An "expert" on any place is someone who has lived there more than thirty years, or less than thirty days.

Anonymous

Travels while living in Beirut, 1969-1970

The following maps give some idea of the ground I covered while living in Beirut, Lebanon, during the 1969-1970 academic year, my Junior Year at UCLA, on the University of California "Education Abroad" program at the American University of Beirut (AUB).

The photo at right is from my first morning in Lebanon, where we had been put up, temporarily, about a block from the university. This is looking west up the street. The University, along Bliss Street, is just a block over to the right.

From the arrival of our University of California group in Beirut until the end of the Fall semester, the only travelling I did was during our orientation period, run by Eileen and John Olmsted, who was a chemistry professor. For two weeks until classes started, we lived in tents at a YMCA camp up in the mountains, near the village of Ras al-Matn -- later a battleground in the Lebanese Civil War. Since Beirut was still very hot and humid in September, Ras al-Matn was a nice place to be -- indeed, there was a point on the highway up the Mountain where there was a palpable boundary between the humidity below and the drier air above -- a "dry line." Not only did we have the typical sort of orientation lectures, and some lessons in Lebanese Arabic, but we went on a good number of field trips around Lebanon:  to Byblos, Sidon, Tyre, Baalbek, Beit Meri, Beit ed-Din Palace, and up to a cedar grove near Beit ed-Din. Once classes started, the kind of excitement we had was from the curfew imposed on Beirut while there was fighting in the south between the Lebanese Army and Palestinians. This frightened our families back in the States, but it actually made our part of Beirut very quiet; and since there was no military presence, we wandered around a bit and held curfew parties.

Towards the end of the semester I began planning the only trip in the area that I really wanted to make, to Egypt. This was to be my only trip on an actual tour, set up by a local Lebanese travel agent with students and faculty from AUB and a number of non-academic Lebanese along. This made for a good busload and nice mix of people, and the interaction between the Lebanese and the Egyptians was often instructive or amusing. There weren't many places we could go in Egypt at the time, since there was a low level of fighting going on between the Egyptians and the Israelis, who were still occupying the Sinai. Cairo, Alexandria, Luxor, and Aswan (and to Dendera and Abu Simbel by boat) were the only places tourists were allowed. Our tour hit Cairo, Luxor, and Aswan. I almost didn't go, however, since I got hit with a stomach flu two days before I was supposed to leave. Fortunately, it turned out to be only a 24 hour bug, though it was nasty enough at first. So I was well enough the day before leaving to get my laundry done, buy film, etc.

The year 1970 turned out to be my main year of travelling. In February, during semester break, I went to Syria with a couple of guys from the California group, Alan Campbell and Dennis Anderson. We went out to Palmyra in the Syrian desert and visited the sights in the cities of Hama and Aleppo, also spending a night in Homs, though there wasn't much to see there. What I see at our hotel, while going to the bathroom in the middle of the night, was an old farmer, in traditional costume (baggy pants) washing his feet in the sink. Also, it may have been the first place where the toilet was actually just a hole in the floor. Later I saw some facilities like that in Japan (but this is now rare, and instead modern Japanese toilets tend to light up, warm up, and talk to you, or play music or pleasant sound effects). It was still pretty cold at the time, and so even in the desert we were pretty heavily wrapped up. In the image, I am at the water wheels on the Orontes River just outside Hama. The city was later destroyed by fighted in a rebellion; and I don't know if the water wheels even survived.

It turned out that AUB observed two different Easter holidays, one for Western (Gregorian) Easter in March and another for Eastern (Julian) Easter in April. Over the March Easter, I went along with a rather large but informal group of students from AUB on a trip to Jordan. We didn't have a lot of time to work with and only spent two nights in the county, but on one long day we went all the way down to Petra. Since there was time, we paid the drivers a bit more and continued all the way down to Aqaba, on the Gulf of Aqaba. I liked the idea of seeing a place famous from Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and of washing my hands in the waters of the Indian Ocean, or at least a distant branch of it. The route also crossed the scenic Wādī Rūm, , in which some of Lawrence (and John Wick) was filmed. On our way back from Jordan we stopped briefly in Jerash and then spent the night and visited the next day in Damascus, which I hadn't seen yet.

For Eastern Easter in April, I went back to Syria with a friend I had made on the trip to Jordan, and whose head we see at right at Aqaba, Gay Lee, who was in Beirut from Beloit College in Wisconsin, but whose home was actually in California, in South San Francisco. We spent nights in Aleppo, Hama, Palmyra, and Damascus. It was warmer weather at that point, but not too warm. One curious experience we had was in the taxi going out to Palmyra. There were a number of other passengers with us, as was the custom, and about half way out in the desert, the taxi left the paved road and headed off across to the desert to drop a couple of people off at their house out in the middle of nowhere. Just as we got to the house, they invited us to visit them! I'm sure that would have been fascinating, but Gay Lee and I were a little too timid to get stranded in the middle of the Syrian Desert with a family of people we could hardly talk to and didn't know anything about! So we politely declined and went on to Palmyra.

In May, Gay Lee and I made another day trip to Damascus; but the big trip of the month was out to Cyprus. The University of California, of course, had another program in Israel, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Somebody came up with the idea that it would be interesting to get a bunch of us Beirut students together with the Jerusalem students to talk about the Arab-Israeli conflict. The closest "neutral" place to do that was on Cyprus, which at the time had not yet been partitioned by war into Greek and Turkish zones, though there were already Greek and Turkish areas. It turned out to be an interesting get together, and we saw a fair amount of Cyprus in the process. At left we see Dennis Anderson, and the blond hair he needed to conceal in Syria, talking to one of the girls from Jerusalem. I took along one of the Arab outfits I had bought in Syria and made a bit of a splash showing up in it at one of the meetings -- sort of "Kelley of Arabia," though in darker, Syrian colors. We ended up seeing quite a bit of Cyprus, including Paphos, where Aphrodite was born.

Further photos of the Acropolis can be found here, and of the Elgin Marbles here.

