fully adopt the dominant language. The Irish famously kept their brogue. A few years after we moved to the Midwest, my mother remarked on Southerners who still spoke with thick Southern accents. She saw it as a form of quiet rebellion. We had already lost ours.

Movies from the 1930s often featured Irish cops speaking in heavy brogue. As a boy, I assumed these men had recently immigrated, earned citizenship, joined the police force, and simply never learned to speak unaccented English. I was wrong. Many of their families had been in America for over a hundred years.

The general run of Irish tended to cluster together, took lower-class unskilled jobs, and—true to the stereotypes of the era—drank and fought a great deal. Their quintessential literary portrait appears in the figure of Pap Finn in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

Few modern readers realize that 19th-century America was so prosperous, with abundant food and cheap alcohol, that large numbers of men could drift through life without steady housing or work—often faring better, in material terms, than today’s homeless populations.

Pap Finn (the name means Pap Irish) has kidnapped Huck and is letting him have it for putting on airs: “You’ve put on considerable many frills since I been away. I’ll take you down a peg before I get done with you. You’re educated, too, they say—can read and write. You think you’re better’n your father, now, don’t you, because he can’t? I’ll take it out of you. Who told you you might meddle with such hifalut’n foolishness, hey?—who told you you could?”

I have walked through life with the above reduced in my mind to Who larn’d you to be better than your Pa?”

The conflict between Pa Finn and Huckleberry is culture warfare in one family.

Here is a relevant passage from James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village” (1953):

“The most illiterate among them [the Swiss villagers] is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York’s Empire State Building, should anyone here ever see it. Out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory—but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive.”

James Baldwin was a bookworm of a Black man in the same way that I am a bookworm of a white man. Yet I have always told my classes that Baldwin was wrong in this assertion. None of us has an innate relationship to the cathedral at Chartres; our connection to it exists only by adoption. And that act of adoption is equally available to an African as it is to the descendant of Viking raiders.

The Africans brought the whole cloth of their culture to the New World. The trip from Africa to the West was called “The Middle Passage.” In the annals of human history there is no human journey more fraught with peril, abuse, fear, and suffering. The only protection the Africans had was their value in the new world marketplaces.

African women arrived in the new world made pregnant by the crew—so, European blood had already begun to penetrate their African family. Besides the efficiency of slave ship cargo storage, there were other horrors—mostly left out of the cleansed general histories (including this essay)—but the slaves pressed together in the hold were prone to outbreaks of infection; diseased slaves were thrown overboard because they had no value in the marketplace. That says enough. The Middle Passage is the one facet of our history that I cannot bear to look at closely.

The enslaved Africans forged a vibrant, syncretic culture from diverse West African traditions on plantations across the American South. For 246 years, this emerging slave culture wrestled with the brutal realities of bondage.

Two-hundred-and-forty-six years is long enough to lock in every cultural trait that we all inherit from our ancestry.

One factor worked in the slave’s favor in his relationship with the master, though it could equally work against the slave, and that was the slave’s cost. Miss Watson in Huckleberry Finn knew that slavery was wrong and eventually freed Jim in her will, but when she was alive, she couldn’t get past the fact that Jim was worth $800 in the open market ($800 in 1840 would be worth approximately $30,623 in 2026 dollars). The money warped her Christianity, and she planned to sell him down the river and Jim ran away.

Throughout history, very few enslaved people worked hard voluntarily. The overwhelming majority performed their labor only under coercion—driven by fear of punishment, the desire to protect their families, or the basic need to survive.

The Apostle Paul in Colossians 3:22–25 made the Christian argument: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.” (NIV)

When I worked at U.S. Steel and was eager to be known as a good worker, I was soon taught the contrary worker culture of the mills: “Not so fast, young man. This job will still be here tomorrow.” I slowed down.

Since I taught in colleges for more than two decades, I dealt with many Asians from different sources. Whatever their personal feelings, I mostly have no idea, but I can testify that they had completely mastered the art of assimilation to American culture.

They spoke English to perfection without accent—they could teach me grammar. They worked extremely hard. They showed up every day. They treated the subject matter as a challenge to be mastered. Their assignments were done fully, and on time.

I’ll admit the above reads like a stereotype, and I got my comeuppance. One day a young Asian sat before me, and I looked upon him with my stereotypical expectations. I was wrong. As an infant, he had been adopted by a pastor of a small evangelical church in the United States, and had the same good will, relaxed self-absorption, and slovenly academic habits I had learned to expect from such a source.

I never forgave him for not being an Asian.

NOTE:

MY NEW NOVELLA, THE DEATH OF SERGEANT YORK, IS AVAILABLE ON AMAZON NOW!

This Substack is edited by Titus Gee

“For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. The standing grain has no heads; it shall yield no flour; if it were to yield, strangers would devour it.”
Hosea 8:7 ESV

“The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses for it must needs be that offenses come but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’”
Abraham Lincoln, 2^nd Inaugural Address

In August 1619, the White Lion a 160-ton English privateer ship operating under a Dutch letter of marque (along with another privateer, the Treasurer) captured about 20–30 Africans from the Portuguese (or Spanish-flagged) slave ship São João Bautista (San Juan Bautista) in the Gulf of Mexico. The White Lion then sailed to Virginia and landed them at Point Comfort (modern-day Hampton/Fort Monroe), later the same month.

They were sold as indentured servants working alongside white and some Indian indentured servants, which meant service for four to seven years and then freedom.

Soon, laws across the South hardened into chattel slavery for life. Although U.S. imports from Africa continued, they added only modestly to the enslaved population; historians estimate that 388,000 to 450,000 Africans arrived in total, with the highest volumes coming after the Revolutionary War when South Carolina — especially Charleston — and other ports reopened and ramped up the trade. More than 100,000 Africans were brought in between 1787 and 1808 alone. By far the largest growth in the enslaved population in the newly minted United States, however, came from natural increase through births. By contrast, 10.8 million slaves were shipped from Africa to the rest of the nations in the Western Hemisphere.

Several prominent Southern political and social leaders prior to the Civil War expressed deep regret over the institution of slavery, viewing it as a moral evil and economic burden, yet they failed to implement a workable solution for its gradual end. Among them were several of the prominent revolutionaries and leaders of the new nation.

Thomas Jefferson, who in Notes on the State of Virginia denounced slavery as a “moral depravity” and a “hideous blot,” warned that it could provoke a race war and yet freed only a handful of his own slaves.

George Washington described slave ownership as his “only unavoidable subject of regret,” in his will arranged for the eventual freedom of his own slaves — the only Founding Father to do so.

James Madison condemned slavery as contrary to republican principles and supported colonization yet freed few of his own slaves and offered no practical national plan.

Henry Clay of Kentucky, a leading Whig statesman and colonization advocate who repeatedly called slavery a “great evil” and a violation of human rights, owned slaves himself while depending on the impractical American Colonization Society scheme to resettle freed Black people in Africa.

In their visions for an end to the institution, these leaders, like the nation itself, relied upon gradual emancipation, colonization, or the westward diffusion of slavery — essentially kicking the can down the road. All three approaches ultimately proved impossible. A slave economy could not coexist indefinitely with a free-labor one; over time, one system would undermine the other. Racial fears and deepening sectional divisions prevented any lasting resolution until war and emancipation finally settled the issue.

The above is known by most people alive today, but little else.

Many owners and overseers saw themselves as acting under Christian moral principles or Enlightenment ideals of order and improvement — often expressed through paternalistic rhetoric. In this hierarchical world, enslaved people even found a group they could look down on — poor whites.

A prime enslaved field hand (especially a young male) often sold for $300–$1,000 (roughly $11,000–$36,000 today) or more in the antebellum period — many times a poor white laborer’s annual earnings. From this vantage point of their own “value,” enslaved African Americans coined and popularized the enduring slur “poor white trash” (or simply “white trash”).

