"A Son at the Front," by Edith Wharton - A Review

 Walking into our library to finish and send out this essay, I noticed on our Aura (a welcome gift from our youngest son) a photo of my wife when we were first married, and I thought of how much the world had changed. Then I paused: How much of that change is real, and how much is because I now view the world through eyes grown old?

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

“A Son at the Front,” Edith Wharton

June 24, 2023

 

“Through all this alternating of tragedy and triumph ran the million

and million individual threads of hope, fear, fortitude, resolve,

with which the fortune of war was obscurely but fatally interwoven.”

                                                                                                                                A Son at the Front, 1923

                                                                                                                                Edith Wharton (1855-1897)

 

Ethan Frome may be Edith Wharton’s most famous novel, but she is best known for chronicling New York’s “Gilded Age,” with its wealth, political corruption, and corporate greed, through such novels as The Age of Innocence (winner of the 1921 Pulitzer) and House of Mirth. 

 

A Son at the Front was a departure. It tells of a young American, George Campton, who was born in France. Following a bout with Tuberculosis, he has just graduated from Harvard when the story opens in July 1914. His parents, divorced, live in Paris. His father (John) is an artist – a recent success – and his mother (Julia) is now married to a prominent American banker based in Paris, Anderson Brant.

 

The novel is suggestive of the period. The last major European war (the Franco-Prussian War) had ended in 1871. Industrialization and trade had made Europe wealthy. Wealth had brought culture and civility. The new Century appeared promising. Despite Germany’s re-arming, complex alliances, and the assassination of Austria’s Archduke Ferdinand, the prospect of war seemed incredulous to the leisure classes in Paris. When war came on August 3^rd, everybody “agreed that the war would be over in a few weeks.” No one foresaw the trench warfare that followed, nor could any have foreseen the cost to France: 1.4 million dead and 4.2 million wounded, out of a pre-war population of under 40 million. Realization of its horror sunk in gradually: “This war could no longer be compared to other wars: Germany was conducting it on methods that civilization had made men forget.”

 

It is with this background that we follow the young George Campton who saw himself and his generation as “internationalists.” “People are too healthy and well-fed now; they’re not going off to die in a ditch somewhere.” But when Germany invaded Belgium his tone changed: “The howling blackguards! The brigands! This isn’t war – it’s simply murder!” We watch George – the “son at the front” – through a telescope, but the microscope is trained on those at home, especially his father, an introvert who lacked social skills: “His misfortune had been that he could neither get on easily with people nor live without them…” With George’s induction, the war consumed his family: “What was war – any war – but an old European disease, an ancestral blood-madness seizing on the first pretext to slake its frenzy?” It is George’s experiences, shared vicariously by his parents, stepfather and others, that keeps the reader’s attention. 

 

The story’s outcome is not a surprise; what makes this book special is Wharton’s evocation of a place and time she knew well. As in all her books, she wrote of what she knew. Childless, she had divorced her husband of thirty years and moved to Paris in 1913, a place where she had spent part of her childhood. When war broke out, she stayed, helped refugees and visited the front as a journalist. Keep in mind, A Son at the Front was published less than five years after the Armistice – a story for anyone interested in the horrific consequences of war – particularly, a world war that set the table for the next thirty years.

"A Modern Industrial Strategy?"

 “Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” is the opening line in a late 19^th Century Rudyard Kipling poem, written during British rule in colonized India. Those lines describe current differences between Democrats and Republicans.

 

With the indictment and (likely) impending trial of Donald Trump for willfully violating the Espionage Act, Democrats have sown seeds of a whirlwind whose ravages will mean a further fracturing of an already divided nation. Members from both parties have secreted documents, whether on an illicit server in Chappaqua, in boxes in a Delaware garage, or in a Palm Beach estate. This action on the part of the Department of Justice will result in an Old Testament retribution of an eye for an eye.

 

I feel sorry for the youth of our nation who will inherit what their progenitors have wrought.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“A Modern Industrial Strategy?”

June 15, 2023

 

“A modern American industrial strategy identifies specific sectors that are foundational to

economic growth, strategic from a national security perspective, and where private industry

on its own isn’t poised to make the investments needed to secure our national ambitions.”

Jake Sullivan, National Security Adviser

Brookings Institution, April 27, 2023

 

The presumption in Jake Sullivan’s words, quoted above, are astounding – that there is a, yet-to-be-named, “modern American strategy,” which identifies “specific,” but unstated, “sectors that are foundational to economic growth,” which are “strategic from a national security perspective.” But since the private sector has neither the means nor the foresight to “secure our national ambitions” (whatever they are), then it must be left to the public sector to decide how much and where to invest, decisions prior administrations from both parties have left to markets. Sullivan refers to this as Bidenomics. In reality it is central planning.

