Fire Scars

I have a book recommendation for you, but first, let me tell you why I think this book is important.  

When I read a book, I totally immerse myself in a different world.   If my house caught fire while I was reading, I wouldn’t notice it until the book caught fire.  This is not just idle speculation, once while reading by candlelight in my pickup, the candle fell over and set fire to the dashboard and I didn’t notice until the fumes from the burning plastic made it hard to breathe.  (If you are curious, it was a book by Steven King.)

Nothing, however, will break my immersion into an alternate world more than an author’s making a glaring mistake because of ignorance of the subject matter being discussed.  Just last week, I set aside a book that claimed that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated before he could be elected to a second term, a mistake so startling that it was like suddenly being doused with a bucket of cold water.   I can think of several books that were all but destroyed by horrendous geographical errors (there are, for example, no mountains along the gulf coast of Texas) or the absurdity of a gun-wielding protagonist’s inserting a fresh magazine into his revolver.  (For God’s sake, will someone please tell Len Deighton that you can’t put a silencer on a revolver and that the fastest way to reload a Smith and Wesson is not to swap cylinders!)

These idiotic mistakes don’t happen in good books because good authors write about subjects they know.  In Agatha Christie’s sixty-six murder mysteries, she killed off thirty people with poison—more than any other novelist ever has.  Christie used poisons in her books because she knew about them, having worked as an apothecary’s assistant in a hospital during the Great War.  Back in those days, most medicines were still compounded by hand, requiring extensive knowledge of the toxic effects of the ingredients used.

Another great example of an author’s writing about what they know is Dick Francis, the British jockey who turned author after an injury on the track ended his racing career.  Francis wrote wonderful books, each centered around some aspect of the racetrack that he knew so well and could describe in such detail that the reader would enjoy.  

This is why I really love the new book by John (Jack) Wright, Fire Scars.  Wright, a retired geographer and conservationist from New Mexico State University (occasionally “affectionally” referred to as Enema U in this blog) has written about what he knows and understands.  The book centers around forest conservation in Montana, where the author lives half of every year, dividing his time between New Mexico in the winter and Montana during the summer.  

I’ve known Jack for decades, as he was one of the best, if not the best, of the lecturers and mentors at the university.  In his classes, he displayed a unique ability to connect with his students—a gift that he displays equally in his writing.  Never “preachy”, this book tackles complex subject matter and informs even as it entertains.

To really explain why I think this book is so important, I might have to explain just why Jack and I are good friends.  On the surface, we have almost nothing in common:  He’s a damn Yankee from Maine, while I’m a poor, dumb ol’ country boy from West Texas.  He went to Berkeley and I graduated from a state agricultural college.  Consequently, you could comfortably park an oil tanker in the gap between our political beliefs—except that as Jack and I discussed politics and current events, we found that we agreed far more often than we disagreed.  Given a bottle of Laphroaig and about an hour of intense “discussion”, we invariably find compromises and agree on pragmatic solutions to even the most difficult of problems. 

These terms describe why this is such a great book on conservation in the West:  Wright is both pragmatic and ethical.  There is an endless supply of books that extol the virtues of conservation and respect for the fragile environment of the Western United States, but almost all will be justifiably ignored because these books promote policies that cannot and will not be implemented in today’s complex society.  If the solution involves the total elimination of ranching or of the petroleum industry or of mining, it won’t matter that your cause is noble because your program will never be implemented.  Wright’s book exhibits just as deep a respect and love of the West, while supporting what can realistically, possibly be implemented.

While reading Fire Scars, I frequently remembered my pleasure in reading Edward Abbey’s Money Wrench Gang.  Both authors have extensive experience and knowledge of the fragile American West, but where Abbey wrote a feel-good story about solutions that were absurdly impossible to implement, Wright presents intelligent policies that are well within our grasp.  Where Abbey was a mad poet, Wright is a wise and thoughtful scholar.  The former may be lovable, but the latter is the one we should listen to.

Everyone wants a clean environment, everyone wants to preserve America’s wilderness, and everyone wants to protect our forests, but far too frequently, the proposals to accomplish these goals are heavy on emotion and short on science.  All too frequently, conservationists ignore the realities of economics, politics, and population pressure and propose impossible solutions, while ignoring the measures that can realistically be implemented.  Fire Scars avoids that problem by presenting realistic solutions but still entertaining us with a solid mystery that is inhabited by believable characters.  

Because I know Jack, I know how much work and thought went into this book.  The result is something you will enjoy, too.  Thankfully, he created memorable characters in a setting that will almost certainly lead to a sequel.  I look forward to reading his next book. 

The President as Head of His Party

Something seems seriously wrong with the way our political parties select candidates for presidential elections.  As I write this, a slight majority of Republicans would prefer someone other than Donald Trump to be the party’s nominee in next year’s election.  Yet the former president, as presumptive head of his party, seems likely to successfully secure his party’s nomination.

Similarly, President Joe Biden is very likely to secure the nomination from the Democrat Party despite more than half of party members desiring a different candidate.  As president, he is also considered the head of his party and as I write this, it seems unlikely that any other candidate will be successful in wrenching the party’s nomination away from him.

Despite neither man being the preferred candidate by the majority of members from his party, it seems very likely that those two men—a  president and a former president—will once again be on the ballot in November, 2024.

Both a sitting president and a former president have enormous power within a political party, and while that party can consolidate behind a different candidate, the result is nearly always disastrous.

The first sitting president to be denied the nomination by his own party was John Tyler (1841-1845), who became president after the death of William Henry Harrison.  Though Tyler was not popular in the Whig Party, he had a secret plan to win the Whigs over:  he was going to send the US Navy to the independent country of Texas and protect it from the imaginary invasion by Great Britain until the state could be annexed.  There were a couple of holes in the plan (chiefly that Great Britain was not planning an invasion and that the use of the military in a foreign country had to have congressional approval).  

Tyler’s secret plan required the willing cooperation of a friendly Secretary of State, Abel P. Upshur, and a compliant Secretary of the Navy, Thomas Gilmer, as well as the knowledge that—if the plan was successful and Texas was annexed—Tyler was likely to be forgiven by both his party and the electorate.  Unfortunately, just before the plan was to be put into action, there was a ceremony aboard the USS Princeton, which was armed with the “Peacemaker”—the largest naval cannon in the world.  When the admiring crowd convinced the captain to fire the massive gun as a demonstration, the gun blew up, instantly killing both Secretaries Upshur and Gilmer, as well as any chance of Tyler’s being nominated, much less elected.  

Denied the nomination by the Whig Party, Tyler formed an independent party, The National Democratic Party, and ran as the new party’s presidential nominee.  Naturally, he lost, and since he had siphoned off so many of the Whig voters, so did his former party’s candidate, Henry Clay.  Tyler’s defection from the Whig Party gave the victory to the Democrat candidate, James Polk.

In 1852, President Millard Fillmore wanted to run for reelection, but had powerful opposition within his own party, the Whigs.  Both Daniel Webster and General Winfield Scott desired the nomination and each sought to convince Fillmore to support their candidacy.  At the party convention, no candidate could secure enough votes for the nomination.  After multiple ballots, some of Fillmore’s delegates began to defect to Scott, and Fillmore finally announced his support for Webster.  It was too late, however, and Scott finally secured the nomination, alienating both Webster and Fillmore.  Since the party was now effectively divided, Franklin Pierce, a Democrat won the election.

