#28 – Mary Ellen Weller: French-Canadians in the American Civil War: A Book Review

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Note from Moderator: Mary Ellen filed this review of a book about the Civil War over a year ago.  It seems particulary pertinent as a memory for Memorial Day, 2009.  A companion to this article might be a recent talk by Howard Zinn on America’s “Three Holy Wars” at the 100th anniversary celebration of the Progressive magazine.  The Civil War is one of those wars.  His 35 minute talk can be viewed at http://www.commondreams.org/video/2009/05/18-0

Mary Ellen Weller: Riding the bus was an essential part of the French Heritage Tour sponsored by the IF Midwest May 2, 2008 [http://www.IFMidwest.org] . Essential because of who was sitting in those seats. Some were on the program and many were authors of books related to French-Canadian heritage in the US. What follows is a review of one of those books, a fascinating look at the US Civil War as an engine of French-Canadian immigration. It is not yet available in English.

Les Canadiens Français et la Guerre de Sécession, 1861-1865, une autre dimension de leur migration aux Etats-Unis

(French Canadians and the War of Secession, 1861-1865, another dimension of their migration to the United States)

by Jean Lamarre, Professor of History, Royal Military College of Kingston, Ontario

Quebec: VLB Editeur, 2006.

Americans of French-Canadian descent are likely to find their first immigrant ancestor arrived here between 1840 and 1930. In those 90 years more than a million French-Canadians came south of the border. The numbers are especially high during the time of the American Civil War. Exactly why young men of 15 to 49 (average age 25.2) (p. 51) would choose to fight in a neighbor’s civil war is addressed in Mr. Lamarre’s intriguing book and the answers are surprising.

The facts and evidence on which this work is based represent months of often tedious research in the National Archives in Washington D.C. where military records for each and every enlisted man are found. Lamarre used Record Group 94: the Adjutant General’s Office, Civil War (Union) Compiled Military Service Records. “The researcher who wants to consult the personal file of a soldier must fill out, for each one, a form on which he indicates the name of the soldier and his regiment.” (p.26)* Using such a laborious process Lamarre gathered a sample of 1320 Union soldiers of French-Canadian origin, of whom 1142 were born in French-Canada and 178 in the US. He concludes that they represent about 10% of the total French-Canadian participation in the Union Army.

In addition to the challenge of submitting the necessary forms one by one to establish this sample, was the challenge of recognizing French surnames from approximate homonymic spellings in English. The recruits often could not spell their own names. More than 90% of these men could not sign their contracts and simply made a cross at the bottom of the page (p. 53). Check Mr. Lamarre’s appendix for the name Duquette and you will get a quick lesson in the challenges he faced. Remember, he had to order each record individually by name.

Once accessed, the record shows the soldier’s age at enlistment, his home, his place of enrollment, date of enrollment, and assigned regiment. The appendix which lists this information for the entire sample of 1320 French-Canadian Union soldiers will certainly be useful to anyone doing a family history. Thirty regiments from Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, New Hampshire and Rhode Island are represented. Additionally, the record might note injury, hospitalization, discharge at the end of his contract, re-enlistment, or status as a prisoner of war. Lamarre has re-created the stories of many individual soldiers and tells them with great care within the body of the text.

The first wave of (over-)confidence and patriotism that brought volunteers to the Northern Army swept many French-Canadians with it. An early victory was expected. Some joined for adventure, some for patriotism, some to combat slavery and some for the security of food, shelter, and a small salary. Those French-Canadians already living in the US were often pressured to show their allegiance to their new country by enlisting. In some communities there was violence against immigrants.

The situation at the border echoes the years of the Revolution. Just as Loyalists headed north to avoid the Revolutionary War, many, many French-Canadians returned to Canada alongside Americans seeking shelter from the conflict.

Lamarre notes that seasonal employment in both logging and farming, from New England to Michigan, had become a way of life for many French-Canadians. Some were motivated to enlist to protect these very personal economic interests. They reasoned that if the South won the war, they could lose these jobs.

That very line of reasoning reveals a lack of employment opportunities in French-Canada. Between 12,000 and 20,000 French-Canadians enrolled in the Union Army and Lamarre states that “it is above all the financial advantages accompanying enlistment that attracted the French-Canadians”(p. 49). At first, the “assurance of a monthly salary of $13” seemed “preferable to the idleness and poverty that awaited them on returning home” p. (48). As this most deadly of all American conflicts dragged on, with tens of thousands of Union soldiers dying in battle after battle, and few enlistments to replace them, Congress voted signing bonuses as part of the Militia Act of 1862. French-Canadian enlistments went up again. In 1863 a draft was established and “enlistment became even more profitable”. (p. 49)

Lamarre brings out three very important aspects of recruitment and enlistment that were new to me. One, under the draft it was legally possible to pay a substitute to enlist in your place. 14% of the French-Canadians who enrolled, did so as substitutes (p. 58) Two, recruiters for the Union Army operated in French-Canada openly before the British enforced the Foreign Enlistment Act (which forbade British subjects from fighting in foreign wars), and clandestinely as ‘job recruiters’ even after Britain’s declaration of neutrality. Three, the payment of Bounties to new recruits after 1862 led to a pattern of desertion and ‘bounty jumping’. 

