James’s Comments

James’s comments from the History is Not Boring group.

Note: James is not currently a member of this group.

We're hoping for Denish to play as strong a role as possible, and to run for the office herself next time around.

Richardson is competent and gets things done, but he has run a corrupt administration; I saw a lot of that from the inside working for first the department of health here in NM and then the corrections department. He essentially sold a number of executive positions to the highest bidders, as Governor Blagojevich in Illinois is accused of trying to do. An example is the Secretary of Corrections, Joe Williams. The guy was an employee of the corporation that used to be called Wackenhut and is now the Geo Group - he was the warden at the prison they run for the state in Hobbs, and he ran a brutal, dangerous facility - inmate abuse was rampant and it was understaffed to a degree that made it a much riskier workplace than the state-run prisons.

When Richardson ran for governor, Wackenhut made a very big donation to his campaign, and presto, their boy Joe Willy gets tagged to be his Corrections secretary. Since he's been in office, he's done every kind of favor for Wackenhut that he could. Once Richardson leaves the governor's mansion, the assumption within Corrections is that Williams will go back to work for Wackenhut/Geo Group and probably get a hefty bonus for all the help he gave them while officially working for the state instead of them.

I saw similar cronyism in the Health Department - Richardson was as bad as Bush when it comes to giving plum jobs out based on relationships rather than qualifications.

Richardson also does not tolerate dissent in any way, even loyal subordinates trying to warn him of mistakes he's making - if he says jump, anyone who isn't airborne as they ask how high is instantly out of work. One of the uproars when he took office was his novel requirement that every appointee provide him with a signed, undated letter of resignation to keep on file so he could dump them if he chose without officially having fired them.

Good point, George - our economy, shaky as it is, is more diversified than Russia's.

Yes, the media seemed to adore Palin until she started opening her mouth. It was that weird combination of winking and leering, preaching, venom, and boneheadedness that soured people - her interview with Katie Couric really showed that she was neither prepared nor very bright. But she's the kind of person who always blames her problems on others - self-pity is a lot easier than self-examination.

Hmm. Manuel, did they explain his rationale for that forecast, or what he meant by "fall apart"? I'll have to look that up and see if I can find out.

Sounds like sour grapes to me... it looks as if we're headed for some difficult years, but this country has survived a civil war and some other horrendous depressions, and is a lot tougher than he seems to be giving it credit for. The U.S. is a lot more cohesive than the U.S.S.R. ever was - a lot of its "member Republics" were really subjugated territories that didn't want to be part of that empire and were never assimilated.

Russians have a long tradition of not understanding how America works and not believing a society can function with what we would consider even a minimum of freedom and civil liberties. And people from other authoritarian cultures have underestimated the resilience of democracies and their citizens many times - I'm thinking of how the Nazis and the Japanese Empire, among others, were sure we were too decadent, effete and pampered to put up a fight.

My aunt gave us a copy of Calvin Trillin's "Deciding the Next Decider: The 2008 Presidential Race in Rhyme" (I'm not counting the books we got for ourselves, too many to keep track of here.) I like Trillin's "Deadline Poet" feature in The Nation; it's always one of the first things I read in that magazine.

I'd like to see some of these ideas tried out:

1. Education - aid both to poor countries, and to poor people in all countries, in the form of merit-based scholarships to train engineers, doctors, scientists, teachers, etc. To make it fair to people who would otherwise have a hard time competing for the scholarships due to poor schooling or no schooling as children, set up programs open to any applicant who can show that his/her childhood education was substandard, which would give them a year or two of intensive preparation for the exams to qualify for the regular scholarships (I cribbed that one from the Marine Corps - it not only offers lots of opportunities for enlisted Marines to go to college and become officers, as I did, it offers a prep school for Marines who went to lousy schools as kids to enable them to compete evenly for the commissioning programs.)

