A few short extracts from Vonnegut’s book A Man Without a Country for some Labor Day thinking:
Most Americans don’t know what the socialists did during the first half of the past century with art, with eloquence, with organizing skills, to elevate the self-respect, the dignity and political acumen of American wage earners, of our working class. … “Socialism” is no more an evil word than “Christianity.” Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve. … Get a load of this. Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was not yet four, ran five times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, almost 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:
As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.
As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it.
As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?
When you get out of bed each morning, with the roosters crowing, wouldn’t you like to say, “As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
How about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.
And so on
Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld stuff.
For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes be posted anywhere.
“Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break! .. I did get to know one socialist … Powers Hapgood of Indianapolis. He was a typical Hoosier idealist, like Debs, was a middle-class person who thought there could be more economic justice in this country. He wanted a better country, that’s all.
After graduating from Harvard, he went to work as a coal miner, urging his working-class brothers to organize in order to get better pay and safer working conditions. He also led protesters at the execution of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in Massachusetts in 1927.
Hapgood’s family owned a successful cannery in Indianapolis, and when Powers Hapgood inherited it, he turned it over to the employees, who ruined it.
We met in Indianapolis after the end of the Second World War. He had become an official in the CIO. There had been some sort of dust-up on a picket line, and he was testifying about it in court, and the judge stops everything and asks him, “Mr. Hapgood, here you are, you’re a graduate of Harvard. Why would anyone with your advantages choose to live as you have?” Hapgood answered the judge: “Why, because of the Sermon on the Mount, Sir.”
Oh my. Lee Siegel has been dethroned. I once resigned from the blogofascist empire in deference to the Great Man and was only persuaded to return so that I might blog in the grand Siegellian tradition and teach those worthless young would-be writers from knock-about origins a thing or two about culture and talent. Now he is gone and I am adrift. Should I stay and carry on the fight? Or should I leave again in solidarity with my mentor, brother and inspiration?
While I ponder the thought of an internet without Lee Siegel, in honor of the Great Man, I’d like to remind you blogofascists of what you’ll be missing:
You’d think that staring into the mirror and repeating your name over and over would have the opposite effect of helping you get out of yourself, but that’s not the case. The idea is to find a place so deep inside yourself that, with intense concentration, you look to yourself like a stranger. Your very name becomes an alien phrase. Physically, you start to seem imaginary. Spiritually, you start to seem more real. Hoffenshtoffen suggests keeping a packed suitcase standing in the middle of your apartment as a symbolic reminder of that magical fulfillment, self-surrender, when you leave yourself utterly and travel in a trancelike state to pure objective reception of the outer world.
Sounds silly and pretentiously spirituel, I know. But extricating oneself from oneself is the great problem of human life. Buddha’s name for the smothering, clamoring self was “desire”; Plato’s was “appetite”; Rousseau’s was “reason.” (The translations are Sylvester Cointreau’s.) William James, my favorite American writer, wearily wrote to a friend toward the end of his life that the human ego had begun to repel him. I sort of feel like that sometimes. That’s why, more and more, I love the sound of laughter. Not withering, or cruel, or exclusive, knowing laughter. I mean ego-bursting laughter that is like wisdom speaking in slang.
So who is this person staring back at me from the mirror in my bathroom? My lips are small and thin; Maya likes the way the upper lip protrudes slightly over the lower one. Carmencita likes the lower lip, but she also wants me to wear cologne. A certain roundness and softness to my face always bothered me. I wanted to look hard and lean and chiseled, just as I wanted to have that invincible steel will of Central European intellectuals like Arthur Koestler, and not all that moist, tremulous high (and low) feeling I’ve inherited from my Russian-Jewish forebears. Everyone in my family is vibrato; there is not a note blanche to be found in our entire genetic pool. Weeping was a form of communication. One sob meant hello, two sobs meant good-bye, three sobs meant “There’s a call for you,” and so forth. Hoffenshtoffen, who gets bored by lachrymosity, says that I was born with a silver violin in my mouth.
