Nothing new under the sun

Faithful readers know that I'm a student of John Boyd. (See A Vision So Noble: John Boyd, the OODA Loop, and America's War on Terror.) More recently I got interested in an older war, the one that began on September 1, 1939, and as is my habit I fetched the bound volumes of Life magazine home to look at contemporary photos and articles. I was flabbergasted to read this analysis of the invasion of Poland, in the October 2 issue:

The German Army Invents a New Kind of War
.... The Germans therefore decided to carry the war of fast mechanized columns to its farthest extreme. Normally the end of war is to destroy the enemy's armed forces. To do so it is essential to maintain one's own strength by keeping lines of communication to the rear open. The Germans tried something radically new.... It was a logical extreme development of the infiltration tactics used by the German army in 1918.
This new tactic was simply to strike for the enemy's bases and communications, hell-bent for leather, and largely ignore his armed forces.... Deprived of [its supplies] by loss of its bases, [a modern army] will sooner or later be rendered powerless. A mechanized army can move as fast as 15 m.p.h., as against infantry's 2 m.p.h. It can flicker around infantry and hit it in the back while infantry is slowly turning around....
The Poles heard that the Germans were at Lodz, at Warsaw, at Random, at Sandomierz, at Brest-Litovsk, at Lwow, and they were filled with bewilderment. Their commanders could not force the Germans to stop and fight long-drawn-out frontal battles. The mechanized columns slid around them and vanished on into Poland.

This is pure John Boyd, even unto the bewilderment, which he regarded as essential to an opponent's defeat, whether in an aerial dogfight, a ground campaign, or basketball or chess. It is also a very good description of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Amazon among the icebergs

That's our only child amidships, with a young Brit steering. The dinghy is Amazon, so called for the Swallows and Amazons series beloved of her daughters. It is 13 feet long, designed by a South African, welded up from aluminum in our garage by our son-in-law, and powered by a second-hand sail from our neighbor Ned McIntosh (who prefers wooden boats). Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The pirate's cave, Lerici

One afternoon Enrico rowed us to the Grotta Azzurra, the blue grotto on a point of land a few hundred meters south of the castle. He was a fisherman in his twenties, tall for the time and well built; he evidently made it a practice to visit the castle and hit upon the foreign girls, on the no doubt well-founded theory that they were more readily available than the young women of his village, which most likely was Fiascherino or Tellaro, farther along the coast. Further, I judged that when the foreigners didn't cooperate, he switched his attention to their male colleagues. I can't be sure of this, because he never hit on me.

Google tells me that there is indeed a Blue Grotto in the Gulf of Poets, but places it four kilometers across the bay on the island of Palmaria, and on the western shore to boot. So the place Enrico took us can only be the Tana del Brigantino, the pirate's cave well known to local boys. There's a shallow bay just below the castle, into which the German bicyclists liked to dive from the heights, then a sharp promontory about 500 meters south in a straight line. This is the Maralunga peninsula, all rocky cliffs on its squared-off seaward edge and along its southern coast.

Somewhere along here, I think, was Enrico's cave. He assured us that it was prettier than Capri's famous Blue Grotto. I have no way of comparing them, having never been south of the Tiber River. But it will serve: silent in the limpid afternoon, the water dripping from Enrico's oars, illuminated in blue indeed, the light coming up through the seawater to reflect upon the walls of the cave. It was one of those enchanting reversals, as when a southern sea is warmer than the breeze blowing across it. In this case, the water contained more light than the air, so that it was our primary illumination. And we were young and would never die.

On the way back to the castle, Letitia began to ruminate upon men and their hairy chests. Enrico's chest hair--curly and black--struck her as very decorative, compared to my mine, which was considerably more sparse and a less masculine brown--a brown, morever, that was blonding almost daily under the sun. As for Giorgio, his chest was quite hairless.

Enrico smiled sweetly, understanding that whatever we were saying, he was the subject of our chat. To change the subject, he took out a pack of Nazionale and handed it around. We each took one except Giorgio, who did not smoke. Enrico smiled more broadly and said: "Will you take it from my lips?" (Letitia translated for me, since Enrico and I were the only monoglots in the party.) Ah, poor Giorgio! Enrico put a Nazionale in his mouth, lit it, took a drag on it, and passed it to Giorgio. Thus he smoked his first cigarette, much as with my help he had learned to make his own bed.

