The first vote I ever cast was for Jerry Brown for governor. The first vote I ever cast for president was for Gerald Ford. (That was the last time I ever voted for a Republican, btw.)I have become a little bit more coherent since then.
I was not, at the time, a fan of Jimmy Carter; I thought he was sanctimonious. I was 20. (Little could I have imagined what was to come.) And I thought Ford had done the right thing by pardoning Nixon. Yes I really did.
I did not understand the zombie nature of Republicanism and had no way of knowing that unless you drive a metaphorical stake through the heart of GOP crooks and liars, they will be back, refreshed and and ready to screw up the country in almost exactly the same way, within just a few years. In those days, I couldn’t imagine that the Republicans would ever elect someone worse than Nixon. I thought we had gone back to “normal” where nice moderate guys like Jerry and Ike would keep the seat warm until the real leaders would return. Live and learn.
The thing I remember most about Ford, though, was his family. They were great — a bunch of handsome baby boomers frolicking on the lawn, rumored to have smoked pot in the white house, fresh and cool and so much less uptight than Nixon and the girls. As a young person of the same age, it was a powerful image that meant something to me.
And Betty remains my favorite first lady of all time. She was funny and human and normal. I’ll never forget watching her hosting a Bolshoi ballet on television when she was obviously under the influence of something or other. I thought to myself, this is a real woman of her time. And of course, she went on to be one of the first famous women to announce that she was fighting breast cancer and founded the Betty Ford clinic not long after. She has done a world of good for the recovery movement.
Ford was an old school GOP moderate, the kind that aren’t around anymore. But he bears some responsibility for what came after. After all, his administration spawned the two most twisted leaders of the Bush administration — Cheney and Rumsfeld. From what I know of Jerry Ford, he wouldn’t have been proud of that particular accomplishment. He was not given to megalomania and grandiose schemes.
He bound the nation’s wounds for a moment, but in doing so he created an infection that has festered for the last thirty years. His heart was in the right place, I think. But it was a mistake I hope this nation never makes again.
He was a decent man who had a good sense of humor. RIP.
People can say I’m being hysterical all they want, but I honestly feel that a woman’s right to choose is about to go the way of the death penalty as a fundamental liberal value. The party is dying to find a reason to throw in the towel. And people like this are helping them do it:
Party strategists and nonpartisan pollsters credit the operative, Mara Vanderslice, and her 2-year-old consulting firm, Common Good Strategies, with helping a handful of Democratic candidates make deep inroads among white evangelical and churchgoing Roman Catholic voters in Kansas, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Exit polls show that Ms. Vanderslice’s candidates did 10 percentage points or so better than Democrats nationally among those voters, who make up about a third of the electorate. As a group, Democrats did little better among those voters than Senator John Kerry’s campaign did in 2004.
[…]
Ms. Vanderslice’s success in 2006 is a sharp rebound from her first campaign, in 2004. She was hired, at age 29, to direct religious outreach for Mr. Kerry in his presidential campaign and was then quickly shoved aside, a casualty of a losing battle to persuade him to speak more openly about his Catholic faith, even if it meant taking on the potentially awkward subject of his support for abortion rights.
The midterm elections were a “proof point” for arguments that Ms. Vanderslice had made two years before, said Mike McCurry, a Democratic consultant and former spokesman for President Bill Clinton who worked with Ms. Vanderslice on the Kerry campaign. For the Democrats, Mr. McCurry said, Ms. Vanderslice and her company “were the only ones taking systematic, methodical steps to build a religious component in the practical campaign work.”
Ah yes, all the usual suspects. Mara Vanderslice, the Jim Wallis acolyte, is a little bit more open about her agenda sometimes, if not in the NY Times:
I also believe that the Democratic Party — we really need to engage in a more thoughtful debate on the abortion issue in this country. I can’t tell you how many times I had conversations with people of deep faith [who] said, “I support you [and] everything you are doing on every other issue except for this one.” It is such a painful and divisive issue in this country, and we have, therefore, avoided it, I think, to a large extent. I don’t think that does service for us. I believe that we need to work across our differences to find ways to reduce unwanted pregnancies. There are a million and a half abortions every year in this country, and no one can feel that’s a good place for us to be. But we need to support the programs that we know reduce the need for abortions. Abortion rates went down to their lowest levels in 25 years under President Clinton; abortion rates went up under President Reagan. We need to work together to support the programs that will help women choose life, and I think we need to be open to a new dialogue on this issue.
We need to support the programs that will help women choose life. She slipped that one right in there, didn’t she? It’s hardly a ringing endorsement of a woman’s right to own her own body. In fact, I don’t hear even one tiny acknowledgement in that argument that it’s important to defend the right to abortion. All I hear is smooth PR copy.
