First day of the Somme + 100

Regardless of politics, the Brits have been doing an amazing job of commemorating the First World War. Starting with Lights Out, the hour of darkness that engulfed the country on the centenary of the assassination in Sarajevo that started it all, and continuing with the “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red” installation at the Tower of London, the arts have led the way in this effort.

Yesterday, of course, there were many very moving events and services for the first day of the Battle of the Somme, including a vigil by both civilians and military held at the Grave of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey through the night of 30 June-1 July.

(Photo from the Daily Mail.)

That grave, after all, holds the remains of a soldier brought over from Northern France in November 1920, lost in the war that was supposed to put paid to war. Yesterday, Queen Elizabeth II laid a wreath at the tomb.

There was also an all-night vigil at the Thiepval Memorial at the heart of the battlefield:

The memorial was built between 1928 and 1932, and I have to say that I find it just the teensiest bit bombastic; definitely a product of its times. But what is extraordinary, to me, is its monumental size (which you get a hint of from the above photo, courtesy of the Daily Mail: those little dots by the center plinth are soldiers standing watch), combined with the fact that all four sides of each of the 16 piers holding it up are covered with the names of those I call the-lost-but-never-found: the 72,246 men who were killed along the Somme between 1915 and 1918—but never identified.

The day I went there it was swirling in fog, and I came across it suddenly. I was utterly unprepared for the size, and completely overwhelmed by the names. My first thought, as it loomed out of the mist, was, “Damn, that is one ugly structure.” Then I saw the names. And when you’re walking among the pillars, it’s as though they’ll never stop. It’s horrifying.

Thursday night they placed lights in front of all the headstones that mark the graves of the dead who could be identified, and the effect was of lumenarias. Lumenarias light the way for Mary and Joseph at Christmas. You can imagine for yourself what they might have illuminated at Thiepval this week.

(Both photos from The Telegraph.)

And there was a very beautiful service there yesterday, with Royals and heads of states, and soldiers.

But the commemoration I found the most powerful was one staged across the country by 14-18 NOW, an arts organization formed to keep World War I in the eyes and memories of the country. 

For twelve hours on Friday, men dressed in full WWI kit appeared at transportation hubs up and down Britain, in an event called “We’re Here Because We’re Here,” and hashtagged #wearehere.

The performers were volunteers, aged 16 to 52, which is representative of the age span of the majority of soldiers who formed the attack on the first day of the Somme. They showed up in London, Glasgow, Bristol, Leeds, Sheffield, Birmingham, Chester, Swansea, Manchester and other cities, in complete silence except for the occasional rendition of “We’re Here Because We’re Here”, which the men they portray would probably have sung on their way to the front.

Viz. this video from Kevin Johnson, via Twitter, shot in Plymouth:

Plymouth train station #wearehere pic.twitter.com/RdD4EzIuV0

— Kevin Johnson (@Kev_Johnson__) July 1, 2016

They also handed out cards printed with the name and details of the specific soldier they were portraying. And each one they represented was killed on 1 July 1916.

If they were going for a one-to-one ratio, they’d have to pass out nearly 20,000 separate cards.

What “We’re Here Because We’re Here” has accomplished is to distill the vague notion of “first day of the Somme” and “58,000 casualties” down to a name and age on a card, associated with a face in wool drab uniform, heading off to eternity.

Which is, to my mind, the way it should be.

A summer day in France

One hundred years ago today the British Army impaled itself upon the idea that if you only throw more infantrymen at entrenched machine gun emplacements, you’ll achieve a breakthrough in a war of stagnation. 

The assault had been planned for months, conceived in part as a means to offer relief for the French at Verdun, a meatgrinder if ever there was one. It was preceded by a week-long artillery barrage; seven days of heavy guns spewing shells that were meant to have destroyed the bulk of the German frontline soldiers, and to have terrorized the survivors.

It failed.

The first day of the Battle of the Somme cost the Brits 58,000 casualties (almost 20,000 of them dead), but won no breakthrough. Neither did it break through the dense crania of the British generals. The new commander, Sir Douglas Haig, remained boneheaded to his death, which unfortunately came long after the Armistice in 1918.

(Generals typically were not in danger of injuries, unless they fell off their polo ponies or slipped on the floor of the officers’ mess at châteaux several miles behind the lines.)

No, wave after wave of Tommies went over the top from 1 July to 18 November without enough land to grow a decent crop of corn changing hands. The ground was churned to sludge by unbelievable numbers of artillery bombardments; farmers are still turning up unexploded shells as they tend their fields. The hard-baked summer ground turned to rivers of mud in autumn rain, and then to frozen wasteland in winter as the casualties mounted by an order of magnitude. In the end the butcher’s bill ran to 420,000 British, 200,000 French and 500,000 Germans dead, missing and; wounded.

At Beaumont-Hamel, the Newfoundland Regiment was almost completely wiped out, a catastrophic loss to the province. Even today, as Canadians celebrate Canada Day, to Newfoundlanders, it's Memorial Day.

