Fifty-One: Interrogare redux

[Office of Literary Agent.]

AGENT    I’m sorry, but the play just doesn’t work.

AUTHOR    Why not? This is my most important work, Andrea; you liked the other pieces. What’s wrong with this one?

AGENT    Well, it just doesn’t work as a play. It’s like watching paint dry, or having to sit through “My Dinner with Andre” for the fifth time.

AUTHOR    Well, I liked that movie. I am not sure I could sit through it five times, but I have done it three, at least.

AGENT    But this is like a political dialogue, a lot of talking, about Empire and things people don’t care about anymore. And there’s no dramatic action.

AUTHOR    What do you mean? The protagonist gets hanged, and the antagonist is arrested for exposing himself. What more do you need?

AGENT    Well, that would be fine, but they happen at the end, and the build up has nothing dramatic.

AUTHOR    There’s an interrogation of a major historical figure. Isn’t that dramatic?

AGENT    It’s like you and me sitting here chatting; it doesn’t feel like an interrogation.

AUTHOR    Well, I admit the stakes have been raised by Abu Ghraib and waterboarding, and so what we used to think of as dramatic, no longer seems so any more. But, that’s history, these were all gentlemen; they addressed each other in a civil manner, even if the stakes were still great.

AGENT    But, that’s another thing about it. Nobody knows or cares about some obscure Irishman executed during the First World War. It isn’t important history.

AUTHOR    You are so wrong about that. Just because no one knows about it, doesn’t mean that it isn’t important.

AGENT    Well, even if I am wrong, the fact that no one in your audience will have a clue about the significance of what is going on will just mean that they won’t fill the seats.

AUTHOR    This is a play about Ireland. I could just go onto any street in Dublin or Belfast and read the text aloud and I would get an audience.

AGENT    But we aren’t in Dublin. And American audiences don’t know this stuff; they need a kick in the pants to help them digest their history – particularly when it isn’t something that they had spoon fed to them in their high schools.

AUTHOR    But there are a lot of Irish Americans, and even more German Americans. Don’t you think they would be interested in knowing how the British manipulated American society and how they shaped American history? The outcome of this story largely determines the cesspool that the twentieth century would become.

AGENT    Really? I certainly didn’t see that.

AUTHOR    Well it is true nonetheless. If the British hadn’t been able to neutralize Casement, it would have been very difficult for the Americans to support the British in the way that they did. What Thomson does in my play – along with everything else he was doing at the time – essentially wins the war for Britain. This was the most unpopular war ever fought by the Americans, so if Casement had been able to promote an Irish position in opposition to it, Woodrow Wilson would have been in a jam. You know he was the president, right?

AGENT    Don’t get snarky. I still don’t think it works as a play.

AUTHOR    Look, I have some people workshopping it nearby. Could you at least come to see them work over the next couple of days? It may help you to see that the play is more interesting and dramatic, than you think.

AGENT    If I must. I am not confident about its prospects at all.

Fifty: Pudding and Bow Tie

George Will’s op-ed piece from The Washington Post (11/1/12) was quoted at length today on Morning Joe. It is a nasty piece.  Will describes President Obama as “indolent in mind,” and suggests that his campaign has a “bilious tone,” with its “scurrilities about Mitt Romney as a monster of, at best, callous indifference.” He continues, “Obama’s oceanic self-esteem — no deficit there — may explain why he seems to smolder with resentment that he must actually ask for a second term.”

Will then goes on to insult Joe Biden in what couldn't possibly be a bilious tone, and then everything else about the Democratic candidates’ reelection campaign. It is like the George Will of old, when he was on the right of his party and he could be truly nasty in ways that made one sit up and take note, simply because he was way beyond the realm of Republican and Democratic consensus. Indeed, it wasn’t that one used to believe in the 80s and 90s that he was the only one who would use a word like “bilious”; one actually believed in those good old days that he had invented the word himself to describe his own behavior (with approval, of course – as he has no self-esteem deficit either). But for many years now he has seemed a shade of his former self. The Republicans have moved so far to the right, so that no compromise with any Democrat is acceptable. They began this move (led by Gingrich) against the other great democratic moderate – Clinton – whom, like Obama, they painted as a borderline socialist. And, in the process, they left George Will trying to tie his bow tie a little tighter so that he would be welcomed to their tea party. Since then Will has just seemed confused as to whether he should be going along with the radical right, or trying to claim (as he did today) that his brand of nastiness is actually the middle.

