The following is a summary of the December, 2011, issue of The St. Croix Review.

In "Finding Something to Believe In," Barry MacDonald writes about the purpose of the St. Croix Review.

Mark Hendrickson, in "Green Fiascoes and Boondoggles," has four reasons why the government should stop funding green energy programs; in "Veterans: What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen," he writes about the psychological wounds suffered by veterans of war; in "Looking Ahead to 2012, 2013, and 2014," he assumes Republican victories in 2012, asks whether a Republican administration would have the integrity to put the country first; in "Short-Lived Euphoria in Europe" he describes the hopeless financial situation decades of socialism has wrought; in "We've Been ZIRPed," he writes that the Fed's low interest rate policy rescues the government but punishes savers.

Herbert London, in "Woodstock in New York," gives his take on the Wall Street demonstrators in New York after talking to them; in "Israel and the U.S., 2011" he describes political realities among Israelis and Palestinians and President Obama's insincere support of Israel; in "Israel and Just War Theory" he explains the lengths Israeli forces go to spare innocent lives; in "The Neglect of 'High Flyers'" he sees how our educators neglect our brightest school children; in "Taxing Those Who Leave the U.S." he reveals how Americans who leave the country with no intention to return are forever subject to U.S. taxes.

Allan Brownfeld, in "'Flash Mobs' in the Summer of 2011: An Example of Family Breakdown," describes the sudden gatherings of mostly African-American mobs that attacked bystanders; in "Crony Capitalism: A Growing Threat to Economic Freedom," he gives plenty of detail of corrupt connections between lawmakers and businessmen.

Paul Kengor, in "No Regrets: Frank Kravetz's Story," relates the story of a WWII tail gunner who was shot down and captured by the Nazis; in "Death of a Bad Dude: Kaddafi's Removal, 30 Years Late?" he reveals a secret overture to President Reagan by a director of French intelligence to assassinate Moammar Kaddafi in 1981; in "On the Deficit, the Rich, and the Tea Party" he cites personal encounters with Americans who are impervious to facts; in "On Steve Jobs, Roseanne Barr, and the Wall Street Mob," he demonstrates both the irony and the ignorance of the mob and the unfunny comedienne.

In "Tattoo," Thomas Martin shares his response to a friend's dilemma: his daughter wants to pierce her belly button and get a tattoo. What should he do?

In "Divine Winds - Retelling the Pacific Air Battles of WW II," William Barr recounts the Doolittle Raiders' bombing of Tokyo; the Battle of Midway; the Mariana Turkey Shoot; the Kamikaze; and a typhoon in December 1944 that almost sank the U.S. Third Fleet.

Jigs Gardner, in "Versed in Country Things, Part 3 - Disturbing Revelations," conveys a sense of growing disillusionment as the "pastoral dream" of living in the country was replaced by hard labor, isolation, and poverty.

Jigs Gardner, in "Children's Reading," displays a long list of stories for children that transmit the most profound truths and the highest values.

In "Conservative Magazines, A Survey - Anatomies of 'Bama, etc." Fayette Durlin and Peter Jenkin point out the best articles on the economy and the debt crisis, on the London riots and the GOP hopefuls, on President Obama and events in Egypt and Turkey, and more.

Fayette Durlin and Peter Jenkin

Fayette Durlin and Peter Jenkin write from Brownsville, Minnesota.

We write this Survey in order to acquaint Review readers with a wide range of conservative thought as reflected in a dozen or so magazines. By doing so, we are better informed about issues we all care about, and we always learn more, sharpen our knowledge - as we hope this issue's column will reveal. Incidentally, this column is unique; no other conservative magazine dares do it!

First, let's compare how our magazines cover the same stories. Almost all have published several articles about the economy, specifically on the debt crisis and attempts to deal with it, and of course, we need to understand the issues and their ramifications, but by now we sense a sameness about the stories, and our eyes glaze over as we turn the pages. There was, however, one article, "Who Do You Really Believe?" (American Spectator, Oct.) by Brian Wesbury, that was a real standout: a clear, simple explanation of the 2008 financial panic that cut through all the conflicting arguments to show how politicians, rather than greedy bankers and Wall Street villains, were the bad actors. Most conservatives know that, but Wesbury's article, with its straightforward clarity, makes an unforgettable argument.

The London riots, covered in several magazines, were trenchantly commented on by Roger Scruton and Tom Bethell (American Spectator, Oct.) And there were also good pieces by Jonathan Foreman (National Review, 8/29, and Commentary, Oct.).

The magazines have sedulously followed the campaigns of the various GOP hopefuls, and the best pieces have been Andrew Ferguson's long, thoughtful piece on Gov. Perry (Weekly Standard, 8/29), Kevin Williamson's analysis of Ron Paul (NR, 9/10), and Jon Huntsman (NR, 10/17), and Fred Barnes' comparison of Hermain Cain and Obama (WS, 10/10).

Obama himself, of course, gets a lot of attention, such an easy target that the articles have become tiresome, but once again, there are outstanding pieces. In "Being Obama" (WS, 9/5), Jonathan Last convincingly nails Obama's vanity as his hallmark. In "The Innocents Abroad" (NR, 9/10), John Bolton writes the best analysis we've seen of Obama's foreign policy, stressing his "intellectual laziness," "credulous and inexperience," "gullibility," "narcissism," "incompetence," and "inattention." "Obama is simply an invention; there is less to him than meets the eye. Worse than being merely doctrinaire, he is hollow at the center." An indelible portrait. Noemi Emery's "Overrated" (WS, 10/10) is another definitive piece, a brilliant description of Obama's lack of political skills. "His governing theory was that he would make speeches and win people over; then Nancy Pelosi would twist arms, or break them."

Now let's turn to important stories that are not so generally covered. The Weekly Standard, which was initially more hopeful than other magazines about the democratic possibilities of the Egyptian uprising, has a grim piece, "The People, No" by James Kirchick (WS, 10/3) about the emerging dangers of populism in Egypt, a sobering account by a well-informed reporter. There's a sharp story by James Panero, "Blunder at the Biennale" (New Criterion, Sept.) about the exhibition by our State Department at the biennial show in Venice that "broadcasts a singular anti-American message created by second-rate artists," and it concludes, "The first lesson of [the exhibit] is that the world is as unimpressed by the orthodoxies of American political correctness as it was by Soviet orthodoxies." The description of this shameful show has to be read to be believed. The October issue has a deadly description of Brasilia, the capital of Brazil (designed by followers of Le Corbusier, a description fatal to the pretensions of that overrated architect). Noemi Emery describes the "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" (WS, 9/5) - all politicians - with her accustomed clarity and wit, exposing "a class to whom money - its own, or that of the people - means little or nothing at all." Such incredible ostentation was an eye-opener for us. Jonathan Last writes "The Lost Girls" (WS, 9/25) about the demographic disaster of China's one-child policy. Simon Wynberg's "Shoah Biz" (Commentary, Oct.) is a critique of Holocaust exploitation: "New works that draw on the Holocaust are all latently exploitative, but there is something doubly offensive about turning an existing masterpiece into Shoabizness."

"The Trouble with Turkey" (NR, 10/17) by Michael Rubin is a sobering account of that country's turn toward Islamism with attendant muscle-flexing throughout the Middle East, a danger to Israel and U.S. interests, evidently unsuspected by our State Department. Caroline Glick in The Jerusalem Post (10/3), reprinted in Israel News (10/7) adds to Rubin's analysis information which indicates considerable economic weakness, so that:

Its hopes to be a regional power are faltering. The only thing Israel really needs to be concerned about is the United States' continued insistence that Turkey is a model ally in the Islamic world. . . . [I]t is U.S. support for Turkey that makes Erdogan a threat to the Jewish state and to the region.

Clearly, a country to watch.

Finally, there are articles interesting in themselves about things by the way. So Judy Bachrach writes a very funny review (WS, 8/29) of the latest Jane Fonda book, and Andrew Ferguson writes a hilarious critique of Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with JFK (WS, 10/3). Mark Steyn, who we think is the best columnist of all the writers in these magazines, turns out, every two weeks on NR's back page, witty, deeply perceptive essays criticizing contemporary culture (in the broadest sense). "Is America Periclean," an essay by Victor Davis Hanson (New Criterion, Oct.), is an excellent analysis of Pericles' funeral oration, as reported by Thucydides, and its application to America and its past. Finally, Joseph Epstein has a discerning review of Alfred Kazin's Letters (NR, 8/29).

Merits and Demerits

Commentary made some welcome changes in its October issue by eliminating Jon Podhoretz's embarrassing editorial and printing Joseph Epstein's Jewish joke right in the front of the magazine.

National Review has a soft spot in its head for Matthew Scully, a former staffer, now a very stupid and wildly untrustworthy animal rights advocate, and in its 10/3 issue prints a review by a Scullyite (Claire Berlinski) of an animal rights book by another Scullyite, advocating the end of farming (of course called "factory farming"). That NR should print such trash is depressing, and it lessens our respect for the magazine. *

Jigs Gardner

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..

Most of our lives had been spent in the company of people against a background of the ebb and flow of other people. We do not realize how lights, vehicles, sounds of people attenuate the impact of nature, which in our new life was massive. Now our only neighbor was cranky Otis, seldom seen, cars on our road were very rare, and days and days went by without the sight of a person except the mail driver. The expected arrival of a guest filled us with anticipation, the visit itself was a time of intense excitement, and when departure time came we were wretched, feeling as if a piece of ourselves were being torn away, leaving us desperately lonely. I remember those feelings very well, and given our circumstances and expectations, I can understand and even sympathize with them, but they tell us how immature we still were (in the perspective of our much more isolated life in Nova Scotia ten years later, our Vermont experience seems like Broadway). We had guests perhaps once a month, and how strenuously we entertained them! I seemed to be seized by a determined enthusiasm to show off the woods, the fields, the hills, the views. As soon as they arrived we would tramp for miles on the old trails and logging roads, talking, arguing, exchanging news, and telling stories, laughing and joking, returning to the warm room in the welcoming house for tea and cookies and more boisterous conversation.

Guests were not our only visitors; sometimes strangers dropped in. Thus appeared one late fall day Ernie and Martha Moore as I was working a little way down the road, cutting up the dead stub of an old maple that had blown over in a storm the night before. A red-faced, heavyset man called out from a station wagon in a commanding voice, "Hey! That's one of my trees you're cutting!"

Before I could think of what to say, he laughed. "That's O.K. Help yourself. Living at Corbin's? Your wife at home?" He said something to the woman at the wheel. Stepping out of the car, he said, "Here, I'll give you a hand," reaching in back to get an ax.

Ernie introduced himself and showed me the ax while his wife drove up to our place. He kept the ax as I had never seen one kept: the handle was well rubbed with linseed oil and the gleaming poll was enclosed in a leather shield. He examined my ax critically. "Too rounded at the corners, reduces your cutting edge. And there's too much metal back of the edge; you have to take that down." Hanging his jacket on a sapling, he went to work, and it was a pleasure to watch him as he handily split out long chunks with a few quick strokes. Ten minutes was enough. "I'm out of shape. Haven't done this in years."

Not wanting him to watch me clumsily continue the job, I handed him his jacket and we walked up to the house where we found his wife drinking coffee and talking to Jo Ann. A small, sharp-eyed woman who spoke decisively, she was describing, with great vehemence, how frightful the winters were on the hillside.

"Oh, they weren't so bad," Ernie interrupted, booming out a series of anecdotes about horrific snowstorms, huge drifts, and Siberian temperatures, stories whose point always turned out to be Ernie's prowess and ingenuity. Martha cut him short by asking us about the Corbins. We told her the little we knew, but this was another opportunity for Ernie, who began telling stories ostensibly about Corbin but really about himself. I stopped him this time, asking how he came to own the land the old maple stood on.

Martha replied, with a wave of her hand towards the window, "We own everything."

And so it was, or had been. At one time they had owned the entire gorge and hillside down almost to the highway, how many acres I cannot even guess. Even then they had not parted with much of it, just Otis's twenty acres and Corbin's one hundred. How they acquired it made a curious story. During the war, Ernie, then in the Navy, wrote to Martha that now was the time to take steps to realize their dream of living on a farm in Vermont. Martha, who had emigrated as a young girl with her family from Germany after World War I, and who was a shrewd, tightfisted woman, a true peasant in her attitude to landed property, traveled to northern Vermont and bought the land from three or four owners who still lived there, and soon after the war they settled into a farmhouse halfway down the hill, a plateau before the land plunged downhill again. How much farming they did I never asked, but from background details in Ernie's anecdotes I gathered they did some.

