History Matters More

Fundamental Conditions for Living Well

2012-01-12T13:35:00.001-07:00

Over the holidays, I have been asking friends and acquaintances about what is necessary to live well. I get many of the usual answers: health, money, purpose in life, education, and political freedom, among others. It struck me that the tone of most responses suggested a causal relationship between one’s own initiative (i.e., one’s autonomy, agency, and authority), and the conditions that our specific culture or society provides. While I did not disagree with most observations suggested to me, I was also struck that two very big factors were entirely ignored – the health of our one-and-only planet, and luck. It also seemed to me that a kind of democratic spirit in their responses elevated tertiary conditions (e. g., political freedom) and under-estimated more critical ones (e. g., education).

1. The Health of Our Planet – It seems to me that lately we have responded to this absolutely fundamental condition to “well-being” in three ways. First, many persons feel exhausted and defeated after decades of outrage over the incapacity of our governments and societies to attempt even modest responses to climate change. Secondly, many remain in denial, for one bad reason or another. Thirdly, and most absurdly, some seem to believe that we will find a new planet to colonize. These folks might as well be lumped in with the deniers.

Even if we are alarmed by what is occurring, the health-of-our-planet issue clearly suggests just how limited human agency is, whether we are thinking of ourselves as individuals, or in the collective sense of societies. Perhaps this is why we do so little, or make such small, gratuitous efforts (e. g., buying an electric car), in the face of possible extinction. We cannot face how limited our authority is, or how “un-special” we are as a species.

2. Luck – We used to speak of good fortune or luck more frequently in the past. The Greeks, after all, centered their whole conceptualization of the cosmos on “fate,” although they also felt human beings need not invite bad fortune by acting with hubris or stupidity. Until very recent times, most of us were humbled by the chance good fortune we had received. In my own case, I would have to say that most of my good fortune (and I have had a lot of it) was the consequence of the convergence of many lucky circumstances. That is, I inherited good genes and health; I was lucky to be born at a time, and in a place, where democratic, and relatively inexpensive, education had reached its zenith; I was lucky to marry a person who supported and aided and encouraged me; I was lucky to get one of the last university teaching positions in my field, and so on.

Luck is not a popular concept in our aggressive ideological age. To be humble when reflecting on one’s good fortune is anathema to an age that rewards “attitude,” bravado and brash self-assertion, and, social and economic “bullying.” One “makes one’s own luck” is the modern, and often false, mantra (especially, it appears, of some CEOs). To admit luck, good or bad, as a fundamental quality to our well-being means that those of us who are wealthy have no way to justify our wealth. Charity is the buy off for good luck; it is the action that reveals how, beneath it all, we know we are lucky in comparison to someone else. Unfortunately, charity can also act like Catholic confession; we often like to think it can absolve us of taking further social and political action and reform.

3. Education – A person can be poor or lack good health, but if they are educated to their abilities their well-being will be vastly improved. Obviously, if a person is terminally or perhaps even chronically ill, health may claim a superior place above education, at least until one is healthy again. In short, I do not agree with the slogan: “if you have your health you have everything.” For most of us, however, education at all levels is the most important element which human beings can control and improve. There are corollaries to this axiom. First, everyone needs education that is available and affordable for all. In other words, equality of opportunity in education is essential, and in our society, this means public education. Secondly, vocational education, while a useful secondary consequence of real learning, is not real education for the larger, more important, purposes of creating better human beings, better citizens, and persons who can think rationally and express themselves creatively. Thirdly, education must be perceived individually and collectively as something that occurs lifelong. With good education for all, the richness of life is accomplished, and things like good government, liberty, and social human decency will follow.

4. A “Modest Competence” – Having a “modest competence” is, in large part, a mere consequence of living on a planet that remains beneficent, of the good luck inherent in one’s person or society, and a culture in which equal education is secured. But it is also a consequence of public goals and private beliefs. I like to use the 18^th century phrase – “modest competence” – because it is so much more inclusive than saying “a good income” or “money.” A “modest competence” implies economic resources that keep one out of poverty. It is revealing that most countries measure economic poverty as a falling below a percentage of median personal or family income. In other words, poverty is made relative, recognizing that the poor are not a fixed social class but are persons who, through their circumstances, been deprived of the full means to live life fully. By contrast, the U. S. measures poverty as an absolute number, and, the right-wing Heritage Foundation goes further and measures poverty by how many material “amenities” a person or family have. This latter means of measuring suggests that all matters of poverty should be measured in terms of levels of material acquisition and consumption alone.

A “modest competence,” however, also implies a set of skills or abilities that make one free from the most demeaning human labor, and of being free of slavery. And, it can be seen as a measure of personal autonomy and agency in general as well as the capacity to be competent in being a contributing member of society.

Undoubtedly, almost all of you who read this will disagree with at least some of my list, and likely some of my conclusions. Given my list, however, I am bothered first by how puny our attempts have been, and apparently will continue to be, in regard to really big issues, like climate change. It makes me worry that we are simply not terribly competent as a species. Secondly, I am appalled at how little true humility and true charity we feel and express as a consequence of the luck factor. This suggests to me that we are not terribly competent as a species but believe we are. Thirdly, our abandonment of real education at almost every level draws me toward the conclusion that we are not terribly competent as a species, and do not give a damn if we are not. And, finally, our inattention to establishing a “modest competence” for all suggests to me that we are not terribly competent as a species, and are filled with disrespect for others and a general self-loathing of the human condition. Yet, despite all of my concerns about the limits of human intelligence and goodness, we can look at our current condition as so bad that there is no way but up. In fact, I do believe that we are at least on the cusp at addressing some of the matters that would improve our collective well-being.

How to Keep the "Occupy" Movement Alive

2011-11-28T17:07:00.001-07:00

By all accounts, a substantial majority of Americans and Canadians have supported the "Occupy Wall Street" movement. A vast majority of us also have short attention spans. Andy Warhol over-estimated everyone's power of concentration, by five minutes at least, when he made his famous quip that in the post-modern world we could all expect fifteen minutes of celebrity. So, while some might have thought that a rolling series of protests might take place for years, as they did in opposition to the Vietnam War, none of us really thought this protest could be sustained as it was laid out. Winter alone has compromised the Occupy protestors in a way that cannot be mitigated. Will the Occupy protest be forgotten as quickly as our fifteen minutes of fame?
What can be done? What visible presence can be brought in order to sustain and further the peaceful protests that have begun? I believe there is a visible method of protesting that could continue for years, and have real effect. Instead of trying to maintain one camp in every city and town, might it not be possible to have from two to a dozen people volunteer to represent the protest for a half a day or a full day in selected locations in any given urban area. These volunteers might be assigned to stand and picket in front of a bank or brokerage firm, for example. If enough volunteers can be mustered, as they could in our larger cities, Occupy protestors would be present at several venues every day. Some venues, such as a strategic location in view of Wall Street (or, rather, in the view of Wall Street operatives), could be womaned and manned every day of the year for many years.
The virtue of this plan is that it only takes a few people with picket signs to perpetuate the idea of the 99% versus the 1% and .1%. It will not be "news" for the media, at least not after a few minutes, but it will be a steady reminder of reforms needed and policies not taken. Common people, for want of a better term for who we are, will not forget and might even be heartened by the knowledge that someone is keeping the cause alive. In the mass societies in which we live today, attempting to impress politicians, legislators, and the economic movers-and-shakers with numbers of protestors in one place at one time is only possible with a scale of protest numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Tahrir Square has been remarkable in regard to this old style protest, but it cannot be a model for this kind of protest, where the metropolitan center of Manhattan does not carry the central symbolism of Tahrir Square in Cairo, and where the issue is one that resonates with all of us locally across a very big continent.
Permanent protestors, brought out daily on a rotating volunteer basis, has a secondary value. It allows us all to participate in a meaningful way. I joined the "Occupy" march in my home town but I was not the only one who left wondering if such a brief symbolic act was worth very much. Over my lifetime, I have also done volunteer work for political parties. Because political parties do not want you for your ideas or your views on policies (unless you are among the .1% elite in the party), they generally want you to lick stamps, deliver leaflets, or put up campaign signs. Standing in front of Bank of America with a few like-minded protestors is much more rewarding. Unlike "MoveOn," for example, an elite cadre would not simply ask you to sign a petition and to contribute money; you would have to inform yourself well about issues and possible policies because you might be asked important questions during your volunteer picketing, or worse, accosted by opponents.
Finally, organizing for this kind of permanent protest can lead to a larger pool of reform-minded people than will remain if the current method of protest is allowed to fizzle. People like you and me, standing in front of Wells Fargo, might even find other important things that could bind us together in opposition to the world of alienation that has now displaced what used to be called the "democratic people out of doors."

Arab Spring -- American Fall

2011-10-26T15:51:00.002-06:00

Listening to American commentators “tsk, tsk” about what will become of Arab peoples after their successful removal of those dictators who kept them poor and repressed, is to learn again what the words hypocrisy and irony mean.

All American pundits express their concern that a powerful religious segment of this or that society might seize power through democratic elections. (Meanwhile, in America, a powerful religious segment of society, led in recent decades by Christian evangelicals, has captured American politics in the most profound and extensive ways.)

Most are apprehensive about the maintenance of secular government among the civic cultures of Arab states. (Meanwhile, in America, a large right-wing contingent wants all Americans to include a Christian God in their Pledge of Allegiance, and to bow their heads to that God in schools and all civic places and at all civic ceremonies and functions. Who is the last president of the U. S. to admit publicly that he did not believe in that God? Well, of course, the answer is: none.)

Many fear that institutions and special interest groups inside those Arab countries will manipulate democratically elected governments and the economies of these reformed states for their own particular and pecuniary interest and advantage. (Meanwhile, in America, it is estimated that there are at least 25,000 lobbyists plying their trade in Washington, D. C. Almost all national candidates for office take enormous sums of money from corporations to whom they are later beholden. When successfully elected, these self-same candidates make little effort to hide the fact that they will serve the interests of those who monetarily supported their candidacy. Some Americans even applaud the Citizens’ United case for allowing corporations to use their vast resources to influence elections in any way they wish [even if they are restrained in an inconsequential way from giving large sums directly to candidates]).

Others worry that a new strong leader will emerge in some of these states. (Meanwhile, in America, those on the political left and right and even middle, plead for “leadership” from someone strong enough to cut through legislative logjams and judicial constraints, and cure the economic and cultural ills of the nation. Pleading for strong leadership in a democracy is admitting that that democracy is not functioning.)

In fact, as the Occupy movement (if it can be called a movement) illustrates, Americans and others wish they could join in the Arab Spring party, at least a little. Occupiers and Tea Partiers alike feel, even when they do not understand, the malaise of their own nation. Why should they not? Including myself as an American citizen and culpable villain, I offer this long and discouraging list:

We have made a civil religion out of the U. S. Constitution and out of our own brand of free market capitalism. The constraints of these two civil religious impulses, all subsumed under a ubiquitous and mystical thing called “American exceptionalism,” leaves little wiggle room for practical reform based on “thinking-outside-the-box.”

For over a century, we have emptied our wallets and destroyed or wreaked permanent damage on tens of thousands of our fellow citizens through the prosecution of various wars -- some small, most not; some just, most not. From George Washington, who warned about “entangling alliances” (meaning being dragged into other people’s wars), through Dwight Eisenhower, who first publicized the nexus between corporate capitalism and a powerful military (the “military-industrial complex”), words of restraint have been ignored in favor of military adventures. These military adventures became worse in the past half century. Fictitious excuses (often known and understood by large numbers of Americans before hostilities even began) were paraded before us for fighting in Vietnam and expanding that war and for assaulting Iraq. Other military adventures were justified for the most pathetic and transparent reasons. And then, when attacked for the first time on their own soil since 1813, Americans allowed fear to overwhelm them, with the consequence of a “homeland security” culture that is nothing short of totalitarian.

We have pushed a political culture of democracy, and the institutions of democracy, to near collapse. A few young children may innocently proclaim their desire to be “President” some day, but none, in this winner-take-all culture, want to be a city councilwoman or a state representative, or even a member of Congress. So-called “citizens,” who can name at least 100 singing groups or 500 professional sports stars, cannot name more than 10 members of Congress. “Civics” as a high school course has largely disappeared. Saying you are “not political” is proffered as a moral virtue. It is no wonder that libertarian opposition to all government is seen as a legitimate democratic position.

We have allowed the “freedom” of the free market to supercede and cancel all other social considerations that may stand in the way of hyper-capitalism, and now especially investment capitalism. To quote the Populist Kansas politician, Mary Lease, “Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.” (c. 1890).

We have stood by as the two most important institutions in a democratic society have been bought off or allowed to fail: education and a free press. Governmental lack of respect for education and teachers is no longer something that needs to be spoken in hushed tones. Private schools and home schooling are usually little more than religious proselytizing or narrow cultural propagandizing.

Our free press is anything but. It takes no wisdom whatsoever to know what Rupert Murdoch represents and promotes, or what U. S. A. Today is willing to engage or say, or why “The PBS Newshour” offsets moderate centrists with right-wing commentators from the Heritage Foundation. If you do not get your analysis and opinion from various political blogs (and there are many good ones), you go uninformed.

We have allowed ourselves to be “dumbed-down”; we have “amused ourselves to death” (as Neil Postman puts it). The “bread and circuses” of Rome has nothing on us (except for the fact that they at least kept the “bread” coming). We sit and passively watch cage-fighting, where someone is as sure to get mauled as a Christian in the ring with a lion. We applaud sports heroes who suffer brain injury after brain injury and never seem to live to the age of sixty. Life in America is “brutish and nasty” and many times, to fill out Thomas Hobbes’s famous quotation, “short” (usually short on reason and reflection). We watch “reality TV,” where self-proclaimed experts publicly belittle and abuse the many contestants they face while making clear that there can be only “one” winner. It is now a winner-take-all culture, which explains why 99% of the population might be concerned about the 1% who hold the wealth.

As healthy human beings, we must all have hope. Hope in the case of America today is that things are near the bottom: things can only get better. It is not impossible, as long as democratic political institutions are maintained, for all of the problems listed above to be improved or even righted. It is not likely to come from a populist movement like the one Mary Lease helped to lead, nor from a turn of the 20^th century progressive movement.

We will likely have to look to leaders who will help us out of this, despite the fact that relying primarily on leaders is antithetical to real democracy. But if it is to be leaders, I have my own list of American leaders of the past. This list includes: Thomas Paine, Benjamin F. Bache, J. Q. Adams, Frederick Douglass, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, Jr. What did these people have in common? Several things. They all came to their larger world-view of things through education and long periods of reflection. They were all outraged at matters as they stood. (Mary Lease, for example, admonished poor farmers to “raise less corn and more hell.” All of my heroes above “raised hell”; will anyone do so today?) They were all tenacious in promoting revolutionary or reformist goals. They were all consistent in the things they supported and the things they opposed. Only one of those listed here – Frederick Douglass -- profited financially from his reformist prominence (OK, Jane Addams did accept posh speaking engagements as a kind of holiday to herself, so that she could briefly have some rest in a good hotel room and a couple of good meals). All of them grew intellectually and emotionally from their efforts.

We can all learn a valuable lesson in civics and humanity from the people listed above. And, if we all imitated their actions, we might move from our current condition of despair to one of real hope.

Jack Layton’s Real Legacy

2011-08-29T19:27:00.000-06:00

Now that most friends, followers, and commentators have had their opportunity to consider Jack Layton from their particular perspectives, I would like to offer a brief salute to Mr. Layton that may be a little different in kind or in emphasis from the memorials of praise from others.

Jack Layton was a professional politician. This does not mean that he could not have made considerably more money in some other profession if partisan politics had proved a dead end (just as many teachers and professors and general practitioners and pastors could “profess” some other calling, to their pecuniary advantage, if they so chose). Jack Layton knew he was a professional politician, and he respected those things that made professional politicians successful. He followed his plan of success, however, by abiding by a few simple rules: be as honest as possible, treat those around you with respect and kindness, and try to approach your professional life with some sense of good humour, if not joy. In other words, Jack Layton did what all good professionals and good crafts persons and good business persons do. Most importantly, he approached his profession with forethought and good conscience: intention is absolutely necessary for any virtue to be ascribed.

But, you might say, have we not had many noble politicians in Canada’s recent past? One only needs to think of Stanley Knowles, Robert Stanfield, and even Ed Broadbent. They were (and are) good persons. But they were good persons in a different political culture, one not so ideologically riven, one less negative, less slanderous, and less vicious. Furthermore, they did not bring a third party to major party and opposition party status. The moral high ground is easier if you lose (which is not to say that Mr. Layton fully won either).

I supported Bill Blaikie in the leadership contest that Mr. Layton first won, and I was skeptical of Mr. Layton’s character and goals and tactics at that time. I was wrong, not that Bill Blaikie is not a wonderful, moral person. But that too is the rub: I favored Blaikie because I saw him as the most visibly moral candidate; I did not see him as a political winner, as a professional politician. This is a matter of “shame on me,” since I have spent much of my life trying to convince people that they MUST be political, in a partisan way. I have generally failed, despite my constant chiding of people who say they are “not political” with the retort, “then you are, in a democracy, immoral.”

Jack Layton made practical politics respectable, something others should pursue with purpose and enthusiasm. Jack Layton saved, at least in a small way, in a small country, the ideal of politics in a democracy.

An Alternative History of the United States

2011-08-23T21:45:00.006-06:00

When Howard Zinn died in 2010, he had done what few American historians have been capable or willing to do: he had written and published an influential, alternative history of the U. S., namely, A People’s History of the United States (1980). This may seem unremarkable. Are not all histories of the U. S., a “people’s” history? Well, no. Until very recently, most American history was heroic and elitist. Examples include, but are hardly limited to: the exceptionalism of the American Revolution (unsullied by the bloodshed of the French Revolution, or so it is not quite accurately alleged); the energy of the westward movement (of which there were many “movements,” and most not very glamorous or praiseworthy, e. g., the removal of the Cherokees, the seizing of Mexican lands in the southwest, and the attempts by Brigham Young and the Mormons to isolate themselves in some alternate universe in Utah); and, the genius of the founding fathers (the many biographies that fawn praise on the “founders” are enough to form a new land bridge across the Bering Straits). In more recent times, some American historians have turned their attention to the maelstrom of popular culture. But here too, America is presented as the author, and often the ultimate arbiter, of all pop culture subjects.

You might think that I am going to return to my “old saw” about American ethocentricism and exceptionalism. Well, it must be admitted that these elements are central to my proposal for a new American history – something radically beyond Zinn’s “people’s” history -- but recent events remind me that both of these prominent American characteristics might be subsumed in a new American history, under a different subject title. Maybe we need a “History of American Stupidity and Cupidity.” (Well, that will not work; most people do not own a dictionary to look up the word “cupidity.”) Maybe we need to call it: “Self-Isolation and Self-Congratulation: A History of America.” Or, maybe we need something called: “Cultural Lag: America as a Country Always One Step Behind Modern, Progressive Nation States.”

Recent events suggest just how laughable the actions and “ideas” of Americans have become (if only these action and “ideas” did not have such important consequences for the rest of us). They also should encourage some brave soul to write a history of how laggardly Americans have proven to be in their history.

Let me offer some historical reasons for this needed new history:

1. In 1696, a New England Puritan elite succumbed to a popular hysteria over “witches.” Although this “witch-hunt” was begun in the parochial confines of Salem township and Salem village, Massachusetts, many important Puritan “Divines” were implicated. Even the eminent theologian and scholar, Cotton Mather, was convinced (for a time) of the legitimacy of “spectral” evidence in court proceedings against accused person.

All of this might be understandable historically if England and western Europe were of a like mind about the existence of witches. But they were not. They had moved on almost a half-century earlier, passively agreeing that the “witchcraft” threat was unreal, “spectral evidence” ridiculous, and real witches a thing of the “dead” past. But the Puritans knew better, and this would establish a long pattern of old world “wrongness” and new world “rightness” that never seems to have ended.

2. In the 1790s, right-wing Americans (yes, they have almost always been with us; maybe we should construct a statue to American right-wing lunatics on the National Mall, and then be done with them) believed there was a conspiracy of the “Illuminati” (a mysterious and almost entirely fictional European brotherhood) and of French revolutionaries to take over the new United States. Among the conspirators were new immigrants (from Ireland, in particular), anyone who was a friend of Benjamin Franklin, almost all journalists, Thomas Jefferson, and, oh yes, anyone who was not a Hamiltonian Federalist (John Adams’s Federalists, well, they probably were not enemies within, but they certainly were not any help either).

Two hysterias down, many to go. I will not trouble you with most of them.

3. In 1861, the United States and the Southern Confederacy engaged in a “GREAT CIVIL WAR.” The South, you see had gotten a truly idiotic 3/5ths clause into the U. S. Constitution in 1789 (which allowed the South to count the total slave population in any given state as 3/5ths of its total population for establishing the number of representatives that state could send to Congress, or for the apportionment of federal direct taxes in that state -- the latter of which never happened). In addition, the South had constructed a truly Willy Wonka version of its own culture, in which southern culture and manners were superior to culture and manners in the North. To top it off, they had convinced southern poor whites, whom they exploited openly and viciously, that the real problem was the threat of Black slaves. Former Congressman James Louis Petigru of South Carolina had it right when he said on the eve of the “GREAT CIVIL WAR”: “South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.” At least the latter half of his conclusion might be applicable to the current condition in the United States.

“But,” you might protest, “wasn’t the Civil War a noble advance for African-Americans and for American national unity?” Only in the most parochial sense, and American history is nothing if not parochial. Without denigrating Abraham Lincoln and many other noble souls of that period, the fact is that any idea about the validity of chattel slavery had been abandoned by other modern western countries long before the American Civil War. Britain abolished slavery in 1772; Upper Canada abolished slavery in 1793; Lower Canada did so in 1803; and, slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833 (granted, it was grandfathered in by making free only those slaves who were six years of age or younger as of January 1, 1834). The new French Republic of France abolished slavery in 1794, and ten years later, taking the ideological lead of the “mother country,” Toussaint L’Ouverture led a slave uprising that declared Haitian independence and ended slavery in Saint Dominque.

So, what is the point? The point is that the “idea” of slavery was dead long before American’s grandiosely defeated southern slavery. Oh, and by the way, Jim Crow laws and Southern repression kept African-Americans in a state of near bondage until, well, just yesterday.

American history is replete with new, modern ideas being implemented first elsewhere, and then later in the U. S., only to be superceded with great fanfare about American originality and leadership.

4. Take for instance, the matter of Workmen’s Compensation, a small but important part of the modern labor movement. Great Britain, Germany, and, yes, even the United States, had all developed the ideal of workmen’s compensation in the 1880s. But in the United States at that time -- a nation riven by partisan politics, with both parties to the right of many European political parties – the implementation was slow (partly because of highly politicized and often hostile courts). So, Great Britain introduced a real piece of legislation regarding this matter in 1880, and Otto von Bismarck implemented compulsory workmen’s compensation in Germany in 1884. The province of Ontario followed soon after, in 1886, with its own version of workmen’s compensation. It took the U. S. a bit longer, with a few states near the worldwide vanguard, but most far behind.

But to read American textbooks, one would think that the modern labor movement arose in the U. S., and that the U. S. then tutored the rest of the world on how to organize labor.

5. It hardly needs repeating that the U. S. has been most laggardly in regard to health care. To read American newspapers and magazines, one would think that the Obama administration -- in Star Trek fashion -- had ventured into territory that no one had dared enter before. But, of course, we all know this to be embarrassingly false. The Obama health plan guaranteed the profits of pharmaceutical companies and guaranteed a new pool of customers for health care insurers. In fact, if heath care insurers were less political and more practical, they would know that if they added in almost all Americans to private plans, the health of Americans would go up, and, and with fewer claims for chronic or emergency care, their profits would also go up.

Alas, almost every modern country has national, universal health care of one type or another. But, one can be assured that when the U. S. finally implements such a program, they will have long forgotten the efforts of Harry Truman and Hillary Clinton, to introduce such a program, to say nothing of the long “socialistic” health care experience of almost every other country. They will OWN the invention of modern health care, and historians had better get that right.

If anyone thinks I exaggerate in my observation of the American political and cultural landscape, I recommend that they read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. This is not a history of the United States, and it must be admitted that it contains the sometimes haughty, highly “constructed” observations of a twenty-something-year-old European aristocrat. But even discounting that, the rampant parochialism and stupidity of American politics as it was just emerging in the 1830s, is made undisputedly clear. (Doubters should read The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi, published around the same time as Democracy in America; and Flush Times was written by an American!)

In reality, it would be useful to have an American history positioned within the context of a larger world. American historians have been moving timidly toward “Atlantic civilization” history, but that is a movement begun long ago by a few Americans, some Canadians, and some British scholars. As it is now, we should have a candid history of American insularity, stupidity and laggardness. But, hey, try to find a publisher.

A Modest Proposal on U. S. Proof of Citizenship

2011-04-28T18:04:00.000-06:00

After the national humiliation that was (and perhaps still is) the Obama vs. "birthers" circus, it seems only just that the national government and the collective states do the right thing by establishing an appropriate test for national office-holders. This test would make obsolete the need to find ancient birth certificates yet still meet the standards of those who wish that only true Americans be eligible for national office. After all, what the "birthers" apparently want is a way to deny office to persons who do not understand the constitutional, revolutionary, and christian principles upon which the nation was founded.

In the spirit of the "birthers" movement, therefore, I offer the following, simple multiple choice exam that must be passed by any candidate before they can assume the national office to which they are elected. Failure to answer all of the questions correctly will result in their ineligibility to occupy national office.

1. In what part of the U. S. Constitution does the phrase "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" appear?

a. The Preamble

b. Article I

c. Article III

d. The First Amendment

e. The Fourteenth Amendment

f. None of the above

g. All of the above

2. Who penned the final draft of the U. S. Constitution?

a. George Washington

b. James Madison

c. Thomas Jefferson

d. Gouverneur Morris

e. Thomas Paine

f. None of the above

g. All of the above

3. The opening paragraph of the U. S. Constitution contains which of the following phrases?

a. ". . . to provide for the general welfare . . ."

b. ". . . when in the course of human events . . ."

c. ". . . the equal protection of the laws . . ."

d. "Congress shall make no law prohibiting the freedom of religion"

e. "These are the times that try men's souls . . . ."

f. None of the above

g. All of the above

4. The Declaration of Independence:

a. has no status as a constitutional or legal document

b. was written by a man who was unwilling to admit that he was, in fact, an atheist

c. was a propaganda document intended to influence European powers

d. was signed in large handwriting by a Massachusetts politician trying to impress his constituents

e. was criticized and even ridiculed by some American politicians after the revolution was over

f. None of the above

g. All of the above

5. The "Founding Fathers"

a. were more intelligent than subsequent American politicians

b. were driven to their success through their broad adherance to The Bible and Christian principles

c. set aside social, cultural, or economic differences in writing the U. S. Constitution

d. avidly sought to establish the democratic principle of legal equality for those born in the U.S.

e. believed that God had guided their hand in writing the Constitution

f. None of the above

g. All of the above

6. A majority of the "Founding Fathers" were

a. religious zealots

b. Baptists

c. Anglicans

d. Catholics

e. evangelical Christians

f. None of the above

g. All of the above

7. Who among the "Founding Fathers" was most religious?

a. George Washington

b. Thomas Jefferson

c. John Adams

d. Thomas Paine

e. James Madison

f. Alexander Hamilton

g. William Pitt

8. What is the source of the claim that: "God helps those who help themselves"?

a. The Declaration of Independence

b. Benjamin Franklin

c. Thomas Paine

d. George Washington

e. The Bible

f. None of the above

g. All of the above

9. When were the words "under God" placed in the U. S. Pledge of Allegiance

a. 1776

b. 1789

c. 1865

d. 1914

e. the 1930s

f. the 1950s

g. the 1990s

10. When the U. S. government began in 1789, to whom did the phrase "We the People" refer:

a. everyone

b. white men, women, and children

c. less than 25% of the entire population of the collective states

d. more than 25% of the entire population but less than 50% of the population

e. those born in the U. S., and immigrants who met congressional residency requirements

f. None of the above

g. All of the above

[The answers are: 1f; 2d; 3a; 4g; 5f; 6f; 7c; 8b; 9f; 10c] How did you do? By their own admission, John Boehner and Michelle Bachmann failed!!

Obama and the "birthers"

2011-04-27T15:18:00.000-06:00

   The perceived need for the President of the United States to make public the official long copy of his birth certificate to prove that he is, indeed, a citizen of the U. S. is a shameful moment in the American past. It is likely to prove as embarrassing as John Adams's refusal to stay in Washington, D. C. to see his former friend, Thomas Jefferson, inaugurated. It reminds one of all of the loyalty tests devised during the Cold War, and Joe McCarthy's disgusting brow-beating and berating of those testifying before his committee, and the House on Un-American Activities Committee hauling all sorts of terrified persons before their committee to humiliate the testifier and his/her families and friends.
   The fact that President Obama felt compelled to offer this evidence is disgusting in several ways. First, on the political level, it is apparent that the Republican Party leadership had many opportunities and plenty of time to quell the "birther" movement from the start. It did not do so out of fear of its most vocal social (not financial) benefactors on the far, far right. Yet, the Republicans had every interest in doing the right thing. In the 1960s, when former governor of Michigan, George Romney, was considering a run at the presidency, a small number of persons raised the point that Romney had been born in Mexico, not in the U. S., and since the 14th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution states clearly that: "Persons born in the United States are citizens of the Uniteds States and the state wherein they reside," they thought they might have a point. Yet, it had long been understood that children born of American parents while they were abroad were also considered to be American citizens. No political opponents made much of this issue, and Romney remained a legitimate candidate in everyone's eyes until he decided not to run. One would think that one of the current Republican candidates, Mitch Romney, who knows the story of his father's political career full well, would have been loud in his condemnation of those who would keep the "birther" issue alive.
   Second, the sub-text of race is hardly hidden by those who oppose President Obama's claim to be a citizen. It has only been about fifty years since African Americans could indeed claim the practical rights of U. S. citizens, and many who deny the legitimacy of his citizenship now would willingly return to the era of the 1950s, when Blacks in most of America knew their place, which was not in public office or even voting for that matter. There is more than a little truth to the fact that right-wing Republicans (and let's face it, they are almost all right wing) sentimentalize the 1950s and would like to return to the Eisenhower era, when true family values prevailed. There was more ugly about the 1950s than good, however. The decade did witness the rise of a broad American middle class, caused by the fact that the U. S. was not devastated by the World War II as was most of Europe and much of Asia, but it was also the era of racism, the suppression of women, and a period of anti-intellectualism.
   Finally, the even more disturbing element in the origin's of Obama's birth issue is what it reflects about American notions of the "other." In fact, only American intellectuals would use the term the "other" because most non-intellectual Americans either bask in the misperception that everyone is included in America, or they complain that America is not pure enough, i. e., pure white, conservative, native born, and christian. As I have argued in other places, Americans are not familiar with the outer world, especially that exotic world of Africa and Indonesia (and we might as well say Hawaii, in regard to those who hate the "other") which helped to inform and educate Barack Obama. A majority are ethnocentric. In fact, a majority are xenophobic in a way that only the world's most backward, remote, and traditional nations can be identified as xenophobic. For a country that often lauds its heritage as a land of immigrants, this narrow view of human acceptance is especially troubling.

Post-Democratic America

2011-03-28T09:14:00.003-06:00

In a recent opinion column in the NYTimes, Thomas Friedman made the smart connection between Barack Obama’s election to the U. S. presidency and the democratic uprisings in north Africa and the Middle East. Might it not be possible, Friedman ruminated, that the election of a black man to the presidency inspired young, dispossessed members of nations currently ruled by used-up dictators to rebel? It will be an enduring irony of this period of history that a nation and a society – the United States of America – which is in many ways moving rapidly away from the demands of living democracy, has inspired others to take up the “struggle for democracy.”