And should a President seeking reelection with Obama's record not “smolder with resentment”? If any other President had achieved what Obama has done – saving the auto industry, establishing health care, completing the withdrawal from Iraq, killing Osama bin Laden, and a host of other things – he or she would not be having the kind of difficulty getting reelected Obama has had, against someone who clearly has the same kind of oceanic self-esteem that any candidate for President must have, and who clearly has made considerable gaffs and blunders (not to mention all his outright falsehoods and flip-flopping) that would have killed off any other candidacy. And certainly no one would be charging that President, as Will is doing, with being “indolent in mind.” The fact that Barack Obama is black goes a long way to explaining why he is having such difficulty, why he is not considered fundamentally moderate in his policies, and why this has-been journalist is describing him as indolent.

Forty-nine: Pygmalion

THE NOTE TAKER: You see this creature with his Queen's English: the English that will keep him on the dole queue to the end of his days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass him off as an American graduate student at a faculty-student tea party. I could even get him a place as an American historian which requires altogether different English.

When I came to do graduate work in the United States, I was immediately confronted by the need to alter my writing style. Such style as I had acquired would have been representative of the British public (private) school and the British university system – not Oxbridge perhaps, but a very respectable Scottish version. This style was marked by long sentences and a liberal use of the passive voice. Such style, I soon learned, was verboten in an American graduate school. Indeed, any manual of style that one might consult would almost always tell you to eschew the passive voice, and make all sentences, where possible, active. I did not perceive the need for this change myself, but was soon informed that it would need to be done. Rather, I would need to do this. The first seminar paper draft that I handed in was so marked up when it was returned to me that almost every sentence needed alteration. Indeed, my professor had marked up so many of my sentences that I would have to alter almost every one. 

No harm done, I suppose. My sentences were shortened and simplified; I even did this myself: I shortened and simplified my sentences. Now, I would no longer sound like Gibbon, or to the American ear a longwinded gibbon, but would be to the point and direct. My actors would do their acting, and my thick description would have the benefit of all being about people actively doing things. Agency would be clear for one and all.

The significance of this for me is more than mere nostalgia. I am no Eliza Doolittle. I do not feel that I have been changed irreparably by several American Henry Higginses, and that this is not entirely a good thing. The point is rather to note that American academics’ preference for the active voice over the passive says something about them. This is a political preference, and links tidily to the kind of social history that has predominated in the United States. There is something that we might consider very American about the notion of agency (even if it descends from E.P. Thompson, we can blame it on his American Mom!), because having people make their own history and performing these things in the active voice can, I think, be tied to the gendered discourse of republicanism (i.e., the idea of independence as the mark of respectability). [Now, before I am accused of being an exceptionalist, let me say that this was also one of the characteristics of the British colonial official charged with the duty of uplifting the "benighted" masses – acting. It was also part of the anti-intellectual ethos of the British public school (a connection that may be suggestive about the atheoretical proclivities of Social Historians).] 

But the active voice only ever takes us so far. However hard we try we always seem to stumble on the person trapped in his/her passive passivity – the subaltern who is certainly not able to speak in the active tongue of the bona fide citizen of History.

Forty-eight: Convict Histories

It always seemed to me that “Subaltern” was an odd term for a school of history endeavoring to capture the narratives of the lowest classes in India. “Dalit History” seemed like a better bet to me, comprising the study of the poorest elements of the work force, the slum dwellers, and the so-called “untouchables.” This was before I understood that subaltern was not necessarily intended to replicate the Thompsonian search for a working class to whom agency could be given. Indeed, the subaltern was perhaps a worthy choice because it was so difficult to define and locate. It was, or came to be in its more recent guises, a category of people to whom agency could not be given. They were in a sense beyond the reach of agency – once they had it, they were no longer subalterns.

There is actually a rather odd aspect to the notion of the professional historian being the bearer of agency to his or her subjects. After all, the historian is by his or her location – wandering the book fair at the AHA Conference, teaching in some fairly lavishly endowed colleges and universities – aspiring to remove himself or herself from the slum of graduate school and reach secure bourgeois existence in the heights of the tenured profession – very far from the dalits of the world. They are far enough from the dwellers of American inner-cities; their difficulties speaking for and representing such people are legion. 

Is there history to be written from the perspective of the convict? “Convicts of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains!” That has a pretty good ring to it. But, we would be able to see the world through the eyes of the transported convict, carried to the Americas or to Australia. What made him/her do what she did? Was she the true Durkheimian deviant – created by the society as its ultimate emblem? Is this, other than the suicide, the ultimate subaltern. Can he/she/it be celebrated?

