Imagine you just got onto a bus and the only empty seat is next to some self-absorbed slacker who’s plugged into an iPod, eyes closed, rocking back and forth and singing loudly to himself. Now you know what it feels like to watch the new TV commercials for Apple’s online music service.
Grandpa’s Skyhawk
Jonathan pointed me to this post, about a school in California which is not sure it wants to keep the A-4 Skyhawk which has been on display out front for many years. This got me thinking.
A generation or more back people had few qualms whatever about weapons and war as matters of public celebration and commemoration. The period from the end of World War II until the late Sixties was one in which there was an unusual consensus about the rightness of America’s cause and the wars it fought during that period. Liberals had supported WWII because it was against fascism, and the old time, main street Republicans had supported it grudgingly because we had been attacked and Southerners supported it because it was a war and they always support America’s wars. The various tanks and howitzers in town squares or in front of VFW halls come from this era. This also partly due to the fact that there was a mountainous heap of surplus tanks, etc. which could be gotten easily, welded in place, and painted green. (And you Chicagoans should note next time you are strolling downtown that the State Street bridge is the Bataan-Corregidor Bridge.) The consensus era continued in the early Cold War, which was led initially by Democratic liberal internationalism, so liberals supported it, and main street conservatives supported it because it was against Godless communism, and Southerners supported it because it led to a larger military and the possibility of a war as well as because they didn’t much care for Godless communism, either. So, war and the threat of war and our recent victories were in the air at this time, and monuments featuring weapons were not particularly controversial.
Airplanes had a special appeal. There were lots of surplus planes, for one thing. Also, added to the general willingness to use hardware for commemoration, there was a romanticism about aviation, especially jet aviation, which it is hard for us to conjure up. My Dad got his pilots license when he was 16, in1945, and he was taught by true first-generation pilots. So I have tasted that pioneer-era excitement in hearsay fashion. But you only have to look at the popular culture of the late 40s and 50s and you see aircraft and jet imagery everywhere. Chuck Berry even had Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer “zooming like a Sabre jet.” So, airplane monuments were doubly appealing during that period. Airplane monuments were in large part a celebration of American know-how and technology and speed and energy and vitality — at least as much as they were of an instrument of war.
Previous eras have had a more ambivalent public response to our nation’s wars, and little or no technophilia such as we saw in the Jet Age. WWI produced very few public monuments. In fact, the Yankees of New England and the Upper Midwest had opposed the war, grudgingly supported Wilson once we got in, and then turned against the whole thing the minute it was over. There is a World War I monument in Oak Park, Illinois which is massive, impressive and quietly tasteful — but it is a memorial to the dead, not a celebration of victory. The Spanish American War was met with genuine public ambivalence, and was so badly botched in its execution, that there was little desire for commemoration. The Civil War produced the many cannons and soldier statues in county seat squares, on both sides. In New England and in the upper Midwest every old town square has its white-steepled Protestant church, often a brick late Victorian Catholic church, old trees and large houses on the surrounding streets — and a civil war statue or cannon. But the tone of these monuments tends to be somber or stoic rather than celebratory. Most monuments to the Revolution were put up many years after the events, like the Minuteman statue at Lexington, a stark and beautiful work, and the somewhat less powerful statue at Concord. Saint-Gaudens’s equestrian statue of George Washington in the Boston public gardens is a magnificent and frankly martial work, but it was more a celebration of American national identity and unity than of the war per se. The Mexican war was a land-grab by the Slave-ocracy, which was not popular in the North. U.S. Grant participated in it, and said it was the most shameful chapter in our history. I’ve never seen a monument to it. Of course, the very popular Vietnam monument in Washington DC is anything but celebratory. Its very abstractness allows each visitor to bring to it and take away from it what they want and need.
