How can you lie back and think of England when you don’t even know who’s on the team
I’m having trouble getting back into the blogging swing of things and I’ve always been fueled creatively by my massive hatred of David Brooks, so I thought I’d go after this low-hanging fruit:
In 1920, Winston Churchill’s mother held a dinner for M. Paul Cambon to celebrate the end of his 20 years as the French ambassador to Britain. One of the guests asked Cambon what he had seen in his two decades in London.
“I have witnessed an English revolution more profound and searching than the French Revolution itself,” Cambon replied. “The governing class have been almost entirely deprived of political power and to a very large extent of their property and estates; and this has been accomplished almost imperceptibly and without the loss of a single life.”
Buried in that answer is a picture of how politics should work. Britain faced an enormous task: To move from an aristocratic political economy to a democratic, industrial one. This transition was made gradually, without convulsion, with both parties playing a role.
Gradually? Without convulsion? I don’t know if you’re aware of this David, but most British historians believe that the First World War was pretty convulsive. And definitely not very gradual. He seems to think that Britain cast off her aristocratic rulers by a process of “constructive competition.” In fact, what happened was that we went to war, conscripted millions of young men and sent them to France to be machine-gunned. Simultaneously, our government was taken over by a clique, led by Lloyd George, which ruled autocratically from a garden shed in No 10 Downing Street. Meanwhile, a whole part of the country – Ireland – descended into civil war. Somehow, I don’t see that as a “gradual” transformation.
Without convulsion to Bobo means without argument among elites and without undue influence from the vituperative, foul-mouthed masses. Millions of pointless deaths? It’s all in the game. The important thing is that no elites’ fee fees were hurt.
I can’t think of a better example of how differently the Village views things than you or I do. Better that an entire generation gets mustard gassed than that a single president gets blown by an intern.
I will say that Bobo did achieve one thing with that column: he’s now known as a clueless elitist twit on both sides of the pond.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:06 pm
It’s better to destroy Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security than to make David Brooks suffer the indignity of slightly higher tax rates.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:07 pm
You know, even that criterion gets tossed in the shitter the moment Senator Toe-Tappy McMinnesota Blowjoberson gets busted.
All that’s important is the rich being in charge. There’s no way Brooks can spend two minutes in New York City and continue to worry about rich and powerful people getting blown by their secretaries.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:09 pm
Shirley!
May 26th, 2011 at 3:09 pm
FWIW I think Bobo was limiting himself to Lloyd George, Churchill and the rest of the Liberal Party emasculating the House of Lords. He (Bobo) is still a fucking idiot for the reasons stated above and all the other ones, also too.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:09 pm
Knowles’ counterpoint is brilliant. Just fucking brilliant. Love how he has no compunctions at all about calling Bobo an ass. Would that the American media would do the same.
Or better that 90% of Americans see their finances and investments (including real estate) disappear into thin air (or into the pockets of zillionaires) leaving them destitute for retirement, homeless, without health care, and jobless than the corporate or marginal tax rates be increased by a single percentage point. Otherwise known as “Paul Ryan is a Very Serious Person.”
May 26th, 2011 at 3:11 pm
To give him his due Cambon is clearly basing his idea of what a convulsive, non-gradual societal transformation looks like on the French Revolution, and the Paris Commune.
Those subjects of the King killed between 1914 and 1921 in the course of convulsive, non-gradual societal transformation were, with the exception of a thousand or so Irishmen and women, not killed by other subjects of the same King.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:12 pm
In fact, what happened was that we went to war, conscripted millions of young men and sent them to France to be machine-gunned.
Including, it should be pointed out, an insanely large portion of the British ruling classes, who were often first over the top, swagger stick in hand, ready to be mowed down by the machine guns. The aristocrats were slaughtered. I’m often reminded of the enormity of the generational massacre by this quote from Tolkien:
“One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.”
May 26th, 2011 at 3:16 pm
@Davis X. Machina: The Russian Revolution was happening at this time as well. It provides a bit of a counterpoint.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:16 pm
Does’t the bulk of early 20th century British literature revolve around the demise of the old ruling class in the wake of the carnage wrought by WWI? Wasn’t there, literally, a lost generation? What about Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon and the rest of them? Why does anyone pay attention to anything David Brooks says, he is both and idiot and a disingenuous asshole.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:18 pm
you know, I can’t explain this, but—unlike with McCardle or Sully—I NEVER get tired of Brooks-hate posts.
He is just that despicable.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:18 pm
@Stefan:
Fascinating. I’d have thought draft-dodging by the rich and the shameless would’ve been at least as high in Britain during the Great War as it was for us during Vietnam.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:19 pm
I’m 65 years old.
I was liberal before I knew the word, or what it meant.
Most of the time, on most of the blogs I frequent, I take great snarkastic pleasure in picking on the GOBP and the TeaTards.
