Fire Scars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The President as Head of His Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How NOT To Be A Crappy Professor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, Let’s Be Friends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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