New Tenants
(Botta’s Pocket Gopher (Thomomys bottae). I did not get this close- not yet, anyway. Photo Wikipedia)
The new tenants moved in without benefit of lease. Sort of like Mrs. Mouse in the Mailbox last year, dammit. I am not happy with the trespassers, and I am not going to get into who is trespassing on what. Not on Monday, anyway.
I was sitting on the porch, wondering if I should try to cut the grass this late on a Sunday, and then, bold as brass, two Gophers strolled out from under the front porch, headed for the lawn to so some happy-hour foraging.
I have seen them on the property before, though not actually under my porch. There were several thoughts that occurred to me simultaneously: Should I shoot them? Should I get another drink and let them be?
This actually caused me to do a little research before grabbing the shotgun. And, glancing at the clock, making a drink. Wait- no alcohol before shooting. Well, OK, no gunfire this afternoon. I might shoot the Panzer by mistake- and plus, those rodents can be vicious when provoked.
What you and I call “gophers” (you know, the interns you send for a vente Starbucks) are actually known in the natural world as “Pocket gophers,” since their chub cheeks (fur lined- elegant!) are used to tote food back to their extensive burrows, which is mostly what I was concerned about.
See, all pocket gophers create a network of tunnel systems that provide protection and a venue for collecting food, which would include the garden I have not quite got around to cultivating this season. The Russians are WAY ahead of me, and bringing in the first crop of shallots and spinach already, with heritage tomatoes to come shortly.
I think the Russian Truck Patch is far enough away that they are safe from predation from my side of the fence, but you never can tell.
Drinking safely inside, just in case an enraged pocket monster attacked me with his or her savage front teeth while perusing my iPad on the porch, I discovered I had a further problem.
Unlike its close relative the ground squirrel, gophers do not live in large communities and seldom find themselves above ground willingly.
And worse, from my perspective, Pockets are solitary outside of the breeding season. They are pretty aggressive about maintaining their turf, with territories that vary in size depending on the resources available. I have five acres, so that is a problem if they decide their need liebensraum.
Males and females may share some burrows and nesting chambers if their territories border each other, but in general, each pocket gopher inhabits its own individual tunnel system.
This has dramatic implications for my summer. Seeing two of them meant it was probably were probably going steady, if not already engaged.
Depending on the species and local conditions, pocket gophers may have a specific annual breeding season, or may breed repeatedly through the year like American college students.
When they reproduce, each litter typically consists of two to five young, although this may be much higher in some species. Crap.
I think it is a trip to the Lowe’s for some humane cages, thick leather gloves, and high explosives, just in case.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Keep Calm and Swim
Well, it was great wandering off into the days when people knew the difference between right and wrong, and knew that there were things you could do and things you couldn’t.
It was also good to spend some time with people who were real, amalgamated heroes. Of course, the reason that they were heroes was that there was awful peril and a world at stake.
Those kinds of people are still around, of course, and some correspondents wrote to remind me that there are young men and women who have made multiple deployments to the various horrors overseas. I would be remiss, before returning to the what passes for reality these days, if I did not acknowledge their considerable sacrifices.
I saw them at Walter Reed, in the Ortho Clinic, learning how to use their new limbs. It was humbling and affirming at the same time. So, to them, I think we ought to give some sincere thanks and not say that bravery and honor are things left to the great struggle against Fascism.
This is late. I have already written two fairly massive stories this morning that got me sort of emotional. I don’t feel like sharing them- who needs the aggravation, anyway? I was pretty much calmed down when a pal sent me a scathing essay on what is happening on the Border this week that was simply mind-boggling.
You can find it yourself if you want, but I can’t do it today. Sorry. This essay threatened to lurch off into another variation of the previous efforts this morning. Enough is enough. I am going to get some exercise and head for the country.
It is way too nice a day to waste on politics, particularly the toxic process we have permitted- even encouraged- to become the norm, rather than the exception.
