That’s Border Patrol head Gregory Bovino on CNN this morning, defending the second fatal shooting by federal agents in Minneapolis. I could take only about thirty seconds before I muted the television’s sound. That left me with his image. Why is he wearing a Sam Browne belt?
The belt was an innovation by British General Sam Browne: after losing an arm in the Sepoy Rebellion, it stabilize Browne’s sword belt, making it easier for him to draw it from its scabbard.
Oh, and this is how the British dealt with accused Sepoy (Indians who served in the Raj’s army) rebels: Blowing them apart from the muzzle of a cannon.
The Sam Browne belt became a regular feature in the British Army, down to the present. For one thing, it immediately distinguished officers from their inferiors. And, in class-conscious Britain, “inferiors” is not an accidental word choice. After his catastrophic losses in the 1916 Battle of the Somme–7,000 British soldiers mowed down by German machine-gun teams in the first thirty minutes—their commander, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig wryly commented that “it certainly keeps them off the streets, doesn’t it?”
Unfortunately, the belt also became standard for American officers until it was discontinued in World War II. That’s Haig, on the left, and his contemporary, our John J. Pershing, on the right. American police forces adopted it, as well, until it was realized that criminals were using the belt to strangle arresting officers.
The accessory found its way into Hitler’s hypermilitarized Germany, as well. The Fuhrer, even as a humble early-on National Socialist, rarely appeared in public without his, and the Sam Browne belt became standard for the SA, or Brownshirts, the nearest historical equivalent to ICE.
Bovino is fond of long trenchcoats, another feature of another Nazi organization, the Gestapo, or Secret Police (the movie still is from Jojo Rabbit), another apt description of the masked paramilitaries now infesting Minneapolis. It was also favored by Wehrmact officers, including those celebrating the 1940 fall of Norway in front of the Oslo National Theater. The fashion statement is more dire when it’s illustrated by an exhausted Field Marshal Paulus surrendering in 1943 Stalingrad.
So if appearance is everything, Gregory Bovino, a small man, is meticulous about his.
It’s so ironic when the same man, with supreme gall, tells us not to believe what our eyes see.
Last night, PBS reprised the 2024 All Creatures Great and Small Christmas episode. It tugged, as usual, at the heartstrngs, but this was set at Christmas 1941, when the world had gone quite mad.
Earlier in the season, the housekeeper, Mrs. Hall, had reunited with her estranged son, only to see his train take him away to a war in progress in Britain since 1939, and to his duty in the Royal Navy.
Word comes over what was called the wireless that her son’s ship, the battle cruiser HMS Repulse, has been sunk, along with the battleship Prince of Wales. The Farnons and the Herriots were about to attend to Christmas dinner when Siegfried, the head of the veterinary practice, had to break the news to the woman who is the emotional glue of the home. When she collapses, the ripple that spreads through Skeldale House is seismic.
The news shouldn’t have been brought because the tragedy shouldn’t have happened. Only three days after Pearl Harbor, the two great ships sailed north heedlessly, without air protecton, and, just as Pearl Harbor had proven, battleships were vulnerable to air attack. 840 British sailors died, the victims of that terrible and seemingly congenital White Man’s disease, arrogance. Swarms of Japanese planes descended on the pride of the Royal Navy in the Far East. Twenty-eight Japanese aviators gave their lives for their country in a running battle that lasted a little over an hour.
The illustration depicts Prince of Wales with Repulse in her wake.
The loss of Prince of Wales would have resonance in America, waiting to learn about the destruction wreaked on the American base at Pearl Harbor. The British battleship represented the birth of the Anglo-American alliance that seems to be in grave danger today. It was on Prince of Wales, off the coast of Newfoundland, where Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt met—in person, for the first time— for a conference that concluded with the issuing of The Atlantic Charter, a set of principles that seem to be in grave danger, as well. This is Churchill’s annotated copy:
(Above) Churchill, always fond of cats, greets Prince of Wales mascot Blackie on arriving for the conference. Blackie survived the battleship’s sinking; many of the sailors, attending divine services with the two leaders, would not.
The great ship was ideal for the meeting between the president and the prime minister. One of the similarities that cemented their friendship was their love for the navy. Churchill had served as First Lord of the Admiralty (he used the term “Naval Person” to refer to himself in his correspondence with Roosevelt) FDR, like his wife’s uncle Theodore, had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy.
FDR and Chuchrill aboard Prince of Wales. Gen. George Marshall is just behind the president.
Three months later, it was appropriate that another battleship, HMS Duke of York ( engaging a German battleship, Scharnhorst, in the 1943 photo below) brought Churchill to America.
On the way to the White House, motoring through Maryland, the Prime Minister regaled the President by reciting, from memory, the Whittier poem “Barbara Fritchie,” about an elderly Frederick, Maryland, woman who defied the invading Confederates by waving the American flag out her window. The poem is very long and not very good, but Churchill relished it—reminding his hosts that he, thanks to his mother, Jennie, was half-American.
Jennie Jerome Churchill and her sons, Jack and Winston
Lee’s troops in Frederick, September 1862. They’re on their way to Antietam, the costliest battle in American history.
Churchill arrived at the White House on December 13 and didn’t return home until January 17, 1942. Along the way he horrified White House staff with his breakfast orders, which included copious amounts of whiskey and soda, remained naked—not counting the cigar— and pink as a cherub when the president visited him immediately after a bath. Churchill, a late-late riser, worried Eleanor because he kept her husband up until the wee hours; the P.M. also made discreet use of the White House’s potted plants because the president adored cocktail hour and invented concoctions for his guests that were said to be truly dreadful.
Churchill, to FDR’s right, witnesses the lighting of the National Christmas tree, December 24, 1941.
The meetings were productive but fraught: The two leaders (Churchill may have had a mild heart attack) were enduring the aftershocks of Pearl Harbor and the capital ships’ sinkings: Japanese troops were advancing rapidly in the Philippines, the fall of Hong Kong on Christmas Day crushed the prime minister.
Historians theorize that these runaway Japanese successes, and FDR’s fondness for his new friend, played a key role in the president’s decision to issue Executive Order 9066, which was enforced here, in Arroyo Grande, 2400 miles from Pearl Harbor, 2800 miles from Washington DC and 5400 miles from London.
The aftershocks of December 1941 finally crested here on April 30, 1942. This war spared no one.
Why can’t my generals be more loyal, like Hiter’s generals? Donald Trump to Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly.
Hitler’s generals tried to kill him, and they almost pulled it off, Kelly replied.
The most famous example of Kelly’s history, which is factual, as opposed to the President’s knowledge of history, which is nonexistent, is the July 20, 1944 bomb plot, engineered, as we all know, by Tom Cruise (Valkyerie), not my favorite actor, with an assist by Bill Nighy, who is.
The story is familiar to those who study history. Claus von Stauffenberg, a decorated German officer who kept losing parts of himself (one eye, one arm), was, like most of modern Washington D.C., disgusted with his nation’s leader. Unlike most of D.C., he was willing to do something about it.
At Hitler’s bunker in East Prussia, the Wolf’s Lair, Stauffenberg nudged a briefcase full of plastique under the map table to the edge of the Fuhrer’s kneecaps. He then discreetly left. Another officer, wanting a better view of the movement of the mythical panzer divisions–reinforced, equipped and sped into action across the map—Normandy at one end and the Russian frontier at the other, by Hitler, nudged the briefcase out of his way and behind a support that held the map table up.
The finicky offer painted the wall when the bomb detonated.
The Fuhrer had his pants shredded. Sadly, the explosion did not kill him at all.
Hours later, Stauffenberg was shot, the lucky fellow, unlike other senior officers, Bomb Plot plotters, who were hanged with piano wire, a procedure filmed and played for Hitler’s pleasure.
Claus and Nina von Stauffenberg in their 1933 wedding.
Our piano-wire days are not here yet, but we need to be patient. We’re firing already, nicely, on all eight cylinders of Gestapo.
The doomed nationalist, Stauffenberg, was from Baden-Wurttemberg, and so were the ancestors of my beloved Grandma Kelly, whose maiden name (Kircher, from the word for “Church”) was blended with Irish blood, which may have led to two Irish husbands—one Keefe, a charming drunk and a car thief, my biological grandfather; one Kelly, a cop, my real grandfather.
