Ninety Years After the Somme

July 1, 2006 is the 90th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, the Big Push that cost 60,000 casualties on its first day and ground to a halt over four months later. The total British casualties were 360,000, having advanced about 5 miles on a 10 mile front.

Typically in most battles the winning side suffers about 20 percent casualties and the losing side about 30 percent. The British started with about 13 divisions on July 1, say 130,000 men, and suffered nearly 50 percent casualties on the first day.

It is commonplace to say that the spirit was kicked out of the British by the Battle of the Somme and by the incompetence of their generals. In the London Guardian Sir Max Hastings writes:

The Somme is perceived as the great betrayal of innocents - and of the old working class in khaki - by Britain's ruling caste in breeches and glossy riding boots. It is thought to exemplify the futility of the first world war, and to represent the apogee of suffering in its campaigns.

Certainly the British did not take their soldiering as seriously as the Germans, and were much slower at learning the lessons of the Great War than the Germans, whose first military think tank was created during the Napoleonic War by then Lt-Col Scharnhorst. But whether their generals were a stupid as John Mosier insists in The Myth of the Great War the Battle of the Somme marked the end of Britain as a world power.

But it wasn’t just the old ruling class that went to ruin on the Somme. The respectable lower-middle class also bled to death. The “Pals” and “church lads” battalions were decimated on the Somme, and with them the mutual-aid world of “friendly societies” and self-help that was the glory of industrial Britain in the nineteenth century.

Today the self-help ethos of nineteenth century Britain is no more. The Pals have been replaced by the “hoodies” and crime is 2,300 percent higher than before the Great War of 1914-18.

Preserving The Trust Network

One thing is for sure. Democrats don’t trust Republicans. And conservatives don’t trust liberals. Liberals don’t trust the Pentagon. The Supreme Court doesn’t trust the executive.

That’s all right. It’s just politics. But the problem is that trust has been eroding on the personal level. Women don’t trust their husbands to stick around. And no-fault divorce has made it easy to skip out on a spouse.

That’s a problem, according to conservative writers like Jennifer Roback Morse and Carolyn Graglia, because trust the the bedrock that a loving family needs to be successful in staying together and raising children.

For instance, children that don’t have a close and trusting relationship with their mother in the first year of life find it difficult to establish trusting relationships throughout their lives. Babies are needy, and if their needs aren’t met they experience the world as a hostile world. We are not just talking about material needs here, but the need for the baby to know that its mother is there for it.

We’ve rather forgotten all that in the excitement of the baby boom and the modern emphasis on contract theory in politics.

Radio host Larry Elder recently demonstrated how trust works in human society by relating a little story about his 91-year-old father.

When his mother died, he assumed that his father would want to come and live with him. But no. As Elder’s brother explained from the porch of his father’s house, pointing to the row of houses across the street and down our side.

"You see the lady who lives over there?" said Kirk. "She brings beans that she grows for Dad. The one over here uses the lemons from Dad's backyard to make Dad lemonade. See this house over there? Well, this lady, the man who lives next-door to her and the woman two houses away are all part of a sort of 'neighborhood watch.' If somebody sees something suspicious, they'll call the cops in a hurry. Same thing about an ambulance if somebody needs help."

His father needed to stay in his neighborhood. The neighbors needed him.

That’s how face-to-face society works: in reciprocal trust between family and between neighbors.

It is something we have lost as we have given up our birthrights to experts and professionals.

Why Mexico Has an Emigration Problem

The United States has an immigration problem. Actually, of course, the US has always had an immigration problem, right from the start, as Native Americans will tell you. Sometimes the immigrants take over; sometimes they merely assimilate.

But the flip side of the US immigration problem is other countries’ emigration problem. After all, why should people want to leave the country of their birth for the inevitable struggles of finding home and work in a new and strange country?

Because the economy stinks, that’s why. And unfortunately, that applies to our neighbor to the south. That takes some doing, according to Deroy Murdock, when you consider that Mexico

is contiguous to the world’s largest market and abounds in oil, natural gas, gold, silver, beaches, seafood, water, historic treasures, museums, industrial centers, and wonderful people.

How did the Mexicans manage it? Says Alberto Saracho:

There are institutions, some established in the colonial years, that still curb people’s freedom to work, produce, and prosper.

