AMB

The Doc and I are just back from visiting Tucson.  Ostensibly, we went to see half of our grandchildren.  Now that I’m back, my bathroom scale thinks we were just visiting a town with real restaurants.

Good restaurants are not something we do well in Southern New Mexico.  For most of this half of the state, a seven course meal would be a six-pack of Mexican beer and a burrito. 

We have the usual fast-food places, the usual large chain restaurants—including one with “Texas” in the name (despite the fact that the corporation is based out of Kentucky) and it's filled with waitresses who constantly yell “Yeehaaa” for no apparent reason.  I don’t eat there, because the one time I went, I was the only thing remotely Texan in that large dirty barn.  If you eat there, you probably believe Taco Bell is Mexican food, too.

We do have a few very nice restaurants.  Too few, in my opinion.  The reason seems to be that, while this border state seems to be awash in drugs, it is damn near impossible to obtain a liquor license.  Our state legislature seems to believe that if you deny a man a single drink in a bar, it would never occur to him to buy a whole bottle on the way home.   Every third store in town sells alcohol, but a restaurant with a full bar is fairly rare. 

There is a good Italian restaurant that I like, owned and managed by Vince.  On a regular basis, I go to his restaurant, admire the pesto pasta, the calamari, the beautiful pizzas—and then I order the half order of the salmon salad.  Unfortunately, what was once love handles has, over time, turned into a death grip. 

Vince runs a great restaurant where the bread is fresh and the service friendly.  His establishment is definitely one of the exceptions in Southern New Mexico.

The restaurant is directly across the street from Enema U, and I’ve lost track of the times I have eaten there.  Yesterday, I noticed something new.  Vince evidently had the restaurant custom decorated:  along the walls are murals depicting life in Northern Italy.  For the first time, I noticed that a fisherman was loading a net into his boat, whose name was clearly visible: ‘AMB’.

I couldn’t stop laughing.  This was a joke so old, I marveled that Vince knew it.

I used to teach military and naval history, and one of the fundamentals students had to learn was the international naming conventions for ships.  I remembered part of a lecture I had once given my students.

“When we read about the USS Constitution,” I said in my best professorial voice.  “What does the prefix USS stand for?”

“United States Ship,” would be the prompt answer.  (I had great students, since my course was required by neither the College of Education nor the Sociology Department).

“Correct.  President Theodore Roosevelt established this in an executive order in 1907.  The prefixes started as abbreviations to save time and there are a few exceptions.  Privately owned ships used by the Navy have USNS affixed to their name.  During the Civil War, what did CSS stand for?”

“Confederate States Ship.”

“Correct again,” I said.  “When you read about other countries, it gets a little more complicated.  HMS on British ships can stand for either Her Majesty’s Ship or His Majesty’s Ship.  If you are reading about a ship from a century ago, you might see HBMS for His Britannic Majesty’s Ship.  The Titanic carried the prefix RMS for Royal Mail Ship.  And to add to the confusion, lately, the navy of Saudi Arabia has started using HMS as well.”

“Sometimes, those prefixes are important.  During the War of 1812, the British captures the USS President.  Since sailors are superstitious and it is considered bad luck to rename a ship, the frigate became the HMS President.”

“British Commonwealth nations use a variety of this.  Canada uses HMCS, New Zealand uses HMNZCS, while Australia uses HMAS.   What kind of ships does the Transylvanian navy use?” I asked.

Silence.

“Blood Vessels, of course.  C’mon guys, wake up.  Transylvania is a landlocked version of Romania.  Actually, Romania is one of the many nations that never adopted prefixes in front of their ships' names or stopped using them in the last fifty years.  If you are reading about World War II, neither Imperial Japan nor Nazi Germany ever adopted a standardized naval prefix.”

“Sometimes,” I continued, “the prefix just tells you the type of ship.  RV is for research vessel, PS is paddle steamer, and SV means sailing vessel.  Let’s go back to countries.  Mexico uses ARM, for Armada de Mexico.  While the old Soviet Union did not have an official prefix, some historians for clarity sake used USSRS.”

“Okay,” I said.  “One last one.  Why does Italy use AMB?”

Silence.  Every student stopped taking notes.  They just knew this was going to be on the test.  Finally, convinced no one knew the answer, I let them in on the joke.

“Atsa My Boat,” I said.

Vince was never in my class, so I have no idea where he heard that old joke.  If you are near Enema U, stop at his restaurant and see for yourself.  I recommend the calamari, even though I've never had any.

Professor Grumbles

There is a sure sign that you have passed a milestone:  You'll know that you are getting old when you start attending far more funerals that weddings.  Yesterday, we lost one of the good ones...One of the irreplaceable ones.

A couple of decades ago, I met Professor Grumbles on my first day of teaching.  I had received a phone call from one of my favorite professors, asking if I wanted to teach a weekend class on Mexican History. 

“Sure,” I said.  “When does it start?”  I owed this professor, and I probably would have agreed to anything he asked...Within reason.

“Day after tomorrow.”  This was unreasonable, but I did it anyway—through a full semester of Saturday morning classes, each lasting two and a half hours.  This is teaching hell, where neither the sleepy students nor the bored professor want to be there.  Despite the obvious obstacles, that first class went well and I have done no honest work since.

