April 9, 2012:
When I was sixteen or seventeen I used to go over to the golf course on the other side of town and try to get caddying jobs, hoping to make a little money. I didn't play golf, didn't know much about the game, and couldn't recommend a particular club for a particular shot. I was good only for carrying bags. Not a job I was born to, obviously. And I came to dislike golfers, most of whom, in my admittedly limited experience, seemed to be unusually rude, or often in sour moods. Worse than that, they all had money, yet many of them didn't tip. It was my first real experience of the upper middle-class. I didn't like them. After that I was never tempted to play golf, or to watch it on television. And that continued through most of my adult life. Watching golf is like watching grass grow, I was told many times, and I agreed.
But then I chanced across the end of a tournament on TV one Sunday afternoon when I was channel surfing and stopped to watch one of the leading players--I think it was Phil Mickelson--seal up a victory on the last hole, where he needed only two putts to win, and then watched in amazement as he blew up and three-putted the hole, even though his last putt was less than a foot from the hole. And this was a guy who was really good at this game. I was impressed. Here was something I could relate to--blowing it big time when it counted. Who doesn't do that from time to time? I certainly have. I finally realized that this was an interior game, maybe the most interior of all. Your only opponent is yourself, your nerves, the level of your skill. Your opponents are fighting their own demons; you're fighting yours. The fact that so many pros in the game use sports psychologists doesn't surprise me. Huge amounts of prize money are at stake, you're trying to get this little white ball into a cup that's located three or four or five hundred yards away, the fairways are surrounded by trees, deep rough, there are sand traps, water hazards, and thousands of people may be standing around watching your every move, and par must seem like at least one shot too cruel. Not to mention below par.
After that when Pace, our neighbor, invited me over to watch Sunday afternoons, I often went. Pace plays golf and she's very good at it, usually winning tournaments in her age group. We're of an age, so the age group is not at all young, but still she bangs through a course in the 90s and sometimes less, knows the professionals both male and female, and it's fun to watch the game with her. And then there's the beauty of the courses. I watched a good part of the Masters this past weekend, saw Bubba Watson win in a playoff and watched the tension pour out of him after he sank his last putt in tears he couldn't control, sobbing in his caddy's arms, and it was quite moving. I know what that feels like. Every time I turn in a story I wait with that kind of tension in me to hear that it's acceptable, that they like it, they're going to publish it and pay me for it. Performance is all. And all this took place in one of the most beautiful settings in America: Augusta National, in Georgia. It just takes your breath away; as an example of landscape design, I think it's nearly unmatched: rolling greensward, majestic old trees, everything beautifully groomed. It reminds me of the eighteenth-century English landscapes designed by Capability Brown. It reminds me of Paradise. It feels like Paradise, too. Golfers have a code of conduct that's unusual in sports: they're polite, they report their own infractions of the rules even when they're inadvertent, even when they're unseen, they step over or around the line between their opponents' balls and the holes when they're on the greens, they wait patiently for others to line up their shots, and they generally speak well of each other. Temper tantrums are frowned upon; indeed, they're fined for them. It's stately, dignified, and yet all this intensity is wrapped up in all that formality. That's what art is, intensity wrapped up in beauty and formality. And this Paradise even has its Adam, its fallen man, in the great Tiger Woods, the best of them all, the ur-golfer, who lost his cool and his mojo when his wife caught him cheating on her, not just with one woman but with many, and apparently came after him with one of his own golf clubs. Tiger has yet to recover from his fall; one wonders if he ever will.
Okay, I'm not an idiot. These are country clubs, after all, not utopias, and the country club mentality is one of the banes of this country's existence; it feeds the elitism, the isolationism, and the arrogance of American wealth. Augusta National still won't admit women to membership. The first time Tiger Woods played there, in a tournament, they wouldn't let him in the gate the first day he came to practice. The sport is international and you see people from all over the world on the course now, including V. J. Singh, who's Polynesian, and any number of Korean pros. More blacks will appear, I imagine, as more reach a point where they can afford the game.
But make no mistake, golf is hardly a sport representative of the racial mix in this country, or the economic mix. Still, it has become one of my favorite sports to watch, and I make no apology for it. All that intensity, that interior passion, masked, managed, contained and put to the service of a golf swing. That's what writing can be like at its best: the passion you bring to a subject, and to the craft, contained, restrained, directed. You will sometimes see a pro make a 35- or 40-foot putt on an impossible curving line across an undulating green and pump his arm when it drops. I have done the same when I've gotten the words right. I do it at my desk, but these guys get to do it in these gorgeous settings. Yes! you exclaim to yourself, and you thank the gods for your luck at being able to do what you do, and for the gift, and the time, to practice your skills.
Monday, April 9, 2012
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
THE VALUE OF BOOKS
March 27, 2012:
A cold day, chilly in the house. It takes a long time to warm this house up. Yesterday was warmer and I spent a good part of the day on the front porch, which is enclosed but still the coldest room, going through books. I'm engaged in a major thinning operation, hoping to get rid of a thousand of them, maybe more, out of the six or seven thousand I own. When you own that many, and the house is too small to put them all on shelves, you wind up not knowing what you have or where to find it, and that's frustrating. I recently wrote a piece for Military History magazine on WW II in Yugoslavia and the editors couldn't find a decent map showing what territories were occupied by what forces during the war. I happened to find what they wanted in a used bookstore a day later, but going through my books yesterday I found at the bottom of a pile an historical atlas of the Balkans I had forgotten I owned. So it's time to bring it all into some kind of order. I can't work anyway. Burned out by the latest magazine piece, on Faberge.
Anyway I've done this before, although not often on this scale, and it requires a certain amount of self examination, because ultimnately it's about who you are, what you know, why you wanted to know it. Take all the books on mind and consciousness that I'm now getting rid of. Acquiring those books started when I did a piece maybe thirty years ago for Psychology Today called "Selves." It went on for pages and pages, that piece; it was the longest piece they ever published; and my wife remembers reading it before she knew me and being very annoyed by it, although she did finish it, because it opened with an experience I had had, namely seeing myself on TV for the first time, and she seemed to think I was bragging. But I wasn't bragging; the piece was really about the slipperiness of the concept of self and the many different ideas about the self that had prevailed over the course of Western history. I was especially interested in the mind/body problem and the fact that philosophers and scientists are still arguing about it, trying to determine how minds, which are non-material, can emerge from material objects like brains. When you write 7,500 words on a subject like that you can't help but think you'd like to know more, write more, contribute in a more substantial way to the argument, and so over the years you tend to accumulate books on consciousness and the philosophy of mind and I have a fair number. But now I know I'll never write that book. It's one of too many subjects that really went nowhere for me. Often it's the lack of a venue in which to pursue the subject that determines your interests. Now I'm getting rid of them.
All my books have stories like that behind them. They represent interests pursued and then abandoned, as in this case, or interests put aside for a time, or interests I still intend to take up, they are the material signs of my intellectual history, and they have two values for me: the personal, and their value in dollars. Most of them won't bring much. But their personal value can be great. I just won't get rid of my editions of John Donne or Edmund Spenser or the like, even though I'm not likely to look at them more than once again in my lifetime, because that's where I started out, in English literature, that's my first love; for a while it's where I wanted to spend my life. Unfortunately I didn't like to teach, hadn't the patience for it, and I could see, too, how petty the politics of university life was. It wasn't for me. (It's interesting how much of my identity is based on refusals; I wonder how much that's true for other people.) Other books you keep for other reasons. I have a little book aimed at women from the mid-nineteenth century called How to Be Pretty Though Plain. I keep it for the title alone, which is charming and sad at the same time. I won't sell my copy of Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, which is in Latin--I no longer read Latin--because it's an Aldine Press edition, one of the first pocket-size books, published in 1546. 1546! The oldest object I possess, beautifully printed, immaculate paper. I paid $10 for it at an antique shop. It's imperfect--someone took a colored pencil to it at one point in its past and underlined some pages, and its monetary value is therefore quite modest. But that's all right. It's a reminder of what a well-made book is like, in a world of planned obsolescence. And I have several shelves filled with early Modern Library editions, when they were printing them with leatherette bindings. They're mostly from the 1920s and they're a record of what the 1920s thought would be books of enduring value: Maeterlinck; James Branch Cabell; George Meredith; Gabriele D'Annunzio; Max Stirner. Who? Max Stirner? The first line of J. L. Walker's Introduction to Max Stirner's book, The Ego and His Own, reads, "Fifty years sooner or later can make little difference in the case of a book as revolutionary as this." Really. I can think of few books as unread, as forgotten, as this. How, then, could I get rid of it?
But scholarship that's out of date, history books that have been superceded by newer books that have gone deeper into the archives, they will go. How many histories written in the past can we read with profit? There are the classics, Thucydides, Herodotus, Gibbon, and the like, but how about Polybius? I have a four-volume translation fo Polybius and I'd love to sell it, but I've tried, and it turns out to be a drug on the market, nobody wants it. Then I have a copy of Jacob Burkhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, written in the nineteenth century. It's a handsome copy, a small quarto, full of pictures. I read the book, but not this copy, forty years ago, and I loved it. So dramatic, so powerful. But who accepts his version of the Renaissance any more? Very few. It's yes and no on this one. But yes, I'll keep it. I can't get rid of books I once loved.
So there it is. I have to look at every book, look into it, before I make a decision. This is my life, my mind, I'm dealing with, this is me in a sense, where I've been, where I'm going, and there is so much I still want to know. The books I haven't read yet exert a pressure; it's almost as if they whisper to me from the walls. Jefferson said he couldn't imagine his life without books, and I know what he meant. I'll get rid of this 1,000, but others will come into the house. They come unbidden; I'm still getting books from publishers who think I'm still a reviewer. They send them even when they know I'm not. Publishers of all people respect the lover of books; I might talk about them, I might be a source of the word of mouth they value so much. Because in the end a book is nothing without its readers, nothing but paper, cardboard, and ink. Valueless. There are books, then, that I keep out of sheer respect: for the work, the tremendous effort, and the skill that went into making them. I'll never read all that I have, but that's not the point, really. How often do I look at the art on our walls here? The point is to surround yourself with objects of knowledge, interest, beauty--absorbing objects, objects you can bury your mind in, objects you can talk to. Otherwise life is bleak, lonely in some essential sense. You have less of a connection with the world. Books are the engine of thought; you cannot really go anywhere without them, or know much. Without them your life is inevitably far less than it should be.
