I Don't See You

The pimply-faced mouth-breather at the concession stand handed over our 3D glasses and gushed unbidden, "It's the best movie I've ever seen! I've watched it ten times now! You guys are gonna love it!"

Had it not been that the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda was on my arm, the Colonel might very well have succumbed to the overwhelming desire to set the vocal chords on "stun" and subject the errant youth to a brief, but effective, lesson on a select number of points. The comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda's ever-so-slightly tightened grip on the Colonel's arm indicated that she had detected the tremor in the Force that often foretells a curmudgeonly blast from yours truly.

I cooled my jets.

However, after watching "Avatar" and then closing my eyes for an extended strategic planning session, the Colonel awoke this morning with jets at full military power, and the beneficiary of the resultant pedantic post will be you, gentle reader, instead of the public school product pushing concessions at the multi-plex. While the electrons comprising this missive are ordered for his consumption, I doubt the young man's ability to apply the fifth grade level reading and comprehension skills required to plow through it. But, the Colonel has always harbored a fondness for lost causes...

First, the Colonel cares not one wit about the "experience" of some adolescent whose digestive tract is still processing what his mother fed him for breakfast before pushing him out the door and pointing him toward the bus stop to join the other neighborhood punks-in-training beginning their matriculation at Che Guevara Elementary School. Just give me my bucket of stale and outrageously overpriced popcorn and my watered-down and outrageously overpriced fountain drink, and point mutely toward the Men's room so that I can prepare to sit still through a long and outrageously overpriced movie. If you must speak, restrict your vocalizations to short, intelligible utterances laden with information and respect--not necessarily in that order.

Second, the Colonel wonders to what better use the several hundred dollars you spent on repeated viewings of this movie could have been put. Oh, I don't know, maybe some suspenders to help keep the waistband of you trousers from sliding down around your thighs. Or, maybe a hat with the bill on the front. Or, maybe a haircut.

Third, the Colonel would like to know against what films you applied your cinematic comparisons to arrive at the erroneous conclusion that this is the best movie of all time. "Caddy Shack" was more original and had a better plot than this tree-hugging homage to anti-capitalism. "Avatar" has some really neat special effects, but contains little novelty--most of the movie was lifted from other films. Even with the few remaining synapses firing in the amorphous goo laying fallow in the recesses of my brain-housing group, the Colonel was able to detect and identify scenes and devices plagiarized from "Aliens," "Star Wars," "Dances with Wolves," and "Starship Troopers," to name only a few.

On a positive note, the Colonel appreciates Cameron's allusions to the evils of mercenary armies in the service of corporations. These re-United States sully the good name of our people with the allowance and employ of such mercenary outfits as Xe (aka, Blackwater).

It has always been the Colonel's position that the United States military should be used to do corporations' bidding--they pay for it.

Give ME a Teleprompter, Please!

The Colonel really wishes everyone would lay off of our president regarding his use of a teleprompter. Frankly, the Colonel longs for the day when technology catches up with the dream of a memory chip behind the ear and a personal HUD ("head-up display" for all of you Mississippi State and LSU grads) to guide my every spoken word. Programmed to prompt the statistically most effective and least inflammatory responses to the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda's every query, the Colonel's quality of life would dramatically surge into the upper 90's as measured by daily tracking polls.

The Colonel can only imagine the soaring heights to which his familial popularity would rise once his off-hand remarks and scattered-brained utterances are disciplined and scripted for the most effective delivery. And with the behind-the-ear memory chip implant providing pronunciation and diction cues (appropriate to the audience), there would be no more of the verbal stumbles and monosyllabic guttural utterances that otherwise characterise and dominate this Marine's speech.

One fervently hopes that second and third generations of these devices would even provide faithful speech replication--nothing like the flat-toned computer speak by which Steven Hawking currently communicates. These devices will, if the Colonel's happiest dreams come true, have the ability to pick up even the slightest of the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda's whispers in other rooms, accurately interpret their hidden meanings, and provide an automatic reply calculated to satisfactorily answer in a soothing-toned voice replication, thus negating the need for personal constant monitoring and attention to the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda's communication network. The Colonel can only imagine the marital bliss thereby provided.

The Colonel's communication with non-familial contacts would also benefit from the envisioned technology. The heretofore unintelligible utterances of bored store help would be instantaneously translated and winnowed for what tiny bits of useful information might exist in their verbalized breath expulsions. An answer of thanks would be generated and produced for the Colonel, obviating the need to actually personally reply. This might actually save the Colonel from the legal action sure to be incurred if he acts on the overwhelming impulse to grab the offending mouth-breathing public school product by the stacking swivel and... Anyway, you get the idea.

Teleprompters for all, I say.

Ode to Anas Platyrhynchos

It has been a season to remember. For the uninitiated, the sport--nay, Calling--that is duck hunting, seems a foolish pursuit at best. When one who has never been hears of the 0-dark-thirty reveilles, the wind-chilled boat rides, the frozen-fingered handling of dozens of decoys, the back-killing hours standing in thigh deep water, the expense of guns and ammunition, and the often empty-handed result of all of these rigors, they need no other confirmation that their friend is three or four shells shy of a full box. And in more years than not, with birds in short supply, and those warier than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, the hunter himself comes to the same self-evaluation. But, then, just about the time a duck hunter is ready to enter a seven-step program to wean himself from the addiction, there are seasons like this one that provide the rush that hooks him deep in his soul and leaves him longing for the next season's fix.

For the Colonel, there may not be many sights in this world whose thrill compares to that of a brace of greenheads turning and dropping altitude toward the decoys, wings cupped into the wind. Well, there is the sight of the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda after a couple of hours absence. And, there is the sight of a sleepy-eyed grandson toddling towards you for his morning hug. And, okay, there's the thrill of seeing the Rebels run on to the field for the first time in September. But, other than that... a duck on the downwind approach, gear down and wings cupped, in the soft light of a early winter morning...it just doesn't get much better than that.

The past several seasons here at the northern end of southern nowhere have been marked by low water and even lower numbers of ducks. We persisted though, trekking to isolated pockets of flooded timber in all but forgotten patches of cypress swamp. Sometimes we saw a few ducks. Most often not. Our trips became as much social outings as hunts; our cold, wet, birdless misery bonding us; our watch phrase ever the refrain, "maybe next year we'll have enough rain to flood the lake and the hunting will be better..."

And then, heavy rains came early this fall, washing away the bitter disappointment of a once buoyant Rebel football season aground on the rocks of reality, filling the lake to overflowing and our hearts with the hope of flocks of mallards escaping the ice up north and finding wet room to raft and loaf. A month ago, we were living the dream. There were birds in abundance, some of which even turned their heads to our plaintive reeds and circled our spread. And some of those thrilled our hearts, and the hearts of ammunition manufacturers, with the wind dance that brought them into range of our guns.

Yesterday, the first day in a nearly a week that we could get back on the lake--thunderstorms and waders don't mix--we motored to a spot that provided the perfect protection of calm water in a strong west wind and expectantly went through the well-rehearsed drill of donning waders, throwing decoys, hiding the boat and then hiding ourselves. We waited. No birds. Our ducks were gone--probably further south.

Stupid ducks, who needs 'em?

Surf's Up

"Bait and switch" is an effective short-term tactic, but it is a hopeless long-term strategy. We've all been its victim in a store--responding to a ridiculously low price advertised on the Bettermade 1000 only to find that the store is fresh out when we get there, "But, we have plenty of the Bestmade 2000 and it is really a much better value than the Bettermade 1000."

When applied to the prurient playground of politics, "bait and switch" takes the form of either comely specific campaign promises made with no intention or ability to keep, or nebulous rabble-rousing rhetoric that stirs the heart but has no soul. This deceit is not a recently discovered political art form, but has been in existence for as long as man has interacted with man. Moses recorded in Genesis, perhaps the first known broken campaign promise--the apple, as delightful as the fruit of its consumption seemed in the abstract, did not produce the constituent contentment its consumption promised.

