The Crimean War

Theirs not to reason why

Theirs but to do or die

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred

In 1853, England and France decided that Russia was becoming a bit too strong for their liking.  In particular, they were concerned that the Russians would invade the Balkans and capture Constantinople (now known as Istanbul) and thus be able to send their fleets worldwide year round.

In addition to various Internet sources, I watched a three part documentary on the war on Amazon Prime.

Initially the dispute was between Russia, led by Tsar Alexander II, and the Ottoman Empire, which became Turkey in 1922 – a secular republic though mostly Muslim.  For their part, the Russians (Orthodox Christians) assumed the British (Protestant) and French (Catholic) would never side with the Ottomans (Muslims) against them, only to find that the European powers were more leery of Russia gaining a naval presence in the Mediterranean than they were of religious compatibility. 

Bomarsund and Kronstadt.  The latter fortress protects St. Petersburg, for centuries the Russian capital, from enemy naval attack.  The British decided it was too strong to attack, so they attacked the former fortress and then left.  As a result, St. Petersburg was never seriously threatened during the war and remained in Russian hands.  For that matter, the Germans never succeeded at taking Leningrad during WWII, instead besieging it for three years.

The Balkans.  Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia, Albania, and Serbia.  These were under Ottoman control at the time.  The Russians attempted to invade what is now Romania during this time, but were repulsed by the Ottomans and their British and French allies.  One particularly interesting character was Omar Pasha, a European who converted to Islam and became one of the Ottomans’ more capable military commanders.

Sevastopol.  The Russians’ major city and port on the north shore of the Black Sea; the peninsula on which it’s located is called the Crimea.  The Allies landed here, set up a base of operations at Balaclava, and made various attempts to besiege and attack Sevastopol.  For their part, the Russians eagerly defended it, sending various relief armies to attack the British and French, with mixed results.  Eventually it fell in September 1855.

Timeline

October 5, 1853.  War breaks out between Russia and the Ottoman Empire.  The British and French send forces to Constantinople, while the Ottomans successfully defend the Balkans from a brief Russian invasion.

March 1854.  The British (PM Lord Aberdeen) and French (Napoleon III) declare war on Russia.

October 1854.  The Charge of the Light Brigade, a doomed cavalry charge against heavily fortified Russian artillery positions.

November 1854.  The Battle of Inkerman.  The British manage to defeat a Russian force sent to relieve Sevastopol.

September 1855.  After several bombardments and Allied attacks on the Russian fortifications at Malakoff and the Grand Redan, the Russians finally abandon Sevastopol, allowing the Allies to occupy it.  The British make it a point to destroy all port and shipbuilding facilities to temporarily neutralize Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

January 1856.  The Austrians finally threaten to enter the war on the Allied side, prompting the Russians to ask for peace.

March 1856.  The Treaty of Paris ends the war.

Notables

Zouaves.  The French North African troops, with their distinctive headgear and pants, acted as France’s de facto elite troops.  As the French had been in combat in Algeria off and on since 1830, they had considerable combat experience.

Inkerman.  I remember the pool in Paris.  Despite superior numbers, the Russians were unable to defeat the British forces’ technical superiority:  armed with 1853 Enfield rifles (standard issue of the Confederate Army years later) vs the Russians’ smoothbore muskets.  Rifling triples the effective range of a longarm, giving riflemen a distinct advantage over musketeers except at point blank range.

Florence Nightingale.  She did not come to Balaclava but remained at Scutari, a large Turkish barracks at Constantinople where the Allies sent most of their wounded.  She pioneered many concepts of hygiene which were almost unknown at the time.  

Sisters of Mercy.  The Russian equivalent of Florence Nightingale. 

Leo Tolstoy.  The Russian writer fought in this war and used his experiences to write War & Peace.  He looks remarkably like Dean Stockwell.

Battle Photography.  This was the first major conflict to be photographed.  The technology wouldn’t allow moving soldiers to be photographed, but posing – and immobile corpses on a battlefield – were fair game.

The Trooper.  I’m not sure if Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson or Steve Harris have ancestors who fought in the war – neither are old enough to have done so themselves, obviously – but their song “The Trooper” is a rare rock’n’roll tribute to this otherwise obscure conflict.

The war caused heavy casualties on both sides, though at this point most were caused by cholera and poor hygiene than bullets or cannonballs.  The Russians kept the Allies out of St. Petersburg, whereas the Allies kept the Russians out of Constantinople and the Balkans, making the capture of Sevastopol the only major accomplishment of the war.   

Democrats

Lately I’ve been arguing with Trump supporters more often on Facebook, possibly a waste of time, who knows.  The most annoying trait they have is labelling all Trump critics as Democrats.  When you have an obvious non-Democrat like former Trump SecDef Mattis busting on Trump, the story is “some ulterior motive”.  Right, only Trump supporters are intelligent and non-biased.  Quite the contrary.