The province bought 75 acres at the site and preserve it as a memorial to their loss.

Time-travelers from today visiting the trenches and looking up from their mobile devices (on account of no signal) might be astonished to learn that even after the appalling statistics from the Somme and Verdun, the war would continue for 28 more months before the combatant nations finally called a halt to the carnage.

So pause a moment and think of the day when the sun truly began to set on the British Empire, and consider the tens of thousands of men who’ve rested along the battle line for the past hundred years.

Gospel

You know how I feel about promoted tweets, a feeling that (as I’ve reported) is shared by a good portion of the Twitterverse. And given the kind of trolling that annoying people on social media opens you to, I really wonder why some organizations make the decision to pay $0.50 to $2.00 per engagement transaction (favorite, retweet, reply). Especially when most of those replies are nothing but snarking-before-blocking.

For example, this one came into my timeline a while ago:

And just before I hit block, I looked at the replies, most of which heartened me no end. E.g.:

And (my special favorite):

Taking the average price per engagement of $1.35 (which I found, of course, on a blog site), the cost to this organization to shove their product into the faces of people who clearly are not even their ancillary target market was in the range of $2500 (for the likes and retweets, which may well be from their friends and family members). Then they paid another $50 or so for the replies (at time of my viewing).

I suppose that knowing the advertiser had to pay for the trolling is just icing on the cake of what are often the funniest Tweets out there.

Vox populi, vox Twitterati

You might have noticed a good deal of flapdoodle going on about last week’s referendum in the UK to enucleate itself from the European Union, the infamously named Brexit. It was in all the papers. And all the newscasts. And all the social media.

It was accompanied by vast amounts of hysteria, promoted by both the Remain and Leave sides. The former predicted an amorphous but nonetheless inevitable Armageddon if the voters opted to leave, and the latter painted an apocalyptic picture of [white] Britons awash in vast millions of benefits-swilling immigrants and idiotic over-regulation from a remote and Wog-infested bureaucracy in Brussels that does nothing except suck up British pounds at a rate even higher than the immigrants, if the electorate voted to stay.

Viewing this at a distance I actually wondered if the politicians on both sides had possibly got some bad beer, and were suffering from ergotism. And let me just point out that, yes, I get it: it's annoying as hell to be told by a committee of Spaniards and Slovenians that your artisanal pickles must be in a brine comprising a certain percentage of salt. Yippee! You've cocked a snook at the Slovenians. But only if you're expecting your sales to be restricted to the UK. If you want to sell your pickles to anyone in the EU, your brine is still going to have to conform to their standards. Plus: tariffs.

At any rate, the voting public chose 52%-48% to exit the EU last Thursday, with leavers heavily in the rural and over-45 crowd and stayers in the urban and millennial set. (The exception to the age bracket would be ex-pats who’ve retired to Spain. They really, really wanted Britain to remain because: retired in Spain. But those who’d lived out of the country for more than 15 years didn’t get a say. They were incensed and didn’t see the irony at all.)

And here's a disheartening statistic: it's estimated that the 18 to 24-year-old set couldn't even be arsed to, you know, vote. They reckon that only 36% of eligible millennials actually cast a ballot. Shame on you. I can't even—men and women through the centuries have fought and died to establish and maintain the principles of democracy and you sit this out? Spaniards and Slovenians who have living memory of dictatorships must just be agog. Shame on you.

The immediate result was a loss in the value of the GB pound and a drop in the markets. (Including the ones my 401(k) is in; thanks, Brits. But what the hell; I'll just take the $12.49 left and drop it in a Mason jar. Don't worry about me.) Prime Minister David Cameron and a bunch of other politicians of both major parties have also tendered their resignations, but I don’t consider that as catastrophic, on account of they’re pols, and their replacements can hardly be any worse, even if they’re no better. Except for Nigel Farage; he’s as bad as you can get. 

Cameron used the metaphor of needing a different captain to move the ship of state forward. Evidently he woke up on Friday and discovered that the ship he'd launched with such high expectations was the Titanic, so of course he wanted to hand off the helm.

It's neither British nor nautical, but here's another image that comes to mind when thinking of Cameron:

As an aside, I never thought I'd hear myself saying this about a banker, but Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, appears to be the only one in British leadership circles to actually have thought concretely about Leave contingencies. If it weren't for him outlining the Bank's plan for safeguarding the economy, the entire world would be swirling the drain. The man definitely earned his bonus for the year.

(A lot of the blame for this situation must be laid at Cameron’s door, because he set up the referendum as a campaign promise a couple of years ago and then found himself painted into the corner of having to actually, you know, call it. He’s now trying to delay moving the process forward, I suppose in hopes that a deus ex machina will appear and fix everything. But the leaders of EU member nations appear to be in agreement on one thing: that sooner is better than later when it comes to easing the turmoil Britain has caused. They’re very politely informing the UK that, since it’s served notice of intent to divorce, it really ought to move its clobber out of the marital house. They’re even holding open the door so it doesn’t hit the British butt on the way out.)

