Brexit Comes Closer

By Glenn N. Holliman

Our English writer, Terry Field, is once more in Florida for the winter.  From his warm haven in the sun, he spins a story for Americans of a thinly disguised United Kingdom that is hurdling toward its exit from the European Union in March of 2019. Here are our writer's latest fearful words on this turn in British history. I have inserted some 'translations' to ease our Americans understanding of this essay. 

Mr. Field is not the only person concerned about Brexit.  The December 22, 2019 Washington Post carries an opinion piece by Anne Applebaum echoing the words below.  It is worthy of taking the time to google. What will the new year bring for our many friends in the United Kingdom?  We shall soon see. - GNH

Bexit for Americans by Terrance Field

For Americans looking at Britain across the Atlantic, I suggest they consider their country as follows in order to get a flavor of what is happening in Britain at present.

Let is call that country 'Briterica'. Here is the picture I ask Americans to paint in their minds.

I am an Briterican.  MY country does not have a population of approximately 60 millions, with space all around. (As does the USA.) My country is more like 1.4 billion, crowded into about half the nation.  (If the U.K. had the geographical area of the USA.)

The rest is composed of hills and heather with the odd strange person wearing a colourful unisex plaid skirt, running around in it and asking after the next 'dram' or fried Mars-bar. 

Like Shakespeare often did, our Briterican (Terry Field, left, coins a new word whilst at leisure mulling great thoughts.

My country, Briterica has no natural resources at all, save for some good-quality anthracite coal, that sadly cannot be burned save for the sad outcome of destroying the planet's climate.

MY country is 23 miles away from a gigantic continent (Europe) containing one much more powerful economy and half a dozen more or less similar sized economics, The whole being about six times my country's GDP.

My country, Briterica, is socially divided and there is a cultural and political war that has caused my political system to paralyse and cease to function ( That at least is similar to America).

As a solution to my social and economic problems, of which the principle characteristics are all but no depth of industrial scale from design to output, save for armaments ( a little like Russia) and only one massive income earner, a thing called 'The City', a time-zone finance centre that can disappear like the morning dew if European competitors decide to do the same thing on a serious scale).

Briterica's auto and auto industry is a screwdriver shed operation, putting together major components trucked in from the continent and from Japanese owned factories around the central belt of the globe.

My education system, a little like America's is not globally competitive. It is losing ground to the best of the rest. Similar to America's. However, there is one very big difference between Briterica's educaton system, and Americas. In Briterica, about ten percent of the children are educated in very high quality private schools. the rest are educated via state or nation-funded schools. The ten percent get well over 80 percent of the best and well paid professional roles.

That means less than 20 percent go to the eighty percent who attend 'state' schools.

The people were given a choice. (The 2016 nation-wide referendum to stay or not to stay in the European Union with its rules, regulations and shared tariffs, customs and some laws.)

Do we wish to build a fence down the entire length of the Nississipi (the English Channel) with holes called customs posts, and border guards to stop people crossing between the two halves, as well as walls between the outside super continent and Briterica or not. The alternative was to keep the present trade, human discourse and social arraignments in place.

The people, before they decided to vote, were told by some of the politicians in favour of building the massive customs wall down the Nississipi that, if the people voted for the change, there would be a large green bird with blue spots who would fly over Briterica, and reign down free drugs for all the sick, and offer do-it yourself scalpels to allow all the very ill to correct their illnesses for free, Morphine would be provided, but it would be the type that had NO risk of any kind of addiction. (Terry here is referring to promises made to better fund the National Health Service.)

The people of Briterica believed these politicians, and, dreaming of the scalpels and drugs coming down for the sky, voted to divide the country and build the fence down the Nississipi.

Each side of the fence, by each entry point, there were built gigantic truck-parks, each the size of half the state they were found in.  As the goods passed east and west through these fence holes, customs officers checked everything. 

Thoroughly and slowly. Thus trucks took three weeks to make the crossing. Including salad vegetables.

As all trade was to be run by WTO terms, all goods passing across the Nisssissipi were subject to tariffs, varying between 6% for all industrial and related goods, to 46% for agricultural goods, livestock and the like.

To add flavor for an American, Briterica also started out, before this change, with a living standard 60% that of the average American income, and with real estate prices anything up to three hundred percent the American level.

As this new regime of hard borders, customs posts, high tariffs and dislocated economic failure takes hold, a little schoolboy in Peoria, Illinois stands up, and asks the teacher,

 " Miss, why did British adults do this???  Over the twenty mile stretch of Water, Great Germania, a much bigger country than Briterica, and Imperial Japanica, a massive country in the Mythical East, are closing ALL their factories!!!"

