Face Masks and Enema U

First, a couple of confessions.  I hate wearing a mask in the classroom.  With every breath, my glasses fog up and the world briefly vanishes.  While talking a test the other day, I suddenly realized that I was subconsciously holding my breath while reading the exam.  If it turns out I flunked it, I’m going to blame it on the lack of oxygen.  

Secondly, I don’t know a damn thing about whether masks are effective or not.  I tried, like everyone else working on a Google Doctorate of Medicine, to do my own online research and eventually ended up watching videos of cats riding on Roombas.  I’m going to let my wife, The Doc, handle that problem and just wear the mask she gave me.  (I don’t know why I bothered, since after a half century of married life, I have long since learned that the only two problems I am in charge of are bugs and loud noises after dark.)

Now, that I have confessed my ignorance of all things masked, I find the current Covid policy of Enema U to be a little…. well…. useless.  First, everyone has to wear a mask indoors, maintain social distances, and either get vaccinated or be tested weekly.  Or maybe it was weakly.  In any case, very little of that is actually happening.

Okay, everyone is wearing a mask indoors.  Some people are even wearing them over their noses.  And those who remove their masks to sip at the ever-present coffee cup or thermos, usually put them back on.  (Officially, food and beverages are not allowed in any classroom, a rule that is followed religiously—which means the rule is only enforced on Easter Sunday.)

If a student doesn’t have a mask, they can walk into the building, continue down the hall, and go into their classroom, where they can ask the professor for one provided by the university.  The guidelines are unclear on the concept, but presumably the student is supposed to hold his breath until he receives his mask.

The university’s guideline on social distancing is also ignored.  Of the rooms in which my classes meet, if we were to strictly uphold the six-foot minimum spacing, half the students would not be able to enter the room.  Crowded doorways, restrooms, stairs, and hallways will remain the norm until someone redesigns the way the classrooms are built.

While every faculty member and student must provide either proof of vaccination or negative results of a weekly Covid test, these rules were enforced only after the first five weeks of the semester.  Hopefully, the virus, infused with school spirit, patiently waited though this period before it began to spread across campus.

Needless to say, I think most of the measures the administration is invoking to fight Covid will probably prove to be fairly ineffective.  But, I also think the university is doing the best job it can under these conditions.  You can’t rebuild the classrooms, you can’t turn the faculty into mask police, and you can’t control human behavior, though they have periodically tried to do so.  The administration might have instituted the vaccination policy a little earlier, but overall, I give the university a good, solid “B” on its Covid policy.  While I find the conditions to be slightly humorous at times, I’m also grateful I wasn’t tasked to do this impossible job.

College students are, at least technically, adults.  Everyone attending a face-to-face class does so knowing the dangers, and chooses to take the risk of being there in exchange for pursuing an education.  (That voluntary acceptance even includes that weird old, gray-bearded man taking freshman economics courses.)  While the choices may be harder for the faculty, ultimately, they too, are there by choice—something for which the students should be more grateful.

However, not everyone at the university deserves a passing grade.  Alone among the faculty, one professor used his classroom (and his students) as a way of spreading his own personal political opinions and biases.  He refused to wear a mask, refused to be vaccinated, and refused to submit to weekly Covid tests.  These were all ‘impositions upon his freedom’, he declared, daring the administration to take any action against him.

The administration, of course, promptly removed the onus of teaching from him, placing him on leave pending a final decision on his continued employment.  Since then, this lone professor has found any number of avenues via which to voice his opinions about his being placed on leave, about the results of the last presidential election, and on several other rather bizarre topics, managing to blame a large number of people for his troubles in the process, while accepting no personal responsibility for them in any way.

Personally, I believe that every person has the right to decide for themselves whether they wish to be vaccinated.  Although I believe in vaccinations, I also believe the first freedom you give others is the right to make bad choices.  If a person refuses to be vaccinated, that is their right.  I also believe just as strongly, however, that a business has the right to set standards and rules for its employees.

