Author Archives: Countrylawyer

Pete Townsend, Call the Oval Office

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Four years ago I observed, I can’t remember to whom now, that we’d just elected Tommy Walker to be president. 

This article in Commentary makes the same point, but quite a bit more intelligently than I did.

Remember the last track of the opera, though, is “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”  Tommy stands revealed as what he in fact was:  A talented (if by that you mean Very Good at Something Trivial, e.g. pinball) but essentially fraudulently sold quasi-messiah.

I don’t know what Pete Townsend’s politics were or are.  Most likely he’d pay at least lip service to Dear Leader, the way the rest of them do.  But he wrote the music for this presidency over 40 years ago.  And the music he wrote is profoundly disillusioned and disillusioning.  Isn’t it curious how the more insightful artists and others on what you’d assume would be the politico-cultural far left have a habit of saying things, either directly or in their art, which are difficult to reconcile with that universe of thought?  “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” will we now?  In fact we did.  “We’re Not Gonna Take It” anymore, except we just voted for four more years of exactly what’s got us to this point.  Question Authority, a principle laid out in very convincing detail, somehow translates to Embrace Authority . . . at least for the rest of us.  I can’t make up my mind whether they truly do not perceive any incompatibility between their politics and their art, or whether, their artistic success having insulated them from many of the consequences of their politics, they’re being hypocritical in espousing both at once, or whether they’re being entirely cynical about the whole thing, knowing that records (other than in country music) and movies about Your Granddaddy Actually Was Exactly Correct just don’t sell very well. 

I prefer the first of those explanations:  It just doesn’t strike them as dysharmonious to oppose waterboarding because it terrifies hardened killers into revealing the details of their terror networks without actually doing them any physical harm, and at the same time to support a particular president’s unilaterally setting up a “disposition matrix” under which anyone in any country can be liquidated remotely via drone strike.  I prefer that one because it requires me to make the fewest assumptions about what’s between someone else’s ears.  On the other hand every explanation of observable facts has to account for all observable facts.  After sufficient data points accumulate which test the assumption underlying my preferred explanation — that someone can see what happens when particular political measures are introduced and in good faith not perceive any causal relationship between the two — that underlying assumption becomes ever less plausible.  Back in the 1300s they thought that Jews caused the plague.  So they kicked them out, or burned them alive, or whatever.  Then someone noticed that even places that had no Jews still were decimated.  So it must be God’s anger with the world?  No matter how pious an area was, they still sickened and died.  “Bad air” from the swamps?  The plague struck into the high country as well.  What explanations will today’s artistic set cook up by 2016 to explain the world that will exist then? 

It’s still Bush’s fault begins to sound a bit shop-worn, one would think.  I may be wrong.  If one believes exit polling, something more than a third of the U.S. electorate still thinks it’s Bush’s fault for the fix we’re in, four years after Dear Leader was elected, nearly four years after he was inaugurated, and nearly six years after The Most Ethical Congress, Evah took office.  It appears that you can in fact keep beating a dead horse and convince folks that it’s the horse, and not the broken wagon turned the wrong way on the road, that is the problem.  For the future, the trauma of accepting that one has been had by someone may be so great as to bar perception of having been had.  I guess we’ll see.

I just wish that “Won’t Get Fooled Again” had not become the music for a car commercial.

Can You Handle the Truth?

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And ought your doctor serve it out to you, whether or not you can “handle it”?  For that matter, is it for your doctor to decide whether you can handle it?

One of the most basic human cravings is for certainty.  We spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and wealth on efforts which all come down to knowing the future or controlling it, which is just the second verse of the same song.  Illness, serious illness for which there exists no known cure beyond cutting out part of one’s body and hoping the doctor cut high enough (to borrow Jennie Churchill’s injunction to her own doctor, although that was gangrene), is about as diametrically opposite to certainty as you can get.  Even if you’ve just been plucked off the street by Stalin’s NKVD, there’s actually a human will on the other side of your dilemma, and you can know something about that will and how it’s likely to deal with you.  Cancer has no mind, no will, and very little predictability.

So how long do I have, doc?  What are my chances?

Is it ethically more defensible to give someone a hope to cling to, when in one’s mind and heart one knows that hope is nearly certain to be blasted?  Is it more proper to speak in terms of “percent” chances, when those percent chances are derived from sample sizes in the tens of thousands, and you have exactly one patient in the consulting room?  I mean, this patient either will or will not live more than six months.  As a statistical proposition, I do not have a “60% chance” of dying within six months.  Of all people diagnosed with my same cancer at approximately the same stage as mine, 40% may live longer than six months, but that really tells me nothing.  Where am I in that sample?

I’m not a doctor and I’ve never sat in on a conversation like the ones described in the article.  But it strikes me that the doctor and the patient are talking about two completely different things.  The doctor says, “Six months,” by which he means something along the lines of “half of the people diagnosed in your condition will be dead no later than six months post-diagnosis”; in other words, he’s talking about the median survival period.  The patient hears, “You will die roughly six months from today.”  One is statistically correct but irrelevant to the specific patient and to what the specific patient wishes to know.  The other is almost assuredly incorrect.

Serious illness, especially when not of a kind correlated to the patient’s own behavior (e.g. lung cancer for the life-long heavy smoker, or cirrhosis for the incorrigible drunkard), has to be perceived as, among other things, a monstrous injustice.  This is not supposed to happen to me.  I was good.  I did all the “right” things.  I ate my damned broccoli, after all.  I went to the gym; I ate whole wheat bread; I bought “organic” fruit; I skipped dessert.