We walked down to see them one day during the week they were there, and Ernie took me into the woods to show off the work he had done there, cutting out dead trees, thinning small evergreens, stacking limbs for rabbit habitat. Back at the house, he opened a cabinet in the cellar and pointed to a few jars of preserves. Taking one out, he read the label. "'Pumpkin 1952'! Still as good as ever, I bet!" Beaming proudly and a little wistfully on the dusty jar, he was momentarily a touching figure.

From the bitterness in her voice when Martha talked about life there, I could easily imagine how desolate the life must have seemed to her and how determinedly she must have fought with Ernie to escape from it. Over the years I met other older people who had moved to Vermont, like the Moores, to pursue the pastoral dream, but every one had jumped ship. Very few modern people were suited for it, certainly not the Moores. They say (like so many) and think they mean, that they yearn for a life of repose, sharing a vine-covered cottage with their mates far from the madding crowd, but in fact even a hint of such a life frightens them. I cannot reckon up the number of visitors to our farm in Nova Scotia who noted the "peace and quiet," declared how much they wanted to come and stay in our log cabins, and then fled down the lane as fast as the potholes would let them, never to be seen again. There is a false heartiness about them that cannot conceal an inkling of dread. Most modern people abhor silence, tranquility, solitude.

The gregarious Moores were perfectly suited for the life they had chosen after the Vermont fiasco: running a tavern on Long Island. Ernie's blustering hail-fellow manner and Martha's shrewdness fit very well in that picture. Nevertheless, there was about them just a touch, not of sadness, but of the bafflement of those who, happily enmeshed in the busy toils of some humdrum existence, once had dreams, even if they were the wrong ones.

Then there were Ralph Corbin's friends who wanted his new address. That accounted for the first two or three, but then oddities began to appear, people who approached the house in an uncertain, wandering way, looking around vaguely. I could never find out what they wanted. Address? They had it. Buy the printing press? Oh, is that for sale? No, they didn't think they wanted it. How about the farm? They looked around and then shook their heads. Well, what can I do for you? That they could not answer. They were very similar: dull, drippy, indistinct. If I asked them about themselves, no sparks were kindled and they had little to say. If they said anything it was about the Corbins, and their tone told me that they, especially Ralph, were something special in their lives, and their works and ways were not those of lesser mortals. Where was Barbie's herb patch? Did I do my laundry in the pond? That's what they did. Ralph kept a goat (looking askance as Aster). Ralph thought it cruel to work a horse. Ralph never kept pigs; he was very gentle and didn't believe in killing.

I didn't take offense because the remarks weren't delivered aggressively, but sort of dribbled out as they stood on the porch looking around aimlessly. They had nothing against me, except that I was not Ralph Corbin, who was evidently a mythic personage who meant something to them, probably in connection with "The Simple Life" (they mentioned his booklet). But we were living in the master's house where all his miracles were wrought, and our daily life there was beginning to cast doubt. How come, if he lived there through the winter, he didn't have a woodshed? And the cellar had not been set up to store all that wonderful harvest from the garden he bragged about - anything down there, as we belatedly discovered, would freeze. And the garden was tiny. Finally, the laundry in the pond. Sparing Jo Ann and forgoing the poetry, I had tried to scrub a sheet there, but it was too shallow and dirty, and I had to do it all over again in the sink. We weren't sure Corbin was all he was cracked up to be - and yet, there was the booklet and there were the disciples. Finally, there we were, working like hell just to maintain any life at all, never mind a Simple one, and Corbin's believers were reproaching us in the name of the master's principles. It was a puzzle to us. We had no idea that it would be a theme we would live with for many years.

A countryman walked into the dooryard late one afternoon as I was splitting wood. Nice horse, he said, nodding at Ginger tethered nearby. His light blue eyes were the brightest I'd ever seen, he had a bristly reddish moustache, and his flat denim cap was cocked jauntily over one ear. Would I come with the horse and help pull his truck out of the ditch? I was thrilled that anyone should think I knew enough to go round pulling trucks out of ditches with a horse! As we headed for the barn to get the harness we passed my great pile of firewood, a jumble of long crooked limbs and short logs difficult for a novice like me to estimate, but I knew it was a lot, maybe five or six or seven or even ten cords. I asked the stranger, who glanced appraisingly at the pile. Two cords at the outside, he said, and we passed on. I know we must have gotten the harness and put it on the horse, but I was in such a state of stunned amazement, reeling from the collapse of the happy delusion that the winter's wood supply was in the bag, that I hardly knew what I was doing until I found myself walking along the road beside Ginger and the stranger. The pickup was in the ditch all right, but the situation wasn't too bad, and knowing what I do today, I think we could have gotten it out. Then, of course, I knew nothing, and the stranger, who was rather halfhearted about the job, soon gave it up. The sun had just set, and as we walked back all the last leaves in the wood beside the road glowed for a few moments with faded shades of orange that slowly and then suddenly lost all color to dusk. How cosy the house looked with the lamps lit, as we drew near! I felt bad about not pulling the truck out, felt I had let down the stranger, so I invited him in for a bottle of home brew. Well, he said, in a ruminative way, "I don't mind if I do."

"Fred Brown," he said to Jo Ann, raising his cap.

From Toonerville. Don't you know Toonerville? The little boys here waiting for the school bus in the morning can see the settlement just down the highway, can't they?

he said, smiling at the children playing marbles on the rug. We carried on a curiously tentative conversation as Jo Ann worked on supper and the children played quietly, because he didn't seem to be quite present; he was perched on the arm of a chair near the door as if ready to be off in a moment, as if he were not committed to the situation, and he spoke absently, inattentively. Even the mandatory catechism - Where did we come from? What did we do? - lacked the usual edge of insistent curiosity. Never one to be circumspect, I told the truth quite frankly. To most tight-lipped country people, where candor is unknown, our story sounded so absurd that it was immediately suspect, our naive openness regarded narrowly as the deepest duplicitous guile. It was hardly better if I were believed; then we were dismissed as lunatics. What Fred thought I never knew; in all the years of our acquaintance he seemed to take us pretty much as he found us. His account of himself was the usual potpourri of rural jobs: logging, farm work, pulp-cutting, a stint at the Fairbanks Morse mill in St. Johnsbury, selling firewood, and so on. That was fine beer, he said, so I got him another one.

Chore time came and I went out to the stable with milk pail and lantern, leaving Fred perched on the chair arm, staring into his glass. When I returned fifteen minutes later, he was just as I left him. Stay for supper, we said, but at that he roused himself. No, no, he had to get home. Thanks for everything, and he was gone.

Of course, as the reader will have guessed but I didn't know for a long time, Fred had a skinful. If I had given him another beer, he might have fallen on his face. He, and nearly every other member of his clan in Toonerville, populated exclusively by Browns, was an alcoholic. He and some of his relatives were later to play a large role in our life.

And what of Otis? Aside from the comfort of his light across the gorge in the evenings, we saw very little of him - but we heard him. He had a horse I never saw although the name was in my ears enough.

"Whoa, Tony, whoa! Tony stop, stop! Oh, Tony, why'd you go and do that?"

These litanies of grief, and the poor man never sounded angry, only sadly put upon, floated across the gorge from the spruce woods below his house where he was trying to skid some logs. It would not have been easy in any case, due to the steep terrain, and perhaps Otis wasn't a very good horseman, but I know that Tony was real trouble because he had a maddening habit common among work-shy horses: he was forever backing up. As soon as Otis hitched him to a log, Tony would start backward, entangling his legs in the chain and whiffletree, screwing everything up. Once, when Tony managed to skid some logs up to the house, he then backed over them, wrapped the chain around his legs and fell sideways into a double set of spike tooth harrows leaning against a fence, immediately enmeshing harness, whiffletree, and skid chain in the harrows. Otis had to cut the harness off to free the damned horse. Working in the woods, listening to the woeful shouts from across the gorge, I was thankful that Tony didn't belong to me, because however ignorant or unskilled Otis might be, I was worse - I knew nothing. But Ginger was perfect, doing whatever I asked of her without balking, patient of my ineptitude, never giving me even a reproachful look.

One day I fell in the stable, bruising my shin badly, and before I realized what was going on the bruise was infected and I was in bed with a fever and a hugely swollen leg. Jo Ann had to push me in the wheelbarrow to the stable to milk. We got a message to Willie via the mail driver, and he kindly picked me up to take me to his doctor in Barre. I told him as we were driving along how vital my health was because now I was the family's only resource. Nothing - no person, no institution - stood between us and the vicissitudes of life. I was absolutely independent, with Jo Ann and the children depending wholly on me.

In those days there was a stretch of highway between Marshfield and Plainfield where the road ran along and down the curving face of a long hill. In the center of the view, standing amidst a tangle of brush, was a shell of a derelict brick house, roof, doors, windows gone, so that you looked down inside it while winding down the hill. I stared at it as I listened to Willie, who spoke with the happily interested air of one who has been stimulated to a related thought. He had never been independent, he said cheerfully: his mother had paid for the herd of cows, for the new well, for the Volkswagen for his wife. Of course, she insisted on being fair, spending an equal amount on his sister, which accounted for her Volkswagen, as well as much else. He rattled on about his mother's money while I stared at the shell of the house, my insides feeling just as hollow.

I had looked upon Willie and the Woodwrights as, in some sort, models. They led lives that seemed ideal to me, combining old-fashioned farm work with tastes and interests I associated with the educated life, and I had stupidly thought those leisurely lives were made possible by the milk check, and that Jo Ann and I could learn to do something similar. But if I had thought about it, if I had remembered the farmers I had worked for, I would have known that they worked long and hard for a small living, and they certainly didn't lead beautiful lives as my Vermont friends did. I didn't mind their independent incomes, and in fact would have welcomed one myself; it was the sudden exposure of an illusion that was so shocking, an illusion that I, with some implicit cooperation from Willie, had naively created.

The immediate effect was to deepen our sense of isolation. Just as we had spun away from the academic world, from so many of the ideas and attitudes we had once shared, now we were discovering that we did not belong to the world of those we had considered our new mentors. There had already been signs of that, an accumulation of observations that now, in the light of Willie's revelation, came together in what we thought of as the Staged Life, or Country Fakery, most obviously in the case of the Woodwrights. People with less sense and taste would have made much of their handsome place, would have spoiled it by thrusting it at visitors, but they behaved as if their surroundings were commonplace, just as they themselves were unpretentious and down to earth. Nevertheless, they were on view, and they subtly (and I suppose unconsciously) made sure the visitors saw all the Exhibits. How could I fault them for liking to be admired? But what was bogus about the scene was that the Woodwrights allowed their visitors to cast them as stars in a morality play called Beautiful Simple Country Life (BSCL), a play that works only if there is tacit cooperation between actors and audience: both have prescribed roles, specific tasks and lines and gestures which mesh in a shallow fictionalization of the lives of the stars. The audience, poised in worshipful wonder, asks BSCL questions:

"And you raise all your food yourselves right here?"

"You use horses for everything?"

"You grind your flour in that little mill by hand?"

The stars maintain the play by telling the audience what it wants to hear: To tell the truth - We haven't ground flour in that thing for years; we buy it at the supermarket - rings down the curtain and sends the audience home disgruntled. A successful production rewards everyone: the stars get admiration, and the audience is also gratified because, by showing their appreciation of the BSCL they show their sensitivity and intelligence, their superiority to the putative materialism of the majority culture. I was aware of this because we had been exposed to it on a small scale, by a few visitors. How well I knew that moment when a question was asked and I looked at the expectant face radiant with the faith, and knew that by a small lie I could make everyone a little happier. Everyone but ourselves. The phoniness was too palpable, and we resented being reduced to absurd clichs, so it was relatively easy for us to refuse the gambit. Our gradual comprehension of the phenomenon, in itself an education, helped to develop our thinking in other ways and directions. Very early in our new life we were offered the choice of honesty or falsity, and of maturity or self-indulgence. What we would have chosen in our former life I cannot say, but I know that our slowly growing sense of what life required of us on the hill determined our decision.