Long before I set foot in a classroom this semester, the university set clear standards for both students and faculty.  As a condition of my enrollment, I accepted these conditions.  As a condition of his continued employment, this professor knew what was expected of him—not only by the university, but by the students in his classroom.  It was within his rights to decide to refuse these conditions and leave the university system.  The university is also within its rights to give him the ultimatum to comply or leave.

The university goes to bizarre lengths to avoid this kind of public confrontation, and I’m reasonably sure that if this professor had wanted to avoid a public fight, he could have taken a semester off or have taken a sabbatical, while continuing to be paid.  Alternately, he might have taught his classes online, avoiding any necessity to be on campus.  The professor obviously chose to make this a public fight, satisfying his ego while sadly ignoring any responsibility to the students, who are the ultimate losers in his needless confrontation.

Employers are capable of making demands that employees do not like, and if they wish, these employees can refuse their paychecks and seek employment elsewhere.  That Enema U is a part of the state government does not change this simple fact.  

On second thought, perhaps the professor is teaching the students a valuable lesson after all.  As a far better writer than I once remarked:

“A person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or doubtful.”  Mark Twain – Tom Sawyer Abroad.

William Mack Lee and the Lost Cause

Having spent the first few decades of my life studying machines and computers, in the nineteen eighties I decided it would be more fun to study people by pursuing degrees in history and anthropology.  I was embarrassingly old before I discovered something that should be painfully obvious to anyone who has paid attention in a high school history class:  that throughout history, there have been no guilty people.

Well, there have been a lot of truly evil people over time, but each of these villains has been perfectly innocent in his own mind.  No matter what people have done, they convince themselves that they are always justified in their actions by forces out of their control.  This reasoning, of course, is nonsense, but people have an inherent need to find ways to justify their actions, no matter how utterly wrong they may be to the rest of us.  People who cannot find a way to do so, probably go mad.

This same inherent need to justify actions evidently applies to large groups of people in a collective need to explain actions that otherwise appear reprehensible.  So it is with Southerners still trying to explain away slavery and the Civil War.  Almost immediately after the war, Southerners wholeheartedly accepted the negationist theory of the Lost Cause—an absurd belief that the actions of the South were somehow honorable and that slavery was not the root cause of the war.  

While the North and the South differed on several issues, all the arguments except slavery could have been resolved by negotiation and compromise.  Put simply, if there had been no slavery, there would have been no war.  Any attempt to justify the war or the actions of the southern leaders is denial of the simple fact that the Southern states fought primarily to retain the institution of slavery because their economy depended on it.

After more than a century and a half (and after more than half million people died fighting a senseless war), you would think that this issue would have been settled for good, but since the recent removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee from Richmond, the whole rancid issue has bubbled to the top of the septic tank again, and with it, the ludicrous tale of William Mack Lee.

William Mack Lee was a former slave who, in the first part of the 20th century, began passing himself off as the former cook and body servant of General Lee throughout the Civil War.  In the South, people donated small amounts of change to pose for pictures with William Mack Lee and listen to his stories about how he cooked for General Lee through the war.  You could even buy a copy of his pamphlet, “History of the Life of Rev. Wm. Mack Lee, Body Servant of General Robert E. Lee Through the Civil War: Cook from 1861 to 1865”.  Having read that long title, you can read the other half of the pamphlet for free here.

According to William Mack Lee, the ‘Marse Robert’ was the epitome of Southern gentlemen: a kind master who freed his slaves more than a decade before the Civil War, and who was such a wonderful master that none of his slaves left, preferring to stay on the plantation.  William Mack Lee says he remained on the general’s plantation for eighteen years after the war.

The problem of course is that William Mack Lee was a fraud and liar.  I can’t really bring myself to blame him, however, considering that he was an elderly former slave without a pension or means to support himself, was forced to eke out a living by telling people what they desperately wanted to believe.  I’m just surprised this didn’t get him elected to Congress.