This kind of slick talk (and it is slick) reminds me of the anti-abortion groups who also claim they are just trying to “open a dialog.” Here’s Mary Kay Culp, preident of Kansans For Life on NOWa while back:
MARY KAY CULP: Well, he [Samuel Alito] looks like he’s a real careful– a real careful, thoughtful, analytical guy, and I like that. And– because I’m a little tired of this being portrayed as if he has an agenda, that all of a sudden, poof is going to happen if he gets on the court.
BRANCACCIO: Agenda being getting rid of Roe v. Wade?
MARY KAY CULP: Exactly. I don’t think that that’s going to happen. And if it does, all it means is that the issue comes back to the states.
BRANCACCIO: But, with all the work that you’ve been doing in Kansas for all these years, don’t you think that if it becomes a State’s matter that in Kansas like that (SNAP) you’ll get rid of abortion? Huh?
MARY KAY CULP: No. I don’t. Unh-uh. I don’t think that’ll happen in the states. But, what can happen is a real discussion. What can happen are committee hearings in your Senate and your House where witnesses are called– witnesses who have had abortions– witnesses on both side of the issue. And, it can be heard — the most frustrating thing about Roe is that it just slammed the door. When you try to get a State law passed even to regulate just a little bit, or partial birth abortion, anything, a legislator will tell you– “Well, you know– we can’t do that under Roe versus Wade anyway.”
[…]
BRANCACCIO: I don’t understand how Kansas wouldn’t– ban abortion quit quickly after that. What do you know about the state of that debate in your state…
MARY KAY CULP: It isn’t that. It’s just that I know how the political system works. Then you can have real discussion. Then every– both sides are gonna get aired, and if the media’s fair about it, both sides are gonna get aired. That– you know, that’s a question. But at least democracy will have a chance to work on it. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything either way.
In case anyone wonders what Mary Kay really thinks about the political process and the judiciary and the wonderful dialog we’re all going to have, check this out:
Hours after the outgoing attorney general of Kansas charged one of the nation’s few late-term abortion providers with illegally aborting viable fetuses, a judge dismissed the charges, ruling Friday that the attorney general had overstepped his authority.
Atty. Gen. Phill Kline angrily vowed to get the charges reinstated.
“This is war,” said Mary Kay Culp, executive director of the anti-abortion group Kansans for Life.
The flurry of activity marks the latest twist in a long and bitter fight over abortion in Kansas.
That “reasonable” woman who appeared on NOW talking about “dialog” was the staunchest supporter of that creepy nutball Kline, who was uncermoniously booted from his job by the people of Kansas in November. She will say anything, as you can easily see by a simple Google search; her words are well tailored to each different audience. The woman is a political operative.
I believe that Ms Vanderslice is doing much the same thing, although she’s working within the Democratic party rather than as an outside activist:
Dr. Welton Gaddy, president of the liberal Interfaith Alliance, said her encouragement of such overt religiosity raised “red flags” about the traditional separation of church and state.
“I don’t want any politician prostituting the sanctity of religion,” Mr. Gaddy said, adding that nonbelievers also “have a right to feel they are represented at the highest levels of government.”
To Ms. Vanderslice, that attitude is her party’s problem. In an interview, she said she told candidates not to use the phrase “separation of church and state,” which does not appear in the Constitution’s clauses forbidding the establishment or protecting the exercise of religion.
“That language says to people that you don’t want there to be a role for religion in our public life,” Ms. Vanderslice said. “But 80 percent of the public is religious, and I think most people are eager for that kind of debate.”
What does she hope to accomplish with a “debate” about the separation of church and state? The only people who are upset by that phrase are the far right. Why should Democrats accomodate such a thing? It’s politically idiotic.
“God’s love was so much stronger than any of my doubts,” she said, acknowledging that like some other young evangelicals she still struggles with common evangelical ideas about abortion, homosexuality and the literal reading of Scripture.
[…]
She and Mr. Sapp, 30, a Presbyterian minister’s son and a fellow evangelical with a divinity degree from Duke, set out to test the rejected ideas. They organized workshops in which Democratic candidates practiced delivering short statements about their faith or their moral values. They urged Democrats to meet with even the most staunchly conservative evangelical pastors in their districts.
They persuaded candidates not to avoid controversial subjects like abortion, advising those who supported abortion rights to speak about reducing demand for the procedure.
And they cautioned against the approach of many liberal Christians, which is to argue that Jesus was interested only in social justice and not in sexual morality.
“The Gospel has both in it,” Mr. Sapp said. “You can’t act like caring about abortion and family issues makes you a judgmental fool.”