A school boy in Briteria will observe that no drugs (medicines) have fallen from heaven. One scalpel did arrive by GS mail, but Daddy had lost his job in The Baguar factory that closed, and he used it to slit his throat." Can I have free school lunches now? You cancelled them for lack of money??? 

Aaaaaaarrrrrrrrgggggggghhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!

 I hope you Americans get a flavor of the British reality.

Back in France, Part 2

by Glenn N. Holliman

My friend and frequent correspondent has returned to France from his winter sojourn in Florida.  Here are a few of his latest encounters with French culture and the battle of the belt of which many of us engage. - GNH

Pumping iron
by Terry Field

This time last year my return to the reality of rural France, replete with challenges undesired induced introspection, laced with the particular stresses the life of a step-parent – well anyway this step-parent – is required to endure.

The consequence was an indulgence in comfort-eating, and in Normandy that means the product of both the cow and of the ear of wheat.

Parisian  display of Argentine beef

Thus I grew to resemble a mini-Michelin man (for those of you of a certain age the picture will be unwholesome), yet lacking the vacuous smile.  Add into the mix a decline in required hormones as the age bit, and the central belt made up for the newly puny little arms.

Oh dear.

Right, pastries near Avenue Foch in Paris

Reversing this will be tough. My enthusiasm for recovering an element of my waistline was however boosted by the comments of a French tailor close by the Avenue Foch in good old friendly (?) Paris.

I entered his shop, closely followed by my wife to inquire of the possibility of his making me a suit, slacks and a jacket.

The tailor is possessed of a ‘beak’ almost as long as the previously mentioned heron, and sharp eyes that focus immediately upon the part of me that approximates to that on the world between Capricorn and Cancer.

His jaw stiffens. I ask him the likely price and time to make.

In translation, I report here that he refuses to accommodate my requests.

‘I refuse’ he says, hands glued to the cutting table as if to accent the statement.

Below Terry considers Gallic concerns!

‘You are deformed’ he tells me.

‘And you, Madame, are to blame!’. He projects a Gallic dart of utter contempt to Fina who is hiding by the entrance, which would wither a person made of weaker stuff.

Fina's offering from her Normandy chateau

Not to be put off, and challenged by his assertions, I ask ‘what must I do’ (not to be ‘saved’, although the horror of it all seemed to take on a religious dimension), but rather to be ‘dressed’ ?

‘Return to your home, consume only a light potage every evening before six in the evening, then, appropriately ‘reduced’, return, I will assess you, and if satisfactory, I will suit you sir’.

I am walking on air. I have gained motivation, laced with the agreeable surprise of where it has come from. A tailor has identified my condition with a rapier like precision no quack could begin to match.

In a socialized medical system, there would be offered a weary contempt and disdain.

In any medical world, The Possessor of All Relevant Knowledge ( aka ‘the doctor’) in such a ‘socialised healthcare’ system would say something along the lines of

‘You need to follow a balanced diet, refrain from eating too much of the wrong sort of thing, and perhaps you may thus defer experiencing a myocardial infarction; although as a man you do realize the fat on your midriff constitutes in effect another organ, and it send signals to you heart that will undoubtedly result in a shortening of your lifespan. Women seem to be able to tolerate midriff fat. Strange that, do you not find?’

What does he mean?

Nobody knows?

When do I start and what do I do? How do I check I am on the right lines? What is right for me? Any guidance available?

Silence reigns. Why? He has gone into at least three other cubicles and delivered the same valueless platitudes to three other tubbies in the time it takes me to put trousers and shirt on and tried to put some intelligent responses together.

I never see him again.

3.25 minutes per patient.

That’s your lot. Socialised medicine, underfunded. Great in the First World, isn’t it!!

The ‘Private Insurance Based experience’

Were one to approach a doctor in a private insurance-based ‘healthcare’ system for the equivalent experience, and having completed the five-page in depth life-history medico-legally compliant data record required to get over the threshold of the cardiologist’s office-suite, the conversation could well run along the following lines.

“Well Mr. Field, welcome! Great to see you.

I read that you would like to work with me to further optimise your bio-functions and make sure that every day is a great day for you and your family! I am SO pleased we were able to schedule the tests we offered you and I am SO EXCITED to be able to tell you the great results we found and all the work we can do together both today and in the months and years ahead to make sure you keep firing on all cardiological cylinders! 

