A Very Sad Book

This [Tim Tzouliadis's "The Forsaken"] is a very sad book, the story of thousands of Americans who, during the Depression, lured by sham Soviet propaganda and pro-Soviet falsehoods spread by the likes of George Bernard Shaw and the corrupt New York Times Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, migrated to the USSR in search of jobs and a role in the "building of socialism." It was, in the words of the author, "the least heralded migration in American history" and a period when "for the first time in her short history more people were leaving the United States than were arriving." Most of these expatriates, not intellectuals but simple working men, were quickly disenchanted and wanted to return home, only to find that Moscow considered them Soviet citizens and barred them from leaving. Ignored by the American government, many of them ended in the gulag.

The history we know is false. No matter how hard they try, historians when they write can't purge themselves of knowing how it turns out. Usually, I suspect, they don't even try. To understand why people did what they did, you have to stand in the past and blind yourself, so you cannot see ahead.

In the 1930s, capitalism and liberal democracy looked like dead ends. The Soviet Union, filtered through the supposedly reliable reporting of Western observers who actually went there, seemed to be charging ahead with inspired workers and full production, where the U.S. was a land of cold chimneys and breadlines. In Germany and Italy, other collectivisms made monumental strides, under dynamic leadership, amid popular enthusiasm. That a certain brutality accompanied all this was known, but it had not yet become monstrous and even then the full degree did not become apparent to most people till after the war.

I wonder about "for the first time in her short history more people were leaving the United States than were arriving." I don't have the right books on hand now, but it might be there were brief periods in the 1830s and perhaps 1850s, during severe economic downturns, when more people were leaving than arriving.

History Matters

Herodotus, goddamn it.

This New Yorker piece eventually gets it right for a long stretch. But it opens with the highbrow journalist's (or is it the New Yorker's?) condescension to "this ostensibly archaic epic" and closes with a barf-making moral equivalence passage -- America is the Persian Empire, see! Bush I is Darius! Bush II is Xerxes! Iraq is Greece! The mighty, evil empire loses and fails! Which I guess means bin Laden, al-Sadr, and the grubby beheaders of Baqouba are Leonidas and Callimachus, eh, smart guy? Didn't go there, did you? But you edged around it so tightly you can't prevent the thought from finishing in your reader's mind, if not on your page. And it's repulsive.

Time always tells, as he himself knew so well. However silly he may once have looked, Herodotus, it seems, has had the last laugh.

I don't think he's laughing, and I don't think he ever looked as silly, even to you and your friends, as you do now.

The discovery that great works of the past are not dusty and dull, but share stylistic qualities with the radically modern, is nothing new. It could only surprise a journalist. Someone who never had heard how Tolkien rescued "Beowulf" from the philologists. "Cinematic" is the praise-word the surprised discoverers usually bestow, as though people of the past never made big pictures in their heads before Hollywood put them into dark rooms to watch movies. Sure enough, it turns up here.

Here is where the reviewer (Daniel Mendelsohn) get it wrong while getting it right:

But the persistent appeal of such scenes, in which the outnumbered Greeks unexpectedly triumph over the masses of Persian invaders, is ultimately less a matter of storytelling than of politics. Although Herodotus is unwilling to be anything but neutral on the relative merits of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy (in a passage known as the “Debate on Government,” he has critical things to say about all three), he ultimately structures his presentation of the war as a kind of parable about the conflict between free Western societies and Eastern despotism. (The Persians are associated with motifs of lashing, binding, and punishment.) While he isn’t shy about portraying the shortcomings of the fractious Greek city-states and their leaders, all of them, from the luxury-loving Ionians to the dour Spartans, clearly share a desire not to answer to anyone but their own leaders.

Anyone, at any rate, was preferable to the Persian overlord Xerxes, who in Herodotus’ narrative is the subject of a magisterial portrait of corrupted power. No one who has read the Histories is likely to forget the passage describing the impotent rage of Xerxes when his engineers’ first attempt to create a bridge from Asia to Europe across the Hellespont was washed away by a storm: after commanding that the body of water be lashed three hundred times and symbolically fettered (a pair of shackles was tossed in), he chastised the “bitter water” for wronging him, and denounced it as “a turbid and briny river.” More practically, he went on to have the project supervisors beheaded.

Herodotus’ Xerxes is, however, a character of persuasive complexity, the swaggering cruelty alternating with childish petulance and sudden, sentimental paroxysms of tears: it’s a personality likely to remind contemporary audiences of a whole panoply of dangerous dictators, from Nero to Hitler. One of the great, unexpected moments in the Histories, evoking the emotional finesse of the best fiction, comes when Xerxes, reviewing the ocean of forces he has assembled for the invasion, suddenly breaks down, “overcome,” as he puts it to his uncle Artabanus (who has warned against the enterprise), “by pity as I considered the brevity of human life.” Such feeling for human life, in a dictator whose casual indifference to it is made clear throughout the narrative, is a convincing psychological touch. The unstable leader of a ruthlessly centralized authoritarian state is a nightmare vision that has plagued the sleep of liberal democracies ever since Herodotus created it.

It's the stories in the histories that matter most. As in poetry and fiction. They teach us to be fully human. Not political. Not creatures of faction, class, race, or gender. But human. The great stories are stories of people, and ultimately there is no difference between the heroes whose names stand in memory after 2,500 years and those you never heard of, still living,

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood,

or the slingers and foot-soldiers in the Anabasis, which is why we tell the stories over and over to ourselves and teach them to our children. This is what people can do! Even when all around them looks bleak!

It wasn't Xerxes' rage at the waves that I most remembered from that part of the story. It was what came just after in Herodotus' account:

As he marched out the army, Pythias the Lydian, dreading the heavenly omen and encouraged by the gifts given to him by Xerxes, came up to Xerxes and said, "Master, I wish to ask a favor of you, which would be a small favor for you to render, but would be a great favor for me to receive." Xerxes, thinking that he knew everything Pythias could ask for, answered that he would grant the favor and asked him to proclaim what it was he wished. "Master, it happens that I have five sons, and they are all bound to soldier for you against the Greeks. I pray you, king, that you have pity on one who has reached my age and that you set free one of my sons, even the oldest, from your army, so that he may provide for me and my possessions. Take the other four with you, and may you return having accomplished all you intended."

Xerxes flew into a horrible rage and replied, "You villainous man, you have the effrontery, seeing me marching with my army against the Greeks, with my sons and brothers and relatives and friends, to remind me of your son, you, my slave, who should rather come with me with your entire household, including your wife! You may now be certain of this, that since the spirit lives in a man's ears, hearing good words it fills the body with delight, when it hears the opposite it swells up. When you at one time performed well and promised more, you had no reason to boast that you outperformed your king in benefits; and now that you have turned most shameless, you shall receive less than what you deserve. You and four of your sons are saved because of your hospitality; but one of your sons, the one you most desire to hold your arms around, will lose his life!" Having answered thus, he commanded those charged to accomplish this to find the eldest of Pythias's sons and cut him in half, and having cut him in two to set one half of his corpse on the right side of the road and the other on the left side, and between these the army moved forth.

Which sounds rather unlike George W. Bush and a great deal like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. West is still West, East East, despite progressive polemics and the false weathercock of journalism.

The Amateur Expert

If you're one of the many commenters here who believes I should never write about something I haven't read, seen, and heard myself, just pass this by.

