Gaza Blues

 

Like most people, I have read a lot about the often poisonous effects of “social media” on the popular mood and our shared discourse.  But such “social media”as I have experienced is mainly second hand.  We don’t have it or see it, except as reported in the news.  And if there is anything more febrile than a tweet, it is a newspaper account of a tweet.  I do get a great deal of email, though, much  of which is political or commercial junk.  My morning email included an arresting message from someone called Meghdad, a person (or bot) otherwise unknown to me.

 

Do you see and are you quiet?

Do you hear the cries of the oppressed people of Gaza and are you still silent?

Do you see the crushed bodies of thousands of children and women in Gaza and are you still silent?

Are you alive or just a moving corpse?

Do you have only one name for being human or do you also have human emotions?

If you have ears, if you have eyes, and if you have human emotions, why don't you shout and protest against the criminals who committed these crimes in support of your government?

 

The message, which I have reproduced in its entirety,  was accompanied by several photographs, mainly of dead babies.  It is on me, not Meghdad, that I looked at the photos.  I didn’t have to do so; I chose to do so.  They would wring tears from a serpent.  But Meghdad’s tone still offended me.  The idea that I, or anyone I knew, was silently indifferent to what was happening in Gaza confounded me, though I certainly expected there to be a diversity of opinion about just what that was, or is.  I was startled that some college professors and many idealistic students could actually praise the barbarous criminality (including, incidentally, baby-murder and revolting sexual violence) of October 7.  I am very far from an uncritical attitude towards Israel.  Who can look at practically any photograph coming out of Gaza without distress?  Though considerably reduced by infirmity I do make a claim to humanity and human emotions, and I do indeed have eyes and ears.  In addition to these organs of sensory perception, I do have a mind, and unfortunately the mind I have  tends sometimes to worry over troubling complexities at the expense of comforting and often deadly certainties.  I shall not venture down the endless and tortured dead end path of WhatAboutism, even if honesty demands acknowledgement that what the “Arab-Israeli conflict” is mainly about has become What About?

 

            What about, for starters, “the criminals who committed these crimes in support of your government”.  I do believe the war is “criminal”, not just in the general sense that most wars are, but in ways specific to this one.  But I see no other plausible interpretation of the phrase quoted than that in Meghdad’s opinion the Israeli Defense Forces are conducting a criminal war in support of the government of the United States of America!  What I actually see with my eyes is the American President, his Secretary of State, and large sections of the American policy  intelligentsia and opinion makers agonizing over a situation of mind-numbing complexity as they attempt, with a little success, to moderate Israeli military activity in a situation that has been fostered by bad actors since the days of the Pharaohs and continues to be exacerbated by bad actors today.  I actually have great sympathy with and admiration for President Biden’s impossible efforts.  There are some problems that are insoluble by loudly repeated dogmatism alone, such as all of them.

 

            Years ago, when I made a serious attempt to "keep up”, I read several books by Arthur Schlesinger. Jr. (d. 2007).  He is no longer frequently mentioned, but he was a prominent public intellectual of my youth and a notable luminary in the Kennedy galaxy.  He was an old-fashioned liberal intellectual, a serious historian who moved easily between academia, active public service, and the research library, stopping every fifteen minutes or so to write another book—so it seemed from his enormous output.  As a medievalist, I could never take the image of the Kennedy Administration as “Camelot” very seriously, but with Schlesinger—a balding egghead who looked like a 1950s rent-a-professor including the bow ties and tweed jackets—the idea was preposterous.  Sir Bedevere?  One Schlesinger book to which I had a complicated reaction appeared in 1991: The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society.  Its central point was stimulating, but I resisted it.  It was that the “melting pot” theory of American immigration—e pluribus unum—forming a national unity out of a culturally diverse body of immigrants from all over the world—had come to an end.  It was being replaced by a better goal—cultural diversity.  In this vision our country could become a kind of demographic warehouse of a hundred mini-cultures.   Well I was a college professor, and how can a college professor not be in favor of  cultural diversity?  Let a hundred flowers bloom.

