Decisive Battles: Frontiers 1914 - Part 2: Keep The Right Wing Strong

 Last time we looked - very briefly! - at the geopolitical buildup to August 1914. 

The tl:dr version is that:
1) Europe in the waning years of the 19th and the opening of the 20th Centuries was a cross-cutting tangle of alliances meant to reassure the major powers that they wouldn't be isolated in a Great Power war.

2) These included:
a) Germany and Austria-Hungary, a peculiar and one-sided arrangement that seems to have persisted because i) Austria needed German economic and military strength, while ii) Germany needed SOMEbody to be their pals, and the Austrians were that desperate.
b) Italy and the Ottomans were kind of strap-hanging on to the Austro-German alliance, but i) Italy was pretty much the definition of "not really a Power" AND pretty much hated the Austrians, while ii) the Ottomans weren't useful for much of anything in Europe AND were pretty much "The Sick Man" they're conventionally portrayed.
c) On the "other side" were France and Russia, forced into an arranged marriage when Germany dumped Russia and France was looking for help to offset its economic and demographic weakness vis-a-vis Germany.
d) Great Britain wasn't really sold on all this Continental dick-waving, but i) had patched things up with France because of concerns about Kaiser Wilhelm's idiotic Navy fetish, and ii) had an arrangement with Belgium, who, sensibly given the aggro dudebros all around, had declared their absolute neutrality on the whole Franco-German pissing contest.

3) When the political crisis in the Balkans that exploded at the end of June (and, remember, Franz Ferdinand was just the final spark; the problems between Austria-Hungary, Serbia, Russia, the Ottomans, as well as the Balkan minorities within and without the Austrian borders, had been festering for decades) the immediate military concerns of the various powers were (in alphabetical order):

Austria-Hungary: defeating Serbia before the Russians could mobilize and threaten the northern regions of Bohemia and Moravia (in what are now the Czech Republic and Slovakia) and Galicia (in modern Poland):

By ArdadN - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5867649

France: A German invasion (I know - it was that simple, but not easy...)

Great Britain: Kind of nothing, at first. France versus Germany? Not their problem, tho I'm sure Herb Asquith and Downing Street were giving the HochSeeFlotte the side-eye just in case...

Italy: Not happy to be dragged into a European war by the fucking Austrians (bastardos!) over some damn thing in the Balkans. 

(This eventually led to Italian reneging on their Central Power-alliance commitment, BTW.)

Ottoman Empire: Kind of wanted to slap Russia, but the overall involvement was a fuckup. Turkish  historian Kemal Kaspat summed it up as follows:

“Ottoman entry into the war was not the consequence of careful preparation and long debate in the parliament (which was recessed) and press. It was the result of a hasty decision by a handful of elitist leaders who disregarded democratic procedures, lacked long-range political vision, and fell easy victim to German machinations and their own utopian expectations of recovering the lost territories in the Balkans."

 So, yeah, kind of a fuckup.

Russia: Fulfillment of promises to the Slavic nationalists in the Balkans, as well as a fear of Austro-German attacks from Galicia and East Prussia.

Great Power Chess: Germany Moves First

Of the Powers Germany was in what appeared to be the scariest military position.

Everyone else had a border to worry about, but Germany had two; in the East against Russia, in the West, France.

(Technically so did Austria-Hungary. But the Serbians were feisty, not insane, so they weren't coming at Vienna. Russia? Ohfuckyes.)

The Eastern German border around what is today Poland was 1) open geographically - rivers (and other water bodies like marshes and lakes) were the only real defensible obstacles - and 2) perfect for the "mass effect" of Russian attacks. 

The whole "Russian Steamroller" was a thing for a reason.

German war planning, then, had to either figure out a way to fight a modern, dangerous French Army in the West while simultaneously facing a monster Russian invasion from the East, or...

Strike quickly and decisively on one front, defeat that enemy, then turn to the other side of Germany to beat the other.

Meaning that in the 1914 war chess game Germany was playing white and had to move first.

When you look up at the whole "Eastern border" description you can see why that move also had to be to the West. Russia had bodies and ground to lose and keep fighting; trying to force a Russian "Sedan 1870" was a mug's game. If beat along the border the Russians would just take their lickings and fall back into the vast expanse of western Russia.

France couldn't. Simple distances show why:

So prewar German planning (after the lapse of the Reinsurance Treaty pretty much ensured a two-front war) was based on:
1) German mobilization - both troop formation and rail transport to the forward railheads - running more quickly that either France or Russia's,
2) Fighting delaying actions in East Prussia, while
3) Attacking France and knocking it out of the war ASAP.

But.

How to do this?

Because the French knew what had to happen as well as Germany did, and had the advantage of knowing where it was coming from: the former pieces of France grabbed in 1871, Alsace and Lorraine.

Le système Séré de Rivières

After the debacle of 1870 the French Government formed a committee to develop a defensive barrier to the next foreign (presumably German) invasion. The Wiki entry has a nice summary of this:

"France created the Defence Committee (Comité de défense), which was active between 1872 and 1888, whose mission was to reorganize the defence of the French frontiers and coasts. It was necessary to compensate for the lost territories of the north-east; to modernise old fortifications, which had been shown to be wanting in the last war and to create new fortifications proof against modern weaponry using new and more powerful explosives."

This organization oversaw the creation of the fortifications known as the "Séré de Rivières" system after the engineer officer who ran the committee from 1874 to 1880.

These forts ran the length of France's northern and eastern borders, but were densest (and strongest) in the northeastern corner along the Franco-German frontier:

Note that this wasn't intended as a wall, but more like a sabo dam; separated blocking points with corridors between them that would funnel attackers (the green arrows in the cartoon above) where they could be engaged by the French maneuver forces and defeated.

Now...mind you, by 1914 this system had a big problem, and I do mean BIG...

The development of superheavy artillery like this Krupp 420mm howitzer meant that the forts couldn't defend themselves; typical fortress guns ran in the 75mm to 155mm caliber.

The 155mm 155 "L de Bange" design from 1877 was the heaviest artillery the de Rivieres forts mounted, with a maximum range of about 13,000 meters.

The superheavies' maximums ran from 8-9,000 meters up to 14-20,000, and they were semi-mobile (though slow to emplace and displace) which meant that even when they didn't outrange the fortress batteries they were difficult to hit without forward observation. 

The forts had no such benefits.

Still, even outdated, the de Rivieres forts presented some difficulties to a German assault that depended on speed. The monster cannon meant that even the strongest fortification could be destroyed or taken. But that would take time, and time wasn't on Germany's side.

