When Letter-Writing Was Art

December 22, 2013 at 11:40 pm (Lagniappe)

The mail is so abysmally boring these days, and so it has been for some time.  I strolled out to the mailbox today without the least sense of anticipation, long inured to the wad of paper trash that passes for mail in the twenty-first century. First in the pile was a Humana solicitation, presumably seeking my business for Part D Medicare coverage. I did appreciate their forthrightness, however—they announced on the envelope that “This is an advertisement” instead of pimping the envelope up with “official business” and all the other mimicking of government correspondence. The next item was a solicitation for Dish television, sent from Houston, addressed thoughtfully to “OUR NEIGHBOR AT” followed by my address and accompanied by numerous asterisks, various codes in both numbers and letters, and about fifty vertical marks of different lengths, all no doubt intended to enhance our neighborly feelings and gloss over the fact that they were two states away and didn’t know my name. Neighborhoods just aren’t what they used to be. Yet one has to go through it all or risk missing some bill. Next in the pile was a thin cardboard flyer solicitation from Wesley Medical Center, addressed to “OUR FRIENDS AT” followed by my address. Since they were actually in Hattiesburg, I had graduated from “neighbor” to “friend.” Again, there were those fifty vertical marks of various lengths on the adhesive address label, probably indicating the degree of friendship. The next two actually had my name: an invitation to the luncheon for retired folks from The University of Southern Mississippi, and the newsletter from the Salvation Army. Finally, an L.L. Bean catalogue. Happily, no bills. And of course, no actual personal letter, by which I mean a letter from someone I might actually know, maybe even handwritten.

It has not always been so, of course. Almost any adult over 30 can remember a day when written personal communication was not by texting or email, but through actual letters, handwritten, on stationery or even lined paper, in envelopes, with a stamp. From the writer’s licking the seal of the envelope at one end to the reader opening it at the other could take from two days to two weeks, and of course things could change during that time. Now contact is instantaneous, whether from down the hall or around the world. But as recently as 1989, in the Late Pleistocene pre-email period, it took a minimum of a week, and often more, for my near daily letters to get from India to home, and it seemed like even longer to receive letters from home to wherever I was in India. A letter, especially from a sweetheart or spouse, was a small treasure, sometimes ripped open to be read avidly on the spot, sometimes tucked away to be read and savored in a quiet, private moment. Letters were deeply embedded in the culture, even in our music: The Box Tops’ “The Letter” (“Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane. . . .”), Elvis’s “Return to Sender,” The Beatles’ “P.S. I Love You” and “All My Lovin’,” Allan Sherman’s “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah,” Lulu’s “To Sir, With Love,” and R. B. Greaves’ “Take a Letter, Maria” are among many examples of “obsolete” songs no more likely to be imitated today than you are to get a letter in the mailbox.

I have been reading my father’s letters to my mother when he was in the Pacific during the Second World War. They apparently wrote each other about every two or three days, and some of his were eleven or twelve pages, though his writing was rather large. All of his letters from a war zone went through the censor, with the envelope bearing the censor’s stamp, since any reference to specific war activity or even mention of their locations was forbidden. Thus they are filled with the banalities of his daily life, much love-talk, plans for a future together, and routine mentions of which letter he received from her, how long it took, or semi-playful chiding that he had not received one from her for several days. Hers typically took two weeks to arrive, sometimes almost a month, and he would read them in some private place and then save them for another reading in the evening. No phone, no Skype, no Facebook, no twittering, no email—only letters.

In addition to actually getting a letter, the anticipation of getting letters, especially from home, was itself a deep pleasure, and if none arrived when expected, well that could ruin a whole day. I well remember a tiny event during an all-summer Scout trip to Alaska in 1963, when each Scout was required to send one post card home per day. We received mail about every week, usually at a national park office, and one week I remember another Scout—a country boy named Baxter, older, probably shaving for three years—visibly saddened that he had received no letter that week, while all the rest of us had. I even wrote his Mom, urging her to more diligence. A few fellows had sweethearts back home, and naturally those letters were supremely prized, as well as the source of some jocularity among those of us less favored.

Love letters constitute the most important sub-genre of the genre of letter-writing. In 1980 a trove of the love letters of the  twelfth century Heloise and Abelard was discovered, and I remember thinking when I read them some years ago that the student, Heloise, wrote slightly more eloquently—and more erotically—than her tutor, Abelard, the great philosopher and churchman who was castrated at the orders of Heloise’s uncle when he discovered their liaison. The mere fact that those letters were originally preserved though somehow lost for nine-hundred years is testimony to their importance, their vividness undiminished. She, having borne Abelard’s daughter, secretly married him to minimize the scandal (though protesting partly to protect his academic reputation), but soon got herself to a nunnery, though their love was unabated. The passions expressed in those letters reflected the great but lost love of her life, and those passions boldly triumph over the religious life—she became an abbess—to which she had effectively been sentenced. A particularly memorable passage captures the perfect intermingling of her love and passion: “if Augustus, emperor of the whole world, saw fit to honor me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me to possess forever, it would be dearer and more honorable to me to be called not his empress, but your whore.” Perhaps sitting in an attic today somewhere in England are some equally passionate letters from one William S. to the mysterious dark lady of the Sonnets.

I have also enjoyed, being a father of adult children, the letters of Galileo’s daughter Celeste, who, like her sister, was illegitimate. That status prevented her from being married in polite society, despite the long and loving relationship of Galileo and their mother—who later, with Galileo’s blessing, married another man. Galileo arranged for both girls to enter a convent. For some reason—resentment, illiteracy, disinclination to write, who knows—the sister never wrote her father. But Celeste wrote often. Her letters reveal her to be gentle and self-sacrificing, as well as adoring and deeply solicitous of her father’s well-being. Perhaps, like Heloise, the cloistered life gave her letters an even greater intensity, poignancy, and beauty.

In the American political sphere, no letter exceeds Lincoln’s letter to Mrs. Bixby for sheer rare beauty and metaphorical power in its attempt to assuage the inconsolable grief of a mother who, according (wrongly) to the War Department files, had lost five sons in the War: “. . . I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.  I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.”

Though Lincoln must inevitably take the laurel for presidential prose, Jefferson was not far behind, and John Adams not so far behind Jefferson. After their Revolutionary friendship, then later their bitter presidential rivalry, the aging Sage of Monticello wrote the aging Sage of Quincy. Several hundred miles apart, they never saw each other again, but for eleven years they wrote each other endearing and widely ranging letters, including another memorable one in the sub-genre of “consolation letters,” from the widower Jefferson to Adams on the death of the latter’s beloved wife Abigail, late in 1818: “. . .Tried myself in the school of affliction, by the loss of every form of connection which can rive the human heart, I know well what you have lost, what you have suffered, are suffering, and have yet to endure. The same trials have taught me that for ills so immeasurable, time and silence are the only medicine. . . . but that it is of some comfort to us both, that the term is not very distant, at which we are to deposit in the same cerement, our sorrows and suffering bodies, and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost, and whom we shall still love and never lose again.” What a pleasure those two aging giants must have experienced after the fires of their political enmity had been extinguished by time and wisdom as they read each other’s letters of friendship and collegiality, almost right up until their simultaneous deaths on July 4, 1826, fifty years to the day after their signing the Declaration. A scholar of Benjamin Franklin’s letters refers to the period as the Republic of Letters, denoted by its “serious correspondence,” and notes how Franklin bunched up his overseas letter writing right before the ship was to set sail. With the twittering, email, and Facebook of today, no one born after 1990 can possibly imagine the fraught anxiety or the quivering anticipation—and often both intertwined—of waiting two or more months to hear from a loved one, or needing to heavily tip the ship’s captain to make sure the treasured letter arrives at its proper destination.

