Category: History

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June 25, 1876

General Custer: Should I go down there, or withdraw? Well? What’s your answer, muleskinner?

Jack Crabbe: General, you go down there. …

Custer: You’re saying, go into the coulee …?

Crabbe: Yes, sir.

Custer: There are no Indians there, I suppose?

Crabbe: I didn’t say that. There are thousands of Indians down there, and when they get done with you, there won’t be nothin’ left but a greasy spot.

–“Little Big Man” (1970)

Back in 1989 or so, my dad and I drove from Chicago out to the Little Bighorn battlefield. Interstate 90 runs within sight of the place, but we had taken a two-lane road, U.S. 212, up from Belle Fourche, South Dakota, northwest of Rapid City. We figured it would be a more interesting trip, and that route also passes close to Rosebud Creek, the site of a battle between U.S. troops and Indian warriors that took place about a week before the Little Bighorn. As I remember it, we drove around on a gravel road for an hour or so before concluding we had no idea where the Rosebud site might be.

Arriving at the Little Bighorn site on 212 is dramatic. You’re crossing a series of low, rolling hills and rather suddenly catch sight of pastures and planted fields in a relatively broad valley; the river is down there, and so is the Interstate. Crow Agency, Hardin and Billings lie to the north and west; to the south and east are Garryowen (named after the Custer’s regimental song), Lodge Grass and Sheridan, Wyoming. It is not heavily populated country.

Instead of driving down into the valley, you turn into the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. There’s a rather spare visitor’s center and museum there (remember: information current as of first year of first Bush administration; as for today, I note that the National Park Service’s virtually useless Little Bighorn site includes two live webcams). What I’m sure makes the strongest impression on everyone who visits are the white marble slabs, like headstones, that mark the spot where each member of Custer’s force were believed to have fallen. If you know just the outline of the story, the landscape and those markers tell the rest pretty compellingly. (According to the National Parks Conservation Association, the white markers have been supplemented by red granite ones denoting where Indian warriors fell during the battle.)

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Road Trip Placeholder (II)

Stronghold062007

Drove back from Portland yesterday, detouring far east of Interstate 5, across the Cascades down to Klamath Falls, Oregon, then one way or another found myself at Tulelake and Lava Beds National Monument in far northern California. Stronghold is a railroad stop, a grain elevator, just outside Newell, California, in the Tule Lake basin. I’m guessing that the name comes from a bit of local history: the last redoubt of the Modoc leader Kintpuash (known to his new white neighbors as Captain Jack; he led the rebellion known as the Modoc War in 1872-73) was in the lava beds a few miles from here. More local history: Newell was also the site of one of the big World War II internment camps for Japanese Americans; eventually, the camp was designated as a segregation center for internees’ whose loyalty was questioned, and it was operated with a heavy military presence. The area feels fantastically remote. A couple archive pictures from the areas agricultural past here and here.

[In the picture above (looking southeast) : If you click for a larger version, Mount Shasta is just visible in the lower right hand corner. Image below looks north.]

Stronghold062007A

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Poet Laureate of Decomposition

Happy birthday to the only poet (I’m confident) to have a garden fertilizer named after him. Yes, it’s Walt Whitman‘s day; born 1819; and some time long after, honored by a former UC Berkeley English lit student who started a designer dirt business called American Soil Products (now located up the road in Richmond). One of the company’s offerings is Walt Whitman Compost. Years ago, when I had occasion to write a Sunday business feature on American Soil for the late, lamented (by me) Hearst Examiner, I asked the owner how the compost got its name. Simple. A poem from “Leaves of Grass” called “This Compost.” Whitman contemplates how the earth has disposed of the dead, all “those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations; Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?” Then he continues:

Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form'd part of a sick person—yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,
The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests,
The young of poultry break through the hatch'd eggs,
The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare,
Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato's dark green leaves,
Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the dooryards,
The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.
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‘Is It Nothing to You?’

