Walls, Damned Lies, and Statistics

Even paradise could become a prison if one had enough time to take notice of the walls.
― Morgan Rhodes, Falling Kingdoms

And so, here we are.

Thirty-four days, as I type this.

Thirty-four days since our government failed, shut down, deadlocked. Whatever you want to call it.

Thirty-four days, two full paychecks for 800,000 American citizens who are growing increasingly desperate.

Thirty-four days since our government has functioned to even its normal minimum levels of competency and service.

Thirty-four days, more than a month now with no end in sight, since your food was fully inspected for safety, since your taxes were processed or there was somebody available at the IRS helplines to provide advice and support (you, however, will still be required to file on time or suffer the consequences for your failure).  Thirty-four days since your national parks and national museums were staffed and patrolled and cleaned. It’s now been more than a month since those who guide more than a hundred thousand commercial airline flights safely through the skies every day have been paid, since those who guard your airports and seaports and transportation systems have been paid.

What’s that?

Don’t worry, don’t cry, when this shut down is over, they’ll get paid?

Sure. Maybe. Probably. But that eventual paycheck won’t pay the overdraft fees on bounced checks or the penalties from overdrawn accounts or the fines for late rent or the interest on short term loans or make up for the things families had to do without.

You want to know how bad it is?

Do you?

Yesterday I saw something I’ve never seen before.

I saw the Commandant of the United States Coast Guard, Admiral Karl Schultz, publicly apologize to the men and women, uniformed and civilian, of his service for the failure and inaction of America’s elected leaders. For betrayal of trust and the abject failure of the nation they are sworn to defend.

Those men and women put their lives on the line every single day for America. There is no service that more directly risks their lives in protection of America than these guardsmen. And they do it every day, every night, calm and storm, peace and war, from search and rescue in the frigid arctic waters of Alaska, to counter-terrorism in our ports, to border patrol and drug interdiction along our Southern coast, to war in the Arabian Gulf. They’re out there, every single day, right now this very minute, no matter what, no matter the risk. And today, their commander had to apologize to them and direct them to food banks and mutual aid societies in order to feed their families.

This is a disgrace we will never live down.

Tens of thousands of government contractors have been sent home. A lot of them won’t get paid. There won’t be any back pay for them. And don’t tell me they will get paid, because I know better. See, I used to be one of them. After the second government shutdown in a year and losing more than a month’s pay, I quit. I walked away from government contracting and America got the short end of the deal on that one. I had 30 years of experience, first as career military, then as a government employee. Much of my training and knowledge came from that service – just like the vast majority of government contractors. The United States gets a pretty damned good Return on Investment by hiring us. I took that and walked away. Became a writer. Put my fate into my own hands, for good or ill. Because I was sick of working for free, sick of working for faithless selfish sons of bitches, sick of not knowing from month to month or contract to contract if the projects I started, the effort I invested, would be thrown away because a bunch of goddamned children in Washington could not, or would not, do their jobs. In the end, I walked away because I was sick and goddamned tired of being treated like trash by my own government. It’ll be the same here. Irreplaceable talent will go out the door, lost forever. And your government will become even more inefficient, more unskilled, more inexperienced and will have to pay to find and train new people, those desperate enough – or stupid enough – to put up with being treated like shit.

It’s happening right now.

And it’s going to get worse.

The Federal Judiciary ran out of money last week and will have to start shutting down services. That’s right, the federal court system. You’ll want to think about the implications of that.

The situation at our Airports is growing critical. These systems, security, traffic control, airspace management, are almost unimaginably complex and are all interlinked. One portion fails, and there are ripple effects, harmonics, across the entire structure. The system is already overloaded, pushed to capacity and beyond. It doesn’t take much. You see this every time there’s a snowstorm at a major hub. It doesn’t have to be the entire system that goes down, just a part, a critical piece, a crisis, a snowstorm, a walkout, a slowdown by disgruntled workers who haven’t been paid in a month, and air transportation in the US will collapse into chaos. That’s not just passengers, you know. It’s business. It’s mail service, cargo, shipping, UPS and FEDEX – including critical prescription shipments to the elderly and to veterans. It’s live organ transfers. It’s all the people who aren’t government workers but depend on this industry for a living, from the janitors to the food court service workers to the baggage handlers. It’s a thousand other things you never thought of. The second order effects can’t even be calculated, particularly if major airlines go into default because this sector of our economy is thrown into chaos.

The Commerce Department is mostly offline. The division that compiles critical economic data, the Economic Analysis and Census Bureau, is shuttered and that information isn’t being gathered or published. This information is used to adjust the economy and to manage other government departments from Agriculture to the Treasury, to determine lending rates, to determine Gross Domestic Product, personal income, INFLATION, spending, trade, and new home sales.

This morning, as Secretary of Commerce billionaire businessman Wilbur Ross wondered out loud why his furloughed employees are resorting to food banks to feed their families, President Trump tweeted this:

The economy is doing great, says Trump.

Great. Just great. The economy is doing great. Better than any time in our history.

That’s what Trump said.

But how would he actually know?

No really, how would he know? With Commerce shut down, how does Trump really know? How? Fox And Friends? Is that it? Is that where Trump got his information?

Okay.

So, how do they know?

Ask yourself, where did Fox News get this information? Who compiled it? Using what methods? What sources? Where did the raw data come from? What's the margin of error? How current is the information? How do you really know what the economy is doing when the agency most directly responsible for monitoring it has been shuttered for over a month?


Trump is gleefully whistling along with the jaunty music played by the Fox News dance band as the Titanic steams full speed at the iceberg.


The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), food stamps, runs out of funding in six days. So what, say conservatives. They hate that program to the very depths of their flinty Christian souls. But that’s also the same funding line that pays for subsidized school lunches. People, kids, are going to be hungry by and by and you have to wonder what their precious prophet would think of that?

New applicants for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will have to wait. Those already enrolled will continue to receive their benefits, but new applications can’t be processed until the government comes back on line – and this is the point where I remind you that your president said he is willing to keep the government shut down for “years.”

But, hey, billionaires got a tax break and the economy is doing great, Folks. Just great. Probably.

Thirty-four days now and no end in sight.

A new record for Trump.

A new record for governmental failure in America.

I guess huzzahs are in order.

Why?

Why are we here, in this moment of failure?

Why are certain Americans acting as if this failure of government is something to celebrate?

Why is the President and his party acting as if this failure of their own administration is some sort of victory?

Why?

Well it’s simple really. It’s about slogans.

Build a wall and crime will fall.

Now, there’s a slogan for the same MAGA hat wearing mouth-breathers who hear Trump say, “The economy is doing great!” and nod their heads without a single question.

Build a wall and crime will fall.

There’s a slogan that perfectly sums up an administration that daily boils down xenophobia, jingoism, racism, not to mention complex matters of economics, commerce, demographics, foreign policy, climate change, war, into a tweet.

Build a wall and crime will fall.

The perfect slogan for attention deficit disorder America.

Build a wall and crime will fall.

Catchy. Mindless. Empty bombast masquerading as pithy intellect. Yes, indeed, there’s a slogan that is the perfect summation of Donald Trump.

Build a wall and crime will fall.

Except … what crime?

I’m not saying there’s no crime in America because obviously there is, but what crime are we talking about here?

Build a wall and crime will fall? What crime? What kind of crime? Murder? Rape? Shoplifting? Speeding? Tax evasion by billionaires? Political corruption? Treason? What crimes are we talking about?

And when Trump says “crime will fall,” what does that mean? Fall? That’s a pretty vague measure. Fall by what? Feet? Meters? The number of barleycorns that will fit on Trump’s tiny thumb? Furlongs per fortnight? Are we talking eighty percent or some fraction of a percentage point?

I mean, slogans are great and all, but what are we really talking about here?

Trump gleefully seizes on every violent crime committed by an illegal alien…

… but never seems to mention the hundreds, thousands, of similar crimes committed every week by those Americans who were born and raised right here in the good old United States of America.

What percentage of crimes are committed by illegal immigrants?

Is this really the most significant problem we face? Crime wise?

What are the statistics? What percentage of crime, and what kind of crimes? It matters, you know.

Show me the equation.

No. No. Don’t shake your head and try to move the goalpost. Trump said: “BUILD THE WALL AND CRIME WILL FALL.”

Build a wall and crime will fall.

How do you know?

Look here, you want to spend billions of dollars that we do not have to build a wall, and you tell me that wall will cause crime to fall by some amount. Okay. Fair enough. Prove it. Or if not prove it, at least show me the numbers which support your argument.

Build a wall and crime will fall.

