The Wreck of the San Telmo

If you are a fan of adventure and expedition stories, you probably know that credit for  the “discovery” of Antarctica (in February, 1819)  south of the 60° south latitude, part of the Antarctica Treaty Area.  Close enough.

The second caveat is that he didn’t actually initially land on the distant island, since 

the area is known for tricky fog banks and, frankly, when he reported the sighting of the land, no one believed him.  So, several months later Smith went back and landed on an island (Which he promptly named for his monarch, King George, the Batshit Crazy.)  Mapmakers (being known for their puritanical nature) just recorded it as King George Island, which is the northern-most island of the Southern Shetland Islands, now also known as the Smith Islands.

William Smith also reported that he found the washed-up wreckage of a sailing ship.  We will never know if Smith found anything else because his logbook has never been located.  Since there was only one recent missing ship from the area, everyone assumed that this was the wreckage of the San Telmo.

A year later, the Royal Navy financed a larger expedition by William Smith and his ship.  On this third expedition the rest of the Southern Shetland Islands was charted and the landmass of Antarctica was spotted for the first time.  

But, what of the San Telmo?

Napoleonic France took King Ferdinand VII of Spain captive in 1808, touching off the Peninsular War.  It was during this time that most of the Spanish colonies in the new world took advantage of the power vacuum and launched their revolutionary wars for independence.  By the time the king was returned to his throne by the British Army, most Central and South American nations either had achieved independence, or had started revolutions that had progressed too far along to be quelled.

By 1819, both Argentina and Chile had broken free and were united to help Peru achieve independence.  Since Spain depended on Peruvian Silver to maintain what was left of her empire, the fighting was fierce.  In 1818, Spain sent the San Telmo, a 74-gun ship of the line to Peru—in part to carry enough soldiers to reinforce the garrisons there, as well as to escort a load of silver back to Spain.  The San Telmo was the flagship of a Spanish naval squadron under Brigadier Rosendo Porlier y Asteguieta.

Although Spain had lost a significant portion of her navy in the 1805 battle of Trafalgar, she still maintained a powerful navy of excellent warships, including the San Telmo, which was listed as, “a second-rate ship of the line”.  At two-thirds the length of a football field and 52 feet width, she was a floating, heavily armed castle, with 24-pound guns on her upper deck and 18-pound guns on the lower deck.  Including officers, sailors, and marines, she carried a  crew of 644 men.

In order to reach Peru, the San Telmo had to sail around Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America, then through the tempestuous waters of the Drake Passage—one of the most dangerous sea passages in the world.  The San Telmo would also have to sail head-on into a strong eastward current, against fierce winds and avoid floating ice while encountering constantly choppy seas.  This frigid area is known for its bad weather and the constant threat of rogue waves as high as 65 feet.  A wave like that would have towered forty feet over the deck of the San Telmo.

On September 2, 1819, another ship in the convoy observed that a powerful wave had knocked out the tiller of the San Telmo, rendering the ship impossible to steer.   While the sails could have been set to compensate for the loss of the tiller in calmer seas, in the rough waters of the Drake Passage, the ship was doomed.  The ship was thus presumed to have sunk with her entire crew.

But the mystery remains:  where did the crew perish?

William Smith knew that he was being credited for discovering a new land mass and it was very much to his advantage to be recognized as the first man to set foot on a land whose existence had been theorized but that had never actually been seen.  But could the San Telmo have drifted far enough south to have reached the island first?

The British made several expeditions to the area, in part for exploration, and in part in search of good hunting areas for both whaling and seal hunting.  James Weddell, who was in those locations between 1822 and 1824, recounted that, on Livingston Island, a great number of seal bones were found dispersed on a beach on said island along with the scattered timbers of a wrecked vessel.  As he later wrote:

On a beach  in  the  principal  island,  which  I  named  Smith’s  Island,  in  honour  of  the discoverer, were found a quantity of seals’ bones, which appeared to have been killed some years  before,  probably  to  sustain  the  life  of  some  ship-wrecked  crew ;  suggesting  the melancholy reflection that some unfortunate human beings had ended their days on this coast.

The bones had to be relatively recent, since while there are no timber-eating worms in the far southern seas, but there are worms that eat both whale and seal bones.  For shipwrecked sailors, surviving any length of time on the island would be very tough, with the average daytime temperatures hovering around the 32 degrees Fahrenheit, and dropping below freezing at night, accompanied by strong winds, frequent rain and snow.  There are not enough trees or other vegetation to provide a significant source for fuel. 

Did the surviving crew of the San Telmo reach the Southern Shetland Islands and manage to survive for a short time before they died of exposure?  If so, they were the true first discoverers of Antarctica…and they were the first to die there.

Hoarding Toilet Paper

Evidently, the local stores are out of toilet paper…again.  There is not really a shortage, but we have a panic.  Despite the fact that the vast majority of toilet paper used in the United States is made domestically, the port strikes brought up fears of a supply line disruption which caused people to begin panic buying.  Other shoppers, noticing the steadily decreasing supply, joined the stampede.  The strike is over…for now, but it may take a few days for the shelves to be full again.

To start with, I’ll confess:  I have a three-month supply of toilet paper in the garage.  This is not something new, nor did I start hoarding because of Covid, I’ve bought such non-perishable commodities in bulk and kept a large supply on hand ever since I lived on Galveston Island and kept the house stocked for potential hurricanes.  I still keep candles in the freezer and have a couple of gallons of kerosene for the lanterns stowed away in the shed, too.

Come to think of it, each of the cars has an emergency roll of TP safely stored in a one-pound coffee can.  Since Folgers moved to an 11.5 ounce can a couple of decades ago, it might be time to change the rolls.  Does toilet paper go bad?

According to the people at Cottonelle, however, I’m running perilously low on TP.  Their research, independently confirmed by several other studies, shows that the average American uses between 130 and 150 rolls of wiping paper a year.  Some of the other data collected is interesting.  Women use a little more than five times as much toilet paper as men, and people in the South use 16 rolls a year more than people living in the West.  

Periodically, toilet paper is hard to find, and usually it’s for a good reason.  When I lived on Galveston, if a hurricane’s track in the Gulf showed there was a significant chance of the storm landing near the island, days before the storm hit, people flocked to the stores and bought up all the flashlight batteries, bottled water, Spam, and toilet paper available.  The shortages were only local, and everyone in Galveston knew that even after a bad storm, the stores would be stocked up again within a month or two.

Residents of the island expected this, and if you were smart, you bought such items in bulk during the spring, and if a storm didn’t hit, you slowly consumed the extra items over the fall and winter.  This was a regular cycle and everyone on the island expected it.  Just like we knew that you could pick up a good deal on a second-hand Honda generator—never used and still in the box—right around

And then, of course, there was The Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020, due to Covid.  This was both a panic and a shortage.  While there is no doubt that some people began panic buying:  some stores were shut down and some factories shut down, so at least some of the shortage was real.  I suspect that the shortages of 2020 will always be on our minds every time there is a hint of a potential disruption of the supply line.  We’ll once more rush out and fill a grocery cart with crap we don’t really need.