This problem of endeavoring to reach the masses occurs to one as one reads, Roberts's, Shantaram. The book is really quite a fascinating study of Mumbai, all its many layers from top to bottom, from criminal world to business world (which may not be any distance traveled), and all its many connections to the Indian hinterland and the different parts of the world. Mumbai is out of reach to the tourist and even to the anthropologist. Who among either of these groups will live in the slum, work alongside slumdwellers as they deal with fire and cholera, talk to crime lords, see the leper colonies where black market medicines are secured, visit and sojourn in the labor catchment areas of Maharashtra, and any number of other things that the narrator does in this tale? The tale itself is a cross between Conrad’s Lord Jim and Papillon. And, it provides a glimpse of a world that exists beyond the respectable world of convention and scholarship. 

And what makes it possible for such a work to exist is the fact that Roberts is an escaped convict. He does things that many other people would not do. He is forced to go to places that many other people would not go to. It isn’t a history of convicts, of course, though it certainly feels like a history of prisoners of ill-fortune; but it most certainly is a history that only a convict could have written.

If one wanted to understand the world of the turn of the 18th century, there was really only one person who had the breadth of experience to really explain it to you. That person was not a historian like Edward Gibbon or a poet like William Blake, though the latter might have told you a thing or two you needed to know. That person was Olaudah Equiano, who witnessed the world in all its aspects from enslavement in Africa, through the Middle Passage, to a number of experiences in many different slave colonies in the Americas, and finally to freedom. At the beginning of the twenty-first century one of the few people who could really give you an inside view of the world – at least outside Baltimore and “The Wire” – is a former Australian convict who now resides in Mumbai.

This is a must read, in my humble opinion, though I hasten to add that listening to the 35 CDs performed by Humphrey Brower may be even better. Brower's rendering of all the accents, and his ability to draw all the life out of the narrative is truly astounding. Whether or not Hollywood and Johnny Depp can capture the depths of this book and make it more than a mere adventure story remains to be seen. [what happened to that movie?] Of course, there are many who will feel that by purchasing this book they are allowing a man to benefit from his crimes, a man who committed murder (though I don't recall him declaring this in the novel). Oh well, it is a great story, and I think one that we all may learn from; does a man repay his debt to society, by letting that society know some of its shortcomings, some of the ways in which it functions? I don't know.

And a brief addendum: Since writing this, “Slumdog Millionaire” has appeared in the movie theaters and has carted off all the Oscars for best movie, best director, and the like. This is a good movie; it perhaps does not deserve all the awards it has garnered – since there are plenty of Bollywood movies that are better, and there is an Orientalism involved in the judgment of its quality – but it is definitely good. The director, Danny Boyle, really has done an extremely good job of being not an overbearing Brit in India, but someone who first of all declares that he knows nothing and needs to be shown what is going on. His best scenes – those early in the movie, in the slums – really provide a sense of what it must be like living in those mazes – well, perhaps not living, you get a better sense in Shantaram – but endeavoring to get by and survive, particularly as a child. In the end, though, it may fall back on established narratives, and ends in a romance that lets the viewer off the hook.We come away, realizing we have seen horrors, but they are distant – and anyway, everyone is dancing bangra at the end – so all's cool.

Shantaram, by contrast, says the world is [expletive], but don't just blame the perpetrators of these crimes – good guys and bad guys are pretty hard to distinguish – and in the end we are all complicit. In convict history, you heard it here first, we all have to realize that the voices we hear, are voices we ourselves created.

Forty-seven: Revolting Revelations

We need our revolutions to be pretty. Well, not exactly pretty, like rosy, but pretty, like neat. They need to be comprehensible and easy to interpret; otherwise how usable will they be for those who come after. They need to be undertaken by the ‘good’ people, or – if we are trying to resist change – by the ‘bad’ people. They shouldn’t be undertaken by a diverse group of people for conflicting purposes grounded simply in material self-interest. So, this brings us to a second rule: revolutions should be undertaken by idealists, whether or not we like them. That way we can find our own ‘better’ selves reflected through or in the revolution. If it is our fight, we will need to see the changes (often violent as they are) as being worth it because they are backed up by our high ideals. If it is someone else’s fight, we will want our side to be justified by a cause or two of our own, even if it is just the assumption that the status quo is the best of all possible worlds. Either way, we help define ourselves neatly in the process. 

But revolutions are never this way. While they may have half lives of idealism that can get the nations that emerge from them through a decade or two, or maybe even a century or two, they are always open to interpretation and questioning. Simply put, the new orthodoxy that gets established in the place of the old orthodoxy is still going to be inadequate as an explanation for the messiness of history. 

