Washington retreats from Yorktown

The two wars between Britain and the United States may not have been very large as wars go, but they can be counted on to heat up the atmosphere wherever they are introduced into conversation. Well, let’s have a bit of heat.

Actually, if the alternate history I’m suggesting here worked out logically, George Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau would never have been at Yorktown in October 1781. The victory over Lord Cornwallis at the siege of Yorktown was actually decided on September 5th between French Admiral de Grasse and the English Admiral Thomas Graves off Cape Henry.

I’m sure many of historical what-ifs have been investigated for the Virginia campaign and the siege of Yorktown that year, but I wonder if any of them took place at the opposite end of Chesapeake Bay. The British forces had a lengthy history of combined operations even before the War of American Independence, but they rarely got it together this time. The Federal tactics of the Civil War and the British successes in the War of 1812 indicate how the cooperation of land and sea forces could dominate Chesapeake Bay. To achieve this success in 1781 required a better admiral than Thomas Graves.

On September 5th, Washington’s army was still in the vicinity of Philadelphia, having not yet boarded de Grasse’s transports to ferry them down to Williamsburg. Admiral Graves’ fleet, sent south from New York to counter the French fleet that had arrived from the West Indies surprised the French at anchor near the mouth of the bay at ten in the morning. De Grasse was in a difficult situation and ordered his ships to slip their anchors rather than waste time raising them. The French warships then had to beat out of the bay against both tide and an offshore wind as the British van under Admiral Hood came closer.

Hood saw the tactical advantage of attacking the French as they tacked out past Cape Henry in no particular order and proposed the plan to Graves. Graves was no Nelson, and rather than assent to something so novel ordered his fleet to mark time until the French line was ordered enough that he could sail his own line of battle against them. This he did and instead of smashing the French piecemeal, succeeded in getting his own ships so badly mauled that he never pressed the attack home and ultimately fled back to New York for repairs.

That left the way open for the well supplied French and American troops to be assembled and invest Cornwallis at Yorktown.

What if Hood had crippled the major part of de Grasse’s fleet at Cape Henry and the French had been obliged to retreat from Chesapeake Bay? Firstly, would Washington ever have left Delaware to embark for Williamsburg if he’d known the British now controlled the bay? If he hadn’t been informed in time, and embarked, what would have been the chances of his army being sent to the bottom of the bay if the Royal Navy had intercepted the transports? What if he and his army had made it to Williamsburg only to find that it was now Cornwallis with the supples, the naval support, and the reinforcements to go after him?

Clearly George Washington is the prime candidate for being the protagonist of this story. Either trying to rescue his troop transports from the Royal Navy frigates, or trying to assemble some coherent defence of Virginia against a now-ascendant Cornwallis – or even more contrafactual, constructing defences to prevent the British from coming to the head of Chesapeake Bay and threatening to advance on Philadelphia. Perhaps this alternate history could be even more exciting than the actual rolling up of the abandoned and disillusioned Cornwallis at Yorktown.

This could even work into a series, because historians recognize that American independence would have never been abandoned and would have been pursued again even if the present war was lost. What would the Brits have done with Washington – exiled him to St Helena? What secret movements in the colonies would have kept the dream alive? What about the rest of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence; what plots would they have worked on from their exiles in Paris? Would those American exiles and their army have returned from France in 1805 at Napoleon’s behest to weaken an overstretched Britain beyond breaking point? The world we know today could have been very different.

Columbus and Henry VII:

Everyone has heard that Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain commissioned Columbus for his 1492 voyage of exploration. Perhaps few remember that he had struggled for many years to interest other monarchs and rich nobles in Europe in his venture without success. Columbus even sent his brother Bartholomew to Henry VII of England in 1491 looking for money and support.

Henry was a known penny-pincher whose principal preoccupation, as the final victor of the interminable Wars of the Roses, and the first of his royal line, was in founding a solid Tudor dynasty on the English throne. He may have been intrigued by the idea, but had far more important demands on his time and money. But what if Henry VII had agreed, and the conquest of the Americas had gone to the English crown?

There is a historical precedent that tells us England and its monarch were not completely averse to voyages of discovery. “On 5 March 1496 King Henry VII of England gave Giovanni Caboto, known as John Cabot, letters patent with the following charge:

…free authority, faculty and power to sail to all parts, regions and coasts of the eastern, western and northern sea, under our banners, flags and ensigns, with five ships or vessels of whatsoever burden and quality they may be, and with so many and with such mariners and men as they may wish to take with them in the said ships, at their own proper costs and charges, to find, discover and investigate whatsoever islands, countries, regions or provinces of heathens and infidels, in whatsoever part of the world placed, which before this time were unknown to all Christians.” (Wikipedia)

Cabot was financed partly by Bristol merchants and sailed from Bristol. He is credited with being the European discoverer of North America and believed to have landed in what later became Newfoundland. (Here I will forbear from telling any Newfie jokes.) Bristol mariners had long had an interest in discovering or rediscovering an island in the ocean they knew as Hy-Brazil, which they held to be a source of a valuable red dye, so Atlantic voyaging wasn’t completely unknown to them. It’s also believed by many that Portuguese fishermen were already fishing the Grand Banks off Newfoundland before Columbus sailed – they just didn’t hire the right PR firm.