2. As Servius says, population control - and rollback - is vital. This planet just does not have the resources to support this many people at anything like a healthy standard of living. On the one hand, no country or super-national body can or should be able to force population control on any country that doesn't accept it willingly. On the other hand, a lot can be done with things like some incentives India has offered men to get vasectomies. And if we can improve global public health and reduce infant/child mortality to 'first world' levels everywhere, it might go a long way toward helping people get comfortable with having fewer children in the first place. The rich countries could, by trimming our military budgets moderately, provide inoculations to every child in the world, and safe drinking water to every human being.

I fear, though, that overall things are going to get much worse before they get better, if they ever do, because of:
a. environmental change reducing food production, increasing the number and intensity of natural disasters, and allowing tropical diseases to move farther from the equator;
b. continuing population growth, which no one is going to turn around before the Four Horsemen do it for us;
c. the growing power of large multinational corporations, which have more power than many governments and use it to function in a sociopathic way - witness the current trend toward trying to privatize and exploit water resources the way they've long done with oil; and
d. depletion of a lot of the things on which we've built our current industrial civilization, to the point that resources that have always been cheap will become much more expensive.

If there's anything that might offer hope for crating enough change in the ways people see the world and what we're willing to do to make things better or keep them from getting worse, it will most likely be the perception of a common threat - that seems to be about the only thing that pulls large numbers of people together for any length of time. In the past it's usually been a war, occasionally some other event like the flu pandemic at the end of World War I. Lacking that kind of unifying external threat, the large majority of humanity will probably refuse to face reality or to voluntarily share the wealth until it's too late.

Lincoln didn't want the Civil War - he did everything he could to reassure the South that he planned to lead as a moderate. The southern states started seceding as soon as he was elected, well before he was inaugurated, hence before he had the chance to 'bring' anything. Even after he took office, he made it clear to the Confederacy that if they wanted a war of secession, they would have to fire the first shot - which they did.

I think the comparisons between the Kennedys and the Obamas are superficial and don't get much past the surface. As noted, the two couples come from very different parts of society - the Kennedys from the wealthiest and most powerful segment, the Obamas from a world much more familiar to many more people, the working class. They are/were products of very different times; have/had very different foci and preoccupations; and face/faced very different sets of expectations.

The comparisons seem to be based on not much more than the elements of glamor and braininess, and the likelihood that Obama will echo Kennedy's call for Americans to become more public-spirited again, in Obama's case after decades of being encouraged to be self-absorbed, complacent, and infantile, as in Bush's announcing after 9/11 that what we really needed to do was go to the mall.

I agree that Obama is likely to face unrealistic expectations, but he knew that when he decided to run. And in his favor, if he turns out to be even vaguely competent, he'll look dazzling compared to Bush. (I had a conversation recently with a friend who commented that he found it exhilarating to have a president-elect that spoke in clear, grammatical sentences expressing coherent thoughts, after eight years of being embarrassed for our country every time Bush opened his mouth in public. Yeah, in some ways Obama gets to have the bar set pretty low.)

Lincoln is first for me, not only because he was a visionary and, to hold true to what he knew was right, incredibly strong, but because he had to overcome his burdens of deep depression and the grief of his son's death while he was saving the country.
Eleanor Roosevelt is next for me, for her courage, compassion, and conscience.
And my third choice is George Marshall, both for his role in winning World War II as the senior leader of the U.S. Army, and for his wisdom as Secretary of State after the war in creating the Marshall Plan to rebuild the devastated parts of the world.

Interesting how attitudes change. My grandmother's first language was Czech, but she was ashamed of being what many people considered a foreigner, even though she was born in Ohio. So when my mom was growing up and asked Grandma to teach her Czech, Grandma claimed not to remember the language (not too convincing, since she sometimes spoke it at home with her own mother) and insisted that she was a regular American and only spoke English. Frustrating for Mom, because she was intensely curious about her heritage and was getting stonewalled by the one person who could have told her the most about it.
There was a sad, ironic postscript to that story; my grandmother died of Alzheimer's, and near the end, at about the time she couldn't remember who family members were anymore, she lost her English and could only speak Czech. But she'd made sure her kids didn't learn it, so they couldn't understand whatever she was trying to say.