This barely-reconstructed rebel doesn't often offer praise for yankees. However, the Colonel is heartened that the good people of Massachusetts demonstrated this week that even the most closed-eye constituency can be roused from its for granted-taken slumber. But, the Colonel is also aware that the results of Massachusetts' US Senate special election to fill the seat formerly held by Miss Kopechne's last boyfriend are not as insignificant, nor as earth-shattering, as the two political parties would have us believe. True, the results are newsworthy--much more so than most of the tripe that passes the lips of newsies--but, our assessment of them must be tempered by the adage attributed to Tip O'Neil that "all politics is local." In reality, the Democratic candidate, once she secured her party's nomination, believed she had the election sewed up in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 3 to 1 and whose electorate went for H in a landslide barely 14 months ago. When Coakley's campaign awoke to slipping poll numbers, a rash of ham-handed missteps and electorate-insulting gaffes left her wide open to the Republican's deft counterattack.

While the Colonel does believe that an element of anger and disgust at the bait and switch tactics of the Obama administration provided some momentum away from the Democratic column in the Massachusetts senate race, as well as the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races, the politicians positioning themselves to catch the wave should not mistake the message. As much as the brokers of power and purveyors of political pablum would have us believe, American political sentiment, on the whole, is not particularly policy-driven. We might say that we want our government to take care of this personal need or to do this or that for us, but, when our government intrudes into our lives in order to provide the service, we react as we nearly always have since 1775--with anger.

What we Americans really want, and for which our Constitution so adeptly provides, is government responsive to our desires for the freedom and opportunity to achieve our personal goals. We want government that provides physical security. We want government that ensures a level playing field. We want government that does our business in the open, so that we can supervise those we have chosen to serve us. We want government that does not take us for granted. Promise us "a chicken in every pot" if that is what gets you elected, but don't tell us how to cook it.

Sadly, the Colonel is afraid that the message coming out of Massachusetts, and Virginia and New Jersey, will be misinterpreted as policy-driven by politicians whose hubris prevents them from accepting that they are there because we put them there. Politicians with personal agendas will attempt to ride the current wave of popular sentiment to the left or to the right, showing off to the crowd on the beach, padding their personal power bases--and their pockets.

The Colonel hopes that real American leaders will emerge to harness the current productive wave of popular political sentiment before it turns into a destructive tsunami of violent popular expression.

But, hope is not a strategy, nor an effective course of action.

What We Owe Haiti

Were it not for Haiti, the dirt poor nation from which heart-rending pictures and descriptions of earthquake destruction are filling our news, the United States might not exist in any form near what we know today. Certainly the United States should respond to the need of this hemispheric neighbor with the massive and immediate aid that only the United States has the capacity to provide and the means to deliver. Whether that aid will significantly improve the lot of the Haitian people in the long run is another question. However, that is besides the point. The United States owes its very existence to the actions of the ancestors of present day Haitians.

The history of Haiti is perhaps one of the most interesting of all of the lands in the Western Hemisphere. The island of Hispaniola, on the western end of which sits Haiti, was occupied by the Arawakan Taino when Columbus and his crew of misfits and mercenaries blundered ashore in 1492. Within a few generations, due to European diseases and depredations, the Taino all but ceased to exist on the island. The gold and silver, after which the Spanish scoured the island, turned out to be much more prevalent on the New World mainland and the majority of Hispaniola was largely abandoned and left to serve as a base for Caribbean piracy.

While British and Dutch brigands also used Hispaniola, it was French pirates who established the first permanent settlement on the nearby island of Tortuga. In 1652, King Louis XIV commissioned an official French settlement on Tortuga; and in 1664, the French West India Company took over administration of the Tortuga colony and claimed control of the Western portion of Hispaniola. In 1697, Spain ceded this part of the island to France. French plantation owners imported West African slaves to work their fields and by the end of the 18th Century maintaining the over half a million laborers in Haiti accounted for a third of the Atlantic slave trade.

To maintain control over a slave population that outnumbered them 20 to 1, French planters employed the most ruthless and inhumane methods imaginable to discipline and terrorize their charges. Tens of thousands of slaves escaped to the interior where they formed their own communities, supported in large part by raiding their former masters.

On the heels of the revolution that plunged France into bloody chaos, slaves on Hispaniola began a rebellion in 1791. The French attempted to regain control of the island by declaring emancipation in 1793. Turmoil at home and war with Great Britain resulted in French neglect of their colony and former slave leaders filled the power vacuum. The most prominent of these, Toussaint Louverture, led an army of former slaves in turning back a British invasion, and by 1801 had brought the entire island under his control.

Meanwhile, Napoleon had seized power in France, and in 1802 sent a huge force to reclaim French control of the island. His intent was to rapidly subdue the island and then use it as a base for invasion of North America via New Orleans. For all his military genius, Napoleon never did quite learn to take the environment into account when embarking on one of his campaigns (see his experience in Egypt and Russia). Within a year of landing on Hispaniola with the mission of re-enslaving the black population, nearly half of the forty thousand French troops were dead from malaria and yellow fever. The remainder of the French invasion force was destroyed by the former slave army and they declared their independence on January the 1st, 1804.

As Napoleon's dream of Western Hemisphere conquest died, he attempted to salvage what he could and sold his claims in North America to the United States in order to finance his ongoing war with Great Britain. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 more than doubled the territory of the United States and allowed the great westward expansion that changed the former colonials into masters of nearly an entire continent. Were it not for the freedom-fighting former slaves whose descendants are clawing their way out of the rubble in Port-au-Prince today, our nation might very well be nothing more than an asterisk in European history.

Of course, the re-United States paid Haiti back in the early 20th Century by sending Brigadier General Smedley Butler and a brigade of Marines to sort things out for them. But that's grist for another post.

Ice Age Accoutrements

A rare snow fell here at the northern end of southern nowhere this week. With the white stuff still filling the air, the Colonel layered up, grabbed his trusty musket, and headed out into the storm to conduct a security patrol of the back forty. I enjoy the change of scenery winter brings to the landscape. I like the long, stark views afforded by the leafless woods--even more, the dramatic change wrought by a blanket of snow and ice. I was ostensibly looking for deer or a pesky coyote, but sighted snowy memories instead.

Standing next to a tall cedar as the snow swirled, the Colonel's mind drifted back to other cold, snowy adventures. Thirty years ago, this January, a brash young Lieutenant Gregory was volunteered to attend the Mountain Leader Course at the Marine Corps' base in the Sierra Nevadas. There, in a month's time (amazing, the Corps' economy), this thin blooded southern boy was transformed into an Arctic Warfare "Expert." So tagged (erroneously, at best), I became a member of a small cadre of Marines tasked with leading the transformation of a jungle-fighting Corps into a force capable of fulfilling our Cold War mission of engaging the Godless Soviets on the flanks of the NATO main effort. One said flank was Norway.

When I returned to the swamps of Camp Lejeune from the mountains of northern California, the "word" was our battalion, Second Battalion, Second Marines (2/2), was scheduled to participate in an exercise in Norway in the coming fall. In preparation for subsequent deployments to Norway, battalions would go to Minnesota or Wisconsin to train and prepare for their arctic adventure. To prepare for our upcoming Norway deployment, the Second Marine Division sent us to the Mojave Desert--at the height of the summer. There's just nothing like 18 hours a day of sunlight and 115 in the shade to get you in the mindset to handle 18 hours a day of darkness and 20 degrees in the sunlight.

Luckily for the Marines of 2/2, and this one in particular, our exercise, Teamwork '80, took place in central Norway, before the snow began to fall.

