McGoverning

[Wayside]

There are always so many butterflies in the Middle East that they will suck the air from your lips with their wings and leave you in the vacuum to drown.

*clicks tongue* Mish mushkila...

I'm actually a little pleased with my replication of Mohammed Reza's combination of boundless conceit and silent desperation that makes him an eternal disappointment to pretty much everybody. Except not the "pretty much" part. So, everybody.

As well you should be.

This is my first Advent present.

*faints dead away*

 

[Yes]

As always great work.

Thank you. Very much.

*clicks tongue* Mish mushkila...

Blithe assurance is never a good look in this region.

As well you should be.

Thank you kindly.

*faints dead away*

We at McGoverning Acres are really very big on The Fans. The place wouldn't be in business without them.

Next time: fun with petrodollars, archaeology, and thalwegs, among other dangerous obscurities!

 

[skaven]

I'm not normally much of a one for these big Cold War military stories, but you really manage to make it flow superbly. Fascinating to read about a time when the IDF was worth a damn.

“Given the uncertain currency markets since President Nixon floated the dollar, your country — indeed your own company, given its stock in trade — would benefit very much from a stable source of value for its government paper, and a reliable source of capital to finance borrowing that fuels the growth,” Yamani looped a long finger in a circle, “that underpins value in that paper. We ourselves would benefit from such a guaranteed investment and also from … certain other advantages.”

 

[Yes]

I'm not normally much of a one for these big Cold War military stories, but you really manage to make it flow superbly. Fascinating to read about a time when the IDF was worth a damn.

Thanks! It's a bit of a departure from the general run of McGoverning to do what is so explicitly a war story, but also a place where Trends very much come into play. There are also complex but distinctive differences here: on one hand the Israelis actually get a much firmer substantive US security guarantee out if it than they ever have IOTL, from the McGovern administration no less. But the primary-source record from OTL points to McGovern's (naive? possibly. Foursquare and determined? as always) respect for Israel and his position as a Democrat of his era clinging to any electoral mandate he can claim by his fingernails whereby he cannot afford to lose the votes of Jewish Americans tied historically to the party. But in the Butterfly Field of events Israel gets roughed up a bit more: even heavier casualties, a rougher time on the Syrian front especially, lower reserves of fuel and materiel (IAF excepted) by the end of the fighting, and they haven't really crossed the Canal as they did IOTL, they've just cut off the two main Egyptian field armies on the eastern bank.

You've also hit on an important point, not just about quality in the sense of skill and measurable outcomes. This (together with OTL's Entebbe raid a few years later) were perhaps the last times the IDF took on the role that helped define its own, and the State of Israel's, position in the hearts and minds of many Americans during the first decades of the state. This was the last hurrah for the dashing, young, surprisingly-leftist children of hope, the generation who had grown up to spite the Sho'ah and fight for their lives against the weight of numbers in a hostile world. The seeds of future problems had grown already by that point, even in the very character of the state itself - in longtime correspondent Patrick Tyler's excellent phrase that it was "Sparta masquerading as Athens" - but '73 was an existential struggle and one in which Israelis could make the case that they were actually fighting for the very survival of their whole enterprise in survival. There were great stakes among some of the other parties too: the Assad regime was in some measure fighting for the survival of a coherent Syrian state through a central, nationalist project aimed at the collective enemy, Israel. Likewise, in an irony that is either Orwellian or downright Zen, Anwar Sadat was fighting for a future with some measure of peace and stability in it, by staking the claim to Sinai and to a restoration of Egyptian pride and national sense of self that would give him the leverage to stabilize borders and relations. Awful lot of marbles being played for.

Then, too, there are the stakes of various other players, the US included, where we're just starting to see how things might play out, and that leads me to your YouTube clip:

Nice. I get exposed to more quality tunes around here as people find apt musical quotations for the moment.

 

[Yes]

Edge of destruction: captured Israeli troops taken before the media by Syrian forces

Pride restored?: Egyptian assault forces raise their flag over one of the forts along the Bar-Lev Line in Sinai

Councils of war: Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, together with Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and other officials, meet with Israeli troops and reporters on the Sinai front

Seizing the moment: Crown Prince Fahd (left) and Minister for Petroleum Sheikh Zaki Yamani of Saudi Arabia (center) speak with the Shah of Iran (right) at an emergency
meeting of OPEC members near the end of the Yom Kippur War; in response to President McGovern's security guarantee to Israel OPEC imposed an embargo on the US and
several other nations supportive of the Israeli position

Slippery slope?: US naval assets help deliver troops of the 1st Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division to Sinai to join Soviet and UN troops enforcing a cease-fire
between Israeli and Egyptian forces there, a flashpoint of contention in the wider Arab-Israeli conflict

 

[skaven]

Nice. I get exposed to more quality tunes around here as people find apt musical quotations for the moment.

It's a great tune, and also the soundtrack for the famous opening of Adam Curtis' Bitter Lake, in which the petrodollar is presented as one of the key tipping points for the west into the destruction of a single unified narrative, and the slide into hypernormalisation.

 

[Yes]

It's a great tune, and also the soundtrack for the famous opening of Adam Curtis' Bitter Lake, in which the petrodollar is presented as one of the key tipping points for the west into the destruction of a single unified narrative, and the slide into hypernormalisation.

And now I have more Christmas-holiday viewing too Good stuff. Also your sig-line poet may bubble to the surface of butterflied narratives in his home region, just to point out.

 

[Yes]

This is of an earlier vintage than McGoverning, but I'm just gonna leave this here for careful readers, with a particular shout-out to @Bulldoggus:

 

[Indiana Beach Crow]

and the Pittsburgh Pirates and Oakland Athletics squared off in the World Series,

This is completely plausible, since the NL East basically was a 5-way tie that season, and butterflies could make any one of them the NL Champs, but I'm choosing to believe it's because Roberto Clemente's flight made it safely to Nicaragua the year before. With him around that's more than enough to put the Buccos over the top that season.

George McGovern had a shortwave on, set on a table by the French doors. It let him keep up with the baseball as he’d done since he was a boy straining to hear Cardinals games crackle across the air out onto the High Plains.

I always knew George was good people, being a Cardinals fan is just more proof of it.

 

[Yes]

This is completely plausible, since the NL East basically was a 5-way tie that season, and butterflies could make any one of them the NL Champs, but I'm choosing to believe it's because Roberto Clemente's flight made it safely to Nicaragua the year before. With him around that's more than enough to put the Buccos over the top that season.'

As a fellow Nope Not Gonna Say It Just Gonna Say Not Young Anymore you get all the points for spotting one of the TL's Butterflies-in-Passing. Haven't officially decided whether he travels sooner or later or safer or what, but yes he makes it to Managua and back. Which, as you say, Clemente plus a better-than-OTL performance from the pitching staff is enough to get Pittsburgh to the top of the East, past a still-overconfident Dodgers squad, and into the series against the juggernaut As. Thanks to the magnificent butterfly machine at www.whatifsports.com here in the McGoverning TLverse the Pirates drop the series to Oakland 4-2 but the Bucs play gamely, Roberto in particular, if they're let down anywhere it's by pitching despite the solid(er) regular season.

I always knew George was good people, being a Cardinals fan is just more proof of it.

I became aware of this fact over on The YouTube, where a C-SPAN books segment from the Nineties still knocks around in which George shows up at one of the big St. Louis independent bookstores to talk about his graceful, tragic account of his daughter Terry's OTL life and death. The set-up speaker who introduces McGovern? You should dare to guess it: Tom Eagleton. Really quite a thing to see the two of them in close proximity there. As part of George's warmup he mentions being a Cards fan as a boy listening to the AM drift out into South Dakota. Seemed like the just sort of reclaimed-reality on which this TL feeds.

