At “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918,  guns officially fell silent across Europe and World War One came to a military end (the political finish came in 1919 with the Treaty of Versailles).

The following November 11, the winning nations commemorated the final ceasefire with the first “Armistice Day” events

Not celebrations as such, mind you: The observances were — and in some countries at least partially remain — somber remembrances (the UK now calls November 11 “Remembrance Day”) of 20 million dead in “the war to end all wars,”  driven by sentiment against ever returning to that kind of carnage.

That sentiment, unfortunately, proved insufficient to prevent World War 2 and hundreds or thousands of subsequent deadly conflicts, which is bad enough.

Worse, though, is what America did with “Armistice Day.” In 1954, Congress replaced the traditional “Armistice Day” observance with a celebratory “Veterans Day.”

Instead of mourning war, we now celebrate warriors. Parades. Air shows. Political speeches. Free meals, drinks, haircuts, etc. for veterans.  A lot of “thank you for your service” to everyone identifiable as a veteran of the US armed forces; quite a bit of mutual back-slapping among those of us who “served.”

To me, the best way to celebrate veterans would be stop making so many of us — especially, but not only, of the dead, maimed, traumatized, and homeless varieties.

Since the first Armistice Day, the US has fought a second “world war” and countless smaller wars — declared and undeclared — around the globe, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of American lives and millions of foreigners’ lives.

The US armed forces maintain a global network of military bases, remain bogged down in the Middle East after a quarter century of the “global war on terror,” and have now been at on-again, off-again open war with Iran for a year-and-a-half.

The US government constantly rattles its saber, actively seeks excuses to militarily intervene in other countries’ internal affairs and international disputes, and fuels even the wars it doesn’t actively participate in with foreign aid and arms sales.

Two-time Medal of Honor recipient Smedley Butler tallied up the cost in his book, available free online, War is a Racket: “Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.”

None of that is worth celebrating. It’s a cost, not a benefit.

The US armed forces’ oath of enlistment binds future “veterans” to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

Even if one accepts that as a worthy goal, when’s the last time it actually turned out to be the job?

Not during my lifetime, at least that I can think of, and I turn 60 the day before “Veterans Day.” The war I fought in was premised on kicking one tyrant out of Kuwait so another tyrant could return and rule again. Constitution? Nowhere in sight.

Commemorating “Armistice Day” — and making that commemoration a call for peace and a rejection of the American war racket — makes far more sense to me than celebrating “Veterans Day.”

If we want to thank veterans “for their service,” the first step is to bring them home and stop letting politicians put them in morally bankrupt jeopardy of life and limb.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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The week before the November 3 midterms, Ryan Zickgraf didn’t need to know their outcome to be sure that a fictional, far-future “television captain from the Eighties” could “still offer a more ambitious political vision than the people governing us” in “Patrick Stewart’s Picard was liberalism’s lost promise” (UnHerd, October 30).

That week would see its share of memorials to Stewart and his Star Trek comrade Walter Koenig. They wouldn’t have been on the ballot (X-Men voice actor Lenore Zann becoming a Canadian parliamentarian while Stewart anchored that franchise’s live-action film series is the exception that proves the rule), but neither were their principles: Matthew Yglesias summing up Stewart’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard as embodying conspicuously absent “secular, rational, compassionate, egalitarian” values is, as Zickgraf notes, “an affectionate tribute with an awkward implication.”

It wasn’t the physical implausibility of transporters and holodecks which led Stewart to tell Variety that “the world of ‘Next Generation’ doesn’t exist anymore” since “nothing is really safe” in 2020 (just before Picard premiered in January of that year).  Zickgraf notes that Picard retreating from the Federation’s flagship to being “holed up at his family vineyard” amid a future “devolved into suspicion and isolationism” is “roughly where American liberals found themselves in the decade since November 2016, nursing their Obama nostalgia” during “the loss of liberal idealism of post-Obama America.”

Zickgraf could have added that liberals spent that decade far more suspicious of Russians than audiences viewing Koenig’s Pavel Chekov innocently asking about American “nuclear wessels” while time traveling to the then-present of 1986’s Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.  Deeming Stewart’s debut a year later “just in time for the end of history” would have seemed premature at a time when the winding down of the Cold War was as hard to be confident about as that of Reagan’s drug war.  Even if the New York Times saw a Trek crew refocusing on “coping with problems within their own borders” under new management in contrast to “President George Bush,” overly “fixated on foreign policy,” in 1993.