But I am being absolutely serious here: How can educated people, opinion leaders for the leading media outlets, be so fucking clueless and out of touch?
I’m not talking about people on the fringes, at Fox, say, or the Manchester Union Leader when the Loebs were still alive.
We’re talking about the Times, and PBS, for FSM’s sake!
May 26th, 2011 at 3:19 pm
@beltane:
Truly a difficult trick to pull off.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:19 pm
These gradual, imperceptible changes, without convulsion, are why Ken Follett was able to write another kabillionty-word novel about the subject…..sheesh…. *
O/T, when the technologically impaired meets pared-down tech support, frustration results. We are supposed to be able to get access to our wireless network on handheld devices, etc. but we have to put in a “ticket”. I thought they would either tell you the password for the wireless network, or come in and key it themselves if they didn’t want you to know it. Instead what I get is a link to an apple tech support page called “unable to use wifi because there’s no address listed for the device” which doesn’t seem relevant to what I’m trying to do. I make confused phone call. I get “well, were you able to add the wireless network with the SSID I gave you?” Um, I don’t know how to do that. You didn’t give me any instructions about doing that. Oh well.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:20 pm
WWI was the way serious people make sure that everybody feels some of the pain of changing the system. Sure it would have been quicker and easier and far less bloody to follow the examples of the french or russians and only machine gun the aristos, but doing that would have been like giving out tax increases without cutting medical care.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:22 pm
@jibeaux:
He is too Becket-friendly in Pillars of the Earth for my taste.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:22 pm
History is subjective.. Er, I mean subjected. Subjected to constant rewriting by half wit wingnuts.
One of the last scenes in Idiocracy is set in an amusement park “Time Machine” with a history of how Hitler used to ride dinosaurs (or something like that.) My first thought upon seeing that was, “Well, that is why we don’t let Republicans write history books.” Of course, living in Texas, I now see that was wishful thinking.
“Half of writing history is hiding the truth.” Capt. Malcolm Reynolds
May 26th, 2011 at 3:23 pm
@eemom: Agreed. Maybe because he’s on pbs, npr, the sunday wankfests and the op-ed page of the NYT every week, like he knows WTF he’s talking about.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:23 pm
@Chris:
Again, most of my knowledge of WWI comes from that Ken Follett novel, so take that as you will. But one of the main characters is an aristocratic officer, and it definitely conveys a sort of feeling of some obligation but mostly real desire and associations of prestige to serve in the war—honor, valor, country, that whole bit. It seemed a very different attitude than Vietnam.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:23 pm
@Omnes Omnibus: Asquith did rather better than Kerensky, but then Ramsay MacDonald was no Vladimir Lenin, nor were Arthur Balfour and George V exactly Tsar Nicholas and Stolypin.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:23 pm
@MikeJ: The French most certainly did not machine gun their aristos.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:24 pm
@beltane:
Probably has something to do with his (totally undeserved) megaphone at the Paper of Record™
@Chris:
A completely different dynamic (also a completely different time). Remember, what became known as “total war” started with ww1. Most of the guys that signed up had no idea in the world what they were in for. The reference somewhere upthread to “going over the top with swagger sticks” captures it pretty well.
Tuchman is very much recommended here.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:24 pm
@Chris: The one thing I will give the British ruling class grudging credit for is that they they were not chickenhawks. They still operated under the old, feudal set of values.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:24 pm
@Stefan:
You are right. We Americans have no idea of the slaughter of British upper class youth in WWI. We simply can’t imagine it. The closest thing in our history is the death toll in the Civil War. Britain had over 990,000 casualties in WWI (the U.S. Civil War, by comparison, had about 625,000), large numbers of them from the officer class, always made up of the aristocracy. An entire generation of men was lost.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:25 pm
Every picture tells a story, don’t it?
http://driftglass.blogspot.com.....ow-ej.html
May 26th, 2011 at 3:26 pm
Fascinating. I’d have thought draft-dodging by the rich and the shameless would’ve been at least as high in Britain during the Great War as it was for us during Vietnam.
Oh dear god no. Not at all. There was still a concept of noblesse oblige. One led from the front.
If you’re ever at Oxford or Cambridge and can get into the dining halls, you can see the lists of students killed —which doesn’t even count the ones wounded, maimed, blinded, shattered—during the Great War. The death count is astonishing.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:26 pm
@Omnes Omnibus: Let us not confuse virtue with lack of opportunity. Loading them on a barge and sinking them in the Loire is low-tech, but still sends a message, as they say.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:27 pm
It’s nice to see that the very healthy Contempt of Our Very Serious People syndrome has crossed the pond. And the fact that Brooks’ beatdown was delivered by an apple-cheeked boy who looks all of 24 makes it even sweeter. Maybe respecting the opinions of the VSP is not unlike tolerating racism and homophobia: a condition more related to age than to social standing. If so, I am optimistic for a future with a better pundit class.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:27 pm
@Omnes Omnibus:
You can avoid these problems by being largely ignorant of history, though, and then you don’t really notice. :)
I’m reading Wolf Hall now, after a failed attempt at listening on audio so I’m somewhat familiar, it’s a revisionist historical fiction portrayal of Thomas Cromwell. Okay, you might not like that then.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:27 pm
@Chris:
Au contraire. They enlisted in droves. Few chickenhawks among that bunch. Say what you will about the British aristocracy, they take service to the country and queen quite seriously. Hell, even today Prince Harry served in Afghanistan.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:27 pm
@arguingwithsignposts: No to mention both sides of the political divide, such as it translates cross-pond at least.