I really wish the Dems would stop bullshitting themselves for five minutes and deal with reality instead of this public relations and marketing nonsense. These people want the party to become socially conservative. As, apparently, do a whole bunch of other Democrats for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that they hope to peel off some swing voters whom they have been persuaded would be more than willing to vote Democratic if the bitches and the fags would just STFU and get with the program. This nice young woman will show everybody how it’s done.
Fine. Let’s have that “debate” all these busybodies say they want to have. Let’s see some real figures that show that a whole bunch of swing voters are clamoring for more religion in politics and that the nation is hungering for two socially conservative political parties. But before we have it I wish that Democratic candidates would search their consciences and ask themselves if they really want to further empower religious fundamentalists who “struggle with abortion and gay rights and the literal interpretation of the Bible?” And if they reach way down and find that they don’t really care about any of that, maybe they could look at the polls and recognize that they are going against the majority in this country, including many of the religious who are not social conservatives and believe in that old fashioned American value: “live and let live.”
A good part of this so-called religious awakening is hype. Consider this, from the Barna group which tracks religious opinion and trends:
Major Christian Leaders Are Widely Unknown, Even Among Christians
In today’s celebrity culture, even the most well-known ministers remain relatively obscure. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is Rick Warren. Pastor of a megachurch in southern California and author of the bestselling book, The Purpose Driven Life, he has appeared on countless radio and television programs and on the cover of numerous magazines in the past several years. His book, with sales exceeding 25 million copies, is reportedly the biggest selling non-fiction book in U.S. history (with the exception, ironically, of the Bible). Yet, despite such accomplishments, Mr. Warren remains unknown to most adults in this country. Three of out every four adults (72%) say they have never heard of him, including two out of every three born again Christians (63%). Among those who recognize his name, he has an average favorable-to-unfavorable ratio of 2:1. (In contrast, several other individuals evaluated had ratios of better than 10:1.)
Another example is James Dobson, the Christian psychologist whose radio program regarding family matters reaches the largest audience of any religious personality. Almost six out of every ten adults (57%) said they had never heard of Dr. Dobson; in fact, nearly half of all born again Christians said they did not know who he was. Among those familiar with Dr. Dobson, 27% had a favorable impression and 8% had an unfavorable view. However, among evangelical Christians – the small but well-chronicled segment that is clearly Dr. Dobson’s core constituency – his rating was 69% favorable, 4% unfavorable, and 21% who had never heard of him. (The other 6% did not have an opinion of him.)
Meanwhile:
The survey showed that evangelical Christians have significantly different views about public figures than do other Americans, including non-evangelical born again Christians.
Compared to other people groups, evangelicals were better informed about and awarded higher favorability ratings to all five of the religious leaders tested, as well as to President Bush. When compared to born again Christians who were not evangelical, they held considerably more negative views of Ms. O’Donnell, Mr. Gibson, President Clinton and newscaster Katie Couric. They were also much less familiar with country singer Tim McGraw
The fact that evangelicals seem to be more conservative than everyone else in the country, including all the other Christians, may just mean that they are, you know, conservatives. Since they are also more likely to be southern and hold other views that are hostile to the party that represents the rest of the country, they just don’t seem like a good bet for the Democratic party. It’s just insane to try to appeal to the people least likely to support you!
The fact is that Americans are comfortable with religion and most feel that their leaders should believe in God. Bible verses and religious language are nice shorthand ways of conveying values and spiritualism. Many of the messages in the Bible are fully in keeping with liberal values and can be called up to support a politician’s positions without any controversy. Nobody is saying otherwise. But most people in this country are simply not as engaged in this deep theologically based political conversation as these hustlers would have us believe.
In fact, if the Democrats want to get involved in religion, I would suggest that they start looking at what the right is doing to the mainline and liberal churches in this country. It’s as bad as anything that’s happened in politics and it’s happening under the radar. If people like Ms Vanderslice would really like to help Christians in this country feel like they have a seat at the Democratic table, maybe she should spend a little less time cultivating the right wingers who already hate half the people in the Democratic party and concentrate a little of that energy in helping the liberal Christians who are struggling to survive the onslaught. I’d even help, and I’m not religious at all.
But Vanderslice and her friends aren’t actually liberals are they? They are missionaries going into the heart of darkness to convert the heathens.
Heroin-related deaths in Los Angeles County soared from 137 in 2002 to 239 in 2005, a jump of nearly 75% in three years, a period when other factors contributing to overdose deaths remained unchanged, experts said. The jump in deaths was especially prevalent among users older than 40, who lack the resilience to recover from an overdose of unexpectedly strong heroin, according to a study by the county’s Office of Health Assessment and Epidemiology.
“The rise of heroin from Afghanistan is our biggest rising threat in the fight against narcotics,” said Orange County sheriff’s spokesman Jim Amormino. “We are seeing more seizures and more overdoses.”
