Ten Years On
Two days after the tenth anniversary of the bombing of Baghdad, I would like to devote this post to listing the benefits of the U.S. invasion of Iraq that cost the lives of over 4,000 Americans and 100,000 Iraqis:
John Brown’s Body
Yesterday, I spent time in the woods removing vines that strangle the life out of the trees that feed them – bittersweet, Virginia creeper, multiflora rose, poison ivy, some grown so thick it takes a chainsaw to cut them. Naturally my mind turned to Henry Thoreau. Whose wouldn’t? Too often we think of Thoreau at Walden as a mild environmentalist, a man who planted beans, went for long walks and dined regularly with the Emersons. We sell him short. I went out yesterday to cut vines and clear my mind; Thoreau “went to the woods . . . to front only the essential facts of life, . . . and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” This was no gentle sojourn in his mind, no diversion from real life. This was Jesus in the wilderness confronting his own life and impending death.
A few years after leaving Walden, Thoreau wrote about John Brown, soon to be executed for leading the attack at Harper’s Ferry and arming local slaves, and who has ever since been demonized as a wild-eyed fanatic, America’s first terrorist. Not to Thoreau. Of the small band, he wrote, “These alone were ready to step between the oppressor and the oppressed. Surely they were the very best men you could select to be hung. That was the greatest compliment which this country could pay them.”
And he reminded the rest of us that “we preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty violence every day.”
Party Lines
Senator Lindsey Graham (R, SC), who grows increasingly shrill in the face of a possible Tea Party primary challenge in 2014, called Chuck Hagel “one of the most unqualified, radical choices for secretary of defense in a very long time." Senator, get a grip . . .
More radical than Donald Rumsfeld (2001-6), who oversaw the disastrous war in Iraq,who became the first leader of America’s military to justify torture, and who rationalized the condition of U.S. battlefield equipment by telling his own troops that “you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want ” – even though it was America that had decided to go to war?
Or than Jefferson Davis (1853-7), the only secretary of war to be subsequently charged with treason – for leading a war against the U.S. government that resulted in 700,000 American dead?
More unqualified than Dick Cheney (1989-93), who responded to a question about his five Vietnam-era deferments by saying, "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service?”
Or than Simon Cameron (1861-2), who resigned from the war department after less than a year because his corruption was so astounding?
Republican objections to Hagel seem fourfold: He challenged the Israeli lobby; he opposed the Iraq war; he seeks alternatives to bombing Iran; and he crossed party lines to support Obama in 2008. Good for him.
In 1997 Bill Clinton nominated Republican Senator William Cohen to be secretary of defense. The senate confirmed him unanimously. And he went on to do an excellent job. How times have changed.
Dystopia
Imagine a future with no past. It’s impossible to do so because time doesn’t work that way, and yet this is the great totalitarian dream, manifest most recently in the efforts of fanatical Islamic rebels to destroy the rich manuscripts and artifacts of the Golden Age of Timbuktu. Reminiscent of when the Taliban dynamited the magnificent 6th-century Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan’s central valley 12 years ago, the rebels sought to eradicate the centuries of history and foundation of an ancient culture that live for their people in the sacred books and statuary. While we naturally and rightly save our most empathic horror for the atrocities committed against living people, there is something almost as appalling about the destruction of a people’s cultural past. It is what makes us who we are. It is why we write books and create art in the first place. And totalitarian regimes – Stalin’s purges, Mao’s cultural revolution, the Khmer Rouge’s Year Zero – strive to eradicate all vestiges of it. In fact, it is the goal of most Utopian visions – even the American melting pot: Henry Ford used to have his company’s workers participate in a pageant in which they would march into a huge black pot, dressed in their impossibly backward ethnic costumes, and march out the other side purged of their Old-World idiosyncrasies and looking exactly alike. In Mali, where they have been risking their lives to save their identities for centuries, people know firsthand that the totalitarian’s dream is the human’s nightmare.
