bfaure – Page 20 – Ramparts of Civilization

February 9, 2014

Sports As Epic Story- The Kaiser in Kitzbuhel

Franz Klammer 1976 Innsbruck Winter Olympics

The 2014 winter Olympics at Sochi has had its fair share of distractions somewhat obscuring the always interesting stories behind competitive sport. Pictures of inadequate toilet facilities, rancid water, Olympic rings that don’t open and overbearing Russian presidents have distracted from the games inherent value, the celebration of human capacity and courage. I have no doubt, though, that great accomplishments will soon take over from the other nonsense and give us some really stirring memories.

Sport is unique in that characteristic – creating a universally shared suspense and awe at what the athlete, challenged, can achieve. The venue is intense competition without violence. The Olympics, specifically, allowing nationalist fervor without the need for rancor. In some venues of course, the lack of violence does not imply the lack of pressure or the lack of danger. There is perhaps no more dangerous venue to the athlete than the Alpine Ski Downhill, and perhaps no less forgiving of an error.

There have been many great downhills in my memory that etch intense memory, but nothing comes close to the accomplishment of Franz Klammer at the 1976 Winter Olympics. The story has all the components of an epic, the tension of watching something unbelievably special unfold. As acts of profound human accomplishment in the face of overwhelming pressure, the Kaiser at Kitzbuhel has them all beat.

Austria is a nation of skiers and assumes their champions will represent the country as champions at the pinnacle of the sport. The test for the Austrian athlete is demanding – win and be immortalized, or lose and be forgotten. In 1976, the Olympics came to Austria at Innsbruck, and fittingly, the one of the most epic two minutes in sport, the Men’s Downhill, was placed at the most demanding course for that event in the world, the Streif run on Hahnenkamm mountain in Kitzbuhel. The Streif, a run with a 840 meter vertical drop and average 27% angle of decline with maximums of 40 degree inclines can break the will of the most courageous skier. The word, loosely translated from German as “graze” or “streak”, lives up to its foreboding reputation from the very outset, with the skier instantaneously assuming top speeds approaching 140 kilometers an hour. The course enters almost immediately into the famous ‘mousetrap’ where a jump of nearly 300 feet leads to an almost immediate left turn, resulting in severe gravitational compression and many falls off the course. The run continues with steep drops, hairpin turns and infamous limited visuals that can bring the bravest skier to feel apprehension not only for failure but for injury or worse. In a race often determined by hundreds of a second in outcome, a moment of hesitation can be fatal to success.

In 1976, the most prideful Alpine skiing nation hosted the greatest skiers on its greatest downhill course, and put forth its greatest champion. Franz Klammer known as the Kaiser for his domination of World Downhill from 1974 onward, was the greatest of Austria’s formidable team, and was holding the entire nation on his shoulders when he took the last run at the Streif on February 5th, 1976. He trailed the defending Olympic champion, the great Bernhard Russi of Switzerland, by a half second, with the course rutted, icy, and extremely treacherous from the courses of so many previous competitors.

The Starthaus at the top of the Streif at Hahnenkamm

Klammer was considered unconquerable in the downhill event, having won 8 of 9 on the world championship circuit and genetically bred for this particular downhill and its terrifying turns. Regardless, it is difficult to identify with the pressure he felt when he stared out of the starting gate down at the mousetrap and the perils beneath.

Of course, that’s where champions live – the place the rest of us can only dream of. Klammer, with the weight of his country and his own sense of history on his shoulders, determined to leave all caution behind, and release his skills at their maximum, regardless of personal risk – and see what would happen. What happened of course was epic. The world watched a person defy physics skiing at the edge of control and disaster, and determining go even faster. On two occasions, he seemed completely out of body control, hurtling sideways, and heading into hay bales and fences. Most of the time he somehow controlled speeds of 60 to 80 miles an hour on one ski, absorbing ruts and ice with perilous angles. His goal after all, was not to finish, not to survive – but to win.

The grainy video does not do the original visual full justice but the announcers let you know what is being witnessed, because they know the fine line this man has chosen between victory and perhaps death. It is perhaps even more intense in local television broadcast. The Kaiser at Kitzbuhel made all of humanity shimmer that day in the glory of a man conquering his own mortality, and a nation explode in the pride of watching someone prove to be even better than advertised. With such moments, sport reaches perfection.

February 2, 2014

People We Should Know – #25 Milt Rosenberg

For almost 40 years, when most of the world had converted what is considered entertainment into a certain kind of superficial fluff, the Chicago radio station WGN stubbornly held on to an anachronistic concept of entertainment that was unavailable in almost every other forum. From 1973 to 2012, in the evening hours on WGN a very special idea that learning and enlightening listeners through conversation could be a popular form of entertainment, was made possible by a unique man, Dr. Milton Rosenberg. For decade after decade, Dr. Rosenberg with a mesmerizing voice, commanding intellect and bottomless interest in a universe of conceivable topics captivated his audience with thousands of interviews with the famous and unknown, topics great and obtuse, side by side. The concept that quiet and in-depth discussions with individuals most knowledgable in their area of expertise could survive in a culture where the acquiring of opinions have progressively been based on feelings rather than facts and logic was revolutionary. It could not have been done without the special personality and abilities of Milton Rosenberg. The fantastic legacy of this program is one of the major influences that formed the logic for the existence of this blog, as is why Milt Rosenberg is Ramparts People We Should Know- #25.