These two “truths” – that revolutions need to be pretty and idealistic – seem perfectly clear when we are looking at other people’s revolutions. Take the Russian: There were a bunch of Bolsheviks – a majority in nobody’s minds but their own – who imposed communist doctrine on an empire. Ditto China. But the idealism Petered out and the St. Paul of corruption turned Leninist idealism into Stalinist pogroms. Ditto the Cultural Revolution. The French: from Girondins, through Robespyre and guillotine, to bones apart – say no more. It is only when we come to the American Revolution that everything – history – comes unglued. Here a revolution that never made much sense to anyone who was involved in it – and certainly not much to the British who had other concerns to deal with – developed idealism half-lives that push well beyond strontium on the road to plutonium for some of the seediest of self-interested characters – 230 years and counting.

How does a society, your society, pull off this feat of repeatedly injecting idealism back into its revolution and continuing to find this comprehensible and historical? There are many answers. 

The first, of course, is that you need your revolution to have been considered a relatively insignificant affair – and indeed, the stakes were considered to be very low with regard to the American revolution. The fact that nobody cares about your revolution, because it simply isn’t seen to matter very much, really helps you to stake a claim for idealism and plant your seed firmly in this idealistic soil. Compare any other revolution and the responses they stirred. Haiti – slaves revolting, wow, stomp on that. Russia – proletariat acting out, let’s all invade. China – Mao or less insane, how about a war in Korea? America – well we don’t need its food anymore, because we’ve got Canada; we don’t want to do what it takes to win this thing, because we may lose our prosperous slave colonies in the Caribbean. Besides, who the hell wants New Jersey?

The second is that you should, in spite of yourself and your best efforts to do otherwise, become a great nation. In this way, the seed firmly planted will grow into a strong plant, and the fact that the seed is being given miracle grow that allows it to shoot up in spite of, not because of, the idealistic soil will go largely unnoticed. A Louisiana Purchase is really all you need. This will take you from being a small nation hemmed in by empires that will be able to pick you off at a time of their choosing, to being an empire in your own right. You will have won the yellow bits on the Risk board – well the best spaces, anyway – and you can begin an expansion of your own. Your best efforts to do otherwise would be to say to Napoleon, as Jefferson did, hey, we don’t mind if you invade Haiti. We worry more about the success of a slave rebellion on our own plantations in Virginia than we do about the fact that you’ll bring your army to New Orleans, and establish the whole Louisiana territory as your breadbasket for your sugar colonies.

The third answer is that every time you go back to develop the teleology that you call history you must simplify the story so that the messy parts get left out. Essentially, this means you must forget New Jersey – home of the Sopranos and their ancestors. 

So what of New Jersey? If you are to understand the revolution, or at least comprehend all the dimensions of its incomprehensibility as a pretty revolution, you must learn about New Jersey. Who were the 18th-century Sopranos? They were basically the Proprietors and their agents who wanted to ensure that they established a Scottish style landowning system at the expense of the yeomanry, who had settled on the land. While the landowners were clearing the land in the Highlands of Scotland, the would be owners of New Jersey, the Proprietors, were getting their agents to begin the process of clearing all the lowlifes (read regular people) from their lands throughout the colonies.

Arch villain in this is a man named James Alexander. 

The rise of the professional bar further alienated common farmers from the judiciary. In 17th-century America, educated lawyers were rare. Many lawyers had no formal legal training, and some were only semiliterate. In the 18th century this changed as London-trained attorneys (James Alexander being a prominent example) arrived in the colonies and established informal law schools in their offices. Soon, a trained legal cadre emerged and reignited a deep, latent hostility to the bar, variants of which were evident throughout Anglo-American society. The hostility of provincial yeomen toward lawyers was strong because they were understood as dispute-encouraging parasites. “There is,” wrote a young law clerk in 1745, “perhaps no Set of Men that bear so ill a Character in the Estimation of the Vulgar, as the gentlemen of the Long Robe.” The fact that James Alexander trained many of New Jersey’s lawyers in his office only reinforced popular hostility to the bar.

The Revolution in New Jersey was essentially a story of these lawyers endeavoring not to lose control of the position they had established under William Franklin, in the face of growing dissent against the Crown throughout the colonies. This meant that they needed to know which way the political winds were blowing and act accordingly. The result was that their loyalties were not firmly established, and they were quick to respond to whether or not General Howe or General Washington was on the ascendancy.

All of this is embodied in the person of Richard Stockton. He was a product of the East Jersey and New York law firms, a judge who was very much aligned with Lord Dartmouth and Franklin. He was the kind of person who would turn up at a convention of radicals and instead of immediately signing an idealistic declaration of independence, would ask for a recapitulation of the pros and cons; he was the kind of person who would later sign an oath of loyalty to the King, and then once Washington had reestablished control, change sides once again.

