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A Memoir: Part Two
"The Pragmatic Volunteer" will be a twice weekly series. Check back every Wednesday and Friday for the latest installments!
Previously: A Memoir: Part One
Author's Note: What follows is the poorly thought-out and loosely examined history of the life of a guy who didn’t much matter in the grand scheme. But he mattered. We all matter. And I had a hell of a lot of… fun and such along the way. I intend to chronicle some of the experiences of a 23-year career in the United States Air Force.
So I was sent to Denver, Colorado for technical training. First time I’d ever liked a place that didn’t have an ocean nearby. One of the first things I learned living that far above sea level was that it really does matter in the realm of physical training. People younger than me were dropping off the sidewalk to puke in the grass (no running path back then at that base – the USAF wasn’t known for the elite-level physical fitness of its troops in those days).
The specialty to which I had been assigned was heavy on electronics and back then, that meant one needed to grasp basic stuff about circuits and theory and drinking beer and partying… wait. Just the first two. As far as you know. The first thing you have to learn when learning electric theory is algebra. It took me a minute to reacquire the whole ‘‘x’ is a number’ thing, but it clicked within the first couple days or so. Algebra is a funny old thing. One never needs it until one actually does. And when one needs it, nothing else will do. I think I’ll name my carry piece “Algebra.” Less than a month after I arrived at tech school, the space shuttle Challenger was scheduled to launch for its tenth mission. Because of the historic nature of that mission (mostly due to Christa McAuliffe being the first educator selected for space flight as part of “Teachers in Space,” a Reagan initiative to bolster public support for the expensive program), our instructor had a television on and tuned to CNN. For anyone too young to remember, CNN was pretty solid and worth paying attention to back then. They were also the only commercial network carrying the entire process live. So it was that I watched the disaster unfold in real time on television. It is the first time I remember crying in the presence of people to whom I wasn’t related. At the beginning of ‘systems school’ (the second phase of the training where we learned about the specific, well, systems we were to be working on in the field), the school’s squadron commander (aka commanding officer or CO) came in for a meet and greet. The major went around the room asking the usual stuff. Name, why did you decide to grace my beloved Air Force with your presence, etcetera. Answers were as you might expect (travel, college money, chicks…). Then he came to me. Again, I told the truth. He lost interest in me very quickly, which suited me just fine. It was also during this training that my education in the odd manners of speaking of my fellow countrymen continued. I was assigned a roommate from Wisconsin, and it actually took me a minute to understand what he was saying when he said the word “bag.” It sounded like ‘baeg.’ Something akin to the sound of the ‘bag’ in “bagel.” Fascinating. As it turned out, a guy from my ‘sister’ flight in BMTS was also a Sconnie and had also been selected for the same career field as me. We became good friends at our first Permanent Duty Station (PDS). I may or may not have called him “Bagel” a lot after a few beverages. A couple weeks after Challenger, my daughter was born. The DoD insurance covered almost all of the medical costs and everything turned out fine. Mission Accomplished. She was born in my hometown because her mother had been too pregnant for air travel by the time I was authorized to have ‘dependents’ living with me. There are actually some strict rules in the Air Force, despite what some of the other services may insist. So I flew down to meet her the following Friday after duty. It was 14 February, and she was beautiful. She still is. At some point before the end of tech school I received the assignment to my first PDS. Bergstrom Air Force Base just outside Austin, Texas. I was newly minted Avionic Sensor Systems Technician, and Bergstrom was home to the largest collection of RF-4C reconnaissance jets stationed in the continental United States (CONUS). The RF-4C was a modified version of the famous fighter from early in the Vietnam era. The F-4 was known to those of us who loved / hated her as ‘The Flying Pig.’ The theory was that if you put big enough engines on it, you can make a brick fly. I was assigned to an Aircraft Maintenance Unit (AMU) and my buddy Bagel to the back shop. Basically, I fixed wires and such on the flightline and helped with other duties to keep those pigs flying and taking pictures. If the problem came down to a box, my job was to pull the box and take it to Bagel and he’d fix it. One of the more mundane and routine tasks on my daily schedule was taking mission film from the Recces, putting it into a plastic film can and delivering it to the “PIs” or Photographic Interpreters. These are intelligence folks who specialize in figuring out exactly what an aerial image shows. Have you ever tried to figure out the height of a building based on shadows and other inputs just from an overhead image? It’s… complicated. Every couple of years back in those days (when most developed countries used manned aerial tactical reconnaissance vehicles – most now don’t), an international competition called the Reconnaissance Air Meet (RAM) was held to determine who was the Best Damn Recce Unit in the World. It was serious business, and we were very busy during the 10 days or so Bergstrom hosted it when I was there. Also found out that Aussies have a summer uniform that includes short trousers. Lucky bastards. On the flightline, we used color codes for the various flying units to differentiate between all of them. My unit, for example, was the 45th AMU. On the radio, the 45th was “Blue,” and my specialty was “Blue Photo.” During RAM ‘86, with many units from all over the world visiting, we had to expand our use of the light spectrum on radio comms. So one unit was known on the radio as “Black Photo.” To keep things fair, we had all been assigned converted conexes to use as storage for film and as darkrooms to do the aforementioned removing film from cameras and putting it into cans. As a home unit, we had our own hardened (and air conditioned) facility, but were required to use the conex so the playing field was level. We also were not allowed to use the darkroom we had built into the back of our ‘bread truck’ for the same reason. That was a ‘local man’ thing, and not everyone was clever enough to have one. These conexes were left unsecured during the flying schedule. They were secured using padlocks and there weren’t enough keys to ensure every crew could have access when they needed it. The USAF team out of Zweibrücken Air Base in what was then West Germany was assigned the “Black” radio call sign. And we were having issues with them stealing our film and other supplies, which they did to such an extent that it caused us problems at times. So we came up with the always-effective ‘put a piece of paper with words on it up on the door’ plan. That ought to keep those jerks out of our stuff. The words written on that piece of paper? “No Black Photo Troops!” It never even occurred to any of us that there might be some type of issue. We knew what we meant. A bit later, our expediter (the guy driving the Blue Photo bread truck and assigning us all various jobs) pulled up at the conex. I was in the truck at that point. Well, Blue Photo expediter, himself a black photo troop (but not a Black Photo troop) saw our sign and he could not stop laughing. Finally, he caught his breath, said ‘Yeah, fuck those assholes!,’ and had us change the sign to “Blue Photo Personnel Only.” Ah, youth. Another particularly memorable flightline moment happened later in my 3-year tour of duty at Bergstrom. The bread truck had pulled up to a jet on which I had been assigned a job. As I moved to gather my tools and equipment, our flightline maintenance ops coordinator (call sign “Alpha”) crackled into life on the radio alerting the Maintenance Operations Center, from which all flightline maintenance was overseen: “MOC, Alpha. We’ve got one on fire.” I looked out the front windows of the truck and saw an F-4 standing still in the air, nose pointing at the sun. Fire was indeed evident, and a second after I looked up, there was a “pop” and some extra flames. A few seconds later, as the ruined equipment was exiting my field of view, I saw two silk canopies descending from the vicinity where it had been. Both aircrew members survived with minor injuries. ‘Minor injuries’ is code for ‘were violently jettisoned out of a flying jet aircraft by rocket-powered seats with enough force to escape the conflagration which drove this drastic decision.’ Did you realize that Martin-Baker Ejection Seats egress an F-4 so quickly that your eye can’t detect it (at least not when you’re marveling at seeing an Air Force jet burn in the sky)? I did not. As it was reported later, the No. 2 engine (that’s the starboard one of the two jet engines), experienced a massive compressor failure on takeoff due to an undetected or ‘within tolerance’ crack in a flywheel in the workings of it. “Massive compressor failure” means the turbine stopped turning all at once, like locking your brakes but you didn’t know it was going to happen. And you’re hundreds of feet in the air. When I first saw the plane, the driver was vertical in a very tight turn in a heroic attempt to get that piece of shit to the ‘safe area’ (safe space?), which was a large area of clear field designed for jets with major problems to ditch if possible. We do that