The phrase, “Struggle for Democracy,” which has been used in book titles and television series and in common parlance, is an apt one in regard to what democracy is. Democracy is not a place of arrival, it is a process of living together in a nation and a society. Many Americans ascribe to that understanding. Even more Americans struggle in some way for inclusion in their own society, or to extend liberties essential in a democratic state. The political culture of the United States as a whole has eroded into something entirely different, however. The U. S. has arrived at the doorstep of post-democracy.

The phrase – post-democratic – is oxymoronic, of course, but it does describe the process of cultural drift and the evolution of political mental states that has occurred in the U. S. since at least the 1950s. The neo-conservative, consensus history that emerged in the 1950s with historians like Daniel Boorstein, proclaimed a history of fulfillment and accomplishment for American democracy – as if the struggle were over. The election of John F. Kennedy gilded the lily of accomplishment, offering us less an effective presidency than a cult of personality and a royal family Americans could call their own. Then everything went wrong. Political assassinations were followed by the impeachment of Richard Nixon, which was followed by the election of an anti-government president, Ronald Reagan. “Camelot” became a wistful remembrance. Politics became something dirty, something a decent person avoided. And, ordinary citizens and elites alike began to avoid political engagement.

This decline in a vital political culture in the U. S. was accompanied by the rise of baby boomers who claimed they had a right to prosper, and they did prosper. Indeed, the raison d’etre of that generation, despite the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, was not social service and the collective improvement of society (except for a few counter-culture individuals) but one’s own ability to become rich and to hold onto those riches. Baby boomers passed on to their offspring the ideals of material wealth and entitlement. The term democracy elided into something akin to the sanctity of the individual and claims for individual privacy. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the importance of politics and government in democratic America was eclipsed by the quest for individual prosperity, greed, and the anti-political, anti-democratic culture of “looking out for number one.”

The rise of popular culture from the 1950s onward was both symptomatic of these fundamental changes, and a driving force away from democratic political engagement in its own right. Over time, young and old alike could name prominent bands and singers, or members of sports teams, but could not name their congressman/woman or identify the principle political issues of their time. As my students would say with pride, “I am not political.” By our own time, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and prominent Tea Party spokespersons could not even distinguish the different phrases and contents of the Declaration of Independence (which has no legal standing) and the Constitution of the United State. Over the past sixty years, we have not only become “dumbed-down,” we have become proud of our stupidity. It matters not that one knows nothing of complex issues: “this is what I believe, and my opinion is as good as yours.” In contemporary America more than any place on the face of the earth today, one’s mere opinion successfully claims equal status with scientific theory, rational arguments, or even truth itself. In the realities of democratic government, politics as the “art of the possible” has been replaced by ideological certainties born of one’s mere opinions, much to President Obama’s dismay.

In my own field of America History, the evolution of historiography has been from the prominence of political history in the 1950s to social history in the 1970s and 1980s to the prominence of cultural history today. I respect this shift in emphasis and have participated in it myself but I find that many of today’s American historians have limited understanding of political history and therefore little interest in the issue of democracy, insofar as democracy is a political or governmental matter.

It has been suggested to me that in the American context perhaps democracy follows a natural pattern not unlike that of a climax forest. We should all hope that this analogy is appropriate, and that we can anticipate the peaceful decline of the old stands of timber for new growth from the bottom up.

Humility Before Civility

2011-01-21T11:57:00.000-07:00

It is difficult to discover appropriate “first principles” of social conduct, and we often do a very poor job of sorting out “first principles” from imagined or perceived needs of a secondary order. Over the past half century, for example, we have witnessed a headlong rush to give “the economy” priority over “society.” Protecting and improving “the economy” is the current mythical “first principle” in North America. Although the idea of “the economy” is somewhat abstract, “the economy” never seems to encompass the real local economic needs of ordinary people, and it as often does not even mean the needs of a national economy, but rather some fictive, imagined capitalist dream world and/or the remote and heartless idea of a world economy. No day passes without someone making the absurd declaration that we humans need to serve the gods of economic growth first (usually meaning undisturbed, unalloyed market-capitalism), and the health and other social needs of human beings and societies need to be served second, if at all. Rather than have recognized this no-holds-barred, capitalist ideology for what it is -- a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” and a survivalist, social Darwinism “red in tooth and claw” mentality -- we have allowed “the economy” to assume the vestments of an unimpeachable “first principle” not unlike the “first principles” established by Thomas Aquinas in relationship to Christian theology in the High Middle Ages.

So, now, when everyone in the U. S. has come to call for a new “civility” in American politics and life, we are confronted again with the question: should “civility” be recognized as a first principle for human conduct and social organization, or, is the “first principle” concept of civility first analogous to the idea of “the economy” outlined above. Is “civility” really a second order condition that flows from some first order idea, just as a good economy should be a second order consequence of a first order emphasis on good societies? Of course, I believe “civility” as the consequence of the success of a more important “first principle” – namely, “humility.” “Civility” is the happy result of widespread “humility.” (And, one could argue, as I have in other blogs, that humility itself is a second order quality derived from empathy, but I will leave that discussion for another time).

To be humble is often defined as to be “without pride,” and for this reason humility has failed as it runs up against has the boastful, self-confident, cocksure, mythology of laissez-faire or free market thinking and behavior. This is not to say that people can be perfectly free of personal “pride.” And, if we believe the New Testament to be at least fundamentally accurate as an historical account (as I think we can), then even Jesus sometimes acted in a prideful manner. The implicit assumption in achieving practical humility is that we try to restrain an excess of pride in ourselves.

A more fundamental, rational, and useful way to understand humility as a first principle -- from which civility is a derived consequence -- is to consider humility as the conscious ability to understand that we are not, individually, the measure of all things. Whatever our talents and abilities, other persons have correspondent talents and abilities, and no matter how intellectually or socially accomplished we may be, someone else, indeed, many other people, are more intellectually or socially accomplished than we are. No matter how kind and generous we may be, there are others who are more kind and generous; no matter how smart we may be, there are others smarter. And so on and on.

It is always a surprise to me (although it should not be) when I read obituaries, and discover the uniqueness and richness of almost every human life described in those remembrances. It is even more surprising when we are told about the rich and meaningful lives of persons who are the victims of mass killings (as in the recent Tucson case in which six people died in the aftermath of an assassin’s attempt to kill Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords). One of these was a young girl whom one might first guess was just another mall pedestrian but who, as it turned out, was a inquiring young person eager to learn more about democratic politics work. Who would have considered this? Or, who would have guessed that some people, in the midst of the this melee, including a federal judge who was killed, would have heroically intervened to try to stop the killer. The point is not entirely the heroism that people display but the breadth and depth of their lives that emerges from their biographies. To know another person at all, is to recognize the integrity of that person.

We need not feel abject inferiority in the face of the humbling truth that almost every other person we encounter contributes something important to society, and has some quality from which we can learn important individual lessons. In fact, rather than retreat into some kind of Calvinist despair about our unworthiness in the face of this truism, we should consciously and rationally begin to approach every other human being with the understanding that they have some quality or virtue which we undoubtedly wish we possessed, or possessed in a larger measure. Every person we encounter need not prove to us beyond a reasonable doubt that they are virtuous in some specific way. It is simply sensible for us to assume that they are.

If we move from accepting the necessity of humility to its operational consequences, we arrive at “civility.” How could we treat any other person with something less than dignity, if we accept the rational argument for humility. Because we are currently living in Mexico, we have come to understand the importance of saying “Buenos Dias” when meeting someone on the street. Mexicans, more than many people on this earth, know the necessity of humility. Acknowledging others on the street, or in passing, used to be a standard element of “civility” but it is interesting that that acknowledgement has now – after the rise of an “every-man-for-himself” market-place ideology – become optional. (Yes, people have baldly told me that whether you greet someone with a “hello” or “how are you” is entirely optional, even with people you already know).

Small courtesies like taking one’s turn in line or giving someone space to pass you on the sidewalk have fallen into similar disuse, as we fail to acknowledge that others even exist, let alone possess those personal qualities that are similar, equal, or superior to our own. So, if other persons do not matter, if we are not humble in the presence of others, why should we listen to the ideas or opinions of others? Why should we hope for anything other than the elimination of our political opponents? No one used to use the term “bully pulpit,” but it is now used routinely in regard to the advantage that the President of the U. S. possesses in being heard. But the “bully pulpit,” so to speak, is not held in monopoly by the President; legions of others – especially radio hate mongers like Rush Limbaugh – conduct grandiose, uninterrupted monologues in which the worth of other opinions is completely ignored or disdained. Only humility, which is something individuals can come to understand rationally and apply willingly, will provide an antidote to the uncivil behaviors that surround us today.

On the other hand, it is not easy to assume that some transformation in American manners and “civility” will soon take place. I have read some journalists who argue that when Joe Welch, the attorney for the U. S. Army in the Army-McCarthy hearings of the early 1950s, finally got thoroughly disgusted with Senator Joe McCarthy’s behavior and resignedly asked, “Senator McCarthy, have you no decency?,” that American “civility” suddenly returned to American life. It did not. The incivility of American life continued, and although it was sometimes pushed underground for a time, incivility has largely remained a chief feature of American political life.

In fact, incivilities are more prominent in American history than almost any other element. To name only a few “uncivil” cases in historic American political culture – cases having to do with the much vaunted “founding fathers” and their generation -- look at the Matthew Lyon – Roger Griswold assault in Congress in the 1790s, or the vituperative attacks on both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson in the 1790s and early 1800s, or the famous Alexander Hamilton-Aaron Burr duel, in which Hamilton was killed by one of the most “promising” political figures of the early 19^th century. An early American historian, Joanne Freeman, who has written brilliantly on “honor” in early American political life in an earlier book, recently published a revealing article on political violence and the bearing of weapons in Congress from the 1820s through the 1860s. “Incivility” in the form of violence, in Congress, was more pronounced in some periods of American History than it was on the nation’s streets. Freeman is apparently writing a new book on American political violence which will reveal how central “violence” and “incivility” have been in American political life.

In regard to more contemporary times, Barbara Ehrenreich’s recent book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, presents another angle on America’s no-humility, no-civility culture. While Ehrenreich attacks the false notion that being positive and cheery in one’s outlook and emotions results in greater happiness, health, and prosperity, and while she lambastes the many self-help speakers, organizations, and gurus, and their methods of operation, the most important message to be derived from her well-researched book is that American history from its beginnings has focused on how individual Americans are solely responsible for their own well-being (whether that well-being is spiritual or economic or physical or mental). In my work as an American historian, I have always come to the conclusion that the American perception is that every individual should pursue and possess three things: autonomy (freedom to construct one’s own life), authority (freedom from others governing one’s life), and agency (the innate capacity to make whatever you want of yourself). Ehrenreich convincingly details the course of what she calls “bright-sided” positivism from Calvinist beginnings to R. W. Emerson and Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale to almost every management or business school to the American Psychology Association to modern therapists, and so on. The unifying message throughout is that everyone should be positive (in fact, must be positive and cheery), that we are in control of making ourselves better through work, and that failure only happens when we do not consistently act in a positive manner (even if such an attitude is entirely inappropriate in certain circumstances). No wonder the American rich (and even not so rich) today argue that they should keep whatever wealth they have “earned” (when, in fact, they have truly earned very little of the wealth they possess. Fortuitous circumstances of birth and place of residence and education, inheritance, infrastructure, subsidies, a nation not leveled by war in the 1940s, and even chance, are far more important than the usually puny “valued added” work of the individual claiming that “they” earned their wealth).

And, where does “humility” fit into my “autonomy, authority, agency” triad, or Ehrenreich’s review of a “self-help culture” that has always pervaded American history and, more importantly, bamboozled gullible Americans? It does not. It cannot. Yet, Americans may yet have “humility” thrust upon them, and have “civility” follow as a consequence. The poor have always discovered the reality and necessity for humility. Many of the poor have also come to realize the promise that humility possesses for some kind of self justification and hope. The way the U. S. is going, there will be many more poor citizens in their future, and they will learn, through experience, all too well the limits of “rugged individualism” or “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps” or “naming and claiming wealth” or “owning one’s responsibility for one’s self.” Humility should be embraced as a reasonable necessary condition to civility but future circumstances may well decide the fate of humility and civility for America.

"Eliminationist" America

2011-01-10T14:09:00.002-07:00

The assassination attempt on the life of Representative Gabrielle Giffords this past weekend has already aroused the old – and sadly too old – American debate (and it is a thoroughly American debate) as to whether this would-be assassin and accomplished killer of six others was a lone deranged person or someone whose acts were stimulated, perhaps even initiated by political rhetoric and an unyielding political right-wing ideology. There is no need to repeat or analyze again the singularities of this case. There is the need for Americans to ask themselves some hard questions about their peculiar “culture,” however.

The isolated, deranged gunman argument, which I have seen repeated again and again throughout my life, and is repeated today by Ross Douhat in the NY Times is getting harder and harder to support as a simple explanation. American political assassinations are simply too frequent, in comparison to acts of political murder in other “advanced” democratic and modern states, to allow the crazy -loner theory to inure us to such a sorry lament of inevitability. Paul Krugman’s observation in today’s NY Times, that an “eliminationist” political culture is at least partly a factor in this assassination (and I would argue it plays a part in other American political assassinations as well) is closer to the mark in explaining how mentally troubled persons (who can be found in all societies) are tempted to act out their politically bizarre and awful dreams in America.

Many on the so-called American left (N.B.: people living in the sane rest of the world should be reminded that the American “left” is the equivalent to your centre to moderate centre left) blame gun control, which is only a secondary issue in assassinations. Most on the right, as I have said, blame individuals whose mental health has simply failed. As this argument implies, these damaged individuals have become damaged by means of bad hard wiring in their brains or drugs or chemicals or anything that has to do with the discrete individual and nothing to do with the society and culture in which they live.

The American public – unfortunately including too many American historians -- are keen to proclaim the doctrine of American Exceptionalism as a means to define themselves, and to detach themselves from the evils and inferiorities of a European past. But when it comes to accepting the negative qualities of their “exceptionalism,” such as an historic pattern of political assassinations and attempted assassinations, which are at least as prevalent as any observable positive “exceptionalisms” they may trumpet, they are silent. This hypocrisy is no problem, however, because American exceptionalism allows – no, it insists -- that Americans remain the sole judges of their own behavior and their own past. In a wonderful exercise of tautological thinking, to do otherwise would be to deny their own exceptionalism. Americans need answer to no one but themselves (morally or for purposes of public image) and they are thus free to construct whatever historical narratives and structural arguments that will satisfy their sense of comfort.

We need to remind ourselves of two necessary truths:

1. American political violence “is as American as cherry pie,” even if H. Rap Brown was wrong on so many other political levels. But, hey, if you are God’s chosen people or at least a culture more favored than any other in the world, you need not seriously address this “manifest tendency” of “manifest destiny.” Even those on the so-called left like to suggest that the latest round of political violence is new, and a product of America “now,” rather than acknowledge that it has been there all along. The “eliminationist” politics that Paul Krugman laments comes, in fact, from a long American heritage beginning with Puritan authoritarianism and the ruthless winner-take-all politics of colonial Virginia through the uncompromising politics of High Federalism and the Essex Junto through Jacksonian extremism and the emergence of the “No Nothing” Party through abolitionists versus slave owners through American industrial capitalists like John D. Rockefeller versus progressivism through the same laissez-faire capitalist ethic of 1920s and 1930s Republicans versus the New Deal and FDR, and on and on (as you all know) to today. If Americans were more familiar with other political traditions: the common law of England; parliamentary democracy and the idea of a “loyal opposition”; minority government and the compromises it imposes; and, just the sheer political humility that some nations – e.g., Germany, by necessity – have come to terms with, Americans might be able to moderate, and perhaps even subdue, the “eliminationist” cancer of their political heritage.

2. American ignorance of an outer world persists throughout American history. Until recent decades, for example, most American presidents had never traveled nor lived abroad. Most Americans (other than the very rich), historically did not travel abroad at all, and when they did they often incubated themselves from the “locals” and their culture. The flagship of American travel today is the “Luxury Cruise,” which isolates travelers just about as completely as anything can from encounters with another culture. Many Americans love to be tourists but most do not want to be travelers or to live, even for a moment, the life of the expatriate. Until Americans grow more curious of the outer world (not the outer world of empire, or the world they felt they had to subdue), their hope for their own inner political peace is not likely to be fulfilled.

[N.B. It is necessary to always state the following caveat regarding my political blogs: what I write above does not apply to twenty to thirty per cent of American citizenry at any given time in recent American history. Diane Athill in her book Stet talks of hoping and trying to be in the thirty per cent or so of all persons in the world who are thoughtful, reflective, generous, and broad-minded. I believe that that many Americans have also always been in that category, including many Republicans I know. Unfortunately, twenty to thirty per cent does not equal the fifty to sixty per cent that would improve American culture and democracy.]

Jan. 10, 2011 Tlaquepaque, Mexico

America’s Near Future and the Failure of American History

2010-11-13T18:56:00.000-07:00

It must be clear by now that, in a few more years or a few more decades, the U. S. A. will no longer be the chief arbiter of relations among nations. It will not be the world’s primary democracy nor the political beacon for emerging free societies. It will not be the hub of the world economy, and its dollar will not be the center around which other currencies will orbit.

Yet, contrary to those who subscribe to linear historical inevitability, it will not “collapse” (in some Jared Diamond conceptualization of societal collapses). It still has massive agricultural resources, industrial capacity, and educational/intellectual potential. It could even become a leader in what we now call “alternative energy” or the “eco-friendly” revolution. (We call this “future” by various names but what it will be – very soon -- is simply what we will come to accept as the normative future in terms of energy-power, human interrelations, human mobility, and so on).

Like other modern nation-states that have felt the sting – and the embarrassment – of losing their leading roles on the center-stage of the world’s nation-states, the U. S. will go through a transition of denial. England, or what became the U. K., lost its primacy in the West in 1919. It did not recognize this loss for several decades, although it did recede from empire to commonwealth with more grace than India, for example, may be willing to acknowledge. France lost its moral center in 1940, disgraced itself in Vietnam and some of its other former colonies, and grudgingly gave up its European continental importance (in the 1950s) in favor of a gallic sense of internal, cultural superiority (starting with De Gaulle and lasting until Sarkozy).

The U. S. will react to its decline in a more exaggerated way than either the U. K. or France have done. Although the two latter nations are renowned for their haughty claims to cultural superiority, and for their too frequent displays of insular “jingoism,” the U. S. is an even more profoundly proud and smug nation. Its origins are based on a mythology of colonial rebellion against religious authority and arbitrary government. Its two central historical motifs – the American Revolution and the Civil War – have to do with victories for local autonomy and self-rule, in regard to the former, and the morally purposeful, industrialized, unified nation-state, in regard to the latter. “Conquering” the “empty” frontier, “stabilizing” the Western Hemisphere, and “Saving the World for Democracy” through the two World Wars, have further gilded the ornate frame around the mirror into which all Americans gaze narcissistically.

What do Americans see as they peer, seemingly perpetually, into that elaborately framed mirror? They see EXCEPTIONALISM writ large. American historical debates about who they are as Americans, or how they got here, may be sharply debated between leftist historians and rightist historians, but both sides agree that Americans have possessed, and continue to possess, a special “genius” not shared – indeed, not shareable – with or among other peoples of the world. American ideals may or may not have been achieved, depending on which group of historians (past or present) one is reading, but they are special American ideals, and not international ones.

American “EXCEPTIONALISM” has been supported by most importantly by one thing – American historians. The products of these historians have represented a nation in ways that are largely self-congratulatory and entirely self-referential. It is true that a few American historians have refused to play that game, but most American historians deal in the matter of: “how did we get to be so good and great” or “how did we fail, given our special dispensation of historical grace, to become so good or great”? The proof of this failure of written American history is to be seen in what American historians study and write about, and what they do not study or write about. Much of American history has been political, and much of that political history has been “heroic.” Until recently, it has been top-down history, from presidents down to mayors and city councils. Witness, for example, the “PBS New Hour” having a “presidential historians” panel, but no other American history panel. American History is an in-house game. Although many British and French historians, for example, live in and were educated in countries other than the U. K. of France, very few American historians are to be found outside the U. S. For ordinary Americans, what happens in America, stays in America. Its borders are sharp. Canada and Mexico might as well be the North Pole and Antartica. It is true that a few American historians have now ventured into things like “Atlantic Culture History” which links the U. S. to England and Europe. But, American History is mainly limited to the continental geography of the U. S. (Hawaii and Alaska intrude uncomfortably, occupying folding chairs at the family dinner table). When American historians are adventuresome, they consider things like “popular culture,” which, of course, is an American product with world derivations. Comparative history, which exists in the rest of the historical world, is an unknown thing to Americans and American historians. How, after all, can America be compared to anything else?

So, the prospectus for how Americans will react in the next few decades to what is only a partial demise in their importance, is not a promising one. Their claims of exceptionalism are likely to become more shrill. Their detestation for the “other,” in all forms, is likely to become more extreme. The best the rest of the world can do is to try to welcome Americans into the broader world, and that may take a great deal of good will and time.

The Destructiveness of Words

2010-06-16T20:02:00.002-06:00

In the last two days, we have heard two people use words that say more than they, and even we, want to acknowledge. First, President Obama, in his speech yesterday, referred to people in Louisiana and Alabama as “our neighbors.” I do not believe that anyone, even those criticizing the speech for partisan reasons, has picked up on this “mistake.” If the President were queried on the matter, I am certain that he would say that he meant that all Americans who did not live in those two states were neighbors of those who have suffered misfortune, etc., etc. In fact, however, Louisianans and Alabamans are full citizens of the United States; they are not “neighbors”; they are part of the nation, just as equal as any other members of the union. “Our neighbors” are Mexico and Canada. In a previous blog, I said that American ethnocentrism was not just a national siege mentality against a hostile outer world but was reflective of a strong regional disparity in the U. S., where even various parts of the U. S. A. were like foreign and strange territory to those who do not live in them. So much for democratic national solidarity. Poor Louisiana; poor Alabama. It is Katrina redux.

Today, Carl-Henric Svanberg, the president of British Petroleum (they would like to be known as BP in order to take on a greater world-wide glamour, and in order to attract more stockholders) said that he wanted to help the “small people” of the Louisiana and Alabama coast. The Huffington Post (huffing as usual) and other media latched on to this mistake. Tonight, on the PBS Newshour, Mr. Dudley, a clever spokesperson for BP, excused the Swedish president of BP, claiming that his president speaks English as a second language, and that he meant “small business people” not lesser people. Carl-Henric Svanberg almost certainly learned English as a young boy. He likely knows how to speak and write the English language better than most Americans. So, you may be assured, you can keep the “small people” reference in your mind for what was meant – people poorer, weaker, and more impotent than Mr. Svanberg and his capitalist executive colleagues.

Language means something. Who among us has not said something truly destructive to those we love, and we know that what we said had some kind of truth to it even though we immediately want to disown that truth. The President of the U. S. (who almost certainly has not even thought of “neighbors” as a mistake) has just made one of those irretrievable mistakes. Mr. Svanberg has more graphically made the mistake. And, what are the messages? First, it is still a world of “them” and “us.” In the U. S., it is a matter of “I’m all right, Jack.” In the larger capitalist world, it is a matter of large capital versus, well, everyone else, and everyone else, in the end, loses. In both cases, the real substance of “democracy” loses.

There is a tragedy beyond this. As everyone speaks the language of human-being superiority, animals throughout the northern Gulf of Mexico are in truly mortal danger. A new genocide, of sorts, is being played out. We will not lament, and shed our false tears, until someone like David Attenborough comes along ten years from now and documents the whole thing. By then, it will just be sentimentality. And, while you are at it, you might shed a false tear for democracy as well.

The (Im)perfect Storm

2010-05-24T19:24:00.007-06:00

"Flash in the Pan" is the archaic phrase that comes most to my mind when I consider the history of the American republic and its latter-day, very short-lived empire. As an American historian, I have sometimes questioned my choice to teach and do research in the subject of American history. After all, many of the so-called "founders" of the nation thought they had failed at conception. And, the America that properly emerged victorious and confident after World War II did not last for more than a brief moment. Cold War insecurity led to dominance over mainly second and third-world nations (e.g., Vietnam) who in turn became surrogate client states that prove the adage: "the tail that wags the dog." Now the great nation -- and it was a great nation -- slips away with little effort to preserve itself as a nation, let alone as a nation with pretensions to lead the world in public morality and goodness.

Three elements have converged to guarantee the rack-and-ruin of the U. S.A. They have combined to form a "perfect storm" from which Americans and, alas, perhaps the rest of us, cannot easily escape. Only one of these elements can claim any pretense to virtue.

1. Libertarianism -- The American ideal of "liberty," born in the colonial period and brought forward in the American Revolution was truly revolutionary for its age. Without going through a discourse on the history of liberty in the last two hundred odd years, let's just say that it was a grand idea. But at least in the last thirty years that idea has suffered from distention. It has become a coarse and grotesque corruption of itself. Liberty has now become libertarianism. "Leave me alone, I want to be completely free!" In other words, I have no obligations other than to myself. Government is not just a necessary evil (as many in the 18th century would admit) but a complete evil. Regulations of any sort (other than traffic regulations) are anathema to being American, or so these ill-educated, myopic ethnocentrists contend.

2. The Public Interest -- No one in the U.S.A. dares any longer to argue that there is a "public interest" to be considered and protected. The U.S. Supreme Court proved recently in the Citizens United case that even "THEY" no longer identify a "public interest." No appeals to the needs of society or the needs of the nation, let alone the needs of the world and humanity, have any cache with Americans. There is "my" interest and nothing else.

3. Ethnocentrism -- Americans are a self-referential people. They look in the mirror and gage the rest of the world by what they see. Many of them may be"tourists" but most of them are not travelers. A small and significant number of Americans understand the "outer world" or what most Americans call the "overseas" world (even "overseas" when they are talking about Canada and Mexico). But that minority does not count at all in terms of developing a national consciousness. Instead, most Americans are ignorant of the rest of the world or fearful of the rest of the world. All but the traveling minority are scornful of the rest of the world. But it is worse than that. Most observers and commentators on the American nation (well, most since Alexis de Toqueville) assume there is a spirit of national unity in the U.S. There was, but it has largely disappeared. Americans see themselves as Virginians or Californians more than they see themselves as Americans. Few yet see themselves as "citizens of the world," as Thomas Paine declared himself to be. (Paine made a big mistake in that. Although he was an American citizen, and obviously did much to further the success of the American revolution, George Washington -- yeh, the big guy himself -- refused to retrieve Paine from a French prison during the French Revolution because, in Washington's opinion, Paine had relinquished his American citizenship by going to France and becoming a representative in their National Convention. Washington's refusal to save Paine was a harbinger of all things to come in American ethnocentrism). Narrow-minded, parochial, ignorant of and fearful of the rest of the world, Americans have imprisoned themselves in their own country.

So, what does this have to do with a perfect storm? Well, it helps to explain a lot about the tepid, almost ho-hum, attitude of Americans to the Katrina disaster and now to the Gulf of Mexico oil surge disaster. If we all want to just be ourselves, and if we have never heard of the idea of a public interest, and if everyone who lives outside our region is considered an outlander, then how can there be any response? Katrina and the oil disaster (which will probably be far, far worse than even the most negative experts claim) are just chapters in many "perfect storms" to come. The Americans have no means at their disposal to deal with any of them. Libertarianism is their individual refusal of responsibility. A lack of a sense of a public interest means that no agencies, government or otherwise, can intervene in disaster unless they do so completely on their own, without public support. Ethnocentrism leads to a sense that disaster can never touch "my" region or my home; no hurricanes or tornadoes or earthquakes will deprive me of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

There are reformists impulses in American society, and many Americans would like to change many things. But the prospects for this happening in the foreseeable future are dim.

What “Freedom” are we Talking About?

2010-05-06T18:22:00.001-06:00

The reductio ad absurdum of “freedom” and “liberty” that has become the mantra and entire ideological “argument” of the right-winger movement in the U. S. A. (usually but not exclusively known as the Republican Party) needs more examination. Since the right-wing will not be addressing or defining what they mean by “freedom,” I will volunteer some definitions.

Most people probably assume that freedom is a pretty simple concept, and that everyone shares their definition of freedom and what freedom encompasses. But starting with John Stuart Mill and moving on with Isaiah Berlin in the mid-twentieth century and then Charles Taylor and others more recently, freedom has been increasingly seen as meaning at least one of two things: 1) freedom as a removal of shackles or restraints, and 2) freedom as permission and opportunity to create something, do something, to take positive action in some regard. The first – known as negative liberty or negative freedom – has an illustrious history in things like the end of slavery or the end of a censured press. The second – known as positive liberty or positive freedom – has an illustrious history in things like society or state-driven economic reforms or social justice reforms.

Paradox and irony do not begin to describe how the modern right-wing has twisted the concepts of negative and positive freedoms into comical parodies of all real freedom. First, the right-wing refuses to see any positive liberty because they refuse to see any role for the state, and ipso facto, with no state there are no social and economic reforms and justices to be addressed. Some question whether there is such a thing as society at all, following the famous dictum attributed to Margaret Thacher that “there are no societies, there are only individuals and families.” The right-wing’s world of besieged families resisting outside influences as if they were defenders of the Alamo, and their Ayn Rand world of bizarre fictional individuals who robustly and egoistically fashion their lives with little social assistance, defy the realities of a real world of mass populations and that world’s vast historical accomplishments in everything from health to education to economic well being that have been produced through the collective efforts of societies. Thomas Paine, a friend of free market ideas and an opponent of strong governments, nevertheless believed that human beings naturally formed societies, and that society was the fundamental basis for both public and individual good. In short, ignoring historical realities and real modern needs, the right-wing does not recognize positive the legitimacy of positive freedom at all.

Oddly, the right-wing now seems to outdo itself in idiocy when it comes to distending its natural penchant for negative freedom. The thirty-year revolution that began with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thacher seemed grounded, at first, in old (some would also say respectable) ideas about laissez-faire capitalism, low taxes, and a minimal state. Those ideas, which admitted some idea of limitations, have now taken on an unlimited character: capitalism should be left entirely unfettered; no taxes should be passed (well, unless you are fighting a war for the empire somewhere); and the state should wither and disappear altogether (they seem to know little about their ultimate affinity with Karl Marx). Many who advocate such things as unregulated capitalism are the unknowing (and sometimes knowing) stooges of big corporations and investment banking. But lately, this extension of “pure” freedom has had some very strange consequences (one would say amusing if one did not give a damn for the world and human life in general):

1. Tea Party members and other right wingers demanding lower taxes, despite the fact that some 40+% of Tea Party advocates, under new tax breaks for the middle and lower classes, do not need to pay any tax at all. In fact, some 45% or more of American households do not need to pay any federal income tax. See Gail Collins amusing blog in the NYTimes “Celebrating the Joys of April 15” (April, 15, 2010) for other interesting statistics on a tax regimen that angers the right because those with big incomes (one can hardly call them “earners”) pay most of the bill.

2. A Supreme Court which in its “supreme wisdom” has declared corporations of all sorts eligible for First Amendment free speech protections. Not only did the Court overrule a lot of impressive precedent, they gave a new, rightist, purist definition to “person” which defies reason and the Constitution. (I have said more on this elsewhere and could say much more, but it would not matter. Citizens United is the Dred Scott case of the 21^st century; it has the same apparent logic and the same catastrophic unreality).

3. An oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that will have long term effects, and begs the question as to whether deep off-shore drilling can be done at all. Yet, several Republican right wingers have used this “opportunity” to ask for more off-shore drilling, in complete defiance of what has just happened and of reason itself.

4. A terrorist attempt in Times Square in NYC that has right wingers falling over themselves to proclaim their full attachment to the Second Amendment to the U. S. Constitution (wrongly interpreted as it is), and pledging their troth to the practice of even those on a terrorist watch list having the “right” to bear arms.