Or even a week. I still have the letters of my first serious girlfriend from her six-week study abroad program in Salamanca, Spain. To this day, forty-eight years later, the name “Salamanca” has a curious magic for me, partly from its mellifluous sound but more so from its conjuring up a youthful and innocent summer where two virginal lovers lived the travails of separation, mitigated by daily letters. Absence did make the heart grow fonder, but the absence was lessened just barely but oh so necessarily by the fact that that handwriting was hers, she had held the letter, perhaps kissed it, and left just a hint of that familiar perfume on its pages. I still remember walking down the driveway to the mailbox after my nine-hour day of construction work, hopeful of at least one; two if I had missed one the day before or it was a Monday. I was sixteen, she was fifteen, and her Salamanca letters re-read today, just as surely as mine would, almost ache with a plaintive sweetness, a nearly unimaginably naïve innocence, a tender playfulness, and the full expectancy of an enchanted future of marriage and parenthood. Four summers later, I wandered Europe and my letters to the woman who became my first wife still took about a week, and many days of that trip I made my way to the American Express office seeking her letters to me.

After all, things could happen in the days or especially weeks between the writing of the letter and the reading of it. In Ken Burns’ 1990s production of The Civil War, many viewers found the single most poignant moment of Burns’ rendering of that cataclysm to be the reading of a beautiful letter from Major Sullivan Ballou to his wife Sarah. Numerous viewers of the show, including me, requested copies of the letter from PBS stations on which the show aired. I still have my copy, though not in his own hand, unfortunately, and it is moving with every reading. The letter anticipates the possibility of his death: “Sarah my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me unresistibly on with all these chains to the battle field. . . . I have, I know, but few and small claims upon Divine Providence, but something whispers to me—perhaps it is the wafted prayer of my little Edgar, that I shall return to my loved ones unharmed. If I do not my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, and when my last breath escapes me on the battle field, it will whisper your name. . . . But Oh Sarah! if the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you, in the gladdest days and darkest nights . . . always, always and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath, as the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by. Sarah do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for thee, for we shall meet again. . . .” A week later, perhaps about the time Sarah read those words, the author of this gentle letter was killed at the first battle of Bull Run.

I am not sure of all the forces inviting me to engage in my recent frenzy of letter-reading. I had read the Jefferson-Adams correspondence long ago, as well as the letters of Nietzsche (letters much overshadowed by his “philosophizing with a hammer” books), the slightly disappointing and sometimes too obsequious letters of Voltaire, and the deservedly heralded letters of Keats, who at twenty-five died of tuberculosis in his room which I visited by the Spanish Steps in Rome. Orwell too died of that scourge at age forty-nine, and on a friend’s recommendation I recently read his letters, many suggestive of his unwillingness to be duped by the Left or the Right. He had directed his literary executor that if he did not live to finish Nineteen Eighty-Four, the manuscript should be destroyed. Thus put in a letters frame of mind, I read that first girlfriend’s letters, a small book of history’s love letters, and re-read Henry James’ delightful novelette The Aspern Papers, having remembered how much I enjoyed it as a college freshman. Based on the letters of Shelley to Clair Clairmont, the book focuses on the enterprising and deceptive efforts of a young gentleman scholar conniving to acquire the letters of long deceased poet Jeffrey Aspern to his youthful lover Juliana, who is now an ancient, haughty, and frail recluse, and who is rightly suspicious of her young tenant and fiercely protective of her treasure. The reader never learns what the letters reveal, and neither does the scholar, who after a long campaign hastily retreats from Venice following Juliana’s death and the guileless but shocking proposal by Juliana’s spinster niece for his acquisition of the letters. Proposal rejected, she burns the letters.  Perhaps gentlemen should not read other gentlemen’s—and ladies’—mail after all. But these days “mail” means almost everything except letters. In such a case, we must read those of a previous generation, since we receive none of our own.

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Thank You, Ms. Lerner, for Doing Your Job

May 27, 2013 at 4:45 pm (Political Commentary)

The formula for polemical writing typically advises beginning with acknowledgments of the valid or at least arguable points of the other side. These acknowledgments are typically rather perfunctory, though well meant. But I really mean them: any targeting by the IRS of a group solely on the basis of political ideology, while giving a pass to groups with the opposite ideology, is wrong. Richard Nixon should not have done it when he sought to have the IRS target specific individuals known in his circle as his enemies list. The IRS should not have implied that the NAACP was treading on dangerous ground relative to its tax-exempt status in George W. Bush’s administration, nor should it have attempted to intimidate a church that had a speaker—not a church employee—advocating some political point not friendly to the Bush administration. The Nixon case had nothing to do with tax-exempt, non-profit status, unlike the Bush cases and now the Obama case.

I remember no particular outrage in either of the Bush cases. Now, however, we have a full-blown ersatz scandal, with both Republicans and Democrats preening in high dudgeon. But there are some specifics to this case that I have heard nowhere else other than from Lawrence O’Donnell’s show, The Last Word. These include: (a) the actual law states that organizations should be denied tax-exempt status unless their activities are “exclusively” devoted to “social welfare” and thus not even a little bit political; and (b) as early as 1959 the IRS essentially ignored the law Congress wrote and passed, and substituted the word primarily for Congress’s exclusively. That one change in wording means that organizations which claim that their primary purpose is social welfare, but which allow up to 49% of their purpose to be devoted to political advocacy, would be approved for tax-exempt status. But by the law, as actually written, the IRS could not approve their tax-exempt status since any political activity would bar that status being granted. So, by law, only an organization that is exclusively a social welfare organization—which is to say, an organization without any political action activity at all—can be granted tax-exempt status.

Democrat Carl Levin in 1994 inquired of the IRS about the use of these two mutually exclusive terms, exclusively and primarily. The IRS replied in a letter obtained by O’Donnell that the IRS interpreted the word exclusively to mean primarily. This is the point that should make us mad with the IRS—that somewhere, at least by 1959, it was violating the law by rendering one critical word (exclusively) in the law null and void, and all on its own substituting for that word another word (primarily) that was totally incompatible with the word Congress wrote. The difference between exclusively and primarily is the difference between dog and cat or often and never—they are not exactly opposites, but they do not overlap since they each exclude the other. They are not subject to possible misinterpretation by being roughly synonymous like sometimes and occasionally. They mean very different things, and the IRS had no business changing the meaning of the law by changing those words. The IRS doesn’t tell us that we should “primarily” or generally not cheat on our taxes, but that we should “exclusively” or never cheat on our taxes. They would not be happy if we “primarily” didn’t cheat. God didn’t tell Adam and Eve to try not to eat the apple, or not to eat much of it, or not to eat it unless it looked like it was about to rot. He told them, quite unambiguously, Don’t eat the apple. There was no room for interpretation. When the IRS changed that one word, they committed their original sin.