The first panic I remember occurred back in 1973 and came from a surprising source:   there was a genuine gasoline shortage.  OPEC—particularly the Arab member countries—was angry over our support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War and had stopped exporting oil to us.  Gas prices shot up and there were shortages.  This in turn caused a devaluation of the dollar, resulting in foreign countries buying up large sums and amounts of American beef creating another shortage.  Faced with these very real shortages, consumers were already nervous.

In December of 1973, Congressman Harold Frolich was concerned about the paper industry in his district.  At a press conference, he announced that "The U.S. may face a shortage of toilet paper within a few months," adding that the only solution might be rationing.  This was all nonsense as there was no shortage, nor was the government even remotely considering rationing it.

This was a joke, whether Frolich intended it as such or not.  A week later during his monologue, Johnny Carson told his television audience "There is an acute shortage of toilet paper in the good old United States. We gotta quit writing on it!"

Carson had an audience of 20 million people and evidently every one of them rushed out the next day and started buying toilet paper.  The news spread and people across the nation started buying up toilet paper as fast as the stores could stock it.  Since Japan bought most of their paper products from the United States, the panic reached their country.  Japanese women stood in long lines for hours to buy small packets of paper.

After a few weeks, officials from the Scott Paper Company had several press conferences trying to reassure the nation that there was no shortage.  For the most part, these notices were ignored.

The problem, of course, was that people could see that there was a shortage, since there was no toilet paper on the shelves.  As fast as the factory could ship it, and as fast as the stores could put it on the shelves, people were grabbing it up.

CBS had Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, make an announcement on the evening news, “Unfounded rumors of a shortage has caused excessive demand at retail outlets.”  Several nights later, Johnny Carson told his audience, "For all my life in entertainment, I don't want to be remembered as the man who created a false toilet paper scare.  Apparently, there is no shortage!"

Perhaps these televised reassurances worked, or maybe people just observed that every week, more toilet paper was on the shelves, no matter how temporarily.  Or maybe everyone eventually just had enough toilet paper to last them for a while.  The panic was over.

Economists have studied why people willingly engage in such panics even though they suspect they aren’t real.  Our willingness to participate is rooted in something called “zero risk bias”.  When uncertainty threatens, people find comfort in taking action, even if they understand that the action does little to reduce the overall risk.  Effectively, we are saying that maybe we can’t control the big picture, at least we can wipe our ass.

Nancy Drew, USN

Let me start with a simple fact:  The Hardy Boys books were much better than the Nancy Drew books.  I can say this on the basis of having read 40-odd Hardy Boys books and one Nancy Drew book.  That’s a more than adequate sample size if you are both prepubescent and male.

My parents learned that, for $1.98, they could throw me a cheap mystery book and I would be (mas o menos) well-behaved for several hours.  This was peace and quiet at a price they could afford.  I later understand this concept very well when, at the age of eighteen, I ran a small café on the South Texas border and the eatery, unfortunately, had a jukebox.  After listening to Freddie Fender singing Wasted Days and Wasted Nights approximately a million times, I put a blank record in the jukebox and titled the two songs, Life After the Bomb and After Infinity.  For only a quarter, I could purchase fifteen minutes of peace and quiet.

One day (evidently because the only bookstore in our small town was out of the Hardy Boys series), my mother bought me a Nancy Drew book, written by Carolyn Keene.  Though I never told my mother, I enjoyed the book.  I still preferred Hardy Boys books, but the book was okay.  At that age, reading a book “written for girls” was like riding a mini-bike—it might be okay, but you don’t want any of your male friends seeing you do it.

I doubt that any boy ever read all 178 of the Hardy Boys books, or that any girl ever read all 175 Nancy Drew books.  Depending on how you count the books in each series, there may be many more than that, since the books were written, rewritten, restarted, and issued in hardback, paperback, and graphic novel format several times.  This is not counting the multiple movie, television series, and video games that have appeared since the first book was published in 1930.

That brings up the usual question:  Did the Hardy Boys appear before or after Nancy Drew?  Neither, both series are publications of the Stratemeyer Syndicate.  In 1896, the first series, the Rover Boys, was established along a set formula:  Each series featured set characters, a formulaic plot, a fictitious pen name for an author, and a ghost-writer who was paid a pittance to flesh out an outline handed to him by the syndicate.  The first series was so successful, that many more followed.  The Bobbsey Twins started in 1904, Tom Swift in 1910, the Hardy Boys in 1927, and Nancy Drew began publication in 1930.  The latest new series from the company is the Three Investigators, which began in 1964.  All of the above series are still in publication.

After the success of the Hardy Boys series, Stratemeyer approached the same publishers and offered them a new series, featuring a young female detective named Stella Strong.  The publishers accepted the offer and the first three novels were contracted out to Mildred Wirt Benson.  Following a strict outline, Benson wrote the stories for a flat fee of $125 without royalties.  The series was immediately successful and Benson was contracted to write five additional books for the same price.

By the time of publication, Stella Strong had turned into Nancy Drew, who was a blue-eyed blonde who had graduated from high school at sixteen, and who was the daughter of a wealthy and successful lawyer whose clients frequently paid the expenses as Nancy solved crimes associated with the cases her father defended.  Of course, that was the original series—Nancy changed over the decades.  In the early series, Nancy drove a roadster and by the fifties she drove a convertible, but in the latest books, she owns an electric car.

Note.  Somewhere, over the years, I lost most of the those early Hardy Boys Books, possibly because of how cheaply-made the books were.  I gave one of my last remaining copies to my nephew, who eagerly read it.  About forty pages into the book, he had a question, “What’s a jal-o-py?”  Now that I think of it, I wonder how many of today’s readers know what a “roadster” is?

Mildred Wirt Benson wrote the first eight books, but when the depression hit   Stratemeyer realized that, with so many writers out of work, he could lower the pay offered to his ghostwriters.  When Benson learned that the new fee would only be $75, she quit, so Stratemeyer needed a new stand-in for Carolyn Keene.

Walter Kariq was an American art student in Paris when World War I started in 1914.  Kariq wanted to fight, but the United States wouldn’t join the war for three years, so he joined the French Foreign Legion, ending the war as a Captain of Infantry.  When the war ended, Kariq worked as a writer, a columnist, and a cartoonist while he traveled the world.  He visited Mexico and Canada, spent weeks in Japan in 1935, and sent dispatches back from the Philippine Islands, the Malay Peninsula, Ceylon, India, Egypt, Italy, and France. 

Somehow, in his spare time, Kariq wrote twenty books for children, under a variety of pen names.  And, as you probably have already guessed, he was the next Caroline Keene, writing volumes eight through ten of the Nancy Drew series, starting with Nancy’s Mysterious Letter.  

When World War II started, Kariq joined the Navy, eventually rising to the rank of Captain.  During the war, he wrote numerous battle reports and articles, as well as serving on the USS Texas.  By the war’s end, he was an aide to Admiral Nimitz.  After the war, Kariq remained in the Navy, writing history books and some of the scripts of the Victory at Sea television show.  Following the war, Kariq also continued writing novels, including one of my personal favorites, Zotz!, which was made into a movie of the same name.

