Hemingway, Men At War
Posted: June 25, 2023 Filed under: Hemingway, war, writing Leave a comment
once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.
Went looking for the origin of that quote, because it seemed relevant to the current WGA strike.
The “internet of quotes” is a candy-colored jungle, where no one ever bothers to give the source or the context and half the time it’s wrong or on an inappropriate sunset backdrop.
This quote can be found in the Introduction to Men At War, by Ernest Hemingway. Men At War was a literary anthology first published in 1942. Hemingway edited his introduction for the 1955 edition. We find the whole essay reproduced here, and it’s worth a read.
The writers who were established before the war had nearly all sold out to write propaganda during it and most of them never recovered their honesty afterwards. All of their reputations steadily slumped because a writer should be of as great probity and honest as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chase or note, and after on piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.
on some pitiful bravado compared to some solid magnificence:
it was like comparing the Brooklyn Dodger fan who jumps on the field and slugs an umpire with the beautiful professional austerity of Arky Vaughan, the Brooklyn third baseman.
on Tolstoy’s War And Peace:
his ponderous and Messianic thinking was no better than many another evangelical professor of history and I learned from him to distrust my own Thinking with a capital T and to try to write truly, as straightly, as objectively and as humbly as possible.
On cavalry:
A man with a horse is never as alone as a man on foot, for a horse will take you where you cannot make your own legs go. Just as a mechanized force, not by virtue of their armor, but by the fact that they move mechanically, will advance into situations where you could put neither men nor animals; neither get them up there nor hold them there.
on fights:
At that moment it was perfectly clear that we would have to fight them.
When that moment arrives, whether it is in a barroom fight or in a war, the thing to do is to hit your opponent the first punch and hit him as hard as possible.
A couple recommendations I’ve got to check out: a story called “The Wrong Road” by Marquis James and “The Stars in Their Courses” by Lt. Col. John W. Thomason, a chapter in a book called Lone Star Preacher (did Shelby Foote crib that title title for his book on Gettysburg?)
To live properly in war, the individual eliminates all such things as potential danger. Then a thing is only bad when it is bad. It is neither bad before nor after. Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present minute with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire. It, naturally, is the opposite of all those gifts a writer should have. That is what makes good writing by good soldiers such a rare thing and why it is so prized when we have it.
(is that what DFW was trying to say, re athletes not soldiers, in his Tracy Austin review?)
I have seen much war in my lifetime and I hate it profoundly. But there are worse things than war: and all of them come with defeat. The more you hate war, the more you know that once you are forced into it, for whatever reason it may be, you have to win it. You have to win it and get rid of the people that made it and see that, this time, it never comes to us again.
As for Arky:
After leaving the Seals, Vaughan bought a ranch in Eagleville, California, where he retired to fish, hunt and tend cattle. On August 30, 1952, Vaughan was fishing in nearby Lost Lake, with his friend Bill Wimer. According to a witness, Wimer stood up in the boat, causing it to capsize, and both men drowned.
Gordon Granger
Posted: June 24, 2023 Filed under: WOR Leave a comment
Juneteenth is not about any one man but it was Gordon Granger who posted and enforced General Order #3 in Galveston, kicking off the day.
The historian’s eye was intrigued by this line in Granger’s Wikipedia page:
General Ulysses S. Grant disliked Granger[11] and prevented him from gaining more prominent commands in the West or in the Eastern Theater of the American Civil War.
The citation there is for a bio of Granger, but why not get the word from Grant himself? We scanned Grant’s memoirs for mentions of Granger:
While the advance up Mission Ridge was going forward, General Thomas with staff, General Gordon Granger, commander of the corps making the assault, and myself and staff occupied Orchard Knob, from which the entire field could be observed. The moment the troops were seen going over the last line of rebel defences, I ordered Granger to join his command, and mounting my horse I rode to the front. General Thomas left about the same time. Sheridan on the extreme right was already in pursuit of the enemy east of the ridge. Wood, who commanded the division to the left of Sheridan, accompanied his men on horseback in the charge, but did not join Sheridan in the pursuit. To the left, in Baird’s front where Bragg’s troops had massed against Sherman, the resistance was more stubborn and the contest lasted longer. I ordered Granger to follow the enemy with Wood’s division, but he was so much excited, and kept up such a roar of musketry in the direction the enemy had taken, that by the time I could stop the firing the enemy had got well out of the way. The enemy confronting Sherman, now seeing everything to their left giving way, fled also. Sherman, however, was not aware of the extent of our success until after nightfall, when he received orders to pursue at daylight in the morning.
