Of Haircuts and Hamilton

Thursday, January 08, 2009
We are south of Puerto Rico at 15 degrees north and 67 degrees west, doing 7.9 knots. Ahead of us lie thunderstorms. Off to the right, some distance away, is Venezuela, home of Hugo Chavez, house-fly. We are 490 NM from Barbados and expect to arrive on Saturday. Some of the men are antsy already, and we’ve been sailing for only 11 days: less than a quarter of the way there. What a bunch of weenies. Of course, they are used to a 14-day rotation, they have wives and kids, boats and motorbikes, and booze, or other interests. They missed Christmas, and new year’s day, bowl games, family… To me, this is as much home as I have. It’s a good job among good people, so I am content ashore or aboard ship. When there are no hurricanes to fight, this is a pretty easy task.

One plus about being out here: haircuts. No one has to worry about them. I got one just before sailing, and it is a bad one. The woman used only scissors, comb, and fingers, and she created a geometrical thing on my head. She cut it quite short at my direction “since it will be six or more weeks…” It was so short that it would not lay down very well, so it was spiky and punk-looking. I thought it would lay down in a couple of weeks and would work out fine for my well-groomed entry into Capetown. It has grown out, and I classify it as the third worst haircut I ever had. She managed to cut some kind of negative ellipsoid on the top right side. Where my skull rounds outward, she cut a saucer, rounded inward on that side. Looks like a hairy swimming pool. My hair is too fine and much to short to style in any manner. It is still spiky on the left side at the part, and concave on the right side, which will get spiky when it is a little longer. So I’ll have a soup turin with spikes on my pate on one side and long, frizzy hair over my left ear on the other. Fortunately, hair style is not noticed out here, but it made me so mad that I cut the left half of my mustache off, and they notice that. Hair! Who needs it! I am setting a new trend, growing only half a mustache. When I get home, I am going to go to that woman with my half mustache and when she asks about it, I’ll tell her that it is designed to draw attention to my haircut.

My worst haircut occurred in Rio Grande City. We were drilling a deep, hot well in Starr County. I went to town one afternoon and found a barber shop, complete with rotating white and red spirals. It was a one-seater, and the proprietor was a Mexican, maybe forty years old. He offered this seňor a shot of tequila when I walked in. That should have clued me in: “you wohn leetl wheeskey, no?” I sat and was duly covered in a green, red, and white shroud bearing the eagle and serpent of Mexico, and he went to chopping. First there was a painful tug, followed by some term like “osheet.” It went down hill from there, and when he was done he gave me the job for half price. I wish I had taken that shot. When I got home, I found my hairdo resembling that at the nether regions of a long-haired dog, tufts and warps all over. Patchy. It was so bad that my wife bought me a hat and told me not to take it off. I look dorky in a hat, so I went to the land owner’s place and borrowed his sheep shears and scalped myself. It was seven weeks before I could comb my hair again. The Alamo remembered.

I won’t write the details, but the second worst was in New Bedford, Mass. When I got back out on the ship, the superintendent asked where I got my haircut. I told him, and he said, “I won’t be going there.”

I landed in Luang Prabang, Laos, one time to pick up some indigenous folk for a fight up north. We had the occasion to wait for a couple of hours, and a few of the troops had bicycles. I borrowed one and pedaled to town, about a mile or two. I found a kid selling ice cream on a bike, so I told him where he could make a fortune (and he did). There was a young man sitting in a barber chair outside getting a haircut in the street. He was licking an ice cream happily, hair cuttings and all. I pedaled back to the aerodrome and there were perhaps a hundred pilots and soldiers happily licking ice creams, but without hair cuttings. I don’t think I could enjoy ice cream and hair. Then we flew off to war, and some of those kids died that day with ice cream spots on their shirts, and blood.

North of us, in the Leeward Islands—not so far away—lies the Dutch island of St. Eustatius. It is only 8 square miles in area, but has a neat history with the United States. In November, 1776, a ship bearing a red, white, and blue flag appeared near by. The Dutch fired a salute, honoring the new flag of a new sovereign nation. They were the first foreign power to acknowledge the United States. The whole story was revealed in the book, First Salute, by Barbara Tuchman. She presents this history so well, as she did in everything she wrote. We were actually very fortunate to have survived our war of independence and of independence itself. Perhaps we’ll explore why later.

