L. C. Rees

Unhistory Friday: The Discovery of Middle Earth

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As  The Discovery of Middle Earth:  Mapping the Lost World of the Celts nears its end and  appeals to  Geoffrey of Monmouth as a source of historical truth proliferate,  even the most oblivious reader starts to get the joke: Geoffrey’s  Historia Regum Britanniae  was a milestone in the genre of historical fiction satirizing historical non-fiction by posing as  historical non-fiction.

Geoffrey succeeded so well that he earned 900 years worth of cranks mistaking his fiction for fact. As with Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, Geoffrey’s character of King Arthur is so compelling that many Historia  readers keep insisting that Arthur must be real. This insistence is yet another demonstration that fiction believed shapes history as much as fact believed.  The ideal of the real (but fake) Arthur shaped how Latin Christian rulers portrayed themselves and (sometimes) acted, and how their subjects thought they should portray themselves and act. Edward I  even resorted to  digging up Arthur’s bones to co-opt fiction to support his  conquest of Free Britain.

Longshanks to Britons: See here?  Arthur’s bones. No Once and Future King can save you now.

(Twirls mustache).

The Discovery of Middle Earth  does not approach works by titans of its genre like Rachel Carson or Umberto Eco; the library  Discovery of Middle Earth  belongs in would explode in swirls of subatomic particles if it ever brushed against Eco’s antilibrary. But, even if it does not belong in  Eco’s  library, it does belong in another Eco chamber. Like Eco’s  Foucault’s Pendulum,  Discovery of Middle Earth satirizes independent scholars who start drinking their own research. Though it lacks the deep scholarly verve and meticulous revelry in small details  that makes Eco’s masterpiece a feast for readers,  Discovery of Middle Earth  is more approachable to readers who might get lost in  Foucault’s  weeds of arcana but who want more than the thin swill of  the Dan Brown corpus.

The protagonist of  The Discovery of Middle Earth  (a thinly veiled pastiche  of best-selling British highbrow tourist guide author Graham Robb) is an English independent scholar who spirals down into madness as an artifact recovered in the backyard of his Oxford cottage leads him to discover a previously unseen “Celtic” geography of lines drawn across Europe by “Druids” so contemporary that they would not be out of place at a Davos symposium. Soon enough he starts seeing this pattern staring back at him from obscure rural corners of France and later Britain and Ireland. As with all madness, he first becomes one with the pattern and then descends below that oneness when he finds the pattern staring back into him.

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John Quincy Adams on Gaza

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Our relations with Spain the Palestinian National Authority (PNA)  remain nearly in the state in which they were at the close of the last session. The convention of 1802 Oslo Accords  of 1991 and 1995, providing for the adjustment of a certain portion of the claims of our citizens for injuries sustained by spoliation, and so long suspended by the Spanish  PA  Government  has at length been ratified by it, but no arrangement has yet been made for the payment of another portion of like claims, not less extensive or well founded, or for other classes of claims, or for the settlement of boundaries. These subjects have again been brought under consideration in both countries, but no agreement has been entered into respecting them.

In the mean time events have occurred which clearly prove the ill effect of the policy which that Government has so long pursued on the friendly relations of the two countries, which it is presumed is at least of as much importance to Spain the PLA as to the United States Israel to maintain. A state of things has existed in the Floridas Gaza Strip the tendency of which has been obvious to all who have paid the slightest attention to the progress of affairs in that quarter. Throughout the whole of those Provinces to which the Spanish Palestinian title extends the Government of Spain  the PLA has scarcely been felt. Its authority has been confined almost exclusively to the walls of Pensacola and St. Augustine  the West Bank, within which only small garrisons have been maintained. Adventurers from every country, fugitives from justice, and absconding slaves have found an asylum there. Several tribes of Indians  Islamists, strong in the number of their warriors terrorists, remarkable for their ferocity, and whose settlements extend to our limits, inhabit those Provinces.

These different hordes of people, connected together, disregarding on the one side the authority of Spain the PA, and protected on the other by an imaginary line which separates Florida the Gaza Strip from the United States Israel, have violated our laws prohibiting the introduction of slaves, have practiced various frauds on our revenue, and committed every kind of outrage on our peaceable citizens which their proximity to us enabled them to perpetrate.

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Kill the Department of Defense

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew  bureaucracy: “You know, I’m a juggler, and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does.”