Among the numerous errors in the pamphlet is William Mack Lee’s claim that he was Robert E. Lee’s slave who accompanied the general during the war.  There still exists an accurate inventory of the general’s slaves and William Mack Lee isn’t listed.  Nor did the man cook for the general, as Robert E. Lee wrote about the two slaves that accompanied him during the war:  Meredith was his cook and Perry was his valet.  And while he claims the general left him almost $400 in his will, if you read it—and it’s available online—no such provision can be found.  Nor is it possible for the former slave to have remained on the plantation for eighteen years after the war.  The general never set foot on his old plantation after the war, which by then had been converted into Arlington National Cemetery.  In any case, the general died five years after the war.

For anyone remotely familiar with the events of the Civil War, one tale from the pamphlet is obvious nonsense.  According to the author, "I was with him at the first battle of Bull Run, second battle of Bull Run, first battle of Manassas, second battle of Manassas..."  The Battle of the Manassas and the Battle of Bull Run are the same battle, as the North tended to name battles after rivers and streams, while the South usually named battles for nearby towns, communities, or railroad junctions.  Not only would no Southerner ever refer to that battle as Bull Run, but General Lee was not even present at the first battle.

By far the most ludicrous story in the pamphlet is William Mack Lee’s account of Stonewall Jackson’s putting on the uniform of a Union officer so that he could sneak through Union lines and spy on the enemy’s army.  I will admit that General Jackson was a weird duck—he used to watch battles while sitting in the saddle, sucking on a lemon, with one hand raised in the air (supposedly to “balance” him).  While I would love for the story of General Jackson’s being a spy to be real, it’s impossible.

That the wild tales of William Mack Lee continue to be believed by gullible people is proof that far too many Southerners are desperate to believe that Robert E. Lee was someone worthy of respect.  General Lee was a brilliant battlefield tactician, but he wasn’t a very admirable man.  Lee certainly did not free his slaves a decade before the war—the laws of Virginia required freed slaves to leave the state within 12 months.  There is also ample evidence in the general’s own writings that he treated his slaves harshly.  In one case, after two of his slaves who had run away were recaptured, Lee ordered that they be stripped to the waist and given 50 lashes each.  Still not content with their punishment, Lee ordered their backs washed with brine water.

In 1857, Lee inherited more slaves, but the inheritance came with the stipulation that Lee free the slaves within five years.  Lee went unsuccessfully to court twice to postpone the required manumission of the slaves, only freeing them two days before the deadline.  When Lee took his army north of the Potomac River into Union territory, he allowed his officers to capture free Blacks and take them back south to be sold for profit.  Lee’s writings and letters leave absolutely no doubt whatsoever that he wholeheartedly supported slavery.

After the war, General Lee could have, had he wished to, spoken out against the violence in the south against freed slaves, but he chose not to do so.  In addition, while he never became a member of the Ku Klux Klan, as the president of Washington College, he allowed a chapter of the KKK to operate on campus—something that would have been impossible without his permission.

While I’m at it, I might as well talk about the realities of the claimed amazing abilities of the general.  Robert E. Lee was a master tactician, capable of sizing up the terrain of a battlefield and positioning his forces better than any other general in the war.  However, as a strategist, Lee was poor—even disastrous.  It was his choice to fight a long, conventional war against the more populated and industrialized North—a decision that was just short of downright stupid.  Making matters worse, after Gettysburg, there was no good reason for Lee to continue a war that he could clearly never win.  Certainly, after Lincoln won reelection in 1864, there was no possible way for the South to win the war.  By continuing a futile war, Lee sacrificed tens of thousands of lives long after it was time to seek an armistice.  

I’m a multi-generational Southerner, and I understand the desire to find good in our heritage, but the South needs to find better heroes.  There is no particular reason why the people of the 21st Century need to continue to honor controversial heroes of the past, especially if it was a past like that invented by William Mack Lee—one that never actually existed.

