Author: bfaure

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Enter The Fixer

     We have become so numb to the inability of governments to address in adult and disciplined fashion the significant issues of our time that when such discipline is revealed, its harshness is initially tart as pickle juice. Thus the response of thousands of public employees to the adult requests of the governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, to pension and health care benefit adjustments he deems necessary to begin to deal with the state’s future busting 3.6 billion dollar budget deficit and billions more in unfunded mandates. Unlike the United States government, which can continue to pretend that balancing a budget is a task for future generations, most states are obligated by their constitutions to pay as they go. This sensible proposition of assuring sufficient funds available for the public expenditure was in the not too distant past considered a sacred trust of legislatures. Theirs was an emotional attachment to considering an additional tax to pay for an additional good, but at least it was pertinent to the consideration of the entire taxpaying public weighing the expense of a potential good to benefit that public. No more. The last few decades have resulted in a severe tipping of the scales with public unions requiring the taxpayer to progressively assure the public employee’s personal well being and comfort at the expense of any consideration of the public good. This achievement, through the weapon of “collective bargaining”, has resulted in the incestuous relationships of the public unions, fed by tax dollars, financially supporting the re-election of representatives who allow them to progressively feed, in a never ending progression.

     Collective bargaining, the process by which unions negotiate with their employer for hours, wages, work safety, and benefits, requires a set of assumptions, checks and balances for each to negotiate in good faith. The first is the assumption that the union is representing the best interests of the workers and the second that the employer is concerned with the availability of a productive work force to achieve profit and growth.
In the private sector, the checks in power to each comes in the realization that the union risks the members jobs if it undermines too significantly the company’s ability to make a profit, the company understanding that its primary capacity to make money comes from an adequately compensated work force that will be productive. Collective bargaining in the public sector distorts all aspects of this careful balance. The public sector employee and government both rely not on profit motive but rather a third financier, the taxpayer, to passively provide the funds for both. The public union can ask the taxpayer to continue to pony up more and more because there is no defined profit capacity. The available funds are simply limited to that which the government is willing to collect, and the power of the government to increase its power and reach, thereby increasing the number of public employees, is limited only by its ability to remain in power. The result is the impossible arrangement that allows public unions to invest in maintaining governments that, thankful for the support and ability to stay in power, progressively kick their fiduciary responsibilities to the public down the road. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a strong proponent of union rights, saw the infeasibility of the public union relationship with government as did the last socialist mayor of a major city in America, mayor Frank Zeidler of Milwaukee, who in 1969, warned “that the rise of public unions put a competing power in charge of public business next to elected officials.”

     Enter the Fixer. With the tsunami election of 2010, the voters of Wisconsin, a predominantly liberal state, rebelled against its impending financial doom, by electing a governor and legislature empowered with the singular mandate to restore the appropriate balance between the elected government and its people. The fixer comes in the form of Governor Walker, who in eight years as Milwaukee County Executive, managed to maneuver one of the state’s most liberal counties to the land of balanced budgets without tax increases. Despite getting called every name in the book, he persevered against entrenched interests time and time again by sticking to the overriding principle that his ultimate responsibility was to the taxpayer that paid the bills assure appropriate government, not to the beneficiary who demanded its inappropriateness. Elevated to the chief executive position in the state, he has brought with forcefulness to bear this overriding principle, and the hornet’s nest of entrenched interests has again been kicked over, on a much larger stage. If the interests that seek to derail Walker’s compact with his mandate, they will find him an immovable object. His separation of the public union from its oppressive hold on the levers of governmental funds and function, by removing its right to impel all public employees to fund the union and separating the collective bargaining rights for wages and pensions from job safety and grievance, is the most aggressive challenge to unions’ stranglehold on government decision making in decades. Walker has correctly identified the a lawmaker freed from the pressure of union tactics, regardless of party, may be more willing to review expenditures with a more objective eye. With objectivity, comes freedom of thought, and with freedom of thought, just maybe preservation of the republic form of government. IF Governor Walker pulls that off, he indeed will be the Fixer we have been waiting for.