Milt Rosenberg was already a distinguished professor when he started with WGN in a cultural affairs program that eventually became the program, Extension 720. With a doctorate earned in Psychology, Dr. Rosenberg had already been a teaching professor at distinguished universities such as Yale, Dartmouth, Ohio State and the Naval College, when he became a full professor at the University of Chicago and became involved in the radio program. The concept was a two hour conversation with an expert or investigator in the subject of the evening, followed by an hour allowing the listeners to call in and ask the host and the expert questions. The subject was ‘everything’, or as Dr. Rosenberg put it, “just about everything except pop psychology and poodle trimming.” Night after night year after year, listeners could hear in depth discussions from scientists, writers, reporters, historians, actors, and politicians, the growing influence of the program bringing prestigious guests as diverse as Carl Sagan, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, Bob Feller, MArgaret Thatcher, George Will, Mark Steyn and David Brinkley. It required Rosenberg’s magnificent mind and voracious study habits to make each interview an enveloping thought process, rather than a question and answer session with shallow questions and staged answers. It was brilliant, it was wonderful, and it was interesting.

In 2012 at age 87, Dr. Rosenberg’s program as a regular feature on WGN was finally terminated, and a special piece of American culture was thought to be lost. The wonderful thing is that despite Dr. Rosenberg’s advanced age, he remains a powerful intellectual force and is completely in tune with the times. He has seemlessly moved on to the current great foum of ideas, the internet, continuing to entertain people with wonderful conversations now available in podcast form sponsored by the website Richocet.com which is hosting the current Milt Rosenberg Show where Milt is continuing with ongoing wonderful energy and brilliance the ideas central to the original Extension 720. Even better, he is assuring that the almost 4 decades of radio history that encompassed his show will now be made available to current generations with a thirst for knowledge through conversation, by subscribing at 45 dollars a year to the library of all his previous radio shows. It is a treasure to go back and listen to a Henry Kissinger, a Martin Gilbert, a Margaret Thatcher at the height of their intellectual powers review the pressing ideas of their day, and for me has been already worth every dollar. I don’t now how long Dr. Rosenberg can keep it up, by I am certainly cheering him on as tries to preserve for all of us a vanishing form of discourse that can so enrich our lives. For his many years and ongoing efforts to bring the richness and diversity of learning and knowledge in a comfortable form to all of us, Milton Rosenberg is Ramparts People We Should Know- #25.

Milt Rosenberg interviews Martin Gilbert on the Life of Winston Churchill

January 26, 2014

Why Don’t We Care About Facts Anymore?

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The latest Harris polls have come out this past week regarding the state of the country’s confidence regarding the nation’s management and future and they are grim. Powerline reviews these polls in anticipation to the President’s State of the Union address and finds that Americans by an almost continuous ratio of three out of every four citizens feel the direction as to managing the large challenges of this country, whether the environment, economy, education, health care, jobs, or foreign policy, is poor. The conclusion is that this is one of the most comprehensively pessimistic index of American confidence ever. What contributes to such pessimism and drives the most self correcting government mechanism ever developed to drive a Lamborghini of countries off the cliff?

I think it is as John Adams once said – “Facts are stubborn things.”

The country has spent the past fifty years of its history increasingly turning philosophically to the measuring stick of Values rather than Facts to guide its direction. Values and what they say about us are infinitely more comforting then dealing with the harsh realities of facts. Values declare an ideal world as it should be and define a truth that does not require a carefully constructed argument based on facts. It is an unpleasant sensation to recognize that people should respond and how they react in reality to facts are dissonant. The very liberal but factually enlightened Daniel Patrick Moynihan discovered this almost fifty years ago when he made the mistake of critically assessing the social effect of government’s war on poverty on a specific group, the nation’s African American poor. As a disciple of Lyndon Johnson, Moynihan was determined to find the government’s aggressive effort to wrench the nation’s poor out of poverty successful, but found instead dangerously opposite trends in the reaction of the population to the “help”. The positive values in the civil rights movement overlaid with the timing of the war on poverty were assumed to create an environment of opportunity and safety net that would improve the situation for the average urban poor – but Moynihan was finding disturbingly opposite trends. The crux of the issue seemed to be the fact that illegitimacy and single parent families were exploding in what had been a population that had lagged but at least paralleled the rest of the nation’s population in terms of economic progress and family stability.

This wasn’t a liberal versus conservative argument. Certainly Moynihan as a staunch liberal wasn’t rejecting the concept of the nation providing a strong hand in helping its nation’s poor or overturning hard won civil rights. He was instead pointing to facts and the need to understand them in guiding policy. What he and other factualists were not prepared for was the spectacular blow back from value biased proponents that vilified the report, not for its logic, but for its argumentative ‘illegitimacy’. In the values world, the facts suggested an effort to “blame the victim”, and imply a racially tinged “promiscuity” to the urban poor that was opposite of Moynihan’s argument. Although many bright individuals saw similar trends to Moynihan’s observations, the corrective actions that might have helped generations of poor were stamped out by the a progressively entrenched group of powerbrokers that felt they ‘owned’ the values argument, and that being non-judgmental regardless of outcome was the appropriate judgment.

What neither Moynihan or much of the nation recognized at the time was this values movement, philosophically being non-judgmental about fact and result meant being progressive and politically correct, would overwhelm all the naturally corrective capacities of adjusting to facts.

Fifty years later, and trillions of dollars of right minded non-judgmental expenditure has left us with gaping holes in urban poor education, family stability, economic capacity, and confidence in the future. No set of facts are up to withstanding the blizzard of invectives regarding victimhood, accepting any socially dissonant behavior, or continuing to explode the budgets of failing programs designed to “help”.

