Author: wdfyfe

Before WD called himself a writer, he worked at a number of different jobs from stacking lumber to interior design. He studied English at UBC and creative writing at ASU where one of his teachers, Rita Dove, taught him the importance of the tale. He has written for radio, magazines and newspapers, but never television. He’s published both fiction and nonfiction in Great Britain and the US. He reads French passably and speaks enough Spanish to get from A to B and find the toilet. He has interviewed John Cleese, Peter Ustinov, Margaret Drabble, Kenneth Branagh and enough other famous people to make him a hopeless name dropper. His not-so-secret passions are history and trivia, and he has never lost a game of Trivial Pursuit — although he did come 4th one drunken Quiz Night at the Uxbridge in Notting Hill. He lives on the Pacific Ocean, although, not close enough to see, so he spends his days looking at a computer screen. It’s a wonderful life and he has only one regret: he can’t type faster.

George Custer Is Not Politically Correct!

Today is the 136th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Big Horn; alternatively called Custer’s Last Stand or the Battle of Greasy Grass (depending on which side of the bowstring you’re on.)  Just in case you were raised by wolves, the Little Big Horn is a river in Montana.  In June 1876, it was the home of several thousand pissed-off Native Americans (Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho) who were fed up with being pushed around.  On June 25th, General George Custer showed up — with five companies of the 7th Cavalry — to do some major pushing.  It wasn’t the best time to pick a fight; by the end of the day, George and all his soldiers were dead.

The Little Big Horn is a pivotal event in US history.  It almost exactly bisects the timeline of the American expansion west of the Mississippi.  (Mythology aside, the Old West, as it’s called, lasted barely thirty years.)  It also marked a change in the American attitude towards the indigenous populations of the West.  After Custer, the US military was turned loose to settle some scores.  By 1890, the frontier was officially closed, and America, the modern nation, was moving on to bigger and better things.

I realize that writing about Custer and the Little Big Horn is like running with Politically Correct buffalo.  Like buffalo, the politically correct are short-sighted and ill-tempered.  Chances are good that I’m going to get either trampled or gored.  However, I think I speak for all of us when I say Custer is one of the villains of history.  He wasn’t always that way.  For more than half of the last 136 years, he was a hero.  His picture was admired on literally thousands of walls across America, courtesy of Anheuser-Busch’s famous but woefully inaccurate painting of Custer’s Last Stand.  It’s only in my lifetime that the painting was taken down and Custer grew fangs and started spitting green saliva.  That’s the nature of interpretive history, though.  As Mort Sahl once said, “If you keep a consistent political position, you’ll eventually get tried for treason.”  That’s kinda what happened to Custer.  When the political winds began to change, he was too dead to change with them.  You see, history doesn’t change; historians do.

In the last 50 years, Custer has been called everything but nice.  He has been portrayed as a megalomaniac; a glory hound, building his political career on the bodies of dead Cheyenne babies; a walking insane asylum; and everything in between – including a nepotist and an unfaithful husband.  It’s now universally accepted that hell itself couldn’t hold half his nastiness.  He is the poster boy for America’s racist, money-grubbing theft of the continent it now occupies.  Unfortunately, these charges could be directed against any 19th century American who took Horace Greeley’s (John Soule’s, actually) advice to “Go West, young man.”  (The insane asylum crack, however, is just Hollywood’s way of making amends for Errol Flynn’s They Died with Their Boots On.)  Actually, calling Custer a racist is redundant; they all were, including his boss President Ulysses S. Grant — the guy who led the charge when his boss, at the time, Abraham Lincoln, wanted to free the slaves.

I’m not trying to start an “I Love Custer” club, but regurgitating, history half digested, in order to support a moral judgement is how we lose sight of our historical legacy.  In fact, representing Custer as a man with character flaws large enough to drive a stagecoach through is actually postulating that it’s no wonder he got everybody killed at Little Big Horn; the guy was a mess.  This is the soft prejudice that usually accompanies politically correct.  In the end it’s always about us, and everybody else is just a reflection.  The last thing these nouveau historians are willing to admit is that a brilliant military leader named George Custer got out generalled by a guy who didn’t wear pants.

