Don't Let the Door Hit You, Uncle Bob 5 July 2011 by Jeff Huber

Leave it to the Washington Post, perhaps the most fetid carcass in the tomb of our once vibrant fourth estate, to lead the pandering applause for recently recycled defense secretary Bob Gates. In a recent fawning fluff piece on the Gates legacy, Pentagon correspondent Greg Jaffe, a journalistic progeny of David Petraeus myth fabricator Thomas E. Ricks, gushes like a bobbysoxer about how Gates established a reputation for “straight talk.” There’s plenty of media shame to go around on this story, though; Anna Mulrine of the Christian Science Monitor writes a similar love letter, cooing about the how Gates spoke “truth to power.”

Great. Caesar’s. Ghost. If Uncle Bob established anything, it’s that his mouth has more sides to it that the number of angels that can fit on the head of a pin. In a city desperately overpopulated with nude emperors, Gates was especially notable for his ability to maneuver around the naked truth like a master danseur. The guy had more positions than the Kama Sutra.

Possibly the best example of Gates’ mendacity is his smoke-and-mirror bombast on reductions in defense spending. Gates conspicuously championed the cause of reduced military spending. But his idea of slicing $100 billion from the defense budget over five years was “saving” it so the Pentagon could spend it on modernizing and recapitalizing military equipment and sustaining troops. That’s like forcing your kids to "save" their allowance so they can blow it in a candy store. And when you get right down to it, the military’s major expenditures come in two basic categories: equipment and troops. The only other military expense is war, and where the federal budget is concerned, war is like Jell-O: there’s always room for it.

In June, Gates’ number necromancers announced plans to “freeze” the Pentagon’s budget, by which they actually meant that they could stop asking for annual increases—excepting for adjustments for inflation, of course—by 2015. But a lot can happen between now and then, and even Gates sheepishly (or wolfishly?) confessed that predictions that far into the future have a “troubled track record” and that "any number of these decisions could be reversed." By “any number,” one can safely assume that Gates meant “all.”


"The defense budget
is not the cause
of this country's
fiscal woes."
In a speech to his war mongrel pals at the American Enterprise Institute (parent organization of Bill Kristol’s malignant Project for the New American Century), Gates allowed that defense budget cuts needed to be “part of the solution” to the country’s economic woes, but in the same breath he added “I have long believed – and still do – that the defense budget, however large it may be, is not the cause of this country’s fiscal woes.” That’s a remarkable remark, considering that the official defense budget accounts for over 50 percent of discretionary federal spending and that the real tab for defense outlay, when you chalk up defense related spending not included in the DoD budget—non-DoD agencies defense-related spending, veterans benefits, interest on debt incurred by military spending and so on—may, according to some credible arguments, run to over half of all federal outlays.

But the defense budget largely trickles into the pockets of military industrialists like the folks who belong to the American Enterprise Institute, and they are perfectly willing to hear that defense spending had nothing to do with ruining the economy. They want to believe, or rather they want the rest of us to believe, that the economy was shipwrecked by all those black and brown people who got up one morning and forfeited on $700,000 billion worth of mortgages that the liberals made the banks lend them because of some law Jimmy Carter passed in the ‘70s.

Feckless Jaffe writes of how much Gates cared about the troops he commanded, and about his concern for their welfare in combat: "Gates helicoptered into a hardscrabble U.S. base near the Pakistan border," Jaffe writes. "Many of the soldiers had just been through a withering, weeklong battle that took the lives of six of their colleagues. 'I feel a personal responsibility for each and every one of you since I sent you here,' Gates told them. 'I just want to tell you how much I love you.'"

Jesus, Mary and Shemp. I love you, man, in your hardscrabble base after your withering battle, dude. It’s lucky for Uncle Bob that I wasn’t among the soldiers at that hardscrabble firebase, because he wouldn’t have gotten back into that helicopter under his own power. Jaffe doesn’t say how he came by this Bunyon-esque narrative; he likely heard it from the same unnamed “senior military official” who feeds him the most of the propaganda he channels into his paper and calls “news.”

Despite how much Gates loves his hardscrabble, withered, battle hardened, desert tanned, crew cut, musky odor emitting troops, he is perfectly willing to screw them out of pay and benefits in order to meet his phony-baloney budget reduction strategy. He’s also pushing a plan to poke veterans (those hardscrabblers of yesteryear) out of pay and benefits.

He doesn’t like doing that, mind you. It breaks his little heart, I'm sure. But he’s already cut important weapon programs to the bone, and he’s only preserving must-have initiatives that will allow America to fight its future wars, high-dollar gizmos like flying submarines, and a killer drone that can fly halfway across the world from the deck of an aircraft carrier that’s already halfway across the world, and global strike rockets that can whack distant terrorists with a fraction of the wallop that could be delivered at a fraction of the cost by overpriced bombers we’ve already bought, and stealth fighters that may or may not be able to defeat air defense systems that may or may not ever exist*, and robot soldiers who don’t need any pay or benefits at all, and whose moms and dads and wives and kids won’t whine about it when they accidentally get killed by their fellow robot soldiers. The shameful list of pricey gee-wizardry still on the defense dole goes on indefinitely.

Gates likely reckons we’ll need all these gizmos in future, because despite saying that he’s become “cautious on wars of choice,” he is singularly responsible for extending our wars of choice in Iraq and the Bananastans; he was the tool of choice to usher in the Iraq surge under young Mr. Bush and he backed Petraeus and the rest his velvet coup generals when they pulpit bullied young Mr. Obama into surging in the Bananastans. I highly doubt whether baby boomers or Xers will see the end of those two conflicts.

Candid, straight-talking, truth-to-power-telling Bob Gates was so full of crap I could smell him clear down here in Virginia Beach. Lamentably, his successor, Leon Panetta, is likely to make Gates seem downright Washingtonian vis-à-vis the truth. And the guy on deck for the SecDef job, new CIA chief David Petraeus, will make the Gates tenure look like the good old days.

*Don’t be fooled by tales of Gates’ opposition to stealth aircraft programs. They’re still alive and well and consuming more tax dollars than any ten federal infrastructure programs.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.
at 8:47 PM

4 comments:

Trevor Kroger said...
I used to process travel expenses for General Dynamics. A bigger chunk of the Defense budget than anyone wants to admit goes to Hooters. And not for any soldier's benefit, it was always the same bunch of ad men. I swear, wherever they went on "business" they would go out of their way to fnd a Hooters and charge it to the company Amex.

2:12 PM
Jeff Huber said...
LOL. Ah, yes, the Hooters rider, cause of many a DoD contract overrun.