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Ramparts Hiatus

To all my fellow guardians of the ramparts, a brief hiatus is in order for the captain of the guard. I will be computer free for a few days, brewing up some new thoughts and sharpening my attention for the days ahead. Please take the time to peruse past favorites and stay in touch. Ramparts of Civilization will be back soon with all new adventures that make this world so damn interesting….see you soon!

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Who’s Next – Maybe Turkey?

     The events in Egypt continue to evolve at a breathtaking pace.  The most recent news is the dissolution of the puppet parliament and the government’s associated agencies with the role of comptroller in the hand’s of Egypt’ military.  The military insists it is positioning itself to moderate a transition to representative government with elections to occur in September.  History as always allows for lessons to reflect upon.  The Egyptian military overthrew the monarchist government in  1952 with a council of officers led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, in a so called “Association of Free Officers” dedicating themselves to be “guardians of the people’s interests“, named a  President, General Muhammed Najuib, with backing from disparate groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian Communist Party.  Sound familiar?  In a short time, however,  the council reformed itself into the Egyptian Revolutionary Command Council, tensions rose between the civilian government and the Council , and Nasser in January of 1953, declared a one party state, with progressive attainment of the machinery of power until after the Suez conflict in 1956, he assumed direct control.  He did not abdicate his power, promoting a belligerent form of pan-Arab nationalism until his death in 1970.  His fellow officer and long time confidant, Anwar Sadat, took over, and following Sadat’s assassination in 1981, was succeeded by Hosni Mubarak.  Egypt’s current “guardians’, the Egyptian military,  own a direct ancestral connection to this history. 

      The position of the military as a force of the people in Arab lands are perhaps linked to the only time it seems to have at least attempted to participate in institutionalising an Islamic country’s attempt at democracy.  The Turkish hero of World War I, Mustafa Kemal Pasha, who successfully resisted the British at Gallipoli in one of the British Empire’s most painful defeats, additionally resisted the victorious allies’ attempts to subjugate post war Turkey.  He refused to accepted a divided stump of a country proposed, declared himself Kemal Ataturk, “father of the Turks”, and successfully fought a small war of independence, resulting in the formation of the modern Turkey we know. Through his entire reign, he sought to modernize Turkey along secular, democratic lines, assuring the Turkish Republic would not dissolve in fractional tribal chaos that plague so many lands of the former Ottoman Empire.  Though he was a strong proponent of western democracy, he always saw the Turkish military as the ultimate protectors of the republic against unstable interests and felt no qualms about occasionally “righting the ship of state” with military oversight and intervention when needed.

     The past few years in Turkey have seen the creeping expansion of an Islamist government in Turkey led by democratically elected Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, and the military has been slowly but progressively marginalized.  Erdogan has worked tirelessly to remove secular generals from the army and replace them with those who have less issue with an islamist shade to Turkish society and law, similar to the progressive role of the Revolutionary Guard in Iran removing the secular voices of the Iranian army in the early 1980’s.  Ataturk would have been appalled and would have “cleansed” the government of this tendency toward religious governance, believing it anathema to a modern society. European governments have been vehement in their warnings to the Turkish military to remove any desire on the military’s part to “control” events, further emboldening Erdogan.  Now it appears that the cauldron that has simmering beneath the surface in Turkey, driven by the recent events in Egypt are about to boil over.  Erdogan has determined to take the final step in emasculating the military’s independence by essentially accusing them of treason and plottage of an overthrow of Turkey’s government, and seeking the arrest of many officers.  This unreported event may prove to be a more dangerous and unstable event than anything happening in Egypt, and bears very close watching.  The current American government’s stunning ineptitude regarding Egypt, has absolutely no room for error in Turkey, a NATO ally astride the gates of Europe. 

     Like the mythical box of Pandora, the lid has been removed to a multi-century suppression of Middle Eastern forces that will play out in a way we can only guess. It is hard to know if there is another Mustafa Kemal Ataturk out there.  One thing is for sure, The Obama Administration is ill equipped to recognize such a leader, and sadly unwilling to be principled enough to be a steady force for good, in a unstable time crying out for American leadership. 

