The Divine Mr. M.

Nebs Ruminates Upon The Temple

2008-07-23T19:35:02Z

~In all the hostile noise directed at me and Le-Le about 'cultism' and Sex Panic and the very Idea of The Temple what gets lost are the real world projects and goals that are the True Purpose of The Temple as clearly outlined in its Mission Statement and in its Long Term Goals.

The quote below is from a Sister who I hope to one day recruit to teach Majick and Ritual in The Sisterhood Trainings. At the very least, I will present her as a 'role model' – which I suspect will both amuse and horrify her – to those who will teach said subjects.

Let her words give you some general idea of the 'tone' of The Sisterhood that I envision.

“The entry of Sol into Leo was palpable. I could hear my heartbeat, and was full of energy.

I think that my objection to intellectualism is pretty simple, though not universally applicable: it is probable that the person will turn out like Woody Allen, so emotionally stunted they find their sexual peers amongst the kiddies. It is probable they will become lost in a maze of self-created bullshit, be morally bankrupt, conceited to the point of waddling about in a Crowley-like fashion despising all inferiors, and psychologically abusive as a sport. But, uncultivated people are no fun either. It is a relief that god does not like you better if you're smart. This is probably why they (egoistic heartless mental types) are such a pack of atheists, and worship their clergy and artists rather than the invisible flying spaghetti monster of spiritual regeneration: it is rather like sucking the dick that is pointing at the moon, because you can't suck the moon.

My point is that the ego dislikes what it can't control. Your mincing forays into orgies and chemicals aren't fooling anyone you know. You don't do anything you're not trying to 'master'. But guess what! You're still gonna die! All is vanity.

I'm going to be annoyed if you people kill me and then worship an idol of me made of all these insults. Probably you'll publish them as a book of aphorisms and meditate upon an insult once a day. She was a goddess! So we killed her, because she wouldn't sit on the altar otherwise. Spiritual necrophilia ruined christianity - christians would have hated the crap out of that man while he was alive. I guess dead is better; corpses neither reject nor mock; you can pretend whatever you want, that they love the little children, approve of your vicious doings, whatever.

My misanthropy is getting rather finalized and irreversible. I thought spirituality would be, I dunno, more full of wonderment at all the inner beauty. Maybe I'm also too full of cynical snorting for Jesus.”

Read It and Weep

2008-07-23T18:55:01Z

~Below is the Factiod List from The American Human Development Project.

Health

* The U.S. will spend $230 million on health care in the next hour.

* One in six Americans goes without health insurance (around 47 million people).

* According to the National Academy of Sciences, lack of health insurance results in lost economic value equal to $178 million to $356 million every day, due to the poorer health and earlier deaths of the uninsured.

* The U.S. ranks #24 among the 30 most affluent countries in life expectancy – yet spends more on health care than any other nation.

* The U.S. infant mortality rate is on par with that of Croatia, Cuba, Estonia, and Poland; if the U.S. infant mortality rate were the same as that of top-ranked Sweden, 21,000 more American babies would live to celebrate their first birthdays every year.

* A baby born in Washington, D.C. is almost two-and-a-half times more likely to die before age one than a baby born in Vermont. African American babies are more than twice as likely to die before age one than either white or Latino babies.

* Changes in behavior and the physical and social environment can help avoid about 70 percent of premature deaths.

* Insured adults under sixty-five are 50 percent more likely to have had cancer screenings than the uninsured; early detection saves lives and dramatically lowers treatment costs.

* Premature death by homicide is more than five times higher in the U.S. than the OECD average; 68 percent of U.S. homicides in 2006 were committed with a firearm.

* Nearly a third of all female murder victims were killed by intimate partners (husbands and boyfriends). [my emphasis]

* More than one million Americans are living with HIV.

* One American dies every 90 seconds from obesity-related health problems.

* According to the U.S. Census Bureau, children living in central cities are less likely to play outside than other children; in central cities, 48 percent of Latino children and 39 percent of African American children were kept inside because of parental perceptions of neighborhood danger. Inactivity is considered a major factor in obesity among 66 million young people.

* African American children are two-and-a-half times more likely to be hospitalized for asthma than white children – and five times more likely to die of asthma.

* Suicide is the eleventh-leading cause of death in the U.S. overall, and the third-leading cause of death among children and adolescents. More than 90 percent of those who die by suicide have had mental or substance-abuse disorders.

* One in seventeen Americans (about 6 percent of the population) suffers from severe mental illness.

* More than half of all personal bankruptcies in the U.S. are related to an inability to pay for illness or injury.

Access to Knowledge

* College graduates can expect, on average, double the lifetime earnings of high school graduates.

* Fourteen percent of the population – some 30 million Americans – lacks the literacy skills to perform simple, everyday tasks like understanding newspaper articles and instruction manuals.

* Twelve percent of Americans lack the literacy skills to fill in a job application or payroll form, read a map or bus schedule, or understand labels on food and drugs.

* More than one in five Americans – 22 percent of the population – have “below basic” quantitative skills, making it impossible to balance a checkbook, calculate a tip, or figure out from an advertisement the amount of interest on a loan.

* In 2006, 4.5 million young people ages eighteen to twenty-four were not in school, not working, and had not graduated high school.

* Nearly one in six American children lives in a family whose head didn’t graduate high school.

* School quality is a decisive factor in choosing where to live for many families with school-aged children; in 2003, parents of about one-quarter of all students reported that they had moved to their current neighborhood to enable their children to attend a better school.White children ages one to five are about four times more likely to have been read to in the past week than Hispanic children, and about 50 percent more likely to have been read to than African American children.

* By age three, the children of affluent mothers have vocabularies twice as large as those of the children of low-income mothers.

* Among four-year-olds, 40 percent of children from disadvantaged backgrounds were proficient in number and shape recognition, compared to 87 percent of children from privileged families.

* High quality preschool for disadvantaged children has positive long-term impacts; children who participated in the High/Scope Perry Preschool Project had a 44 percent higher high school graduation rate, had 50 percent fewer teen pregnancies, were 46 percent less likely to have served jail time, and had a 42 percent higher median monthly income than the control group.

* Educational expenditures vary significantly by state; New Jersey and New York spend around $14,000 per pupil, Utah spends less than $6,000 per pupil.

* Schools with high proportions of minority students, poor students, and English-language learners were more likely to hire novice teachers than schools with low proportions of these students. Minority and low-income children are more likely to be taught English, science, and math by an “out-of-field” teacher than are high-income and/or white students.

* African American students are three times more likely than whites to be placed in special education programs, and only half as likely to be placed in gifted programs.

* In 2003, 45 percent of children whose parents had advanced degrees were in gifted classes, compared with 10 percent of children whose parents did not graduate high school. Children whose parents were married and better-off also were more likely to be in gifted classes than children of the never-married or poor.

* Only three-fourths of American public high students graduated on time (within four years) with a regular diploma in 2003-2004.

* College-going rates among high-achieving high school graduates from poor families are about the same as the college-going rates for the lowest-achieving high graduates from affluent families.

* Children whose parents have at least a college degree enter college at more than twice the rate of children whose parents did not graduate high school; disparities in degree attainment are greater still.

Standard of Living

* The richest 20 percent of all U.S. households earned more than half of the nation’s total income in 2006.

* The top 1 percent of U.S. households possesses a full third of America’s wealth.

* Households in the top 10 percent of the income distribution hold more than 71 percent of the country’s wealth, while those in the lowest 60 percent possess just 4 percent.

* Nearly one in five American children lives in poverty, with more than one in thirteen living in extreme poverty.

* The poverty line for a family of four (two adults and two children) is an income of $21,027 before taxes; in 2006, more than 36 million Americans were classified poor by this definition.

* In every racial/ethnic group, men earn more than their female counterparts. [my emphasis]

* In 1980, the average executive earned forty-two times as much as the average factory worker; today, executives earn some four hundred times what factory workers in their industries earn.

* In 2004, median net worth was $140,800 for whites, and $24,900 for nonwhites.

* The real value of the minimum wage has decreased by 40 percent in the past forty years.

Other Domestic Issues

Homelessness

* Over the course of a year, at least 1.35 million children are at some point homeless.

* More families with children are homeless today than at any time since the Great Depression.

Hunger

* The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that on a typical day in November 2005, members of well over half a million households had their normal eating patterns disrupted due to lack of money or other resources.

Criminal Justice

* The U.S. has 5 percent of the world’s people – but 24 percent of the world’s prisoners.
* In absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population, the U.S. has more prisoners than any other country, including China and Russia.

* From the 1920’s until the 1970’s, the U.S. prison population was stable at about 110 per 100,000, about the same as our peer nations today. But now more than 700 people out of every 100,000 are behind bars.

* African Americans are imprisoned at six to eight times the rate of whites; the rate is much higher for African Americans who do not graduate high school; by age thirty-five, 60 percent of African American high school dropouts will have spent time in prison.

* State and federal prison inmates average just eleven years of schooling.

* About 1,900 people with criminal records are released every day and, according to the Department of Justice, two-thirds of them will eventually end up back in prison.

International Comparisons

* A poor child born in Germany, France, Canada, or one of the Nordic countries has a better chance to join the middle class in adulthood than an American child born into similar circumstances.

* The U.S. ranks second among 177 countries in per-capita income but 12th on human development, according to the global Human Development Index, published annually by the United Nations Development Programme. Each of the 11 countries ahead of the U.S. has a lower per-capita income than the U.S., but all perform better on the health and knowledge dimensions.

* The U.S. infant mortality rate is on par with that of Croatia, Cuba, Estonia, and Poland.

* If the U.S. infant mortality rate were equal to that of first-ranked Sweden, twenty-one thousand more American babies would have lived to celebrate their first birthdays in 2005.

* In 98 countries, new mothers have 14 or more weeks of paid maternity leave. The U.S. has no federally mandated paid maternity leave.

* The United States ranks second in the world in per-capita income (behind Luxembourg), but thirty-fourth in survival of infants to age one.

* The U.S. ranks forty-second in global life expectancy and first among the world’s twenty-five richest countries in the percentage of children living in poverty.

* In the 2006 OECD international assessment of fifteen-year-olds, in math, the U.S. came in twenty-fourth, and in science, the U.S. came in seventeenth.

* The U.S. incarceration rate is five-to-nine times greater than that of our peer nations.

...and pointing these facts out in public debate makes you a godless commie trying to provoke 'class warfare'.

Old Meme: LJ/AB Rep

2008-07-23T17:59:15Z

Please vote how you feel about our current representation and how you feel your representative should interact with the community.

..I voted 'yes', 'yes', and "Impeach The Bitch!"..lol..

[More Shite]

Nebs Sez:

2008-07-23T17:54:02Z

"I am a snarky buttplug!"

The 90-Division Gamble

2008-07-23T00:50:36Z

~This is some of what I study in order to write about what I write about. I suspect this falls into the tl;dr category for many of those on my Flist. But give it a quick scan anyway. It shows, among other things, that WW2 was never a 'guaranteed win' for the United States and that modern warfare is a very complex undertaking.

From U.S. Army Center Of Military History
by Maurice Matloff

Of all the calculated risks taken by General George C. Marshall in World War II none was bolder than the decision in mid-war to maintain the U.S. Army's ground combat strength at ninety divisions. Students of warfare will long debate whether the decision was as wise as it was courageous, as foresighted as it was successful.

