Freude Schoner Gotterfunken x 10,000

Rather than me quote all of Schiller's masterpiece, you can listen to it here, as sung by 10,000 Japanese.  Apparently an annual New Year's Eve community event in Osaka, something like this has been done every year for quite a long time.  They make everyone in the audience a part of the production.  Here's the scene from New Year's 2012 (gotten from this source):

The soloists are professionals, clear and very sharp, as are the orchestra and conductor.  Speaking of the conductor, at the end of the performance he looks like he's been through the war, and no wonder - any chorus of 10,000 will be hard to manage, even if comprised of professionals.  And these folks are amateurs, some old and some very young.  The chorus is a big, lurching, heaving beast, reliably a note behind the orchestra.  Such a dispersed group could hardly expect to stay together, and it hardly matters.  There's something deeply impressive about a performance where there is no audience.  And for this song, in particular.  No one is passive, all are singing about the universal effects of joy and amity.  There are no listeners, or rather everyone is a listener, and the small sing right along with the great and all are contented.

Watching the Watchers

This charming image is from a National Geographic photoblog:

Kids still like watching airplanes today, but the gawkers furthest down the sidewalk don't appear to have any with them.  Those lumbering beasts were novel enough to inspire fascination, and air travel still had a mystique.

Very different today, where air travel is uncomfortable, tedious, and fraught with frightening police state theater.

I also like that they felt free to pull over to the right lane of an expressway to relax and watch.

The Wrong Kind of Socialism

In the 1960's, LDS Apostle Bruce R. McConkie attempted to write an unofficial dictionary of Latter-day Saint doctrine.  Not meant to be authoritative, the results were somewhat uneven though the effort was sincere.

One blind spot was regarding politics.  Here, in the "Signs of the Times" article, McConkie described the famines, depressions and economic turmoil supposed to precede the Second Coming of the Savior Jesus Christ:

Because of iniquity and greed in the hearts of men, there will be depressions, famines, and a frantic search for temporal security--a security sought without turning to the Lord or obeying his precepts.

So far, so good.  But things take an odd turn here:

We my expect to see the insatiable desire to get something for nothing result in further class legislation and more socialistic experiments by governments.

As if "socialistic experiments" were any problem at all right now.

How Re-Enacting Started

Wow this got to me.  From Confederates in the Attic:

Veterans bivouacked at actual battlegrounds, donned their old uniforms, and occasionally performed mock versions of the heroic deeds of their youth.  In 1913, hundreds of geriatric rebels rushed as best they could across the field they'd crossed during Pickett's Charge, toting canes instead of muskets and greeting their erstwhile foes with handshakes rather than bayonets.

War is the Enemy of Art

Enemy of real art, not propaganda disguised as such.  Hermann Hesse, in an essay just after the start of the Great War:

Among our writers and men of letters there are, I believe, few if any whose present utterances, spoken or written in the anger of the moment, will be counted as their best work.  Nor is there any serious writer at heart who prefers Korner's patriotic songs to the poems of Goethe who held so conspicuously aloof from the War of Liberation.

Hesse remarks further that the "super-patriots" really do hold Goethe quite out of favor in their militaristic atmosphere, which is very much the point.  War ruins art and the warlike mentality degrades our ability to appreciate it.

Security in the White House

He saw the men ahead.  There was no way to avoid them.  The guards could not seem to keep them out, and many of them slept in the White House hall.  The word had passed that he was coming, and so they were on their feet and smiling.  Each of these wanted a favor...In four years of living in the White House, Mr. Lincoln had become accustomed to the morning vultures.  He could do little to be rid of them...
There was no way around them...Some men, desperate or arrogant, grabbed the crook of his arm and held him until the President pulled himself loose and said: "I am sorry.  I cannot be of help to you."  Some spoke quietly and swiftly, their heads swinging to follow him as he kept walking.  Some wept.  A few muttered threats and departed.