2:59 PM
charlie ehlen said...
Thank you for another excellent commentary sir.
I will keep the one comment in mind forever, the one where you mention that Bobby gates has "more positions than the Kama Sutra". THAT is outstanding, and it describes the majority of the US political types and most government employees of "high" rank such as the ones lil' Bobby has held during his long career of "gummint service".
As to his supposed comments on how he loves his troops, when I was in Vietnam Gen. Walt came over there just before he retired. He was known as the "grunts general" yet he never made such a damn fool comment. Yes, if you or I had heard Gates make such a comment he'd have to be carried to his ride out of that base for sure. Ridiculous does not even begin to describe such total BS.
As to the boomers seeing the end of this line of wars of choice, no way. Remember, us boomers are now the newest "class" of senior citizens and are on the downhill side of life. No, we will not live to see these damn fool, useless wars of choice end. We don't have enough of this life left for that. I doubt our grandchildren have that long. Endless damn fool wars of choice for endless profits for the war industries.

3:09 PM

Jeff Huber said...
I'm not sure which aspect of the "love you man" story is most disgusting: that he might have actually done it, that his PAO told Jaffe about it, or that Jaffe printed it.

J

Special report: Sargent’s portrait! PART 1—BRUNI AGONISTES (permalink): Last Saturday, a letter to the Washington Post critiqued the paper’s editorial judgment. The Post is focusing on the wrong things, a distant reader said: LETTER TO THE WASHINGTON POST (7/2/11): Bernie, Not Bachmann

On Monday, Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.), gave a 90-minute dissertation on ways to negotiate the debt ceiling on the Senate floor. Not one word on your front page. Instead readers got a photo of Michele Bachmann, who will probably not win the GOP presidential nomination and certainly won't be president. What is the matter with The Post? Your front page amounts to the adoration of political clowns instead of serious politicians who are interested in helping with the serious problems facing us all.

S. R., Point Roberts, Wash.

Did the Post err in offering front-page coverage of Bachmann’s official kick-off event? Not necessarily, no. (To view the paper’s front-page lay-out that day, click this.) But the Washington Post, like the New York Times, has made little extended attempt to explain the complexities of our budget situation.

Sanders’ ideas have been ignored, but then again, so have everyone else’s. To all intents and purposes, it’s impossible for citizens to be well-informed about our most basic policy issues.

In large part, this situation reflects the sad, silly culture of our “mainstream press corps.” How ridiculous is the well-entrenched culture of this pitiful “D-plus elite?” On Sunday, an opinion piece in the New York Times helped us take the group’s measure.

People! At long last, Frank Bruni is back, offering his deathless insights on American politics! Late in May, Jeremy Peters broke the news in a New York Times news report. “Frank Bruni, whose writing career at The New York Times has spanned two presidential campaigns, part of a papacy and more than five years as chief restaurant critic, has been named an Op-Ed columnist,” Peters wrote. Eventually, Peters quoted the “full memo” from Andrew Rosenthal, the paper’s op-ed editor.

Rosenthal was very excited to report Bruni’s return:

ROSENTHAL (5/24/11): I am very excited to announce today that Frank Bruni has agreed to join the ranks of Times Op-Ed columnists. Frank will be, first off, writing the Page 2 column in the remake of the Week in Review.

This column, which will be a new anchor feature of the section, will be a sharp, opinionated look at a big event of the last week, from a different or unexpected angle, or a small event that was really important but everyone seems to have missed, or something entirely different. It will fast become a destination for our readers with Frank at the keyboard.

Frank also will be writing a regular Op-Ed column in our print pages and online, most likely on Thursdays. He is a net addition to our lineup, not a replacement for anyone or anything.

Frank needs no introduction. His work as a political writer, a foreign correspondent, food critic and magazine writer for the Times have been popular with our readers for almost 16 years.

His first column will appear in the first edition of the new section, unless, of course, he decides to write sooner.

Bruni “needs no introduction,” Rosenthal declared. We beg to differ, though only a tad. But first, let’s review Bruni’s column from this Sunday—the second column he has written for his newspaper’s new Sunday section.

Change is everywhere at the Times! The old Sunday section was “Week in Review.” Now, the section is “Sunday Review.” That said, can we talk?

Your nation is sliding into the sea. Its economy is in extremely bad shape; its politics is even worse. Potentially disastrous decisions face us in just the next several weeks. But people! So what?

Given a highly visible platform in the Sunday New York Times, what topic did Bruni choose to discuss? The fact that our presidential candidates sometimes mention their children in public! Presumably, this was, in Rosenthal’s language, “a small event that was really important but everyone seems to have missed.” (Or maybe it was “something entirely different.”) But Bruni was deeply concerned by this problem. Here’s the way he started:

BRUNI (7/3/11): Time for Oratorical Contraception

Elections routinely start with candidates' pledging more debates than they'll ever really consent to, committing to a positivity that sours faster than unrefrigerated milk and promising to listen as much as they talk, a congenital impossibility.

For the 2012 presidential race, I'd like them to make a different vow—and actually keep it.

How about everyone's agreeing to shut up about their kids?

As he continued, Bruni discussed the various acts which had him so upset. When Michelle Obama went to South Africa, she took her daughters with her—and even let them be videotaped reading a book at one point! (Perhaps she should place them in purdah.) And not only that! When Jon Huntsman announced he was running for president, six of his children were present as well! Indeed, quite a few Republican candidates have offended Bruni this way:

BRUNI: At least the president shows more restraint than many of his Republican challengers, who used the opening minutes of their presidential debate a few weeks ago to engage in a kind of reproductive arms race, each of them one-upping the other on the fecundity front.

Rick Santorum mentioned his seven children. Michele Bachmann followed up by plugging her five children and her 23 foster kids, making the latter sound like permanent charges rather than the temporary lodgers they were. Mitt Romney ticked off five sons, five daughters-in-law and, lest he let Bachmann lap him, 16 grandchildren.

Then Ron Paul outpaced them all. Instead of giving a count of his own kids (five), he tallied roughly 4,000 lives that he, as a physician, had helped usher into the world. Go, babies, go.

Jon Huntsman wasn't on hand, but a week later he answered his rivals' verbal ploys with a visual one. He and his wife rounded up six of their seven children for an endless trek across a verdant lawn to the podium set up for his presidential announcement. As the Huntsmans marched in a photogenic phalanx, each step was like a mantra: family man, family man, family man.

“Rick Santorum mentioned his seven children!” To Bruni, this was part of the week’s most significant topic. And needless to say, it had to happen! Before he was done, Bruni was chiding Bristol Palin for “hav[ing] surgery to reshape her jaw.”

Bristol did this “for medical reasons, she contends.” So the thoughtful analyst wrote, letting us know he’s not certain.

Columnist Bruni needs no introduction, Rosenthal said in his memo. Indeed: If you followed Bruni’s coverage of Campaign 2000, when he was the Times’ Bush correspondent, you weren’t surprised by the fatuous topic which had him worked up this week.

