Ed Cranswick was a buddy of mine in High School. We hung out in the physics lab at Nyack High School and got into trouble. We, along with Mike Sivy (now a semi-famous stock market writer), built a computer out of army surplus relays. We made a jacob’s ladder from a high voltage transformer, and we set the physics lab on fire on parent teacher’s night.

Ed is one of the 10 or so really smart people that I have met and liked. He was originally from Australia and was so fed up when Bush was elected that he left the US and returned to the land down under. Ed’s father was from England and his mother was from Australia and he spoke with an English accent.

Ed was a human shield in Iraq and as time goes on he seems less and less crazy and more and more like he was the only one I know who stood up to his convictions.

He has a cool piece in an anti-war web site. The article is part history, part biography, part short story and part an indictment of the war. It is about the British battle of at Beersheba, Palestine which was fought to provide the British with Oil, if Ed is right.

From what I read, the Sinai and Palestine Campaign, of which the battles at Beersheba were part, had more to do with keeping the Suez Canal open by fighting the Ottoman Empire than controlling oil fields. My Dad always claimed that WW I had a lot to do with oil from the start and that even though most of the fighting was in France, the goal was to control the Mideast. Ed’s claim that his grandfather died Fighting Muslims for Oil for the British Empire, is, perhaps, not entirely true, in that keeping Europe from being conquered by the Germans played a part in the war.

The_Light_Horse_by_Edward_Cranswick

A quick little Ed Cranswick story: There was a large relief map of Africa in one of the classrooms. I think this was a creative writing class. While Ed was standing in the front of the class reading, the map fell off the wall and landed on him. He struggled to get out from under it and lifted it back in place. After it was rehung on the wall, he turned to the class, and in his perfect English accent he deadpanned: “Ah, the white man’s burden.”