(RADM Donald “Mac” Showers, USN-Ret. Photo Socotra.)

It is Mac’s 93rd birthday today. I am hoping we get to celebrate in a low-key manner, perhaps tomorrow. The Admiral says that he only commemorates the divisible birthdays these days. 95 might be the next big one, but I think I will observe this one, at least with you.

1919 was the year Mac came into the world. It was a year in which the Nation was reeling from the Spanish Flu outbreak that followed the end of the Great War. 500,000 Americans died. The Stanley Cup could not be awarded since both teams were KO’d by the bug. Think about it. Half a million dead here a home- half a percent of everyone who lived here at the time- it makes the American contribution to the fighting in Europe seem irrelevant.

The Versailles Treaty whose confiscatory provisions against Germany would make WWII inevitable was being ratified by the Allied powers. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified by the several states, and made the onerous provisions of the Volstead Act and Prohibition possible.

Mac is not in favor of that any more than I am. But he had the opportunity to live through that failed experiment in altering human nature, and the Great Depression, which actually did alter the way people acted, at least for a few decades.

In one of our early conversations at Uncle Julio’s, we veered off backwards from what I thought we would talk about. Mac spoke more about an America where the banks were shuttered and people got by in Iowa on the barter system than we did about the pivotal moments of World War II.  Mac is an ambassador from another age, and I salute his life and spirit. It is a great honor to have him as a pal.

Mac’s perspective helps put all this campaign nonsense in context. Times have been worse and more frightening than they are now. Bad as they are, things can change.

Actually, that is an understatement. Oh course they will change- that is what society does. What we are doing at the moment cannot be sustained. The numbers don’t work, and that means that whatever is coming will be radically different than what anyone says out there on the campaign trail.

It makes me sigh. We seem to be unable to have a rational national discussion about what the future is going to look like if we don’t clean up our financial disaster.

Demonizing that nice Mr. Ryan is hardly the approach. His budget approach is a gradual one, and is hardly the scorched earth that is being depicted. He only claims his approach balances the budget in a decade, and that will be three elections from now. And something is going to happen, regardless of who is at the controls.

If there is to be a bill payer- and trust me, there will be- the choices are going to be stark and unpleasant. I wish we have a rational discussion of the choices we confront.

Bashing the one percent may be satisfying, but even if the government confiscated all their wealth it would not address the structural problems of the debt or the mushrooming entitlement mess.

Just when I was going to need it, too. Crap.

That was the backdrop to a week that featured continued improvement in ambulation, so there were moments I could concentrate more on moving around than what the future holds. I drove the new Panzermobile down to Charlottesville for a meeting with the Government, listening to both liberal and deep South religious programming on the radio with more than mild befuddlement at what passes for issues in the campaign.

I have no idea about smart options to deal with the future. Stockpile gold or silver? Canned goods? Ammunition?

Silver makes sense, but in a society that has forgotten about the idea of even paper money in favor of imaginary plastic, how will the barter system work when we come to it? It is not like it hasn’t happened before. We just have forgotten about it, like the half million Americans who died of the Flu.

Mac helps us remember the context. My thanks to him for the wisdom of his years on this day.

Happy birthday, Admiral.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com