For the most part, Bruni’s reporting on Candidate Bush tended toward silly and facile. (He also displayed a strong instinct to fawn. And to withhold unflattering news until he wrote his campaign book, well after the election was over.) Who can forget the thoughtful way he opened a lengthy news report early in the New Hampshire primary?

BRUNI (9/14/99): When Gov. George W. Bush of Texas first hit the Presidential campaign trail in June, he wore monogrammed cowboy boots, the perfect accessory for his folksy affability and casual self-assurance.

But when he visited New Hampshire early last week, he was shod in a pair of conservative, shiny black loafers that seemed to reflect more than the pants cuffs above them. They suggested an impulse by Mr. Bush to put at least a bit of a damper on his brash irreverence, which has earned him affection but is a less certain invitation for respect.

Reporter Bruni drew plenty of meaning from Bush’s shiny black loafers this day. Similar nonsense became his trademark as the campaign unfolded.

You can’t really blame this on Bruni. By the time of Campaign 2000, the mainstream press corps was thoroughly steeped in an utterly fatuous culture. Bruni served this culture quite well. But the culture belonged to his “D-plus elite.” It wasn’t Bruni’s invention.

In May, Rosenthal told the world how excited he was by Bruni’s return. In recent years, Bruni has been his newspaper’s chief restaurant critic. Now, he would return to more seminal topics.

Or would he?

On Sunday, Bruni gave us a look at the fatuous soul of a destructive D-plus elite. Please remember the context here. You yourself may have been annoyed at some point by the way politicians display their kids. But Bruni was given a chance to address the world on any possible topic—and he chose to ponder this trivial topic above all the rest.

Greg Sargent did a good job last week describing the culture of the upper-class press corps. For the rest of the week, let’s ask ourselves two basic questions:

How did press corps culture descend to this point? And why do so few liberals notice?

Tomorrow: Sargent’s portrait

AGONISTES! The New York Times’ newest op-ed star was troubled by Bristol’s new jaw: TUESDAY, JULY 5, 2011

BRUNI Learning to hate the other tribe/Fourth of July edition: In June, Marist conducted an information survey concerning the Fourth of July.

Respondents were asked two questions. Here they are:

Questions asked in the Marist survey:
“On July 4th we celebrate Independence Day. From which country did the United States win its independence?”

“In which year did the United States declare its independence?”

These were open-ended questions. Respondents were required to volunteer answers. No possible answers were provided.

As is always the case in such matters, the public’s knowledge was less than perfect. Only 76 percent of respondents named Great Britain as the country from which we won independence. Only 58 percent named 1776 as the year independence was declared.

(Presumably, Marist accepted “England” as a correct answer to that first question. But in typical expert fashion, Marist didn’t clarify this point in its press release on the survey. For the full press release, with all Marist data, just click this.)

On July 3, Steve Benen discussed the Marist survey. After quoting the press release giving the survey’s results, Benen offered his thoughts about the survey’s “internals.” Skillfully, he helped liberal readers learn to deride The Other:

BENEN (7/3/11): Taking a look at the internals, a couple of other angles stand out. For one thing, there’s a noticeable regional difference—Americans living in the South did noticeably worse than everyone else in both questions.

There are also age differences—on both questions, the younger the respondent, the more likely he/she was to be wrong. Here’s hoping wisdom comes with age.

Steve said he hopes wisdom comes with age. Perhaps he was being ironic.

How did Steve interpret the data? After quoting Marist’s basic findings, he quickly cited “a noticeable regional difference,” with the South doing “noticeably worse than everyone else in both questions.” In this way, Steve helped liberal readers enjoy a favorite habit—mocking the dumb-ass ways of the red-state South.

Sorry. Steve was basically playing you again, as he sometimes does. In fact, the differences are fairly small among the four regions identified in the data, although the South scored lowest on both questions.

Where does a much larger difference occur? Being a party-line man, Steve would never tell you. But a much larger difference occurs when Marist breaks the data down by race (white versus non-white), as you will quickly see if you review “the internals.” Example: 67 percent of whites got the year of independence right, versus 39 percent of non-whites. This 28-point difference dwarfs the difference between the score of the South and the scores of the other regions.

By the way: Are we aware that the South has a larger non-white population than higher-scoring regions?

Given the sweep of American history, it shouldn’t come as a giant surprise that whites did better with these questions than non-whites did. Nor should it come as a giant surprise when Benen spins readers the way he does. How were readers supposed to react to his remarkably selective presentation of “the internals?” In comments, one of Benen’s misled readers barked out a preferred party-line:

COMMENTER: “There's a noticeable regional difference—Americans living in the South did noticeably worse than everyone else in both questions.”

Why I'm shocked, SHOCKED, that the heavily RightWing South is so extremely ignorant.

Sad. In fact, there is no evidence in the Marist data that the “right-wing (i.e., white or conservative or Republican) South” proved any more ignorant than anyone else about this historical topic. But so what? This commenter greedily swallowed the bait his affable host had served.

Did Steve intend for readers to have this sort of reaction? We don’t know. But here’s how he ended his post:

BENEN (continuing directly from above): Rick Santorum recently argued the public’s limited historical knowledge is the result of a liberal conspiracy—apparently, ignorance will help lefties “impose…new values” on the country”—but under the circumstances, it appears we’d be much better off if Americans simply ignored the historical recollections of people like Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin.

In the past month, Bachman and Palin have made some historical misstatements. But there is no sign in the Marist data that Republicans did worse on these measures than we brilliant Democrats did. We’d guess that they probably did better, though Marist didn’t keep track.

Let’s repeat: Given the sweep of American history, it shouldn’t come as a giant surprise that whites did better with these questions than non-whites did. (Presumably, this may also be a reflection of more recent immigration patterns.) But might we make a further note about Benen’s work? Like many assembly-line pseudo-liberals, he rarely stoops to discuss the public education issues which are suggested by data like these. In fact, Benen almost never discusses public school topics at all. In the pseudo-liberal coalition his type has assembled, black and brown children no longer count. They simply aren’t one of the groups we discuss. As far as we pseudo-libs seem to care, they can go hang in the yard.

Are southern Republicans dumber than northeastern Democrats on the measures surveyed by Marist? There is no indication of that in the data. But so what? We pseudos just want to have fun!

Remember: “Divide and conquer” is an oligarch strategy. In the long run, it stands in the way of progressive advance; it keeps average people in the two tribes from seeing their common situation. But it also provides a lot of good fun for those who enjoy tribal politics.

Rush and Sean have always played it this way. How quickly our tribe moved to ape them once we emerged from the woods!

Marriage: The Next Chapter

Introduction

Historically, marriage has been laden with restrictions intended to protect social customs.

When New York lawmakers voted last month to legalize same-sex marriage, they greatly expanded citizens' access to the rights and protections of the marriage contract. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, along with many others, likened the prohibition of same-sex marriage to earlier bans on interracial marriage, which were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1967.