So, what do we have here? On one level, we have people so uneducated (in what we used to call “Civics”) and so simple-minded as to demand an absolutist interpretation of freedom. On another level, we have people living in fictive worlds of their own, very strange, imaginations. “Avatar,” the movie, is not much ahead of the curve. Many right wingers have in fact made themselves into “avatars.” They live in a world they imagine, or think they want. Reality plays a very small role in this exercise of freedom.

In the end, I think of the words from “Me and Bobby McGhee” – “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Total negative freedom is total alienation, and the right wing is certainly alienated from society, and perhaps now from themselves.

Talk Is Cheap (and priceless)

2010-02-28T12:45:00.006-07:00

My father was not taciturn in his speech but he did think that actions spoke louder than words. Among his most firmly held beliefs was his conviction that the material consequences of the work he accomplished – water well drilling and plumbing -- would speak to the memory of his existence. I know some of my father’s inventions. He crafted (invented) a well-drilling rig on a homemade oak and steel frame, for example, and short of both money and access to proper well drilling equipment he made many of his own heavy tools. Unfortunately, unlike the visible fruits of labor of sculptors or architects, my father’s work was inconspicuous except to the few who chanced to examine it at close range. Still, what one did rather than what one wrote or spoke, was what mattered most to him. He did not disdain the written and spoken word but neither did he think that either was as important as the useful knowledge of the craftsman. In his mind, “book learning” was not bad; it was just secondary to the invention that flowed from experience in material crafts. For my father, those who talked were worse than those who wrote. Almost every time after having had to listen to someone talk too much (and, on more than one occasion, that included his two sons and his daughter), he would mutter: “the empty wagon is the one that makes the most noise.”

I cherish the memory of accompanying my father to drill wells with his improvised machinery, and of watching him solve a knotty plumbing problem. But I also wish that I had some verbal or oral artifacts of his life to pass along to my sons and grandsons. I only have vague ideas about his life between his birth in 1896 and WWI. I know he briefly joined the “Wobblies” (IWW) (a “youthful mistake,” he later told me) while training as a steamfitter in Detroit, and I know that he was inducted into the U. S. Army late enough in the WWI to avoid being sent “over there.” His life in the 1920s and 1930s – those were all depression years where we came from -- and even much of the 1940s will always remain obscure to those few of us who still remember him. What my brother and sister and I recall of him are more the incomplete remembrances of children and adolescents than of keen observers.

Neither my brother nor my sister and I ever shared my father’s view on the limited value of books. We all read a fair amount (my brother read an enormous amount), and I entered a profession that required constant reading. For a long time, however, I probably shared some of my father’s prejudice about “talk.” Perhaps my ill-formed diminution of “talk” or oral sources was reinforced because I am an 18^th century historian, whose primary sources are manuscripts. I have always loved research that involved diaries, journals, letters, even commonplace books and almanacs, and I have always pitied those poor modern historians who had to use lesser materials like radio broadcasts and film and oral history evidence. Oral, spoken evidence was too light, too transient, too unreflective, and too “cheap” to for me to take seriously.

For the past year now, I have been conducting oral history interviews of persons who were engaged in the founding and early development of the university where I spent my career – The University of Lethbridge. Because it was not founded until 1967, many of its earliest members are still able to remember well their involvement in that university’s early years. Yet, my initial motives were more negative than positive in regard to recording these interviews. Instead of lauding the richness of oral history interviews, I too often have said (and still say), that the regrettable lack of written sources about this university’s first formative years makes the use of oral history sources necessary. No one has left rich diary and journal sources. No one’s correspondence remains extant, and since the rise of computers and email, it is certain that useful electronic source materials disappear in a nano-second as well. So, I sigh and lament that all I can do is record fifty or so oral history interviews (twenty-seven are completed as of this date). Because I have the time, I usually add with little enthusiasm, that I might as well finish this project on the first generation of the U of L out of duty. These interviews just have to be done, I suggest with the tone of voice of someone who must wash the evening dishes. Before I began the project, I also said to myself (and no one else) that these interviews would be like mining some low-grade ore field, looking for a few nuggets valuable enough to keep. I thought I was looking for a few meager answers to specific questions about the origins, policies, programs, governance, liberal education, and people of the first decade of the University’s existence.

I was wrong, of course, and after my first interviews, I slowly began to distance myself from my snobbery and weak prejudices. What I found were fascinating, highly varied, stories about childhoods and personal educational experiences. Arcs of personal narrative, of personal history, emerged in the earliest interviews and have continued ever since. The enormous achievements of my colleagues in their personal and professional lives made me much more humble about my own accomplishments, and made me respect the fullness of everyone’s life when put into an autobiographical context. I have put most of my pre-planned, specific questions aside. I now start each interview with no notes. I just try to encourage interviewees to describe their lives, and then we proceed largely on autopilot. I eventually “converse” too much with everyone I record, but what my interviewees say is so evocative of our shared past that I often cannot keep my mouth shut (my father was right, at least about me). I now find myself contemplating more openly the views of others about teaching or research or curricula or programs or liberal education that I once resisted openly and forcefully. With every new interview, my respect for oral history sources increases.

This is not to say that I am blind to the shortcomings of oral history. Remembrance of the past well after the occurrence of events is problematical at best. Autobiographies – which oral history interviews are in short form -- are one of the weakest forms of historical evidence. My personal narrative, biographic approach creates incomplete and false historical narratives. My role as an interviewer who converses with his subjects – and one who was a participant in or observer of most of the events discussed – further distorts any objective picture of the past. But, look at those written sources I used to admire above all others. Personal letters are carefully crafted to address a specific reader. Diaries and journals are biographical and generally written in a self-serving manner. It is true that if one puts together a large enough body of someone’s personal correspondence and self-reflective writing, a subtext of unintended truths seep out of this verbal self-justification. Yet, I have seen subtle, undeclared truths about the character or essential nature of my interviewees seep out of an hour and a half to a two-hour interview as well.

As a late convert to oral history, I cannot tell you how much I would now give to be able to turn on my digital recorder and talk to my father for two hours. Since I cannot, I urge the rest of you to sit down and record the stories of your family or friends. You do not have to wait until someone is old; interviews of young children also produce amazing results. While the most astute interviewer cannot get a subject to recreate the past accurately even the most novice interviewer can conduct an oral interview that will produce an astounding record of their interviewee’s experiences, ideas, and feelings.

I am just reading a memoir by Studs Terkel, the famous Chicago interviewer and raconteur, entitled Touch and Go. Terkel knew, and inevitably interviewed, an enormous range of the rich and famous. But, as he puts it, he is (was; he died last year) really someone who has “been celebrated for having celebrated the lives of the uncelebrated among us, for lending voice to the face in the crowd.” According to him, his epiphany in this regard came at a public housing project in Chicago where he recorded a young mother. Here is what Terkel says:

I don’t remember whether she was white or black. The place was mixed. She was pretty, skinny, with bad teeth. It was the first time she had encountered a tape recorder. Her little kids, about four of them, demanded a replay. They insisted on hearing mama’s voice. I pressed the button. They howled with delight. She put her hands to her mouth and gasped. “I never knew I felt that way.” She was astonished, sure, but no more than I was. Such astonishments have always been forthcoming from the etceteras of history. Ever since the Year One.

A Modest Proposal: Mexico, Canada, and the "Citizens United" decision

2010-01-28T18:09:00.007-07:00

As a loyal Canadian, and someone devoted to American constitutionalism, let me make the following "modest proposal" (with apologies to Jonathan Swift). Pemex, the state oil company of Mexico, and Petro-Canada, the at-arms-length-from-direct-government-control Canadian petroleum company, should form an American "dumby" corporation -- what used to be called in the good old days, before Progressivism ruined everything in the early 20th century, a "holding" company. This company could incorporate in N. J. or N. Y. or Massachusetts, or wherever the most troublesome progressive Democrats and judges run for office. (Any first-year law student should be able to write up articles of incorporation that will pass muster in the U. S. and in these states).

Once this corporation is established, it can support candidates for federal office in the U. S., or for elected judges who might be critical to decisions important to Canadian-Mexican interests. Better yet, as a "new citizen" of the U. S., this corporation -- let's call it "Friends of American Democracy" or maybe "F___k American Democracy," both say the same thing in modern American political double-speak -- can work to defeat candidates who think that the Mexicans are just a little too lax in the methods they use to extract oil or distribute and refine it, or who think the Alberta oil sands (i.e., "tar sands") are an environmental corruption.

In addition, being the largest suppliers of oil to the U. S. -- something Americans cannot grasp given American fascination with a Middle East that always puzzles them -- Mexico and Canada can demand some quid pro quo from the U. S. Congress. In regard to the Mexican half of our new "F_____ American Democracy" "new-citizen" corporation, how about getting candidates to oppose any fence across Mexico's northern border, giving full amnesty to illegal immigrants working in the U. S. (i. e., those Mexicans who almost always out-perform Americans incapable of competing with them in wages or in quality of work), and engineering a special deal for poor Mexican corn growers who cannot compete against corn from the Midwest U. S. -- corn that is subsidized by as much as 50% of crop value. Canadians can demand that Americans quit harassing their border with idiotic security plans that have little or nothing to do with security. Canadians might want to get an even better auto-pact, and other trade advantages.

Mexicans and Canadians should revel in the opportunities that the Citizens United decision affords them. A few million dollars is nothing -- truly nothing -- compared to the advantages that these two countries might exact from a nation that does not even know that they -- Mexico and Canada -- exist. (For American readers, let me remind you that Mexico is that strange elongated one to the south, the one that used to own California and New Mexico and Arizona, and , oh yes, Texas. Canada is the cold one to the north -- but you knew that, didn't you -- the second largest country in landmass in the world). Oh, but you say that you know that tourists go to Mexico: well, then, maybe Mexico could get a special tax on American tourists who loiter on their beaches. Oh, and you have heard of Eskimos (they aren't all American, you know) and baby seals so maybe Canada could get the U. S. to end any contention over Canadian sovereignty over the Arctic. Jeez, you have to love the American brand of democracy and the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling. Americans truly are ahead of the rest of the world. They have seen the intelligence in giving away their manufacturing to anyone who will work for a penny an hour less than will their workers, in exchange for the celestial level of having a "service" economy only. And, best of all, they are willing to sell the bothersome governance of their country, and the decisions of their judges, to the highest bidder. What genius!!

From Liberty to Libertarianism to Anarchy

2010-01-22T16:17:00.006-07:00

I am as flabbergasted as anyone about the decision by the U. S. Supreme Court in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission. Accompanied as it is by the probable death of any U. S. health care reform, the U. S. Senate victory by the Republicans in Massachusetts, and what appears to be the expulsion of the Obama administration to the political wilderness, everyone should be alarmed about the future that lies before us. Because I assume this blog is read by my Canadian friends primarily, I want to emphasize that the current of events in the U. S. is important to Canadians as well. As a student of U. S. Constitutional History, I can assure everyone that this is decision with monumental implications.

The Supreme Court decision in Citizens United reversed precedent set and expanded and repeated since 1907 regarding the prohibition of corporations involving themselves in financing campaigns for or against political candidates. It is impossible to conclude anything other than that ideology alone drove the majority of the court. Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion implies that it is too difficult in modern times, with a huge variety of ways of speaking and technologies to convey that speech, to discriminate among speakers. And, in a kind of wave of the hand, tossing aside lightly the enormous weight of precedent, Kennedy essentially comes down on the side of a fully libertarian vision of First Amendment rights. Remember, this is a country and a court that has and does limit speech in all sorts of ways if they think that speech inimical to the peaceful maintenance of the state, and often if they merely think that speech is radical. And, they have often restricted, by one means or another, not only who can be heard but who can speak as well.

Justice Stevens -- in a dissent made enormously long (90pgs.) because he had to repeat all of the weight of precedent, stare decisis, and old arguments -- put the real argument against this new ruling by the Court by emphasizing that the Court is giving corporations new stature under the idea of protecting speech for individuals. As he said,

“The conceit that corporations must be treated identically to natural persons in the political sphere is not only inaccurate but also inadequate to justify the Court’s disposition of this case.

In the context of election to public office, the distinction between corporate and human speakers is significant. Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it. They cannot vote or run for office. Because they may be managed and controlled by nonresidents, their interests may conflict in fundamental respects with the interests of eligible voters. The financial resources, legal structure, and instrumental orientation of corporations raise legitimate concerns about their role in the electoral process. Our lawmakers have a compelling constitutional basis, if not also a democratic duty, to take measures designed to guard against the potentially deleterious effects of corporate spending in local and national races.”

In the 19^th century, corporations were given the standing of “persons” for legal purposes and for certain limited rights (e. g., the right to sue and be sued), but not because anyone seriously thought that a corporation was a person in body or mind. The corporation is a fiction, and it constitutes only a fictive “person” for legal convenience.

Stevens also attacks the effects of this decision. Although assumed effects have less argumentative weight in constitutional law than fundamental principles and precedent, in this case the evidence of what is going to happen is overwhelming. Corporations will have it in their power, through clever and careful manipulation and the means to control most public speech (aside from the internet and private correspondence), and to decide the outcome of elections – no matter how vigilant the electorate may be. “One cannot shout fire in a crowded theatre and cause a panic,” so said Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., but the majority of the current court is quite willing to let a corporation openly, or at arms–length or behind layers of third and fourth party front-organizations, spend millions of dollars to destroy any candidate they wish through powerful devices of propaganda expertly and precisely employed. Public lives will be ruined. Private lives will be ruined. An electoral panic for against candidates will ensue. Only the wealthy friends of corporations need apply for high public office. The greater part of the American democracy will shun politics even more than they do now. The consequences may be catastrophic.

The U. S. Supreme Court’s decision, however, is just part of a larger mudslide, a larger erosion around the very foundations of American society. This slide has its origins in leftist lifestyles as much as rightist politics. “Do your own thing” liberalism married to private profit-motive laissez-faire capitalism has produced a powerful libertarian offspring. That offspring is now well out of hand. Thomas Frank’s observations on Bill Moyer’s Journal last week (Jan. 15) are chilling in the context of the Citizens United case. I thought Frank a bit extravagant in his argument that the Right wants to destroy government altogether by crippling its authority and by placing advocates of radical libertarian principles into office (in short, sycophants or toadies who will destroy government). After this court decision, I am not so certain that he overstates things by much. Ironically, I do believe that the Right wants a powerful central state insofar as the military is concerned – a military that can force other countries to abandon their own free will.

Even more problematical is the heightened unreality about many things that has come to inhabit the minds of many people. The “birthers” are unwilling to believe birth records; Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck are willing to bend facts to suit their larger “truths”; Canadians are told that they do not like the health care system they have despite the fact that all evidence is to the contrary. It gets worse. While Neil Postman may have been correct a few years ago in claiming that we were, as stated in his book title, Amusing Ourselves to Death, he has drastically undershot the mark. We have not just abandon thought and reflection through our attachment to instruments like television, we have become unable to discern truth from fiction. The two have begun to merge seamlessly, and as truth and fiction merge, we get the most outrageous claims about what is and what should be. Now we live two lives, our mundane existence (if we are indeed attached to that existence at all) and the life of our avatar. We are more than one step beyond the existentialist denial of “essences.” We now think we can shape and re-shape ourselves into many different persons. In the process, we are becoming “no person.” “No person” is quite willing to be shaped by the visual media into whatever is available, and “No Person” does not want anyone – family, society, or government – to spoil their delusion. “No Person” is quite eligible for the manipulations of corporate America in the political arena.

In our household (and I do mean that others in our family have arrived at their own independent opinions on American affairs), we used to sigh at what we saw as wrong-headed policies, grit our teeth at the election of bobble-heads, and shout at the TV over stupid decision-making. I cannot speak for others but I am now getting a little frightened, perhaps not for me, but for the future, for my family and my friends who must contend with this world for another half century or more.

Two Good Public Things During My Adult Life

2010-01-22T13:43:00.004-07:00

As I sit here on the last day of my 67^th year, I remind myself of two exceptional, revolutionary things that have happened during my adult life. Both have made a difference in my life, and both have made a difference in almost everyone’s life in the world.

1. The Beginning of the End of Patriarchy

Patriarchy is not dead. As a practice, it thrives in all areas of public life – government, employment, education, health, and religion. The idea of patriarchy as the appropriate way to organize power in everything from the family to society, however, has suffered many defeats over the last 60 years. It will not recover from these defeats, and it cannot reassert its former hegemony.

You might think that I would have mentioned the Civil Rights Movement as the one of the greatest changes for good in my adult life but I believe that that movement was well on its way to victory as the prevailing idea in educated society before 1960. With Martin Luther King, Jr. Day just having just passed, I would like to say – as both a U. S. citizen and as an American historian – that I believe King to be the greatest figure in American History. I say this because I believe that his philosophical and religious approach to civil rights won the victory for equal civil rights and propelled forward the movement for women’s rights and even the rights of the poor. The Civil Rights Movement was, therefore, antecedent to, and necessary for the women’s rights movement and the youth movement, both of which together provided the earliest assaults on patriarchy.

When we think of patriarchy, some of us probably think of fathers who governed their families, men who were usually, though not always, benevolent despots. Robert Young’s portrayal of the head of his household in “Father Knows Best” is the iconic symbol of that soft-patriarchy. Fortunately, my brother and my sister and I, growing up in a very equalitarian home in which the civil equality of Blacks and indeed of all people was assumed without question, did not experience any discomfort from patriarchy since our father never claimed that special status for himself. Almost all of the modern families I know today reveal few traces of patriarchy.

It is more likely, nowadays, to associate patriarchy with male domination and the suppression of women. With the rise of feminism in the 1960s, males of all types were identified as the impediment to progress, and the subsequent history of the women’s movement since then needs no repeating. Women still have less power, still have to outperform men, are still paid less than men, and so on, but equality is only a matter of time; progress toward the equality of men and women will not stop. Women now receive nearly equal education to men, and the recent economic downturn in the U. S. has resulted, ironically, in more men unsuccessfully seeking employment than women unsuccessfully seeking employment. That anomaly is only slightly the result of women receiving less pay for the same work.

It is often forgotten that the end of patriarchy has also benefited men as well. I will use myself as an example. When I went to graduate school, I was told that I would doing so, and told where I was going to go to school, by the head of the history department at Western Michigan. I do not begrudge this since I did, of course, have the choice of going to graduate school or not (although he seemed to make it clear that his decision was close to an order). When I got to graduate school at Wayne State, it did not take long to realize that the head of the department was a demi-god. He was in fact the perennial “head” of the department, and I do not believe he relinquished that post until he died. Older, more senior faculty members (all but one was a man) controlled all of the sources of power that were not monopolized by the head of the department. Junior faculty kow-towed or risked being driven out. Graduate students were even more subservient. Faculty did not collaborate with their students on research. Historical conferences were places where the “big men” of their fields gave papers, and commented on other people’s papers. Today, even undergraduates are often invited to join in a professor’s research project, and to publish papers. Conference presentations and commentaries are now almost exclusively the domain of young people who have new ideas about their subjects. Women are approaching equal status in grad schools. Older faculty members are now respected, if at all, for their experience, but for little else. Heads are now chairs -- persons who serve limited terms, and have limited powers.

Patriarchy is not just about male domination of women; it is about the domination of everyone by older males. Yet, even mullahs in remote regions of Afghanistan or Pakistan are now faced with recalcitrant young women who want to learn. Increasingly, they must accommodate these young women. So, the legitimacy of patriarchy has diminished as the idea of fundamental human equality has risen.

2. The Internet

The importance of the internet in changing nearly everything needs no repetition either. It is a lovely irony that an instrument designed to aid the military has become an instrument to undermine those who hold power in autocratic status as a consequence of their militaries. And, as democracy fades in the halls of governments almost everywhere, it is a happy fact that the internet enhances democratic feelings and ideas among ordinary people almost everywhere.

It only seems like yesterday that a colleague and I attended a conference in Toronto about the relationship of computers to the humanities. At the conference, we were treated to a presentation by a man who explained how a system was in place -- a system that would rapidly expand, he noted -- that allowed a person to send a message to someone else through a computer linked to an “internet” in which bundles of messages were sent at the speed of light to remote servers that distributed these messages to individuals. This was in 1980. It was like telling folks in the 16^th century about jet aircraft.

In 1994, while on a research trip to Massachusetts, June and I were joined by our oldest son, Nathaniel. During a long drive home from an expedition to the ocean, we began to talk about the internet. June and I were speculating on the possible need for governance of the internet for moral purposes, etc. Nat was outraged. For two hours, he tried to convince us of the error of our ideas. Censorship as a means of attacking a few bad things failed to offset the openness of the internet, Nat argued, and its primal democratic nature and its liberating potential should not be impeded. I say today: Nathaniel – you were absolutely right and we were absolutely wrong. The recent conflict over Google’s threatened removal from China again heightens the remarkable importance that the internet holds for the entire world. Beyond that, the recent move by Google to digitize as much of the world’s literature as possible – whatever any of may think about the legal and moral problems inherent therein -- makes the internet the most revolutionary instrument in the history of humankind.

Because the internet now refers to so many things – ideas, information, communication, commerce, religion, and politics – it may have lost some of its singular stature over time, but it still remains those bundles of information shooting off in all directions, accessible to an increasing number of people world-wide. For that I am thankful.

Hey, Pat Robertson: History Matters More, and You Don't Know Any

2010-01-16T11:47:00.004-07:00

Because this is a blog dedicated to history mattering more than many other ways of knowing, it is impossible to let Pat Robertson's idiotic analysis of Haiti pass. As you all know by now, Robertson claimed that Haitians had long ago made a pact with the devil, and were incurring, I guess, "God's" wrath.

It must be said on the face of things that not only is Robertson's logic non-existent, his distortion of his own theological beliefs is problematic as well. Does he mean to say that Haitians made a collective pact with the devil? Does he mean to say that such a pact would automatically be handed down from earlier Haitians to their progeny? Is this some new theological idea about the sin's of the fathers being bestowed on the sons? If he believes in the autonomy of the individual believer (or non-believer), as he purportedly does, how can he talk of collective pacts with the devil? If he believes in the capacity of individual redemption, how can he believe in an historical curse handed down. In fact, Robertson is denying God's redemptive power, which is a heresy in any Christian religious theology that I know.

But that is not the point here. Robertson's history is absolutely crazy. For a full reprise of what he is vaguely and erroneously talking about (please see the Christian Science Monitor article on Haiti for Jan. 14, 2010). First, he suggests that Haitians (meaning Black Haitians) signed a pact with the devil to get out from under the control of "Napoleon III". Oops, Pat, old boy, you are wrongly confusing historical eras and talking about the mid-19th c., not the late 18th and early 19th c. The fact is that the Haitians first took the principles of the French Revolution -- liberté, fraternité, and equalité -- seriously in 1791. By 1794, the radical French Revolution (which, if Robertson knew any history, he would also condemn as the work of those in league with the devil) resulted in the freeing of Haiti's massive slave population. Napoleon attempted to re-enslave them in 1802, which led to the famous revolution under Toussaint L'Ouverture against France. Napoleon -- unlike certain American "leaders" from LBJ through "W" through Obama in regard to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan -- knew when and where to fight and knew that victory in Haiti against this Black uprising would be too costly and too difficult (if even possible). Instead, he cut his loses, turned instead toward Europe, and sold Louisiana (the most substantial chunk of the U. S. ever acquired by treaty) to the fledgling and vulnerable U. S. for $15 million. As the Haitian ambassador to the U. S. has pointed out recently, much of U. S. territory and much of the U. S. opportunity to thrive as an "Empire of Liberty" was because of the Haitian revolution. And, what about "freedom loving" Haitians, who had destroyed the bonds of slavery more than 50 years before the Americans were able to so? Well, naturally, being Black and poor, the rest of the world turned their back on allowing Haiti to become a functioning society. Haiti had always depended on trade, and after their successful revolution they were shut out. If finger pointing is to take place, the so-called developed world of the U.S. and Europe can point their fingers back at themselves.

In short, the Americans are, in an indirect way at least, profoundly beholden to Haiti. Haiti's profound poverty, now made unimaginably worse, is the responsibility of all of us. Unfortunately, more people will hear Pat Robertson's cruel and moronic comments and say -- uh, huh, that most be true -- than will hear the real historical story. I have seen few attempts by the media to review Haiti's real history, and as I watch the devastation on television, no one contextualizes Haiti's plight in historical terms -- the only terms that can possibly inform us about why things are as they are, and why we are all responsible in terms of building Haiti to a society and state.

A New Year. A New Decade? How About a New Century??

2010-01-03T18:08:00.001-07:00

We can all agree that we have just entered a new year – even if January 1 is as arbitrary as any other date as a marker for the year. Purists will insist that 2011 is the beginning of the New Decade, but why quibble about that either. It is irritating, however, to have people declare that ten years ago we entered a new century, and that this new century of ours is markedly different from the previous one. In fact, despite the drama of 9/11, we in North America are living in the old century. The twentieth century, as I see it, began with the Great War in 1914. More than any previous century, it has been marked by totalities, including total war, i. e., wars that recruit the hearts and minds and bodies and lives of whole populations. It has been a century in which the victory of large-scale capitalism has been made complete. The laissez-faire capitalism of the 1920s -- despite being rescued and temporarily modified in the Great Depression – was to be repeated in the rise of the super-corporation in the 1950s, and then pushed to the rarified heights of near religion with the neo-liberal capitalist victories from 1980 to the present. After 1914, matters ranging from war to cold war to medicine to business also resulted in the near total victory of science over all others ways of resolving and knowing. In the backlash against the modernity of warfare and science and consumerism after 1914, we also saw a new kind of religious reaction (I cannot in good faith call it conservatism), beginning with the publication and widespread circulation of the “The Fundamentals” in the early part of the 20^th century followed by frequent religious revivals culminating in the new giants of religion in the likes of Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, and John Hagee.

Unable to break, or even modify, the effects and cycle of the perfect storms created by these elemental features of the 20^th century, we have increasingly come to be their victims. We have come to live in a world where ideologies and other loose systems of thought and behavior have long ago expanded beyond their original essence and their public utility. These systems and behaviors have become distentions – overwhelming, often grotesque, sometimes even caricatures of some decent value or morality that they once represented. I was fortunate enough to have taken a course in philosophy of history from Bill Bossenbrook, a distinguished professor who first alerted me to the nature of distentions. A recent article by Tony Judt – “What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?” – in the New York Review of Books, Vol. LVI, No. 20, has further prodded me to address the business of distentions and the seemingly perpetual century we seem unable to escape. I will not repeat Judt’s argument, although I have long held some of his opinions. I differ with him here in the elements upon which I want to focus. He halls out the usual suspects: capitalism, socialism, communism, etc. I am going to identify a different set of “isms” to highlight how I think “distentions” have distorted and made pathological our quest for social democracy and social justice.

In order to drive home the matter of distention, here are four “isms” that are not (yet) part of our ordinary vocabulary, and why I think they keep us mired in an inappropriate past and an unworkable present.

1. “Economism” – As Judt points out, “economism” does not simply mean narrow economic determinism, although it encompasses that, too. Economism for Judt is “the invocation of economics in all discussions of public affairs.” It is, in short, a kind of economic totalitarianism. Decades ago, June started saying, “When did we stop talking about the needs of society and start talking about the needs of only the economy?” I don’t know. I do know that in many western countries we have shoved the idea of society to the background (at best) and elevated the supposed health of the economy to the very forefront of all public (and, for that matter, private) considerations. We have become servants of an economy that is much more ineffable and fictitious than those mere members of society who must slavishly tend and feed it. Among the worst consequences has been the near total victory of the idea of the trickle-down theory of economic well-being for everyone who is not a part of the financial “industry” or big business. What is so astounding is that trickle-down economic prosperity has been shown to be false in every single historical case where it has been broadly applied. We who live in North America live in societies “of the economy, for the economy, and by the economy.”

2. “Religionism” – The ameliorative effects of religion -- which make us more empathetic creatures and generally expand our humanness – are lost in the distentions of religionism. As Marx observed long ago (in his best philosophical work), religion can cause alienation – alienation from the societies we inhabit on earth as well as alienation from ourselves as full human beings. Some modern evangelical movements have, by their vigorous adherence to certitudes, created further social alienation. A siege mentality in which exclusive groups of the “saved” or the “righteous” need no longer care about the mundane, earthly lives of their fellow human beings, is not a healthy thing for a planet of 6 billion people. Yet we have large masses of people who have turned their backs to temporal society, expending their time trying to calculate the exact date of the rapture.

3. “Familyism” – Yes, I was also surprised to find this word had a meaning (to at least some people). As I understand it, some attach it to a movement associated with Senator Patrick Moynihan – his ideas on poverty, I assume -- that elevate the importance of the family and the maintenance of its strength above other social factors. This is all good in that healthy families lead to a healthy society. But we have, in the last thirty years at least, made family the be-all-and-end-all of life. Whether Margaret Thatcher actually said that “there is no such thing as society; there are only individuals and families,” is perhaps less important than the fact that many have acted on this precept. “We’re all right, Jack” is the saying that comes to my mind, not just in the realm of those who have succeeded economically but with those living in what they think are secure families. Like those entrapped in “religionism,” “familyism” includes a few, and exclues many. Or, in other words, the “family isn’t everything, it is the only thing” (to paraphrase Vince Lombardi’s famous words about winning in football). Even those with close friends and neighbours are more wont to erect the barricades of family than seek more broadly-based social reform. The world has grown to condemn ethnocentrism, but familyism is just ethnocentrism with a smaller circumference. Ironically, while modern science has done much to eradicate racist and ethnocentric arguments, it has inadvertently, through the promotion of ideas like “selfish genes” and the biological necessity of parents protecting their offspring before all else, promoted not only the primacy of the family but the family’s right to prior claims in all societal areas.

4. “Sciencism” – “Sciencism,” despite being antipathetic to “religionism,” is its mirror image. Sciencism is simply the belief that science will, given enough time, answer all questions and resolve all matters. There are many more adherents to this naïve belief than some may realize. Almost no form of public activity can claim authenticity without passing scientific standards. Science is the gate keeper and its near total victory can be seen in almost any modern university one wishes to inspect. Post-modernist resistance has been isolated and restricted to a few English departments and unemployed poets. Even the disciplines of History and Philosophy now claim that they are completely scientific. When I suggest to my friends that poetry might be a source of enlightenment and truth, I am given a look of condescension and amusement. The arts and literature, after all, are decorative. When I further suggest that devotees of “sciencism” would do well to reflect on irony, I am told that science will unravel all ironies as well.

It should come as no surprise to anyone, therefore, that the long 20^th century has been, and remains into the 21^st century, a totalitarian one. It did not end with Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein. It hardly needed, or needs, villains of this type to carry it forward. We will all quietly acquiesce in one totalitarian belief or another. Of course, there have been strenuous movements aside from post-modernism that have tried to offer alternatives. Those who retreated to the land and formed small, self-sufficient communities were not as crazy as we thought in the 1960s. Those who have tried to enhance small-scale capitalism among industrious women in Bangladesh or Africa have resurrected the idea of capitalism as a social benefit just as Adam Smith envisioned it. Missionaries and Humanists who try to encourage the dignity of all human beings, have had an ameliorative effect worldwide. But until we break the iron grip of the “isms” I describe above – not destroy those parts of them that are good and valuable but the totalitarian qualities they flaunt – we will not move on to another “historical” century or a better world.

Vulnerability

2009-12-19T16:18:00.003-07:00

We are all vulnerable. We think it a curse. It leads to doubt and fear and error. It makes us weak and susceptible to all manner of bad choices and tragedies. A recent replay on Bill Moyers’ Journal, regarding Lyndon Johnson’s private telephone conversations during the period leading toward the Vietnam tragedy, reminded me of the enormous implications of one man’s vulnerabilities. In his phone conversations, LBJ affirmed what every anti-war protestor knew: that the Vietnam conflict was a war of national liberation; that further involvement in this war would create a quagmire from which it would be hard to escape; that the war was not winnable. So, why did LBJ persist? Because, as he admitted privately in several phone calls, he would look weak if he did not prosecute the war, and worse, to his mind, he would be pilloried by the Republicans for this perceived weakness. We all know where his vulnerabilities led us, and who and how many paid the price. In the end, LBJ had to withdraw from the run for the presidency in 1968; he had been defeated. If he had resisted his vulnerabilities and pulled out of Vietnam, he might have lost the election, but at least his historical honor would have been preserved.

