Too-Many-Words: The Collected New Year’S Day Essays of Wayne P. Hughes, Jr. with a Sampler of Other Assorted Writings

By Xlibris US

Almost every New Years Day since 1974, Wayne Hughes set down on paper his take on some of the most important issues facing modern life. These essays were not written for publication, but as true correspondence with a circle of friends from many walks of life. Waynes hope was that a dialog would ensue in which everyone, including himself, would learn something new in the New Year. The topics are diverse: touching politics, faith, society, war, family and human nature. Waynes self-imposed rule was that they be written in one sitting, but they are far from spontaneous outbursts of opinion or perfunctory pabulum. His clear prose and thoughtful analysis leads the reader through even the most contentious topics so that even if one disagrees with his destination, you cant help but respect the fairness and balance you met on the journey. Too-Many-Words also includes a selection from Waynes other writings speeches, stories, technical analyses and letters.a

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514431382

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Copyright © 2016 by Jeff Cares.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-5144-3139-9

                eBook              978-1-5144-3138-2

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Rev. date: 03/02/2016

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Contents

Foreword

Essays

Explanatory Note

Who’s A Conservative Now?

Attention Getting Mechanisms

Robot Ethics And Future War

Saving Science

Christmas In Wales And Arlington, Virginia

Roads And Ruin: The Rise And Fall Of California

Too-Many-Words

Persistence And Transformation

Time For Sergeants

Jack Aubrey And The Long Wars

O Brother, Where Art Thy Enemies?

Politics As War

Which Freedom?

Yoda’s Thanksgiving

Ten/Eighty/Ten

Save The Pygmies

Tribute To A Matriarch

Letter To Congressman Panetta

A World Safe For War

Japan’s Sempai

On Shooting An Elephant

Guarding The First Amendment—For And From The Press

Houses On Sand

On Discrimination

Economies Of Scale

Ending The War

Women’s Liberty

Boiling In Oil

Pacifists And Peacemakers

Sampler

Just War And National Interest

Uss Morton Captain’s Farewell

Salvo Model Of Warships In Missile Combat Used To Evaluate Their Staying Power

The Adventures Of Wendy And Megan

Mediocre Goodness

A Reaction To Bultmann

The College Establishment Problem

Letters

On Gay Life

To Professor Rick Rosenthal

Dedication

To Jeff Cares, former thesis student and long standing friend, whose inspiration it was to assemble and publish my New

Year’s Day Essays

FOREWORD

If most naval officers write like they dress—awkward when out of uniform—then Wayne Hughes is the rare exception (at least as far as his writing is concerned!). I could torture the metaphor by talking about fit, style, tailoring and fabric choices, but then I would just prove the point. And I would fail to do the author justice in the process.

Wayne is not just an exceptional writer, but he also has that rare quality of speaking like he writes. Some of us have been lucky enough to sit with Wayne at dinner (or at his favorite pipe-smoking perch at the Naval Postgraduate School—the picnic table outside of Glasgow Hall), to hear fully formed extemporaneous paragraphs between bites (or puffs). These can start as a question for deliberation on the spot, but they usually trigger a give-and-take with much longer legs than the moment at hand. So the conversation continues; and what is truly nice about having the same voice for pen as in person is that Wayne is with us again and again as the correspondence continues.

Wayne was my thesis advisor in 1990, but I wasn’t aware of his New Year’s Day essays until sometime later (probably the mid-2000s), when as part of an email discussion he attached Which Freedom? to his response. Soon thereafter he let another leak out. So I just had to ask about the rest, and I found that since 1974, with only a few interludes, he has written a thoughtful essay on New Year’s Day, or thereabouts, to send to his friends for discussion. I am grateful that he consented to put them together with other selected pieces into this book.

