Seventy-five years ago this week

On November 11, 1940...

In one of the boldest actions in modern military history, a handful of Fairey Swordfish biplanes took off from two British carriers and struck the Italian Fleet at Taranto.  Half of the battleships in that fleet were sunk or crippled, while the British losses – two biplanes – were remarkably modest.  The entire strategic position in the Mediterranean Sea changed in one hour.

Apologies to my left-leaning friends for link. Please ignore any offensive ads that pop up, and everything past the sentence "There are lessons we can learn today." is quite up for grabs in my opinion.

Battle of Taranto (wikipedia).

The Lord of the Manor

Later all four of them are sitting in the plush leather chairs. They are smoking cigars. A moment of stillness.  The smoke lingers along the ceiling in a translucent cloud that glows from the lamps and the reflection of the glass of the photographs on the wall.

Bill's sitting off by himself, behind Bunny, who is in the center.

Bill's sitting in the air tray, a small bit of smoke curling up.  He is looking from chair at the far wall, in contemplation. Bunny is the center of the men, with Bill off behind him. Bunny's jacket is off and his sleeves are rolled up. His collar and tie is loosened.  His shoes are off and his feet in socks are up on an ottoman. Pres is holding his cigar looking at the ceiling.  Knight is cradling a tumbler with ice and scotch.

Bunny speaks to his brother over his shoulder.

"So now that you're back in the area, are you going to the old castle."

Bill smiles. Suddenly in his mind he is far away among the canopy of treetops in the Catskill Mountains, with a tapestry of leaves, and sunlight through them. He sees the pointed roofs of the giant house tucked in among the trees, and the vista out from them, down towards the valley.

"The castle. I haven't heard you call it that in a long time."

"The Lord of the Manor has to return home some time, after all," says Bunny.

Bill breaks a smile, almost a laugh. "The Lord of the Manor...You sound like father," he says.

"He took that stuff seriously," says Bunny.

"Indeed he did," says Bill.  In my mind he is ten years old. Out the window of the automobile he sees the onion farm as they pass it, where the man and the woman are at work in the field with hoes, next to each other. They are clad in costumes from the Medieval Era.

Bill takes a breath. "Actually I have to go to Omaha first," he says.Pres breaks his concentration on the ceiling and looks at Bill.

"Much to do on the ground there. Preparations," says Bill.

"Omaha," says Bunny. He sighs. "That brings me back."

"Going the old way? No, of course not, what I am thinking? You'll be flying there of course."

"But sometimes I miss the old way," says Bunny. "It felt such luxurious...even when it was rustic."

"Yes," says Bill. "It was that indeed," he says starting at the photograph on the opposite wall which we see it is black-and-white image of a 4-6-0 steam locomotive of vintage 1902. There are several figures in the scene, one apparently a hunter with a rifle, and next to him an Indian of the Shoshoni tribe. On the side of the locomotive near the cabin is the emblem of the Union Pacific Railroad.

FADE TO BLACK

LONG PIERCING SOUND OF A STEAM WHISTLE

What Mary Always Said

"The Democratic Party is the future," Bill said. "This has been known since Wilson."

"It is the inevitable playing out of history," he said, in measured tones that suggested he had spoken the words many times before.

"The wheels cannot be stopped from turning. The people want it to be this way. The Democratic Party represents their interests. The people need leaders."

He pauses, and resumes a more natural countenance.

"Roosevelt's...genius...was not simply to realize this, and to embrace it, but to find a way to communicate his will to...to the people."

There he stopped for a moment. They will all listening to him.

"For this I greatly admire him. Who would not?"

"But now it is a new era. Everything until now has been a dry-run. What is coming will be much greater."

He put his empty drink onto the bar.

"You should see the plans for new War Department headquarters, where Bob's office is going to be. It's going to be the biggest office building in the world. Five sides."

Bunny makes a face of amusement, imagining it.

"They had to build it in Virginia," Bill said, envisioning the location in his head.

"I could almost imagine relocating myself there."

He smiled.

"Right-o," interjected Bunny. "I know what that means, when you say that. You go ahead and do that, Bill. Not me. Too humid. If you're going to go South, you might as well go all the way to Miami Beach. That's what I say."

"Speaking of that," Bunny says, with inspiration. "Do you know what we have?" He raises his finger and starts to rise of his chair. "The latest and finest."

He looks at Prescott. "Company reserve stock fresh from Havana."

He disappears through a door momentary then returns quickly carrying a wooden cigar box in both hands. He puts it on the bar in front of Bill and opens it. 

Personally overseen by our man there," says Bunny. "Can you smell that?" His face is of rhapsodic delight. Bill smiles, looking at him.

"Very good," says Bill to him.

Bunny starts to fish under the bar for an object. "But first, Bill. You have to tell us, what did you think when you saw what Kennedy said?"

There a pause, awkward. Pres, who is still by the mantle looks up at Bill, Knight looks at Pres, then up at Bill. Bunny milks it a bit, then says, "He wasn't talking about us, was he?"

Bill cracks a smile. "I can almost guarantee you that he was," he says.

"Well that's, all right. Pop said you have make lots of enemies to get anywhere in life. Besides he's finished now, right?  Such an annoying man. And dangerous too. What a spectacular fall. It almost proves everything Mary was always saying, about the hygiene of the human race. You know, all of that stuff you like too. And the Germans."

"Indeed," says Bill, with a touch of sadness in his eyes."You have a very good point."

He looks at Pres, who is looking into his drink. "You think so too, Pres?"

Pres looks up. He is up to the challenge.

"Yes, that's right," says Pres, with confidence of affirmation. "I think it does prove that, in many ways."

For Bob

"One thing we all can agree on, Bill" said Bunny from his chair, cradling his nearly empty drink, as he talked to his brother over his shoulder "

is that government service wears very well on you."

Bill's eyebrows arch in appreciation. Confirmation he had been looking for.

"Wouldn't you agree, Pres?"

He looks at Pres.

Pres has replaced his drink on the mantle. He is looking at Bill, who is looking off the to the side.

In the pause before he can reply, Bill interrupts.

"I bring wonderful news,"he says, walking a feet over towards the bar to face the rest of them.  He is standing in front of a photograph, a large black and white print of what appears to be a stone hunting lodge, North American, grandiose in size with multiple stories.

"I was just down in Washington," says Bill. "There have been some arrangements."

They are listening.

"Bob will be going to work inside the War Department, working right next to Stimson."

There is a long silence. Even Bunny is letting it sink.

Bill continues, "Bundy too...and McCloy. All of them....special assistants."

"Special assistant," Bunny repeats back, as if processing the words.

Bill says, "Bob will in charge of..", savouring the words,

"...air affairs."

Pres takes a deep breath. He picks up his drink off the mantle again.

"Good for Bob," says Bunny, breaking the tension.

Then he turns to Knight. "I don't want to be a Democrat after all. Let them handle all these things. Washington will be much better for Bob than me."

 "Roosevelt's third term isn't looking so bad. And to think I did all that campaigning for Wilkie. for Wilkie!"
"Wilkie will be working for Roosevelt too," says Bill. "A kind of roving goodwill ambassador."

"It's all coming very soon now. We're all going to do our part, even you, Bunny."


"Well, if that's true, I need another drink," says Bunny, getting up out of his chair. "How about you, Pres? You keeping stride with me?"

"Of course," Pres, chuckling. He downs the rest of his drink and puts the empty on the mantle again.

Bunny walks over to the bar, near his brother and the photographic print of the lodge.