Four years later, President Pierce had his own problems.  Though a Northerner, Pierce believed the abolitionist movement to be a danger to the nation and had supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act, that would allow for the territory to be divided into states, but aggravated the argument about free and slave states to the point that the territory was a bloody battleground that foreshadowed the coming Civil War.  Pierce didn’t seem to realize that he was unpopular with both parties and was shocked at the 1856 party convention when he came in second on the first ballot.  James Buchanan won his party’s nomination primarily because he had been in Europe for several years and had neither any connection with “Bleeding Kansas” nor any direct ties to Pierce.

Though Pierce did not win his party’s nomination, he did manage to exit the White House without guaranteeing his party losing the election.  Buchanan, a fellow Democrat won the election.  This is the only time that a sitting president, denied his party’s nomination for reelection, did not insure a victory for the opposing party.

Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, had run for vice-president with Republican Abraham Lincoln in 1864 on the National Union Party Ticket, a deliberate move by Lincoln to try to unite the country.  Upon Lincoln’s death, the newly sworn-in President, a Southerner, was so unpopular with both parties that though he desired to run for reelection, neither party nominated him.  By the start of the 1868 campaign season, Johnson was so unpopular with damn near everyone that he had to tie a pork chop around his neck to play with his own dog.

The last sitting president to be denied his party’s nomination was Chester A. Arthur, who became president upon the assassination of James Garfield.  President Arthur is one of the “forgotten” presidents, with few today remembering much about him.  To his credit, he fostered several causes including civil rights and the introduction of the Civil Service system.  These reforms effectively divided the Republican Party who gave the 1884 nomination to James Blaine.  Blaine lost to Democrat Grover Cleveland—the first Democrat elected after the Civil War.  According to James Blaine, the loss was due to Arthur’s refusal to campaign for him.

Though Arthur was the last president to be denied his party’s nomination for reelection, there is one last special case that needs to be mentioned.  In 1908, as President Theodore Roosevelt left office, he supported his hand-picked replacement, William Taft.  Roosevelt did everything possible to support Taft’s election and once it was secured, promptly went on safari in Africa.  When he returned to America two years later, he was dismayed to see that President Taft had not handled several matters to his satisfaction.  (In other words, Taft had fornicated skyward.)  If it weren’t for the Secret Service, that elephant wouldn’t have been the only large overweight mammal Roosevelt shot.

In 1912, Roosevelt tried to take the Republican nomination away from Taft, but failed because Taft, as the head of the party, controlled the credentials committee for the delegation.  Angry, Roosevelt founded his own political party, the Progressive Party (usually referred to as the Bull Moose Party).  In the November election, Roosevelt beat Taft, but they had split the Republican votes, guaranteeing victory for Woodrow Wilson who only received 42% of the vote.  If either Taft or Roosevelt had not run, Wilson would have most likely have lost the election.

If the 2024 election follows the track laid out above and if either Trump or Biden is denied his party’s nomination, it will probably divide that party, securing victory for the opposing party’s candidate.  If Trump is denied the Republican nomination, he will probably try to form a third party, once again splitting the Republican vote.  (I won’t even bother giving the details of how Ross Perot split the Republican vote in 1992).

One of the bad things about studying history is to see trends, understand them, and know there is not one damned thing you can do about them.

How NOT To Be A Crappy Professor

This is a topic on which I am uniquely qualified to speak, since I have taught at three different universities in two different fields, and have spent more years sitting in classrooms as a student than any sane person would ever submit themselves to…..Seriously, there are murderers who’ve served less time in jail than I have spent in classrooms and no parole is yet in sight for me. 

And yes, I have occasionally been guilty of many of these inexcusable teaching transgressions, myself.  Perhaps my becoming a student post-retirement is my penance.

There is one absolutely unforgivable teaching sin and it’s one so egregious that students should be allowed to use deadly force to defend themselves against it.   It is okay to create a PowerPoint presentation to go along with your lecture.  It’s even okay if you create dozens and dozens of slides to accompany your lesson.  But it is never okay to read each and every damn slide, word for word for word, to your class.  

Seriously, about 10% of college professors seem to do this on a regular basis and there is absolutely no reason for it.  Unless you are teaching in the College of Education, all of the students know how to read and can probably do it faster than you can read it out loud to them.  You could just mail the damn presentation to the students for them to read and then use the class time for discussion.  

Personally, I’ve always thought that PowerPoint was useful for maps, photos, and lists and in between showing those, you should turn the projector temporarily off.  Here’s an experiment you can try the next time you are in the classroom:   Don’t turn on the computer, just switch on the projector so if shines an empty white screen to the class.  The students will quit talking, then turn and face the screen, ready to pay homage to their digital masters and receive content.  They have decades of experience of mindlessly watching screens and so, by turning on that projector, you’ve switched on their brains in standby mode.

It is amazing how fast projectors and computerized content have taken over the classroom in the last couple of decades.  Maybe it is time to rethink the whole proposition and ask whether PowerPoint really has improved education.  Henry James said that a school was a log with a teacher on one end and a student on the other, but nowhere does James mention that a wheelbarrow full of electronics will turn a poor lecturer into the bionic teacher.  

Another way for a professor to turn off a class is by requiring an expensive textbook that is not really necessary for the student to take the course.  For example, I recently took a course for which it cost $75 to rent a textbook that was so poorly written that even the professor who required it confessed that the book was horrible.  

While we are on the subject of textbooks, if you assign more reading than the students can reasonably do, they give up and won’t read any of the assignment.  This is a mistake normally done by new professors, each of whom earnestly believes they can raise the standard of education in the nation by assigning more work than the students will have time to complete.  Then, in the next class period, the students learn that the professor has also assigned more readings than can be covered during the class.  By that point, the students generally just ignore the reading assignments. 

Students pay a fortune in tuition and, even in a state university, the total amount of tuition paid by a classroom full of students is well over a thousand dollars a day.  Students don’t mind if you cancel a single class, but if you cancel more than a few so you can attend a conference…. Why don’t you write a check and reimburse the students?  I have yet to see a syllabus in which the professor fails to mention that attendance is important.  If it’s important for the students to attend, it should be important for the professor to be there, too.  At the very least, you should arrange for a guest speaker if you are going to be absent.

Speaking of attendance, since the students have paid for the course, don’t waste their class time by taking attendance.  Instead, work harder to make a class so interesting that none of the students want to miss it.

If you give an assignment or hold an exam, students expect their work to be graded and returned within a week.   Well, to be honest, they want it back quicker than that, but they will wait a week.  Don’t give more work than you can grade within a reasonable time and never give a test over the material on homework until after you have graded the homework and returned it.

Most universities now use some form of educational software to deliver course material—systems like Blackboard, Canvas, or Moodle.  If you are going to use this software (and I can think of some valid reasons why you might not want to), then learn to use it correctly.  About a third of the courses I have taken in recent years had menus with links that didn’t work, grading formulas that reported mathematical nonsense, or deadlines that showed work was due in five years.

My last advice for professors desiring to improve their teaching is to look at the resources your university offers.  Every university has some form of in-house academy that offers courses to faculty on how to teach effectively, how to plan lectures, and how to use that learning software.  The courses are free, are offered frequently, and should absolutely be avoided at all costs.  They are, invariably, taught by crazy women who can’t teach, who have never taught well, and if you give them half a chance, will tell you all about how being cheerleaders in high school was the high point in their lives.  Any professor who has taken two or more of those courses is ruined forever and is beyond redemption.