This willful ignorance and war against facts and their basis to constructively correct actions is the foundational cause of this nation’s pessimism.

The values movement has metastasized in many elements of policy discourse, particularly the economic ones, as significant money is to be made from arguing victimhood. The enormous redirection of funds to “modify behavior” in order to “save the world from global warming” continues despite the overwhelming evidence that the so called “settled science” of anthropomorphically induced global warming has collapsed. The pouring of trillions into “stimulus” projects when economic fundamentals suggest the opposite effect to economic growth incentives is created. The crash of health care stability against the desire to make it more fair or equitable, rather than better. The value of democratizing populations that hunger for stability rather than unencumbered elections before any other societal stabilizers are in place. The throwing away of thousands of years of educational concepts on formative development for the desire for each individual to be allowed to ‘ seek their own place’ in what they are educated on, with its resultant disastrous effect on cultural literacy.

And on and on and on.

Facts are stubborn things. Human behavior follows fairly recognized paths that our social engineering efforts often helplessly thrash against. The country is growing increasingly pessimistic because it can’t discern a way out of this mess; it can’t see that good intentions unencumbered by factual adjustment lead only to further deterioration. We are trying to be good by trying to do good, with the opposite effect resulting and contributing to our fatigue. The cure would be in accepting facts to lead to improving the conditions that would lead to progress against society’s ills, rather than projecting value judgements that perpetuate their very existence. The cure would be in listening to voices that discern the balance between values and facts necessary to begin to build some confidence back into the system, and trust the correcting capacities of the system as it was designed, not as we wish to manipulate it. As Senator Moynihan presciently stated so many years ago, no one owns the facts.

January 11, 2014January 11, 2014

The Lion Sleeps Tonight

Cincinnatus was a farmer. In 458 B.C., as he was plowing his field, a representative of the Roman Senate travelled to the farm, and described the crisis facing the Roman nation in a fight to the death with neighboring tribes the Aequi and the Sabines. He told Cincinnatus that the Senate had determined to vote him dictator and give him all powers necessary to save Rome from the invaders. The farmer Cincinnatus became the patriot general Cincinnatus and accepted the charge, eventually leading Rome to a crushing defeat of its adversaries. With the roman world at his feet, he then did what was unheard of for a warrior general with absolute power. He gave up the power voluntarily and absolutely, and returned to his farm. He served the country that he loved, then returned to the farm that he loved. He never confused himself as to who he was, or what was asked of him.

Israel’s farmer general died today, on his farm, and like Cincinnatus , never confused his role as a savior general with his role as a citizen of the country he loved. In various roles, he helped lead Israel from its inception in 1948, through almost every conflict the nation faced over 50 years and returned to his farm until asked again to lead. Ariel Sharon had been in a coma since 2006, but according to his family, decided his time to leave the mortal coil was now. Sharon as through his life, determined his own timetable for action.

And lead he did, to the often stunning unpredicted results as interpreted by those that would be his eternal foes. Sharon was as he put it, a simple farmer, but as a military and political leader he was anything but simple. In the field of battle, he was a implacable foe of the enemy, strategic and innovative in action, and single minded in his determination to defeat those before him. In politics, he often brought his strategic vision into actions that flummoxed his opponents who could not appreciate the clarity of his singular focus, the permanent existence of a viable Israeli state. His strategic realism, saw each battle political or military, as a battle of survival, in which the outcome was to be contributory to the permanent existence of the state. All else was merely charade, he didn’t play charades. His foes despised him because there was no way to defeat him, and his friends struggled with him because he had already determined his victories before his actions. He gave voice to the adage that he achieved results, and left it to others to devise a theory to explain it.

From Israel’s formative battles for independence in 1948, to his spectacular victories against more powerful Egyptian tank forces in the Sinai in 1973, Sharon was a brilliant leader of troops and recognized tactical genius. Such heroes are enormous targets for critique, and Sharon’s aggressiveness was felt intolerable by some who felt Israel’s best position against its foes was an compromising co-existence. Sharon understood the concept of enemy and studied his enemies. He saw no conversion of Arab nationalism or Palestinian desires to seek the obliteration of the state of Israel, so he accepted all issues as to their positive or negative impact on Israel’s ongoing existence. He never made any assumption that he could trust others to protect Israel’s fundamental interests, and did not seek the trust or respect of his foes. To world liberalism and to Israel’s peace lobby, he demonstrated his intolerable flaws in 1982, when he did not hide behind excuses of a massacre of Palestinian refugees that occurred in Lebanon under his watch in 1982 during the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon to rout out increasing dangerous and aggressive Palestinian cells. As defense minister, Sharon sought the elimination of Palestinian forces from southern Lebanon and allowed the blisteringly vengeful forces at work in Lebanon to work toward that goal. In a country torn by competing forces of Christian Lebanese, Sunni and Shia, Druise militia, and a huge dose of Palestinian interlopers, Sharon permitted the Christian Phalangist forces to enter Palestinian refugee camps, to identify Palestinian fighters, and to the Maronite Phalangists, all Palestinians were usurpers to Lebanese territory. A massacre at the Sabra and Shatila camps ensued, and although the actual history of the raids are a confusing morass of Lebanonese versus Palestinian versus Syrian atrocities, the world blame fell directly on the shoulders of Sharon.