Screw it. I am going for a swim.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Pee Wee’s Big Adventure
I was going to do something different this morning- we have spent a fair amount of time lately looking at the vastness of the conflict we call World War II. Many folks have brought up memories of the men who fought at Midway and stormed the beaches in Normandy lately, but I think it is worth remembered everyone who contributed to victory in what (I hope) will be our last experience with total war.
That is the men that fought, of course, but also the legion of women who volunteered for service in the ways that were permitted back then, and those who sustained the farms and families and businesses that were left behind for what was termed “The Duration.”
By that they meant that life might someday return to something like normal, but there was something really important that had to be accomplished without ambiguity, and with immense sacrifice.
Our pal Mac Showers made it to the commemoration 70th Anniversary of the Battle of Midway. He was tougher than I was- I had my tickets but wound up in the hospital instead. I think he knew it was his last deployment, and there was nothing in this world that was going to stop him from making it.
The same sort of spirit energized some of the men who returned to Normandy this past week. I can’t help but mention two of them in the context of Mac’s commitment to the heroes who had gone before.
(Bernard Jordan, now and then. Image from the UK’s Telegraph).
Bernard Jordan is one of them. Staff at the nursing home where he resides these days- he is 89, after all, discovered to their alarm that he went missing from the facility at bed check last Thursday. He pinned his medals from the war on his jacket and left the home to take a bus to France, where Friday morning he appeared at Gold Beach for the commemoration. He had helped shell the pillboxes that now dot the peaceful slope above the surf. The Staff at The Pines in Hume had tried to get him on an accredited tour organized by the Royal British Legion, but couldn’t make the arrangements. Lieutenant Jordan organized himself, escaped from custody, and made his way there himself.
That is pretty damned impressive.
But I have to say that the one who knocked me out was James H. “Pee Wee” Martin. This tough-as-nails former paratrooper was with the 101st Airborne for that night jump seventy years ago with the 506th Regiment, 3rd Battalion, Company G.
(Pee Wee Martin jumps into Normandy one more time. Photo AFP/Joel Saget).
Once on the ground, Pee Wee fought across the hedgerows for the month it took for Ike’s legions to break out and maneuver east. He jumped into the carnage of Operation MARKET GARDEN in the initial attempt to liberate the Netherlands- the one that was “A Bridge Too Far” for many young men to cross. He held a Thompson submachine gun at besieged Bastogne when the Germans tried their last offensive in the West at the Bulge, the one where the German commander demanded the 101st surrender to prevent their annihilation by heavy artillery.
Brig. Gen. Anthony C. McAuliffe responded with one word: “Nuts.” The Germans were not familiar with the American idiom, and understandably a little confused. An enlisted Yank who spoke their language helpfully translated for them. “It means ‘Go To Hell,’” he said.
Pee Wee might have said it more bluntly than that. He is a salty old man, based on his interviews. He completed his combat tour by being one of the soldiers who occupied Hitler’s personal retreat at Berchtesgaden in Bavaria.
He was demobilized and went back to Ohio, where he worked hard and tried to do the right thing.
The 70th anniversary is something special, and it will be the last some of the Vets of the invasion will see. Pee Wee believed he had one more jump in him at the ripe old age of 93, and by God he did it.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/05/world/europe/d-day-paratrooper-jumps-again/
I don’t know if Pee Wee’s generation is really the greatest one. Human beings have always had the capacity to rise to whatever occasion they needed to, given the alternatives, though that seems a bit lacking in these late days of the Republic. Pee Wee summed up the approach of his generation this way: “right was right and wrong was wrong, and everyone knew the difference.”
Our fathers knew that. They did what they did because it was the right thing to do, and the alternative was unthinkable. It was worth giving your life for.
We now live in an age of relativism, and some hold that nothing is worth it. But the fact that there are still men alive like Bernard Jordan and Jim Martin gives me reason to hope that maybe things will be OK.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Milk Run
It is the 70th anniversary of the invasion of Europe, and the beginning of the end of Adolph Hitler’s domination of Europe. There are still veterans alive who were there, and some of them have returned to the beaches where they landed, and changed the course of history.
The Presidents of the United States and the Russian Federation are there to join Francoise Hollande of France to commemorate the greatest invasion from the sea ever attempted. I have mentioned the contributions of intelligence to the war in the Pacific- and it is worth a note that the incredible advantage of the ULTRA program to decrypt German military communications gave the Allies.
Between that, and successful Operational Deception campaign that featured the very real George Patton in command of a thoroughly bogus command called FUSAG- the “First US Army Group”- in order to keep Hitler’s intelligence off guard and prepared to defend the southern coast of The Atlantic Wall.
Only one of the family was there that day, seventy years ago. Uncle Dick was assigned to the Mighty Eighth Air Force, based in East Anglia. This is what his group of young officers looked like on that day:
Officers of the 837th Squadron, 487th Bomb Group, 8th Air Force at RAF Lavenham, Sussex, England.
From Back to Front, Left to Right:
2nd Lt Charles Eubank (pilot), Captain Richard M. Munson (pilot),
Captain Richard M. Gile (pilot),
1st Lt William A. Yowell (pilot), 1st Lt Theobold G. Remaklus (pilot)
1st Lt Bernard T Nolan (copilot),
2nd Lt Thomas C. Valentine (copilot), 2nd Lt. John L. Sada (navigator),
2nd Lt. Royal K. Snell (copilot),
2nd Lt. Robert J. O’Connell (bombardier), Major Aloysius J Ganey (group navigator)
2nd Lt. Francis.W. Nelson (navigator), 2nd Lt. Harold E. McDougall (navigator),
1st Lt. Clement J. Kochczynski (copilot), 2nd Lt. Bernhard W. Nelson (navigator),
2nd Lt. James G. Brooks (navigator) 2nd Lt. David O. Wilcox (bombardier),
2nd Lt. Francis W. Moan (bombardier), 2nd Lt. Bertram Newmark (bombardier),
1st Lt. Virgil H. Bailey (bombardier), F/O William C. Gee (copilot)
It appears these are the officers from the Eubank, Munson, Gile, Yowell, and Remaklus crews in the rows from left to right (Photo supplied by Brad Nelson, and it also appears in Barney Nolan’s “Isaiah’s Eagles Rising,” 2002, available at Amazon.)
And that is where I am this morning. Word around the base at Lavenham in lovely Sussex on the 5th was that the invasion was a go.
The 837th Squadron, 487th Bomb Group, was tasked with implementing Ike Eisenhower’s “Operation Transportation.” There was conflict in the Air Corps between the Big Thinkers like General Carl “Tooie” Spatz about the strategic use of Air Power. Tooie wanted to concentrate on big ticket items in the German Homeland to disrupt the economy- steel, petroleum and manufacturing.
Ike was more interested in keeping the Germans away from the beaches, and wanted rail and road transportation lines of communication interdicted. Ike got his way.
Mission brief was at 2300 that evening, for a first light launch to take out a bridge on the Loire River. The 837th launched uneventfully. For the most part, anyway. Dick’s B-24H Liberator “Buzzin’ Betsy” lost an engine on take-off. That is a ticklish bit of business, since the bomber was fully laden with fuel and bombs- that is 70,000 pounds of airplane and AVGAS and ordnance hurtling down the crowned runway- but he elected to stay with the formation and proceed to the target on three.
Squadron buddy named Bernie Nolan wrote about it much later. The crossed the Channel and were over the invasion beaches at 0600 at 10,000 feet. That is low for the standard Liberator mission profile, and the crews were amazed at the massive Armada standing to off the coast. A solid under cast extended a mile inland and onward into France, effectively cloaking the bridge.
The squadron was under strict instructions to avoid dropping without a clear visual on the target, though that did not prevent the death of 15,000 French civilians in the Normandy campaign. On that day, Bernie said the squadron never dropped a bomb. Bernie called it a classic milk run.
Of course, his aircraft had four working engines.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
None Dare Call It….
“JAP FLEET SMASHED BY U.S.