How is it helpful to someone in that condition, who’s just been handed what’s tantamount to a death sentence for something neither he nor anyone else did, to add to his burden of injustice?  Three months out and I’m dying.  The doctor said I had six months.  This is not supposed to be happening to me!!  I’m not asking to get well; I’ve come to understand that.  But I just want those three months.  Why can’t I have my last three months?  At this point to sit the patient down and explain that well, them’s just the breaks, doesn’t seem to be doing much kindness.  They were always the breaks; all you as the doctor have now done is defer the point at which the patient confronts that fact until a time at which the patient may not have the energy, the psychical strength, or even the simple time to come to terms with it.

I will answer at least one question which Dalrymple poses, and that to the effect that the patient must in the end own his disease and its treatment.  The duty to think clearly about oneself and one’s life is universal and without caveat.  “Tell me what I want to hear,” is an unacceptable position to present to any advisor.  If I had a nickel for every time a client kept asking versions of, “But if I ‘incorporate’ I can’t be sued, right?” I wouldn’t have to keep lawyering much longer.  Same for people who want me to tell them all they’ve got to do is “go to the courthouse and file some papers” and the walls of their personal Jericho will come crashing down.  Or when I explain that, assuming the facts as they’ve told them to me are correct, the outcome of any particular legal dispute ought to be X, but that they should not assume their particular dispute will have outcome X.  But that’s the law!!  That’s right, and you need to understand how frequently a legal dispute’s outcome is only moderately predictable with reference to demonstrable facts and known rules of law.  The client must confess, as it were, to his own degree of risk (in)tolerance, both in an absolute sense (how likely is an incorrect versus a correct outcome?) and relatively to that outcome (can the client bear the financial burden of achieving even a correct outcome?).  Clients who will not confront that question honestly, or who give you some version of, “We’re just counting on you to protect our interests,” (which is to say, we’re looking for someone to sue if we don’t like how this turns out) are to be gently shown to the door.  They will absorb, burn up, all the energy you would otherwise devote to those clients who are willing to engage with the uncertainties of their existence.  And that is deeply unfair to those clients.

Which is to say that I come out on the side of telling the patient everything that I can know about his specific situation, and to be extremely careful about how I present statistical statements.  You as the doctor do have a duty to treat a patient consistently with that patient’s stated desires (up to a point).  You cannot, however, grant absolution from death, or numbers.  To present oneself as an oracle when one knows one is not and cannot be such is to deceive the patient about one’s role.  Shade the facts, “spin” the truth?  How can that help?  That is not to say, however, that you must present all information to every patient in the same way.  With a little bit of luck you can pick up sufficient clues about how this particular patient perceives things that you can sense to what extent he is given to hearing what he wants to hear, or to have his worst fears confirmed, no matter what you say.  If you’re lucky.  But even if you haven’t been permitted sufficient time with this particular patient to have any idea of how he’s likely to respond to any particular factual statement, at some point he’s a grown-up and is morally chargeable with the ability to listen carefully and to think clearly.  This is not a duty you as the doctor ought to assume, even if you could.  Your burden is enough, just figuring out what’s wrong and what’s the most likely to make it better, without presuming to think for your patient.

Yours are the healing arts, after all.  Deceit does not heal.

A Forgotten Generation

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“‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’  If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?  Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.  Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

 So spoke Abraham Lincoln in March, 1865.

Not quite two years ago I had occasion to visit Freiburg im Breisgau, on the edge of the Black Forest, and where 27 years ago I got to spend what’s still the single most enjoyable year of my life. On those few occasions when I am able to visit Germany I always make a point to stop in for at least a day or so. Yes, I am something like a dog and his vomit in that respect. This last time I popped into the principal bookstore downtown. While studying there in the mid-1980s I did most of my shopping there. Granted, Freiburg is a university town (and has been since a couple of centuries before Columbus blundered ashore; in fact it was Martin Waldseemüller, a Freiburg cartographer, who named “America” after Brer Vespucci), but even by those standards it’s an exceedingly fine bookstore.

That visit I picked up Das Amt und die Vergangenheit, a history of the German Foreign Office during and after the Third Reich. It was commissioned by the government and published in 2006, I think, and was written by four authors collaborating. For a book ordered and written by committee, it’s a very useful read. I propose one day to blog it as well, but for the moment I want to concentrate on two books I bought for an aunt of mine. 

She’s an aunt by marriage. She and her four sisters were born in East Prussia; in fact they were so far in East Prussia that their hometown ended up in the Soviet Union after the war. And therein lies her story. Their father had already been killed on the Eastern Front, leaving the mother with four daughters, the youngest of whom cannot have been older than four or five. A very good friend of their father’s was on the staff of the commanding general in that district, and he came to their mother and told them that the war was lost, and that when the Red Army approached they were Major So-and-So’s wife and children. Understood? Sure enough, the Soviets arrived, and they all piled into the major’s staff car with his driver and adjutant. On the way to the airfield they were strafed by a Soviet fighter, killing the driver and wounding the adjutant. Edith, the oldest, once in my presence related looking back through the rear window of the staff car. The entire horizon was lined with columns of smoke and flames from burning villages and farms. 

They made it onto the last plane out of that airfield. A friend of their mother’s stayed behind. She was raped upwards of twenty times a night. At least, however, she was not shot afterward. 

The family, the youngest violently sick with a raging fever that left her largely deaf, fetched up in Denmark in the refugee camps for a number of years.  At one point they got split up. The oldest sister, who could speak English, got a job working for the Americans and met some ol’ boy from what’s still way on out in the sticks. They married and she moved here, eventually bringing after her the third sister, who met and married my father’s middle brother. I think she’s been back to her hometown once since the Wall came down; there wasn’t much left of the old place. The Soviets have done a decently thorough job of obliterating all traces of the original inhabitants. 

I’ve never heard her say much about “wie es gewesen ist” – how it was – but she’s long had a reflectiveness that seems to me at least to be several orders of magnitude more inward than one would expect, even among her generation of older Americans (one pretty much gives up looking for that trait in younger Americans, which of course makes it all the more pleasantly surprising and pleasurable when one stumbles across it). She got into transcendental meditation decades ago and that seems to have answered some need within her. 

