Christopher Koch, The Boys in the Island (1958).
This is a novel set largely in Hobart Tasmania with later chapters in Melbourne. It is a coming of age story about Francis Cullen. His boyish desire to fit in with other boys, his first girlfriend, his efforts to conform to the crowd, his mistakes. It is low key, no great dramas, but many small ones – such is life. The prose is attractive, perhaps forced now and again. But the descriptions of place are effective, and there is truth in the characters.
Francis falls under the spell of Lewie, he of massive self-confidence and little intelligence. Lewie’s ambition is a life of crime, but he is not capable of it. Instead he bullies his friends, steals pound notes from cripples, and dreams of the big time. The game of mutual malicious teasing seemed familiar to me from my boyhood though I left it behind, but not these lads.
Koch calls it ‘The Game:’ Francis ‘found himself, as the weeks passed, drawn into a game, the Melbourne game of double-cross which the girl Keeva had apparently invented, and which Lewie was fast learning, her ardent pupil.…… It was the game, to set traps, to hurt. You did not say what you were thinking. You did not let one another know what you were doing. You found ways of making fools of one another at every opportunity’ (p. 115).
Likewise, Lewie’s philosophy that everyone else is dumb, the proof being that they work, had a familiar ring from fellows I knew, and I am glad I know them no more.
The intrusion of the boy Shane, a much more intelligent and mature peer, seems forced and his final destruction is a distraction from the downward spiral Francis has committed himself to as the only means to escape… Escape what? He always says the Island, hence the title. But is seems that ‘the island’ stands for the small town life that awaits him. Though he never aspires to the life of crime he dutifully, though not always happily, follows Lewie. In Francis we see perhaps the perfect follower.
The aside when Francis worked in a factory and though but a boy himself took under his wing the deficient Athol was nicely done but contributed nothing to either plot or character that I could see.
It is out of print and I read a library copy.
I read it in anticipation of going to Hobart for the APSA conference 2012. I also read Peter Timms, In Search of Hobart (2009) which is not recommended.
Author: Michael W Jackson
Richard Ford, novelist, Sydney Writers’ Festival
Thanks to the suggestion of a friend I went to Richard Ford’s session at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. I have read two of his novels: Independence Day and The Sportswriter. I found them easy to read but, for some reason, I was not engaged enough to want to read more. Indeed there was a ten year gap between reading these two.
http://www.swf.org.au/
However I found Ford an engaging character on the stage, and I liked his literal-mindedness: What I mean is what I say; What I say [write] is what I mean. Do not go looking for symbols or signs. Wonderful.
Likewise the host did a fine job in bringing out what Ford had to say, and the talking heads were punctuated with Ford doing some short readings from his most recent novel Canada.
Ford said in passing early in the discussion that, literal though he was, he did write with a ‘higher purpose’ and I was glad that the first question from the floor took him back to that passing aside. He explained that this higher purpose was to renew in the reader emotions and thoughts of the complete person. I have not got his words quite right, for I was not taking notes, but that is the gist. I found that explanation to be both simple and compelling. But imagine what the Derridaistas would make of that. The heavy artillery of cant and ideology, disguised as scholarship, would rumble.
Having never attended a Sydney Writers’ Festival event before I enjoyed it and just might do it again. The only false note came from the host who made a gratuitous and deprecating reference to Des Moines, Iowa. I know people make these kinds of quips without thinking, and indeed that is the point and the problem. It betrays an enduring mindset.
Here is the web description of Ford’s talk:
Richard Ford: – 15 July, City Recital Hall
One of the masters of American fiction, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford comes to Sydney for an exclusive event presented by Sydney Writers’ Festival. Ford visits Australia on the heels of the publication of Canada, hailed by John Banville as “an extraordinary, overwhelming book”.
With one of the most finely tuned ears in contemporary fiction Ford explores the big issues of our time with a disarming use of the vernacular. Born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1944, Richard Ford is the author of six novels and four collections of stories. Independence Day was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the first time the same book won both prizes.
He talks to Artistic Director of Sydney Writers’ Festival, Chip Rolley.
Nicholas Nicastro, Antigone’s Wake: A Novel of Imperial Athens (2007).