near cities. He never exited that hard bank because the ruined No. 2 had flung bits of metal through one of the internal fuel tanks along the spine of the F-4 (this caused the “pop” and explosion I witnessed), and into the No. 1 engine, ending its useful life. If you know anything about human flight in general and F-4s particularly, you know that this was the point at which one of the crew used one of the ejection handles and they lived to fight another day. We found most of the pieces over the next few days in the wilderness beyond the runway. The jet landed in a self-storage maze near the intersection of Texas 183 and Riverside Drive. It crashed so perfectly inside that you couldn’t see the wreck from any angle accessible from the streets nearby. I drove around it and looked. That jet was ensconced inside the maze of units. You would be surprised how many people who rent such storage facilities remember they keep expensive sports cars and very large jewels in there after the federal government drops a burning jet on their old Elton John records. No civilians were present. No one was seriously injured in the course of the day’s events. My arms did get scratched up from digging through brambles looking for jet pieces. Thanks for asking. Early in this first tour of duty, I broached the idea of having another baby with The Reason I Joined the Military (TRIJtM). She was enthused about it, and so about 9 months later, our son was born. We were young and frisky. And fertile, by any objective measure. I was in the room when this one came along. At the clinic on Bergstrom, so the boy is technically a Texan. Bonus! The reasons we decided to have another child so close to the first (they’re ~1.5 years apart) are manifold (aren’t they always), but mostly it was that I had never planned to serve more than that first 4-year hitch. At a year out I was studying options, had calls in, some good prospects on shrimp boats and possibly the (erstwhile) paper mill back home. And then a thing happened which caught me by surprise: I had a minor ankle injury and was working the dispatch radio when my boss came in and told me I had gotten an assignment to the Philippines. I had heard of such a place, but really had no idea where it was or why my rich uncle would want me to go there. So I talked to some old heads who had been there and did some serious thinking about how hard the work is on shrimp boats. And after a consult with TRIJtM, I reenlisted and we were off to the other side of the world. Woooooo!
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Welcome back to "Ask Alex", where I answer all of your stupid questions with even dumber answers. Have a question you need answered? Tweet it, email it or submit it here and I will get to it (maybe) next week.
-------------------------------- This week, you're getting Ask Alex a day early because Alex is going to be traveling for the next couple of days and didn't think you would all survive without her wit. She is a giver, after all. She spends an awful lot of time in this column talking about Mexico for some reason. She also covers more of her inexplicably favorite television shows, does a little sex-injury talk, gives out some tough-love advice and then dissects Canada’s affliction with an excess of soft wood. Let’s get to your questions! Submitted by: CDP Would you go a couple thousand feet down in a homemade 2-man submarine with its sketchy looking owner? I’ve gone down in sketchier things than that... Surprisingly, this question is NOT a euphemism, he is talking about a literal homemade submarine (as opposed to a littoral submarine, which wouldn’t be able to go very deep at all). And he is talking about one of my (inexplicably) very favorite television shows: River Monsters. You’re probably wondering why a girl who has never lived in any place that couldn’t be described as “urban”, and whose last fishing trip didn’t go very well is so mesmerized by a show about fishing. And frankly, I don’t really have a good answer for that. It sort of fits in alongside my love of Alaska-based reality shows, but a lot of that is very much because the people involved are so incredibly bizarre (looking a you, Noah Brown…) For the uninitiated, River Monsters catalogs the adventures of the ruggedly refined Mr. Jeremy Wade as he takes his dreamy blue eyes, silver hair and charmingly crooked smile around the globe to catch the scariest, most horrifying man-eating freshwater creatures on earth. Jeremy is an artist, a scholar, a poet, an adventurer and a gentleman all wrapped up in one erudite British angler. I can’t tell if he is gay or just British, but he is one sneaky-hot silver fox of a sex symbol. He’s not sneaky hot like Allison Brie, exactly, but he’s got an appeal that is a lot stronger than you’d guess at first glance (ratings note...45% of the audience for this show is female, which I am kind surprised at. except that I just spent two paragraphs telling