The American Spectator

Political Hay

p> em>"Who is in charge of the clattering train? br> The axles creak and the couplings strain; br> And the pace is hot, and the points are near, br> And Sleep has deadened the driver's ear; br> And the signals flash through the night in vain, br> For Death is in charge of the clattering train." /em> /p>

It is a verse from a volume of cartoons in a late 19th century edition of the British magazine Punch. Memorized by a young Winston Churchill, it was on the tip of Churchill's tongue during a 1935 Parliamentary debate over what to do about the rising Adolf Hitler. Experiencing a "sensation of despair" at being unable to convince his colleagues of the growing danger of German might, Churchill considered -- and then rejected as too sharp -- the idea of reciting this poem to underscore his point. In his memoirs of World War II, The Gathering Storm, Churchill obviously regrets the lapse.

As the summer of 2006 lazily unfolds along the eastern reaches of the Long Island Sound, where time always seems to stop in an endless series of days and nights filled with seasonal pleasures, The Gathering Storm makes for interesting reading. Before the book even begins its author takes two pages to lay out, in brief, the "Moral of the Work" and "Theme of the Volume." The "Moral" is simple enough. "In War: Resolution. In Defeat: Defiance. In Victory: Magnanimity. In Peace: Good Will." All solid, if unremarkable, precepts. But it is the "Theme" that rivets attention: "How the English-speaking peoples through their unwisdom, carelessness, and good nature allowed the wicked to rearm."

The words, and the dramatic tale that follows, should be required reading for every person among today's English-speaking peoples. And since the principles illustrated are eternally relevant to humanity in general, those peoples who speak other than English would benefit as well.

YET SITTING HERE AMID THE Long Island farms, vineyards and beaches bordering the Sound, it is the confluence of the personal and the political that makes the old book such a valuable read. The personal comes in the very physical form of the 89-year-old man seated out on the porch, playing a halting game of cards. The man, my father, was born and raised in the nearby small town. It was here that he met my mother, two years his junior, she the sparkling eighth grader, he the high school sophomore who was hard to get off the town's tennis court. Next week they will celebrate sixty years of married life.

But those sixty years could not begin for quite some time after they became young adults, and the details that describe the time of their growing up are, many of them, found in Churchill's book. Before their life together could proceed, my father would have to take an unexpected ride on Churchill's "clattering train." His youth, still innocent in the way of a very middle class American boy whose farthest venture was to hotel school in upstate Albany, was in fact already being hailed by a series of the clattering train's conductors.

No one would voluntarily climb on a train that had Death as the engineer, of course. To make the clattering train attractive it, like all trains, had to have conductors. People wearing the brass buttons of authority who could make the ride seem something other than what it really was, something effortless and easy for prospective passengers enticed by the political equivalent of a shout for "All Aboard!"

topics:
Television, Russia, NATO