N.Y. Times: Silence Speaks Volumes at Intersection of Views on Iraq War

“LEWES, Del. — No one talks, but a lot is said at the intersection of Savannah Road and Kings Highway. Peace demonstrators hung strips of cloth bearing the names of soldiers killed in Iraq as part of their demonstration. Small cities and towns, like Lewes, Del., left, are suffering a large portion of the deaths in the fighting in Iraq. …”

Salon.com: Memorial Day

“For me, like most other Americans, Memorial Day is a time for barbecuing, playing Frisbee, loading up coolers with iced beer, and getting out of town. I usually don’t think about America’s war dead on the last weekend of May any more than I think about our nation’s independence on the Fourth of July, or about the birth of Jesus on Christmas.

“No, my memorial days are scattered and irregular. It is monuments that have most often triggered reveries about fallen soldiers. The words ‘Is it nothing to you?’ inscribed on the great gray World War I obelisk in downtown Vancouver, Canada, stopped me in my tracks late on a summer afternoon many years ago. I had not known this biblical phrase from Lamentations, never seen it on a war memorial before. Maybe it’s a British thing. But for whatever reason, it arrested me, and those long-vanished men who died in fields in France or Germany suddenly appeared, a ghostly company waiting for the simple tribute of memory. …”

Chicago Tribune: Lessons from the Great War

“Frank Buckles, 106, lied about his age to get into the Army when he was 16. He served in England and France, but he never was close to the fighting in World War I. He lives on a 330-acre cattle farm in West Virginia.”

[Later: The full King James Version of the Lamentations verse cited above is: “Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me, wherewith the LORD hath afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger.”

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Cultural History of The Loner

Partyofone

Once upon a time, the idea of “the loner” extended beyond the way the term is nearly universally used in media today: for destructive psychopaths, after they’ve unleashed some horror or other. I carried on a little bit earlier about the Virginia Tech official who first uttered the term in connection to Cho Seung-Hui. It was true as far as it went — and that wasn’t far at all, as Cho demonstrated both in action and in his special delivery to NBC the other day.

Anyway. Didn’t the idea of the loner once carry an aura of austere self-sufficiency, hardy individuality or at least admirable anti-heroism? In recent decades in pop culture, Clint Eastwood’s the type, especially in the Sergio Leone remakes of the Kurosawa epics. Further back, Humphrey Bogart owned the image in his Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade roles. Film noir is the loner’s genre. I could take a leap backward from there to the James Fenimore Cooper novels and his Hawkeye character. Same thing, though incredibly trying in book form. [Belatedly, I note that all the example characters above carry guns.]

But those are sort of limited, shot-in-the-dark examples and ones that rely on the distortion and romance of fiction. I went looking for a little more evidence and context, and came upon the noble example of “The Loner,” a one-season, mid-’60s western series starring Lloyd Bridges (and created by Rod Serling). Then there’s Neil Young’s “The Loner,” which focuses on the menacing stranger. Still a long way off from real life.

Finally, I hit on this, through Google Books: “Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto.” It’s by Anneli S. Rufus, a Berkeley writer Kate and I know from our time, during the relatively enlightened and carefree days of the Reagan era, at The Daily Californian. It’s a serious consideration of the idea of the loner in history, in culture, in society. An excerpt from the introduction:

“Loners, by virtue of being loners, of celebrating the state of standing alone, have an innate advantage when it comes to being brave — like pioneers, like mountain men, iconoclasts, rebels and sole survivors. Loners have an advantage when faced with the unknown, the never-done-before and the unprecedented. An advantage when it comes to being mindful like the Buddhists, spontaneous like the Taoists, crucibles of concentrated prayer like the desert saints, esoteric like the Kabbalists. Loners, by virtue of being loners, have at their fingertips the undiscovered, the unique, the rarefied. Innate advantages when it comes to imagination, concentration, inner discipline. A knack for invention, originality, for finding resources in what others would call vacuums. A knack for visions. A talent for seldom being bored. Desert islands are fine but not required.”

The Anneli lives less than two miles from us as the crow flies. I haven’t seen her in 25 years, since before she was Anneli. Now I know one reason why. But just one.