So since the IRS should all along have been following the law and rejecting applications for non-profit, tax-exempt status for groups engaged in any political activity at all, it was actually right to be questioning or rejecting applications for groups with Tea Party in the name, just as it would have been right had it received applications from groups with Democratic Party, Republican Party, Communist Party or other groups who are obviously engaged in politics, and not just primarily, but exclusively. But even by the lesser standard of the word primarily, they should have been rejected, or at least questioned, since an organization which included in its name a well-known political group could reasonably be assumed to be primarily devoted to political activity rather than social welfare. What we don’t know is how many liberal groups with red flag words in their names were applying and, equally important, being accepted for tax-exempt status. We do know that many conservative groups were applying, but without knowing about the number of liberal groups applying and being approved, the notion of “targeting” is itself misplaced. And if the number applying is small, then the word targeting is simply wrong. You just can’t compare fifty to two. We don’t know the numbers, and we should know them before passing judgment. If, on the other hand, the fictitious Tea Party for American Progress and many similarly named groups were being stalled or rejected, while a roughly equal number of the equally fictitious Radical Leftists for Radical Change and other similarly named groups were not, then we have targeting. Either way, it is reasonable to infer orientation from such names. They tell us their purpose; we know what Tea Party means these days, just as we know what Occupy Wall Street means. When the name itself bespeaks political action, whether left or right, the IRS employees asking for more information before granting tax-exempt status were not stalling but doing their job. And their boss, Ms. Lerner, was apparently doing hers. Nor should we forget that many conservative Republicans would love to see the IRS dismantled, so it seems no huge stretch to conclude that many conservative groups took the opportunity to exploit the IRS misinterpretation of the law that allowed them to conduct political fund-raising and advocacy behind a charade of “primarily” social welfare fronts, all while mooning the very organization they loathe. By contrast, and presuming their applications were comparatively few in number, liberal groups were either too honest or too dumb to exploit that same misinterpretation.

So the IRS is guilty, but not of what it is currently being accused. It is guilty of changing the meaning of the law decades ago, and continuing to ignore the original meaning to this day with impunity. I have not heard a single legislator berate the IRS because of that. Why has no Congressman hurled thunderbolts at the IRS for unilaterally changing the law that Congress itself wrote and passed? That change has led us to this: judgment calls as to what is 49% political and what is 51% political. Returning to the law as written, with that unambiguous word exclusively, would get us away from that by eliminating from tax-exempt status any group doing any politics at all. In so doing, it probably would make most Americans happier knowing that the tax system is not effectively subsidizing numerous political groups whether of the left or the right.

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Rush Limbaugh and his Low Information Voters

May 21, 2013 at 5:13 pm (Political Commentary)

Perennial blowhard Rush Limbaugh bewails the state of American democracy, given its recent re-election of a moderately liberal black man—a deplorable state of affairs due, in Mr. Limbaugh’s view, to the empty-headed hordes of “low information voters.” These poor saps are, by right wing definition, liberal voters, or even those with middle-of-the-road political dispositions. Certainly any Obama voter must ipso facto be low information, and almost any supporter of a Democrat. But Limbaugh is wrong forty-two percent of the time, and he lies fifty-eight percent of the time, which means that his caterwauling should be ignored one hundred percent of the time.

A more accurate definition of a low information voter is the modern descendant of a species discovered by H. L. Mencken: the knuckle-dragging boobus americanus, who, squatting beside the radio, listens raptly to Limbaugh’s mummery and mistakes the sputum dribbling from his mouth as actual reality. This pitiable cretin bears, as Mencken once noted in a slightly different context, “all the stigmata of inferiority—moral certainty, cruelty, suspicion of ideas, fear.” In other words, the true low information voter is the Limbaugh fan, first cousin to Faulkner’s Flem Snopes, but even further debauched. In addition to the stigmata, and since reality is an insufficient explanation for the menacing forces presumed to be surrounding him, Rush’s typical listener leaps to conspiracy theories, filters out any tincture of rationality, and sees himself as the hapless and innocent victim of the vast and bellicose armies of radical leftists seeking to dispossess him of his guns and his lesser constitutional freedoms. Not that he has ever read the Constitution or would actually agree with any of its sentiments, other than the second amendment. In short, he is as ignorant as a housefly. This constellation of unenviable traits makes him the perfect gull for Rush, who has slopped at the trough of public stupidity and paranoia for years and made a fine living at it. Rush’s overriding message is akin to a gigantic, engorged, suppurating boil on the end of his nose waiting for the scalpel, and when its blade pricks, the fetid ejecta splatters over all of those within earshot, anointing them with his imbecilities and lies, and leaving them feeling as if they have been bathed by John the Baptist himself. But in truth, their low information status has just been lowered into negative digits, their fragile hold on reality further loosened, their panic heightened, and their fact-free anger stoked. They rush, so to speak, headlong into the darkness, girded for the Apocalypse, oblivious.

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Last Lecture, Three Lessons

May 9, 2013 at 5:35 pm (Lagniappe)

Last Lecture, Three Lessons

This item is a bookend to “First Lecture, Last Year,” dated August, 2011

Let’s make the circle complete, and end where we began. If you would close your eyes, and imagine the things that I will be telling you.

It is March 12, not 1346, but 2013, maybe 2014. You are not in Bologna, Italy, but in Hattiesburg. You have just come in to Room 135 of this building, and your doctoral committee is also arriving, all with smiles and genuine bonhomie. This is the day of your final doctoral dissertation defense, and you are just a touch nervous, but still confident. Your chair would not let you be here if he, or she, did not believe that you were ready. One of your goals was to get to this day and to know your topic better than anyone in the room. You are professionally dressed, comfortably chit-chatting with the faculty as all of you move to the conference room and have a seat—you at the head of the table—all waiting for the last committee member to arrive. Unlike that little time-traveling you did back in HE 711 to the University at Bologna in 1346, here there are no malodorous smells, since your committee members have all thoughtfully showered. More judicious dental care has preserved at least most of their teeth. Your shoes are fitted to each foot, and you didn’t even have to use pig grease to shine them. Academic debates over transubstantiation are not foremost in your mind, and though you do have a worry list, flea bites and bubonic plague are not on it. The fact that you are here does not mean, happily, that you are necessarily a white European male. You might be, but you don’t have to be.

