The martial spirit in Germany, Japan and America

The UK and EU assumes from time to time the underlying angst of Germany’s WWII attempt to create a Europe united under Hitler's dictatorial rule.  Some of us have felt some ambivalence over the EU's attempting a peaceful equivalent.  With De Gaulle they have sought to get past all that WWII ugliness and get on with perfecting a united, peaceful, Europe.

Over here on the West Coast of the U.S., especially those of us who might also be Marines, there has also been an ongoing interest in the Pacific portion of World War II.  Roosevelt went along with Churchill’s “Europe First” approach, but the U.S. had been outraged by Japan’s “sneak attack” upon Pearl Harbor – American soil; which forced Roosevelt to invest a bit more in the Pacific part of the war than Churchill wanted him to. 

I recall reading about it while it was still going on, cutting battle maps out of newspapers and pasting them in scrap books.  At some point, I decided  to join the Marine Corps – it seemed the proper West Coast thing to do.   I was in Japan (on the way to Korea) early in 1953, a mere eight years after the Japanese surrender, and found no remaining evidence of the fanaticism that inspired Japanese soldiers to fix bayonets, shout Banzai and rush against Marine Corps’ machine guns.  Perhaps as has been the case in Europe, Japan wishes to get past the ugliness of the past, become entrepreneurs, make cars, cameras, and other things and merely get rich.

But recently I’ve learned that there are Japanese historians for which World War II is still a present concern.  They continue to relive the battles of the Pacific war.  I began in Volume one of Ian W. Toll’s Pacific Crucible, War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942.    I discovered reference to Japanese revisionist historians, and Toll’s reference to what he calls the “ground-breaking work of Anthony Tully and John Lundstrom, the Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway: The Japanese Story of the Battle of Midway.  I stopped reading Toll and began reading Tully and Lundtrom; which, thanks to Amazon’s Kindle, I was able to do almost immediately. 

Japanese historians have had the benefit of the memoirs and other records of surviving Japanese military leaders.   Tully and Lundstrom in turn have looked critically at the resulting Japanese historians' conclusions.  The Shattered Sword is a rather long work that examines the Battle of Midway, mostly from the Japanese point of view.  The Shattered Sword is well-written and suspenseful.  Vice Admiral Nagumo was commander of the strike force sent by Yamamoto to trick the cowardly Americans into coming out to fight.  Nagumo hasn’t fared well in earlier histories, but Tully and Lundstrom treat him better than they do Yamamoto. 

Hitler was sneered at by some of his patrician generals (behind his back of course) for being a mere corporal and of no important background.  The same thing could be said of Stalin, and it is interesting that something like that could also be said of Yamamoto who ran in a dictatorial fashion the naval portion of the Japanese war.  Stalin and Hitler could have their enemies killed.  Yamamoto couldn’t do that, but he could always get his way by threatening to resign.  It is interesting the the lower-class Hitler and Yamamoto were opposed by the patricians Churchill and Roosevelt.  Later on another dictator with a lower-class background, Stalin, made equally bad assumptions and decisions about the future.

Leading up to World War II almost everyone everywhere was making assumptions based upon primitive ideas of heredity and race.  Hitler’s ideas are well known, but the Japanese had similar ideas.  They up to and during WWII believed, most of them, that they were the master race and were destined to rule the world.

A fatal consequent belief in regard to their defeat at Midway, was their belief in the inferiority and cowardice of Americans.  Yamamoto sought to trick the American navy into showing up at Midway where he would catch them by surprise and destroy their Aircraft Carriers, something he had not forgiven Nagumo for failing to do at Pearl Harbor.   Neither Yamamoto, nor anyone else in authority could conceive of a Nimitz, spoiling for a fight, already at Midway, waiting for them.

Of course we Americans continue to give our potential adversaries reason to underestimate us.  We were isolationists before World War One, and after that War we became isolationists again.  If Yamamoto hadn’t attacked us at Pearl Harbor we might very well never have interfered, physically, with anything the Japanese were doing in South-east Asia or China.  And if Hitler hadn’t declare War on the U.S., it is doubtful that the U.S. would have been anything more than a supplier of equipment to the Allies.  But as Churchill famously said, “I knew you would fight.  I read about your Civil War.”

Having also read about our Civil War, I see a lot of similarity between the Japanese soldier’s vaunted courage and that of the American Southern soldier.  The Japanese had their “Banzai,” and other frightening yells, but our Southerners had their Rebel Yell before them.  And since our Civil War, doesn’t it seem that we have more Southerners than “Northerners” (and everywhere else-ers) enter the fighting portions of our military.  I was the only Californian, for example in my Marine-Corps Boot Camp platoon.

