Reading Freely

9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America

Posted on February 19, 2018 by smellincoffee

9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America and 4 Who Tried to Save Her
© 2016 Brion McClanahan
354 pages

It is my dearest hope that by the time Donald Trump leaves the West Wing, the office of the presidency will have been so discredited that no one will take it seriously anymore. Congress will take serious measures to counter executive overreach, and the American people will somberly reflect that it was a bad idea to allow so much responsibility, expectation, and power to rest on the shoulders of one man. My second dearest hope is that pigs will fly. Brion McClanahan does what he can to take the American monarchy down a few pegs, though, by devoting half his book to exposing the greatness of a few titans as irresponsible hubris, and hailing a few forgotten men for their diligent work thwarting or ameliorating the excesses of others.

McClanahan scrutinizes each president based on how effectively they fulfilled their oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. Because Article II of the Constitution, which creates the office of President, does not include a full job description, McClanahan relies on debates from the Constitutional convention and the States’ ratification proceedings to determine what was expected of the president. This figure was not to be a king in democratic clothing, but a guardian of the rule of law: his primary job was to keep Congress, the only legislative body, in check – the job that George III failed to do when he allowed Parliament to tyrannize the colonies. Those who maintain a zealous watch are praised here; the rest, like those who invent new powers for themselves, or accept new powers from Congress through legislative fiat instead of constitutional amendment, or presume on the states or other branches’ prerogatives, or allow the other branches to presume on the same, are condemned. In general: 19th century presidents were largely faithful to the job, and 20th/21st century presidents sought to re-invent and magnify the office, and did so to the point that the old republic is now ruled by Jabba the State. (I borrow that, with gratitude and a bellylaugh, from Anthony Esolen.)

McClanahan’s critique is thus very strict, and he does not pardon men for doing pursuing good ends through improper means: that is not how the rule of law works. The Constitution is not a dead decree, a sacred writ that forces us to live in perpetuity by an 18th century society’s rules, but neither is it a piece of clay to be molded in any way. Those who wish to change the structure of US Government must do so through amendment, or – as the North threatened to do, as the South attempted to do – remove themselves and try again. McClanahan’s strict adherence to the original intent of the Constitution, and the observance of the rule of law, will no doubt earn the most criticism from those who read this, who believe that the government should periodically assume new powers as it “needs” them, without respecting the appropriate procedures. But those procedures, the rule of law, protect us from merely being controlled by the whims of men.

So, who are the nine?

Andrew Jackson, who terminated the Second Bank of the United States through extralegal means, promoted a dubious tariff that picked sectional favorites, and threatened to order the militia into South Carolina to prevent it from seceding in response to said tariffs;
Abraham Lincoln, who failed to recognize the legal separation of the southern States from the Union, illegally made use of State militias to invade a foreign power, presumptuously revoked habeus corpus, instituted a draft, instituted the income tax, and helped devalue the currency for starters;
Theodore Roosevelt, who made the president a celebrity and inserted himself into the legislative process, assuming powers not granted to him by the Constitution, including to make presidential proclamations.
Woodrow Wilson, who drove legislation, attempted to institute tariffs that picked sectional favorites, persecuted and jailed Americans for exercising the first amendment, instituted the Federal Reserve, and created powerfully intrusive regulatory bodies with no constitutional sanction;
Franklin D. Roosevelt, who created the American conservative movement by violating so much precedent and expanding the power of his office so quickly that critics didn’t even know where to begin countering his illegal intrusions into lives of people and the economy;
Harry S. Truman, who turned America into the guardian of the world and helped establish the military-industrial complex’s power over the American future;
Lyndon B. Johnson , who continued overreach in both domestic and foreign policy; like FDR before him and Nixon after him, he created agencies that combined legislative, judicial, and judicial functions, ignoring the wisdom of checks and balances;
Richard Nixon, who continued the same sorry trend and pawed at the economy as well, and began the steady erosion of the dollar as a unit of real value; and
Barack Obama, who greatly expanded Bush’s illegal wire-tapping, droning, and pushed through the Affordable Care Act, which made the sorry debacle of US healthcare even more onerous .