Stumble of the Week
Bullying is not only for young males, as 76-year-old John McCain demonstrated when he went after Chuck Hagel during nomination hearings for Secretary of Defense. Still infuriated over Hagel’s opposition to the Iraq war (not to mention to McCain’s 2008 presidential candidacy), McCain attacked his former friend for opposing the 2007 “surge,” which has become the last straw of Republican honor in Iraq. But Hagel was right. The costs were enormous and the gains short-lived, as the current situation in Iraq makes clear. It’s time for those who insist on resurrecting in Iraq the American honor that was buried in Vietnam to recognize the parallels: two ill-conceived and badly executed wars, marked by “collateral damage” and fought in the end primarily to extricate our own troops. If the purpose of war is to extricate our troops from the mess we created, umm . . . Hearts and Minds. We have read far too much about the tragic brain damage suffered by professional football players. San Francisco 49er cornerback Chris Culliver is only 24, but his pre-Super Bowl comments show that muddled brains can come young. “I don’t do the gay guys, man,” he said in an interview. “Can’t be with that sweet stuff.” His damage control? “The derogatory comments I made yesterday were a reflection of thoughts in my head, but they are not how I feel.”
Liberal Hollywood’s image was jolted by a recent study that reported that two of the 10 highest-grossing film actors, Tom Cruise and John Travolta, are Scientologists, and a third, Clint Eastwood, talks to empty chairs.
The Second Inaugural
I cannot wait to be part of the next four years. President Obama’s speech, so masterfully crafted and so mercifully short, called on all of us to embrace the ideals of our past as we work to transform the future of our world. “With common effort and common purpose, . . . let us answer the call of history and carry into an uncertain future the precious light of freedom.” That is the essence of America at its best, and it is fitting that, 150 years after Gettysburg, a man who is half-black and half-white should stand up and tell us so. Obama built his speech on the bedrock of American exceptionalism, which has of late become a touchstone of conservative politicians. But he hardly expropriated their ground, for the belief that America was founded on ideals that make it a beacon for the world is ingrained in the three defining documents of our history – the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Each specifically harks back to those that came before, and Obama repeatedly references every one of them. Each summons the nation to live up to its stated ideals and to honor its past, not by worshipping at its altar, but by building a new future on its foundation. Each expands the definition of community – “Seneca, Selma, Stonewall;” “the poor, the sick, the marginalized” – and all make clear that “our journey is not complete.” And thank God our government has finally acknowledged global warming.
Fifty Years Ago
Later today I will participate in a panel discussion honoring the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s visit to a small school in rural Massachusetts where I was a high-school senior. I wrote about his visit a year ago, and today’s ceremony takes me back to the 1960s, which was the formative decade of my life. It is a time now often disparaged because, it is said, it ended up glorifying violence and led to the narcissistic backlash of the “me generation.” Popular culture instead reveres what Tom Brokaw branded “the greatest generation,” a phrase that has always stuck in my craw. For that was that generation against whom my own was in rebellion, not because we saw our elders as an undifferentiated collection of other-directed organization men in gray flannel suits (as some books of those days described them), but because we saw a country, entering into unprecedented economic prosperity after a devastating depression and a global war, which was reacting violently to the demands of a people who were, in Dr. King’s words, “still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination,” a country that ignored an environment that featured a dying Lake Erie and a burning Cuyahoga River sending flames five stories in the air, a country that was itself engaged in a devastating conflict in southeast Asia. And while we were sometimes attracted to false prophets, we were struggling to change things we believed needed to be changed. They still do.
Stevens
Abraham Lincoln isn’t even in the pivotal scene in Lincoln, Steven Spielberg’s tribute to the 16th president and his Herculean efforts to pass the 13th Amendment. That scene belongs to Thaddeus Stevens, the iron-hard Congressman from Pennsylvania who led the radical Republicans in the House. When his Congressional opponents demand to know whether Stevens supports, not just emancipation, but racial equality, the hall falls silent as he struggles to answer. He had waged a long and lonely battle for both, and he had, as everyone there undoubtedly knew, a black common-law wife. In the gallery Mary Lincoln’s African-American maid sits expectantly beside the first lady. When Stevens declares that he speaks only for legal emancipation, a tear runs down her cheek, as pandemonium breaks out below: the most uncompromising man in America has publicly denied his most fundamental belief to save the amendment to which he had devoted his political life. In one short scene, Spielberg (and Tommy Lee Jones) resurrect and humanize a man whom history maligned and then forgot. After the war, Stevens pushed for equality for the ex-slaves and led impeachment proceedings against President Andrew Johnson. But his unbending opposition to racism, and his contempt for those who abetted it, did not sit well with a nation that wanted its most destructive war to be gone with the wind. Stevens became the fanatic with a clubfoot and a cold heart, the foil to Lincoln, the generous martyr. But Lincoln was dead, and the price the nation paid for vilifying Stevens and the radical Republicans was 100 more years of black oppression.
