| Monday,
September 13, 2004
Friday the 13th falls on Monday this month.
We are awaiting workmen. The first from Sears didn't have
the parts although we had told Sears what the problem was. Years ago Sears
was reliable. It sure isn't now.
For no reason I know I woke up thinking about a poem I read
when I was a child. There was a repeated first line,
O where are you coming from,
Soldier, brave Soldier
with the adjective in the second line changing at each
verse. The final verse of that string was
O where are you coming from,
Soldier, gaunt soldier
I did a Google search on "Soldier Gaunt Soldier" and found
two references, Question 1403 in the search for quotations at this web site
http://www1c.btwebworld.com/quote-unquote/p0000046.htm
and a more substantial reference in
http://members.dca.net/mina/arts/movie_spoilers/war_game.html
which quotes the following lines as being part of the
introductory matter to Peter Watkins' The War Game movie.
O Where are you going?
O Soldier, Gaunt Soldier?
With weapons beyond
The reach of mind?
With weapons so deadly,
the world must grow older
if it does not turn kind.
As it happens, I have periodically looked for this off and
on for years. This is a line from a Stephen Vincent Benet poem which I had
always thought was part of his collection The Burning City along with
Nightmare #5 and Nightmare with Angels, and probably entitled "Nightmare
with soldiers" although that is speculation not memory.
The last verse is a response to the questions.
I memorized it in 1943:
"Stand out of my way and be silent before me,
for none shall come after me, foeman or friend,
Since the seed of your seed called me forth to employ me,
And that was the longest, and that was the end."|
Not precisely the thing to recall when doing weapons design
analysis in the 60's, although perhaps it was. I recited it once to Herman
Kahn when we were discussing deterrence and Doomsday Machines, and such
like.
But I can find no trace that Benet wrote this, nor indeed,
except for the references above, to its existence, which I had begun to
think was a fancy, a false memory; but clearly it was not. Apparently
sometime between 1943 and now, Benet or his heirs decided to eliminate the
work from his literary estate and obliterate the memory of the poem; or so
it would seem.
I have the feeling that it was part of his very rare book
NIGHTMARE AT NOON, and the anti-war sentiments weren't considered proper
after Pearl Harbor.
Any information appreciated.
We found it. See below.
========================
I see the Lt. Gen. in charge of Marines at Fallujah is now
talking: first the Marines were ordered to attack the city, hastily in his
judgment when they had they thought a better approach; then, when they were
winning, the were told after 3 days to stop. This was the worst possible
course of action. Either you try a soft approach or you go in hard, but you
don't abandon the soft approach, go in hard, abandon that, and then start
dithering. Or you don't unless you are a neocon in charge of political
affairs in a war you started but don't know what to do about.
The Marines knew what to do. They were overruled.
The worst of it is that Kerry is surrounded by people of
even less military ability.
Civilian control of the military is fine for grand policy.
When it begins to dictate tactics the results are seldom good. And then the
civilians are supremely self-confident that they know far more than any mere
soldiers about how to "win hearts and minds" or are driven by false visions
of human motivation (neo-Jacobins who are sure that the desire for democracy
beats within the Arab breast despite the daily indications that they would
do ANYTHING to prevent even a smattering of, for instance, women's
liberation) -- when the civilians have a false theory of humanity and no
practical experience, civilian control is costly. One reason democracies
ought not engage in imperial adventures.
Ruling people without consent of the governed is possible,
but the rules aren't the usual ones of democracy.
Incidentally, I note that even the staunchest libertarian
economists now conceded that until you have rule of law you can't have
liberal democracy or liberal economics. The US established rule of law in
Germany and Japan after the war; both countries were too flattened to
resist. Germany had a long tradition of rule of law. Japan had a long
tradition of social obedience, which worked to much the same end.
There has not been Rule of Law in Iraq since Hammurabai.
============
From Ed Hume:
Remember, all ye swabs...
September 19 is International Talk Like a Pirate Day
Arrrr!
-===========-
A speculation: could Clinton operatives have faked the Bush
ANG documents and leaked them to Kerry? A Kerry victory would be a
disaster for Hillary.