The two most controversial names on the list are Lincoln and Obama; Lincoln, because most people will refuse to consider that the constitution of the United States – the little c –constitution – was much different in 1860 than in 2018, that people did consider themselves members of the State of Maryland or the State of Vermont, and that the Union was a debatable issue; and Obama, because he was merely burning down a house that had already had its doors and windows pried off and its interior walls torn down by previous presidents. Oddly, even though McClanahan refers to Obama as the ‘worst’, the chapter on said president is rather short. Frankly, I think ranking a then-sitting president was a mistake.

There are some general lessons to be learned. In the 20th century, the easiest way to gain enormous power was through war — either real war, or by couching social programs in the language of war. Two, the most common violation is the president assuming responsibilities — lawmaking and warmaking — that are Congress’s alone. The president is not granted the authority to summon militias; only Congress may do that, and they require a state governors’ request. It doesn’t matter if Congresses passes a law giving itself power to do this or that — that’s not how the rule of law works. If they could empower themselves, they should just dispense with the formalities and issue straightforward dicta like honest oligarchs.

Following the rogues’ gallery, McClanahan then devotes the second half of his book to praising Thomas Jefferson, John Tyler, Grover Cleveland, and Calvin Coolidge. Jefferson is no surprise, rejecting anything that smacked of monarchy in presidential treatment and , ending as he did the illegal Alien and Sedition acts. Tyler will be unknown to most Americans; he was the first vice president to assume the office of president after Zachary Taylor died, and he spent most of his time in office vetoing Congressional actions that had no warrant in the Constitution. He was so consistent at it that both parties grew to hate him. Good on ya, Johnny! Cleveland was also solid on reining in Congress, and if nothing else he deserves a standing ovation for doing his best to prevent the United States from enveloping Hawaii. Coolidge, of course, has a deserved reputation for being a calm and steady hand on the rudder, intent on reversing growth as best he could within constitutional limits. The sad truth of political economy is that a bad president can increase his powers in violation of the law through his own will, while a good president’s own scruples forbid him from violating the law to reverse course.

The book ends with a series of suggested amendments which would in theory curtail the power of el presidente, though given how much bureaucratic power is now vested in the sprawl of executive departments, said amendments only only be a start. These amendments include limiting the president to one term and sharply enforcing Congress’s sole responsibility as a warmaking body.

When I began reading this, I was a little worried about McClananhan’s style, which — when he is lecturing — can grow abrasive. It’s not a style fit for communicating with people who disagree with you, and I’m happy to report that he largely reins himself in here, though his language grows a little less formal as he comes nearer to the 20th century. I think he manages to be approachable to those who disagree with him, but very few people care more about rule of law than doing what they think should be done now, and to the devil with the consequences. That, combined with the fact that human beings frequently revert to some tribal desire for a strong leader who can take charge and restore confidence in the future — whether he’s killing the old shaman for not pleasing the gods, or forcing everyone to buy health insurance to “fix” the cost of insurance — makes me think all human political experiments beyond a certain scale are doomed to failure.

Happy president’s day…

Related:
Recarving Rushmore, Ivan Eland. A very similar but more thorough review of each president based on their contribution to liberty, peace, and rule of law.
The Cult of the Presidency, Gene Healy. The story of how quiet servants like Tyler and Cleveland were supplanted by celebrities with delusions of grandeur .
The Twilight of the Presidency, George Reedy. A masterful review of how the American monarch is hindered by the sheer expanse of his office

Posted in history, Politics and Civic Interest, Reviews | Tagged Hail to the Chief, history, law, politics, Politics-CivicInterest, US Constitution | 15 Comments

House of Rain

Posted on February 17, 2018 by smellincoffee

House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest
© 2007 Craig Childs
482 pages

Throughout the southwest United States and northern Mexico there are ruins from a people long gone, people remembered as the Anasazi. The name is not theirs; it was applied by the Apache later on, and has a mocking connotation – -the old ones, the rotten ones, the defunct ones. The ruins of cliffside dwellings, abandoned signal towers, and brightly colored ceramics reveal a technically accomplished people, one whose lore contained information gleaned from hundreds of years of close observations: their sites often incorporate features which mark astronomical events, events that no doubt played a part in their mythos. Who were these people, and why did they leave?