But back to the point at t’issue, as Constable Oates might say.  Among the subjects that over the past decade or so have become less taboo in Germany is the experience of the Germans – ordinary citizens – as victims of their own war. There has since 1945 been what for a better expression I’ll call an exiles’ lobby (Bund der Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten is one of the larger groups, I think), but that was always more focused on the politics of the division and the removal of ethnic Germans from what used to be the eastern provinces. They had, after all, to make room for all the Poles whom the Soviets kicked out of eastern Poland. If you imagine two entire populations ripped from their ancestral homes and shoved 100 or more miles west, that’s about what happened immediately the shooting stopped. [In the Deutsches Museum in East Berlin I recall seeing one of the placards that the Soviets just pasted around town. It allowed that within twenty-four hours all Germans were to be gone, taking with them only what they could carry in their own hands. Transportation was not arranged.] 

But the discussion, the engagement, the (and it’s a wonderful German word that captures the sense of grappling with an issue and wrestling it to the ground, there to pull it to shreds) Auseinandersetzung with the civilian German war was either swept under the rug or simply ignored. “We got through it alive somehow and that’s all we need to remember,” seems to have been the parole for the better part of 50 years. There were also enormous guilt feelings, the commonly accepted notion that how in God’s name could you talk about German war victims, with all those pits full of human ash and piles of emaciated corpses underfoot? No, better just to shut up, show up to work, bust ass all day long, save up for retirement, and keep your head down.  If you want to see how it plays out when an entire society takes to heart the divine injunction to “let the dead bury the dead,” then Germany from 1945 through the mid-1990s is a pretty good Exhibit A. 

That is changing. In that bookstore I saw two books both of which I bought for my aunt. The first and shorter is Flucht über die Ostsee – Flight over the Baltic – which is a collection of reminiscences of the refugees who were trapped in the eastern provinces when the Soviets broke through to the Baltic to the west of Danzig in early 1945.  All Prussia, Memel, Pomerania, and several other areas were cut off from the rest of the country. The government began Operation Hannibal in late January, 1945 to evacuate as much of the civilian population, war convalescents, and other mission-critical people as they could. The Wilhelm Gustloff was part of the operations, until she was sunk with anywhere up to 8,000 dead.  They had the evacuees on liners, tugboats, U-boats, freighters, anything that would float and could weather winter navigation.

Where people went to depended, of course, on where they started from. Many made their way to the Baltic shores and then down to Danzig and Gotenhafen, where they took ship for Denmark, Lübeck, Travemünde, and any other port that could berth a ship long enough to unload them. Others went straight to Danzig. It was bitterly cold, and the treks of civilians were frequently under air attack, especially while travelling over the frozen Frishes Haff (the gulf of the Vistula) to the Frische Nehrung, that long spit of land that parallels the mainland, all the way down to Danzig. Entire wagons would drop through the ice, instantly extinguishing the family and all its possessions. Or bombs and strafing would tear family members to shreds (one woman who tells her story saw both parents reduced to bloody piles of flesh by the same bomb), leaving children to depend on the charity of strangers. 

Important to remember is that by and large the only adults of able body were the mothers. The men and older boys were detained, either in the eastern districts themselves or at Danzig/Gotenhafen, not allowed to go onward. The older girls frequently were assigned to military or quasi-military support units, and so not allowed to leave. Only the decrepit and the aged males were allowed to leave. So not infrequently you’d have two or more generations of adult women, trailing multiple children (and not seldom nursing infants), and lumbered down with old men, sick and frail. 

In all, it’s a story that ought to be better known in the U.S.  Our schoolchildren will spend days learning about the Importance of This, That, or the Other Pet Constituency in the Construction of the Western Trading Posts, but they grow up in pristine ignorance of events which to this day shape the political landscape of Europe.  Don’t think that’s a problem?  Our Dear Leader chose September 17, 2009, to share in a telephone call with the Poles that we were craw-fishing on putting them beneath our missile defense shield, a shield which the Poles quite correctly understood to offer them significant protection from resurgent Russian interference.  Anyone less profoundly ignorant of history (and folks, it’s the State Department’s damned job to know these things) would have understood that day to be the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland.  For a good, if somewhat brief, look at what happened next, see Janusz Bardach’s Man is Wolf to Man.

The other book I bought my aunt is called Die Vergessene Generation – The Forgotten Generation. It is specifically about the children, and more particularly about the children who were born between roughly 1937 and roughly 1950. Their older siblings had some – not much, to be true, but at least some – seasoning under their belts by the time things got really, truly horrible for the urban German population (and the eastern rural one as well). If you were born in 1934 then you were ten by 1944, when the bombers began to have it pretty much their own way, and when the Soviets crossed the border into Germany proper the next winter. It was their younger siblings who were exposed to all the delights of industrial-scale warfare, and especially the joys of the clash of races on the Eastern Front, with no psychological defenses to speak of. 

After the war they were also the ones most likely to get lost in the emotional shuffle. “Oh, you were too young to remember,” they’d be told. Or, “Just be thankful we’re alive.” Or, “That’s just how the war was,” or “You must remember we didn’t have it all that badly.” But they did remember, in some cases with repressed recollection, but they remembered all right. Being thankful to be alive and being aware of the plight of others are intellectual responses to dealing with one’s own misfortune and emotional trauma. It’s precisely that intellectual/emotional maturity that the 1937ers and younger just did not have when they shot the works. Their war experiences pole-axed them, and after the war their parents and older siblings were too busy re-building the country to notice these seething little masses of emotional wound gazing about them, hungry, cold, and absorbing the terrible lesson that this might well be the new normal. By the time one is an adult one generally forgets how defenseless children can be, how telling a little girl that there is no room on the sledge for her favorite doll will be a memory that will still be with her when she 75 years old, and that she will instantly be able to call up the hurt and the bewilderment of that precise moment. It’s idle to dismiss that experience with the observation that surely a doll is pretty small potatoes when Marshall Zhukov’s boys are coming out of the woods: To that little girl it’s pretty big stuff; more to the point, all the hurt, the bewilderment, the awareness of being Utterly Unprotected — not by mama, not by papa, not by older brother or sister — which children that age cannot articulate, will attach themselves to that moment of I Have to Leave My Doll Behind.  The adult that child becomes may go decades before finding the words to engage, to grapple with that wounding, but the simple memory of that doll will bring all the old trauma back to the surface.

