Lex Anteinternet: A 2025 Independence Day reflection.

Lex Anteinternet: A 2025 Independence Day reflection.: 

A 2025 Independence Day reflection.

I wasn't going to post a July 4th item this year, as I frankly feel pretty pessimistic about the state of the country.  But after reading some, I thought I ought to.

Independence Day marks, of course, the day 249 years ago when the Continental Congress declared the United States to be independent of the United Kingdom, which had founded the colonies.  It took over a year of pitched combat for Congress to reach that point.  What's really important about it, however, is not so much that the United Colonies declared independence from the mother country, but that it did it democratically and formed a democratic republic immediately.  Indeed, the country was acting as a democratic republic before it actually formed one officially.

From the very onset, the United States was a democracy.  I'll occasionally hear somebody who doesn't grasp that or understand it say "we're not a democracy, we're a republic".  That statements, which indeed was made by our serving Congress woman, shows a lack of understanding on what a democracy and a republic are.  We most definitely are a democracy, and always have been.

The initial structure of the country that was arrived upon by the founders of the country featured a very strong congress and a phenomenally weak president.  The US Constitution, it should be noted, is the country's second, not first, constitution.  The first one that featured that structure was the Articles of Confederation  It was John Hanson, not George Washington, who fulfilled the role of President at first.

The Articles didn't work well, but notable in them is that right from the onset the country was that, a country.  Some people will also occasionally claim that at first we were thirteen countries. That's nonsense.  We were, in fact, a putative country even before the Declaration of Independence, with the initial hope being that the country would be a union of fourteen, not thirteen, colonies.  The reluctance of the Quebecois to throw in with the virulently protestant colonies to their sound quashed that dream, with it setting the continuing tone that Canada wants nothing to do with being in the United States of America.  Nothing.

The Constitution of the US set us on an ongoing path which gives real concern to conservatives such as myself.  Right from the debate on the document there was a struggle between those who wanted to retain a weak national government and strong state governments.  States were, in fact, amazingly unrestrained in their powers early on.  In contrast, there were those who wanted a strong federal government and weak state governments.  The Federalist position, which was the more practical and realistic, ultimately won out, and it would have no matter what.  Even those who opposed Federalism found that they used its powers by necessity when they were in power.

That created, however, a structure in which the country converted the President of the Congress into the President of the United States.  Lacking a king, but remembering the model, the President occupied a position that vaguely recalled the monarch, in contrast to the British example in which the chief executive of the nation was and is a member of Parliament.  This worked well for a very long time, but it did put the US in a situation in which there existed a real possibility of a slow transfer of power to an executive divorced of the legislature.  

Indeed, expansion of executive power occurred nearly immediately.  It took a big jump during the Civil War, again by necessity, and it jumped again in the 20th Century.  Theodore Roosevelt expanded it as it suited his vigorous mindset.  Woodrow Wilson expanded it due to the Great War.  Franklin Roosevelt expanded it due to the emergency of the Great Depression and then World War Two.  Following World War Two the powers already expanded were thought normal, and again the Cold War seemed to make their retention necessary.  A President commited the country to a largescale war for the first time in the nation's history without a declaration of war when Truman sent forces into Korea.  This repeated itself when Johnson did the same with Vietnam.

Indeed, the disaster of the Vietnam War and the legacy of the Korean War caused Congress to attempt to claw back power with the War Powers Act.  The corruption of Richard Nixon resulted in Congress asserting its power as well.  But by the late 1960s the Democratic Party has also accommodated itself to revision of the national organic document, the Constitution, by a Supreme Court that simply made stuff up.  That accomodation started the development of the Democratic Party simply sitting on its hands and letting the courts rule to a large degree.  The Court became sort of an odd co chief executive, with the most egregious example being the absurd decision of Roe v. Wade, at least up until its progeny, Obergefell v. Hodges.

Abuses in the law, with Obergefell being the final example, and a Congress that simply accommodated itself to not really doing anything gave rise to the angered muddled populist far right, and the angry intellectual National Conservatives, the latter of which realised that the former was a plow mule that it could do its work with.  National Conservatives basically abandoned the concept of an expansive democracy in favor of a much more limited culturally correct one and took advantage of, and are taking advantage of, a chief executive whose mind is mush but whose ego is titanic.  They see him, effectively, as a "Red Caesar".

In the meantime, Mitch McConnell's Supreme Court began to hurl back to Congress the powers that it had dumped on the courts like city people dumping kittens on farms.  A Congress used to yapping but not doing anything was not prepared to exercise power once again, and very obviously still is not.  Much of what the Roberts Supreme Court has done in recent years really isn't radical at all, but its suddenly getting there, making decisions which are difficult not to view as seeking to empower the chief executive.

We can't tell where this will end up, and hence the pessimism. We may very well be in an era in which, when we look back a decade more hence, we will see a revived Congress that resumed its proper role, and a diminished Presidency, that's returned to its, even if that looks like something from, perhaps, the 1960s or 1970s.  Or we may seen an ineffective Congress and a nation ruled by a successor Red Ceasar who has more in common with Victor Orban than George Washington.

