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I’ve Been Reading Too Many Blogs
April 7th, 2010
Why does so much of what I read on the Internet read something like this?
Game on! Push came to shove but the other guy doubled down. No matter: they brought knives but we brought guns. What else could we do? We were roiling with conflicting emotions.
Now, skeptics may scoff, but the real story here is the back story. That’s not the inside story, however. They said they were too big to fail, but everyone knows that at the end of the day, it was a case of moral hazard. And that certainly leveled the playing field.
And it was a game changer. But not an eye-opener.
Game on!
They could have spoken truth to power but that would have been incendiary. A fast track to a train wreck. They were underwater and crisis was looming.
For all the hype and hysteria they were bullish until they crashed and burned.
Sadly, the truth is: they caved.
Great Moments in Fighting Back
December 28th, 2009
“Federal prosecutors are expected on Monday to request a judge’s permission to obtain DNA from Mr. Abdulmutallab [the alleged terrorist on Flight 253] to compare with DNA found on remains of the device taken from the aircraft.”
–Wall Street Journal, Monday, December 28, 2009
Let’s not copy the Greeks’ and Romans’ brutality, but acts of war require a tougher response than Miranda-izing the defendant. Here, for comparison’s sake, are three portions of food for thought:
1. Shortly before sending an expedition to Greece in 490 B.C., the Persian King Darius sent heralds to Sparta. They demanded “earth and water,” that is, signs of surrender. The Spartans requested a judge’s permission to compare DNA from the heralds with DNA found on a Persian spearhead.
Oops! Actually, the Spartans unceremoniously threw the ambassadors into a well, where they died. The Spartans later apologized but went on to win the war.
2. In 479 B.C., after the Persians had destroyed the city of Athens and then retreated slightly northwards – Athens having won the great naval victory at Salamis – the Persians sent an ambassador to the Athenian encampment. He offered a peace deal. An Athenian named Lycidas stood up in council and spoke in favor. The Athenians requested permission to compare DNA from Lycidas with DNA from a Persian ram recovered at Salamis.
Oops! Actually, a crowd of Athenian men stoned Lycidas to death and a similar crowd of Athenian women did the same to his wife and children. No record of the Athenians apologizing, but they did win the war.
3. In 216 B.C., after crushing a Roman army at the Battle of Cannae, Hannibal sent ten influential Roman prisoners of war to Rome to negotiate surrender. He made the prisoners swear on their honor to return to his army. The Roman Senate nixed the deal and nine of the ten prisoners returned to Hannibal. The tenth announced that his oath was invalid on a technicality and so he would stay in Rome. The Senators requested permission to compare DNA from the prisoner with DNA from a Carthaginian horse bit.
Oops! Actually, the Senators hogtied the prisoner and dumped him in the Carthaginian camp. The Romans won the war.
Chanukah
December 10th, 2009
Friday night, December 11, marks the start of the eight days of Chanukah, an annual Jewish holiday. But it also lays claim as the start of western civilization. Not Jewish civilization, which was already old at the time of the first Chanukah in 167 B.C., and not Hellenic (ancient Greek) civilization, which was also ancient. But the encounter of the West with Judaism, of reason with revelation, of Athens with Jerusalem: that began on Chanukah.
“Man,” said an ancient Greek philosopher, “is the measure of all things.” The Bible disagrees: “the fear of the Lord,” it says, “is the beginning of wisdom.” Who is right? A great debate about God and man lies at the heart of the West. From Sinai to Babylon, from the lions to the Crusaders, from the Wars of Religion to the Age of Reason – and of Revolution, from Stalin to John Paul II, from eugenics to a belief that life is sacred, and from globalism to a respect for individual states – even Israel! — it remains the central question. Athens and Jerusalem still are what they always were, the struggling twins of the West.
Chanukah commemorates a miraculous victory in a war in 167 B.C. A Greco-Macedonian kingdom, centered in what is today Syria, had tried to outlaw the Jewish religion in its homeland in Judea and to replace it with Hellenic culture. Many Jews, in fact, supported that goal. But that is no surprise, because Hellenism had enormous appeal.
Hellenism seemed to have everything going for it. It was up-to-date, sophisticated, and intellectually satisfying. It offered wealth, health, art, and glamour. It represented the entrance ticket to an imperial civilization. Hellenism offered the opportunity to think big.
Judaism sat at the opposite end of the scale. It was old, small, and poor. It had no empire. It had nothing to offer except faith, trust, love, and strength. But those things, it turns out, are items that the human heart cannot do without.
So the miraculous happened. A small band, burning with faith, went on to defeat an empire.
