Reality Bites

I have a relative in Texas, who shall remain nameless, who in normal prosperous times complains at length about the lazy shiftless good-for-nothings living off of his hard-earned tax dollar.

Now, he is unemployed, living off of his savings, and complaining about how little unemployment insurance pays.
The company that employed him for 20 years recently changed ownership, changed management, and decided that he, and a lot of his long time co-workers are now redundant.

Prayers for his welfare, and for his family.

London is Burning

I'm watching the violence in Britain with growing alarm. It is very different from the political and social unrest in other parts of Europe. In Greece and in Spain, violence is mostly confined to confrontations between protesters (not all of whom are on the same page; Greek protesters complain about the presence of anarchists who charge the police and turn their protests into riots) and cops. Property damage and harm to bystanders is kept to a relative minimum as violence remains confined to areas around legislatures and major public squares.

In Britain, the violence appears to be just random mayhem springing up anywhere and everywhere. It appears to be not only anarchic, but nihilistic with rioters sometimes turning on each other. For example, there is this episode caught on camera where rioters in London at first appear to help another young man who has been injured, and then rob him:



I don't think you would see anything like this in Greece, and certainly not in Egypt or the rest of the Middle East (which is experiencing far worse violence, though theirs is much more clearly defined with people at war with their rulers). This looks more to me like Hobbes' idea of "the state of nature," the war of all against all, which is what makes it so frightening. There is no rhyme or reason to any of it.

To my eye, this looks less like an uprising (spontaneous or organized) of the poor than an outbreak by those who feel that they have nothing to lose, as well as nothing to gain. It looks like kids who have no prospects deciding to go out and help themselves to all that good life that dangles constantly in front of them, just out of reach. Also, I think that there is a large element of what a friend of mine calls "acute testosterone poisoning," a malady all too common in young men, that makes them forget all bounds of reason and decency.

The consequence of all the random violence is the destruction of the rioters' own neighborhoods. It is businesses and homes right where they live that suffer their rage, not the centers of power which remain well protected. It's their own neighbors, people just like them, who suffer all of the harm, not the police, not the government, not the establishment. People who are just as poor and alienated as they are bear the brunt of the rioters' rage.

That tendency of British authorities (religious and secular) to sound like irritated school masters when making public statements doesn't help matters. If anything these "we will find you and punish you" statements only make matters worse, and are primarily for potential voters. They only goad rioters who've never had much time for law into more lawlessness. The disconnect between the political leadership and the people actually suffering this violence appears in bold relief in this visit by London Mayor Boris Johnson to riot-torn Clapham:



And before us Yanks start getting too smug about all the trouble in England, remember that this could happen here, and the violence would probably by much worse since guns are as easy to buy as Coca Cola, and easier to buy than beer. As our economy goes down the toilet while both our legislators and our voters are consumed in ideological warfare, there is a rising population of people of all ages and types who find themselves completely shut out of both the economy and society. Ours is a country where poverty is de facto criminalized with all sorts of punitive fees, rules, penalties, disqualifications, and legislation, further alienating a growing class of the newly poor and the downwardly mobile. As the economy continues to go down like the Titanic, that population will get bigger and ever more restive. There's no reason why the kind of random nihilistic violence that we see in Britain now, where people turn on each other as well as on their society, can't happen here.

I continue to be amazed that in all the abstract talk about the need to balance government budgets in a time of high unemployment, no one seems to reckon with the social and political consequences of these policies. Indeed, the historical record is not encouraging from the USA under Herbert Hoover to Germany under Chancellor Heinrich Brünning, neither of whom saw any success, but saw much suffering with disastrous consequences from their fiscal policies. If any of these financial experts ever bothered to crack open a history book, they might not be so enthusiastic in telling already poor people to suck it up so the banks can get paid.

Hannah Arendt writes in her book On Revolution a whole chapter about uprisings by the poor and by those displaced in the upheavals of modern market economies. She describes their rage as like a force of nature that destroys everything in its path without distinction. She opens her chapter with this epigram by the French Revolutionary leader Saint Just:
Les malheureux sont la puissance de la terre.


ADDENDUM:

Here is Giles Fraser's comment on the now famous video of the bloodied young man being robbed.