The children in the cities were also dunked, with no preparation and no internal structures to enable them to process the experiences, into the horrors of the first massive aerial war. In “Nachts schlafen die Ratten doch,” (“The Rats Sleep at Night, Though”) a short story by Wolfgang Borchert, the story is told of Jürgen, a boy of nine (significantly he’s the only person in the story with a name; the others are types). He’s lying towards sundown in his hiding place in the pile of rubble that was his home until a few nights ago.  He’s exhausted, but knows he must awaken.  He opens his eyes to see an adult regarding him.  The old man attempts to reach this child in the rubble with an offer to see his rabbits.  Jürgen can’t leave his post. Why?  Well, the teacher at school had told his class about the rats in the rubble, and how they ate whatever they could find, including the victims. And little brother is still down there, the boy says. He was only four. The boy thinks if he stands watch over what was once their home and is now his baby brother’s cairn, the rats won’t get to him. But the rats sleep at night, though, the stranger says. 

Fiction, of course, but you can jolly well be sure that little scenes only marginally less terrible played out daily, hourly, in the big industrial targets. 

Die Vergessene Generation is about those children, now in their 70s, and about their children. Many of them (not all, to be sure; even small children can have remarkable emotional recuperative capacity) have spent their lives with vague but still oppressive feelings of disjointedness, detachment from family, difficulty forming or maintaining friendships, anxieties that wash over them at odd and usually inopportune times . . . in short, all the behavioral and psychological traits of people who have something deep within them with which they’ve never made peace.  In at least some instances they’ve managed to pass along their emotional baggage to their own children.

They’re now beginning to talk, some for the first time.  Ever.  The book  intersperses discussion of the history of the (mis)diagnosis and (mal)treatment of these emotional disorders (short version: keep ’em drugged up), and how these issues fit into the larger psychological exercise of Admitting and Understanding of what Germany exactly did during those twelve awful years, with narratives of specific individuals.  One of them concerns a child of Kriegskinder (war children) who has never heard his parents speak of the war, and whose relationship with his parents has always been missing significant substance at its core.  As an adult, he finally asks his father, who explains to him that when your mother and I met and realized we would remain together, we spent an entire night telling each other everything that we experienced in the war.  We promised each other than what we said that night would never leave that room.  Ever.  It was the end of the discussion for that child.  Imagine being told that a huge — perhaps the major — portion of what makes your parents who they are (and therefore who you are) is and will always remain Forbidden Territory.

Then there’s the old woman who as a child and with her own family unable to feed all the mouths (Europe, particularly Germany, starved for well over a year after the guns fell silent) was put off onto neighboring adults, including one who more or less whored her out to pedophiles in exchange for food and cigarettes (the only current medium of exchange).

I opened this post with that quotation from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural because I think what he was trying to capture, and in a way to prepare the country for, were the same issues, the same prism through which the experiences of the war children must be viewed.  Germany gave vent to urges calling forth the worst human nature can be; that part of the world which had the ability to stop it before it exploded all over everyone failed to do so, consciously averted its eyes, buried the truth in hopes that it would not be called upon to step forward.  And the Almighty gave to the world that terrible war as the woe due those by whom the offense came.  The wealth and cultural heritage piled up by centuries of toil was blown to dust within a matter of months.  Today we study the Holocaust not to identify the perpetrators; they’re dead, mostly, and have finally been delivered over to Justice.  We study it because we need to know what lurks within us, what we are capable of doing when we loosen our grip on those parts of our heritage which trace their roots back to the Sermon on the Mount.

The war children will take to their graves the knowledge — admitted even to themselves or not — of what their parents and grandparents did.  Like it or not, that is a guilt which in fact, as one of the Nuremberg defendants allowed on the gallows, a thousand years will not erase.  And yet these deeply damaged people are just that: wounded innocence.  They are the child in Ambrose Bierce’s “Chickamauga,” wordless, uncomprehending, capable only of fear and hurt, two of the most elemental, animalistic, de-humanizing sensations which it is given us to know.  As Die Vergessene Generation makes the point:  The first step in whatever healing is possible must be permission to grieve, validation of pain felt on one’s own head.

My aunt read the book twice before she lent it back to me to read for myself.

Guess They’ll Have to Get the Off-Road Package for That Bus

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When it comes time for Dear Leader to fit Chris Christie under it in 2013.

You see, Dear Gov. Christie made a big show of welcoming Dear Leader to New Jersey after the storm hit.  Squired him around, got his picture taken in the airplane and everything.  Other governors had sense enough to know that the last person in the entire world you need cluttering up a disaster area is the President of the United States of America.  No offense, Mr. President, but you make a pig’s breakfast of everyone’s life wherever you go.  It’s just part of your job.  So thank you very much for the concern but for God’s sake go play golf instead.

The reason why Chris Christie would go to such lengths?  He’s running for re-election next year, as a Republican of course.  His most likely opposition is Mayor Corey Booker, Democrat of Newark.  You’ll recall that Mayor Booker was the feller who blotted his copy book by pointing out that Dear Leader was full of shit for his sliming the private equity industry.  So he was publicly shamed by the national party and made to walk back his statement of the truth.  If Christie can get the White House not to throw its weight behind Booker, Christie’s got a chance — slender, to be sure — of making his way back to the governor’s mansion when it’s all over.