With marriage expanding in once unimaginable ways, what might the next stage in this evolution below ight its definition continue to broaden? What is the future of marriage?

The Moral Logic of Survivor Guilt By NANCY SHERMAN The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless. . Tags: Afghanistan, Aristotle, Army, Friedrich Nietzsche, guilt, philosophers, Philosophy, soldiers, war . If there is one thing we have learned from returning war veterans — especially those of the last decade — it’s that the emotional reality of the soldier at home is often at odds with that of the civilian public they left behind. And while friends and families of returning service members may be experiencing gratefulness or relief this holiday, many of those they’ve welcomed home are likely struggling with other emotions. Is the sense of responsibility soldiers feel toward each other irrational? . High on that list of emotions is guilt. Soldiers often carry this burden home — survivor guilt being perhaps the kind most familiar to us. In war, standing here rather than there can save your life but cost a buddy his. It’s flukish luck, but you feel responsible. The guilt begins an endless loop of counterfactuals ‑— thoughts that you could have or should done otherwise, though in fact you did nothing wrong. The feelings are, of course, not restricted to the battlefield. But given the magnitude of loss in war, they hang heavy there and are pervasive. And they raise the question of just how irrational those feelings are, and if they aren’t, of what is the basis of their reasonableness. Leif Parsons Capt. Adrian Bonenberger, head of a unit in Afghanistan that James Dao and other journalists of The New York Times reported on in their series “A Year at War,” pondered those questions recently as he thought about Specialist Jeremiah Pulaski, who was killed by police in the wake of a deadly bar fight shortly after he returned home. Back in Afghanistan, Pulaski had saved Bonenberger’s life twice on one day, but when Pulaski needed help, Bonenberger couldn’t be there for him: “When he was in trouble, he was alone,” Captain Bonenberger said. “When we were in trouble, he was there for us. I know it’s not rational or reasonable. There’s nothing logical about it. But I feel responsible.” But how unreasonable is that feeling? Subjective guilt, associated with this sense of responsibility, is thought to be irrational because one feels guilty despite the fact that he knows he has done nothing wrong. Objective or rational guilt, by contrast — guilt that is “fitting” to one’s actions — accurately tracks real wrongdoing or culpability: guilt is appropriate because one acted to deliberately harm someone, or could have prevented harm and did not. Blameworthiness, here, depends on the idea that a person could have done something other than he did. And so he is held responsible or accountable, by himself or others. But as Bonenberger’s remarks make clear, we often take responsibility in a way that goes beyond what we can reasonably be held responsible for. And we feel the guilt that comes with that sense of responsibility. Nietzsche is the modern philosopher who well understood this phenomenon: “Das schlechte Gewissen,” (literally, “bad conscience”) — his term for the consciousness of guilt where one has done no wrong, doesn’t grow in the soil where we would most expect it, he argued, such as in prisons where there are actually “guilty” parties who should feel remorse for wrongdoing. In “The Genealogy of Morals,” he appeals to an earlier philosopher, Spinoza, for support: “The bite of conscience,” writes Spinoza in the “Ethics,” has to do with an “offense” where “something has gone unexpectedly wrong.” As Niezsche adds, it is not really a case of “I ought not to have done that.” Leif Parsons But what then is it a case of? Part of the reasonableness of survivor guilt (and in a sense, its “fittingness”) is that it tracks a moral significance that is broader than moral action. Who I am, in terms of my character and relationships, and not just what I do, matters morally. Of course, character is expressed in action, and when we don’t “walk the walk,” we are lacking; but it is also expressed in emotions and attitudes. Aristotle in his “Nicomachean Ethics” insists on the point: “virtue is concerned with emotions and actions;” to have good character is to “hit the mean” with respect to both. Moreover, many of the feelings that express character are not about what one has done or should have done, but rather about what one cares deeply about. Though Aristotle doesn’t himself talk about guilt, it is the emotion that best expresses that conflict — the desire or obligation to help frustrated by the inability, through no fault of one’s own, to do so. To not feel the guilt is to be numb to those pulls. It is that vulnerability, those pulls, that Boneneberger feels when he says he wasn’t there for Pulaski when he needed him. The sacred bond among soldiers originates not just in duty, but in love. . In many of the interviews I’ve conducted with soldiers over the years, feelings of guilt and responsibility tangle with feelings of having betrayed fellow soldiers. At stake is the duty to those soldiers, the imperative to hold intact the bond that enables them to fight for and with each other in the kind of “sacred band” that the ancients memorialized and that the Marine motto semper fidelis captures so well. But it is not just duty at work. It is love. Service members, especially those higher in rank, routinely talk about unit members as “my soldiers,” “my Marines,” “my sailors.” They are family members, their own children, of sorts, who have been entrusted to them. To fall short of unconditional care is experienced as a kind of perfidy, a failure to be faithful. Survivor guilt piles on the unconscious thought that luck is part of a zero-sum game. To have good luck is to deprive another of it. The anguish of guilt, its sheer pain, is a way of sharing some of the ill fate. It is a form of empathic distress. Many philosophers have looked to other terms to define the feeling. What they have come up with is “agent-regret” (a term coined by the British philosopher Bernard Williams, but used by many others). The classic scenario is not so much one of good luck (as in survivor guilt), but of bad luck, typically having to do with accidents where again, there is little or no culpability for the harms caused. In these cases, people may be causally responsible for harm — they bring about the harm through their agency — but they are not morally responsible for what happened. But to my ear, agent-regret is simply tone-deaf to how subjective guilt feels. Despite the insertion of “agent,” it sounds as passive and flat as “regretting that the weather is bad.” Or more tellingly, as removed from empathic distress as the message sent to the next of kin, after an official knock on the door: “The Secretary of Defense regrets to inform you that….” Related More From The Stone Read previous contributions to this series. Go to All Posts » . Indeed, the soldiers I’ve talked to involved in friendly fire accidents that took their comrades’ lives, didn’t feel regret for what happened, but raw, deep, unabashed guilt. And the guilt persisted long after they were formally investigated and ultimately exonerated. In one wrenching case in April 2003 in in Iraq, the gun on a Bradley fighting vehicle misfired, blowing off most of the face of Private Joseph Mayek who was standing guard near the vehicle. The accident was ultimately traced to a faulty replacement battery that the commander in charge had authorized. When the Bradley’s ignition was turned on, the replacement battery in the turret (a Marine battery rather than an Army one) failed to shut off current to the gun. Mayek, who was 20, died. The Army officer in charge, then Capt. John Prior, reconstructed the ghastly scene for me, and the failed attempts in the medic tent to save Mayek’s life. He then turned to his feelings of responsibility: “I’m the one who placed the vehicles; I’m the one who set the security. As with most accidents, I’m not in jail right now. Clearly I wasn’t egregiously responsible. But it is a comedy of errors. Any one of a dozen decisions made over the course of a two-month period and none of them really occurs to you at the time. Any one of those made differently may have saved his life. So I dealt with and still deal with the guilt of having cost him his life essentially…. There’s probably not a day that doesn’t go by that I don’t think about it, at least fleetingly.” What Prior feels are feelings of guilt, and not simply regret that things didn’t work out differently. He feels the awful weight of self-indictment, the empathy with the victim and survivors, and the need to make moral repair. If he didn’t feel that, we would probably think less of him as a commander. In his case, moral repair came through an empathic, painful connection with Mayek’s mother. After the fratricide, Prior and his first sergeant wrote a letter to Mayek’s mother. And for some time after, she replied with care packages to the company and with letters. “Oh it was terrible,” said Prior. “The letters weren’t just very matter of fact — here’s what we did today; it was more like a mother writing to her son.” Prior had become the son who was no longer. “It was her way of dealing with the grief,” said Prior. “And so I had a responsibility to try to give back.” In all this we might say guilt, subjective guilt, has a redemptive side. It is a way that soldiers impose moral order on the chaos and awful randomness of war’s violence. It is a way they humanize war for themselves, for their buddies, and for us as civilians, too. But if that’s all that is involved, it sounds too moralistic. It makes guilt appropriate or fitting because it’s good for society. It is the way we all can deal with war. Maybe, instead, we want to say it is fitting because it is evolutionarily adaptive in the way that fear is. But again, this doesn’t do justice to the phenomenon. The guilt that soldiers feel isn’t just morally expedient or species-adaptive. It is fitting because it gets right certain moral (or evaluative) features of a soldier’s world — that good soldiers depend on each other, come to love each other, and have duties to care and bring each other safely home. Philosophers, at least since the time of Kant, have called these “imperfect duties”: even in the best circumstances, we can’t perfectly fulfill them. And so, what duties to others need to make room for, even in a soldier’s life of service and sacrifice, are duties to self, of self-forgiveness and self-empathy. These are a part of full moral repair. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Nancy Sherman is University Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown and has served as the first Distinguished Chair in Ethics at the U.S. Naval Academy. Her most recent book is “Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind.” July 3, 2011, 6:00 pm

