Today’s word of the day, thanks to Merriam-Webster, is moxie. Moxie is a noun that means a variety of different things: “Courage, pluck, perseverance, etc.; guts” or “Aggressive energy; initiative” or “Skill; know-how” (https://www.yourdictionary.com/moxie); “courageous spirit and determination; perseverance” or “vigor; verve; pep” (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/moxie); or “energy” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/moxie).

M-W says this about moxie: “If the idea of a carbonated bevvy flavored with gentian root makes you thirsty to wet your whistle, then you’ve got some moxie, friend! Lowercase moxie—which today is a synonym of both nerve and verve—originated as uppercase Moxie, as in Moxie Nerve Food, a patent medicine and tonic invented by Dr. Augustin Thompson and sold in New England in the 1870s. Within a decade, when it was clear his drink wasn’t really medicinal, he carbonated Moxie and marketed it as a kind of 19th-century energy drink with a ‘delicious blend of the bitter and the sweet.’ The soft drink and its advertising slogans (among them Make Mine Moxie!) eventually caught on around the country. The beverage was even a favorite of Charlotte’s Web author E. B. White, who wrote, ‘Moxie contains gentian root, which is the path to the good life.’ The semantic jump from ‘a drink that gives you energy’ to ‘energy’ itself is as natural as a good advertising campaign. By 1930, moxie had acquired its earliest modern sense referring to vim and pep” (ibid.).

With the meaning of “courage,” it entered the language around “1930, from Moxie, brand name of a bitter, non-alcoholic drink, 1885, perhaps as far back as 1876 as the name of a patent medicine advertised to ‘build up your nerve.’ Despite legendary origin stories put out by the company that made it, it is perhaps ultimately from a New England Indian word (it figures in river and lake names in Maine, where it is apparently from Abenaki and means ‘dark water’). Much-imitated in its day; in 1917 the Moxie Company won an infringement suit against a competitor’s beverage marketed as ‘Proxie’” (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=moxie).

Today is the 80^th anniversary of D-Day, the Allies’ invasion of Normandy.

My first thought about D-Day is that I probably don’t need to say very much about it because we all know about it already, but I heard today on a podcast that a lot of people, especially younger people, really don’t know much about it at all. Still, I probably won’t say a whole lot about the event itself.

D-Day was the biggest amphibious invasion in military history. Operation Overlord, the official name of the operation, involved landing over 150,000 men from eight of the allied countries on five beaches on the French coast. In addition, thousands of airplanes provided cover for the troops and dropped paratroopers behind enemy lines. Some 4,000 troops, including roughly 2,000 Americans, died in the initial assault, but because of poor leadership in the Nazi’s military and good propaganda by the Allies, in less than a week the beaches were secured, allowing the Allies to land more men, many vehicles, and tons of materiel. “By the end of June, the Allies had seized the vital port of Cherbourg, landed approximately 850,000 men and 150,000 vehicles in Normandy, and were poised to continue their march across France” (https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/d-day).

The invasion in the west made it impossible for Hitler to send reinforcements to the Eastern front, where the Soviet Army was making progress against the Nazis. Hitler had made the classic Napoleonic mistake of invading Russia, a task made formidable not by the military savvy of the Russians but by the Russian winter and the scorched earth retreat of the Russians.

By May of 1945, the Third Reich surrendered. Several months later, the Japanese would also surrender, putting an end to the second Great War.

But here’s what I want to point out on this day of remembrance. After the war was over, the Soviet Union dominated, through puppet regimes, most of Eastern Europe, including the eastern half of Germany. The United States participated in the division of Germany, including the division of Berlin which was otherwise in the part of Germany controlled by the Soviets. But the United States did not maintain control over the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, or any of the other countries it had liberated from the Nazis. Even Italy, which was an ally of the Germans and the Japanese, was liberated rather than conquered.

And the thing is that the United States could have continued fighting. We had joined the war effort more than two years after the beginning of the war, so we were relatively fresher than any of the other participants, including the Soviets. Furthermore, we had just demonstrated to the world the terrible power of the atomic bomb. It is conceivable that we could have turned our power against the Soviet Union; indeed, “According to [Alan] Axelrod, [General George] Patton believed that the Soviet Union posed a greater threat to American interests than Nazi Germany. He believed that the United States should have focused its efforts on defeating the Soviets rather than the Nazis, arguing that the Soviet Union was a more dangerous and long-term threat to American freedom and democracy” (https://www.quora.com/Why-did-General-Patton-say-that-the-US-defeated-the-wrong-enemy-and-should-have-pushed-straight-to-Moscow).

Had we successfully invaded the Soviet Union, that country might never have gotten the bomb, and the Cold War might never have happened, and Korea and Vietnam might never have happened, and Chairman Mao might never have inflicted the Cultural Revolution on the Chinese people, and….

But we didn’t invade Russia, and we didn’t maintain control over the European countries we liberated. Despite a few aberrations, the United States has mostly not been in the business of military conquest. The United States has mostly not colonized other places even though we certainly have the military might to do so.

And 79 years ago, we probably had the moxie to carry out a program of world domination. We just never had the will because part of our founding philosophy was that people should determine their own courses. Today we no longer have that kind of moxie—not the know-how, not the energy, and not the courage. But that’s probably a blessing. People groups should have the right of self-determination. And in 1944, when tens of thousands of Americans invaded Nazi-occupied territory, the right of self-determination for people groups like the French and the Belgians and the Swiss and the Austrians and so many others was what we were fighting for.

Thousands upon thousands of Americans died not protecting our homeland but liberating people in Europe and around the world. Has there ever been a country before that has done that? Will there ever be such a country again?

Today’s image: “Soldiers of the 16th Infantry Regiment, wounded while storming Omaha Beach, France, wait by the chalk cliffs for evacuation to a field hospital for treatment on D-Day, June 6, 1944,” photo taken by the US Army (https://www.defense.gov/News/Feature-Stories/story/Article/3052217/5-things-you-may-not-know-about-d-day/).