2 CARRIERS SUNK AT MIDWAY
NAVY HAD WORD OF JAP PLAN TO STRIKE AT SEA
KNEW DUTCH HARBOR WAS A FEINT”
– Chicago Tribune Headline, Sunday 7 June 1942 disclosing ULTRA information.
I got stuck on something that might be treason this morning, not the Bergdahl thing, but one that happened in the months after the victory at Midway. I am happy the Sergeant is back, and I am also expecting the Army to do the right thing, and bring him up before a Court Marshal on Article 85 or 86 charges under the UCMJ. I don’t really care what the verdict is. Sergeant Robert Jenkins was assigned to the Republic of Korea back during the Vietnam War, decided he did not want to participate, and defected to North Korea.
Bad career move- it took him 40 years to get out. The Army tried him, slapped his wrist with 24 days in the stockade and gave him a bad conduct discharge. At least it saved the taxpayers from having to shovel out the back pay, and if Sergeant Bergdahl deserted or went AWOL, we ought not to have to pay him for it.
But it is funny that it is always the troops who wind up in these situations. I was looking at the daunting pile of manuscript this morning and realized there are a lot of officers who never paid jack-squat for anything. Some of you may recall the essence of the rest of this rant from August of 2010. Mac and I were wrapping up 1943 in discussions at Willow, but we came back to the matter of how Joe Rochefort, the gifted cryptologist, was hung out to dry by the Rear Echelon MFs.
I should stay away from ancient evil, but I need to get to it to describe the burgeoning intelligence effort that took Mac from underlining message and arranging IBM punch cards to making rubber topographic maps of remote islands that no one ever heard about.
I spent the first hour waking re-reading parts of CAPT Eddie Layton’s book, “And I Was There” in preparation for today’s outing, which was intended to talk about 1943. But there are some unburied dead from the period after June, 1942.
I chuckled as I read about Joe Rochefort’s Deputy in the Combat Information Unit, Tom Dyer. Layton said that he had the best collection of pin-ups in the Pacific under the glass on his desk. I made a note to ask Mac about how lurid they were.
Of course, what was on the top of Dyer’s desk obscured them most of the time. He said later that Rochefort and the other analysts, including himself, kept most of the five-digit code groups in their heads, and the desks were covered with hundreds of partial decrypts. They worked port-and starboard watches most days, and around the clock before the Midway break that identified Admiral Yamamoto’s target.
A newly arrived Yeoman once cleaned off the desk when Dyer was sleeping, and there was holy hell to pay, since like the code groups that floated in endless strings through his brain, he knew where every page that lay above the pin-ups was. The effort paid off. With Jasper Holmes trick, the target was identified, and with superhuman effort, a Lieutenant named Joe Finnegan managed to construct a table that cracked the super-encryption on the date of the attack.
Admiral Nimitz crossed the Rubicon at a major inter-service conference on the 27th of May; he believed Eddie Layton’s prediction that the Japanese carrier would launch the attack “on the morning of 04 June, from the northwest on a bearing of 325 degrees.”
Eddie was spot-on, though there was uncertainty up to the last moment. The Japanese had made a pre-invasion change of additives, and HYPO was in the dark on the eve of battle.
I won’t attempt an account of the struggle itself, since better people have done that. In The Dungeon, Mac was placed on a desk under a bunny tube that would deliver messages by pneumatic pressure. Those quaint delivery systems were still in the fleet when I arrived decades later and the rattle of the arrival of the hollow projectile was always exciting. But only a few intercepts arrived as the titanic struggle raged.
What interests me as a Spook is what happened afterward.
(CAPT Joe Rocheford. Official US Navy Picture).
Washington had been predicting that the attack could happen in the middle of June, and fall upon either Alaska, or perhaps to the south. Had anyone in the Pacific paid attention to their better-resourced predictions, the Japanese would have been using the Fleet Post Office code they had assigned to Midway Island.
It is said that victory has many fathers, and defeat only one.