On the other hand, every university has a handful of great lecturers—people who can connect with their students and motivate them to learn.  Those people are never promoted into those jobs at the teaching academies but will usually offer you advice if you ask for it.  You can also learn a lot about teaching—as well as about the lecture material—just by sitting in on their classes.

Okay, Let’s Be Friends

During World War II, the United States totally mobilized for war.  Most Americans don’t know what mobilization means any more, since we haven’t done anything like that in any of the smaller wars we have fought since 1945.

This war was different:  almost all industries stopped producing consumer goods and produced material for the war, instead.  The auto makers stopped producing cars, making military trucks, tanks, and airplanes.  Singer stopped making sewing machines and produced pistols.  Clothing companies produced uniforms and, instead of making shoes, shoe factories turned out combat boots.  

By the end of the war, American factories had produced 86,000 tanks, 296,000 airplanes, 15 million rifles and machine guns, 64,000 landing craft, and 6,500 ships.  Over two-thirds of American industrial output was geared towards producing military hardware.  American industrial production was what enabled the Allies to win, as the real strategic victory was fought not on the battlefield but on the assembly line.

None of the above is to slight the 15 million Americans in uniform at the end of the war, but to simply point out that the incredible output of American manufacturing was what those men—along with our Allies—used to fight the war.

Part of that amazing mobilization was the incredible production of the Consolidated B-24 bomber.  If you watch movies about WWII, you usually see the more photogenic B-17, but the most widely produced heavy bomber in history was the B-24.  Over 18,500 B-24 bombers in assorted variants were made during the war at plants scattered across the United States.  At the height of production, one Ford Motor plant was rolling a new bomber off the assembly line every 59 minutes.  The photo above shows the planes being produced at the Fort Worth, Texas plant.

Though the B-24 could not fly as high as the B-17, it could carry a larger load of bombs farther, making the plane a highly successful bomber that was used by all branches of the American military, as well as by all of our Allies, so it saw service all around the world.  One example of this bomber’s effectiveness would be the 1945 raids on the Japanese city of Nagaoka, a town of 65,000 people.  The most likely reason the city was picked as a target was because it was a center for chemical research and production.  The Japanese survivors, however, maintained that the city was bombed because it was the hometown of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the man who had planned the Pearl Harbor attack.

Nagaoka was firebombed, with estimates of the destruction ranging from 65% to 80% of the urban area.  1,496 lives were lost in Nagaoka, while the air crews that bombed the town suffered no losses.

The United States military stopped flying the B-24 almost as soon as the war was over.  A few were used for transport or submarine patrol immediately after the war, but few were still operating by the start of the Korean War.  Most were scrapped or simply parked and abandoned.  There are about a dozen of the planes still on display, with only two still flying (one of which was manufactured in Fort Worth), so it may be in that photo above.

Long after the war, the people of Fort Worth and Nagaoka became friends, as part of the sister city program.  In the 1990’s, Fort Worth (with the help of its sister city) expanded the its Botanical Gardens by adding a typical Japanese Garden.  As part of that garden, a pagoda was built to house a gift from the people of Nagaoka:  an authentic Mikoshi (left).

A Mikoshi is a Shinto shrine that is believed to promote peace, community unity, purification, and spiritual connection with the deities. Mikoshi festivals can be observed throughout the year across various regions of Japan, with some of the most famous ones including the Sanja Matsuri in Tokyo, Gion Matsuri in Kyoto, and Kishiwada Danjiri Matsuri in Osaka.

I’m not sure that the gift is simply a sign of friendship, but perhaps is additionally motivated by a desire to establish some form of peaceful link with a city whose past includes a link to its sister city’s destruction—call it “insurance”.  I came to this conclusion when I discovered that Nagaoka had made a similar gift to its other sister city, Honolulu.  That Mikoshi is located just outside of Pearl Harbor.

Dorothy M. Johnson

It started with my finding that this month, Netflix was offering The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  Naturally, I had to watch it again, despite having seen it enough times to be able to recite the lines with the actors.  How can you not like a John Ford movie with Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne?  

Without a doubt, this is my favorite western, not only because it’s a great movie, but because one of the closing scenes speaks a great truth about history.  In one of the last scenes of the movie, Senator Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart) finally clears up a common misconception by telling the true story about the death of Liberty Valance.  The editor of the newspaper rips up the notes on the story and, deciding not to print, the truth says, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

We are all shaped by our history, but as the movie illustrates, we are also defined by what we think is our history.  

In any case, rewatching the movie got me to wondering about the source of the movie and about whether the book the movie was taken from was as good as the movie.  I can think of a couple of dozen great books that were turned into horrible movies, so I was hoping that this movie might lead me to a great book.

The movie comes from a story with the same name by the Montana author, Dorothy M. Johnson—someone I knew very little about, having only heard the name in passing because she was a prolific western author.  I checked out as many of her books as I could find from the Enema U library, purchasing the remainder from Abebooks.  

Dorothy Johnson turns out to be a very interesting author.  Originally from Iowa, she moved to Montana at the age of six when her father’s health would no longer allow him to farm.  The family moved to Rainbow Dam in Montana, then a tiny town so remote that drinking water had to be trucked in and so small that there was no school.  As Johnson later wrote about her life there:

“At six, you’re still close to the ground.  You can be fascinated by white pebbles the rain has washed and by the tumbling growth of prickly pear…. Trains went by our front window.”

 As soon as I read that, I was hooked—I had to read everything the woman had written.  Her editors never seemed to use that line to sell her books, but they should have.  Dorothy Johnson turned out to be a writer with a vivid imagination and a gift for description, I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read and am currently trying to track down a couple of her more obscure works.

While Johnson graduated from the Montana State, a major influence on her writing came from living and working in New York City.  One of her books that I’d like to read is an unpublished manuscript titled “Unbombed”, an account of her life as a New York City air warden during World War II.  It is hard to pin down her writing style exactly, but many of her works remind me of the writing of Craig Johnson who writes the Longmire series.  

What was really surprising about her writing, however, is that the short stories bear almost no resemblance to any of the famous movies made from them.  In one slim volume, you can find The Hanging Tree, A Man Called Horse, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, all stories that were made into blockbuster western movies.

Take the story about Liberty Valance, for example.  It’s a good story, but it’s very short—less than two dozen pages that contain very little in common with John Ford’s masterpiece.  In the story, there is no Dutton Peabody, the crusading editor of the Shinbone Star.  For that matter, the town of Shinbone isn’t there either.  Neither are Link Appleyard, the inept sheriff, the struggle for statehood, a stagecoach, or the scene mentioned above.  And almost all of characters have different names, with the lone exception of Liberty Valance.  

The only name change that makes sense is that Tom Doniphon, played by John Wayne in the movie, was originally called Bert Barricune.  Somehow, I just can’t picture The Duke playing a character named Bert.

Similarly, in the short story titled A Man Called Horse, you won’t find much of the story made famous by Richard Harris.  That a short story barely twenty pages long was turned into a two-hour movie with two sequels tells us more about the imagination of the script writers than the quality of the original story.  Similarly, in the original short story called The Hanging Tree, you won’t find much of the role made famous by Gary Cooper.

That the movies are dramatically different from the Johnson’s stories is perfectly all right…I’m just a little shocked.  After seeing countless great books turned into cinematic garbage, it is a little surprising to see that talented script writers could take an acorn of a great story and nurture it into a mighty oak of a movie.  Both Johnson and the writers who produced the scripts should be commended.

There is at least one story by Dorothy Johnson that has not yet been made into a movie—and it should be.  Buffalo Woman is the story of a Sioux woman, from her childhood to her days as a grandmother joining her tribe’s dangerous winter trek into Canada in search of a refuge.  Of all of her stories, I think it is the best by far and probably would have already been made into a movie if the title role had been written for a man.

Dorothy Johnson lived long enough to see the movies made from her stories.  She returned to Missoula, Montana to teach creative writing in the same university where she had graduated.  Always proud of her independence, she left instructions that her gravestone should simply read, “Paid in Full”.  Someone decided she needed an editor, today the marble slab simply reads, “Paid”.

The Cunning Fox

Depending on the culture, the fox in literature represents cunning, deceit, slyness and/or wickedness.  This means that the most honest part of Fox News is the symbolic connection to its name.

Okay, I know that Fox News got its name because the Murdoch family bought 50% of Twentieth Century Fox and spun off a cable news channel to compete with CNN.  And I will freely admit that I don’t find Fox News too significantly different or more politically biased than MSNBC, CNN, or any of the other flavors of news that cater to an increasingly divided market.  All of the various news organizations deliver the news with about the same level of honesty…which is admittedly a bar set very low.  Among the many things not to survive into the 21st century, we can add journalism and honest news reporting.

For years, I have listened to people on the left berate Fox News while people on the right berate MSNBC and their whole pointless arguments have bored me to tears.  All of the networks have smiling political pundits who are just barely intelligent enough to read the teleprompters while not messing up their perfect hair.

Everyone wants to believe that the network that reinforces their own cherished beliefs is better than the network that disagrees with them.  The networks know this and count on it to create and hold an audience, and this is why we don't have a more balanced and unbiased network.  Even a fox knows that the only thing in the middle of the road is roadkill.

After the last presidential election, however, Fox went way too far and committed an unforgivable sin.  After Donald Trump lost his reelection bid, he began claiming that the election was “stolen from him”’.  Now Trump is entitled to express his opinion, and while I personally believe that giving voice to those unfounded opinions does harm to the country, he is entitled to his opinions and all of the news organizations were justified in reporting that Trump held such beliefs.

In the weeks and months following the election, despite extensive investigations by state and federal election officials, by the FBI, by politicians, by newspapers, and by television news—none of them has found any credible evidence that President Biden did not fairly win that election.  But during those months, news commentators on Fox continued to state that the election “was stolen.” 

Doing so brought Fox additional viewers, particularly those upset that their candidate, Trump, had lost a close election.  Disappointed at the loss, many of these viewers were more than willing to accept the myth that the election was stolen.  The Fox News organization realized the potential to attract more viewers and repeated the myth on most of its evening shows.

One of the key components of the false claim of the stolen election was the oft-repeated story that the widely used Dominion voting machines had been programmed to falsify the voting results, thus tipping the election away from Trump.  Anyone who knows anything about the technology used knows that this is about as likely as hackers breaking into a toaster oven and turning it into a Formula One race car.  Seriously, if the Dominion machines had been programmed to steal the election, pulling it off it would have taken a conspiracy involving thousands and thousands of people—in multiple states and in both political parties.  It would be easier to believe that Elvis was alive and married to Amelia Earhart.

This still would have been acceptable if those commentators—people like Lou Dobbs, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity—had actually believed they were reporting the truth, but they didn’t.  Carlson and Hannity privately believed that Trump had legitimately lost the election but continued to deliberately spread falsehoods on the air.  That they deliberately misled the American people is no longer a supposition:  we have their sworn testimony from the depositions in the Dominion lawsuit against Fox.  You can read it for yourself here.  

Dominion sued Fox News and just this week, despite its claims that their reporting was protected by the First Amendment, Fox settled out of court for $767 million, which amounts to a rather obvious and expensive admission of guilt.  While the amount seems staggering, it doesn’t even put a small dent in the budget of Fox News, which generates billions of dollars a year in profits.

I deeply believe in the right of free speech, but I also believe that every American has the right to believe that his vote matters and that our elections are fair and honest.  Personally, I have never believed that voter ID was necessary, since the small number of illegal votes cast would be both statistically negligible and spread across both parties.  But, if using voter ID would mean that that more people believe that our elections are free, then go ahead and require identification to vote.  (The United States is, in fact, one of only two countries that do not require an ID, and the requirement doesn’t seem to put an undue burden on voters in the rest of the world.)

Every American needs to be able to have faith in our election process—to be able to believe that our country truly has a government by the people, for the people, and of the people.  What Fox did was to deliberately undermine that faith and to deliberately spread fear just for the sake of ratings.  Fox wanted more viewers and did not care that it was shaking the very foundations of our republic.  Essentially, Fox News was shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater.  

The Dominion settlement was far too little.  Perhaps, a just settlement might have been enough to bankrupt Fox, but it should have been at least enough to ensure that neither Fox nor anyone else behaves so recklessly in the future.

Is NPR State Sponsored Media?

For years, my good friend Jack and I have argued about various pundits on both the left and the right and their extreme political statements.  Besides throwing red meat to their base, do they honestly believe what they are saying or is this just another example of celebrities making sure their names remain in the news?  After many years of spouting semi-nonsense, do they start to believe their own press releases?

A recent example is Elon Musk’s decision for Twitter to label NPR as “state sponsored media” thus provoking an immediate angry denial by both National Public Radio and the Public Broadcast Service (PBS).  I’m not sure who was acting more childish—the billionaire needlessly affixing a label to organizations we are all familiar with or the organizations who evidently don’t know the definition of the very words that make up their names.

“Only one percent of our funding comes from the Federal government,” claims NPR.  “Public Radio is not state sponsored radio.”

Now those are interesting statements and they deserve a little investigation.  To be fair, I should say that I listen regularly to NPR and over the years have given donations that add up into the low five figures.  I will also admit to frequently being very critical of some of NPR’s policies.  At the very least, I can't understand why the folks at Planet Money can't teach Terry Gross at least the basics of economics.

Right off the bat, I can tell you that NPR does indeed receive only about 1% of its current funding directly from the federal government.  I can also tell you that the statement is a masterpiece of political bullshit deliberately crafted to mislead the public.  Let me explain.

Back in the 1960’s, during President Johnson’s Great Society Program, Washington became concerned about the quality—more specifically, the lack of it—available on the public airwaves, particularly in the rural parts of the country where regular commercial broadcasting was unavailable.  As a child growing up in a rural area of Texas, I can remember a time when our family, didn’t own a television and the family radio could pick up relatively few stations.  If you believe what I tell my sons—and I advise against it—we lived in such a remote location we had cable radio.

In response, Washington passed legislation creating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a private non-profit corporation established and annually funded by the federal government to provide quality broadcasting for all Americans.  The CPB is still in operation and its current appropriation is just a hair over half a billion dollars annually.

To fulfill its mission, CPB created the National Public Radio network in 1970 by linking together 88 broadcast stations.  Most of them were (and still are) university-run stations, with CPB providing these stations content to broadcast.  Today, the number of stations has grown to over a thousand.  For the first dozen years or so, NPR ran huge deficits and there were frequent, and well-founded, public complaints of reckless spending and political bias in the reporting.  

Fifty years ago, you could reasonably argue that not every American had equal access to quality programming.  By quality programming, I mean Car Talk, Prairie Home Companion, and (most importantly) Sesame Street.  From the way some people talk, you would be forgiven for believing that there is a constitutional right to watch Big Bird for free.  

In response to the growing political pressure to review NPR’s budget, CPB staved off the criticism by decreasing the direct funding to NPR while simultaneously increasing the funding to the member stations to enable them to buy program content from NPR.  Since CPB maintains no broadcast stations of its own, it is not responsible for the content of the broadcasts.