Not a week after our return to the relative warmth of coastal Carolina, I was summoned to the battalion operations officer's office and told that I had been "volunteered" to join a small cadre of "officers with arctic experience" charged with preparing the 1st Battalion, 6th Marines for their imminent deployment to north Norway for the aptly named exercise, Cold Winter '81. In preparation for this exercise 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, 1/6 received a couple of weeks of "classroom" instruction (provided by yours truly and three other lieutenants) at Camp Lejeune, and three weeks of field training at Camp Ripley, Minnesota before boarding amphibious shipping and sailing for Norway. The instructor cadre, of which I was a part, flew to Camp Ripley a couple of weeks ahead of time to set up the field training, and then flew to Norway a couple of weeks ahead of the arrival of the ships bearing 1/6.

During all of this "advanced party" partying, we American Marine arctic warfare "experts" got some very valuable training from the Royal Marine Commando, Captain J. J. B. Lear, who was assigned as to the Second Marine Division as part of an ongoing exchange program. Lear, a giant of a man with cauliflower ears from years of rugby scrums, knew his stuff. The Royal Marines had been exercising in Norway for decades and Lear put us "experts" through a crash course designed to impart as much of his knowledge as possible in the short amount of time he had available. Most of the arctic survival lessons I can still bring to mind are accompanied by the visage of Lear's face and the cockneyed, "Got it? Right, then!"

Reassigned as 2/2's assistant operations officer upon my return from Cold Winter '81, I was given the task of preparing the battalion for it's participation in Teamwork '82, this time in the same northern Norway training area in which 1/6 had floundered and frozen in inadequate clothing and equipment. I was as determined, as any brash lieutenant could be, to right all the wrongs of poor preparation and outdated clothing and equipment foisted on 1/6, and prepared a plan for 2/2 that included some equipment requirements currently not available in the Division.

Most of the clothing and equipment we Marines were still using in the early 80's was Korean War vintage, and it hadn't been very effective in the winters of Korea, for that matter. What we needed, in my not so humble opinion, were the much better arctic clothing, tents, sleeping bags and mats, and stoves used by the Norwegians and Brits, and I dutifully submitted a report to my boss saying so. He passed it to our battalion commander, who drug me along on an office call to our Division Commanding General, then Major General Al Gray. General Gray had been an enlisted man in the 1st Marine Division in the bitter cold days of the Korean War, and was revered as a tough, no-nonsense Marine. My battalion commander had served with Gray before and after brief pleasantries between the two, the general turned to me and said "Well, Lieutenant?"

I handed a one page summary of my brief, which included a laundry list of cold weather clothing and equipment requirements, to Gray and launched into my spiel. I had barely begun, when the general huffed and pitched the piece of paper back across the desk at me. He growled something to the effect of "We didn't have all of this stuff in Korea, and we did alright...," to which I responded with some inanity about the number of cold casualties exceeding that from enemy fire at the Chosin Reservoir. Out of the corner of my eye I saw my battalion commander blanch, and then saw Gray's face redden. But, I was committed and figured that since I had just clinched achievement of my terminal rank, I might as well leave my lance embedded as high up in the windmill as possible.

"General, if you are serious about this Division being able to survive and fight in Norway, we need this equipment." I stole a glance at my colonel and he was glaring at me like I had just dropped trou and mooned the CG. When I looked back at Gray, he too was glaring at me, and I figured I had better shut up--reaching terminal rank is one thing, being beaten to death for my insolence by a couple of combat veteran Marines is something else entirely.

After a stony silence that stretched past what seemed like several chow calls, and during which my, vastly, superiors maintained glares that threatened to set the sparse hair on my head on fire, Gray turned to my colonel and dismissed us with promises to find what we needed and instructions about the proper care and feeding of his lieutenants.

Turns out General Gray was already several miles down the ski slope ahead of us. He knew what we needed, and he got if for us. By the time I made my next trip to Norway in 1987, the Marine Corps had, in the words of a Royal Marine officer who saw our new cold weather clothing, "cornered the market on Goretex." By the time Gray and the next couple of Commandants that succeeded him were done, the entire Marine Corps was outfitted in state of the art individual gear and clothing that made moving and surviving in arctic conditions much more effective.

A wind gust blew light snow in my face and broke my reverie. In the long cold walk back to the big house I tried to think about something warm. The hottest thing I could envision was the butt-gnawing I received from my colonel all the long walk back to our battalion area after leaving Gray's office.

The Colonel's Year in Review

It is one of the things I dislike the most about the end of a year. Everyone of any self-considered importance assaults our awareness with an anthology of annualized review and remembrances. Each brings to us a breathless recap of the momentous events of the ending year, bearing bias and little brains as backup material. And, as a special bonus, each year whose numeration ends in the numeral 9 is proclaimed as the "end of the decade," necessitating a breathlessly brainless and biased recap of the last ten years' "important" events. So we have that to look forward to this year. Never mind that the current decade does not actually end until midnight on the 31st of December 2010...but, that's grist for another post.

Needless to say, those of us with no lives (and that includes the three of you who have absolutely nothing better with which to occupy your senses than to regularly waste valuable rod and cone time perusing posts hereon) will have eyes glued to the tube as some windbag (the Colonel knows windbags, being a prominent one his own self) winds down the year/decade with prejudiced recollections, replete with arched eyebrows and disapproving vocal inflection when describing the demise or accomplishment of a productive member of society who happens to be a conservative, or worse, a Republican--and lavishes praise on the "world-changing" impact of deviants like Michael Jackson. The Colonel would have you, instead, consider the year's events as they transpired here aboard Eegeebeegee, capital of the Tallahatchie Free State, situated at the northern end of southern nowhere on the periphery of the middle of nowhere.

The Colonel's Year in Review:

January 1st, 2009. The Colonel awoke clear-minded and relatively pain-free after a good night's rest preceded by a quiet non-alcoholic evening with the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda watching Ilidia Batatcha review the most momentous events of 2008.

January 2nd, 2009. In the 73rd playing of Cotton Bowl, and in the last such named post-season match-up to be played in the venerable Cotton Bowl Stadium, the 25th (BCS) ranked Ole Miss Rebels of the vaunted Southeastern Conference defeated the 8th (BCS) ranked Texas Tech Red Raiders of some little known collection of teams out west. In the highest scoring Cotton Bowl in history the Ole Miss Rebels continued their long and storied domination of the aforementioned little known collection of teams out west, having last trounced a team, Oklahoma State, from said little known and lowly regarded conference in the 2003 Cotton Bowl.

January 26th, 2009. The Colonel celebrated the completion of 53 solar revolutions standing hours on end waste deep in a cypress swamp whose liquid foundation hovered barely a quarter degree above the freezing mark on Herr Fahrenheit's scale, in vane hope of contributing to the noble cause of defending the northern end of southern nowhere from the annual mallard reenactment of Sherman's march to the sea. The Colonel has always been a sucker for lost causes...

February 2009. Sucked...

March 2009. Didn't suck so bad...

April 22nd, 2009. The Colonel celebrated Earth Day by harvesting timber aboard Eegeebeegee and turning it, with the help of his brand new personal saw mill, Semper Filet (not to be confused with his pick-up truck Semper Fillit, his trusty tractor, Semper Field, and his dearly departed boat, Semper Fish), into a few board feet of lumber and a prodigious amount of sawdust.

July 4th, 2009. The Colonel commemorated the 146th anniversary of the fall of Vicksburg to Grant and celebrated the 233rd anniversary of the independence declaration of the since-re-United States (see events surrounding the fall of Vicksburg to Grant) by loading the worldly possessions of Number 1 son and his family into the world's largest U-Haul truck and subsequently leading the exodus from bondage in the Scumslime State to freedom in the promised land on the shores of Lake Brenda at the northern end of southern nowhere just west of the middle of nowhere.

