Morning Coffee (122)

Happy Cinco de Mayo! Most people don’t know the history of this day, which celebrates Ignacio Zaragoza Seguin, the Mexican general who defeated the French at the Battle of Puebla on 05 May 1862. But the hidden history is even more intriguing. General Seguin was placed in command the day prior as his boss General Cesar Delgado became ill after consuming bad sardines with salsa. Interestingly, Mexico has a long history of naming famous victories after the favorite condiments of the general in charge of said victory, and General Seguin’s favorite condiment, much to the chagrin of his troops, was not salsa, but mayonnaise. Had Delgado not been struck ill by his afternoon snack on 04 May, we may well have been celebrating Cinco de Salsa! In the spirit of Seguin’s victory, today is the day which all good and decent people should consume a Fifth of Mayonnaise! Use it on sandwiches, or in a good potato salad.

It is possible that, because I do not speak Spanish, I may have mistranslated “History of Cinco de Mayo,” which is in Spanish. Comprende?

The Rise of Post-Americanism:

I’ve lately read a number of articles on what I suppose should most accurately be called post-Americanism. Apparently, this topic is en vogue at the moment. In all of these articles, the author discusses the “post-American world” but always spins it in one particular way; every single article discusses how this “post-American world” isn’t something to be feared, but welcomed.

What does a post-American world look like? Well, according to most of these authors, the US still has political and military hegemony over the nations of the world, but these nations are achieving parity in areas such as economics, cultural influence, personal affluence, individual prestige, and grandiose public works. Basically, the US is still dominant militarily, but it no longer has the most impressive buildings or most impressive billionaires.

This article, by Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek, describes some of the seemingly superficial areas in which the US has lost its once prodigious lead. Zakaria contends that the post-American world is not so much the depression of the US might, but the rise of the rest of the world. He also contends that US hegemony, which he calls Pax Americana, has been the enabling factor for this rise of the rest.

Is all this a good thing? Zakaria posits that it is. I’m obviously skeptical. I am a patriot, but more importantly, I suppose I could be qualified as a nationalist, which means that I am very “pro” my nation being superior in all endeavors, to include the superficial. Foolish as it may seem, I want my nation to net the greatest haul of Gold Medals at the Olympics. I want my nation to have the most impressive buildings. I want my nation to have the most billionaires even. To cede the lead in any area is to me a further erosion of civic pride and virtue. I do not mind losing so long as we don’t throw our arms up and then give up. Because such apathy is much like any disease: viciously contagious. Zakaria reports that 81 percent of Americans believe that the country is “on the wrong track.” Eighty-one percent. Presented differently, that’s 19 percent that may or may not believe that the US is on the right track. Granted, a lot seems to be going badly at the moment, with gas prices and a “sputtering” economy and a massively unpopular war. It’s not surprising then to see such numbers. But maybe the situation is deeper than that. Perhaps our nation is mired in some sort of national malaise; some sort of melancholic rut from which we can not easily extricate ourselves.

When I am an old man, I fear that I will be able to look back and recognize that I saw my nation’s power peak, and that I lived the last half of my life in the waning stages of that power. We must remember that things are never as clear in the present as they are through hindsight. Will we be able to pick specific events that eroded American might as we can with the Romans? Will we look back with regret our unwillingness to oppose the growing might of China? Will we look back longingly at the wealth squandered on ill-conceived conflicts? Will we wish that we would have done things differently? Let’s hope that we can avoid such a fate altogether, at least for another 100 years. I want my son to be able to grow up in the nation I grew up in, and if he can say that of his son, and then that son to his, perhaps the future won’t look so troubling.

Hey, at least we’ve still got nukes, right? They can’t take those away from us…yet…

Poor, Poor Pain:

Ladies and Gentlemen, if you make less than $30k a year, you will spend 20% of your life in moderate to severe pain. But if you make more than $100k, you’ll have to spend a mere 8% of your life in the same type of pain. And you thought that money was the only thing that separates class. Okay, this is nearly the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever read, and I can’t read it anymore. Its absurdity is causing me moderate to severe pain.

Word of the Day: Fustian (noun): 1. A kind of coarse twilled cotton or cotton and linen stuff, including corduroy, velveteen, etc.; 2. An inflated style of writing or speech; pompous or pretentious language. (Adj): 1. Made of fustian; 2. Pompous; ridiculously inflated; bombastic.

On This Day in History: Columbus lands on Jamaica, and to the dismay of the natives, claims it for Spain (1494). Afrikaans is established as an official language in South Africa (1925). West Germany gains full sovereignty (1955). The 27^th Amendment is ratified, 202 years after its initial submission (1992). Strange that it took so long to ratify a simple amendment governing Congressional pay…

“We find that the Romans owed the conquest of the world to no other cause than continual military training, exact observances of discipline in their camps, and unwearied cultivation of other arts of war.” – Flavius Renatus Vegetius.

Morning Coffee (90)

Good Morning Coffee drinkers; or afternoon, depending on your reading habits. It’s another semi-fine day, right? I leave that to your judgment.

A Touch of the Ole Midas:

If my ancestors had more foresight when they came to this New World, they would have perhaps assisted Cortez in relieving the natives of their precious metals. Or perhaps they would have bolted for California 1849. Because if they passed onto me a mere pound of gold, I would have at present a pretty good sum of money in the form of the glimmering metal. Yesterday the price of gold rose to $894.40 an ounce before settling back down to $881.80. I’m told that’s a record high (although it still falls well below the inflation adjusted high of 1980 when gold reached $2,200 an ounce). Silver, gold’s oldest competitor for worship by shiny-object-loving primitives, rose to a paltry $15.94 an ounce. Platinum though would run you about $1,558 per, which means if I liquidated all of my assets, including the ownership of the highly profitable Morning Coffee, I could purchase roughly 1/10^th of an ounce of platinum. Clearly, I haven’t the curse of Midas.