I think my idea of travelling turned out to be a little too tiring for Gay Lee's friend -- I had this sort of Death March habit of walking around places -- so after we got as far as Corinth, she went back to Athens and flew on to meet friends in Switzerland. I don't blame her -- my wife now, happily, shares my habits of walking, and we've done a lot of walking from Kyôto to London. One delight, actually, of the stay in Corinth -- whose acropolis, the Acrocorinth, Ἀκροκόρινθος, is seen at left -- was running into another American couple, with whom we shared a room. The girl was a Greek history buff, and they had just come from "Sandy" Pylos, Πύλος. She knew all the history and the lore of the place. I really wanted to go there but never made it. She definitely would have been the person to see it with, boyfriend or not.

The rest of my trip was by myself, though I ended up meeting people I knew in Rome, Switzerland, Paris, and London -- including a high school friend, who I didn't even know was in Europe, and who I met quite by chance in the London Bank of America.

My first stop after Corinth was Mycenae. To get there, I took a bus to Argos, and then they just let me off at the road up to Mycenae. It was a couple of kilometers, carrying my luggage, which consisted of a camel leather duffel bag and a large woven bag and strap that I could hang over over my shoulder. There was a youth hostel at the modern town, which was booked up, actually, but they were willing to let me have a bed in the hallway. That was fine. That evening, hanging out with a beer, I got to talking with an English guy who had been doing his own traveling. It all sounded pretty adventurous; and since I had just come from Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Turkey, my experiences were already sounding pretty adventurous also. It also seemed fairly 19th Century, although, unfortunately, many modern problems were already on the horizon. This might actually have been a good fellow to continue traveling with, but I think we were headed in different directions, and I don't remember what his goal was, if any.

At the great Lion's Gate of Mycenae, the adventure seemed to involve a group of French schoolgirls. I had just taken an archaeology class in Beirut, so I already had a pretty good idea what I was looking at. Walking back down the road to catch the bus to Argos, I was in a quandry where to go next. Pylos called, but my goal was actually Patras, and the ferry to Italy. To get there, I could go through Olympia. So I did. Very little is left standing there, but it is the place where now they light the Olympic Torch. See more about Olympia and my suggestion about the Winter Games here.

More relevant to local history was my visit to the Sistine Chapel, which involved entering the Vatican Museum and walking through Kenneth's Clark's Big Room, which is discussed separately.

After three nights in Rome, I took the train to Milan and then switched to a train going to Switzerland. The line was headed to Lausanne, but I got off at Aigle, which is on the Rhône River near where it flows into Lake Geneva.

Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, "ὁ Τηλεπατητικὸς above the Sea of Fog," 1818, by Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), Hamburger Kunsthalle

On the way to Switzerland, the train passed Lake Maggiore and then passed through the Simplon Tunnel. Although the line soon entered the French speaking part of Switzerland (Lower Valais), it intially entered a German speaking part (Upper Wallis, but the same Canton). The customs officials who walked down the train were very, very blond, poster boys for some kind of German racial propaganda.

From Aigle there is a little railway, the Leysin-Feydey, that goes up to Leysin. There was a youth hostel in Leysin that I knew about because I knew that a woman I knew in Beirut was staying there.

Leysin was a ski resort well up in the mountains. While there, I took an overhead tram that went further up the mountain. It is hard to reconstruct now which tram I look, but the simplest one looks like it goes up to the peak called Berneuse. I didn't do any further hiking, but the view from the peak was right out of The Sound of Music [1965]. It was bracing and breathtaking.

The youth hostel was cheap, and I actually stayed five nights. The sleeping was in a communal bunk room, and I was already in bed one night when a couple came in and had sex nearby. The first time such a thing had happen around me. Otherwise, I have no recollection what I did for several days in Leysin.

Back down to Aigle, I finished the trip into Lausanne, where I boarded a train for Paris. When the train entered France, the customs officer noticed that the wrong date had been entered on my Eurail Pass when I had first used it in Italy. It was one of the few times I could use a whole sentencce in French, "Ce n'est pas juste." It didn't make any difference, and that was the last time the issue came up.

In Paris, the night I arrived, I found a small hotel on the Left Bank just by wandering around. When I registered, and the police form asked for "place of birth" (the opposite of the anonymity of Japanese hotels), they were impressed when I put down, "Hollywood, California." The clerk exclaimed, in a Hollywood French accent, "Oliwoud!"

It had rooms several stories up off a single stairwell. The photo at right is the view, not of my room, but from my room, looking out to the buildings in the street out back. When I would come back during the day, and let myself in, the only person in charge seemed to be the maid, who would hear the door open and call down the stairs, "Qui là?" I would call up my room number as I headed up the stairs. Before long it got so that I quite enjoyed hearing the "Qui là?"

Naive as I was, I don't think I always picked up on what was going on. One evening, a young woman staying in another room on my floor knocked on my door and asked if she could borrow my razor. Really? Perhaps I should have asked, in my broken French, if she needed any help with the actual shaving. And now I know the joke, or rumor, that French women actually don't do a lot of shaving. As it was, she just did borrow the razor, and then returned it after a while. I learned nothing about her. I don't think she was actually hitting on me.

My hotel in 1970 was a little different from the one my University of California group was in on the way to Beirut in 1969, when we had a layover in Paris. The view out the window was of a much nicer neighbhorhood, on the Boulevard Voltaire, on the Right Bank. The experience there already involved some acculturation.

The hotel did not have private bathrooms with the rooms, the first time I had run into that in my young life -- although I had heard of it (they say that the Savoy in London was the first hotel, at least in Europe, with private bathrooms -- the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, where Warren G. Harding died of a heart attack, had private bathrooms before the Savoy). What was in the room, however, was a bidet. I did not have a clue what this was. Nor did anyone else in my group. But we did notice that there didn't seem to be any toilet paper around. One of the happy discoveries when we arrived in Beirut was that they had toilet paper.

Even then, it had not quite sunk in that the purpose of a bidet was to wash one's nethers with water rather than wipe them with toilet paper. Even where toilet paper occurs in France, or Germany, or perhaps other places, Americans often complain that it is more like sandpaper than like what they are used to. Of course, the whole idea and manfacture of toilet paper is a modern innovation. Water was the traditional cleaning medium. In the traditional Middle East, vendors with jugs of water could be hired to pour some into one's hand -- the left hand -- which was then used to wipe what needed wiping. This was one reason why the left hand could not be used for food handling, greetings, etc. My Persian professor once said that, if you are left handed, "Don't be."