Be assured, we have a five year program of work I will run past the insurance company you gave me last week and if they are happy we will start right away! We plan to optimize the calcium score in you cardio vascular system, ensure an enduring low-hypoglycemic index nutritional ingestion experience, body sculpt and cryo-freeze your superficial excess fatty deposits, (challenging, in a positive way of course, but we can ‘get there’) and have you work on a cardio exercise program at the Health and Exercise Centre I happen to be a part owner of, (together with my fourth ex-wife, it’s in trust, - no need to worry, she is co-operative) thus I can GUARANTEE you a personally rejuvenating vascular experience that will leave you ready for our long-term CARDIO SUMIT  program, designed to ensure you gain and maintain a fully functioning blood supply to even the most remote, hard to reach and struggling cells in your body, which in your case are, at the moment, just about all of them and everywhere!”

So all in all it’s best to be told you are a reprehensible fat slob by a French tailor in a small tailors shop just near the Avenue Foch, Paris, France.

It is optimally motivating.

My workouts, lunchtime green salads and black coffee are rooted in the vocal cords of this thin assertive little froggie.

So I say THANK YOU!! Merci Mon Brave!

Back in France, Part 1

by Glenn N. Holliman

Our frequent commentator on human affairs, Terry Field of both Florida and France, has returned to his chateau in Normandy.  While in transport from Ft. Lauderdale on a luxury cruise ship, he began to write.  Here is the first of his musings.  - GNH

A Note on Board

by Terry Field

Well, six months passes with the certain pace that time spent in an ageing frame allows to be experienced.

My ‘publisher’ has suggested that I pen a note on my thoughts and experiences of the last few months spent in balmy climes, far south of the rigors of the melting arctic and its revenge on Europe. This was an unwelcome task since I was and am in a dolorous frame of mind, and dwelling upon the reasons is not to be relished. Yet the task is done, and the offering made in this little series of notes by way of observation and occasional conclusion.

As things are now

I am floating like wobbling jelly across a still-warm sea between Florida and the Azores, aboard a gigantic American cruise ship. On the top deck, defying appropriateness is a lawn – not astra-turf – a real lawn, and upon it a white heron has landed, and stands uncertainly. I have seen her follow the ship, circling and keening for a home now irretrievably lost.   She is a Floridian; pure and fine, snowy white, yellow-beaked, feather-tailed, tall and erect on long black legs and broad feet. She is plainly very tired; wings drop immediately on landing and she walks uncertainly as the ship sways.

Below, on land and not sea, Terry photographs 

an avian species at his Florida home.

I approach a steward ‘ Have you any fish? Uncooked?’

‘Yes sir, sea bass or bream?’

‘The heron will not care; sea bass may be better’.

The fish duly arrives, sliced on a platter. I offer the bird some small pieces, dropping them on the lawn in front of the bird. She looks uncertain, moves forward, pecks at the fish with a rapier-like beak, but leaves it alone. The bird seems perplexed, but beyond eating. I suspect she has not eaten for five days and therefore has not taken fluids. Time is running out for her.

Her world has disappeared, hidden by the horizon; she is alone, landed in a place only made for men. For her, the lawn constitutes a fraud; she expects to drive her beak deep and retrieve a beetle or grub, yet one inch down is the steel plate of the deck.

Most people mill around, uncomprehending. This bird’s life is ebbing away yet none seem to see it.

I do not expect to see her alive this time tomorrow.

I am struck that we are doing a similar thing on a broader canvas. To ourselves. We travel both individually and as a species far from the time and condition of our points of origin, from the world that we were made by and for. 

Like this white heron, we travel out of sight of where we knew we could be ourselves, where everything was just right for our needs, before we discovered the thought and language of ‘wants’.

Now we are all in a strange world, made by us, yet not in any sense one that really meets our ‘needs’.

All reports suggest that we will soon find ourselves in a world as harsh and unsupportive of us as the heron found the turf on the top deck of this cruise ship.

Perhaps you caught that the last sentence refers to climate change on going around this fragile planet.  

Next article, Terry approaches a Parisian tailor and realizes he is back in France! - GNH

Two Views of American Foreign Policy

by Glenn N. Holliman

Two intriguing takes on the course USA foreign policy should be taking.  Like it or not (and I do not) Mr. Trump is upending the world order that the United States and Western Europe has sought to offer the world since World War II.   Both articles below are worth a good read over your morning coffee.   -GNH

Judd Gregg: Has Trump wandered into a foreign policy for this century? (from the Hill newsletter, March 6, 2018)

In the late nineteenth century, there was a famous adage that “the sun never sets on the British Empire.” 

Today the claim could be adjusted to say: “The sun never sets on American troops.”

Below, an over extended US Army, 1969 in Viet Nam, photo by the author with the 1st Infantry Division.

This is a legacy of the place the United States found itself in at the end of the Second World War. 

