Socotra House is a concern without specific ideological agendas.
Oh, hell, that is nonsense. Sorry. I know when we start out on these little soap-bubble voyages that we are going to wind up taking a shot at people and things, but I assure you there is actually a vague attempt at a balanced (if jaundiced) view of the Continuing Crisis. I established an office to do it, with a desk and a workstation, but I have not succeeded in finding an ideologically pure candidate to sit in it.
I knew I would irritate some of my best and smartest readers, who consider The Daily a semi-entertaining vehicle of diversion except when it wanders into politics or the climate.
Recognizing those sensibilities, I try to avoid the more truculent approach to obvious public displays of lunacy. Of course, with a Presidential campaign in progress, and such mendacity being displayed by all who consider themselves egotistical and well-heeled enough to actually want to be in the Oval Office. Either of those traits suggests problems of mental health or corruption, but you pays your money and takes your chance, I guess.
Anyway, It wasn?t always like that, or at least there were periods in which venality and pandering were not the norm. In an exchange yesterday, I remembered that the first two public events I recall in this world were the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the heart attack of Dwight Eisenhower.
Ike had a left anterior myocardial infarction in September 1955, while on vacation at his in-laws’ house in Denver. It was widely reported in the media, and it filled this little boy with unease. I mean, if avuncular old Ike could be struck down, what of everything else? I see no direct connection with the crisis in Hungary the next year, but it was another of those pivot points that determined how a good chunk of Europe was going to be run for the next thirty years- and by the end of which the little boy would be an aging bureaucrat and apparatchik.
I also remember eating dirt with Tim Veryzer in the backyard of the rental house on Kentucky Street in Detroit, but that was not so widely reported in the national media and I cannot Google up a year for the occasion.
It is interesting to look back at what happened in Hungary- it was late in 1956 and I was in kindergarten. A student demonstration in Buda-Pest went viral in October, and continued into the beginning of November. Thousands of other citizens thronged to the city to support them, and there were martyrs manufactured by the Security Forces- the AVH- who shot down demonstrators who attempted to occupy the studios of Radio Hungary.
The revolt spread with the speed of news across the country, and the government collapsed. So far, it sounds a little like what is happening in our world. But as popular militias stood up and pro-Soviet officials were detained or executed spontaneously.
The replacement government was not like the one in Epypt, whose anniversary of Mabarak-free rule was uneasily observed by the Generals who served him and the people who let him go.
The Hungarians disbanded the ÁVH and announced they would be pulling out of the Warsaw Pact. The Kremlin was disconcerted, and initially agreed to start negotiations to withdraw the Red Army. Instead, the Politiburo deliberated, and then decided to crush the revolution.
Hungarian resistance continued until 10 November, and there were those who called for Ike to intervene, a course of action he eschewed. I like a lot of things about Mr. Eisenhower. As a soldier who had actually borne the hardship of war, he was reluctant to enter in to it lightly, unlike some of our subsequent leaders.
The Iron Curtain was a new reality, and America and NATO girded their loins to deal with it. I don?t remember much after that in the 1950s, until that young good-looking rake JFK decided he had the looks and the money to be President.
There is way too much to remember about the 1960s, and I am not going to try this morning.
Instead, reading about Nobel Laureate Al Gore?s impending visit to document the ice-melt in the Antarctic, and the mysterious alteration of the historical temperatures of Reykjavik, I remembered the second warning contained in Ike?s last address from the Oval Office.
Did I mention that Mr. Gore is going to go looking for melt in the Antarctic summer? Never mind.
We had a consensus back in Ike?s time that a robust military was necessary to oppose the implacable Communists. Funny that I have come to miss them a bit.
But Ike was a man of impressive observation, and he saw something else that had come to America with the urgency of the big war. We see it all over these days, but it is not talked about as much as the threat from the military-industrial complex.
I was talking to my pal, West Coast Guy. He is one of the most thoughtful of my associates, and is confident that man-made greenhouse gases are going to cook us alive in our own gravy. I respect his views on the subject, but differ on the matter of whether the science is settled.
I had to write him back, saying that key judgment and take ?away from the discussion is whether or not there is a tipping point in the concentration of gases, and if there is, whether we have reached it.
The Scientific Community that has congealed around the climate issue is resolute that something really important is going on and action must be taken.
That is by no means a universal opinion, although contrary views are usually attributed to the influence of Big Oil and the usual exploitive and manipulative capitalists. The Scientific Consensus, of course, was in turn largely funded by Big Government, so I contend that this is at least as much a political and public policy argument as it is about the weather, which isn?t climate.
In my lackadaisical pursuit of the topic, I have seen that some paleo-climatological folks are saying that we might even have the cause and effect of the atmospheric CO2 concentration backwards.
Dunno. I am no scientist. We agreed to shrug and say “oh well,” though he will continue to be pro-active and do the right thing as he sees it. But it got me to thinking about the other thing that Dwight warned us about in his last best speech by the last best guy to serve in the White House:
“We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
The President then went on to describe something else that deeply troubled him:
“Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.”
“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.?
?Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
We are there. I eagerly await Mr. Gore?s report from the South Pole.
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com