Sic Semper Tyrannis

"Strike The Tent" trilogy by W. Patrick Lang

     

Available from:

 iUniverse

http://www.iuniverse.com/Bookstore/BookSearchResults.aspx?Search=patrick%20lang

E-Book version of all three available at iUniverse

Barnes and Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/W--Patrick-Lang?keyword=W.+Patrick+Lang&store=allproducts&iehack=%E2%98%A0

Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/Butchers-Cleaver-Confederate-Secret-Services/dp/0595474764/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358700423&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Butcher%27s+Cleaver

I was interviewed some time ago by the North Carolina Museum of History concerning the writing of this trilogy.

"The Confederate Secret Services, a conversation with W. Patrick Lang, novelist, retired U.S. Army colonel, and military intelligence consultant

Patrick Lang discusses his two novels, The Butcher’s Cleaver and Death Piled Hard, both of which focus on Claude Devereux, a Virginia banker who is recruited by the Confederate secret service and placed in the office of Union secretary of war Edwin Stanton. Approximate run time: 24 minutes. Podcast " 

This podcast is highly recommended

http://ncmuseumofhistory.org/civil-war-and-reconstruction

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"Science currently holds that time travel is an impossibility, but readers of Down the Sky, thefinal volume of Colonel Pat Lang’s Strike the Tent trilogy will question that assertion. Code-named “Hannibal,” Confederate penetration agent Claude Devereux is firmly lodged in the upper echelons of the Federal war machine. Now a Brigadier General of the Union forces with the new Congressional Medal of Honor on his chest, Major Devereux of the Confederate Secret Service knows time is running out. His minders in Richmond may no longer trust him, his personal life is a shambles, and Union spy-catcher Lafayette Baker is determined to bring him down. Only his peculiar, personal friendship with President Lincoln holds his enemies at bay.

Claude’s missions for the Federal War Department take him to major battles, and the reader will experience Cedar Creek, and Fort Fisher as if in person. The vision of Lincoln standing in full view of the Confederate sharpshooters at Fort Stephens is indelible, as is the vignette of a severely wounded Union officer on the grounds of the Belle Grove Plantation after Cedar Creek. Such a view of battle could only have come from the author’s personal experiences.

The book stands alone, but it is a worthy successor to its two predecessors, The Butcher’s Cleaver, and Death Piled Hard. The great Shelby Foote said:

'The Civil War brings everything into a sharper focus with heightened color. Anytime you want to study human behavior, it is well to study the Civil War, because in that you study human behavior under terrific pressure and heat. So that men show what they are for good or bad more readily than in ordinary times.'

Readers of the trilogy, and of Down the Sky in particular will find this unerringly demonstrated by the historical rigor and deep creativity of Patrick Lang.

James Peak

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These books are available in electronic formats to include "Kindle' from major vendors. pl

IMO Iran will wait for Biden

A journo friend called yesterday to ask my opinion about the course of near term events regarding Iran.

The murder of a senior Iranian scientist at the weekend may have been done by Israel or the United States or both in cooperation.  He may or may not have been the "father" of an actual Iranian MILITARY nuclear program as opposed to a CIVILIAN electric power focused program.

In the 2007 NIE on Iran the USIC would not commit publicly to the existence of such a military program and they never have since.  The theory of the case then was that Khamenei ordered an end to an experimental military program after the occupation of Iraq by the US and the destruction of the Iraqi government.  Khamenei published a fatwa stating that such a program was an evil thing and was no longer needed as a deterrent against Iraq.  

The subsequent US/Israeli focus on a putative Iranian nuclear weapons program was IMO an artifact of the Israeli/Cheney/Ziocon fascination with their 1% theory of strategy.  Stated simply, this is the concept that if anything can possibly threaten you, even at a  1% level of probability, then you should seek to crush it.

On that basis the Israelis have long wanted Iran crushed.  They have lacked the means to do it themselves unless they want to use the nuclear weapons they pretend not to have.  They evidently do not want to do that and so their long yearned for solution is that the stupid but strong Americans do it for them with perhaps a minor supporting role for themselves just so that they can claim afterward that they did all the hard bits.

In that context the death of the Iranian savant is easy to see as a provocation intended to bring on an Iranian attack which could be used to goad Trump into a grand finale effort against Iran.

The USS Nimitz Battle Group is in the area with all its wondrous  planes and missile shooting ships.  The US has been moving JDAM shooting B-52s into the region for a week.  Things like the B-2 bomber and B-1B are on call from far away.  Someone has been setting the stage for ...?  Who knows?  I doubt that it is Trump.  He has shown himself to be long on talk, and short on actual shooting.

Are the Iranians dumb enough to take the bait?  I doubt it.  All they have to do is wait for Joe, Blinken et al to take over and they are likely to get something very like JCPOA.  pl 

Richard Townsend Sale 1939 – 2020

 

Richard T. Sale, 81, an international affairs journalist and novelist, died on May 9, 2020, at Duke Hospice - Hock Pavilion in Durham. The cause was liposarcoma, a rare cancer, said his wife, Carol A. Huff.

An unassuming writer of national security news and fiction novels, Mr. Sale notably worked for The Washington Post, United Press International (UPI), Life Magazine and Aerospace Daily.  His published books include: “Clinton’s Secret Wars,” St. Martin’s Press 2009; “Traitors,” Berkley Books 2003; and “The Blackstone Rangers,” Random House 1971.

His to-be-published work includes an historical fiction based on his coverage for Life Magazine of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and a fictional novel from his reporting inside the Arizona State Prison.

For The Washington Post in 1977, Mr. Sale wrote a six-part series on growing tension in Iran, including the first reports of the instability of Shah Mohammed Reza.

Mr. Sale was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in international reporting at UPI by Managing Editor Barry Sussman.  Cited in the nomination was Mr. Sale’s penetration of the U.S. intelligence community to report exclusively on secret developments affecting America’s relations abroad.  This included the  KGB’s construction in the 1980s of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow as a giant “bug,” or listening device.

UPI credited Mr. Sale as “an incessant, tireless reader of books on history, diplomatic practice, political biography and theory,” that informed his stories which “never blame or praise political actions, but simply provide a descriptive analysis,” according to the nomination.

After 27 years in Washington, D.C., Mr. Sale lived in Hawaii for six years where his coverage for the Honolulu daily papers included the military’s largest amphibious movement since the Korean War, as well as human interest stories such as the Easter ritual at Punchbowl National Cemetery.

Returning to UPI in 2000, Mr. Sale earned the international service the distinction of being the first news organization to name Osama bin Laden responsible for the 9/11 attacks in the U.S.  This was followed by Mr. Sale’s exclusive report of a possible explosion of a nuclear weapon in downtown Washington, D.C.

For the last 15 years, Mr. Sale wrote political analysis on the Sic Semper Tyrannis website of retired Col. W. Patrick Lang, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official.

With a life of accomplishment and refined taste in literature, music and the arts, Mr. Sale was most comfortable with a relaxed style, characterized by having a sophisticated cocktail in a fine restaurant, followed by a hamburger and French fries.

In addition to his wife of 30 years, Carol Huff, Mr. Sale is survived by his children James Sale, and wife, Rebecca, of Pasadena, Calif.; Christopher Spiller of Arvada, Colo.; and Tandis Cavagnuolo of Miami Beach, Fla.; also his grandchildren Addison and Emma Sale; Caden and Coltin Spiller; and Capri and Siena Cavagnuolo.

Other survivors include his former spouse, Haida McGovern of Great Falls, Va.; his sister, Lindsey Tucker Bowen, Ph.D., of Cutler Bay, Fla.; and his half-brother, Edward Sale of Pasadena, Calif.; his in-laws, Fred A. and Ann Huff, brother-in-law, Fred J. Huff of Du Quoin, Ill.; and sister-in-law, Susan Smith, and husband, John of Carbondale, Ill.

Mr. Sale is predeceased by his father, film director and writer Richard B. Sale; and mother, Arline Walker Sale Evans.

He was born in New Rochelle, N.Y., spent his early years in Westchester County, N.Y., and attended Columbia University in New York City, graduating from Principia College in Elsah, Ill.

Mr. Sale was cremated as requested. A Celebration of Life is planned for this summer.  In lieu of flowers and to honor Mr. Sale and his feline friends, the family suggests contributions to the donor’s favorite animal protection agency.

Epicurean thought guided Mr. Sale, who believed that what drove the best of human beings was not a desire for fame or riches or power, but the desire to create something solid, original, and beautiful, something that would endure beyond the reach of time.

###

Red Gelatin Salad Night By Richard Sale

          Ben Falls, 36, had been administrator of the prison's Diagnostic and Receiving Center since last August. “It was the opinion of the prison administration and the Department of Corrections that a qualified person was needed for the position,” and Ben got the job. He was good at it.

          One early Monday morning, he was talking to his inmate clerk, Jute, who was doing time for embezzlement.

          Atop a gray metal desk, a boxy radio was blaring. A wiry, dark-haired man, balding and undersized, sat in Ben’s chair, his cheek bulging out as he ate. He chewed happily in time to the music.

          Ben Falls opened the door. His red face was moist with sweat.

          “Hey – Sparky,” Jute sang out happily, chewing. When he saw his boss, he stood up in haste, brushing off crumbs. “Could you turn that down, please?” Ben said coldly.

          Jute looked like a startled raccoon caught rummaging in the trash. “Thought you were Sparky.” He moved quickly to quell the concert.

          As the prison psychologist, Ben Falls was known as a man who would listen before he would judge. Custody officers saw the convicts as the most depraved, vice-hardened and desperate set of men ever to disgrace the face of the Earth, but to Ben the inmates were human beings pretty much like himself, and he took their side against custody.

          There were exceptions – there were murderers who would kill you if they chose to. He knew that there was a small hard core among the inmates who were sullen, ignorant and even fanatical, but the majority were simply ordinary people who had made bad mistakes. His goal was to help them regain their lives, and he deeply cared for their welfare. As a result he was widely popular with them. Therefore, his inmate clerk enjoyed a certain esteem and prestige. More importantly, the two men had liked each other from the first, and a strong, affectionate respect had grown between them, even though, according to prison rules, Jute was required to address his boss as “Mr. Falls.”

Desire - By Richard T. Sale

     It was a tall, unbelievably beautiful tree, finely shaped, with a great, green spreading crest, black dark green leaves, pales blossoms and long, sharp thorns.

  But in spite of its being a splendid sight, some said it was deadly.

     Certainly all the birds said so. They were used to bending the branches of a shorter, modest, more homely nearby trees with their weight as they chattered among themselves about butterflies, bees, worms and the other birds that had flown in among the magnificent trees spreading branches and had never been seen again.

     “It may be a beautiful tree, but who cares if you look beautiful if that’s what you’re really like,” said one fluffy brown bird.

    And then the birds all gossiped about the strange, towering tree, so beautiful and so alluring, and yet at times looking so sinister. But in grand, stately appearance and various attractions, truly the tree had no like.

     But then a strange bird, a newcomer, flew into the deep wood.

     He was red in color with a big crest, strong-beaked, and he was a bird who clearly liked to think things out for himself. That was his strength. He heard what others said, but it never moved him, for he thought with his eyes. Want he saw told him the truth. The eyes never lied.

     The new bird instantly saw that the tall tree was beautiful. He saw its lines, its grace, and its majesty of spectacle. He clung tightly with his clawed feet to a branch of a tree nearby and looked at the tall magnificent tree, struck, moved, touched.

     Around him, one by one, gathered the full, feathery chattering sparrows and small birds who talked tirelessly of the tall tree.

     One, a little sparrow, quite fearless, tilted her head to one side and said to the big red bird, “Why do you watch it so?”

     “Because it is a pleasure to my eyes,” the crested bird said, not deigning to look at the sparrow.

     The sparrow quickly shook its head with vigor. “If something harmful were ugly, you wouldn’t look at it, but because the tree is pretty, you can’t take your eyes from it.”

     The sparrow thought its remark clever and insightful, but the crested bird thought the sparrow merely envious of the tree’s size and beauty.

     He didn’t see that the little sparrow respected and cared for him as a friend and fellow creature and was thinking of its safety.

     The crested bird kept looking at the tree. He kept thinking, “Perhaps no one has looked at it as I am looking at it. Perhaps if I look deeply enough, I will see what no one else has seen, something beyond the rumors, something beyond the fear, something enduring and wonderful, that is hidden from the rest.”

     And he kept looking at the tree, gazing at it, rapt.

     Twilight came, softening the outlines of things, darkening the mountain, the bushes and shrubs, and the red bird sat and watched the darkening tree.

     In the dark, its color gone, the delicate blossoms muffled, the outline of the tall tree was a sinister shape full of menace.

     And the crested bird felt a flicker of fear. Maybe the other birds were right and he was wrong. Maybe his eyes had betrayed him.

     He snuffled his feet and feathers, uneasy, still looking at the tree from his branch, about to fly away, when a voice was heard to say:

     “You needn’t feel fear. You needn’t be afraid.”

     And the bird looked this way and that, wondering where the voice was coming from and to whom it was speaking.

     “It is you, and only you, that I am addressing,” said the voice, coming clearly to him across the darkening air.

     The bird nerved up his courage, for he was not in the habit of taking counsel of his fears, but he was hardly able to believe what was happening. Finally, it addressed the dark, huge towering shape, feeling foolish and frightened.

     “I am here. Who is speaking to me?”

     “I speak to you through your heart,” said the voice.

     The bird, greatly alarmed, almost flew away, and it was only with a great effort that he calmed himself and remained on his branch.

    “But who are you?” he said.

     “I am your heart’s desire,” the voice said kindly.

     The bird cocked his head, entranced, alert but listening.

     “I have no heart’s desire,” the bird said, “and if I did, I would tell no one of it, for fear they might find a way into my heart and be able to do me harm.”

     The tree with its spreading, dark outline answered: “I would not harm you. I may have harmed others, but that was because they came to feed on my blossoms or peck into my sap, or try to make use of me in some way. So many have tried. All have tried. But I have seen the way you look at me, and you I would not harm.”

     The bird, greatly disconcerted, cocked its head to the other side, shifting its clawed feet on the branch. “And how have I looked at you?”

     “With love, with gentle love. Because you don’t believe the other birds,” said the lovely voice.

     The red, crested bird, nervous, puts its head down, then up, and then cocked it to one side.

     “That means only that I wish to think for myself,” he said.

     “Then why do you look at me so?” said the voice from the tree.

     The bird, nervous, shifted position again.

     “Because you are beautiful,” the bird said, quietly, but firm and fearless in telling the truth.

     The huge tree said nothing. In the dark, night began to deepen, the sky was specked with stars, but the tree was almost black. And again, with it wide, crown-like crest, the tall tree looked almost menacing.

     But the bird, now warmed and moved by what the tree had said, recollected in its mind how beautiful the tree’s colors had been by day, in the summer sun’s full flood of light.

     “I can feel your thoughts,” said the tall tree in the dark.

     “Unlikely,” scoffed the crested bird, but feeling a bit frightened.

   It cocked its head sideways again.

     “You think my colors beautiful in the sun,” the voice said.

     The bird stiffened upright, lifting first one foot, then the other, then cocking its head to one side again.

     “Come to me,” said the tree.

     The bird cocked its head to one side, peering into the gloom at the menacing shape.

     “Come to me,” the voice repeated, its tone a kind of gentle urging, so gentle, so soothing, so full of tender love.

Scared to Death: the Dominion of Fear in Politics by Richard Sale

 

 

When fear seizes us and has us in its grip, it dethrones our reason, abolishes our conscience, erases our scruples and reduces us to a batch of blind, panic-stricken reflexes.

After fear retreats, we are puzzled as to why it wielded its power over us the way it did. What happened? What force could wipe our minds clean of everything but abject terror? During the Chicago Convention of 1968, I was working as a cub reporter for LIFE Magazine, I watched police beating people, young and old, in a wild frenzy; I watched people falling after being tear-gassed, I saw others choking on their own mucus on their knees. I saw ordinary people running in panic trampling over others to escape bodily harm. An image that never leaves me is the sight of two cops dragging an unconscious man by his legs, the man’s bloodied head bumping along the ground.

At one point, near midnight, the cops stopped an old woman who had just emerged from the subway. I was traveling with the police unit. Suddenly three cops ran over to her and formed a circle around her and began to scream obscenities into that grizzled face that looked like buckled tin. I tried to intervene, but they charged me, and I backpedaled, demanding they leave the woman alone, and a while later, they turned on me, yanking me by my hair, clubbing me in my ribs, my collarbone, until I fled in terror. I could barely run because I had very badly infected tonsils and a sinus infection, and when tear gassed, I had to breathe through my mouth, my lungs taking the gas in directly. Two months later, I developed asthma that plagued me for fifty years. I never did discover the old woman’s fate.