I don't think the two of them ever got it on. Giorgio often left us of an evening and took the tram to La Spezia, to cruise the waterfront for American sailors.

What was Enrico's experience during the war? I didn't ask, and not because we didn't have a language in common. (Letitia would have interpreted, as she did for the quip about the mouth-to-mouth Nazionale.) Enrico would have been a lad in 1945, but boys did their share in the war, on both sides. Nor would his pretty homeland have been spared. Not far north of Lerici, on the Italian Riviera, there's a village I came to know fairly well in later years, Vernazza by name. No road serves Vernazza, though Mussolini drove railway tracks along the shore, so it has had train service since the 1930s. Hard by the railroad station there's a plaque with the village's war dead, roughly divided in thirds: twenty or so young men who died in North Africa, about the same number Caduta in Russia--and what a shock that frozen winter on the Eastern Front must have been, to fishermen from the Mediterranean--and a final twenty or so who were killed in the Resistance. Enrico must have experienced some of that, if only at second hand.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

25 December 2010

                                                         Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Gitmo: the shocking truth revealed

From a December 10 interview on Al-Jazeera with a Sudanese tormented by Jews at Guantanamo prison:

Walid Muhammad Hajj: The most common method to wear down the brothers was witchcraft.
Interviewer: How did they do this?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: There were, of course, Jews among the [staff of] the Guantanamo Base, and they would set traps for the guys....
Interviewer: They would cast a spell on them?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: Yes, but by the grace of Allah, through frequent reading of the Koran and invocation of the names of Allah, they managed to withstand this.
Interviewer: How did you know that somebody was under a spell?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: Someone like that would change.
Interviewer: In what way?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: For example, somebody would take his clothes off, all of a sudden, or would sit on his bed for three days straight without sleeping....
Interviewer: Tell me more.
Walid Muhammad Hajj: I will tell you how the witchcraft affected the guys. A person would suddenly see his brothers and sisters naked before him.
Interviewer: And they weren't really there?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: Absolutely not. It was as if he was in a different world....
Interviewer: Did they ever use witchcraft on you?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: There was one attempt.
Interviewer: How did they do it?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: Once, when I was sleeping – on the floor, not on a bed – I suddenly felt that a cat was trying to penetrate me. It tried to penetrate me again and again. I recited the kursi verse again and again until the cat left.
Interviewer: But there wasn't really any cat there?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: Absolutely not.

 Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Madi, queen of the castle

     In Britain where I had come from, and in Switzerland, Austria, and Germany where I traveled later, a 1950s youth hostel was a rather idealistic affair, owned by a national or sub-national association and run for the betterment of young people, generally defined as someone no older than twenty-five, mostly hikers, bicyclists, and those traveling by public transport. Hitchhikers were tolerated, but anybody who drove up to a youth hostel would be summarily turned away. This was not the case in France and Italy. In Italy, especially, each hostel seemed to be a private affair, run by an individual or a couple as their livelihood, and the rules were enforced with a generous hand. On the Adriatic coast, I met a German family, touring Italy by car; the hostel was a flat-roofed building, and the five of them dragged mattresses up to the roof, there to sleep in familial privacy. And our little gang lived at the castle in Lerici for the better part of two weeks, though three nights was supposed to be the outside limit for a hostel stay.
     At Lerici, Madi made the rules. I find that her name was Maddalena di Carlo, and that she had some local fame as comunista e partigiana, Communist and guerrilla fighter, who carried the Red Flag in the annual May Day parade. I can find no one to tell me, however, what her career as partigiana amounted to. Did she blow up German supply trains, carry a rifle in the mountains, turn the crank on a mimeograph machine, or merely grumble about the fascists? I don't know; I didn't ask, young and stupid as I was.
    Postwar, Madi became custode amata del castello di Lerici, the beloved custodian of the castle, which was her home and source of income until she was evicted. In 1974 the citizens of Lerici concluded that she could no longer provide her young charges with "an effective and hygienic management," as one of her fans explained the situation to me. By that time Madi was quite the crone, all but sexless in her cropped gray hair, lean face, and cast-off clothing. I don't remember her particularly, but as the flower children of a later generation replaced the vagabondi of mine, she became hugely popular among the them, which likely caused her to become less popular among the townspeople. Not only did the "Lericini" get rid of Madi as hostel keeper; in time they also voted to close the hostel. "The flow of young people ended," my email friend recalled. "They did not carry money and they created disorder." I suppose that was true. Our gang was fairly well-behaved, I think, but we were products of an earlier time. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Couldn't stand another of those Vermont winters!

