USA

Millennial Boyz

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I’m on a mission from Lex. On Thu 12 Jul at 5:34 PM CDT, he wrote me:

> Are the Millennials Different?
>
> I know you are a fan. Any response must be cross-posted on CB!

I can think of nothing better to do on a fine Bastille Day evening — having missed the concert by virtue of being 400 miles to the southwest — than consume modest quantities of ethanol in the form of Boulevard Lunar Ale and compose a rambling post for infliction on the readership here. By way of my usual thinning out of my prospective audience, graze on over to Arcturus for what has become known as the Baby Boomer Apocalypse post, which will 1) impart what I think is the most important aspect of Strauss & Howe’s model and 2) very likely cause you to decide you’ve got better things to do than read the rest of this.

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Oren — Power, Faith, and Fantasy

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Oren, Michael B., Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present, Norton & Co., New York, 2007. 778pp.

History, at its most useful, steadies the nerves and provides perspective on the events splashed daily across TV screens and PC monitors. It should also give us a feel for the problems amenable to solution and those that are permanent (or, at the very least, enduring).

By these criteria, Michael Oren’s Power, Faith, and Fantasy is a history book that should be on the shelf of most American homes … and available at every public library.

The author has made an explicit attempt to write a history of America’s relations with the Middle East that serves the general reader rather than just an academic audience. Practically speaking, this means drawing more extensively on biography and the popular culture of each period of American history to illustrate relations with the Middle East. To better organize the book’s contents, he employs the three themes listed in the title. Power references American trading initiatives, commercial interests, and security concerns. Faith refers to the Christian and Jewish religious interests in the Middle East (as home to Holy Places, putative location for Christ’s reappearance, potential source of converts, and national homeland for the Jews). Fantasy describes the American representations of the Middle East, first triggered by the anonymous 1706 English translation of the Arabian Nights, and elaborated in subsequent years in many books, exhibitions, social fashions, and movies.

Oren weaves the impact of these three themes through the different eras of American history … from the turbulent post-Revolution, pre-Constitution time up to our own. Post-WW2 American involvement in the Middle East is already very thoroughly documented in English, so Oren provides a quick summary of the most recent period in his book. It’s a worthwhile coda but primarily serves those not already familiar with the details. The bulk of Power, Faith, and Fantasy focuses on the period 1776 to 1950.

Risking gross over-simplification of a very large and careful summary, I’d like to highlight the historical phases in America’s relations with the region, as presented by the author.

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Recycling

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Blog-city is closing my personal blog account, and given their spotty service, I’m not going to pay to upgrade to their premium service. For my personal blog, I am going into a joint venture with my blog-buddy CW (who is much more interesting than I am, and is worth reading just for his sleuthing on the missing 727 alone). For the next few months, I’m going to be recycling some old posts, and given Ralf’s post below, I thought that the links in this one might be interesting to some of you:

It is well known that a large contingent of German soldiers fought with the British in the American Revolution, most of whom hailed from the Landgraviates of Hesse-Kassel. These troops were not mercenaries in the traditional sense, since rent-a-regiments were common in 18th Century Europe – it gave the home state revenue, it gave the troops something to do other than cause trouble at home, and it kept the troopers at peak combat readiness. As part of the rental agreement, the Hessian state received guarantees of mutual defense from England in case of attack by France, so in a sense the Hessians were fighting for their homeland by serving the British Crown. What is less well known is that some of those troops stayed in America after the war.

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