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

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If there is one thing we have learned from returning war veterans — especially those of the last decade — it’s that the emotional reality of the soldier at home is often at odds with that of the civilian public they left behind. And while friends and families of returning service members may be experiencing gratefulness or relief this holiday, many of those they’ve welcomed home are likely struggling with other emotions.



Is the sense of responsibility soldiers feel toward each other irrational?
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High on that list of emotions is guilt. Soldiers often carry this burden home — survivor guilt being perhaps the kind most familiar to us. In war, standing here rather than there can save your life but cost a buddy his. It’s flukish luck, but you feel responsible. The guilt begins an endless loop of counterfactuals ‑— thoughts that you could have or should done otherwise, though in fact you did nothing wrong. The feelings are, of course, not restricted to the battlefield. But given the magnitude of loss in war, they hang heavy there and are pervasive. And they raise the question of just how irrational those feelings are, and if they aren’t, of what is the basis of their reasonableness.

Leif Parsons

Capt. Adrian Bonenberger, head of a unit in Afghanistan that James Dao and other journalists of The New York Times reported on in their series “A Year at War,” pondered those questions recently as he thought about Specialist Jeremiah Pulaski, who was killed by police in the wake of a deadly bar fight shortly after he returned home. Back in Afghanistan, Pulaski had saved Bonenberger’s life twice on one day, but when Pulaski needed help, Bonenberger couldn’t be there for him: “When he was in trouble, he was alone,” Captain Bonenberger said. “When we were in trouble, he was there for us. I know it’s not rational or reasonable. There’s nothing logical about it. But I feel responsible.”

But how unreasonable is that feeling? Subjective guilt, associated with this sense of responsibility, is thought to be irrational because one feels guilty despite the fact that he knows he has done nothing wrong. Objective or rational guilt, by contrast — guilt that is “fitting” to one’s actions — accurately tracks real wrongdoing or culpability: guilt is appropriate because one acted to deliberately harm someone, or could have prevented harm and did not. Blameworthiness, here, depends on the idea that a person could have done something other than he did. And so he is held responsible or accountable, by himself or others.

But as Bonenberger’s remarks make clear, we often take responsibility in a way that goes beyond what we can reasonably be held responsible for. And we feel the guilt that comes with that sense of responsibility. Nietzsche is the modern philosopher who well understood this phenomenon: “Das schlechte Gewissen,” (literally, “bad conscience”) — his term for the consciousness of guilt where one has done no wrong, doesn’t grow in the soil where we would most expect it, he argued, such as in prisons where there are actually “guilty” parties who should feel remorse for wrongdoing. In “The Genealogy of Morals,” he appeals to an earlier philosopher, Spinoza, for support: “The bite of conscience,” writes Spinoza in the “Ethics,” has to do with an “offense” where “something has gone unexpectedly wrong.” As Niezsche adds, it is not really a case of “I ought not to have done that.”

Leif Parsons

But what then is it a case of? Part of the reasonableness of survivor guilt (and in a sense, its “fittingness”) is that it tracks a moral significance that is broader than moral action. Who I am, in terms of my character and relationships, and not just what I do, matters morally. Of course, character is expressed in action, and when we don’t “walk the walk,” we are lacking; but it is also expressed in emotions and attitudes. Aristotle in his “Nicomachean Ethics” insists on the point: “virtue is concerned with emotions and actions;” to have good character is to “hit the mean” with respect to both. Moreover, many of the feelings that express character are not about what one has done or should have done, but rather about what one cares deeply about. Though Aristotle doesn’t himself talk about guilt, it is the emotion that best expresses that conflict — the desire or obligation to help frustrated by the inability, through no fault of one’s own, to do so. To not feel the guilt is to be numb to those pulls. It is that vulnerability, those pulls, that Boneneberger feels when he says he wasn’t there for Pulaski when he needed him.



The sacred bond among soldiers originates not just in duty, but in love.
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In many of the interviews I’ve conducted with soldiers over the years, feelings of guilt and responsibility tangle with feelings of having betrayed fellow soldiers. At stake is the duty to those soldiers, the imperative to hold intact the bond that enables them to fight for and with each other in the kind of “sacred band” that the ancients memorialized and that the Marine motto semper fidelis captures so well. But it is not just duty at work. It is love.

Service members, especially those higher in rank, routinely talk about unit members as “my soldiers,” “my Marines,” “my sailors.” They are family members, their own children, of sorts, who have been entrusted to them. To fall short of unconditional care is experienced as a kind of perfidy, a failure to be faithful. Survivor guilt piles on the unconscious thought that luck is part of a zero-sum game. To have good luck is to deprive another of it. The anguish of guilt, its sheer pain, is a way of sharing some of the ill fate. It is a form of empathic distress.