What also happened, rather to my surprise, was a great wave of dismay from a number of people who’d voted to leave, along with a huge spike in Google queries on “What’s the EU?” The sentiments gathered by the media are variants of:

“Wait—what?”

“I never thought my vote would count!”

“Nooo, I was just voting to protest [insert despicable institution name here].”

All of them basically saying that, whatever their intent in ticking the Leave box, they certainly never expected there to be negative consequences, especially the kind of thing that might affect their economic status as individuals or a country.

Additionally, they are oddly pissed off that Scotland, which less than two years ago, held a splitting-up referendum of its own and only chose to remain in the United Kingdom in part because of the membership-in-EU guarantees given them, is now making noises about revisiting the possibility of breaking up the band. Like you couldn’t see that coming? Really?

There has also been an equally surprising surge in demands for a do-over: the folks who are unhappy about the negative consequences (whether they voted to leave or remain) are circulating petitions for a new referendum—same as the one last week, only they just get to vote differently. I don’t know who’s going to ‘splain it to them that democracy doesn’t work that way. (Actually, nothing outside of grade-school sports really works that way, that I can think of.)

Iacta alea est, guys. You chose the door; you have to take whatever prize is behind it. Yes, the referendum was advisory, not a mandate, but how on earth could Parliament override the voice of the people without rightfully being called dictatorial? And anyway, if they'd had a spine they'd never have allowed things to get this far.

Anyhow, the reason I’m even writing about this is because my pal Twitter rose to the occasion, and over the weekend there was a trend on #BrexitIn5Words. I present to you a sampling.

This one references one of the pillars of the Leave campaign: that if the UK pulled out of EU, the money that previously went into the sinkhole in Brussels could instead be invested in the NHS, which is truly in parlous state. (And which, BTW, benefits from immigrants who work in every layer of healthcare from surgeons to hospital cleaners.) On Friday—and I am not making this up—the Leave leaders disavowed having ever tossed around that prospect. Quelle surprise.

I’ll confess that it can be amusing to watch politicians in the same party basically try to cannibalize one another.

A view from our side of the Pond, in case anyone here wants to get complacent and smug.

Pretty much nails it.

Since I don’t watch GoT, I’m not sure what this means, but I’m guessing it’s not complimentary, and not just about unfortunate hair.

Because you knew that sooner or later it was going to be Obama’s fault.

While Darth Putin is a parody account, I’m betting the comment is not far from the truth.

Yeah, pretty much.

And, in the end, no matter how you voted, for whatever reason, or however pissed off you are now, you really have to pull up your socks and make the best of it. If only to get Twitter off your back.

Okay, one more thing. My contribution to #BrexitIn5Words: You're drunk, Britain. Go home.

Good dog!

Well, alrighty then: those madcap folks at Google parent company Alphabet’s subsidiary Boston Dynamics have given us a robotic dog that can clean your house and bring you a beer.

You may recall the robot dogs marketed by Sony back at the turn of the century. The Aibo had an AI component that enabled it to learn at least as well as your average Labrador puppy. The company discontinued the “breed” about ten years ago, and stopped product support and repairs in 2014.

Boston Dynamic’s SpotMini is smaller than its elder brothers, and while not as cute as Aibo, it’s not without a certain charm. Perhaps it’s the hand-puppet maw of the arm that performs various tasks. You’ll want to watch this video all the way to the end, even beyond the copyright notice.

No idea what the cost might be. But one question you might want to ask is: is it housebroken, or will it leave little batteries all over the place?

Gratitude Monday: Almost accurate

I got a surprise Friday morning—aside from that Brexit thing, which was unpleasantly gobsmacking in its shortsightedness. Friends had tickets for a performance by Second City at the Kennedy Center for that night’s performance. One of the had to work; did I want to go see it?

Well, I’m not the world’s biggest fan of improv, but opportunities like that don’t ordinarily drop out of the sky. So I said sure. It made for kind of a long day, since I get into work extra early during periods when the Metro’s Blue Line is buggered. But it was great catching up with my friend, and the performance, “Second City’s Almost Accurate Guide to America”, turned out to be exceptionally funny.

Well—I was a teensy bit surprised that the political skewering vastly favored the liberal viewpoint, but perhaps conservatives don’t go to the Kennedy Center? (The other performance was Kinky Boots; I’m guessing that the butts in those seats weren’t Republican ones, either.) Or perhaps they dislike improv more than I do?

I’m also not sure that the fiberglass wig worn by the guy playing Trump isn’t a fire hazard. But the fiberglass wig worn by the real guy playing Trump looks like a fire hazard, and he gets all kinds of gigs, so that may not be an issue with OSHA.

But as it turns out, the improv bits were minimal, and not at all painful to me. And, as I said, it was very, very funny, with one interlude that captured the battlefield experience of America’s wars for the past 50 years. That was not at all funny, because it was so accurate.

I also loved the consciousness-raising of Dolly Madison.

So today I’m grateful for a lovely evening to finish out the week, a very nice surprise, and friends who roped me into it.