It is true that, today, besides the fees the stations pay to buy content, NPR has many funding sources, including endowments, corporate sponsors and listener pledges, and it is also true that all of the donated money is tax deductible.  It is also true that the stations frequently operate from public universities, often using student labor.  Public radio also pays much smaller royalty fees for playing copyrighted music than do the privately owned stations.  While it is impossible to add up all the tax breaks, free rent, free labor, and reduced licensing fees these stations receive from the government (not to mention the cost of operating totally at taxpayer expense for the first dozen years while the stations established a market position), there is no doubt that these are publicly sponsored stations that enjoy significant advantages over the commercial stations.

But what about Big Bird?  Well, Sesame Street and all the characters are owned by a separate non-profit corporation, Sesame Workshop, whose assets include the royalty rights to enough different toys and merchandise to fill a huge warehouse—Amazon alone has over 10,000 entries if you search for ‘Sesame Street’.  Altogether, the corporation is valued at over $500,000,000 and the president of the corporation is paid just under a million dollars a year.  Even if Public Broadcasting went away, you could still watch Big Bird on HBOMax.

All of the above doesn't really answer whether NPR is actually controlled by the Washington, it just addresses who is paying for them.  In my opinion, Washington probably has little to no direct control of the NPR's editorial content, so Elon Musk is probably wrong to label them as such.  

The question the public should be asking is not whether they are paying for NPR (they are), but whether we even need public broadcasting at all.  Most of the reasons for establishing public media no longer exist.  Even though I live in a relatively remote area of New Mexico, I have a device in  in my pocket that can allow me to listen to any podcast ever made, read any newspaper on the planet, and even watch all 53 seasons of Sesame Street.  You would be hard pressed to find the ‘underserved’ American audience that originally formed the reason to create public media.

Any economist worthy of the name will tell you that the only time that government should intrude into the private market is when there is a market failure—meaning that the market fails to efficiently deliver a product or service competitively to the consumer.  We allow public utilities to deliver electricity and water because history has shown us that the private market has usually failed to deliver those essential services to consumers efficiently.  

We only have NPR because of a market failure in which the private market failed to efficiently provide quality broadcast services to the entire country.  But that was sixty years ago and improved technology has dramatically changed the market.   Since the market failure no longer exists, there is no longer a compelling reason for the federal government to be competing in the free market.  As it happens, even if the government were to continue paying for public radio, the days of radio broadcasts may be soon over.

Today, it is not unreasonable to question whether broadcast radio (and perhaps, broadcast television) will survive much longer.  As the internet grows, the need for thousands of costly broadcast stations becomes increasingly less realistic.  Already, some major automobile companies, including both Ford and Tesla, have announced that future models of their vehicles will no longer come with AM radios: can the death of FM radios be that far behind?  When every consumer is able to choose between an incredible array of commercial-free streaming entertainment—much of it provided free—why would anyone want to listen to a DJ play the same few dozen songs over and over while frequently being interrupted by obnoxious advertisements for the local car dealership?

The internet, with its various music channels, blogs, podcasts, and streaming services has eliminated any need for the taxpayers to continue to fund the production of any media….Even Big Bird.

The Doom Cycle

Let me preface my remarks tonight with a small confession.  I love San Francisco, I’ve been there many times, and I have always enjoyed every visit.  For a poor dumb ol’ Texas boy, to admit that enjoy visiting San Francisco is probably some form of cultural betrayal, but I don’t care.  There are a lot of things to enjoy in San Francisco.

About twenty years ago, I took my sons, What’s-His-Name and The-Other-One, to San Francisco on a vacation and we had a ball.  On Alcatraz, my wide-eyed sons met a former prisoner and listened to his stories about life on ‘the rock.”   There are only a few of those Alcatraz alumni left—the youngest is close to 90 years old.  

I wish San Francisco had stayed that way it was then: I want to visit that place again.  I want to walk through the Embarcadero Center and eat seafood on the wharf.  I want to wander through China Town and order noodles off a menu I can’t read.  Unfortunately, that trip may have to wait a while:  the San Francisco we visited no longer exists.

Sadly, the news today is that San Francisco is in the beginning stages of a doom cycle—meaning that high crime and a declining standard of living are forcing more and more people to leave, hurting  the economy, which triggers more crime that forces more people to move out.  Stores close and displaced employees are forced to move away to find employment.  The number of mass transit riders decreases and the loss in revenue degrades the system.  Rinse and repeat until the last person in the town with a job is the mayor, who promises a miraculous recovery if the populace will just vote for the referendum that will raise property taxes…again.

Nowhere is that downward spiral more evident than in the tech sector that makes up the heart of San Francisco’s Silicon Valley.  The latest information is dire indeed:  63% of the area’s tech firms say they have either downsized their presence in San Francisco or plan to do so in the coming year.  To date, more than 72,000 tech employees have moved out since the start of the pandemic.  While people are still moving to the area, for the first time in decades, 4% more people are moving out than are moving in, and that out vs in ratio for those employed in the tech sector is a staggering negative 35%.

The real estate market is beginning to reflect the exodus, too.  The rent for a one-bedroom apartment didn’t go down during the pandemic—it went up 13%.  The price of homes is still so high that you have to wonder if the people living there actually realize that they could sell their homes, move someplace else and buy a home three times as big and still have enough money left over to put in Olympic-sized pools in their backyards.  (Seriously, folks, what’s keeping you there?  You don’t need a passport to leave that state, you know.)

Currently, there are 17 million square feet of empty office space in Silicon Valley.  That’s a number that has no meaning to most people, so let’s put it another way:  As vast and cavernous as the Pentagon is—it would take a dozen of them to equal the empty office space currently waiting for tenants around the Bay City—and more businesses are moving out than are moving in.

This means there is more empty commercial space than during the worst of the 2008 recession, and the drop in rentals is the worst in more than thirty years…And the trend is accelerating.

The list of companies that have announced that they are downsizing their offices in Silicon Valley includes almost all of the tech companies in the S&P 500 list.  Airbnb, Oracle, Yelp, Ancestry, Brex, Digital Realty, PayPal, Trulia, and Pinterest are just a few of the companies that are downsizing and half of these are leaving the area entirely.  A survey of these company’s management shows that over half of those responding would advise against a new company setting up shop in California.  A third of those responding suggested that in the future, new companies should have a distributed work force that works remotely.

If the current rate of business exodus continues, the city estimates that the property tax base will drop by 35% by the year 2028.  And if the current rate of closure of retail stores within the city continues, the drop in sales tax revenue could be worse.  (Even now, as the revenue from sales tax begins to decline, at least one clueless member of the city council is suggesting that the city should raise the tax rate to make up the deficit in revenue!)

So where are the companies going?  Among the cities listed, Austin was the most popular, with Miami coming in a close second.  If you look at the answers as to why companies are moving, there are common trends:  Companies looking to relocate wanted a state with either low taxes or no income tax, they wanted a right-to-work state and they wanted a location with either a university or a high number of highly-educated people in the tech field.

All of the above was in motion before Bob Lee was murdered this week as he walked through downtown San Francisco.  Lee created the popular payment program known as Cash App and was the chief technology officer for Block.  Lee had already moved out of the Bay Area because of the high crime rate and was only back in the city to visit friends.  He was brutally stabbed and as he lay bleeding in the street begged a passing motorist for assistance—a plea that was ignored.