This depresses me. Nicholson Baker, a non-historian, writes a book on World War II and it seems he makes no effort to distinguish Nazi propaganda from realities, or to discern anything from anything else. It all sounds like Ann Coulter's book on McCarthy, which goes into the museum of history with a core of legitimate questions but pumped up on steroids and driving a bulldozer. Anne Applebaum kept her gorge down long enough to read Baker's book, and discussed it with others:

Yet the dull truth is that we arrived at the topic of Nicholson Baker not because we were talking about the war, but because we were talking about the contemporary cult of the non-expert, or rather the anti-expert: the bloggers who assume that the "mainstream media" is always wrong, the Wikipedia readers who think that a compilation of random anecdotes is always preferable to a learned study, and of course the college students who nowadays prefer to get their news in emails from friends because it is too bothersome to read a newspaper. And the even duller truth is that Human Smoke belongs to this cult, and not to the more exotic outer reaches of the historiography of World War II. One cannot properly understand Baker's book by comparing it to, say, Martin Gilbert's Auschwitz and the Allies or to the latest work on the fire-bombing of Dresden. To understand Human Smoke properly, one needs to read Gawker, Wikipedia, and above all The Da Vinci Code. The latter comparison might sound odd, but the resemblance is actually quite striking. Like Baker, the author of The Da Vinci Code is not a historian. And also like Baker, Dan Brown is a man apparently obsessed by his belief in the existence of a widespread historical conspiracy. (For those lucky enough to be unfamiliar with it, Brown's theory goes like this: the church hierarchy, along with the world's religious historians, art historians, and church historians, have been hiding the fact of Jesus's wedding to Mary Magdalene, as well as his subsequent children, from the public for centuries, using a massive cover-up perpetuated by Opus Dei, and so on, and on, and on.)

Like Choam Nomsky himself, the patron saint of all such types, right, left, or apolitical, they tirelessly and articulately point out the lack of objectivity of the media or the academic gatekeepers, while at the same time puffing their own eccentric version of reality without a scintilla of awareness that these, too, might not be entirely objective.

Sure enough, the Wikipedia entry on Baker offers no clue to the extensive objections (detailed in the article above) to "Human Smoke":

Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (2008) is a history of World War II that questions the commonly held belief that the Allies wanted to avoid the war at all costs but were forced into action by Hitler's unforgiving crusade. It is written in a mostly objective style, largely consisting of official government transcripts and other documents from the time. He cites documents that suggest that the leaders of the United States and the United Kingdom were provoking Germany into war (showing, for example, that Britain bombed Germany before Germany bombed Britain) and that the leaders of those two nations had ulterior motives for wanting to participate. In the epilogue to the book he suggests that the pacifists (who are often vilified by WWII historians) had it right all along, stating: “They failed, but they were right.”

It's depressing from several angles. Among them, to me, is the way this undermines the role of the non-expert. I've been trying all my life to revive that role in history. It's partly personal: I am one. I write history books, but after 16 years of education I had had enough and chose not to go to graduate schools and get the requisite parchments. So I write as an amateur. I am careful in my research, and my books have been cited in the major works of some of the leading professional academic historians of the Civil War. But I always will be an outsider.

Once upon a time, in the late 19th century, the history-writing profession was not divided into insiders and outsiders. Once upon a time it was dominated by literary gentleman amateurs and not by what we now would call professional historians. They helped define America -- they helped Americans understand what they were and they helped immigrants understand what they were joining.

But unlike the modern cult-anti-experts, their scholarship was impeccable. William H. Prescott's histories of Mexico and Peru are heavily footnoted. Francis Parkman's books were highly praised by even the most rigorous academic historians.

What doomed them was their form and tone and overall lack of objectivity -- or Objektivität, to use the correct term. A new generation of young American scholars had learned their history in the universities of Germany, and, following the lead of the German masters, they sought to turn American history into a profession, and to apply the methods of science to it. And this required a commitment to complete objectivity. So, not only should serious history only be written by credentialed academics, it should involve no personal passions or cultural commitments.

While the old amateur class may have done historical research as correctly as anyone would have wished, they also tended to tell it as a story -- their books seemed to echo the architecture of Sir Walter Scott's novels or Shakespeare's plays. And they were prone to write things like:

Where there is no free agency, there can be no morality. Where there is no temptation, there can be little claim to virtue. Where the routine is rigorously prescribed by law, the law, and not the man, must have the credit of the conduct. if that government is the best, which is felt the least, which encroaches on the natural liberty of the subject only so far as is essential to civil subordination, then of all governments devised by man the Peruvian has the least real claim to our admiration.

[Prescott], or:

If ten people in the world hate despotism a little more and love civil and religious liberty a little better in consequence of what I have written, I shall be satisfied.

[William Lothrop Motley]

Motley also wrote of Philip II that, if he "possessed a single virtue it has eluded the conscientious research of the writer of these pages. If there are vices -- as possibly there are -- from which he was exempt, it is because it is not permitted to human nature to attain perfection even in evil."

Their books are still stimulating to read today. They were great storytellers and they could craft an English sentence that felt full and alive in the mouth if you spoke it aloud. Read 1,000 history books published in the last 5 years: Find one to match a paragraph of Prescott or Parkman or John Bach McMaster.

They were a little better, a little more enlightened, than their contemporaries in the American polling places and theater galleries. But not too much so. They sang the national mythologies, but they also could lead The People to the better angels of their nature. They tended to boost Anglo-Saxon Protestant virtues, but regretably they did so by contrast to Catholic vices. Yet as the ancient Greeks could have told you, and they invented democracy, a people without a mythology is not truly alive, not truly a people.

The academics succeeded. They turned out the amateurs, imposed objectivity, and turned a craft into a profession. They banished the author from the text and the values-booster from the national history.

And they instantly fell under attack, in the 20th century, from the deniers of objective truth, from the relativists, iconoclasts, and Marxists. They could not hold the ivory tower, and as they made compromise after compromise with their enemies, new enemies arose, more fierce than the ones before. In the 1960s, it all collapsed and left us with -- what? Whatever it is we now have: "[T]he present period of confusion, polarization, and uncertainty, in which the idea of historical objectivity has become more problematic than ever before." [unsigned cover blurb for "That Noble Dream" by Peter Novick, 1998]

Of course, most Americans who aren't assigned their reading (and paying $40,000 a year for that privilege) will choose to read well-written stories of the past rather than the academic hash. And the loving amateur craftsman of history has never gone away: More Americans learned their Civil War history from Bruce Catton and Carl Sandburg and Shelby Foote, when I was a boy, than from any tenured Ph.D. As, I suppose, more learn it today from Ken Burns. Among living writers, David Hackett Fisher (a proper academic historian) and Paul Johnson have taken up the mantle to some degree. But there never are enough of them, and we always could use more. But being an outsider isn't enough. You have to be honorable.

The Scourging

Robert Kagan -- or anyone with the name "Kagan" -- seems to be invisible to the many people disaffected with the Iraq War. You get the feeling if they saw one of his articles blowing down the sidewalk they'd cross the street with their fingers in their ears and eyes squeezed shut.

As a neo-con icon, he's on the defensive these days. But what he's defending is not just his own political philosophy. His work lately has become a futile attempt to head off a massive re-write of American history to absolve the nation from the Iraq War. Like the Lost Cause version of the Civil War, it allows almost everyone to think they were right all along, just perhaps misled by a few bad eggs.

Which is what is happening now, in a process of collective forgetting. This one will be a lot nastier than the Lost Cause, however, since it focuses not on the unity of the national experience so much as the supposed intrusion of political parasites. Or, as Kagan puts it:

To understand where the idea of promoting American principles by force comes from, it is not really necessary to parse the writings of Jewish émigrés.

Naturally, trying to stave off ostracism, he would tie his favored policies to the great American tradition. But he happens to be right. Historians, such as John Lewis Gaddis have wondered at the forgetfulness of those who consider Bush and Kagan as the kind of people America has to be "restored" away from:

So when Bush, in the aftermath of September 11, evoked the Jeffersonian idea of a world free from tyranny and the Wilsonian idea of a world safe for democracy, he was doing nothing radical or unprecedented: he was well within the tradition of American two-party politics.

As an example of that, Kagan quotes a few half-lines from Woodrow Wilson's war message to Congress in 1917, noting that the president "used language that would make George W. Bush’s speechwriters blush." Here's a fuller excerpt:

We are now about to accept gage of battle with this natural foe to liberty and shall, if necessary, spend the whole force of the nation to check and nullify its pretensions and its power. We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretence about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included: for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them."

... It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts -- for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free. To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.

Of course, the lessons about the dark side, and the wash of cynicism that can follow on failure, are in the history books, too. Collective righteousness, which Wilsonian war politics encouraged, can easily become ungovernable and cruel. Kagan cites the William McKinley/Mark Hanna GOP of 1900, fresh off the victory over Spain that placed the destiny of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba and other places in American hands.

It was, they declared, a war fought for “high purpose,” a “war for liberty and human rights” that had given “ten millions of the human race” a “new birth of freedom” and the American people “a new and noble responsibility ... to confer the blessings of liberty and civilization upon all the rescued peoples.”