Tiger Woods’ recent display of human vulnerability is not to be found in his libido as much as in his bad judgement of character (i.e., his own character and that of his co-respondents); the tawdry leaps into bed with every cocktail waitress and wannabe actress within sight (Maureen Dowd in the NY Times cautions that men should avoid liaisons with young women who have 8 x 10 glossies to hand out); and, his far too easy (or non-existent?) conception about what constitutes virtue and fidelity. More than this, as a young man who demanded the privilege of privacy, who accepted the image of integrity necessary to represent a wide range of commercial products, and who claimed superiority to his other colleagues in a game which demands individual honesty on the course, he failed to live up to the persona he had consciously created around himself. Raised by doting parents, he learned the value of keeping everything within the family -- tight to his chest -- and with tenaciously pursuing one’s own success, and that success alone. Now, he is facing the hardest contest of his entire life, one that none of us ever completely wins – admitting and exposing one’s biggest weaknesses and vulnerabilities to others.

President Barack Obama has his own weaknesses and vulnerabilities, which we are not yet able to portray exactly. “Hope” now seems remote; “audacity” has given way to “timidity”; “Yes We Can” is now “maybe we can’t.” Rhetoric and reality are drifting farther apart in “America-the-political,” and the President seems to have no more immunity from this drift than any average politician.

On the other hand, if we were not vulnerable, we would be monsters. In a culture like ours, with its emphasis on autonomy, individuality, and personal agency, invulnerability would be an invitation to Thomas Hobbes’s “war of all against all.” Madeleine L’Engle (an American writer for young adults who believed in universal salvation) said: “When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable.” Vulnerability is what allows us to love one another. Marriages, partnerships, relationships, and friendships necessarily include identifying and accepting the vulnerabilities of those near us, and exposing the vulnerabilities we have to those we love. This is not easy. Most of us believe that we must pursue friendships without showing weakness. As Walter Anderson (an American painter with a lifelong struggle with mental illness) said, “We’re never so vulnerable than when we trust someone – but paradoxically, if we cannot trust, neither can we find love or joy.” Vulnerability equals humility, a humility that oddly leads in turn to human solidarity.

No season reminds me of our vulnerability as much as Christmas. For some, simple and pure Christian joy may push fears and doubts aside. For many, however, the holiday season raises expectations of happiness and community that are false, expectations that can never be fulfilled. It can easily become a season of failure and depression, as studies and statistics readily demonstrate.

If emotional vulnerability reigns among so many of us around the winter solstice, the poignancy of material vulnerability – of persons and sometime whole societies having poor or no housing, of having little food and inadequate clothing, of receiving no education, and possessing no vision of a personal future – is exponentially greater. The Copenhagen summit on climate change illustrated just how central and profound world poverty is in the discussion of any topic. We would all be well served to remember this, and do something about this material poverty not only in the holiday season but all year long as well. We would be best served to recognize, address, and mitigate insofar as possible those personal, public, and political vulnerabilities – the primary vulnerabilities of feelings and emotions, of compromised thoughts and actions -- which now hinder hope for both the world’s material and non-material future.

Beyond Hope?

2009-12-11T11:51:00.003-07:00

Recent events in U. S. politics and governance leave me feeling too defeated to write or speak or rant. So, I’ll let Henry Adams do it for me. Adams is writing about the period from the Gilded Age into the 1890s.

Henry Adams (1838-1918)

“We are here plunged in politics funnier than words can express. Very great issues are involved . . . . But the amusing thing is that no one talks about real interests. By common consent they agree to let these alone. We are afraid to discuss them. Instead of this the press is engaged in a most amusing dispute whether Mr. Cleveland had an illegitimate child and did or did not live with more than one mistress.” [just substitute Tiger Woods for Grover Cleveland]

“Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.” [The Republican Right]

“Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.” [All of the current Congress]

“Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central powerhouses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces.” [lobbyists for corporations]

“The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing.” [all television network news, including PBS]

“It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.” [Barack Obama?]

Reform in America is now a cause with such a remote chance of success as to make it unworthy of further discussion or consideration. We must drive for reforms elsewhere in the world, and hope that the best Americans will eventually be able to join necessary world-wide causes.

American Exceptionalism: History and Reality Denied

2009-11-30T14:05:00.002-07:00

Ignoring American claims of “exceptionalism” is as impossible as ignoring the U. S. as a whole. Exceptionalism, nationalism, and identity are welded together in the American psyche to form a shield that seems impervious to the facts of comparative history or the conclusions of rational discourse or even the mere use of close observation.*

A recent opinion page by Thomas L. Friedman in the NY Times resurrects some of the distended delusions that can follow from the over-deployment of the exceptionalist claim. In “Advice from Grandma” (Nov. 11, 2009), Friedman, to his great credit, concludes with an excellent prescription regarding citizenship and politics in order that the U. S. avoid a “suboptimal” future in the new competitive world economy. (I have offered a similar prescription at various times in my blog page). But, before offering this prescription, Friedman adds to some of the old canards about American exceptionalism. He begins by noting disapprovingly that some would claim that while the 19^th century was “owned” by Great Britain and the 20^th century was “owned” by the U. S., the 21^st century is to be owned by China. Unwilling to concede the last part of this equation, Friedman goes on to argue contrarily that the U. S. will still maintain dominance as a great world economic power through the special genius of American “imagination.” Citing the Apple iPod as an example, Friedman proceeds to argue that America “is still the world’s greatest dream machine.” This is American exceptionalism a la Friedman today.

So, there we have it, the latest in a long line of characteristics that presumably make the U. S. not only “exceptional” but perhaps even outside the normal constraints of history as well. In 1629, it was the John Winthrop’s claim of “a city upon a hill” for all to see (and admire) that established the first exceptionalist claim; that lasted less than a century. In the late 18^th century it was the American Revolution, which was deemed exceptional in that, unlike the French Revolution, it led to “republican virtue.” In the early 19^th century, with “republican virtue” all but invisible, it was Jacksonian democracy and individualism; and then it was American expansionism and “manifest destiny” or, in other words, the ability of the U. S. to steal lands formally belonging to Mexico. In the latter half of the 19^th century, Americans claimed they were exceptional in their brand of industrial expansion, and in their invention of the modern corporation. And, they crowed, the American “dream machine” was emblemized by the inventions of Thomas Edison -- who promised a major, life-changing, invention every few months of so, followed closely by the mass production genius of Henry Ford. In the late 20^th century, the continental empire of vast resources combined with “democratization” of “lesser” people, who had fallen under American military or economic suzerainty, that marked the rewards of American exceptionalism. By the mid-20^th century we were all watching a fifteen-minute show on television named “Industry on Parade”; the industry was all American, all of the time, and endless in its promise of growth and prosperity (a laughable visual image today). By the late 20^th century, we were told that American exceptionalism could be found in its ultra-advanced economy, which wedded finance, industry, service industries and technology in a way the rest of the world could only envy. By the end of the 20^th century, this exceptionalism had been pared back to claims of technological and educational superiority. Then came the tech stock collapse and the realization that Asians and Indians and “even” the Irish had developed far better educational and mathematical skills than Americans could match.

So, what is left? What is left are still vague claims of superiorities of American character. As hard as this is to believe, American exceptionalism remains as a substitute for history and historical understanding in the mind of even well-educated Americans (e.g., Friedman’s “imagination” claim). But the experience we have garnered from globalization and world trade is that all cultures have about the same abilities – given the chance for a level playing field – to succeed. If you want to see “imagination” at work, just watch any group of poor people around the world, who through their vast capacities for invention find ways to raise food, provide shelter to their families, and sometimes even to advance the education of their children.

Globalization is here to stay, and with it new ideas about law and rights and the protection of all of the world’s citizens in fundamental ways – health care, decent shelter, clean water, good food, education, security, and employment – must be addressed and instituted. Exceptionalism is the last bastion of the 19^th century nation-state. It is the moral equivalent of claims about racial superiority and inferiority. And, we can only avoid global ecological and environmental disasters if we abandon exceptionalisms of all types. If the world community can make any progress on these fronts, we will have all made ourselves more exceptional than any people who ever lived in the past.

* I have addressed this issue academically in, “ ‘And We Burned Down the White House, Too’: American History, Canadian Undergraduates, and Nationalism,” The History Teacher 37, no. 3 (May 2004); and, re-published, in part, as “American History, Canadian Undergraduates, and Nationalism” in Carl Guarneri and James Davis, eds., Teaching American History in a Global Context (2008).

"Mac vs PC"

2009-11-18T19:27:00.003-07:00

We have all seen the “I am a Mac, and I’m a PC” television ads. Justin Long (“Mac” – a skilled actor who retains a boyish appearance and cultivates a suave yet youthful demeanor) and John Hodgman (“PC” – a wildly inventive and always slightly over-weight comedian) stand together against a blank white background. “PC” usually opens with seemingly limitless optimism about the product he represents, only to be disappointed, and then embarrassed when his latest defense of the PC and its operating systems and its applications is utterly undermined. Of course, the actual superiority of Apple computers challenges credulity, and we are all encouraged to wink at some of the near falsehoods at the fuzzy edges of these ads – falsehoods somehow made unimportant in the general spirit of humor and entertainment.

It is these ads, in fact, that suggest the first of three observations I want to make about how Mac computers have come to be symbolically representative of important and controversial elements coursing through contemporary North American culture. For many decades now, the “hard sell” approach to advertising has been revitalized. Billy Mays’s irritating voice (now silenced by his early death) and carnival hucksters like Vince Shlomi (“Shamwow”) are just the grotesque edge of the hard sell approach. The novel “Winesburg, Ohio” suggested long ago that Americans were attracted to grotesques (although one thinks that Sherwood Anderson did not really have these characters fully in mind). Fifty years ago, all of my teenaged friends and acquaintances sneered at the hokey lies of the hard sell. How could anyone succumb to lies and rants of these men (yes, they were all men; watch the TV show “Mad Men”)? We all loved the VW ads or any product that had even a hint of self-deprecation in their message.

The interesting thing about the “Mac” ads is the subtle soft sell underlying the blunt implication that Macs are better than PCs. This soft sell is founded on the underlying decency of both central characters – “Mac” and “PC.” They meet like well-meaning acquaintances, if not quite friends. In fact, they seem to genuinely like each other. There is no muscle flexing and fist-pumping. “Mac” cringes at “PC’s” humiliations and sympathizes with his failures even as “PC” seeks to convince his counterpart of at least some redeeming qualities to his product. True dialogue is attempted. “Mac” remains open to “PC’s” repeated entreaties. The message remains that a Mac is a better computer but that there is a place for PCs in this world as well. There is a hint of the old idea of “market share” as opposed to a Hobbesian war of “all against all.” One would almost think we were back in the 1960s. It is these Mac ads, through their contrast with standard hard-sell ads, that reminds us of the relentless marketing barrage we are exposed to in contemporary times – a barrage that is often aggressive, visceral, and visually manipulative.

The continued existence of Mac computers leads to my second observation: this one is about the centripetal forces of what may start out as capitalism but become something else. No one can agree on the “market share” of Apple computers. Estimates range from 3% to over 20%. It all depends on what you are counting. Nevertheless, Apple computers will never dominate the computer market – not even the personal computer market. This is a consequence of clear forces (not truly “market” ones) that were applied early on in the history of computers. Microsoft on created an early monopoly on operating system software. With no large competitors in the business market, they established the dominance of PCs in every medium-to-large workplace. All institutions had to follow. In my university, only two or three departments (my history department was one) used computers early on. We all used Apple computers. In the late 1980s, as computers became ubiquitous, institutions such as ours adopted Microsoft’s operating systems and IBM hardware. Those of us who clung to Mac’s (and that would be everyone who started with one) were marginalized in many ways. We had more trouble communicating through the university system. We had far, far less tech support. Our then president even told one unit manager that she needed to get rid of “that garbage” (Macs) that she had been using in her unit. Whether it wants to or not, Apple can never intercede in a market that is so interlinked. Much of what passes for capitalism is in fact collusion at best and monopoly at worst. There are no ways, not even anti-trust legislation, to stop this juggernaut, and the experience of Apple computers proves it.

Last week I attended a lecture on why we should still read Charles Darwin’s “Origin of the Species." The speaker pointed out that evolutionary theory has advanced substantially from its origins in the 19^th century, and that many contingencies – genetic, molecular, cultural and human – intercede to modify evolutionary change. For some odd reason, I thought of Mac computers. If some kind of genetic fitness were the sole governing element, Mac computers would be the overwhelming favorite of all personal computer users. Their operating systems, especially from OS X through “Snow Leopard,” are superior in every way. They are more reliable, intuitive, and sophisticated. The Apple operating systems have better graphics than Microsoft systems, and always have had. The artistic design of Mac personal computers (even some of the retro models) have always been far in advance of the gray-flannel-suit appearance of PCs. So, why has Apple not dominated and driven out the inferior species? Instead, it is as if Neanderthal wiped out humans. Some of the answers are suggested above in regard to faux capitalism. Other answers are cultural. Apple designers – especially Steve Wasniak – just seemed too much on the cultural margins of North American life. Macs were too “artsy.” They had too little gravitas. Macs seemed to be the technological equivalent of youthful rebellion. For a highly – and I DO mean highly – conformist culture like that in the U. S. and Canada, Macs just seemed too trivial. [Apple Ipods would be another matter since they were, initially, not part of an interconnected business culture. They did not do our work. Ipods merely entertained. (Although all of that, along with Iphones and Blackberries are going to change the notions of frivolity attached to MP3 players and Ipods)]. Evolution, therefore, is a lot more complex, based on a lot more SHIFTING contingencies, than many scientists would like to believe.

Oh, and I guess it is clear that I have always used Apple computers.

In Defense of Youth

2009-11-06T17:12:00.000-07:00

A recent article in the National Post (Oct. 17, 2009) by Robert Fulford, the celebrated literary editor and journalist, has been gnawing at me since I read it. Entitled, “The Teenage-ification of Manhood,” it was the last in a series of articles by the Post regarding the tendency for modern young people – and too often not so young people -- to become adults at a later and later age, and often not to “grow up” (whatever that means) at all. It is a cruel column, and I dare say the preceding editorials on this subject, were equally mean. There is no need to rebut Fulford’s and the Post’s claims about a long road to adulthood, but there is a need to challenge just about everything else.

As usual, there is a problem with his use of words. For example, Fulford identifies “teenagers” as a social group (now apparently permanent) that emerged after the 1940s. These teenagers, Fulford sneers, are made up of “self-important newcomers” who have constituted themselves as something other than “just adults-in-waiting.” Fulford nods at retailers and overly generous parents as culprits in the creation of this class but insinuates throughout that teenagers themselves are responsible for their continued shallowness and selfishness, for being insouciant slackers who refuse the responsibilities the world has thrust upon them. The truth, of course, is that consumer-capitalism almost single-handedly created and single-handedly continues to maintain, the teenage condition. As can be seen by looking at developed and developing and so-called underdeveloped cultures, the crass consumerist and capitalist underpinnings of modernization and popular culture are all that support the continued existence of the sociological phenomena called the “teenager.” Without these underpinnings, we might resurrect the less derogatory, more benign, more agreeable terms of “young people” or “youth.”

Fulford also implies that to become and remain “adult” is the goal of human existence. It is the ultimate stage of accomplishment in one’s journey through life. An “adult” is superior to a child or an adolescent or a teenager. All conditions and stages of life other than adulthood, he and many other people unthinkingly suggest, are precedent to adulthood and are therefore necessarily incomplete and flawed stages when we consider them in isolation from the goal of adulthood. The calculus is clear: to be an adult is to be mature; to be mature is to be virtuous; to be virtuous is to be rational, emotionally composed, and willing to take responsibility for one’s actions.

This calculus for virtuous adulthood and deficient young people simply does not hold true. In fact, it might be stood on its head. We might say, without much exaggeration, that most adults are persons who have made up their minds about everything important. They are people who have fixed political and social and cultural and moral views. They have stopped growing intellectually and often morally. They have settled for their job, for their old opinions, for their old prejudices. They have given up and have often become cynical about most of the value-laden aspects of the world around them.

We might say, without much exaggeration, that most youth are persons who continue to explore different things in life. They are open to political, social, moral, and cultural change and improvement. They continue to grow intellectually and often morally. They have not settled on an occupation; they abandon old opinions for better new ones; they have not given up.

As for “maturity,” it strikes me that adults and youth (not infants and small children, of course) are about equal in the employment of rationality, emotional composure, and taking responsibility for their own actions. In my personal experience with university students, I believe that “youth” outscores “adults” in all of these categories.

But the condemnation of today’s adults must go further than that. People of my generation (I am on the cusp of being a “baby-boomer,” depending on which demographer you care to cite, and I was a “teenager”) have had many of the advantages of today’s youth, in regard to recreation and possessions and cultural opportunities. Robert Fulford and I have hardly suffered. In addition to that, we have prospered in our adulthood. We received excellent educations at no, or little, financial cost to ourselves. As “adults” we were able to buy houses and stereos and nice automobiles and sometimes even take comfortable vacations. Some of us are even secure in retirement.

Only those who are really old, those who no longer have any contact with vibrant youth, can have the gall to claim that young people are avoiding adulthood in order to continue their lives of play and irresponsibility. When I was first in graduate school I was sometimes accused (by individuals or by the press) of remaining in university to avoid “growing up.” Then, as Vietnam exploded, I was accused (by the same types of people) of remaining in university in order to avoid the draft (I was 1A through my grad school years and could have been called up at any time; I foolishly would have gone). Young people today have it worse. They are told to get good careers and to anchor themselves by establishing their own homes while at the same time society tells them they will never have “permanent” jobs but must continually re-tool themselves for ever-shifting workplace demands.

Incredibly, many young people attempt to conform to this contorted culture and to find their place in this near-impossible economic environment. I know of many students who have a university degree and also have acquired a practical craft skill. I know of many others who have one or two undergraduate degrees and usually a post-graduate degree. I even know some who have multiple graduate degrees. Many of these young people also have extensive volunteer experience. Almost all of them have enormous -- corruptly proffered and enforced, I might add -- student loans (for which they are blamed by “adults” who had to pay little on no tuition themselves). Remarkably, almost all have accommodated themselves – without anger – to having less hope for success and resources than those generations who preceded them (you know, those “adults” who have shifted the blame to the phantom character flaws of youth today). Many young people, of course, have been unable to overcome such the ludicrous Sisyphean challenge placed before them and must eke out what satisfactions they can in life even if they must prey on their parents good will to do so.

So, if you want to retard the aging process quit categorizing and criticizing all young people. Start spending some time with the young people around you. You will become more rational, emotionally composed, and, in the process, you might take more responsibility for yourself and the societal flaws you helped to bring about.

Three Words to Banish

2009-10-24T14:24:00.001-06:00

My friend Erin Phillips recently stated in her blog that she wished the word “closure . . . could be banned from the English language.” She is perfectly right. Unless a person is using the word closure to describe an archaic and arcane political maneuver employed to end a parliamentary debate (usually spelled “cloture”), it should have no place in the language of whole human beings. Why? Because of how the common usage and meaning of the word “closure” has evolved. As I remember it, “closure” flowed out of the lexicon of psychological counseling into mainstream usage a few decades ago as a recommendation for those unable to regain their footing in life because of some loss (death) or personal tragedy. It was directed – it seemed – at those who felt too much, those who were too sensitive. Now, it has too often come to mean: forget your troubling loss or tragedy; “move on”; or, simply and coldly, “get over it.” Original intent has been set on its head. Closure can be seen as serving the most simplistic and selfish purposes. Put the deaths of members of your family behind you – that is, forget them. Forget those events that have caused you hurt. In short, do not admit tragedy into your life. But to be human, of course, is to confront tragedy, to recognize its inevitable role in our lives. It is only through doing so that we acquire any emotional depth, any understanding of the complexities of existence, and any appreciation for the most interesting and unique characteristic of the human condition – irony.

While attending a meeting recently that dealt in part with how the City of Lethbridge might best decide the future use of a segment of its downtown “civic block,” a City official assured everyone that “all of the stakeholders” involved in this issue would be consulted. Stakeholder is another archaic word – this time from the early modern era (16^th – 17^th centuries, that is) – resurrected by capitalist ideologues over the last thirty years to supplant the term citizen. In keeping with neo-liberal economic theory (read: right-wing economic and political beliefs), “stakeholders” are those folks privileged, as John Locke argued, to have exclusive political interests and rights in society. Not only that, but Locke – to the great comfort of the modern right-wing – also encouraged “stakeholders” to seldom employ their political rights because “the least government was the best government.” Graduates of “management” schools or faculties love this word as a substitute for the messy business of democracy – which lets all of the riff-raff into making public decisions. Thus, “stakeholder” pushes aside three centuries of democratic progress, and subverts words like “citizen,” “civic-mindedness,” and “community or public interest.”

Have you been to your dentist lately? You know, the one you have come to admire and trust. Has he begun a “procedure” with the words – “this may cause a little discomfort”? For me, discomfort is finding the blanket has slipped off of me during the night. Discomfort is discovering that the wine you are drinking has more the undertones of tannins than of berries. Discomfort is that sweater that doesn’t quite fit right. An injection into your gums of novacaine or a root canal, are not “discomfort”; they are pain. As in our avoidance of tragedy (in relationship to “closure”) or our avoidance of the great-unwashed mass of citizens (in relationship to “stakeholding”), discomfort allows us to live the lie that we need no longer suffer pain. It is the soft, daily life equivalent of more profoundly disturbing words like – “collateral damage.” It is not quite Orwell’s “double-speak,” but discomfort is a word, along with its many kin, employed with a sleight-of-hand directed at a purpose that is fully and completely manipulative.

In my experience, everyone has several words that make them wince or protest. Computer language, with its catalogue of words now forced into the service of new meanings – e.g., input, download, boot – is a frequent villain among purists. And, ubiquitous phrases changed for no apparent reason – “step up to the plate” rather than the original “step up”; or “at that point in time” rather than the original “at that time” – can be just irritating to some of us (read: me). The point is: word usage usually says a great deal about the pretenses or the politics we embrace.

Nova Scotia

2009-10-09T07:41:00.007-06:00

We are on the train leaving Nova Scotia. It has been some time since we took the train, and some of the contrasts with modern air travel are striking and ironic. During a flight, we see almost nothing, except endless sky, or a land or seascape that is hardly moving. Life is suspended; we are unengaged in almost every way. Narrow aisles, narrow seats, narrow airline management leave us feeling antisocial and trapped. Our privacy has vanished – often in the most embarrassing ways. Anxious for terra firma, our sole attention is directed toward counting off the minutes and hours before we land. The monotony, boredom, and lack of stimulation inside the hull of an airplane are akin to pre-civilized human existence, where we all huddle uncomfortably beside a weak and stinking fire waiting for the weather to clear so that we can move and hunt and eat. Aside from takeoffs and landings, air travel is visually and sensually flat and static. Flying, in short, stimulates few of our modern senses.

The length of time required to get to your destination on a long train trip discourages anxieties over time, and compels us to accept that we are on a journey. We do not have the sense, as we do in air travel, of being a mere object thrown like a dart at a destination. We tend to remain social animals, even if we engage only with our own traveling companion(s). We retain a sense of privacy and self, even a sense of human agency, that is absent in commercial passenger flight. During daylight hours, at least, our modern brains and eyes -- educated by film and television – trace scenes rapidly flashing before us with familiar acceptance. The “big screen” windows on the train -- emulating modern movies and television -- contrast tellingly with the postage-stamp portals of the airplane, through which we see only lonely space or still picture images of distant, unreal, city and landscapes.

What can be said about Nova Scotia that everyone, and all of the “literature” about Nova Scotia, has not already proclaimed? It has a charming coastline. Its landscapes and seascapes blend the wild and pastoral in perfect balance. It preserves its environment and its historic past. Its residential architecture seems placed just right for all passersby to admire and enjoy. (This is a play on June’s observation that all of the sheep in Devon, England, seem to have been positioned ideally for the perfect pastoral scene). Nova Scotia’s beauty is all packaged just right, in proportions manageable in ideal gradation to the foot or the eye or the automobile. And, if you need a change of scenery, a thirty-minute car ride pretty well guarantees any change you seek.

Regions vary extensively enough to make us want to see it all (or most of it). It has small towns with character, and with characters. Its residents seem genuine andcomfortable in their friendliness toward strangers. And, it has enough seafood to allow the formulation of meaningful gourmand comparisons regarding how every restaurant cooks and serves its chowder, scallops, and haddock.

But I am drawn to two other aspects of our holiday in Nova Scotia that return to my mind again and again. First, we are here in the fall. That is, we are in an area of North America where fall is a real and full season. I had forgotten all of the feelings that fall, with its colours and crisp air and mature beauty, evoke in me. At one time, it evoked a happy anticipation of a new school year – at least when I was very young, and then again when I was an undergraduate. As I sometimes reflect either joyfully or sadly, the return-of –the-school-year emotion no longer resonates in me. I suspect that for most persons, fall is mainly a harbinger of winter. It points toward ends, not hopeful beginnings. It is the last call at the pub.

But when I am in an area that has a real fall – not a region where summer’s plants are all ruthlessly and pre-maturely murdered in the first frosts, or where snow appears so suddenly that one feels embarrassed trying to take in their lawn furniture while still wearing shorts and sandals – I am filled with a sense of romantic languor and the satisfactory completion of things. It is the best of seasons for food. Summer menus and winter comfort foods are both appropriate, with fresh vegetables taking their rightful primary place on the table. It is a powerfully romantic season. Sentiments felt through the year are heightened and made more alert. Fall is the harvest, in many ways, of both what the land offers up and our best human empathy and emotions (what the 18^th century called – “sensibility”). It is fulfillment, not end.

Nova Scotia also reminds me of the 1950s. It must be admitted that as we retreat further and further from the 1950s, our appreciation of that long decade (really 1948 through 1962, in my historical calculation of periods) diminishes. What an ugly time the 1950s were in terms of public politics and affairs, and social relations (at least in the North America, and especially the U. S., where I grew up). Cold War hysteria, the McCarthy era with its very real assault on decent people, political conservatism, the beginnings of modern consumerism and greed, overt racism and bigotry, the suppression of more than half of the population (women) in a patriarchy more powerful than at any time before in North American history, and many more issues are rightly subject to our disdain. The 1950s as historical antecedent to the second half of the 20^th century and the early 21^st century comes across as truly irresponsible and reprehensible. So, when the right-wing seeks to return to the 1950s, we are easily repelled by the prospect.

I like to think, however, that even that 20% of Americans, and a far lower percentage of Canadians, who are right-wing, are imagining a different 1950s. The 1950s that Nova Scotia brings back to my mind is, first, one of modest expectations. Most folks in the 1950s, at least where I came from, experienced some sense of employment security, and some sense that they could cloth and educate the kids, fix the house, and drive an automobile that was reliable. I get that same sense of economic equilibrium between anxious poverty and excessive wealth in Nova Scotia. There is an underlying acceptance of things economic in this. No one expects a house with four bathrooms and a whirlpool bath or a Lexus in their driveway, and with those expectations out of mind, they can enjoy what they have. They can also live to a rhythm that is not frantic and distracting. The 1950s (at its best) and Nova Scotia today also seem to demonstrate a level of family and friendship interaction in which people were (are) more attentive to one another. While patriarchy may linger in the background (it did not in my family, even in the 1950s), people then (and today in Nova Scotia) seem to communicate better than we do now. Relationships seemed more complementary and not, as today, either formal or singular and private (i.e., relationships that are binary rather than communal). Anomie, although an emergent characteristic of the 1950s, was less pronounced than it is today. In the 1950s (and what little I have seen of Nova Scotia today), there was (is) a greater desire to live and act in a community of family and friends and acquaintances in a seamless way, rather than compartmentalize all of one’s relationships.

This is all wildly subjective and speculative on my part, of course, and that is why a blog is so much fun. This specific blog is also wistful. But I believe wistfulness is not solely negative. It incorporates a sense of what was or could be again as well. And, our capacity for wistfulness suggests that we need not think that alienation, estrangement, material greed, and consumerism are our only options.

Willful Ignorance and Its Consequences

2009-09-02T12:31:00.003-06:00

While most of the people I know may allow others to make outrageous “truth claims” out of whimsy or sport, we do not accept “truth claims” based on clear and demonstrable ignorance. In consequential matters, we expect a quality of intellectual curiosity, informed opinion, and mature reflection. And, we assume that no one will fall back on so-called “received knowledge” or “blind faith” arguments as a means of ending all further debate.

This is not the nature of the today’s culture, however, where a series of unique circumstances has led us to allow others not only to employ willful ignorance in debate but to take seriously the absurdities of willful ignorance as well. Here are a few brief examples of how some modern historical factors have led to this condition. Some of these are sinister in their calculation; some are the consequence of distensions or corruptions of well-intended cultural change.

1. Modern corporations have manufactured “truth sets” about themselves and their products that involve constructed “realities” in which societal truths are distorted in order to advantage the corporations profit motive. For example, auto companies, through the design of their products and their advertising, promote a sweeping ideal of the good and successful life – a life centered on the automobile.

2. Radical Christianity today has “dolled-up” traditional beliefs, added a guitar player and folksongs to create a glaze of modernity, converted sports arenas into churches to emphasize the popularity of their beliefs, re-done the message of “The Fundamentals” so that “name it and claim it” greed becomes God’s wish, re-invented Middle Eastern History (e.g., John Hagee), and trimmed down the real sources of truth sources to one -- The Bible. The consequence is a contrived alternate universe of belief that appears doubt free and complete in its simple answers to complex problems.

2. Modern politicians have lost almost all sense of public responsibility under the bright light of “celebrity” status and under the easy pressure of corporations with whom they are familiar and even chummy and to whom they are beholden. “Stakeholders,” they willingly admit, trump “citizens” in every important way.

3. Post-modernism, which has legitimately questioned the perspectives from which truths are often derived, has fallen under the pen of acolytes not up to the task of retaining the complexity and integrity of the best intellectual claims of post-modernism. As a result, all truth has become all too relative to all too many people.

4. The decent quest for ethnic, racial, and cultural equality over the past three-quarters-of-a-century has been corrupted into an argument on behalf of a wide range of behaviors and truth-claims based on ethnicity or race or cultural distinction, despite the fact that some of these claims can be authentically challenged by arguments from perspectives other than group identity.

5. Modern education, in its noble attempt to democratize education and bring everyone inside the tent of knowledge, has succumbed to a bizarre reductionism in which “anyone’s opinion on anything is as good as anyone else’s.” Thus, we now have both a juvenile and an adult population who, several times a day at least, bring an end to a conversation or discussion with one word – “whatever.”

During the so-called “town meetings” in the United States this past summer, we saw some extraordinary examples of “willful ignorance.” Bald racist statements, threatened violence, and a shout-down-the-opposition style of free speech employed to deny intelligent discourse and the right of others to speak freely were standard fare. Unable to articulate an argument or use historical examples correctly, “socialism” was easily confused with “totalitarianism” (a word too big for the ranters to handle in any case) and public interest with “communism.” Energized by some assumed “higher truth,” many of this right-wing crowd showed no temerity or embarrassment in telling the citizens of other countries (especially Great Britain and Canada) that they suffered under failed health care systems and that socialized health care was to blame (i.e., “universal, single-payer health care”; most of them seemed incapable of comprehending that complex concept well enough to delineate what they actually hated).

The media’s favorite example of opposition to the current Congress’s health care reform was voiced by a woman who – by chance, I think – began her peroration against health care reform assuming the role of an indignant sufferer who already had had something highly invasive thrust upon her. She ended with the usual “socialism” and “Russian dictatorship” references. Two things interested me in her brief “speech”: her crescendo of anger and her admission at the very beginning of her rant that she did not usually have much interest in, or knowledge of, politics or political affairs. No commentators seemed bothered by either her rage or her admission of ignorance of “political” matters. Journalists and ordinary citizens alike have no cultural language to initiate challenges to the heart-felt opinions of person’s like her– no matter how grossly absurd and incorrect those opinions are. Emotion and theatre trump sanity and reason every time.

