by AM | Nov 22, 2023 | Aggregate
The Biden administration has requested an additional $14 billion for Israel in the wake of the recent Hamas attacks, and Congress seems poised to meet, or even exceed, that request.
We are now accustomed to such reports of massive new military spending; given the deteriorating state of the American homeland, it is nevertheless extraordinary. Calls for fiscal accountability with regard to Pentagon spending are exceedingly rare, even on the “fiscally conservative” side of the aisle. After $113 billion already devoted to prolonging the catastrophic proxy war in Ukraine, with more billions recently pledged by the Biden administration and supported by the chickenhawks on Capitol Hill, do the American people believe they are getting their money’s worth?
Recent polling data show a marked turn in public opinion away from open-ended support for further military escalation of the bloody conflict, and no wonder. Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has pointed out that while President Biden offered a $700 payment per household to Maui survivors of the deadliest wildfire in recent history, he simultaneously requested an additional $25 billion in funding for the Ukraine war, which comes to the equivalent of $500,000 per Maui household. “That gives you some idea of what this nation is sacrificing to fund the war machine,” he writes.
It’s an argument that resonates with American voters weary of forever wars, but the uniparty in Washington bent on escalating the disastrous war in Ukraine has a new argument: Shoveling more billions into the conflict is the best possible use of taxpayer dollars.
“Russians are dying…. It’s the best money we’ve ever spent,” crows the Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
“We’re getting our money’s worth on our Ukraine investment,” asserts the Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.
“It’s the best national defense spending I think we’ve ever done” bragged his colleague, Utah’s Republican Mitt Romney. “We’re losing no lives in Ukraine…. We’re devastating the Russian military for a very small amount of money relative to what we spend on the rest of defense.”
Let’s leave aside for a moment the assertion that the war is actually weakening Russia, which is manifestly not the case. Let’s also leave aside the callous disregard for Ukrainian lives being sacrificed for U.S. geopolitical ends. These remarks also betray a striking ignorance of the relationship between U.S. funding of “forever wars” abroad and deteriorating conditions here at home.
The fact is that American taxpayers’ funding of endless foreign conflicts at the expense of urgent domestic needs extends far beyond the current crisis in Ukraine. American spending on the post-9/11 regime change (Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Libya) has been estimated at an eye-popping $8 trillion.
In the meantime, as Kennedy notes, conditions at home have measurably deteriorated over the past three decades, with “crumbling cities, antiquated railways, failing water systems, decaying infrastructure, and an ailing economy.… We maintain 800 military bases around the world. The peace dividend that was supposed to come after the Berlin Wall fell was never redeemed.”
The “peace dividend” Kennedy refers to is the savings in defense spending that was supposed to come with the conclusion of the Cold War and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe. Finally, the peace economy would be restored. Defense spending as a proportion of GDP could return to the 1–2 percent levels that prevailed before WWII.
While military spending moderated in the 1990s, the promise of a peace dividend never materialized. Instead, the defense budget increased dramatically after 9/11, and it has remained high ever since.
Today, excluding veterans’ benefits and foreign aid spending, the annual defense budget is about $900 billion. In 2000 it was $294 billion. In constant dollars, that’s a 60 percent increase.
The threat of the Soviet Union was replaced with terrorism, and then, mere months after the inept American withdrawal from Afghanistan, a new source of defense contracts fell into the lap of the defense industry—the Ukraine war. The gravy train has chugged on uninterrupted.
What’s the next stop of the gravy train? Already the foreign policy establishment seems to be trying to engineer a war with China, using the same playbook. Bellicose rhetoric, provocative military maneuvers, encirclement, and economic warfare accompany the arming of Taiwan, the obvious vehicle for another Ukraine-style proxy war. Now Congress is promising yet more billions for a new conflict in the Middle East.
Americans’ willingness to finance the forever wars is wavering. Financially-strapped working-class families are going into credit card debt at record levels just to make ends meet. Americans’ credit card debt for the first time ever has surpassed $1 trillion, according to data by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Now, with Ukraine in ruins, nuclear tensions with Russia escalating, and a decaying domestic economy plagued by exploding federal deficits, it is long past time to focus on healing our society and becoming strong again from the inside. Let’s broker peace wherever possible, end the Ukrainian conflict, and use the resulting peace dividend to address our problems here at home…before it’s too late.
by AM | Nov 22, 2023 | Aggregate
Territorial conquest is back around the globe, whether we like it or not. For decades, the internationalist fantasies of the bipartisan establishment have driven us to support expensive and unwinnable projects in every place from Kabul to Kiev. Internationalist overstretch weakened America from a unipolar position after the fall of the USSR to the current multipolar order.