Henry may have had a political reason to authorize the voyage in 1496. Wikipedia again – “Like his contemporary, King Francis I of France, who would send Giovanni da Verrazzano to reconnoiter the eastern seaboard of North America, Henry VII may in part have been motivated by the perceived insolence of the division of the world into two halves by Pope Alexander VI in the Bull Inter Caetera in 1493, which followed the success of Columbus’s first voyage.” While this doesn’t prove that it was possible to persuade Henry to charter the first ocean exploration, it does give an example of what might have transpired from such an undertaking.

Some years ago I wrote a possible first chapter of a novel that had three ships under the Italian navigator Cristoforo Columbo returning up the Thames to report to his patron, Henry VII. I don’t have the material now but I remember anglicizing the names of the actual ships. St Mary is an easy translation; Nina translates roughly as Girl, but its proper name was Santa Clara; Pinta was probably a variant of its owner’s name, Pinzon, which translates as the English chaffinch. Actually the Santa Maria also had a nickname, La Gellega.

The reason for the name varieties probably stems from the impossibly pompous names the Spanish Dons gave to their ships. An aside – the galleon captured by Sir Francis Drake off the South American Pacific coast in 1578 was named “Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion”, but known to the sailors as the “Cacafuego” – the “Shitfire” in plain English.

What would an English Terra Firme have looked like – or the English Main? The alternate history novelist has a tabula rasa for almost any invention desired. I would suggest that Columbus would still have followed his southern route that used the Trade Winds. So the early colonies would still have been Caribbean and Central American. This may well have meant that Giovanni Caboto would have followed a southern route too if he had still made his way to sell his services to the merchants of Bristol. That would probably have made France and Verrazzano undisputed developers of North America – for a few critical years at least.

The history of Cabot and the later English mercantile corporations suggest that the enterprises that followed would have been commercial rather than military – not that English merchants were any more civilized, or less brutal, than Spanish Conquistadors. Henry VIII’s early warships would have been ocean going rather than high-charged carracks of the Mary Rose type, that capsized in battle just off Portsmouth. Where would this alternate history have left Sir Francis Drake, Queen Elizabeth, and the Spanish Armada? The possibilities for the nautical author are almost endless.

I Believe I’m in love with Anne Boleyn……

I promised to show you a plot for an alternate history novel, and Anne figures, but there is some background to cover first. I never thought much of Henry the Eighth’s wives until I saw the models and costumes for a TV drama on the reign displayed at Longleat House during a visit. Suddenly, I realized these were not doughty and overdressed harridans raised and kept in aristocratic luxury, but sweet young women. I’ve had a soft spot for Anne ever since.

The charges Henry had placed on Anne (called by the populace, Nan Bullen, because her father was only recently raised to the peerage) were all monstrous lies and no more than a pretext to make way for his latest infatuation. Well, dynastic politics and the imperative for a son played a part, but only a part on Henry’s desires. Anne’s address to the crowd at her execution; at 8 am on the morning of 19th May 1536, that she knew would be reported to Henry, made her to me the premier among a long history of abused women.

“Good Christian people, I am come hither to die, for according to the law, and by the law I am judged to die, and therefore I will speak nothing against it. I am come hither to accuse no man, nor to speak anything of that, whereof I am accused and condemned to die, but I pray that God save the king, and send him long to reign over you, for a gentler and more merciful prince was there never: and to me he was ever a good, a gentle and sovereign lord. And if any person will meddle of my cause, I require them to judge the best. And thus I take my leave of the world and of you all, and I heartedly desire you all to pray for me. O Lord have mercy on me, to God I commend my soul.”

She was just 33 or perhaps 34 years old. So much has been written and played about Henry and his wives, but I have to wonder if any of that output has done justice to the young woman who could speak thus as she stood before the executioner’s block.

I started to look into writing a story that could combine Anne with her daughter, Elizabeth the First, who was two and a half years old when her mother was beheaded. I decided it should include a time when Elizabeth, too, was but an angry accusation away from execution. The story might need an element of supernatural influence to bring the two together as actors.

The location of the story settled naturally around Greenwich Palace – the old one, not the one built by Wren for Charles II more than a hundred years later – where Henry’s families spent much of their lives. It was the birthplace of Henry VIII, of Queen Mary and of Queen Elizabeth, and where Edward VI died.  It’s likely Elizabeth’s half-sister Queen Mary, Bloody Mary, died there on November 17th 1558 and that Elizabeth lived there at the time.

The story of the perilous relationship between the two half-sisters is entangled in the plots and politics of their father’s court. When Henry had his marriage to Mary’s mother, Katherine of Aragon, declared unlawful (because she had previously been married to Henry’s brother, who had died before ascending to the throne) it made Mary illegitimate. When Henry had Anne Boleyn falsely convicted of adultery, it anulled that marriage and made Elizabeth illegitimate. The two were not drawn together by the common plight because one was inevitably bastardized by the other’s legitimacy.

I’ll get back to the story plot in a bit. Mary became queen before Elizabeth despite a plot to usurp the throne, which enemies of Elizabeth tried to blame on her. Elizabeth had to tread very gently for Mary’s whole reign because of the Spanish connection. Mary had married Philip of Spain, many years younger than her, but no toy boy – it was entirely a political plot to defeat England’s protestants and return the country to Rome. Mary’s entire administration was obsesssed with devising a way to avoid having Elizabeth succeed her. It naturally involved the aging Mary, almost 40, giving birth to a Catholic heir.