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‘Beyond Vietnam’ … and Beyond Iraq

Kevin Morrison, an old softball teammate of mine, just put together a four-minute montage of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech at the Riverside Church in New York. He juxtaposes images of Iraq over King’s words to devastating effect. Kevin also did a Q and A on the historical context of King’s speech, available at a blog called Pop + Politics.

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Vonnegut, Glaciers

Kurt Vonnegut, Novelist Who Caught the Imagination of His Age, Is Dead at 84

From “Slaughterhouse-Five“:

Over the years, people I’ve met have often asked me what I’m working on, and I’ve usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.

I said that to Harrison Starr, the movie-maker, one time, and he raised his eyebrows and inquired, “Is it an anti-war book?”

“Yes,” I said. “I guess.”

“You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?”

“No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?

“I say, ‘Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead.’ ”

What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.

And even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.

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Low Art, High Principle

I’m doing some reporting and research for a story on a website that ran afoul of a big copyright holder and federal copyright law. The crux of the tale is fair use: when is it legally defensible for an artist or commentator, say, to use the copyrighted work of another to create a new and distinct work. Specifically, the story I’m working on involves parody.

As it happens, the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken on this issue. To jog your (and my) memory, the case, Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, involved the rap group 2 Live Crew, which had borrowed elements of Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” as part of a vulgar, mocking remake. The original song’s publisher sued, claiming copyright infringement. A federal district court bought the argument put forward by 2 Live Crew’s Luther R. Campbell (aka Luke Skyywalker), the remake’s author, that his work was a parody that deserved protection under the fair use exception to U.S. copyright law. An appeals court reversed the district court, and the case went to the Supremes.

Just for context, here’s a sample of the lyrics (quoting them here, as part of a commentary, is also an exercise of fair use, or so I’d argue if Campbell, aka Skyywalker, sued me; there’s a nice side-by-side comparison of the Orbison original and the Campbell parody here–unaccompanied by any copyright notices whatsoever):

Verse 1

[Pretty woman] Ha haaa, walkin’ down the street

[Pretty woman] Gir, girl, you look so sweet

[Pretty woman] You, you bring me down to the knees

[Pretty woman] You make me wanna beg please

[O-o-o-o-oh, pretty woman] …

Verse 4

[Two-timin’ woman] Girl, you know you ain’t right

[Two-timin’ woman] You was out with my boy last night

[Two-timin’ woman] That takes a load off my mind

[Two-timin’ woman] Now I know the baby ain’t mine

[O-o-o-o-oh, two-timin’ woman]

O-o-o-o-oh, pretty woman!

The court heard the case in November 1993 and delivered its opinion the following March. In a unanimous decision–that’s right: Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Ginsberg, David Souter, Anthony Kennedy, Wiilliam Rehnquist, Sandra Day O’Connor, John Paul Stevens, and Harry Blackmun, conservatives, liberals, middle-of-the-roaders all on the same side–the court found that 2 Live Crew’s work was protected under the fair use doctrine.

I was talking to my friend Pete about this yesterday, and I said that this is the kind of thing that makes me believe we live in a great country. This wasn’t a case of high art. In Souter’s opinion for the court, he drily notes that having found the Campbell’s song to qualify as a parody of the original, the justices will not take the further step of evaluating its quality.”

But it was a case of high principle, and as such, it was accorded the most serious consideration by the most august tribunal in the land.

“While we might not assign a high rank to the parodic element here, we think it fair to say that 2 Live Crew’s song reasonably could be perceived as commenting on the original or criticizing it, to some degree. 2 Live Crew juxtaposes the romantic musings of a man whose fantasy comes true, with degrading taunts, a bawdy demand for sex, and a sigh of relief from paternal responsibility. The later words can be taken as a comment on the naivete of the original of an earlier day, as a rejection of its sentiment that ignores the ugliness of street life and the debasement that it signifies. It is this joinder of reference and ridicule that marks off the author’s choice of parody from the other types of comment and criticism that traditionally have had aclaim to fair use protection as transformative works.”