Well, they didn’t, says Craig Childs. Or at least, it’s inaccurate to say they planted their flag in New Mexico and Arizona and such places, and then for some reason decided to abandon their ancestral homes. In search of answers, Craig Child hiked and drove throughout the Southwest, venturing far off the beaten track by himself or with archaeology students, to study the land, the light, and these spaces which remain to absorb what understanding can be had. Many of the people he walked with were specialists in the region — archaeoastronomers, say, or those who can identify the region that preserved wood or pottery came from by their chemistry,

Findings from archaeological digs indicate that this was a fluid population, one that frequently moved in response to environmental stresses. The rivers of this region are fickle, alternatively flooding and vanishing The transient ancients were following the water, and an interior nether-world of gods – a place beneath the soil where water was plentiful but released slowly in mountain streams or sudden springs — appears to have been on their mind. Ritual appears to have had a role in their leaving, as well: some sites are thought to have been torched deliberately, by the inhabitants, rather than destroyed in war. Some of their locations appear to have been settled communities, while others were mere migrant camps that could not have supported a large population, but were used as a short-term residence. Eventually these people dispersed in their travels to become the various pueblo peoples, like the Hopi.

House of Rain is neither a travel guide nor a comprehensive history, but rather an attempt to make sense of one through the other. The full story will never be known, though parts can be garnered by studying what was left behind and other pieces are locked away in the lore of native peoples who (for good reasons) do not wish to share their oral histories with outsiders – even outsiders as serious and respectful as Childs. Childs is a native son of the southwest who traveled extensively within it before writing this book, and the amount of contacts he nursed before engaging in this project reveals his sincere interest in the subject. House of Rain isn’t a novelty travel guide – “Ghost Towns of the Ancient West!” – but the chronicle of one man pursuing his passion, to learn as much as he could about those who lived in and loved the same landscape he did. Those who find the mountains and vistas of the Four Corners enchanting will appreciate this tour of a civilization that was.

Posted in history, Reviews | Tagged 2018 Peoples of the Americas, American Southwest, archaeology, history, Mexico, New Mexico, Peoples of the Americas series, travel | 4 Comments

Overclocked

Posted on February 15, 2018 by smellincoffee

Overclocked: More Stories of the Future Present
© 2016 Cory Doctorow
388 pages

I’d never heard of Cory Doctorow before this week, but I encountered his name on a list of promising SF authors and looked him up. Amazon obliged my curiosity with a flash sale on one of his collections of short stories, and so I began reading Overclocked. A collection of short pieces ranging from stories to novellas, Overclocked has some fun with SF classics and exploring concepts like intellectual property, 3D printing, robotics, and artificial intelligence. AI is particularly important, with several stories using characters who have duplicated their consciousness and downloaded it into other carriers so they could achieve multiple goals simultaneously. Doctorow freely borrows titles and concepts from other SF works, which is not surprising given that he believes strict legal protections of intellectual property smothers creativity and innovation; this belief finds expression in several stories here, particularly “After the Siege”. I took an immediate liking to these stories, aided in part by the fact that his best-known novel, Little Brother, is a YA man-vs-state scenario.

The stories:
“I, Robot” has the most fun with SF classics, throwing both Asimov and Orwell in a blender and creating a world where Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia and both have partially roboticized societies….but the societies in question are very different. It features robots, transferable consciousnesses, and a little futuristic law-enforcement.

“When Sys Admins Ruled the Earth”. A bioweapon has been released across the northern hemisphere and the world seems to be ending…but a handful of server admins are keeping the Internet up and the hope of recovery alive — at least as long as the power generators hold out.