Walter Kariq, a combat veteran of the French Foreign Legion, a naval captain who served on convoys in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and who was an aide to Admiral Chester Nimitz—somehow managed to serve over a decade in the US Navy without anyone ever knowing that he was the author of several Nancy Drew books.

One last point:  In 2025, it will be 95 years since the first Nancy Drew book was published, meaning that the copyright on the name expires and anyone can publish their own Nancy Drew novel. Nancy Drew in Space. Nancy Drew CSI. Nancy Drew in the Dallas Cowgirls.  You should start now.

The Last Bombing

When was the last time aircraft dropped bombs on the United States?  When was the last time Americans at home were targeted and killed by attacking aircraft?

Certainly, thousands of Americans were killed by aircraft on September 11, 2001, but that is not what I am talking about.  When was the last time military aircraft attacked Americans at work or in their homes with bombs?

Pearl Harbor immediately comes to mind.  On December 7, 1941, 353 Japanese planes attacked American military targets on Hawaii, propelling the United States into World War II.  Less well known is that shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese attacked the Aleutian Islands, bombing Dutch Harbor before invading Kiska.  

In September, 1942, in the Lookout Air Raids, a Japanese submarine with a watertight hangar, the  I-25, launched a single floatplane off the coast of Oregon, that dropped two incendiary bombs near the town of Brookings.  One caused a small fire that was spotted by fire watchers in a lookout tower and was quickly extinguished; no trace of the second bomb was ever discovered.  The following day, the plane dropped two more bombs, neither of which ignited any forest fires.

Far less well known is the Japanese Fu-Go balloon attacks of World War II.  The Japanese launched 9,300 paper balloons that were filled with hydrogen; each carried four incendiary bombs and a single anti-personnel bomb.  After traveling in the jet-stream from Japan across the Pacific Ocean, a timer was set to  release the bombs over the Pacific Northwest, with the intent of starting large forest fires that would divert manpower from the war effort.  The Fu-Go was the first intercontinental weapon ever deployed.

The program was a failure, however:  No forest fires were started by the bombing program, in part because the bombs were falling during the rainy season.  Out of 9,300 bombs launched, approximately 300 were later located.   These were not exactly “smart bombs”, since the remains of the balloons were found in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming, Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, the Northwest and Yukon Territories, and at sea.  One of the balloon bombs did kill six civilians in Oregon—a party that included a pregnant woman and five children on a Sunday School picnic, who were the only civilian casualties of World War II in the contiguous United States.  

This, however, was not the last time that aircraft bombed targets in the United States.  That occurred in October, 1950, in Puerto Rico, which was an American protectorate.  Though the targets were American citizens on American soil, the bombs were dropped by American planes flown by American pilots.  In other words:  We bombed us.

Puerto Rico became an American territory in 1898 when Spain ceded the island in the Treaty of Paris.  (If you are ever on a game show and asked to name the treaty that ended a specific war, just say the Treaty of Paris, there are more than a dozen such treaties so chances are you’ll get lucky.).  By 1917, Puerto Ricans officially became US citizens—mostly so they could be drafted to serve in World War I.  They can vote for president, if they are residing in one of the fifty states at the time of the election.  (Since only 40% of Puerto Ricans still live on the island, this isn’t much of a problem.)

Though technically part of the United States, we haven’t always treated the islanders fairly, nor have the Puerto Ricans always enjoyed the protections promised them by our constitution.  While many of the islanders wanted independence—a desire that is perfectly legal under our laws providing that such desire is expressed peacefully—our government has usually reacted to such expressions in a draconian fashion.

The problems started back in the 1930’s.  The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party advocated for the island to become independent, much as Cuba had done.  Though this advocacy was legal, the US-appointed governor of the island began cracking down on the organization, arresting the leaders under the charge of sedition.  After two farcical trials—the first was declared a mistrial after the jury refused to convict and the second had a hand-picked jury—the leaders were sent to federal prison for ten years.  A few years later, the police opened fire on a Nationalist parade, killing 19 in what became known as the Ponce Massacre.  Though the police started the shooting and killed unarmed civilians, the President of the Nationalist Party was tried and sentenced to ten years in a federal prison for conspiracy to commit murder.

In 1948, the governor signed a law that became known as the Ley de la Mordaza (gag law) that made it a crime to “print, publish, sell, or exhibit any material intended to paralyze or destroy the insular government; or to organize any society, group or assembly of people with a similar destructive intent.”  You could be fined $10,000 and sentenced to ten years in a federal prison for singing a patriotic song or displaying the Puerto Rican flag.  (And remember, those were 1948 dollars, back when a new Cadillac was $2,900.)

Needless to say, this law is a complete violation of the US Constitution, particularly the First Amendment.  Feeling that they had no recourse left, the Nationalist Party called for an armed revolution, for independence to begin in 1952, on the date that the United States was going to legally change Puerto Rico from a territory to a commonwealth.  Before the uprising was set to start, the Puerto Rican police began surrounding the homes of the party’s leadership, opening fire without warning, killing several people, and arresting anyone inside the homes, charging them with ambushing the police.

The uprising started on October 28, 1950, in San Juan and seven small towns and villages.  Other than holding a few small villages, cutting a few telephone lines and burning down a post office, the revolution was a total failure.  The heavily armed police had several days’ advance warning of the revolution and were not at all hesitant to use overwhelming force to put down the revolution, usually before the Nationalist Party even acted.  Those who were not killed were prosecuted.  Typical of the results was one party leader’s  being sentenced to 20 years in federal jail for the possession of a Puerto Rican flag.

The governor declared martial law.  The United States sent ten P-47 fighter planes to drop 500 lb. bombs on the town of Jayuya, a small town with a population of 9,000.  While the planes then strafed the town, hitting almost every building, the Puerto Rican National Guard moved in, attacking with artillery, mortars, and grenades.  The town was destroyed.  There were 28 deaths in Jayuya, but there would have been much more if the townspeople had not fled.

The revolution was over almost before it was started.  A few years later, the remaining revolutionaries attempted to assassinate President Truman followed by an attack in the House of Representatives, both attacks were unsuccessful.  President Truman later reduced the lengthy prison sentences for those revolutionaries still in jail, at least one of whom had been sent to Alcatraz.  The last of those still in prison were pardoned by President Carter.  

Today, over 85% of Puerto Ricans  prefers that the island remain part of the United States, perhaps because the island residents participate in Medicare and Social Security but do not pay federal income tax.

Enema U After 55 Years

Fifty-five years ago, I was a college student.  Though still in high school, I took a single class at the community college two nights a week.  Today, I’m retired and I am once again a college student, but there have been a few changes in the last half century.

Perhaps the best change in education in the last fifty years is that college is multicultural today.  Enema U is in the arid deserts of New Mexico, but there are students from everywhere—literally from all around the world at the university.  And there are students from every imaginable background attending, too.  There were a lot of barriers to a good education back in the sixties, and thankfully, most of them have now been lowered dramatically, if not eliminated.

But I want to talk about the other changes to college.  These are mostly just the things I see as I attend class, study in the library, or walk across campus to hear a really good lecture about the painting styles of Hieronymus Bosch.

