A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

I thought I’d posted about this before, but I couldn’t immediately find anything. I read a post that was skeptical of the universal feasibility of a financial planner’s advice that everyone should have 3-6 months of living expenses saved up for emergencies. It also mentioned that a 29 year old should have the equivalent of a year’s salary in a retirement investment account. And elsewhere, of course, other experts make other recommendations about what a prudent person should be doing with their money: food, shelter, transportation, insurance of various kinds (auto, property, disability, health), saving for college for your kids, paying off student loans, paying off credit card debt if you have it. I’m sure I’ve seen other recommendations.

What I think would be helpful for a state’s population is some kind of model state household budget based on median incomes in the state and perhaps various percentages thereof. Obviously anyone is free to deviate, and it’s no guarantee of success in life. But, there is a lot of financial illiteracy out there, and it would be helpful if there was a model budget that your average citizen could look at and know that, if their family followed those guidelines, they’d be more or less o.k. You should be paying about $x for housing, $y for insurance, putting away $z into your kids college account, etc.

A skeptical part of me thinks that this would never fly, in part at least, because if we mapped it out in one place, there might have to be an acknowledgment that financial prudence isn’t feasible for the average citizen. It might make the economy-as-morality-play model where we blame people for their own economic misfortune a little less viable.

The blog isn’t quite dead yet, though it’s been more and more dormant. It’s been going, more or less, for fourteen years now. So, happy birthday to the blog!

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the Armistice that ended World War I, “the War to End All Wars.” Once upon a time, we commemorated this as “Armistice Day.” That changed in 1956 to “Veteran’s Day.” In my mind, this shift was unfortunate — not because there is anything wrong with honoring veterans but because we lost something when we stopped honoring the Armistice. We shifted our focus from the end of the fight to those who fought. Warriors are very often noble. War very often is not. When we celebrate the nobility of the warrior we run the risk of forgetting the ignobility of war.

Wars are often petty, pointless, and avoidable. How many of us can say just exactly what the point of World War I was? If you have a reasonable historical background, you can probably describe the causes. But what the hell were they fighting for? Pride, fear, and greed seem like the main motivators. And, of course, there was a huge “sunk cost” component — once the combatants were engaged and once a significant number of soldiers had died in the fight, it was impossible to give up without having anything to show for the sacrifice.

And the sacrifice was immense. The impersonal savagery of war was laid bare, stripped of its romance. Personal valor counted for little in the face of the industrial machinery of death. (At Verdun, the French and Germans fired 1.4 million tons of steel at each other.) Wave after wave of husbands, sons, fathers, and brothers were sent into what amounted to a meat grinder only to claim a few yards of ground; ground that was soon be lost again as the other side reciprocated. After the assault failed, and the attackers retreated to their trenches, they left behind the bodies of wounded men, pinned down under fire, beyond rescue, dying – the craters in which they lay filling with water, temperatures dropping, their moans and screams filling the air. In the trenches, soldiers had to dig ever lower to bury their dead, had to throw their body waste out into No Man’s Land. The horrors go on and on, and I can’t ever do them justice. I wasn’t there, and they are countless. My prose here is perhaps overwrought, but I don’t think I can do justice to what these soldiers went through. They suffered so much for so little.

The end of fighting, the Armistice, was itself a thing that deserves respect. We should continue respecting it by holding war in disdain. War can be necessary. On the American side, World War II and the Civil War seem like “good” wars. The need for World War I, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq is much less clear. The soldiers who fight them can be heroic and noble and deserve our gratitude. But we should scorn those who rattle sabers, indulge their pride, and regard war as a primary instrument of policy without concern for the inevitable human suffering.

In Memoriam

by Ewart Alan Mackintosh (killed in action 21 November 1917 aged 24)

(Private D Sutherland killed in action in the German trenches, 16 May 1916, and the others who died.)

So you were David’s father,
And he was your only son,
And the new-cut peats are rotting
And the work is left undone,
Because of an old man weeping,
Just an old man in pain,
For David, his son David,
That will not come again.

Oh, the letters he wrote you,
And I can see them still,
Not a word of the fighting,
But just the sheep on the hill
And how you should get the crops in
Ere the year get stormier,
And the Bosches have got his body,
And I was his officer.

You were only David’s father,
But I had fifty sons
When we went up in the evening
Under the arch of the guns,
And we came back at twilight –
O God! I heard them call
To me for help and pity
That could not help at all.

Oh, never will I forget you,
My men that trusted me,
More my sons than your fathers’,
For they could only see
The little helpless babies
And the young men in their pride.
They could not see you dying,
And hold you while you died.

Happy and young and gallant,
They saw their first-born go,
But not the strong limbs broken
And the beautiful men brought low,
The piteous writhing bodies,
They screamed ‘Don’t leave me, sir’,
For they were only your fathers
But I was your officer.

Today the news is reporting that a lot of people Trump has named as political enemies have been the subject of attempted bombings. In particular, George Soros, the Clintons, and the Obamas received explosive devices that were apparently similar. CNN’s offices were evacuated after what was suspected to be a pipe bomb. An explosive device addressed to Eric Holder was labeled with a return address for Debbie Wasserman Schultz whose return address also appeared on the bomb sent to Soros. A suspicious package addressed to Maxine Waters was intercepted by Capitol Police and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced his Manhattan office received a suspicious package.

As the saying goes, the past doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. This rash of murder attempts using bombs is reminiscent of the Anarchist Bombings of 1919. Those bombs were carried out by Italian anarchist followers of Luigi Galleani.

In late April 1919, at least 36 booby trap dynamite-filled bombs were mailed to a cross-section of prominent politicians and appointees, including the Attorney General of the United States, as well as justice officials, newspaper editors and businessmen, including John D. Rockefeller. Among all the bombs addressed to high-level officials, one bomb was notably addressed to the home of a Federal Bureau of Investigation (BOI) field agent once tasked with investigating the Galleanists, Rayme Weston Finch, who in 1918 had arrested two prominent Galleanists while leading a police raid on the offices of their publication Cronaca Sovversiva.
. . .
These bombings fed into the Palmer Raids, the Red Scare of 1919-1920, persecution of immigrants, and contributed mightily to the rise of J. Edgar Hoover and all of the civil rights abuses he stood for.

Some of the bombs at that time were accompanied by a flyer that said:

War, Class war, and you were the first to wage it under the cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws. There will have to be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions.

The Palmer Raids were a series of raids to capture and arrest suspected radical leftists, mostly Italian and Eastern European Jewish immigrants (especially those accused of being anarchists and communists), and deport them from the United States. Palmer had told a House Committee sometime earlier that radicals would “on a certain day…rise up and destroy the government at one fell swoop.” A trial run by Palmer was thrown out on First Amendment grounds and he learned to take advantage of “powerful immigration statutes that authorized the deportation of alien anarchists, violent or not.” A young J. Edgar Hoover led the effort, and the raids led to thousands of arrests, many of them legally dubious.

I can’t say what the fall out from today’s bomb attempts will be, but likely nothing good. Opponents of Trump will claim, with justification, that his rhetoric concerning his political opponents is dangerous and condones violence. His supporters who don’t think the violence is justified will likely dismiss the bombs as unrelated to his rhetoric or as a false flag operation. The government can use the attempts as justification for diluting civil liberties and cracking down on disfavored and politically weak groups, be they immigrants or some other undesirable group. Threats of violence will further exacerbate tribal divisions among U.S. citizens, as citizens with differing political opinions increasingly seeing each other as enemies rather than adversaries.