Rich States, Poor States
Nine of the 10 states with the highest median household incomes in America voted for Barack Obama in 2008. (The exception was Alaska, whose governor was the Republican candidate for vice president.) That trend holds this year (except Virginia and New Hampshire are currently toss-ups). Nine of the 10 poorest states are solidly Republican – both in 2008 and today. New Mexico is the sole blue exception. The other nine are rural, southern states. All 10 states receive far more in federal payments than they pay in federal taxes.
But why do poor states overwhelmingly support candidates whose policies favor economic inequality, while rich states vote for higher taxes and more government?
False consciousness? Karl Marx wrote that, because the powerful control the public conversation, they can induce the working class to vote against its own interests. But that doesn’t explain the behavior of the rich states.
The help? Are servants outvoting their employers in Greenwich and Palm Springs? But the domestic vote isn’t what it used to be.
I think the explanation is historical: With the break-up of the New Deal coalition came the rise of third-party movements (Strom Thurmond in 1948, George Wallace in 1968) that led white southerners out of the Democratic party. Nixon’s “southern strategy,” and “Reagan Democrats” realigned the parties around social and cultural issues: abortion, guns, evolution, environmentalism – and, let’s be candid, race.
Far from the distractions people try to make them, these are the issues over which this election is being contested.
Richest States 1968 Vote Poorest States 1968 Vote
10. California DEM 10. Oklahoma GOP
9. Delaware DEM 9. South Carolina GOP
8. Hawaii DEM 8. New Mexico DEM
7. Virginia DEM 7. Louisiana GOP
6. New Hampshire DEM 6. Tennessee GOP
5. Massachusetts DEM 5. Alabama GOP
4. Connecticut DEM 4. Kentucky GOP
3. New Jersey DEM 3. Arkansas GOP
2. Alaska GOP 2. West Virginia GOP
1. Maryland DEM 1. Mississippi GOP
Consensus and Vision
OneMaine is one of several groups that have arisen to combat America’s toxic political conversation. Its purpose is to support candidates across a broad spectrum who reject hyperpartisanship, represent their constituents not special interests, and seek principled compromise on behalf of the whole community. Clearly we are at the limit of strident discourse and unbending gridlock. We need more civility, more thoughtfulness, more effort to understand, rather than react to, each other. But is compromise the way out of this mess?
Compromise has worked best during times of prosperity, as the 1950s, or national consensus, as the “era of good feelings”, or one-party dominance, as the New Deal.
It has not worked when there has been a crisis of vision. In 1776 the colonies issued a declaration, not a joint agreement. All the compromises that tried to resolve the slavery issue only put off the day of reckoning – and ensured it would be horrendous when it came. Those who rejected compromise – William Lloyd Garrison, Robert Barnwell Rhett – were condemned as fanatics. But they knew what Lincoln learned, that a house divided cannot stand.
Perhaps the one exception is the much-maligned 1960s, when the nation seemed bent on tearing itself apart. There was much ugliness: 50,000 dead in Vietnam; federal troops in our city’s streets; the Cuyahoga River bursting into flames; vigilante violence in the South. But out of those times came a new vision and some of the most important civil rights and environmental legislation in history.
Once again, two visions are competing for America’s soul. We do need more civil conversation, but I believe that one vision must triumph before consensus is possible.
Note: If you know people who would be interested in this blog, please send them the link: www.jamesgblaine.com.