All right, let’s start by looking at crime in total.

That’s right, crime in total. Trump said, build a wall and crime will fall. He didn’t say build a wall and there will be less of some certain crimes. He said crime. As in crime in general. So, we need to know the amount of total crime in America.

Then we need to know the percentage of the total crime which is committed by illegal aliens vs the percentage committed by legal residents of this country.

Then we need to look at the percentage of the crime committed by illegal aliens who specifically enter the United States via our southern border – not the ones who come in via the sea, or by air, or from Canada, and not those who come in legally and overstay their visa or those who come here via normal ports of entry using fraudulent identification, only those who illegally enter the United States via the southern border (note that we essentially  just ruled out any wall stopping the kind of crime committed by, oh say for example, the 9-11 hijackers. But I digress).

And then you need to factor in the theoretical percentage of that number who would be stopped by a wall.

And finally, you need to show how that final number would impact the original number, i.e. total crime, and by how much, because that’s what Trump is saying. Crime will fall. Will it? By how much? Enough to offset the enormous cost of this wall and its maintenance in perpetuity? That’s what I’m asking you to show. That number.

That one, right there.

For example: A car theft outfit in San Diego uses illegal aliens to steal cars. Now first we need to know what percentage of overall crime car theft is – which means you’ll need to have a process for determining overall “crime” as a quantitative number. You don’t have that. You don’t have any way to define or calculate that to any useful degree. But for the sake of argument, lets just say that we do. Next you need to know what percentage of overall crime is made up of car theft, and for the sake of simplicity we’ll assume there is only one kind of car theft. Then you need to figure out how much car theft is committed by illegal aliens and of that number, how many of those illegal aliens come across the US/Mexico border illegally (as opposed, for example, to car theft committed by illegal aliens who came from, say, Asia via container ship. Again, for example). Which would indicate that for precision sake, you’d need to have illegal alien crime broken down not only by crime category, but also by illegal alien country of origin AND methodology of illegal entry. Then you need to calculate the theoretical efficiency of a wall in stopping those particular illegal immigrants who enter via that one particular avenue (and ideally, you’d want to further break that number down into specific geographic corridors along the southern border so you could tell if the wall was equally effective along its entire length in stopping crime and if not which areas might require additional measures). And then finally, you’ll need to determine the actual impact on the car theft business or in other words, will that crime “fall” for lack of illegal immigrants who specifically entered the United States via our southern border OR will that particular criminal enterprise simply find somebody else to steal cars?

In this example, the odds are fairly high that a wall will have no impact on this particular crime in any fashion to any statistically significant degree whatsoever.

Now, do the same for murder. For assault. For sexual assault. For theft. For larceny. For bank fraud. For campaign finance violations. For treason.

No. Don’t roll your eyes. It matters. When Trump says “crime will fall” what kind of crime? Because, again for example, credit card fraud in the US costs merchants more than $190 BILLION each year. Now, is that more or less than the amount they lose to shoplifting by illegal immigrants? Well? How much of that credit card fraud is committed by illegal aliens? And how much of that would a wall stop?

That’s what we’re talking about, that number right there.

How do you calculate that number?

According the FBI, white collar crimes, crimes committed by business and government professionals, cost the US $300 billion annually. Trump’s wall wouldn’t affect that statistic in any fashion whatsoever.

So, you see, the type of crime we’re talking about matters.

Build the wall, crime will fall. So what type of crime are we talking about?

Murder? Okay. The homicide rate in the US last year was 4.9 murders per 100,000 people. What’s that? 0.0049 percent, a number so small that it’s statistically zero (unless, of course, you’re one of the people who fall into that fraction of percentage. I’m not trying to be flip here). Now, how many of those 0.0049% murders were committed by illegal aliens that crossed our southern border in a place where a wall would have stopped them?

How many?

Ten percent of 0.0049%?

Twenty?

Fifty?

Even if every one of those murders, every single one, was committed by an illegal alien that would have been stopped by a wall, the statistics for murder would only fall by what?

Yeah. That’s right.

0.0049%.


Now, to be fair to Trump, you can sort of see why the slogan isn’t “Build a wall and crime will maybe decrease in some cases by some tiny fraction of a percentage that is statistically insignificant and isn’t actually being measured by any valid agency to any useful degree while the crimes that actually cost America many billions every year and destroy thousands of American lives won’t be affected in any fashion whatsoever.”


What’s that?

Oh, you noticed, did you?

That’s right, nobody gathers this information.

Unlike the Department of Commerce, this isn’t data that’s going uncalculated because of this government shutdown.

It’s going uncalculated because nobody calculates it.

Nobody gathers this information. Not in total. Not to compile the kind of supporting data Trump would need to prove his slogan to any useful degree.

Back in June of 2018, Trump told the nation that illegal immigrants as a population commit violent crimes at a rate far above that of legal residents (native born and naturalized citizens, resident aliens, visitors, etc). He didn’t put an actual number on it, but he implied that it was a lot.

A day later Senator Bernie Sanders contradicted Trump’s statement and declared, “I understand that the crime rate among undocumented people is actually lower than the general population.”

Who’s right?

How do you know?

Well, that’s the thing. There is no single entity in the US tasked with specifically gathering, compiling, analyzing, and disseminating that data for the nation as a whole. Instead, each state maintains crime statistics broken down by whatever categories they each find useful, there’s no standard. The federal government maintains certain statistics on crimes for which federal law enforcement is responsible, such as forgery or kidnapping. Various agencies gather and maintain various statistics. There’s some overlap, but there’s no single uniform clearinghouse for this information. Any numbers, like those presented by Trump and Sanders above, are, at best, guesses, and you can find thinktanks and research to support literally any position you like.

So when Trump says “Build a wall and crime will fall” it means literally ... nothing.

Like nearly everything else Trump says, it has no basis in provable reality – either for or against. It’s simply a slogan, a soundbite which appeals to the dimwits and the intellectually incurious, those who think “common sense” and “gut instinct” are a good basis to spend billions of dollars on.

Of course, these are the same people who think their “gut” feelings about climate change are equal to actual science, so if nothing else they are consistent.

As is Trump.

A week ago he tweeted this:

So, another caravan is heading towards our border. It's a 1000 miles away, traveling on foot, but OMG! Mexico isn't stopping it, even though this caravan, if it even exists, isn’t actually in Mexico. So we’ll have to stop it like the last two caravans with our wall (which, based on previous tweets, is sort of like a wheel). But this takes a lot of border patrol agents who are not getting paid right now specifically because there is no wall and we want a wall to stop the caravan which is forming but if Mexico stopped the caravan we wouldn't even need a wall probably and everybody could get paid!

Have a headache yet?

I know I sure do.

It’s gibberish. Trump contradicts himself over and over and doesn’t seem to be bothered by it.

The more you try to make sense of what he says, the worse the headache gets. I mean, look at it:

1. Mexico should somehow stop people from migrating to the United States. Right? Doesn't matter how, it's Mexico's responsibility to stop migration of people from outside of Mexico and from within Mexico to the United States. That's Mexico's job, or it should be.

2. Border Patrol is currently doing Mexico’s job. Since Mexico isn't stopping migration. And we don't have a wall to stop them (and yet this non-existent wall stopped the last two caravans and never mind, he’s rollin’), so, US border patrol is doing it.

3. But it takes a lot of border patrol agents.

That's what he said, if I'm parsing his gibberish correctly.

So, if we take that as a given, or at least an indicator of Trump's thought process on this matter, then the preferred barriers to immigration from Central America to North America are (A) Mexico, (B) Wall, and/or (C) Border Patrol.

Now Trump wants Option (B), 30 feet tall and 2000 miles long, because (A) isn't doing its job and (C) actually is but we apparently need a lot of them and we’d like to have less.

But just hang on a minute here.

Estimates to construct a border wall of the kind Trump wants range from (DHS) $21.6 billion to (GAO) $70 billion. Now, I’d say based on my own experience in military and government work over the last 30 years, you can double the high end and you’ll still come out short, but let’s be charitable and split the different. $55 billion.

For reference, the annual budget for the entire Department of Homeland Security for 2017 was $40.6 billion.

Wait, what?

Yep, that’s right, $40.6 billion.

Oh, and you need, conservatively, $120 million per year to maintain this wall once it’s built.

I know, math. But bear with me here, you’ll enjoy the punchline.

Now, the average border patrol agent makes about $56K per year, or about $21.50 an hour.

You know how many border patrol agents you could hire for $120 million?

Do you?

Two thousand, one hundred, and forty-two.

See? I told you you’d enjoy the punchline.

