The St. Croix Review speaks for middle America, and brings you essays from patriotic Americans.
Haven Bradford Gow is a T.V. and radio commentator and writer who teaches religion to children at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, Greenville, Mississippi.
Catholic scholar Sergio Bastianel, in his book Morality in Social Life (Convivium Press), points out that moral reflection cannot be made to substitute for economic reflection or reach technical conclusions of an economic nature but, at the same time:
Moral reflection does show how even the technical questions about economic institutions and structures are never just technical questions. They always involve hidden options of meaning and imply certain aims, with their ethical value, and there is also always involvement in structures of human relations, which have an impact on people's lives.
Jesuit scholar Heinrich Pesch, in his work Ethics and the National Economy (IHS Press), observes:
Any investigation of causes in economics will be incomplete if it does not take the enormous importance of their ethical dimensions into account. We know from experience that the overall material welfare of a nation is definitely conditioned by the practical application of the moral law . . . by the extent to which morality applies to national and economic life.
An article in the May 9, 2011, USA Today noted that both Judaism and Christianity affirm that:
A person cannot worship both the Almighty and the Almighty Dollar; the prophets teach that it is easier for a camel to squeeze through a needle's eye . . . than for a rich man to get into heaven. Obsession with money? Nothing less than the root of all evil.
According to Robert Stuart, chairman emeritus of the National Can Corp., and Rev. Edmund Opitz, a conservative scholar and author of Religion & Capitalism: Allies, Not Enemies (Foundation for Economic Education), the most moral economic system is one that enhances economic freedom and limits government intervention into the free market economy; they insist that the free enterprise economic system is the one most compatible with Judeo-Christian moral and religious values.
Serious proponents of freedom long have warned that economic and political power must be diffused, balanced, and limited. When too much power is concentrated in the hands of government, we find a corresponding dissolution of personal freedom.
Implicit in this view of government's limited role is the rejection of the notion that all problems are reducible to the politico-economic and therefore demand politico-economic solutions; rather, it holds to American humanist Irving Babbitt's view that the economic problem blends into the political, the political into the philosophical and the philosophical into the religious.
But during the 1960s and 1970s we were inundated with talk about how legislation and socio-economic planning would help create "The Great Society." Enact the civil rights bills, we were led to believe, and there will be an end to race problems that have drained the moral and spiritual resources of our nation for over a hundred years. Increase the GNP and provide material benefits to our citizens so that happiness and peace of mind will prevail in our society.
Unhappily the passage of civil rights legislation, though much needed and successful in achieving some noble goals, has not made blacks and whites love one another nor has it secured domestic tranquility; and, regrettably, all the material benefits that young people enjoy have not made them realize that drug-taking, thrill-seeking, and "free sex" are merely substitutes (tedious, at best) for the ultimately more rewarding pleasures that emanate from the practice of virtues like courtesy and kindness, honesty and decency, moral courage, self-respect and respect for others, and the Golden Rule of treating others the way we would like to be treated.
Ever mindful of the intense and persistent demands of man's higher and nobler nature, the proponent of liberty recognizes that most of the problems facing man can be dealt with only through a resuscitation of character, integrity, and the human spirit. Indeed, it is a sad mistake to assume that politico-economic remedies can resolve what really are disorders of the mind and spirit, demanding philosophical and religious solutions. As Burke so trenchantly observed, we cannot resolve the agonizing problem of evil merely by decreeing that monarchies shall no longer exist. *
Murray Weidenbaum is the Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also serves as honorary chairman of the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy. He served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Ronald Reagan from 1981-82.
The rapid growth of government spending and deficit financing underscores the importance of carefully analyzing the huge array of numbers contained in budget documents. That onslaught of statistical information also reinforces the need to recognize the many budget games regularly played with the data.
To start off on a positive note, the situation has improved since the time when policymakers could choose among three competing concepts of the budget. Back then, they could select at different points in time the budget concept that generated the best statistical support for the policy positions they were advocating.
That situation prevailed in the administration of Lyndon Johnson. That time was a high point (or rather low point) in budget manipulation. Of course, no president since has been blameless. That point can be quickly supported by referring to the following 10 examples of budget games. I will illustrate the seriousness of these games and try to show how to guard against them.
Game 1. Changing the way the overall federal budget is measured, especially what categories of spending are included and excluded.
Game 2. Arbitrarily estimating the allocation of future government spending to any specific year.
Game 3. Taking advantage of spending categories that are effectively uncontrollable in the normal budget process.
Game 4. Omitting expenditures that can easily be added later on.
Game 5. Fudging the economic assumptions underlying the budget estimates.
Game 6. Using clever policy assumptions.
Game 7. Downplaying congressional tilting of budget assumptions.
Game 8. Not stating all the key assumptions.
Game 9. Relying on very technical ways to slow down or speed up revenues and spending.
Game 10. Setting up arbitrary budget categories.
In an article published back in the Johnson presidency, I described a new presidential budget with the title, "Federal Spending -- Up, Down, or Sideways?" Back then, three different measures of the budget were used: (1) the administrative budget, which ignored trust funds such as social security, (2) the consolidated cash budget, which incorporated the trust funds, and (3) the NIA budget which put the budget on an economic basis by using the relevant components of the national income and product accounts (NIA or GDP).
Depending on which of those three budget concepts government officials used back then, they could, with technical accuracy, state that federal expenditures for the year ahead were rising, declining, or stable. That choice is no longer available. Since then, the "unified budget" has been adopted. It uses a variation of the consolidated-cash approach, but with important omissions (such as some of the bailout programs).
A different budget game is still played: take advantage of the fact that calculating the surplus or rather deficit for the forthcoming budget year draws on an estimate of future spending (that is, expenditures). However, Congress does not act on expenditures. It acts on appropriations, which are the legal authorizations for federal agencies to spend money.
The game consists of overestimating expenditures in the current year and underestimating expenditures in the year ahead. This is done because the attention of policy makers and those who report on the new annual budget is on the year ahead, which is the budget year. Nobody pays attention to the current year.
Thus, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) can show that the deficit is coming down, based on a phony, understated forecast of next year's expenditures. Of course, when the current year is over, it will turn out that the government did not spend money as fast as it said it would. That pushes up the spending estimate for the next year. But by then, that next year is the new current year and, once again, attention has shifted to the next budget year, and the game can be played again.
It is a game, because each appropriation can be spent over a period of several years, depending on the specific nature of congressional action. The extreme case is military procurement and construction. In budget lingo, these large categories are financed by "no-year money." The contrast with ordinary appropriations is very substantial. The standard appropriation must be "obligated"-in effect, committed by contracts-within a 12-month period; actual expenditures may occur over a 36-month period. In the military case, however, the appropriation is available for obligation for an indefinite period. The imagination can provide numerous possibilities for playing budget games under that situation.
For example, spending on veterans' pensions is subject to annual appropriations. However, when Congress passes an inadequate appropriation because it took OMB's low spending estimate seriously, there's no real penalty for the underestimation that incurred. You can count on Congress later in the year graciously passing a supplemental appropriation when the Department of Veterans Affairs runs out of appropriated funds.
A variation of this game is for OMB to play with the estimates of the various "permanent indefinite" appropriations. That perennially is a fertile field for fiscal manipulation. Those items do not appear in the formal appropriation bills at all. A few key examples help to get the point across: Social Security, Medicare, and interest on the public debt. The actual amount spent is determined by the detailed provisions of permanent laws.
The spending department has great leeway in submitting low-ball appropriation and expenditure estimates for these permanent, indefinite accounts. In each case, the actual appropriation for the year is automatically calculated when the money is actually spent.
Yet another budget game is played by the Pentagon, especially when a war is on (such as in Iraq or Afghanistan). The federal budget can assume that hostilities will end very early. When that does not happen, OMB can send up a supplemental defense appropriation request - but that action will occur after the public discussion of the new federal budget is over.
An interesting side effect is the opportunity for the administration or the Congress or both to add low priority civilian pork to the bill. How can Congress withhold approval - or the president veto - an appropriation to pay for the military forces currently engaged in combat?
