After the War

One of my favorites from the "Band of Brothers" was  a wonderful episode called "Points" which covers the time after the Wehrmacht surrendered.

The American soldiers, were, of course, euphoric, but for many of the officers, there was the problem of "what next?"  For the enlisted men, the citizen soldiers who had no desire to make a career of the Army, the return to civilian life beckoned. 

But some of the officers had never had such good training, so much responsibility, such a fulfilling job, and they considered staying on.

One of the best combat officers, Capt. Speirs, says he is going to "stay with the men" because the Army is such a valuable resource, and it would be a shame to allow it to go to waste. In one sense, you can see it's his career he does not want to go to waste. What can these men do after the fighting which could possibly seem as meaningful as what they did during the fighting?

But of course, that's exactly what happened after WWII and after the Civil War. All those hundreds of thousands of troops just quit, vanished, melted away, "ain't gonna study war no mo'."

After the Confederate Army surrendered and officers like Phil Sheridan and William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant faced the great void of "peace."  None of these men had ever achieved anything close to the success in civilian life they had as military officers. 
Sherman had been a failure as a banker. Sheridan and Grant were more or less aimless non entities.

But following the surrender of the armies, these generals discovered the South may have surrendered its armies but it had no intention of accepting the defeat of the racist, murderous values by which it had always lived. Freed slaves, Freedmen, and Whites who were against slavery or against secession were murdered in astonishing numbers, thousands a month, hundreds at a time.

Over 300,000 Freedman tried to go to schools set up by the Freedman's Bureau, staffed in large part by Northern abolitionists who came South much as the Freedom Riders did 100 years later. But the would be students, the Freedman and their teachers were murdered systematically and methodically by Whites who had no intention of seeing Blacks learn to read, write, learn math and live free. 

Kept Killing with the Klan

Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general who oversaw the massacre of unarmed and surrendering Black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow and elsewhere established the Ku Klux Klan and continued his murderous ways. 

In Georgia, local police were uniformed in gray, to remind Blacks and Whites alike the war may have been lost, but the police still enforced White Power.

Phil Sheridan was put in charge of the military district of Texas and Louisiana and when the trolley company in New Orleans insisted on Blacks riding in separate cars from Whites, he said he'd close the company down unless they integrated the ridership.  He became an integrationist  long before Rosa Parks. He was pugnacious enough to declare martial law in Texas and to fire the governor of Louisiana. 

Grant saw that the generous terms he gave Lee to induce Lee to surrender were exploited as Southerners decided to oppose the end to slavery, to White rule by other means. 
The Southern states refused to accept the 14th amendment which guaranteed everyone the right to vote regardless of race and which guaranteed equal justice under the law. In Southern courts justice was not intended to be equal for Blacks. White men accused of murdering Blacks feared no punishment, and were virtually never found guilty, if they were charged at all.

Blacks were rarely even brought to trial: They were simply lynched.

I'm now into the last third of "Grant" and this is actually proving to be even more fascinating than the war years. I've read about Grant's war career so often, but not much about his years following the war, his gradual radicalization as he saw the foul injustices befalling Blacks.  
It is curious to consider how much more effective the Americans were in "rehabilitating" the Germans after defeating Nazi Germany, where at least outward contrition over the Holocaust seemed pretty pervasive.  Of course, they had to pass a law forbidding the publication of photos of Hitler for a few decades, for fear they would be framed and hung in every home and bar, but at least superficially, Germany seemed to have rejected fascist hate. Nothing like that ever happened in the South. There were never any Nuremberg trials in Richmond. Of course, the Southerners could never claim they were unaware of slavery. In Germany, as the American soldiers noted in "Band of Brothers", they never could find a single Nazi as they rolled through German towns. Everyone was "nicht Nazi." 

So far, Sheridan is looking even better than he did during the war, and that is a tall order. No Union general was braver or more effective or more important, not even Sherman. 