Enlisting as a Substitute was dazzlingly attractive. “The sums paid varied between $100 and $300 in 1863 but they later reached $600 and even $1000. These amounts represented the equivalent of one to two year’s wages in Eastern Canada, a regular small fortune” (p.59).

The British and their colonies north of the border were understandably nervous at the assembly of large armies in the States. Among their fears was possible invasion by a victorious Northern Army. It was thought that the army would be used to pick off territory or whole colonies and annex them to the US. Among the results was the British North American Act of 1867. Huge territories recently opened by the ending of the charter of the Hudson Bay Company in 1860 were indeed causing comment and machinations in the US. Eastern and Western Canada (French and English) pulled together and became a confederation and a country rather than a collection of colonies. Many other factors led to confederation, but the American Civil War had its influence.

With Bounties at amazing levels, the fraud that was called Bounty Jumping is no surprise. Despite the risk of court martial and possible execution, some individuals signed up in several different regiments and collected several bounties, deserting each time, or simply not reporting for duty. Amazing as it seems, the recruits were paid their Bounty and then given time to put their affairs in order at home before reporting for duty. How much temptation does a poor man need? The number who reported honorably for duty is all the more impressive.

The individual stories that Jean Lamarre has reconstructed for this fascinating account of Civil War experiences are a great treasure. Alongside the important facts related to French-Canadian Union Army soldiers as a whole, each individual story humanizes and verifies those facts.

With illegal immigration ever before us as a 2008 campaign issue, with a fence going up between the US and Mexico, consider just this one fact: 25% of the Union Army were immigrants. At that time, if you were here and you were not born here, you were an immigrant. Simple as that. At the end of the war Union soldiers were granted a free homestead of 180 acres in remote places like Minnesota and Dakota Territory. It solved two problems at once: what to do with thousands of men seeking work, and how to populate a continent.

*All translations are mine, mew.

Note: This book is not yet available in English translation, but the valuable appendix is easily accessible with a minimal knowledge of French. An earlier work by Professor Lamarre, The French Canadians of Michigan: Their Contribution to the Development of the Saginaw Valley and the Keweenaw Peninsula, 1840-1914 is available in English from Wayne State University Press.

Mary Ellen Weller is retired instructor of French at Mesabi Range Community and Technical College, Virginia MN.  maryellenwellerATaolDOTcom 

#27 – Dick Bernard: The Webinar on Fear, and related happenings, May 21, 2009

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 In #26, May 21, 2009, I mentioned an adventure on which I was about to embark: hooking into something called a webinar on “The Fear Factor: A briefing on communication and messaging from U.S. in the World”.   This session was taking place in some conference room in Washington D.C.

Apparently at roughly the same time, in the same city, President Obama was making a major speech on essentially the same topic relating to Guantanamo; and former Vice-President Cheney was trying to blunt the Presidents case in yet another speech at the American Enterprise Institute.  It was an interesting day, yesterday. 

 I am of the doofus generation, at least in a technological sense: a Webinar was something novel and largely incomprehensible to me.

 

 Nonetheless, I managed to follow the appropriate instructions, figured out how to put my cell phone on speaker mode, and got my computer linked so that I could watch the speakers power-point, including her occasional small errors in going to the wrong slide, or such.

 

(The power-point, with captions, can be accessed here http://www.connectusfund.org/resources/managing-fear-factor-briefing-us-world) 

 

That the speaker and in-house audience was invisible to me and sounded somewhat tinny was a relatively small problem.  I got the gist of it.

 

 The time on the webinar was well spent, though there are only so many new ways to make a presentation about Fear.

 

Fear is obviously a saleable commodity, and a dominant emotion in homo sapiens (and other vertebrates) brains.  It is survival mode, the bare basics on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. 

 

The speaker described as the “stone age brain”, and it is tempting to ascribe to the others whose views I oppose the inferior intellectual status of Fred and Wilma Flintstone.

 

But I have seen plenty of fear-based behavior amongst the good (and intellectually superior, of course) people with whom I most often associate.  And I’m in the same kettle as everyone else….  We’re all susceptible to Fear.  We just fear different things in different ways.

 

So, the speaker talked about “fears world view”, a view in which the “stone age brain” assesses situations as it would if its owner was in a schoolyard tussle with a bully; in a rough and tumble “wild west” scenario; or as it sees or imagines things out there in the “urban jungle”.  These are all examples of places “where the normal rules don’t apply” and where everyone has to watch out for him or her self.