July 31st, 2009. The comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda celebrated the 33rd anniversary of her marriage to the man of her dreams, the dashing rake, the man, the myth, the legend... The Colonel. The Colonel celebrated said anniversary in much the same way he has celebrated every day since securing his bride in the bonds of holy matrimony--in amazed appreciation of a good and gracious God whose second act of unmerited love toward this colossal sinner was to place the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda athwart the path of my hitherto errant life.

September 18th, 2009. The Colonel returned from a week-long excursion to the Ozarks and declared definitively that he shall never initiate an overnight leave-taking from the comforting confines of Eegeebeegee as long as he shall live...or until the comely and kind-hearted puts her dainty foot down...which ever comes first.

October 6th, 2009. The Colonel celebrated completion of his second favorite person's 4th air-breathing circle round ole Sol. Master Caleb, first of the Gregory men in his generation, is accumulating worldly wisdom at a much more accelerated pace since his escape from the Scumslime State and subsequent arrival at the center of the universe here at the northern end of southern nowhere. The hope of 21st Century Civilization is fast learning the manly arts only practicable in a rural setting. Freedom cannot be truly appreciated until one relieves himself, without fear of neighborly recrimination, at any place of one's own choosing in one's own expansive back yard--for example.

November 10th, 2009. The Colonel celebrated the 234th birthday of his beloved Corps. Many of his fellow Marines celebrated in the midst of combating the enemies of our great republic.

December 7th, 2009. The Colonel celebrated the completion of his third favorite person's 2nd air-breathing trip around the sun. Master Taylor is taking great advantage of the wide open spaces here aboard Eegeebeegee and is fast becoming a race-runner of great renown.

My friends, the Colonel is quite sure that the last few minutes of your life have been spent in frantically bored hope that the next paragraph of this missive would in some small way improve upon the previous. Sorry to disappoint. The Colonel expects that the next year will not fulfill our lofty expectations, as well. Here's hoping I'm wrong.

That, in and of itself, will be a rare event worthy of recollection this time next year.

Declare WAR or Bring 'Em Home

First reports indicate that the latest attempt to terrorize the American public by attacking an airliner over the homeland was planned, ordered, and supported by a radical islamist group operating out of Yemen. Sen. Joe Lieberman, Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, assesses the threat thus: "Iraq was yesterday's war. Afghanistan is today's war. If we don't act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow's war. That's the danger we face." The fact of the matter is that Yemen has been a battleground of the West's cultural war with the islamo-fascists since the last century--the USS Cole was attacked in a Yemeni port in 2000, killing 17 Americans.

The Colonel's personal frustration with this issue is rooted in the strategy (and that is stretching the definition of the word) by which these re-United States and our (ahem) allies have pursued the amorphous "war on terror." Despite W's claim post 9/11 that the battle lines would be drawn clearly between us and those who did not wholeheartedly ally themselves with us in the fight, we have instead flailed against our enemy's tactic in a nearly single-handed, global, force-exhausting game of whack-a-mole and all but ignored the strategic centers of gravity--nation states supporting, at whatever level, the islamo-fascist movement. To use a well-worn war analogy: instead of "making Georgia howl" or "following Lee wherever he goes," as Sherman and Grant correctly attacked the Confederacy's centers of gravity; or threatening (quite convincingly, given the world's largest army and navy being built) Britain with war if they recognized the Confederacy, as the Union did to isolate the South internationally; we have chased individual rebel cavalrymen around the countryside and weakly implored governments harboring islamo-fascists to take actions which are clearly against their interests.

The clear strategic center of gravity of islamo-fascism is Iran, and Iran's ally, Syria. Instead of directly attacking this source of support of terrorists world-wide (Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, Fatah, and the list goes on...) we have attempted to "isolate and encircle" Iran with neo-democratic states. The problem with this strategy is that Iran has not sat idly by while we attempted to install one of the weakest forms of government (democratic republics are, by design, weaker than the will of the people in order to protect the people) in the countries on the peripheries of Iran and Syria. Iran has continued to fund and direct the operations of its proxies both in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as world-wide. It's as if we declared war on Japan's naval aviation and kamikaze tactics post 12/7 and conducted single-carrier task force operations primarily focused on eliminating that threat at sea--without ever dropping even one 250 lb bomb on a war materiel producing factory or supporting industrial center on the Japanese home islands. Until we take this fight to Iran, we will not win the war.

We had a golden opportunity dropped into our laps several months ago when the people of Iran took to the streets in opposition to the islamo-fascist clerics running and ruining their great country. We blew it. The Iranian people now know, just as the clerics tell them, that America has gone soft and cannot be depended upon to come to the aid of freedom-seekers.

My friends, we cannot indefinitely fight this "war" as is the plan of the political elite. We will lose it. The American people were "war weary" after only a couple of years of fighting during the Second World War. We are eight years on in this struggle with no end in sight. It is a crime against our people to pour, year after year, our blood and treasure down this rat hole without a clear vision of victory.

Declare WAR and bring our enemy to their knees or bring our soldiers home.

Not "Merry"

Twenty years ago the Colonel was serving as the Operations Officer for Battalion Landing Team 1/8, deployed aboard amphibious shipping in the Mediterranean for a six month tour. We were the ground combat element of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit (Special Operations Capable) and quite literally the tip of the American "presence" spear that has been maintained in that area since just after the Second World War. Twenty years ago this week, several other Marine officers and I were in Israel attending a planning conference for our unit's upcoming training in that country. I had been to Israel before, on Uncle Sam's behalf, but this visit was a surreal experience. While we were keenly aware that it was the Christmas season and that we were spending it away from our families, there was nothing visible in Tel Aviv to remind us.

It was one of my most memorable Christmases, nonetheless.

There were no commercial and/or secular distractions from my Christian beliefs regarding the reason for celebrating the season. No decorated evergreens. No Santa. No Rudolph. No frenzy to buy gifts. But, if one was observant of the countryside (as is this curious geography nut) on the commutes from downtown hotel to rural training areas, one could see people engaged in activities whose technology and technique had not changed for millennia. For this man, it was one of the greatest feelings of nearness to my God that I had ever experienced.

It has been thus for me ever since. The more I resist the will of merchants, family and friends to "get in the Christmas spirit," the closer I draw to Jesus and His will.

At the risk of incurring the wrath, disdain, or even mild displeasure of those of you for whom the cheery greeting means everything to you this time of year, the Colonel does not wish you a "Merry Christmas." Not if by "merry" you mean so absorbed in the giggly, brainless fluff of the season that you find no time for quiet, reverent reflection on the unfathomable love that God showed man with the gift of salvation through the sacrifice of His Son.

Here's wishing you a very reflective Christmas!

Tea Party Problematics

On this date in 1773, the colonial caper known as the "Boston Tea Party" took place in Boston Harbor. The event has reverberated through the years as "Americans objecting to taxation without representation." The truth is a lot more complicated and a lot less noble.

In truth, taxes levied on the British Colonies in America by the British Parliament did indeed raise the question of "taxation without representation." According to the British Constitution, British subjects could not be taxed without the consent of their elected representatives in Parliament. Since the British colonists in America did not vote for, nor have, representation in Parliament, political rabble-rousers in the colonies argued, with increasing vociferation, that Parliament's taxation of the Colonies, such as was the case with the Stamp Act, was "unconstitutional." In response to the outcry from the Colonials, the British Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in 1765 but maintained, in the Declaratory Act of 1766, that they had the right to raise revenue in the colonies. The irony is that any of the taxation Parliament attempted to impose on the American colonies was much less of a tax burden than that paid by citizens back in the British Isles.