After all have arrived and exchanged the pleasantries that lubricate our daily interactions, your chair asks you to excuse yourself and close the door. Doris smiles and tells you that you will do fine; she knows you well and has a good sense of your likely triumph, having seen quite a few precede you. You thank her and sit down, and your mind wanders back over the events during the last four years or so that have led you to this climactic moment. Obviously one of those events is the day you actually made the commitment to do something about that long-simmering and even taunting thought about pursuing a doctorate in the first place—the commitment coming in the form of an actual application. That very first class of your very first course you remember well, just because it was the first. The courses proceeded, and your knowledge grew incrementally. Some classes were better than others, some harder than others; but overall, the two or three hours out of class for each hour in class was hard and often intense. You selected a chair, and then a full committee. You may have dealt with the stresses of work and family while immersed in those studies—the sick child, the possible slight annoyance of a significant other that you had to leave for class, the supervisor and parent both asking you when this would be over, the juggling of job and school. There were the challenging papers, and your self-recognition that your writing and research skills needed ramping up. Then there was the day you first got the idea for a dissertation. Oh, you were so naïve! It was so unsophisticated, such a jumble, a miasma of possible so-called research questions, bouncing around in what was then a methodological fog in your brain. But clarity started to take shape with your pre-proposal. You even had a disagreement with your chair, but you finally took his advice, and even eventually came to see, in your own good time, the rightness of it. You and your chair worked out any differences and procedural questions you might have had before your proposal defense, as well as before this final defense. So after being your critic, even making that most unenthusiastic face after hearing the first version of your idea, she ultimately became your greatest advocate, almost your coach at the point of defense. The proposal defense had been a warm-up for this one—in some ways harder, since you were persuading them to approve what you were proposing, in effect getting them on board. But today could be easier, since you’ve sort of done it before and you would mostly be explaining what you did and defending your interpretation of what you have done. Or at least so you hope. Just then, as all these thoughts and recollections are flitting through your head, the door opens, and your chair, all smiles, invites you back in.

It’s possible that you have to do a Powerpoint presentation, but it’s also possible you and your chair have decided to proceed the old fashioned way, with you only responding to questions. Your chair tosses out the first one, a real softball about what caused you to be interested in this, and maybe a little summary about how you went about it. No problem. It’s a nice ice-breaker and confidence-builder. Then others join in, moving in a sort of around-the-room pattern. You field questions about specific findings and your interpretation of those findings; you even tie in some of the theory and related literature. Professor X asks you a specific question on theory, but your research questions are perfectly derivative of your theory, and you handle it adroitly. He then asks you what your study “proves,” but you are way too smart for that old sucker punch question and don’t fall for it. Professor Y refers you to page 84 and asks you about a passage, but she doesn’t seem quite satisfied and makes a suggestion for a revision. There’s a good bit of page-turning through the document, with some questions related to particular passages, while other questions were broader and comprehensive. Professor Z, after some other questions from chapters four and five, comes out of left field and asks you what books you read; he is interested in the tenor of your mind. He then advises you to squeeze the lemon a little more in chapter five: get a little more out of the data; do some more meaning-making.

After a little over an hour, your chair wraps up and excuses you from the room for a second time. You step out, feeling pretty good. You chat some more with Doris, who reassuringly tells you that you did fine. After just a few minutes, your chair opens the door, all smiles again, and says, as she so loves to be the first to do, “Congratulations Dr.” and then your name. Your brain, even your skin, floods with relief and justified self-satisfaction. You come back into the room, and your chair reviews the revisions, including some substantial ones, that you will need to make for the final read, the one before the very final draft. Professor Z would like to read your revised Chapter five, but the other members are content to leave any final revisions to the discretion of the chair. You get hugs or handshakes from the other committee members, and then it’s just you and your chair for some clarifications, debriefing, and general decompression.

You drive home, aglow. You are on a Dissertation Defender’s High—the DDH. On some not-far-distant day, you will muse over what other things you have learned during this last formal component of your education—the things other than writing better prose, learning course content, and discovering research methods. You will reflect on the idea that you yourself have the potential to be your own best teacher, and that your education is primarily in your own hands, and that you should be a self-directed learner. Then the second lesson emerges when you begin to have an inkling that partly what a real education means is a divesting of your certitude, a Descartes-like willingness to entertain doubt about your fixed assumptions, and an enhanced willingness to hear the admonition of 17th century Oliver Cromwell, who implored: “I beseech thee, by the bowels of Christ, to consider that ye might be wrong.” You’ve known just a few too many people who, through their own ignorance, simply would not budge on matters where there just might be legitimate alternatives, and you resolve not to be one of those people. And finally, you reflect on a third lesson, this one from Michelangelo, long after that youthful but exquisite Pieta and even decades after the Sistine Chapel when he said, in his eighties: “I have just begun to learn the alphabet of my profession.” Your formal education may be over, but your learning is lifelong. But these three musings are for another day. The remains of this day are for celebration.

You may open your eyes. Class dismissed.

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Background Checks for the Shameful 46

April 23, 2013 at 9:37 pm (Political Commentary)

The Senate’s astonishing pusillanimity this past Wednesday, April 17, 2013, could serve as the core of an argument to adopt enlightened monarchy as the preferred form of American government. By a vote of 54 yes and 46 no, the 46 Noes of the Senate rejected the tiniest, most conservative, least offensive possible measure for sanity and safety in favor of prostrating themselves before the National Rifle Association as the only god to whom their unshakable obeisance is due. Joined by four Democrats who also had their spines removed prior to the vote, 42 Republicans chose to spit in the faces of the 89% of Americans who favor universal background checks prior to gun purchases, and instead offer a blood sacrifice in the form of a No vote to their new god. This Vengeance-is-Mine NRA god does frighten them with Calvinist retribution and ayatollah fatwas should they waver, and so perhaps we should, in good conscience, look upon them with almost as much charitable pity as with revulsion as they bow and scrape. But while we may pity them, and are unquestionably revolted by them for their No votes, Democratic Senator Harry Reid should have subjected them to the consequences of their threatened filibuster: He should have made them come to the well of the Senate and actually filibuster the proposed law, forcing them to expose their craven and spurious arguments until each dropped, exhausted, drained of their venal, self-congratulating excuses and their squalid sophistries. For the Yes voters, it was an opportunity to challenge the filibuster-loving Republican hostage takers, and yet again, it was an opportunity lost.

One might think that that 89% of Americans who support background checks, and whom the Shameful 46 presume to represent, might be their constituency. Representing that great majority would be reasonable, political, even moral. It was what they were in fact elected to do. Instead they chose their new god and the other 11%, who are presumably the felons and mentally disturbed the law was designed to prohibit from having guns in the first place. In effect, the Shameful 46 chose to protect the criminals and advocate, in this one single instance, for what they consider the absolute, unconstrainable Constitutional right—that is to say, the gun right, the only right that matters—of the mentally disturbed. Of course the second amendment is no more absolute than the first amendment. Just as we cannot commit libel or perjury or yell “fire!” in a crowded theatre, we already have background checks for gun store sales; guns cannot be carried on school grounds, in courtrooms, in prisons, or (tellingly) in the visitor galleries of congress; most states prohibit openly wearing guns; and so far ownership of howitzers is not permitted. So the absolutism argument, namely that any constraint at all on the second amendment would be unconstitutional, is simply wrong on its face.