 

In these kinds of situations, the sense of community is very restricted: trusting even the good next door neighbor might be a stretch.  “Me against the world” might be a good phrase.

 

The message I picked up from the Webinar is that the best course is simply to acknowledge that fear is a reality for all of us, and it is nothing to lecture or belittle people about.  People who are fearful are not stupid or crazy.  Fear just is.  And other tactics need to be explored to deal with the political tendency to rachet fear up as a useful “us vs them” tactic.

 

There is plenty of good material available about the topic, beginning with those references noted in #26 for May 21.  Do take the time to take a look at these references.   

#26 – Dick Bernard: NIMBY – Are we killing ourselves through "fear itself"?

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Shortly I will join a webinar sponsored by the Connect US Fund (www.connectusfund.org).  The title of the session “The Fear Factor: A briefing on communication and messaging from U.S. In The World”.   The  suggested readings are listed at the end of this posting.  They are very interesting.

 

I write intentionally before that session convenes.  Somehow it seems that the title is missing something when it says “from U.S. In The World”.  Might it better be, rather, “among us”?

 

The internal use of Fear to manipulate us is perhaps our most deadly enemy as a nation.  As I suggest in the title, we buy this Fear and, I contend, we are accepting the role of “killing ourselves”.

 

Examples are abundant.  Two on the national and international level occurred for me in the past 24 hours

 

1.  Yesterday, May 20, the United States Senate voted 90-6 against a small budget allocation directed towards the closing of Guantanamo Prison in Cuba.  The vote is not because there is serious disagreement with the data about the prisoners long held there, their possible guilt or innocence, the implications of their release, whether they can get a fair trial, etc.  Neither is it about the need to close this institution which has come to represent the worst of what we are as a nation.  We know we have to do this.  But none of this is terribly relevant.

 

The sole question seems to be “where should these prisoners go?”  And the stated and unstated answer is, “not in my backyard” (NIMBY).  We are afraid of these people, and legislators are afraid to face down this fear and do what is right.  They are afraid of the political consequences in the next election.

 

Some of these prisoners, (Many?  Most?), were innocent when they were thrown in jail without any rights, and left to rot there, tortured for information they did not have.  In the tragic irony of such situations, their very false incarceration leads to the near certainty of their continued incarceration in Cuba.  Nobody wants them in their state.

 

Fear is at work.  Politicians know the value of fear as a motivator.  Nobody wants them, even in the most secure facilities in the United States.   

 

If only this were the only example of fear run amuck….

 

2.  The same day the Senate voted I received the draft of a long carefully written letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations questioning the conduct of a recent election in the country of Haiti.  It seems that a major political party was denied placement on the ballot there because its designated leader had not properly signed the required form: a fax’ed signature was deemed improper.  Because this party wasn’t on the ballot, apparently great numbers of people boycotted the election in question, rendering the results invalid: there was no free election.

 

Since the designated leader of the party “is half a world away, exiled to another continent under international pressure” he could not sign in person the form required.

 

I have come to know a bit about this country and the sordid long term U.S. relationship with it.  Most Americans likely know little or nothing about Haiti, which makes it irrelevant and invisible to them.  But what we do reflects negatively on us, in relationship much as we impact negatively on it.

 

The leaders name is Jean-Bertrand Aristide, twice democratically elected president of Haiti, forced into exile by a coup engineered by the U.S., France and Canada in 2004.  Aristide, native born and till 2004 a life-long resident of Haiti, cannot even return to the country of his birth.  He is in another Guantanamo of our making, South Africa, even though he has not been found guilty of anything other than being someone the United States didn’t want to hold office in the desperately poor sovereign nation of Haiti.

 

For a particular reason, his popularity with the people of Haiti, the United States apparently fears Aristide’s return to his home country.   We fear any sense of empowerment of his constituency, the poor, for whose interests he advocated. 

 

Unlike the prisoners at Guantanamo, most Americans have probably never heard of Aristide; in fact, during a period of exile after another coup (1991) he lived several years in the United States.  One wonders if he would even be allowed to come to the United States at this point.

 

We seem mired in a swamp of our own making.  If there is anything we need to fear, it is that we are destroying ourselves.

 

Here are the readings suggested for today’s web-based session.  They are worth the time.