The November hikes, Hart and Hanson

 

[A Jessica anecdote:  having increased my workouts and thus increased the resulting sore muscles, I’ve been taking nightly Epsom salts baths.  Jessica is fascinated by this process and licks the bathwater off the edge of the tub and off my arm.  I try to discourage her, especially since Epsom salts, when taken internally is a laxative.  Also, she tickles.  When I push her away, she waits until my attention is back on my book and then puts her paws on the edge of the tub and looks as though she’s thinking of joining me.  Once again I push her away.  This goes on until she gets bored; which takes considerable time.]

I was pretty disorganized during the first hike.  My shoulders were sore from working out which is why I decided to use a tiny OMD-EM1, but then I couldn’t see the “Info” because of the bright sun and the “Auto” feature is maddening because it chooses where the focus is to be applied based on some algorithm that doesn't correspond to what I see.  I usually want to keep my dogs in focus so “auto” isn’t very useful.  At some point I decided to use the “S” setting.  “S” being shutter priority.  So eventually I set the camera at 1/500 and things settled down a bit.  The lens I used in the first hike was the 12-40 “pro.”  The Olympus “pro” line is made up of superior Zuiko glass; so I ought to be able to take better photos with the 12-40 Pro than with the Panasonic 12-60; although one Olympus fanatic swears that the Panasonic 12-60 is top quality, under priced, and every OMD user ought to have one.

Ben is very friendly.  If I ever needed protection, I doubt he’d be up to it.  But I haven’t needed any protection so far; so it is probably moot.  Still, looking at those guys coming out of the brush they looked like drug dealers straight out of Central Casting.  And, of course, they could have been.  I haven’t had any experience with drug dealers, but I doubt that they go about with chips on their shoulders wanting to pick fights with an old man walking three dogs, the most formidable looking of which seemed very friendly, but he “might” change his attitude of the men showed any sort of aggression . . .

I just finished reading (for the second time) “Sherman’s March to the Sea” from Victor Davis Hanson’s, The Soul of Battle, and have started (for the second time) B.H. Liddell Hart’s Sherman, Soldier, Realist, American.”  Sherman is credited by Hanson and Hart with so demoralizing the South by means of the burning of plantations, tearing up railroad tracks, burning farm products, and living off the land by means of taking (stealing) food and anything else they needed or wanted, as they marched on through.  When he was all done and marched his army of 62,000 soldiers through Washington, there were no women left in the South who were inclined (according to Hanson and Hart) to encourage their men to go back to war. 

Which is something that didn’t happen at the end of World War I.   Europeans thought they had nothing to learn from the American Civil War, and so let the Germans surrender without convincing the German people at home that the German army had really been defeated. Thus, a German majority was anxious to have another go at it.  Sherman (according to Hanson and Hart) made sure that there was no doubt in any Southern homebody's mind that the South had been defeated.  Thus, the South has never after wanted to try it again.  The Germans after WWII were occupied by the British, Americans and Russians and so the Germans at home were at last convinced of their defeat and, hopefully, have no wish to try it a third time. 

Bernal Diaz confesses his fear

Though we have only his own testimony before us in his narration, The Conquest of New Spain, I have no doubt but that Bernal Diaz was an extremely brave and effective soldier, and yet . . .

“It is now a long time since we fought these terrible battles, which continued without intermission day and night, and I cannot be too thankful to the Almighty for my preservation; and now I must relate something extraordinary which befel myself. The reader will remember above that I stated how we could see the Mexicans sacrificing our unfortunate countrymen; how they ripped open their breasts, tore out their palpitating hearts, and offered them to their abominable idols. This sight made a horrible impression on my mind, yet no one must imagine that I was wanting either in courage or determination; on the contrary, I fearlessly exposed myself in every engagement to the greatest dangers, for I felt that I had courage. It was my ambition at that time to pass for a good soldier, and I certainly bore the reputation of being one; and what any of our men ventured, I ventured also, as everyone who was present can testify; yet I must confess that I felt terribly agitated in spirit when I each day saw some of my companions being put to death in the dreadful manner above mentioned, and I was seized with terror at the thought that I might have to share a similar fate! Indeed the Mexicans had on two different occasions laid hold of me, and it was only through the great mercy of God that I escaped from their grasp.

I could no longer divest myself of the thoughts of ending my life in this shocking manner, and each time, before we made an attack upon the enemy, a cold shudder ran through my body, and I felt oppressed by excessive melancholy. It was then I fell upon my knees, and commended myself to the protection of God and the blessed Virgin; and from my prayers I rushed straightway into the battle, and all fear instantly vanished. This feeling appeared the more unaccountable to me, since I had encountered so many perils at sea, fought so many sanguinary battles in the open field, been present on so many dangerous marches through forests and mountains, stormed and defended so many towns; for there were very few great battles fought by our troops in New Spain in which I was not present. In these perils of various natures I never felt the fear I did subsequent to that time when the Mexicans captured sixty-two of our men, and we were compelled to see them thus slaughtered one by one, without being able to render them assistance. I leave those cavaliers to judge who are acquainted with war, and know from experience what dangers a man is exposed to in battle, whether it was want of courage which raised this feeling in me. Certain it is that I each day pictured to myself the whole extent of the danger into which I was obliged to plunge myself; nevertheless, I fought with my accustomed bravery, and all sensation of fear fled from me as soon as I espied the enemy. Lastly, I must acquaint the reader that the Mexicans never killed our men in battle if they could possibly avoid it, but merely wounded them, so far as to render them incapable of defending themselves, in order that they might take as many of them alive as possible, to have the satisfaction of sacrificing them to their warrior-god Huitzilopochtli, after they had amused themselves by making them dance before him, adorned with feathers. [Bernal Diaz, The Conquest of New Spain, Kindle locations 10040-10063]

Comment: Was the fervent praying Diaz engaged in before battle taken into consideration by Nicholas Wade? Not as far as I’ve read. Wade describes religion as providing a personal overseer (sort of like Freud’s Superego) who would have kept him apprised of how he ought to behave in the coming battle, but would this overseer also provide Diaz with the strength to accomplish that behavior and more importantly rescue him if he got in over his head? Diaz thought so, and he did after all survive, and since he wrote his book when he was in his seventies, he had made it into old age with nothing changing his mind.

Diaz was a brave and a very-effective soldier and yet he felt fear as a result of seeing the torture the Aztecs engaged in before killing the 62 men captured from Cortes’s division earlier. In the modern-day American military “fear” is made light of. Soldiers going into battle will “normally” have the “jitters,” but once the fighting actually starts, they are told, they’ll be okay; which is in effect what Diaz describes as his behavior. He feels a bit guilty about the fear, but the modern soldier is told that fear is okay as long as it isn’t incapacitating, as long as it doesn’t prevent the soldier from doing his job. Bravery consists in overcoming that fear, and after all, there are comrades to the right and to the left. One doesn’t want to let them down now does one?

Falling on a grenade and other morals

I don’t for a minute believe that people only sacrifice their lives for kin. My last serious study was of the American Civil War. Countless men gave up their lives and it strikes me as preposterous, something no Civil War historian would ever say, to assert that they were all doing it for their kin. While it is doubtful that many of them had a comprehensive view of what was at stake, they nevertheless, most of them, fought bravely. And if a group’s officer ordered them to make a “suicidal charge,” they would usually do it.

Military historians have puzzled over the motivation of soldiers who will literally give their lives in battle. There are many cases, for example, of soldiers falling on grenades in order to save their comrades and these comrades were in almost all cases not their kin. The consensus view, a view I have never read anyone dispute, is that they do it for their comrades. They fight for each other. Saving their friends becomes more important than saving their own lives.

Perhaps someone who jumps in the water to save his dog doesn’t think he is going to be killed. Maybe he overestimates his ability to swim out of trouble, but someone who falls on a grenade can be in little doubt.

The same sort of thing occurred in many of the Civil War battles. At Cold Harbor for example, Grant sent charge after charge against an impregnable position. General Hood did the same thing in another battle. In World War One, waves of soldiers were sent against positions defended by machine guns. It took countless lives lost before generals realized that superior enemy tactics or technology necessitated a change in their own tactics, but what about the soldiers who were sent on those “suicidal” charges? Why did they do it? Stephen Crane, though he never fought in the Civil War, in his The Red Badge of Courage, is credited with perceptive insight into this matter. The soldiers believe they “ought” to be brave. If they don’t perform as commanded in an attack, then they were (typically) ashamed of themselves, and if they have a chance to redeem themselves by giving their lives in the next charge, they may do it. Crane’s “coward” turned “hero” didn’t lose his life, but he was willing to lose it. And here, by using the word “ought” we are entering into Nicholas Wade territory.