So Chris Christie gave Dear Leader the chance to play “president” all over the television screens, a week before the election.  And it worked.  As a reader at Instapundit calculated: 

In keeping with Professor Jacobson’s warning concerning the media’s “Operation Demoralize” campaign, already in full swing, have you noticed how the role of “Superstorm Sandy” in Obama’s win has now largely been buried by the mainstream media? Other than Chris Matthews’ now infamous praising of God for the political gift the storm provided to Obama, and some mention of the AP’s exit poll data showing 42% of those polled reported being positively influenced to vote for Obama based on his purported stellar handling of the emergency response to the storm, Superstorm Sandy has not found its way into many MSM election post mortems. The reason for that should be readily apparent. The mainstream media’s preferred narrative has predictably changed. Now, the Obama victory is being depicted as the result of America’s widespread disapproval and rejection of Republicans and their extremist, white-focused policies and ideology.

A week before the election, the in-the-tank-for-Obama MSM was deeply worried that Romney was going to beat their guy, so they played up Superstorm Sandy and the game-changing effect it was having on the election for all it was worth. Suddenly, Chris Christie was someone to be listened to, ad nauseum, rather than being dismissed as a partisan Republican attack dog. However, with Obama’s re-election now safely in the bag, the MSM would prefer that Americans forget that a freak storm probably averted an Obama loss. Obviously, such a loss would entirely preempt “Operation Demoralize,” and the only thing the MSM enjoys more than helping elect Democrats is predicting doom and despair for Republicans.

“Operation Demoralize” completely falls apart if one considers just how close the margin of victory was for Obama in the four swing states that decided the election, and how Superstorm Sandy almost certainly moved enough votes from Romney to Obama to provide the election of victory. In Florida, with nearly 8.3 million ballots cast, the margin of victory was a mere 52,000 votes. Because this U.S. presidential election was a two person race, a takeaway by one candidate from another represents a two vote swing. Accordingly, if somewhere in the order of 26,000 Floridians, out of 8.3 million, decided that they were changing their vote from Romney to Obama based on his supposed “heckuva job” in relation to the storm response, those voters alone decided Florida’s 29 electoral votes. Given the AP exit poll and its 42% figure for those who claimed the storm influenced their decision to vote for Obama, it’s safe to say that Superstorm Sandy threw far more than 26,000 voters into Obama’s column and out of Romney’s.

The same argument can be made in Ohio. 5.3 million votes cast, margin of victory: 103,000. If the storm flipped about 52,000 votes or more from Romney to Obama, then no storm meant Ohio would have been a Romney win on election day.

In Virginia, 3.7 million votes cast, margin of victory: 107,000. If the storm influenced 54,000 voters or more to abandon Romney for Obama, the storm was decisive in converting a Romney win in Virginia to an Obama win.

In Colorado, nearly 2.4 million votes cast, margin of victory: 113,000. If 57,000 voters or more moved from the Romney camp to the Obama camp based on the storm, then Obama doesn’t win the state if the storm never happens.

A Romney win in these four states would have given him the election.

I want to emphasize that these are very small numbers of voters in relation to the overall number of votes cast in these states, and with such a high percentage of voters in the AP poll attributing their vote in large measure to Obama’s positive media coverage from the storm, I don’t think there’s much doubt that Obama loses the election, albeit narrowly, if Superstorm Sandy never happened. But for our illustrious media elites, the truth won’t do, not when such a grand opportunity for another anti-Republican hatchet job has presented itself. 

Now Gov. Christie waits for the payoff next year.

If I were Dear Gov. Christie I’d call up the NJDOT garage boys and order up a 5XL maintenance man jump suit, because otherwise he’s going to get grease all over him when Dear Leader shoves him under the bus next year.

Chris Christie can’t be that foolish.  He can’t be so naïve as to think that this dyed-in-the-wool Chicago thug politician whose very political essence is overt racialism and mountebankery is not going to put his back behind getting One of Him into that governor’s mansion.  Seriously; think about it.  Booker’s got to have ambitions that transcend New Jersey.  Is one of the most personally liked presidents in recent history going to be of assistance to him in achieving those ambitions, or not?  And the beauty is that, like Bill Clinton, Dear Leader will for decades to come be able to pop around and pull on an oar for Booker at opportune moments.  But Booker knows for a a certainty he won’t stir a finger unless Corey Booker as governor of New Jersey lines up just exactly right for Dear Leader’s purposes over the remaining three years of his second term. 

So, from Dear Leader’s perspective, who’s likely to prove the more pliant tool?  Chris Christie, white, big, blunt, and famously unafraid of stepping on anyone’s toes?  And did we mention he’s white?  Or Corey Booker, who’s “one of us,” dontcha know, who’s in fact a lot like what Dear Leader only pretends to be (i.e., competent and from all I hear, not crooked, and at least until he gets his chain jerked by the party bosses, sometimes willing to state the truth)?  Oh by the way, did I forget to mention that Chris Christie is white?

Dear Leader may have to get the off-road package installed to get his bus high enough off the ground to fit him, but you just watch:  Chris Christie’s slot under that bus has already been measured and chalked out on the pavement.

And that fool likely made him president again.  And for what?  What’s FEMA done in New Jersey that they haven’t in New York?  Anyone?  Bueller?  Anyone?  And in so doing assured that any post-gubernatorial ambitions he might have entertained within the Republican party just evaporated.  Maybe he never had them in the first place; for his sake I hope he didn’t.  Party apparatchiki have long memories, and as the numbers from last week continue to get parsed by the people whose evaluation of such numbers matter, Christie’s role in enabling the coming four years is going to become more, not less, prominent.

