Reflection on The Inclusive Economy: How to Bring Wealth to America’s Poor by Michael D. Tanner

               My sister recommended this book to me and it was far better than I expected for a Cato Institute publication. I read it physical so I couldn’t take any notes on it, but I had a few thoughts. This book, about poverty and how to solve it using libertarian methods, made five key arguments: that we must reform criminal justice and the War on Drugs, reform the school system (mainly by reducing its size and creating more vouchers or private schools, bring down the cost of housing by allowing the market to do its work, make it easier for the poor to bank, save, and invest, and focus on increasing inclusive economic growth.

               As for the criminal justice, I am on board- there are far too many prisoners for non-violent crimes in the United States. On the schools, however, I couldn’t follow him. I can’t support any policy that tries to reduce public school funding, as I think that’s immoral. I would support voucher/choice programs, however, if they were done within public schools, so that money would follow a student to any public school. Reducing housing costs by fixing zoning laws and allowing the free market to work is something I’d already supported, having read Matthew Yglesias’ The Rent is Too Damn High and I was glad that Tanner agreed. As for making it easier for the poor to bank, I also agreed, and learned a lot about this from Elizabeth Warren’s book, The Two-Income Trap. The last part, about economic growth, was basically just where Tanner said he wanted to cut taxes, and while I am with him on the corporate tax, I think his defense of the 2017 tax cuts was indefensible, as those were clearly made to benefit the rich and any benefits to the poor are made by accident.

               In sum, this is a good book that challenged my prior beliefs at some points and confirmed them at others. I liked it and would recommend, since it’s always nice to read some libertarian stuff. That in mind, I continue to feel like Libertarianism is a dumb movement. Why reduce government all the time? It seems very ideologically stiff to me and I just have too pragmatic a temperament to support this kind of thing. I feel like the book claims to try to find ways to reduce poverty through libertarian policies but actually just serves as a way for the Cato Institute to defend itself against charges that it’s a tool of the rich. Which is true is for the reader to decide.

Reflection on The Horse and His Boy by C.S.Lewis

               This is a really cool Narnia book! This is the first one (in chronological order) that doesn’t begin with children being taken from the normal world into the world of Narnia. Instead, it is the story of children living in Calormen and the horses that help them escape to Archenland and Narnia. I liked it a lot and would put it in an upper tier of Narnia books. Here’s my current ranking:
1. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
2. The Horse and His Boy
3. The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe
4. The Silver Chair
5. Prince Caspian

               There’s also a nice quote in the book, which was the only thing I remembered to highlight. It’s when King Lune of Archenland says, “For this is what it means to be a king: to be first in every desperate attach and last in every desperate retreat, and when there’s hunger in the land (as must be now and then in bad years) to wear finer clothes and laugh louder over a scantier meal than any man in your land.” I think that King Lune is obviously a good king and this quote is a good example of how to be a good leader.

Reflection on The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis

               This is the Narnia book I feel most conflicted about. I feel like with each book they get more creative (I’m reading in the order they were released, so Lion, Prince Caspian, Dawn Treader, and now Silver Chair). This book takes us into marshes and mountains, to the halls of giants and to underground cities, and I would say that the settings explored here are the second-best in the series after Prince Caspian. It is strange to move on to different characters with none of the original four. I think Lucy is especially missed in this book, though Jill Post takes her place. These are definitely conservative books and I thought they were excellently done and conveyed messages about Christianity and tradition and honor really well in the original three but this one had a really annoying motif about “Experiment House.” It always took me out of the story so much when Lewis felt the need to mention it, being the school that Eustace and Jill go to. It is some kind of progressive school that does not teach girls to curtsey, does not use the students’ “Christian names,” and does not teach students who Adam and Eve are (the students have never heard of them). I was laughing each time it was brought up because it was so edgy and it was honestly fine until the very end, when (*SPOILER ALERT*) Aslan literally brings King Caspian back to life so that he can spend five minutes in Eustace and Jill’s world… hitting all the students and teachers they don’t like at Experiment House. Like that is really how you wanted to finish this book? Clearly something had been pissing Lewis off when he was writing this one. Besides that, I would say this was a great book and if it hadn’t ended with the Experiment House stuff I would have said it was the next best after Dawn Treader.

Reflection on Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 by Eric Foner

               Calling Reconstruction an “unfinished revolution” is a very observant thing that Foner does in the title of this book. Reconstruction was truly the Second American Revolution, though the “Redemption” counter-revolution would sweep away many of its changes. This book details Reconstruction excellently and is an extremely thorough and informative account of these important years. I’ve gotta say that it’s one of the best books I’ve read because it is just packed with hard information and knowledge, though at times that can make the book a little more difficult to read. That said, if you are looking for answers to your questions about the aftermath of emancipation, the beginning of free black life in America and how the South changed in the middle to the end of the 19^th century, you will surely find the answers in this book.

               The book discusses in Chapter 2 various “Rehearsals for Reconstruction,” (also the name of the chapter) which occurred when Union forces won certain areas of the South and began to implement social and economic changes under military rule. For example, the famous guarantee of “forty acres and a mule” originated in Special Field Order No. 15, when General Sherman set aside land in the low country of South Carolina, traditionally used for rice farming, for the exclusive settlement of blacks. The land grants were intended to be temporary and, in the end, didn’t come to much, but that order would be remembered by many former slaves as a broken promise, one of many that came from the Civil War and its aftermath. There were other “rehearsals” in coastal areas taken by Union troops, the biggest of which was New Orleans, which was a city that had never followed the same power structure as the rest of the South, being that in New Orleans there weren’t just blacks and whites, but substantial numbers of French-descended whites (I don’t know if they are Acadians or Cajuns or what) and Mulattoes (this is the term that Foner uses for mixed-race people, I’m not sure if it’s acceptable today or if it has some specific meaning, but I’m just going to use it since he uses it).