We know more about the Chimpanzee than we once did. It is now known that in the wild they engage in almost constant warfare with neighboring tribes of chimpanzees. One tribe will try to kill off the males of an enemy tribe, one by one, and eventually take over its females. The Chimpanzee and the line that became homo sapiens split about 5 million years ago. Wade infers that man’s pre-hunter-gatherer ancestors behaved just as the chimpanzee does today, but when man entered into hunter-gatherer societies, the old ways didn’t work. These societies no longer needed an alpha male. They needed to become egalitarian; so, according to Wade, Natural Selection developed “morals” in the Hunter-Gatherer society so that tribe members would behave as they “ought.” Wade lists what he believes were the critical “oughts,” and tribe members who didn’t abide by them, when found out, would be ostracized. Being kicked out of a tribe in those days was tantamount to a death sentence; so it was in their interest to conform.

On being “well read” in history

Putting Dawson’s quote in context, he writes, “. . . “The later mediaeval centuries – the eleventh, for example, or the thirteenth – have each of them a distinctive individual character; but to most of us the centuries between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Norman Conquest present a blurred and vague outline which has no real significance to our minds.  We are apt to speak of Anglo-Saxon England, for example, as though it was the same all through, not remembering that the age of Edward the Confessor is separated from that of the Anglo-Saxon conquest by as wide a gap as that which divides it from the time of Cromwell and Mazarin, or as that which separates our own age from the age of Edward III and Chaucer. 

“In reality that age witnessed changes as momentous as any in the history of European civilization; indeed, as I suggest in my title, it was the most creative age of all, since it created not this or that manifestation of culture, but the very culture itself – the root and ground of all the subsequent culture achievements.  Our difficulty in understanding and appreciating that age is due in part to the creative nature of its activity.  It was an internal organic process which did not manifest itself in striking external achievements, and consequently it lacks the superficial attractiveness of periods of brilliant cultural expansion, like the Renaissance or the Augustan Age.”

After this occurs the passage I quoted yesterday:  “Nevertheless it is not the ‘easy’ periods of history that are the most worth studying.  One of the great merits of history is that it takes us out of ourselves – away from obvious and accepted facts – and discovers a reality that would otherwise be unknown to us.  There is a real value in steeping our minds in an age entirely different to that which we know: a world different, but no less real – indeed more real, for what we call ‘the modern world’ is the world of a generation, while a culture like that of the Byzantine or the Carolingian world has a life of centuries.’

And then Dawson writes, “History should be the great corrective to that ‘parochialism in time’ which Bertrand Russell rightly describes as one of the great faults of our modern society.  Unfortunately, history has too often been written in a very different spirit.  Modern historians, particularly in England, have frequently tended to use the present as an absolute standard by which to judge the past, and to view all history as an inevitable movement of progress that culminates in the present state of things.  There is some justification for this in the case of a writer like Mr. H. G. Wells . . . but even at the best this way of writing history is fundamentally unhistorical, since it involves the subordination of the past to the present, and instead of liberating the mind from provincialism by widening the intellectual horizon, it is apt to generate the Pharisaic self-righteousness of the Whig historians or, still worse, the self-satisfaction of the modern Philistine.”

Comment:  To be “well read” in any period of history is a provocative idea.  I approached that most recently in regard to the American Civil War.  Prior to that, I approached it in regard to Islamism and before that the very medieval period that Dawson refers to.   I was well-enough-read, recently, to get into several debates (arguments) over the merits of Generals Longstreet, Hood, Bragg, Sheridan and McClellan.   But some of those Civil-War buffs knew details about routes, distances, supplies and orders that were beyond anything I knew (or was interested in).  At a certain level I wasn’t badly read, but I wasn’t well-read compared to some of those guys.  

It seems to me the American Civil War is easier to steep oneself in than Dawson’s period.  In regard to the ACW, even if one goes into the pre-war histories of generals and leaders, one is still dealing with only a generation or so, but the medieval period grows out of the Roman period (Empire) and develops differently in the various European areas over several centuries.   How does one steep oneself in such a divergent chaotic and long set of facts and speculations?  Maybe, however, I’ll be able to steep myself in Dawson’s book, assuming I finish it.  I am still reading Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire, A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, and am up to page 290.  Maybe if I didn’t skip around so much I could do more steeping.

On the Nature of Genius and Joseph Epstein

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/i-dream-of-genius/

The above article by Joseph Epstein is an interesting description of things said, thought and written about “Genius” and intelligence.  We feel comfortable with the concept “intelligence,” having more or less ourselves and on occasions when we aren’t in competition with anyone probably know how much we have – unless we habitually lie to ourselves.  But if we do we can no longer turn to Sigmund Freud to find out why because, Epstein tells us, Freud is a failed genius – someone who was thought to be a genius for many years but now that his ideas have been discredited deemed a failure – along with Karl Marx.

