What Interns are For

A Shopping Trip:

The Aristotelian mean between the Clinton and Obama administrations on how to use your interns continues to prove elusive. The Clintons wanted them to do, ah, too much; and as for the Obamas...

Let's say you're preparing dinner and you realize with dismay that you don't have any certified organic Tuscan kale. What to do?

Here's how Michelle Obama handled this very predicament Thursday afternoon:
The Secret Service and the D.C. police brought in three dozen vehicles and shut down H Street, Vermont Avenue, two lanes of I Street and an entrance to the McPherson Square Metro station. They swept the area, in front of the Department of Veterans Affairs, with bomb-sniffing dogs and installed magnetometers in the middle of the street, put up barricades to keep pedestrians out, and took positions with binoculars atop trucks. Though the produce stand was only a block or so from the White House, the first lady hopped into her armored limousine and pulled into the market amid the wail of sirens.

Then, and only then, could Obama purchase her leafy greens. "Now it's time to buy some food," she told several hundred people who came to watch. "Let's shop!"

Health Care: Homestretch

Health Care: Homestretch

Going into the final push, things look good:

Fifty-six percent (56%) of voters nationwide now oppose the health care reform proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats. That’s the highest level of opposition yet measured and includes 44% who are Strongly Opposed.

Just 43% now favor the proposal, including 24% who Strongly Favor it.

So: total support is underwater even compared only to those Strongly Opposed. A clear majority is opposed.

That's before people have time to factor in this:

The Washington Times reports that Barack Obama has finally concluded that Joe Wilson was right, and that ObamaCare presents a big problem in handling illegal immigrants. Fortunately, the White House has found a solution to the problem. No, they’re not going to beef up enforcement or require identification before receiving subsidies and services. They’re just going to offer amnesty so that no one’s illegal anymore....

The Rass poll shows that there has been a fair bit of stability in the polling numbers. One normally wouldn't expect them to change much, then, if they haven't changed much through the August protests, etc.

Still, this is the kind of extraordinary statement that might nudge the numbers. Of the 44% of Americans who at least kind-of support health care, a strong part are union members. Announcing that the plan is linked to a major amnesty effort is one of the few things you could do to undercut rank-and-file union members' support for the plan. It won't make any difference to the organizations themselves, who look at the unionized healthcare workforce as too great a good to pass up. For the average union member, though, the picture is a little different.

Trade It For A Dog

"We Could Trade It For A Dog":

Doc Russia considers the business of raising a daughter:

The best part about it is that from this day on, I can always whip that reference out. when Domestic-6 complains about how tiring taking care of a baby is, I can just say "Hey, *I* wanted to trade her for a dog." When our lovely daughter does something to upset me, I can turn to her and say "you see... *this* is why I wanted to trade you for a dog." Of course, she will run to mommy and whine that Daddy said that he wanted to trade her for a dog, and she'll ask my lovely wife if that was true, and there will be just enough of a pause as Domestic-6 ponders how to answer that question for her to wonder for a moment if it's true.

Now, while this may seem cruel and heartless (two of my specialties), the sad fact is thhat I do not think that I can raise my daughter as anything besides a tomboy, and that means giving her a thick skin. You see, the boys I see growing up maturing in her cohort today are not being raised (for the most part) as men. No, they are something else entirely. So, I must raise a daughter under the presumption that there will be few men (classical men, I should say) available to her. This means no helpless little girl. No delicate little flower. Don't get me wrong; I do want her to be feminine, well-groomed and beautiful. It's just that she is going to have to be the kind of woman who has to make sure that she doesn't mix up her Chanel No. 5 and her Hoppe's No. 9.

While I did once think up a name for a daughter, in the days before it was clear we were meant to have a son, I don't know that I gave much thought to how I'd raise one. I have to admit that I don't think I'd do it very differently. Any daughter of mine would come up knowing how to fence and fight, sing and ride horses, shoot and tell the truth.

It'd be an interesting exercise, to be sure. Perhaps the Good Lord might find it amusing, in which case I might yet have the chance to try it out. Give Doc your best, anyway, because he's very busy with his new job, house-hunting, and the baby-plans to boot.

