Open thread 2/21/22

The New Neo Posted on by

I think Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau had one of the most beautiful voices in the world. Maybe the most beautiful. I don’t even like lieder very much, and he sang a whole lotta lieder. But I don’t really care what he sang; he always sounded so gorgeous.

I was introduced to Fischer-Dieskau through – of course! – a recording of him as the Father in “Hansel and Gretel.” His Wiki entry doesn’t even mention the role, but to me he was superb in that opera. Here he is:

Two random facts:

[Drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1943] he was captured in Italy in 1945 and spent two years as an American prisoner of war. During that time, he sang Lieder in POW camps to homesick German soldiers.

Fischer-Dieskau smoked during a large part of his career. In an interview with B.Z.-News aus Berlin in 2002 he said, “I quit smoking 20 years ago. I smoked for 35 years, and then stopped in a single day.”

The missing “J”

The New Neo Posted on by

For most of my life I never had any interest in genealogy, although I did have an interest in family stories. And it was the family story of a long-lost great-uncle, a mystery I wanted to solve, that propelled me into genealogy research on my own family.

I solved it, and more. I found present-day relatives I became friendly with. I found out the story of the uncle (and his son, who is still alive at almost 100 years of age and about whose existence I’d previously known nothing). I found out about some long-ago philandering ancestors and love children. I found scandalous stories of certain rich ancestors, tales of gossip published in the NY Times that would do nicely in today’s tabloid papers. I found that my mother and grandmother’s family stories were all true, at least the ones I could document. I found that family members on both sides were heavily involved in raising, trading, and training horses, for hundreds of years. That was almost the oddest of all; my interest in horses has been close to zero.

And so I’ve found it a lot more rewarding than expected. But I still wonder why we should care. The stories we learn are so few and so incomplete compared to the vast amount we don’t know. It always perturbs me to find a relative about whom all I can glean are birthdate, marriage date, names of children, and death date – an entire life neatly encapsulated and researched in just a few minutes. The joys and sorrows all lost or imagined, the names unfamiliar, the places unknown.

On one side of my family I’m in possession of many artifacts, including two embroidered samplers. They are fragile and in small frames. They’re not museum quality or anything close to it, but they were made by my maternal great-grandmother and they carry her name and the date of 1861, which meant she was approximately eight years old.

Something that always mystified me, from the time I first saw them when I was a child, was the fact that both samplers omitted the letter “J” from the alphabet. No one could tell me why. It made no sense to me that my great-grandmother had just forgotten the letter; the samplers were carefully stitched. But then it occurred to me to do a search online, and I came up with this:

Many samplers, dated well into the nineteenth century, seem to be missing the letter “J”. Actually, the “J” is a relatively young letter, coming into common usage sometime after 1820. Young needleworkers, such at Katy Bemis, were stitching the alphabet as they knew and used it . . . without considering the “J” as an individual letter.

We also have this:

One explanation is that some of the very early samplers reflected the Elizabethan time (1558-1603) when the alphabet was comprised of 24 letters. Another shortened alphabet, about that same time, included just 21 letters, dropping the W, X, and Y as well. What’s more, U and V were sometimes shaped alike and thus not duplicated on samplers. Additionally, Dutch and German samplers sometimes reflect an early Latin alphabet that did not include J, V or W.

My great-grandmother was born in Germany.

Another mystery solved, which to me is a great satisfaction.

“Once I built a railroad” – The Bonus Army and the On-to Ottawa Trek

The New Neo Posted on by

What went on in this country post-January 6th, and what’s going on in Canada now, have historical precedents not just in repressive dictatorships but even in the US and Canada. It seems that the authorities are always frightened of demonstrations by the proles if the proles are in disagreement with that government. I mean, look what happened in France some centuries back, and in Russia about a hundred years ago.

The historic precedents I’m thinking about, though, occurred in the US and Canada during the early 1930s and the Depression, when many working people became desperate for obvious reasons. I already had been aware of the US movement known as the Bonus Army, but I just learned about the Canadian event called the On-to-Ottawa trek.