“Anda’s Game” : a young teenager who finds meaning by playing in an elite women-only gaming clan is faced with a dilemma when she discovers a community of young Mexican girls online who are forced to play the game all day doing minor tasks to generate in-game gold, which is then sold for real money online. Taking their plight seriously might mean abandoning her friends…

“After the Siege” is easily the longest and darkest, detailing the life of a young woman who is orphaned while her city is besieged by outside powers in retaliation for its open-culture philosophy,The story features an outsider who calls himself a wizard and who — as the fearful and naive girl is turned by the war into a wary, cynical young woman — seems ever more suspicious. This story has the same premise as the short piece which opens the collection, “Printcrime”, but is enormously expanded. In that one, the police destroy and imprison a man who was using a 3D printer to reproduce copyright-protected goods.

“The Man Who Sold the Moon” is a nod to Heinlein, at least in its title. A man forced to look Death in the face encounters a friend who will change his life by dragging him to a Burning Man event, and is enlisted in a project to create a unique robot. When the friend has his own encounter with Death, however, a crowdfunded attempt to realize one of the stricken man’s dreams takes readers to the moon. The technical accomplishment drives the story, but a lot of its heart is the three main characters’ attempts to find meaning in an all-too mortal life now overshadowed by the threat of cancer.

“I, Rowboat”. The most speculative of the stories, this features a sentient rowboat programmed with Asimov’s Laws of Robotics attempting to protect some human shells (rented out to human consciousnesses who like to relive the days of having flesh and such) from a sentient coral reef. There are plentiful Asimov references here, including a robot religion called Asimovism, and a rogue personality which refers to itself as R. Daneel Olivaw. The amount of consciousnesses being uploaded and downloaded from host to host — at one point the boat downloads himself into a human shell — can get confusing, especially when a consciousness has been temporarily cloned. (At one point the rowboat downloads himself into a human shell to effect a rescue, and has a conversation with his rowboat self.)

All in all, I most definitely got my .99 cents worth and hope to try Little Brother at some point.

Posted in Reviews, science fiction | Tagged artificial intelligence, Corey Doctorow, science fiction, short stories | 5 Comments

Everyday Life of the North American Indians

Posted on February 13, 2018 by smellincoffee

Everyday Life of the North American Indian
© 1979 Jon White
256 pages

Everyday Life of the North American Indian is a dated but informative survey of the customs and lifestyles of native peoples across the continent. Most of the content is organized in chapters like “Warrior” and “Artist”, which include areas of life connected to warmaking or artistanship; for instance, the chapter on Shamans encompasses religion, spirituality, and mythology in addition to its particular interest on the role of shamans or similar figures. Because the varied peoples of an entire content are being considered, each hailing from radically different landscapes, each has to be addressed in the most general of terms, and the people of Mexico are largely ignored except as they influence various tribes living throughout the southeast and southwest. Although agriculture was practiced in some regions, hunting and foraging remained crucial — and because local stocks of game could be exhausted, many population employed a strategy of tethered mobility, moving from place to place within a certain region. Religion’s core was nature (gods of sun and corn, that sort of thing), not a philosophy of life, and roles for men and women had both fixed and fluid elements: men did the hunting and women did most of the work around the settlement, but both were artisans and both were particiopants in their political systems. As in other pre-industrial societies, children were introduced to their responsibilities fairly early, helping gather resources as tots, watching their younger siblings, and assuming the full mantle of adulthood by their teen years. The kind of massed warfare popular to depict in Hollywood movies was an anomaly: while native peoples were not pacific, they preferred quick raids to settle scores, at least until their societies were disrupted by guns and horses. However, some populations like the Iroquois, were notoriously severe in war: one of the reasons they joined together in a confederacy was to stem their neighborly bloodletting.

Although this is very general, and hasn’t aged well in parts, the damage is mostly contained by language. As far as I know, the theory that native Americans first arrived in the Americas via the Bering Land Bridge is still the mainstay, though now it’s suggested and understood that the ‘bridge’ was a more substantial landmass that people lived on, not merely transited through. Some of the author’s generalizations were reaching a bit, like suggesting that natives didn’t like to disrupt the land too much: I take it the Moundville culture is an exception, since building enormous soil pyramids from Mobile to Illinois would definitely count as disruptive. The author doesn’t promote any view of native peoples as gentle nature-loving hippies wearing eagle feathers, though. They are in their own turns aggressive and clement, and those who lived closed to the bone were judicious about their use of resources, while those who lived in abundance were more profligate. Charles C. Mann‘s more current research into native America demonstrated ably that some native societies altered the landscape to a wide degree.