As noted in a prior blog, of the 8 Presidential elections from 1988 to 2016 (A.D.), I voted GOP four times (GHWB x2, Dole, Romney) and LPA four times (Browne, Badnarik, Barr and Johnson).  I have never voted Democrat at any level, from dogcatcher to President.  I default to Libertarian candidates, and in their absence I default to Republicans. 

I don’t really have a major beef or problem with Democrats.  To the extent I do, it would be their preference to solve all problems with “other people’s money” (OPM) and take credit for that vicarious generosity.  Plus their ill-advised fixation on gun control, an issue which puts me in the LPA & GOP camp consistently.

PC/SJW.  The "politically correct" & "social justice warrior" crowd also gets on my nerves.  Implying that these left-liberal opinions are somehow objectively correct is itself arrogant and objectionable.  The latter term is more likely to be used as an insult by their opponents.  It's not necessarily Democrat per se, but it is definitely on their side of the spectrum.  By that I mean this business of injecting political ingredients to non-political decisions, e.g. what type of food to eat, which restaurants and businesses to patronize, etc.  Instead of buying the products you enjoy most and eating the foods you like, you have to worry about the firm's employment practices and the politics of its higher echelon, including, but not limited to, its CEO.   Keeping track of all that is a major nuisance and pain in the ass, and added to this equation is the pedantic air of superiority these people bring to this whole thing.  Mind you, the conservatives did this back in the 60s, burning Beatles records in the Deep South (obviously not in New York City or San Francisco - affected smirk) thanks to John Lennon's famous remark about his band being "bigger than Jesus" (Japan had its turn when Lennon rated a Beatles concert a more worthwhile form of entertainment than watching sumo wrestling), giving the rest of us who go to church on Sunday a bad name; no, "religious" and "intelligent" aren't mutually exclusive.  Anyhow, if there's an issue which drives moderates off to the right side of the spectrum, it's behavior like this.

Communists.  Up until 1984, the CPUSA ran its own candidates, with Gus Hall being the most recent.  During the 1930s they actually preferred FDR but ran their own candidates to avoid openly supporting FDR and therefore discrediting him among non-leftists.  Nowadays they simply default to supporting Democrats.  Of course, that doesn’t mean Democrats are communists.

The far left of the Democratic Party, formerly Paul Wellstone and currently Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, could best be described as socialist.  And by that we don’t mean “dictatorship of the proletariat” socialist, but “Denmark & Sweden” socialist.  Both of those European countries have private property, a market economy, etc. and are light years away from China, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea, the remaining “communist” countries.  They’d be more accurately described as capitalist countries with substantial socialist elements.  Giving everyone free health care is going to cost a lot, and their tax rates are extremely high relative to ours, but they don’t have gulags or a secret police.   So in the unlikely event that Bernie Sanders somehow wound up as our President, with AOC as his VP, AND somehow Congress wound up controlled by Democrats both in the House and Senate, our worst case scenario is Sweden, paying $$$$ taxes but not having to worry if we get sick, as the government itself is our health insurance.  A far cry from Stalin’s Russia.

Note that the reality of both parties running in red & blue states means that red state Democrats might skew, ideologically, to the right of blue state Republicans, and vice versa.  This makes both red state Democrats and blue state Republicans (e.g. Mitt Romney and Gary Johnson) particularly viable candidates for president. 

While I’m on the topic, let me talk about some recent Democrats.

Obama.  I didn’t vote for him, choosing Bob Barr in ’08 and Mitt Romney in ’12.  But he was born in Hawaii, and his mother is American, so even if he was born in Kenya he’d still be a US citizen at birth, so this whole business of accusing him of being ineligible for being born in Kenya is colossally stupid.  I’m not thrilled with ObamaCare or this whole business of drones, but aside from those I don’t have any major problems with him and don’t consider him the Antichrist.

The Clintons.  Bill Clinton was a popular two term president.  He was impeached in his second term but not convicted.  That whole business proved to be a waste of time.  NAFTA was fine, but he banned AR15s – no big deal, as I bought mine before the ban went into effect.  Despite all the noise about “Vince Foster” and “Whitewater”, neither Bill nor Hillary wore an orange jumpsuit for those.  For that matter, despite all the noise about “Benghazi”, Hillary was acquitted by a Republican Congress.  D’oh!   I don’t know what they got away with in Arkansas, but neither do I care.   Despite vociferously hostile political forces, neither has been convicted of anything, and neither currently holds any office.  I still find them both to be considerably less slimy than the current president.

Jimmy Carter.  He’s the oldest Democrat I can remember, though I was too young to vote in 1976.  Kudos for getting Begin and Sadat to shake hands at Camp David, but he messed up the Iran hostage deal.  I can’t really say I like or hate him either way.  He does seem like an honest man, which is a huge difference vs the current occupant of the White House. 