According to a Drug Enforcement Administration report obtained by The Times, Afghanistan’s poppy fields have become the fastest-growing source of heroin in the United States. Its share of the U.S. market doubled from 7% in 2001, the year U.S. forces overthrew the Taliban, to 14% in 2004, the latest year studied. Another DEA report, released in October, said the 14% actually could be significantly higher.
Poppy production in Afghanistan jumped significantly after the 2001 U.S. invasion destabilized an already shaky economy, leading farmers to turn to the opium market to survive.
Not only is more heroin being produced from Afghan poppies coming into the United States, it is also the purest in the world, according to the DEA’s National Drug Intelligence Center.
Despite the agency’s own reports, a DEA spokesman denied that more heroin was reaching the United States from Afghanistan. “We are NOT seeing a nationwide spike in Afghanistan-based heroin,” Garrison K. Courtney wrote in an e-mail to The Times.
He said in an interview that the report that showed the growth of Afghanistan’s U.S. market share was one of many sources the agency used to evaluate drug trends. He refused to provide a copy of DEA reports that could provide an explanation.
The agency declined to give The Times the report on the doubling of Afghan heroin into the U.S. A copy was provided by the office of U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a member of the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control.
[…]
Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, warned world health authorities in October of the increase in Afghan heroin.
“This, in turn, is likely to prompt a substantial increase in the number of deaths by overdose, as addicts are not used to injecting doses containing such high concentrations of the drug,” he said.
[…]
The Department of Homeland Security also has found evidence of increasing Afghan heroin in this country. The agency reported skyrocketing numbers of seizures of heroin arriving at U.S. airports and seaports from India, not a significant heroin-producing country but a major transshipment point for Afghan drugs.
You know, I hate to be suspicious of such things, but it seems as if every time we get into one of these boondoggle wars, a whole bunch of hard drugs fine their way back to America. I can’t say for sure that it’s not a coincidence, but you really do have to wonder why it is that when anybody implies that the government might just be involved, they are hounded and discredited.
Josh Marshall has asked a really fun question over at TPM cafe today: What caused the turnaround from Bush and the GOP being on top of the world and poised to rule for centuries in 2004 to where they sit today in 2006?
Most people cite Schiavo, Katrina and the attempt to gut social security, along with a bunch of other interesting moments in the decline of the house of Bush. (There are so many!)
I think all those things were huge, of course. But I actually think it was something a little more obscure. It happened just before the election in 2004 which was so personality driven (and masterfully produced by the Republicans) that people didn’t know quite what to make of it. The implications of this revelation took time for people to absorb — and when they did, they lost all faith in George W. Bush:
The 1991 Persian Gulf War and subsequent U.N. inspections destroyed Iraq’s illicit weapons capability and, for the most part, Saddam Hussein did not try to rebuild it, according to an extensive report by the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq that contradicts nearly every prewar assertion made by top administration officials about Iraq.
Charles A. Duelfer, whom the Bush administration chose to complete the U.S. investigation of Iraq’s weapons programs, said Hussein’s ability to produce nuclear weapons had “progressively decayed” since 1991. Inspectors, he said, found no evidence of “concerted efforts to restart the program.”
The findings were similar on biological and chemical weapons. While Hussein had long dreamed of developing an arsenal of biological agents, his stockpiles had been destroyed and research stopped years before the United States led the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Duelfer said Hussein hoped someday to resume a chemical weapons effort after U.N. sanctions ended, but had no stocks and had not researched making the weapons for a dozen years.
Duelfer’s report, delivered yesterday to two congressional committees, represents the government’s most definitive accounting of Hussein’s weapons programs, the assumed strength of which the Bush administration presented as a central reason for the war. While previous reports have drawn similar conclusions, Duelfer’s assessment went beyond them in depth, detail and level of certainty.
“We were almost all wrong” on Iraq, Duelfer told a Senate panel yesterday.
That is one hell of a “mistake” and if it wasn’t a mistake it was even worse.
Those of us who followed events closely knew long before this report came out that there were no WMD. And on some level everyone else knew that something had gone wrong. I believe that when it really hit people that Bush had sold the war — repeatedly and in great detail — on something that wasn’t true, he was toast. It just took a while for it to sink in.
Anonymous Liberal pinch hitting over at Glenn Greenwald’s place has posted an interesting piece about truth in advertising. He points out that the laws are much more explicit and demanding of honesty in selling consumer goods than it is in politics.
If a company makes a claim which is even slightly misleading, it will quickly find itself up to its eyeballs in litigation, whether in the form of government enforcement actions, lawsuits by competitors, or consumer class actions (often all three). There are also any number of tort and quasi-contractual claims that aggrieved consumers can bring against the individuals and companies who deceived them.