There is a lot to like about it. The contrast between the public admiration of Sophocles as a playwright and then as a general contrasted to his inner doubts, confusions, and inconsistencies is nicely done, and ironic, because it makes him like a character in a play by his great rival, the upstart Euripides.
Very nice portrayal of Pericles as a wily politician who proceeds by halfs, temporizes, and stalls to see how things go. The author is ingenious in showing the immorality of the war of Greek (Athens) against Greek (Samos) – the weapons that kill women and children, torture of prisoners, treason, etc.
Loved the ending when at the Funeral Oration Sophocles’s daughter very daintily insults Pericles in public for murdering allies. ‘Noble Pericles, you have presented us with many dead citizens today. Not to celebrate the defeat of barbarians, but all to subdue an allied and kindred city [Samos]. Thank you, great general’ (p. 201-202). While Sophocles agrees with her he rebukes and punishes her, such is his inconsistent and confused nature.
Brasidas, the unSpartan Spartan
Jon Edward Martin, The Shade of Artemis: A Novel of Ancient Greece and the Spartan Brasidas (2005). This is an historical novel. I gave it five stars on Amazon USA.
A terse, focussed, well-grounded, imaginative, and at times moving account of the life and times of Brasidas, the most unSpartan of the Spartans. Brasidas emerges from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesean War as larger than life but also obscure. If we know so much about the Athenian Alcibiades, what he drunk (too much), who he screwed (everyone), how he carried on (endlessly), we know next to nothing about Brasidas who nearly won the war single-handed. Martin offers a rounded picture of the complete man, his first love, his difficult relationship with a demanding father, a wife whom he did not love and children whom he did, the interaction with those lesser beings: helots, and the mutual perspective of Athenians and Spartans.
The story is drawn along several fault lines in Brasidas’s personal and political life and offers insights into the inner workings of the Spartan society and oligarchy paralleled to the all too public workings of Athenian democracy. For history buffs, the novel cuts away too soon from some of the major events like Mytilene but that is necessary to keep the focus on Brasidas.
I am going to read another of Jon Edward Martin’s books, and I hope he writes more.
It is very well written, no superfluous asides to pad the pages, no convoluted passages that cry out for that vanishing breed – the sub-editor, no unusual word choices that bespeak dictionary English rather than spoken English. It is certainly the equal of Nicholas Nicastro, Isle of Stone (2005) and Peter Carnahan, Pharnabazus sits on the ground with the Spartan Captains (2002). These two cover some of the same historical events. It fleshes out some of the information from Timothy Shutt’s A History of Ancient Sparta (Audible 2009) without the ponderous didacticism.
Medical deviance, structure, and agency. The bad news has good news in it.
Stoner (1965) by John Williams.
The genre is the academic novel. That category might make one think of Tom Sharpe, David Lodge, Malcom Bradbury, Mary McCarthy, Kingsley Amis, C. P. Snow, or the ineffable Willa Cather. But John Williams is in a class nearly by himself in Stoner (1965).
Williams’s prose is windowpane clear. The emotions of his principle character Stoner are deep but nearly silent and all the more elemental. Stoner is surrounded by people who do not understand him, and lives his life entirely in their company.
http://www.amazon.com/Stoner-York-Review-Books-Classics/dp/1590171993/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1339811528&sr=8-1&keywords=stoner
What is incomprehensible and mysterious about Stoner is that he loves the worlds that words make in books. In the English Department at the University of Missouri between 1920 and 1960, where he passes his days, this love is neither well-known nor highly regarded. That he lives only to read, to write, and to talk about literature makes him an academic failure in the company of career-makers who care nothing for words and ideas.
The accounts of Stoner’s several transformations from boy to student to scholar are marvellous. The best of these transformations is perhaps the last when his hand brushes a book and its pages quiver with life. That is the moment he dies forgotten, unlamented, and unmissed.
I did find the plot mechanical. Edith, the wife, and Lomax, the Head of Department, were ciphers there to bedevil Stoner, but who were otherwise empty of meaning. Nor did I find it creditable that the dean, Finch, would be so staunch. But each of these three characters provides a mirror for Stoner’s reaction and that is enough.