This leads to a nice joke about the image sometimes conjured of conquering Islām, that the warriors held a sword in one hand and a Qurʾān in the other. The punch line is that this must have involved entire armies of left-handed swordsmen, since holding a Qurʾān in the left hand would have been unthinkable.

In the modern world, where the Japanese now produce toilets that light up or warm up when you come near, and supply music or spoken instructions for your edification, one can also use streams of water again for cleaning. Not that toilet paper is ever lacking in Japan. But you may like the options.

Those familiar with an older Japan will know that toilets often used to be holes in the floor, perhaps with a hose to clean things up a bit afterwards. I ran into this on a train in 1988. This did not surprise, or appall, me, since I was familiar with such things from Syria, even in fairly nice hotels in Damascus.

Years later, in 2005, my wife and I would take the train down to Dover from London, on a clear and sunny day, just to see the Cliffs. The photo at left is at that time, looking north from the pier at Dover. The cliffs here are not as stark as elsewhere along the coast; but they are cliffs, and definitely are limestone, just like on I-10 in West Texas. Up on Dover Castle, we ran into another couple, also teachers, from Los Angeles.

Arriving in London in 1970, I went straight to the office that was handling my charter flight ticket back to New York, just to get everything set up (I briefly became of a member of the New School for Social Research). The office was off Picadilly Circus, seen at right. In those days, the Circus was an actual traffic circle. Now it had been redesigned into a regular intersection, despite what seems to be a trend in the States to replace signals with circles. The redesign involves a large pedestrian area, which may have been the point. One's life is no longer imperiled by walking over to the statue of Cupid.

When my ticket was settled, I asked if they could recommend a place to stay. The fellow in the office, who looked like a character from A Hard Day's Night [1964, directed by Richard Lester], warmly answered that I should stay at the "Inns of Court." I had no idea what this was, but I followed his directions and walked across London. I have been unable to reconstruct exactly where this was, but the "Inn" in question was certainly Lincoln's Inn or Gray's Inn, not the Middle or Inner Temple.

I arrived to find that the great accomodations were actually no more than a "crash pad," with everyone sleeping on the floor of a large room. The only advantage I saw in this was that they would store my luggage overnight in a separate locked closet. Otherwise, I spent the night wandering around London. I went for dinner to get Fish and Chips, the only English food I had ever heard of. I did not know, at that point, that "chips" actually meant french fries. It was many more years before I noticed that English potato chips are, in turn, "crisps." While I have had fish and chips in London again on a subsequent trip, I do not find it a great dish. At the Atlantic Chip Shop in Brooklyn, I discovered "shrimp and chips," which I enjoyed several times before the restaurant, tragically, closed. They had breaded the shrimp differently from what I have always found with fried shimp in American restaurants. And I could put HP Sauce on the "chips." Otherwise, I vividly remember that night sitting on a bench on the Thames across from the Houses of Parliament.

Subsequently, my memorable dining experience in London was at an Indian restaurant. I knew nothing about Indian food and have no recollection of what I ate, except that it was good. My impression at the time was that Indian restaurants, now ubiquitous, were still a little unusual. I have no recollection of any other food I ate in London in 1970.

The next day, I took my Europe on 5 Dollars a Day and went looking for a bed and breakfast. I found one for three nights near Russell Square, and subsequently another one for the rest of my stay near Hyde Park. This ended up being qutie nice. Apart from my tourism, a memorable occasion was seeing the movie M*A*S*H for the first time.

One of the transient sights of London in 1970 was the removal of the old London Bridge and the building of its replacement. The new bridge can be seen in the foreground and the old, stone bridge behind it. I found this all a little confusing. The "London Bridge" here is not the one of the nursery rhyme, which was about the Mediaeval bridge, which had houses on it. The stone bridge here is its Victorian replacement. The old bridge was, after all, "falling down."

Once removed, the Victorian bridge was being shipped to Arizona, to Lake Havasu, where it would be reconstructed across, not the Colorado River, but a canal that now separates an island in the River from the City of Lake Havasu. This still seems like an odd transaction for something whose only real claim to fame is its long vanished predecessor. One does hope that the worthies of Lake Havasu City knew which bridge they were getting.

A more durable sight was the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum, the key artifact for the decipherment of Ancient Egyptian.

It does not seem like the best presentation was for it to be embedded in a wooden case, but that has now been corrected as the exhibit, and the whole museum, has been remodeled since 1970. The new exhibit, however, is not arranged in a way that would allow for a young woman in a short skirt to be easily included in the shot, as happened here (unintentionally). I have no recollection of what she was looking at behind the Stone.

The new exhibit can be seen below left, with the Stone set upright and viewable from both side. This was in 2005. By then, I was 35 years older than in 1970, and most of my hair had gone white -- although at least I still had it. For some images of the Elgin Marbles, see here.

Part of the interest of my visit in London was that it was in the last days, indeed, the last year, of the use of traditional English money, the old £sd system. Decimal coins, the £p system, were already in circulation for 5p and 10p; but for the time being these were just used for their 1s and 2s value. As it happened, the farthing and half-penny had already been withdrawn from circulation; but there was still the shilling, six pence, three pence, and old penny in circulation.

The pennies, extraordinarily, included coins at least as old as the reign of Edward VII. I had gotten used to seeing old coins in the States already disappearing. By an interesting coincidence, the exchange rate at the time was $2.40 to a pound. Since there are 240 old pence to a pound, this made the British penny worth exactly one U.S. cent, easing calculations of value.

It was both charming and sad to have shop keepers, when they realized I was American, launch off into their explanation of how shillings and pence worked. They obviously relished the chance to explain English ways to a Yank, but, soon enough, they would no longer need to do that. Since then, the 5p and 10p coins have shrunk in size, since their modern value is not remotely comparable to what it had been when they were silver. Indeed, a shilling, before World War II, like a quarter in the States, could have bought dinner.

The final act in London was getting ready to return home. Part of this was shipping some books that I had picked up along the way. I had already mailed a number of packages of books from Beirut, like the one at right, and they had all arrived safely in Los Angeles -- this from a post office with the reputation of having the occasional "accidental" fire when there got to be too much of a backlog of mail. In London I only wanted to mail two packages, which I wrapped up and tied up like the ones from Beirut.