     Fasten your seatbelts. Its going to be a very, very bumpy night.

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The Great One

     February 12, 1809, 202 years ago, lost in the wild frontier of Kentucky in a log cabin placed at the side of a creek called Nolan, outside the settlement of Hogdenville, a miracle of history occurred. An illiterate tenant farmer named Thomas Lincoln and his wife Nancy Hanks brought into the world an epic soul. From such humble roots, one of the great thinkers and unquestionably one of the world’s most gifted leaders came into being to a nearly untouched natural world. He was Abraham Lincoln, and in his relatively brief life of 56 years shook the very foundations of his nation and changed it forever.

     It is the ultimate test of nature versus nurture when one examines the life production of Abraham Lincoln. He certainly had no significant identifiable schooling, and his upbringing provided nearly no stimulants for learning beyond the skills needed to survive in a very rough and occasionally brutal wilderness. His step-mother Sarah Johnson, coming into the family after the untimely death of Lincoln’s mother at age 11, found a melancholic and wild boy, but inured in him an uncommon devotion due to her unstinting love for him.  Though illiterate herself, she saw in him something nobody else saw, and pushed him to learn to read and write. In the Indiana wilderness the family moved to, Lincoln proved a voracious self taught student in writing skills, grammar, and the few books available to him. The entire scope of his training was frankly his will to learn, and the interpretations of his learning all his own. From wilderness wild cat to eventual local learned man, the philosophic world view devised by Lincoln was entirely unique and his own creation.

     David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln biography is in my mind the most passionately human biography of Lincoln and a must read for any who wishes to understand Lincoln the man who became Lincoln the colossal historical figure. The specific chapters reflecting the years of Lincoln as a young circuit lawyer in Illinois are essentially perfectly written. Lincoln was a mental sponge, forgetting no personal interaction, no lesson to be learned, no overarching theme to the simplest disputes and events. He built on his friendships, his experiences, and his battles to develop an uncommon awareness of the unique qualities of the American Experience and the vital role of the common man in framing it. With no apparent template for a guide, he created a strong and complex capacity to understand, and importantly, elucidate that understanding to others, in clear and precise language. It was a skill that was natural, his own, and absolutely, genius.

     Lincoln wrote and spoke on so many topics of importance to his time that an entire career studying the many moments of brilliance have consumed academicians since his life ended.  The more amazing reality is how often he spoke in a way that evoked universal themes that crossed multiple generations that speak to us today.  The speeches written by Lincoln resonate for our time; the House Divided speech, the Lincoln Douglas debates, the first and second Inaugurals, and the jewel in the crown, the Gettysburg Address.  He was additionally at his greatest in the simple letter responses to friends, and the letters of consolation to the war’s bereaved, showing each his ability to understand their prism of understanding, their own special role and their personal sorrow.   This President in saintly fashion absorbed every arrow, every pain, every loss, every need as his own, and it showed stunningly in his rapid aging in photos over the five year period of the Civil War.  The mind , though, did not age, and his brilliance revealed in the final weeks of his life showed eternal strength of character and a bottomless desire to take on monstrous social complexities and provide the leadership to solve them.
    

Everyone’s favorite Lincoln is their special Lincoln – Lincoln the Western Railsplitter, Lincoln the Writer, Lincoln the Philosopher, Lincoln the War Leader, Lincoln the Speech Maker.  Any one of these Lincoln’s would be worthy of a birthday treatise.  Lincoln the Miracle Man is my favorite today – the perfect Product from nothing, out of nothing, through the strength of his own will and the freedom offered by his society to have an equal chance as any other, to excel, and flourish at a miracle level, to the benefit of us all.  He is the man, who at his First Inaugural, looking into the dark chasm of the impending cataclysm of the Civil War, forgave us our sinful stubbornness and projected the way  to our eventual salvation by relying on our inherent goodness and the saving grace of our humanity:

” I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends.  We must not be enemies….The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and headstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell  the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