My grandmother and my mother, circa 1925, about when the first Irishman, Ed Keefe, disappeared forever.
Baden-Wurttemberg, where the bomb plotter and a California gold chlorider (my Grandma Kelly’s father, Michael, who worked in a gold-processing mine and mill now beneath Lake Shasta) is stunningly beautiful.. On the left is the town where the Kirchers lived, until the 1830s; on the right is the Evangelical Lutheran church were Michen, my third great-grandfather, was baptized.
So there’s little chance that Stauffenberg and I are distant cousins. I wouldn’t mind it.
That’s not all. Oh, no.
Hitler was examined intensively after the bomb’s detonation had reduced his pants to crenelated culottes, There was not damage Down There, not that der Pilz des Anführers(“The Leader’s Mushroom”), a term suggested by porn star and Trump couplet and strumpet Stormy Daniels.
But up there? Here’s where I come in. I attended Stanford University.
Okay, for a week.
I studied the history of Depression, New Deal and World War II America with Dr. David Kennedy—an amazing man—who’d written the Pulitzer Prize-winning account of those years, Freedom from Fear. On one of our breaks—all of us high-school history teachers—we toured the Hoover Institute.
To refresh your memory, Hoover accomplished this in the 1932 presidential election (in red).
He was succeeded, of course, by some fellow from upstate New York who gave my teenaged father a job in relief work, distributing food to proud Ozark hill people whose starvation, briefly, overcame their pride, who sent CCC teenagers from New York City to Arroyo Grande to reclaim the soil that had been devastated by erosion, whose federal employees built school buildings extant in Arroyo Grande, whose vice president appointed my father to Officers’ Candidate School during World War II, whose tour of Camp Lejeune in December 1944 was guided by a Marine, a motor pool driver, a sergeant, a woman, from nearby Oceano, California, who’d lost her brother two years before on Tarawa.
Thelma and George Murray, in a composite made for their mother after his death.Murray’s body, and the graveyard of his Marine brothers on Tarawa, disappeared. He was found and came home to his mother –hie is now buried with her–in 2017.
So there’s all that.
The Murrays are all that. Our alleged president isn’t. He gives us nothing, sacrifices nothing, cares nothing for us, deserves nothing from us.
But at the Hoover Institute, an incredible repository, I was allowed to hold the X-ray of Hitler’s skull, taken after the misdirected explosion at the Wolf’s Lair this day in 1944. I have not seen an x-ray of our leader’s skull, but I have seen this one.
What I’ve seen instead, and just in the last few days, are President’ Trump’s ankles. They are grossly swollen, explained away glibly by the latest of his snake-oil doctors, like the one who proclaimed him the fittest man ever to occupy the White House.
But I’ve learned not to take his doctors’ word for anything. A more hopeful explanation, after a steady diet of Big Macs, incinerated New York steaks, gray inside, and colored only by Heinz ketchup, Kentucky-fried buckets whose grease is wiped clean on the armrests of Air Force One, double Mar-a-Lago helpings of chocolate cake with ice cream—he eats piggishly in front of his guests, allowed slivers of cake—complemented by exercise that consists of driving a golf cart across painfully manicured—by immigrants–putting greens. So there is a good chance that those bloated ankles portend congestive heart failure.
And, with God’s help, and may it be soon, the arteries that supply his heart and his brain will collapse.
He will not die for awhile.
He will stare, silent and furious, just as Stalin did at his Inner Circle after his stroke—many of them were soon the be shot at the Lubyanka, the secret police slaughterhouse in Moscow—at the the White House eunuchs who’ve abetted his every aberrant behavior, most of all the predatory ones, and they will have nothing for him, nothing to save him from the drowning his cruelty has earned him.
The cruelty he’ll leave behind is vast and invasive. The healing will take years. The war that lies ahead of us will be the hardest we have ever fought. To fight it, we need to look beyond ourselves.
Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee review at Spithead, 26 June 1897. BHC0645
The best of times, the worst of times. Nineteen years after the Diamond Jubilee, Britain’s vaunted Navy was mauled by the German High Seas Fleet at the 1916 Battle of Jutland. At right is the British battle cruiser Invincible. She wasn’t.