As it happened, the Royal Mail lost one of my packages. It never arrived. And its contents were valuable. One item was the Turkish Qurʾān I bought in İzmir. This was the only official translation of the Qurʾān that has ever existed; and it was authorized, of course, by the Ottoman Sultāns who had assumed the title and authority of the Caliphate, and had generally been accepted in the Islamic World as legitimately so. This was the most unique acquisition of my entire year in Lebanon, bought from a Turkish bookstore in Turkey itself; and Perfidious Albion, which has an actual tradition of its Subjects showing up with strange books, managed to lose or steal my Turkish Qurʾān. Were there no Gentlemen left in England?

Nearly as distressing was the other book in the package, which was a Greek New Testament that I bought in Athens. Some years later, when my mother was going on some tours of Europe, I asked her to buy another one on her Greek trip. She did, and it is a valuable item, with a Modern Greek translation and the "Byzantine" text, or the textus receptus, of the New Testament. This is a different recension from the "Alexandrian" text featured in the Nestle-Aland edition of the New Testament [Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, Stuttgart, 1981, 1990]. There are small but interesting differences between the texts, as in two cases discussed here.

A book that I did not trust to the mail, but carried with me, was the Greek text of the Old Testament that I also bought in Athens, the extraordinary Septuagint (often just called "LXX," the "Seventy"). This remains a treasure indeed, with the added recollection of having carried it, not a small book, across Europe from Athens to London. Where this site features quotes from the Old Testament, the Hebrew, Latin, and English texts are usually from sources now easily obtainable in conventional ways. But the Greek text is from this hand carried Septuagint, the final trophy of all my travels.

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Copyright (c) 1999, 2000, 2011, 2018, 2020, 2022, 2023 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D., Postumus Friesianorum, All Rights Reserved

The Grand Duchy of Baden

I have a personal connection to the Grand Duchy of Baden, namely that my great-grandfather, my maternal grandmother's father, immigrated from there in 1861. His name was Ernst Friedrich Werner, and he was only 11 years old at the time. His family settled in Nebraska, where he ended up having a large family, owning a fair amount of land, and retiring early to Falls City, Nebraska. When he died in 1931, my mother was only 10 years old, but that was old enough that she remembered a bit about him, more than her own mother, who had died in 1927. Since Ernst married a girl who was all German herself, that made my mother half German and me a quarter. One of my mother's cousins has traced the Werner family in Baden all the way back to 1670. The chart shows the descent of my grandmother Louise from her great-great-great-great grandparents, Johann Werner and Maria Schuhmacher.

My mother, however, looked more like her father's side of the family, which was English and Scottish, than like the German side. I take after her, and after my father's Scotch-Irish family. If I have to be part German, however, Baden is not too bad. It is South German, and when the Werner family left, it was still an independent state, under the Grand Duke Friedrich I, several years before German unification. They got out just ahead of Bismark. Unfortunately, Bismark has caught up with us, since, as I like to say, American government the way it is now owes more to Otto von Bismark than it does to Thomas Jefferson.

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Philosophy of History

The Five Flags

Scattered around this Vita are the flags of the five places that I've lived, most of them while I was engaged in the long Odyssey of my college education. I was born and grew up in California and have since returned here to teach, so the "Bear Republic" flag of California turns up quite a bit. California was only briefly, if one can say at all, an independent republic, during the "Bear Flag Revolt" of 1846 against Mexico. This was not a very serious bid for independence, however, since John C. Frémont was already present, securing the territory for the United States. A de facto independence had earlier existed a bit longer, after Mexico became independent from Spain in 1821. Upper California was forgotten for a few years and left to its own devices. When Mexican governors arrived, they were not popular, and the Californios revolted in 1831. Pío Pico led the resistance and was eventually accepted as Governor, and the last Mexican one, of California.

My Freshman year of college, 1967-68, I spent in Albuquerque. I had already visited my aunt and uncle and cousins near Alamogordo in 1962. I have loved New Mexico ever since. It was so high and dry I noticed at the time that my hair would dry out almost instantly after a shower. I used to get nosebleeds from it too. Now it would be murder on my skin, which dries out badly in the winter even in Los Angeles. New Mexico had a longer history than California, with the Spanish arriving in 1536. Subsequently, New Mexico Indians regained independence only once, in the great Pueblo Revolt of 1680-1692. One of the most fascinating things about New Mexico is that many of the old Pueblos do still exist, with a continuous history of habitation for many centuries. The most famous, and the only remaining multi-storied one, is at Taos -- to the fascination of people like D.H. Lawrence and C.G. Jung. The flag of New Mexico is based on the sun symbol of Zia Pueblo. I have enlarged it on the flag given here, since I think on the standard flag it is too small. Happily, I've been back to New Mexico many times since leaving in 1968, driving back and forth to Texas, visiting my aunt and uncle (different ones from '62) in Alamogordo, and seeing my old Beirut friend Craig in Albuquerque.

After my Sophomore year at UCLA, I ended up at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon for my Junior year, 1969-70. I tell several stories about that elsewhere. I didn't know too much about Lebanon before going there, apart from ancient and Classical history. Some important historical sites, like the temples at Baalbek, I actually had never heard of. The only shadow on Lebanon's future at the time were the Israeli responses to Palestinian attacks from South Lebanon. This ended up provoking clashes between the Christian and Moslem communities in Lebanon, and soon set off a Civil War that really lasted for almost 20 years. When I was there, however, Beirut seemed like a place that was too busy making money and envoying life to do anything so foolish as to destroy the country over politics and religion. Beirut got all the recent movies from the United States and Europe, which were shown in their original languages, with the English language movies usually with French or French and Arabic subtitles. One of my favorites that year was Easy Rider (1969), which was altogether a strange movie to be seeing in Lebanon -- though not as strange as the long-running and vastly popular Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969). It was also the year of much protest over the War in Vietnam, with the Kent State shootings and all. That, consequently, all seemed rather distance. Effecting us more directly was the drawing of numbers for the draft lottery. I think mine was 196 (out of 366 for the days of the year), which turned out to be high enough that I didn't have any trouble with the draft. Since I never saw the news on television that year, or even heard it very often on radio, all other events, like the problem with Apollo 13, seemed equally distant. I usually found out about events from the Beirut English language newspaper, the Daily Star, and then from Time and Newsweek every week. There was no international direct dialing in those days. I only talked to my parents twice on the phone during the whole year. (When I went away to New Mexico, there wasn't any direct dialing -- no area codes, no zip codes, and no general bank credit cards.) The Lebanese flag mainly consists of one of the most symbolic things about Lebanon:  a Cedar tree, used to build everything from ancient Egyptian boats to the Turkish Hejaz railroad.

