Wednesday, May 18. 2005
Paul Berman on Daniel Bell Berman recounts his travels through the campus travails of the 60s and the adolescent foolishnesses of the "New Left", under the mentorship of the wise sociologist and ex-socialist Daniel Bell: Now all this was fairly idiotic. Nothing is more bovine than a student movement, with the uneducated leading the anti-educated and mooing all the way. I'm glad to recall, looking back at those times, that my own radical activities pretty much avoided the student custom of persecuting the professors. I was much too fascinated by them to want to rail against them, except now and then. Besides, the anti-intellectual atmosphere began to weigh a little heavy on the bookish students. Hofstadter, in his study of American anti-intellectualism, had already put his finger on these moods and fads, as if predicting the uprising at his own university. And so I can understand, in restrospect, why Bell chose to flee Morningside Heights. To be sure, though, the student uprisings spread to Cambridge, too. There was no escape. Berman's pal Szymanski lost persepctive on what was going on, while Berman took his own path through ideological mazes: My own response to the Columbia strike and its revolutionary offshoots differed from Szymanski's almost entirely. The fervor for Marxism-Leninism in its several variations dismayed me from the start. The conservative Bolshevik instinct on cultural matters struck me as absurd. And so I rebelled against the rebels, and I did this by veering off in anarchist and anti-Communist directions—which always seemed to me truer to the original spirit of the New Left. I mentioned this to Bell, and he told me that he too had come under an anarchist influence as a kid. He had known the New York group around the German emigré anarchist Rudolf Rocker, and because of those connections he had come across an early exposé of Soviet tyranny by Alexander Berkman. Berkman's pamphlet had inoculated Bell against any temptation to join so many others of his generation in venerating the Soviet revolution. He quotes Bell's powerful observation: "Among the radical, as among the religious minded," he wrote, "there are the once born and the twice born. The former is the enthusiast, the ‘sky-blue healthy-minded moralist' to whom sin and evil—the ‘soul's mumps and measles and whooping coughs,' in Emerson's phrase—are merely transient episodes to be glanced at and ignored in the cheerful saunter of life. To the twice born, the world is ‘a double-storied mystery' which shrouds the evil and renders false the good; and in order to find truth, one must lift the veil and look Medusa in the face."
Read the entire piece in BookForum - it's a piece of school-yard history which has attracted far more attention than it deserves, and Berman seems to agree.
Wednesday, May 11. 2005
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Saturday, April 30. 2005
 Gen. Peter Pace
Unpublished remarks GENERAL PETER PACE Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [now nominated to be Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff]Extemporaneous Remarks as delivered at theUSS HUE CITY’S 11th Annual Memorial Service marking the 35th Anniversary of the Battle for Hué Mayport, Florida 2 February 2003 Captain Young, to you and to your magnificent crew, thank you. Not only for the extraordinary hospitality that you have given to all of us here, but also for all that you do with your ship of the line to protect U.S. interests around the globe. And it's great to see you're back in the water. And in April when you get back to the sea, it's going to be with the same professionalism and spirit this ship has exhibited since it was christened on 21 July 1990. Admiral, Captains, Colonel Al Colter, and to all of you who are here today, I've given a lot of speeches along the way and I don't get intimidated very easily anymore. But today is one of those days where my heart is pounding a little harder than it normally does because I need to find the right words. And also because I know there's Italian blood in my body that will rush to my heart, and it's going to be a contest whether my brain gets to rule or my heart gets to rule while I'm speaking to you. So if I slow down a couple of times while I'm up here just bear with me. First of all, you should know the ground rules of who Pete Pace is. I am here in pride as an observer of those who fought in Hue City, not with pride as a participant because by the time I got there all the hard work was already done. And we should not forget that, if you study military history you know that attacking forces normally like to have a ratio of about three good guys to about one bad guy if you're going to attack. In the case of Hué City, about 2,500 U.S. servicemen, mostly Marines, attacked 11,000 N.V.A. (North Vietnamese Army) in a well-defended city...and kicked their butts. But I can say that because I wasn’t a part of it. It would be inappropriate if I had been and said it that way. But to get there, and to join that magnificent group, I graduated from the Naval Academy and went on to The Basic School like all Marine officers do, and I got trained up to go to Vietnam. If you recall, those of you who were alive back then, in the winter of '67-'68 there was a huge blizzard on the East Coast. And that blizzard closed down training at Quantico. And it happened to be at a time when we were supposed to learn how to fight in cities. "Not doin' it," one instructor said. "Have to learn how to fight in a tight space. And, so it's unfortunate that you're going to miss this training. But if you have to fight in a city, we'll train you up for that before you go." So off I went to Vietnam. And I still didn't know I was going to go to "Two/Five." So I got into Da Nang and got on a cattle car, which is basically a big old tractor-trailer truck that had seats in it. And it had seats in the middle, and it had seats on the outside. So I sat on the outside, and I was across the way from a major who looked at me and said, "This is your first tour in Vietnam, isn't it?" And I said—and I'm wearing my gold bars—and I said, "Yes, sir. It is." He said, "You know how I know?" And I said, "Other than my rank, sir?" He said, "Yeah, see, the veterans sit on the inside so the guys that sit on the outside can take the bullets." So this is good. This is day one, and I'm saying to myself, "I'm already dead." Found out I was going to "Two/Five." Still didn't know what the words "Two/Five" meant. Just knew that I was going to be proud to be part of that great, great unit. Got up to Phu Bai, and then I started realizing that Phu Bai was close to Hué and that all that stuff I'd been reading about in the papers was about to become part of my life. Then-Major O. K. Steele, who is now a retired Major General in the Marine Corps, who was the battalion XO (executive officer), said, "Come on. We're gonna' go." And we got in a jeep. He's in the front seat. We had a driver. We had a guy in the back with a rifle and me, and we take off for Hué City. So we drive from Phu Bai to Hué City with one jeep. And I'm saying to myself, "OK, I didn't die in Danang; I am going to die en route to Hué City."
Continue reading ""
Wednesday, April 20. 2005
Ernie Pyle's Death of the Captain The great war correspondent, on Jan 10, 1944, here. With thanks to Michelle Malkin.
Tuesday, March 22. 2005
Excellent review of the real 1960s, by Bruce Bawer in the Wilson Quarterly. I was there then, and he got it right. Useful for those of you all who are too young, or can't remember... "To those on the right, the 1950s were the last good time, an era of sanity and maturity, order and discipline, of adults behaving like adults and children knowing their place. To those on the left, the 1950s were a time of fatuous complacency, mindless materialism, and stultifying conformism—not to mention racism, sexism, and other ugly prejudices. By contrast, “The Sixties,” for conservatives, were an explosion of puerile irresponsibility and fashionable rebellion, the wellspring of today’s ubiquitous identity politics, debased high culture, sexual permissiveness, and censorious political correctness. For liberals, the period was a desperately needed corrective that drew attention to America’s injustices and started us down the road toward greater fairness and equality for all."
Friday, March 18. 2005
WW IV The best review of the history of the American role in the ME, by Bacevitch in the Wilson Quarterly. He contends that the seeds of our current World War IV were planted by FDR, that the war was declared by Carter, and reaches its full development now. And yes, it's about oil. And a pact with the devil - a pact not so much for oil itself as a pact for politically-necessary growth and prosperity.
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