The decision to limit the Army, ratified in May 1944 on he eve of OVERLORD, was a compound of necessity and choice. A variety of influences played a part in it-national policy, Allied strategy, air power, American technology, the balance between American war economy and manpower, logistical and operational requirements, the needs of Allies and sister services, and General Marshall's faith in the fighting qualities of the American soldier. The decision came at the end of a long series of steps going back to the pre-Pearl Harbor days when American planners had first begun to be concerned about the problem of determining the size and shape of the Army needed for global and coalition warfare. [1]

In the beginning the military had shared the traditional confidence of the nation at large that there would be sufficient resources and strength to meet the needs of war. Early estimates, in late 1941 and in 1942, of the "cutting edge"-in divisions-needed to win the war were high. In the Victory Program of the fall of 1941, the War Department projected an Army with a peak strength of 213 divisions. The Victory Program was premised on a strategic policy of offensive operations in Europe and on the assumption that the Soviet Army might collapse and the United States and Great Britain might have to defeat the huge armies of Germany unaided. [2] Throughout most of 1942 the common assumption in the War Department was that it would ultimately be necessary to support at least two hundred divisions. [3] The Washington Army Staff recognized the parallel need of building a far-reaching, heavy-fisted air arm. The blueprint for that expansion, embodied in the 273-air-group program approved in September 1942, was to remain the Army Air Forces guide in World War II.

By the end of 1942, despite the turning of the tide of war, General Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff, and his advisers were uneasy. They had seen their plan for an early cross Channel operation -ROUNDUP - scuttled in favor of TORCH (invasion of northwest Africa) and divisions that they had hoped to concentrate in the United Kingdom skimmed off to meet the requirements of the northwest African and Pacific campaigns. This trend reinforced sober second thoughts they were beginning to have about the American manpower problem. To continue what appeared to them to be essentially d policy of drift in Allied strategy raised grave issues about mobilizing and deploying U.S. forces. Supporting a war of attrition and peripheral action, in place of concentrated effort, raised serious problems about the size and kind of Army the United States should and could maintain.

At the same time the conviction was growing that it was becoming both necessary and possible to plan on a more realistic, long-range basis for mobilizing the manpower-and resources-needed to win the war. The transition to the initiative in northwest Africa and in the Pacific appeared to present the opportunity as well as the compulsion to define with greater certainty the main outlines of subsequent operations and to make more dependable estimates of how many trained and equipped units would be required.

To establish a proper manpower balance for the United States in wartime was as difficult as it was important. Out of some 25,000,000 Americans physically fit for military service, the absolute ceiling on the number that could be utilized for active duty was estimated to be between fifteen and sixteen million. [4] On the surface, it was hard to understand, given this pool of manpower, why there should be any manpower problem at all. Why, if Germany could maintain a military establishment of 9,835,000 or 10.9 percent of its population and Britain could support 3,885,000 or 8.2, did American manpower officials insist in late 1942 that 10,500,000 or only 7.8 percent would be the maximum force that the country could sustain without incurring serious dislocation to the American economy? [5] The problem as well as the answer stemmed basically from the fact that the Allies had from the beginning accepted the proposition that the single greatest tangible asset the United States brought to the coalition in World War II was the productive capacity of its industry. From the very beginning, American manpower calculations were closely correlated with the needs of war industry.

The Army had therefore to compete for manpower not only with the needs of the other services but also with the prior claims of industry. Cutting too deeply into the industrial manpower of the country in order to furnish men for the Army and Navy might interfere seriously with arming U.S. troops and those of the Allies for the successful conduct of the war. Furthermore, the United States was fighting a global conflict. To service its lines of communications extending around the world required large numbers of men, and great numbers of troops were constantly in transit to and from the theaters. The problem for the Army was not only how much should it receive as its share of the manpower pool but also how to divide that share most effectively to meet the diverse demands made upon it. The progress of the war on the Russian front and the prospective air bombardment over the European continent still left uncertain, at the end of 1942, the Army's ultimate size as well as the number of combat divisions necessary to win the war. It was also still difficult to predict with exactitude the casualty rates to be expected or the reserve strength that would be needed.

Postponement of the plan to launch a major cross-Channel operation in 1943 made the need of mobilizing a large U.S. ground army less immediate. Instead, greater emphasis was placed on first developing U.S. air power. Given this and anticipated limitations in shipping, it appeared at the end of 1942 that the projected deployment of a huge air force overseas by the end of 1944 would definitely restrict the number of divisions that could be sent overseas by that time. It was clearly undesirable to withdraw men from industry and agriculture too long before they could actually be employed in military operations. Allowing a year to train a division, the mobilization of much more than a hundred divisions by the end of 1943 appeared to be premature. In late 1942, moreover, materiel procurement plans for the armed services for 1943, particularly for the Army ground program, were revised downward by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in response to a War Production Board recommendation. All these limiting factors pointed to the need for scaling down previous long-range calculations, as well as for effecting economies in manpower within the Army. [6]

The process of reducing earlier long-range estimates, begun on the War Department and joint planning levels toward the end of 1942, was clearly reflected in the approved Army troop basis for 1943, circulated by G-3 in January of that year. [7] This troop basis set the mobilization program for 1943 at 100 divisions. It called for a total Army strength of 8,208,000, a figure previously approved by the President. This troop basis marked the turning point in War Department and joint Army-Navy calculations. At last these estimates were approaching the ultimate ceiling strengths of the Army.

Efforts to formulate troop bases for 1944 and beyond that were being made at the same time pointed to the need for drastic reductions of earlier estimates. [8] The planners were working from the old assumption of the late 1941 and early 1942 period that the USSR might be defeated by the Germans, thus forcing on the Allies a far greater and more costly ground effort. Since the effects of the planned

bomber offensive from the United Kingdom were also unknown, the planners had had to take its possible failure into consideration. Viewing both of these factors pessimistically, it was inevitable the planners should produce high estimates envisaging a very large ground force. They calculated that it would be far easier to decrease an over-expanded Army than it would be to build up an inadequate one, especially since it took a year to train a division for combat. Add to their dilemma the uncertainties of shipping and production and the lack of firm strategic decisions to guide them and it was small wonder that the planners were overshooting the mark.

The JCS, on the other hand, faced with criticism of their use of manpower, had realized that the planners' figures would not be accepted and had turned the manpower problem over to their senior advisers. The Joint Strategic Survey Committee concluded that the Joint Planners had gone astray in trying to match Allied forces, division for division, with the enemy. They held that proper consideration had been given neither to the relative efficiency of forces nor to prospective Allied air superiority and the effect of the bomber offensive on German morale and war effort. They recognized that shipping would determine the amount of force that could be applied, and they believed that Allied superiority in production would also be a controlling factor and should be exploited in every possible way. [9]

In line with this more optimistic outlook, the Army planners suggested that the most realistic approach to the manpower problem would be to agree upon the maximum number of men that could be inducted into the armed services without impairing the development of U.S. war production capacity. This number would represent the final troop basis, and strategy would be devised in accord with that figure. [10] Since the President in September 1942 had approved an Army of 8,208,000 for 1943, 8,208,000 appeared to be the logical figure with which to work. [11]

In January 1943, G-3 warned that the 8,208,000-man Army might approach the limit of manpower available and that adjustments from within would have to be made to secure the kind of Army needed to win the war. [12] Faced with the prospects of a declining manpower reserve and an improving strategic situation, the Army reviewed its employment of men in the continental United States. Early in January Marshall set up the War Department Manpower Board, with Maj. Gen. Lorenzo D. Gasser as its president, to make specific recommendations for reducing the forces assigned to the zone of the interior. [13]

In consonance with this economy drive, Marshall approved-in February-a new Army troop basis that called for an enlisted strength of 7,500,000 and between 120 and 125 divisions, for June 1944. The over-all goal for 1943 of 8,208,000, which included officers, was retained on the ground that such a force would be necessary to take advantage of any favorable opportunities that might come to pass. [14]

Defense of these requirements before the Senate and against such critics as Herbert Hoover was made slightly more difficult by the unofficial opposition of certain Navy officers. [15] In early February five investigations on the subject of manpower were going on in the Senate and one in the House. The position of the Army in the face of this Congressional probing rested upon the heavy preponderance of divisions at the disposal of the enemy and the possible disaster that might ensue if the size of the Army was reduced and the disparity in combat divisions increased." [16] The War Department correctly gauged the reaction of Congress. Maj. Gen. Alexander D. Surles, director of the War Department Bureau of Public Relations, put it succinctly: "Despite all talk, Congress isn't sure, and members will not risk their political necks by taking a position where they might be charged with sabotaging the war effort. They will talk, but they won't act." [17]

Nevertheless, in order to fortify its own thinking and planning on mobilization, the Army decided that it should also conduct an investigation. In accord with the earnest efforts of the Chief of Staff to trim Army requirements, the Operations Division in February designated a special committee, headed by Col. William W. Bessell, Jr., to recommend changes in the current military program indicated by shifting strategic conditions. The main question the committee was to investigate was the efficacy of building up foreign forces-such as the Free French-as opposed to arming U.S. troops, and the comparative effects of these alternatives on the American manpower situation and on Allied efficiency in prosecuting the war. [18] This was a rephrasing of the thorny problem-how far to go in aiding Allies-which the Army planners had faced from the very beginning and were to continue to face.

The Bessell committee survey revealed that little could be gained by increasing the volume of international aid to the Allies at the expense of the development of U.S. forces. Equipping the manpower of nations, other than the Soviet Union and Great Britain, with arms and munitions would not substantially increase the total amount of effective manpower that could be placed in combat, nor would it put troops into combat more quickly than would the current program for preparing American troops for active service overseas. [19] In late April the committee scaled down its estimates of the ultimate strength from 185 to 155 divisions and accepted an 8,200,000-man total as the planning ceiling figure-the "maximum strength" for the Army imposed by manpower limitations. It recommended that the U.S. Army, and especially the Air Forces, be developed to the maximum strength practicable within the estimated limitations on armed forces and be deployed as quickly as possible. [20]

The committee concluded that the time had definitely come for long-term programming to guide the war machine developing in the United States. Since adequate training for a division required a year, mobilization and production had to be planned well in advance. Mobilization and production had, therefore, to be linked to national policy and strategic planning. The basic strategy of the United States was still sound and should be adhered to, and "any tendency to disperse our forces to other than the main effort [should] be avoided." What was required, the committee decided, was a broad and long-range strategic plan for the defeat of the enemies of the United States whereby requirements might be balanced against means and resources and then translated into a realistic military program. In this connection, the committee warned that the American public wearied quickly of war and would not countenance any slow process of attrition. [21]

In April the need for careful manpower budgeting was further emphasized. The War Manpower Commission, informing the armed services that approximately 1,500,000 men could be furnished to them in 1944, stated that this figure would be close to the limit of those that could be withdrawn from the manpower pool without jeopardizing war production, transportation, and essential civilian services. The Army estimated that by vigorous economy it would be able to save about 485,000 men during the remainder of 1943. Since the Army-Navy requirements for replacements alone would run about 971,000 for 1944, there should be a cushion of about one million men to fill the need for new units and to meet emergencies. At this time the War Manpower Commission estimated 11,300,000 men, and the Joint Staff Planners 10,900,000, as the number that could be kept in uniform indefinitely. The JPS went so far as to recommend no increase in the Army for 1944 over the approved 1943 Army Troop Basis goals-8,200,000 total strength and 100 divisions (though the latter was already a somewhat dubious figure). [22]

As the TRIDENT (Washington) Conference between the Americans and the British approached its close in late May 1943, a deepening realization that careful examination of troop strength and its employment was a "must" led the Army to attempt a correlation between the military program and the requirements imposed by the conference decisions. At this point General Marshall and his assistants took what proved to be an important step in calculating the wartime Army troop basis. A Committee on the Revision of the Military Program was appointed in the War Department General Staff to study that program carefully in an effort to revise it downward. This committee, composed of two Operations Division officers, Col. Ray T. Maddocks and Lt. Col. Marshall S. Carter, and Col. Edwin W. Chamberlain, G-3, was to examine the threat of over-mobilization and "to investigate the possibility of decreasing the total number of ground divisions required in our troop basis." [23] It was anticipated that the findings of the committee would serve as a guide to determining the ultimate strength of the Army and the subsequent mobilization rates.

