Saturday, August 3, 2019
Meddling...............................
President Kennedy, during his first months in office, spent long hours on the exotic disturbances in Laos—primarily because just before his inauguration, Eisenhower had told him that Laos was the key to all Southeast Asia. Once they had taken Laos, the Communists, he said, could bring "unbelievable pressure" on Thailand, Cambodia, and South Vietnam. If the situation reached the point where other countries could not be persuaded to act with us, we should be willing "as a last desperate hope, to intervene unilaterally." Kennedy's interest in Laos was no doubt further stimulated by the natural desire of all new Presidents to show their skill at statecraft. Laos was at the time the only game in town—the only genuine shooting war, even though little actual shooting was ever heard.
To me, Laos and Vietnam were all part of the Southeast Asia drama that had begun long before. Refusing to sign the 1954 settlements that made possible the French withdrawal, Secretary John Foster Dulles had the preempted the French role. With his addiction for formalistic paper solutions, he had devised the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO)—a so-called mutual security arrangement the included the United States, Great Britain, France, Australia, and New Zealand as well as three Asian states: Thailand, Pakistan, and the Philippines. By a supplementary protocol, the signatory states of SEATO pledged themselves to protect three nonsignatory nations: South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Through Dulles's astigmatic vision, Laos loomed large as a "bulwark against Communism" and a "bastion of freedom," and by the end of 1960, we had provided the Laotian government with nearly $300 million, of which 85% was to help build an army.
Not much of an army was ever built, however, for the Laotian generals and civilian bureaucrats concentrated on stealing the new wealth. That left a Viet Minh-directed group, the Pathet Lao, to establish a firm hold on the villages and countryside. Old friendships and family played a role; the leader of the Pathet Lao, Prince Souphanouvong, was closely tied to Ho Chi Ming, while the regular government of Laos in Vientiane was headed by his half-brother Souvanna Phouma. In October 1957, the two half-brothers negotiated the so-called Vientiane Agreements, which provided a neutralized Laos under a coalition government—with the Pathet Lao represented in both the army and cabinet.
That infuriated Dulles, who thought coalitions with Communists a halfway house to perdition, so he made use of his own family ties by persuading his brother, CIA Chief, Allen W. Dulles, to force out Prince Souphanouvong and replace him with a politician bearing the even more unlikely name of Phoui Sananikone. Then the CIA conjured up from France a Laotian military officer named General Phoumi Nosavan; sixteen months later, Phoumi overthrew Phoui (which could have been either a significant event or a typographical error). Five months after that, Souphanouvong escaped from jail to the North, and the Pathet Lao resumed the civil war.
Phoumi in turn was displaced by a young paratroop captain, Kong Le, who seized power and asked Prince Souvanna to form a new government that, as before, would be neutralist. Meanwhile, the Defense Department continued to whoop it up for Phoumi, who, with American encouragement, took the Royal Laotian Army to Savannakhet in September 1960, where he proclaimed a new government and denounced Souvanna. Washington promptly responded by sending him American military aid, though continuing to give economic assistance to the Souvanna government in Vientiane. Then, in December, shortly after the American elections, Phoumi marched on Vientaine. Souvanna fled to Cambodia, where he made a deal with Souphanouvong. Kong Le, prudently taking along a huge store of American supplies, joined the Pathet Lao. That ended the first act of a preposterous long-running serial that, more than anything else, resembled a Kung Fu movie.
-George W. Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern: Memoirs
We should know our history.................
Ten years after the United States had withdrawn its last man, ignominiously, from Saigon, the journalist Joseph Lelyveld observed acutely, "When we talk about Vietnam, we are seldom talking bout the country of that name or the situation of the people who live there. Usually we are talking about ourselves. Probably we always were, which is one conspicuous reason our leaders found it so hard to shape a strategy that fit us and our chosen terrain." There are many ways of explaining why the United States came to grief so spectacularly in Vietnam. But the plain fact of it will always be astounding. The United States was not only five times more populous than Vietnam, its economy was seventy-six times larger. In 1964 there were only around ten countries in the world, aside from sub-Saharan Africa, that were poorer than Vietnam in terms of per capita gross domestic product, at a time when the United States cam in second only to Switzerland. Technologically the gap between the two countries—not least in the realm of armaments—was so large as to be nigh immeasurable. Yet America lost. Small wonder the Vietnam War became a trauma not just for those men who served in it but for all Americans of that generation.
Robert McNamara, who was secretary of defense throughout the period of military escalation, looked back in shame on at least six different failures for which he took at least some measure of responsibility. There was the failure to consult allies, despite the existence of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) since 1954; the failure to appreciate how a people in arms could withstand and overcome the most sophisticated weaponry; the failure to see the limits of economic and military aid in the process of state building; the failure to uphold democratic principles in the governance of South Vietnam; the failure to understand the complex relationship between the application of military force and the achievement of political objectives; and above all, the failure of the American decision-making process itself. To explain this, McNamara blamed lack of time, lack of institutional memory within the government, and "the incremental nature of decision making about intervention in Vietnam [which] never allowed policy makers an opportunity to step back."