I used to drive past Sheridan's statue in the middle of "Sheridan Circle" on Massachusetts Avenue once or twice a week, when I lived in Washington, and never really thought more about him. I knew he had won the Shenandoah Valley campaign, but I was only dimly aware of the critical role he played in trapping Lee, at the end.

Sheridan married a much younger woman, and when he died at age 57, his widow was still young, attractive and much pursued. She lived another 50 years after his death, dying in 1938. When asked why she had not remarried, she replied, "I'd rather be Phil Sheridan's widow than the wife of any living man." 

That is hardly the sentiment one hears in the 21st century, but looking at 21st century men, and comparing them to Phil Sheridan, and for that matter, to Ulysses S. Grant, one might say, little wonder.

The Trouble with History: The Case of William Tecumseh Sherman

Five hundred pages into "Grant" I'm still enjoying it, although, truth be told, being 500 pages into "Grant" is like being 250 pages into a well edited book.
The same paragraph about whether or not Grant was drinking on a given day, or during a given journey appears over and over.

Mr. Chernow desperately needs an editor.

It's pretty obvious Chernow sat down with piles of books and files on every given major battle, every journey, journals from Grant's friend, Rawlins, books from historians Bruce Catton, James McPherson, and others and then pasted their comments into his paragraphs for that event. 
The same sources keep getting quoted, often nearly the same quotes about whether or not Grant was drinking.

That being said, the picture which emerges of Grant and of those who mattered most to him, and to us--Sherman, Sheridan and Lincoln-- is worth the slog.

I have photos of Sherman on my walls, on coffee mugs, I like the image of him as implacable, and unwilling to accept the fantasy of war as something chivalrous.

One has only the excerpts from letters, the reports of historians, friends, adversaries, but it's not like you can see Gwen Ifil interview him on TV. It's not like you actually can have him over for dinner and judge for yourself.

On the other hand, there are enough reports of things he said at dinner parties, things he wrote, which line up.  You can draw some tentative conclusions. 

On thing seems pretty clear: William Tecumseh Sherman was a white supremacist.  
He believed Negroes were simply inferior, lacked intelligence and courage, could not be taught.  He said, on more than one occasion, when it came to Whites and Negroes there could only be a master/slave relationship. He said whenever you have Negroes, they destroy things; Whites build things.

As slaves left plantations in the wake of Sherman's march, and as they trailed after their savior--and many saw him as just that, the second coming of the mesiah--Sherman clearly considered them to be a nuisance, a rabble to be dealt with. Unlike Grant, who with more exposure to Blacks began to see them as human beings, and witnessing their valor in combat, Grant gained increased respect for them, Sherman was, from all we can see, unmoved.

And yet...There's always the "but." Sherman did plan to provide freed slaves in liberated Southern lands, plots of land from plantations now wrested from control of the slave owners; he gave individual slaves 40 acres each to farm, for the practical purpose of allowing them to support themselves without further government aide and also as a way of bringing imperious White plantations owners to the realization their claims to land were null and void. (This was later reversed by Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson.)

But where  other Uninon generals embraced the idea of recruiting and using Negro troops--in particular Generals Thomas and Grant--Sherman would have none of it. The Negroes might be capable of farming but not soldiering Sherman apparently believed.

In the run up to the War, at a dinner party and among friends, Sherman opined that Blacks were better off as slaves than they had been in Africa, better off as slaves than they could be on their own.  For the most part, the slaves were well treated Sherman told his dinner party companions, and  the slaves were and ought to be happy. 
All that was said just before the war. That was before his march, before he saw the joy of the newly freed slaves. 
But even seeing their joy in liberation, Sherman took this as the expostulations of silly children.

All this may seem at odds with Sherman as one of the three major forces which ended slavery, but Sherman was, in fact, the embodiment of that Unionist who really did not give a hoot about the people involved, the slaves or even the slave owners. What animated him was the idea.  The idea of "Union."

Union was tied up in the idea of order and loyalty and patriotism for Sherman, at least as far as you can discern from the records historians unearth.

 While Lincoln and eventually Grant understood you could not have Union without an end to slavery, Sherman seemed to ignore this. 