A special word of warning: If any budget issue sounds very technical or boring, pay special attention to it. That can be camouflage for something really important. For example, a vital part of any detailed analysis with lots of numbers - such as preparing a budget - is selecting the underlying assumptions.
Thus, the forecast of corporate profits is a key determinant of the amount of corporate tax collections shown in the budget. Treasury officials can come up with rosy estimates of the flow of corporate tax receipts just by using very optimistic assumptions of the future profitability of American companies.
Many other categories of revenues and expenditures are sensitive to economic conditions. The standard example is unemployment compensation. Less obvious but often far more important is the swing in personal tax collections. For example, anticipating a stock market boom will raise the estimate of capital gains, an important element of personal income and of personal income tax collections. Again, there is no penalty for making a bad guess, even if the overestimate is clearly intentional.
These assumptions may be as important as the economic assumptions. Take the "patch" on the alternative minimum tax (the widely reviled AMT) that Congress has voted in recent years. The "patch" is a rough attempt to offset the effect of inflation on the amount of income subject to the AMT, which is in effect a second income tax. If the Treasury makes a positive assumption about the enactment of the patch, the federal revenue stream will be much lower than if they assume no passage of a "patch."
Numerous other legislative actions influence government revenues or expenditures. A few current examples help to make the point: Will the Bush tax cuts be extended again? Which ones?
A fundamental difference between the OMB numbers and the estimates of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) relates to the key assumptions underlying them. Of course, each uses somewhat different economic assumptions, but usually these are not the major reason for their differences. The key CBO assumption-mandated by Congress-is to estimate the budget trends for future years on the basis of existing law.
That sounds very sensible - until you stop to think about it. That single inflexible assumption means that no expiring legislation will be extended and no new legislation will be enacted during the period being forecasted. Nor will any existing legislative authority be repealed or even modified. I cannot recall any fiscal year in modern times when the actual budget outcome met this rigid assumption. Certainly no presidential budget is ever prepared on that basis.
To minimize boredom, I will not go through the details of the differences between OMB and CBO budget numbers, on the one hand, and those of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on the other. Let us just note that the variations in assumptions produce quite different long-range spending and deficit estimates.
More about the importance of assumptions. Sometimes the most crucial assumptions are unstated. For example, the congressional explanation of the new health reform law skips over the fact that the cost estimates shown cover only items included in the budget. The many costs that the law imposes directly on health care providers and insurers are carried at zero.
Thus, in the back of the published analysis of the new law, page after page shows zero costs for many items voted by Congress. It takes a close reading by people versed in arcane federal lingo to even notice that all those zero costs result from the fact that the title of the table indicates that it only covers direct expenditures. Nothing in the accompanying text alerts the reader to the significance of this technical point. In the normal course of events, numerous so-called indirect costs will be borne by the users of health care services - those voters are also called patients.
Another budget game played by the fiscal authorities is taking place right now. On occasion, Congress is reluctant to increase the statutory limit on the size of the federal debt - even though it has been very generous in voting the outlays and tax cuts which generate the need for additional deficit financing. One Washington cartoonist described the situation in terms of a large dog being cajoled into moving into a small doghouse while his master simultaneously is bringing him a generous supply of additional food.
Under these circumstances, Treasury can and has drawn down its cash balance in order to finance temporarily some especially urgent outlays. The government can also delay investing the cash it receives from the Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes. That increases the cash available for direct expenditures. At the margin, the Treasury can and has slowed down the issuance of checks to government contractors and to beneficiaries of other spending programs.
In a limited way, Treasury also can speed up the process of cashing the checks sent in by taxpayers. Paying clerks overtime to reduce the normal backlog of unprocessed checks is not economically efficient. However, in the short run, such action increases cash flow, enabling Congress to continue debating whether to increase the debt limit.
Real gamesmanship is involved in developing arbitrary categories of budgetary presentation. On occasion, analyses of federal finance focus on nondefense spending or omit (or segregate) capital outlays. One extreme exercise of this sort once led to the gripe, back in my Budget Bureau days, that if you exclude from your analysis enough of the spending programs that are going up, the overall budget will look like it is going down.
What can we do about these budget games? Here's a suggestion. For several years, the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) published competing analyses of each new federal budget. Brookings started the activity, drawing on its substantial array of full-time scholars. Often that included Charlie Schultze, a fine economist and former budget director. For a while, I did a similar but less comprehensive analysis for AEI. Both studies were widely used. In any event, after a few years, I went on to other matters. Subsequently, so did Brookings.
I still believe that such independent studies of each new federal budget are useful. They could serve as a deterrent to the budget games so often played - or at least alert the public to their impact. The national interest is not when government officials devote time and effort to playing "spin the budget." *
Fred A. Kingery is a self-employed, private-equity investor in domestic and international financial markets from New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, and a guest commentator for The Center for Vision & Values. This article is republished from V & V, a web site of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College, Grove City, Pennsylvania.
If you had been living on another planet the last three years, you would be shocked to learn that the credit-rating agency, Standard and Poor's (S&P), has placed the current AAA credit rating for the debt issued by the U.S. Treasury on a "negative watch" status. Most of us who live on planet earth had already concluded that the credit worthiness of our sovereign debt would be downgraded - unless Congress and the president were to fix the nation's debt problem. Although the financial markets reacted to this "negative watch" news as if it wasn't really news, S&P did get the nation's attention. After all, it was the first time since the attack on Pearl Harbor (70 years ago) that a downgrade on the outlook for U.S. Treasury securities had been issued. Like Pearl Harbor, Americans don't have a minute to waste in responding to the threat.
What prompted this change in the credit outlook by S&P? To answer that question, consider the following:
Suppose you were to buy a home using a 30-year, fixed-rate, $200,000 mortgage that cost you 5 percent. Your monthly payment would be $1,070 for 30 years. Your debt level is initially fixed and declines going forward. Other than the assumption that you have the income security to maintain the monthly payments, the risks associated with the debt and its cost are defined and fixed.
Now consider the case of our national debt. The level of debt is not fixed. It's set to grow dramatically going forward. The cost of funding the debt is not fixed either. Current Treasury debt yields are at a historic low and set to rise going forward. The assumption that we have the ability as a nation of taxpayers to service our debt via tax revenue is dependent on the variability of the growth rate of the U.S. economy going forward. Clearly, the risk connected to our ability to service our nation's debt is not defined and fixed; yet, it's set to rise dramatically.
Specifically, the total federal debt level will exceed $14.3 trillion in the very near future. The portion of that debt held in the form of marketable securities is over $9 trillion. The current interest expense on the marketable portion of the debt is $200 billion (2.2 percent). Over 20 percent of this debt will mature in under one year and just under 50 percent of the debt will mature in less than three years. Moreover, the annual deficit (new debt) is projected to be over $1.5 trillion and will remain as an additional ongoing annual borrowing requirement for as far as the eye can see.
America's current borrowing cost is at a historic low of about 1 percent compared to a historical average cost of funding slightly over 5.5 percent. As noted above, the current annual budget interest expense is projected to be $200 billion per year. What happens if the cost of financing returns to anywhere near the historic average of over 5.5 percent?
A recent analysis published by Lawrence B. Lindsey projects that marketable debt held by the public could rise to $13.1 trillion by 2015 and $16.7 trillion by 2019. The interest expense is projected to rise to $847 billion by 2015 and $1.15 trillion by 2019. As a percent of the tax revenue flowing into the federal treasury, interest expense could easily exceed 30 percent and approach as much as 50 percent. All other forms of budget expenditure would be threatened by this major claim on the nation's tax base. This is the future financial trap being laid out by the policies of the current government and finally being acknowledged by S&P.
Oh, and here's the rest of the news flash S&P forgot to mention for our professional political class in Washington:
The day of reckoning for this national financial train wreck is approaching much faster than you think. The federal government's current policies of extend and pretend will no longer appease the financial markets. If our politicians don't fix the nation's debt problem on their own terms now, with substantive and credible policy changes, then the financial markets will fix the problem for them later. Specifically, later is sometime between now and the November 2012 elections. The clock is ticking. *
Dear Sir:
I must take exception to Dr Hendrickson's critique of Paul Ryan's budget proposal in the June Review. While it is true that the Ryan plan is not a conservative dream budget, it is, as Dr. Hendrickson admits, "a step in the right direction," and it is probably all we can get at this time. Instead of demanding all or nothing, I think conservatives should embrace the chance to advance our cause by incremental steps, constantly putting forward viable alternatives, a "policy-oriented conservatism" in Yuval Levin's words.