I said that Williams is in a class nearly by himself. Together with him I would assign Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (1925), a seat. She, too, captures something of the wonder and awe of learning that the other scribes listed at the outset are too jaded to realize and probably incapable of portraying.
My thanks to Trevor Cook for mentioning this book.
The Passage of Power, The Years of Lyndon Johnson
Wow! Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson is a magnum opus, a stupendous achievement, the most vivid biography imaginable, an insightful study of political power, a tragedy of Shakespearean depth…The Passage of Power is the fourth volume in The Years of Lyndon Johnson, and in some ways it is the best so far.
It is the best because it covers the best of its subject – Lyndon Baines Johnson. That best emerged in the crucible of a seven-week period between 22 November 1963 and 8 January 1964. For informed readers the dates pulse with meaning. No explanation is required.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Passage-Power-Lyndon-Johnson/dp/0679405070/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1339646548&sr=1-1&keywords=robert+caro+the+passage+of+power
Caro offers in-depth studies of the characters in this drama and places them in the context of the times. The ego and alter-ego relationship between John and Robert Kennedy is particularly compelling. In the sunshine there is the charming Dr Jekyll of John Kennedy and in the shadows there is the deadly Mr. Hyde of Robert Kennedy. Those who were not won over by the former had to deal with the latter. ‘Ruthless’ is the only word that applies to Robert Kennedy.
Though Caro implies that John Kennedy’s decision to put Lyndon Johnson on the ticket as vice-presidential candidate was the one thing John did not tell Robert and it is the one thing that Robert did not know by the telepathy with which these two brothers usually communicated. Ever the realist, John Kennedy knew he had to win the south to win and that he could not win the south alone or with any other running mate but Johnson and that Johnson alone could deliver the south. John did not tell Robert because Robert hated Johnson from the first time they met, a feeling the Johnson came to return in full measure, and Robert would have objected, as only he could object, to his brother, so to avoid that confrontation John did not tell Robert, John just did it himself and once it was done then it was done, and not even Robert could undo it, though undo it he tried several times, thus ensuring Johnson’s continued enmity.
Fascinating as this part of the story may be, it is but preliminary. The focus of the book is Johnson’s presidency from the moment John Kennedy was declared dead at Parkland Hospital on 22 November 1963 to the State of Union address on 8 January 1964 which launched the so-called War on Poverty. In between those dates Johnson performed miracles.
He calmed panic. He quelled hysteria. He stayed the hands that held the sabers. Stability, continuity, and order, these he created from fear, confusion, and anger and he did this nearly from the first moments and he showed a self-discipline that no one, least of all those who knew him best, thought he had. That alone caused one of Robert Kennedy’s delegated haters to refer to Johnson at this time as ‘masterful.’ By ‘delegated haters’ I mean one of Robert Kennedy’s aides who hated Johnson, it seems, because his boss hated him. The aide certainly hated Johnson before the assassination and in time he returned to hating him, but even he admitted that in the crisis Johnson was …’masterful.’ Others who disliked Johnson also acknowledged that this seven week period was …’magnificent.’
It was masterful because after the initial shock, Johnson took charge in a calm and purposeful way. It was magnificent because in those seven weeks Johnson did things John Kennedy did not do in the preceding three years and could not have done.
What things are these?
1. He defeated a threat to presidential power in an obscure Senate bill that had enormous implications which implications he realized immediately and which he averted.
2. He cut the defense budget more than it has ever been cut before or since, and this at near the height of the Cold War, only a little more than a year since the nuclear brink in Cuba.
3. He caused the House of Representatives and Senate to vote for tax cuts which legislation had been lost in committee by its opponents for eighteen months before he put he hand to it and it was lost no more.
4. He caused the Senate to pass a civil rights bill that had all but disappeared from the legislative calendar and which was opposed by a majority of Senators, but one-by-one he won over a majority giving a Master Class on how to count votes.
5. He started the War on Poverty with the monies saved from defense.
It is a breath-taking list, one that would make a four-year term admirable, and these things he did in seven weeks, while doing much else besides. It is exhausting to read the nearly hour-by-hour account that Caro offers of this titan at work. Did he ever sleep? Did he ever sit quietly and eat a meal? Did he ever zone out with fatigue? Evidently not during these weeks.