Perhaps instead of decrying the appalling cowardice of the 46, we should be praising the courage of the 54. It is part of the sad commentary on American gun politics that their votes were, in many cases, considered real acts of courage. But can that really be so if 89% of us already believe in universal background checks? Was it that tough a vote to say “yes” both to the people and to simple common sense and “no” to the new god? Was it that tough to say that we should do something that preserves the second amendment while maybe, just possibly, making society a tiny bit safer to boot? Was it that tough to cast a vote FOR twenty first-graders and six of their teachers and their families? Aren’t those grieving parents, in some attenuated way, also US? The relatively small amount of real courage that it took to vote yes on Wednesday only accentuates the profound cowardice of those who voted no. From April 17, 2013 forward, anyone victimized by gun violence that can be traced to a gun sold without a background check at a gun show to a convicted felon or an adjudicated mentally disturbed individual can blame not only the perpetrator, but also his forty-six co-conspirators in the U. S. Senate.

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Republicans, Race, and the Politics of Resentment

November 23, 2012 at 7:20 pm (Political Commentary)

The intense hatred of Barack Obama by so many Republicans is so fervid as to deserve thoughtful scrutiny. This hatred far exceeds normal political distaste for the opposition candidate. Obama, at least to his supporters and even some Republicans, is not some sort of far-left fanatic bent on turning America into a socialist state, though that is at least part of the charge against him. Despairing Republican voters such as a Navy veteran accuse him, for example, of “knowing nothing about the economy” and having spent four years doing “nothing.” A friend of mine attacked his foreign policy in vague terms, but I could not help but wonder if he was in fact attacking the very idea of a youthful, non-military president having sufficient gravitas and understanding of Realpolitik to make credible foreign policy decisions at all. The fact that former Secretary of State and four star general Colin Powell endorsed Obama, and specifically his foreign policy, surely set back many Republicans, for whom Powell is the embodiment of honor as a military hero—a black man to whom they can point with pride and simultaneously burnish their own claims of racial blindness. How, they must have privately asked, could he endorse Obama’s multitudinous failures, unless it was simply an act of racial solidarity? The fact that Powell endorsed McCain against Obama in 2008 just makes it more puzzling.

I confess to a degree of partisanship that sometimes makes me uncomfortable. But the hatred of conservatives towards Obama outstrips my dislike for Bush, or even for Romney, whose mendacities and perpetual flip-flopping could only leave a neutral observer aghast. There certainly must be more to it than the mere fact of Obama being a Democrat in the White House. Right wing radio has been apoplectic since the election, alternately brooding and braying, filling their rhetoric with secession, implied violence, and racist screeds. One long-bearded truck driver interviewed by USA Today was “prepping” for the apocalypse and could only lament that he now needed to buy more guns before doing so became illegal. His was the face of the paranoid far right-wing, and not reflective of the GOP at large. Even so, how far is his extreme view from that of Donald Trump, who tweeted that Obama’s re-election was a call to “revolution”? Nor do we see the Republican Party repudiating its primitivist Tea Party wing, which has done nothing to disguise its vicious contempt for Obama, including signs at rallies portraying him alternately as Hitler and as an ape.

The ape imagery is, of course, a familiar racist trope. Few Republicans would admit a racist element in the mainstream of the Party, but that element embedded in the virulent anti-Obama animus is simply unmistakable among the Republican right. Here in Mississippi over 200 Ole Miss students protested the election results in racist terms on election night, and a similar rally occurred at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. The thirty-somethings down the street from me who stole my Obama signs three different times left a note deriding the “HNIC”—an apparently well-known acronym in redneck circles meaning “Head Nigger in Charge.” Much of what passes for general anti-Obama sentiment based on his policies and alleged liberalism is in fact covert racism intertwined with a profound and unalterable resentment. What Obama represents is the source of this resentment: a presumed multi-racial tide of black and Hispanic Americans inundating and submerging white America. Not only is white America under assault in this view, but it has a moral and patriotic obligation to “take back” our country, a phrase common among the Tea Party radical right but also among regular Republicans. Hispanics and Asians, though still part of “the Other,” are reluctantly acknowledged by the far right at least to be hard-working; but in our long, race-conscious history, African Americans have always been seen by innumerable whites as lazy. This stereotype was recently employed by Republican hardliner John Sununu, who used the word in reference to the President and refused to recant it when a shocked Andrea Mitchell offered him the opportunity.

The laziness charge flows perfectly into a larger white Republican narrative of a runaway culture of entitlement which benefits blacks in particular, and thus becomes a central tenet of the politics of resentment. The fusion of a white Republican perception of blacks inordinately benefiting from the “gifts” of an entitlement-drenched government, coupled with a smoldering bitterness toward the government for its extortionate over-taxing of whites to support the socialist, entitlement bureaucracy, is the jet fuel of the Republican narrative centered on and animated by resentment. Their shorthand is We (patriotic, white America) pay; They (mostly minority freeloaders) play. A construction worker working next door told a friend and my wife that he had to keep working so that he could pay all of his income to the government. Though he smiled, the comment reflected his resentment-inspired politics. Romney tapped into the resentment in his infamous, secretly recorded comment about the 47% who did not take responsibility for their own lives and depended on the government (including veterans, retirees, and the disabled) for their livelihood. Ryan expressed the same sentiment with his overly simplistic comment about “makers and takers.” The fact of Obama’s race hugely exacerbates the politics of resentment, since from the white Republican perspective he won only because of minority support. Certainly he would have lost without minority support, just as Romney would not have been in contention without a majority of white support. But that is sort of the right wing’s point: We’re supposed to be a white, Christian nation, and so it is nothing short of galling to have that nation run not only by a black man, but a likely Muslim and, at least in Trump-world, a black man not even born in the United States. The whole “birther” obsession is both an attempt to de-legitimize Obama’s presidency as well as an appeal to the politics of resentment. Informed Republicans may scorn the birther and Muslim absurdities, but even for them those absurdities are part of the background noise and are rarely disavowed.

For Republicans, especially but by no means exclusively those born to wealth, “entitlement” evokes connotations of lower classes receiving unearned benefits, benefits which they also see themselves paying for. This perceived transfer of wealth is the centerpiece of the virulent attacks on “socialism,” and it is at the heart of their resentment. Of course entitlements also redound to veterans, retirees who have worked their entire lives, and the disabled—not just Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens.” But for the well off, and many in the middle class, entitlement also has another meaning, though one not acknowledged: it is one rooted in wealth, heritage, race, and class, in addition to personal accomplishment. This sort of entitlement is the opposite of “noblesse oblige”—namely “le droit de seigneur,” the right of the upper class, the presumed duly earned privilege of the doers and makers. In its most naked form, it is the privilege of race. Like good health, it is barely recognized unless lost; and Republicans’ dual perception of its loss to the undeserving masses, coupled with the unearned, socialistic “gifts” and entitlements for the “takers,” drives the resentment. For the underclass far right, this unacknowledged upper class- and race-based entitlement takes the form of racial heritage and race pride, again coupled with the anger and resentment toward the 47% unwilling, according to Romney, to take responsibility for their own lives. Any parsing of American politics, in particular invidious attitudes toward the current president, can hardly avoid examining the politics of resentment as a central animating force.