Another, more immediate fact that drove us apart from Willie and his friends was our sudden poverty, and it wasn't the "voluntary poverty" Corbin smugly prattled on about. We had really fallen out of our class, and we were an embarrassment. One evening Willie stopped in and presented us with some meat he had bought at the store. The chief thing I recall - the lamps were lit, and I can see him coming through the doorway, smiling nervously, and holding out the package - was our unease, Willie's and mine. I was as inept at receiving charity as he was at giving it. Some people are instinctively graceful about it, making charity seem quite natural, but for most of us it must be a learned skill. Neither Willie nor I had it then, and the moment's awkwardness was deepened because not long ago we had been colleagues, equals, good friends.

Then there was the garden incident. A visitor was up, and we drove over to Willie's. We were standing near his garden, and as I glanced at it my heart leapt with acquisitiveness. I remarked that he had left a lot of vegetables.

"We got what we wanted. You know how in the spring you're all fired up to plant a lot, but come harvest time you don't really want all that stuff."

I could see beets, carrots, a couple of pumpkins, old lettuce, corn stalks, a burst cabbage. For a long moment I felt wolfish, not metaphorically but actually, like a lean hungry creature that would brush Willie aside to fall on the garden with a fierce rapacity, scooping up the tattered spoils to throw them in the car and speed off. I had to turn my back to continue the conversation undistracted. I could not have asked Willie for what he wasted, it would have been too much, too raw. I was still able to preserve the decencies between us, but I knew we were different now, our situations had changed, and henceforth we would see each other in new, ambiguous ways.

Unsettling revelations, startling shifts in perspective, these were the headline events in our life, but our ordinary existence, the unspectacular but deeply satisfying routine of our daily work went on, the ground base as it were, while the year deepened into late fall: taking care of the children, felling trees, splitting wood, making meals, milking the cow, feeding the animals.

In the beginning of November Otis broke his arm working in the woods and, impatient with the healing, decided to spend the rest of the winter at the Veteran's hospital in White River Junction. So Tony was sold, the old green pickup disappeared from the roads, the only light on the dark hillside went out, and after all Otis's bluster about whether we could take it, we were left to endure the gathering winter alone.

The days were always cold now, and the wind drove before it rain mixed with sleet, no weather for a failing horse like Ginger to be out in, even if there were any nourishment in the dead frosted grass. Shivering in her stable, she grew thinner day by day. I chopped hay and mixed it with grain and apple pomace, but it wasn't enough. Willie was expecting word from me to send her to slaughter, but we put it off, not because I was working her, but because we hated to give up on the patient, gentle horse. At last, when we saw that she was only wasting away, I sent a note to Willie and two men came with an open trailer hauled behind a pickup. Now she balked for the first time, now she had to be blindfolded and pushed and pulled onto the trailer. When the driver paid me, he said, shaking his head, that it was as if she knew where she was going. But as I watched Ginger huddled in the wind, flurries of snow catching in her mane, I knew she was only regretting the meager protection of her stable; she could know no more.

But I did. As I write, I am looking at a shapshot taken in September: the grass is lush, the maple in front of the house spreads its thickly leaved crown against the sky, and in the middle distance Jo Ann is standing beside Ginger, holding Nell and Curdie on the horse's back, while Jesse is patting her nose and Seth stands aside, watching and smiling.

So ended the autumn, the end of the beginning of our new life.

Next Time: The Test of Winter. *

William A. Barr

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.

William Barr reminds us of a time when we unambiguously exploited our resources and skills, were self-confident, and so were respected and admired around the world.

The Saumrai's Achilles' Heel

According to traditions and legends that reach back three thousand years, Japan as a nation and its people thought themselves superior in culture, invincible in warfare, and impregnable against all invaders. In 1274 AD, Kublai Kahn, the mighty Mongol conqueror, launched a fleet of ships to invade Japan. A typhoon struck his armada and destroyed it. The Japanese called that typhoon Kamikaze, or Divine Wind. Kublai Kahn tried to invade Japan again in 1281 but failed once more. The warrior ruling class, the Saumrai, built on this tradition, elevating it to a national model of strength and a personal code to be proudly demonstrated before the Japanese people at all times. Honor is noble, but humiliation and defeat are so repugnant as to invite hari kari. This deep-rooted culture was inculcated into the hearts and minds of all Japanese warriors and accounts for the tenacity and ferocity Japan's enemies have encountered through the ages.

The first Saumrai were legendary warriors who lived noble and dangerous lives marked by honor, integrity, and loyalty. Such ideals were always evident in the Saumrai in their service to their feudal lords. The Saumrai warrior's service found its ultimate expression in self-sacrifice, even heroic death.

Strangely, Japan and Great Britain have similarities in certain ways. Each nation is a large group of islands offshore from a huge continental land mass. Their isolations fostered in each such common traits as self-sufficiency, unique languages and cultures, naval strength, empire aspirations, and national pride. For instance, each culture has its legendary heroic figures - for the Japanese, their Saumrai heroes; for the Englishman, their famous Knights, such as Richard the Lion-Hearted and King Arthur.

Parallel as Japan and Britain are to this point, further examination reveals contrasts which are stark, differences in the uses made of these noble orders and the roles they played in their respective cultures. The Japanese military elite has consistently inculcated the Saumrai codes into the minds and disciplines of the Japanese by every device to mould their reverence toward ancient warriors and to seriously emulate them. This is in contrast to Knighthood in Britain where ever since the Middle Ages, heroes of the Crusades, for example, were lauded. Orders of Knighthood in Britain were formed involving holy vows of loyalty, such as the Order of the Bath, Order of St. Michael and St. George, and Order of the Thistle, among others. British author, Sir Walter Scott, who wrote extensively concerning Knighthood portrayed Ivanhoe, Sir Lancelot, and Sir Galahad, etc. as fictional heroes to be appreciated as literary entertainment, not warlike inspiration. Scott's writing, however, is merely a lesser part of a huge pantheon of British literary giants from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Dickens and Kipling, all part a rich cultural endowment not equaled nor even approached by Japan's culture through the centuries. What is more, the British never deified their Monarch in the manner of Hirohito to further inspire fanaticism.

[We digress to see the irony in that Jimmy Doolittle's heroism as leader of his Raiders on Japan in April 1942 exemplified and demonstrated the heroic virtues called for by the Saumrai code, but, in contrast, James H. Doolittle was knighted by King George VI and accorded the Medal of Honor by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, neither in keeping with Saumrai elitism.]

[We digress further. For centuries the common Chinese have used a slang term for all Japanese people that translates into our language as "little folk." This usage stems from the fact that, on average, Japanese were about two inches shorter in stature than mainland Orientals (and all Occidentals, for that matter). This disparity lends all the more irony to our subject when we take note of the height of the man who attacked the vulnerable Achilles' heel of the Saumrai when he led his band of Raiders out of Shangri La in April 1942. We speak of the same James H. Doolittle who was, in fact, little. When he stood erect, he measured 5 feet 6 inches!]

Until the middle of the 19th Century, Japan was isolated from Western civilization, ruled by feudal warlords called Shoguns (literally, "Great Generals"). In 1854 Commodore Matthew Perry of the U.S. carried out missions to Japan to open commercial relations, leading to concessions from the weak Japanese government of the Tokugawa family. The feudal lords of Western Japan reacted to this by making an alliance with Emperor Mutsuhito and by winning a civil war, opening the door to Western technology. By portraying the Emperor as a divine figure and by introducing universal education that glorified his empire, the hearts and minds of the people were universally conditioned to hold their Emperor in awe, he being the 122nd direct descendent of Jimmu Tenno, Japan's legendary founder.

[We add one more ironic flower to our bouquet of oddities by noting that Japan's legendary founder was Jimmu Tenno, while the leader of the Tokyo Raiders in April 1942 was known widely as "Jimmy"!]

The militarists made the Emperor's ministers responsible for modernizing Japan's army and navy. Development began under the control of eight powerful industrial families such as Mitsui, Mitsubishi, and Sumitomo. Western experts were invited to modernize Japan's mining, manufacturing, ship building, and transportation industries, as well as their financial structure. All this was a plan spanning generations, and a promotion of the medieval Saumrai elites, a Japanese social class composed of what recent Americans have applied to their own "military-industrial complex."

It became evident to these powerful families that Japan lacked such essentials as iron ore, coal, oil, timber, and other critical items for its industrial development, so armed invasions were carried out into Korea and Manchuria. Thus by the start of the 20th century Japan began to reach for empire status in the Orient. Their aggression in Siberia in 1904 led to the Russo-Japanese war in which the Czar's Russian fleet was badly defeated. In the Treaty of Portsmouth, conducted by President Theodore Roosevelt, Russia was forced to make generous concessions to Japan in Manchuria and offshore Islands.

In World War I Japan made itself a token enemy of Germany. By not firing a shot they benefitted from the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations by gaining mandates over Marshall, Caroline, and Mariana Islands and special privileges in China. In the Washington Naval Conference in 1921-1922, Japan acquiesced to a 3-5-5 ratio of battleships among herself, the USA, and Great Britain, having no intention of holding to such limitations although we and Britain would naively do so.

By this time a consortium of the Saumrai militarists and the eight industrial families had taken control of Japanese affairs by keeping Emperor Hirohito hostage in his own palace and setting all policies in his name and outside of legislative processes. Accordingly in 1931 they provoked a war in Manchuria, overran it, and renamed it Manchukuo. By this time the militarists saw a special destiny for Japan as masters of the Orient and the vast Pacific Ocean. Their propaganda in the schools and the media and the use of the Emperor as an Imperial deity implanted a sense of superiority and invincibility among the Japanese people. On July 7, 1937, a minor incident in Peiping was all the militarists needed to wage full war on China that led to an occupation of all seaboard cities and other key locations. The rape of Nanking in December 1937 was an atrocity amounting to one of the largest human massacres in history and betrays the warped ruthlessness of the military leadership. Japan was limited only by its ability to stretch its army manpower for the occupation of both Manchukuo and all of huge China.

Diplomatically, Japan joined the German-Italian Axis as a partner as World War II developed, recognizing that European entanglement was their great chance. When France fell in May 1940, Japan was quick to invade and occupy French Indochina. After this aggression in Asia in 1940 the U.S. placed an embargo on all oil, scrap iron, and timber going to Japan. On October 17, 1941, Prince Fumimaro Konoye's coalition cabinet was forced out by the aggressive leader of the militarists, General Hideki Tojo, who took control of all affairs and put Japan on a wartime footing with rigid control of industry, agriculture, and the economy.

Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was a consequence of Japan's vast Asian ambitions and its great need for raw materials such as oil for fuel from the Dutch colonial islands of Borneo and Sumatra while the American-occupied Philippine Islands were positioned to choke off this vital trade route. Their bold attack on Pearl Harbor might well have worked for them had our three aircraft carriers been in port that Sunday morning. We lost battleships but the Pacific naval war was soon to be fought by carriers and their warplanes.

After December 7, 1941, Japan's might was manifest, indeed, with a procession of Japanese conquests such as the Philippines, Guam, the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, and Burma. Japan became the lord of all lands and seas stretching from the Aleutians 4,500 miles south to the Solomon Islands, and from Wake Island west 5,000 miles to Burma. We must ask ourselves: What if our three carriers had been in port that Sunday morning? Tojo's regime came so close to accomplishing their destiny - their realization of Japan as the unquestioned master of the entire Eastern world!

Did this Achilles have a weakness?

Listed above is a long list of glorious military conquests that fed assurances to the Japanese. Who was left on that island nation to question policy or practice? All Japan was proud and ready to wear the mantle of power and prestige. Tojo and his military/industrial complex were delivering glory and the people were convinced of their magnificence and superiority. Their control of the Japanese media permitted the Saumrai to condition the minds and hearts of the Japanese by their propaganda, and in their schoolroom textbooks. It was especially easy for those rulers to reinforce existing national pride by reporting conquest after conquest-victory over Russia in 1904, the Pacific island mandates in 1920, Korea and Manchukuo in 1934, subduing China in 1935, occupying French Indo-China in 1940, and all their victories and occupations in late 1941 after Pearl Harbor - the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, the Dutch East Indies, Burma, Singapore, and the glorious sinking of the British battleships Repulse and King George V. What could shake the confidence the common people of Japan had in their leaders and Saumrai at this point in 1942? All Japanese believed themselves to be superior and impregnable, rightful masters of East Asia and the vast Pacific. Where might be their vulnerability? After countless generations and 122 successions since Jimmu Tenno, their ancient founder, how could their divine Emperor, Hirohito, be anything but all-knowing and just? They felt secure in their homeland after these thousands of years of isolation and invincibility. What could shake their trust in their leadership?