 

Greg Ip, in last weekend’s edition of The Wall Street Journal, wrote of Mr. Sullivan’s speech: “Sullivan’s target was what some in the policy world call neoliberalism: the free trade, laissez faire economic priorities shared by Republican and Democratic administrations for decades.” “Executive policy-making,” wrote Christopher DeMuth, a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute, in the same issue, “has an ideological basis – that of ‘expertise,’ which holds that modern life demands government by expert administrators in place of amateur legislators.” When did Karl Marx replace Adam Smith?

 

Certainly, there have been times when government has had to take the lead – in times of war, in building the interstate highway system, DARPA, NASA, etc. But the concept that a state-mandated industrial policy is the wave of the future is to believe that Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, etc. have brought to their people greater efficiencies, higher living standards, a cleaner environment, and greater financial opportunity and equality than the democracy and free market capitalism of the United States, and the West. Waste and inefficiencies are more common among government agencies than in private companies for which the threat of bankruptcy governs behavior. Shareholders can more easily dispose of their stock than taxpayers abandon their communities or states. Auditors from OpenTheBooks.com, an organization that accepts no government payments and uses forensic accounting and open records to hold government accountable, recently quantified that improper and mistaken payments admitted to by the 17 largest federal agencies in the U.S. since 2004 totaled $2.9 trillion. 

 

Power is an aphrodisiac, and the power of the American presidency has grown over the years, as federal agencies have assumed more responsibilities and as Congress has forfeited some of theirs. It is generally conceded that Democrats are the party of government expansion, and that Republicans have the job of reining in federal power; though both parties are attracted to the magnetism of power. Nevertheless, it is unsurprising that twice as many federal employees are registered as Democrats than Republicans. As for political donations in 2020, Democrats out-scored Republicans about 5-1. In the June 23 issue of The Spectator, Roger Kimball wrote, in what is not a total exaggeration: “Every honest person understands that conservatives are allowed to take office but not allowed to take power in the United States.” 

 

The claim by Mr. Sullivan is that free-trade and laissez-faire economics have, as Mr. Ip wrote, “hollowed out the U.S. industrial base, undermined America’s middle class and left the country dangerously vulnerable to climate change, Covid-19 and the weaponization of supply chains by hostile nations.” To deal with these problems, Mr. Sullivan urged a “modern” American industrial policy, in which “a more assertive federal government guides investment, industry and trade.” Keep in mind, these are the folks who destroyed our energy independence, locked down schools and businesses, bankrupted thousands of small businesses, spent trillions on Covid relief, raised the national debt by $3 trillion, and gave us the worst inflation in forty years. And these are the folks that have radicalized cultural and educational institutions. Should they be in charge of our industrial policy?  And how does a government mandated and run industrial policy differ from central planning, the essential tenet of socialism? And which has been better for individual freedom, a rising standard of living and a cleaner environment – capitalism or socialism? Where are air, rivers, and lakes cleaner? In Russia, China, and Venezuela, or in the United States, Britain, and Canada?

 

Mr. Sullivan couched his words and terms in tones acceptable to those who proudly display their moral superiority: He wants to do away with Republican’s “regressive tax cuts;” (according to the OECD, the United States has the most progressive tax system in the world). He wants to replace “deep cuts to public investment” (this after passing the $1.85 trillion American Rescue Plan) and eliminate Republican measures that have “undermined the labor movement” (which measures he did not disclose). He claimed that Bidenomics would produce “a just and effective clean-energy transition,” “restore the middle class,” and repair “faith in democracy and liberty.” Just how this was to be done we were not told.

 

Mr. Sullivan might argue that I have misinterpreted and/or overstated his proposal, and perhaps I have. But his words remind me of the Arabian proverb: “If the camel once gets his nose in the tent, his body will soon follow.” Like climate and like all living things, governments are not static. They are run by individuals, and personal growth is achieved when the institution, whether a federal bureaucracy or a private enterprise, expands. So, expansion in government is natural. That said, government expansion should be done with care, not willfully. Our government was founded on the premise that its power would be limited, and that individual freedom would be paramount. Keep in mind, it was the over-reach of His Majesty’s government that sparked the American Revolution. 

 

Over the past two hundred and fifty years, we have moved toward more government control, and that is probably to be expected as we have become a larger, more complex nation, with better communication and wider access to information. However, we are a nation founded on the principles that all men are created equal, there is a right to private ownership, we operate under the rule of law, one is innocent until proven guilty, and justice is meted equally. The risk is that we are moving away from those simple but eternal principles, toward more government control. And that is why Mr. Sullivan’s words are so frightening.

"Forest Walking," Peter Wohlleben

 My wife and I feel fortunate to live where we do, where the woods are accessible with paths that make it easy on aging legs – a place and a time to escape. 

