Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
This is interesting:
John McCrae’s Flanders Fields is iconic. No more need be said. Unfortunately, its meaning has been distorted by the most popular voice and instrumental accompaniment. This new reading of the poem has transformed Flanders Fields’ meaning. My guess is that this metamorphosis was unintentional, but one and all should work to recover the original public meaning.
Neptunus Lex wrote about his “youngster” cruise as a Midshipman attending the Naval Academy. This is the first of two cruises that a Midshipman takes: during the second cruise, your activities are those of an officer…
But during youngster year, you sail as a Sailor. You wear dungarees, chip paint, sweep passageways and stand enlisted watches. You sleep in enlisted berthing, eat in the enlisted mess and attempt to get some sense of the men you are supposed to lead in three year’s time, and the lives they live. ..You are tempted to believe that this work is beneath you. You are a Naval Academy midshipman, the cream of the crop. You are special.
and
You spend some time in the engineering plant – in a gas turbine ship, an amazingly clean and quiet space. Totally incomprehensible. It resembles nothing at all like the wiring diagrams in your thermodynamics textbooks.
But there’s a 23 year old Sailor who didn’t go to college, never read Thoreau, and who nevertheless understands it all. He patiently tries to teach you how it works. He speaks to you like one would speak to an elderly person in a nursing home, slowly, simply. You feel patronized, and worse: You realize that you do not entirely understand.
You are beginning to learn – not about engineering. But about Sailors.
and
You’re heading home. Bridge watches now, under the tutelage of 20 year old quartermaster’s mates. Men from small towns that you’ve never hear of, in states you remember dimly from your grade school geography. From farming families, where no one went to college, and no one was expected to. Men who could fix your position to a hundred yards moving at 20 knots across the endless sea using only the stars, a stopwatch and a sextant. Men who could debate the finer points of Strauss and Engels. Men who play classical guitar to an appreciative audience in the 80 man berthing during their time off duty. Who have dreams of their own that they will tell you about, when no one else is listening. Men who would risk their lives to save yours in the midst of a flaming inferno, without hesitating for a moment to reckon the cost, to tally the odds. Men who would die for you, if they had to.
And you begin to realize that you’re not special because of who you are, the grades you got in high school or where you’re going to college. You’re special because of who you’ve been selected to lead, when your time comes.
And that, my friends, is the beginning of wisdom.
Definitely read the whole thing.
There was a general…can’t remember who it was…who remarked that you will can never be a good officer unless you like Soldiers. (And you can’t fake it for long, he added.) I think it is pretty clear that Lex liked Sailors.
One way of evaluating any leader…military, political, business executive..is his attitude toward those he leads or wants to lead.
I posted a bit on the role of the individual and terrorism last year.
We are a week from the Trump inauguration and there are all sorts of threats by the left to disrupt the inauguration.
What can individuals do ?
Tomorrow, my wife and daughter are going to drive to Tucson where we have bought a new home. They plan to leave early and about 10 AM will be passing the Tonopah turnoff on the way to Phoenix. Yesterday, there was quite a bit of excitement there.
According to Col. Frank Milstead, the director of DPS, the trooper was responding to the shots fired call when he came upon a single-vehicle rollover wreck near Tonopah. A woman had been ejected from that vehicle.
The trooper immediately stopped and began laying out flares.
DPS Capt. Damon Cecil said the trooper — a 27-year-veteran of the agency — was ambushed by the suspect when he got out of his vehicle at the scene of the rollover. The trooper was shot and wounded.
I have not yet heard if the suspect was crazy or what motive he might have had. A passerby stopped and told the suspect to stop his assault on the trooper. The passerby then went back to his car and got his gun. He told the suspect to stop or he would shoot him. He did not stop and the passerby shot and killed him.
Milstead, speaking from the hospital to which his trooper and taken, said an “uninvolved third party” who was driving by saw the trooper grappling with the suspect and stopped to help, eventually shooting and killing the suspect.
That civilian, using the wounded trooper’s radio, was the one who alerted DPS to the shooting.
“To the civilian on the DPS trooper’s radio, if you can hear me, I need you to let me know where the suspect is that got in an altercation with our trooper,” the dispatcher could be heard saying on the scanner.
“The suspect is … occasionally breathing or stirring. He’s been shot by a passerby,” the man with the wounded trooper’s radio calmly responded. “He’s laying right next to the officer.”
Arizona has been an open carry state since it was a state. The chief of the Department of Public Safety said his trooper would not be alive but for the passerby with the gun.
I am leaving a state that has become horribly corrupt since I first came here in 1956. I have much higher hopes for Tucson where we will be living after Monday.
It has been a hassle but I have high hopes for the new place in Tucson.
I am taking all my guns. California is Chicago with good weather. My niece who is a nurse at Rush medical center has a friend, another nurse with metastatic breast cancer but still working. Yesterday, leaving work, she was held up. She told the gunman, “Go ahead and shoot me, I have nothing to lose.” He robbed her but did not shoot her.
It is interesting that there is such a high overlap of political opinion between College Professors and Entertainers…the latter category not being known for their intellectual or scholarly tastes, on the average.
Significance, if any?
