Sorry about the title. This post isn’t going to live up to it. A friend of mine made an observation about education discourse that prompted a few thoughts I wanted to jot down. In recent years, there has been a fair amount of discourse talking up “the trades”* as a good alternative to college. The tone of the discourse often has at least the undercurrent of college being an inferior choice.

(*As I understand it, “the trades” refers to a job that requires some amount of skilled manual labor. But there’s probably an additional component because I’m not confident that all skilled manual labor is what people mean when they use the term. But, in any case, plumber, electrician, carpenter, and welder are examples.)

This isn’t an inherently bad take. College isn’t for everyone, it’s expensive, trade work can be lucrative, and it’s valuable work in its own right. On any number of occasions, I’ve mentioned the “No Time to Lose” report from the National Conference of State Legislatures on building a world class educational system. One of the features of such systems is a path for career and technical education. Singapore and Switzerland are cited as places with strong CTE programs.

But the Discourse isn’t really about that. With respect to one exchange where the opinion-haver said that we do a poor job of educating kids with “exceptional spatial abilities” and need programs for “those who think with their hands,” my friend observed that the solution for such kids was always focused on things like shop class and never art class or home economics.

Being a man and not especially well attuned to feminist thought, that blind spot had not stood out to me. But, now that she mentions it, of course this whole discussion has a strongly gendered component. It’s of a piece with what Real Men do and don’t do. “Real Men shower after work, not before.” Eggheads aren’t manly. Everything must be gendered and, it goes without saying, the masculine must be valued more than the feminine.

The people who say that all work has (or should have) dignity and the trades are valuable are, of course, correct. But, when the commentary goes beyond that and sneers at other kinds of work, something else is going on. Look at what kinds of work they are devaluing in the process to determine what the subtext is. And, as often as not, it seems as if there’s an effort to prioritize a certain kind of masculinity.

Sheila has a good post on bureaucracy in which she responds to a David Brooks column. Brooks asserts that “growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.” That can be true. But I’d also argue that they tend to bring order out of chaos, fight entropy, channel resources more effectively, and have other salutary aspects. Remember that meme about how much some of us think of the Romans? Here’s another one for you — for centuries, the Roman bureaucracy was way more effective than the individualism of their neighbors. Entropy bats last, so even that system fell apart eventually. Bureaucracy can obviously go too far, but it’s easy to make that observation and then turn around and assert some level of inconvenience to you personally represents “too far.”

For my part, I think a lot of bureaucracy is akin to public health measures and drainage infrastructure. You only notice the inconvenience. The horrors they protect you from are forgotten and go unnoticed.

In honor of President’s Day, this is my list, pulled from the top of my head based on a lot of half remembered history. It contains plenty of recency bias and penalizes Presidents about whom I’ve read bad stuff in the more recent past. They get penalized for my ignorance: for example JFK gets credit for his handling of the missile crisis, but I don’t happen to know much about his other accomplishments, meanwhile LBJ had plenty of flaws, but his work on civil rights and the social safety net are pretty extensive and continue to have an impact on our daily life. And I try to filter out stuff they did while not President: for example, Ike gets no credit for World War II and Grant gets no credit for the Civil War. On the other hand, I don’t do this reliably: Madison probably gets a lot of warm fuzzies from me for having written the Bill of Rights. So, here you go:

1. Franklin Roosevelt
2. Abraham Lincoln
3. George Washington
4. Theodore Roosevelt
5. James Madison
6. James Monroe
7. James K. Polk
8. Thomas Jefferson
9. Dwight Eisenhower
10. Lyndon Johnson
11. Joe Biden
12. Barack Obama
13. Bill Clinton
14. George H.W. Bush
15. John Quincy Adams
16. John Kennedy
17. Jimmy Carter
18. Grover Cleveland
19. Herbert Hoover
20. Ulysses S. Grant
21. Harry Truman
22. Gerald Ford
23. Ronald Reagan
24. William Taft
25. William McKinley
26. Martin Van Buren
27. James Garfield
28. John Adams
29. Zachary Taylor
30. John Tyler
31. Calvin Coolidge
32. Benjamin Harrison
33. Chester Arthur
34. Rutherford Hayes
35. Andrew Jackson
36. George W. Bush
37. Woodrow Wilson
38. Richard Nixon
39. William Henry Harrison
40. Millard Fillmore
41. Franklin Pierce
42. Warren Harding
43. James Buchanan
44. Andrew Johnson
45. Donald Trump

Heather Cox Richardson has a good post on Abraham Lincoln’s 1838 “Lyceum Speech.” At that time, Lincoln argued that the nation’s success contained the seeds of its destruction:

He warned that the very success of the American republic threatened its continuation. “[M]en of ambition and talents” could no longer make their name by building the nation—that glory had already been won. Their ambition could not be served simply by preserving what those before them had created, so they would achieve distinction through destruction.

For such a man, Lincoln said, “Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.” With no dangerous foreign power to turn people’s passions against, people would turn from the project of “establishing and maintaining civil and religious liberty” and would instead turn against each other.

To preserve the nation, we needed to make reverence for the laws and our institutions the political religion of the nation. “As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor…. Let reverence for the laws…become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.”

I’m reminded, as I so often am, of the quote from “a Man for All Seasons” concerning respect for the law:

We need to protect and preserve our institutions.

Indiana’s Citizens Action Coalition has written a paper explaining how the water “LEAP” project in Boone County, relying as it does on transferring massive amounts of water out of Tippecanoe County and shipping it down state, reveals “severe deficiencies in Indiana’s water and economic development policy.” A couple of the key points:

• The shell-game with water to enable the LEAP district is fomenting public dissent and a water war, contrary to sound water policy.
• From a policy perspective, the state views water strictly as a tool for near-term, opportunistic economic development, not as a resource that requires strategic and systematic consideration to secure water availability for communities into the future and to ensure water bill affordability for ratepayer

I plan on reading it in more detail when time allows, but I’m reminded of Indiana’s gas boom.

The people of that time were profligate with what seemed like an unlimited supply of gas. They were spectacularly wasteful. “It became fashionable to erect arches of perforated iron pipe and let them burn brightly day and night for month after month.” There were calls for conservation that were largely ignored. (“In 1893 the State Inspector of Natural Gas wrote, ‘The waste has been criminal and the day of repentance is fast approaching, and can only be delayed by practicing the most rigid economy and unrelaxed efforts in the husbandry of this valuable resource of our State.’”)

…

By 1902, however, the wells were starting to fail and the falling pressure was allowing salt water to creep in. Companies that had re-located to take advantage of the cheap, readily available gas were forced to close. The boom ended as quickly as it started.

This is the eighty-second anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Quoting a Wikipedia article I copied 18 years ago, “the Imperial Japanese Navy made its attack on Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii, was aimed at the Pacific Fleet of the United States Navy and its defending Army Air Corps and Marine air forces. The attack damaged or destroyed twelve U.S. warships, destroyed 188 aircraft, and killed 2,403 American servicemen and 68 civilians. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto planned the raid as the start of the Pacific Campaign of World War II, and it was commanded by Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who lost 64 servicemen. However, the Pacific Fleet’s three aircraft carriers were not in port and so were undamaged, as were oil tank farms and machine shops. Using these resources the United States was able to rebound within six months to a year. The U.S. public saw the attack as a treacherous act and rallied strongly against the Japanese Empire, resulting in its later defeat.

Back in 2016, I wrote:

We were fighting against Imperial Japan, a place where militaristic nationalists had taken control of the government and stoked notions of Japanese exceptionalism. The America fought for by the Americans 75 years ago stood for a country (in principal if not always in fact) governed by the consent of the governed where all men are created equal. The home of the brave.

We should always be mindful that, as Edward R. Murrow pointed out, “we are not descended from fearful men.” When our own militaristic nationalists come peddling fear and exceptionalism, we should strike them down just as we struck down Imperial Japan so that the dead of Pearl Harbor shall not have died in vain.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I recently finished the book “Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan” by Herbert Bix. It contains quite a lot about the events on the Japanese side that led to the decision to attack Pearl Harbor. From what I read, it doesn’t sound like anyone on the Japanese side particularly thought that they could win a war against the U.S. even if the Pearl Harbor attack was wildly successful which, from their perspective, it was. Rather the internal logic and rewards of domestic politics led the decision makers down a path they couldn’t seem to escape. Particularly after invading China some years earlier, they had the tiger by the tail. Resistance to the militaristic nationalists was punished politically and sometimes with physical violence. And it doesn’t seem like Hirohito himself had any particular appetite for curbing their impulses. He seemed to share their goals in many cases.

After capturing Manchuria in 1931, Japan was bogged down with a full scale war in China by 1937. It increasingly needed resources to keep up the war and invaded French Indochina in 1941 (with permission of Nazi-occupied France). The U.S. froze Japanese assets in the U.S. which effectively ended Japan’s ability to purchase oil from the U.S. This caused Japan to seek to wrest control of Singapore from Great Britain and the Philippines from the U.S. in order to establish control of the oil in the Dutch East Indies. To facilitate those moves and mitigate U.S. ability to retaliate, it attacked Pearl Harbor.