 "Let's drink to Bob getting his government job," he says. "Knight you're joining me. Bill, you too.  For Bob."

"For Bob," says Bill.

Bert

After Bunny finished signing the last document in front of him, he pushed it forward across the table towards Knight. Then he clapped his hands together, "OK, so where's the scotch?"

Later all four men are in another room. It is dark and paneled, with no visible exterior windows. The illumination is from multiple soft lamps. Over the mantle of dark unlit hearth of fireplace is the mounted head of a majestic elk. On the wall are many photographs, so much like a continuous heterogeneous mosaic, of hunters with trophies from various parts of the world---beasts of North America, South America, and Africa.  There are glass cases visible along the wall, but the contents are unseen.

Bunny is relaxing in one of the several soft plush leather chairs, with a drink in hand, on the rocks. Bill is standing by the bar looking at a photograph on the wall. Knight is in another nearby chair. Pres is standing on the other side of the chairs from Bill, by the mantle. He is practicing a golf put.

"Well, my dear brother," Bunny says, staring at the opposite wall with his drink, "did you hear?"

He pauses, "In your absence, Franklin Roosevelt has been elected to president again for a third time."

Bill still looking at the wall photograph, smiles, almost a chuckle.

He lets a beat pass before replaying. "Who could have imagined such a thing, when it started?"

He lets another beat pass. He takes a slow breath. He has a twinkle in his eyes. "What a fantastic opportunity."

"For whom?" Bunny asks, a bit skeptical.

Bill rotates to look at him. "All of us," he says.

"Easy for you to say. You're not the one who has to be a Republican."

Bunny looks up at Pres, who is still in his putting pose.

"Pres knows what I'm talking about." Pres looks up from his imaginary putt.

"At least you have to be a Republican too," Bunny says to Pres.

"But that's what comes from living in Greenwich. Imagine you trying to be a Democrat out there."

Pres stands up, dropping his imaginary putter. His face erupts into the most comical expression , as if it is the funniest thing he has ever heard. The two of them, looking at each other laugh at again, and Knight laughs with them in his chair.

When the laughter has subsided, Bill says to Pres "How's your eldest? Almost graduated."

Pres sobers up a bit, but is still red faced from his laughter. "One more year to go. Writing for the school newspaper. Captain of the baseball team most likely. Soccer too. Says he's going to run for president of the student council."

"Very good," says Bill.

And then adds, "Oh, and how's Bert? Haven't talked to him in ages. Still alive and kicking?"

"Oh, yes," says Prescott, who picks up his drink off the mantle where it has been sitting. He leans against the mantle. "Still very much alive."

 "That's good to hear," says Bill.

Pres nods his head. "Indeed," he says, taking a drink of his scotch.

Poor Fritz

When the laughter subsided in the room with the collegiate sports photographs, Bill glanced at all three of them, said, "Well, we're legal now. Time for business."

In the conference room with the clock and the framed sitting portraits through the ages, the aforementioned one in the center is now revealed to depict all four men among the group in it, Bill and Knight are standing whereas Pres and Bunny and sitting in two of the chairs. Knight has his case open and he has distributed documents among them. Bunny is looking down at the one in front of him. Pres is signing the document in front of him.

Knight leans over to take a document that was  on the table in front of Bill and puts in a stack of other documents.

"That's all for the firm itself," says Knight.

"Now," says Bill to Knight. "Union Bank."

Knight nods and puts his fingers onto a folder in his over case. He distributes documents to Bunny and Pres.

As look at them, Bill says to them, "Fritz has been arrested."

Pres pauses and looks up. Bunny continues signing the document without stopping.

"They've put him a sanitarium," Bill adds, breaking into a grin.

"Poor Fritz," Bunny says, with great pathos, as he finishes signing.

Bunny

Right before the Stooping Man to the open door of his car, a man in a grey coat and hat stepped forward towards him with a small thin envelope of white paper in his gloved hand. The Stooping Man, right by the car door, paused to accept the envelope.

Inside the car, he is seated. With the car door open, he unseals the envelope and withdraws the folded piece of paper. The message is in typed script:

Here and ready.

   Pres

The Stooping Man puts the envelope in his inside coat pocket.

Later his car pulls on to Wall Street and stops in front of the building of gargoyles. There the driver parks and opens the door for him. He steps out onto the curb, puts on his hat, and gives a momentary expressionless glance towards the top of building before going inside.

Inside an sunlit room, with several comfortable lounge chairs next to each other, the man who had come in from Greenwich by car, and the man who had entered the elevator with a case, are sitting in chairs. They are smoking cigarettes. There are standing ash trays next to the chairs. On the walls are framed black-and-white photographs of ancient collegiate and prep school male sports teams and players. Yale is written on one of the uniforms.

The man from Greenwich is speaking to other one,

The thing of it is---the kids. You hate to say to see a guy do that to his family. Pariahs. That's what they will be.

In the hallway outside the office, the elevator arrives and a bell is heard.

The man from Greenwich pauses, having heard it.

"Bill's here," he says to the other.

"You always have the knack."

"Pfft. I timed it, from when the messenger came back. But we'll see. He looks at his watch, as if timing something."

He signals to the other man and put out their cigarettes, and they stand up out of their chairs.

As they do so, and turn, they see the Stooping Man standing in the doorway, smiling and looking at them.


"Hey there!" Pres says to Bill, and shakes his hands, the way a close friend shakes the hand of a man he has not seen in a long time. Knight steps up behind Pres and does the same, shaking Bill's hand.

"Long time no see," says Pres to him, punctuating each syllable like reciting an Indian chant.

Bill throws his head back in a silent chuckle and brings his jaw back down level. He looks up at the photographs on the wall. He sighs deeply and looks back at the other two men.

"A fine college reunion this is," says Bill, who steps forward to the middle of the room, between the two other men.

"Is my brother here yet?...No wait, I know he isn't..." he pauses, "but here he comes."

He motions towards the door, with a grin, and almost on cue a boisterous bustle in heard from a nearby room---greetings, hello, hey there. 

The man who comes in the door is in his  Forties, balding to the point of just having a tuft of hair on time. He is grinning wide, and animated in his motion, playful and sanguine.

"Bill!" he says, and he grabs hold of the Stooping Man with a tight embrace. The Stooping Man, in his embrace, smiles back at him.

"How's merry old London?" the bald man says to him. "I here they are having a war over there."

He leans a little closer and whispers, "You didn't start it, did you?" and then breaks out in laughter, and the others laugh with him.

"Bunny, thankfully you have not changed one bit in my absence."

The Stooping Man

When the Stratoliner had landed and finally come to rest on the runway, and the forward door was opened, and the passengers started to disembark into the autumn air of Long Island, one of the first to emerge, but not the first, having let a few people go out ahead of him, was the tall man who had been seated at the window, and had looked down through it at the building of gargoyles on Wall Street.

He was long of frame and sturdy. He had been athletic in his youth, in boarding school. He had handsome features. He wore the most conventional of wool coots. His suit was immaculate to him, seemingly showing no extraneous crease. As he came through the door, he bent his head down slightly, in order to pass through it. And on the other side, and the top of the stairs, and while donning his hat, he did not stand fully straight, but kept the posture of stooping as a part of his posture, as if he were always passing through the door of a passenger aircraft.

As he looked out over the runway momentarily, his face went into its automatic response in these situations, the muscles followed the well-organized, tightly-scripted routine they knew so well, while drawing his facial muscles back into what would have been taken for the genuine and warm smiles.