Unlimited Refills:

Do you know what is scary? A significant percentage (I think it was 30%, but I’ve lost the source) of those who voted for Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire’s primary said that if given a choice, they would have voted for Bill Clinton again. You might assume that this is scary for a number of reasons; that Bill was a bad President or made a mockery out of the Office of the Presidency or was weak in some area or another. But this isn’t what I think is scary about this. No, it’s scary because it means that a surprising percentage of our citizenry have no regard whatsoever for an integral part of our political system, and a part that I think should be expanded far beyond its present use. I’m talking about term limits. Apparently, a check on the personal accumulation of power isn’t all that important provided people feel good.

I guess it should come as no surprise, since we are talking about the same species who has been a-okay with handing over near unlimited powers to all sorts of people, provided that they make their problems appear to go away and make them feel safe and snug in their beds. I’m not talking, of course, about people who’ve been forced to bear the yoke of tyranny by violence or were unlucky enough to have been born into it. I’m talking about people who actively cede power to an individual or to an office (which are generally occupied by people). Our version of Cincinnatus, George Washington, would have been given a crown by the people had he desired and accepted it. We would have simply handed over all for which we had so recently fought because a man gave us a warm and fuzzy feeling of security; because he was a competent leader and because he had helped win us our freedom. Wouldn’t that would have been the height of irony? Ceding our freedoms to the man who helped us win them? We have already created our own aristocracy, and while it may be that titles and honorifics are not passed down from generation to generation, the concept is the same. Knowing that, what would our government look like had Washington not wished to retire to Mount Vernon? It’s a blessing (and a curse) that our political institutions are now pretty firmly entrenched, as limits on Presidential terms are a Constitutional Amendment (22^nd, ratified in 1951). But as history has shown us, firmly entrenched is a mere illusion of permanence when it comes to man’s institutions, for without conscious renewal of the vows of constraint, they will be slowly eroded by those who seek more power. What’s surprising, though, is that it took so long for the Constitution to be amended in the first place, considering what Jefferson wrote about it in 1807 ("if some termination to the services of the chief Magistrate be not fixed by the Constitution, or supplied by practice, his office, nominally four years, will in fact become for life”) and what others thought before and after him. What is not surprising, however, is that while the purveyors of our laws have limited Presidential power in this regard, they have not taken the opportunity to similarly constrain themselves. Hopefully that can be changed in the future, and we can implement another check against “benevolent tyranny.” And hopefully, we don’t someday, in a fit of irrational fear, repeal the 22^nd Amendment and crown ourselves a new Caesar.

The aforementioned bit of New Hampshire exit polling, about which I was speaking prior to mounting the soapbox, also suggests that perhaps a third of those who voted for Hillary Clinton might have done so solely out of nostalgia. That is not as scary as the disregard for term limits, as it’s simply part of human nature to be nostalgic, but it is jarring to think that Mrs. Clinton might be elected, whatever her merits or demerits, based largely on the fact that her husband was once President and the passage of 8 years has bathed his term in a rose-colored light. Is this how simple we are as an electorate? Rhetorical question. If this is the case, what I wrote in previous Morning Coffee (81) certainly must be even more foreboding. Imagine another Clinton or a Bush getting a chance because of nostalgia.

Sensationalism is Grand:

I was itching for something else to write about, since the above is simply too short considering yesterday’s grandiose composition. Thankfully, I found something about which to complain. Here is the Drudge Report’s headline for an article on some local news station’s website about school lunches:

“School bans desserts; Parents given strict policy for bag lunches…”

That sounds great, right? I was actually sort of angry that a school would dictate what I was allowed to put in my child’s Transformers lunch box. I was going to write up an angry diatribe about the nanny state and what not, because it’s getting out of hand and this article would have illustrated that. I’m fine with the school changing their lunch policy and providing my kid a quality meal for a mere $7 (sarcasm), but not with dictating to me. But here’s what the article says about bag lunches:

“Parents can pack anything they want in their kids' lunch, but they've all received the school's wellness policy that encourages them to go for healthy snacks.”

The difference between what the headline suggests and how the article reads on that topic is radical. Drudge is known for sensational headlines, but this is probably the worst I’ve ever seen. In no way do I read that parents are given a strict policy for bag lunches. I wish people were a little less inflammatory. Here at the Morning Coffee we (I) try to approach issues with a certain amount of constraint and objectivity. I probably fail more often than not considering I’m but a man and imperfect and such, but I hope I’m never as blatant as the above example.

Word of the Day: Ephemeral (adjective): 1. Lasting a very short time; short-lived; transitory. 2. Lasting but one day. 3. Anything short-lived, as certain insects.

On This Day in History: In one of my favorite moments in history, Julius Caesar crosses the Rubicon, starting a civil war which would be the beginning of the end of the Republican Era of Roman history (49 BCE). Eventually, the Senate and People of Rome (SPQR) would shower upon Caesar numerous accolades, and would elect to make him Dictator for life. He would soon be killed by the famous tyrannicide Marcus Junius Brutus and his cohorts, but the damage to the Republic was irreversible, and Rome would be ruled, for better or for worse, by emperors until its end. It should be noted that Rome’s disdain of tyrants and kings was even more deep-seated than our own, and yet they succumbed. Of equal relevance to the today’s overarching theme, Thomas Paine first published his Common Sense on this day (1776). In this publication, Paine asserts that he will “offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense…”

"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom." – Thomas Paine