Anyway, the people who are blessed with an A-4 Skyhawk in front of their school should be grateful to have it. It is a relic of a different time, and we should respect, or at least try to understand charitably and sympathetically, what earlier generations were trying to do by putting it up. The people at the school should understand and appreciate their history. Like it or not, this is a nation built and sustained by war. For all its faults, it is a proud and worthy history. And whether you agree with that or not, we should all be able to squarely face that history, and its tangible relics, and preserve them for the next generation.
Update. Jonathan sent me a link which shows that the Washington statue was not by St. Gaudens. A little research discloses it was in fact sculpted in 1869 by Thomas Ball. So much for Lex’s feigned omniscience.
Doctors as Government Snoops
Via the Politech list comes notice of an FBI pilot program in which emergency-room physicians report to the feds suspicious injuries or illnesses that might have resulted from terrorist activities.
We’ll have to wait and see how it turns out, but from the article’s description of the program there appear to be some potential pitfalls. The program’s use of non-police agents raises the same questions as did the now-defunct homeland-security plan to deputize meter readers and cable-TV installers to report suspicious activities. The incentives in such schemes tend to be for massive over reporting. Given that there are probably very few terrorists among the population that uses emergency rooms, the odds of a very high percentage, and high absolute number, of false positives seem significant. The cost to the people who are incorrectly fingered will be high, and nobody knows if any terrorists will be caught. There will also be a temptation, as Declan McCullagh notes, to expand the program to report drug use and other activities that are unrelated to terrorism.
This program is a bit like the system for reporting child abuse, except that there are probably several orders of magnitude more child abusers in the health-care-seeking population than there are terrorists, and deciding which medical problems result from terrorist activity is probably much less clear cut than deciding whether a child has been abused. I don’t know if the FBI is up to the task. (The Bureau is still trying doggedly to make a case against Steven Hatfill, for supposedly mailing the anthrax-laced letters that to some of us seem more likely to have been sent by the Sept. 11 hijackers.) It’s difficult for me not to be skeptical that the benefits of this program will exceed the costs even if it does catch the occasional terrorist.
There is also the matter of the spirit in which this program is being promoted.
That approach, Allswede acknowledges, sometimes raises issues with the constitutional right of being presumed innocent until proven guilty.
“That was in the days of our founding fathers when the worst thing that could happen to you was your horse was stolen,” he said. “We were willing to give up a few horses in order to prevent innocent people from going to jail. But in the era of bio terrorism, when you could lose a city, the threshold has changed.”
This is the new justification for government snooping and bureaucratic empire building: with the existence of WMD, the stakes are so high that safeguarding the rights of individuals (life, liberty, and property are contemptuously dismissed as “a few horses”) is secondary. This is a dangerous idea.
I’d like to give the FBI the benefit of the doubt but I can’t. It never accounted adequately for its abuses at Waco and Ruby Ridge; its leaders stymied proper analysis of pre-Sept. 11 intelligence and didn’t take responsibility for their failure (they still have jobs); it has bungled major investigations and covered up malfeasance (the Crime Lab). Its competence is questionable. This snooping plan deserves more scrutiny.
Remember William Pitt’s apothegm:
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Osama: Amputee, Cadaver, Loser
The Command Post links to this story which says that OBL probably had his arm amputated after the Tora Bora raid, and then probably died from it, since surviving an amputation under those unsanitary conditions is unlikely. Of course, this is all speculation. But it seems pretty convincing.
I sure hope it is true. I must say the idea of OBL scurrying around up in the mountains hiding from our commandos, getting caught in a huge air attack, barely surviving the raid, maimed, undergoing a field amputation, then falling sick, withering, suffering a fevered, lingering death of shock and infection up in the mountains, knowing he’d blown it, knowing the soft, weak, cowardly US had killed him, knowing that the Muslim world was not rallying to his cause, knowing we were going to hunt down the rest of his gang like rats … well, I like that a lot better than him being vaporized by a direct hit on his cave. He did not deserve a quick death.
Bush put it well. They chose to go to war with the United States, and war is what they got.
And if he’s not dead, we will get him. Sooner or later, dead or alive.
Death to America’s enemies.