World-Wide-Matel

I read Amity Shlaes’ book “the Forgotten Man” a couple of years when it first came out, just before the big economic downturn.  Her timing was excellent in the light of subsequent events and the insights for the Great Depression have been helping me understand the events of the great recession.
 
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme, as Mark Twain quipped, and some of the arguments of the 1930s seem very contemporary indeed.   One of the themes most pervasive in Shlaes’ book was the importance of confidence, consistency and trust. These things are the true basis of a prosperous economy, but they are impossible to measure accurately and so are often overlooked or downplayed.

Why are you willing to exchange your real labor or goods for a piece of paper with the picture of a dead president?  It is backed by nothing but trust.  I lived in Brazil during a time of hyperinflation. People didn’t trust that their money would hold its value or their government not to be capricious (and they were right) so to protect themselves they had had to devise all sorts of tricks and techniques that were often wasteful and destructive to the system as a whole. And once trust breaks down in something as important as money itself, it spreads to other areas, creating a general state of uncertainly and feelings of helplessness.
 
One of the most important functions of government is to create as much certainty and predictability in society so that people can plan for the future and feel secure in their transactions with each other.   When fails in its duty to maintain stability or, worse, when government itself comes to be viewed as unpredictable, arbitrary or capricious, the bonds of society begin to erode.
 
Some actually welcome this.  Disorder reduces the aggregate level of wealth but often has the effect or redistributing income, or at least distributing pain since people who cannot properly plan cannot do better than those who just wouldn’t. Making opportunity generally less available tends to equalize outcomes by negating the cumulative value of hard work, talent and foresight.
 
What the FDR administration did to harm economic recovery was to create uncertainty, according to Shlaes. She gives many examples.  The one I like best is the Schechter chicken case.  Part of the New Deal legislation, regulated poultry prices, making it illegal to offer discounts or allow customers to choose their own chickens. The Schechter brothers, a couple of kosher butchers, were accused of doing these things and of “destructive price cutting.” They were found guilty, given a fine of $7424 (big money in those days) and tossed in jail for a couple months. When the full weight of Federal power can come down on kosher butchers for selling a chicken and they can get jail time for doing business as they always have, you have significant uncertainty.
 
The relevant New Deal Federal laws were declared unconstitutional when the case reached the Supreme Court.  Justice Louis Brandeis took aside one of Roosevelt’s aides and told him, “This is the end of this business of centralization, and I want you to go back and tell the president that we're not going to let this government centralize everything."
 
Most of the New Deal programs & ideas did not survive the test of time or the courts. The reason we don’t understand that is we look back at it now with a kind of “survivor bias,” i.e. we judge it by those that did survive – a relatively small and more successful subset.  But what really saved the New Deal’s reputation was the onset of World War II. To his eternal credit, Roosevelt saw the trouble on the horizon and he understood that he would have to harness the power of the United States – all of its power – to fight the threat of totalitarianism. So the always pragmatic president chucked or let fall away many of the more radical New Deal programs and much of the anti-enterprise rhetoric into the dust bin of history, much to the chagrin of his more radical associates, such as Harry Hopkins and his wife Eleanor.  We kept the songs, murals, myths and lots of mixed feelings.

My father grew up during the Depression and always took a kind of pride in the fact that he could trump any contemporary hard times stories.  No matter what happened, he could say, “You are lucky.  When I was growing up things were a lot worse.”  And he was always right.  You just couldn't argue with the old man when he played the "Great Depression card."

Posted by Broadnax at 09:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In early human societies, and among the less technologically advanced until now, war is/was endemic.  Simple societies are warrior societies that live in a constant state of lethal conflict. These are small fights, murder raids & minor skirmishes, but they are never ending. The “noble savage” was kept in top form by the exigencies of war. 

Posted by Broadnax at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

“I need it like a hole in the head”.  I always thought it was probably a direct translation from a foreign language because of the peculiar grammar.  But I don’t really know where it came from and I figured it was just a saying. 

Alex and I went through a forensic archeology exhibit at Smithsonian. Take a look at the skull alongside and try to guess what killed this guy. I don’t suppose you would need a degree in forensic anthropology. Most of the other exhibits were less obvious. They can read various types of sickness on the bones. Evidently significant numbers of people died of toothaches in the old days, or more precisely from infections related to abscesses. What a way to go? There was a lot of misery back then from things that we just no longer think about. I stroll through this exhibit will cure even the worst case of nostalgia for the good old days.

Life in the old days was nasty, brutal & short for most people. Even the rich people lived rotten lives if you look at the things they had to put up with and suffer from. The old palace looks good, until you recall the state of plumbing, air conditioning and medicine that the fat cat had to live with. None of us would willingly trade places with Louis XIV if we had to really live his life.

Speaking of living nasty, brutal & short lives, take a look at the map below and try to find North Korea. It is truly a benighted place - literally. When you go to museums and think about how rotten life used to be in the dark old days, it is useful to recall that in some places it never got any better and I have no doubt that living in a fever ridden colony a couple of centuries was better than living in a place like North Korea today. It must be like living in a giant, endless concentration camp, where technology is used to create misery and control rather than improve lives.

BTW - the map is just supposed to show the world's bright lights, but when you look at it you cannot help noting that North Korea doesn't have many. 

Finally, we have something that makes life better, IMO, something even the richest king couldn't have before the 1880s - Coca-Cola. Below are Kola nuts, used to make Cola flavored soft drinks. I recalled an old commercial for 7up talking about the un-cola nuts and with the wonders of YouTube we can see it again.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Alex and I visited the “human origins” exhibit at Smithsonian.  I have trouble keeping up with the changes.  As I recently wrote, I had to change my opinion of the Neanderthal man now that I found out he is a closer cousin and probable ancestor.   You would think that all these prehistoric things would be more or less consistent, but they are not.  Scientific perceptions change.

Anyway, the exhibit is very good.   Most of the artifacts are copies, but I wouldn’t be able to tell the real ones anyway.  The picture on the side is the "ice man" discovered frozen in the Alps. He may have been the victim of a murder more than 5000 years ago. Anyway, the exhibit is mostly set up to educate kids, but old people like me can enjoy it too.

The thing that made the biggest impression on me were the wax museum recreations of pre-humans.  If the Neanderthal man walked down the street today, you might notice that he was unusually husky and unattractive, but if we was properly groomed you might not give him too much of a second look. Of course one reason not to stare would be to avoid eye contact with a dangerous looking weirdo.  But my point is that I think you would consider him human.  We do share genes with this guy, as we have recently discovered.  Not so the others like the Homo-erectus.  It was interesting looking into their eyes, or at least the eyes that current science has provided them.

Another surprising part of the exhibit was a skull from Lapa Vermelha, Minas Gerais in Brazil.  (I will put that on my list of places to visit.)  This fossil has been carbon dated to 11,500 years ago. The interesting thing is that the ancestors of today’s Native Americans were not supposed to be there yet.  There is a lot of political argument over very old human fossils in the Americas.

Native American tribes often have creation myths that say they have always been in or near their current locations. Science and anthropology indicate that their ancestors wandered over from Asia via a land mass at what are now the Bearing Straits. The discovery of ancient skulls that do not resemble the current Native American populations upsets some people. They can go to considerable lengths to prevent the evidence from being uncovered that contracts the myths or threatens their positions as “the first Americans”, as with the Kennewick man, who looked more like Jon Luke Picard than Sitting Bull and was evidently most closely related to the Ainu people from Japan.

History is never really simple and when it gets tied in with current political sensitivities it is really hard to get things right.   It is really hard to believe that things that happened more than 10,000 years ago still make a big difference to today’s politics, but they do.

It is a little silly.  When you go far enough back, none of the current ethnic distinctions make any sense and all human history is the common heritage of mankind.  The more we learn from archeology and genetics, the clearer that becomes.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I cannot really recall if Paul Kennedy came in person or if I “met” him on an electronic program, but I do recall having him for a program on his book the Rise & Fall of the Great Powers.  That was back in 1989 and the general idea then was that the U.S. was about to be overtaken by Japan as the great power.   It seems pretty absurd in retrospect. Japan doesn’t have the resources or the demographic strength to challenge the U.S. in the long-term.  Of course now we talk about China and India, maybe even Brazil.

The decline & fall of the United States was a very popular topic back in the 1980s.  Actually, it is always a popular topic.   Different commentators emphasize different things at different times.   Back in the 1970s when I first became aware of the genre, the favorite danger was ecological collapse.  We have come back to that one somewhat today.   Running out of energy is also a perennial favorite.   But the one that encompasses them all is political-economic failure.   That is the one that Kennedy talks about.

I hadn’t thought much about him in the last decade but I was reminded when I saw him on the PBS Newshour. He explained that the timing of his U.S.decline, replaced by Japan hypothesis was a bit off. Japan was the one that went into decline. The Soviet Union unexpectedly collapsed relieving the U.S. of the superpower competition.  American productivity (and so wealth) jumped as communications technologies began to be applied to business. He didn’t add, but I will, that American business went through revolutionary change and reorganization. The economy he was thinking of in the 1970s was not the same one he was living with when he wrote the book in the late 1980s.

It is easy to miss the dynamism of the American economy and academics who look at the “big trends” are often the ones who miss it the most. One reason is that they are trying to impose patterns, often anthropomorphic patterns, on complex systems.   

It is hard not to view societies or civilizations in human terms of birth, growth, maturity, decline and ultimate death. The depressing German historian Oswald Spengler made an explicit science of this with specific stages of growth and decline.  Each civilization had a life span of 1000 years. He thought that civilizations have as much chance of changing or extending this lifespan as you or I do with our physical bodies. Spengler codified what lots of other people thought but he really hit a rich intellectual vein. Lots of people who never heard of Spengler implicitly follow his ideas. Spengler is compelling and very interesting, as well as being completely wrong.

Countries and civilizations do not have life spans analogous to people. The only reason we think they do is because of the extreme power of the pattern that we see in our own lives. It is true that countries and civilizations have some beginning and ending but they can copy from others and they have almost endless capacity for change and renewal. They also morph and combine.