Are the recipients of the Nobel Prize geniuses?  Epstein knew several of them and thought not.  He concludes that “it is always sensible to remember that in 1949 the Nobel Prize in medicine was given to Antonio Egas Moniz, a Portuguese surgeon, for developing the procedure known as the lobotomy.”

“Schopenhauer wrote: ‘A man of learning is a man who has learned a great deal; a man of genius, one from whom we learn something which the genius has learned from nobody.’”

“Who is and who is not an authentic genius is a question always up for dispute,” Epstein writes.  “Dante, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy are on most lists. So, too, among the ancients, Homer, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart are the indisputable musical geniuses. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo and Raphael make the cut in the visual arts. So in science do Euclid, Galen, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Darwin. In politics, Pericles, Alexander the Great, Julius and Augustus Caesar, Napoleon, Winston Churchill, and Mahatma Gandhi would seem to qualify, with Lenin and Hitler and Stalin and Mao Zedong falling into the category of evil geniuses.

I spent several months recently studying the American Civil War and tend to see things with its perspective.  By the end of this war several generals were considered geniuses, especially Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee.  In terms of what they individually accomplished they deserve this classification more than any other generals, although nothing said about the Civil War nowadays goes unchallenged.  But if we look at these generals we see how large a role chance played in their being given the opportunity to displace their abilities.  Also, their abilities were not initially evident.  They needed to make a few mistakes before they were able to display “genius.”  And early in the war no general was permitted that latitude. 

At the beginning of the war George B. McClellan was called “the Young Napoleon.”  He was thought to be the most talented general in the Union Army, but he didn’t move his inexperienced army quickly enough or win spectacular enough battles, so Lincoln replaced him.  By the time Lincoln appointed Grant to lead the Union army he had learned that he needed to allow his general the chance to make a few mistakes.  Would McClellan have won the war a couple of years earlier if Lincoln had allowed him that same latitude he allowed Grant?   Ethan Rafuse, in McClellan’s War, published in 2005 and some others argue persuasively that McClellan is today underrated. 

The Generals in the Civil War were all under orders.  Lincoln for the Union and Davis for the Confederacy looked at his pool of officers and with a few advisors decided whom to promote or demote.  Lincoln we say in retrospect did well when he promoted Grant.  Davis in the same sense did well when he promoted Robert E. Lee.  Were these the only generals who could have done well at that level?  We don’t know because many generals were never given the chance.  At the end of the war, for example, it was thought by many that Nathan Bedford Forrest could have functioned at the very highest level.  Others dispute this with great vehemence I hasten to add, but the pool of talent was much larger than the numbers given the chance to perform at that level.

I would same the same thing about many of the geniuses on Epstein’s list. Most wouldn’t have had a chance to rise to the level called “genius” if they had been born to poorer parents.  Many wouldn’t have done well if they had not “sold themselves” to those who had the decision-making power to enhance their advancement. 

Also, the conception of who the geniuses are seems to change with every age.  In the Romantic age for example, “The Romantics preferred their geniuses daring like Lord Byron; mystical like William Blake; and tragic like poor John Keats. For them, geniuses, simultaneously heroes and martyrs, were blessed with gifts for revelation, and cursed by being at odds with the culture of their time. The ideal type of genius for the romantic was the poet. Percy Shelley called poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”; they were also prophets, who showed and revealed the sacred. Romantic critics—Henry Hazlitt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson—made the genius out to be above the law, a law unto himself, and in his own way a god.”

I tend to think that in a healthy society there is a pool of people who with the right education and encouragement, and the right occasion or emergency can rise to a level subsequent generations may term genius.  This pool is made up of potentially highly intelligent and highly talented people. 

In this age many of the highly intelligent may look up from the pool at the odds, look at who “succeeds” and who doesn’t and decide striving after “success” or “genius” isn’t worth the candle.  Nevertheless they are still out there in each generation available to be called upon if needed, and if the calling is phrased properly.

Was this English Major really a Major???

I described the current challenge to my description of my engineering career to an engineering friend who wrote back, “You might find your career at DAC as "ordinary", but to many (most?) people a career at a top flight (no pun) company working on exciting hi-tech projects is far from ordinary. Imagine some guy working as a purchasing agent for Best Buy, as one of many examples.

“You have an exciting resume and most people with lots of time to post on the internet do not. I see this on the firearms forums, where I have become convinced that most participants in the discussions do not actually own or shoot guns; they are engaging in ritual fantasy and really do not have real working experience with the topic.”