The truth is Custer wasn’t drunk, crazy or incompetent, nor was he morally bankrupt and he didn’t torture kittens on his day off.  He was just a man of his times.  On June 25th, 1876, he planned a classic enveloping maneuver to trap the Sioux and was beaten when Crazy Horse out manoeuvred and outfought him.  Like it or not, Custer was good at what he did.  It just so happened that Crazy Horse was better.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  There don’t have to be mitigating circumstances or moral turpitude to explain the Sioux victory.  The truth is General Custer (like Captain Fetterman* ten years before him) ran into a 19th century military genius named Crazy Horse, who used his limited resources, the terrain and his opponent’s arrogance to win overwhelming victories.  It’s that simple.

Contemporary historians would lead us to believe that, after the Civil War, swarms of snarling swindlers headed west, armed with Winchester rifles and the single evil purpose of destroying everything in their path.  The robbed, raped and pillaged their way to the Pacific because the indigenous peoples were too pastorally ignorant to stop them or even figure out what was going on.  This makes for good reading in sophomore textbooks, but in actual fact, it’s nothing more than another Anheuser-Busch painting with an academic bibliography.

When we bother to look, history tells us that in the second half of the 19th century, two nations — the United States and the Lakota Sioux — fought it out for supremacy on the northern plains.  Both were a dynamic people.  The outcome was never in doubt: the United States had overwhelming advantages, yet the Lakota Sioux and their allies managed to keep them at bay for a generation.  In the middle of that conflict, on a sunny day in June, the United States 7th cavalry went looking for a fight and got their ass kicked.  That’s what happened 136 years ago; I don’t care how you paint the picture.

 

*Captain William Fetterman may or may not have boasted, “Give me eighty men and I’ll ride through the whole Sioux nation,” but when he did get a crack at it, he got less than 500 yards.  On December 21st, 1866, Fetterman, 79 soldiers and two curious civilians marched out of Fort Phil Kearny to relieve a work party that was under attack.  Taunted by Crazy Horse and a few of his Oglala buddies, they crossed Lodge Trail Ridge and walked into an elaborate ambush.  He and his entire command were killed.

Are You Smarter Than a 10th Grader?

When I was in high school, we once had a substitute teacher who wasn’t very interested in Grade 10 math — but he had a puzzle.  He gave each of us a copy and told us to solve it.  I did – in my third year of university.  It took me five years because, at the end of the hour, when no one had solved the puzzle, he told us he’d give us the answer the next day — but the next day never came.  Our regular teacher got over his hangover and came back to plague us with his boring rendition of “X plus Y equals who cares,” and we never saw the sub again.  I went on to a life strangely devoid of algebra, Mr. Wilson (not his real name) probably drank himself to death and that faceless substitute teacher joined my personal Pantheon of favourite people.  He showed me, at a very young age, that the mind is a muscle and if you don’t exercise it, it gets flabby.

This puzzle has been attributed to Albert Einstein and it has been claimed that only 2% of the population can solve it.  I doubt it.  It’s rather simple, actually, once you discover the key.  There is no trick to it; it’s pure reason.  However, there is a method – and that’s the key.  I’ve updated it slightly for the 21st century but other than that it’s the same puzzle I was given [mumble, mumble] years ago.  Now, it’s your turn to give it a try.  Good luck!  (I’ll give you the answer next Friday — unless Mr. Wilson comes back from the grave.)

There are five houses in a row.  Each is painted a different colour and each inhabitant is a different nationality.  They each own different pets, drink different beverages and drive different cars.

From the clues below, deduce who drinks water and who owns the zebra.

1 – The Englishman lives in the red house.

2 – The Spaniard owns a dog.

3 – Coffee is drunk in the green house.

4 – The Ukrainian drinks tea.

5 – The green house is immediately to the right of the ivory house.

6 – The man who owns snails drives a Buick.

7 – The man in the yellow house drives a Cadillac.

8 – Milk is drunk in the middle house.

9 – The Norwegian lives in the first house.

10 – The man who drives a Ford lives next to the man who owns a fox.