And so, as of last night, neither are we. Neither am I. In my self-doubt—was everything I taught about America for over thirty years a lie?—I needed to turn to a constitutional monarchy to tamp down, if only in shallow ground, my fear for the loss of our republic. I turned, specifically, the this Shelley poem.
Shelley’s poem reminds me a bit of Jonathan Edwards’ sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Both men beat the hell out of you, only to let you off the hook with the faintest of hope at the ends of their respective literary landmarks. Edwards—after some of his Puritan parishioners had fainted in the pews out of abject terror—held up the reputation of a loving God. Shelley’s more nebulous, with his “glorious Phantom.” It’s a thinner sliver of hope than God is.
Shelley was a Romantic, but he was in this case an accurate political analyst. George III, having lost America, was dotty, slipping in and out of bouts with insanity that were made worse by treatments that neither a king nor a commoner deserved. His pinch-hitter was the Prince Regent, George IV on Papa’s death, who lacked morals and wisdom and common decency. With the locomotive being invented in his time, George IV was definitely a train wreck. He was, a shipwreck, too.
Gericault, Raft of the Medusa, 1819. Inspired by a real-life shipwreck.
And finally, way down here in the essay, is my thesis: England was saved, after 1819, by a stunning series of reforms that transformed a plutocracy into something approaching democracy and likewise transformed the kind of soulless capitalism, evoked so passionately by Dickens, into an economy that—finally and reluctantly—recognized the working class as human beings.
It was not a straight path. The president-elect has theatened to turn the military loose on protestors. The British government did just that. In Manchester’s St. Peter’s Square in 1819, British cavalry charged into a crowd of working-class protesters who had the audacity to demandy parity in Parliament for urban boroughs vs. rural boroughs, dominated by the immense power of the landed aristocracy. About a dozen were killed; 400 were injured.
Peterloo.
England would continue with the kind of xenophobia that marks successful modern American politics.
Theirs was deadly, too: A million Irish died in their Famine while grain harvested in Ireland was sent to England; the Sepoy Rebellion in 1857 India would be crowned by lashing suspected ringleaders to the muzzles of cannons, which were then fired. And, of course, Britain would join in the plunder of Africa, the European competition there tempered—so fierce that it threatened war among White people on the Continent— finally, by the Congress of Berlin in 1885. In the interlude, Britain used Indian poppies to win over the Chinese, who became addicted to opium, and then fought two wars to force their trade conditions on the devastated nation. It was the Art of the Deal.
A British East India Company warship, right background, destroying Chinese junks in the First Opium War.
So Britain struggled and inflicted great cruelty. But along the way, as the power of the monarchy began to ebb and pass to Parliament (It’s notable that Article One in our Constitution is devoted to Congress). For Victorian England, this meant a kind of golden age of power and prosperity—named for a queen who thought it unwise Royal Navy sailors to grow beards–in which there was painful, incremental, but important progress.
I’m not suggesting that we are entering a similar age of reform. We are in for hard times.
Trump, born at the onset of the Boomer Generation, is the final prank we—pampered and indulged as children— have to play on the generations after us, who deserve so much better from us.
The next four years will be especially hard on women, as they were on British women in Victoria’s time, in the age of the Ripper murders, of women being banished from the industrial workforce to become the Ripper’s prey, of suffragists being force-fed in prison, a harrowing version of rape, of Emily Wilding Davison throwing herself in front of a horse at The Derby to show how ready women were to sacrifice themselves for the right to vote, of middle-class widows, required to wear, in mourning, black crepe—they went up in flames in an age when gas jets lit up middle-class homes—and of young women shell-fillers in World War I factories, called “canaries” because of the TNT poisoning that turned their skin bright yellow. TNT would sterilize some and kill others.
Women will suffer, now as they did in Victorian (and Edwardian) England. I do not know where American women are headed. I only know that I want to be there with them. I want to be there, too, with Dreamers, with union workers, with journalists, with teachers, with clergy.
Mary Travers, gone 15 years now, sings here, more cogently and more brilliantly, with Woody Guthrie’s lyrics, everything that I mean to say here.
A Work in Progress 