The very first day, as I exited my too-small classroom in one of the oldest buildings on campus, waiting outside the door was another professor who was clearly irritated that I had kept my class to the last minute.  I remember thinking, "Who is this man?"  He was old, short, overweight, and dressed in khaki shorts, a dark t-shirt, and a faded khaki photographer’s vest with bulging pockets.  He looked like a retired Greek fisherman.  (To be fair, so did about half the rest of the faculty.) 

We hated each other on sight.  He wanted in that classroom early and I believed that if the students had paid for two and a half hours, they were going to get the full measure.  It took a few years for us to actually get to know each other, but we became the best of friends. 

Saturday mornings are the deepest corner of teaching hell, which is why there was a class available for someone who hadn’t even applied for it.  But why was Dr. Grumbles there?  He was a full professor, who was tenured, and who had enough seniority that he certainly did not have to teach on the weekends—unless he wanted an extra class.

I have a theory—supported by no one but me—that the best way to determine who the best professors are is to visit the faculty parking lot on the weekend.  There are few professions where a good job can be done in a forty-hour work week, and that includes education.  Perhaps I just liked the crackpots, but I frequently noticed that all my friends at Enema U—all the faculty that I respected—could be found working through the weekends...And that certainly included Professor Grumbles.

Years later, when he was the department head, Professor Grumbles and I had a meeting with the Dean of Accelerated Distributed Distance Learning Excellence Department (ADDLED).  Or something similar.  She was in charge of the weekend college and we wanted to offer a new course combining language and history for which we needed her permission.  We sat in her office and waited patiently while she had a long telephone conversation.  As we waited, we scanned the books on the shelves behind her, all of which were full of the kind of self-help books one can find in grocery stores.  “Building Teamwork Through Meetings", "Ten Steps to Positive Management” or “Learn to Lead With Post-It Notes”. 

For the next fifteen minutes, we couldn’t look at each other.  One glance and we would have busted a seam laughing.   Eventually, we explained the course to the dean, who immediately responded that she didn’t know if either a language or a history course was being taught on the weekends.  Now, Professor Grumbles and I had been teaching just such classes on weekends for years, in a classroom not twenty feet from her office….all of which he patiently explained to the woman for whom we had been working for years.

“Oh,” she said.  “I didn’t know.  I’m never here on weekends.”

“I’ll be happy to submit a proposal to you,” answered Professor Grumbles.  “On a Post-it note if you prefer.”   The meeting went downhill from there.

Dr. Grumbles showed up regularly in this blog, and always as a sympathetic character.  Come to think of it, he is largely responsible for this blog.  I had written a throw-away piece about learning to sail to enter in a contest.  He liked it and suggested that I write another one...And another one.  That was eight years ago and the good professor somehow found time to comment on each and every one.  See those ads to the side?  They generate a modest amount of money that is enough to pay for a limited number of bound books, each of which is a collection of the blogs for that year.  Professor Grumbles is one of the few people to own the entire set. 

Actually, he wrote half of one the blog posts.  The entire post was just a set of emails we sent back and forth discussing movies, another of his great loves.  Though the post does not indicate it, the emails were sent back and forth during a long meeting where some administrative moron (redundant) read his powerpoint presentation to a group of people possessing at least 50 college degrees.  This is the real reason iPads are taken to meetings.

His support is not that surprising.  A great professor—not so coincidentally the one who offered me that first class—once told me that the rarest thing at a university was loyalty and that the vast majority of the faculty had no idea what loyalty meant nor were they prepared to pay the price it required.  Professor Grumbles was one of the few who did.  He was kind, gentle, and patiently friendly, though this didn't mean he made friends easily.  When he did acquire friends, he stuck with them. 

Something just occurred to me:  That small list of faculty capable of loyalty and the list of faculty who worked weekends, and the list of people whose courses I thought worthy of students' attention…are all pretty much the same list.  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

The good professor taught German and I have frequently wondered how I managed to get a bachelor’s degree from his department and never met him.  Whatever the reason, it was not until I became part of the department that I really got to know him.  God, the arguments we had.  And the friendship we formed. 

The good professor got his start in German because of an elderly Mercedes.  This was a pre-war car and the price was cheap because it was in miserable shape.  Luckily, the car came with an owner’s manual.  In German.  By the time that manual got painstakingly translated, he was hooked.  In college, he and a friend bought a motorcycle with a sidecar and traveled across Europe.  By the end of the trip, he was deeply in love with languages.

Another love was the theater.  A professor of Languages, somehow Professor Grumbles was also at one time the head of the Theater Department.  He loved the stage and threw himself into every part.  I lost track of how often the beard and mustache came and went, depending on the role he was playing.  I liked him best in HMS Pinafore, but I must admit that he made a perfect Santa Claus.

One of his favorite courses was the history of German film.  He loved to show movies in his classroom, but towards the end, Professor Grumbles was getting a little deaf.  The sound level in that classroom slowly grew in volume over the years until it was thunderous.  Eventually, I would sneak up to his classroom and use a remote control to lower the volume without his knowledge.  He'd raise it, I'd lower it, and then he'd demand to have the audio equipment repaired or replaced.  Eventually, the university just stopped scheduling classes adjacent to his room.