Note this exchange between Knowles and a commenter:
In other words, they really hate Brooks because he’s such a Lefty. The Telegraph is a Tory paper essentially (even thought Cameron is a Tory, but he’s also too lefty for these guys), and I wasn’t at all surprised to scroll down and find that sort of exchange.
The good news is that we can bask secure in the knowledge that left and right agree on one thing: David Brooks hasn’t the slightest idea what he’s talking about, most especially when he’s playing sociologist/historian. Mainly because there are actual facts involved there rather than nebulous political opinions, and people who know even a little bit about a subject will see immediately that he hasn’t a clue.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:27 pm
Perhaps brooks should have watched season 4 of black adder. He might have understood more about the Brits in WWI.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:27 pm
It’s OFFICIAL:
Paul Ryan IS Satan.
Edited to Add: I hope the Democrats work that Cheney quote into every Congressional campaign ad for the period November 2011 – November 2012.
.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:28 pm
@arguingwithsignposts: My colleague plays that episode in history class on the day closest to 11/11. The girls report back, invariably, that it made the boys cry. In high school.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:30 pm
He not only ignored WW I; he also pretends that the many years of British labor strife, the many strikes, the rise of the labor movement, the depression and the Hunger Marches of the 1930s, never happened. Brooks’ England is a fantasy England of Masterpiece Theater and Merchant-Ivory movies, where the lower classes don’t exist.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:31 pm
@JGabriel: Oooh, Lady Starbursts better watch out, there’s a new hot chick in town.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:32 pm
@Chris: You have to understand, the Great War totally changed the way western societies thought about war. A lot of boys marched off to war expecting glory and honor and a chance to distinguish themselves. They didn’t expect mustard gas and trench foot until it was too late.
By the time Vietnam rolled around, though, everyone had pretty much figured it out.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:32 pm
@jibeaux: Loved Wolf Hall. Perhaps I am just an anti-clericalist. FWIW I am also pro-Richard III.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:32 pm
@efgoldman:
Or on pretty much any subject on which she decided to focus. On WWI, The Guns of August and The Proud Tower are essential reading for understanding the social, political, and military situation just before and just at the start of the war. Love me some Barbara Tuchman.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:32 pm
@Librarian: That is also Andrew Sullivan’s England. At least Bobo is not alone in fantasy land.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:33 pm
@Stefan:
To this
and basically everyone else who wrote something like that… that’s kind of heartening to hear.
I know the concept of “noblesse oblige,” but I didn’t think it was actually practiced the way it was supposed to, if you know what I mean… I kind of assumed it was like “charity” and “trickle down” today, where you’re just supposed to assume that the people at the top will behave nobly and well, and when they don’t, shut up that’s why. It’s your fault for not giving them enough hugs in the first place.
If most of the upper class really did take it so seriously, well then, my hat’s off to them. Wonder what they had that so few of our elites do.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:34 pm
Fascinating. I’d have thought draft-dodging by the rich and the shameless would’ve been at least as high in Britain during the Great War as it was for us during Vietnam.
By Vietnam, Americans had internalized the idea that “war will get you killed and you won’t be appreciated.” During WWI, there was very much the idea that war was an opportunity to have a good time, endure some moderate risk which would make life more exciting than sitting around at home, and maybe win a few medals. Basically, the expectation was that each side would engage in a few skirmishes, win a few battles, and then sign an armistice involving some land swaps. After that, the junior officers from the aristocracy could come home and have stories to tell of their youthful heroism for the next few decades. efgoldman has this right: they “had no idea in the world what they were in for,” because the entire landscape of waging war had substantially changed.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:34 pm
Shirley IL is 10 miles South. Every time I pass the exit I sing this song.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:35 pm
We Americans have no idea of the slaughter of British upper class youth in WWI. We simply can’t imagine it. The closest thing in our history is the death toll in the Civil War. Britain had over 990,000 casualties in WWI (the U.S. Civil War, by comparison, had about 625,000), large numbers of them from the officer class, always made up of the aristocracy. An entire generation of men was lost.
The population of Great Britain in 1914 was about 45 million, of which approximately 900,000 men were killed in the war. A comparable figure for the US today would be losing about 6,000,000 dead in four years. (By comparison, there’ve only been about 6,000 American dead in ten years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq).