He appealed to the ego of egoists, to the patriotism of patriots, to the intellect of intellectuals, to image to the Narcissists, to the Kennedy legacy to those that clung to that, to favors for those who would trade favors, to duty to the dutiful, to honour to the honourable, and each time he got the equation right in this seemingly endless human calculation. Meanwhile, to the nation and world of television viewers he projected a sorrowful calm and a deliberate determination.
Counting the votes for the civil rights act, Johnson insisted that every Republican in every forum be addressed as ‘a representative of the party of Abraham Lincoln who had freed the slaves.’ He insisted that every Republican from Illinois be addressed, in addition, as ‘from the land of Lincoln who freed the slaves.’ In private conversations with Republicans who opposed the bill, Johnson kept asking them to live up to their great founder, Abraham Lincoln. In the end about half of them did. Without Johnson’s incessant pressure no more than one or two would have. He made it happen.
If John Kennedy’s beautiful words made us think, Lyndon Johnson’s earthy prose made us act, so said one of those whom Johnson moved to action.
Some of the most touching parts of the books are the descriptions of Mr. Hyde in mourning for his other half. Robert Kennedy was stunned by John Kennedy’s murder and he remained stunned for weeks, for months afterward. Jacqueline Kennedy showed courage and self-control enough for several, but Robert was utterly bereft. In private Robert took to wearing some of John’s clothes, an old tweed jacket that had been left at Robert’s house by accident months before, a navy coat that was in a car. It is almost, but not quite enough, to make me feel sorry for Robert Kennedy.
Caro’s work, this book especially, sets the standard for research, everything has been done, everything, and this book sets the standard for judicious and balanced judgements for there are judgements aplenty. The book is not merely a recitation of information. Like Thucydides, and likening an historian to Thucydides is the highest praise, Caro has arranged the material to lead readers to the points he has drawn from his study. PhD students would do well to examine the method in this study. When Caro quotes the findings of another, earlier author, he then affirms the truth of those words by saying he has interviewed those same subjects and got the same answers, he too has read the same boxes of files and found that same material in them, he too has been to the spot and measured the distances, he too has stood in setting sun on the stretch of land and felt warmth on his face at that same time of year and can confirm the accuracy of those earlier reports. And if he cannot confirm the assertions of others, it is because he has found something they missed. He takes nothing for granted, assumes nothing is settled and tests everything for himself and for his readers.
Is it any wonder that The Years of Lyndon Johnson is consuming its author? At one point Caro sold his house to finance this research. His wife, put aside her own career, first became his research assistant and then went to work as a school teacher to fund his research. When he claims, by implication, to have read 5,000 documents in one archive, I believe he did. I said ‘by implication’ because Caro does not boast of his research for to him, doubtless, it seems natural, like breathing.
This book cross-references the first three volumes extensively, more than I have ever seen before in a multi-volume biography and I have read at least three of those. Caro says that The Years of Lyndon Johnson is not a biography but a study of the years of Lyndon Johnson. In making this claim, Caro seems to be explaining both the lack of chronological order and the cross-referencing to earlier volumes that the omission of chronological order requires. To this reader that seems a distinction without a difference, and one of the very few false notes in The Passage of Power.
This book refers to the following volume, one that I anticipate eagerly whether it covers seven weeks or more. Though I expect a subsequent volume will return to the negative side of Johnson that dominates much of the earlier volumes, and Caro says as much in the last words of this volume.
Pygmies and giants
I spend my life in academic circles. Round and round I go. While circling I sometimes notice what other people are saying. Can’t be helped.
One of the things I notice them saying is a general contempt for, derogation of, and enthusiastic debunking of great men and women. Here as in so much else the academy mirrors the wider world among those journalists, bloggers, Facebookies, and writers who think of themselves as intellectuals with self-appointed role is to be critical of our culture, well, really of everything.
Bringing down the great is a blood spot. Here these Lilliputians are hard at work:
The biographers spare us no detail about hair dye, punctuality, reading habits, pain-killers, alcohol, the shenanigans of offspring or siblings, and – and in the great tradition of the mess media (that is not a typo I mean “mess media”) saving the best for last: sex. There is no matter too small, too private, too irrelevant that it is not touted, shouted, and blogged to diminish and to demean the great.