Twice Mary thought she was pregnant, once early in the marriage, before Philip left his bride for important business on the continent, and once more after his second visit to the realm he co-ruled with the old lady. Mary was in very poor health by this time,  the Catholics were getting desperate for a male Catholic heir, but again it was a false pregnancy.

In the real history, Mary gave up the dream in March 1558 some time after making a new will concerning the realm should she die in childbirth. The whole pretence was abaondoned by October of that year, and then she died on November 17th. There was no way the Catholic party of England could prevent Elizabeth from becoming queen — perhaps they entertained false hopes that she would retain the overlordship of Rome, because she had had to pretend to be Catholic for the entire reign to avoid being accused of plotting rebellion again.

In my plot, the courtiers around Mary decide to insert a ‘bedpan’ baby into Mary’s birthing room in March – a tried and true strategem from other dynasties that involved some other woman giving birth secretly close by so the child could be claimed as the royal child. Mary had restored the convent adjacent to the Palace of Greenwich early in her reign – the Convent of the Observente Fryers,  (Mary’s spelling) – clearly an ideal source of secret but illegitimate babies.

I’m nearly up to leaving the rest of the story to you, but I have one more twist I like. One of the household ladies, or perhaps one of the younger nuns in the convent learns of the duplicity and goes to Elizabeth’s quarters to tell her. I would have the girl a striking double of Anne Boleyn – close enough that Elizabeth almost faints at first sight of her. Not only this, but the girl knows the whole tragic story of Anne’s fixed trial and execution and has much spunk as Anne in seeking to ensure the daughter does not lose out to the same kind of injustice.

Supernatural? Perhaps, but otherwise my fictional protagonist could be a protege of one Henry Carey who was born of Mary Boleyn, Anne’s sister, and claimed by her new husband William Carey –  although the royal secret was that Henry VIII was the child’s real father from an affair Henry had indulged before he met Anne. Henry Carey was raised partly by Anne when she was queen, and much later made Lord Hunsdon by Queen Elizabeth. One could suppose that Henry C, who would have been 32 in the month Queen Mary realized her second ‘pregnancy’ was also false took a hand in the matter. It wouldn’t be a big distortion of history for him to be watching over his mother’s neice, or for the whole plot of the false prince being covered up as a political necessity once it was foiled.

Well, there it is. If you think you’d like to take a stab at it, please let me know. Otherwise I may go back to it myself one day.

Alternate History novels.

Enough of the economics, my interest lies in writing fiction. However I expect I will use some contrarian economics in an alternate world scenario some time. Keep reading for the promise below of some free plot suggestions.

 

I see a lot of alternate history that starts with an event not happening, or turning out in an a-historical way, but what about impulses that try to go against the stream of history?

What about a successful class war in Medieval times? Watt Tyler tried to overthrow a cruel feudal society in 1381, as did many others, so how might their revolutions have turned out?

What if slavery was outlawed by the church in the early 16th Century? (Religious integrity overcoming economic interest.) Would Spain’s empire have foundered? What about all the later plantations in the New World?

What about the technical advances in the 1700s, that could have led to the Industrial Revolution taking off then – steam pumping engines, canal building, dyeing, cotton spinners, and knitting frames, etc? What they lacked in order to start the industrial ball rolling were the social conditions. These, if I recall correctly, were the agricultural advances that enclosed the common farmland and created a large dispossessed workforce, the colonies that supplied cheap raw materials, and the captive markets in those colonies for cheap manufactured goods – especially cotton products.

In my novels I wanted to bring together the ideas of starting an Industrial Revolution in a society not otherwise prepared for it, and that of the interactions between people with outlooks like our own and those of an earlier age. Like Samuel Clements (Mark Twain), who was so fascinated with the idea of juxtaposing our common sense with attitudes frozen in backward societies that he wrote “A Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur”, I wanted to explore the interactions between moderns and people of an earlier time.

How would one create a scenario where a static society could be pushed enough to start it moving in a new direction? First, you have to pick a society – and select something that readers are already fascinated with. In our history, between 1650 and 1720, we have all the elements of swashbuckling adventurers (although strictly speaking, the buckler went out in Shakespeare’s time), sailing ships and cannon (seafights and pirates), revolutions and wars (Marlborough and Prince Eugene against Louis XIV’s marshals), and some good diarists (Pepys) to provide the day to day life as background.

This gives rise to my Iskander scenario.

My group of people with modern ideas and knowledge have to be brought into this earlier society, and they have to be persistent enough to overcome the inertia of ideas inimical to the developments they want to introduce. I didn’t see any alternative but to have them arrive together by some vehicle (a starship), and have no means of avoiding the task I set them (they are in an alternate Earth and cannot get back). The starship is just a taxi and becomes a geosynchronous satellite and communications base – I wanted to keep the focus on the realistic aspects. (No whizzing around the stars in space opera, and no funny-face aliens.)

There is a choice between bringing them into our own 17th – 18th Century world or a completely different one. If I chose ours, I need to have them act within already known parameters and events. I felt that limited me to another very English or American colonies what-if, since only a selected few foreign sources have been translated into a language I read. By picking a markedly different alternative world, I could use the culture of the period but set it in other parts of Europe, or even the world.