Eventually, Professor Grumbles became department head and had his turn dealing with a group of faculty that was about half wonderful and half disaster (with a bloated chupacabra thrown in).  As anyone could have predicted, he kindly gave everyone a clean slate and an offer to start over fresh—and everyone immediately reverted to character. 

Professor Grumbles, at least in my opinion, was a great department head.  He was respectful to the administrative trolls, patient in department head meetings, and disbelieving of everything they said.  As was frequently required, enthusiastic departmental cooperation was always reported. 

The university seems to lose a lot of the good ones.  You could make a great university with the professors who have left Enema U in the last ten years and Professor Grumbles was one of the best.

I have to stop.  Professor Grumbles said that while he liked my blog posts, he began to lose interest after 1500 words.  We’re there.

Have Coffin, Will Travel

Juan Perón came to power in Argentina in 1946, largely by being the first to understand the rise of the working class and the effective use of communications.  When he was elected (despite the best efforts of the US State Department), Argentina was sitting on tremendous cash reserves and had a booming economy.   It didn’t take long for Juan and Eva Perón to blow through that surplus.

As a populist President, his wife, the diminutive Eva (or Evita as she was popularly known) was positioned as the Mother of the Country, publicly granting financial gifts to the poor--even as the Peróns siphoned money off to Swiss Banks while destroying the financial wealth of the country. 

By 1951, the Perón rule was obviously coming to an end.  A country known for its endless rolling wheat fields and limitless cattle herds was rationing food and subjecting the populace to “wheatless” and “meatless” days.

The elections slated for 1952 were pushed forward to 1951, and during the campaign one of the candidates for the presidency was arrested and another was shot.  Evita—now in a hospital and being treated for cervical cancer—proclaimed that anyone who did not vote for Perón was a traitor. Thirty-six percent of those voting in November met Evita's criterion for treason since Perón received only 64 percent of the votes cast--at least according to official accounts.

By June 1952, Evita was out of the hospital, but weighed only 80 pounds and was obviously ailing. Vast crowds of women surrounded the presidential home, praying on their knees for a miraculous recovery.  Despite this effort, on July 26, 1952, Evita, 33, died of a disease she was probably never told she had.  Two million hysterical mourners attended the funeral services that lasted for thirteen days.

Finally, Evita’s body was moved into the Ministry of Labor’s building where her body began a very long embalming process.   Dr. Pedro Ara began pumping the cadaver with alcohol, glycerin, and plasticizers—a process that lasted almost two years.  Unlike most mummification processes, Dr. Ara left all of Evita’s internal organs in place.  His goal was to preserve a perfect Evita for all time. 

During the long process, Dr. Ara practiced, making both wax and vinyl replicas of Evita.  In essence, he made a small army of life-sized Evita Barbie dolls.

In the meantime, the government began planning the largest memorial for a dead woman since the Taj Mahal.  The monument never got past the stage of digging a huge hole in the ground, but when finished, the monument was supposed to be larger than the Statue of Liberty.

Lonely, Juan Peron passed the time with a small squad of teenage girls whom he gifted with matching motor scooters.  Let’s not judge, remember, Juan was a grieving widower.

While all of this was going on, the labor unions of Argentina began petitioning Pope Pius XII to begin the proceedings for Evita Perón's canonization.  The annual request—and its subsequent denial—has been repeated annually ever since.  Who knows, since the current pope is not only an Argentine but a past Perónista Party supporter, who knows what is in the future?

As the last wheel fell off the economic wagon of Argentina in 1955, a new general took over in a military coup, and Juan Perón fled the country.  During his travels afterward, he met Isabel Martinez, a Panamanian nightclub dancer with a fourth grade education, and she accompanied him to Madrid, Spain.  President Franco had offered his fellow Fascist a home in exile.  Since the Catholic people of Spain frowned on the former dictator living with a teenager who wasn’t his wife, Juan married for the fourth time. 

Meanwhile, back in Argentina, the military was afraid that the body of Evita might become a rallying point for a new army of Neo-Perónistas.  They confiscated the body and ordered its destruction, but the military officer assigned the task couldn’t bring himself to destroy Evita.  Well, not all of her.  He was a little skeptical that the plastic dummy in the glass coffin was real, so he cut off one of the fingers to see if it was real.  It was. 

First, the body was moved to a wooden coffin which was hidden in a wooden packing crate.  Then, the body was hidden in the municipal water works, but the secret leaked out, and when mourners started showing up, the crate was moved to various military offices before finally being shoved into the back of a windowless van and parked in an alley behind a theater.  When flowers and candles began appearing next to the van, the crate was moved to a Major’s home and hidden under old newspapers in the attic.  The pressure of having Evita in the attic must have weighed heavily on the major, since he shot his pregnant wife one night, supposedly in the mistaken belief that revolutionaries were breaking into his home to liberate Mrs. Perón.

Note.  I don’t know about you, but I have these mental images of an army marching into Buenos Aires to do battle, carrying the coffin of Evita in the van, sort of like it was the Ark of the Covenant.