Uncle Theodore
Uncle Theodore

As in many aspects of FDR’s life, his wife’s uncle  was a model. As Assistant Secretary of the Navy, young hotshot Uncle Theodore proved chronically wearisome to his boss, veteran Massachusetts state Republican machine cog  John Davis Long. When Long took a day off once, Uncle Theodore, liberated by a sudden vacuum of adult supervision, tried to start a war. Long countermanded Uncle Theodore’s orders but it was too late: Uncle Theodore had his war and it was splendid.

Padawan
Portrait of the master as a young man

In 1913, to prevent regime uncertainty, newly elected Thomas Woodrow Wilson (may his bones be crushed)  said, “Fine, you want a Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, I got your Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy right here.” So into the family sinecure went spunky 31 year old New York State Democratic Senator Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He immediately commenced his own Long struggle against his boss, Raleigh, North Carolina News & Observer publisher and race baiter  Josephus Daniels. While Daniels focused on high-level issues like controlling every radio in America, FDR Uncle Theodored him by secretly lobbying Congress to  build up U.S. naval strength to levels Daniels opposed. FDR even attempted to start his own splendid little war by mobilizing the U.S. Navy against unrestricted Hun submarine attacks in 1917.

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You will be gamed

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It is dangerous to promote an ideal and pretend it’s not for entertainment purposes only.

From time to time, motivational slogans like “national interest” and “grand strategy” have proved useful in prodding the slothful along. Fiction has power to move people and move people it does. Mixing up myth for reality, however, leads to cognitive whiplash when reality steps, as it must, on myth. Many gleaming ideals are little more than bright colors painted on after the fact to cover up grimy back stage shenanigans and less than visionary ad hoc improvisations, usually for temporary short-term political gain.

Entering politics, if you lead with your idealistic chin, you will soon discover you have a glass jaw. As Warren Buffet might have said once, “If you’ve been playing poker for half an hour and you still don’t know who the patsy is, you’re the patsy.” This is true even in organizations that are reputedly non-political. Experience suggests that, the more someone protests how non-political they are, the more political they prove to be.  Consider three of the most consequential peace treaties of the twentieth century:

“Key West Agreement”  (Function of the Armed Forces and the Joint Chiefs of Staff)

Signed: April 21, 1948

Belligerents: United States Army, United States Navy, United States Air Force

Results:

  • ‘The Navy would be allowed to retain its own combat air arm “…to conduct air operations as necessary for the accomplishment of objectives in a naval campaign…”‘
  • “The Army would be allowed to retain aviation assets for reconnaissance and medical evacuation purposes.”
  • “The Air Force would have control of all strategic air assets, and most tactical and logistic functions as well.”

Pace-Finletter Memorandum of Understanding

Signed: November 4, 1952

Belligerents:  United States Army, United States Air Force

Results:

  • “removed the weight restrictions on helicopters that the U.S. Army could use”
  • “widened the range of tasks the Army’s helicopters could be used for”
  • “created an arbitrary 5,000 pounds weight restriction that limits the Army’s ability to fly fixed-wing aircraft”
  • “the U.S. Army…is dependent upon the U.S. Air Force to purchase and man fixed-wing ground-attack aircraft to fulfill close air support missions”

Johnson-McConnell agreement

Signed: April 6, 1966

Belligerents:  United States Army, United States Air Force

Results:

  • “the U.S. Army agreed to give up its fixed-wing tactical airlift aircraft”
  • “the U.S. Air Force relinquished its claim to most forms of rotary wing aircraft”
These are examples of what Paul Wolfowitz said about the use of “weapons of mass destruction” as the primary justification for the Iraq intervention:

“The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason,” Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in a Pentagon transcript of an interview with Vanity Fair.
 
The magazine’s reporter did not tape the telephone interview and provided a slightly different version of the quote in the article: “For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.”

America’s armed forces are, and always have been, dens filled with vipers scrambling for procurement bucks. For every John Boyd willing to subsist on morning dew and lichen gnawed from the bottom of rocks for principle, there are fifty James Wilkinsons with eyes single to the glory of their personal bottom line.

Some of this is due to unideal incentives to let slip the inner sociopath when someone, previously constrained by circumstance of the most bootlicking sort, acquires power. A professor of H.W. Brands  used to observe “a country gets the foreign policy it can afford”. This is why, since political power is a form of supply that generates its own demand, today’s U.S. has a finger in every global pie. Similarly, a problem at a lower rank can become a catastrophe when promoted to higher rank. More power comes with more opportunities for pratfalls: an officer gets the Paula Broadwell he can afford.

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