Many philosophers have looked to other terms to define the feeling. What they have come up with is “agent-regret” (a term coined by the British philosopher Bernard Williams, but used by many others). The classic scenario is not so much one of good luck (as in survivor guilt), but of bad luck, typically having to do with accidents where again, there is little or no culpability for the harms caused. In these cases, people may be causally responsible for harm — they bring about the harm through their agency — but they are not morally responsible for what happened.

But to my ear, agent-regret is simply tone-deaf to how subjective guilt feels. Despite the insertion of “agent,” it sounds as passive and flat as “regretting that the weather is bad.” Or more tellingly, as removed from empathic distress as the message sent to the next of kin, after an official knock on the door: “The Secretary of Defense regrets to inform you that….”



Related

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Indeed, the soldiers I’ve talked to involved in friendly fire accidents that took their comrades’ lives, didn’t feel regret for what happened, but raw, deep, unabashed guilt. And the guilt persisted long after they were formally investigated and ultimately exonerated. In one wrenching case in April 2003 in in Iraq, the gun on a Bradley fighting vehicle misfired, blowing off most of the face of Private Joseph Mayek who was standing guard near the vehicle. The accident was ultimately traced to a faulty replacement battery that the commander in charge had authorized. When the Bradley’s ignition was turned on, the replacement battery in the turret (a Marine battery rather than an Army one) failed to shut off current to the gun. Mayek, who was 20, died.

The Army officer in charge, then Capt. John Prior, reconstructed the ghastly scene for me, and the failed attempts in the medic tent to save Mayek’s life. He then turned to his feelings of responsibility: “I’m the one who placed the vehicles; I’m the one who set the security. As with most accidents, I’m not in jail right now. Clearly I wasn’t egregiously responsible. But it is a comedy of errors. Any one of a dozen decisions made over the course of a two-month period and none of them really occurs to you at the time. Any one of those made differently may have saved his life. So I dealt with and still deal with the guilt of having cost him his life essentially…. There’s probably not a day that doesn’t go by that I don’t think about it, at least fleetingly.”

What Prior feels are feelings of guilt, and not simply regret that things didn’t work out differently. He feels the awful weight of self-indictment, the empathy with the victim and survivors, and the need to make moral repair. If he didn’t feel that, we would probably think less of him as a commander.

In his case, moral repair came through an empathic, painful connection with Mayek’s mother. After the fratricide, Prior and his first sergeant wrote a letter to Mayek’s mother. And for some time after, she replied with care packages to the company and with letters. “Oh it was terrible,” said Prior. “The letters weren’t just very matter of fact — here’s what we did today; it was more like a mother writing to her son.” Prior had become the son who was no longer. “It was her way of dealing with the grief,” said Prior. “And so I had a responsibility to try to give back.”

In all this we might say guilt, subjective guilt, has a redemptive side. It is a way that soldiers impose moral order on the chaos and awful randomness of war’s violence. It is a way they humanize war for themselves, for their buddies, and for us as civilians, too.

But if that’s all that is involved, it sounds too moralistic. It makes guilt appropriate or fitting because it’s good for society. It is the way we all can deal with war. Maybe, instead, we want to say it is fitting because it is evolutionarily adaptive in the way that fear is. But again, this doesn’t do justice to the phenomenon. The guilt that soldiers feel isn’t just morally expedient or species-adaptive. It is fitting because it gets right certain moral (or evaluative) features of a soldier’s world — that good soldiers depend on each other, come to love each other, and have duties to care and bring each other safely home. Philosophers, at least since the time of Kant, have called these “imperfect duties”: even in the best circumstances, we can’t perfectly fulfill them. And so, what duties to others need to make room for, even in a soldier’s life of service and sacrifice, are duties to self, of self-forgiveness and self-empathy. These are a part of full moral repair.


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Nancy Sherman is University Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown and has served as the first Distinguished Chair in Ethics at the U.S. Naval Academy. Her most recent book is “Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind.”

More Perfect Unions By ROSS DOUTHAT

In 44 states, the future of gay marriage still depends on legislatures, governors and voters — and eventually, perhaps, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. But in New York, as in five states before it, gay marriage’s future is in the hands of gay couples themselves.

Over the decades ahead, their choices will gradually transform gay marriage from an idea into a culture: they’ll determine the social expectations associated with gay wedlock, the gay marriage and divorce rates, the differences and similarities between gay and lesbian unions, the way marriage interacts with gay parenting, and much more besides.

They’ll also help determine gay marriage’s impact on the broader culture of matrimony in America.

One possibility is that gay marriage will end up being a force for marital conservatism, among gays and straights alike. In this vision, the norms of heterosexual marriage will be the template for homosexual wedlock. Once equipped with marriage’s “entitlements and entanglements,” Jonathan Rauch predicted in his book “Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America,” “same-sex relationships will continue to move toward both durability and exclusivity.” At the same time, the example of gay couples taking vows will strengthen “marriage’s status as the gold standard for committed relationships.”

At the other end of the spectrum from Rauch’s gay conservatism are the liberationists, who hope that gay marriage will help knock marriage off its cultural pedestal altogether. To liberationists, a gay rights movement that ends up reaffirming a “gold standard” for relationships will have failed in its deeper mission — which Columbia law professor Katherine M. Franke recently summarized in a Times Op-Ed article as the quest for “greater freedom than can be found in the one-size-fits-all rules of marriage.”

That’s the kind of argument that makes social conservatives worry about polygamy (and worse). But liberationism has been gradually marginalized in the gay community over the last two decades, and gay conservatism seems to have largely carried the day. The desire to be included in an existing institution has proved stronger than the desire to eliminate every institutional constraint.

Still, there’s a third vision that’s worth pondering — neither conservative nor liberationist, but a little bit of both. This vision embraces the institution of marriage, rather than seeking to overthrow it. But it also hints that the example of same-sex unions might partially transform marriage from within, creating greater institutional flexibility — particularly sexual flexibility — for straight and gay spouses alike.

This idea is most prominently associated with Dan Savage, the prolific author, activist and sex columnist who was profiled in Sunday’s Times Magazine. Savage is strongly pro-marriage, but he thinks the institution is weighed down by unrealistic cultural expectations about monogamy. Better, he suggests, to define marriage simply as a pact of mutual love and care, and leave all the other rules to be negotiated depending on the couple.

In “The Commitment,” his memoir about wedding his longtime boyfriend, Savage described the way his own union has successfully made room for occasional infidelity. “Far from undermining the stable home we’ve built for our child,” he writes, “the controlled way in which we manage our desire for outside sexual contact has made our home more stable.”

The trouble is that straight culture already experimented with exactly this kind of model, with disastrous results.

Forty years ago, Savage’s perspective temporarily took upper-middle-class America by storm. In the mid-1970s, only 51 percent of well-educated Americans agreed that adultery was always wrong. But far from being strengthened by this outbreak of realism, their marriages went on to dissolve in record numbers.

This trend eventually reversed itself. Heterosexual marriage has had a tough few decades, but its one success story is the declining divorce rate among the upper middle class. This decline, tellingly, has gone hand in hand with steadily rising disapproval of adultery.

There’s a lesson here. Institutions tend to be strongest when they make significant moral demands, and weaker when they pre-emptively accommodate themselves to human nature.

Critics of gay marriage see this as one of the great dangers in severing the link between marriage and the two realities — gender difference and procreation — that it originally evolved to address. A successful marital culture depends not only on a general ideal of love and commitment, but on specific promises, exclusions and taboos. And the less specific and more inclusive an institution becomes, the more likely people are to approach it casually, if they enter it at all.

In courts and now legislatures, this has been a losing argument. But as gay New Yorkers ponder what they want their marriages to mean, they should consider one of its implications: The hardest promises to keep are often the ones that keep people together.

Corporate Cash Con By PAUL KRUGMAN: July 3, 2011

JWatching the evolution of economic discussion in Washington over the past couple of years has been a disheartening experience. Month by month, the discourse has gotten more primitive; with stunning speed, the lessons of the 2008 financial crisis have been forgotten, and the very ideas that got us into the crisis — regulation is always bad, what’s good for the bankers is good for America, tax cuts are the universal elixir — have regained their hold.

And now trickle-down economics — specifically, the idea that anything that increases corporate profits is good for the economy — is making a comeback.

On the face of it, this seems bizarre. Over the last two years profits have soared while employment has remained disastrously high. Why should anyone believe that handing even more money to corporations, no strings attached, would lead to faster job creation?

Nonetheless, trickle-down is clearly on the ascendant — and even some Democrats are buying into it. What am I talking about? Consider first the arguments Republicans are using to defend outrageous tax loopholes. How can people simultaneously demand savage cuts in Medicare and Medicaid and defend special tax breaks favoring hedge fund managers and owners of corporate jets?

Well, here’s what a spokesman for Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, told Greg Sargent of The Washington Post: “You can’t help the wage earner by taxing the wage payer offering a job.” He went on to imply, disingenuously, that the tax breaks at issue mainly help small businesses (they’re actually mainly for big corporations). But the basic argument was that anything that leaves more money in the hands of corporations will mean more jobs. That is, it’s pure trickle-down.

And then there’s the repatriation issue.

U.S. corporations are supposed to pay taxes on the profits of their overseas subsidiaries — but only when those profits are transferred back to the parent company. Now there’s a move afoot — driven, of course, by a major lobbying campaign — to offer an amnesty under which companies could move funds back while paying hardly any taxes. And even some Democrats are supporting this idea, claiming that it would create jobs.

As opponents of this plan point out, we’ve already seen this movie: A similar tax holiday was offered in 2004, with a similar sales pitch. And it was a total failure. Companies did indeed take advantage of the amnesty to move a lot of money back to the United States. But they used that money to pay dividends, pay down debt, buy up other companies, buy back their own stock — pretty much everything except increasing investment and creating jobs. Indeed, there’s no evidence that the 2004 tax holiday did anything at all to stimulate the economy.

What the tax holiday did do, however, was give big corporations a chance to avoid paying taxes, because they would eventually have repatriated, and paid taxes on, much of the money they brought in under the amnesty. And it also gave these companies an incentive to move even more jobs overseas, since they now know that there’s a good chance that they’ll be able to bring overseas profits home nearly tax-free under future amnesties.

Yet as I said, there’s a push for a repeat of this disastrous performance. And this time around the circumstances are even worse. Think about it: How can anyone imagine that lack of corporate cash is what’s holding back recovery in America right now? After all, it’s widely understood that corporations are already sitting on large amounts of cash that they aren’t investing in their own businesses.

In fact, that idle cash has become a major conservative talking point, with right-wingers claiming that businesses are failing to invest because of political uncertainty. That’s almost surely false: the evidence strongly says that the real reason businesses are sitting on cash is lack of consumer demand. In any case, if corporations already have plenty of cash they’re not using, why would giving them a tax break that adds to this pile of cash do anything to accelerate recovery?

It wouldn’t, of course; claims that a corporate tax holiday would create jobs, or that ending the tax break for corporate jets would destroy jobs, are nonsense.

So here’s what you should answer to anyone defending big giveaways to corporations: Lack of corporate cash is not the problem facing America. Big business already has the money it needs to expand; what it lacks is a reason to expand with consumers still on the ropes and the government slashing spending.

What our economy needs is direct job creation by the government and mortgage-debt relief for stressed consumers. What it very much does not need is a transfer of billions of dollars to corporations that have no intention of hiring anyone except more lobbyists.

A Celebration of the Birth Days of Ralph and Anne Ganzer

Good morning, friends, here assembled at Trinity Lutheran Church of Ingleside, Illinois, on this, the third day of July, 2011, a.d., to celebrate the birth days and the lives of our beloved Ralph and Anne Ganzer, happily married 61 years, this past 11, January, 2011. This is an early celebration, because we wanted to do something special for them, and to make it as surprising as possible, the Hand of God intervened and made available to get them to drive up here, totally unsuspecting, this morning.

Ralph Bertram Herbert Ganzer was born 24 July, 1928, to Harry and Linda Ganzer, in Blue Island, Illinois, at Saint Francis Hospital, (buildcing no longer extant) known now as ST FRANCIS HOSPITAL & HEALTH CENTER, 12935 S GREGORY: BLUE ISLAND, IL 60406, the second oldest of four children, the boys, Jim (five years his senior), Floyd, my Godfather (five years his junior) and Marilyn, our dear beloved, and too sadly departed Marilyn Ganzer-Patrick.

Ralph's Grandfather John Ganzer was as community leader in Blue Island, and raised and support two full families, fathering eight children by his first wife, and five by his second. He left unto each of his children a place to live. Quite an accomplishment for a German immigrant.

Dad grew up attending First Lutheran Church of Blue Island, Illinois, and going to First Lutheran's German School, where a bi-lingual education was the order of the day (but then of course, the Germans spoke German, which was acceptable, whereas today, the bilinguals speak Spanish, not so acceptable). Ralph excelled and sports, played them all the time – football, boxing, wrestling, golf, baseball, softball, pool, bowling, and swimming. He also developed early on a love of mathematics and English. He started his working career as as Caddie during the depression, where the rate was $0.90 cents a bag, and the tips were not always in cash, but he did get his first set of golf clubs from one of the less well off gentlemen for whom he caddied, at Navajo Fields, and he was hooked, like a bass, hook line and sinker. He has had a love affair with the game his entire life, which has enabled him to meet some of the most wonderful people you can imagine (although, sad to say, 'tis true that golf has destroyed more good men than whiskey), not merely because he was (and remains) such a fine player of the game, but that his life's calling as a teacher was made pretty clear at an early age.

Ralph got his first taste of what it means to be in a union, and to go on strike, and what you do with strike breakers. You hit them in the jaw so that they submit, and then you reach a compromise, and then you go back to work, no animosity held, as a caddie. During the war years, his Uncle Louie got him a job working the ice docks of Blue Island, a huge train hub, where they would ice down the meat cars, moving slabs that weighed 400 pounds each. This developed his strength, stamina, and ingenuity, and made him an even more prodigious football player (line backer and full back) and strong wrestling opponent. And the pay was very good, with time and a half after 40 yours, and double over time pay for Sundays.

Dad was immensely popular, as an athlete, but also as a true-blue loyal friend who hung with all the usual high school cliques. His leadership abilities were easy to ascertain.

The summer after his senior year in high school (1946), Howie Wilson, the industrialist who built dozens of college dormitories across and up and down the state of Illinois approached him to ask, “Ralph, what are you going to do come August?”

“Well, I'm making very good money working here in the ice house,” (where, by then, according to the family legend maker, Floyd, his younger brother had to cover for him because he had started dating Shirley Anne Hockett and was burning the candles at all three ends – work, dating, sports).

“Why don't you come down to Western Illinois State Teacher's College and we'll play football?” asked Howie. Sold American – you can give the young man a lot of money, but you can't sate his desire to compete and excel at athletics. “Okay,” replied Ralph.

So, down they went, where, as the eleventh team to scrimmage against the varsity in Macomb, on one of those God-forsaken sweltering days in August where your eyes sweat, and the mosquitoes and grass hoppers invade you nostrils, ears, eyes, and throat, the squad looked pretty good, so the coaches took the usual suspects – a QB, a running back, and a flanker, which, in another era, would have been the end of the football dream – but in 1946, after the war, things were a tad looser. And so several weeks later, Western's Athletic Director fielded a phone call from Carthage College which wanted to play a team it could beat for its homecoming game. The last 17 players cut were sent to Carthage, where, these Italian, German, Slovakian, and Irish lads who LOVED to hit, to fight, to play what is now known as “smash-mouth football” defeated (without having practiced a play) Carthage's team. This raised a few eyebrows, and four years later, these fighting men spear-headed one of Western's two undefeated squads (1949) under the coaching of Vince DeFrancesca. Ralph was a tri-captain, along with Bill Crowley (best man at his wedding) and the red-headed, freckle-faced piano player, Red Miller, best known for his years of coaching the Denver Broncos into the Super Bowl four times, although never winning.

Meanwhile, back in Centerville, Iowa, Dale and Verna Best-Hockett were raising a family of their own, the twins, Catherine (Cottie) and Carolyne (Lyne), born 31 October, 1929, and Anne (Moonie), born 2, August, 1931.

Verna was a couple of years older than Dale, although Dale was a big kid, and exceedingly bright – quite a scholar, probably the smartest of the three brothers, Harold, the oldest, who went to college and ended up working as a VERY successful salesman for General Electric, and George, the youngest, who made a career in the Banking Industry. Dale was a rail raod man, a conductor. When the girls were about to enter high school, Verna and Dale moved to Blue Island, because there was a LOT of rail road work to be had there. Dale was as conductor for the Rock Island Line. But, the depression hit, and Dale lost his job. Fortunately, Verna was a very skilled and talented seamstress, and FDR had good people advising him that the way out of the economic depression was to put people to work, and thus Verna got a job with the WPA teaching women to sew, so, in addition to her own sewing repair and clothes making business, she made money teaching for the WPA. The fmaily was able to make ends meet, and even take in a farm girl to do chores, make meals, and in return had a place to stay and could attend high school.

The sisters were all beautiful, musically gifted, and very smart. There were plenty of boys hanging around them all, but once mom caught the sight of dad's muscled back, at the swimming pool, it was all over. They started dating when she was a high school sophomore, and have been together ever since. Mom worked as a secretary, including after graduation from high school. But, she hated working there. So, she went to work to get dad to propose, which he did, saying, “If you don't marry me now, you'll end up going to school and marrying another college boy, and I'll never see you again.” SOLD AMERICAN.

Dale would have been dead set against this union, so Verna helped Anne escape out the window, down a ladder, late one January night. She arrived in Macomb, the much heralded fiance of Ralph, the BMOC. She got a job working in a law office of a state Representative, and they married shortly thereafter, witnessed by all of dad's fraternity brothers, with Bill Crowley the best man. Jim Ganzer (TORONADO) came down to sing for their wedding. Up in Blue Island, several folks speculated it was one of those, “better hurry up and get married before the kid drops” deals, but, Grandma Linda knew better: “They are in love,” was her final verdict. And they were, and still are. How do we know this? It is in their bickering that they reveal how much each still matters to the other. If you didn't care, you wouldn't take the time to bicker, about stuff upon which you are both in 100% AGREEMENT – each trying to get the last word in (when you come from a family with dynamically personalitied older siblings, getting in the LAST WORD is a matter of pride, and face!).

Upon completing his undergraduate work, Ralph got a job offer to be head football coach in a small town. They were able to borrow a car to go on the interview. The offer was $2,800, varsity football coach and math teacher, but mom was advised that she was NOT to do anything that would bring in money, lest it rob the pockets of the “real” citizens of the town.

They drove back in utter silence for 20 miles. Then rather than play ostrich people, they addressed the issue. “What should we do, honey?” said one to the other. We are NOT going to work in that wretched town, the other replied. Total relief. “I'll get my masters.” “That'll work, I'm making good money working in the attorney's office.”

And the deal was done. Although, I would be remiss to omit the story of how dad set mom to be a smoker, while they were returning from the local movie theater, dad spotted the wrestling coach, and gave mom his cigarette. She puffed it, and was temporarily hooked. His wrestling coach complained, “Ralph, couldn't you have at least waited until wrestling season was over? You'll never win another match.” And he DIDN'T win another match, but, eventually, they got a prodigal son out of it, a lovely, talented horse-loving dauther, a GOOD son, and a master craftsperson, in the form of Gay Linda Ganzer Offutt, John Franklin Ganzer, and Marianne Catherine Ganzer.

From these issue came forth Adam James Ganzer and Scott David Offutt, both of whom I would be bragging at great length upon, but, as this has already taken too much time from your own socializing, I will simply leave with this:

God has blessed us with YOU, our family, friends, neighbors, golfing buddies, sister mothers, congregants, singers, and put you all here for us, guardian angels, to watch over, to guide and keep us safe from our selves, and from the troubles of the world.

Thank you all. God bless you all. We are humbled, and deeply grateful.

With Love, to You, and All You Love

THE GANZER FAMILY