I hope the reader will find what Wayne’s ever-increasing list of correspondents truly treasures. In a time when authors try to pass 140-character messages and keypad-spelled, autocorrected notes as serious correspondence, these essays are all handcrafted missives to be read, kept, and then read again. While many modern commentators flock to the blogosphere to hold court over shrill, out-of-sequence, look-at-me! comment threads, Wayne’s essays are a remarkable contrast, not just for their content, but also in the standard they set for civil argument and thoughtful debate.

As exciting as it is now to receive an annual e-mailed essay from Wayne, I can’t help but think that it must have been a special treat to get that manila envelope with a Pacific Grove postmark just after the New Year (particularly at sea when mail calls are sparse). I hope the reader will enjoy these essay-visits as much as Wayne’s friends have throughout all these years.

ESSAYS

EXPLANATORY NOTE

The self-inflicted rules for writing the New Years Day Essay are two. First, the draft must be completed on 1 January. No fudging by writing anything down in advance, either. In fact, most of the time I do not know the subject until well into December each year. Second, I may take as long as needed to edit the essay, vet it with Joan, and occasionally check the facts, as happened when I wrote Roads and Ruin: the Rise and Fall of California. But if I haven’t mailed the essay—emailed it in recent years—by the third week in January I am going get enquiries my friends.

It was not until about 1980 that I decided I must write the essay in one day. This was necessary because otherwise procrastination would take over. You will notice there is no essay in 1999 because Joan and I were flying home from Alaska on New Year’s Day. Rules are rules. But you will find an interesting exchange of correspondence later in the book.

I think the essays have held up pretty well. Certainly they are much more durable than the meanderings of many pundits. Anyway, I don’t hesitate to publish my innermost thoughts of, say, forty years ago. With the same resolution I’ve added a Sampler of eight other writings and one of the only two poems I’ve ever written.

You may want read the 2007 essay first to see why the title is Too-Many-Words for the essay and for this collection. I compiled the readings with more than a little concern that I was only contributing to the plethora of stuff only purporting to be interesting and entertaining. You must sample and decide for yourself.

Wayne P. Hughes, Jr.

1 September 2009

Pacific Grove, California

WHO’S A CONSERVATIVE NOW?

New Year’s Day, 2014

First thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging.

Lettin’ the cat out of the bag is a lot easier than puttin’ it back.

- Old farmer’s advice

When I contemplated this essay almost two years ago, I could not answer my own question. I wanted to show that American society had turned upside down and Progressives had become the entrenched conservatives, preserving their progress. Part of my problem was not knowing when the shift to progressive intransigence began. Since then I’ve drawn from two clarifying sources, one classic, the other quite contemporary.

The classical source is Thomas S. Kuhn, whose great book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, describes how difficult it is, even for scientists, to admit they have been wrong when confronted by new evidence. Kuhn says it took a generation to pass before a better scientific paradigm is accepted. The older scientists were archetypal conservatives.

The contemporary source is the editor of The Claremont Review of Books who writes:

Liberals don’t believe in a right of revolution against liberalism. They consider progress as they define it to be irreversible… As liberals see it, conservatism’s job is to conserve liberalism. When it threatens to overturn a program like Obamacare, the Right ceases to be conservative and becomes radical, indeed revolutionary, insofar as it threatens not just a cabinet department or two but the whole religion of one-way leftward progress and the whole worshipful establishment built around that faith… Of course the Tea Party’s very name refers to a revolution—not to the American Revolution but the irrational French one. [A smart liberal like Sam] Tanenhaus doesn’t see much of a difference, because he sees as extremist any form of politics that doesn’t go with the evolutionary flow and that appeals to universal and timeless principles of justice. One is tempted to say he rejects natural rights as firmly as John C. Calhoun did and for a similar reason: they endanger the ancient regime, which in our time is liberalism.*

Ancient regime indeed. I think progressivism began to ossify in the middle of the 20th Century, at the same time that neo-conservatives turned away from liberal philosophies.