Whenever defenders of "The Lost Cause" want to sanitize the idea of exactly what that cause was, they refer to people like Sherman who, like so many Northerners entered the war simply because the idea of breaking up the Union was an anathema. And it was true, in the beginning many if not most of the Union soldiers had little sympathy for slaves. But, as Lincoln so famously described, whatever got people to join the war initially, ultimately everyone knew, in the end, slavery was the real cause of the war, if not for people like Sherman, for the people of the South and for enough of the North.


That mythological eminence, Robert E. Lee, was clearly a thorough going racist, who was appalled to see a colored officer on Grant's staff at Appomattox, and took his presence at the surrender ceremony as a personal insult. Sherman would have understood completely.

Where Grant was canny enough to refuse to allow Southern officers to take their "property" back home with them after they surrendered at Appomattox--because slaves were property--Sherman made no such order when he signed the surrender agreement with Johnston.
Lee had already surrendered in Virginia but Sherman had to chase down Johnston and demand the surrender of the Army of the Carolinas. Sherman attempted to allow the officers to keep their slaves and to leave slavery in place in the Carolinas. 

Grant had to rush down to Durham, to  nullify the agreement.  

Oddly, Johnston had asked Sherman only for what Grant had given Lee, a pardon for his soldiers so they would not be tried as traitors and a promise not to molest them or prosecute them. But Sherman wanted to go beyond the simple surrender of an army; he wanted to settle the outstanding political issues which might threaten the peace after the army was disbanded, so he tried to guarantee the slave caste system would remain intact in the South. 

After the Civil War finally wound down, after the last small Confederate armies scattered around the South had disbanded and only scattered guerrilla resistance remained, Sherman replaced Grant as commander of the Army and he pursued the Indian wars, and he was just as remorseless in his pursuit and subjugation of the American Indians as he had been of the Southern rebels. 

Indians, after all, were not White.
So, once again, there are no heroes. No role models. There are only men who do heroic things and the same men often do despicable things.

We can look at them and understand the "Jungian thing," as Joker says in "Full Metal Jacket" when a stupid, officious colonel confronts him about the "Born to Kill" stenciled on Joker's helmet and the peace button on his collar. "The duality of man," says Joker. "You know."

The World's Best Medical System: Medicare For All v For Profit Medicine

Next time someone tellsyou about what a  calamity socialized medicine would be, and how much more efficient the free market system is, with all its incentives, think about this story.

An executive at one of the big pharma companies told me over lunch his company had cut 4,000 sales jobs, but some of those folks could be retrained to be billing reps.

Let's not talk about him

What does a "billing rep" do? Well, when a group of oncologists sets up an infusion center in their office, or when a hospital sets up such a center, where cancer patients are given intravenous chemotherapy drugs, the doctors or the hospital buys the drugs, not the patient. The patient's insurance company then pays the doctor for the drug, and pays him a fee to start the IV and administer it. This is all quite apart from the fee the insurance company pays the doctor for the office visit, where the doctor decides what drug to give the patient.

The doctor then has to bill the insurance company for payment for the drug, and that's where the drug company billing rep comes in: The drug rep knows exactly how to bill the insurance company, so the number of milligrams administered fits the profile in the insurance company's computer for the disease the patient has. There's a whole elaborate system with numbers corresponding to diagnoses and another for procedures. The drug company helps the doctor maximize his reimbursement from the insurance company.

Iceland has a national health care system

Now, why would the drug company be so kind to the doctor as to guide him through the reimbursement system? Why would it it be worth the salary of a drug rep? 

Because the doctor has choices among several "me too" drugs, made by different drug companies, and there's often not a hair's breadth of difference among these competing drugs, save, perhaps, for the amount of money the doctor might pocket. 

"In the good old days, the doc could get 25% of the cost of the drug, which for a drug which costs $10,000 a month is $2500, multiplied by 100 patients, thats $250,000 a month. "A lot of beach houses got built on cancer chemotherapy," the drug guy laughed.