There is, of course, a rational explanation; there always is. “The Syrian-Greek state had passed its prime.” “The Jews had short lines of communication.” “They mastered guerrilla tactics.” “The Greeks overplayed their hand.” “Judea wasn’t worth the bones of a Macedonian grenadier anyhow.” If rational explanations are enough for you, then take your pick.
But if you think that “the heart has its reasons that reason knows not of,” if you think that there is more to life than shifting particles, if you respect science without worshipping it – in short, if you doubt that man is God, then wonder at the light of a miracle burning in the dark days of winter.
Lend Me Your Ears
December 6th, 2009
December 7 is a day that will live in infamy, but not only because of Pearl Harbor. Two thousand years before Japan’s surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet, another event in American history took place: the murder of Marcus Tullius Cicero. American history? Although Cicero was Roman, he had a unique influence on the minds of America’s Founders. We owe to Cicero the American ideal of a nation ruled by laws and not men.
Rome’s greatest orator, Cicero had a tongue like a silver switchblade. Or a sharp Sardinian jack-knife, with a handle carved in horn. When it came to speaking truth to power, Cicero lacked nothing in courage. In 43 B.C., power was a dictator, Mark Antony. No fan of cutting words, Antony made Cicero pay – with his life. He sent a pair of thugs to shut Cicero up for good.
God forbid that anyone should have to pay a price like that today for political courage. But I think of Cicero, now and then, at times of political oratory. I did this past week on the occasion of President Obama’s address at West Point.
Supporters of the Afghan War, it seems, fall into two schools when it comes to the President’s speech. One school sees a con man; the other, a statesman. Both schools agree that Obama had to steer between the nation’s interests and his own anti-war political base. One school says that it took guts and vision to commit 30,000 troops to an Afghan surge, while the other sees political flimflam in the promise to start withdrawing those troops 18 months later (you can’t fight wars on a timetable).
Me, I’ll give the President the benefit of the doubt. Now it’s our soldiers’ turn: they’ll take his words to war and even to victory. No matter what he promises now, no President will pull his troops out in 18 months if they are winning.
Yet I have to confess that I didn’t listen to Obama’s speech last Tuesday. Honestly, I’m not planning to tune into his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Oslo on Thursday either. Patriots should be proud of our President’s honor. Surely he’ll deliver his words beautifully, as he always does.
But a politician’s words call for a buffer – a cooling-off period for hot rhetoric. An online transcript will do just fine for Obama’s remarks. Which leads to another anecdote from ancient history.
Lysias was one of Athens’ greatest orators. He specialized in writing speeches for the law courts. The story goes that he dashed off a whopper for one client, who read it with great excitement.
“Lysias,” the man said, “it’s a wonderful speech. We’ll dazzle the jury and win the case with ease.” Lysias took a bow and accepted his fee. The next day, however, the client came back with worry on his face. He had re-read Lysias’s words and seen through them.
“It’s a terrible speech, Lysias,” the man said, “full of cheap tricks and logical fallacies. We’re bound to lose.”
“Relax,” Lysias answered. “The jury is only going to hear it once.”
Big is Beautiful
December 3rd, 2009
My love song to large lecture courses has just been posted on Minding the Campus, http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2009/12/big_is_beautiful.html.
Alexander and Afghanistan
December 2nd, 2009
We fight wars with men – and with ghosts. When it comes to haunted battlefields, Afghanistan is second to none. The specters stretch backwards from the Soviets, who failed in Afghanistan in the 1970s, to the British who suffered there in the nineteenth century, and all the way to Alexander the Great, who conquered Afghanistan long ago but at a terrible cost. Fine books by Steven Pressfield and Frank Holt have recently examined Alexander’s Afghan War – a conflict, as some say, that was the original quagmire. And Alexander was one of the greatest generals in human history. Who are we to surge 30,000 more troops into the graveyard of the great?
Well, so the argument goes, but I beg to differ. Alexander’s history offers a much more positive lesson. In fact, it suggests that the U.S. and NATO can win in Afghanistan.
It would be pedantic to point out that most of Alexander’s “Afghan” campaign took place outside today’s Afghanistan; most of the fighting took place in the nearby states of what are today Tadjikistan and Uzbekistan. Nonetheless, the war spilled over into Afghanistan, which served Alexander as a base. And the war did not go well.
It was lengthy and exhausting. Alexander lost almost as many men in one bloody day as he had in the four years it took him to conquer all the lands between the Mediterranean Sea and eastern Iran. Alexander found himself driven to massacre civilians in the tens of thousands and to destroy their towns. Exposure to cold, wind, and snow raised his men’s casualty toll. Bandits and warlords proved challenging to an army used to fighting conventional warfare.