As you said, it’s impossible to imagine what that would do to us.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:35 pm
@arguingwithsignposts:
That’s quite interesting.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:36 pm
@Davis X. Machina: I was just concerned about historical accuracy. None of this Steam Punk crap for me.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:37 pm
“A whole part of the country—Ireland…”
F**k that, too.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:37 pm
@Stefan: As i’ve recently been reading about the 1918 flu epidemic, it’s worth noting that the bullets and trenchfoot weren’t the only killers patrolling the battlefields.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:39 pm
If most of the upper class really did take it so seriously, well then, my hat’s off to them. Wonder what they had that so few of our elites do.
Mainly childhoods of brutal emotional isolation, bullying, sodomy and repression. Say what you will about that, but damn it, it works.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:40 pm
@Chris:
Today’s elites have the advantage of have watched previous generation get fed into the meat grinders that were WWI and WWII. Especially WWI.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:40 pm
@geg6:
Also,
I can well imagine it. I’m half-French: whenever I go back, virtually every town I pass through has a monument somewhere with a list of the people who died in the war. When you’re in a relatively small village, see several dozen names on the monument and remember that life was harder and shorter back then in any case, it’s a pretty sobering thought. “Lost generation” is the right word for it.
But I’d never thought about the class implications of the war or how rich vs poor people behaved. Thanks for all the comments, I’m appreciating it.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:40 pm
Britain have a “revolution” and it was called the Industrial Revolution; to put it simply, the aristocracy evolved into plutocracy. No need to bloodshed, since the winners are the losers. France could have achieved that if not where for the St. Bartholomew’s night.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:41 pm
Brooks needs to go home and listen to The Kink’s ‘Arthur’ album about 40 times. One of the best musical statements ever made about class warfare in England.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:41 pm
The idea of England, and the UK, in general, of being all merry and undergoing peaceful happy happy consensus change is an myth, during the 20th century and before. I guess the enclosures, Glorious Revolution, the Black Laws and various alterations (towards liberal and than back to stingy) in the Poor Laws , Reform Act in the early 19th century were all very consensus and peaceful and merry.
I think the bottom half of the column is why Brooks dusted off this old myth to write a column supporting the Tories, who need a little pundit love right now. He starts with Thatcher, who declared that ‘society’ does not exist (not sure how that goes with merry consensus change in a population of atomistic individuals who recognize no thing called ‘society’). Interesting that Thatchers vision of democracy with no society, led to the UK being ruled by monied twits from the south.
Brooks also has a few sentences in praise of Very Serious Person rule, that confuse the analysis of short run deficit policy in a recession, with long run deficit policy over business cycles.
This is high brow VSP propagaada, full earnest pauses and furrowed brows, signifying nothing, other than that we should happily fork over the dough to rich twits nicely when they ask for it.
Edit: pundit love for the Tories and their abject coalition mascots is needed because their fiscal austerity policy is failing. I sincerely hope it does not fail as badly as initial statistics indicate, but it is not working the way it was advertised by the Tories.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:42 pm
@arguingwithsignposts:
Frankly, I don’t think that even that would have sparked understanding in the shithead.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:43 pm
@Chris: It was traditional for the sons of the aristocracy to attend military schools and to become soldiers. A way of making themselves serious people. The First World War was so different from other wars, though, and a lot of officers also got killed.
In the literature field, remember that Lord Chatterly had been in the war and returned wounded. IIRC, the wound was not explicitly spelled out but did involve his ability to have sex, along with trauma stress. That was one reason that Constance (Lady Chatterly) was unhappy in the marriage and open to an affair with the grounds keeper.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:44 pm
@Chris: IIRC by 1918, everyone from the 1914 graduating class at St Cyr (the elite French military academy equivalent to West Point or Sandhurst) had been killed or wounded.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:45 pm
@geg6:
Also, too, Paul Fussell’s books on both WW1 and WW2, in particular “The Great War and Modern Memory”, are excellent.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:47 pm
@Mandramas: The St Bart’s massacre was in 1572. How would it affect the industrial revolution?
May 26th, 2011 at 3:47 pm
@jibeaux: You should read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August for the start of WWI.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:48 pm
@JustMe:
They were not paying attention to the final stages of the American Civil War, in which sneak previews of trench warfare and slaughter on an industrial scale (with rifles and cannon) were available.
Most military men didn’t quite grasp this either, to be fair. In 1914, it was all this “home before the leaves fall” imaginings that turned out not to be how things were.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:50 pm
@JustMe:
They were not paying attention to the final stages of the American Civil War, in which sneak previews of trench warfare and slaughter on an industrial scale (with rifles and cannon) were available.
