It’s less than three weeks until the fortieth anniversary of the first human lunar landing. Alan Boyle has a roundup of links. It’s also a good time to start planning a commemoration ceremony with friends and family. HappilyUnfortunately, it’s on a SaturMonday this year, a good eveningnot such a good evening to have a party.
Link is fixed, too thanks to commenter “Jim.”
My old high school in Flint is being closed (as part of downsizing the city in general). It was the oldest existing high in Flint, I think, arch-rival Flint Northern having been closed and moved to a more modern facility while I was attending high school. Here are some pictures of the farewell from its many decades of alumni. I remember playing french horn in the orchestra on that auditorium stage.
And Gordon Young (not an alumnus — he attended the Catholic school) did something that I never did (though I did wander a lot in the steam tunnels) — he climbed the tower, and took some great photos. That blue dome you see in the distance is the planetarium in the arts and cultural center, a large campus of which Central was just a part. It also contains the main branch of the public library, an arts institute and museum where I used to take art lessons as a kid, Mott Community College (where I attended my first two years before transferring to Ann Arbor) and the former home of the University of Michigan – Flint, before it moved downtown back in the eighties. The trees over to the right of the planetarium are on the estate of Charles Stewart Mott, the General Motors philanthropist who made Flint one of the great places to live in the country when I was growing up, before it all started to fall apart, about the time I graduated from Central, in the early seventies recession.
I haven’t lived there since 1977, but I would have liked to attend this farewell.
A couple weeks ago, I noted that World War II is passing out of living memory. But there are still some who remember remaining, some bitter, some sad, and Carol Gould talks to a few of them.
General Petraeus is a brilliant military tactician and strategist, but he doesn’t seem to understand much about politics in the Middle East:
You can tell a lot about a person’s views (and values) by the way he answers the following question: “Would a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict solve the problems of the Middle East, or would solving the problems of the broader Middle East — namely, Iran — one day bring about a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?”
Someone should ask him to elaborate on his views.
From Michael Barone and Frank Tipler.
It makes me all the more curious to see his college transcripts. Did he even take a course in history? And what’s really appalling is that it isn’t just him — there are apparently no fact checkers in the White House itself.
And Victor Davis Hanson says that the president reminds him of himself. A much younger, and more naive himself.
[Update a few minutes later]
Obama’s message of weakness:
The speech…impressed many conservatives, including Rich Lowry, my esteemed editor at National Review, “esteemed editor” being the sort of thing one says before booting the boss in the crotch. Rich thought that the president succeeded in his principal task: “Fundamentally, Obama’s goal was to tell the Muslim world, ‘We respect and value you, your religion and your civilization, and only ask that you don’t hate us and murder us in return.'” But those terms are too narrow. You don’t have to murder a guy if he preemptively surrenders. And you don’t even have to hate him if you’re too busy despising him. The savvier Muslim potentates have no desire to be sitting in a smelly cave in the Hindu Kush, sharing a latrine with a dozen half-witted goatherds while plotting how to blow up the Empire State Building. Nevertheless, they share key goals with the cave dwellers – including the wish to expand the boundaries of “the Muslim world” and (as in the anti-blasphemy push at the U.N.) to place Islam, globally, beyond criticism. The nonterrorist advance of Islam is a significant challenge to Western notions of liberty and pluralism.
Once Obama moved on from the more generalized Islamoschmoozing to the details, the subtext – the absence of American will – became explicit. He used the cover of multilateralism and moral equivalence to communicate, consistently, American weakness: “No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons.” Perhaps by “no single nation” he means the “global community” should pick and choose, which means the U.N. Security Council, which means the Big Five, which means that Russia and China will pursue their own murky interests and that, in the absence of American leadership, Britain and France will reach their accommodations with a nuclear Iran, a nuclear North Korea and any other psychostate minded to join them.
This reminds me of the old The Simpsons episode about the right way, the wrong way, and the Max Power way. There’s the Reagan way, the Carter way, and the Obama way. The latter is like the Carter way, but way faster. We’re not even half a year into the presidency.
Next year, it will be roughly two-thirds of a century since the Normandy landing. The ceremonies on the beach had been held every ten years up until 2004. I remember the 1974 anniversary, and my mother, who had been a WAC in Egypt, commenting that she couldn’t believe that it had been thirty years. It’s sobering to realize now, as my age is close to hers then, that the landing was as close to her in time as the Iranian revolution and the worst of the Carter era is to me now.
Anyway, today’s ceremony has been only five years since the last one, because it won’t be long before there are no survivors left. The youngest of the men who stormed Juno, Gold, Sword, Omaha are eighty-three years old, and many of them are older, and they are dying by the hundreds each year as their ages advance. There will be many fewer on the seventieth anniversary, and just a handful, if any on the eightieth.
When they’re all gone, will European and North American leaders still gather on the once blood-soaked sand to commemorate their sacrifice and bravery? If so, for how many more years, before it becomes an event in long-forgotten history, irrelevant to those generations? We no longer have such ceremonies at Gettysburg, a similar watermark in political and military history, because no one alive remembers it first hand. Has any president given a speech there on the anniversary (the nation’s birthday)? Has any made a speech there on any day since Lincoln made his famous address only a few months after the event? I suspect that as time goes on, no one will show up at Normandy on June 6 except history buffs. The “greatest generation” is passing, and with them, an era.