Following Lee’s murder, a number of tech executives in the area have announced they are going to reconsider their firms’ remaining in Silicon Valley, and it was about this time that we started to read stories about the city being caught in a doom cycle.  

The number of tech workers remaining in San Francisco is still huge and the total population of people working in the computer industry on the West Coast is by far larger than anywhere else in the United States.  The downward trend is reversible and there is hope that San Francisco can still fix the myriad of problems that currently plague the city.  San Francisco is a “survivor”.

It wouldn’t be the first time the city has recovered from adversity.  The town was destroyed by fire in 1851 and again in 1906.  And the list of earthquakes that have damaged the city would be very long.  Each time, the city has bounced back.  Hopefully, it can do so again.

My Favorite Actor

It’s movie trivia time!  What actor appeared in more movies than John Wayne and Cary Grant combined, was in most of Frank Capra’s movies, appeared in The Wizard of Oz, got a gold medal from the Red Cross for entertaining the troops during World War II, and quietly vanished from the public eye in the 1950’s?

No, it was not Marjorie Main, but that’s a great guess, since the woman was in damn near everything.  The correct answer is, “Jimmy the Raven”.  Well…his name might have been, “Jimmy the Crow”, as there is some debate about which species of Corvid he was, but he was definitely Jimmy the Large Black Bird who worked with Jimmy Stuart, Cary Grant, and Katherine Hepburn.

Jimmy, whatever he was, was raised and trained by the famous animal trainer Curly Twiford, who claimed to have found Jimmy in the Mojave Desert, apparently abandoned in the nest.  Twiford raised Jimmy, teaching him more than 50 tricks, such as opening an envelope, bringing objects, lighting a cigarette, using a typewriter, and riding a specially built miniature motorcycle.  According to Twiford, Jimmy was as intelligent as the average 8-year-old human child, and was capable of learning a new trick in less than a week (perhaps a little longer if the verbal command to trigger the trick was two words instead of one).

You can watch Jimmy performing one of those tricks in a wonderful comedy, You Can’t Take it With You (1938), where Jimmy works in the basement and helps make fireworks.  I’d explain that, but it might spoil the movie for you.  Just trust me, it’s a great movie, directed by Frank Capra, starring James Stewart, Lionel Barrymore, and Jean Arthur.  And, of course, Jimmy the Raven—the real star of the movie.  Alternately, you can watch The Wizard of Oz and watch Jimmy torment the Scarecrow.

Unfortunately, Jimmy didn’t get much credit for the movies he starred in, since in almost all of them his name doesn’t appear in the credits.  The only exception I have found, so far, is the somewhat less than exceptional Johnny Weissmuller neo-Tarzan movie, Jungle Jim, and even there, he appears as Caw-Caw the Crow.

Twiford didn’t particularly care what you called his bird as long as you ponied up the $500 a week fee for Jimmy to be on set with a handler.  If you wanted Twiford to be present, in case the director wanted Jimmy to learn a new trick, that was an extra $200.   Twiford had an incredible stable of animals and supplied everything from bears to meadowlarks to the studio.  According to Curly, Jimmy earned enough money to pay for the room and board of the entire menagerie.

There is a great story that the director of a Ritz Brothers movie wanted 300 cats for one scene.  Even Twiford didn’t have that many cats on hand, so he advertised in the newspapers that he would pay 75 cents for a cat, no questions asked.  Since that was good money for a cat, one enterprising young teenager stole a cat from his neighbor, a policeman, and sold the cat to Twiford.  The policeman figured out what had happened  to his pet and was successful at retrieving his cat.  The teenager, figuring that with hundreds of cats on hand Twiford couldn’t tell them apart, promptly stole the cat again and collected another 75 cents.

Supposedly, after the shooting was complete, an agent from the ASPCA showed up, having received dozens of complaints from people who had lost their cats.  The director, George Marshall, gladly gifted all the cats to the agent, since the studio was paying $120 a day just to feed all the critters.  According to Louella Parsons’ column about the event, it took ten policemen to help transport all the cats to the Humane shelter.

No director hired Jimmy the Raven more frequently than Frank Capra.  Capra rewrote scripts just to include parts for the bird.  In his 1946 classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, Capra cast Jimmy as the pet crow of Uncle Billy, to help indicate that Uncle Billy was eccentric.  In Arsenic and Old Lace, Capra had Jimmy hanging out in the cemetery, to help add a somber tone to the comedy.  Strangely, though Capra used the bird in almost all of his pictures after 1934, the director didn’t mention Jimmy in his autobiography.  

We will probably never know just how many movies Jimmy appeared in.  While I’ve made a list of about three dozen movies in which I’m certain Jimmy is an uncredited star, I’ll admit that it is kind of hard to tell one raven from another.  Hell, it’s damn near impossible to tell a raven from a large crow.  The various people who specialize in collecting data on who starred in which movie estimate that Jimmy starred in more than 600 movies and fewer than a thousand.  

The last movie featuring Jimmy may be Ring Circus (1954).  About a year and a half later, Curly Twiford passed away and his menagerie critters were all sent to new homes.  No one knows what became of Jimmy, who by that time would have been more than twenty years old—fairly old for a raven raised in captivity.  

No animal has ever won an Oscar—the Academy rules expressly prohibit nominations for animals.   That is a shame, since I can think of several animal roles that have been portrayed more brilliantly than those of some of the recent winners.  Maybe it is time for a few Lifetime Achievement Awards for a few worthy animals.  Asta in the Thin Man movies, Pyewacket from Bell, Book, and Candle, Lassie, Cheetah, and Tony the Wonder Horse should all receive awards.  And—if for nothing else than the incredible number of movies he appeared in—Jimmy the Raven should definitely get an Oscar.

The Supposedly Strange Funeral of Henry VIII

Picture Henry VIII.  Fat guy with a beard, right?  I always picture Robert Shaw from the movie, A Man for All Seasons (a movie I highly recommend, even if the depiction of Henry as he is trying to divorce Catherine of Aragon is a little off).

At the time, Henry was clean shaven, slim, athletic, and rather tall.  No one is exactly sure how tall, but when his skeleton was measured in the early 19th century it measured 6’ 2”, while his custom suit of armor used for jousting was made for a man 6’ 4”.  That is just one of the many misconceptions about Henry.  Take that beard for instance:  There is a persistent legend that frequently shows up in history books that Henry, perennially short of money, imposed a tax on beards in 1535–a tax that Queen Elizabeth later tried unsuccessfully to increase.

Great story, but it never happened.  There are quite a few more completely false legends about Henry.  Take the one about his being fat.  (Well, late in life he had a 52” waist and easily topped 300 pounds, but that certainly wasn’t the case for most of his life).  Henry spent so much time playing tennis, hunting, jousting, and engaging in other athletic pastimes that he was forced to turn over almost all affairs of government to his advisors, chiefly Cardinal Wolsey.

In 1536, the king was jousting when he took a hard hit from a lance.  Not only was the monarch unseated, but the horse fell onto his legs, badly injuring them.  For the rest of his life, the king’s physical activities were greatly reduced.  Unfortunately, he continued his other great hobby:  consuming over 5000 calories a day.   

If you search the web, you can find quite a few sites that will inform you that Henry VIII killed all, or almost all, of his six wives.  This is a blatant exaggeration, for the kindhearted king only had two of them executed.  There is pretty good evidence that he even loved at least two of his wives (although not the ones that he had beheaded, of course).  There is a handy rhyme to remind you the eventual fate of his wives: divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived.