Perhaps we should be encouraged by the fact that the country has weathered previous existential threads to its democratic nature.  The War of 1812 presented one when a large portion of the country wanted nothing to do with the declared war and thought about leaving the infant nation.  The Mexican War saw something similar, and the Civil War, in which half the territory of the country attempted to leave in order to keep a large percentage of its population in chains.  World War One sparked further crises when it became unclear what the President's powers were in regard to a foreign war, and following the war the country acted wholly illegally towards those on the radical left.  During the Depression a right wing threat to the nation caused a putative coup to develop, the news of which was then suppressed.  Deep Communist penetration of the government in the 1930s and 1940s, was covered up in the 1950s and the reputation of the Congressman exposing it forever trashed, something his lack of restraint aided in.  The disaster of the Vietnam War and the following horror of Watergate caused many to feel that democracy in the US was dying.

Of course, we've never had a figure like Trump  before make it into the Oval Office.  The closest we've ever had to that was Jefferson Davis, in the Confederate White House, who at least was more genteel.  Huey Long was much like Trump, but of course he did not replace Franklin Roosevelt.

Still, there is reason for optimism.  Trump is not a popular figure.  He's wrecking conservatism which conservatives will have a hard time overcoming in the remainder of my lifetime, but there are signs that his bolt is now shot, in spite of his budget bill.  So much political capital was spent on that that it will bring the Democrats into power in Congress in 2026. They'll have to act like a Congress at that time.  Repairing the damage will take time, but perhaps not as much time as might be feared.  The populists may have done the country a favor by peeling back the lazy ineffectiveness of the pre 2016 Congress, and the National Conservatives may be doing the country a favor by restoring some of the basic elements of conservatism. They're both damaging the country enormously by being inhumane.

When the reign of the Red Ceasar ends, and I think that will be by this time next year, maybe  Congress will go back to its proper role and the gutless cowards of the GOP who have allowed this to occur will be retired in disgrace.  The country got over the Civil War.  There's hope it can get over this.

War and moral decay. Was originally Lex Anteinternet: Monday, July 2, 1945. Advances on Balikpapen.

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, July 2, 1945. Advances on Balikpapen.: 

Monday, July 2, 1945. Advances on Balikpapen.

Maria Michi in Rome, Open City.  She also played the role of the welcoming Italian turned prostitute in Paisan.  Both films were directed by Roberto Rossellini and filmed immediately after World War Two.  Why am I featuring her? See below.

Tokyo's population was down to 200,000 people due to evacuations from the bombed city.

Australian troops took Balikpapan's oil facilities.

American operations conclude on the Ryukyus.

The submarine USS Barb fired rockets on Kaihyo Island near Sakhalin,the first instance of a submarine firing such weapons.

Mountbatten is ordered to launch Operation Zipper, the liberation of Malaya, in August.

The 1945 Sheikh Bashir Rebellion broke out in Burao and Erigavo in British Somaliland against the British.

"The American Farmer" was the cover story in Newsweek.

Louis Till, father of Emmett Till who is remembered for being lynched at age 14 in 1955, was executed by the U.S. Army at Aversa, Italy for two counts of rape and murder.  

The elder Till had married the younger Till's mother when they were 18, over the objections of her parents. The marriage was not a happy one and she divorced him after he physically attacked her.  A conviction from that resulted in his joining the U.S. Army in order to avoid a prison sentence.

While Tills' conviction and execution are debated, the circumstances of the crime, which involved a home invasion and rape, are vile, and it seems that the trial was well conducted.

What's this have to do with the younger Till's lynching?  Absolutely nothing.  The junior Till never knew his father as the relationship had disintegrated when he was a mere infant.

There may be something, however, to take away about the horrors of the postwar world.  Armies are made up of all kinds of people, particularly conscripted armies.  Putting somebody in uniform so they wouldn't go to jail was fairly common.  There was a guy in boot camp with me who was there for that very reason, and I know a very successful person who essentially had the same thing occur to him.

And wars are a huge violation of the moral order.  Invading armies have always been associated with crime, with rape being a particularly common one.  Occupying armies, and even garrison armies, have a fair amount of moral depredation they bring on as well.

This certainly doesn't apply to everyone in uniform in these conditions, and not even the majority of those in uniform, in most modern armies, but it's frankly the case that World War Two created a vast amount of prostitution in Europe, some of it of a massively desperate type as portrayed in Rossellini's Paisan, and discussed in Atkinson's The Day of Battle.  Italy was quite frankly particularly hard hit as its infrastructure was far less developed than that of France or Germany, and it's population lived much more primitively and much closer to the poverty line.  Indeed, the vast bulk of the Italian population even before the war lived in what Americans of the same period would have regarded as poverty.

In these conditions, Italian women became targets.  Many prostituted themselves.  Some entered what might be regarded as a species of concubinage.  A biography of Bill Mauldin notes, for example, that for a period of time both Mauldin and another Stars and Stripes reporter kept girls in their mid teens, something that would have been regarded as a crime in the U.S. given the girls' very young age.  Paisan, as noted, depicts a middle class Italian girl descending into poverty, and then trying to grasp a straw out of it that nearly appears.  The classic The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit depicts a middle class American businessman who was an officer during the war engaging in a secret affair that produces a child while a soldier in Italy.