Some sort of bird on Batchelder's pond, Hampton, NH

"But now, it's not so good. They only get 6%, typically. That's only $600 a patient or $60,000 a month. 
Still, a mortgage payment, I thought.
It made me think of that old quip, "More people make a living off cancer than die from it." And it made me think of all those other blatant conflicts of interest our commercial system has fostered, like doctors who own the laboratories which run the tests they order on patients. The more tests they order, the more money they make. 

But, in the case of cancer drugs,  look beyond just the drug company and the doctor. The doctor has an office staff, a big office staff, often four or five ladies doing the billing, and the insurance company has its staff of folks receiving and entering the bills into their computers and issuing payment checks and the insurance company has its CEO and his staff. 

If we had a Medicare-for-all health care system, tomorrow all those jobs would evaporate over night.

Land of the free, home of the chumps

And with them, of course, so would all the expense built into our bloated system.

The cancer patients would still be going to the infusion centers, getting their drugs. But, of course, the choice of drug might not depend on which drug company offered the doctor the biggest paycheck.

Oh, but that would be the ruin of the best medical care system in the world!
Oh, its so sad to be ruined. 

My Imaginary Obama

Starting every day with a tweet from the Dotard is a great way to wake up. Splash of cold water in the face.

New to Twitter, I signed up to follow my favorites, but with President Obama there were several choices. One was BarakObama @ BarackObama but it was really dull. It showed a picture of Mr. Obama and his profile said he was a Dad a Husband a former President and a Citizen, presumably in that order. Its posts showed the usual yawners about let's all celebrate the new year by resolving to do better. Whatever.

But there was another site, Barack Obama at Prez Obama which was much more lively. This was his alter ego site, I presumed, the angry Obama site, like that Angry Obama he did with the comedian Keegan-Michael Key (his "anger translator)  at the Washington correspondents' dinner.


And best of all, he liked almost all my responses! A little red heart appeared when I said something he liked.


But, oh, woe is me. The Obama I liked so much turned out to be a fake Obama, a website run by the comedian Carrot Top.

Bogus Obama: "I'm the one in the middle"

And too bad. That cartoon the phony Obama posted in response to the my-penis-button-is-bigger-than-yours was priceless. Especially with the comment: I'm the one in the middle.


Of course, that was also my clue this was not Obama.


Obama just never mixed it up like that.


You wanted him to. That first debate with Romney was a disaster because he simply could not get mad. He wasn't just a mild mannered, nice guy in that debate; he was a eunuch.


Which may, in some way, explain the appeal of Trump. Just give me a guy who can throw a punch, even a clumsy, stupid, wild and ineffective punch.


Of course, now with North Korea suddenly talking with South Korea, Mr. Trump claims it was all because he was such a tough guy with such a big penis.
But I am sure a lot of my fellow citizens nodded when Trump complained about Pakistan and asked why were are giving them money. And why we need to prop up NATO when the European nations are not pulling their share.

So, when the next Democrat emerges, I hope he'll be more like my imaginary Obama.
The real Obama is still the best President in my lifetime.

The Apprentice

"Show me an intern who will only triple my work, and I will kiss his feet."
---The Fat Man "House of God"
(Medical resident commenting on how much effort it takes to teach someone else your job, rather than simply doing it yourself.)

One of the few real failings of President Obama was his embrace of the idea that a college education is the key to success for the individual and for the nation.

Surely, for him, college, then law school, that academic track made his fortune, but this is not going to be true for the vast number of folks in the nation, certainly not for the class we call "blue collar" or "tradesmen" or "craftsmen" or middle class.