The Redman Brothers, Joe and John, in the Office of Naval Communications and OP-20G (Radio Intelligence Section), respectively, had immediate access to the senior brass of the Navy and took credit for providing the intelligence that enabled the victory.
Anyone who has been forward and afloat knows that the Shore Establishment always wins, and the chance of victory is enhanced the closer your desk is to the flagpole at the Pentagon, or in Mac’s time, at Main Navy.
Once victory was certain, historian Stephen Budiansky quotes Joe Rochefort told everyone at Station Hypo that he “didn’t want to see them for three or four days.” He expected everyone would just go home and catch some sleep. Instead, a house party on Diamond Head was convened. Budiansky quotes Rochefort as saying it was a “straight out-and-out drunken brawl” that lasted the entire three days. Then everyone shook off their hangovers and went right back to twenty- and twenty-two-hour shifts to tackle the new code book and additives that the enemy had introduced into JN-25 before the battle.
I need to ask Mac about that. Or retiring Associate Justice of the Supreme Court John Paul Stevens, a lawyer in civilian life who worked with him at HYPO.
I am more likely to see Mac at Willow.
But the real battle was just beginning thousands of miles east of Midway. The assertion that Washington’s Station NEGAT had been right was breathtaking enough, but there was an implied task contained in taking the credit for other people’s success. They had to discredit Joe Rochefort and Eddie Layton.
The coup
engineered by the Redmans to oust Joe Rochefort is quite extraordinary.
The Chicago Tribune Affair reveals the banality of institutional evil. A war correspondent named Stanley Johnson provided the article on which the re-write man in the Windy City based the headline slugs up above.
Johnson was a classic exemplar of the knock-about, wise-cracking newshound. Born in Australian, he wore a big black mustache and had served in the Australian Army in World War I. He roamed Europe and Asia for years after the war, and wound up as a stringer for the Tribune’s London bureau. He came to the U.S. after the fall of France and married a former showgirl he had met in Paris years before.
He became a U.S. citizen, and his free-wheeling ways brought him to the attention of the virulent FDR-hating publisher of the Tribune, Robert Rutherford “Colonel” McCormick. The Colonel had several axes to grind with Washington, and publishing Johnson’s florid dispatch was just part of his maverick campaign against it. He dispatched Johnson to cover the war in the Pacific, and Johnson wound up embarked in USS Lexington for the action. The Ship’s PAO may have failed to have him sign a secrecy agreement. In any event, Johnson was either shown or had inadvertent access to classified information, and did not view himself as bound to protect it.
Shudders ran through the Navy Department at the prospect that the Japanese would recognize the success at penetrating the JN-25 code would be apparent, based on the precise information about the Japanese order of battle contained in the sensational- and otherwise incorrect- article.
Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox leaned on the Colonel to shut down the publicity on sources and methods, and the Colonel reluctantly agreed to spike the story. It is possible that the disclosure, picked up by a couple other major dailies, might have passed without issue.
The Redman brothers seized on the substance of Johnson’s article, which they correctly deduced came from the classified 31 May Fleet Intelligence Bulletin to Commanding Officers identifying the disposition and identity of the Japanese forces defeated at Midway.
Eddie Layton goes on to describe the following leaks to legendary radio newshawk Walter Winchell, who made two broadcasts decrying the compromise while explicitly talking about it. The Redmans pushed for an indictment in Federal Court against McCormick and Johnson, managing to keep the matter going, and a matter of public record. The story broke out again on the 8th of August
Years later, Jasper Holmes wrote about the impact of the headlines and the following publicity engineered by the Redmans in hs book Double-Edged Secrets, “Any informed reader could only conclude that Japanese codes has been broken.”
Eddie Layton’s 1985 book lays out a case of staggering mendacity that followed triumph. The Redmans wrote mutually re-enforcing memos up the chain accusing Joe Rochefort of insubordination, and recommending HYPO be brought to heel, and be placed under an officer more to their liking.