“ONCE Toto parts the curtain, the Wizard of Oz can never be the wizard again. He is forever Professor Marvel, blowhard and snake-oil salesman. Hurricane Katrina, which is likely to endure in the American psyche as long as L. Frank Baum’s mythic tornado, has similarly unmasked George W. Bush.”
LIMBAUGH: I love these kinds of stories, ’cause we’re just getting them all over the place: Waistlines continue to grow in the United States. Another crisis story here, ladies and gentlemen, from our old buddies at the Associated Press. “The gravy train — make that the sausage, biscuits, and gravy train — just keep [sic] on rolling in most of America last year.” Thirty-one states showing an increase in obesity. Mississippi continued to lead the way; an estimated 30 percent of adults there are considered obese, an increase of 1.1 percentage points when compared with last year’s report. Indeed, “the five states with the highest obesity rates are Mississippi, Alabama, West Virginia, Louisiana, and Kentucky — exhibit much higher rates of poverty than the national norm. Meanwhile, the five states with the lowest obesity have less poverty. They are Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont.”
[…]
LIMBAUGH: I think you might then say that the obesity crisis could be the fault of government, liberal government. Food stamps, all those — you know, I’m gonna tell you people a story. I — just, well, the government, you could say, is killing these people because we know obesity kills, and the government’s killing the poor. The Bush administration is killing the poor with too much food.
Notice that the Bush administration is now “liberal government,” and that he fails to acknowledge the fact that the poorest states are all Republican.
I won’t even mention the irony of a guy like Limbaugh — who makes more than 25 million a year — talking about obesity being caused by poverty.
“You’re Doin’ A Heckuva Job Brownie:” One Year Ago Today
by digby
Bush congratulated Brownie even though he had just viewed a DVD with highlights of horrors on the ground on AF One as he made his way to the Gulf for the above photo-op:
The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.
Rove took over handling the crisis and immediately got to work on the most important priority:
In a reflection of what has long been a hallmark of Mr. Rove’s tough political style, the administration is also working to shift the blame away from the White House and toward officials of New Orleans and Louisiana who, as it happens, are Democrats.
”The way that emergency operations act under the law is the responsibility and the power, the authority, to order an evacuation rests with state and local officials,” Mr. Chertoff said in his television interview. ”The federal government comes in and supports those officials.”
That line of argument was echoed throughout the day, in harsher language, by Republicans reflecting the White House line.
In interviews, these Republicans said that the normally nimble White House political operation had fallen short in part because the president and his aides were scattered outside Washington on vacation, leaving no one obviously in charge at a time of great disruption. Mr. Rove and Mr. Bush were in Texas, while Vice President Dick Cheney was at his Wyoming ranch.
Mr. Bush’s communications director, Nicolle Devenish, was married this weekend in Greece, and a number of Mr. Bush’s political advisers — including Ken Mehlman, the Republican National Committee chairman — attended the wedding.
Ms. Rice did not return to Washington until Thursday, after she was spotted at a Broadway show and shopping for shoes, an image that Republicans said buttressed the notion of a White House unconcerned with tragedy.
These officials said that Mr. Bush and his political aides rapidly changed course in what they acknowledged was a belated realization of the situation’s political ramifications. As is common when this White House confronts a serious problem, management was quickly taken over by Mr. Rove and a group of associates including Mr. Bartlett. Neither man responded to requests for comment.
The first official talking point, however, was to blame the victims. I wrote that morning:
I heard this shocking exchange between Aaron Brown and Jamie MacIntyre last night too, and was stunned. There is clearly a culture of pass-the-buck whining about military failure taking over the Pentagon if their first reaction is to complain about partisanship…this was an official talking point. On Thursday, September 1st, three days after the scope of the disaster was well known, George W. Bush sent his disaster officials out to the media with the instructions that they were to blame the victims — the same day that we were seeing dead bodies and dehydrated children all over our television sets.
Here’s the exchange I was talking about:
MCINTYRE: And as to your question about political, I talked to a lot of people at the Pentagon today who were very frustrated about the fact that the perception was being created that the military didn’t move fast enough. And they did it somewhat as political. They thought that part of the motivation was the critics of the administration to make the president look bad.