For the wall’s maintenance fee alone, you could add two thousand new border patrol agents. For a fraction of that $55 billion, hell for a fraction of the $5.7 billion Trump is demanding now, you could fully train them and equip that force with everything they need, and then some.

So, I’ve got to question the priorities here. Because it seems increasing the number of border patrol agents would be a whole lot cheaper than building a wall – and this is a method that Trump himself says works. Is working. Right now.

Moreover – because you just knew there’d be a moreover -- if Mexico is your preferred primary defense, why would you hamstring that country via this new USMCA trade deal? Wouldn’t you want them to have the assets necessary to stop these caravans of immigrants permanently? Say by, oh, I don’t know, offering immigrants good jobs in American factories based in Mexico? I mean, wouldn’t you want Mexico to be more attractive a destination than America? Same language, similar culture, lower cost of living, good jobs? Seems like everybody would win here.

And while we’re on the subject, if border patrol agents are currently the most cost effective method of securing the border, why in the hell would you keep the government shut down?

I mean, don’t you think they’d be even more effective if they were actually getting paid?

The US/Mexico border is 1954 miles long. Currently, about 700 miles is fenced in some fashion.

Meaning a bit more than 1200 miles isn't.

And the parts that aren’t are in remote territory, far from urban development on either side of the border.

So, if you build this wall, 30 feet high, 2000 miles long, 1200+ miles of it would STILL traverse remote territory.

Now, people being people, it won't matter how high the wall is, or how thick, or whatever passive systems (such as spikes or concertina wire, etc) you include. Given enough time and resources, human ingenuity will find a way over, under, or through your wall in short order. And that is particularly true in remote areas, outside of full time observation.

In our case, that's about 1200 miles worth of remote territory.

You don't need to take my word for this, you can research the effectiveness of such barriers from the Great Wall of China to the Berlin Wall, from Hadrian's Wall to the West Bank Barrier.

What?

What's that?

Oh, right. The West Bank Barrier, the wall which divides Israel from Palestine.

Yes?

It works, my critics say.

And it does. In the areas where it’s patrolled and fortified. Because in those areas it's not just a wall, it's a multi-layered defense system. Barbed wire, anti-sniper concrete wall over part of its length, vehicle ditches, electronic systems, patrols. In areas of high priority, it’s monitored 24 hours a day, every day. It is patrolled 24 hours a day, every day. The cost to Israel (and Palestine) is high. It works. Yes it does. It keeps people penned up, keeps them apart, keeps people out, maybe keeps them from killing each other. Just as it was designed to do and a number of American conservatives look to that Israeli model as an example. But even Israel didn’t fortify that barrier over its entire length. It’s too expensive. Too impossible.

The American version would have to be vastly longer and vastly more expensive.

In Israel, that barrier was designed, rightly or wrongly, to separate nations and people at war.

And the only way a such a barrier works is with constant monitoring, constant patrolling. Because otherwise, as I mentioned up above, all you need to defeat it is a ladder and some quiet time. This is true of the West Bank Barrier. And it was true of Hadrian's Wall. And the Great Wall of China. The Maginot Line, the Berlin Wall, Saddam's line. Etc. They all had to be monitored and patrolled. Or they were no more an impediment to movement than any natural barrier, any river, or hill.


And as Trump himself said, or implied rather, it’s not the wall that is the barrier, it’s the border patrol.


Up above, I mentioned the Maginot Line.

The French spent enormous resources to fortify their borders with the well known Maginot Line in the northeast of France and the lesser known (and somewhat more successful) Alpine Line (sometimes called the Little Maginot Line) in the south. But once in place, those resources were fixed. They could not move or be used elsewhere.

When the Nazis did a rapid end run around the fortifications through the Ardennes Forest, all the enormous resources of the Line were immediately rendered moot, left behind in their fixed, immobile positions. The Line is still there today, its walls rotting, rusting, and useless, a tourist attraction and a monument to fatal folly.

That’s the lesson of the Maginot Line: a wall is fixed in position, and thus the defenses and resources of a wall are only useful at the wall.

And as we’ve already noted, as Trump himself has noted, a mobile force on our southern border is far more effective. Is currently effective. And could be made even more effective for a fraction of what a physical barrier would cost. Flexible. Adaptable. Mobile. Not anchored to a single physical installation. Able to relocate rapidly to areas of threat, and then move again with the threat changes.

Walls are good for small, limited, controlled areas where the wall is part of a larger defensive system, and continuously monitored, protected, and maintained. Where those manning the wall have a significant advantage over those the wall is designed to control.

Like a border in a high population area, such as the high density regions around crossing points in Southern California, Arizona, and Texas.

Areas where we already have a wall.

For Trump's wall, a barrier 2000 miles long, to work, you will have to monitor it in real-time along every inch. You will have to install cameras and sensors, fly drones and aircraft, and put out daily patrols. The wall will be constantly probed. Constantly tested. Constantly watched by those we're trying to keep out. There isn't any way to hide it. 2000 miles long, 30 feet high, and visible in orbit. We become anchored to our wall, constantly trying to find any weakness before the adversary does. Any moment of inattention, any blind spot, any weakness, will be found – and exploited. The odds are with the attacker, not the defender, especially over that distance.

Because that is human nature. Ask any prison guard.

Of course, the people of the US and Central America are not at war.

Those seeking refuge in the US are unlikely to storm the border with a Blitzkrieg of tanks and dive bombers – and if they were, we wouldn’t build a wall anyway because the US military doesn't fight from fixed positions.

Those who build walls in the desert often die on them. As Saddam's army learned – or didn't actually, given how the second war with the US went.

Again, walls are useful for certain limited applications. But they are utterly impractical over thousands of miles. Your assets become fixed, inflexible, unable to adapt, and if bypassed they're useless.

You will never get a return on your investment.

The only way to make a wall effective over that distance to monitor and man it over every inch every minute of every day.

If you have to have eyes on the border an anyway, if you have to patrol the entire length in real time anyway, if you have to monitor the cameras and sensors and drones anyway, if you have to counter any breach anywhere anytime anyway, THEN YOU DON'T NEED A PHYSICAL WALL.

For a wall to work, to do what Trump promises, it can’t be a simple barrier, no matter how long, no matter how high.

Like the West Bank Barrier, or the Great Wall of China, it would have to be a complex system of technology and human beings where the physical wall itself is the very least part, its defenses fixed and inflexible, unable to adapt to changing circumstance.

And that’s the joker, right there.

See, once you implement the supporting systems and personnel you need to secure the wall, you no longer need the wall outside of a few small areas.

And without a wall, those security systems become much more flexible, mobile, unpredictable, and adaptable. They then have the advantage.

And it is cheaper. Vastly cheaper.

History, our own military strategy, and our national security policies learned over two painful centuries, demonstrate just how useless and ill advised a fixed defense is.

This isn’t about crime.

It’s not about terrorism.

It’s not about immigration.

It’s not about sovereignty.

It’s not about some humanitarian crisis on the border.

Because we could do something about all of those things, more effectively, more quickly, more cheaply, right now, and without shutting down our government.

No. It’s about fear.

Whenever I write about this wall on social media, the overwhelming response is that illegal immigrants will just go around a wall.

And that is likely true.

They’ll go around the wall. They’ll go over it or under it or come in via a different route. They’ll come in legally and overstay their visas. They come in using fraudulent papers. They’ll arrive hidden in cargo at our seaports or Canadian ones and come across the unwatched northern border.

They’ll find a way, because people always do.

And those in power, those telling you that you should be afraid, those who profit from fear? The sloganeers? They’ll want these illegal immigrants to come. They’ll need them. Oh, not to pick the fruit or mow the grass or watch the kids for cheap – though they’ll want that too.

No, those who profit from fear need something to fear.

Those who profit from fear need somebody to blame.

Those who are afraid, they must have somebody, some threat, some nameless shapeless dread, to fear.

It's the easiest form of power, the simplest way to manipulate the rudest of minds. Them. They’re getting in. They’re taking your jobs. They’re committing the crimes, raping, murdering, stealing your democracy. Them. Did you hear about them? They are here, oh you bet they are. Be afraid.

And so, we’ve got to do more.

We’ve got to be safe, dammit.

You built the walls, you patrol the beaches and the skies. But it's not enough, those in power tell you. It can't be enough. It can never be enough. It won’t end with the wall. We have to have somebody to fear. They are still getting in. They are here. Oh yes they are. Who else would be causing these problems? Committing these crimes?

We’ve got to do more. We’ve got to be safe. Don't you want to be safe? Don't you want your kids to be safe? Don't you want your country to be safe?