That’s an interesting perspective – I previously had a thought something like that, that I had a certain sort of advantage by working at Douglas, McDonnell Douglas, and Boeing for all those years, but the thought was in regard to things I wrote or the way I approached debates in the forums.  But when I think of influences, I usually rank the Marine Corps at the top.  In one of the Civil War histories I read, the author said something like “most enlistees enlisted at about age 17 and 17 through the next few years are the most impressionable for any young man” -- something like that.  That period for me included my three years in the Marine Corps and without doubt I was affected by those years.  After that I stormed through four years of college as a Marine and not as I might have if I’d entered college right out of high school.  I was very aggressive (intellectually) in college and that aggressiveness extended into my first job after graduation: working at Douglas.  I started in a group where I assembled and rewrote engineering proposals going to the Air Force.  The Air Force had complained that Douglas Engineers were such poor writers that half the time the Air Force had no idea what was being proposed.  The Chief Engineer decided to hire some likely-sounding young men who could write in order to make these proposals presentable. 

That was fairly interesting for an English Major.  Old time Engineers didn’t appreciate young people telling them their work wasn’t up to snuff and if they could, chased them off.  “Get out of here.  I have work to do.”  But I was a Marine, a Buck Sergeant no less, and wouldn’t be chased.  Many of these encounters were like the sand-box fights one has as a young boy.  You knock each other down for a while, get up, shake hands and become good friends after that.  It wasn’t long before these old-timers were confiding in my about what they liked and didn’t like.  I had become one of them.

That happened at Santa Monica beginning August 1959.  I worked on Thor mostly, but when we won the Skybolt program I worked on that – no longer on proposals but mostly on something called the “Task Plan” which was to itemize and describe every element in the Skybolt Program.  By the time Skybolt was cancelled (Christmas 1962) there were just a couple of us left, we who were hired by the Chief Design Engineer because we could write.  Most who worked on Skybolt at that time were laid off but I was able to wangle a transfer to Long Beach to become a “Specification Engineer” on the DC-8.  More experienced Spec Engineers were working on the just-launched DC-9.  I was given a few airlines and was responsible for the “Delivery Specification” for each delivered airplane.  No airline accepted a baseline configuration; so changes had to be processed.  That was also one of my responsibilities. 

I didn’t like being a Spec Engineer and so wangled my way onto each new major proposal.  I worked on the C-5 proposal for almost two years.  We lost the proposal to Lockheed.  After that I was accepted back into the “Spec Group.”  By that time we were working on extended versions of the DC-8.  When the KC-10 came along I worked on proposal for that as well.  This time we won the program and I finally got a job I really liked: Program Engineer.  I worked for the Director of Engineering and did many of the wide variety of things necessary to the launching of a new program.  During our peak effort we had perhaps six Program Engineers to cover the various engineering tasks.   The tasks that were most memorable for me were the electronic systems.  I had to not only make the proposal to the Air Force but sit through the pricing and negotiations and then oversee the work and be a liaison with the Testing Division as we proved to the Air Force that our system worked.  A system that comes to mind was Rendezvous Guidance -- as one might imagine the “Rendezvous” system was of vital importance.  The KC-10 tanker and the planes it needed to refuel needed to be able to find each other, but enough of that.

Back to Edmundson:   Consider the final paragraph in his article http://chronicle.com/article/The-Ideal-English-Major/140553/ :

“What we're talking about is a path to becoming a human being, or at least a better sort of human being than one was at the start. An English major? To me an English major is someone who has decided, against all kinds of pious, prudent advice and all kinds of fears and resistances, to major, quite simply, in becoming a person. Once you've passed that particular course of study—or at least made some significant progress on your way—then maybe you're ready to take up something else.”

Since I did what Edmundson is recommending, do I see these matters the same way he does?  Not quite.  If I had gone directly into college after High School and then been sent to Douglas Aircraft Company, I wonder if I would have succeeded any better than the myriad of Liberal Arts graduates who left Douglas as quickly as they could for more congenial work.  My Marine Corps experience said as much about who I was if not more than my English Major.  I was a Marine who could also write.  That identity was much more acceptable to board engineers and engineering managers than a mere English Major. 

Also, I didn’t “take up something else” as a matter of choice.  I didn’t say to myself, “now I’m ready to become an engineer.”  After I graduated from college I had bills, needed a job, looked around and couldn’t find one, went to the Bliss Employment Agency, was sent to Douglas Aircraft and began the aforementioned career with a good deal of reluctance which I buried, apparently successfully, for the nonce.  Is there any justification here for the boasting I was suspected of?   None that I can see.  But perhaps I should be more appreciative of my career than I am, for as my friend illustrated I might have ended up a Purchasing Agent for Best Buy . . . Nah!