So we're back to where we were when we talked about sieges. The only ways to crack the walls was over - escalade - through - breaching or treachery - or under - mining. All took too much time or too many lives.

The alternative is obvious when you look at it.

Around.

If you attack where the forts aren't, they can't slow or stop you.

Which is where we meet this guy:

A Man, A Plan, A Strong Right Wing...Schlieffen!

Alfred von Schlieffen (1833-1911) was a Prussian of Prussia, son of a major in the 19th Century Prussian Army. The only unusual part of the junior von Schlieffen story is his choice to skip the more usual cadet school route to a commission for the University of Berlin.

Instead Alfred chose the Einjährig-Freiwilliger ("One-Year Volunteer") option, which the von Schlieffen Wiki entry kind of messes up.

The volunteer system - let's use the common shorthand "EF" for it - was a way for wealthy and/or aristocratic types to shortcut the officer training program. You came in like a regular draftee, but 1) only for one year as opposed to two or three, and 2) paid for everything yourself. The EF Wiki entry is much better at describing this:

"...would opt to serve a one-year term rather than the regular two or three-year conscription term, and who would be allowed a free choice of service branch and unit, but who were obliged to equip and support themselves at their own expense throughout. In today's monetary value this cost might equate to at least 10,000 Euros, which restricted the option to members of the affluent social classes, considered to be "officer material", who hoped to pursue a Reserve-Officer career path."

Instead of the reserves, von Schlieffen was tapped for a regular officer career and started the Kriegsakademie - the Prussian Sandhurst or St. Cyr - in 1858 and was commissioned three years later in the topographic bureau of the Generalstabs, the Prussian General Staff.

A very Prussian officer career followed. War service in 1866 against Austria (including the Battle of Koniggratz, which I should really write up someday) and in France in 1870. 

Advancement through the ranks, although I get the sense that his superiors kind of saw him as a Big Military Brain - Schlieffen got a lot of staff postings under the Prussian (and Imperial German) flagpole - so more staff than troop unit time.

By 1886 he was a two-star Generalmajor, a three-star Generalleutnant by 1888 and in 1891 nicked the top Army job, Chief of the General Staff.

This meant von Schlieffen had tremendous influence on German military policy...but not alone. Ian Senior's 2012 work Invasion 1914 has a good breakdown of the forces in play in the Imperial war planning arena. 

These included Schlieffen as Chief of Staff, but also the Prussian Ministry for War (Preußisches Kriegsministerium), the three-star corps commanders (all 23 of them), and of course the Emperor and the Imperial "War Cabinet".

You need to keep this in mind, because it plays a huge part in the "Schlieffen Plan" story. 

Because there were plans, and then there were budgets, and though Schlieffen could make the former the Minister for War had control of the latter.

So a lot of Schlieffen's "planning" had to do with shaking Reichsmarks out of the Minister and the rest of the Imperial machinery, including the Emperor, the Cabinet, and the Reichstag - all of whom had their own objectives.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

When he set his ass behind the Chief's desk in 1891 Schlieffen inherited a general war plan that (to sum it up briefly) anticipated two fronts, Russia and France, and doped out a quick strike to the East that would catch the Russians still mobilizing and grab some land and cash to use negotiating a favorable peace. 

In the West, though, the de Rivieres forts ruled out an aggressive move. The plans prescribed a defensive fight to pull the French Army out of their fortified lines where they could be counterattacked and defeated.

Schlieffen haaaated this, both because he was an aggro kind of guy and because he wanted to win outright rather than depend on the tricksy machinations of politicians and diplomats. Senior (2012) details his work through the process of changing up the general war plan between 1891 and 1906.

He changed to defense in the East, for all the reasons we've detailed (plus improvements in the Russian defense lines around East Prussia).

Then planned that the attack would come in the West, where the Rhine armies would be heavily weighted-up to include the new superheavy artillery to crack the fort problem. Schlieffen counted on a quick victory there (somehow) and then the efficiency of the German rail system to transfer forces East to hold off the Russian hordes.

But.

The fort problem in the West remained difficult. Senior (2012) explains: "...in 1894 he briefly toyed with the idea of outflanking the fortress belt to the north of Verdun while at the same time pinning down the French center by means of an attack on Nancy, but reluctantly came to the conclusion that he did not have enough men for both tasks...in 1897...he returned to the theme..."

The major problems with these schemes were manpower and movement. One solution was that Schlieffen wanted more maneuver forces, up to seven full Armeekorps. The Minister for War repeated replied not just no but fuck no.

The other issue was the rough and close terrain along the area along the Alsace-Lorraine frontier "north of Verdun"; few or no rail lines; small, narrow roads and not many of those. The area was okay for defense, not so much for a major attack.

That's probably what got Schlieffen thinking that the way to go was around, not through.

Specifically, around France through Luxembourg, Belgium, and (he'll get there) Holland.

This first emerged in the 1899 plan set.

The plan - and these things were called "Aufmarsch" (deployment) plans, more a general set of instructions for the who went where than what a modern GI would consider an "operations order" - called for a big right-wing swing up through Belgium, and Luxembourg. It was still relatively modest but you can see Schlieffen already thinking "big enveloping hook".

So that's where things still stood in 1904.

Then several pieces of news arrived. The French extended the fortress lines to the northwest, past the Franco-German border towards Belgium and Luxembourg. 

Russia, meanwhile, was getting handed its ass by Japan.

That spring Schlieffen mounted up his boys for his semiannual "staff ride" along the Western frontiers. Apparently this was his thing; he'd trot around the prospective engagement areas, throwing out ideas and asking his staff pogues to snipe at them. 

It sounds like it was all very taxing and saddle-sore-ass-wearying, but it was Schlieffen's way of testing his ideas.

The 1904 ride produced Aufmarsch I (West) in 1905; what we think of when we think "Schlieffen Plan";  big sweep - seven full Armies - through Belgium and the dangly bit of southeastern Holland. These heroes would strike west deep into central Belgium then hook back south and east into France to trap the presumed French offensive that would have rammed into the Metz/Rhine region of the Franco-German border.

This was the plan Schlieffen tossed out to his staff in his final staff ride, and invited three staffers to take swings at it. Senior (2012) discusses this ride in detail (p. 32-34), but the tl:dr is that in Schlieffen's mind, anyway, his "big sweep" plan beat the three opponents' rebuttals. It was a war-winner. 

The "final version" emerged as what's called the "GroBe Denkschrift" ("Great Memorandum") distributed after Schlieffen's retirement, in January, 1906.

The basic idea was that a huge portion of the German Army would be committed to the West, leaving the East to a small defensive force to delay the (presumably lagging) Russian advance. 