Almost all the arguments between progressives and conservatives have been over whether or not progressives engender a better civilization—make actual progress. Conservatives point to the unexpectedly dire consequences of progressive actions. The two philosophies differ as to what makes a better life, and whether the means of achieving it is to promote individual freedom or the authority of an elite to dictate what is best for society. For example, both progressives and conservative believe medical progress is a good thing, but state-funded medical care has created obvious consequences, changed life styles not always for the better, created crises of affordability, and engendered the current debate over what is just and fair in distributing medical benefits.

Liberals Are Different

Progressives sometimes call themselves liberals, but a conservative liberal is not an oxymoron, and modern liberalism is full of contradictions. The cornerstone of classical liberalism was personal freedom to succeed or fail, and the right to choose for better or worse. A modern liberal has forgotten his roots, which stemmed from people who wanted to free themselves from kings who dictated who would receive what rewards. A modern liberal espouses doctrines of social justice determined by a government. Our elected and appointed officials are now the American king who dictates who gets which benefits, including their own. A modern liberal believes personal freedom may be constrained for the good a government engenders, and taxes and property may be taken from one to give to another. Because of its ambiguity I won’t use the identifier, liberal. For similar reasons I won’t refer to left wing and right wing positions.

Progressive Inversions

A progressive is someone who wants to change things. A conservative is someone who resists a particular change and properly should be called a preserver. To understand the strange inversions that began in the mid-20th Century, reflect on who today are the Changers and who are the Preservers.

Below is a progressive agenda that is preservative in nature. The agenda is sometimes paradoxical. Today’s Press is a good example. Newsmen believe in change because change is news and the status quo is not. But journalists since long before the Progressive Era have been splendidly conservative—that is to say, consistent—in reporting news that fits their view of what is newsworthy. For example, Yellow Journalists promoted—some say caused—the Spanish-American War in 1898. Hence the profession’s bewilderment as it suffers from changes in society that are not new news, yet threaten the very existence and influence of dailies, weeklies, and major television networks. Reflect on the appended list of the ten top trends based on a survey of 1,592 leaders from academia, business, government, and the non-profit world. Not one of the trends was promoted by a journalist. They just happened, in the same sense that journalism’s diminished influence came about in spite of its best efforts to stay important—and unchanging.

Accepting that there have been and will be paradoxes, my aim is to illustrate contemporary proclivities in the progressive wing of society that help to answer the question, Who’s a conservative now?

Deficit Spending must be preserved in good times and bad. In recessions the American government spends beyond its means in order to prime the pump; in recoveries it does so lest the recovery be stifled; and in good times to preserve prosperity long enough to create another bubble and a new recession that needs more deficit spending.

Global Warming is bad and mankind must spare no effort to keep the climate, sea levels, and ice at the poles, just as they are today. It has been settled by the majority vote of progressive scientists that humans are the cause. We progressives want to preserve the present climate at any cost to the world economy. We reject all other science-based evidence that changes of climate are beyond mankind’s power to prevent, or that a warmer earth might be better for mankind. We must suppress all evidence that the world’s climate has been warming and cooling for a very long time and will continue to do so despite anything mankind can do. After we exhibit human power over world temperatures, we will next subdue plate tectonics and prevent earthquakes. No more Mount Krakatau explosions, either.

Dress Codes must be tolerated among teen-agers because modern adults should tolerate slovenly attire. We progressives admire the fact that teenagers are actually conservative because they all dress alike. The radicals are the few who either rebel against convention by dressing neatly or who go to a school that requires disciplined dress codes.

Creative Art is whatever self-identified artists create. For the sake of progress we accept some dissonance and vulgarity from them because art must have the freedom to shock. Good government must not interfere with art—though we allow ourselves to regulate nearly everything else—because individual artists can judge for themselves what is creative and progressive. Old artistic standards of goodness and beauty are now passé.

World Government is a good thing. The United Nations and its many beneficent agencies exhibit that, as with most change, when a little is good, more is better. Outmoded privileges such as our American veto power in the Security Council should be eliminated because they impede stronger and more progressive world government.