                                     ***

So when we view such events and the clashes between groups, we often fail to take into account the workings of fear in every confrontation. Instead, we turn it into a melodrama – good versus evil, instead of examining the influence of fear on both parties. I was a victim of police brutality, yes, but afterwards I did ask myself were the cops brutal because they liked to inflict harm or did the demonstrators scare them half to death, and, in terror, they began to blindly lash out, afraid for their own lives.

Plain People By Richard Sale - republished at RS' request

 

To no one: I will tell you why I single out “Trump’s transgressions’ as you put it. Why his attitude gets under my skin. 

The character of Donald Trump can only be seen clearly by means of an historical lens, not a political one.  People on the site who shuffle the names of the opposing candidates like so many playing cards, don't seem to penetrate the strategy of Trumps tactics.

What interests me most are Trump’s assertions about Immigration. Trump is an extension of an old historic phenomenon – at bottom, he resembles the old rural populist like William Jennings Bryan. His remarks on based on his resentment of foreigners, the conflict between nativist Americans and their hallowed values versus the aliens who Trump sees as attempting to take over the world. 

Trump’s trademark branch of thought is not new. It recapitulates American social and economic conflicts of long standing: the rural versus the city, American native pride versus the corrupt foreigners (which used to include dislike of Jews,) dislike of Catholics versus Protestants, the pure uniqueness of American civilization  versus the corruption of Europe. Many of these views dueled in face to face competition for many, many years. It is my opinion that Trump is the “poster child” for this version of what has been called, “native American pride.”  

"Upcoming Elections" By Richard Sale

  

Our judgments reveal who we really are. 

An election is an occasion for ordinary people to endorse or reject certain political programs or personalities. If you belong to a political party, you have already given up a great deal of your intellectual independence, your self-ownership. Belonging to a party means that you have no choice but to endorse the party’s platform, many party members are hardly aware that that program was put in place by senior political figures who serve their own self-seeking agendas. I know a few close friends, one of whom is a former Colorado legislator, who have forsaken their own deep, personal convictions in order to submit to their leaders. (They tell of this without blushing.)

I don’t belong to a political party, (*) not because I think I’m superior to the rest of us, but because I abhor anything that drives us to think in unison, which is what a political party demands.  Even in a group we retain our own individual view of life and our personal circumstances, but such things don’t seem to matter in an election. It is a sad fact that a political party thinks in a herd. A party by its nature ignores our temperament, moral character, intelligence, and education. The less educated a voter is, the more he or she is liable to be swept along with a leader’s rhetoric, the spate of clichés he or she utters, ignoring the knowledge and experience that enables a  voter to cross examine what they are being told. Voters remind me of schools of minnows that veer one way only to suddenly veer in another. All of us are supposed to arrive at our conclusions by strenuous study, comparison, and dispassionate analysis, not mere association. Unanimity is the enemy of individual thought. An election assumes that we are all basically the same that every personality has an equal worth, and that reasonable people will do as they’re told by their leaders and endorse the majority.

But is the majority right?

Very often, it’s not.

"U.S. Marines Shot to Kill" by Richard Sale

With Iran back in the news, I found this old file of mine from 1981. Thanks to The Washington Post, in 1976 I spent eight or nine weeks in Iran gathering notes for six front-page articles.  The discoveries I made were eye-opening. I had married an Iranian who was raised in England and had who had never gone back to Iran.

But I grew very close to her father who worked for the Shah, He taught me to love Iranian music, to learn passable Farsi, history and to love the Persian poets. My favorite was the poet Saadiq, from Shiraz, his was Hafez. I spent hours up in the Elborz Mountains.

We never discussed what I was up to, but I learned quickly by walking the streets.

I learned that the Israelis were running the torture chambers of the Shah’s secret police, the Savak.  I found that arms sales in country were being done by Bell Helicopter and other corporations who had moved into Iran from Vietnam.  (Bell people were known for riding their motorcycles through the big mosque in Isfahan. I got tons of death threats after my articles appeared.

I flew down to Shiraz to interview U.S. helicopter pilots who were flying secret military missions.  Outside Shiraz, you come across the ruins of Persepolis. Shiraz was noted for its beauty, for its reflecting canals and cypress trees. One night I went out late to mix with the people there.  I walked for three hours.   I had an eight o’clock meeting with a SAVAK official at breakfast.  I told him how I spent my evening, and he just stared for a moment then said, “I know.”

Heartlessness By Richard Sale

Over the weekend, I watched two episodes about the great Soviet leader, Stalin, his rise to power, his treachery towards friends and comrades and allies. (It was shown on the AHC channel: “Apocalypse: Stalin.” What emerges is a horrifying character that began as a bank robber and ended as a mass executioner and the instigator of man- made famines that killed millions.

Stalin was a very vain man. There are no official reports about the height of Joseph Stalin because Stalin was sensitive about it; he went to great lengths to conceal his lack of stature from the Soviet people and the world because he stood only at 5 feet 4 or 5 feet 5. He was an un-attractive man with his pockmarked face, bad teeth, his limp, and his withered left arm yet his deepest ambition was to develop his country, weaken or kill rivals and have his image plastered on every public building.

Stalin had a library of 20,000 books. He could quote The Bible, Jane Austin, and Bismarck and others. But from those things he learned little. He lacked refinement, elegance, social polish, and compassion.

His selfish self-worship led his soul by the nose.  In each of us there is an innate selfishness which defaces our character.  William James talks of a man on a bus that remains sitting while women are standing or grabbing a bigger portion to cut out his neighbor.  Such selfishness is a reflex, he said.  It can be curbed, held back by careful self-examination and can be weakened over time.  But Stalin was a spiritual primitive. He lived in a society where having a conscience was seen as a vulnerability, not a strength. If you hesitated or brooded over a fact or a course of action or tried to correct an impulse, you were lost.  If you didn’t seize your chance, another predator might snatch it from you. That’s how Stalin’s mind worked.

Age of Intolerance by Richard Sale

Or perhaps it is more accurate to label it,  “The Age of impudence.”

Not everyone has a sound or perceptive mind and the powers of expression needed to articulate its thoughts, but today, thanks to Social Media, no one escapes its malignant, magpie scrutiny.

Today everything is a “controversy,” because today everyone has a voice. “No one is exempt from silly things. The misfortune comes when they say them earnestly. They put themselves at great pains to issue trifles,” said the Roman playwright Terence. Today we have Whoopie Goldberg on The View lecturing the wife of New England quarterback Tom Brady because Whoopie took umbrage about something the wife said to their daughter about Tom’s loss at the Super Bowl.  Apparently Brady’s wife wasn’t humble enough. Shaun White got savaged because he dragged the American flag after he won Gold at the Olympics. (That strikes me as a mistake, not a crime, but several critics still managed to throw a lot of sand.)

It used to be that nation states embodied their own ends. Today, ordinary people do. In the past, the multitude revered certain things – political or religious authority, great scholars, outstanding physicists, sculptors, painters, and builders.

These have lost their allure. Today what the average person admires is him or herself. Such people embody the definition “smug” – which means that you are happy with yourself as you are, with no need to improve or perfect, as the great Spanish philosopher Ortega points out. Such people see in their nature no limitations, no dullness, no shortcomings of mind or temperament or experience. They cede no authority to anything outside themselves. Success used to belong to the gifted. No more. Success today is due to popularity or fame. Anything that isn’t immediately accessible is dead in the water. Originality is overlooked, and complexity is an annoyance. If it doesn’t sound familiar, what merit can it have? Popularity judges things by their fame and extent. If it’s a best seller, it has merit because so many have bought it.

We used to respect linage, goof manners, grace, bodily carriage, wit and learning. No more. Today, we Americans live in a mass democracy. Our happiness does not reside in our intellectual exertions - our attempts to master history or science or enrich our minds by studying or art and literature. Such things seem foreign to us; they offer little excitement.

It is a bitter fact that with equality comes anarchy. No one subordinates themselves to any set of rules any more. Equality strips away prudent restraints. The dullest among us is free to insult the brightest. Why not? If you write or say anything that someone doesn’t like, they shoot their poisoned arrows at you. Some enjoy seeing you in pain.  They feel pleasure at seeing you writhe. Your suicide amuses them. There are such people.

“Tis sweet when the sea is high and the wind is driving .  To view from the shore, another’s anguished striving,” said the great poet Lucretius.

"Sterile Chit-Chat" by Richard Sale

 

 “The greatest achievement of human society and one of its rarest pleasures is conversation,” aid Jacque Barzun, an historian who taught at Columbia University when I was there.

Today, who believes such a statement to be true?

Is conversation today the greatest achievement of human society? Fat chance, as they used to say.

Over the holidays, my wife and I went to a small party at a friend’s house. We are very close to the family. One son is becoming a State Dept. intern in Croatia next year.  I was eager to heart him out.

Instead, a mother and her daughter arrived late and the daughter, in her twenties, was eager to hold the floor. The daughter began by saying that she has a sister who moved from South Carolina to somewhere in North Carolina, and then she began a  rambling dissertation about a railway line being developed here in N.C. where my wife and I live. One line was based in Durham, and it was going to run to the airport, but someone contradicted this, saying that it stopped short of the airport, and the daughter went on anyway.  Then she began to talk about some housing program in the state, and there was nothing in what she said that was worth knowing. Clearly, she felt no mercy for her listeners.

Remember, as a member of the group, I did not want to stir up conflict; I only wanted to stir up interest. In  any case, everyone was glassy-eyed when the daughter finished. It was clear we were dealing with a mind of dead sediment and what was needed was an energetic fish to suddenly stir up a momentary disturbance. Alas, there wasn’t one. The sediment soon just settled back to what it was, entirely dead.

In the car after we left, I was nettled.  My wife said to me, “Look -- they were simply ordinary people talking about ordinary things. They have a right to do that.’ I countered by saying, “Fine. But I retain the right not to listen to them,” and quoted Walter Bagehot, the great 19^th century critic who said that “ordinary people use what brains they have, but it usually doesn’t amount to much.”

There was another disheartening incident.

The Tyranny of Popularity - by Richard Sale

“Things that are easy to swallow are hardly ever nutritious.”

Nothing of worth ever begins as something popular. Something of outstanding worth usually has to make its way gradually, moving on timid steps, out into a hostile, indifferent world.  It doesn’t bolt into the spotlight like an extravagant starburst. It moves on hesitant steps, always extremely vigilant, because on all sides looms The Popular which can overwhelm it or lead it astray. A work of extraordinary merit usually it takes a great deal of time to gain its footing, and it requires a lot of exposure, analysis and comparison before a book or a painting or a play or a beautiful building are recognized as being “the real thing.”

That recognition can be as slow as a glacier’s progress.  When the Italian Dante finished his The Divine Comedy,” the critical opinion of the day damned it as “Gothic obscurantism.” It isn’t. It is measured, stately and beautiful. Today, it is extolled as one of the great narrative poems in Western Civilization. It took 150 years for the greatness of Shakespeare to emerge, thanks to the Romantics.  Even The Iliad, Homer’s masterpiece, required a long span of time before its imperishable beauty was praised. The Greeks of Homer’s time were so corrupt, they even denied that the Trojan War took place. Homer’s work was dismissed as mere fraudulence.

Great art is like a message in a bottle.  The heaving sea is populated with acres of bottles bobbing on the swells. A curious onlooker can idly fish out a bottle and take out the message. If the message has no interest for him, he lets it fall into the surf. If it appears to have brief interest, he may perhaps hand it to his neighbor who might gaze at it for a minute, then discard it. This is where endowments of intelligence and gifts of emotional depth and perceptiveness begin to play a part. Say we have a mind that consistently spends its time reading, observing, reflecting, and meditating. Over time, he or she is going to develop skills based on those activities. He or she will lead two lives, the personal and the intellectual. The skills from the latter depend on the growth of insight, vivid interests and focused observation.

So what happens when a richly endowed mind comes across the message? It will not read the message idly, but with genuine curiosity.  If it is a trifle, he throws it away, but if it isn’t, he will consider it, examine it,  create a scale of importance, rate it, and if he has friends of similar temperament and gifts, will pass it on to them.  In other words, the reaction of his friends will vary according to their brains and emotional depth, but it isn’t likely that they would want to discard it without a hearing.  Soon some preliminary agreement will be forged about the worth of the message.  Analytic comparisons take place. That is how fame is established and spread. Fame depends on convincing the skeptical.

So what establishes value?  The passage of time. Time weeds out nuisances and but keeps the worthy creations and onlookers and readers will begin to rank them in the scale of importance and excellence.  There is always a struggle taking place in a civilization between the cheap and glamorous and the quiet and truthful. The more our nature is limited, the more our brains and feelings are shallow, the more likely they will be to praise what is worthless and to exalt what is false and dubious.  Integrity grows in our character only by overcoming the inferior elements of or minds and supplanting them with something more alert and astute.  If you have a nature that risks ridicule because it halts to think before it pronounces, you have a nature that is honest.  It may be mistaken at times, and may come to repudiate its earlier judgments, but if it has integrity, it will demand repeated efforts to correct its earlier misconceptions.

The best in us wants to admire the admirable, not the shoddy and flimsy imitations of it. We do not want to substitute something that has an enduring value, something that acts to stimulate accomplishments for something flashy and worthless, and yet people do that all the time. They forget that the popular is usually the radically unsound because the popular caters to our mental or spiritual limitations. Popularity is a mirage that masks merit. The first idea to delight the mind may not be a sound or noble one. It may beguile, mislead, stupefy, and it may lead he mind completely astray. The goal of our thought should be clearer or more accurate and more deeply felt perceptions of our own common life. To obtain greater clarity of sight, we have to shun things that pretend to be insightful or durable when it fact, they betray and blind us.

Masterpieces of art enter the world like messages in a bottle. There are hordes of bottles bobbing about in the broad sea, and in each bottle, is a message that seems like all the others, until a reader or spectator, or a discerning critic takes the message out and is exalted by it.  Of course, the spread of its fame can be tantalizing slow, as you can see from the examples above.  Some natures, receptive, richly endowed with feeling and superior brain power will come across them, and they will work tirelessly to save them from oblivion. But, as I said, that takes time.

In a democracy, whose political ideology declares that all men and women are created equal is a worthy political goal. But if you move beyond politics, we encounter the array of masterpieces in Western Civilization, and to appreciate them requires exceptional gifts of temperament and mind. What is a masterpiece? A masterpiece is a work of an artist whose ambition was to construct something so beautiful, so humanly dramatic and poignant that it will endure beyond the reach of Time. That is the aim of genuine artists whether their art is sculpture, painting or writing architecture or composing musical masterpieces.

 

Ho Chi Minth by Richard Sale

 

My third day at LIFE Magazine, in January, 1968, I was being introduced to various staff, and was taken to the Text Department as part of my orientation. The Text Department did long analytical articles on subjects of importance –Vietnam, the Cold War, the Mafia and organized crime. There I met a man with a game leg named Gene Farmer, and he was grumbling resentfully to me about having to take a train to New Haven to interview some `goddamn Frenchman.’”

I was curious. I asked him who the goddama Frenchman was, and Gene replied it was Paul Mus. I was blank. Who the hell was Mus? Farmer gave me a pitying look, and explained that  Mus had signed three peace treaties with Ho Chi Minh on behalf of French government. He was teaching up at Yale because he’d had a falling out with de Gaulle. He was an Oriental Scholar.

So I said I’d go, and I did.  It was an extremely cold, rainy night with gusty winds.  I made my way to Mus’s office and entered. No one was there, but then he came striding in. Mus was the first man of genius I had ever met. Mus was a short, dark haired man; he wasn’t handsome, but he was all personal force and he was extraordinarily intelligent. But he had a giant ego too, and he began right away to brag about how, in Paris during the Nazi occupation, and how, at the age of twelve, he had razored off gold buttons from the Nazi uniforms while riding the subway in Paris. It was crime punishable by death, but he hadn’t cared. In fact, he ended up having more gold buttons than the other boys.

You might comment that he wasn’t a modest man, but no great man was ever modest. He told me that he didn’t like LIFE Magazine, and said he despised its founder, Henry Luce, and said he wouldn’t cooperate with him in any way. I was watching him very carefully. I was very, very shy at that time. I was puzzled as to why he would agree to an interview with a publication he despised.

I was pathologically shy, but I liked to take risks. I saw this man, I knew he taught diplomacy in Southeast Asia, and I knew that with his personality, he completely dominated his students. You could tell that right away. So I thought, if I am to succeed here, I must be rude, to subvert the usual.

I told him, that, with all due respect, I found his remark about Mr. Luce to be “obtuse” because Luce had been dead for 18 months, and I was merely representing his organization.  I remember the careful, measuring, challenging look he gave me. I went cold for a moment, but then, all of a sudden, his whole manner changed.  I guess he had seen that I wasn’t the usual submissive toad-eater, and therefore I had become an object of interest to him. He suddenly, very abruptly, asked me if I knew French literature.  I told him I did.