No realm of human knowledge is so exemplary in exposing willful ignorance as the extensive lack of political knowledge among members of a democracy. Perhaps I read too much George Orwell when I was younger because it was Orwell who convinced me that everything is political. He made that claim on several occasions in clear prose and implied it in almost everything he wrote. Like many others of his generation, he also got to see how willful ignorance of political matters and head-in-the-sand morality led to the horrors of WWII and its dress rehearsal for WWII – the Spanish Civil War. In my own experience, students (and others) used to tell me individually that they “were not political.” I usually tried to convince each of them that everyone, through either action or passivity, was political. In class, I would rant more damningly on the subject.

No society -- no matter how rich and secure – can afford the luxury of willful ignorance. Yet, that is pretty much where popular politics stands in the U. S. In an earlier blog, I compared the right-wing campaign against health care reform -- supported by willfully ignorant followers -- to the processes at work in Nazi Germany in WWII. Calling someone or something “Fascist” or “Nazi” has become a hackneyed cliché, and almost all listeners and readers dismiss the speaker or author for employing mere hyperbole when those epithets are used. For that reason, and to avoid being willfully ignorant and irresponsibly angry myself, I propose to argue that a substantial number of people on the far right of American politics are indeed acting in a fascistic manner, a manner that would be at home in 1921 Italy and 1933 Germany. There are caveats, of course. Not all of what is happening in opposition to American health care reform fits that definition. But too much of it does, and that ranting opposition is not simply the result of the heartless economic interests of corporate America or the political interests of the Republican Party. This is not to say that some “putsch” has begun. But I am claiming that radical right-wing behavior has taken on the attributes of something more than colorful extremist speech – speech at which some may laugh (e.g., “The Daily Show”) and others simply weep.

Let me elaborate by referring to two specific essays that address the issues at hand: one by Umberto Eco, regarding Fascism; the other by Erik Hoffer, the very popular author of The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951). Eco is a professor of semiotics – not political ideology. Hoffer, a longshoreman and not technically a philosopher, thought and wrote extensively on the psychology of adherents to mass movements of all sorts. I am drawn to both partly because they employ historical experience as a legitimate guide and partly because, in regard to the subject of blind believers and followers, they considered these issues from the viewpoint of public intellectuals, not as academics with some puny professional thesis to promote.

In a small article in the New York Review of Books (1995) entitled Ur, or Eternal Fascism, Eco laid out fourteen specific “features” of fascism. To call someone or something fascist, Eco noted, was to apply Wittengenstein’s observation that games cannot be precisely defined by firm rules but must be understood as having broadly shared characteristics which constitute an ineffable “family resemblance” to one another. Fascism, for Eco, depends on a similar set of resemblances. It is politically, ideologically and philosophically “discombobulated,” he says, but it is firmly fixed in many of its emotional manifestations. Of the fourteen general points that Eco identified with eternal fascism, at least ten apply to the all-too-visible angry right-wing in the U. S. today. And, as Eco argued, of his fourteen points “it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”

Hoffer’s arguments complement Eco’s. No matter what their belief, Hoffer claimed, “true believer’s” are alike in believing there is “one and only one truth.” Eco also saw his eternal fascists as people for whom “truth has been spelled out once and for all.” Ironically, having been given the right to be taken seriously as a consequence of modern conditions of relativism, these people insist on absolute truth. True believers tend to follow a few leaders, Hoffer observed, and they are notable in their lack of humility.

In relationship to today’s angry right-wing extremists opposing health care reform (and many other “liberal” things), Eco and Hoffer offer some enlightenment.

1. The “town-meeting” extremists are completely uninterested in rational discourse or attempting to discover solutions to problems apparent to the rest of the population. They are not open to argument. They make absurd claims and charges. But, as Hoffer noted, “Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense and sublime truths are equally potent in readying people for self-sacrifice if they are accepted as the sole, eternal truth.” Eco more subtly defines this as attachment to a “syncretic” culture in which internal contradictions and incompatibilities may appear but in which the dominance of some “primeval truth” will always prevail.

2. The “town meeting” extremists and the vast array of right-wing radio talk show hosts are angry and filled with hate. Why? Because, as Eco points out, “disagreement is treason” in eternal fascism. Disagreement implies “diversity,” something they also oppose, as can be seen in their hatred of Muslims and Mexicans, and so on and on. Fascists have a “natural fear of difference,” Eco notes, and they may pretend that the mother country is under siege. Hoffer, too, observes that attempts to shame or belittle or poke fun at such extremists does not work and is simply “more likely to stir their arrogance and rouse in them a reckless aggressiveness.” Just think of Rush Limbaugh, who DOES speak for this minority, and apply the above.

3. Right-wing political and economic extremists proclaim that all they want is freedom. “Freedom” has been their mantra in all debates, despite the fact that the freedom they advocated in health care meant more dictatorial authority in the hands of their insurers, and likely more costs to everyone in society, including the economy in general. But the “freedom” they speak of is not one that involves toleration of speech or press or political association. They make no apology for opposing representative government, another of Eco’s conditions of “eternal fascism.” Why this apparent internal contradiction of being “for freedom” but against its practice? Hoffer contends that true believers find that affective “freedom is an irksome burden . . . We join a mass movement to escape from individual responsibility, or, in the words of an ardent young Nazi, ‘to be free from freedom.’”

4. These right-wing adherents offer no complex solutions to complex issues because they are not interested in being autonomous human beings (truly free persons) struggling with difficult, sometimes irresolvable problems. Their “’Leader’ pretends to be their interpreter,” Eco argues. So, all that these right-wing followers have to do is use a few words that they believe are so obnoxious as to turn people away from any reform – words like “communism” and “socialism” and, laughably, “liberalism.” “All of the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax,” Eco claimed, “in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.” The final word on this matter belongs to Hoffer in his description of the antithesis of the true believer:

“Free men are aware of the imperfection of human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity.”

The right-wing in the U. S. today should not be taken lightly. Allusions to them as “fascistic” are not entirely misplaced. The cruelties of Mussolini and the Nazis need not be repeated for fascist tendencies to be in play. And, we should all heed Hoffer’s understanding of the truly free person. In doing so, however, we must take “willful ignorance” as a serious threat and a social disease that must be cured insofar as possible.

As postscript, here are a couple of recent quotations peeled off the internet on the matters above:

“ Hopefully, the attempt to restore 1953 America will not turn into an attempt to impose 1933 Germany.” (JohnG – Paul Krugman, “Comments of the Moment” list, Aug. 30, 2009, NYTimes)

“ If ignorance is bliss, why are these people so angry?” (Len Kaminsky, cited in Paul Krugman “Comments of the Moment” list, Aug. 30, 2009, NYTimes).

No More Good Will

2009-08-11T21:01:00.000-06:00

Barack Obama came to the presidency of the U. S. not so much as the next liberal president or the next reforming president but as the “good will” president. His invitation to “good will” cooperation is ending as badly as possible. With his inability to find a “good will” purchase point from which to lever improvements in American society and culture, we may be seeing the end of the worthwhile remnants of American democracy.

This is not to say that “democracy” has been the most important thing to Americans in their short past, despite their wish to have-their-cake-and-eat-it-too by basking in the moral glow associated with democracy. Americans have always been more advocates of “freedom” than democracy (“Live Free or Die” reads the New Hampshire license plate; something one would expect to read as a tattoo on an Hell’s Angel’s biker rather than as a state motto). They have also been more “cowboy capitalists” than democrats (capitalism meaning only the right to make a lot of money and then restrict the free market in order to retain that wealth; yes, whether we are talking about persons or corporations, that is the American definition of capitalism; let Adam Smith turn over and over and over in his grave).

But now something more precious yet has been lost. What has been lost is “good will” -- the willingness to let policies be debated, for people to disagree, for one’s ideas to be defeated by the will of an informed majority, and above all, to trust one’s fellow citizens. The reasons for this failure are several. Destroyers of “good will” believe that there is only ONE truth. Enemies of “good will” do not believe that there is such a thing as an informed majority, and whether they are the current majority or the current minority they will not agree to any policy or action that defies their own particular views – in full. The rest of us display little effort in destroying their “willful ignorance.” Hate-mongering “citizens” wear their ignorance as a badge of honour and never appeal to reason while we willingly respect their right to vent their spleen rather than spit upon their offensive ideas and positions. In an earlier time, everyone would turn away from such lunatics with disgust and never, ever heed their claims. Because these creatures of hate promote certainties about life (and afterlife for that matter) that are based on “received knowledge” – that is, not knowledge at all but blind belief – trust of one’s fellow citizens is irrelevant. In fact, there no longer is such a thing as “citizen.” Now we have “stakeholders” (those who hold financial stock in the enterprise, not those who were born and live in a community).

The prospect could not be more appalling. Some like to see the problem as “Republicans” or “right-wingers” or “free-marketers” or “pro-lifers” or “evangelical rightists.” And, we apply labels like “fascists” to these people and groups, somehow trying to relieve ourselves of their presence and ugly brutishness by dismissing them as advocates of an antiquated and rejected way of thinking. We are wrong. They are worse than “fascists.” “Kristallnacht” has a close cousin in “town meetings” where gutless screamers shout down Congressmen/women who have organized these meetings to get “input” on the issue of health care. Goebells has nothing on a radio announcer who thinks that a few liberals should be left alive so that we can remind ourselves of what we should avoid. National Socialism’s emphasis on intelligent, healthy Aryan youth has nothing on a society that does not believe that millions of their own citizens should receive preventative and rudimentary health care.

If some vigorous (not violent, not hateful) response is not made very, very soon, Americans are headed for something much worse than second-class world economic status. They are headed for a persistent culture of “hate,” something akin to what has existed in Northern Ireland and still exists in Israel/Palestine. The not-so-Holy Land will have a New World counterpart.

Chronology

2009-08-07T15:46:00.005-06:00

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading Anthony Grafton’s Worlds Made By Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West. Among other themes, Grafton’s essays consider the wide intellectual interests of Renaissance figures, interests that they believed were not particularized and distinct but integrated and closely related. In one essay he discusses, Johannes Kepler – the brilliant scientist who introduced the idea of elliptical orbits of the planets (pgs. 114-36). Kepler, it seems, had a passion for chronology, not quite what we today would call “history,” but rather the dull, plodding ordering of people and events. Why? Because Kepler knew that knowledge was constructed over time in a particular order and that that order was critical in discovering truths and dismissing myths about the natural order and the universe.

Kepler was battling what modern advocates of evolutionary science have to fight – opponents who find the hand of God in creating complex things out of nothing, or find God intervening capriciously in the evolution of knowledge, or those who think that the past is made up of quixotic jumps from one particular set of circumstances to an utterly different set of circumstances. Evolution is about the order of things, and getting that order of things right. Whether evolution is gradual or subject to surges (à la Stephen Jay Gould), it is a matter of chronological order.

My son, Ike, and I were discussing this on the phone the other day. When I told him that I was struggling with writing a little essay on this subject, he got enthusiastic, saying that he, too, was frequently troubled by the realization that most people have no idea about “what followed what” in history. Ike was an anthropology/archaeology major in university and thus may feel Kepler’s concern more intimately than even I do. (I say this because my interest in history is less with chronologies than with asking relevant questions about some period in the past so that the answers might enlighten us about who we are in the present). Chronology is more dogged (and I might say more boring) than that, even though it is an absolutely essential underpinning in order to address the things I think need to be considered in history.

After reflecting on this problem more, let me pose this issue of chronology in two ways – one way that is essentialist and the other way that is relativistic.

1. We need to understand how one thing necessarily follows another in time.

2. We need to realize the relative nature of time in regard to different aspects of the natural and social world..

By now you are saying, these are trite truisms – as perhaps they are. But, do you have a firm and extensive grasp about how things have evolved over time? Do you understand the necessity of Greek and Roman philosophy to the evolution of early Christianity, to the Renaissance, to the emergence of the modern world? Do you know when the modern world began, and what the chronological landmarks of increased modernization and modernism are? Do you understand the necessity of the long evolution of Catholic doctrine as a condition for the emergence of the Reformation? Do you understand that the Enlightenment was built on a broad foundation of ideas that emerged in the 16^th and 17^th centuries? Do you realize that the rise of a “national people” in the American and French Revolutions was not some idea that suddenly came to everyone as just common sense but was built on foundations that included, for example, Bolingbroke’s reflections about what made a “patriot king”? Do you remember that Marx called the rise of the capitalist “bourgeoisie” the most revolutionary thing that had happened in modern times, and then suggested communism was simply a logical and inevitable response to that radical development? And, so it goes – on and on – in a correct order.

Those who do not realize how things evolve chronologically from the past to the present allow themselves to believe several preposterous and false things:

1. They may believe in inexplicable divine creation and whimsical divine intervention.

2. They may believe in something historically akin to “immaculate conception,” “spontaneous combustion,” or fate and chance; things just happen, in no particular order or with no particular meaning. Thucydides wrote his History of the Peloponnesian War because he knew that when and how one thing followed another in time produced critical consequences.

3. They may also believe that “now” – the present – is the only reality, and that the past is “dead” and gone; the modernist (and false) corollary to that is that the present is superior to the past in all ways, the past being just a collage of inferiorities and failures. This latter is also intimately tied to the rise of technology. People know that the discovery of electricity preceded their laptop computer, and therefore the present is always superior to the past because it is always technologically more advanced (many individuals deny this but their implicit behavior shows that they indeed embrace this false concept of past and present).

In other words, those with little respect for and knowledge of chronology can be characterized as either blissfully arrogant in their ignorance or suffering from a kind of subconscious vertigo when viewing the world outside their immediate home and locale.

But in fact, of course, all people do have some sense of time passing and of events following one another, and “home and locale” provide their understanding. They get their sense of time from the family and from the small events immediately relative to their lives. This substitute for a broader knowledge of chronology prejudices everything in favor of the individual and the family. If we do not know anything about how our culture and society evolved over time we discount the profound importance of that broader world, even if and when our well-being and very lives may depend on a knowledge of events in time.

Time as relativistic and not meted out in even measures can be seen by the false categorization of time that we all participate in and falsely promote. This is seen most prominently in our depiction of decades – the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and apparently on and on for the rest of the modern era (an era which may, in fact, be nearly over). But the 20s might be seen as 1922 to 1929, and the 50s as 1948 to 1963, and so on – all depending on understood perspectives. We historians commit the same error in regard to centuries. We glibly say the 18^th century was this, and the 19^th century that, and the 20^th century something else. Chopping up the passage of time into decades and centuries ignores the fact that some time is measured in very long paces (geological time, for example); that some foundations of society and cultures are tied to a longue durée of time (which Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel, Leroy Ladurie and the Annales school of history has presented as more important than mere surface events [histoire évènementielle]); and, finally, that some historical events have sped up time (the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions, the two World Wars, the introduction of moveable type and the rise of the internet).

Like serious music, historical time is not merely the matter of whole notes held over several bars but rather the interplay of whole through 64^th notes (the speed of time) played in varying time measures (the different pace in the march of time depending on place). It involves melodies (prevailing historical tendencies over a long period of time – e.g., modernization) answered by counter-melodies (resurgent traditionalism – e.g., reborn evangelicalism or rediscovered ideological capitalism). And, it hosts new themes suddenly and dramatically introduced which throw earlier themes akimbo (revolutions -- quiet or violent).

Ike and I share a kind of quizzical interest when we meet a new person, quietly wondering just where this person places herself in time and the universe. The result can be like giving a lecture to a class of immigrants who have a limited knowledge of the language; just how much vocabulary can I use that makes sense to this person?

At its worst, in a democratic society, large numbers of people having no sense of historical time can lead to some bad consequences, as we have experienced again and again. A majority may subscribe to static religious answers to who and where we are, and force the rest of us to accede to their solutions to what they see as “our” problems. Not knowing the long evolution over time of human and civil rights, still others might re-institute restraints that the rest of us thought had been sorted out in an earlier era (or earlier century, more likely). The same may be said of those who have resurrected unlimited free-market capitalism, apparently oblivious to the fact that we already went through that cycle more than a century ago, and that over time we learned what was wrong with unyielding implementation of that ideology (did Milton Friedman know nothing about the past, nothing whatsoever?) We need to know what about the past is irrelevant or truly “past,” and we need to know what about the past persists and is relevant today (this is my nod to George Santayana). We can still respect the ordered events of the past as different from today, as a distinct “other time,” without considering the past to be a time inferior or irrelevant to our own. Insofar as possible, we need to know chronologically “where” we are; historians can add the ingredient of analyzing “how” we got here. No one can provide a full and satisfying answer to “why,” however.

Fifteen books

2009-06-25T16:51:00.011-06:00

My friend, Maren Wood (Dr. Maren Wood, that is), recently posted on "Facebook" a list of 15 favorite books that she could remember and list in 15 minutes. I thought it was quite interesting. I do not know if she believes these books reflect who she is, or who she has become, or just if she found these books amusing or interesting or informative.

I was going to do the same thing, but then I began to reflect on this exercise a bit. I am 66 years old. I have read a few more books than Maren but, more importantly, I read many of them a VERY long time ago. What did influence me? And, were my influential books ones that I enjoyed? Just what would I be saying if I made such a list? I still do not know the answer to all of those questions, but I made the list anyway. To be fair, I probably took 30 minutes to put it together. And, I am not surprised, in some ways, in regard to what I listed while I am stunningly surprised in other ways. The books I listed, I should note at the start, are ones that profoundly effected my thinking or my perspective at the time that I read them, and for some time thereafter. I cannot, on the other hand, quote from any of these books. Nor can I even tell you the summary of the story or the ideas or sometimes even all of the subject matter. First, I will list them, and then maybe I can explain some things.

15 Books

(in order of publication date, not importance, I guess)

1. Michel de Montaigne, Essays (1580)

(Montaigne had human behavior and individual aspirations and human foibles sorted out long before Freud or modern psychology or modern sociology)

2. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791)

(Paine invented modern democracy. He invented a modern journalistic style of argumentation. He articulated the true nature of society and its needs in a postive, even optimistic way. And, what did he get for this? The refusal the country he helped bring into being -- the U. S. -- to reclaim him as a citizen from a Jacobin prison cell. Admire George Washington all you want, he failed the morality and decency test on this one (as did a number of people). The only thing his critics then and now had right was that Paine could be a pain as a dinner or house guest.)

3. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays (1841, 1844)

(I would not want to have dinner with Emerson either. Stuffy, arrogant and oh so judgmental, in a way only New Englanders can be. But I would like to write with the care and precision and insight with which he wrote. His themes and ideas on life and nature are broad, universal, and inspirational, with just the right dash of east Asian religious philosophy.)

4. Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1849)

(Emerson’s better half; and, to his credit, Emerson knew and admitted this. This is an essay for a young person. When you get older, you squirm uneasily in your seat as you read it, and realize you have not lived up to your human and civic responsibility. I could have included Walden (also written for the young), or Thoreau’s other naturalist stuff, which are just as important, but this essay lays our responsibilities on the line.

5. George Eliot (Marian Evans), Middlemarch (1874)

(I read this later in life. It is a romantic novel, and its sentiments would be syrupy or cloying in the hands of a less skilled writer. But Evans makes her characters warmly human and sympathetic, and as the pages turn you cannot help but feel better about individual human beings – well, about the potential she found in human beings. Some call this the best novel ever -- I will not disagree.)

6. Emile Zola, Germinal (1885)

(My brother brought this book home during his first year of university, and I may have read it that summer. In any case, I read it when I was young and had hardly heard of Marx or the miseries of industrialization or the need for social justice or – well, you get the idea. This novel was like a slug in the stomach. One of the best works of realism (well, it was one of the novels that introduced realism), it is moving throughout, despite being a long book.)

7. George Orwell, Essays (1920-1950)

(Orwell was a journalist and essayist. Animal Farm and 1984, while brilliant in theme, are not especially well written and are heavy-handed in satire and argument. Orwell the essayist is always engaging as an observer, as a critic of those modern forces that have overwhelmed humanity and deeply harmed fragile human beings. I do not always agree with his politics but as a 20th century critic he was not bettered by anyone.)

8. Hannah Arendt, On Totalitarianism (1951)

(I read this book in graduate school, and it introduced me to a thinker and writer whom I have admired and recommended ever since. All of her works set out the limits of human achievement. Besides articulating the “banality of evil” in individual and collective human behavior, Arendt sets out the profound underpinnings of totalitarianism in a manner that suggests its ubiquitousness and its persistence. Totalitarianism is still with us, as is fascism.)

9. Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle (1963)

(As a science fiction story that I cannot remember, this novel is a bit of an oddity on this list. But I remember it as the best of Vonnegut. Sometime in the 1960s I made Vonnegut my summer reading, and I loved his whimsy and his sense of the absurdity of modern life. Many saw him as a fun read, but I think he was a powerful thinker with a lot to say for his time. By the way, Vonnegut apparently pushed this novel as his dissertation in anthropology, and finally won out!)

10. Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)

(Nature, ecology, philosophy, religion, and sensuality (yes, beyond the cat scene in the opening; there is always something sensual about Annie Dillard, matched only by a brilliant intellect) all laid out by a brilliant young writer – well, she was at that time – articulated in the small compass of Tinker Creek in Virginia. I love her later stuff as well – especially For the Time Being.)

11. V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (1979)

(The persistent power of tribalism over nationalism and modernism and democracy, and the suffocating grip of the past over the future make this a dismal but compelling novel about Africa in general and the Congo in particular. I once took up Naipaul as my summer reading, and when I displayed signs of persistent depression and melancholy, and June discovered what I was reading, she made me quit. Good thing. Naipaul is too often right about the worst prospects for the future.)

12. William McNeil, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (1985)

(This is a brilliant work of big history. I made it the foundation for the latter portion of my History 1000 classes for the last 15 years of my teaching. The relationship of the economy and democracy and arms build-ups and war is frighteningly laid out by McNeil.)

13. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1985)

(While many other works might take the place of this work (some by Leroy Ladurie, for example), this was one of the first and one of the best representations of cultural history and its promise – at least for me. Being an old fashioned political historian, it helped release me from the dull statistics of social history and imagine a future for history that was vibrant and alive. It also encouraged another field to emerge – microhistory -- and this is a field that is going to be of as great importance as cultural history will be.)

14. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (1991)

(A lot of the historical interpretation I have brought to my writing has centered around human agency, autonomy and authority. Taylor takes on the existential, relativist side of these qualities and, again, while I do not always reach the conclusions he does, no one has seized this issue more intelligently than Taylor.)

15. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (2001)

(The best book I have read in the last ten years, again written by a journalist. Menand frames the real lives of the leading pragmatist thinkers – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Peirce, and William James – in a fascinating and engaging way. Menand’s book stands as one of three books – the other two being Wallace Steigner’s Wolf Willow (1955 ) and Norman McLean’s A River Runs through It (1976) – as the books I have either given away or recommended highly to a lot of people.)

Conclusion:

What surprises me is how serious most of this stuff is: I am not a fun-lovin' guy. I was also struck by how little of this list consists of "official" history; sure, I list McNeil and Darnton -- who are academics. And, Menand is a popular historian; Arendt is a philosopher who knows her history (what a rarity!), and Naipaul is a novelist who knows history and much more. But secondary works of history have not often impressed me, partly because I find them a boring read and partly because I find the analysis in academic history to be weak or limited. I believe that "history matters more," but not that certified historians matter more. I am also surprised to see how many of the things that have influenced me have been essays -- sometimes by philosophers, often by journalists. Montaigne, Paine, Emerson, Thoreau, Orwell, Darnton and Taylor are all essayists essentially. Perhaps I am too lazy for longer books; perhaps I like arguments presented in a short space without all of the footnotes and documentation. Six of my list are Americans, although their ideas range well beyond national boundaries, in the main. Only Thoreau, Dillard, and Menand have written on themes local to America, and even they are looking at a more distant horizon.

Ingmar Bergman begins his film Fanny and Alexander (1984) by portraying his nostalgic memories of Christmas at his grandmother's home. I somehow recall (but cannot locate and quote) a scene early on in the film, where Bergman's fictional grandmother -- Helena Eckdahl (played by Gun Wälden) -- admits that she never knew what a mother was, and that she only acted out what she thought was the role of being a mother. Becoming and imitating and role-playing rather than essentialist being is, of course, pure existentialism and pure Bergman. Looking at my list of books, I wonder if my life has not played out as a contest between essentialism and existentialism. Many of these books shaped my views of society, politics, human agency, cultural interaction, manners, morals, and nature. Have I just lived a life imitating the arguments, ideas and persuasions of books? Or, did I choose those books to read -- and to be influenced by -- because of already established proclivities of mind and sentiment? It is a "chicken and egg" question, I know, but the degree to which I give weight to either side of this question is of interest to me.

Listening

2009-06-16T19:33:00.005-06:00

Our ability to say what we want, to express our opinions, to reveal our inner-most emotions, to let people know what we are thinking or feeling RIGHT NOW, has never been greater. Most people are not going to get the opportunity of journalists or editors or pundits to let the world know what they have on their minds or in their hearts. But who needs that. We all have the chance to say what we want, when we want to say it. Conversations have never been more free. Electronic media -- such as e-mail, blogs, "Skype," "Facebook," "Twitter," and a long list of devices from cell phones to photo phones to Blackberrys have produced FREE SPEECH (in most cultures and countries). Even repressive regimes cannot stop people from speaking their mind. (I am only stating the "bleeding obvious" here.)

Post-modern analysts has elevated "discourse" above all other motive forces in human relations. Long ago, it became the catchword of Michel Foucault, and deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida. Now it is the catchword of thousands of academics, and attached to, and dismissed by its opponents,as a culture of secular humanism. The material world, the world of institutions, the world of traditional culture, has given way to a world identified by, and defined by, discourse alone.

Do not get me wrong. I love this spread of what we now call "discourse." I love being able to retrieve the opinions of loved ones, friends, and acquaintances about all manner of subjects. Two of my good friends are, for want of a better word, "talkers." I am happy with that. I learn much from them -- both in regard to rational thought and modern emotions. I delight in the opportunity for millions of people to express ideas and feelings to a wide audience. "Facebook," which I have criticized in another blog, allows my "friends" to let the rest of us know how they feel, what they are doing, what they feel is important -- now.

But discourse is not just about making speeches. Discourse is not just about expressing one's own feelings and angst and outrage and opinions. Discourse is, by dictionary definition, also about "conversation," and for "conversation" to occur, there has to be a "listener." No, that is not correct. There has to be at least two persons who are both speakers and listeners.

In the last twenty or so years of my life, I have acquired the ability (although I have not always exercised it wisely) to listen to others speak at great length, with only an occasional comment or reflection on my part. The people with whom I have done this, would probably deny that I have done this. They would claim that I spoke, interjected, interrupted, and generally dominated the "conversation" more than they did. I have been charged, sometimes rightly, with taking up all of the conversation time. But, lately, I have been actually timing how often I speak, and how often those in my company speak. In most cases, I have not exceeded my quota of time.

This has been driven home to me in a concrete way by the fact that I have been conducting oral history interviews of first generation members of the administration, faculty, and student body of my university. In some of these interviews, I have almost been an inanimate object. My subjects have narratives to tell, and they have not needed questions to propel them forward. In other interviews, I have commented on one or another subject, in the hopes of eliciting some response from my interviewee. But, in all of my interviews, I have begun to recognize again the importance of just being there, of making eye contact, of showing an interest, of smothering a smile or a laugh, of nodding in agreement or shaking my head in disagreement. I am the listener. Although my family and friends would not believe this, I truly enjoy just listening.

Much of post-modern discourse literature and theory acknowledges the importance of listening. But, aside from "reader response" theories of literature, there has been only a modest concession given to "listening" as an important part of discourse. By this I mean true listening: listening not just to the ideas and opinions of others but to the cadence of the speech of others, to the manner in which they express themselves, and to the modes of expression they employ. Unfortunately, listening has become much like manners -- something one can ignore with social impunity. But no one can be a whole person without listening; just as no one can be a whole person without expressing themselves in some way.

2009-06-10T10:52:00.003-06:00

[This letter to the editor was published in The Lethbridge Herald for June 10, 2009]

Alberta Bill 44 provides that parents (or guardians) of students must be notified “where courses of study, educational programs or instructional materials . . . include subject-matter that deals explicitly with religion, sexuality or sexual orientation.” Safe teachers will interpret “explicitly” as “to address in ANY WAY matters regarding religion, sexuality or sexual orientation.” That is one big problem. Another is that our Legislative Assembly wrongly thinks that religion and sexuality and sexual orientation are discreet subjects that can be segregated, even surgically divided from other subjects. Their understanding of “knowledge acquisition” (to use an ugly but revealing business term for education) is narrow, laughable, and ludicrous. Most real knowledge is integrated, and “religion” and “sex” are among those that overlap, intersect and merge with other subjects in all sorts of ways. “Religion,” especially, is a subject so broad and so intimately involved with the basic elements of being human, that it touches upon almost every other subject involving human beings. Being religious (or not) has to do with how we view our world; how we react to our world; how we make sense of our world. To place it under special status (totalitarian regimes over the last century have eagerly placed issues of import under this status) is to eliminate much of what we call philosophy, history, and the study of society (to say nothing of art).

“Sexuality” and “sexual orientation” are as problematical. While we KNOW what the legislature thinks it means by “sexual orientation,” they are babes-in-the-woods in regard to the broad subject-matter of “sexuality,” subject-matter intimately associated with many critical aspects of human development. The message is clear for any teacher, however: stay away from anything that has to do with processes of biological reproduction in any form and, for good measure, anything dealing with human affection and intimacy. Who knows how fast those subjects might suddenly veer into the forbidden realm of human sexuality.

If we lived in a province where “reasonable expectations” prevailed, good teachers with options would leave, and faculties of education would howl in protest. But we live in Alberta, an alternate-reality universe. Aside from a few courageous students and teachers, we will see little more than tighter lips, and young people poorly prepared for the world in which they live.

Halve Everything

2009-06-01T08:39:00.015-06:00

By now it is obvious that the hope aroused by the candidacy and then the election of President Obama has not caused a sea-change in the hearts and minds of his countrymen/women. Historians may find, fifty years from now, some important change among some young people who were inspired by the President's appeal to pragmatism and decency and reform. Right now, no such transformation is apparent. Why has the rocket fizzled? First, because, although the Republican Party and most of its federal representatives appear insane at best, congressional Democrats appear little better -- a hopeless motley crew of partisan hacks, intellectual light-weights, and visionless place-holders. They simply have no clue about moving forward in a clear, uncompromising direction toward anything. They consider halving every piece of legislation as bold and courageous reform. Secondly, and even worse, President Obama, partly because Congress has forced him to do so, has decided to halve everything as well: half a stimulus program; half ownership of GM (actually more); assuming half the costs of an irresponsible banking industry; a half-assed health program that promises very little change; half-way measures in pursuing those responsible for instituting a widespread torture program into American "intelligence" work; a halved promise on closing the Guantanamo Bay "facility"; a half-and-half attitude toward the virtues of unregulated capitalism.

But these are surface issues, ones that can be changed with the election of a better Congress, and the appointment of better justices to the federal courts, and perhaps evidence of more backbone in the current administration once some victories are posted. Deeper cultural currents and bigger problems cannot be so easily eradicated. Here are my seven deadly sins of American politics and society:

1. The American public, as responsible citizens, continue to lag behind every democratic, or democratically developing country, in terms of their political acumen and activism. "I am not political" is a phrase worn as a badge of moral honor only in North America. When students began to use this "excuse" with me in Canada in the 1970s, I developed a standard response: "If you are not political, you are immoral." By political, I mean something more than passively voting. I mean acquainting oneself with the political issues of the day; protesting policies one considers bad or wrong-headed through a variety of means; and, discussing politics with one's acquaintances. These are the minimums. Contributing to a political party or working for a campaign or signing petitions and supporting online political interest groups, is a step further in the right direction.