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Freedom and the Internet

     Who is Wael Ghonim? Whether the name is familiar or not, Wael Ghonim is the new Egyptian face of the freedom uprising in Egypt and the human symbol of the power of the Internet. Ghonim, a marketing manager for the Internet giant Google, managed to become the focus for the dispersal of information and tactics for Egypt’s restive population. It was conceptually his arrest that led to the final crushing pressure for President Mubarak, leader of Egypt for over thirty years, to succumb and abdicate his presidency on Thursday. The real power of freedom however was not an individual but rather the instantaneous availability of the latest unfiltered information made available by the Internet, that surprised and overwhelmed the Egyptian autocracy, and resisted its determined efforts to shut it down. The power of the Internet continues to grow to the point where “secrets” held by government are increasingly vulnerable, and the very existence of dictator’s capacity to control information, and therefore their populations, increasingly suspect. The iron fisted rulers of Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, and China have certainly taken notice and are alarmed for their own governments’ vulnerability.

     The ability to disperse information out of the control of governments to influence events is not a new phenomena. The presence of so many talented printers in America at the time of the American Revolution made possible rapid distribution of revolutionary concepts for digestion by the populous and their progressive weaving into the fabric of the body politic. The availability of telegraph made intercontinental development possible in the United States by achieving the simultaneous awareness of people thousands of miles apart, linking their common reaction to events in a coordinated fashion. There has not been, however, until now, truly simultaneous global linking that is offered by the Internet, and it is now the stalwart protector of free expression, for both good and ill, to all nations on earth, regardless of their ruler’s opinion as to what is “best” for their people. Whether the information is searched, linked, video shared, tweeted, or facebooked, the overwhelming access offered to real time events has changed us forever.

     As a free society, we are in no position to drop our guard against those in authority who are threatened and seek to “control” this phenomena. The Internet since infancy has been maintained by the United States to the advantage of its development and to the horror of those world wide and even within the U.S. border who believe better “control” is in order. They seek to “tax” the Internet and thereby achieve control of the commerce, “police” the Internet and determine what is or is not politically correct, and “regulate” the Internet to assure governmental control over who would have access and to what extent.

     Whatever your political or philosophical persuasion, however you feel about the potentially “dark” use of the Internet to invade privacy, lovers of freedom must be unequivocal in the Internet’s defence from the “good intentions” of legislators. The beauty of the powerful, and stunningly non-violent upheavals in Eastern Europe, Lebanon, Tunisia, and now Egypt, over the past decades are the direct gift of the free flow of ideas and the exposure for all to see of the empty and reactionary delusions of authoritarian governments. The greater control over the access of information and the greater the likelihood of the Tienanmen Square and Tehran massacres that are buried in shadow.

     Freedom calls for illumination and we all gain from the brightness of its light. As Dylan Thomas so aptly put, Rage, rage against the dying of the Light. God bless the Internet and its power to project the human Voice.

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Super Sunday

     The football contest between my Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers to be played later today in Dallas, Texas has world event  ramifications.  It is estimated a billion people will watch the game, and the lucky 100,000 on site attendants will have forked over considerably more than the listed 1500 dollars a ticket for the privilege to be present at the event.  During the game, television commercial sponsors will pony up 3 million dollars for 30 seconds of air time for the exposure to the teeming masses watching the game.  What a change from the first “super” bowl contests between the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City chiefs in January 1967, and subsequently the Green Bay Packers and the Oakland Raiders in January, 1968.  The ticket price to the first game came in a very tolerable twelve dollars, and barely 60,000 seats were able to be sold in the cavernous Los Angeles Coliseum, leaving large swaths of the stadium uninhabited.  By the second game in Miami, Florida, there was considerably more buzz and attendance, but the game featured the mighty Packers, who were felt to be too dominant for a lowly American Football League team to compete with.

     In a general sense, the pressure was all on the Packers, who had everything to lose in terms of prestige in the case of an upset to the upstarts from the AFL.  The NFL team owners had been under a progressive financial onslaught from the newer American Football League for some five years, as the burgeoning technology of 1960’s television broadcasting and its higher revenues made clear to all  that the real money was to be made not in ticket sales, but commercial sales.  The Packers, as representative of the establishment, were expected to uphold the quality standard of the NFL, but in truth the dispersal of talent through money was progressively “leveling” the talent pool between the two leagues. 