Update (21 Nov 12):  I’m not claiming to be clairvoyant or anything, but boy can I call ’em or what:  Hot Air has a report on the fall-out, as it stands now.  Money quote:  “Romney 2012 donors, many of whom were doubtless prospective Christie 2016 donors, are supposedly ‘furious.’ Two things here. One: While Christie will wisely and strenuously attempt to frame this as an argument over whether he was supposed to ‘do his job’ in the aftermath of a ferocious disaster, that’s a total red herring. The objection isn’t that he worked with Obama, it’s that he seemed bizarrely determined to lavish fulsome praise on the guy with election day bearing down.”

Of Greeks, Barbarians, das Ausland, and Voting for Revenge

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It appears that, 2,000-plus years after it was last politically relevant, Greece still offers us lessons to ponder.

I hadn’t picked up on this when it was first published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, back in September, but better late than never.  It’s an article about the resurgence in political discourse, particularly in Greece, of the concept of the “barbarian” as a category definition.  The “troika” that has been attempting, with in truth not much to show for it, to jerk a knot in Greece’s butt for some months now is publicly characterized as demanding “barbaric” concessions and measures.  The German finance minister Schäuble had the temerity to observe that, while Europe remains willing to support Greece, they cannot keep “pouring into a barrel with no floor.”  President Karolos Papoulias responded, “I do not accept that Herr Schäuble mocks my land; as a Greek I do not accept that.  Who is Herr Schäuble to mock Greece?  Who are the Dutch?  Who are the Finns?”  Of course President Papoulias labors under no inability to identify the peoples he references.  He knows jolly well who they are.  What he means to ask is, “Compared to Greeks, who are the Dutch to pass judgment on them?”  In doing which he grasps 2,500 years back, to a time when it mattered what Greece thought about anything.

“Barbarian” began as simply “non-Greek,” someone who did not speak Greek.  It became over time something more, an identification to distinguish between an idealized self-image and the reality of power in the ancient world.  It became, in other words, a device to bridge the gap, to reconcile the contradictions, between one’s self-assessment and the assessment passed by the balance of the world.  The world became divided into “we” and “barbarians.”  As the article points out, by the Fifth Century B.C. (note to the gentle reader: you will never catch me using that mealy-mouthed “B.C.E.” bullshit) the Greeks could point to their many accomplishments culturally, socially, artistically; they could look about and see that they were admired and copied.  But they could also see that the Persians didn’t seem to care.  They could see that the Persian tide in Asia Minor kept rising, sweeping all the wonderful Greek refinements before it.  The factual world, the world as it existed outside Greece, was not cooperating.

In the crisis of the Persian ascendancy the response was a call to unity among all Greeks to come together and defeat the barbarian hordes.  Which they actually then did, or at least to the extent of running Persia back out of Asia Minor.  And having done so, the concept of the “barbarian” as the Other settled fast in the Greek self-understanding.  The Persian army had been mindless slaves, defeated by superior Greek culture.  This gave Greece not only the ability to rule, but — and this is very important in understanding where things are, in Greece and . . . ummmmm . . . elsewhere, today — the right to rule, the right to be as they choose to be.  Being Greek became sufficient justification all by itself; it became definitionally the Good, the Just, the Desirable.

The Romans gladly adopted the concept of the “barbarian” from the Greeks (when they’d squashed Greek independence for the next 1,900-odd years).  At first, as in Greece, “barbarian” meant simply “non-Roman.”  But in the face of growing threats from outside the empire, the concept began to mutate, just as it had hundreds of years before in the Greek mind.  “Barbarian” became someone so utterly non-We that it became conceptually impossible to concede his fellow-humanity.  A “barbarian” became someone as to whom, because he was so utterly non-We that the normal moral ties to others within the circle of We no longer bound the Roman, one need not quibble with the delicacies of human intercourse.  Treaties and simpler promises became non-binding.  And as the non-We grew in power, it had to be beaten back.  Forcefully.

[I will here note that, human nature being what it is, there is more than a tinge of delight in the exegesis in a German newspaper about others who divide the world into Greeks and barbarians.  There is a noun in German, and signficantly it’s a singular noun.  It is used to refer to those areas of the world for which an English speaker, for example, would need whole expressions like “the rest of the world,” or “foreign countries,” or even “other places.”  But the German can simply refer to “das Ausland” — “the out-land.”  One either finds oneself in Germany or in the out-land.  There’s a joking story that Bavarians divide the world into Bavarians and Prussians; it doesn’t matter whether one is born in Peoria or Peking, Pretoria, Pakistan, or Pomerania: one is a Prussian.  I suppose human nature is in fact pretty much universal.]

But what do 2,500 year-old politico-cultural responses to threatened self-images have to do with us, here in the United States, today?  It has to do with hacks like Paul Krugman, and his rhetorical question of who cares what’s the matter with Kansas.  The “better,” because more anti-American, America won the election Tuesday.  Fly-over country.  The sticks.  Kansas.  These expressions are the new analogue of “barbarians,” and like barbarians, those in these areas are no longer quite fully level pegs with the more “diverse,” and “better” America.  Jas Taranto, author of the WSJ piece linked, sums it up:  “The lack of self-awareness here is something to behold. Krugman identifies a racially defined out-group, excludes it from the ‘real America,’ and declares the in-group to be a ‘better nation’ than the out-group (which is, in fact, part of the same nation). All this in the name of tolerance.”

It’s not a good thing to be a barbarian when dealing with a Greek or a Roman.  One of the things that I picked up on (well, “picked up on” is probably not the right phrase, because one “picks up on” subtle indications, and what I’m about to describe was about as subtle as Sherman’s evangelising Georgia) while attending law skool at a . . . well, let’s call it a certain northeastern skool which enjoys an extremely exalted self-image, was the underlying assumption among my classmates that they were incredibly clever (true), and thoroughly well-intentioned (also true, or at least I was and am wiling to assume that).  From those two correct proposition they proceeded to draw conclusions that scared and scare the bejesus out of me. 