How We Die By Richard Sale

 Triviality

 

Today, we learn in snatches or in brief bites. We don’t settle down to learn comprehensively.  We can’t concentrate. Our life is one of incessant interruptions. If I look up a news article on the Web, swarms of ads descend to interrupt, and we spend precious time trying to delete them and move on as even as more continue to appear.  The volume of ads are so asphyxiating these days that it isn’t worth the effort to get rid of them, and so I turn them off., annoyed and exasperated.

The chief point is that we cannot sit and think and read or reflect in peace any more. Everything calls to us, tempts us, distracts us, befuddles and annoys us. Our brains are not what they once were, not because of age, but because our culture works differently on them and hinders their further development.

News items are intruders. Their origin is external to our thought. If outside events are always being dumped on our brains, it is hard to take the time to grade them in terms of our general knowledge. We do we really know?  It takes a lot of reflection to answer that.  Only by looking at our own knowledge from all sides, do we get a grasp of the insights that come from experience rather than the knowledge that come from foreign impressions. Schopenhauer once said that real thinking means “comparing truth with truth.”  To me that means deciding which truth had more meaning and priority in my own mental life?

The ability to focus on a subject for a long time without fatigue was one of Napoleon’s mottos.  Who today can do that?  What benefit to we get from blotting out distractions and learning to reason carefully for a long time without getting tired? It becomes harder for us to do everyday.  Topics flock to our brains. The Middle East, President Trump, North Korea. 

Are these things really interesting? If we buckle down and concentrate on them, what will be the reward?  To me, the rewards are always meager. There is a lot of competition when it comes to current affairs. If we fall behind, we suffer a pang of regret – some neighbor knows more about current affairs than I do.   But so what? I want to ponder things that are unique to my own temper and mental capacity. I don’t want to become a replica of my neighbor. There are few worse fates than that. I want to ponder things that are appropriate to my nature and experience. I want to encourage thoughts that have truth and life in them that occur naturally, not from without.

I do not understand why so many people strive so hard to be up to date.  They are always in a race to try and announce headlines before their neighbors.  They rarely study or master the stories the headlines advertize. They evade the labor of memorizing. All they can recapitulate are the headlines. If you ask about the stories, they hesitate then falter out, “I only saw the headlines.”  I am sometimes eager to have them summarize what they’ve read, but there is no there, there as Gertrude Stein said about Oakland, CA.

Let’s face it. Today we are all the junkies of daily news.  “The Daily Fix” phrase is perhaps the most appropriate. It is really shameful if you think about it, but no one does, or if you protest about the meaningless deluge of daily news, you are labeled over-sensitive or nit-picking. Most of us awake to news headlines. There is a hurricane, an accident that kills sailors, a helicopter crashes, a new threat of annihilation from an Asian punk regime. But do we learn anything from these? We are like those toy birds that dip their beaks into a dish of water. They look as if they’re drinking, but they don’t. They are not built to absorb anything.  Their dipping looks like activity, but it is all counterfeit. Unfortunately the breathless topics of today are not of permanent interest nor do they enrich the mind.  They are transitory, destined not to last. They keep us floating on the surface of life, preventing us from diving deep and discovering something new and valuable and priceless.

We see lists of notable books on the Civil War, the downfall of the Soviet Union, the Fall of the Bastille.  We see new books on the French Revolution or the fall of Paris in 1870. We see histories of the Balkans or the Ottoman Empire. We see books about the nature of power, religious or corporate or military. Do we read them, study them?

As we get older, our minds get more introspective. We want to seize the enduring truths that reside in our nature or our close friends. Such things sharpen the mind; help expand the range of our inner insight.

Conflicts by Richard Sale

                                           

(The scene: A newsroom the morning after a riot where police beat and tear-gassed protestors, vacationers and civilians, causing severe injuries to many. The chief characters are photographers and staff. The speaker is Phil Hammond, in his late fifties who has reported on Chicago for decades. The listeners are worn out, depleted, almost inert from fatigue. I wrote this yesterday.)

----------------- 

  “No, no, no, no, no,” said Hammond.

“Phil…” Edie said, keeping herself under control.

“No, no, no, no, no, absolutely not. Do you really think it’s that simple? Shit, you’re a reporter, for God’s sake.”

“Phil…”

“For God’s sake.”

“Phil…”

“People, do you hear me? People...People are the only things that matter, the only things that count, the only things worth getting excited about. People. Their welfare, their safety, their needs, their predicaments, and their souls.” He vehemently shook his head. “No, no, no, no, no, no...”

Hammond was an oddity. He had once taught at a private school, had two years at the University of Chicago, studying theology. His chief ambition was to become a Navy chaplain. But he had a bad heart and he drank too much, and ended up as a reporter in Chicago He knew the city inside and out.

“Phil. Could I get a word in here. PHIL?”

“No!”

“Come on, Phil...” said someone.

“I’m amazed,” Phil said.

“What’s so bad about that?” Macklin said.

“Because you keep saying cops. Cops; so what, cops? I mean, what does it mean, cops? Huh? Being cop, does it really mean they are all slabs of irredeemable evil? The embodiment of all that is dark and wicked in the human predicament? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Hey, Phil, Jesus, come on,” Gomel said. “No one is saying that.”

“Or is Daley? Or Johnson? Is that what you’re saying? Because that’s bullshit.”

“What’s bullshit?”

“Because it’s just a word.”

“What’s just a word?”

“Bullshit,” injected someone.

“Cops,” Hammond corrected. “Cops is just a word. It’s just a little batch of symbols on a page that stands for what? For just so many people. That’s all. Just a bunch of people. Just like you. And like me. Or do you think they’re constructed of an entirely different and more inferior stuff than us?”

“Oh, please,” said Jennifer, rolling her eyes up in her head. She wasn’t alone. There were additional impatient groans and other rude repudiations. Hammond wasn’t fazed in the least. “Just like yourselves.” he insisted. Then he fell still and shook his head in wonderment. “I mean, that’s the whole problem. That is exactly the whole problem....”

Hammond had a cup of steaming coffee in his speckled hand. They were all indolently occupying chairs, sofas, or sitting round-shouldered on the edge of the low coffee table.

Crown gave a sudden great, gapping yawn. Crown waved his hands as if fending off flies in front of his face, defensive. “I’m tired. It wasn’t a criticism.”

Hammond grinned, holding his cup.

“Look, I wasn’t slandering them,” Edie said.

“Yeah, Phil, give us a break,” Gomel said. “What do you think? That we’re making last night up? Don’t you read the papers? Have you seen Fielding’s piece?”

“No, what’s it like?”

Dumb and Dumber - by Richard Sale

I am writing in praise of Pat Lang’s recent post and his keen observations into politics.

We must remember that the majority of the American public elected Trump President.  That is where the real blame lies. Trump says he doesn’t like poor people, but says he loves uneducated people.  Why? Because uneducated people are basically uninstructed mobs. They are suggestible. They are like sponges – their destiny is to soak things up. They can’t think except in a group.  the French poet Baudelaire hated the Belgians because he said “They were born to think in unison.” On CBS Sunday Morning this week, one of my wife’s favorite shows, (not mind,) Ted Koppel did a bit that made clear that not only we do we know same things in common; we get that knowledge the same way at basically the same time. Such a thing is drastically retarding to the mind’s development.

In other words, we are in the grip of hideous uniformity. This means that what we claim to know is a very superficial brand of knowledge. It doesn’t help either that we are also a nation drowning in data.  If you want to hear a weather report, it goes on for five minutes, many of the facts reheated over and over again to the point of stupefaction. What should be an alert or a heads up becomes an instance of tedious self display in order to be favorably noticed. Bah, humbug.

People are more and more like schools of minnows who swim in the same direction, then suddenly swim in other direction. They don’t break ranks, there are no minnows that desert the pack and strike out for themselves.  To me that defines politics.  Most people do not grasp that politics exists only because of the indifference of the majority. I won’t belong to a political party for tat reason. Whoever embraces a political party is giving up their intellectual; sovereignty and independence. A political party is a school of followers, all swimming n one direction for the sake of unity. The people I mostly talk to are usually liberals, liberals by habit, inclination, and conceit. Liberals assumed their ideas are superior to any other ideas.  (I am not a conservative.) They don’t vote on the basic of evidence. They don’t vote for merit. They vote in order to admire their views because those are the most enlightened views, and their views make them extremely self-righteous about what they believe, as if no other beliefs could possibly be as compassionate, foresighted or charitable as their own.

My own views are simple - I try to vote for merit. I try to vote for honesty, for people of heart and vision. I am suspicious of politicians because most are devoured by a lust for power.  That lust comprises them from the beginning. The lust for power has always destroyed the society it lives and rules in, but that is ignored. I have ideals, but I don’t take them for granted; I remain skeptical of them. I try to refine and improve and perfect them all the time.  Recently, I had a discussion with two young women who voted for Hillary, and we still angered over her loss, and when I said I didn’t vote for Trump or Hillary, one was affronted.  She said, Well one of them was going to run the country, so you have to vote for one of them. I told them I didn’t vote for either of them because I did not want that on my conscience. A very bright young man who wrote in Bernie Sanders on the ballot felt the same way. I asked the young women if they had studied the email scandal.  They hadn’t.  I said I had a file of one hundred pages showing what a conniving, heartless skunk Hillary was and would be happy to forward the file to them. I doubt they will read it. They have already been convinced.

But was my view correct? I thought it was or I wouldn’t have aired it. In any case, I dislike collectivities.

To me, the chief evil in today’s political scene is the decline of the critical spirit.  What is that? It means a capacity for analyzing things in order to accurately determine their value.  What does this require? You must be observant. You must be unhurried. You must be studious. The video image dominates our culture to our detriment. These images flash before us in less than a second.  We have no time to examine their meaning, their accuracy or their worth because the rapidity of sequence denies us this.

What I see today is a clouding of mental alertness, a growing insensitivity of personalities because of our cultural decline. We put up with all sorts of nauseous smells, deafening noises, abrupt accidents and crashes and atrocities. Modern man is becoming increasingly insensitive, ever more addicted to constant excitement and novelty, requiring harsh stimulants, disdaining any sort of repose of the mind in order to develop it.

Our thought has its basis in perceptions. We see or hear something that strikes our mind, and it makes us curious. What was it about the sight or sound that made us want to know more about it? So we begin to investigate. We view similar perceptions.  After a while we develop a sense of hierarchy, putting the most worthwhile at the top of the list.  It takes critical capacity to do this.  We have to observe, compare, compare again, gather more examples, and finally begin to hammer out an order of value. The brain is key to this, (I almost said, "to this process," a phrase widely overused.) The brain is always busy. It takes nothing for granted.  It questions, it cross-examines. We come to our own conclusions by thinking things out.  Thinking is a precarious activity. Thinking doesn't deliver certainties or ready made conclusions.  Thinking simply requires we take more thought before we can rest on our opinions. We are never sure we are right in what we think until we have gathered more incidents, experiences and examples, and even then, the mind is left in suspense.  What if a new experience upsets your carefully constructed hierarchy?

But the chief virtue of thought is that acts to deepen us, to widen us, make us more open to the unexpected, the unfamiliar and the novel, less able to reject things that are odd or strange. Thought keeps open the door to learning. Conceit and ignorance seal it shut.

But who today thinks of such things?

Quelle Surprise! By Richard Sale

 

Part One 

It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the information given to President Trump by Israel and passed to the Russians was something the Russians already knew about. 

I cite this story below.

Soviet spies infiltrate Mossad, sources say

 

"By RICHARD SALE   |   Dec. 14, 1987

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WASHINGTON -- Soviet infiltration of Israel's spy agency, Mossad, is the most serious blow to Israeli intelligence since the 1970s and U.S. intelligence also was breached as a result, U.S. intelligence sources reveal.

Mossad has been penetrated by 'highly placed' Soviet moles and a full-scale internal counterintelligence investigation is under way, the intelligence sources said.

A Justice Department source said U.S. counterintelligence agents became aware of the Israeli-Soviet espionage pipeline when data stolen by Jonathan Jay Pollard, a U.S. Navy analyst convicted of spying for Israel, was 'traced to the Eastern bloc.'

Intelligence sources said data reaching the Soviets via this route included sensitive U.S. weapons technology and strategic information about the defense forces of Turkey, Pakistan and moderate Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia.

U.S. intelligence analysts said the Pollard data was traded to the Soviets in return for promises to increase emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel.

One analyst said Israel's 'right-wing' Jews are involved with spying for the Soviets and called it 'ironic,' noting that left-wing elements were responsible for similar scandals in the past.

A senior U.S. official said morale in Mossad 'had plummeted' but refused to comment on whether the breach had damaged U.S.-Israeli intelligence ties.

In Jerusalem, an Israeli government spokesman denied knowledge of the security breach.

'I know nothing about all that,' said Avi Pazner, spokesman for the prime minister's office. 'It seems to be utter fantasy.'

A State Department spokesman also declined comment. But an administration official said the Soviet penetration of Mossad was discussed at meetings of CIA, FBI and other U.S. counterintelligence specialists about the Pollard case.

'One of the guys was commenting that if Pollard had stolen stuff, at least it was going to a U.S. ally, but a CIA guy spoke up and said that if Mossad was involved it meant that copies of everything were going to (the KGB's) Moscow center,' the source said.

Pollard began serving a life sentence early this year in what U.S. officials have called one of the worst intelligence disasters in U.S. history, according to a senior administration official.

Asked to describe the Israeli-Soviet spies, an administration intelligence source said: 'They are highly placed agents in the top echelon of Mossad.' The source also said the infiltration has occurred at 'very significant levels.'

Israel has launched a full-scale investigation into the Soviet infiltration, disguising it as 'a probe into financial corruption' of some Mossad agents, an administration source said.

The source emphasized that 'counterintelligence investigations always begin with the painstaking study of financial vouchers,' inquiries aimed at determining whether an agent has received large, unexplained payments or lived an unusually high lifestyle. Another source said most double agents 'are caught by the careful study of documents.'

Israel apparently was first used as a base for Soviet agents in the early 1960s, when Professor Kurt Sitte, a nuclear physicist at the Institute of Technology at Haifa, was exposed as a Soviet agent.

Sitte, a specialist in cosmic radiation working with the U.S. Air Force, was convicted in 1961.

"Desire" By Richard Sale

 

  It was a tall, unbelievably beautiful tree, finely shaped, with a great, green spreading crest, black dark green leaves, pale blossoms and long, sharp thorns.

 But in spite of its being a splendid sight, some said it was deadly.

 Certainly all the birds said so. They were used to bending the branches of a shorter, homely nearby tree with their weight as they chattered among themselves about butterflies, bees, worms and the other birds that had flown in among the magnificent trees spreading branches and had never been seen again.

 “It may be a beautiful tree, but who cares if you look beautiful if that’s what you’re really like,” said one fluffy brown bird.

 And then the birds all gossiped about the strange, towering tree, so beautiful and so alluring, and yet so sinister. But in grand, stately appearance and various attractions, truly the tree had no like.

  Then a strange bird, a newcomer, flew into the deep wood.

  He was red in color with a big crest, strong-beaked, and he was a bird who clearly liked to think things out for himself.

  That was his strength. He heard what others said, but it never moved him, for he thought with his eyes. They alone told him the truth. The eyes never lied to you.

  The new bird instantly saw that the tall tree was beautiful. He saw its lines, its grace, and its majesty of spectacle. He clung tightly with his clawed feet to a branch of a tree nearby and looked at the tall magnificent tree, struck, moved, touched.

  Around him, one by one, gathered the full, feathery chattering sparrows and small birds who talked tirelessly of the tall tree.

  One, a little sparrow, quite fearless, tilted her head to one side and said to the big red bird, “Why do you watch it so?”

   “Because it is a pleasure to my eyes,” the crested bird said, not deigning to look at the sparrow.

  The sparrow quickly shook its head. “If something harmful were ugly, you wouldn’t look at it, but because the tree is pretty, you can’t take your eyes from it.”

  The sparrow thought its remark clever and insightful, but the crested bird thought the sparrow merely envious of the tree’s size and beauty.

  He didn’t see that the little sparrow respected and cared for him as a friend and fellow creature.

  The crested bird kept looking at the tree. He kept thinking, “Perhaps no one has looked at it as I am looking at it. Perhaps if I look deeply enough, I will see what no one else has seen, something beyond the rumors, something beyond the fear, something enduring and wonderful, that is hidden from the rest.”

  And he kept looking at the tree, gazing at it, rapt.

  Twilight came, softening the outlines of things, darkening the mountain, the bushes and shrubs, and the red bird sat and watched the darkening tree.

  In the dark, its color gone, the delicate blossoms muffled, the outline of the tall tree was a sinister shape full of menace.

  And the bird felt a flicker of fear. Maybe the other birds were right and he was wrong.

  He snuffled his feet and feathers, uneasy, still looking at the tree from his branch, about to fly away, when a voice was heard to say:

  “You needn’t feel fear. You needn’t be afraid.”

  And the bird looked this way and that, wondering where the voice was coming from and to whom it was speaking.