A cold day, chilly in the house. It takes a long time to warm this house up. Yesterday was warmer and I spent a good part of the day on the front porch, which is enclosed but still the coldest room, going through books. I'm engaged in a major thinning operation, hoping to get rid of a thousand of them, maybe more, out of the six or seven thousand I own. When you own that many, and the house is too small to put them all on shelves, you wind up not knowing what you have or where to find it, and that's frustrating. I recently wrote a piece for Military History magazine on WW II in Yugoslavia and the editors couldn't find a decent map showing what territories were occupied by what forces during the war. I happened to find what they wanted in a used bookstore a day later, but going through my books yesterday I found at the bottom of a pile an historical atlas of the Balkans I had forgotten I owned. So it's time to bring it all into some kind of order. I can't work anyway. Burned out by the latest magazine piece, on Faberge.
Anyway I've done this before, although not often on this scale, and it requires a certain amount of self examination, because ultimnately it's about who you are, what you know, why you wanted to know it. Take all the books on mind and consciousness that I'm now getting rid of. Acquiring those books started when I did a piece maybe thirty years ago for Psychology Today called "Selves." It went on for pages and pages, that piece; it was the longest piece they ever published; and my wife remembers reading it before she knew me and being very annoyed by it, although she did finish it, because it opened with an experience I had had, namely seeing myself on TV for the first time, and she seemed to think I was bragging. But I wasn't bragging; the piece was really about the slipperiness of the concept of self and the many different ideas about the self that had prevailed over the course of Western history. I was especially interested in the mind/body problem and the fact that philosophers and scientists are still arguing about it, trying to determine how minds, which are non-material, can emerge from material objects like brains. When you write 7,500 words on a subject like that you can't help but think you'd like to know more, write more, contribute in a more substantial way to the argument, and so over the years you tend to accumulate books on consciousness and the philosophy of mind and I have a fair number. But now I know I'll never write that book. It's one of too many subjects that really went nowhere for me. Often it's the lack of a venue in which to pursue the subject that determines your interests. Now I'm getting rid of them.
All my books have stories like that behind them. They represent interests pursued and then abandoned, as in this case, or interests put aside for a time, or interests I still intend to take up, they are the material signs of my intellectual history, and they have two values for me: the personal, and their value in dollars. Most of them won't bring much. But their personal value can be great. I just won't get rid of my editions of John Donne or Edmund Spenser or the like, even though I'm not likely to look at them more than once again in my lifetime, because that's where I started out, in English literature, that's my first love; for a while it's where I wanted to spend my life. Unfortunately I didn't like to teach, hadn't the patience for it, and I could see, too, how petty the politics of university life was. It wasn't for me. (It's interesting how much of my identity is based on refusals; I wonder how much that's true for other people.) Other books you keep for other reasons. I have a little book aimed at women from the mid-nineteenth century called How to Be Pretty Though Plain. I keep it for the title alone, which is charming and sad at the same time. I won't sell my copy of Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, which is in Latin--I no longer read Latin--because it's an Aldine Press edition, one of the first pocket-size books, published in 1546. 1546! The oldest object I possess, beautifully printed, immaculate paper. I paid $10 for it at an antique shop. It's imperfect--someone took a colored pencil to it at one point in its past and underlined some pages, and its monetary value is therefore quite modest. But that's all right. It's a reminder of what a well-made book is like, in a world of planned obsolescence. And I have several shelves filled with early Modern Library editions, when they were printing them with leatherette bindings. They're mostly from the 1920s and they're a record of what the 1920s thought would be books of enduring value: Maeterlinck; James Branch Cabell; George Meredith; Gabriele D'Annunzio; Max Stirner. Who? Max Stirner? The first line of J. L. Walker's Introduction to Max Stirner's book, The Ego and His Own, reads, "Fifty years sooner or later can make little difference in the case of a book as revolutionary as this." Really. I can think of few books as unread, as forgotten, as this. How, then, could I get rid of it?
But scholarship that's out of date, history books that have been superceded by newer books that have gone deeper into the archives, they will go. How many histories written in the past can we read with profit? There are the classics, Thucydides, Herodotus, Gibbon, and the like, but how about Polybius? I have a four-volume translation fo Polybius and I'd love to sell it, but I've tried, and it turns out to be a drug on the market, nobody wants it. Then I have a copy of Jacob Burkhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, written in the nineteenth century. It's a handsome copy, a small quarto, full of pictures. I read the book, but not this copy, forty years ago, and I loved it. So dramatic, so powerful. But who accepts his version of the Renaissance any more? Very few. It's yes and no on this one. But yes, I'll keep it. I can't get rid of books I once loved.
So there it is. I have to look at every book, look into it, before I make a decision. This is my life, my mind, I'm dealing with, this is me in a sense, where I've been, where I'm going, and there is so much I still want to know. The books I haven't read yet exert a pressure; it's almost as if they whisper to me from the walls. Jefferson said he couldn't imagine his life without books, and I know what he meant. I'll get rid of this 1,000, but others will come into the house. They come unbidden; I'm still getting books from publishers who think I'm still a reviewer. They send them even when they know I'm not. Publishers of all people respect the lover of books; I might talk about them, I might be a source of the word of mouth they value so much. Because in the end a book is nothing without its readers, nothing but paper, cardboard, and ink. Valueless. There are books, then, that I keep out of sheer respect: for the work, the tremendous effort, and the skill that went into making them. I'll never read all that I have, but that's not the point, really. How often do I look at the art on our walls here? The point is to surround yourself with objects of knowledge, interest, beauty--absorbing objects, objects you can bury your mind in, objects you can talk to. Otherwise life is bleak, lonely in some essential sense. You have less of a connection with the world. Books are the engine of thought; you cannot really go anywhere without them, or know much. Without them your life is inevitably far less than it should be.
Friday, March 9, 2012
THAT IRRITATING THING, KNOWLEDGE
March 9, 2012:
The other day, trying to keep up, always a challenge, I read a piece in the New York Review of Books by William Nordhaus on climate change, and here is Paul Krugman, writing today about Republicans and higher education, under the ironic title "Ignorance Is Strength." Republicans doubt the value of higher education, according to Krugman, partly because in the colleges and universities the scientific faculty are all Democrats (which they are, reports Krugman, by a factor of nine to one); and they can see them corrupting the minds of America's young with leftist ideology--like climate change. When in fact we all know from the Bible, which is the only book that anybody really needs, that God put the earth here for mankind to use as we wish, and God being Almighty, we therefore have nothing to fear from the earth. He'll fix everything.
Fifty years ago that would have been a gross mischaracterization of the Republican position on such an issue; then Republicans were as eager to develop nuclear energy, cure cancer, and ride the sciences to the future as Democrats were. Now, it seems, not so much. Now they remind me of the Catholic Church in Galileo's time. No, the Church thundered, the sun revolves around the earth, as do the planets and the stars, and there are 1,029 stars (really; that was the count), they are fixed in the sphere they belong to, as are the planets, each in its sphere, and the moon in its. They put Galileo on trial for his life for demonstrating otherwise, and in 1610, if I have the date right, they forbade the teaching of what we know now to be the truth, on the literal pain of Inquisition: i.e., torture. Galileo sensibly recanted, saving his skin, and ultimately the truth prevailed.
But it takes a long time for the truth to prevail. Copernicus first introduced his theory that the earth revolved around the sun, and not vice versa, in 1543, give or take a year; it took about 150 years before it was generally accepted in astronomical circles, and for some in the Church it was not until the nineteenth century that it became an acceptable fact. Ignorance is always slow to dissipate. In the Middle Ages it was taken as fact that the Garden of Eden was a real place, still existing in the world, and there was a great deal of speculation about where exactly it was to be found; speculation continued into the age of exploration, into the Renaissance, and Columbus was persuaded he had found the site in what we now know to be South America, at the headwaters of the Orinoco. A hundred years later Sir Walter Raleigh bought into this idea, too, and pressed his search for El Dorado into the same area. You still see on TV the occasional documentary about people searching Mt. Ararat in Turkey for the remains of Noah's Ark, even though it is a settled fact that there is not and never has been enough water on the earth to cover it to the altitude it would require to place an ark there. The Garden of Eden, by the way, stood on a mountain high enough to allow it to escape the Flood: that was Doctrine.
And now, climate change. Global warming. If the planet has not shrugged us off by then, as it shrugged off the dinosaurs, we will look back four or five hundred years hence and wonder at the same level of the doctrinaire, the same kind of embrace of ignorance represented now by the Republican Party as was embraced by the Catholic Church four or five hundred years earlier. It is amazing. Fifty years ago, when I was young, I would never have predicted this; Republicans and Democrats alike were science enthusiasts, and when John Glenn orbited the earth, the first American to do so, the whole country rejoiced. Not just Democrats. And what made that orbit possible? The Enlightenment. The scientific revolution that began in the late Renaissance and followed it into modern times. Hundreds of years, in other words, of scientific and technological development that left antique, mythical conceptions of the universe and the earth's place in it far behind.
What happened to that Republican Party? The Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhauer had been for a few years the president of Columbia University, and there was little question about his commitment to knowledge and science. The appallingly ignorant George W. Bush had no idea where Iraq was until he invaded it and had never, if I remember correctly, been to Europe before he ran for president. Increasingly we stand alone in the developed world, not at the head of it but at the rear. Our schools are bad and getting worse; our students are falling farther and farther behind; and a significant percentage of the electorate thinks global warming is an elitist myth. Evidently it will take a real Flood this time to wake them up to reality. Four or five hundred years from now people, if there are still many of them left, will look back and say, "They could have prevented it from happening. What were they thinking? Just how stupid were they?"