Pedro de Alvarado

In “L’il Abner”, there was a long-running gag about Joe Btfsplk, the very embodiment of bad luck.  Joe, who was always pictured with a small dark rain cloud over his head, brought disaster and calamity to any one around him.  Always well-meaning, Joe was a perfect jinx.

While Joe was Al Capp’s invention, there is a larger than life historical figure who brought disaster and ruin wherever he went.

Pedro de Alvarado was a Spanish conquistador in the early days of the Central American conquest.  Immigrating to Cuba in 1511, Alvarado quickly rose to prominence among the Spanish officials who carved out estates on the island.  Alvarado was tall and handsome, and with red hair and beard, he made a striking impression on those he met.  He was capable both of being affable to his friends but also of being cruelly violent to his enemies—the perfect combination of traits to be a successful conquistador.

Alvarado was on the little remembered first expedition to Mexico that was led by Juan de Grijalva in 1518, a year before the infamous Cortés expedition.  Grijalva, who brought Alvarado with him as his lieutenant, sailed along the coast of Mexico wary of the large war party of natives that generally opposed his landing on the coast.  Trading glass trinkets and metal knives, Grijalva and Alvarado were able to gather a considerable quantity of gold, most of which was in the form of 600 golden axes.  Perhaps most important, they learned of a richer settlement to the west, the Aztec Empire.

Upon returning to Cuba, the axes turned out to be made of copper, not gold, a failure that Alvarado successfully convinced the governor was not his fault, but that of Grijalva.  When the Cortés expedition left, Pedro was the second in command, a move that proved tragic.

Cortés eventually made his way to Tenochtitlan, where he was the guest of Montezuma.  Through the Aztec chief, Cortés learned that a new group of Spaniards had arrived on the coast, whom Cortés knew had come to arrest him.  (The governor had reason to believe Cortés was a little too independent and wouldn’t share the plunder.)  Cortés left Pedro in command and hurried back to the coast.  Leaving Pedro in command of a delicate diplomatic mission was sort of like letting the Taliban run Vassar.

During an Aztec religious festival—which Pedro interpreted as satanic rites—‘he massacred the priests and nobles.  By the time that Cortés returned to the city, the Spanish forces were under siege.  As you can imagine, Cortés was a little peeved at Pedro, and ordered him to guard the rear of the Spanish forces as they evacuated Tenochtitlan.

Tenochtitlan was built on an island that was connected to the shore of the lake by long causeways.  For defensive purposes, the Aztecs had constructed the causeways with removable sections, which Cortés soon discovered could also be removed to keep the Spaniards from escaping.  Using a makeshift wooden bridge, the Spaniards fled for their lives while the Aztecs surrounded the causeway with canoes filled with warriors who attacked the fleeing men with arrows.

The makeshift bridge became stuck in the first gap and the terrified men were forced to leave it behind.  The next gap was crossed by the surviving men climbing over the bodies of the men who had preceded them.  According to an account by Gonzalo Ocampo, Pedro de Alvarado, already wounded, crossed the gap by using a lance as pole vault.  

While Cortés and Alvarado, eventually returned and defeated the Aztecs, the night of their bloody and violent escape, July 10, 1520, is known as La Noche Triste, the Sad Night.  Pedro went on to conquer most of Guatemala and part of Honduras—partly by enticing native leaders to negotiate (occasionally by burning them.  Native tribes deprived of leadership were much easier to conquer. 

Eventually, Pedro got bored and hearing of the great wealth being discovered in Peru by Pizarro, decided to try his luck further south.  You can imagine just how excited Pizarro was to have the personification of bad luck suddenly show up on his doorstep.  Knowing that all Pedro really wanted was gold, Pizzaro gave him a fortune in gold bars simply to leave.

Pedro was halfway back to Spain before he realized that he had been paid in gold painted lead bars.  At least they weren’t copper axes.