The younger Redman, John, managed to get himself assigned to the CINCPOA staff as communications officer, and used a private coded circuit to keep Washington apprised of his progress on isolating the renegade code-breakers.
With all the news of compromised codes flying about, it should not have come of much surprise that the Japanese changed their version of the JN-25 code a week after the news of the Tribune indictments, and the work of the previous six months was rendered useless. It would take four months of round-the-clock work to recover the ground that was lost.
Fleet Admiral Bill Halsey always said it was the campaign in the Solomons that was the turning point of the war, not the battle of Midway. I suspect he felt that way because he was not there, being confined to his hospital bed during the fight.
But his point it taken. The see-saw battle to keep Henderson Field on Guadalcanal in American hands gave birth to the ironic unofficial motto of the Marines that the “Navy will always abandon you in a pinch.” The Tokyo Express roared in each evening by sea to re-supply the Japanese forces, and before it was done, two dozen men-of-war littered the floor of Ironbottom Sound. When the battle was over, in February of 1943, the Imperial Fleet never advanced again.
I will ask Mac his professional opinion on whether the single-minded campaign by the Redmans to wage war on Joe Rochefort might have disclosed the success of Station HYPO against the codes to the watchful Japanese.
Joe Redman put on the rank of Rear Admiral, and John made Captain. I understand ambition, but this might be something else. If what they did caused the Japanese to re-think their security, they might be guilty of something more than careerist aspirations.
You see, the Marines landed on Guadalcanal on the 7th of August, and when the JN-25 codebook changed the next week, the Americans were suddenly flying blind. How many people died as a result?
(Marines in the Field, Guadalcanal, 1942. Our pal JoeMaz’s father is in this photo. Official US Navy picture).
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Echoes of Battle
(The manuscript of the book about the life and times of RADM Mac Showers. Photo Socotra).
Things are all over the map about developments in Afghanistan this morning. I am deeply disturbed about it all, but I am going to let others comment and have the thing play out on its own merits.
This is a week that marks the anniversaries of something else, something foreign to the ambiguous and ambivalent world of this new century.
I am referring to the desperate times of total war in the Pacific and Europe.
In 1942 and 1944, great forces and hundreds of thousands of people were surging forward to their fates. Continents stood at risk, and the continued existence of nation-states and their people were at stake.
I got out the manuscript of the book about Mac Showers, since he was the last insider left alive from the little team of code-breakers who provided the advantage that enabled Admiral Chester Nimitz and his heroes to prevail at the battle near Midway, 72 years ago.
Arguably, Midway was the end of the beginning of the most catastrophic war in human history. The invasion at Normandy almost two years to the day later signified the beginning of the end, though I feely admit that is a Anglo-American perspective on the sprawling violence on the Eastern Front.
Let’s take the first part first. I don’t normally distribute PowerPoint slides, but a pal in the Pacific sent me the presentation they are using to commemorate the achievements of men who my friendship with Mac Showers made human and immediate: Joe, Eddie and Jasper.
Take a moment if you have the time to look at what they accomplished. As Joe used to say, “you can achieve anything, if you don’t care who gets the credit.”
To the men who fought.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
The Land is Good
There are so many issues in play this morning that I am a bit dazed. The glorious weather continues, and it feels good to be alive and crashing around at the farm. I don’t know what to think about the Kings beating the Blackhawks to advance to the Stanley Cup Finals. Do you?
The most important are the outbreak of Perestroika, if not outright Glasnost at Refuge Farm, and the beauty of life in the country. I am going to steer away from the topic, though, and allow the diplomats continue to work the issues over wine and cheese. I can tell you that free trade and good will are already manifest- the products from the garden are already delicious- shallots and spinach with some grated cheese and balsamic vinaigrette.
The land is good, if you treat it properly.
There was a vigorous back and forth this morning among the Usual Suspects about the President’s new initiative on Carbon Dioxide limits and coal-fired electrical plants. I am not going to get into that one again, since (sigh) this has devolved to the point that facts don’t seem to matter much. Even if you agree that temperatures have increased a bit over the last century (I do), and that people have something to do with it (we have) and that CO2 has increased (though the temperatures don’t seem to be reacting to it much), there isn’t much common ground on whether or not there is a crisis worth immediately sacrificing a key component of the national power grid with only wishful thinking to replace it.