Because they’re so smart and so well-intentioned, what they believe proper is not only by definition correct, but also morally right.  Because what they desire is correct and right, anything that is contrary to what they desire is wrong and wicked (“barbaric,” in the ancient learning).  Thus a dispute between them and someone who does not desire what they do is not just a disagreement over methods or goals but rather a struggle between Virtue and Iniquity.

In a struggle between Virtue and Iniquity, anything that aids the triumph of Virtue must itself be virtuous, at least to the extent employed in the aid of Virtue (thus: ballot-stuffing in, say, Texas is wicked; ballot-stuffing in Philadelphia after you’ve forcibly ejected one party’s poll watchers, so that in those precincts you have 90%+ voter turn-out with 99% voting for one party, is vox populi incarnate).  Anything that opposes Virtue, such as for example suggesting that maybe you ought to have Congress, rather than the EPA, decide to destroy coal-fired electricity generation, is by hypothesis Wicked.  In the same manner that because Marxism is an inherently liberating political system, all wars to expand Marxism are wars of liberation, so all measures necessary to put the Paul Krugmans of the world, and my classmates, in charge of everything are meet and right.

Anything necessary to ensure that my desires are not consulted or realized is therefore not merely permissible, but mandatory, because anything less would be to give aid and comfort to Iniquity.

A number of years ago (OK; it’s been almost 28 years now) I read Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom, a history of slavery in colonial Virginia.  The larger theme of his book is of course the paradoxical inter-relationship with the colonists’ yearning for what they understood as freedom for themselves, even as the foundation of their colony’s labor system was, remained, and had always been fundamentally un-free.  Among the subsidiary, but no less interesting things I recall about the book was the story of how the un-free labor system gradually changed from indentured servants to African slaves, and how that final and complete transition occurred much later than one would guess, and had to do with changing life expectancies of the laborers (short version: if you can’t expect a laborer to survive more than a couple or three years in the pestilential environment of tidewater Virginia, why on earth would you buy the fee simple in a slave when you could lease an indentured servant who wasn’t going to survive the term of his indenture in the first place?).  Another was how racism, or the specifically racialist characterization of the African slaves, was fostered not to support the introduction of African slavery but to justify its perpetuation.

It’s that last point that unsettles me.  It is now simply accepted discourse to attribute sub-human understanding, morality, and motives to those who do not share the leftist frames of reference common on the coasts.  Those of us who do not are barbarians, and unworthy of engagement on terms similar to what one would extend to one’s fellow humans.  We may be lied to, expropriated, and exploited to fund the Civilized Elites’ realization — or at least sufficient for them to surround themselves with a warmth-giving coccoon to seal out conflicting feedback — of their self-images.  If we are ground down; if there is no work for us; if we can no longer afford to give our children the opportunities which we ourselves had; if our temples are violated; our idols jerked from their plinths and dragged behind the Conquerors’ chariots to amuse them:  We have received no more than our due.

We should make no mistake:  Dear Leader exhorted his supporters to vote for revenge, and revenge is precisely what they mean to have.  Our very existence is an affront to their vision of themselves as the paragons of humanity.

My question is whether those of us who do not share the leftists’ opinion of themselves will so far rouse ourselves as to find our way to our own Teutoburger Forest.  Rome was ejected from across the Rhein not by the Germans’ becoming more like Romans, but by their determination that they would not become so and their unity in vindicating that determination.

I’m So Glad It’s 2012 Instead of 2005

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. . . because if it were 2005, then responsibility for all these freezing, starving, looted, un-motorized people would be laid directly at the door of the Oval Office, and it would be Dear Leader’s responsibility, personally, that each and every one of them doesn’t have a completely dried-out, re-built, and habitable house.  Right Now!  But since it’s 2012, that’s just the breaks and no one outside those neighborhoods needs to bother about them.

It’s just, you know, Bad Luck that eleven days after a storm hit they still don’t have power.  Back in 1994 then the last Big Damned Ice Storm came marching along, my parents were without power for three weeks.  They only jumped them up the priority list because my father was coming home from the hospital.  He’d hydroplaned his car into a concrete barrier at 65 m.p.h., bounced back into traffic where he was immediately struck broadside by a Chevy Suburban which crushed the driver’s door of his Town Car in to the centerline of the car, spun him around, hit him again, and knocked him rear-end-first back into the barrier.  They quit counting fractures in his chest at 17.  And he was coming home.  So my mother called the electric department up and they sent the crews to get some light and heat to their house.

Update I:  To borrow what ought be the immortal words of Margaret Thatcher, “I refer you to my earlier comments.”  I’ll just observe that the “high marks” for dealing with Sandy are being somewhat . . . errrmmm . . . indiscriminately given to Dear Leader by the same people who somewhat . . . errrrrmmmm . . . very discriminately assigned poor marks to Geo. W. in 2005 for dealign with Katrina.

November 9

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Among my less annoying habits and fascinations is noting odd quirks of historical coincidence.  Like today, November 9.  Let’s take a brief wander across the arc of history as it unfolded on this date.

November 9, 1918:  Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicates, ending the Hohenzollern dynasty in Prussia and the experiment of Imperial Germany.  The empire was less than 50 years old.  Just by way of comparison, the U.S. turned 50 in 1826.  Yes, I’m aware the constitution was quite a bit younger, but the U.S. as a single polity was in fact created by the Declaration of Independence, by which the now former colonies declared themselves to be free and united.  In 1826 we were just getting into the second generation of dominant statesmen after the founders had passed from the scene.  Clay, Calhoun, and Webster were just over a decade into Congressional careers that would last until 1850 or later.  Jackson, the first president elected from outside the original states, was two years away from his first election.  So by the 50 year point the U.S. had both fundamentally changed its form of government, peacefully, and had successfully made the peaceful transition from the founding generation and its aspirations to the first generation which didn’t really have any adult recollections of anything other the United States.