     There is still a bit of the quaint quality to looking back at the simpler processes of the first two super bowls when compared to the current extravaganza. Perhaps this is most epitomized by a game the Raiders participated in the following year.  With the New York Jets leading the Oakland Raiders with a few minutes to go in the fourth quarter of a late season AFL contest, the NBC television network broadcasting the game ran up against the hard hour change of their scheduled Sunday television event and simply left the game in mid-stream  to go to the  broadcast of  the movie “Heidi”.  The nation, tuned in to the game, was left blind to a stunning comeback by the Raiders, scoring two touchdowns in the last minute to defeat the Jets, viewed by no one except those in the stadium.  It was the first occasion for the network to understand the attraction and power building in the public’s passion for the sport event Peter Rozelle, the NFL commissioner was devising, as howls of protest for the nation’s fans watching nearly shut down the network.  It was a blunder that NBC, nor any other television network for that matter, would ever make again.  By the second super bowl game, it was becoming clear that the public was becoming attached to the winter spectacle of a final professional game clash between the two “best” teams, and the game, initially referred to as the NFL- AFL Championship Game, had metamorphosized into something “Super”. 

     On the occasion of hopefully the Green Bay Packers achieving their thirteenth professional football world championship and fourth Super Bowl triumph today, let’s look back at the two games that started it all:

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Reagan at 100

     February 6th, 2011 is the centenary of the birth of Ronald Reagan.  The internet and main stream media are abuzz with memorials to the man and his principles, his presidency and his policies.  Many of the same media commentators and politicos who considered Reagan dis-interested, detached, and by some, an outright dullard, now claim him as a leader to emulated by our current drifting president.  Reagan, the man, would have been amused by this late introspection on his finer qualities, but he never really cared what they had to say when he was alive, so I doubt he would have put any significant weight to their recent “conversions”.

     Ronald Reagan was born in Tampico. Illinois on February 6, 1911, a birth date that precedes the births of President Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, and Carter who served before him.  He was already 69, when he was inaugurated and three weeks short of turning 70, the oldest elected President.  It certainly colored  his personality and approach to issues.  He grew up and became an adult through the great defining American trials of the 20th century, World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II.  He was imbued with the “can do” spirit, the concept of American exceptionalism, and acknowledgement of evil in the world.  It permeated his every action and he personally interpreted all events domestically and internationally through those prisms.  A country and world change considerably over 100 years, and the battle between morphing perceptions and bedrock principles form the context for all retrospective interpretations of a great man’s ability to lead and effect events.

     How did Ronald Reagan truely do when thrust late in his life to the position of leader?  As with all great leaders, his very success produced the growth of powerful enemies and significant push back from those who wished him to fail on the basis of the type of world he was striving to create.  A look back with the clarity of time makes for an interesting and measured assessment:

Reagan as Visionary :     A visionary is usually credited with being a complex thinker, seeing subtle trends that others fail to see, and predicting a future that seems illusory and at times infeasible.  Despite the common perception of Reagan as a dullard with only actor skills and good looks, he proved to be an extraordinary visionary.  It is now hard to perceive the time when the Soviet Union was seen as an implacable foe and the future dominant societal model for most of the world, but it was every bit that and more when President Reagan early in his Presidency declared the Communist dictatorship running the Soviet Union “an evil empire” and communism as a form of government destined for “the ash heap of History”.  These were bold and completely provocative words that were uniformly felt as brash and needlessly dangerous.  Within the eight years of Reagan’s leadership the entire edifice of soviet communism collapsed and he proved to be spot on in his analysis.  Reagan additionally refused to see the decline in American exceptionalism that all were noting and claiming, as the twin hammers of Watergate and the stagflation of the Carter years shook the nation’s confidence. The visionary Reagan declared America as the “shining city on the hill” and confidently predicted America’s “best years are still ahead of it.”  Within a decade, a beaten, bedraggled, and pessimistic America stood astride the world as the solitary economic and military super power and history’s greatest productive engine and influential colossus.  Reagan as visionary – the greatest since Lincoln.