John Ingraham,
Boquet, NY
Hi, Barry. Thanks for forwarding the correspondence.
Mr. Ingraham has put words in my mouth. I never stated that conservatives should reject the Ryan plan or that we should demand "all or nothing" in terms of reform. I simply pointed out that the Ryan plan is not as "conservative" as it could have been or as liberals have made it out to be.
The writer and I agree that what is politically achievable is going to be far from ideal; also that, relatively speaking, the Ryan plan is better than the status quo. The reason I wrote the article the way I did (criticizing Ryan's plan from the right) was so that his position would seem more centrist; also, to make the case that sooner or later we will need to go beyond the Ryan plan (or whatever parts of it eventually are enacted into law in a post-Obama/Harry Reid era) if we are ever to restore fiscal soundness to government. That is an inescapable economic fact.
How reform works out politically is beyond my capacity to predict, but if I have a choice between policies that are, say, 70 percent destructive and 90 percent destructive, I'll go for the less destructive policies, of course.
Best regards,
Mark Hendrickson
President Obama played his trump card on July 12 in his showdown over raising the ceiling of the national debt before the August 2 deadline. He told a CBS broadcaster:
Well, this is not just a matter of Social Security checks. These are veterans' checks. These are folks on disability and their checks. There are about 70 million checks that go out. . . . I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3rd if we haven't resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it.
When he says "there may simply not be enough money in the coffers," he is lying.
The President is scaring the elderly and the disabled. He wants Americans to believe Republicans are taking pay away from soldiers.
If the debt ceiling weren't raised by August 2 there would be a 44 percent drop in government spending. It would be the Treasury Secretary's job under the direction of the President to prioritize which agencies get funded.
According to an excellent post by Kurt Brouwer at his "Fundmastery Blog" on July 12, there is no need for the Treasury to default on its debt after August 2. Every month the Treasury owes roughly between $15 to $20 billion in interest on the national debt, and every month the Treasury takes in through tax collections on average about $200 billion.
Kurt Brouwer cites a Bipartisan Policy Center study that estimates $172 billion in tax revenues available in August when the debt ceiling is reached, and about $307 billion in promised expenditures by the federal government for August.
If the Republicans, the President, and the Democrats are unable to agree on raising the debt ceiling by August 2 there will be a partial government shut down, but there will be enough money coming into the Treasury to pay for interest on the debt ($29 billion), Social Security ($49.2 billion), Medicare and Medicaid ($50 billion), active duty troop pay ($2.9 billion), and veterans affairs programs ($2.9 billion).
President Obama's and Treasury Secretary Geithner's rhetoric describing catastrophic consequences of a default is also a lie. There would be enough money to pay the interest on the debt. The President and the Secretary are deceiving the American people. There is no danger of a default on the nation's debt.
But without a deal hard choices would have to be made. Who would go without?
It costs per month $31.7 billion to fund defense vendors; $3.9 billion for IRS refunds; $9.3 billion for food stamps and welfare; $12.8 for unemployment insurance benefits; $20.2 billion for the Department of Education; $6.7 billion for Housing and Urban development; and $73.6 billion for the Departments of Justice, Labor, Commerce, E.P.A., and HHS.
Imagine a government shut down with the President using his power of choice to conjure heart-wrenching T.V. footage. He may choose not to send out Social Security and Medicare checks, or not to pay for food stamps, and welfare benefits. The media would create images comparable to the residents of New Orleans stranded in the sweltering heat without food, water, and medicine after hurricane Katrina; only this time the spectacle would be nationwide. CBS will release a poll, using a skewed sampling of adults with few Republicans included, showing that Republican's have become villains in the public's opinion. Some famous entertainer will say: "The Republicans don't like poor people!"
The President has a very simple narrative: The Republicans have decided to shut down the government because they refuse to raise taxes on the wealthy. He will say that he was reasonable, and was considering cutting entitlements (don't believe it, he's never given specific proposals).
The simplicity of the President's message gives him some advantage, although it is difficult to know how much. Republicans have to be careful not to be blamed for initiating the shut down. Our financial problem results from decades of overspending, a most egregious example being President Obama's nearly $1 trillion stimulus package of February 2009 that failed to keep unemployment under 9 percent.
As of this writing the Republicans have two plans. There is the Cut, Cap, and Balance, involving cutting and capping spending as a percentage of GDP, and passing a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. There are virtues to this approach but it would take a lot of explaining, and take many years to effect - each state voting to approve the amendment. Cut, Cap, and Balance couldn't pass the Senate.
Then there is the McConnell plan giving the President the ability along with the blame for raising the debt ceiling without spending cuts (cuts are promised but such promises have been ignored in the past) - it couldn't pass the Republican-controlled House.
The problem for Republicans is that their responses are convoluted and time consuming, and the House and Senate Republicans aren't unified. The president will show us the suffering poor on T.V., and the Republicans will counter with charts and statistics.
The American people already know the federal government has a spending problem; Republicans were elected in 2010 to put a check on President Obama and the Democrats. But if polls are accurate, Americans are not yet prepared for cuts in the entitlements, including Medicare, that are driving the nation to financial ruin.
The American people don't yet understand the magnitude of the government's impending failure to meet its promised benefits in a few years. Finding how to make people see that Medicare and Medicaid are going bankrupt while the liberal politicians and the media (being ignorant?) obscure the truth is proving difficult.
The debate over raising the debt ceiling is an opportunity to further educate the American people. But the Republicans must avoid being seen as wanting the shutdown. If pushed to the brink the Republicans should pass a bill through the House that raises the debt ceiling along with spending cuts equal in proportion. A 6-month extension of the debt ceiling, raising it $500 billion, with $500 billion in cuts, as Charles Krauthammer has suggested, is a good idea. They should not raise taxes.
Let the Senate fail to act on, or the President to veto, the House legislation. Let the Democrats take blame or at least share blame for a shut down. Let the American people witness the chaos ensuing from the failure to put our finances on a sound footing. Conservatives have enough media outlets today to get our message out, a factor we didn't have during the 1995 shutdown.
Honest people must inform the American people that if the current pace of spending isn't addressed, the interest on the debt climbs from today's $214 billion a year to $931 billion in a decade - Charles Krauthammer's numbers.
The Republicans must nominate an articulate presidential candidate who can hammer the President on his high unemployment numbers, the dismal economy, and the corrupt manner by which the Democrats and the President rushed through both the hugely-expensive and ineffective 2009 stimulus and the 2000-page Obamacare legislation before anyone had time read the bills. Make the President defend his exploding spending and his wrong-headed energy policy. Let the President's failure speak for itself. *
The following is a summary of the June, 2011, issue of The St. Croix Review.
Barry MacDonald, in "The Point," describes Stillwater, Minnesota, and the St. Croix River, and explains how he keeps a balanced view of politicians.
Mark Hendrickson, in "Inflation: Food, Fuel, and the Fed," shows how the federal government is responsible for rising prices; in "How 'Radical' Is the Ryan Plan?" he says that Ryan's plan doesn't question the legitimacy of government redistribution of wealth, and thus is not a "cure"; in "Christian Conservatives and Randians," he urges a tactical alliance between atheists and Christians, with the shared goal of "prying government's grip off our nation's economic windpipe"; in "Budget Tightening in Pennsylvania - and Around the Nation" he details ex-Governor Ed Rendell's profligate spending, and what is necessary to change direction; in "A Tale of Two Union Disputes: the NFL vs. Wisconsin Teachers" he shows how it's not the NFL players who practice extortion; in "Imperfect Justice in Snyder v. Phelps" he takes issue with eight Supreme Court justices over the "right" of a hateful pastor and his flock to protest a Marine's funeral with signs saying "God hates you."