We were then the only democracy capable of standing up to the threat of the Soviet Union. We carried the flame of freedom for the world. We had the ability, strength and wealth to do this.

The Soviet Union, of course, no longer exists. It was run into the ground by the determination of President Reagan, the resilience of our market economy, and the cause of liberty.

We still assume the burdens that arose out of our role as the only world power dedicated to promoting peace, democracy and freedom, however. 

It is an appropriate cause. But the process and means of its execution need to be reconsidered.

Ironically, as with some of his other basic impulses, President Trump has wandered into this arena and suggested potentially appropriate approaches.

Having America soldiers in every corner of the globe may no longer be the best manner of pursuing our purpose.

Trump has suggested, for example, that we withdraw totally from Afghanistan. His national security team seems to have tempered this policy.

The president’s impulses here are right.

There is no question but that in the wake of September 11, 2001, we needed to go into Afghanistan and deliver, with significant force, an important message: that we would not tolerate the Taliban allowing the country to be a sanctuary for terrorists.

But the time has come to leave. The effort at nation-building in Afghanistan, just as earlier in Iraq, has not worked well. 

There are many reasons for this. But it is a fact. We should admit it and not compound the failure by staying there.

In departing, we should leave behind a very clear message.

This message should state bluntly to whoever takes over Afghanistan that if they allow it to become a terrorist haven again, we will be back with devastating force — not to build up the country, but to destroy those who allow terrorism to fester there.

In fact, this should be the message that we send to all parts of the Middle East. Our focus should not be nation-building, but rather lethal retaliation against those leaders whose nations assist terrorist intent on harming us.

We do not need troops stationed all over the world to execute this policy. We have the technical and tactical ability to do it without such a commitment.

We should also appreciate the fact that China is not inherently an expansive military power. It wishes to have its sphere of influence, particularly in the South China Sea. It intends to have a massive military capability to make the point that it is a rising superpower. 

China should be a nation we work with at a variety of levels, recognizing that it is also our most capable competitor in many arenas, especially trade. 

This should not lead to confrontation.

China is the only power that can resolve the North Korean issue in a manner that does not involve force. Our policies should be directed at encouraging Beijing to do so for its own sake. 

We should not allow our concerns about China gaming our trade relations to dominate our relationship in a manner that diminishes the chances of solving the North Korean issue.

If China fails to act on North Korea, then we need to make it clear we will turn to Japan for help.   

This would involve encouraging Japan to change its constitution — written largely by General Douglas McArthur when he led the occupation — to allow Japan to rearm. 

It seems probable that if China needs to choose between having a rearmed Japan or a disarmed North Korea, they will choose the latter — and take action to make it happen.

There is also the major issue of how to manage the disastrous deterioration in the Middle East caused by the collapse of Syria and underwritten by Iran.

If there is a lesson from our engagement in Iraq, it is that massive use of American troops on the ground does not necessarily improve things in the region.

Our strategic interest there has been dramatically altered now that we are producing enough oil and gas domestically to take care of our needs.

The endless religious conflicts between Sunnis and Shiites, the Israelis and Palestinians, and numerous other subgroups have been only marginally affected by U.S. engagement.

We should rethink our purposes there.

The need to stifle the growth of terrorists who threaten us should again be our main objective.

The score-settling by nations such as Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran is not something that requires our direct involvement.

The fear that Russia will replace us as power in the region should hardly be the motivator that sets our course. We should send Moscow our condolences and move on.

The fact remains that we are not in a position to cure the causes of these conflicts or significantly impact them.

Times have changed.

We need to change our role in the world.

We need to recognize the new reality of a competitive China and an intractable Middle East that is no longer critical to our energy supply. 

We need to understand that there are limits on our ability to draw people of very different cultures and experience into forms of government they do not accept.

Trump may be on to something when he suggests that, essentially, we should carry a big stick to enforce our rights to protect ourselves.

He may also be on to something when he essentially suggests we should stop there. 

Judd Gregg (R) is a former governor and three-term senator from New Hampshire who served as chairman and ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, and as ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Foreign Operations subcommittee.

A Response to Senator Gregg by Terry Field, Englishman and Insightful Observer of the Human Race 

An interesting justification of a changed posture. Of course, the idea of using devastating, previously unavailable military capacity to project force allows you to leave a region - indeed all regions - and subsequently target an area infected with potentially non-compliant opposition groups and forces and destroy them will be cost -effective for you.

However, imagine the relationship you have with the world. You will sit there, with immense power, deliverable from an immense naval capacity, from homeland bases equipped with projectiles able to destroy anywhere in earth in much less than an hour after the decision is made, and from strategic bases able to deliver low blast high yield tactical nuclear weapons on the heads of any locally resurgent enemy.