And they seemed to question the motives of some of our reporters who were out there and hearing these stories from the victims about why they had so much sympathy for the victims, and not as much sympathy for the challenges that the government met in meeting this challenge.
And I have to say thinking about that, it doesn’t really seem all that unusual that you would tend to understand the plight of the victims a little more than the bureaucrats in Washington.
BROWN: Yes, I mean, I’m glad you told us that. And they have every right to believe they believe and think the way they think. I mean, and I mean that. But you’ve got people who have been living as refugees. It is not hard to understand why our first heart beat goes in their direction. We’ll worry about the bureaucrats later.
That night, I watched in abject horror as Shepard Smith and Geraldo on Fox Newsof all places, reported on conditions so horrible that you could not believe it was America in 2005. I wrote:
Bill O’Reilly is trying with all his might to make this story about “thugs” and bad Democrats but both Fox news reporters on the ground are having none of it. Shepard Smith and Steve Harrigan are both insisting that the story is about people dying and starving on the streets of New Orleans. Smith is particularly upset that the mayor sent buses to the Hyatt today and took tourists over to the Superdome and let them off at the front of the line.
O’Reilly says “you sound so bitter” and said they need a strong leader like Rudy Giuliani. Smith replies that what they needed “on the first day was food and water and what they needed on the second day was food and water and what they needed on the third day was food and water.”
O’Reilly is practically rolling his eyes with impatience at Smith’s pussified outrage about the plight of a bunch of losers who were asking for it. He really, really wants to talk about scary black boogeymen and steppin-fetchit politicans. It doesn’t work out. He looks relieved to move over to the Natalee Holloway story.
[…]
Sean’s up now and he’s equally uncomfortable with Shep’s story about the thousands still stuck on freeways and bridges with no food and water — who have been ignored for days now. He’s been covering one single bridge for days and nobody knows why they haven’t been helped yet. He’s almost shrill.
Now Geraldo comes on and he freaks out, begging the authorities to let people still stuck at the convention center walk out of town. Shep comes back and he says they have checkpoints set up turning people back to the city if they try. (wtf?) They are both on the verge of tears.
Sean says they need to get some perspective and Shep screams at him “this is the perspective!”
This was some amazing TV. Kudos to Shep Smith and Geraldo for not letting O’Reilly and Hannity spin their GOP “resolve” apologia bullshit. I’m fairly shocked.
Watch it again over at Crooks and Liars. It’s still hard to believe.
Meanwhile, over at The Corner:
NOT A NATIONAL DISGRACE [Rich Lowry] A dissent from this column I wrote yesterday:
It is not. It is – or ought to be – a disgrace and an embarrassment to Louisiana and New Orleans. I see the way Florida prepares for and responds to hurricanes; I see the way Mississippi and Alabama are dealing with this one; I’ve seen the Carolinas and Virginia deal with hurricanes, too. I’ve been in Miami and Norfolk when hurricanes hit, though not as severe as this one, and seen folks come together to support each other in the crisis. I see the outpouring of support from surrounding states and from the federal government heading to Louisiana as fast as it can.
And then I see citizens of New Orleans shooting, raping, burning, and plundering while their government officials stand by helplessly…
Of course, nobody actually “saw” any of this, because it didn’t happen.
Earlier I referenced the book Liberty and Freedom in which the author, David Hackett Fischer, differentiates the meanings of the words liberty and freedom. He first describes a simplistic , libertarian definition wherein each word implies “a power of choice, an ability to exercise one’s will.” This definition, if acted out, lends advantage to people of privilege and means. As I indicated before, however, Fischer goes how to describe other ways in which the original meanings of liberty and freedom were distinct from one another:
“Liberty … meant unbounded, unrestricted, and released from restraint … to loosen a set of bonds … the condition of being independent, separate, and distinct … not ruled by another’s will … some degree of separation and independence.”
…
“Freedom has another origin … which meant dear or beloved … someone who was joined to a tribe of free people by ties of kinship and rights of belonging.”
…
“In that respect, the original meanings of freedom and liberty were not merely different but opposed. Liberty meant separation. Freedom implied connection.”