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Contributions to the Dead Letter Office–Exhibit A

September 18, 2012 at 9:27 pm (Political Commentary)

Sometimes you just spit right into the wind, knowing perfectly well the result. Even so, the spitting can still be a little fun, even if, as in the case with the following letter, you know that it is dead on arrival and probably culled by some stern and highly offended secretary so that it never soils the hands of its intended public servant.

September 21, 2009

Dear Senator Wicker,

I have, with the passing of the decades, learned to refrain from the common temptation to write one’s elected representatives with a view to dissuading them from what I might consider to be a perilous course, largely because I have found such letters to be ineffective. No doubt this ineffectiveness is due to my peculiar views generally favoring democracy and the commonweal rather than oligarchy and plutocracy, wedded to what I perhaps erroneously consider the morally proper thing to do; the consequent result being that those views are received as the misguided, pernicious, or naïve bleating of the pinko left and thus relegated to the only suitable place—the round file.  But I do not mean to bore you or to waste your time. I merely meant to establish what you might consider my “reverse” bonafides: to wit, that I am a member of what to your party would be the loyal opposition.

But I am in receipt of your recent “Report on Health Care,” and the bonds that usually keep me silent were loosed. I believe that you are an honorable man, despite a senatorial campaign that on both sides was remarkable only for its lack of civility, truth, and candor. (I had thought to write a letter prior to election day and send it to whomever proved to be the victor; its theme was to be simply that you—or Governor Musgrove—should be ashamed of the campaign for its near total incapacity to run more than a single advertisement that did anything other than to recite, usually with no small degree of hyperbole, the multifarious irregularities and digressions from integrity of your respective opponent. How refreshing it would be if our campaign discourse could emerge from the slums and gutters which have become its natural element; but that forlorn hope has been nearly abandoned by most Americans, I suspect. But in compliance with the view expressed in my opening, and despite my repugnance at the scurrilous nature of the campaign, I kept my own counsel.) But I do believe that it is a blotch on your honor to continue uttering the shibboleth that, regarding health care, anything other than some minor tinkering with the status quo constitutes a “government takeover.” It is—and I am totally sincere in asserting this—truly difficult for me to believe that a man of your gifts and accomplishments actually believes this; but it is equally difficult for me to accept that you would knowingly engage, by using this loaded refrain, in the flagrant demagoguery and seemingly unashamed mendacity that the phrase represents. A public option would no more represent a government takeover of health care any more than the existence of The University of Southern Mississippi and its sister public institutions takes over higher education, as the success of Millsaps, William Carey, Tougaloo, and Mississippi College testifies. Nor does the existence of the U. S. Postal Service seem to imperil FedEx or UPS. Would you have opposed state-sponsored elementary public education in the nineteenth century on the ground that it would eliminate the cobbled-together private venues in which readin’, ‘ritin’, and ‘rithmetic were taught? Wouldn’t the success of Presbyterian Christian School and Sacred Heart here in Hattiesburg belie that opposition?

I have a close friend and colleague of 29 years who votes Republican; another who with her husband daunted me in taking into her home after Katrina a total stranger, an elderly black refugee from New Orleans, and following through by finding local housing for him and assisting in a thousand ways up through his funeral about a year ago. It was an example of being your brother’s keeper that illustrated for me how far I fall short of that Biblical admonition. And yet, when it comes to national policy, it seems to me that the Republicans (the Civil War being excepted) and the most conservative Democrats are far too often on the wrong side of history, and act in the interest of the corporate, the powerful, and the well-heeled. How many Republican congressmen voted for Social Security, the Civil Rights Act, or Medicare? And yet despite their actuarial problems, aren’t Social Security and Medicare now acknowledged by Republicans to be public goods? And would we do away with the government-run Veterans Administration?

I must lastly tire you with a comment in response to your observations about waiting lists in Canada and Great Britain. It is the nature, of course, of politics and polemics to articulate only those sides of an issue which support one’s position, disingenuously ignoring, as if they did not exist, any aspects uncongenial to that position. But I am sure that you are aware that both of those countries provide coverage for ALL of their citizens; that their health care is far less expensive per capita than ours, even though the physicians and hospitals are actually private; and that in general their people are healthier than we are. Though I am not proposing copying their systems, it is certainly less than honest to suggest that the mere existence of a public option represents a “government takeover” duplication of Canada’s system, and equally less than honest to neglect to mention those significant superiorities of their system, while only endlessly bemoaning their waiting lists.

After 157 years as slave-holding colonies, and another 87 years from the day we proclaimed that we were a nation, we abolished that “peculiar institution.” While health care is not the moral touchstone that slavery was, it is not a passing issue, and it has its own moral imperatives (I pass over entirely the current unsustainable fiscal imperatives). Eventually we will have universal coverage, and that coverage’s cost will not forever spiral upward, far outpacing inflation. I invite you to break ranks and represent your fellow Mississippians on the right side of history—not as a politician, but as a statesman, perhaps even with a touch of Genesis 4:9 in mind. If you cannot, I do at least ask you to forego misleading us further with hand-wringing, fear-mongering, and utterly false pronouncements about “government takeovers.”

Respectfully and cordially,

John R. Rachal

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The Necessity of Making Moral Distinctions

September 1, 2012 at 8:29 pm (Ethics)

In the late 90s I was reviewing a book on ageism that was so bad that I should, in retrospect, have begun the review as Dorothy Parker once began a review: “This book should not be tossed aside lightly; it should be thrown with great force.” Though missing that opportunity, I did find the book frightfully easy to excoriate, from its grammar to its multiple factual errors to its grave self-contradictions (was the editor simply asleep through the publication process?) to its offensive and puerile comparisons, which unintentionally illustrated the fallacy of moral equivalence. As an example of the last, the authors served up several comparisons of American ageism to Nazism: “The Jews are our misfortune, sloganeered the Nazis. The old are our misfortune, cry the not-so-old in America.” The authors lamented the “incarceration” of the old in nursing homes which represent a “final solution mentality” with the same function as “concentration camps everywhere.” Mining the theme for its full shock value, they suggested that “it is not unreasonable to speculate that our sciences of biology, psychology, and sociology could find justification for extermination of the old in the same manner as Hitler’s scientists found reason for exterminating the European Jews over half a century ago.” Even without dropping the wiggle words “not unreasonable,” “speculate,” and “could,” authors Ursula Adler Falk and Gerhard Falk’s intent is crystalline in its clarity: ageism is the moral equivalent of Nazism. We are invited to conjure images of evil-eyed, cackling, modern scientists spending their days in the lab bent on discovering the final solution for the extermination of the old.