Pedro went back to Guatemala where he had been appointed governor, but the conquistador didn’t exactly have the temperament for government, so be began planning an expedition to China and the Spice Islands.  The mischief Pedro could have gotten into in China would be enough material to fill a book, but unfortunately (Or, perhaps, fortunately!), Pedro never made it there.

There was a small uprising among the local natives, and Pedro was responding with a band of soldiers when his horse stumbled and fell on him, killing him.  His death left a political vacancy, so his wife, Beatriz de la Cueva was appointed to be his replacement. The bad luck continued! — a wall of the crater lake above the capital collapsed.  The water rushing down the side of the volcano carried off most of the inhabitants, but the new governor may still have been alive when an aftershock collapsed what was left of the chapel in which she and the remaining townspeople had taken refuge!

What's Next?

With America’s exit from Afghanistan, our longest war is over.  Personally, as a historian, I have no interest in rehashing America’s military and political missions during that time.   I have no doubt that shortly bookstores will be inundated with books, each detailing exactly what went wrong, with no two such written accounts agreeing on a single detail.

Instead of talking about Afghanistan’s past, I’d prefer to climb out on a limb and make a few predictions about the future of Afghanistan.  It should take only a few months for the reader to plumb the depths of my naïveté, fact-checking my predictions, allowing new grist for the people who delight in sending me hate mail.

Historically, one of the hardest jobs for a revolutionary army has been what to do with your military after the revolution is won.  A revolutionary army fighting a protracted guerrilla war is vastly different from the military needs of a new government that seeks to defend its borders and protect the very infrastructure it had tried so valiantly to destroy during the previous decades.

Military history gives us numerous examples of the difficulty of transitioning a revolutionary army over to a professional army, almost all of such efforts resulting in failures and either new revolution or protracted civil war.  Just off the top of my head, I can think of three main reasons for the failure.

First, there is the difficult problem of military demobilization.  Put simply, angry men with guns react negatively to being issued pink slips.  Angry men with guns who have few skills other than breaking things and hurting people react violently when being told they have to seek employment in an economy that has been crushed by decades of war.  In far too many cases, these men have historically found employment using the only skill they know—they enlist in a new revolution, fighting against the government they have only recently installed.

Demobilization, in general terms, has always been a problem for military leaders.  Julius Caesar gave his veterans land in newly created towns along the frontier, thus not only stabilizing the area, but moving potential threats far from Rome.  If you read the history of Honduras from the last decades of the 19th century to the first decades of the 20th century, the same names keep surfacing.  Soldiers rarely even stopped fighting long enough to change uniforms as various governments came and went.  In Afghanistan, there is another problem:  even if the new government keeps all of the Taliban fighters, what do they do with the 300,000 men who were in the Afghan army?

It is inevitable that the Taliban will begin fighting with Al Qaeda, who will fight Isis-K, and all of them will fight groups that we haven't even heard of yet.

Second, there is the problem of what to do with revolutionary leaders, as the skills necessary to lead a small band of guerrilla fighters does not easily translate over to the skills necessary to lead a mechanized unit or to maintain and fly helicopters.  The very nature of the skills necessary to be a successful revolutionary officer are not the same skill set required by a professional army trying to defend a nation’s borders. 

When Francisco Madero successfully overthrew the Mexican government of Porfirio Diaz, there were simply not enough high-ranking jobs in his new government to reward all of the officers who had led his revolution.  As a result, within a year, many of his former trusted officers were now leading a new revolution against Madero.  After his successful revolution, Fidel Castro solved this problem by “exporting the revolution” to Africa and South America.  Many of his former soldiers who didn’t die in those foreign wars ultimately ended up in Cuban prisons.  There is a very good chance that if the Bolivian Army hadn’t killed Che, Fidel would have had to do so.