9/12
I write this with deep respect, but most of the people who died on 9/11 were not heroes. They were victims, and we should never forget that – or them – because there but for fortune went you or I. Many people behaved heroically that day and after: those who rushed the cockpit of Flight 93 over Shanksville; the first responders; the volunteers who came to the site in New York and put themselves at risk; and those who performed anonymous acts of bravery and kindness as they were trapped in their burning tombs. I think a lot about those people and the terrible horror of their last hours. By calling heroes those whose lives end tragically, often at the hands of bad people, we risk turning human beings who were murdered into icons . . . and turning 9/11itself into a day of national idolatry, rather than one of painful remembrance. We may not all be heroes, but we are all humans.
Writing this was made more difficult by yesterday’s events in Libya, where the U.S. ambassador, Christopher Stephens, and three aides, were killed by a mob enraged over an anti-Islamic film made by a California real estate developer and promoted by Terry Jones, the Gainesville preacher who set off riots of his own when he threatened to publicly burn the Koran two years ago. Ambassador Stephens had knowingly put himself in harm’s way and was deeply respected in Libya for his knowledge and courage, both during the revolution and as ambassador. He was a hero.
Note: The rainfall map failed to load on yesterday’s emails. I apologize. . . but it does give me a chance to plug my website, www.jamesgblaine.com, where you will find it.
Stumble of the Week
Note to self: How could Richard Nixon not make my list of least favorite presidents? Because . . .
#5 Andrew Jackson, the president of the people with an unfortunate whiff of Pol Pot. He opened the White House doors to the “common man” while he threw merit out the window by awarding government jobs solely on patronage – all of which pales beside the “trail of tears,” the forced and deadly relocation of all southeastern Indian nations to Oklahoma.
#4 Rutherford B. Hayes shouldn’t have been president at all. Samuel Tilden won the popular vote and led by 19 electoral votes, with three southern states in dispute. A commission, voting along partisan lines, gave their 20 votes to Hayes. The price? The removal of federal troops from the South, the collapse of Reconstruction, and the lethal ascendency of Jim Crow.
#3 Ronald Reagan’s folksy demeanor masked a divisive presidency. His image of the welfare queen in a Cadillac signaled that the poor – at least those who were urban and black – were not just getting what they deserved. They were getting more than they deserved. His pronouncement that trees cause pollution signaled that know-nothingism was a legitimate response to environmental destruction.
#2 James Buchanan. Pennsylvania’s only president spent four years doing nothing while the nation moved with increasing violence toward civil war.
# 1 George W. Bush. After going on vacation for the month of August, he returned just before September 11th . . . to which his response was to tell us to go shopping while he launched two disastrous off-the-books wars, legitimized torture, and instituted tax-and-spending policies that led to the worst recession since the 1930s and left the country in shambles.
Just for Fun
As election season kicks off, I offer you my five favorite presidents (at least for now). #5 Dwight D. Eisenhower. Surprised myself with this one. Despite some huge mistakes (like overthrowing the government of Iran), Ike appointed Earl Warren Chief Justice of a court that ended school desegregation; dispatched federal troops to integrate the schools in Little Rock, Arkansas; and warned of the dangers of the “military-industrial complex.”
#4 John Quincy Adams. Defeated by Andrew Jackson after only one term, he immediately gained election to Congress where, for the next 17 years, he led the anti-slavery movement and became a tireless national spokesman for emancipation.
#3 Thomas Jefferson. Although a slaveholder, Jefferson gave America its dominant myth of the small farmer and independent craftsman, even as the Industrial Revolution was preparing to crush the reality. The most intellectual of presidents, he produced the Declaration of Independence, supported the separation of church and state, and advocated both liberty and equality.
#2 Franklin D. Roosevelt. The “traitor to his class” who protected American capitalism from its worst excesses, FDR led us through both the Great Depression and the Great War. The New Deal is looking particularly good – as the Tea Party seeks to dismantle it – because much of the national infrastructure we built then we still use now.
#1 Abraham Lincoln combined a poet’s sensibility with a horse trader’s cunning to hold the nation together through its bloodiest war and to end its most shameful institution. Ridiculed by his many foes, he had a transcendent dignity.
That’s my list: two Republicans, two Democrats and a Whig. Three served in the 19th century, two in the 20th.
Tomorrow we might stumble onto the five worst.