Early in June 1943 the committee (informally called the Maddocks Committee since Colonel Maddocks was the steering member) issued its general report. [24] Its studies confirmed the need for reducing the number of divisions-a view that had been gaining increasing support since the end of 1942. The strategic basis for this conclusion was in part the demonstration by the Soviet armies of their ability to check the German advance. Another significant factor brightening the strategic picture was the improving prospect of gaining air superiority over the Continent. These developments finally made obsolete the initial Victory Program estimates of 1941.

The committee made three basic recommendations. First, it proposed the reduction of the strength of the Army authorized for 1943 from 8,248,000 to 7,657,000.25 Second, it called for modification of the current troop basis to provide a balanced force built around eighty-eight divisions, the number already activated. The twelve additional divisions scheduled for activation during the remainder of 1943 were to be deleted from the 1943 program. Third, it recommended that the ultimate size of the Army and of the major units in it (air and ground) should be decided at the end of the summer. The ultimate size of the Army was largely to depend on the course of Soviet-German fighting and the effectiveness of the combined British-American bomber offensive in Europe.

If the outcome of the fighting on the Soviet front and of the combined bomber offensive was favorable, the committee believed that an ultimate strength of one hundred divisions would be necessary to win the war. To defeat Germany would require between 60 and 70 divisions, and from 30 to 40 divisions would be needed for operations against Japan and for a strategic reserve. After the downfall of Germany, additional divisions could be transferred from Europe to defeat Japan. [26]

In mid-June 1943 General Marshall and the Secretary of War approved the committee's general report. [27] The Chief of Staff informed the press that the activation of twelve additional divisions would be deferred until 1944. Lest this news lead the American public to overconfidence and a relaxation of the war effort, and obversely, lest the enemy conclude that the reduction signified that the United States was unable to fulfill its mobilization schedule, he requested that the information be kept in confidence. [28] On 1 July 1943 the War Department circulated a new, approved troop basis for 1943. In accord with the committee's recommendations, it provided for 88 divisions and an Army strength of about 7,700,000. Two provisional light divisions, which were also authorized, soon were given permanent status. As a result, the new troop basis for 1943 envisaged a 90-division Army.

Reduction of the early 1943 Troop Basis of 8,208,000 to 7,700,000 men, approved by the President in November, was accomplished by the more or less general acceptance of the 90-division limit as the "cutting edge" necessary to win the war. Within this limit the character of the cutting edge changed considerably. There was a definite trend toward increasing infantry and airborne divisions during 1943 since strategic and tactical demands as well as the need to save shipping space favored the use of forces that were not so heavily armed or so completely motorized. As a result, a decrease in the rate of activation of armored divisions was ordered and motorized infantry divisions were reconverted to standard infantry divisions. At the end of 1942 there had been 52 infantry, 2 cavalry, 14 armored, 2 airborne, and 4 motorized divisions in the Army-74 in all. One year later there were 90 divisions in existence-67 infantry, 2 cavalry, 16 armored, and 5 airborne. The 16 new divisions activated during 1943 represented less than half the number of divisions-38-activated in 1942.

Accumulation of activated and trained divisions in the United States began to mount during 1943 because of the imbalances in shipping and the strain on port capacities and in the absence of final strategic decisions." Training camps were crowded and it was difficult to activate additional divisions-only 13 divisions moved overseas during the year as compared with 17 in 1942. This left 60 divisions in various stages of readiness scattered throughout the United States. Many, however, were neither at full strength nor fully equipped, since replacements often had to be drawn from the newer divisions and the outfitting of French divisions in northwest Africa had produced shortages in equipment. [30] When in late 1943 new demands for manpower were made to operate the B-29's, to provide for the rotation program, and to keep the Army Specialized Training Program going on a reduced basis, any possibility of organizing another fifteen divisions in 1944, as had been planned in mid-1943 and approved in the Victory Program Troop Basis of October 1943, appeared doomed. [31]

With the activation of a new division in August 1943, the 90-division program was fulfilled. Henceforth, problems of reserves and narrow margins of safety became nightmares to disturb the planners' dreams. The question whether 90 divisions would be enough was to plague the War Department down to the end of the war. [32]

In early 1944 the requirements in troops for the cross-Channel attack (OVERLORD) accentuated certain Army-wide manpower pinches and made the planners take another serious look at the Army troop basis. During the Cairo-Tehran Conference, the Joint Logistics Committee had estimated that there would be a serious shortage of service troops during 1944 for the war against Japan, and also a shortage of men for the B-29 program. The committee suggested that the Army troop basis be revised to anticipate these shortages and that the United States take a calculated risk and eliminate the fifteen infantry divisions that were to be set up in 1944. This would leave the Army with 90 divisions-43 for the war in Europe, 7 for North Africa, 22 for the Pacific, and 18 for the continental reserve. If necessary, service troops could be organized from the eighteen reserve divisions. [33] A report of the Operations Division's Strategy Section in late December 1943 substantiated this estimate that 90 divisions would be enough to win the war, although it allocated 58 divisions for Europe and North Africa, 25 for the Pacific, and kept only 7 in the reserve. The Strategy Section recognized the possibility that the Army might not be able to activate the additional fifteen divisions and remain within the 7,700,000-man ceiling adopted in November. The economy program had released some 212,000 men for reassignment during 1943, but Selective Service had fallen behind in its inductions, and the War Department was 200,000 men short of its 7,700,000 goal. On top of this, the rotation program approved in December would require 60,000 men during 1944, and the Air Forces had requested 130,000 men for its B-29 program. Even if Selective Service were to meet its quotas in 1944 and make up the 200,000-man deficit, there would be a cushion of only 22,000 men left over from the 212,000 recovered from the economy program. Besides, the Strategy Section concluded, there were no firm requirements for the fifteen additional infantry divisions. [34]

The activation of the fifteen divisions was deferred, but the continuing scarcity of service troops led Marshall to call a conference of theater G-4's in Washington in late January to consider the problem. Writing personally to several theater commanders he requested their aid in effecting any economies possible and recommended a number of expedients to relieve the deficiency in service troops. [35]

The Army was trying desperately to stay within the 7,700,000 ceiling and to meet needs from within by rigid economy and adjustment. Discussing the whole Army personnel problem frankly with the Joint Chiefs in early February Marshall pointed out that the ground forces were short about 87,000-97,000 troops and were forced to take men from other divisions to fill up those going overseas. Economies had produced a saving of 100,000 men but the need of manpower for the B-29 program had eaten this up. Now there was a deficiency of 100,000 service troops for OVERLORD, the invasion of southern France (ANVIL), and western Pacific operations, and a large number of tactical units were being used to help in the housekeeping of training establishments in the United States in order to release service forces for overseas duty. The need for service personnel often resulted in abbreviated training periods and less efficient troops. Marshall estimated that replacements and rotation fillers, added to induction shortages and ground force and service deficiencies, made the present deficit between 340,000 and 400,000 men. [36]

Marshall decided that the time had come for drastic action. The Army, he concluded, could not justify, in the face of such personnel shortages, the Army Specialized Training Program that had been set up to educate some of its more intelligent men in colleges. On 10 February, he cut back this program to 30,000 men, releasing 120,000 for distribution, mainly to ground and service forces. Later in the month he was able to secure Presidential pressure on the War Manpower Commission and the Selective Service to review occupational deferments and to provide the forces required by the armed services. [37] By spring, most of the induction backlog had been made up.

Easing the manpower situation still left the haunting question whether there would be enough strategic reserve in the Army troop basis to ensure the defeat of Germany once the troops were ashore in France. Of all the calculated risks taken by Marshall and his staff in preparing for invasion of the Continent, the greatest was the decision to hold to the 90-division troop basis. Even on the eve of OVERLORD, there were uneasy doubts in high Washington military circles about the gamble. On 10 May Secretary Stimson, long an advocate of a bold cross-Channel move, raised the issue with General Marshall. Stimson wrote:

I have always felt that our contribution to the war should include so far as possible an overwhelming appearance of national strength when we actually get into the critical battle. By this I mean not merely strength on the battle front but in reserve. It has been our fate in two world wars to come in as the final force after the other combatant nations had long been engaged. Our men have thus come to the field untested, even when well trained, to fight against veteran enemies. Such conditions make the appearance and possession of overwhelming strength on our part important both tactically and psychologically. [38]

Stimson feared this might not be the case on the Continent in 1944. Against the estimated fifty-six German divisions that were to defend France, the United States would have barely more than an equal number available for the offensive by the end of the summer. The average age of the men in the American divisions was now rather high, and the Army would need a large number of replacements. Army calculations, both in the European theater and in the United States, seemed to Stimson "to shave the line of sufficiency rather narrowly instead of aiming at massive abundance." When all the OVERLORD divisions had left the United States, there would remain in the United States only fourteen uncommitted divisions. These would constitute practically the only reserve for operations in France. The British could offer no such reserve to assist the United States. As a result, the Germans would not get a picture of overwhelming strength opposing them. Furthermore, the estimated German reserve of eleven divisions was almost as large as the American reserve. The German Army was better fed than in 1918, when German morale did not break. All of this led Stimson to fear that a stalemate might develop in November when climatic conditions on the Continent would reduce the power to maneuver. Even the advantageous factors of intensified air bombardment of Germany and the Soviet advance might not be enough to ensure complete victory. The Russians, he observed, were still a long way from Germany. "Furthermore, the Russians are already reaching boundary lines where they conceivably might stop with their grand strategic objective of national defense satisfied by the eviction of the invader and the gaining back of all they had lost, plus the Baltic states." To forestall a stalemate, Stimson asked Marshall, should not new manpower legislation be sought from Congress before the elections in November? Should not new divisions be activated now by the War Department?