There's something about the human mind, something in it that fears knowledge and the change it brings, that clings to old certainties or what it thinks are certainties, that wants everything to stay just as it was in the good old days. It's the same thing that condemned Socrates to drink the hemlock, that locked Galileo in a dungeon and threatened him with the rack, and that now denies the truth of global warming and wants to believe that evolution is "just a theory." And it is this that now dominates one of our two major political parties and seeks the power to return us to much darker times, when knowledge was persecuted and suppressed as a matter of policy and everybody knew his or her place.
The other day, trying to keep up, always a challenge, I read a piece in the New York Review of Books by William Nordhaus on climate change, and here is Paul Krugman, writing today about Republicans and higher education, under the ironic title "Ignorance Is Strength." Republicans doubt the value of higher education, according to Krugman, partly because in the colleges and universities the scientific faculty are all Democrats (which they are, reports Krugman, by a factor of nine to one); and they can see them corrupting the minds of America's young with leftist ideology--like climate change. When in fact we all know from the Bible, which is the only book that anybody really needs, that God put the earth here for mankind to use as we wish, and God being Almighty, we therefore have nothing to fear from the earth. He'll fix everything.
Fifty years ago that would have been a gross mischaracterization of the Republican position on such an issue; then Republicans were as eager to develop nuclear energy, cure cancer, and ride the sciences to the future as Democrats were. Now, it seems, not so much. Now they remind me of the Catholic Church in Galileo's time. No, the Church thundered, the sun revolves around the earth, as do the planets and the stars, and there are 1,029 stars (really; that was the count), they are fixed in the sphere they belong to, as are the planets, each in its sphere, and the moon in its. They put Galileo on trial for his life for demonstrating otherwise, and in 1610, if I have the date right, they forbade the teaching of what we know now to be the truth, on the literal pain of Inquisition: i.e., torture. Galileo sensibly recanted, saving his skin, and ultimately the truth prevailed.
But it takes a long time for the truth to prevail. Copernicus first introduced his theory that the earth revolved around the sun, and not vice versa, in 1543, give or take a year; it took about 150 years before it was generally accepted in astronomical circles, and for some in the Church it was not until the nineteenth century that it became an acceptable fact. Ignorance is always slow to dissipate. In the Middle Ages it was taken as fact that the Garden of Eden was a real place, still existing in the world, and there was a great deal of speculation about where exactly it was to be found; speculation continued into the age of exploration, into the Renaissance, and Columbus was persuaded he had found the site in what we now know to be South America, at the headwaters of the Orinoco. A hundred years later Sir Walter Raleigh bought into this idea, too, and pressed his search for El Dorado into the same area. You still see on TV the occasional documentary about people searching Mt. Ararat in Turkey for the remains of Noah's Ark, even though it is a settled fact that there is not and never has been enough water on the earth to cover it to the altitude it would require to place an ark there. The Garden of Eden, by the way, stood on a mountain high enough to allow it to escape the Flood: that was Doctrine.
And now, climate change. Global warming. If the planet has not shrugged us off by then, as it shrugged off the dinosaurs, we will look back four or five hundred years hence and wonder at the same level of the doctrinaire, the same kind of embrace of ignorance represented now by the Republican Party as was embraced by the Catholic Church four or five hundred years earlier. It is amazing. Fifty years ago, when I was young, I would never have predicted this; Republicans and Democrats alike were science enthusiasts, and when John Glenn orbited the earth, the first American to do so, the whole country rejoiced. Not just Democrats. And what made that orbit possible? The Enlightenment. The scientific revolution that began in the late Renaissance and followed it into modern times. Hundreds of years, in other words, of scientific and technological development that left antique, mythical conceptions of the universe and the earth's place in it far behind.
What happened to that Republican Party? The Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhauer had been for a few years the president of Columbia University, and there was little question about his commitment to knowledge and science. The appallingly ignorant George W. Bush had no idea where Iraq was until he invaded it and had never, if I remember correctly, been to Europe before he ran for president. Increasingly we stand alone in the developed world, not at the head of it but at the rear. Our schools are bad and getting worse; our students are falling farther and farther behind; and a significant percentage of the electorate thinks global warming is an elitist myth. Evidently it will take a real Flood this time to wake them up to reality. Four or five hundred years from now people, if there are still many of them left, will look back and say, "They could have prevented it from happening. What were they thinking? Just how stupid were they?"
There's something about the human mind, something in it that fears knowledge and the change it brings, that clings to old certainties or what it thinks are certainties, that wants everything to stay just as it was in the good old days. It's the same thing that condemned Socrates to drink the hemlock, that locked Galileo in a dungeon and threatened him with the rack, and that now denies the truth of global warming and wants to believe that evolution is "just a theory." And it is this that now dominates one of our two major political parties and seeks the power to return us to much darker times, when knowledge was persecuted and suppressed as a matter of policy and everybody knew his or her place.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
WHY I AM A DEMOCRAT
February 19, 2012:
I read this morning in the Times that Rick Santorum thinks we should do away with public education.
Words fail me.
So yes, privatize everything. Turn the entire country into a business. And if you can't afford the tuition at the new private schools that will emerge from this scheme? Well, tough luck. Too bad. Who said life was fair?
In the real world everything is connected. You know the image: a butterfly stirs a patch of air in Africa, the resulting hurricane reaches Florida a month later. A street vendor torches himself in protest, out of despair, in Tunisia; the Arab world explodes. Poor Chinese peasants with different attitudes toward work and different needs from our own take jobs at wages no American would suffer, and whole industries here collapse. Everything has consequences. Take hope away from the poor long enough, continue to multiply poverty and despair here, in our own country, and it will have consequences. They will be dire. Burn enough fossil fuels, disbelieve in global warming, and consequences are certain to follow. Really horrendous consequences, for the entire world.
I come from a Republican family but the Republican party of my youth did not spurn science, despise the poor, or appeal so blatantly to the worst impulses of the population. I am enough of a realist to know that the poor will always be with us, that human beings are not perfectible, that most people will not pay much attention to the complexities of public issues, and that politics is rife with corruption. I know people don't learn from history. That most of us lead lives of quiet desperation and all that. And I know that not everyone is educable and it is very difficult to devise an educational system that works well enough to raise the possibility of living a better life across the board, at all income levels, in all socioeconomic strata.
But here's the thing--YOU HAVE TO TRY. Not trying, giving up on the whole affair, abandoning the poor to their fate, not seeing that you with your luck, your job, your advanced degrees, your sophisticated tastes HAVE AN OBLIGATION regardless of the probability of whatever programs you devise succeeding is to sink not just their chances, but yours, too, and your children's chances. Because everything is connected. We are a nation, not a mere random conglomeration of individuals, and the nation has a soul and you can destroy that soul, chop it into regions and sects and factions, fill it with hatred and intolerance, and it will be no more. The world is fragile, nations are fragile, things can and will fall apart and if you deny this, if you turn your back on others, vote for destroying the education system, for ignoring scientific facts and attacking the science that discovered them (which Rick Santorum is doing right now, on TV, as I write), you speed the process of decline. A nation is, in Benedict Anderson's phrase, an "imagined community," a creature of faith more than anything else. I don't mean religious faith, either, but faith in each other, in our good intentions, our willingness to help, our understanding that we're all in this together. Because everything is connected. Rich and poor, we live in the same cities and pass each other in the street, we function in the same economy, and the health of the whole depends on the health of each.
You have to try, even if you know that your successes will be small, and that much will be wasted in the process. And that's why I am a Democrat, because the party does try, inept as the attempts often are. Trying is an absolute necessity. It is a sign that the nation's soul is compassionate and tolerant of differences, that whatever the outcome at least we have not become totally greedy, totally indifferent to the fate of others, particularly the people on the bottom who have forgotten what hope is. Al Gore, John Kerry--you could see that they were not good campaigners, that they didn't know how to pull the political triggers that get people elected; but it was clear at the same time that they cared for more than those of their own class, that the fate of the earth was important to them, that they had that fundamental sense of compassion and tolerance that marks men as good.
Wealth does not trickle down, as Republicans want us to believe, but greed does. Greed gone rampant will infect us all and lead to the war of all against all that will eventually consign the United States to oblivion, should we let it happen. There is a reason Occupy Wall Street and its followers have focused, insofar as they have focused on anything, on the 1 percent; it's because the superrich represent just that, greed gone rampant, out of control; they symbolize the logic of turning a nation into a business. It trickles down, scrambling the power system in California, as Enron did just a decade or so ago, out of sheer greed; it trickles into home financing and makes millions homeless, out of sheer reckless greed; it gets into the language, redefining words like freedom and liberty, making them all about business.
I will stick then with the politicial party that created Social Security and Medicare, that fought for the civil rights laws of the 1960s, that instituted the Federal regulation of business greed, and that still shows signs of caring, even if in small ways, for the poor. Programs often don't work, but they make an effort; they are signs that we care for our poor, our crippled, our helpless. History will judge us by what we tried to do, by the help we tried to give, even if we failed. If we do not care, if we do not try, we will not have a history. The great democratic experiment will have gone to its doom, and the entire world could well be the worse for our having existed.
I read this morning in the Times that Rick Santorum thinks we should do away with public education.
Words fail me.
So yes, privatize everything. Turn the entire country into a business. And if you can't afford the tuition at the new private schools that will emerge from this scheme? Well, tough luck. Too bad. Who said life was fair?
In the real world everything is connected. You know the image: a butterfly stirs a patch of air in Africa, the resulting hurricane reaches Florida a month later. A street vendor torches himself in protest, out of despair, in Tunisia; the Arab world explodes. Poor Chinese peasants with different attitudes toward work and different needs from our own take jobs at wages no American would suffer, and whole industries here collapse. Everything has consequences. Take hope away from the poor long enough, continue to multiply poverty and despair here, in our own country, and it will have consequences. They will be dire. Burn enough fossil fuels, disbelieve in global warming, and consequences are certain to follow. Really horrendous consequences, for the entire world.