“Quiet up there in the back, I will say what I mean by the ‘great’ in a moment. Right now I am setting the scene. Take a deep breath and count to ten, while I go on.”
I have seen every one of the items listed above trotted out as if it were the news of the moment. Did the premier dye his hair? If so, will he admit it? If he does not admit it, is it a deceit that goes to the heart of his character? One imagines the empanelled Sanctimonious Ones on ABC1 wisely nodding heads. On SBS the journalists interviewing each other would furrow their brows. One reaches for the remoter! “On his deathbed a former US president was reading a Western novel!” Shock! Horror! That one was presented to despoil the legacy of a two-term U.S. president. Punctuality? Well a British prime minister was always late, so the foreign policy of that government was suspect. All of this is noxious enough but more genteel and abstruse versions of the same approach exist in the academy. There they pass for more than entertainment.
In classrooms bespectacled, bearded, uncombed, bejeaned lecturers, for whom finding a parking place is THE major challenge of the day, sarcastically belittle the likes of Winston Churchill for the titillation of undergraduates. Much of social science is always the assault of pygmies on giants.
In another context Churchill once said, now that the war of the giants is over, the wars of the pygmies will begin. He meant that now that World War II was over, there will be fights over the remains. See The Irrepressible Churchill, ed. by Kay Halle (1966), p. 249. Exactly so.
That assault goes on with renewed vigour these days. That which is so far from our own experience we scholars ridicule. Thus does Homo Academicus rule. Of course, armed with PhDs, we are clever enough to conceal our jealous ridicule in polysyllabic terminology borrowed from the French or the German to make it sound important.
The ‘great,’ by the way (I said I would get to this term), are those that have to face those terrible challenges that life deals out to but a very few and who have prevailed: War and peace, life and death, now or never, and the like on a national or international scale. Presidents, prime ministers, generals, citizens in the firing line, these people have to do something that affects a great many others. Action not discourse analysis!
Among those that do have to face these matters, some enter the pantheon of greatness, as Winston Churchill, who was voted the Greatest Briton in a BBC exercise a few years ago. No sooner was the last video broadcast confirming that Churchill was the Greatest Briton to the British people, than the scholarly detractors searched the mental soft disk for the old notes setting to rights Churchill’s claims to fame. Though long dead, he is still a good career-making target for the pygmies. (Yes, I know about evil and incompetence on a grand scale, but that is not the focus here. Do pay attention.)
Churchill, they said, was not great because … he did not rescue enough Jews, he invaded Norway, he did not invade Sweden, he either did not help Greece enough or helped Greece too much, he was wrong about India (was he ever!), he was but a nationalist just like Hitler, he drank too much, he took too many risks, he did not take enough risks, he did not hold war time elections, and the list still goes on. The list is so long that it becomes difficult to see why we once, evidently mistakenly, thought so highly of him. Abraham Lincoln has been periodically accorded the same debunking. As has just about everyone else from Jean d’Arc to Sister Teresa. Only the mediocrities escape the opprobrium. Chester A. Arthur’s good name is safe from the attention-seeking scholar or journalist.
In a televised panel discussion on the ABC a noted journalist, well he said he was noted but I had never heard of him before or since, said in passing of John F. Kennedy “now we wonder what we ever saw in him.” This from a scribe who never went near a nuclear button over Berlin, never contemplated the missiles of October, and still less was never responsible for the lives of the crew of a PT boat rammed by a Japanese destroyer in the darkness of night in a black sea. My goodness how smug and superior we can be, we who have faced the parking lot crisis.
Having come this far Reader, and I know some slackers have not stayed this long, there is a larger point here about how social scientists, and the replicators in the mess media, see the world. To keep it simple, there is structure and there is agency. To a social scientist, just about everything that happens is due to structure. Agency, taken to mean the unique, sui generis contribution of individuals, one at a time, explains virtually nothing, and so is not taken seriously. Social forces are massive but invisible and impersonal, and they explain everything. Emile Durkheim laid the foundation for the concentration on structure with his remarkable study of what seemed to be that most private and idiosyncratic of all acts, suicide, and showed the social causation that explained variations in its occurrence.