And hey, Doc, cheer up: you can always marry her off to mine. (This is how those arranged marriages in other cultures happen so early, in case any of you ever wondered about that.)

Sucks to be ya'll.

Sucks To Be Ya'll:

So today the President announced that we would not be building anti-missile defenses in Eastern Europe. There were two reasons we had thought we would be: as a hedge against Russia, whose invasion of Georgia last year shows that it is ready to use military force against even US allies; and because such defenses would allow us to protect Western Europe against Iranian nuclear missiles, should they be developed.

Two other items of interest for today:

It is the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Eastern Europe.

The IAEA says Iran is definitely developing nuclear weapons.

Sleep well, Poland.

So, if they take our guns away, can we use swords instead?

They appear to work:

Hours earlier, someone had broken into John Pontolillo's house and taken two
laptops and a video-game console. Now it was past midnight, and he heard noises
coming from the garage out back.

The Johns Hopkins University undergraduate didn't run. He didn't call the police. He
grabbed his samurai sword.

With the 3- to 5-foot-long, razor-sharp weapon in hand, police say, Pontolillo crept toward the noise. He noticed a side door in the garage had been pried open. When a man inside lunged at him, police say, the confrontation was fatal.

Bad Idea

You'd Think Someone Would Grasp...

...that this is not the right time for this particular idea.

This week the House is scheduled to approve H.R. 3221, an education lending bill that CBO reports will increase the deficit by $50 billion. The bill includes a little-known provision to give the Secretary of Education $500 million - to be provided to to any entity he deems “appropriate” - to develop and disseminate free and “freely available” online courses....

Federal curriculum is contrary to longstanding government policy - and it’s unnecessary. For decades, Federal law has prohibited the U.S. Department of Education from exercising control over the “curriculum, program of instruction . . . or over the selection or content of library resources, text books, or other educational materials by any educational institution or school system.

The school speech went over so well, I can't imagine why anyone would object to the Feds appropriating money to write curricula for students. By all means, full speed ahead with this new Federal action! Come on, folks, work with us.

I was over at one of our local primary schools for a martial arts event, and I saw what they did with the Obama speech. One of the teachers assigned a creative writing project that, I gather from the results, was something like:

'Imagine that President Obama announces that he has repealed the Bill of Rights. Write a letter telling him why he should keep it instead. Please explain which amendment is most important to you, and why.'

I noticed that the clear victor among 'most important amendment' for these Georgia children was the 2nd Amendment; the runner-up was the 1st Amendment, for its protection of religion.

I suppose I'll have to do my part as a good citizen and schedule a meeting with the principal, though, to express some concerns.

I don't really object to the idea of asking children to imagine the government violating the Constitution, and to think about what their duty as citizens entails if it does. That's good civics; it's something we should all think about, whoever is currently in charge in Washington.

However, it's very bad civics to fail to convey that the President has no power to repeal the Bill of Rights. The President is not involved in Constitutional amendments of any sort. They are formulated in Congress and ratified by the states; or they are formulated by a Constitutional Convention, once a supermajority of states has called for one. In the event that a President declared that he was suspending the Bill of Rights, then, a rather stronger response than a polite letter would be called for from the citizenry.

In the unlikely event that some President should make such a declaration down the road, I'd hate for today's children to come away thinking, "Oh, dear. Teacher said this might happen. I guess I'd better write a letter."

Meanwhile, if it's not the right time for the Feds to be trying to write curricula, it's probably also not the right time for asking the students to imagine that President Obama is about to suspend the Constitution. Tensions are a bit high right now, as some of you may have noticed. I like the concept of having people think about their duty as citizens to restrain government abuses, but it might have been better to formulate the exercise in a slightly more theoretical way. ("Imagine some future president...", etc.)

China History

History & Tourism in China:

When we were in Hang Zhou, we used to encounter Chinese tour groups occasionally. Hang Zhou was the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty, and the site of a scenic lake called Xi Hu ("West Lake"), once home to poets and philosophers as well as the lords of the realm. It's certainly worth going to see if you happen to be in the area. It's about eighty-five miles southwest of Shanghai, linked by rail, so you could do it in three days or so.