Let’s take the Bonus marchers first. They were World War I veterans who had been voted bonuses by Congress for fighting in the war, but the money was going to be paid them in 1945 and they felt they needed it now. They were about 10,000 of them, and they came to DC in 1932 and set up several camps of makeshift huts in less inhabited areas, in many cases bringing their families. They were accused of being Communists, and there definitely were Communist infiltrators among them, but the vast majority were not Communists and they ousted Communists when they found them.

Then:

On July 28, under prodding from the Herbert Hoover, the D.C. Commissioners ordered Pelham D Glassford to clear their buildings, rather than letting the protesters drift away as he had previously recommended. When the veterans rioted, an officer (George Shinault) drew his revolver and shot at the veterans, two of whom, William Hushka and Eric Carlson, died later.

Both are buried in Arlington National Cemetery, by the way.

Later the army cleared out the main camp, with some familiar names in charge [emphasis mine]:

At 4:45 pm. commanded by General Douglas MacArthur, the 12th Infantry Regiment, Fort Howard, Maryland, and the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, supported by six M1917 light tanks commanded by Maj. George S. Patton, formed in Pennsylvania Avenue while thousands of civil service employees left work to line the street and watch. The Bonus Marchers, believing the troops were marching in their honor, cheered the troops until Patton ordered the cavalry to charge them, which prompted the spectators to yell, “Shame! Shame!”

After the cavalry charged, the infantry, with fixed bayonets and tear gas (adamsite, an arsenical vomiting agent) entered the camps, evicting veterans, families, and camp followers. The veterans fled across the Anacostia River to their largest camp, and Hoover ordered the assault stopped. MacArthur chose to ignore the president and ordered a new attack, claiming that the Bonus March was an attempt to overthrow the US government. 55 veterans were injured and 135 arrested…

During the military operation, Major Dwight D. Eisenhower…served as one of MacArthur’s junior aides. Believing it wrong for the Army’s highest-ranking officer to lead an action against fellow American war veterans, he strongly advised MacArthur against taking any public role: “I told that dumb son-of-a-bitch not to go down there,” he said later. “I told him it was no place for the Chief of Staff.” Despite his misgivings, Eisenhower wrote the Army’s official incident report that endorsed MacArthur’s conduct.

…The shacks in the Anacostia Camp were then set on fire, although who set them on fire is somewhat unclear.

Historians think that the unpopular action contributed to Hoover’s defeat in the 1932 election. But, since nothing had been resolved concerning the bonuses, there was another march when Roosevelt was president. He handled it differently:

During the presidential campaign of 1932, Roosevelt had opposed the veterans’ bonus demands. A second bonus march planned for the following year in May by the “National Liaison Committee of Washington,” disavowed by the previous year’s bonus army leadership, demanded that the Federal government provide marchers housing and food during their stay in the capital. Despite his opposition to the marchers’ demand for immediate payment of the bonus, Roosevelt greeted them quite differently than Hoover had done. The administration set up a special camp for the marchers at Fort Hunt, Virginia, providing forty field kitchens serving three meals a day, bus transportation to and from the capital, and entertainment in the form of military bands.

Administration officials, led by presidential confidant Louis Howe, tried to negotiate an end to the protest. Roosevelt arranged for his wife, Eleanor, to visit the site unaccompanied. She lunched with the veterans and listened to them perform songs. She reminisced about her memories of seeing troops off to World War I and welcoming them home. The most that she could offer was a promise of positions in the newly created Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). One veteran commented, “Hoover sent the army, Roosevelt sent his wife.” In a press conference following her visit, the First Lady described her reception as courteous and praised the marchers, highlighting how comfortable she felt despite critics of the marchers who described them as communists and criminals.

FDR had more of the populist touch. In 1936, the heavily Democratic Congress voted to pay the veterans their bonuses, FDR vetoed the bill, and Congress overrode the veto.