Then a huge portion of the Western force - 71 of a possible 81 divisions, including a ginormous assembly of Reserve ("Ersatz") Armeekorps to be raised on mobilization - would drive through the Dutch "Maastricht Appendix", Belgium, and Luxembourg, turning the French left and then looping in behind the Franco-German border - ideally west of Paris - to crush the French Army between the swinging German left wing hammer and the German right wing that would  buttressed by the German border fortress belt anvil.

The "conventional narrative" then goes on to detail a series of gradual modifications to Schlieffen's original all-or-nothing left-wing sweep effected under the aegis of Schlieffen's successor, Helmuth Johannes Ludwig Graf von Moltke (usually referred to as "Moltke the Younger"), particularly:

1) Refusal to cross the Dutch border. (Moltke explained that a hostile Holland would close the Rhine ports, "closing Germany's windpipe", as well as possibly opening a debarkation point for British troops),

2) Strengthening the left wing by pulling one right-wing army out to double the size of the left, and then

3) Further weakening the right wing by pulling out more troops to reinforce East Prussia in 1914.

Supposedly these modifications collectively doomed the actual invasion by denuding the German right of enough force to accomplish its mission. Hence the repetition of the apocryphal Schlieffen deathbed admonition "Keep the right wing strong!" and the conventional "wisdom" that the unmodified Schlieffen Plan would have succeeded.

There's a good discussion of this "narrative" tradition in the "Civilization Fanatics Center" blog by someone named "Dachs" out of Russia. 

 (I know nothing about this guy, or his intent in posting the piece. It's still a useful analysis, so, spasiba.)

Apparently the "narrative" appeared in the early post-WW1 period, among historians and military theorists like Basil Liddell-Hart, and was amplified in the aftermath of WW2, principally in a 1958 book by Gerhard Ritter, Schlieffen Plan, Critique of a Myth. 

The Ritter book centers on a series of previously unpublished drafts of the 1905 memo, and it reflected his take on Imperial German militarism, which "Dachs" summarizes as:

"Schlieffen's militarism precluded any discussion of whether invading Belgium and the Netherlands was morally or legally correct, and instead sent a million men headlong into infamy on the grounds of national interest and winning the war. His uniquely German sense of precision had timed the campaign so exactingly - down to the hour, as Ritter had it - and demanded that France be defeated in forty-two days, so as to turn on Russia before it could mobilize its own armies."

But.

"Dachs" then runs down the subsequent scholarship of the 1914 invasion, including the work of Terence Zuber's 1999 The Schlieffen Plan Reconsidered, which posited that the 1905 drafts Ritter relied on and the supposed "ideal" 1906 Denkschrift "plan" were, in fact; 

"...relics of that omnipresent feature of army politics, a budget debate. Schlieffen wanted more troops and more money to hire them with, so he drew up the "war plan" employing a number of soldiers outlandishly higher than anything the Germans could employ in 1905 in order to demonstrate how kickass the German military could be if the Reichstag would but give it the cash necessary to implement Schlieffen's vision. Explaining it as an actual war plan, Zuber said, made no sense."

Among the other "Schlieffen skeptics" Martin van Creveld's work on the logistical issues which we discussed in the Battle of the Marne piece suggested that:

"...an attack through Belgium simply could not have incorporated the numbers of troops Schlieffen envisioned in Ritter's memo, even in peacetime...van Creveld argued that if Moltke had dispatched more men to the right flank, they would have just been an extra drain on already-overstretched supply lines, and the Germans might have run out of steam even before they reached the Marne."

In conclusion, "Dachs" says: "What does it mean for European diplomacy if Germany's war plan was not always predicated on a war with both Russia and France, or an offensive against France? The Sonderweg and the Griff nach der Weltmacht (NB: two schools of thought regarding the connection between German geopolitical thinking and the resulting aggressive military adventures) have been generally disproven, for various reasons (which I might go into in another history article). But that does not mean there is a dominant interpretation to replace them. So the state of historiography on the period today: many voices, but no chorus."

 

Okay, then...so what? What does all this mean?

So.

The bottom line seems to be that, regardless of the details of operations or the geopolitical intent, the German 1914 war plan called for 1) a defensive posture along the Franco-German border coupled with 2) a big hook through Belgium - with the implied acceptance of that triggering a British declaration of war and a British Expeditionary Force landing on the Channel Coast - to avoid the fortress belt and round the west end of the French (and British) defenses.

The right-wing armies would then "roll up" the Allied defenses from the northwest most quick smart, forcing evacuation of the Verdun/Toul/Epinal/Nancy fortresses and - presumably - capitulation.

To do that, the German reconnaissance elements had to be sure to find that open flank, while the security elements along the French border had to keep the Deuxeme Bureau from spying out weak points in the German defensive lines.

So cooked down to general mission tasks, based on the actual 1914 Aufmarsch, the job(s) of the German reconnaissance and security/counter-reconnaissance elements looked something like this:

1. Due west of the northern start lines - the central Belgian plateau from roughly the fringes of Antwerp to the areas around the French fortress town of Maubeuge - the primary mission was reconnaissance. The commanders of the German First and Second Army needed to know where their enemies were - and, even more importantly, weren't - to ensure the right wing sweep was wide enough to net their catch.

These areas were complicated by the "big-picture/small-picture" range of information needed. The overall German commanders - Moltke and the Emperor and his War Cabinet - needed long-range planning intelligence. Meaning well ahead of the forward infantry strength so those march columns could be routed or re-routed to envelop the Allied troop units.

The individual Army commanders (Kluck with First, Bulow with Second) also needed tactical intelligence, though, in order to figure out their most effective course of action for engaging those Allied units.

Overall, this was the trickiest and most recon-asset-consuming part of the theater.

2. To the southeast - west of Luxembourg, mostly in and around the Argonne Forest - the mission was more complicated. It still had a reconnaissance component, but that was more for the tactical and local needs of Third and Fourth Armies rather than the strategic recon needs of the first two armies. 

And in that area the German cavalry and light infantry would need to screen out French (and/or British) recon teams to prevent the premature discovery of the "hinge" in the German line.

3. Furthest to the southeast - ahead of the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Armies along the Franco-German border - the primary task was screening, fighting off French cavalry and their light infantry recon units to mask any potential weak points in the German defenses and keep the anvil together until the hammer could strike.

We're going to get deep in the weeds of "who's doing all this stuff", be before that we're going to look at the Other Side of The Hill; France, and its war plans that all this strong-right-wing-ing was intended to unhinge and knock sideways.