Social forces may be economic, religious, ideological, or political, or social and they flow through the world, rather as the atmospheric highs and lows that we never see, determining the social weather. Exemplary individuals are created by the patterns of these social forces, as are thunderstorms. It is this context that an analyst can say that as colourful and extra-ordinary as Churchill was with all his habits, tics, and contradictions, none of it was unique to him but rather created by the English class system, its political expression, and the like. Had the individual we know of as Winston Churchill been killed crossing the street in Manhattan while on a speaking tour in 1929, as he very nearly was, then somehow or other Britain would still have held out until the United States and the Soviet Union tipped the balance in World War II. It is not quite determinism but it almost sounds like it. But leaving that aside, the point is that the dominance of structure leaves no room for the expression of agency, when all of the fine points have been pointed, the qualifications qualified, and the quibbles quibbled, if ever that end is reached.
Indeed in some sense, social science grew into a profession in reaction to the explanation of events as the actions of great men in history by Thomas Carlyle. The social sciences arose to study society as itself causative, leaving aside the greats, as well as the smalls (we mere mortals).
Every social scientist knows that structure prevails in every important way and they say this in the research they do and in the classes they teach (yet, I suspect, they harbor the belief that they are creative individuals – agents, themselves an exception to the rule they preach). Accordingly social scientists routinely decry the great man in history focus on extra-ordinary individuals like Winston Churchill.
Social science took individuals out of social explanation. It was in reaction to this dehumanizing of social life that leadership studies emerged. Sometimes leadership studies descend to a set of steps to follow to be a leader, a sort of Churchill’s Handbook approach, which by implication denies uniqueness to Churchill while attributing agency to him. “We can all be little Churchills, if we try” is the message. That message is ludicrous but it does answer to some need because those books about leadership are legion. The covers change and the titles come and go, today’s talk-show sage is forgotten tomorrow, but the books on leadership spill off the shelf. The fact that there are so many of them itself suggests that readers believe there are leaders. Something social scientists know is just silly.
Well, many social scientist act as if they know that when they denigrate Churchill, though as noted above, they may also think of themselves as exceptions to the rules they apply to him. The academic custom of making oneself an exception was codified by Karl Mannheim when he wrote of ‘free-floating intellectuals’ who are in but not of the society, and so able to perceive its structure. Try his Ideology and Utopia (1929).
The representatives of the mess media do not have deadline-time to go into any of these doubts and qualifications, so they say. They do have time to smirk, sneer, and opine – they call it subjective journalism, I am told – sure in the faith that any claims to leadership are dishonest, false, and dangerous. (It seems sometimes to be a collective and endlessly rerun Watergate investigation: one leader became a crook, therefore all leaders are always crooks.)
A journalist was once waxing on about the void of leadership everywhere (except, by the implication of silence, in the mess media) when one interlocutor demurred and said ‘no man is a hero to his valet.’ It was a show stopper.
Since the interlocutor was not a native speaker of English the words came out with the emphasis on the wrong syllables, and true to form, this journalist could not seem to understand English spoken by someone who does not speak Leagues-club English. So the remark had to be repeated a few times for the compère to get it. Then it had to be explained.
Here is the explanation: The valet does the laundry, makes the bed, tidies the closet – this is the world of the valet, that is all the valet sees of what the employer does. Napoleon’s valet saw only dirty socks, ripped jackets, and other detritus. One person’s dirty socks are much like anyone’s dirty socks, so there is nothing in the valet’s world distinctive about Napoleon. And that is the point, no man is a hero to his valet (it was said by Georg Hegel) not because no man is a hero, for some clearly are, like Napoleon (in this case ‘hero’ can be taken to mean larger than life), but because the valet is only a valet, i.e., lives in the valet’s world where dirty socks are the reality. Hmm. Most journalists these days are content with dirty socks because they seem only to see the valet’s world.