Resources
Detecting Intentions, Managing Fear: How Americans Think about National Security
Produced by the Topos Partnership for the National Security Network
http://www.connectusfund.org/resources/detecting-intentions-managing-fear-how-americans-think-about-national-security-0
Death Grip: How Political Psychology Explains Bush’s Ghastly Success
By John J. Judis, in The New Republic, August 27, 2007
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=9e9af105-6745-497a-b5f8-4f304749eed4&p=1
“Cheney’s Fear Mongering”
Political Cartoon by Morin, in The Miami Herald, April 5-11, 2009
http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/politicalcartoons/ig/Political-Cartoons/Cheneyu-Fear-Mongering.htm
“A Nuclear 9/11?”
By Brian Michael Jenkins, Senior Advisor to the President of the RAND Corporation
http://www.rand.org/commentary/2008/09/11/CNN.html
“Clark blasts GOP terror video”
Alex Isenstadt, in Politico, May 8, 2009
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0509/22268.html

 

 

#24 – Bob Barkley: Power vs Force

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As the transition from Bush to Obama continues, the differences between the reliance of power versus force, while subtle, are still quite substantive. I believe it is best explained in a piece I wrote in the midst of the Bush incompetence.
The tension between power and force is great and often misunderstood. Much of the problem here is the western worlds—or at least most Bush sympathizers—misunderstanding of the differences between these two dynamics.
And when it comes to which of these two will win in the long-term, power will eat force for lunch.
Power is about influence, persuasion, example, compassion, civility, modeling, pacifism, peacefulness, humility, and is intrinsic by nature; it is a ‘pull’ action.
Force is about bullying, brashness, greed, militarism, war, arrogance, hubris, brutishness, and is extrinsic by nature; it is a ‘push’ action. We have just escaped a US leadership that revered force, and, while not yet complete, the shift is apparent to at least a balance of the use of power and force.
Gandhi, M. L. King, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Reinhold Niehbuhr, and Jesus exemplify power. Its essence is in ideas rather than things, and it is transmitted through words, serenity, calmness, and trust. Use of this model generates eager followers rather than reluctant servants.
King George III, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, bin Ladin, Saddam, Caesar, Herod, and, some would argue, to an increasing extent the US and British leadership for the past 8 years in particular, exemplify force. It is transmitted through fear, intimidation, coercion, dishonesty, and violence. It generates obedience and subservience rather than voluntary and enthusiastic acceptance.
The world has had its share of force, but force has never sustained a society in the way that power has. Martin Luther King captured the concept with the following: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” It will always take the power of some new and more reasoned influence to rectify the damage done by the wrong-headedness of using force.
A friend has offered that recently, “We have at work a strange version of the force/power distinction that operates as if force is the measure of power. Those holding this belief think that a bigger force will inevitably win, and they dread that others will conquer them if they don’t achieve total domination first. The only thing that can be won in such a paradigm is more control. And to maintain such control requires an ever-increasing ruthlessness and creates a world that responds only to force – a world that is driven by extrinsic reward or consequences rather than by an intrinsic sense of hope and of true community.” A study of history—Rome, Hitler, Napoleon, on and on, take your pick—shows that force is always trumped and is never sustainable long term.
A tweaking of this power vs. force discussion might well lead to what Reinhold Niebuhr would have referenced as “power and humility.” This comment about Reinhold Niebuhr recently came to my attention*, “Niebuhr understood that the exercise of power can be shocking and, at times, corrupting. But he also understood that power is absolutely necessary to fight the battles that must be fought. The trick is to fight these battles with humility and constant introspection, knowing that there is no monopoly on virtue. Moreover, this combination is simply more effective. For power untethered from humility is certain to eventually fail.”
And in the wake of World War II, Niebuhr warned us “we are so deluded by the concept of our innocence that we are ill-prepared to deal with the temptations of power which now assail us.” I can’t think of a better bit of advice to those that today control our government.
Finally, Niebuhr wrote, “If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory.” Or quoting an old adage, “Hubris is terminal.” And there couldn’t be a better description of where Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush, et al, had been leading this nation.
In my manuscript titled “Progressive Thoughts from a Liberal Mind: Creating a More Perfect World,” this section has received the most attention by occasional readers. It is also the one I seem to refer to most often as I reflect upon today’s international climate.
Undoubtedly we must guide our nation to the use of power as here defined and to avoiding a reliance on force. Ultimately, particularly in the long term, all models based upon force will fail. But quite unfortunately, the failure of these models falls upon the children of the perpetrators rather than upon them. This means that it is most often the shortsighted and selfish – those lacking “humility” – who most rely on force to settle their grievances and frustrations or satisfy their greed.
It will serve us well to reflect upon this dynamic of power v. force as we evaluate efforts by the Obama administration to make the transition as it is apparent they wish to.
* Quotations by Rienhold Niebuhr are from his book Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study of Ethics and Politics
_________________________
Robert Barkley, Jr., Worthington, Ohio. Email at RBarkle@columbus.rr.com. Retired Executive Director, Ohio Education Association, served as Interim Executive Director, Maine Education Association, thirty-five year veteran of National Education Association and NEA affiliate staff work, long-term Consultant to the KnowledgeWorks Foundation of Cincinnati, Ohio [www.kwfdn.org], author of: Quality in Education: A Primer for Collaborative Visionary Educational Leaders, Leadership In Education: A Handbook for School Superintendents and Teacher Union Presidents, Principles and Actions: A Framework for Systemic Change (unpublished), and Progressive Thoughts from a Liberal Mind: Creating a More Perfect World (unpublished and available online upon request).