First, the classrooms are absolutely different.  In 1969, the classroom had bright fluorescent lights, open windows, a couple of fans, blackboards, and  (frequently) ash trays on the tables.  Today’s classrooms are dimly lit by LED bulbs so as not to wash out the electronic screens and projected images.  White boards and smart boards have almost completely replaced the blackboards.  And while there are still a few smokers on campus, they have all been moved to the entrances of buildings where their second-hand smoke can be enjoyed by everyone.

Today, an air-conditioned classroom with windows that still work is a rarity.  One of my classes was moved to a zoom meeting last week because the classroom’s air conditioning had failed and, though it is a beautiful classroom, due to its modern design, it would have been intolerable without air conditioning.  This is new to me:  thinking back, I believe I was a sophomore at the University of Houston before I ever saw an air-conditioned classroom.  

The most obvious change, of course, is technology.  The most sophisticated thing I owned used to be a slide rule, which is something so useless today that even my instructors have never heard of one.  Today’s students have calculators, computers, iPads, and smart phones.  The number of students still taking notes by hand on paper is a small minority.  In both of my classes today, some of the students attending are physically hundreds of miles away.  In my art history class, one of the students—previously a friend of mine—was attending a zoom class from a bench in the middle of the Metropolitan Museum of Art!  He was actually sitting in front of a painting by the artist we were studying.  (Bill, I’m so jealous I’ve decided to hate you for a few weeks!)

With only two courses left before completing my degree in Economics, I have yet to purchase a textbook in that field.  All of my course work has been delivered electronically, with online sources.  Once they’ve graduated, if any of the former economic students needs a reference book…. Well, evidently books are becoming irrelevant.  Students do their research online, rarely using the library anymore.  In a few decades, if you look up the word ‘library’ in the dictionary, the definition will say:  “li-brar-y (noun) Warehouse of yet to be scanned bound paper.”

There is a little noted side effect of all this technology:   No one can do math anymore.  In my economics class, we work with fairly complicated formulas, but in working with them you still have to know how to do simple math—something that today’s students simply cannot do in their heads anymore.  As I grew up before calculators and my instructor grew up in Kurdistan where calculators were relatively scarce, we found no problem performing simple math problems like multiplying 16 by 22 in our heads.  The rest of the class looked like they had been asked to perform magic—every hand reached for a phone to use the calculator.  After class, one of the students told me his elementary school no longer taught the multiplication tables.  If there is ever a shortage of batteries, the world will return to the dark ages in a week.

There is another  change brought about by technology:   I never hear any music on campus anymore.  There are no students playing guitars on the quad, no music in the student center, and as I walk by the dorms I hear no one playing their stereo too loud.  That’s not to say the students aren’t listening to music—they are—but it is all being done with wireless ear pods.  You see students everywhere (even during classes), sitting there with little white buttons in their ears.  Whatever they are listening to doesn’t seem to make them very happy, as they have a look of intense concentration as they live in their private worlds.

Students are different these days, too.  Back in 1969, it was the middle of the protests against the Vietnam War.  There was a general sense of involvement—students were engaged and truly believed that they were changing society.  Even at Enema U, students believed that their protests were bringing about change.  If you look at the sidewalk just outside of the administration Building, Abattoir Hall, you can dimly see scratched in the sidewalk the words “Stop the Bombing”.  Evidently messing up that freshly poured concrete worked, since it’s been more than fifty years since the US Air Force bombed any part of Southeast Asia.

Today, I can’t imagine a single cause that riles the students into a fury.  The university has raised the tuition into the stratosphere, has leased out the cafeterias to a company that serves swill at high prices, has turned a thriving bookstore into an empty t-shirt shop, and has generally ignored the welfare of the students.  All without a student protest.  I’m not sure these students would protest if you set fire to them.

Fifty years ago, students were dirt poor.  Today, a walk through the student parking lot shows a whole lot of very nice, expensive cars.  According to the Wall Street Journal, more students today are working while going to school—perhaps because of the higher tuition.  Despite the stories of students surviving on bottom ramen, every student seems to have an expensive phone and a relatively new laptop.  Perhaps this is because of the ready availability of student loans.

Okay, enough comparisons.  Who has/had it better—students today, or students half a century ago?

Well, I have to take the Vietnam War and the draft out of the equation.  There was a certain pressure to pass that calculus exam so as not to lose your student deferment back in the sixties that has no parallel today.  There was nothing to motivate a study session like knowing that if you blew the exam you would get drafted.  

Other than that, I think being a college student in the sixties was easier than today, if only because it was more affordable.  Even with the advances in technology that exist today, I think the opportunities to learn are about equal.  I guess there is one thing that has never changed:   if you apply yourself, and you work at it, you can still get a good education if you want it bad enough.

The Royal Principality of Enema U

Late night television the other night was airing the Cary Grant movie, To Catch a Thief.  It’s a great old classic, but what grabbed me was the scene where Grace Kelly was driving her car a little recklessly down a twisting coastal road.  Twenty-five years later, Princess Grace died when she missed a sharp turn on a similar road and her car plunged off a cliff.

This, of course, got me to thinking about Monaco—the tiny, strange, little kingdom that served as a home to Princess Grace.  Then, from Monaco, I started thinking about Enema… What can I say?—I have a mind like a ping pong ball (which, if you have been reading this blog for long, you already know).

In any case, it turns out that Enema U and Monaco have a great deal in common.  Once that occurred to me, the similarities became obvious.  In reality, Enema U is a small medieval fiefdom.

First off, there are the matters of size and content.  Monaco is a small, self-contained little country with its own government, laws, permanent population, police department, fire department and a migrant work force—all fitting into 482 acres.   Enema U, in comparison, has its own governing body, with separate laws, a permanent population, an independent fire department, a police force, and a migrant work force—all fitting into 900 acres.  

Yes, Enema U is slightly larger than Monaco, but this is a ag school, so we need a little more room for the cows.  

Monaco has an art gallery and a museum.  Enema U has an art gallery and a museum (as well as an excellent art department).  Monaco has a hospital, a clinic, and doctors.  Enema U has a hospital, a clinic, doctors, a medical school, and a nursing school.  Monaco has fine restaurants and hotels.  Enema U has a hotel and…. Well, Monaco is ahead on that one.  No one outside of administration has ever said that Enema U had even fair dining facilities.  The campus restaurants are leased out to a company that specializes in providing food for universities, airports, and prisons.  (I’ve always suspected that the best food goes to the prisons:  after all, no psychology major has ever shivved a cafeteria worker because there wasn’t enough ketchup.)

For centuries, Monaco has been ruled by the head of a royal family, the Grimaldis, with various ministers under him to set policy.  While Enema U does not have a royal family, we do have royalty.  Enema U has a football coach, who must be the ruler, since he is the highest paid employee on campus.  Under His Royal Coachness, there is a bus load of minor officials:  a chancellor, a provost, a dozen deans, and enough vice-presidents to form a healthy chorus of yes-men.

Monaco has a state flag and a national anthem and it is a voting member of the United Nations.  Enema U has a school song, a mascot, official colors, and is a full-fledged member of the NCAA—an organization that is far more powerful than the United Nations.  Monaco is multicultural and plays host to people from around the world, many of whom speak languages from all over the world.  Enema U has both students and staff from all across the globe and even teaches a variety of foreign languages.  