Of course you do.

We've done everything to keep them out, walls, wire, soldiers, guns, dogs, but they're still here, it’s not enough.

So, we need some way to identify who belongs and who doesn't. We have to know. To be safe. To be sure.

You need proper identification.

That's right. Proper ID. And control over who gets that ID. And then, well, then we'll need some sort of secret police force to check that identification to make sure they’re not sneaking about. Right?

I mean, we have to be safe, don't we?

We have to be sure.

Papers, please. Papers.

That's how this goes.

It's never enough. You can never be sure. You can never be safe. You have to keep doing more. More walls. More barbed wire. More guards. More dogs. More identification.

More slogans.

More of everything, except for … proof.

That's how this goes every goddamned time.

This is how republics die, right here. Through ignorance and stupidity and fear.

Those who thrive on this kind of power, the power of fear, they need you to be afraid.

And so it will never be enough. Ever.


A society that starts building walls out of fear will one day end by building its own prison.

“They want us to be afraid.
They want us to be afraid of leaving our homes.
They want us to barricade our doors
and hide our children.
Their aim is to make us fear life itself!

They want us to hate.
They want us to hate 'the other'.
They want us to practice aggression
and perfect antagonism.
Their aim is to divide us all!

They want us to be inhuman.
They want us to throw out our kindness.
They want us to bury our love
and burn our hope.
Their aim is to take all our light!

They think their bricked walls
will separate us.
They think their damned bombs
will defeat us.
They are so ignorant they don’t understand
that my soul and your soul are old friends.
They are so ignorant they don’t understand
that when they cut you I bleed.
They are so ignorant they don’t understand
that we will never be afraid,
we will never hate
and we will never be silent
Let life be ours!”
― They Want Us To Be Afraid
      Kamand Kojouri, poet, novelist

Simplification

Fifty years ago, a guy named Walter M. Miller Jr. penned a provocative and terrifying tale.

It was the only book he ever published, but it was a doozy*.

A Canticle for Leibowitz tells the story of a small abbey of monks living in a post apocalyptic world devastated not just by a terrible war, but by deliberate and willful ignorance.

Like much of the fiction of the 1960’s, Canticle was shaped by the Cold War. In the story, six hundred years before the events of the novel, civilization was destroyed by a nuclear exchange between East and West. The survivors could have rebuilt their world, could have remade civilization, wiser perhaps, more cautious, they could have put aside their differences and learned to cooperate.  Instead, they descended into savagery.  They killed the surviving scientists and the engineers, blaming science and technology for the devastation instead of the fear and hatred and politics that had led them to disaster, and then they deliberately discarded the hard won knowledge of their ancestors.  As the world disintegrated into a new dark age that would last for the next eight hundred years, they hunted down and burned the last books, along with those who could still read and write.

As ignorance and superstition fell across the continent, the survivors proudly began to call themselves “Simpletons.”

Miller’s description of the Age of Simplification was mere scene setting for Canticle, a prelude told in bits and pieces scattered across a tale that spanned the twelve hundred year story of a small order of Catholic monks, the Albertian Order of Saint Leibowitz, dedicated to the preservation of knowledge in the blasted ruins of what used to be New Mexico. We learn early on that the titular character, the order’s founder, a former Jewish electrical engineer converted to Roman Catholicism named Isaac Leibowitz, was caught by a mob of Simpletons while attempting to save one final load of books from the flames, he was then hung by the neck and burned alive for the crime of literacy and “booklegging.”

Re-reading A Canticle for Leibowitz today, what strikes me is Miller’s portrayal of religion as safeguarding and preserving scientific knowledge instead of denying and suppressing it –  a bit of irony obviously not lost on the author, as the superstitious monks of the story revered a handwritten grocery list as sacred text right next to a book of electrical engineering.

But it was always Miller’s description of the Simpletons that fascinated and repelled me.

There are days that I wonder if Miller didn’t get it backwards.

Simplification first, then the fall of the civilization – and the rise of savage empires.

Unlike the 1960’s we no longer expect the world to end in nuclear war. 

Now when I imagine the end of the republic, it’s not the cataclysmic thunderclap of The Bomb I hear.

It’s not the martial drumbeat of goose-stepping fascists, nor the clanking rumble of poorly made communist tanks in the streets of America.

The soundtrack of our demise won’t be the crash of falling buildings and exploding ordnance and the stutter of machinegun fire.

It’ll be to the sound of the raging mob.

 

See, the problem with a government of the people, by the people, and for the people is, well, the people.

 

You’ve heard me say it over and over, our republic depends for its very existence on educated, informed, and reasonable citizens. 

Our country, our civilization, was not designed to be run by a bunch of simpletons.

This isn’t my idea, our nation was founded on this very concept.

Prior to the the United States, countries were ruled by those who had been born and bred and (supposedly) educated to run them.  

A government of the people was a whole new model of government which directly implied that anybody of sound mind could be as educated and informed and as reasonable as any king or noble – something we Americans, and subsequently most of the modern world, now take for granted.

However, for this concept of a government by the people to work, there turn out to be certain consequences.

If you’re going to have a government of the people, if any random Joe Shit The Ragman can rise to power at the whim of the electorate, it clearly follows that everybody must be educated and intelligent and reasonable enough to actually run the the place.

In a republic such as ours, willful ignorance and deliberate stupidity are not virtues.

This assumption was explicit in the founding of America. It’s why originally only landed white males could vote, because they were assumed to be exactly those people, educated, intelligent, and reasonable. When education and freedom were extended to all citizens, those explicit assumptions were extended as well – or vice versa, depending on your viewpoint.

Certain things directly follow from this basic idea:

• A government of the people implies that if the population is on average cooperative, educated, informed, and reasonable so too will be the resulting government.
• Likewise, in a representative democracy, an unreasoning and uncooperative population tends to produce a government of obstinate braying jackasses who are incapable of running the country. And typically, once this state exists, collapse or transition (by whatever means) to a more effective form of government (of whatever type) usually follows.

That’s the Achilles Heel of a democratic republic.

Republics are resilient. A republic can survive many things, conflict, pestilence, civil unrest, widespread dissent, recession, depression, radical changes in fortune and society, and even civil war – but a population of ignorant simpletons?

A democratic republic can survive an unhappy restive population, but not a willfully ignorant and uncooperative one.

A growing proportion of our population appears to have discarded reason, intellect, and cooperation for fanaticism, for ignorance, for fear and hysteria, for unreasoning simplification.

A significant fraction of our population is now firmly convinced that violent revolution and civil war are the only ways to “save” the United States – the apparent logic being that in order to avoid supposed FEMA Reeducation Death Camps of Death, they must preemptively overthrow the government and herd all us unsavory types into … um, well, American Reeducation Camps of Christian Capitalist Patriotism, those of us that they don’t just shoot outright anyway.

Another fraction is firmly convinced that America, indeed civilization, isn’t worth the effort, they’d like to burn it all down and live in the ruins – because for them peering suspiciously out the gun ports of their bunker while eating salted rat under the flickering yellow light of kerosene lanterns is preferable to flush toilets and paying taxes.

Repudiation of education, abandonment of reason and intellect, and disdain for the spirit of cooperation – the very things our republic was founded on – are apparent at every turn of this bankrupt worldview and strongly apparent in those that we choose to represent us, i.e. the herd of braying jackasses we currently call the US Congress.

Increasingly, these simpletons want to erase the hard won advances of our predecessors, of science and technology, of society and civil rights, of advance and change and reason and cooperation, and retreat to what they think must have been a better time.

Now, of course, the United States has always had a stubborn core of religiously fueled uncompromising anti-intellectualism – ironic, given that the men who created America were as a group the most educated, intellectual, reasoned, and cooperative outfit to found any nation in recorded history.  But since the early 80’s the strident repudiation of intellect by a religion increasingly hostile to reason and obsessed with apocalypse and Dominion has grown exponentially and it shows in everything from creationism to climate-change denial to those that would gleefully let the world burn in order to realize some ridiculous muddleheaded mumbo-jumbo of biblical “prophecy.”

It’s not just that these people are predicting a new dark age, they’re actually looking forward to it.

The thing is, they might indeed lose their republic; but they’re not likely to get what they’re wishing for either.

Last week, John Stossel penned an opinion piece for Fox News where he randomly cherry picked the opinions of one Dr. Carl Richard, professor of history at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, to make some kind of half-assed doomsday comparison between the fall of the Roman Empire and the United States.

Stossel’s OpEd is subtly entitled:  OMG! OMG! Will America soon fall, just as Rome did?!!!!!