This particular and most egregious assertion of moral equivalence can be easily rejected as outrageous by anyone with even a smattering of knowledge of the Holocaust and of ageism. It would hardly require an Auschwitz survivor to be repelled by the comparison. Here the equivalence is made in order to enshrine ageism with the moral gravitas and hideousness of the Holocaust, thus “elevating” ageism to a level of depravity almost unique in the annals of human degradation. (One must be careful here with that word “unique.” While the Holocaust holds pride of place in the modern imagination when it comes to institutional evil, we should not forget that both Stalin and Mao were each responsible for more actual deaths, certainly making the twentieth century unique in history for its grim necrology.) It may certainly be true that some things are, however, morally equivalent. Discernible differences may be so small that a rough equivalence can be justifiably argued. Additionally, we may need to wrestle with questions of degree or even opportunity, especially on matters of brutality and death: Was, for example, Cambodia’s Pol Pot the moral equivalent of Hitler on the fundamental question of presiding over a Holocaust—the same in kind, though lesser in degree? Probably so. But that caveat does not require that we abandon rationality in favor of doubtful equations.

The usage of moral equivalence—comparing two or more things and suggesting that there is no moral or ethical distinction to be made between them—is not always offered as a means of elevating or reducing one thing to the level of another, as in the case of the ageism authors. More often it is a device to imply that the common assumption of the moral superiority of one thing is a flawed assumption, and that in fact the two allegedly disparate items being compared are morally no different. Almost disdainfully, it asks, How could you possibly think that one of these things is better than the other when it is as plain as the nose on your face that they are the same, both equally mired in the mud? This equating occurs frequently among those disenchanted with politics, who justify their own disengagement by bemoaning that all politicians are the same and the parties are the same, wriggling and squirming for their own self-aggrandizement. Thus why bother to vote, since it makes no difference? The bankruptcy of this pitiable argument should be self-evident; but if not, one might ask the Mississippi black man of 1962 who was not allowed to vote if it makes a difference to him; or the woman of 1910 who had no vote if it makes a difference to her; or ask the historian if George McGovern and Richard Nixon had different agendas, or if Lincoln were a better president than Millard Fillmore.

Our current political campaign reveals how gravely polarized the electorate is, yet still there are many who accept the debased moral equivalence of the two candidates. USA Today, for example, recently editorialized that both candidates were equally guilty of lying about the other. As evidence, it offered a Romney ad that claimed that Obama would end any expectation of work requirements for getting welfare; then the editorial offered an Obama superpac ad that claimed Romney had killed a woman who lost her health insurance. The difference, barely acknowledged and relegated to insignificance by the author, was that the first was a Romney-endorsed ad, while the second was not an Obama ad at all, but a superpac ad supporting Obama, and by law not vetted by or coordinated with the President’s team. Aside from my own perception that the Romney campaign has been overtly mendacious (Obama “apologizes for our country” or the red-meat lies of Ryan’s acceptance speech) while Obama has not, the newspaper, in decrying the low tenor of the campaign, argued that both candidates were morally equivalent in their proclivity for lying.

Nor is academe exempt from the fallacy of moral equivalence. It has become quite fashionable in elevated academic circles to argue that cultural values are inherently equivalent, and that it is the apex of cultural narcissism to proclaim otherwise. This view is partly a laudable rejection of jingoism and American exceptionalism, partly a defensible embrace of egalitarianism, and largely a reaction to the colonial exploitation of indigenous peoples of Africa, India, and the Americas. In the colonial view, the exploitation (though not even recognized as such) was totally justified in the name of empire building and the grotesque and lachrymose self-pity of “the white man’s burden” in civilizing (read: exploiting and sometimes butchering) the benighted “savages.” One can still reject jingoism, embrace egalitarianism, and be justly repulsed by the sense of moral and cultural entitlement which animated colonial exploitation and yet not succumb to the postmodernist doctrine that cultural values and cultures themselves are inevitably morally equivalent.

Human aspirations may have a common foundation, but those aspirations may manifest themselves in very different societal and cultural outcomes, ranging from those in which a voice in how one is governed is a matter of theocratic superstition to those in which it is a matter of voting; from those in which the poorest of society are exploited to those in which the law insures some minimal livelihood; from those in which belief is a matter of coercion to those in which it is a matter of conscience; from those in which half the population are legally considered chattel to those in which no woman is forced to marry, forced to cover her face, prevented from driving, prevented from obtaining an education, prevented from speaking her mind, or prevented from holding any office. The proponents of the moral equivalence of cultures should live for a while in some of these other places, but if not that, at least listen to one who has, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali (cited in Christopher Hitchens’ collection of essays, Arguably), who concludes in her book Infidel what to many would be obvious: “I left the world of faith, of genital cutting and forced marriage for the world of reason and sexual emancipation. After making this voyage I know that one of these two worlds is simply better than the other. Not for its gaudy gadgetry, but for its fundamental values.” This is not the language of a postmodernist ideologue, but someone who speaks from “lived experience.”

In the fullness of infinite time and the grandness of infinite space, there may be nothing of substance to differentiate among the infinitesimally unimportant moral beliefs and actions of a few tribes of a single, short-lived, pathetic species infesting some dry corners of a tiny mote of rock floating around in a miniscule speck of a galaxy. In this cosmic view, Aristotle’s philosophy, Shakespeare’s plays, my death or yours—or, for that matter, the extinction of humankind—is of no more consequence than the death of a gnat. But in our quotidian lives, the ones in which we get up and go to work, shop at the grocery store or till our patch of land, kiss our spouses and hug our children, and find what happiness we may—in that life we do not dwell overmuch on the grandiose, or fret overlong on the eventual death throes of the sun our planet circles, or take that long, long, cosmic view of the insignificance of our species. Instead we live in the present and inhabit a wide, familiar, and often disturbing world of the relatively immediate and the more or less local. And in that world, differences can matter; and failing to make necessary moral distinctions is as simplistic as its opposite—seeing the world in black and white.

John Rachal
September 1, 2012

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Mr. Grant, Meet Mr. Twain

August 17, 2012 at 6:05 pm (Literary Criticism)

Our local library was having a book sale of some of its presumably surplus books, and for a song I picked up Mark Perry’s Grant and Twain, a dual biography of the title characters. While containing enough background to justify the increasingly popular dual biography classification, essentially the book focused on the period in which these two giants of nineteenth century America (though Twain lived until 1910) found their lives intersecting in the interest of literature and history. Perry centers his story on Twain’s tenacious efforts to get a very reluctant Grant to write his memoirs and the near herculean effort required of the dying general and president to do so. While Twain clearly wanted to be the publisher himself—his concern for business matters never being far out of mind—he admired Grant and genuinely felt that Grant’s narrative of the War, particularly given his role as the North’s overall military commander, would not only be handsomely profitable but historically necessary.

After Grant and his son were led into desperate financial straits by a smooth-talking business partner with a good eye for bad investments around 1883, Grant—who had nobly but unwisely given up his military retirement when he became president—was desperate to find a means to support his family and to pay his mounting debts. He thus came to see, with Twain’s and others’ urgings, the as yet unwritten memoirs as a means to his financial salvation. In the mean time, the devoted cigar-smoker was diagnosed with an inoperable cancer of the mouth, with the result that his writing became a painful race against death, which came in 1885. But as Lincoln had said over two decades earlier about this almost preternaturally calm and brave man, “he fights.” (Commander-in-Chief Lincoln had finally found his general, after sputtering attempts with three previous ones, including the vain, contumacious, and ultimately craven George McClellan, to whom Lincoln had tartly said that if the General wasn’t planning to use his army, then he, Lincoln, would like to borrow it.)