Finally, the military leadership of the country decided it was time to move Evita completely out of the country.  Shipping off the various vinyl and wax duplicate corpses to various Argentine embassies as decoys, the real coffin was shipped by cargo ship to Italy where it was buried in a cemetery outside of Milan in a grave marked ‘Maria Maggi”.  Naturally, it didn’t stay there long.

Meanwhile, the former president of Argentina, Pedro Eugenio Aramburu (the general who had ousted Juan Perón in 1955), was kidnapped and executed by supporters of Juan Perón.  A few years later, they stole his corpse and offered to trade his body for that of Evita. 

In 1971, when yet another general staged his own military coup against his former military comrades, he took over a country that was yearning for the good ol’ days of a past that had never existed.  Desperate for support, the new president made a deal for the endorsement of Juan Perón, who was still exiled in Spain.  For $50,000 in cash, the restoration of his lost citizenship, and the return of the body of Evita, Perón heartily endorsed the new president.  This was a monumentally stupid move on the general's part, since all it did was legitimize Perón in the eyes of his supporters.

Spanish and Italian police accompanied the hearse bearing Evita’s body to Perón’s home in Madrid, where the former President had had the world’s largest Barbie doll placed in an open coffin on the coffee table.  Nightly, Juan’s third wife, Isabel combed her hair.  According to one source, he occasionally had Isabel lie on top of the coffin to absorb the “energy” from Evita.

By 1973, Perón was once again elected president and returned to Argentina, leaving Evita in Madrid.  When Juan died in 1974, his wife Isabel briefly became the president--the first female president of a country anywhere in the world.  Anxious to appease the country’s Perónistas, she had Evita shipped from Madrid to Buenos Aires where Evita lay in state at the Casa Rosada (the pink house is the Argentine equivalent of the American White House).  Within days, the body of former President Aramburu was found abandoned on a Buenos Aires street.

By now, Evita needed a "little" repair.  For too many years, the crate had been left standing upright, so her feet were broken.  There was also evidence that someone had opened the coffin on occasion and had hit her with something.  Her nose was broken, and well….as it says on a box of cereal, “Some settling of contents many have occurred during shipping.” 

Who do you call to fix a really big Barbie Doll?  It may give you some idea of her condition when I tell you they called in an Art Historian. Really! There are lots of pictures!

Eventually, the coffins of both Juan and Evita were put on display one final time in 1976, and once again, the people of Argentina stood in long lines to gaze down on the remains of their beloved former dictators.

When the military finally had the next,  inevitable coup in 1976, they quickly put Isabel under house arrest, and scooped up the coffin of Evita.  It was time to permanently settle a problem that had needed a solution ever since the woman had died, twenty-four years previously.  Separating the couple forever, Evita was taken to her father’s family vault and buried under three steel plates and 18 feet of concrete, deep enough to survive a direct nuclear hit.  Ironically, she is located in Recoleta Cemetery, fairly close to the grave of President Aramburu.

Come the Apocalypse, the only thing left on Earth will be cockroaches and Evita. 

All of that concrete and steel was probably a good idea.  In 1987, vandals broke into the tomb of Juan Perón and sawed off his hands.  They have not yet been recovered.

The Detective Lost in the Dark

A little more than a century ago, Mark Twain was testifying in front of a Congressional committee about legislation concerning impending copyright laws.  Twain had fought mighty battles to secure the rights to his books in both the United States and Europe, and had some unique ideas concerning intellectual property rights.

While the author really wanted rights in perpetuity, he was willing to settle for the life of the author plus fifty years.  At one point in his testimony, Twain seemed to contradict himself, saying for the vast majority of authors, the copyright laws were meaningless, since the life of most literary works was substantially less than the copyright law.  As Twain said:

….One author per year produces a book which can outlive the forty-two year limit, and that is all. This nation can not produce two authors per year who can create a book that will outlast forty-two years. The thing is demonstrably impossible. It can not be done!

Twain believed that the popularity of most literary works would not last long enough to matter and that the famous authors of today would be forgotten within a generation—a prophecy that was certainly borne out.  How many books published in the 19th century have you read?  For the vast majority of Americans, Twain and Conan Doyle may be the only authors of the century most of us can name, much less claim to have read.

The list of authors who momentarily burned bright in the spotlight only to vanish a few years later is seemingly endless.  Together, these forgotten works form a literary goldmine for the reader interested in just a little digging at the local library.  And since Congress did not listen to Twain, most of these works are not in the public domain, meaning that you can read them online or download them to a Kindle for free.

This brings us to Ernest Bramah.  I can just picture you saying, “Who?  Never heard of him.”

Bramah was a British writer of a century ago.  A failure at several occupations, he began his writing career by sending in letters to a local newspaper.  Supported by his father, Bramah lost a small fortune as a farmer, then lost even more money when he attempted to sell a book about his misadventures behind a plow.  After this failure, he found menial employment as a secretary on Grub Street in London. 

Grub Street was a poor section of London known for small publishers of books and magazines of low cost and perhaps of even less value.  These were the kinds of literary endeavors that would later be called “Pulp Fiction”.  It was there that Bramah eventually found employment, working for Jerome K. Jerome, the author and magazine editor.

Note.  It was only after reading the works of Bramah that I became interested in his early life and discovered his connection to Jerome, one of my favorite authors.  (If I could own only one book—a nightmarish prospect—it would be Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat.)  The writing styles are not similar, either in tone or subject matter, so there is no apparent connection between the two authors, yet something attracted me—It can’t be a coincidence.

Bramah eventually wrote another book, a novel about Kai Lung, an itinerant Chinese peasant whose travels give him the opportunity to spin gentle morality tales in which peasants invariably find peace through frugality and humility.  The first book, The Wallet of Kai Lung was submitted to eight publishers before it was finally accepted.  Perhaps the reason for multiple rejections was that Bramah knew nothing about China.  Bramah simply made up a world with imaginary customs, laws and people and labeled it China.  Since his readers knew no more about the real China than Bramah, he got away with it.

Bramah is still getting away with it:  Have you ever heard of the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times”?  This is not Chinese, it is Bramah.  Though by now, I have no doubt the saying has actually made its way to China.

In 1914, Bramah began publishing a series of detective stories in The Strand Magazine.  Today, Tht Strand is familiar to most for publishing the Sherlock Holmes stores of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  At the time of publication, however, the magazine frequently gave top billing to a forgotten detective, Max Carrados, an invention of Ernest Bramah.

Max Carrados was a brilliant detective, very much in the tradition of the English mystery, who solved mysteries despite being totally blind.  It was this disability, perhaps, that heightened his other senses and allowed him to find solutions to crimes which even Scotland Yard had failed to solve.  The stories are nothing short of brilliant.

It is impossible not to compare Sherlock Holmes to Max Carrados and wonder why one is a household name and the other all but forgotten.  There are several obvious reasons.  Doyle developed all the characters in his stories, bringing London to life for readers of any age, while Bramah focused on Carrados and his overcoming his handicaps, assuming that a contemporary reader was already familiar with Edwardian London.  In addition, while the action stories of Doyle readily lend themselves to television and movies, Carrados—operating quite literally in the dark—can only easily exist in the imagination of the reader.  It is for this reason that Carrados has been successful produced several times on the BBC radio, but has never been tried on the big screen.  Sherlock Holmes, by comparison, appeared in movies as early as 1900.

Bramah wrote science fiction, predicting airlines connecting the countries of Europe before a plane had even crossed the English Channel.  His work of political fiction, What Might Have Been (1907), predicts the rise of Fascist Germany with depressing accuracy.  The work was even later credited by George Orwell as an inspiration for his own (slightly more well-known) book, 1984. 

Of all of Bramah's works, I can only heartily recommend the mysteries of Max Carrados, but it still is a shame that he has been forgotten by today’s readers.  I highly recommend that you access and read them here.  Long after Twain argued for a copyright that expired fifty years after the death of the author, the European Union extended the rights to seventy years postmortem.   Which meant for the works of Bramah, the copyrights expired five years ago.  

It turns out that Twain was correct.  The copyrights on the works of Ernest Bramah no longer matter.

Prom Night Along the Brazos

The two old ranchers were sitting in the Buckhorn Cafe early, working on plates of biscuits and gravy when the deputy sheriff walked in. 

"Morning Mike, Kent," the deputy said as he sat down on one of the counter stools and turned to the waitress.  "Morning to you, too, Mary Lou.  Can I get a cup of coffee?”  The last greeting was unnecessary as the waitress was already moving, a pot of coffee in one hand and a large white, porcelain cup in the other.

"Good morning, Bob," answered Kent while Mike, with a mouth full of breakfast, just waved a fork at the deputy. 

As the waitress poured a cup of coffee, she asked, “Aren’t you getting off a little late this morning?”

Mike swallowed his biscuits and added, “Yeah, I thought you were on the graveyard shift.”

“I still work nights, but the whole department got a workout last night.  I just now cleared all my calls.  It’s the end of the school year and the high school had their damn prom last night.  We had anxious parents calling in all night, wondering where their children were.”

“Probably afraid their young’uns were doing exactly what they had done on their own prom night,” said Kent.  The old cowboy smiled, undoubtedly remembering his own high school adventures.

As Mike reached across the table for the bottle of Tabasco Sauce, he saw the smile on his friend’s face and snorted.  “Don’t know what you’re grinnin’ at,” he said.  “When we went to school, they hadn’t invented dancing yet.”

The deputy put his coffee cup down on the counter and swiveled his stool around to look at the two men.  “As far as I can tell, no two teenagers in the county slept in their own beds last night, and less than half of them were sleeping anywhere!  I think every pasture in the county has a family sedan stuck in the mud up to the floorboards.  The tow trucks will be busy ‘til Memorial Day.”

The two ranchers laughed.  “Is that what had you busy all night?  Are we going to have some shotgun weddings in a few months?”

The lawman shook his head and answered, “As far as I can tell, there were more fathers worried about their cars than there were fathers worried about their daughters.  There was one interesting moment last night—I think I met the smartest kid in the county and think that boy’s going to be a future congressman.”

“I hope you shot the little weasel, we already got more politicians than skunks,” said Mike.

“Pay no attention to him, Bob.  He’s just acting ornery because Barbara’s got him on a low cholesterol diet again.  The fat content in his head’s about a quart low.  That’s why we snuck out to eat breakfast here.  He’ll feel better after he finishes his bacon.  Tell us what happened,” urged Kent.