So now, on to Canada. Here’s an account of the Canadian incident I’ve never heard about before. In this case, the demonstrators were more violent than either the Bonus Army or today’s present-day Freedom Convoy (which has been remarkably peaceful; not that that has protected them from the Trudeau government and media claiming otherwise). However, from what I’ve read, it seems that the Canadian demonstrators’ violence in the 1930s incident was sparked by the police initiating violence against them:

The Great Depression crippled the Canadian economy and left one in nine citizens on relief. The relief, however, did not come free; the Bennett Government ordered the Department of National Defence to organize work camps where single unemployed men were used to construct roads and other public works at a rate of twenty cents per day. The men in the relief camps were living in poor conditions with very low wages. The men decided to unite and in 1933, and led by Arthur “Slim” Evans the men created Workers’ Unity League (WUL). The Workers’ Unity League helped the men organize the Relief Camp Workers’ Union…

About 1,000 strikers headed for Ottawa. The strikers’ demands were: wages of 50 cents an hour for unskilled work, union wages for skilled, at least 120 hours of work a month, the provision of adequate first aid equipment in the camps, the extension of the Workmen’s Compensation Act to include camp workers, recognition of democratically elected workers’ committees, that workers in camps be granted the right to vote in elections, and the camps be removed from the purview of the Department of National Defence. Public support for the men was enormous, but the municipal, provincial and federal governments passed responsibility between themselves. They then decided to take their grievances to the federal government. On June 3, 1935, hundreds of men began boarding boxcars headed east in what became known as the “On-to-Ottawa Trek”.

They ended up stopping in Regina. But negotiations with the government didn’t work out, and then [emphasis mine]:

At 8:17 p.m. a whistle was blown, and the police charged the crowd with batons from all four sides. The attack caught the people off guard before their anger took over. They fought back with sticks, stones, and anything at hand. Mounted RCMP officers then started to use tear gas and fired guns….The battle continued in the surrounding streets for six hours.

Police fired revolvers above and into groups of people. Tear gas bombs were thrown at any groups that gathered together. Plate glass windows in stores and offices were smashed, but with one exception, these stores were not looted, they were burned. People covered their faces with wet handkerchiefs to counter the effects of the tear gas and barricaded streets with cars. Finally, the Trekkers who had attended the meeting made their way individually or in small groups back to the exhibition stadium where the main body of Trekkers were quartered.

When it was over, 140 Trekkers and citizens had been arrested. Charles Miller, a plainclothes policeman, died, and Nick Schaack, a Trekker, later died in the hospital from injuries sustained in the riot. There were hundreds of injured residents and Trekkers were taken to hospitals or private homes. Those taken to a hospital were also arrested. Property damage was considerable.

…The next day a barbed wire stockade was erected around the area. News of the police-instigated riot was front-page news across Canada….

…During the lengthy trials that followed, no evidence was ever produced to show that strikers fired shots during the riot. For his part, Bennett characterized the On-to-Ottawa Trek as “not a mere uprising against law and order but a definite revolutionary effort on the part of a group of men to usurp authority and destroy government.”

In the 1930s, the demonstrations both in the US and Canada were supported by the left as well as much of the populace, and the governments in question (both Bennett’s and Hoover’s, that is) were more from the right. Nowadays, in both Canada and the US, it’s mostly the right that is demonstrating against the control exercised by leftist governments (or in the case of January 6th, against a perceived fraudulent takeover by a leftist government).

And just as with Hoover in the US and the election of FDR, the conservative Bennett of Canada felt the political repercussions:

The events helped to discredit Bennett’s Conservative government, and in the 1935 federal election, his party went from holding 135 seats to just 39. After the Trek, the Saskatchewan government provided free transportation as a peace sign back to the west. The camps were soon dismantled and replaced by seasonal relief camps run by the provinces, and that paid the men slightly more for their labor than the earlier camps. Although the Trek did not reach Ottawa, its reverberations certainly did. Several demands of the Trekkers were eventually met, and the public support that galvanized behind the Trek set the tone for the social and welfare provisions of the postwar era.

In other words, Canada and the US veered to the left after these incidents, in part as a result of government heavy-handedness on the part of the right. Will history repeat itself – or at least rhyme – only this time with the parties reversed?