Most military men didn’t quite grasp this either, to be fair. In 1914, it was all this “home before the leaves fall” imaginings that turned out not to be how things were.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:50 pm
@Han’s Solo: this may be hard to hear, but malcolm reynolds is sort of a space teabagger. he hated the central government, but chafed at how people suffered without the benefits and protections of one. for example, the NLRB might have something to say to the owners of jaynestown, of the FBI might have a talk with those people attacking the old west space whorehouse.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:52 pm
When I taught World War I to my students, I put the total death toll (about 16 million) in terms of 9/11; I said, “Imagine the equivalent of about 3 9/11 attacks occurring every single day for 4 years”. That had an effect.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:54 pm
And Brooks? He’s a Tory, on both sides of the Atlantic.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:57 pm
@PurpleGirl:
Sounds like the elites stuck with the officer corps until war became a really really bad thing, and then decided it wasn’t so fun anymore, basically.
Interesting thing about that – the move by the elites away from military service happened during the same time that uniformed personnel started losing more and more power to the people back home, like Pentagon technocrats who often have never been near a battle field (nobody today has the visibility or influence of a Rommel or an Eisenhower).
I realize there are a lot of reasons for that – most obviously modern communications made it easier and easier to command the battlefield from home. I wonder if the elites’ move away from the military might also have something to do with it, though.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:57 pm
I think David Brooks needs to read “My Boy Jack” by Rudyard Kipling, who sent his near-sighted son to die for King and country.
May 26th, 2011 at 3:58 pm
I always thought the lyric was “when you don’t even know who’s in the team.” That’s what it sounds like when he sings it.
As to nobless oblige, we used to have it back then too. Lots of rich man’s sons volunteered for WWII. But many of them have since gone so far down the rathole of Randism that they think they don’t owe anyone or anything, especially the Nation, a few bucks, much less their lives. I’m not sure many rich man’s sons would fight for England anymore.
May 26th, 2011 at 4:00 pm
The Aristocrats!
May 26th, 2011 at 4:02 pm
@vonhonkington:
Oh boy! Sci-fi and politics… must stay away… no, can’t.
Firefly had a libertarian bent all around, IMO (“governments are for getting in a man’s way”) which kind of fits with the show’s general setting as an anti-Star Trek.
OTOH, the Alliance is a lot like a cyberpunkish corporate-run dystopia. One of the key never-explored parts of the Firefly verse was Blue Sun, a huge corporation which, among other things, employs the Hands of Blue, and has a ton of power in the Firefly verse. I’d have been curious to see them develop that theme and Blue Sun’s place in the Alliance, but as we all know the show was cut short and the movie went for the more basic “space cowboys vs evil government” theme.
Ah, well. One more thing to mourn.
May 26th, 2011 at 4:06 pm
@MarkJ: Anecdotal here, but during my military service, outside of West Pointers, I knew on guy from Dartmouth who was in my OCS class, a three guys from Princeton, and two of three others who, like me, had gone to highly selective liberal arts colleges. The Dartmouth guy and I were the only ones who undergrad degrees had not been at least partially covered by ROTC. The vast majority of today’s US officers are lower middle to middle class state college graduates who went to school on ROTC scholarships.
May 26th, 2011 at 4:07 pm
@beltane:
Great War literature is what my husband focused on at university back in the day, and yes, there’s a lot of it. Like most Americans, I paid more attention to WWII in school. Reading Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth absolutely blew my mind.
May 26th, 2011 at 4:08 pm
@Chris:
France had about 1.4 million dead and 4.3 million military wounded out of a population just short of 40 million. Added up, that is roughly half of the male population of fighting age. It’s a ridiculous number.
May 26th, 2011 at 4:08 pm
Greetings from your Toronto brunette, who would like to add:
Our neighbours shake their heads
And take their valuables inside
While my countrymen piss in the fountains
To express our national pride
And to prove to the world that England
Is just as rotten as she looks
They repeat the lies that caught their eyes
At school in history books
But the wars they think they’re fighting
Were all over long ago
What do they know of England who only England know?
May 26th, 2011 at 4:10 pm
I’m still trying to figure out the right wing’s adoration of Churchill, whose greatest accomplishment was fighting on the same side as socialist Roosevelt and communist Stalin.
May 26th, 2011 at 4:21 pm
I’m still trying to figure out the right wing’s adoration of Churchill, whose greatest accomplishment was fighting on the same side as soshulist Roosevelt and kommunist Stalin. Comment edited because of moderation.
May 26th, 2011 at 4:23 pm
@R-Jud: I always think of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen as the poets of WWI. Wilfred Owen wrote Dulce et Decorum Est (It is sweet and right). The whole phrase is Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori (it is sweet and right to die for your country). Want to talk about snark/sarcasm…
May 26th, 2011 at 4:24 pm
@Shoemaker-Levy 9: Churchill started out as a Tory. He fought in South Africa (Boer War) and the Sudan. (A good foundation for his future political career, you see.) And he did come from an aristocratic family, although not the main branch.