Next: I Got XVII Plans But the Krauts Got One

Mourning the lost

 

A friend of mine and I were drinking and the conversation turned to the disaster that is the former Ottoman province of Palestine. We both agreed that it was all just hell and fucking disaster and that neither of us could see a way out.

I mourned that I as an Army-mad kid had idolized the Tzahal, the Israeli Defence Forces. I'd repainted my little plastic model Sherman and M3 halftracks in IDF colors to wargame the Six Day War with the Israelis as the heroes, and that it hurt to see my old heroes fighting women and kids and guys who just wanted the land they, too, grew up in.

My friend replied that he had been raised to see Israel as heroic as well, as a vision of strength for a kid growing up Jewish. But even more, that he - as a child and an adult - had been confident that Judaism was different from the other religions. That the long history of persecution, that the long tradition of thoughtful rabbinical exegesis surrounding the Torah, would defend his faith from the sorts of sectarian horrors that had so often visited so many other religions. That Jews would be better.

"It turns out..." he mourned, "...that we aren't. We just lacked the opportunity."

My ancestors were used by their English masters to help them run their apartheid state of Ireland. That's what "Scots-Irish" means; Scottish imported to Ireland to be reliable Protestant muscle for the English project to keep the Irish down. I'm the spawn of the "settlers" of 17th and 18th Century Ireland, no different from some ultraorthodox swinging dick gunning for Arabs in the West Bank.

My gaffers didn't lack the opportunity, either.

I was lucky; some time along the road my clan escaped that ugly cycle, came here to the US where the earlier wave of "settlers" had done the ethnic cleansing of the original natives for them, so no need to bloody their own hands.

Is that what we are? Is that all we are? Just one wave of conquerors after another? One more round of oppression and murder and rape and ruin and merciless hatred?

I honestly don't think I want to know the answer.

I do know this; no matter how much killing Hamas has done this past week it will not kill the problems of the people of Palestine.

And no matter how much killing my old heroes of Tzahal will do in the coming weeks it will not change the problems of Israel with the people of Palestine.

And yet the killing will go on and on.

I can do no better than Wright did, ending his long discussion with a quote from Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz:

“Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk: Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America—burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing? This time, it will swing us clean to oblivion.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

As it was written...

 I thought it was worth reposting this. I wrote it initially as a comment over at Nancy Nall's joint.

"What frustrates me most about this Gaza mess is the obvious fact that it IS an Israel problem, or at least it was. If the new country was going to be a “Jewish state” (and my memory of the first sabras was that there were many pretty secular Israelis in the early days, but the goal was still “Jewish”) then anyone who was not-Jewish was gonna be by definition not-100%-Israeli. So the danger of what the Occupation made a fact – Israel as an anti-Arab apartheid state – was always kinda baked in.

If the Arab states had been less shirty about the issue, if Israel had been less threatened, if the Great Powers had been more concerned…well, they weren’t. So here we are.

And here we’re gonna be. All the killing, all the hate, all the vengeance…there’s no undoing any of that. There’s no getting around it. Too many people now see hating on the “others” as giving their own lives meaning…and Israel is caught inside their own history. They fear giving up the Territories (I had a friend tell me flat-out “Israel cannot survive without the Golan” and that’s a widespread belief about the West Bank, too – they’re strategic depth) but to keep at least the West Bank means continuing apartheid at best, and flat-out ethnic cleansing at worst.

And for the Arab subjects? How galling it must be to look at how the world reacted to South Africa, how Mandela is revered and the armed wing of the ANC is overlooked no matter how many white farmer families they murdered (“one Afrikaaner, one bullet”), compared to how their own Bantustans are viewed.

Nope. It’s just grimdark no matter where you look…"

That's the saddest part.

There might have been another path...if people were different than they are. Kind, gentle, thoughtful...to those others not their own.

But we're not, most of us. We're the same fang-baring monkeys we've always been.

So, no. The moment you set yourself up as a "......" nation; white, black, Christian, Mormon, sun-worshiping...is the moment you make the other the Other, a danger and a threat, the Outsider.

So it was written.

So it is being done. Selah.

Update 10/13: Jim Wright has a thoughtful rumination on the same subject.

Dictator perpetuo

 First. Sorry for the long absence. No excuses. I'm just a bad blogger.

Second, I'll try and do better.

Third...this is not really a new post. 

It's just the latest in a long string of posts that began back in 2007 - Jesus wept, that's sixteen years ago! - with this discussion of how I kept seeing echoes of the Late Roman Republic in the then-U.S.:

"A nation grown suddenly great, enlarged by war, troubled by disturbance abroad and contention at home.
A people divided, made complacent by wealth and power yet enervated by political strife and economic uncertainty.
A government given over to the wealthy, whose vicious infighting consumes their ability to make sound choices for the betterment of the People, or the nation.
A military made hard, and indifferent to democratic ideals, by decades of professionalism and unremitting war.
An economy dominated by great corporations, relentlessly pressing down the opportunities for the individual and the small company."

 My prediction for the coming years was...dark:

"Our system of government, designed for a small agrarian republic, is failing under the weight of size, wealth and power. I don't think we can reverse this cycle, this time. I think the system has broken down, overwhelmed by lucre, by fear and greed and cynicism. I think the American people have lost their zeal for liberty. I think that we are fated to decline into an increasingly turbulent diminution. I think that my children's lives will be more difficult than mine, and theirs more difficult still.

And like the Roman century left at the last frontier milecastle, sacrificed by our Emperor and ignored by our Senate, we can only hope to do our best to go down as slow as possible, die as hard as practical, before the fall of the gathering dark."

From my vantage point here, though, I don't think I was fucking dark enough.

Because I didn't anticipate this magoo:

That a massive plurality of the American public would vote for, and a series of relict institutions - that the Framers crafted to continue to ensure the political mastery of fellow rich guys long after their deaths - would empower, a sleazy nitwit real estate grifter?

Yeah, well...who the fuck would have wanted to anticipate that?

And yet. 

Here we are.

And here's where we're going:

Fucking pay attention to this. 

It's important, and it's not a coincidence or a just a casual aside or a mistake or some random Elmo outgassing. The pissy little Afrikaaner rich kid isn't just bloviating. He's a reliable peek into the wingnut MAGAt id fever-swamps, and this is 1) what they want, and 2) what they think they have with Tubby.

They see him hanging their enemies - and that's me, by the way - from his long red tie the way Sulla's troops hacked and hung their way through Sulla's enemies.

So it's a good moment to talk about ol' Sulla.

