History Lessons

There is a very important anniversary coming up this weekend, one which marks one of the seminal events of the 20th Century, a tipping point where, quite literally, the world as we know it hung in the balance. Pity we don't really teach History in this country any more, because I'm willing to bet that few of you have any idea what I'm talking about, and even fewer of you understand just how vital the event in question was to shaping the world we live in now.

This Saturday marks the 65th anniversary of Operation Overlord, more popularly known as D-Day. From the Second World War. You know, the one that was fought in black-and-white.

In military terminology, the phrase "D-Day" really has no meaning other than being the day on which any given operation begins, just like "H-Hour" simply designates the time at which it begins. There were a lot of D-Days in the Second World War, both in the European Theatre of Operations and in the Pacific Theatre of Operations. But the one that happened on 6 June 1944 has a special significance attached to it, and so we know it simply as D-Day. The D-Day.

There was a lot riding on Operation Overlord. Not just the effort of the Allies on the Western Front - which, really, did not exist until Overlord - but the entire war in Europe hinged on that invasion. Had it not succeeded, it is entirely likely that Europe would still be in the throes of a new dark age, with Hitler's Third Reich still extant. Had there been a Cold War, it would not have been with the Soviet Union, but with a Germany in control of the European continent.

Imagine what would have happened had D-Day failed. There would have been no lodgement in France, from which the Allies could liberate Western Europe. There would have been no way for the Allies to mount another invasion attempt before 1947, at the earliest. By 1944, the British had reached a manpower crisis; part of the reason for Montgomery's slow movements after the invasion was because the British couldn't afford to take massive casualties. They simply couldn't replace them. Had the invasion failed, the loss of troops involved would have weakened the British to the point that they might have been knocked out of the war.

The Americans, too, faced a manpower crisis in 1944. The U.S. Army only fielded 89 Divisions in the war, and from 1944 on there was a severe shortage of men at the cutting edge - tankers, artillerymen, and particularly riflemen. Casualty rates and the under-estimation of personnel needed for the USAAF strained the system to its limits. Divisions in combat were maintained at something approaching their authorized Infantry strength only by ruthlessly stripping training Divisions and forcibly transferring personnel from the Army Air Forces. Had Overlord failed, the U.S. wouldn't have been knocked out of the war, but it would have been rendered incapable of conducting ground operations in Europe until the Army had been rebuilt.

If Overlord had failed, then Germany's western flank would have been secure for at least two years. Which means that many of the Divisions stationed there would have been unneeded, and could be transferred elsewhere. In other words, they could have been sent to the Eastern Front to face the Russians.

Infused with fresh Divisions, German strength on the Eastern Front would, at the least, have been doubled. That would have given them an essential parity with the Russians. Even with Hitler's notoriously stupid direction, that would have been enough to stabilize the Eastern Front. No Russians smashing their way across Poland, no Russians crossing the Oder, no Russians taking Berlin. Not a very pretty picture, is it?

So June 6 is, indeed, a very important day. The day, if you will. A day when the world hung in the balance, and didn't fall off the knife's edge. But for most of us, it will be just another day, and we will think nothing of those young men who sleep peacefully, at last, in foreign lands. Nothing that those men did, after all, who gave all of their tomorrows for our today, affects us, right?

We really do owe a debt we can never repay to those young men who parachuted into the Norman fields, who waded ashore at Utah Beach, and at Gold Beach, Juno Beach, and Sword Beach, who bled at Omaha Beach, where the waters turned red. There aren't very many of them left, for we have reached that point in time where they are departing us swiftly, to join those who never left those places. Soon enough, the men who gave us these gifts we have will all be gone.

Really, Saturday is not just another day. It is one of those days that we should never forget.

Oink, Oink . . .

Ah, it is finally June. The days are getting warmer as we move toward Summer, soft breezes gently ripple through the newly-green trees, and the girls . . .

Okay, I'll be the first to admit it. I am a walking HR specialist's nightmare.

It occured to me this afternoon, as I was wandering through the grocery store and noticed all the women decked out in chest-hugging shirts that they must have painted on, and little almost-there shorts with cutesy slogans emblazoned across their bums, that I must be the kind of man that sends HR people screaming for the Valium and seriously reconsider their profession.

Not that I need a sign hung around my neck that reads "Caution: Pedophile At Work," but I really don't seem to remember teenage girls being built that way when I was that age. Curves in all the right places, sure, but not that curvy . . . nor that eager to show said curves off. And then there are the twenty- and thirty-somethings . . .

Oy.

