POTUS Ike and SECWAR Gates

Dear Dr. Bones,

Any second- through ninth-rank publicist and/or tertiary educationaliser who happens to approve of liberalism and democracy--possibly even of "the Democrat party"--is likely enough to make a fetish of burning candles to St. Ike. "After all, jennies and jackasses, General Eisenhower was one of THEM, but he ADMITTED that" et cetera, et cetera.

So here’s an unexamined notion crying out "Examine me!" -- no doubt about it. Even better, it is OUR unexamined notion, at least if one does not scrutinize the pronoun usage too rigorously. Picking on ourselves is better sport than picking on even the best militant extremist Republicanians currently functional, not to mention almost infinitely better sport than picking on the Kiddie Selfservative Movement.

Kiddies and neokiddies perhaps scarcely come into play, though: they will either have been so successfully wombschooled that they scarcely know who St. Ike was, or else they will have been trained to write him off in a flash as just another obvious R.I.N.O. Indeed, should Wally Wingnut and Cindy from Wasilla first hear of the Crusader in Old Europe for the very first time the day after tomorrow, they are bound to write him off in a flash with two distinct knee-jerk responses inculcated by their trainers:

(1) "Never apologize, never explain": anybody who even seems to suggest that the Party of Grant & Hoover (and Goldwater an’ Atwater ’n’ ...) might possibly have erred grievously cannot, eo ipso, be the real McCaughey. She (the apologizatrix, I mean, who claims the inferior generic pronoun by right) may not be a ""conscious, dedicated agent of the ... Conspiracy" such as the John Galt Society had discovered in Gen. Eisenhower himself, but she must be some kimd of Fifth Columnist all the same, wittin’ or witless.

(2) "That was Then, this is Now"[1]: expecting the kiddies and neokiddies and G.O.P. geniuses of 1431/2010/5770 to attach any importance to ‘their’ Gen. Pres. Eisenhower after fifty years is as silly as to expect them to feel the slightesr urge to defend their Col. Sen. Frémont after 154 years. Gone with the wind is all that! Or call it "destructively creationized."

So much for kiddie selfservatism.

As to ourselves, I believe there are three distinct issues involved here. To disentangle them in order, from the most peculiar to the most general:

(1) Is the individual publicist/educationizer correct when he presents U.S. Secretary of War R. M. Gates as chela to Eisenhower’s guru? Does the incumbent WARSEC really disapprove of a supposed "military-industrial-_____ complex" of any sort? Of the precise sort that St. Ike forewarned against? Of the sort or sorts of MIXC that decent Democrats traditionally prefer to imagine that he forewarned against?

(2) Did the general himself indeed forewarn against what most Democrats have taken his MIXC to be? Mighn’t he have meant something rather different, something less obviously convenient for good-guy political purposes?

(3) What intrinsic validity does this "Even THEY have had to admit that XYZ" shtyk possess? In the ideal case, that is, the case in which THEY do not simply shrug XYZ off as Mediæval History or neoëxcommunicate the admitter of it as nothin’ to do with THEMselves. [2]

***

At the moment I feel more live refining questions than guessing at answers, but, briefly:

(1) The peanut-gallery peanuts seem mostly to doubt the Secretary’s Eisenhowerism, and I incline to suspect they are right.

(2) If I thought this business worth a research project, which I do not, seeing that the militant extremist GOP are not go’n’ta give a hoot no matter what the facts were, I should try to confirm or refute the conjecture that Gen. Eisenhower worried first and foremost about a MIXC that would corrupt his beloved violence profession. That he was what WARSEC Gates calls "a low-maintenance leader of simple tastes, modest demands, and small entourage" because he thought such austerity the best plan for successful crusading. Having been born as long go as 1308/1890/5650, Eisenhower might very easily have thought that to march into battle trailing a long train of Persian apparatus was to ask for Persian military outcomes, like Marathon and Salamis and Platæa and the various unhappy collisions with Alexander III of Macedon.[3]

(3) A genuinely hard question, it seems to me. Perhaps the place to begin is by insisting that we are not automatically responsible for what other good guys may choose to admit or ‘admit’. Unless we know more than simply that so-and-so has ‘admitted’ such-and-such, what is his admission to us? At best, only a strong suggestion that we ought to go look up what he said and decide whether or not we care to admit as much ourselves.

That proposed scheme has nothin’ at all to do with how militant extremism behaves, naturally. But it would be remiss indeed to consider that we have done our intellectual and ethical duty by simply being no worse than Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh are. Far be that from!

Happy days.

__
[1] Referring to neoterically indoctrinated kiddies from within the holy Homeland™, one naturally give the current version of their Party-an’-Ideology soundbite. Writing for an audience of Martians or Ruritanians, though, who had never heard of such strange creatures before, one would have to give the original of it, that is, Their Ford’s ever-immortal rulin’ "History is bunk."

By the way, sir, St. Ike is unquestionably more ‘history’ than anything else for the present keyboard, in the sense of "beyond living memory." I recall watching him show off his "prairie French" to Televisionland at the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway, hardly a political event. The U-2 fuss of 1960 I vaguely recall, but without any definite Eisenhower connection. Retrospectively, of course, that affair pretty well nails poor Ike’s coonskin to the wall for a wimpy apologizer, thoroughly unworthy of Party an’ AEIdeology. They shoulda gone with Taft!

But Father Zeus knows best.


[2] The advanced student may, as an optional exercise, discuss how ‘we’ feel about the shtyk in question when we have to take it rather than dish it out.

There is an awful lot of that going around just at present, as it happens. Ms. Student might start from Glenn Greenwald of Salon, who has a list as long as your arm, Dr. Bones, of things that he takes President Summers and Mr. O’Bama to have -- very injudiciously, in Mr. Greenwald’s eyes -- admitted that the vile Busheviki were right about all along.


[3] Back in the good old pre-wombschool days, these so-called ‘classical’ human events would, I presume, have been familiar enough to bear mention in a public and political context. My own particular favorite in this venerable Persian-bashing genre would have been moderately obscure even then, though. It goes like this, Xen. Ages. I 28:

Moreover, believing that contempt for the [Iranian] enemy would kindle the fighting spirit, he [Agesilaus, king of Sparta in the early fourth century B.C.] gave instructions to his heralds that the barbarians captured in the raids should be exposed for sale naked. So when his soldiers saw them white because they never stripped, and fat and lazy through constant riding in carriages, they believed that the war would be exactly like fighting with women.