(The photos at the link are carefully cropped so as not to show much of Hang Zhou itself, which -- excepting a narrow corridor along the lake and around the university -- is a classicly Communist city. I noticed right before we left that I had done the same thing, so I went back and took photos of all the trash, open sewers, and falling-down International Style buildings... someday, I should dig out those photographs and scan them, both the beautiful ones and the ugly ones.)

The Chinese Tour Group is characterized not just by the megabuses, but by a uniform. The tourist is issued a cap and t-shirt in a matching color -- usually bright red, but possibly bright yellow, in Hang Zhou. They are marched in formation around the city by a tour guide dressed in the same uniform, but distinguished by her megaphone. Important facts are shouted through the megaphone during the march around the city. It's really something to see.

One thing that struck me toward the end of the video was the remarks about China being the 'land for big dreams.' In a sense, that's really true, and it's the one part of China that makes me wonder if some of the China-boosterism has something to it. I don't expect China to overtake America in power, or equal American power, anytime soon; but it is certainly true that it's easier to try a "big idea" in China than here. That used to be America's strength, but it is gone now.

There are two reasons for this: America is expensive, so big ideas are harder to fund; and America is heavily, heavily regulated. Everything you might want to do is surrounded by laws and regulations, and the threat of lawsuits. None of that dogs the big dreamer in China; and his money goes about eight times as far.

Bill Clinton = Racist

OK, I Got It:

I wasn't that put off by Ms. Dowd's column, because... well, because it was Ms. Dowd. The NYT's rival, however, has this analysis of her piece today:

"For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both."

Well, not the entire South. Bill Clinton is a southerner. Then again, he supported a white candidate against Obama, didn't he?

Good point. What could possibly explain that? Racism, obviously.

A Better World Through Piracy

A Better World Through Piracy:

What happened to that good old king-beheading sentiment after the English Civil War?

This pirate, too, began pistol-whipping Snelgrave, until some of Snelgrave’s crew cried out, “For God’s sake don’t kill our Captain, for we never were with a better Man.” At this, the pirate left Snelgrave alone, and the one who had tried to shoot him took his hand and promised that “my Life was safe provided none of my People complained against me.” ....

What if [pirates] added up to a picture of working-class heroes? In 1980, the Marxist historian Christopher Hill, wondering what became of the king-beheading spirit of the English Civil War, noted that when the monarchy was restored, in 1660, many radicals emigrated to the Caribbean. Their revolutionary idealism may have fallen like a lit match into the islands’ population of paupers, heretics, and transported felons. Elaborating Hill’s suggestion, the historian Marcus Rediker spent the following decades researching pirate life and came to believe that pirate society “built a better world”—one with vigorous democracy, economic fairness, considerable racial tolerance, and even health care—in many ways more praiseworthy than, say, the one that Snelgrave supported by slave trading. True, pirates were thieves and torturers, but there was something promising about their alternative to capitalism. Other scholars claimed pirates as precursors of gay liberation and feminism. But, as pirate scholarship flourished, so did dissent. In 1996, David Cordingly dismissed the idea of black equality aboard pirate ships, pointing out that a number of pirates owned black slaves, and warned against glamorizing criminals renowned among their contemporaries for “their casual brutality.”

Howard Pyle wrote, in his Book of Pirates, "[W]ould not every boy, for instance -- that is, every boy of any account -- rather be a pirate captain than a Member of Parliament?" Apparently, it's more fun for academics, too.

My favorite lines, though:

A brisk, clever new book, “The Invisible Hook” (Princeton; $24.95), by Peter T. Leeson, an economist who claims to have owned a pirate skull ring as a child and to have had supply-and-demand curves tattooed on his right biceps when he was seventeen, offers a different approach. Rather than directly challenging pirates’ leftist credentials, Leeson says that their apparent espousal of liberty, equality, and fraternity derived not from idealism but from a desire for profit. “Ignoble pirate motives generated ‘enlightened’ outcomes,” Leeson writes. Whether this should comfort politicians on the left or on the right turns out to be a subtle question.