you that Jeremy is hot, so maybe not.) He is also not above jumping in a river to chase a fish (in a perfectly weathered Oxford shirt, obvs), or using himself as bait, or trying to get himself zapped by an electric eel. He has captured things as disparate as the insanely adorable giant Japanese Salamander and the Goliath Tigerfish, which I can only assume is a thing that Great White Sharks have nightmares about. Within the last season, he has expanded the quest to include ocean-fishing, which has opened the door to millions more (it seems) horrible, horrible creatures that are just below the surface of the ocean at all times trying to eat you. That included a brand new episode this week in which he hooked an 1,100 pound Sixgill Shark that had never before been caught by fishing rod, and then hopped in the above mentioned homebrew submarine to try and find one at its natural depth (several thousand feet) by strapping a pig carcass to the front of the sub. Along the way, he mentioned that, nbd, they had no means of being rescued if something went wrong and no way of communicating with the ship on the surface. Were these my favorite Alaskan Gold Miners, I would happily note the rank idiocy of the gang that can’t shoot straight, but for Jeremy, it just seems like an insignificant detail that might add drama for other people, but probably not him… To answer your question, then, no I wouldn’t get in that sub with its sketchy owner, but I sure as hell would get in that sub with Jeremy Wade! Submitted by: Kayla So, this girl I know (definitely not you, Alex, and definitely not me...totally someone else...OK, it’s my friend, um, Becky) got super drunk recently and forgot how “strenuous” certain activities can be. Then she woke up with a splitting headache and several regrettable aches and pains...this seems like something you’d have some insight on. Also, there was a giant stuffed bear with a #MAGA hat on the mantlepiece. Possibly related. I’m not sure what kinda dirty slut you think I am that I would have a lot of insight into sex injuries...I’m as virtuous as Arete herself! In fact, had I lived in Rome, they likely would have named the goddess Virtus Alex instead and we would be using the word alexious to describe someone of high moral standards. Probably. (“Shit, that chick is cray!” - Things Caligula probably would have said if he met 20 year old Alex.) Kayla, when a boy and a girl fall in love, they sometimes have certain urges. These urges are natural and they shouldn’t be ignored: they are just God’s way of telling you that you are not a little girl anymore, and you are getting ready for motherhood. It’s nothing to be ashamed of...after all, sex is natural, it's chemical, it's logical, habitual, it's sensual, but most of all, sex is something that we should do...sex is something for me and you. Sex is natural, sex is good, not everybody does it but everybody should*, sex is natural, sex is fun, sex is best when it's one on one**. *Despite being in Wham!, George Michael is not a doctor. Please consult with your doctor to see if your heart is healthy enough for sex **FactCheck: questionable I opened this question to Twitter to see if anyone wanted to share any funny sex injury stories, but apparently I’m followed by a bunch of joyless prudes who limit their humping to missionary style love under the warm covers of a darkened room. Thankfully, I have no such reservations about slutting it up a little bit… Not to turn this into an issue of Penthouse Forum, but I could rattle off a pretty long list of injuries ranging from muscle strains to bumps and bruises to just plain old issues of overuse. And none of those include anything related to any kind of BDSM stuff, which isn’t really my bag. It also doesn’t count that one time that I had sex with my husband, slowly swelled up to the size of an elephant seal and then required surgical intervention 8 months later to remove two massive growths from my uterus. That is a whole other story... I once missed a day of work because I threw out my back in the shower. That was really weird...there was nothing particularly acrobatic or scandalous about the actual sex, I must have just been leaning over at a really weird angle, because 20 minutes later my lower back seized and I could barely move. Speaking of which, I hear way too many people down on shower sex...which to me is just a sign that you need a bigger shower and a bench. And/or some Trader Joe’s Mango Shave Lotion (trust me on this...you’ll thank me later). That wasn’t even my first shower injury...I slipped and bruised my tailbone once a long time ago. I was standing on one foot and may have possibly been in something of a toe-curling moment and lost the grip on the floor. Wham...straight down and whacked my ass on the stone bench in the shower. That was hilarious at the time, but hurt a lot more the next day. And I have fallen out of bed. Twice. There were extenuating circumstances