Joe Biden.  Although he isn’t yet the official nominee, his nomination will be rubber stamped at the convention.  We’ll see who he picks as VP.  Normally I’d consider him the epitome of mediocrity, who maxed out as Obama’s VP, but seeing as Trump has set the bar so low as to be subterranean, I can’t think of Biden winning in November as a bad thing.  

He does share the dubious distinction of being a Democrat whose view on marijuana seems to date back to 1937, and even stranger, appears to be sincere.  If he does win, and the Senate flips over to the Democrats, possibly he could be persuaded to sign off on pro-MJ legislation.  That remains to be seen.  I will not be voting for him, though:  Jo Jorgenson has my vote unless Jesse Ventura runs.

Al Gore.   “A lockbox…” & petulant huff/eyeroll.  In a perfect world, Al Gore died of prostate cancer in 1994 and Frank Zappa is still alive and well, and presumably convinced to run as President due to the current occupant of the Oval Office being so colossally incompetent as to induce this man to step forward.  Alas, that’s not what happened. 

Gore had his own share of sliminess.  He got my uncle knocked out as FEMA director because the guy talked back to him at a hearing.  He went to Vietnam in a journalist unit which would not see combat, so he could say he went without risking his life; this may have been why my uncle, a combat veteran of WWII and Korea, and not big on "people skills", saw fit to be a bit direct with Mr. Gore.  He likes to take credit for authoring the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 – because it eventually resulted in the Internet - but bristles at being accused of trying to take credit for creating the Internet. 

Earlier Democrats were Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, and Franklin Roosevelt, to name a few, my favorite being Grover Cleveland.  Of these, I’ll note the following:

1.         Johnson.  My mother was his personal nurse, and I have a framed birth announcement, signed by both Lady Bird Johnson and LBJ himself, dated on my actual birthday.  LBJ was from Texas and his legacy was sending US troops to Vietnam in 1965.  Bryan Cranston, aka Walter White from “Breaking Bad”, did a great job portraying him in a recent biopic.

 

2.         John F. Kennedy deserves credit for defusing the Cuban Missile Crisis, otherwise none of us would be here today.  I was not around to experience it, but by all accounts we came perilously close to a nuclear war with the USSR.

3.         FDR I commented on earlier, on a blog about him and his cousin Theodore https://formula57l.blogspot.com/2020/02/theodore-franklin.html.

4.         I also covered Grover Cleveland in a prior blog https://formula57l.blogspot.com/2012/12/time-tothrow-another-curve-ball-at.html.

There you have it.  No demons or communists, just a bunch of guys who were fairly similar to their Republican competitors. 

The Wire

Although nominally no longer seeing my amiga chinesa in Fort Lee, NJ, I am still in contact with her, and she helpfully clued me in that Amazon Prime had many HBO shows on streaming – until May 20.  That sparked me to finish off The Wire (ready for Season 5) and Boardwalk Empire (Seasons 4 & 5, blog forthcoming).

While I’d done a blog on Baltimore before, I had not reviewed this show, which as just noted, I only now finished.  Sadly, for various reasons, many TV shows or movies are set in one place but filmed somewhere else.  Any film taking place on Mars or another planet is obviously filmed here on Earth.  Some shows have to be filmed elsewhere because the actual location looks too different nowadays than it did when the movie or show is supposed to take place.  In some cases they take extreme liberties, as they did filming “Baretta”, a 1970s TV show set in Newark, New Jersey, in Los Angeles, a city which bears absolutely no resemblance to any place on the entire East Coast, much less a city from which NYC’s distinctive skyline can be seen.

 

Be that as it may, the producers of “The Wire” succeeded at filming this show in Baltimore, Maryland.   Some of it takes place down town in front of city hall – the downtown area which I recognize the most, though I’m in Baltimore County courts in Towson far more often than in the Baltimore City courts seen on this show - but much of it takes place in the less upscale neighborhoods, where the criminal element lives and does its business.  I can’t say I recognize those parts of town, but I’ve been through enough to know that it is, in fact, Baltimore. 

The narrative concerns the endeavors of the Baltimore City police department, which on occasion interacts with Baltimore County, Maryland State Police, and those pesky and arrogant bastards in the FBI (Feds).  There are various criminal elements, led by charismatic figures such as Stringer Bell (Idris Elba), attempting to establish or defend, as the case may be, their empire from both the legal authorities but also, more often, from each other.  The show also covers politics in the mayor’s office and at the Baltimore Sun, which seems to have an inferiority complex relative to the Washington Post, located southwest by about 30 miles.