Early drafts were criticized as having too weak a story tension. These poor local inhabitants with their gunpowder weapons presented no danger to my modern whizz kids. This was before the Iraqis and Afghans demonstrated that the perseverance, doggedness, and outright cussedness of a less technically proficient society could outweigh all that modern technology could bring against them. (One more proof of the old military dictum that the spirit of the soldier is worth more than all the secret weapons imaginable.) Before 2006 I had to counter the impression of technological invincibility by introducing earlier stray starship invaders who arrived 200 years before and conquered the largest empire in the alternate Earth. (The Carthaginian). By the time my people arrive, these other strangers have clamped down an interdict on any technical advance which could upset the status quo of their empire. They thus provide a second and larger obstacle to my group’s success.

Ideas about the Multiverse hold there has to be a historical bifurcation to get into an alternate timeline, and I chose to have the Carthaginians win the Punic Wars. There was no Roman Empire on Gaia, the name of this alternate Earth.

I know there could be some weaknesses in my scenario, but throughout my emphasis has been on creating publishable character driven novels – and their requirement is different than a wargame or sim-type scenario. I propose to suggest possible openings and scenarios for a number of alternate history plots over the next few weeks (just think, some FR** novel plots that I’d like to see but don’t have the time to work on).

And they call them Equities?

If you had bought the whole basket of stocks used to provide the Dow Jones Index in 1999 in preparation for your retirement this year it would have cost you $10,000. Guess what? The Dow just clawed its way back to $10,000 this week – you wouldn’t have lost a thing. Except today’s US dollar would buy you 25% less than it would in 1999. Good luck on your retirement.

The dictionary says of the word equity; fairness or impartiality, justness, something that is fair and equitable. Since everyone’s stocks would have lost the same amount of value I suppose one must concede that the stock market is eminently fair and equitable. I’m not so sure I would call it just.

I have stayed away from the stock market for 40 years, because the hit I took in 1969 convinced me that the only source of profits in the market are the losses of the poor suckers whose stocks go down. And the probability was strongly in favour of mine being the ones to go that way. I don’t know horses, but I would expect an equal amount of insight and judgement devoted to following the races as one spends on investigating corporate balance sheets would result in somewhat better returns. At least horses don’t lie, even if their owners might.

Of course, most people put their savings in the hands of experts – mutual funds, hedge funds, real estate income trusts and the like – and sleep soundly at night. The question there is the competence of experts – the economists who advise banks and governments for example. The people who I follow online at the Daily Reckoning have a sound contrarian take on economists, quote –

“Of course, everyone now knows that the recession is over. NABE interviewed 44 economic forecasters. Four-fifths of them said the recession was over.

But we don’t care what they said. These are the same seers who missed the biggest single event in financial history. There are many banking crises, recessions, panics and defaults in the record books. But none were as great as the one that hit September a year ago. Most economists didn’t see it coming; why should we trust them to tell us when it is going?”

The US administration is attempting to shore up the hole in the credit dyke with every last trillion they can borrow (satire intended) – and badgering wiser foreign governments into maintaining the same reckless policy. The problem isn’t a lack of credit – it’s an overwhelming preponderance of debt. People don’t want to borrow and spend – they have already borrowed and spent too much. They are trying to whittle down the debt they’ve already taken on. The only organizations accepting the free credit that the US government is shovelling out the door are the banks, who borrow it for next to nothing and turn around to lend it back to the government as Treasury bonds making a 4% return. Talk about money for old rope. Talk about a swindle.

Goldman Sachs announced a big profit. JPMorgan, the Wall Street firm that was bailed out by the feds a year ago, reported income of $3.6 billion in the 3rd quarter. Isn’t that good? Not if you look where the money came from – the poor sucker who foots the bills, the US taxpayer.

Following the Daily Reckoning again – the current crisis is not a recession, it’s a depression. A recession is a temporary hiccup in the daily flimflam of putting one over on the suckers – it recovers quickly once the markets hit the brakes and then the accelerator and continue with business as usual. But when the problem comes from a systemic failure – like the failure of the credit bubble that has lasted for around thirty years – and no amount of twiddling will get the fuel flowing again, then you’re in a depression.

Everybody’s mother warned them about borrowing when they were in the cradle – or should have. When you borrow, the folks who loaned it expect it back – with interest. If you borrow more than you can pay back you land in the poorhouse with Dickens’ Mr Micawber – “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” The US, both government and society, have been borrowing and spending far beyond their means since, at least, 1973. There can be no recovery until a huge portion of that debt is paid off and the creditors are confident that the rest will follow in due course.

The rest of the world waits with bated breath to see what is going to happen, but some are still betting on the stock market – in this case, not that stocks will go up in value but that they will come down. They are shorting the market, selling stocks that they do not have in the expectation that they will be able to buy them at a lower price by the time the law requires them to hand them over. Is what happens to the sucker who just bought them at the higher price equitable? Is it fair and just? Considering that the market would be a great deal fairer if the law required a more prompt delivery of the stock – but doesn’t – the amount of profit to be made at the sucker’s expense could be limited. Regulate such a thing? Outrageous! How are the financial wizards to keep their profits up and their queue of eager clients increasing? I guess the other fellow’s loss is unimportant if it doesn’t happen to your savings.

If you’re into stocks, the $10,000 Dow is an illusion. It can fall as fast as it did last year. October is a good month for stock market crashes … and waddayaknow, it’s October now.

Meet Gore Vidal – another Contrarian.

I picked up a couple of London Times interviews with Gore Vidal this week and have to reproduce some of his comments here to show you what a really intelligent contrarian brings to a discussion. I’ll quote a few things from an earlier interview, from May 18th 2008 – while the presidential election campaign was just gathering steam.