Another member of the flagellant order of the former Kennedy-Johnson officials was McGeorge Bundy. In a memorandum written as late as May 1967—a year after he had left the administration to run the Ford Foundation—Bundy could still assure the president, "The fact that South Vietnam has not been lost and is not going to be lost is a fact of truly massive importance in the history of Asia, the Pacific and the U. S." Nearly thirty years later Bundy added a simple marginal note; "McGB all wrong." His explanation for the American failure was a basic underestimation of "the endurance of the enemy."
-Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist
Fifty years ago................at Woodstock
Crosby, Stills & Nash....................................Suite: Judy Blue Eyes
Friday, August 2, 2019
Fifty years ago......................at Woodstock
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.......................Long Time Gone
It's been a long time comin'
It's goin' to be a long time gone
And it appears to be a long
Appears to be a long
Appears to be a long time
Yes, a long, long, long, long time before the dawn
Turn, turn any corner
Hear, you must hear what the people say
You know there's something that's goin' on around here
That surely, surely, surely won't stand the light of day, no
And it appears to be a long (yes it does)
Appears to be a long (mm)
Appears to be a long time
Such a long, long time before the dawn
Speak out, you got to speak out against the madness
You got to speak your mind, if you dare
But don't—no, don't no—try to get yourself elected
If you do you had better cut your hair, mm
And it appears to be a long (yes it does)
Appears to be a long (mm)
Appears to be a long time
Such a long, long, long, long time before the dawn
Thursday, August 1, 2019
Secret...................................
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
-attributed to Albert Einstein
Building blocks..........................
It's a thrilling story of invention: the young wizard of Menlo Park has a flash of inspiration, and within a few years his idea is lighting up the world. The problem with this story is that people had been inventing incandescent light for eighty years before Edison turned his mind to it. The lightbulb involves three fundamental elements: some kind of filament hat glows when an electrical current runs through it, some mechanism to keep the filament from burning out to quickly, and a means of supplying electric power to start the reaction in the first place. In 1802, the British chemist Humphry Davy had attached a platinum filament to an early electric battery, causing it to burn brightly for a few minutes. By the 1840's dozens of separate inventors were working on variations of the lightbulb. The first patent was issued in 1841 to an Englishman named Frederick de Moleyns. The historian Arthur A. Bright compiled a list of lightbulb's partial inventors, leading up to Edison's ultimate triumph in the late 1870s. [one version of that list may be found on page 38 of this pdf.]
-Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
image via
Historically misunderstood..............
By any measure, Edison was a true genius, a towering figure in nineteenth-century innovation. But as the story of the lightbulb makes clear, we have historically misunderstood that genius. His greatest achievement may have been the way he figured out how to make teams creative: assembling diverse skills in a work environment that valued experimentation and accepted failure, incentivizing the group with financial rewards that were aligned with the overall success of the organization, and building on ideas that originated elsewhere. "I am not overly impressed by the great names and reputations of those who might be trying to beat me to an invention. . . . It's their 'ideas' that appeal to me," Edison famously said. "I am quite correctly described as "more of a sponge than an inventor."
-Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
Fifty years ago.....................at Woodstock
Blood, Sweat & Tears.....................................their 22 minute set
Wednesday, July 31, 2019
The glory of repetition.................................
I was once asked, at a journalism conference, how I defined my job. I said: My job is to write the exact same thing between 50 and 100 times a year in such a way that neither my editors nor my readers will ever think I am repeating myself.
That’s because good advice rarely changes, while markets change constantly. The temptation to pander is almost irresistible. And while people need good advice, what they want is advice that sounds good.
-Jason Zweig, as cut-and-pasted from here
Fifty years ago.................At Woodstock
Richie Havens...........................................................Freedom
Soul force.............................
We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.
-Martin Luther King, Jr., as excerpted from here
Tuesday, July 30, 2019
Stand thou forth.........................
I am not a day of season,
For thou mayst see a sunshine and a hail
In me at once. But to the brightest beams
Distracted clouds give way, so stand thou forth,
The time is fair again.
-The King, as channeled by Wm. Shakespeare in Act Five Scene Three of All's Well That Ends Well
Still haven't come across where..............
.......................................................Shakespeare wrote this:
Sean Carpenter........................
……..wants to know how you're going to finish out 2019:
Take a deep breath, grab a sip of water, and remind yourself that the actions you take over the next 30 days will have a huge effect on how the year will end.
Make sure part of your plan includes building relationships, solving problems and having fun. After that, the rest of the actions you take should be pretty easy to figure out.
Truth is elusive, although alcohol helps..........