[Update in the afternoon]
It occurs to me that this is probably the first such event at which none of the leaders speaking at it were alive when the landing occurred. G. W. Bush was born just after the war, but in 2004, Chirac gave a speech, and he was twelve years old when France was liberated. I’m pretty sure that Sarkozy, Harper, Brown and Obama are all baby boomers.
[Update a while later]
Lots of D-Day posts and links over at Aaarrrggghhh (not a permalink, just scroll).
Michael Ledeen points out more alternate history from the president’s speech:
On the other hand, there were so many errors of history that I was left wondering if there is anyone in the White House that checks facts. “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition.” But the Muslims had been driven out of Spain by the time of the Inquisition. The Inquisition was Catholic, after all. What was he thinking? And even if he was thinking about an earlier epoch, the so-called Golden Age, “tolerance” is hardly the right word. Yes, non-Muslims were permitted to live, provided that they submitted to Muslim rule and paid their rulers. Yes, Jews were better off in Muslim lands than in Christian areas during the Middle Ages. But “toleration” it wasn’t. One of my best professors used to argue that the word, in its contemporary sense, only began to make sense in the seventeenth century.
He credited Muslims for inventions of others, from the magnetic compass to algebra to pens, arches, and even to printing. It’s as if there were no ancient Chinese inventions, and the Romans had to await the Prophet before they could build the Pantheon. And someone really should tell him that printing came from the Orient, was rejected in Muslim domains, and then developed in Europe. It was introduced into the Middle East in the 15th century by Jews, who were not permitted to publish in Arabic. So the first printing press in the region was brought by Jews who then published in Hebrew.
The absolute worst part of the speech was the mush about Iran. He could have talked about the great Persian contributions to Western culture, or credited Cyrus the Great for issuing the first known document dealing with human rights. He didn’t do that (Cyrus wasn’t a Muslim, after all). Instead, he regretted American meddling in Iran in 1953, and then moved on to assure the mullahs that they were fully entitled to have a (peaceful) nuclear program. As if nobody knew (Bushitlercheney had made the same point, let us not forget). Not a word about Iranian killers around the world. Not a word about the dreadful repression of the Iranian people. Not a word about any possible consequences if, as everyone expects, Iran builds atomic bombs.
That’s because he expects there to be none. I suspect that the Israelis have a different idea.
…but he didn’t quite say it:
Riley and Olsson…concluded that Commander Armstrong and his family members do pronounce the word “a” in a discernible way.
And based on broadcasts from Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin from the surface of the Moon, it is clear that the word “a” was easily transmitted to Earth without being obliterated.
But their analysis of the intonation of the phrase strongly suggests Commander Armstrong had intended to say “a man”. There is a rising pitch in the word “man” and a falling pitch when he says “mankind”.
According to Mr Olsson: “This indicates that he’s doing what we all do in our speech, he was contrasting using speech – indicating that he knows the difference between man and mankind and that he meant man as in ‘a man’ not ‘humanity’.”
I think it’s safe to say that this has been analyzed to death at this point. It’s only been forty years.
Michael Moynihan points out that West German “fascism” was manufactured in East Germany.
After Obama assumed office in January, whatever hesitation that existed in North Korea’s policy-making circles regarding the likely response of U.S. administration has disappeared, and its leadership now feels it can defy the U.S. and the international community with impunity.
A series of actions taken by the Obama administration have created an impression in Iran, the “Af-Pak” region, China and North Korea that Obama does not have the political will to retaliate decisively to acts that are detrimental to U.S. interests, and to international peace and security.
Among such actions, one could cite: the soft policy toward Iran: the reluctance to articulate strongly U.S. determination to support the security interests of Israel; the ambivalent attitude toward Pakistan despite its continued support to anti-India terrorist groups and its ineffective action against the sanctuaries of Al-Qaida and the Taliban in Pakistani territory; its silence on the question of the violation of the human rights of the Burmese people and the continued illegal detention of Aung San Suu Kyi by the military regime in Myanmar; and its silence on the Tibetan issue.
I’m afraid it could be a lot worse.
[Early evening update]
More thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson:
Fate, chance, luck, and more will contribute to the outcome of any presidential action — unpredictable, of course, but in the cruel game of assessing presidential decision-making, no grounds for excuse.
Moreover, both these problems not only antedated Obama, but antedated Bush as well, yet they cannot be massaged with “reset” button and a “Bush did it,” nor by soaring “hope and change” rhetoric. Neither Ahmadinejad nor Kim Jong-il care a whit about Obama’s landmark advance to the presidency, or his sober and judicious efforts to show rational concern for their own predicaments; instead, they calibrate only the degree to which Obama poses an obstacle to their regional ambitions, whether they be rational or not.
As David Pryce-Jones notes, the more sincere he is, the more naive he seems.