 

There are other books that carry this theme, like Thoreau’s Walden and Bill Bryson’s more recent, humorous Walk in the Woods, a story of his hiking the Appalachian Trail. Forest Walking belongs on the same shelf.

 

Sydney M. Williams

30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314

Essex, CT 06426

 

Burrowing into Books

Forest Walking, Peter Wohlleben

June 10, 2023

 

“Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods.”

                                                                                          John Muir (1838-1914)

                                                                                          John of the Woods: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir

                                                                                           Edited by Linnie Marsh Wolfe, 1938

 

Most people look at a tree as a source of shade, or something to tap in the spring if a Sugar Maple, a risk to power lines in winter, or a wonder of beauty if a White Oak, Copper Beech, or Giant Sequoia. Like Thoreau, Peter Wohlleben looks deeper. In the introduction, he writes: “When I talk of the forest, I’m talking about a community. In a forest left to its own devices, trees of different ages and different species grow in the places they choose and that suit them best.” The pleasure from reading Mr. Wohlleben’s book justifies the sacrifice some conifer had to make to provide the paper on which the book is printed. 

 

Peter Wohlleben, author of The Hidden Life of Trees (reviewed January 14, 2017), has been criticized for anthropomorphizing trees, which he delightfully does. In an interview, a few years ago, at the Yale School of Forestry, he said: “Trees have just as much character as humans do.”  It is his passion for individual trees, his love for the forests he manages, and his joy in the woodlands he walks through, which suffuse his writing and causes readers to smile. To him, trees are generational: “In an intact ancient forest, huge trees shade the ground, using nearly all the sunlight that falls on their canopies to generate food to fuel their growth, while the younger trees wait patiently in the shadows below.”

 

With Jane Billinghurst, editor, publisher, and translator of his earlier books, Peter Wohlleben embarked on a series of hikes through several national parks in Canada and the United States: Lake Livingston State Park in Texas, Florida’s Highlands Hammock State Park, Letchworth State Park in New York, South Carolina’s Sumter National Forest, Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, and others. We are told how we can identify trees by their bark, how dead trees (“snags’) are “apartment buildings for the forest’s maintenance crews,” and the advantages of winter hiking when the woods are quiet, the hikers few, and the mosquitoes and midges “peacefully slumbering.”

 

Mr. Wohlleben is a lively, informative companion, as one walks through the forest. We are told that the largest fungus found so far is a honey fungus in Oregon’s Malheur National Forest, spread “over three and a half square miles,” that “trees get fatter at night,” and that on “a hot day, a mature tree sucks up to 130 gallons of water from the ground.” He writes of the symbioses of nature, of predator and prey. But he adds: “To keep the forest healthy, we need to look beyond partnerships to what biologists are now calling guilds – arrangements of give-and-take that involve different winners and losers depending on the day or season but together keep the whole system running smoothly.” 

 

This is a book of advice, with chapters titled: “Forest Activities with Children,” “Seasonal Walks,” “Comfort in the Forest,” and “Choosing Your Wardrobe.” It is a book that proves the adage: ‘learning can be fun.’ And that is why you will enjoy a stroll through the woods with Peter Wohlleben.

"Hope"

 It is fitting that an essay on ‘hope’ should be sent during the week we remember the 79^th anniversary of the Normandy invasion, for it was hope for its success that filled the hearts of the millions of those who for most of a decade had lived under the boot of Nazism.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Hope”

June 9, 2023

 

“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement.

Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.”

                                                                                                                                Helen Keller (1880-1968)

                                                                                                                                Optimism, 1903

 

Hope is a verb and a noun. It reflects one’s optimism and posits one’s positive, achievable goals. It should not be confused with Walter Mitty-like grandiose dreams. It speaks of the possible. Hope has been around as long as humans. Speaking to the Corinthians five decades after the death of Jesus, Paul spoke of the need for faith, hope, and charity. Helen Keller, blind and deaf since age two, wrote the words quoted in the rubric above while a student at Radcliffe. Two months before his death, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke in Washington, D.C.: “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” 

 

Politically, hope has been absent in the U.S. for almost a generation. From the end of World War II until the assassination of President Kennedy, America was filled with promise. We faced challenges. Bomb shelters were built for fear of nuclear annihilation, and the 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik lent concern that the Soviets were leading in the space race. But our nation’s response was positive, and we felt safe. On May 25, 1961, in a speech before a joint session of Congress, President Kennedy promised to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade – a goal the nation achieved when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon’s surface on July 20, 1969. Sadly, Kennedy did not live to see this, but the U.S., during those years, had a can-do spirit, driven by admiration for Country, self-confidence, and hope.