The U.S. has been declining RELATIVE to the rest of the world since the end of World War II.  This should be a cause for celebration, not fear. After World War II, most of the world was either in ruins as a result of war or just poorly developed. They had to catch up and the general growth of wealth has helped us too, as others have begun to pull their own weight and contribute to the general welfare. In some ways, prosperity is natural if you just stop doing stupid things. The biggest success story of recent decades is China. As they shifted from their benighted communist system, their economy developed. While they are now a rival in a way we never thought possible, they are also a source of wealth for us as well as themselves. Imagine if they had continued along the Maoist lines.  Is it better to face a rapidly developing China that is a good, if over clever trading partner; or would we prefer a communist state near Malthusian collapse and destabilizing the entire world?

We feel a little nostalgia for the good old days, but they weren’t really that good.  We are better off NOT being the sole superpower, or being the only game in town. If we imagine the world 50 years hence, we will be wrong in detail, but you can see some trends.

The U.S. will still be the most important country in the world in 2060, but we will have several peers including China, India, the EU and maybe Brazil.  You can imagine some regional groupings, but there is nothing currently in the cards.  China has enjoyed a fantastic growth rate, but it will hit some ecological and demographic speed bumps soon.   The same goes for India.  Russia is the power of the past.  In 2060, it will have a smaller population than it does today unless it changes fundamentally, in which case it might no longer be Russia.  The EU will also have a smaller population, but since it starts with so much economic and social capital it will still be important. 

The country I am most interested in (besides the U.S.) is Brazil. The old joke was that Brazil was the country of the future and always would be, but reforms, good decisions and some luck have brought the future to us now.  The U.S. and Brazil share an important characteristic – they are American in the New World sense.  Both our countries were built by immigrants and have been very open to outside influences, techniques and technologies.   Both Brazil and the U.S. are large, resource rich countries with the demographic weight to be powerful into the future.

But I hope and believe that by 2060 the national power will be less acute in the sense of rivalry and it will matter less which country has the biggest economy or the most powerful military. Paul Kennedy talked about the “Concert of Europe” where the great powers more or less cooperated or at least coexisted.  Of course, there were lots of problems with that specific formulation.  Historians can and have written whole books talking about them and of course, we can do better now with our improved technologies and the benefit of the experience that our ancestors didn’t have. 

Having one single country as the “leader” is not the only way there is.  From the fall of the Roman Empire until the end of World War II, there wasn’t really a predominant power in the Western World.   We can have diverse and dispersed power centers within a globalized network.

Posted by Broadnax at 08:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sometimes there is nothing you can do, but everybody expects you to do something. That is the time for the rain dance. Put on a good show, create a lot of sound & fury to keep people occupied so that they will keep you around long enough for things to improve, so you get credit. Politicians are master rain dancers, butt all of us have done a few. Sometimes you just have to be seen to be doing something.

I have been reading a book about real rain dances, called Floods, Famines and Emperors:  El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations.  The author talks about the various times when climate change caused civilizations to thrive and crash.   One chapter talks about the Pueblo of the Southwest.  (I think that is where the term “rain dance” comes from, BTW.)  Their population expanded during relatively wet times and then their populations starved and dispersed during when the same Medieval warm period that brought prosperity to Western Europe brought droughts to Southwestern North America that lasted decades or centuries.  Changes always bring winners and losers.

The author Brian Fagan says that a lot of early civilizations were based in part on the implication that priests and rulers could control the weather. Their activities to do this ranged from the merely wasteful to the downright gruesome.  A lot of complicated rituals and ceremonies were designed to do things like make the Nile flow or bring on the season rains.  The ancient Maya seem to have based their belief system on the need to capture, humiliate, torture and kill people from neighboring areas in order to sacrifice them and appease bloodthirsty gods who otherwise would bring drought and destruction.  They left some nice pyramids, but living through in those times must have been like being a minor character in a endless horror movie.   Unfortunately, these kinds of superstitions were the rule and not the exception in pre-scientific societies.

At our safe distance, we sometimes think of these superstitions in the benign fairy-tale sense of an enchanted forest full of fairies, elves etc. But think of how horrible it would be if you really believed it. The pre-scientific world must have been a frightening place. Everything you did could offend some spirit or nymph, so you needed to turn to shaman, witch or priest to protect you from capricious nature, which they (and you) attributed to benign or malevolent intelligence that had to be mollified.  

Some ritual had to be performed, but nobody was ever was sure if they worked.  Of course, they didn’t work but sometimes they might look like they did. If I do ceremonies to make it rain, and it eventually rains, I take credit.  A smart shaman probably had an intuitive sense of probability, so he did his rituals at times when things were moving in the right direction. You can see how the shaman might have added some value by his experience, on balance, however not. 

I suppose superstition is a step toward science. Alchemy led to some real discoveries about chemistry and physics. Astrology gave us some of the tools later needed by astronomers. 

Superstitions are an attempt to put some planning and order into an unpredictable world.   The problem is mostly based on mistaking correlation for causality, poor record keeping and the evidently natural human propensity to see patterns that don’t exist. Superstitions are a kind of distortion of reason, but they can be ostensibly reasonable.    

Of course, we still do rain dances too. The world is still an unpredictable place.

Anyway, I recommend Floods, Famines and Emperors. A lot of his ideas seemed very familiar, but I didn’t put it together until I started writing this that I had read one of his earlier books called The Long Summer.  It is still sitting on my bookshelf. These books help put the climate change debate in its historical perspective. We have been here before and maybe some perspective on how earlier climate changes affected earlier people may help us in the future.

Posted by Broadnax at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It seems an esoteric subject, but it still makes a useful study today.   I went to see a talk by Edward Luttwak on the “Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire.”  Luttwak is an interesting guy who has done lots of things.  He not only writes books about the Byzantines, but he also write regular commentary about current events and even is part owner in a cattle ranch in Brazil.  BTW – for reference I also attended a lecture on Byzantine history at Smithsonian and wrote a post re.  

Luttwak started with the sources, of which there are many but they are complicated.  If you study of the pre-Byzantine Roman Byzantines, you have a lot of history and archeology to study.   Byzantium is harder in some respects and easier in others.  While there is a wealth of numismatic evidence, archeology is not as helpful.  So much was concentrated in Constantinople (Istanbul) and that has not been well studied.  One reason is that the Turks didn’t much care about the Christian-Greek-Roman civilization they displaced and more modern archeologists were more interested in the ancient Greeks, but probably the most important reason is that the city has been continuously occupied.  It is just hard to dig in such a crowded place.  But what you don’t have in archeology, you make up for in manuals and diplomatic reports.

The uses of intelligence and guile 

The Byzantines were very sophisticated in their study of diplomacy and what we would today call intelligence or anthropology.  They did research observations, made reports and wrote field manuals a lot like we do today. They needed them. For much of their history, the Byzantines were beset by enemies all around.  They didn’t like to use their army too often because it was relatively small, and expensively trained and equipped. It was better to use leverage, so they studied everybody around them, found their strengths, weaknesses and vanities. The reports still exist.  Often the Byzantine sources are the best historical documents for neighboring people. The early history of the Turks, Croats, Serbs, Bulgarians, Hungarians and others comes mostly from Byzantine observations.

Divide and conquer

The Byzantine method was to get enemies to fight each other.  Flatter, cajole, threaten or bribe as appropriate.   Their longest enduing and most dangerous rivals were Muslims, but then as now the Muslim world was not united. The Byzantines noted that no connection between supposed religious fervor and willingness to take bribes. When their spies told them that there was talk of jihad, they would send around gift baskets to local Muslim rulers, which often served to dampen enthusiasm for the holy war, at least temporarily. Their politically incorrect assessment was that these guys were either at their throats or at their feet. True or not, that assessment worked for them.

Byzantine diplomats studied everybody and reported back and they interviewed anybody who came to Constantinople.  Often the emperor would meet important foreigners himself. The system worked reasonably well, evidenced by the fact that the empire endured for centuries in a very rough neighborhood.

The Byzantines believed in being benevolent when they could, but they recognized that this came only through strength, never weakness. Always be combat ready but avoid combat if possible. If you can bribe or trick your way out of a mess, why not?

It reminds me of the saying l learned, "Any problem you can buy your way out of is not a problem; it is an expense."  Maybe the original thought came from our Byzantine ancestors.

Soft power

Success of this kind of strategy required an openness not usually associated with the Byzantines. Luttwak pointed out that they allows a mosque in Constantinople (for foreigners and visitors).  They also freely translated their texts into other languages.  Unlike the Muslims who insisted that the Koran remain in Arabic, the Byzantines were liberal with their sacred texts.  The Byzantine monks Cyril and Methodius created a written language for the Slavs and many Slavic languages are still written in the script named for Cyril.

Rise comes before the fall

Luttwak thinks that the weakening of the empire came as a result of too much temporary strength (pride goeth before a fall). Life was good in 1025. That was the year when the Emperor Basil II left the empire in possession of lands from what is now Iraq into Southern Italy.  Borders were secure and the Empire prospered.  There followed a golden generation, when the Byzantines got flabby.   They permitted large landholders to take over tracts formerly occupied by people who supplied the border troops and didn’t pay enough attention to security.  When the threat did come, they were not united enough or clever enough. After  the Turks wiped out much of the professional core of the Byzantine army and captured the Emperor at Manzikert in 1071, Anatolia opened to the Turkish conquest and colonization.  The Empire never really regained its footing.  

Posted by Broadnax at 05:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I-Tunes have been a great thing for those who like university lectures.   You can download full courses that would have been almost impossible to find before, or at least very expensive. The one I am listening to now is Donald Kagan’s history of ancient Greece from Yale University  I have admired Kagan’s books and I find that his lectures are equally well presented and prepared. 

Greek history is something I knew very well, but it is surprising how much you forget and how much you can still learn from a basic survey course taught by a good professor.   It is also interesting how my perspectives have changed over the years since I studied the Greeks in graduate school.  

Experience is the big difference.  I studied history back then w/o experiencing much of it myself.   Human events look a lot different after you have been involved more of them.   Things seem a lot neater back then.   As far as I understood, leaders made decision and people followed them.  I now understand that leaders often make unclear or confused decisions, or they don’t make them at all.  Even when they are clear and definitive, the details get mixed up by the time they move to the lower layers.   And even if the communications are clear, their followers often don’t follow.   