Revolutions are never neat, of course, but it is neat, as a historian, to see how the least idealistic of all the revolutions has gained ascendancy as the most determined by ideas. That is partly the result of so much history, all those messy bits, being suppressed so comprehensively.

Forty-six: Historian on a Sunday

A Sunday a while back, that is:

There’s an interesting review of Margaret MacMillan’s Dangerous Games in The New York Times Book Review section (7/19/09), written by David M. Kennedy – one elite Stanford historian reviewing the work of an elite Oxbridge one, and very gracious he is too. 

I haven’t read the book, so I don’t intend to judge its merits, but if the review is an accurate one (and I don’t see any reason to believe otherwise), then it raises interesting questions about the practice and purpose of history. What history is good for, MacMillaan claims, is teaching us humility and skepticism. This is something that I would certainly agree with in broad strokes, and it is certainly the case that professional historians should spend most of their time teaching critical thinking tools, rather than imparting certain “facts” to captive audiences. But, does it ever really teach people humility and skepticism? 

The secular humanist might want it to do so, and I would certainly fit in that category, but this article is intriguing to me because it doesn’t appear to recognize one of the central problems inherent in the desire to impart skepticism and critical thinking. It can be boiled down to this: skepticism is frequently the privileged vantage point of people who survive on the labors of those who do not have the same privileges that they do. Ouch! 

There are several points of note that derive from this axiom:

1) Reaching for skepticism (for the professional historian) can become an exercise in cutting off the nose to spite the face. Take, for example, that oft-repeated George Santayana statement, quoted almost ad nauseam, “those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” This statement, or the sensibility it reflects, fuels much of the public desire (and imperative) for history, and going too far in the direction of saying that such comments are utter nonsense (which logically they are, if one deploys any degree of skepticism whatsoever), might undermine the exalted position of history in the schools and the academy. For instance, saying that the history taught in high schools is largely nationalistic propaganda, treating it skeptically, would be to threaten a privileged position it has held in the curriculum.

Indeed, the discipline has been embedded in and tied to the ascendancy of the nation state; its continued “health” might be considered dependent on the perceived need that fosters federal and state funding of our institutions. If one says to the state legislator that history only teaches skepticism, and shouldn’t bolster un-skeptical notions like patriotism, he or she will wonder what it is that the state is getting out of the funding put into the colleges. This has no doubt already occurred to many legislators. This isn’t to suggest that we should stop being skeptical, but it is to gesture in the direction of Spivak’s “strategic essentialisms,” a common state of existence for the public functionary, and somewhat compatible with skepticism (serving the public good may be a good a thing to do).

2) We end up being critical of those still more skeptical than ourselves. Watch out for those Cultural Studies relativists, they are going way too far and end up being merely nihilists. Logically again, if one is a skeptic, there is no reason to feel this way. The problem is that the Cultural Studs go beyond what we might consider the bounds of professional decency (as defined at Stanford and St. Anthony’s) – they are self-referential and argumentative and they blur empiricism in all their theoretical gobbledygook. MacMillan “inveighs against the eclipse of ‘professional historians’ by ‘amateurs’” – but on what grounds, as a skeptic, can she do so? One does so out of insecurity, derived from the fact that once you accept the skeptical position it is difficult to police the boundaries of the discipline – such policing tends to end up being done in the readers’ reviews of manuscripts, submitted to publishing houses and journals (themselves feeling the heat), and tenure and promotion decisions – frequently by people who feel embattled and concerned about the problems of carrying out these gate-keeping functions.

3) Finally, having outlined the problems in national historiographies, how does one single out the Afrocentrist for particular scorn – comparing its relationship to the past as similar to the relationship between The Da Vinci Code and theology?  Surely (speaking in the tongue of the skeptic) the Afrocentric history is no different from other histories, except that it is the marker of the unprivileged (largely), or it is the marker of those who would use its narratives to attain such privilege. But the historiographies through which Kennedy and MacMillan have attained their vaunted positions in the profession could be described in similar terms perhaps. And at least Afrocentric histories haven’t as yet been responsible for wars and genocides, in quite the same way that other histories demonstrably have been.

Being a skeptic and learning humility from history is not only recognizing (as MacMillan does) that we learn of the error of our ways through study of the past – that if we are critical of what people have done in the past, others who follow us will be critical of what we do. It is as also about being aware that for most people history is going to be something altogether different – it will be the means through which they pass onto their children and their communities their views of the world, which are anything but skeptical and are lacking in humility – they will tend to be triumphalist and positive. And, when push comes to shove, we have to recognize that in spite of our privilege as professional historians we are frequently ourselves to be located in this position also – not least because we are unwilling to acknowledge our own privileged locations.

