Blogger Veteran For Truth

W—not John Kerry—is unfit to serve as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States of America. Read about W's sorry military record and tell me that W is fit for command. Just as he sneers at John Kerry's lack of experience and flip-flopping, W came to the White House with the poorest credentials of ANY of his predecessors and he has waffled again and again and again. Hell, I don't hate W, I hold him in contempt as incompetent and corrupt. Worse, he—unlike his predecessor the Slickster—has caused the deaths of too many fine young people by his leadership in the war on terror. There has been no declaration of war on terror. Why? Like the war on drugs, the phrase is nonsensical. Wage war on Saudi Arabia (the real culprits in 9/11) or Iran (a helluva lot toughter than Iraq) or North Korea (Déjà Vu all over again?), but don't spout nonsensical slogans that result in wasteful loss of life. I hope that John Kerry nails W in the debates when the issue of military service in the 1970s comes to the fore. The slacker, frat-boy, smirking weasel has had a free ride long enough. ¡Basta ya! If this is (fair & balanced) outrage, so be it.

[x The Nation]
Bush's Military Past
by IAN WILLIAMS

Even allowing for the usual military-bureaucratic incompetence, records relating to George W. Bush's National Guard Service have a suspiciously low survival rate, so there has been understandable incredulity about the recent revelation that a crucial quarter's pay records from 1972 did not survive the Pentagon's alleged attempt to transfer the microfilm to a more durable medium. That incredulity was enhanced rather than allayed when they eventually were discovered behind whichever filing cabinet they had been dropped.

At issue is whether Bush was, technically at least, a deserter in his fourth year of National Guard service, when he requested a transfer to Guard duties in Alabama so he could assist a Republican senatorial campaign there.

Bush asserts that he turned up and did his duty. However, no one on the base remembers seeing him, including the commanding officer and several other officers who say they were actively looking to network with the hot-shot Texan with the influential father--but waited in vain.

The paper record does show that he was ordered to report for a flight medical exam in July 1972, but that Bush "failed to accomplish" it, and that in September he was ordered to report for an inquiry into why he had not passed. His memories of these momentous events which grounded him and made him unfit for flight duties seem very hazy.

The White House says that since the plane he flew was about to be phased out of service, he felt he did not need to maintain his pilot rating. Normally, the Armed Forces do not take kindly to such executive decisions being made by junior officers--and in reality, the Texas Air National Guard was still flying the Delta Dagger that Bush was trained on even after he had gone to Harvard Business School.

The difficulty is the classic one: how to prove a negative. But there is clearly a dog that is not barking here. For example, the "failure to accomplish" his medical examination could mean either that he did not turn up, or that he did and failed it--in which case the answer may lie in medical records that the Bush Administration has refused to disclose.

It may or may not be significant that mandatory drug testing was introduced in 1972, and that Bush spokespeople have maintained that he had not used narcotics since 1974--while maintaining a discreet silence about what happened before then.

Bush could, if minded, produce W2 forms from the IRS that would show his Guard earnings while in Alabama. He has not. The White House has occasionally released a flood of documents seemingly intended to confuse the issue. The one tangible record that has emerged is that in January of 1973, Bush turned up for a dentist's visit in Alabama--which is intriguing in itself since he was supposed to be back in Texas by then. The dentist is the only military person in Alabama with a credible memory of Bush attendance. Or rather, he affirmed that it was his signature on the examination card although he had no specific memory of peering into the mouth that later launched the Iraq War.

In fact, even when the allegedly destroyed microfilm could not be found, the information on it was not really missing at all. Joseph Nobles, who blogs as Bolo Boffin, discovered each quarter's record also replicated the three previous quarters. By comparing adjacent records, Noble deduced that while 1st Lt. Bush claimed a few non-active duty days in Alabama, on one of which we know he was at the dentist, he returned to Texas with zero active duty days in the previous year. The rediscovered data confirmed what Nobles had deduced, and Bush's failure to show up for active duty. He was then booked for almost full-time duty for three months, presumably in an attempt to clear the books before giving him early discharge for Harvard Business School (his second choice, since the University of Texas Law School turned him down).