Fischer goes on to lay down what I think is a very sharp demarkation between responsible Americans on the one hand, and unfeeling libertarians and libertines, the President included, on the other:
“It is interesting (and urgently important for us to understand in the modern world) that these ancient traditions of liberty and freedom both entailed obligations and responsibilities. But they did so differently. The gift of [liberty] brought with it an obligation to act in a wise and responsible way–not as a libertine. A person with liberty was responsible for his own acts.”
“A person who was born to freedom in an ancient tribe had a sacred obligation to serve and support the folk, and to keep the customs of a free people, and to respect the rights of others on pain of banishment. In modern America too many people have forgotten this side of our inheritance. They think of liberty as license without responsibility, and freedom as entitlement without obligation. To think this in the modern world is to remember only half of these ancient traditions.”
All of the above was included in Fischer’s introduction. Six-hundred pages and many essays later he penned the following composition. Long time readers of Hullabaloo will recognize its theme as one contained in more than a few of Digby’s previous posts:
Massive Resistance
White Citizens Councils and Visions of Southern Liberty
States Rights and Southern Liberty Impeach Earl Warren.
—-Southern Bumper Sticker
In the deep south, many whites turned strongly against civil rights. The result was a fierce collision between two social movements. Once again, as so often before in America, each side passionately believed that it was the true defender of liberty and freedom. The conservative reaction began to grow immediately after the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision in 1954. It kept on growing through the late 1950s and accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s. Moderate politicians fell silent. Even Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy kept very quiet and failed to give the country the leadership it needed in a critical moment. Eisenhower reluctantly enforced integration decisions but told his friends that the appointment of Earl Warren as chief justice was the greatest mistake of his career. Kennedy was appalled by the violence of the white southerners against the first Freedom Riders in 1961 and sent six hundred federal marshals to Alabama after southern leaders refused to restore order. But he also tried to shut down the Freedom Marches and sent a peremptory order to his civil rights advisor, Harris Wofford. “Call it off!” President Kennedy demanded. “Stop them! Get your friends off those buses.” Kennedy felt that the Freedom Rides were “embarrassing” before his Summit meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. In another episode, African diplomats on the road between Washington and New York complained of Jim Crow in restaurants along Maryland highways. President Kennedy replied, “Tell them to fly!”
With those attitudes in the Oval Office during the presidencies of Eisenhower and Kennedy, and with open encouragement for massive resistance from southern governors such as Orval Faubus in Arkansas, Ross Barnett in Mississippi, and George Wallace in Alabama, smoldering pockets of southern racism suddenly burst into flame. White supremacy organizations multiplied below the Mason-Dixon line. The Ku Klux Klan became active again. These groups turned to terror and violence as a tool for crippling the civil rights movement. Arsonists burned black churches and Jewish synagogues. Assassins murdered civil rights leaders. Bombs killed and maimed black children in schools and homes. This violence was done with strong support from some wealthy and powerful people throughout the southern states.
The ideology of the southern conservative movement was cast in libertarian terms: liberty from the hated federal government and especially the Supreme Court; liberty from “outside agitators and “ni**er equality”; liberty for “states’ rights” and “southern rights.” Its rhetoric reached back to the iconography of southern independence in the Civil War. So also did its symbols. A modern revision of the old Confederate battle flag became the leading emblem of white supremacy and massive resistance. It claimed a kinship with Robert E. Lee, but this was not the old four-square “stainless banner” that had been carried with honor by the Army of Northern Virginia in the Civil War. This was something different, a twentieth-century polyester Jim Crow flag with rectangular proportions that were ironically closer to the Stars and Stripes than to the old Confederate battle flags. The southern flag of massive resistance was a new image, invented for a second civil war and quickly adopted by racist movements in many parts of the world.
The iconography of massive resistance was complex. An example appeared in a photograph by Cecil Williams of a run-down rural gas station at Sandy Run in Calhoun County, South Carolina. It served whites only; in some parts of the Deep South even gas pumps were segregated by race. The windows of the battered building bore many images: a devotional portrait of Jesus, a modern Jim Crow flag of massive resistance, angry bumper stickers for white supremacist candidates, and defiant racist slogans.
