Wagons West: ignorant armies still clash by night

How much the family of my German Jewish father took its heritage and mindset from Europe. At a time when America plunged deep into the heart of Europe via two World Wars -- all the while absorbing millions of European immigrants -- high, low, in the middle.

Even though my father, Arthur, was born on a new frontier -- in Guatemala in 1897 of a German Jewish dry goods merchant, Albert, who immigrated to America in the 1880's.

My grandfather railroaded to San Francisco, rejected the West as a place with little opportunity, before setting up business in Guatemala City. Then coming east to bring his family home to New York City circa 1902.

My father grew up a child of Europe in America's East.

In the last century European ways of thinking (Freud, Marx, as well as more classical studies) deeply penetrated our universities and political movements. Our power and energies allied with Europe against a Russian political religious movement whose prophet, Marx, was a German Jew.

It seemed no American could be truly educated without reentering and studying the belly of the mother from which he/she sprung.

Only "now" perhaps has "push back" really picked up steam.

*********

The other powerful strain in American history was the push west, expansion, wagon trains, the Mexican War -- the China trade -- and of course the marines and businessmen (such as in a small way my grandfather) who pushed south to influence, create hegemonies in Latin America.

Perhaps no one played as great a part as President James K. Polk in turning an offshoot of Europe into a great trek west. We, who sprung from Europe, spent little time studying this "father" of the Mexican War. For my generation it was sometimes fashionable to look upon this frontier son of North Carolina and Tennessee with embarrassment for stealing America's future from Mexico's past.

*********

I find it interesting how some friends of mine, the children of immigrants, know little of American history in the times before their ancestors came here.

For some such people the folk music and culture of the Sixties was a way of connecting with that deep American tradition which sprouted before the turn of the century European immigrants came. Even as our generation marched separate from America, we could "pretend" to connect.

So I, a child of the Cold War, took off in the other direction -- to the West. To the University of California at Berkeley to study the mysteries of "Communist China" -- China, where Europe and the US at one point uneasily co-existed in the years before Japanese and American expansions collided.

It was this collision of non European dragons which merged with, perhaps decisively, the Second World War.

Looking back, those of us who were products of the Cold War.....A strange time when the "enemy" the government funded us to study seemed opague, distant, as behind a screen -- through a glass darkly.

Now there is but one superpower -- no doubt strategically overextended -- but that only time will tell. Many centers of power and culture co-existing amidst the technologies of communication and globalization......

It is a world convulsing still in minor struggles -- throwing sparkling and often misleading images of both color and darkness all around the globe. The images change so fast it is sometimes hard to tell day from night.

Amid the shifting sands of faith and doubt are seeds for both the secular and the fundamentalist. It sometimes seems the more the communication, the more the confusion and fear.

And so, as it seemed to Matthew Arnold, trapped in the Nineteenth Century "loss of faith," it can seem so still:

*********

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Dover Beach (1867)

A tale of two families: dry goods to cell phones

Oddly enough, while researching the website of Carlos Slim Helu, the Lebanese Mexican telephone mogul who rivals Bill Gates as the world's richest man, I found this photo of the dry goods store La Estrella de Oriente (“the Star of the East”). His father, Don Juan Helu, started it just before World War I.

Juan, who came to Mexico in 1902 at age 15 to avoid the Ottoman draft, married Dona Linda Helu, a Lebanese woman in 1926, He fathered Carlos in 1940.

Carlos, who owns much of Latin America's cell phone industry, runs America Movil, which runs Tracfone, a prepaid cell phone company with millions of customers in the United States.

His recent setback was the collapse of Comp USA in which he had a controlling interest.

This picture of the store struck me as incredibly familiar. Had I seen it before? Then I looked to the right of my desk at that fragmented, delicately framed photograph of my German Jewish grandfather Albert -- in his Guatemala City dry goods store, circa the beginning of the last century.

The stores and the way the staff stand look almost exactly the same -- except Don Juan's store appears a tad bigger, more employees, and more heavily stocked!!!!

Ah, if only.

If only my grandfather Albert, who left Germany for the United States in the 1880's to avoid Bismarck's draft, had stayed in Guatemala with his German Jewish wife. Instead he returned to the US circa 1902 to continue his work in dry goods!

Perhaps today I would be running a cell phone empire!!!!

Instead of only using a Tracfone.

Politicians: careful when you reset that clock!

Despite all the mutual saber rattling between the U.S. and Iran, don't let the politicians and pundits scare you about a world war erupting between proud Iranians and arrogant Americans.

So many modern confrontations take thirty years to heal. Peace could break out around 2010.

The Korean War, beginning in 1950. did not formally end until the United State and China established diplomatic relations in January 1979.

The Vietnam War, also born in the Fifties, but taking off in open military confrontation betwen the US and North Vietnam in 1965, did not really end until formal military and intelligence exchanges in 2005. The seeds of accomodation were apparent at least ten years earlier.

The American Iranian "proxy war," beginning with the taking of American hostages in November, 1979, should run out in about 2010 -- unless trigger happy politicians on both sides fail to read this blog -- and take military action to set the thirty year clock back to "year one."

True, some conflicts stretch longer. The "Cold War" between the United States and the Soviet Union stretched more than 40 years from 1948 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. So the Iranian American "proxy war" could last as far into the future as 2020.

All depends on how many times politicians on both sides set back the clock.

One trick to managing these conflicts is patience and balance -- so that after thirty years the ticking alarm clock awakens us comfortably to the morning sun.

A few bad dreams are natural. Rabble rousing, fear mongering, provocation for domestic political advantage, saber rattling, mutual vilification. For politicians of many nations these are as normal as "apple pie."

But they could get out of hand. If the politicians are not careful, they could set the clock back to "year one."