By the way the compère’s confused and condescending response to this aphorism from someone whose English was not League’s-club standard was a clear example of a more general phenomenon. Members of the Australian mess media sometimes seem unable to understand English from non-native speakers in a way I am told Japanese just cannot fathom Japanese, even letter and tone perfect, spoken by a European. Hence those ABC television news items with subtitles for a speaker who is perfectly clear, if labored, in English. Remember those Dutch bankers in the 1980s who went to Perth to question Alan Bond’s many instances of creative accounting, long before it unravelled, in heavily accented English only to excoriated by the mess media for challenging our great man (see, yes, I know claims to greatness can be dangerous, salt can be dangerous, too, but it is part of life). For a time the pygmies preferred nationalism. But that changed.
No, most people probably do not remember these Dutch bankers because when that great man’s fall came this part of the story was sent down the memory hole by those in the mess media who latter wanted to take credit for his downfall. Only those with clipping files retained it.
Where have all the haters gone? Not far.
The historical record is replete with haters. The closest I have ever come to them, happily, is in a small museum in Topeka Kansas, Wizard of Oz country there in tornado-land. A superseded public school is home to the Brown versus Board of Education Museum: http://www.nps.gov/brvb/index.htm.
It is a National Park historical site. I have been there several times.
Each time I have an involuntary, visceral reaction to the one of the displays. Each time I think about it long afterwards.
The display is a narrow hallway in darkness. On each side are flat panel TV screens nearly life size projecting the segregationists of the day defending their ways and shouting abuse at half a dozen black elementary school children. I saw those images on the family television as a lad, and they were distressing then, but to experience it now – sound track turned up – is, nearly, frightening.
There they are, the proud white men and women, screaming – cords distended in their necks – and shouting, gesturing and posturing to compare blacks to apes, and inevitably they have Bibles in hand. The original footage is black-and-white, but I imagine their faces red. These are the haters. Once seen, never forgotten.
Where are they now? They are all around. Do not doubt it.
There are plenty of other haters then who were less visible, but these haters did us the favour of revealing themselves for what they were. Haters. There is no other word for it: H A T E.
These days the Haters seldom assemble for network television cameras to rant the rant. But surely they are still among us, no less numerous, and no less venomous. Full of hate, they still have a Bible at hand.
Perhaps it is an example of a long fallout (pace geology) that the object of so much hatred now is the government itself. Attorneys-general, Presidents, and National Guardsmen enforced integration, all agents of government, that demonic force ruining lives far and wide.
Are they Timothy James McVeigh’s brethren and sisteren? When they lift their eyes from a Bible, they see the world through the cross-hairs of a rifle sight.
I said “a” Bible twice because it is their Bible; it is not mine. Theirs is a book of hate, betrayal, fire, vengeance, righteousness, and more righteousness, and again righteousness. Mine, the one I read in Sunday school, chapel, New and Old Testament Religion at the church school I attended, this is a book of charity, faith, loyalty, sacrifice, endurance, compromise, fidelity, concession, compassion, hope, kindness to strangers, and the like.
I am not at all sure what conclusion to draw from any of this, but I see a connection in that hard continuity of hatred, which is readily to be found on the Internet and contemporary politics. It is there but not on prime news television this time around.
In the quest for office in the last generation the politicians everywhere have tapped that vein of hatred. They no longer run against rivals. They no longer have opponents. Rather the rivals are manifestations of evil. They are Satan’s hand. They are God’s enemies to be smote. When the educated, privileged, political class descends to this hatred, it is not surprise that such debasement is spread further by others.
Hatred is the only explanation I could think of for the vituperation heaped upon Bill Clinton years ago. At my remove Clinton seemed to be a harmless cracker who joshed and joked his way past an incumbent, patrician President who had no interest in people. Clinton continued to ah-shucks his way past a very competent but out-moded opponent a second time. In the first instance in 1992, Clinton was mightily aided by the loose canon of a third party. That was Ross Perot for those of fading memories.
The public and published vituperation of Clinton for those eight years gave me pause for thought, but that was only the part above the waterline. A few friends seemed to think I would be interested in the Internet traffic in trashing Clinton, and so for a time in the 1990s I had a daily dose of the bad things smart people could think of to say about him. He, of course, gave them plenty of ammunition. It wore thin quickly and finally I did ask these friends to cancel my subscription to their feeds. But it was an insight into the minds of smart people who took the time to hate. It went way beyond rationality. It was emotional, Mr Spock! That Cracker Clinton had not right to be president, votes or no! That was the nerve that flinched beneath the daily tirades. They got their wish when that draft dodger, the junior Bush, restored the dignity of the office by wearing cufflinks.