Many times the writing of the history itself is what makes sense of the events.  Historians provide frameworks that sometimes don’t really fit, but still may be persistent.   Thucydides, the great historian of the Peloponnesian War, influenced the writing of history and ideas about democracy for 2500 years.  He evidently tried to be fair, but in his act of choosing made the narrative what it became.  The father of history, Herodotus, told many of the stories we still remember.   We probably would not have heard of the 300 Spartans and they certainly would not be making movies about them today, if not for the compelling story told by Herodotus and many of the quotations he used.   When the Persians threatened that their arrows would blot out the sun, the Spartans responded that they would fight in the shade.   That sticks.  

Thucydides was a participant in some of the events he wrote about.  He had been a man of politics.  He had led an expedition in battle.  Herodotus was also a man of the world.  Not so much modern historians.   I wonder how much a scholar can understand the events they write about if their only experience is vicarious.   Sometimes shit just happens.  There is no good explanation.   A scholar tends not to like this.

Kagan addressed the problem of agriculture in Greece.  He mentioned that it was a difficult area, long debated by historians. I know that, since I wrote my master’s thesis on the reforms of Solon.   (It was a very bad thesis and I hope it has been lost, BTW).   Kagan mentioned Victor Davis Hanson on several occasions.   Hanson is a classical scholar, but his insights come from the fact that he is also a farmer.  Few historians have that kind of background and it was this unique background that gave Hanson his insights.  Some things make perfect sense to someone with experience.  For example, why do you grow a variety of crops on a small farm?  Because you want to take advantage of all the diversity of soils and seasons.   Sometimes the “optimal” crop just won’t grow.  Beyond that, if you have just one crop, you will have too much to do at some short times during the year and than almost nothing to do the rest of the time.   It is obvious once somebody says it.   Most Greeks were small farmers.  The rhythms of the season influenced their history.   It is good to understand them. 

For example, it is easy for a marauding army to burn a wheat crop, but only at certain seasons.   Greek farmer-soldiers usually had to be close to home at this time to protect and harvest their own crops.  Spartans were an exception to this, since they lived off Helot-run estates and didn’t do any farming themselves. (or any work at all besides war)  It is nearly impossible to kill an olive tree.    An invading army can chop at them, but they sprout back.  Ancient historians sometimes refer to these things and/or to weather conditions, but a lot of it goes clear over the heads of any historian or student who has not experienced such thing.

I wonder how much else we all miss.

Posted by Broadnax at 05:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Alex and I went to a lecture at the Smithsonian about the Byzantine Empire by Lars Brownworth.  It was a good lecture and the guy had very good humor timing but he also made some excellent points.  

One of the key points is how the Byzantines have been disrespected for centuries.   Even the name “Byzantine” is pejorative.  The Byzantines referred to themselves as Romans, which made sense since they were indeed the heirs to the Roman Empire in an unbroken line of history.  Some of it is the responsibly of one man – Edward Gibbon, whose monumental book “the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” has set the concept of Rome for more than 200 years.   But in many ways he was merely reflecting a general Western prejudice against the East.

It seems to make sense that we could call the end of the Roman Empire when the city of Rome fell, but this is not the case.  By the time the actual city of Rome fell to Barbarians in 476 it had no longer really been the capital of the Empire for some times.  The Western Empire was ruled from the more defensible Ravenna.   The more important Eastern part of the Empire was ruled from Constantinople.  By that time also the Roman Empire had occupied the Mediterranean world for more than 600 years.  It had become a single cultural entity a lot like the U.S. in North America.  California or Nebraska is not less American than Virginia or Massachusetts because. 

Take that back in terms of our own history and we are back to 1409, almost a century before the European discovery of America.   Henry V had not yet become king of England and – BTW – the Eastern Roman Empire was still in existence.   That was a long time ago, so you can imagine that a citizen of the Roman Empire had no real concept of anything before Rome, or maybe had about the same feeling as we would about Henry IV (for most people i.e. none). 

Anyway it was one cultural region and the Mediterranean united the region, not divided it.   North Africa was as much part of this Roman world as Italy.   We forget about that today because we think in terms of East and West and we think of the Muslims in the Middle East as natural and native. BTW, many mosques are pattered after Byzantine churches (especially Hagia Sophia, that you see in the picture) and the Muslim world owes a lot to the Eastern Roman Empire in general, as we do. 

If you read other parts of my blog, you know I am a fan of the great empire of Rome.   The Byzantines preserved and transmitted the ancient heritage to us.  Byzantine texts and scholars helped spark the renaissance.  We should pay more attention to their history.

I think it is great that Smithsonian sponsors these lectures and that hundreds of people come to listen to them.  

Posted by Broadnax at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thomas Jefferson was a remarkable guy.  The thought deeply about almost everything and made the world a better place.  On his tombstone he wanted to be remembered for founding the University of Virginia and authoring the statutes of religious freedom of Virginia the Declaration of Independence.  Any one of those accomplishments would make him a great man.   He didn’t even mention being president of the United States.

We first visited here in 1985.  Chrissy was pregnant with Mariza and I remember thinking that it would be nice if our expected child could become part of this legacy by going to Thomas Jefferson’s university.  She did.   So besides his contributions to our freedom and prosperity, I have a very personal reason to thank Jefferson.

Monticello is owned and run by a private foundation that makes its money from ticket sales and donations.  The foundation supports historians, archeologists and researchers in addition to maintaining the house and grounds.  

Alex and I talked about the pros and cons of a private foundation.  It seems like a place like Monticello should be government owned, but why?  A private foundation is more flexible and can often do a better job.  Many of our best American universities are private and they are the best in the world. A foundation works out just fine for Mr. Jefferson's home.  

Jefferson always considered himself a farmer.  He grew tobacco and wheat as cash crops and produced vegetables, apples and other fruit for consumption on the farm.  Like other plantations, Monticello was self-sufficient when possible.  They made their own bricks from local clays. Carpenters from the estate made furniture from the wood of the local forests.  Jefferson owned 5000 acres, which gave him a diverse landscape to draw from.  Below is Jefferson's vegetable garden.  It is set up to take advantage of warming winter sun.

Jefferson was an active manager of his estate. Washington's Mt Vernon actually turned a profit, not so Jefferson's Monticello.  The difference was top management.  Washington didn't have Jefferson's intellect, but he had practical abilities.  Jefferson was an idea man.   And his house - and our country - is full of his ideas, but he was not a good businessman. He died deep in debt and his heirs had to sell Monticello.

Of course, Jefferson didn't do much of the real work. The paradox of Jefferson the hero of freedom is Jefferson the slave owner.  Slavery had existed since the beginning of history, but by Jefferson's time the Western world was beginning to see the moral contradictions of the practice.  Jefferson shared the revulsion of slavery in theory, but couldn't bring himself to take the practical and personal steps against it.  I guess he was just a true intellectual in that respect and unfortunately remained a man of his times. 

In any case, Jefferson's contributions far outweigh the negatives of his personal life. All human being are flawed.  They make their contributions based on what they do best, not what they do poorly.  

We Americans were truly blessed during our founders generation.  Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton & Madison all were greats.  But the remarkable thing is how their skills and even their personalities complemented each other, even when they fought and hated each other. Their differences created harmony and their joint efforts filled in for some serious individual flaws.

The American revolution is one of the few in world history that actually worked (i.e. didn't end in a bloodbath followed by despotism). We can thank good luck & favorable geography.  But the biggest factor was the moral authority, courage and intellect of our first leaders.  We are still living off their legacy. 

Above is the visitor's center that opened last year. In the spirit of Thomas Jefferson, it takes advantage of natural forces and uses appropriate technology.  This is a green building, earth sheltered, energy efficient and heated & cooled to a large extent by geotheromal energy.  The wood and natural stone construction is simple, but elegant.  I like it.

Posted by Broadnax at 08:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Alex and I visited the battlefields associated with the Petersburg Campaign and Robert E. Lee’s final retreat.   Petersburg gave the world a taste of what trench warfare would be like.  You go from Federal earthworks to Confederate earthworks.   As in the World War I, the armies were racing around the flanks.  It soon became a grim slog, a war of attrition.  The South could not win this kind of war. They just didn't have enough men or materiel. 

Above is Alex in front of some of the earthworks.  Below is a reconstruction. 

Lee was trying to escape to the west, where he could hook up with General Joe Johnston, while Union forces tried to bottle them up.   Lincoln’s fear was that the war would go on and maybe turn into a guerrilla war.  The Petersburg campaign has that endless war feeling anyway.  They were regularly taking thousands of casualties each DAY.  The soldiers were becoming more accustomed to war and much more cynical. They came to understand that the war in Virginia was ending and nobody wanted to be the last man killed.  There is a good novel about this period called "Last Full Measure" that captures some of the feeling.

Above is a soldiers' house.  It looks like a playhouse, but it held four men.   Below is what is left of the crater. Union miners from Pennsylvania made a tunnel under the Rebel positions and blew up Confederate fortifications.  Unfortunately, the attack didn't go well.  Union troops poured into the crater and many were trapped there. It looks bigger in real life.  You also need to remember that there has been almost 150 years of erosion and filling in.

America’s Civil War was remarkable in its ending.   In France, terror followed revolution.  The Russians and Chinese murdered millions of people in similar situations.  In fact, protracted Civil Wars almost NEVER end without significant retribution and bloodletting.   I think that I can safely say that the ending of the American Civil War was unique in human history.   The victors were generous and the vanquished honorable.  Because it happened as it did, we think of it as inevitable, but the decisions made in April 1865 were not foreordained.

Grant allowed Lee’s soldiers to keep their side arms and their horses.  Robert E. Lee instructed his men to go home and become good citizens.  Most did.   

I know that some scholars talk about the “myth” of reconciliation and point to the problems that persisted. Some people still hold a grudge for Sherman's march through Georgia and the Carolinas. You have to ask the “compared to what?” question.  In most countries, more people die violently AFTER the wars.  Not in America.  Rebel leaders are usually executed.  The lucky ones are only imprisoned or exiled.  Not here. Can you imagine Cuba exiled welcomes back by the regime?  Russian exiles lured back were usually murdered.  

The Civil War was the worst war in American history.  The destruction was horrendous.  Yet after it ended … it ended.  April 1865 was probably the most remarkable month in world history.  This just doesn’t happen very often – or at all.   I think we should take time to think about this.  If others had learned from the Federal-Confederate example, we might have avoided most of the carnage of the 20th Century.   