A subtle point, indeed.

A Poem of Tournament

A Poem of Adventure:

From Sir Thomas Malory:

In this country, said Sir Marhaus, came never knight since it was christened but he found strange adventures; and so they rode, and came into a deep valley full of stones, and thereby they saw a fair stream of water; above thereby was the head of the stream a fair fountain, and three damosels sitting thereby.

And then they rode to them, and either saluted other, and the eldest had a garland of gold about her head, and she was three score winter of age or more, and her hair was white under the garland.

The second damosel was of thirty winter of age, with a circlet of gold about her head.

The third damosel was but fifteen year of age, and a garland of flowers about her head.

When these knights had so beheld them, they asked them the cause why they sat at that fountain? We be here, said the damosels, for this cause: if we may see any errant knights, to teach them unto strange adventures; and ye be three knights that seek adventures, and we be three damosels, and therefore each one of you must choose one of us; and when ye have done so we will lead you unto three highways, and there each of you shall choose a way and his damosel with him. And this day twelvemonth ye must meet here again, and God send you your lives, and thereto ye must plight your troth. This is well said, said Sir Marhaus.

NOW shall everych of us choose a damosel. I shall tell you, said Sir Uwaine, I am the youngest and most weakest of you both, therefore I will have the eldest damosel, for she hath seen much, and can best help me when I have need, for I have most need of help of you both.

And so did a young knight choose a lady of sixty years age; nor, when Sir Thomas Malory recounted it to his audience of bold knights and bold ladies, did that seem so odd a thing.

A Poem of Torment:

From A Celtic Miscellany, entry 52. The poet is an Irish man called Uilliam Ruadh (which is to say, "Red William").

I am ensnared by the maid of the curling locks.

Alas for him who has seen her, and alas for him who does not see her every day; alas for those trapped in her love, and alas for those who are set free!

Alas for him who goes to meet her, and alas for him who does not meet her always, alas for him who was with her, and alas for him who is not with her!

A true picture, and one of many like it. Many of the poems of love, from Ireland and Wales and Scotland, reflect the values of the courtly love tradition quite highly.

Not that all these poems are sad. You may enjoy entry 40, a Welsh version of Tristan and Isolde, which ends differently from the tragedy you may have heard before.

A Sign:

A Sign:

Two million people came to protest creeping socialism; one of them brought a sign.

Enid & Geraint:

Once strong, from solid
Camelot he came
Glory with him, Geraint,
Whose sword tamed the wild.
Fabled the fortune he won,
Fame, and a wife.
The beasts he battled
With horn and lance;
Stood farms where fens lay.
When bandits returned
To old beast-holds
Geraint gave them the same.

And then long peace,
Purchased by the manful blade.
Light delights filled it,
Tournaments softened, tempered
By ladies; in peace lingers
the dream of safety.

They dreamed together. Darkness
Gathered on the old wood,
Wild things troubled the edges,
Then crept closer.
The whispers of weakness
Are echoed with evil.

At last even Enid
Whose eyes are as dusk
Looked on her Lord
And weighed him wanting.
Her gaze gored him:
He dressed in red-rust mail.

And put her on palfrey
To ride before or beside
And they went to the wilds,
Which were no longer
So far. Ill-used,
His sword hung beside.

By the long wood, where
Once he laid pastures,
The knight halted, horsed,
Gazing on the grim trees.
He opened his helm
Beholding a bandit realm.

End cried at the charge
Of a criminal clad in mail!
The Lord turned his horse,
Set his untended shield:
There lacked time, there
Lacked thought for more.

Villanous lance licked the
Ancient shield. It split,
Broke, that badge of the knight!
The spearhead searched
Old, rust-red mail.
Geraint awoke.

Master and black mount
Rediscovered their rich love,
And armor, though old
Though red with thick rust,
Broke the felon blade.
The spear to-brast, shattered.

And now Enid sees
In Geraint's cold eyes
What shivers her to the spine.
And now his hand
Draws the ill-used sword:
Ill-used, but well-forged.