In the twentieth century, these symbols inspired a new civil war within the South. On one side were very angry southern whites who used extreme violence as an instrument of repression. The beatings and bombings and murders were mostly the work of downtrodden poor whites whose only claim to distinction was that they were not black. They were funded and protected by southern leaders of wealth and power.
On the other side were southern blacks and white liberals who chose the weapons of nonviolence during the 1950s and early 1960s, at a heavy cost but with ultimate success. These contending groups were very different in many ways, but the two warring southern movements for civil rights and white supremacy shared a common heritage. Both were were strongly Christian and evangelical and quoted the same Bible. Both had deep roots in American history and shared a strong sense of rights and entitlements. Both were very southern in speech and manner. But in other ways, the contrast could not have been more complete. Here was a collision of rage against reason, hatred against love, brutality against humanity, force against nonviolence. It was also a conflict of separation against integration, hierarchy against equality, and liberty against freedom.
I am officially an idiot. (Not news to many of you, I’m sure.) I really believed that the duelling pageants would benefit the Democrats. I felt that the newer Katrina story, replete with horror stories of people still unable to go home, piles of rubble remaining on the streets, and journalists who saw themselves as the heroic center of the story last year would lead to a surfeit of Katrina stories that would rend the heart and remind everyone that Bush failed in his most basic mission — stepping in to help its citizens in a time of such great crisis that the normal functions of everyday life are disrupted. I was wrong.
After a series of perfunctory stories and a couple of plodding Bush speeches, the official anniversary is over.
Yet, it was exactly one year ago today that this was unfolding:
“Just moments ago at the Ferragamo on 5th Avenue, Condoleeza Rice was seen spending several thousands of dollars on some nice, new shoes (we’ve confirmed this, so her new heels will surely get coverage from the WaPo’s Robin Givhan). A fellow shopper, unable to fathom the absurdity of Rice’s timing, went up to the Secretary and reportedly shouted, ‘How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!’”
While Condi was shoe shopping, we were all seeing this on our television screens:
President Bush appeared on Good Morning America that morning and made his famous statement “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” The Washington Post also reported Bush’s stern warning:
He also warned Gulf Coast residents, including those searching for water and food, not to break into businesses or commit other crimes during the crisis.
“There ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this,” Bush said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
“If people need water and food, we’re going to do everything we can to get them water and food,” Bush added. “It’s very important for the citizens in all affected areas to take personal responsibility and assume a kind of a civic sense of responsibility so that the situation doesn’t get out of hand, so people don’t exploit the vulnerable.”
The president of the United States “warned” people not to break into businesses for food and water. Can you imagine such a thing?
This kind of talk was rampant that day, and it resulted in delaying aid as relief workers and rescuers refused to enter the allegedly lawless city. It was later verified that this was almost all nonsense, which anyone could have guessed considering that there were cameras all over New Orleans and none of them were capturing any of this alleged violence. The only thing we saw was some casual looting in tennis shoe stores and Wal-Mart. But that didn’t stop the media from breathlessly reporting it as if it were true. And the rightwing ate it up.
Here was what Peggy Noonan was vomiting up that day:
As for the tragic piggism that is taking place on the streets of New Orleans, it is not unbelievable but it is unforgivable, and I hope the looters are shot. A hurricane cannot rob a great city of its spirit, but a vicious citizenry can. A bad time with Mother Nature can leave you digging out for a long time, but a bad turn in human behavior frays and tears all the ties that truly bind human being–trust, confidence, mutual regard, belief in the essential goodness of one’s fellow citizens.
[…]
We had a bad time in the 1960s, and in the New York blackout in the ’70s, and in the Los Angeles riots in the ’90s. But the whole story of our last national crisis, 9/11, was courage–among the passersby, among the firemen, among those who walked down there stairs slowly to help a less able colleague, among those who fought their way past the flames in the Pentagon to get people out. And it gave us quite a sense of who we are as a people. It gave us a lot of renewed pride.