Okay, I might have added the OMGs and the exclamation points, but I think the omission was obviously an oversight on Stossel’s part.

And OMG! is most certainly implicit in the text.

Stossel went to Princeton, and he’s supposed to be an experienced columnist, but frankly his essay looks like something that would garner a D- in any high school freshman English class. It’s chock-a-block with non sequiturs, fallacies of false comparison, outright historical falsehoods, odd little unattached paragraphs, and unattributed quotes.  Hell, even the title of the piece begs the question in a fallacy of circular logic.  Stossel can’t decide if the United States is a republic or an empire, which is probably why he keeps confusing the Roman Republic with the Roman Empire while doggedly trying to compare the two to the United States.

The article begins thus:

A group of libertarians gathered in Las Vegas recently for an event called “FreedomFest.” We debated whether America will soon fall, as Rome did.

Historian Carl Richard said that today’s America resembles Rome.

The Roman Republic had a constitution, but Roman leaders often ignored it. “Marius was elected consul six years in a row, even though under the constitution (he) was term-limited to one year.”

Sounds like New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg.

“We have presidents of both parties legislating by executive order, saying I’m not going to enforce certain laws because I don’t like them. ... That open flouting of the law is dangerous because law ceases to have meaning. ... I see that today. ... Congress passes huge laws they haven’t even read (as well as) overspending, overtaxing and devaluing the currency.”

The Romans were worse. I object to President Obama’s $100 million dollar trip, but Nero traveled with 1,000 carriages.

Tiberius established an “office of imperial pleasures,” which gathered “beautiful boys and girls from all corners of the world” so, as Tacitus put it, the emperor “could defile them.”

Emperor Commodus held a show in the Colosseum [sic] at which he personally killed five hippos, two elephants, a rhinoceros and a giraffe.

To pay for their excesses, emperors devalued the currency. (Doesn’t our Fed do that by buying $2 trillion of government debt?)

Nero reduced the silver content of coins to 95 percent. Then Trajan reduced it to 85 percent and so on. By the year 300, wheat that once cost eight Roman dollars cost 120,000 Roman dollars.

Nowhere in this muddleheaded libertarian twaddle does Stossel attempt to actually address the ominous warning of the title with anything other than innuendo and hand waving.

We debated…

Debated?

In other words, a bunch of angry miserable libertarians (that’s redundant, isn’t it?) sat around in a big circle-jerk crying into their beer about how the country is going to hell and how everything is going to fall apart at any second, so get your guns and grab your womenfolk, time to head for the bunkers and don’t forget to pick up a brochure on how to make gunpowder from your own piss on the way out.

Debate means something else.

…whether America will soon fall, as Rome did.

Rome? Which Rome?

Rome didn’t just fall.

It wasn’t like one day there was a Rome and the next there was the Dark Ages and people were looking around with a confused expression on their faces, “what the hell happened to Rome?” “I dunno, did you look behind the couch?” “Of course I looked behind the couch, it’s not there!” “Well, where’s the last place you saw it?” “I dunno, Turkey maybe?

Rome evolved over a long, long period of time.  It grew and shrank and fought against itself and was sacked and burned and rebuilt. And which Rome are these libertarians talking about? The Village? The City State? The Kingdom which eventually evolved into the Republic? Which became The Empire? Which split into two empires which went their own separate ways, one of which just sort of faded away and one of which became a religious theocracy? All over a period of more than twelve hundred years?

If you’re going to compare the Current United States to Rome, you have to be a lot more specific.

The Roman Republic had a constitution…

Oh for crying out loud, for most of its history the Roman constitution was an informal hodge-podge of various guidelines and governmental principles passed down through the generations mostly by word of mouth or in collections of writings from various politicians. And the Roman Constitution continuously evolved over the years, and there were radically different versions depending on which period of “Rome” you’re talking about. The late Republic’s version resembled what we today would very loosely call common law. 

“Marius was elected consul six years in a row, even though under the constitution (he) was term-limited to one year.”
Sounds like New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg.

Sounds like New York City’s Mayor… ?

The Bloomberg Bogymen again? The hell?

I call Shenanigans.

Gaius Marius was Consul of the Roman Republic – the most powerful man in the known world at the time. History informally calls him “the third founder of Rome.” He was a general of the Roman Army, a soldier of Rome, a commander of Legions, a statesman in the original meaning of the word. Marius was a hard-eyed ruthless ambitious son of a bitch, he’s one of the guys responsible for changing Rome from a republic into an empire, along the way he conquered about half of Europe, provoked a rebellion that nearly turned into a civil war, and killed untold hundreds of thousands of people.

Michael Bloomberg is the mayor of New York City, which is one city of hundreds of cities within the United States and not even the country’s capital, hell it’s not even the state capital. Think about what that means. New york might be a big damned city, but it’s not a nation, Bloomberg is a mayor, not an emperor.  Bloomberg doesn’t command armies and far from conquering the Germanic tribes of Europe, or even their distant German descendants in his own state, Bloomberg is the guy who banned supersized Slurpees because he wanted people to live longer and be healthier and to save money that the government spends in order to care for the health problems caused by too much soda.  Liberals like to promote his name for governor of New York and for president of the United States, so far he’s declined to run for either. He was term limited out of office after his second hitch as mayor, but after New York City changed its election laws, Bloomberg was reelected for a third time.

Bloomberg’s reelection was perfectly legal, no violations of the US Constitution, the New York State Constitution, or even the Roman Constitution occurred.

Marius’ reelection was likewise legal.

While there’s some question as to which laws were actually in effect when Marius was reelected, those laws turn out to be moot since there was an invasion going on and, with Cimbrian barbarians at the gate, Rome wanted Marius the General in charge, so the laws against reelection were voided by the Roman Senate.

Also, Roman law and US law are wildly different animals, ditto the Roman Republic and the US one. They’re not comparable except in the broadest of outlines.

You want to direct Stossel to the fallacy of false  equivalency or should I?

“We have presidents of both parties legislating by executive order, saying I’m not going to enforce certain laws because I don’t like them. ... That open flouting of the law is dangerous because law ceases to have meaning ... ”

Who is Stossel quoting here? 

Is it just some random libertarian? Is it one of Stossel’s drinking buddies? Is it himself, does he quote himself the way Rush Limbaugh does? Is it that aforementioned historian? Who? Where did the quotes come from? What context were they uttered in? Where’s the source reference and associated link? The entire article is peppered with these unattached quotes. Hell, Stossel could be quoting Michael Bloomberg for all you can determine.

And what is it with these people and executive orders?

The president, whatever his party, isn’t legislating anything. That’s congress’s job – though they’re not doing much legislating either.

The president is the head of the Executive Branch of the US Government. That’s his job. The Executive Branch is the largest and most complex portion of the government, there are fifteen enormous departments under the Executive, and hundreds of agencies, bureaus, boards, offices, government owned corporations, inspectors general, charter organizations, commissions, and enterprises – and one of those departments includes the entire US military. How, exactly, do you think the president directs all of those people?

What? What’s that? You call it a what? And order from the executive?

Yeah.

Executive Orders apply only to agencies that fall under the Executive.

Executive orders must comply with the law, with the Constitution. They can be challenged by congress. They can be contested in court. The President cannot, repeat cannot, give you an order – unless you work for him.  He can’t give Congress or the Court an order. He can’t give business or industry an order – and in fact one of the few times an Executive Order was struck down by the court was when Harry Truman tried to give the steel industry orders.  Executive orders apply only to the executive branch of the government, that’s how the president – i.e. the Executive – manages his constitutional area of responsibility. Executive Orders have the force of law, but only for the Executive Branch of the government, and they are issued to clarify US federal law as legislated by congress as it applies to various executive agencies.

For example: if Congress passes a bill that makes unrestricted domestic spying on American citizens by NSA once again illegal (i.e. congress repeals certain articles of the Patriot and Protect America Acts and the president signs that into law), the intel spooks don’t just magically turn off the monitors. These are massive complicated programs, there are active funding lines (and that money has to be accounted for, it can’t just be spent elsewhere, it was specifically allocated for these programs by the NDAA and other bills. I.e. it’s the law), there are billions of dollars of assets in play, there are legal contracts with commercial companies that must be honored, there are thousands of people involved, there’s all that data. The office of the president has to issue an executive order to the Department of Defense (which is the authority NSA falls under) to bring the US intelligence community into compliance with the new law and describe the exact parameters under which the department will operate going forward, this is the president’s legal responsibility. The Secretary of Defense then issues more specific orders to DIRNSA (the director of the National Security Agency), who then issues his own orders via directive that address the very specific technical, procedural, and administrative actions to be taken.