He doesn't mention the ambivalent outcome of all that, the nasty guerrilla war in the Philippines and the serious domestic dissent it inspired. But Kagan is right in connecting the core of what passes for "neo-con" attitudes today to Lincoln, to Seward, to Henry Clay, "who sought to place the United States at the 'centre of a system which would constitute the rallying point of human freedom against all the despotism of the Old World,'” to Alexander Hamilton, to Thomas Jefferson, to John Quincy Adams, to George Washington, to the Declaration of Independence itself.

Jefferson wrote of an empire of liberty. Americans in his lifetime tried to extend it by force to Canada, before they realized the Canadians wanted none of it. The Monroe Doctrine, which tends to stand nowadays for all pan-American policy of the U.S. in the early 19th century, masks a genuine idealistic support for the Latin American nations after they broke from Spain by Adams, Clay, and many others.

The American belief in spreading liberty in the world always has been tangled up in more mundane motives and thwarted by cross-currents of more realistic and ambitious diplomacy. It has involved us in an essential split between those who wanted to concentrate national effort on perfecting the American experiment and those who sought first to expand it. It has involved furious debates over literal empire vs. an empire of influence and ideas. The man most likely to have coined the term "manifest destiny" became a bitter opponent of the war against Mexico that seems now to be its natural expression.

People steeped in Protestant Christianity will at once recognize the shape of these problems and debates. And the evangelism of early America was both the template and a motive force for all of this. Its influence on American ways of thinking and acting can not be underestimated -- with the single exception of the deistic intellectual generation of the Founders.

So when George W. Bush, in his clumsy way, says he felt the hand of divinity steering him toward a bold move to spread freedom and liberty in the Mideast, some people gasped in horror. But that is nothing more than American history. If you hate it on sight, if you proscribe something so deep in American soul as the recent and despicable innovation of a recently risen foreign-born coterie, you disown your heritage whether you know it or not.

Borah, Borah, Borah!

Big news:

"We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history," Bush added.

Democrats are fuming. This quote set them off at least once before, in 2006, when Rumsfeld used it in a speech.

The curious thing, to me, is that neither he nor Bush named the Senator. The quote comes from a Progressive, isolationist Republican, William E. Borah of Idaho. Who may well have said it, conversationally, but not on the record. As far as I can tell it is attributed to him first in a biography published 20 years after his death.

I should add that it is curious that so many media outlets reporting the story (such as the AP, linked above, Reuters, or CNN) don't bother to track down the source of the quote. But the uncuriosity of the media is universal now and no longer seems curious to me.

Borah is an interesting fellow to look at in the light of modern red-blue America. Here, from his Wikipedia entry:

As a senator Borah was dedicated to principles rather than party loyalty, a trait which earned him the nickname "the Great Opposer." He disliked entangling alliances in foreign policy and became a prominent anti-imperialist and nationalist, favoring a continued separation of American liberal and European Great Power politics. He encouraged the formation of a series of world economic conferences and favored a low tariff.

A maverick Republican, in other words. The best quip about him comes from the underrated early 20th century humorist Calvin Coolidge. Told Borah was fond of horseback riding, Coolidge replied, "It's hard to imagine Senator Borah going in the same direction as his horse."

A "Progressive" Republican, in one of the now-unrecognizable historical meanings of that word. Isolationist, anti-imperialist -- like the paleo-cons of today. But an early champion of globalization and open markets, and a partial backer of the expanded federal powers of the New Deal. He sponsored bills that created the Department of Labor and the Children's Bureau and supported Roosevelt's efforts on old-age pensions.

And, as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1925 to 1933, a supporter of American engagement with the pariah regime in the Soviet Union.

As Chairman, he became known for his pro-Soviet views, favoring recognition of the Communist regime, and sometimes interceded with that government in an unofficial capacity during the period when Moscow had no official relations with the United States. Purportedly, Kremlin officials held Borah in such high esteem that American citizens could gain permission to travel throughout the Soviet Union with nothing more than a letter from the Senator.

Which might make a more interesting path than the one Bush used in invoking him as a warning against engagement with Ahmedinejad's Iran.

Past is Never Past

Blogism is rooted in journalism, and, for all that it touts itself as something exceptional and scorns its source, blogism is prone to the same blind spots as journalism.

Including a "New Yorker"-cover perspective on history, where the last 20 or 40 years (depending on the age of the blogger/journalist) make up the bulk of history and the definition of "normal."

Here's a quote in a recent New York Times story on the economy:

“The most important model that rolled off the Detroit assembly lines in the 20th century,” said Harley Shaiken, a labor economist at the University of California at Berkeley, “was the middle class for blue-collar workers.”

Right. The notion that a working man could have company-subsidized health care, unemployment benefits, a retirement savings plan, and a wage that would buy him a modest house, a new car every few years, a vacation once in a while, and a college education for his kids -- that is a comparatively recent thing in American history.

It was not always so. It was not considered essential to the health of the republic by Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, or Lincoln.

It happened for many reasons: capitalism's rising tide; capitalism's fear of communism; Roosevelt's big government; Roosevelt's big war; the closing of the frontier; the restrictions on immigration. You can't claim only one source, unless you're a polemicist, not a person with a sense of history.

Knowing these sorts of things doesn't buttress anyone's present position. It only makes the picture more complicated.

And what's the use of that, eh?

* * *

Good line:

The landmark political fact of our time is the replacement of our middle-class republic by a plutocracy. If some candidate has a scheme to reverse this trend, they've got my vote, whether they prefer Courvoisier or beer bongs spiked with cough syrup. I don't care whether they enjoy my books, or would rather have every scrap of paper bearing my writing loaded into a C-47 and dumped into Lake Michigan. If it will help restore the land of relative equality I was born in, I'll fly the plane myself.

Too bad it's Thomas Frank, the "What's the Matter with Kansas?," "One Market Under God," "Commodify Your Dissent" guy.

Just because it wasn't true in Lincoln's day doesn't mean a relative equality, a populous and middle class enjoying a healthy life that everyone has equal opportunity to achieve, aren't the pulse of modern America. The right does itself and its country no good when it dismisses the left's concerns about that.

* * *

Which leads to this:

Hough notes the unravelling of the New Deal and the rightward movement of both parties in economic policy, but leaves out the social, economic and ideological transformations of which these are symptoms, and the dramatic alteration in the balance of forces in favour of capital that has accompanied them. Against this backdrop, Hough’s hope that the parties will henceforth ‘represent the economic interests’ of the median mass of voters seems like whistling in the wind. Certainly, neither of the Democratic contenders in 2008 has plans to do so.

From "New Left Review." I didn't even realize they were still in business. The review is a short history of American national political parties and presidential elections from a leftist perspective. It is not a complete picture or a balanced one, but it is one worth bearing in mind when building your own complete picture:

Hough’s account draws on intensive archival work to detail the processes by which the two parties contrived to limit electoral participation, gerrymander constituencies and divide up the electoral spoils within the ferociously competitive landscape of modern industrial America — greatly aided, although he does not spell this out, by the first-past-the-post system. At stake, for both parties, has been the problem of mobilizing maximum electoral support for policies that are not primarily conceived in the interests of the median voter.

Of course, the grass-roots from-the-bottom-up alternative for political action in a democracy is unlikely to yield results congenial to the New Left's hopes and dreams. As the article itself indicates, without seeming to be aware of it:

When the Whigs, magnates and manufacturers failed to offer a refuge to Protestant workers alienated by the Irish-run lower ranks of the Democratic machine in the 1850s, they were swept away by the anti-Papist, anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party in a revolt from below.

One of the nastier episodes in American history, and a faction of extremists that make Michelle Malkin look like Dorothy Day.

The author of the book being reviewed has made his specialty in studying the political structure of the Soviet Union, and both he and the reviewer seem content to find it essentially similar to the modern American political landscape. Which shows how a layperson with a dollop of common sense can be confident of his own conclusions even if all the historians and commentators and pundits in the world treat him with contempt.