In the vacuum left by an America weakened by government incompetence, military overstretch, and economic insolvency, the neocon cousins of the liberal internationalists see the fraying order and believe the solution is indiscriminate American intervention. Yet the right answer to American decline isn’t to waddle even more into peripheral conflicts around the world, but instead to defend our homeland against emerging threats from both near and far.
The internationalists in both parties are intent on convincing Americans to direct taxpayer dollars to Kharkiv that still looks better than parts of San Francisco—at least before Gavin Newsom gave the city an emergency face-lift in preparation for Xi Jinping’s recent visit.
Amid this narrative onslaught, one such invasion has gone conspicuously forgotten: Azerbaijan’s invasion in September of the previously autonomous Artsakh region adjacent to Armenia.
Some context: Artsakh has been populated mostly by Armenians since antiquity. Armenians are Christians who speak an Indo-European language. When the Soviets took control of the Caucasus in the early 1920s, they designated Nagorno-Karabakh as an autonomous oblast within Soviet Azerbaijan, recognizing its unique majority ethnic Armenian character in the otherwise Azeri republic. Azeris are Muslims who speak a Turkic language. This situation held until the late 1980s, when tensions boiled over into violence. It wasn’t long after the fall of the USSR in 1991 that war erupted in the First Nagorno-Karabakh War of 1992-1994.
Against all odds, the Armenians won the war and established control over Artsakh. Azerbaijan worked with its pan-Turkic big brothers in Turkey to slowly rearm, aided by two decades of military assistance from the U.S. American taxpayers were made for 20 years to arm the greatest enemies of the world’s oldest Christian country. Even worse, supporting Azerbaijan seems like the rare case where American foreign policy elites understood the sin they were committing but still did it—and did it for money.
In 2020, Azerbaijan invaded Artsakh and defeated the Armenians in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War. All of the American military assistance helped. They regained much of their lost territory and reduced Artsakh to a single road link to Armenia, the Lachin Corridor. In late 2022, they blockaded the road and slowly choked Artsakh to death. When Azerbaijan formally invaded again in September 2023, Armenia was completely outmatched and sued for peace after a day. Now, in just a few weeks, over 100,000 Armenians have fled their ancestral homeland in Artsakh to live as refugees in the rest of Armenia.
In other words, Azerbaijan is doing the same thing to the Artsakh region that Russia is doing to Ukraine—but the U.S. and Europe are looking the other way and pretending not to notice. It is because Azerbaijan has one of the most effective lobbying operations in the U.S. and other Western nations.
Bankrolling it all is oil and gas. Azerbaijan’s largest employer, taxpayer, and piggy bank for influence-peddling is the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR). SOCAR has a fancy office that opened in Washington, D.C. in 2012, right around the time Azerbaijan was campaigning for exemptions in the Iran sanctions that would allow construction to continue on their Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP). If that was the goal of SOCAR’s office, it worked. President Obama’s 2012 Executive Order on sanctions exempted the pipeline, and so did the Iran Freedom and Counter Proliferation Act.
John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and now heading up “clean energy” projects for Biden, was the co-founder of the Podesta Group, the D.C. lobbying firm that represented the Embassy of the Republic of Azerbaijan in the United States from 2009 to 2017. John left the firm early on, but kept close ties with his brother Tony, the other co-founder and principal. In 2016 FARA filings, the Podesta Group made 17 pages of contacts on behalf of Azerbaijan that year. By comparison, another client of theirs, India, had four pages. All of those contacts paid off; between February and June of 2016, the Podesta Group was paid $379,325.73 for its work on behalf of the Embassy of the Republic of Azerbaijan.
All of that caviar has made Azerbaijan a lot of powerful friends. American interests abroad shouldn’t be guided by foreign lobbyists, but all too often, it seems that’s exactly who is making the crucial decisions on how and where to divert our precious resources. Unfortunately, American foreign policy is heavily influenced by whoever can write the largest check—or, in the case of Ukraine, whoever can write the largest check to the President’s ne’er-do-well son.