This isn’t a secret. This is how the government works.

Do they not teach this stuff at Princeton any more?

And the president never said “I’m not going to enforce the law.” Never. Didn’t happen, never happened.

The president directed the Justice Department not to defend certain laws against legal challenge before the Supreme Court, that’s a whole different thing from not enforcing the law. 

There is no, repeat no, “open flouting of the law.” That’s just made up political horse puckey.

For example: If the president chooses not to defend the idiotic Defense of Marriage Act in court then that’s his decision as president. That’s why we elected him, twice. But until Section 3 of DOMA was struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in 2013, the federal government under the president enforced the law as it stood. This isn’t open for argument, it’s plain provable fact.

Of course, this “Obama is not enforcing the law” bullshit isn’t really about defense of traditional marriage, is it?

It’s about illegal immigration.

Libertarians are ambivalent about same-sex marriage, but their panties are twisted into a hard tight little knot over the mere thought of illegal immigrants getting away with something.

That’s a hallmark of the libertarian philosophy, they’re all about flouting laws they themselves don’t agree with, especially when it comes to guns (in the name of liberty, of course) but angrily insist that everybody else toe the line.

The accusation of not enforcing immigration laws holds about as much water as the beef over DOMA – but you couldn’t prove that to fanatics and there’s not much point in trying.

The Romans were worse. I object to President Obama’s $100 million dollar trip, but Nero traveled with 1,000 carriages.

Tiberius established an “office of imperial pleasures,” which gathered “beautiful boys and girls from all corners of the world” so, as Tacitus put it, the emperor “could defile them.”

Emperor Commodus held a show in the Colosseum [sic] at which he personally killed five hippos, two elephants, a rhinoceros and a giraffe.

Jesus Haploid Christ, talk about the mother of all non sequiturs.

What the hell is Stossel trying to say here?  We’re like Rome but not really and besides the Romans were worse so I object to the cost of a presidential tour of multiple countries across Europe and Africa but 2000 years ago Roman emperors engaged in debauchery and slaughtered animals in a stadium that I’m too upset to even spell correctly [** Edit: See the footnote] which is so totally like meeting with heads of state to improve trade and relations with the US. Bleet bleet. Ook ook. Also, Nazis.

Dread Cthulhu, folks, an Ivy League educated journalist? Really? 

I don’t know about you, but at this point I’m starting to wonder who he had to blow to get the job.

To pay for their excesses, emperors devalued the currency. (Doesn’t our Fed do that by buying $2 trillion of government debt?) Nero reduced the silver content of coins to 95 percent. Then Trajan reduced it to 85 percent and so on. By the year 300, wheat that once cost eight Roman dollars cost 120,000 Roman dollars.

What the hell is a Roman “dollar?”

And how did we get from Commodus killing hippos to inflation? There isn’t even a connecting sentence. Seriously, what the fuck?

Again, what does this paragraph even mean?

Note: also, not exactly a great supporting argument for return to precious metal standards as libertarians demand, is it?

The rest of the article is of similar cut. Poorly reasoned, poorly structured, filled with fearful ominous gibberish that only serves to summarize the fevered undefined shadowy night-sweats of conservative terror.

But then again, the frightened angry people who read this silly nonsense aren’t doing so with red pen in hand and they aren’t actually demanding anything other than confirmation of their own hysterical undefined fears.  So I suppose it follows that Stossel has given up even pretending to be an actual journalist.  Stossel knows his audience, and his employer, and he gets paid the same for hysterical tripe and he does for actual journalism –  which is probably why he’s just phoning it in. 

This kind of dreck, journalists like Stossel and the declining standards of mainstream media, aren’t the cause of this disease, they’re a symptom of the larger cancer.

Articles like Stossel’s, and there are many, are indicators of a marked decline in intellectual rigor, in national integrity, in civil discourse, in reasoned dialog, and most especially in an informed, educated, and reasonable population.

Not only does a major, supposedly professional, news organization employ a “journalist” who would actually write such amateurish copy, editors who would accept it without correction, an owner and managing board that would allow such juvenile doomsaying to post unchecked under their imprimatur, but it also indicates that a significant fraction of the population accepts this nonsense with an unquestioning nod of their fearful ignorant heads.

A republic, especially one like ours, depends for its very existence on an educated, informed, and reasonable population that is willing to cooperate for the benefit of all.

A republic, most especially one like ours, cannot suffer fearful ignorant simpletons gladly.

Not for long anyway.

And not in the majority.

Stossel and his simpleton friends draw the wrong lesson from Rome.

The Roman Republic didn’t fall.

The Roman Republic became the Roman Empire.

Democracy gave way to dictatorship eight hundred years before the actual fall of Rome.

When the Roman Senate, i.e. the Roman legislative branch, fell to infighting and inaction, to ignorance and unreason and obstruction, when the legislature became incapable of cooperation and thus action, those with the will and the ambition seized power and declared themselves Emperor.

That’s the true danger of this ongoing deliberate simplification.

In a democratic republic, when the population is no longer capable of cooperation, when they eschew education and reason for ignorant superstition, then they are no longer capable of running the country and by default they give up their right and authority to do so.

And that, right there, is how republics die.

When the end comes to the American Republic it won’t be to the apocalyptic thunder of nuclear war.

It won’t be to the martial drumbeat of goose-stepping fascists, nor the clanking rumble of poorly made communist tanks.

The soundtrack of our demise won’t be the crash of falling buildings and exploding ordnance and the stutter of machinegun fire.

It’ll be to the simpleton cackle of that moronic laugh from the Beevis and Butthead cartoons, eh heh heh heh heh heh...

 

 

 

---

* Walter M. Miller was a prolific writer of short fiction. A Canticle for Leibowitz was a “fix-up,” i.e. three of Miller’s previously published short stories were combined with additional material and rewrites to create a single novel. The book was supposedly inspired by Miller’s experience both as an engineer and as a tail gunner in the US Army Air Corps during WWII where he flew more than 50 missions over Italy and was present at the bombing of the Abbey at Monte Cassino. Miller was a hell of a short story writer and he penned some of the best short science fiction ever written, winning a Hugo Award for it. But he suffered terrible post traumatic stress disorder from his war experience and from horrible writer’s block when it came to novels – and especially with the pressure of crafting a suitable sequel to the fantastically successful Canticle (which won Miller another Hugo for best novel in 1960). He struggled with his demons and that sequel, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, languished for years until he died under tragic circumstances with it unfinished. Science Fiction writer Terry Bisson completed the book from Miller’s outline and the novel was published under Miller’s name posthumously.

 

** (Update) From The Grammarist: Coliseum and colosseum are both common spellings of the word referring to (1) the famous Roman amphitheater built in the first century A.D., and (2) any large amphitheater used for sports or other public events. Neither spelling is considered wrong in either use, but while the forms are often used interchangeably, the famous structure in Rome is now usually spelled Colosseum, and coliseum is generally reserved for other uses. Exceptions are easily found, however, and there is no consensus evident in popular usage.

I stand corrected, Stossel’s spelling was acceptable. My apologies to Princeton University.

The Good Old Labor Days

You ever stop to wonder what you life would be like if it was 1911 instead of 2011?

Imagine.

Imagine what it was like to be your great grand parents.

In 1911, the United States was in the middle of the Second Industrial Revolution.  It was a time of wonder and ever advancing technology. It started in the 1860’s and would last right up until the beginning of World War I. It began with steel, the Bessemer process to be specific, a cheap and easy way to mass produce strong and reasonably lightweight metals.  Strong lightweight steel was the skeleton of the modern age, the core of everything from the new cars to steamships and oil rigs to utensils and lunchboxes, to the machines that manufactured the future, to the finest handgun ever made – Colt’s model 1911, named for its year of first issue and still in production a century later.  In 1911 a tall skinny fellow by the name of Eugene Ely landed a Curtiss #2 Pusher on the deck of USS Pennsylvania and took off again – and thus was born naval aviation, a profound moment that would change the very way wars were fought and thus change almost everything else too. Many of the pilots who, a few years later, would fly over the battlefields of WWI carried Colt’s Model 1911.  In 1911, for the first time, you could buy a Cadillac with an electric starter – and despite the fact that there were still plenty of horses out there on the roads, the car had become so ubiquitous – due in part to Henry Ford lowering the price of a Model-T to $690 that year – that Michigan created the first modern roads when the state started painting white lines down the middle of the more heavily traveled avenues. Electricity itself was no longer a novelty.  Though many factories were still powered by steam, electricity was becoming increasingly common.  The first modern public elevator began operation in London, England, and soon became common everywhere – leading directly to the modern city skyline.  And above that skyline in 1911, Goodyear flew their first blimp.