Forty-five: Shame, Shame, Shame

It must be time to give out our less-frequent-than-annual Annual Award for historians who have transgressed the bounds of common decency.

Just imagine that you are presenting a paper at the convention of one of your discipline’s organization. You are presenting a chapter from your dissertation. You have presented this work at a special conference previously, but you are pleased to have this opportunity to present it to a wider audience. You have been slaving away on this dissertation trying to rework it into a publishable manuscript after having just earned your degree.

You get through the paper and you feel relieved as the audience claps while you return to your chair. The respondent gets up to speak. He is a fairly prominent member of your field, someone who has published several books, and someone who has taken up a chair at a fairly prestigious university. You are hoping that he liked your paper. You are to be disappointed.

This man rises and in a very gruff manner begins to launch into a diatribe against you. There were two other papers that were presented but he doesn’t spend much time on them; his main ire is directed at you for some reason. But it doesn’t seem to be so much what you have said, or what you have argued, it seems to be just you.

He says that he has googled you and found that you have presented this paper somewhere else. He notes that it has taken you about ten years to finish your dissertation, and he wonders why it has taken so long for you. It didn’t take him so long. He went straight from his final exams to his thesis, and it only took him three years. Moreover his thesis was published only a few years after that.

For some reason, he doesn’t mention the level of funding he received from his prestigious university graduate program; he doesn’t mention that, while he did have kids, he was married and most of the reproduction of the household was undertaken by his partner or spouse. He doesn’t recognize that it is conceivable that you might have taken a different route form his own; that you may have needed to bring up your kids largely on your own; that you may have needed to teach at a community college because you didn’t get the same kind of support that he received.

And you wonder whether he would be willing to recognize that your struggle to complete your thesis was akin to the struggle of those people whose history you were describing, those facing discrimination and impoverishment. His endeavors to describe the same thing from the lap of grant-funded luxury – were they marked in any way by empathy of any kind? Does it matter? you imagine him responding. He got to the Truth of the matter, and he did so more quickly than you, because you seem to have been lazy, or you have some other character flaw.

And you say to yourself, wasn't it ever so? And you say no wonder this fellow has won the Annual Award for lack of decency.

Forty-four: Newtered No More

So, who the heck is Saul Alinsky? And who the heck knows who he is? And given the fact that 99 out of 100 people, being generous here, haven't got a clue who he is, why is Newt Gingrich throwing his name around like it's a piece of common confetti?

Saul Alinsky was a Jewish community organizer who lived between 1909 and 1972. There is no connection between Barack Obama and Alinsky, except that Obama was briefly a community organizer. Hilary Clinton, apparently, wrote her undergraduate thesis on the guy. Machiavelli for the poor, is how he is described by CNN. He was a non-Marxist radical. Quintessentially American, in fact. A radical who was eschewing Marxism -- doesn't get more American than that!

But lets face it, who in Gingrich's audience has a clue about this? No one. Why does he say this then? It is the same red meat he is throwing at the audience with regard to race -- Obama, "the food stamp President." He can say that so that he doesn't have to be overtly racist, or at least so that a racist audience can feel comfortable imbibing what he is saying. But where there is racism, can anti-semitism be far away? The answer is no. This is an appeal to the old populism; where Obama isn't simply an African American radical, he has also to be sold as a European social democrat. How better to do that than to throw around the Jewish name of a largely forgotten radical?

Of course, one of the great things about this kind of bating is that it actually resurrects the names of people like Alinsky. For, in fact, he would speak to the 99 percent. He would speak to the Occupy movement -- which is, unquestionably, to speak to an American audience. The result is that we are not Newtered by the rhetoric, as the Grinch would want -- perhaps we can be empowered. Long live, Saul!!

Forty-three: More Pauline History Rewrites

Ron Paul has suggested that the Civil War was unnecessary. It was unfortunate, and slavery could have been eradicated by other mechanisms besides warfare. He points to the case of the British Empire, where the government paid compensation to the slaveowners for their slaves, and where slavery was brought to an end peacefully.

It goes without saying that this is not a very well thought out proposition on Paul’s part. For two reasons: first, because the situation in the United States was fundamentally different from that in the British Empire – on so many levels; second, because the notion that the U.S. government would pay this kind of compensation to one particular segment of the population, fundamentally undermines Paul’s own claims about the Constitution not really allowing such things, and that the government should remain small and should stay out of the economy.