Something this big should have a plan- and that plan should include clean nuclear technology, though that seems taboo.
The fact remains that 111 of the last 114 computer model simulations have either moderately or disastrously overstated the actual measured trend in temperature suggests we need better observations and certainly better models to understand what is going on.
Then there is the political response to the release of the only American POW held in Afghanistan. Or Pakistan, as it turns out in the case of PFC Bergdahl. I resent the fact that his return is being treated as a political football.
I always felt that if I got bagged, someone would be coming to get me back. We pride ourselves on leaving no one behind.
If it is true that he wandered off on his own, leaving his weapon, helmet and flack jacket behind, so be it. He is back. He may not be a hero, but he was a soldier. The fact that others may have died trying to get him back means something, too. But it doesn’t mean we should not have tried.
But for the record, the five Taliban leaders we released from GTMO ought to go on a very special list and if they even think about rejoining the fight, we ought to put them down.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
On the Radio
‘Cause they said it really loud
They said it on the air
On the radio, whoa, oh, oh
On the radio, whoa, oh, oh
On the radio, whoa, oh, oh
On the radio, whoa, oh, oh
On the radio
-Donna Summer “On the Radio,” courtesy of Metrolyrics
I swam for a full hour yesterday, first session of that duration of the new season. God, it was magnificent- maybe the best weekend of the whole summer. Not too cold, not too hot, low humidity and for one magical weekend, no extremes whatsoever.
It was a little chilly to start, but as I moved in the blue water the sun warmed me and filled me with the animal joy of movement. I even made a point of not sitting out too long in the pleasant sunshine so the skin did not redden overmuch. Life is grand.
(IPad Mini in waterproof case. Perfect for keeping up while paddling.)
I listen to the radio as I swim these days. It helps forestall the boredom that sets in with the repetitive motion, and the slow circling motion that helps pace the exercise. I used to listen to National Public Radio as performed my aquatic yoga, but my friends there have become a little shrill for my taste, and the sometimes jarring commercial news-and-talk radio does a better job of simulating balance. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled into the President’s Weekly Radio Address.
I didn’t really know that it still existed, but not only is it still around, the CBS radio network actually carries it (and the GOP rebuttal) each Saturday morning. There is long precedent for the conversation between Chief Executive and his subjects. FDR began the tradition when he was Governor of New York State, and confronted a recalcitrant legislature. He carried it over into his unprecedented four terms in the Oval Office in the dark days of the Depression and global war.
The print media of the day dubbed them “Fireside Chats,” since they were a cozy way of getting around the nonsense of opposition to the New Deal and let Mr. Roosevelt speak directly to his constituents.
“No longer was the message of the administration to be tinkered with by the interpretations of the press; Roosevelt was simply going to tell the people what he was doing and why. This level of intimacy with politics made people feel as if they too were part of the administration’s decision-making process and many soon felt that they knew Roosevelt personally.”
Ronald Reagan, ever the showman, migrated the evening fireside to the Saturday morning analogue media wasteland. The move coincided with the increasing irrelevancy of the medium in the new age of digital communication that makes the radio addresses hard to find. But I was still amazed at the content.
You would think that the dramatic developments at the VA might have been worth a comment- particularly in the context of the Affordable Care Act. Some words that might instill confidence in the public and shore up the increasingly ragged notion that the Government can do anything effectively or efficiently. But nope, none of that. Instead we are off on another grand adventure.
Normally, the weekly radio address is recorded in the Oval Office, or some place we are supposed to think is the Oval Office, evoking the last great period of the Progressive ascendancy. This one was different, but familiar. The President went to a place with the human props he thinks are so effective.