Monaco has a luxurious casino that provides most of the operating capital to run the monarchy.  Enema U would open a casino in a flash if the state government would allow it—it could be run as a joint operation by the Math Department and the Economics Department.  Until the state gives the green light, the school has a foundation that collects donations from alumni, but how the monies are spent is kept so secret that the CIA could take lessons in security.

Once a year, Monaco has a spectacular Grand Prix auto race.  Enema U has almost daily races by the students all over the surrounding community.  Hell, one student even managed to roll his car in the parking lot—let’s see Monaco top that.

Monaco has thousands of tourists daily, whose sole purpose is to spend money and leave quickly.  Enema U has the same thing, but they are called students.  Monaco has a large workforce that lives outside its border.  Enema U has a small army of staff members who commute daily, work for small wages, then leave the campus to return home.  Monaco has limited housing, but there are thousands who live within the small realm.  Enema U has thousands of freshmen who are required to live on campus in housing that is, at best, limited.

The main business of Monaco is gambling.  People come from all over the world to play the games of chance, winning and losing large sums of money in a palatial casino.  And here is the biggest difference between Enema U and Monaco.  While Enema U has a palatial football stadium where games are played, the cost is at such a high price that there are only losers.

Pigs is Pigs

Almost sixty years ago, when the original Star Trek television series was being aired, David Gerrold submitted a humorous episode that was quickly accepted by the producers.  Entitled “The Trouble With Tribbles”, the episode dealt with the crew of the Enterprise acquiring a tribble—a strange little furry alien that was both lovable and harmless.  

Unfortunately, it seemed that Tribbles multiplied so rapidly, that within days, the ship contained hundreds of them, each multiplying rapidly.  Where one of the featureless little balls of fur was lovable, thousands of tribbles were a menace.  (Actually, Spock calculated that there were 1,771,561 tribbles).  How poor Captain Kirk handles this lighthearted crisis is the substance of the plot.  (You can watch an excerpt here.) 

Shortly before the episode aired, the producers of the show became aware that there was more than a passing resemblance between the tribbles and a creature in a story written by Robert Heinlein in his 1952 book, The Rolling Stones.  In Heinlein’s version the crew of a spaceship, the Stone Family, acquire a lovable furry alien while visiting a mining camp on Mars.

Angelo tickled it with a forefinger; it began to purr like a high-pitched buzzer. It had no discernible features, being merely a pie-shaped mass of sleek red fur a little darker than Castor's own hair. "They're affectionate little things and many of the sand rats keep them for pets - a man has to have someone to talk to when he's out prospecting and a flat cat is better than a wife because it can't talk back. It just purrs and snuggles up to you."

Soon after the flat cat arrives on spaceship, the flat cat has eight “kittens”, each of which soon delivers a kitten of its own.  And so forth.  In the Heinlein version, the Stone family solves the problem by banishing the flat cats to a refrigerated cargo hold that puts the little Martian critters into hibernation.  Eventually, the surplus flat cats are sold off to lonely miners in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.  (You can read the entire book here.)

When the producers questioned David Gerrold about the origin of the story, he admitted that he may have unintentionally borrowed the idea from Heinlein.  (Gerrold may have unintentionally borrowed ideas from other authors as well, one of his other scripts bears a striking resemblance to West Side Story.)  As T. S. Eliot said, “Good writers borrow; great writers steal.”

Gene Coon, one of the producers of Star Trek reached out to Heinlein, sending him a copy of the script and asking the author for his approval.  Heinlein, a fan of the television show, graciously waived his rights, not even asking for a credit line when the episode aired on television, saying that he had borrowed the idea for flat cats from Ellis Parker Butler’s book, Pigs is Pigs.

At this point, you’re probably asking, “Who the hell is Ellis Parker Butler and what is Pigs is Pigs?”

A century ago, Butler was a well-known humorist, writing books and magazine articles.  Though he was primarily known for his day job as a prominent New York banker, he also published over 30 books and more than 2,000 short stories (the stories were published in leading magazines, alongside works of such contemporary authors as Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Arthur Conan Doyle.  He created the character Philo Gubb, a detective who solved crimes while murdering the English language.  

Sadly, we frequently forget the works of authors soon after they die.  As Mark Twain once remarked, “The very memory of the departed author is frequently lost, and even the works of many, once in great favor, are soon forgotten.”  

In the case of Ellis Parker Butler, this would be a mistake, because there is a timeless humor about most of his works and his writing is eminently readable.  If you can find them, that is…I checked the local libraries and found but one single copy of any of his books.  Luckily, they are all available online as electronic editions.  I bought the complete works of Butler from Amazon for $2.  (By “complete”, they meant 32 books and short stories, but it is a nice collection.)

By far the most famous of Butler’s works is the short story, Pigs is Pigs.  First published in American Illustrated Magazine in 1905, it was published as a short, illustrated book the following year.  I was able to find a great first edition copy for $10 at a used bookstore in New Jersey, but you can read it online for free here.

In the original story, Mike Flannery is the railway agent in the small town of Westcote.  A devoted company man, Flannery operates strictly by the rule book of the Interurban Express Company.  When a consignment of two guinea pigs arrives, Flannery wants to charge the freight rate for pigs, thirty cents per head.  The consignee, a skinflint Scotsman named Morehouse, refuses to pay more than twenty-five cents per head, the published rate for pets.  When neither man will budge, Morehouse leaves, promising to complain to the home office.

As you have probably guessed, the guinea pigs rapidly multiply while correspondence to and from the home office slowly debates whether ‘pigs is pigs’ or ‘pigs is pets’.  By the time the matter is resolved, there are tens of thousands of guinea pigs.  This is a slight exaggeration, of course.  If Spock can do the math on tribbles, I can do the math for guinea pigs.  Assuming that the first two guinea pigs were both female, both pregnant, and both delivered the day they arrived in Westcote, by the end of a year, the maximum population possible would be 3,636 guinea pigs.  (I’ll spare you the calculations, but guinea pigs mature in 60 days and can have five litters a year.)

In 1910, Edison labs made a movie based on the story.  Another film and an animated cartoon soon followed.   Since these were published in the early days of cinema, Butler didn’t receive any screen credit (let alone, any pay) for use of his work.   Finally, in 1954, Walt Disney produced a high quality color cartoon of the story, that was nominated for an Academy Award.  Though the opening scene briefly displays an animated image of the book, the author’s name is so dim that I had to enlarge the picture to see the faded words, “Ellis Parker Butler”.  I doubt that even a few who watched the cartoon noticed it.  In the opening credits, Disney even says the story is by Leo Salkin.

The Star Trek episode about the tribbles was so popular that later Star Trek series—Star Trek Next Generation and Deep Space Nine—referenced the original episode.  One of the world’s best-selling science fiction authors used Butler’s plot.  And two movies and two cartoons (one of which was nominated for an Academy Award) were published based on the original story. 

And all of this was done without anyone’s giving Ellis Parker Butler any credit.