The thing of it is, we men are constantly told not to objectify women. We are constantly told that putting a woman and the idea of sex into the same thought is a bad thing, the greatest of social sins, and that only a severely intellectually-handicapped, knuckle-dragging pig - in other words, a man - would do something like that. Humans, after all, are intelligent beings, right? So, naturally, political correctness trumps evolution.

Oops. Guess I'm just a pig, and a rather unevolved one, at that. Reality, meet political correctness. And do try not to drool on the floor, please.

Women, I suppose, should hate Lycra. Because, when a man sees a really cute woman in the grocery store wearing bike shorts and a sports bra that do absolutely nothing to conceal all the right curves being in all the right places, just what does she think that guy is going to think about? Biking? Please . . .

And, really, is just looking cause enough to scream "Animal! Off to sensitivity training with you at once!"? I mean, if you don't want us looking, why do you wear those little tube-tops and wonder bras? Or the little low-riding shorts with the writing on your butts? I'm so confused. My little porcine brain hurts.

Personally, at this point in my life, I've been through quite a few HR specialists. I'm sort of the Mount Suribachi of that profession, only the Marines had an easier time of it with theirs than HR folk have with me.

Q: "What do you think about when you see a woman?"
A: "She's cute. I'd like to meet her."

Q: "What do you think about when you see a woman's breasts?"
A: "Umm . . . sex."

Q: "And why do you think about sex?"
A: "Because I'm a man?"

Q: "But don't you think about that woman as a person?"
A: "Sure. I think of her as a person I'd like to have sex with."

Q: "No! Bad dog! No biscuit! Thinking of women and sex is wrong!"
A: "If it were that wrong, neither you nor I would be here . . ."

Don't get me wrong. There are a lot of things I value in a woman, such as intelligence, wit, a sense of humour, the ability to carry on and hold her own in a conversation . . . But, let's face it. When a man first sees a woman in a thong bikini, that's not what he's thinking about. All due apologies to the sensitivity trainers out there, of course.

Yet it still seems to me that there's a double-standard out there. It seems that it is perfectly acceptable for a group of women to look at a man and talk about how cute his buns are, or what a ripped six-pack he has, and so on. But, if you reverse the genders of everyone involved in that scenario, all of a sudden it's like the Japanese are bombing Pearl Harbour.

I'm all for equality here, really. But at times it seems like as soon as a man looks at a woman, sirens start going off, red lights start flashing and you're sitting in a class about sexual harrassment before you even know what's going on.

Ah, well. I can't help it. It's a hard-wired thing, I suppose. Personally, I'd be ecstatic if a woman looked at me and thought "Sex!" But that's just me. I mean, just looking never hurt anything, did it?

Looks like it's going to be another long Summer . . .

Here We Go Again . . .

Hmm, seems to have been a while since I've insulted anyone, so . . .

Sonia Sotomayor. The President's first pick to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court. Let the posturing begin . . .

To tell you the truth, I don't know that much about her. And if we're all going to be honest, who among you does? I suspect the answer to that is not very many, but I also suspect that little fact isn't going to stop half of you from portraying her as the greatest jurist since Solomon, and the other half of you from painting her as somewhere to the left of Lucifer.

Whereas, objectively, she is probably neither.

But that still doesn't make necessarily make her a good, or even desirable, choice for the Supreme Court.

As I said, I really don't know that much about her. What I do know, however, is that some of the things she's said makes me sit up and say "Um, what?" And that, it seems, in all the hullaballoo and pundits and politicians racing to stake out positions, no one is asking the right questions. Democrats, it appears, are tripping all over themselves to support her nomination because she was put forth by the President. Republicans, it appears, are tripping all over themselves to oppose her nomination because she was, well, put forth by the President.

And both sides are missing the mark, and in so doing, committing a grave disservice both to their responsibilities and to us.

Let's focus on the three things that I do know about her.

First, her decision in the New Hampshire fire-fighters case. That was the one where, on a promotion exam, the White firefighters outscored the Black firefighters and, as a result, the municipality in question decided to promote no one. In her appellate opinion, Sotomayor in effect managed to render no opinion while upholding the lower court ruling in favour of the municipality, which was to promote no one. Talk about side-stepping the issue . . .

Look, I'm not bashing fire-fighters here; my brother was a paramedic/fire-fighter, and I know a lot of fire-fighters. But this isn't rocket science, folks, it's a fire-fighter's exam. There aren't any "fuzzy" areas on the test. To really over-simplify things in the interests of saving space, something's going to burn, or it's not. Some flammible materials require something other than water to extinguish them, or they don't.