My daughter's situation is funny. Her ex-husband belongs to an extended Hispanic family that still have strong ties to communities in Mexico, while my daughter is your basic standard-issue Anglo; but she speaks Spanish, because a lot of her friends growing up spoke Spanish as their first language, and her ex can only speak English despite his family heritage.

When a knowledgeable and articulate historian tells a story in a way that brings it to life, including that historian's perspective, that makes it easier, for me at least, to be aware that - as Dianne said above - these were big events happening to real people, often turning their lives upside down. When a historian lets more of his or her own humanity come through, it helps illuminate the humanity of the people being discussed.

Re science fiction, some of it is shallow and silly, but some is excellent. You might try Kim Stanley Robinson's work - he is outstanding. Very deep and thoughtful explorations of various "what-if" scenarios, either in our collective future or ways things could have gone differently in the past. Complex characterization, real issues, meticulously researched settings. His work is literature, regardless of genre.

Hmmm. Will, in some ways you and I are almost polar opposites, but we also have a lot in common.

I've found that for me, writing nonfiction comes very easily - maybe because it's more or less technical stuff (psychotherapy references and tools) - but I've been trying to put together a novel for over 30 years now and never get far.

I started out as a pretty conservative person, too - I voted for Reagan the first time - but over the course of 20 years in the Marine Corps and a couple of graduate degrees, I shifted far toward the liberal end of the spectrum, and in most ways that's where I've stayed. The only issue where my beliefs would be considered conservative by most people is gun control - I am against restrictions on gun ownership by responsible and competent people; we do need to fix the system to make it harder for people who are criminals or are not sane to get weapons, but that can and should be done without encroaching on the rights of the rest of us. I value the entire Bill of Rights and am a solid member of both the ACLU and the NRA.

Perhaps the 20 years of immersion in what is among other things a deeply collectivist subculture in the Marine Corps indoctrinated me with a strong belief that we must be one another's keepers and that the social contract and safety nets are essential to civilized life. One of my professors in grad school told us that as modern Americans (he was Australian), we were enculturated in such an individualistic society that we probably couldn't comprehend the mindset of a person from a collectivist society; I wrote a paper arguing that as a career military professional I was deeply conditioned to see things in a collectivist way. He ended up agreeing.

I've been blessed in many ways and feel an obligation to share those blessings via paying taxes to support social programs and via being generous to useful causes. It probably is part of what led me to choose two careers that are basically oriented toward service to others, first in the military and then as a therapist.

Some of that perspective probably comes from my upbringing, too - my mother and stepfather were both staunch liberals - and from the fact that now, as a military retiree and disabled vet, I'm dependent on others to be my keeper, more or less.

The Bonus March was a tragedy. Those WWI vets were asking for early payment of bonuses they'd been promised for fighting in "The Great War" - President Hoover's response was cold, callous, and politically tone-deaf in refusing to even talk with them and sending the Army to disperse them; by exceeding his orders and destroying their encampment, Douglas MacArthur was even worse. Even Richard Nixon once went out and just sat down with a group of protestors outside the White House, talking with them to try to understand their perspective. Hoover was not an evil person, but his "not my job" reaction to people's suffering allowed evil results to take place when he could and should have ameliorated them. As noted, things didn't get much better for several years under FDR, but people appreciated, first, that he was trying one thing after another, and second, that he reached out to them.

I've read different things about the logic behind the post-WWII GI Bill - the view that seems the most reasonable is that it was a combination of genuinely wanting to repay the country's debt to the troops and of wanting to avoid having a mass of workers flood into the job market at the same time industry was gearing back to peacetime production levels, which could have triggered widespread unemployment and a return to recession or depression. It paid for itself many times over by helping the veterans buy homes, go to college, and/or start small businesses, all of which expanded the middle class and increased the long-term tax revenue stream.

I wish our culture would get past its obsession with a nitpicking, perfectionist set of expectations for politicians. Industry and the military learned decades ago that "Zero Defects" was a mentality that guarantees results ranging from mediocrity to outright failure. People like Lincoln, TR, and FDR could not get elected today, but people like Reagan, GWB, Dan Quayle, and Sarah Palin are able to succeed in politics. That doesn't reflect well on us.