2. American journalism is immoral in the news they choose to cover, in the manner in which they report the news, and in ways they choose to analyze the news. Failures of omission and of commission are replete throughout all branches of the media. If we are not being addressed by vacuous air-heads of both sexes, whose hairdos alone tell you where they place their priorities, we are being assaulted and insulted by a parade of right-wing "experts" and subdued moderates in what journalism considers "balance" in analysis. There is no balance, and even if all sides were represented equally in these "debates," halving the views of two extremes does not result in truth and sensibility.

3. "We live in the grip of the most powerful ideology the world has ever known -- capitalism." These are the words I used for over twenty years in my first year history classes whenever the issue of ideologies of the past became a topic of the course. Most older students thought I was going to end that sentence with the word -- "communism." The rest shrugged this sentence off as irrelevant, set against the power of pop culture (which is itself a partner in maintaining the myth of capitalist inevitability). But the pervasive and destructive influence of capitalism as an ideology seems to continue. And, it has emerged from our financial crisis virtually unscathed -- a remarkable feat for a set of ideas that should have been badly damaged by its advocates and extreme enthusiasts. Indeed, journalists make no objection when commentators -- or the "punditocracy," as Michael Moore correctly calls it -- sweepingly proclaim that the free market system is sacrosanct and must not be impeded. What utter nonsense. Some things must be nationalized (health care, we say today; roads and public utilities, so said Adam Smith in 1776; and why, by the way, don't right-wing ideologists read and cite him). Some things need regulation (uh, savings-and-loans, as proven by the early 1990s fiasco under Bush I, and the banks, as proven today). And, some things need to be driven by the market (our choices in what foods we want in our restaurants and what clothes styles we want to put on our backs).

4. Paul Krugman, in a recent NY Times opinion piece, identifies the beginning of the current state of economic crisis with the Reagan administration. This is true. I have recently come across a talk I gave when Reagan was re-elected in 1984, and was reminded again that I never could comprehend his election to either term. What were people thinking? He was not even the jolly person most people made him out to be. He was a vicious anti-communist, anti-unionist, and anti-government-activist. He presented himself as some kind of lollypop libertarian; maybe that's why people think he was sweet. And then, just like the New England Puritans of the 17th century, the Republican presidential leadership proceeded to decline. Bush I (a seemingly good hearted and courageous veteran), along with his country-club, pretty boy running mate -- Dan Quayle, stumbled through a term. Newt Gingrich then steered the Republicans of the 1990s into an Alice-in-Wonderland vision of politics and economics and the future. And, then there was Bush II, a man almost as shocked as William Henry Harrison to be inhabiting the White House. We know the rest about the worst president in American history; Bush II was kind of the "Secretariat" (to use a horse-racing analogy unflattering to that great race horse) of bad and evil politics. Thirty years of wrong ideas, of "spend a lot but don 't tax" policies, of anti-democratic politics, has left most of us with no memory of how politics might be practiced correctly.

5. Only in the impoverished world, do we see a middle and lower class as dispirited as we find them in the U.S. They have been down so long that just keeping one's job, or keeping a pay check that does not rise with inflation, is seen as a victory to be celebrated. Marx was only partly right in calling "religion the opiate of the masses"; sports, pop culture diversions, and, hey, real opiates, are also part of the "opiate[s] of the masses." Some say that ordinary folk have been "dumbed down." It is worse than that; they have been thoroughly anesthetized against hope and planning for the future. No hope and no planning are emblematic of societies of the poor throughout the world.

6. How long have we put up with fighting the brush fires of idiotic right-wing political and religious groups and advocates. OK, abortion is not a good thing; but given sex education in the U.S. (and many other places) it is at least a necessary "evil." Plus, as a man, I expect to have authority over my body; women should too. Darwinian evolution is right, insofar as every credible scientific test has been applied against it. Schools are not places over which parents en masse should determine curriculum or how subjects should be taught. Parents must insist on the production of good teachers, and then get out of the way. Being "gay" or "lesbian" is natural; "homosexuality," for want of a better comprehensive word, has existed from ancient times to the present. The only debate is how many people are naturally gay or lesbian; and that, my friends, is a discussion just too, too boring for me to address. Stupid cultural and moral issues are exhausting and diverting from real issues regarding how millions of real people are to live their real lives well.

7. No one, from teenagers to the enfeebled elderly, are "entitled" to all that they claim. Yes, the young should be educated and protected. Yes, the elderly should be cared for in a humane and caring way. After that, it is all a matter of how far a society wants to go to enhance these protections without extending false expectations. If you are a lazy and not very bright teenager, you should expect the consequences of those twin failings -- one outside your control, the other supposedly within it. If you are a cranky, contentious, and poor senior, you should expect something less than luxury and fawning attention from those around you. There is no historical imperative that any age group should lead a life of sybaritic ease, or that ennui is the correct and expected response to unfulfilled expectations.

So, with these 7 Deadly Sins still in full play, I am not anticipating seeing anything like the changes to politics and society that, only a few months ago, I thought might be possible in my lifetime.

[For those who think I am being harsh regarding the Obama administration, please read Kevin Baker's article, "Barack Hoover Obama: The Best and the Brightest Blow It Again," Harper's Magazine, July, 2009]

Sudoku

2009-05-19T11:32:00.014-06:00

This blog posting is written as a response to a challenge by my friend Kathryn to write something on "sudoku." So, like anyone who comes from an academic background, I will pretend to make something out of nothing -- so to speak.

The name itself -- "sudoku" -- suggests something Japanese and exotic, a game that somehow connects us to a Japanese sense of logic and clarity while not requiring Japanese language to comprehend. The truth is less culturally exciting and more prosaic. In fact, everything about sudoku is prosaic -- that is one reason we like it. "Sudoku" was "invented" by Howard Garns, an Indianapolis architect, in 1979 and given the truly ordinary name of "Number Place." It was picked up in Japan by the Nikoli publishing company, and after being renamed "Sudoku," meaning "single number," it became popular throughout Japan, where it was eventually offered in national newspapers like Asahi Shimbun. The game became really popular, however, when it was picked up by the press in Great Britain in 2004, where it became featured regularly in The Times. From Great Britain, "sudoku" spread rapidly throughout the world, but it has remained most popular in the U. K. and North America.

"Sudoku" is invariably labelled "addictive," not just on book jackets for advertising purposes, but in every short-hand description of the game. This proves once again our delight in pathologizing every thing in which human beings engage. (The fact

is that many mundane things -- like eating -- are merely addictive too). Addiction is apparently the normative state of things now, and if you do anything, either occasionally or frequently, that is not "addictive" you must be some kind of a pervert.

I do not so much think of it as addictive as I see it as a marker in my day. Just as we all use markers in speech (e.g., "so" and "well," and President Obama's now famous "annnnd"), I use sudoku as an interruption or marker in my day. I use it as a way to wake up in the morning, while having a cup or two of coffee. I use it after walking the dog, to catch my breath. I use it after dinner, as dessert. I use it as punctuation between tasks -- especially household ones. "Sudoku" is also handy, in the way that crossword puzzles are handy, in allowing one to ignore the poverty of stimulation one gets in airports or on planes or in any waiting room (it beats reading old "Macleans" and "Car and Driver" at the doctor's office).

The game is supposedly also useful in keeping your brain active. But I have noticed lately that I don't so much think through the puzzles anymore than look for the 20 odd combinations of number layouts, and just start filling it in. I am not bragging; if you have done as many of these as I have, you would do it too.

But why is it so popular? Well, not trusting my own instincts, I looked up a few internet sites on this issue. They say: First, it is a simple game; single number 1 through 9, and the rules are simple. Secondly, there is only one right answer, and in proceeding through the puzzle you are giving yourself immediate evaluative feedback -- uh, that is, you know how you are doing all of the time. To make it harder, I sometimes do not write little "possible" numbers at the top of every box, but insist that I memorize the combinatorial possibilities. My friend Erin gave me an electronic sudoku player one time which required this tactic; it was difficult and good, until I wore out the machine. Lately I have started timing myself, to add an external challenge to the whole thing. Thirdly, each puzzle is different from any other you have done. Lately, I have exhausted all of the "difficult," "bizarrely challenging," and "evil" puzzles (they are given many different names), and have found myself buying what appear to be "new" sudoku books that are merely reprints of old puzzles. Believe it or not, my poor feeble brain actually remembers many of these formerly-done-puzzles (I cannot remember the names of people I have known most of my life, but I can recognize old sudoku puzzles; I am to be pitied and censured). The saving factor is that even if it is a puzzle you did before, you start it differently and solve it in a different pattern. Fourthly, some argue that because the puzzle is self-correcting (that is, when you have to do something else after putting the same number in the same column or row or square -- twice), you can go back and try to correct your mistakes. I have now taken a very Calvinist -- unforgiving -- approach to my sudoku. If I have made a mistake, I mark a bold "bar-sinister" line across the whole thing and give it up. I suppose Catholics and Anglicans can do the same sudoku over and over, occasionally saying "oops" everytime they make a mistake; ah, the joys of absolution.

Now, having said all of this, I leave you with this sudoku happening that I found on the internet:

"In June 2008, an Australian drugs-related jury trial costing over $1 million (AU$) was aborted when it was discovered that five of the twelve jurors had been playing Sudoku instead of listening to evidence."

Now do you take Sudoku seriously? Next time, think about what your airplane pilot is actually doing.

Opposite Directions: Mexico and the U. S. Respond to Swine Flu

2009-05-06T07:35:00.013-06:00

My friend Jim Ellsworth, a permanent resident in San Miguel de Allende, was the first to introduce me to this old parable about Mexicans. "Two men -- one American, one Mexican -- try unsuccessfully to catch a departing bus. The American says: 'Damn, I missed the bus.' The Mexican says: 'The bus left without me.'" This popular portrayal of Mexicans as people who do not take personal responsibility, who do not admit their failings, or do not acknowledge that they need to correct something that has gone wrong, is becoming increasingly inaccurate. But even when it resonates with accuracy, it is just a reflection of a country in which great wealth held by a few overwhelms the great mass of people who have very little. The parable of not being responsible is the parable of a people with limited personal agency. They cannot be the author of their destinies since those are controlled by a system of class and wealth that is nearly closed. So, why should they assume personal responsibility when such a claim of agency (responsibility) can only be taken in the negative -- applied against their failings, and never taken in the positive -- never applied to their advancement and advantage.

Americans, by contrast, see themselves as possessing nothing but personal agency, from colonial Puritans (ironically) to modern day marketing majors. Each one of us, it is presumed (often inaccurately), are the agents of our own future and of our own success and wealth. Unfortunately, when a sense of agency is exaggerated -- as it invariably is in the United States -- the consequences can be grotesque. First, if someone or some group of people are the necessary human agents behind a turn of events, then when bad things happen on a broad scale, someone has to be responsible for inflicting these bad consequences upon us. Historically, if Americans have not been able to identify the villain(s) clearly, this psychology leads to conspiracy theories. Secondly, if the villain(s) who have inflicted bad things cannot be identified early on, and the bad things persist and grow (e.g., the recent swine flu "pandemic"), Americans react with fear and suspicion. Both of these tendencies were historically revealed most fully and clearly in the Red Scare of 1919, and the Communist Conspiracy scare of the early 1950s.

I watched with perverse interest, therefore, when the "swine flu" emerged from Mexico last month. I say "perverse" interest because, although I was residing in Mexico at the time, I got almost all of my "news" from CNN (the only English language news channel available in our casita). The grotesque appeal to fear and panic by CNN (an appeal offered in the face of the testimony of the "experts" they interviewed, who counseled calm attentiveness), would have been humorous, if the CNN appeal had not been so cravenly driven by the pretty girls and pretty boys who pose as serious journalists on CNN's broadcasts. After a few days of watching

CNN, we clearly understood only two things: that we were learning precious little of value about the swine flu, and that 90% of what we heard and saw was the moral equivalent of brainwashing.

The message was two-fold: first, there was the thinly veiled accusation

that Mexico and Mexicans were the responsible agents (which fit well into the CNN and Lou Dobbs's vision of the Mexican threat); and, secondly, that Mexico had been and continued to be so irresponsible that the lives of Americans, well, of most of America actually, were threatened, and that we had much to fear.

Because we watched a lot (too much) of CNN for that first week (April 21-28), it came as a surprise when, overnight, CNN decided this story of responsibility and fear was no longer selling too well, and suddenly pushed it off the headlines. They moved on to evaluating (read "judging") President Obama in his first 100 days -- another comical and exaggerated exercise in applying human agency and responsibility to one person (a person who was not the agent of what he was trying to fix, for that matter).

In the end, we found out two things about the "swine flu" by living in Mexico: first, Mexicans did not panic, partly out of a sense of fatalism (there are benefits to not believing that human agents stand behind all things good or bad), and partly out of common sense. Mexico City alone has more than 20 million people (maybe 22-23 million); if we

triple the number of swine flu cases identified or suspected, from 2,000 to 6,000, we are still left with a very miniscule percentage of cases in Mexico City (you do the math). How much can you do about the spread of "swine flu" in a congested population like Mexico City's in any case? Secondly, Mexico City did respond quickly. They were transparent about the disease. They did get on it right away. Mexico took extraordinary measures to cut down on the spread of the disease (shutting down public events very early on; preaching public caution through hand cleaning, masks, etc.; sharing information readily with WHO and other countries). They punished their economy, especially small businesses in Mexico, probably much more than they should have.

In short, Mexico shouldered the burden in this matter. They should be applauded for their responsibility. Americans, especially CNN, should be castigated for their fear-mongering and attempt to arouse hysteria. But beyond that, as Mexico shows itself to be an increasingly modern democracy with a sense of global responsibility, the United States continues to be ethnocentric and inward looking. While Americans prefer to wallow in fear (FDR should have said: "All you have . . . is fear itself"), while they make a psychological hobby out of fearing those things that are beyond human control, Mexico has made the best of its sense that some bad things just happen, and no one is responsible, while at the same time, at an official government level, accommodating the world at large in every way possible to check the disease. Mexico seems to have succeeded in both ways, and they are the better country for it.

To Stay in Mexico

2009-04-21T14:33:00.046-06:00

Because of the death of our friend Carl, part of our stay in Mexico has left us feeling out of place and time. Our grieving has known no locality, and we both often snap back to "reality," puzzled over where we are, and sometimes even wondering what season it is. The little essay that below is not about that part of our "stay" ("holiday" is grossly wrong; "vacation" hardly right; "travel" would be right, if we moved more; "stay" seems more right given the total experience). What I will say here will not be news to many who are familiar with Mexico, or at least with those of you who have seen more than the gated-beach-resort Mexico. Still, many things below bear repeating, to myself if no one else.

1. The Assault on the Senses -

Color confronts you everywhere in Mexico, from flowers in bloom to the bougainvillea on our garden wall in San Miguel that proves more hardy than the most common weed.

Not content with nature, Mexicans produce their own riot of color -- in fabrics, in clothing, in buildings, in kid's plastic toys.

Chiapas and Oaxaca

And, while colors often appear to be primary, and therefore easy to imitate, the fact is that they are much more subtle than you first imagine, especially in fabrics and stuccoed walls. We have often stared at exterior and interior walls in Mexico (usually painted in a faux style), and said, we can do that. The fact is -- we cannot. Our friends, Kathleen and Jim Ellsworth of San Miguel de Allende, have painted house interiors for decades (and they can do this kind of painting) but they will readily testify to the nuances in this kind of house painting.

Oaxaca

Ruins (ruinas), cobblestone streets (in old colonial towns like San Miguel) and dust are the second assault on sight and the senses. Ruins like the Mayan complex at Palenque (Chiapas)or the Zapotec ruins of Monte Alban (Oaxaca) are justly shown off with pride.

"Second rank" ruins, like the ex-convento at Cuiapan (construction begun in 1530 and shutdown in 1550 because Philip V thought them too expensive), barely get a glance.

In fact, the whole country often appears to be ruins covered in dust, as were all of the buildings surrounding the gold and silver mines of Minerales de Pozos below.

And, after all, what town, or even village, does not have a church dating to the 1500s (well, almost none, actually).

All of this is to say nothing of rickety, termite-eaten gates (in every city and town) -- behind which may lie a mansion worth millions of dollars or the humble residence of a poor Mexican family. Who is to know.

Streets are barely navigable in most old towns. The sidewalks are narrow, and the holes, big enough and sometimes deep enough to swallow a whole person, wait uncovered and unmarked for the first "gringo" to make a mistake. Anyone with a propensity to twist their ankle should never come to Mexico. We often walk in the street, dodging whatever car or truck comes along. Those who drive confront "topes" (speed bumps) every little distance. A man who took us by van from San Cristobal de las casas to Palenque (a distance of 200km that took over five hours) shrugged and said to me: "200 kilometers of road; 350 topes." He was apologizing, not exaggerating.

Sounds in Mexico are something else. Road traffic, blaring horns, dogs barking and fighting, birds singing, church bells being rung at every imaginable hour (with no apparent reason; often in the middle of the night), fireworks (especially in San Miguel; hey, you have a birthday, "let's fire off major fireworks from 4am to, say, 10am."), people barking their wares. Total disregard for others in making sounds of every sort define the equivalent total lack of privacy in Mexico, just as that privacy is lacking in many traditional societies.

Smell is another thing. For June, it is the smell of fresh corn tortillas, sold from little shops along the street. For me, it is a bakery two houses away down the street (again, you would have no idea it was a bakery because it is located behind a set of rotting wooden doors -- there are actually people who make rotting wooden doors here -- real nice ones -- I am not kidding you). Every other day of so, we get the sweet smell of bread (Mexicans are really keen on sweet; less on salt). But if you try to guess which day you might get bread (these folks seem to wholesale it for other tiendas - stores), you are likely to be disappointed.

More likely smells are auto and truck exhaust emissions (forget fighting for clean air emissions; Mexico alone will defeat the world on that score). And, even more, the sweet smell of the sewer. It hits you anywhere, anytime. It may be a big drain on the street; it may be the drains in the house. Despite having the knowledge to know how to handle this in homes, Mexican plumbing continues to develop without using elbow traps, vent stacks, or good closed sewers. My father, a plumber, would be appalled.

Touch should not be left out. Every surface in Mexico has a texture, even a smooth wall. Stucco, brick, cobblestones, steel fixtures, wooden chairs, thin plate glass, iron-work gates and windows are all ubiquitous, all immediate.

II. Mexico the Mysterious --

You really don't know what you are going to encounter in Mexico. Last night we went to a restaurant we had eaten at two years ago. The same guitar player was playing. He is just about as good as any jazz guitarist (and classical for that matter) that you are ever going to hear. He, however, is always going to be eking out a living a "Mama Mias." Kathleen took us on a trip and stopped at a small humble house where the owner builds musical instruments, including the most fantastic drums I have ever seen or heard (people from far away commission him to build them). He also builds beautiful sounding flutes and recorders. But his life is still humble.

On that same trip, while looking at a ruina way out on a nearly impassable dirt road in the middle of a desert, I heard the sound of a vehicle approaching. I guessed it was a pick-up. It wasn't; it was a fully loaded Coca-Cola truck, lurching and swaying its way across the seemingly empty desert. It had probably been to some very small miscelania or tienda near some houses where the four kids in the neighbourhood needed their daily intact of Coke (bad teeth and diabetes are major afflictions in Mexico now).

Excursions to towns on their market days always surprise you -- whether it is an old woman carrying an enormous live turkey upside down around the stalls, bargaining hard to sell it, or this goat, being kept cool and safe in a novel way before being sold.

Some mysteries are anticipated, yet they still surprise you. These women are part of the Easter Sunday procession (about two hours and a mile long, including an orchestra and a couple of choirs); maybe it is just seeing middle-aged women carrying heavy platforms with icons for such a long time.

Other things are puzzles of a sort, and gringoes seem to be drawn into these just as much as anyone. Many walls of elegant houses expose the bricks beneath the stucco, as if to suggest that the stucco had fallen off, and the house was a shambles outside. This one, near our home, was weirder yet. The message over the door read, "Cantina of the Dogs," and an accompanying plaque read: "No women. No uniformed people. No minors allowed." And, it pictured dogs fighting -- as if it were Michael Vick's house. All a bad joke; the house is an ordinary (though rich) residence.

Not all mysteries are to be seen or smelled or heard. Our "lavanderia" posts hours 8 to 8, Mon. through Fri. But many days they are not open until 10, and then sometimes you see one of the family working there at 10pm at night. It is all a suggestion (much like traffic signs). This is

not to bad mouth Mexicans. They are hard workers; anyone working a mere 60 hour week is an executive or a slackard. They are polite, often very friendly, and they love their children without reservation.

In fact, the economy of the vast majority of semi-poor or poor Mexicans is interesting. Everyone seems to be selling something. Hawkers can be very much in your face. No space is free from someone selling something. Restaurants are assaulted outdoors and often indoors by old women selling trinkets or flower sellers and even sometimes by someone selling food! One day I said to June, "I wonder which of these sellers is allowed to move up and down the corridors of the Mexican Congress." She immediately replied, "Why, all of them, of course." And, so it seems. Yet, for all of this "selling," most people have no change. "Cambio" is hard to come by in Mexico, and everyone we talk to (meaning native Mexicans) says it is just laziness on the part of sellers: if you want it, the buyer must have or get the right change. In fact, June and I think we should start a "cambio" business in Mexico; we would make a fortune.

Well, we probably would not. Hordes of people all selling the same goods, or nearly the same goods, feel some social compunction to try to make a sale just because the culture demands the social gesture. But in the real economy underneath this false entrepreneurship, they all know that the number of buyers is limited. And, if any seller does something special in their peddling, that peddler knows that within days everyone will be doing the same thing. They have learned the hard-knocks side of capitalism. Where there is a void, a need, a want, someone will fill it. But in Mexico, thousands will fill it, and no one will move up. That is the economy here; no one will move up, except the small percentage of elites and the small number of lucky souls who get advanced educations. The social-class order fixes everything, and entrepreneurship is a joke. So, why have "cambio" ready.

In many ways your heart breaks in Mexico, but in other ways, on reflection, one wonders about our so-called "values" -- including modernization, capitalism, education, and so on.

The Loss of a Close Friend -- from a Great Distance

2009-04-13T14:00:00.002-06:00

Two days ago a very close friend of mine, Carl Granzow, died suddenly of cancer. A year ago he had been treated for bone marrow cancer, and went into remission. I had a good year with him after those treatments, probably better than many we had had in the recent past. He helped me with some design and engineering issues regarding home renovations; I spent time with him in his shop, joked about utterly unimportant things with him, and went "shopping" for trucks (one of his favorite wasting-time pastimes). Our families had some very good times together. It had been much like the early years of our friendship, over twenty-five years ago.

It was a friendship for which I can express no regrets. Many years ago I told him that I considered him a brother (despite the fact that I have a brother I see too infrequently and who I love). A few years later, quite independent of my declaration, he said the same thing to me (despite the fact that he had a brother he saw too infrequently who he also loved). Over the years, my wife and I became close friends of their family, so close that his wife and their children are like extended family to us. Although my friend and his family had their own large, extended family -- a family about as close as any family ever could be -- they even tried to bring us into their tent. Well, quite literally, since every year they all went camping together in August, and they always tried to get us to go along.

I think we all made it clear how we felt about each other, and that is the important message of this blog. My generation, at least, is usually too circumspect about telling others exactly how we feel about them. We either think the words are too lavish and inappropriate -- telling a robust, very masculine man that you love him like a brother -- or we worry that the sentiment will not be reciprocated. Both are a foolish caution; we are all fragile human beings who need to tell others how we feel about them; to do less is parsimonious and irresponsible. Years ago, when she was in her later years, my mother-in-law told me that, in the end, all we can do is love one another. I was so pleased to hear her say this (since we did not share religious beliefs), that I did not say: "well, of course, that's all we human beings have."

In my last blog, I criticized one aspect of the internet -- "Facebook." I don't take back anything I said about "Facebook." But, because we are in Mexico and my friend died in Canada, I will say that the internet has been a benefit beyond description for us. We got a chance to talk to our friend via "Vonage Talk" telephone service, and the reception was clear and good. We have been kept up-to-date by many other very important friends via phone and email. We have remained in touch with a wide community. And, for all of that, we are thankful for modern technology. We are also thankful for having had such a good, generous and loving friend.

Too Much Information? Too Many "Friends"? The Culture of "Facebook"

2009-04-01T12:33:00.012-06:00

The internet is undeniably one of the greatest boons to humankind -- ever. It has democratized information. It has democratized opinion. It has democratized democracy.

As we are now traveling in Mexico, I can assure you that the internet has made the practicalities of life much easier. You not only can buy airline tickets online, but in Mexico, at least, you can buy bus tickets online as well (buses being essential travel in Mexico) and even many van and taxis services in more remote places. Almost everyone has some kind of wi-fi service here (even if some servers are slow and unpredictable). You can stay in touch with family and friends via "Vonage Talk" or "Skype" or, for Americans, via some small USB connector telephone device -- all with very little cost to the user.

But in regard to the way we appear to others, the evolution of the internet has taken some peculiar twists, in my humble opinion. (It must be humble because despite being an early user of computers -- from main frame computers in the 1970s to laptops today -- I am NOT, and never can be, part of a cybernetic culture, simply as a consequence of my age and the pre-cybernetic culture that formed my character). The internet has changed discourse, as many people smarter than I have observed. It has supposedly created new "communities," which, if you stretch the definition of community to its breaking point, one might grudgingly admit. But it has also accentuated the most powerful drive among individuals for autonomy, agency, and authority. In everyone's quest to present themselves as they would wish to be seen, it has also become a vehicle of egoism (and sometimes narcissism and exhibitionism).

Not long ago, I enjoyed sending and receiving e-mails. While not examples of the best writing, e-mails allowed me to send information and ideas and so on to my family and friends, and to receive e-mails, in a private way. Today, I seldom receive personal e-mails, except tiresome marketing ones from my "friends" at Amazon and VRBO and Expedia and Eddie Bauer. Sometimes folks write a short note to me, sometimes with accompanying pictures, etc., but e-mail as an important internet method for anything other than formal business is as dead as the proverbial dodo. The death of personal letters, and now the death of personal e-mails, might be seen as the death of the paragraph and narrative communication in everyday life.

Most of my family and friends are now members of "Facebook," or some like service. This seemed great at the start, and still is in some ways. You could see how everyone was doing at a glance, including what was on their mind, and how their lives were unfolding daily. You could post your whereabouts, the progress of your work, your very, very latest opinion on politics, links to interesting sites, causes you cared about, etc.

Then it gradually changed (well, hell, gradually in cybernetic time). In my case, my family actually seldom uses it (except for outgoing mail from my wife and me), despite my having signed my sons on as "friends" and now as "family" ("Facebook has now started encouraging you to categorize folks in a certain way, to compartmentalize your discussion of yourself and with others in the framework they want to lay out). But now I may ditch the whole thing, if one can do that; I understand that no one ever really "leaves" "Facebook"; apparently "Facebook" is much harder to remove than a tattoo. I am getting uneasy as well as unsatisfied.

Before the "Facebook" people sue me for defamation, let me say that their service, with all of its bells and whistles (comments to post, walls to write on, messages to send, photos to mount, notifications to peruse, etc., etc.) is something I have readily embraced. Now, however, using "Facebook," even opening it up, is beginning to creep me out. Here are the reasons.

1. Logging into "Facebook" makes me feel like a voyeur. No, I take that back, it literally makes me a voyeur. Before going on, I need to admit that the idea of this blog came from a truly voyeuristic experience we had last week. While lolling away our lives on a small beach in the state of Oaxaca, a group of young people (mid-20s?) arrived. One of them was a woman who enjoyed being topless. Well, I should correct that by saying she enjoyed being topless in front of the rest of us. (Now, don't get me wrong, I didn't object, nor did the other men there). Her exhibitionism -- in the surf, doing exercises on the beach, getting a tan -- was transparently directed at the rest of us -- the audience. Yet, if it were not for a few things she said, that we happened to overhear, we actually would have known little about her; the human anatomy is, after all, a lot more universal, and in most ways, less individually revealing than we often admit. So, in fact, this young woman actually exposed far less of herself by being nude than by identifying herself as a self-centered exhibitionist. In an odd sort of way, the presentation of self on "Facebook" is just as revealing, and revealing to more eyes.

Despite the fact that I have very narrowly restricted my "friends" list, it is obvious when I read my friends' postings that I am observing a great deal -- maybe a great deal too much -- about their daily lives. But that, as you all know, is only the tip of the iceberg. Most importantly, your "friends" have other "friends," completely unknown to you, who comment on your friends' "statuses." ("Facebook," as you all know, likes words like "status" -- ingenuously twisting the word "status," with its implication of gravity and centeredness, into meaning something enormously fluid -- something moment to moment -- not something permanent and anchored). You see some intimate comments from those friends and, of course, when you make a comment about those, hundreds of pesons you do not know can read that comment as well. It is an incredible and interesting irony, I believe, that generations younger than mine are outspoken on behalf of their "right" to privacy yet they willingly expose much about themselves through "Facebook."

2. "Facebook" culture has made us all a little more egotistic, at best. OK, I am basing this on the example of one person -- me. We seek out those who will be our "friends," taking comfort and cheer when people agree to be our "friend." Some, well, very many according to what I have heard, collect as many "friends" as possible in some kind of egoistic frenzy. It is all very reminiscent of Valentine's Day in 5th grade. We then post something, and are disappointed if no one comments. We comment on others posts, and are disappointed if no one comments on the comment. We publish a profile with clever or ironic photos of ourselves. We put pictures on "Facebook," often to draw attention to our lives and how we are living them. And, I fear, some people may be actually transferring their egos entirely to "Facebook" as the medium to display their lives. In this regard, it is informative to look at Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, a work published sixty years ago. His brilliant discussion of how we dramatize and represent ourselves in front of different audiences could well be applied to our presentation of ourselves on the internet. I hope some scholar will take up applying his theories to things like "Facebook."

3. Our use of "Facebook" may diminish our capacity to communicate well and to be part of a real community. It does not necessarily lead to this, of course, but the one-sentence-culture of "Facebook" seems more like passing notes to one another in 7th grade (only doing it now in a manner so that ALL of the classes in the school can see it; intimacy shared -- that is, exhibitionism). The recent rise of "twittering" seems a further extension of this mode of "discussion" and "comment." "Twittering" is simply gossiping. And, from what I have read, "twittering" occurs at something like the junior high school level of discourse, moral conduct, and linguistic elegance as well. The difference with "twittering" is that it seems to be a status thing; just which important people will listen to you "twitter" (i.e., which important kids in school will listen and talk to you); who can you get to respond to your "twitter," and so on.

Altogether, there is little sustained expression or argumentation in using "Facebook" to "communicate." One reason I started to blog (is that a verb?) was as an antidote to having no other way anymore to communicate thoughts and reflections to other people (although, admittedly, I have no idea whether there is anyone reading these or not, despite my having installed a "status counter"; perhaps this makes blogging just a form of intellectual masturbation. It probably is; for now, I will not go there).

Having been so critical and condemnatory, I must say again that I, as readily as most, like to go to "Facebook" to see how my real friends and family are getting along. But I remain wary -- very wary -- and suspect that I, along with my family and friends, may be stepping over too many lines (as I argue above) in using "Facebook." In the end, I suspect we all communicate with those who matter to us through more intimate and private means -- the telephone, e-mail perhaps, letters, cards, "Skype," and, above all, through face-to-face engagement.

Hey, if you liked this blog, push the "like" button, or leave a comment on the link below, or send my blog link on to a "friend," or send me a picture, or . . . . ; - )

Bicycling to Bliss

2009-03-06T14:12:00.018-07:00

Spring is near upon us, and that turns every young-old man's fancy to bicycling (well, not exclusively). We used to call it "biking" in the old days but motorcyclists stole that from us, and you don't take back what "bikers" have stolen -- at least not without doing yourself almost as much harm as getting clipped by an eighteen-wheeler at 60 miles an hour.

