RUTHFULLY YOURS

The great American humorists have something in common: hatred.

H. L. Mencken and Mark Twain both could be uproariously funny and charming — and Twain could be tender from time to time, though Mencken could not or would not — but at the bottom of each man’s deep well of humor was a brackish and sour reserve of hatred, for this country, for its institutions, and for its people. Neither man could forgive Americans for being provincial, backward, bigoted, anti-intellectual, floridly religious, or for any of the other real or imagined defects located in the American character.

Historical context matters, of course. As Edmund Burke said, “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.” Twain was born in 1835, and there was much that was detestable in the America of Tom Sawyer. Mencken, at the age of nine, read Huckleberry Finn and experienced a literary and intellectual awakening — “the most stupendous event in my life,” he called it — and followed a similar path. Both men were cranks: Twain with his premonitions and parapsychology, Mencken with his “Prejudices” and his evangelical atheism. He might have been referring to himself when he wrote: “There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.”

The debunking mentality is prevalent in both men’s writing, a genuine fervor to knock the United States and its people down a peg or two. For Twain, America was slavery and the oppression of African Americans. For Mencken, the representative American experience was the Scopes trial, with its greasy Christian fundamentalists and arguments designed to appeal to the “prehensile moron,” his description of the typical American farmer. The debunking mind is typical of the American Left, which feels itself compelled to rewrite every episode in history in such a way as to put black hats on the heads of any and all American heroes: Jefferson? Slave-owning rapist. Lincoln? Not really all that enlightened on race. Saving the world from the Nazis? Sure, but what about the internment of the Japanese? Etc. “It was wonderful to find America,” Twain wrote. “But it would have been more wonderful to miss it.”

In high school, I had a very left-wing American history teacher who was a teachers’-union activist (a very lonely position in Lubbock, Texas, where the existence of such unions was hardly acknowledged) for whom the entirety of the great American story was slavery, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the Great Depression, and the momentary heroism of the New Deal (we were not far from New Deal, Texas), with the great arc of American history concluding on the steps of Central High School in Little Rock on September 23, 1957. It was, for reasons that remain mysterious to me, very important to her — plainly urgent to her — that the American story be one of disappointment, betrayal, and falling short of our founding ideals.

Much of this phenomenon isn’t about how one sees society but how one sees one’s self. Literary men invent literary characters, and very often the first and most important literary character a writer invents is himself. Samuel Clemens cared a great deal more about money and the friendship of titled nobility than Mark Twain ever would, and Mencken was in real life subject to the sort of crude superstitions and pseudoscience that Mencken the public figure would have mocked. The great modern example of this was Molly Ivins, a California native raised in a mansion in the tony Houston neighborhood of River Oaks, who liked to take her private-school friends sailing on her oil-executive father’s yacht, who somehow managed to acquire a ridiculous “Texas” accent found nowhere in Texas and reinvent herself as a backporch-sittin’ champion of the common man, a redneck liberal.

The chief interest of Molly Ivins’s writing about Texas is that it demonstrates how little she actually understood the state, or the Union to which it belongs. As with Twain and Mencken, Ivins’s America would always be backward and corrupt, with Washington run by bribe-paying lobbyists (a lazy writer, she inevitably referred to them as “lobsters” — having thought that funny once, she made a habit of it) and a motley collection of fools and miscreants either too feeble or too greedy to do the right thing, defined as whatever was moving Molly Ivins at any particular moment.

Mencken lived in horror of the American people, “who put the Hon. Warren Gamaliel Harding beside Friedrich Barbarossa and Charlemagne, and hold the Supreme Court to be directly inspired by the Holy Spirit, and belong ardently to every Rotary Club, Ku Klux Klan, and anti-Saloon League, and choke with emotion when the band plays ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’” Much of that horror was imaginary, and still is. But we must have horror, especially in politics. How else to justify present and familiar horror except but by reference to a greater horror? In this year’s election, each candidate’s partisans already have been reduced to making the argument that while their own candidate might be awful, the other candidate is literally akin to Adolf Hitler. Yesterday, I heard both from Clinton supporters and Trump supporters that the other one would usher in Third Reich U.S.A. “Don’t tell yourself that it can’t happen here,” one wrote.

The Islamic Republic of Iran was designated a state sponsor of terrorism in 1984. That move came several years after Iran had seized American hostages while demanding $24 billion in cash and gold to be paid into a Muslim bank for their release.

The total, according to Secretary of State Muskie, came out to $480 million per hostage.

Carter eventually reached a deal to release billions to Iran while Muskie claimed that the ransom payment meant that “the United States emerged stronger and Iran emerged weaker.” Such counterintuitive arguments have become a staple of Obama rhetoric which insists that appeasing terrorists somehow weakens them and strengthens us.

Muskie also said the deal would “not to make any arrangement to encourage terrorism in the future”.

That of course was not true. Paying out ransom to terrorists only encourages more terrorism. While the hostages were freed, the terror tactic never went away.

In 1989, Iran was still trying to blackmail President George H.W. Bush by offering to free yet more American hostages in exchange for around $12 billion in assets. The hostages had been seized by terrorist affiliates of Iran which by now had been on the state sponsor of terror list for nearly half a decade.

Carter’s ransom deal blatantly violated the law. His Treasury Department ordered banks to defy the courts which were addressing claims of damages by American companies. While he and his administration insisted that they were not paying ransom because it was Iran’s money (a familiar claim that has been repeated by Obama with his own ransom payment), that’s exactly what they were doing.

It’s how Iran saw it. It’s why Iran kept taking hostages and demanding ransoms.

Everybody is looking for defense dollars. The latest sleuth is Luke O’Brien, an Army “Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Fellow” at the National Defense University. He thinks he has found a $62 billion pot of cash if we just got rid of our land based ICBMs. The money could then be spent on more important conventional military needs.

It is true nuclear modernization of the USA deterrent force will cost $700 billion over the next 25 years according to a study done by the Center for Security and International Studies. At first glance that is a great deal of money. But it averages $28 billion a year for nearly 500 missiles, submarines and bombers, 5-12 types of warheads, the command and control associated with the force, and the nuclear laboratories and facilities supporting warhead production, safety and refurbishment.

This comes to 4.6% of the current defense budget and a projected ½ of 1% of the Federal budget in 2025 at the initial peak of modernization spending.

Now it is also true that to improve military readiness now and restore both our nuclear and conventional deterrent, we need more defense funding in the next five year defense plan, and certainly in the next decade. Otherwise we may end up with a hollow military much as we did at the end of the Carter administration. But killing ICBMs simply doesn’t solve either problem.

In the next ten years the nuclear platforms including nuclear capable bombers, land based missiles, and submarines will cost $135 billion. These funds are roughly divided between sustainment of old systems and modernization for new ones.

The ICBM sustainment is $15 billon while another $7 billion would be for modernization. A modest additional amount is also projected to be spent on ICBM warheads and new command and control systems bringing the total to around $24 billion for the next decade.