"The Children"

Rudyard Kipling

The Children 1914-1918

('The Honours of War' - A Diversity of Creatures)

"These were our children who died for our lands; they were dear in our sight.

We have only the memory left of their home-treasured sayings and laughter.

The price of our loss shall be paid to our hands, but not to another's hereafter.

Neither Alien nor Priest shall decide on it. That is our right. But who shall return us the children?

At the hour the barbarian chose to disclose his pretences,

And raged against Man, they engaged, on the breasts that they bared for us,

The first felon-stroke of the sword he had long-time prepared for us -

Their bodies were all our defence while we wrought our defences.

They brought us anew with their blood, forbearing to blame us.

Those hours which we had not made good when the judgement o'ercame us.

They believed us and perished for it. Our statecraft, our learning

Delivered them bound to the Pit and alive to the burning

Whither they mirthfully hastened as jostling for honour -

Not since her birth has our Earth seen such worth loosed upon her.

Nor was their agony brief, or once only imposed on them.

The wounded, the war-spent, the sick received no exemption:

Being cured, they returned and endured and achieved our redemption.

Hopeless themselves of relief, till death, marvelling, closed on them.

That flesh we had nursed from the first in all cleanness was given

To corruption unveiled and assailed by the malice of Heaven -

By the heart-shaking jests of Decay where it lolled on the wires -

To be blanched or gay-painted by fumes - to be cindered by fires -

To be senselessly tossed and re-tossed in stale mutilation

From crater to crater.

For this we shall take expiation. But who shall return us our children?"

Obama thinks most of us are wrong (sigh)

quoted from "Obama Goes Nuclear," by Philip Klein in The American Spectator:

"...When CBS asked Americans in April 2001, “Do you favor or oppose George W. Bush's $1.6 trillion tax cut for the country over the next 10 years?" supporters outnumbered opponents by a 51 percent to 37 percent margin. In June 2003, a Gallup poll found Americans supported the second round of cuts by a 47 percent to 43 percent plurality, while Harris found that 50 percent thought the tax cut was a “good thing” compared to 35 percent who said “bad thing.”

Yet polls show a majority of Americans oppose the health care bill and a CNN poll released last week found that just 25 percent of Americans want Congress to pass something similar to the two existing bills. A Gallup survey taken last week found that Americans oppose using the reconciliation procedure to pass a health care bill by a 52 percent to 39 percent margin. There has been a sustained national outcry against this legislation that first manifested itself in town hall meetings last August and culminated with the election of Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts in January.

Yet Obama, whose entire candidacy was built around the idea that change must begin from the bottom up, is now pursuing a top down strategy.

“It is a complicated issue,” Obama said of health care on Wednesday, continuing, “it easily lends itself to demagoguery and political gamesmanship, and misrepresentation and misunderstanding.” And he observed that “The American people want to know if it's still possible for Washington to look out for their interests and their future.”

Evidently, according to Obama, Americans only oppose his favored proposals because they aren’t smart enough to understand them, and are incapable of looking out for their own interests and future."

__________________________________________________

The Rasmussen polls, which predicted Barack Obama's 2008 presidential win, show a strong majority of likely voters oppose the proposed health care plan - 52% oppose it, and 43% strongly oppose it - almost as many as the 44% of likely voters who favor the plan.

Why don't I like this plan? To quote Cecil Day-Lewis, I'm defending the bad against the worse.

Based on my experience working with Louisiana's state-owned health care system, I can say that the opportunities for rampant corruption are vast in any governmentally-controlled health care system, where politics, bribery, favoritism and not bottom-line cost-benefit analysis drive every fiscal decision.

And the Party of the late John Murtha will be making every one of those decisions. The earmarks on any health care appropriation bill (which I freely admit are a bipartisan issue) alone would probably dwarf the cost of the Golden Parachutes under which health-care executives bail out of their careers.