Popular discourse on "cycling" (hey, we still own that word, don't we?) usually centers on one of two things: 1) those who have recently returned to cycling and are now annoying prophets of the past-time, prepared to proselytize as readily as Jehovah's Witnesses (you know, maybe the latter would be more successful if they rode bicycles); and, 2) those who have recently returned to cycling, and discovered that bicycles are legitimate road vehicles, and now want all legal (to say nothing of moral) authorities to take their side in a religious crusade against the automobile. My wife and I once lived in Maastricht, Netherlands, and within a week, we were ready to start a movement on behalf of pedestrians against those swift and silent bicycles that zoomed across our cross-walks. This latter group of complainers on behalf of cyclist rights is not content (nor am I) with bicycle paths or routes (motorists seem to view signs marking bicycle routes with amusement, as if they read: "you should take this route, there are fewer cars to get in your way." Bad drivers; drivers on cell phones, whose

peripheral vision narrows to blot out any view of cyclists; drivers with malicious intent; drivers who don't stop when you have the right of way; drivers who do stop and dumbly treat you like you are a pedestrian, even when you are occupying a driving lane -- these are the bane of all cyclists existence. Feel suicidal? Have a death wish? Don't have a thrill park nearby? Take up cycling.

The bicycle itself is the Rodney Dangerfield of vehicular traffic. How can anyone take

seriously a slight machine that is all skeleton with only a few tendons and ligaments attached. Many apparently see bicycles as a fossile remnant of an antique age. Weren't they just a brief, awkward, unsuccessful evolutionary step between the horse and the automobile? Speaking of evolution (or rather its critics), think of William Paley's argument about coming upon a watch, and examining it. One could only conclude, he declared, using the watch as an allegory for the workings of nature, that a purposeful designer was behind its construction. Now, if you are fond of Paley's argument (I am not, nor have been most philosophers), substitute bicycle for watch. What have you got then? A creator with a sense of humor? A creator that doesn't quite have it all together? A creator that isn't infallible?

The outward appearance of the bicycle itself is only half of the equation. If you watch the "Tour de France," as I do (despite my suspicion that the top ten riders on any given day are using the newest version of designer drugs), you might find some beauty or elegance to the whole thing. After all, these riders are fit athletes with about 0.0% body fat. One would think

this would allow them to wear skin-tight outfits and maintain the sex appeal of Circe de Soleil performers. But it does not. Something about hunching over handlebars on a pretend seat drains away any latent sexiness. Well, sitting on a bicycle does have a profound negative effect on male prowess (but, hey, so do those steroids). I know of few women or gays who find the Tour de France particularly titilating, no matter how fit the body or meager the outfit. In other words, even professional cyclists look a little bit alien on these machines. When creatures from outer space do appear, I have no doubt they will look a lot like Lance Armstrong on a bicycle (you heard it here first!). What is even worse, most of us ordinary cyclists don't have the bodies to look good even standing on a street corner, let alone after swinging our posteriors up on a saddle that seems to promise some clever torture to follow (which it often does). In short, (and by now you are saying, please cut this short), bicyclists are comic figures riding high ona machine that appears too scant and frail to support the adult human body.

But what a ride! Bicycles are made for the rider, not the observer -- open air, speed, the wind and elements right in your face, gliding along with minimal effort (except up hill; this contrast to gliding largely proves the existence of the devil and evil). Looking out from atop a bicycle (if you can forget how others see you who are not on a bicycle) is a grand way to encounter the world (well, except for encounters with cars, of course, which may explain the popularity of trail biking). Those of you of a certain age will remember Schwinn and other bicycles that figuratively weighed nearly as much as your father's Buick, and which literally did weigh as much as a modern Honda Civic. But the modern bicycle has almost no relationship to the old Schwinn. In fact, the bicycle has evolved more technologically that it has in appearance. In some ways, those who produce modern bicycles (Specialized, Giant, Kona, and several even more elegant brands) are more advanced in engineering than car manufacturers (although, given the state of the auto industry, this may not be claiming too much for them). They are light. An ordinary $500 bicycle today may weigh less than an expensive hand crafted bicycle twenty years ago. They have improved brakes and cranks and pedals and shifters, etc., thanks to Shimano and other companies that can now make quality parts at ordinary prices. And, they roll out on silky smooth bearings and improved wheels and tires. Altogether, riding a good bicycle (not even the top of the line bicycle) is like taking a quality sports car for a drive.

Wait for a nice spring day, and take one for a test ride.

Splitting the Difference: The Sin of the Media, The Danger of "Pragmatism"

2009-03-01T17:53:00.025-07:00

It seems like a very long time ago, although probably it has has been only twenty years since it began, and maybe fifteen years since it became a dangerous virus in journalism and television. I am referring to the now standard practice of so-called "balanced" reporting in the political press and among television interviewers. Contemporary editors, journalists and media opinion seekers simply choose one or more "experts" on the subject at hand from the so-called "Left" and "balance" this off with one or more appropriate "experts" from the "Right." The deployment of this too formulaic method of "splitting the difference" rests upon an enormous act of faith -- that truth or some possible means of resolution of a political problem will emerge from this exercise.

We all know that this premise is weak and that good solutions are not the consequence of such poor logic. At best, we readers and listeners may, quite inadvertently, get to know what the "Center" thinks, because those in the press who came of age from the 1980s onward falsely believe that the centrists they have chosen for "balance" really represent "Left" ideas. They do not. They are only labelled "liberal" or from the "Left" by the "Right," which since the 1980s has managed the diction and discourse of politics. So, the playing field has been shifted quite far to the right even before "balance" is imposed. Representatives of the "Right" have been identified quite easily by this generation of the press and media because the Republican Party has been unapologetically to the right since the 1980s, and their spokespersons are plentiful throughout America. The "Right" has also managed to fund a number of think-tanks from whom "experts" are not only willing to be interviewed, but whose entire raison d'etre is to be interviewed.

It is worth a brief few words in contrasting Canada and the United States in regard to this evolution. There are right-wing enthusiasts in Canada, as Barbara Amiel's long tenure at Maclean's magazine attests. But rightist politics as expressed by Amiel, and leftist politics, often expressed in the past by NDP or BLOC representatives and others as well, are always transparently right or left. They are sincere in their positions but they are less likely than their American counterparts to man the barricades and show no quarter to their opposition. They are ideologues "light," and those who are cast themselves in a more American ideological mold are either compelled either to keep quiet or to accept being marginalized. Even right-wing think-tanks in Canada are more modest in their mission statements and declarations of purpose than in the U. S. The C. D. Howe Institute rather blandly submits that it "aims to improve Canadians' standard of living by fostering sound economic and social policy." The Fraser Institute claims its "vision is a free and prosperous world where individual's benefit from greater choice, competitive markets, and personal responsibility." These are not quite motherhood statements but they come close.

Contrast these statements of purpose with those of the three leading (and gargantuan) think-tanks in the U. S. The right-wing American Enterprise Institute claims its purpose is "to defend the principles and improve the institutions of American freedom and democratic capitalism -- limited government, private enterprise, individual [and] liberty and responsibility" as its prime goals. Note that the purpose is first nationalistic, then supportive of democracy insofar as it is capitalistic, and that private enterprise is to take full precedence over government. The Heritage Foundation is virtually a replica in purpose: "To formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense." Like so many rightist organizations, they appropriate the word "conservative" when all they care to "conserve" are 19th century Christian values and patriarchy. The Cato Institute, while mirroring the other two institutes cited above, recognizes this latter issue and denies that it is "conservative" in its long statement of philosophy. "'Conservative' smacks of an unwillingness to change," they protest, and, "Only in America do people seem to refer to free-market capitalism -- the most progressive, dynamic, and ever-changing system the world has ever know -- as conservative." Taking up, but not fully embracing the label "libertarian" (which describes a condition as far "right" or "left" on the political spectrum as one can get), they seem to settle for "market liberalism," because "Market liberals appreciate the complexity of a great society," and "they recognize that socialism and government planning are just too clumsy for the modern world." They close with a further shot at anything that is not to the "right": "Today collectivism and planning are outmoded and backward, a drag on social progress."

These think-tanks provide the main fodder of argumentation for the "Right" in the press and media (even when not interviewed directly). I don't know about you, but I have seldom seen "communists" or "socialists," or "democrats" who favor the poor and working and middle classes, interviewed alongside Cato, Enterprise, or Heritage spokespersons. We all know, and some of us even joke about, the Fox Network and its news and political punditry shows. And, until recently at least, Glenn Beck's face frequently filled our television screens, to say nothing about the ubiquitous Lou Dobbs. Rush Limbaugh needs no introduction -- nor should he get one. Their main counterparts, significantly, are court-jesters -- Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert -- who can make us laugh as they snipe and allude and ridicule, but who can always retreat behind the curtain of entertainment, never compelled to take a clear position on principles or policies.

But what of the news programs, you might add, and the "liberal" press? Well, yes, there are those columnists at places like The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The New York Times (Cynthia Tucker, editor of the first, and Frank Rich, political columnist of the latter), but how many of you read, or even know their names. Most newspapers claim "balance," which means some obvious display of rightist principles and ideas, and some coy inclusion of meek ideas from the political center. Television news programs, other than the shouting matches staged by folks like John McLaughlin, seldom have regular reporters or pundits who are even moderately to the left.

All of this was driven home to me after I read an old study (4 October, 2006 published by FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) (see their blog). They addressed the issue of "balance" on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer. Our family has pretty well watched this show ever since it was begun by Lehrer and Robin MacNeil. Like others, we were troubled when, in 2005, Kenneth Tomlinson launched a campaign to move both PBS and NPR to the "right" in its political commentary. Bill Moyers show -- NOW -- was dramatically ended (though now reborn as Bill Moyers Journal), and it seemed to us that the Newshour interviewers suddenly began to pitch under-handed softballs to a long line of hard-hitting "rightist" commentators. It came as a surprise to me, therefore, to learn that Tomlinson had long been happy with the Newhour's balance. FAIR tells why. A 1990 study by FAIR revealed both the elitist and the rightist bias in the Newshour over the past long decade. The Newshour to make a long story short, had moved itself to the right even before heavy pressure from a Republican Congress and a G. W. Bush presidency.

We all know the reasons for the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of rightist media and journalism: the corporate consolidation of the media; the death of independent newspapers; the marketing of news through the hiring of pretty men and women as replacements for real journalists; and the ubiquitous economic bottom line which never seems to be served by anything but the so-called "good news" of so-called "conservatism." Yet, what we have all clung to through this revolution is the fictitious idea of "balance." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. fathered this modern idea in his dissent in Abrams v. U. S. (1919) when he adopted the laissez-faire economic theory of the 19th century (now famously reborn by the right, with all of its fallacies intact) to argue for a "free trade in ideas." Liberals and the "Left" bought into this idea too readily. The problem is that such "free trade" is not governed by the quality of the ideas; it is not a "free trade in good ideas" but a free trade in whatever ideas have power and resources and a voice. Those latter ideas are not always well derived and not often good. It seems to me that many of the so-called liberal ideas that broadcasters like Walter Cronkhite and others suggested, came from experience, reflection, rationality, and examination. Some of these folks still remain in the press and on television, but precious few.

Now that many of the consequences of unregulated capitalism (read "greed") have once again been revealed, we might think that real balance can be restored. This seems to be a belief of Barack Obama and his administration as well. But balance will always be much more difficult than first assumed, and organizations like FAIR and other journalism watchdogs are essential in trying to restore responsibility and reason to the press and media. If not, we will continue to see disgraced and wildly radicalized rightists like many Republicans in Congress given equal (or more) time to make their feeble and patently wrong cases. If not, President Obama may, through his desire for consultation and cooperation, continue to strike a middle that is impossible to attain or false from the start. Let's just try to identify good ideas, and nothing else.

The "Deserving" vs. the "Undeserving" Poor

2009-02-21T10:44:00.024-07:00

A brief article in the N. Y. Times ("Week in Review," February 8, 2009) reminded me of how little progress we have made in our understanding and conceptualization of "the poor" and in any resolution to end "poverty" in, let's say, the last, 2500 years!! Jason deParle, in "The 'W' Word, Re-Engaged," re-raises the ages old American issue of how the U.S. will address, administer, distribute, handle, deal with, quietly maintain, sometimes ignore, frequently sweep-under-the carpet, and inevitably ghettoize -- "welfare" and those who receive it -- the poor. All of this makes me review in my mind some features in the history of the poor, and especially the perverse history of poverty and the poor in the U. S.

When Jesus said, "For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always." (Matthew 26:11), he did not mean to say that we can ignore the poor because they are always lingering about, or that he was more important than the issue of the poor, and that they were worth ignoring compared to his presence. He did mean that those around him should seize the moment; in his case, the brief moment he would be alive. And, importantly, he meant that the poor will always be "WITH" us, not segregated from us, not apart from us, but there to be supported. As he said, "whenever you wish you can do good to them" (Mark 14:7), but he would not always be there.

Most cultures have and do accept the fact that the poor are always "with" them. Two things strike me as interesting historical aspects of this fact: 1) the poor generally have stood in some kind of reciprocal relationship to others, especially the rich, in most cultures and societies; and, 2) the poor are often considered just that -- poor -- and nothing else. In the city of Rome before and after the birth of Christ, the poor were an integral political element that the rich sought to support through food subsidies, housing, and entertainment in exchange for political support. The same relationship holds today in much of Latin America -- most famously today in Cuba and Venezuela. In feudal Europe, the relationship of the poor (serfs and then later peasants) to vassals and lords stood at the very heart of the social structure. In early modern Europe, the poor -- both the agricultural poor and city artisans and servants -- occupied the role of producers and workers, while the obligation of the rich was to consume the products of the poor. With industrialization and modernization (18th century to now), the reciprocal part became more distorted, with the poor increasingly perceived as being exploited, and reciprocity a fiction (thus the rise of Karl Marx and a whole host of socialist and communist thinkers). As for the second facet, for most of history, and in most places, the poor have been seen simply as people without money and resources. Poverty has not meant, and does not mean in many cultures today (especially more traditional ones), that the poor are or have been stupid, lazy, or immoral. Above all, the idea of poverty and the poor has not generally carried with it the notion of the poor being undeserving or unworthy in a broad range of ways (income, food, housing, health, education, entertainment, etc.).

The image of the poor and poverty in the United States of America (and, interestingly, far less in Canada, where in most regions poverty and the poor are seen to be more of an integral part of the social fabric) has been a perverse and severe one. Poverty in the colonial period was identified strongly with the marginalized -- non-Puritan newcomers in New England, indentured servants and sailors in the middle colonies, and African slaves and non-landing holding poor whites in the South. Radical Protestant ideas of "election" or salvation, which took away free will and put God in complete charge of choosing who would be saved, ironically left residents of communities often judging severely who was worthy and who was unworthy on the basis of poverty. By the time of the Revolution (1770s-1780s), republican virtue was added to the mix, leaving even "enlightened" reformers, in places like Philadelphia, carefully discriminating between the "worthy" and the "unworthy" for the administration of poor relief. Americans haven't stopped doing that. In Jacksonian democracy, it has been argued that the division in society was between "producers" and "non-producers" (A. Schlesinger, Jr., and others), thus making the rich prove their productivity as well. And, in 1899,

Thorstein Veblen, who invented the modern idea of "conspicuous consumption" was able to suggest that the rich, most of whom inherited their wealth and did nothing to contribute to society -- the "leisure class" -- were least deserving.

That idea did not last, except among left-wing reformers. Even during the Great Depression (1929-1941) and the New Deal (1933-1939), FDR strongly opposed welfare that was not attached to work. Work relief was the very core of the WPA, and even there, wages were kept low in order to allow the private sector of the economy to complete with the government in paying low wages itself. Furthermore, FDR wanted to keep non-work relief to a minimum and low in value in order to encourage people to take jobs, despite the fact that many of the poor (children, for example) could not enter the work force. Most of American society spent the second half of the 20th century trying to move up into the middle-class, while the middle-class, in the last 30 years, at least, has tried to move up to the upper-class. Industrial opportunity, education, the happy

absence of warfare on American soil contributed to real accomplishments in the creation of a broad middle class. But after the 1960s, that progress slowed and reversed. Many Americans have deluded themselves into thinking they were middle-class when in fact they were much poorer. As David Hackett Fisher waggishly noted in one of his books, "Only in America does the middle class own only its debts" (or something close to that).

Denial and invisibility has been part of the problem, as Michael Harrington

pointed out in "The Other America" in 1962. Most poverty, by then, was out of sight, off the main highways, in rural America, or in urban ghettoes where rich and white America refused to drive. Other factors, like the rise of casual dress (tee-shirts and jeans, for example) no longer visually distinguished the poor from the middle class. But other problems

with the idea of poverty and the poor arose at the same time. When I was in college in the early 1960s, I attended a presentation by the anthropologist-novelist Oscar Lewis (The Children of Sanchez). It was the first scholarly-academic talk I had ever attended, and was I impressed! Lewis was introducing (at about the same time as Harrington) the idea of "a culture of poverty." The idea was that the poor formed communities of their own, apart from the rest of society, self-sustaining and self-perpetuating. For Lewis and Harrington, these "cultures of poverty" had arisen from profound systemic failings of the mother culture, not from some inherent moral failings of the poor themselves. I distinctly remember Lewis, in response to questions, explaining that being poor did not mean being stupid, the eloquence of some of the poor Mexicans he interviewed attesting to that fact. That was a whole new representation of the poor from what I had heard before. My recent travels to Mexico have confirmed this in my mind, as I have found very poor Mexicans more politically astute, for example, than their richer brethren.

The Harrington-Lewis conceptualization of "cultures of poverty" became the foundation for Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty," and it appeared that the will to end poverty had finally arrived. Two major elements of American life, however, not only stymied that will but produced an American relationship with poverty and the poor that may be the most retrograde in human history. 1) The first problem is that with new attention paid to poverty and the poor, the exaggerated American idea and psychology of human agency kicked into over-drive. "Rugged individualism" and belief in being the author of one's own destiny do not begin to describe the perversity of the American religion of agency. Stemming from the radical protestantism of the 17th century, individual agency became the prime interpretive tool in understanding society. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, born into poverty himself and the Congressional point man in the "war against poverty," was so imbued with the idea of individual agency that, in the end, he became a principle enemy of the poor by "blaming the victim" in poverty. The individual as cause of his/her own poverty is now even more powerfully embedded in the American psyche. The second force was and is right-wing anger, a modern anger that was driven mad by the New Deal and then by LBJ's social policies, and that highjacked the war on poverty as a means of retaliation. Always able to mangle any idea that has unexpectedly crossed their path, the right latched onto the "culture of poverty" idea of Harrington and Lewis, and distorted it into meaning that the poor had created their own ghettoes of poverty, and were responsible in furthering that culture, and were using it to milch money out of taxpayers who had earned their money (another moronic and mangled interpretation of how individuals are solely responsible for even multi-million dollar salaries).

From the late 1960s onward, individual agency and the "culture of poverty" became occasion to ask just what the poor "deserved" to have. In the 1960s and 70s, the question often was, should they be allowed to have a color TV, and call themselves poor, or even a TV? What should they be allowed to buy, to have? Should they live a life of no pleasure, no intellectual stimulation, no engagement in the material and intellectual middle-class world? In 1980, Ronald Reagan officially launched the rightist anti-poor movement when he cleverly married racism and an attack on the poor by asking whether or not a "big buck" he had seen spending "food stamps" in a grocery store for "T-bone steaks" should be allowed to do so. By the 1990s, Bill Clinton was emboldened enough to match his sexual exploits and slight-of-hand denials by "ending" poverty by shutting down welfare. Well, in fact, he hid the funding of poverty, and his successor continued the process of minimal provision by under-the-table means.

Needless to say, we are at the nadir of any desire for addressing poverty or changing our conception of what it is to be poor, or even how to successfully live "with" the poor. As Megan Mcardle has recently observed, "The mental model most Americans use for dealing with poverty is Dickens-with-a-hotplate." Will this change as the fortunes of most of us retreat in the New Depression? Will having less allow us to conceive of the idea that living well involves material advantage only to a small degree? American history certainly doesn't hold a lot of promise for this in the U.S., but it may improve things in the rest of the world.

(Ideas from, and conversations with, June Tagg, Pat Chuchryk, and Malcolm Greenshields have contributed to this essay. They are not responsible, of course, for the imperfections in this essay).

Announcers

2009-02-15T13:24:00.026-07:00

Like most folks, we found ourselves glued to the TV during the inauguration of Barack Obama. But one thing struck us as out-of-the-ordinary, as just not quite in sink with the occasion -- that was the delivery of the announcer. Every time someone new was introduced to the VIP podium, the announcer intoned, what sounded like: "Laaaadieees and Gennntlemen, now playing left field and batting fifth -- Baraaaack H. Obamaaaa."

OK, I exaggerate but not by much. Americans always do conduct their ceremonies in sometimes clumsy and sometimes inexplicable ways. For most observers, this was exemplified in the muffed oath of office, fumbled not only the the Chief Justice of the U. S. but by the new president as well (for a brief moment, it had the quality of the "Vicar of Dibley" episode in which Alice marries Hugo and takes over the vicar's lines leaving them both in confusion as they briefly reverse roles). If you had the fortitude, or enough snacks to last through the inauguration, you might have also seen the lawn mower contingent that marched (uh, pushed and "mowed"?) their way through the official parade (what was that about???). But for us, the announcer was the high-light. He would not have been out of place announcing "The Cavalcade of Sports Friday Night Fights." "In this corner, weighing 185

pounds wearing red trunks, the disgraced former president of the United States -- Geooorge Dubayaaa -- Bush." As it turns out, the actual announcer was one Charlie Brotman, who has been the auguration announcer ever since Ike's second inaugural in 1956. (I think June and I missed him before because, to be frank about it, we probably haven't listened to or watched an inaugural since 1952). June thought his announcements in this year's inauguration sounded more like those of a Circus announcer: "Laaadieees and Gennntlemen, cast your eyes to the center ring where Dr. Stranglove, disgraced former Vice-President of the United States, will perform a sharp-shooting exhibition from his wheelchair."

All of this makes me think about announcers in my lifetime, and how critical their voices are in situating ourselves in time and place. In the U. S., sports announcers probably have had the most recognizable voices. What male, of my generation, would not immediately remember

the voice of Mel Allen, who almost seemed to make the N. Y. Yankees into a virtuous organization (almost -- my two favorite teams were, and remain, the Detroit Tigers and any team playing the Yankees). Even fewer persons, men and women alike, would not recognize the voice

(and image) of Howard Cosell -- a Jew born in North Carolina who famously and publicly defended Muhammed Ali for refusing the draft during the Vietnam War, and who much later was fired from announcing pro-football for describing an African-American running back in seemingly racist terms (Cosell was many things, but not a racist). Other great sports announcers come to mind too; Curt Gowdy (from Wyoming), the long time announcer for the Red Sox and then for national sports, whose mellifluous voice was enhanced by his addiction to cigarettes.

So, sports announcers really did define American culture. But they have been only half of the equation; the other half have been news announcers. Before the pretty men and pretty women, who now smile through the broadcast of whatever latest tragedy has captured the attention of the media, there were stentorian announcers, those men (all men -- sorry, this is a very politically incorrect paragraph -- as was the last one, actually) whose listeners and viewers made them a part of the family routine. The earliest I remember were H. V. Kaltenborn

and Lowell Thomas, the latter presenting himself as the soothing voice of journalistic reason and much-traveled worldly expertise (I wonder how many people were encouraged to

travel because of him). Then there was Walther Cronkite -- everyone's father figure, everyone's "trusted" American -- whose contemporaries challenged him for presenting the news in the most excellent fashion possible. Chet Huntley (from Montana and a man who chain-smoked while delivering the news) and his intellectual side-kick, David Brinkley. And, after this generation, there was Dan Rather, and more importantly perhaps, Tom Brokaw (who was from South Dakota, and always sounded faintly intoxicated, which, if he were wise, he should have been on some news-casting occasions), and Peter Jennings (a Canadian who also smoked heavily, and died of lung cancer at the age of 67). What is it about famous American announcers coming from the wide-open spaces and adopting the pose of the Marlboro man.

I had my own brief encounter with announcing as the "voice of the University of Lethbridge," almost three decades ago. A friend of mine was university "publicist," and he chose me, I am certain, not because I came from an remote town in the mid-west (which I did), or because I was a heavy smoker (although I may have been a smoker at the time), but because my voice sound "unremarkable" and neutral. I had to do take after take of the shortest, simplest lines. One recording of me was an introduction to the University that was put on a looped recording in a kiosk in the main foyer of the University. My voice spoke over a slide show whenever a passerby pushed the start button. The whole thing ran too many years (well, anything over a day would have been too much for everyone). I used to jog to get past the kiosk. The only thing worse than hearing your own voice say the same thing over and over, is to look at the profile of your own face in a mirror (yikes!!). My other odd experience as an announcer was a video presentation I made for the University, in which I was filmed (in summer, in a steamingly hot business suit, with sun glasses) stolling along the very steep side of a coulee slope, as I intoned about the University (seen in the background behind me). In those days, video was new, and I had to lug a huge set of wrapped cables that were run up my pant leg to a mic on my lapel. I dragged the whole apparatus along as if I were "Chester" in "Gunsmoke." Now, if you can remember Dennis Weaver as "Chester," you are old enough to need a nap. I don't care what time it is. Go to bed!

Why Is the Political Right Always So Angry?

2009-02-08T11:40:00.013-07:00

Do you find yourself, when discussing politics or society or culture, struggling to define your terms? Do you notice that anyone you are talking to struggles also, or else falsely assumes that you share a common nomenclature? No words are more empty, more available for broad, differing, even contradictory meanings, than words like "liberal" or "conservative." Liberal can mean either holding progressive views on society or conversely hands-off laissez-faire views of government, society and the economy (a rightist view). Conservative can mean someone who seeks to conserve the natural ecology of the planet (a leftist view) or someone who demands the maintenance of patriarchy and a host of precepts regarding abortion, birth control, and class, race and ethnic divisions. The antiquated designation of one party as the "Liberal Party" and another as the "Conservative Party" in Canada is a prime example of the ridiculous use of these terms. The Liberals really aim to conserve the so-called "environment" and a host of long-standing Canadian institutions; the "Conservatives" would like to usher in a new kind of "libertarianism."

Putting aside liberal and conservative, what useful terms remain? Not many if we mean to divide North American societies into two distinct camps. We have neo-progressives (the pragmatic Obama style of what used to be termed "liberal"); we have neo-liberals (the free-marketers who will just not go away, despite reality); we have "libertarians" or hyper-individualists who extend free-market economic ideas to all of government and society. And, so it goes, as you all know.

Yet we know that there are two opposing sides -- that the "born again" Christian is likely to support the free-market capitalist, and that the ecologist is likely to befriend governmental activism and be pro-choice and in favor of socialized health care -- despite the internal contradictions in these positions. So, how can we label them. For many years now, I have simply divided the two camps into "traditionalists" and "modernists." Traditionalists (I also use the term "rightists" at times) tend to create a static vision of an ideal past (more of which later). Modernists (I also use the term "leftists" at times) tend to create a dynamic understanding of the past, present and future. [But, you might protest, the rise of modernism in art, for example, was a rise in individualism, in artists demanding that they be free to pursue art in their own highly individualistic fashion (much like the "libetarian" ideal that I place largely in the rightist camp with traditionalism). That is in part true. But more importantly, the artistic rebellion called "modernism" was a revolt against older, traditional forms of art. It was dynamic.]

By now you have started your own list of ways in which my dialectic is wrong. I will not answer your objections here. The point is that "modernists" are open to new ideas, new ways of doing things, to experimentation. This does not mean that they are hostile to things like the "family," although they may be willing to expand the boundaries of family in new ways. The tend to favor the gifts that science can bestow -- not just in pure knowledge, but in the application of science. They may use philosophy and history to provide some general pathways, but they are not as gripped by specific philosophical mandates or historical imperatives in the way traditionalists are. The ugly side of "modernism" and "modernization" comes when its adherents elevate some particulars to the altar of ideology. Modernization economic and development theory has ruined populations in much of the second and third world, even more so when its disciples refuse to recognize the ways it is not working. Cultural modernism rigidified becomes "political correctness," and can be just as nasty as any right-wing position. Where modernism fails is where it loses its sense of dynamism and possibility.

Traditionalism has its merits, I think, when it is emulates the better side of Edmund Burke's conservatism -- not in his particular love for the institutions of Church and Crown but in his argument that "habit," and what he called "prejudice," provide the mortar to hold societies and cultures together. This conservatism might be called the best of cultural evolution. But rightist politics, which I place under the umbrella of traditionalism, hardly follows Burke's conservative ideal any longer. Some might think that "Rightists" are attached to history, that they look to the past for answers. But modern traditionalism -- those who cry out for the sanctity of the unborn, traditional marriage, patriarchy, and laissez-faire economics, and against government, taxes, bureaucracy, and even society itself on occasion -- are not devoted to lessons of the past or history. They are devoted to a mythical past of their own creation.

History is about change over time, and its lessons are about how history can positively or negatively inform us about where we are now, and where we might go. Rightists are about fixed principles of economics, fixed principles of the family, and a fixed image of how society should operate, even if they articulate this vision very poorly. In fact, they are idealists clinging to wrong ideas and romantics clinging to a time in the past that never existed. To be more precise, rightist businessmen (and they are usually men), some entrepreneurs, some industrialists, and most financial movers-and-shakers, live under the foggy impression that there once was something akin to the state of nature in economics -- sometime after Adam Smith (who, if they really knew his ideas about human empathy and the limits of the free market, they would disown) -- when laissez-faire blossomed. They applaud the industrial revolution in this, and the rise of the corporation in the late 19th century, and the business culture of the 1920s, and the conformist culture of the 1950s, and hail these as the brief eras in which all was true and right, when we were all homo economicus. Social and cultural rightists imagine that perfect world of the past in which father was the bread-winner, mother was the home-maker, and the children were all well-behaved. "Father Knows Best" and "Leave It to Beaver" were the iconic emblems of that perfect time in the past. Most rightists in the U. S. A. today would like to re-create that era, just as earlier traditionalists yearned for 19th century Victorian forms and attitudes. Having grown up in the 1950s, I would be willing to disabuse anyone of the perfectness of the era. Rural poverty, racism, sexism, desperate lives of political and cultural conformity, anti-intellectualism, "Red baiting," child abuse, poor health care, and the Cold War were more the reality than suburban bliss.

The consequence of this perverted romanticism and perverted idealism has been a perverted cynicism. In the U. S. A., at least, the right has felt that its "vision" has been attacked, corrupted, and disadvantaged in a broad conspiracy to keep their romantic ideology out of power. It began with the Federalists in the 1790s and early 1800s. They were willing to abandon the idea of a new nation, because the "people" might rule, and the best and the brightest (read: the richest) would no longer hold positions of privilege. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and the Hartford Convention of 1815 were the height of their frenzy and rejection of the "modern" world. In the late 19th century, the courts were assailed for attempting to interfere with the God-given right of corporations to do as they pleased, including forming discriminating monopolies (e. g., John D. Rockefeller). Social Darwinism became the favored form of understanding Darwinism in general: some were meant to be rich; some meant to be poor, and so on. When "Progressivism" (1890-1914) retaliated with sweeping social reform, rightist-traditionalists were aghast, but overwhelmed (let's hope 2009 forward is similar). But in 1912 "The Fundamentals" were published, which promised and attained religious backlash against science and Darwin. In the 1920s, the tensions and hatreds the war engendered led to escapism and helped bring about the laissez-faire heaven that rightist-traditionalists had hoped for. Then the Great Depression and FDR destroyed that. The political right planned its revenge from the 1930s onward. Their hatred of FDR and Truman was venomous. Eisenhower proved too soft for them. JFK and LBJ, even Richard Nixon, and then Jimmy Carter were anti-christs (if the plural is possible). If you don't believe the levels of hatred from the 1930s until Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, read the right-wing press for that era. Then, in 1980, Ronald Reagan put a happy -- let's say "Ronald McDonald" -- face on everything. The right was back. Nirvana had been attained.