An NPR piece this morning about the apprentice program in Germany brought this into bold relief.
A German remarked: "When someone attains the status of 'meister' (master) from his apprenticeship, you see the notice in the paper, and they throw a party. When someone gets a Master's degree at university, nobody notices."
In Germany one of four workers works in production of products, as opposed to services. In America it's one out of eight.

apprentice wreslter

Of course for a German style approach to apprenticeship to take hold, or, more accurately, to reassert itself, in this country, we would have to overcome several obstacles. An article in The Atlantic explores why the Germans are so much better at preparing people for careers in industry, and much of it has to do with their willingness to accept "tracking" in public schools and centralized government control over the nation's educational system, two ideas which are close to non starters in America, where the Left abhors tracking and the Right abhors government in general.


Beyond those problems are others: 
1/ Industries, factories, would have to be willing to invest time and money (and profits) into training their own workers. 
In America, we cannot even get the NFL to invest in training the 3,000 professional football players they need. They want colleges to do that for them.

2/ Planners in what used to be called "Manpower" would have to accept the fact we need more craftsmen, blue collar workers.
Currently, the average "machinist" is in his late fifties with few younger men or women in the pipelines. The current factory machinist needs to use computers, his hands, his eyes, and his brain in new ways.

College professors and administrators are unqualified to be guiding students, and planning for the manpower needs of industry or of the nation, although their ignorance has never stopped them from seizing that role. One of the most obvious areas where you would think undergraduate college faculty would be valuable would be training preparing future doctors for their profession, but the opposite has been true. Undergraduate faculties have actually milked aspiring pre medical students mercilessly for their own purposes--insuring a captive audience for calculus and organic chemistry and biology professors--while adding little to the quality of preparation of future doctors. 


 With respect to the willingness of industry to invest in training its workers: 

When Henry Ford conceived of an assembly line, it was an effort to dispense with the need for craftsmanshp. It was a way of exploiting labor. You did not need to teach a man to make an entire automobile; you just needed to teach him to put a bolt in here or a tire on there.
.

In America,  community college programs have tried partnering with local factories to train students for jobs in those factories, only to have the corporate board move the factory to China and the students were left hanging.

Somebody either in government or industry or a working combination, has to be able to predict what kind of workers, with which skills, will be needed.
This is no easy task. 
Predicting the jobs of tomorrow is no easier than predicting economic or financial futures.
Most of the good jobs today involve computers and did not exist five, ten, fifteen years ago. 
Most of the people I meet today are doing jobs for which their college educations played no role in preparing them. They learned on the job or often on their own time, taking computer courses.

Before the Second World War, there wasn't much central planning of labor and industry, but when the United States decided to gear up to produce 10,000 airplanes a month, and tanks and jeeps and weapons and ships, central planning was no longer assailed as communism; it was essential for survival.

Where is all that sort of analysis and planning now? 

Is There An Immigration Problem? Audi Alteram Partem

Bear with me now. 
I am going to sound, for a few moments, like a Build-the-Wall Donald Trumpee (or Trumper as they prefer) but I am wending my way toward a new understanding and that takes some treading through swampy areas.

You will understand I have previously posted in my Six Articles enunciating where all true, thoughtful Dems should be, that there is in fact no immigration problem, only a perception problem, in these United States. 

I came to this conclusion based in part on my experience with folks from the Massachusetts towns of Lawrence, Haverhill and Methuen, where the immigrants I've met struck me as fine  people, struggling to make it, working harder than most citizens and worthy of our support.

But now I'm reading the New Yorker article by Jonathan Blitzer "Trapped"  detailing the experience on Long Island, N.Y.,  and I realized the inspiring story of immigrant communities in Essex County, Massachusetts may not be what people on Long Island are living. 

Some numbers:
1/ By the mid 1990's more than 90,000 Salvadorans were living on Long Island. 
The population of El Salvador is 6 million, which means something approaching 2% of their population fled north to Long Island. 
Who knows how many fled to Los Angeles?

Honduras has 9 million people. Nicaragua has 6 million. 
These 3 Central American countries then have 21 million people.


2/ In Brentwood, a town of 60,000, nearly 70% of the population is Hispanic, of whom 16,000 are Salvadoran. The Salvadoran government opened a consulate in the town.
3/ MS-13 has 400 members in Suffolk County, LI. In Los Angeles there are 10,000 and in Central America 50,000.
4/ In one year 2016-2017 MS 13 was thought to have committed 17 known murders in Suffolk County, LI.