 

            But a version of the “multicultural” ideas he was talking about is  now entrenching itself in our universities and among other thought leaders, sometimes with perilous consequences.  It is setting Americans at each others’ throats.  It has already seriously weakened the freedom of speech that should be the bedrock of our cultural exchanges.  I fear it has already done permanent damage not just to the internal operations of our educational institutions but to their reputations in the eyes of the public they must serve and on which they must depend.  If hating Jews or despising Muslims is your thing, maybe it’s “cultural,” part of an essential “identity” of “identity politics”.  This New World is not so much the guarantor of new beginnings as the custodian of old grievances.  But the world has a plateful of problems related to demographic, agricultural, and climate matters of fairly recent appearance without so carefully preserving and reanimating ancient ones.  From the historical point of view there is something surprising, perhaps even amazing about the survival of the human race through its centuries of violent folly.  The pathway of its continuing survival has been the intense application of innovation, adaptation, and perhaps above all cooperation, which depends on ethical intelligence.  Will we still have that in sufficient quality and quantity?  I won’t be here to watch, but I can hope.

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Kennedy Assassination

 

 

This blog has not devoted much attention to historical anniversaries, but I must make an exception for one just past—the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963.  I must inquire on behalf of all who are likely to recall the precise circumstances of the day with a sharp specificity.  Where were you when you learned that the president had been shot?  Practically everyone in my age group  can and will answer that question with minute detail.

 

            The first general elections in which I seriously interested myself were those of 1952 and 1956.  These were heady days for the serious expansion of civil rights in the country—a topic, contrary to much official memory, of large and sympathetic engagement by many young southerners of all races.  For many of us it was a time of serious mental maturation.  Like many contemporaries I was a fervent partisan of Adlai Stevenson, who lost twice, and pretty decisively, to Eisenhower.  But one now had the sense of freshness and possibility.  By the summer of 1958, a little more than five years before he was murdered, Jack Kennedy had made his prominent appearance on the national scene and in a curious way even on my scene.  It was hard for young people to stimulate much enthusiasm for Eisenhower, with or without the dubious assistance offered him by  Richard Nixon.  I graduated from college in 1958, and I spent most of that summer in Washington, thanks to a patronage job arranged out of the blue by Senator Fulbright, as I waited to sail to England to take up a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford.  On a stifling late morning in July, when for forgotten reasons I was out on the streets sweating  in a heavy suit, Senator Kennedy pulled up in his open convertible and stopped at a light approximately five yards away from where I was standing, also waiting,  in the middle of Union Station Plaza near the Post Office.  He was tanned, his hair coiffed but unconfined.  Next to him on his big car’s big front bench-seat was an unknown beautiful young woman as perfectly turned out, radiant, and relaxed as the senator himself.

 

The Senator looked me in the eye and smiled charmingly directly at me.  His right hand was draped casually over the top of the steering wheel, and he languidly raised its index finger in  a gesture of minimalist  eloquence  that said “Not bad, huh, kid?”—meaning the convertible, the babe in the convertible, and doubtless the perfection of his current being and future prospects in general.  Obviously, this man was going to be President.  He knew it.  I knew it.  The babe knew it.  Silently but unequivocally he shared the vital data-point with me curbside.  Then the light changed; he nodded courteously; the young woman laughed; their car took off; I stood there dripping with sweat.  My first president.

 

Five years later, lots of changes.  He was President; but I myself wasn’t just chopped liver. I had earned three more academic degrees and completed a doctoral dissertation of intimidating erudition.  I had found and married my life partner.  We had a child on the way.  I was a newly appointed Instructor in English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and I was just at the moment puffing up a hill hurrying from one classroom to another amidst a large moving crowd with my friend and colleague Alan Dessen.  I picked up on the chatter.  Something about something bad happening to the President in Dallas.  “Well,” said Alan.  “This might be true.  Kennedy really was going to be in Dallas.”  “This will finish the Birchers!” said some hirsute graduate student from the human stream.  Then he said it again, and yet again even louder.  The reference was to members of the far-right group, the John Birch Society, who would now be discredited for having shot the President.  Every cloud has its silver lining.  It took us a while to get better information.  John Kennedy would appear to have been shot by the only Communist in Texas; and very soon we heard he was dead.

 

Dealey Plaza.  The Grassy Knoll.  The man in the window. The Zapruder film. Jack Ruby.  The New Orleans Cubans.  Magic bullets.  The Warren Commission.  Everybody knows the story, yet we still don’t know the story and never will.  In fact it becomes ever harder to believe there is a story at all.  A flood of information and disinformation, police incompetence risen to new heights, the agony of evidentiary ambiguity and a hundred special agendas—all inexplicable, all funneling into  mystery now canonized.  The Kennedy assassination has become, year after year for sixty years, increasingly fugitive and ungraspable.  Still, I would not have chosen the topic were it not for a serendipity.  About ten days  ago I got in the post a new volume of the Library of America: Don DeLillo: Three Novels of the 1980s.  The Names, White Noise, and Libra.  De Lillo is one of our truly brilliant experimental American novelists.  Libra is his novel about Lee Harvey Oswald, who was a Libra, or perhaps I should say it is a fictitious treatment of Oswald and the Kennedy assassination which, while repeatedly stressing its fictionality and denying its historicity, is more illuminating than eight or ten other “straight” histories I have read.  DeLillo is not merely a very fine writer; he is a formidable research scholar.  There is probably less fiction in his fiction than in most history books.  Certainly much better fiction.