May 26th, 2011 at 4:27 pm
@Chris:
Did the US have the same tradition of service in the officer corps by sons of the elite that Great Britain had, at least after the era of the antebellum South? For that matter, it sounds like Lincoln and Stanton ran the war from the telegraph room of what’s now the Old Executive Office Building just as much as the circumstances allowed. I think that particular change is almost entirely due to the improvement in communication technology.
May 26th, 2011 at 4:31 pm
@Linnaeus:
From some stuff I read, though, it was so overwhelming and relentless it became almost meaningless. Orwell writes in one of his essays about being a boy in school and seeing the teacher move a line in France a tiny bit, with everyone knowing that this little move meant a mountain of new corpses, and the class not really caring about it but about whatever distraction was in the newspapers at the time.
Also, military service for the nobility meant military service, not champagne units where you sat around and did an acceptable length of “service” to stick on your resume. I think the future Queen Elizabeth ended up driving a truck.
May 26th, 2011 at 4:32 pm
@PurpleGirl: Churchill was an odd duck politically, Tory then Liberal (and a near Radical at that) then Tory again (but cast into the wilderness). In some ways he was very liberal but in an odd way. For example, he favored good wages and reasonable hours for workers, but hated workers demanding them. Basically he was sui generis.
May 26th, 2011 at 4:32 pm
@Shoemaker-Levy 9:
Heh. He was the only major leader who was on the right side of the war and a conservative! No wonder they love him. (Though he was fairly moderate if memory serves – wasn’t it under his leadership that they accepted universal health care after the war because “the people voted for it”?)
It’s often forgotten (and not by accident I’m sure) just to what extent World War Two discredited the old conservatives on the continent, especially in France where Vichy had ruled on a “work, family, country” platform. Collaboration will do that to you.
And I wonder what would’ve happened here if FDR Democrats had used the war hysteria as a partisan tool the same way Republicans did during the Cold War. You know, attack the GOP as “fascist sympathizers,” “a list of card-carrying fascists on Wall Street,” etc. I’m not saying he should have. But I wonder if it would’ve hurt the GOP and given the Dems the ability to claim “patriotism” and “strong on defense” cred the same way.
May 26th, 2011 at 4:32 pm
@PurpleGirl: By an odd coincidence, I see that Winnie’s most famous ancestor John was born on this day in 1650. I might add that John’s father was also named Winston.
May 26th, 2011 at 4:41 pm
Doug,
You may be just warming up, but that was a smooth swing, and it made solid contact. Welcome back.
May 26th, 2011 at 4:42 pm
From the comments on Knowles’ piece:
I think that should be a tag.
May 26th, 2011 at 4:42 pm
@ericblair: Yes, Princess Elizabeth was a truck driver and mechanic. In the movie The Queen, there is a scene in which the Queen calls back to the Balmoral motor pool to report a broken axle and she reminds the person she’s talking to that she repaired trucks during the war.
May 26th, 2011 at 4:42 pm
@Omnes Omnibus: Wolf Hall was the reason I bought a Kindle. Holding it made my wrists hurt. Great book, though.
May 26th, 2011 at 4:47 pm
The males in the royal family do military service because of a long tradition (kings once led the troops into battle in person) and also because the military was the only respectable profession which they could enter. They couldn’t go into business or law or medicine or the press, so they went into the army or the navy.
May 26th, 2011 at 4:49 pm
If they had, the Bush Crime Family as we know it today would not exist. Prescott Bush was a Nazi collaborator.
May 26th, 2011 at 5:10 pm
@dollared:
Thanks!
May 26th, 2011 at 5:11 pm
@Davis X. Machina: I cry when I watch that episode. Brilliant. I learned as mich history from Black Adder as I did fdrom Barbara Tuchman.
May 26th, 2011 at 5:19 pm
IN. Who’s IN the team.
In England, you’re “in” a team. In America you’re “on” a team.
So disappointed…
May 26th, 2011 at 5:25 pm
@vonhonkington:
The series didn’t last long enough to fully explore Mal’s core political beliefs beyond the fact that he was traumatized and embittered by being on the losing side of a civil war. The movie indicates that the Alliance was less interested in an NLRB to provide protections for workers than it was in drugging them into submission so that there would be less “aggression.”
The first few episodes actually left a bad taste in my mouth, in that the show seemed to be about Lost Cause nostalgia “in space” but without any slavery unpleasantness to get in the way of us feeling sorry for the rebels. Later episodes, however, seemed to imply that the war was won by a fascistic oligarchy which then promptly ignored the frontier planets completely while building a utopia for the loyalist planets.
Not sure what this has to do with the topic, but it was a pretty good show.