The disappearance of Bush's federal payroll records mirror the evidence of Texas records going down the memory hole. According to Lt. Col. Bill Burkett Rtd, of the Texas Air National Guard, in 1997 he heard his superior officer, Major General Daniel James, on the speakerphone with George Bush's chief of staff, Joe Allbaugh, and communications director, Dan Bartlett, arranging the sifting of Bush's military records.

Burkett also claimed that soon after he overheard Assistant Adjutant General Wayne Marty, in discussing the then Governor Bush's records, caution "make sure there's nothing in there that'll embarrass the governor." Burkett said he later saw files and photocopies of pay and performance records--and the name on at least one of them was "Bush, George W., 1LT."

Another officer, George Conn, originally verified much of Burkett's story. He has since retracted his memories of the specific conversations and events, a retraction that unkind souls have suggested may be due to his current position as a civilian defense contractor in Germany. Although he strongly qualified his retraction by affirming that "Lt. Col. Burkett is an honorable man and does not lie," the White House seized upon the quasi retraction to back up its case.

In some ways this is almost irrelevant. The core issue is that George W. Bush, who campaigned eagerly for Republican pro-war candidates, joined the National Guard, ticking the box to refuse overseas service, at the height of the Tet Offensive, in what Senator Robert Byrd has called the "War of His Generation."

He did so with the aid of nepotistic influence, jumping a long line, despite a 25 percent score on his pilot aptitude test--and despite a series of driving convictions that should have required a special waiver. He was commissioned an officer despite having no pilot experience, no time in the ROTC, and without attending Officer Training School.

And then he went missing for a year, and as a reward was allowed to terminate his service early so he could go to Harvard Business School.

His use of the National Guard to escape Vietnam should have inhibited him and his party from successively attacking the patriotism and martial virtues of triple amputee Senator Max Cleland and John Kerry--having earlier pointed fingers at Bill Clinton. But going AWOL, to the extent of deserting for a year even from this surrogate service, makes him doubly vulnerable. Which may of course account for the seeming fungibility of his paperwork, even though, in truth, these people have no shame.

Ian Williams contributes frequently to Foreign Policy in Focus on UN and international affairs.

Copyright © 2004 The Nation

How We Spin Webs Of Self-Deception

Oh, we are so arrogant. Frances Fitzgerald deserves a Stakhanovite Hero of Labor award herself. If this is (fair & balanced) historiography, so be it.

[x Washington Post]
HISTORY LESSONS
The View From Out There: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History By Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward (New Press, 2004)
Reviewed by Frances FitzGerald

Here are a few things students in this country will not find in their history books but that students from certain other countries may know for a fact:

a) Our revolution was inspired by the work of the French Enlightenment philosophers (not the essays of John Locke).

b) We won that war largely because the British commanders were slow and blundering (not because of the wisdom and determination of George Washington).

c) What we thought of as a revolution was for many inhabitants of British North America an extended civil war, in which many were forced into exile.

d) After Gen. Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in 1781, the Spanish and French fleets opened full-scale war with the British in the Caribbean.

As might perhaps be imagined, the facts betray points of view: a) comes from a French history text; b) from a British one; c) from a Canadian school history; and d) from a text published for the English-speaking West Indies.

Dana Lindaman, a graduate student at Harvard, and Kyle Ward, an assistant professor at Vincennes University in Indiana, have compiled this collection of excerpts from other national history textbooks out of concern for the insularity -- or what they call the "isolationist tendency" -- of the American educational system. In fact, U.S. history texts are not as insular as they once were; nor are they any more insular than most national histories of other countries. Still, much in this collection would startle not only American high school students but many of their teachers as well. In addition, while this is not its purpose, the book, taken as a whole, explains rather better than the punditry mills why many countries, particularly those once known as "the Allies," take such a dim view of the United States.