All things considered, though, Everyday Life of the North American Indian is helpful. It’s replete with photographs, to boot.

Posted in history, Reviews | Tagged 2018 Peoples of the Americas, history, Native America, Peoples of the Americas series, social history | 2 Comments

The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis

Posted on February 12, 2018 by smellincoffee

The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis: Eleven Campus Stories
© 1951 Max Shulman
223 pages

Imagine if PG Wodehouse wrote stories about a girl-crazy freshman at the University of Minnesota, circa late 1940s. That’s kind of what reader will find in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. I first read this book in 2003; it was a going-away gift from my high school librarian, who had to discard it but thought I would like it. She was right — I loved it. I loved the silly humor, the archaic slang (“Wow-dow”, “he fractures me”, etc), the presence of this world that was so obviously different from mine. The eleven stories are not sequential, or integrated; unlike I Was a Teenage Dwarf, the Dobie here is not a fixed character. In one story he may be serious and cunning, and in another he’s apparently been given a dose of ecstasy, nibbling on girls’ fingers and jumping about “like a goat”. He studies, variously, mechanical engineering, law, chemistry, journalism, and Egyptology. Every story pivots on Dobie’s relationship with a girl, and more often than not he’s the one being led around by the ear, a bobby-soxed captain at the helm. Other times his desire to impress or woo a woman lead him astray. These stories are FUNNY — funny for the silly language, for the absurd scenarios, for the tongue in cheek narration. There’s also a lot of physical humor, something that’s hard to pull off in a literary medium. No wonder I took to Wodehouse so strongly when I first read him: he reminded me of this first brush with Shulman, who for me, never lived up to this book , no matter what else I read by him. (A lot of the other stuff was more bawdy than absurd.)

Read The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. It’ll fracture ya.

Related:

The closest Shulman ever came to matching this book for me was Barefoot Boy with Cheek, another campus-life satire.
“Love is a Fallacy“. One of the stories is available online. This is sort of a Frankenstein story in which budding law student Dobie tries teach logic to a girl he’d like to marry…only to have the tables turned on him.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged humor, Max Shulman, short stories | 7 Comments

Moundville

Posted on February 12, 2018 by smellincoffee

I have finally broken ground on this year’s study series with Everyday Life of North American Indians (© 1979), but before I start posting reviews and such I’d like to share some photos from a day trip I took with some friends three years ago. Our destination was Moundville, Alabama, site of the Moundville Archaelogical Park.

The park is the site of an ancient and abandoned city associated with the Mississippian culture. Several sites like these exist in the eastern United States: the largest place is Cahokia, in western Illinois (very near St. Louis, Missouri). I’ve heard of another mound near Mobile, but it is not accessible by road. “Moundville” was abandoned prior to the arrival of Europeans, much like the city-sites of the Anasazi. At its height, it may have had a thousand people. As with the Anasazi, it is believed that the inhabitants of this place merged or became the tribes which later lived in the region — in this case, tribes like the Chickasaw. The park now contains 21 mounds, but early reports refer to 30.

After entering the park at the visitor’s center in the left background of this photo, visitors will see them a wide field dotted with grassy mounds, with a circular road connecting them. This photo is taken atop the largest mound, considered to be the chief’s by virtue of its size.

There are about 77 steps — I’ve never counted myself, but before I took this shot back in May 2015, a young boy and his father were descending, and the boy counted nosily. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt!

At the far end of the circle is an air-conditioned museum, which houses artifacts and the expected information about the park, and the possibly political or religious uses of the mounds.

One of the exhibits.

Behind the museum are a few smaller mounds, plus ponds formed from the depressions left from excavating the dirt to build the original mounds.

Another area of the park houses three artificial huts built in the style of residences, and each contain half-melted plastic figures which once resembled humans doing the sort of things one expects museum exhibits to do — burying people, marrying, that sort of thing. In their melted state they’re rather gruesome. Enjoy another shot of the placid fields instead!