Supposedly, on his deathbed, Henry muttered, “Monks, monks, monk” as his dying words.  This was supposedly indicative of a guilty conscience for all the monks and priests the king had executed after he banished the Catholic Church.  (As if a man who had married his brother’s spouse and had two of his wives beheaded had a conscience).

In reality, as Henry lay dying of renal failure, a physician told the king that he would likely die soon.  The king asked to see the Archbishop of Canterbury, then said, “I will first take a little sleep and then as I feel myself I will advise on the matter.”  When the archbishop arrived, the king was asleep and never woke up.  As dying words go, those suck.  (My favorite dying words come from Pancho Villa.  After being ambushed, he lay dying in the street, but still had the presence of mind to say, “Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something important.”)

Of all the nonsense myths about Henry VIII, the strangest and most persistent is about his funeral.  According to the legend, his burial was so delayed that during the funeral, his rotting corpse exploded due to the hot weather, and feral dogs lapped up part of the bloody mess.  Evidently, the moral of the story was that even the high and mighty among us eventually still end up as worm food.  (Or, in this case, Alpo).

The legend is nonsense, of course.  Henry VIII died in January, when it certainly was not hot.  His body was embalmed and sealed in a lead coffin with a wax likeness of the king placed on top of the casket.  In accordance with his will, he was placed in a vault alongside his deceased wife, Jane Seymour.   The king’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, the Dowager Queen, loyal to the end, attended the funeral.   Henry’s will allocated enough funds from his estate for masses for the late king to be held daily in perpetuity.  About a year after his death, the government found other uses for the money, evidently deciding that if the late king hadn’t made into heaven yet, it was a lost cause.

Henry’s will also stipulated that the vault containing both his body and that of Jane Seymour was to be only a temporary resting place and that eventually, both bodies were to be placed inside a magnificent memorial and chapel that Henry had helped design.  A brass statue bearing the king’s likeness was cast and polished and golden candlesticks were made in preparation.  Unfortunately, after the King’s death, the country was more or less constantly at war with somebody (usually France), so the treasury was always short of cash and construction of the memorial was delayed repeatedly.  Eventually, the statue was melted down for the money and the golden candlesticks were sold to a church in Belgium. 

Over time, due to the limited space in the church, other bodies were added to the vault, including that of King Charles I and one of the children of Queen Anne.  Somewhere along the line, the church just forgot where Henry’s body was located.  After the Battle of Trafalgar, the marble sarcophagus (originally meant to hold Cardinal Wolsey but appropriated by Henry) was removed and used as the base of Lord Nelson’s tomb in St. Paul’s.  About a decade later, the church realized just who was in that vault, and the coffin of King Charles was relocated.  Finally, a bronze slab was laid over the vault indicating both King Henry VIII and Queen Jane Seymour were located there.  

So, where did the urban legend of Henry’s body exploding and being partially devoured by dogs come from?  Surprisingly, it started while King Henry was still alive.  When the Pope declined to give the king a divorce from his constantly faithful first wife, Catherine, Henry broke with the Catholic Church establishing an independent Church of England.  This started a religious civil war within the country, pitting the pious against the opportunistic clergy.  

On Easter Sunday in 1532, a Franciscan delivered a sermon denouncing the King’s lack of faith, using as his text chapter 22 from 1st Kings.  The story from the bible recounts how King Ahab died from wounds he received in battle and was buried in Samaria.  His battle chariot was then washed in a pool where the prostitutes bathed and dogs licked the king’s blood as the chariot was being washed.

From this single sermon, the legend grew and over time was embellished endlessly.   Finally, the “official” version of the event was created by Agnes Strickland when she published her twelve volume magnum opus, “The Lives of the Queens of England” in 1848.  According to Strickland, a buildup of gases within Henry’s coffin burst the coffin open and a plumber was called to repair the breach in the lead plating.  While the Church waited for the plumber, blood and gore oozed from the coffin, being lapped up by feral dogs.  

It's not too late to build that memorial for Henry VIII.  It’s been 475 years since the government of England stole those funds from the king’s estate.  With interest, that should amount to quite a sum by now if the treasury were forced to pay it back.  While there are no living direct descendants of Henry VIII, King Charles III claims to be distantly related to the Tudor royal family.  Since he has no apparent real job, he should take up the family cause and finish the memorial.

Lost At Sea

After spending the last week on Oahu, I’ve been thinking about the hazardous nature of shipping cars to these islands.   Mostly I’ve thought about this because I had to mortgage my first born grandchild to rent a Jeep Pickup for a week from a Turo, a service that does for vehicles what Airbnb does for homes.  At the rate I paid, the guy who owns this truck will have it paid for in a year. 

Note.  I was looking forward to trying the new Jeep Gladiator Pickup, it looked interesting.  Now that I’ve driven it….I don’t want one.  Pickups should have at least a six foot bed, preferably 8 feet.  This truck was fun, but basically, it was an overpowered car with an open trunk—essentially neither a good truck nor a good car.  If the Jeep people ever wise up and give it a real bed, a standard transmission, and a smaller engine, I might be interested.  With its present configuration, it is not half the truck my old 1963 Ford was.

 

From what locals have told me, shipping a car from the mainland here costs about two grand and takes about a month for a vehicle to leave the mainland and make the more than 2000 mile trip to Hawaii.  And with my luck, the shipping container containing my vehicle would be the one blown overboard. 

 

This, of course, got my mind wandering to all the great cars that have managed to be lost at sea.

 

Any discussion about great cars lost at sea has to start with the Felicity Ace, a car carrying vessel that was basically a floating parking garage filled with a little over 4000 high-end cars, including Bentleys, Lamborghinis, Porsches, and Audis.  On its journey across the Atlantic, just south of the Azores, the ship caught fire.  The various auto makers were quick to point out that the fire might have been caused by a cook’s carelessly leaving a rag on a hot grill.  Indeed, the fire might have been started by any number of ways, and it would be recklessly premature of you to think the fire was most likely caused by one of the lithium battery  powered vehicles in the ship’s hold.

 

Whether or not those highly problematic batteries caused the fire, the deadly fumes they put out was certainly the reason firefighters could not extinguish the ship as it furiously burned for weeks. The ship finally sank in March 2022, so that those hundreds of millions of dollars worth of luxury cars are two miles underwater—sufficiently deep that by the time we develop the technology to salvage ships at that depth, all that will be left will be the tires.

 

If your Porsche went down with the Felicity Ace, you will be sad to learn that the company who charged you a couple of grand to ship your car will only refund a measly $750 of your shipping fee.  Evidently, you get a partial repayment because your car did make it partway across the Atlantic.  Perhaps you can take solace in the fact that your loss is far from novel:  similar losses have occurred more frequently than you might expect—eight such ships have either sunk or lost their cargo in the last twenty-one years.

 

Of all the cars lost at sea, the most famous has to be the 1912 Renault Type CB Coupe de Ville that went down with the Titanic.  You know, the car that Rose and Jack made famous in James Cameron’s 1997 movie.  (Yes, it has been that long and, in reality, the car that was featured in the movie was the next year’s model, but it was close enough).

 

William Carter, a native of Pennsylvania, fell in love with the luxury car when he took his family to Paris.  Sitting there in the showroom, the black car with large white wheels, gold spokes, and red velvet interior was beautiful.  Carter could well imagine sitting in the glass enclosed rear while his chauffeur, exposed to the elements, steered the powerful car with its 25 horsepower motor up to the dizzying speed of 35 miles per hour.  How could any American resist?  Carter bought the car for the incredible price of $5000  (roughly $140,000 today).