Bret Devereaux did a terrific look at the old bastard. I direct you to him; it's all worth the read but here's his nut graf:

"The real problem wasn’t the office of dictator, but the apparatus that surrounded it: the short duration of military commands, the effectiveness and depth of the Roman aristocracy (crucially undermined by Sulla and Marius) and – less discussed here but still crucial in understanding the collapse of the Republic – the willingness of the Roman elite to compromise in order to maintain social cohesion. Without those guardrails, the dictatorship became dangerous, but without them any office becomes dangerous. Sulla and Caesar, after all, both marched on Rome not as dictators, but as consuls and proconsuls. It is the guardrails, not the office, that matter."

And here's mine: Trump has already become our Sulla because he's gotten away with jumping the guardrails. 

The guardrails are already smashed. The attempt to seize power has moved one entire party to become Sulla-ites; they would choose a Caesar rather than accept defeat, so the arrival of Caesar is now only a matter of time and individual, because the GOP is willing to take power through illiberal means rather than accept any sort of United States that doesn't conform to their already-reactionary vision.

We the "liberals", the not-Sulla plurality, are still trying to pretend that these fucking MAGAts are "our fellow citizens" who just have some teensy policy differences with the rest of us, rather than a blood-hungry mob who will kill to seize power rather than consider the horrifying possibility of the existence of a ladyboy in a cocktail frock.

The only hope of avoiding that would have been that in January 2021 the entire US public and the political leaders of all varieties to have 1) turned decisively and violently - in legal terms - against Tubby's attempt at Doing a Sulla, and 2) after impeaching him prosecuting him, convicting him, and jailing him and everyone who helped him try and overturn a popular election loss.

It would have been the equivalent of the Senate and the People of Rome rising against Sulla in 83 BCE when he forced the Senate to appoint him dictator in defiance of the mos maiorum and the traditional forms of dictatorship that had worked for Rome during the Early and Middle Republic.

Would that have worked for the Romans?

Given that Sulla's troopers were out in the Field of Mars butchering thousands of people as he gently suggested that the Roman governance might be well entrusted to him?

Probably not.

But it'd have at least driven home what a chancy throw trying to Do a Sulla was.

Now?

The only way past this mess is for the Republicans to do the same; not just refuse to support but to massively, violently reject Sulla Trump and all and everything he stands for. 

Hmmmm. Let's see. How's that going, again?

WASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSF.

There's no England now...

 ...the title of which I ruthlessly pirated from this LGM post discussing the mix of assumptions, illusions, and legal fictions required to gain and maintain sovereignty.

In this case, of Great Britain

As a person I have - no, really, I'm not kidding - absolutely no opinion one way or another on monarchy as an institution in general and the British "royal" system in particular, other than it seems slightly more nonsensical than most human social gimmicks.

You're my boss because your mom and dad were my boss?

Get the fuck out.

But as We the People seem bound and determined to prove, the "Will of the People" can produce equally ridiculous results (Empty G? That you? Siddown and shaddup, girl.) so, well, okay. You be you, Brits. You want some king? Knock yourselves out.

That the current occupant of the throne of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Scotland, and (a little bit of) Ireland seems to be a doddering old goof whose beliefs include a pottage of nonsense and crunchy granola nature-fakery (along with some genuinely sensible love of nature itself...) seems unimportant to the big picture. The job is kind of central to the idea, not the person who does it.

This picture itself says it better than words...

The goofy hat and gold cocktail frock that encases the old white guy IS the king. The old white guy is just the dressmaker's dummy that holds it up.

The Brits want that? Fine. Not my circus, not my gold-encrusted monkey.

What made me think about all this mummery was turning on the television last Sunday morning (looking for the "other" British thing I think about, football - okay, "soccer", anyway...) and the first image that emerged out of the dark was this:

First, no question; the British do this whole "gorgeous, tactically useless, military spectacle" thing better than anyone. Part of it is the outfits; they've had centuries to get the dress uniforms right, and their Class A's (Number One dress? No, the Wikipedia tells me that the formal name is "Full Dress") are fucking sharp as a razor.

(Don't take this the wrong way; there's military and morale value to that "useless military spectacle". A soldier who looks and feels badass, whose unit looks badass, might well be more badass when the military chips are down.

Modern warfare often makes your own combat power invisible. In a world of artillery and tac air to be seen is to be hit and hit to be destroyed, so we do our best to disperse and hide ourselves.

So there's a value to be had in stepping out on parade, looking good and feeling strong. Illusion? Sure! But there's a sort of "dress for the job you want" to it there, too. And the British have got that shit down cold and hard. Drill Sergeant Lawes was all swoony.)

Second, and finally, though, it drives home the ironic point that kings (and presidents and caudillos and juntas and congresses and so forth) are, at bottom, what they are because they're hedged about with those marching troops.

The "importance" of those rulers, in a national and international sense, is almost entirely dependent on all those soldiers and sailors and fliers in their pretty clothes that marched down the wide mall to the pretty palace last Sunday.

Them - and their gajillion guns and tanks and trucks and hordes of ginormous battle ships and aircraft and bullets and missiles.

But in Britain? Now? Pretty soldiers and sailors and fliers on parade?

That's all this king has left.

The massive armies and fleets they symbolize? The storms of bombers? The sort of real military power that those big blocks of marching men (and now women) once meant? The temporal power that made the "King of Great Britain, Scotland, and Ireland" someone who had to be reckoned with?

Gone.

Modern Britain is a geopolitical afterthought. Not quite Andorra...yet. But no longer any sort of real global economic and political power alongside the real Greats.

And that's fine in a human sense. You can have a good and satisfying and happy life in Andorra as easily as in a Great Power. More easily, frankly, than in some - Russia or the PRC, I'm looking at you. For many of us in this Great Power? There's a cost to all those tanks and ships that might otherwise go to our lives. 

Ask some poor sod in a leaky tent down by the Cut in North Portland how that works.

Watching the pretty marching, it occurred to me that habits of thought are as difficult to break as habits of body. 

We think of "The King (or Queen) of England" as Somebody, a person of consequence, because there's still all that Stuff; palaces and crowns and fancy golden wagons. But mostly because of all those marching soldiers and sailors and fliers.

That's how they became kings and queens back in the day, right? Because they were the bosses of armies and fleets of the baddest motherfuckers around. Because swords (and rifles and cannon and missiles) hoicked them onto the Iron Throne and, beyond all laws and rules and customs, when push came to shove, kept them there by naked force, against all enemies foreign and domestic.

The U.S. president, the Russian premier, the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party?

Those people still have that power.

King Charles III?

Does not.