               Foner then discusses the initial black response to emancipation. Above all, the end of slavery was seen by freedmen as a miracle and a sort of millenarian event that no one alive would forget. People started to dress differently, especially women who wore more colorful and ostentatious clothing. People held large meetings, formerly illegal under slavery, that often discussed politics and issues of the day. People also started to buy guns and liquor, both previously illegal. Freedmen also started to create schools, and although it was difficult (sort of a blind leading the blind situation due to a shortage of qualified teachers), people rushed to schoolhouses to get an education. Last, but not least, freedmen were obsessed with travelling. All over the country, as travel restrictions on slaves ended, freedmen up and left their plantations to go and see their country. A Texas slave said of the end of the need of travel passes that, “They seemed to want to get closer to freedom, so they’d know what it was—like it was a place or a city.” There was also the creation of an independent black church. Before the war, slaves could only go to white churches (where they would be put in the back) or attend churches with white ministers (who often focused on biblical passages that emphasized obeying authority). After the war, the refusal of whites to give blacks an equal place in their congregations and the black movement to be independent of white people gave rise to separate black churches like the AME, a religious segregation that exists to this day. Foner writes that “on the eve of the war, 42,000 black Methodists worshipped in biracial South Carolina churches; by the end of the 1870s, only 600 remained.” One exception was the Catholic Church, which did not require blacks to sit in separate pews (though parochial schools were segregated).

               On the economic and political side of things, not many blacks would hold land over the long term, but most who could afford it tried to buy land as soon as possible. There was clearly something not just economic, but also psychological going on in the desire to be independent and have one’s own land. Those who did acquire land were more likely to register, vote, and run for office later on and into the 20^th century. Foner points out that although immediate landownership for blacks could have meant an economic independence and segregation that would have been very bad for the southern economy, the survival of the plantation system that came instead was no better, as the South stagnated for the rest of the century economically. Politically speaking, something interesting is that while in all Southern states, the first to step forward to lead the black community politically were those who had already been free before the war (therefore already having education, money, and social standing), that only remained in Louisiana and South Carolina. In other southern states, freedmen (those freed after the war), rose to power after a few years. Despite the gains that were made by blacks, whites reacted viciously. It reminds me of the Holocaust, when Jews returned to their homes in Eastern Europe and found that the discrimination was just as bad as ever, with whites attacking and murdering blacks all over the South. The main difference is that when Jews continued to suffer pogroms even after World War Two, we were able to flee to the United States and Israel while Blacks had fewer options and generally chose to remain to claim the rights that were given to them on paper in the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th amendments.

               Foner then moves into talking about the economy in Chapter 4, and in short, the economy was not good. There were just straight up bad seasons, not to mention the fact that massive amounts of infrastructure was destroyed and so many died in the war (260,000 men- one fifth of the South’s adult white male population). On top of that, with slaves free and women and children working less, wages rose drastically, making life tough for the formerly economically immune planter class. Foner writes that, “measured in hours worked per capita, the supply of black labor dropped by about one third after the Civil War.” In addition to women and children working less, the men also wanted to work less, as after being freed, no one wanted to work the same hours they did in slavery. The Freedmen’s Bureau, created to assist in the adjustment of exslaves to normal life, was not able to do its job well. Instead of having some blacks farm independently and others work as hired laborers, the lack of land for freedmen resulted in nearly everyone signing annual contracts to work on the plantations, returning to the old way. And remember, the old slavers were not used to labor negotiations and having employees who could leave at will. They also were not ready to give up corporal punishment, so in many ways, these contracts were like a return to slavery. Think about this: farm laborers would only be paid at the end of the year based on the crop success, meaning that the freedmen bore the risk of crop failure (which happened in 1866 and 1867 in nearly all of the South). Essentially, the postponement of payment offered planters and interest-free loan from their own employees. Forced to choose between these contracts, gang labor (everyone together under an overseer on some project) and sharecropping, which gave blacks tenancy on some planter’s land, freedmen overwhelmingly chose sharecropping to avoid the  overseer. This allowed freedmen to hunt, fish, and grow crops on their own time. However, given just a couple of years, loans from planters to sharecroppers would become a way of trapping them on the plantation and forcing them into labor relations that were close to a return to slavery.

               Chapter 5 is called “The Failure of Presidential Reconstruction,” detailing the differences between the actions of President Andrew Johnson, which essentially allowed Confederates to return to power immediately, versus Congressional Reconstruction, which came about in 1867 and actually attempted to enact social change in the South. Johnson has gotta be one of the worst Presidents ever. This passage from Foner sums it up: “Despite talk of punishing traitors, the President embarked on a course of amazing leniency. No mass arrests followed the collapse of the Confederacy; only Henry Wirz, commandant of Andersonville prison camp, paid the ultimate penalty for treason. Jefferson Davis spent two years in federal prison but was never put on trial and lived to his eighty-second year; his Vice President, Alexander H. Stephens, served a brief imprisonment, returned to Congress in 1873, and died ten years later as governor of Georgia.” The President proved totally unwilling to punish traitors or reward the loyal, which is a very bad strategy, even when you forget the moral and legal issues present. Johnson, one of the few Democrats to remain loyal during the war, quickly aligned himself with the old southern elites. It shows you how important the assassination of Lincoln truly was, completely changing the post-war situation. Southern elites who quickly came back into power passed laws to make life harder for freedmen, like limiting hunting and fishing plus requiring fenced land, making it difficult to eat and make money for anyone without livestock or land. They also stripped public institutions of funds. For example, North Carolina, which had begun public education shortly before the war, abolished it, preferring to educate none at all than to educate white and black children equally. One important political effect of Presidential Reconstruction is that, because it made no distinction between free mulattoes and blacks, those two groups would ally together during Radical Reconstruction from 1867-77, with whites failing to split them, as occurred in Jamaica.