It seems the situation Robert Conquest described from 40 years ago has left its mental dust bunnies in some unswept corners of the Left's house:

In the late Sixties when my book The Great Terror came out, it was still true that, as the great historian François Furet noted, after the war and the demise of fascism, “all the major debates on postwar ideas revolved round a single question: the nature of the Soviet regime.” He adds the paradox that communism had two main embodiments — as a backward despotism and as a constituency in the West that had to be kept unaware of the other’s reality. And, up to the last, this was often accompanied by a view of the Cold War as an even exchange — with the imputation that any denigration of the Soviet regime was due to peace-hating prejudice.

In Most Cases

I'd be inclined to dismiss someone's efforts to apply 19th century identifications and planks to 21st century U.S. political parties that happen to carry the same name. But in this case I'm inclined to approve. Just because, as Quixotic as it might be, the effort deserves every encouragement: Talking to "Republican organizations around the country, showing office-holders, candidates and activists how they would benefit tremendously from appreciating our Party's heritage of civil rights achievement."

Mytheducation

Two meditations at The Beiderbecke Affair that reinforce my conviction that mythology is ultimately more lasting, and more important, than history -- either objective or relativist. And that historians ought to to be wary, like Hippolytus was not, of serving exclusively one rational goddess and scorning the other, emotional, one.

My opinion, not necessarily his. But his words re-sparked that.

The Outsiders

Obama on patriotism:

I love this country not because it's perfect, but because we've always been able to move it closer to perfection. Because through revolution and slavery; war and depression; great battles for civil rights and women's rights and worker's rights, generations of Americans have shown their love of country by struggling and sacrificing and risking their lives to bring us that much closer to our founding promise. And as long as I live, I will never forget that I am only standing here because they did .... That is the country I love. That is the promise of America.

He may not frame it the way you would or list the same categories you would. But do you see that it is the kind of thing you say when you are within the American tradition and intend to stay there?

Which ought not even to be a consideration in a presidential campaign, but nowadays it has to be.

In fact, Obama's rhetoric is closer to the original patriotism of the young country, whose citizens saw it very much as a work in progress, with divine guidance but distant goals, than is much of what passes for patriotic speech today. "My country, right or wrong," whether uttered by Decatur or Schurz, always had a sincere qualifier: May she always be right. And an unspoken commitment to do one's part to make or keep it that way.

In the early republic, Americans furiously debated highly divisive issues, from slavery to Indian removal, economics, foreign relations, big government, religion and politics, war and peace -- easily as fractious as the topics we mangle one another over today. But the debaters were of a broad consensus that America was a place meant to improve and to achieve its potential, and that solutions to these problems and the power to accomplish them lay in the inherent virtues of the people and the nation. They typically framed their arguments in appeals to the moral and enlightened qualities in their fellow citizens. As late as Lincoln's time, he (and Seward) could write of "the better angels of our nature."

Yet it seems to me something entered the American discourse about the time of Thoreau and Garrison. It stood outside the American experience, and said the country and the people in it were so tainted and inherently wicked that the problems, not the virtues, defined America, and the solutions lay outside the nation and the people. And the proper place for a moral person was in opposition to America as it is.

It had as its necessary antimatter the slavery apologetics that repudiated the Jeffersonian vision of human equality and the spirit of the Declaration of Independence.

It has been with us ever since. One side-effect is the sort of protest or civil disobedience that makes no attempt to convince anyone or change anything, and is aimed only at expressing the moral superiority of the protester to the country he inhabits.

The very challenges our forebears debated now became the stigmata that mark the country as fatally flawed. On the left, it has almost become an academic shibboleth that the taint of the treatment of Indians and slaves was so great that it drowned in blood and tears any claim to special virtues for America.

In every election, one side will tell you that the system is working, even if it splutters and knocks. They will tell you the country is on the right track, even if it swerves.

And the other will persuade you you're being cheated and that things are hopelessly off track and need to be fixed.

No party has a lock on those positions. Democrats and Republicans will switch seats regularly. What has been lost in the rhetorical degradation of our politics is the discernment to talk those lines within the boundaries of a patriot's speech. There is a danger in being too negative about the country. That is a tight rope to walk. But it is not necessarily anti-patriotic, just as the position that asks you to stay the course is not necessarily complicity in whatever flim-flam may be breaking up the national compact.

Obama, in that speech, clearly takes his stand inside the line that separates the patriot from the political anti-patriot. There and elsewhere. I think he sees the line and knows it for what it is and is careful of it. He need only read Frederick Douglass, who had a sure sense of it, despite much greater cause for stepping over it than many of his modern admirers can claim. And I am willing to take Obama at his word on that much.

But that means Obama must also see, and know, how much, how vast a weight, of his support is outside that line. And that he will have to reckon with this someday.

Names

Jackson.

Lincoln.

Wilson.

Roosevelt.

Nixon*.

Bush.

Each name like the thud of a wrecking ball against the edifice of the constitutional government of 1787. The walls are strong. Some names shock harder than others. The damage accumulates. The last is not the strongest. But the edifice is weaker.

*Watergate, historically, will be the short final chapter. The longer ones will be on meddling in the economy and the currency, the impudent expansion of executive powers.

Crêpes of Wrath

Quote of the day, from the little dead dude:

When he snatched the crown away from the compliant pope and crowned himself in 1804, he supposedly said to his brothers, “If only Dad could see us now!”

America's Second-Longest War

What is it? I bet you didn't guess. I had forgotten it, too, till I came upon the chapter about it in Daniel Walker Howe's excellent new period history, "What Hath God Wrought." The Wikipedia article, on a quick read-through, looks fair, substantial, and rooted in good sources. It's not pretty. As nothing is from the U.S. Indian relations in the Jacksonian era.

Thoroughly Modern Margaret

The Eaton Affair in Andrew Jackson's first term wasn't the original bombshell American political sex scandal. That honor would have to go to the Hamilton-Reynolds fiasco.

But the Eaton Affair might be the most consequential, and most revealing. Every one that comes down the pike, even today (I'm thinking of New York) reminds me of this in crucial ways.



Margaret Eaton

They called her "Peggy," but she preferred the more formal "Margaret." She's a type most people today would recognize, however rare she was in 1830 America. She was voluptuous -- traffic-stopping beautiful -- and she knew it, and she enjoyed the attentions men paid to her. Her work tending bar in her father's inn in Washington, D.C., gave her ample opportunities. She was a brash woman with tremendous social ambition.

She married at age 16 to a minor navy official. It could have been a lonely life, with a husband so often away at sea, but Margaret never seems to have wanted for company. She made a good friend -- a very good friend -- in a middle-aged widower senator from Tennessee named John Eaton, and she was widely known to be his mistress. The paternity of her children was a matter of open speculation. Eaton seems to have loved her, and he helped out her family -- as well as using his clout to make sure her husband was at sea oftener than he would have been otherwise.

Margaret's husband died suddenly in 1828 during one of his voyages, apparently by suicide. How much he knew of his wife's infidelities, and how much it contributed to his despair, is an open question. What is clear is that eight months later, on New Year's Day 1829, Margaret, 29, married John Eaton. Remarriage within a year of the death of one's spouse was considered scandalous. The real scandal, however, was that Eaton, a longtime protege of Andrew Jackson and the campaign manager of Old Hickory's recent presidential victory, was about to become the U.S. Secretary of War.

As one D.C. insider wrote to another, "Eaton has just married his mistress, and the mistress of eleven doz. others!"

Understanding many things from those days requires a modern person to use creative imagination. Washington, D.C., wasn't even a city then. It was a cluster of mean villages around indifferently built government offices in the middle of an unhealthy swamp, with mud in the roads and crops planted over the right-of-way of some of them. Its permanent residents were too few to sustain much of a social life.

The people who flocked there for part of each year to run the government left for home as soon as they could. Many brought their wives and families with them, and the women, especially the wives of Southern politicians, built and carefully cultivated a social order and a social life for a capital that badly needed both. Government then, of course, was entirely the work of men. Men also were the patronage-seekers and hangers-on who clouded about the government like flies. Washington must have been one of the most disproportionately "male" towns in America then, and the men, even the Southern aristocrats, were a coarse, sexual, spitting, catting, cursing set whose bad qualities concentrated as their numbers swelled.

The hostess wives had their work cut out for them.