The rest of the opinion is an evaluation of 2 Live Crew’s work against the four factors that must be weighed in determining fair use: the purpose of the work, whether it is commercial or not-for-profit and whether it has “transformative” value in commenting on or criticizing the original; the nature of the original work and whether it deserves copyright protection; the “amount and substantiality” of any copying and whether it appropriates the heart of the original work; and the likelihood that the new work may kill the market for the original work or foreclose new ones.

It’s an absorbing exercise. Go and read it. It’s well worth the time. And I guarantee it’s the only Supreme Court decision in which you’ll find the words, “Big hairy woman/all that hair it ain’t legit/Cause you look like `Cousin It’.”

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Supporting the Troops: A True Story

The president is getting lots of air time today for his visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center; now that imperfections in the nation’s care for its wounded warriors have come to light, he vows, solemnly and sincerely, that the government will do better. And as long as someone’s keeping their eye on the problem–someone like the Washington Post, which brought the scandalously poor treatment to light–things will probably improve.

Meantime, he is escalating the war in Iraq, guaranteeing a steady flow of new clients for Walter Reed and the nation’s other military and veterans’ hospitals. The escalation also means that the services have to scrape together bodies to make sure that units headed for Iraq, or those held there on prolonged tours, are as close to full strength as possible. Where is the Pentagon finding the bodies? Here’s a story involving a friend of ours and her son.

The son was in the Marines, part of the first-wave invasion force sent into Iraq in March 2003. His unit’s combat assignment was over quickly, and he and his comrades were pressed into police duty in Baghdad and other locations in northern Iraq. Back then, when the mission was declared accomplished and administration’s victory lap was interrupted only by the need to mop up “non-compliant forces” and “destablizing influences” in the lexicon of the day, the son’s unit was quickly rotated back to the States, and he was discharged soon after.

I don’t know the letter of military regulations, but my understanding of the deal Marines have is that when they leave the corps, they don’t really leave the corps. For the first 48 months after discharge, they’re considered part of a ready reserve force and can be called back to service at any time. Only after that 48 months is up are you free and clear from an involuntary call-up; if you decide to join the reserves or go your own way at that point, that’s your business.

For our friend’s son, that four-year period for involuntary call-up will be over in a few months. He got married recently, and he’s going about his life pretty much the way any kid in his mid-20s would, with the significant exception that he’s been in combat and was assessed a disability rating of 40 percent because of post-traumatic stress syndrome when he left the corps. His mom, who’s not a Veteran’s Administration bureaucrat, a Navy medical officer, or a military lawyer, sort of figured that the 40 percent disability meant her son couldn’t or wouldn’t be called back despite the news that the armed services have begun to recall discharged members.

So she was puzzled the other day when her son asked her whether he had gotten anything from FedEx.

No, she told him—was he expecting a package?

No, he said–a letter from the Marines; they might be recalling him to service.

How could that be, she asked–you have a 40 percent disability.

The son told her that sure, that was right–but that a buddy of his, someone rated with a 60 percent disability (I don’t know the reason) had been summoned back to duty.

So this is the support the troops get from an administration whose leading members made damned sure they were never anywhere near the shooting when it was their turn: First, send the troops out on a tragically half-baked mission; second, when they start coming home with major physical and psychological trauma, make them fight an ill-prepared bureaucracy and medical system for care; third, when you find yourself in a pinch, call on the guys who have already given pieces of themselves and tell them they’ve got to go back in. Oh, and fourth, you question the patriotism and loyalty of anyone who questions your way of doing business.

All in all, it’s a heck of a recruiting campaign.

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Your War in Numbers

Seventy-six U.S. soldiers have died so far this month in Iraq, according to Iraq Coalition Casualties. That makes March the seventh consecutive month in which the toll of U.S. soldiers killed has reached 70 or above, the longest such period since President Bush launched the war in March 2003.

Five hundred ninety-nine U.S. soldiers have died since September 1, 2006; that’s the highest toll for any seven-month span in the entire war, exceeding the 584 U.S. lives lost from August 1, 2004, through February 28, 2005, a period that included both the costly offensive against Fallujah and an insurgent onslaught leading up to the Iraqi national elections on January 30, 2005.

Iraqi deaths in the same span: Conservatively, about 1,300 and counting for March. More than 13,000 since September 1.

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