on both occasions that I will refrain from sharing in this forum (you’re welcome to ask offline...I may ignore you or I may answer you, I make no promises) but I am a repeat bed-faller-outer. One of them involved a pretty good knock on my head that left a bump and a splitting headache the next day (could have been a concussion, could also have been the river of vodka I drank before that.) The other time I landed on my elbow and got another pretty nasty bruise. None of these, I would like to note, ever led to abandoning the intended goal, mind you, because that would have been a total rookie move. I also once cut my finger really badly, but that was only sort of tangentially sex-related. It was more directly related to picking up a piece of a broken ashtray with the intention of throwing it back at my mother, who had thrown it against a wall near me in anger for sneaking my boyfriend into my bedroom during my junior year of high school. OK, not exactly “sneaking” so much as telling her that solely because I knew it would make her get angry and do something like throw an ashtray at me. It was a super healthy relationship. Submitted by: @fastfreefall Alex, i just got my tax refund and need to make it grow quick. Kid's college bill, my vices, hobbies, the vig on a sketchy loan, and a Yaqui shaman in the Sonoran desert I keep on retainer all add up to a desperate need for cash. Should I put it in a mutual fund, try to grow it at black jack or craps? Thanks. Well you have come to the right place! I happen to specialize in can’t-lose get-rich-quick schemes! I mean, I don’t want to brag, but I once made like a billion dollars in a month in Dope Wars… First of all, few people ever really have income problems, they have spending problems. And you are no exception, so we are going to need to trim some of this fat. Your children can fend for themselves...so that is right out. What is the point of paying for their college if they are just going to have to support you in old age? I’d also cut loose the Shaman...that guy almost certainly isn’t pulling his weight. You could just buy Castenada’s whole series on Don Juan Matus and learn all there is to know, but I’d even encourage you to skip that. Not to sound culturally insensitive, but I wonder what - other than an extraordinarily high tolerance for punishment - the Yaqui have to offer you. For 500 years they’ve barely advanced as a civilization and they’ve been the butt end of abuse by the Spanish, American and Mexican authorities, as well as their rival Natives. Most of their historical highlights are failed revolts against various Spanish and Mexican authorities and a series of decisions to back horribly inept alternatives to those authorities. Lest you think I am making light of a great deal of suffering, I will seriously note that the Yaqui have been the victims of a long string of horrible injustices inflicted by a wide range of bad actors. Just as one example circa 1900, Porfirio Diaz, Mexico’s 30+ year dictator, repeatedly provoked the Yaqui into uprising for the purpose of seizing their land for his mining friends. He then re-accommodated at least 5,000 Yaqui into the exciting new Mexican industry of “slavery.” By 1937, Mexico kinda felt bad for the 10,000 remaining Yaqui and elected a leader, Lazaro Cardenas, who was someone sympathetic to their plight (note: he was also the general who defeated them in a war in 1917). Cardenas granted them autonomous lands and a whole bunch of farming equipment and training that seems to have been pretty beneficial to the Yaqui. As far as I can tell, there are a little over 30,000 Yaqui living today, spread between that territory and other parts of Mexico, Arizona and Texas as well. While all of that is a fun little history lesson, it does make me question what great wisdom you really expect to gain by following the teachings of a guy who seemed crazy enough to a society of squash farmers that they (presumably) threw him out. I’m pretty sure that he is basically the Vox of the Yaqui, mindlessly spouting poorly-reasoned and utterly useless thinkpieces, and that they just have a lot less tolerance for that sort of behavior that whitey does. End result: the shaman is off the payroll. You also list your vices and your hobbies separately, which seems to indicate that your vices aren’t really that strong. A really good vice, whether it is vodka, gambling, heroin or hookers is going to crowd out any actual hobbies. Not a lot of raging alcoholic stamp collectors, and very few people elect to buy comic books rather than feed their smack habit. So cut whatever dumb hobbies those were. That leaves the vig on a sketchy loan and these unnamed “vices”. Since you asked about gambling, instead of just heading straight to the casino, I’m going to assume that gambling is not one of those vices. Which also means that, unless you are a threat to appear on My Strange Addiction (“I eat carpet. Not in the lesbian sense, I