Cabinet wives customarily headed this embattled minority party, and in Jackson's first administration, the chief among them was Floride Calhoun, wife of the veteran vice president. They did their best to cut Peggy Eaton cold. No other wives spoke to her at the inaugural. Floride would receive her visits, but not return them. Most of the other cabinet wives followed suit. [Foreign diplomats, accustomed to behaviors at the courts at home, didn't understand any of this.]



Floride Calhoun

The dissonance in the cabinet families soon began to intrude on official business (which always is wrapped up in social affairs) and it caught the attention of Jackson. His own wife had a certain scandalous past, and it had been brought out against her, and him, in the nasty campaign of 1828, and when she died shortly before he was sworn in, the bitter, vindictive Jackson blamed her death entirely on the stories told about her.

That may be one reason he instinctively took Margaret Eaton's side, despite what everyone was telling him. He called an emergency session of the cabinet and others concerned in the case (but not the wives) and insisted Margaret was an innocent victim of slander.

As others tried to disabuse him of that notion, he insisted, "She is as chaste as a virgin!" The phrase became a general joke in the capital, though none dared tell the irascible president so. He also explicitly compared her case to his dead wife's, which put the cabinet men in an embarrassing position. Really, for Jackson, this was about his authority. Were his political servants to obey him or not? If he said she was a virgin, that ought to have been good enough for them. She was a virgin. Modern party politics, with their insistence on loyalty over everything, were being born.

The denouement of the scandal is told in the link above. Margaret and John Eaton left town after the Cabinet purge, prompting Henry Clay to quip, echoing Shakespeare, "Age cannot wither nor time stale her infinite virginity." It broke up Jackson's cabinet and cemented his enmity of John C. Calhoun.

The only winner was Secretary of State Martin Van Buren, the wiliest American alive and the first modern politician -- and I don't mean that as a compliment. As a widower, he could freely socialize with the Eatons, and by doing so he proved himself a loyal follower worthy of Jackson's trust. He went out of his way to pay calls on Margaret Eaton. The Jackson-Van Buren alliance created the Democratic Party. If Jackson had been able to work with Calhoun, or even J.Q. Adams (though that chance had passed by 1828), the evolution of American politics would have been strikingly different.

A historian, writing on the eve of the Civil War, could write accurately that "the political history of the United States, for the last thirty years, dates from moment when the soft hand of Mr. Van Buren touched Mrs. Eaton's knocker." Proving, incidentally, that "knocker" did not have one of its modern slang meanings then.

There's something appealingly modern about Margaret Eaton, and her defiance of prudish social conventions. But if you think about it, she is not the feminist pioneer in the story. To find that person, you have to look where you don't expect to find her.

Recent historians, often women, working from a feminist perspective, have seen the Eaton Affair in another light. Here is a summation of their view (though written in this case, by a male historian):

The women who ostracized Margaret Eaton did not act out of mere snobbish rejection of a tavern-keeper's daughter; social mobility was not despised in the Jackson administration. The women saw themselves defending the interests and honor of the female half of humanity. They believed that no responsible woman should accord a man sexual favors without the assurance of support that went with marriage. A woman who broke ranks on this issue they considered a threat to all women. She encouraged men to make unwelcome advances. Therefore she must be condemned severely even if it meant applying a double standard of morality, stricter for women than for men. This conviction was widespread among women, not only in the middle class and regardless of political party. The women who had the courage to act upon it, standing up to Andrew Jackson and risking their husbands' careers, insisted that expedient politics must not control moral principle. They believed that women acting collectively could advance the moral state of society. Theirs was the attitude that justified women's role in contemporary moral reform causes like temperance and antislavery. And although most or all of them would have been shocked if it had been pointed out, theirs was the attitude that would lead in a few more years to an organized movement on behalf of women's rights. [Daniel Walker Howe, "What Hath God Wrought," 2007, p.338]

Carrolling

[posted by Callimachus]

Journalists should not try to write with historical perspective. Because among all people, journalists uniquely lack it. The present moment looms so huge in what we do that the whole purpose of human history, from the time the first monkey tumbled out of a tree onto the savanna in Pleistocene Ethiopia, was to create THIS WEEK!

Let's take James Carroll as honestly stating of what he thinks, in his column, "A troubling turn in American history." His thinking is hopelessly confused. Among what he thinks is that THE PRESENT MOMENT is "the climax" of American history.

But that's the lesser problem. To the journalist's psychological near-sightedness he adds the neo-progressive's reflexive tendency to paint most of what America is and does in the world in the darkest possible colors. Yes, the two tendencies almost always go together in journalism, but they are not the same thing.

Even that's not his worst problem. His big difficulty here is that he can't decide which qualities are the good ones and which are the bad ones in America -- is our public moralism a fault or a virtue? Is our freedom good or bad? Is our quest for moral ideals a sin or a halo? It changes for him from one historical situation to another and one paragraph to the next. It's like watching someone try to run with his shoelaces tied together.

IF COLUMBUS is the beginning of the story, and, say, Lincoln is the middle, what is the end? Each episode of the American narrative surfaced a problem, which prompted attempts to resolve it, which led in turn to a new problem. This movement from problem to resolution to new problem and ever new efforts to fix things is what makes the American story great.

Well, there's 350 years between Columbus and Lincoln, and less than 150 between Lincoln and us, but there you can see the journalistic near-sightedness kicking in.

It's the peculiarity of the disaffected to see every moment in terms of something wrong that needs to be fixed. I'd be willing to bet that 99 percent of the people who have lived on this continent since Columbus saw their times in terms of how good they had it compared to the people who lived before. And in terms of having fun or making money or finding the path to salvation, or raising their kids right.

Rather, we have to be roused to "fix things." Something has to pick up the bed and shake us out of it and tell us to go get dressed and do it. We get kicked into action by something like Pearl Harbor, or the stock market crash, or losing the first two years of the Civil War. Americans who are fixated with "fixing things" on a daily basis tend to be regarded as tiresome cranks, like the abolitionists or the anti-saloon league.

So Columbus arrived in 1492, but carried the European virus of ideological absolutism - what led Queen Isabella to expel Jews from Spain that same year. Such absolutism sparked Old World religious wars, and Puritan dissenters defied it by coming to America. But they brought their own version of that absolutism.

He's probably confusing the Puritans and the Pilgrims. He's evidently confusing something. The Puritans didn't come to escape persecution. They came to live in the intense purity of community they had tried, and failed, to force on their fellow citizens in England.

John Winthrop's City on a Hill was a religiously gated community (no "pagans" or Quakers), with the magistrate empowered to coerce conformity. Therefore Roger Williams proposed the separation of church and state. By Jefferson's time, though, that distinction justified the separation of private morality from public ethics. Private morality meant he and others could keep the private property called slaves.

There is a world of historical trouble in that paragraph. It's closer to parody than history. Carroll seems to be saying here church and state were separate in Jefferson's day (they weren't; you still could be fined just about everywhere for blasphemy or for playing cards on Sunday), and that private morality was therefore separate from public ethics (it wasn't: just ask Hamilton about Mrs. Reynolds). And that slave-owning was a matter of private morality (it wasn't; it was very much part of both the national social culture and the global economy).

In Jefferson's day, just about everyone in America knew and agreed that slavery was wrong and more or less immoral and would have to end somehow. They question was how, and when. In the Northern states, it was ending then by a process of gradual emancipation, compensated by state governments, and a subsequent reordering of the laws to relegate free blacks to a proscribed and inferior position. That was the North's answer. It seemed likely the South would head in the same direction over time.

No one outside a handful of fanatics considered it proper or moral to have immediate emancipation, accompanied by full social and legal equality between the races. To pretend that was the moral position in that time and place is to impose modern morality on past times. To do that is to forfeit the right to talk seriously about the past.

And here's where Carroll first reverses himself. He seems to be saying here the government ought to have enforced a public morality by forcing Jefferson to free his slaves (into what? to go where? to do what?). Isn't that just another kind of "moral absolutism?" Is that really the kind of America he wants to inhabit? The only difference between that and the Puritans banishing Quakers is that it would be a moral purity he happens to approve as opposed to one he despises.

But who does he think will be determining and enforcing morality in any given generation? In our generation? Modern-day puritans or a neo-progressive minority of cranks? Come to think of it, that's how electoral politics seems to look to a lot of people on his side of the political balance beam.