Nah. Couldn't be. But Carville sure looks perky...
---
While we are on this, it turns out that David Alston may
have misremembed in his speech at the DNC: that is, he was not on the boat
when Kerry was aboard. As he was the only black guy on the boat, one would
think this would be remembered. Alston told of being present during the
action that resulted in Kerry's Silver Star. Alston was wounded and
invalided out of service before Kerry took charge of that boat. Yet Kerry
listened as someone claimed to be part of his crew, but could not have been,
and said nothing.
I am here reporting something I have been told:
"Thus, *at no time* did David Alston serve with John Kerry.
In fact,
they did not even serve "side by side" in different boats: Kerry's
first boat in 1969 was PCF 44; prior to that, Kerry's and Alston's
boats were in two different Coastal Divisions and did not participate
in any joint operations. And the 44 boat and the 94 boat did not
participate in any joint patrols in the one week that Kerry commanded
44.
"In other words, the available evidence indicates, astonishingly
enough, that Alston simply *fabricated his entire speech* before the
Democratic convention, along with all the corroborative details he
gave in an interview on Nightline: they never served togther, either
on the same boat or even on two boats patrolling together. They never
fought together, and Alston was already in hospital before the
incident that gave Kerry his Silver Star.
"Yet Kerry stood by and listened to the fabrication, as did the few
other Swift vets who support Kerry, despite knowing that Alston was
wounded and medevaced out the same day they lost their skipper, who
was then replaced by Kerry (as Alston was replaced by Short)... and
not a one of them said a word to correct the record."
I have no evidence on any of this, and normally I wouldn't care, but after
this came the forged CBS papers, and one does begin to wonder. I don't blame
Alston. He was shot up badly and it's easy to forget who was with you then
things happened. But surely someone would know who Alston's skipper was when
he was wounded? And on what date it happened?
I have found this, which says Alston was on
board for a while, but how long is conjecture. So it's lapsed memories, and
that I can very well understand.
http://nationalreview.com/york/york200408160842.asp
===
I see that CBS is doubling the bet again, and PC Mag is
coming in now:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1644869,00.asp
and if all this reminds you of Alger Hiss desperately trying
to show that the pumpkin papers COULD have been forged by someone with
enough money and resources than it should.
Hiss was never able to show that anyone DID construct a
typewriter that could produce text that looked as if it came from his old
Underwood. Not one person involved in the conspiracy to jail Hiss ever came
forward. The weight of evidence is immense and it all says Hiss was guilty.
Same here: there is a desperate effort to show that this
blurred document COULD have been genuine if the ANG had access to a
Selectric Composer. But that was a rare machine. I have a Selectric, still,
and I have all the type balls, and none was Times New Roman; but an ordinary
Selectric couldn't have done that anyway. The Selectric Composer was
expensive and comparatively rare. I never saw one outside a University and
only one there; it was used to make really neat looking stuff. But the
Selectric was usual for document.
At Boeing in the 50's the Unit Secretary had an IBM
Executive for formal letters, but almost all Company documents were done on
ordinary machines. At Aerospace I had my own Selectric, but I was rare in
that most engineers wrote long hand. I had to produce many documents, and I
type faster than I write, so it was easier for me to do my drafts on a
Selectric. Incidentally I had also the most advanced Underwood/Ollivetti
electro-mechanical calculator in existence at the time, a very big thing
that printed tapes and trundled noisily; I also had a 20" slide rule. It
made it easier to calculate expected values using fractional exponents. For
the final stuff, which we'd game out to do Monte Carlo models, I'd
have my models coded into FORTRAN and run in Central Computing, but it was
easier to get preliminary results using expected values and I could do those
myself in my office with calculator and slide rule. (If you missed it,
see this.)
Anyway, there is no evidence that the writer of those
documents had access to or even knew of the existence of the Selectric
Composer, nor has anyone found any documents done on a Selectric Composer
associated with this man or the ANG unit. CBS is doubling the bet again, but
it's desperation.
Has anyone been able to show ANY document in Times New
Roman dating from that time? Done on a Selectric Composer or anything else
that could do proportional spacing?
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