British beauty.

Before British socialism killed off its sports car industry the world was blessed with such delightful creations as the AC, MGB, Sunbeam and Triumph.

Triumph TR6, 1968-76.

America had a great appetite for these when the only homemade options were the porky Thunderbird and the poorly made Corvette.

But British socialism saw to it that “If I can’t have it, you can’t have it”, which seemed to be the mantra of the socialist government, and labor unrest saw to it that all British sport car manufacture ceased at the end of the 1970s. Mazda filed the niche nicely with its superb Miata, manufactured to this day and, unlike its British predecessors, it started every time, did not leak oil and had air conditioning which actually worked.

Of the 91,850 TR6s produced, 83,480 were exported; only 8,370 were sold in the UK, which explains why the above, a neighbor’s car, has left hand drive. My neighbor actually owns two, the other in red and both sport the period-correct red rimmed tires which came with the car. Doubtless he is adopting that tried and true dictate of British car ownership. Own two. One to drive, the other to fix. It probably helps to have two British mechanics also, for when one goes on strike.

In the event the TR6 had a simple, reliable single cam in-line six and a gorgeous body by Italian Giovanni Michelotti, to whom Triumph wisely delegated design.

iPhone 11 Pro snap.

FDR got it right.

At the height of the Great Depression the Roosevelt administration created the Works Project Administration. According to Wikipedia:

Above all, the WPA hired workers and craftsmen who were mainly employed in building streets. Thus, under the leadership of the WPA, more than 1 million km of streets and over 10,000 bridges were built, in addition to many airports and much housing.”

The current administration (a misnomer, I grant you) thinks that giving people money is the way out of their dramatic loss in income. After all, the average American has savings between $2,729 and $15,589 which, on the face of it is as close to zero as makes no difference. Americans need to relearn the meaning of thrift and stop looking for handouts. They also need productive jobs, not clerical positions selling sportswear. A new WPA would put them to work rebuilding all those rotting roads and bridges and, hey, learning to use a shovel is easier than using a supermarket scanner. Their labors would recapitalize America and, with related efforts, deleverage a society addicted to debt.

Instead, what we see is this sort of shocking image. A line of SUVs awaiting handouts of food at a food bank:

You can sleep in a car but you cannot drive a house.

Leverage? Those SUVs are all financed, of course, and the credit cards of those drivers are earning some usurious lender 21% annually. So while we put Americans back to work wielding shovels, let’s cap credit card lines and limit interest to 4%, which will neatly transfer the pain from the borrower to the lender.

As a photographer it’s not lost on me that the greatest burst of documentary photography the world has seen was at the behest of FDR’s Farm Security Administration whose Roy Stryker hired the best of the best to tour America and document the depredations of the Great Depression. We should recreate that organization in these troubled times, too. Lest we forget.

In a couple of legislative actions we get safe roads and bridges and a revitalized nation, which beats useless malls and unnecessary ‘discretionary’ spending.

A classic error in US foreign policy.

Post-WW2 US foreign policy disasters date from the Marshall Plan of 1948, which saw the United States lending $128 billion (in today’s money) to Britain (28%), France (18%) and Germany (11%).

The Marshall Plan was a replacement for the never enacted Morgenthau Plan – named after FDR’s foreign secretary – which proposed that Germany should be stripped of all its weapons-making and related industrial capacity. This aligned with Churchill’s preferred approach which had him not only stripping Germany of all its industrial might but also returning the nation to a collection of pre-Bismarck agrarian states, no threat to anyone other than to one another.

America excused aid to a race which had murdered 6 million Jews and countless millions of others on the grounds that forgiveness beat the creep of communism. Meanwhile, England, without which there would have been no D Day invasion, meaning that all of Western Europe would be speaking German today, had to endure another decade of rationing and only finally repaid its war debts to the US just three years ago. Such was the allied spirit of the cold war.

There’s a fine pictorial in the UK Daily Telegraph showing many images of celebrations on VE Day on May 8, 1945, which makes this Friday the 75th anniversary of our contemplated recapitalization of the murderous German race. Not surprisingly, many Britons asked who had actually won the war the Germans started.

Click the image for the article and photographs.

Not satisfied with this foreign policy disaster, America went on to give us modern, nuclear North Korea (34,000 Americans dead), Viet Nam (58,000) and countless more in its ill considered forays in the Middle East. The sole success, Reagan’s defeat of the Russians, was destroyed with the installation of a dipsomaniac Yeltsin, only to be replaced by the murderous Czar Putin and his oligarch buddies.

After VJ Day (8/15/1945), which saw a feudal Japan destroyed and recreated by the genius of Douglas MacArthur into a peaceful, democratic ally, America’s foreign policy since WW2 is one of unmitigated failure, reflecting the nation’s loss of the will to win. The oft repeated State Department preference that the US should not engage in ‘nation building’ saw one success when it did (Japan) and only failures when it refused to do so (all the other wars).