               In Chapter 6, Foner transitions into Radical Reconstruction, the period when Congress took over, mainly the “Radical Republican” wing of congress, led by Thaddeus Stevenson. In 1866, they won huge at the polls, putting a 2/3 majority of Republicans in both houses.They were going to go much harder on the old elites and do much more to help freedmen. There were going to be challenges, however. For example, the Southern Homestead Act failed to achieve its purpose of transferring lands from the old Confederates to blacks and loyal whites because blacks did not have the capital to buy lands and most whites who bought acted as agents for lumber companies. However, they were more successful on other issues, like a civil rights bill and the passage of the 14^th and 15^th amendments, despite Johnson’s opposition. They were able to pass those constitutional amendments thanks to the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which divided the Confederacy into 11 military districts and only allowing the reinstitution of states if they approved those amendments.

               The South developed very differently during Radical Reconstruction than during Presidential Reconstruction. The old elites who reasserted power in Presidential Reconstruction were thrown out in 1867 and Republicans began to claim power in the South. Blacks became extremely excited about the possibilities offered by participation in politics and chose to stay in the South, trying to build a more colorblind society, which would not end up happening. Despite huge wins for Republicans in 1866, 1867 was a mixed year for them, with the Republicans winning big in the South, thanks to restrictions on ex-confederates voting, but losing in the North, as Democrats took power. While these were all off-year elections, it foreboded problems. It meant the end of any land redistribution in the south, and 1867 would be a high water mark, when congressmen enacted major policy changes in the South, yet got a glimpse of their electoral future. From then on, Reconstruction would decline, having barely begun.

               Republicans who had power in the South were completely disordered. Foner writes that, “walkouts and fistfights disrupted party conventions, members of some factions connived with Democrats to defeat their rivals, Republican legislatures impeached Republican governors, and Florida’s lieutenant governor even seized the state seal and claimed the right to rule. Such displays weakened the party’s coherence and its image in the North, and undermined its claim of bringing to the South a new era of responsible government.” Within the black community, things slowly transitioned into a class hierarchy, as separate black neighborhoods sprung up in cities, creating a black business class, while black artisans in port cities like New Orleans and Charleston declined in prominence. Economic changes for free blacks varied by region. For example, in the South Carolina and Georgia lowcountry where rice was the most prominent crop, “initial federal policy, the inability to attract outside investment, a prolonged period of local black political power, and the cohesion and militancy of the black community… promoted black landownership.” As a result, freedmen were most successful there. On the other hand, in the tobacco and cotton-growing South, where farming did not require as much capital or as much coordination in the labor force, factors that would have forced more cooperation, the planter class was able to control its land and resume production.

               In Chapter 9 “The Challenges of Enforcement,” Foner discusses the difficulties faced by black reformers during Reconstruction, which came mainly as results of virulent racism and hatred on the part of white Southerners and passive racism and indifference on the part of white Northerners. Foner tells us that, “At least one tenth of the black members of the 1867-68 constitutional conventions became victims of violence during Reconstruction, including seven actually murdered.” The Ku Klux Klan emerged as a force of anti-black terror, killing freedmen’s livestock, whipping whites who bought cotton from independent blacks, and burning down plantations for renting land to freedmen. They sought to regulate blacks as a vigilante force and had the support of huge numbers of Southern whites, becoming a horrible force of terror. Whites were far more likely to commit violent acts against blacks than blacks against whites. Of the large numbers of blacks put in prison, they were largely for property crimes, while whites had impunity for violent crimes including the murders of many blacks. Eventually, thanks to the election of Ulysses S. Grant as President, the Klan was crushed in 1872, something that Johnson had had no interest in doing. It would reemerge again, but that was the end of their Reconstruction chapter.

               The Panic of 1873 is a huge event that is detailed in Chapter 11 “The Politics of Depression.” This thing blew my mind and I need to learn more about it because it’s way more important than I realized. It was called “The Great Depression” at the time and the economy contracted for FIVE STRAIGHT YEARS until 1878. SIXTY-FIVE MONTHS! That is the longest period of economic contraction in United States history. The Panic diminished Northern interest in Reconstruction and coincided with a series of very conservative Supreme Court decisions that emasculated postwar changes. Reconstruction had been in decline for some time and by the time of the Panic it was barely even in force anymore. It would officially last until 1877, but the end had already begun.

               The book ends with Chapter 12, “Redemption and After,” as “Redemption” refers to the years after Reconstruction when the South “redeemed” its political institutions. I am not sure if there is a clear end date on Redemption. In the judiciary, the courts retained the extra power they gained, but used it not to forward social equality among the races, but rather “to protect corporations from local regulation.” Most Southern states started to drastically cut spending. For example, the Florida legislature abolished the penitentiary and abandoned the construction of an agricultural college. Alabama’s “Redeemers” closed public hospitals. State services started to disappear. However, there were other “mini-reconstructions.” For example, “Readjusters” came to power in Virginia in 1879, pouring funds into public schools, abolishing the poll tax, raising taxes on corporations, reducing taxes on small farmers, and reinforcing blacks’ political and civil rights.” Foner also writes that, “A decade later a Populist-Republican alliance won control of North Carolina,” which brought the state a “Second Reconstruction” that increased education funding, returned control of county government to local voters, and revived black officeholding. I think that it is interesting to read this in light of the book American Nations, which does a very good job illustrating the differences between the Deep South and Tidewater, which would include Virginia and North Carolina, states that are fundamentally different from the rest of the South.

