ON THE NAMING OF CARRIERS & THE HONOURING OF PRESIDENTS, AND OTHERS

Today Donald Trump, former star of The Apprentice and currently playing President of the United States and Tweeter in Chief, gets to play George Bush Top Gun soldier as he will commission the USS Gerald R Ford, in his words 'the biggest aircraft carrier in the world'. The ship will be a stirring tribute to a world leader whose major accomplishments were sabotaging the Warren Commission, pardoning Richard Nixon, falling down airplane stairs, and telling New York City to (metaphorically) 'drop dead'.

But there is a certain protocol to the naming of U.S. Navy ships after former Presidents. Consider this list:

Teddy Roosevelt (Republican): Nimitz-class supercarrier
Woodrow Wilson (Democrat, wartime president): submarine
Harding ( Rep, most corrupt administration before Reagan) nothing
Coolidge (Rep, didn't speak) nada
Hoover (Rep, Great Depression) zilch
Frank D Roosevelt (Dem, former asst secretary of Navy, wartime president, elected 4 times): destroyer Roosevelt, also honoring his wife Eleanor...pictured above left
Harry Truman (Dem, dropped A bomb, started CIA, pursued Commies): Nimitz supercarrier
Dwight Eisenhower (Rep, commander of allied forces in Europe WWII): Nimitz super carrier
John Kennedy (Dem, decorated PT Boat commander in WWII, assassinated) Kennedy-class carrier to be replaced by a Nimitz-class
Lyndon B Johnson (Dem, Navy reserve in WWII, sort of wartime president): destroyer
Richard Nixon (Rep, Navy desk jockey doing procurement deals, treasonous October Surprise in Vietnam, enemies list, quitter) zip
Gerry Ford (Rep, see above, served in Navy in WWII): super-carrier
Jimmy Carter (Dem, Naval Academy graduate): submarine
Ronald Reagan (Rep, made movies during WWII, colluded in treason with hostage takers in Iran, pursued illegal war in Nicaragua, most corrupt administration before Bush II): Nimitz supercarrier
George HW Bush (Rep, decorated Navy pilot in WWII, joint-architect of treason with Iranian hostage takers, invasion interruptus in Iraq): Nimitz supercarrier
Bill Clinton (Dem, draft-dodger, blow-job receiver): don't even think about it
George W Bush (Rep, failed and still-running wars in Afghanistan and Iraq based on knowing lies, most corrupt administration since Reagan, dodged draft via National Guard & went AWOL on that, made 'mission accomplished' landing on carrier, thus far 14 years prematurely): His Time Will Come

Do you notice a pattern here? If you haven't, here's a short-cut:
Republicans: 5 ships, 5 super carriers
Democrats: 6 ships, 2 carriers, 2 destroyers, 2 submarines)

It's as if they're taking advice from Fox News.

The naming of ships is the responsibility of the Secretary of Navy. Traditionally, battleships (extinct) were named after states; cruisers after cities; destroyers after war heroes; submarines after fish, until nuclear missile subs came along and were named after 'statesmen', especially those who encouraged wartime procurement. Carriers were traditionally named after battles (eg: USS Yorktown) except for the Enterprise, carrying on the name of a famous warship. Modern supercarriers are named for presidents, except for the Vinson and Stennis, named for congressional committee chairmen who gave the military more money than even they wanted. Both Vinson and Stennis were staunch and virulent segregationists, while Vinson also gets extra points for having defected from the Democrats to the Republicans when Lyndon Johnson got the Civil Rights Act passed. They seem out of place among the carriers, even among the lineup of B grade presidents.

Interestingly, Obama's Secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus (former governor of Mississippi) who served through both Obama terms, thus becoming the longest-serving Secretary of the Navy since World War I, came under huge metaphoric fire for trying to name some smaller ships, including the submarine Lyndon Johnson cited above, after, wait for it, Democrats! They included Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (a littoral ship, sort of a modern PT boat), and auxilliary ships after Congressman John Lewis, a hero of civil rights; the late Congressman Ray Murtha, the first Vietnam veteran elected to Congress; Cesar Chavez, the civil rights activist and a Navy veteran; and Harvey Milk, a Korean War Navy veteran and city supervisor of San Francisco, assassinated because of his gay activism. Cue your seamen jokes. The photo above right was posted by the 'American Families Association'. You can guess how they felt about honoring Harvey Milk.

CARL OGLESBY: THE INDPENDENT OBITUARY

My obit of Carl Oglesby, SDS leader and author of one of the most interesting of assassination studies, was in yesterday's Indy (29 September); you can link to the online version here. By the time I came to consider SDS, Oglesby was already on his way out, but his earlier writings and speeches were impressive, and The New Left Reader, which he edited, was a handbook of sorts as I wandered my way through protest. Oglesby's version of left-wing politics reflected his working-class upbringing, and a certain idealism which originally led him to found useful alliances with the wider anti-war and civil rights movements, with whom he organised the first great March on Washington. But his faith in the ultimate rationality of America's political leaders proved misplaced, at best. When the Weathermen came along, Oglesby was condemned as being hopelessly bourgeois, when really what he might have been was hopelessly American.

From that perspective, it's easy to understand the importance the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK had for him; he helped found the Assassination Information Bureau, and he wrote a number of books which reflected the wealth of information he gathered. The most interesting is The Yankee and Cowboy War, which tries to create a sort of unified field theory of the assassinations, and connect the dots between Dallas in 1963 and Watergate in 1972. It was a foreunner of what came to be known as 'Deep Politics', considering the forces that really power our country (and indeed, today, the world) regardless of who holds nominal power, and he tried to identify a power-struggle within that American elite between the old money of the east and the newer money in the west. If you don't see the relevance today, consider the Bush family, Skull and Boners all, who begin as Yankees, merchant bankers in New York with Prescott becoming a senator from Connecticut--but transform into Cowboys--George W goes into the oil bidnez, heads the CIA, and eventually becomes president, and Shrub, full scale born-again Texan, doesn't do much of anything but serves the needs of Cowboys as he becomes governor of Texas and then president, where he gets to recapitulate the Reagan malaise on a far grander scale.

I hadn't seen much by Oglesby on that malaise; he did two books on the JFK assassination in the 90s, but the more interesting of them draws heavily on Yankee/Cowboy, and I've yet to read Ravens In the Storm, his memoir of radical politics in the Sixties, but I surely will. I never even knew he'd made two folk-rock records, and it's interesting because one of the covers makes him look just like the great keyboardist Barry Goldberg. But in many ways he symbolises the better impulses of the Sixties generation--even though, like most of that generation's leaders, he came from the pre-baby boom. Perhaps someone ought to consider why my generation has proven so incapable of leading itself, at least in a progressive direction.