After I graduated from UCLA, it ended up taking a year to work out what to do. Thanks to Lenn Goodman, whom I had met while he was a visiting professor at UCLA in 1970-71, I got a Fellowship at the University of Hawaii, where he had gone, and went out there for the next three years, 1972-75. This was altogether a different life than I had had before, since I had something like my own income for the first time, and in the third year even had an independent job teaching classes for Chaminade College. But I also got lucky and got married in my personal life; and for what seemed like a long time at the time suddenly was part of a new, very large extended family of in-laws. When I told the secretary in the Philosophy Department who I was marrying, she even knew the family name:  "The Rathburns are an old kamaāina family," she said. A kamaāina, "child of the land," is someone who is either Native Hawaiian, Part Hawaiian (hapa haole), or whose family had been in Hawaii so long that they are the moral equivalent. The first Rathburn in Hawaii, Samuel, was Gaye's great-great-grandfather. Her great-grandfather was born in Hawaii in 1868. Although sometimes it occurs to me that I might have simply stayed in Hawaii, I was beginning to get "rock fever," the feeling of being trapped on the island, and I did want to go on for my Ph.D. at a somewhat more prestigious institution. So I pulled up such roots as I had begun to set down. Although the flag of Hawaii contains the British Union Jack, the Kingdom was never a British possession. The Royal family, however, liked to savor a special connection to Queen Victoria, and Protection by Britain was sometimes considered as a defense against designs from the United States. The British were never that interested in assuming any responsibility for Hawaii, however, and eventually a coup delivered the Kingdom to American interlopers and then to the imperialism of President McKinley. The tutus, the grandmothers of Hawaii, still march in parades wearing black, in mourning for the loss of Hawaiian independence and the old Kingdom.

The move to Texas for Gaye was her first time living someplace besides Hawaii, and even though our marriage barely lasted five months there, she stayed many years and later only moved as close to home as California. My own subsequent love life in Texas was dreadful. I found more romance at the time on trips back to California. I don't know why that was. I did, however, end up getting involved with a group of friends in Austin and so in many ways had an active enough social life. Arriving in Austin in 1975, living there steadily until '79, and then off and on for several more years, I got to know the area pretty well and saw it change as Austin grew from around 300,000 people to more like 400,000. I do miss my friends, the night life (places like the Armadillo World Headquarters, Threadgill's, the Broken Spoke, etc.), and especially the food. Not only was the Mexican (Tex-Mex) food incomparable, but other things, like gingerbread pancakes, I have found nowhere else. I saw the entire rise and fall of Jorge Arredondo's restaurants, from the little enclosed stand of the original "Jorge's," to the chain of restaurants all over Austin, and finally to the lone "Jorge's" that was sold to pay off the bankruptcy. The whole story took almost twenty years. A great cook just needed a better business manager. It was some of the best eating ever. However, it was in Hawaii that I gained 40 pounds, entirely from Gaye's and my own home cooking. By the time I graduated from UT in 1985, I weighed little more than when I had arrived. The Texas "Lone Star" flag, of course, dates from the nine years of the Republic of Texas, 1836-1845. Hawaii and Texas are the only two States that had serious experiences as independent countries apart from the United States. The old French Legation still stands as a tourist attraction in Austin. I imagine Texas might still some day ask the Supreme Court to enforce the provision of its Treaty of Annexation that explicity reserved a Right of Secession, a right that was of course not respected when Texas was returned to the Union by force, along with the rest of the Confederacy, in 1865. Not that I am in favor of secession either now or then (as a Jacksonian Unionist, like Sam Houston):  I am just curious about what mental gymnastics of sophistry the Court might practice in such a decision.

I first put these five flags together in June 1981 when I was visiting Mt. Rushmore with my cousin Cheryl. In the gift shop they had little four by five inch flags of every state and every country. So I thought I would get ones for the places I had lived. Later I made a little stand for them. The only flag that might be added would be New Jersey. Since my second wife started teaching at Princeton in 1990, I have been spending a lot of time back there. A lot of it has been rather like living in a place:  Going grocery shopping, buying furniture, getting to know the area, shoveling snow, driving in fog, etc. It is at least, then, a home away from home; and it would be nice if some circumstance could arise (i.e. finding work there) so that I could move back completely. Unfortunately, the flip side of academic tenure is the rigidity of the workforce, the scarcity of openings, and the difficulty of changing jobs. So there is no certainty short of retirement of becoming a resident of New Jersey. The flag of New Jersey is not very interesting, simply the coat of arms of the State on a background that I have variously seen as off-white, tan, or yellow. It is supposed to be "buff," the color of the uniforms of the New Jesey regiments under George Washington (a color impossible to get right with my graphics programs). Apart from that, there is nothing particularly historic or symbolic about the flag. So it is not quite in the same league, as a flag, as the other five.

The seventh flag assumed in most of the above would be the national flag of the United States of America. In my lifetime, three versions of the flag have flown, with 48, 49, and 50 stars. If only Old Glory still stood for what she once did, as when planted on Missionary Ridge or Mt. Suribachi. Does the Star-Spangled banner yet wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave? It still waves, but it is no longer the land of the free or the home of the brave. A large majority has sold their birthright of freedom for a share in the loot of the welfare state. They have willingly become peons of thieving, lying, tyrant, con-men politicians, whining about their Medicare and Social Security "benefits." They have given up ownership and control of their own bodies to federal authorities whose idea of compassion is to let people with cancer suffer and die rather than send the "wrong message" about something so obviously medicinal as marijuana. They have even given up the recourse of armed resistance against an occupying army of paramilitary police forces and Gestapo-like federal agencies. When North Carolina ratified the Constitution, it declared, "that the doctrine of non-resistance against arbitrary power and oppression is absurd, slavish, and destructive to the good and happiness of mankind." Yet the public now has little sympathy for anyone defending themselves (like the Branch Davidians) against even transparently illegal assaults by government authorities. The federal government now is precisely the kind of government that NONE of the Founding Fathers wanted -- a centralized national government with unlimited power ("plenary powers" according to the Clinton Administration itself). No, it is no longer the land of the free. And with such citizens, it cannot be the home of the brave either. A shame and the disgrace to the Founders, it has become a home of cowardly serfs, people who have forgotten, or now perhaps have never known, what their country is all about.