The Redeemers did not fully integrate segregation into Southern law until the 1890s, which could be either early or late, depending on how you look at it. The Redeemers tended to create laws that focused on the protection of white property. White lawmakers tried to put any black they could get their hands on in prison and would then hire them out as forced labor, recreating the same dynamic as slavery. South Carolina and Florida achieved the hiring out of nearly every convict in the state, especially necessary in Florida, which abolished the penitentiary, meaning that if you went to jail in Florida, you basically went back to plantation slavery. Redeemers also created “lien laws” that “gave a landlord’s claim to his share of the crop precedence over a laborer’s for wages or a merchant’s for supplies, thus shifting much of the risk of farming from employer to employee.” In 1877, North Carolina passed a law that placed the entire crop in the planter’s hands until rent had been paid and gave him full power to decide if the obligation had been fulfilled with no one else a sharecropper could appeal to. Laws that worked to hurt sharecroppers and help planters started out in the black belt but soon spread to damage the interests of white yeomanry too, a pattern that is common in the history of the South. Foner writes that, “Partly because of Redeemer rule, the South emerged as a peculiar hybrid—an impoverished colonial economy integrated into the national capitalist marketplace yet with its own distinctive system of repressive labor relations. While the region’s new upper class of planters, merchants, and industrialists prospered, the majority of Southerners of both races sank deeper and deeper into poverty.” Outside corporations then came in and carved up everything and exploiting the South without contributing to it. Per capita income in the Deep South showed ZERO GROWTH FROM 1880-1900, a pretty big indictment of the Redeemer policies in my mind. For blacks specifically, it was even worse. In 1900, they owned an even smaller percentage of the land than they had at the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and most worked by moving from plantation to plantation in search of paltry sums of money and better conditions than the last plantation.

I want to conclude by re-emphasizing that this is an absolutely spectacular book jam-packed with facts and knowledge. I feel like I just took a whole college course with all I learned and I absolutely loved it. Foner tells us that the end that, “What remains certain is that Reconstruction failed, and that for blacks its failure was a disaster whose magnitude cannot be obscured by the genuine accomplishments that did endure.” The tragedy of the failure was extremely clear for almost another hundred years, as the Jim Crow South oppressed blacks and forced them into segregated schools. Today, there are still laws on the books that date from the Redeemer period and amendments to the Constitution from the Reconstruction period. We still fight the same political fights over who can vote, which often is a racial fight. The prison system in the South and the use of police all over the country is evolved from racist norms developed during these times and the tensions that exist today can probably be traced back to them. This book is essential reading if you want to understand America and the South.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• South Carolina’s School for the Deaf and Blind integrated and then, at the demand of staff, re-segregated, even though students who were blind would never have known the difference.
• Between 1860-70, five Northern states tripled their tax burden, Michigan quintupled, and New Jersey sextupled.
• From 1867-73, the bonded debts of Boston, New York, and Chicago tripled.
• I learned about the Exodusters, which was a number of blacks who left the South to head west, largely settling in the Great Plains region and living there until the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl era.
• This is not a fact, but just a quote from the author that has some relevance to today’s politics: “Democracy, it has been said, functions best when politics does not directly mirror deep social divisions, and each side can accept the victory of the other because both share many values and defeat does not imply ‘a fatal surrender of … vital interests.’ This was the situation in the North, where, an Alabama Republican observed, ‘it matters not who is elected.’

Reflection on Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America by Chris Arnade

               This is a great book that reminded me a lot of Our Towns and American Nations. In the book, Arnade sets out to explore and meet people from “back row America” which basically means people with little money and formal education who often live in their hometowns either because they don’t want to or cannot leave. He contrasts it with “front row America,” made up of people who are more globalistic, who leave their home towns, who are educated, and who are largely atheistic or agnostic. I think that these are some very important distinctions. I would say that they’re much better distinctions than are made in American Nations because they account for class, education and urbanization. Arnade also discusses race, as race divides “back row America” into black and white or immigrant and non-immigrant. One deficiency of the book, especially in comparison to Our Towns, is that it offers no solutions except listening to one another, which was disappointing.

               The book is full of good quotes from people and there are two that I want to point out as especially good. One is that “the harder you work, the less you make.” This is a fucked up thing that I find to be largely true. It seems like the jobs where you have the fewest breaks and the least time off are the jobs that pay the least. Meanwhile, if you work a white-collar job in an office building, it’s very easy to slack off and screw around without anybody noticing for most of the day. You can’t do that so much as a waiter or as an assembly line worker. All those blue-collar jobs have some supervisor that makes sure they’re doing something all the time while so many white-collar jobs just let you do whatever you’re doing on the computer. It’s not 100%, but it feels like a trend. Another good quote is “What’s going to happen if you give only nine bones to ten dogs?” This is in the context of jobs. When there isn’t enough work to go around, people are gonna fight and bad things are gonna happen. The most important thing in our society is that we have enough work to go around to keep people busy, because when we’re not busy, bad things tend to happen. Having jobs also brings us into contact with more people in a positive environment, making it a social experience too.

               While the author offers no solutions, I think that I can point out some general things that need to happen to improve life around the country. A lot of trouble comes from the fact that when industrial jobs left communities outside of cities, nothing replaced them. As a result, the most talented and lucky people went to universities and moved to cities because they could never go back to their hometowns that had no opportunities. These are “front row Americans” and the brain drain that puts them all in cities is a huge problem. Similar to the way that old people are leaving their old communities for retirement paradises in Arizona and Florida (which I read about in Leisureville), massive problems in American life are emerging from a sort of segregation and secession on the lines on age, education, wealth, and race. It results in a geography of small havens of globalized, educated, wealthy, and often white elites in urban havens, surrounded by the opposite communities in other parts of cities and in the more suburban and rural areas.