mean I eat actual wool carpeting”), your basic problem is either some kind of substance, or professional ladies of the night. Really, from a financial perspective, this is a super easy decision. First, you should stop snorting that much cocaine. Second, either quit banging hookers, or buy cheaper hookers...sure, they will be a little fatter and have fewer teeth, but in your state, I can’t see where that matters a whole lot. And third, the appropriate use of the money is to pay off that sketchy loan. If that loan is as sketchy as you say, then the rate on that loan is almost certainly predatory and it is unlikely that you will find any potential investment that will outperform that. So get that guy off your back with you legs intact, and for fuck’s sake, man, get your shit together. Submitted by: Timothy E. Miller How do women handle social conflict vs how men handle it? Is there a definite variation or difference? I doubt I am breaking new ground here, but men and women do tend to handle social conflicts in different ways (except on Twitter, where everyone handles conflict with the same basic pattern: 1) snark, 2) insult, 3) taking offense, 4) blaming the insulter and/or snarker, 5) blocking, 6) nostalgic reminiscence about that crazy fat chick with the blue hair and the weird Aaliyah obsession). {That remains one of my very favorite Twitter moments, and I am pretty sure that @rrobertshwartz, @marcannem96, @nochiefs, @sohlersarah and @brunuscutus will all enthusiastically agree on that. And probably Don McLean, too.} Short version: men tend to be more physically confrontational and women tend to be much more political. If two guys in middle school get in an argument, they meet by the bike rack, punch each other in the face twice and then everyone is pretty well friends again. Girls are much too refined to punch, so they enlist all of their friends, choose sides, spread rumors and refuse to speak to each other for the entirety of high school. Unless there is hair pulling, of course. I know there are people who are fond of saying that there would be fewer wars if women ran the world, but they often leave out that there would be a lot more cold wars. Italy won’t sign a trade deal with Mexico because Mexico was on Spain’s side when France and Spain had that argument over Andorra in 1987 and Italy was on France’s side. Plus, Mexico TOTALLY wore the same flag as Italy to the UN ball, and who do they think they are kidding by putting that little design on there and pretending they didn’t totally steal it from Italy? Mexico is a slut and I heard that she blew Japan after the last Olympics in the parking lot before he drove her home, but then he totally bailed on her because he really only let her do that to make Estonia jealous. I mean, I don’t know for sure, but Argentina told me, and she said that New Zealand saw her crying in the parking lot at Dairy Queen about it later that night with Nigeria and Morocco. By the way, I am pretty sure that New Zealand’s “deviated septum” surgery was really just a nose job. Let’s take a second here to appreciate the Mexican flag, which is pretty awesome. Sure, they clipped the colors from Italy, but have you ever looked closely at the crest in the middle? It’s a Golden Eagle eating a Rattlesnake while perched on a prickly pear cactus, which serves as a metaphor for good and evil in traditional European cultures while simultaneously recreating the legends of the founding of Tenochitlan, when an eagle (representing the Sun god) devoured a snake (representing knowledge). I think the cactus was just to kinda tie the whole thing together, like Jeffrey Lebowski’s rug. On this subject, I am going to declare that Albania has the coolest flag. Red flag, black double eagle...simple but it shouts blood and mayhem and I love it. I’m going to give Oregon the nod for best state flag, since it has two different sides and one of those sides is a beaver. South Carolina, New Mexico and Alaska are the runners up for that designation. Texas and California would be, but you people fly them way too often...tone it done, you’re annoying everyone else!!! Want me to prove it? I don’t even have to link to them because you already know what they look like. Wait, what was I talking about? Right, conflict resolution. Apparently, women sometimes get sidetracked in absurd discussions about flags, which reminds me that this is at least my second digression into flag trivia...the very first Ask Alex question got me on the subjects of flags. Why do I love flags so much, and how come I have never noticed this before? I better move on...this answer is off the rails and there is no getting back. Submitted by: Shooting Hipster The softwood lumber dispute between Canada and the US is as old as the trees. Who's right and who's wrong in this dispute? The countervailing duties announced today against Canadian lumber producers are as high as 25% effective May 1st. Some are retroactive