He descended in the stairs as if he were an anonymous traveler. There were no photographers rushing up to greet him, as if he were a Hollywood star arriving for a premiere in the City. The photographers were miles away, and unconscious of his presence. It is the way he wanted it.

He walked across the tarmac carrying nothing in his hands. He split off by himself, and was trailed by a few other men several dozen feet behind him. Near one of the hangars he approached an automobile. The door was opened for him by a uniformed chauffeur was stood at attention like a soldier.

Wearing the same smile as on the stairs, he approached the open door of the automobile, making eye contact with nobody.

Out of Greenwich

[continued from here]

Shooting his mouth off.

That was the truly the one unforgivable sin. It was truly the only rule of the entire game, the only one that had to be obeyed by all players. All the other rules were simply guidelines foisted upon each man by nature. The strong are victorious. The weak perish.  All rules of behavior beyond that derive from this brutal self-correcting principle.

The man in the back of the car thought about these things as he driver took him south on the main highway from Connecticut into New York, and then the Bronx.

He should be glad that Kennedy has destroyed himself this way, so precipitously. Certainly he will glad about that, he thought to himself, in reference to another person. He will not take as any kind of setback. He never does.

Instead the anger he cultivated during his commute was more personal. It went close to the center of his own struggle, of the things he himself had been forced to learn along the way, through bitter experience, and what had been taught to him.

Keeping your mouth shut was not just part of the code.  It was the essence of the code. 

To violate it in such open way, most especially in the press, as Kennedy has done, was to make everyone stop in their tracks and pay attention to you. It was the height of awkwardness. The band stops playing.

No real damage is usually done. Nothing changes, except that  never again can you be taken into trust.

Worst of all---and this is what made the man in the car especially angry---you have destroyed your family. The ambitions of your wife---for she is the one who will hold your ambitions as a banker holds a promissory note---have been destroyed in an instance.

Your sons will also inherit this distrust, before they have even had a chance to become men. The man who kills his career by speaking out in the wrong way is thus the despicable of men, an egotist of the greatest scale, who accomplishes but destruction.

Now he could hear his own fathers words to him, when he was much younger. He thought about them, and how he would express them himself, to his own sons, if he could start from scratch.

It may be unfair, but that is how it works. Society is a family enterprise. Individual persons act within in societ, as they do in sport, but as in sport it is always as part a team, and in society the basis of each team is a family. Either it is your own family, if you are powerful, wealthy and long-established, or as part another family, with whom you wish to ally.

"Mr. Bush,"

He was interrupted by driver, as they had arrived at the front of 63 Wall Street.

Gargoyles

[continued from here]

When the Stratoliner was almost at the Brooklyn Bridge, and now well below ten thousand feet, and slightly to the east of the tip of Manhattan, alongside the aircraft one might have noticed that one of windows in the forward part of the plane, hitherto shaded by a closed curtain, as the others nearby it, was slightly parted, only a slight crack, as if to let in as little sunlight as possible.

One might have noticed the fingers of man of middle age pulling the fabric aside this way, long enough that he might look down onto the tops of the building along Wall Street, the rivals to the Bank of Manhattan Trust buildings, going down the hill. His eyes sought out a particular building, all the way down Wall at the bottom of the hill at Pearl Street. Compared to the Bank of Manhattan Trust, it was hardly worth attention to the casual observer. Only thirty-six stories---half of the number of its dominating rival, and rising even shorter since it was placed closer to the water front.

It blended in well with the other buildings, although a closer inspection of the rooftop, one might noticed the anomaly of the strange decor---the medieval pikes along the roof, and the great drain spouts projected from the side, gave the appearance of prickly fortress, armored for battle. It was the opposite of the soft inviting look of the Empire State.  One could not have noticed as well, unless one was very up close to the roof, that the drainspouts were guarded each and every one by gargoyles that scowled down at the street below.

Down inside that building, on one of the topmost floors, sunlight fills a large empty conference room with a large polished table flanked by cushioned chairs bespeaking great opulence expressed in subdued tones. On the wall are portraits of groups of men, sitting in a pose towards the camera. In some of the portraits, the style of their dress and grooming obviously goes back to the middle of the previous century. Other groups of men are from earlier in the Twentieth Century. The portrait in the center shows a group of men in the contemporary era. About a dozen men are in the portrait. Some of the men are sitting in chairs in front, and others are standing behind them, dignified.

Looking closely at the portrait one might have noticed one of the men sitting off to the side. He was lean of frame with gentle contours of face, and deep eyebrows. He looked in his late Forties. He was in fact the man who had been looking out the window of the embassy in Moscow.

Next to it is a large clock on a shelf. The hands of the clock reads a few minutes past nine o'clock.

In the passenger cabin of the Stratoliner, we see the same man sitting in comfortable seat by himself byside the window where the curtain is pulled closed, as it in the other nearby rows, which are empty. His gold wristwatch says ten minutes past nine.

Down on the street level of Wall Street, far too small to be seen from the aircraft, men in wool coats and hats walk briskly along the sidewalk towards their destinations, some stepping out of automobiles with drivers, and taxis, and others coming up from the subway, and walking extra fast, as if trying to catch up with the others.

One of the men, who is carrying a leather attache case, approaches the front entrance of the building at Wall Street and Pearl, the one with the gargoyles on the top. He turns into the entrance and goes into the lobby. A close inspection would have revealed him as one of the men standing in the back of the portrait next to the clock. As he enters the buiding, we see the address as 63 Wall Street.

Meanwhile out in the wooded suburbs of Greenwich, Connecticut, where a few late commuters are still waiting on the train station, up in the hills beyond the station,  a graceful mansion sits among the trees and hedges, the door opens and a man---also one of the ones standing in the portrait, in his mid forties, with light hair, a large forehead,  pinched-up eyebrows comes out of the front door also carrying a leather case and with several folded newspapers under his arm. He walks in relaxed fashion along the path towards the garage, where a uniformed driver is wiping the windshield wipers of a late model sedan. The driver greets him as the man approaches, without stopping his work. The man with case smiles and says something back to him. One would have noticed that they had a very relaxed relationship, and had been comfortable with each other for a while, and that the man with the case felt at ease talking to him, and vice versa.


With the driver at the wheel, they come down past the train station. The man with the case sits in the back reading one of the folded up newspaper. Looking at one,  he grimaces a bit, as in in distaste. The newspaper is the Boston Globe.

The headline is several weeks old now. The news is old. But he must bring in the paper anyway, in case a copy of it is needed. He looks at the headline.

Kennedy Says Democracy All Done

Pinch Coming in U.S. Trade Loss
Ambassador Asks Aid to England Be Viewed as “Insurance;” Begs America Wake Up, Give More Power to Mobilize Industry. By Louis M. Lyons

Joseph P. Kennedy was sitting in his shirtsleeves eating apple pie and American cheese in his room at the Ritz-Carlton. His suspenders hung around his hips...

Skipping down past the fold he reads

“Hitler has all the ports in Europe, you see. Never forget that. The only reason the English haven’t taken over the Irish ports is because of American public opinion.

If We Get In, Democracy Ends
 
“People call me a pessimist. I say, 'What is there to be gay about? Democracy is all done.’”
“You mean in England or this country, too?”
“Well, I don’t know. If we get into war it will be in this country, too. A bureaucracy would take over right off. Everything we hold dear would be gone. They tell me that after 1918 we got it all back again. But this is different. There’s a different patter in the world.

 


"Idiot," he mutters to himself, scowling at the words on the page. His driver asks him if he said something. His face immediately changes to a pleasant smile and he waves it off.