War is a bad thing, and large armed forces are a temptation to employ them. So we must preserve the momentum to shrink the Department of Defense so that our goal of world peace can be achieved.

Worship is a good thing to preserve and extend. Among many noble things to worship are Islam, scientism, consumerism, relativism, and the best religion of them all, atheism. Progressives must guard against the dominance of any religion that asserts superiority. Christianity, with its absurd claims to holy power and majesty, is an insidious threat to broadminded worshipfulness.

Saddam Hussein led a government we should not have overthrown because that was a change in the status quo. Conservatives who wanted to free the Iraqi people from a despot were only interested in the oil in Iraq and Kuwait. Now conservatives want to upset the status quo again by constraining Iran.

Women’s Emancipation took a big step towards equality when the voting rights amendment was ratified in 1921. Progress became an irresistible force with the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s. Emancipated women are a progressive achievement that now seems invulnerable to attack, nor is there much disagreement that women’s rights should be preserved.

Expanded Sex, from teenagers to the Viagra-agers, is one of the progressive movement’s greatest achievements. We still have some sorting to do over prostitution, pornography, pedophilia, polygamy, puberty’s onset, gay rights, and group marriage. But more sexual freedoms and pleasures have been a progressive achievement to be preserved against conservative accusations of inconsistency.

The Holiday Season is especially rewarding to preserve, because Christmas is bit by bit being overtaken by progress. Houses are decorated with Santa Claus, polar bears, elves, reindeer, and other whimsical reminders of childhood. Television and blog-site commercials are ever more enticing with things to buy. Throughout December, The Monterey Peninsula Herald supported holiday season progress with three times more pages devoted to marketing than to news.

Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are entitlements engraved in stone and to be preserved. Adding yet more benefits to these systems at any cost is the way to sustain the original wisdom of their progressive creators. Additional oversight by the Affordable Care Act is another rewarding government service to the American people.

Ranking the New Conservatives

Federal and State Employees are the most conservative people in the nation. They foster a culture that has few rewards for risk-taking but many for just knowing and following the rules. Where else are individuals so well insulated from firing, pay cuts, or benefit reductions when the rules are followed?

College Professors are next most conservative by protecting lifetime tenure and promoting faculty members with identical, unchanging outlooks. The academy wants to change all aspects of society except itself. Many Federal research dollars support traditional research in traditional departments, even though the big breakthroughs in technology and engineering have recently been interdisciplinary. Most tenured professors have been slow to accept distance learning as a legitimate mode of education and do not want to learn the new skills required.

Lawyers are the third most conservative group in American society because by definition their obligation is to enforce existing law and legal precedent. A lawyer who wants to foster change becomes a politician who creates more laws to help him get reelected. Lawyers also become judges. There are no checks on judicial decisions based on the costs versus benefits of their actions. It is cruel irony that corporations which government officials hold in contempt must add more lawyers to interpret elaborate government statutes.

Military Organizations are a distant fourth among conservative bodies, even though they are accused, not without truth, of always preparing to fight the last war. But the U.S. armed forces cannot be wholly conservative because they have been in the forefront of establishing career opportunities for woman and male minorities. Nor can military organizations of other nations be conservative for long, because when war comes they either adapt or lose the war. Nevertheless the landscape is cluttered with dead reputations of military leaders who thought better was more of the same—but bigger—battleships, battalions, and budgets.

Progressive and Conservative Progress

Do you have your own list of conservative outlooks among progressives? Or of what would be genuine acts of progress, like reducing government spending to a sustainable level that will not burden our children? Writing down my favorites has been a chance to compare the fruits of the progressive movement with the unintended consequences, like amazing medical successes that are offset by the costliness of treatments.