#20 – Dick Bernard: The Drones as Solution, or Problem?

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A reader comment follows this post.
The May 10 edition of CBS’ “60 Minutes” featured a segment on the military’s new star: an unmanned reconnaissance and war plane called a Drone. The segment, “Drones: America’s New Air Force”, likely remains available for viewing at http://www.60minutes.com. It is worth watching.
The Drone has those same qualities that used to attract me, as a kid, to the Ray Guns of the science fiction world of Flash Gordon, and the two-way wrist radio of super cop Dick Tracy. Lasers and digital phones are now old news in our society. The $11 million Drone with its $1 million camera is simply the latest rendition, allowing an operator sitting in a windowless high tech building in Nevada to take out bad guys in Afghanistan or other places thousands of miles away.
No more is there any risk to our “side”: someone simply presses a button, and out of existence goes some evil doer or group of evil doers over there. We are safe and in control. We don’t need to see the “whites of their eyes”; indeed, part of the star quality of this weapon is that the victim of it is not even aware that he is even being watched. (I think I can say “he” with a certain amount of confidence.)
There are downsides, of course, like possibly killing innocent civilians, or maybe even blasting out of existence an erroneous target, but that’s small price to pay, or so would say the supporters of this new smart warfare.
But is it so “smart”?
The program drove me to my internet search engine for some very elementary statistics: The United States has 3 million square miles of land surface compared with a world total of 57 million square miles. This translates into the U.S. occupying roughly 5% of the world’s land mass. Similarly, we have roughly 5% of the world’s population. And we’re a very large country.
What are the odds that an ever more sophisticated generation of Drones can successfully patrol the world for us, and rid it of all evil doers. For that matter, what are the odds they could control the evil doers in just our country, or my state, or town, or even neighborhood?
The odds of course is essentially zero, unless some target has been tirelessly tracked for months, and is a creature of habit, never moving, always following the same routine. Of course, a smart potential target blends into the neighborhood as well, putting at risk people who don’t even know he is there.
I think, here, of the lowly cows who used to be in the pasture at my grandparents place in North Dakota. They used to occupy the pasture south and west of the barn, wandering at will throughout the day, except for morning and afternoon when they would march along the proverbial cow path to the barn to be milked. Now, these were creatures of habit, easily predictable targets. How well would the Drone do its job if its target was a single one of those cows, a renegade one, who needed to be taken out? Could it single out its target, and not damage the other cows in its company? Would these other “productive citizen” cows just be considered a dispensable collateral damage?
Ah, high tech weaponry seems so innocuous and effective until you look the tiniest distance beyond it. They are, first of all, like all aggressive weaponry, a waste of natural resource. There is little “productive” that can be said of weaponry: it’s function is to destroy including, in the case of bombs and bullets, itself.
Conversely, the very survival of Humanity, from the basics of family onward, in the most primitive society to the most advanced, is rooted in the business of positive relationships.
The more powerful we became (I speak in the past tense), the less we felt we needed to engage continuously and positively with the world citizens who occupy the rest of the 95% of the planet. Unlike cows (so far as I know), humans whatever their language or culture have a tendency to develop relationships, and to not forget how they were treated.
Without positive relationships, no number of Drones will save or even protect us.

#12 – Claude Buettner: Atoms for Peace Needs Rethinking

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A very conservative acquaintance once asserted to me that the primary purpose of a national government is to establish security. Our global governance system (UN, WTO, IMF…) is failing by this primal measure to guard against potential global conflicts that could be precipitated by the ever-increasing water/food/energy insecurity.
There is an inherent loophole built into the “Atoms for Peace” regime (http://www.iaea.org/About/index.html) which allows all nations the right of owning the entire production cycle of nuclear material. As Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector and the presenter in our past September Forum [MN Citizens for Global Solutions “Third Thursday”], pointed out in his recent book, Target Iran (http://www.amazon.com for details), all nations including Iran have the right to process nuclear fuel for civilian use. Unfortunately, the exact same process used for enrichment of nuclear material for civilian energy use is also used for further enrichment for use in nuclear bombs for military use (merely cycle the material through the cascading centrifuges until the desired concentration is reached).
How could international law be changed to block countries from developing this technology or at least requiring all nations to submit to full supervision of the concentration phase of production? Can we imagine the US and Russia (who own 96% of all nuclear weapons according to the reputable Union of Concerned Scientists) going along with these new requirements? Can we imagine other countries agreeing to such supervision if these rules don’t apply to the US and Russia? The relationship between the US and Russia, especially on the nuclear issue, will remain pivotal if the world is to move forward on the security front.
Allen Greenspan recently said it was human nature that caused the global financial meltdown and because human nature doesn’t change a similar meltdown could occur again in the future. Hmmm…if that’s true then by the same reasoning we remain vulnerable to all-out nuclear war and the 96% of the nuclear weapons must also be seen as a greater long-term threat to civilization than the new ones coming on line. It may seem that the cycle of mass violence the past shows us is the skeleton of human history upon which the details are fleshed out. But it is social, industrial and governmental structures that make up the framework of civilization and it is war, and especially global war, that is the cancer that threatens that structure. What we need now are effective structures for peace, to use a favorite term of our late MN Citizens for Global Solutions local chapter inspiration, Stanley Platt.
It’s time to get on with the work of civilization to establish and maintain peace at the international level, even if peace is imperfect at the local level. In the same way peace among adjacent US states doesn’t completely eliminate local crimes or brawls. The higher authority of our federal courts allows even serious disputes between states to be resolved without resorting to action from the militia. This is the tradition that needs to be established at the international level.
Claude Buettner is a life member of Citizens for Global Solutions (CGS, formerly World Federalists) and the current President of the Minnesota Chapter of CGS. He’s also active in other internationally related organizations such as United Nations Association, Committee on Foreign Relations, and Minnesota International Center. He’s a salesperson for MTS Systems Corporation. He can be reached at claude101ATcomcastDOTnet.