"Some people just can't help shooting their mouth off," he said.

His driver nods as if  he knows exactly what he means.

At that moment,  on the high floor of the building guarded by gargoyles, inside the conference room, the clock among the portraits reads ten minutes past nine o'clock. We see this is also the time on the watch of the man in the back of the car. In the passenger cabin of the plane it is also the time on the watch of the man sitting by himself, beside the window, who appears lost in thought, as if his mind is calculating some very long tabulation.


Just at that instant, through the nearby open door of the cockpit, one of the crew members, whose one watch has stopped, asks the captain for the time, and he tells him "exactly nine o'clock on the dot."

The War About to Come

In due course the plane descended below 10,000 feet as it came over the upper harbor along the Brookyln waterfront headed towards Governor's Island.

In that era (1940), anyone looking at New York, whether from ground level or 12,000 feet, could not have help but been struck by the thick seamless jagged carpet of wharves and piers that jutted nearly every available piece of real estate on the waterfront.

Along both sides of the East River, and on the other side of the island along the North River---the part of the mighty Hudson and it scrapes along the west side of Manhattan, carving its last great channel as it barrels to the sea.

There on the Manhattan side are the great terminals of the mighty passenger lines, whose numbers of elegant traffic has dropped precipitously over the last year with the coming of the war.

The last war finished off the great German lines. Now the British ones are falling to the same fate. Cunard's great new, the RMS Queen Elizabeth is a troop transport. Soon the American ones will join them, and instead of passengers in Manhattan they will pick up men in uniforms on the opposite bank, on the Hoboken pier, disgorging from the rail lines that fan out to the military training bases. These men will be gathered from around the country to come here, and they must be transported over the ocean. Then they will be transported back, or their cadavers, some of them, and dropped off at the pier once again, and then fanned out across the continent back to their homes.

It's a big beautiful system. Last time was so disorganized. It was a trial run. This time we will get it right. The system will work much better, and this time too it will be sustained.

The View from a Stratoliner

 [continued from here]

November 1940

Against a brilliant blue sky, with a spatttering of cumulus clouds in the background, a shiny fixed wing aircraft, a Boeing 307 Stratoliner, bearing no marks of any commercial airline, hovers gently in the air as it soars twelve thousand feet above the Lower New York Harbor, the contours of which below describe gentle arcs forming the northern coast of New Jersey and the islands of New York that frame the unbridged opening of Hudson. In the distance, towards the direction of motion of the aircraft, the little tops of the skyline of the City form jagged crests recognizable in their climax in Midtown at the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings.

Even at that altitude, the Midtown towers---both in volume and height---clearly dominate the skyline at the near tip of the island, the ancient glacial hillock where the old Dutch settlement has become for many decades running the city's financial district, the skyline of which reaches it own singular crest at the recognizable four-sided pointed copper spire of the high pyramidal copper top of Bank of Manhattan Trust Building---70 stories and 942 feet---rising out straight up out of the bedrock of the island a little down Wall Street from the top of the hill at Broadway.

The view advantage from the Stratoliner is the apparently same that one would have achieved with any of the passenger aircraft of the day that could achieve twelve thousand feet, yet at the same time it is completely different and unique. For the Stratoliner is not just any fixed wing commercial aircraft, but is the first one produced by human beings with a pressurized passenger cabin. For those who have had the privilege of experienced this comfort, the experience of air travel has changed for ever. The jarring physiological side-effects that came with high-altitude passenger flight in unpressurized flight, and its concomitant psychological disruptions, is now a thing of the past. For those who can afford it, a new type of personal transportation is available.

Eventually too the noisy propeller engines will be replaced by sleek jet ones. The gas turbine engine has been the rage among flight enthusiasts since the 1920s. The Germans have already flown such an aircraft, and shown that it is practical. It is only a matter of time. The pace of advancement may be slow or fast, depending on the exigencies that drive the adoption of such innovations. Now there is a war. Things always happen faster in a war.

In the meantime, for a few select people in the know, this ability to place oneself swiftly anywhere on the globe in relative ease and comfort, has rewritten the rules of the game. All the ways that things were done in the past has now been eclipsed by this new power, of appearing in person at any place on the planet of one's choosing.

One day this ability may be commonplace, but for now, those who can experience this are a very select club. They are the same people who even when not in the air, can travel in the greatest luxury on sea or earth. They have always lived in a different world than the rest of us, but now the gap has suddenly gotten much, much bigger.

The great statesmen and generals of the past, and even the great conquerors of empires, could barely have dreamt of the ability to do such a thing.  

Compared to previous eras, a new type of human being has been created, one with almost godlike abilities compared to previous eras.   

Those who can take advantage of it first will be those who can master the world. This is always how it has worked, and how it will always work, until the end of time.

Imported from Facebook

(deleted and moved here for continuity purposes)

Originally comment on shared post:

"Never thought that reading 50-year-old book reviews (without knowing it) would make me so happy over morning coffee."

[link to article]

If civilization is wiped out in a nuclear war between East and West, it is quite likely that Hegel will be among the few authors to survive the holocaust. His writings are currently being studied in places as far apart as Ghana and Cuba. He is part of the curriculum in Samarkand, and Mao Tse-tung has seen to it that Chinese schoolboys are imbued with a proper respect for the official philosopher of Prussian conservatism. There are bearded sages in Central Asia for whom he has taken the place of Aristotle (the only other philosopher to have come to their notice). Africans who study in Paris cannot fail to return with potted fragments of Hegel in their mental baggage, though they may think of themselves as followers of Marx or Sartre. All in all, Hegel has made good. The only considerable area of contemporary civilization where he remains taboo is the Anglo-American academic world.

The appearance of a critical commentary on Hegel by Professor Walter Kaufmann provides a welcome opportunity for examining some of the reasons for this cultural lag. The most important of them is obvious. As Sidney Hook observed in a recent Encounter article, the Anglo-American school of philosophy has been hard at work since the First World War trying to make people forget its own previous indebtedness to Hegel.

(emphasis mine)

The Skullist Concept of Class

The number of Skullists that we ultimately identified was very small. The list of names is short. This is principally because to be a Skullist was not simply to be an admirer of Skullism, or to wish to be Skullist. It also meant having the opportunity and means able to practice Skullism a criterion which greatly limits the number of potential individuals to a very small subset of the elite. Having great wealth helps a lot, but it is not sufficient. More important is the idea of class.

It is important to emphasize Skullism is very much about the old idea of class, a notion that was also once quite prevalent in the psyche of most Americans, very heavily in the 1930s and dominant until at least the 1940s, but which since ebbed away and has largely been exorcised from the collective view of society.

This nearly complete disappearance of the notion of class from the American collective social self-consciousness is precisely one of the great assets of the Skullists, in that it has allowed them to become effectively dominant within American society while, as T. and I used to say, hiding in plain sight.

The idea in this day and age that such a group of "elite-thinking" people could be so snobbily class-conscious strikes modern Americans as somehow rude---a violation of an assumed universal social compact of Pop Culture egalitarianism.

The vague idea that taken hold is that yes, the rich are an indeed an oppressive and greedy class, and they pursue their own screwed-up interests, but to use the terminology of a Jazz Age artist, the rich are actually not much different than you and I.

Their motivations are mostly like our own types of greed, lust and pettiness, but on a much larger scale. They are ultimately as chaotic and shortsighted in their mode of living as ordinary citizens who live paycheck to paycheck and hope that someday life will be different.