I will take these, very briefly, in turn. Unlike in the United States, slaveholding in the British system (by and large) was not at the metropole – it was in the periphery of the empire. While slaveholders had lobbyists at Parliament, their representatives did not represent half of the constituencies of that body – as was the case in the Senate and the House of Representatives. Moreover, in Britain in the 1830s the wealth of the slaveholding areas of the empire did not compare with the wealth of the slaveholding States in the 1850s. Those 50 percent of the States where slavery existed were going through a major economic boom founded primarily on the profit from cotton, and from the collateral associated with property from the bodies of the slaves. To get slaveholders to back down from their position that their civilization was superior to that of a free labor economy – both economically and morally – was not something that could be done by mere compensation. Everyone knew this at the time and a Ron Paul coming along to suggest this idea would have been laughed out of court – both in South Carolina and in Massachusetts. One could go on, but if these points alone aren’t sufficient to make the case, then no amount of evidence would suffice for someone proposing such a specious argument.

But, add to this, how does a government that is supposed to have no income tax on which to draw revenue compensate slaveowners for the value of their property in slaves? How would then one not also compensate the slaves for their years of unpaid labor (though Paul wouldn't propose this, I am sure)? Such an act to compensate slaveowners would be a major intervention in the economy by the government, and if it was Constitutional do this, it would then be a precedent for any other similar act of government -- e.g. the New Deal, the War on Poverty (against which Ron Paul now rails). Dr. Paul may have some sensible things to say about foreign policy, though he invariably arrives at these things by a logic that undermines the soundness of what he is saying, but these particular economic ramblings of his are just sheer nonsense. 

Forty-two: Reserve Judgment

Ron Paul is suggesting that the gold standard is required by the Constitution. This is not the case. Gold is mentioned once in the Constitution, in Article 1, Section 10. This article basically says that no State is entitled to act like the federal government. Thus, “No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.”

So, if the Constitution were making a mere confederation of states with no other authority but the states themselves, then there might be a case for saying that gold and silver were a required basis for currency.

But this is not the case, as the authority of Congress overrides the States in this area. This is handled in Section 8 of the same article:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures; [etc.]

Clearly, the Constitution would allow Congress to do pretty much anything that its members deemed was necessary to secure the wealth and prosperity of the United States.

One of these things has been the establishment, in 1913, during Woodrow Wilson’s administration, of the Federal Reserve System. This basically oversees the banking system and is intended to secure against the kinds of financial panics that are frequent occurrences in the capitalist system. The Fed was designed to protect capitalism from itself, and there have been plenty of cases where it has clearly achieved this – though it has failed on several occasions also, mainly due to faulty management (e.g., 1929 & 2008).

The assault on the Federal Reserve System from the right is intended to allow unfettered capitalism to reign once more. The notion that the economic cycles of boom and bust that preceded the 1913 creation of the Fed would be preferable to the oversight of the financial markets currently in place is absurd. Ron Paul’s grasp of history is flimsy at best – and he makes Gingrich look like a veritable scholar in this department – but this isn’t too much to grasp (though, of course, one has to note that one strand of Republican thinking wants chaos for its own sake – a return to the notion of the survival of the fittest, with everyone’s hands on the Bible and a gun – so it may not be that Paul is blind to these realities after all).

Republicans generally hope that people forget history altogether so that they can make up their own historical transcript out of their own fanciful whole cloth. They certainly excel in this area.

Forty-one: Birth of a President

The birther controversy seems to be absolutely bogus. If one is born outside the United States and not of American parentage one can be President of the United States, so long as he or she is elected to the office, of course. Examine Section 1, Article 2.  It says, “No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, AT THE TIME OF THE ADOPTION OF THIS CONSTITUTION, shall be eligible to the Office of the President.” So the statement of being a natural born citizen is qualified by the timing of when the Constitution was being adopted. All those people, by my reckoning, must be dead, though in Ron Paul’s world of Constitutionality, this may in fact be open to question.  How do we know that this is not meant to rule out foreign-born people altogether? We know this because of the statement that follows immediately after this: “neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, AND BEEN FOURTEEN YEARS A RESIDENT WITHIN THE UNITED STATES.” Why would it be necessary to say anything about fourteen years of residence if everyone needed to be a natural born citizen? The fact that this is in there means that for the time after that period when the Constitution is adopted this is the rule that should be applied.

And this makes sense in relation to the requirements for the House of Representatives and the Senate. The former required, the following: “No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.”

Meanwhile, the Senate required this: “No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.”