               This means that the solution is to either get these people back into the smaller towns or to create a way for people in the future to prosper where they already are. I think this means the development of skills using the internet, which can cheaply deliver courses to people in their homes wherever they live so long as they have a connection. Hopefully, it would result in businesses going to where the skilled people are. It means low taxes on businesses, so that they can develop easily and profitably, yet higher taxes on the wealthy, to pay for projects that can revitalize poor towns. I think it also means a replacement of prisons with rehabilitation programs for people with drug addictions. Like I mean a serious effort at stopping addiction, since that is costing our country massive amounts of time, money, and emotional pain. We also need to promote more spiritual belief and faith, whether in religion or something else, but whatever it is, there needs to be some kind of spiritual awakening. Religion has a huge power to save people and if we can’t get people to go back to church, we need to develop other institutions that can fill the same societal hole.

Reflection on Orlando by Virginia Woolf

               Orlando is about a gender-bending English lord who achieves hundreds of years of age, living from the time of Queen Elizabeth to 1928. It is a really strange and abstract story, and I think that I’d heard before that that’s how Virginia Woolf writes, but it was really weird. I liked her style of writing though, especially when she made jokes. Woolf is funny. My main criticism is that it was hard to understand at many points and it seemed to go off in many directions at once.

Reflection on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis

               The third book of the series and my favorite so far. Dawn Treader has the greatest adventures and it just clearly the best book. Coolest entry into Narnia so far, great new characters, great old characters, awesome book for Lucy, who is amazing, and just the most dramatic, emotional journey in all the books. It’s basically about sailing to the end of the world and is absolutely stellar.

Reflection on Warfighting by the U.S. Marine Corps

               This is another publication by the US Marine Corps, this time focusing on the fighting doctrine of the Corps. I read it to get a better sense of the theory behind how the Marines operate. The book starts with an interesting observation. It is that war and peace exist on a spectrum. Absolute war and absolute peace happen rarely in the real world. War is just an extension of all sorts of policies that can be taken, such as ending diplomatic relations, imposing tariffs or sanctions, or small border clashes. Therefore, the state is always in a continuous relationship with conflict. The doctrine also states that there is no clear difference between the offense and the defense, as a good offense must still take time to consolidate its position and maneuver, which is defensive, and a good defense must counterattack, which is offensive. It reminds me of a game of chess in how both players are constantly on the offensive and defensive.

               There is also advice in the book that applies in situations that have absolutely nothing to do with war. It is written that, “Because we recognize that no two situations in war are the same, our critiques should focus not so much on the actions we took as on why we took those actions and why they brought the results that they did.” I think this is an important quote because when one reviews their performance in any field or endeavor, criticizing one’s own actions is easy, but it is much more effective to think about why one took those actions. We ought to deeply analyze the assumptions we held that caused us to take good and bad actions. Another major part of the philosophy that is useful in civilian life is to emphasize in-person communication as much as possible. Humans don’t just communicate with words, but with intonation, expressions, and body language that are lost on the phone and in writing. After all, high quality information is much better than high quantity information.

               The Marines operate by maneuver warfare. This is opposed to attritional warfare, with maneuver being about “shattering the enemy’s cohesion through a series of rapid, violent, and unexpected actions,” while attritional warfare focuses less on tricking the enemy and more on wearing him down. To do this, the Marines must use decentralized command and focus less on timetables and specific sequences of events and more on creating disorder and taking advantage of critical moments to strike the enemy’s weak points. It is written that, “If we are to win, we must be able to operate in a disorderly environment. In fact, we must not only be able to fight effectively in the face of disorder, we should seek to generate disorder for our opponent and use it as a weapon against him.” Therefore the Marines don’t put too much control in subordinates and don’t strive for certainty. The Marines choose to shape only the general conditions of war, including “canalizing enemy movement in a desired direction, blocking or delaying enemy reinforcements so that we can fight a piecemealed enemy rather than a concentrated one, shaping enemy expectations, or attacking a specific enemy capability to allow us to maximize a capability of our own…” The point is to develop several options for any given moment, so that the officer in charge is not restricted in his or her choices. Then, when the decision must be made, the Marines tell us that, “a good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” Speed and decisiveness are the crucial principles.

Reflection on American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard

               I still don’t really know how to feel about this book. I think the best way that I can put it is that Woodard has some really interesting insights, though he creates an argument about the “eleven regions” that has a lot of holes. Basically, there’s a lot of good an a lot of bad in this book. The foremost sin is that he includes nothing about Florida! WTF! He just eliminates us from the book and I thought that was super lame. There are extremely brief references to northern Florida a few times but we’re basically just not in this book and half of Florida isn’t even assigned to one of his eleven regions. I question off the bat if regional/geographic divisions are the most important divisions in the United States, an implicit assumption of the book, rather than racial differences or urban/rural differences, which I think are likely bigger.