This is the story of the beginning of the end of the Saumrai and the Japanese Empire. This is how it was possible. This is what was done.

A Spark of Light at the Far End of a Long, Dark Tunnel

Almost in desperation in the wake of Japan's parade of conquests, which were at the same time a succession of Allied disasters culminating in the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt asked Chiefs of Staff George P. Marshall and Ernest J. King: What can we do to retaliate for Pearl Harbor so that the morale and confidence of our people and our Allies do not deteriorate? We need to know where is our hope? We must not sink into despair.

As if by the hand of fate, an obscure suggestion came up through channels that on the surface seemed absurd, but this thought eventually worked its way to Adm. Ernest J. King and then to Gen. Henry "Hap" Arnold. Could a long-range bomber take off from an American carrier?

It is miraculous that this question wasn't crumpled and tossed into the nearest wastebasket. Nevertheless, Capt. Francis Low, a USN submariner, hat in hand, approached Adm. King, known to be stern and somewhat haughty, and said, "Sir, I've got an idea for bombing Japan." Ernest King's patience was normally short but on this thought he willingly listened. "Suppose some long-range bombers could take off from a carrier deck and bomb Japan." That led Adm. King to urge Capt. Low to contact Capt. Donald Duncan who took the idea seriously and studied it for five days. Duncan came up with a thirty-page, long-hand analysis which narrowed down to the B-25 as the aircraft and the Hornet as the launching carrier - a very fortuitous arrangement.

When this analysis reached Gen. Hap Arnolds's hands, he called for more information. Hap had a special aerial friendship with the famous aviation pioneer, Jimmy Doolittle, going all the way back to San Diego flight training in 1918. Hap had called Jimmy back into the Air Force in 1940. Now he wanted advice on a significant question: "Jim, what bomber do we have that will get off in 500 feet with a two-thousand bomb load and fly two thousand miles?"

Finally, the right question was put to the right person. Jimmy Doolittle responded the next day to conclude that the B-25 Mitchell bomber could be modified to carry out such a mission and quickly volunteered to lead it. Hap Arnold replied that Jimmy was too valuable for such risk.

At that time it was fortunate that the new carrier, the Hornet, had just been commissioned and was ready for a shakedown cruise off of Norfolk. To be safe, the navy arranged to have three B-25 bombers fly to Norfolk and carry out actual takeoffs at sea from the deck of the Hornet. Then and there it was found that the relative wind plus the carrier's speed forward made shorter takeoffs more feasible.

Doolittle was swift to get twenty-four B-25s modified for this exacting purpose: Stripped of defensive armament, certain radio equipment, and any other heavy and unnecessary items; enlarged fuel capacities designed, built and installed. Secrecy of the project was also paramount for the sake of the priceless end result, the safety of the precious aircraft carriers, and the raiders themselves. Time and again Doolittle had to expedite against ho-hum, routine attitudes among ground personnel to get needed things done fast and right. Hap Arnold's "green light" had to be resorted to often.

The selection of the most qualified and available B-25 group was soon settled. Four squadrons from the Seventeenth Bombardment Group flying out of Pendleton, Oregon, were given orders for " voluntary and hazardous duty" and so to fly to Columbia AAFB in South Carolina. Each bomber crew consisted of the pilot, co-pilot, bombardier-navigator, radio operator, and gunner-mechanic; five-man teams to be screened for experience and training. Capt. E. J. "Ski" York, a West Point graduate, was told in confidence the nature of the mission so that he could single out the best qualified men from the Groups. Each one was told that it was a volunteer, risky mission involving short takeoffs, but nothing more.

On March 3, Doolittle met this group of about 140 men at the USAAF training base at Eglin Field in the Florida panhandle where short takeoffs were perfected. He stressed volunteers only, the importance of secrecy, and teamwork. During the three weeks of intensive training at Eglin, preparation came in many forms. Lacking tail guns in the early B-25 models, two broomstick handles painted black were fitted to the tail to deter enemy pursuit. Capt. Ross Greening fashioned twenty-cent "Mark Twain" bombsights that would work better at treetop levels than the top secret Norden bombsight. Anything and everything that Doolittle and his squadron needed to get ready was cleared through Hap Arnold and done promptly. On one weekend Lts. Tom Griffin and Davey Jones were sent to Washington for briefings by USAAF Intelligence on the bombing targets, Chinese landing sites; they were given necessary maps and data folders for all twenty-four bombers.

Late in March Doolittle received this coded message from Hap Arnold: TELL JIMMY TO GET ON HIS HORSE. Training was over. It was time for the squadron to fly out of Eglin Field and proceed separately to McClelland Field in Sacramento, California, which they did by flat-hatting across the U.S., practicing for their low-level kind of Tokyo mission. On April 1, after all the planes were given a complete maintenance check, they were then flown to Alameda NAS to be hoisted aboard the waiting Hornet. When it was determined that only sixteen B-25s could be squeezed onto the flight deck and still permit takeoffs, the rest of the planes were left behind but all personnel were brought aboard as reserves and also to avoid security breaches.

Jimmy considered the strain of recent training when he gave liberty to the pilots and crews that evening. A night on the town in San Francisco for seventy-nine flyboys would seem risky but they were all present and accounted for on the next morning when the motor launch picked them up and delivered them to the Hornet on schedule. On that April day a convoy force of seven ships escorted the Hornet with its sixteen USAAF bombers in full display on its flight deck. As this task force sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge it prompted much speculation as to its purpose. Stories were leaked that the bombers were being ferried to the Pacific to give a plausible spin to the spectacle.

Once out to sea, Hornet Captain Marc Mitscher announced over the ship speaker, "Now hear this! The Hornet will take the Army bombers to a launching site near Japan to bomb Tokyo." This news finally put to bed all speculation concerning such unique circumstances. Wariness and doubt, army-navy rivalry, crowding, and inconveniences gave way immediately to comradeship, cooperation, and the collective delight to be part of such a brilliant operation.

Now there would be sixteen days of mellow-fellow aboard during which Doolittle would brief his men on the details of their mission such as escape, evasion tactics, expected enemy defenses, fuel conservation measures, and the five target cities: Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Yokohama, and Kobe. At this point, all believed that Chinese airfields were prepared for their landings, refueling, and further flight on to Chungking. They were also briefed on first aid by Lt. Thomas R. White, a physician who volunteered for the mission as a gunner on bomber number 15.

There was one prohibition made clear to all crews. From the start, when Davey Jones and Tom Griffin were briefed in Washington by AAF Intelligence back in February, they were instructed: THOU SHALT NOT BOMB THE JAPANESE EMPEROR'S PALACE. Now on the Hornet, about to carry out their mission, that instruction was stressed over and over to one and all. There was no confusion on this.

When the eight-ship task force reached the 180th meridian sailing west, they were joined by another eight ships including the carrier Enterprise with Adm. William E. "Bull" Halsey aboard. Since the Hornet's deck was crammed with army bombers and thus unable to use its own planes below in the hanger deck, a second carrier, the Enterprise, was there to provide air cover and scouting surveillance.

Improvised accommodations were necessary for the army guests on the Hornet. Folding cots were added to the normal quarters for officers and men. Inevitably the poker playing skills of the navy and army were put to the test. Scuttlebutt had it that navy sharks tasted much army blood, not that money mattered much when a deadly and dangerous mission lay ahead.

As the expanded task force approached Japan, Jimmy Doolittle had the presence of mind to bring along medals that had been bestowed on him previously by the Japanese for his aviation pioneering. Photographers were on hand to picture Jimmy's grin of satisfaction while wiring one of his medals to the fin of a 500-pound bomb destined for a Tokyo tank factory.

By mid-April task force refueling was completed so that oil tankers and some destroyers could turn back, four days before the scheduled takeoffs. Heavy seas and brisk winds tested the nausea tolerance of the army "landlubbers" aboard.

Taking Flight from a Moving See-Saw

At dawn on April 18, 1942, Admiral Halsey's task force found itself bucking forty-knot headwinds and thirty-foot swells that made each ship ride like a bucking bronco. Soon they would be on their way toward Japan to retaliate for the Japanese "dastardly" bombing of Pearl Harbor four months before, that "day of infamy" as expressed so eloquently by our President in his summary to a joint session of Congress. Now the Hornet carried on its pitching flight deck sixteen USAAF B-25 twin-engine bombers lashed down against the fury of a Pacific storm while eighty raiders were hunkered down waiting to reach their launching site still hundreds of miles toward Japan.

But the unexpected suddenly happened. The Japanese positioned a screen of fishing trawlers strung out 800 miles off shore to the east that also served as pickets and one of them was discovered at 05:58 by Lt. O. B. Wiseman flying on patrol in an SBD airplane off the Enterprise. With radio silence invoked, Wiseman scribbled his reckoned position on paper and handed it down to his gunner to put in a waterproof pouch. They dove through clouds, flew over the Enterprise, lowered flaps, and dropped the pouch on the flight deck. When Halsey read the note, his chief concern was to remove the navy's two precious carriers from danger now that the enemy had seen and reported them. Halsey immediately dispatched the cruiser Nashville to sink the picket with its main salvo at 900 yards but the rolling seas made accurate fire impossible. Finally, after forty minutes and 938 rounds of 6" shells, down went the trawler, radio and all.

Meantime, here was Halsey's predicament: their mission called for the task force to deliver the raiding bombers to a point five hundred miles from Japan, but instead they were still eight or nine hours sailing time (or 250 extra miles) away from the planned launching site. The Admiral was compelled to protect the carriers above all else, little knowing the exact consequences to the Raiders who would be forced to expend 250 extra miles worth of their precious fuel and thus be unable to reach the planned Chinese landing sites. Now where would they land? Any delay in launching would increase the danger of the loss of two of his carriers when at that time our navy was down to only four carriers in all the vast Pacific theater.

So at 08:00 Adm. Halsey gave this order: LAUNCH PLANES X TO COL. DOOLITTLE AND GALLANT COMMAND GOOD LUCK AND GOD BLESS YOU.

Try to imagine the immediate scurry on the Hornet flight deck of army and navy personnel on short notice at such an unexpected command. No time for breakfast, or to pack belongings, or get seasick. The CV-6 Hornet ship and crew were fresh from commissioning and without cruise, much less combat experience. (Not "salty" in navy lingo). Try to visualize the pitch and roll of the ship and the saltwater spray of the storm as well. Also, attempts were made at the last minute to fill and stow five-gallon tins of extra aviation fuel in each bomber. All of the chocks and tie down ropes had to be released, engine and turret covers removed and stowed, all these measures plane-by-plane amid engine start-ups and revving. Simultaneously, sixteen crews were reviewing check lists, stowing loose items such as flight gear, parachutes, navigation instruments, life rafts, ammo, survival gear, etc., all done frantically rather than by deliberate procedure.

Please also appreciate that none of these pilots, Doolittle himself included, (nor anyone anywhere) had ever taken off in this situation, that is, a two-engine army bomber from a partial deck of a naval carrier, much less on a heaving see-saw flight deck in a storm, and all this on sudden notice. As practiced, the LSO (landing signal officer Lt. Edgar Osbourne, waved instructions by flag signals, revving up, more revs, etc. and then, at the exact moment, releasing the footbrakes for the start of the takeoff run. That moment must be at the precise time the plane reaches the bow of the ship, as the bow lifts in the wave cycle. The boost of the rising deck proved as beneficial as a lowering deck would be disastrous by launching the bomber down into the oncoming wave. Such intuitive coordination comes by uncommon savvy, not to be found in instruction manuals.