May 26th, 2011 at 5:48 pm
“They couldn’t go into business or law or medicine or the press, so they went into the army or the navy”
nor can you break up estates, the oldest inherits everything and if you are a younger son its church, army/navy, or out in the cold
May 26th, 2011 at 5:50 pm
@ericblair:
@PurpleGirl:
In World War II, though, not the Great War.
May 26th, 2011 at 5:50 pm
Mega-dittoes on the Will Ferrell as Neil Diamond reference, by the way.
May 26th, 2011 at 5:56 pm
@drkrick:
In the US, there were still lots of rich/connected people in the service during WWII. GHW Bush, for instance. I was struck by this in the life of Adm Grace Hopper: She and both her siblings from a very comfortably-off family all volunteered for service in WWII and two of them did so even after being initially rejected for being too old/skinny to serve.
This is in remarkable contrast to the VietNam war. Does anyone here know what it was like for the Korean War? Did the ruling class of the US show up for that one like they did for WWII or did they almost all stay home like they did for VietNam?
May 26th, 2011 at 5:56 pm
@SiubhanDuinne: In her defense, she was a bit young to have fought in the Great War what with being born in 1926 and all that.
May 26th, 2011 at 6:02 pm
@SiubhanDuinne: I didn’t think ericblair was saying Elizabeth was working during WWI (not being born yet, even if Bush 43 thought she was 200 years older than she was). I was just pointing out to him that he was right—she was a mechanic and truck driver.
(Had she indeed been alive during WWI, she would have knitted socks and hats and rolled bandages.)
@Omnes Omnibus: Thank you.
May 26th, 2011 at 6:25 pm
@JustMe: The Civil War pretty much wiped away American illusions about war. Mark Twain saw that and predicted WWI when he wrote about the war in the last chapter of Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
May 26th, 2011 at 6:26 pm
@Nutella: GHW Bush? Did you forget Joe, Jack and Katherine Kennedy? Joe and K were killed, and Jack won the Navy Cross.
May 26th, 2011 at 6:28 pm
@Calouste: remember to quote that the next time some wingnut makes that joke about how many Frenchmen does it take to defend Paris. The answer is 1.4 million, or 5 times the number the US lost in WWII.
May 26th, 2011 at 6:32 pm
@honus:
Yes, the Kennedys are excellent examples of rich people serving in WWII.
Bush came to mind in contrast to his son, the VietNam war draft dodger, as typical of their respective generations.
I wonder if the Kennedys also show that contrast? Did any of them serve during VietNam?
I think it’s a bipartisan phenomenon.
May 26th, 2011 at 6:37 pm
@Nutella: @Nutella: I think most of the Kennedys were too young to serve in Vietnam. There’s also a distinction in that I don’t recall the Kennedys being big cheerleaders for the Vietnam war while avoiding it. Bobby Jr. was probably old enough, but I don’t blame his family for not making him go so soon after his father and uncle had been shot.
As far as it being a generational thing, I would note that John Kerry and Al Gore, both rich privileged democrats, volunteered and served in Vietnam. Oh, and Chuck Robb, too.
May 26th, 2011 at 6:44 pm
@Nutella:
Roosevelt (FDR) had sons in the military. Roosevelt (TR) had a son at Normandy.
There were plenty of sons of senators serving in combat.
Nowadays, not so much.
May 26th, 2011 at 6:44 pm
@honus:
Compare and contrast with enthusiastic supporters of the Vietnam War like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who found all sorts of ways to avoid putting skin in the game. Now, see Al Gore and John Kerry, who both served in country.
May 26th, 2011 at 6:46 pm
Blackadder goes Forth, episode 6, parts 1&2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjXi4L6dQGk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK3mOaQyqcA
Pay close attention to Blackadder’s talk about British army service before WWI, and George’s realization that all his Cambridge friends are dead.
May 26th, 2011 at 6:47 pm
Chris: many still serve now. Most of the members of the Royal family, for example, have served. A number of them have served in war, most recently Prince Harry in Afghanistan. The Queen herself drove a truck in WWII.
There are families with a tradition of military service and they still follow tradition.
May 26th, 2011 at 6:48 pm
@Nutella:
I don’t think any of the Kennedy kids were of age for Vietnam but I’m not sure of the extended cousins group. But John Jr. was just a toddler, as were probably Bobby’s kids.
FDR’s sons served during WWII —they swapped between being their father’s aide de camp and fighting. And I think one of the daughters also served.
May 26th, 2011 at 6:48 pm
WWI actually destroyed the British ruling class. There was none left after WWI save some mentally and physically crippled veterans, the older generation, and some of the royal family who were too nitwitted to even go get themselves killed off including the egregious Mountbatten. The officer corps comprised the British upper and upper middle class; officers tended to last about a half day, if there was any action. The slaughter of the privileged was so vast, that even Kipling turned anti-war and anti-government after his son was slaughtered. Cambone – any relation to the discredited Bush official – couldn’t have been more wrong. Nor Brooks.