Herbert London, in "The Horror of Killing One's Own," sees an emerging barbarity throughout the globe and wonders what America can do; in "Libya and the Loss of American Sovereignty" he says waning American predominance will embolden the Chinese, Russians, and Iranians; in "Rediscovering Alexander Hamilton" he reviews a recent documentary film of America's "man for all seasons"; in "Marxism Redux" he defends capitalism as the most adaptable economic system the world has known; in "The Divinity Dupes at Yale" he describes a recent discussion at which an Imam asks Jewish students to appreciate Islam, while he himself does not show appreciation for the West's Judeo-Christian traditions.
Allan Brownfeld, in "One Reason for Our Educational Decline May Be Bad Students, Not Bad Schools," considers whether our entire approach to education in America is in need of reassessment; in "The Focus of Attention on the Role of Public Sector Unions in Leading Cities and States to Fiscal Crisis Is Long Overdue," he details an impending explosion in cost of the pensions and healthcare benefits of government workers; in "Horrors Continue in Zimbabwe, but the World Largely Looks Away," he reminds us of the brutality thriving outside of America; in "American Colleges and Universities Are Failing to Transmit Our History and Culture," he marks the 1960s, when a decision was made that history was starting over.
Paul Kengor, in "Bush, Obama, and Osama: America's Hour of Choosing," recalls a speech made by President George W. Bush immediately after the 9/11 attack; in "When Winston Warned America: Churchill's Iron Curtain at 65" he recounts the outrage and dismay Churchill received from Western opinion-makers - before he was proved right; in "The Ted Kennedy Chronicles: A Look at the Latest Declassified FBI Files" he says that the memos raise questions about his connections to Communist sympathizers; in "Death of the Pro-Life Democrat?" he remarks on the long process of polarization on abortion between the parties.
John A. Howard, in "Some Reflections on Choosing a College," writes about the need to transmit the virtues necessary for self-governance to the young, and he explains how well our universities are doing (not well).
In "The Great Lisbon Earthquake: Thinking Theology and Natural Disasters," John Van Til ponders an event in 1755, and the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and asks why God would permit such suffering.
In "A Memoir of World War II," William Barr relates the story of the bombing of the Nazi oil fields in Ploesti, Romania, by B-24 Liberators, the shooting down and capture of American airmen, their humane treatment by ladies of the Romanian royalty, and the later reunion of the of the former airmen and the "Queen of Hearts" after she fled Communist oppression during the Cold War.
Fayette Durlin and Peter Jenkin, in "A Continuing Survey of Conservative Periodicals," consider National Review, Israel News, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Times, New Criterion, Range, The Claremont Review of Books, and First Things.
Jigs Gardner, in "Letters from a Conservative Farmer - The Land of Cockaigne," writes about the absurd collection of defunct ideas and leftist ideology current in his region among yuppie farmers.
Jigs Gardner, in "Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man," reviews the magic of Siegfried Sassoon's writing that draws readers in to savor the genteel life of prewar England.
Jigs Gardner is an Associate Editor of the St. Croix Review. Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Brewer's Dictionary defines it as "an imaginary land of idleness and luxury," and a 13th century French poem claims "the houses were made of barley sugar cakes, the streets were paved with pastry, and the shops supplied goods for nothing." An American folk version is the Big Rock Candy Mountain. In time the name came to mean a sort of Cloud Cuckooland where irresponsible nonsense reigns, and I think of it today when I listen to the public discourse here.
I live in the Champlain valley on the edge of the Adirondacks, an area of small towns in the countryside, just across the lake from Vermont. The nonsense does not emanate from local ignorance, but from the presence of yuppies. Wherever they are thick on the ground, as in Vermont or the next town - which became a target for yuppie colonization from Vermont twenty years ago, perhaps because it is a pretty, old-fashioned New England town, and is also a terminus for the ferry from Vermont - then the culture, the climate of opinion, becomes an absurd collection of defunct ideas and leftist ideology. Bear in mind that ideology is supremely important to yuppies, what the moral sense is to ordinary people.
To illustrate what I'm talking about, consider a very successful farm in the town called a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) where patrons pay a yearly sum and get in return vegetables, dairy products, eggs, and some meat. CSAs are a yuppie phenomenon, but they are also a form of market gardening, an ancient way of doing just what its name declares: the retail selling of garden products. In America in my lifetime, going back to the 1930s, the classic form was, and is, a stand beside the road on land belonging to the farm where the produce is grown on a plot cultivated by a family member, often a youngster. It was only a very small part of the farm's business. Sometimes an adult, usually retired, who was an especially good gardener would cultivate a piece of land just for a market garden. Then there were men (very rarely women) who grew vegetables but supplemented them with produce bought wholesale at a city market, or they might travel southwards to buy early produce, as I bought ripe tomatoes last July from a market gardener who had bought them from a grower a hundred miles south. I have known many market gardeners, but only one, perhaps two, made their entire living from it: it was too uncertain and the returns too meager.
One of the initial impulses behind the formation of CSAs was to remedy meager returns by bringing customers into the production process. In the beginning, customers cultivated crops in the communal garden, or they helped the gardener with his crops, and here we meet a potent yuppie concept, community. This does not mean, as it usually does, a heterogeneous group of people living in the same place - to yuppies it means the like-minded. Yuppies always maintain rigid caste distinctions, avoiding places, shops, or activities involving ordinary people. Here they have their bakery, their library branch, their public hall, and even their health center. From the start CSAs were, from the demand side, their creation.
But why get involved in vegetable production? This is another legacy from the 1960s when the fad of reputedly healthy eating of vegetables emerged from what had been regarded as quacky "health food" stores in the 1940s, united with a later myth of the sins of commercial food production and distribution. Big Agribiz joins Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Box Stores, and Big Whatever in the yuppie pantheon of evil. Thus the origins and ideological appeal of CSAs.
Of course, they quickly evolved away from customer involvement: how many yuppies really wanted to do that sort of labor? And by that time the more astute entrepreneurs understood their customers. So the prices are high, choice is restricted, and quality is uneven, but ideology dictates the exchange: the goods are "organi" and they come from a small, local farm. Patrons think they're eating healthily at the same time as they're defying big bad commercial agriculture as well as supermarkets. Quality, choice, and price are considerations in ordinary commercial transactions, but not when one is buying ideological satisfaction. Of course, the ideas are empty husks. There is no such thing as "organic" farming. Confusion abounds. Some think "organic" means production without chemicals, an absurd idea because chemicals are in and of everything, and others think it means food produced without man-made chemicals, but there is no difference between man-made chemicals and those occurring naturally in the environment. And the most exhaustive tests have failed to find any difference between things grown organically and any other way. When they buy from a CSA, yuppies are bolstering their self-esteem.
The symbolic renunciation of commercial agriculture, a big yuppie theme these days, is also devoid of substance. American farmers are the most highly skilled workers in the world. That they brutally exploit livestock and ruthlessly despoil the land are stupid, vicious lies that no amount of logic seems to refute. How do you make a profit from unhappy animals and ruined land? Behind this is another defunct yuppie idea: that primitive technology is better - more wholesome, more "human," more uplifting - than sophisticated modern methods. So much is made of workhorses at the CSA, but no real work is regularly done with them - it's just part of the clever pose. Yuppies also vehemently condemn genetically modified plants.
Of the four CSAs in the area, the one just described is the only one that makes a profit because it was first on the ground, it has a favorable location, and the entrepreneur thoroughly understands his customer. The others, and this is typical of yuppie enterprises, are bankrolled by indulgent parents, but they also make their contribution to the fog of defunct ideas. It was recently reported of one CSA that when the owner turned his pigs into a field to work up the land, as pigs will do, he was not plowing with a tractor, so was not contributing to global warming, a bit of news that rated as ecstatic paragraph in the local paper.
So far, I have described phenomena at an analytical distance, but it is also possible to experience the stupefying effect of defunct ideas directly, as I did recently. One speaker was an "organic" dairy farmer, the other a "green" contractor who builds energy-efficient homes. The conversation began with an allusion to global warming when they both agreed that bad storms were a sign of it (in the global warming literature, everything is a sign of it, signaling that it is an unfalsifiable hypothesis, hence absurd. See Karl Popper). They went on to agree that Vermont's only nuclear power plant had to be closed. The farmer had appeared in a TV ad against it. Of course, electric rates would go up, maybe by thirty percent, which would be a Good Thing because then people would really want green homes. And then solar power wouldn't seem so expensive. At the moment, of course, only tax credits made it viable. And so on.