On 16 May, just three weeks before OVERLORD was launched, General Marshall replied. He agreed that everything possible must be done to prevent a stalemate from developing in the fall, but he disagreed with Stimson's analysis and conclusions. Marshall wrote Stimson, "We are about to invade the Continent and have staked our success on our air superiority, on Soviet numerical preponderance, and on the high quality of our ground combat units. [39] Exploiting these advantages, Marshall hoped, would convince the Germans of the futility of fighting for a stalemate. He felt "the air arm should be our most effective weapon in bringing home to the German people and the German Army the futility of continued resistance." As a result of recent conversations between Averell Harriman and Stalin, he also believed the Russians would not break off their current efforts until Germany was defeated. Emphasizing that the Army was relying on the qualitative rather than the quantitative superiority of its ground force units, he declared, "Our equipment, high standard of training, and freshness should give us a superiority which the enemy cannot meet and which we could not achieve by resorting to a matching of numerical strength." Marshall pointed also to the advantages of the replacement system designed to keep American divisions in the line at full strength, the preponderance of artillery, and the employment of air superiority in close tactical support.

Even on a strictly numerical basis, Marshall thought that the American divisions would eventually compare very favorably with the German forces. Shipping and other logistical factors would limit the build-up in Europe to about 4 divisions a month, but even at that rate, by April 1945 the 59 divisions available to the United States could be utilized. Adding some 21 British divisions, and an additional 10 to 15 U.S. and French divisions that could be made available for employment in France if a defensive position were assured in Italy, the Western Powers would have some 95 divisions to employ against the estimated 56 German divisions. The most troublesome factor, he informed Stimson, would be the comparatively slow rate of American build-up-a direct product of purely logistical limitations. That factor, above all others, might result in slowing down Allied operations, since the Germans, if they felt free to transfer divisions from other fronts, could deploy their forces more rapidly than the Americans could build up theirs.

If, however, all current plans failed and a stalemate did occur in November, then Marshall felt new major strategic decisions would be required. A few additional divisions would probably not be enough to break the impasse. If new divisions and supporting units were now created, furthermore, "emasculating drafts" on existing divisions would result and present plans for their deployment would be upset. Thus, he reasoned, no far-reaching changes should be made in the Army troop basis until the outcome of the initial stages of the invasion was clear. "Considering the matter from all angles and with the realization of the hazards involved," Marshall concluded, "I believe that at the present time no increase should be made in the over-all strength of the Army, except as may prove to be necessary to provide replacements." Beyond "prudent" advance staff planning for increasing the troop basis, which he had ordered the War Department General Staff to undertake, Marshall was willing to stand pat. Clearly, he looked upon the Allied divisions in the Mediterranean as part of the strategic reserve for the invasion of the Continent. He was anxious to make what he regarded the surplus American and French divisions in Italy available to support the main effort in France, as earlier he had been to extract seven British and American divisions from the Mediterranean for OVERLORD.

Behind the calmly reasoned and formal language of Marshall's reply to Stimson lay one of the boldest calculations of the war. [40] How great a calculated risk was being taken was further emphasized by the concomitant willingness of General Marshall and his staff to allocate military manpower for the B-29 program against Japan, instead of investing in more divisions.

The remainder of the story belongs to the annals of accomplishment. The strenuous efforts of General Marshall and his staff from early in the war to conserve the precious stock of American military strength for the desired cross-Channel operation paid off. To support OVERLORD and its follow-up operations, the Army funneled forces into the United Kingdom and later into continental Europe in ever-increasing numbers during the first three quarters of 1944. Actually, more divisions were sent overseas in the first nine months of 1944-the bulk of them going to the European theater-than had been shipped overseas during the previous two years of war. By the end of September 1944, 40 divisions were located in Europe with 4 en route, as against 21 in the Pacific. [41] In the air, the preponderance lay ever more heavily in favor of Europe-149 groups were allocated to that struggle as opposed to 57 groups on the other side of the world. With the bulk of the Army's combat strength overseas deployed against the Reich, and with most of the divisions still in the United States slated to go to the European theater, the Chief of Staff and his planners could consider their original concept of "beat Germany first" well on the way toward accomplishment. Although there were still over three and a half million men left in the continental United States at the end of September, there were only some 24 combat divisions remaining. Most of these were to be sent to Europe eventually, but the Army planners had hoped to maintain some of the 24 divisions as a strategic reserve to cope with any unforeseen emergencies. The estimated size of the reserve ranged from 5 to 15 divisions, but no definite decision had ever been made by the Chief of Staff. With Germany supposedly on its last legs, there seemed little need for concern on this score.

But there is a postscript to this story that deserves careful reflection. When the crisis caused by the Ardennes breakthrough of December 1944 denuded the United States of all the remaining divisions and left the strategic reserve a memory, the possibility of having raised too few divisions rose again to cause War Department planners from Stimson on down some anxious moments. [42] Because of the unexpected developments in Europe, not one division was sent to the Pacific after August 1944. By V-J Day all eighty-nine active divisions were deployed overseas and all but two had seen combat. [43] Fortunately the crisis of late 1944 was the last unpleasant surprise. If another had come the divisional cupboard would have been bare.

Certain by-products and implications of the decision also deserve serious consideration by postwar students. The decision was a striking illustration of acceptance by Army leaders of the fact that there were limits to their slice of the American manpower pie. The 90-division troop basis represented their attempt to provide a realistic meeting ground of three fundamentals of modern warfare-strategy, production, and manpower. It represented the relatively small, if compact, ground combat force that the country that was also serving as the "arsenal of democracy" found it could provide for a global coalition war without unduly straining the war economy and standard of living of the American people. In the postwar debate over strategy, critics who have characterized the American case for concentration and power-drives as "narrow" and "rigid" have uniformly overlooked the impact of manpower ceilings on that case. It is doubtful that the United States could have succeeded with its 90-division ground combat force had not the ground forces of the Russians and other allies held and fought well. It is also doubtful that the United States could have succeeded with the size and kind of ground cutting edge it produced had not it also turned out an effective, heavy-fisted, long air arm. The self-denying limit on cutting edge of Army ground forces in favor of air force expansion undoubtedly spurred further the growing movement for air force autonomy.

It will long be a question whether the photo-finish in World War II reflected an uncommonly lucky gamble or a surprisingly accurate forecast. But few would deny that, in their performance on the field of battle in the critical campaigns of 1944-45, the hitherto still largely untested divisions of the U.S. Army, so largely a product of General Marshall's own faith and struggles, vindicated the bold calculation in Washington.

MAURICE MATLOFF, Historian with OCMH since 1947. Graduate fellow, Ph.D. in history, Harvard University. Taught: Brooklyn College, University of Maryland. Lecturer: Naval War College, Army War College. Member of the American Historical Association's Committee on the Historian and the Federal Government. U.S. Air Forces, World War II. Co-author: Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1941-1942 (Washington, 1953), and author: Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1943-1944 (Washington, 1959), UNITED STATES ARMY IN WORLD WAR II; and numerous articles and reviews in military and historical journals.

