FIFTY YEARS IN PRINT

It just struck me: I’ve been published for fifty years now.  Good lord!  How did that ever happen?

I keep a list of my published articles, not so much for ego or old-time’s sake as for reference.  Ask any author and you’ll learn that it’s a whole lot easier to thumb through “the files” for THAT article than to research the subject again.  There’s also the monetary factor—recycling articles doubles (or triples) your productivity.  My personal best is three reprints for an article first published in 1977.  One article, four checks.  Love it.

Anyway, recently I was looking at my articles list and noted the first entry:

1964

October.  Drum Corps World.  “Beaver State Beat.”  $0.00

That was the first of ten entries for DCW, as I was a 15-year-old percussionist in my hometown’s American Legion drum and bugle corps.  The Falcons had a lot of talent—one year at the state championships we won 60 percent of the medals for individual competition but finished near last in the corps field event.  A year or so later one of our horn players finished third at the nationals. 

Because I didn’t start flying until the next year, in ’64 drum corps and Scouts occupied most of my time.  I subscribed to DCW and noted a dearth of coverage from the Pacific Northwest, so I contacted the publisher, offering to fill in the gap.  His name was Joseph Something, and he readily accepted.  No reason he shouldn’t since he wasn’t paying anything!

The year and a half of “Beaver State Beat” exposed me (corrupted, some might say) to The Power of the Press.  The column was part news, part gossip, and part opinion.  Well, OK, a lot of opinion.  But suddenly a high-school freshman from Athena, Oregon, was considered Influential in the esoteric world of Northwest drum and bugle corps.  People started deferring to me.  Some phoned with Insider Information, which even at that callow age, I knew to treat with caution.  Were the Cadets really dumping their music director?  Was the Eagles’ drum major really ineligible because he’d passed his 20th birthday?  People wanted to know such things.

I learned a valuable lesson, writing for DCW: when in doubt, waffle.  My columns contained useful phrases such as “We hear that,” or “Reliable sources claim…” 

Finally my drum corps participation came to an end.  My last column was in May 1966, the last year I was active.  By then I’d done about all I was going to accomplish.  I’d placed three times in individual competition, winning state titles in tenor drum and rudimental bass, and besides, I’d started flying in ’65 and finished my Eagle Scout badge that year. 

However, the overall experience was a positive one, other than a severe crush on an extremely cute blonde in the Seattle Thunderbirds color guard.  Alas, geography worked against us. But I gained some confidence as a writer, learned life lessons about competition, and made some long-term friends.  It’s been fun catching up with a couple of them on Facebook.

Looking farther down the list, I see that I’ve been published every year except 1967 and 1969.  That’s understandable, because I graduated from high school and started college in ’67, and worked summers on the ranch and at the local airport.  The interim articles were published in Northwest Flyer, the Journal of the American Aviation Historical Society and the International Plastic Modelers Quarterly.

I published 15 articles before I finally got paid for one, a magazine journalism class at the University of Oregon.  The deal was: sell an article and you got an A.  “Omens, Augurs, and Jinxes” sold to Air Progress in 1971—a whimsical study of aviation superstitions.  The most memorable one dated from France in the Great War.  A pilot was considered bulletproof if he carried a garter removed from the leg of a virgin in the dark of the moon.  Honest.

It was a point of pride that I aced every writing class I took at OSU, the U of O, and later in Mesa Community College’s screenwriting course.  But a then-and-now comparison invites broad contrast.  I wrote my first six books and about 100 articles on a Royal Standard manual typewriter that my father bought before I was born.  It’s still in the family but most of the vowels are worn down.  When I was dragged into the computer age with a doorknob in each hand and skid marks on the floor, I devoutly did not want to change.  But it was clear that the publishing world was inevitably headed over that cyber-cliff, so I adapted.

However, the discipline I learned on that Royal served me extraordinarily well.  So did the most valuable class I ever took: freshman typing in high school.  It was held in the unheated basement of the Athena First Baptist Church at 8:00 a.m., an hour before the regular school day began.  I was oafishly proud to earn my 40 word-per-minute pin, a sort of compensation for never getting a perfect attendance pin owing to childhood asthma.

Far more importantly, composing on a manual typing writer forced me to organize, to focus, and to think ahead.  After all, in those days Cut And Paste involved scissors and Scotch tape, if not actual paste.  So economizing on words and time paid dividends.