Abraham Lincoln presided at the altar on which the bloody sacrifice of civil war was justified by "freedom," but no sooner had redemptive violence ("... as He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free") saved the nation's soul than it spawned the Indian genocide, and the Jim Crow betrayal of blacks.

More bad history. Indian genocide only began after the Civil War? Tell that to the Cherokee. Or the Pequods or the Conestogas. As for the Black Codes, they were a northern invention, well established before the war in places as far-flung as Ohio and Oregon.

The bloody sacrifice of the Civil War was justified to "preserve the union" (as it says on the monument in the center of the town where I work). I can assure Carroll that not one man in 20 in the Northern armies would have given "freedom for black people" or Julia Ward Howe's lyric as his reason for leaving the farm and family behind to die of dysentery in an army camp or a Southern prison.

So what does Carroll want? If "redemptive violence" is bad -- and "ideological absolutism" certainly stoked the fires of the abolitionists -- shouldn't the North have let the South depart in peace? And let slavery perhaps continue to this day? After all, think of how many teachers could have been hired with the cost of the Civil War. Yet Lincoln, armed with those two bad things, "saved the nation's soul."

In the name of freedom, the United States conquered a continent, and claimed a hemisphere - a destiny whose virtue was manifest against corrupt European imperialism. In the American Century, the nation born in rejection of ideological absolutism called itself capital of "the free world," but redemptive violence went nuclear, and defense of that freedom required absolute readiness to destroy the world. The chill of Cold War "realism" froze the American conscience.

As though -- again -- Americans sought the Cold War, went lusting for more "redemptive violence" and confrontation once World War II ended. As though the thing we longed for most in 1945 wasn't to get the hell home again and forget about goddamned Europe and all the rest of it. As though there was no aggressive Soviet empire out there except in the imagination of Americans, or it was created by our own actions.

An unexpected thaw (warming Gorbachev and Reagan) ended the Cold War bloodlessly, and America had a chance to redefine national redemption, removing violence from its center.

Note the odd sentence construction. The thaw is something that happens to Reagan and Gorbachev, not because of them. What is the agent? Is it like global warming, something that "just happens?" [I suspect he wants to say it happened "because of me and my friends in the nuclear freeze movement," but even he lacks the temerity to actually do that.] Or is it too disturbing to Carroll's thesis to allow that the scary application of "ideological absolutism" by Reagan helped precipitate the end of the war and the thaw?

That brings us to today. If this nation followed the pattern of its own historic reckoning with the ever unfinished work of public morality, political discourse would be defined by the dual-project of eliminating nuclear weapons and building international structures of peace. Instead, we are paralyzed by a war that no one wants, unable to change what matters most.

One would think that, if put to a democratic vote, modern Americans might take up as "public morality" issues such as abortion, which Carroll might not like. But let it pass.

The sad thing that Carroll won't let himself see is that, in Iraq, America is doing the thing he says he always wanted it to do. It is doing what he said makes America great: Moving from "a problem" [Sept. 11 attacks and rise of jihadism] "to resolution" [change the artificial and Cold War-based dynamic of Middle-Eastern nations to give people there freedom and democracy] "to new problem" [it's a lot harder than many people expected, and takes a lot longer than many of us have patience for] "and ever new efforts to fix things."

Do our sons and daughters lost in Iraq not "die to make men free"? Except he wants to give it up right now and walk away. Which hardly is "what makes the American story great."

And what he advocates -- walking away from it -- is not "fixing the problem" any more than the federal government "fixed" the race problem of the South by abandoning it to local Jim Crow laws. Any more than Jefferson would have purged himself of the moral taint of slave-ownership by simply turning his blacks off the plantation and out into a hostile world.

History just won't stay put in the "this is good, this is bad" narrative favored by people like Carroll. The Indians and the blacks were victims of the Americans? Well, the Indians bought and sold black slaves, and the descendants of the Cherokee took sides with the Confederacy. The Cold War was bad, desegregation was good? Well, the global competition with the Soviets for hearts and minds was what motivated the federal government to finally get aggressive with Southern states over race relations.

"Last week," Carroll writes -- and here we arrive at THE MOST IMPORTANT MOMENT IN HISTORY -- "this story reached a climax of sorts, with developments like these:" and he lists "War Cost" (as though it didn't cost anything till this week), which, he claims, could buy "9 million teachers to public schools for a year. Where would American education be if that happened instead? And where Iraq?" I'd dearly love to know where he thinks Iraq would be if we walked away from it tomorrow. I need a good laugh after reading all this cloying nonsense.

Mercenaries. We learned that the United States government has surrendered to "private contractor" hit squads the primal function of protecting its own diplomats in Iraq. Such unaccountable and profit-driven forces betray the foundational American military ethic. Hessians at last.

"We learned?" You learned, you mean. It's been developing since the Clinton Administration. But when the only attention you pay to the military is to decry the cost of it and to pontificate about how gay people ought to serve in it, you tend to miss these things till they're on top of you. Oh, and the Hessians were not mercenaries. They had no choice but to fight. Oh, and you never would have won your beloved Civil War without the enlistment bounties.

Abolition. Barack Obama made a major speech calling for a return to the long-abandoned goal of nuclear elimination. "We need to change our nuclear policy and our posture, which is still focused on deterring the Soviet Union - a country that doesn't exist." The major news media ignored this important declaration, obsessing instead with horse-race polls and fund-raising totals. Nuclear reform (antidote to proliferation and terrorism both) is not a campaign issue.

But we (or some of us) also learned last week that the U.S. has been dismantling its old Cold War nuclear arsenal even faster than treaties require it to do. How on earth is nuclear disarmament a deterrent to terrorism, anyhow? One thing we have learned -- and not just last week -- is that weakness in the face of an enemy is a spur to terrorism.

Torture. The Bush administration was revealed to have again secretly approved "enhanced" interrogation methods at restored CIA "black sites," where prisoners are once more held without treaty protections - measures that Congress and the Supreme Court have already rejected. Despite scandals, US torture continues.

Bad stuff. Read your history. Bad stuff, but hardly new stuff. What's new is being scandalized by it. But that would be a good development, and surely we can't admit that.

These developments would be disturbing enough, but what they point to is an interruption in this nation's most important public tradition - the movement from recognition of a problem to its attempted resolution.

No, what they point to is your lack of attention.

From ill treatment of native peoples, to enslavement of Africans, to temptations to empire, to a religious embrace of violence, to Red Scare paranoia, to an insane arms race - we Americans have had our failings. But we have faced them.

Sure, sure. We faced our ill treatment of native Americans after all their land had been confiscated. We ended enslavement of Africans only by the accidental good luck of the Southern leadership forcing the crisis. And please don't put McCarthy's hearings in the same scale pan as genocide, unless you really want to be called a fool.

Insane arms race? That was an American failing? Doesn't it take two to race? The nice part about being nothing but a historical whiner is, you never have to say what you would have done differently and explain how that would have led to a better outcome. We now know far more about the thinking of the Soviet leadership than Eisenhower and Kennedy did in their days. And what we know makes us realize that the American vigilance was, if anything, too slight.

The capacity for self-criticism and change has defined our history.

News flash: Change happens whether you criticize or not.

But that is not happening today.

By which you mean this week. Did the Civil War take a week? Did the Cold War?

We are in an arms race with ourselves, and will not stop. Our unjust war is just unending. Our politics and media, meanwhile, form a feedback loop of banality. "Freedom" has become our prison.

He's right about one thing. We need more teachers. If someone can get out of a public high school and still write like that and pass it off as serious thinking, we need lots more teachers.

Does all of this reveal a deeper flaw in our moral narrative itself? After all, we say today that our story began with Columbus. But what about the ones who welcomed him?

In the modern-day Cuba? Why don't you ask them? If you could find any left. But, guess what? It wasn't Americans who wiped them out. That's not part of our "narrative."

Here's what Columbus had to say about those who welcomed him: "It appears to me, that the people are ingenious, and would be good servants ...." And later, "I could conquer the whole of them with 50 men, and govern them as I pleased."

That, perhaps, is what Carroll would have the people of the world say about us.