In the 1930s, when I was a babe, the population of the United States was 130 million and there was a clever joke at the expense of the Vermont farmer who was told that the state line had shifted, so that he now lived in New Hampshire. "Thank goodness," he said. "I couldn't have stood another of those Vermont winters!"

Some things change, some don't. The population of the U.S. is now 300 million, but progressive Vermonters are still fleeing across the line to their low-tax, redneck neighbor. Between 2000 and 2010, New Hampshire grew at more than double the rate of Vermont--indeed, double the rate of the rest of the New England states.

The catch, of course, is that most of the newcomers are precisely the same Good People who drove up the taxes in Vermont, Maine, and especially Massachusetts. And now that they are here, they're voting for the same Wouldn't It Be Nice If... projects that got their home states into trouble. Blue skies! - Dan Ford

Um, yes!

From the Australian newspaper:

Bjorn Hurtig, Mr Assange's Swedish lawyer, said he would lodge a formal complaint to the authorities and ask them to investigate how such sensitive police material leaked into the public domain. "It is with great concern that I hear about this because it puts Julian and his defence in a bad position," he told a colleague.

"I do not like the idea that Julian may be forced into a trial in the media. And I feel especially concerned that he will be presented with the evidence in his own language for the first time when reading the newspaper. I do not know who has given these documents to the media, but the purpose can only be one thing - trying to make Julian look bad."

So it goes in the world of Leaky Wikis. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Surviving Hitler: A Love Story

Thirtysome years ago I was ski-mountaineering in Switzerland with, among others, a young couple who were celebrating their graduation from law school. I saw Eddie and Claudia occasionally thereafter, and once or twice met her mother at their house. Now I discover that this lovely woman was born in Germany, by Reich laws a Jew, and that not only did she survive the war but married a German soldier who toward the end became involved in the plot to kill Hitler--and that he too survived! Their remarkable story is the subject of a short film, Surviving Hitler: A Love Story, now going the art-house and prize-competition rounds. It will be released on DVD in March. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

What goes around, comes around...

In an exquisite piece of retributive justice, London's Guardian newspaper has published the Swedish prosecutor's case against Julian Assange, the Leaky Wiki man who is now on mansion arrest in England. The report was--get ready for it!--leaked to the newspaper. And--funnier and funnier--Mr Assange, through his attorney, is calling for an investigation of the leak! Perhaps he and the U.S. State Department could save money by putting their cases in the hands of a single lawyer. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

If I've lost Koren, I've lost upper middle class America

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Making a list of who's naughty and nice

Julian Assange goes back into court today (right about now, in fact) to ask for release on bail of £200,000. This would enable him to spend Christmas in a nice English country home, albeit with an electronic bracelet, though in fact he would doubtless be heading for France in a fishing smack, like a latter-day Scarlet Pimpernel. Lots of luck extraditing him from France, where both sexual misconduct and espionage are considered more in the nature of parlor tricks than high crimes.

Meanwhile the U.S. seems to be scrambling for evidence sufficient to indict Mr. Assange for espionage, since it would be easier to extradite him from Britain than from Sweden for a couple of reasons. MSNBC has enlisted a panel of "experts" to assess the Leaky Wiki's odds if the U.S. does manage to lay hands on him, and the assessment is rather gloomy for Mr. Assange and his supporters.

Of course this all depends on whether he can be extradited. One of the obstacles, if he goes to Sweden to answer the charges of rape and molestation, is a rather funny one: Britain would only be loaning him to Sweden! He apparently can't be sent from there to the U.S. without British approval. (The other reason is more mundane: Britain has a fast-track extradition agreement with the U.S.; Sweden does not.) Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Pity about the crowds!