Above is a battlefield at Five Forks.  When the fight turned into a battle of attrition, most of the engagements were small, but this was a key turning point. Phil Sheridan defeated troops under the unlucky George Pickett, who was off having a fish dinner and didn't return until it was too late. The collapse of the Confederate position at Five Forks led directly to Lee's decision to abandon Richmond & Petersburg.  It was the beginning of the end for the Army of Northern Virginia and for the Southern Confederacy, and so Five Forks is sometimes called the Confederate Waterloo.  There is nothing much to see here today.  The trees and fields have grown back.  It is hard to believe that war was ever close to this peaceful, bucolic place.

Posted by Broadnax at 07:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I first saw Indian mounds when I was in 4^th grade.  We went up to Lizard Mound State Park on field trip.  It scared me for days.  They had one mound opened and inside was a skeleton mounded up.  In my childish way, I figured that skeleton would follow me since I desecrated the mound by looking at it.   A lot of movies have a plot sort of like that.   I think that is the basic premise of “Poltergeists”

Now the mounds are no longer scary, just interesting, which is why I went to visit the Hopewell Mounds near Chillicothe, Ohio.   There was a whole mound building culture about 1500 years ago.   The mounds in Ohio were loosely affiliated with those in Wisconsin in that they had a trading network. 

I won’t go into too much detail about the mounds.  You can Google them.   The mound building stopped around 1500 years ago.  Nobody is sure why.   The leading theories have to do with climate change (it got cooler around that time) and maybe just the usual exhaustion and overpopulation.

The mounds are now grass covered, but according to the notes the used to be covered with gravel, making them more like little pyramids.   Not all the mounds are burial mounds.  The whole complex has a earthen berm around it.

Besides the mounds, there is not much in the town of Chillicothe.  It has the usual chain restaurants.    The town’s big industry is a paper mill.   One of the novelties was this expressway.   It is like a drive through Seven-Eleven.    There was a woman inside who brings the stuff right to your car as you drive through.  It looks like it was originally a car wash.

Posted by Broadnax at 06:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As I mentioned in the previous post, I went to the museum with my sister.  I have changed a lot, but stayed the same in key aspects.  The change I don’t like it the disappearance of the “Trip Through Time.”  You used to start with earth geology and go right through to the modern age.   I recall you could look in on cavemen drawing on the cave walls, see Roman house and a medieval counting house.  When you got through all history until about 1600, when you wandered over to  America and ultimately to the streets of old Milwaukee.  Yes, the impression you got at the Milwaukee Museum was that all human history culminated in Milwaukee of around 1900. 

The “Streets of Old Milwaukee” exhibits are still the same.  It is kind of a “Twilight Zone” moment to see the old lady on the rocking chair, an eternal look of bemused befuddlement on her face.   She sat there when I visited with my school class in sixth grade and there is a good chance she will abide on that porch long after I am gone.

The Museum is 125 years old this year and they featured the kind of exhibit you would have seen at that time.   I kind of like the old fashioned display.  The Victorians self-confidently stood astride the world and brought back pieces of their discoveries for others to see.  Their world-view – at least those who stocked useums - included a strong idea of progress and evolution.  They saw things in linear fashion.  Privative man advanced to become modern man.   Backward peoples and cultures were just earlier stages of the European civilization, which stood at the apex of history. 

The whole idea of progress was shaken by the carnage in the trenches of World War I and then virtually destroyed by the various horrors of the 20th Century. The wars and dictatorships corrupted human virtues like courage, duty and honor.  It was a tragedy, but we should not throw out the whole system.   The idea of linear progress has many flaws, but the judgment-free multicultural relativism that has generally replaced it is not a workable outlook in the long run.   A hierarchy of progress does not exist, but the sundry random, planned and pernicious aspects of societies worldwide are not all created equal. 

Some adaptations are better than others and that means that some cultures are better than others for particular situations.   Multiculturalism is dishonest conceptually.  Cultures are constantly changing and adapting.   Presumably, we should all borrow the most appropriate aspects of any culture we encounter and abandon those of our own that are no longer working out.    In a context of cultural contact, you won’t maintain multiple cultures, salad bowl style.  Rather the cultures will mix and merge creating something richer and fuller of options than any of the ingredients.  But the original cultures will atrophy.  They will not and should not be maintained, except in the museum sense, much like the unchanging and un-living old lady endlessly rocking on the porch in the streets of old Milwaukee.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I love my American heritage of freedom and I believe, maybe naively, that liberty is the natural state of humankind, even if most humans still do not enjoy it and we face real world constraints on our actions worldwide. 

In the 1980s, the communist empires were cracking.  President Reagan needed to negotiate with the regimes withholding freedom from the people of Eastern Europe, but he also never forgot whose side we were on.    We negotiated with the rulers, but stood with the people.  Many people in the U.S. questioned this stand.   They said it was empty rhetoric at best, or maybe even dangerous.  

What we say matters.  The people of Eastern Europe did not consider it empty rhetoric and it turned out that we achieved greater arms reductions and security than anybody imagined before, so it was neither empty nor dangerous.   President Reagan quoted a Russian proverb, “trust but verify.”   There could be a corollary, negotiate but don’t forget your values and remember that the ruling regime is not the people. 

Today the Iranian people are boldly standing up to the regime that has oppressed them for thirty years.   Some are dying at its hands, and yet they persist.   The rulers of Iraq are more ruthless than the Polish communists were in the 1980s, but the principle is the same.   Our place is with the people of Iran.  They are not asking that we intervene or meddle.  They just want us to state unequivocally where our own values and ideals stand.   If we didn’t do the right thing in 1953, maybe we can do the right thing now.

It was twenty years ago THIS MONTH that Poles elected a non-communist government.   Most pundits thought it was a silly dream that would just be crushed, as communist authorities had crushed these sorts of things before.   But it endured.   The crack in the communist wall that started in Poland spread throughout the whole benighted region.    Five months later the Berlin Wall, that horrible symbol of hate and oppression that had stood for almost thirty years, was torn down by the people.   Two years after that, the Soviet Union just dissolved and communism, which had ruled so ruthlessly for generations died with a whimper so small that we weren’t even sure it was dead.  

I know a lot less about Iran that I do about Poland and I don’t want to overdo the historical parallels.    But I do believe that if history does not repeat, it often rhymes.    The Iranians are heirs to the ancient Persian traditions of learning and tolerance.   In many ways the Mullahs are an alien anomaly that doesn’t fit the illustrious Iranian culture any more than communism fit Poland.   Stalin said that imposing communism on Poland as like trying to put a saddle on a cow.  He didn’t mean it as a compliment and he did indeed impose it anyway, but culture does matter and old habits have a way of reasserting themselves, especially habits of the heart.  Persian states, ancient, medieval and modern were often models of tolerance, learning and good government of their times.  It was Cyrus the Persian who ended the Babylonian captivity of the Jews.   Let’s hope the Persian habits of tolerance and openness are indeed habits of the heart.   And let’s make sure we know – and they know and the world knows - that we stand for their freedom and ours.  

BTW – since this is so many a Internet-reported affair, you can support the people of Iran by asking Google to make their daily logo reflect the Iranian struggle. 

http://whereistheirvote.x10hosting.com

Also please check out these pictures.

Posted by Broadnax at 07:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

When one of my computers crashed a couple years ago, I thought I lost a whole set of pictures from trips to Istanbul and Rome, as well as a good many Warsaw photos.    Well … I did back them up on a disk, which I came across today.   I have been having a good time looking through the slide show. 

When I thought I lost the pictures, I tried to write up the lost memory.   The text is below, but now I have included some of the formerly lost pictures.

We lost the computer memory that included my pictures of the trip Alex and I took to Rome in February 2002.  I enjoyed looking at them from time to time.  I had a really good time with Alex that time.  He was interested in learning and enthusiastic about Rome. 

Maybe a picture is worth a thousand words and I can write that much about it.

The flight down was not bad except that we sat next to a woman who seemed to have a cold.  We did not get sick, but it was unpleasant to sit next to her.  Coming down into the airport, the thing you notice is umbrella pines.  I was hoping to see a little of Rome, but the airport is far away.

It was hard to find our way around from the Rome airport.  We finally got our bearing and took the train to Rome.  I remember the train was very comfortable.  We went past a lot of rural slums.  Lots of gypsies lived along the tracks.   They had little trailer villages surrounded by garbage.   I was surprised how warm and kind of desert like it was.  It was a little like S. California or maybe even some of the less arid parts of Arizona.

Our hotel was out of town.  We took the train and then a taxi.  It was a Holiday Inn Express and it had a free shuttle to the subway.  Next door was a big supermarket, which was good to have for coke and snacks. 

On the first night, we walked to this commercial area where there were shops and restaurants.  It was very lively and the weather was warm, very different from February in Poland. Restaurants were not open in the early evening.  Italians don’t eat until late.  As I recall, we had to eat at a Chinese place, since that was all that was open.

We got up early the next day and caught the subway into town.  It was dreary and gray. The subway was depressing and crowded.  It seems like the start of a bad day.  It wasn’t.  As we came out of the subway station, the sun came out with that fresh look after a rain and we saw the Coliseum, behind was the Forum. It was a magic moment.  Alex was excited.  I had pictures of him at the Coliseum and in various places in the Forum.   He is skinny and wearing my red coat. It is too big for him.

That day we also went to the Circus Maximus and the Palatine and Capitoline Hill.  The Palatine is where the emperors had their homes.  Now it is park like around ruins.  We walked a lot that day. 

The next day we went along the Adrian wall and downtown.  The most interesting was the Pantheon.  I had a picture of the sunlight coming in though the hole in the top of the roof.  We also saw Hadrian’s column.  There was a nice picture of Alex in front of it.   The Tiber is a small river, but it is nice nearby.  Lots of sycamore trees.

We walked all along and came to the Vatican.  It is very clean and neat.  There are lots of things to see.  The Vatican museum has many of those famous works of art that you always see in books.  We also saw the Sistine Chapel.  There were big crowds.  We went to St. Peters.  I had various pictures.  It is an impressive place.   It rained hard that day.  My Goretex did okay.  Poor Alex was soaked worse, but he didn’t complain. 