  “It is you, and only you, that I am addressing,” said the voice, coming clearly to him across the darkening air.

  The bird nerved up his courage, for he was not in the habit of taking counsel of his fears, but he was hardly able to believe what was happening. Finally, it addressed the dark, huge towering shape, feeling foolish and frightened.

  “I am here. Who is speaking to me?”

  “I speak to you through your heart,” said the voice.

  The bird, greatly alarmed, almost flew away, and it was only with a great effort that he calmed himself and remained on his branch.

  “But who are you?” he said.

  “I am your heart’s desire,” the voice said kindly.

   The bird cocked his head, entranced, alert but listening.

  “I have no heart’s desire,” the bird said, “and if I did, I would tell no one of it, for fear they might find a way into my heart and be able to do me harm.”

  The tree with its spreading, dark outline answered: “I would not harm you. I may have harmed others, but that was because they came to feed on my blossoms or peck into my sap, or try to make use of me in some way. So many have tried. All have tried. But I have seen the way you look at me, and you I would not harm.”

  The bird, greatly disconcerted, cocked its head to the other side, shifting its clawed feet on the branch. “And how have I looked at you?”

  “With love, with gentle love. Because you don’t believe the other birds,” said the lovely voice.

  The red bird, nervous, puts its head down, then up, and then cocked it to one side.

  “That means only that I wish to think for myself,” he said.

  “Then why do you look at me so?” said the voice from the tree.

  The bird, nervous, shifted position again.

  “Because you are beautiful,” the bird said, quietly, but firm and fearless in telling the truth.

WMD Mirage By Richard Sale

The sketchy information that justified launching U.S. cruise misses on Syria takes us back to an unpleasant episode in our past.

On May 29, 2003, President George Bush announced during a speech in Poland that, “We have found the WMD.” His tone was jubilant.

He pointed to two Iraqi mobile labs who allegedly were involved in producing chemical weapons, which had been named by a German intelligence source code named Curveball whom the CIA had never interviewed directly.

The mobile labs proved to be harmless.

The rational for the Iraq War of 2003 was mainly based on lies, but of all the fatuous and insulting lies told to the U.S. public, the ones regarding Iraq’s WMDs were the lowest. They would dishonor a sewer.

In May of 1991, under the cover of Operation Provide Comfort, the U.S-run military relief effort in Kurdistan, the CIA began an intensive program to debrief Iraqi defectors about Saddam’s WMD.  U.S. intelligence agencies were in a state of shock when, after the war, they found Saddam had progressed much farther in his WMD programs than they had thought.

One of the first things the United States did was to infiltrate the United Nation Special Commission, UNSCOM.  As early as May of 1991, a senior Iraqi scientist had defected to America, making his way through Kurdistan.  He was called, “Defector source DS-385.” At first, the U.S. refused to share the information with UNSCOM, but later it did and the CIA was soon holding daily briefings for UNSCOM officials. Soon the CIA teams, based in Bahrain, were invited to send reps from the U.K, Canada and Australia.

The CIA operations there were complex. There was a National Security Agency team in Bahrain tasked to review the agency’s findings. The NSA unit was a special unit under the NSA’s “B” group responsible for the Middle East. The intercepts were sent by satellite relay to Bahrain and forwarded to the NSA at Fort. Meade, Maryland. The CIA also had a Special Collections Unit, a five man team able to intercept not only the calls of senior Iraqi leadership but also their security detachments.

The surprise UN inspections were invaluable. The UNSCOM teams destroyed so much WMD equipment that in July of 1994, that the UN leader Rolf Ekeus had wanted to lift sanctions from Iraq.

But the problem was that no one knew what the exact status of Saddam’s WMD arsenal was. UNSCOM was constantly bedeviled by faulty information. One DIA analyst was always peddling the worst case scenarios, one allegation insisting that Iraq had squirreled away a large batch of Scud missiles. But on August 8, 1995, the obscuring murk vanished when Saddam’s son in law, Gen. Hussein Kamel, defected from Iraq and the whole landscape lit up. He was not a pleasant character-- he was a megalomaniac, delusional etc -- but he had unsurpassed access to Saddam’s WMD processes -- their inventory, the performance of individual weapons, knowledge not only about weapons but even where they had been made, by whom, and where they had been deployed. Ekeus, accompanied by two technical experts, were told that Iraq had “unilaterally destroyed” Saddam’s WMD in the summer of 1991. His questioners were stunned, and he expanded. “All weapons—biological, chemical, missile nuclear warheads were destroyed,” Kamel adding, “You have an important role in Iraq with this. You should not underestimate yourself. You are very effective in Iraq.” Later I learned that this destruction had occurred in June of 1991.

Not only did Saddam not have any WMD, his intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, wanted Baghdad to display complete openness to the United Nations on strategic grounds.  The Mukhabarat did not want Saddam to hide any WMD or remnants of WMD programs or in any way hamper or impair the work of the inspectors. The Mukhabarat’s only concern was to keep the weapons inspectors under the closest possible scrutiny and to get them out of the country. Other Iraqi security organizations disagreed, among them the Special Security Organization which felt that anything related to Saddam’s security could never be discussed with the UN. Yet much of this resistance was not perverse willfulness, but based on Iraq’s own pride in its being a sovereign nation.

In Operation Desert Fox, a bombing campaign that involved 650 bomber and missile assaults during a 72-hour period, CENTCOM Commander, Gen. Anthony Zinni targeted, not Saddam’s WMD but Iraq’s air defense system, Saddam’s pillars of powers including palaces strongholds, units of secret police, guard, an transport organizations. Several barracks and units in and around Baghdad or outlying provinces were hit as well. The attacks were designed to shake the regime to its core and destabilize it if possible. But the attack did not drop one bomb on Iraq’s Army.

In 2009, I asked Zinni about Saddam’s WMD.  He said, “If Saddam had any WMD, it was only tactical stuff – old Soviet artillery rounds, and those things tend to degrade quickly.” He added that Iraq wasn’t storing or producing WMD at all.

But the aim was to weaken Iraq, not occupy it and Zinni was shocked by the Bush administrations claim of WMD.

We all were.

"Freedom of Expression Part Two" By Richard Sale

“The mark of a true democracy is a perfect toleration of all opinions,” said le Gustave LeBon.

Crowds

What occurred in Vermont was further evidence of the corrupt nature of a crowd. In this case, a crowd of students from a liberal arts college was the major actor that attacked a guest speaker, injured a teacher, and its flaws should be examined.

Multitudes are dangerous. The frenzied passions of a multitude can sweep away the scruples of the individuals in it because crowds are full of unconscious and intolerant elements. Crowds obliterate the differences between the collective and the individual. Common passions and sentiments, if provoked, are enough to form a crowd. An individual can lose his integrity when he gets submerged in a multitude.  The individual voice means little to the members of a crowd. If a member of a crowd doesn’t endorse what the crowd endorses, the dissenting opinion of the individual has little weight. It’s like trying to listen to the song a bird during an avalanche. You simply can’t hear it. In a crowd, the solitary voice is useless.

It is a sad truth that the mood of a crowd is both dictatorial and unstable. Its animosities are contagious. They spread through its members like a virus. To become a member of a crowd, a person has to give up a portion of his or her own idiosyncratic personality, its self-ownership, in order to belong to an ignorant collective, a multitude armed with false certitudes. The motive that often drives a crowd is a desire for self-glorification, to have your views be found superior to rival ones. They see rivals as low, gross and brutal.

The crowd is always right. Crowds are obvious, impatient, irrational, they believe in their righteousness. Because they think they are without flaw, a crowd will vilify opponents using undermining hearsay and unsound evidence. Certainty of a crowd is able to shut up any opposition. Thanks to the emotional conformity of a crowd, the avenues that act to question or reassess or compare are sealed shut. To be a member of a crowd demands that you give up a big piece of your self-ownership - your own emotional and intellectual independence. 

To shout someone down may give you the complacency you’re your views are the only ones that matter. But power in a crowd comes from knowing that you think just like everyone else in your group. Crowds think in unison, yet crowds are fickle. What the crowd cries up, the crowd will soon cry down. It is merely a matter of time. But for a moment, the crowd is invincible.

Unfortunately, that sense of self-satisfied complacency derived from the belief that you are always right works to rot the soul over time. It weakens the power of your mind and weakens the powers of detached and objective judgment. In a crowd, complacency is a sinister quality.

Another thing. Crowds are always illogical and aggressive. Reason seeks balance, but crowd demands unanimity of belief and feelings. Because of this, crowds are quick to take offense. Crowds are emotionally headlong. In any public discussion, there will always be some points on which the author and the crowd agree, even if only on minor matters, but a crowd will overlook them. Crowds are also touchy. If proved wrong on any point, the crowd can turn into a lynch mob.   I went to school in St. Louis and one of my teachers told me of how he walked alone one night when he heard a huge din up ahead. A crowd was about to hang a man (for what I offense I don’t recall,) but the teacher, who was a levelheaded, honest man suddenly found himself chanting, “Hang him! Hang him! Hang him!” and afterward, he found himself utterly bewildered by his conduct. Such is the power of a crowd. 

Freedom of Expression? By Richard Sale

 

A Vermont college says it has initiated an independent investigation into a protest in which the author of a book discussing racial differences in intelligence was shouted down during a guest lecture and a professor was injured.

Middlebury College president Laurie Patton said in a letter to the school community on Monday that once that work is completed the college will follow a process of determining a course of action for each person understood to be involved in last week's events.

She says people have the right to make their voices heard in support of and in opposition to other people and ideas but the college's concern is acts of disruption and violence.

Author Charles Murray's talk was moved to a different location and was live-streamed to the original venue. But protesters drowned it out.

The college says some protesters became violent and one pulled a professor's hair, twisting her neck.

Hundreds of students chanted as Murray started to speak at an event Thursday, forcing the school to move the talk to an undisclosed location Charles Murray's new book argues that the economic problems of America's working class stem largely from their own character flaws, and that wealthier people should be less shy about teaching them how to live responsibly.

The election of 1824 - provided by Richard Sale

The most visible candidate was House Speaker Henry Clay. A leading War Hawk during the War of 1812, Clay had a power base in Kentucky, was a gifted public speaker, and had support for his so-called American System of protective tariffs and federally sponsored internal improvements. His high-profile advocacy of these issues made him a familiar name in much of the country. Although he was well known, his clear identification with the war and nationalism weakened his roots in the South, which was beginning to fear supporting anyone for President who was not a slave owner or a supporter of states' rights.

 

Then there was General Andrew Jackson from Tennessee, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans. Jackson's reputation as an Indian fighter and western expansionist, owing to his military escapades in Spanish Florida (see Jackson biography, Life Before the Presidency section), gave him national standing above all other candidates. It also helped that Jackson could enter the race as an outsider, a defender of the Republic who had risked his life in service of his nation. In fact, his supporters talked about him as another George Washington. Few experienced politicians, however, expected Jackson to win if any of the opposing candidates could broker a cross-regional coalition that would unite either the West or the South with New England or the mid-Atlantic States.

 

Such a coalition was no easy task to achieve. After all, the 1824 election occurred in a day and age when a new political electorate composed of regionally focused voters had only recently been empowered with the franchise. Since 1820, the old political caucus method by which the congressional leaders nominated presidential candidates had fallen into disrepute. This was principally because the old caucus system failed to connect with the wishes of the new voters, the tens of thousands of males who had been enfranchised by the removal of property ownership as a criterion for white male suffrage. This new climate looked to regional endorsements of candidates by state conventions or state assemblies, which meant that regional popularity, rather than congressional intrigue, would drive the nomination process.

 

Although Adams was a centrist politician of sorts-a Jeffersonian-Federalist, to coin a new term-many Americans still identified him as a New Englander and as the son of the old Federalist leader John Adams. Additionally, many staunch Democratic-Republicans blamed Adams and his supporters for having transformed the party of Jefferson into a disguised form of Federalism under the rubric of "National Republicans." Southerners, moreover, objected to Adams because of his moral opposition to slavery. They remembered his criticism of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 as a proslavery conspiracy, and they suspiciously recalled Adams's efforts to include language opposed to the international slave trade in the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812.

 

Four Democratic-Republican Candidates

 

In the summer of 1824, an unofficial caucus of less than a third of the congressmen eligible to attend nominated Crawford for President. Supporters for Adams denounced the caucus bid, and the Massachusetts legislature nominated Adams as their favorite-son candidate. The Kentucky legislature did the same for Clay. Both nominations followed the pattern set by the Tennessee legislature, which had nominated Andrew Jackson in 1822. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina dropped out of the presidential race by announcing his bid for the vice presidency, a move that both Adams and Crawford endorsed. Because all four candidates were nominal Democratic-Republicans-the Federalist Party had disintegrated by this point-the election would be decided without reference to party affiliation.

 

As the campaign progressed, Jackson emerged as the man to beat. The size of his rallies in key swing states-Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, New York, and New Jersey-far surpassed or rivaled those for Clay and Adams. In this first election in American history in which the popular vote mattered-because eighteen states chose presidential electors by popular vote in 1824 (six states still left the choice up to their state legislatures) -Jackson's popularity foretold a new era in the making. When the final votes were tallied in those eighteen states, Jackson polled 152,901 popular votes to Adams's 114,023; Clay won 47,217, and Crawford won 46,979. The electoral college returns, however, gave Jackson only 99 votes, 32 fewer than he needed for a majority of the total votes cast. Adams won 84 electoral votes followed by 41 for Crawford and 37 for Clay.

 

 

The Fly by Richard T. Sale

There once was a fly. It loved itself excessively. It flew in quick-changing jerks. Its flight was full of stops and starts, and it had eyes in the back of its head, and it thought, “I can do anything. I am the most smartest creature in the world and that makes me the most formidable.”

“Even more formidable than a lion?” asked a humble turtle one day, tired of hearing the fly brag about itself.

The fly liked to torment the turtle by landing on its face, making it pull its meek head in.

“Watch me,” said the fly.

It took the turtle a long time to accompany the fly to where the lion was lying sleeping in the grass, especially since the fly twice landed on the turtle’s face and he had to put his head in twice.

The lion, heaving eaten a heavy meal, was lying blinking in a daze when the fly landed on its nose.

With a great shake of his head, the lion dislodged the fly, but the fly landed right back again.

“So if he is stronger? Do you think he can hurt me?”

The turtle thought it better to leave the lion alone -- the great beast was starting to sit up and switch its tail.

So the fly buzzed and landed right on one of its eyes. With a great roar, the lion pawed at  his face, and the fly nimbly flew away. It circled the lion's head, and the lion, in a rage, roared and tried to paw it but its claws were too clumsy and the fly escaped.

So all the poor turtle heard for the next few days was how great the fly thought it was finally. Trying timidly to assert itself, the turtle said, “Well, at least I can swim. You can't do that, you must admit.”

“Idiots. Why do I need to swim when I can fly?” asked the fly, zooming about and trying to land on the turtle's nose.

“Please don't,” said the turtle.

“Okay, this one time I won't,” said the fly. ““But you can't make me not do it.  I like to do what I want, when I want, and no one can stop me.”

 And the fly went buzzing about, annoying all the larger, slower beasts of the forests. The elephant tried to swat the fly with its trunk, but was too slow; the leopard tried to bat it with its paws, and did no better than the lion.

The fly was practically off its head with praise of itself.

He and the turtle were sitting on the grass, the fly on a blade, the turtle just sitting, quiet.

The fly was talking about itself, when the turtle spotted something that looked almost like a green twig. He thought he saw it move.

He tried to ask the fly what it was, but the fly interrupted, talking of all the new triumphs it planned to have over other animals in the forest.

“The horse is faster,” said the turtle.

“But I can fly and why should I race a horse?” the fly said.

“The mole can go underground,” the turtle said.

“And he's blind when he's not digging in a hole,” said fly.

“But the birds fly like you,” said the turtle.

“But they're not as nimble,” said the fly and landed on the turtle's nose.

As the turtle's head came out, he thought he saw that a green twig had moved. He tried to tell the fly, but the fly was too busy making mock.

“Do you know how stupid you look with your eyes all scrunched up, and your silly head being dragged backwards and your fat little …”

The fly never finished.  A tongue flicked out and back and snatched the fly which disappeared into the lizard that looked like a twig.

“Very talkative,” the lizard said calmly. “Very good too,” it said, licking its lips.

And the moral is this: To be slow is not to be stupid. To be fast is not to be smart.  To be nimble is not to be strong.

But to be conceited is to be blind.

 

                                                          

                                                         ###

"A Ramble on the Greeks" By Richard Sale

     Before the fall of Greek democracy, Athens began as a center of education and humanity. The best honey and the most deadly hemlock were produced there.  

     According to Jacob Burckhardt, the great 19^th century historian, the Athenians loved progress; they were quick to make decisions and execute them; they never hesitated; they were keen for foreign adventures and forays, and pursued advantage for themselves as much as possible.