He was forced to resign, and returned to his farm in disgrace. And so he remained in the political wilderness, until the Palestinian Intifadas of the turn of the century brought Sharon’s version of realism rather than idealism back into vogue. Despite Israeli efforts for ten years to reach a negotiated accommodation with the Palestinians, The Palestinian leader Arafat found that 96% territorial concessions by Israel were insufficient to the 100% he felt appropriate, and turned the West Bank into a war zone. He achieved the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians and returned terror as a weapon to his negotiating technique.

Sharon as always was unaffected by enemies acting in expected ways. As leader of Likud and eventually the hybrid political party, Kadima, he became Israel’s eleventh Prime Minister despite his controversial background, and proceeded to turn the concepts of peace upside down. Seeing the Gaza strip militarily indefensible by Israel and meaningless strategically. he unilaterally pulled Israel out and left it to the Palestinians, stunning the world that always assumed he would see all of Israel’s military gains as inviolate. To that end he dismantled and moved Israeli settlements in Gaza, considered politically impossible, but achieved by Sharon in short order. Negotiating with Palestinian leader Abbas, following the death of Arafat, he determined that decisions henceforth regarding territory would be singularly based on Israel’s strategic defensive interests, and was on his way to a comprehensive process for permanence when he was suddenly silenced by a stroke in 2006. He remained in a silent coma until his passing today.

There is no telling as to what might have been the sequence of events with a Sharon in power for the first decade of this century. It is clear that his enemies are happy to see him gone, as he was unbeatable, and tireless in their destruction. It is also clear his country and neighbors lost the pathfinder that envisioned a way out of the blind idealisms and dysfunctional radicalisms that haunt the region today. Today the lion finally sleeps, and the world has lost one of its great leaders. Somewhere, as in the picture that leads this blog, Sharon and Moshe Dayan are again sharing the tactics that allowed the survival of Israel against overwhelming odds. The farmer of the Negev desert would remind Dayan, that even in the desert, unyielding will and visionary thinking can make for a bountiful harvest.

December 29, 2013

May 10th, 1940

On May 10th, 1940, His Royal Majesty advanced the seals of office of prime minister to Winston Spencer Churchill, thus finally placing Churchill in the leadership position he had coveted for 4 decades. The previous prime minsters Baldwin and Chamberlain had managed to coddle the bombastic dictator of Germany Hitler through the policy of appeasement, allowing the territorial acquisitions of the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, followed by laying prostrate before the ruthless acquisition of Poland and Norway. The day before, May 9th, a hundred division German army exploded on the western front slicing through Luxemburg, Belgium, and the Netherlands and stunningly, out of the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes forest into the heart of France. Through these previous stalwart leaders Great Britain had responded to such aggression by symptomatically reducing its investment in Britain’s own forces leaving the home of the British Empire at a spectacular disadvantage to the Nazi war machine.

Now they turned this unsolvable mess and crisis over to Churchill. Thank You very much.

There are tremendous lessons that can be learned by watching what Churchill did with such a craptacular gift bestowed upon him.

It would be assumed the first response would be to whine. After all, he had spent the previous eight years warning of the impending and building disaster, only to be ignored, disdained, and humiliated by the very men who now expected him to somehow find a way out. Even at the moment of governmental collapse, amazingly Prime Minster Chamberlain and the King, hoped to avoid an ‘uncontrollable’ Churchill government, looked to Lord Halifax, one of the architects of the appeasement policy and sure to seek an accommodation with Germany, as their first choice to succeed Chamberlain. Halifax, a better politician than thinker, realized he had no hope of securing the confidence of now thoroughly disgusted and anxious House of Commons and deferred to Churchill. With such wobbly indications of support, Churchill became prime Minister.

Lesson #1 – no whining. Churchill’s first public announcement of where to start in such a crisis was to define , unequivocably, the end:

I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.

The hand Churchill had been dealt was all but unwinnable, but he wasn’t about to compromise on the necessity of defining the end as complete victory, not a set of “make due, our time is past, the challenges are too great” compromises. The aim? Victory. The means? Whatever it takes, however long it takes. Churchill knew that in order to toughen people up for great hardship, it would be critical to assure them their leaders would not in the end sell their sacrifices out to some weak compromise that would ensure their enslavement. Everybody would be in together to victory, or annihilation. With such stark realities, there would be no time for whining or playing the blame game.

Lesson #2 – complete commitment. The first stunning surprise of the British governmental bureaucracy to the new Prime Minister’s style was ‘nobody rests until the goal of victory was secured’. Entering into the job at the advanced age of 65, no one was prepared for Churchill’s incredible work drive. Every minute of every day was committed to the goal, and the days were as long as even much younger men could possibly tolerate. Churchill drove everyone to care about everything, no matter or fact too small or unimportant if it might contribute to the fabric of victory. Churchill defined progress as Action- “Action this Day”. “Action in Three Days”, “Potential Action”. Moving, probing, challenging, resisting were the processes to be developed. Sitting back and reacting was defeatist, and would not be tolerated.

lesson #3 – Man’s best instincts evolve through crisis. Churchill had an unassailable historical perspective, and understood that true crisis often brought about great achievements of will. Once he had succeeded in focusing the national will not on achieving the best of possible outcomes of defeat, but on a future victory, he knew determination and creativity would take hold. Under the pressures of expected overwhelming defeat, Britain found the capacity to win the Battle of Britain, solve the Enigma code, advance the secrets of the atom, develop radar, and understand the complementary role it would have to play to the emerging super power the United States.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”

Lesson #4 – Transparency. It was assumed by the British government before Churchill that the people were best left in the dark about the menace presented by the German military machine and the potential horrors of assault on the homeland. Churchill would have none of it. From the start he accepted the intelligence of his people to understand the task at hand, and the dangers they faced. Though not professing religiousity, Churchill embraced the Christian Virtues of Temperance, Patience, and Diligence as essential elements in the DNA of the people he led, and recognized the need to support the those traits with unvarnished Truth. He never underplayed the dangers or the sacrifices required, nor the difficulties that lay ahead.