What seems to really push peoples’ buttons, in a good way, about the show is that it describes all these organizations as being similarly dysfunctional.   Even the drug dealers have these meetings in a room around a table in which they discuss policy and strategy – what drugs they’ll be selling, who gets what territory and who should be whacked next - and for his part Stringer Bell seems to want to incorporate business ideas into the drug trade.   

Having said all that, the show revolves around all these colorful characters, and here are some of the more prominent ones I noticed and cared about:

Street Level Cops (Baltimore City PD)

McNulty (Dominic West).  The main dude, back as a patrolman in S4 and back in the detective section for S5, where he plots with Freamon to accumulate police resources for one task (a serial killer who only exists because McNulty himself is playing with the corpses of whichever homeless guy turns up dead) – APPROVED! – to be reallocated to the other – UNAPPROVED – to take down Marlo Stanfield, the up and coming drug kingpin, actually a much bigger threat and a much more worthwhile target of limited police resources.  An alcoholic with a string of failed relationships, he remains sympathetic despite, or maybe because of, his consistent dysfunctionality.

Kima (Sonja Sohn).  Half black, half Asian, lesbian police detective, very sharp and just as ethical.  My eyes are on her if she’s onscreen.

Freamon (Clarke Peters).  One of the detectives – he has a highly amusing WTF attitude, the epitome of COOL.

Bunk (Wendell Pierce).  A homicide detective leery of McNulty’s games, but just as on the ball as the rest.

Higher Level Officials

Cedric Daniels (Lance Riddick).  One of the more scrupulous and honest police superiors, we want to see him rise to the top, mainly because almost all of his superiors are complete assholes.

Carcetti (Aiden Gillen, well known as Littlefinger on “Game of Thrones”).  A councilmember who works his way up to Mayor – a white mayor of Baltimore, imagine that – by the end of season 4.  In season 5 he finds out the hard way how stressful the job is for a city that can’t simply solve all its problems by printing infinite amounts of money with no gold behind it.  I found him a bit slick but not slimey enough to be called dishonest, certainly nowhere as bad as Littlefinger.

Bad Guys

Omar (Michael Kenneth Williams, in Boardwalk Empire as Chalky White).  A robber whose exclusive target is drug dealers.  I couldn’t like him enough to cheer him or, nor hate him enough to want him dead.

Stringer Bell (Idris Elva).  The charismatic second in command of the west side gang, but his ambition and skill eventually put him at odds with his boss, Avon.  Here’s a line of work where being too good might well be just as deadly as being not good enough. 

Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris).  The head of the west side gang until he winds up in jail; his nephew doesn’t do too well.  Kind of arrogant but knows his stuff, at risk of being eclipsed by Bell.

Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector).  Effectively takes over from Avon Barksdale after Barksdale winds up in jail.  Young and arrogant but sharp enough to navigate the politics of Baltimore's underworld and imminent prosecution.

I like how the show doesn’t try to make all the crooks 100% likeable, and acknowledges that many of them are just plain bastards.  Among the more sympathetic ones, the deal is that traditional routes to success (college at University of Maryland or Johns Hopkins) are off limits due to the reality of coming from the streets, so they’ll do the best they can in the alternative career program of the criminal environment, until they reach a point where they can cash out and transfer to legitimate, legal sources of income.  But many are doomed to live and die entirely within the criminal underworld – again, as likely to be taken down by criminal competitors as by the police or the justice system. 

Miscellaneous

Bubbles (Mike Smith – just kidding, Andre Royo). The user who finally gets his act together in Season 5.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuRFzsGeETM

Compelling story lines, good characters, lots of Baltimore scenery, it’s hard to resist the show.  What I can’t fathom is why anyone from Maryland in general, or Baltimore in particular, would not want to watch the show, especially since it’s on DVD and no longer exclusive to HBO.  If I were running admissions at the University of Maryland, you couldn’t get in past me without successfully recognizing a “Wire” reference.   :D

Mein Kampf

[I had actually written this back in 2006, but as one of my earliest blogs on a prior site it did not make the transition to Blogger, the current site.   In its prior format I also reviewed Paulo Coelho’s book The Alchemist, which I’ll leave aside for now.  Both were dull books which I only finished by sheer determination.]

I started this in junior high, picked it up sometime in college (and got no further) and finally picked it up a third time years out of law school and finally finished it.  The problem is that the first half of the book is autobiographical and extremely dull.  The second half is where it starts to finally get interesting.  As most German speakers & writers are dense and verbose, and Hitler is no exception, I naturally had to read an English translation.

Mind you, Hitler held no political office before taking power in 1933 and had little in the way of education in 1914 before joining the Imperial German Army.  Reading his own words, you get the benefit of a one-sided conversation with Hitler himself (though most accounts indicate that his tendency was to dominate conversations anyway and not pay much attention to what anyone was trying to tell him).  