The takeoff path of a mere 467 feet to the bow was to follow two critical lines painted on the Hornet flight deck; the inboard white line was to guide the nose wheel and the yellow line was for the left wheel which runs a mere sixty inches from the starboard edge of the flight deck, and in so doing, assures that the right wingtip will clear the superstructure of the conning tower by the same snug margin. Obviously, the B-25 and the Essex-class carrier were not designed for each other. Here was classic improvisation, often the key difference in the annals of warfare between victories and defeats.

Col. Doolittle in plane one took to the air at 08:20. His climb tended to "hang on his props," close to a stall. Travis Hoover in plane two followed in five minutes and also came near to stalling in his steep climb. It was then that the conning tower blackboard was changed to: "STABLIZER IN NEUTRAL" so that the rest of the planes were launched without incident except plane seven. Lt. Ted Lawson's plane somehow took off with flaps up and came dangerously close to being swallowed up by an oncoming wave but somehow it eventually managed to clear the whitecaps and struggle into the air.

The last plane on the deck, piloted by Lt. Bill Farrow, also proved to be a special case. Plane sixteen's rear half extended way over the flight deck stern. Loading its rear compartment could not be done until the other planes were out of the way. Six deck handlers held down Farrow's nose wheel while he revved up his engines to inch his plane forward. Just then the Hornet rocked and sea foam streaked across the deck making deck work all the more dangerous. One of the six deck handlers, Mechanics Mate Bob Wall, lost his footing as the Hornet lurched and he slid into plane sixteen's left propeller sweep, amputating Wall's left arm. Amazingly, this was the only severe casualty among the Hornet crew despite the wild conditions and confusing circumstances of that fateful morning.

Farrow's bomber finally took off at 09:20, exactly one hour after Doolittle's rise into the air at which point Adm. Halsey wasted no time in ordering the task force out of harm's way on a course headed back to Pearl Harbor. With the Hornet deck clear of bombers, its own complement of warplanes were lifted on the elevators and resumed flying along with the planes from the Enterprise. Their search and patrol flights found no enemy in pursuit. Mission accomplished. Meantime Doolittle's Raiders were giving Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe a taste of their own medicine and the fortunes of war began to shift our way.

Divine Wind vs. The Divine Hand of Fate

What to say about Imperial Japan's invincibility, superiority and destiny as the master nation of the Far East and the vast Pacific Ocean? What had been the ingrained assurance in the minds and souls of all Japanese for countless generations, and confirmed by military victory after victory since 1904, was brought to question for the first time by the 32 bombs dropped on five Japanese cities by the sixteen Doolittle Raider bombers on April 18, 1942, 132 days after the Pearl Harbor abomination!

Who could deny what was there to see and hear and suffer from those bombs? Premier Tojo, the leader of the Saumrai elites was caught in seeming disgrace and embarrassment after having assured the Japanese public that retaliation for the Pearl Harbor attack would never bring harm to the Japanese homeland. No doubt, an emergency meeting of the Saumrai elites took place immediately to deal with this sudden loss of face, this threat to their political ascendency, this subversion of their sacred code.

There had always been factions, even within the Japanese ruling class. The army contended with the navy for appropriations and for strategic control. There were hot heads vs. cool cucumbers. After the bombs fell there came a call for unity and resolve among these powerful groups to deal with this new crisis - the Saumrai's problem of exposed vulnerability. The raid also made a statement: that the United States of America was not ready to sue for peace nor call for negotiations, but rather, was resolved to unleash furious retaliation with the exercise of its military and industrial power.

In the face of this crisis, the Saumrai unified on a solution proposed by one of their leading elites, Fleet Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. He proposed that a smashing naval victory would erase the disgrace at home and also persuade the U.S. to conciliate for the conclusion of a shortened war with Japan, permitting the U.S. to concentrate on the war in Europe already under way. Yamamoto envisioned that the Far East and the vast Pacific would become "a Japanese lake." He proceeded to assemble a massive armada for the invasion of Midway Island that included a diversionary feint toward the Aleutians.

By early June, six short weeks after the Doolittle raid, the Japanese fleet was bearing down on Midway with more than 160 warships not counting patrol, landing craft, and the diversionary group attacking Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands. Yamamoto's intention was to obliterate the U.S. fleet at its weakest moment and remove it as the last threat to Japan's fulfillment of its ultimate destiny.

Central to this armada were the same four aircraft carriers, pilots, and airplanes that had rained death and destruction on Pearl Harbor only six months before. All that Adm. Nimitz could muster to resist this invasion force were his remaining two carriers, the Hornet and the Enterprise, the same two of the Doolittle raid, plus a limping and late Yorktown, which was still under frantic repair.

One small advantage favored Adm. Nimitz at the moment. U.S. intelligence had broken the Japanese code and had advance indications of Yamamoto's intensions. Nimitz deployed his two carriers to a rendezvous at a location known on the map as "Point luck," north and west of Midway, with bushwhacking enemy carriers in mind. Once the enemy fleet was spotted by PBY search planes, U.S. B-17 bombers from Midway and Hornet torpedo planes went hitless in the futile first phase. Meantime, Japanese carrier planes devastated Midway and were returning to their carriers for refueling and rearming for a second strike. Five other groups of planes from the American carriers launched and were having trouble finding each other. Hornet dive bombers reached their range limit and had to return in frustration. Up to this point in the battle, nothing had gone as planned nor had the enemy been damaged. All this indicated poor surveillance, inept coordination, and futile execution.

Suddenly, in a fateful five minutes, the fortunes of the Pacific war were reversed, not by the Divine Wind that destroyed Kublai Khan's invasion fleet in 1281, but rather by the Divine Hand of Fate that set the table for Uncle Sam's hungry aviators. Enterprise dive bombers finally sighted three of the four Japanese carriers when their decks were strewn with bombs, gasoline and crowded planes - at the very time of their greatest peril, when they were getting ready for a second strike against Midway. While enemy fighters were busy at sea level shooting down our torpedo bombers, the skies above were unprotected. Dive bombers of the Enterprise dropped their eggs on the crowded decks below without resistance. The Kaga and the Akagi became instant infernos as explosions of their own torpedoes ripped them apart. As if by more divine guidance, dive bombers from the Yorktown then arrived to share in the feast. They sealed the fate of the Soryu in similar fashion, but Japanese torpedo planes from the fourth enemy carrier, the Hiryu, happened by and were able to locate the Yorktown by following Yorktown's own dive bombers as they returned home from their feast, and in so doing the Hiryu planes torpedoed and crippled it, forcing all Yorktown planes still in the air to be orphans on the two remaining American carriers. With great zeal, those same planes took off the next day, tracked down the Hiryu, and sank it to complete the extermination of all four of the Japan's prize carriers.

Without his carriers, Yamamoto was obliged to cancel the invasion of Midway Island, turn tail and return with his armada to his homeland in humiliation, ironically, a disgrace to be avoided at all costs by devout Saumrai warriors.

The battle of Midway suddenly turned out to be a spectacular and fateful victory. All four Japanese carriers were sunk with all 332 of their planes and all their seasoned pilots as well.

The hand of fate that kept our aircraft carriers at sea at Pearl Harbor in December reappeared on our behalf again in June at Midway, the turning point of the Pacific war. It prolonged the war long enough for America's war production to build to overwhelming proportions that Japan could not match, with or without the Saumrai.

The Winds of War

Since the Mariana Turkey Shoot in June 1944, in which USN pilots in their new Hellcat and Corsair fighters flying from the new Essex-Class carriers proved their superiority by sweeping skies of Japanese pilots and airplanes, Japanese military leaders were compelled to resort to desperate measures. Following the June disaster in the Marianas, but before he was forced to step down as Prime Minister, Saumrai Shogun Hideki Tojo set forth a desperate fall-back plan for Japan's eventual survival. The first measure was to round up youthful, idealistic zealots - those ready to give their lives in keeping with the ancient Saumrai codes - to be trained just enough to fly land-based bombers on suicide runs against American ships. Tojo assigned Rear Admiral Arima to plan and execute an ongoing tactical unit called Special Attack Force that was ready to trade the loss of Japanese planes and pilots for the destruction of enemy warships. The Saumrai remnant reached back to medieval history for the symbol of Japan's invincibility and named it Kamikaze (literally, Divine Wind, or "Wind of the Gods"), harking back to Kublai Kahn's tempest-tossed invasion fleets that foundered off Japan in the 13th century.

The Japanese war cabinet grew even more desperate after their failure to thwart the Leyte Gulf landings in the Philippines in October 1944. It was time to unleash Kamikaze with all of its Saumrai implications of traditional heroic courage, duty, and loyalty. Flying from Mindanao and Clark Fields, a squadron of Zeke fighters armed with improvised bombs attacked Rear Admiral Sprague's Taffy 3 task force just after their miraculous survival in the Battle off Samar. Using dive bombing tactics, suicide strikes hit the jeep carriers Kitkun Bay, Kalinin Bay, and St. Lo. The first two carriers were severely damaged but saved by damage control, but the St. Lo became the first of many Kamikaze fatalities when its gasoline and torpedo stores were set on fire, blowing the unfortunate jeep carrier apart on October 25.

From that start, Kamikaze tactics grew to be the last hope of Japan's war council. In the Allied invasions of Mindoro Island (Dec. 1944) and Lingayen Gulf on Luzon (Jan. 1945), the use of suicide attacks increased so that by the invasion of Okinawa (April 1945), Japan flew more than 6,000 Kamikaze missions against U.S. ships causing great damage and many deaths, but not enough damage to prevent our support of invasions one after another. It is significant to note that in spite of the considerable damage Kamikaze caused, not one of the eleven Essex-class carriers went to the bottom of the sea in all of World War II.

Japan's Divine Wind vs. Our Divine Hand of Fate

The other serious threat to our landing forces and naval operations in the Pacific theater was the power of nature. While our Third Fleet was beginning to store up for the next phase of landings on December 18, stormy seas caused refueling lines to break, and refueling to cease. A typhoon hit the China Seas so severely that three destroyers capsized, and seven other ships were heavily damaged, 186 airplanes were lost, and over 800 officers and crewmen were swept overboard. How ironic that such a tempest had ruined Kublai Kahn's invasion fleet in the year 1274, and that such a typhoon loomed to threaten Japan's mortal enemy once more, and at such a critical moment!

Wind force 26 knots; barometer, 29.74. By morning the Third Fleet found itself at sea, low on fuel, and in the center of a convulsive, diabolic, furious tropical typhoon. Destroyers needing ballast, escort carriers, and mine sweepers all struggled to survive as they danced on the wave crests. When their sterns would not answer to the helms, each skipper prayed to avert the maw of the typhoon's vortex.

As we ponder the matter of Divine intervention in momentous conflicts, we are prone to see the Hand of God in the fact that our only three Pacific-based aircraft carriers were at sea on separate missions on that day of infamy and so realized no damage at Pearl Harbor, for if they had been destroyed also, the war would have been short and tragic.

We are prone to realize that the heavy seas and strong headwinds out turned to be beneficial to Col. Doolittle's Raiders as they took to the air on short notice in a tight 475-foot-long runway, all sixteen bombers being launched upward into the strong headwind.

When the Doolittle Raiders were scattered all over vast China, many Americans were miraculously herded together and saved from the Japanese by a bi-lingual helper, a Christian missionary named John Birch, who later served on Gen. Chennault's 14th Air Force staff until killed in 1945.

We are quick to appreciate that in the Battle of Midway we did everything wrong at the start but suddenly, in a matter of five minutes - at the moment of their extreme vulnerability, with bombs and gasoline scattered on deck for a second mission -four Japanese carriers were blown out of the water, requiring Adm. Yamamoto to retreat with his fleet and invasion armada to his Japanese homeland in utter disgrace.

We soon recognize that Adm. Kurita had our forces overwhelmed off of Samar Island and could have destroyed our invasion operations on our Leyte beachhead were it not for Adm. Sprague's Taffy 3 baby flattops dodging in and out of rainsqualls and smokescreens and for his intrepid tin cans charging full tilt in the face of certain destruction. Kurita unexpectedly turned tail and returned home, also in disgrace.

General Patton ordered his Chaplain to compose a prayer petitioning for clear skies over Bastogne. That prayer was met and our air power came to the rescue of "the bulge."