The Civil War exposed the fundamental economic weaknesses of a society built on chattel slavery when pitted against the dynamic capitalism of the free-labor North. The South had tied nearly all its capital to human property — enslaved people represented the bulk of many planters’ wealth — while investing relatively little in factories, railroads, or other physical infrastructure. By contrast, the North poured resources into industry, machinery, and a wage-labor system that paid market rates and encouraged innovation and mobility. The clash between these two structures was inevitable: slave labor, with its low marginal cost, threatened to undercut free workers’ wages wherever the two systems competed, creating irreconcilable tensions.

In the end, a system that permanently enslaved some ultimately undermined the economic freedom of all. When war came, the South fielded brave and resourceful armies but lacked the industrial base to sustain a prolonged conflict. The North possessed both a large, motivated fighting force and overwhelming manufacturing, transportation, and logistical superiority. Most enslaved African Americans were kept on the sidelines or pressed into labor roles; many seized the opportunity to escape or aid the Union. The result was the Confederacy’s decisive defeat.

One of the most serious problems arising from the facts of slavery was that the amount of African blood in the African slaves materially diminished with each generation. According to AI at least three quarters of the slaves freed in 1865 had some white ancestry.

It could not have been otherwise. Africans had been in North America for 246 years by the end of the Civil War—roughly sixteen generations. Enslaved people lived primarily near their owners and overseers within isolated plantation communities, each separated by some distance from the next.

At Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, for example, most enslaved workers and overseers resided along Mulberry Row — the long service road lined with workshops and cabins (the many red dots on the topographical map). Additional quarters dotted the surrounding landscape, while some house servants lived in cellars and dependencies directly beneath the mansion itself. This physical closeness, repeated across thousands of plantations, shaped daily life and the demographic realities of the era.

In typical periods, Monticello housed roughly 130 enslaved Black residents versus a much smaller core group of roughly a dozen to two dozen free whites (plus transient visitors).

While humanity faces many social problems beyond our direct control, two stand out as especially deep-rooted and destructive: disordered sexuality and violence. The biblical account of the Fall gives us the earliest clue. Before eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve “were both naked, and were not ashamed” (Genesis 2:25). Immediately afterward, their eyes were opened; they recognized their nakedness and felt shame for the first time. God’s question cuts to the heart of the change: “Who told you that you were naked?” (Genesis 3:11). This new awareness marks the fracturing of innocence. Sexual desire and the human body, once experienced in unselfconscious harmony within marriage, became entangled with shame, lust, and exploitation. Violence soon followed: the first murder — Cain killing Abel — emerges directly from the same broken relationship with God and with one another (Genesis 4). One need not study psychology to notice the recurring connection. Both sex and violence tap into primal drives for power, possession, and dominance that, apart from grace and self-control, easily turn destructive. They are not merely cultural issues but symptoms of a fallen nature we all inherit as children of Adam and Eve.

Monticello was a natural, isolated human community — rife with both virtues and faults — where the population typically lived in a roughly five-to-one Black-to-White ratio. Black women were attractive, white men held near-absolute power, and the combination proved volatile in both directions. Flirting and sexual relationships occurred naturally as men and women lived and worked in close daily proximity. Mixed-race children followed, as they almost always do when human beings of both races are thrown together in such circumstances.

Katherine Anne Porter captured a parallel anxiety in her semi-autobiographical stories in The Old Order, especially “The Journey,” and related sketches drawn from her Texas plantation childhood. Describing her grandmother Sophia Jane’s private worries, she wrote:

This quiet vigilance reveals how deeply the natural results of proximity had become part of everyday plantation reality.

White fathers responded to these mixed-race children in widely different ways. Some denied paternity outright. Frederick Douglass, born in 1818 to the enslaved Harriet Bailey, never knew his white father, who was widely believed to be his master or a close relative. Separated from his mother as an infant and visited by her only a few times at night before her early death, Douglass grew up with both maternal absence and complete paternal silence.

Others showed limited acknowledgment. In William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, Isaac McCaslin reads the old plantation ledgers and confronts his grandfather Carothers McCaslin’s cold bequest of a thousand dollars to his mixed-race offspring:

Yet some white fathers went further. After the Civil War, one of my Black Special Forces friends’ antebellum white ancestor openly acknowledged his mixed-race son and bequeathed him a farm. That land stayed in the family for generations. My friend remains visibly African American, yet his family story carries that acknowledged paternal line.

Sixteen generations of white blood flowing into Black blood eventually allows the current to run both ways. I know this personally: two of my own great-grandmothers — one born in 1847 in Ohio, the other in 1855 in Louisiana — carried African ancestry. According to the racial laws and customs of the time, both women would have been classified as Negroid (or “colored”/Negro), regardless of how light their skin or how European their appearance.

The Ohio-born woman entered the family carrying the last name Hamilton and refused to change it to Simons. She insisted her grandfather was Alexander Hamilton. Even from a distance, that stubborn refusal marked her as a woman with real attitude — what the modern Black community would call “having backbone” or “not taking mess.”

I suspect that attitude was forged in generational pain: the original wound of paternal abandonment, carried forward by two successive generations of women. The message was clear: You can get me pregnant and walk away, but I’ll keep your name, my story, and my pride. I’ll show you.

No one knows whether the story is true. What we do know is that this Ohio-born Hamilton woman brought an aristocratic profile to her descendants — one my father inherited in full measure along with strikingly dark skin. (My father’s complexion was so deep that when my mother first saw him, she thought he was Filipino. In the social world that she knew, she would not have identified him as African American.) We also know that anyone living in Bluffton, Indiana, before the Civil War would have understood she carried abundant African blood. Beyond these details, little else is certain.

My Louisiana great-grandmother was a large-boned woman who carried the gene for sickle cell anemia, which later appeared in two of my mother’s sisters. Her last name was Lee. The large and widely branched Lee family in Virginia owned slaves on many plantations; over the course of its history, the total number of people they enslaved reached into the hundreds and approached the low thousands. The family also practiced manumission (the formal freeing of enslaved people). Freed slaves commonly took their former master’s surname. One manumitted Lee slave moved to Mississippi early in the nineteenth century, passed for white, and raised a son who later fathered my great-grandmother in Louisiana.

Because of deep ignorance a large share of Americans today — likely a strong majority, perhaps 60–80% or more — are unaware that many American slaves could pass for white.

I was unaware until I bought a book in 1960 that contained pictures of numerous plantation slaves who were white. I lost the book in the attic, and the photos have been removed from public access. What everyone in the 19^th century knew, no one in the 20^th century seems to know.

Here is Mark Twain’s description of his great character Roxanne in Pudd’nhead Wilson:

My father may have been aware of his ancestry, though he never did refer to it. He did mention to me Oklahoma’s racial laws several times in my life, quoting the following from state law: “The term ‘colored,’ shall be construed to mean all persons of African descent who possess any quantum of negro blood.”

He graduated from Seminole High School in 1938, and the University of Oklahoma in 1950, and I am sure that earlier in life his dark skin had raised questions enough times he was made aware. His third son inherited the skin without the aristocratic features, and for much of his life people have taken him for Black on first meeting.

My parents were committed Christians and active members of Baptist churches. Our home church was in Glen Park, Gary, Indiana. If my extended family had a secular religion, it was racial integration. There were fifteen of us in the immediate family circle. The adults worked as schoolteachers in the Gary public schools and in Calumet Township. The high emotional point of the family’s drive for integration came in 1963 with the March on Washington. My brother managed to get himself filmed doing a conga line dance with others on the National Mall.

White flight accelerated through the 60s and by the time I returned to Gary in 1972 it was definite. White families were moving out of my parents’ neighborhood on 51^st Street, and our church was moving south of highway 30. With Christian grace my parents argued against the church move. They made no enemies, but the church moved. Meanwhile I became pastor of a small Baptist church much nearer Lake Michigan and the Porter County line, but still in Gary.

The church I pastored was mostly peopled by transplanted southerners. A Latin culture family, a scattering of Hoosiers, an upstate New Yorker, and a black family began to attend after I became pastor.