If New Orleans damages that sense, it’s going to be painful to face. It’s going to be damaging to the national spirit. More damaging even than a hurricane, even than the worst in decades
I was getting a little bit crispy by the time I read that and so I replied:
Yes, nothing must be allowed to blemish the steely-eyed rocket man’s moment of pulsating, wet-making glory.
Here are a couple of people you won’t have to waste a bullet on, you fucking privileged asshole:
I don’t know if all of you have seen the footage today from the convention center in New Orleans, but it is shocking. There are dead bodies lying all over the place. People are waiting for help and the only people who’ve come in there are news crews and Harry Connick Jr. (And fuck you Michele Malkin.) It’s a living hell.
The MSNNC reporter just said that he counted 82 buses lined up outside the city waiting to go in to evacuate people from the convention center but they won’t go because they’ve been told it isn’t safe.
On 9/11 we had cops and firefighters running into collapsing buildings to rescue people. Today, days after the crisis hit, I’m watching people with little babies desperate for food and water and nobody is coming in to help them.
What in the hell is going on?
Perhaps this comment by Homeland Security chief Chertoff explains the Bush administration’s slow motion response:
“The critical thing was to get people out of there before the disaster,” he said on NBC’s Today program. “Some people chose not to obey that order. That was a mistake on their part.”
For Christ’s sake the tourists couldn’t get out either. All the rental cars were booked and the airport was closed. Lucky for them, most of them were staying in high rise hotels and they rode out the storm. And now they have someplace to go — home. The locals who didn’t have cars aren’t quite so lucky, are they?
I think Chertoff’s comment says everything we need to know about how this government viewed this catastrophe. “We told ’em to get out; if they refused (or couldn’t) they brought this on themselves.” That’s the Republican philosophy in a nutshell. “You’re on your own, losers.”
I think Americans expect more of their government than that. That comment should be hung around the necks of these poor planning, corruption spreading, deficit spending, budget slashing, warwmongering, tax cutting assholes like a dead Louisiana pelican.
I’m even more angry about this than I was a year ago. Let’s hope most Americans are too and we tell these fearmongering bastards just what we think of them this November. This can’t ever be allowed to happen again.
* The second picture above is different from the one I originally posted of a man holding a baby standing next to the body of a dead man. I had linked to the yahoo site and I can’t locate it now.
The other day, in flacking his upcoming addresses on the importance of sending more of America’s children home to their moms in body ba- sorry – transfer tubes for no reason whatsoever, Crawford’s Own Churchill said:
These are important times, and I seriously hope people wouldn’t politicize these issues I’m going to talk about…
The only sensible response is to repeat Dick Cheney’s immortal words:
Most readers of blogs like this one know that the question “Was the US founded as a Christian nation?” is a joke. Not so many a newspaper editor or tv producer, who regularly permit the likes of James Dobson or Tim LaHaye to get away with asserting without contradiction that the founders were devout Christians. David L. Holmes’s happily concise new book, The Faiths of the Founding Fathers should serve as a useful corrective. He doesn’t exactly come out and say that the christianists are lying about the religious beliefs of the Founders, but that’s only because he doesn’t have to. The facts he amasses speak for themselves. However, given the nearly telegraphic, dispassionate style of the book (it contains neither an introduction nor a final chapter to summarize and assess what’s discussed), some reading-betwixt-the-lines and deduction is called for, on occasion. The book is packed with information, but I’ll discuss only one part of it here, which I think is the core of the book.
What were the Founders’ faith? In a chapter amusingly entitled “A Layperson’s Guide to Distinguishing a Deist From an Orthodox Christian,” Holmes, a professor of Religious Studies at William and Mary, writes
The religious beliefs of the founders seem to have fallen into three categories: Non-Christian Deism, Christian Deism, and orthodox Christianity.
What’s Deism? Holmes quotes the immortal Tom Paine:
Its creed is pure and sublimely simple. It believes in God and there it rests. It honours Reason [and] it avoids all presumptuous beliefs and rejects, as the fabulous inventions of men, all books pretending to revelation.