The Black Warrior River, which the city overlooked and which was its lifeblood, I’m sure. As I stood here I could almost imagine seeing hostile war-boats rounding the curve of the river. Unlike the Alabama river, the Black Warrior River remains navigable to heavy industrial and commercial traffic. (The Alabama river is so constricted by dams and such that it’s mostly used for pleasure craft and fishing these days.)

Moundville is intriguing for its mysteries: why did people build it, remain a few hundred years, and then melt away into the forest? Cahokia had a similar fate. There are just so many stories which have played out across familiar landscapes that have escaped the record completely. All we can do is stare, wonder, and probe the ground for answers.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged Native America, TW on the road | 4 Comments

The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England

Posted on February 11, 2018 by smellincoffee

The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century
© 2008 Ian Mortimer
342 pages

Within minutes of being transported to the time of King Arthur, Mark Twain’s fictional Yankee found himself arrested and facing death. If only he’d had a copy of Ian Mortimer’s Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England, he could have avoided such peril. Mortimer’s guide is a winsome social history of the 14th century, which covers every thing from social structure to city smells to table manners. Herein we are told what to see, what to wear, where to eat, what to do (and more importantly, what not to do — like enjoying a bit of mutton on Fridays). Now, it’s rather improbable that you or I or anyone else will ever actually have the chance to visit the 14th century, unless we’re doing it at the side of Geoffrey Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales. But this book’s real service to the modern reader is to bring the past alive, to guide readers through a remembrance of old England– down its crowded, jostling, feces-strewn streets, through alleys of barking vendors, past parades of solemn clergymen, into hovels and palaces and across plains where knights joust and yeomen farm — to encounter the very real and varied stories which memory has forgotten or abused. What a delight!

Ian Mortimer is an nigh-unparalleled host to the past, filling a wide table with a treasure of information. What aspect of life are you curious about from the medieval epoch? You will find it here. Clothing? You’re covered, literally, from head to foot, from young boys to old women. (Middle-aged men are not covered too well, wearing alarmingly short doublets that show off their expansive hosiery and ridiculously pointed shoes.) Are you interested in justice, or the miscarriage thereof? Mortimer reviews the structure of law and order, from the neighborhood tithing-man up to the king’s courts. Or perhaps you’d like to poke into medieval medicine? …well, you can, but you shouldn’t. It involves treatments of boiled puppies. One of the more interesting and unexpected chapters was on the medieval character. Medieval men and women lived much more closer to death than we did, but this manifest itself in different ways: a macabre sense of humor, a love for fleeting beauty, and a ready tolerance of heads on pikes outside the public gates. There are some curious omissions, like religion: the Church’s social structure appears again and again, of course, from church courts to travelers’ inns runs by monks, and the bits on custom can’t avoid religious discussion, whether we’re eating fish during Lent or going to court because it’s always held on this-or-that holiday. The ways people worshiped, however, are not addressed. Obviously Mortimer couldn’t cover everything, and so much is tackled that it’s a minor fault — but considering how strongly interconnected religion is with everything else, it’s a curious thing to not mention.

On the whole, I was enormously pleased with this book. Blame it on watching Men in Tights as a lad or playing too much Age of Empires, but the medieval epoch is one that has fascinated me for most of my life. I used to have a dim view of it, but was cured by encountering Frances and Joseph Gies’ medieval history works, books like Life in a Medieval City and Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel. The Gies and Mortimer’s works are obviously close kin, considering how much they intersect, but the Gies wrote several social histories of that sort and weren’t as pressed for space as Mortimer. He delivers an amazing amount of material in just a few hundred pages, but the strength of this book is not merely its content. Mortimer brings alive the intimate human experiences of the medeval epoch — the despair of parents losing their families during the Great Plague, the passion and tenderness of poets and courtesans, and the inescapable sense of Belonging, as peoples’ social ties were everything. Mortimer is also upfront about his sources, whether they’re inklings from the Canterbury Tales, or art, or formal histories, court records, that sort of thing.