[1] The subject of this study is treated more fully in connection with
mid-war strategic planning in Maurice Matloff, 'Strategic Planning for
Coalition Warfare, 1943-1944', UNITED STATES ARMY IN WORLD WAR II
(Washington, 1959). In addition to the works listed in the notes,
published sources that provide helpful bibliographical leads or
background are: Robert R. Palmer, Bell I. Wiley, and William R. Keast,
'The Procurement and Training of Ground Combat Troops', UNITED STATES ARMY
IN WORLD WAR II (Washington, 1948); "The Army Re-Shaped," in Kent
Roberts Greenfield, 'The Historian and the Army' (New Brunswick, NJ.:
Rutgers University Press, 1954); and Bureau of the Budget, 'The United
States at War' (Washington, 1946).
[2] Accounts of the Victory Program planning are contained in (1) Mark
Skinner Watson, 'Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations'
(Washington, 1950), Ch. XI; (2) Ray S. Cline, 'Washington Command Post:
The Operations Divisions' (Washington, 1951), Ch. IV; and (3) Maurice
Matloff and Edwin M. Snell, 'Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare,
1941-1942' (Washington, 1953), pp. 58-62, 350-52, all in UNITED STATES
ARMY IN WORLD WAR II.
[3] In September G-3 reached its peak estimate of about 350 divisions
needed to win the war. Memo, G-3 for CofS, 15 Sep 42, sub: Mobilization
Plans, War Department G-3 files (WDGCT) 320 (9-15-42). The projected
number of divisions grew in 1942, partly because estimated requirements
for defeating Japan were superimposed on the original estimates for
defeating Germany.
[4] Biennial Report of the Chief of Staff of the United States Army,
'July 1, 1943 to June 30, 1945, to the Secretary of War', p. 101.
[5] (1) OPD Brief, title: Notes ... 43d Mtg JPS, 28 Oct 42, filed with
JPS 57/6 in Operations Division (OPD) files, ABC 370.01 (7-25-42), 2.
(2) Memo, Brig Gen Idwal H. Edwards for Lt Gen Joseph T. McNarney, 4 Feb
43, sub: Troop Basis, 1943, War Department Chief of Staff of the Army
files, WDCSA 320.2, Sec. III (1942-43).
[6] For a discussion of the late 1942 factors influencing Army troop
basis calculations see Kent Roberts Greenfield, Robert R. Palmer, and
Bell I. Wiley, 'The Organization of Ground Combat Troops', UNITED STATES
ARMY IN WORLD WAR II (Washington 1947), pp. 214-17.
[7] Memo, G-3 for CG AGF and CG SOS, 25 Jan 43, sub: Troop Unit Basis,
1943, WDGCT 320.2 General (1-25-43).
[8] The Victory Program of late 1941 had assumed a total of 10,199,101
men for the Army alone by June 1944, and as late as November 1942 the
Joint Planners were estimating that 10,572,000 men would be needed for
the Army by December 1944.
[9] JCS 154/1, 24 Dec 42, title: Troop Basis for All Services for 1944
and Beyond. JCS approved this study at their forty-eighth meeting on 29
December 1942.
[10] OPD Brief, title: Notes ... 48th Mtg JCS, 29 Dec 42, with JCS 154/1
in ABC 370.01 (7-25-42), 2.
[11] Memo, Admiral William D. Leahy for the President, 30 Sep 42, with
JPS 57/D in ABC 370.01 (7 25 42), 2.
[12] Memo, Edwards for CGs AAF, AGF, ASF, 29 Jan 43, sub: Reduction in
Training Establishments and Other Zone of Interior Activities, WDCSA
320.2 Sec. III (1942-43).
[13] (1) Ltr, Marshall to McNarney, 10 Jan 43, and (2) Memo, Gasser for
CofS, 11 Feb 43, sub: Missions and Functions of the War Dept Manpower
Board and Methods of Procedure, both in WDCSA 334 War Dept Manpower
Board.
[14] (1) Memo, Brig Gen Patrick II. Tansey and Lt Col Marshall S. Carter
for Maj. Gen Thomas T. Handy, 3 Feb 43, sub: Troop Basis Planning, and
(2) Memo. Edwards for ACofS, G-1, G-4, OPD, and CGs SOS, AAF, AGF, 25
Feb 43, sub: Troop Basis Planning, both in OPD 320.2, 673.
[15] (1) Final Draft of a Text Prepared for Mr. Green of the Senate
Military Affairs Committee by SOS with OPD and G-3 Co-operation, 16 Feb
43, title: Size of the Army, OPD 320.2, 678. (2) Memo, Marshall for SW,
5 Feb 43, sub: Manpower, and (3) Ltr, Stimson to Knox, 12 Feb 43, WDCSA
320 SS. (4) Address by Stimson, 9 Mar 43, title: The Size of the Army,
OPD 320.2, 678.
[16] (1) Min, Gen Council Mtg, 1 Feb 43, OPD 334.8 Gen Council, II. (2)
Memo North for Handy, 14 Feb 43, OPD Files, Book 7, Exec 8.
[17] Min, Gen Council Mtg, 8 Mar 43, OPD 334.8 Gen Council, II.
[18] Memo, Handy for Bessell, et al., 26 Feb 43, sub: Current
Military Program, ABC 400 (2-20-43).
[19] Rpt by Special Army Committee, 15 Mar 43, title: Survey of Current
Military Program, ABC 400 (2-20 43).
[20] Rpt by Special Army Committee (Rev.), 28 Apr 43, ABC 400 (2-20-43).
[21] Ibid.
[22] JPS 57/8, 26 Apr 43, title: Troop Bases for All Services for 1944
and Beyond.
[23] Memo, McNarney for Maddocks, Chamberlain, and Carter, 24 May 43,
sub: Revision of Current Military Program, filed with Tab G with Rpt by
Special Army Committee, 15 Mar 43, in ABC 400 (2-20-43).
[24] Interim Rpt by Special Army Committee, 1 Jun 43, title: Revision of
Current Military Program, submitted with Memo, Maddocks, Chamberlain,
and Carter for CofS, 1 Jun 43, sub: Revision of Current Military
Program, ABC 400 (2-20-43).
[25] Forty thousand nurses had been added to the 8,208,000 figure.
[26] Interim Rpt by the Special Army Committee, 1 Jun 43, title:
Revision of Current Military Program, ABC 400 (2-20-43). In June 1943,
soon after the completion of its work, the Maddocks Committee was
dissolved. For the committee's studies and recommendations, see
especially papers filed in OPD 320.2 and in ABC 400 (2-20-43).
[27] Interim Report by the Special Army Committee, 1 June 1943, title:
Revision of Current Military Program, filed in ABC 400 (2-20-43)
contains General Marshall's recommendations. An attached "Brief" of the
report, 7 June 1943, bears the note: "This paper has the approval of the
Secretary of War. 6/15/43. G.C.M."
[28] Ch. VII (prepared by Maj William P. Moody) in Sec. IIC,
"Mobilization, Procurement and Allocation of Manpower," in JCS MS,
History of World War II.
[29] Richard M. Leighton and Robert W. Coakley, 'Global Logistics and
Strategy, 1940-1943', UNITED STATES ARMY IN WORLD WAR II (Washington,
1955), Chs. XXV and XXVI.
[30] Greenfield, Palmer, and Wiley, 'Organization of Ground Combat
Troops', pp. 220-21.
[31] (1) Ibid., pp. 231-32. (2) Victory Program Troop Basis, 26 Oct 43,
Tab Deployment of Divisions, in Condensed Information Book, 6 Nov 43,
Gen Handy's copy, Exec 6, OPD Files. This document bears the typed
notation "Approved-By Order the Secretary of War-Joseph T. McNarney,
Deputy Chief of Staff."
[32] (1) John J. McCloy, "In Defense of the Army Mind," in Harper's
Magazine (April, 1947), Vol. 194, pp. 341-44. (2) Interv with Brig Gen
Frank N. Roberts, 29 Mar 51. (3) Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On
Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948), p.
476.
[33] JCS 581/3, 4 Dec 43, title: Specific Operations for the Defeat of
Japan.
[34] (1) SS 199, 21 Dec 43, title: U.S. Divisions and Aircraft Required
To Win the War, and (2) SS 203, 24 Dec 43, title: Summary of Current
Situation With Regard to the 15-Division Proposal, both in ABC 381
Strategy Sec Papers, Nos. 196-213 (7 Jan 43).
[35] (1) Msg, Marshall to Harmon, 27 Jan 44, CM-OUT 10668. (2) Ltr,
Marshall to Devers, 27 Jan 44, no sub, WDCSA 320.2, 4.
[36] Min, 144th Mtg JCS, 1 Feb 44.
[37] (1) Memo, Marshall for SW, 10 Feb 44, no sub; (2) Memo, G.C.M.
[Marshall] for McNarney, 18 Feb 44, no sub; and (3) Memo, Marshall for
the President, 22 Feb 44, no sub, all in WDCSA 320.2, 19.
[38] Memo, Stimson for Marshall, 10 May 44, sub: Our Military Reserves,
Paper 42, OPD Files, Item 57, Exec 10.
[39] Memo, Marshall for SW, 16 May 44, sub: Increase in the Strength of
the Army Secretary of War Files, Staff.
[40] See McCloy, "In Defense of the Army Mind," Harper's Magazine
(April, 1947).
[41] Matloff, 'Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1943-1944', Ch.
XXIII and App. D.
[42] (1) Stimson and Bundy, 'On Active Service', p. 476. (2) McCloy, "In
Defense of the Army Mind," Harper's Magazine (April, 1947), p. 342.
[43] The 2d Cavalry Division had been inactivated in North Africa,
giving a final total of 89. The 13th Airborne Division stationed in
Europe and the 98th Infantry Division stationed in Hawaii failed to get
into action.

Net Censorship Law Struck Down Again

2008-07-22T22:30:31Z

A federal appeals court struck down yet again a law that would have required websites to verify all visitors' ages if any of its content wasn't suitable for minors. Tuesday's ruling from the 3rd U.S. Court of Appeals adds to a decade of losses for the government's attempt to regulate speech on the internet.

Celebrity Necrophilia

2008-07-22T14:37:10Z

...via Styles Checks

General Daily Horoscope

2008-07-22T14:35:55Z

The Sun returns to its home sign today, roaring its way into heart-centered Leo at 6:54 am EDT. The midsummer Sun exhibits the true power of intent, relentlessly showing up high in the sky day after day. In a way, we can all be like flowers in full bloom now, boldly demonstrating our beauty. Mercury's easy trine to electric Uranus enables us to flash our intelligence, yet the dreamy Pisces Moon reminds us that what's hidden is also important.

Virgo
It's hard to figure out the energy today because you are less likely to be noticed, yet you are more likely to make a brilliant breakthrough. You have an uncanny ability to know exactly what to say now, as if you can hear the thoughts of others. Your mind is running at high efficiency and you are so good at jumping to conclusions that it looks like you know more than you truly do.

"On Her Imperial Majesty's Secret Service"

2008-07-22T14:34:25Z

~When I awoke yesterday morning, I had a thought that was both scary and exciting. “See Luanda and Die” was whispering in my ear, “I'm not a short story; I'm a novella.” And I realized that combined with “The Empress of Krakatau”, I might actually have the makings of a whole book. I could toss in “Tea Time in Panjin” up front as a sort of 'prologue' and the already extensive time line as an 'epilogue'.

I will admit it scared me more than excited me at first. The concept of My First Book feels a bit overwhelming. Some days I really believe in my work. Other days...it all seems like just a bunch of fucking hack work.

But right now I believe and I'm a bit excited. I'm even thinking about the cover art work, something that evokes the old James Bond paperback covers, but with the appropriate 'steampunk' style and themes.

You might say I'm getting ahead of myself, but that's how I roll, baby.

Besides, I just had another one of those, “But I Already Thought Of That!” moments a few days ago when I saw that JJ Abrams was centering the new Star Trek movie around Spock. The ST screenplay I have worked upon on and off for the last ten years did just that. Not saying he stole it. No way he could know about it. But I have this...thing that often taps into the Zeitgeist and I think it's time to 'get the finger out'.

BTW I created a new LJ memories category for all this stuff; Anglo-American Imperium. “Snapperland” is still there, but I'm just letting it sit.

Two on Race and Sex in America

2008-07-21T23:40:48Z

Metro Editor Fired For "Obama Is My Slave" Publicity Stunt Story

Susie Bright on The History of "Black" and "Inter-racial" Porn Videos

On Line Drama Interpretive Macro

2008-07-21T15:33:08Z

Gee, Ya Think?

2008-07-21T15:08:43Z

The three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Federal Communications Commission "acted arbitrarily and capriciously" in issuing the fine for the fleeting image of nudity.

H.G. Wells's 'Land Ironclad'

2008-07-21T14:52:46Z

"Wells envisioned a huge, hundred-foot-long vehicle propelled by eight pairs of pedrails, wheels ringed with flexible feet to give traction. He also gave his vehicles innovative weapons: remotely controlled rifles with an advanced sighting system that gave tremendous accuracy even while moving."

Click on Pic for some more genuine and original Old School Steampunk goodness

Thousands in Florida with criminal records work unlicensed as loan originators

2008-07-21T14:23:01Z

From McClatchy
By Matthew Haggman, Rob Barry and Jack Dolan | Miami Herald
Monday, July 21, 2008

Gary Kafka, former body builder with a long rap sheet and violent past, wrote millions of dollars in mortgages in South Florida without ever applying for a state license.

Fresh out of prison after serving time for bank fraud, he never went through a criminal background check before selling loans. He never took a competency exam.

He never had to.

More than half the mortgage professionals registered in Florida -- 120,563 -- entered the industry this decade without being licensed by the state, The Miami Herald found.

Known as loan originators, they perform the same job as mortgage brokers but aren't bound by the same rules.

Read the complete story and the series at miamiherald.com

..I got ya deregulation right here..*grabs crotch*

Me and My Girls

2008-07-20T20:35:07Z

From The NYT Magazine
By DAVID CARR
July 20, 2008

Where does a junkie’s time go? Mostly in 15-minute increments, like a bug-eyed Tarzan, swinging from hit to hit. For months on end in 1988, I sat inside a house in north Minneapolis, doing coke and listening to Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” and finding my own pathetic resonance in the lyrics. “Any place is better,” she sang. “Starting from zero, got nothing to lose.”

After shooting or smoking a large dose, there would be the tweaking and a vigil at the front window, pulling up the corner of the blinds to look for the squads I was always convinced were on their way. All day. All night. A frantic kind of boring. End-stage addiction is mostly about waiting for the police, or someone, to come and bury you in your shame.

After a while I noticed that the blinds on the upper duplex kitty-corner from the house were doing the same thing. The light would leak through a corner and disappear. I began to think of the rise and fall of their blinds and mine as a kind of Morse code, sent back and forth across the street in winking increments that said the same thing over and over.

W-e a-r-e g-e-t-t-i-n-g h-i-g-h t-o-o.

They rarely came out, and neither did I, so we never discussed our shared hobby.

I was lonely, but not alone. The house belonged to Anna, my girlfriend and dope dealer, who had two kids of her own and newborn twins by me. One night, Anna was out somewhere, and I was there with the kids. I had a new pipe, clean screens, a fresh blowtorch and the kids were asleep. It was just me and Barley, a corgi mix I’d had since college. When I was alone and tweaking with Barley, I’d ask her random questions. Barley didn’t talk back per se, but I heard answers staring into her large brown eyes.

Am I a lunatic? Yes. When am I going to cut this stuff out? Apparently never. Does God see me right now? Yes. God sees everything, including the blind.