I come from a Republican family but the Republican party of my youth did not spurn science, despise the poor, or appeal so blatantly to the worst impulses of the population. I am enough of a realist to know that the poor will always be with us, that human beings are not perfectible, that most people will not pay much attention to the complexities of public issues, and that politics is rife with corruption. I know people don't learn from history. That most of us lead lives of quiet desperation and all that. And I know that not everyone is educable and it is very difficult to devise an educational system that works well enough to raise the possibility of living a better life across the board, at all income levels, in all socioeconomic strata.
But here's the thing--YOU HAVE TO TRY. Not trying, giving up on the whole affair, abandoning the poor to their fate, not seeing that you with your luck, your job, your advanced degrees, your sophisticated tastes HAVE AN OBLIGATION regardless of the probability of whatever programs you devise succeeding is to sink not just their chances, but yours, too, and your children's chances. Because everything is connected. We are a nation, not a mere random conglomeration of individuals, and the nation has a soul and you can destroy that soul, chop it into regions and sects and factions, fill it with hatred and intolerance, and it will be no more. The world is fragile, nations are fragile, things can and will fall apart and if you deny this, if you turn your back on others, vote for destroying the education system, for ignoring scientific facts and attacking the science that discovered them (which Rick Santorum is doing right now, on TV, as I write), you speed the process of decline. A nation is, in Benedict Anderson's phrase, an "imagined community," a creature of faith more than anything else. I don't mean religious faith, either, but faith in each other, in our good intentions, our willingness to help, our understanding that we're all in this together. Because everything is connected. Rich and poor, we live in the same cities and pass each other in the street, we function in the same economy, and the health of the whole depends on the health of each.
You have to try, even if you know that your successes will be small, and that much will be wasted in the process. And that's why I am a Democrat, because the party does try, inept as the attempts often are. Trying is an absolute necessity. It is a sign that the nation's soul is compassionate and tolerant of differences, that whatever the outcome at least we have not become totally greedy, totally indifferent to the fate of others, particularly the people on the bottom who have forgotten what hope is. Al Gore, John Kerry--you could see that they were not good campaigners, that they didn't know how to pull the political triggers that get people elected; but it was clear at the same time that they cared for more than those of their own class, that the fate of the earth was important to them, that they had that fundamental sense of compassion and tolerance that marks men as good.
Wealth does not trickle down, as Republicans want us to believe, but greed does. Greed gone rampant will infect us all and lead to the war of all against all that will eventually consign the United States to oblivion, should we let it happen. There is a reason Occupy Wall Street and its followers have focused, insofar as they have focused on anything, on the 1 percent; it's because the superrich represent just that, greed gone rampant, out of control; they symbolize the logic of turning a nation into a business. It trickles down, scrambling the power system in California, as Enron did just a decade or so ago, out of sheer greed; it trickles into home financing and makes millions homeless, out of sheer reckless greed; it gets into the language, redefining words like freedom and liberty, making them all about business.
I will stick then with the politicial party that created Social Security and Medicare, that fought for the civil rights laws of the 1960s, that instituted the Federal regulation of business greed, and that still shows signs of caring, even if in small ways, for the poor. Programs often don't work, but they make an effort; they are signs that we care for our poor, our crippled, our helpless. History will judge us by what we tried to do, by the help we tried to give, even if we failed. If we do not care, if we do not try, we will not have a history. The great democratic experiment will have gone to its doom, and the entire world could well be the worse for our having existed.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
WHAT NEXT, PUSSYCAT?
February 4, 2012:
What is next? Seedless apples?
I don't know. I was in New York Thursday having lunch with a friend and had something under an hour to kill afterwards before my bus left, so I dropped into the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Ave. at 18th Street, their flagship store, to look at their books in American history. It was intimidating. Each bookcase in that section was about seven and a half feet tall and there were maybe fifteen of them, probably a thousand titles all told. At least 800, anyway. I looked at them and I thought, do I really want to add another one? Then I had another thought: damn, I only have about forty-five minutes to look at them. And where else can I find anything like this abundance? What are we going to do when all the bookstores disappear?
Publishing is in the midst of this huge transition and nobody knows how it's going to turn out. Will physical books disappear, replaced by ebooks? I just can't believe that. Of course I'm an old guy so it figures I wouldn't be able to believe that, especially looking around the house, the bookcases, the 6-7,000 books in the house. I'm thinning them out now, carton by carton, in the hopes of exposing the floor space in the two rooms I use as offices; and I don't mind getting rid of them, up to a point. But they represent, no, more than that, they embody my own intellectual history, the progress of my interests, my passions over the years, and while I know, being old, that I'll never read most of them, I can't get rid of them all. Not by any means. They mean too much to me. Even if I haven't read them yet I know where they fit in my own private map of the world.
And I'm reluctant to get rid of them too because I don't know what I'm going to do next. The project I have been aiming my life toward for so many years is exceedingly difficult and hard to pin down, it's in American history, so I have to keep most of my books on that subject, and there are a great many. At the same time I despair of this project, it's really difficult, it's hard to sell to a publisher, any publisher, I've discovered, and I have other projects that would be much easier, for which in fact I've already written material (years ago), and for which I also have a great many books. So I can't get rid of those, either. I am getting rid of the Arctic books. I've done the Arctic. I'm sick of ice; I'll never write another adventure book (unless someone begs me to, and for serious money); that phase of my life is over. I hope. But nothing is fixed in a writer's life. He begins again just about every day. When he's writing he has to read over in the morning what he did the day before, then figure out what to say next, how to say it, and where it will fit in the overall design, which itself changes with each sentence, each thought. And for me, well, I never think I know enough. Other people always know more. Thus this library of mine. I use it to mine the material, to know more. It's a never ending process. But it does actually end, and I'm old, and the end game is upon me, and I'm not sure what to do next. Or whether I can even do anythiing that will sell, because publishing is in such big trouble, publishers are scared, and you never know where or when you're going to find somebody to take a chance on you and your big ideas.
I think I'm going to be experimenting with the ebook market soon; I have a bunch of essays, starting with the ethics columns I wrote for Esquire, to which I'll add some of the other pieces with moral themes I've written over the years, and I'll make a book out of them. Maybe go over to the dark side and publish it with Amazon. But I don't know. I love real books, books you can hold in your hand, flip the pages of, write in the margins of. I don't feel I'm reading a book unless I can write in the margins. Books are wonderful physical objects, and the greatest invention for storing knowledge mankind has ever conceived. Browsing through bookstores has been one of the most satisfying pleasures of my life.
Well, I suppose I'm going to write another one, no matter what. It's what I was born to do; I have no choice. Add one more title to those shelves, if there are still shelves stocked with books when I'm done. Wish me luck. Wish us all luck, because without books, it's the dark ages all over again.
What is next? Seedless apples?
I don't know. I was in New York Thursday having lunch with a friend and had something under an hour to kill afterwards before my bus left, so I dropped into the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Ave. at 18th Street, their flagship store, to look at their books in American history. It was intimidating. Each bookcase in that section was about seven and a half feet tall and there were maybe fifteen of them, probably a thousand titles all told. At least 800, anyway. I looked at them and I thought, do I really want to add another one? Then I had another thought: damn, I only have about forty-five minutes to look at them. And where else can I find anything like this abundance? What are we going to do when all the bookstores disappear?
Publishing is in the midst of this huge transition and nobody knows how it's going to turn out. Will physical books disappear, replaced by ebooks? I just can't believe that. Of course I'm an old guy so it figures I wouldn't be able to believe that, especially looking around the house, the bookcases, the 6-7,000 books in the house. I'm thinning them out now, carton by carton, in the hopes of exposing the floor space in the two rooms I use as offices; and I don't mind getting rid of them, up to a point. But they represent, no, more than that, they embody my own intellectual history, the progress of my interests, my passions over the years, and while I know, being old, that I'll never read most of them, I can't get rid of them all. Not by any means. They mean too much to me. Even if I haven't read them yet I know where they fit in my own private map of the world.
And I'm reluctant to get rid of them too because I don't know what I'm going to do next. The project I have been aiming my life toward for so many years is exceedingly difficult and hard to pin down, it's in American history, so I have to keep most of my books on that subject, and there are a great many. At the same time I despair of this project, it's really difficult, it's hard to sell to a publisher, any publisher, I've discovered, and I have other projects that would be much easier, for which in fact I've already written material (years ago), and for which I also have a great many books. So I can't get rid of those, either. I am getting rid of the Arctic books. I've done the Arctic. I'm sick of ice; I'll never write another adventure book (unless someone begs me to, and for serious money); that phase of my life is over. I hope. But nothing is fixed in a writer's life. He begins again just about every day. When he's writing he has to read over in the morning what he did the day before, then figure out what to say next, how to say it, and where it will fit in the overall design, which itself changes with each sentence, each thought. And for me, well, I never think I know enough. Other people always know more. Thus this library of mine. I use it to mine the material, to know more. It's a never ending process. But it does actually end, and I'm old, and the end game is upon me, and I'm not sure what to do next. Or whether I can even do anythiing that will sell, because publishing is in such big trouble, publishers are scared, and you never know where or when you're going to find somebody to take a chance on you and your big ideas.
I think I'm going to be experimenting with the ebook market soon; I have a bunch of essays, starting with the ethics columns I wrote for Esquire, to which I'll add some of the other pieces with moral themes I've written over the years, and I'll make a book out of them. Maybe go over to the dark side and publish it with Amazon. But I don't know. I love real books, books you can hold in your hand, flip the pages of, write in the margins of. I don't feel I'm reading a book unless I can write in the margins. Books are wonderful physical objects, and the greatest invention for storing knowledge mankind has ever conceived. Browsing through bookstores has been one of the most satisfying pleasures of my life.