I look forward to reading the rest of the books in this series, possibly in April given the English connection.

Related:
The works of Frances and Joseph Gies, especially:
Life in a Medieval City, Life in a Medieval Castle, Life in a Medieval Village, Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel, and The Knight in History.
The Other Side of Western Civilization. Articles on various workaday aspects of the ancient and medieval world.
The Age of Faith, Will Durant

Posted in history, Reviews | Tagged Britain, history, Medieval, social history | 6 Comments

Fool’s Errand

Posted on February 8, 2018 by smellincoffee

Incredible as it sounds, it is nearly possible for a child conceived in the first week of the US invasion of Afghanistan to have come of age and deploy there himself. He’s out there now, a sixteen or seventeen- year old waiting for the day when he can fight in his father’s war. The Afghanistan war is an odd one — the United States’ longest war, yes, but one of its least-cared about: not popular yet not protested. Americans just don’t seem to care about the trillions of dollars burned under the shadow of the Hindu Kush mountains, the thousands of American soldiers killed, or the hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians killed in attempts to destroy the nebulous enemy. Fool’s Errand is a case not just against the war, but against apathy. This war was badly conceived, badly executed, and maintained as a litany of errors, one feeding the fire that the initial invasion intended to squelch. The United States will leave Afghanistan eventually, and the area will collapse into civil war eventually. The only question is how many more lives will be ruined and how many more enemies DC will create in its belabored efforts to fight a hangover by hailing the hair of the dog.

They hate us for our freedoms, the president said as American troops marched into Afghanistan, and the wound of 9/11 was still too raw for anyone to question the claim. 9/11 was barbaric and unconscionable and to posit that it was done as a reaction to DCs own policy in the middle east would have seemed like an insult to the innocent slain – even though bin laden and al-Queda’s hatred for the American troops parked in Arab countries, used as bases to constantly bomb Arab citizens, was well documented. Even as the United States moved toward Afghanistan with an objective of overthrowing the Taliban that had given bin Laden shelter, the war was not inevitable: the rulers of Afghanistan then were willing to give bin Laden up, given to a US ally, but the administration in its heated desire for revenge had no interest in doing anything deliberately. Instead, American men and material were thrown into the same grave that claimed the armies of Alexander, the Brits, and the Russians. Homo sapiens is a misnomer.

From there the misery continues: having destroyed the old order, as disagreeable as it was, DC fumbled repeatedly in attempts to create a new one. It created an effective civil war in the country in its use of one pliable-but-despised tribe to do the governing, and through the breakdown of social order rose the criminal chaos that the Taliban had largely arrested by imposing its own illiberal order. Oddly, people object to being invaded and bombed, and a relatively small number of scattered al-Queda fighters grew into a native resistance — and the more bombs that fell, the more lives destroyed in an attempt to get the bad guys, the more enraged and distressed men picked up guns and started fighting. Money gone to train Afghanis to defend their “country” disappeared with the trained troops, who had little real interest in fighting their neighbor insurgents. The chaos spread across the region as DC tried to intervene in other regimes, and the “war on terror” became a sustained nightmare of bombs for those on the ground, creating new lifetimes of American enemies in the middle east. Osama bin Laden, hiding comfortably, could bask behind his own MISSION ACCMPLISHED banner: he wanted to draw the Americans into an unwinnable war, and they drove straight into the minefield. (And he’s not the only enemy DC effectively helped: the Islamic Republic of Iran was once surrounded by armed Sunni states; now those rivals are ruined and Iran has much more influence over the region, to the despair of DC’s partners in crime, the House of Saud.)

Depressing and infuriating, Fool’s Errand tells a full story. There’s the military history of the invasion and growing insurgency, followed by futile attempts to squelch it, but Horton also dips into the politics of the region and of DC, showing how the anti-war aims of Obama were frustrated by inertia and the fact that the DC establishment — the bureaucrats, the lobbyists, and the defense and intelligence contractors who are guaranteed work — has no interest in bowing to history just yet. They’ll keep sending other people’s children to die and burning other people’s money.