During those years (1974-1978) Gary seemed to average two or three murders a week. I had two Gary policemen in my congregation, both of whom I considered excellent men. Adding to the atmosphere, a chapter of the Outlaws motorcycle gang lived directly across the street from the church and parsonage, giving me a front-row seat to the daily workings of local crime gangs.

The city was largely African with fringes of white neighborhoods on the edges — especially near Lake Michigan.

My eldest son was in the first grade, and I drove him to school every day. Often I followed the city school bus, watching clouds of marijuana smoke pour out of every window. This was a grade school bus. I remember thinking, “Any civilization that cannot get its fourth graders to school without them arriving high on drugs is not a civilization at all — it is a society already in collapse.”

I took my son out of the public school and enrolled him in a Christian school. The Black family in our church followed my lead and placed their daughter in the same school. I provided the bus service in our van. The girl was in fourth or fifth grade and had a saucy, confident attitude — the kind that in another era might have reminded me of my great-grandmother. She always rode in the front passenger seat.

One morning I had the radio on, and The Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar” came on. I enjoy the song’s driving rhythm. Suddenly the young Black girl beside me shouted, “Don’t blame us! You can’t blame us!”

I was startled and confused. Who was blaming anyone? I turned off the radio. Nothing more was said, but I sat in quiet shock. Where had the notion of blame come from?

Later I visited the family. The father, a powerfully built man who looked like a bowling ball, took me aside into the front room. “I just want to know,” he said. “I just want to know — what about my people?”

I did not handle the moment well. I had lived so long with the idea of “our people” or “all people” that the phrase “my people” stunned me. I made the usual soothing, reassuring noises, but they clearly fell short. Not long afterward, the family left the church.

My parents’ neighborhood gradually became all Black, yet they were determined to die in the house they loved, and they did. It was a different world. A Jamaican drug dealer lived close enough to consider himself their friend. A neighborhood thug tried several times to rob them by demanding they lend him money, but eventually stopped. I always suspected the closer neighbors had quietly threatened to “cut his water off.”

I once watched two women fighting in the street — a sight I had never seen before. I felt no superiority as I watched them. I knew my own grandmother, when young and newly married, had attacked another woman in their West Texas church for flirting with her husband. My uncle later described the scene: the two of them rolling in the aisles in what he called “a catfight for the ages.”

My parents spent three years helping my brother try to plant a mixed-race church in Glen Park. They worked hard and prayed faithfully, but it never took root. There was some attendance, but little lasting commitment.

I have reviewed my life and find that I have had many relationships with African American people: two domestic servants who cleaned house and baby sat, a field hand (quite a man) named Arthur on my uncle’s ranch in Oklahoma, three soldiers in the army, two Black families in churches I pastored, a college professor, and a dozen or so students in two Christian colleges where I taught.

I liked or respected all of them. I can’t describe them all, but I will describe enough to advance my thesis.

Friendship isn’t required in all relationships, but I respected all that I dealt with. I attempted friendship with several of my Black acquaintances and failed in a couple of cases.

It turns out that I have had two Black friends in my life, and both were in the army.

Glendale Sands:

I was the squad leader, and he was in my basic training squad. He was from New Orleans — aggressive, fun loving, and serious with a commanding 6’2” physical presence. He was a good soldier.

He also tried to kill me when we were learning the sleeper hold in the tough guy parts of our training. I never forgot to tell him he had tried to kill me, and he never failed to laugh at me. I think I talked him into going airborne, and I know I talked him into trying to make Special Forces.

After infantry training and jump school (not together) we both arrived at the same time for Special Forces training. After our first round of training — How to teach a class — I met him coming out of the orderly room.

“I’m going to the 101^st,” he said. “I can’t stand the mission around here.”

I agreed with his opinion, but I had quit college and couldn’t afford to quit Special Forces.

I never saw him again. In Vietnam it is amazing how the word floats around the invisible, smoky pathways of communication and someone told me he had been badly wounded in one the 101st’s many battles.

Researching for this essay, I learned that he had become a lawyer in Mississippi and died in 1986 when he was 41.

A Soldier Named Leathers, Whom I Couldn’t Save:

He was in my squad during infantry training — a draftee noticeably older than the rest of us. I always pictured him yanked from the most remote holler in Alabama and dropped straight into a crowd of strangers he didn’t hate but had no desire to know. He had no desire to be in the Army and drifted through its ranks like a lost soul.

He had soft eyes and a rare, sweet smile. More than anything else, he wanted to remain invisible — and he mostly succeeded. Socially, he made no friends, but he made no enemies either. He kept to himself, caused no trouble, and lived in quiet peace with those nearest him.

I ran the duty roster, and that brought us into conflict. Upon arrival to our barracks, he had quickly discovered the pool table in the day room, and I soon learned that if I needed Leathers, that’s exactly where I’d find him, shooting pool by himself.

He quietly resented every obligation the Army placed on him but complied. He especially hated the barrack’s duty roster. Much of my time was spent tracking him down in the pool room and ordering him to fulfill his duty.

He was neither noisy nor evil nor hostile. His solitude was entirely by choice. All he wanted was to be left alone, yet I kept ruining his day. Many squad leaders would have looked the other way and quietly worked around him on the duty roster. I couldn’t. I’ve been by-the-book my entire life. It was my job to make sure he did his.

The breaking point came one quiet weekend, and it was over something as ordinary as mopping the barracks floor. I had already gone to the day room twice and told him to get it done. On the third trip, he was nowhere to be found. I finally found him at the front of the barracks.

“Leathers,” I said, “you have to mop the floor.”

He turned on me, eyes burning with real anger. “Why don’t I just kick your ass?”

I grew up in Gary and had run into young Black guys in groups of two or three downtown at night more than once. The first time, I stumbled on a response that worked — so I used it again, and it worked every time after.

No matter what they asked, I answered with a perfectly flat stare and a dead-straight face:

“I don’t have a nickel.”
“I don’t have a match.”
“I don’t know what time it is.”

They always broke contact and moved on.

So, I looked Leathers dead in the eyes and said with a straight face, “Leathers, after you kick my ass, you’re mopping the floor — then you’re going to jail.”

The tension drained from his body. He slumped, then quietly mopped the floor.

At the end of training, Leathers received orders for Korea. We later heard he tossed his duffel bag into a ditch and caught the next bus back to Alabama. What amazed me most was how he had arrived in the Army already wrapped like a mummy in invisible cultural bandages — cut off from everyone, even the other Black soldier in our squad.

If I had found the courage on any given Monday to pull him behind the barracks and settle it man to man, he would have kicked my ass. By Wednesday or Thursday, we would have reached an understanding, and he might have become a soldier.

He needed help, but not the kind most counselors offer. No society can afford the army of therapists required to fix every human fracture. In my experience, most counselors are better suited to Erector Set engineering than to the organic life of an apple tree. They bring mechanical tools to living problems and wonder why the patient stays broken.

Ernie Johnson:

He had been an engineering major at Texas A&I before dropping out and trying for Special Forces. I had been a history major at Baylor University before I dropped out and made the fly at Special Forces.

We met at the Special Forces Training Group (SFTG) in the Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg. Nearly all our fellow soldiers were college dropouts of one kind or another.

Ernie was an athlete. In the segregated high schools of Texas, he had quarterbacked his Class 4A team to the PVIL state championship (the Prairie View Interscholastic League — Texas’s segregated Black high school league).

He didn’t drink and he didn’t smoke. His eyes were quick and smiling most of the time. His diction was perfect, and among a group mostly made up of college dropouts, he was at the top of the class.

We ran side by side on the long evening runs. When the sergeant called it quits, Ernie would yell back, “C’mon, Sarge — keep going!”

I smoked a pack a day and glared at him with mock hatred, but it was all in fun. We rarely spoke about life after the Army; we were too busy preparing for Vietnam. I’ve never learned the exact casualty rate for our December 1965 Training Group class, but many of the men I stood in formation with at Fort Bragg were killed or wounded.