What makes that interesting is that we just talked about a time when that job, and the person who did that job, did have that power. When all those marching guys really did symbolize a scary badass guy's imperial reach, the mailed fist at the end of a very long royal arm.  

Not anymore.

So if I was British I'm not sure but that Sunday morning might have felt really odd, like I was taking part in a MMORPG, a sort of Great Power cosplay. 

All those gilded coaches and gorgeous uniforms and soldiers and sailors right out of the Empire? 

In the words of Bashō:

natsukusa ya
tsuwamono domo ga
yume no ato.

夏草や兵共がゆめの跡

That is to say;

Waves of summer grass:
All that remains of soldiers’
Impossible dreams.

So as not to end this silly rumination on a serious note, here's the "Wins the Internet" comment from the linked LGM post:

"*hushed Huw Edwards voice:
"And now the Rt. Hon. Capt. Penny Mordaunt RN, PC, MP, acting today in her role as Moistened Bint Peculiar, proceeds down the aisle carrying the magnificent Imperial State Scimitar which she will then lob at His Majesty in a part of the ceremony dating back to the time of King Arthur."

Doge eat doge

I talked about this earlier, but I thought about it again the other day when I went to one of the people I follow on Twitter (Arielle Dror, who does a terrific job with National Women's Soccer League stats...) and this smirking idiot popped up:

Apparently the mutt has something to do with Elmo and his repping for one of those crypto scams ("Dogecoin") and for some bizarre reason the weirdo Afrikaaner has slapped it on his site, possibly to remind people that if you "invest" in cryptocurrency you're the word that fills in the blank in the phrase "A ______ and his money are soon parted."

It's irritating, because it's a reminder of this over-moneyed nitwit, and because I don't use the site for things like news, or to visit anyone other than pundits, sportswriters, and artists I enjoy I don't often have to be reminded of the sorts of scumbags that populate the Dark Intellectual Horsepaste Web or whatever they're calling the MAGAt/"alt-Right"/freikorps-o-sphere these days.

(And while I'm on the subject of "Twitter people I enjoy" I'd be totally remiss in not repping Ironlily for her adorable "Ordo Medaire" Twitter waifus...

Cute 14th Century warrior nuns? Sure! Bring it!

Plus one of her tweets made me find the "Combat of the Thirty", which has to be the fucking hands-down most utterly whack 14th Century chivalric thing EVAH. If you like them, too, stroll over to her Patreon and drop a buck in the collection box. I'm sure the sisters will send an Ave Maria your way.)

Anyway.

Point is...while I yield to no one in my contempt for Elmo and his wingnut horde, the sound and fury is still offstage for me. Don't see or hear it unless I run across someone else who has.

But that's kind of how it is living in a blue city in a blue part of the state while working inside a blue Internet. I don't go looking for these assholes, and I moderate stuff like replies to this blog, so I can hunt them down and kill them if they come looking for me.

I can't imagine what it must be like for people like me in places like Mississippi or Tennessee, though, and that's kind of the point. For them it's Elmo's doggie's ass in their faces 24/7. Everywhere. All the time.

Which is why I don't want anyone to have to live there, either.

But short of doing a Bill Sherman?

I can't do anything any more than I can whip Elmo's doge to kennel. The brach gets to sit by the fire and stink.

Friday Jukebox: Christmas Eve Edition

Seeing as how I've exposed myself as a latte-sippin' effete lover of musical theatre, today's jukebox includes a couple of songs I love from a couple of musicals I adore.

The first is from Anais Mitchell's Hadestown, a darkly gorgeous retelling of the Greek tale of Orpheus and Eurydice reimagined as a modern parable of love, death, fate and power.

At this moment Eurydice is facing a choice; struggle and hunger with her beloved, or a life of surety in Hadestown. The Fates ask her what she's going to do:

Wonderful song in a wonderful show that, if you're familiar with the story doesn't end...well.

The other is sung by this gal:

She's Anne of Cleves, the fourth of the "Six Wives of Henry VIII", and is currently part of the cast of the musical Six, about, well...go figure.

All the ex-wives are fun (for the purest entertainment you might give Anne Boleyn's "Don't Lose Your Head" a listen...) but Anne is the Queen of the Castle (woof!) as you might expect from the one woman who came off her head-on-collision with Hank the Eighth the better off for it.

So this Christmas Eve we can join her "Doin' my thing in my palace in Richmond!"

And as a weird example of the way my mind works, enjoying Six the musical took me from there to thinking about all of the ex-wives and their ex, and from there to the peculiar tale of the infamous jousting accident of 1536, which will be the subject of my next serious post.

But between now and then I'll be back with some Christmas crap.

Cite your sources

I get that this sort of thing has become so utterly bog-standard from the GQP/wingnut Right that the rest of us have gotten to the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ phase and just kind of elide wingnuts and wingnut pols saying it;

Okay, so.

I've made it pretty clear where I stand on the whole business of theocracy. It's a bad idea, and - believe it or not - not just for those on the theocratic-outside. 

It's bad for religion and especially bad for whichever sect gets the whip hand. The whole sorry history of the European Wars of Religion make that clear. Becoming the state religion of Rome (and its successor states) was bad for the Roman Church.

But here's the part that I think we don't talk enough about.

One of the most troublesome aspects of theocracy (or any political system that depends on an unquestioned, received creed - Nazi-style fascism and Soviet-style and Mao-style Communism were others) is that they rely on the fundamental truth of the received narrative.

In other words, for Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism to "work" enough of the fundamental tenets of the creed, from Kapital through the diktats of Stalin, have to be "true". They have to reflect some fundamental political (and economic and social) reality that can be applied to the messy business of daily life.

If the fundamentals don' t work - if they're not really grounded in reality or something close to reality - then the chances of that theocracy of working IRL become significantly more difficult.

We saw that with Marxism.

The fuzzy guy had some interesting ideas. But it turned out that they were really difficult to turn into practice that didn't involve a whole lot of human misery.

Turns out that a LOT of Marxism was a sort of 19th Century political version of Scientology, and it turned out that running a civil society on them was really difficult to turn into anything that wasn't pretty punitive.

So.

What this led me back to was something I got to thinking about when I went and re-read my old battles piece on First Panipat.

When I wrote the original I hadn't gotten to the point of checking the original source materials. I did the usual "I did the research" thing on the Internet where I peeked at the first dozen Google hits and wrote based on what came up.