Reading a book composed entirely of excerpts from textbooks may seem an unpromising activity, but history texts reveal much about national perspectives and prejudices: They are more expressive than government pronouncements; they get into matters diplomats avoid; and yet, as the authors note, they are in varying degrees state-sanctioned and thus official, or semi-official, stories about the national past. Most reflect public attitudes; all help to create those attitudes because they are the most widely read histories in each country, and because kids read them during the formative adolescent years. What students remember from their reading is not, of course, so clear. (It's certainly not clear in the United States, where history texts run to 1,200 pages and weigh about four pounds.) Still the texts have an authority that books by individual historians lack, for, even in the best school systems, teachers, in their desperate attempt to drum in a few names and dates, rarely question their points of view, and students hazily come to regard what they read as the truth.

History Lessons includes excerpts from a wide range of countries: Russia, Japan, Zimbabwe, Iran, North Korea -- but not, for some reason, China. Best represented, however, are the schoolbooks of our continental neighbors and of those European countries long involved with North America. Some of the commentary on U.S. policy is unsurprising. An attentive American high school student could probably guess what a British text would say about D-Day, or what a Mexican text would say about the annexation of Texas, or how a Filipino text would describe the Spanish-American war and its aftermath. But how many Americans know -- as Filipino students do -- that in 1937 the Philippines sought to join the British Commonwealth out of a well-placed fear that the United States would not protect it from an invasion by Japan? And how many Americans could characterize the Canadian schoolbook view of U.S. history?

According to Canadian texts (six are cited), the United States planned to conquer and annex Canada during the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War and at various points in between. During the Cold War, the United States repeatedly bullied Canada into supporting its aggressive military policies. Canadian officials hoped that NATO would evolve into a North Atlantic community that would act as a counterweight to U.S. influence in Canada, but in vain: Canadian governments had to toe the U.S. line or suffer humiliation. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker, concerned that Kennedy's belligerence might lead to a nuclear war, waited three days before announcing that Canadian forces had gone on the alert. In the next election, the Americans used their influence to topple the truculent prime minister. Diefenbaker's successor, Lester Pearson, aligned Canada more closely with the United States, but in 1965 he annoyed Lyndon Johnson by calling for a bombing pause and a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam War. In a meeting after the speech, Johnson grabbed Pearson by the lapels and shouted, "You pissed on my rug."

Thus have Canadian texts immortalized the Johnson vernacular.

In few countries are the texts so consistently critical of the United States as they are in Canada, but in a couple of cases the rhetoric is alarming. For national security purposes, we should have read Saudi textbooks years ago, for even while Saudi diplomats were cooing to American officials, Saudi students were reading rants about "Crusader" and "Neo-imperialist" attacks on Islam.

Most national school histories take a fairly parochial view of world events: That is their nature. Some, like the French text that gives the French resistance the entire credit for the liberation of Paris in 1945, reveal more about their own countries than about the United States. Others serve to reveal our degree of insularity and self-preoccupation. For example, U.S. texts describe the French and Indian War as a purely American conflict, but British and French texts show the war to be a mere incident in the ongoing struggle between the two European empires. Too, the thoughtful and nationally self-critical Nigerian account of the Atlantic slave trade paints American slavery against a much larger canvas.

On a few issues, the texts of our neighbors and of European countries (at least those that are cited by Lindaman and Ward) directly contradict the received wisdom in U.S. schoolbooks. The purpose of the Monroe Doctrine, they agree, was to assert U.S. economic hegemony in the Americas; Truman's purpose in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to frighten the Soviets and prevent them from entering the war against Japan; later the United States overplayed fears of Soviet expansionism. In contrast to American schoolbooks, these texts stress the U.S. pursuit of its economic interests during the Cold War, but then they are in general far franker about economic interests and political power than American texts. Notably, too, European schoolbooks give extensive coverage to 20th-century Middle Eastern conflicts, while American histories hardly mention them.

History Lessons is sloppily edited. (There were 2.5 million, not 25 million settlers in the American colonies in 1776.) And it could have been better introduced and annotated. For example, the authors suggest that the Cuban account of the Spanish-American war reflects a 20th-century perspective. But all textbooks reflect contemporary perspectives; and, if publishers in other countries re-edit and republish their texts every few years, as they do in the United States, then the texts may represent far less stable national attitudes than they appear to. The authors also tell us that most modern French texts are not narratives but collections of primary source materials with short historical summaries. But what are the formats of the other texts they cite? What grades are they designed for? (And, by the bye, how much do they weigh?) Still, the authors deserve a Stakhanovite Hero of Labor award just for reading all of these texts. And they have put together a provocative, timely and surprisingly readable book. •

Frances FitzGerald is the author of Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, which won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award in 1973; America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century; and, most recently, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

Julia Child, RIP

Julia Child was a national treasure. If this is (fair & balanced) gastronomy, so be it.