     Plans not carried out were counted as failures.  Every gain seemed to them trivial compared to what remained to be done, and after a failure, they set to work to obtain some new success. They never paused to enjoy what they had. They were also incessant meddlers who gave no peace to themselves or their neighbors.    

    The best of the Greeks pursued excellence (‘arte’’), an honorable existence, but the din of the mob drove the excellent underground.  Homer said that the ambition of noble people was “to be first, and outshine the rest.” He called them “the Virtuous Few,” and they were to be a guiding, living force in the democracy.

     But those who were outstanding in any way faced envy, an undermining hatred of anyone who was better than the rest,  delighting in their misfortunes, making incessant efforts to thwart and humiliate them at every turn.  Homer depicts the jeering of a victor and the pain it inflicts.

Expansion    

     The problem was that as the polis expanded the more ruthless and unprincipled it became. Greek democracy laid claim to excellence in ethics and morals, but there was little concern about the happiness or suffering of others.  Slaves had no rights, yet they were expected to have morals. Morals were mere tools for subjugation.   

     The polis claimed it was working for the common good, but it had developed in a way that embraced mutual aggression and nasty feuding. Its citizens were easily provoked and led astray by strong passions of the commonplace. Hesiod in his masterpiece “Works and Days” pronounced the Greek democracy “unrighteous.”

"Virtue's Fool" by Richard Sale

I wanted to forward to the readers of the site a bit of  two chapters from my novel, Virtue’s Fool. The novel takes place during the Democratic Convention, notorious for its police violence.

The action  takes place in the early hours of the morning. There are two characters, Harvey Stone, a man in his sixties, theSenio Deputy Managing Editor of Epoch, the Great American Magazine, and Peter fielding, a young reporter who has been with there only  seven months. Peter has already gotten two national exclusives about the illegal bombing of North Vietnam, and the building of the U.S. spy plane, the SR-71, which was built “off the books,” its cost disguised as “engine overhauls” at the Wright-Patterson air base.

The Midwestern editor, Adrian Hall, has appointed Peter to head four teams of reporters and photographers to cover the street violence.  When these chapters begin, Pater has been out late. He has been attacked, chased, tear-gassed and is entirely worn out.  Harvey Stone is trying to mentor Peter, a shy ambitious man who remains very uncertain of his footing there.

I implored the readers to remember this is a conversation, not a term paper.

Chapter 42

Harvey was looking commiseratingly at Cheryl, who was gathering up her tings, about to leave. He looked up and saw the figures in the doorway. They came in slowly, like old men.

“Well, well,” he said to them. “The wanderers.”

It was almost two in the morning.  Their faces were white as chalk, but Harvey instantly saw that something was wrong with their eyes. He got to his feet, and waited for them. Howard came first; his body bulging with equipment, Peter just behind, and behind him came Duane, a bundle of nerves. They moved feebly, utterly worn out. Peter and Howard were bareheaded. Duane was holding a helmet.

“You look like shit,” Harvey observed.

“You know, a simple ‘good evening’ or a ‘how the hell are you, would probably suffice,” Howard said.

“Not to guys who look the way you look,” Harvey said. And he realized then that their eyes were swollen from tear gas.

“What are you doing here?” Peter asked. His face was utterly worn out. “You should be in bed,” he told Harvey.

“Waiting for you guys. Christ, I was beginning to think you’d been sent to jail.”

“We went to check out the streets of Old Town. After they cleared the Park the cops forced a lot of kids into Clark Street,” Howard said. His eyes were swollen small.

“Clark Street, I heard. So what happened?”

“Everything. We saw all kinds of stuff,” Peter said, blinking. His blue eyes were swollen.

“Like what stuff?”

“Oh, I don’t know. They had cops piling out of unmarked cars and beating people. They hit residents, forced some out of their houses...” Peter said. “...we saw some guy trying to drive his car, and the cops stopped him and, leaning in his window, he said, ‘Listen, you goddamn mother fucker, get this fucking car out of here’. And then...” Howard was saying. “He was a guy just trying to get home,”

A Tribute to Trump Supporters by Richard Sale

Whatever their class or station in life, everyday people  have a right to live normal life that has its moments of satisfaction and pleasure and peace. So many people live lives of quiet desperation, and over time,  if the conditions of their life continues make them suffer, they will feel alarmed, oppressed and cheerless.

Trump supporters are very aware of these things: the vast wealth that has infiltrated politics, the closing of the doors that were to help them rise in life,  the flood of consumer goods, that they are being ignored by the TV news.  All this funds indignation and anger that social evils that make them miserable are allowed to continue without efforts to alleviate or change them for the better. They believe it is entirely unjust that they have to suffer from needless misery all their lives.

Many people don’t have time to reflect on the meaning of their lives. Their lives consist of strenuous exertions, back breaking efforts, and for many the rewards for those efforts is piddling. They are fated to work like oxen and their pain only ends when they die. No respite, no encouragement, no praise or honors are theirs.  For the majority life offers noting but the  slavery of work.   

President-elect Trump said he loved uneducated people. His aim was to reach people through their feelings. I may disagree with many of the stances of such people, but uneducated people are still people. They are proud, they fearlessly confront suffering, they provide for their families and children, but without rewards and new incentives, providing for others becomes a thankless task.

People who lack education, who aren’t cultured, who have no knowledge of history are still human beings, and they still have rights. The goal of any political system is to provide the means for people to pursue happiness in any way they can under the law. We all have a right to be happy and contented and proud, They work to expand the benefits and pleasures earned by their efforts. We used  to respect “the “common good” as an ideal, but the common good isn't common any more. The common good these days belongs to the elites. If you don’t belong to an elite, you feel betrayed and left behind. No enjoys second place.

Tedious, poorly paid work  which offers no prospects, strangles ambition. Human beings must have certain prospects before them or they wither under ceaseless drudgery. A hopeless life is a dismal one.  To try to improve your lot, when the social and political conditions denies us any feeing of real worth, is the worst fate imaginable.

When people are trapped in that kind of life they will choose to change it.  They hope for escape, and the hope of change helps them to endure  their lot. That is what Trump supporters feel. Patrick Henry wrote, “we have it in our power to create the world new.”   President-elect Trump campaigned on this idea. He told his supporters that he would build a better, more just order of human society. He said that certain evils had no right to exist, and that he would combat them.

No human being should die feeling that his or her was basically a disappointment.

In 1925, a British clergyman noted these things as enemies of the common people:

Wealth without work.

Pleasure without conscience

Knowledge without character.

Commerce without morality.

Science without humanity.

Worship without sacrifice.

Politics without principle.

 

Perhaps the battle against such things can begin anew.

"A Ramble on Hillary" By Richard Sale

 

(I told Pat that I was writing about Hillary Clinton, and wanted the article to be in two parts. This is the first part.  The second will attempt to describe the email scandal.)

Kissinger once observed that in contemporary America, political power “gravitates towards those who have an obsessive desire to win it by any means, and whoever does not monomaniacaly desire the goal of getting it, whoever afraid of it or disdains it, will fail, however great their qualifications.” To a political leader, voters are the means of attaining their aims. Voters are flattered, cajoled, admired, wooed, pressured and are endlessly courted and pursued.  The great bulk of voters are gullible and ignorant. They don’t reason, they submit; they are incapable of self-doubt. They reason that “if you’re right, you’re right,” and the door to their mind slams shut. In the TV interviews with the supporters of the candidate, they lack the intelligence to explain why they have chosen a candidate that they have.

Politicians are a bit like mosquitoes – they live on others’ blood. All politicians are creatures ruled by self-interest. The French aphorist Bruyere has written this marvelous passage: A politician is “a man who knows the ways of the Court (and) is master of his gestures, his eyes and his face; he is deep, impenetrable; he pretends not to notice injuries done him, he smiles to his enemies, controls his temper, disguises his passions, belies his heart, speaks and acts against his real opinions. All this elaborate procedure is merely a vice which we call deceitfulness, which is sometimes as useless to the courtier for his advancement as frankness, sincerity and virtue would have been.”

That is a perfect description of Hillary.

On Disagreement By Richard Sale

 

 

People who habitually employ an abusive and bullying tone, are, at bottom,  insecure people with a weak ego. It is weakness that makes such people so aggressive and unkind in their statements. Why are such people so afraid of hearing what they dislike, that they must launch an attack not on what someone has said, but to savage the character of the person who said it?   They act very bellicose, baiting, berating, but that warlike manner is a bit of a sham. It conceals drastic insufficiencies of character and will.  Certain people walk around with such a huge their chip on the shoulder that it renders them unable to stand upright or think straight. An insecure character is always on the verge of mauling anything that does not agree with its own vulgar ideas. Novelty offends them and turns them sour. Their thoughts travel on a well used road and, in spite of contradicting evidence, they  are determined to remain in their usual rut. Anything that collides with their prejudices is seen as treasonous. Their prejudices seem to them to be God’s law, not to be challenged or questioned.

 

A weak ego is always trying to portray itself as a strong one. But a weak ego is ultimately, defeatist. Such an ego glares, paws the ground, lowers its head, but never charges with telling effect. Its role is merely to alarm and disconcert. People gain strength of character by doing selfless and brave things such as being faithful to comrades or enduring grave dangers, and the result is that they forge their own self-respect. People who have a high regard for themselves, as distinguished from conceit, do not bully nor intimate nor try to overbear and bully. Such things are beneath a person of honor.

 

I had my first experience with shady and dangerous characters while working as a legal investigator for the U.S. Senate. I was assigned to make a case about widespread fraud in California nursing homes. The attorney who hired me, a friend, clearly didn’t expect me to succeed. The relevant statutes were expiring, and my three-person staff was inexperienced. Yet within six weeks, we had the FEC undertaking a full investigation, as did the San Diego D.A., as well as the FBI, who launched a  full field probe. 

 

When I announced these results to my bosses, they were glum. I was puzzled. Then I was abruptly fired. Thanks to an article I happened to see in The Wall Street Journal, a law firm hired me to foil a two billion dollar takeover of an international pharmaceutical company, headed by the target I had been pursuing.  At that time, I was getting death threats, hang up calls, etc., because I suspected that the target had ties to organized crime. Thanks to a former California State Trooper, everyday I had to go out and get on my knees to search for bombs strapped to the drive shaft of my car or look for one in the dashboard or the glove box. The takeover collapsed because of  the evidence I uncovered. The friend who had hired me for the Senate, soon became the head of the nursing home association. He had been in their pocket from the first

 

"The Latest Craze" By Richard Sale

The main stream media is making a big deal of Pokémon Go, and the spreading degree of its fame is stupefying.

It appears to me that the chief feature of culture today is the drive to be superficial. We are like schools of minnows, swerving this way and then that, with no settled direction or steadfast purpose except to keep ourselves distracted at all costs. Is that the true fate of ,mankind? To idolatrize gadgets and fiddle ourselves into inanity?

Is knowledge no longer valued for its own sake? What use is it? Why ponder over a thing, when you can turn on the TV. Do you think any TV listener could pass a quiz on what they just saw? Could they form a sound conjecture about its importance? Don’t things of real intellectual or moral worth require our focused attention? Popularity today is incessantly confused with the superior. Most of our TV programs end up being popularity contests where the less worthy opinions are listened to the most.

Why should we apply ourselves to the study of art or history? Why does history matter? The TV news incessantly mentions Islam. People’s reaction is to cringe. But what do people know about it? There is much more historical fact that corroborates Mohammed’s career than that of Jesus. The first gospels were written almost a century later after he died. But to many of the American public, Islam is a synonym for something distasteful that makes them afraid. Such a reaction is merely ignorant. Daniel Defoe once said that there were hundreds of warriors who vowed to end Popery without knowing if Popery was a man or a horse. That sums up the prejudice of most Americans about Islam.

Mohammed was a great man, but he was also a man of his time and place. The religion of the Arabs before him was a primitive one. Their holy of holies was the Kaaba, the black stone of Mecca. The black stone was the one to which the Amazons used to pray, according to Apollonius. Before Mohammad, the Arabs worshipped various goddesses. Allah himself was ancient. A thousand years before Mohammed, the Persians wrote,” Allah is exalted,” but he was only one of many deities.

Mohammed was not a man of the desert. He was a man of Mecca, a prosperous city on a major caravan route which largely controlled the trade between India and the Mediterranean. The prophet soon encountered the differences between the rich and the poor and took note of them. Aside from the Kaaba, he revered another accomplishment of the Arabs -- their poetry. Because most Arabs were illiterate, they developed a prodigious capacity for memorization, and that talent preserved the Koran. In Mecca, there were colonies of Jews and Christians, and Mohammed knew a bit of the Jewish scriptures, once observing that the Jews worshipped Ezra as the son of God. (This was not true, however.) But he denied the divinity of Jesus and thought the Crucifixion was a Jewish falsehood. But for some explained reason Mohammad accepted the Virgin birth. (There were paintings of Jesus and Mary on the walls of the Kaaba.) He identified Allah with the Jewish and Christian God. He borrowed the idea of the Last Judgment and the resurrection of the flesh. ( I had always been suspicious of the Resurrection since one of my teachers at Columbia College told me of how Zoroaster, the Persian prophet, was torn to pieces by his followers but had risen after three days.)

After forty years of leading an obscure live of a successful businessman, Mohammad married a rich widow, and it was then that he was visited by the Angel Gabriel who dictated to him the revelation of Islam. It was a moment very much like that of St. Paul on the road to Damascus. From the beginning, Mohammed was opposed by the powerful and respectable at Mecca who thought him quite mad, and he fled to Medina. After he became a political and spiritual leadrs of his community, He waged war against the Meccans, intiating hostilities by raiding their caravans in the holy month of of the pilgrimmace when war was forbidden. He justified his aggression by preaching war against idolators as a sacred duty (jihad.) With a force of three hundred he routed a thousand Meccans in the battle of Badr and proved his generalship by holding off numerous counterattacks.

He may have preached an other worldly message, but he himself was a worldly man. He had a shrewd grasp of economic and political topics. He had eleven wives and enjoyed the company of concubines. He was addicted to war, but at that time who was not? Europe was going through the Dark Ages. If Mohammed could be ruthless he could also be kind, generous and magnanimous, He was an attractive person, shy, fond of jokes and fun, and was unfailingly courteous. He loved honey. He humbly shared his household chores with his wife, and was very indulgent of people’s failures. He died quietly and fearlessly.

"Chicago Riot" by Richard Sale

As a cub reporter for LIFE Magazine I was assigned to head five street teams to cover the streets at the Chicago Convention of 1968. The characters are Roger Snider, the magazine’s top political writer who was demoted for having offended a U.S. Senator in one of his articles. Roger thinks himself the brightest mind on earth, an idea which makes him the most boring. But even his superiority becomes overwhelmed when the violence occurs.

Other characters are Crown, Roger’s photographer, and Barnaby Hart, who is another reporter.

I covered the event with Howard Bingham, Mohammed Ali’s personal photographer. I was witness to the police brining up the saw horses in front of the Haymarket Inn. I escaped.  Richard Sale

                                                   Chapter 87

     Grant Park was not the usual park; it displayed belts of greenery that had been cut into major parallel streets between Michigan Avenue and Lake Michigan one and a half miles away. After the attacks of the afternoon, the police wanted to pen the kids up in Lincoln Park, keeping them away from the Hilton, but there were a variety of bridges and overpasses that went north and south and which crossed over the railroad lines and they led into Michigan Avenue. Many of the kids who had escaped the attacks up at Lincoln Park were now heading there. The exodus from Lincoln Park speeded up after the National Guard began to gas the kids and it found that there were too many bridges, too many choices, and the authorities had been outwitted. The wind suddenly shifted west, causing eyes to tear, faces grimacing, people stopping to try and put a handkerchief to their eye, many of them never having to sniff tear gas before in their lives.

Worse, the beatings in Lincoln Park had attracted hundreds of newsmen, all of whom had now headed to the Hilton to cover what was soon to be called, “The Wednesday Night Massacre.”

Roger Snider stood squarely out in the middle of Michigan Avenue, next to the Hilton, behind the police line, his hands thrust into the pockets of his white gabardine jacket, wearing expensive, tasseled loafers and dress slacks. He had eaten a steak dinner, had two scotches and now he felt full and contented and less anxious. He had spent his afternoon drinking at a local bar where Norman Mailer, who had suddenly left to go speak at the bend shell, leaving him with McCarthy staffers most of whom were in a glum mood. (Roger would only learn later that Mailer was watching the spectacle that violent night from the safety of the nineteen floor of the Hilton.)

A lot of whisky had made Roger feel brave. The sight of the revolving blue lights of the numerous police cars was hardly cheering to his spirit, and what he felt now was a gloomy foreboding. The crowd was keyed up to an extraordinary pitch of frustrated despair, disgusted rage, and helpless indignation. Seeing that both the kids and cops were edging towards a more lawless mood, the situation had, minute by minute, manifested a more menacing character. A slow fuse was burning towards one final, horrible explosion, Roger thought. It was just a matter of when.