But the deeper I dug into the sources - especially for the events that occurred prior to widespread literacy and the printing press - the more I discovered that one of the biggest problems with the "accepted narrative" of these ancient events is that it is often 1) culled from a tiny handful of accounts that are often 2) lost in the original form and exist only as multiple-generations-removed from the original, and 3) afflicted with one or more "unreliable narrator" issues (where there are more than one contemporary source the sources contradict each other, sources state as facts things that we know from physical evidence are untrue, are written by authors that are unfamiliar with the physical realities of ancient or medieval warfare, i.e. monks writing military history...).

So, as it turns out, a lot of what we "know" about these past events - actual events we know really happened - turns out to be either untrue, or partially true, or (more often) simply impossible to accurately pin down.

And these are simple events! We're not talking about using them to set up a political system!

Which got me thinking about theocracy, and specifically Christian theocracy; what do we actually know about the actual events, people, places, and things that have been codified over centuries into the "Judeo-Christian ethic" that a lot of theocratic or theo-friendly politicians, pundits, and other authorities like to cite as the best form of human government.

Here's a little chart that displays the historians who wrote about the world of the Mediterranean littoral (including, obviously, what was then the Roman province of Judea) during the period that we interpret from the books of the New Testament that discuss it was the time of Jesus Christ:

As discussed above; this is perforce only a partial list of the people who may have written histories of this time. This is just those whose accounts remain to us!

As noted in the picture, though; none of these authors mention any of the things that are stated in the Gospels (and Acts) that you'd expect to have come to the attention of a diligent historian.

Many cultures around the 1st Century BCE/CE tended to place great import on astrological signs and symbols. Something like the "Christmas Star"? SOMEbody should have said something. Nope.

The "Massacre of the Innocents"; Herod I's supposed ratissage of newborn Messiahs? You'd think someone - particularly Josephus, who was pretty tuned into events in Judea - would have mentioned that. Nope.

The events surrounding the crucifixion - the darkening sky, the earthquake - should have caught the notice of someone writing from somewhere close enough (like Alexandria or Damascus) to have heard, felt, or seen them.

Nope.

I don't know if the whole basis of Christianity is as sketchy as Joseph Smith and his golden plates.

But if I was researching some event in ancient warfare?

I'd be utterly hesitant to place any confidence in that event - what happened, how it happened, even if it actually happened at all - if all the contemporary sources save one ignored it as if it had never existed.

If you want to govern me based on your love of Christian scripture...okay. That's your call.

But to insist that I accept that's any more of an inescapable "truth" than governance based on the events of the Twilight novels or the philosophy expressed in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic?

Sorry. That's not just a bad idea. It's a bad idea based on complete and utter bullshit.

And the fact that We the People don't laugh it out of the public square is...not a good sign.

Christmas Eve, 4:00 am

 The Little House is dark. 

 Well, almost dark; the IKEA light under the shelves in the kitchen corner is on - because I made a pot of coffee about half and hour ago - and the phosphor glow of the laptop screen picks out one end of the table that makes the east half of the front room the "dining room".

Have I ever talked about this house?

It's almost a century old. Ninety-nine years old in just over a week; built in 1922, when this part of what's called the "Peninsula" - the triangle that narrows to the northwest as the Willamette and Columbia Rivers converge - had been Portland for barely seven years.

(Before that it hadn't been much of anything, lightly-built-over farmland between the little city of St. Johns to the northwest and Albina to the south - to the east was pretty much actual farmland all the way out east to the mouth of the Gorge. But that was then.)

The area was slowly filling in, but slowly. Here's the Corps of Engineers aerial photo from 1936. Nearly thirty years after incorporation, and over a decade after the Little House was built, and much of this section of what is now the "Portsmouth" neighborhood was open fields, including actual FARM fields.

This house and the house just to the east were built on the same plan, presumably by the same builder, and because of that probably on "spec"; that is, not to a waiting homeowner but by a developer who hoped to sell the new houses to random buyers.

It's...well, my Bride likes to describe our house as having "ugly bones", and it's true. The two houses were thrown up cheap and quick and small. The original design had a pair of rooms facing the street; a "parlor" and a "dining room" separated by a structural wall from the back of the house. The dining room opened onto the kitchen, the kitchen onto a hallway that ran the length of the house. In the back were two bedrooms on one side and a bathroom on the other. A detached garage sat out in the back facing the alley.

It looked like this:

Both this and the sister house next door have been extensively modified since they were built. Interestingly, the house to the east still retains the original separate parlor-and-dining-room arrangement, but at some point (probably after the fire that damaged the front of our house in the 1980s) the owners tore out the wall between the two front rooms to make a single large one.

They also punched a hole in the load-bearing wall that runs across the house, opening the hall to the front.

At some point they enclosed the back porch, making the weird "room of closets" we ripped apart fo make Missy's now-filthy-trashpile of a bedroom.

Here's the current floorplan:

The best part of the house are the wood floors. They're not hardwood - remember; cheap, quick, and small - but they're a clear, straight-grain fir. 

They were also painted, for some reason, and were repainted numerous times. The earliest coat was the most peculiar; when I stripped the floors in both the bedrooms the bulk of the paint came up in strips. Y'know, the way paint does when you strip it.

The bottom layer, a deep red color, turned into a sort of vile jelly. I suspect it probably had a crap-ton of lead in it, too, but the consistency was the worst part. You had to scrape it with a blade and then wipe the blade to clear it. It also stained hell out of anything it touched. I have no idea what it was, but it was truly nasty.

After all the paint a former owner laid down a then-standard cheap, nasty Seventies or early Eighties short-nap carpet. Pulling THAT shit out was pure pleasure.

Anyway...that's the house. The roof is getting there; it's easily twenty years old and small parts tend to turn up in the yard after a big storm, so that's on the list. The boards of the deck we had built outside the east wall ten years are getting a little shifty, as well, so those need to be replaced soon.

And...well, this seems mean when I just say it out loud, but...the house is getting smaller as I get older, and I'm ready for the kids to move out on their own so we can have it to ourselves.

I'm tired of the mess, and tired of the clutter, tired of having little or no privacy or quiet when everyone's home. They're good kids and I love them, but...I'm ready to start loving them from a bit more distance.

I suspect that makes me a bit of a bastard.

But as I think I've mentioned. I am a bit of a bastard. I've got some sort of deep-seated survival thing that makes me more than a little callous. I'd be the guy who walks out of the airplane-crash-in-the-Andes-where-the-survivors-resort-to-cannibalism having gained three pounds. It's not that I don't feel the griefs and regrets. It's just that I do, and then I go about my business.

So I don't want my kids out of my life; I just want them in it a bit further away.

And I want my life back.