Even more ironic is that the "Boston Tea Party" was in fact a reaction to lowered taxes on tea imported to Britain and then exported to America by the East India Company. British law, in granting a virtual monopoly on the British tea trade, required the East India Company to bring the tea to Britain first (in order to be taxed) and then auction the tea to middlemen who then shipped it to America. The taxes imposed and the cost incurred to make this indirect delivery to the colonies in America, meant that the Dutch could smuggle (a costly enterprise, considering the risks of confronting Britain's naval patrols) tea into American (as well as Britain's) ports and sell it much more cheaply than could the East India Company. When Parliament's Tea Act of 1773 reduced the taxes to undercut the Dutch smugglers and eliminated the requirement to auction the tea to middlemen, it directly impacted on the profits of American merchants who sold the smuggled tea. And, many merchants who had heretofore legally sold East India Company tea, were not given consignee commissions by the East India Company which could now ship its tea to America on its own right.

It was, therefore, a coalition of political rabble-rousers and undercut merchants that spawned protests against the new tea system, even though it meant that the people could now enjoy their cherished tea much more cheaply than before. Coercion--the threat of great bodily harm that was becoming an American talent--caused most of the East India Company consignees to resign their commissions and most of the tea sent to the Americas in 1773 returned to Britain in the ships whence it had come. Except, that is, for the three ships bearing tea to Boston. Seems the governor of the Massachusetts colony, whose two sons just so happened to possess East India Company tea consignee commissions, was not a man to back down in the face of threats. While every other colony's consignees had resigned their commissions, Governor Hutchinson's sons did not, and three ships bearing tea were tied up in Boston Harbor by the middle of December amid a standoff between the governor and colonists who refused to allow the tea to be unloaded.

British law allowed customs officials to confiscate cargoes for which import duties had not been paid within 20 days of arriving in port. When the first tea-bearing ship, the Dartmouth, arrived in Boston in late November, the local cabal of political rabble-rousers and undercut merchants called a mass protest meeting at which chief political rabble-rouser Samuel Adams led passage of a resolution calling for the Dartmouth's captain to return his ship and cargo to England. This impromptu congress also assigned a guard to prevented unloading of the Dartmouth, and Governor Hutchinson refused to allow the Dartmouth to leave Boston and return to England. With the deadline for paying the import duties looming and the possibility of custom officials seizing the Dartmouth's cargo, Samuel Adams was rousing the rabble at another meeting of the people on the evening of the 16th of December. At the end of the meeting, a group of men, the immediate impetus for whose actions is lost to history, disguised themselves as Native Americans, boarded the Dartmouth and two other vessels that had recently arrived bearing tea, and dumped all of the ships' tea cargo into the water.

We Americans point proudly to the "Boston Tea Party" as one of the seminal events in our revolution against British "tyranny." Many of us are invoking the event's remembrance in our protest against the current fiscal irresponsibility of our federal government's elected leadership. I'm okay with that. But, just know that no revolution, war, nor any other political movement is as pure in motive as our idealistic recollection of it years later.

Revolutions are bloody, divisive affairs. Perhaps it is better to ease our collective conscience with selective memory and revisionist remembrance.

The Explosive Pride of Narcissism

One hundred and thirteen years ago today, Alfred Nobel died. Today, his mortal remains set a new grave-spinning speed world record. On the fifth anniversary of their benefactor's death, the first Nobel Prizes for accomplishments in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace were awarded. Upon his death, Alfred Nobel, perfecter of the use of nitroglycerin, inventor of dynamite and the blasting cap, and, paradoxically, an avowed pacifist, bequeathed a fund from which monetary prizes would be awarded "...to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind." Nobel's Peace Prize, decided upon by a committee chosen by the Norwegian Parliament, was to be awarded to "...the person who has done the most or best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

Our young President was chosen for the Peace Prize, presumably, for his speeches. He has done nothing else of substance to merit the award. Even Jimmy Carter, as misguided in his decision-making and prone to pompous pronouncements as any President in the history of the Republic, has a resume of accomplishments (if mostly unmitigated disasters; with the one exception being his work with Habitat for Humanity) upon which one could deliberate for the purpose of such an award. President Obama has speeches.

Seems to the Colonel that President Obama could have boosted his stock enormously among adults by laughing off (and declining) the Peace Prize. He would have demonstrated that he "got it." Instead, he showed that he wanted it.

Therein lies the measure of a man.

The Last Legal War

Sixty-eight years ago today the Congress of the United States fulfilled its duty under the Constitution and declared war on the Empire of Japan. It has shirked that duty ever since.

On December 8th, 1941, President Roosevelt addressed the Congress for only ten minutes. With the rest of the nation listening by radio, Roosevelt declared that the previous day's date would "live in infamy" and called Japan's strike against Pearl Harbor a deliberate, premeditated act of war. His request for a formal declaration of war by the Congress was agreed to by every member of that body, save for a lone pacifist dissenter who presumably voted his principles and did not really believe that the United States should not respond with force against the Pacific expansionists threatening our Pacific expansionism.

While the Colonel is tempted to glaze the eyeballs of you three gentle readers whose lives contain so few pressing matters that wasting time plodding through this pedantic post is of no consequence, we will dispense with the history lesson describing the geo-political tidal forces and American interventionism that alternately encouraged and then condemned Japanese self-assertion in the Orient. Suffice it to say that the Japanese leadership didn't wake up on the wrong side of their futons in late November of 1941 and launch the carrier strike force toward the Sandwich Islands on a sake-induced hung-over whim. I'm not trying to justify their actions, any more than I would attempt to justify Hitler's, Stalin's, Mao's, Johnson's, or bin Laden's. It is just important to understand that no geo-political action, no matter how heinous, spontaneously occurs independent of other factors. The only vacuums in international politics occur in the brain-housing groups of those who believe that bad actors are always "unprovoked."

However, the point of this missive is that in every instance of the use of American military power since 1945, the Congress of the United States has been negligent in the disregard of its Constitutional duty. Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the United States Constitution places the responsibility of authorizing and paying for war squarely on the shoulders of the Congress. The Executive Branch may have responsibility for execution of military operations to accomplish a national strategy, but it is the Congress’ role to declare that a state of war exists between the United States and another state (or non-state) entity. In this regard, Congress has been woefully remiss in its duty for nearly seven decades. In 1950, President Truman committed American forces to full scale military operations without a formal declaration of war. President Johnson did the same in Vietnam beginning in 1964. Following the Vietnam conflict, force “authorization” for which the Congress passed the unconstitutional Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Congress sought to limit a future President’s use of military force with the cumbersome and impractical (not to mention, unnecessary) War Powers Resolution, which accomplished both an unconstitutional abrogation of Congress’ responsibilities and an unconstitutional infringement on the Executive Branch’s powers. The unconstitutional resolutions “authorizing” force against Iraq in 1990 and 2003 are further cases in point regarding a cowardly Congress bowing to an over-reaching Executive for the sake of re-election.

The Colonel would not have you think that the use of force in Korea, Vietnam, and against Iraq were not in the nation’s security interests. While cogent arguments can be made on both sides of that issue, the point is regardless the efficacy of the “vital national interest argument” in a given instance, our Constitution, and the will of its Framers, is quite clear regarding the way our nation may legally go to war. The Constitution, in Article I, gives the Congress the express authority “To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water…” Absent Congress’ formal declaration of war, the use of offensive military force by the Executive is unconstitutional—therefore illegal, and grounds for impeachment.

The constitutional remedy for congressional constitutional malpractice is, in our democratic republic, vested in the hands of the people via the ballot. The Colonel not-so-humbly suggests we use our power accordingly at the earliest opportunity, and every one thereafter.