#11 – Dick Bernard: Swine Flu, Fear, Hype and Hysteria

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During 1918, my mother almost died in the WW I flu epidemic. I know because she wrote about it in her memories, thusly:
“I think one of the most traumatic experiences I had happened when I was about nine years old and got the World War I flu. Many people were very sick and some died. I had a very rough siege with that flu and remember when Dr. Salvage came out in some very cold winter weather, in the middle of the night, to keep me from bleeding to death. I don’t remember what he did but I had a very high fever and was bleeding from the nose and I spit out chunks of blood. I think they thought I was gone for sure. I recovered though and it took a long while for me to regain my strength. I can remember having some wild dreams and nightmares and must have been out of my head at least part of the time. .”
Esther Bernard, Jan. 1981, page 116 of Pioneers: The Busch and Berning families of LaMoure County North Dakota.
I was seven years old when I got hepatitis and had a very rough time with that. There was no simple way to handle yellow jaundice and it had to work out of the system. I think they give blood transfusions now. I had an upset stomach for several years after that which is probably why I had such a rough time with the 1918 flu
I thought of Mom’s recollection this morning with the breaking news about the Mexican Swine Flu fears. It became big news yesterday; today’s paper had much front page coverage, including a map of the United States which showed 8 cases in Ohio, 7 in California, 2 each in Texas, , Kansas and Ohio. “It’s not a time to panic,” the White House said”, while suggestions were about that we were at a time of possible epidemic, or global pandemic. 1918 came up, as did 1957 and 1968. I wasn’t around in 1918, but I don’t remember anything about 1957 or 1968 so the grim reaper must’ve passed us by. (By the winter of 1918 Mom’s family included her parents and six children. As best as I can tell, she is the only one who got sick with the flu. The 1918 pandemic apparently mainly impacted on young adults – people 20-40. My grandparents would have been in that general age range; neither got sick.)
I don’t know all the details about 1918 and the flu epidemic. I know my grandparents had telephone then; that Dr. Salvage was in a town 10 miles away, that roads were good enough for a car to get through to most farms IF they weren’t blocked with snow, or impassable due to mud.
I don’t know what Dr. Salvage had in his medical bag when he visited Mom; I don’t know if something in that bag helped her turn the corner, or if Mom just got lucky and slowly got better. It does appear, though, from the history she and her siblings recited that at her farm the grim reaper had picked her, and only her, for attention during that awful time period. And I know, too, that in that long ago time the odds of medicine making any difference at all were much lower than today: if you got sick, you either got better or you didn’t. Other than the phone and the newspapers and word of mouth, there were no other media to really fan up the fear, such as there is today.
So, today, lots of newsprint and air time is expended to emphasize the possibility of a dire threat from a flu that has so far affected 21 people in the entire United States. (As I write, the MSN home page has updated the number to 40). People are assessing who they know who’s been to Mexico recently. I took a couple across the driveway to the airport a month or so ago, as they were enroute to a two week vacation in Mexico. A good friend recently came back from a vacation in Mexico. Should I steer clear of them till the threat passes? Will I start to see people wearing masks in grocery stores? Should I buy a mask, or get in line for Tamiflu?
What I do know is that fear sells, and sells well; and fear can rapidly turn into hysteria. And there are many who benefit from the hype, selling fear and hysteria. Of course, fear and hysteria solve nothing, but are certain realities.
Is it useful to exercise prudence in these times? Absolutely. But making it into front page news at this stage?

#8 – Dick Bernard: Susan Boyle, and "Cynical", "Tiger" and "I dreamed a dream"….