The next day we went to outskirts of town.  Very nice gardens.  We also went to the Via Appia.  It is very pretty with interesting ruins all along.  This was the major highway to and from Rome and the the road where Jesus met St Peter as he was fleeing Rome during Nero's pogrom.  Peter asks Jesus Quo Vadis (where are you going).  Jesus said he was going to Rome to be with his people. Peter went back to Rome where he was martyred by being crucified upside down. 

Posted by Broadnax at 09:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Most people are uncomfortable with the exercise of authority and they usually resent those who do.   Lord Acton’s observation about the corrupting nature of power still applies.  ("Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."

Nevertheless, establishing order requires authority and w/o basic order, nothing much gets done.  Power need not be overly coercive and the most effective leaders are those who welcome the participation of other.    I have written on this subject on many occasions.  But sometimes you come to a bottom line where a decision must be made.   In those times, a leader who refuses to make the hard decisions is shirking his duty. 

  Leaders who refuse to lead are the leading cause of unhappiness in the workplace, IMO.   Worst of all are the guys who won’t lead, but like to boss.  Next worse are the ones who hide among the rules.  Rules apply to most situations and all routine decisions.  You need leadership for those times when they don’t. Leadership requires the exercise of judgment, which will always seem arbitrary to those who disagree.   

I learned an interesting lesson from an exercise in my leadership seminar last year.  Reference this link for details.  I don’t think it was the one intended.   I was chosen as a group leader by a more or less random and unfair procedure.   In the exercise, points were distributed based on rank but were also earned by individual and group effort.  I determined that our group could score lots more points if we cooperated and with my two leadership colleagues, we created a system that distributed the points fairly.  The facilitators were surprised and (I think) a little chagrined that we were scoring so many points w/o dissention.   We soon got dissention, when another group used the rules to seize power, despite the fact that it cost us all points.   The lesson I took was that the essential task of power is to maintain it.   Nasty and Machiavellian as it might seem, the simple fact is that you cannot accomplish your goals (even if your goal is to pass along power to someone else) if you are deposed.  Weak leadership does nobody any good.

I am reading a book Alex gave me for Christmas called Rubicon.  It is about the fall of the Roman Republic.   The author is very talented, but he evidently doesn’t like the Romans.  His description characterizes them almost as an infestation that infected and ultimately destroyed the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean.   Their virtues of perseverance, bravery and patriotism are seen as merely enablers of their cruelty.   A couple months ago I finished a book called Empires of Trust, which left almost the opposite impression.  I have been reading Roman history for a long time.  They are both right.   The Romans established the greatest Empire in history and brought order, a degree of justice & prosperity to the lands of Europe, Africa and Asia that surrounded the Mediterranean and now are thirty-six separate nations.  They were brave, resolute, consequent and practical.  They were also cruel, mendacious, superstitious and capricious.  In other words, they displayed all the usual attributes of power.

I admire the Romans, with all their faults.   Our world is very much based on theirs.  Our American constitution embodies many of the lessons of Rome, only better.  I believe in progress and that sometimes we can learn from history.   We learned from the Romans and we can be better than they were because we stand on their shoulders.  The fatal flaw of the Roman organization was their messy succession procedure.  Augustus established the principate (became emperor) through stealth and maintained it with the fiction that he was merely the first among equals.   He is recognized as a political genius and a great man for his achievement and it was probably the only way to pull it off.   But it avoided some of the responsibly of power and made each transition an unpredictable adventure which often involved murder and the exercise of military muscle.

The Romans were hated and justifiably feared because of their power.  They deprived the people of the Mediterranean of political freedom, what we would today call national self-determination.   If you annoyed the Romans, you paid a high price.   But the Roman Empire provided a great deal of liberty, tolerance and personal autonomy.  (Of course all ancient societies were horrible and oppressive by modern standards.   Remember that progress thing.  But compared with the available alternatives, you were probably better off living in the Roman Empire than anyplace else in the world at the time.)

Above - Romans perfected the dome and pioneered the use of concrete in buildings.

Most of my ancestors were among the barbarians who destroyed the Empire and I imagine my grandfather many generations removed scratching himself in the Forum trying w/o success to figure out how all that water got to the fountains.  The Empire fell in 476 in the West (although it hung on until 1453 in Constantinople) but the idea of Rome persisted and the whole world is heir to their achievement.  You can see it in architecture from Shanghai to Seattle.  Washington looks a lot like a Roman city.  The Romans were not very original, but they were experts at assimilating and developing ideas from a diversity of sources.  They developed what became our concepts of rule of law, citizenship, the concept of a republic and separation of powers, so we Americans are especially indebted to them.   Our Founding Fathers knew what we sometimes forget.   

Posted by Broadnax at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was watching the History Channel today about Neanderthals.  Back when I was in school, we learned that they were a separate species from modern humans and that it was likely that anatomically modern humans were hostile to them and maybe wiped them out either through competition, conflict or a combination of both.   The Neanderthals were portrayed as brutes, who lacked the skills and organizational abilities that made modern humans so successful.   Now the Neanderthals have been upgraded.   According to scientists on the show, these guys not only were among our ancestors, but may have contributed the gene that makes it possible for us to learn language – the quintessential human trait. 

Science is not neutral.  It is embedded in current culture and sensibility.   Even if scientists answer all the questions in an unbiased way, the questions themselves are heavily influenced by the surrounding society.   The original theories of the Neanderthal were postulated in the 19th Century, in an age when conflict and competition was accepted as a part of nature.   Today being cooperative and inclusive is in style, so it should come as no surprise that we now see our long lost cousins in kinder and gentler terms.   I don’t know what the Neanderthals were like.    Nobody does.   We I do know is that our speculations often depend more on us than on what they were really like.

BTW – a fascinating book on the subject is Before the Dawn, which traces human prehistory by studying changes in our DNA.   The interesting thing is that evolution didn’t end; it is just not operating to the same sorts of characteristics.    Evolution doesn’t always go in the direction of improvement.  Fitness in the Darwinian sense just means that you contribute more genes to the next generation.  To accomplish this in the natural environment, you usually needed to be stronger, faster, smarter or very lucky, but the pressures have abated.   By Darwinian standards, the fittest person in history may be that woman who just had eight kids, on top of the seven she already had. 

Another change in interpretation has to do with dinosaurs.  I learned that giants were clumsy, lumbering reptiles.  Now we hear that some we agile and maybe were warm blooded with feathers.  Who knew?  Most of today's real cool dinosaurs, such as raptors, were largely unknown when I was a kid.

Above are little dinosaurs? 

BTW - Chimps are very agressive, as we were reminded by the recent chip attack.  In the wild about 1/3 of male chips die from violence. Primitive man was/is violent too.  That is our heritage that we struggle to overcome with our civilization.  There is no such thing as a noble savage (and Rosseau sucked anyway.)

Posted by Broadnax at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The good news is that cable television has resulted in a proliferation of good programs about science, history and politics.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, lots of moving pictures must be worth millions of words, but the pictures may be out of context and if you count up the total number of actual words in an hour on History Channel, you could probably fill only a couple of pages. (Re pictures - I watched "the Real Abraham Lincoln."  It featured a reenactment of the young Abe.  But the guy has a beard.  Lincoln didn't grow the beard until 1860.) TV spends a lot of time repeating scenes of collapsing buildings, burning fires or horsemen galloping, w/o explaining the significance.    The shallowness of the medium is the bad news.

This extends beyond the series of gripping but unenlightening images.    I also notice a general decline in rigor.  Maybe it is a general phenomenon, but you notice it clearly on TV.   Instead of trying to evaluate evidence and sources, the programs sort of throw it all out there with equal credibility.   This would be okay with a written source or among scholars, but the television images don’t provide enough background or references for the viewers to evaluate veracity, even assuming most audience members had the background or inclination to do so.

It is bad enough when we have dueling “experts” but it gets worse when many programs seem to put oral histories on par with real ones.   All histories are subject to interpretation and just because something is written down does not mean that it is true.   But oral history must be even more carefully evaluated because it is literally subject to change w/o notice.  

The strength of written sources is that they freeze impressions and the facts at the point of writing.   Facts don’t improve with age.   An earlier recollection is more factual than a later one and a primary account is better than a secondary one.  An investigator can compare a written record against subsequent ones to detect enhancements or omissions.    It makes it harder to change the story.   It is also possible to nail down the assertion, so that you can check them against other evidence.   

Oral histories do not suffer these constraints.  When confronted with disconfirming evidence, an oral history can just change.   The danger to the integrity of the story comes not only from deception, but also from innocent rationalization.   People tend to want to fit their stories into current realities.   They smooth the edges to make them conform to the present needs.    

This story changing is most often a social process.   Stories change in the telling and retelling and in a short time they come to reflect the aspirations, interests, prejudices & desires of the group more than reality.  Oral history has great value because it tells you a lot about the people telling the story; it tells you less about the actual historical events on which is it ostensibly based.   It has to be handled carefully. 

Of coures all history starts off as oral.  It is the raw material.  Beer starts off as barely and hops, but it requires some processing before you drink it.  The same goes for oral history.  If you take oral history from those who actually experienced an event, you can check facts.   It is helpful to compare stories of individuals who have not communicated with each other much since the events in question.   It gets harder when you get into the second or third generation of the story.     At that point it has probably become myth.  It may be based on the truth but it is not truth.

Myth is usually more interesting and plausible than actual historical events.  Heroes are stronger and braver.  Villains are scarier.   Causes are more just.  Events make more sense and often presage big developments of the future.   They make better narratives precisely because they have been edited and enhanced by the people who have told and retold the stories. 

The compelling nature of oral history and the resulting myths makes them especially dangerous on history television.   They are almost always more interesting and more easily recreated in dramatic reenactments.   It gets worse in our PC world.  Many historical programs these days portray the confrontation between literate and pre-literate societies.    The literate societies have historical records that can be critically evaluated and parsed.   You get the warts and all portraits.   Given the critical nature of this inquiry, we often end up with a mostly warts portrait.  On the other side, we have the myths property altered in light of subsequent events.    

Below are Alex and Chrissy at "America's Stonehenge" in New Hampshire.  We visited it when we lived nearby in Londonderry.  It is worth seeing but not worth going to see.   The History Channel featured it as a "mystery".   It is a mystery - a mystery why some clown would pile those rocks, but otherwise it is clearly not ancient.   But a TV show with lots of cool angles and supositions can make it seem so.