Flag Flap

The Colonel has never been flippant about flying the flag of these re-United States. From the long distant past of my childhood to the halcyon days of my young adulthood, I was at the receiving end of prodigious pedantry from members of a generation for whom veneration of our flag was one of the most sacred rituals of our nation's patriotic religion. Some of the most fervent posterior gnawings ever aimed my way were as a result of very slight procedural errors regarding the escort or display of The Colors. Since that early education at the hands of men who knew, I have always been mindful that for over two centuries young men and women have willingly given their lives for the freedoms and principles of the nation for which that flag stood.

Comes to the Colonel's attention this morning, this case: http://www.wtvr.com/news/wtvr-veteran-flagpole,0,2550197.story

Seems that a hero of our nation has trespassed upon the supreme authority of some power-mad home owner association president in a Henrico County, VA community. How dare Colonel Barfoot, recipient of the nation's highest recognition for battlefield valor, presume to flout the sensibility-protecting strictures against flag poles in front yards! He is permitted by the subdivision's supreme authority to display his flag in the manner prescribed for any and all other affinities--such as a banner representing a school or season. As if our nation's symbol should be equated with a square of cloth bearing the likeness of a pumpkin, hanging from a unobtrusive short pole, slanted from the front porch!

Colonel Barfoot knows whereof he speaks when he says, as quoted in the article linked above, that most people nowadays fly the flag incorrectly and disrespectfully. Most Americans have no earthly clue that the methods and manner proscribed for displaying the flag of the United States carry the weight of law, under United States Code, Title 36, Chapter 10. Most Americans don't know even the basics of caring for and presenting The Colors. For example, did you know that the flag is never flown after sunset unless fully illuminated by a dedicated light source?

Colonel Barfoot should have known better than to move into a subdivision wherein his patriotism would be subject to the supreme authority of the homeowners' association. If he would like, he is more than welcome to build a home on an acre of the Colonel's spread here at the northern end of southern nowhere.

I'll even put the flagpole up for him.

Happy Birthday, Monroe Doctrine!

"Mind your own business and I'll keep my nose out of yours." This distinctly American notion, although increasingly out of practice in our scandal-driven, media circus world, has its own geo-political body of doctrine for which the principle is the spine.

On this date in 1823, during his seventh annual address to Congress, President James Monroe declared what became known as "The Monroe Doctrine" -- a set of principles for international relations, half of which was to guide the formulation of United States foreign policy for the better part of the next two centuries. Drafted primarily by future President, then Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, the policy arose from American concerns about attempts by European powers to reassert their political and commercial interests in the Western Hemisphere in general, and in territories adjacent to the nascent United States, in particular. While the nations at whose western hemispheric "meddling" the Monroe Doctrine was aimed paid scant attention to the upstart post-colonial country's declaration (we had no Navy or Army of any substance with which to enforce the doctrine), North Americans seized on the notion that the Americas, and the vast resources and space therein, were theirs for the taking and everybody else should steer clear.

What gets little attention in the Monroe Doctrine, is the other side of the coin. American presidents for the next 150 years, invoked the hemispheric non-intervention principle of the doctrine to justify the United States' actions in our hemisphere, from territorial expansion to self-defense to police actions to containment of communism. However, as Adams saw it, the Monroe Doctrine was actually a quid pro quo pronouncement that the United States would keep its nose out of European affairs if the Europeans would stay out of American affairs. From the standpoint of most European powers this was a laughable proposition--the United States was seen as a fractious collection of backward bumpkins; hardly a threat; and almost certainly to dissolve into several even weaker regional entities when the democratic republic experiment foundered. Were it not for Great Britain's tacit acceptance and enforcement (she had the world's preeminent Navy with which to do so), the doctrine would have been easily broached by any number of powers, including Spain, France, and Russia (who had designs on a frozen extension of Siberia--but for a small strait--in the far Northwest).

Up until just before the end of the century, the United States did indeed follow the isolationist strictures of the Monroe Doctrine. Then, the opportunity arose to invoke the doctrine against, and take advantage of, a weakened Spain. By the time the dust settled at the end of 1898, the re-United States were not only masters of the predominance of North America but were also in possession of colonies nearby in the Caribbean and way off to the west in the Pacific. It was becoming hard to maintain a straight face in our isolationist pronouncements and our condemnation of colonialism.

But, we persisted. Until 1917. But that's another story.

Constitutional Machinery vs Congressional Machinations

Never forget that a congress is first and foremost a political animal. While some members of a congress may place the people above their politics, and their country before their caucus, collective congresses will nearly always put priority on the accumulation and maintenance of political power. It has been so for the entire history of these re-United States.

On this day in 1824, the Congress of the United States, precisely following the Constitution's 12th Amendment, selected John Quincy Adams as the next President of the United States. It was an operational test of modifications made to the new American machine of government and it worked like a charm--for the party in power.

The 12th Amendment to the United States' Constitution, proposed by the Congress in December of 1803 and ratified by the requisite number of the States in June of 1804, corrected a couple of perceived "flaws" in the way Article II of the original constitution proscribed election of the President and Vice President via the Electoral College. Prior to the 12th Amendment; Article II, Section 1, Clause 3 provided that representatives from each State in the Electoral College, would each cast two votes for a candidate for President with the stipulation that the two could not be inhabitants of the same State. The candidate receiving a majority of the votes of the electors would be President, the next highest vote-getter would be Vice President. No majority vote was required for election of the Vice President; ties were decided by the Senate. If no presidential candidate received a majority of the votes cast by the Electoral College, Article II empowered the House of Representatives to choose the next President, from among the top five vote-getters.

One of the "flaws" in this original system was that if each member of the Electoral College voted a strict Party line, there would be a tie between the two candidates from the most popular ticket. This occurred in 1800 when Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr of the Democratic-Republican (I kid thee not) party each received 73 electoral votes (against the Federalists' John Adams' 64 and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney's 63). The Democratic-Republicans bungled a plan to have one of the Electors abstain on one Burr vote thereby giving Jefferson the majority needed to be elected President. History does not record which elector failed to get or comply with the Abstention Memo. The election then went to the Congress of the United States to decide--the outgoing Federalist dominated Congress. Jefferson was the Federalists' greatest political opponent, and the Federalists in Congress voted for the more palatable and less hated Burr instead of Jefferson. The first ballot, and next thirty-four, were exactly the same. Eight states for Jefferson, six for Burr. There were sixteen States and the Constitution called for a simple majority (not plurality)--nine, in this case--to win.

Oh, and here's where it gets really salacious. Alexander Hamilton, Washington's closest aide in the Revolutionary War and greatest champion of the Federalist cause during the push to replace the Articles of Confederation with the new Federal Constitution, was a close friend of Jefferson's and an antagonist of Burr's. Hamilton, although a Federalist, campaigned vociferously for Jefferson in the halls of congress during the marathon congressional version of the movie Groundhog Day. Hamilton supported Jefferson because he was "by far not so dangerous a man" as Burr. Hamilton's animus against Burr was evidently rooted in Burr's defeat of Hamilton's father-in-law in the 1791 U.S. Senate seat race in New York. Hamilton's exertions against Burr successfully changed one Federalist vote from Burr to Jefferson on the House's 36th ballot and Jefferson was elected President. Turns out Burr was indeed a dangerous man with a long, unforgiving memory. Vice President Burr killed Hamilton in a duel on July 11th, 1804.

The other "flaw" in the original Electoral College process was the fact that the top two vote-getters for President would most likely have campaigned against each other as political rivals, even if nominally from the same party. An unscrupulous politician (excuse the redundancy) so elected as Vice President could easily undermine policies of the President or even be tempted to engineer a coup de tat to oust and replace the elected President. The Republican Jefferson had found himself in just such a position of opposition when he had been elected as the Federalist Adams' vice president in 1796. The Twelfth Amendment, by providing for the election of the President and Vice President as a combined party ticket, theoretically at least, eliminated this possibility.