Most important of all to the success of Skullism has been the cultivation of the Postmodern idea that there is no longer any significant distinction between old money and new money.

A quick illustration of how the true principle of class used to function within American society can be found in the history of the American diplomatic corps, and specifically of the ambassadorships. Until recent decades, there has arguably been no greater preserve of the old moneyed elite than this group.

In former times, as a matter of pure necessity, this collection of public servants would have been necessarily drawn from the set of Americans who were comfortable moving in foreign cultures with some form of ease. They had to be cosmopolitan enough of mind and habit to represent the nation among the nobility who have historically represented the nations of the Old World.

More so than any other branch of the government, these public servants would largely have come from the elite of the Northeast and especially graduates of the elite boarding schools and the Ivy League. They would have been the well-connected, well-heeled sort of people who are comfortable commanding a staff of servants. They would have spent their youth abroad at times, and become accustomed to behaving properly while interacting with the upper class of Europe and other continents. That is, they would have given America a semblance of "class" in a roles where such things were not optional but mandatory.

In the era when Americans still understood this idea,  all Americans any class would probably have agreed that these people were exactly the ones all of us would have wanted representing the nation among the crowned heads of Britain and the continent.

It is the kind of dignified public role that only certain people are bred to do. Others, no matter how wealthy they have become, simply cannot fill this kind of role. They retain a vulgarity of mind and habit that only serves to discredit America in the eyes of the rest of the world. The egalitarian notion that people of all backgrounds are capable of filling these types of roles can only lead to disaster.

At least, that is how a Skullist would probably think about it.

Skullism

[continued from here]

Through our long investigation of the Skullists, T. and I came to develop a fascination for what we came to call Skullism, which can be defined, at least for the time being, as the collective philosophy of action, and the practical implementation thereof, towards achieving certain worldly goals, namely power over other men on a large scale to the levels of nations, ultimately to the point of having the power of life and death over as many other human beings as possible.

Any study of history will quickly discover that such individuals have apparently existed since the dawn of recorded history, and certainly before that as well, if the archaeological record can interpreted in the traditional way. In fact, the impulse to have such power of other people strikes most sane modern individuals as extremely primitive, and associated in particular with prehistoric cultures and among native tribes of recent times, and the ones that still live today as if in the Paleolithic Era. The prevalence of skull veneration among such primitive cultures is well attested.

But when T. and I spoke of the Skullists, we knew that we always implied individuals from recent history,  particular from the mid-Nineteenth Century onward, but not infrequently earlier than that, especially when tracing the lineage of earlier forms of Skullism throughout history.

Somehow though, the list of names that we gathered, that we both could incontrovertibly agree were Skullists (and we never disagreed [1]), were individuals who seemed to flourish from around the year 1830 onward. The people we became most fascinated with were ones from the mid-Twentieth Century onward.

It was clear in our mind that Skullism as we had chosen to define it and examine it, was somehow a manifestation of the modern world itself, the civilization created by the scientific and industrial revolutions.

We were both struck by the irony that such a situation could come about, given hat modernity (and especially the Twentieth Century) has not infrequently been painted in history as synonymous with the notion of inevitable progress towards ever greater openness, democracy, and egalitarianism throughout the world, touching all nations and peoples until some form of quasi-utopia society of fairness may come within reach.

Because of this irony, we came to see Skullism, and the Skullists in particular, as a kind of Bizarro World counternarrative to the commonly depicted rosy scenario about of the 20th Century as being about the Great Liberation of Peoples.

Skullism represented everything that this rosy narrative was not supposed to be about. Instead of democracy, it was about highly concentrated power. Instead of egalitarianism and fairness, it was about bloodlines and privilege. Instead of openness and truth, it was about secrecy and lies.

And of course, instead of people, it was about skulls.

[1] This not to say we did not encounter many borderline cases of individuals who had moved in the circles of Skullists and flirted with Skullism, or who were half in the Skullist world. But we tended to agree about who those individuals were, and of those who were incontrovertibly fully Skullist. 

The Reich Unconquered

May 1, 1945 Bern, Switzerland.
[continued from here]

The main street through the old city is peaceful. The sun is shining. The Zytglogge, famous clock that inspired Einstein while he was at the patent office ticks off a minute.

On the street, at a kiosk, the morning newspaper is mounted on a board. At the kiosk a woman buys a pack of cigarettes. Berlin has fallen, the newspaper says in German.

The woman buys the cigarettes and walks down a side street.

She imagines the burnt out and destroyed city she has just read out.

She finds an inconspicuous door which leads to a flight of stairs. She unlocks the door, steps inside, then locks the door behind her. She presses a button and announces herself on an intercom. She then walks up the stairs and is buzzed through a door there, where she enters an office that is full of activity from many people in the room, at desks and typewriters, and in offices as well, the doors open. She greets a man through a door in an office who is wearing a tweed jacket and smoking a pipe. He is sitting at a desk looking at map.

She sits at a desk where there is a typewriter and multiple telephones.

At his desk. looks at her and smiles, and greets her, then takes another puff on his pipe and looks intently at the map. On his desk are multiple telephones as well, and a small flag of the United States. There is a photograph of Harry Truman on the wall.

It is a map of the front lines in Europe, the situation on the ground as of that morning, the boundaries between the forces of the Allies and the Axis, from Norway down to the Adriatic Sea.  His eyes study the contours of the lines on it.

He looks over the area near Berlin. The lines there show that the German resistance has collapsed. The Russians have even broke across the Elbe to be met by the rapidly approaching Americans and British forces.

He shakes his head, tsk tsk, as if in pity, contemplating the fate of the city and those in it. He can imagine the bunker, the Russian soldiers going through it. He has never been there, but he has read and heard much about it.

He can imagine the fugitives, certain ones that he knows so much of, and certain ones he has met personally. He can imagine one by name, whom he can imagine is probably dressed in a disguise, perhaps even as a woman, in hiding or trying to make his way through the enemy lines, to be rescued. Things will probably not go well for him, he imagines. If only he had gotten out earlier...

His gaze then shifts south from Berlin, through the circular area of Bohemia still held by the Reich forces---sheltered in the ring of the mountains (like a lunar crater in the middle of Europe, as Galileo once said). The mountains there are not impossible for the Russians, however. They didn't hold out the Germans in 1938, of course. It is only a matter of time before theyare penetrated and the German resistance is squeezed out of Czechoslovakia.  They will perhaps make a last stand in Prague in the High Tatras.

Then to Vienna, the city that was overrun by the Soviets three weeks ago.

The Russians did not advance much further than that. After Vienna fell, the remaining Panzer corps had retreated into the nearby Alps which were, for all intents and purposes, impenetrable to the Red Army, which was geared towards flat terrain, as every Russian Army had been.

The Russians did not to make much further headway up the Danube since then. They were throwing everything they had in the north, to try to put as much German ground behind them as possible before meeting up with the western Allies. It was the principal mission of the Soviet Army at that point.

Thus the Reich still held sway and existed in most of the Austrian highlands, all the way to the Swiss border. The war had not yet reached there. But everyone knows it is just a matter of time. Still, it affords precious days and weeks for those in the redoubt to make preparations for the inevitable. There is so much that needs to be handled, and stored, and moved. The man with the pipe imagines the scurry activity from people he knows are there---packing up documents, burying crates underground.

This of course had been the plan---the retreat to the Alps, where the Reich could gather its rest while it negotiated for survival in some form. How ironic that the man who so much had loved the idea of this, was now trying to make his way through the Allied lines in a house dress.