I listened to that incredible foolishness, and that's when I thought of the Land of Cockaigne.
In the next issue: Versed in Country Things. *
Fayette Durlin and Peter Jenkin write from Brownsville, Minnesota.
To found a magazine of opinion and maintain it successfully requires an extraordinary character. When, for whatever reason, the founder leaves, carrying on the enterprise in the spirit of the founder proves, finally, to be impossible. He was more than ordinarily gifted, and such a one does not surround himself with equally strong characters. Those who carry on the magazine may be competent, but they cannot replace the lost leader. Without his spirit animating the magazine, it begins to lose its character. It may remain a fine publication, but it will never be the same.
So National Review, the premier conservative biweekly for over sixty years, has been in a slow decline since William Buckley retired from active involvement some years ago. Still a good magazine, it is no longer the Delphic oracle of the movement, not just because its political judgments have become uncertain, but because the editing has gone slack and the special zest that used to be NR's hallmark is gone. This shows most obviously in "The Week," those paragraphs of topical comment at the front of the magazine. Once a pungent delight, they are now mostly damp squibs. The widely varied columns of Buckley's day have been replaced by dull pieces (and in some cases, unreadable ones). Only Rob Long's humor column is first rate. (After a prolonged absence, the incomparable Mark Steyn is back, as of the 3/21 issue!)
The issue of 2/21, we are happy to say, belies to a degree our gloomy remarks: it is true that "The Week" is limp, but all comments on Egyptian affairs, including essays by David Pryce-Jones and Anthony Daniels, are level-headed, more than can be said for some conservative magazines. There's an illuminating article about the wastefulness of our pseudo-space program, and three of the four features, one about Jeb Bush, a profile of Thomas Sowell by Jay Nordlinger, and one on the Pigford fraud, are excellent, but the one about the Senate by William Vogeli is too academic for this venue. Three of the four book reviews are good. Since both of us stopped going to the movies many years ago, we cannot comment on the film column. So of the eighteen items, we derived something of value from eleven. Some of the pieces - on Jeb Bush, space waste, and the Pigford fraud - were news to us.
Israel News is a four-page weekly newsletter from a Toronto synagogue that reprints five or six articles published in the U.S., Israel, Canada, or Great Britain analyzing Middle East affairs. There are nearly always pieces by such brilliant analysts as Caroline Glick and Barry Rubin. Essential reading for Israel sympathizers. Subscriptions: Israel News, 613 Clark Ave West, Thornhill, Ontario L4J 543, Canada. $50/year.
Access to Energy is a monthly four-page newsletter started more than forty years ago by Petr Beckmann, and a brilliant publication it was, exposing absurd environmental fears, and making the case for energy development, especially nuclear. Unfortunately, he died young, and he turned the publication over to Arthur Robinson, a scientist with his own lab in Oregon. At first, Robinson carried on with environmental news, and he was a driving force behind the petition of scientists against Al Gore's climate change agenda. Unfortunately, he has pretty well dropped environmental issues in favor of Tea Party diatribes (he ran unsuccessfully for Congress last fall), something we need much less than critical analyses of Greenism.
Environment and Climate News, a monthly twenty page newspaper published by the Heartland Institute, is a compendium of news stories about Green issues - States' struggles with the EPA, the cost of "renewable" energy, schools teaching Green propaganda, etc. Since it does not examine these matters in any depth, it is really no more than a series of memos reminding readers of current Green issues. It is no substitute for thorough analyses of every aspect of Greenism, and where are we going to find that? Until very recently conservative publications were embarrassingly ignorant about Greenism, and the only consistently anti-Green magazine was the libertarian Reason. The most reliable conservative magazine on this issue today, beside our own Review, is The American Spectator, where George Gilder leads the attack. It is most unfortunate that conservatives have been so backward about this, an inevitable consequence of their tendency to focus exclusively on politics, ignorant of how Lefties carry their politics everywhere, even into the countryside.
An example of the unreliability of conservatives on this subject turns up in the feature article of the 2/28 issue of The Weekly Standard, "Green Power, Red Light," about Greens at war with themselves about energy projects. The project, a huge solar energy setup in the Mojave Desert is now being sued by the Sierra Club. The author shows how solar (and wind) power generation uses much more land than conventional generation, thus greatly increasing potential regulatory challenges. It's obvious that these projects, strenuously promoted by the government at the same time that every obstacle possible is placed in the way of conventional energy development, are wasteful disasters, and that should be the real story here, the scandal which should be getting maximum conservative attention. But that isn't the point of the essay, which is that if the government wants to promote this nonsense it must reform the regulations so that the usual frivolous azreen suits cannot block the projects. The rest of the article is an outline of how to improve the regulations. Incredible.
The Washington Times is a forty-page newspaper owned, we understand, by Sun Myung Moon (hope we've got that right), so it covers news from China, especially military news, assiduously. We do not read it for news, nor do we think anyone else does because most of the stories sound like press releases: "GOP Hearings Put Obamacare, Oil Spill Under Scrutiny," "Senator Paul Says Tea Party Holds Power on Hill." The intellectual level is not high; the paper's conception of conservatism pretty much begins and ends with the Tea Party. We subscribe for the columns, ten or more every week, and they are indeed worth reading: Michelle Malkin, Dennis Prager, Thomas Sowell, Wesley Pruden, Mona Charen, Lawrence Kudlow, Tony Blankley, Pat Buchanan, to name the most prominent. The editorials are usually good, too.
The New Criterion is an eighty-page monthly magazine of the arts, very high-toned and austere, not to say snooty. For instance, information about the contributors is so sparse as to suggest that a reader's curiosity is voyeuristic. The editor and founder, Hilton Kramer, once the art critic of the New York Times, is very attached to modern art, and that's the central subject in the magazine, with seven or more pages always taken up with an essay by Karen Wilken, usually on a major museum exhibit, followed by short reviews of gallery shows. The Wilken essays, which may be about any kind of art (not necessarily modern) suffer from lack of illustrations, but the reader is made to feel that the articles are for readers who have been to the exhibition or who know the paintings so well that they don't need illustrations. If the reader can make little sense of Wilken's essay and doesn't care for modern or contemporary art at the galleries, this section of the magazine is a dead loss.
There is a growing tendency to turn over the main section of the journal to symposia, always a sign of editorial desperation. Of the four issues since last November, three have special sections devoted to one topic. These may or may not interest the reader, but they are certainly less interesting than a varied group of essays would be. The one on Art in the December issue has an illuminating essay on Art Nouveau by Michael Lewis, and the symposium in the January issue - "The Anglosphere and the Future of Liberty"- has interesting essays by Anthony Daniels, Mark Steyn, Keith Windschuttle, and James Bennett. The February symposium - "Limited Government in an Age of Uncertainty"- is not so good, probably because the writers, like Andrew McCarthy and Amity Shlaes, have a limited repertory of well-known ideas, so the reader learns nothing he did not already know.
Let's look at the November 2010 issue. After brief and refreshingly acerbic "Notes and Comments" by Hilton Kramer, there's an essay on J. S. Mill by the lively (if uneven) Anthony Daniels, a dull (because we know the story by heart) piece on the decline of the New York Times, an excellent essay on Fanny Kemble, and one on Mahler. As always with the main essays, they are thorough, concise, and well written. NC publishes three or four poems in every issue, nearly always interesting and sometimes excellent. First Things publishes religious poetry, and National Review publishes one poem per issue, but the ones in NC are the real thing. Kevin Williamson reviews plays, always at too much length. The art section follows, and then the music column by Jay Nordlinger, a fine writer on all kinds of subjects, but trivial and shallow on music. The media column by James Bowman is usually the best thing in the magazine, but it suffers from a mannerism which seems to be growing on Mr. Bowman: he tends to write long convoluted sentences that are almost incomprehensible. Five book reviews follow, well written and intelligent, usually on subjects, like art and culture, not found in conservative magazines.