But wait, read the "National Review" from the 1980s forward, and you'll find that isn't true. According to those farthest to the right, the victory had not been won (why? because they demanded, and still demand, total victory). During the 1980s, even during the 1990s when Newt Gingrich and his crew dominated Congress, the right complained bitterly about always being left out, of the Left conspiring against them. Hate was the underlying principle of most rightist editorials, even during their heyday from 1980 to 2008. And, why? Because the transformation was not perfect. Hedonism and pop culture continued. Abortion remained. All government had not been destroyed. The economy was damned near, but not completely laissez-faire. The Right had upped their demands after 1980, and doomed themselves to failure when perfection could not be attained. Rush Limbaugh was their chronicler -- a man who never basked in rightist-traditionalist victories but was and still is always angry, angry, angry at the fact that people are still allowed to live in America who do not agree with the full rightist vision.

What a strange history -- one hard to believe. And, there is no foreseeable end in sight. Rather than work with a very accommodating president, the Republican right has decided to vote against him -- just like the Supreme Court in the early 1930s worked against the New Deal, and just as most Republicans, for the last century, have identified the Democrats as an evil force. This is not just a post-empire America that is emerging, it is one that is filled with hate from a large minority of its population. As the unilateral power of the U. S. slides away, are Americans going to suffer a continued ideological tribalism or a renewed sense of possibility in which homo civicus once again arises?

Ebert Gets It Right

2009-02-05T11:25:00.001-07:00

Do not miss Roger Ebert's blog of Feb 5, "Well, Here's What I Think." It is what I think, too. Ditto, ditto, ditto.

Atheism: What's It Good For?

2009-01-30T21:54:00.011-07:00

Those who call themselves religious unbelievers, some statistics claim, are increasing in a world that, at first glance, would seem to be more and more religious. Even the new president of the United States, a staunch believer himself, recognized the legitimacy of "unbelievers" as loyal Americans (wow!) (He did hesitate slightly in his delivery, however, before uttering the word -- "unbelievers"). In truth, the increase in the numbers of "unbelievers" is probably not furthered by anti-religious "atheist" zealotry so much as by a large number of unbelievers holding a common sense disbelief in religious claims or by the fact that those same unbelievers have remained untouched by a religious experience that in its mystery might over-ride common sense denials.

Yet the "spokespersons" (for want of a better word) of "unbelief" have almost exclusively been "atheists." For some time now, I have refused to be called an "atheist" or, for that matter, an "unbeliever," "heathen," or "pagan," despite the fact that I am convinced that there is no god, and that the universe is largely (although probably not exclusively) a material one. People like me, who attempt to call themselves "humanists," largely fail in promoting themselves in a positive way, and "humanism" has largely become a euphemism for rationalism and "atheism," or at least humanism has been co-opted by atheist proponents and groups.

So, because I would like to deny "atheism" and "atheist" as the appropriate labels for my sentiments, I must first deal with these terms as the terms of choice for both religious advocates and religion deniers. While the dictionary defines "unbeliever" as a more negative term than "atheist," I think almost everyone today would argue that "atheist" is a word freighted with more implications of stridency. Throughout the 19th century, it was a pejorative word. In more recent times, "atheist" has been equated with an active campaign of rationalism and materialism. In very recent times, an "atheist" is, with some justification, assumed to be someone who campaigns vigorously against theism and religion in general; someone who may be condescending in their scorn of religion (Dawkins), or at least look forward to a day in which their rationalist arguments will push religion into obscurity (various free thinker societies). "Atheism" as it is currently practiced in some quarters is not quite the Inquisition stood on its head, but it certainly contains elements of self-righteousness that would not be unfamiliar to John Calvin.

If I claim to believe essentially what "atheists" believe, what is my objection? My objection is to the narrowly bitter cultural view that much of atheism promotes: 1. religious belief is based on superstition and blind faith. 2. religious belief ignores rational arguments and is anti-intellectual. 3. religion as a whole equals bigotry and intolerance. 4. religion looks backward toward tradition and therefore ignorance, while atheism is modern and looks toward the future. All of this, it should be noted, was argued as early as the eighteenth century. Not all atheists would subscribe to all of these representations, but most would have to agree with the tone. As I have said elsewhere, atheism is angry -- angry at those who ignore common sense; angry at the wars and misery religions and religious beliefs have caused. But, above all, atheists refuse to move on from their initial premise -- that there is no god and that most religion is ridiculous. Most atheists refuse to look at religion as the cultural consequence of human nature, of human experience over the millennia. Most atheists today, it seems to me, refuse to move on from their disbelief, even move on to pick through the rubble of religion to sort out the very best of love, redemption, brother/sisterhood, and morality that religion either authored or refined.

All of this is preamble, really, to why I am bothering to write this essay at all. A recent news item (whether accurate or not may be beside the point) has claimed that the Toronto Free Thought Association has planned the production of signs declaring: "There probably is no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy life." The two sentences are worth deconstruction. In trying to counter the view that atheism was "gloomy and angry," this group over-reached. Their first sentence suggests that whether there is a God or not is to be taken lightly and is of little consequence. Here they are being too disingenuous by half. The second sentence suggests that our worries originate with religious belief, or at least the belief in an all-powerful god. Successful removal of a "god-out-there" has absolutely nothing to do with the end of worrying or the end of humankind's worries -- quite the contrary. Their precept -- to "enjoy life" -- may be laudable as one of several human goals but all too many critics of atheism think that is just why atheism is dangerous -- because it is about unchecked hedonism; getting what you want now, and to hell with anyone else. So, even the re-assuringly friendly intent of this free thought slogan fails in many ways.

For years, non-religious friends of mine and I have contended that the logical consequences of atheism are these: 1. Because there is no "god-out-there," we are even more dependent on our own intentions and good work. 2. Because there is no god to administer justice, mercy, and forgiveness, we had better pay continual attention to our own lives and societies, so that we, as imperfect human beings, can further both justice and mercy insofar, and as often, as we can. 3. With no authoritative god, we must draw from the best of human experience to be our guide, and that experience comes from many quarters, including the tenets and practices of various religions. 4. Because there is no after-life, we must make the most of this one. We must live in the moment. We must respect the integrity of our lives, and the lives of others. We must enjoy life, but in ways that will aid the enjoyment of others, and of generations to come.

If all of these legitimate consequences of what is inelegantly called "atheism" appears to look a lot like a porridge made of the best aspects of all of the world's religions, well, in many ways it is. Hey, Rober Ebert has one helluva lot more fun in dealing with one small, small aspect of this stuff in his latest blog (Jan. 28) entitled: "In the Sweet Bye and Bye." If you read this, treat yourself to dessert -- read his.

Historical Moments v. You're History

2009-01-23T15:59:00.010-07:00

The recent inauguration ceremony of Barack Obama has encouraged many pundits, waxing romantic in the warm glow of the moment, to declare that "this-or-that" aspect of this event constitutes an "historic moment." I have heard more than one commentator declare that, "this moment will be studied by historians for many years to come." Television networks, never given much to tradition or history in any other respect, eagerly seek out and listen to "presidential historians" (a type of historian I had never heard of until Michael Beschloss and PBS so anointed him to that position; the breed seems to be multiplying, however). Now every self-respecting pundit panel has a presidential historian to offer comparisons of yester-year with today, each trying to outdo the other in re-telling amusing anecdotes about Andrew Johnson's drunkenness or William Henry Harrison's short one-month presidency.

At the other end of the spectrum, and generally in that long, long pause between the brief stirring moments of eventful history, in which no saleable public celebrations are swelling the coffers of corporate media, "history" is employed to mean something different. It is used as a synonym for the words "unimportant, insignificant, irrelevant, gone and forgotten or at least something or someone worthy of being forgotten." "You are history" is as bad as it gets in terms of being labelled. Sports announcers love it. With one team losing beyond reprieve, "they're history" is the favorite chant of sports analysts and fan alike. A colleague of mine and I used to watch TV baseball games together and roar with laughter every time "they're history" or "its only academic" was used to sluff-off the irrelevant, forgotten, or the end. Of course, popular culture cares little for reflection but a lot for "attitude," so "they're/you're history" provides the occasion to "dis" whatever and whomever is at hand that needs quick dismissal.

[Other disciplines have similar problems, I guess, or at least that's "my personal philosophy." Certainly everyone from linguists to anthropologists to mathematicians and physicists suffer from being misunderstood in some grand way. So, this reflection on history is not special in some respects. But someone else must speak for them.]

So, what's it to be: meaningless void or a dusty album of precious keepsakes. Neither really. Even the puerile pundits and the prince[sses] of pop culture know they are not talking about "real" history. Yet you could ask ten people on the street or in the ivory tower what history really is, and you'd get ten answers. Few seem to know or care to speculate on the "uses of history" (as it used to be put when historians and others pondered the value of history -- not a large business these days). A few years ago I had a science colleague come to me worrying over a speech he had to give to a large academic convention. In writing his talk, he had apparently painted himself into a corner where he had to justify history as a useful handmaiden to knowledge. And, quite frankly, he couldn't think of a single useful thing regarding knowledge of the past (if I came to any of my science colleagues and asked them if there was any use to science, I think I would be considered "committable"). I told him that history establishes the contexts of the present, and it serves (for his case) a useful caution against forging ahead in policies and programs before considering the human past in relationship to the cause. He was pleased that history might perform the task of dull theatre back-drop and under-appreciated security guard. I really didn't have the heart (nor the energy) to go on further with him.

Frankly, most of my academic friends think this: history provides facts and descriptive material that can be used by better minds than those possessed by historians to analyze society, politics, government, and culture. There is great confusion among them in defining the differences between archivists/librarians and historians. Aren't they the same? Aren't they all engaged in some antiquarian exercise, operating on the hope that some of the scraps they assemble will have useful meaning in the future? The other problem comes with "historical method." I once was asked a question regarding the methods of history (tossed out by the president of our university no less -- a scientist), and I flubbed around before seizing on some insane answer (the trauma was too great -- I forget what I said).

Lately, I just say to everyone -- "There is no legitimate discipline called history." On the one hand, it is completely capacious and inclusive, it is everything except the fleeting moment and our reckless imaginations about the future. On the other, it is a discipline without topic or focus. Is it about government and politics (it was thought to be until fifty years ago)? Is it about society and culture, and if so, how is it different from sociology or anthropology? It has no methodologies, other than the ones borrowed or shared with other "disciplines." It might be rigorously scientific; it might be as intuitive as poetry. Now all I care about is a good question, one relevant to the present and foreseeable future, one that can be informed by the past, and how skillfully and convincingly an historian fields that question. And, as for method, well, all historians, whether they admit it or not, damned well scramble to put together each and every method at their disposal, hoping that that rare commodity -- common sense -- will be their general guide.

The Inauguration: Washington, Jackson and Obama: Men of Myth

2009-01-19T17:43:00.006-07:00

Barack Obama's inauguration will be just the third of its type in American History. By "type" I mean the inauguration of a person who has become an American political myth BEFORE becoming president of the United States. The other two who could proclaim mythical status before holding office were George Washington and Andrew Jackson. All three share some things in common. All three had worked hard to make themselves into "myths" (although they may not have favored that word) before assuming office. Washington had spent his whole life making himself into the solid "father" of his country, avoiding any actions that would suggest he was uncertain about anything or that he was weak and vulnerable like most mortals. Jackson relished his fame as both an Indian fighter and as hero of the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812. He made no attempts to correct exaggerated reports about his bravery and democratic principles. Barack Obama made himself a myth by writing two books -- "Dreams from my Father" and "The Audacity of Hope" -- and by discussing race when necessary while simultaneously rejecting the role of being merely a racial candidate.

All three were feted by their nation. Washington took an eight-day journey from Mount Vernon to New York City (the first capital) in the spring of 1789 that was nothing less than a coronation processional. Celebrated at every town through which he passed, Washingtion was received by thousands of admirers at New York harbor upon his arrival, and was the object of an emotional inauguration, at the end of which Robert R. Livingston turned to the crowd and proclaimed: "Long live George Washington, President of the United States." Mobs of Andrew Jackson supporters overwhelmed Washington, D. C., in 1833, drinking and reveling in their triumph, leading the famous newspaper editor Amos Kendall to sum it up: "It was a proud day for the people. General Jackson is their own president." Obama's inauguration has already been even more broadly attended and celebrated.

George Washington was embraced because voters believed he would bring stability and order to a fledgling government and nation. Citizens waxed enthusiastic over Andrew Jackson because he embodied the bold spirit of nineteenth-century individual heroism (a spirit sparked by Napoleon), and more importantly because he was seen as the embodiment of democracy. Barack Obama is embraced for both of these reasons: stability/order and democracy. Unlike the other two, Obama also carries with him, for the nation, a spirit of "hope" that has not often infected American politics.

In some ways, therefore, Barack Obama emerges as the greatest mythic figure to enter the White House. We can only hope that the people of the United States can live up to the myth that they (and he) have created. For his part, it seems likely he will deliver the best he can, which will be something far short of all that is hoped for; for our part, if we deliver even a little of the involvement and engagement he and others have called for, American democracy and society can be transformed for the better.

Creationism v. Evolution: Hope, Meaning, and Truth

2009-01-13T16:43:00.006-07:00

Why do the contentious words over creationism (or whatever current noun is chosen to represent those ideas) and evolution never go away? Why, since the 1920s (at least), have we had an angry war between both sides, even though Darwinian evolution and Christian Higher Criticism lived a comfortable co-existence through the 19th century? Why isn't one side declared the victor? or both sides seen as having something to say? or both sides seen as having nothing to say?

I think the answers to these questions lies in what is NOT said by, or about, either camp. The answer does not have to do with the truth of science and the falsity of religion, although both of these claims can be made in most cases in my view. My position is clear: 1) the "truthfulness" of the claims of evolution are born out every time evolution is tested; 2) the specific claims of fact by creationists are almost always false, or at least deceptive and incomplete. So, why is the discussion on-going, persistent, seemingly ubiquitous. Let me deal with each side, and how each side is perceived by the other side.

First, let's take the side of evolution, which I am certain is accurate insofar as it has been developed and tested. This is a theory but not, as too many say, "only a theory." A theory is an idea tested and found accurate insofar as it can be made accurate by known facts. The facts about evolution are "true." But scientists, and others, assure us that all they want to do is to explain the known universe -- from its smallest particles to its cosmic dimensions, from how the smallest elements in the universe work, to how the universe has unfolded and is unfolding. There is a disingenuousness in this, despite the fact that popular science and popular culture likes to believe there is a quest for pure knowledge.

The fact is that the "truthfulness" of science leading to an understanding of a knowable universe is only a romantic, perhaps just mythic, part of the scientific enterprise. Pure science -- just finding out how things work -- is a noble ideal held by many scientists (including my son) but none of them would be funded for any of this if there were not others who would willingly exploit scientific discovery for practical purposes.

Let's take neuroscience as an example. Does anyone really believe that we fund neuroscience just to find out how the brain works?? Does anyone really believe that once we find relevant particulars about brain function that we will not eagerly exploit that knowledge for practical, applied purposes? Do any neuroscientists today believe that they are not a part of a large project to "correct" brain function when necessary. Who, even among an ignorant public, would deny science and those who apply scientific discoveries, the right to stop Parkinson's disease, or MS, or Altzheimer's disease, or ---- and now the road gets slippery --- depression, mental retardation, anti-social behavior . . . . You fill in the rest of the blanks, and what you will finally get is the re-formation of the human being, ultimately made smart, stable, less varied, and, well, not quite so "human" anymore.

As Hannah Arendt pointed out long ago in "The Human Condition," the "truthfulness" of science is NOT about meaning, it is about factual certitudes that are put to applied use -- in this case she was most interested in atomic weaponry. Oppenheimer was not an innocent bystander. Nor are scientists in most fields. They all know that their work will be applied to some human "problem." This does not mean that scientists are villains; it just means that scientists are part of a social body that is all too willing to use whatever technology or use that science offers.

What is the point to all of this? The point is that the way we see science, and the way too many scientists present the issues, is too coy. Science is not just about discovery, it is about manipulation of nature, and manipulation of nature inevitably means changing the nature of nature. Above all, it means changing "MEANING" in a very large sense. It is this that many religious advocates cannot abide -- that science will define "meaning" by its pro-action, not its discoveries, and perhaps even that science itself has become a religion of a sort.

And, what of creationism? or creation by design (I saw an article in the local newspaper that literally re-hashed William Paley's watch-maker argument, an argument debunked even in his own day by Hume and others). What creationists (in their hearts) want to do is to claim that only in religion (usually only in THEIR religion), human beings will find "MEANING." Religion is about meaning, about our relationship to nature, to everything.

But creationists, and many other advocates of religion, broadly over-reach. They want their cake and eat it too. Unsatisfied with accepting the "mystery" of God or of their beliefs, they want the meaning of their religion and facts about the natural world to be entirely true. Kingsley Amis wrote a prophetic little novel in the 1960s entitled, "I Want It Now," about a super-selfish young woman. She would be the prototype of modern hedonism. What we forget is that Creationists, even the most humble religious followers (outside of Islam and Buddhism), are part of what I define as the "I want it now; I want it all" culture. If others grew up with a sense of material entitlement, they all grew up with a sense of "religious entitlement." There is very little humility, Christian or otherwise, in the demand by some "believers" that the Bible is literally true or that their religion is the possessor of all truth. True religion is about a lot more mystery and uncertainty than these folks would have it.

Science plays God with nature, and religion corrupts its best qualities by demanding to be the possessor of "truthfulness" that is patently not true in "fact." Science needs to stop pretending to be the innocent; it has not been for more than a century at least. Religion needs to stop pretending that it "knows" factual truth about nature; there was a day -- well, centuries ago now, or at least so it seems -- when it would have been heresy of the highest sort to pretend to know God's will. And, so, there is no end in sight to this sometimes circus-like debate, no matter how "smart" people get, or probably how truly pious and pacific religion becomes.

Update - January 17, 2009:

In some ways, the essay above has a conclusion that needs re-stating in a somewhat different way. My stance is that both religion and science have failed in their humanism to some degree. While it seems to me that science is completely correct regarding the facts of evolution and the weakness of the creation by design argument, some scientists are using this truth as a campaign against theism and even religion as a whole. This atheism has been a little heavy-handed, suggesting that religious believers are ignoramuses, and ignoring the historical development and evolution of religious belief and practice to suggest the hyper-revolutionary idea that several millennia of human religious behavior should and can be obliterated. This angry atheism ignores religion as a critical, if not necessary, part of human history and society. It is very hard to anticipate a future in which religion -- which is, after all, a human way of dealing with matters of love, brother/sisterhood, redemption, and many other qualities necessary to living life well -- will not exist in some form or other and even thrive.

For its part, religion has become unpleasantly defiant and angry in its own right. Most of the tenets of religion -- piety, forgiveness, love, acceptance -- have been utterly lost in the battle over evolution and its fall-out. More than that, advocates of creationism make preposterous arguments -- arguments that only demean human intelligence and human promise. They belittle hundreds of years of science and the accumulation of knowledge, casting aside human historical developments as readily as the most radical atheists.

In short, both sides remove themselves from the civilization, culture, society, and standards of humanity that they should nuture in order to posit arguments of pure truth. Both sides need to exercise a little more humility.

Charity and Gratitude

2009-01-09T16:45:00.004-07:00

With the holidays just ended, most of us have probably given to a charity or two. CARE, Doctors Without Borders, the Stephen Lewis Fund, the local food banks, etc., are popular here, and we all feel a warm satisfaction in giving to these charities. There are no strings attached, and even something like the Christian Children's Fund, which makes gifts personal and individual, does not expose us to people face-to-face. Everyone is grateful -- the givers and the receivers.

But then there is charity at home, in our community, face-to-face. The tone changes. The hungry person on the street is not altogether happy with the meal you have bought for him -- that should have been pastrami not corned beef. June and I deliver for "Meals on Wheels" once a week. The vast majority of recipients are gracious and engaging and pleased to have the service and someone to talk to for a few minutes. But even among the gracious, you begin to see qualifiers. "Phone before you deliver the meal" because the recipient always keeps her doors locked. "When you arrive (after calling ahead on your cell phone), deliver the meal to the side door. Ring the bell. Take off your shoes. Cut the meat. Get a spoon." Do not talk to me, I am busy watching my TV show. "Do not allow the bird to escape. It is allowed to fly free in our house." Or, no face-to-face, "enter through the side gate, ring the bell, enter the foyer, put the meal on the table beside the door"; one almost expects to read the following instructions: "back away slowly, do not look up, run for the car."

What is going on, don't they realize we are doing this as volunteers??? Well, yes, they do. And, "damn it, I wish I didn't need this service." Or, "my daughter, my son has made me take these meals, to be invaded in my own home by a different stranger every day." Charity is a hard thing to receive -- we used to say in a "prosperous society." But it isn't the level of prosperity one has, or one had. It is the culture of autonomy, agency, self-reliance that is threatened in taking these meals, or that handout, and "damn it, I resent the fact I have to be helped at all." So, while it appears the MOW volunteer has the upper hand, the condescending ability to give charity to someone they see, "I can take charge myself, put up rules, make that deliverer remove their shoes, put myself back into the seat of power."

It is hard to expect manners, politeness, above all gratitude, from people who feel they have lost too much in the bargain. But when the gift is from a remote source, even one you may know by name and face, and when it is desperately needed, or life changing in need, the gratitude is palpable and real. So, "charity may begin at home," but it is hard to give at home. As a friend of mine once said about raising one's own children, the experience is the very definition of "unrequited love"; in fact, it is worst than that for most, probably. The other fact about charity at home is that society collectively should be doing something about the need, not some local agency of charity, and we all know that (e.g., we should not need soup kitchens and homeless shelters). This makes local charity even harder to justify and maintain; it also makes the recipients rightfully disturbed at being placed in the position they find themselves.

Uh, and what does this have to do with "history matters more." Almost everything. It has to do with how we decide to care for the folks in our own society, and how that has been ignored in the past.

The Economic Crisis: CEO Effigies and Continuing Anomie

2009-01-02T09:13:00.003-07:00

Our public and private reactions to the economic crisis have been almost as interesting as the economic issues themselves. It now appears clear that the primary psychological reaction to the crisis is anger at the bloated incomes of leading CEO's, especially of those CEO's who head companies that have, or will have, received bailout money. One almost imagines the effigies of bank presidents being dragged through the streets while onlookers beat them with brooms and little boys set them alight with their father's lighters. Who cannot but wish that these unrepentant men (and, yes, they all seem to be men, which adds another layer of spite to the issue) would be disgraced, made pariahs, thrown out by angry stockholders, reduced to poverty, and perhaps even prosecuted under some unknown laws for bad morals and worse behavior.

But, alas, we are even less knowledgeable about who these villains are specifically than were angry onlookers in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Then, at least, there were only a handful of these men, and many of them were prosecuted in trials that kept a large, impoverished public entertained. Today, these are more anonymous figures, scattered among hundreds of companies. And, of course, most of today's over-payed CEOs have operated within the law. The most we can hope in our modern culture is that Michael Moore will make a movie about them, and that Larry King will live long enough to replay Moore's contempt for them again and again.

The fact is that we live in a popular culture today that still clings to the pretense -- at some out-of-date, traditional morals level -- that public exposure equals permanent disgrace and humiliation, when everyone should know that all it means is increased celebrity for the offender. In fact, the tabloid, popular magazine ethos (and this includes Newsweek, Time, etc.) will love the fodder that the anti-CEO movement will provide. We all know that each story, each chapter, each saga will play out like the narrative of Brittany Spears sad life -- bad behavior followed by a confession of sins, followed by a six-day rehab in the Bahamas, followed by redemption. And, hey, if this sorry and frayed pop culture narrative fails, CEOs feeling the heat can just build a mansion somewhere in the Caribbean or South America and never have to listen to anything other than ocean waves and the groveling entreaties of their villa's servants.

Hating CEOs, or waiting for their repentance, is a feeble way to spend our time. If we want to get at them, we can legislate tight standards of pay and remuneration for any persons heading publicly traded companies and banks. We can demand restitution of the Securities and Exchange Act of the Depression (and the closing of loopholes in its administration). Better yet, we can work at those things that will improve the wages and benefits of working people, especially in regard to union organization and power (as was done in the Great Depression). We can demand health care reform and the return to fixed benefit pensions, instead of the insane, Las Vegas style 401k plan method (e.g., improve Social Security, which, by the way was enacted in 1935). We can demand a greater democratization of our political culture, which also occurred in the Great Depression.

The only thing that will unfold like it did in the Depression is the anticipation that things will soon get better. There were upswings of confidence in 1930, 1934, and 1938, all of which were swiftly brushed aside with an even worse, even deeper, economic crisis. We are already looking forward to a rebound in 2010 (and, maybe that will even happen; more likely we'll be disappointed, and predict a future date for the sun to shine).

What will not happen is the mythic rising of ordinary people as was depicted in John Ford's "The Grapes of Wrath." Even that film alludes to how neighbor did not help neighbor, and how community failed. If anything, the Great Depression resulted in even more private lives. More people bought radios which they could huddle around in the privacy of their homes and more money was spent on gasoline than one would have thought, in order to escape the realities of one's existence (including the neighbors) for a brief ride in the country and more people spent money to see escapist movies. (One of the ironies of our current crisis, as I see it, is that television prices have plummeted, when in fact, more people will be buying new ones as a means to escape the realities of today's crisis; well, I never did understand supply and demand, I guess).

If anything, we live in a culture even more defined by anomie than in the 1930s. Karl Marx's ideas about alienation seem meager in relationship to the stark loneliness we have produced in modern prosperous times. Harder times will not change habits of privacy deeply ingrained over several generations of North Americans. I am not likely to act in concert with neighbors who I do not even know (despite my efforts to know them), and who are not likely to say "hello" or even look me in the eye as I pass their porch. If we are to create community, or accomplish collective action, it is only going to occur over the internet, through blogs, podcasts, political action groups. Why? Because the internet preserves relative anonymity while providing enormous potential for democratic power. My oldest son pressed this vision of the internet on me many years ago, when it first emerged, and I am now a believer in the significance of the internet as our first and best source for community and democracy. If we want to preserve community, we have to preserve the open channels of the internet. If we do not use the internet wisely as a tool for democratic solutions to our current capitalist "crisis" (and, by the way, Marx rightly pointed out that capitalism loves to use "crises" to defeat its opponents and reformers), we might well discover how anomie adds up to despair more than freedom.

"The Economic Crisis"

2008-12-17T10:18:00.006-07:00

Isn't it interesting that no one will claim the "d" word ("depression") for what is happening? Most people think this is because so-called experts on the economy do not want to frighten an already alarmed consumer public. But another reason, it seems to me, is just as likely: experts do not want to use the "d" word explicitly because that is an historical reference, and God forbid that we should use lessons of the past rather than economic theory or modeling as our primary guide. But, where now are the theories of Milton Friedman, and his many legionnaires of the "Chicago School"? Where is the theory of "rational expectations" that he and his ideological followers claimed were the iron law of economics. They have gone the way that all ideological solutions go in hard times and times of profound change -- into the garbage. Ideologies are usually the luxury of good, stable times, or are held by persons and groups remote from holding power. Hard times call for using historical experience (although only insofar as historical experience is relevant -- and that is the trick, of course) and for applying practical solutions and for being flexible. Ideology generally allows none of this. (One of the few exceptions to this might be the French Revolution, when an ideology of "liberty, fraternity, and equality" were the slogans. But it should be noted that "liberty, fraternity, and equality" themselves only work as general guiding principles rather than firm ideological strictures, and these principles all required practicality and flexibility for implementation -- something French Revolutionary ideologues failed to appreciate, thereby ruining prospects for those principles to thrive for a very long time).

Yet, history is exactly what has insinuated itself into the "economic crisis" discussion despite the fact that "theory" has been the mother and teacher of almost all economic "experts." Ben Bernanke referred to the problem of the need to open lines of credit early on in the crisis, and his reasons, he admitted, flowed from his historical knowledge of the 1930s depression. Now the big issues of "restoring confidence" and eliminating "fear" and "stimulating" the economy and developing infrastructure -- all derived from our knowledge of the Great Depression -- are the watchwords of the recovery. History is useful in this crisis for the big reasons -- to determine how people might behave in either a rational or irrational sense, or how failures to face crises (e.g., Japan in the 1990s) can make things worse. The reason fewer people do not appreciate the use of history in a crisis like this is that technical details of the Great Depression, for example, do not translate readily for our more global economy today. But it is just in the details that history is of minor use. History may not repeat itself, but large conditions remain the same. The "South Sea Bubble" crisis of the early 18th century has much in common with the depressions of the 1880s, 1890s, 1907, and the Great Depression. Only those who arrogantly assume that the present is superior to the past can foolishly think otherwise.

Obama and the Limits of American "Exceptionalism"

2008-12-01T15:35:00.004-07:00

[This essay was published in the Lethbridge Herald on Dec. 1, 2008]

I enjoyed Professor Harrison's recent article (Herald, Nov. 27) on the prospects and dangers for Canada of an imperial Obama presidency. His concern about Canada being seduced by an Obama-led U. S. government only to see Canada, "crash on the shores of the faltering American empire," seems, at this time, more phantom than real. In any case, Canada has already generously submitted to American desires by taking on some of the "heavy-lifting" for a largely American war in Afghanistan. Can we be more seduced?

It is worth noting that American military power and international influence is limited at this time. It is true that Mr. Obama's saber rattling in the campaign, in his pledge to have Bin Laden found and killed and in his threat to invade the Pakistan territories without Pakistan's consent, were the most troubling promises of his campaign. Tough guy rhetoric was necessary, of course, to combat Mr. McCain's exclusive claim to being firm in foreign affairs. But Mr. Obama is not alone in wanting Bin Laden killed, and incursions into the Pakistan territories have been taking place for several months already. In fact, as events of the past few months have strongly suggested, the impending end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by the United States and its "allies" will not be decided by the U. S. alone but by Iraqi and Afghan governments and by events beyond the power of any state, including the U. S., to control. If politics is "the art of the possible," international affairs and war in the current world are even more constrained by "what can be done" over "what any state, even the United States, wants to be done."

Professor Harrison is most troubled by Mr. Obama's appeal to American "exceptionalism." Some of us who have taught American History have tried, over long careers, to eliminate the "exceptionalist" perspective in American History. The fact is, however, that I cannot think of a single American president or candidate, and regrettably only a very few American historians, who have not raised the banner of American "exceptionalism" to explain the American past and predict its future. Insofar as this mythic claim in American politics and history supports democracy and civil rights in the U. S., it has some small value. But "exceptionalism" has not been solely the handmaiden of empire; it was promoted in some periods of American History as readily by isolationists as it has been by imperialists in other periods. "Exceptionalism" is not, and never has been, primarily a foreign policy call to arms.*

Professor Harrison is right that the United States is a "faltering" empire, and the vast majority of those who are writing on how this end will unfold are themselves American. There is no increasing support for empire in the U. S., and the Cheney-Wolfowiz-Perle crowd who promoted American exportation of these neo-con ideas is now disgraced (as these ideas were among all progressives long before now).

I predicted in an earlier submission to the Herald that we should hope Mr. Obama embraces a pragmatic progressive approach to politics. So far he has suggested that he will do so. As Canadians we should hope, as our best ally against imperialism, that truly pragmatic progressive politics become the fashion both south of the border and in all political states.

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*On my position see, James Tagg, "'And, We Burned Down the White House, Too': American History, Canadian Undergraduates, and Nationalism," The History Teacher, 37 no. 3 (May, 2004). Also, the same as James Tagg, "American History, Canadian Undergraduates, and Nationalism," in Carl Guarneri and James Davis, eds., Teaching American History in a Global Context (New York, 2008).