It is very tempting watching scenes like this unfold to try to put as much distance between ourselves and the perpetrators as possible. We would never do such a thing. We are not like that at all. And we begin talking about personal morality and "feral" youth.

Jean Jacques Rousseau believed that we are all fundamentally good, but corrupted by social convention. John Calvin believed that we are all basically evil, incapable of redeeming ourselves, and requiring the constraints of law and religion upon our base and depraved natures. I don't believe in either of those concepts. I think that we are all basically self-serving. We avoid pain and danger and seek gratification of our needs and desires just like all the rest of life on this planet. We are animals as well as souls. We've built an entire social, economic, political, and cultural construct around acquisition ("greed" is the less polite word for the same thing). Perhaps a lot of what we call "values" are in fact skills for survival in a world where "lean and mean" and adaptability --what one Wall Street analyst called a willingness to "shoot the wounded and eat the children"-- are necessary for success. The animal in our natures is all-triumphant with art and culture reduced to success trophies and the bright shiny things bower birds display around their nests to attract mates. Perhaps that's something to think about before we use the word "feral" about anyone. To my mind, the only real difference between the financial industry effectively robbing savings and pension funds through arcane "insurance" structures, and hoodlums breaking in and robbing a store is one of scale. We really are all brothers and sisters, perhaps more so than we care to admit. Maybe what is so horrible about the spectacle of the bad Samaritans is the sight of our own animal natures stripped bare of all constraints.

Key West, 1946

My father enlisted in the Navy right out of high school. He was bound for a stint in the military anyway, his number came up on the draft board later that year. He served in the Navy from 1946 to 1948. He was an amazingly lucky man when it came to timing. He joined just after World War II ended, and left 3 years before the start of the Korean War.

After basic training, he was stationed in Key West where he worked as an airplane mechanic taking apart scores of now redundant military surplus aircraft, everything from fighters to bombers. He loved the work, and came away with a lifelong love for the military planes from that era.

My father remembered his tour of duty in Key West in glowing terms. It was one of the happiest times of his life, and he talked about it for years. I remember all the old stories: about barracuda fishing; about the huge stingray pulled into a small wooden row boat that turned out to be not quite dead and thrashed about reducing the boat to splinters; about watching waterspouts in the distance dancing about on the water; about the amazing sunsets; about flying planes large and small.

While digging through accumulated family history in Dallas over the past few days, I discovered a trove of snapshots from that very period in my father's life. These were all small photographs taken on a cheap camera by my father, or by buddies or girlfriends.




My father out on leave; he's in the center wearing the sailor suit and surrounded by girls and buddies.




He took his camera with him on those many plane flights, and took a lot of pictures. He took this while riding in what appears to me to be a bomber.





This looks to me to be a massive sea plane. It appears as if he was leaning out of a window to take this picture.






He took a lot of pictures of the view. This appears to me to be downtown Miami in 1946 viewed from a plane.





I'm not sure, but I think this is Key West from the plane. That appears to be the base down in the lower left. I should point out that I've never been there, so I'm only speculating.




Sunset somewhere over the Keys in a plane.





A lot of these pictures were taken on leave. He took this picture somewhere down beneath the sheltering palms in Florida.






And here's a day at the beach somewhere in southern Florida.






Evidence from these photos (and from some other items we found) suggests that Dad was quite the ladies' man, and a much coveted item. This appears to have been taken by a buddy or another girl with his camera.





My father with friends on the beach.




Dad on the beach photographed by a buddy, or more likely, by a would-be girlfriend. He was only about 18 or 19 at the time.



He was reassigned sometime in 1947 to Texas A&M for some kind of training, and then honorably discharged in 1948. After that, he very reluctantly went to college, to SMU where he sweated through an undergraduate degree in engineering, bankrolled by a wealthy friend of the family. He barely graduated. His next adventure was in Colorado where in the early 1950s he helped his mother and step father build one of the first ski lodges in Aspen. And the stories started up again.

A Strange Brass Vase

I spent a lot of my time in Dallas going through old family papers and photos that haven't seen the light of day in more than 50 years. Many mysteries were solved, old misinformation corrected, and some new discoveries were made.

Among those new discoveries was information about a curious brass vase that I've always known, and that my mother sent to me about a week ago. She always displayed flowers in it, and my grandmother put irises in it when she owned it.



It turns out that this curious vase is a German artillery shell from World War I. My grandfather picked it up on a battlefield in France.