It was wishful thinking to hope that Barack Obama would become what Zickgraf called “a real-life version of Picard mixed with [The] West Wing’s Josiah Bartlet,” the latter character himself embodying who Democrats wished Bill Clinton would have been. George W. Bush likewise failed to trounce America’s enemies with the take-charge action-hero tactics of Clinton-era crowdpleasers like Independence Day and Air Force One.

Yet it’s not merely the case that earthbound politicians can’t avail themselves of “advanced technologies such as replicators and energy-to-matter conversion.” Like the nominally “progressive socialist” labor leader in The Mouse in the Moon, they see any shift from the status quo as “a plot to deprive the people of work, or raise prices beyond their means” in Leonard Wibberley’s 1962 satirical novel about a microstate racing to the moon as the easiest path to foreign aid, while standing in the way of more efficient production and distribution that would lower prices. Don’t Copy That Floppy! warned VHS tape viewers not to duplicate such computer software as Oregon Trail (developed via Minnesota state taxes) and Tetris (from the Soviet Union).

The ultimate testament to Stewart’s acting skill is that he made it hard not to suspend disbelief, one hour at a time, in what Zickgraf calls “authority with authoritarianism apparently filtered out.”  In the real world, we have what we need to exclude authoritarians from getting in the way of getting things done.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

I’m writing this column on the morning of November 3, technically “election day” in the US even though, per the Assocated Press, more than 57 million Americans voted “early” (in person or by mail) this year. Chances are you won’t read it until later this week, after the polls have closed and most of the mail ballots have purportedly been received and counted.

In almost any US election of the 20th century, the election would have mostly been considered “over” late Tuesday or early Wednesday. Perhaps a few razor-thin races might remain unresolved, with recounts in the offing.

Not that there wasn’t any grousing about it. Many still living can recall the claims in 1960 that “the graveyards of Chicago” brought in late and fraudulent votes to put John F. Kennedy over the top versus Richard Nixon for president. But that grousing was after the fact — the election was “over” and by golly those deemed winners were certain to take office.

These days, elections don’t end when the votes are cast and counted. In every close race (and many not-so-close races) of consequence, the supposed losers and their supporters move immediately to screeching “Rigged! Stolen!”

They demand recounts. They go to court seeking to have ballot boxes seized and election officials indicted.

In one case, which you may remember, they even stormed the Capitol to prevent certification of the results and, potentially, to hang the vice-president of the United States as he presided over said certification.

In another, earlier case, the losing candidate immediately went to work trying to blame Russian meddling, rather than her lackluster campaign and well-deserved negative public image, for her loss.

How did we get here? I trace it all back to a presidential election which was arguably actually “stolen.”

In 2000, it came down to 537 votes in Florida. The courts halted recounts and declared George W. Bush the winner; subsequent analyses almost uniformly concluded that Al Gore would have won the presidency if the recounts had proceeded.

Attempts to undo the courts’ rulings failed, in part because Gore, himself vice-president, congenially presided over Congress’s certification of his loss instead of going to war over the matter. But Democrats never forgave, or forgot … and we entered a new era of bipartisan “fight them until hell freezes over, then fight them on the ice.”

No matter what happens today, expect Election 2026 to drag on into the new year.

If the predicted “blue wave” materializes, Republicans will contest every close election both in the courts and, quite possibly, by declining to seat newly elected Democrats in the US House and Senate. They’ll declare any and every unfavorable result “rigged” or “fraudulent.”

If the “blue wave” crests lower than predicted, Democrats will contest every close election in the courts and declare any unfavorable result “rigged” or “fraudulent.”

Those of us who expect (and usually get) business as usual from government no matter how elections come out can only shake our heads and note “play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”

If you voted last week, or vote today, I won’t put you down for it. I voted too, because voting is one way of expressing my opinion and I like to express my opinion.

But voting is mostly just entertainment — and the Great Election Show, like Happy Days, has long since “jumped the shark.”

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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