               One really good thing about the book is the way that the author divides the country into more specific and logical blocks than North and South or Coastal States and Flyover States. The best distinction made is between the regions of “Tidewater” and the “Deep South,” pointing out the Tidewater, the aristocratic region home to Jefferson, Washington, and Madison that had tobacco plantations, declined in influence throughout the 18^th century, and thought of slavery as an embarrassment. The Deep South, on the other hand, founded by Barbadian slavers, was always proud of slavery and saw it as a positive good. Therefore, the reason why slavery went from being seen as an embarrassment to a source of pride from the American Revolution into the 1800’s and culminating in the Civil War was not due to a change of opinion. Rather, it was that those who argued rose to and fell from prominence- the Tidewater tobacco farmers who felt shame became less powerful as Deep South slavers became more prominent, farming cotton, the new cash crop that made them richer and made slaves all the more profitable. The author even distinguishes between the social lives of planters in Tidewater and the Deep South, pointing out that since Tidewater had rivers that made doorstep delivery to plantations possible, the Deep South did not, and as a result, Tidewater developed no major cities while the Deep South created Charleston. Deep South planters went to Charleston to have a good time in the city and often lived there while Tidewater planters stayed in their mansions.

               Another interesting distinction between Yankee and Appalachian Midwesterners, who met in the West having come from the different regions. They spoke, as a result, with different dialects. They also had different customs. Woodard writes, “Yankee Midwesterners placed their homes on the road, ate potatoes as their starch, planted fruit orchards, built barns and straight board fences, harnessed their horses to carts for a race, negotiated written contracts, and buried their dead in town graveyards. Appalachian Midwesterners built their homes near the center of their plots (for privacy), preferred corn as their starch, spurned orchards, built open sheds if they sheltered their livestock at all, enclosed pastures with split-rail fences, rode their horses when racing, negotiated verbal, honor-bound agreements, and put their relatives to rest in family plots or isolated graves.” While the Yankees were more community-based and sought to build utopian communities based on good works and righteousness, the people from Appalachia were more about individual salvation and a “bilateral relationship with God.”

               The worst thing about this book is the total lack of discussion of black people/slaves and their descendants. Where do they fit in as a nation? Woodard ignores them mostly, and they clearly do not fit in with the other “nations” described in the book. That annoyed me. He did the same with Native Americans until the conclusion of the book, when, all of a sudden, he jumps to talking about them and about Canada, which was a strange ending. In sum, this book has interesting things to contribute, but does not adequately address all the threads that are brought up.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• The Constitution was only approved in 1788 by a 30-27 vote. That is really close!
• “Being sold down the river,” originally referred to slaves sold from Kentucky and Tennessee down to the Deep South, as the international slave trade had become illegal, forcing Deep Southern slavers to import human property from other US states.
• Mexico’s war of independence killed one in ten of its people and cut its GNP in half. GNP would not recover to 1805 levels until the 1870s.
• New York City was one quarter Jewish in 1910.

Reflection on There Are No Dead Here: A Story of Murder and Denial in Colombia by Maria McFarland Sanchez Moreno

               There Are No Dead Here is about the history of paramilitary organizations in Colombia, who are the right-wing equivalent of guerrillas, like FARC, M-19, and the ELN. This book traces their roots back to “La Violencia,” a period of bloody civil war between liberals and conservatives in Colombia that broke out when the presidential hopeful Eliecer Gaitan was assassinated. At the end, with 200,000 dead (one in sixty Colombians), the Conservative and Liberal Parties made peace, forming the National Front, agreeing to alternate their time in power. However, some Liberal groups refused the offer, claiming it favored the Conservatives. They continued the war under the banner of the “Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC).

               Under the command of “Tirofijo” (straight shot), FARC continued to fight the war and was joined by other guerrilla groups mentioned above. For a time in the 1980’s, the war was overshadowed by the drug war, as the Cali and Medellin cartels did battle in the streets of the country’s major cities. However, they were only one small aspect of the greater war that Colombia had not stopped fighting. In fact, cartel members joined that war when M-19 kidnapped the daughter of one cartel member, creating a paramilitary group called MAS- “Muerte a Secuestradores” (Death to Kidnappers). As guerrillas continued to kidnap the wealthy and landed, they needed way to defend themselves, much like the cartel leaders had done. In 1994, the government legalized the formation of “Convivirs,” which were sort of private militias.

               These got out of control. Soon, the paramilitaries formed for defense became a new type of gang. They sold drugs, massacred whole towns full of people, and stole land from others. It became a way for the wealthy to form private armies that would go on taking over their rivals’ land. Attempts to investigate them, heavily detailed in the book, were made nearly impossible by assassinations, threats, and blackmail carried out by paramilitaries against their investigators. Colombia had always been corrupt, but it got bad enough that the major security and investigation agencies were corrupted, as they ended up in the hand of the paramilitaries. It didn’t help the situation that they found an ally in Alvaro Uribe, first as governor of Antioquia, then as President of Colombia, and today as one of Colombia’s foremost senators. Uribe and his family have been tied up in mysterious ways with the paramilitaries for a long time, publicly supporting laws of amnesty for their crimes, and privately doing who-knows-what behind the scenes.

               As president, Uribe was immensely popular, as he took a side in the war (the paramilitaries) and essentially won. He freed hostages and defeated guerrilla groups, most notably FARC. He left office as the most popular president in Colombian history, as most people were willing to forget massacres by paramilitaries that would kill dozens if it meant that the war would come to an end. Peace was made by his successor, Juan Manuel Santos, but Uribe bitterly opposed it, saying it treated FARC to kindly, which a very narrow majority of Colombians agreed on.  However, peace was made anyway, ending the war with FARC, which left 220,000 people dead, millions forcibly displaced, and hundreds of thousands “disappeared.”

               This is a really good book about the situation in Colombia and I think is good for Americans to read since it shows the reader how Pablo Escobar is really just a small part of the story. It reads like a crime thriller as you are taken through the lives of the investigators of paramilitary crimes. I was particularly impacted by the fact that many places described in the book are places that I have personally visited, for example, I have been to San Juan Nepomuceno, where there is a monument to the “El Salado” Massacre, where dozens where killed by “Jorge 40,” who lived in Valledupar, just a 2 and a half hour drive from me. The book also mentions El Dificil, a town just an hour away, describing voter fraud that was occurring there as recently as the early 2000’s. In sum, this is a really good education on modern Colombian conflict and an eye-opener for anyone who thinks that Pablo Escobar is the end-all be-all of Colombia.