Firstly he speaks about JFK and compares him to Barack Obama. The interviewer is ‘I’.
“I ask if he thinks Obama has a similar charisma to that of John F Kennedy, whom Vidal got to know because he was related to his wife, Jackie.

“I never believed in Jack’s charisma,” Vidal says shortly. JFK, he believes, was “one of our worst presidents”; Bobby, his brother, was “a phoney, a little Torquemada”; and their father, Joseph, was “a crook – should have been in jail”.

So much for Camelot. “But Jack had great charm,” he adds. “So has Obama. He’s better educated than Jack. And he’s been a working senator. Jack never went to the office – he wanted the presidency and his father bought it for him.”

Here, GV is a contrarian from insider knowledge – always the best source upon which to base an opinion. The trick is to find an inside source one can trust. I’m prepared to accept the opinions of the Kennedys on trust, because they are not unique to my reading.

The next excerpt which aligns with the educated opinion from outside the US, is contrarian in that it is the opposite of that expressed by most of the internal US commentators. I particularly like his take on advertising which backs up my own comments in a previous post of mine.
“However, in Vidal’s eyes, McCain is just a symptom of the real malaise affecting America today: the cynical subversion of the US constitution. “The Bush people”, he says, “have virtually got rid of Magna Carta and habeas corpus. In a normal republic I would probably have raised an army and overthrown them. It will take a hundred years to put it all back.”

By now he has worked himself up to a crisp fury: “Those neocons, lawyers, the big corporations – worse than that, extremists – want to get rid of the great power of oversight of the executive. See what they’ll try to do to Obama. They’re crooks. They’re just gangsters. They are the enemy of the United States. There’s no such thing as a war on terrorism. It’s idiotic. There are slogans. It’s advertising, which is the only art form we’ve invented and developed. It’s lies.”

Now to go to the later, September 30th 2009 article.
“Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama during the Democratic nomination process for president. Now, he reveals, he regrets his change of heart. How’s Obama doing? “Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.” America should leave Afghanistan, he says. “We’ve failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it.” The “War on Terror” was “made up”, Vidal says. “The whole thing was PR, just like ‘weapons of mass destruction’.”

In this next paragraph, note that he speaks of ‘you foreigners’ because the interview is for a British newspaper. Also the reason for the fox hunting metaphor, which I must say doesn’t equate to kindly old men in most British eyes – so the contrarian can be as biased or out of touch as the rest of the world, but then Vidal is 83.
“Vidal originally became pro-Obama because he grew up in “a black city” (meaning Washington), as well as being impressed by Obama’s intelligence. “But he believes the generals. Even Bush knew the way to win a general was to give him another star. Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”

One or two more excerpts – just to pull a few more chains.
“Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has become corrosively isolationist, he says. “Ask an American what they know about Sweden and they’d say ‘They live well but they’re all alcoholics’. In fact a Scandinavian system could have benefitted us many times over.” Instead, America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realize how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.”

I guess the contrarian has to be prepared to support unpopular, even hated causes at times. ( I suspect the ‘bought’ below is a typo for brought.)
“Vidal became a supportive correspondent of Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killing 168 people. The huge loss of life, indeed McVeigh’s act of mass murder, goes unmentioned by Vidal. “He was a true patriot, a Constitution man,” Vidal claims. “And I was torn, my grandfather [the Democrat Senator Thomas Gore] had bought Oklahoma into the Union.” McVeigh claimed he had done it as a protest against tyrannical government.”

The links to the articles are –

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article6854221.ece

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article3952774.ece?print=yes&randnum=1254347757631

I think that paints a fair picture of a lifelong contrarian, even if Vidal is rather a unique case. It points up the contrast between holding contrarian views and expressing them. I’m sure, if you asked Gore Vidal, whether it is honest and useful to express contrary opinions so forcefully he would reply that such are the bones of a full and complete debate. Does he get away with it? Well, he is 83.

I’m not the only Contrarian

I thought you might like to read parts of an e-mail I received a week ago to show I’m not only just one of many contrarians, I’m one of the sober ones. I’m not trying to sell you anything.

Part of the opening says –
* IS YOUR CHOLESTEROL HIGH ENOUGH to avoid heart attacks and strokes?
* ARE YOU GETTING ENOUGH SUN to prevent the world’s most dreaded cancers?
* ARE YOU EXERCISING SO HARD that it’s hardening your arteries?
* ARE YOU EATING ENOUGH SALT to prevent high blood pressure?
* ARE YOU EATING ENOUGH EGGS & BACON to ward off macular degeneration?
* GOT ARTHRITIS? GUESS WHAT! This animal fat reverses the damage in 24 hours!

The e-mail came to me from the same outfit that sends me investment tips as well as a daily newsletter on their reading of the actual state of the economy vs the Government’s slant. They are card-carrying contrarians – and no, I don’t invest with them, I just like to read their viewpoints. The author of the medical contrarianism is listed as William Campbell Douglass II, MD. billed as medicine’s most acclaimed myth-buster.

Let’s take a moment to comment on the claims above.
1. My Naturopathic doctor (the one whose advice I take before I go to an MD) says that the cholesterol hoopla is grossly overstated. Cholesterol is supposed to be flowing through our veins and arteries because it’s the substance the body uses to repair injuries and leaks in the vessels. If you have a lot of blood vessels patched up with cholesterol the damage was there first and caused by something other than the cholesterol – good or bad. Secondly, your body normally produces cholesterol for protein creation and in order to have enough of this repair substance available.