Paradoxically, I doubt there has been a more successful place or time for innovation than the U.S. during the rise of progressivism. It would be churlish to say the many recent advances have been in spite of progressivism. Nor do most conservatives gainsay the accomplishments of early progressive leaders. Two great presidents, Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, are esteemed as effective leaders in wartime, and for promoting progressive goals in the early 20th Century, such as suffrage for women that became effective in 1921. Roosevelt the trust buster reduced the influence of robber barons and railroad tycoons. Wilson exploited income taxes soon after the XVI Amendment made them legal in 1913, he championed the League of Nations as an international body to prevent another war as dreadful as the one he helped to win, and his Secretary of the Navy dried our navy’s ships of liquor well before the Prohibition Amendment came into effect in 1921.

Historians have not been as ready to acknowledge conservative accomplishments. At a time when the progressive movement was expanding its influence, Calvin Coolidge and Dwight Eisenhower progressed society with conservative outlooks. Both reduced the wartime debts they inherited and fostered economic prosperity by restraining government interference. Both avoided war, yet enhanced the prestige and influence of the United States in the world. Coolidge and Eisenhower believed innovation would come from individual initiative, and both oversaw a boom in new technologies like better cars, airplanes, refrigerators, washing machines, electric tools, and highways—advancements that served the people more directly than do today’s big residences, hedge funds, and computer gadgetry. Heartwarming to this former naval officer, both reduced the army but maintained a Navy second to none.

Probably historians believe government activity represents progress for the same reasons journalists believe action is news. Progressive historians have been prone to measure executive success by how many new laws were passed and how many more dollars the government collected and dispersed. They give little credit to executives who reduced government oversight and expenditures while its creative citizens prospered.

Achieving Aspirations

I have answered the question Who’s a conservative now? by suggesting that progressives have changed to preservers—of bigger government; of more laws and lawyers; of more protection of an education structure that resists change; and of all the unintended consequences that threaten to constrain and interfere with creative genius. Here is an example.

A recent book by John Allison is entitled The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure. Allison’s lesser thesis is that government actions created the housing bubble and delayed recovery when the bubble burst. His greater thesis is that a competitive market is better than crony capitalism, which is collusion between the financial world and a government that imposes controls intended to promote big investment results. Crony capitalism has replaced the military-industrial complex as a bigger threat of overweening government. Here is a conclusion from Allison’s last chapter:

To be innovative, to be creative, individuals must be able to think for themselves, to think independently. Statist societies are ultimately doomed to failure because they stop creativity, which destroys human progress. The idea that there can be a highly successful and creative authoritarian society in the long term is not factually correct. The idea often pictured in fiction of a highly successful authoritarian society and a messy, less economically successful, but happier free society is false. The choice is between being authoritarian and poor and being free and prosperous. Compare North Korea and South Korea, East Germany and West Germany, Cuba and Florida, and so on. Statism does not even result in more equality. There are always some individuals in statist societies who are more than equal (those who lust for power).**

Allison echoes George Orwell’s classic, Animal Farm, where some animals are more equal than others, and anticipates a Congress and staff that exempt themselves from Obamacare. Allison’s book is also reminiscent of Frederick Hayek’s warning in The Road to Serfdom against centralized planning. Mostly Allison writes about his own experience in the financial world and of guiding a successful business through the housing bubble, despite destructive government policies and onerous regulations. I have a personal experience to match his. The Farmers State Bank of LaGrange, Indiana suffered a loss in only one quarter when the housing bubble burst and other major financial institutions came to the edge of bankruptcy. I inherited the FSB stock from my mother, who said, don’t sell it as long as Miles Perkins is on the Board. Allison’s BB&T Corporation is much larger than FSB, but Allison and Perkins had similar philosophies of responsible investment.