Related:
The author’s podcast, featuring over four thousand interviews with foreign policy analysts, dating to 2003.

Posted in Politics and Civic Interest, Reviews, World Affairs | Tagged George W Bush, Middle East, military, Obama, politics, Politics-CivicInterest, Scott Horton, terror war | 19 Comments

Books from a time capsule of sorts

Posted on February 6, 2018 by smellincoffee

Around Christmas, the technical expertise and beneficence of a friend allowed me to recover the data from a computer of mine from 2004-2008, one that has been offline since that spring when either its power supply or motherboard gave up the ghost. The machine spanned a transitional point in my life, from the high watermark of youth, to the beginnings of my adulthood. There are all sorts of artifacts from my life-that-was: saved chats, scores of MS Works documents, and…Livejournal posts, and I thought it would make an interesting exercise to look through them and see what books I was mentioning in conversation back then.

1. The Paragon, John Knowles

I apparently picked this up in 2005, following up on my interest in A Separate Peace. If I ever finished it, I don’t recall a blessed thing about it.

2. Short stories by James Turber

Thurber was mentioned in a psychology text, used in a class that I hated going to — not for lack of interest in the subject, but because the teacher was new, obnoxious, and dull despite his background as a saxophonist from Las Vegas. I used to sit in the back and read during the lectures. I mention that I went to the library looking for a collection of Thurber’s works, so evidently the text caught my attention better than the teacher.

3. Balance of Power, James Huston

I actually remember this one! Very vaguely. It’s a political-action thriller in which there’s some naval terrorist action, and the President won’t act so the Congress decides to dust off the Constitution and use that clause that allows them to issue “Letters of Marque”, or…engage mercenaries for bounty-hunting. This was one of the books I was reading in psychology class. My questionable verdict: “That is one good book”.

4. Ratpack Confidential, Shawn Levy

“It was the ultimate spasm of traditional showbiz–both the last and most of its kind. It was the high point of their lives and a midlife crisis. It was the acme of the American Century and a venal, rancid, ugly sham. It was the Rat Pack. It was beautiful.”

Just one of the many Ratpack and Sinatra-related books I was reading in 2005, along with The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin‘. I was utterly obsessed with Sinatra, listening to the same two CDs over and over again. (“Sinatra Reprise: The Best is Yet to Come”, and “Classic Sinatra”).

5. Submarine! I can’t find this book on amazon, but I seem to have purchased it at a mall in Montgomery, Alabama, and described it as a WW2 submariner’s memoirs. I went into the bookstore looking for a book on “zoology”, and mention browsing the gangster nonfiction a bit, including the memoir of Henry Hill.

6. Man of Honor and Bound by Honor, by Joseph and Bill Bonanno — the memoirs of a father and son who were part of the New York mafia. I was a bit obsessed with la cosa nostra in 2004 and 2005. Both were borrowed from my history professor, whose office I haunted regularly.

7. That Was Then, Then is Now, S.E. Hinton. I used carry this one in my jacket and read from it whenever I was waiting on something, and I mentioned it incessantly. No wonder my copy of the book is so beaten up!

8. Travels with Charley in Search of America, John Steinbeck. I revisited this one in 2010, but I don’t know how my take on it drifted in the five years that passed. (When I mentioned the book the first time, it was quickly overshadowed by chatter about a girl…)

9. British History for Dummies and Shakespeare for Dummies. Both read in late spring 2005, in part for leisure and in part to help with a paper on Othello. I used to have a sizable collection of for Dummies and Complete Idiot’s Guide to… books, as they were cheaper surveys of various historical subjects.

10. The Broker, John Grisham. Another book I read during Psychology after receiving it for my birthday early 2005.

Also mentioned, but never elaborated on, were “a book of sketches from the Larry King Live show”, and “Men’s Relational Toolbox”. I assume the latter was self-help about relationships.

Although I wasn’t listing my books back then — and even when I started writing about books on purpose, instead of mentioning them in online journals and in AIM conversations — I seem to have been a fairly active reader despite the pressures of writing constant papers and struggling with literature like Phaedra.

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