USA

Springs, Cables, and the Rebirth of America

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Last year, I came across an essay written by 17-year-old Ruby LaRocca, winner of a Free Press essay contest. She spoke of The taut cable of high expectations and the bad consequences that occur when that cable is slackened.  The essay reminded me in a passage in Antoine de St-Exupery’s novel of ideas, Citadelle, about which I had recently been thinking.

In this book (published in English under the unfortunate title Wisdom of the Sands), the protagonist is the ruler of a fictional desert kingdom.   One night, he visits the prison which holds a man who has been sentenced to death in the morning is being held. He muses that the soul of this man may well contain an inward beauty of some form–perhaps his sentence should be commuted?…but decides otherwise:

For by his death I stiffen springs which must not be permitted to relax.

The particular context in which I had been thinking of this St-Exupery passage was the situation in San Francisco.  Failure to enforce laws–while endlessly searching for ‘inward beauty’ in the perpetrators of a wide range of crimes–had resulted in a relaxation of those springs of which St-Exupery wrote. And not only in San Francisco.

Our society at present suffers from both the loosening of Ruby LaRocca’s ‘taut cables’…which act to pull people upward…and St-Exupery’s ‘springs’…which reduce the incidence of disastrous falls. Over the past several years, both of these (related) failure modes have become increasingly dominant.  I believe that we were on a track to a very dark time…see my post Head-Heart-Stomach…but that we now have a real chance to turn things around.  There really does seem to be a new feeling among a high proportion of Americans and across several dimensions of attitudes and opinions.  Not all Americans, of course…but a lot. And while there are many ways things can go wrong, there is plenty of reason for hope.  We’ll discuss some of the threats and challenges later (soon), but for the moment, let’s briefly relax and breathe a sigh of relief as to what has been–at least for now–avoided.

Nothing is saved forever, as Connie Willis noted in one of her novels, but in America, something very important has been saved, at least for now. It will need to be saved many more times in the future, both the near future and the far future, but for now, thankfulness and celebration are appropriate.

(I discussed the Ruby LaRocca essay and the St-Exupery passage previously, here)

Lighted Airways and the Radio Range (updated)

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When airplanes first started to be used for serious transportation purposes, sometime after World War I, the problems involved with flight at night and in periods of low visibility became critical. Transcontinental airmail, for example, lost much of its theoretical speed advantage if the plane carrying the mail had to stop for the night. Gyroscopic flight instruments addressed the problem of controlling the airplane without outside visual references, but there remained the problem of navigation.

An experiment in 1921 demonstrated that airmail could be successfully flown coast-to-coast, including the overnight interval, with the aid of bonfires located along the route.  The bonfires were soon displaced by a more permanent installation based on rotating beacons. The first lighted airway extended from Chicago to Cheyenne…the idea was that pilots of coast-to-coast flights could depart from either coast in early morning and reach the lighted segment before dusk.  The airway system rapidly expanded to cover much of the country–by 1933, the Federal Airway System extended to 18,000 miles of lighted airways, encompassing 1,550 rotating beacons. The million-candlepower beacons were positioned every ten miles along the airway, and in clear weather were visible for 40 miles. Red or green course lights at each beacon flashed a Morse identifier so that the pilot could definitely identify his linear position on the airway.

Lighted airways solved the navigation problem very well on a clear night, but were of limited value in overcast weather or heavy participation. You might be able to see the beacons through thin cloud or light rain, but a thicker cloud layer, or heavy rain/snow, might leave you without navigational guidance.

The answer was found in radio technology. The four-course radio range transmitted signals at low frequency (below the AM broadcast band) in four quadrants. In two of the quadrants, the Morse letter N (dash dot) was transmitted continuously; in the other two quadrants, there was continuous transmission of  the Morse A (dot dash.) The line where two quadrants met formed a course that a pilot could follow by listening to the signal in his headphones: if he was exactly “on the beam,” the A and the N would interlock to form a continuous tone; if he was to one side or the other, he would begin to hear the A or N code emerging.

The radio range stations were located every 200 miles, and were overlaid on the lighted airways, the visual beacons of which continued to be maintained. The eventual extent of the radio-range airway system is shown in the map below.  All that was required in the airplane was a simple AM radio with the proper frequency coverage.

