Blithering On

We know from experience that it's difficult to distill an event to a sentence or even to a paragraph and accurately capture its fullness or its context and implications. Leaving important voids in the storytelling leaves it to others to tell it their own way to the point that they might distort the facts and the story. But the retelling of history is full of examples where that very thing happens, where the story is told and retold inaccurately. Sometimes it's done to illustrate a broader point. Sometimes it happens to make the history easier to follow and more relatable to students. Sometimes it arises out of mythmaking where over time, the myth takes on the appearance of truth. Take Mason Locke Weems for example. In his "The Life of Washington," Parson Weems wrote that young Washington damaged his father's cherry tree and confessed as much to him: "I cannot tell a lie...I did cut it with my hatchet." Some retelling has it that he didn't just cut th...

Remember the old parable of the scorpion and the frog. A scorpion and a frog stood on riverbank one day. As the frog hopped toward the water to swim across, the scorpion asked him to carry him on his back to the other side. The frog answered, “No, no…I’m not going to do that. We’ll get halfway across then you’ll sting me and kill me.” But the scorpion answered quickly. “I would never do that. Think about it. If I sting you, you’ll die, and I’ll drown. It would doom us both.” Finally persuaded, the frog agreed. Sure enough, halfway across the river, the frog felt the sudden sting of the scorpion’s barb and the paralyzing venom spreading, his body going numb. As the frog faded into death and began to sink, he cried out, “Why would you do that? You’ve stung me and I'm dying! Now we’ll both drown!” The scorpion answered simply: “Of course I stung you. I’m a scorpion. It’s what I do.” We shouldn’t be surprised when actors behave according to their nature. The real mistake is expecting t...

In 1786, a group of farmers in western Massachusetts—many of them Revolutionary War veterans—rose up to stop the courts from seizing their land for unpaid debts. Led in part by Daniel Shays, they shut down the courts and attempted to seize a federal arsenal in Springfield. In response, Massachusetts Governor James Bowdoin raised a militia and dispersed the rebellion. That episode spotlighted a fundamental weakness in the early American national government under the Articles of Confederation. There was no standing army, no reliable authority to raise one, and no clear power for the national government to intervene in state-level unrest. The implication was unmistakable: if a larger or multi-state rebellion arose, there might be no coordinated response at all, potentially leaving states to act independently to preserve their own security. The rebellion also sharpened awareness of broader defects in the Articles of Confederation. The national government had no power to tax, which kept it ...

In every American war there is what should be an indelible truth: that we pull together and stand behind our mission and our troops. Support among our countrymen should be unambiguous and unwavering. Yet too often, that unified front becomes fractured by politics once the fighting begins. Of course, debate, dissent, and political maneuvering are the lifeblood of our constitutional republic. They're such an important part of our collective problem-solving formula that we protected that right in the U.S. Constitution. The issue with the politics isn't the dissent—it's the timing. And poor timing signals weakness. For decades, American leaders of both parties have declared that the United States would never tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran. Those statements weren't whispered in some back room; they were repeated openly by presidents, secretaries of state, members of Congress, and allies abroad. They were a red line drawn by a long line of administrations intended to assure Ir...

I've resisted commenting on the outrage over the Department of War's purchase of steak and lobster for our troops. Now, I think it's time for me to weigh in. I never considered any part of my military service to be scandalous or frivolous, but I guess it's time to rethink that. I enlisted in the Marine Corps in the mid-1970s. In the 24 years that followed, I deployed at sea for three months or more six times, four of those times for six months or more. Confession time... On just about every one of those occasions, we were treated to a meal of steak — and sometimes lobster — at some point along the way. And we lapped it up wantonly, as if it was something that we should actually feel good about. But the scandal didn't end there. I started out as an infantryman, and when we were in the field on Thanksgiving or Christmas they would actually truck a hot holiday meal out to us — usually a turkey dinner with the trimmings for both holidays. They did this even though one o...

  “When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him.”   —Franklin D. Roosevelt, September 11, 1941 On November 26, 1941, a Japanese carrier force slipped out of port and headed east across the Pacific under strict orders to attack the U.S. Navy fleet at Pearl Harbor. We know how that turned out, but suppose the United States had learned that the Japanese fleet had sailed and had intelligence that disclosed its mission before the Japanese struck on December 7. Would Washington have been justified in hitting them first? In hindsight, the answer is yes, but what about when that question mattered most: before the attack? More than a century earlier, a similar question helped shape the principle of self-defense in international law. In 1837, British forces crossed into American territory and destroyed the American steamer Caroline , which had been supplying Canadian rebels. The incident—known as the Caroline Affair—created a dip...