If the work of the American Revolution needs to be done all over again, then we might end with an eighth flag, the Liberty Tree Flag of 1775. The "Appeal To Heaven" on the flag is based on a quote from John Locke (The Second Treatise of Civil Government, §20):

For wherever violence is used, and injury done, though by hands appointed to administer Justice, it is still violence and injury, however colour'd with the Name, Pretences, or Forms of Law, the end whereof being to protect and redress the innocent, by an unbiassed application of it, to all who are under it; wherever that is not bona fide done, War is made upon the Sufferers, who having no appeal on Earth to right them, they are left to the only remedy in such Cases, an appeal to Heaven.

The American people don't seem to know that their government is at war with them, even though the "war on drugs," which is a war on freedom and the Constitution, is called just that.

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Copyright (c) 1999, 2000, 2011 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D., Postumus Friesianorum, All Rights Reserved

Since I joined the Libertarian Party, I have encountered many people prepared to defend the right of the Confederate States to secede from the Union. Similar arguments have even been made by the economist Walter Williams in his newspaper columns, even though he himself is black and, one might imagine, would particularly appreciate the liberation of the slaves by the Union Army. The libertarian columnist Vin Suprynowicz, of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, has also said recently (March 22, 2000), that Abraham Lincoln was "America's greatest mass murderer" for prosecuting the bloody war to subjugate the Southern States.

Now, I think that the arguments in favor of Southern secession based on self-determination could be cogent and persuasive. They certainly seemed indisputable to me when I was a teenage Civl War buff, and I have no difficulty understanding how some reasonable persons of good will can still be persuaded by them, especially when we consider the present Federal Government, which is no less than an active system of tyranny. But it has been a long time since I could accept the adequacy of such arguments. I am a Union man. I have already detailed the reasons for this in my review of Jeffrey Hummel's Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men and in a separate discussion of President Lincoln. Here I will consider the matter in a more personal way. [note]

First of all, as Walter Williams' friend, the economist and really philosopher Thomas Sowell, says, good things are rarely achieved in politics, or in life in general, without trade-offs. The evils of the unintended consequences of well motivated policies and deeds are often so considerable as to erase the expected goods, if any, of the actions intending them. Similarly, even things worth doing are rarely unaccompanied by other consequences which are less desirable. This calls for the often difficult and thankless "cost/benefit" analysis. Worse, life sometimes favors us with real moral dilemmas where an undoubted and compelling goal can only be achieved through the commission of some real injustice. This circumstance in politics and statecraft was the most bravely faced by Machiavelli. In libertarian circles, one finds a division between Utilitarians, who will find no difficulty in balancing the goods achieved in a cost/benefit analysis, and the "moralists", for whom the consequences are irrelevant and all that matters is whether an action or a policy violates a strict moral principle, like the "non-initiation of force" (promoted, if not originated, by Ayn Rand).

Utilitarians would be more comfortable with a cost/benefit analysis of the Civil War and with the reality of the imperfect outcome thereof; but since the Civil War raises intensely moral issues, a purely Utilitarian analysis is bound to sound a little strange. Did the war bring about greater happiness for a greater number of people? Since many were slaughtered and impoverished, it is hard to see much improvement in that respect. Although the freed slaves were certainly happier, and their economic conditions actually began improving faster than that of whites (see Sowell's Ethinic America), Utilitarianism is really ill equipped to evaluate the overall benefit of this, since it could very well be that the "greatest happiness of the greater number" could be purchased with the continuing slavery of the slaves, whose marginal loss of happiness might nevertheless be overwhelmed by the benefit of the slaughter and economic destruction avoided for the majority. After all, Southern slaves were better fed, better housed, and lived longer than "free" people in many other places in the world, like Ireland. While an argument like this has certainly been made, especially in the past, and may figure as an element in more recent aguments, the touchstone of the issue is not Utilitarian at all, but a conflict of moral principle.

Did Lincoln "initiate force" by invading the South? Well, strictly speaking, no, since the War began with the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter. Lincoln deliberately waited until the Confederates began the shooting. Now, it can be argued that the Confederate action was justified, because Lincoln had refused to turn over the Fort, which was, after secession, the property of South Carolina and so was being held as stolen property, which South Carolina had the right to take by force. This argument, however, raises the question of whether the slave owners of the South had a right to hold African human beings as property. If they did not, then any person of good will would have the right, indeed the duty in the right circumstances, to free those human beings. If the "initiation of force" was supposed to be Lincoln holding the stolen property of Fort Sumter, the force had already been initiated, and renewed on a daily basis, on a far more massive and egregious scale, by all the slave owners of the South and everyone who aided and abetted their crimes. Lincoln said that he just wanted to preserve the Union, not free the slaves, but Southerners didn't believe that, which is why they seceded, and, surprise, surprise, the War ended up freeing the slaves after all. Lincoln got the Thirteenth Amendment passed by Congress in December 1864 and subsequently told the Confederates that he would consider any conditions of surrender they might propose, on the non-negotiable basis of both reunion and emancipation. Lincoln was even willing to compensate slave owners (however unwilling other Northerners were), but the Confederates would never consider the pre-conditions.

Did the Southerners, in general, have a right to secede, on the basis of moral self-determination? Yes, but this is an unreal argument, because Southerners never would have considered secession if they had not thought it necessary to preserve slavery. South Carolina had a much stronger case in 1832 when it threatened secession over the protective tariff passed by Congress. This law was unconstitutional, since a protective tariff is a tax designed to benefit certain industries and producers, at a cost to consumers, and thus violates the "general welfare" clause of the Constitution. South Carolina was threatened with force by President Jackson, a strong Unionist, but then was mollified with a reduction in the tariff. This is still a living issue, since protective tariffs have not only never been declared unconstitutional, and are still used and advocated, but the "general welfare" clause has instead been used to justify Congressional spending on any purpose whatsoever -- all of which are expect to "contribute" to the "general welfare," even when they are pork barrel bills with no other purpose than to subsidize the businesses of certain individuals -- although both Madison and Jefferson both pointed out that such a practice would destroy the whole purpose of the Constitution as a grant of limited and enumerated powers to the Federal Government.