It’s a New Semester at Enema U

For days now, the residents of my sleepy little town on the high desert of New Mexico have known that a new term was about to start at Enema U, the rather bad football team with a university attached to it like a barnacle on the Titanic.  Almost overnight, our streets turned into racetracks, and it became impossible to drive anywhere without a four-wheeled proctologist six inches off your rear bumper.

The start of classes had the familiar feel—impossibly packed parking lots, lots of strange, leaflet-wielding people who are standing in the hot sun, telling you that their God was the only true God, and students wandering aimlessly around, trying to find the correct building that is represented by only two code letters on their class schedules.  The latter task was made much more difficult because, for some reason, the names had been removed from the outside of several buildings.

After a few decades of being a faculty member, I enjoy being a student again.  And why not?  I hear good lectures on interesting subjects, I have the luxury of being able to use faculty parking, I do my studying in a well-maintained parklike setting, and most importantly of all, retired faculty are allowed to take classes without paying tuition.  Currently, I’m simultaneously a senior in pursuit of degree in Economics and I’m a grad student in pursuit of a degree in Art History.  

Taking a somewhat eclectic mix of classes means that besides being probably the only student to carry a graphing calculator into the art building, I get to talk to a wide variety of students.   Perhaps one of the most frequent topics brought up is student loans.  It seems that almost everyone has borrowed money to attend classes, but—interestingly enough—no one has mentioned the idea of the government’s forgiving those loans.  Since these are students still in college, I assume they have confidence that their future careers will enable them to easily pay back those loans.

Regarding some of them, I have no doubt that they are correct, but as for too many others, I’m a little worried.

Most of the students majoring in business, accounting, and economics seem to have a well-thought-out plan of what they intend to do:  whether they intend to go on to grad school, whether they intend to leave the state after graduation (depressingly, almost all of them do), and what kind of jobs they want.  A surprising number of them have already made strong connections with their future employers.  

One student had a very well-thought-out plan.  Raised in Juarez—his home is literally within sight of the U.S. border—he was labeled a foreign student on a student visa.  Perhaps one of the brightest students I have met recently, he had a double major in math and economics, he was graduating at the end of the semester, and he was already being courted by a number of prestigious companies.  He confided to me that while he wanted to accept the job offer he had from a New York bank, he probably was going to accept the offer from a company in London.  The reason?  His student visa expires after graduation, and he is not assured of being able to secure a new visa that would allow him to work in the US.

In a time when millions and millions of people from all over the world just walk by that young man’s house on their way across the border, we allow one bright young man to come to America long enough to earn two college degrees at a college heavily subsidized by both state and federal tax dollars—then force him to work in Europe before he is able to pay income tax!

New Mexico proudly grows green chili, pecans, and cotton.  We also produce microchips, aircraft parts, and an amazing amount of petroleum.  Our most significant export, however, may be the college-educated young men and women who must flee our state each year in search of employment.  If that wasn’t bad enough, now we are exporting them to London.

Perhaps equally heartbreaking was the young girl I met who was pursuing a degree in music with an emphasis on vocal performance.  This was a very bright young lady who had excelled in school and had been told from an early age that she must go to college and “do something good with your life.”  So, she went to college and for lack of any idea what to do, had ended up studying music.  She’s a senior and has received absolutely no job offers from anybody.  She is currently thinking about going to graduate school in education so she can teach school but is a little concerned about the mounting debts she is accumulating with student loans.

Please don’t misunderstand me:  I am not advocating for turning universities into trade schools—and there is absolutely nothing wrong with vo-tech education.  (And there is also nothing wrong with a liberal arts degree—Hell, I have half a dozen of them!)  If the only way you can be happy is studying some obscure field with few employment prospects, then you should go ahead and pursue that career.  What bothers me is how many students pursue college education without knowing anything about the cost or future benefits of a career in that field.

If I can go down to my local Lowe’s to buy a refrigerator—and that is the only reliable place to buy a household appliance today—Lowe’s and the manufacturer are required by law to provide me with energy information, warranty information, safety information, and the size, capacity, available features, and model number of the refrigerator.  I must be told an estimation of the cost of running the refrigerator for a month, and all of this information must be given to me in an obligatory manual, so that I know precisely what my money is buying.

On the other hand, if I want to pursue a degree in philosophy (which nationwide leads to employment in that field a whopping 9.1% of the time), the university will never give me any information about my chances of future employment, the average salaries in that field, or even what the average monthly payments will be for the student loans I’ll be forced to take out to pay for my education.  Give me at least the same kind of information you would if I were buying a fridge.

I’m not advocating that universities should stop teaching any particular classes.  (Well, they could burn down the College of Education and the average IQ on campus would dramatically improve.).  I just think that before universities help students take out large student loans, they should provide a little information about the likelihood of employment in that field and the average salary.  

Do you want to know a staggering statistic that is NEVER shared with students?  The average lifetime earnings of students who successfully received a college degree in Early Childhood Education, Fine Arts, or Human Services and Community Organization is, on average, lower than that of high school dropouts.  

And high school dropouts don’t have any student loans to repay.

Political Sense but Economic Folly

The presidential election is looming and both candidates are pushing their economic plans for the nation.  Predictably, each promises to lower inflation, to increase employment, and to build the middle class, while warning us that the insane plans of their opponent will bring about a recession, unemployment, and genital warts.   

I want to discuss the economic plan broadly outlined by Vice President Kamala Harris today.  The key word in that sentence was “broadly” since few details were given.  In case you think I’m picking on Harris, let me say I am not fond of the economic plan of former President Trump, either.  Since both candidates seem to be moving away from free trade, I think that both need a semester of freshman economics.  Nonetheless, Harris proposed hers today, so I’m talking about hers now.

The proposal to provide first time homebuyers with up to $25,000 assistance for a down payment doesn’t need much scrutiny, because such a bill has little likelihood of passing.  If it were passed, this bill would increase demand while doing nothing to increase the supply of homes for sale.  Since increasing demand faster than increasing supply guarantees both shortages and higher prices, this proposal would be dead on arrival (at least as it was presented today).

If you really want to reduce the cost of housing, the fastest route would be to lower the cost of production, thus increasing supply.  The easiest way to do that would be to reduce the cost of government regulations on home construction.  According to a study by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), the regulations imposed by all levels of government account for approximately $93,870, or about 24% of the current average sales price of $397,300 of a new single-family home.  While this is a national average, the cost of regulations in some areas—think California—is twice that.  (And this regulatory cost has increased by more than 10% during the Biden Administration).

Harris proposed a new federal statute limiting the sale of homes to corporations seeking rental income.  Ignoring the problematic constitutionality of such a proposal, wouldn’t it be better to focus on the cause of the problem?  If government regulations limit production while our country’s immigration policy insures a growing demand, why wouldn’t corporations in search of a steady profit stream invest in housing?  I would also point out that large corporate landlords have a lower overhead cost due to a larger economy of scale and may very well offer lower rents and better service than private owners renting out single houses. 

Nor am I going to spend much time discussing the idea of controls.  Vice President Harris didn’t actually mention price controls, she called it “federal laws against price gauging”.  (We can only assume she meant price gouging.)  Strangely, Harris believes that central regulation is necessary to control the price of food in an industry where the current average profit margin is a measly 1.6%.  Since price controls have a long, long steady record of complete failure in lowering prices, it is hard to believe that Congress would risk almost certain failure to lower prices 1.6%.  I would point out that oil rich Venezuela’s price controls on food have been so successful that the inhabitants of Caracas broke into the zoo and ate many of the animals.