 

But you cannot so much as approach this tar pit called the “Kennedy assassination” without being blackened with its very sticky goo, almost impossible to scrub clean.  I discovered this when I was writing The Anti-Communist Manifestos and became lured into a side-track following the flamboyantly anti-Communist  literary impresario Isaac Don Levine, a native Russian-speaker and plenipotentiary anti-communist hobgoblin who became guru to Marina Oswald as he had been guru to earlier generations of needy Soviet refugees and defectors.  His Russian fluency, fairly rare in the America of the earlier twentieth century, gave him what was at the time an unusual advantage in Soviet matters, and he made the most of it.  He is usually described as a journalist—which is not wrong, exactly, but hardly suggests the scope of his political influence on the anti-communist right.  You may never have heard of this master co-opter of agendas, but he will surely one day receive the major biography he deserves.

 

DeLillo is a novelist, and novelists tell stories.  Historical novelists tell historical stories.  The “story” of Libra is a doozy, but in case you have not yet read it, as I had not, I shall say no more.  The smallest homage I can pay to so brilliant a vision is to avoid ham-handed “spoilers”.  What I will venture to say is that  John Kennedy really did live, and he really did die from horrible gunshot wounds.  Before that this very same man really did lift his index finger in silent but significant communication with me, me personally.  How can it be that the nearest thing one can find to an explanation of the thing is a work of unapologetic fiction?

Collecting and Recollecing

 

 

On Sunday mornings Joan reads aloud the collect of the day at the breakfast table.  This week began with one of my favorites* and set me thinking about both certain eccentricities of the English language and the very powerful ways in which reading has informed my own life and the lives of so many close to me.

 

The noun collect, denominating the introductory prayer with which the celebration of the Eucharist has begun nearly since time immemorial, is a peculiar one.  Like the verb of the same spelling, it derives from the Latin colligere, which means “to gather together, to collect.”  But the nominative collect has a vocal emphasis on the first syllable and the verbal form on the second.  Participants in the same church service will pray a collect and join in when they collect the offering. In the first instance what is being gathered are prayerful intentions, in the latter pecuniary  contributions.

Thomas Cranmer

 

The verbal beauty of Anglican liturgy is in part a resort of historical serendipity.  Various early Latin versions of most of the collects are abundant, but the English Reformation coincided with a great increment in humanistic learning and vernacular enrichment that is evident in ecclesiastical translation.  Furthermore, many Church leaders were accomplished writers, in particular Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, the literary genius behind the Book of Common Prayer of 1549.  Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall series of novels (and plays) has popularized other less admirable aspects of the ecclesiastical events of the age.

The exhortation that Bible readers should read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the substance of Holy Writ would merit an essay of its own.  Particularly rich is the tradition of reading as providing a kind of nutrition through eating.  The famous phrase “inwardly digest” from this collect became nearly proverbial in later English literature.

 

                                              BOSWELL**

and

HUME

 

But I realized, unfortunately too late, that what I chose for literary and aesthetic interest compels me to brush up against some dreaded heavy-duty theology.  That is because what all the reading, marking, and spiritual manducation in the collect is in aid of is the fostering of hope in one of the most mysterious of Christian doctrines: the immortality of the soul, eternal life, “life after death.”

James Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson, made a visit to his dying friend, the famous philosopher David Hume.  Hume was a radical religious skeptic. Boswell, a conventional Christian who recited the Nicene Creed and its clause affirming his belief in "the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting" on a frequent basis, was perhaps hoping for a deathbed conversion.  If so, he would be disappointed.  Hume was utterly unphased at the prospect of his impending death and, in his own expectation, the definitive annihilation of his being.  Both Hume’s belief and his unbelief astonished and terrified Boswell.  That meeting took place on July 7, 1776, when the United States was three days old and perhaps five percent of educated people then held ideas closer to those of Hume than to those of Boswell.  I suspect that by the bicentenary of 1976 Boswell would have had trouble getting five percent  among the same demographic.  It has been well said that the Enlightenment project was the “disenchantment of the world.”  The more that science could explain, the less room there was for folkloristic legend and myth, however endearing or even fascinating it might be.  Anthropologists were wont to speak of “primitive” beliefs, from which the human species gradually emerged in its slow progress toward a fuller rationality.  In individuals this process involved overcoming the infantile sensibility, putting away “childish things” as the Apostle Paul himself called them.  But putting away childish things can be painful.  Wordsworth was a child of the Enlightenment.  “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” he cried out—that dawn being the French Revolution.  “But to be young was very heaven.”  Yet one of his most profound and mature poems—usually called the Immortality Ode-- (“Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”)—begins with a lament for a spiritual truth overhwhelmed by an inferior “science”:

 There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream

   The earth, and every common sight,

         To my mind did seem

         Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

 

It is not now as it hath been of yore…

 

It is commonly believed that the origins of our religions are to be found in primal fears, especially the fear of death.  The Roman poet Statius put into the mouth of one of his less attractive characters an opinion that became a set piece for atheists in our older literature: “Fear first created the gods!”  It is a line that appears in Chaucer.  I myself have come to a very different hypothesis and a more positive one.  The belief in immortality grows not out of fear but out of affirmation of the goodness of life.  This was Cicero’s opinion.  He says that he could never deny the immortality of souls even if its impossibility could somehow be definitively demonstrated.  In his view life itself was so good that it could not possibly be subject to all the woeful limitations endured by human bodies.  I never used to think about any of this too much.  Funny how octogenarian thought may differ from that of junior high school.  But which of the two is actually more childish?

As the French say,--and of course they have something snappy to say about practically everything-- “Pour être mort, il faut mourir.”  In order to be dead, it is necessary to die.  But one can quite honestly express a fearlessness of death while acknowledging the dread potential of the dying part.  On this front the messiness of the possibilities become ever more obvious, and they do tend to crowd the mind.

         But so do many other things.  Hume was an empiricist, an empiricist being someone whose judgements and actions are founded in actual observed experience.  I think our worldviews are determined less by what we “believe” than by what we see.  What we see is for me best captured in words by poets who have written about their own observed experience in remarkable ways.  Here, for example, is Hopkins:

 

   The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed…

 

This is in one way a rather conventional Victorian religious poem.  That is what it seems to want to be.  But the poet’s extraordinary imagery will not allow it to be.  The grandeur of God cannot be captured in a simile, only hinted at.  It is bright; it is dynamic in its shining.  All well and good.  But then comes the seeing, the deep seeing.  “It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil crushed.”  What an amazing line.  Read, mark, learn…

 

 

* TWENTY-FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST: THE COLLECT.  Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them: that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast  the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our saviour Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

 

**The are pluses and minuses in having an erudite readership.  This post had been mounted for less than two hours when I received an email from Terry Seymour, once an undergraduate of mine and now (among numerous other achievements) one of the worlds leading experts on Samuel Johnson and his circle, suggesting that this painting, purloined for the usual decorative purposes from Google Images, is not of James Boswell but (probably) of Thomas Percy.  My feeble reply to this is "Who is Thomas Percy?" But I don't need much research to conclude that he was better looking than Boswell, and since it's still pretty early in the morning, and since only God and Seymour are likely to know the difference, I think I'll leave him there. I also appreciate an email from God relating to other matters touched upon in the essay.   But I warmly thank my friend Terry for giving me the opportunity of a little glad if embarrassed learning.

Special Aups

                                          Vaduz

Aups

 

A few subjects of this essay will be our daughter Katherine’s travel itineraries, the beautiful crisp fall weather we are enjoying, the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie, and the wit and wisdom of Julius Caesar.  Saturday’s beautiful weather—bright, chilly  crystalline air  rapidly warming beneath  a brilliant rising sun—was particularly splendid as experienced on the bluestone patio onto which the sliding doors of our glass walled house open at the back.  From the front everything about the house is flat and uninteresting.  It gives off the vibe of a small, windowless warehouse.  It does have the distinction of having been designed by an eminent member of the Architecture School about 1960, a fact that gives me small comfort whenever I contemplate its gray, windowless street front.  That is because its backside, which is for our purposes the living side, is almost spectacularly beautiful. The yard slopes down gradually toward a nearly acceptable workshop-tool house; behind that the view from the house includes several beautiful yards of the extensive fieldstone wall I myself built in earlier days.  Beyond that a lovely path makes its way through a field on which a younger generation once played baseball, and then along a forested path that leads, after about a quarter mile of forested common land, to a T-junction.  There walking paths in either direction follow the cliff side looking down on Lake Carnegie. 

 

This lake is one of the ornaments of our campus and our town.  According to legend it was a great disappointment to the university trustees, who had in the first decade of the twentieth century been cultivating Mr. Andrew Carnegie, industrialist and philanthropist, in the hopes of a gift of some large and imposing public University building.  Among the favorite gifts for which he was noted were libraries and “science buildings,” both of which made them salivate—in the very discreet manner in which Presbyterian elders might be seen to salivate, of course.  But fortunately Mr. Carnegie had ideas of his own.  In the days when a dollar was a dollar, he gave away three hundred and fifty million of them.  He knew that what Princeton really needed was a long, thin water reservoir that could double as  a recreational site, with special emphasis on the manly British sport of competitive rowing. 

 

I’m sure you follow the sequence here.  It was on the bluestone patio looking down toward the path that could eventually lead us to Carnegie’s aqueous bounty that we on Saturday enjoyed a whirlwind visit of an hour and a half from our daughter.  All three of our children are notably dutiful with regard to us, the APs (aging parents) but Katherine’s attentiveness can be described only as heroic given the fact that her job, leading a major American cultural foundation with its principal seat in Los Angeles, requires frequent travel to major European capitals—and, as it turns out, at least one not so major.  She was on her way to hop a plane to Zurich, the major airport closest to her actual destination—Vaduz.  Vaduz???  I faced the humiliation of having to learn that it is the capital of Liechtenstein.  It turns out Vaduz is an actual place.  You might describe it as a suburb of Davos.  They apparently have Davos-style meetings there.  I wouldn’t know.  Look, I’ve been to the Sulphur Springs Fair twice, but I never heard of this Vaduz place.  To my credit I already suspected that Liechtenstein itself might be real, and I was secretly glad to have confirmation.  But our daughter was shocked, shocked, by my ignorance.  A European capital city!  You…a college professor?

 

         In the long run this humiliation excited a competitive spirit.  Surely there must be somewhere on my own itinerary that would stump her.  I couldn’t think of one off the top of my head, so that my own eventual email riposte probably reached her mid-Atlantic.  I inquired how frequently she visited Aups.  Gotcha!

 

Aups is not exactly the capital of anywhere.  It is actually a beautiful little village in upper Var in Provence that has been around for a very long time--a lot longer than this jumped-up Vaduz, I’ll warrant.   I have been able to visit it a couple of times thanks to its proximity (maybe ten kilometers) to our friend Andrew’s house at Salernes, where we have spent several delightful vacations.  In fact, both of the APs are practically Aups habituées.  Any place so ancient is bound to have some interesting associations, even if it has been in decline for a couple thousand years.  It is, for example, famous for its truffles, at least among trufflers.  In an earlier century its Catholic peasantry was badly bloodied up by a mob of Cathars, which is of interest given that the Cathars were usually on the losing side of that equation.  But its more interesting fame, for purposes of an obscurity contest, is more ancient yet.  For thanks to Julius Caesar Aups has a credible claim to be the most insignificant place in Europe.  If you know even a little about Julius you are likely to know that he was much concerned with fine distinctions of social and political hierarchies.  He liked arrangements in which the hierarchies were clear and he was at the top of all of them.  He happened to pass through Aups on his way to conquering Gaul.  He probably regarded the hamlet as nothing more than an inadequate watering hole for his men’s horses.  But he is supposed to have made his larger hierarchical attitudes clear by saying: “I would prefer to be the Number One Guy in Aups than the Number Two Guy in Rome.”  It was an attitude likely to get him into trouble one day.  But as an example of imperious wit it was enough to establish little Aups as the world’s quintessential Loserville.  I doubt that my attempt to invoke its legendary obscurity can harm it though.  The proper French pronunciation of the place may sound like what an Anglophone might blurt out after dribbling soup down his shirtfront, but Scandinavians now pay half a million for a decayed stable in the area.

 

Returning to the Number One Guy ever to visit Aups, everyone knows that Julius Caesar was a man of parts.  He was among other things quite the wit, and he seldom passed through any part of his expansive and expanding Empire without making some memorable comment especially designed for teachers of Latin 101.  His most famous such remark of course is a masterpiece of precision recording his activities when he strayed with imperial intent into a part of the world  that wasn’t quite yet fully pacified, as the Romans like to put it.  Veni, vidi, vici.  Where, I ask you, would introductory Latin students be without veni, vidi vici?  “I came; I saw; I conquered.”  Just popped out of his mouth, apparently.  He also has famous last words.  Et tu, Brute?  (Or was that Shakespeare?)  And into how many parts is omnia Gallia divided?...

                           

                                tres partes, of course

 

History and Oblivion

 

This will be a very brief essay.  No essay at all, really, more like a sad mini-meditation on the ambiguities of history.  It has been hard to be anything but sad in the current historical moment.

 

I have spent most of my life studying history.  It has been history of a special sort, since it has focused on old works of art, literary and visual.  My approach has been a fairly common one.  I have tried to understand old verbal and visual constructs in terms of the likely intentions of their creators and their intended audiences.  Trying to understand the past in its own terms is very hard work, because the past is a foreign country, or rather many foreign countries. We keep saying that we must heed the lessons of history, that we must never forget this or that.  Sometimes the thises and the thats are of gigantic size, the evils of the Atlantic slave trade, the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust of European Jewry.  Who possibly thinks that such enormities should be forgotten even if they could be?

 

         But historical memory has many uses, some of them more conducive to human felicity than others.  My own paternal grandfather provides me with a monitory example.  Though born in this country, he was a fanatical pseudo-Irishman.  His father, who arrived in America as a youth about the time of the Civil War was for most of his life a coal miner in southern Illinois, but I think my grandfather was born in Detroit.  He had a mediocre career in various pockets of the lower, lower middle class.  Its high point was a brief stint as a recruiting sergeant in the Spanish-American War.  The immigrant father (my great grandfather) abandoned Catholicism in a dramatic fashion that I might recount another time.  His son (my grandfather) turned the family religion department over to his Northern Baptist wife.  His chief spiritual passion, so far as I could judge, was hating England.  I don’t know that he had ever seen an actual Englishman, but I supposed he must have.  However, he didn’t need to have done so in order to hate them all with a fury.  Thus did the internalization of certain quasi-legendary iniquities of the administrations of Viscount Melbourne and Robert Peel continue to sour the world view of a man into the 1950s.  And, incidentally, some of his posterity.

 

But among the world’s active and malignant ancestral hatreds, that born of the Irish famine was, if you will allow the irreverence, small potatoes compared with many others.  Some still active ones were already virulent at the dawn of written history.  When Joshua, who lived in the Bronze Age, first crossed the River Jordan, the land in which he found himself, however promising and indeed promised it might have been, was far from uninhabited.  It was replete with Amelikites needing to be smitten “hip and thigh”.  The Amelikites, sometimes called simply Amelik, were  an indefinite tribe, or race, or coalition, who appear widely but indefinitely,  (both in terms of chronology and of geography) in early sacred history.  What is definite is that they needed the hip-and-thigh treatment, that is, ethnic cleansing, aka genocide. 

 

Never forget.  Remember the three hundred at Thermopylae.  Remember the Alamo.  Remember Treblinka and Sobibor.  But for the love of God remember them in a fashion more likely to lead to their effectual oblivion than their repetition.  John Kennedy performed one of the most benign and brilliant achievements of modern history during the Cuban missile crisis when he simply pretended  that he never received a certain provocative note from Nikita Krushchev.  (To his credit, Krushchev, having taken the time to think twice, went along with the fiction.)  This was an act of willful oblivion that may have allowed the continuation of the human species.

 

 

 

Autumn Chill

 Autumn, serious autumn, arrived here on Friday.  By “serious autumn” I perhaps mean “ambivalent autumn,” Keats’s season of mellow fruitfulness plus a rather chill drizzle.  The soggy colorful leaves are now clogging the street drains and damming up in the gutters to make a chain of nasty puddles.  We have plenty of clichés to cover the phenomenon.  You have to take the good with the bad; life is like a box of chocolates.  But, especially as I grow older, I find the bad is so bad that it is very difficult to savor the good to its fullest.  A couple of weeks ago in my first response to the murder and mayhem in the Middle East I turned to the famous psalm Super flumina Babylonis (“By the waters of Babylon”), concerning which I had a few years ago written a book.  One of its most memorable verses is this: “How can I sing the song of the Lord in an alien land?”  Thoughts surrounding this verse have continued to tug at me.  In its historical context the psalm’s specific setting is the so-called “Babylonian Captivity” six hundred years before the birth of Jesus, when many Jews were carted off to slavery by their Babylonian captors after the sack of the Jewish capital.  But the song has for many centuries also been interpreted metaphorically and morally.  That alien land, which unfortunately is too often and too frequently where we find ourselves, is a world blighted by human hate, violence, and open warfare.  “The song of the Lord” is the humdrum life of peace and sufficiency for which all surely must long and far too many cannot attain.

 

            But we did obtain a nice thick slice of it over the weekend as we celebrated the nineteenth birthday of our granddaughter Cora Louise, a college sophomore who seems headed for a major in philosophy.  We were a restaurant party of five.  In addition to Joan, me, and the birthday girl herself, we were joined by her eldest sister Sophia and Sophia’s husband Raymond.  The venue was one of the better of several Thai restaurants in our town.  It is called “Amazing Thai.”  Amazing, well, that might be pushing it just a bit, but the fare was indeed delicious, of high quality, and certainly ample, just the right thing for the dark, chilly, and rainy night that had nothing left in it of Indian Summer.  Not that it would have mattered all that much.  The essence of family events at their best is the natural feeling of shared affection, good humor, and easy and wide ranging conversation.  Old age is not without its trials (not forgetting also the tribulations, if only for rhetorical purposes), but it offers rewards one can only claim by growing old. We are all individuals, but unless we are singularly unlucky, we are not alone.  We are a part of many families, but most especially of our own family, sometimes called the nuclear family.  There are many forms in which human community has been preserved and perpetuated, and I shall disparage none.  But the mode of  overwhelming practice in the western cultures of which I am both an historical student and a living part has been socially sanctioned monogamous marriage.  My own life partner and I have had the challenges, obligations, responsibilities, high privileges and unique satisfactions of bringing into the world three remarkable children, each of whom now with a life partner has brought into the world several more of their ilk.  Children no more.  The oldest now nears sixty.  Even if I lack the biblical grape vine and the fig tree, we now have the unique pleasures of their camaraderie, and that of their children, on our bluestone patio, and on rare occasion the Amazing Thai restaurant.  To fete young Cora Louise in an atmosphere of wide-ranging, good natured, and often witty conversation, is a pleasure literally priceless.

 

            But how to sing the Lord’s song in an alien land?  For Gaza was never far from our dining table talk.  The name bubbled up from other conversations at other tables.  In any event, we ourselves brought it with us to the restaurant.  Cora’s father is both an Arab and a Jew, the son of Iraqi parents expelled from their ancestral homeland by a Jew-hating government two long generations ago.  That is a superficially "identity" way of describing him.  His colleagues and students know him as an American sinologist of international repute who has done ground-breaking work on East-West cultural contacts in the period of early modernity--often called by us "the Renaissance."  Cora's other grandparents live in Jerusalem.  She may well have immediate relatives in jeopardy for all I know.  So even in the midst of a mellow and celebratory supper, there was the sorry background music of the alien land.

 

         Most controverted issues, even ones on which intelligent people must come down more on one side than another, and perhaps overwhelming more, have some ambiguity and nuance.  For myself I find it very difficult to be an hundred-percenter on what has traditionally been called the “Arab-Israeli Conflict,” of which the War in Gaza is the most visible current manifestation.  Tolerating differences of opinion, even vehemently expressed opinion, is part of the price of existence in a world of free thought.  But what are we to make of widely bruited pronouncements by a tenured history professor at one of our great universities?  This man, a laureated expert in his specialized field and following what I regard as a sacred profession as a guide of young people, gleefully reports in a political pep rally before a bunch of them that he is exhilarated—yes, exhilarated by an attack perpetrated by barbarous fanatics with bullets and blades on women, children, geriatrics and a crowd of young peaceniks at a musical event.  Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.  Such  was the barbarism of warfare in Palestine six centuries before the Christian era.  Still current in 2023.  Exhilarated!

Constitutional Review

      

For many reasons, I am loath to write on political topics.  The chief reason is that I am not an expert on politics, or even particularly “political” in the popular sense.  Furthermore, most of us are already suffocating in the foul air of political commentary, most of it evanescent and a good deal of it annoying.   But now and again I, like so many others, do get provoked by the unintelligent, inefficient, and slothful actions of way too many of our elected representatives.  That so many such people get elected in the first place is extraordinary.  The history of our country, for all its failures as yet to honor its original hopes, has been driven by intelligence, innovation, and competence.  But our current Congress is by the standards of any self-respecting body requiring reflection and cooperation to arrive at effective joint action, simply incompetent. 