[NOTE: The title of this post quotes a line from the song “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” It came out in 1932, and there are references to the Bonus Army without actually naming them outright:

Once in khaki suits
Gee, we looked swell
Full of that yankee Doodle De Dum
Half a million boots went slogging through hell
I was the kid with the drum
Say don’t you remember, they called me Al
It was Al all the time
Say don’t you remember, I’m your pal!
Brother can you spare a dime?

The song’s lyrics were written by two socialists. There were a lot of people turning to socialism back then, because the Depression caused a lot of doubt about capitalism.]

Police on horseback against the truckers in Canada

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, one thing is settled – sufficient numbers of police in Canada are cooperating with the arrests of the demonstrators, and so it is being accomplished. For a populist movement like that of the truckers to succeed, it either has to get big enough to overwhelm the authorities, or the alternative is that the authorities’ enforcers – that is, the police and/or army – have to refuse to cooperate with the roundup and thus prevent it from happening.

Neither of these things have occurred so far. And I doubt they will occur, because public opinion in Canada – according to polls, anyway – seems to be mainly against the truckers. Perhaps that’s the result of the effectiveness of government propaganda combined with the general Canadian tendency towards compliance and obedience and not liking to make a fuss.

Horses are sometimes used in a responsible manner for crowd control. But the police have to know exactly what they’re doing and control the horses, as well. In Ottawa, we have the story and video of police on horseback charging into the crowd of peaceful protestors and knocking down two people, one a woman with a walker. There were some reports that she was killed, but they don’t appear to be true. On the other hand, authorities’ excuses that someone threw a bicycle and spooked the horse also don’t appear to be true.

In the usual irony, the same people who were so incensed by fake reports of border guards on horseback using whips on people trying to cross our southern border illegally seem quite unperturbed by Canadian officers on horseback mowing down people not too far from our northern border.

A COVID lockdown backlash?

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s a little bit – just a tiny bit – as though people are waking up from a bad COVID dream. Something about the length of the whole thing, plus the seeming relative mildness of Omicron, appears to have caused this.

Sensing the fatigue in the voting public, and feeling the hot breath of the midterms on their necks, many Democratic politicians have backed off somewhat on their most draconian anti-COVID measures. Perhaps they’ve read polls such as this:

The DCCC, which is the main campaign arm for House Democrats and is currently chaired by New York Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, worked with outside consulting groups to conduct an online poll of voters in the 60 most competitive House districts for the upcoming 2022 midterms. The poll was conducted from mid-January to early February, had approximately 1,000 respondents and a 3.1% margin of error…

The poll found that that 57% of voters in competitive congressional districts agree with the statement, “Democrats in Congress have taken things too far in their pandemic response,” and 66% of self-defined “swing” voters in competitive districts agree with that statement. White and Hispanic voters in competitive districts were equally as likely to agree (59%), while Black voters (42%) and Asian voters (46%) disagreed with the statement. The poll also did not define what “taken things too far” means.

Must be a bit frightening for them, if they can’t make up the difference with fraud.

The article begins with this sentence:

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) is concerned that Republican attacks on the Democrats’ handling of the COVID-19 pandemic have “alarming credibility,” according to a slide deck obtained by SFGATE.

I wonder whether it occurs to them that this may be because Republican attacks turned out to be factually correct. Or is that even an issue that matters to them?

Why is Ilhan Omar on the side of the convoy donors who were doxxed?

The New Neo Posted on by

See this:

In this tweet, Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar thrashed an editor over at the Ottawa Citizen/Sun for sharing a story on the Stella Luna Gelato Cafe in Ottawa because the owner gave $250 to the Canadian trucker convoy through GiveSendGo…

Omar rightly points out that this is harassment. It is, in all senses of the word, “unconscionable.”

See also this.

I asked a question in the title of this point. I don’t have an answer. I don’t even have a theory, except that this is egregious enough that Omar thinks that similar techniques can and will be used against her and her supporters.

Do you have a better notion of what’s going on with ILhan Omar? I have to say I find it surprising.

