FunctionalAmbivalent

64 Years Ago Today

Dwight Eisenhower:

Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Forces:

You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.

But this is the year 1944. Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned. The free men of the world are marching together to victory.

I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty, and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory.

Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

To hear, rather than read, Eisenhower's words, go here.

For photos of the D-Day invasion, go here.

To see Eisenhower's handwritten notes of what he intended to say if the invasion failed -- a very, very real possibility -- click here.

Waterboarding In the Past

Commentor Frank makes good points deep, deep into the longest discussion this blog has ever seen. Primary among his points the difference between waterboarding as practiced by today's enlightened CIA and the "water cure" of World War II. In researching my response to Frank's points, I came across the quote below, from a defender of American torture during the Spanish American War. The quote:

In an article, "The 'Water Cure' from a Missionary Point of View," Reverend Homer Stunz justified the technique. It was not torture, he said, since the victim could stop it any time by revealing what his interrogators wanted to know. Besides, he insisted, it was only applied to "spies." The missionary also justified instances of torture by pointing out that U.S. soldiers "in lonely and remote bamboo jungles" faced stressful conditions.

So, after nearly 8 years of Bush Administration leadership, we're on our way to being as enlightened a nation as we are in 1898. That's before the Geneva Conventions, just by the way, and the defense of abominable behavior today is almost exactly the same as it was then.

What Happens To Former New York Mayors Who Run For President

John Lindsay, mayor of New York from 1966 to 1973, ran for President in 1972 and, like Rudy Guiliani, never parlayed his name recognition into actual votes. Handsome, telegenic and likable in an effete, eastern way, he touted his experience in the "second toughest job in America" but couldn't connect with the folks in the outback. He left politics and worked for a succession of law firms, and at the end of his life found himself unemployed, unhealthy and without medical insurance. Newly elected Mayor Giuliani "hired" Lindsay as a city consultant, paying him $10,000 a year and providing health insurance, a minor corruption that no one really objected to. Lindsay died in South Carolina in 2000.

Why Adolph Hitler Was Like He Was

Farts. Seriously. According to real historians.

It's Not Really One of Those Things You Think of as Being Invented

Vincent DeDomenico, the inventor of Rice-a-Roni, has died.

DeDomenico worked in his family's pasta business when he was inspired in 1958 to create the mix of vermicelli, macaroni and flavorings that millions of Americans came to know by its advertising slogan as "The San Francisco Treat."

Don Your Nicest Sweatsuit For the Funeral

When I got out of college and was driving to California to try my hand as a movie writer, I stopped overnight in Las Vegas.  I had never been there before.  I pulled off the freeway and onto the strip and stayed at the first place that had a name I recognized: The Stardust.  I paid $6 for my room, which was out back of the casino in a low-slung, two story, motel-style buildings.  I ate a $2 gambler's buffet and lost $40 playing at the $2 blackjack tables.  The next morning I left just after dawn to pursue my show business dreams.

The Stardust Hotel, a fixture on the strip almost since the strip's inception, will be blown-up this week. 

The Stardust is one of the few leftovers from the era when Vegas was glamorous and exotic, something more than a shopping mall with slots and mobile home parking available. 

``We wore long dresses and gloves for dinner, Jackie Onassis-type things,'' said Jill Rader, who danced on the Stardust stage. ``Now people slop on through, and they look a mess.''

It's been a few years since I was in Vegas, but last time I was there I spent most of my time feeling like I was walking around the Parallel Universe Galleria.  I was there for three days and didn't see a single mob guy.  Gangsters, yeah.  There were plenty of those, in from L.A. in their pimped-out rides.  But no mob guys.

Mostly, there were middle class Americans having less fun than they were pretending.  That's how Vegas has always struck me.  It's a great place to spend 48 hours.  Any more than that is pointless.

Blow the whole damned place up, I say.  But leave the golf courses.

I Dive Now Deep Into the Functional Ambivalent Archives...

...to a time when this wasn't really even a blog.  It was just kind of a test to see if it wanted to be a blog over on Blogspot that I wrote for a while.  I was checking to see if I wanted to be a blogger before I told anyone I had a blog, and one of the things I wrote back then is relevant now.  Why?  Because there are continued rumblings that Dick Cheney is going to run for President.

Here are excerpts from the thing:

I've figured out how to handicap the Presidential election. No, really, I have. I know who's going to win, and I have a sure-fire way to know who's going to win not only this presidential election but every presidential election until, oh, about 2040.

The person who wins will be the person most Americans would rather party with. 

No kidding; do the math. We've turned into a party nation. Our basic needs are covered, and even our poor are fat and have color TVs. We're all about the weekend, and the weekend is all about the party, no matter what form the party takes. What we don't want is a President Buzzkill who's going to go all weepy on us just because a few losers can't get their shit together enough to have a life.

Would there ever in a million years be more of a President Buzzkill than growly, old, about-to-keel-over-dead Dick Cheney?

Whether we know it or not, that's how we make our decisions come election day. Look at every election dating back to Nixon. We invariably elect the person we'd most like to party with.

Who would you rather party with: Ronald Reagan or Walter Mondale? Reagan, hands down. Red-nosed story-teller, does a great Irish accent, laughs out loud without a moment's hesitation. Reagan's so much fun he makes even his ossified Hollywood crowd seem like the Rat Pack. I'd belly up to a bar with him any day. Mondale? Two beers, max. Two beers and I'd be looking around for a way out. Not a bad guy, really, but if there's no one around who's any more fun than Mondale, I think maybe I'll call it a night.