Well, I suppose I'm going to write another one, no matter what. It's what I was born to do; I have no choice. Add one more title to those shelves, if there are still shelves stocked with books when I'm done. Wish me luck. Wish us all luck, because without books, it's the dark ages all over again.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
DON'T OCCUPY WALL STREET
January 24, 2012:
What happened to Occupy Wall Street? Winter weather, presumably. Or maybe the movement was as evanescent as its message was vague. I wrote a piece about it that ran in the January issue of Town & Country in which I explained why it struck me as useless and ill-thought-out--actually not thought out at all--and I'm still processing the reactions I got from my friends. My friends are liberal, and they disagreed with me. Even though the movement accomplished nothing concrete, they said, it did raise consciousness about the income gap, which has been growing steadily for more than thirty years. Well, OK. But the income gap has not only been growing for thirty years, it has been reported on during most of that time, if you cared to look. Economists call it the Great Divergence, and the best piece I've read on the subject ran in Slate as a series about a year ago, or maybe a year and a half. It was written by Timothy Noah and he explained pretty thoroughly the congregation of factors that has caused it. He also made it clear that the phenomenon--as is true of most social phenomena once you get into them--has complicated causes, many of them global in scale, and only one of which is the greed of what he calls the Stinking Rich, and that you cannot hope to solve the huge economic problems the country faces simply by lopping off their heads, guillotine-style.
In any case the Great Divergence is a huge problem, it affects our future as a nation quite deeply, and it deserves better than a half-assed living-in-tents movement that wanted mostly, it seemed to me, to feel good about itself, to see itself as a true democracy in which everyone had a voice, a la the ancient Greek city states, in which citizens met en masse to make critical decisions. That system produced Athens, whose citizens met en masse and sent Thucydides into exile for not making it to Sicily in time to support the Athenian army there, even though bad weather made it impossible to him to get there in time, and met again to condemn Socrates to death for asking inconvenient questions. They want, in other words, to come off as virtuous. What crap. Come on, people. Do you really think sitting around on park benches discussing whether or not they should even have an agenda is going to accomplish anything? No message ever emerged from these wannabe rebels. Put them up against the blacks who put their lives, their lives, on the line in Selma in 1965, or the citoyens who stormed the Bastille in 1789 or the citizens of what was not yet the United States who starved and died in the snows of Valley Forge to form, de novo, of all things, the first modern republic. Or, most recently, an object lesson in what a real movement looks like, the Islamic citizens who fighting for their lives in Syria right now to depose the Assads from their dictatorship. Put them up against these people and they look simply pathetic.
This country is on the road to becoming second-rate, if not third; it has already lost its place as a leader in all kinds of measures, not just in income equality but in medical care and, most importantly of all, in education. In economic opportunity we have flat-lined. The percentage of our children who live in poverty is a national disgrace. Millions of kids have no chance at all of ever improving their lives, the number of people in prison is a nightmare. And we think Occupy Wall Street is a movement. No it's not. It has no program, no agenda, no legs, no discernible leaders. Indeed, it abjures leaders. Get real.
By which I mean, if you want to change things there are established means to do it. Those means are political, and politics is unavoidably dirty, complicated, Machiavellian. It entails working with people you don't like and don't agree with to come to some kind of flawed compromise that gives each side something and takes something away from each side. It requires you to meet and greet, to think long and hard about complicated issues, and to harbor, somewhere in the back of your mind, a dedication to the common good. So run for office if you really want to change things. Or serve on a local government committee, find out for yourself what it's like to be under attack from people who mistake your motives, what it's like to have people in the community call you at all hours wanting something or complaining about something, all of which you will endure as a public service and for which you will be paid nothing at all.
Do that and I'll begin to take you and your opinions seriously. Or present me with a set of ideas, a program, you're willing to die for. I'll take that seriously, too.
What happened to Occupy Wall Street? Winter weather, presumably. Or maybe the movement was as evanescent as its message was vague. I wrote a piece about it that ran in the January issue of Town & Country in which I explained why it struck me as useless and ill-thought-out--actually not thought out at all--and I'm still processing the reactions I got from my friends. My friends are liberal, and they disagreed with me. Even though the movement accomplished nothing concrete, they said, it did raise consciousness about the income gap, which has been growing steadily for more than thirty years. Well, OK. But the income gap has not only been growing for thirty years, it has been reported on during most of that time, if you cared to look. Economists call it the Great Divergence, and the best piece I've read on the subject ran in Slate as a series about a year ago, or maybe a year and a half. It was written by Timothy Noah and he explained pretty thoroughly the congregation of factors that has caused it. He also made it clear that the phenomenon--as is true of most social phenomena once you get into them--has complicated causes, many of them global in scale, and only one of which is the greed of what he calls the Stinking Rich, and that you cannot hope to solve the huge economic problems the country faces simply by lopping off their heads, guillotine-style.
In any case the Great Divergence is a huge problem, it affects our future as a nation quite deeply, and it deserves better than a half-assed living-in-tents movement that wanted mostly, it seemed to me, to feel good about itself, to see itself as a true democracy in which everyone had a voice, a la the ancient Greek city states, in which citizens met en masse to make critical decisions. That system produced Athens, whose citizens met en masse and sent Thucydides into exile for not making it to Sicily in time to support the Athenian army there, even though bad weather made it impossible to him to get there in time, and met again to condemn Socrates to death for asking inconvenient questions. They want, in other words, to come off as virtuous. What crap. Come on, people. Do you really think sitting around on park benches discussing whether or not they should even have an agenda is going to accomplish anything? No message ever emerged from these wannabe rebels. Put them up against the blacks who put their lives, their lives, on the line in Selma in 1965, or the citoyens who stormed the Bastille in 1789 or the citizens of what was not yet the United States who starved and died in the snows of Valley Forge to form, de novo, of all things, the first modern republic. Or, most recently, an object lesson in what a real movement looks like, the Islamic citizens who fighting for their lives in Syria right now to depose the Assads from their dictatorship. Put them up against these people and they look simply pathetic.
This country is on the road to becoming second-rate, if not third; it has already lost its place as a leader in all kinds of measures, not just in income equality but in medical care and, most importantly of all, in education. In economic opportunity we have flat-lined. The percentage of our children who live in poverty is a national disgrace. Millions of kids have no chance at all of ever improving their lives, the number of people in prison is a nightmare. And we think Occupy Wall Street is a movement. No it's not. It has no program, no agenda, no legs, no discernible leaders. Indeed, it abjures leaders. Get real.
By which I mean, if you want to change things there are established means to do it. Those means are political, and politics is unavoidably dirty, complicated, Machiavellian. It entails working with people you don't like and don't agree with to come to some kind of flawed compromise that gives each side something and takes something away from each side. It requires you to meet and greet, to think long and hard about complicated issues, and to harbor, somewhere in the back of your mind, a dedication to the common good. So run for office if you really want to change things. Or serve on a local government committee, find out for yourself what it's like to be under attack from people who mistake your motives, what it's like to have people in the community call you at all hours wanting something or complaining about something, all of which you will endure as a public service and for which you will be paid nothing at all.
Do that and I'll begin to take you and your opinions seriously. Or present me with a set of ideas, a program, you're willing to die for. I'll take that seriously, too.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
BREAKING UP THE U.S.A. TWO
January 14, 2012:
In the London Review of Books for 15 December I came across a review of a new book by the English historian Norman Davies, who specializes in large volumes (this one is over 800 pages) covering big swaths of history. It's called Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe. And I just finished writing a piece for Military History about Yugoslavia in World War II. Then there's the Historical Atlas of the Celtic World, another random pluck from my library, which is full of maps of countries you never heard of: the Kingdom of Brittany, the Duchy of Brittany, Galatia, Pannonia, and on and on. So I keep running into countries that no longer exist. Yugoslavia is only the latest example. Created in 1921 by the great powers at the Paris peace talks after World War I, Yugoslavia was a forced merger of Serbia, Slovenia, and Croatia, with Montenegro thrown in for good luck. The first assassination came a year later, the second in 1928, and during World War II the country barely contained a civil war that raged at the same time, between Serbs and Croats, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, Nazis and Communists. It's an open question which killed the most people, whether it was the Croatian Nazis, who massacred Eastern Orthodox Serbs in huge numbers, or the German Nazis, who killed ten civilians every time a German soldier was ambushed, or the Partisans, led by Marshal Tito. Whichever it was, more than a million people died. What the great powers ignored--this is what great powers do, ignore realities--was the history of the Balkans, where the various religious and national groups have always hated each other. The Balkans have seen dozens of kingdoms, republics, and mini-empires vanish.
Mini-empires, like the Serbian empire, and major empires, like the Ottoman, the British, the French empire under Napoleon. They all come, they all go. What makes us think the United States is immune? We are a military power, but so was the Roman Empire, the overwhelming military power in ancient times, with huge effective fighting forces; but its army could not save it. Corruption, greed, the lust for power--they are human universals, appearing everywhere we appear. Men of large fortunes crop up, as Montesquieu said, they soon begin to think they may be happy and glorious by oppressing their fellow citizens, that they may raise themselves to grandeur on the ruins of their country. Last night at dinner an old friend of ours said that within a generation we may see a revolution in the United States. If we do, the nation may break up. It will be, perhaps, like India and Pakistan in 1947, a vast migration, hundreds of thousands of people killed, as Muslims fled to the latter and Hindus to the former. Examples of nations breaking up are legion. Where will our populations flee? Quiet migrations go on all the time here. Half the people I know are in exile from the Midwest, including my wife.
We are not an exception in the long history of the world, we are no better than other countries, we harbor the same weaknesses, the same unthinking arrogance, the same kinds of hatreds. Our educational levels are sinking well below the standards set in a good part of the rest of the world; the level of our income inequality, which is a reliable predictor of unrest, is much higher than in Europe and even some Third World countries. Half the polity seems to think that science, which has given this same polity an amazing lifestyle, is "merely theory," and it has become impossible to tell the public the truth about anything. Meanwhile we continue to entertain ourselves to death.
This is a note my readers have heard from me before. But I cannot help it. I am an old man, and it is very painful to watch my country deteriorate before my eyes. I read somewhere recently that the chief environmental scientist at NASA thinks the Keystone pipeline that has been proposed to run from Canada through Nebraska to refineries in Texas would be the tipping point. If we start refining the dirty crude that comes from tar sands, we can say adios to the planet. But name an oil executive that has the interests of the planet, rather than those of his corporation, at heart. Is there one? Are there actual patriots out there? Is civic virtue completely dead? Congressional corruption has become, not a crime committed only by a few, but a necessity for all; they cannot escape it; they have to raise campaign money, very large sums of it, and that by itself is enough to destroy the country.