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Susan Boyle, Britains Got Talent, April 11, 09. A great gift… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY.
To be as clear as I can be: Susan Boyle’s performance on Britains Got Talent on April 11 was stunning and real. She was so good, but the lead-up made her sound so unlikely to be as outstanding as she was, that I struggled a bit. But it didn’t take long to accept that what I was hearing was true: Susan Boyle was very, very real real.
Here is how the feelings evolved for me, and how I see them as applying to all of us in our very cynical and untrusting society.
ABC Evening News with Charlie Gibson on Tuesday afternoon, April 14, was my first contact with Susan Boyle. The last item was the piece on her appearance on the popular British show. From the first note, hers was a stunning and moving performance by a common country girl, her skeptical audience “turned on a dime” and was cheering unceasingly. I’m “country” to the core, and I felt huge pride in her performance.
I sought out the clip and found it on YouTube. At the time I seem to recall there had been something over 2 million views (as I write this, it’s over 12 million). I had noticed, even on the ABC clip, a slight difference between Susan’s mouth movement and the music, but I noticed the same difference in the other speakers, so I simply interpreted it as a synchronization problem, which I know is common in early edits of video. Still, the performance was so wonderful as to be hard to believe.
Overnight Monday night came an e-mail from a friend urging me to look at the video, from a different source than the one I had found.
Within a few hours everything mitigated toward the reality of Susan, her background, her outstanding voice, her dream. I sent the link on in the morning. At that time there had been 5 million views. Later, on Wednesday, I found Susan to be on the cover of my MSN page on the internet.
I received a few e-mail comments, which follow this piece. I had no doubts.
I’m still awestruck. Some observations:
1) Susan Boyle is, in my view, a shero of the first order. She did what very few of us would ever consider doing. She knew that she was good, but she also knew that she would be subject to the withering and “cynical” view of the panel and audience on the program. She went out there anyway, and represented all of us “commoners” in a most remarkable and real way. I share the feelings of one of those who commented (below): I hope that in the process of marketing her talent, her handlers will not try to remake her from what she is, a Scottish village lady who loves to sing.
2) Susan also represents to me our society’s tendency to dismiss reality in favor of fantasy. The expression “don’t judge a book by its cover” comes to mind. But we are always looking for the cover, first: the resume, the reputation…. Ironically, had Susan come out on stage with a fancy “cover”, sophisticated-looking, made-up and all, in the latest fashions, then we would have seen an image, and, even if she sang exactly the same, the judges and the audience would have probably looked for flaws in her vocal performance.
3) My guess is that most of us are prone to fantasy. It’s how we’ve been “made-up” by our life experience, especially in the age of television and beyond. We’re taught “slick”. Or, even more, we’re taught to stay in our place, our “class”.
4) Susan Boyle and Britains Got Talent, and ABC and MSN and all the rest, demonstrate another truth: both the sophisticated media and we unwashed masses need each other, and provide benefits to each other. There needs to be some kind of a “truce”. Without the opportunity presented by Britains Got Talent, Susan would never have had the opportunity to be seen by what is already tens of millions of people. Without big media – ABC and MSN and many others – I never would have seen her performance. She would have been hidden in her Scottish village.
5) It is the Susan’s of the world who make life worth living. Her success is something we can and should celebrate. In our own ways, we can all be Susan in our own places!
Congratulations to a true diva cut from common cloth!
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Some early comments received:
Apr 15 09 12:11 a.m. “Check out the above site to hear the American idol lady from England…a real treat and inspiration to late bloomers everywhere.”
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Apr 15 8:14 a.m. “Wow. When did this happen? I just hope they don’t remake her. I like her as she is. Half the happiness is the surprise.
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Apr 15 6:04 a.m. “ I’m not the ultimate cynic, I loved this video, but I frankly wonder if it isn’t lip-synched. In the first two lines, I saw disparity between the timing of sound and lips. And a couple other times going through.
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Apr 16 7:37 a.m. “The Susan Boyle thing is quite a phenomenon. (I will admit that when I
first viewed it and I didn’t watch the whole thing, when I saw the guy off stage say something like “you didn’t expect that did you?”…. my internet skepticism was raised and I started surmising it was some type of scam with lip synching involved…. goes to show you how easily one can become skeptical in the modern world)….
This came just at the right moment…I watched “Tootsie” last night (25th anniversary edition) and there was a special feature afterwards on the making of the film in which Dustin Hoffman talks about how he felt to learn what it was like to be an unattractive woman in a society that doesn’t tolerate it. He cried while talking about it (maybe he was acting) but it was very moving to see; he said he had never realized how callous men are to homely women and how many doors shut in their faces without giving them a chance. He said for some reason the world forgives ugly men, but not women.
This singer must have never tried wholeheartedly, knowing that. Good for her, giving it one last go.”
We’ll see if anything comes out on this. I hope not, but if it does…
I’ve thought of another possibility, i.e. it may well be Boyle’s voice. But she would have sung this song many times to the same taped accompaniment, and they could have used a singing of it which was not the one in front of the crowd. I don’t know.”
My first take on this is that it is symptomatic of the recession, instead of high flying rich and famous types being idolized, people are seeing the quintessential “everywoman” who is something special. Is this hyper populism? On a psycho-social note the other thing is the interesting expose of human disposition toward expectations based on visual inspection. Can a middle aged, overweight, non hip person possibly be talented? Very interesting comment on human nature in my opinion.”
Update – May 24, 2009
The performance which led to this post on April 16, 2009, has now been viewed by 60,000,000.  Last night Susan Boyle won the highest number of votes in the next round.
Update June 1, 2009
Susan came in second in the final round, May 30, 2009.  As of this date, her video has been seen 65,000,000 times, the fifth largest viewership ever on YouTube. 
 