You would have no relationship with the struggling governments of those regions. Yes, they would hate and fear such as the Muslin death-cults, the Taliban, etc, yet all you offer for your 'partners' is the reality of your comfortable dis-engagement, their eternal misery, and the prospect of a significant part of their territory being turned into a charnel house at a moment's notice.

Since 1945 America has been able to tie the world up in a web of obviously mutually beneficial economic, cultural, social and political relationships. All have benefited.

Sit in your castle and lob large lumps of stone onto the heads of the cottage dwellers all around, and you will be surprised at how little they will want to know you.

Add to this the uncomfortable reality that you can never effectively subdue from the air - to smash powerful local opposition you must BE THERE. If you are not there, gathering your gigantic military power on the way but only threatening devastation from afar, then you absolutely guarantee that the opposition to you will be total.

Why? Because you no longer offer the world anything at all.

HUBRIS

There is no conceivable condition where any level of potential force will subdue an enraged world. You can dream of such a thing; but you cannot ever achieve it. At least not by leaving the rest of the world alive.

There are now in existence weapons that can utterly destroy all mammalian life and leave the physical infrastructure completely intact. This is new. It does allow for new thinking but imagine the reality the thinking must accept.

If a large region of the world moved to a state where its population entirely opposes you, then you will cause chaos there by attacking it, and that will force others not into your orbit, but away from you (visa Kim in North Korea after your actions in Libya and Iraq).

You will not be able to dissuade others from opposing you unless you act with a new power and force. You will, for this new and truly Imperial global posture to work, have to utterly destroy a region - perhaps a number of regions - to ensure that all others comprehend the risk of disengagement with you is one of total annihilation. The widespread use of neutron bombs - tactically sized ones - is the cornerstone of this new thinking as described in this article.

This allows you now to control events on the ground entirely from the air.

And how have you done this? By ensuring that from the moment the air bursts happen and henceforth, there are NO events on the ground of any kind. All life there dies in hours. Then Pax Americana reigns.

The following day, of course, you have no friends anywhere. You have vassals. The American dream becomes the American nightmare.

LESSON  1 Hide behind a wall of death, and do not use it, and the world will get on with its business without you.

LESSON  2 Use the weaponry and you have no relationship with the world. And it WILL arm itself and one day do to you what you have done to it.

As for China, it is not a passive regional power. It is what it can become, as it grows and grows. In the 16th century, Britain was a little island in thrall to the Holy Roman Emperor, run by brutish warlords. It grew and grew and grew. And as a baby grows to an adult it became another thing. It is doing the same now but in reverse and very quickly indeed. 

The Chinese and Japans are, and they know it, the most intelligent people on earth. China has your population plus 1000,000,000 people. OF COURSE it will become an immense power. With no dysfunctional effete 18th century romanticism, it will deploy it forces and be willing to lose enormous numbers to defeat the West - you in effect - if the prize is big enough. IN a century, if you hem it in, then the prize will certainly be big enough.

This article is a reflection of all that is wrong. (President Jimmy) Carter said, at the end of his term, that America needs to become a humble partner nation. No arrogance, no excess, no violence, no destructiveness on a whim.

 And the response to this in America? Hatred and contempt. Yet he was correct. If America really wants to maintain its influence, protect its life, be loved as well as respected, then it must become the secular reflection of Christianity. That religion captured hearts by the offering of a weak, defenseless God, who was willing to destroy part of himself for the recovery - the redemption - of his creation.

To willingly suffer and die for others. Moral heroism is an overwhelming force. Nothing can stand against it.

If you are loved and admired for sharing the way you deploy your wealth, together with rational kindness then you will hold sway in the hearts of people. That is your insurance policy.

Not tactical neutron bombs, rail guns and hyper-sonic delivery systems. You cannot do any of that good stuff by hiding and periodically slaughtering. Neutron bombs are the things, together with digital control systems that give you a dangerous illusion.

You cannot be as free of the rest of us as you wish to be. And you are not as powerful as the article suggests you are.

Your only chance of long term success is to become responsible, slow to act, possessed of immense material power yet rational in your use of those assets, and morally upright.

The conundrum is the same as we had in India. We had military force but only when we used it at Amritsar did we lose all authority.

As a preference I much prefer the American to other powers. It is the place I really care for 

most, and yet am debarred from living in. But the cold reality is that other great powers will appear. You will become weaker. 

And an article that comes from out of Star Trek and the ghost of the Rand Corporation reflects hubristic ego, not reality. It is Trumpian, not Christian.

Comments?