up to 90 days. Is this a good move by the administration? What will be the effects of this decision? Who gains and who pays? Because I am a super classy broad, I am not even going to make any jokes about how of course America has a shortage of softwood and needs to import it from Canada. That would be crass and offensive to Canadian men! Although, now that I think of it, my favorite Twitter Canadians, like Citizen Dickbag (the single best handle on Twitter) and McJenny, tend to be women...so maybe I am on safe ground with softwood jokes. I should just leave it to them (that is what we like to call "an invitation"). Moving on… I’m going to take this one from bottom to top, starting from the questions at the end. The people who gain (and the ones who most aggressively lobbied for the tariffs) are domestic softwood lumber producers, who will feel the relief of about ⅓ of their market competitors suddenly being forced to charge ~20% more for the same products. The people who pay most directly are the large consumers of softwoods (first and foremost home builders) and indirectly their customers (home buyers). Also, impacted, obviously, would be the makers of the traditional two-color plaid favored by Canadian loggers, who can expect to see a steep decline in sales to the makers of more elaborate-patterned plaid worn by American loggers. A sharp hedge fund manager may go long Dunkin Donuts and short Tim Horton’s in anticipation of some hiring changes... I don’t think that it is a particularly wise policy by the administration, but I am also not going to pretend that it is a big deal in isolation. Nor am I particularly worried about a huge trade war with Canada, despite Trump’s bluster and Canada’s milk-pricing maneuvers. When you really get down to it, we’re just not going to get into a huge fight with Canada over this...they are our biggest trading partner and foreign energy provider, our closest ally, our most important friend and culturally the country on earth most similar to the United States. We’ve had trade disputes before and we will have trade disputes in the future and we will work them out like we always do because it is in both of our best interests. As you note in your question, this is a 34-year running dispute over lumber subsidies and it is likely to get smoothed over in a manner similar to prior engagements. This last flared up in 2006, at which time we negotiated a 10-year agreement designed to fix the issue (the expiration of that deal is what caused the recent hubbub.) Your question of right and wrong, though, is a tougher one...and the answer is unclear, although the WTO has historically sided with Canada over this. The root of the issue is in forest ownership. US forests are privately owned and managed. Forestry companies buy their land privately and then harvest the lumber on the land according to their own schedules and based on their own business analysis. They tend to replant and re-grow the forests that they cut since it is in their interest to do so because they already own all of that land. The cost of the forests, then, are paid in the taxes on the land and the cost of capital required to acquire and hold the forests. It is priced right into the business model. In Canada, most forests are publicly owned, and the timber companies lease the land from the government at regulator-established long-term prices. There is no market mechanism, really, and US producers argue that the leases are substantially below what would be a market-based lease rate. Complicated other factors (location and size, variety and species of trees) make those comparisons difficult to make, but my general instinct is that a Canadian price advantage is due to the pricing of land...it just doesn’t seem like there would by any other systematic differences to account for significant price differences, and some reasons - transport and working conditions - that would make Canadian lumber inherently pricier. {Note: no one has actually said how big this price advantage is, just that it seems to exist.} Call me crazy, but it strikes me that the easiest solution to all of this is for Canada to simply establish standard environmental and production terms and then auction the leases in a free and fair bidding process...best way to figure out a fair market price is to, you know, create a fair market. But what do I know? BUT… We’re still not addressing the root issue here. This isn’t about milk of lumber or even the Viagra supply to treat that softwood problem. This is about a much larger affront to Canadian sensibilities and national pride. They are too polite to say so publicly, but I think we all know what the Canadians are really after: an end to the United States’ refusal to export any Stanley Cups to Canada. This is going on 25 years now, and unless Edmonton or Ottawa can somehow buck the trend, this will be yet another spring of a totally Cup-less Canada. Is it any wonder they’re so angry?