As a midshipman at the Naval Academy, I read Vannevar Bush’s Modern Arms and Free Men. We remember World War II, as Hayek did, as heavy with centralized planning. Yet political scientists criticized the mistakes made in mobilizing industry and wanted more controls to achieve more efficiency. Bush said these critics did not appreciate the virtues of a government that granted wide latitude and bestowed generous benefits to an industry producing less than perfect ships, tanks, aircraft, and other goods of war. They wanted greater efficiency by still more top down management like that of Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini. Bush showed that when those authoritarian systems failed they did so catastrophically, because when the leader made a bad decision there was no way to keep the consequences from rippling through the fabric of the entire nation.

Progressives live in a world of aspiration; always hoping the next change will bring humanity closer to perfection. C. S. Lewis believed God created in us a similar yearning, but for something attained by listening for and following His guidance. Secular progressives have the same yearning but seek it through their will rather than God’s, following their own desires and imposing them on others.

How, then, to achieve genuine progress? Progressives believe in changes they impose to improve collective mankind’s condition, but could it be that each individual wishes for the power to preserve some values and reject changes that are contrary to his image of progress? Progressives fondly remember FDR and LBJ because both Presidents sought better lives for all Americans by government action. But the successful progressives of our 21st Century will be leaders who have the clearest understanding of what sustains and prospers our nation, sometimes by change, sometimes by steering a steady course, and always by letting each individual chart his own destiny insofar as possible. Yet I also believe that government, whether big or small, free or authoritarian, is not what matters most. I have come to think that any form of government—communism, socialism, progressivism, capitalism, or conservatism—will prosper if it is guided by a holy spirit in the hearts of men, but none can succeed that rebels against the intention of God. Karl Marx and his disciples doomed communism to failure by explicitly repudiating Godly religion. Progressives, capitalists, and socialists are just as likely to fail in the long run when they say, not thy will or God’s, but mine be done.

I espouse richer lives. I mean richer in service, not in prestige, power, and pelf. The most important task in my life was to grow a strong family. I learned this from my parents and ancestors. The Navy taught me to work in teams that execute well-tested procedures and replace those that are going to fail. Thirty-five years in the academic world taught me that too much of a good thing is a bad thing, and that every old farmer knows what’s important better than anyone in Washington. There is one more imperative that I had to learn for myself. It is to find at least two people with more aptitude than me and nurture their careers of service. I can claim more than two, though it has taken awhile.

A Footnote On Trends

These are the ten biggest trends in the world as seen by 1,592 American leaders. They appear in an Outlook on the Global Agenda 2014, assembled by the World Economic Forum.

1. Rising societal tensions in the Middle East and North Africa

2. Widening income disparities

3. Persistent structural unemployment

4. Intensifying cyber threats

5. Inaction on climate change

6. The diminishing confidence in economic policies

7. A lack of values in leadership

8. The expanding middle class in Asia

9. The growing importance of megacities

10. The rapid spread of misinformation online

How many trends on this list represent human progress? How many were aided, or might have been constrained, by progressives seeking to improve society?

ATTENTION GETTING MECHANISMS

New Year’s Day, 2012

In the Hughes family everyone knows AGM-ing means trying to draw unmerited attention. It was a trait of our teenage daughters. They grew out of it but this Christmas the AGM syndrome was back in our two youngest grandsons with hints of it in our granddaughter who has just turned thirteen. This week I read an essay by P. J. O’Rourke*** that was uncharacteristically garbled, probably because O’Rourke was trying to write like a baby boomer. O’Rourke left no doubt, however, that he thought people born from 1945 to 1965 were a generation locked into adolescence.

Why has attention grabbing insinuated its way into American adult life? It’s because there are too many people and too many products vying for attention: watch Me, buy My product, listen to My TV channel, or go to My movie. There were antecedents—anarchists, protesters, and social climbers amidst the moneyed class described in F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. But today we are inundated with attention seekers.

Here are examples:

Retail stores have so many products that each one of them can get lost in the mass of merchandise. Joan points out the addition of obnoxious little ads pasted to the floor saying buy Schmirty’s or Sugergrits or some otherwise faceless food.