The republic is dead, long live the oligarchy. Jefferson thought we should have a revolution every generation, and he has a point. The United States may have had its day. It needs to be rethought, from the bottom up. The fire next time, said James Baldwin. Think about what we have come to: a corporate raider is one of the leading candidates to run the country. Who can take pride in such a situation? And there's no Teddy Roosevelt to come riding in on his horse and save us.
In the London Review of Books for 15 December I came across a review of a new book by the English historian Norman Davies, who specializes in large volumes (this one is over 800 pages) covering big swaths of history. It's called Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe. And I just finished writing a piece for Military History about Yugoslavia in World War II. Then there's the Historical Atlas of the Celtic World, another random pluck from my library, which is full of maps of countries you never heard of: the Kingdom of Brittany, the Duchy of Brittany, Galatia, Pannonia, and on and on. So I keep running into countries that no longer exist. Yugoslavia is only the latest example. Created in 1921 by the great powers at the Paris peace talks after World War I, Yugoslavia was a forced merger of Serbia, Slovenia, and Croatia, with Montenegro thrown in for good luck. The first assassination came a year later, the second in 1928, and during World War II the country barely contained a civil war that raged at the same time, between Serbs and Croats, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, Nazis and Communists. It's an open question which killed the most people, whether it was the Croatian Nazis, who massacred Eastern Orthodox Serbs in huge numbers, or the German Nazis, who killed ten civilians every time a German soldier was ambushed, or the Partisans, led by Marshal Tito. Whichever it was, more than a million people died. What the great powers ignored--this is what great powers do, ignore realities--was the history of the Balkans, where the various religious and national groups have always hated each other. The Balkans have seen dozens of kingdoms, republics, and mini-empires vanish.
Mini-empires, like the Serbian empire, and major empires, like the Ottoman, the British, the French empire under Napoleon. They all come, they all go. What makes us think the United States is immune? We are a military power, but so was the Roman Empire, the overwhelming military power in ancient times, with huge effective fighting forces; but its army could not save it. Corruption, greed, the lust for power--they are human universals, appearing everywhere we appear. Men of large fortunes crop up, as Montesquieu said, they soon begin to think they may be happy and glorious by oppressing their fellow citizens, that they may raise themselves to grandeur on the ruins of their country. Last night at dinner an old friend of ours said that within a generation we may see a revolution in the United States. If we do, the nation may break up. It will be, perhaps, like India and Pakistan in 1947, a vast migration, hundreds of thousands of people killed, as Muslims fled to the latter and Hindus to the former. Examples of nations breaking up are legion. Where will our populations flee? Quiet migrations go on all the time here. Half the people I know are in exile from the Midwest, including my wife.
We are not an exception in the long history of the world, we are no better than other countries, we harbor the same weaknesses, the same unthinking arrogance, the same kinds of hatreds. Our educational levels are sinking well below the standards set in a good part of the rest of the world; the level of our income inequality, which is a reliable predictor of unrest, is much higher than in Europe and even some Third World countries. Half the polity seems to think that science, which has given this same polity an amazing lifestyle, is "merely theory," and it has become impossible to tell the public the truth about anything. Meanwhile we continue to entertain ourselves to death.
This is a note my readers have heard from me before. But I cannot help it. I am an old man, and it is very painful to watch my country deteriorate before my eyes. I read somewhere recently that the chief environmental scientist at NASA thinks the Keystone pipeline that has been proposed to run from Canada through Nebraska to refineries in Texas would be the tipping point. If we start refining the dirty crude that comes from tar sands, we can say adios to the planet. But name an oil executive that has the interests of the planet, rather than those of his corporation, at heart. Is there one? Are there actual patriots out there? Is civic virtue completely dead? Congressional corruption has become, not a crime committed only by a few, but a necessity for all; they cannot escape it; they have to raise campaign money, very large sums of it, and that by itself is enough to destroy the country.
The republic is dead, long live the oligarchy. Jefferson thought we should have a revolution every generation, and he has a point. The United States may have had its day. It needs to be rethought, from the bottom up. The fire next time, said James Baldwin. Think about what we have come to: a corporate raider is one of the leading candidates to run the country. Who can take pride in such a situation? And there's no Teddy Roosevelt to come riding in on his horse and save us.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
BREAKING UP THE U.S.A.
January 11, 2012:
"A republic, Madame, if you can keep it."
That was Benjamin Franklin's famous reply when, after the Constitutional Convention came to an end in Philadelphia, a woman asked him what kind of government they had fashioned. A republic, if we can keep it, and I am beginning to think we cannot. At the time the chief authority on republics was the French philosophe the Baron de Montesquieu, who had made an extensive study of the forms of government from antiquity on; he wrote in The Spirit of the Laws that "It is natural for a republic to have only a small territory; otherwise it cannot long subsist. In an extensive republic there are men of large fortunes, and consequently of less moderation; there are trusts too considerable to be placed in any single subject; he has interests of his own; he soon begins to think that he may be happy and glorious, by oppressing his fellow-citizens; and that he may raise himself to grandeur on the ruins of his country."
It's too bad only scholars read Montesquieu any more. He was clear eyed on the problems of government and he understood the principal problem facing a republic: the power of private wealth. There were no corporations when he wrote, only individuals, and the wealthy ones tended to be aristocrats with huge tracts of land whose income derived from what the French call rente, not from industry. We have no titled aristocrats and wealth no longer comes from land, but the amount of private wealth, private interests, on the loose in this country and its propensity to aggrandize itself at the expense of ordinary citizens has multiplied enormously since the 18th century. Corporations are not persons, despite the Supreme Court, but persons run them, and we deceive ourselves if we think they have the interests of the country at heart. They are, for the most part, multinational. They serve their own interests. To do that, they buy political power in Washington, and it works well for them. They get what they want, which is the freedom to do what they want--with the resources that theoretically belong to the republic; with the environment we all share; and with our money. I remember Engine Charlie Wilson's statement back in the 1950s that "What's good for General Motors is good for the country." Engine Charlie was the head of General Motors before he became Dwight Eisenhower's Secretary of Defense, and his remark proved prophetic; General Motors was one of those private interests that was "too big to fail" and got bailed out in 2008. Like the banks, which were also "too big to fail." They were, indeed, too big to fail. "Persons" all, they had become far more important to the way things are than the ordinary persons who lost their homes and their jobs in the Great Recession that is still going on.
I sometimes wonder when, approximately, the United States stopped being a republic in Montesquieu's classic sense. Charles Sellers dated what he called the "market revolution" from the 1830s, and personal fortunes in the modern sense, market fortunes, the beginnings of industrial fortunes, did begin to appear then. Robert Caro, in the third volume of his Lyndon Johnson biography, has a section on the history of the Senate that dates the beginning of its decline as a deliberative body to about the same time, and the term "self-made man" made its appearance, via Henry Clay, in I believe 1828. A classic republic is very hard to keep. It requires not only a certain moderation in size, but a moderation in its citizens' ambitions--a spirit of equality, that is--and a level of vigilance that only an educated public can sustain. We are not, obviously, an educated public, and the level of education is dropping rapidly in comparison to other modernized countries. This is only a sign of the low status we assign to intellectual achievement, and our indifference to it. Far too many of us think the goal of life is to make the most money and have the most toys. The so-called American Dream, which used to be about creating equal opportunities, a level playing field, in the context of a republican form of government that did its best to guarantee fairness in the game of life, is drifting over the horizon. We no longer have the kind of leaders we can be proud of. The current Republican contenders for the Presidency are pathetic; even Republicans are uneasy with them and the front-runner comes out of corporate life and has a history of destroying businesses and jobs for the sake of profit.
Maybe it's time to bury the corpse. My like-minded friends and I sometimes joke about moving abroad, to another country, if 2012 puts someone like Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich into the oval office. But we also joke about cutting the ties that bind, letting the part of the country that wants to regulate not industry but people's lives, that wants to put religion where it never was, in the U. S. Constitution, that has no tolerance for gays, for Moslems, for difference of any kind, that hates government and blames it for all the self-inflicted ills they suffer from, that thinks the theory of evolution is an abomination and the Bible the only book you ever need--let that part of the nation, I say, have its own country to do with what they will. I suggest they get Texas and the South. Let them secede. The very next Republican primary is in South Carolina, which was the first to secede from the Union in 1861; maybe secession should be on the agenda in the debates. The republic is dead and gone, and money killed it, just as Montesquieu said it would. What we have now is something different, something shameful. The Founders would have called it unAmerican. They would have been right to do so.
"A republic, Madame, if you can keep it."
That was Benjamin Franklin's famous reply when, after the Constitutional Convention came to an end in Philadelphia, a woman asked him what kind of government they had fashioned. A republic, if we can keep it, and I am beginning to think we cannot. At the time the chief authority on republics was the French philosophe the Baron de Montesquieu, who had made an extensive study of the forms of government from antiquity on; he wrote in The Spirit of the Laws that "It is natural for a republic to have only a small territory; otherwise it cannot long subsist. In an extensive republic there are men of large fortunes, and consequently of less moderation; there are trusts too considerable to be placed in any single subject; he has interests of his own; he soon begins to think that he may be happy and glorious, by oppressing his fellow-citizens; and that he may raise himself to grandeur on the ruins of his country."
It's too bad only scholars read Montesquieu any more. He was clear eyed on the problems of government and he understood the principal problem facing a republic: the power of private wealth. There were no corporations when he wrote, only individuals, and the wealthy ones tended to be aristocrats with huge tracts of land whose income derived from what the French call rente, not from industry. We have no titled aristocrats and wealth no longer comes from land, but the amount of private wealth, private interests, on the loose in this country and its propensity to aggrandize itself at the expense of ordinary citizens has multiplied enormously since the 18th century. Corporations are not persons, despite the Supreme Court, but persons run them, and we deceive ourselves if we think they have the interests of the country at heart. They are, for the most part, multinational. They serve their own interests. To do that, they buy political power in Washington, and it works well for them. They get what they want, which is the freedom to do what they want--with the resources that theoretically belong to the republic; with the environment we all share; and with our money. I remember Engine Charlie Wilson's statement back in the 1950s that "What's good for General Motors is good for the country." Engine Charlie was the head of General Motors before he became Dwight Eisenhower's Secretary of Defense, and his remark proved prophetic; General Motors was one of those private interests that was "too big to fail" and got bailed out in 2008. Like the banks, which were also "too big to fail." They were, indeed, too big to fail. "Persons" all, they had become far more important to the way things are than the ordinary persons who lost their homes and their jobs in the Great Recession that is still going on.