Reagan as International Leader of the Free World:      Reagan aggressively changed the role of the United States from a reactor to world events to a confrontational competitor with the Soviet Union for the world’s philosophical leadership.  The concept of detente was scuttled and a new and constant defining of the inherent flaws in dictatorial process and planned economies were unflinchingly and tirelessly put forth by Reagan and his philosophical counterpart, Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of Great Britain.  Confrontation ruled every decision, from the resistance to “nuclear freeze” advocates in Europe and America, to proxy wars in Angola and Nicaragua.  The result was an identification of the oppressed populations of Eastern Europe that free nations had finally found their “backbone” and the result, a spectacular, lightning quick, and fundamentally inevitable collapse of the puppet governments installed by the Soviets and the dramatic return of freedom and democracy to Eastern Europe, and briefly, to the Soviet Union itself.  For this accomplishment alone, Reagan stands as the greatest international leader since Franklin Roosevelt, and among the great liberators the world has ever seen.  His unique personality of disagreeing without being disagreeable proved an awesome weapon in negotiation with world leaders, and even Gorbachev, outwitted and outmaneuvered by Reagan diplomatically as a knowing parent does with a child, always saw Reagan as respectful and a man of peace. Now that’s an accomplishment of rare stature.

Reagan as domestic leader:      Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981 with a United States in an apparently irretrievable recession state, shackled by previous administrations with crushing stagflation and abject misery.  The unemployment rate hovered at 8 percent, Inflation at 12.5% and the prime interest rates at 21.5%.  A triad of no jobs, spiralling prices, and expensive seed money made it next to impossible for Americans to get ahead, buy a home, invest in an education, or plan for future costs.  The effect on the economy and the American psyche was defined as a “malaise” by President Carter.  President Reagan would have none of such defeatism, slashing tax rates, interest rates, governmental regulations and unleashing the greatest boom in American economic history, lasting some 20 years until the dot.com bubble burst in 2001.  In his time in office the stock market increased 321% in value, government receipts averaged over 8% increase on average per year despite the “lower” tax rates due to the spectacular economic expansion.  The downside to Reagan’s economic miracle was his attraction to increased military spending balancing any conservative aversion he had to democrat inspired increases in discretionary spending, resulting in a deficit boom that added three trillion dollars to the national debt. Subsequent presidents, excepting President Clinton in his final four years in office,  have done little or nothing to effect this pattern, making the Debt the primary challenge of our times.  The economic grade for Reagan as a result is mixed, and any credit for economic expansion may be eventually historically overwhelmed by the deficit monster he unleashed.

Reagan as Defender of the Ramparts:    Reagan identified himself with free people, and all people aspiring to be free.  Despite the cartoon image falsely placed upon him by mainstream media, he was a very learned, well read, and articulate man who wrote most of his own speeches  and framed his own philosophy in what became to be known as the Reagan Revolution.  Reagan understood freedom, and the threats to it, and spoke at all times to the historical thread that made America a bastion for freedom.  He recognized evil as primarily an evil against the individual and the individuals aspirations, free thought, and free will.  He never lost sight of the potential inherent in each man, and sought to assure the environment always be supportive of risk and production to allow all to maximize that potential.  When he stated, “Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall!” he was additionally speaking of the artificial barrier put up by governments to suppress a people’s free will, as much as their movement.  He was, in short, perhaps the purest philosopher to ever inhabit the White House, and the greatest defender of the Ramparts since Lincoln.