In such a situation, where a wrong is inflicted and justice denied, South Carolina had a right to either violent or non-violent resistance. Secession would be a form of violent resistance, and so justified. However, in 1860 South Carolina was not afraid of injustice, but of justice. Despite what some now say, it was not the continuing problem of tariffs that pushed the "fire-eaters" over the edge. It was the "Black Republicans." While persons have the right to exercise their rights, like voluntary association, for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reasons, no one has the right to any action whose purpose is to perpetuate crime and escape from justice. Southern slave owners, although we may say, as Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman actually did, that they were acting in good faith, nevertheless were engaged in one of the most vile businesses of human history. Even worse, they were justifying it with a pure racism that served to all but completely dehumanize their African bondsmen. This became one of the worst poisons in American history. It had already infected Constitutional Law through the Dred Scott decision (1857), which held that no black person was a citizen of the United States or had any rights that need be recognized by white people. This monstrous doctrine did not end with the Civil War. Even when the slaves were free, and their rights enshrined in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Southern die hards, given a free hand by the withdrawl of Federal forces in 1877, created regimes of Jim Crow and Segregation that disenfranchized, terrorized, and oppressed black people for another century. Much as the Civil War damaged Constitutional government, this pales in comparison to the degree to which racist Segregationists discredited the Tenth Amendment by constantly invoking Federalism and States' Rights in order to justify their crimes and brutality against black people. By the 1960's, it was impossible to mention the Tenth Amendment without sounding like one of them. As with slavery itself, they were using what sounded like noble principles to hide the most appalling and disgraceful beliefs, attitudes, and actions. It is sheer perversity for this to be ignored now by those who are getting up on their own moral high horse but only see the pretexts, not the crimes behind them.

One of the very worst effects of Segregation for the freedom of all Americans is one that I have never even seen mentioned -- I have discussed it in the essay on Machiavelli. The Dick Act of 1903, which abolished the traditional Militia and instituted the National Guard, is certainly a manifestation of Segregation. No Southern State wanted its black citizens to be trained and armed with military weapons, let alone have them "keep and bear" the arms on their own recognizance. Black people might have actually been able to resist the judicial and extra-judicial Terrorism of the Segregationist regimes in that case. It was enough trouble after the Civil War that black Union veterans, keeping their wartime weapons, had been able to do just that. The original Militia Act of 1792 had only referred to "white" citizens, but this could not be sustained with any credibility under the Civil War Amendments. So just chuck the whole thing. Keep the National Guard white, and in any case keep their weapons in armories. Then blacks could be kept disarmed and helpless -- especially when the Supreme Court took no cases on the Second Amendment at all, a way of denying it to blacks without actually saying so. Now, nearly a century later, the chickens have come home to roost on us all. The sustained attack on the Second Amendment that we see carried out by the Press, academia, Hollywood, and the Democratic Party means no less than to impose a Jim Crow, helpless serfdom on everyone. Honest citizens don't "need" military weapons, or even handguns, for the trivial purposes of hunting or target shooting. Meanwhile, the rest of the Bill of Rights can be completely destroyed, and those who try to resist with any force, or even with no force, are condemned and reviled by all.

In the light of this evil history, the problem may be, not that the Civil War was too brutal, but that it may not have been, if anything, brutal enough. The Southerners were not so defeated that they did not have the wit and the energy to destroy the freedom of Africans nearly as thoroughly as if they had still been slaves. Indeed, it is hard to know just what would have worked, but at least some effort might have been sustained if the North itself had not been corrupted by Southern ideology and wearied by the effort to preserve rights for blacks that many Northerners didn't really believe in anyway. The Dick Act was only the beginning of turning the whole country into something like the Segregation regime. After the turn of the century, we see increasing romanticization of the Southern cause, and increasing Northern diffidence over the lost rights of blacks, creating the means by which similar rights could later be stripped from all. In time, the Civil War was not even called by its Northern name, which was the "Great Rebellion." Instead, the Southern name, the "War between the States," which implied that it was the States fighting each other, not the Southern States fighting the United States, became more popular -- until, even today, this is sometimes regarded as the proper, old-fashioned name for the War from any viewpoint. [note]

The worst step in the process, however, was the election of Woodrow Wilson as President in 1912. The first Southern Democrat to be President since the War, Wilson immediately began bringing Segregation to the Federal Government. Black postmasters were fired. Black sailors discharged. Soon the United States Navy was entirely white. Black Army units were raised and sent to France in World War I, but Wilson kept home the illustrious traditional black units, like the "Buffalo soldiers" of the 9th and 10th Cavalry, even though France had specifically asked that these be sent. Even worse, perhaps, Wilson used Roosevelt's "Bully Pulpit" of the Presidency to promote his racism. The movie Birth of a Nation, the vicious story of the Ku Klux Klan told by the Southerner D.W. Griffith, was praised and perhaps even named by Wilson. It is no wonder that a revived Klan, which had originally been destroyed by President Grant, became a political power to reckon with, even on the national level.

Soon this was all mixed with the muddled fascism/socialism of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, one of whose principal constituencies was in Populist Southern Segregationists, like Huey Long, who, already living in a regime of poverty, theft, and oppression, saw nothing wrong in damaging or destroying the free market and private property on a national level. President Truman, curiously, helped save the economy with a benign neglect and damaged Segregation with the integration of the armed forces. As attacks against Segregation mounted in the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, the crisis arrived with President Johnson. A Southern New Dealer himself, Johnson, out of true, noble moral conviction, moved to destroy Segregation. But rather than simply end it, Johnson merely reversed it. The law that previously required private discrimination, now prohibited private discrimination. This did not restore freedom to black people, though it ended judicial oppression and terror directed against them, so much as reduce freedom for all. In line with New Deal principles, the Fifth Amendment, which requires that "private property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation," was further eroded, and but it would be the Thirteenth Amendment itself that would be compromised. Business is service. Business that is either prohibited or required to offer certain service is not voluntary. The anti-discirimination law of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 thus created a regime of involuntary servitude. Today this has expanded to the point that innocent and playful sexual banter in an office can, even if merely misinterpreted and misunderstood, become a Federal Case -- a Federal Civil Rights offense. This turns the very idea of Civil Rights on its head, ceding vast, terrifying, indeed totaliarian, powers to government.