...
In constant 2000 dollars, the World Bank reports, Mexican per-capita GDP was $7,758 in 1980. It inched upward to $8,661 in 2003. Over that period, Chile went from trailing to topping Mexico, with its figures rising from $4,620 to $9,706. Former laggard South Korea leapfrogged from $4,556 to $16,977.

...
[B]etween 1987 and 2004, manufacturing productivity grew 183.3 percent in Chile, 196.6 percent in South Korea, and 307.6 percent in China. Meanwhile, like a tequila-soaked worm, Mexico advanced 2.7 percent.

And on top of that Mexicans are apparently getting ready to elect lefty Andrés Manuel López Obrador as a president. That is their right. The trouble is that the twentieth century demonstrated in pretty clear terms that lefties don’t have a clue when it comes to making a nation prosperous. You would think that the message would be getting through by now.

So it looks like the US is going to continue to have an immigration problem. And Mexico will continue to have an emigration problem.

Worse Before It Gets Better

Today conservatives are angry about the New York Times, angry about the Supreme Court’s Hamdan decision, and angry about the limp wrist resolutions in the House and the Senate to deplore the Times’ declassification of the terrorist financial tracking program.

So let us step back and think a little.

This war, the War on Terror, World War IV, the war between the West and Islamism, or whatever we want to call it, is not going to be easy. President Bush never said it would. In fact, from the beginning, he said it was going to be a long war.

Obviously our trans-national secular elite does not think that the war is really a war. Perhaps that is because, as of right now, they do not feel threatened. And if they do not feel threatened then there is no threat, because they know best.

Of course, at this stage of the conflict we do not yet know how serious it is. Just as in 1938 it was possible to do some wishful non-thinking and persuade yourself that Herr Hitler had a point. The Germans had been badly treated, etc. We now know that nothing short of all-out conflict could have stopped Hitler. But in 1938, people did not know that.

Is this really a world conflict, or just a bunch of rich Muslim kids with guns and bombs who are really not worth getting into a sweat over? We don’t know.

Why wait until the threat has fully matured, you might ask? Why not finish it off with a neat 0.25 GDP war and a few thousand deaths rather than wait until it takes a WWII type effort of full national mobilization and hundreds of thousands of deaths?

No doubt that is what serious people used to worry about in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor.

Yet maybe that is what it is going to take. After all, if the New York Times really believed that the terror threat was real then they wouldn’t have recklessly compromised national security. They would have gone to the White House for guidance, rather than to straight-arm it.

Yet think how hard it would be for them to admit that Bush is right about the War on Terror. For one thing that would mean admitting that Bush and the Republicans are right. And one thing they know in Manhattan is that they are right and fundamentalist Religious Right conservatives are wrong. So they go back to their old familiar template, reenacting their glory days. As Peggy Noonan writes:

[T]he people who run the Times now are not so much living as re-enacting. They're lost on the big new playing field of American media, and they're reenacting their great moments--the Pentagon papers, the Watergate days. They're locked in a pose: We speak truth to (bad Republican) power.

And why not reenact? It’s a vicarious excitement, a reminder of the good old days. But of course it is also putting the nation at risk. Because if you started to do some real thinking then you might have to deal with the fact of the underclass poor. How come that the underclass seemed to come after the War on Poverty? Or you might start to wonder about the vast and underperforming schools. Or you might ponder how the ranks of people on disability doubles every ten years. Best not to think about all that.

There is a natural ebb and flow in the nature of things, and things are going to have to get a lot worse before the liberals and Democrats are going to see what is right in front of their eyes and get with the program on the war on terror.

Things are going to get worse before they get better. You’d think that after 9/11, after 3/11 in Madrid, 7/7 in London, that people would be getting the idea. What will it take, do you think, for them to get serious?

Maybe it is better not to think about that. But here’s a prediction. The New York Times will never admit that Bush was right on the war on terror.

Getting Snobbish in Tuscany

Suppose you bought a house in Tuscany. Then what? Then the problem would be to move heaven and earth to avoid being taken for an American or a Brit.