I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty’s Government-every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation. The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength. Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

Lesson#5 – Tools of Victory. Great challenges are won by inexorable will, but Churchill knew that one could not fight modern battles with sticks and stones. The fundamental weapon in victory was a people’s understanding of their basic position in the battle as one of being in the Right. Victory however has to be achieved on a progressively level playing field, and Churchill looked to seal the leaks in capacity so permitted by his predecessors and look to all avenues to achieve capacity, including developing his relationship with the United States. He wanted to make clear that it was not expected by the British people that the world would need to share the sacrifice, but rather that the world would accept that the battle outcome was one worth winning. Churchill believed that the tenets of western civilization were a shared responsibility and advantage, and the investment in preservation was in the interests of not only Great Britain, but like minded democracies like the United States, and even the subjugated peoples of Europe now living under the Nazi tyranny. Churchill was not asking for sacrificing lives for British existence, he was interested in supporting the unalienable existence of western principles, and by providing the means where available to support and supply, stand up for those rights.

We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.

———–

On June 22nd, 1940, France capitulated and all of continental Europe was under the yoke of the Nazi war machine. Five weeks into his premiership, Winston Churchill faced the overwhelming crisis of our times – alone. Less than five years later, the omnipotent Nazi threat was crushed and no more. The achievement is truly stupefying, but grounded in the recognition that in all crisis management , principled focus on your inherent strengths, grim determination, and marshaling your resources can with destiny’s help achieve victory.

Unfortunately, I feel today’s western world is approaching similar moments of crisis and threats to their existence. Although the menace is not so much state sponsored, the pattern of defeatism, appeasement, and self destruction is progressively apparent, and our leaders reflect similar traits to the British bumblers of the 1930s. Progressive debt, isolation, appeasement of foreign tyrants, and draw down of a nation’s defenses are sowing a defeatism in our nation that make it increasing difficult to imagine defeating the impending crises of existence that our wayward habits are driving us toward. The President stands in a posture that almost seems blind to the tides of destruction, not dissimilar to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, who seemed progressively denser as the risks grew higher. Churchill, in perfectly framing Stanley Baldwin, may have inadvertently defined perfectly our current President Obama as well.

“Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened”

As we gear ourselves up for what will be necessary to return to stability and progress as a people, let us hope that a Churchill awaits in the wilderness to tell us the truth, a show us the way out.

December 15, 2013

It Turns Out, the World is Still a Dangerous Place…

The Obama administration has had a fairly busy month trying to keep a wayward internet site from flummoxing up people’s health insurance coverage, charging inadvertently their bank accounts for insurance they did not yet have, and struggling to maintain the site with a capacity for volume and security remotely consistent with sites one fiftieth as big in scope. Its very stressful, and it absolutely doesn’t help that the rest of the world will not give America a break and allow it the space and time to be converted to a socialist utopia, without forcing international instability on the administration as well. After all, the governmental takeover of one sixth of the largest economy in the world was to be the Magnum Opus of this president, and his entire foreign policy was designed to put international issues behind him, so he could concentrate on domestic revolution.

The Obama Doctrine, removal of the United States as a determining force in world affairs, initiated with the infamous apology tour. the Russian Re-Set, and the extrication of American forces from the hard won military stability in Iraq. With the United States acting more like an absent uncle singularly concerned about the world’s environmental health, respectful and even submissive before all other nations, regardless of their malevolence or darker intent, Obama assumed a period of tranquility that would allow him the time to focus on the real enemy, America’s individualist tradition.

The roll call of untoward responses to this policy is mind boggling, starting with A and the Arab world chaos and ending at Z with Zawahiri and the re-emergence of Al Qaeda, and constituting a myriad of mis-steps in between. After a summer of ineffective and contrary bungling of the Syrian debacle and the dangerous appeasement of the Iranian totalitarians in their desire for nuclear armament, the last thing the President needed was two more cracks to develop in the Doctrine.

The above photo captured an event in Kiev, Ukraine last week but shadowed eerily the events of 1989. An enormous mob decides the period of Soviet dominance has stood long enough and pulls down and destroys the primary symbol of all powerful communist oppression, Vladimir Lenin. Across eastern Europe and even parts of Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union, this was an epic and essentially peaceful sight twenty years ago, but this time there is a more ominous pall to this event. The Ukrainian people are not celebrating the demise of a dictatorial foreign oppressor , but rather the re-insertion of it in their lives. The president of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovych, on November 21, announced the reversal of a decades long movement of Ukraine into the European orbit pointing towards the establishment of ties with the European Union and NATO, instead directing Ukraine back into the sphere of direct Russian influence and dominance. President Yanukovych, who since his election in 2010, has succeeded in positioning his family and friends along the lines of a typical Russian criminal oligarchy, syphoning key Ukrainian industries and power into their hands, hoped to “seal the deal” with blessing of the ultimate overlord Putin, who has perfected the format in Russia and seeks to restore old fashioned Russian dominance on former Soviet Republics. The minority Russian population of Ukraine, ~18% of the Ukranian population has felt its influence diminish with independence and supports the president. The great majority of the Ukrainian population has no intention to go back to subservience and demands follow through with impending agreements with the European Union. The BBC has reported on the massive rallies in the Ukrainian capital and this time tearing down Lenin statues in Europe’s second biggest country may not go down so peacefully.