Friday, January 9, 2009
It is about 300 NM from Barbados. We are doing 8.2 knots at N14° 35.6’ and W64° 19.5’ tracking 107 degrees. That will take us 11NM south of St. Lucia and her twin volcanoes, jumping out of the sea. Some weather concerns have some supervisors re-planning a fueling stop: St Lucia or Barbados? Who cares? Not all supervisors reside beneath the bozone layer, but enough do to cause doubling of effort, paper trails, and confusion. Never show them what you are working on, or you’ll have to put it on a spreadsheet and distribute it to Him, Hymn, Her, and Hal. Hal is the political correctness guy. Pretty soon, the document becomes the raison d’etre, and the job for which it was created scarcely matters anymore. Then, Him thinks we ought to add the what-for temperature, and Hymn wants the sum of the squares of the residuals…Her thinks the procedure for covering the female end of a tubing is sexist and must be renamed. Hal is quick to remind us that we can not use a “flat bastard file” and must either rename it, or get rid of the tool. In other words, things work here just as they do everywhere.

Not far away, to the north, is the island of Nevis, a British colonial possession. It is from there that Alexander Hamilton came. His boyhood was one of uncertainty and poverty, so when he had the chance to go to the American Colonies, he took it and was educated in New Jersey and New York. He distinguished himself as a college graduate and lawyer. During the War, he was a captain in the New York Militia and became aide-de-camp and confidante of General Washington. He commanded three battalions at Yorktown and was elected to congress. He resigned that commission in order to practice law and to form the Bank of New York, which still exists. He was the only New Yorker to sign the constitution. Washington appointed him Secretary of the Treasury, and his influence on fiscal matters was tremendous. Hamilton fought for a strong central government and its implied powers, and from that came the federal assumption of national and state debts and certain tariffs, as well as a national bank. From my point of view, there could have been no United States without the central government assuming states’ war debts, the first functional step in coalescing the nation together.

Hamilton was born out of wedlock and was eventually abandoned by the male parent, from whom comes the name Hamilton. His mother inherited some property on Nevis which included a library, and from that, Hamilton educated himself, including the classics. He was, a bastard, denied access to the British school, which was run by the church. When he was thirteen, his mother died, and Hamilton came to the colonies. He carried that stigma with him for the remainder of his life. (Alexander Hamilton, by Ron Chernow.)

During the course of his second term, Washington became excoriated by opponents— former allies and friends—led by Jefferson and Madison. They formed a coalition fully opposed to Hamilton and to the administration. This led to the unhappiest fact of American political inheritance: the creation of bicameral competition. The rift was vitriolic, renting the fabric of our new democracy and directly led to the death of Alexander Hamilton. The new party, the Democratic-Republicans were not evil, but opposed the Federalist ideas of building a nation. I believe that their loyalty could certainly be questioned.

I personally note here that the two principals, Jefferson and Madison, were brilliant men, but they were NOT combatants in the war. Both were in Congress, except Jefferson who spent much time at Monticello, or on the run. Their primary concerns were with the Hamiltonian ideas of the Treasury and strong national government, and they also wanted a system of checks and balances to protect the minority from any possible tyranny from the majority: individual rights.

Washington, on the other hand, fought the entirety of the war and took no pay from the treasury, but paid out of his own accounts. He was victimized by being given charge of rag tag armies without rifles or shoes or training, and who were not being paid by congress, as promised. Neither would the congress, nor the states from whence came these men, increase the duration of enlistments, such that at year’s end, the entire army just melted away. Congress, neither then nor now, met its obligations, nor put the country first. I am convinced that George Washington is the greatest American to live, and his single most significant acts were those of denying us a monarchy (in which he would have been king by popular acclamation) and of retiring from the presidency and going back into private life. He established the precedent. After Yorktown, he could have had anything. His modesty and principles remain elevated far above the rest of us.