Reagan As A Flawed Hero:     The story of heroes is always additionally a story of their humanity and resultant flawed journey.  Reagan struggled mightily at times in his presidency.  His impulsive decision to inject Marines without battle orders into the maelstrom of Beirut, Lebanon contributed to their vulnerability to their enemies, resulting in the horrid terrorist attack that left hundreds dead in their sleep, and Reagan was forced to ignominiously withdraw the troops. The defeat lead to the image of America as paper tiger by  islamists such as Osama bin Laden and seeded devastating long term problems with radical Islam we struggle with to this day.  His impenetrable decision to indirectly link hostage release with arms trade with his avowed enemies, the islamofascists of Iran, nearly led to his impeachment, and was profoundly short sighted.  He had, after all, come into office, on the day the initial Iranian hostages were released and had to have been aware of the double dealing and intolerable character of the Iranian radicals.  These blind spots compromising his purified  philosophy of interaction with evil forces significantly tainted President Reagan’s legacy as a grounded principled leader who understood the overarching historical forces at work.

     Reagan at 100 on balance seems to hold up just fine through the prism of history.  No man without foreknowledge of events can not helped to be shaped by them, for good or ill.  Reagan goes down as one of the great leaders of history for his ability to shape events as they were shaping him, not through the force of his intellect like Newton, or the force of his energy like Theodore Roosevelt, or the force of his will like Pope John Paul I, or the force of all three like Abraham Lincoln,, but rather through his grounded faith in the potential of the common man and his willingness to our story to all who would listen, again and again and again.

     Happy Birthday , Ronald Reagan.  We miss you.

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Trapped In The Snow Globe

   Nature, you magnificent bastard, you’ve done it again!  

     Just when the world had convinced itself that global warming hysteria and its accompanying pseudo-science would become the “law” of our times, mother nature delivers an uncommon blow to remind us of her awesome power and the pathetic capacity of we puny humans to control or influence her.  On February 1-2,  she delivered one of those storms for the ages that people will talk about for future generations as a good old paralyser.  Want to get out to your job, the store, even out your front door? Fagettaboutit!  Snowdrifts the size of school buses are blocking your way, and with continuing winds of 90 kilometers an hour aren’t going away any time soon.   A two thousand mile wide swath of awesome natural power swept across the United States with the energy of hundreds of nuclear bombs and the moisture of several years of rain water converted to ice and snow to boot.  Sit back and gaze at this storm’s incredible profile over the continental United States, Courtesy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s weather satellite:

     The size of this creation is a wonder to behold .  From the tip of Texas cascading in an epic spiral of pummeling blast over the midwest center over Chicago until its leading tip is seen over New York, this storm would swallow up several hurricanes.  Woe be to those who assumed that cold weather creations are any less damaging  or destructive than warm weather ones.

     It was likely massive storms such as these that over years and years brought the type of snow cover that created the massive glaciers of the ice ages.  This monster coupled with Great Britain colder and snowbound the any year in recorded history,  China seeing significant increase in snowstorms and cooling – wait a minute is Man causing another Ice Age?

     Everybody calm down.  Whether we are heading to the permanent balmy future of global warming, or a progressive ice bound century, we are in the thrall of natural forces that will determine all of that for us.  Hysterical forecasts to the contrary, we can all take a breath and do what we have always done.  Deal with the way things are, and get on with it.  It would be nice if governments who progressively enjoy telling us what to eat, what to drive, what to read, what to listen to, what to learn, what to illuminate our darkness with, what to expect for a life, would get the message…. We live in a Snow Globe, and Someone other than us controls its every shake.

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The Great Defender of the Ramparts

     On a cold winter day in late January, 1965, my mother initiated one of my seminal moments of personal development without me recognizing it at the time. She asked me across our kitchen counter whether I knew who the gentleman was who passed earlier that day. I was just a little boy, and had no conception, but I remember in one of my first significant memories that she stated that the man with the cigar and angry face, Winston Churchill, was a great man, and was now gone. There was no way for me to know that as I defined my love of history and the story of the great achievements of western civilization, that my study of this man, whose presence in the world was announced to me by my mother at the day of his demise, would become one of my most important influences. With all Sir Winston Churchill’s achievements, I have always held most dear his sense that life was a special gift, and the opportunities presented, not to be wasted. January 30th is the occasion of the 41st anniversary of his state funeral on January 30th, 1965, and deserves a look back.