Oh, Canada!

The New Neo Posted on by

So now they’re arresting the organizers of the demonstrations in Canada.

Why is this tyrannical behavior being manifested in Canada of all places, that mild-mannered country to the north where the folks say “oot” for “out” and sometimes add “eh” at the end of their sentences?

My theories:

(1) Because Canada is a country populated by unusually polite and relatively docile people, there hasn’t been much pushback against increased authority during the COVID years till now, which has made the authorities feel safe to be very controlling and authoritarian.

(2) Canada doesn’t have a robust history of free speech or liberty in general, compared to the US. For example, hate speech laws have been in place there for quite some time. And Jordan Peterson got his start by challenging – on liberty grounds – rules that compelled the use of certain pronouns.

(3) Canada never fought to free itself from Britain. In fact, many US Tories fled there as a result of our own revolution.

(4) Trudeau is a woke narcissist who has felt entitled from birth. He’s a bit like Joe Biden without the age-related cognitive challenges.

(5) Canada has a state-controlled and compliant TV and radio media known as the CBC which is supportive of the left-leaning government.

(6) Canada has a handy Emergencies Act that’s quite murky in its details, broad in the powers it grants government, and has never been tested before so there is no precedent for its use.

(7) Canada has the US treatment of the January 6th demonstrators as inspiration: demonize your opponents and then crack down, hard. What’s happening in Canada now is somewhat different but definitely related, and the January 6th experience probably emboldened Trudeau.

NOTE: I tried to embed a section of this video with Viva Frei, but embedding wasn’t allowed. So I suggest you click on the link and watch 11:34 through 14:22.

NOTE II: The title of this post is a reference to the Canadian national anthem.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) The East Germans had the Stasi. We have hackers and the MSM to dox those guilty of supporting the right to think for oneself and liberty.

(2) The jury in Sarah Palin’s defamation case returned a “not guilty” verdict for the Times. Absolutely no surprise for two reasons. The first is that the standard set in Sullivan for a public figure to win a case of defamation against a newspaper is nearly impossibly high, giving the press almost unlimited power to lie and defame with no repercussions as long as it’s against a public figure (that’s why they ran into some trouble with Sandmann, who wasn’t a public figure till they made him one). The second reason is that the judge said he’d throw out any guilty verdict, even as the jury was still deliberating, and as could easily be predicted the unsequestered jury heard about this. This sets up an appeal, but as Professor Jacobson writes:

This leaves Palin deprived of her most meaningful appeal — to reinstate a jury verdict in her favor if the appeals court reversed Rakoff’s dismissal of a verdict. Instead, Palin has a murky appeal on substance because she has a negative jury verdict, so the most the appeals court could do is order a new trial, not reinstate a favorable verdict.

However, I don’t think that the jury verdict was going to be favorable, even absent the judge’s intervention.

(3) Trudeau implies that a Jewish MP is a Nazi for “standing with people who wave swastikas” (that is, with the Freedom Convoy as filtered through leftist propaganda). And here’s the ironically-named Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland with more of the regime’s tyrannical pronouncements:

I don’t use the word “tyrannical” lightly here.

(4) Hillary Clinton and the MSM say pay no attention to that Durham behind the curtain.

An ode to the 1980s

The New Neo Posted on by

For me, the 1980s are somewhat of a blur, because I spent them having a baby and then raising that baby and intermittently working part-time. I was exhausted much of the time, and not really part of the zeitgeist.

Which means I don’t quite relate to this Daily Mail article by Julie Burchill, although I think she might be correct:

Growing up as a working-class female in the 1970s, I was expected never to express myself. And after a few glorious decades of freedom, I suddenly find myself in that situation again. Like when I was a child, I’m being told what I can and can’t say, except now the scolders are younger than me…

It was the last great decade of fun and freedom: after people realised that racist and sexist jokes were stupid but before the echo-chamber nit-picking of today. They were simpler times. We lived fully in every moment, without the distractions of social media and entertainment-streaming.