Picking a few bones with Edmundson's English Major

This morning I found myself thinking about Edmundson’s article:

“The English major is, first of all, a reader. She's got a book pup-tented in front of her nose many hours a day; her Kindle glows softly late into the night. But there are readers and there are readers. There are people who read to anesthetize themselves—they read to induce a vivid, continuous, and risk-free daydream. They read for the same reason that people grab a glass of chardonnay—to put a light buzz on. The English major reads because, as rich as the one life he has may be, one life is not enough. He reads not to see the world through the eyes of other people but effectively to become other people. What is it like to be John Milton, Jane Austen, Chinua Achebe? What is it like to be them at their best, at the top of their games?”

When I first read his article I wanted to agree with him, but as of this morning, I can’t quite.  He says “there are readers and there are readers.”  Does he mean to break all readers into two categories, those who read to anesthetize themselves and those who read to become other people?  I do a lot of reading but don’t identify with either of these categories.   To ‘read to become someone else’ is his preferred category but doesn’t this smack of schizophrenia?  

I wonder if Edmundson has read Collingwood.  Collingwood says that the historian (and presumably the reader) should take stock of himself and strive to set his preconceptions aside as he studies his subject, but Collingwood doesn’t mention the self-gratification; which I gather Edmundson assumes when he describes the blessings of living multiple lives through reading.  Surely most good historians are going to enjoy their work, but do any of them “become other people”?

My wife has always loved to read biographies but I never saw any indication that she had become any of the people she read about.  In my recent study project, the American Civil War, I read a lot of biographies but never had the slightest inclination to become any of the military figures I read about – not even the generals I admired.  I admired Sheridan, Longstreet, and John Hood for example, but each one had flaws, and in a history forum when my admiration for these generals became clear, I was pounced upon (figuratively) because of those flaws.  I would argue that their virtues overshadowed their vices, but this was not something someone who read about these generals but didn’t like them as much as I did could agree with.

But maybe Edmundson has only literary  figures in mind.  However, in looking at the three figures Edmundson mentions, I wonder how one would set about becoming Jane Austen.  One of her biographers, Jan Fergus, wrote that information about Jane Austen is “famously scarce.”   Typically, her biographers provide the sketchy information available and then draw conclusions from the characters in her novels.  So shall Edmundson’s reader live Austen’s life through the sketchy biographical information or through her novels? 

Edmundson elaborates: “English majors want the joy of seeing the world through the eyes of people who—let us admit it—are more sensitive, more articulate, shrewder, sharper, more alive than they themselves are. The experience of merging minds and hearts with Proust or James or Austen makes you see that there is more to the world than you had ever imagined. You see that life is bigger, sweeter, more tragic and intense—more alive with meaning than you had thought.” 

I don’t agree with this either.  Harold Bloom wrote a couple of books that touch upon this, The Map of Misreading comes to mind.  The reader, but perhaps only the creative reader, reads critically and thinks he can do better if he chooses to.  Bloom someplace sites artistic works that were demonstrations of a creative reader choosing to “do better.”  Perhaps not every English Major would do this, but those in Edmundson’s “ideal” category would at least feel this to the extent that they are not intimidated by what they read, and this is a long shot from wanting to live it. 

I have more appreciation for some of the other things Edmundson says, for example his response to Heidegger’s “language speaks man”:   “. . . Not all men, not all women: not by a long shot. Did language speak Shakespeare? Did language speak Spenser? Milton, Chaucer, Woolf, Emerson? No, not even close.”  I’m not sure where this Heidegger quote came from, but Heidegger didn’t believe language spoke for all men either – especially not himself.  He made up words to convey what he believed was his unique “speech,” i.e., philosophy.  But in general I take Edmundson’s meaning.  Most people, most likely, have no reason to be dissatisfied with the limits of language.  Creative people like those he mentions (including Heidegger) never feel constrained by the limits of language.  They get out of it more than the common reader thought was there – a bit more, perhaps, than Wordsworth’s ‘often thought but ne’er so well expressed.”

Further down Edmundson wrote, “The English major wants to use what he knows about language and what he's learning from books as a way to confront the hardest of questions. He uses these things to try to figure out how to live. His life is an open-ended work in progress, and it's never quite done, at least until he is. For to the English major, the questions of life are never closed. There's always another book to read; there's always another perspective to add.”   My most recent example of this is the American Civil War.  I believed it was the single-most formative event in U.S. history but I had never seriously studied it – until recently.  This was a “hard question” for me, that is, the war itself was extremely complicated.  One must study the major battles, read biographies of the important military and political figures, struggle through the important issues still being debated and then draw, or at least I drew only tentative conclusions.  But none of this pertained to how I lived my life.