In his comments elsewhere, Holmes explicitly states that Deism cannot be considered a Christian religion as it rejects too much that is explicitly Christian, including the divine authority of the Bible. In other words, Deism’s pretty close to the bare minimum one can believe if one claims to be at all religious.
“Orthodox Christianity” is kind of a vague, catch-all term that includes both Roman Catholic and Protestant beliefs (it has nothing to do with Eastern Orthodox Christianity; it refers to how closely a belief system cleaves to western Christian orthodoxy). Unlike, perhaps, “Orthodox Judaism,” a follower of orthodox Christianity in Holmes’s sense need not be especially devout or observant, but rather must simply accept as true at least some aspects of the New Testament or traditional Christian belief. For instance, if you accept Jesus’s divinity but not the doctrine of transubstantiation, you could be thought an orthodox Christian, according to the way Holmes uses it, as opposed to a radical Deist.
Occasionally, I’ve seen the term used by christianists to confuse people, but Holmes, who is no christianist, uses “orthodox Christian” in a very specfic way, essentially to differentiate styles (or depths) of Deistic belief. In other words, when it comes to the Founders, Deism is the normative religious belief system, not Christianity. Therefore, the concept of some kind of generalized “orthodox Christianity” is helpful, not in uniting Christians politically as the christianists desire, but solely in demonstrating how the Founders’ beliefs deviate from strictly defined Deism. The term simply serves Holmes’ purpose in pointing to ways that the Founders privileged the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible in various subtle, perhaps even unconscious, ways. As his book makes abundantly clear, nearly all of the major male figures involved in the Revolution were Deists.* However, it wasn’t a consistent or organized theology; almost by definition, it couldn’t be. Many of them went to at least some church services (even if they didn’t take Communion) or maintained ties to the church of their youth. Many, including Franklin, held to beliefs that, strictly speaking, weren’t reasonable but supernatural. These are, according to Holmes, intimations of Orthodox Christianity within their Deism. They modulate their Deism and give some of the Founder’s beliefs a “Christian Deist” bent. But that does not make them pious, devout, or practicing Christians. Holmes goes to considerable lengths to demonstrate that assertions of specifically Christian piety for many of the Founders are baseless.
The religious beliefs of the Founders were highly individualized, and often a contradictory muddle, like the beliefs of most Americans today, and quite unlike the sclerotic and highly politicized irrationalism of modern christianists. Indeed, after finishing Holmes’ book, one can’t escape the conclusion that the decision to omit explicitly Christian references from the Declaration of Independence (and insert explicitly Deistic ones) was deliberate and supported even by those Founders with radically different beliefs, such as Jefferson and Adams. Furthermore, the fact that God is not mentioned in the Constitution was also deliberate. “We forgot,” Hamilton once quipped. Well, perhaps they did, but certainly on purpose.
But as I read him, Holmes goes even further. It is abundantly clear from the structure of the book, only in the most general sense are the three categories Holmes proposes (Deist, Deist Christian, orthodox Christian) equally populated by influential Founders. In fact, most of the “orthodox Christians” were women who, like it or not, had no direct power.** In short, regarding religion, Christianity per se was important to the mindset of the most influential founders, but more important still was the non-Christian religion of Deism, which most believed to a greater or lesser extent.***
And so, once again, when one examines the hysterical debates perpetrated on the country by the extreme Right, there is no there there. Yes, of course, it is a mistake to equate the non-rigorous religious thinking of the Founders with atheism or “secularism.” But here’s the point: Holmes can’t find anyone important to quote who makes such a basic error, not even the “secular humanist” journal Free Inquiry. Yes, as quoted in Holmes’ book, Gordon C. Wood, in The Radicalism of the American Revolution, appears to overstate the case for the Founders’ disinterest in organized religion and belief. However, Holmes cites numerous cases of important figures in the Revolution who avoided religous confirmation or failed to mention the consolations of religion at moments of personal crisis. Conclusion: Wood certainly did not exaggerate by much.
