Though in retirement I have left behind many of the
professional activities of my old professional life, I have been surprised to
find that one feature of that life—invitations to give lectures, informal
talks, or after dinner speeches—has not gone away. And since I enjoy talking to people, I accept whenever
possible. Thus it was that I found
myself last Friday evening offering informal remarks to the annual dinner of something
called the New Jersey Society of the Cincinnati. My supposed topic was “The Uses of History” or some such,
but it was I who received tuition on that topic.
Like
many Americans, I have become rather casual, if not actually cynical,
concerning the greatness of our nation’s founders, beginning with George
Washington. Yet to examine almost
any aspect of Washington is to reveal greatness of a kind sadly unimaginable in
our current political leaders and aspirants. His role as first General President of the Societies of the
Cincinnati is but one small feather in a lavishly plumed cap.
The
eighteenth-century squirearchy loved reading classical literature, and imitated
classical history whenever possible.
Thomas Jefferson for a time tried to use Virgil’s Georgics as a practical handbook of animal husbandry. The great seal of the State of Virginia
bears the motto Sic semper tyrannis—words
supposedly uttered by Brutus as he stabbed Julius Cæsar and actually uttered by
John Wilkes Booth as he shot Lincoln.
(Instances of the bad uses of
history greatly outnumber the good.)
Among
the heroes of legendary Roman history was the farmer Cincinnatus. He was plowing a field when a
delegation of importunate citizens arrived to beg him to assume the
dictatorship of the infant city, then threatened by hostile neighbors. Though he much preferred his agrarian
life, he submitted to duty’s demands, left his farm, assumed the leadership of
the city, organized its defense, and defeated its enemies. But the biographical punch line is what
he did next—resigned the dictatorship, went back to his farm, and continued
plowing.
Coming to terms with term limits
For
the American revolutionaries Cincinnatus was the perfect historical model for
so much of the officer corps of the Continental Army, and most obviously for
its supreme general officer, Washington.
For modern Washington—the city as metonymy for the congressional body
and its whirling satellites—Cincinnatus is an historical indictment of career
politicians. The Society of the
Cincinnati, founded in 1783, was a group of former
army officers committed to the “immutable principles” of the fellowship that
had given the Society birth. Needless to say these do not include the
one immutable principle of our contemporary political class—the acquisition and
retention of political office by any means possible.
There
are actually fourteen affiliated societies—one for each of the original states,
and one for France. These were the
allies who had prevailed against a great—perhaps the greatest—European military
power. New Jersey was not
then a ganglion of superhighways, but the battlefield of such decisive action
as that at Trenton, Princeton, and Monmouth. The founding of the Society was contemporaneous with the
establishment of a promising settlement on the Ohio River, which was given its
name by a proud veteran.
Membership now is by lineal descent, and is parsimoniously granted.
I
knew none of this when I agreed to give my little talk. On the same day I gave it, a squabble
broke out in our capital city concerning bragging rights for assassinating
Osama bin Laden. This episode
began in unseemliness, and has not become more salubrious as days have
passed. I expect soon to hear from
one of the candidates not only that he did or certainly would have done it, but
that it would have been a good idea to attach Osama’s body to a Chevy Volt and
drag it seven times around CIA headquarters.
They
built in marble; we continue in cinder block. Everybody knows that.
For that first crucial decade of our Republic we survived not only
without an FCC or a Securities and Exchange Commission, we survived without an
army or a police force! What
protected us in our extraordinary vulnerabilities were certain ideas about
citizenship, not yet turned to irony, inhabiting the hearts and minds of
certain idealists.
As
we enter a presidential campaign likely to excite discouragement and perhaps
even revulsion in the minds of thoughtful citizens, we can perhaps turn again
to antique history and classical myth in hopes of finding at least aesthetic
comfort. Various ancient
authorities report the existence of a monstrous race called the Pygmaei, a tribe of very little people
who lived—and here the authorities vary—either in little subterranean burrows
or in houses made of eggshells.
The Pygmies lived in the back of beyond, on the edge of nowhere. Periodically they did battle with their
ancestral enemies, a race of birds of approximately their own stature, usually
identified as storks. The dubious
battle betwixt Pygmies and Storks is a not infrequent subject in classical
art. The grotesquerie of it all
must have been considered diverting.
Indeed it does seems a more amusing pairing than donkeys and elephants.
