Forgetting History

World War II is fading from people’s memory as surely as its veterans are fading from the scene. That fact seems particularly odd to those of my generation. We boomers grew up in the shadow of that war. Most of our fathers served in it. The years of our childhood and youth were commonly called the post-war era. The books, movies, TV shows, and comics we read and saw were full of stories from the war. Even as children we understood that it had been a life changing event for our parents, and as we grew older we learned what it meant for the life of the country and the history of the world. Now we see generations of Americans to whom the Second World War is apparently as remote and dimly understood as the war with Spain in 1898. It’s strange and sad and I think wrong that the awareness and understanding are fading so much and so quickly.
I thought of this today when I noticed the absence of notice in the media of the fact that this is the 70th anniversary of one of the most important events of World War II – the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and the start of the war on the eastern front in Europe. The four years of battles that followed that invasion were among the bloodiest and most brutal in history, and their ultimate outcome did much to determine the course of the war and the shape of the post-war world. The crimes and atrocities committed in eastern Europe by the Nazis until they were defeated in 1945 and by the Soviets until the collapse of their empire almost fifty years later were among the most horrible in history. It’s not an anniversary or a story we should be forgetting.

California and Detroit

Marketwatch recently ran two stories on what it claimed were the most and least expensive places to buy a house in the United States. The methodology was questionable, but the general conclusions fit with other data. Ritzy suburbs of big eastern cities and several places in California were on the list of most expensive, while some rural communities, small towns, suburbs in the south, and Cleveland and Detroit were on the list of least expensive.

This is interesting because not too many decades ago, Detroit was a center of prosperity with a booming auto industry and an average income said to be greater than that of New York City. The dreary history of Detroit’s decline is well known as are some of the causes – the parallel decline of the Michigan auto companies, a city government degenerating into something remarkably corrupt, kleptocratic, and inept even by big city standards, expanding welfare and criminal classes, the rise of anti-industrial “green” politicians and pressure groups, and years of its better and more productive citizens abandoning the city for more congenial places to the south and west.

Now parts of California are the sort of economic dynamos that Detroit was at the middle of the 20th Century. I hope it lasts, but California’s government is at least as hostile to enterprise and success as any in Michigan ever was, and we are already seeing flight from that state by fed up productive people. We can hope that by the middle of this century we do not see another Detroit in the now dynamic areas of California. A lot of it will depend on whether the state’s governments wake up and change course. That’s hoping for a lot. I would not want to live there or own property there just now.

The Sad case of the Non-barking Dog

There are times when we can learn as much from noticing what did not happen as we learn from observing what did. People who lived under the Soviets talk about piecing together ideas of actual events from the omissions in Pravda. In a famous Sherlock Holmes story, a mystery was solved by noticing that a dog had not barked under circumstances where, if certain assumptions had been true, it would have. We are seeing something similar in the case of Anthony Weiner.

Reporters, politicians of both parties, and assorted public moralists are expressing outrage all over the various media about his actions. Leaders of his own party have pleaded for his resignation. It has been a national scandal. Yet what he really did, while puerile, creepy, and a bit revolting, was not really a big deal. He exchanged vulgar photos of himself and messages about himself with various women who participated voluntarily. (At least one of his correspondents was a teenage girl, but there has been no report that he solicited her or did anything else illegal in his contacts with her.)

What I find interesting is that these are the things people are focusing on and outraged about. Almost no one is calling him to task for his systematic, ongoing, serial, vilely unscrupulous lying about the matter. He lied to people in the media. He lied to the public. He lied to his colleagues. He lied to his friends and associates, many of whom were made to look foolish in public by defending him. He lied even as he confessed to his earlier rounds of lying. Yet, almost no one is citing that as a reason for him to resign in disgrace. Someone once wrote that one of the things Americans are least honest about is their expectation of honesty. They say they value honesty and expect it of others, but routinely accept that touts and politicians are lying to them without holding them the least bit accountable for it. This case illustrates that very well. People should be demanding that Weiner leave office, not only or mainly because his a pervert, but because he has shown himself to be an utter scoundrel. That this is not happening very much suggests in a sad way just how much the American people have become accustomed and resigned to mendacity from those in power. Outrage over the lying is the worrisome dog that should be barking like mad and is not.