Edmundson concludes with, “What we're talking about is a path to becoming a human being, or at least a better sort of human being than one was at the start. An English major? To me an English major is someone who has decided, against all kinds of pious, prudent advice and all kinds of fears and resistances, to major, quite simply, in becoming a person. Once you've passed that particular course of study—or at least made some significant progress on your way—then maybe you're ready to take up something else.” 

My stepfather, a truck driver, advised me to major in Engineering.  I rejected his “prudent advice” and majored in English.  Ironically I abandoned the course being urged upon me by college advisors, i.e., to get my PhD and teach, and instead became an engineer.  But would Edmundson say that my step-father was not a human being?  No one else in my family was an English Major or any other kind of a major – except one cousin who majored in nursing.  Were none of these human beings?   I don’t think Edmundson intends to be an elitist, but it is possibile to see a hint of that: the best thing one can achieve in college is to become an English Major.  Those who do not become English Majors let language speak through them and have only “one life to live.”  I’ve never watched the soap by that name but actors seem to be better examples of living other people’s lives.  Some actors devote major portions of their lives to being someone else.  I think of David Suchet being Hercule Poirot for example.  Did Suchet consider it a waste of time to spend so many years being Poirot?  I don’t have that impression.  He seems to have been happy doing being him. 

I wonder if Tom Selleck is happy being Jesse Stone.  Stone suffers from depression but manages to solve crimes in spite of it, but perhaps Selleck finds it appropriate to end his acting career on this depressed note.  Perhaps he realizes that acting, becoming another person, isn’t a very admirable thing to be.

Three years in the Sixth Corps -- Bill Salois

I’ve been slowly reading (with a Kindle) Three Years in the Sixth Corps by George. T. Stevens, Surgeon of the 77th Regiment, New York Volunteers, published in 1866.

This is tough reading because I’ve previously read accounts of the battles he describes.  I gather that his book was based upon the letters he wrote to his wife during those battles; whereas the histories I’ve read were based upon several generations of writing and thinking about them. 

I engaged in several debates that turned acrimonious over the merits of General George McClellan.  I personally compared several historians and ended up leaning toward the idea that he had been unfairly treated by most of them, but the troops liked him, several historians wrote.  Well, not George T. Stevens.  He was very critical of McClellan for not moving the army more quickly against the enemy and especially for not sending up reserves in support of the units Stevens was attached to – or fought with?  I don’t know if Stevens did any actual fighting.

In another war, the Korean, Bill Salois and I didn’t do any actual fighting either.  We got over there in 1953 when the fighting was winding down.  I changed places with a Marine who didn’t want to go to Korea in order to get over there and then planned to see if I could get transferred to the front lines, but truce negotiations were going on and I was told that such transfers were no longer possible. 

We were in an “Intelligence” outfit in Kunsan.  I would drive a Jeep over to the Air Force Base, get the current bombing plans, take them back to my base and give them to the people responsible for guiding bombers over K8 on their way to North Korea. 

Bill and I became part of Emhoolah’s “tribe.”  Emhoolah was a full-blooded Indian who liked to drink beer.  He assembled everyone at the Marine Corps base who was part Indian to be part of his “tribe.”  Bill was 1/4 Blackfoot Indian.  At the time I believed I was 1/8 Indian.  I learned later through DNA testing that my family was mistaken about that.  No Indian DNA showed up in my results, but at the time I thought I was part Indian and drank with Emhoolah, Bill Salois and two or three others.

Bill was from Montana and talked about going back there after he got out and starting a small ranch.  He urged me to come with him.  We could make extra money by riding in competition at rodeos.  That appealed to me while I was in Korea but after I got back to the states I decided to go to college instead.  I just this morning learned that Bill died at age 68 on December 29, 2001 of cancer.  “He was born December 2, 1933, worked in construction and was self-employed.  He served in the U.S. Marines and was a Korean War veteran.”  He was buried in East Glacier Cemetery. 

If I needed any further proof that this was the Bill Salois I knew I looked up two of his sons, John and Gabe Salois and there are photos of them riding bucking broncos at rodeos. 

Bill and I had no more control over what sort of war we would be engaged in than George Stevens, but we were the same sort of “volunteer” that join our armed forces whenever there is a need.  Why is it that young men do this (I was 17 when I enlisted) and not older men who have more time to think about it?  I don’t know.  I just recall at the time that I very much wanted to join the Marine Corps.  However, after the truce was signed and there were no further wars on the horizon, and my enlistment was up, I got out to go to college.  I didn’t really want to stay in the Marines, although some times I wonder what it would have been like.  I was only interested in being there for the war – such as it was.