Trapped in drug-induced paranoia, I began to think of the police as God’s emissaries, arriving not to seek vengeance but a cease-fire, a truce that would put me up against a wall of well-deserved consequences, and the noncombatants, the children, out of harm’s way.

On this night — it was near the end — every hit sent out an alarm along my vibrating synapses. If the cops were coming — Any. Minute. Now. — I should be sitting out in front of the house. That way I could tell them that yes, there were drugs and paraphernalia in the house, but no guns. And there were four blameless children. They could put the bracelets on me, and, head bowed, I would solemnly lead them to the drugs, to the needles, to the pipes, to what was left of the money. And then some sweet-faced matrons would magically appear and scoop up those babies and take them to that safe, happy place. I had it all planned out.

I took another hit, and Barley and I walked out and sat on the steps. My eyes, my heart, the veins in my forehead, pulsed against the stillness of the night. And then they came. Six unmarked cars riding in formation with lights off, no cherries, just like I pictured. It’s on.

A mix of uniforms and plainclothes got out, and in the weak light of the street, I could see long guns held at 45-degree angles. I was oddly proud that I was on the steps, that I now stood between my children and the dark fruits of the life I had chosen. I had made the right move after endless wrong ones. And then they turned and went to the house across the street.

Much yelling. “Facedown! Hug the carpet! No sudden movements!” A guy dropped out of the second-floor window in just gym shorts, but they were waiting. More yelling and then quiet. I went back inside the house and watched the rest of it play out through the corner of the blind. Their work done, the cops loaded several cuffed people into a van. I let go of the blind and got back down to business. It wasn’t my turn.

Twenty years later, now sober and back for a look at my past, I sat outside that house on Oliver Avenue on a hot summer day in a rental car, staring long and hard to make sense of what had and had not happened there. The neighborhood had turned over from white to black, but it was pretty much the same. Nice lawns, lots of kids, no evidence of the mayhem that had gone on inside. Sitting there in a suit with a nice job in a city far away and those twins on their way to college, I almost would have thought I’d made it up. But I don’t think I did. While I sat there giving my past the once over, someone lifted up the corner of the blind in the living-room window. It was time to go.

On the face of it, I am no more qualified to take my own inventory than the addict with the fetid dreads who spare-changes people on the subway while singing “Stand by Me.” Ask him how he ended up sweating people for quarters, and he may have an answer, but he doesn’t really know and probably couldn’t bear it if he did.

To be an addict is to be something of a cognitive acrobat. You spread versions of yourself around, giving each person the truth he or she needs — you need, actually — to keep them at a remove. Let’s stipulate that I do not have a good memory, having recklessly sautéed my brain in fistfuls of pharmaceutical spices. Beyond impairment, there may be no more unreliable narrator than an addict. Recovered or not, I am someone who used my mouth to constantly create one more opportunity to get high.

Here is what I deserved: hepatitis C, federal prison time, H.I.V., a cold park bench, an early, addled death.

Here is what I got: the smart, pretty wife, the three lovely children, the job that impresses.

Here is what I remember about how That Guy became This Guy: not much. But my version of events is worth knowing, if for no other reason than I was there.

I was born a middle kid in a family of seven children into a John Cheever novel set on the border of Hopkins and Minnetonka, suburbs on the western edge of Minneapolis. It was a suburban idyll where any mayhem was hidden in the rear rooms of large split-level houses. My home was a good one; my parents were kind; no one slipped me a Mickey, and if they had, I would have grabbed it with both hands and asked for another. It is baked into my nature.

Let’s skip high school. I graduated and traveled out West, hopping a bus of the so-called Rainbow Family, and on the ensuing ride, they gifted me with peyote, a profound sense of life’s psychedelic possibilities and a tenacious case of the crabs. I came back to Minneapolis and took crummy jobs, including working at a hydraulic-tube assembly plant where my boss was a dwarf who took Dolly Parton’s breasts as his central religious icons. I eventually enrolled in two land-grant universities where I had many friends, very little money and what Pavlov called “the blind force of the subcortex.” I subsisted on Pop-Tarts and Mountain Dew, along with LSD, peyote, pot, mushrooms, mescaline, amphetamines, quaaludes, valium, opium, hash and liquor of all kinds. Total garbage head.

On my 21st birthday, a dealer who dropped his money on Dom Pérignon at the fancy restaurant where I worked palmed me a cigarette tin and told me to open it in the bathroom. I did the powder inside and it was a Helen Keller hand-under-the-water moment. Lordy, I can finally see! My endorphins made a Proustian leap at this new opportunity, hugging it and feeling all its splendid corners.

Every addict is formed in the crucible of the memory of that first hit. Even as the available endorphins attenuate, the memory is right there. By 1985, I tried freebasing coke and its more prosaic sibling, crack.

“Crackhead” is an embarrassing line item to have on a résumé. If meth tweakers had not come along and made a grab for the crown — meth makes you crazy and toothless — crackheads would be at the bottom of the junkie org chart. In the beginning, smokable cocaine fills you with childlike wonder, a feeling that the carnival had come to town and chosen your cranium as the venue for its next show. There is only one thing that appeals after a hit of crack, and it is not a brisk walk around the block to clear one’s head. Most people who sample it get a sense of its lurid ambush and walk away.

Many years later, my pal Donald sat in a cabin in Newport, Minn., staring into a video camera I had brought and recalling the crackhead version of me.

“As good friends as we were, as much as I loved you, you weren’t you. I wasn’t talking to my friend David; I was talking to a wild man. You were a creature. I was afraid.”

If the subject of careers or majors came up, I told people I was a journalist, with only that uttered noun as evidence. But then I caught a real, actual story for the local weekly and the fever to go with it. I was a dog on a meat bone when it came to stories; I could type — and sometimes write — as fast as the next guy, and I had an insatiable need to know more. My work got noticed, and some of the more unfortunate aspects of the guy who produced it were overlooked. I got jobs, nailed investigative targets and won a few awards.

During the day, I took the slipperiness of public officials personally — my moral dudgeon is freighted with irony in retrospect — and displayed significant promise as a reporter. But as time wore on, I combined a life of early promise as a writer with dark nights full of half-baked gangsters and full-blown addiction. I became a dealer for the creative community in Minneapolis, selling coke to colleagues, comedians and club kids. I was a frantic fan of the amazing Minneapolis music scene at the time — Soul Asylum, the Replacements, Prince — but the only thing I played with any regularity was drug-addled fool. I moved grams, eight balls, ounces, quarter pounds — no one trusted me with a kilo for more than a few minutes. Every day I would wake up to a catalog of my misbegotten life — jobs, money, girlfriends and family were all subject to the ineluctable entropy of the junkie lifestyle.

There were signs early on that the center would not hold. In the mid-’80s, I was working on a running story about a suspect who had been accidentally shot dead while he was being taken into custody by the police department’s decoy unit. In the middle of the reporting, my phone rang, and one of the cops from the decoy unit was on the line. “You know, I’ve been asking around, and your life is not without blemish,” I remember him saying. “You better watch your step.” For weeks afterward, I would drive somewhere and see the van from the decoy unit in my rearview.

Some of my running buddies went to prison, but I was more of a misdemeanant, spending hours — and every once in a while, days — in various county jails. I lived by this credo: moderation in all things, especially moderation.

My duplicity around women was towering and chronic. I conned and manipulated myself into their beds and then treated them like human jewelry, something to be worn for effect. And when I was called to account, I sometimes responded with violence.

One night in 1986, I was at a party for Phil, my longtime coke connection who was going away to federal prison. I met Anna, who had better coke than Phil and soon developed a fondness for me. She was selling serious amounts of coke and allowed me to pretend I was her partner. We were an appalling mix, metastasized by her unlimited supply. In less than a year, I lost my job, and she lost her business.

It would have ended there, but on April 15, 1988, Anna had twin girls. My daughters. Our remaining friends had begged us, quite reasonably, to abort them. Pals began to boycott our house because it had become such a grim, near-scientific tableau of addiction’s progression.

Eventually we both went to treatment, and our kids went into foster care. I sobered up; Anna did, too, until she didn’t; and I obtained physical custody of the twins, Erin and Meagan. As a power trio, we worked our way off welfare. I married somebody grand, we had a baby and professionally, one thing led to another, and I ended up working at The New York Times. I have lived most of the last two decades showered by those promises that recovery delivers, with luck, industry and fate guiding me to a life beyond all expectation.

But was it really all thus? When memory is called to answer, it often answers back with deception. How is it that almost every warm bar stool contains a hero, a star of his own epic, who is the sum of his amazing stories?

If I said I was a fat thug who beat up women and sold bad coke, would you like my story? What if instead I wrote that I was a recovered addict who obtained sole custody of my twin girls, got us off welfare and raised them by myself, even though I had a little touch of cancer? Now we’re talking. Both are equally true, but as a member of a self-interpreting species, one that fights to keep disharmony at a remove, I’m inclined to mention my tenderhearted attentions as a single parent before I get around to the fact that I hit their mother when we were together. We tell ourselves that we lie to protect others, but the self usually comes out looking damn good in the process.

The arc of the addict, warm and familiar as a Hallmark movie with only the details pivoting, is especially tidy in the recollection:

I had a beer with friends.

I shot dope into my neck.

I got in trouble.

I saw the error of my ways.

I found Jesus or 12 steps or bhakti yoga.

Now everything is new again.

In the convention of the recovery narrative, readers will want to scan past the tick-tock, looking for the yucky part so that they can feel better about themselves. (Here’s a taste: When I got to detox for what I thought was the last time, they took one look at my arms and brought me a tub filled with lukewarm water and Dreft detergent to soak my scabrous, pus-filled track marks. They dropped pills into my mouth from several inches away as if feeding a baby bird, and even the wet-brain drunks wouldn’t come near me. See how that works?)

Today I am a genuine, often pleasant person, I do solid work for a reputable organization and have, over the breadth of time, proved to be an attentive father and husband. But drugs, it seems to me, do not conjure demons; they reveal them. So how to reconcile my past with my current circumstance? Which, you might ask, of my two selves did I make up?

As a veteran journalist, I decided to report the story. For two years on and off, I pulled medical and legal documents and engaged in a series of interviews with people I used to run with. By turns, it became a kind of journalistic ghost dancing, trying to conjure spirits past, including mine.

Some people I interviewed wanted me to say I was sorry — I am, and I did. Some people wanted me to say that I remembered — I did, and I did not. And some people wanted me to say it was all a mistake — it was, and it was not. It felt less like journalism than archeology, a job that required shovels and axes, hacking my way into dark, little-used passages and feeling my way around. It would prove to be an enlightening and sickening enterprise, a new frontier in the annals of self-involvement. I would show up at the doorsteps of people I had not seen in two decades and ask them to explain myself to me.

In drug-gangster movies, the kingpin is always some guy with a pock-marked face who has goombahs on his flanks on the way into the restaurant, sits with his back against the wall and always gets the big piece of chicken. But the most successful person I did business with was just a touch over five feet, cute, with a full head of dyed blond hair, a little mouth and a fondness for maniacs in matters of the heart, if not business.

When I met Anna, I was more or less living with Doolie, a woman I adored. I began stepping out on her because Anna was in high effect, moving what she said was a kilo a month from straight-up Colombian sources through a series of reliable associates who were also her pals. She worked dead drops in storage spots, safe-deposit boxes and mules to keep her at a remove from the nuts and bolts of the drug enterprise. When the piles of money were too big to hand-count, she used a digital scale to weigh piles of 20s. She had two kids in a nice house in north Minneapolis; the serious dope business was done elsewhere.

On our first date, we mowed through my eight ball of indifferent coke. She sent me to a safe under the carpet of her steps, and I beheld a pressed kilo of pure cocaine. Decades later, we were talking outside a hotel in Tucson. She still had no trouble recalling the dimensions of a kilo of coke.

“It was about as big as a book, about this big,” she said, framing the air with her hands. “It still had the snake seals; I mean, it was right from the Medellín cartel.”

It had been 10 years since we had even seen each other. Of all the trips I had taken in pursuit of the past, this was one in which a common truth was unlikely to emerge. We each need to find a place to put our time together that does not leave either of us immobilized with shame. I ended up with our kids, but the moral ground curiously rests with her. I hit her, for one thing. And whatever she did, she did out of a kind of love. My instincts were far more mercenary.

In her version, everything was going swimmingly until I came along, and then I seduced her into smoking cocaine. In my version, I lumbered into her life, succumbed to abundant blandishments and descended into a violent, destructive mania.

For a time, we were both riding high. I had a budding reputation as a reporter, and she was one of the most respectable sources of serious weight in the city. Anna introduced me around to her pals as her trusted associate, but they all knew precisely what I represented: the guy who would ruin a good thing. Certainly she got a primer from her adjacency to me, observing that the difference between snorting and smoking coke was vast.

“We fought for about six months about it, and then I joined you,” she remembered. She tipped over almost immediately. By the spring of 1988, six months after we had gotten together, her business was in disarray, I had lost my job and then, oh, yeah, she was pregnant. Together Anna and I drew many lines in the sand and then stepped across them, usually with me leading the way.

When Anna’s water broke in her living room on Oliver Avenue, I had just handed her a crack pipe. (Anna, by the way, swears such a thing never took place. I have my memories, and she has hers.) She had just entered her third trimester. Were we in the midst of giving birth or participating in a kind of neonatal homicide? The water beneath her became a puddle of implication. Now look what we did.

“Man, them are little babies, where’d you get ’em?”

The kid, about 8, saw me coming out of the hospital with a twin in each arm in May of 1988. I was speechless. How could a child this small, this unknowing, tell at a glance that these children had landed on me from a very great distance?

They had been patients in the neonatal intensive-care unit for a month. Born at 2.5 and 2.9 pounds, and each just over 15 inches, Meagan and Erin arrived two and a half months premature. According to medical records, which I requested almost 20 years after the fact, Erin “cried spontaneously, but each time her crying stopped, her heart rate decreased and her respiratory effort became poor. She was intubated in the delivery room. . . . ” Meagan “had umbilical, artery and venous catheters placed on 4/16/88 for blood pressure and arterial blood-gas monitoring and for delivery of emergency medications.” Once the jaundice of their early birth wore off, they were small pink spots surrounded by an array of tubes and machines, the organic part of the apparatus.

As I stared at them in my addled state on visits to the hospital, my mind wandered to bath time, something I had heard that you did with babies. What would we use, a teacup?

Once we got the girls home, the heart and respiration monitors seemed specifically designed to terrorize us. One of them would shift positions or spit up a bit, and the alarms would go off. Recently, I went to see a pal, Chris, now a professor of creative writing in New Orleans, who watched the unfurling disaster back then.

“One winter night, you called me late and said, ‘We’re out of diapers, we don’t have diapers,’ and you thought somebody was watching the house,” he recalled. “You guys were paranoid and getting high, and you said, ‘I think the cops are watching the house; I can’t leave,’ and so I went to the convenience store, got some diapers, drove over, with diapers and milk or something.”

Chris did what he could, but other friends thought of calling the authorities. A document I found in the twins’ medical files suggested they were already on the case: “The parents have appeared to be open about their drug use. They have stated their intention to attend A.A. meetings and provide a chemically free environment for their children. This may be difficult without intervention considering the long reported history of drug use,” said a letter dated April 22, 1988, from the medical team to Child Protective Services of Hennepin County.

I remember driving to a dark spot between the streetlights at the rounded-off corner of West 32nd and Garfield. Right here, I thought. This would be fine.

The Nova, a junker with a bad paint job my brother bought me out of pity, shuddered to a stop, and I saw two sleeping children in the rearview, the fringe of their hoods emerging in outline against the backseat as my eyes adjusted to the light. Teeny, tiny, itty-bitty, the girls were swallowed by the snowsuits. We should not have been there. But I was fresh out. I had nothing. I called Kenny.

Anna was out, and I could not bear to leave them home, but I was equally unable to stay put. So here we were, one big, happy family, parked outside the dope house. Then came the junkie math. If I went inside the house, I could get what I needed in 5 minutes, 10 minutes tops. The twins would sleep, dreaming their little baby dreams where their dad is a nice man, where the car rides end at a playground.

The people inside would be busy, working mostly in pairs. Serious coke shooting is something best done together. The objective is to walk right up to the edge of an overdose without actually dying. The technique was to push the plunger in slow but large. One would be pushing, watching as the other listened to the interior sound of blood and nerves brought to a boil. Are you good? Yes. No. . . . Just, um . . . ah . . . that’s perfect.

Kenny’s lip-licking coke rap was more ornate, somehow more satisfying, than that of most of the dealers I worked with. His worldview was all black helicopters and white noise — the whispering, unseen others who would one day come for us. It kept me on my toes.

But tonight I had company. I certainly couldn’t bring the twins in. Even in the gang I ran with, coming through the doors of the dope house swinging two occupied baby buckets was not done. Sitting there in the gloom of the front seat, the car making settling noises against the chill, I decided that my teeny twin girls would be safe, that God would look after them while I did not.

I got out, locked the door and walked away. Inside, a transformation — almost a kidnapping — got under way. The guilty father was replaced by a junkie, no different from the others sitting there. Time passed, one thing begot another and eventually I was thrown clear.

Leaving, I remember that. Out the metal door and then out the front door with its three bolts onto the porch and the hollow sound of my boots on the wood floor. A pause. How long had it been, really? Hours, not minutes. I walked toward the darkened car with drugs in my pocket and a cold dread in all corners of my being.

I cracked the front door, reached around, unlocked the back and leaned in.

I could see their breath.

God had looked after the twins, and by proxy me, but I realized at that moment that I was in the midst of a transgression He could not easily forgive. I made a decision never to be that man again.

In Minneapolis 19 years later, I stood on the spot outside Kenny’s where I parked that night. The car was, according to my brother Jim, a Chevy Nova. He sent me the title: ’79 Chevy Nova with 89,950 miles on it, plate number NHS091. Thinking back through all those years, I remember standing by the car, I remember looking back in. I remember the math. And I remember the snowsuits.

But that’s where the plot thickens and the facts collide. Erin and Meagan were born on April 15, 1988. Whenever I felt compelled to explain myself and the cold facts of our history, that night outside Kenny’s was the necessary moment. In the story as I recited it, that horrible night occurred very soon after they were born. I thought I quickly entered treatment because even though I had been an unreliable employee, a conniving friend and a duplicitous husband, nothing in my upbringing allowed me to proceed as a bad father. The twins were then whisked into temporary foster care soon after their birth. After that, it’s a Joseph Campbell monomyth in which our hero embraces his road of trials, begins to attain a new Self and hotfoots it back to the normal world.

Nice story if you can live it. If the girls were born in April, and I went into treatment a few months afterward, as I have always said, where did the snowsuits come from? Minnesota is cold, but not that cold.

When I was talking to my brother about the make of the car and mentioned the snowsuits, he said: “That’s easy. You didn’t go to treatment until sometime in December, like eight months after they were born.”

He’s almost right. I did not enter Eden House, a six-month inpatient treatment program in Minneapolis, until Nov. 25, 1988. So the presence of snowsuits on a cold November night were undoubtedly real. That part about me straightening out right after they were born? A myth, but not the kind Joseph Campbell had in mind.

Sometime soon after that night at Kenny’s — the week before Thanksgiving 1988, as I would later find out — I became convinced that something brutal and unspeakable was about to land on all of us, including the kids. At our house, it all was needles, blood, babies and piles of dirty clothes. High or not, it was hellish to behold.

I called my parents and said that if they took the kids, I would go to detox and Anna would go to treatment. “You told us that there were no adults in the house, that it was a dangerous place for children to be,” my dad recalled as I talked to him on his deck overlooking Lake Minnetonka in the summer of 2006.

Did I say goodbye to the girls? I can’t remember, and neither can my dad. And then I left. Having benchmarked a new kind of bottom, I needed gas and a boost of coke, so I stopped at the station just up the street from their house. I was out of my mind with grief and loss, and when I pulled out of the station, I gunned the engine to leave behind what I had just done. I got pulled over a few blocks away for driving recklessly and thrown in the back of the squad car. When we got to the brightly lit station, the cop who pulled me over stared at the welter of needle marks on my arms. He went out to his car and came back red-faced, tapping a bindle of coke into the palm of his hand.

“I found this under my backseat,” he said. “You put it there.”

“I can’t help you with that, officer,” I said as politely as I could manage.

They eventually kicked me loose.

It took me a few more days to get to detox, a nice suburban facility near my parents’ house. Detoxes are really human aquariums, a place where large, Librium-infused humans bob here and there, watched by the staff through thick plate glass in case one of them freaks out or starts flopping around. My job, as it turned out, was to settle my arms up to my biceps in a large tub of Dreft detergent, a nice low-tech way of disinfecting my track marks without involving a lot of hands-on work by the staff. I had become a white-trash untouchable.

A few days later, my parents had Thanksgiving dinner, and I came straight from detox. My babies were there. After dinner, my parents spoke to me quietly, off to the side. They had spoken to my older brother, John, a guy who worked in leadership for the Catholic Church, and he had wired up temporary foster care through Catholic Charities. Erin and Meagan would be placed with a family while I went “to deal with things.” It was decided that I would follow my detox with an intensive six-month rehab program at Eden House, a last-chance facility in downtown Minneapolis.

So that was it. Only it wasn’t. When I was in New Orleans talking to Chris about that time, he reminded me that the night before I went in to Eden House, I had to go back at it one more time.

“You had called me and wanted me to pick you up some rocks, because you were going in the next day, and you wanted to get high one more time. And I did. I think it was the only time I’d been to your parents’ house, but we were in your basement or first floor, the bedroom down there. I had to open up the car door for you because your hands were all swollen up, your arms were all bruised up from — ”

Um, shooting coke?

“Yeah, I think it was kind of a moment for me,” he said.

By my recollection, when the twins went into temporary foster care, I handed them to some faceless county bureaucrat. Besieged by unseen forces within, the father, with the gentle encouragement of his parents, admits that he is worthless and that strangers must step unto the breach and pry the children from his hands. Never happened, at least not that way.

When I called Pat and Zelda, Erin and Meagan’s temporary foster parents, in the summer of 2007, they explained there was no faceless bureaucrat, that my mother and I had dropped them off just before I went to Eden House. They loved those babies from the minute they saw them. Their father? Not so much.

Zelda: “You were very serious, very somber, and it felt kind of belligerent, like you really weren’t interested, like you really didn’t want to talk to us much, but we were a necessary evil. This was a good place to put the girls. You were that way and — ”

Pat interrupted. “And you were high.”

Zelda: “You were a bit disheveled.”

David: “Disheveled and high.”

Zelda: “Yes.”

Pat: “And you fell on the floor.”

David: “In what way?”

Pat: “You just kind of lost your balance and fell on the floor, and I remember thinking that if one of the babies was there, the baby would have suffered some pretty severe injury.”

Pat had his doubts about ever seeing me again.

Pat: “I remember thinking, this will never work . . . you were so far out of it. I just thought that this was a way of exiting the scene.”

Eden House was a long-term therapeutic community, the kind of place that brimmed with slogans. This was the main one: “The answer to life is learning to live.”

This is the point where the knowing author laughs along with his readers about his time among the aphorisms, how he was once so gullible and needy that he drank deeply of such weak and fruity Kool-Aid. That’s some other story. Slogans saved my life. All of them — the dumb ones, the imperatives, the shameless, witless ones.

I lustily chanted some of those slogans and lived by others. There is nothing romantic about being a crackhead and a drunk — low-bottom addiction is its own burlesque that needs no snarky annotation. Unless a person is willing to be terminally, frantically earnest, all hope is lost.

All the assets I had — an ability to verbalize, intellectualize and filibuster — got no play at Eden House. In at least a few other treatment centers, I was often seen as baby Jesus, a counselor’s pet who knew all the jargon and right buttons to push. At Eden House, I was seen as a fool, and a pretty soft one at that. It wasn’t Abu Ghraib, but it wasn’t the treatment place with the elliptical machine and a staff nutritionist, either.

The chronicity of addiction is really a kind of fatalism writ large. If an addict knows in his heart he is going to use someday, why not today? But if a thin reed of hope appears, the possibility that it will not always be so, things change. You live another day and then get up and do it again. Hope is oxygen to someone who is suffocating on despair.

The implications of a misstep arrived every weekend. My parents would come by with the twins after having picked them up from the foster-care family and set them down to crawl around in the visiting room. I can remember one of the female counselors — Beth, maybe — coming in and marveling at Erin and Meagan and asking no one in particular whom they belonged to. It took me just a second to realize the answer.

“That would be me.”

My counselor at the time was Marion, a large black man who affected mirrored sunglasses and an air of mystery. Three months into treatment, I had arranged all of the necessary passes to go to my sister’s wedding. The Friday night before the event, Marion called me into the office and told me if I went to the wedding, I should not bother coming back. I was livid, and my family suggested that I should walk away from this arbitrary place. I remember going down to Marion’s office later to tell him off, but then I stayed and did not go to the wedding. What had he said to me that changed my mind?

Marion pulled up on a motorcycle at a coffee shop in south Minneapolis in July of 2006 with the mirrored shades still firmly in place. I told Marion that I remembered going down to his office to tell him where he could put his “therapeutic no.” What had he said? He remembered what I did not.

“You were on the verge, and I told you, ‘Well, why don’t you just get those two girls high too?’ ”

When I got out of Eden House after six months, I moved into a sober house and began taking care of the kids here and there. Anna and I were no longer together, but she had sobered up as well, so the children had been returned to her. But while I was going to recovery meetings and doing my little freelance writing assignments, Anna began struggling.

One day in the summer of 1989, I showed up at her house and the twins were wet, hungry and wailing. We went to the nearby 7-Eleven on Penn and Dowling Avenues in north Minneapolis. I waited until the spot right in front of the door opened up, and I went and quickly bought diapers, milk, new bottles and some bananas. While I changed them, they ate the bananas and drank the milk with an animal intensity. I decided not to take them back, not knowing what it meant other than the fact that I would need my own place, more clothes and more money.

If I am a good person now and an able father, I must have been the easy choice as custodial parent back in the day. In this formulation, when I started pursuing custody, I was just a beefier version of Mother Teresa, all selflessness and calm, and Anna was a nasty basket case. Eighteen years after the case was decided, I went to see Barbara, the attorney who helped me obtain custody of my daughters.

These many years later, Barbara hesitated when I ran that story and then told a different one.

“You looked unwell,” she said. “You weighed close to 300 pounds. It was in the winter, and you had on a very heavy coat, but it obviously didn’t fit you; it was raggedy. If I had seen you on the street, I would have thought you were homeless, because you were very rough. Your hygiene was bad; your eyes were rheumy.”

But even so, I was a man about my business, right?

“I wasn’t used to having clients look like you. I didn’t do criminal; I represented banks and mortgage companies, and so to have you come in and want custody of two little babies, um, I struggled with whether or not that was even a realistic goal that we should consider. . . . I couldn’t tell if you were following along well enough to understand the impact of what this would mean to your life.”

So other than being addled from an unspeakable habit, a little smelly and a touch on the amazingly obese scale, I was good to go. Ready to star in one of those car commercials where the kids crack wise in the backseat while the dad says something sage and knowing into the rearview. Except I didn’t have a car. And the kids did not legally belong to me. I had never married their mother or established my paternity. I had no insurance, and I had not paid taxes in several years.

Although Anna has always given me abundant credit for doing a good job with our twins, she is quick to remind me that I stole them in the first place. A part of me was convinced she was right. Revisiting the issue with Barbara, I talked about how we managed to persuade Anna to take a drug test when she moved back from Texas, where she had been staying with her mom. We made visitation conditional on a clean result, and she came up positive for cocaine and pot. I remembered this as a clever linchpin in our legal strategy, but Barbara reminded me that Anna had failed that test over and over and that she moved in with a dope dealer when she got to town. How she missed appointments to see the kids, missed court dates, switched lawyers and eventually agreed to a settlement that gave me physical custody of the girls.

History suggests that things turned out as they should have, but Anna’s suggestion that I was not the obvious choice as the twins’ custodial parent found significant traction when I went back and looked at the record. I had won a tallest-midget contest with Anna, nothing more. Each of us had a history of relapse, and mine was far more extensive. The lie that I told myself — that I was made entirely new by my decision to lay off drugs — kept doubt at bay. If I really examined my fitness in all of its dimensions, I would have been paralyzed. It was a fairy tale that kept me alive and allowed me to make it come true. Everything good and true about my life started on the day the twins became mine.

When a woman, any woman, has issues with substances, has kids out of wedlock and ends up struggling as a single parent, she is identified by many names: slut, loser, welfare mom, burden on society. Take those same circumstances and array them over a man, and he becomes a crown prince. See him doing that dad thing and, with a flick of the wrist, the mom thing too! Why is it that the same series of overt acts committed by a male becomes somehow ennobled?

I’m not saying that raising children, especially by yourself, is a trip to Turks and Caicos, but single parenting is as old as reproduction. Families declare themselves in all sorts of versions, and ours happened to be two adorable toddlers stapled to 250 pounds of large, white male. Still, people who knew our circumstance marveled at its idiosyncrasy. And people who knew me before the twins wondered all the more.

I had no idea what I was doing, but children teach you how to care for them. Leave the house without an extra diaper, and they will have some brutal, smelly event at a McDonald’s. Let them wheedle their way into your bed so you can get some rest, and you will be fighting them off every single night of their young lives. Gradually, slowly, the three of us developed a routine at bedtime, with baths, prayers and stories — stuff I had been brought up on or seen on TV.

As we spent more time together, they began to know me, and I came to adore them — madly, deeply, truly. We developed other rituals. When it came time to actually turn out the light, I would sing a song of my own making.

To the tune of nothing in particular, but very up-tempo:

“Oh, I’ve got the nicest girls in town,

I’ve got the nicest girls in town.

They are so nice, they are so sweet,

I love them twice, they can’t be beat.”

And then, a real strong Broadway finish, with every note held and punished (apologies to Ethel Merman).

“Oh. I’ve. Got. The. Nicest. Girrrrrrrls.
Innnnnnn.

Townnnnnnn.”

It was a huge hit in our crummy little upper duplex, but if that all sounds like some after-school special, with the fat ex-junkie dad singing to his misbegotten daughters, well, it is what it is.

I always thought that people who spent endless amounts of time drilling into their personal histories are fundamentally unhappy in their lives, and I’m not. I’m ecstatic in my own dark, morbid way and subscribe to a theory of the past that allows the future to unfold: We all did the best we could.

Even with the trope of reporting, my addiction narrative arrives at some very common lessons. Too much of a bad thing is bad. If you don’t sleep and eat but drink and drug instead, you will lose jobs, spouses and dignity. And while the lessons of the recovery story are important, they are even more prosaic. Once I stopped doing narcotics and alcohol, I landed good jobs, remarried, had a baby and, of course, learned to love myself.

Junkies and drunks frequently end up putting a megaphone to their own pratfalls in the form of memoir because they need to believe that all of the time they spent with their lips wrapped around glass, whether is was a bottle of vodka or a crack pipe, actually meant something. That impulse suggests that I don’t regret the past — it brought me here to this nice, happy place — but I’d also like to squeeze something more from it. And so I have.

Two years of reporting and a lot of awkward conversations later, I realized that in reductive psychoanalytic terms, I had achieved a measure of integration, not just between That Guy and This Guy but between my past and my present. Carl Jung suggested that until we embrace both our masculine and feminine sides, we can’t be made whole. For all the testosterone I have deployed in my affairs, I experienced salvation in expressing common maternal behavior. You are always told to recover for yourself, but reproduction has an enormously simplifying effect on life: Are you willing to destroy others, including little babies, in order to feed the monster within?

Not in my case, but it was a much closer call than I would like to admit. I now inhabit a life I don’t deserve, but we all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn’t end any time soon.

David Carr is a culture reporter and the media columnist for The New York Times. His book, “The Night of the Gun,” from which this article is adapted, will be published in August.

Random

2008-07-20T18:17:09Z

~The trucklette is unloaded!

It was quite lovely around dawn today; breezy and overcast. So after Le-Le went to bed, I pulled the trucklette in front and just hauled out the rest of the stuff. There wasn't too much left and it was over quickly.

Then I took another nap, a solid two hours. Bit by bit, I'm getting back up to speed.

I also got a cheque for the balance of my security deposit in the mail yesterday. It was only 60% of the original amount, but I can't quibble. The place did need some serious cleaning just from being allowed to sit empty for all that time.

But that ends the present fiscal crisis...at least in this one American household. We'll see what next month brings when next month gets here.

As a Sign of The Times, that lovely PayPal gift will give us the gas money that will allow us to go and deposit the cheque. The trucklette's gas gage was right on empty and the lil 'low fuel' red light went on and off a few times on Friday's shopping trip.

Late tonight we'll put some gas in the tank, take a ride down Sierra Highway, maybe with the windows open, and pop the cheque in the nearest WaMu ATM...which is about seven miles away. But it will be good to get out of the house.

A Note on the recent trolling in Le-Le's LJ: [go look cause I ain't linkin'] What I just said to MacCrimmon sums it up as far as I'm concerned, ”They are the purposeless semi-feral 'children of America', who see no future for themselves and therefor have no care for the present or for those outside of their 'pack'.”

And that's all she wrote...

Insurance Company Rules!

2008-07-20T17:19:42Z