Editorial slackness shows up in a couple of shocking instances when the magazine published wholly inadequate essays on the deaths of two eminent writers - J. F. Powers and Louis Auchincloss - written by people who knew hardly anything about the author's works.
The magazine's strengths are its good writing, its concern with the arts, and its publication of superior poetry.
Range, a quarterly of eighty-six pages that bills itself as "The Cowboy Spirit in America's Outback" may seem an odd choice for this survey, but the magazine and the Westerners who read it are adversaries of Greenism and its governmental collaborators who are pushing Westerners around and locking up Western lands. Remember that Greenism is opposed to productive land use anywhere. The voices that are heard in Range are authentic voices of ordinary Westerners, and it is refreshing to hear them. The magazine features excellent photography, as well as "Red Meat Survivors," old ranchers who are still hanging in there, recalling their struggles and scorning the vegans. There's a large letters section and much argument about issues Easterners seldom think about, like the proper way to deal with feral horses, and so on. Range's value is that it opens new vistas for us, expands our horizons. Unfortunately, its performance is very uneven.
The Claremont Review of Books is a quarterly of seventy outsized pages aptly calling itself "A Journal of Political Thought and Statesmanship." Considering the Fall 2010 issue there are, in addition to Charles Kesler's editorial and the letters (thoughtful), four essays on political thought, nineteen book reviews, and a concluding one-page essay by Mark Helprin. All but a few of the reviews fulfill the magazine's description, and these are related cultural matters: lives of Arthur Koestler, Henry Luce and Somerset Maugham (Conservative editors should never consider literary figures, like Maugham, because their judgments are invariably shallow). If Commentary is intellectual without being academic, The Claremont Review is the reverse. That is a criticism, but it is not so damning as it sounds: so many of the books discussed are written by academics for university presses, and the Review's writers are almost all academics that the magazine is bound to smell of the lamp. Other academic stigmata are a lack of cogency and concision. Its conservatism is a little belligerent, hostile to neo-conservatism.
In any case, The Claremont Review has made for itself, in a short time, a serious position among conservative periodicals, and we always look forward to its appearance.
The April issue of First Things has arrived, and a new editor has taken over. The editorial is fatuous, and the two short initial essays are very dull (and dubious). The four feature essays, averaging seven pages of double columns, are long and dense: about the Soviet war against the Catholic Church, about aging, about Evangelical squabbles, about a Catholic boyhood in the 1950s. The magazine, originally ecumenical and inter-faith, has become steadily more Catholic, and now its readership is like to be confined to seminaries.
The immediate purpose of this survey is to acquaint readers with a wide spectrum of conservative thought. We hope also to sharpen our perception and improve performance. It is a part of our effort to make the Review a specific voice in the conservative medley, a voice that will be known as wide ranging in its outlook, having something cogent to say about economics, the countryside, about high culture, and about the life of ideas. By showing varieties of conservative thought, the survey should help to make the Review known as the foremost magazine of critical conservatism.
In the next issue: The Magazines and the Middle East. *
William Barr was an aviator with the U.S. Naval Air Corps during W.W. II, and flew in the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific regions.
This account may seem an odd choice for the Review, but it tells a story that should interest our readers, reminding us of a time when we unambiguously exploited our resources, were supremely self-confident, and so were respected and admired around the world.
One of the salient features of the war was mobility. Although the Germans used horses for hauling to a considerable extent, the one indispensable item for both sides was gasoline. Early in the war Canadian oil fields and refineries were connected to Halifax for convoys to Britain while German U-boats lurked in the ocean saving their torpedoes for vital oil tankers as prime targets. Those were the days of the "Battle of Britain," when Britain stood alone.
Then in the Lend-Lease / Arsenal of Democracy" period before USA's entry into the war, Oklahoma/Texas oil gushed from flow to flood in the transport of oil out of Houston, around the tip of Florida, up the East Coast to refineries, and then to trans-Atlantic convoys. It was then that NAS Banana River (where I served) was created on Cape Canaveral to hunt and kill German submarines that sought to choke off this vital flow of Allied oil.
Immediately after America's entry into the war, gasoline was rationed at home while our petroleum industry supplied more than 80 percent of the Allies' aviation fuel. Soon petroleum made up more than half of all USA's exports. The Battle of the Atlantic was a struggle between submarines and the convoys and their defenders. Attesting to our success is the overwhelming supply of arms and fuel on hand in Britain for the invasion in June 1944. The Allied High Command quickly laid an underwater pipeline from Britain to France to insure the flow of vital fuel to feed the Allied war machine on the Western fronts.
Meanwhile the Axis war machine found itself dependent on the rich oil fields of Ploesti in Romania. Allied military strategists quickly recognized the possibility of shortening the war by depriving the Axis of this precious Ploesti oil.
After the Allied success in driving Rommel and his forces out of North Africa in Operation Torch, the feasibility of air strikes against Ploesti first became evident. An air base was set up in Benghazi, Libya, composed of USAAF B-24 Liberator bombers for the specific purpose of a daring, long-range bombing strike against Ploesti. Named Tidal Wave, this mission of 1500 miles round trip required stretching the limits of fuel/bomb load for the B-24s and their crews. Furthermore, with the Germans expecting Allied strikes against Ploesti, their fighter plane protection and their anti-aircraft gun fire was known to be even more formidable than Berlin's. Nevertheless, the possibilities of depriving the Axis of vital fuel and shortening the war compelled the decision to undertake this dangerous mission for five squadrons of B-24 Liberators totaling 177 bombers. On August 1, 1943, those bombers took to the air amid clouds of Libyan desert dust kicked up by over 700 roaring engines.
At about noon, local time, the planes reached Ploesti where they flew at treetop level to evade both enemy planes and radar detection. The flak was as thick and deadly as the worst fears had imagined, but the low-level tactic permitted evasion and access to planned targets for most of the bombers. Ploesti was scorched by incendiaries and damaged by explosions, enough to justify the investment of planes and men.
Most of the damage to the bombers came in the turn away from target and the regrouping phase where ground fire found its marks and crippled many of the planes before they were able to head for far away safety. Two such bombers crashed among many. We cite these two particular fallen planes because both crews experienced gracious deeds of royal compassion - not kindness from ordinary country folk but mercy from the most unusual, unexpected sources, from Romania's Queens.
The first is 1st Lt. John Palm, a tall Texan from El Paso, the pilot of the B-24 named the Brewery Wagon, in the 376 Bomb Group (Heavy) called the "Liberandos" during Operation Tidal Wave. In the Bomb Group's approach the lead navigator had made an early turn, a mistake as it turned out that brought the Liberandos into the heaviest ack-ack concentration below. Flying in and out of rainsqualls, Palm found his plane separated, yet headed for the target. This brought concentrated ground fire and soon an 88-mm shell exploded in the nose, killing the bombardier and navigator while destroying three engines. Palm jettisoned his bombs just in time while co-pilot Bill Wright flooded the engines with foam to avoid a huge gasoline fire, at the moment their bomber skidded and crashed.
Eight of the ten-man crew survived the crash, including John Palm whose right leg was almost shot away. With his leg in a tourniquet, Palm was carried to a truck by Romanian soldiers and ended up in a Bucharest private clinic run by a Dr. Georg Petrescu. Palm relates, "I could tell right away that Dr. Petrescu was a wheel and an Allied sympathizer." This orthopedic surgeon immediately removed his dangling leg and sutured the stump.
After a night's sleep, Palm received friendly visitors. Attending to him and sympathizing was a slender, pleasant lady. She explained, " I am Helen and this is the King." At her side was King Michael, Helen's son. John Palm recalled a news item that described King Michael operating a tank during army maneuvers. An animated conversation followed involving airplanes, motorcycles, cars and such - all this in the English language! Eventually, Queen Helen took advantage of a semi-private moment to whisper to Lt. Palm, "You know we are not free to speak. Do the Americans understand that our sympathies are with you?" Looking up from his hospital bed, John Palm winked at the Queen with a confident smile, fulfilling with flair the function of America's de facto ambassador to the Courts of Romania.