“We Came in Peace for All Mankind”
Neil Armstrong died unexpectedly on Saturday, 51 years and one month after becoming the first person to walk on the moon. With over half the world’s population not yet 30, the moon landing is ancient history. And it does seem a different era. The Apollo Program, which fulfilled President Kennedy’s challenge to land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, was the culmination of an intense space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, with the backdrop of the Cold War and fears of a science gap, which would lead to nuclear weapons inferiority, a destabilized world and a withering war.
So it is not surprising that Armstrong planted an American flag on the lunar soil. But unlike conquistadors of old, Armstrong did not claim the moon as American territory. In fact, not far from the flag, he and Buzz Aldren laid a plaque that read simply: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”
With private companies gearing up for the commercial opportunities of space travel, with others thinking about exploiting the resources out there and colonizing new planets for when we have destroyed this one, with space itself increasingly littered with human debris and weapons of war, the words of that plaque are worth remembering.
With the exception of those doubters who insist he was actually in Arizona, Armstrong’s “small step” electrified the nation. Conceived by a president and built with public funds, it’s a reminder of what we can accomplish when we dream together.
Sticks and Stones
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) via Annie Blaine. This, I think, helps explain the poisoned atmosphere of our political discourse. It has become personal in the worst kind of way.
It has happened before. On May 22, 1856 on the floor of the U. S. Senate, Preston Brooks, Democratic Congressman from South Carolina, beat Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts so viciously with his cane that Sumner never recovered. The attack came in response to a speech two days earlier in which Sumner had heatedly attacked both the institution of slavery and the character of those who practiced it. Brooks intended to “punish” Sumner, not for his attack on slavery but to avenge the honor of his relative, Senator Andrew Butler (D, S.C.).
Many Southerners thought Sumner had it coming. As the leader of the radical Republicans in the Senate, he was an uncompromising abolitionist whose speeches were filled with invective and incendiary allusions. (His counterpart in the House was Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, he of the club foot, who held the seat I ran for in 1996, a seat now occupied by one of the most reactionary men in the United States Congress. Such is the sad trajectory of the Grand Old Party.)
Four years later, the country was at war, in part because some had taken forceful speech against an unconscionable institution as attacks on their personal honor.
Bombs Away
“The United States dropped more bombs on Laos than on Germany and Japan in World War II.” The BBC newsman uttered that sentence yesterday as I was driving along thinking of nothing in particular. He had one of those professional British voices that lull you into a half-listening sense of a world in order – “I say, Jeeves, will you pack the soup-and-fish, and we’ll jump into the two-seater and toodle on down to Blandings.”
Then it sunk in: more bombs on Laos than on Germany and Japan. We dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, and over just three days in 1945, waves of US and RAF bombers made 15 square miles of downtown Dresden disappear.
We weren’t even at war with Laos. Yet an average of one B-52 bombed the country every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. When we were finished, we had delivered 260 million bombs – a ton for each Laotian – making them the most heavily bombed people, per capita, in the history of the world.
About a third of the bombs failed to explode, and they have killed an estimated 20,000 people since. Hilary Clinton returned to Laos yesterday, the first official American visit since we left Southeast Asia in 1975, and one of those who greeted her was a young man who had lost both hands and his eyesight on his 16th birthday.
He is what we now call collateral damage. If it happened here, we’d undoubtedly find another name for it.
American Exceptionalism
I believe in American Exceptionalism, the idea that America is a unique nation with a special mission. This does not mean that America is “better” than other places, nor that other peoples don’t have their own exceptional stories. But even before the first European settlers had disembarked on the New England coast, America was as much an idea as a place, and it was a land were people came – among other reasons – to work out their destinies. As Americans continually fell short of their ideals, someone would arise, like a biblical prophet, to call us back to our principles. In particular, four men – writing across more than 300 years of history – remind us of America’s destiny to be a beacon to the world.
- In his 1630 sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” John Winthrop urged his small band of Puritans to “be as a city upon a hill,” for they would be judged – by themselves and by the world – on the principles they had come to live by.