The right solution isn’t for the U.S. to militarily intervene in Artsakh, any more than we should be militarily engaged to allow Ukraine to recapture the Russian-occupied regions of the Donbas. Rather it is for the U.S. to disengage by ceasing its layers of explicit and implicit support for Azerbaijan.
Chief among these layers of support is Section 907. In 1992, Congress passed the Freedom Support Act. Included in the legislation was Section 907, which explicitly banned the U.S. from sending direct aid to the government of Azerbaijan. This legislation worked as designed until 2001, when the Senate adopted an amendment that allowed the president to waive Section 907, which American presidents have done annually ever since. Put another way, since 2001, the U.S. has provided military assistance to Azerbaijan—our foreign policy elites helped build the war machine used to push Armenians out of Artsakh.
Much of that military assistance would have been beyond Azerbaijan’s means if not for the various gas pipelines they have built with Western assistance. Europe needs gas to fuel its economy, and America sits atop one of the world’s great gas bounties. We could have supplied Europe with a near-endless supply of liquified natural gas, but instead, we acceded to the climate change agenda. We restricted our gas industry at home, while encouraging our biggest oil and gas companies to lead all sorts of projects abroad. The climate cult made Azerbaijan and its petro-pals flush with cash.
All Armenia needs is a fair chance. Armenia needs America to stop enabling Azerbaijan.
The ways to do it are simple. Shut down the Azerbaijan lobby. Cease publishing its lies in the complicit U.S. press. Stop delivering military assistance to Baku’s dictator. Unleash the American energy sector and use our bountiful resources to undermine Azerbaijan’s gas markets in Europe.
This last part is key: Greater American prosperity, made possible by a robust revival of America First policies at home, can usher in a new era of peace around the world. Imagine America unburdened by heavy-handed influence peddling at the highest echelons. Imagine America unashamedly pursuing its own interests.
It’s time to stand up for what’s right. It’s time to stand up for American interests.
by AM | Nov 22, 2023 | Aggregate
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador set the tone for U.S.-Mexican relations when he asserted earlier this year that Mexico does “not produce fentanyl, and we do not have consumption of fentanyl; why don’t they [the United States] take care of their problem of social decay?”
AMLO’s brash assertion revealed much about what he really thinks of el Norte and President Biden’s feckless Mexico policy. Under Biden, the highest priority in U.S.-Mexican security relations continues to be for the Department of Homeland Security to keep our frontier open to illegal migrants, even after millions have already crossed the southern border.
The White House imposes no negative consequences for Mexican non-cooperation on fighting illegal drugs, even as Biden’s own counternarcotics chief sounds the alarm. According to DEA Director Anne Milgram, “The most urgent threat to our communities, to our children and our families is [the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel] which are mass-producing the fentanyl that is poisoning and killing Americans.”
Biden’s economic team also voices no cautionary concerns about where U.S.-Mexican commercial integration is going. It should be clear that Mexico’s capacity to remain a solid business partner is deeply undermined by its internal corruption-criminal cancer. Yet U.S. businesses are charging headlong into a new era of “nearshoring” industries in a country where criminal cartels vie for control of almost 40 percent of the national territory, where wide-spread Mafia-like extortion squeezes all legitimate businesses, and the judicial-police-legal system is a shambles.
Into this void, thankfully, rides Governor Greg Abbott and Texas to fight for the Lone Star State and the American national interest, and in particular to resist the Biden administration’s open-borderism. The Austin-based Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), joined by the Heritage Foundation, recently put a spotlight on this crucial fight with a summit on U.S.-Mexican relations.
The good news coming out of the TPPF summit is that Texas, even after three years of struggle with the Biden administration, still has plenty of resources and energy, particularly when it comes to keeping out illegal migrants. The bad news is that U.S.-Mexican relations are not likely to improve when AMLO leaves the presidency in 2024, and the Biden administration has no remorse or second thoughts about its destructive policies towards Mexico or Latin America.
First and foremost, alas, is the wearying fight against Biden’s refusal to protect the American border from millions of invading foreign migrants. With admirable resilience, Texas is still refusing to accede to Washington craziness; Abbott and his team, led by the state’s lawyers and the Department of Public Safety, continue to undertake a spirited resistance against unprecedented federal malfeasance in defending the national frontier.