Now I realize that a PC’s cut and paste function has tempted me to become less disciplined, even leaning toward laziness.  It’s easy to become profligate with words, since they’re only electrons on a screen.  Today writers can move entire pages or even chapters around to suit their fancy, and what took hours before can be done in minutes or less. 

But whenever I catch myself tending toward laziness, I can revert to the early 1960s, recalling the tiny thrill of seeing my byline and the satisfaction of providing information and opinion to My Readers, however many they were.

That was 650 articles and 50 books ago, but moreover, it was FIFTY years ago. 

How did that ever happen?

THE WORLD'S BIGGEST ARMY

This month's Rant is based upon a magazine article I wrote in 2011.

We’ve all see the bumper stickers: “The 2nd Amendment is not about duck hunting.”

Definitely true.  But maybe the Second Amendment is linked to deer hunting.

Consider this:

A popular email circulating in The Gun Culture notes that in a recent season, Wisconsin alone fielded 600,000 hunters.  According to Badger State sources, that number would equal the eighth largest army on earth, which is true (after the active-duty military of Turkey and ahead of Iran).  Reportedly Michigan’s hunters numbered about 700,000 and Pennsylvanians approached 750,000.

Actually, the email was wrong.  Checking online, we find that in 2009 Wisconsin sold 843,000 deer licenses, including 638,000 for firearms.  And Pennsylvanians purchased 948,000 general hunting licenses for the 2009-2010 season. 

Then there’s Michigan.  Between 2004 and 2009, those folks purchased an average of 1.56 million deer tags annually, including bow hunters. If that number represented individuals, the Wolverine State fell between the active military strengths of China and the United States.

So what’s the foregoing have to do with preserving our right to bear arms?

The Founders were deeply mistrustful of a standing army, with good reason.  They had just won the war for American independence from Britain, which possessed the greatest army on earth.  The Second Amendment was crafted as a check on the greedy grasp of government: a permanent deterrent and, if necessary, an active resistance.  That’s why they placed so much emphasis upon personally-owned arms.

Reportedly other people took note.  Again reverting to internet sources (caveat emptor anyone?) they included Japan’s Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto who planned the Pearl Harbor attack.  Allegedly he advised against an invasion of North America “because there would be a rifle behind every blade of grass.”

Like the more famous quote about awaking a sleeping giant, Yamamoto’s purported statement regarding armed Americans cannot be verified.  (There’s some evidence that the statement was made by another Japanese officer.)  Certainly Yamamoto was aware of widespread civilian firearms ownership, as he studied in the U.S. during the 1920s.  More pertinent, however, is logistics—the axle upon which all wars turn.  By 1942 Japan was engaged in a long war in China while expanding its holdings in Asia and the Pacific, stretching its shipping to the limit.  With a population of 100 million, the Japanese Empire had no prospect of conquering 130 million Americans—even if the Japanese could get here.         

However, it’s interesting to speculate upon the Empire of the Sun clashing with tens of thousands of American deerstalkers armed with Winchester 94s and Model 70s.

Today the military-industrial complex’s go-to bogeyman is China, which is not about to start a war with its number one trade partner.  That feud would destroy both economies, but the Pentagon and the pols need somebody as an excuse for buying platinum-plated stealth airplanes and submarines.

So let’s set aside the Who for a moment and look at the What.  What would an invader face, aside from the U.S. military?

It’s called the unorganized militia.

Presently the U.S. armed forces involve 1.47 million active and 1.45 million reserve component personnel: 2.92 million at home and abroad.

What’s left to oppose our hypothetical invasion?

For starters, it’s not several million deerstalkers.  Those merely with hunting licenses are not the Founders’ bulwark against oppression. They’re just where you start the winnowing process.  (Some background: c. 1980 an Oregon IPSC friend was a game warden.  He conducted some impromptu field tests of random nimrods and found that the average effective range on a paper plate was about 40 yards.  On the other hand, some of us know people who’ve made one-shot kills at 300 yards.)

Meanwhile, let’s omit the NRA.  It has about 4 million members but there’s no telling how many are proficient marksmen.

So what’s the likely number to resist oppression?

Consider how many Americans bag a deer every year.  It’s far less than the number of hunting licenses but it’s a good starting point.  After all, anyone who spends money, time, and effort tromping around the woods, being cold and uncomfortable for the chance to fire one round, is a candidate for resistance.