We are compelled to consider the Saumrai's own ideology that a divine hand (Kami means God), that the Mongols of Kublai Kahn were swept away in their invasion attempt, inferring that their Kami has been a divine patron of that chosen Island nation ever since the 13th century.

We recall that Doolittle and his seventy-nine brave airmen were emphatically briefed not to damage Emperor Hirohito or his palace due to the reverence Japanese have for him as their Divine Ruler.

When the Doolittle Raiders dropped all thirty-two of their 500-pound bombs on Tokyo and four other Japanese cities in April 1942, the first seeds of doubt in Saumrai invincibility were planted.

When Adm. Yamamoto was forced to retreat from Midway in June 1942, those seeds were cultivated.

When we were victorious in the Marianas in June 1944, thereby bringing the homeland of Japan within bombing range of our B-29 bombers, those seeds grew enough to expel Tojo as Premier.

When Adm. Kurita's armada was unable to prevent the Leyte Island landings in the Philippines in October 1944, Japan's lifeline of critical fuel was cut and the seeds of doubt flourished.

When the all-too-true typhoon of December 1944 failed to founder our Third Fleet as did the legendary tempest that saved Japan from the invading Mongols in 1274, the Saumrai sense of invincibility was gone with the wind.

Fair is fair. Were we blessed by a Divine Hand at critical times? Yes, indeed! Many times.

But were the Japanese blessed by their Kami in World War II?

In late 1945, Emperor Hirohito felt compelled to respectfully request an appointment to visit Gen. MacArthur to pay his respects early in our occupation of his once-proud nation. Humiliation is an abomination to the Saumrai code of honor. At last, after countless generations, and after utter defeat, the Saumrai traditions were laid to rest amid the smoldering ashes of a once-invincible nation.

Historical note. After World War II, Hideki Tojo, the preeminent Saumrai exponent and perpetrator, was tried and convicted of countless crimes against humanity. He was hung along with the cruelest of his infamous Generals, spurning hara kiri and suffering shame and defeat at the end of a rope, thus taking with them the last vestiges of Japan's Saumrai military traditions.

Adieu and Amen. *

Thomas Martin

Thomas Martin teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. You may contact Thomas Martin at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

A good friend of mine is worried because his sixteen-year-old daughter wants to pierce her belly button and get a tattoo. He thought I, being a father of two grown daughters, could offer some advice on how he might discourage her from both of these acts.

His daughter's basic argument is that the "other girls" in high school are getting tattoos and "it's just body art anyway, DAD!"

What his daughter wants epitomizes two quite natural longings in man's nature. First, everyone hungers for something permanent in life; and, second, everyone wants to praise the source of God-given life.

What child does not love their mother?

My friend's daughter in her exuberance wants to express the gift of life coursing through her veins by placing jewels around her navel as if it were a tabernacle for everyone to adore.

A pierced navel, so attractive to teenagers in hip huggers, won't be an appealing display in her twenties when stomachs start to fold and women no longer desire to exhibit their bellies to strangers. Fortunately, the pierced navel will heal and close to a faint scar.

Here, a father need not worry.

The permanent tattoo, however, is an altogether different matter, even though it is a longing in her for something that is unchanging and eternal.

From the earliest time, man has used his skin as a canvas. Tattooing was first a form of scarification, as primitive man found he could cut holes in his skin, char sticks in the fire and then apply the black ash to his wounds to create tribal markings.

Since tattooing involved pain, fire, and the letting of blood, it was associated with a sacrifice to the gods. Primitive man believed that the indelible mark of a tattoo released sacred forces which aligned a person's soul with his god's purpose, increased virility and fertility, delineated hierarchies within tribes and preserved the body after death.

The idea of having indelible marks releasing sacred forces still exists in the indelible mark of baptism, which washes away original sin and gives those sealed with this sign a purpose that transcends far beyond the body art of the tattoo parlor.

It is safe to say, people who get tattoos nowadays are not practicing a sacred art form; tattoos have the power to draw attention. It is the mark of a self-indulgent age when young and old alike treat their skin like a canvas for a commercial artist's symbols and slogans so other people will notice them, and, if you're a high-schooler or a gang member, be admitted to the in-crowd.

Did you ever stop to notice how the tattooed are held captive by what is pumping-up off their bicep, rising up above the crack, in their back, fluttering off their shoulder blades, or winking from their breast (wherever!)? Just like a Narcissus, who fell in love with his image and drowned in a pool of water, they are eager for everyone to see the indelible markings on their proud pound of flesh.

No young girl in the spring of her life thinks of the winter of her discontent when she will have more skin than she needs. The now supple and meaty flesh springing back from the tattooist's needle, will sag, a skin of wrinkles, creases and cracks so that the colorful parrot plumage now pricked onto her left shoulder might later be mistaken for a waterfall - or a buzzard.

A young girl who wants a tattoo as an expression of "body art" is taking the easy way out. True body art involves the art of having a body by willfully accepting responsibility and caring for one's soul. The art of maintaining a body starts with eating a well balanced diet, exercising self-control in the soulful act of being virtuous and not letting your carnal desires rule your body.

A young girl must see that true beauty is not skin deep but emanates from her soul, in her smile, those flickering lashes, gentle lips, abounding exuberance and, more importantly, in her virtuous character which will not sag, wrinkle or crack in time as she transcends the grave.

And so it goes. *

Barry MacDonald - Editorial

When our politicians preach, they try to convince us of their reasonableness, "the rightness," of some action they intend to take. They inspire by speaking of the bonds holding us all together and point to some noble purpose.

Tribal loyalty is easy to grasp, as it is based on the family, an intimate group. Governing a nation of 300 million of differing ethnicities is no picnic. The attempt to gather a majority to win an election is a sophisticated art.

In the last election candidate Obama was eloquent and inspirational. President Obama has squandered so much support because his relentlessly partisan and deceitful actions belie his campaign speeches. It's clear by now he's just another politician who says one thing and does another.

The problem following in the wake of someone like President Obama is the arising of, or perhaps a resurgence of, a cynicism toward the entire political system. Do all the politicians lie? Are they only in it for themselves? Is politics only a system for dividing the spoils among insiders?

The purpose of The St. Croix Review is to perpetuate the best of American culture, while letting go of what is unworthy. Just as we are in love with our neighborhoods, and have become attached to the minutest features of the houses, parks, and streams nearby, or to the habits and personalities of neighbors and friends, the writers of The St. Croix Review want to keep alive the ideal that America and her ways and manners is home.

Words are important only in as much as they are an honest attempt at conveying the truth. The problem today is that few believe what our leaders have to say. There is a sense that everything coming out of Washington D.C. is focus-grouped and poll-tested. And everyone bringing the packaged words is suspect: how much can we believe really?

After all Washington, D.C. covers only a small portion of the landscape, and we have the ability to dispose of deceitful leaders. What the American people need most is a proper view of the problems confronting the nation, so that we don't become confused and divided, bickering among ourselves. The St. Croix Review provides a clear view of problems and solutions.

There are many essays in this issue about the struggles of soldiers. The soldiers who have sacrificed so much know how lucky they are to live in America, "the land of opportunity." The following was sent to me in response to the announcement of our annual dinner at which Jigs Gardner spoke:

Mr. MacDonald Sir:

Thank you kindly for the yearly expenditure of your body and soul in the production of your wonderful and satisfying conservative publication.

I note this year that the dining-in event will be on 11 Nov. Some of us Alaska boys can't make that but send a thank you to those who plan, execute, and supervise the traditional dinner. Too bad you don't have some fresh pacific salmon.

The 11th of November is also Veteran's Day, and this year it is 11-11-11! Won't see that again for a century. As a vet (24 years in the Army and a couple in combat) I think we do appreciate the topic that Mr. Gardner will address because we were part of that force that backed up the political and economic stance of the USA with the weapon to our shoulders, so to speak. We knew when we entered the service that there would be days (years) of family separation and turmoil, conditions that were unpleasant, and actions to complete that were expected of boots on the ground. There were remarkably delightful times like coming home to the USA and wanting to kiss the tarmac, to salute the stars and stripes and hug our loved ones. But we came home! Many of our comrades were killed in action, the KIAs. They gave it all in support of our country regardless of politics, part, or position. If you see fit, Sir, ask Mr. Gardner to consider acknowledging the Military on 11-11-11, even briefly, the veteran survivors and the families of the fallen will be very grateful.

Peace! Thanks again for your work on The St. Croix Review.

Thomas H. Webster

LTC. U.S. Army (Ret.)

The following is a summary of the October, 2011, issue of The St. Croix Review.

In the Editorial "Upsides" Angus MacDonald writes about happiness.

Mark Hendrickson, in "Gold's Meteoric Rise," explains the rise of gold signals the plunge of the dollar and our economy; in "The Limits to Bernanke's Power," he believes it will be very difficult to avoid higher interest rates, making economic recovery difficult; in "Big Deal or No Big Deal?" he analyses the results of the debt-ceiling deal in August; in "Solutions for the 'Tax Gap,'" he says the primary reason people cheat when paying taxes is our political system is perceived to be "immoral, dishonest, and corrupt"; in "Bernanke and the Potemkin Economy," he explains why he terms Fed Chairman Bernanke an "inflationist" and how growth as measured by GDP during the Obama administration has been illusory.

Herbert London, in "From Coming Boom to the Coming Gloom," compares our economy today with that preceding the Reagan revolution, and believes the weight of government spending today imperils our liberty as never before; in "The Walls That Divide Europe," he writes of the pernicious effects of "no go zones" where non-Muslims may not enter; in "A Palestinian State? What Does the Evidence Suggest," he shows how U.S. taxpayers contribute to funds the Palestinian Authority uses to support terrorists; in "Venice: A City of Dreams," he says that "getting lost in Venice is one of the great joys in life."

Allan Brownfeld, in "How America Goes to War: Rediscovering the Dangers of an All-Powerful Executive," shows how both parties of have been guilty, when given the opportunity, of pushing an ever-expanding power; in "Dramatic Decline in Public Education Leads to Renewed Push for Voucher Programs," he writes fewer and fewer high school graduates are prepared for college or a career, and one-fourth can't pass the entrance exam for the Army; in "The Supreme Court's Strange Embrace of Violent Video Games for Children" he writes the warping brutality of the games, the exploitation of children by adults, and the requirements of civilization require the reconsideration of this case.

Paul Kengor, in "Could You Survive Another Great Depression?" , relates how his Grandparents survived the Great Depression - by relying on themselves - and considers how unprepared today's Americans are; in "Two Negotiators: Obama Vs. Reagan," he compares Obama's tantrum during the debt ceiling debate with Reagan's masterly accomplishments; in "No Contest: The Reagan Stimulus Vs. Obama's," he writes Obama's version poorly compares with Reagan's success and leadership; in "It's the Spending, Stupid: A Crucial Historical Look at Federal Government Spending" he documents the relationship from 1965 between ever-increasing federal spending, recessions, and deficits; in "The Secret Memo That Predicted the Soviet Collapse," he reveals a now-declassified memo by Herb Meyer detailing the economic and demographic nightmare that brought down the USSR.

In "Science Getting Settled . . . the Reality of Global Warming," Lawrence Solomon writes that evidence points to cosmic rays and the sun as the cause of global warming. He relates how alarmists have rallied to suppress the evidence for over a decade. Suppression is ongoing.

In "The Need to Restructure the Department of Defense," Earl Tilford shows how to reform a sacrosanct bureaucracy.

Haven Bradford Gow cites modern-day examples of honor in "Sports Should Build Good Character."

Jason R. Edwards, in "The Bedroom in the Classroom," shows the lunacy of California lawmakers in mandating the inclusion in social-science textbooks of the significant contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans for students K-12.

Jigs Gardner, in "Letters from a Conservative Farmer: The Simple Life, Continued," shows the transformative effects of handling animals and tools, and he writes a loving tribute to his wife.

In "The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln," Jigs Gardner writes of his fascination from childhood with Lincoln, reviews Michael Burlingame's excellent book on Lincoln, and probes the strength and eloquence of this great man.

Fayette Durlin and Peter Jenkin, in "Conservative Magazines: Timeliness," says that publications are timely if they convey a sense of urgency to passing events. They discuss the EPA and harmful regulations, and look at Commentary, The Washington Times, National Review, The American Spectator, and The New York Times.