On the Sunday after Thanksgiving 1965, Ernie and I were walking the streets of Raleigh, North Carolina, when we spotted a diner with a TV showing the Dallas Cowboys against the Washington Redskins. As fellow Cowboy fans, we stopped to watch. When Dan Reeves threw a pass, we stepped inside and joined the crowd.

We had barely found a table when a flustered young waitress hurried over.

“You need to leave,” she said.

I looked at her, startled.

She repeated, “They want you to leave.”

We stood up and walked out—Ernie first, me right behind.

Outside on the sidewalk, Ernie stood stunned, staring without seeing. I was confused and furious — righteousness turned on its head always hit me that way. Ernie looked embarrassed. I sputtered a few incoherent protests while he said almost nothing. We never spoke of it again. That was the last time I ever saw him.

The next day we began Training Groups’ two-week graduation exercise called Operation Cherokee Trail in Pisgah National Forest near Asheville, North Carolina. We traveled 263 miles in three open back semi-trailers to reach our destination. Ernie and I travelled in different trucks and went through the exercise with different units. We slept it off when we returned, graduated and scattered our separate ways.

I have tried to find Ernie but have failed. I personally have nothing but good memories of him.

Ernest Johnson and I when I was experimenting with existential art photography

James Alan McPherson:

A somewhat famous man unknown to most of my readers. He was the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He wrote two books of short stories, several memoirs, and books of essays.

He was my favorite professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Born just thirty-six days after me in 1943, he was technically almost my exact contemporary. Yet because I was the student and he the professor, I always treated him as the older man and myself as the younger. I don’t call him a friend because the relationship between student and teacher is professional. Friendship has nothing to do with it.

A woven flat cap sat low on his head. Over an open-collared shirt with no tie, he wore a loose, dark flannel sport coat the color of old coffee grounds — somewhere between brown and black. The coat hung comfortably over his mild Greenstreet bulk, soft and unpretentious.

I sat before him in his office. He sat before me. Both of us silent. Finally, he answered my question: “Your writing needs more touches,” and lapsed again to silence.

I left his office convinced I had just interviewed the Buddha.
As the program unfolded, my opinion changed. I came to see that my writing still needed work, and only I could figure out what it lacked. More importantly, I realized that the Workshop, for all its pleasures — easily the two best years of my life — rested on a fundamental con: writing cannot be passed from the professor’s mouth to the student’s notebook and then into a finished story.

I took a second workshop with him — something unusual, since students were expected to spread themselves among the famous writers who were supposedly eager to share their secrets. Later, I also took a reading seminar from him. In those two courses I heard his stories and came to know him better.

One night in the workshop, he spoke about the difficulties he had faced as a serious Black student — a bookworm constantly harassed by athletes. It sounded grim. Then, during another session in the reading seminar, I casually used the word “ghetto” to describe housing in East Germany.

My words clearly hurt him. I was stunned. Here was a man as solid and grounded as anyone I had ever known, yet the mere mention of the word “ghetto,” even in a European context, still had the power to wound him.

It is that wound — still raw among African Americans after all these years — that deserves our attention. Because we are in trouble.

Never in American history have so many talented, articulate, and wise African Americans been so publicly visible — people whose voices are a pleasure to hear and whose ideas merit real attention, respect, and support.

They represent a substantial and growing share of Black citizens, and the long-term trends favor them. The optics, however, tell a different story.

As far back as 1993, Jesse Jackson spoke painfully about the optics:

“There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved. After all we have been through, just to think we can’t walk down our own streets, how humiliating.”

The great changes in racial relations during the 1960s rode an enormous wave of public sympathy. My Texas roommates in 1962 and 1963 were firm believers in segregation, yet they still felt genuine sympathy for the Black people living around them. I know this is hard for people who didn’t live through that time to believe, but there is no cure for ignorance.

At that time, in that place I was the fire-breathing village radical. And however wrong my roommates may have been in basic facts; they carried no visible hate.

Zoom forward to today. What has our experience been?

CCTV cameras, police bodycams, and cell phones have created a flood of images — most of them unflattering to the urban Black community.

A quick search on YouTube turns up dozens of AI-generated clips — some of them showing young Black men urinating on Austin Metcalf’s grave. These videos are largely created and shared by supporters of Karmelo Anthony.

Such grotesque displays inevitably trigger the predictable racist backlash: “Savages!”

We often see videos of Black mobs looting stores and rampaging through businesses. Social media overflows with footage of Black men being taken down by police. The sheer volume makes it feel like the dominant story of our time.

How is it possible that so many Black drivers, stopped by officers, still cannot produce a valid license? One would expect that at least some would.

Last weekend in Chicago alone, twenty people were shot and seven were killed.

Too often, Black teenagers questioned by police can barely form complete sentences. Looking at them, it is difficult to picture them functioning in any normal workplace.

The current euphemism for the national mood is “Black Fatigue.” Fatigue is too mild. For a growing number of Americans, the feeling edging closer is raw hatred.

This is not just a problem. It is a national damnation.

NOTE:

MY NEW NOVELLA, THE DEATH OF SERGEANT YORK, IS AVAILABLE ON AMAZON NOW!

This Substack is edited by Titus Gee

In 1212 AD a young shepherd boy (likely around 12 years old), Stephen of Cloyes from Cloyes-sur-le-Loir in central France claimed a vision in which Jesus (disguised as a poor pilgrim) appeared to him, gave him letters for King Philip II of France, and instructed him to preach a Crusade.

Dismissed by the king, Stephen preached at Saint-Denis (near Paris) during the Lendit fair and gathered a large following. He led them toward the Mediterranean Sea, promising divine miracles.

In Germany, Nicholas of Cologne, also a shepherd, heard of the French crusade and had a similar vision of Christ. He rallied followers in Cologne and led them south across the Alps into Italy. This was how the Children’s Crusade began—a short-lived, unsanctioned religious movement in medieval Europe that drew together thousands of children and adolescents (with some poorer adults among them). Contemporary chroniclers sometimes claimed figures as high as 50,000, but modern historians consider the more realistic total to be in the range of 10,000 to 30,000 participants.

The Children’s Crusade of 1212 starkly exposes the logical insanities lurking in fundamentalist religious thinking —“If we have enough faith, God will . . .”

In plain words, the Crusade proclaimed: “Faithful children will provide the soldiers; Christ will provide the victory.”

God did not intervene. Almost all the children perished en route through a combination of hardships: exhaustion and starvation while crossing the Alps, disease, exposure, malnutrition.

According to later chroniclers, a large portion of the French contingent was lured by merchants in Mediterranean ports (especially Marseille), put aboard ships under false promises, and sold into slavery in Egypt and North Africa. Very few of the children ever returned home.

The most recent large-scale use of child soldiers occurred during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988). Iran, under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, extensively recruited and deployed tens of thousands of children — primarily through the Basij militia and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). As part of a deliberate mass mobilization strategy, boys as young as 9–12 were sent into battle, often after brief indoctrination in schools emphasizing martyrdom.

Motivated largely by religious fervor and drawn disproportionately from poor families, these children participated in notorious “human wave” assaults. Lightly trained or unarmed, they were used to clear minefields and absorb Iraqi gunfire, serving effectively as cannon fodder to compensate for Iran’s equipment shortages and to overwhelm the enemy through sheer numbers. Iranian officials later acknowledged sending more than 550,000 underage volunteers to the front.

A high-end estimate puts the number of Iranian child soldiers killed at around 50,000. Using the common modern battle ratio of roughly 1 killed to 3–4 wounded, the total casualty figure (killed plus wounded) would be approximately 200,000.

The 18th-century Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753) never actually asked the famous question, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” However, the riddle is closely associated with his idealist philosophy. Berkeley argued that objects only exist as they are perceived (“esse est percipi” — to be is to be perceived). In his view, the tree would still make a sound because God, as the eternal perceiver, would hear it.