         If we really revered the Founders, we might pay more attention to the dangers that many of them saw in the excesseses of party feeling.  This particular mess was principally (though not exclusively) the work of a few fanatically self-righteous Republicans; but this few is enabled by the  pusillanimity of many others in their party.  At the top of the agenda of the piously invoked “people’s business” is self-preservation, holding onto office at whatever price.  Donald Trump is not the cause of the enfeeblement of American democracy, but the result of it.  What is wrong with American democracy is the democrats.  I do not refer here to the members of a particular political party, though they do play their role, but to the demos, the people, the electorate.  We have met the enemy, and it is definitely us.

         It was never as though the continuing existence of the United States, let alone its rise to world prominence, was a foregone conclusion from the moment they cleaned up the battlefield at Yorktown.  There is a famous anecdote concerning Benjamin Franklin recorded in the journal of a Maryland delegate to the Continental Congress.  You probably know it.  I hope it’s authentic, though it doesn’t really matter, because it is certainly true.   As the Congress completed its work, a Philadelphia lady ran into the sage philosopher on the street and asked him, “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”–“A republic,” was Franklin’s reply, “if you can keep it.’”  Well, they did keep it for a while, but it was often pretty touch and go, until by about 1858 it became obvious that for a lot of influential and unhappy campers in the South it was likely to be simply go.  Efforts to keep it had to become even more strenuous.  Was the idea of “democracy” even realistic?  In his immortal speech on the battlefield at Gettysburg—a speech more consequential even than the epic battle it memorialized, one sage auditor noted—President Lincoln characterized the still young and embattled nation as one “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the propositions that all men are created equal.”  He continued, “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation , or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

         The question remains current.  History is always enriched by myth, and if the myth can contain a little something lost in translation, all the better.  The Chinese leader Zhou-en-Lai was supposedly asked what he considered the most important consequences of the Paris student “revolution” of 1968.  “Too soon to tell,” he replied.  This banal comment has become an apothegm of profound Confucian wisdom on the assumption that the question referred to the French Revolution (1789).  Because it really is too soon to tell whether our country can long endure.  The republican ideal can be kept alive only if we keep trying to refine and expand it.

“Democracy” is an imperfect system  of majority rule, not a license for minority obstruction.  In fact, Kevin McCarthy’s principal crime, in the eyes of his extreme adversaries, was the act of bipartisanship—a tepid and coerced one admittedly—that actually broke a legislative logjam, temporarily resolved the immediate problem, and allowed the House to function.  His crime was dealing with Democrats, who hold about 49% of the seats in the House and 51% of those in the Senate.  Those statistics are not of the sort to encourage any realistic, patriotic legislator of either party to claim an overwhelming mandate absolving them of the obligation of compromise, and serious compromise at that. 

That is what is required of elected representatives, but there is a prior requirement for those who elect them.  That is a certain minimal knowledge of the structures of constituted government and a certain minimal participation in their operations.  I am not talking about what is needed for a college degree in political science.  I am talking about knowing what the three constitutional branches of government are and do, the distinctiveness of our bicameral legislature, the names and broadly espoused policies of our own elected representatives, and at least a little about the systems operating in our own state and local governments.  Study after study has revealed vast swathes of the American electorate to be ignorant of these most elementary of matters. 

A march of malcontent fascists with tiki torches spewing vile into the streets of Charlottesville is hardly a good advertisement for the state of American democracy; yet I doubt that the Union troops at Shiloh would have found in them the mortal threats to our national existence that a good deal of over-heated rhetoric coming from the punditocracy now suggests.  Those men knew what a real mortal threat was.  The tiki-torchers are at best, and worst,  the emblems of serious political pathology.  But there are upwards of three hundred and thirty millions of Americans.  Surely you can find three hundred of them to march in support of any benighted idea you come up with, including axe murder.  We need a serious national “back to basics” political review.  I think what we need is three or thirty million of us marching in support of calling for a Constitutional Convention.  A certain amount has happened in the political, technological, and industrial world since the late eighteenth century.  You have probably noticed.  The authors of the Constitution hoped they were enshrining some immortal ideas, but not even the pious among them aimed for a sacred book.  The Founders believed that amendment would be continuous and frequent.  Some argued for a constitutional convention every five years by statute for purposes of review and probable updating.  For many civil libertarians the most important part of this most important document is the so-called “Bill of Rights,” the first ten amendments added to the document virtually while its ink was still tacky.  You might say the sainted Founders forgot the most important part their first try.  But all too soon a brilliantly original and experimental document became for many a kind of textual fetish.  One of the grievances of the so-called Russian Orthodox “Old Believers” was the orthographic modernization of the spelling of the name of Jesus in a seventeenth-century Bible.  So easily can the letter stifle the spirit.  We can do better—which is the meaning of the word amendment—but will we?