My own politics, restated yet again, are libertarian, and thus I have no inherent sympathy for national socialism, per se, or any doctrine advocating a totalitarian dictatorship.   By the time I read it completely I had developed my sympathies for libertarianism and read Atlas Shrugged multiple times.  The symbolism of Nazism, its swastikas, sigrunes and totenkopfs, are all well and fine, but fall well short of the critical mass necessary to convince anyone to actually embrace the ideology itself.

Having said all that, how would I summarize Mein Kampf, for those of us unlikely to elicit anywhere near the excessive patience required to digest the whole damn thing? Aside from hating Jews and France, did he have anything else of interest to say?

Actually, yes…

1.         Hitler loved England and had phenomenal admiration for Great Britain.  Britain, as a sea power with its Royal Navy and farflung overseas empire, was not necessarily at odds with Germany.  He actually criticized the Kaiser for trying to compete with Britain on the seas and with colonies abroad, a strategy which turned out poorly during WWI; did Germany truly derive any benefit from its empire? Discuss.  Hitler’s peace offering to Churchill in June 1940 was likely sincere, especially since he had that quest for lebensraum in the East to pursue and could use a few more divisions in that direction instead of guarding against an Allied invasion of Europe.

2.         Of course, Hitler hated France.  As a land power, France was a threat and a competitor to Germany in Europe.  Moreover, the French could at least be proud of Napoleon and his brief empire.   There would be no chance of peace with France if Hitler was running things.  And as we well know, Hitler defeated France and took that brief tour of Paris. 

3.         Growing up in Austria-Hungary, and in Vienna in particular, Hitler witnessed firsthand the chaos of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its parliament, hopelessly deadlocked with a multitude of different nationalities speaking different languages and at cross purposes.  Mind you, our own Founding Fathers felt that such an environment would prevent “tyranny of the majority” as no one group could dominate the rest.   Of course, Hitler had no background in US history, nor did he read any Marxist literature.   I guess his time in prison was spent dictating to Rudolf Hess instead of reading anything useful besides the newspaper.  If he had little patience to listen to anyone besides himself, what chance was there that he would have the patience to read what anyone else had to argue – especially anything resembling an opposing viewpoint.  He certainly wasn’t about to read the Federalist or Anti-Federalist papers or anything by an advocate of democracy and freedom.

4.         The flip side of this is that Hitler was convinced that the arduous process of taking power would ensure, in a Darwinian sense, that only the best and fittest would succeed at becoming dictator.   By that time (1924-25) Mussolini was in power in Italy, but Stalin had yet to consolidate power in Russia after Lenin’s death in 1924.  No bad dictators?  Enlightened despots?  We’ll see, won’t we?

5.         Hitler also predicted that the US would eclipse Great Britain as a world power.   Certainly true, and so far as I can tell, very much ahead of the curve in making this prediction.  And with the US successfully taking on Nazi Germany in France, Belgium, and Germany itself, AND island hopping through the Pacific against the Japanese at the same time, and finally building not one, but TWO atomic bombs AND successfully dropping them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surely the US proved him right on this issue – to his detriment and at his expense, along with Japan’s. 

As noted in my prior blog on Trump, I don’t know any Nazis personally, nor am I aware of anyone who read this book and emerged as a Nazi as a result.  He certainly didn’t persuade me, either of national socialism or of anti-semitism, which strikes me as gratuitous hate for its own sake.  For that matter, I never bothered to even attempt to read Das Kapital, and on that side of the spectrum, the Communist Manifesto is succinct enough for its stated purpose.   Atlas Shrugged, as long, verbose, and overindulgent as it may have been, did succeed at converting me to the libertarian cause.  My understanding is that Mein Kampf was liberally distributed in Nazi Germany but few bothered to actually read it. 

Anyhow.  There you go, the most interesting parts of this dull book condensed for the rest of us.  You’re welcome.  :D

Ragtime

I had meant to review these earlier, but criticizing Trump and waxing poetic about the virtues of the AR15 (yet again) took precedence.  

This was a novel, by E.L. Doctorow, in 1975, followed by a movie in 1981.

Two issues I want to address before I go into both.

Book vs. Movie.   How many times have you heard someone remark, when asked if they read a book, “I saw the movie” or “I’ll wait for the movie”?  Probably multiple times.  Unless the novel has been drawn out to a multi-episode miniseries, chances are you can watch a 90-120 minute movie much quicker than reading the novel.  None of us are getting any younger, so I suppose the time element could be a justification to forgo reading the book.

However, books give us certain benefits.  Characters' subjective impressions and thoughts – these don’t translate well into film.  Sex and nudity – you can go to town here on paper, to an extent which would render the film pornographic if faithfully adapted to the screen.  And sci-fi can go all over the place, to an extent which might be prohibitively expensive to translate onto the screen. 