Concubinage is one thing.  Rape quite another, but murder is beyond the pale even for most whose morals decay in wartime.  But not for everyone.  And of course, we haven't touched on the Red Army, for whom wholescale rape, and then murder, of the women of the countries they overran was routine.  The percentage of Soviet soldiers that went home as rapist likely isn't known, but it was appreciable, and appreciated apparently by Soviet women, which lead to that generations domestic lives being notoriously turbulent.

War changes everything, and most of what it changes, isn't for the better.

Last edition:

Sunday, July 1, 1945. Battle of Balikpapan. The Post War German Map. Blondie.

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Lex Anteinternet: Some Labor Day Reflections.

Lex Anteinternet: Some Labor Day Reflections.: 

Some Labor Day Reflections.

Yesterday, I made some observations on Denver, and today I'm doing the same on Labor Day, 2024.

Of course, it's immediately notable that I'm making these the day after Labor Day, which was a day I didn't get off.  I worked a full day. 

I was the only one in the office.

Labor Day dates back to the mid 1800s as an alternative to the more radical observance that takes place in many countries on May 1.  Still, nonetheless, early on, and for a long time, there was a fair amount of radicalism associated with it during that period when American labor organizations were on the rise. The day itself being a widely recognized day off is due to organized strikes on the day that started occurring during the 1930s, to the day as sort of a "last day of summer holiday" is fairly new.

Even now, when people think of it, they often think of the day in terms of the sort of burly industrial workers illustrated by Leyendecker and Rockwell in the 20s through the 40s.  Otherwise, they sort of blandly associate it with celebrating work in general, which gets to the nature of work in general, something we sort of touched on yesterday with this entry;

Deep Breath

A Labor Day homily.

Sadly, I'm working on Labor Day.

Early on, Labor Day was something that acknowledged a sort of worthy heavy work.  There are, in spite of what people may think, plenty of Americans that still are engaged in that sort of employment, although its s shadow of the number that once did.  Wyoming has a lot of people who do, because of the extractive industries, which are in trouble.  Ironically, therefore, its notable that Wyoming is an epicenter of anti union feelings, when generally those engaged in heavy labor are pro union. There's no good explanation for that.

When Labor Day became a big deal it pitted organized labor against capital, with it being acknowledged by both sides that if things went too far one way or another, it would likely result in a massive labor reaction that would veer towards socialism, or worse, communism.  Real communism has never been a society wide strong movement in the United States, in spite of the current stupid commentary by those on the political far right side of the aisle accusing anyone they don't like, and any program they don't like, of being communistic.  But radical economics did hae influence inside of unions, and communists were a factor in some of them, which was well known. As nobody really wanted what that might mean, compromise gave us the post war economic world of the 50s and 60s, which were sort of a golden age for American economics.

One of the unfortunate byproducts of the Cold War era, however, was the exportation of jobs overseas, which brought us the economic regime we have today, in part.  The advance of technology brought us the other part.  Today we find the American economy is massively dominated by capital in a way it hasn't been for a century, and its not a good thing at all.  The will to do anything about it, or even understand it, seems to be wholly lacking.  As a result of that, while an increasing number of Americans slave away at meaningless jobs in cubicles, and the former shopkeeper class now works at Walmart, we have the absolutely bizarre spectacle of two Titans of Capital, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, spewing out populist rhetoric.  Populism, of course, always gets co-opted, but the working and middle class falling for rhetoric from the extremely wealthy is not only bizarre, its' downright dumb.

Indeed, in the modern American economy, having your own is increasingly difficult.  Entire former occupations that were once local have been totally taken over by large corporations while agriculture has fallen to the rich in terms of land ownership, making entry into either field impossible.  Fewer and fewer "my own" occupations exist, and those that do are under siege.  

One of those is the law, of course.  Lawyers, because of the nature of their work, still tend to own their practices, as to medical professionals of all types. The latter are falling into large corporate entities, however, and the move towards taking down state borders in the practice is causing the consolidation of certain types of practice in the former.

Not that "having your own" in the professions is necessarily a sort of Garden of Eden either, however.

Recently, interestingly, there's been a big movement in which young people are returning to the trades.  That strikes me as a good thing, and perhaps the trades are finally getting the due they deserve.  Ever since World War Two there's been the concept that absolutely everyone had to achieve white collar employment, which demeaned blue collar employment, and which put a lot of people in occupations and jobs they didn't care for.  I suspect the small farm movement reflects that too.

Indeed, on my first day of practicing law as a lawyer over thirty years ago the long time office manager, who must have been having sort of a bad day, made a comment like "you might just end up wishing you had become a farmer".  I remember thinking to myself even then that if that had been an option, that's exactly what I would have become.  It wasn't, and it never has been for me, in the full time occupation sort of way.

Oh well.

And so we lost the garden to labor in, but we can make things better than they are.  And we could do that by taking a much more distributist approach to things.  Which seems nowhere near close to happening, a populist uprising notwithstanding.