He got too excited. Later he’s grumpy:
Finding that Granger had not only not started but was very reluctant to go, he having decided for himself that it was a very bad move to make, I sent word to General Sherman of the situation and directed him to march to the relief of Knoxville. I also gave him the problem that we had to solve—that Burnside had now but four to six days supplies left, and that he must be relieved within that time.
More or less the last we hear of him:
All these movements were designed to be in support of Sherman’s march, the object being to keep the Confederate troops in the West from leaving there. But neither Canby nor Thomas could be got off in time. I had some time before depleted Thomas’s army to reinforce Canby, for the reason that Thomas had failed to start an expedition which he had been ordered to send out, and to have the troops where they might do something. Canby seemed to be equally deliberate in all of his movements. I ordered him to go in person; but he prepared to send a detachment under another officer. General Granger had got down to New Orleans, in some way or other, and I wrote Canby that he must not put him in command of troops. In spite of this he asked the War Department to assign Granger to the command of a corps.
Boy Grant is an efficient writer. Granger died of a stroke in Santa Fe in 1876 after chasing around Apaches for awhile.
Los Angeles: The Ultimate City
Posted: June 16, 2023 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
Picked up a used copy of this one, from the genre of New Yorker (the magazine) writers doing longform jobs on big topics. It’s not super insightful or vital in 2023 (“restaurants in L. A. must have plenty of parking space available”) but I appreciated this summary of the socialist history of California:
When Moscow smelled like chocolate
Posted: June 11, 2023 Filed under: Russia Leave a comment
A Moscow memory:
Walking around Red Square in May, in a good mood. Six days of travel, six days on the train, from Beijing on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Now here I was, I’d made it to Moscow. Moscow! The dream of every Chekhov character. Soon I would meet a friend.
This was 2007, post Cold War, post post Cold War. Moscow boomed, exploding with wealth and energy. At least it seemed to me. Eurasian beauties stepping out of chaffeured cars and into Prada. Certainly Moscow seems to boom when you arrive from the east, where what you see out of the train windows is bleak. True log cabins, shells of abandoned buildings, stark forests, vast cold rivers.
Now here were the towers, the mazes of the ancient and modern city. The city that stopped Hitler and Napoleon! Deep intense people inside Café Pushkin eating smoked goose borscht (the waitress there, I can still picture her, like a movie star from a movie too intense to ever film). Soulful men sweating naked inside the the Sanduny Baths. Chandeliers in the metro stations.
That morning I’d waited in line to see the waxy candle mummy of Lenin. The wall of memorials to the revolutionary heroes (“German Jews,” I heard the tour guide say. “We have a joke that the Russian Revolution was started by German Jews”).
There were the spires of Saint Basil’s, the image most often used to represent Russia in video games. Here was Red Square, and then there was the Kremlin, right there, can you imagine? I was just strolling past the place that stood as symbol for the calculating minds of the Evil Empire. Now, walking towards the river, there was a smell I kept noticing, An alluring smell, a tempting smell. A sweet smell, a smell I recognized but it couldn’t be that. Is that… the smell of chocolate?
It can’t be. Is that fantastical, enormous building just across the river, on the island… is that a chocolate factory?
Why did it seem surprising? I never thought of Russia as a great producer of sweets, but why not? There were massive constructions everywhere, products of enormous, empire-sized energy and direction. Take the giant Moscow State University building for example. Why wouldn’t they put some of that force and power into chocolate?
Sad to learn they’ve since closed the Krasny Oktyabr factory and turned into like mixed use condos. Too bad. I still feel my marvel. The idea that all this time, outside the Kremlin, Moscow smelled like chocolate.
(source on that photo, cheers to Hans-Jürgen Neubert)
the purpose of the beehive
Posted: June 10, 2023 Filed under: business Leave a commentCOWEN: What do you think is the central insight you have about how to build that, that is otherwise under-emphasized?
GODIN: I think that Frederick Taylor’s demise is long overdue, that the purpose of a beehive is not to maximize the amount of honey we produce. The honey is a by-product of a successful beehive. That what we have is the chance to get what we want by connecting with people who have a choice about where they work, who choose to enroll with us, to avoid the false proxies of “You look like me” or “You sound like me” or “I want to have lunch with you” when we hire people, and instead dance with the people from whatever background that are going to make our project better.
