For $1,000, fill in the blanks:
 
_____ underestimated the _____ and overestimated his own army...he had assembled only nine divisions - some 100,000 troops.  His own generals were doubters; they told him it would take an army more than twice that size to invade and occupy  _____.  To compound his error,  _____ was committing _____to a second major battlefront while he was heavily engaged in _____.
 
 
I don't have the music from Jeopardy, so while you're thinking you can read this, which I gurantee you will never hear on David Letterman:
 
Rudy Giuliani had finally found a hooker who would service him for $50 and the cost of the room.  Rudy saved the $50 by taking her into St. Patick's Cathedral, which had pews and everything.  The hooker lay down on the pew.  She looked and saw Rudy a few feet away jerking off.  "What are you doing?" she asked.  Rudy said, "For $50, do you think I'm giving you the easy one?"
 
I await your replies.
 
Time's up.  The correct answers are:
 
Mussolini  underestimated the Greeks and overestimated his own army...he had assembled only nine divisions - some 100,000 troops.  His own generals were doubters; they told him it would take an army more than twice that size to invade and occupy  Greece.  To compound his error,  Mussolin was committing Italy to a second major battlefront while he was heavily engaged in East Africa.
 
Quite by accident I came across this paragraph in the Partisans and Guerrillas volume of the Time-Life series on World War II.  What a surprise, huh?  Bet some of you out there thought the missing words were Bush Iraquis Iraq Bush America and Afghanistan....I take that back...no resemblance at all...who could compare us to some fascist clown?...we're the good guys.
 
Yeah...that's the sort of funny info you come across when you read.  More people should try it.  Just think if I'd sent copies of that book to Cheney and Rumsfeld back in 2002.  Iraq war wouldn't have happened.  But for want of a nail and all that.
 
Read.  Ya know, once people thought they should read to understand the way life happens by looking at how it happened before.  Yeah...that's so old world.
 
Oh, I don't believe history repeats itself.  As Mark Twain said, at best history rhymes.  And yet, just look at those blanks in that paragraph.  That, as Rummy said, is stuff happenin'.  I got to thinkin' about readin' and what can be learned by readin' as a result of Halberstam's mention of The Reason Why in the e-mail one of you sent me last week.  I read The Reason Why a decade ago...about the charge of the light brigade and the Crimean war more broadly.  The charge was a misunderstanding of orders.  General ordered his men to take the enemy cannon.  But the officers who got the message couldn't see the cannon the general could see.  They could only see cannon a way down a long, broad plain, so that goin' at those cannon would be like goin' after cannon at the end of a handball court.  While the cannon was shootin', of course.  Clear suicide.  In fact, one of the commanding officers was heard to mutter as he turned his horse toward the cannon, "Here goes the last of the Brudenells."  And he did go, along with most of the 600.
 
The Reason Why...the reason why was the two commanding officers hated each other.  They could have conferred about an obviously insane order and sent a messenger to get clarification.  But they hated each other, and so most of their men died.  They acted out of emotion, not principle or rationality.  Oh, heck, and how could anyone find anything in a book like that that had anything to do with anything today?  I mean, this is a war like no other...the white house crowd said so, didn't they?
 
This war clearly isn't like Vietnam.  Vietnam lasted most ten years.  We got a long time to go before anyone can compare this war to Vietnam.  Besides, this war is a bonanza, not a quagmire.
 
No, I see this war as more like the Revolutionary War.  And guess what?  We're the British.  Yeah.  Ya see, the U.S. has had ten major wars, counting this one.  The Rev, 1812, Mexico, Civil War, Spanish, WWi, WWii, Korea, Vietnam and Freedom.  This one now has lasted longer than any other except Vietnam and the Revolutionary War.  I think the Revolutionary War lasted six.  Well, about readin'...one of my favorite books is about our Presidents.  In the section on Washington, the book tells how when Cornwallis surrendered, the war ended.  But the Brits won most of the battles.  A British army was landing in New York just when Cornwallis surrendered.  George III wanted to keep it up.  But it was just too damn expensive.  They could have kept fighting.  The fighting was very much in progress.  But they surrendered.  Just wore 'em out.  Nothing final.  So I was hopin' to use readin' to make some point about thinkin' about how sompin went in the past and what that might have to do with how sompin might go in the future....ah, but it's a new woild.
 
In the new woild, people don't write about history and facts...they write about ideas...like there was a guy a decade ago who wrote that because the soviet union fell, there would now be no more history...really...this guy got his book published and people bought it...and people think P.T. Barnum was the king of malarky.  people call that writer a neo-con, although I don't see much difference between neo-cons and what we used to call reactionaries, bearing in mind that history at best rhymes...ideas...the great thing about writin' about ideas instead of history and facts is that you can use ideology and opinions and wishful thinking instead of logic and research...if people get used to readin' and listenin' to ideas instead of facts and history, then they'll fall prey to pretty much any kind of manipulation or just plain preposturous bullshit...like that we would be greeted in Iraq as liberators...or that we have to take out Iran before they attack us...I mean, we just made that mistake, and we're still suffering from it...in what terms can we describe human behavior that repeats mistakes, mistakes only recently made to boot?
 
Gee, I once loaned a girlfriend money and didn't get it back.  Then another girlfriend asked me for money, and I said to myself, "Gee, I think I made that mistake before."  But I loaned the second girlfriend money.  I didn't get that money back either.  Can you think of any terms that might be descriptive of my behavior?  Think hard.
 
But readin'...I was lookin' in a book titled What If?  It's a book of alternative history, like what woulda happened if the D-Day Invasion failed?  Or what woulda happened if the Mongols got to Paris?  Tripe, of course.  Closer to fiction than forecast.  In fact, back in 1994 I started my own sci-fi story titled The Moderns, in which explorers travelled back in time to the Mexican Olmecs, who existed at about the time of the Roman Empire.  The story was to be about what the time travellers inadvertently changed.  And as soon as they met the Olmecs, two of the explorers would disappear, having caused a change that prevented their own births.  The explorers would travel forward to the Mongol age and find that they had done something which did, yes, result in the Mongols taking Paris, and I envisioned a scene of the Mongols riding their ponies through Nortre Dame and stripping and raping the women of Paris on the plaza in front of the great church.
With disquiet, the explorers return to the present.  Well, their visit to the Olmecs resulted in the Olmecs making the discovery of Europe, and not vice-versa.  The explorers are arrested and led before some official.  On his wall is a portrait of Winston Churchill.  Except Churchill has eyes with epicenthalic folds and a Fu Manchu moustache.  They're condemned to be sacrificed with their hearts cut out while they're alive in front of thousands, ala the ancient Olmecs.  Improbable that human sacrifice would be retained so long?  Hey, Christmas started around the time of the Olmecs.  But I digress.
 
I brought up alternative history because I thought about what if Bush had read the Partisans and Guerrillas volume which I read.  I envisioned all his aides telling Bush he had to invade Iraq.  And then Bush would say, "Never!  I will not go down in history as the biggest clown since Mussolini!"
 
Just kidding.  Aw, come on, don't take it so seriously.  I'm just a guy who reads.
 
Here's somethin' else I read.  From Kipling.  "Here Lies a Fool Who Tried to Hustle the East."  

24 Fifth Ave.,   Fri, 13 Jul 2007