Any claims that government control of the entire health care economy will result in efficiencies are farcical, based on Louisiana's experience. It took Bobby Jindal to sort that rat's nest out, and I haven't heard Barack Obama reaching out for Bobby Jindal to run the national health care system. We're not likely to, either.

Busting the AMA's Union Rules: A partial solution to health care costs?

As a pre-med who couldn't jump through the hoops necessary to get the 3.8 or so grade average minimally necessary for admission to medical school, I firmly believe that the British system (in which a Bachelor of Medicine, four-year college graduate can perform most primary care treatment tasks) bears looking at.

You don't need four years undergrad schooling, four years medical school, a two year internship and a residency that can last several years to diagnose upper respiratory congestion and work down a differential diagnostic tree. One of the reasons National Health Service works in the UK is that the cost of educating and hiring physicians is much lower. There are MDs there, most of whom specialize in non-primary care.

I think that a little re-thinking and marketing is in order. Import the British Commonwealth's Bachelor of Medicine degree program, or adapt current nurse practitioner and physician assistant programs so that they are equivalent to the British basic physician level of competency (and for all I know, they may be already - the only English physician I ever consulted took three weeks to clear up an oropharyngeal infection that an American practitioner could have cleared up with a ten-day course of Keflex).

It's time to break up the AMA's union rules. They are part of the impasse we face. If becoming a practicing physician only took four to eight years and didn't require unrealistically high grades in a four-year undergrad program before medical training even began, medical care WOULD be less expensive. Certainly, if or when "health care reform" goes through, the flood of uninsured patients into the existing primary care physician pool will swamp available physician resources. We need more primary care practitioners.

And that is something I think that conservatives, liberals, libertarians and Tea Partiers could ALL get behind.

The Sons of Martha

Editor's introduction to The Sons of Martha by Rudyard Kipling



There is more than one kind of aristocracy.

Luke tells us the story: Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus, were
entertaining Jesus and his disciples. Martha rushed about the kitchen
and household, seeing to the cooking, bringing wash basins, changing
towels, and doing the other things needful when one's home has been
unexpectedly invaded by a celebrity and his entourage.

"Now it came to pass, as they went, that he entered into a certain
village: and a certain woman named Martha received him into her house.

"And she had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus feet, and
heard his word.

"But Martha was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and said,
Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? Bid
her therefore that she help me.

"And Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou are careful
and troubled about many things:

"But one thing is needful: Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall
not be taken away from her."

(Luke 10:38-42)



Much has happened since then; but Rudyard Kipling tells us, we sons of
Martha have yet to pay the final reckoning.

Imperial Stars Vol. I: The Stars at War, Jerry Pournelle, ed. p. 227







The Sons of Martha

Rudyard Kipling 1907

The sons of Mary seldom bother, for they have inherited
that good part;
But the Sons of Martha favour their Mother of the
careful soul and the troubled heart.
And because she lost her temper once, and because she
was rude to the Lord her Guest,
Her Sons must wait upon Mary's Sons, world without
end, reprieve, or rest.
It is their care in all the ages to take the buffet and
cushion the shock.
It is their care that the gear engages; it is their care that
the switches lock.
It is their care that the wheels run truly; it is their care
to embark and entrain,
Tally, transport, and deliver duly the Sons of Mary by
land and main.

They say to mountains, "Be ye removed." They say to
the lesser floods, "Be dry."
Under their rods are the rocks reproved-they are not
afraid of that which is high.
Then do the hill-tops shake to the summit-then is the
bed of the deep laid bare,
That the Sons of Mary may overcome it, pleasantly
sleeping and unaware.
They finger death at their gloves' end where they piece
and repiece the living wires.
He rears against the gates they tend: they feed him hungry
behind their fires.
Early at dawn, ere men see clear, they stumble into
his terrible stall,
And hale him forth a haltered steer, and goad and turn
him till evenfall.
To these from birth is Belief forbidden; from these till
death is Relief afar.
They are concerned with matters hidden - under the
earthline their altars are-
The secret fountains to follow up, waters withdrawn to
restore to the mouth,
And gather the floods as in a cup, and pour them again
at a city's drouth.

They do not preach that their God will rouse them a
little before the nuts work loose.
They do not teach that His Pity allows them to drop
their job when they dam'-well choose.
As in the thronged and the lighted ways, so in the dark
and the desert they stand,
Wary and watchful all their days that their brethren's
day may be long in the land.

Raise ye the stone or cleave the wood to make a path
more fair or flat -
Lo, it is black already with blood some Son of Martha
spilled for that!
Not as a ladder from earth to Heaven, not as a witness
to any creed,
But simple service simply given to his own kind in their
common need.

And the Sons of Mary smile and are blessed - they
know the Angels are on their side.
They know in them is the Grace confessed, and for
them are the Mercies multiplied.
They sit at the Feet - they hear the Word - they see
how truly the Promise runs.
They have cast their burden upon the Lord, and - the
Lord He lays it on Martha's Sons!

We've had enough government by the Sons of Mary, who expect someone else to clean up the messes they make in Congress.

We need to find Sons (and Daughters) of Martha, who know what it means to serve without glory or fame, and who are dedicated to fixing what's broke.

It would be nice if we could get 60 of them elected to the House this November....

Just sayin'

How to Find Meaning in a World of Shifting Standards

"If we are searching for meaning in a world of shifting standards, literature is one place we can find it. All of us have periods of our lives when meaning is lost, and other periods when it is found again. It is an inescapable part of the human condition to be borrowing meaning from one another. No man is an island. Or as William Blake said it:

The bird a nest,
The spider a web,
Man friendship."

Freeman Dyson, Weapons and Hope

Professor Dyson, who in my opinion is the best living author to come from the cloisters of science, was talking (in 1983, at the height of the Cold War's final phase) of how to restore meaning to life when it lies under constant threat of nuclear annihilation.

Those of us who have been paying attention know that the so-called "end of history" in which the uneasy nuclear standoff between Russia and the West supposedly ended was a clever piece of public relations during the Clinton Administration with very few real ramifications.

While the size of our and the Russians' nuclear arsenals has shrunk somewhat with the withdrawal of our first-line Peacekeeper ICBMs and their obsolete and much-less functional classes of ICBMs, enough missiles and warheads remain and can be rapidly retargeted to cities and military bases in both nations to cause the near-instant death of tens or hundreds of millions. And the Russians under Vladimir Putin have not been shy about threatening to use them on us lately if we deploy non-nuclear, solely defensive anti-ballistic missiles and guidance radars in Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Between this gradual erosion of the nuclear peace we thought we had negotiated with the Russians, the North Koreans' inexorable march towards being a callous, rather psychotic nuclear-armed dictatorship, and the eventual conversion of the Middle East into a spiders' web of nuclear tripwires strung by the Iranians, Israelis, Syrians and eventually the Saudis and Gulf Emirates, we are heading directly toward what can at best be a much less stable revival of the Cold War in which there are not two poles of opposition but several - Shiite versus Sunni, Syrian versus Lebanese and Saudi, Muslim versus non-Muslim and of course, Arab versus Israeli.

And we and our children and grandchildren will have, as we lose loved ones in a multi-generational war on terrorism or as mushroom clouds rise over town or desert, perhaps even here, to search for meaning in a world that seems to have none. Freeman Dyson's words are no less true for having been uttered 26 years ago during the last Cold War. Now, in this undeclared, weakly-defined and much less stable new Cold War, we have to crack our books and use the Internet to connect with the men and women who have gone through the same challenges as us - constant threats to our lives and livelihoods, the specter of death or dissolution and lived to write about it.

I am probably going to use this blog from time to time to show where literature speaks to me personally, and to us all in this depressing, frightening time of endless crises and unending war.
I can't think of a better way to use this space.

Defending the Bad Against the Worse...

"They who in folly or mere greed

Enslaved religion, markets, laws,
Borrow our language now and bid
Us to speak up in freedom's cause.

It is the logic of our times,
No subject for immortal verse -
That we who lived by honest dreams
Defend the bad against the worse."