When you lay it out that simply, people go, “Well, of course.” Then they go back to work in some place that demeans them and undermines them and asks them to phone it in. It just breaks my heart to see that gap.
Seth Godin talking to Tyler Cowen.
50 Cent on water
Posted: June 9, 2023 Filed under: business, water Leave a commentJust looking at things and not understanding why they’re the way they are sparked interest and ideas. I may walk down the grocery aisle, see a gallon of spring water for $2.69, and then I walk farther down, and there’s a gallon of spring water for 59 cents. And I’m like, So I wouldn’t know whether that was Poland Spring if it was in two different glasses. Yo. I want to sell water. This was before I knew Vitamin Water existed. But I knew I could charge $1.50 extra per piece and it wouldn’t even matter. I could get in the middle of that, come in at a dollar and change, and see what happens.
from this Vulture interview.
JAB III
Posted: June 4, 2023 Filed under: America Since 1945, Texas Leave a comment
James Baker signed memos JAB III but he was really James Baker IV. All the previous Jameses Baker had been powerful lawyers and fixers in Houston, Texas. They had nicknames, more like titles. The Judge, etc. The first James Baker, our James Baker’s great-grandfather, knew Sam Houston. The Bakers played a role in the opening of Houston’s ship channel, enabling the city to outflank and overtake Galveston. (A side benefit of this book is the early pages provide a pretty good history of Houston).
JAB III might’ve ended as another in this line, quiet, forceful, but not a national figure, had he not met a remarkable transplant to Texas named George Herbert Walker Bush. The two of them shared weighty lineages, prep and Ivy League backgrounds. They formed a brotherly relationship, they were doubles tennis partners (club champions, these guys play to win). The rise of one was linked to the rise of the other.
Baker was that way because of who he was and where he came from, and it was his strange luck, and the country’s, that he happened to be ready to leave his hometown and legal career behind at just the moment when the entire Republican elite had been decimated by Richard Nixon’s Watergate disaster.
Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, Under Secretary of Commerce, White House chief of staff for President Ronald Reagan, failed candidate for Attorney General of Texas, Marine officer, Princeton guy, elk killer.
Brokaw told him the key was understanding that Baker was a patient and expert turkey hunter. He would rise before dawn, dress in camouflage, venture out into the Texas heat and then sit there not so much as blinking. “And he waits and waits until he gets the turkey right where he wants it,” Brokaw told Netanyahu, “and then he blows its ass off.”
JAB III’s last major act in American politics* was presiding over the legal team that won the battle that gave George Herbert Walker Bush’s son, W Bush, the presidency. Whether on reflection the outcome of that victory is exactly the future JAB III would’ve wanted we can discuss later.
Cheney was thirty-five years old and, following Donald Rumsfeld’s promotion to defense secretary, had become the youngest man ever to serve as White House chief of staff. With the demeanor of a cool cowboy from Wyoming, the fierce intellect of a Yale dropout-turned-doctoral-candidate, and the discipline of a recovering drinker, Cheney had established himself as a force to be reckoned with in the White House
In 1980 JAB III was Bush’s guy, but Ronald Reagan picked him as his chief of staff. Why? JAB III outmaneuvered people who’d been around Reagan for years. How? That’s why I wanted to read this book. It was written by Peter Baker (no relation) and Susan Glasser, two NY Times reporters who are married. The book is snappy and good, recommend. As an act of service and review we prepared this summary for the busy executive.
Baker was, deep down, neither very versed on matters of policy nor intensely interested in them. As long as it was directionally sound, he was satisfied.” …
It was a classic Baker solution to the problem. As a negotiator, he always looked for ways to satisfy his counterparts’ concerns—or more precisely, ways to let his counterparts publicly demonstrate that their concerns had been addressed—without giving up the substance of what he was trying to secure.
The answers to my questions about how he rose in the Reagan administration were that he was extremely hard working, practical, canny. Reagan advisors Stuart Spencer and Michael Deaver recognized his talent and needed someone to stop a potential civil war among the Reagan team. They convinced Nancy Reagan JAB III was the guy. JAB III would be quick to say Ronald Reagan made his own decisions, but it wouldn’t’ve gotten to Ronald Reagan without Nancy Reagan.