On the other hand, the quotes Holmes provides from the christianist LaHaye’s writings – “even secular humanists would have to admit to the religious (particularly Christian) origins of this nation” – stands exposed as just so much wildly inaccurate blather. Far more important to the origins of “this nation” is the liberal project of the Enlightenment, particularly Deism and perhaps most importantly, the consummately Enlightenment values of religious freedom and toleration (not the same thing). These values, clearly at the core of nearly every Founders’ political credo, are nowhere close to being a central part of orthodox Christianity, where the divinity of Christ, belief in the Bible’s authority, and belief in the moral truth of Christ’s and Paul’s teachings hold sway.
Holmes’s book also has a notable Epilogue in which he briefly describes the religious life of every president from Ford to the present one. Most readers of this blog will probably find that he is grossly unfair to the Democrats.**** But what I also noticed was a much stronger level of criticism of Republicans (even of Reagan!) than is common in many books that examine religion and politics from a religious/evangelical perspective. And so, whatever reservations I might have about certain details, I couldn’t help concluding that the entire book was a stinging critique of the religous right, written in a non-polemical style to attract those people – such as network tv producers, Fox News types, and the more gullible segments of their audience – who may have been bamboozled into taking scoundrels like LaHaye, Dobson, Falwell, and Robertson as serious theologians or social commentators.
If you have any interest in the religious beliefs of the Founders or any doubt as to how idiotic the notion that the US was founded as a Christian nation really is, you really should pick up this short, and intelligently written, book.
*The three most notable exceptions in Holmes’ book were Samuel Adams, John Jay, and Patrick Henry. As was Elias Boudinot, the president of the Continental Congress and a foe of Paine’s. The presidents were all Deists of one stripe or another.
**Holmes provides several good reasons why a disparity of belief along gender lines occurred. What were they? Read the book (grin).
***Was the US founded as a Deist nation? That’s a slightly more interesting question, perhaps, than whether it was founded as Christian nation, but the answer is emphatically “no.” Holmes’s book makes clear that the Founders had as little interest in foisting Deism on Americans as they did Christianity. The US was established as a civil government that deliberately separated church from state. Duh.
**** He makes a minor error, neglecting to mention that William Sloane Coffin had no recollection of a conversation in which Bush claims that Reverend Coffin insulted his father. As discussed elsewhere, I go further that that and strongly suspect Bush was lying.
The point being made is that how the Iraq war is characterized can help determine the likelihood of Congress to continue its support for the war, and also, and perhaps more significantly, help determine the likelihood of American voters to continue sacrificing their children in someone else’s war.
Basically, DfCT’s post deconstructs how the Republicans got to their desired new framing, the one being promulgated by GWB’s current speech campaign, where the Chief Executive offers perfumed pink clouds as an antidote for administration-induced fear. DfCT then goes on to suggest the alternative frame by quoting from a News and Observer op-ed:
Facts have also accumulated to conspire against the administration’s preferred frame. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi of al-Qaeda in Iraq is dead, Iraqis are killing each other at a much greater rate (approximately 3,400 per month) than they are killing U.S. troops, and American generals have admitted the possibility of a “civil war” fought along sectarian lines.
The generals’ frank admission has created a temporally limited opportunity for critics of the war to reframe the conflict and begin to credibly discuss disengagement alternatives.
Republican Sen. John Warner of Virginia apparently seized upon this potential when he recently speculated that the president might need a new statutory authorization from Congress legitimizing American involvement in a nascent Iraqi civil war. Acknowledgment of a civil war would truncate the U.S. intervention into three phases: a major combat operations victory, a counterinsurgency campaign draw, and a civil war of which many Americans want no part and legislators did not approve.
This recognition offers an opportunity (for either side of the aisle) to reframe the war as a humanitarian intervention with questionable prospects for success. Ample research has shown that Americans are less tolerant of casualties in this type of war — suggesting that they might be persuaded the time has come to begin the process of disengaging from Iraq.
Isn’t using the term “civil war” a wedge tactic that could gain bipartisan support, and one which the Dems should fully exploit? DemFromCt says yes, and says it much better than I can. Inquisitive political minds should read the full post in order to capture its saliency.
By the way, who said this: ” … the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people … is a reason to help the Iraqis but it’s not a reason to put American kids’ lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it.”