2. I know this is anecdotal evidence, but I used to wear nothing but swimming trunks and sandals when I worked for over four years in North Africa, in the hottest sun you might find anywhere. I subsequently wondered if I had set myself up for skin cancer – I had also been an avid sunbather in my younger years in England (not the same degree of sun exposure, I admit). However, I’ve never had a trace of it – so perhaps our Dr Douglass is right when he suggests we need to use our natural defences to make the most of them.
By the way – ever notice that if you tell a medical doctor about some alternative medicine that worked for you your testimony is mere anecdotal evidence? If you told an equally subjective tale as evidence in a court of law it could be sufficient to hang someone.

Let’s skip to 4. My Naturopath tells me not to reduce my salt intake below the moderate usage I have always had. The body needs the sodium salts to maintain the inner environment in the same briny state as the oceans where our cells evolved. Internally, we never left the ocean.
I think that’s enough to suggest that these claims are not too extravagant or unsubstantiated. This contrarian advice is as solid a description of reality as the opposite views of the medical profession, whose members are terrified to consider anything outside the gospel preached by the pharmaceutical industry and the medical associations lest they lose their licenses.

Dr Douglass is not as timid: –

“ No, you’re being way too patient! But we’re going to get the last laugh on those jokers…

Because all the ‘facts’ they’re flinging at you are just MASS MEDIA MEDICINE!

Mass Media Medicine is to REAL medicine as McDonald’s is to REAL food…

It was never intended to make you healthy…

It’s intended to make billions of dollars for giant corporations…

And the only science behind it is marketing science!

It’s all about selling us ‘health’ goods & services WHETHER OR NOT WE NEED THEM…

Scaring us into buying drugs to prevent diseases (like ‘high cholesterol’) that don’t exist…

Bullying us into buying high-markup, high-carbohydrate, meatless mush…

Hounding us to buy instruments of torture in the name of exercise…

And when all this stuff finally does make you sick, they reply that you need even more “ …

Now there’s a real Contrarian who’s not afraid to pull the chain of his opposition. He goes on:–

“ And you’re going to love what 40 years of clinical studies really tell you to do! As you’ll see on the pages ahead, from now on you have DOCTOR’S ORDERS to…

* Chow down on juicy T-bones and 3-egg omelets prepared with real butter…
* Trade in that water bottle for a case of ice-cold beer…
* Drink all the coffee you want, laced with heavy cream if you like…
* Take naps instead of running laps…
* And tell the cholesterol cops they’ll have to terrify someone else…

Skeptical?
Now you’re talking my language…

Never, ever do anything just because someone swears it’s healthy!
Make them prove it and guarantee it – like I’m going to do right now. “

Like the advice? You might want to take a look at his website http://www.douglassreport.com/   Personally I feel my present healthcare is doing what I need, but I’m always willing to look at opinion that may contradict, or perhaps go beyond the views I accept – as some of William’s does.

The words I like best are where he agrees that his reader should be skeptical. Trouble is, if his advice or the conventional MD’s does harm you may not have the ability to reverse it. In my opinion it’s the reason for learning how to live with a contrarian stance early and do as the Buddha advised, “Test everything”.

Contrarianism for the Masses.

Contrarianism is widely considered to be only a stock market strategy. Since most investors are completely incapable of predicting the future moves of the market it stands to reason that opposing the flow and doing the opposite – selling while others buy, and buying when others sell – is more likely to lead the individual to a beneficial result. What I suggest is that most people, in all categories of human activity, are completely out of their depth and likely to cling to the popular and conventional beliefs and attitudes out of desperation. The chances are – they’re wrong.

One has only to consider the huge number of people – mostly men – who spend no time preparing and informing themselves to confront the serious matters of their times, but who can spout off the whole teams of players at their favorite sport and list the scoring records of these individuals right back to the time they came off the Ark. How likely are these individuals’ opinions about social concerns and voting choices in elections to be guided by wisdom and good sense?

That is why we celebrate the times when the great mass of the public excel themselves in producing consensus in problems that really do matter and take part in actions that lead to improvements in the human condition. Those events are truly worth celebrating, but it’s a great pity that they do not come more regularly. What I suggest with my promotion of contrarianism is that enough people consider alternative opinions and mind-sets all the time that society has a wellspring of wise discrimination, and beneficial decisions become more common.

What about some examples?

Firstly matters of health. Far too many people live thoughtless lifestyles of greed and self-indulgence in the expectation that some pill exists, or will exist, to treat their ruined health when nature follows its natural course. Even medical doctors mouth the platitudes of preventive health care – while merely prescribing the latest panacea pill that big pharma has produced, in the hope it might alleviate the symptoms.

The whole western world enjoyed the spectacle of a simple faith that property could only increase in value, and that it was wise to take on huge burdens of debt in order to cash in. Real property is a finite resource, and over the longer scheme of things it must inevitably be sought after by an ever growing population, but none of these plungers into huge mortgages ever considered the shorter term considerations defined by their employment histories and likely lifespan. The contrarian noticed that the real estate bubble had become unstable and stayed the heck away.

The tricky subject of religion shows the immense power of the herd instinct. If the neighbours go to worship in this mosque, this church, this synagogue, this temple, then most people follow the crowd – even when in their hearts they find the platitudes and or diatribes totally irrelevant and unsatisfying. There is absolutely no shortage of religious expression in the world, but very few people have ever had the gumption to examine the ones they were born into critically and consider leaving them. The contrarian can be expected to do so, for after all, you are stuck with this life and should make the most of it.