[x Washington Post]
Julia Child, Famous Cook, Dies at 91
By Bart Barnes


Julia Child sits in her kitchen in August 2002 after it was moved to the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. (AFP) 

Julia Child, 91, America's foremost apostle of gourmet French cooking and Epicurean dining whose television programs and cookbooks helped elevate the gastronomic standards of a generation, died Friday morning at an assisted living center in Montecito, Calif., where she lived.

She had kidney failure, her niece, Philadelphia Cousins, told the Associated Press. She died two days before her 92nd birthday.

Child broadcast her culinary gospel to an audience of millions, beginning in 1963 as the hostess of a highly acclaimed public television program, "The French Chef," which launched a career of more than 30 years on public and commercial television. She was author of seven best-selling cookbooks, the first of which, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," was said at its publication in 1961 to have been the definitive English language work on French cooking.

For aspiring chefs from coast to coast, she took the mystery and intimidation out of French cooking, explaining her meal preparations procedures in simple and down-to-earth terms that encouraged a new spirit of adventure and creativity in American kitchens. " . . . any literate person with a reasonable amount of manual dexterity can concoct praiseworthy French meals," Child insisted.

On television the 6-foot, 2-inch Child had a superb sense of showmanship, a cheery exuberance and a delightful lack of pretense that endeared her to millions and made her a national folk hero. She often made mistakes in her kitchen, and these gaffes were not edited out of the show. This helped create a personal bond between Child and her audiences, most of whom had made similar mistakes in their own kitchens.

Her aim, Child once said, was "to have things happen as they naturally do, such as mousse refusing to leave the mold, the potatoes sticking to the skillet, the apple charlotte slowly collapsing. One of the secrets of cooking is to learn to correct something if you can, and bear with it if you cannot."

Such was her fame and influence that in November 2001, when Child left her Massachusetts home of 42 years to return to her native California, she gave her 20-by-14-foot kitchen to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. It opened to the public two years ago.

Boston's public television station, WGBH-TV, broadcast her first cooking show on a trial basis in 1962. In 1963 she became a regular fixture on the station's programming schedule. This was the period when John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy were in the White House, and their style and elegance captured the nation's imagination. They had a French chef of their own, Rene Verdon, and America was eager to learn about French cooking.

Within a few years, Child's show was being carried by 104 public television stations throughout the nation, and it became a prototype for dozens of televised cooking that followed in subsequent decades. It won the George Foster Peabody Award for distinguished achievement in educational television in 1965 and an Emmy Award in 1966. Time magazine did a cover story on her in 1966, and her cookbook sales soared, opening a new chapter in the book publishing industry. There were 49 cookbooks published in the United States in 1961 when Child and two colleagues released "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." Thirty years later, American publishers were publishing more than 800 cookbooks annually.

Other books by Child include, "The French Chef Cookbook" (1968), "From Julia Child's Kitchen" (1975), Julia Child & Company (1978), and "Cooking with the Master Chefs" (1993).

Julia McWilliams was born in Pasadena, Calif. As a child she seldom entered the family kitchen. "Gray lamb with mint," was a typical family dinner, she later recalled. She graduated from Smith College and worked during the 1930s as a publicist and copywriter for W.&J. Sloan furniture stores in New York and Los Angeles.

During World War II she was a file clerk with the Office of Strategic Services, first in Washington and later in Ceylon and China. There she met Paul Child, an OSS mapmaker and connoisseur of fine food and wine. They spent their spare hours together sampling the delicacies of Asian cookery.

After the war, she returned to California where she took her first cooking lesson, at the Hillcliffe School of Cookery in Beverly Hills. In 1946 she married Child, who had become a Foreign Service officer. They lived in Washington until 1948 when he was assigned to Paris as an exhibits officer for the U.S. Information Agency.