But there is more going on. The man with the map looks finally at the southern part of the map. There the contours of map are most interesting. In all the attention in the north, the two great Allied-Axis "fronts" meeting in central Germany as the Reich collapses, there is so little world attention being paid to the "Third Front," in northern Italy. There the Reich had surrendered the coastal fringe and the valley of the Po River to the Allies, but here they had done so by a quietly negotiated withdrawal. The territory still held by the Germans is extensive, and barely penetrated at all by the Russians.

Down by the Adriatic, the Germans are dug into the mountains as in Austria. But here in the south the mountains they held are not in landlocked area but close to the sea. In fact, as the man with the pipe knows very well, and can imagine in his mind, the Reich is still operating a navy in the ports in the Adriatic, even out of Trieste and Venice, where there are German u-boats docked peacefully in obscurity in the docklands, and in nearby bases.

They are waiting for passengers to arrive, and for goods to be loaded on board. There are many such boats, in more than one such location. In fact, as the man with the pipe knows, there is still a functioning German support system in the port areas. It is not only functioning but is being aided in my places by members of the Allied forces.

It is a complex operation against the clock to accomplish an extremely important goal. On it will depend so much.

The phone rings in the outer office.  She looks at it. She answers the phone differently depending on which phone rings. Knowing the difference is the essence of her job.

For this phone, she simply says "Good morning, Bern office."

A male voice says "Let me speak to the station chief.'

The woman says, "Right away, sir."

She leans back in her chair so the man in the office smoking the pipe can see her through the door. She nods. He nods back.

She puts through the call. He picks it up. A big wide grin breaks across his way. He greets the caller. They make small talk, in an old Ivy League companion way. He seems to come alive even more while talking to the person on the phone. As he talks, the man picks up a paperclip off his desk and turns it over while looking at it.

Then the voice on the phone asks him, "Say, how's that old clock of yours running lately?

Allen smiles broadly. He startes at the paperclip almost hynotically, as if it is a magic icon full of great power. He imagines the submarines in the docklands, and the passengers getting on board them.

He replies, nonchalantly,

"It is running quite smoothly. Smoothly, indeed."

The Philosophy of the Global Elite

[continued from this]
[see also The Defining Characteristic of the Global Elite]

From 1815 forward, history takes a sharp break. It was apparent to certain men at the time how different the new era was from the past.

There was an idea among educated men of many nations of the west that although Napoleon had ultimately been defeated, and the Congress of Vienna had attempted to restore the old order as much as possible, that nevertheless the old order in fact could not be restored but instead had been overthrown permanently.

In its place was an order almost as Napoleonic as if Napoleon himself were reigning as emperor of Europe. This was because above all Napoleon succeeded, as many saw it, because he was the quintessential embodiment of the spirit of the age, namely the triumph of reason and order over superstition and irrationality.

No where was this consciousness of the irreversible effects of Napoleon more felt than in Germany, which had undergone the most radical political realignment of any region of Europe during the wars.

The more dire consequence of the Napoleonic invasions and retreat had been the destruction of the the Reich (or First Reich as it was later called), after almost nine hundred years of continuous interrupted line [see note 1].  The Reich (i.e. Empire) was a loose confederated security alliance of over fifty smaller principalities, bishoprics, counties, baronies, duchies, free cities, and even a few major kingdoms, with an Imperial head. Most of these constitutent states were German speaking, but they also included notably Bohemia, which was Czech speaking. The emperor was technically elected but the seat had been held in Vienna by the King of Austria for long enough that Vienna was synonymous with the imperial capital.

The Reich in 1648

Napoleon abolished the Empire in 1806, putting in its place a rationalized German Confederation. But after the war, there was no going back again. The situation in German was permanently altered in favor of larger modern kingdoms. This included a Kingdom of Austria stripped of its imperial privilege but still the most powerful remaining German state (hence it was the seat of the conferece). It also included the Kingdom of Prussia, which was the largest post-Napoleonic German state by far. Prussia had in fact put up among the fiercest  and best resistance to Napoleon among  the Germans, and had been crucial to the victory at Waterloo.

Prussia was organized like a giant army throughout its society, from the king on down through the nobles to the peasants and serfs, who were still effectively bound to the land through the institution of the state. Prussians made excellent soldiers, and made up excellent fighting units. Not surprisingly, int he century after Napoleon, Prussia would eventually dominate not only the other smaller German states but even Austria.

Prussia was also where the men of thought arose, who formulated a  new rational philosophy based on the historical lessons that Napoleon had taught the rest of the world, even in defeat.


The first and foremost of these men was Fichte, who had fought in the great Battle of Nations for German independence against Napoleon in 1813. It was at this battle that many Germans from throughout the empire had first developed the idea of German nationhood, in the same way that the Revolutionary French conceived of a French nation.

Fichte's pupil was Hegel, who would hold the chair of the philosophy department in Berlin for many years. Hegel attempted a post-Kantian theory of history, which was highly influence to Marx, who was formulated a theory of history that was essentially Hegelian in character.

This explains the Marxian fascination for Napoleon as the ultimate actor of history. He is the embodiment of the idea of praxis, in that he by his actions actually crafts history by his will.

It also should furnish enough information to understand why Marxist philosophy, as it has evolved since Marx to the present moment, is the core philosophy of enlightenment of the elite. To be enlightened in a Marxist sense, and to be included in certain circles of great power, is to be a master of dialectic of the itself, to place oneself among the select few with ability to craft the transition from one great historical age to the next.

Hegel

 1. For reasons I will explain later, my preference here is to consider the Reich as dating from Otto I (i.e. around 962 A.D.)

The Skullists

(continued from previous post)

The Skullists---that's what T. and I came to call them, the small group of individuals who had captured our attention during our research into what was supposed to be a rather benign creative project (of writing a screenplay).

The name was perfect, we both agreed, and from then on we both knew exactly the specific people we were talking about, who up to that point had not really a name collectively.

Most obviously, they seemed to have a literal fascination with human skulls. Personally I came to conclude that the reason for this was the same as the fascination for skulls found throughout history--namely that is is an excellent way to create fear, awe, and reverence among other people. It has always been a good way to scare people off. Bogey man stuff. Oooga Booga. Turn back. Enter ye not here, lest ye shall suffer the consequences.

But there was an even deeper reason, no doubt one that arguably is connected with the reason I've already stated, namely that a fascination with skulls often manifests as a desire to create many new ones, in great blood-stained heaps, on battle grounds and killing fields.

This desire strikes the modern person as a primitive blood lust belonging to another era. Most rational modern human beings would never admit to wanting such things, or that such lusts are found only in psychopaths. Yet recent human history seems to provide an iron-clad argument that such phenomena (and thus such kinds of death-seeking passions) and not at all a rare relic of an earlier evolutionary time of humanity, but are still very much present in modern society, and in more than a few of the individuals that comprise it.

Chapter Zero. Preliminaries

[Ten years ago this month, my friend T. and I embarked on an amazing journey of intellectual curiosity. I made him a solemn promise I would write it up one day. So this is part of it, in case you're interested.  Mostly it is from memory, augmented with some recent fact checking. I promise to try to make it as accurate as possible, to what we figured out. I'll endeavor to correct anything that conflicts with the known historical record, as well, and add to it as I can.---M]

April 12, 1945

Vienna. Evening. Inside the old city, within sight of the palace where, one hundred and thirty years before, the delegates to the great Congress danced the evening away, while deciding the fate of the post-Napoleonic world, now a small group of soldiers of the Reich make a furious stand and against the soliders of the 3rd Ukrainian Front, which has poured into the city, having infiltrated the suburbs nine days before. By nightfall, the Soviets will have taken the last bridge on the Danube, and forced the last defenders out of the docklands. The Soviet Army will pour into the Danube chasing into the Alpine foothills for a last stand.