- In 1776,Thomas Jefferson looked out on an America that had become a sprawling and diverse land; and whereas Winthrop had stressed community (“we must be knit together, in this work, as one man”), Jefferson wrote that individual equality and liberty must be the foundation of the new nation.
- Eighty-three years later, Abraham Lincoln warned his audience at Gettysburg that the ideals of the Declaration were threatened by war and undermined by slavery.
- And in 1963, at the base of the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King, Jr. referred directly to the earlier documents to call Americans back to the national ideals we espoused but did not live by.
As we remember America’s founding, it is well, also, to remember the enduring tension between America’s ideals and America’s reality.
Suicide
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” So opens “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Albert Camus’ essay on the meaning of life in an absurd world, written as the Nazi atrocities had commenced in France.
Camus’ philosophical musings – which were born of the resistance movements in both France and Algeria – met the modern world head on last week when the Associated Press reported that suicides in Afghanistan now exceed combat deaths among American troops.
Part of the reason is that we are winding down the war: since January 1st there have “only” been 124 combat deaths. By contrast, there have been 154 suicides, a number that has been rising since 2005.
The Pentagon and veterans groups give several reasons for the increase, one of the primary ones being the ongoing lack of compassion for soldiers who seek treatment for emotional stress. That stress is compounded by the traumas of multiple combat tours and family and financial problems back home.
War is the ultimate theater of the absurd. In it, young people are trained to kill – and taught to die – in defense of life . . . and then discarded. Their isolation is exacerbated in a professional military that is cut off from the people whom it is meant to serve. The old draft kept the army connected to those people, if only because it had to train so many who did not want to be there and because they asked the question that all commanders dread: why are we doing this?
History Lesson
Herb Reed and William Lee Miller have almost nothing in common, other than that their obituaries appeared side by side in yesterday’s newspaper. Reed was the last living member of the original Platters, the 1950s pop group that recorded “The Great Pretender,” “Only You” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” They were one of the first so-called crossover groups, whose songs appealed to both white and black audiences in an era when “race music” was banned in much of the South. We now call it “rhythm and blues.” Miller was a historian who wrote popular books abut the national debate over slavery. In addition to biographies of Abraham Lincoln, he wrote Arguing About Slavery, the story of the “gag rule,” which forbade any petition about – or even discussion of – slavery on the floor of the House of Representatives. Congressman and former President John Quincy Adams spent the last years of his life fighting and finally repealing the rule.
Almost 120 years separated the introduction of the first gag rule in 1836 and the release of “The Great Pretender,” the Platters’ first number-one hit, in 1955. A lot had happened in between: The Civil War; the introduction of Jim Crow laws in the South after a brief interlude of Black progress; the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education mandating public school integration. And yet, despite the Platter’s enormous success across racial lines, they still had to play for segregated audiences in the South. “There was still so much prejudice everywhere,” remembered Reed. “How could you enjoy it?”
The Good Drone
Sixty-eight years ago this morning, allied forces landed on the Normandy beaches and began the push through France that would end the war in Europe within a year. World War II, known as “the Good War,” was the deadliest war in history. Over 60 million people were killed, more than 2.5% of the world’s population. Yesterday, a CIA drone strike in Pakistan killed Abu Yahya al-Libi, Al Qaeda’s deputy leader, in what we are told is a major blow against terrorism.
Why does the world not seem safer this morning?
Because the war on terrorism is the current century’s equivalent of “the good war,” we justify the use of unmanned drones to seek out and kill people thousands of miles away. But the program seems at least morally uncertain and, in the long run, strategically counterproductive.
Exactly a week after D-Day, the Germans unleashed a barrage of unmanned V-1 rockets that did far more damage to Britain than had the entire Blitz. Three months later came the V-2, which, according to Lynne Olson’s Citizens of London, “traveled faster than sound and approached their targets in total silence.”
There is a huge distinction between Hitler’s rockets, which were weapons of indiscriminate destruction, and the drones, which are infinitely more precise. And yet, the latter are clearly descendents of the former, which, wrote Evelyn Waugh, were “as impersonal as the plague,” bringing death suddenly from the sky.
Both weapons killed; neither brought victory to those who used them; and in Germany’s case, the rockets led to Nuremburg.