I would also point out that Vice President Harris, the former senator from California and a long-term resident of San Francisco, did not mention controlling prices in Silicon Valley, where the average profit margin is 44.13%.  As a point of reference, the national average profit margin for businesses is roughly 8.5%.

For me, the most disturbing parts of Vice President Harris’ economic plan are the areas that she only hinted at.  For example, there are vague references to giving the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) more power to prosecute price gouging.  The FTC is already tasked with this job but over the last three and a half years has been remarkably unsuccessful in any of its attempts to prosecute  companies.  Without specific details, the voters can only speculate as to how Harris intends to implement her economic policies, but we can project that she will propose legislation similar to what Senator Elizabeth Warren has introduced—a bill that Harris has strongly endorsed.

One of the measures in the bill would empower the FTC to “require companies to publish detailed internal data about costs, margins, contracts and their future pricing strategies.”  What Warren—and evidently Harris—seem not to understand is that published pricing plans allows companies to legally and publicly collude to set prices artificially high.

Allow me to demonstrate.  I collect Golden Age Mystery novels, particularly hard back editions of books by Rex Stout and Ellery Queen.  If, for example, I needed a copy of The Doorbell Rang by Rex Stout, I could easily search the internet for copies available from used book stores.  Right now, I could take my pick of purchasing a good quality hardback edition of this book from stores in Reno, Dallas, Atlanta, and Phoenix.  All four stores will sell me a copy for $6.24.

Doesn’t that seem strange?  $6.24 is a rather odd amount, and how is it that all the stores have the same price, exactly to the penny?  If I search for the same book on Amazon, they list almost a dozen used bookstores eager to sell me a copy for $6.29.  Exactly $6.29.

This is not a coincidence; it is an example of what happens when retailers publicly publish prices.  Almost every used bookstore in America lists its books for sale on Abebooks.com, a central listing point for used books.  When a bookseller obtains a new book, it can easily check for the prevailing price for that book among its competitors.  If you are curious why the bookstores on Amazon are a nickel higher than those listed on Abebooks, I presume it is a handling fee for Amazon.  You see, Amazon, the world’s largest seller of new books owns Abebooks, the world’s largest seller of used books.

Somehow, this price collusion is legal and absolutely results in me paying a higher price for books.  If grocery stores were forced to publish their prices, we could expect the same result for food prices.

So much for the Harris economic plan.  Even if she is successful this fall and becomes our next president, none of the policies listed today is likely to ever become law.  None of the proposals makes any economic sense, but all do make political sense.  This nonsense will probably become popular with some voters.

Unfortunately, the people who have taken freshman economics are outnumbered by those who haven’t.

The Debates that Never Were

By the early 1960’s, it was obvious that television and the daily news coverage were changing politics and how our candidates were being elected.  It wasn’t an accident that Disney had created campaign ads for Eisenhower or that it was a televised presidential debate had catapulted Kennedy into the White House ahead of the front-runner, Nixon.  Nor was it an accident that, just 20 years later, an actor-turned-politician was elected president.

Increasingly, campaigns became more about optics and sound bites and less about issues and policy.  John F. Kennedy, despite being an obvious benefactor of this trend, (to his credit) wanted to change the trend and bring back the days of whistle-stop campaigns and issue-driven elections.

By 1963, the upcoming presidential election was obviously going to be a contest between Democrat Kennedy—who would be seeking reelection—and Republican Barry Goldwater.  Even though Kennedy was a New England liberal and Goldwater was a Western conservative, the two men were close friends.  Despite being political rivals, the two men often discussed issues, with Goldwater even advising the President about how his policies were being received in various parts of the country. 

Simply put, the two friends had agreed to disagree on some issues and could still discuss ideas on which they were diametrically opposed.  This is a skill that has lately become as rare as impartial news reporting, but still exists in a few isolated cases.  My friend Jack, for example, despite being a Yankee who will be embarrassed beyond measure for being mentioned in this blog, differs with me politically on most issues, but in our Laphroaig-laced discussions, we almost always reach a mutually acceptable compromise.   We can do this because there are no overpaid talking heads deliberately twisting our conversations into messages that will fit on a bumper sticker. 

President Kennedy longed for the country to return campaigning back to the days of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, when the two rival candidates for the Senate traveled over 4,000 miles, debating in each Illinois congressional district.  Though the two men did not travel together (Douglas traveled in style with a private railway car that was  equipped with a cannon that was fired at each stop to signal his arrival while Lincoln traveled by coach and boat), they met frequently and had known each other for years.

During the seven debates, the first candidate would speak for an hour, followed by a 90-minute rebuttal.  Finally, the first candidate would end the debate with 30-minute closing remarks.  The two candidates alternated who started first at each of the seven debates.  In an age before television, the three-hour debates were considered great entertainment and attracted large crowds.

President Kennedy proposed to Senator Goldwater that the two men should join together in the upcoming presidential campaign, traveling in the same plane, The Caroline, owned by Kennedy (The Caroline was the very first presidential campaign plane).  They would stay in the same hotels, debating each other at stops across the country.  These debates would be a substantive discussion of issues and policies, not media stunts. 

The logistics of such a campaign were still being discussed when Kennedy was assassinated, ending the dream of holding such debates.  Demoralized, Goldwater even announced that he was dropping out of the race, though months later his party successfully convinced him to reenter it.

There was sharp contrast between the friendship of Kennedy and Goldwater, who respected each other, and the visceral hatred between Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson.  There were no presidential debates in 1964, which makes that race the only presidential campaign since 1960 that has lacked a televised debate.  Absent the cordiality of friendly debates, the race once more became a media circus in which discussion of policy was replaced with sound bites, partisan attacks, and misleading television ads that featured more emotion than honesty.

During the 1964 presidential campaign, the most infamous advertisement was the "Daisy" commercial aired by Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign.  This 60-second spot, which aired only once, on September 7, 1964, depicted a young girl counting petals on a daisy, followed by a chilling sequence of a nuclear explosion.  The commercial was designed to evoke fear and highlight the perceived danger of Barry Goldwater’s stance on nuclear weapons and his perceived willingness to use them.  The imagery of the atomic blast was a powerful and visceral representation of the stakes in the election, aimed at convincing voters that Goldwater's aggressive rhetoric would lead to catastrophic consequences.

The ad never mentioned Goldwater and was only aired as a paid political advertisement once, but was played repeatedly by news programs.  Within a week of the paid spot, it would have been difficult to find a single voter who was unaware of the advertisement.  You can watch the ad here.

The "Daisy" commercial had a profound effect on the electorate by playing on the public's fears of nuclear war.  It successfully framed Goldwater as a dangerous extremist whose policies could escalate into a global catastrophe.  This dramatic and emotional appeal resonated with voters, contributing significantly to Johnson's landslide victory.  The ad underscored the power of television in shaping public perception and so it became a defining moment in campaign advertising, demonstrating how fear and emotional appeals could influence electoral outcomes.