Summit experts analyzed the American constitutional crisis that Biden’s border policy has unleashed. The president’s dubious claim that opening the U.S. border is a matter of “foreign affairs,” exclusive to the federal government, blithely ignores that admitting millions of illegal migrants overwhelms state obligations to provide local services and community security. Constitutional mandates, such as those spelled out in Article IV, Section 4, and the 10th Amendment, are valuable legal tools in thwarting the warped federalism that is trying to force Texas, and other states, to prioritize foreign migrants over their own citizens.
The Lone Star State is in a fierce legal struggle to halt Biden’s outrageous campaign to remove and dismantle state-deployed concertina wire and water barriers in the Rio Grande that block illegal migrants. The tactic is effective, and Biden officials are predictably outraged; they have tried to destroy the barriers physically, and Texas has sued to protect state property. The smuggling cartels also see the barriers as a serious impediment and are directing more of their human cargo to cross into other states, such as Arizona.
Having come up with many creative responses to Washington, such as transporting illegal migrants to blue states, Abbott has called a fourth special session of the legislature to commit more resources to the crisis. A new bill under consideration would make unlawful entry into Texas a state crime and authorize county officials to order foreign migrants returned to ports of entry. The plan cannot push them all the way back into Mexico, but it would slow migrants’ northward progress.
Panel experts at the summit detailed how the U.S. Border Patrol regularly coordinates directly with Mexican government authorities to move illegal migrants across the border, a phenomenon without precedent in American history. Panel experts also denounced the policies that exhort millions from around the world to tramp through Mexico to the American frontier, despite the open knowledge countless thousands fall victim to cartel abuses. The mass exploitation includes crimes against women and children, including rape and chattel labor, as well as some 2,000 verified deaths, yet little of this carnage and tragedy captures media attention; they prefer the romanticized immigrant-arrival story.
Similarly, AMLO rarely decries these cartel abuses that take place on Mexican territory. Instead, he proclaims that all economic migrants should exercise their “universal human right” to illegally cross national borders – risks to women and children be damned. No doubt that AMLO also smiles at the $51 billion in annual remittances that Mexicans in el Norte send back. That is why el presidente continues to demand more visas and access for Mexicans to go north. More than 38 million Mexicans or first-generation Mexican-Americans already live in the United States, of which some five million are illegally present.
Consider the immigration data just for Mexicans: in 2022, the State Department issued some 66,000 immigrant visas (green cards) to Mexicans; plus 1.7 million temporary visitor visas; and over 400,000 temporary work visas. In addition, the Biden administration, in accommodating AMLO while ducking public scrutiny, also “paroled” in another 57,000 Mexicans. Yet the Mexican president still wants more access, and the White House thoroughly agrees: Bringing in foreign workers is manifestly a higher Biden priority than trying to reintegrate marginalized Americans back into the U.S. labor force.
The American trade über alles lobby is equally worrisome, and shortsighted. U.S. businesspeople and policymakers need to have an honest discussion about how robust trade with Mexico might actually be cutting against the national interest in areas other than just the loss of manufacturing jobs. It was a debated topic at TPPF summit, but it is inconceivable that the Mexican underworld does not get a substantial cut of the $780 billion in legal products and goods crossing the border in both directions.
Some 175,000 Mexicans work for organized crime, making it the country’s fifth largest employer. The cartels reap profits not just through smuggling illegal drugs and migrants, but through widespread extortion of normal business activities, including cross-border trade. The extortion is hidden amid legitimate fees and costs, such as those associated with freight forwarding, insurance, and warehousing, leaving most Americans unaware that it takes place. But Mexicans live constantly with these kinds of Mafia-like shakedowns that garner the criminal underworld vast profits south of the border.
Gangsters brandishing AK-47s are only the foot soldiers of a sophisticated crime and corruption cancer that is strangling Mexico. AMLO’s much ballyhooed claims of overcoming it are not only untrue, but they mask the Mexican president’s ruthless pursuit of power and control. As summit experts pointed out, AMLO will leave office in 2024, but will almost certainly be succeeded by his protégé Claudia Scheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico City.
Whether Scheinbaum turns out to be an AMLO puppet or a new leftist political force, she is unlikely to make any progress against the corruption-criminality axis that dominates Mexico. Intense national efforts, backed up by a quarter century of NAFTA commercial integration and a decade of Washington’s Merida Initiative, have all dramatically failed to boost Mexico’s modernization forces. Instead, the criminal underworld became more entrenched and profitable—and not just from its illegal drug market in the U.S.—as our southern neighbor unsuccessfully struggles to develop a functioning judicial system and reliable police forces. La presidenta Scheinbaum will have no answers to the criminal bribes and death threats that permeate Mexican institutions.