As a result, companies take great care to ensure that their statements are truthful, and consumers can be reasonably confident that advertisers are not lying to them.
The same is not at all true in the realm of politics, where candidates and interest groups can pretty much say whatever they want and voters are generally left to fend for themselves. Lies and misleading claims are commonplace, if not the norm. The perverse result is that most Americans are far better informed (or at least far less misinformed) when they step into the mall than when they step into the voting booth.
Anonymous Liberal points out that all the consumer laws on the books are predicated on studies that show most people don’t have the ability to sort through a bunch of competing information and figure out what is true (or what works) and what doesn’t. We have found that citizens appreciate some rules and some guidance. He also notes that states tried to inject some truth in advertising laws into the political arena but ran afoul of the first amendment and have pretty much given up the effort, which he agrees is probably the right thing. After all, when it comes to political speech you have to have a very hands-off government policy, for obvious reasons.
But the system is supposed to have a mechanism for dealing with this — the press. It’s protected by the same amendment that protects the politicians and operates on an equal constitutional basis. If jouranlists were doing their job correctly they would function as the political consumer watchdogs and enforcers of truth in advertising.
The thing is, they think they are. They nitpick something ridiculous, like Al Gore’s joke that his grandmother sang him a certain lullabye while allowing a huge majority of the country to believe that there was a connection between Saddam and 9/11 — something which those of us who were paying close attention knew was untrue, by virtue of the administration’s cleverly misleading statements.
Anonymous Liberal notes:
I remember, for example, that in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, the media made a habit of noting that most Americans supported the invasion. Rarely, however, did anyone mention the fact that nearly 70% of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 or the fact that the Bush administration had been going out of its way to foster that misperception.
That’s exactly right. And it wasn’t as if Bush was being particularly subtle about it:
Times have changed in America. Times have changed after September the 11th. It used to be we thought oceans would protect us. A lot of us growing up said, we don’t have to really worry about some of the conflicts overseas. We may be involved, we may not be involved, because we’re protected, we’re isolated from the harsh realities of some of the killings that were taking place on different continents, so we could pick and choose. We don’t have any choice in this new war, see. We learned that the enemy has taken the battlefield to our very own country. My most important job is to protect America. My most important job is to do everything we possibly can to protect innocent life from a group of killers.
That’s why I’ve started and stimulated a discussion on Iraq. I wanted the American people to know that there’s a new reality which we face, a reality that oceans no longer protect us. The reality that this person in Iraq has killed his own people with weapons of mass destruction, a reality that he has invaded countries. The reality that he has stiffed the United Nations for 11 years. Sixteen different resolutions have been passed calling on this man to disarm. Sixteen times he’s ignored world mandates. These are the realities we face and we must deal with it.
Clever and stupid all at the same time. It was clear to those who were paying close attention that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11 and that this was cunning rhetoric designed to give exactly the opposite impression. And yet the Bush administration repeatedly made speeches and statements like that above and suffered virtually no blowback in the media. In his press conferences, the white house press corps failed to properly follow up or make it clear that Bush was being clever when he made these connections and instead laughed and fawned as if they were at a movie star’s press junket.
It was their job to sort that rhetoric out, right as it happened, no matter how unpleasant it might have been. The failure to correct that misimpression (along with dozens of others) led many millions of Americans to support the invasion of Iraq who otherwise might not have. Had the press done its job, acted as the public’s “political consumer” advocate, and put pressure on the administration to explain its claims, the war would likely have happened anyway — they were determined to do it come hell or high water — but Bush would not have won re-election. They made it possible for someone who had lied blatantly to the people in some cases, misled them in others and started a war based upon what turned out to be a completely false premise to hang on long enough to win another term before people belatedly realized they had been taken to the cleaners. That’s quite an achievement. (I’m still waiting for the ethics panel on that subject to be convened — I wonder how that’s coming?)
Anonymous Liberal says he has some ideas as to how to incentivize honesty in politics and I’ll be looking forward to reading it. In the meantime, it’s important that we keep the pressure on the press to do the job that democracy requires it to do. They are getting very stroppy about it, but that’s too bad. When you screw up on this scale you are going to have to take some heat.
After posting yesterday from Henry Adams’s autobiography, published in 1906, I noticed the following sentence in the 1996 introduction by Edmund Morris:
The fact that we keep hearing Adams in them, and recognizing figures from our own time on every other page of The Education (see the uncanny portrait of President Reagan, alias President Grant, on p. 264) is proof of the universality of true art.
On page 264, Adams is telling about a dinner with journalist Adam Badeau, a follower of Grant. In this, I don’t think Reagan is the only modern figure getting nailed, and notice how in the same passage, Adams disproves Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. True literary genius. (Remember, too, that Adams is writing in third person.)