November 9, 1923.  The Beer Hall Putsch is suppressed, with gunfire.  Weimar Germany had already weathered the Kapp Putsch in 1920, just barely.  It, too, involved drawn weapons.  While it survived both, each of the two left the nation weaker, not stronger.  The sentences handed out to Hitler and his henchmen were laughable, and served only to give notice that the state was unwilling to fight to preserve itself.  If the state will not so fight, why should the citizens fight for it?

November 9, 1938.  The nightmare truly begins to assume concrete outline.  Some second-tier functionary of the German embassy is shot and killed in Paris, and by nightfall the Nazi party apparatus has been mobilized to take to the streets in a “spontaneous demonstration” of outrage against the Jews.  Thousands of Jewish shops and homes are looted and burned.  Many thousands are beaten, many are killed.  The synagogues go up in flames.  The streets in the cities are so coated in shattered glass the next morning that the evening’s doings have gone down as Kristallnacht (“crystal night”).  Oh sure, the scenes in Austria in March, 1938 have been horrible enough, with Jewish noblewomen forced to crawl on their hands and knees, scrubbing the pavement with their toothbrushes, and politically undesirable people vanishing.  But Europe could kid itself that such scenes can’t always be helped when one nation is swallowed by another.  There will be aches and pains, in other words.  And of course in Munich back in September all that happened was all those Sudeten Germans were finally allowed to go “heim ins Reich,” as they’d so loudly demanded.  But Kristallnacht was different.  It was a government not merely failing to protect an entire segment of its populace; it was that government taking the lead in organizing the attacks on that populace.

November 9, 1940.  Neville Chamberlain dies.  The last man with a clear shot at stopping Hitler in his tracks, who lied and smarmed his country into a position of almost helpless exposure to the Germans, lives long enough to see himself revealed as one of history’s greatest fools and suckers.  The only reason Great Britain survived the pickle Chamberlain left it in was the geographic accident of the English Channel.  We now know that if Chamberlain had stood firm in September, 1938 the generals would have taken Hitler out.  In fact, they would have Taken Hitler Out; the plotters were staged in an apartment building a few blocks from the government headquarters, each with his assignment and armed to the teeth.  The plot was to take Hitler out directly he was caught and shoot him.  But when Chamberlain caved in he jerked the rug from beneath their feet.  Who will flock to support a bunch of renegade officers whose forces were just spared the effort of fighting by the brilliant political machinations of the Führer?  I would observe that, like all the modern American “news” organizations which have diligently squelched any story, any angle, which might reflect poorly on their own chosen Dear Leader, so also Geoffrey Dawson of The Times repeated killed stories filed by his foreign correspondents in Germany, describing in great and very accurate detail exactly what the Nazis were up to, both in terms of rearmament and in terms of political repression.  Dawson killed the stories for the express reason that he didn’t want to annoy or upset “Herr Hitler.”  He decided there were some truths which Britons were just not entitled to know.  His ideological heirs populate the U.S. media industry today.

November 9, 1989.  For the first time since August, 1961, the borders from East to West Germany are opened.  Security at the checkpoints is abandoned, and with it the 45-year monstrosity that was the German Democratic Republic, with its Stasi torture chambers, prisons, and camps, its SED, and all its odious apparatus.  The Germans don’t celebrate the event on the day, though; they won’t give the remaining neo-Nazis the gratification of surreptitiously celebrating the anniversary of Kristallnacht.

Odd coincidence, isn’t it, that so much pertinent to a single theme should have come to pass on the same day?

Timing is Purely Coincidental

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Over at DaTechGuy’s Blog, there’s a litany of things that unexpectedly! begin dropping from the skies within hours of Dear Leader’s re-election.  Small arms treaty?  Check.  Carbon tax?  Check.  Layoffs galore and transfer of jobs overseas?  Check.  Further down-grades to U.S. sovereign debt?  Yep. 

I’m sure that the reporting of these events, the staking of these positions, has zero — nothing at all — to do with having the presidential election safely in the bag.  Especially things like massively unpopular UN treaties the intent and effect of which will be to curtail civilian ownership of firearms in the U.S. and reduced supply of same to Israel.  It was his attitude towards gun control that cost Algore the 2000 election most likely.  Dear Leader is a more savvy politician than that.  So back in July he stonewalls the UN, asking for “more time.”  And by the merest happenstance that “more time” works out to coincide exactly with the date of the presidential election.

Will wonders never cease?

I’m Sure the Eric Holder DOJ Will Be All Over This

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Let’s see, voter turnout in city overall is 60%.  Some wards, but not all, had the poll watchers from one party forcibly ejected from the polling place.  And in those wards — in which the poll watchers were illegally ejected — the turnout magically tops 90%, and of that 90% who turn out, over 99% vote for one of two candidates.  This is a level of voter participation and unanimity that would make Stalin smile (of course, Stalin would find out who that <1% was and have them shot; well, in fact he’d probably go ahead and shoot the rest anyway, just to make sure).  To see how the operatives with bylines reporters are presenting this, or rather not, see this article, which omits any mention of the poll-watching monkeyshines.  No, this is just good GOTV work and party discipline.

This is the same city in which in 2008 a group of goons were charged with and judged guilty of voter intimidation.  And then the federal DOJ, after the conviction, tosses the charges out at the instigation of the political appointees.

Having got away with merely having their thugs outside the polling place to intimidate voters, they’ve now realized they can in fact get away with pretty much anything, and so they don’t bother even hiding it any more.  Well, they don’t really have to hide it, do they, because the press will hide it for them.

I’m going to hazard a prediction and say that this is the last anyone will hear of this.