If we get the chance to take our grandsons on a vacation to the east coast, I want to take them to some of the battlefields of the Civil War and walk the ground, explain what happened and why, in the most human and accessible way I can. That's the kind of connection with history they'll remember.

When I was in school we did that, anything from little holiday one-act plays to debating different issues from the times studied; once we were divided into groups, given some info about our culture's norms and so on, and turning us loose with contradictory goals.

Rote memorize-and-regurgitate is the easiest way for teachers to approach history, and with more focus on teaching math and English to a test, it's the safest too. It's too bad that it's the worst approach.
We're working to get our grandsons (ages 5 and 7) interested, by looking at how people live in other places, how and why major events like the Civil War and the Depression took place, and about noteworthy people from those periods. Seems to be working, from the questions they ask at the time and later.

Arrogance, definitely; also something that may have been cultural chauvinism, or racism - the same kind of thinking that, going into WW2, caused the American military to disastrously underestimate the Japanese - the stereotypes about how they were supposedly all nearsighted runts whose planes and ships were poorly designed and built, no match for American troops and hardware. Our military establishment learned better the hard way, but apparently the auto industry didn't get the memo (then again, it may have been just a bias against products of any other country; one of the Detroit Big 3 - I think it was Ford - had the chance to buy the entire Volkswagen operation, lock, stock and barrel, after WW2, but turned it down.)

Japanese engineers have, in several fields, done some pretty innovative work. The Mitsubishi Zero was an amazing airplane for its time, for example, and Kawasaki still builds some superb military hardware. They've done some outstanding stuff in electronics, too, as well as cars.

Overall I am not an admirer of Japanese culture - being stationed there was disillusioning; it's a very status-and-appearance based society, where one person is fawned over and another treated with contempt and indifference based on their status. It's also one of the most racist, sexist, xenophobic cultures that has ever existed.

But they do some very solid engineering, in both the design and production arenas.

Re the wages and pensions, you're right, Will, about making commitments like that based on expectations of future income; it was the amounts that I consider fair and reasonable. Social Security's main problem has been the raiding of the trust fund, Al Gore's famous 'locked box', for other spending. Kind of like the situation with the trust fund meant to maintain aviation infrastructure - airport facility upkeep and modernization, etc. A set amount is added to every airline ticket sold and goes to that fund; but starting decades ago, the government abused it - the administrations in power tried to tap into it and were blocked by Congress, but they also refused to use it for its intended purpose, even when some of the infrastructure was falling apart, so they could count the money in the fund as an asset to make the deficit look smaller.

Planned obsolescence is definitely a big factor too. We can build airplanes and ships that last for decades if properly maintained, often in much more harsh and demanding operating environments than cars, but we still think a car is outstanding if it lasts past 200,000 miles.

I did my first degree in management, and a few years later did some training in TQM (total quality management), then after I retired from the service I did more training in TQM, systems theory, and continuous process improvement working for the health department helping county and tribal health councils. In all that training, the American auto industry was held up as a bad example - not for the wages and pension plans, those were fine, but for their design and production methods.

The leading figure in systems improvement for decades, an American statistician named W. Edwards Deming, had tried and tried to get the Detroit executives to try implementing the ideas he was expounding, but their attitude amounted to "it's not broken, we don't need to fix it." So after WWII he went to Japan to help rebuild their industrial infrastructure. To see the effects of his teachings on quality management, we can look at the Japanese auto and electronics industries.

The leadership in Detroit never did really get it. But then never did the executives of most other American industries, either.

This may be one of the areas where Obama needs a vocal and demanding popular movement to push him farther and faster than he would otherwise go. His record shows a tendency to be cautious, and that's a good thing, especially after eight years of extreme recklessness as a leadership style. But I tend to agree with a piece in the current issue of The Nation ( http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081201... ) arguing that Obama's situation is something like FDR's was entering his first term - that article talks about the economy, but the idea may apply in geopolitics too. The gist of it is that FDR was also inclined toward caution but was driven to much more vigor and flexibility by the unnerving intensity of the electorate's demand for serious change.