Meantime, at the bidding of the Queen, Dr. Petrescu moved patient Palm to a private room where her highness could visit incognito without courtier interlopers snooping about. She was the wife of Carol II, the Romanian King who had previously put her away - his true wife - in favor of the intriguing, infamous Magda Lupescu, eventually causing Carol to abdicate in favor of Helen's and his son, Michael.
When Tidal Wave survivors were finally rounded up and out of various hospitals, they were assembled in Timisul in a prisoner-of-war camp in the Transylvanian Alps, that is, all prisoners except John Palm, who was free to go his own way in Bucharest on his peg leg, mostly at the beckoning of Queen Helen. He soon became a conduit of news from the outer world to those 108 downed airmen behind barbed wire in Timisul.
As mentioned above, a second crashed B-24 has our special attention. Coming off bombing Red Target, one of the "Eight Balls" of the 44th Bomb Group piloted by 1st Lt. Robert O'Reilly, was trailing smoke and in big trouble. The huge plane crashed and skidded on its nose on a dry riverbed on the thousand-acre estate of Queen Caterina Caradja, of the House of Cantacuzene. Her Highness held royal ancestry reaching back ten centuries to the Byzantine era. In fact, Queen Caterina was King Michael's wife and thus she was Queen of Romania in 1943 at the age of fifty.
Like her mother, Queen Caterina kept busy operating orphanages and foster homes for 3,000 unfortunate children in war-torn Bucharest. By nature she had more compassion for others than concern for herself.
Queen Caterina was energetic, active, blue-eyed, fair-skinned and attractive. Her father had placed her in a private British boarding school when she was but three where she remained until sixteen. This explains her fluency in English language, history, and traditions. Royal bloodlines to Queen Victoria had something to do with this grooming arrangement.
That Sunday she was in conversation with a Polish countess whom she had rescued from the Nazis during the invasion of 1939. Suddenly O'Reilly's bomber crashed nearby. Queen Caterina jumped into her 1939 Plymouth automobile and raced to the scene, thinking like all the others that this was a Russian airplane. Eight of the crew had survived and escaped to a nearby thicket, but two bodies were trapped in the nose of the plane. The gathering of people assumed that they both were dead, but a child said, "I saw one of the Russians move."
Immediately Queen Caterina's bold nature and compassion took control of the situation. Under her direction the wounded body of 2nd Lt. Richard Britt, the navigator, was extracted from the wreckage with great difficulty. The ruptured wing tanks of fuel had leaked down to the nose section and drenched Britt and his clothing causing blisters the size of pancakes over much of his torso. Queen Caterina had noticed that the nickname of the plane was Shoot, Fritz, You're Faded and so she asked Britt, "Boy, are you an American?" and then heard his reply, "Yes, Ma'am."
Two German soldiers proceeded to drag Britt away, but Queen Caterina, true to her boldness, said, "No you're not! He's our prisoner." Somehow her authority prevailed as she dragged Britt into her Plymouth along with a car full of her orphans and she had her chauffeur drive them to a regional clinic for Britt's treatment.
Plane pilot O'Reilly and the rest of his Shoot, Fritz survivors had witnessed this episode from their nearby concealment. In time they were apprehended by Romanian citizens who were holding them to turn them over to the Nazi authorities. When Queen Caterina got word of this she found them in a cellar, saying, "Boys, there are only friends here. Now come up and let us help you." They emerged and help they got! Villagers brought peaches, pitchers of milk, cheese, apples, fresh bread, and sugar. At this, O'Reilly questioned, "Why all this when we were just dropping bombs here?" The Angel's reply was, "My boy, we Romanians never hit a man when he is down, and besides, we like Americans very much. Your chaps used to work here in the refineries." For the moment, our Angel was able to prevail against the local Nazi authorities.
Meantime, Richard Britt's burns required medical attention. Queen Caterina watched every step, insisting on full care. His skin was peeled off like wallpaper and replaced by medicated jelly. In effect Britt became a mummy. It took about a month for new skin to form and for him to be able to move around. Queen Caterina visited him regularly and carried on conversations that explained both his and her circumstances and they became good friends.
All this time the prisoner population at Timisul kept building. Soon the officers were separated from the enlisted men so that they were never together. In a year the original 108 grew to 1,274 rambunctious souls clamoring to get out.
John Palm's wooden leg and his Bucharest ladies of influence gave him opportunities to move around, meet people, and gather news of the war which he brought into Timisul to prisoners who listened avidly. One day Palm brought along John Cune, a high ranking recent POW who told of Boeing B-29 Superfortresses, aviation advances, the invasion of Italy, and the news that all Tidal Wave personnel had been awarded Distinguished Flying Crosses in absentia.
Now in August of 1944, the Russian tanks were moving into the region and the Germans were moving out. Timisul was up for grabs. Queen Caterina was up against big problems in caring for her 3000 orphans in the transition.
The appetites of the Allied strategists to shorten the war by blasting Ploesti were as strong as ever. The determination of the anti-aircraft batteries around the Ploesti complex was strengthened all the more.
When in mid-year 1944 the Allies had pushed their way half way up the Italian boot, a U.S. Army Air Base was set up at Foggia, which is near the boot spur on the Adriatic Sea. From here the flying time to Ploesti and back was two hours less than the run from Africa. This new 15th Air Force airfield was home for squadrons of Boeing B-17 long-range, high-altitude, four-engine bombers and it was not long before another Ploesti air raid was scheduled. Instead of low-altitude tactics as were carried out from Benghazi, this mission adhered to traditional USAAF emphasis on high-altitude, "pinpoint" practices.
Howard Schuch was a tail gunner on one of those bombers on a Ploesti run out of Foggia in mid April, 1944. The flak was so severe that all systems went dead. Howard and all the crew were forced to bail out and parachute from on high.
After the Germans were entirely gone from Bucharest, the POWs were moved to what had been a girls' school and conditions improved. Howard Schuch writes that one day they were visited by King Michael and Queen Caterina, who gave them candy and pastry. The royal couple did their best to care for the POW's both before and after the Germans left by responding to pleas for better food and bathing facilities. There was a plague of body lice and bed bugs.
Col. James Gunn became another POW during the last Ploesti air raid just before the retreat of the Germans from the area. He saw that the wounded needed treatment and recognized the plight of all 1,274 of the prisoners. Only two weeks after his capture and as the highest-ranking POW, he took off in an Italian fighter plane and headed for Foggia to arrange for an airlift out of Romania, but was forced to return, not having adequate range.
It so happened that the Queen Caterina had a nephew (Constantin Cantacuzene) who was an ace Romanian fighter pilot who had his own ME-109. At the departure of the Germans and the Russian advance, Constantin made himself available to easing the plight of the POWs at the urging of his Aunt Caterina. He offered to fly Col. Dunn in his fighter plane if they could modify it to accommodate a passenger. This was improvised by removing radio equipment and stuffing the Colonel head first into the fighter plane with his boots sticking out in the slipstream. With a map in his lap and a briefing from Col. Dunn, they took off to fly to Foggia while fervently praying that they would not be intercepted by Allied fighters or shot down by Allied flak. Their only precaution was to hand paint a crude American flag on the underside of the wing and hope for the best.
Flying under radar detection, they miraculously reached Foggia USAAB. Constantin cut the engine, jumped out of the plane, raised his arms, and shouted the only English words he knew, "Pull those boots!" Fortunately he was not shot on the spot and Dunn was dragged from his aerial coffin after his 550-mile confinement.
Meantime, the King and Queen proceeded to arrange for a suitable airfield for such an airlift. The 15th Air Force brass lost no time in setting up the operation. Popsetti Airport was selected as the turn-around landing site. A string of busses were commandeered to transport the POWs twenty by twenty. In Foggia, some B-17s were stripped of bombing gear and machine guns and modified to accommodate twenty men, be they sitting or on stretchers. Radio co-ordination was established and the wheels began to turn. It was the last day of August, 1944 and the first day of freedom for 1,274 liberated fliers.