The Obama Doctrine would have suggested that the Russian Re-Set fashioned by the president and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would have solved this issue, but no one bothered to tell the Ukrainians that their future might not jibe with the acclaimed Re-Set. Dealing with a more belligerent Russia certainly would be within the capabilities of the United States as long as the Pacific sphere of American influence was to remain – ‘pacific’. Unfortunately, not so much.

At the very moment the European door is coming off its stable hinges, the Pacific Rim, stable for decades is wobbling dangerously. China, seeing the bent knee nature of American foreign policy evidenced in a tired ‘here-we-go-again’ presidential bow to another tin horn dictator, this time Cuba’s Raul Castro, moved aggressively to declare the South China Sea in its sphere of influence, extending its military defacto control over strategic islands that just happen to be in the sweet spot of oil and gas deposits. Sphere of Influence just happens to be a sensitive subject in these parts, given that the Imperial Japan declared a Co-Prosperity Sphere of Influence leading to World War II, that wasn’t Co anything and was prosperous only for Japan. Japan and South Korea, having more than enough instability from the deranged Chinese client state North Korea, are in no mood for unilateral declarations of influence, and issue is setting up for some serious moments of potential conflict. Earlier this week a Chinese naval vessel attempted to get the US Guided Missile Warship the USS Cowpens to stop in its transit through previously accepted international waters in the South China Sea. This move was clearly designed to intimidate, and forced the 560 foot 10,000 ton craft to perform dangerous avoidance maneuvers. This kind of action, against naval vessels of countries such as Vietnam, Korea, and particularly Japan, may create a tension that is not so easily deflected, given the history of the region. Since the days of the British Imperial Navy ruling the waves, the maintenance of “open sea lanes” has been considered the critical ingredient to world trade and peace. China may see the current guarantor of safe and open international waters, the Untied States, weakening in its resolve. Somebody, somewhere is bound to make a fatal mistake in such a vacuum.

When you own the car, and drive the car, all the passengers are at the mercy of your skill in operating the car. The United States for decades has “owned” the position of guarantor of world stability, and its weaving all over the road, is making the passengers very nervous, and very leery of the driver’s competence. The best we can likely hope for under this administration is, despite their tendency to overt their eyes from the road and spend their time texting while driving, that we don’t end up in a major pile-up. The reality is putting incompetent drivers in charge of such a powerful car is bound to lead to multiple serious fender benders at the least, and nobody is going to want to be along for the ride.

December 1, 2013

The Savior of Private Enterprise(?)- Space

Space X Dragon capsule supplies ISS - space.com — Space X Dragon capsule supplies ISS – space.com

President Obama has maintained a consistent vision of converting America into a socialist utopia. Though he objects to the moniker ‘socialist’ , he has delivered an unceasing attack on the pillars of private enterprise through tax policies and regulation that create no doubt as to his ideological bent on the forces that brought America to economic greatness. The country’s priorities have been reset from economic vitality and defense supremacy to social investment, wealth redistribution, and marked retraction in defense expenditure. He has done what he could to suppress private sector financial creativity, energy exploration, small business enterprise, and most spectacularly, health care, in an effort to assure the ultimate direction, and with it power of determination, comes from the government.

In one industry, however, President Obama deserves credit as an economic visionary. Either through personal lack of interest in the subject, or the desire to remove the resources of the government from huge expenditures for which he could discern no social value, President Obama in 2009 declared a revolutionary privatized strategy regarding space exploration and development. Since 1961, the vision of the national government was for steady progress in manned space exploration, with the moon landing achieved by 1969, reusable space shuttle by 1981, and a permanent space station by 2000. The assumption was that the manned missions would progressively point outward toward the planets, with returns to the moon and ultimately Mars and the other planets envisioned. Given the spectacular costs and engineering support required for such goals, it was assumed that only a national consensus project could achieve the economic wherewithal for such undertakings.

President Obama declared, however, with the coming retirement of the space shuttle, that the national government would divorce itself from direct manned orbital flight, and would rely instead on private corporations to achieve the capacities to secure safe low earth orbit flight, satellite launch, and space station re-supply. The problem was, of course, no such capacity in the private sector existed, and the result of the policy was a howl protest from well informed traditional supporters of NASA, such as former astronauts Neil Armstrong and Jim Lovell.

Four short years later, we should give the avowed socialist President Obama a private enterprise medal. A remarkable amount of progress has been made in the private sector, led by the particular entrepreneurial genius of Elon Musk (see Ramparts People We Should Know #21 ) and Space X. Space X has already achieved successful cargo delivery reproducibly to the space station, and the commercial exploitation of manned flight for both tourist and orbital ventures are progressing nicely. New companies such as Orbital Sciences Corp., Bigelow Aerospace, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic and Sierra Nevada, as well as established aerospace companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin are preceeding to goals of successful manned space flight, and not just to low earth orbit. The directions each are taking are diverse, aggressive, and ultimately unbound by the typical stultifying bureaucracy of governmental creation usually dominated by congressional bias. The Washington Post has an exceptional overview of old versus new space development that is worth exploring fully to grasp this exciting development, as we live through so many other disappointments of the current economy.