George H.W. Bush or Mike Dukakis? This one's tougher, for a couple of reasons. First of all, G.H.W. Bush is the kind of preppie who gets a little tanked up and wants to sing in harmony, which is something I don't go for. Plus, I'm thinking Dukakis's wife, Kitty, knew her way around a game of Truth or Dare. I bet in her jewelry box there are beads she earned fair and square in New Orleans. All the same, you've got to go with Bush as the safe choice because Mike has these tendencies to lapse into a statistical analysis of traffic patterns.

Then Clinton beats G.H.W. Bush no sweat. The 1992 election was like the scene in "Animal House" where John Belushi sits down at the cafeteria table with the clean-cut boys from the Beta House. While Preppie-in-Chief Bush looks on in appalled horror, life-of-the-party Bill blasts mashed potatoes all over the perky bosoms of the nearby cheerleaders. Of course we elected Bill Clinton twice. We did it for the same reason "Animal House" is still a staple of Saturday night reruns. We love this stuff. Who wouldn't want to party with Bill for eight years? He's like Reagan but without a conscience. To have fun with Clinton, all you'd have to do is maintain a legally defensible distance and let the action come to you.

Clinton and Bob Dole? Bob's hilarious, in a snarly kind of way, and you definitely want to have him around when something snide needs to be said to the snobby girls at the next table. But he's not the leader of the party pack, and Clinton is, so Clinton won again.

Al Gore and George W. Bush? Again, even sober Bush is tons more fun that Gore. And back in the President's drunk-driving days...this is a man who has not only been to a strip joint, but knows how to deliver a generous tip using only his teeth. You want to know what's in the National Guard Record that keeps Carl Rove up at night? It's not the spotty attendance; we already know the future President took the Guard seriously only as a means of avoiding going to Vietnam. No, somewhere in the long-lost personnel files of 1st Lt. George Bush there's something that would make the President intolerable to the religious right. Say, a brawl at an off-base sporting house.

The Democrats are now in the process of nominating John Kerry. Anyone want to party with Senator Kerry? Anyone? Well, maybe for a while, if his wife picks up the bar tab. But come the critical midnight hour, when legends are made, I'm heading off in search of someone a little more little more like President George, who's out back packing people into his Range Rover to go drive across lawns in that new subdivision out by the Interstate.

I would add this: Can anyone out there imagine Vice President Cheney having any kind of fun at all that wasn't mean and, ultimately, regretable?  Oh, yeah, pushing a beer bottle into the spokes of a wheelchair so the poor guy can only go around in circles or calling in an airstrike on his arch-rival's new sports car...that I can see.  But knocking back a few and telling the kind of off-color jokes that made Drew Carey famous and get people elected President?  I don't think so.

The problem on the other end is, of course, that the core attribute for survival among Democrats is earnest sincerity.  There's not a one of the front runners who'd make a normal person feel like staying out past 9 o'clock at night.  It's so bad that I've heard serious Democrats talk about running Kerry again, apparently because he was so much fun the first time around.

And no, I'm not giving anyone the URL to the old site.  It's embarrassing.

House of Commons, London, 1940

Winston Churchill:

The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."

Comedy From One Who Knows

James Thurber, from "The Quality of Mirth":

We are a nation that has always gone in for the loud laugh, the wow, the yak, the belly laugh, and the dozen other labels for the roll-'em-in-the-aisles gagerissimo.  This is the kind of laugh that delights actors, directors and producers, but dismays writers of comedy because it is the kind of laugh that often dies in the lobby.  The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.

"The Most Votes Ever Cast for a President"

The statistic that President Bush won more votes than any other President is being bandied about as proof that the President has a huge mandate for his agenda. Adam Yoshida, not-at-all-smug conservative triumphalist, makes the case like this:

Not only is the President the first candidate to win a majority of the vote in a Presidential Election since 1988, but he also won more popular votes than any other candidate in history.

First of all, saying that something has not happened "since 1988," in Presidential election terms, is not all that big a deal. That's three elections. It's like saying "Bill Clinton never did it and neither did I!" Interesting, perhaps, but not something to put at the top of your resume.

As far as the "more popular votes" claim goes, well, duh. There are more people. The President Bush got more votes than, say, President Lincoln implies nothing about the quality of their leadership.

Let's have a look:

George W. Bush won, by latest count, 59,117,523 votes. That's a lot. If you had a nickel for every one of those votes you'd have a lot of nickels. It is, in fact, more votes than any other President has ever won. But President Bush received those votes from a country that has 25% more people than it did when Ronald Reagan set the previous record.

According to the US Census Bureau, which ought to know, the current U.S. population is 294.6 million. Certainly, it's more than the 235.4 million Americans there were in 1988, when Ronald Reagan won 54.4 million votes.

Bushes vote's represent 20% of the population. Doing the math the same way, President Reagan secured the votes of 23% of Americans.

This is a small thing, I know. But if they're going to claim that 51% of the vote constitutes a huge mandate based at least partially on the claim that President Bush got "more votes than ever cast before for a President," we might want to keep the scale of that mandate in perspective.

Republicans do the real numbers/percentage switch whenever it suits their spin. (Democrats, too! Also me, when I'm explaining to my clients how good a job I'm doing.) The current federal deficits, which are a record based on simple-old dollar figures, are dismissed as insignificant because they're a smaller percentage of GDP than previous deficits. (Under, interestingly, President Reagan.) Bush Buddies do the same for gas prices, which they say are not that high, once you adjust for inflation. I'd buy that, but it cost my wife $45 to fill up the minivan the other day, and $45 is a lot of money.

So, for the sake of consistency, they really ought to stop saying that President Bush won more popular votes than anyone else. In pure numbers, sure, but percentages count. And 51% is a majority, not a mandate.