The basic question that a lot of us have is why capitalism is such a boo-word among young people and why socialism is such a yeah-word. Young people sympathetic to socialism seem determined to believe that when they observe things they don’t like, capitalism is at fault; when they observe things that they do like, socialism deserves the credit. Yet the book drives home the point that the truth is the opposite.
-Arnold S. Kling, as he reviews this just-now-available book
Fifty years ago.................At Woodstock
Country Joe...........................I-feel-like-I'm-fixing- to-die-rag
Monday, July 29, 2019
Not the version you hear on the radio....
Joni Mitchell....................................................Woodstock
I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him where are you going
And this he told me
He was walking along the road
And I asked him where are you going
And this he told me
I'm going on down to Yasgur's farm
I'm going to join in a rock 'n' roll band
I'm going to camp out on the land
I'm going to try an' get my soul free
We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
I'm going to join in a rock 'n' roll band
I'm going to camp out on the land
I'm going to try an' get my soul free
We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe it's the time of man
I don't know who I am
But you know life is for learning
We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
Or maybe it's the time of man
I don't know who I am
But you know life is for learning
We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation
We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil's bargain
And we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation
We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil's bargain
And we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden
Culture, as mirrored in advertising..........
English has evolved over the past century because of mass media and advertising, but the shadowy literary establishment in the United States, in and outside academe, has failed to adjust. From the start, like Andy Warhol (another product of an immigrant family in an isolated Northeastern industrial town), I recognized commercial popular culture as the authentic native voice of America. Burned into my memory, for example, is a late-1950s TV commercial for M & M's chocolate candies. A sultry cartoon peanut, sunbathing on a chaise lounge, said in a twanging Southern drawl: "I'm an M & M peanut/Toasted to to a golden brown/Dipped in creamy milk chocolate/And covered in a thin candy shell!" Illustrating each line, she prettily dove into a swimming pool of melted chocolate and popped out on the other side to strike a pose and be instantly toweled in her monogrammed candy wrap. I felt then, and still do, the the M & M peanut's jingle was a vivacious poem and that the creative team who produced that ad were folk artists, anonymous as the artisans of medieval cathedrals.
-Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three Of The World's Best Poems
Couldn't find the exact advertisement she was talking about on YouTube. This compilation might serve notice though that the M & M creative team are indeed folk artists. Enjoy:
Never heard this one before..............
Consider what life would have been like for a farmer in New England in 1700. In the winter months the sun goes down at five, followed by fifteen hours of darkness before it gets light again. And when that sun goes down, it's pitch black: there are no streetlights, flashlights, light bulbs, fluorescents—even kerosene lamps haven't been invented yet. There's just a flickering glow of a fireplace, and the smoky burn of the tallow candle.
Those nights were so oppressive that scientists now believe our sleep patterns were radically different in the ages before ubiquitous night lighting. In 2001, the historian Roger Ekirch published a remarkable study that drew upon hundreds of diaries and instructional manuals to convincingly argue that humans had historically divided their long nights into two distinct sleep periods. When darkness fell, they would drift into "first sleep," waking after four hours to snack, relieve themselves, have sex, or chat by the fire, before heading back for another four hours of "second sleep." The lighting of the nineteenth century disrupted this ancient rhythm, by opening up a whole array of modern activities that could be performed after sunset: everything from theaters and restaurants to factory labor. Ekrich documented the way the ideal of a single, eight-hour block of sleep was constructed by nineteenth century customs, an adaptation to a dramatic change int he lighting environment of human settlements. Like all adaptations, its benefits carried inevitable costs: the middle-of-the-night insomnia that plagues millions of people around the world is not, technically speaking, a disorder, but rather the body's natural sleep rhythms asserting themselves over prescriptions of nineteenth century convention. Those waking moments at three a. m. are a kind of jet lag caused by artificial light instead of air travel.
-Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
Sunrise.............................
I had always loved sunrise: was always renewed in spirit. For all my life I'd felt cheated if I'd ever slept through dawn. The primeval winter solstice on bitter Salisbury Plan had raised my childhood's goose pimples long before I understood why, and it had long seemed to me that dawn-worship was the most logical of primitive beliefs.
-Dick Francis, as excerpted from Wild Horses
photo via
Fifty years ago.............at Woodstock
Mountain.........................................................Blood Of The Sun
Checking in with Thurber..............
“All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.”
Sunday, July 28, 2019
Purging..........................
The search for happiness is not about looking at life through rose-colored glasses or blinding oneself to the pain and imperfections of the world. Nor is happiness a state of exultation to be perpetuated at all costs; it is the purging of mental toxins, such as hatred and obsession, that literally poison the mind. It is also about learning how to put things in perspective and reduce the gap between appearances and reality. To that end, we must acquire a better knowledge of how the mind works and a more accurate insight into the nature of things, for, in its deepest sense, suffering is intimately linked to a misapprehension of the nature of reality.
Fifty years ago............at Woodstock
Mountain...........................................................Southbound Train
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