Is this a pervasive problem? An invasion? Or just a drop of ink in a large tub? 

In my own mind, I go back to images of Ellis Island, where grateful immigrants, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, arrived by ship, the wretched refuse of the teeming shore, ready to transform themselves and their newly adopted country in a soulful ascent to greatness. 

But there is a difference between the wretched refuse disembarking from those ships and the folks who walked across the Southern border of this country. Those huddled masses on the ships, were on ships.  That constituted a sort of control to the process. Rules, unfair or fair, wise or not, racist or not, could be enforced.

If the government decided it wanted to admit only a certain number or a certain type, that spigot could be turned on or off in accordance with by the will of the government, which, in theory at least, reflected the will of the American people already inside the club.

So that was "immigration."

When you have now with Central America is a population which is walking across the border.
That is something different. 
You can call it an "invasion" which evokes the image of hordes of orcs or Huns lead by Genghis Khan on horseback.  Or you can call it a tide, which is less emotive, but suggests a gentler process or you can call it a storm surge, which is more apt, coming as it does because of the tempest occurring in Central America. 
But, whatever you want to call it, Trump was getting a a sort of truth in his moronic way, when he sputtered, "We're not getting the best people. We're getting the criminals."

Of course, we are getting refugees which include some wretch refuse, but we are also getting some thugs, some nasties.

There are at least two sorts of immigrants we have to consider who would be undesirable. The lost souls of MS13 variety, who have no future but violence and early death and will take down solid citizens with them, and the wretch refuse, who by their simple numbers, as a group, not as individuals  pose a problem.
What if all 21 million decided to come to the United States?
And, if we decide to be really big hearted and throw open our borders entirely: what about  100 million Indians or the 100 million Chinese who might move here tomorrow if we threw open our borders.?

The problem with the first group, the illegal immigrants who are criminals becomes a logistical one: identifying, apprehending and sequestering these folks is a no brainer.

The second group simply requires laws, because, like their Ellis Island predecessors, they require a boat or an airplane and there are control points there.

The bigger issue, the harder issue, is what do we do with the illegals already here who pose no MS13 type threat, but occupy space, demand services and act as a magnet for those they left behind who wish to join them here?

Era of Drama Queens and Big Guns

That pendulum must swing. 
So we went from No Drama Obama to the Dotard--to call President Heel Spurs an empty suit is to demean the empty suit. The Hollow man. 

But we see it everywhere, men who are drama queens, carrying guns to heighten their dramatic impact. See, look at me. See how dangerous I am. Watch me, sometime is about to happen.

Look ma! I'm a soldier!

And that is how these bearded children are:  They need to drum up drama to think of themselves as important.

We have no underlying political or social bomb which requires dramatic action: There is no issue like slavery calling for a John Brown or bludgeoning on the Senate floor.

What are these guys, from Bannon to those pathetic neo storm troopers in Charlottesville so agitated about? 

Tantrums looking for a reason. Rebels without a cause. Colicky boys who don't know why they are screaming or what about. 

Hey, at least I've got her attention

The white race is under attack! We are losing the country to radical Islam! Sharia law will rule the land! 

Oh, plueeeze. 

When I was maybe 7 or 8, my friends and I would dress up in whatever approximations of military garb we could scrape up and we'd carry our toy guns about the gulleys and forests of Northern Virginia, latter day Huck Finns, looking for adventure, playing out our romantic fantasies. We'd launch attacks against imaginery, phantom armies, charge gloriously into battle. 

Bloodied heir to Stonewall Jackson: In his own head

Those guys in Charlottesville look like that to me.

Strap on a gun, dress up like soldiers and now you're important. Scream about the immigrant invasion pouring over the border, the Muslim terrorists at the borders. The dark skinned men lusting after White women, and presto, you're an important person, a soldier in the White cause. 

Is anyone, other than these drama queens, buying it?