Based on available data, we conducted a tedious state by state survey of deer “harvested” nationwide by adult rifle hunters. (Bow hunters typically account for 11 to 34% of deer taken.)  Much of the information is incomplete: useful figures for Florida, Montana, and Oregon are unavailable, and there is little deer hunting in Alaska and Hawaii.  Other states only show totals of deer taken without breaking out archers, juvenile or out of state hunters.  In order to guesstimate rifle hunters for those states, we split the average of bow hunters, deducting 20% from the overall figures. 

Our figures have obvious glitches.  Many states permit multiple tags, usually with drawings for various areas and controlled hunts beyond the general season. But by rounding, we should achieve a fairly conservative total of competent riflemen over age 16. 

Excepting the states noted above, our accounting shows that typically 4,985,000 rifle hunters bag a deer annually.  Taking an extremely minimal total for the uncounted states, we rounded up to an even 5 million, still 30 percent more than the combined U.S. military-police total of 3.8 million.

Would all of those 5 million actively resist?  They’re certainly more likely to do so than those who simply buy a license or belong to an organized group.  Of course, we all know some extremely dedicated folks who have never filled a game tag, so let’s call it a push.

Comes “the day.”  What happens when 5 million riflemen decide to fire one round a week, apportioned daily? 

China has 2.28 million active military and 800,000 reserves.  North Korea has 1.1 million active and 8.2 million reserves, counting all branches.  Nobody else is close in either category, though North Korea cannot even feed itself. 

So, being whimsical…

If The War begins with hordes of enemy parachutes descending across the nation on Monday morning (you recall the scene in Red Dawn), it probably ends Tuesday morning, after potentially 714,000 rounds are fired.  With 70 percent accuracy (the shooters are all successful hunters) that’s almost 500,000 hits--likely more than the total number of exposed targets at one time nationwide.

If 10 percent of the deerslayers decide to resist, that’s half a million rounds per week, or 71,400 per day with 50,000 hits in the first 24 hours.

If only 1 percent of the deerslayers decide to resist, that’s still 50,000 rounds per week, or 7,100 rounds per day yielding 5,000 hits.  That war could last a few days, but the round count probably is more than enough to preserve the nation for its rightful owners.

Just as the Founders intended. 

AUGUST 2014: CENTURY DOWNSTREAM

One hundred years ago this month, the world changed.  The conflagration was called The Great War.  It retained that name for 21 years until the next round received a Roman numeral Two.

On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist, supported by five conspirators, murdered the Austro-Hungarian archduke and his wife during a state visit to Sarajevo.  The Austro-Hungarians pressed Serbia with demands that would never be met.  Austria invaded Serbia; Russia mobilized in support of the Serbs; Germany naturally supported Austria; France’s treaty with Russia drew in the British.  Overlapping alliances tumbled the world into global conflict spreading to Africa and Asia.

Six young men destroyed the world.  Princip was barely 19; four others also were under 20.

To a large extent the Great War was an immense family feud.  King George of England and Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany were grandchildren of Queen Victoria, who had died in 1901. The Czarina, Empress Alexandra, was Victoria’s grand-daughter yet George V and Nicholas II might have been twins.  As nations and empires mobilized, the Kaiser and the Czar exchanged eerily friendly telegrams: “Dear Nicky” and “Dear Willie.”  All to no effect.

Perhaps almost impossible to grasp today was the enormous enthusiasm for war in every country.  The French seethed under thirty years of humiliation after Prussia’s victory in 1871, seeking to reclaim lost territory.  Recruiters did a booming business everywhere.  Every nation expected quick victory—“the troops will be home by Christmas.”  But by fall of 1914 the morass had settled into a stalemate, especially in the west with trenches running from the English Channel to the Swiss border.

Technologically, the Great War was a landmark event.  It involved large-scale operations by modern warships, submarines, aircraft of all types, and debut of the tank.  The advantage quickly passed to the defense.  The combination of barbed wire, machine guns, and rapid-fire artillery kept the Allies and Germans facing each other across No Man’s Land for years.  One result was the end of cavalry after millennia on global battlefields.