A summit panel also examined the Biden administration’s overall engagement in Latin America and the Caribbean. In the discussion, some conservative critics argued convincingly that Biden has no discernible diplomatic strategy for the Americas. In fact, however, the “Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection,” which the president proclaimed in 2022, is the heart of administration engagement for the region. U.S. foreign policy is all about promoting open-borderism and massive immigration.
As the TPPF summit made clear, Biden’s approach is as removed from enlightened America First principles as U.S. diplomacy for the hemisphere has ever been. Biden zealots have not only unleashed migration chaos in Mexico and across the Americas, but their “foreign policy” has put Texas and other states on the frontline in defending the rule of law in our own country.
It is a great shame that Abbott does not have a national pulpit to respond to the prickly Mexican president; at least the governor understands the U.S. national interest. Meanwhile, we can only hope that AMLO does not ask President Biden to renegotiate the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
by AM | Nov 22, 2023 | Aggregate
The writing is on the wall. An op-ed in the New York Times entitled “I’m a Ukrainian, and I Refuse to Compete for Your Attention” summed things up nicely: A media junket the author’s friend had been organizing to Ukraine was canceled. The T.V. crew instead left for the Middle East.
The United States controls how the war in the Ukraine proceeds and always has. Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said that it was the Americans who scuttled any chance of peace in Ukraine as early as March 2022, soon after the war began. “The only people who could resolve the war over Ukraine are the Americans. During the peace talks in March 2022 in Istanbul, Ukrainians did not agree to peace because they were not allowed to. They had to coordinate everything they talked about with the Americans first. However, nothing eventually happened. My impression is that nothing could happen because everything was decided in Washington.”
Fast-forward to 2023, and the story is different. Earlier this month NBC News quietly released a report that said U.S. and European officials broached the topic of peace negotiations with Ukraine, including “very broad outlines of what Ukraine might need to give up to reach a deal with Russia.” NBC said “the discussions are an acknowledgment of the dynamics militarily on the ground in Ukraine and politically in the U.S. and Europe.” They began amid concerns that the war has reached a stalemate and about the ability to continue providing open-ended aid to Ukraine.
Biden administration officials are also worried that Ukraine is running out of men in this war of attrition, while Russia has a seemingly endless supply. Ukraine is struggling with recruiting and recently saw public protests (of course not shown on American T.V.) about President Volodymyr Zelensky’s open-ended conscription requirements. Kiev is resorting to sending 40- and 50-year-olds to the front.
This comes as Time is reporting Zelensky’s top advisers admitted the war is currently unwinnable for Ukraine. Things look a bit better from the point of view of Ukraine commander-in-chief General Valery Zaluzhny, who believes the war is only at a stalemate. “It’s now a battle of inches,” say American sources quietly.
Americans will be forgiven if they never hear this bad news, never mind be surprised by it if they did. The narrative which drove sports teams to wear blue and yellow patches and E Street Band member Steve Van Zandt to paint his guitar the Ukrainian colors was simple. Amidst a flood of propaganda, the story was always the same: Ukraine was pushing back the Russians with weapons provided by a broad range of agreeable NATO benefactors. Between Ukrainian jet fighter aces with improbable kill ratios to patriotic female sniper teams with improbable hair and makeup, Russia was losing. It would be a difficult but noble slog for “as long as it takes” to drive the Russians out.
Any talk about peace was insulting to Kiev, fighting for its survival and all. Meanwhile, Zelensky at first flew around the world like the antichrist Bono, procuring weapons while showing off his man-to-man relationships with celebrities. (Now desperate, Zelensky is claiming Russia, Iran, and North Korea sponsored Hamas’s attack on Israel as he tries to rustle up support.)
It’s as compelling as it is untrue. Any thoughtful analysis of the war showed it to be, from early days, a war of attrition at best for the Ukrainian side. While the U.S. could supply nearly bottomless cargo planes full of weapons and munitions, right up to the promised F-16 fighter-bombers and M1A tanks, it could not fill the manpower gap. Any appetite for American troop involvement was hushed up early in the fight. Russia could do what she had always done at war: hunker down in the field and reach deep into its vast territory to find ever more conscripts to wait out the enemy. It didn’t hurt that Russia’s capability versus NATO equipment was surprisingly good, or perhaps the Ukrainians’ handling of sophisticated Western arms was surprisingly bad.