The system made reliable scheduled flying a reality, but it did have some limitations. Old-time pilot Ernest Gann described one flight:

Beyond the cockpit windows, a few inches beyond your own nose and that of your DC-2’s, lies the night. Range signals are crisp, the air smooth enough to drink the stewardess’s lukewarm coffee without fear of spilling it…Matters are so nicely in hand you might even flip through a magazine while the copilot improves his instrument proficiency…

Suddenly you are aware the copilot is shifting unhappily in his seat. “I’ve lost the range. Nothing.”

You deposit the Saturday Evening Post in the aluminum bin which already holds the metal logbook and skid your headphones back in place…There are no signals of any kind or the rap of distance voices from anywhere in the night below. There is only a gentle hissing in your headphones as if some wag were playing a recording of ocean waves singing on a beach.

You reach for a switch above your head and flip on the landing lights. Suspicion confirmed. Out of the night trillions of white lines are landing toward your eyes. Snow. Apparently the finer the flakes the more effective. It has isolated you and all aboard from the nether world. The total effect suggests you might have become a passenger in Captain Nemo’s fancy submarine.

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Those Assertions About Trump’s “Darkness”

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A Financial Times headline today refers to “Trump’s dark campaign.” This is not surprising coming from the FT, but even the WSJ today refers to Trump’s “dark pitch.” If one wants to look for Darkness, I’d suggest that it can be found in the rants of the Harris campaign and Democrats in general against Trump and especially against his supporters: ‘Fascists’…’garbage’…’anti-American’. I also see plenty of darkness in the ideology and policies of the Democratic Party…the divisive obsession with race/ethnicity…the casting of blame rather than solving problems, as with the blaming of grocery prices on ‘price gouging’ rather than government-caused inflation…the strange Democrat affinity with the Iranian regime…the tolerance of anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish violence on campuses and elsewhere…plenty of darkness there.

This video by a celebrity Harris promoter certainly sounds to me like a clear threat against Trump supporters. More darkness.

I haven’t personally attended any of Trump’s rallies, but those who have–such as this foreign student, who attended both Trump and Harris rallies–generally report an atmosphere which is positive rather than negative, and welcoming rather than hostile.

As an example of Trump’s ‘darkness’, the WSJ quotes from a rally speech in which he referred to ‘fighting against the most sinister and corrupt forces on earth.’ I wouldn’t have said it exactly that way, but there is no question that America is under threat by some trends that, if not interrupted and reversed, will destroy our society. And these trends are all heavily pushed by the Democratic Party and groups closely associated with it.  I’ve discussed these trends in my post Vectors of Societal Destruction–and the Growing Pushback Against Them.

Hopefully, the pushback will be strong enough to interrupt and reverse these trends before it is too late.

The Phobia(s) That Are Destroying America

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Many educated/urban/upper-middle-class people show a disturbing level of fear, contempt, and anger directed toward Christians, non-college graduates, and rural people (especially southerners).   This complex of negative emotions often greatly exceeds anything that these same people feel toward radical Islamists or dangerous rogue-state governments. I’m not a Christian myself,  but I’d think that you would be a lot more worried about people who want to cut your head off, blow you up, or at a bare minimum shut down your freedom of speech than about people who want to talk to you about Jesus (or Nascar!)

It seems that there are quite a few people who vote Democratic, even when their domestic and foreign-policy views are not closely aligned with those of the Democratic Party, because they view the Republican Party and its candidates as being dominated by Christians and “rednecks.”  The hostility toward Trump is substantially motivated by hostility toward those who are his supporters (or those who are assumed to be his supporters)

What is the origin of this anti-Christian, anti-noncollege, anti-“redneck” feeling? Some have suggested that it’s a matter of oikophobia … the aversion to the familiar, or “the repudiation of inheritance and home,” as philosopher Roger Scruton uses the term. I think this is doubtless true in some cases: the kid who grew up in a rural Christian home and wants to make a clean break with his family heritage, or the individual who grew up in an oppressively conformist Bible Belt community. But I think such cases represent a relatively small part of the category of people I’m talking about here. A fervently anti-Christian, anti-Southern individual who grew up in New York or Boston or San Francisco is unlikely to be motivated by oikophobia. Indeed, far from being excessively familiar, Christians and Southern people are likely as exotic to him as the most remote tribes of New Guinea.