"I Let My Mind Wander"

[Posted by reader_iam]

And other fashion crimes.

The Vanishing Artist

[posted by Callimachus]

Graduation speech:

Fifty years ago, I suspect that along with Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Sandy Koufax, most Americans could have named, at the very least, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, Georgia O'Keeffe, Leonard Bernstein, Leontyne Price, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Not to mention scientists and thinkers like Linus Pauling, Jonas Salk, Rachel Carson, Margaret Mead, and especially Dr. Alfred Kinsey.

I don't think that Americans were smarter then, but American culture was. Even the mass media placed a greater emphasis on presenting a broad range of human achievement.

I grew up mostly among immigrants, many of whom never learned to speak English. But at night watching TV variety programs like the Ed Sullivan Show or the Perry Como Music Hall, I saw—along with comedians, popular singers, and movie stars—classical musicians like Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein, opera singers like Robert Merrill and Anna Moffo, and jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong captivate an audience of millions with their art.

The same was even true of literature. I first encountered Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman, and James Baldwin on general interest TV shows. All of these people were famous to the average American—because the culture considered them important.

Today no working-class or immigrant kid would encounter that range of arts and ideas in the popular culture. Almost everything in our national culture, even the news, has been reduced to entertainment, or altogether eliminated.

I've been thinking about this passage for days and still am not sure -- not whether I agree or not; I think he's right -- but why, exactly, it changed.

One idea, and not necessarily the most important, is that 50 years ago we were still a newly minted world power, still more than half thinking of ourselves with the inferiority complex stamped on us by generations of British and French snobbery. We still half suspected we were the stunted, illiterate yahoos they told us we were.

So an American being good at something was worth newsprint, was worth celebrating -- the root of "celebrity." Even if -- especially if -- it was a foreigner who had chosen to come here or fled here. Because most of us were, then, closer to having an immigrant ancestor (the 1900-1910 period was, I believe, the peak of immigration). That was part of America: "We may be stunted, illiterate yahoos, but we will embrace every genius who's tired of living in your little country."

Now, we expect all the prizes, all the medals, all the Nobels and Pulitzers. It's almost a scandal when we don't sweep the board. Yeah, our kids don't test out as well as the Singaporeans, but we have an excuse for that.

Another feature is the relative monopoly of the media back then in a few hands. Monopoly is supposed to be a bad thing, but I laugh when modern anti-capitalists decry the contemporary media as monopolized. You can tell they're under 40. Back then, Ed Sullivan could literally put an opera singer into every American neighborhood. Perhaps it was one man's taste, or his sense of responsibility, or just the sponsors' wishes, but it gave us something we lack, and miss.

That doesn't explain the loss of poets and opera stars, which probably is more due to those art forms being swept into irrelevance by new ones we invented, which are as tasteless as paper and no substitute for the bread of life that was in old poems.

Does KSM Watch NBC?

[posted by Callimachus]

Perhaps he should. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the tortured monomaniacal terrorist mastermind of al Qaida, in his presentations to his military captors, compared Osama bin Laden to George Washington.

Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News said essentially the same thing in 2005 in talking about stories in the news cycle. The topic was the suggestion that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then newly elected president of Iran, was one of the 1979 hostage-takers.

It is a story that will be at or near the top of our broadcast and certainly made for a robust debate in our afternoon editorial meeting, when several of us raised the point (I'll leave it to others to decide germaneness) that several U.S. presidents were at minimum revolutionaries, and probably were considered terrorists of their time by the Crown in England.

Now, as in 2005, several voices that ought to know better pick up that putrid ball and run with it, dashing toward the moral equivalence goal line.

As difficult as it is to be patient with this sort of rascality, it's just barely possible that Williams' co-workers are sincerely ignorant or were seduced by the sirens of the current dominant school of anti-American historians, who have been luring every notion of American exceptionalism onto their rhetorical rocks.

The first thing to bear in mind is that the American rebels of 1776 thought of themselves as Englishmen upholding traditional rights of free Englishmen. Their political revolution was deeply conservative, like the Southern revolt of 1861.

And the American rebels had many sympathizers in the British military -- including the Howe brothers -- and many friends in the civil government, even among its top leaders. William Pitt commended the colonies for resisting the Stamp Act, and Edmund Burke's "Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies" once upon a time was memorized by American schoolchildren. Evidently this ended before the days when NBC news producers went to school.

These were no mere reflexive "root against the home team" types such as we have got a lot of in the U.S. today. Rather, men like Pitt and Burke saw in the American colonists the pure essence of British love of liberty, which they felt was threatened at home in England as well as abroad by an encroaching royalty. Burke, a true conservative, was able to distinguish among revolutions. He supported the American colonists when they stood up to the Crown, but he deplored the French Revolution -- the one that actually invented the word "terrorist" -- as antithetical to all good British, and human, virtues.

Indeed, there was much bitter feeling in Britain toward the Americans after the success of our Revolution. But it had the feel of a familial dispute, a sense of ingratitude in the heart of the mother country at her impudent children.

As for the crown itself, the anecdote is told by the painter Benjamin West that when he talked to King George III during the war, the monarch asked him what he thought George Washington would do if he prevailed. Return to his farm, West predicted -- accurately.

"If he does that," King George remarked, "he will be the greatest man in the world." When news of Washington's death in 1799 reached Europe, the British channel fleet, then at war with America's nominal ally France, paid honor to the president's memory.

Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were the only presidents to have taken part in the Revolution. Both John Adams (1785-88) and James Monroe (1803-06) served as ministers to Great Britain. Ask yourself if it would be thinkable for the United States to receive in official diplomatic reception Osama bin Laden or some other person it regarded as a current or recent terrorist against America. When Adams, formerly his subject, was presented to His Majesty at the Court of St. James as the first United States ambassador, the king, Adams reported to John Jay, "was indeed much affected, and I confess I was not less so." Thomas Jefferson, meanwhile, met with British officials in London in the spring of 1786, while he was United States minister to France.

All of that hardly sounds to me like the way one behaves toward a terrorist enemy. But the solons of NBC perhaps know more about history than I do. I'd be curious to know their arguments.

I don't care about KSM's opinion in the case, but Williams reaches into millions of American homes every night. While sitting under the hair dryer, Williams should take some time to read David Hackett Fischer's "Washington's Crossing," and learn what made the American Revolution so different -- so exceptional, to use the damned word.

Fischer's concluding chapter explains why:

In 1776, American leaders believed that it was not enough to win the war. They also had to win in a way that was consistent with the values of their society and the principles of their cause. One of their greatest achievements in the winter campaign of 1776-77 was to manage the war in a manner that was true to the expanding humanitarian ideals of the American Revolution. ... In Congress and the army, American leaders resolved that the War of Independence would be conducted with a respect for human rights, even of the enemy. This idea grew stronger during the campaign of 1776-77, not weaker as is commonly the case in war.

It had been a year of disasters. The British routed the Continental army from Long Island, then captured New York City along with many prisoners. The redcoats next pushed George Washington back through New Jersey, waging an increasingly savage campaign not just against the Continental army but against the whole "Levelling, underbred, Artfull, Race of people" they found in America.

Yet early in 1777, John Adams wrote to his wife, "I know of no policy, God is my witness, but this -- Piety, Humanity and Honesty are the best Policy. Blasphemy, Cruelty and Villainy have prevailed and may again. But they won't prevail against America, in this Contest, because I find the more of them are employed, the less they succeed."

What they fought for colored how they fought. And here, too, the comparison with modern Iraq is instructive. The American revolutionaries had woven into their flag not just stars and stripes, but ideals of liberty, whether it was the learned political theorizing of Madison, the commercial common sense of Franklin, the town meeting democracy of New England soldiers, or the stoic self-discipline of Washington. Educated or ignorant, they built their cause around this quality, learned from their experiences as British citizens, and it informed their decisions on the battlefield.

Not all American leaders agreed. Others in Adams's generation believed, as do many in our own time, that America should serve its own national self-interest, defined in terms of wealth and power, and seek it by any means. But most men of the American Enlightenment shared John Adams's way of thinking. In the critical period of 1776 and 1777, leaders of both the Continental army and the Congress adopted the policy of humanity. That choice was reinforced when they learned that some British leaders decided to act differently. Every report of wounded soldiers refused quarter, of starving captives mistreated in the prison hulks at New York, and of the plunder and rapine in New Jersey persuaded leaders in Congress and the army to go a different way, as an act of principle and enlightened self-interest.