Newspapers are desperate for attention because of today’s non-print alternatives. The alternatives have little sidebar ads, some of which bounce around to try to catch the eye.

Public television has lost all sense of dignity, propriety, and public service and is only one decibel less noisy than commercial outlets. Television has so many channels that earning attention with a calm demeanor and a worthy message is becoming a forgotten talent.

Many movies are tawdry displays of sex, blood, gore, and noise. It is conventional wisdom that today’s raunchy movies appeal only to teenagers, but O’Rourke implies they are in fact marketed just as much to adults who never grew up.

Theater was early into the business of attracting audiences with emotional brutality.

All contemporary entertainment is now laced with Look-At-Me puns and satire that are at best merely cute.

Twentieth Century music became increasingly loud and repetitive in an attempt to get attention. In classical music dissonance substituted for grace and structure. Arthur Honneger’s Pacific 2-3-1 illustrates; yet it is a cut above most with an attempt to imitate a steam engine with an orchestra. But Honeger’s music is a pale shadow compared with the opening number in Meredith Willson’s Music Man: Rock Island exhibits truth about Iowa’s people who are riding in a railroad car.**** Far worse is today’s popular music. It is all fetish and, strange to say, delivers an unimaginative sameness of noise and vulgarity.

If it is my lack of taste in art to prefer painting and sculpture done before the 20th Century over anything by Jackson Pollock or Andy Warhol, then I am wrong to think modern art is not about beauty, goodness, and expressions of universal truth but is mostly AGM gimmickry to achieve unmerited fame and fortune.

This evening two young endorsers in a TV ad struggled to exceed prior verbal excess by calling the food crazy good and insane. That’s it: This sandwich is insane.

The two most dignified Republican candidates for President are Mormons. I’ve never met a raucous Latter Day Saint. Mormon behavior contrasts sharply with both political handlers and contemporary street corner evangelists who—unlike John and Charles Wesley or the Salvation Army—manned megaphones to blast a message of hellfire and damnation at Santa Monica’s downtown shoppers.

If Anglo-Saxon sports had existed when Dante wrote the Inferno he might have added a tenth circle in Hell, just below those condemned for violence, fraud, and treachery. Or perhaps only the tasteless, out-of-control fans merit the ultimate torment. Self-promoting announcers may rank only in the sixth circle of hell. I’d put the players, especially basketball players, in the fourth circle (for lust) and football players in the sixth circle (for greed). Whatever distribution Dante and Virgil might decide upon, it is hard to imagine a noisier, more combative, less consequential set of attention getters than British soccer fans, American sports announcers, and football players on the field doing victory dances in end zones.*****

Here are examples of what is not AGM-ing. Twittering may be overdone in personal communications but it is concise compared to the bloviating in chat rooms, and twittering seems more an attempt never to be alone than to self-promote. Background music in stores is a plague that exists because retailers think customers cannot stand silence—which is rather the opposite of an attention getting mechanism. There is plenty of loud music, such as Franz Schubert’s 9th (Great) Symphony and much of Beethoven, that is full a grace and deserves to be heard. Attention getting that was highly appropriate were cavalry bugles blaring charge, and bagpipes leading the Scot Ladies from Hell against a terrified enemy.******

Choose your own Attention Getting Mechanisms, for they are all around you. But indulge your teenage children—and grand-children—because juvenile AGM-ing is nothing new and part of a temporary rebellion that still is universal. Honor the arts and foods and medicines and statesmen who merit your respect and ignore—if you can—the attention grabbers who are Peter Pans that never grew up. Honor young soldiers who grew up in the crucible of a life devoted to giving rather than taking. I continue to teach at the Naval Postgraduate School because none of my students believe AGM-ing is part of their lives. American Exceptionalism doesn’t stem from buying and consuming things or from treating democracy as license to self-indulge or self-pity. Exceptionalism comes from quiet admiration for the beauty of the earth and the freedom to choose how you will