 

#3 – Dick Bernard: Binghamton NY April 3, 2009

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Reader comment follows this post.
It wasn’t until late afternoon on Friday that I learned any details of the latest gun-related tragedy, this time in Binghamton NY. Thirteen dead, plus the shooter; four critically injured; possibly some cause and effect of the shooter having recently lost his job for some unknown reason; an apparent pre-meditated intention to kill as many as possible by blocking the door through which people might escape. It was all horrific.
As I write, Saturday morning, April 4, the facts are beginning to emerge: the shooter had two pistols on him, both registered firearms; he’s Vietnamese, apparently a U.S. citizen for decades; apparently knew well the place where he killed the thirteen people, most of them studying for citizenship…. The stories and analysis are just beginning.
Full disclosure: small arms were around me when I was growing up. Shooting gophers when they were pests on the North Dakota prairies was something I was accustomed to: their tails were worth a nickel, a lot of money to a kid, then. A bunch of us kids were playing with my Dad’s 22 calibre rifle when I was perhaps nine. It was hanging in the garage, and it was off-limits…. There was a bullet in the chamber; it went off; luckily nobody was killed (we were lucky). Dad and Mom never knew of that close call.
In the Army, I qualified as Expert with the M-1 Rifle. Thankfully I never had to use my skills. I have never owned a gun, or had an interest in purchasing one, and to the best of my recollection haven’t shot one since the Army days. There’s never been a gun in a home of mine. I have no issue against hunters and hunting in the traditional sense of that word: shotguns, regular rifles, licenses….
The national debate for years has gone far beyond the lines I describe above. We are an armed and very dangerous nation of far too many people armed to the teeth, wallowing in fear and resentment of this, that or the other.
Binghamton, April 3, 2009, could well be the tip of a very large iceberg.
I decided, last night, to check in on the two “poles” of our nation’s fascination/obsession with guns and other weapons to see how they were spinning Binghamton: the National Rifle Association and the Brady Campaign. www.nra.org and www.bradycampaign.org. As of 8 a.m. this morning, NRA does not have a word on what happened in Binghamton; as of last night, the Brady Campaign had commented. You can visit their website, and they can speak for themselves.
Even before the reports on Binghamton, I’ve seen scraps of information. One of the news reports I heard mentioned that in this country of 300,000,000, there are 250,000,000 firearms. The ban on assault weapons has apparently sun-setted; till yesterday afternoon there was no real interest in gun legislation…there are other bigger problems to deal with. Gun and ammunition sales are sky-rocketing in this country. We are awash in dangerous arms. The “Gun Lobby” is feared by politicians.
April 2, 2009 – a day before Binghamton – a New York Times editorial commented on a last minute federal regulation issued in December 2008 making concealed loaded guns legal in our national parks and wildlife refuges. “In December, ignoring proper procedure and the risk to public safety, the Bush administration rushed through regulations allowing people to carry concealed, loaded guns in national parks and wildlife refuges.” (The NRA website posted a commentary on that issue from a Joshua Tree, California, newspaper.) A Judge just threw out the rule, calling it “astoundingly flawed”. It remains to be seen if the court ruling will be appealed by the new administration.
And the top headline in yesterday’s Minneapolis paper, hours before Binghamton, was simple and stark: “Was this gun in the hand of Fong Lee when he was fatally shot by a Minneapolis police officer? Or was the weapon planted at the scene? One shooting. Two stories.”
Guns do make excellent partners for crime: A week or so ago Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking in Mexico, made news north of Mexico’s border when she observed that most of the weaponry in the current drug wars in Mexico came from U.S. sources; as did most of the demand for the illegal drugs which has precipitated the violence over drug territories in Mexico.
Those who revere gun rights will begin again reciting the mantra: “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people”, and the like. Of course, concealed hand guns make killing easier.
We love our guns, and other unhealthy things.