That's on the first page of Jim Bishop's bestseller The Day Lincoln Was Shot.  Quite foreboding the lack of security, too, for the title tells us what happened to President just a few hours later.  This atmosphere at the White House registered quite a surprise - it's a tremendous contrast to the armored fortress that the White House has become since.

Until that day, the 14th of April 1865, no US president had been assassinated.  Security is usually reactive, and people don't often assess threats realistically until the threats have been proven.  But the nation was just finishing a calamitous civil war, and lots of people had animosity for its author, and the Administration knew it, "talked about it...worried about it and...counterplotted against it."  Steps were taken, but (then and now) it is difficult to protect the life of a public figure from the truly determined.

Mr. Lincoln's philosophy was that he could be killed at any time by anyone who was willing to give his own life in return.  Now and then, the President discussed a violent death, and, in this, his attitude was one of sadness and resignation rather than fright.

That must wear on a person.

Jobs for Ex-Servicemen

From Jonathan Shay's thought-provoking book Odysseus In America.  Excerpted in the New York Times:

For which civilian careers does prolonged combat prepare a person? Let's look at the strengths, skills, and capacities acquired during prolonged combat:
• Control of fear.
• Cunning, the arts of deception, the arts of the "mind-[expletive]."
• Control of violence against members of their own group.
• The capacity to respond skillfully and instantly with violent, lethal force.
• Vigilance, perpetual mobilization for danger.
• Regarding fixed rules as possible threats to their own and their comrades' survival.
• Regarding fixed "rules of war" as possible advantages to be gained over the enemy.
• Suppression of compassion, horror, guilt, tenderness, grief, disgust.
• The capacity to lie fluently and convincingly.
• Physical strength, quickness, endurance, stealth.
• Skill at locating and grabbing needed supplies, whether officially provided or not.
• Skill in the use of a variety of lethal weapons.
• Skill in adapting to harsh physical conditions.

Shay answers his question later in the chapter.  It's a rather obvious conclusion:

A career that war exactly prepares veterans for upon return to civilian life is a criminal career...

This problem has been around for a long time.  In other times and seasons whole societies were affected by soldiers trained to violence and then abandoned by their employers.  From Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century:

Outside Paris the breakdown of Paris was reaching catastrophe.  Its catalyst was the brigandige of military companies spawned by the warfare of the last fifteen years.  These were the Free Companies who "write sorrow on the bosom of the earth" and were to become the torment of the age.  Composed of English, Welsh, and Gascons released after Poitiers by the Black Prince, as soldiers customarily were to avoid further payment, they had acquired in the Prince's campaigns a taste for the ease and riches of plunder...They imposed ransoms on prosperous villages and burned the poor ones, robbed abbeys and monasteries of their stores and valuables, pillaged peasants' barns, killed and tortured those who hid their goods or resisted ransom, not sparing the clergy or the aged, violated virgins, nuns, and mothers, abducted women as enforced camp-followers and men as servants.  As the addiction took hold, they wantonly burned harvests and farm equipment and cut down trees and vines, destroying what they lived by, in actions which seem inexplicable except as a fever of the time or an exaggeration of the chroniclers.

Fever and exaggeration surely there were, but Tuchman also provides inadvertent hints at other explanations: these freebooters were looking for patrons, people to pay them to fight in actual battles, or not to fight at all.  By that measure, the bigger effect they had on commerce and production the more motivated wealthy lords might be to buy them off.

It's a long-held theory that more than one of the Great Crusades was motivated, at least in part, to get these brigands to practice their brigandage somewhere else and hopefully have their population thinned by attrition as well.

The 20th Century surely has had more soldiers than any other, perhaps all the others combined, and almost all of them did not continue in military work after the big wars ended.  In the US, the G. I. Bill was intended to provide privileges and opportunities for returning soldiers to find something to do with their lives other than the killing and madness of great military operations.  Their new jobs were a tremendous contrast to their old ones.  This photo taken in 1951 (found on a National Geographic website) are a group of former soldiers learning how to decorate cakes: