Earlier in the year, the
legislature of my home state passed a resolution making it official. The Bowie knife is the official state knife
of Arkansas. I actually didn’t know that
there were official state knives, but in this instance the legislative effort
was fully justified. The nickname of the
Bowie knife has for at least a century and a half been “an Arkansas
toothpick.” In 1837, at a session of the
House, in the middle of a debate concerning the taxation of wolf pelts, the
Speaker stepped down from the podium and, using this implement, stabbed a
fellow representative to death. While
one can hardly take pride in such history, one can and must find some
comfort. When I hear about “unparalleled
political polarization” or “unprecedented refusal to seek legislative
compromise,” I can subject the evidence to the Arkansas Toothpick Test. So far nothing that has happened or not
happened in the admittedly disgraceful 115th and 116th
Congresses—public approval ratings ranging between nine and thirteen
percent—has passed the Toothpick Test.
I try to apply the Toothpick Test
also to the increasingly numerous incidents of supposed “constitutional crisis”
in our political reports. We are in that
huge swath of the North American continent that is just emerging from a
ferocious heat wave, and I had for a couple of days a slight viral something or
other that I dare not offend by taking lightly.
Luke and his two kids, accompanied by their older cousin Cora, left for
Montreal Saturday morning, and enabled by General Motors refrigeration
engineers, reached their destination safely before nightfall. Settling into a Sunday indolence I dignified
as therapeutic, I spent a long while reading the “Weekly Review” section of the
Times. Almost all of the actual Op-Ed pages are
taken up with blistering denunciations of President Trump and/or the entire
Republican Party. There is nothing very
new here, and that is the point. The New
York Times, by any rational judgment
one of the world’s great newspapers, has become as partisan, repetitive, and
fulminating as all the rest of the national press. The Times
is of course “left.” Many other
voices are on the “right”. They shout
at, and about, each other. The PBS “News
Hour” sort of continues its brave façade of impartiality, but with increasing
difficulty.
I have discovered that there is a
great deal of chatter on the Internet concerning the question of civil war--whether
one is possible in current America, whether it has not already begun. Not all of the chatter is entirely
loony. Our actual Civil War of the
1860s, which was by no means without its ideological complexities, was
motivated with a certain clarity. It was
sectional and closely related to the distinctive economies of North and South
and in particular the southern agrarian economy and the institution of slavery
that enabled it. A very large part of
the wealth of the southern states was in human property. The Framers of the Constitution had
notoriously attempted to accommodate the institution of slavery without exactly
enshrining it. Political unity, however
attenuated, was a goal so desired as to enable a kind of cosmic wishful
thinking, from which one might say we have not yet entirely broken free even
today.
The comparative clarity of 1860 is
gone today. Today’s war-gamers generally
speak of Blues and Reds, but these groups are by no means identical to our two
main political parties which, we are forced to note, have in a sense exchanged
valences from the Old Days. The
differences between the groups are still to a degree regional, but by no means
cleanly so. Economic, social, educational,
and cultural disparities and divergences play a major role. The role of race,
so prominent in popular rhetoric, is actually rather opaque. The salient differences between 1860 and now
are dramatic, and include the following.
Our populated territory is now huge.
Its population is huge. It is
also about eighty percent urbanized. Comparatively
few Americans today have any direct role in their own food production. There is a vast armory—hundreds of millions of guns—distributed among the population. All sections of the country are dependent
upon cooperation with others, but this is particularly true of the cities,
which in gross generalization tend in their political organization to the Blue,
often dark Blue. Were there (God forbid!)
an actual new civil war, such factors could preclude organized armies in
uniforms and most other things we think of when we think “war”—most but the
horrors, that is. And they reveal large
advantages for the Reds.
Several political commentators have
spoken of a metaphorical “civil war” already underway. But the violent political discourse of past
few years has invited even some of my intelligent and knowledgeable compatriots
to imagine not metaphors but frightful realities. I should have thought that one 1858 was
sufficient for our nation. The Impossible, it appears, perhaps isn’t after
all. We are perhaps closer to the
discourse of the Arkansas Toothpick than I had imagined. Toothpicks remind me that today’s
unpleasantnesses begin with an early dental appointment; but just as soon as I
get back I intend to watch the appearance of Mr. Mueller before his
congressional inquisitors. On PBS.
.