The Japanese seemed to have known that they had no clear exit plan once they attacked the U.S. The hope seems to have been that they would strike a devastating blow, expand rapidly, and then when the U.S. geared up for war, they could back off from some of their acquisitions into a more defensible position and then negotiate a more favorable peace than would have been possible had they not attacked in the first place. But, among other things, Japan had trouble retreating to more defensible areas in a timely fashion. Ultimately, the U.S. regrouped, engaged its overwhelming industrial capacity for military purposes, and won a critical battle at Midway. One military historian called it “one of the most consequential naval engagements in world history, ranking alongside Salamis, Trafalgar, and Tsushima Strait, as both tactically decisive and strategically influential.” After that, it was a matter of time before Japan would unconditionally surrender. The combination of the continuing military losses, the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Russian declaration of war against Japan finally broke the Empire’s back and overwhelmed the forces of militaristic nationalism that had precipitated the attack against the U.S. in the first place; compelling Hirohito to surrender on September 2, 1945, in hopes of at least maintaining his status as Emperor even if he was not able to retain so much of his power.

The U.S., primarily under the leadership of Douglas MacArthur, occupied and reshaped Japanese politics until the Treaty of San Francisco in 1952.

I recently read some discussion about how nostalgia tends to focus on a period about thirty years prior. In the 80s, there was a focus on the 50s; in the 90s, a focus on the 60s; a lot of love for the 90s at the moment. This is not a particularly new idea. I think the most prevalent theory I’ve seen is that the people who create cultural content become dominant about 30 years after their childhood and then make nostalgic content about that period. There’s probably a fair amount of truth to that.

But another aspect that has occurred to me is that it’s probably the sweet spot where the past is familiar but not threatening. Too close to the present and events remain messy and contentious. Too far back and they are alien, potentially uncomfortable, and maybe too sterile to evoke emotion.

Right now, I remember enough of the 90s to be amazed when people talk about “what an optimistic time it was.” In my head, I can’t help but think that Kurt “Voice of a Generation” Cobain was pretty famously not an optimist. Not as culturally pervasive, but “Pump Up the Volume”

“I really don’t see why you can’t be cheerful for one second.”

“I’ll tell you since you asked. I just arrived in this stupid suburb. I have no friends, no money, no car, no license. And even if I did have a license all I can do is drive out to some stupid mall. Maybe if I’m lucky play some fucking video games, smoke a joint and get stupid. You see, there’s nothing to do anymore. Everything decent’s been done. All the great themes have been used up. Turned into theme parks. So I don’t really find it exactly cheerful to be living in the middle of a totally, like, exhausted decade where there’s nothing to look forward to and no one to look up to.“

But, now we can look back and a lot of the things we worried about never came to pass or we more or less navigated the challenges. The good times, good music, good shows, etc. all stand out and the difficult things faded. Or, I don’t know, maybe most people just have the memory of a goldfish.

The origin of the term Hoosier as a demonym for people from Indiana is lost to the mists of history and probably will never be settled with any kind of authority. But, I just came across a theory that seems plausible. (And they aren’t all plausible — I remember an elementary school history book including the idea that it’s a play on “whose ear?” because early Hoosiers would wrestle a lot and possibly bite each other.) There are others that are plausible – such as one that it’s derived from an old Anglo-Saxon word that refers to a promontory or cliff; presumably based originally on an idea that people from those places were unsophisticated at whatever time the term gained traction.

In any event, the notion advanced by William Piersen suggests that maybe the term has a connection to a freed black man referred to as “Black Henry” Hosier who was an unusually gifted orator and evangelist. Piersen didn’t find the existing theories particularly satisfying. In support of the “Black Henry” idea, he notes that Henry’s last name was variously spelled by contemporaries as Hoosier, Hosier, Hossier, Hersure, Hosure, Hosure, and Hoshur, all of which sound a lot like “Hoosier.” Henry accompanied Methodist preachers and was nominally assisting them, but the reality seems to have been that he was the main draw. Of Henry, early American luminary, Benjamin Rush said, “making allowances for his illiteracy, he was the greatest orator in
America.” Frontier Methodists were apparently less than scrupulous about racial separation and so it’s plausible that more refined elements of white society, Baptists and such, might have used the term as a slur for the less refined backwoods Methodists of the sort who might listen to the preaching of an illiterate black man. Piersen finds support for this idea in the 1833 poem “the Hoosiers Nest” that uses the word “Hoosheroons.” Piersen speculates that this might be a play on terms like “quadroon” and “octoroon” which were used to label the amount of “black” blood a person had.

As a matter of memetics, I can definitely see where a term combining social class, religion, race, and a famous personality as a put down might gain currency and then, subsequently, be embraced by the targets as a badge of honor. It’s a thin reed, but plausible.

If you want to read more broadly on the subject, Jeffrey Graf provides a good overview on the competing theories.