What about the music the herd listens to? Ever notice how little the popular taste resembles music? What about the movies – very few of which are worth the price of their admission. What about the lawn in front of the house when water shortages and total waste of your leisure hours could be reduced from converting the grass to xeriscaping? What about the political party you vote for? The same one that your dear old Dad supported – and every ancestor of his since Magna Carta.

I get a big kick out of the Gnostic Gospels – the Nag Hammadi library discovered at Jabal-al-Tarif in 1945. In one, the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is reputed to have said, “Men think perhaps it is peace I have come to cast upon the world. They do not know it is dissension I have come to cast upon the earth: fire, sword, and war. …” If the Christian religion did only one good thing, it was the releasing of western society from the bonds of tribal conformity and allowing us the gift of thinking for ourselves. And changing old ideas for better. Let’s hear it for the contrarians. Let’s hear it for the rebels.

When the Self is the Problem.

Another late post because we were away where I had no Internet access. (At least, not enough peace and harmony to compose something and take it to a local library to post it through their online access.)

I’m making a transition to a new topic, an exploration of the contrarian viewpoint. I don’t have a posting to mind as I start writing this, but I do have some thoughts from the past five days that may serve as a transition piece.

This summer my brother-in-law spent almost six weeks in hospital with heart failure. Actually a partial failure in the by-pass arteries he’d had installed about eight years previous. He wasn’t expected to come out of the hospital on his own feet, but eventually the low point of being strapped into a bed with six IVs and tubes everywhere transformed to the first faltering steps of being able to get out of bed – and later to an expedition out of the ward to buy fresh fruit from a stand in the foyer and to eat them on a bench outside the hospital entrance. This without approval or assistance. (His nurse eventually decided he’d played truant long enough and sent security to fetch him home in a wheelchair.)

After many troubled days, during which he was dumped on us, he was at last admitted to the lodge that wouldn’t originally accept him until some residual conditions were dealt with. In the past five weeks he has recovered some strength as well as a great deal of desire to regain his old stubbornly independent and hermit ways. It seems to me that he has entered a time of life where the underlying changes have rendered his previous modes untenable, but he is desperately attempting to claw them back. (Rather like the US administration attempting to claw back the old bubble debt economy instead of accepting that the world’s biggest debtor needs to put its house in order and pay its bills.)

Watching him desperately attempting to reverse the effects of age and sickness – even if only in his own mind – has been a salutary lesson to me. In some ways a quite heroic picture, but in others equally pathetic. One cannot dismiss heart failure by an effort of will. The past five days he has been in his own home again – a visit because the medical authorities have pronounced him unable to care for himself – where we tried to help him gather up some more essential belongings to take back to the limited space he has in the lodge. He, however, was fixated on collecting and boxing his extensive collection of movie DVDs and music CDs. I carried a total of more than 150 pounds of boxes out to stack in the back seat of his car to take back with us. He has yet to persuade the lodge to provide the extra storage space for these boxes, but that’s not the biggest problem. He didn’t take the DVD player and has no space in his small room for his huge flat screen TV. It doesn’t look as if he is ever going to be able to get them back out of storage to use in the future. He might offer his fellow lodge members a couple of years of movie nights on a lodge DVD/TV setup, but that is a suggestion he scoffs at.

He has always owned cameras, usually expensive professional ones, but I won’t even dwell on the new top of the line digital camera and the stand-alone print copier he has never used because he’s never been able to figure them out. They too, of course, must be taken to the lodge. As the neighbour commented – he never takes pictures anyway. (He very briefly attempted to get into the computer age about 20 years back but gave up in disgust because the devices wouldn’t obey his orders.)

Most of his life he wholeheartedly accepted the role of consumer, whose only input into society has been to buy stuff. He used to be a prisoner of Malls and Sales, and now is a prisoner of the ‘stuff’ he accumulated. It struck me that all those possessions are a necessary part of the self-image he has of himself. In some ways he’s not safe – not complete without them. I have no idea how to get him to attempt to free himself. I cannot guess how many more days or years of active life medical science has granted him, but I neither can I see him taking advantage of them. He has the opportunity to throw himself open to new possibilities outside of the self-imposed hermitage he’s lived in for the past ten or more years – despite his new limitations. If only he would leave his private room at the lodge once in awhile and learn to love his fellows in humanity …

So I’m looking at his predicament as a way to avoid making my own mistakes – because although I may sound smug and superior I know I’m not really that much different. But I’ve always been a contrarian, so I see switching paradigms as inherently possible. If you see how stupid it is to smoke cigarettes you quit, as I did over 40 years ago. If the lifestyle you developed over the past umpteen years is no longer practicable you look for a new one. While that is the logical procedure I doubt it’s as easy for me to accomplish as I imagine. It may not be easy for you, either. That’s what I want to explore with my new direction and I hope you readers will follow me into the insights possible through contrarianism and offer your own comments.

Differences and Comparisons in an Alternate World.

The main reason for using an earlier alternate Earth as scenario for a novel or a series is the freedom to explore events that did not happen in our world. I’ve already covered the absence of a Roman Empire. A bigger distortion, following critical suggestions from early readers, was the introduction of the prior arrival of another group of off-worlders – the crew of a lost star-cruiser from yet another alternate Earth. Yeah, I felt it stretched credibility too far as well.