“I was driving down the dirt maintenance road along the Brazos River, looking for couples out parking.  The sheriff says not to bother anyone unless we suspect there is underage drinking or someone is a little young to be out there….y’all understand, we don’t go looking for trouble, but we are trying to prevent it before it happens.”

Both of the old ranchers nodded their heads in agreement and the deputy continued his story.

“Well, I was about a mile down from the bridge below Santo, almost to the catfish restaurant when I see this car pulled off the road, way back under the trees.  That sure as hell wasn’t unusual last night, but the interior light was on and I could see a young man sitting in the front seat and a young girl in the back seat.  That was unusual, so I decided to get a closer look.”

By now, Mary Lou had come out of the kitchen, and was listening as intently as the two ranchers while she refilled the deputy’s coffee cup.

“Well,” said the deputy.  “I turned on the light bar, and pulled up behind their car.  As I was walking up to their car, I could see the boy was reading a magazine and when I got up to the window, there was this young girl, sitting in the back seat doing her fingernails.  They were just as cool and calm as a pitcher of buttermilk.”

“Well, the boy rolls down his window, and I start to question him,” said the deputy, and then he recounted his conversation with the two teenagers.

“Evening.  What are y’all doing out here this late?  Having car trouble?”

“No, sir.  Just reading this hunting magazine, officer.”

“What’s she doing in the backseat?”

“She’s doing her nails.”  At this, the young girl looks up and smiles sweetly at the deputy. 

“How old are you?”

“I’m nineteen, sir.”

“How old is she?”, asks the deputy, pointing to the girl in the backseat.

The young man looks down at his watch for a second, then answers, “She’ll be eighteen in eleven minutes, sir.”

Both of the ranchers laughed while Mary Lou just smiled and walked back into the kitchen.

“Yeah, that sounds like a budding politician.  What did you do then?” asked Mike.

“Wasn’t much I could do,” said the deputy.  “I told her ‘Happy Birthday’ and left.”

We've Seen This Before

When I told my wife, The Doc, that I intended to compare Venezuela today with Mexico during the Revolution, she was immediately supportive and enthusiastic.

“Who in Hell would want to read about that?” she asked.

Hopefully, you. 

It was Karl Marx who said: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”  In 1915, Mexico descended into a violent and bloody revolution that devastated the country, easily qualifying as a tragedy   Today, Venezuela appears to be starting the process all over again, a sad farce.  Below, are some comparisons of the two countries that seemed pertinent, at least to me.  Venezuela is on the left, Mexico is to the right.

In 1915, President Victoriano Huerta—pictured at right—was rapidly losing control of Mexico.  For decades, the country had been led by a Porfirio Diaz, a dictator who skillfully co-opted power from opponents and used the mineral wealth of the country to finance his one-man rule.  After Díaz was finally deposed, a freely elected (and innocent) president did not last long before being murdered by Huerta, a follower of Diaz, who then seized power and attempted to rule.  Unfortunately—for both Mexico and for himself—he was not equal to his predecessor and the country descended into war.

From 1999 to 2013, former military officer, Hugo Chavez, was Venezuela's leader.  Despite vast income from petroleum, Chavez ruined the country’s market economy and moved the country closer to socialism while eliminating most civil rights.  Upon his death, his hand-picked successor, Nicolas Maduro—a former truck driver and labor leader—took over as president.  Today, Venezuela may be the "richest poor" country on Earth.

As the people of the Mexico turned increasingly against him, President Huerta decided to use the military to maintain power.  He told his Congress that he would have peace at any price, meaning he would spend enough to make the army big and powerful enough to crush his political opponents.  One of the reasons the eventual revolution became so violent and bloody was that Huerta greatly expanded the military, whose members frequently deserted and took their newly-purchased weaponry with them.

Eventually, Huerta began conscripting incredible numbers of men, sometimes by simply picking men out of crowds at fairs or public events.  At one point, over 180 priests were conscripted and forced into service (even the sixty who were found to have venereal disease).

Maduro has a small, but fiercely loyal army.  During the Chavez rule, the military attempted a coup, and when it failed, Chavez ruthlessly purged the army of all but the most intensely loyal military leaders.  Since the army is now not large enough to quell the growing public demonstrations, Maduro has begun arming citizen militias to help put down the opposition. 

President Huerta rapidly lost control of the situation, so he suppressed newspapers, arrested men in wholesale lots, and began using assassination squads to eliminate his enemies.  When the National Assembly refused to back his actions, Huerta dismissed the assembly and arrested most of them, too.

In the last general election, parties opposing Maduro’s Socialist Party won a majority in the National Assembly.  The Supreme Court refused to seat enough of the newly elected officials that the opposition was denied a majority.   After months of public protest, the politicians were finally seated, but the Supreme Court stripped the body of all legislative powers and Maduro ordered the treasury to withhold the Assembly’s paychecks.

While Chavez had already closed most opposition newspapers and radio stations earlier, President Maduro has found a few news outlets to target.  CNN en Espanol was shut down recently, and the government refuses to let the New York Times reopen their office in Caracas.  A lot of news reporting about Venezuela today comes from neighboring Colombian or Brazilian-owned news sources.