The President deserves credit for stumbling upon a prime example of how trusting the arena of ideas and the process of private market competition can lead to dramatic improvements in human development and life quality. And if he’s not careful, might just make America an economic leader in the current century as great as the last. Were he only to have such stumbles in the other areas of our moribund economy. In reflecting upon the overarching principles of human behavior versus utopian ideal, we once again turn to Winston Churchill for some prescient words:

“Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.”

November 24, 2013

The Gardens of Aranjuez

In the locale of Aranjuez , south of modern Madrid, the royal family of one of the world’s greatest empires placed their spring home to celebrate their spectacular power and wealth. At the end of the 15th century, with the Castilian monarchs having finally ended 700 years of Moor colonization of the Iberian peninsula, the confident rulers of Spain and Portugal saw no issue in dividing the entire world between them. In the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, the lands of the New World (minus Brazil) and the Far East were considered to be in the Spanish sphere of hegemony, Africa and the Indian islands the province of Portugal. No one of course bothered to tell any of the indigenous peoples, but such was the air of supreme authority that Spain spent the next two centuries taking this divide very seriously and proceeding to exploit their sphere with dominant conquest. For a time the inhabitants of Aranjuez injected intense catholic religiousity and the Spanish language into a third of the planet, and absorbed unimaginable wealth.

Spain became Europe’s most intense empire, its explorers Conquistadors, its religious intellectuals Inquisitors, and its monarchs supreme authoritarians. The intensity was felt throughout the culture, in the intensity of linguistic expressions, the power of its religious art, and particularly the music. The home of Flamenco, Andalusia, married the supreme confidence, intense romanticism, faint mysticism, and woven rhythms of Moor culture into an erotic and powerful cultural dance and music that survives to this day. The family of plucked stringed instruments of the renaissance, the lute and the mandolin, particularly appropriate for solo expression, proved inadequate to the Flamenco artist until idealized in the the form of the guitar. The guitar deepened the resonation of the sound and the scope of the available expression. Although the inherent strengths of the guitar attracted many composers of many nationalities , it was in the venue of Spanish culture that the instrument seemed to be invented for. The dry heat, the vast plains, the inescapable power, and the apparently eternal nature of Spanish influence long after the supreme monarchial power was gone, seemed to resonate through the guitar.

By the twentieth century, the spectacular reach of the Spanish Monarchs and the pilgrimage of the world to the Gardens of the palace at Aranjuez

to seek their blessing was a faint memory. The intensity and sense of mysticism that was Spain flowered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as the empire’s power collapsed. The music of De Falla, Tarrega, Sor, and Granados all found beautiful expression through the guitar, but it was a mid-twentieth century composer who achieved the perfect expression of unique Latin passion, intense and expression, and maybe, a real dignity that the true conquistadors never had. November 22nd was the 112th birthday of Joaquin Rodrigo, who managed to compose the unrivaled king of guitar concertos as an homage to his homeland and the magnificent gardens at Aranjuez. The modern concert hall is deficient without at some point performing Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, the perfect expression of the guitar’s musicality, dignity, and capacity for expression. The second movement in particular, in which the guitar is sublimely echoed by the English horn , cousin of the oboe, expresses the composer’s love for his homeland vistas better than any photograph could provide, and the depth of the Spanish soul that one great guitar performer after another has attempted to make their own.

In this quiet last week of leading to the celebration of fall’s harvest bounty before winter sets in, we wish Joaquin a happy birthday, a immerse ourselves in the splendor of Spain.

November 16, 2013November 17, 2013

Peace In Our Time

Prime Minister Chamberlain returns from his meeting with Herr Hitler with a Peace Agreement - 1938 — Prime Minister Chamberlain returns from his meeting with Herr Hitler with a Peace Agreement – 1938

On September 30th, 1938 an ebullient Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain spoke in front of an enraptured crowd, having just stepped of the plane from his triumphant visit and negotiations with the once Chancellor now Fuhrer of Germany, Adolph Hitler. Raising a piece of paper above his head he declared that what he had achieved was “peace in our time”.

“The settlement of the Czechoslovakian problem which has now been achieved is, in my view, only a prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace. This morning I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler, and here is the paper that bears his name upon it as well as mine. Some of you, perhaps, have already heard what it contains, but I would just like to read it to you – ‘We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.’ “

The ‘Czechoslovakian problem’ was of course the unwillingness of Czechoslovakia to accept unconditional surrender and the takeover of their country by Nazi Germany without a fight. The British and French were caught in a dilemma in that they were obligated by treaty to support Czechoslovakia in any threat to her borders, and now they had to find a way to relieve themselves of their obligations. The ‘way’ was appeasement – they declared Germany had the natural right to assume sovereignty over any territory with a significant German population, and the borders of “a small, far away country over which we know little” seemed immaterial. The concept of appeasement – achieving a country’s martial desires without actual war so as to prevent war – was obviously predicated on the idea that there was a point of satiation to a country’s lust for power, territory, and dominance. It also required a complete willingness to throw one’s own principles and the target country’s existence under the bus.

On September 1,1939, after four consecutive years of appeasement strategy, and 335 days after Chamberlain’s clutched paper declared ‘peace in our time’ , Germany invaded Poland and World War II was underway.

In Geneva in 2013, an eerily similar group of participants, Britain, France, And the United States are having negotiations with a martial country, Iran, which basically will determine the potential existence of another country, Israel, which is of course is not invited to participate. As the BBC reports:

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton told a press conference that there had been a lot of “concrete progress but some differences remain”.