Most people in the United States remain unaware of Iran’s child soldiers, therefore what God knows, they don’t—it never happened.

The only connection between those 50,000 dead child soldiers and Berkeley — or the readers of this essay — lies in our conscious assent to the truth of that figure. Once we accept the number as real, we must also confront the reality that the mullahs who ordered and glorified this policy were monstrous, and that the theology used to justify sending children to clear minefields was morally depraved. (Notably, even the medieval Popes refused to sanction the Children’s Crusade).

Nevertheless, child warriors have been a recurring feature throughout human history. A classic example is the biblical account of David versus Goliath. David was still too young to serve as a soldier in King Saul’s army, which is why he was sent to deliver rations to his three older brothers who were fighting the Philistines, and not to fight the Philistines. Modern commentators often estimate that he was around seventeen years old at the time.

But that’s incorrect. Seventeen is more than old enough to serve as a soldier. In my own advanced infantry training squad, several members were seventeen. I’ll admit I saw them as children and did my best to protect them from bullying by the older, rougher, and bigger trainees — but they were fully capable of doing the job.

David was too small to wear King Saul’s armor. He told Saul that he had killed a lion and a bear in defense of his flock. He was fourteen or fifteen, but his weapon of choice—a sling—was recognized as lethal on the battlefields of the day.

The Royal Navy (and its predecessor, the English Navy) relied on young boys for roughly 400 years (c. 1550–1956). From the 1500s, boys as young as 7–12 commonly served as cabin boys, powder monkeys (carrying gunpowder to cannons), and ship’s boys. They served in both world wars in the 20^th century.

My great-grandfather Samuel Jefferson “Sam” Martin, Sr. (born in Arkansas, April 1848) enlisted in the Confederate Army around age 16 (likely late 1864) and served more than a year in Company K, 10th Missouri Infantry, CSA, under General Sterling Price (in Price’s Missouri Expedition / Army of Missouri operations in the Trans-Mississippi theater).

He was a horse handler in an infantry unit. In 1951 my Uncle Bill showed me Sam’s 10-gauge, double-barreled shotgun behind the kitchen door. He had carried it in the war and used it after the war to run-off suiters to his five beautiful daughters.

He hated slavery. He was known for saying: “The idea that one man could own another man is one of the cruelest notions to ever occupy the human mind.” But he also said that “Blood is thicker than water,” and fought for the South.

In World War II Hitler Youth had about 8.8 million members. Many transitioned into military or paramilitary service as the war progressed, especially after 1943 when manpower shortages became acute.

The12th SS Panzer Division was formed in 1943 primarily from Hitler Youth volunteers (mostly 16–17 years old). It had more than 10,000 boys; in its 1st Battalion, more than 65% were under 18. It saw heavy fighting in Normandy (suffering 60% casualties, mostly teenagers) and later battles.

According to Allied accounts, the German “boy soldiers” (primarily from the 12th SS Panzer Division) performed with remarkable fanaticism, reckless bravery, and ferocity — but ultimately suffered devastating losses and could not stop the Allied advance.

Allied soldiers and reports described them as fanatical and fearless fighters: They attacked with “shocking fanaticism,” springing “like wolves” against tanks, fighting on even when encircled or outnumbered until wiped out. British and Canadian troops were astounded by their contempt for danger and willingness to die.

Which brings me to the point of this essay. Boys want to be in the war. They do not whimper and cry (which is what many would wish to imagine). A boy from birth is on the way to become a man, and more than anything else wants to finish the journey. When I was seven years old, my grandfather took me to a West Texas family ranch, and a bull broke its pasture after dark. I wept and begged the men to take me with them to round up the bull. I still can feel the pain of their rejection.

As recorded above, allied soldiers were shocked to find out that the fierce defenders of German positions—who commonly fought to their last bullet before surrendering—were boys.

In Treasure Island, Jim Hawkins represents the quintessential boy hero living out grand adventures: he finds the treasure map, foils the pirates’ mutiny, kills Israel Hands, and helps secure the buried fortune.

It is women who suffer most from the image of child soldiers. They cannot help but see the helpless infant they once nursed at their breast and instinctively long to preserve the sacred protections that nurturing should guarantee.

There is some overlap between human behavior and lion behavior. Female lionesses most often fight a losing battle to save the lives of their young cubs from the conquering lords and masters of the pride. It is the way of the lion. The new lord and master will most likely be dead himself within two to three years.

Humans behave differently, but not stupidly — David wasn’t sent to fight the war — but as a youth desiring manhood, he forced his way into the battle. Grown men are a lot more pliable on the subject than grown women. If the boy can do the job, like orphaned or extremely poor powder boys in the Royal Navy, then — given the opportunities of the day — he is almost always better off in the navy.

To use children as living shields and bullet-stoppers, the way Iran’s mullahs sent their own boys to the slaughter, is what The Godfather would rightly call infame.

But women have a primary role in how we respond to child soldiers. They are more sentimental (God bless them), than logical. Thus, when I joined the army, I didn’t call home and say I am thinking about joining the army—the sky would have fallen. I called home and said, “I have joined the army.”

I never mentioned that I had volunteered for the infantry and airborne training. Only when the orders arrived did I tell them I’d been assigned to the infantry and was leaving for Fort Benning Jump School.

I didn’t reveal that I had volunteered for Special Forces — I told them I had been sent to Special Forces Training Group. And for years I never admitted I had volunteered for Vietnam. I said I had been ordered there.

My mother and grandmother were two tough West Texas women. Their female forebears had endured the raw, dangerous life on the Comanche frontier. When I left for Vietnam, they kept their faces appropriately stiff and brave.

But behind the stoic faces were two independently seething volcanoes of hysteria. Which was sublimated in prayer. Their prayers were answered, though my father at a later time came to me and said in a low voice: “Jack, don’t you ever put me through something like this again.”

I look at it this way: If you’re male, you’re doomed to become a man. And if life is going to hit you hard anyway, you might as well start today.

When his father died, Eddie Rickenbacker went to work in a factory at age fourteen. Floyd Zula — the man I’ve written about before — was kicked out of Lew Wallace High School in the seventh grade and started at U.S. Steel in Gary, Indiana, the following Monday. My own great-grandfather was a horse handler in the Civil War, working behind the front lines at just sixteen.

Child warriors have appeared in many cultures throughout history. We cannot, however, equate or identify them with the exploitation of children by figures such as radical mullahs or Adolf Hitler. Such monstrous leaders take advantage of a very admirable trait — the desire of the boy to be with the men.

An orphan or extremely poor youth who found his way into the Royal Navy endured much the same harsh discipline imposed on adult sailors. For minor offenses, however, boys were usually only caned rather than subjected to a full flogging with the cat-o’-nine-tails. To us that may seem harsh but caning was commonplace for young boys wherever they found themselves in British society at the time. The point it is that those boys became the sailors whose impact on civilization stands among the greatest in world history (the end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade not least among their accomplishments).

These are impulses that ought to be guided, not discouraged.

The worst aspect of modern American civilization is the culture-wide suppression of the young male’s desire to become a man.

NOTE:

MY NEW NOVELLA, THE DEATH OF SERGEANT YORK, IS AVAILABLE ON AMAZON NOW!

This Substack is edited by Titus Gee

By the time this essay is published, it may already be out of date. We could be in a full-fledged war with Iran. As of Monday afternoon, June 1, 2026, however, the United States is not engaged in active kinetic hostilities with Iran.

What happens or doesn’t happen lies in the mind of President Donald Trump.

He has much on his mind.

We are merely his audience. The burdens weighing on our thoughts cannot compare to the Balrogs and Orcs laying siege to Trump’s own.

When I was the primary message radio-teletype (RTTY) operator for the Special Forces C-Team headquarters that commanded our units in IV Corps (the Mekong Delta) during the Vietnam War, I was amazed by how much I knew about the course and details of our war — yet far more amazed by the vast stretches of ignorance that remained. We fought a major battle that took place within a half-day’s march of my location. Beyond knowing it occurred along the Mekong River, I couldn’t have found it on a map.

Only a tiny handful of people truly grasp everything Trump must confront, and I — like nearly the entire world — remain largely in ignorance.

The reason war so often becomes a morass is that the principle which launches a war must be followed through to its conclusion. Russia is learning this bitter lesson in Ukraine, where it has suffered roughly 1.2 million total casualties (killed, wounded, and missing) over more than four years of fighting.

And no matter how firmly Trump clings to the principle that Iran must never possess a nuclear weapon, I doubt he fully anticipated the worldwide seismic shifts that have resulted from acting upon it. Like any leader who starts a fight, he almost certainly shrugged off the risks, confident he could handle whatever consequences followed.

His enemies accuse him of not thinking things through — the most common charge being that he failed to anticipate the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. It would indeed be a serious fault if true, but the accusation is foolish. The Strait of Hormuz must have been uppermost in everyone’s mind when the war was planned.

What I suspect weighed less heavily on the war planners’ list of concerns was the reality that no living Muslim could equably accept the defeat of a fellow Muslim nation — even a rogue state like Iran that many Muslims view as an enemy and a practitioner of deviant heresy — especially when that defeat was delivered with the full participation of Israel.

The Persian Gulf nations — primarily Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman — would welcome a ceasefire right now. Iran has been significantly weakened, yet these Gulf states have no desire for regime change.

In the Gulf states scenario, the United States can continue monitoring Iran’s nuclear materials from satellites. Any Iranian attempt to disrupt the Strait of Hormuz would ultimately be resolved through sustained global market pressures and practical alternatives — such as expanded use of pipelines to the Red Sea, overland routes bypassing the Strait entirely, and increased access to Mediterranean ports via existing and proposed infrastructure.

Trump is trying to bundle any Iran deal with broader Arab-Israeli peace gains, offering Israel additional diplomatic victories — such as expanded normalization agreements under the Abraham Accords — to offset any concessions made in the negotiations with Tehran.

Thus, his wistful but ultimately hopeless plea for a stronger embrace of the Abraham Accords: “After all the work done by the United States to try and pull this very complex puzzle together, it should be mandatory that all of these countries, at a minimum, simultaneously sign the Abraham Accords . . . I am mandatorily requesting that all countries immediately sign the Abraham Accords. And if Iran signs its agreement with me, it would be an honor to have them also be part of this unparalleled world coalition.”

Regional reactions have been largely negative — a mix of bemusement, silence, and outright rejection (for example, from Pakistan) — with many nations citing excuses such as the situation in Gaza and unfavorable public opinion.

Approximately 50,000 American military personnel are committed to operations in and around the Middle East in support of the 2026 Iran conflict. Current costs to maintain this force in the present standby phase (post-ceasefire, April–May 2026) are estimated rather widely at between $95–500 million per day. These expenses cover the ongoing naval blockade, monitoring activities, personnel rotations, and deterrence posture.

The statistic above is slightly misleading. Even when an aircraft carrier sits idle in its home port, it incurs enormous daily costs. The data visualization below (prepared with AI assistance) illustrates the cost differential between normal peacetime operations and the current conflict surge:

1. War/Sustained Ops Cost: Current elevated spending during Iran-related operations ($95–500 million range per day).

2. Normal Peacetime Baseline: What the same ~50,000 personnel and associated assets would cost in routine stations, ports, and duties ($50–150 million range per day, shown with representative midpoints).

3. Extra/Differential: The true incremental daily cost of the conflict surge (generally $100–300 million+ per day).

Regardless of cost concerns, Trump is not going to keep Marines confined to ships for an indefinite period while he negotiates with the Iranians. The forces in theater will either be used or sent home.

He will not vacillate or lose himself in a fog of words. He will press the war to a decisive conclusion, leaving no doubt that he has achieved his stated goals.

All of this is vintage Trump: equal parts common sense and high drama. Rather than watching the months tick by toward the November elections in ordinary time, we find ourselves inside a grand opera — written by, directed by, and starring Donald Trump. We may not know every act in advance, but we sense the inexorable schedule and the looming climax. The current Iran chapter must end in decisive victory at the perfect dramatic moment. Then comes the “Free Cuba” act, followed by the surging economy movement, the storming of the Democratic ramparts, and the triumphant election climax — all building toward the final arias and the fall of the curtain.

I have never seen him perform with greater discipline and concentration.

And the Democrats, with almost theatrical predictability, willingly line up to play their assigned role in the drama.

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President Trump talks tough and acts tough enough to frighten his enemies. But now he has hold of a tar baby—Iran—and having grabbed tight and he can’t let go.

It turns out the president is a reluctant warlord and really wants to make a deal. The cease fire has lasted longer than the bombing because Iran has trapped him in the Iranian Mullah Two-Step

The dance goes like this (with real quotes):

1. “After that, they’re gonna have no bridges, no power plants. Stone ages, yeah, stone ages...”

2. “No, no. We will do what you ask.” Written responses arrive—they don’t.

1. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!!”

2. “No, no. We will do what you ask.” Written responses arrive—they don’t.

1. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will... We will find out tonight.”

2. “No, no. We will do what you ask.” Written responses arrive—they don’t.

1. “We will take out easily destroyable targets that will make it virtually impossible for Iran to ever be built back, as a Nation, again . . .”

2. “No, no. We will do what you ask.” Written responses arrive—they don’t.

Trump stays with the dance, because at bottom he’s a used car salesman with a vision of peace and prosperity—he’s not a warlord.

The complexities of Trump’s Mullah dilemma go well beyond any foreign policy trap most of us have seen in our lifetimes.

1. You cannot sustain that massive a concentration of military hardware and personnel for long. The Russians thought they would finish Ukraine in two weeks. Four years later they are still grinding away. Time is not on our side here.

2. Even if the Mullahs meekly signed up to every demand tomorrow, how do we guarantee real compliance without keeping an enormous American force in the region indefinitely?

3. Worst of all, the Mullah Two-Step makes both him and us look ridiculous. The great United States and its President Donald Trump are being played like children while the mullahs shuffle, smile, and stall.

Trump has real courage and vision, but his greatest skill may be playing ringmaster in a spectacular circus. The show is magnificent—yet even when spectacle dominates, the plot must still be followed, or the audience eventually walks out.

There was an old saying in the Airborne: “Just say Airborne and do it.” Trump will do his duty. He will commit the infantry, seize the islands that control the Strait of Hormuz, bomb his way through the target list, establish a base to keep the strait open, maintain the blockade, declare victory, and then stand down that enormous concentration of military power.

And then the hard part begins. Iran will seethe with hatred and rebellion. The Mullahs will slaughter as many of their own people as necessary—hundreds of thousands if that’s what it takes—while the United States and Israel stand offshore supplying weapons and moral support, hoping for a successful uprising that may never fully arrive.

We will find out on Monday.

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Whatever history ultimately decides about the current Trump cabinet, many observers already view it as a marked improvement over the Biden administration in cohesion, loyalty to the president’s agenda, and willingness to challenge Washington norms. It features several high-caliber figures, but Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio stand out as particularly gifted.

Whether it ranks among the strongest cabinets in American history — alongside Lincoln’s or Washington’s — historians will judge once the full record of policy outcomes, crisis management, stability, and long-term results is clear. Like every modern administration, it has faced turnover and questions about qualifications, but its unified strength has been a clear asset in advancing the president’s priorities.

Early national discussion about the 2028 presidential race, since the 2024 election, has centered on Vance and Rubio. The beauty of the choice for Republicans is that voters would face a contest between two outstanding leaders. Insert Governor Gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris into a matchup with either man. The majority would clearly side with Vance or Rubio.

Rubio has been on a strong pace since his appointment. At his current rate of travel, he threatens to eclipse John Foster Dulles’s record as the most traveled secretary of state in history. He handles hostile questions from the mainstream media and Democrat lawmakers with courage, sharp logic, savage repartee, and a command of the facts.

Rubio has become a star — and he proved it on May 5 when he stepped in for Karoline Leavitt at the White House podium. Even the usually skeptical press corps, friend and foe alike, received him like a rock star. No one quite shouted “I want to have your baby,” but the enthusiasm was unmistakable. Whatever else happened that day, Rubio delivered, and the room loved it.

A recent AtlasIntel poll (May 4–7, 2026) showed Rubio leading Vance among Republican-leaning respondents, 45.4% to 29.6%, with Ron DeSantis a distant third at about 11%. Most polls since 2024 had shown Vance in the lead.

Such polling encourages some Democrats to indulge in Gunfight-at-the-OK-Corral fantasies — imagining their 2028 candidate marching triumphantly into the White House by stepping over the political corpse of a fractured Republican Party after a Vance-Rubio civil war.

Yet both men have repeatedly affirmed their friendship and mutual loyalty.

In an NBC News interview on May 11, 2026, Rubio said:

“JD is a very good friend of mine. If JD runs for president, I think he’d be a phenomenal candidate. I’ve said publicly, and I’ll say it again: I’ll be the first person to sign up and support him.”

On October 29, 2025, on the Pod Force One podcast, Vance declared:

“First of all, no, there’s not going to be any tension. Marco is my best friend in the administration, and he and I work a lot together.”

He has reaffirmed that sentiment several times since.

Rubio often stresses that he speaks for the president, yet he maintains a clearer separation from Trump’s personal identity — and that is only natural. If Rubio is the administration’s voice on foreign affairs, Vance is its full shadow and enforcer. Vance doesn’t just echo the president’s agenda; he advances every jot and tittle of it while actively rooting out corruption in federal programs, especially in blue states.

Vance is the most accomplished vice president of my lifetime. He handles verbal attacks from any source with ease and remains firmly grounded in real-life experience, rigorous training, and natural ability. I have never seen him falter when articulating a strong, persuasive case for any major national issue or policy — including U.S. actions regarding Iran.

The strongest case for JD Vance running in 2028 is simple: Marco Rubio has become a national treasure as Secretary of State. America benefits enormously from keeping him exactly where he is — and Vance running for president is the cleanest way to make that possible.

There should be no real argument. Both Vance and Rubio would make excellent presidents, but Rubio is an outstanding secretary of state. Vance would excel wherever he serves, but if Rubio leaves the State Department, no one can truly fill his shoes.

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My wife asked me, “Who is James Carville?”

She was looking at her iPad.

“He was Clinton’s best known campaign strategist—most famous for the phrase ‘It’s the economy, stupid,’ whether that was what he said or not. I admire him for being a Marine, staying married to the same woman, and being able to pierce through the false conservatism of the first Bush presidency.”

Silence from my wife.

“You must be reading something he said.”

“He sounds deranged.”

“He has a Democrat and Bush Republican malady. It comes from exposure to the Bacillus commonly known as Donald Trump—prolonged exposure does not seem to produce immunity.”

“Hah ha! You’re trying to be funny.”

“Not at all. I’m dead serious.”

You don’t really notice the Bush Republicans anymore for two reasons: Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) has struck them mute, and their numbers have been so thoroughly decimated that the faction has become a genuinely endangered species inside the GOP.

Carville is a different animal. At his core, he’s a fiery Irishman drenched in hot Cajun blood. When someone with that kind of temperament goes into the terminal stages of TDS, you can’t help but notice — they’re simply too entertaining to ignore.

The Democrats in general are in a terrible mess. They are like a tribe of apostate Christian natives migrating in canoes and lost in a morass of quicksand, tangled foliage and meandering open streams that seem to go nowhere.

They imagine the United States as a national rescue mission like Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago without all the spiritual nonsense, where a peasant from any point on the globe can come to have his feet washed and toes clipped by a real podiatrist—all free, no strings attached (but vote Democrat).

And they see unfolding before their eyes:

SATAN HIMSELF!—whose nefarious plan is to free, or at least smash Iran beyond recognition, to free Cuba from the state slavery known as communism, to send everyone in the country the largest tax return in their lives, to turn the country’s economy into a pounding engine of prosperity, and to guarantee that every vote is legal and verified by a personal identity card (I am 82 years old, and I cannot buy a can of beer in California without showing a picture ID), and to do all this well before the midterm elections.

No wonder bands of zombie Democrats wander around the open fields moaning their curses and frothing all the names their crushed minds can muster: “FASCIST!” “HITLER!” “NAZI!” “FÜHRER!” “KING!”

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MY NEW NOVELLA, THE DEATH OF SERGEANT YORK, IS AVAILABLE ON AMAZON NOW!

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One attempt to assassinate President Trump is an incident.

The second maybe a coincidence.

But the third is a pattern—and it strongly suggests that four and five are coming.

Thomas Matthew Crooks, Ryan Wesley Routh, and Cole Tomas Allen all fit the recurring model of alienated, underachieving males who attempt to assassinate American presidents. Some succeed. Most do not.

These failed men tumble into megalomaniacal daydreams chasing a Mighty Mouse delusion: “Here I come to save the day!” Or, as Eddie Murphy’s character Kit Ramsey declares in the closing moments of Bowfinger: “I saved the world! I saved it!” It’s one of the funniest button scenes in cinema.

At its core, the male desire to play the hero—saving the damsel tied to the railroad tracks, stopping the bank robbery, charging up San Juan Hill—is fundamentally decent and essential to the traditional male role.

For me, it began at puberty. I would lie in bed fantasizing about saving our church congregation from invaders bursting through the doors during a sermon.

It was a strange fantasy, especially in 1956, when no such threat existed. I both savored the daydream and rejected it as a guilty sickness.

Before long, I channeled that energy into the real world: working out beside my bed, seeking fighting advice from older friends, and reading every book I could find.

Cole Allen, by contrast, appears in his photos as a weapon fetishist. What’s missing from the image above is his shotgun. The Mossad assassins who tracked the Munich perpetrators carried a discreet .22-caliber Beretta. That’s the difference between a boy playing dress-up and a true professional.

Here’s a strange but telling story. I know two different men named Mike Kennedy who live at opposite ends of the world. I hadn’t spoken to, written, or seen either in more than ten years. Then one day both called me within an hour of each other for trivial reasons. I remember imagining a voice crying across the ethers of the universe saying, “Mike Kennedy—call Jack Simons right now.”

Neither has called since.

Now, I find myself wondering what voice has cried across the universe saying, “Hound him. Hurt him. Persecute him. Prosecute him. Lie about him. Falsely accuse him. Shoot to kill. Destroy Donald Trump!”

The raw record of attacks is staggering. It includes Crossfire Hurricane, the Mueller investigation, the 51 intelligence officials’ letter on the Hunter Biden laptop, two impeachments, multiple civil lawfare cases, four criminal indictments, and now three assassination attempts. This list alone should spawn generations of master’s theses and doctoral dissertations.

The only other American president hounded to a comparable degree—though not for as long—was Abraham Lincoln. Democrats may not like the comparison, but in this one respect it is unavoidable: the intensity of the hatred is the same.

Trump hasn’t just disturbed the Democrats—he has poked a global hornet’s nest. If the world were the Roman Senate and Trump Caesar, a sizable assassination conspiracy could easily form. Even some unlikely allies might gladly join in, leaving Trump to utter “Et tu, Brute?” to more than one assassin.

The Secret Service has the hardest job in the world. The agent at the barrier was not looking directly at Cole Tomas Allen when he began his charge. He spotted him only after Allen had already passed through the metal detector. The agent stepped back, drew his weapon, and fired. Several agents fired weapons. No one hit the would-be assassin. Allen tripped, and they swarmed him.

It may be shocking that they all missed, but it shouldn’t be. To a man and woman, they were combat novices—eager, well-trained, but untested under fire. Range shooting is fundamentally different from a real-world encounter. Even adding every agent present that day, the number with prior combat experience in the Secret Service would be vanishingly small.