You can easily imagine what all the fighting did to the people of Mexico.  As trains were used exclusively for military transport, crops rotted in the fields since there was no way to transport them to the cities.  With so little food available, food prices climbed dramatically.  With tax revenues falling, Huerta increasingly turned to his treasury department's printing presses to finance his government.  The resulting inflation eliminated the savings of the small middle class and the lack of hard currency effectively destroyed what was left of the economy.

When Maduro came to power, the country had $30 billion in reserve, despite falling oil revenue.  Petroleum accounts for over half of the country’s annual GDP.  Today, the cash reserve has shrunk to less than $10 billion, which is just enough to meet this year’s debt payments.  To finance operations within the country, the government printing presses run around the clock and to  discourage the black market, Maduro refuses to print bills larger than 100 Bolivars.  (This is despite the fact that they actually cost more to print than they are worth—Maybe, this only makes sense if you are a socialist.)

Shoppers lug suitcases of bills to stores, where clerks cannot fit the wads of bills into cash register tills, so they dump them into boxes.  There is little fear that the notes, individually worth about the same as fast food napkins, will be stolen.

While employment is dropping, there is one occupation that is growing in number:  You can now be paid for standing in line for someone waiting to buy food or medicine.  It has been estimated that in any given line, half of those waiting are bachaqueras (black marketeers) or those being paid by them to hold a place in line.  Fully half of the limited food available in the government run stores ends up being sold on the black market by people whose legal salaries might be less than the roughly $25 a month—the official minimum wage.  Large numbers of the middle class—doctors, teachers, accountants—have quit their jobs and turned to the black market to earn their living.

Since food could not be sold or transported, and since increasingly large armies stole livestock and conscripted farm workers, agriculture in Mexico crashed.  Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans starved.  An even larger number fled the country, most of them moving north into the United States.  Without sufficient workers, mines shut down and quickly flooded.  Many factories and railroads became military targets and were destroyed in the wars that engulfed Mexico for years.

Venezuela has large agricultural assets, but they have not been encouraged lately.  With a seemingly endless source of oil revenue, it was simpler for the country to just import food.  Until recently, more than half the country’s food supplies have been imported.  Today, food shortages are acute.  The average Venezuelan has lost 20 pounds since Maduro came to power.  This is called the ‘Caracas Diet’.  As you can see from his photo at right, Maduro is not on the diet.

Venezuela should be ranked among the more prosperous countries, since it possesses the world’s largest oil reserves, surpassing even Saudi Arabia.  Both countries, charter members of OPEC, have roughly equal populations.  And that is about where the similarities end.  (Well, they are also the two cheapest places on Earth in which to fill the tank of your car.  In Saudi Arabia, a gallon of gas costs about $.75, while in Venezuela it will set you back about a nickel.  Actually, it is less than four cents a gallon.  In Venezuela, gasoline is more prevalent and cheaper than drinking water.)

Venezuela also has the world’s fastest contracting economy, the second highest murder rate, horrific shortages of medicine, and rising rates of malnutrition that rival the worst countries of Africa.  The IMF is predicting that inflation, currently in triple digits, might reach four digits by the end of this year.

As the economy of Mexico shrank, the various armies began looting the property of foreign-owned factories and warehouses.  Before long, the Mexican government nationalized (the polite way of saying ‘stole’) foreign-owned property.  Without new investment in those factories, production halted.  Up to that point, Mexico had been the producer of a significant amount of the world’s silver, and when production dropped there, it caused a spike in the commodity’s price.

Between Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro, it might be easier to list the foreign-owned assets that have not been nationalized.  Fully 10% of the S&P 500 firms have lost property in Venezuela.  Ford, IBM, McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Mondelez (Oreos), United, Lufthansa, Delta, American Airlines, and DirecTV have all lost property, and cut back operations in Venezuela.  This week, the assets of General Motors were seized, eliminating the jobs of 2,678 employees.  There are signs that the next corporation whose assets will be “liberated” are those of the Spanish communication company, Telefonica.

With many of the essential oil field services provided by the same foreign corporations who have had their assets increasingly attacked by Maduro government, petroleum production has begun to diminish, particularly on the offshore oil platforms.  As oil production falls, so does income to the Maduro government.  One can easily predict that there will be ecological disasters in the Venezuelan oil fields in the near future.

After Mexico’s violent revolution, it took decades before the country had a stable government.  If Venezuela follows the same pattern, the same thing might well happen.

Or maybe not, perhaps this is all coincidence.  Remember, this historian is essentially just a poor dumb ol’ country boy.  As Mark Twain supposedly said—and absolutely did not—“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

Far From the First Time, Part 2

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the traditional relationship between the President of the United States and the press.  What most Americans tend to believe are unique or worsening conditions, are more often the norm across American history.  The same can be said about the record of presidential candidates changing their minds once elected.  Presidential flip flops are the norm, not the exception. 

The term ‘flip flop’ is not universal in politics.  England uses "U-Turn", while Australia says "backflip", but the meaning is fairly constant.  A politician has performed a somersault and changed his position—usually while maintaining that both positions are somehow consistent.