Is it not obvious that there is a natural progression from the House to the Senate to the Presidency? Is it really credible that the founders who created the Constitution on the grounds of reason, would suddenly throw this all out with regard to the President? That they would suddenly make the presidency a position that is fundamentally different from the other positions is not credible. They were clearly concerned about foreign aristocrats coming in and trying to establish a monarchy, but the fourteen years residency was sufficient guarantee against this. Come now. These people were not simpletons. They were intellectuals. They could think their way out of a paper bag. They were not birthers, and they did not establish natural-born citizenship as a basic criterion for the position of President.

This issue has never been taken up by the Supreme Court. If it were, however, there is no question how they would rule. Unless, of course, they were birthers and simpletons themselves. Well, I suppose it is open to question then.

Forty: Xtreme History®

The X-Games, bringing together a multitude of Xtreme Sports, have been going on for many years. I learned the other day [December 2006] at a Christmas party that there is now something called Xtreme Programming taking shape. This is a new approach to programming founded on a relationship between programmer and client that is far more interactive than previously was the case. Heretofore, a programmer would be given a task by the client and would work away at her/his computer returning with a finished product, a program that would hopefully meet the needs of the client. Now, though, Xtreme programmers are approaching their task in a new way and based upon altered assumptions. They believe, quite reasonably, that the client doesn’t really know what he or she wants when hiring the programmer, and so, rather than hibernating until the project is done, the programmer needs to be engaging the client in the process of creating the program. Programmers need to present their clients with all the possible alternatives, make suggestions about different ways of approaching the project, and share their sense of the new vistas that get opened up as the programs take form. In this way they can more effectively teach the client how to use the program once it is finished and, they believe, the program can more efficiently meet the client’s needs. In addition, the program will spawn new approaches to programming that will continue to push the boundaries of interactivity. All this sounds promising. Perhaps we can apply this thinking to the world of History.

Now is the time, then, to establish Xtreme History®. Here, historians will work more closely with their clients (however these are to be defined), bringing them into the process of creating a history that is more usable for them. We could introduce historians into all walks of life, having them shadow public figures, to offer the historical alternatives. Let’s take American presidents as our example. Instead of having to wait around for popular historians to write their over-priced evaluations of the work of presidents who are long gone, we can have a historian sitting on the cabinet to provide instant historical assessments. “No, Mr. President, if you invade Iraq and you do not have a shred of evidence that Saddam is producing WMDs, it may not look good for your reputation in the future. Look what happened to Richard Nixon when he tried to lie to the American people. Mind you, in his case, resignation after threatened impeachment was followed by scholarly rehabilitation. In your case, it might mean you get through your presidency unscathed, but your historical legacy may be forever scarred.” Such Xtreme historical interventions might work wonders in an evenly divided cabinet dealing with tough issues. You know that Presidents are constantly thinking about their legacies, particularly in their second terms, so why not give them help in this area? After all, if they have to turn to other cabinet members for advice, people who have their own legacies and ambitions for higher office to take care of, they may not get the advice that they really need. Assign them an Xtreme Historian®, however, and they will be much better served. [Additional consideration: as we develop our Xtreme methodologies, we would need to go back to study some of the proto-Xtreme Historians® – there’s Arthur Schlessinger giving advice on matters historical to JFK, and, of course, Woodrow Wilson providing Divine historical guidance for himself.]

If we follow this bold historiographical path just think of the possibilities for the members of our American Historical Association to become bona fide public intellectuals. The President of the AHA could be assigned a space in the closet adjacent to the Oval Office, used so effectively by Monica Lewinsky, and services could be provided very directly to the President of the United States. The AHA President’s message every January at the Convention would become a national media event, as the Most Extreme Xtreme Historian® provided his or her “State of the President’s Legacy Address.” Once this becomes firmly established as a yearly ritual we might find Xtreme History® filtering down into all areas of American society and culture. Just imagine in season nine of the Sopranos, the show is revitalized by the introduction of an Xtreme Historian® who shadows Tony Soprano providing advice on how he will look to posterity if he blows away some minor character. “No, Mr. Soprano [Xtreme Historians® lose the appearance of objectivity if they use first names],” Ricordo Heatstatter says, “don’t ice Michael [Xtreme Historians® should endeavor to learn the language of their clients]; it won’t look good for the historical record if you kill one of your close relatives. If you’ve got to do it, have someone else take him out – and don’t let me know about it, as I’ll have to include it in my historical account.” 

The possibilities are endless. We finish with a possible public service announcement, or caption for AHA Perspectives:

Xtreme Historians® needed! Help save your ailing profession; help save the nation, even the planet! Opportunities available! You must be prepared to provide your services anytime, anywhere, and in any unsavory capacity. No job is too small. No history is too dirty. You too can help launder the historical record.