Robert C. Whitten reviews Climate Gate, by Brain Sussman and Climate Coup, by Patrick Michaels, two books that undermine the science of man-caused, catastrophic global warming.

Robert C. Whitten

Robert C. Whitten holds a Ph.D. in physics from Duke University and an M.S. in meteorology from San Jose State University. He is a research scientist, NASA-retired, author or editor of five books, and author or co-author of 117 papers in the archival literature on various aspects of atmospheric science, and is a commander, U.S. Navy Reserve-Retired.

ClimateGate, by Brain Sussman. World Net Daily, Washington, D.C.: 2010, pp. 224, $25.95.

Climate Coup, by Patrick Michaels. Cato Institute, Washington, D.C., 2011, pp. 270, $24.95.

"The Emperor has no clothes." That is the message emanating from the emails hacked from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University, UK. For over twenty years we have been assured by the science establishment of the U.S. and Europe that catastrophic global warming resulting from human caused emissions of "greenhouse" gases (carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide) is imminent unless we drastically reduce them. However, the whole thesis has increasingly come into question by the lack of supporting empirical evidence as well as by the fraud demonstrated by the hacked emails. The only "evidence" is the output of general circulation computer models that are extremely limited for prediction purposes.

The two books reviewed here address the controversy in varying and complementary ways. Brian Sussman who is currently a talk show host on KSFO, San Francisco, is a trained meteorologist and was earlier a weather forecaster on a San Francisco television station. In his book ClimateGate he goes all the way back to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring of the 1960s and the ensuing ban on DDT, the origin of Earth Day in 1970 (Lenin's centennial) and Al Gore's movie that led to a Nobel Prize. He then discusses the steady self-organization of the global warming movement, based on greed (the quest for research grants, and "crony capitalism" by big business), thirst for political power as well as a peculiar "religious" belief. The author explains in considerable detail the "hockey stick" global temperature history proposed by Michael Mann and associates, which shows a steady temperature record for a thousand years until the late 20th century when it shows a sharp rise (the blade of the hockey stick). The Medieval Warm Period (1000 to 1250 AD) and the "Little Ice Age" (1500 to 1850 AD) were carefully omitted by Mann et al. The hacked emails clearly demonstrate the concern of Mann and other scientists of the global warming cabal as to how they would get rid of the embarrassing Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age. Sussman also reviews the efforts by the cabal to censor the opposition, and to influence the reports of the UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as well as the attempts by the Congress (Waxman-Markey) and the Obama administration to enact legislation and regulations to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Michael's volume, unlike Sussman's, is a multi-author book dedicated to exposing the invasion of the rights of American citizens by government in the name of protecting the environment. The basis for the invasion was born over seventy years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court under pressure from the Roosevelt administration when it authorized Congress to delegate its legislative authority to executive agencies. Not much was done about regulating environmental issues until the Nixon administration, when the EPA was established with broad regulatory authority. Since then the EPA, in true bureaucratic fashion, has steadily expanded its reach into every aspect of the lives of the citizenry.

Extension to control of greenhouse gas emissions began in 1992 with the Rio de Janiero conference. Since then several more meetings have been convened, most notably in Kyoto, Japan, and Copenhagen, Denmark. The first conference set definite goals for reduction based on 1992 emissions and embraced "cap and trade," in which those with reductions in excess of the 1990 base, such as the recently united Germany, could trade their credits on an international market. Some individuals such as former Vice President Al Gore took advantage of the emission credit trade opportunity and amassed vast fortunes. The second conference experienced no such "success," collapsing before any agreements could be reached, despite entreaties by President Obama.

In the meantime a growing number of atmospheric science skeptics (of whom this reviewer is one) began to analyze the temperature data used to advance the global warming (GW) agenda. In response, the GW alarmists circled the wagons and made all out efforts to block publication of dissent. Statistician Ross McKitrick, recounts his own frustrating experience in publishing his papers on the subject. In November 2009, internet hackers who may have been located in Russia, hacked into the email storage at the CRU at East Anglia University. As mentioned in the review of Sussman's book, the emails revealed a vast conspiracy to silence dissent by controlling science journals and the peer review process.

Additional articles discuss the signing onto the GW/climate change agenda by the Department of Defense, the effects on developing countries of switching agriculture from food production to growing bio fuels, the erroneous claims that GW will lead to disease epidemics such as malaria, and finally the efforts to indoctrinate school children with environmental propaganda.

As a combination, these two books provide an excellent introduction to the science and politics of environmentalism in its climate change cloak. The interested reader may also wish to consult the website of the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP): http://www.sepp.org/.

Fayette Durlin and Peter Jenkin

Fayette Durlin and Peter Jenkin write from Brownsville, Minnesota.

In May we received a call from Commentary: the magazine was polling its readers to test reactions to a possible shift in publication from a monthly to a biweekly. We would guess that Commentary, like all publications, is feeling the effects of competition from the Internet, a general name for all those forms of instant communication available today. So the editors (we suppose) thought they could better compete by being more timely, by publishing every two weeks rather than four. Stated like that, you see the fallacy: no printed work, not even a daily paper, can be as timely as the Internet.

We have been using "timely" as if we all understood its meaning, but it really is a most elastic term. The dictionary says "opportunely; in time," but if we think about it, timeliness is a presence in every political magazine, no matter how infrequently it is published, for the obvious reason that such publications exist to comment on current public affairs. What we're really talking about are degrees of timeliness, and magazines handle this issue in various ways.

Among the dozen or so publications we survey, it might be thought that The Washington Times, a weekly newspaper, would be most timely. While the articles (as we have noted before) read like press releases, they are about current events - "Romney leads GOP Hopefuls in Filling War Chest," "Violent Mexican Drug Cartel Leader Taken Into Custody" - but we would not call them timely because they lack any sense of time pressing on the moment; that is reserved for the columns, and not all of those either. In the July 11 edition Steve Milloy has a first-rate column, "Last Chance for GOP to Stop EPA Train Wreck," so timely that the reader feels the urgent need to make Congressmen read it and take action at once.

A key to any strategy for addressing the EPA problem is for . . . Republicans to drop their fear of the agency and its enviro-activist allies . . . it is no longer 1970. In 2011 America, the air, water, and the rest of the environment are clean and safe. . . . Republicans must recognize that the EPA is largely driven by left-wing ideologues, not people who are more concerned about the environment or exist on a higher moral plane than the rest of us . . . [who] use the agency to increase government control over the use of energy and to stifle economic development.

Milloy enunciates a strategy for controlling the EPA now, via the appropriations process. This - dismantling growth-inhibiting regulations, promoting economic resurgence - is the most important issue for Republicans to champion, and it is a burning issue now. Timely indeed. The issue of August 8 has another fine piece by Milloy on the EPA's new ozone regulations that makes the same point, that we have to confront directly the environmental arguments of the Greens and show their falsity.

Pat Buchanan has a column, "Homosexuality and the Death of Moral Community," certainly timely, which quotes an Archbishop:

A new kind of America is emerging . . . and it's likely to be much less friendly to religious faith than anything in the nation's past.

Buchanan predicts:

We are entering an era when communities will secede from one another and civil disobedience on moral grounds will become as common as it was in the days of segregation.

So it is the columnists who are most timely in the sense that they write about current issues that are burning, urgent.

National Review has a classic format: "The Week," dealing with matters that can be contained in a short paragraph, is the timely feature of the magazine, but two of the columns in the back by Rob Long and Mark Steyn (the only worthwhile ones), are also timely, Long in a comic way, Steyn in his incomparable ironic style. Steyn's essays always convey a bleak sense of realism about our prospects that gives them a sense of urgency.

The American Spectator, a monthly, tries to have the timeliness of a biweekly and the depth of a monthly, but it doesn't quite make the latter grade because the feature articles are nearly always second-rate. The test of depth is that you go back to the essays to reread them, and that can only be said of the regular columns by James Bowman, Roger Scruton, and Tom Bethell. Timeliness is achieved by Tyrrell's feature "The Continuing Crisis" in the front of the magazine, by reprints of two of his syndicated columns at the end, and by James Taranto's "Presswatch" column. One aspect of Internet timeliness we haven't mentioned is its preoccupation with the trivial, the tawdry, and the sensational, and "The Continuing Crisis" makes use of such items in a comically deadpan way, putting them in their place.

So what did we tell the caller from Commentary? Why, to stay the course as a monthly, and later we wrote to the editor, invoking the authority of this column, pointing out the value of the thoughtful essays Commentary is famous for, essays rarely found in other publications. An extraordinary magazine, it seldom publishes anything second-rate (aside from fiction). Partly this is because, unlike a magazine like National Review, which is largely staff-written, its essays are written by men of affairs like John Bolton and Elliot Abrams, and such men are usually likely to have more profound things to say than journalists.

For instance, in the July issue John Steele Gordon has an article, "Growth: The Only Way Out of This Mess," adapted from a speech given at a Federal Judicial Circuit conference, which argues that the way out of the depression is by promoting growth, specifically by freeing energy development from the restraints imposed by the administration and the forces to which it panders, like the Greens. He develops the idea from a persuasive account of our resources and our history, by the way making the point that concentrating only on spending reduction is not enough and is also politically risky. Focusing on promoting energy development as well as spending reduction would be not only a winning political strategy but a platform of governance. This is not a new idea, of course, but the author argues the case so persuasively that it takes on a fresh luster. An essay like that is not uncommon in Commentary.

The magazine also prints pieces that are timely in the immediate sense, like Andrew Ferguson's two-page column, "Pressman," at the end of the magazine. In July he dissected the hosannas that greeted the appointment of Jill Abramson as the new executive editor of the New York Times, emphasizing "the liberalism that suffuses the work of even the most careful reporters is so deep-seated as to be altogether unconscious," of the variety he calls:

Timesism: the bizarrely inflated opinion that many readers hold of the Times. . . . Timesism is a strain of American liberalism, the liberalism that dares not speak its name.

Try convincing a Times reader that it expresses a point of view, not Reality or Truth.

We recommend the quarterly newsletter of the Property Rights Foundation of America, P.O. Box 75, Stony Creek, NY 12878, which is concerned with private property issues and the assaults thereon. The annual meeting in upstate New York in October is terrific, a day-long series of excellent speakers from the front lines of struggles over property rights all across the country. We have to travel a long way, but we never miss a meeting. Cost of membership: $30.00

Of course, being a monthly or quarterly does not guarantee profundity. We had high praise for National Affairs in the last issue, but its summer issue is a complete dud, rehashing old themes and arguments.

Random notes: NR has an excellent, thorough profile by Robert Costa on Michele Bachman in its July 18 issue, much better than the sketchy one in The Weekly Standard. And Adam White has a thoughtful essay on the legal thinking of Justice Alito in the latter on July 18. Both essays show that a weekly or biweekly can publish essays of solidity and depth, essays that we want to reread and rethink.

The summer issue of the Claremont Review of Books contains several interesting articles and reviews, most notably by Scott Yenor on the American Presidents series which not only assesses individual volumes but shows their conceptual failure, what can be called the historicism of Progressive thought, "reminding us of the need for constitutional history of the U.S. premised on the importance of first principles." William Voeglis' thorough essay on the pathologies of the 1960s people and their liberal apologists then and now is timely and important.

One of the best things about the magazine is its letters section, so good that it reminds us of the letters in Commentary 20 years ago, and that's no mean compliment. Such a lively and intelligent column is a great asset - and a great benefit to readers. It creates a discussion as it extends, contradicts, and deepens the argument in the original essay. In this issue Lino Graglia has a letter about an article by Hadley Arkes in the spring issue, a letter which very effectively shows the subjectivity of Arkes' theory that natural law must be the basis of constitutional law and judging. Arkes is a sympathetic figure, an author of several weighty books, but we have always felt the dangerous subjectivity of his theory, and the exchange between Graglia, clear and concise, and Arkes, vague and insubstantial, confirms our fears. As Graglia says:

. . . when a judge looks outside the text of the Constitution in a constitutional case, he looks nowhere but in himself, to his own policy preferences.

So we have learned something significant by an exchange of letters.