The injured came out first. The POW officers, true to their code, were the last to be flown out. Twenty by twenty, plane by plane, the evacuation process and the turn-around flights were carried out with precision. With P-47, P-38, and P-51 fighters as escorts, those dogfighters could not contain their jubilation as they turned Popsetti airport skies into an acrobatic circus.
As expertly carried out as the evacuation shuttle was, all-military management was now caught flatfooted. Normally, prisoners of war are liberated at the end of hostilities or in accordance with armistice terms. This World War was far from decided in any theater, on any front, now in September 1944. The brass in Washington were not ready with systematic reassignments. These 1,274 service men were oddities, even unique, being the first and only ones of their kind in all of World War II.
In time, everything got sorted out and they all had separate assignments. Richard Britt, the navigator rescued by Queen Caterina, now with his body burns healed, found himself in Houston at Ellington Field as a navigation instructor until the war mercifully drew to a close. Houston was where he lived and worked, also where he found a wife and raised two daughters. The Queen and Romania drifted into his remote memories.
Fast forward to 1955. Britt got a phone call from New York asking if he were a prisoner of war in Romania in 1944, a question that led to his appearance on "The Today Show" with Dave Garroway. When the show was being televised live, at a certain point, Richard Britt was absolutely astonished to meet the Queen when she appeared after eleven long years! Their embrace revealed everything - that they knew, remembered, and immediately recognized each other. As the program continued, the Queen's noble bearing and self-assurance came through as before.
During their three days in New York as guests of NBC's "Today Show" and their flight back to Houston, Richard and Queen Caterina had a chance to get reacquainted. She would relate the cruelty and oppression Romania suffered under Communist Russia's occupation. She and Michael were held hostage as mere puppets. Michael fled to Switzerland and after eight years of oppression Queen Caterina was obliged to smuggle herself out of the Iron Curtain on a Danube river barge, abandoning her estate and family property. Her greatest regret was to acquiesce at the inevitable Soviet indoctrination of her 3000 orphans. Once out of Soviet control it took her three years to arrange documentation for immigration to the United States. Now in 1955, she had made it at last.
At the same time, Richard attempted to bring the Queen up to date concerning his affairs. He married Dorothy in Houston, completed his college degree at the University of Texas on the G.I. Bill. Now he was employed in the lumber business. By now Dorothy and he were proud parents of two young daughters. The contrast was dramatic between Queen Caterina's suffering under Communist property confiscation and usurped authority in Eastern Europe compared to Richard's comfortable adjustment in the land of opportunity. Their circumstances were now completely reversed compared to 1944.
Yet some things never change. Queen Caterina brought with her out of Europe her instinct of compassion. Instead of her dedication to her orphans in Bucharest, she now had a passion to make contact with "her Boys." the battered, broken, lice-ridden prisoners she cared for and had managed to set free.
After leaving Richard in Houston, the Queen, now aged 62, began her travels across America in search of her various POWs, crossing the northern tier of the country in the summer season and across the South in the winter.
On a Sunday in August 1973, the telephone rang in the home of Howard Schuch in Cheviot (a suburb of Cincinnati). The caller asked in a demanding tone, "Howard, why didn't you attend the Ex-POW Reunion in Dayton this past weekend? This is Queen Catherine Caradja from Romania and we expected you to attend since you live nearby." Howard was so stunned he could hardly respond. Recovering after he finally realized who was calling, "I didn't know you were in America. I didn't know about the reunion. I would be there had I known." It turned out that by this time, eighteen years after coming to America, the Queen had compiled a roster and helped form the Organization of the Former Prisoners of War in Romania. In fact, Roy Meyer, the Bombardier on Howard's B-17 bomber was the Secretary-Treasurer of the group.
Howard dropped everything and drove over to the other side of Cincinnati to meet the Queen again after almost thirty years. He had seen her only once in Romania when Michael and she visited the POWs in August 1944, but when she opened the door their embrace was as if they were all in the family. What a sudden development! Now at age 80, Catherine (now called that instead of Caterina) was just as lively and enthused as a teenager.
The next reunion was scheduled at Louisville in 1974. Howard not only met Catherine again, but was delighted to find his Hustlin' Gal crew mates, Roy (bombardier), Alex (radio operator), and Jordan (flight engineer) after thirty years! It was 1944 all over again among comrades, but after a full generation, these reunions were now populated by wives and family members.
Every place she went, continually through 1992, after 38 years of travel and reunions in America, the Queen earned and received love and respect. She died on May 26, 1993, at the age of 100 years, 3 months, and 28 days. *
John Van Til is a fellow for Law & Humanities with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. This article is republished from V & V, a web site of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College, Grove City, Pennsylvania.
It was November 1, 1755, All Saints Day in the Roman Catholic faith. The churches were full as the faithful worshiped. Suddenly, the earth began to shake and continued for more than three minutes. The city of Lisbon, Portugal, soon lay in ruins from the quake that caused fissures that were 15-feet wide in places. Many ran from the falling and fallen buildings to the Tagus River in the center of town, seeking refuge on boats docked in the harbor. Moments later, a gigantic tsunami rushed into the harbor and up the river-sweeping away all in its wake.
The quake was felt hundreds of miles away and the tsunami rippled south to North Africa, north to England, and all the way to North America. Modern studies rate this quake at 9 on the Richter scale - the same as the revised magnitude of the one that just hit Japan. Records show that half of the city's population of about 100,000 died in the event and most of its buildings were destroyed, including those housing great works of art and the records of the Portuguese empire around the world.
In sum, the Lisbon earthquake ranks as one the worst natural disasters in modern history when measured by loss of life and destruction of property.
Historians and literary figures who study theology, science, philosophy, and other ideas see the Great Lisbon Earthquake as much more than a grand natural disaster. As with all great events, natural or otherwise, people always seek to explain its cause and meaning. The Lisbon event is no exception. Yet, there was something unique about explanations of it at the time, and strikingly, for generations to come.
On the one hand, Christian thinkers, of many stripes, continued to explain natural disasters as examples of an almighty God exercising power over His Creation. Yet, the devastation in Lisbon was so great that age-old questions again came to the fore:
Why would God allow suffering and evil in this world? Why would he permit such disasters?
These questions point to the problem that theologians call theodicy, a kind of defense of divine justice in the face of what men perceive to be physical or moral evil. Hundreds of books, broadsides, and novels were written about the problem of evil in the wake of the Lisbon event. As might be expected, the Book of Job became the focus of many when commenting on the problem of evil. Job was pious, a man after God's heart, but still suffered the loss of family and great wealth, forced to endure bodily sickness - festering boils and more.
The account makes it clear that it is not Job's place to question, but only to endure. God is in charge, testing Job.
In contrast to traditional religious explanations of the cause of the Great Lisbon Earthquake, a new form of explanation for natural disasters arose. It was the child of the newly minted intellectual stance we know as the Enlightenment. Conditions in nature were said to explain natural disasters. The philosopher Leibniz seemed to suggest that we see disasters [evil] as part of a larger picture, that this is the best of all possible worlds and evil is simply part of it. Famously, Voltaire ridiculed this view, in his Candide and other works, and posited that evil is all around us and we must live with it. Another figure influenced by the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, wrote several pieces on the Lisbon quake, attempted to explain its cause as the result of massive gaseous changes below the earth's surface. This is, of course, a prime example of a "naturalistic" explanation of events.
A main point here is that the Lisbon quake unleashed an intellectual conflict over the question of how to explain natural disasters, one that lasted for generations, reappearing when quakes like Haiti's (2010), Southeast Asia's (2004), and Japan's (2011) occur. Notice that explanations of Japan's quake today so far are largely in the scientific-naturalistic mode. Surely scientific explanations - tectonic shifts and the like - are sound and most helpful. But, seismology has not yet reached a stage where accurate predictability is routine.
While seismological explanations are satisfying in many ways, they do not preclude even the most ardent naturalistic scientist from wondering, at another level, why these events are allowed to occur. Thus, he joins the rest of humanity - educated and primitive - who still wonder why a loving God allows such evil to exist. Surely this question turns some who think about it into atheists. Yet, others reaffirm their belief, like Job, that it is ultimately their duty to trust God under any and all circumstances. Who, after all, can know the mind of the Creator of the universe? *