The next problem with the military is simply the motivation of revolutionary soldiers.  Often, the only bond holding a resistance movement together is a shared hatred of the existing government.  Once that government is toppled, the various fighting forces frequently  realize they no longer have a common cause and turn on themselves.  There is a sad truism that most violent revolutions, deprived of an external enemy, eventually form a circular firing squad.  There are numerous examples:  the French Revolution, the successful slave revolt in Haiti, or even the Republican Congressional revolution of 1994 led by Newt Gingrich.  The Taliban is, at its roots, a collection of tribal allegiances and its apparent unified front will soon dissolve into tribalism with no common enemy, ending with numerous warring factions led by tribal strongmen.

Last, but not least, naturally, the Taliban forces are going to expect to be paid.  Even the most dedicated army grows restless when its pay is withheld.  During the Mexican-American War, Winfield Scott had a very difficult time keeping his army in check when the payroll was not delivered on time.  I don’t relish the job of any general facing a horde of angry, well-armed men while he tries to explain why the promised wealth will be delayed…again. 

This last point brings up the last of my predictions.  The Taliban will never be able to establish a viable economy.  Throughout all of history, there are few examples of a successful revolution setting up anything close to a stable economy without the help of a genius like Alexander Hamilton.  (Though few have failed as spectacularly as Fidel Castro, who turned most of the Cuban economy over to the untrained hands of Che Guevara.  Among the many economic models to follow, Che chose to emulate the economy of Communist East Germany.  No, seriously!  It will be sort of like a car manufacturer’s deciding to reintroduce the Yugo, but with the fuel tank of a Pinto and handling of a Robin Reliant.)

The Taliban have already started imposing some harebrained economic policies.  Banks are forbidden from allowing their depositors to withdraw more than a $100 a day, thus destroying any popular trust in the banks.  There is a shortage of money circulating as people begin hoarding (a condition that is guaranteed to worsen when the Taliban begins issuing its own currency).  Gresham’s Law states that when a country issues suspect currency; the public supply of foreign hard money vanishes.  (Put more colloquially, Gresham’s Law is “Bad money drives out good.”)  

Argentina tried to legislate its way out of an economic crisis by restricting withdrawals from banks, forbidding capital from leaving the country, and issuing so many different kinds of money that, for a while, the most popular form of ‘currency’ in the country was a barter coupon that was the equivalent of an hour’s labor.  The government issued currency was so worthless that even a few airlines preferred payment in barter coupons.

It is almost inevitable that the Taliban will print its own money, legislating an impossible exchange rate with Western currency, thus ensuring inflation.  (When Venezuela did this, it immediately touched off hyperinflation.  The current exchange rate is $1 US will get you 4.6 million Bolivars.)  As the Afghan economy begins to fail, the Taliban will limit how much money can be taken out of the country, thus simultaneously ensuring the beginning of vast capital flight while discouraging any foreign investment.  As inflation gets out of control, the Taliban will probably institute wage and price controls, thus destroying what is left of the economy.  I would predict that Afghanistan, where 90% of the populace already lives in poverty and 1 person in 3 struggles to obtain food, will be back to a barter system of exchange within two years.

Afghanistan currently receives financial aid from Pakistan, China, and Iran, mainly because these countries had a vested interest in seeing America tied down in a war with little possibility of a political victory.  Now that America has left, there is far less incentive for these countries to continue to aid Afghanistan.  Iran is financially broke, and Pakistan, nearly so, and neither country is likely to put Afghanistan’s interests above their own.

I can almost hear the reader saying, “Wait, won’t they just grow more poppies and export opium?”

The Taliban will certainly try, but I doubt it will work as the world has changed since the Taliban were last in power.  Not only is the world market already fairly saturated with opium, but the market is shifting towards more powerful and easier to produce synthetic opioids.  Somehow, I just can’t imagine the Taliban setting up vast chemical laboratories and competing on the world market.  Afghanistan currently does, and will continue to export drugs, but I just don’t believe it can expand its market significantly.

So, the bottom line for Afghanistan a few years from now?  A long and incredibly violent civil war, the battles to be fought in a desperately poor country by impoverished people—with expensive modern arms and equipment left them by the US.  At least until those start to need maintenance.