     The state funeral for Sir Winston Churchill was the first for a commoner since the funeral for the Duke of Wellington, and captivated the nation with a special solemnity. Millions lined the streets to watch in eerie silence as the cavalcade brought the coffin through the streets of London, each with their own memories of how Churchill’s will, defiance, and courage held them together when all appeared lost. Three hundred thousand more viewed him as he lay in state in Westminster Hall, and six thousand of the gratified world leadership and family participated in the funeral mass at St. Paul Cathedral, including all of the living leaders from the tumult of the world war conflict that fought at his side. The coffin was then taken by barge down the Thames like the funeral of a great ancient warrior, where even insensate machines, the cranes along the Thames, bowed in respect. Then, like Lincoln, from Waterloo station across the English countryside viewed by hundreds of thousands more, to his final resting place to the little church in Blandon, where his parents and his brother were buried.

     The enormous contribution and influence that Winston Churchill held over our interpretation of the role of the individual in western civilization is critical to our society’s spirit and intermittently a subject for this blog, but not for this particular essay. The most important memory of the purity of a nation’s love for this common man who achieved uncommon things, is inspiration for all who aspire to play their part. He remains the primary  example of how individuals sustaining personal defeat after personal defeat, can ultimately triumph if they are true to the vigorous and clarifying  defense of  overarching principle.     

      Churchill’s biographer Martin Gilbert quotes Lord Chandos, as best describing Winston Churchill’s qualities as a statesman:

“He enjoyed a conflict of ideas, but not a conflict between people. His powers were those of imagination, experience, and magnanimity. He saw Man as noble, and not as a mean creature.  The only people he never forgave were those, who, in words he often used, ‘fell beneath the level of events’. “

 

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So You Think There’s A Chance?

     Time and time again throughout history, the key element of what drags down great societal processes into oblivion is the crisis of spirit. The Roman Empire, so dominant in technology, commerce, unifying legal rights regardless of nationality for nearly a thousand years, crumbled under the stress of the lack of the individual’s sense of investment in keeping the whole sclerotic edifice going. The British Commonwealth of nations, bringing the tradition of rights of the common man, education, justice under the law to a billion people and driven by the force of a “can do” spirit, took a considerably shorter period to give up the mantle of leader and developer. World War II drained the British of their last sense of exceptionalism and within a decade the flower of the best elements of British experience and structure had wilted in most of the developing world. The United States, since 1776, the citadel of individual freedom and exceptionalism, has been the world’s primary force in accomplishment in technology, literacy, elimination of poverty, and creative thought based on the simple premise that the individual, unbounded by statist restrictions, holds the capacity for unlimited creation, progress, and betterment of society. This spirit, this “can do” nature, is now under attack and serious strain in this country, the most developed society founded on human potential in the history of man.

     The deterioration of the “can do” spirit now in place holds many similarities to previous historical processes. The loss of the spirit is usually self inflicted. The individual, comforted by the society’s wealth, assumes that the “can do” spirit by others amply supplies sufficient force to remove the individual responsibility for his own outcomes, that others “can do” it for him. The external forces eternally threatened by examples of what is possible in environments of unfettered human creation, look to any weakness of the spirit and the subsequent will of the free, in order to destroy, and prevent the viral nature of freedom among their own. The price of sustaining energy across generations is often enormous, with the need to maintain the principles of achievement in future generations who did not experience the sacrifices necessary to achieve progress, yet must accept their responsibility in maintaining them. The final blow is a loss of confidence that leads to the loss of exceptionalism- “we are no different, no better than others”. This final crisis is not one of racial superiority, but rather, individual superiority, the sense that while all others around me may fail, my own success is predicated only on my own will and effort.

     The threats are manifold to humankind if this particular American brand of exceptionalism dissolves. The loss of the impulse of free markets. The rise of regional hegemony and conflict. The return to statist principles of stability, at the price of individual freedom. The neglect of the world’s neglected populations when the rest of the world internalizes. America for all the good and ill it creates, has been responsible for one primary force the world would miss, the energy to fail, fail, and try again, until the failure is righted, and is crowned by success.

It may be a naive spirit, but naivete masks an overwhelming force for good, that even against the worst odds and the most dire conditions, if we try hard enough, we can soar.