The first use of the term seems to be when President Grover Cleveland changed his mind about a treaty between the United States and Great Britain concerning fishing in Canadian waters.  The Canadians had been confiscating the fishing boats of Americans who violated the treaty.  When Cleveland, cognizant that America was in the wrong, sought a peaceful settlement of the issue, newspaper cartoons appeared showing the president as a fish ‘flip-flopping” on the issue—and the term stuck.

Within two years, the New York Times had an article about a Tammany Hall politician running for the office of District Attorney just two years after unsuccessfully running against Tammany Hall.  From that point on, the term was used regularly in the press. 

Frequent presidential reverses existed long before the term did, however.  President Jefferson had denounced both Presidents Washington and Adams for their support of a National Bank, believing such a bank would encourage national debt.  However, Jefferson didn’t hesitate to borrow money to buy the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon.  With a down payment of only 20%, Jefferson had a London bank issue bonds to raise the remainder of the money.

As a presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln promised no radical acts against either the institution of slavery or actions against the South.  Lincoln’s speeches made it plain that he was against freeing the slaves, favoring instead a policy of “compensated emancipation” and forced recolonization of Africa.  Since the government could not possibly come up with the funds to buy the estimated four million slaves (nor the colossal number of ships necessary to transport them), you have to wonder how serious Lincoln was about this campaign promise.

Lincoln also promised not to use force for domestic purposes and to support states’ rights.  During his inaugural address in 1861, he vowed to not use federal troops within the states, saying that such an act would be “the gravest of crimes” against the Constitution.  This promise endured for slightly more than a month.

Wars feature prominently in failed presidential promises.  Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection in 1916 on the campaign slogan of “He Kept Us Out of War!”.  Ignoring that Wilson would in less than six months from the election ask Congress for a Declaration of War against Germany, the President had already sent an invading army into Mexico.

Ironically, in his speech to the joint houses of Congress, Wilson said that the world must be “made safe for democracy”.  Before the year was out, Wilson would help pass laws that saw the biggest roll back of civil liberties and freedoms in our nation’s history.   

In the election of 1932, while the nation was sliding into the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised the voters that he would not only cut government spending, but that he would balance the budget and eliminate extraneous and unnecessary federal agencies.  Roosevelt made so many contradictory promises during the campaign season that his opponent, President Hoover, likened FDR to a “chameleon on plaid”. 

Once elected, President Roosevelt not only tripled federal spending, he initiated over 100 new government offices, so many that even his supporters referred to them as the ‘alphabet agencies’.  (A surprising number of which still exist today.)

In 1960, John F. Kennedy ran against the military policies of President Eisenhower.  Touting that he would eliminate the ‘missile gap’—a phrase he coined— with Russia, he played upon the American fears of a nuclear holocaust during the darkest days of the Cold War.  What Nixon knew, but because of security restrictions could not divulge, was that the United States actually had a large technical lead against the Russians in missile technology.  (Today, with recently released documents, there is evidence that Kennedy knew the truth, having already been briefed on American missile superiority.)  Once president, Kennedy stopped talking about nuclear missiles and focused on a military buildup of conventional military hardware instead.

After losing to Kennedy, perhaps Richard Nixon learned from the experience.  After campaigning strenuously against the Vietnam War and President Johnson’s attempts to end the war through a negotiated peace.  As a candidate, Nixon said the only way America should end a war was "to win it."  Once he became president, Nixon greatly expanded the war while negotiating what he called “Peace with Honor”.  Today, polls show that more Americans associate the war with Nixon than Johnson. 

The presidency of Ronald Reagan is remembered as the epitome of conservative policy, but as the governor of California, Reagan raised taxes and helped pass liberal laws on abortion.  While running for the presidency, Reagan called for tax cuts, and while he did cut taxes in 1981, less remembered is that he raised them in 1982.

When George H. W. Bush stated strongly at the 1988 Republican National Convention, “Read My Lips—No New Taxes!”, he most likely doomed his reelection chances after raising them only two years later.  His quote became a political joke that eventually may be the only thing remembered about his presidency by most Americans.

In 2008, all of the candidates—Republican and Democrat—were against gay marriage.  In an amazingly short period of time, this became an issue that even conservative candidates would dodge, usually by saying that it was “an issue best left to states”—a phrase that is political shorthand for putting your hands over your ears and yelling “Nah! Nah! Nah! Nah!  Next question!”

Also in 2008, Barack Obama urged his opponent, John McCain, to accept federal campaign financing, an act that would guarantee both candidates $84 million dollars to fund their election attempts while imposing rigid financial restrictions on donors.  Obama quickly dropped this proposal when his campaign treasury began to receive larger than expected donations.  When Obama refused to accept federal funds, he became the first presidential candidate to refuse federal financing since 1976, when the campaign reform laws were passed.

We should accept that every politician will change position on issues after the election.  There is probably nothing wrong with this.  As John Maynard Keynes once said, “When the facts change, I change my mind.  What do you do, sir?”

Changing your mind as conditions change is okay.  What we, as voters, need to challenge is the politician who denies that he has changed his position, that his new stance on political issues is consistent with his old stance.

It is okay when voters believe a politician’s lies—this is business as usual.  It is not okay when the politicians start believing themselves.