Badeau, who had come to Washington for a consulate which was slow to reach him, resorted more or less to whiskey for encouragement, and became irritable, besides being loquacious. He talked much about Grant, and showed a certain artistic feeling for analysis of character, as a true literary critic would naturally do. Loyal to Grant, and still more so to Mrs. Grant, who acted as his patroness, he said nothing, even when far gone, that was offensive about either, but he held that no one except himself and Rawlins understood the General. To him, Grant appeared as an intermittent energy, immensely powerful when awake, but passive and plastic in repose. He said that neither he nor the rest of the staff knew why Grant succeeded; they believed in him because of his success. For stretches of time, his mind seemed torpid. Rawlins and the others would systematically talk their ideas into it, for weeks, not directly, but by discussion among themselves, in his presence. In the end, he would announce the idea as his own, without seeming conscious of the discussion; and would give the orders to carry it out with all the energy that belonged to his nature. They could never measure his character or be sure when he would act. They could never follow a mental process in his thought. They were not sure that he did think.
In all this, Adams took deep interest, for although he was not, like Badeau, waiting for Mrs. Grant’s power of suggestion to act on the General’s mind in order to germinate in a consulate or a legation, his portrait gallery of great men was becoming large, and it amused him to add an authentic likeness of the greatest general the world had seen since Napoleon. Badeau’s analysis was rather delicate; infinitely superior to that of Sam Ward or Charles Nordhoff.
Badeau took Adams to the White House one evening and introduced him to the President and Mrs. Grant. First and last, he saw a dozen Presidents at the White House, and the most famous were by no means the most agreeable, but he found Grant the most curious object of study among them all. About no one did opinions differ so widely. Adams had no opinion, or occasion to make one. A single word with Grant satisfied him that, for his own good, the fewer words he risked, the better. Thus far in life he had met with but one man of the same intellectual or unintellectual type–Garibaldi. Of the two, Garibaldi seemed to him a trifle the more intellectual, but, in both, the intellect counted for nothing; only the energy counted. The type was pre-intellectual, archaic, and would have seemed so even to the cave-dwellers. Adam, according to legend, was such a man.
In time one came to recognize the type in other men, with differences and variations, as normal; men whose energies were the greater, the less they wasted on thought; men who sprang from the soil to power; apt to be distrustful of themselves and of others; shy; jealous; sometimes vindictive; more or less dull in outward appearance; always needing stimulants, but for whom action was the highest stimulant–the instinct of fight. Such men were forces of nature, energies of the prime, like the Pteraspis, but they made short work of scholars. They had commanded thousands of such and saw no more in them than in others. The fact was certain; it crushed argument and intellect at once.
Adams did not feel Grant as a hostile force; like Badeau he saw only an uncertain one. When in action he was superb and safe to follow; only when torpid he was dangerous. To deal with him one must stand near, like Rawlins, and practice more or less sympathetic habits. Simple-minded beyond the experience of Wall Street or State Street, he resorted, like most men of the same intellectual calibre, to commonplaces when at a loss for expression: “Let us have peace!” or, “The best way to treat a bad law is to execute it”; or a score of such reversible sentences generally to be gauged by their sententiousness; but sometimes he made one doubt his good faith; as when he seriously remarked to a particularly bright young woman that Venice would be a fine city if it were drained. In Mark Twain, this suggestion would have taken rank among his best witticisms; in Grant it was a measure of simplicity not singular. Robert E. Lee betrayed the same intellectual commonplace, in a Virginian form, not to the same degree, but quite distinctly enough for one who knew the American. What worried Adams was not the commonplace; it was, as usual, his own education. Grant fretted and irritated him, like the Terebratula, as a defiance of first principles. He had no right to exist. He should have been extinct for ages. The idea that, as society grew older, it grew one-sided, upset evolution, and made of education a fraud. That, two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant should be called–and should actually and truly be–the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. One must be as commonplace as Grant’s own commonplaces to maintain such an absurdity. The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.
I would say he nailed Reagan, who probably would have been too smart to put Iraq in competition with the general interests of America, but the narrative is too good for Bush, who, when coupled with Reagan, indeed seems to confirm that Darwinism is working in reverse. UPDATE: For balance, see Barbara O’Brien’s excellent post about Grant.UPDATE II: darrelplant provides a link to Grant’s personal memoirs.UPDATE III: Dr. Attaturk weighs in.
I realize that all the cool people think Christmas music is a satanic plot but I am a major fan. I love teh Christmas songs.