Whether or not Kennedy would have been successful in changing the format of presidential debates is one of those “What If” games that can kill hours and drive historians insane.  Kennedy seems to have been committed to the idea, but as a politician he was also committed to the idea of winning.  In addition, traveling with Goldwater would have inevitably elevated Goldwater in the eyes of voters.

Kennedy wanted to change the nature of presidential debates before the trend of media-driven campaigns became fixed.  It is too late now for such an idea to take hold.  Presidential campaigns have become billion-dollar businesses in which far too many people have a vested interest in continuing their particular partisan circuses.  All we can do now is keep buying tickets to the show and continue watching the clowns.

The Three Thirteenth Amendments

The U.S. Constitution, despite its remarkable endurance over more than two centuries, requires amendments to remain relevant in addressing contemporary issues and societal changes.  Originally designed to establish a foundational framework for governance, it set out broad principles that have needed refinement and expansion to adapt to evolving political, social, and technological landscapes.  For instance, as new civil rights challenges and social justice issues emerge, amendments are necessary to ensure that the Constitution addresses these concerns comprehensively and equitably.  The relatively small number of amendments—just 27—reflects both the Constitution’s inherent strength and the deliberate process required to alter it, emphasizing the balance between stability and adaptability in the American legal system.  

The rigorous amendment process deliberately established by the Constitution itself is a double-edged sword.  It requires a significant consensus across both federal and state levels, ensuring that changes reflect broad national agreement and withstand partisan shifts.  This high bar for amendment has contributed to the Constitution’s stability, making it a lasting document that provides consistency in governance.  However, the difficulty of amending the Constitution can also lead to stagnation, where important updates are delayed or sidelined due to the complexities of garnering sufficient support.  As a result, while the small number of amendments highlights the strength of the original framework, it also underscores the challenges of adapting constitutional provisions to modern realities.

Besides the national constitution, every state has its own individual constitution.  These are much longer documents that tackle a broader range of legal issues.  They are much easier to amend, with some states having passed hundreds of amendments.  Alabama currently sets the high water mark with 950 amendments.  

In comparison, amending the national constitution is extremely difficult.  First, the amendment must pass in both the House of Representatives and the Senate by a two-thirds vote.  Since it hard to get two-thirds of any group of politicians to agree on loving their mothers, but even less anything else, this is a high hurdle.    Should the proposed amendment secure congressional approval, it then has to be ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures.  I’m not sure that three-fourths of the state legislatures are staffed by politicians who ever had mothers

With the difficulty involved in passage and ratification of a proposed amendment, you can understand why the Constitution has only been amended 27 times and why it is highly unlikely that the constitution will be amended any time soon.  There are no currently pending amendments passed by Congress likely to be ratified by state legislatures in the near future.

There are, however, six amendments that have been passed by Congress that could—but won’t—be passed by the state legislatures.  They are still on the books and if a miracle (or six) happened, they would become laws.  One of these amendments is the Equal Rights Amendment—an Amendment that has been pending ratification for decades and is still unlikely to pass anytime soon.

Among the other comatose amendments are two amendments that were supposed to become the 13th Amendment.  These are not the amendment that was ratified in December 1865, that eliminated slavery in the United States, but earlier amendments that were passed by Congress and were ratified by a few states, then simply fell into legal limbo.  They are not laws, but are still valid pending amendments.  If sufficient states were to suddenly choose to ratify these laws, they would become valid constitutional amendments to the United States Constitution.

The first 13th Amendment proposed was the “Titles of Nobility Act” that revoked the citizenship of any American who accepted a title of nobility from any "emperor, king, prince or foreign power".  While two separate articles in the U.S. Constitution already prohibited both the federal government or any state from issuing any form of title of nobility, this proposed amendment went a step further, eliminating any chance of a citizen with formal ties to another government from running for an elected office.

The reason for the proposed amendment was, of course, Napoleon…Jerome Napoleon, the youngest brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, married an American woman, Betty Patterson of Baltimore.  Their son, Jérôme Napoléon "Bo" Bonaparte, was both an American citizen and an heir to the Bonaparte royal line.  Though Emperor Napoleon I annulled the marriage by royal decree, it was later restored by Emperor Napoleon III.  

Fearing some form of future royal political career for the young Bonaparte, or the creation of a Legion of Honor with ties to Europe, the proposed amendment was passed by Congress and came close to being ratified by a sufficient number of states to become a valid amendment.  The confusion about the number of states necessary to ratify the amendment became confusing as new states were rapidly joining the union, causing some 19th century law books to mistakenly state that it had become law.  Today, ratified by 12 states, it still  needs the ratification of an additional 26 states to become law.  

The “other” 13th Amendment is the Corwin Amendment, which has been adopted by Congress but also lacks ratification by enough states to become a valid amendment.  It was proposed by Ohio Senator Thomas Corwin in 1861 and was quickly passed by Congress in the time between Abraham Lincoln’s election and his inauguration.  Today, the Corwin Amendment is also known as the “Ghost Amendment”.

The Corwin Amendment was passed in response to the escalating tensions between the Northern and Southern states in the lead-up to the American Civil War.  At the heart of the amendment was an attempt to prevent the dissolution of the Union by addressing Southern concerns about the federal government's slowly growing power over slavery.  The amendment was designed to provide a constitutional guarantee that Congress would not interfere with slavery in states where it already existed, aiming to reassure Southern states that their way of life and economic interests would be protected.  The hope was that this concession might persuade Southern states to reconsider their secessionist stance and remain within the Union.

Additionally, the Corwin Amendment was part of a broader effort to seek a compromise that would preserve the Union and avoid the impending conflict.  The political climate was desperate, war was imminent, and many leaders believed that some form of compromise was essential to prevent the fragmentation of the nation.  By offering constitutional protection for slavery, the amendment sought to address one of the most contentious issues of the time, hoping to defuse the immediate crisis and create a basis for dialogue.

Support for the bill came from both the North and the South.  Though Lincoln never openly supported the bill, he did make sure that copies of it were sent to the legislatures of Southern states, hoping that those states might choose ratification over secession.  President Jame Buchanan, still president until March 4, 1861, wholeheartedly supported the measure and insisted on signing the legislation even though there was no legal reason to do so.

The proposed amendment was ratified by only five states—far short of the number necessary for it to become law.  Southern states chose secession, and the Civil War was the result.  Even though three of the five states later rescinded their ratification (a process of dubious legality), the adopted amendment could still become law if ratified by enough states.

The adopted amendment states:

No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.

The Corwin Amendment, like the original U.S. Constitution, carefully avoids the use of the word “slavery”, substituting instead the euphemisms “domestic institutions” and “involuntary servitude”.

Even today, if sufficient states were to ratify the Corwin Amendment, it would become the 28th Amendment and would invalidate the 13th Amendment, returning slavery or involuntary servitude to those states whose state constitutions have not specifically outlawed the practice.  Those states are Alabama, Arkansas, California, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Oregon, Tennessee, and Vermont.   

Although there is almost no chance that another two dozen states will ratify the Corwin Amendment, maybe it is time for those remaining eleven states to amend their state constitutions.