 

Since I made fun of Aspen's "sustainability" pretenses the other day, I thought I should post this photo taken by my iPhone at about 9:20 one morning, with exactly one other skier visible in the panorama. That's why I take my annual ski week in December: good snow, low prices (well, comparatively low), and few people. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Sustainable excess

One of the joys of skiing at Aspen is the breathtaking amount of bling that's apparent here, even at this time of year. Aspen is the home of the million-dollar fixer-upper. (They don't actually get fixed up. They get bulldozed and replaced.) Sally Wife gave up skiing with me in Aspen because window shopping here had become so preposterous that she no longer enjoyed it. Why gaze into shop windows when the stuff on display is so upscale that you can't even pretend to aspire to it? (One time on the  Snowmass bus, Sally nudged me and nodded toward the woman in the seat opposite. "She's wearing," Sally whispered, "more than our net worth!")

But so pervasive is  Good Thinking that it has spread even to the citadel of excess. The Aspen Times has a pull-out advertising section on the theme of Sustainability. I saw a hymn to Sustainability on the safety bar of the Ajax Express high-speed quad lift. And I saw a large sign--green, of course--on one of the lift towers begging me to Fight Global Warming.

Fight global warming? If I wanted to fight global warming, I would have stayed home and snowshoed through the woods. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Information wants to be free!

And by golly we'll shut down the webite of any organization that thinks otherwise! Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The WikiLeaker

I confess to a bit of schadenfreude in the case of Julian Assange, refused bail in London while he fights extradition to Sweden on charges of rape and molestation. Of course his fanboys will see the evil hand of the CIA behind all this. One could only hope! It's pleasant to think of Sweden, determinedly neutral for nearly two hundred years, suddenly revealed as a sleeper cell of the CIA!

It's tempting to think of Mr. Assange as another Osama bin Laden, bent on destroying the United States. In truth he more resembles  Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who sent letter bombs to people in order to draw attention to his crackpot ideas. Mr. Assange sends document bombs, again to draw attention to his crackpot notion about the Conspiracy that is America's place in the world. No doubt he will make our lives less comfortable, just as bin Laden and Kaczynski did--or if not less comfortable, then less efficient. (The Unabomber is the reason you must take a package to the post office if it weighs more than thirteen ounces, rather than leave it in your mailbox for the carrier, if the package has stamps on it.) Diplomats will be less honest than they already are; they'll miss more opportunities than they presently do. More static, more fog. It's hard to imagine, however, that a diplomatic corps forced to do business on the telephone is such a disaster as to threaten the nation's security.

In the meantime, Mr. Assange, enjoy your Christmas holiday in London Gaol. Do they have internet access? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On going to war

On 9/11, Nate Fick is on shore leave in Darwin. An Australian motorist gives him and a buddy a ride back to the USS Dubuque, the assault ship cum aircraft carrier that was to have been the Marines' floating home for a six-month deployment in the Pacific. They are to steam immediately for the Persian Gulf. Says the lieutenant, himself probably only twenty-two years old: "Looking at the Marines, I saw football stars and thugs and baby-faced eighteen-year-olds." These are the men he will lead into Afghanistan. (Or so I suppose. I haven't read that far yet.)

I've caught on to the title. One Bullet Away refers to the odd angry shot that could make Lieutenant Fick the Recon company commander--or, by the same token, could make his platoon sergeant his replacement as platoon leader. A convincing, thoughtful book. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The self-contained citizen

One of the great features of travel has been the chance to overdose on movies. But last night I found myself crouched over my laptop while the Hotel Durant's wide-screen television stayed dark. Now that Netflix is streaming (mostly old or odd) movies on the internet, I can do better by reserving the choice of time and title to myself, rather than to Ted Turner or American Movie Channel. By the same token, the Durant's telephone stays quiet while I touch base with my iPhone.

Less and less do we dip into the common pool of experience. Wealthy people live in gated communities and send their kids to Sidwell Friends. Coin-operated telephones are close to vanishing from the public space (and are seldom operated by coins any longer, now that a quarter can't do what a nickel used to accomplish). The Sundeck atop Aspen Mountain still has its bank of phones outside the restrooms, but the only customer they had yesterday was one of the Mexican busboys. (What ski bums used to do in Aspen is now done by Mexicans and by Australians on summer vacation.) The customers each had a cell phone to himself.