We comfort ourselves that they missed with good form and evident courage. But imagine how many more Crooks, Rouths, and Allens walk among us, each imagining himself the hero who will satisfy the lust for Trump’s death that fills a significant portion of the population.

How many Democrats in the North and South quietly rejoiced when Abraham Lincoln—the “baboon,” the “ape,” the “idiot”—was slain by John Wilkes Booth?

The international situation has worsened. Behind the scenes, we don’t know how many nations may have quietly committed to the idea that the world would be better off without Donald Trump. Besides Iran, several others could be legitimately suspected.

If a nation secretly resolves to silence the world’s biggest troublemaker, one might assume the job would be executed with ruthless professionalism. That assumption should feel menacing—because it is. Yet from my own professional experience long ago, I was repeatedly struck by how many such operations never rose above the level of moronic.

The Secret Service must nevertheless anticipate every possibility and control every well-prepared foreign space.

Trump won’t hide in the White House.

No virtue shall go unpunished.

If the worst does happen, his enemies will deny his courage and behind a hypocritical mask of sorrow they will celebrate his death.

NOTE:

MY NEW NOVELLA, THE DEATH OF SERGEANT YORK, IS AVAILABLE ON AMAZON NOW!

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However little the vast American audience may know about Iran, most can see that Iran represents a difficult problem to solve—a landscape of mirrors—approach it straight on and you may only see your own assumptions looking back.

It’s mostly our ignorance that hinders clear understanding. Simply put, what makes the Iranians different from other Muslims?

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, when speaking at a press conference about negotiating with Iran, answered the question without answering the question:

He doesn’t describe the theology he refers to. He doesn’t because it is arcane, complicated, and incompatible with Western civilization’s commitment to philosophical materialism.

As I have mentioned before, philosophical materialists tend to see witchcraft, sorcery, fundamentalist Christianity, and the two main strains of Islam — Sunni and Shia — as relics of humanity’s ignorant past.

Shia Muslims represent approximately fifteen percent of the Muslim population, yet they rule or heavily influence worldwide Muslim interactions. They also are concentrated in a few very active, aggressive countries while the vast majority (Sunnis) are seldom heard from.

Summary Table (Approximate Shia % and Influence)

Azerbaijan and Bahrain both have Shia majorities, yet a secular government in Azerbaijan and a Sunni monarchy in Bahrain have kept aggressive Shia activity in check.

Shia eschatology (the branch of theology that deals with the “last things”) pushes its adherents to extremism.

Here is a bare bones synopsis of Shia eschatology based on my research:

Iranian Mahdi eschatology is the Twelver Shia doctrine of the Hidden Imam (Muhammad al-Mahdi, the 12th Imam), integrated into the Islamic Republic’s ideology as both religious belief and political theology. [The name “Twelver” comes from their belief in twelve divinely appointed Imams (spiritual and political successors to the Prophet Muhammad)]. Muhammad al-Mahdi, the 12^th Imam (born around 869–870 CE), is also known as the Hidden Imam because he remains alive—under divine concealment—and he will one day return as the Mahdi (the “Rightly Guided One”) to bring justice, defeat evil, and usher in the end times before the Day of Judgment.

The Mahdi demands orthodoxy and obedience. This leads to a fundamentalist mindset that shows up in numerous religions, but Shia Muslims are the current world champs: The more I obey God the more pleased he is. If I am faithful enough, God will reward me with victory.

This mindset is capable of almost infinite extension: Failure results because I am not faithful, true, committed enough, which becomes an argument for doubling down.

I asked AI to write a generic Fanatic’s Creed (in the voice of a zealous believer):

This creed is a composite of recurring patterns from various extremist ideologies — including certain strains of messianic Mahdism. Many people whose worldview is still anchored in the Middle Ages find such beliefs irresistible.

This is what the president faces in Iran: no surrender and no negotiations. That is why I believe he must ultimately order limited infantry missions to seize the islands in the Strait of Hormuz and recover the Iranian’s enriched uranium.

In the past no one would have believed a nation could win a war without committing the infantry. If the Iranians were rational, this war would have been the first exception to that belief.

But in present circumstances Trump must commit the infantry to topple the leaning tower of fanaticism upholding the Iranian resistance. Losing half a billion dollars a day means nothing to fanatics. Yet confronting warriors who can send thousands of committed fanatics to their deaths daily, each expecting a paradise filled with virgins, should force even the fiercest zealot to wonder: perhaps it is wiser to remain in this sexually limited reality than to ascend to that promised reward.

President Trump tries to do the right thing. But he has already fudged on the enriched uranium when he says, “We know where it is.”—the implication being we can watch it from space, etc.

He knows that there is no way to retrieve the uranium unless we physically dig it out ourselves. We can’t blow up a tunnel with enough bombs that the Iranians can’t reopen it. I think he will use the 82^nd airborne division to gain control of the uranium.

Meanwhile, everyone knows that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps can close the Strait of Hormuz anytime it pleases in the future if it still possesses the fortified islands that dominate the passage. They have been lying quiet and silent in the present crisis, maybe in hope that no one will notice.

Again, the president is being somewhat evasive by not stating the obvious: control the islands, and you control the strait. There is no need to invade the mainland. Simply seize the islands and hand them to whoever can hold them. The Arab neighbors might struggle to defend them against a resurgent Iran. A European consortium of nations that depend on oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz could maintain control, but that would require the Europeans to rediscover a courage they no longer seem to possess.

The doctrine is as old as the British seizure of Gibraltar.

The Marines will take the islands.

So far, President Trump has kept casualties miraculously low—more people die playing video games than have been killed so far in this war. The intense Shia ideology and its use of messianic proxy fighters mean the war cannot go on without a major increase in deaths.

Trump’s Democrat enemies—packs of ravening werewolves lurking just outside the glow of the national campfires hoping for opportunity and weakness—will jump him from every direction crying and weeping on behalf of male children being sent to the slaughter. They will search the meme closet to find every rancid phrase referring to the subject.

• “Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die.” — attributed to Herbert Hoover (from his 1944 speech to the Republican National Convention).

• “I’m fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.” — George McGovern.

• “Old men make wars, young men fight them.” — A common folk-style phrasing, sometimes expanded to “Old men make wars, young men fight and die.”

I was a young man who went to war – a stupid war as it turns out. But that doesn’t keep the above statements from being nonsense.

Nothing in the world matches the demands of combat: endless hours, heavy packs, rigorous physical demands, myriad health difficulties from malaria to trench foot🙂, bad food, physical discomfort from weather and exposure outdoors. Young men are the only ones who can handle it. Older sergeants and officers do the best they can, but the young men must always carry them in some sense.

I’m not talking about sad sack outfits from the military’s worst (even though good officers and sergeants can raise sad sack outfits to a high level of effectiveness). I’m talking about the military’s best: the 82^nd Airborne, the Marines.

Those young men joined the military and volunteered for Airborne or the Marines because they wanted to fight in the real thing—shoulder to shoulder with men of high character—if the nation called them to war.

I enlisted in the Army infantry and went Airborne for the same reason: I wanted to be among the best. I volunteered for Vietnam because I wanted to fight in America’s wars. I was not a victim, and neither are the troops who will soon find themselves in harm’s way against Iran. Those who insist on portraying them as victims misunderstand the warrior spirit that has always drawn determined young men to the sound of the guns.

The Democrats will fight battles more suited to their character – they will accuse the young soldiers of obeying illegal orders and pursue them to ends of the earth to prove them guilty of war crimes.

But if Trump is the man I believe him to be, he will commit the infantry when no other path exists—despite the filth that will be heaped upon him—because he is an honorable man who takes his duty seriously.

There will be casualties.

NOTE:

MY NEW NOVELLA, THE DEATH OF SERGEANT YORK, IS AVAILABLE ON AMAZON NOW!

This Substack is edited by Titus Gee