Which brings us to the Presidential Election of 1824. When Federalist John Quincy Adams (son of the second President), populist Democrat Andrew Jackson (the hero of the Battle of New Orleans), Georgia's William Crawford, and Kentucky's Henry Clay (and Speaker of the House), all failed to garner the necessary majority of the votes of the Electoral College, the newly adopted Twelfth Amendment came into play:

"The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice...," and "...The person having the greatest number of votes as Vice-President, shall be the Vice-President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed, and if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice-President..."

In plain Murican: If no candidate receives a majority in the Electoral College, the House of Representatives picks the President from among the top three vote-getters for President, and the Senate picks the Vice President from among the top two vote-getting VP candidates. Interestingly, there is no requirement for consideration of party or ticket. So, in a case where different parties controlled the House and Senate, a President and Vice President could, in theory, be elected from different parties. Imagine, if you will: President Obama and Vice President Palin... In fact, such a dilemma very nearly could have arisen in 1992, when early on (before Ross Perot exposed himself as the whack-job that he is) it looked like there would a be a possibility of none of the three tickets (Bush-Quayle, Clinton-Gore, and Perot-Stockdale) winning a majority of the Electoral College vote. With the House then in the hands of the Democrats and the Senate majority held by the Republicans, all kinds of strange combinations can be imagined to have resulted!

In the 1824 presidential election, Andrew Jackson garnered 99 electoral votes. John Quincy Adams got 84. One hundred and thirty-one was the number of a majority and so the 12th Amendment was invoked.

And, here's where it gets salacious, again. Jackson was a visceral and vocal opponent of many of the Federal institutions created over the first couple of decades by the Federalists (Washington, Hamilton, et, al.). He was a popular military hero and feared by the establishment. Henry Clay, whose votes in the Electoral College had prevented either Adams or Jackson from getting a majority, threw his weight (he was Speaker of the House, remember) behind Adams and convinced the House to elect Adams over Jackson, in contravention of the will of a majority of the people of the United States. Clay was rewarded for this act by appointment as Adam's Secretary of State.

Congresses always act in their own interests. Important point to remember as the Health Care Reform debate swirls.

Economic Electrons

Today is Cyber Monday. This productivity-sapping, at-work, on-line Christmas shopping day rivals Black Friday in the lemming-like behaviour of humans swept up in the holiday shopping frenzy and rushing over the cliffs of rampant, credit-fueled consumerism. By the time this post joins the crowd of trons taxing bandwidth, on-line retailers will have a good idea whether this holiday shopping season will be a successful one for them, and economists will have a good feel for whether our spending will boost the economy, or if we'll be mired in a moribund recovery. I'm betting on the latter. It's not that I want the recovery to be a slow, painful experience. I'm just a student of history, and history tells us that consumer-driven commodity/asset bubbles drive recoveries. Unfortunately, the soap-slick on the deck from the popped housing and credit bubbles is going to make getting back on our feet much, much harder this time around.

The Colonel is, as may surprise many of you (at least two of the three of you who regularly subject yourselves to rod and cone wastage perusing posts hereon), a huge fan of the electronic technology that allows me to sit here at my computer and do my shopping. No need to subject myself to the sanity-testing inanity of parking lot bumper cars and shopping cart traffic jams. No need to stand in line at the cashier behind a crowd of teenagers whose vocabulary is restricted to the words "like," "dude," and "I'm all." No screaming snot-nosed miscreants announcing their parents' inability to grasp even the most rudimentary elements of imposing their will on a child and instilling a modicum of discipline. No slack-jawed, dull-eyed, un-caring cashiers dumping my treasures in flimsy plastic bags, one per bag, until a modestly-numbered list of purchased items swells in crinkly crush to fill an entire shopping cart with land-fill bound, petroleum-based baggage and packaging.

The Colonel is content to test the claims of Life Lock and and answer the question: "What can brown do for you?" When the rumble of a delivery truck up my gravel drive announces the arrival of my cyber-bought booty, I might even put on some clothes and go out and meet the man in the van.

Bloody Betio

It was an unnecessary battle that had to be fought, in a necessary war that needn't have been. The vengeful victors of the Great War imposed a punishing treaty on Germany in 1919 and one of the punishments was to strip Germany of its colonial possessions in the Pacific. Japan filled the colonial vacuum and occupied islands and atolls across the western Central Pacific. One of these was Betio in the Tarawa Atoll. In the run-up to its war with America, Japan began to heavily fortify its ring of protective islands and Betio was such a bulwark in this maritime Maginot Line that the Japanese commander boasted that it would take a "million men a thousand years" to wrest the speck of coral from him.

Thirty-five thousand Americans, the Second Marine Division and elements of the Army's 27th Division, commenced their assault on Betio sixty-six years ago this morning and took just 76 hours to secure the island. The cost was horrific. A thousand Marines died at Tarawa. Nearly 700 US sailors died ferrying the Marines ashore. Of the Japanese garrison, only 100 were taken prisoner.

After the war, the commander of the invasion force, Lt Gen Holland M "Howling Mad" Smith, wrote the following about the battle in his controversial memoir "Coral and Brass":

"Was Tarawa worth it?" "My answer is unqualified: No. From the very beginning the decision of the Joint Chiefs to seize Tarawa was a mistake and from their initial mistake grew the terrible drama of errors, errors of omission rather than commission, resulting in these needless casualties." [We] should have let Tarawa 'wither on the vine.' We could have kept it neutralized from our bases on Baker Island, to the east, and the Ellice and Phoenix Islands, a short distance to the southeast."

The assault on Tarawa was the first truly opposed landing by American forces on Japanese held territory. A year earlier, at Guadalcanal, the First Marine Division had caught the Japanese by surprise and landed unopposed to seize the airfield on that vital island astride the sea line of communication north of Australia. If the ensuing series of bitter battles on that island spelled the end of Japan's march south in the Pacific, the taking of the Tarawa Atoll signalled the beginning of America's march westward across the Pacific to bring the war to Japan. While Tarawa may not have been strategically important from a location standpoint (Smith's point above), the assault itself provided enormously important tactical and operational lessons that paved the way for successful amphibious assaults against fortified defenses in both the Pacific and European Theaters over the remaining two years of the war.

The Colonel joined the Second Marine Division in January of 1979, thirty-five years after the blood-bath on the beaches of Betio. As I sat in the passageway outside the office of the Commanding Officer of the 2nd Marine Regiment, waiting on my opporturnity to report in to my first operational assignment as a Marine, I had time to scan the paintings, plaques, and pictures on the bulkheads. Opposite me was a painting of Marines wading ashore at Tarawa. I was overwhelmed, and am still awe-struck, by the bravery of those men who waded into the meat-grinder on the beaches of Betio.
Throughout my time on active duty as a Marine, the thought was never far from my mind that, as General Lejeune wrote in 1921, before the heroics and sacrifices of the Second World War, "In every battle and skirmish since the birth of our Corps, Marines have acquitted themselves with the greatest distinction, winning new honors on each occasion until the term Marine has come to signify all that is highest in military efficiency and soldierly virtue. This high name of distinction and soldierly repute we who are Marines today have received from those who preceded us in the Corps."

Not many of the survivors of the battle for Tarawa are still with us. And, true to the virtue of their generation, they would disdain any recognition on this day. All the more reason to give it.

Thank you, gentlemen.

Death Before Bowing

The Colonel has fumed and fussed electronically with friends for several days regarding the image of our President (the democratically elected leader of the greatest nation on the planet) bowing before the hereditary Emperor of Japan, penning explanations of the two century old American tradition of not bowing that arises from our Constitution's explicit prohibitions regarding titles of nobility. But there was something else so fundamentally disturbing about H bowing that I could not put my finger on it. That is until the Colonel's brother wrote, "One can only imagine the feelings of the Greatest Generation as they see him bowing to the emperor of the nation they fought and defeated in the Pacific. And what about the families of those who paid the ultimate price?" Then I knew why the bow bothered me so much.