Modern historians are understandably frustrated.  They want to write about pre-literate societies and they want to write about conditions of the common people in all past worlds.   Unfortunately, pre-literate people don’t write at all and the common people didn’t write much until recently.    I don’t know a precise number, but I doubt that more than 5% of all the ancient Roman texts still exist, so we start out with a small sample.   None of the authors are representative of their societies, in that most people couldn’t write, so you already have an elite enterprise.   There are no significant female historians from the Roman period and the Romans were unenthusiastic about letting their subject people write critical accounts of their rule.   Beyond all that, most the writers were not interested in the doings of the common people, male or female, Roman or not.  When the sturdy yeomen are featured, it is usually just a didactic example.  Victor Davis Hanson wrote a good book on people working the land, who always made up the vast majority of the population, called “The Other Greeks," but there just are not many good sources.  

Posted by Broadnax at 10:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Below is George Washington on Boston Commons. Washington set the tone for the presidency.  He was the indespensible man, so often talked about but actually so rare in history.  

Most Federal employees working in DC don’t have to come in tomorrow, inauguration day.   It would be literally impossible for most of us to get to work anyway.   I don’t know how many people will come in for the inauguration, but it will certainly be enough to clog the Metro.   I thought about going down to try to get a glimpse of the activity, but decided against it.   I would just become part of the crowd problem.  Besides, I figure I will get a better view watching TV.

Below is the stone wall in Fredericksburg.  The battle that took place there in 1862 was bloody, with the Confederates shooting from behind the stone wall.  Nevertheless, two years later, during a terrible civil war, we held our elections on schedule.  Lincoln won a second term.  Lincoln was another indispensible man.  He was remarkable not only for winning the civil war, but for his profound generosity at the end.  Read his Second Inaugural Address.

People who know me are aware of my leanings and I don’t talk about politics on this site, but I can voice support for my president.   All Americans wish President Obama success.   I am glad that he seems to be so popular worldwide.  Although I think that anti-Americanism goes beyond our political leaders or our policies, it doesn’t hurt to have a leader who is personally popular. 

I listened to an interview on NPR this afternoon with a guy whose parents were Black Panthers.    He said that he distrusted Martin Luther King when he was a young man because he thought that such peaceful and respectful tactics couldn’t work.    But as he got older, he saw the error of his ways.   Still, he said, he was surprised when Obama won in almost completely white Iowa and he was astounded when he won the presidency of the United States.    If you think back to 1968, it is truly astonishing. 

Below is the old fashioned train in Durango, Colorado.  The genius of our Constitution allowed our republic to expand from sea to sea w/o compromising our democracy.  The railroad and telegraph helped tie the continent together.

It makes me wonder how much better the world could be if some of the violent militants around the world had chosen a more peaceful strategy of change. Some of these generations long armed struggles make no objective sense if you are looking for real results.  Of course, I think the difference may be that King was trying to help his followers become part of the American dream. Non-violent tactics require a fundamental respect for and belief in the humanity of your opponents.  Many international militants have more bloody revolutionary aims and are less loving of their opponents.  They are not really looking for mutual solutions.

Each new president is a new beginning.   That is another astonishing thing.  We have become so accustomed to it that we forget how astonishing it is – 220 years of successful transitions, even during the civil war.   Few governments in world history have that kind of record of success.  The U.S. is considered a young country, but we have the second oldest government in the world and the oldest living constitution.   I expect the best is yet to come.

Posted by Broadnax at 07:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Herodotus

Washington Post featured a report from a guy who toured the world of Herodotus.    This is the link. 

Herodotus was the world’s first historian.    Of course people wrote about historical events before his time, but they didn’t think in the historical sense of trying to connect disparate events into a meaningful whole.   For the ancient pre-Greek civilizations, history was just a series of bragging press releases, with pharaohs, kings and warlords exaggerating and sometimes completely fabrication triumphs.  There was no understanding of greater causality.  They also looked for supernatural explanations to all human affairs and/or are accounts of the work of God on earth.   That is, BTW, is what differentiates Herodotus’ work from the Book of Samuel, which some scholars have called the first history, or from something like the Iliad, which has a narrative and talks re historical events.    

Herodotus was often not accurate. That is not why he was the “first historian” He accepted all sorts of hear-say and outright myths. His was also a very intensely personal work and he makes little or no attempt to screen for his own bias.  This is one reason it is so much fun to read his work. But he did seek to understand the context of his events in his inquiry, which is the more precise translation of his word history. 

Herodotus is great literature, but my favorite ancient historian is Thucydides.   His Melian Dialogues and the book about the Syracuse campaign should be required reading for anyone trying to understand world affairs.   It is interesting how you can see progress in the writing of history.   I like Thucydides better, but Polybius is a better historian, because he had the advantage of the experience.   (Polybius put the rise of Rome in the greater context.)  Today, standing on the shoulders of these giants and others who came after, the average graduate student is a better historian than any of them.    We have the gift of being able to take the best of the past.    We should never squander that gift. 

Improvements in how historians could assess events are examples of technologies of the mind or technologies of thought.  

We easily recognize technologies of the physical world.  Using technology, a weakling driving a bulldozer can do more than the strongest man working by hand.  We all remember the story of John Henry and the steam drill.   But we overlook the more important technologies of thought & mind.   The most obvious are in hard sciences and subjects like math.   The greatest mathematicians of any time before around 1600 could not pass an introductory statistics and quantitative methods class.   The tools we use today just were not yet invented.  But this goes for others things as well.  

It is also true for cultures.   Culture is a form of technology in the broad sense.   It gives people the package of techniques and skills they need to adapt to the world and its challenges.  Some packages work better than others.    I am talking about “small c” culture too.  Firms have cultures.   That is why some companies can consistently outperform others.  

Below is Jarash in what is now Jordan.  The Romans knew how to bring in water.  The skills were lost and it went from thriving city to impressive ruins in a couple of generations.

Culture is the mystery ingredient that frustrates the predictions of the data-obsessed analysts.   It is usually the explanation why the same sorts of investments in plants and equipment prosper in one place and flounders in another. And an unwillingness to address the problem culture lies at the bottom of most failures to institute meaningful change.   You can supply all the physical technologies you want; they are worthless and even harmful without the technologies of the mind to integrate them into the cultures.   I talked in an earlier post re the various sorts of barbarians unable to figure out the Roman technologies that made it possible for cities to prosper in arid or hostile environments.     This is a lesson of history we should learn.   The great thing about taking lessons from ancient history is that much of the politics and passion has dissipated so we can be a little more objective. 

Anyway, Herodotus is truly entertaining.   I would love to do study tour like the one described in the report.   I used to read Herodotus to the kids as bedtime stories.   There are lots of good lesson that go with the good fun.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

You used to have to travel to get special things.   It used to be fun to shop at the duty free shops.  Globalization has changed all that.    Now in America you can get almost anything from almost anywhere.  There are loses that go with this gain of globalization and diversity.   It takes a lot of the fun out of discovery when you discover the same stuff wherever you go.   

There are still some things that you can't get easily even in America.  These are mostly things that don’t travel well.   Bread is a good example.   Bread must be baked locally and I have never been able to find European quality bread in the U.S.    I don’t really understand why that should be the case, but it is.  Cheese and sausages are also like that. Sausage made in Milwaukee is better than the Euro variety, except for salami.  French soft cheese is better than the same varieties in the U.S.  We also make great hard cheeses and these travel well.  Not so the soft varieties, IMO.  A Frenchman once told me that it was because of American health regulations and practices.   We require a level of sanitation that is beyond actual health requirements and some of the good flavors come from types of "impuritites".  The same goes for Polish ham.  Ham tastes better when the pigs get a variety of food, i.e. slop.    

It used to be that beer didn’t travel well, but modern packaging has changed that.   Good tap beer is still a local pleasure, however.    I think that comes more from the psychological aspects than reality.  Although I doubt I could pass a blind taste test, the same beer tastes better in pleasant surroundings served in the right kind of glass. 

They have a unique kind of vodka in Poland called Zubrowka.   It is what you see in the picture.   It is named after the bison that lives in the forests of Eastern Poland and it has a piece of grass and some herbs that give it its special flavor.   Some people like to mix it with apple juice; I just like to drink it straight and cold.  

Zubrowka is hard to come by in the U.S. I guess globalization doesn’t work for everything.  A Polish friend brought me this bottle. 

The Polish bison has an interesting story.   They were wiped out in the wild early in the 20^th Century, but restored with stock from zoos in Sweden & Germany and reintroduced into Bialowieza, the biggest area of old growth deciduous forest in Europe.  Bialowieza used to be completely in Poland, but the Soviets moved the border in 1939, when they and the Nazis cooperated to dismember the second  Rzeczpospolita.    In an odd twist of history, Hermann Goering was instrumental in protecting the bison in Eastern Poland in the Bialowieza forest during WWII. He and his fellow Nazis were more interested in animal than human rights. 

I visited Bialowieza back in 2002, but didn’t see any wild bison, although they had some injured ones convalescing in a compound.   I did see some semi-wild bison near Bielsko.  They were more recently introduced there.  The European bison is smaller than the American bison and doesn’t have the characteristic hump. (We saw a herd of American bison in the Custer National Forest in 1992.  They are really magnificent animals.)  

I remember the trip to Bialowieza and the really massive oak trees.  The biggest ones are named after Polish kings.   They are not the biggest oak trees in Poland, however.   The biggest one  is near Poznan.  I didn’t see that one.   The second biggest is near Kielce.  They call it "Bartek" (the Poles name big trees) and it was supposed to be around 1200 years old, but I heard that it is "only" a little more than 600.   The story is that Jan III Sobieski  rested under the tree on his way back from the battle of Vienna where the Poles saved Europe from the Turks in 1683.  I saw that tree in 1995.  Near Raclawica, where Kusciuszko defeated the Russians in 1794 there is a big linden, under which Kusciuszko rested after the battle.  A living link with the past makes history a lot more immediate. Our driver, Bogdan, knew I liked trees and he took me to these sorts of places on the way to programs in other cities.  He was a great guy, who knew the countryside.  Those were the days before I kept a blog or took digital photos.  It is a pity not to have a record. 

Posted by Broadnax at 10:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There is trouble in Gaza again.   Like so many other places around the Middle East, the longest time of sustained peace and prosperity came courtesy of the Romans.   Under the Roman Empire, Gaza enjoyed six centuries of peace and prosperity.  

Above - This is in Amman.  In Roman times it was called Philadelphia.  This is the marketplace  where merchants met and scholars discussed.

At that time, the inhabitants spoke Greek and the city was a center of culture, known for its sophistication and love of the ancient customs.  Probably for that reason, Gaza remained pagan longer than many other cities. It didn’t become Christian until the middle of the fourth Century. 

Anyway, the point is that Gaza is not naturally a terrible place.  If Hamas would wise up, it could be a nice place to live, as it was when it was under better management for six centuries during the Roman times.   Too bad the Romans are no longer in the business.   Please see this link for our visit to the Roman city of Jarash.

It reminds me of Monty Python, when the miltants ask “What have the Romans ever done for us?”

From "Monty Python's Life of Brian"

Reg: They've bled us white, the bastards. They've taken everything we had, not just from us, from our fathers and from our fathers' fathers.
Stan: And from our fathers' fathers' fathers.
Reg: Yes.
Stan: And from our fathers' fathers' fathers' fathers.
Reg: All right, Stan. Don't labour the point. And what have they ever given us in return?
Xerxes: The aqueduct.
Reg: Oh yeah, yeah they gave us that. Yeah. That's true.
Masked Activist: And the sanitation!
Stan: Oh yes... sanitation, Reg, you remember what the city used to be like.
Reg: All right, I'll grant you that the aqueduct and the sanitation are two things that the Romans have done...
Matthias: And the roads...
Reg: (sharply) Well yes obviously the roads... the roads go without saying. But apart from the aqueduct, the sanitation and the roads...
Another Masked Activist: Irrigation...
Other Masked Voices: Medicine... Education... Health...
Reg: Yes... all right, fair enough...
Activist Near Front: And the wine...
Omnes: Oh yes! True!
Francis: Yeah. That's something we'd really miss if the Romans left, Reg. Masked Activist at Back:
Public baths!
Stan: And it's safe to walk in the streets at night now.
Francis: Yes, they certainly know how to keep order... (general nodding)... let's face it, they're the only ones who could in a place like this.
(more general murmurs of agreement)
Reg: All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?
Xerxes: Brought peace!
Reg: (very angry, he's not having a good meeting at all) What!? Oh... (scornfully) Peace, yes... shut up!

BTW – The ancient Middle East was nothing like the modern one.   First off, there were almost no Arabs.  Around the coast, most people were Greek, at least in language and outlook.   In Egypt the upper classes spoke Greek and had a Hellenistic culture, while the common people lived a lot like they had under the pharaohs.  Inland in much of what is now Israel, Jordan and Iraq, people spoke Aramaic.   This was the language had been a common language of the Persian Empire.    There were many nationalities in the region, but Arabs were not prominent among them at this time.   Arabs arrived in the 7th Century, when they conquered those places from the Roman (Byzantine) rulers.

The Arab conquest is one of the great historical anomalies.   They came just at the right time.   The Byzantine Empire had just finished a long and mutually exhausting war with the Persians. Either of these great Empires could have dispatched the Arab raiders at almost any other time, but in these particular decades they were weakened.  The Byzantines also had a schism problem.   The Christians of Egypt and Syria had a doctrinal dispute with the Christians in Constantinople.   In other words, the armies of the prophet came upon a weakened and divided empire.    Such is the role of chance in history.   

No matter how it happened, it is truly astonishing to anybody who studied ancient history to contemplate the complete transformation and in many cases destruction of the ancient cultures of the region.  A thousand years of Greek culture was submerged in a couple of decades.   It was a much more complete change than happened in the West, where the lands of the Western Roman Empire still speak languages descended from Latin and still have cultures that can be traced to their ancient heritage.  Northern Africa, which is now Libya, Algeria and Tunisia, were very Roman, but that heritage is gone.

I think some of it has to do with the natural environment.   Barbarian invasions in places like France or Italy destroyed much of the infrastructure of civilization, but the environment was more forgiving.   Ancient cities could grow back as times improved.   Roman and Greek cities in the arid places like the Middle East or North Africa were more dependent on the engineering infrastructure.    The Arabs invaders in the south and the Germans in the north were all interested in taking the riches of the Roman Empire, but didn’t really understand the complexities of making it work.    

When the Roman engineers died off or left their work, and no new ones were trained, the great aqueducts broke down.  This didn’t happen all at once, but in the course of some years, the knowledge was lost.  In the areas of the German conquests, natural rainfall allowed a fall back.  Not so in the more arid regions.  That is why you see those Roman cities in the middle of the deserts. The Romans knew how to make these places productive.    

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Below is the personal story from one of the blog readers about his great grandfather who came from the city of Anah.    It is an interesting and tragic family history.  With his permission I am posting it here.  I will let professional historians sort out the connections and timelines.  I just think it is worth reading and have placed it as it is.

I am going to tell you the story about my great grandfather Isaak El Eini. As I mentioned El Eini means in Arabic from Anah. The picture I am attaching is not a good picture taken in the 1930s in Khartoum, Sudan. He is the elderly man in the back alone. He was thin, tall, dark. The lady in the front was his niece whose parents had moved from Anah to Khartoum around 1900. 
 
He was born in the 1860s. He came from a Jewish family. Anah had been a part of the ancient Babylonian Empire. The Jews had been brought over from Judea by King Nebuchadnezzar in 586BC.
 
Jews, Christians and Moslems lived in the town in harmony with no problems. Each in their own neighborhoods. The family were in the Caravan business. They took care of the camels, merchandise etc. Anah was an important station on the Damascus to Baghdad caravan route (it took 33 days). The caravans comprising of as many as 1,200 camels carrying textiles from Britain, sugar, tobacco, drugs etc would stop in Anah for 3 days as it was here where they would cross the Euphrates river. From Baghdad there were caravans to Basra where merchandise would continue to India and Asia by ship.
 
After 1888 when the Suez Canal was opened for all shipping it was quicker to transport goods by ship. This devastated the family business. So Isaak left Anah and moved to Egypt, which was prospering from the construction of the Canal. In those days there was no Iraq. It was known as Mesopotamia and like Egypt was part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire.
 
He moved to Aswan in southern Egypt and began trading with the tribes in the Sudan. In the late 1890s the British decided to take over the Sudan which was ruled by the Mahdi. Lord Kitchener headed the Anglo Egyptian Army. Isaak followed the army as a civilian trading with the Sudanese all the time. When they arrived in Omdurman (Khartoum) they put a siege on the city. However the siege was not working and the Mahdi was holding out.
 
Lord Kitchener chose Isaak to act as a spy, enter Omdurman  and to pretend he was a trader who had crossed the Red Sea from Arabia. He brought many gifts to the Mahdi. In return the Mahdi gave Isaak a young boy and girl as a gift to be raised as slaves. Isaak had no choice but to accept the gift.
 
While in Omdurman Isaak found out that the Mahdi was holding off the siege because some Egyptian Officers were giving / selling arms to him. He left the city and gave all the information to Lord Kitchener.
 
Kitchener won the battle and became a hero in Britain. As a reward he gave Isaak a lot of fertile land in Omdurman. Soon later he told all his brothers and sisters to leave Anah and come live in Omdurman / Khartoum. They lived there till 1967 and became Sudanese citizens. But in 1967 when Israel and the Arabs went to war, Sudan expelled all the Jews. The family then moved to Britain and Switzerland.
 
Now Isaak stopped working. He lived off the land holdings and every few years he would sell some acres to live on. He was a terrible husband. and playboy. His wife lived in Cairo all the time with his only daughter Massouda, my grandmother. He would travel to Cairo about once a year to see them. It was basically like being divorced.
 
In his 70s he had spent all his money. In the early 1940s  my father living in Cairo, heard a knock on the door and it was Isaak. He was sick and died soon afterwards.
 
As to the two children who were given as gifts by the Mahdi: one was a boy and the other a girl. Isaak's wife and my grandmother raised them and sent them to school. At 16 the girl got pregnant. Because they wore long wide dresses my grandmother did not realise that she was pregnant. She tried to give birth to the baby and kill it. My grandmother rushed her to the hospital. The needle was infected and she died in the hospital; so did the baby.
 
The boy later got a job at a bank. His son became a very important official at the same bank.
 
Hope I did not bore you with such a long story.
 
Best wishes,
Semsem

Posted by Broadnax at 05:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I like to watch the Sunday morning news programs.  My morning routine includes “This Week,” “Chris Matthews,”  “Fox News Sunday” & “Meet the Press.”   I have to switch around among them, since they overlap.   That is interesting because you often see the same “opinion makers”  being interviewed on a couple of them.    It might be easier just to get the talking points.  These shows are ABOUT politics, so I shouldn’t complain, but I think they are too much about politics.

Below is Augustus Caesar, Rome's first Emperor.

They see everything through a political lens.   I understand that Washington is a political town and politics pervades everything, however I don’t think everything is reducible to politics alone, at least politics in the sense of the competitive game.   On “Chris Matthews” eight out of the twelve pundits thought “the right” would give President Obama the benefit of a long honeymoon.   I agree with the majority.   But I disagree with Matthews and the panel when they characterized this as simple politics.   They will have to give it because they cannot be seen to oppose him.   Matthews et al are smart people and I recall the two old sayings:  “it takes a smart person to be cynical, but a wise man to get beyond that” and “A man’s view of the world is a confession of his own character.”    

Not everybody is motivated by politics – not even politicians – and especially not ordinary people.   I have particular and strongly held political views, but between elections I want my President to succeed no matter what party and I want our Congress to work under the best possible conditions.   In between elections, I don’t want to think about politics very much.  Most people are like that except during tough political campaigns or when making a calls to talk radio or C-Span.    Being politically aware all the time is just too exhausting.

Our system makes good or at least okay decisions most of the time.  More important is our capacity to experiment and reinvent while maintaining the fundamental integrity of our structure.  The fact that we enjoy the oldest living Constitution in the world and are second oldest continuous government in the world (after the Brits) is ample evidence of our stability.   It is noteworthy that the British heritage has influenced so many stable democracies (Besides the U.S. and UK, Australian, New Zealand, Canada, among others, and arguably even India).  To a significant extent, the countries with this heritage allow their citizens more freedom FROM politics than most others.   In America, it is possible to be prosperous, secure and successful w/o strong political connections.   If you think about that for more than a minute and put it into historical context, that is truly amazing.   Freedom FROM arbitrary government action and the capriciousness of petty officials is rare in history.   We complain about our lack of freedom and opportunity, but we have (to paraphrase) the worst possible system … except for everything else.

I worry that we may ask too much from government and I get nervous each election season.   History shows that people voluntary give up freedom in return for the promise of stability and prosperity but they end up usually getting none of the above.   It is useful to read the stories of Republics, ancient and modern, as our Founding Fathers did.  This could happen to us too, but the good sense of the American people and the soundness of our institutions win out in the end.   Most of us are not really interested in letting politics intrude too much into our daily lives and private affairs – especially nto “theirs” but even our own.   We get a little hysterical from time to time, but to the disappointment of radicals on all sides, moderation and good sense prevail. 

Posted by Broadnax at 04:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Military bases and battlefields are often located on beautiful natural locations.  It makes sense when you think about it.  They were looking for high ground that commanded some natural features.   Such places have nice views.   Below is the view of the Potomac from the Marine base at Quantico where I went to participate on a panel on civil military affairs at the Expeditionary Warfare School. 

We had an interesting discussion about NGOs in battle spaces.   The students were generally unsympathetic to the neutrality of NGOs and their arguments were cogent.   What happens when an NGO learns about an imminent attack?  On the other hand, it is important that we have NGOs maintain the ability to work with both sides, at least nominally.   This is especially important for an organization like the Red Cross, which has real responsibility to minister to the victims of armed conflict on all sides.   There will always be a dynamic tension.    It takes physical courage to be on a battlefield and it takes moral courage to maintain neutrality in these tough conditions.   The expedient thing to do in the short run is often not the right thing for the long run.  I defended the NGOs, although I admitted that the actions of many also annoy me much of the time.   We cannot always defend only those things we like.  

Beyond that, NGOs are a key part of civil society.   They usually help us with stability operations, whether or not they want to work toward “our” goals.  They provide services that make life better for the local people.   The bad guys tend to hate them for that.   Their goal is to make life horrible for the average person in order to break down support for legitimate authority, create chaos and drum up recruits for their nefarious purposes.   Of course, that does not include the politically motivated NGOs, and there are a few of them.

The military does tradition well.  The building where we met was called Geiger Hall.  Many buildings are named after famous people, or people who gave piles of money to whatever institution is naming the place.  This is different.  General Geiger earned the honor AND the building owners explained why.   The constant exposure to the reminders of his successful and heroic life gives instruction and inspiration.  These are things we need more in our lives.  Below is the story of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a truly remarkable man.  If you don't know the story, I suggest you google him.

I had to rush back from Quantico to do a presentation on strategic communications for the JSAT at NDU.   Our part of the task force is studying that and I will write more insights re public diplomacy when I have more of them.   I will have to go to Doha to work on this in early December.   Back to the Middle Eastern desert.   Actually that area is pleasant in the winter, it is only for a couple weeks and I won’t be in the war zone, so I don’t mind.   

I walked along the Potomac on the way from the Metro to NDU, where I met this guy.   He told me that he was fishing for catfish and rockfish and catching some catfish.   As a senior citizen, he says he doesn’t need a license to fish in the Potomac.   He has been fishing there for more than a half century, back when this part of Washington was a poor semi-rural town.

Above - with all the oak trees, we have alot of squirrels, agile and graceful creatures.  Three of them were burying acorns, but by the time I got my camera out, only one remained.   This one reared up.

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Veterans’ day is one of the few Federal holidays held on the actual date, even when it is not on a Monday, because it commemorates the specific occasion on  the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month when the armistice went into effect in World War I.   I went to Arlington Cemetery to think about what the day signifies.   

I used to pass through Arlington Cemetery on my bike when it was still possible to cut through Ft Meyer on the way to Washington.  After 9/11 this was closed off and they also banned bikes and runners in the cemetery.  I understand that but I don’t really agree.   It is not a sign of disrespect to pass through the place. 

Posted by Broadnax at 08:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since I am talking about old stuff, I thought I would put up a picture of my bike.  I had to take it to the shop and get new back sprockets.  The guy at the shop commented that he rarely saw one of them actually worn out, but mine was.   I got that bike in 1997.   I rode it a lot.    Best bike I have ever owned.

My walks to the Metro and to FSI plus the Metro rides take more than two hours a day and I have had a lot of opportunity to listen to my I-pod.   I have a really good program from the Teaching Company about Roman history.   (The History of Ancient Rome, by Garrett Fagan of Penn State)There are 48 half-hour lectures and I have gotten as far as the assassination of Julius Caesar.   

Posted by Broadnax at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The picture below is not related to the article.  The Marines let me play basketball with them.  It was the majors and above v the captains and below.  I was on the old guy team and we won.  Evidently experience and guile beats youth and energy.  Maybe we were just lucky.  I was just happy not to get hurt.

 
A lot has changed in Western Anbar since I arrived here almost a year ago and as my assignment comes to an end, I can appreciate them.  

The first big difference is the physical appearance.  Last year much of this province looked like what it had recently been – a war zone.  Shops and homes were boarded up, in ruins or flattened.  People looked shocked and sullen.   Anbar is still not up to what most of us would consider acceptable standards, but improvements are phenomenal and the change palpable. 

Along the whole Western Euphrates River Valley (WERV) and into the desert oasis cities of Nukhayb and Rutbah markets are open; streets are busy; the shops are full of goods; things are happening.   We used to use a “banana index” where we looked at produce in the shops as a proxy for goods being available.  Bananas available that were not green or brown indicated a decent distribution network. Today that index is overtaken by events, since shops are full.  We now are thinking of going over to a “gold standard” since we now see gold and jewels in shop windows and assume that the owners must feel safe enough from both insurgents and ordinary crooks to be so confident.

Security is increasingly taken for granted by many people and now they are moving on to other concerns, such as economy, traffic and building their lives.

The picture below is a fort built by the British in sometime around 1927.  The British ran Iraq as a League of Nations Mandate until 1932, when Iraq became an independent monarchy under King Faisal, of Lawrence of Arabia fame. Even after independence, the British maintained bases here.   I don't know if this was among them.  In fact, most people don't think much re this fort, but it is still in use as a police HQ.  The British built to last.

When the fort was built there was nothing around it but desert.  Rutbah's claim to significance is that it is a "wet spot"  that gets around 4.5 inches of rain a year, and it had a well. The Fort guarded the road that connected Amman with Baghdad and the oil pipeline.   If you didn't have to stop for borders or checkpoints, you could drive from Amman to Baghdad in around 16 hours.  Rutbah and the fort are around the half way point.  It goes to show how much has changed.  Back in 1927 the fort was in the middle of nowhere.  It is still in the middle of nowhere today, but around 50,000 people live in and around Rutbah.  

I can only imagine how isolated it must have been in the 1920s.  I can picture those Brits with their khaki and pith helmets.  My friend Tim R bought me a pith helmet as a joke.  Of course I cannot wear it here, but I wish I could.  They are really good for keeping you cool.   Air moves easily inside and if you soak them in water the evaporation over a couple hours really helps lower the temperature inside.  They are very good for hot and dry places, which is probably why they were so popular.  But they have the unmistakable connotation of old-fashioned empires.  Both pith helmets and old fashioned empires are out of style these days.

When I was trying to confirm that date of the fort, I ran across this interesting article about Rutbah a few years ago.   It sounds familiar.  Above is a new mural on the police station wall.  Our ePRT helped pay for it.  I read in this article that this once had a Saddam mural.  We painted over it.  All these murals kind of look alike.  I don't like them, but I suppose the blank wall bothers people.

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We drove from Jerash a dozen kilometers and eight centuries to the castle at Ajloun.   It was built in 1184 by the Muslims to secure local iron mines and as a counter to the Crusader castle at Belvoir, across the plains.  They say you can see Belvoir from Ajloun, but the day was a little too hazy in that direction for that, or maybe we didn’t look in the right spot.  If you notice the picture up top is very clear sky. That is looking NE.  I don't know why there was so much haze to the west.

Ajloun never fulfilled its original purpose.  Saladin defeated the Crusaders at the battle of the Horns of Hattin in 1189, which was the beginning of their expulsion from the region.  Castles are interesting to look at and sometimes beautiful, but it is well to remember that they were part of a military technology.  Before the advent of accurate cannon, it was very difficult to capture a well defended castle.  It was a real force multiplier and also a potent psychological symbol of the power and control. 

This castle looks like others I have seen.  It is a little less sophisticated than those I saw in Poland or Germany since it is an earlier version than most of those.  The most sophisticated castle I have ever seen in the Teutonic Knight’s castle at Malbork in Northern Poland.  That one is made of bricks, however, not stone.

below are some pines on the landscape. I think they are Turkish or Alleppo pines, but I am not very good at identifying such species.  Some of them almost look like my loblolly pines.

Ajloun is situated on a hilltop with wonderful views of the surrounding area.  The area here is semi-arid, but it supports olive, apricot and pistachio groves as well as significant pine forests.  As you can see from the pictures, it is a pleasant countryside.

As I write this, the pleasant countryside is a pleasant memory.   I am on my way back to Al Asad.   Right now I am stuck in Baghdad, in the Internet café waiting.  I have learned that I cannot get a flight to AA until Tuesday and then I have to go a circuitous route, on rotary wing, so I figure there will certainly be a dust storm somewhere to strand me in some shit hole along the way.   I have decided to go down to Kuwait instead.   I have a good chance of getting there tonight and then I have a better chance of catching a fixed wing flight to Al Asad.   The longer way sometimes leads faster home.  Wish me luck. It is going to be a long trip no matter what.

I am looking forward to getting back to work at Al Asad.  The work is usually interesting, even if conditions are sometimes challenging. There is still a lot for me to do in my last months.  I read the news about improvements in Iraq.  Casualties are way down for both Iraqis and Americans.  I think we are going to succeed here in Iraq put we have to finish our job and I have to finish mine.  Less than four months to do.  Hard to believe.  Time flies when you are having fun.

Posted by Broadnax at 06:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)