Here is the bottom with all of the markings. It was made in February 1915 in an ordinance factory in Karlsruhe.

Here is my grandfather, Harry Schumacher in 1918. He graduated from Washington University Medical School in St. Louis, and joined his classmates when they all went down to the enlistment office immediately after commencement. With them, he was sent to France to the front lines as a medical officer.



Here is my grandfather's company. He appears on the back row, second from the left. The names of all of these men are inscribed on the back of the photo, but the writing is now very hard to read and almost illegible.

At the end of the war, my grandfather received a victory medal just like this one. We discovered it in a box among his papers. We keep it in the safety deposit box now.

After the war, Lieutenant Schumacher became Doctor Harry Schumacher, a country doctor in Altamont, Illinois where he practiced for the rest of his life. He thought nothing of traveling over muddy and dusty roads, through deep snow drifts to remote isolated farms to visit patients who frequently had very little with which to pay him. Sometimes distances and travel conditions would be so difficult that he would spend the night as a guest on these farms. During the Great Depression, he was one of the very few doctors in the area who accepted payment in barter. This meant a lot to debt ridden farmers desperately trying to hold on to their farms, and they never forgot him for this. My mother remembers eating very well during the Depression. Minor house calls might mean fresh produce and boxes of preserves, minor surgery might mean a chicken, and major treatments and surgery would mean a cow or a pig sent straight to the butcher for the doctor.

Probably his most painful military service was not during the Great War, but as a member of the local draft board during World War II from 1942 to 1943. We were losing the war during that period. American forces in the Pacific suffered a series of disastrous defeats at the hands of the Japanese with thousands of casualties. Dr. Schumacher had to send young men he had known since their births into battle and to probable death. It was too much and he asked to be discharged from that duty after a little over a year.

Dr. Harry W. Schumacher died in 1949 at the age of 59 and is buried in Union Cemetery in Altamont.




He received a medal just like this one when he left the Selective Service in 1943. We keep it in the safety deposit box with his WWI victory medal.

And I'm Back

Back in New York.

Taxi!



And I'm back with Michael and the cats.

While in Texas, I met Lauren Gough, who blogs under the name Mutha. She drove all the way over from Foat Wuth in the blazing heat just to see me. We had a delightful Tex-Mex lunch together. She's a wonderful person, and it's great to have someone to visit in the Great State other than my relatives.

And how hot was it in Dallas? When I arrived on Wednesday, it was 114F. It was 107F when I left. The daily high never dipped below 105F. At night, it would cool down to 85-90F. Lawns and trees were brown and scorched. Creek beds were dry as a bone. Reservoirs were very low. No one was out, not even the birds or squirrels, in the hours from about 10AM to about 7PM. The sidewalks were so hot that they would melt flip flops. A woman in Tyler baked cookies in her car. It was hot enough to warp railroad tracks. Heat warped tracks may have caused a freight train derailment in East Texas. By next week, Dallas will tie its old record from 1980 for the hottest summer ever.

Needless to say, I did not get out much. I was getting cabin fever by the end of my stay. The electrical grid is strained down there with rolling brownouts. One neighborhood suffered a blackout.

Ma is much better than I expected, able to get around the house, and even cook a little. She gained some weight and looks better.

She also still smokes, and at 83, she can do whatever she damn well wants as far as I'm concerned.

Here's Bob Wills and Tommy Duncan singing about hot and dusty Texas:

Big D

Off to Dallas tomorrow for a few days to visit Ma. I'll be back Monday.

August in Texas, where the heat is so intense it warps railroad tracks. I probably won't be getting out to do much touring.








An old postcard from the 1936 Texas Centennial Exhibition in Dallas. This building still stands.


And here's Jo Stafford in 1956 going into raptures over Big D, "little a double l a s! And that spells Dallas, where every home's a palace 'cause the settlers wouldn't settle for no less!"


NOTE

Sorry folks, but I'm taking the comments off line while I'm gone. I won't be around to clean out the spam from the back comments, or to keep a certain troll from Providence, RI from dropping turds in the punch bowl.

This Completely Pointless, Artificial Crisis is Over.

On to the next one.

Lesson learned: extortion works.


UPDATE:

"All the goddam deals to come!"

Keith Olbermann pulls no punches.