But Clinton’s constant bath in the hatred was as nothing compared to the cyber malevolence now spewed out about Barrack Obama. It is unbelievable. It goes beyond the Blue Dogs and Swamp Rats that now typify Congressional debates.
The Haters are still there and hard at the unending work of hatred, but they do not gather quite as conspicuously for the cameras. Not yet anyway. And when they do gather the message is coded. The Bible seems to have been supplemented by the Constitution, but like the Bible before it, it remains largely unread by those that shout the loudest about it. The totemic reading of the Constitution in Congress in 2011 was a sorry spectacle. Surely somewhere in there it says no black man can be president was the coded message. It did do that in its original form with its affirmation of slavery. The United States Constitution is a noble document, one written before the Industrial Revolution, before ‘electricity, the train, telephones, radio, television, automobiles, airplanes, rockets, nuclear weapons, satellites, or space exploration. There’s a lot they didn’t know about. It would be interesting to see what kind of document they’d draft today.’ Indeed. The quotation is from Ross Perot, by the way.
Had the Framers, as those who participated in the writing of the Constitution are reverentially called, today might have spent their time praying over the Magna Carta before going out to shoot a soft target.
Tocqueville’s America
Alexis de Tocqueville’s Discovery of America by Leo Damrosch (2010)
A superb book this one. It brings out much from Tocqueville’s notebooks and letters, which is then related to Democracy in America, volumes I and II. The comparison is always informative, as we see Tocqueville refining the ore, and at times arresting to see the conclusions he wrestles from the raw material. He laboured to suppress snap judgements when he saw something different and even offensive to his sensibilities. Not common that restraint.
Impressive research underlies the book, as the author compares Tocqueville’ experiences with that of other European travellers in the United States at the time. This cross section of European travel writers is quite striking. He was not alone in making the trip, but he alone made a lasting work from it.
Following Tocqueville’s trail also makes the reader aware for what he missed. Tocqueville missed meeting Abraham Lincoln by a few miles. Tocqueville made nothing of the differences between Canada and the United States. He only saw in Canada the ghost of its French past. Though Tocqueville was travelling at a time when Associationism was a current in American intellectual life he seems never to have encountered any of its advocates or adherents. That is strange since Associationism, though now a relic in the museum of dead ideas, was a cut-down version of Frenchman Charles Fourier’s theories of humanity. It peaked about ten years after Tocqueville’s visit but its seeds were there at the time of the visit. Nor did Tocqueville encounter any of the other utopian colonies like Nashoba in Tennessee, though he passed close by. It was ended at the time of his trip, but only just, and no one seems to have mentioned it to him. It was a Southern experiment in interracial living.
The long chapter on the three races was abridged from student editions of the Democracy in America for many years. But that chapter is powerful on every point. Slavery is pernicious, degrading both parties. Tocqueville talked to red men, but never to black as far as I can tell.
Harvey Mansfield, Jr. Tocqueville: A very brief introduction (2010) is a concise account of Tocqueville’s whole life and work. It is quite remarkable in condensing so much into so few very well chosen words. It is highly recommended. I cannot say the same for The Ideal of Alexis de Tocqueville (2000) by Manning Clark. Sheldon Wolin’s rambling Tocqueville between two worlds (2001) glitters now and again, but mostly it rambles.
To return to Damrosch’s Alexis de Tocqueville’s Discovery of America, it is superb on the paradoxes that Tocqueville embodied. Genius is sometimes defined as the ability simultaneously to hold contradictory ideas. By that definition Tocqueville was certainly a genius. He was democrat and anti-democrat at once. He was a liberal and a conservative. He admired energy and daring and valued calm order. Would that there were more geniuses less inclined to simple labels with even simpler conclusions.
http://www.amazon.com/Tocquevilles-Discovery-America-Leo-Damrosch/dp/B0058M75UI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334627754&sr=8-1