Reforms And Other Illusions

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson (Mark Twain)


There is talk of reform in the air.

Hang onto your wallets.

Based on experience of the last couple of decades, there's nothing so harmful to ordinary working people as "reform."

Remember the song about the "rich get richer and the poor get poorer?" That was about reform.

Examples:

Tax reform. Translation: Rich people pay less tax. Workers pay more.

Welfare reform. Translation: Mothers go to work. Who raises the children? TBD.

School reform. Translation 1: Take money and resources from public schools, divert them to charter or private schools. Translation 2: Blame problems on teachers.

Entitlement reform. Translation: Reduce entitlement programs.

Social Security reform. Translation: Reduce benefits.

Election reform. Translation: Make it harder for poor people to vote.

You get the drift.

Happy New Year!

Bad Bargains

It can be well nigh impossible to undo a bad bargain.

Slavery was a bad bargain in 1787/1789. It took three quarters of a century and the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives to undo that bad bargain.

Would it have been better to let the slave states go their own way? Possibly.

The settlement of the disputed election of 1876 (Hayes/Tilden) was a bad bargain. It ended reconstruction prematurely and left the former slave states free for nearly another century to do as they wished with their own citizens. It took the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's and the loss of yet more lives to undo that bad bargain.

The Second Amendment was a bad bargain. It sought to limit the coercive power of the federal government by depriving it of a standing army in lieu of state militias. In the end, we got both.

Unification of the armed forces was a bad bargain. A classic case of a solution in search of a problem. Coordination between the Army and the Navy was quite good throughout World War II. Coordination between the Army and the US Army Air Forces was not so good. USAAF wanted to go off and fight wars on their own. That was not ever a really good idea. It is even less so now. But we'll never be able to undo having a separate independent Air Force. Even if no one any longer remembers who Douhet was.

Deregulation was a bad bargain.

The Bush tax cuts were a bad bargain.

Deregulation and tax cuts together have enabled the super rich to redistribute wealth upward from working people to wealthy plutocrats.

Pardon me if I fail to salute the idea of a grand fiscal bargain.

Seventy Years Ago: War In The Pacific

December 31, 1942. The Japanese military high command decides to evacuate forces from Guadalcanal. It will be a complex and challenging undertaking to withdraw forces, and will take more than a month. There will be more battles.

USS Essex, lead ship of a more powerful class of aircraft carriers, is commissioned today.

On New Guinea, after more than two months of jungle fighting against well-defended Japanese positions, the US Army I Corps was nearing victory at Buna on the north coast of New Guinea. Victory here will relieve pressure on Port Moresby.

Seventy Years Ago: Pacific Fleet Carriers

December, 1942, the US Navy's force of aircraft carriers was depleted. Of the seven carriers in service at the time of Pearl Harbor, only USS Ranger, smallest and slowest of the seven, remained undamaged. She was also the only one of the seven serving in the Atlantic Fleet.

The Pacific Fleet had lost Lexington, Yorktown, Hornet and Wasp. That left only Saratoga, twice torpedoed and repaired and Enterprise, damaged at the Battle of Coral Sea,and bombed six times later in the year.

Relief was at hand.

USS Essex, prototype of a newer, more powerful class of carriers, was to be commissioned in two days - December 31, 1942. Two weeks later, USS Independence, prototype of a smaller carrier built on a cruiser hull, was to be commissioned. Independence carried fewer aircraft, but was as fast as the larger Enterprise and Saratoga.

There would be nine new Independence class carriers in service by the end of 1943, almost one a month entering service. Only one, USS Princeton, was sunk in combat.

But the backbone of the Pacific Fleet was to be the Essex class. Thirty-two were ordered. Twenty-four were completed by war's end.None was lost in combat.

Seventy Years Ago: Women Auxiliary Territorial Service

On the home front in the US, women were tending their victory gardens, saving tin cans, riveting aircraft together and such like. In the U.K., it turns out some young women were drafted into various auxiliary services. This included manning antiaircraft artillery.

Some gave their lives. Here is one story.

Seventy Years Ago: "I'll Be Home For Christmas"

My father left home in February, 1942. He had just returned to Tallahassee from the Carolina Maneuvers on December 5, 1941, two days before Pearl Harbor. By March he had been transferred to Mobile, Alabama to prepare for overseas movement. We didn't see him for over three years.

He missed three Christmases with his family. He was gone "for the duration" as we said it in those days. No one ever finished the phrase: duration of what?

A lot of fathers, brothers, sons, and even daughters missed a lot of Christmases in those years. We were all in it together.

"I'll be home for Christmas," one popular song put it. After dragging the story line out, the song closed "If only in my dreams."

Today we have soldiers who keep going back into combat. In 1942, it may have been a long time at the front, but usually only once. Today, the tours are shorter, but repeated.

We have had soldiers and marines in Afghanistan for twelve Christmases. Three times as long as World War II.

Don't forget our troops. It's time to bring them home.

Christmas Gift!

In former times, across much of America, the expected greeting on Christmas morning was "Christmas Gift!" This was true especially in the South, but also in parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio and elsewhere. The Dictionary of American Regional English provides details.

I never heard it used myself, but learned about it in the mid-40's from a book a great aunt gave me: Miss Minerva And William Green Hill. The book was written around 1900 by a Memphis schoolteacher, and described a child's life in Southeast Missouri.

The effect of greeting someone with "Christmas Gift!" was not unlike "Trick or Treat!" That is, the person greeted had to give a gift to the person who first uttered the phrase as a greeting. My father, born in 1915, remembered the custom from the 1920's. It had fallen into disuse by the time I lived in Mississippi in the 1940's, replaced by "Merry Christmas" as a greeting.

But the game of catching the other person first and thereby getting a present, had disappeared.

Christmas Gift!

Good Guys And Bad Guys

I'm always a little uneasy when I hear young soldiers talking about "good guys" and "bad guys." How, I wonder, do they tell the difference, especially in someone else's civil war. Our guys weren't very good at it in Viet Nam, though I remember the time an airborne spotter called off a gunfire mission. He could tell the villagers weren't acting like bad guys.

All of us who grew up watching cowboy movies could easily tell the good guys from the bad guys. Good guys wore white hats and light-colored clothing. They were straight talkers.

Bad guys not only wore black hats, they sneered and bullied people.

Back in the 1950's, John Steinbeck wrote an essay about good guys and bad guys. He described the conventions of the cowboy movie in great detail. It was his young son who decoded the art form for him.

During the Army-McCarthy hearings, he asked his son if he had watched the hearings on television. He had. Could the son tell who was the bad guy? Yes. McCarthy was the bad guy. He wasn't clean-shaven and he sneered at people and bullied them.

Watching Congressional Republicans on TV, I think they didn't get Steinbeck's memo. Most of them seem clean-shaven enough, but they haven't dropped the sneering and bullying.