So, here’s my random ten on this Christmas morning:
J-i-n-g-l-e Bells — Frank Sinatra The Christmas Song — Nat King Cole Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree — Brenda Lee Oh Holy Night — The Morman Tabernacle Choir Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) — Darlene Love Merry Christmas Baby — Elvis A Chipmunk Christmas — Alvin and the Chipmunks (those of you of a certain age will understand) Rudy The Rednose Reindeer — Dean Martin Little Drummer Boy — Bing Crosby and David Bowie
And if we are lucky, we’ll all be singing this one some Christmas in the near future because it will be true:
Upon visiting the awe-inspiring Chartres Cathedral in France, Henry Adams, intellectual and sage descendant of two presidents, concluded that the Virgin herself was responsible for its creation:
At last we are face to face with the crowning glory of Chartres. Other churches have glass — quantities of it, and very fine — but we have been trying to catch a glimpse of the glory which stands behind the glass of Chartres, and gives it quality and feeling of its own. For once the architect is useless and his explanations are pitiable; the painter helps still less; and the decorator, unless he works in glass, is the poorest guide of all, while, if he works in glass, he is sure to lead wrong; and all of them may toil until Pierre Mauclerc’s stone Christ comes to life, and condemns them among the unpardonable sinners on the southern portal, but neither they nor any other artist will ever create another Chartres. You had better stop here, once for all, unless you are willing to feel that Chartres was made what it is, not by artist, but by the Virgin.
If this imperial presence is stamped on the architecture and the sculpture with an energy not to be mistaken, it radiates through the glass with a light and colour that actually blind the true servant of Mary. One becomes, sometimes, a little incoherent in talking about it; one is ashamed to be as extravagant as one wants to be; one has no business to labour painfully to explain and prove to one’s self what is as clear as the sun in the sky; one loses temper in reasoning about what can only be felt, and what ought to be felt instantly, as it was in the twelfth century, even by the truie qui file and the ane qui vielle. Any one should feel it that wishes; any one who does not wish to feel it can let it alone. Still, it may be that not one tourist in a hundred — perhaps not one in a thousand of the English-speaking race — does feel it, or can feel it even when explained to him, for we have lost many senses.
Edmund Morris, writing the modern-day introduction to Adams’ 1906 autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, which itself was written uniquely in third-person, tells us that Adams was “too rationalistic to be religious,” but adds that he “nevertheless believed in an ordered universe.” Relating Darwin and religion, Morris further stated that Adams’ reaction to Darwinism “was somewhat blunted by an agnostic unsentimentality.” So where, then, did Adams get his expressive awe of the Virgin Mary? Perhaps the answer is revealed in his third-person autobiography, where he talks about the Virgin as a force, or as a symbol of power:
… he knew that only since 1895 had he begun to feel the Virgin or Venus as force, and not everywhere even so. At Chartres — perhaps at Lourdes — possibly at Cnidos if one could still find there the divinely naked Aphrodite of Praxiteles — but otherwise one must look for force to the goddesses of Indian mythology. The idea died out long ago in the German and English stock. St. Gaudens at Amiens was hardly less sensitive to the force of the female energy than Matthew Arnold at the Grande Chartreuse. Neither of them felt goddesses as power — only as reflected emotion, human expression, beauty, purity, taste, scarcely even as sympathy. They felt a railway train as power, yet they, and all other artists, constantly complained that the power embodied in a railway train could never be embodied in art. All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.
Adams then went on to set mortal men apart from the force of the Virgin, and, perhaps too, from women:
Yet in mechanics, whatever the mechanicians might think, both energies acted as interchangeable force on man, and by action on man all known force may be measured. Indeed, few men of science measured force in any other way. After once admitting that a straight line was the shortest distance between two points, no serious mathematician cared to deny anything that suited his convenience, and rejected no symbol, unproved or unproveable, that helped him to accomplish work. The symbol was force, as a compass-needle or a triangle was force, as the mechanist might prove by losing it, and nothing could be gained by ignoring their value. Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the greatest force the Western world ever felt, and had drawn man’s activities to herself more strongly than any other power, natural or supernatural, had ever done; the historian’s business was to follow the track of the energy; to find where it came from and where it went to; its complex source and shifting channels; its values, equivalents, conversions. It could scarcely be more complex than radium; it could hardly be deflected, diverted, polarized, absorbed more perplexingly than other radiant matter. Adams knew nothng about any of them, but as a mathematical problem of influence on human progress, though all were occult, all reacted on his mind, and he rather inclined to think the Virgin easiest to handle.
Nearing the end of the introduction, Morris writes about Adams:
It is his confidence that Chaos can be controlled, once its hidden energies are understood and embraced, which speaks to us even now, even more than his exquisite prose style. We, no less than the disillusioned generation that made The Education a phenomenal bestseller in the years immediately after World War I, are confronted by a future that seems to reject old certainties. Just as Adams’ first readers had to adjust to a fairly complete transformation of the world’s social and political order, so must his latest confront such imponderables as, say, the decline of print culture in the West, and the unbalancing of the gender equilibrium in Eastern abortion clinics.