We can never know how many people died in the Great War but the figure appears to run around ten million military personnel.  More specifically, the toll involves five to six million military deaths and three million civilian among the Allies with three to four million military and three and a half million civilians among the Central powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey).  Call it 8.2 million to 11 million military deaths and 7 million civilian to all causes.  Fifteen to eighteen million total dead from combat and war related causes.  Nothing remotely comparable had happened in Western history.

The foregoing does not count victims of the related Spanish Flu pandemic that circled the earth and claimed at least 50 million in 1918-1919, maybe twice as many.

America’s role in the GW remains simplistically seen at best in the public’s mind.  Maybe the best treatment is Thomas Fleming’s Illusion of Victory (2004) which focused attention on Woodrow Wilson’s “neutrality” while supporting the genuine “merchants of death”—not arms makers but financiers with a vital interest in recouping their loans to Britain and France.  Yet Wilson was re-elected in 1916 on the basis that “He kept us out of the war.”  We never learn: five decades later Lyndon Johnson was elected as the peace candidate.

The U.S. lost about 117,000 people, mostly in the last six months.  That’s because we did not officially enter the war until April 1917, two years after one presumed reason, a U-boat sinking the British liner Lusitania with 128 American deaths.  Widely overlooked was the fact that they had ignored the published risk of German submarines, and unknown was the ship’s illegal cargo of munitions for Britain.

Another stated reason for America’s declaration of war was the notorious Zimmermann telegram, an absurd suggestion by Berlin’s foreign minister that invited Mexico to invade the American southwest and recover Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona with German support.  In early 1917 the Mexican government studied the prospects and rejected them as unworkable.  Meanwhile, the Brits deciphered the message and leaked it to Washington. 

The weight of American manpower did not come to bear until the summer of 1918, and then it was substantial.  But America’s entry may have done more harm than good.  Allegedly Winston Churchill said in retrospect that absent a U.S. declaration of war, there would have been a cease-fire in 1917.  By then the French army was wracked with mutiny; Russia was toppling to the Bolsheviks; Britain was out of reserves; and Germany was feeling the effect of the naval blockade plus massive losses.  The Austrians made a habit of drubbing the Italians to little gain, suffering the heaviest proportional losses of the war.

When the Western allies forced an armistice upon Germany in November 1918, the stage was set for Round Two.  The Versailles Treaty sought to punish Germany for “starting the war,” ensuring that two generations of Germans lived under crushing debt until a former Bavarian corporal rose to power in Berlin.

Practically unknown today is the fact that the U.S. and British navies maintained a blockade of German ports for eight months after the armistice, leading to thousands of deaths that winter.  The starvation eased after Germany’s new government agreed to more Allied demands in 1919.

Small wonder, then, that a seething resentment brewed up, yielding Adolf Hitler.  At the same time, the horrors of the Great War produced a generation of pacifists in Europe who naively (or stupidly) felt that no war was worth fighting.

Might the Great War have been prevented?  Probably yes, although it was so convoluted a situation that hardly anyone could have foreseen it.  Germany might have tried harder to rein in Austria, and Britain might have declined to participate, which certainly would have affected France.  But given the boiling ambition of Russia and France; Germany’s perceived need to support Austria; and the general enthusiasm for war throughout Europe, the entire cauldron was bound to boil over.

Among the absurd slogans of the Great War was that it Made The World Safe For Democracy.  At its core, the war was a clash of empires, and most of them survived, many undemocratically.  The British Empire remained intact as far off as India.  France’s colonial outposts stood fast, and even Belgium retained its holdings in Africa.  Perhaps pegging the irony meter was Japan, which sided with the Allies and gained former German holdings in the Pacific.

Concludes historian Eric Margolis, “Even today, British historians continue to distort history and blame Germany for a war that was everyone’s fault.”

Could there be another Great War in Europe?  Probably not.  Aside from the mellowing effect of a globalized economy, war is far too expensive today for sustained, large-scale combat.  If you cannot afford to buy large numbers of extremely expensive ships or aircraft, and must rely upon a volunteer military, the options are limited.

But then nobody seriously expected a world war in August of 1914.  Perhaps that’s a chilling lesson, as we humans continue to insist organizing ourselves into nation-states.

For a whimsical explanation of the entire mess, I recommend this treatment, unfortunately by an anonymously talented author.

 “If World War I Was A Bar Fight.”

http://cdrsalamander.blogspot.com/2014/07/sunday-funnies.html