Reflection on A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms by George R.R. Martin

               I am sad because there’s no more GRRM for me to read now except for A World of Ice and Fire, but I feel like that doesn’t count. This is a great book for fans of the show and books and is such a good reminder of how skilled George R.R. Martin is as a writer. I cruised through this one in two days and it felt like eating candy it was so good and readable. The books are about two travelers of the Seven Kingdoms about a hundred years before A Game of Thrones and skillfully tells a story about the “game of thrones” that is occurring through the two travelers who are really peripheral to it all. We hear lots about Bloodraven throughout the book and he is one of the most interesting “off-screen” characters. Also, I love when GRRM describes food. He is amazing at it and always makes me hungry.

Reflection on The Passage of Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson Volume 4) by Robert Caro

               I think this might have been the best book in the series so far. In Volume 4 of TYOLJ, Caro covers the presidential race of 1960, the selection of Lyndon Johnson as Democratic VP, Johnson’s fall from power with his transition from Senate Majority Leader to Vice President, his rivalry with and mutual hatred of Robert Kennedy, the assassination of JFK, and Johnson’s transition, in which he took power and guided tax reform through congress along with a civil rights bill. At the end of the book, Johnson is in 1964, preparing for a new presidential campaign, another civil rights bill, and a potential buildup of a conflict in an otherwise obscure southeast Asian country called Vietnam.

               Lyndon Johnson’s path to the presidency surprised me because such a smart man made a big error. He went to the Senate. All his life, he would remark that he needed to stay in Washington, since, “that’s where the power is,” yet if he wanted to be President, the Senate was a bad steppingstone. In the history of the United States, Warren G. Harding was the only senator to go directly from the Senate to the Presidency. Kennedy would be the second and Obama the third. The first problem is that a senator will always be pissing someone off. You are forced to decide on national issues, making you friends and enemies. To rise high in politics, it is better to have few friends and few enemies than many of both. With many, you are locked in to a ceiling of popularity, if your views are unknown, you have a chance to shape future perception. I am reminded of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, who would usually sit out debates, rising only to comment on the absolute core of the issues, and only after many had already spoken. Secondly, Senators were not so powerful in the primary process- largely, senators followed the lead of the governor of their state, as it was he who commanded a state delegation at a party convention (if the governor was of the same party).

               Strangely enough, the Democratic Primary of 1960 came down to two senators, Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) and John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK). LBJ lost. It was for two reasons. Before the convention, he did too little, too late. For some reason, Johnson waffled about deciding to run. He tried to be aloof and wanted to be drafted in, taking extreme measures to cover up his candidacy. He was extremely fearful of losing and being humiliated, as had happened to him at the convention in 1956. He declared officially on July 5^th- six days before the convention. He was so committed to the “inside” route of running for president, using insider elites and smoke-filled rooms, but he had made no efforts on the “outside track.” He made no major speeches and had no presence outside of Washington elites. JFK, on the other hand, had been campaigning for most of two years, giving speeches, and meeting people from all over their country and asking for their votes. At the end of the day, if one candidate has asked for your vote and the other thought it would be beneath him to do so, you’ll probably give your vote to the first guy. The second reason LBJ lost was due to a debate at the convention. Johnson challenged Kennedy to a debate and stacked the room with Texans who would, of course, support LBJ. Kennedy, however, charmed them. He was funny, sharp, and on his game. They came away impressed and the debate had the reverse effect that Johnson wanted. Kennedy easily won at the convention.

               By 1960, the South was beginning to separate from the Democratic party. Democrats had nominated liberals supported by the northern faction at three conventions in a row with it being Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 56 and now Kennedy, a Catholic, in 1960. Southerners found themselves more strongly allied with conservative Republicans than their fellow Democrats. In 1960, Baptist ministers preached against Kennedy and the anti-Catholic feeling was very strong. Kennedy therefore needed Johnson as his VP candidate to bring the party together. RFK would later claim that Kennedy only offered the position to Johnson as a courtesy, but author Robert Caro gives convincing evidence in the text that this is untrue. Why Johnson took the post is more confusing. Why leave the position of Majority Leader of the Senate, where he had been the most powerful Democrat in Washington, to become the Vice President, a position with no real power? I think this is when LBJ realized the Senate would never get him to the presidency. Any more time there would have made him too controversial a figure. He overestimated his power in the Vice Presidency and erroneously thought that “power is where power goes,” thinking that he would continue to exercise influence on the Senate as VP. Johnson also knew that Vice Presidents often became presidents, though he must have not weighed this so heavily with such a young presidential candidate.

               As Vice President, Johnson was depressed. I won’t get into it right now, but his rivalry with JFK was real, though not too bad, and his hatred of Robert Kennedy was powerful. RFK hated him back and took pleasure in humiliating him while he was Attorney General and Johnson was Vice President. Johnson passed those three years with little to do, imagining that his shot at the presidency was over. Then, in Dallas, Texas, Johnson’s home state, Kennedy was killed. The chapters of the book that happen around this are extremely well-written and thrilling. Caro gives the reader a really good sense of how impactful the Kennedy Assassination was, what it was like to be there, and what it was like to be in Johnson’s shoes. During the four days from the shooting to the funeral to Jack Ruby’s shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, 166 million Americans in 51 million homes tuned in at some time to the news coverage. During that time, the average American family watched for a total of 31.6 hours, or almost EIGHT HOURS PER DAY.