When I first saw a ‘portable telephone’ — the size of a brick — I remember a group of us sitting around it, poking it with fascination, like the monkeys at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It was indeed the 80s when I first saw a portable telephone, which was actually a car phone and if memory serves me it was actually somewhat larger than a brick. But a very exotic thing it was, owned by an old friend of my husband’s who had become very very very wealthy. Such a phone was way out of reach for us, and the thought of possessing one hardly even occurred to me.

The 80s may have been a blur for me, but the 90s were not. By then, several things had happened. One was that my baby was now in middle school and high school. Another was that I had a chronic pain problem from serious back and arm injuries (I’ve chronicled a lot of that on this blog; see this, for example). Still another was that I was back in school to get a Master’s degree.

It was that last experience that opened my eyes to some vast cultural and cognitive changes in the world around me – especially in the academic world but hardly limited to that. But it was highlighted in that setting, where I noticed what was then known as PC thought.

I had to take an undergraduate class at one point, and that’s where I first saw it clearly. The generation coming up all agreed on some things that seemed absurd to me: for example, that no student should ever hear a single world from a professor that the student found offensive or upsetting, and if such a thing occurred, it was by definition the professor’s fault, not the student’s. Standards were no longer objective but were instead subjective and feelings-based – if the student’s feelings were hurt, that was the only fact that needed to be considered.

This seemed so obviously wrong to me that I stood up in a rather large class and explained, but no one – and I mean no one agreed with me (or if they agreed with me they were already keeping their mouths shut), and I was simply ignored as they continued on their un-merry ways.

At the time I didn’t have much of a context in which to put the experience, but it alarmed me. I did immediately realize that it was generational in nature, that something in the atmosphere around these young people as they had been growing up had shaped their beliefs in this fashion. Now, in retrospect, I believe it was the slow ascendance of the leftists of my generation into power – that Gramscian march that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and of which I was unaware.

In other words, the generation beginning to come of age in the 1990s had been trained into these modes of thought, educationally speaking (and to some extent by parents). It was in the 1990s that the same 60s generation was now firmly in power, including ascending to the presidency but hardly limited to that.

I don’t think that 60s generation – my generation – was composed predominantly of leftists. I certainly wasn’t a leftist, although I was a Democrats (Democrat and leftist were not synonymous back then). But leftists often sought out a particular kind of power, the power to shape thinking and particularly the thinking of the younger generation. Sometimes that was very explicit, as when Bill Ayers decided that education rather than terrorism would now be the best way to bring about the revolution he and his fellow leftists so desired.

In the 90s, I was seeing the first indications of that, and it was already deeply-rooted. Now we are seeing it coming to fruition and dominating. The next decade will tell us whether there will be no return from it, or whether the backlash to it will build and will triumph.

Thinking of going on a cruise?

The New Neo Posted on by

Ed Driscoll reports on what it’s like in this age of still-existent COVID restrictions.

I’m certainly not racing out to do it.

And yet, for a short time right before COVID I was thinking of trying it. One of the attractions, for me, would be not having to keep packing and unpacking and instead staying in one room while moving from destination to destination. Another attraction would be the food, which would also be the drawback.

The basic idea would be to have a more relaxing vacation and yet see some sights and not just sit on a beach. But another drawback is that I prefer to wander around my travel destinations at leisure and be able to change plans if I’d like to stay in a certain place longer. In cruising, that’s not possible.

My parents used to love to cruise. But they usually went with four to eight other couples who were good friends. Cruising wasn’t their only mode of travel, but the reason they chose it was clear to me: they usually went in late February right before what was known in our house as tax season. My father was a lawyer and CPA, and March and April were his grinding months. Every evening after work he would come home, have dinner, and then get out his papers and work and work till bedtime. We weren’t supposed to disturb him, and we didn’t. The cruise was a way to relax and and store up energy for the coming push.

That was a long long time ago, in the days when many cruise ships left from piers on the west side of New York and there was no need to fly somewhere to begin the journey. It was also in the days when every night out of port people dressed up formally, in tuxedos and evening gowns. I’ve got the photos to prove it.