It took a toll on Alexander’s wonderful army, and to what end? Greek rulers survived for 150 years in Afghanistan, and Greek settlements lasted centuries more. For example, Kandahar – today a center of the American war effort – was once known by the magical name of Alexandria . . . Alexandria-in-Arachosia. But the Afghan war was not worth the price Alexander paid for it. He would have been better off staying in Iran and consolidating the huge empire that his army had already won, an empire that stretched from Egypt and Greece eastward.
Some things haven’t changed. Afghanistan still represents tough terrain for soldiers. It still is a paradise for brigands and bandits, but there the similarity ends.
Western soldiers today enjoy protection from the elements that Alexander’s Macedonians could hardly have imagined. The ancients had no thermal polypropylene and no snow tires.
More important, the kind of war that the surge in Afghanistan represents could not be more different than the war that Alexander fought in the region. The surge aims to protect civilians, not kill them. Allied plans aim at defeating warlords through policing, reconstruction, and diplomacy, not by wiping out cities.
Most important of all, the Afghan War is sound strategy. It demonstrates our determination that once a country is liberated from Islamist tyranny, it will stay liberated. (The sins of Karzai’s government cannot compare with those of the Taliban.) It guards the flank of Pakistan, a country with a strategic location, the world’s third largest Muslim population (175 million, of whom 95 per cent are Muslim), and, last but not least, nuclear weapons. Afghanistan was peripheral to Alexander but it is central to American interests.
Our soldiers in Afghanistan will suffer, unfortunately, as soldiers always do. They deserve our sympathy and support. General McChrystal’s counter-insurgency strategy has a real chance of succeeding. All it will take is the will to win. I hope the American government has that will. I know the American public does.
Napoleon Palin
December 2nd, 2009
A little over two hundred years ago this season, Napoleon became famous. He grabbed a French flag, strode onto a bridge over the Adige River in northern Italy, and led his men in an attack on the Austrian army on the other side. As the French advanced, enemy guns took out soldiers on either side. With the luck of greatness, Napoleon went on without a scratch. Finally, he fell off the bridge into safety – and a muddy ditch. Napoleon’s daredevil charge accomplished little, and it took two more days of heavy fighting before the French finally drove the Austrians from the other side of the river.
But it wasn’t the mud or the delay that men remembered: it was the sight of General Bonaparte waving the flag in the perilous fight. An iconic painting by the French artist Antoine-Jean Gros, the Shepard Fairey of his day, made sure of that. Bonaparte on the Bridge at Arcole (1801) depicts Napoleon as a young hero, alone and commanding, with a sword in one hand and a flag in the other. Next to that image, what did reality matter?
Or maybe courage under fire was reality enough. Napoleon went on to dominate Europe for the next twenty years. During that time, his ability to project the commanding strength shown in the painting proved far more important than the details of a November day.
American politics these days reminds me of Napoleon on the Bridge at Arcole. Wave the colors, march forward boldly, and you might win the presidency. Barack Obama proved this in 2008. Now, Sarah Palin is taking her turn.
Palin’s book, Going Rogue, is the political equivalent of raising the battle flag and striding onto the bridge. The title suggests insurgency, which was not Napoleon’s style, but he understood the need to adapt to changed conditions. In an age of talk radio and tea parties, it’s rebels and not four-star generals who the public wants to hear from.
The cover photo shows the former Alaska governor looking confidently into the distance. Like Napoleon in Gros’s painting, she stands out boldly against a background of clouds. Palin’s red jacket is as striking as Bonaparte’s black uniform. And she too, has a flag – in a lapel pin.
We can judge the power of Palin’s image by her political enemies’ counter-attacks.
Newsweek moved quickly by putting a cheesecake photo of Palin on its cover. This is as dismissive as the sight of Napoleon in the mud would have been.
Palin has shown an ability to weld myths deftly. It will be fascinating to see if her re-emergence onto the public stage marks a rendezvous with destiny or a bridge to nowhere.
A Wartime Thanksgiving
November 22nd, 2009
In most of America nowadays, Thanksgiving is a day of family, food, football and a foretaste of four weeks of shopping. But in some American homes, the holiday retains its religious character: it is a day to give thanks to God for His blessings. And in a special, few American households that have men or women at war, Thanksgiving is a day to thank the Lord of Battles for the survival of loved ones. For those families, Thanksgiving is a day of guns and God. So it was 146 years ago, when Thanksgiving became fixed as an American national holiday — and by no less a man than Abraham Lincoln.