Beyond that - and I know this may be silly of me - I thought the whole point of such exams were to get the most-qualified people into those kinds of positions. I mean, if you're dealing with a toxic chemical fire, who do you want in charge? The person who actually knows what they're doing, or the person who may be a bit shakier on the whole thing but was put in charge in the interests of diversity?

Now, if the test itself was somehow biased . . . fix the test. If the test was fine as it was . . . encourage people to study harder. Seems simple enough. The fact that in this instance the minority candidates all scored lower on the test than the White candidates may have just been a statistical anamoly specific to that group of testees, or it may not have been. But by rendering an opinion that had no opinion, Sotomayor effectively dismissed the whole issue in favour of the status quo ante.

Bad time to have your building burn in New Hampshire . . .

Second, there is her opinion that the Bill of Rights (that is, the first ten Amendments to the Constitution) should be "open" for interpretation by the States. Put into English, that means that the individual States should be free to put whatever spin they want to onto the Bill of Rights. And that, frankly, is a big steaming load.

For everyone who has by now forgotten what they were taught in their High School civics classes, the Constitution is supposed to be the supreme law of the land. Meaning, in those instances where Federal and local law conflict, Federal law wins out. Furthermore, the Constitution itself is a document that spells out specifically which powers are delegated to the Federal Government; that is why there is that little clause in there which states that those powers not enummerated to the Federal Government are reserved to the States.

The Bill of Rights are a bit trickier. They are, for all intents and purposes, absolutes, and they are written that way. Which means, if we are to still believe that the Constitution trumps all else, any "law" that a State passes which conflicts with the Bill of Rights is Unconstitutional and has no force. They can not, therefore, be "reinterpreted." The only possible exception would be the First Amendment, which states that "Congress shall pass no law" regarding the establishment of a religion, or abridging freedom of speech or the "right of the people to peacefully assemble." But none of the other nine original Amendments contain that language. Rather, those are all couched in absolute, "this shall not be done" terms.

If you are going to accept the argument that the Bill of Rights is open to interpretation by the individual States, then you are also going to have to accept the argument that each State can expand, curtail or eliminate the rights enummerated by those Amendments as they see fit. Which means that you're going to have to accept the idea that Utah could establish Mormonism as the State religion, or that Wyoming could eliminate free speech within its borders, or that Missouri could do away with the concept of due process because it's such a bothersome little detail.

Is that really a good idea?

Third, there is her statement that "Policy is made at the Appellate Court." Well, no, it's not. Granted, that's a somewhat vague statement, since as a practical matter court decisions wind up being policy through the mechanism of precedent, but it is the very vagueness of the statement that should cause us to examine it closely.

In the broader sense, courts are not there to make policy. There is already an arm of Government in place to do that: it's called the "Legislature." On the Federal level, that body is called Congress. Which is why we go through the whole process of electing Representatives and Senators, those folks who are charged by the Constitution with passing laws and making policies in our names. If you don't like the laws and policies those people are passing, then don't re-elect them, elect someone else . . . but that's a different rant entirely. It would also require us all to get off our collective butts and actually take the time to vote, but we all have our crosses to bear.

In any event, courts are there to interpret the law, and do so based on precedent. They are also there to make sure that nothing the legislative or executive arms of Government do is Unconstitutional - though, really, that review is something you won't find anywhere in the Constitution. Frankly, it's a good idea, and I'm glad we have it, but judicial review is a concept that Chief Justice Marshall invented out of whole cloth. Be that as it may, what the courts aren't there to do is make policy. Look at the language in the Constitution that creates the Supreme Court, which states that it will have the power "to hear cases of equity and law." That clause also empowers the Supreme Court to create lesser courts - that's where the Federal circuit courts come from, for example - but nowhere does it grant the court the power to make policy.

Thus, to argue that the Supreme Court, or any other court, for that matter - are or should be policy-making bodies betrays a serious misunderstanding of what courts are for, and of the powers delegated to the courts by the Constitution. Nor is that a Left/Right statement; it is equally unacceptable whoever is using a court as an activist stage. The framers of the Constitution were pretty explicit in their desire that policy-making powers were the preserve of those who were elected by the people. It is a dangerous thing, I think, to allow those powers to be exercised by people who are not only appointed, but appointed to their positions for life.

Those, I think, are the questions that should be asked. Not only of Sonia Sotomayor, but of anyone who is nominated to such a position. They are the questions that really matter, and which should concern all of us. I am, however, pretty confident that they are also the questions that won't be asked, precisely because they are substantive and make for really bad sound bites.

Ah, well, you get what you pay for, I guess.