But the most predictable factor leading to quiet U.S. moves toward some sort of “peace solution” in Ukraine is as predictable as the battlefield results. There is unease in the U.S. government over how much less public attention (despite the propaganda) the war in Ukraine has garnered since the Israeli–Hamas conflict began more than a month ago. Combined with a new Speaker of the House seeking to decouple aid to Israel from aid to Ukraine, officials fear that shift could make securing additional funds for Kiev difficult.
Americans, both the people and their government, distracted by the greatest propaganda tools ever imagined (the media), seem capable of focusing on only one bright shiny object at a time. In the case of wars, a new bright shiny object must include two clear sides, one good and one pure evil, with one preferably an underdog, daily combat footage which can be obtained without too much danger, and a football game-like progression across a map that is easy to follow. It should not be boring. Ukraine was such a conflict and enjoyed almost a full two-year run.
Nevertheless, the fickle attention of America shifted to the Middle East just as things started to look more and more like static WWI trench warfare in Ukraine. It was a hard act to follow, but something always follows nonetheless (the same calculus works for natural disasters and mass shootings, which are only as mediagenic-good as the next one coming.) Over 41 percent of Americans now say the U.S. is doing too much to help Kiev. That’s a significant change from just three months ago when only 24 percent of Americans said they felt that way.
Ukraine, like Israel, owes most of its continued existence to American weaponry. However, despite the blue and yellow splattered on social media at present, Ukraine does not have anywhere near the base of support Israel does among the American public and especially within the American Congress. The terms for resolving the war will be dictated to Kiev as much by Washington as they will be by Moscow, as with Crimea a few years ago. The end will be quite sad; Russia will very likely solidify its hold on Donbas and the Crimea, and achieve new territory to the west approaching Kiev, roughly 20 percent of Ukraine. Ukraine will be forced to set aside its goal of joining NATO even as the U.S. takes a new stand on its western border with Poland.
It is all something of a set piece. America has an old habit of wandering into a conflict and then losing interest. “We have your back” and “we will not abandon you” join “the check’s in the mail” and “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” among joking faux reassurances. Our proxies seem to end up abandoned and hung out to die. As in Iraq and Afghanistan, never mind Vietnam before that, what was realized at the end could have most likely been achievable at pretty much anytime after the initial hurrahs passed away. It is sad that so many had to die to likely see it happen in 2023.
by AM | Nov 22, 2023 | Aggregate
Sports
State of the Union: Gaudeamus igitur, the 139th Game is played today.
(The 1875 Yale Bulldogs/public domain)
The American Conservative is irregular in its sporting coverage, but pretty assiduous in its treatment of American folkways and traditional practices. Today at New Haven, the Harvard Crimson (8–1) and the Yale Bulldogs (6–3) are going to contest the field per the rules of American football for the 139th time. The wicked sons of Eli—the Yalies, that is—lead the series 69–61–8.
Your humble correspondent is, alas, unable to cover the event live, but imagines it will be much like earlier iterations of The Game (this meeting of athletic titans is called The Game, so styled). Blackie Sherrod, a sportswriter from Texas, got to the heart of the thing when covering the 1960 meeting:
This one dignified old gent in Tyrolian hat, Tattersall vest and stout brogues stood discreetly behind a rock wall and produced a brown bottle from somewhere in his Brooks Brothers garments. He pulled heroically at the stuff, while his freshly powdered wattles quivered in protest, and went into a spell of coughing and eye watering.
You just knew that this fine gent would never repeat this torture on any other day of the year. He usually sat in a lush leather chair at the club and had Jarvis or Cleve or Hamilton fetch him an ale for his appetite.
But, by gad, sir, this was The Game and these things have to be done.
Sherrod had a good time, despite the perhaps disappointing football on display, which is not the point anyway.
And so, it seemed to this scarred fugitive from the grim, grim world of Southwest football, that The Game isn’t The Game at all, in our provincial terms.
Rather it’s a holiday to be anticipated and relished, a place to take your best gal with a calm realization that there has to be a loser just as there has to be a winner, and the sky ain’t gonna fall down, regardless of the result.
The Hahvuds lost, to be sure, and the pure blue amateur sky stayed up there and everybody had a ball and who’s to say these citizens ain’t got the right idea?
Gaudeamus igitur. Go Harvard.