Excerpt from the account of 2nd Lt. Ben R. Morin, US Army:

"In late March, 1942, Ben and the other [American prisoners of war] were sent to Tarlac. It was there that they came under the control of the Japanese military governor Capt. Tsuneyoshi. He later became the commandant of Camp O'Donnell. The first night at Tarlac, Capt. Tsuneyoshi sent two NCOs into the jail to persuade the POWs to bow. Ben recalled being slugged and beaten. In response to this, the POWs met and decided that it would be best to bow if they hoped to survive. The next morning the POWs bowed to the Japanese. To them, they had achieved a small victory because the Japanese had to use force to make them bow."

Excerpts from "The Watcher," by Peter vanRuyter Schoeffel:

"Stratton was all bones, but for a persistent little pot belly. He was so bony he could barely sit or lie down. He could put his thumbs and fingers together in a circle and run them all the way from his ankle to his upper thigh. A half-inch shy of 6 feet tall, 100 pounds. Still, he could get beyond hunger, into some place where the pangs merged into the dull ache of daily existence. But thirst? Three days without water, and you’d kill your grandmother to get hers. In 1967, after some three months of torture, Stratton was photographed at a Hanoi news conference as he bowed deeply to all four corners of the room in front of his captors. The iconic image went around the world. Bowing was a matter of honor to the Vietnamese; a lackluster bow was excuse enough for another round of beating. His bowing, he says, was meant as an exaggerated, cartoonish gesture of defiance. But in America, some wondered if he had been brainwashed, or fallen in with his captors, though those rumors lessened as word of the prisoners’ sufferings leaked out. And upon his release from Vietnam, a wire service reporter wrote that “Stratton’s gaunt, stooped figure and haunted expression” had become “a symbol of the plight of the American POWs.”

Still, the suspicion lingered far longer than that, even as McCain, shortly after his release, took pains to clear Stratton’s name. “He stood up for me when other people were saying things,” Stratton says. “When I was down, people kicking me, he stood up for me, and he didn’t have to. He gained nothing.” As for his captors, Stratton figures most were just doing their job. But every day he sees the thick rope scars they burned into his forearms. His forgiveness knows bounds. “There are two or three, if I saw them today, I’d kill them.”

The foregoing are but two of tens of thousands of stories from Americans who suffered unspeakable horrors at the hands of their captors and yet knew at their very core that to bow was un-American. Untold numbers of Americans were summarily executed by their Imperial Japanese Army captors for their refusal to bow. American prisoners of the North Vietnamese communists, like Stratton above, endured fierce torture before they broke and bowed. When Stratton was trotted out before international visitors to the "Hanoi Hilton" he knew that if he were filmed bowing, it would be an obvious sign back home that the Vietnamese communists were torturing and attempting to brainwash the Americans they held.

Bile rises in the Colonel's throat each time he sees the images of President Obama bowing before Saudi and Japanese royalty. I am personally offended that my representative to the rest of the world is so narcissistic, vain, and pompous that he believes he knows better than the rest of us. His actions are clearly calculated not for American consumption, but for the world's. In a sense that should be the way it is when our president travels abroad.

One wonders what the rest of the world really thinks when Obama abases himself and his country.

Presidential Obsequity

Our president is making the rounds of Asian capitals this week and the first photo the Colonel saw from his sojourn was of H bowing very low before the Japanese Emperor. One wonders if the Saudi king, for whom our president "didn't bow," is miffed at this. Frankly, the Colonel was almost willing to give H a pass on the Saudi bow; chalking it up to a reflexive action reflecting our President's childhood indoctrination in an Indonesian madras. Old habits are hard to break. But, the bow before the Emperor of Japan cannot be explained as anything but a calculated show of deference. The irony is that the Japanese emperor ought to be bowing to American presidents. Were it not for American grace, unprecedented in the history of victorious warring nations, at the end of WWII, the present emperor's father, Hirohito, would have been hanged, as was the fate of his war minister, Tojo.

President Obama's evident disdain for American tradition and time-honored protocol has the Colonel wondering just how far all of this will go. What America-demeaning gesture or self-serving apologetics will be employed in the next capital on his overseas schedule? Having an affable bumbler like our previous president making personally embarrassing gaffs abroad is one thing. Reducing our great nation in the eyes of others just to gain favor is quite another, and constitutionally unacceptable.

The irony of all of this foreign royalty reverence is that it runs diametrically opposed to the egalitarian ideals inherent in socialism and liberalism (if a difference can be discerned between the two). In this is manifest the vacuous nature of the political positions staked out by those on the left. Were liberals true to their ideals, they would be howling in protest at an American president fawning over representatives of the last vestiges of hereditary royalty on the planet. Instead, they will defend the obsequious actions of our president abroad as pragmatic steps to curry favor with peoples whose opinion of us must be softened.

It's enough to drive this old centurion crazy--if he weren't already several rounds short of a full magazine.

No Hope in Dixie

The inexorable, common sense-sucking gravity of the political correctness black hole pulled another victim past its event horizon this week and the law of unintended consequences is poised to assert itself in response.

The new chancellor at Ole Miss is getting quite an education in his first few months in office. One of the first lessons has been: "Never issue ultimatums to spoiled fraternity boys." Bowing to what the Colonel suspects was very little pressure from a small handful of wadded-panty simps worried that the University's reputation was being adversely effected by the student body chanting "The South will rise again!" at the conclusion of "From Dixie with Love" (an awful admixture of "Dixie" and the "Battle Hymn of the Republic"), Chancellor Jones warned that if the students persisted in the chant, he would ask the band to stop playing the tune. Need the Colonel tell you how the students reacted?

So, amid a football season that has fallen dramatically from the hyped heights of preseason hope to the near despair of cruel reality, a fresh controversy has bubbled up from the cauldron of resentment and disappointment. And, despite the best intentions of those whose naive wish is for a bland society in which no one's feelings are ever hurt and no one's delicate sensibilities are ever the least bit bruised, there is going to be a whole heap of hurt feelings and bruised sensibilities before this unnecessary brouhaha blows over.

Turns out that Chancellor Jones has a talent for recruiting. The only problem is he is recruiting for those mouth-breathing, pillow case-wearing, pit bull-raising, knuckle-dragging, uneducated, ignorant, village idiot, trailer trash buffoons who march under the banner of the Ku Klux Klan. By drawing attention to an innocuous, if offensive to a small minority, chant, and by making such a public spectacle of banning the song at whose end the chant occurs, Jones has played right into the hands of the sheet-wearers and they have seized on the controversy to grab some free publicity and recruiting air time. The Klan has announced that they will be on campus, in full regalia, for tomorrow's football game against Tennessee and next week's game against LSU. Just what we need.

Not 14 months ago, Ole Miss and Oxford, garnered positive national attention beyond our wildest hopes as we played host to the first presidential debate. As hard as some in the effete, intellectually-challenged yankee liberal media tried to find it, there was none of the un-reconstructed ugliness upon which they had hoped to report. But, this morning the Colonel is certain there is hand-rubbing glee erupting in editorial board rooms from Boston to New York at the prospect of pictures of the Klan marching through the Grove tomorrow morning.

The sad thing is the sentiment behind the chant, "The South will rise again!" was clearly not racially motivated. It was a matter of plain old regional pride. The Colonel knows full well that the simple-minded, sheet-headed, non life-having, eighth grade-educated segregationists use the phrase. They also use the phrase, "God Bless America." Are we going to stop saying that as well?

That is the problem with black holes--once you start feeding one, its appetite becomes insatiable.