Out in the Pacific, where it is already the early morning of the 13th, on the island of Okinawa, the 22nd Marine Regiment is blasting out the Japanese defenders on the north end of the island. They are within sight of the tip. By mid day they will burn out the last defenders and complete the conquest of the island.

Inside a sunny room in Georgia, an man sitting in a chair rehearses a speak in his head. Everywhere around the globe the Axis powers are in retreat. The forces of the United Nations are on the verge of forging a great peace for the coming ages. From this peace, will have the opportunity to build world in which freedom and peace are the birthright of all peoples.

Across the room, a woman is painting his portrait. In the corner of the room, a large burly man in a suit stands silent and watching. As the woman paints at the easel she hears the old man mumble "I have a great pain in my head," and he slumps over.

Later the old man is a bed, in a room, surrounded by a doctor, a nurse, and the man in the suit. Another man is in the room, with grey hair and a suit.  The doctor looks at him. The man turns to the burly man in the suit and says, "Call the Vice President..."

In Washington, D.C., in an office building there are footsteps running down a hall.

Meanwhile, ten miles away in Moscow, inside a large office in the U.S. Embassy, the telephone rings.

A man sitting in a large leather looking out the window into the night time sky picks up the phone.

A voice mumbles on the phone.

"I see," says the man in the chair.

He turns and looks out the window in the Russian night.

In Washington, D.C., the footsteps of the runner reach a door. Truman is with his assistant.

"Mr. Truman, this is for you."

He reads it and looks up and his assistant with a grave face and nods.

As Truman is being sworn in as president, the man in the U.S. embassy is still looking out into the night. He nears the words of the old man in the house in Georgia.

From this peace, will have the opportunity to build world in which freedom and peace are the birthright of all peoples. 

A knock at the door. A messenger with a telegram. Mr. Ambassador. This just came in.

"Put it over there. Tell Mr. Kennan I would like to see him."

He hears the voice again:

The Allied powers which have won this great victory as the United Nations, now can go forward as the United Nations of peace. The leaders and representatives of the victorious nations must gather with the leaders of all nations who are willing to join the cause of freedom in creating this new order.

The man looking out the window is smiling.

The Great Crack-Up has begun

One can feel it in the air. Everyone who has been paying attention knows that it is underway.

I won't belabor you with a recap of the headlines, but anything coming out of the financial news lately is very ominous, as far as the world financial system. Everyone knows it is very susceptible to systematic collapse on a large scale. It is the inevitable mathematical consequence of the type of the debt-rigging that has been going on around the world since about 1982, when the current system was invented.

But a larger, long-term order is at threat, one that goes back before the early Eighties. More specifically we are seeing the severe loosening of the world order that was created in the late 1940's, in the wake of World War II. Much of what we assume about the world, based on the situation coming out of those years, could undergo great change in the near future.

The current world order dates from around the invention of modern television networks in the United States, which happened in about 1947. That was thus the year that modern pop culture was invented, and gradually assumed the role of the de facto religion of our society (replacing nearly all the functions of the various churches, which are a now a subculture within America).

But television is going away. The stranglehold that television has had over America, and the world, will become more apparent as the control ebbs away.

That this is happening in conjunction with the collapse of the post-1982 financial order is no accident, since it was the controlling interests of the post-1947 world order who positioned themselves to take advantage of the financial revolution (in a way that allowed them to manufacture enough money to buy out the rest of the world). So they are essentially going down together.

I agree with my friend Doug, however. What comes after will feel like living hell to some of the people who have gleaned the fat from the old system, especially in the latter days, and who are unwilling to repent. For a great many people, and most people, in fact, it is going to feel like a breath of fresh air, and a bit of liberation.

Summer of Outrage

Strangest coincidence of the summer.

June 19: The Last Rhodesian

July 28: Cecil the Lion

These are the summer's two greatest outrages so far, based on the volume and intensity of the call for immediate justice.

Quite uncanny, especially since both refer explicitly to the guy I would nominate as the key to understanding the world order that was created in late Victorian times, the successor to the one created in Vienna in 1815, and the one which took the world into World War I and beyond, arguably defining the broad currents of the Twentieth Century.

No single human being envisioned and embodied this order more than he did, even Victoria herself, who was mostly a figurehead.  Rhodes was a doer, and a visionary who could rally powerful men of like mind to his causes. We very much live in the world he helped create, for good and ill. The struggles and challenges we face are ones that he put into motion, with force of will and genius, for motives that we would very much understand today.

There was some great insight about him the recent series about Queen Victoria's empire, which we caught on OPB last month. Very well done, although it only scratches the surface about Rhodes. Highly recommended.

Now Wait a Minute!

Summer has a David L. Cooper Soundtrack

My favorite Sky Lounge ear bud listening right now. I really like "Claude's Odds," in which Cooper accompanies a recording of T.S. Eliot reading Burnt Norton.

I like the arrangement order of the nineteen pieces too, the way it builds up to heavy bass tracks, as in "Harm Money." After that, "Winged Lump" feels like the theme of a Seventies t.v. show that was never made.

Probably my favorite so far is "Plane Glazed." I love the crowd laughter soundtrack at the end, after the music stops. What are those people laughing at? I imagine they represent somehow the laughter of ridicule that everyone hears who attempts to bring something of creative value to the world. This is especially true of my generation, I think, since we were so inculcated in a necessity for expressing all of our thoughts and feelings through irony. The only pure expression is to mock yourself as you are doing it, and be your own ridiculer. Somehow you have to do it anyway.

Or maybe the musician did a funny physical gag on stage with a banana right at the end of the song.

Full disclosure: Coop is a good friend of mine of many years.

The Defining Characteristic of the Global Elite

Two hundred years ago yesterday the broken armies of Napoleon retreated off the battlefield at Waterloo. So much of the French Army fell into capture by Allied hands, especially the artillery (the means by which Napoleon had originally made a name for himself as a military tactician), that his position became completely untenable. Six days later he announced his abdication as Emperor of France.

It was the second such abdication, and thus the second end of the Napoleonic wars in less than a year. Napoleon had been defeated in 1814 but had broken out of his exile in early 1815. He had then returned to France and quickly seized the leadership of the state anew. He then took his revived armies outside France to confront the nations allied against him. His revival was very short-lived. He got only as far as Belgium, in June. The defeat there was catastrophic. As quickly as it had started, it was all over once again, and this time they would make sure Napoleon could never escape. Now the peace could begin in earnest.

Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington (1769-1852)

The Napoleonic dream was dead, it seemed. But what was this dream? Was it simply about a man's ego to dominate the world? Was it for the glory of France? One could say it was partly both of these things. But even for Napoleon, and for many who supported him, and those who have studied him since then, it was about much more than that. It was a fight over the determination of the structure of the world going forward over the next century and beyond. Napoleon, after all, was the Prince of the Revolution. He believed he consciously embodied its principles in his own being, especially in bringing Europe into an age of applied reason.

Napoleon's defeat essentially marked the dawn of the global era, in which Earth would experience a planet-wide integration of its economy and political structures like never before. It was the "new world order" of its day. The Napoleonic wars had been in a sense the conflict over how that order would be structured, including of course who would be in charge of it.