One may take such new issues and leaf through The Education in search of applicable wisdom. Almost at once the book falls open at:
Of all movements of inertia, maternity and reproduction are the most typical, and women’s property of moving in a constant line forever is ultimate, uniting history in its only unbroken and unbreakable sequence. Whatever else stops, the woman must go on reproducing, as she did in the Siluria of Pteraspis; sex is a vital condition, and race only a local one. If the laws of inertia are to be sought anywhere with certainty, it is in the feminine mind.
By his shock use of the word mind, instead of body, Adams at once transmits a message of comfort. Unable as he naturally was to imagine social engineering by sonogram, his faith in das ewig Weibliche, and his “Dynamic Theory of History” (which perfectly fits today’s explosion of cybercommunications), persuade us that sooner or later, oppressed women in China and India will get wired, and wise to, the manipulation of their wombs by men.
Now I understand everything.
May the force (de femme) be with you.
Merry Christmas. UPDATE: For clarity, I should be more explicit in saying that I believe Adams was fascinated by the power of the female, or das ewig Weibliche. I do not think that Adams was endorsing religion. I believe he was laying out a connection between the female role in the continuity of history, the symbolic power of the Virgin, and the role of men, who historically have always had to be busy ‘doing things’ — like building churches and burning bridges. As people here have probably gathered, I am not a religious person and what Adams penned above helps convince me of the practical manifestations of religion, both good and bad.
A pole war is threatening to ruin Festivus. Three manufacturers of the holiday decoration invented in a 1997 “Seinfeld” episode are in a battle over who deserves the right to trademark the name “Festivus pole.”
On Dec. 26, 2005, Mountainmen Enterprises of Belle Vernon, Pa., applied to trademark the term for its metal holiday ornaments.
Nine months later, the Wagner Companies of Milwaukee, Wis., filed a counterclaim, saying it had been selling Festivus poles well before then.
Enter TheFestivusPole.com of Arlington, Va., which says its online business pre-dates Wagner’s.
Three weeks ago, after Mountainmen failed to respond, the Patent and Trademark Office ruled for Wagner, though Mountainmen has until Jan. 6 to appeal.
This is actually in keeping with one of the most important Festivus rituals — the airing of the grievances.
Eleanor Clift put together a column in which she outlines a few of the Bush administration lies for the year. (I’m sure we could come up with a list that goes on for days with that one.) But what is more interesting to me is the following:
The administration had the media snookered much of the time. Stories that were underreported largely because they ran counter to administration spin include:
A study that shows the death toll among Iraqis has reached as high as 655,000. Extensively researched by teams of doctors commissioned by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Md., the study—and the controversy over its sampling methodology—was given scant attention by the media because it was so far out of line from the administration’s projection of perhaps 50,000 civilian deaths. That’s still a horrendous death toll of innocents in a country the size of Iraq. Now, 100 bodies routinely turn up every day in Baghdad’s morgues, the victims of sectarian violence, and the report, published in October in The Lancet medical journal, seems to be closer to the truth than anything the Bush administration has acknowledged.
Private contractors in Iraq. There are 100,000 government contractors in Iraq, a number that rivals the 140,000 U.S. soldiers in the country. It’s dangerous work; some 650 contractors have died there. They do a lot of the jobs the military used to do, everything from providing security and interrogating prisoners to cooking meals for the soldiers. They work for military contractors like KBR and DynCorp International, which are helping train the Iraqi police force. This is the largest contingent of civilians ever operating in a battlefield environment, and there’s been no congressional oversight or accountability. That should change with the Democrats taking over the investigative committees on Capitol Hill. The abuses may be just waiting to be uncovered.
America’s secret torture prisons, whose existence Bush acknowledged as part of his tough-guy campaigning this fall. Set up in the aftermath of 9/11 to hold suspected terrorists indefinitely, the legality, morality and practicality of these so-called “black sites” have come under scrutiny. After a brief flurry about the use of torture tactics like “water boarding,” where a prisoner is made to feel he’s drowning, the story of these CIA-operated overseas prisons faded. Yet they contributed to the central tragedy of the Bush administration, the collapse of America’s standing around the world.
I would add the anti-science campaign being waged by the Republicans and the return of the Taliban to that list.
Anyone care to add more? (I’ll print the entire list in a couple of days, just for fun.)
Update: Theresa at Making Light made a list earlier of underreported stories. Some of them run counter to administration spin and some are just plain underreported. I hadn’t heard of a couple of them and I read a lot of papers.