 

Cameron took a few liberties with the facts.  Besides using a later model car, Cameron ignored the fact that the actual Renault was packed in a giant wooden crate, then was stowed into a packed forward cargo hold of the doomed ship.  I guess torrid lovemaking in a packing crate doesn’t sound as romantic.  (You can take solace, perhaps, to learn that at last report, Rose’s handprint left on the window of the car in a moment of passion is still visible.)

 

To date, the Renault has not been located among the wreckage of the Titanic.  Since the bow is largely intact, and the car was supposedly securely crated, it is remotely possible that someday the car might actually be recovered.  Cars in worse condition have been restored, so we might someday see that car again…or at least parts of it.

 

Of all the cars lost at sea, my favorite was lost during my lifetime and is more valuable than any of the vehicles listed above.  On July 25, 1956, the Andrea Doria was sailing to the United. States when it collided with the Stockholm  While most of the passengers of the ship made it safely off the sinking ship, 51 passengers went down with the liner.  Also sinking to the bottom, securely held in a cargo hold, was the only Chrysler Norseman ever produced.

 

The designer of the car was Virgil Exner, who incorporated all the modern innovations that Chrysler intended to introduce into its car line over next few years—features like disappearing headlights and vanishing door handles.  The most noticeable feature was a completely cantilevered roof rising from the rear of the car.  With no front pillars to block the view, the newly designed, specially hardened windows wrapped around three sides of the car.  Car collectors today say the car could easily bring over a million dollars at auction.

 

There is only one way to describe the car:  sleekly beautiful.  Powered with a V8 engine, the car had been hand-built by famed Italian coach-builder Carrozzeria Ghia, to be the star of the 1957 car show circuit.  Since the entire project was kept under wraps, few photos were taken.  Not only was the ship lost before the designers ever got to see it, but to this day, no one is sure what color the car was painted.  The B&W photo at right has been colorized.

 

Since the Andrea Doria sank, divers have descended the 200 feet to the wreck several times, and what remains of the Norseman has been located.  Shortly before the cargo hold containing the vehicle collapsed, a diver reported that what little remained was nothing but a totally rusted pile of unrecognizable metal.  Identification would have been impossible but for the four tires still waiting to drive their first mile.

What If?

Tantalizing as it might be, historians should never start playing the “what if” game.  (You know, that alternative history game in which you change one little fact and then try to speculate how much that would have changed later events).  If the Democrats hadn’t split the ticket in 1860, would the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, still have been elected?  If George Washington had been killed in the French and Indian War, would the United States have lost the Revolutionary War?  My God!  We might be speaking British today!

I have nothing against alternative history, and for a lot of people, it is harmless speculation.  Harry Turtledove has made a profitable career writing some wonderful novels about alternative history.  Alas, historians simply know too many obscure historical links, chance meetings of historical figures, and strange coincidences—too many variables.  If a historian starts thinking along those lines, there is simply no stopping point.  Before long, the poor historian is up in the middle of the night, wondering if his Aunt Sally would have been a tea cart if she’d had wheels.…or if fish ever get thirsty….or why they call it “life” insurance?

Unfortunately, even though I know the risks, I have one of those nagging little “what if” questions I can’t let go of.  And like every good historian, I’m going to start at the very beginning.

England has had male preference primogeniture since the Norman invasion in the 11th century.  Male preference primogeniture means that royal titles and entailed estates are inherited by the first-born male heir, if one exists (although, failing that, the first-born female heir can inherit).  Curiously, the law doesn’t mention who inherits if one of the ancestors is a horse, which seems clearly the case for the current British monarch, King Charles III.  

For centuries, the male heir to the throne had first rights, even if his older sister was brighter and more capable (as they quite often were).  The rule was obviously sexist, it was frequently self-defeating and it lasted far longer than it should have.  And when the law was finally changed, it was, of course, for even more self-serving reasons.

On October 10, 2010, Prince William and Kate Middleton became engaged and they were married some six months later.  Kate Middleton was attractive, articulate, and very popular.  And there was obviously a 50% chance that their first child would be female, resurrecting up for the first time in more than a century that old primogeniture law about shoving females to the rear of the royal bus.  The popularity of the British monarchy was already somewhat in decline, the Queen was old, and it was easy to see that the eventual coronation of (then) Prince Chuck would not be an overwhelming success.  Well, the law was changed in 2013 with the Succession to the Crown Act of 2013, just in time for the arrival of Prince William and Princess Kate’s first child, the current Prince George of Wales.  Since the royal tricycle motor was male, it turns out the rush was for nothing.  The next child was female, so technically, she is now third in line for the throne, beating out her younger brother.

But, what if that Succession Act had been passed earlier, say right after Queen Victoria married Prince Albert?  Queen Victoria was popular, and she had proven to be a good monarch, so why not stop the prejudice against female heirs to the throne?  

If the primogeniture law had been changed in the nineteenth century, upon Queen Victoria’s death in January, 1901, her son Edward would not have become king, instead her eldest daughter, Victoria, would have become the second Queen Victoria.  Unfortunately, Queen Victoria II would have ruled for only a very few months, before she passed away and the crown passed to her eldest son, Wilhelm.  Now, things get really interesting:   if Wilhelm had grown up to be the King of England, he would not have become Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.  

Note.  Queen Victoria, the first one, not the imaginary second one, managed to marry her children off to all the monarchies of Europe.  In the first World War, the King of England, The Kaiser of Germany, and the Tsar of Russia were all her grandchildren, thus first cousins.  The war was quite literally a grotesque family feud.

As Kaiser, Wilhelm was incredibly jealous of his uncle, Edward VII of England, and after Edward died in 1910, he was jealous of his first cousin, King George V, too.  Kaiser Wilhelm did not start World War I by himself, but he certainly pushed the rapid militarization of Germany that was copied widely in Europe.  He deliberately went out of his way to hike tensions between Germany and Great Britain.

Okay, I admit it: historians are deeply divided about whether the Kaiser was truly guilty of starting the war, and though the Allies wanted to try him for war crimes (particularly for the brutal massacre of Belgian civilians), the Kaiser never stood trial.  At the end of the war, he fled to the Netherlands at the invitation of a sympathetic Queen Wilhelmina.  Though the Allies tried repeatedly to have the Kaiser extradited, the Queen held her ground, saying that such extradition would violate the Netherlands’ neutrality.  The Kaiser spent the rest of his life living in a castle there, surrounded by his vast wealth.

The bottom line, however, is that the Kaiser was certainly partly at fault, and if he had been the King of England instead of the Kaiser, the war—had there been one—would have certainly been very different.  Perhaps his inferiority complex would even have been assuaged and the militarization of Europe would have never happened.  

If the first World War had never occurred, then the Tsar would not have been discredited by early military defeats and the entire Russian Revolution may never have happened.  Lenin would have been unable to come back to Moscow, the rise of Communism would never have happened, and there would have never been a Soviet Union.And if the First World War had never happened, then the horrible provisions of the Versailles Treaty would have never been imposed, thus—perhaps—leading to…no World War II?  And most important, if that one little law had been enacted when it should have been…. then none of us would have ever heard of Charles, his son Harry or Harry’s publicity-obsessed wife, Meghan.

Oh, and if you are interested in the continuation of the above thread, the current English Monarch would be Queen Friederike Thyra Marion Wilhelmine Dorothea von der Osten.  She is pictured at right (and, for the record, she is the one in the middle).  I have no idea what she’s like, but she has to be better than Charles, Harry, and Meghan.