Madison Square Garden.  What attracted me to Ragtime was the shooting of Stanford White by the jealous Harry Shaw at Madison Square Garden on June 25, 1906.  My father, a proud New Yorker (although from Brooklyn), told me that there were no less than FOUR different “Madison Square Gardens”.

V1.       1879-1890 at the actual Madison Square in Manhattan.  That’s named after James Madison (P4, 1808-1816) and located at Fifth Avenue and Broadway at Twenty-Third Street. 

V2.       1890-1925.  At the same location.  This is where the Shaw-White shooting took place in 1906.

V3.       1925-1968.  At Eighth Ave. between Forty-Ninth and Fiftieth Street, now the site of One Worldwide Plaza.

V4.       1968-present.  The current venue, where the Knicks and Rangers play, and concerts are held here.  It took over Penn Station, which is now completely underground.  I caught a season 4 episode of “Boardwalk Empire” where Nucky Thompson winds up in the above-ground Penn Station.  My sole experience at the current MSG was seeing AC/DC there in August 1988 with my brother.  We managed to snag fifth row seats from the box office just days before the show, probably because no one was particularly impressed with their current album, Blow Up Your Video, which truly stank.  Fortunately for AC/DC fans, the band is well aware that their later material stinks, and live you can expect the set to be mostly split between Bon Scott material and Back In Black songs, with just a handful of other songs.  Anyhow. 

Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow.  It was published in 1975, and Doctorow himself was born in 1931, so he has no firsthand knowledge of New Rochelle, NY, or of Manhattan, in the early 1900s.   The peculiar charm of the novel is that it blends a fictional family in New Rochelle, NY – the part of NY right before you hit Connecticut on I-95 after leaving NYC – with historical characters.  Moreover, the novel goes off in various tangents concerning the historical characters, leaving the fictional characters to be returned to later.  The novel’s various tangents were highly entertaining, so much so that reading it, in addition to watching the movie, was well worthwhile.  For example, Harry Houdini shows up early on, then Sigmund Freud & Carl Jung, then famous anarchist Emma Goldman, JP Morgan and Henry Ford, etc., with actress Evelyn Nesbit the most prominent historical character, winding up in a romantic relationship with fictional Younger Brother.

Ragtime (DVD).    I read about the Shaw-White shooting a few months ago, discovered this movie has it, put it on my Netflix queue (not available for sale on DVD for a cheap price) and by the time it finally arrived I had forgotten why I put it on my queue.  Elizabeth McGovern, nowadays the American Mom on “Downton Abbey”, is much younger, playing Evelyn Nesbit, the Gibson girl of the Art Nouveau era.  Part of the film deals with her, her jealous husband Shaw who winds up in a murder trial, and the Younger Brother (Brad Dourif) who has a crush on her.  Mind you, she shows up completely nude (!).  The rest of the film covers a black guy, Coalhouse Walker (Howard E. Rollins), a jazz musician fortunate enough to own a Model T.  Driving through New Rochelle, the local fire department blocks him off and dumps horse shit on his car.  Eventually Walker assembles a team of confederates – including Dourif’s character in blackface – in hoods, brandishing Springfield rifles, and takes the Pierpont Morgan Library hostage.  Relative to the novel, the film sticks to the narrative concerning the fictional family and ignores the tangents concerning historical characters.

The cast is remarkable.   I wasn’t able to recognize James Cagney as Police Commissioner Waldo, but I did recognize Dourif, McGovern, Jeff Daniels as a New Rochelle cop, Fran Drescher ("The Nanny") as a Jewish woman fighting with her husband in the Jewish neighborhood of NYC, John Ratzenberger as the cop who arrests Shaw after the shooting, and Samuel L. Jackson as one of Walker’s gang members.  This alone should make the film worth watching, but as noted above, I found the novel complements the film and makes enjoying both to be worth the effort.  

M16 and AR15

After reviewing my blog records, I realized that I’d never actually reviewed this particular weapon, though I’d mentioned it in prior blog entries.  As such, some of this might seem repetitive, so if you’re bored, move along, nothing to see here.

M16.   In the late 1950s, a guy named Eugene Stoner invented a new weapon for the US Army, the AR15, to replace the M14, the weapon which replaced the M1 Garand as its standard weapon in the 50s.  Unlike the Garand and M14, the AR15 had no wood, but a triangular plastic foregrip and stock – some thought this made it cheap, like a toy (“the Mattel gun”) – though the German WWII submachine gun, the MP40, came out several decades before and was 100% metal and plastic, a departure from the Bergmann and ERMA submachineguns the Germans were using immediately before.  Also, unlike the M14 calibered in 7.62x51mm, aka .308, the AR15 had a new cartridge and caliber, the .223/5.56mm. 