               Johnson’s transition would be a challenge. Most of those serving in the White House, the Cabinet, and the Executive Branch had a strong loyalty to Kennedy, and often did not like Johnson. However, the power of the Constitution was unquestioned. Johnson was able to do a better job than Kenned at pushing bills through congress, specifically on civil rights and taxes. While being in the Senate could have hurt his ability to get elected, it was a boon to his ability to govern. Writes Caro (quoting a staffer), “Where Kennedy had been polite and sympathetic on all matters of basic principle, more often than not he had been evasive on action. Kennedy was not naïve, but as a legislator he was very green. He saw himself as being dry-eyed, realistic. In retrospect, I think that for all his talk about the art of the possible, he didn’t really know what was possible and what wasn’t in Congress.… When it came to dealing with Congress, Johnson knew exactly what was possible.… Johnson made it plain he wanted the whole bill. If we could find the votes, we would win. If we didn’t find the votes, we would lose, he said. The problem was as simple as that.” Johnson pushed through major legislation and put the government back to work. By April 1964, he was polling at 77 percent approval and 9 percent disapproval.

               Caro tells us that power often, but not always corrupts, what it always does is reveal. In that case, he argues, Johnson was not a racist. It had all been a ploy, and when he came to power, he immediately set about on civil rights legislation. It’s interesting. LBJ would claim at certain points in his life that as a young man, working on graveling roads, he had been doing “nigger work,” yet it seems like that only endeared him to the black experience. Though in many ways he showed himself to be a racist, the truth was more complicated. For me, the verdict is still out. He was very much a man who did many racist and anti-racist things, so it’s difficult to determine what he was (if he has to be one or the other).

               Like I said earlier, I think this book was the best of the Years of Lyndon Johnson series (so far- the fifth is still unreleased). It covers fascinating events and sets up RFK and JFK as fascinating foils to Johnson’s character. One criticism I have is that Martin Luther King Jr. is hardly mentioned, which I thought was strange since the book fell under 1000 pages. There would have been room. I imagine he’ll play a bigger role in the next book. I am very excited for the next book, which will cover the 1964 election against Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the War in Vietnam, the rise of the hippies, the RFK assassination, the end of Johnson’s presidency, and the last years of his life. You just know with history like that that it’s gonna be a good book. Johnson, however, may have already hit his peak in our story during that transition period. Caro writes on the final page of the book, ending it:

The story of the presidency of Lyndon Johnson will be different in tone from the story of the transition in part because the elements of his personality absent during the transition were shortly to reappear. Yet for a period of time, a brief but crucial moment in history, he had held these elements in check, had overcome them, had, in a way, conquered himself. And by doing so, by overcoming forces within him that were very difficult to overcome, he not only had held the country steady during a difficult time but had set it on a new course, a course toward social justice. In the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson, this period stands out as different from the rest, as perhaps that life’s finest moment, as a moment not only masterful but, in its way, heroic.

If he had held in check these forces within him, had conquered himself, for a while, he wasn’t going to be able to do it for very long.

But he had done it long enough.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• The Vice President is not, under the Constitution, a subordinate to the President. The VP can only be impeached by Congress, not removed by the President.
• In October of 1963, Defense Secretary McNamara was already stating the need to withdraw from Vietnam.
• While Congress gave FDR a free hand in running the US war effort in World War Two, FDR did not pass a single piece of major domestic legislation after the 1937 Court fight (when he tried to pack the Supreme Court without even notifying the Senate or hist Vice President first).
• Johnson once went to  country club in Texas and integrated it himself, bringing a black woman with him.

Reflection on Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis

               This book was not as good as Lion, the first in the series, but is cool. It has really interesting elements of time-travel and explores the world of Narnia in a different way, enlarging it as well. However, the plot felt really similar to the first book’s plot and that felt annoying. I hope the third has greater differences. There are a few cool quotes from the book that I liked:

“That’s the worst of girls,” said Edmund to Peter and the Dwarf. “They never carry a map in their heads.”

“That’s because our heads have something inside them,” said Lucy. [Even though Edmund is a douche in this quote, he does get better in this book. I hated that kid in the first book.]

“You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,” said Aslan. “And that is both honor enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content.” [This line reminds me a lot of themes from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

In sum, this is a decent book for the second in the series and I am going to continue to read The Chronicles of Narnia.

Reflection on Leading Marines by The U.S. Marine Corps

               This is a book that teaches a lot about leadership, especially the concept that you can not ask someone you lead to do anything you’re not willing to do. It also emphasizes the uniqueness of the Marines and the culture that exists in the Marines. It is elitism in its purest sense- Marines train to be the best, believe they are the best, and will let you know it. There are lots of great quotes in the book, for example a Marine father saying to his Marine son, “May our Corps not have to go in harm’s way on your watch; but if it does, may you never be the second Marine there.” Marines overcome fears by being well-trained and well-led, having convictions that will sustain them, and by fighting for one another. Those are pretty valuable traits for any organization to have, whether it be a government agency, a business, or a baseball team. A good organization runs on those three aspects that provide good preparation and motivation. The book also discusses rules to use to promote innovation. First, it is the leader’s responsibility to bring subordinates’ ideas to the surface or analysis. Second, leaders must allow for the opportunity for subordinates to share ideas. Third, the leader should make clear that he or she expects honest opinions, not patronizing opinions meant to flatter. These are easier said than done, but if done correctly, will create a tight bond between the leader and the led, allowing the leader to know the intimate details of how his or her group functions and allow the led to shape the progress of their own organization. I think this is a great book for learning leadership skills and it definitely makes you want to become a Marine when you read about the culture that exists in the Corps.