On the 16th of August in the year 1660, in the town of Chipping Campden in England, a man named William Harrison left his house to go for a walk. Mr. Harrison disappeared, save a few articles of slashed and bloody clothing. Following a convoluted series of pleas and trials (including one offered and then retracted guilty plea), three servants were charged with, convicted of, and hanged for the murder of Mr. Harrison. Then, in 1662, William Harrison came home. His story of his disappearance wasn’t very believable, but one thing was abundantly clear: he was very much alive, so the three people executed for his murder hadn’t killed him.
The earliest hard evidence of encoded death penalty laws enforced by a state actor dates to the 18th century B.C. and Hammurabi of Babylon. There were 25 different crimes punishable by death. In the 7th century B.C. Draco of Athens just went ahead and made everything punishable by death, although in his defense the Athenians did ask him to do it (he was subsequently ostracized and driven out of Athens, proving that The People have always been fickle). The Judeo-Christian tradition also obviously has historical and religious justifications for the death penalty. Modern America’s use of the death penalty, as rare as it is today in historical terms, is keeping with what has been considered a societal norm in most places at most times. This is not, however, a very compelling argument for its continued use. The state of Arkansas, in its haste to make hay while the sun shines, has brought the death penalty to the political fore in a way that it isn’t much anymore in America. The conventional wisdom is that people on the Right will be for the death penalty, those on the Left will be against it, and that is still largely true. But support for the death penalty on the Right offers a glaring contradiction beyond any moral or religious argument: why, if you distrust the government to the extent that so many on the Right purport to, would you trust the government to get the death penalty right? This contradiction actually applies to the justice and legal systems as a whole. Most police officers, prosecutors, and judges are undoubtedly good citizens just trying to do their jobs. But so are most people at the DMV. It doesn’t necessarily make them above reproach, or even particularly competent. The idea that being reflexively in favor of law and order as a “conservative” principle in any traditional understanding of the term is to lose sight of the fact that those police officers, prosecutors, and judges are, in fact, the government. They should frankly be viewed with the skepticism traditional conservatives view any arm of the government. And they should certainly be viewed with the utmost skepticism when the question involves the state taking the life of a citizen. Barring a Constitutional amendment banning it, states have the right to carry out the death penalty if their voters so wish. But at some point, it became, like everything else in America, a purely political proposition. Voters tend to believe that their side, the people they’ve elected, will get it right. For politicians in red states or conservative districts, being against the death penalty means you’re soft on crime. That these politicians get elected by decrying government corruption, ineptitude, and waste is an irony seemingly lost on most voters. Skepticism of the government should demand that we are skeptical of all government, not just those aspects of which we disapprove. Which brings us back to Mr. Harrison. His reappearance and the subsequent realization that the authorities had executed three innocent people is said to have led to the English common law principle of corpus delicti, literally “body of the crime.” Literally needing a body to convict of murder actually persisted well into the 20th century in the English-speaking world. Yes, some guilty people undoubtedly escaped justice. But (getting back to that Judeo-Christian tradition) as Maimonides put it, better to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death. And where the government is concerned, do you really believe they only screw it up one time in a thousand? |
MisfitsJust a gaggle of people from all over who have similar interests and loud opinions mixed with a dose of humor. We met on Twitter. Archives
January 2024
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