Not so much on the radio, in my mind, but of course he multi-purposed the event across media that did not exist when FDR established the Fireside Chat. Mr. Obama evoked the kids, of course, by speaking at the Children’s National Medical Center. He said: “I refuse to condemn our children to a planet that’s beyond fixing.”
I am not convinced that it is, and thought back to that bizarre speech he made about the planet starting to heal, and the seas ceasing to rise, based on things he hadn’t done yet.
Of course, he was talking about the new EPA rules he is going to impose tomorrow morning, first thing on the second of June.
I listened hard, but couldn’t hear anything about the other new set of sweeping regulations, the ones that will place decorative ponds on private property (or the two little streams that bound the property of Refuge Farm) under the jurisdiction of the EPA bureaucrats in Washington. I guess those will be released late some sweltering summer Friday afternoon.
Anyway, the upshot of this Chat was that Mr. Obama is going to direct the EPA to place the first carbon pollution limits on existing U.S. power plants, which are still mostly fueled with that nasty coal stuff. There are those who argue the rule will put a stake in the economy, and will result in the loss of 224,000 jobs every year through 2030 and impose $50 billion in additional annual costs.
Considering that the economy still is languishing, and in fact actually contracted in the last quarter, that seems sort of ill-advised, you know?
Plus, where I come from, if you are going to do something big, you normally have a plan to accommodate the change. The Government says that currently, 37% of the electrical supply is produced by coal-based generation plants. I listened hard, but could not hear mention of any plan to replace the electricity produced by burning coal.
I guess it will sort of happen by itself, like getting an appointment to see a doctor at the VA.
The line as I heard it was that by targeting carbon dioxide, the administration is going to help young asthma patients. “In America, we don’t have to choose between the health of our economy and the health of our children,” said the President. He went on to say that the cost of carbon pollution “can be measured in lost lives” and roughly “100,000 asthma attacks and 2,100 heart attacks will be avoided” in just the first year that the standards go into effect.
Since we breath carbon dioxide (regularly, if we are lucky), I was having a hard time following the argument. But Mr. Obama was actually at a hospital, the children seemed real enough and it was on the radio, so it must be true.
He has also dispatched his people to fan out across the country to build support for the new regulations, and reassure those who might be concerned about the impact of the coming rules. Like people who are concerned about a reliable source of warmth in the winter and a cooling breeze in the sweltering summer.
The extremes of winter and summer kill people, too. But we don’t want to quantify that.
That is what is so ironic about it all. The narrative is that the new rules will benefit public health. Predictably, the devilish details of the rules have been closely guarded- in a Republic you don’t want people to question really big new agenda items. It is inconvenient and slows down change.
For my part, I would prefer to have a working national power grid, regardless of how it is fueled, until there is a rational, workable and affordable replacement. “Renewable” sources of energy only make up about 5% of electric production, so good luck with that. We seem to be intent on knee-capping the basic component of a vibrant economy “for the children.”
We can give thanks to Tom Steyer and his ilk in the crony capitalism world. Tom is donating a hundred million dollars to the President’s party this election cycle to support bold environmental action. Koch Brothers? Don’t make me laugh.
Steyer made his billions exploiting the financial practice of “absolute return” investing, a strategy that aims to produce a positive absolute return regardless of the directions of financial markets. Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital did pretty much the same thing. In the gambling world, that would mean betting for and against the house, and it worked out pretty well for him. Not so much for the rest of us, but no matter. Maybe he feels bad.
Even after donating a hundred million dollars to ensure that his voice of alarm is heard, Mr. Steyer will have plenty of cash left over. I imagine he can probably afford a Honda generator to power the appliances in his mansions if a weakened grid goes down.
I was paddling furiously in the pool, though not actually going anywhere in particular. The President said: “The shift to a cleaner energy economy won’t happen overnight, and it will require tough choices along the way.”
I wonder exactly what he has in mind for those choices? Wouldn’t you think you would want to have a plan for the transition that we could talk about?
He did not mention one, except to trust in the American spirit of innovation. We may be shivering when it happens, but it is all true. Must be. I heard it on the radio.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303