Equally exotic, but much safer to sneer at. And here, I think, we have the explanation for much, though not all, of the anti-Christian, anti-Southern bigotry. It is a safe outlet for the unfortunately-common human tendency to look down on members of an out group. Safer socially than bigotry against Black people or gays or those New Guinea tribesmen; much less likely to earn you the disapproval of authority figures in school or work or of your neighbors. Safer physically than saying anything negative about Muslims, as you’re much less likely to face violent retaliation.

There are some other factors which I think motivate some people toward the anti-Christian anti-Southern mindset. One is the fear that Christians, especially Southern Christians, are anti-science, and that Republican electoral victories will reduce Federal support for science or even lead to restrictions on scientific research. And indeed, some conservatives/Republicans have been known to make some pretty strange statements, such as former Rep. Paul Broun’s assertion, “All that stuff I was taught about evolution, embryology, the Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell.”

But in realistic terms, there is far more threat to US science from “animal rights” terrorists – the vast majority of whom are politically on the Left – than from anti-evolutionists. And there is even more threat from  pressures on allowable and non-allowable topics for university research…pressures which emanate almost exclusively from the “woke” Left. And numerous followers of “progressivism” are believers in various forms of mysticism, such as magical crystals and a conscious Gaia, which are at least as inconsistent with pure scientific materialism as are the Biblical miracles. At the level of practical technology, the irrational hostility toward nuclear power, genetically-modified crops, etc., comes almost entirely from the Left.

Another factor is sex. Many seem to fear that conservatives/Republicans are anti-sex “Puritans” and will force women into metaphorical (or maybe not so metaphorical!) chastity belts. Democratic Party operatives have done their best to conflate opposition to forcing institutions to pay for birth control with opposition to birth control itself. In reality, no serious Republican national-level politician is remotely proposing the banning of birth control or, for that matter, the banning of homosexuality. And, speaking of “Puritanism,” we should note that the anti-male hostility emanating from certain radical feminists, who are almost entirely creatures of the Left, has done much to poison the relationship between the sexes, especially on college campuses.

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Shall It Be Sustained?

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As a July 4th tradition, I’ve posted an excerpt from Stephen Vincent Benet’s poem Listen to the People.  The title I originally used for these posts was It Shall Be Sustained, which is from the last line of Benet’s poem.

Narrator:

This is Independence Day,
Fourth of July, the day we mean to keep,
Whatever happens and whatever falls
Out of a sky grown strange;
This is firecracker day for sunburnt kids,
The day of the parade,
Slambanging down the street.
Listen to the parade!
There’s J. K. Burney’s float,
Red-white-and-blue crepe-paper on the wheels,
The Fire Department and the local Grange,
There are the pretty girls with their hair curled
Who represent the Thirteen Colonies,
The Spirit of East Greenwich, Betsy Ross,
Democracy, or just some pretty girls.
There are the veterans and the Legion Post
(Their feet are going to hurt when they get home),
The band, the flag, the band, the usual crowd,
Good-humored, watching, hot,
Silent a second as the flag goes by,
Kidding the local cop and eating popsicles,
Jack Brown and Rosie Shapiro and Dan Shay,
Paul Bunchick and the Greek who runs the Greek’s,
The black-eyed children out of Sicily,
The girls who giggle and the boys who push,
All of them there and all of them a nation.
And, afterwards,
There’ll be ice-cream and fireworks and a speech
By somebody the Honorable Who,
The lovers will pair off in the kind dark
And Tessie Jones, our honor-graduate,
Will read the declaration.
That’s how it is. It’s always been that way.
That’s our Fourth of July, through war and peace,
That’s our fourth of July.

And a lean farmer on a stony farm
Came home from mowing, buttoned up his shirt
And walked ten miles to town.
Musket in hand.
He didn’t know the sky was falling down
And, it may be, he didn’t know so much.
But people oughtn’t to be pushed around
By kings or any such.
A workman in the city dropped his tools.
An ordinary, small-town kind of man
Found himself standing in the April sun,
One of a ragged line
Against the skilled professionals of war,
The matchless infantry who could not fail,
Not for the profit, not to conquer worlds,
Not for the pomp or the heroic tale
But first, and principally, since he was sore.
They could do things in quite a lot of places.
They shouldn’t do them here, in Lexington.

He looked around and saw his neighbors’ faces…

The poem is very long, and is worth reading in full. The full text was published in Life Magazine; it is online here.

Benet’s poem ends with these words:

We made it and we make it and it’s ours
We shall maintain it. It shall be sustained

But shall it?

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