Baroness Ashton said talks would resume on 20 November.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said he was not disappointed with the outcome in Geneva, and that the talks were “something we can build on”.

He said all parties were “on the same wavelength” and “there was the impetus to reach an agreement”.

US Secretary of State John Kerry said: “There is no question in my mind that we are closer now than we were before.”

The considerations of negotiation are whether to determine as to whether Iran can achieve its national interests without a conflict. As Chamberlain discovered in 1938, there was no value in attempting to discuss with Hitler any other nation’s potential interests. It was only if Hitler would be able to achieve what he wanted through non-combat means. The president of Iran indicates a very similar philosophical view:

Again as reported by the BBC:

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said on Sunday that his country would not abandon its “nuclear rights”, which included uranium enrichment.

“The rights of the Iranian nation and our national interests are a red line. So are nuclear rights under the framework of international regulations, which include enrichment on Iranian soil,” he told parliament in remarks quoted by the Isna news agency.

The fundamental reality that is obscured by all the diplomatic language is Iran’s view of its innate destiny. It believes Israel’s existence is an aberration to be eliminated. It believes Islam is not a chosen religion but a means of dominance over individual choice, and there is no room for other opinions, other than submission. It believes the western world has circumvented its national destiny and that as great Persian nations in the past it intends to achieve total control of its sphere of influence. Like another nation did in 1938, it believes it is a nation of racial and cultural superiority that is destined to achieve its goals regardless of any temporary considerations.

The good news for Iran is that the United States, once the bulwark of defense of religious freedom, individual rights, and sovereignty of nations is now led by an administration who feels Neville Chamberlain’s failure was, that he didn’t go far enough.

October 27, 2013

American Adagio

SAMUEL BARBER 1910-1981 — SAMUEL BARBER
1910-1981

The musical world of the 1920’s and 30’s was taken with the influence of the bold American genre of jazz which seemed to capture the independent, self reliant and mildly undisciplined nature of the new world. To sophisticates, however, the musical creations of American composers such as Morton and Gershwin were relegates of the music hall, not the decided seriousness of the concert hall. American music held for them a decidedly superficial rhythm oriented character that fell short of the depth of conscience and emotion that were the province of the great European composers. Of particular sensitivity was the concept of the middle movement of a classical piece, since Haydn’s classical construction a piece of contemplative and reflective interlude that elevated classical music from entertainment to a direct treatise on humanity itself.

The center movement was typically framed at a pace that projected at 55-65 beats per minute, or about a beat a second. Not morbidly slow, but consistent with breathing or walking, to focus on the individual and inward direct nature of the movement. The tempo was known as Adagio, and the great composers were noted for the Olympian heights their creativity carried this uniquely human tempo. Wolfgang Mozart with his magnificent Adagios in the Piano Concertos No. 21 and 23, Ludwig Beethoven with his heavenly Adagio in the Emperor Piano Concerto No.5 set the standard for the performer rising above the hushed mass of the orchestra to strike a very individual strain of beauty and contemplation. The sound of something almost otherworldly projects from these masterpieces that always leads the listener to clear their mind, breathe slower, and consider a connection to the sublime. The depth of soul required was felt to be confined to a European sophistication that projected from almost 2500 years of civilization. Americans were juveniles to that tradition.

As in art, American composers were creating every bit as sophisticated a musical composition legacy as their European counterparts, but the credit was scant. Composers such as Copland, Hanson, and Ives brought American inflections to classical compositional structure but fought for attention at the concert hall even in their own country. The American ear sought the traditional voice of the European composer as much as the European audience.

Samuel Barber (1910- 1981) changed all that with a piece of music that connected to the soul every bit as much as the great composers, and using the sacred weapon of the Adagio. With his String Quartet Opus 11, composed at the age of 25 in 1935-6, Barber plugged deeply into the evocative tempo of the Adagio and created a composition that resonated at all levels, from the intimate sounds of the quartet to the intense layers of the orchestra. Here was pathos, yearning, searching, and otherworldly in nine minutes of perfection. Barber knew he had in his words a ‘knockout” of creation, and it didn’t take long for the serious performance world to agree with him as Barber created the Adagio for Strings for the concert hall. Toscanini, who saw American music as casual and rarely performed it, recognized Barber’s masterpiece for what it was, a magisterial creation using the Adagio tempo, worthy of any European composer’s best work.

Barber, born in West Chester, Pennsylvania to a musical family, likely stands as the greatest American composer of the classical concert tradition, with his Violin Concerto, Piano Concerto and Second Symphony having a regular rotation in any international orchestra’s armamentarium. But the Adagio is his moment of genius, when he discovered the perfect language of humanity’s core that transcended all nationalities. Whether in Beijing or Berlin, Boston or Beirut, audiences are immediately transported to their inner depths of recognition of the soul and frail majesty that is human creation. From the occasion of national crisis, state funeral, personal tragedy, or evoking of a simple human life, Barber’s Adagio brings everybody to the edge of intense emotions and to the verge of tears. Not for its sadness, but for its clarity of what is so human about all of us.

The Adagio for Strings has taken its place in the pantheon of great orchestrial Adagios, but I am emotionally struck but the simple beauty of Barber’s genius in the form of the quartet. I am particularly moved by the organ like performance of the Amstel Quartet’s version below that goes through one’s chest like a great bellows, using an instrument I usually avoid for any introspective listen, the saxophone. Barber by his death in 1981 achieved the recognition as a composer of stature, but the singular achievement of his Adagio, raised him to greatness.