The August issue of Environment and Climate News has an excellent two-page piece by Rael Jean Isaac, "Environmentalists vs. Renewable Energy," showing that Greenism is really about "cutting the supply of energy, not finding alternative sources." Indeed, John Holdren, Obama's energy czar, in 1973 declared that the goal must be to "de-develop the U.S." *

Jigs Gardner

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..

Part Two

For the next few days the men (there were five of us) took axes and crosscut saws and swede saws to the woods to cut firewood. Men (that is, men not used to the job) love to play at woods work, and not the least enjoyable part was creating at mealtimes what we thought was the atmosphere of an old lumber camp, bragging of our exploits, kidding one another, and putting away heaps of food. Oddly, there was no woodshed, no place to store firewood at all, so we quickly threw up a lean-to outside the back door. Then there was the problem of getting the wood to it. The woods weren't far from the house, but the distance was too great to carry it. We dragged some of the smaller stuff in and stacked the rest beside the logging road. Before long I'd have to find a way to haul it.

Willie offered to sell us one of his horses, Ginger, a sweet-tempered Morgan who had had her molars pulled a couple of years before, so that now she could eat only short grass. Fine on summer pasture, she could make it through winter only on special feed like alfalfa pellets. I knew this, but I did not know it in any real way; I had not yet learned the obduracy of material fact, I was heedless of the specific material limitations of the things that now made up my world. I thought about it for a while, but recognizing that I knew less about horses than I did about cows, I finally turned Willie down. But he understood my need - moving that firewood - better than I did, and he returned at the end of the week with Ginger in a truck.

"Keep her as long as you need her and then I'll sell her to the Minks. The dealer offered me twenty-five dollars, so I've got to get that."

Willie also sold us our last animal acquisition, a pig. Walt, one of our friends, had driven me over to the Woodwrights to see about buying a stove, and on our way out the lane we met Willie, who had a honey of a deal for me: friends of his who had to return to Boston for the winter, asked Willie to sell the two pigs they had rashly bought back in June. He offered me both for twenty-five dollars, a great buy that even I could recognize - but I didn't want two pigs and I didn't want to spend more money. Eventually, he talked me into taking one for ten dollars. He pointed up the road: just take the next right; it's the only house on the road, and the pigs are in a pen behind the barn.

When we walked around the corner of the barn, there was a pig all right, an underfed shoat, fifty or sixty pounds, but he wasn't in the pen, he was standing outside, watching us warily, ears and tail erect, his tight little body tensely poised. If is easy to say that today I would know what to do, I would know the artful ways to trick the pig back into his pen, or failing that, I would know how to capture a loose pig. Lord knows I've done it often enough. Today, however, is not yesterday, so what we did was to approach the pig directly, uttering insincere endearments in enticing tones - "Here piggie piggie, nice little piggie" - and the pig shot away into the bushes. All those years have passed, and I can still see his bottom vanishing into a clump of goldenrod. There follows in my memory a blur of thickets of greenery streaked with the scampering figure of the pig. The blur finally slows, stops, and I see the pig, tensely poised, watching us warily from the far end of a glade. Walt and I, scratched, sweaty, panting, exhausted, stare back for some moments before turning away in disgust.

The pig was captured next day after Willie helped us organize a roundup with all our manpower. The animal roster was now complete: Aster the cow, Ginger the mare, twelve hens and a rooster, and Clay the pig, named after a megalomaniacal former colleague because of the way he ran around the pen, trying to gobble up everything in sight. These were not just things, simple additions to our property, but as with everything else we put our hand to in those two years, in order to use them we had to master them, which meant learning and resolution. For the moment, Ginger and Aster were either in the pasture or staked out on tethers around the barn and yard, eating the lush grass thriving in all the rain we were getting. There was plenty of old hay in the mow for winter, plus some I had cut raggedly with a scythe. Some of that would be chopped for Ginger, I thought. Both the cow and horse required a grain supplement, and the hens and pig would have an all-grain diet, plus the tiny amount of table scraps that escaped from our kitchen. I figured I could just about afford the grain, but Clay would stretch the budget, so it would be wise to find something else to feed him. It was Otis who gave us an idea when he warned us about Mrs. B. She had dropped in a couple of times and shared meals with us, and he had seen her jeep in the yard.

"She does that to everyone, heh heh. If you don't put a stop to it, she'll be here every day, heh heh."

I told him about her attempt on Mrs. Allen's garden, and he questioned me closely about the details. Foiling Mrs. B. was evidently a rare feat, and I had the feeling that we went up in his estimation. Despite all her talk, that was all the "gardening" she actually did, he said, going around after the summer people left to scavenge their gardens.

Walt and I drove out the next day to cruise the back roads, but there weren't many summer places locally, and the jeep tracks and general devastation told us that Mrs. B. had preceded us. At least we got corn stalks. Venturing farther took us beyond her range, and then we filled the trunk, as well as the back seat, with beets, carrots, parsnips, lettuce, beans, huge yellow cucumbers and zucchini, burst cabbages, turnips, even some winter squash and pumpkins. Everything except the root crops was frosted and nibbled on, but chopped and mixed with grain, it was relished by Clay.

Whenever I recall that time, a sunny warmish week at the end of September, this scene arises in my mind: the pale light of autumn slants across the white clapboards of a shuttered, silent house; a flock of starlings flies up, wings whirring as they wheel over the garden; a rank growth of weeds gone to seed stands pale and withered, drily rustling when we push them aside. As we intently gather our harvest into grain bags, the thin chirping of crickets, the most evocative noise of autumn, sounds insistently all around us, unheeded except in memory.

After that, Walt and Mary, the last of the Labor Day crew, went home and I spent my days cutting firewood and hauling it home with Ginger and the wagon. Looking back, I can see that the three main drawbacks were my ignorance, my physical weakness, and my inadequate resolution, by which I mean that I had yet to learn that to succeed in an enterprise, I must dedicate myself to it, heart and soul. I thought I was serious, and I was by my lights - they just weren't good enough then. My tools were swede saws, a four-foot bull saw (or one-man crosscut), several six-foot crosscuts for visitors, a six-pound splitting maul, steel wedges, two single-bitted axes, and a handsome double-bitted axe given me by Stoney, a former student, an axe that had been forged for him at the Spiller foundry in Maine, the finest tool I have ever owned. By what was for me an amazing act of forethought, I had asked a friend, back in the summer, to teach me how to sharpen everything. I had no quarrel with the tools; it was the man behind them who didn't come up to the mark. Felling and cutting up big hardwood trees by hand is tremendously strenuous work requiring strength, knowledge, and skill, none of which I had, although I soon learned the basic knowledge from Kephart's old Camping and Woodcraft. Knowledge, however, is not enough; you must put it into practice. It took a long time, years really, to build up skills like the coordination of eye and arm which makes every blow of the axe tell, or like the ability to judge instantly and unconsciously the amount of strength to put into each act, or like the discipline of muscles which concentrates and economizes strength. Of course I improved. By Christmas I didn't have to rest every few minutes, and I had finally mastered the undercut, the notch that determines where the tree will fall. My notches at first were really only ragged bites at the bark, and I hacked all around the tree like a beaver - and no tree fell on me. There were other miracles. Because of my lousy notches, the trees fell all over the place, often into neighboring trees, with the daunting result that I sometimes had as many as five trees lodged at once in different parts of the woods. Ever the optimist, I hoped that they would fall down during the night. When that didn't happen, I would climb the lodged tree and hack away at the limbs to free it. If that failed, I would fell the tree it was lodged in in my usual felicitous fashion while standing under the leaning tree. There were some exciting moments, but I was nimble and was never caught. The tree down and limbed, I would saw it into lengths, eight feet for small trees that I could lift, shorter and shorter for bigger and bigger ones, splitting the largest blocks on the spot. It takes much experience to know just where to strike a block to split it, especially if it's any length. I could, often did, bury as many as four wedges in a log with no effect, driving them steadily into the bowels of the wood, hoping desperately that the block would suddenly split open and all the wedges would tumble out at my feet.

Today, thinking about what I did in the woods that fall, and knowing all that I have learned about logging in the intervening years, it amazes me not only that I was not killed, not even hurt, but that I got any wood out at all.

I hope I have made the physical exigencies of the task and its achievement clear, but there was something more important involved, a mental change that governed not only the work in the woods, but all aspects of this new life. At the beginning of this section I said my resolution was inadequate, but gradually, even then, it was changing. I was becoming responsible, conscientious, and dependable. I had been a good teacher, but in some ways I had been slack and irresponsible, almost adolescent. Evidently my temperament needed physical testing, and that in a dire situation, to bring out whatever good qualities were in me. With only shadowy hints of what was happening, I was discovering myself. What Jo Ann was doing is another story.

I do not know how other writers approach the task of writing about their wives; not many do, I suppose. The only one who comes readily to mind is Hemingway, and he lied about them all. It is very difficult for me. As I write this, we have been married for nearly fifty-seven years, and I think I know her better than I have ever known anyone, but it is love that creates the difficulty. For instance, I can write about my parents and I think the portraits would be honest. But they are long dead and I never loved them as I love Jo Ann. What holds me back is the fear that I might miss some of the truth, that unwittingly I will do her an injustice, that the reader will get the wrong impression. Well, I shall tell the story as it happened and trust that her character will appear in her actions.

I was raised in a city, Jo Ann grew up in the up-and-coming suburbs of Brookline and Newton, but we also had significant experiences in the countryside, Jo Ann in an old-fashioned camp in Maine (simple wooden cabins with orange crates for storing clothes, swimming in a cold lake before breakfast, hiking to pick raspberries along dusty roads, playing Indians around a campfire on Sunday nights), while my teenage summers were spent working on a farm. Those experiences made lasting impressions. In graduate school (we were married while still in college) we had our first vegetable garden, and I began making jam from wild fruits. I could lay it to parsimony because we had very little money and the babies were arriving thick and fast (we had our first three in just as many years), but I doubt if we saved much by our early efforts at self-reliance. I think we just liked doing it, searching for wild fruits and learning how to use them, and of course we ate better, which was always a consideration. Right after our marriage Jo Ann had learned to bake bread, and by the time we moved to Vermont I was growing and preserving vegetables, keeping hens, making lots of jams and jellies, learning about wild mushrooms, and making soap and wine and beer. Jo Ann was busy with the children, but she had to deal with what I produced, and, with the aid of the Fannie Farmer cookbook, she raised herself from a state of blank ignorance to a point where she rivaled my mother - a statement not many men will make. She would be grievously tested here during our first experience in self-reliance.

At this time in our life - circumstances would change - she was not directly concerned with the animals (although she was always better at handling them than I, because she has a calmer personality) but sometimes she had to take a hand. There was the spectacular afternoon when Aster escaped from the pasture, Ginger broke her tether, and Clay managed to climb out of his pen. I was off somewhere (she says that's when these affairs always happen), and when I returned, Jo Ann had quietly caught the wanderers and returned them to their proper places. She wasn't required to help me outdoors much, but when she did she was indispensable.

As I was writing this, I asked her what she thought of the experience when we began it, and she said she "liked the challenge." I think that could stand as a central motif in both our lives.

She, too, was discovering herself, learning that she had deep inner resources she never knew she had, discovering a basic toughness that brought her through many hard times. It wasn't the life she would have chosen for herself. But she followed it because that's where the love of her life led. She never could have endured, however, if she, too, had not been attracted to becoming self-reliant. As she said, she "liked the challenge."

As the fall days grew shorter, the practicalities of our situation pressed upon us. Would I be able to cut enough firewood? Would we have enough food? How long would our money last? Would we be able to learn the myriad skills we were beginning to see were necessary for this life? Would we make it through the winter? What would we do if we couldn't? These constant worries, never spoken, affected our behavior in ways we did not at first recognize. I remember coming down from the woods one afternoon to find Jo Ann sweeping up broken glass: she had dropped another lamp chimney, the third in a week. Such chimneys, especially for the odd lamps Corbin had, were hard to find, so some annoyance on my part would be understandable, but I was enraged, and I accused her of trying to undermine all my efforts. At the end of my tirade she said, trying to explain her recent uncharacteristic clumsiness, that she had been made nervous by my dense gloom: I hardly spoke to her or the children. My rage collapsed; I had not realized any of this, what I felt or how I was acting. The understanding was a great relief - but the worries remained.

In the next issue: "Disturbing Revelations." *