I realize that things would have been difficult during a global pandemic regardless, but I'm quietly furious at Tubby Twatmite and his merry band of incompetent GOP grifters and stooges for fucking it up so badly that I have to sneak around like a weasel in a minefield. 

I miss all the little pleasures; the evenings out, the casual times with friends, the little small change of life.

And it's worse because that time is running out. I don't have thirty or forty years to make up for this lost time. I've got, if I'm lucky, another fifteen or twenty good years and then it's going to go to hell in a hurry. I'm not looking forward to my eighties, assuming I make it that far. 

So I rage at every day we're immured behind the high walls we need to keep the Mongols out, and that makes me resent even more every moment I'm losing to this fucking Plague, and that makes me even more pissed off at the goddamn nitwit and his slobbering cult.

And I'm tired of watching my country and my countrymen become smaller and meaner and stupider and angrier. 

I'm tired of the past four years where everything is transactional, all about the Art of the Deal, contingent on What's In It For Me. I want us to be better, and kinder, and smarter. 

I want a brighter day.

I want what Charlie Pierce wants and said sooner and better than I:

"...may you all have the rest and peace of this mid-winter holiday season. May all your whiskey be mellow and may all your lights shine. And may there always be a candle in the window, calling you home, calling you out of the storm, calling all of us home, together, and home."

Thirteen Years

Thirteen years ago this coming July I started writing at this place. It appears that I promised to "...talk about politics, soccer and adoption.".

Well, I did that for goddamn sure. At the time, of course, we were in the middle of what was the then-tortuous process of international adoption, so that was a huge part of our lives. Now? Well, there's this salty Asian kid who for some reason lives in our house and leaves her shit lying around everywhere while she pursues her fascination with art and butterfly ranching and polaroid pictures. She's not "adoption", she's just our kid, whose connection to "adoption" is reduced to stuff like giving us a hard time for not forcing her to take Mandarin classes whilst skipping blithely over the fact that she was a total butt-pain when we tried back in the day.

She's a sweetie and I love her dearly, but she's also become a paranoid goober about my posting her picture here (as if any of you, assuming anyone actually READS this stuff which I'm inclined to doubt given the stats Facebook shows me, give's a rat's ass) so you're just gonna have to imagine what she looks like today.

Soccer? Not anymore. I've got a whole 'nother crib where I talk about the Beautiful Game.

Funny story about that, actually.

Back in...oh, some time around 2014 or so, I think, I ran into a guy who ran a little soccer site called Slide Rule Pass. It's gone, sadly, because The Internet, but back in the day is was one of the more thoughtful and incisive Portland soccer sites. I went on as a commentor, got into some give-and-take with the blog owner, and tl:dr ended up writing about the Thorns, the women's professional team here in Portland. Another long-time follower and commentor came on board to write about the men's team, the Timbers, and off we went.

A couple of years later - in late 2017 - along comes the guy who was the then-editor of the "big" Portland soccer site, Stumptown Footy, who poaches us away to do the same thing for his site we were doing for SRP. The original Slide Rule owner is busy downstate, loses interest, stops paying the hosting fee, and the site just dies.

So I end up writing a column called "Thorns FC" for Stumptown for the 2018 season while my compa writes "Six Degrees" - it's a fun column and it's still going. Here's a link to him, in case you're interested. Whatever.

Anyway, I do my thing, the same thing I've been doing all along; analyzing teams, tactics, and results, discussing what I think is working and what isn't. I call my shots, and this doesn't impress a lot of the club's officials or some players, and I don't really give a shit about the "newsy" stuff; I'd rather write a deep dive into league goalkeeping metrics or comparing the play of the Thorns' midfielders.

And this, apparently, isn't what the Stumptown editor wants (despite 1) me doing the same thing I've been doing all along when he hoovered me away from Slide Rule Pass, and 2) my having warned him that I wasn't going to change, and not changing). After the end of the 2018 season, I have the dubious distinction of getting canned from a non-paying hobby gig, which is kind of ridiculous when you think about it.

So I took my soccer ball and went...well, not home, but to another website, where I do the same irritating things only for myself rather than for SB Nation.

At least I'm still doing politics. Well...sorta.

The problem with "politics" as it currently exists in the United States is that they are effectively stymied.

"Politics" is, as bottom, simply the civic discussion about how goods and services are distributed. Who gets what, how much, and how that happens. In a rational polity that process is a sort of give-and-take, with the various factions agreeing, disputing, or (often) fighting over those questions. There's typically a "liberal" or "left" side that wants more distribution of a greater share of private wealth for public goods (meaning a more "level" society with more collective activity), and a "conservative" side that wants less of both, that is, less confiscation and distribution of private wealth (meaning more concentration of wealth, a more hierarchical society, and less collective actions).

But the "conservative" side of the U.S. public is no longer a "conservative party". It's a nonsensical cult addicted to magical thinking like "trickle-down economics" and "taxes are theft" that have been proved ridiculous any and every time they are actually attempted, as well as a lunatic cult of individuality that is perhaps best embodied in the utterly mad insistence on the Right of foregoing protective masks in the face of a lethal respiratory pandemic.

There's no discussing or arguing for or against that nonsense. There is nothing I can do, or say, that will ameliorate that sort of idiocy. The American "Right" is utterly lost, they are impervious to reason and discourse, they are obviously, openly, loudly out-and-proud looney cultists. You can see that as well as I can, nothing I can say will change that, and nothing I can say will help. They're just fucking nuts, and repeating "Jesus wept, they're just fucking nuts!" is the ultimate in wasting breath.

So I'm not really bothering anymore, other than the occasional snark at the idiocy-of-the-day, like the whole "Blue Lives Matter" bullshit I talked about the other morning.

What else..?

I'm still picking my way slowly through military history though I've largely run out of events that intrigue me. I'm thinking of adding one final entry to the "Imperial Japanese Army - What Went Wrong" series this August with a short diversion on "August Storm", the Soviet offensive through Manchuria in 1945, but beyond that...hmmm. Any other suggestions?

I try and keep this from being a daddy blog, so I don't see doing more family stuff, despite the brutal reality that I'm turning out to be a Suburban Dad. Yesterday, "Father's Day"? Moved the lawn. Cooked hamburgers on the grill while sipping a beer.

Christ, I'm a meme.

Portland and Oregon are great places, so possibly I'll keep posting about my Northwest home. One of the saddest parts of the Plague Year is not being able to get out and about the way I used to.

So that's kind of where this place has gone as an early teenager. At least I'm here and it's still here; long-form blogging is going the way of cuneiform, but I'm going to try and make it run as long as I can.

Any suggestions for subject matter, though..?

Oh, wait...

Cats!