Your whole life would revolve around getting people to say “Buongiorno” in the street instead of “Hello.” It’s not easy, as Anna Blundy explains. For instance how do you get people to stop addressing you in English? For a start, you have to dress like an Italian. Guess what that means.

Though it was almost 100 degrees in the shade and all the Italians had taken refuge in Sardinia, I drove to Lucca wearing stilettos and a tight skirt. I curled my hair and retouched my lipstick all day. ‘Buongiorno, Signora’ all round and immediately on to the next rung.

Are you sure you have the backbone for that kind of punishment, girls?

Of course, there’s another problem lurking out there. How to differentiate yourself from the other ex-pats that are crowding in, looking for their own Tuscan villa just a little down the hill from Tony Blair? The technique is to sound as if you have lived in Tuscany forever.

[O]ne must adopt a tone of utter despair when speaking of the continuing invasion (in which we ourselves, naturally, have played no part). ‘Do you think there are more than there were when we came?’ I ask Jenny, bowing to her impressive decade of prosecco-swilling.



‘Oh God, yes,’

And the awful thing is that, the way the Italians aren’t having children, there ought to be bargains in the Tuscan villa market for years to come. It’s too awful, darling.

Rep. King Wants to Shine Light on College Admissions

If you search for: Racial and Ethnic Preference Disclosure Act on the New York Times website you won’t get any hits.

That is odd, because the New York Times has made a point of publicizing the secret anti-terror programs of the United States government on the argument that the release of such information is in the public interest.

But the New York Times doesn’t seem to have much interest in shining the light of knowledge into another notoriously secretive area of American life: the policies of university admissions officers.

Rep. Steven King (R-IA) wants to change all that. As reported by Peter Kirsanow he is introducing a bill into Congress,

“Racial and Ethnic Preference Disclosure Act.” The bill would require institutions of higher learning that receive federal dollars to disclose to the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education and the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice various items of information related to the use of race, color and national origin in the admissions process.

Well, it’s only fair, isn’t it? I mean, people need to know things about a college’s admissions process before they start shelling out admissions fees. They need to know things like:

(1) how much weight its admissions process gives to an applicant’s race, ethnicity, etc; (2) the probability that a student given preferred consideration on account of race or ethnicity will have to enroll in a remediation program; (3) graduation rates for preferred students vs. that of non-preferred students; and (4) the probability that preferred students will default on student loans.

Wouldn’t you want to know stuff like that before you applied to a university?

But the question is, why has the New York Times, which believes in the public’s right to know the methods and tactics of the national intelligence agencies, not weighed in to support this modest proposal of Rep. King?

Brit Chicks Want More Time With Children

In the US there is a swelling movement of women who are wondering if career and children are a sensible combination, indeed whether, as Carolyn Graglia puts it, “market production” has any moral or economic advantage over “domestic production.”

Now British working mothers are beginning to wonder too. Writes Camilla Cavendish: “For me, the desire to be with my children is physical, like an elastic band stretching. I can’t be away for too long.”

And now there’s a poll to back her up.

This week, a YouGov poll of 1,736 mothers in First magazine demonstrates how profoundly unhappy many mothers are with living this way. More than half feel guilty about time spent away from their children. Two thirds think that mothers should stay at home with their babies and toddlers during the first few years — though nationally, less than half do. A third would like to reduce their working hours, and more than a third say they would give up work altogether if they could.

How did we get to this point, where mothers have been tossed into the workplace and told that it is good to leave their children to a childminder? And where they are exhausting themselves—for what?

Here we have the most prosperous society the world has ever seen, and mothers are running themselves ragged?

There seem to be two trends on a collision course. The National Center for Health Statistics says that in 1995 6.6 percent of couples were “childfree,” up from 2.4 percent in the 1980s But wealthy hedge fund managers are going for four and five children, and many people are saying that “three is the new two.”

Writes Cavendish:

We live at a time of greater opportunities for women, of greater job flexibility, of higher average incomes, than at any period in history. Yet we increasingly talk as though we have no control over our lives. We are the first generation to feel that we cannot afford to bring up our own children.

Yes, what is that all about? In the richest society we say we cannot afford to bring up our own children? Who are we kidding?

There is this to think about. When women are at work, governments get revenue from their market production. And they get more control over the nation’s children. It’s all about power, as the postmodernists say.