Cecil Day Lewis, "Where Are the War Poets?" 1943

In the middle of World War Two, one of England's better poets took time out to sum up the only logical attitude toward politicians in the democracies - the people who dare to lecture the rest of us on our civic duties while pocketing bribes and pandering to blocs of idiots with voter registration cards in their wallets.

It's still not such a bad attitude today.

We may have to send our sons and daughters overseas to fight in stupidly conceived and executed wars in order to protect the rest of us from those who would kill or enslave us for their warped version of God or social justice - or their own greed and parochialism. We may have to pay taxes to support stupid make-work projects as well as the things that we need to have in order to have a civilization.

We don't have to be enthusiastic about it, though, and when we get a chance to change things, we should. Just over half of us thought we were changing things, apparently in November 2008. Just under half of us thought we were defending the bad against the worse.

In times like this, healthy cynicism about the motives of ANY politician is the only antidote to lies told us "for our own good."

Thoughts on Force Protection From a Father

Eight years into the Global War on Terrorism, and four years after my son died in Iraq with eight other men when a roadside bomb detonated under their Bradley Fighting Vehicle, I've had time to think about how the war was fought. Specifically, the thing called "Force Protection" which supposedly guards the lives of our troops overseas.

I think the concept is a contradiction in terms. You send a military force into a country to fight the enemy. Its protection lies in its intrinsic military strength and the match of force type to threat, nothing else.

Bush, Rumsfeld and company did it completely bass-ackwards, when it came time to put more troops in Iraq in 2004. They took reservists and Guardsmen who were given a lick and a promise in the way of training in the summer of 2004 at Fort Hood and other training depots (they never got their full span of training at Fort Irwin's desert warfare training facility) and sent them into a hot war, through streets they did not control in vehicles which turned out to be inadequate to what by then was a known enemy tactic.

Of course, I want to know how terrorists obtained a seemingly endless supply of artillery shells to make into roadside bombs when the Iraqi Army was supposedly beaten.

Those troops should have been intensively trained over a long enough period to assure their combat capability. We should, as a longer term consideration, rethink our Army's "big-unit" fixation. Big tanks, big armored personnel carriers, and big units don't win the day as often as small, fierce, rapid units such as the US Marine Corps Marine Expeditionary Units.

In fact, it strikes me that for the anti-terror mission, the Marine Corps is a MUCH better fit of force to threat than the US Army.

Whether we:
- push the current trend of "jointness" to a unified military service in which MEUs are the predominant arm of our land forces (with transfer of National Guard formations to the training and supply structure that serves the MEUs, and integration at every level of doctrine, supply and equipment between active, reserve and Guard elements);
- simply enlarge the Marine Corps to the point where it can once again serve to protect American interests abroad unaided by the Army, or
- gut the Army's training and doctrine to bring them into line with the Marines' much more effective use of manpower to control enemy territory by patrols on foot backed by light armor;
we HAVE to learn from our mistakes in Iraq.

I don't sleep well these days. I named my son "Armand," after his grandfather, my father, who also served in the US Army during the final days of World War II in Europe. Those of us with a smattering of the Classics know that I sealed his fate in the act of naming him "arms-bearer."

I raised him to respect and love his country, and was proud when he signed up with the National Guard. His mother and I went to Fort Sill for his Basic graduation exercises, and we were flushed with pride that our son had become a tough, professional soldier.

And it all pushed him into Iraq where he could die after ill-conceived error after error on the part of the people who were making the calls. Armand's death followed a prior roadside bomb detonation under his squad's Bradley (which left all hands unharmed) by two weeks, so the decision-makers can't claim ignorance of the specific nature of the threat he faced.

My son died because Army troops were laagered within walls instead of out in the field controlling the territory. He might still have died then, but at least it would have served a military purpose. I can't see one in the circumstances of his actual death.

If he had died in the street, his weapon at the ready, able to defend himself and his team-mates, in the Marine Corps, I think I might get more sleep.