I sometimes wonder when, approximately, the United States stopped being a republic in Montesquieu's classic sense. Charles Sellers dated what he called the "market revolution" from the 1830s, and personal fortunes in the modern sense, market fortunes, the beginnings of industrial fortunes, did begin to appear then. Robert Caro, in the third volume of his Lyndon Johnson biography, has a section on the history of the Senate that dates the beginning of its decline as a deliberative body to about the same time, and the term "self-made man" made its appearance, via Henry Clay, in I believe 1828. A classic republic is very hard to keep. It requires not only a certain moderation in size, but a moderation in its citizens' ambitions--a spirit of equality, that is--and a level of vigilance that only an educated public can sustain. We are not, obviously, an educated public, and the level of education is dropping rapidly in comparison to other modernized countries. This is only a sign of the low status we assign to intellectual achievement, and our indifference to it. Far too many of us think the goal of life is to make the most money and have the most toys. The so-called American Dream, which used to be about creating equal opportunities, a level playing field, in the context of a republican form of government that did its best to guarantee fairness in the game of life, is drifting over the horizon. We no longer have the kind of leaders we can be proud of. The current Republican contenders for the Presidency are pathetic; even Republicans are uneasy with them and the front-runner comes out of corporate life and has a history of destroying businesses and jobs for the sake of profit.
Maybe it's time to bury the corpse. My like-minded friends and I sometimes joke about moving abroad, to another country, if 2012 puts someone like Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich into the oval office. But we also joke about cutting the ties that bind, letting the part of the country that wants to regulate not industry but people's lives, that wants to put religion where it never was, in the U. S. Constitution, that has no tolerance for gays, for Moslems, for difference of any kind, that hates government and blames it for all the self-inflicted ills they suffer from, that thinks the theory of evolution is an abomination and the Bible the only book you ever need--let that part of the nation, I say, have its own country to do with what they will. I suggest they get Texas and the South. Let them secede. The very next Republican primary is in South Carolina, which was the first to secede from the Union in 1861; maybe secession should be on the agenda in the debates. The republic is dead and gone, and money killed it, just as Montesquieu said it would. What we have now is something different, something shameful. The Founders would have called it unAmerican. They would have been right to do so.
Monday, January 2, 2012
WHAT AN AMAZING COINCIDENCE
January 2, 2012:
This one is, you'll have to admit, close to spectacular. My wife and I were visiting my daughter and her family, who live in Shrub Oak, New York, where my first wife and I spent our last years together in a large beautiful house on Main Street that was built around 1810 and had accumulated twelve or thirteen rooms, depending on how you counted them (one was really an anteroom), over the years; and we stopped at the deli two doors down from this old house of mine and then went through the graveyard behind it to look at the back yard, and we saw the owner in the yard looking for his dog. Lorraine, my wife, being bolder than I, went over to him, introduced herself, and told him I had lived there many years before, and he invited us in for a tour. The vegetable garden in the back where I had grown corn, string beans, innumerable tomatoes, lettuce, Swiss chard, zucchini, peas, strawberries, melons, was gone. That was sad. Also gone was the flower garden I had put in. But the house had been fixed up. Heat in the kitchen when I lived there came from a radiator set in the middle of the floor; we put the kitchen table over it. He had changed that. There had been renovations inside, but no architectural changes. The house looked great, better than when I owned it. He took us upstairs, even to the third floor, where my first wife and I had put heat in; previously it had been unheated. The bookshelves I had had built into the back parlor downstairs were still there. Altogether it looked just grand, and I missed it. It was a great house, big enough for my library, handsome, with the slate mansard roof, the giant old trees--I missed it.
At the end of the tour I thanked him, and we exchanged business cards. And we both gasped a little. My name is Anthony Brandt. His last name was Abrandt.
I've had many coincidences in my life, but this was more striking than most; this had enough of an impact that when the house came up for sale a year or so later it occurred to me that it was some kind of message, that I should sell my house in Sag Harbor, buy back the house in Shrub Oak, and change my life. Once again. Not that that was possible. Lorraine would have had none of it, all our friends are here in the Hamptons, they're close friends, people we regard as family--it was just unthinkable. But I did love that house. It had a two-story barn, attached sheds, lots of land, it was closer to the city than Sag Harbor, and there was so much space. It was tempting. It was impossible. I was locked into my life. I wasn't free.
So what did it mean, this strange cosmic cross-reference, this reminder? That's the thing about coincidence, it seems always to be full of meaning, but what the meaning is tends to remain obscure. Or it may be that we simply read meaningfulness into it, that there's really no meaning to it at all. Where you stand on this issue, in fact, says much about who you are. Do you think the universe has a meaning, that life has a direction, that in the end all will be explained? or are you a rationalist, do you see life as just one thing after another, without a story to it or any kind of purpose?
I haven't totally made up my mind on this issue. Right now I'm reading Carl Jung on the subject; Jung thought synchronicities, which is what he called coincidences, highly meaningful and used them in his therapeutic work. He was plugged into various spiritual disciplines and they tend to take these kinds of events quite seriously. Read Jung and his followers, and there are a great many, and you find what amounts to real faith in the meaningfulness of coincidences. Read a mathematician, on the other hand, and you find explanations full of statistical probabilities that tend to dismiss any chance of them being meaningful. They have a point. Among the infinity of events that make up human existence, it only stands to reason that at some point you will run into somebody with your name, or a name very close to yours, in a situation that is important to you. How many degrees of separation are there among any two persons in the world? Only six. And I read recently that the figure is actually lower than that, more like 4.7. The most amazing coincidence, one of these mathematicians said, would be if there were no coincidences.
So that's where I am right now, walking a wire between these two positions, and that's what I'm going to do this winter, walk the wire, investigate, write about coincidences. Call it a long essay. My memoir about my family and my childhood, which I finished this past September, exhausted me. I spent the fall trying to decide what to do next, how to survive in these economic circumstances, which are hard on writers. It's a way of taking a break, not writing a long book. I'll keep the readers of this blog up to date on my progress. I've neglected the blog. I'm not going to do that any more. In the meantime, here's another coincidence.
Lorraine and I were in Venezuela in 1981, working, if that's the word, as quality control inspectors for a hotel chain, and one of the hotels was in Ciudad Guayana, on the Orinoco. We noticed on a map that El Dorado was about 140 miles to our south and we decided that it would be a shame to be that close to El Dorado and not go see it. It was only a little village, but still, the name--and it was right where Sir Walter Raleigh had thought he would find the "real" El Dorado, i.e. the legendary city of gold so many explorers sought for so long. We rented a pickup truck and headed south, down the road, the only road south, into light jungle and abandoned farms, and we got to El Dorado and took a room at the only accommodations there were, a rough (to say the least) motel of sorts with units made of concrete and thatched roofs. That evening we went out to the gazebo next to the river that ran through El Dorado and encountered a BBC film crew, staying there on their way to the tepuis further south where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle set his fantasy The Lost World, where dinosaurs still roamed. We spent the evening with them talking, and at one point Lorraine mentioned that she knew somebody in London, a photographer named David Redfern.
"Oh, really," said the crew's producer. "I used to date his secretary."
This one is, you'll have to admit, close to spectacular. My wife and I were visiting my daughter and her family, who live in Shrub Oak, New York, where my first wife and I spent our last years together in a large beautiful house on Main Street that was built around 1810 and had accumulated twelve or thirteen rooms, depending on how you counted them (one was really an anteroom), over the years; and we stopped at the deli two doors down from this old house of mine and then went through the graveyard behind it to look at the back yard, and we saw the owner in the yard looking for his dog. Lorraine, my wife, being bolder than I, went over to him, introduced herself, and told him I had lived there many years before, and he invited us in for a tour. The vegetable garden in the back where I had grown corn, string beans, innumerable tomatoes, lettuce, Swiss chard, zucchini, peas, strawberries, melons, was gone. That was sad. Also gone was the flower garden I had put in. But the house had been fixed up. Heat in the kitchen when I lived there came from a radiator set in the middle of the floor; we put the kitchen table over it. He had changed that. There had been renovations inside, but no architectural changes. The house looked great, better than when I owned it. He took us upstairs, even to the third floor, where my first wife and I had put heat in; previously it had been unheated. The bookshelves I had had built into the back parlor downstairs were still there. Altogether it looked just grand, and I missed it. It was a great house, big enough for my library, handsome, with the slate mansard roof, the giant old trees--I missed it.
At the end of the tour I thanked him, and we exchanged business cards. And we both gasped a little. My name is Anthony Brandt. His last name was Abrandt.
I've had many coincidences in my life, but this was more striking than most; this had enough of an impact that when the house came up for sale a year or so later it occurred to me that it was some kind of message, that I should sell my house in Sag Harbor, buy back the house in Shrub Oak, and change my life. Once again. Not that that was possible. Lorraine would have had none of it, all our friends are here in the Hamptons, they're close friends, people we regard as family--it was just unthinkable. But I did love that house. It had a two-story barn, attached sheds, lots of land, it was closer to the city than Sag Harbor, and there was so much space. It was tempting. It was impossible. I was locked into my life. I wasn't free.
So what did it mean, this strange cosmic cross-reference, this reminder? That's the thing about coincidence, it seems always to be full of meaning, but what the meaning is tends to remain obscure. Or it may be that we simply read meaningfulness into it, that there's really no meaning to it at all. Where you stand on this issue, in fact, says much about who you are. Do you think the universe has a meaning, that life has a direction, that in the end all will be explained? or are you a rationalist, do you see life as just one thing after another, without a story to it or any kind of purpose?