11 – The house with the Cadillac is next to the house with the horse.

12 – The man who drives the Chevrolet drinks orange juice.

13 – The man from Japan drives a Dodge.

14 – The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.

It’s Child’s Play at the G20 Summit

Just in case you weren’t watching, the international playground got a little bit more petulant this week.  It seems not everybody wanted to play nice at the G20 Conference in Los Cabos, Mexico.  For those of you who are unaware (and the rest of the world who doesn’t care) the G20 is kind of a super-bloated G7 (G8, actually.)  Still in the dark?  It’s an economic summit of the boys (and a few girls) who run the world.  Originally, this was a summit of financial people – economists, bankers and such – but lately the politicians have been taking centre stage.  This is unfortunate because most politicians really don’t understand economics; few, if any, have ever even paid their own bills.  Which is why any good accountant will tell you our planet’s financial wellbeing would be better off in the hands of SpongeBob SquarePants and Patrick.  All that aside, the leaders of the top twenty economies do get together every so often (at fun destinations the rest of us save all summer to visit) to take pictures of each other and talk a lot of nonsense.  Invariably, they all pose for a group photo that looks like Mrs. Cranston’s 4th graders all grown up, then they pick up pencils and go home.  It’s kinda like a birthday party with speeches – or it has been, until now.

It’s been a long time since I played “I did not/You did so” seriously, but I can still recognize a schoolyard squabble when I see one, and Jose Manuel Barroso’s nasty comments the other day were nothing more than that.  Barroso is the head of the European Commission, and he’s all bent out of shape because the politicos in North America have been spouting off about what’s wrong with the Euro.  In a snit, he got his mittens on a microphone, and in less than diplomatic-speak, told the boys north of the Rio Grande to mind their own business.  Actually, it sounded a lot more like “You’re not the boss of me,” complete with fist-on-hip defiance.  Then, before our guys could say “Shut up!” to him, he went on to point an accusing finger across the Atlantic and say, “You started it.”

The maturity level of the powers that be in our world has always been in question, but this really is a new low — especially from this guy.  He’s got some cojones yapping off, considering he’s been President of the European Commission since 2004, long before Greece quit paying its bills.  Not only that, but during the neverending story of the monetary emergency we call Europe, I never saw him in any of the Merkel/Sarkozy photo-ops.  Plainly speaking, it doesn’t look to me like Jose Manuel Barroso spent any time draining the swamp before the Euro crisis started — or killing alligators after things got rolling.  But he wasn’t finished yipping!  The next thing you know, he’s poor-mouthing the IMF (International Monetary Fund) saying North America should throw in an extra ten billion or so, just in case somebody else south of the Alps decides to go belly-up.  I don’t know how they play the game in Europe, but on this side of the Allegheny Mountains, you don’t call somebody down and then ask him to pay for the privilege – especially when he’s been footing the bill for most of sixty years!

Luckily, all this happened at the G20 Summit because, as anyone who’s followed them closely will tell you, the major accomplishments of these conferences is, in a word, nothing.  Everybody talks a good fight and throws billions of Dollars, Euros and Yuan at each other — in the hope that some of it will stick — but in the end, nobody is willing to tackle the real problem: the bills are coming due and nobody’s willing to pay them.  Actually, that’s why Barroso got in a pout.  Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper (who has two degrees in Economics, BTW) had the audacity to point out that Europeans were still spending more money than they were worth, and if they didn’t stop the red ink soon, they were going to drown in it.  Maybe I’m just backing the hometown boy, but I’ve got to agree with Harper.  Europeans have been ignoring their credit limit since before I was born.  In the old days, they could depend on Uncle Sam to cover the shortfall, but ever since Obama discovered there are more numbers after a trillion, they can’t really rely on America’s sweaty twenties any more.

Guys like Barroso should take some time away from the microphone, wander down to the local McDonald’s and ask the kid behind the counter how she handles her money.  I can almost guarantee that she’s not spending ten times more than whatever minimum wage she earns.  Actually, that little trip might do him (and a few of his G20 buddies) a lot of good.  From my point of view, if the powers that be are going to act like adolescents, I’d like them to at least be smart ones.