And the shock from the spear-break
Rang from bandit-towers
Rattled the wood, and the world!
Men dwelt there in wonder.
Who had heard that tone?
They did not remember that sound.

His best spear broken
On old, rusted mail,
The felon sought his forest.
Enid's dusk eyes sense
The strength of old steel:
Geraint grips his reins.

And he winds his old horn,
And he spurs his proud horse,
And the wood to his wrath trembles.
And every bird
From the wild forest flies,
But the Ravens.

Up The Trail

Up The Trail:

Just a pretty afternoon ride in the late summer of Georgia. Nothing special about it; but the wife is aboard her new Tennesse Walker, which several of you admired recently. She has a fondness for "between the ears" shots, so here is one.

Some appropriate music, if you like your horse pictures with music:

Hm

ACORN:

Via Southern Appeal, I learned quite a bit about the kind of services ACORN can offer.



I'd like to believe this video was faked... because the alternative is believing that it wasn't.

Oh, and they're under investigation for vote fraud in Florida now, too.

Giving the Lie

I skipped the umpteenth rendition of the Obama-Health-Care speech -- either the twenty-eighth such speech, or the 121st, depending on how you count -- so apparently I missed something interesting.

In an angry and very audible outburst, Representative Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina, interrupted President Obama’s speech Wednesday night with a shout of “You lie!”

His eruption — in response to Mr. Obama’s statement that Democratic health proposals would not cover illegal immigrants — stunned members of both parties in the House chamber.

This phrasing is not a "breach of protocol," as the NYT would have it, but part of another protocol. Kenneth S. Greenberg, scholar of dueling (and baseball, oddly enough; he had some interesting things to say on the intersection of those two things in the post-war American South), noted:

Only certain kinds of insulting language and behavior led to duels. The central insult that could turn a disagreement into a duel involved a direct or indirect attack on someone's word -- the accusation that a man was a liar. To "give someone the lie," as it was called, had always been of great consequence among men of honor. As one early-seventeenth-century English writer noted, "It is reputed so great a shame to be accounted a lyer, that any other injury is canceled by giving the lie, and he that receiveth it standeth so charged in his honor and reputation, that he cannot disburden himself of that imputation, but by the striking of him that hath given it, or by chalenging him to the combat."

TigerHawk is thus right to wonder if restoring the duel would reinforce civility, because it is the duel that is involved here. It's also of note that a congressman from South Carolina was the actor, since the only other time that dueling forms were brought into Congress I know of was also by the South Carolina faction. I mean, of course, the caning of Charles Sumner, which was not a duel precisely because the South Carolina faction wanted to send the message that he was no gentleman (and therefore unfit for a duel, but only for a beating).

In any event, there is actually one other way to resolve the issue short of combat, and it has occurred. The apology from the gentleman from South Carolina resolves the matters of honor at issue in the dispute, as long as the President is willing to let the matter pass. As Alexander Dumas put it, if a gentleman has apologized, he has done all he can do. He cannot grovel, after all, and remain a free and equal man. The apology is the ultimate offer to resolve things peacefully.

So the matter is resolved; but it was an interesting display. The last time we saw such a thing in Congress was 1856. The Civil War was still years away, but the tensions were building to the point that a split was coming.

UPDATE: Here's the video.



Actually, the gentleman from South Carolina was responding to provocation. The President had just finished accusing "prominent politicians" who spoke about the panels President Obama has actually endorsed of spreading "a lie."

Now, most of us reading this probably assume that he meant Mrs. Palin -- although, as she is retired, she is no longer a "prominent politician." It's highly likely that the Congressman from South Carolina, and many others in the room, took that remark as being pointed at them. Thus, the President was accusing them to their face of being liars.

Under those circumstances, Rep. Wilson's remark was no more than to give the President back what he had so freely offered others. It was entirely proper; and his apology, then, highly generous.

The Great Leap Forward

大跃进:

China is better than us in some ways, says Mr. Thomas Friedman:

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China’s leaders understand....

There are three things that have to be said about this.

1) This precise aspect of Chinese society, far from being praiseworthy, is what gave us arguably the greatest human tragedy of the 20th century. Given that this century also included the First and Second World Wars, the Holocaust, etc., even to be in the running is a dishonor of remarkable proportion.

The Great Leap Forward (sometimes pejoratively called the Great Leap Backward) (simplified Chinese: 大跃进; traditional Chinese: 大躍進; pinyin: Dàyuèjìn) of the People's Republic of China (PRC) was an economic and social plan used from 1958 to 1961 which aimed to use China's vast population to rapidly transform China from a primarily agrarian economy by peasant farmers into a modern communist society through the process of agriculturalization and industrialization. Mao Zedong based this program on the Theory of Productive Forces. It ended in catastrophe as it triggered a widespread famine that resulted in millions of deaths.

"Exactly how many millions of deaths?" you might wonder. The figure is unclear, because the Chinese government -- to preserve social harmony, and public confidence in the government -- refused to admit it was happening at the time. Estimates run from about sixteen and a half million deaths, to upwards of thirty million.

The second world war caused at least twice as many deaths, but that was the result of global fighting over a large number of causes. The Holocaust was an act of explicit malice, but killed far fewer people. These 16.5-30 million lives were lost simply because a country's "leadership" made a decision on "critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 20th century."

The current Chinese government is a direct descendant of that previous one. While it is unlikely in this incarnation to force changes that cost millions of lives, neither can we so lightly pass over the graves of these people. To describe this quality as "a great advantage" of the Chinese system is obscene. I trust that Mr. Friedman will have the grace to be humiliated when he realizes what he has written.

2) Furthermore, as someone who has lived in China and traveled outside of the cities as well as to some of its cities, to industrial and to agricultural regions, it is absurd to suggest that China will be overtaking us in "clean energy" in any but the most symbolic ways. China absolutely depends on coal. There are days when you can see the smog stepping down in grades if you climb high enough. When I would wash my bedding, the water turned black.

Yet millions flock to those polluted cities because the alternatives in the countryside are even worse.

China's government isn't doing anything substantive about the pollution, and nor should they. These steps are mere propaganda designed to distract from China's absolute refusal to take the steps that would be necessary to actually clean up China.

Thank goodness those steps have fooled people so well, I suppose. The cost of switching away from coal and to a clean energy base would destroy the Chinese economy and cast hundreds of millions into chaos. The resources do not exist to make China clean while also avoiding another famine on the scale of The Great Leap Forward. God defend the Chinese people from such a decision as Mr. Friedman seems to want to advocate!

3) Finally, as to the propaganda of out producing us on electric cars: yes, it's true that China can decide to focus its resources on a given area, and that can allow them to outperform the United States in that area. If, that is -- if and only if -- it is an area we don't care about.

The United States' economic system is unimaginably more powerful than China's. If the Chinese autocracy decides to make a showpiece of electric cars, they could indeed outproduce us in electric cars, because Americans don't much like them or want them. If the American people were to decide that they did want such cars, however, that casual decision -- a simple switch in our preferences -- would result in a boom in the construction of such cars that China could never hope to match.

Doc Russia rightly explained why the Chevy Volt will fail. It's a simple essay in pictures: what GM promised versus what it delivered.

Promised:



Delivered:



You can see that he's right. That makes the point: the only reason China has even a hope of making a showpiece of this is that there aren't any electric cars Americans actually want. Change that, and you'll see some electric cars.

I know that Mr. Friedman has often written insightful things, so I don't wish to scold him too harshly or at too great a length. Still, this was an example of blindness both to the facts and to the moral history of China. We ought to wish for the decent, honorable people of China to enjoy a future of freedom more greatly resembling our own, than to wish even for a moment for a system that could give us our own Great Leap Forward.

Heh

This Should Work:

So you want to "regain traction" on health care/insurance reform. What does that mean? Well, it means you "lost traction" after a bruising month of town hall meetings, which proved that there was limited support for the idea of "reform," and a great deal of concern that it would ultimately hurt Americans. People are worried about it harming the elderly, those requiring chronic care, and that it will lead to rationing, and that it will imperil medical advancements by defunding innovation. A new suggestion to "regain traction," then, should address those issues.

Or, you could just add huge fines on every American family for noncompliance. No reason to think anyone would object to that.

Kill a Man - Marry the Widow?

Kill a Man - Marry His Widow?

In childhood, I remember having one of those books of random facts and trivia (I believe it was Felton & Fowler's Best, Worst, and Most Unusual) - which claimed to be telling me the ways of an African tribe, in which the penalty for murder was replacing the dead man; you had to do his job, assume his obligations, and marry his widow if he left one.

I've never seen it confirmed, but I've seen it used twice in comedies. One is in an early Abbot and Costello movie - The Winsome Widow of Wagon Gap (Costello's character travels to a western town that has this custom -he accidentally kills a bad man with a mean, mannish, and homely widow, whom he has to marry - on the strength of this deed, he becomes the sheriff, for one one dares to touch him - and he carries her picture instead of a pistol...). The other is in Gilbert and Sullivan - in one of the last two plays they did. (They'd always quarreled, and they broke up after The Gondoliers over an argument about carpets - but they got back together twice, and wrote two of their best but least-known plays.) This was The Grand Duke - subtitled The Statutory Duel - and here is a link to the song that explains it all. However, this recording is lacking the first couple of lines:

About a century since
The code of the duello
To sudden death, for want of breath,
Sent many a strapping fellow.

The then-presiding prince,
Who useless bloodshed hated,
He passed an act, short and compact,
Which may be briefly stated...

...listen to it all; but the upshot is that the prince replaced duelling with the simple draw of a card, and whoever draws the low card is legally dead, and the other man must "discharge his debts, pay all his bets, and take his obligations." (How this would square with Grim's view of duelling among our ancestors as expressed a few posts ago - the point being a man's ability to die for his position, whatever the facts of it - this I won't think about for now.)

Time for searching around is very short for me - my new assignment carries a heavy guilt load. Does anyone here know whether such a custom ever existed?

Sober Men and True

"Sober Men and True"

Since we were just speaking of Western songs, what about the ones they actually sang in the West? This is an occasion to mention another great character of old Tombstone.

Only a few of Tombstone's 4,000 residents were interested in attending church, which was usually held in a tent where the sound of honky-tonk pianos coming from the nearby saloons often drowned out the minister's voice.

All of this changed on January 28, 1882 (just three months after the gunfight at the O.K. Corral), when the Reverend Endicott Peabody arrived in town.... He weighed around 200 pounds, enjoyed boxing and baseball, and worked out every day. As one contemporary said, "He had muscles of iron."

The Episcopal women had been trying to raise money for the church building fund by holding raffles, but progress was slow. The Reverend Peabody, who was not one to be easily intimidated, decided to solicit donations on both sides of Tombstone's "dead line."

He walked into a hotel casino, ambled up to a high-stakes poker game, introduced himself, and asked for a donation for the church. One player handed over $150 in chips— and promptly told everyone else to do the same. The local musical society put on the opera H.M.S. Pinafore and gave the proceeds to the church fund.

He went on, back east, to educate a boy named Franklin Roosevelt. In 1882, however -- a scant few months after the Gunfight at the OK Corral, and while the Earps were still waging war against the forces of the outlaws, the Democratic party and the county government -- he convinced saloons and gamesmen to fund a church, and partially with opera.

Here (at 4:18), in that particular opera, we find the sailors in that opera about to be inspected by the First Lord of the Admiralty and hoping that they will be found "sober men and true."



Which, of course, brings us to Afghanistan.

After a Nato airstrike killed as many as 125 people last week, General Stanley McChrystal was keen to get the situation under control — fast.

When he tried to contact his underlings to find out what had happened, however, he found, to his fury, that many of them were either drunk or too hungover to respond.

The article asserts two things I know from personal experience: the Americans are banned from drinking under any circumstances, and the joke is that ISAF stands for "I Saw Americans Fight."

I have never been a fan of General Order #1, having lived under it twice. If anything can justify it, though, it's German troops who give delayed and hung-over reports "that it was too dangerous to visit the blast site, four miles outside their camp, because they might get shot at." Were he here, I'll bet the Reverend Mr. Peabody would have some good words to say on the subject.