I'm retired from the USMC but still consider myself a professional soldier as well as a student of history. I've been doing a lot of thinking on Iraq and even more on Afghanistan - I can't see that there ever was an honest and rational policy or plan for Iraq, and although we had little choice on Afghanistan and started out effectively (though way too late), the way we've been doing things there for a while is self-defeating. Obama needs to consult with the widest range of experts on that culture and on counterinsurgency he can find - the British have forgotten more on that subject than we've even learned yet.
It's like Molly Ivins said - the first law of holes is, when you see that you're in one you should stop digging. Trying to fight a counterguerrilla war using heavy firepower is like switching from an ordinary shovel to a steam shovel. One of the books Obama should be reading is A Bright Shining Lie, about John Paul Vann's experience in Vietnam. The advice he's going to be getting from some of the current leadership will be useless - they are committed to the status quo, and seem unable to come up with any idea except to do more of the same, harder.

My fear is that people will have impossible expectations - that they'll turn on the Obama administration when he and the people he chooses are unable to quickly or easily solve problems that no one could. Straightening out the economy is one - it will take, among other things, undoing a lot of years of warping the system to subsidize big business at the expense of individual taxpayers, mostly the middle class.

Another, and one in which it's looking as if Obama is going to err and make things worse instead of better, is the war in Afghanistan. Getting out of Iraq will be hard but dealing with Afghanistan will be much harder - the history shows that no foreign occupier has ever subdued Afghanistan for long, and there's no reason to think we are somehow so special that from half a world away we can do what Alexander the Great, the British Empire, and the Soviet Union couldn't. To whatever extent Obama pushes harder and raises the stakes there, it will just be that much harder to extricate ourselves.

It was his handling of the Vietnam War that kept LBJ from going down in history as one of the great presidents, and Afghanistan could be the same kind of trap for Obama. It was there that Osama Bin Laden hoped to lure the U.S. into an unwinnable occupation that would end up pulling the Islamic world together via the perception that they were under attack by the American-led West - Iraq was a freebie, an unexpected extra gift Bush gave him.

It's looking now as if the choice for Secretary of State will be between Hillary Clinton and Bill Richardson. Of the two, I like neither's personality, but I think Richardson's experience leaves him more qualified, and he has proven effective as a diplomat in past jobs. The last thing we need now is someone who, like Clinton, leaves many people seeing her as abrasive and unyielding representing the U.S. to the rest of the world. The rest of the world seems a wee bit tired of that.
I worked in state government under the Richardson administration for several years, and the man definitely has some major flaws - he can be pretty arrogant too, and within his organization he dislikes and punishes dissent. He has a tendency toward cronyism that has come back to bite him more than once. That said, he has gotten a lot of good things accomplished.

Re hate speech - I like the way Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center put it. People do have a right to hate. They don't have a right to act on that hate, or to incite others to act on it. I treasure the ACLU for supporting that principle even-handedly - they've gone to bat for anyone whose rights were being infringed upon, from the far left to the KKK and Rush Limbaugh on the right. In the 12 Step programs, there's a slogan (one of many) that comes from the 12 Traditions - "Principles Before Personality." That equates, when translated into the sphere of public discourse, into the rule of law under which the Bill of Rights, as well as the body of criminal law, apply to everyone equally. We must support freedom even for thoughts we despise if we want to claim that freedom for our own thoughts without hypocrisy. When I was in the military, the way they put it in classes on ethics and civics was, "I may totally disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

The Modern Whigs (here's the URL for their website: http://modernwhig.org/ ) is a moderate, centrist party - they first came to my attention via a story in the Marine Corps Times, since about a third of their membership are active duty military people or veterans. It would be kind of ironic for them to supplant the Republicans as one of this country's two main parties, because that would be the reverse of the way the Republicans took their place about 150 years ago (Lincoln was originally a Whig.)

It's kind of like the Society of Creative Anachronism, to which I belonged when I was sturdy enough to engage in that kind of broadsword-and-armor fighting - it can be a lot of fun, but nobody chooses to make their persona that of a peasant. Everyone is among the nobility. It's educational, but far from realistic.