After some modification (the Air Force adopted the AR15 without nonsense or cluelessness) the Army adopted the AR15 as the M16.  In doing so it modified Stoner’s design slightly and also changed the formula for the .223 ammunition charge.  This caused immense problems when the weapon was used in combat in Vietnam, prompting a change to the M16A1.  Both the M16 and M16A1 are select-fire: they fire semi-auto OR full automatic, thanks to an auto sear inside the weapon.

 

They both have the triangular handguard; these used to be so common but unwanted as to be thrown away, whereas nowadays they’re difficult to find and in high demand, though they will only fit guns with 20” barrels, and many AR15s these days have 16” barrels.

Later on, the military ascertained that full automatic was wasting ammunition, and changed the design to fire three round bursts.   This became the M16A2.  In addition to that change, cosmetically the weapon went from the triangular handguard to a cylindrical handguard.  All of these are with 20” barrels.

Currently the US military is using the M4 Carbine, which has a 14.5” barrel and a vertical foregrip under the handguard.  The M203 grenade launcher has been a popular attachment under the handguard, obviously replacing the foregrip.  The M4A1 brings back the full auto provision instead of the 3 round burst. 

AR15.  In 1963, the civilian, semi-auto only AR15 was introduced.   The internals of the weapon forgo swapping in the auto sear from the M16 and easily converting it to select fire or full auto.  The caliber is the same: .223/5.56.  

In 1993 I purchased a brand new AR15, this was a Colt weapon with a 20” barrel and cylindrical handguard, meaning outwardly it looked identical to an M16A2.  I fired it once at Clark Brothers range in Warrenton, Virginia and sold it, partially in exchange for the Mauser Kar98K (WWII German, built in 1942) which I still have. 

More recently I purchased a Springfield Armory Saint, a more recent AR15 variant with a 16” barrel, new, proprietary handguard, collapsible stock, and other goodies, still in semi-auto format.  A major cosmetic difference is the absence of a carrying handle, which over the years came off once owners decided to fit all sorts of night sights on the top of the receiver, which the carrying handle interferes with.  I’ve fired it more than once, which puts me ahead of my prior ownership.

According to Springfield Armory, it took its time when coming up with the Saint, and when it did so, it took an eclectic mix of all the fancy features which AR15s had developed over the years, in particular (as identified in Springfield’s marketing materials): mid-length gas system w/pinned gas block; flip-up sights; M-LOK handguard (plastic, of course – have yet to see a wood handguard for an AR15); accu-tite tension system (whatever that is); forged upper and lower receivers (the two major sections of the gun itself); and M16 bolt carrier group.  Also, by now the standard magazine capacity is 30 rounds, and the current standard mags are made of plastic instead of steel (Magpul P-Mags). 

As noted, the AR15 is semi-auto only, meaning it fires as quickly as you can pull the trigger.  The M16, M16A1 (full auto) and M16A2 (3 round burst) are legal for civilians but only as Class III weapons, meaning you have to be willing to pay in the neighborhood of $25,000 and wait 6-9 months for the BATF to do a full background check on you.  Most civilians are probably satisfied to pay $500-$1000 for a semi-auto AR15 and leave it at that.  I know I am.

.223/5.56.  The two are not exactly the same: a gun chambered for 5.56 can fire .223 without a problem, but a gun chambered for .223 cannot fire 5.56.  I noticed my Saint specifically says “5.56mm” on the barrel.  FYI, most modern weapons have the caliber explicitly labelled on the gun itself (e.g. my Beretta says “9mm Parabellum” on the slide).   

There are two major types of 5.56mm: in M193 format, this has a 55 grain bullet, and in M855 format, it has a 62 grain bullet.   Supposedly M193 (55 grain) does a nice job on flesh but a poor job shooting through doors, windows, clothing, foliage, etc, whereas M855 (62 grain) does a better job of the latter but then simply zips straight through the person you’re trying to kill, without doing much in the way of damage.  Take your pick. 

https://www.ammunitiontogo.com/lodge/m855-vs-m193/  

vs. AK47.  I also have a civilian, semi-auto AK47, a Romanian variant with black stock and foregrip.  Of course it’s in 7.62x39mm caliber.  The Saint has a fairly roundabout way of loading, whereas the AK is simple:  load up the magazine and rack the charging handle.  The conventional wisdom is that AR15s are more accurate than AKs, but below 300 yards the differences are far less substantial.

The strange thing is, I keep hearing that the #1 reason for the .223/5.56 caliber’s adoption was because the rounds are smaller than .308/7.62x51 or .30-06, and so soldiers can carry more of them.  Certainly 5.56 cartridges are clearly smaller than 7.62x39 cartridges.  But when I look at the 30 round AR magazines and compare them with 30 round AK magazines, they aren’t a whole lot smaller.  In absolute terms, a 30 round AK magazine really isn’t all that big, at least as far as I perceive.