In 1911, America was booming. Her factories were churning out new products at a record pace. The western frontier had all but disappeared – oh, there were still a few bandits and cattle rustlers out there, but the wild wooly west was long gone.  The gold rushes, the boom towns and gun fights were long over.  Hell, by 1911 Wyatt Earp was living in Los Angeles working as a “trouble-shooter” for the city police department.  He’d fought his last armed battle a year before and would soon move to Hollywood as a consultant for the new movie industry. 

It was certainly a marvelous time.

If you could afford it.

If you lived through it.

See, those churning factories were horrible places.  In 1911, most were still powered by a massive central steam engine which drove an enormous flywheel, which in turn powered shafts and belts and pulleys, which finally powered the machines.  And though, as noted above, electricity was becoming increasingly common, most of those factories were still poorly lit simply by the light coming in through skylights and banks of single pane glazed windows.  Often boiling hellholes in the summer and freezing dungeons in the winter – both air conditioning and central heating were still decades away – the buildings were filled with smoke and poisonous fumes from the various manufacturing processes, lead vapor, heavy metals, acids, chlorine, bleaches, all were common.  Normal working hours were from dawn to dusk, typically anywhere from twelve to fourteen hours a day, sixty and seventy hours per week for wages that would barely pay the rent and put food on a factory worker’s table.

Child labor was common, especially in the textile industry, though in some states there were supposed to be laws regulating it.  The kids toiled right alongside their parents.  The children typically worked the same hours as adults, but for a quarter, or less, of the pay.  Pictures of the time show children working barefoot among the machines, ragged sleeves flapping near the flying belts and spinning pulleys.  Whole families hired out to the factories, the men doing the heavy labor, the women and children doing the more delicate tasks. Towns sprang up around the mills, often controlled by the factory owners. Company towns, where workers very often became little more than indentured servants.  Life in a company town was often better than the alternative on the streets of places like Hell’s Kitchen or out in the fields of the South. Company towns gave workers a higher standard of living than they would otherwise be able to afford. But the running joke was that while your soul might belong to God, your ass belonged to the company.  Mill towns and mining towns and factory towns and logging towns were common across America, places where the company owned everything from your house to your job to the church you prayed in to the store you bought your food from. And prices were whatever made the company the most profit and in many places there were laws that prevented you from renting or buying outside the company town.  The company might pay you a decent wage for the time, but they got a lot of it back too.  Get crosswise of the company and you lost it all.  Get injured on the job and could no longer work, and you lost it all. Get sick, and you could lose it all.  Get killed, and your family was out on the street.  There was no workman’s comp. No insurance. No retirement but what you managed to save – and since you probably owed a significant debt to the company store, your savings were unlikely to go very far.

Of course, you could always take a pass on factory work and return to the land.  In 1911, millions of Americans were farmers.  Farming, especially in 1911, was hard back breaking work (it still is, just in a different way) – so hard that seventy hours a week in a smoke filled factory with a high probability of getting maimed or killed looked pretty good in comparison.  Most of those farmers, especially in the South, didn’t own their fields. They were sharecroppers, living in conditions little better than slavery or the serfdom of the Dark Ages.  Of the small farmers who did own their own land or rather owed the bank for their own land, more than half lived in abject poverty.  In the coming decade, the decade of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, most would lose everything.

Most of America was powered by coal in those days and if there was anything that would make life in a factory town or in the sweltering fields look good – it was working in a West Virginia coal mining town.  It was a race to see what would kill you first, explosion, cave-in, or the black lung.  And just like in the fields and factories, children worked alongside their parents – if they had parents, orphanages were also common. And orphan labor was even cheaper than the average child, both in life and in pay. Renting out orphan labor was a good gig, if you could get it.

You could always become a merchant seaman, though life at sea was damned rough. You could move west and become a logger, though you’d probably live longer in the mines of West Virginia. You could still be a cowboy, or a cop, or carpenter none which paid worth a good Goddamn and had the added benefit of a short lifespan.

Since people got sick and injured a lot, and most couldn’t afford even rudimentary medical care, many turned to patent medicines.  The pharmaceutical industry was only loosely regulated, but by 1911 there were some few laws in a handful of states regulating the more outrageous claims for the various elixirs. The big medicine shows were gone, but in 1911 there were still plenty of drug store shelves stocked with hundreds of varieties of patent medicines. Some were mostly benign – like Coca-Cola – and some were downright toxic – like Radithor, made from water and radium.  As late as 1917, The Rattlesnake King, Clark Stanley, was still making Stanley’s Snake Oil, a worthless mixture of mineral oil, turpentine, and red pepper, and fleecing sick people out of their money and making them yet sicker (hell, as late as the 1960’s TV’s commercials touted the benefits of smoking for sore throats. And, as late as 1970 there were still X-ray foot measuring devices in use in a handful of shoe stores across America).

In 1911, only a few states mandated that your kids attend school, and then only though elementary.  In the South segregation and Jim Crow Laws were in full force and civil rights were decades away. Lynching was common.  On the other hand, women could actually vote in exactly five states, well, six if you included California which grudgingly acknowledged in November that females might be citizens too despite their unfortunate plumbing. 

In 1911, maybe three out of ten Americans could ever expect to own a home, most would pay a landlord their whole lives. Few had any rights in those relationships either, you paid the owner and you lived with what you got or you got thrown out. Period.

In 1911, a lot of Americans were hungry. More than fifty percent of seniors lived in poverty, but then the average lifespan was only about fifty-five, maybe sixty if you hadn’t been breathing coal dust or lead vapor all you life.  Few of those seniors had pensions, most lived on the charity of their families – if they were lucky enough to have families.  Sanatoriums were a common place for the aged and infirm to spend their brief final years. 

In 1911, if you had ten kids, you might expect six of them to survive to adulthood.  If you were lucky. Polio, tuberculosis, measles, mumps, pneumonia, whooping cough, hard labor in the mines and factories and fields, lack of social safety nets, lack of proper nutrition, lead paint, food poisoning, poverty, orphaned by parents killed by the same, would probably claim at least four of those kids. Likely more.

 

People from that generation always wax nostalgic for The Good Old Days – and then they immediately proceed to tell you why life was so much harder and more miserable back then.

 

The simple truth of the matter is nowadays, even in this time of economic downturn, we Americans live a pretty damned good life.  And we live that good life because since 1911 we’ve put systems and laws and regulations in place to improve life for all of us.  Programs like Social Security and Medicare have a direct and measurable affect on how long we live, and how well. Regulations governing working conditions and workplace safety have a direct and measurable affect on the probability that we’ll survive to retirement.  Laws that prevent the rich from owning a whole town, or abusing workers, or turning them into indentured servants, or hiring children at pauper’s wages to maintain the machines in their bare feet, have directly benefitted all but the most greedy few. 

The American dream isn’t dead, far from it. 

I’ve been to countries where dreams have died, America is far, far, far removed those hellish places. 

It is a measure of just how far we’ve come, and just how big an impact that those laws, regulations, and social safety programs have had that those who directly benefit from those very same laws, regulations, and programs can complain with full bellies just how terrible they have it.

Things like Social Security, Medicare, Workman’s Compensation Insurance, The Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance, child labor laws, federal minimum wage, occupational health and safety standards, the Environmental Protection Agency, The Centers for Disease Control, The departments of Education and Health, Labor Unions and workers’ rights, and yes, even Welfare, all of these things were created for a reason. For a good reason. For a compelling reason. 

These things were created because when you leave it up to the church and charity to fed the hungry and clothe the poor and heal the sick, a hell of a lot of people go hungry and cold and ill.  It is really just that brutally simple. 

These things were created because when you leave it up to charity and family to take care of old people, a hell of a lot of old people end up stacked like cordwood in institutions. The moldering remnants of such places are all around us.

These things were created because when you leave it up to people to save for their retirement or a rainy day or for accident and infirmity, a hell of a lot of them don’t, or can’t, or won’t.

These things were put in place because when you leave it solely up to the market to weed out poor products and fake medicine and unsafe machines, they don’t, or can’t, or won’t. 

These things were put in place because when you leave it up to industrialists and share holders to treat their workers with dignity and respect and to pay them a living wage for their hard work, you get indentured servitude.

These things were put in place because when you leave it up to devoutly righteous people who go to church every Sunday to decide what is right and proper and moral, you end up with lynchings and segregation and Jim Crow. And that is a Goddamned fact.