May 26th, 2011 at 6:54 pm
@Omnes Omnibus: I have a weak spot for the not-quites of this world—Asquith, Kerensky, Dukakis, Pierre Mendes-France….
May 26th, 2011 at 7:00 pm
@drkrick: Not after the Civil War, but the wall with all the plaques from 1861-65 at Harvard, in Memorial Hall, is jaw-dropping.
And at St. Cyr, the French West Point, there’s a plaque, mentioned above, that just says “The Class of 1914”. What it doesn’t say is ‘all but two died before the end of 1914.
Every time I hear about ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ I get very, very angry, thinking about that plaque.
May 26th, 2011 at 7:05 pm
@Davis X. Machina: ooh, let’s make a list! Carl Yastrzemski has got to be on it. How about Sun Yat-Sen?
May 26th, 2011 at 7:12 pm
@Davis X. Machina: Brissot?
May 26th, 2011 at 7:14 pm
@Omnes Omnibus: Yep. An early one. I wasn’t aware of his abolitionist work and visit to the US.
There’s got to be dozens more. You can’t be ineffectual to the point of being a joke, or a high and noble failure. you have to just miss.
The sportswriter and blogger—one of the very, very best—Joe Posnanski, has written about his own personal Baseball Hall of the Very Good.
Come to think of it, Brit comedians still get a laugh when they sing ‘Lloyd George knew my father/My father knew Lloyd George’, and I can’t think of a single Asquith song.
May 26th, 2011 at 7:23 pm
@Davis X. Machina: Denis Healey would probably fit as well.
May 26th, 2011 at 7:29 pm
@Davis X. Machina: Asquith’s great granddaughter is a hell of an actress and today is her 45th birthday,
May 26th, 2011 at 7:32 pm
@fasteddie9318:
Glad someone got it, I realize it’s obscure.
May 26th, 2011 at 7:43 pm
Onmes Omnibus: Helena Bonham Carter or Anna Chancellor?
May 26th, 2011 at 7:47 pm
@Emma: Bonham Carter. I wasn’t aware of Chancellor’s connection.
May 26th, 2011 at 7:51 pm
@Omnes Omnibus: First in Greats, iirc, and so a hero to all us classics people.
May 26th, 2011 at 7:55 pm
all this reminds me, I’ve been meaning to find a copy of “Oh, What a Lovely War.”
May 26th, 2011 at 7:57 pm
Goodness. I think young Daniel Knowles is in over his head and his inexperience with American culture is showing. He’s acting as if Brooks is wrong because he got his facts wrong. He is assuming the Brooks is making a good faith effort to describe or explain things using the facts of history as some kind of guide. That’s just silly! Very few opinion writers these days do that and it’s kind of quaint that people in other countries believe that they do. He’s not trying to explain…when is the last time he did that!
I’m guessing that somewhere in that sentence is the whole point of the article, since where the agenda gets set in the U.S. is not where Brooks is currently found. OUR political culture is broken. But that couldn’t have anything to do with David Brooks…
May 26th, 2011 at 8:22 pm
SHIR-LEEEE!
May 26th, 2011 at 9:09 pm
Not after the Civil War, but the wall with all the plaques from 1861-65 at Harvard, in Memorial Hall, is jaw-dropping.
I will be there this weekend and will, as always, bow my head. And save a special thought for Col. Robert Gould Shaw—“he would not bend his back”.
May 26th, 2011 at 11:24 pm
Omnes Omnibus:Chancellor is Asquith’s great-great-granddaughter, and get this, Jane Austen is her eight-times-great aunt.
May 27th, 2011 at 12:04 am
Brooks is odious. And there is little doubt that he is operating based on an idealized and mistaken view of Britain.
That said, the linked Telegraph article does a poor job of refuting him, and the post here is off base too.
It seems bizarre to count WWI as an internal social cost of transitioning to a less aristocratic society. It’s more a nasty thing that happened to the country. (Similarly, 9/11, for example, was not a ‘cost’ of Bush’s tax cuts.) Now, WWI had manifold deep effects on the British class system, but it’s not crazy to treat it as separate from the costs Britain went through as part of social transformation – the Kaiser’s machine guns & bayonets killed upper, middle, and working class Brits; this was not an internal convulsion.
Brooks certainly ignores the disruptive elements of the British social transformation and takes for granted that the effort was successful. But I don’t think he’s ignorant of WWI or saying that was a worthwhile cost – he views it as an exogenous cost to the transformation he proposes. So it’s a little slimy to imply he’s fine with those deaths. And the Telgraph writer comes off as a bit of twit. He also dings Brooks for using the term ‘prep school’ (instead of ‘public school’) in the NYT, although it’s pretty obvious Brooks has selected the term the NYT’s American readers will understand.
In sum: Brooks is wrong about a lot of things, but this post is miles off base, which makes him look a lot better than he deserves.
May 27th, 2011 at 3:45 pm