Militias.  With the COVID19 virus in the news lately, we’re also seeing an abundance of armed men walking around with rifles, protesting their governors’ demand that they stay at home and behave themselves.  Really, guns are not necessary to effectively protest, but apparently they believe an armed protest to be more persuasive and effective.  And the #1 gun you’ll see them carry is the AR15, in all sorts of different variations.  I haven’t seen one I could specifically identify as a Springfield Armory Saint, but I wasn’t looking too hard.  I’ve yet to hear of an armed protest in Virginia, I’d be more inclined to stay home and go out only for necessities, wearing the mask when I do - and leaving the Saint at home.  That’s as much as I’d care to comment about this at this time.       

Trump: It's Not About Politics

Lately I’ve been vocal about calling Trump himself and his supporters idiots, and gotten some flak about insulting people because I disagree with their politics.  What they don’t seem to understand, is that with regard to Trump’s incompetence and our opposition thereto, it’s not about his politics.

First off, I’m a Libertarian who was originally Republican.   Here are my presidential votes, starting in 1988, when I was 19:  George H. W. Bush (1988), George H.W. Bush (1992), Bob Dole (1996), Harry Browne (LPA) (2000), Badnarik (LPA) (2004), Bob Barr (LPA) (2008), Mitt Romney (2012), Gary Johnson (LPA) (2016).   I have never voted Democrat, at any level.  I default to Republican candidates unless a Libertarian happens to be running for that slot.  I have some issues with Democrats, which I’ll address in a later blog; for now, suffice to say that I am not a Democrat and never have been. 

FYI:  Libertarians are a third party whose basic premise is that the proper function of government is to protect individual rights, not to redistribute wealth (the Democrats’ major problem), to legislate morality (the Republicans’ major problem), or to start wars abroad or favor businesses with subsidies and regulations at their request (both parties’ problem).  As a practical matter most Libertarians seem to be former Republicans fed up with the GOP, and when it comes to stealing votes, the LPA’s votes are mainly at the expense of Republicans.  In addition to defending gun rights, Libertarians also support legalizing marijuana, which leads them to be slammed by Democrats as “Republicans who smoke pot.”   Among the Republicans themselves, the “Libertarian Wing”, as it were, is Ron Paul, Rand Paul (his son), Justin Amash, and Thomas Massie.  The LPA candidate for president in 2012 and 2016 was Gary Johnson, former Republican governor of New Mexico.  

Trump’s Politics.  He really doesn’t have any.  This was a guy born rich from the start, spoiled for his entire life.   A doctor renting space from his father falsely diagnosed him with bone spurs, which kept him out of Vietnam.   Even Al Gore knew enough to go to Vietnam, albeit in a non-combat unit, just so he could say he went; GWB went into the Air Force National Guard, a unit which would not be sent overseas.  Trump has not been mayor, state legislator, state governor, or US congressman.  His sole experience in politics has been in local, shady real estate deals, “you scratch my back, I scratch yours”.  He lacks the ability to understand politics at the abstract level; he wouldn’t know Das Kapital from Mein Kampf from Wealth of Nations.  Tell him, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” and he would zone out, not even recognizing the nature or source of that quote.

NRA.  About the only consistent political position Trump seems to be able to articulate is support for gun rights.  This isn’t because he loves guns, or is passionate about the principle behind the Second Amendment.  It’s because he simply recognizes the NRA as a political ally, so he’ll support whatever they ask him to do.   If someone else tells him, “maybe it’s not a good idea to allow private citizens to own guns which outwardly appear to resemble the M16s our own military carries,” he’ll say “yeah, sure” and unwittingly orally advocate gun control as a principle.  Then a few days later the NRA will helpfully remind him of their position, he will be utterly confused, but will then simply repeat what they told him to say.   Given that I support gun rights, own several guns, and am myself an NRA member, I have to say that on the one political position which Trump most consistently supports, I agree with him.  Not for the same reasons, but hey…

Under normal circumstances I would agree that calling someone an idiot because you disagree with their political views is wrong.   But I don’t do that with Democrats, who are ostensibly on the other side from me.   At the extremes, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who explicitly identifies as a National Socialist (Nazi), I may have met a few people who self-identify as communists, socialists, or anarchists, and do not recall ever calling them idiots for that reason, if any.  I do it with Trump supporters, not because they’re nominally Republican, or because Trump is nominally the Republican president, but because Trump is an idiot, Trump is incompetent, and his politics are irrelevant in this whole equation.  

Maybe you can imagine someone you went to high school with, someone you could sit down and have a beer with, and discussing politics the two of you would agree 100% on the issues.  But this person has never held office and is not qualified to be the mayor, much less run the United States.  Would you say this person should be the President simply because you agree with their politics?   Come on, now.