Grant, now slowly and painfully dying of cancer, contrived to live up to Lincoln’s appreciative “he fights.” With help from his son and some former military subordinates (one or two of whom had their own possibly competing memoirs), he wrote. His capable doctors managed to relieve his pain with laudanum applied to his tongue. He also dictated, but that became difficult, as did swallowing. Indeed, his doctors eventually attributed his actual death to starvation. He finished the second volume—his final campaign—a few weeks before his death.

I remember reading a single volume American Library version of his memoirs some twenty years ago and being surprised at its high literary quality. Twain noted this as well. But Perry’s dual biography fleshed out Grant’s war narrative handsomely, yielding an impression of a man of longstanding modest and calm demeanor in the face of both catastrophic military consequences and approaching and painful death. His lifelong love for his wife Julia (perfectly paralleled by Twain’s love for his wife Livy), as well as his concern for his personal integrity, particularly in terms of paying his debts and having it known that the prose was his alone, are deeply endearing qualities matched by his quiet courage and sheer doggedness. Though Grant’s less-than-successful presidency, ridiculed by the refined Henry Adams, was marked by scandal (though not his own) and has been seen by historians in stark and invidious contrast to his successful prosecution of the War, it is within bounds to speculate that the War would very likely have been further drawn out without him, and possibly might have turned out differently. Owing to his financial crisis, the importuning of Twain and others, his own integrity, his persistent anxiety for his family’s welfare, and his implacable tenacity allowing him to hold off death just long enough, he was able to leave us a historically necessary masterpiece in the genre of military memoirs.

John Rachal

August 17, 2012

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Scalia Considered

July 9, 2012 at 4:12 pm (Political Commentary)

Just when we thought it was safe to conclude that the Supreme Court is hopelessly partisan, Chief Justice Roberts deftly throws a few morsels to the Right but manages to defend the healthcare mandate as constitutional, not on the four liberal justices’ ground of Congress’s right to control commerce, but rather on the ground that the mandate is effectively a tax and Congress does have the right to tax. Thus the centerpiece of the law was preserved, and not by the vote of the usual swing-voter, Anthony Kennedy, but by the conservative, George Bush-appointed Chief Justice, John Roberts. This outcome, particularly with this unexpected alliance of Roberts and the four liberal justices, was predicted by virtually no one, least of all me, who assumed the usual politically dictated outcome of 5-4 against.

It was certainly refreshing to see the Court tack counter to expectation. The 2000 Bush v. Gore decision broke perfectly along party lines, giving the election to Bush despite—though this was outside the Court’s consideration—the election being the country’s fourth in which the fellow with the most votes did not become president. The execrable Citizens United case also broke along party lines, allowing elections to be determined by train loads of one hundred dollar bills collected from mega-rich anonymous donors seeking to buy an election, all on the specious ground that a corporation is a person, a citizen, and thus entitled to free speech. Wealthy people generally being Republicans, the decision has rightly been interpreted as more favorable to the GOP, and already in this election cycle millions upon millions have slipped in to Superpacs, mostly favoring Romney. Even John McCain excoriated this decision, a decision allowing democracy to come perilously close to simply being bought, particularly in elections below the presidential level.

But the healthcare decision went, in general, liberals’—and one might even say moderates’—way. The four liberals of the Court (Ginzburg, Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor) voted predictably. Three of the five dependable conservatives (Thomas, Alito, and Scalia) did also. Kennedy, as usual, leaned right, though he does not always do so. The surprise was Roberts, always heretofore conservative. Among the plenitude of questions and implications the decision has for healthcare, it also raises the question of the influence of political affinity as the determiner of Court decisions. The healthcare decision notwithstanding, most decisions do seem to reflect the political orientations of the justices, however much we might wish otherwise. In all but the most obvious cases, a law’s constitutionality often evades the actual language of the Constitution, and depends instead upon the politically infused interpretations the justices offer of the Constitution. If this were not so, presumably it would be a total mystery to observers and commentators as to whether a controversial and especially politically-charged decision might be 9-0 for, or 9-0 against. Instead, we can generally predict eight of the votes. We know the political leanings of the justices, and on that basis we can with some likelihood determine how they will interpret the Constitution to arrive at the decision that comports with their politics.

What is interesting is that one of the justices, Antonin Scalia, takes strong exception to that, at least concerning his own decisions. I have now seen Scalia, the current Court’s longest serving justice, give two speeches. He is a charming and forceful speaker, devoted to the idea of “originalism,” a doctrine asserting that the only way to interpret the Constitution was by its “original intent,” which presumably can always be ascertained by a close reading. Scalia suggests that there are no legal questions—which he differentiates from moral questions—which cannot be interpreted within the purview of the Constitution; its principles are immutable whatever the ephemeral facts of any particular modern case might be. In contrast to originalism, he opposes the doctrine of the Constitution as a “living document,” a view he reviles on the premise that such a constitutional philosophy allows the meaning of the Constitution to change every few decades as social values evolve. Reasonably explicit in this argument is Scalia’s objection that the “living document” view inevitably invites politics into Court decisions, whereas originalism insures that decisions are safely insulated from politics since justices would rely only on the original intent of the framers.

Even aside from the highly suspect perspective that modern justices can derive the framers’ collective intent, the Scalia presumption that such derivations are immune to the political leanings of the interpreter is both naive and self-deceptive. Between the Constitution and a particular justice’s opinion is a layer of personal political conviction, a fact which every president nominating a justice and every senator voting on a nominee well knows. The most obvious evidence for this is found within Scalia’s own decisions—almost invariably conservative, at least when there is a conservative-liberal angle to the decision. Would, for example, the framers have endorsed the execution of child criminals—an issue the Supreme Court decided against a few years ago? How are we to decipher the framers’ intent on such a question? And in the absence of a clear constitutional prescription on a question, i.e., constitutional silence, isn’t trying to get into the minds of the framers and determine their intent at least as hazardous as relying on prevailing, rationally argued, ethical views? And by what consensus do we apotheosize the framers to such an extent that we assume their values and prescriptions, which were influenced by their cultural milieu just as ours are, to be infallible? The “father” of the Constitution, James Madison, apparently did not lose an excess of sleep over slavery, nor did he seem much troubled by excluding half the white population—women—from voting. So much for original intent of the framers. Those shortcomings were eventually “corrected” by amendments, and thus became constitutional, but those amendments were political products of their time and consequently clear evidence of an evolving, “living,” document. Why would the framers have inserted a mechanism for amendments if they did not wish to acknowledge the possibility of need for change, modification, or addition over time? The very fact that the framers provided that mechanism is itself evidence of their “original intent” that the document was a living document, to be amended as future generations saw fit.

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