Only then did Julia Child sample French cooking for the first time, and it was a new and revealing experience for her. "I didn't know such food existed," she recalled years later.

She took French lessons at the Berlitz language school to refresh her college French and then enrolled in the Cordon Bleu, the famed Parisian cooking school. Later she took private cooking lessons from master chef Max Bugnard.

Through mutual friends she met Simone Beck and later Louisette Bertholle, two French women who had been considering writing a French cookbook aimed at an American readership. Neither of them knew English, so they asked Child to join them in the project. She liked the idea but was not ready for such an undertaking.

Instead, Child suggested that they start a cooking school, which they did. It was called L'Ecole des Trois Gourmandes, and it was held in her apartment on the Left Bank at five dollars a lesson.

Later Child accompanied her husband on Foreign Service assignments in Marseille, Bonn and Oslo, where she also operated cooking schools. Eventually she decided she was ready to write the cookbook. In collaboration with Beck and Bertholle, she spent years researching and writing. In her previous readings of French cookbooks, Child had been unable to find sufficient detail. She vowed that their new cookbook would correct this flaw.

In the first draft, there were more than 900 pages of the most detailed information on French sauces and French poultry alone. Their editor took one look at it and pronounced it totally unpublishable. A revised and shortened version took several more years to produce, and that manuscript was turned down by their original publisher, Houghton Mifflin. But an astute editor at Alfred A. Knopf saw merit in it, and in 1961 "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," was published. It reflected more than a decade of learning and experimenting with French cooking by Child and her colleagues. This process included two years of perfecting a recipe for French bread, even longer in developing a process for making French puff pastry.

By 1995, more than 2 million copies of the book have been sold in about three dozen printings. It was popular not only for the doors that it opened into a new world of cuisine for American cooks, but also for its common sense approach to food preparation. As well as recipes for such dishes as veal prince orloff and souffle au chocolat, there were tips on easy ways to peel onions and how best to remove water from scallops. Suggested menus included both haute cuisine and cuisine bourgeoise. Don't cut corners, use the freshest and best ingredients you can find and follow directions, Mrs. Child urged her readers. "The essence of French cooking is that everything is supposed to taste like itself."

Publication of the cookbook coincided with Paul Child's retirement from the Foreign Service, and the couple settled in Cambridge, Mass., because, according to Julia Child, "there are always lots of nifty people in university communities." She said she planned to "cook, write and teach."

Paul Child died in 1994. They had no children.

A friend that Child had known in Paris was working for Boston's educational television station, WGBH-TV, after the couple came to Cambridge and he suggested to Child that she appear on the station's book review program to promote the cookbook. She accepted and during the course of her appearance beat some egg whites in a copper bowl to illustrate a point. This prompted dozens of requests for a cooking program, and the station asked Child if she'd try it on an experimental basis, which she agreed to do. To the television audiences, she was not only a good cook; she was good theatre. Her show became a fixture after three trials, and it was not long before her trademark signoff, "This is Julia Child. Bon appetit," became known to millions.

Over the following decades she became the elder statesman and high priestess of gourmet cooking in America. Her cookbooks and television shows helped create new opportunities for aspiring French chefs everywhere. There were 30 public celebrations, stretching across the country from Boston to Los Angeles and extending over a six month period to mark her 80th birthday, on Aug. 15, 1992. Her cooking style also was parodied by Dan Aykroyd on Saturday Night Live.

With Vintner Robert Mondavi and others, Mrs. Child founded the American Institute of Wine and Food in 1981 to "advance the understanding, appreciation and quality of wine and food." She revised her cookbooks to take into account the invention and wide availability of the food processor, and she continued to write new cookbooks. The seventh and last, "The Way to Cook," was published in October of 1989, and its dishes ranged from chocroute garnie to Boston Baked Beans.

She was outspoken in her criticism of what she called the "nutritional zealots," who in the late 1980s began warning ominously of the dietary dangers of the likes of butter, cream, red meat and salt. "I'm afraid if we don't get over this terrible food fear hysteria, it will be the death of gastronomy," she said.

An unhappy stomach, she insisted, would be a greater health hazard.

Staff writer Patricia Sullivan contributed to this article.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company