Wars and birthdays

I caught ahold of Writer's Almanac as I was flipping across the tops of the waves of the internet and read what happened today in Garrison Keiler's history of civilization. Apparently, Benjamin Franklin had returned to America from Paris, where among his amorous conquests of the French court, he also negotiated the Treaty of Paris with the British. I am sure that it was rather galling to the British to have to go to Paris to negotiate with the Americans over the spoils of the American Revolution. Or the Presbyterian Revolt, as they called it in Parliament. It just goes to show how many irritated Northern Irish or Ulster Irish there were in America at the time. I suppose you also had quite a few discontented English and Welshmen and Scots who took the opportunity to kick butt on their former British betters. I suppose I should place "betters" in quotes.

At any rate, the war had ended; Lord Cornwallis and his hessians and whatnot had returned to England; the Tories had gone off to Canada and Jamaica and Bermuda and the other English possessions in the New World and we were happy to get down to the complicated task of nation-building and constitution-creating. Ben was happy and he said that there is no such thing as a good war or a bad peace.

About one hundred years later, the Spanish American War ended and John Hay, who began as Abraham Lincoln's secretary, was remarking about the wonderful way in which the Spanish American War had ended. Some historians would dispute that, since it began as Cuba's war for Independence and ended with Civil War in the Phillipines and American gangsters in Havana. However, Hay was an old man and hadn't served in the Civil War when he was a young man. Kind of a latter day Dick Cheney.

I suppose I can't speak to harshly, since I didn't serve in the military when I was young man, but it is an easy thing for an old man, who spilt no blood in service to his country as a young man, to commit the youth of his dotage in foreign wars. You may quote me on that.

At any rate, as I was reading this day's Writer's Almanac, it occurred to me to look back in the archives to my 50th birthday in 2006. I found that on my birthday on December 12, 2006, Garrison Keiler and his minions were writing about the birthday of Frank Sinatra and Gustave Flaubert. Two interesting persons born on my birthday. Sinatra, who was the heir to Bing Crosby as crooner to America in the 40's, 50's and 60's. A young man from Hoboken, NJ who dreamed of singing for a living and made quite a living for himself in the end. He also consorted with film stars, musicians and gangsters.

Flaubert, on the other hand, was spared Law School due to his epilepsy, and spent his youth in such debauchery as was available in the streets of Paris and the other capitals of Europe. As a young man, he tried writing and was convinced to write about a young married woman who betrays her husband and ultimately dies, leaving the husband to clean up the mess she left him. The book became his masterpiece and an example of the fall of marriage and morality in Europe at the end of the Nineteenth Century.

Sharing your birthday with Sinatra and Flaubert leaves me with the question as to whether the fields of music and literature have been preempted at this point. Time will tell, I suppose.