One of JAB III’s main goals as Reagan’s chief of staff was to stop the yahoos around Reagan from getting the US involved in a war in Central America. He succeeded (mostly). Iran-Contra might’ve been avoided if JAB III hadn’t switched jobs, and gone to run the Treasury Department. Iran-Contra was sloppy and JAB III did not tolerate that. He was a scary but admired boss.
He was rich, but not as rich as people thought. When on vacation, he could usually be found shooting quail in South Texas or fishing the Silver Creek near his ranch in Wyoming. He kept a bottle of Chivas Regal in a desk drawer for an afternoon drink when needed. He swore profusely and told dirty jokes. “Did you get laid last night?” he would ask his young advance man, Ed Rogers, each morning when they were on the road together during the Reagan years. It was not a throwaway line. “He’d look me in the eye and want an answer,” Rogers recalled.
When JAB III was a kid his dad (JAB II? Also JAB III?) took him elk hunting, deep in the woods. JAB III came back with the biggest elk as his trophy. You wonder if that’s the turning point. What if the boy JAB had flinched, or said “I don’t want to kill a mammal”?
JAB III had a way of not being present at the moment of blowup. When the 1987 stock crash hit he was on his way to hunt elk with the king of Sweden. He was out of Enron just at the right time. And out of the White House for Iran-Contra, maybe he saw it coming.
And so in his desire to move on and move up, Baker left Reagan with a partner manifestly ill-suited for the job, arguably a disservice to the president he had worked so hard to make successful.
He was a flop as a retail politician, losing the one statewide race he ran in. His power was tremendous. Out of spite for the Houston Chronicle for not endorsing him, he eliminated an exception to a law stopping a nonprofit institution from owning a newspaper, thus ruining Houston Chronicle’s structure (and maybe the newspaper?) More or less singlehandedly he arranged with his worldwide financial counterparts to weaken the US dollar (good for US exporters and making it easier to pay down US debt).
Baker had little interest in Asia, Africa, or South America, nor did he want to become embroiled in the turmoil in South Africa as its system of racial apartheid unraveled in the face of international protests and sanctions. He especially wanted to stay away from the Middle East and the endless failed quest for peace between Israel and the Arabs.
Actually sometimes he is interested in South America:
Sometimes, they would conjure up the other part of their life together, getting back on the tennis court or dreaming up a hunting trip. When they flew in a helicopter over Barranquilla, Colombia, in February for a summit, Baker looked out the window at the landscape below and said to Bush, “This is a place where you and I could shoot some quail.”
In 2000 Baker led W’s legal team in the recount battle. Baker is played (well) by Tom Wilkinson in the film Recount. Ted Cruz was the guy who read the final Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore and translated: we win. Brett Kavanaugh was also there.
Baker doesn’t talk down W to these biographers but the ultimate results cannot have been to his satisfaction. Perhaps he tells himself the alternative, a Gore presidency, would’ve been worse. I don’t know. The W administration cannot be said to have ended in US triumph. Not enough JAB III or his ilk? Too much? A lesser grade? JAB III’s patron Cheney was there. JAB III was considered to replace Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Didn’t happen: remember, he’s never there when it blows up.
As this book begins, Baker is considering Trump:
In the end, he voted for him.
A lesson here may be that forceful, smart people may have the illusion they can bend history but the consequences of both their ways and means are unpredictable.
Not sure how actionable a book like this is:
“This is not a man who sat back and read Machiavelli or read the great books about influence and power,” noted David Gergen. “It just came naturally to him.”
But it gives you the feeling of a little more understanding of the workings of the world.
You can also read, for free, online, JAB III’s oral histories with the Miller Center. Even the way he lays out the ground rules in the 2004 interview shows you what you’re dealing with. And the role of Dick Cheney in the rise of JAB comes through too.
Knott
There were some reports—not to get back to Edmund Morris—that the President was never quite the same after this assassination attempt. Did you see any change?
Baker
No. No. President Reagan had a very private but very deep spiritual faith. Remember he said, “I decided after that, that whatever time I had left, I was going to devote to the man upstairs.” Or “He spared me.” I saw that. I saw that reflective spirituality component of his personality, but that’s all. In terms of being less vibrant, less vigorous, less effective? No, I didn’t see it. Ask Fritz Mondale if you think he was adversely affected. [laughter] He wasn’t. That was a blowout election.
* if there’s a flaw in this book, it could’ve used more about Baker’s work in Western Sahara, which apparently ended in frustration when Morocco refused to budge. Maybe that was still ongoing at press time.
Helytimes 