I haven't totally made up my mind on this issue. Right now I'm reading Carl Jung on the subject; Jung thought synchronicities, which is what he called coincidences, highly meaningful and used them in his therapeutic work. He was plugged into various spiritual disciplines and they tend to take these kinds of events quite seriously. Read Jung and his followers, and there are a great many, and you find what amounts to real faith in the meaningfulness of coincidences. Read a mathematician, on the other hand, and you find explanations full of statistical probabilities that tend to dismiss any chance of them being meaningful. They have a point. Among the infinity of events that make up human existence, it only stands to reason that at some point you will run into somebody with your name, or a name very close to yours, in a situation that is important to you. How many degrees of separation are there among any two persons in the world? Only six. And I read recently that the figure is actually lower than that, more like 4.7. The most amazing coincidence, one of these mathematicians said, would be if there were no coincidences.
So that's where I am right now, walking a wire between these two positions, and that's what I'm going to do this winter, walk the wire, investigate, write about coincidences. Call it a long essay. My memoir about my family and my childhood, which I finished this past September, exhausted me. I spent the fall trying to decide what to do next, how to survive in these economic circumstances, which are hard on writers. It's a way of taking a break, not writing a long book. I'll keep the readers of this blog up to date on my progress. I've neglected the blog. I'm not going to do that any more. In the meantime, here's another coincidence.
Lorraine and I were in Venezuela in 1981, working, if that's the word, as quality control inspectors for a hotel chain, and one of the hotels was in Ciudad Guayana, on the Orinoco. We noticed on a map that El Dorado was about 140 miles to our south and we decided that it would be a shame to be that close to El Dorado and not go see it. It was only a little village, but still, the name--and it was right where Sir Walter Raleigh had thought he would find the "real" El Dorado, i.e. the legendary city of gold so many explorers sought for so long. We rented a pickup truck and headed south, down the road, the only road south, into light jungle and abandoned farms, and we got to El Dorado and took a room at the only accommodations there were, a rough (to say the least) motel of sorts with units made of concrete and thatched roofs. That evening we went out to the gazebo next to the river that ran through El Dorado and encountered a BBC film crew, staying there on their way to the tepuis further south where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle set his fantasy The Lost World, where dinosaurs still roamed. We spent the evening with them talking, and at one point Lorraine mentioned that she knew somebody in London, a photographer named David Redfern.
"Oh, really," said the crew's producer. "I used to date his secretary."
Saturday, December 3, 2011
STRONG TEA AND AMERICAN HISTORY
December 3, 2011:
Why has it taken me to age 75 to figure out that I should not let my tea steep so long? It took a suggestion from my wife, who will no doubt trumpet her triumph mercilessly (triumph and trumpet--same root for these two words?), to let me see the error of my ways. Previously I let it steep for six minutes, and suffered for it--acid reflux; trembling hands. Now, not so much. Three minutes is enough. I offer this as a small item in the how-to-live department. In self defense, let me add that I have remembered throughout my life a remark my father made about the tea served in the house of my mother's parents, up the street from us; it was an old farmhouse, they had a coal stove in the kitchen, and they left tea in a open pot on top of the stove, which, since it was a coal stove and the embers were always, so to speak, on, was permanently brewing. By the end of the day, my father said admiringly, that tea would put hair on your chest. So I thought strong tea was a family tradition, and it would only be right to follow it.
The fewer remarks fathers make, I find, the more authority they seem to gain.
But this is only a passing thought. It was a remark of Auden's that really got me going today. He said that he liked America, where he spent the latter half of his life, because it was "devoid of history," and therefore much less class-bound and tradition-bound and more open to him and his work than his native England. Since I know some American history it gave me pause that he would think such a thing about a country that fought a revolution and a civil war, had had, at the time he made this remark, more than thirty presidents, had occupied an entire continent, built innumerable cities and countless towns, had no more free land to give away and had become a world power. And he lived in New York City, which dated from the 17th century.
Still, you know what he meant. Auden went to Oxford, which was already a university when Christopher Columbus was trying to persuade Ferdinand and Isabella to sponsor his fantasies and let him sail west to reach the East. London dated to the Romans; Stonehenge had been around forever. Compare that to, say, Omaha, or Denver. I was in Albuquerque not too long ago and it was so temporary in feel that it seemed like a strong wind could have uprooted the whole place and turned it into tumbleweed. As Gertrude Stein so notoriously said about Oakland, there's no there there. The layout of the roads, the style of building, the scattered downtown, a shopping center here, another there, the old Spanish mission architecture scant on the ground: what was it all doing there? In no way did it explain itself. I remember drving into Visby, a small Swedish city on the island of Gotland in the Baltic. To get in you had to drive through the city gates. You could walk the perimeter of Visby on its ancient wall. You instantly knew you were in a very particular place, a place with a definite identity. It was a Viking city, a medieval city, it was once a power in the Hanseatic League, and it was rich in roses. For all its northern latitude, the Baltic is friendly to roses, and they were growing everywhere.
History is attached to places, it is to a large degree about what happened in a particular spot, and in America, not a whole lot has happened in a whole lot of spots. There's not much to look back to in those spots, not much tradition, very few families identified with the place. This is one reason American politics is so stupid, and so ideological. As in all politics, it is usually about competing economic interests, all of them vying for space at the public trough; but beyond that, because we have so little history, because our places are so flat, so devoid of texture, with so few handles to grab onto--do people who only moved there five years ago walk around and call themselves Albuquerqueans? how do you identify with a suburb?--our representatives have no place to represent, only political philosophies. And so our politics is full of screaming about abortion rights and "freedom" and economic theories on both the right and the left built not out of facts but out of ideology. And there is nothing worse than ideology for making sensible workable policies. Ideology leads to passing phenomena like Herman Cain calling themselves "leaders," or, since I brought the subject up, the Tea Party, doing--laughably, stupidly--the same.
We used to think of ourselves as a practical people, alive to what works regardless of the theory behind it. Lacking historical anchors, anchors to particular places, an identity we can identify with, so to speak, we become Republicans and Democrats and very little useful gets done. I suppose we have to wait for a very long time for this to change, for Americans to become not members of a party, but citizens. We all need to read more history, and to make more, in order to become who we actually are. We need not just to settle in a place, but to settle down and make some place our own.
That, I think, is what we need. What we'll get is something else again.
Why has it taken me to age 75 to figure out that I should not let my tea steep so long? It took a suggestion from my wife, who will no doubt trumpet her triumph mercilessly (triumph and trumpet--same root for these two words?), to let me see the error of my ways. Previously I let it steep for six minutes, and suffered for it--acid reflux; trembling hands. Now, not so much. Three minutes is enough. I offer this as a small item in the how-to-live department. In self defense, let me add that I have remembered throughout my life a remark my father made about the tea served in the house of my mother's parents, up the street from us; it was an old farmhouse, they had a coal stove in the kitchen, and they left tea in a open pot on top of the stove, which, since it was a coal stove and the embers were always, so to speak, on, was permanently brewing. By the end of the day, my father said admiringly, that tea would put hair on your chest. So I thought strong tea was a family tradition, and it would only be right to follow it.
The fewer remarks fathers make, I find, the more authority they seem to gain.
But this is only a passing thought. It was a remark of Auden's that really got me going today. He said that he liked America, where he spent the latter half of his life, because it was "devoid of history," and therefore much less class-bound and tradition-bound and more open to him and his work than his native England. Since I know some American history it gave me pause that he would think such a thing about a country that fought a revolution and a civil war, had had, at the time he made this remark, more than thirty presidents, had occupied an entire continent, built innumerable cities and countless towns, had no more free land to give away and had become a world power. And he lived in New York City, which dated from the 17th century.
Still, you know what he meant. Auden went to Oxford, which was already a university when Christopher Columbus was trying to persuade Ferdinand and Isabella to sponsor his fantasies and let him sail west to reach the East. London dated to the Romans; Stonehenge had been around forever. Compare that to, say, Omaha, or Denver. I was in Albuquerque not too long ago and it was so temporary in feel that it seemed like a strong wind could have uprooted the whole place and turned it into tumbleweed. As Gertrude Stein so notoriously said about Oakland, there's no there there. The layout of the roads, the style of building, the scattered downtown, a shopping center here, another there, the old Spanish mission architecture scant on the ground: what was it all doing there? In no way did it explain itself. I remember drving into Visby, a small Swedish city on the island of Gotland in the Baltic. To get in you had to drive through the city gates. You could walk the perimeter of Visby on its ancient wall. You instantly knew you were in a very particular place, a place with a definite identity. It was a Viking city, a medieval city, it was once a power in the Hanseatic League, and it was rich in roses. For all its northern latitude, the Baltic is friendly to roses, and they were growing everywhere.
History is attached to places, it is to a large degree about what happened in a particular spot, and in America, not a whole lot has happened in a whole lot of spots. There's not much to look back to in those spots, not much tradition, very few families identified with the place. This is one reason American politics is so stupid, and so ideological. As in all politics, it is usually about competing economic interests, all of them vying for space at the public trough; but beyond that, because we have so little history, because our places are so flat, so devoid of texture, with so few handles to grab onto--do people who only moved there five years ago walk around and call themselves Albuquerqueans? how do you identify with a suburb?--our representatives have no place to represent, only political philosophies. And so our politics is full of screaming about abortion rights and "freedom" and economic theories on both the right and the left built not out of facts but out of ideology. And there is nothing worse than ideology for making sensible workable policies. Ideology leads to passing phenomena like Herman Cain calling themselves "leaders," or, since I brought the subject up, the Tea Party, doing--laughably, stupidly--the same.
We used to think of ourselves as a practical people, alive to what works regardless of the theory behind it. Lacking historical anchors, anchors to particular places, an identity we can identify with, so to speak, we become Republicans and Democrats and very little useful gets done. I suppose we have to wait for a very long time for this to change, for Americans to become not members of a party, but citizens. We all need to read more history, and to make more, in order to become who we actually are. We need not just to settle in a place, but to settle down and make some place our own.
That, I think, is what we need. What we'll get is something else again.
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