This criticism of my original scenario took place near the summit of the hubris under which the Bush administration took on two wars that they thought would be walk-overs. My critiquers didn’t accept that any society without advanced technology could pose a threat to a modern intrusion. Hello, Iraq and Afghanistan. We now know better – in fact I knew better then – but I felt I should cater to the beliefs of my potential readers.

So I added the Trigons to the series, conquering the indigenous Greco-Carthaginian Empire about two hundred years earlier. I had felt the indigenous empire was all too capable of getting the better of my hi-tech arrivals, and so I postulated only a couple of hundred Trigons who had intermarried to the point that they had become a foreign aristocracy who devoted most of their energy to protecting their privileges from the locals – much like the Normans in 11th/12th century England. I did keep my intention of showing that a lack of technological expertise doesn’t mean the local antagonists are incompetent, and also that in any conflict situation it is morale, belief system, and courage that wins every time. Unless you happen to be sitting in Langley, Virginia, and bombing some helpless individuals in Pakistan, but then the degree of arrogance displayed is counter-productive to any future settlement.

The Trigons were from a society technologically more advanced than my Iskander Earthlings, but they were a military crew, capable of operating their star-cruiser efficiently, but no more capable of maintaining or replacing it than would the modern crew of an atomic submarine be of doing the same to theirs. When refueling or major maintenance is needed on any of these modern ‘wonders’ they have to be taken to the specialist installations to have the work carried out by a whole new team. No wonder then that the Trigon conquerors lost not only the use of their star-cruiser in the intervening 200 years, but also the ability to maintain a technologically advanced society. They are right back to the same 17th century infrastructure that the locals had created.

Which brings me to the reasons for picking the late 17th century for my Gaian society. Firstly it has to be the romance of the period. In Earth history this is squarely located in the middle of  “Three Musketeers” territory with all the excitement of swordfighting and sailing ships. The early financial empires, the Fuggers and the Medici, had begun to give way to national banks in Venice, Holland, and England. The primitive broadside warships of the Armada period had given way to the standardized ‘rates’ and fleet tactics of the Anglo-Dutch wars. Ships and mariners could undertake routine ocean voyages – not without periodic disasters, but more certainly than could the sailors of Philip and Elizabeth’s time. The pike was being superseded by the musket and bayonet, and field artillery had become more of a battlefield weapon than the old cannon hauled by teams of oxen. The early glimmers of science were beginning to make way against the dead weight of revealed knowledge and superstition.

The next reason has to be the availability of good historical records of the period. I have to admit that my depth of research would be considered scanty in a history department, but with two good  works to bookend the period available, I can easily find extra publications to expand on particulars. For my window into the thoughts, society, and actions of my 17th century Gaians, I found Samuel Pepy’s Diary to be a valuable source. For my guide to the politics and campaigns of the period I find Sir Winston Churchill’s biography of his ancestor John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, to be more than adequate. I have a collection of history books that I have accumulated over the years – almost too many to detail, but I’ll mention some – “European Economic History”; “25 Centuries of Sea Warfare” and N.A.M. Rodger’s “Naval Histories of Britain”; “Western Civilization”; “By the Sword”; “A Brief History of Science”; “The Lore of Ships”; “Anne of England”; “The Old European Order”; as well as all the instant sources to hand on the Internet.

I particularly like the date, 1670, the year in which a young woman called Julie d’Aubigny was born. For readers who find my heroine Gisel Matah to be a bit too hard to believe, I’ll mention something of what is known about “La Maupin”. Julie was born to the wife of a minor nobleman, Gaston d’Aubigny, a secretary to the Compte d’Armagnac. Gaston had two passions in life – womanizing and sword fencing – and having no sons to train devoted his attention to his daughter. Perhaps he also thought he should give her some advantage in life to protect her from men like himself. Anyway, by the time Julie was sixteen she could better most of the men who came to her father’s Salle – his swordfighting gymnasium at the Count’s chateau.

Julie was also somewhat precocious, becoming the mistress of the Count at the age of 16, and going on to a collection of lovers – male and female – over the following 20 years. She also had a husband who she lived with once, a fellow called Maupin who the Compte d’Armagnac had selected to prevent scandals should she become pregnant. Julie sometimes fought as a man and sometimes as a woman, and had at least one lover with whom she operated a fencing school. She also had a fine, if untrained, contralto voice and sang in opera in Marseilles and Paris.

Her most notorious exploit was the time she attended a ball given by the King’s brother, the Duc d’Orleans, dressed as a man. She attempted to seduce three young noblewomen at the ball, leading to challenges from three courtiers who were their escorts. Julie readily accepted the challenges, dismissed their complaints that the streetlights were out with the observation that the moonlight was sufficient, and defeated all three of them. King Louis XIV, the “Sun King”, was furious at her wounding three of his courtiers and wanted her thrown into the Bastille. One account says that Monsieur, the King’s brother, interceded on her behalf, but the version I like says she had an interview with the king herself and charmed him into forgiving her.

Julie died young, giving up her wild life and the Paris Opera in 1705 to enter a convent, where she died a couple of years later. She deserves a new novel to be written about her – to complement the one written in 1835 – but I’m not sure whether to attempt it. As my historian friend at the University of Calgary says, my French isn’t up to original research. She did suggest a couple of English language sources I might try, but … we shall see