On his right, he saw the dense throng contained by the Guard in Grant Park while to near to his left was the impressive, illuminated Hilton Hotel, its entrance ringed by blue figures. To the north, the intersection was filling solid with people, coming from the band shell, and the street before him was lit up by harsh, stark lights, and it was starting to fill up.

Roger was a cool, methodical man, hard to frighten, alert to atmospheres and able to interpret what they meant. As he looked on, he assumed his usual a patronizing air, animated by his usual sense of seeing things from a greater mental height than others did, and he frowned tensely: one thing was clear. In the case of both the cops and the kids, Roger knew he was witnessing a case of mental contagion. The cops hated the kids. Because of that, they would set out to break the kids’ spirit, ruin their will, and pursue them into their innermost recesses in order to make them afraid of the police. To a cops, frightfulness pays, Roger thought.

"Valumfree" by Richard Sale

I have been laboring for over ten years on a novel called “Daily Trials.” A long while ago, I spent a month in the Arizona State Prison for LIFE Magazine. Two inmates ran the prison. One of them was a close friend of a third inmate who was being allowed to die because of the negligence of corrupt prison doctors. The prison psychologist and I were threatening with being taken hostage unless the inmate was transferred into a civilian hospital. This I did. I got him transferred.

This chapter is based on an actual incident. There was a killer named Tim Valumfree put on Death Row for killing two men, and one day he appeared in the prison psychologist’s office, Val Emery, to ask him for a better job. As I listened, I had realized that I had never heard anything so shameless, arrogant, rude and unfeeling as Valumfree s rant, so I blew up I told Valumfree he was a first-class jackass without manners, courtesy, or any civilized virtue, or words to that effect.

One day, when I was about to leave the Yard to go lift weights with two convicts, both bank robbers, I stood with Val Emery as the guard on the gate lowered the keys the IER Yard where the weights were, using a fishing pole. This was May of 1970. Some guys from Death Row were lined up behind us, and I was paying them no attention, when suddenly I felt a sharp poke in the middle of my back. I turned. It was Tim. He smirked “See, I could have stabbed you just now,” which was the wrong thing to say. I am a very shy man, but there is a hair trigger lurking in my nature and Tim pulled it. I cursed him out again for his rudeness, and then asked him, “Why would you want to stab me? Because I called you names?”

In the second chapter of the novel, Ben Falls is listening to his clerk, Jute, relate how he had had a run-in with Valumfree over the weekend. I know this is a bit long, but I ask you to please bear with me.

"Home Alone" by Richard Sale

My wife, Carol, got up at 3:15 Thursday morning for a 6:30 fight to Denver. It’s the first time in over 30 years that one of us went to visit while the other stayed home.

I have two sons, one by Carol, and the two other children by my ex-wife. My son by my ex-wife, James, is turning fifty, and my daughter, Tandis, also half-Iranian, is thirty six, divorced and raising two young girls. Carol’s son, Chris, forty-seven, (I think), did me the honor of adopting me a few years ago. At a gathering in Denver last October, his father and I were in the same room, and Chris introduced his dad and turning to me he said, “And this is my father.” My son James and Chris, share the same generous nature.

Chris and I grew up together. He was a very impish, mischievous, willful, and a brilliantly intelligent child. His mother and I fell in love right away, and I soon moved in with her. But being newly in love is fraught with its own uncertainties, ignorance, vivid fear, and widespread touchiness because the lovers are so vulnerable. I feared that Carol was not lost in my love the way I was lost in hers, and her deepest fear is that I didn’t belong to her the way she belonged to me. When I would blow up at Carol, or she at me, I would grab some clothes and books, and leave the house, but no sooner had I reached the front door, then I would find Chris at my side, “I’m coming too,” he said. And that was always the case. He provided a steadying ballast for that tempestuous sea of early passion and early love, and we grew very close.

Chris, like James, is a single father who has proved an amazingly competent and loving parent. He is kind, encouraging, very strict when he has to be (but only when he has to be) and has raised by himself two teenage boys who are everything a father could wish: they are thoughtful, generous, honest (most of the time,) alive to life and receptive to new ideas and new experiences. Their minds are sound and sympatric. They read because they know that to know more is to be more. They remember. They reflect. They build our hopes along with theirs. They are achievers.

There is a passage in the Ethics by John Dewey, which quotes William James: “When I am moved by self love to keep my seat whilst the ladies are standing or take the biggest portion to cut out my neighbor, what I really love is that comfortable seat. It is the thing itself that I grab. I love them primarily like a mother loves her babe, or a generous man his heroic deed. Whenever, as here, self-seeking is the outcome of a single instinctive propensity, it is but a name for certain reflex acts. Something rivets my attention fatally and fatally provokes the selfish response. In fact, the more I am utterly selfish in this primitive way, the more blind my absorbed thought will be in the objects and tendencies of my lusts and devoid of any inward looking glance.”

(My memory is declining a bit. My ability to remember complicated passages has been a bit compromised by time.)

One phrase in particular passage stands out, “In fact, the more I am utterly selfish in this primitive way, the more blind my absorbed thought will be in the objects and tendencies of my lusts and more devoid of any inward looking glance.”

On Being Self-Absorbed - by Richard Sale

 

Self-absorption is a disease of temperament that assumes that what is personal to you will automatically be found personal and interesting for everyone else. It is the disease of an idle mind in search of entertainment, someone who has become the slave of the desire to be noticed at all costs. Such people appear to be giving to you, but actually their purpose is to take. They affect to have an interest in you, but at bottom, they are like second graders who cry, “ME ME, ME” at the top of their voices. This makes a mockery of any attempt at friendship with them.

It is a colossal mental error, a huge misjudgment, to think that the petty details of your life are going to be found interesting by others who have no knowledge of them. Such a person is clearly not able to do justice to others unless they fall into with their own views and preoccupations. In such people, their bloated egoism demands that strangers like us must hear their dreary recital of the petty and trivial stories in the hope of gaining our recognition and applause. We are commanded to be attentive to their anecdotes, yet the listener of them can’t picture the conduct of their subjects or characters nor are we able to conjure up the voices in their stories.

By now you are wondering what in the world is Richard ranting on about? I’ll explain.

We wife and I had first encountered a young daughter of a neighbor when we moved to Durham, North Carolina, seven years ago. We lived across the street from her family, and at night, a young girl and her girl friend would come over and ring our front door bell at 10:00 at night, and wait for the reaction. Sometimes the bell rang at midnight. We didn’t pay the much attention. They were young, impish kids after all.

We saw her grow up. We saw her body gain in grace, and her mind grew perceptive, curious and sharp. It was clear that she had a force of personality. She was direct, fearless, and had charm. We also soon learned that she was also shrewd and manipulative and a shade ruthless. One night, when she was a junior, she secretly hosted a house party for her friends where beer and wind and liquor was served and enjoyed while she pretended she was somewhere else. (Her mother had left her alone. )In other words, the girl, (we’ll call her Carol,) could be subtle and sly -- which are unnerving qualities if you are a parent.

A Visit Home by Richard Sale

 

 

I went with my wife to visit her parents. She comes from a small town in southern Illinois, Duqoin, which is slowly dying, its hey day long past. Its basic industry had been coal mining, and everyone was bitter about natural gas killing off the mines and killing jobs. Many blamed President Obama. I tried gently to explain that the discharge from the burning of coal was a horrible polluter, but my arguments bounced like peas off one listener, like peas off a steel helmet. But clearly the town is down at the heels, with no relief in sight. My wife was very saddened by the sight, driving by and looking at the old houses she and her friends had grown up in.

We prayed at the grave of one set of grandparents. I prayed too. I asked God to bless their souls; noting they had loved and inspired and made a mark on the souls of their children. I always remember the sentence by Civil War historian, Bruce Catton, writing of the war’s veterans, saying at first, they were admired, then tolerated, and then forgotten.

Isn't that the same for all us? We enjoy two generations of being remembered, and then we too will be forgotten. But hopefully, we imparted values in our children that will stand them in good stead in living their lives.

Thoughts and Insights

 

Several things occurred to me when we were there.

Never ever dismiss a stranger. They may look commonplace, their speech may appear dull and insipid, their appearance may be unkempt, but that person is liable to be the one who performs the Heimlich maneuver when you choke over a steak. That is not to say that we should try and make use of any new stranger you encounter. Simply try to remember that they were human souls just like us. Admire people for what they think they are and leave the rest alone.

There is one golden rule when you see a stranger or a group of strangers: look and overlook. By disliking a stranger totally, you leave them no room for compromise; because what you are demanding is that they have to become a different person for you to like and admire them. Yet no one can, by an act of will, alter his or her own peculiar individuality. You cannot alter their moral character, the intellectual gifts, their temperament and physique. A short man is a short man. A tall man in a tall man. If you dislike someone and break into a rash at the thought of them, you leave them no course but dislike you and enter into a disagreeable conflict with you. Even an idiot can sense another’s contempt right away. .

It is every person’s habit to view another and think that you are more intelligent or have better morals or more physical talents than they have. This is a grievous error and a symptom of blind conceit. We all of us suffer from parts of our personality that fall short; areas of the mind that are dense, feelings that are tone deaf to certain gifts of others. Conversation with strangers will soon make clear what such areas are. Don’t defend your shortcomings. Keep silent.

Steer clear of labels. Labels are as touchy as explosives. In any political discussion step wide of labels. If someone strays into politics, examine the qualities that you admire in leaders. Be truthful. But above all things, don’t declare what side you are on. Even in the best of us, politics brings out the worst in us. Allow them the freedom to be wrong, just as they would allow us the freedom to be wrong as well.

No man can see over his own height. You can only admire in an others, what you possess in yourself. A man who is color blind will never be stirred by discussions of the color blue or red or yellow. He knows that it is admired, but really doesn’t know why and never will. You cannot convince a colorblind that there is such a thing as color. Don’t make the effort. If a person has gifts of a low order, and then said next to Hemingway, little of you say about Hemingway would be intelligible to them. Don’t ever voice an admiration for something only in order to try and make someone who doesn’t share it feel stupid. An ordinary mind roams on a very narrow road, a very narrow orbit. All of us exhibit an ordinary mind at some point or other.

The first rule of traveling to a strange place has two intellectual requirements, look and overlook. You should right away judge of the people you meet and talk to. Therefore, listen carefully and don’t talk. If you are waiting until there is a pause in the conversation which allows you to start to exposit the merits of The Iliad or The Odyssey, don’t waste your time. They are not interested, their experience of life doesn’t allow any such interest, and so don’t be a nuisance. Confide your ideas to your diary.

Like dispositions feel an agreement right away. Never mind how absurd their opinions sound (yours are just as absurd) and simply listen and enjoy what they have to say. There is no intellectual competition between friends. They have their experience of life and you have yours. At certain points, an insight of their will excite interest in you and you want to reply. Do. But be brief and begone.

Memories

 

The Necessity of the A-Bomb by Richard Sale

We know that President Obama is going to visit Hiroshima, and there are remarks being made that he should apologize for the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My own view is that we have nothing to apologize for. War made bring out the best in the soldiers and Marines who fight it, but taken as a whole, wars are often barbaric lunacy.

In August of 1945, President Truman wrote a letter to Sen. Richard Russell Jr. in which he said, “I know that Japan is a terribly cruel and uncivilized nation in warfare, but I can’t bring myself to believe that, because they are beasts, we should ourselves act in the same manner. Using the A-Bomb was meant to save young American lives, but Truman added: “…I also have a feeling for the women and children of Japan.”

In 1945, the war with Japan was raging at its height. In January of 1944, Japanese studies had concluded the war was lost. Japan had been defeated long before Harry Truman became President. Yet the Japanese fought on, its soldiers bent on dying to the last man. American casualties in the Pacific war spiked to new heights. There are several excellent books on the battle of Okinawa. With the Old Breed, by Eugene Sledge is one I read again and again. It is the best personal account of the war and is a memoir of the first distinction. There is Robert Leckie’s excellent book, and there is Gerald Astor’s Operation Iceberg which is superb. The horrible U.S. casualties in that battle made the use of the atomic bomb imperative

The three months since Truman took office in April, American battle casualties in the Pacific were half the total of U.S. casualties during the whole Pacific War.

Said a U.S. caption of Military Intelligence at the time, “We had only abundant evidence in those days that surrender was excluded from the Japanese ethos.” He added, “Thousands of Marines and (Army) soldiers had died rooting out Japanese from their fox holes and bunkers when they were perfectly aware that their situation was hopeless.”

He said that even if the Japanese were beaten, “Japan’s soldiers would hold on fighting for months.” The Japanese government wanted to hold on as long as possible to avoid a complete defeat, hoping that they would gain a better bargaining position when defeat came.

According to several books about Truman, the one written by David McCulloch is among the best. According to him, Japan had 2.5 million regular troops in the home island, plus every male between fifteen and forty-five was being drafted while every female between seventeen and forty-five was being conscripted and armed with everything from bamboo spears, brass cannons plus they were taught to how to be suicide bombers, strapping explosives to their bodies in order to throw themselves under advancing American tanks.

Ideals and War by Richard Sale

 

When America goes to war, it attempts to halt destruction, atrocity, and murderous brutality by its enemies. Another reason for going to war is to prevent further slaughter or exploitation or ending slavery. The ultimate aim of a war is to reestablish social and political order and impose some measure of justice over the aggressors who first caused the conflict.

 

There are two kinds of war –limited and unlimited. Wars of annihilation seek to devastate, murder, slaughter and expunge from history a group of hated people. We are currently waging such a war against IS. It’s the same kind of war we waged against the Nazis and the Japanese military in World War II. That war was an unlimited one -- a fact we tend to forget.

Western Values

 

Our Western civilization is a one based on the Christian faith in which the development of individual human souls, individual human personalities, is is the destination and goal of history. As the historian Herbert Butterfield said, every human being is “a separate well of life,” and as such, deserves to be treated with respect and compassion. This view collides with the biological view of life which sees the end of life as the advancement of the species, not the individual. The preciousness of the individual soul, its innate value in the eyes of God, is discarded as useless by such a view. The worship of the collectivity, displayed by Nazism and Communism, cares little about the individual human destiny. To them, individual human beings are simply the means, spent carelessly and lavishly in order to secure the victorious collectivity. This contradicts the Christian idea that the individual soul has a value that cannot be weighed, that the individual soul is of eternal moment and should be respected as such. Human beings, the human personality, Butterfield said, “the crowning blossom of civilization.” This is what Greek culture and the Christian traditions have taught us.

War and Values

 

Unfortunately when war comes, these ideals are quickly sidestepped or ignored or overshadowed by other, more sinister elements and factors. War releases all kinds of vicious vicesa; depraved ambition, voracious greed and an obsession with gaining wordly glory. What emerges in the rank of the “good” side versus the “wicked” side is rivalry that springs up within the “good” factions. The branches of the U.S. armed forces began a campaign to be thought the most decisive factor in victory, the bringer of imperishable triumph. In America, the U.S. Army Air Forces, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Marines quickly began to build their own empires. Ideals and selfish self-interest are blended together so expertly that they seem the identical.

In a very short amount of time, the desire to win at all costs, said to be a chief characteristic of our enemies, becomes our desire as well. War provides incentives for equipment and weapons manufacturers and scientists to devise more deadly weapons. Worse, the warring parties who pretend to serve the Good, are devoured by the desire to profit off of the selling of more deadly and injurious planes, missiles etc. Waging war soon becomes an ideological crusade not waged for human betterment, but waged in the service of vested interests. The aim of war is not simply victory over your enemies, it means trying to reap as much profits as you can while defeating them. The ideals for which the war has ostensibly been fought are contaminated and deformed.

Ideals remind me of a settlement set in a low land, surrounded and protected by a huge dike. The turbid sea surrounds this, and the sea is always at work, searching out ways to seep in, weaken, gain entrance and destroy. Political structures of history provide a framework for human activity, but over time, they pass away. They pass away because of human vices, little defections from honesty and fairness which makes the tottering structure finally collapse.

Wars of Annihilation

 

My uncle Jim served with the Eighth Air Force. He was a medium sized man slender and strong with sea-blue eyes. He had a loving wife and his children adored him. His father mistreated him. When he got back from serving with the Eighth Air Force and called home from Penn. Station and his father got on the phone As my uncle announced that he had returned alive, all his father said was, “I’ll get your mother.” Late in Jim’s life I once asked him what he hated most in life, and he replied with great passion, “I hate injustice.”

His heart’s desire was to be a pilot, but he had no depth perception and became a nose gunner in a B-17. He had earned a Distinguished Flying Cross after discovering that the man in the rear of his aircraft had gone silent. He went back and found that the plane had been hit and a shell had severed their oxygen lines. Thanks to what he saw, the pilot lowered the altitude and then, with nifty flying, brought the crew home safe.