These things were put in place because when you leave it up to the factory owners to decide wages and safety and working hours, you get this:

 

When you leave it solely up to bankers and the factory owners and the industrialists, well Sir, then what happens is they end up owning it all and you get the scraps.

And right up until very recently that’s exactly how it was.

Fundamentally, government exists to protect the weak from the ruthless, otherwise what damned good is it?

 

Lately there are a lot of folks who think they want to live in 1911, rather than in 2011.

Chief among those people is this ruthless idiot:

Ever since the dawn of the so-called Progressive movement over a century ago, liberals have used every tool at their disposal — including notably the Supreme Court — to wage a gradual war on the Constitution and the American way of life…

(Click on the quote to find out which presidential candidate said it, and what else they think about the last century’s progress)

 

The question you need to ask yourself, on this of all days, is what century do you want to live in?

 

Happy Labor Day folks.

Friday Observation

Tiger Woods messed around with what? Twelve, maybe fourteen or so women?

Wilt Chamberlain claims to have bedded 25,000 women over the course of his career.

Amateurs. The both of them.

Joe Lieberman just screwed 47 million Americans, men, women, and kids.

What a stud.

Hope he wore a condom.

That’s Why They Call It Duty

I [state your name], having been appointed a [rank] in the U.S. Army under the conditions indicated in this document, do accept such appointment and do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter, so help me God.

This is the US Army Appointment Acceptance and Oath of Office – an officer of the US Army must sign the appointment instrument, and swear with his right hand upraised those words. That oath is an officer’s sacred duty, it comes above all else. Note especially the portion that is in bold: I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.

Now, as an officer either your word, your sworn oath, is good or it’s not. Period. There is no middle ground. Either you are a man of your word, or you are not. If you break your word, even once in the performance of your duties, then your word cannot be trusted. Duty, honor, authority, responsibility, accountability – all the things that we hold most dear in the military – depend on that simple fact, either your word is good or it’s not.

Notice what that oath doesn’t say.

The oath, which all officers swear, does not say that you must agree with the orders you are given. The oath does not say that you may only execute those orders you agree with. Note that the oath does not require your approval in any way shape or form of the civilian leadership of this country.

Notice what obligation the oath does place on you:

You agree, freely, that you will “well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office.” Well and faithfully. If you are a religious person, you’ve given your word to do so before your God, and either your word to him is good or you’re just full of shit when it comes to your religious beliefs. If you are a non-believer than you’ve given your word and have only yourself to account to. Either way, once you sign that paper and take that oath you are personally, personally, accountable for the well and faithful discharge of your duties. You are accountable to the Service, accountable to the Government, accountable to the people of the United States – and especially accountable to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

An enlisted person gives a different oath, though it essentially binds them to the same ideal. The difference is that an officer must give his or her word freely – i.e. they cannot be coerced. Enlisted can – it’s called conscription. This is an important distinction, because of the ultimate responsibilities of the officer, a commission must be voluntary – officers cannot be drafted. This distinction is clearly and painstakingly spelled to each potential officer – because once they assume the office they will give up certain rights. For those of you who do not have military experience, and maybe even for those of you who do, it may appear that an officer has far greater latitude of action than enlisted – this is incorrect. One of the great advantages of being a senior NCO (Enlisted) is that you can choose to some extent what to know and what not to know – and officer has no such latitude. Allow me to illustrate: two privates and a buck sergeant go out on the town the night before deployment, they get shitfaced and forget about curfew, and stagger back to the barracks at 0400. Enlisted Outcome) The First Sergeant, who has done a post taps roll-call and knows the party boys are missing is waiting for them: First has options, he can call the MPs and throw the book at them for failing to obey orders, or he can (and probably will) tuck them safely into bed – and then wake them up with a fire hose two hours later and make their lives a living hell for the next two weeks with the Company Commander being none the wiser, officially. The First Sergeant will assume responsibility for the idiots, that’s his job after all. No paperwork will ever be filled. Officer Outcome) The Captain greets the party boys upon their return: He has no options. Period. His oath and rank require him to uphold the Uniform Code of Military Justice So Help Me God, those men will be put on report for failure to obey a lawful order, there will be an Article 32 hearing, the buck sergeant will become a private, asses will handed to their owners - and the First Sergeant will get chewed the merry hell out in private by the Major for not taking care of business.

This is how it works. I’m not asking you to agree with it, I’m telling you how it is. And it’s this way for a damned good reason. Because of what we do, a military must have rigid discipline and structure, but because it is first, foremost, and always a human endeavor, military command structures must have some flexibility. Those that lack this flexibility become brittle and break when stressed – you have only to look to the militaries of any third world dictatorship to see this. Those that allow too much flexibility suffer a catastrophic breakdown in discipline and become ineffective mobs – any multinational force under the aegis of the UN is a pretty good example.

The reason I mention it is that I want you to clearly understand that an officer’s options are limited. He gives up certain rights when he takes that oath. He agrees to uphold not only the Constitution but more importantly, at the personal level, the Uniform Code of Military Justice (the UCMJ) and the regulations of his service. (Note: when I say he, I mean he or she, but I’m tired of typing that, substitute the gender or genderless pronoun of your choice whenever I say he). This is not only tradition, it is not only the law, it is not only regulation – it is the very glue that hold military structure together.

Simply put: The officer’s obligations are rigid, but they are strictly voluntary. In peace or in war, in uniform or out, either that officer’s word is good – or it’s not.

And if it is not, if he breaks his word, if he fails to live up the exacting details of service with honor – then he has no one to blame but himself, and he should expect nothing less than the full force of the UCMJ.

Meet 1st Lt Scott R. Easterling, US Army.

Lt Easterling feels that the duly appointed President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, is an “imposter” and “usurper.” Lt. Easterling feels this way because, and stay with me here, he thinks that President Obama has not provided sufficient evidence of his US citizenship. In fact, the Lieutenant feels that until the president provides a “vault copy” (whatever that is) of his birth certificate for verification, Lt Easterling will not consider Obama either the Commander in Chief or the President.

Lt Easterling is an idiot.

However, he is entitled to be an idiot – up to a certain point. That point being this, he is allowed to think whatever he likes, beyond that he is in violation of his oath, Army Regulations, and the UCMJ.

See, Lt Easterling has given voice to his discontent, and has, in fact, put it down on paper as part of a lawsuit by a California attorney, Dr. Orly Taitz Esq, which questions President Obama’s citizenship and legal right to hold office. (Take a gander through her website, Defend Our Freedoms Foundation, read her bio, check out who she keeps company with, read her blog – really, go on, do it. It’s too gobsmackingly rabid to miss. This site may very well be the gooey black carcinoma deep within the NeoCon cerebellum).

The alleged original letter is here. I say alleged because there seems to be some question, raised by reporters at Military.com, of whether or not Lt. Easterling actually exists. I’ve done a bit of checking through my contacts, it’s unclear at this point and I can’t say one way or the other – so we’ll go with alleged and assume that this Lieutenant is a real person.

A real stupid person.

A dishonorable and disgraceful example of an officer who does not understand his oath and whose word is utter shit.

Supposedly, Easterling writes in the last paragraph:

I implore all Service-members and citizens to contact their Senators and Representatives and demand that they require Mr. Obama prove his eligibility. Our Constitution and our great nation must not be allowed to be disgraced.

This statement alone is tantamount to a declaration of sedition and an exhortation to mutiny. Surely no US Army officer, even a pogue Lieutenant, could be that stupid.

If Easterling is indeed a real officer, and if in fact he did write this letter and give DefendOurFreedeoms permission to publish it under his own name – then Lt Scott Easterling should be brought up on charges in accordance with the UCMJ and Court Martialed.

I’ve served under a number of Presidents and civilian leaders I had no respect for, Clinton and George The Simple Minded come immediately to mind. Clinton wasn’t too bad, in retrospect – but Bush was…well, you know what my opinion of George W. Bush is. In fact, I’ve written extensively about my hatred of George W. Bush, I’ve ridiculed him, I’ve parodied him, I’ve accused him of crimes against humanity, and I’ve said here on this site that the only time I would not piss on him is if he was on fire. But I never, ever, expressed such sentiments until after I left the service, and certainly not in print, and certainly not in a public and national forum.

And in or out of uniform, I certainly never engendered my comrades in arms to rise up en mass and question the authority of the chain of command.

When I wore the uniform, I kept my thoughts regarding the Commander in Chief to myself and soldiered on as best I was able.

That’s what our oath is all about.

That’s what duty means.