History

Forty five years ago this day, August 28, 1963, it was, I have a dream!:

Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, We are Free At Last!!!
Barack, this is your moment!

I watched most of Bill Moyers’ interview with Andrew J. Bacevich last evening. What an eye-opener! I’d been aware of a lot about Bacevich (see my post from last year) but had never known what he looks like nor witnessed his strong personality in a video before.

I would sum up what he is saying as follows: we have become an imperial nation over the past thirty years because of the combination of our naivety and hubris about “freedom” and our craven commercialism.

A small group of us at the top has led the way into this economic, political and military pickle we’re now in, and he blames Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II all about equally, except of course that Bush II has really accelerated our decline, but we, the American people as a whole, bear equal responsibility for being oblivious and allowing this nonsense to go on. You could blame the media too.

He feels that no matter who is elected president, Obama or McCain, nothing much will change because we are already far down the road with this imperial state and certainly Obama does not appear to have deviated much from the status quo, evidence for this being he does not list Andrew J. Bacevich among his advisers.

Bacevich is a Professor of International Relations at Boston University, retired Army colonel, and West Point graduate who served in Vietnam and retired from the U.S. Army with the rank of colonel. He’s come out with a new book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, which Moyers referred to in his interview with Bacevich.

He invokes Reinhold Niebuhr, that famous intellectual American theologian of the 20th century, in this paragraph given by Moyers from the first chapter of The Limits of Power:

The United States today finds itself threatened by three interlocking crises. The first of these crises is economic and cultural, the second political, and the third military. All three share this characteristic: They are of our own making. In assessing the predicament that results from these crises, THE LIMITS OF POWER employs what might be called a Niebuhrean perspective. Writing decades ago, Reinhold Niebuhr anticipated that predicament with uncanny accuracy and astonishing prescience. As such, perhaps more than any other figure in our recent history, he may help us discern a way out.

So what should we do on Nov. 4? I’d say hold your nose and vote for Obama. Here’s a paragraph from a comment by PacificCoastRon on Steve Clemons’ blog:

So: oppose Obama all you want up til Nov. 3rd, criticize him, hold him up to higher standards, advocate for the revolution you’d like to see, and call out the Democrats for the cowardly leeches that most of them are. But hold your nose to make sure you vote for him on Nov. 4th (or earlier if you can vote by mail), and get all your friends to vote for him, and get all your friends to make sure the Republicans don’t steal it again. then on Nov. 5th you can go back to being disappointed in Obama, and in pressuring him and criticizing him with all your might to guide him towards your vision of utopia.

The alternative, John McCain, is unthinkable.

A number of weeks back, in mid-February in fact, I caught a person named Mark Perry on C-Span II talking about his new book, Partners in Command: George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War and Peace. This takes you back to World War II and the efforts to stop Hitler. It seems that Perry thinks highly of both Marshall, a great leader, and Eisenhower, who later became President, and perhaps is best remembered for his warning us about the Military-Industrial complex. The warning wasn’t heeded of course.

But what I’m leading up to is in Perry’s talk, which can be found here, he does not have very much nice to say about war. In fact, at one point he admits that he would now pull all our troops home from overseas spots around the world, and greatly reduce the size of the Military-Industrial complex which, as he says, is way too bloated.

So, here’s basically a conventional military historian saying we should emulate the Ron Pauls, Denis Kucinichs, and Mike Gravels of the world in terms of foreign policy. Pretty radical for an apparent centrist. Of course, this is all in a dream world and won’t happen — I mean the bringing back of our troops from around the world and the slashing of the size of the Pentagon.

Over and out.

Juan Cole posts a great visual history of Middle Eastern empires beginning about 1800 BC. This is the YouTube version of the Maps of War with a neat musical accompaniment add-on:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The above poem, Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley is perhaps appropriate, as Juan points out.

No, I haven’t flipped out and gone for Irving Kristol, considered the founder of American neoconservatism, for president. Instead I’m going for IRV, or Instant Runoff Voting!

Many places in the world use IRV now, including even a few places here in America. For example, Aspen, Colorado, and Sarasota, Florida, as Hendrik Hertzberg points out, have become the latest jurisdictions to adopt it.

Hendrik has a nice discussion on his blog of the effects of IRV in the recent elections in Australia. The Green Party there got 7.7% of the vote which because of IRV helped push the leading Labor Party over the top for the win.

Just the opposite of course occurred in America in 2000: Ralph Nader’s Green Party with 2.7% of the vote sank the candidacy of Al Gore. Here’s the way Hendrik describes it:

For the past seven years, Americans (and the world) have been suffering from the head-pounding hangover of that 2.7 per cent: President George W. Bush. Even though a clear majority of us—51 per cent—wanted a left-of-center government, we got, with the help of a little nudge from the Supreme Court, a very, very right-of-center one.

Thanks Ralph!

Remember Pearl Harbor? Sixty-six years ago today, as a boy of twelve going on thirteen I remember sitting in our living room listening on our old radio to H. V. Kaltenborn describe the horrendous attack. So, I thought I’d try to Google up something interesting about this 66-year old event.

I found some archived recordings of brief interviews with people on the streets of New York City the day after the attack. They’re pretty brief, about two minutes worth, but capture the amazement and indignation of ordinary people at the time. Worth a listen. Fortunately, I guess, I was too young to serve in the military during WW2.

Here’s a photo of the USS Shaw exploding during the Pearl Harbor attack.

Thanks to the Danz Family for this image.

UPDATE: Would you believe the USS Shaw survived that attack? She got repaired, returned to duty, and earned eleven battle stars during WW2, finally becoming decommissioned on October 2, 1945. Way to go, USS Shaw! See the wiki.

Well, I failed to make a post yesterday mentioning it was the birthday of my grandfather, Homer M. Seavey. He would have been 146 years old yesterday, November 19, 2007. If you remember (ha ha?) last year there was this funny coincidence on his birthday. See here. I lit a candle in church for his 145th birthday, and then, lo and behold, the next hymn happened to be on page 145. That was last year. This year his bday was on a Monday and there was no hymn on page 146 sung on Sunday. Who cares? you might ask?

No, it’s not about Bulls trapping Bears like in the financial markets, it’s about an old Native American trap to capture real bears! Or maybe it was an early settlers’ trap rather than Native American. Hard to know at this point. Anyway it’s a structure made out of stone slabs with an opening for a bear to enter and begin hibernation. Here’s a picture of it I took yesterday afternoon:

Note the stone slab in the lower left with the two holes in it. When the bear is sound asleep, a group of people can lift this heavy stone slab, using the two holes I would imagine, and place it across the opening of the structure, thus trapping the bear. Of course, if the bear is strong enough he could push that heavy slab away and escape. But they probably can back the slab up with more slabs and make it impossible. Not nice for the bear, eh?

It was such a beautiful day here yesterday, cool with a completely cloudless sky, that I couldn’t resist driving over to the wooded area where the bear trap is located. It’s about a twenty-five minute walk from the parking area up the hill through a path in the woods to the bear trap. Also, on the way there’s an old quarry that was last used over one hundred years ago. Here’s a picture of the remains of that:

Yes, back in the good old days there was a President of the US named Richard Milhous Nixon. He even got his face, looking so pleasant and docile, on a 32¢ stamp:

Of course later Dick had to resign the Presidency under a dark cloud. But he would probably be a liberal by today’s standards. Remember that Nixon made that dramatic visit in 1972 to the People’s Republic of China thus taking the first step in normalizing relations with that communist country.

Well, Steve Clemons has an eminently sensible piece on his blog today hoping that Hilary Clinton would not be a Bush-Cheney-Lite, as Barack Obama has called her, but instead a Nixon-Lite. Steve ends his piece with the following two questions:

Will it be Hillary that changes the world and goes to Cuba? to Iran? to Syria?

Or will it be Obama?

These are good questions because so far Hilary seems to be saying she would not go to Cuba, Iran, or Syria, whereas Obama is saying he would.

UPDATE 7/28/2007: The Election Central Saturday Roundup at the TPM Cafe provides the following response from John Edwards:

Edwards: Hillary/Obama Spat Over Foreign Leaders A Distraction From Real Issues:
During his own speech yesterday before the National Urban League, John Edwards denounced the current fight between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton over what conditions should be met before meeting with hostile foreign leaders, calling it a distraction from issues of poverty and other domestic concerns. “We’ve had two good people — Democratic candidates for president — who spent their time attacking each other instead of attacking the problems that this country is facing,” Edwards said. The Associated Press says the remark was met by “a mixture of groans and applause.”

Good point, John! Keep up the good work!