What had his B-17 bombed? It had bombed Cologne Germany in May of 1942, then it had fire bombed Hamburg. He bombed Berlin twice. He once remarked to me, “It’s good we won the war. If we hadn’t, we have been branded as war criminals. Which we were.”

Strategic Bombing Offensive.

In October of 1917, Winston Churchill wrote, “All attacks on communications and bases have their relation to the main battle. It is not unreasonable to speak of an air offensive as if it were going to finish the war by itself. It improbable that any terrorization of the civil population which could be achieved by an air attack could compel the government of a great nation to surrender.”

He goes on, “In our case, we have seen the combative spirit of the (British) people was roused, not quelled, by the German air raids. Nothing we have learned of the capacity of the German people to endure suffering justifies us in assuming that they could be cowed into submission by such methods, or, indeed, that they would not be rendered more desperately resolved by them.” But then he added, “Any injury to the civil population because of an air attack must be regarded as incidental and inevitable.”

But Churchill changed. In 1940, Churchill was the de facto head of the British Armed Force, and British historian, J/.F.C Fuller said that by endoring such aerial attacks, Churchill detonated “a war of devastation and terrorization unrivalled since the invasion of the Seljuk’s.” We all know what the Seljuk’s did.

In May of 1942, according to historian J.M. Spaight, the British bombed objectives on the German mainland before the Germans began to bomb objectives on the British mainland. Freiburg was the first German target to be savaged.

Policies got more bloodthirsty. The Casablanca Conference of January 1943, outlined the chief German targets as the destruction of military, industrial and economic system, aimed at “undermining the morale of the ‘German people to the point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.”

In other words, Churchill had come to ignore his own earlier insight and now aimed to destroy not German military and industrial targets, but the lives of innocent German civilians. One such atrocity, the bombing of Cologne, hit the center of the city where some 5000 acres were destroyed and, according to German estimates 11,000 and 14,000 were killed. The main object of the attack were not German industries but German civilians. According to Wikipedia, a total of 12,840 buildings were destroyed of which 2,560 were industrial or commercial buildings. Among the buildings classed as “totally destroyed” were: 7 official administration buildings, 14 public buildings, 7 banks, 9 hospitals, 17 churches, 16 schools, 4 university buildings, 10 postal and railway buildings, 10 buildings of historic interest, 2 newspaper offices, 4 hotels, 2 cinemas and 6 department stores.

The next horror was the firebombing Hamburg, in July 1943. Six British raids hit it at night, the Eighth Air Force hit it twice by day, and 7,500 tons of bombs were dropped. According to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, Europe, between 53 to 60 percent of the city was destroyed and about 80 percent of that was due to fire. About 12.5 square miles was entirely burnt out, 32 square miles was damaged. Between 60,000 to 100,000 were killed, and 750,000 were rendered homeless.

The Survey says, “As many fires broke through the roofs, there arose a column of heated air more than two and a half miles high and one and a half miles in diameter, as measured by the aircraft flying over Hamburg, This column was turbulent and was fed at its base by onrushing cooler ground-surface air. One and a half miles from this fire this draft increased the wind velocity from eleven to thirty-three miles per hour. At the edge of this area, the wind velocity must have been appreciably greater as trees three feet in diameter were uprooted. In a short time, the temperature reached an ignition point for all combustibles and the entire area was ablaze. In such fires, complete burn-out occurred; that is, no trace of combustible material remained and only after two days were the areas cool enough to approach.”

Fuller quotes this account, “Eyewitnesses described how the holocaust was so terrible the air was sucked into from outside the perimeter of the fire. Many were suffocated or shriveled up in the intense heat. Others were drowned on throwing themselves into the canals. Days later, when nearby cellars were opened, thousands were found to have perished as though cooked in an oven.

Next, the Air War Against Japan

"Socialism in America" By Richard Sale

 

Most people live life day by day. They are too busy and harassed to ever form a general outlook about the human existence that they are part of. Their ideas have no intellectual scope. Their minds manifest little or no penetrating perspective. They don’t have the knowledge to criticize the world at large. They live in a busy flatland with mountains arising all around, but they don’t know how to climb them, don’t have the means to gain a height from which you can see an endless vista of alternatives and possibilities.

Social reformers are different from the ordinary person. They see beyond the usual constricted view of life. They are inspired to try and remodel the world. They are sensitive to human suffering, and are dismayed by human inequities and groups that dominate and exploit others. The true reformers have the imagination that tries to picture very different possibilities and alternatives to the life that we currently live. They yearn for a world in which creation is revered rather than mere possession, where work gives the joy and the satisfaction of accomplishment rather than a record of cheerless exertion in which workers have no voice in the work’s direction. They were emotional people, enthusiastic, mental active, gifted with a high degree of imagination, and they deployed their minds with the goal of lessening the suffering in the workplace. They think of the world not as it is, but as it could be made. Without a sense of what is valuable, a sense of what is to be preserved and treasured, any society is on the verge of cultural and political suicide.

And then there are people like Mr. Gregg. Notice the name. Judd Gregg (R) is a former governor and three-term senator from New Hampshire who served as chairman and ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, and as ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Foreign Operations subcommittee. On a site called, The Hill, he warned us against the supporters of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and his menacing socialism: “They might start with the experience of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Notice the name. Or the National Socialist movement called Nazism. Notice the name again. Or Maoist China, a socialist state again in name. Millions of people died under these banners of socialism and millions more were impoverished.” Gregg says that socialism impoverishes the masses and lowers their standard of living. He names Greece, Spain and Portugal as an example of socialist failure and added, “The list goes on and on. Country after country, where the demagogues of class warfare and “something for nothing” economics have sold their bill of goods to a frustrated electorate, has seen not only a drop in its standard of living, but in many instances peoples’ freedoms and lives destroyed. He ends with this baleful warning, “Try to find such opportunity or such prosperity in a socialist nation. It does not happen.”

But it does, and Mr Gregg reveals himself as a meathead. He doesn’t seems to know of any other kinds of socialism except the totalitarian, which is hugely disappointing. A sense of objectivity should compel you to study a subject before you denounce it, but Gregg is not aware of any such obligation.

You would think a man as dogmatic as Gregg would take the pains to find out that in Denmark there are a rapidly rising number of millionaires whose wealth exceeds one million U.S. dollars and has a thriving equities market. In fact, 69.00 Dames describe themselves as millionaires according to the RBC’s annual World Health Report, according to news reports.

"Back to Jackson" by Richard Sale

 

I promised Pat I would do another ramble on Andrew Jackson. I think that the best book on Jackson was written by Arthur Schlesinger. “The Age of Jackson.” I recommend it to anyone as the most thorough analysis of Jackson, his personality, political trends of his time, the bank war, and Jackson’s Kitchen Cabinet, etc.

Jackson’s election is usually described as an expansion of democracy, but it is more accurate to say it was an expansion of opportunities for the small capitalist. The bulk of these felt that the door or avenues of advancement had been blocked or compromised.

America was still a nation of small towns and farms. Only one out of fifteen Americans lived in a city. Factories had sprung up but only in small numbers. The bulk of small capitalists believed that the door to economic fulfillment should be nudged open. The growth of the railroads opened up vast tracts to anyone who wanted to make money. The small capitalists were hardworking and ambitious and obtaining economic success was a bedrock belief of theirs. This class included workers, shopkeepers, craftsmen, and small business men.

James J. Grund, an immigrant who had come to America in 1836, wrote: "Business is the very soul of the American…business is the source of all human facility. It was as if all America was one gigantic workshop over the entrance of which was the blazing inscription, No admission Here, Except on Business.” This inclination was, in many cases, corrupt. Many American of the day were more interested in the speculative value of the land rather than their agricultural yield. Many of their ventures were financed by wild cat banks that used their money recklessly and stiffed their debtors.

In the East, there were sound, safe state banks that bitterly resented the U.S. National Bank of Nicolas Biddle who wielded his power in Philadelphia.

President Franklin Roosevelt had called GOP capitalists of his day, “economic royalists,” and he wanted to restore opportunities that had been snuffed out by their corrupt preponderance. This meant creating a government that would be an equivalent in force and power them.

To Jackson’s age, it was felt that business opportunities had been stifled by the National Bank which blocked the way to success for many humbler Americans. They turned to the states to obtain charters for newer banks better able to meet their needs, but the banking charters issued by state legislature ended up little monopolies themselves. Individual parties whose capital was deemed too small were denied entrance to strategic avenues of advancement offered by banks, ferries, turnpikes, bridges and railroads.

The Bank of the United States was the largest of thee privileged monopolies. One of the major forces propelling Jackson was the belief that the bank had denied many genuine opportunity and the ability to compete. As a man, Jackson loathed unfair privilege. To his mind, one of the worst defects of Biddle’s bank was that it was immune from government control. He intensely disliked the fact that a quarter of the bank’s shares were held by foreigners.

Jackson harbored a real feeling for the underdog. He had an obsession with fairness, in my view. In one of his speeches, he denounced any political structure that acted to make the powerful more powerful; he was aware, he said, that the gifts of nature, talent, wealth, etc were unevenly distributed. He didn’t want to try to abolish such uneven gifts of nature. What he wanted above all, was equality before the law because that would enable the humbler members of society a fair chance at success in life.

"The Big Short" by Richard Sale

My wife and watched the film, “The Big Short” recently. I did not think the screen play too incoherent, too hasty, and too hurried nor did it make clear where the subprime mortgage scandal began.

I am now reading, The Big Short, by Michael Lewis, and it makes for blood-curdling reading.

The whole scam had its source in income inequality. Its am was to defraud the middle class and the poor. Income distribution was skewed and was becoming more skewed in favor of the rich. That’s what started to whole subprime mortgage crisis. The pitch for subprime mortgage bonds was that you were helping consumers get free of high interest rate credit card debt and putting him into lower interest rate mortgage debt.

The subprime mortgage industry was at first seen as a useful addition to the U.S. economy. It soon turned into a doomsday machine.

The concept was based on turning home mortgages into bonds. One man’s liability was another man’s asset, but now liabilities would be turned into little bits of paper that anyone could sell to anyone. The small market in mortgage bonds was funded by all sorts of strange stuff: credit card receivables, aircraft leases, auto loans, health club dues. The most obvious untapped asset in America was the American home. People with first mortgages held vast amounts of equity in their homes. There was a stigma in going to own a second mortgage borrower, but the reasoning was that if we mass market the bonds, the cost of borrowing will go down. The lower middle class would replace high interest rate credit card debt with lower interest rate mortgage debt. Of course the target of the bonds was the “less credit worthy Americans.” The mortgage bond wasn’t a single giant loan for an explicit fixed term; instead, a mortgage bond was a claim on the cash flows of thousands of individual home mortgages.

The bond sellers took giant pools of home loans and carved them up to pay debts made to homeowners into pieces called tranches. Such loans carried government guarantees. The holders of such bonds could resell them to other investors. It was a fast buck business.

During the 1990s, the subprime business was only a small fraction of US credit markets. A few tens of billions. As income inequality grew, so did the subprime mortgage market. The accounting for subprime mortgages was increasingly arcane. Moody’s did an account that made clear that underlying the bonds were pools of underlying the individual mortgage bonds - how many were floating rate and how many of the houses borrowed against the owner occupier. The most important question was how many were delinquent? Wall St Firms were not disclosing the delinquency rate of the home loans they were making. The operator sold all the loans to people who packed them into mortgage bonds. “How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.

To maintain the fiction that they were profitable enterprises, the sellers needed more and more capital to create more and more subprime loans. Sellers manipulated interest rate buyers who were told they were paying 7 percent on there loans when were actually paying 12.5 percent. They were tricking their customers. It was usual practice to make sure that the middle lower income people received the most protection. This system gave them the least protection against such schemes. Eisman said the goal of the mortgage subprime market was “fuck the poor.”

Credit Default Swaps

 

From Wikipedia

A credit default swap (CDS) is a financial swap agreement that the seller of the CDS will compensate the buyer (usually the creditor of the reference loan) in the event of a loan default (by the debtor) or other credit event. This is to say that the seller of the CDS insures the buyer against some reference loan defaulting. The buyer of the CDS makes a series of payments (the CDS "fee" or "spread") to the seller and, in exchange, receives a payoff if the loan defaults. It was invented by Blythe Masters from JP Morgan in 1994.

In the event of default the buyer of the CDS receives compensation (usually the face value of the loan), and the seller of the CDS takes possession of the defaulted loan.^[1] However, anyone can purchase a CDS, even buyers who do not hold the loan instrument and who have no direct insurable interest in the loan (these are called "naked" CDSs). If there are more CDS contracts outstanding than bonds in existence, a protocol exists to hold a credit event auction; the payment received is usually substantially less than the face value of the loan.^[2]

Credit default swaps have existed since 1994, and increased in use after 2003. By the end of 2007, the outstanding CDS amount was $62.2 trillion,^[3] falling to $26.3 trillion by mid-year 2010^[4] and reportedly $25.5^[5] trillion in early 2012. CDSs are not traded on an exchange and there is no required reporting of transactions to a government agency.^[6] During the 2007-2010 financial crisis the lack of transparency in this large market became a concern to regulators as it could pose a systemic risk.^{[7][8][9][10]} In March 2010, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (see Sources of Market Data) announced it would give regulators greater access to its credit default swaps database.^[11]

CDS data can be used by financial professionals, regulators, and the media to monitor how the market views credit risk of any entity on which a CDS is available, which can be compared to that provided by the Credit Rating Agencies. U.S. Courts may soon be following suit.^[1]

Mike Burry, a genius who was the first to detect the upcoming crash of the subprime mortgage market fraud, said that his strategy was not to get the best loans, but the worst loans and then bet that they would fail. The price of a loan was rated by bond rating agencies who usually gave a triple A rating on loans. Burry he had collected a lot of triple B-rated loans. They were risky, and the riskier they were, the greater the chance that they would default. Soon, he owned $750 million in credit default swaps in subprime mortgage bonds. These were bonds he had handpicked to explode. He said that the beauty of credit fault swaps was that they enabled him to make a fortune if only a tiny fraction of the dubious pools of mortgages went bad.

A final word on Burry from Wikipedia

In 2005, Burry started to focus on the subprime market. Through his analysis of mortgage lending practices in 2003 and 2004, he correctly forecasted the real estate bubble would collapse as early as 2007. Burry's research on the values of residential real estate convinced him that subprime mortgages, especially those with "teaser" rates, and the bonds based on these mortgages would begin losing value when the original rates reset, often in as little as two years after initiation. This conclusion led Burry to short the market by persuading Goldman Sachs to sell him credit default swaps against subprime deals he saw as vulnerable. This analysis proved correct, and Burry profited accordingly.^[7][8][9] Burry has since said, "I don't go out looking for good shorts. I'm spending my time looking for good longs. I shorted mortgages because I had to. Every bit of logic I had led me to this trade and I had to do it".^[2]

Though he suffered an investor revolt before his predictions came true, Burry earned a personal profit of $100 million and a profit for his remaining investors of more than $700 million

No one ever went to jail for this fraud that almost destroyed the U.S. economy.

Jackson Part Two By Richard Sale

 

 

     I think Pat’s choice of the times of Andrew Jackson as mirroring our own age of discontent was brilliant. I would like to add a few comments.

     The rise of Andrew Jackson marked a new development in American political institutions. From 1812 to 1828, historians tell us that the two-party system had disappeared, replaced by personal, local, sectional conflicts that had come to predominate over broad policy discussions at the national level. The power of the presidency had declined, and the propertyless masses had begun to infiltrate politics.

     The world of Thomas Jefferson had begun to expire even before he retired as U.S. President. The Federalist Party was destroyed by the 1812 War. The 1820’s were a time of huge discontent, financial panics, threats of rebellion, and outbursts of violence. Much of the mood was due to the fact that thriving and vigorous classes felt that the central government was either hostile or indifferent to their needs and interests. Jefferson’s promise of equal rights for all had been betrayed, replaced a single class who kept most of the benefits to itself. The class responsible for their bondage was indifferent to its effects on the wider populace.

   For example, the new Western states felt their development was being thwarted or sidelined by the economic policies of the East. The impact of the new industrialism of the Northern and Middle states, especially the capitalist reorganization of what had been journeymen industries, spurred discontent to a fever pitch fed by several financial panics. The broadening of suffrage resulted in even more discontent, because the masses believed they were being denied the same advantages enjoyed by the East. Western famers or Eastern workingmen felt themselves suffocated by the existing order and were eager for change. They threw their effort at passing reforms that would vindicate their social status. They wanted security, but even more, they wanted respect. The depression of 1828-9 proved a tipping point.

A Ramble on Trump by Richard Sale

I began this piece with these words.

   We are responsible for the rise of Trump. Every time we have not made the extra effort, every time we leave something undone that has moral or spiritual and intellectual value, every time we don’t do something honest or good or worthy, we provide the soil for a man like Trump to rise and flourish.