Also, thanks again to whatifsports.com, I can tell you that ITTL the Cards skip the big multiplayer trade with the Red Sox late in '73 and keeping the band together, as it were, turns out to be a good thing. They inch their way to the top of the division, then shock an on-paper superior Dodgers lineup in the NLCS. On to the Series we go: both the Cardinals and Athletics murder each other away, respectively, so the As come home to Oakland-Alameda with a 3-2 lead. In a grim Game 6 the Cards force more baseball with a 4-3 win. Then, as an aging Bob Gibson saddles up against Johnny "Blue Moon" Odom, it's the Cardinals' offense wot did it as the baseball Cardiac Cards pull it out 7-6 and gratify, among others, a President with a lot on his plate.

Not St. Louis' only brush with title bouts in the Seventies: in January '77, after the Bicentennial season of the NFL, the football Cardinals of the "Air Coryell" years square off against the Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl XI. The Silver and Black take the day 31-24 but it's a hell of a shootout between Ken Stabler and Jim Hart, most passing yards of any Super Bowl to date bc the anti-"dead ball" passing rules come in a couple of years early, along with some other developments in the game.

But I digress

 

[Bulldoggus]

I can tell you that ITTL the Cards skip the big multiplayer trade with the Red Sox late in '73 and keeping the band together, as it were, turns out to be a good thing.

No.

 

[Yes]

No.

There will be ... cosmic compensations. Rest easy.

 

[King of the Uzbeks]

E t e r n a l B i g R e d M a c h i n e

 

[Indiana Beach Crow]

As a fellow Nope Not Gonna Say It Just Gonna Say Not Young Anymore you get all the points for spotting one of the TL's Butterflies-in-Passing.

It would be kind of funny to read this TL from one of the butterflies-in-passing point of view, where the great Pirates dynasty of the 1970's is the focus and we only get random asides to things like 'President McGovern'.

Also, thanks again to whatifsports.com, I can tell you that ITTL the Cards skip the big multiplayer trade with the Red Sox late in '73 and keeping the band together, as it were, turns out to be a good thing. They inch their way to the top of the division, then shock an on-paper superior Dodgers lineup in the NLCS. On to the Series we go: both the Cardinals and Athletics murder each other away, respectively, so the As come home to Oakland-Alameda with a 3-2 lead. In a grim Game 6 the Cards force more baseball with a 4-3 win. Then, as an aging Bob Gibson saddles up against Johnny "Blue Moon" Odom, it's the Cardinals' offense wot did it as the baseball Cardiac Cards pull it out 7-6 and gratify, among others, a President with a lot on his plate.

 

[Indiana Beach Crow]

No.

 

[Indiana Beach Crow]

E t e r n a l B i g R e d M a c h i n e

I'd say don't bet on it, but Pete Rose already did.

 

[Bulldoggus]

Also, I'm not totally sure about the 1973 A's not bringing it home. I mean the Mustache Gang were like a dominant team.

 

[King of the Uzbeks]

I'd say don't bet on it, but Pete Rose already did.

PeTe rOsE bEt tO WiN

 

[Yes]

Also, I'm not totally sure about the 1973 A's not bringing it home. I mean the Mustache Gang were like a dominant team.

Sorry for the unclear language there: the Mustache Gang did indeed put paid to the Pirates 4-2. It's the miracle St. Louis team of '74 that throws up a roadblock (the games have been "played", I was as surprised as anyone but I think it's Game 6 that gave them momentum in the algorithms - first Series where all games were won at the other guys' yard?)

 

[Yes]

E t e r n a l B i g R e d M a c h i n e

On the Trends Not Butterflies side of things, Cincinnati definitely gets a major share of the action in the Seventies.

It would be kind of funny to read this TL from one of the butterflies-in-passing point of view, where the great Pirates dynasty of the 1970's is the focus and we only get random asides to things like 'President McGovern'.

Given my fondness for deep backstory I've worked up a variety of ancillaries to the main TL checking in on things where either I just plain have an interest, or where ordinary folk in this TLverse would probably care about the details and outcomes much more than when President McGovern hogs all three channels plus PBS (save us, UHF!) to talk about rescuing the American present with American principles FREAKING A-GAIN.

Hilariously apt.

I'd say don't bet on it, but Pete Rose already did.

PeTe rOsE bEt tO WiN

Ain't no party like a National League party.