 

In the second half of the 1960s, with Vietnam, student riots, and a drug-infested and sexually voyeuristic Woodstock, hope dissipated.  Malaise set in during the 1970s, as the country experienced Watergate and the first ever resignation of a President, the ignoble evacuation of Saigon, an oil shock, inflation, prolonged recession, and a stock market that treaded water over ten years. The confidence we felt in those post-War years was gone. But by summer’s end 1982 a feeling of relief spread across the land, and the stock market began to rise. The dragon of inflation had been slain by Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, at the cost of a short but steep recession. Ronald Reagan, a gifted speaker filled with optimism and confident in America’s future, had been elected President in 1980. His “morning in America” persisted into the 1990s, only to be impaled by a tech bubble and the attack on September 11, when Islamic extremists flew four airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing almost 3000 civilians.  

 

In the ensuing twenty-two years, with credit and bank crises, spiraling debt, inflation, and political division, we have never regained that sense of confidence and hope. Many thought the election of Barack Obama signaled such a return. But unfortunately, he chose to deepen racial divide. Today the nation is filled with anger, despair, and a sense of helplessness. Even Moms for liberty is seen as a hate group. We are divided by race, gender, and sexual orientation. Identity has replaced merit. Equality of outcome is deemed more equitable than equal opportunity. Urban politicians, dependent on donations from teachers’ unions, refuse to offer school choice to their cities’ poorest residents. For too many, persistent and rising welfare benefits lead to dependency. Instead of two-parent families, it is said to “take a village” to raise a child.

 

Police are under attack and crime has risen. Our southern border is porous. Cities like San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia have lost not only their charm but their livability, as stores are shuttered and the homeless defecate on streets. A sense of impending doom has descended on the nation’s young, as climate scaremongers say we face an existential crisis, if we persist in using gas stoves and do not drive EVs. Drug use is up, as are suicides, especially among the young. Teachers’ unions have become the most important financial backers of Democrat politicians, yet student scores keep declining, affecting most seriously the poorest in inner cities. Blacks are told to express their grievances, that their fate is to be a victim, dependent on government largesse. Whites are told they are oppressors. The ladder that allows for ascension up the socio-economic steps has been yanked away by the political left. 

 

One consequence has been a decline in birthrates, which, more than climate change, pandemics, or AI, threatens mankind. Exponential economic growth depends upon exponential growth in the labor force. Fertility rates below 2.1, needed to maintain a population, mean an aging and, ultimately, a declining population. Some of that can be made up with immigrants, but, as Malcolm Collins wrote recently in The Telegraph, those in the U.S. “…often don’t realize the pools from which they draw (Central America, South America, and the Caribbean) collectively fell below the sustainable rate in 2019.” This is a problem for the West. Mr. Collins added: “Western countries are like farmers draining an evaporating pool to keep their crops healthy, and ignoring the situation because the pond is unlikely to totally dry up in their lifetimes.”

 

Government, not individual initiative, is seen as the answer to all problems. “We have to paint a dark, bad picture because that’s what justifies more spending,” said Robert Doar, who once ran social services for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in an interview in last weekend’s The Wall Street Journal. Joe Biden projects the image of a doddering old man. Donald Trump, a man I supported twice for President, looks backward, focused on retribution, rather than a brighter future. E Pluribus Unum, the 1782 motto of the United States, is no longer applicable, replaced by the metaphor of a salad bowl, which emphasizes differences, rather than what we have in common. 

 

But the future is never clear. Habits and attitudes change. What climate fear mongers overlook is the ability of species to adapt, and for the Earth to adjust through, for example, what is known as the Iris Effect, which exerts “a significant negative climate feedback that stabilizes tropical temperatures and limits climate sensitivity.” This according to Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi, writing in the February 2022 issue of Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences. They were quoted by Andy Kessler in the June 5, 2023 issue of The Wall Street Journal. Cyanobacteria, one of the earliest known forms of life, has been around, according to microbiologists, for 3.5 billion years. Ctenophores date back 700 million years, Sponges 600 million years, Horseshoe Crabs and the Elephant Shark over 400 million years. Man first evolved in Africa between two and six million years ago, during the late Cenozoic Era. He has lived through myriad temperature changes. Adaption, not scare tactics, should be part of any environmental plan.

 

Man is almost infinitely resourceful and adaptive. He is aspirant, and, when allowed by the political system under which he lives, he is creative, and innovative. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, in the depths of the 1930s Depression, in the early days of World War II, at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in the jungles of Vietnam, after the attack on 9/11, and during the credit crisis of 2008-9, it was hard to be confident of America’s future. But those earlier periods – the two decades after World War II and the 1980s-1990s – showed what was possible. We need leaders today who are honest about our challenges, not issuing canards to deflect the truth. We need leaders who, unafraid to acknowledge our faults, emphasize our goodness. We need leaders who offer hope, not fear. At the start of the Civil War, but in a posthumously published poem, Emily Dickinson wrote; “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul/ And sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.”