     We have allowed ourselves to become slaves to the poking of gadgets or TV news or reality shows --every time we let apathy overcome the force of effort and let us evades the effort required to read and study in order to understanding how the world works and our place in it we have created Trump. He is the mammoth created by our own laziness, ignorance and irresponsibility. Every time we tried to be just like everybody else we provided ground for the rise of Trump.

     Our country was formed by aristocrats, men of learning and man of breeding. They knew that society is by nature aristocratic. They said so. The Founders were men of the world: they were lawyers, farmers, planter-business men, speculators, investors. They feared popular uprisings (Is not the rise of Trump a kind of popular uprising?) They were suspicious of democracy because they thought individual self-interest “the most dangerous and unbrookable quality of man,” and it was their aim to control it. They gloried in the feeling that they were doing something new that benefit the bulk of the people. They did not think that the superior person is a petulant individual who thinks he is superior to the rest. In their lives, they made great demands on themselves, piling up duties and displaying the stamina to conquer difficult obstacles; they were driven by their own idea of perfection and warned against excessive self-interest and greed and self-aggrandizement. People who had no ideal of perfection were chaff, and they were the wheat. No society was possible without moral and intellectual standards. It was the effort to develop them that infused pride to people’s efforts.

“There is a degree of animal spirits and showy accomplishment which enables its possessors to get a start in the majestic world, says Hazlitt. He goes on in another essay, to describe people who “strut and swagger and bluff and jostle his way through life, and have the upper hand of those who are his betters in everything but health and strength.”

   The Founders, bewildered and speechless, would gaze helplessly at today’s political world.

Ideology and Hillary’s Foreign Policy by Richard Sale

     The Founding Fathers “saw Americans as essentially no different from the general run of human beings; subject to the same limitations, affected by the same restrictions of vision; tainted by the same original sin or, in a more secular view by the same inner conflicts between the flesh and spirit, between self-love and charity.” Thus writes the American political thinker, George Kennan in his magnificent book, “At the Century’s Ending.”

     The historian Arthur Schlesinger said that “the unity of the United States was an experiment – not an easy one, not one whose successes were automatically assured,” but an experiment “undertaken in defiance of history, fraught with risk, problematic in outcome.” The great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whose books I used to pore over, warned, “No nation is sacred and unique.” All nations stood before God.

     The most pervading fear of the Founders was a fear of democracy. Their view was a direct anthesis of modern American democratic faith. The Founders revered the idea of liberty, but it was their view that democracy menaced liberty. To their minds, liberty was not linked to democracy but to property. Freedom for property would bring liberty, not to all men, but to worthy men. Just as the individual’s capacities were unequal, the amounts of property that men owned would correspond to their unequal gifts of intellect and capacity.

     The Founders were actually a studious bunch. They studied the history of Greek city-states, medieval history, the Renaissance, and what they concluded was the history “displayed perpetual vibrancy of extreme liberty and anarchy,:” in the words of Alexander Hamilton. The dread of the propertyless masses was universal. The Federalists felt that the greater danger came from the majority of ordinary people. Of all the factions, a majority would pose the greatest danger to national stability, they said. Once in power, the majority would be eager to launch its own “oppressive schemes” to the detriment of the welfare of the nation, according to James Madison. (He probably would have fainted if he ever listened to Trump.)

     Whatever their faults, the Founding Fathers were part of the “realistic school” of foreign policy, but in the wings there hovered another group that had, not a realistic view of America but a “messianic” view of it. This group saw America “as fulfilling a predetermined destiny...American was a wonder work of Providence…a journey of the elect…a salvation beyond history,” said Schlesinger. In other words, like the Hebrews, Americans were a chosen race. America, the nation, had been built by the Almighty who had created a nation that was “unique in virtue and magnanimity, exempt from the motives that governed other states,” Schlesinger said. The messianic view of history was last embodied by President Ronald Reagan. But Presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, also holds such views. God has made us great.

     For the messianic school, American excellence in moral or diplomatic matters is a given. American virtue and motives are not to be questioned. The goal of foreign policy is to gain power over other nations, to be sure, but this expansion is only done for their own and America’s good. We don’t wish to injure others, but if they are stubborn and resist American power and ignore what’s good for them, it is their own fault for whatever happens next. The histories of other distant countries, their aspirations, their national epics, their events, their national pride, their history and failures are going to have to give way for a vast, new American democracy that will bring peace and prosperity to all, whether the world wants it or not.

     The messianic outlook asks the American public not to think of failures (indeed, it barely admits them,) and reminds them that you only gain strength by remembering and elaborating on your successes. Of course, anything as blameless and good as the America nation, will draw envious enemies to it, and American political leaders must get in the habit of increasing their support or obtaining more public unity by braying that America is encircled by a terrible, remorseless, pitiless enemies capable of inflicting massacre, genocide or any brand of ghastly atrocity on unsuspecting American citizens. The threat posed by such nations can only be erased by toppling their leaders, using unbridled American power. such a nation will only enjoy peace under American-backed leadership. Such toppling of foreign leaders is called “regime change.”

A Ramble on Hillary By Richard Sale

     I don’t care for Hilary Clinton as a candidate for the U.S. Presidency for reasons I will shortly make clear, but I admire her attempt to overcome the male hogwash that has so long been part of our national life.

     What sort of male hogwash? I sometimes try and realize the obstacles that the prejudices of pigheaded men have put in the path of Hillary from the beginning. In our national history, women have been consistently slighted, underrated and slandered.  We have all heard the arguments. Women are not on an equal footing with our glorious males. A woman was worth only 3/5^th of a man.  (You can add up any way you wish, but the total remains the same.) Women were not made for strenuous mental or physical efforts. Women are childish, silly and shortsighted. A woman’s life is supposed to be trivial and easy going. Women cannot reason; women are not able to reflect.  They are inferior to men in terms of things like fairness, honesty, conscientiousness, and insight. Women are mental myopics. Women don’t have original ideas. They get their ideas from men.  Women are incapable of being objective. Women have a tendency to run away with their feelings. Women are guilty of perjury much more than men. Women are a stunted, narrow shouldered. Broad-hipped and short-legged breed. And even when women band together, they don’t command the mental power of men.  A woman’s whole purpose in life is to propagate the race.

   All of this is vile.

     On the other hand to elect a woman to be president on the ground that she is a woman, strikes me as racist. We should vote for merit and not sex.

    

But to elect a woman to the Presidency merely because she is a woman, strikes me as a racist view.

 

The Dilemmas of Victory (2) by Richard Sale

 

I made a grievous error in not noting, at the outset of the first part of this piece, that I was discussing only an earlier part of Roman history. I will try and undo that error now.

The Gracchi and the Revolution

 

     I know that this is repetitive, but Success simply introduces a whole new series of challenges and demands for new energies, approaches and fresh tactics. The complexity of the fresh necessities brought about by the advent of triumph usually places the country in some new peril, on the verge of new precipices it hasn’t prepared itself for by its history or experience. All history conceals big blanks in its narrative. Success implies novel difficulties and requires the imaginative and structural resourcefulness to meet them. Success causes some people to pause and rest and relax their exertions, but in fact, rapid a new growth is needed to forestall either retarding discord or outright decline. Success focuses on one area of our environment, one area of endeavor, and related areas of effort, while others, if not addressed, may cause us to lose what we've won. Victory almost always has very unexpected and unfortunate consequences for the victors for which they have no remedies.

     The victory of Rome in the Punic War cut like a chain saw through the whole fabric of the society. There was a flood of new wealth from the conquered provinces, which displaced in part the older economy, which was based on the peasant farmers who formed the main base of Rome’s military forces. Corn, the farmer; s chief crop was now being imported, although its impact on the economy was minimal, More important, the long period of conscription to which the farmer was subject meant that he had no one to maintain or improve or even hold his property when he was abroad. He won Rome; s victories only to return to a ruined home. There was no one and no agency for him to approach for redress.

 

The Dilemmas of Victory by Richard Sale

     I read a lot of history because the wars in history all exhibit many of the same factors. 

      It has always been my impression that Rome was an aggressive power, opportunistic, always eager to expand whatever the cost. This impression is false. Many times, just like any other power, it was the victim of fear and of necessities that drove and intensified fear. Fear, as a component of rivalry which dreads any attempt to fend off superiorities under which one is liable to be subjugated, is a much underestimated component of history and foreign policy. (Trump appeals to such fear.)

  In any case, one of Rome’s first wars, with the Etruscans, was occasioned by pressures of population growth along with Rome suffering from famine and pestilence because of having too little land to sustain its people. By conquering Veii, the great Etruscan city, and defeating the Etruscans, Rome would gain fertile badly needed territory that could be farmed. In other words, Rome’s fear was mixture of the self-defensive and of aggression.

     The Etruscan confederation of city-states had no unity, no small factor in its defeat. The Romans provoked the Etruscans by occupying a place called Fidenae, and full war followed. It was in 396 BC that it destroyed Veii, the chief Etruscan city. (I don’t know much about the Etruscans except they were 12 city-state league and that the gladiatorial games was perhaps one of their inventions, along with, perhaps, the Samnites.) In any case, the war left Etruria fell into Roman hands. At a stroke Rome doubled the size of its territory. Rome got Etruria’s excellent system of roads and Rome=s farmers got farms.

      Roman leaders replaced the two annually elected consuls, civilians, with three, later six -- all army officers with the same power.

     Trouble soon followed victory. It usually does.

Ortega by Richard Sale

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/the_athenaeum/2015/12/ortega-by-richard-sale.html

'Decline" by Richard Sale

 

 Trump is the vile prophet of the ignorant, truculent and misinformed. In everything he says, there is something narrow, philistine, and under bred. He loves the applause of his followers, but at bottom, Trump displays no respect for them unless they agree with everything he says however dubious and unsound. 

Trump’s followers are like people who travel deep into a desert waste in order to bury their IQ’s there. They are uncouth, crass, belligerent characters. They are further evidence of a general collapse of moral and intellectual standards. One man, bulky and built like an alongshore man was seen shouting with demented violence at Muslims, “You are all terrorists!” You are all terrorists!” 

Or savor these quotes from Molly Ball’s article on Trump which just appeared recently in The Atlantic and which I had not read until today:

“In today’s time, if I’m a white person who’s proud to be white, I’m a racist,” says 44-year-old Kevin Stubbs, a land surveyor who shared his Marlboro Reds with an African American T-shirt vender on the way in. “Yet a minority can say that.”

“I do not feel safe,” says his fiancee, Loree Ballenberger, 42. “People are coming in across the border, and we have no idea where they are coming from.” She recently called her congressman to urge him to vote for a bill limiting Syrian refugees. (??)

“I remember seeing Muslims around the world celebrating after 9/11,” says Chip Matthews, a 63-year-old retired carpentry teacher in glasses with tinted lenses. So what if it was the Mideast and not New Jersey? “The basic point, I think, is true,” he says.

“I look at the pictures of those refugees and they all look like able-bodied young men, 18 to 30 years old,” says his wife, Patrice Matthews, a 62-year-old retired school-district worker. Matthews doesn’t see why we have to be the ones to help these people. “It’s their country—they need to take it back,” she says.

Basically the speakers are white lower middle class men and women. Their ideas appear to come from barroom conversations. The speakers have no culture. They have no knowledge, no perspective. They make us feel that delusion and ignorance flourish everywhere. Apparently they have never read a book. Reading is a high culture function, said Huizinga, and he is right. In reading the mind absorbs much more quickly; it is perpetually selecting, bracing itself, it skips, it stops to think and recall; it exercises a thousand mental activities which are denied to the mere listener. The ignorant don’t read.  The speakers above don’t think; they are merely repeating what they have heard. 

Trump never apologizes but then he has no need to. He is never wrong. He does not make mistakes.  If caught in a lie, he stubbornly repeats it in a tone of belligerent defiance.Some of us were raised to think that the thought and actions of the Pope were infallible.  Clearly, we had never met Trump.  His followers either suffer from blindness or insensitivities of temperament, combined with certain witlessness. In Trumps followers, sentiment is allowed the larger part of forming judgments, in direct contradiction of the critical intellect. A vulgar and misinformed hunch is used to justify a choice that is based on untutored and base intuition. Unfortunately, the rabble is incapable of making distinctions, and as a result Trump is viewed with a perverted reverence. Trump’s followers lack the tools of knowledge and breeding required to analyze things perceptively. Their thought consists of repeating vulgar, hackneyed slogans, and their make up and emotions are fueled by resentment of others. They see things in black and white, and therefore see badly. They resent the effort of thinking. 

There is an old fable in which an aggressive crow, a disagreeable bird, the terror of his neighborhood, awoke one day and gazed out at the forest from the top of his tree. The crow was very conceited in his views, and since he was quite certain he was right, he never altered them. So on another day when the aggressive crow declared that, “The sky is a beautiful yellow,” a new bird appeared, a crow, wearing spectacles down his nose. He was known as being very wise and full of cunning. As the two birds talk, the old wise crow then asked the bully, “Do you ever see the color blue?” 

The aggressive crow was dumbfounded. “What do you mean, ‘blue’? What sort of question is that? I have been flying through these woods and treetops for years and I have never once ever seen ‘blue.’” And the aggressive crow became quite angry and started to flare his feathers. “Where would I see ‘blue,’ as you call it?” 

That is Trump in a nut.  Whatever he can’t perceive or mentally grasp doesn’t exist. The logical, the objective, the incisive, are basically ignored.  Violent prejudice and passion overwhelm the desire to ascertain the truth. Higher and purer forms of civilization paid homage to the striving to become accurate in our judgments, but Trump’s proclamations are a blizzard of insults and misinformation. Trump believes that his popularity among the least educated of Americans is a sign of strength and evidence of his personal appeal.  He has neither. His ideas are all downgrades of popular clichés and common restments. One sees in him an upsurge in ruthlessness, an increase of hatred for whatever he does not understand. Trump sees enemies everywhere as do his docile supporters. 

At bottom, Trump is a vulgar, blustering lout. He has not any vestige of courtesy and disdains the idea of honor.  One sees in his pronouncements and behavior a deterioration of American critical sense and its decline of judgment. He is the new Huey Long, the American Mussolini. Mussolini, used poison gas in Abyssinia, and sent one of his wives to an insane asylum, and murdered his son by lethal injection, and Trump has not yet sunk to those vile depths mainly the American public wouldn’t stand for such crimes. The American political systems prevents them. But make no mistake: Trump lacks any sense of restraint which makes him very dangerous. 

Once the conflict between good and evil took place inside the souls and hearts of individual men. It now takes place between rival groups, each of which lays claim to represent the highest and most disinterested virtue.  The conscience of the individual has been replaced by the conscience of the mass which is free to indulge in any sort of wickedness. The result will be the onset of a new barbarism and violence of the most brutal sort.

 

Obama as "Bottom" Richard Sale

Some of Obama's errors:

 

Undermining Hosni Mubarak and letting the Muslim Brotherhood come to power,

 

Overthrowing Gadhafi in spite of his anti-terrorism stance.

 

Helping fuel a coup in Ukraine.

 

Trying to undermine Assad with no replacement in sight.

 

Staring away as Turkey behaves more and more badly.

 

Obama's cracked anti-terrorism coalition which pictures Saudis and Qatar and the Gulf states as allies even though they support iSIS.,

 

Good grief!

The Pursuit of Happiness by Richard Sale

 

     Man is a vile animal.

     “The Seven Years war exceeded in atrocity all the previous wars," said French master historian Albert sorrel.  “We are surrounded by hanged corpses,” reported a witness, “and women and children are still being massacred when they oppose the pillage of their own homes.”  Other witness said that, “Nothing like it had been seen since the invasion of the Huns. Inhabitants were hanged after their noses and ears were cut off, their limps torn away, their entrails and their hearts open.” But even these savage conflicts had limited objectives.

     In his Ethics, Schopenhauer said, “Man is, at bottom, a dreadful wild animal. We know this wild animal in a tamed state called civilization and therefore are shocked by the occasional outbreaks of his true nature; but if and when the bolts and bars of the legal order fall apart and anarchy intervenes, it reveals itself for what it is.”

     Does any group of rational human beings live only in order to die?  The goal of life is development and fulfillment, not destruction or mass suicide.  To die was a natural as being born, but you do not court death; you don’t worship death.  You face death with courage and gratitude after having led a worthwhile life embued with moral purpose.

     But with the coming of al-Qaeda death became “glorious,” and IS has quickly embraced that view. IS views the deaths produced by terror is the ultimate fulfillment of the human destiny. Martyrdom was assigned the highest priority by al Qaeda’s volunteers and the same can be said of the followers of IS.  Killing and dying for Allah are viewed as the highest form of sacrifice.  Much time is spent by IS and AQ training their followers to die.         This is homocial and suicidal lunacy, People who glorify death don’t deserve to live. Above all things,  life must be respected and revered, developed and refined. The goal of pursuing happiness is a sound one.  It rejects death and seeks to prevail over evil. IS is destined to perish.