There were no Geneva Conventions in the mid-18th century, but every soldier and officer understood the customs of war, which were binding on their sense of honor as warriors. A wounded or cornered enemy could ask "quarter" from the other side, and there were standards for accepting it, or rejecting it. Plundering was universal, but if a house was occupied, and the owners did not resist, the proper plunderer always left the family enough to live on, and he did not take personal items.

There was no international bureaucracy to threaten a violator with a lengthy trial in the Hague, of course, but his own officers could order him summarily shot, which does count as a sort of deterrent. Or the bad behavior could invite like reprisals from the other side. Officers of the two armies in the Revolution traded hot charges across the lines when the system broke down.

Americans, unlike the British, generally extended the right of quarter to their enemies, even as the Americans reacted with indignation as British slaughter of wounded and helpless Continental soldiers. After the Battle of Princeton, Washington put a trusted officer in charge of the 211 captured privates with these instructions: "Treat them with humanity, and Let them have no reason to Complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British army in their Treatment of our unfortunate brethren. ... Provide everything necessary for them on the road." Hessian prisoners were so well treated that, once they had got over the shock of it, they could be sent from one holding place to the next without an armed escort. After the war, almost a quarter of the Hessians remained in America. Their names still dot the phone book in the part of Pennsylvania where I grew up.

Any large army is going to have in its ranks men whose better natures will unhinge in the stress of war. Horror and brutality will happen every time an army marches to battle, as sure as innocent civilians will be killed. If you can't accept that, better to be a pacifist. At least it's an honest position. Better than pretending you didn't know. The job of a nation and its leaders, military and civilian, is to ensure the horrors are as few as possible, and the war crimes are exceptions.

The fact that there were many exceptions to the American ideal of 1776 -- especially in the case of loyalist legions and runaway slaves -- does not change the essential fact that the American leaders attempted not just to win, but to fight a war they could look back on with pride, and that would be a fitting birth to the nation they sought to make. And they largely succeeded. "The moral choices in the War of Independence," Fischer writes, "enlarged the meaning of the American Revolution."

The Islamist terrorists, too, have their ideals: a terrorized and repressed people, rule by the firing squad and the slaughter knife, Ba'athist fascism and Islamist fanaticism. They, too, make their moral choices based on their ideals. Does anyone, even Michael Moore, imagine that their "victory," should that nightmare come, would be followed by a replay of Philadelphia, 1787?

As Fischer writes in his concluding paragraph:

[American soldiers and civilians in 1776] set a high example, and we have much to learn from them. Much recent historical writing has served us ill in that respect. In the late twentieth century, too many scholars tried to make the American past into a record of crime and folly. Too many writers have told us that we are captives of our darker selves and helpless victims of our history. It isn't so, and never was. The story of Washington's Crossing tells us that Americans in an earlier generation were capable of acting in a higher spirit -- and so are we.

Blame Us

[posted by Callimachus]

I give up. Everything is America's fault. Always. I'm going to write a book listing the 100 greatest calamities of all time, and explaining how they are exclusively the fault of Americans.

You think it can't be done? OK, give me one you think will be hard. Say ... The Black Death.

Piece of cake, ducky. Sure it struck 150 years before Columbus sailed. But as we all know, time (or "time") is an artifcial, patriarchal structure imposed on a fluid reality, where in fact influence and effect, author and text, flow back and forth through one another. A reality-based approach to this issue will, therefore, reject the two-dimensional projection of the Male Gaze represented by "before" and "after."

A mutated variant of Yersinia pestis might spread very slowly in a world of self-sufficient socialistic gender-equality communal cultures and be tempered by evolving resistances. Instead, thanks to the capitalistic, individualistic mercantile men, the plague bacteria shot through Europe like electricity, riding up the rivers and into the seaports on shipboard in a matter of three years.

Meanwhile, the scientific discoveries that might have helped Europeans discover the cause of the disease, and develop appropriate treatments for it, was stifled by a dominant religious culture that repressed such free inquiry.

And where, in the centuries since, have both Europe's predatory capitalism and its Christian repressions migrated, settled, concentrated, and merged? You got it, ducky! What caused those tens of millions of deaths in Europe is ... the mutant human nature currently embodied in the United States of America!

• The Irish Potato Famine? Ginned up by the corporate ancestors of Halliburton so they could import cheap labor willing to work the looms for pittance.
  
  
• The 1918-19 influenza pandemic? Direct result of World War I, which an unwilling and peace-loving Europe was thrust into by the manipulations of American big money men.
  
  
• Red Chinese famine of 1958-61? No one would have starved if the Chinese had not been forced into extreme measures by the hegemonistic policies of the Eisenhower administration, backed by the rabid anti-communist lackeys in the corporate media.
  
  
• Bangladesh floods of 1970? As we subsequently have learned, all bad weather is a result of man-made climate change, and all climate change in geological history is the result of SUVs and NASCAR tailgate barbecues.
  

I'm telling you, it can be done. And it would sell. I'm writing a cover letter to George Soros even as you read this.

Down on the Bayeaux

[posted by Callimachus]



Cute! But it sort of makes me think of "Monty Python."

[Hat tip: Blogenspiel]

Thin Air

[posted by Callimachus]

Via Althouse, The Museum of Broadcast Communications is assembling a top 100 most memorable political moments from radio and television. Her commentariat, and others around the Web, are enthusiastically compiling nominations.

I've been thinking about this in off moments today, like when pushing thew baby stroller around town. My list probably would be more narrowly drawn than most people's. For me, a moment would have to be clearly principally political, and somehow it would have to depend on being seen, or heard, via broadcast media.

That is, the John F. Kennedy assassination (including the killing of Oswald and JFK's funeral) was utterly gripping television. But the thing itself was not essentially a political event: It was a tragedy that centered on a politician. And Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech was electrifying. But the broadcasting of it was not essential to that quality. The impact of his words, his mere presence in the flesh, rippled through the crowd of shell-shocked burghers in the plaza in front of the rathaus steps. The cameras and microphones were ancillary.

Events clearly on the list would include such performances as Nixon's "I am not a crook" speech. In fact, probably half the events that came to my mind on a first consideration involved Nixon in some way. Perhaps it's a reflection of my age -- there's a generation of Americans that will take its Nixon obsession to its grave, and I'm on the tail end of it. Perhaps it's just the way the man looked on camera: Visibly uncomfortable, shifty, falsely sincere. It both was and wasn't a reflection of who he really was -- a man is more complex than that -- but it was how he looked.

Many of the rest involved Churchill's World War II broadcasts: Speaking to the people of England, and especially London, in their bomb-gouged neighborhoods and cracked houses. "Give us the tools, and we will finish the job." Speaking plainly and eloquently, in that drunken slur of a voice. It is impossible to listen to him, even now, without almost smelling the stain of burned-out houses on the breeze. The fact of it being a broadcast to the nation, not just a speech to an audience, is deeply entwined in the words.

Others: The Army-McCarthy hearings; Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor; the "Saturday Night Live" Gerald Ford sketches; "A New Beginning" at the Republican nominating convention in 1984; Jesse Jackson's speech to the Democratic convention in 1988. Bernie Shaw asking that eviscerating "what if your wife was raped" question of Dukakis in the 1988 debates, and the Duke's jaw-droppingly inept reply.

There are many gray cases. Neville Chamberlain's notorious "peace for our time" comment -- does it depend on his being seen waving that flimsy piece of paper in the air? I think it does. Hitler's grant party rallies -- do they depend on the film footage, or was the real, present experience of them the essential matter, and something the film could only hope to capture in shadow? I've stood where he stood and looked out over that landscape outside Nuremberg: I don't think the films come close to what it meant to Germans to be there.

The Chicago Democratic convention of 1968: street riot or political act? The famous scare-mongering anti-Goldwater "Daisy" political ad? But it only aired once, despite being the topic of a million subsequent theses by j-school students.

Those are just a few. My list is necessarily full of American examples, since those are the ones I've seen at close range and can best judge in terms of their impact.