The worst poison of American history is thus, not the Civil War, not Abraham Lincoln, but the unrepentant racists who created, in Segregation, the blueprint for the destruction of all American freedom. Cancer patients who are put in prison for using medical marijuana to prolong their lives; people whose bank accounts are seized because they like using cash; people who are summarily fined because they write a mere protest on their income tax return; people who are harrassed and even prosecuted for lawfully using a lawfully owned weapon in self-defense against criminals:  the list of tyranny and abuse, if we want to begin making it, would now be almost endless. James Bovard has had no trouble writing a book called Freedom in Chains. Here, I have provided an Indictment of the United States Government.

I do not pay taxes or obey many other Federal and State laws except under duress, with the real and present threat of violence from agents who every day break their oath to "Preserve, Protect, and Defend the Constitution of the United States." These threats have no moral authority, since the taxes and laws are unconstitutional, unjust, and tyrannical. This means that a legitimate government has ceased to exist. What remains is nothing but terrorism and gangsterism -- a colossal extortion and protection racket. The Declaration of Independence says that "to secure these Rights, governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed." Well, these faithless bastards no longer have my consent. But that doesn't stop them, does it? They got enough suckers to vote for them and simply do not have to care what I think, whether I voted for them or not.

If things are really so bad, what do we do? Secession? Well, since most Americans have been bought and paid for with "benefits" like Social Security and Medicare, there is hardly enough left as an organized territory to secede, apart from a few radicalized individuals. But this, really, is the heart of the problem. What does secession accomplish, anyway? Do smaller states practice less tyranny than larger states? Well, no. Historically, there do seem to be more republics that were smaller states, while Empires were usually autocracies; but today Africa is full of small states, few of which are democracies, and many of the larger countries are free, or nearly so -- with the principal exception of China. Why do states practice tyranny at all? Because the devices have not yet been perfected for restraining government and preserving justice, even where historical circumstances make these desired goals. The faults of the system of checks and balances and enumerated powers created by the Founders in the Constitution were already perceived by men like Jefferson and Madison. They would probably be surprised that it worked as well as it did, for as along as it did, especially with the cancer of slavery corrupting politics, both in its own day and for long after.

In a basically peaceful and prosperous country, where the tyrannies of government are egregious and dishonest but tolerated, even popular, the best hope for the long run is satyagraha, Gandhi's technique of non-violent resistance. Violent resistance, although morally justified, is not very prudent when the government is ready, willing, and able to use deadly and overwhelming force, and little in the way of a sympathetic hearing can be expected from the Press or, for that matter, from any substantial portion of the public. The public has been so corrupted, and what Jefferson called the "spirit of resistance" is so compromised, that no violent act would be properly understood. Since Gandhi's non-violent technique itself is designed as a method of persuasion as well as resistance, it is the indicated means where some hope of persuasion remains, and where the purpose is the ultimate correction and reform of the system -- the restoration of Constitutional Government.

If some constituted organ of government, at any level, can be brought into the cause, then more conspicuous and critical means can be brought to bear. Like Virginia and Kentucky resisting the Federalist Alien and Sedition Acts, or South Carolina resisting the protective tariff, I have provided a California Resolution of Nullification, by which the entire State would cease acknowledging and cooperating with Federal authority. We are certainly, to be sure, nowhere near being able to do anything like this, since most people accept being, in effect, slaves of the Government, but it would be a substantial step in the process, when the occasion arises.

So I am a Union man, not, as this would be understood today, a member of a labor union (which are really conspiracies to put other people out of work), but a supporter of the Union of the States in the Federal Government of the Constitution, like Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Sam Houston. This is my country, my American Revolution, my Constitution, my Bill of Rights, and and my inalienable Liberties. The faithless, vicious thieves and tyrants (e.g. Bill Clinton) who now run the country are the ones who should "secede," i.e. get out and go to some more appropriate place, like Cuba or North Korea. My only disagreement with other Libertarians is when the government wholly jumped the tracks, 1861 or 1933, not that it has done so. I only wish I could be with Sherman's invincible "bummers" marching on Washington, to clear out the rats, rather than just Savannah, to free the slaves. Now we must free all of ourselves, black and white.

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"Marching Through Georgia"

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Copyright (c) 2000, 2016, 2017 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D., Postumus Friesianorum, All Rights Reserved

I am a Union Man, Note 1

In the most personal respect, I am half Southern and half Northern, with my father's family from Arkansas and my mother's from Nebraska. But my own name is entirely Southern, since it is the same as my father's name, which he got when he was born in Arkansas in 1916. The family member we know of, my great-grandfather Lee Ross, who fought in the Confederate Army, came down with measles, we were told, and returned home, a wise move when there were more deaths from disease than from combat in the Civil War.

To my dissertation advisor at the University of Texas, however, I was, being from California, a Yankee, but he mellowed a bit when he found out about my father's family -- although at the time I had never been closer to Arkansas than Dallas. Most of my mother's family were recent German immigrants, but there was an in-law who was a captain in the Union cavalry.

My Southern ancestors were all Scotch-Irish. The history of this ethnic group and my family's place in it is examined in more detail elsewhere.

What the word "Yankee" means depends on where you are. Abroad, all Americans are Yankees. In the South, anyone from outside the South is a Yankee. And, outside the South, a Yankee is someone from New England. I can imagine the mortification of some Southerner being in, say Latin America, and having someone shout "Yankee Go Home!" He would very much want to join in, "Yes! Yankee Go Home!"

I noticed that my father pronounced the word "Negro" just like Lyndon Johnson -- although he detested Johnson -- somewhat like /nigra/. He did not, as far as I ever noticed, ever use the other "N" word. He also pronounced the word "coin" as /coen/ and was rather perplexed when my mother complained that there was no such word. Later in Texas, however, I heard that pronunciation again. My mother's own dialect differences she never noticed, like pronouncing "wash" as /worsh/. I had picked up that one, and it stuck with me for a while.

The Application of the Word "Yankee"

The Scotch-Irish

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