On Saturday, October 3, 1863, President Lincoln proclaimed the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. Thanksgiving Day in America went back centuries, to the Pilgrims at Plymouth Plantation in 1621, if not before. Earlier Presidents had declared Thanksgivings, but Lincoln was the first to set Thanksgiving Day on the last Thursday of November. And there it has remained, ever since.
Lincoln acknowledged, in his proclamation, the country’s situation “in the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity,” but he emphasized the country’s prosperity even in a time of war. He wrote:
“No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.
“It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”
Nearly eight bloody weeks passed between Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation on October 3 and Thanksgiving Day – in 1863, as this year, Thursday, November 26. In Virginia’s Piedmont Region, Union General George Meade and Confederate General Robert E. Lee fought five skirmishes. On October 19, for example, Confederate Cavalry General J.E.B. Stuart surprised the enemy and forced him into a humiliating, five-mile chase, ending in the capture of 250 Union cavalrymen. On November 7, to take another case, Union forces overran a Confederate position at dusk and captured 1,600 men. But neither army won a strategic advantage and the Virginia campaign ended in stalemate.
The Western Theater told a different story. In September, the Union Army had driven Confederate forces out of Tennessee and into Georgia. The Union took the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee, which was a transportation and manufacturing hub. But the Union troops pushed too far and suffered a shellacking at the Battle of Chickamagua on September 19. The Confederates drove them back into Chattanooga and laid siege to the city.
Then, Ulysses Grant came to the rescue. The campaign that followed was one of the war’s most dramatic, and it included such famous generals as Sherman, Hooker, Longstreet, and Bragg. Weeks of fighting reached a climax in two Union victories on November 24 and 25 – the Battles of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge – that lifted the Confederate siege of Chattanooga. That Tennessee city was Grant’s Thanksgiving Day gift to President Lincoln.
As the weeks passed between the proclamation of Thanksgiving and the celebration of the holiday, thousands of Americans were wounded, captured or killed in battle on American soil. Homes were destroyed, business were ruined. And new lives began, as slaves were freed.
One other thing happened during those eight weeks: one other event that, in a modest way, summed up the American experience as few things ever have. One week before Thanksgiving Day, on Thursday, November 19, on a clear autumn afternoon in Pennsylvania, Lincoln stood up before a large crowd and spoke. He gave the Gettysburg Address.
Veterans Day
November 9th, 2009
Soldiers suffer stress. That story, as old as Homer, has resurfaced after last week’s massacre at Fort Hood. An American soldier shot and killed other American soldiers. Perhaps the shooter was a victim who snapped under stress, as some now claim, or perhaps he was a terrorist whose warning statements the Army ignored. Investigators are currently working to cover people’s backsides…I mean, to find the truth. We’ll see.
Soldiers suffer. What better time than Veterans Day to salute their patriotism and self-sacrifice? And their clear-headedness: because for all the horror and misery they endure, soldiers avoid the twin illusions of civilians. They don’t romanticize war and they don’t think that pacifism equals peace.
I encountered that lack of romanticism in a recent conversation with a combat veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. I asked him about charisma. How important, I asked, is charismatic leadership is in battle? “It’s not” was his answer. Charisma, he explained, plays a role in peacetime, but when soldiers go into battle they want competence. No heroes on horseback for this old soldier.
We all encounter the equation of pacifism and peace every day. It starts with slogans such as “all you need is love” and “what if they gave a war and nobody came?” It moves on to declarations that concessions bring peace. It ends up in fantasies of global government or Fortress America.
Unfortunately, somebody always comes if they give a war. A hard and warlike outsider always stands ready to conquer the children of peace. All that protects us is wise diplomacy backed up by brave soldiers. Reason enough to say to those soldiers: Thank you.
From Troy to Afghanistan
October 16th, 2009
This week I revisited the Trojan War: I gave the John C. Rouman Classical Lecture at the University of New Hampshire. Although I’ve told that story before, it’s been a year or two, and I couldn’t help but feel how fresh it is. “The past is a foreign country,” as the saying goes – or is it? A long war, winnable only by unconventional means, speaks to our current condition. So does the world of Homer, a place where life is struggle and nothing good comes without pain. And somewhere, somehow, some shrewdie is building a wooden horse – and some shlmiel is going to buy it.
As for Troy, archaeology shows that it really existed, in what is now northwest Turkey. It was destroyed by a raging fire around 1200 B.C. Vast fortifications, arrowheads and spear points, an unburied skeleton, and the absence of most items of value: these all suggest that the city had been sacked. Was this the Trojan War? The ancient Greeks, who were the greatest skeptics who ever lived, believed that the Trojan War really took place. That is good enough for me.