Napoleon's escape from his exile had come in the midst of the continent-wide peace conference that had begun the previous autumn after Napoleon's initial defeat, that had set about to determine the structure of the world going forward.

Just as history had seen nothing like Napoleon himself, so the congress that met in September 1814 in Vienna was in a scope that was unprecedented in European history. Nearly all the nations of Europe, large and small, empires and principalities, victors and vanquished, had representatives there, because the wars had touched upon nearly every part of the continent to some degree.

They spent long months over the fall and winter hashing out what the world (that is, Europe, her colonies, and the High Seas) would look like. It was not an easy process, of course, with so many agendas at play, and potentially dozens of sides on any particular issue. The scale and complexity of intrigue and secret deal-making was probably unlike anything the world has seen since.The conflicts between the victors gave much leverage at times to the defeated French.

Some of the delegates had nearly a free hand in their negotiations in Vienna. For example, the Russian Czar came in person to the conference (who wouldn't want a vacation from St. Petersburg?). Being pretty much an absolute monarch, he didn't have to get authorization for his decisions from anyone (although in practical terms, it was often much more complicated than that. Even Emperors need support).

Others delegates needed to report to their sovereigns in their respective capitals, using the slow communication of the day.  But sometimes that wasn't much of a restriction to the flow of diplomacy. The diplomats themselves were almost universally noblemen, highly influential among their peers. The host Austrian delegate Metternich was considered the true power in Austria. Kings got bored with governing, and needed someone else to manage things. Power devolved to the well-connected who were also competent, cunning, and interested in such matters. Back then, being foreign minister was often the real power in a kingdom.

The strongest democracy of the day, that might have complicated the process of decision-making, was the United Kingdom. Yet their delegate, the Duke of Wellington, had been also granted nearly a free hand at the conference by His Majesty George III's government (the British had a very strong position there, and they also had clear objectives, which they almost completely achieved). Wellington's stature was only enhanced when he himself took to the battlefield to defeat Napoleon in person at Waterloo. Such were the diplomats of the day.

One thing to keep in mind about this, when one imagines this grand scenario playing out in Vienna for almost a year, while even interrupted by the final campaign against Napoleon: the diplomats met behind closed doors.

Not all the negotiations were necessarily secret (although many were), but they were all private. It was a private discussion and agreement among gentlemen, until the final public treaty was signed.

There was no free press at work during the conference. Once again, only Britain had anything resembling our modern concept of one. Austria certainly did not. There were no daily statements by delegates in the paper of record. There were of course no press conferences, and thus no sound bites, and certainly no viral videos. Even if one could record such things by some means, there would have been almost no means to distribute them to the people in the various countries, even to the literate folk---certainly not in any timely manner.  In most of Europe, there was not yet an expectation that such an institution should even exist. The idea that what the delegates did was accountable to the people in their home countries would have stuck them universally as silly, at least by how we use that phrase today.

All of that had to come later for Europe, in the mid Nineteenth Century, with the rise of what came to be called Liberalism---namely, the right of individuals to free expression, free opinion, and free communication. Liberalism erupted even in places without democracy, for example in Prussia. It was such a contagious idea, and ripe for the time. Liberty. The essence of liberalism.

But it was a very rocky process, and took several great efforts to establish the right to publicly oppose the sovereign. No one likes being openly criticized. Kings certainly did not.

Thankfully for them, and the nobles who served them, in 1815 all of that was yet in the future. By today's standards, the delegates in Vienna might as well have been in a mountain retreat in the Alps, guarded by security forces, with a complete press blackout even on mentioning the existence of the conference. No wonder they could get so much done. 

If you want one defining characteristic of what can been called the Global Elite, it is in the paragraph I just wrote above. It is defined by an idea, namely that the world would be much better off if the powerful people of the world, the ones who really know how the world runs,  could get together and do what they need to do in private, without the ridiculous and pointless distraction of either a (classically) liberal press nor contemporary media reporting. Nor do they want to be bound by agreements such as  (classically) liberal Constitutions (especially ones that enforce restrictions on what sovereigns can do). They prefer their own types of contracts among themselves, with no such fetters placed on them by the masses who have no idea how things actually are.

Sometimes they don't mind a little democracy, though. They have mastered that particular speed bump that once threatened to interrupt their line of control over the centuries. It doesn't seem to bother them much at all lately.

The Most Controversial Building in Portland

I came home one night in late May to find a KATU reporter standing on the sidewalk in front of my home, having people read Internet rants about how awful we were to live in our building.

Been meaning to write about this awhile, but since I leaked it on Facebook today on a friend's feed, I might as well as well come out of the closet.  We live here.

LEED-certified building in Portland designed to withstand waves of hatred

As I mentioned on Facebook, before we signed the lease,  Red and I did not see the much-despised marketing video featuring the fictitious tenants "Luke and Jess,"  but it probably would not have changed our minds (despite backwards baseball caps being the international sign of douchery).

At the time, back in early January, we were less a week back from our long trip, and I just wanted to stop paying a hundred and thirty bucks a night for the hotel in northwest Portland where we were staying at the time. I told Red that the rent at our new place seemed absurdly cheap by comparison (and by comparison to anything in New York or San Francisco, etc.). We had our pick of multiple new units.

Three days later we had our stuff moved in, and our bikes stowed in the basement room, still with some of the decorations on them from last year's Burning Man.

In the months that followed, especially while I was still working for the Big Publishing Company, I spent much of my days up in the sky lounge on the roof working on my laptop, sometimes with other residents but mostly by myself. 

Almost every day the property manager gave a tour to a prospective tenant while I am there. I felt as if I had been cast in some kind of on-going performance art piece.

The big glass windows up there in the sky lounge allow a magnificent vista throughout much of eastside Portland and across the river to the skyline of downtown. Almost nothing obstructs the view for miles around. You can even see Mount Hood most days.

A narrow walkway crosses the middle the roof. It's good for a short stroll when I am feeling restless. Supposedly there are fifty restaurants in the surrounding blocks. Off to the west, the tops of the  tallest towers of downtown blend right into the line of ragged Douglas-firs at the crest of the West Hills right behind them. I probably spend more time upon the roof than anyone in the building. Recently I told a friend by text that being up there felt like standing on the deck of ship in the "Gulf of Trendy."

That was all before I stumbled upon the marketing video of Luke and Jess (I was looking for something about the building to send to architect friend of mine in Colorado, since he designs places like this). I thought the video was rather daft because Luke and Jess supposedly have lived here for 18 months, although the building has been open less than a a year.

Then the articles startled coming out in Willamette Week, the local alternative weekly. Half a dozen about the building have popped up in my news feed since the first of May. I recognized the first one by the photo. Most have been about the "controversy."

For some reason, the building has really touched a nerve.  It became a meme on the Portland Reddit, mostly in an ironic sense about the hipster complaining about it. The local t.v. news said the marketing video has inspired "visceral hate" by many Portlanders.

Honestly when we chose this place, were just looking for a decent place to live. I wanted a place that didn't smell of mold, like every cheap room I ever had in Salem back in my college days. For some reason, that wound up putting me smack dab in the center of the gentrification drama of PDX 2015 (the year they removed the carpet).

But who can complain? A couple weeks ago, I overhead the property manager tell a prospective tenant that the unoccupied retail space on the first floor, which has been unoccupied all this time, is soon going to be the home a new hip place to eat and drink. It's going to be a coffee shop by day, and a tiki lounge by night, she said.

Last week the print edition WW had a cartoon of the building on the cover, with the title "Grow Up Portland." The cartoon has a guy waving from the roof...