We all seem to be specialists now. We pretend to "celebrate diversity," as the posters at the University of New Hampshire say, but in fact our lives are less and less diverse. Gives a whole new twist to the notion of E Pluribus Unum. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

One Bullet Away

I am hugely enjoying One Bullet Away, in which Nate Fick tells the story of his introduction to the Marine Corps in the summer of 1998. I was surprised and impressed that Officer Candidate School in the USMC sounds a whole lot tougher than the basic training I went through in the winter of 1956 at the hands of Korean War veterans who had learned the hard way that untrained troops are a menace to themselves and their comrades. Evidently the Marines never unlearned this basic truth.

I particularly liked what young Mr. Fick says about his motivation for joining up: "I wanted to do something so hard that nobody would ever talk shit to me." He was a junior at Dartmouth, and OCS was his summer vacation; he'll become a Marine second lieutenant in June 1999. This is the same Lieutenant Fick who was chronicled in the HBO mini-series, Generation Kill. As portrayed by Stark Sands, he's appealingly decent and thoughtful--and regularly rebuked by the headquarters POGs for caring more about his men than the orders he's been given. It will be interesting to see what the real-life Nate Fick says on this subject. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

If unemployment is getting worse, we should raise taxes, right?

Reports the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON – In a surprising setback, the nation's unemployment rate climbed to 9.8 percent in November, a seven-month high, as hiring slowed across the economy.

The report was a reminder that the economic recovery is proceeding more slowly and fitfully than many economists had expected. It is likely to push lawmakers before year's end to pass an extension of long-term unemployment benefits, which expired this week.

No mention of taxes! Apparently it escapes the wizards at the Associated Press that if you raise taxes on the hiring class, you'll get less hiring. (You'll also get less work, but that's a much more subtle result.) Could it be? -- could it possibly be? -- that hiring slowed precisely because small businessmen feared their taxes would go up on January 1?

Congress meanwhile thinks this is a great moment to raise taxes, at least on the more favored members of society, who are also the ones running the businesses that aren't hiring anybody this month, thanks all the same! Of course the vote is mostly a symbolic nod to the "progressive" left of the Democratic party, since such a bill has almost no hope of passage in the Senate. But it does show how desperately some people would like to reprise the 1930s, when the Roosevelt administration took a financial panic and turned it into an eight-year Depression. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On Grannie's feeding tube

During the debates on ObamaCare, there was much talk of the Death Panels that would decide whether decrepit oldsters would be allowed to live. It's time to spare a thought for the hundreds, probably thousands, of informal death panels in households around the country: let's suppose that Grannie dabbled in real estate and now owns half a dozen properties each worth $500,000. Her net worth therefore is $3 million and probably quite a bit more when her various checking accounts are factored in. Are the heirs doing the math? You bet they are!

If Grannie dies on or before December 31, the estate passes entire to her loving kin. If she hangs on past the New Year, however, and the U.S. Congress fails to act, they get a tax bill of well over a million dollars (55 percent of everything over $1 million)! How many heirs, do you think, are keeping one eye on Nancy Pelosi and the other eye on Grannie's feeding tube? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Dziekuje!

Poland is one of history's most tormented nations, regularly invaded by its neighbors (and occasionally invading them), and in 1945 shifted like a skateboard several hundred miles to the west. This was Stalin's double punishment: eastern Poland was incorporated into the Soviet Ukraine, and in exchange Poland got a chunk of eastern Germany, thus diminishing both rivals and pushing the USSR's security zone deep into Europe.

The other day, Stalin's successors took responsibility for another of his atrocities against Poland: the murder of thousands of Polish officers and noncoms at Katyn and other forest sites. (The link is to the gripping 2007 film.) This is progress, as noted in the Wall Street Journal today. The editorial tells a lovely story about the jazz pianist Dave Brubeck, who was a soldier in the liberation of Europe from German control, and who visited Poland in 1958 on a cultural exchange mission. At that time, Mr Brubeck composed a piece entitled Dziekuje. He played it the other day at his 90th birthday celebration, at which time he explained that "dziekuje" is the Polish word for "thank you. And I want to play this piece as thanks to the people of Poland for resisting Soviet Communism."

When Soviet agents murdered those thousands of Poles, they intended to decapitate the future Polish society. They then blamed the atrocity on the Germans, figuring that no one could ever challange that story. Instead, they cemented the evil in historic memory, and encouraged rather than suppressed Poland's desire for freedom. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford