Tag: history

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Polybius et al & the Rise of the Roman Empire

Since I am talking about old stuff, I thought I would put up a picture of my bike.  I had to take it to the shop and get new back sprockets.  The guy at the shop commented that he rarely saw one of them actually worn out, but mine was.   I got that bike in 1997.   I rode it a lot.    Best bike I have ever owned.

My walks to the Metro and to FSI plus the Metro rides take more than two hours a day and I have had a lot of opportunity to listen to my I-pod.   I have a really good program from the Teaching Company about Roman history.   (The History of Ancient Rome, by Garrett Fagan of Penn State)There are 48 half-hour lectures and I have gotten as far as the assassination of Julius Caesar.   Studying Roman history is a good way to learn about leadership, good & bad, and the fall of the Roman Republic provides examples of what happens when the traditions and institutions of order break down.   The Founding Fathers were well versed in Roman history and our own Constitution is very much influenced by the Romans.  We tried to address the fatal flaws that played out in the ancient city.  Besides that brief unpleasantness in the 1860s, it seems to have worked out okay. 

Look at a dollar bill to see the persistence of Rome.  On the great seal, we have the Roman style eagle holding a scroll that says “e pluribus unam” – from many, one.  The other mottos are “novus ordo seclorum” – new order of the ages and “annuit coeptis” – he (God) favors, taken from the Virgil’s Aeneid.  All in Latin.   The Roman Empire fell in the west in AD 476.   In 1776 it was a profound influence on what for Romans was an undiscoved country.

So much of what I learned more than thirty years ago comes back when I listen to the lectures.  I thought I forgot, but now I realize how much I learned, kept & internalized.  I just didn’t remember where it came from.   I had a seminar in Polybius my first year in grad-school.   My major professor, Ken Sacks, specialized in that historian.  Polybius wrote in Greek about the rise of the Roman Republic.   We read the sources in Greek (at least tried) but the big lessons were in historiography and the nature of evidence.    History is constructed by historians and they have a responsibility to follow the sources and not exceed or extrapolate from them.

Polybius discussed the rise of Rome and the Punic Wars.  He figured those were events worth investigating.  The Romans and the Carthaginians stumbled into the conflict over a bunch of Italian criminals who had taken over a not very important city in Sicily.  One lesson I take from history is that events are a lot more illogical than we make them sound later on.   A good historian makes a story that hangs together with conditional causalities, most of which would be unknown or unclear at the time AND some of them might actually be only the artifact of the historian’s story telling skills.

One of the biggest pitfalls of the study of history is the overemphasis on agency.  Sometimes shit just happens.  But we look for some person, persons or particular events to credit or blame for what happens – the agent – and historians always find one.  If that person had not already figured out how to make his own contribution look brilliant, his biographers provide him with an ex-post-facto plan more brilliant than than any that could have been concieved in advanced.  I believe that history is shaped by human choices and that great individuals have a great influence on events, but it is sloppier and less direct than we have to make it appear when we write up the reports.  It makes us too confident that our leaders can solve our problems and creates a systematic bias in our politics.

Scholars and military historians look at the Punic Wars as case studies in conflict and the perils of power.   The most studied of the three wars is the second (the one with Hannibal).   The Romans should have lost that war, but they just refused to give up.    The refusal to be beaten, coupled with the unusually large manpower reserves they could command explains their dominance of the Mediterranean.   They were not brilliant strategist, brilliant inventors or subtle thinkers.  They just has a talent for doing practical things and they just kept on coming back when most others would have given up.

Pyrrhus of Epirus learned it the hard way.   He beat the Romans twice and beat them big.   He waited for them to ask for terms but they just raised more armies.   Pyrrhus had to give up and go home saying “One more victory against the Romans and we shall be utterly ruined,” hence the term Pyrrhic Victory. 

The body of the history of the Republic is patchy and contradictory.   Less than 5% of what historians think was available is extant.   The author describes the process of finding history like looking at the Palace of Versailles through the keyholes.   You see some things very clearly, but there are big places you don’t see at all.   Historians know very little about ordinary folks because the ancients, at least those who could write, really didn’t care much about them.  They wrote about the important people, i.e. generals, senators, kings and emperors, so even if we had all the sources available in the ancient world we still wouldn’t know much re the common people.    

Nevertheless, a lot of historians are trying to write the history of the common man.  We can draw clues from archeology, but while archeology can tell us a lot about physical structures, and lately with a sort of CSI archeology even a lot about the physical condition of the people themselves,  it doesn’t tell us much about their attitudes or ideas.   You may also draw the wrong conclusions.   Imagine if a future archeologist knew there was a war with the U.S. on one side and Japan and Germany on the other, but doesn’t know the exact dates or who won.   He digs up a Los Angeles from around now and finds that cars and products made in Japan and Germany predominate.  Does he conclude that they won the war and colonized the U.S.? In my history seminars so long ago, I learned to assess and judge sources.  We did that by the context, the language, the historian’s skill and comparisons with other events.    You have to try to assess not only whether the historian THINKS he is telling the truth but whether or not he has the capacity to know the truth.   Some things you just cannot know.   No matter how troubling this may be, it is the fact.  We don’t get to fill in the blank spaces with what we want to be the truth.  Polybius, BTW, was a very good historian and his access to leading Roman politicians put him in the position to know lots of things.   Still, like everyone else, he has his strengths and weaknesses.  A lot of what applies to ancient history also applies to evidence in general and especially all that is proliferating on the Internet.   Sure, there is a lot more information on the Internet, but like the ancient sources, you have to assess whether it is true or if it can be true.  People just lying are only the start of the challenge.  Some honest people are not in postions to know and others cannot figure it out even when they have all the facts in front of them. Not everybody who thinks he is telling the truth IS really telling the truth and many people aren’t even trying very hard.  You have to be careful.  Those lessons of studying history apply today too.

The study of history does indeed have practical value.

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The Haunted Temple

Above – The Euphrates looking north and west. 

Our Iraqi friends told us that there was an ancient temple, cursed & haunted by a gin/ghost nearby, so of course we had to go see it.  It sounds like the beginning of a ghost movie.  You know the story line.  The local guys warn us re the ghost.  We don’t believe in ghosts and boldly go.  The ghost catches everybody one-by-one.  It didn’t work out that way because there really are no ghosts, but maybe the gin got us after all.  It was a lot farther away than we thought, over wrenching roads.  But when we finally got there the view of the Euphrates was beautiful and the place interesting.

Below is the temple mound

Unfortunately, our hosts really didn’t know much about the site.   They told me that it was not only that they didn’t know, but that it was unknown.   Archaeologists had not properly studied the place.  There had been some looting, however, and they did send some shards to Baghdad to be studied.   They told me that the shards were Assyrian and said that they were from around 2000 BC.  This means they are from the middle bronze age, what they call the old Assyrian period, when the Assyrians were establishing trade routes, but before they established their empire.  But I don’t know if the information was reliable. 

I studied ancient history, but I really don’t know much re the practical work of archeology.  The site looked to me like the remains of an ancient city with maybe a ziggurat making up the highest point.  The soil underfoot was not like the nearby soil.   My guess (and it is only a guess) is that this is a multi-layered ancient city.   Around here, they built with mud brick.  When the bricks wore out and the city filled with trash, they simply leveled the buildings and built on top.  Over the course of centuries, the cities rose about the neighboring landscape.  Archeologists can dig into the mounds and date the artifacts according to layers.  Ancient Troy had nine layers.  When Heinrich Schliemann dug into the mound, he thought he found Priam’s treasure.   He was mistaken – wrong level – but he did open the site to further exploration.

Below – this guy was interested in history and told us what local people knew re the place.

Someday, I suppose, they will excavate this mound.  It doesn’t seem like a very important place, but in ancient history you never know.   Sometimes seemingly small discoveries cause paradigm shifts in how we view history.  I saw lots of shards of pottery, pieces of bone and what looked like a shearing knife, but I have no idea if these things are ancient remains, the debris of somebody’s goat grab from last year or some of each.

Someday, I suppose, they will excavate this mound.  It doesn’t seem like a very important place, but in ancient history you never know.   Sometimes seemingly small discoveries cause paradigm shifts in how we view history.  I saw lots of shards of pottery, pieces of bone and what looked like a shearing knife, but I have no idea if these things are ancient remains, the debris of somebody’s goat grab from last year or some of each.

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Foreigners Loving America … or Not

We were canc’d for our trip to Al Qaim by bad weather, so I am stuck at Al Asad w/o any new Iraqi stories to tell.   But I still can produce blog entries.

After Iraq I will go back to my job in public diplomacy.  I have been thinking about that in my spare time and when I think I write.  These are just my thoughts about some of the big trends.   We will soon be in a new administration and some people expect a big change in our image overseas.  I don’t.  Not in the long term.  We will get a bounce in January as everybody welcomes the new president, but it will be ephemeral.  I worked for Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush.  The only thing I have noticed about opinions of our presidents is that people always seem to like the last president better than the current one.  I have seen more continuity than change in both our policies and our image.  Many of the trends are long term. British Lord Palmerston cynically noted that, “Nations have no permanent friends or allies; they have only permanent interests.”  I find that depressing, but it is true that what we are will trump what we say in the long run.  

We were never as popular as some people remember nor are we as unpopular now as some people think.  Foreigners usually claim that they like the idea of America in general, but the often don’t like much about anything in particular about its current manifestation.  This is a long term problem.  On the other hand, they also say that they don’t like the current American government, but they like most Americans.  It is just a very complex situation.  The overall American reputation has clearly suffered under George W. Bush, but is our reputation so dependent on one man? Can Obama or McCain change that?

 I have been watching America’s image overseas for more than twenty-five years.  What I have observed is that some things have changed more than others. We have never been widely loved by the so-called intelligencia overseas, with a few exceptions, such as in Eastern Europe.  I was there.  I remember.  But during the Cold War their criticism could go only so far. European pacifists might claim that America and the Soviet Union were morally equivalent, but they knew they were lying. Demonstrations in those days were a kind of burlesque theater, with nice looking props and good displays of pseudo-emotion but not much real substance. They were well orchestrated, often partially funded by the KGB and featuring lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Euro-lefties wanted to harass and weaken the U.S., but not so much that we couldn’t defend them from the power of the Soviet Union.

The collapse of the Soviet Union came as a surprise to everyone, although many now claim to have anticipated it.  With the benefit of hindsight, they can clearly see the cracks that were not apparent at the time. It took the world several years to figure out that it really had happened and that consequently the U.S. was unbound and the world’s only superpower.  A lot of books were written about it with about a five year time lag.  The French called us a hyper-power back in the 1990s, and it wasn’t meant as a compliment.  

During the Cold War, U.S. power was balanced and constrained by a nearly peer competitor in the Soviet Union. After the collapse of the Evil Empire, the U.S. was free to use its power.  In some ways, it was almost compelled to do something.  The excuse that U.S. action would provoke an overwhelming Soviet response was removed. It was disquieting.  

Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz bitterly complained to then Secretary of State James Baker that the U.S. would never have dared attack Iraq if it was still a client of the powerful Soviet Union, and he was right, but that had changed by 1990.  

The U.S. also never would have intervened in Bosnia or Kosovo had the Soviet Union still been standing.  We would not have been able to invade either Afghanistan or Iraq. The Cold War created caution and a stability because thermonuclear incineration always lurked only around a half hour away. All of today’s leaders grew up in this environment; it seemed permanent. Then, it was gone like the snows of past winters.  It was a welcome relief, but many people had grown comfortable with the constraint.

Historians and political scientist have long understood that if any single power emerges unchallenged it will be balanced by others, usually sooner rather than later and usually in by coalition of the weaker powers. In the 1990s, pundits and experts hopefully and probably sincerely declared that the U.S. was immune to the sorts of forces that had affected great powers throughout all of recorded history. We talked about the end of history.  What did that even mean? 

Our intervention during the first Iraq War did not provoke great backlash (although it provoked a lot more than many recall today) because it was dressed up as a worldwide effort and – more importantly – it was a conservative and self-limiting enterprise.  The stated and real goals were to reestablish the previous status quo and leave everything – and everyone – else more or less intact. Bosnia and Kosovo made the Russians and the Greeks lividly angry and disrupted the NATO alliance, but we had the Western Europeans mostly on our side because we were doing their work for them and they were mildly embarrassed that they couldn’t clean their own house.  

These adventures did sow the seeds of future troubles. In a small but telling episode in 2000, the French refused to sign onto Albright’s pet project, The Community of Democracies, despite its innocuous declaration that democracy was a good thing.  The only thing they really didn’t like about it was that it was greatly favored by America. 

George Bush blundered into a growing mess. We were already being accused to being unilateral and arrogant, with some justification. Bush made it worse. He was inexperienced in foreign affairs and it showed. Bush lacked the Clinton duplicity. Clinton had no trouble parsing words and letting people believe what they wanted to hear in them. I say this with admiration more than criticism.  Sometimes the sugar coating is all it takes to swallow the bitter pill.  For example, Clinton rejected Kyoto and objected to the land mine treaty, but nobody could really tell. Clinton never had any intention acting on these sorts of things, but he was wise enough to obfuscate. Bush told the Texas truth and that doesn’t go over very well in Paris salons.  

9/11 created a very interesting situation, one that should be studied closer. Except in places like the Palestinian territories were people openly celebrated, most of the world was sympathetic, but if you look closely at this sympathy you see the seeds of something else. America for the first time in its history was seen as a victim. The attacks seemed to humble the U.S. and bring it down to the level of ordinary countries. Temporarily, the U.S. was less threatening as the world’s superpower and in need of help from others.  This didn’t last. Any American president would have reacted aggressively to the attacks. We are an aggressive people, after all, which is how we got to be so powerful. But the Bush Administration and especially Donald Rumsfeld talked a little tougher than was useful. They also made a big mistake in September 2001. The U.S. got all kinds of offers of help from allies and friends. We could have formed a broad coalition of allies who really had autonomy. However, these kinds of coalitions are messy from the military and logistical point of view. Rumsfeld understood that we did not NEED help from the military point of view and that potential helpers would probably get in the way. He was right from the narrow military point of view, but very wrong from a political one. I am not saying we acted completely alone, but the “my way or highway” attitudes came through a bit too often.

I have to add in my personal observation re public diplomacy.  In the 1990s, we unilaterally disarmed our information operations.  We were told that the Cold War was over and our sort of work was not so much needed anymore.  I saw it happening.  We closed our libraries and cut our public affairs staffs.  I had to close my library in Krakow; we got almost no speaker programs; we closed the consulate in Poznan.  And this was happening all over the world.  The number of officers in public affairs dropped by almost half and almost nobody got promoted from around 1993-2000.  It was a devastating time.  A lot of good officers reached their mandatory time in class and were kicked out of the FS.   In better times they would have moved ahead to bigger and better things.  My point is that after 9/11, when we needed a robust public affairs effort, we just did not have enough people or resources in the field to get the message out because of the cuts.  Colin Powell worked hard to make up for the deficit, with his diplomatic readiness initiative, but it takes 7-10 years to develop an experienced FSO.  We lost a generation of officers and it hurt.  Well, back to the main story.

A wiser political point of view would have been to consult and bring allies along in the process to bind them to the joint enterprise. The alliance would have been clumsier, but more robust. I lay the blame for not doing this at the feet of the President. George Bush was too inexperienced in international politics.  Of course, it is really easy to see this now.  In times of emergency thing are not as clear.  (BTW – Clinton was inexperienced too, but he was lucky to fall into the most benign international environment in history. That started to change in the late 1990s.  International experience is helpful.) Instead he took the advice of Cheney and Rumsfeld. They were indeed correct – to a point, but they were solving the current problem at the expense of a future solution.  A wise and experienced president would have looked beyond today’s solution to see tomorrow’s problem.  

I don’t have the time here to talk about the further degeneration that happened as a result of Iraq, but I believe that the seeds of trouble were sown in September-October of 2001 and not a year later. I am not sure that we could have brought along the Germans or the French, who opposed us for their own domestic political reasons, but it would have been better to start from a stronger base.  

As a tangent, I believe that our evident victory in Iraq may make us ostensibly LESS popular because it will show that American strength can win even against an”unbeatable” opponent in the heart of the Middle East. But although the talk will remain acrimonious, maybe even get worse, many of the local power brokers will behave better in the presence of strength than they would have had we been defeated. It reminds me of when I see eagles fly. They are often surrounded and harassed by small birds. After it is all said and done, however, it is better to be the eagle than the pigeon.  

My original question was whether or not a new president can get us out of this mess. MY answer is that the American image problem goes way beyond one man, even the president. The meta problem is U.S. power. The president can mitigate the problem, but not by very much. On the plus side, much anti-Americanism is still often burlesque. I have traveled all around and not run into too much of it in REAL life. If Americans behave reasonably well, they are treated reasonably well. Some people have told me that foreigners are nice to me because they want my money. I don’t really believe that but don’t care anyway. If $5 can rent loyalty it is sure a small price and any hatred that can be expunged for a few dollars doesn’t run very deep. Beyond that, our products sell overseas and our investments are welcomed. Thankfully, there is still more sound and fury to anti-Americanism than substance.  That is not to downplay the menace of anti-Americanism.  It constrains our policy choices in some very real ways.  We can mitigate it: we should mitigate it, but we cannot eliminate it.  Every place a person in the world turns, he finds Americans, often giving advice. It is no-doubt annoying. Ironically, our image will improve to the extent that our power wanes and/or as other rival centers of power emerge. We can see that happening already in the case of China. Significant “anti-Chinese” sentiment is building up among the chattering classes because of their positions in Darfur or Tibet and their heavy handed management of investments in Africa will soon create a further backlash.

When American is compared to an ideal, we suffer; when compared to something in the real world, we do okay.

The sad fact of human nature is that everybody has to have somebody to dislike and blame for their problems.  It doesn’t really matter if it is true or even if they believe it deep down.  The political leaders of some crappy little country don’t want to take the blame for the bad conditions created by their policies.  Easier to blame the ubiquitous Americans.  Even in a well-run country lots of things go wrong.  Need someone to blame?  The U.S. has served this role for a good many years and we will continue to do that, although we may soon have a little help from rising powers.

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Bubblers & Civic Virtue

I went down to Washington to meet Chrissy for lunch and took advantage of being there to see some of the memorials.   

Washington is a truly beautiful city.  There is a lot to see and it is all free. I corrected a German tourist who I overheard saying to a fellow European, “Americans have so little history that they have to make a bigger thing of so short a time.”  I pointed out the truth that we Americans enjoy the OLDEST continuous government in the world after only the UK.   We have not had a radical or violent overthrow of our government since 1776 and we have lived under the same Constitution – never suspended – since 1788.   I asked him just to think about it.  I didn’t point out that Germany was not a country until 1871 and that it went through some interesting changes after that.

Below is the new office building where I will work in 2009, although I bet I won’t get a good view of the Potomac.

Below is the same building in April.  They are making good progress.

Many Europeans have a different and, IMO, mistaken view of history.  They fix on places and traditions instead of people.   Some people live close to old things but no “people” or culture is older than any other.   My mother’s family left the new Germany soon after Otto Von Bismarck’s unification thing in 1871.  My father’s family left Poland (then subject to the Russian Empire) soon after.  I am glad they did.  When they came to America, they didn’t just set back the human clock to zero and start over.  They added to America’s in a shared heritage.  I have been to Germany.  We make better sausages in Milwaukee, but they still make better beer. 

BTW – I hear my great-grandfather used to imply that things were better in Germany.  This made him unpopular during World War I.  Of course he was not telling the truth.  ALL immigrants think that America is better than the places they left, otherwise they would be there and not here.  It is true even if they don’t want to admit it.

Below – Washington still has many big and beautiful American elms.

There is no such thing as a culture outside its human carriers.   It is not resident in old buildings, the land or anything else non-human.  Parents pass their culture on to their children and some cultural traits can be astonishingly long-lived, but each transition produces an imperfect copy.  This is great.  Otherwise the culture would be as dead as a rock.  No two individuals have the same understanding of their culture.   We talk about culture as thought it was something palpable, but it really is just a chimera and a very ephemeral one at that.  Better to adapt the best things you can find rather than stick only with the adaptations that worked for your grandparents.  Even the best things must be adapted.  Living people adapt and so do living cultures.  I think America does this well.  I love our traditions and still feel a kind of excitement when I walk around the Capitol Mall, even though I done it literally hundreds of times.  On the other hand, I would not want to be limited to the skills of Washington’s dentist.

Above is WWII memorial from behind.

Of course, I didn’t bore the European tourists with all that either.  Germans usually have good teeth. 

I thought of change and persistence as I walked past the World War II memorial.  It is a new memorial, but it is so very well done and fits perfectly into the Mall that you would think it had been there forever.   It commemorates the courage of my father’s generation.   Each year there are fewer and fewer of them.  Their courage is something worth passing along.

There is one simple tradition that seems to be disappearing – bubblers.*   There are still bubblers on the Mall.  There used to be lots of bubblers around generally, now not so much.   I suppose they are trouble to maintain.  Vandals break them or put gum in the spigots.  But I think the culture has taken a small wrong turn in not keeping those things around.   A bubbler is an obvious symbol of civic virtue.  Everybody gets to have something everybody needs and it is available to all.  The symbolism is one of the reason that separate bubblers were so offensive during the time of Jim Crow.   Now people sell bottles of water.   Everybody carries a bottle of water around to “hydrate”.   I would rather have the bubblers.

*Drinking fountains to people not from Milwaukee

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The Worst Hard Time

I just finished The Worst Hard Time about the dust bowl of the 1930s.   Some of what the author describes applies to Iraq.  We get the various different colors of dust and it is almost impossible to get away from it.

Below is the American dust bowl.

The dust bowl was a man-made disaster caused by the plowing up of prairie grass as farmers tried to produce crops which were not suited by nature to the area.   This process was exacerbated by “good luck”.  There was a boom in grain prices caused by WWI and the collapse of grain production in Russia (which had been a big exporter) after the revolution there.   This coincided with some unusually wet weather on the American high plains and during the 1920s times were good, with bumper harvests and high prices.  But later as grain prices dropped (i.e. returned to long term normal), farmers had to put more and more land in production merely to make the same money.  It became a viscous (BTW the original idiom is indeed a viscous not vicious) circle with farmers breaking up the sod to grow more grain and growing more lower the prices and encouraging more sod-busting.   Then the rains stopped.  Subsequent investigation showed that the drought of the dust bowl was not abnormal, but w/o the grass to hold the soil, it blew away.

There is a good PBS series on the Dust Bowl, BTW with a good webpage.

We learned a lot from this experience.   We now have methods that can build or at least maintain soils.  The most important lesson is that you have to work within the bounds of nature and there are some things you just cannot do, no matter how attractive or how much you want it.  The Great Plains have recovered (mostly) from the dust bowl.  Farming there is dry land or irrigated, usually with water from the Ogallala Aquifer, but much has reverted to grassland and many rural counties have never recovered their populations. 

Iraq has a climate like the Texas Panhandle, only hotter.   Anbar gets 4-7 inches of rain in a usual year.  Most of that rain falls in winter.  I saw a couple of good storms and once it rained all day, but the place is a desert.  I wonder, however, how much of desolation is man-made.   The dunes in Anbar are dust and dirt, not sand.   Plants can grow on dirt, if they have a chance.  Unfortunately, people and goats have been working on this place for 4000 years.  It would never be verdant, but how much could be restored?   We have planned and funded some small scale restoration projects.  I don’t know if they will last very long.  Local shepherds have incentives to let their animals devour what they can get, even if it means destruction in coming years.

I had some grandiose dreams when I came to Anbar.   I envisioned a small version of the CCC, an ink blot version.  We have had lots of contacts with local farmers but I don’t know if we have done any lasting good.   The desert will probably swallow up all we do.  Ozymandias leaps to mind.

Above is the Al Asad dust bowl with the duster blowing in

Probably the best thing I did for environment of the desolate region was negative.  We declined to fund “emergency feeding” for the local sheep and goats.   It seemed cruel, but it really would not have helped even in the short run and it would have caused must more destruction and despair even in the medium term.   There are just too many of them for the carrying capacity of the land.  They destroy everything green.  My Ag-Advisor Dennis, who did a lot of his work and growing up in Texas near the old dust bowl, understood the futility – even perniciousness – of the subsidies.  It needed NOT be done. I agreed with him 100%.  We took the hard decision and I am proud of it, although I told him that if they ever make a movie about this, we will certainly be the villains. Sheep and goats are desert making machines, but they are cute.

Anyway, I recommend the book.  About the same time you should also read The Forgotten Man, also about the Great Depression but with a broader perspective.

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The Study of History

I didn’t have a picture to go with this post, so I fished this out of the files.  It is from Milwaukee near the lake.  On top of the old building is the Schlitz globe.  This is an interesting historical study.  Schlitz was once the world’s biggest brewer, but it declined and disappeared in the course of around ten years.  I used to think it was because my father, a big beer drinker, switched from Schlitz to Pabst and ultimately to Bud (which is not really beer, since it is made from rice) but I suppose there were other reasons too. 

Its former headquarters are now yuppie condos. I think they call them “Brewer Hill.”  Milwaukee no longer gets that sweet smell of fermentation I recall riding my bike past the place in the early mornings on my way to a job at Mellowes Lockwasher factory on the north side.  

Schlitz became famous and “made Milwaukee famous” in 1871, when Joseph Schlitz sent wagon loads of beer as a relief measure to the victims of the great Chicago fire, better than the usual donations, IMO.  The other historical curiosity involved in this is that most people have heard of the Chicago fire.  Fewer know anything about the great Peshtigo fire, which happened about the same time.   The Peshtigo fire was the largest fire in North America.  It destroyed thousands of acres and didn’t stop until it hit Lake Michigan.  These guys didn’t get any beer. 

I have not been to Peshtigo in more than thirty years, but I still remember that you could see the mark on the ecology even a century later, with the relatively even aged old growth.

The Study of History

When I talked about big Arnold in college I meant Toynbee, not Schwarzenegger.  Arnold Toynbee started off as a classical historian and developed a comprehensive theory of history.   I think he was the last serious historians to try such a thing.  Nobody dares do that today.  Any comprehensive theory will be wrong in some specifics.  Legions of grad students and professors will find and amplify those errors until they are like a festering bucket of puss on an otherwise glittering career.   Today they will be joined by an even larger group of internet searchers who like nothing better than to enhance their nerdy little status by pulling down somebody big.

Professional historians today study esoteric fields where nobody has bothered to go before (often for good reason), preferably ones dominated by obscure sources or oral histories (which are usually protean and riddled with error but impossible to debunk).   Today’s great historians, such as David McCullough, Joseph Ellis, Victor Davis Hansen or the late Stephen Ambrose, are often derided by the cognoscenti as popularizers.    It is too bad.  People, ordinary people, are hungry for the sweep of narrative history.  That is why “The History Channel” is so popular, why “Band of Brothers” sells so well on DVD or why even semi-historical series such as “Rome” are watched by millions.

I am not arguing against being correct and careful.  I am the first, as many know, to complain about mistakes in historical detail. The trick is to know that something is not perfect and know that it is still useful and good at the same time, and not just throw the babies out with the bathwaters.  “Rome”, for example, is wrong on many (most) details, but it is still worth watching for some insight into an ancient world.  It makes you think and that is worth the effort.Victor Davis Hanson commented on “the 300”, which was literally a comic book version of that great confrontation at Thermopylae.  Sure, he said, it was wrong in details, but the idea of it was right (I paraphrase).  But it was better to get history into popular culture than to leave it completely out.  Serious people will check the facts and it might be the start of a life-long interest.

I fear this malaise has spread through the general culture.  We check, recheck and second guess every statement and decision, so that nobody can any longer be bold. Even if you are not wrong, the constant investigation will take its toll.  The Lilliputians will pull down any Gulliver; the hammer of public opinion will pound down anybody who dares stick up for any reason beyond mere vacuous celebrity, which ironically seems exempt probably because it doesn’t smack of true effort and is therefore non-threatening to the indolent.Any comprehensive theory of history must be wrong because such a complicated system is unknowable by mortal man in all its details.  That does not mean the effort of finding one is frivolous.  W/o some kind of mental model, history is just a meaningless jumble of one darn thing after another.    We all understand the world through mental models that are simplification of reality, maps of territory.  You need the map, but you know it does not include all the details.  Everybody has and uses mental models.  Most of them are unconscious.   Just because you do not study history or think through a model does not mean you don’t have one.  It is just that you picked it up inadvertently and you have not thought about it. For example, most Americans have a mental model of Roman history based on Edward Gibbon’s “Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire.”  Most people have never heard the book and almost nobody has actually read it, but this is the model they have unconsciously accepted for Rome and to some extent erroneously extrapolated to the modern United States.   Gibbon was not right in many respects and it is better to make a conscious choice. In the metaphysical sense, no model is complete or right, but some are useful and some are more useful than others.  We should not stop striving for the useful truth even as we understand that the ultimate truth is beyond our beyond our capacity to understand.  It is best to use a kind of scientific method, constantly testing and refining our ideas and adapting them to changing circumstances.  One more thing re the Lilliputians who refuse to allow greatness, no individual is consistently great or great in all aspect of his life.  Close scrutiny will reveal the flaws and the small minded take significant pleasure in pulling down those who boldly try to stand tall.  Internet makes this easier. 

I was thinking re one of the greatest men in history, George Washington.   Today he would be out of luck fast.  The incident at Jomonville Glen (when he failed to stop his Indian ally Half King from bashing the brains out the French commander) would have ended the career and probably the freedom of anybody today.   Washington was not a great man his entire life, in everything or to everyone.  He was great during several key times, sometimes key MOMENTS, such as putting on his reading glasses and stopping the Newburgh conspiracy from subverting our Republic.   Those couple of seconds were enough. I don’t have my own theory of history.  I have cribbed from Toynbee and accreted lots of modern management and decision theory.   I don’t know if I would be bold enough to assert my own comprehensive theory; I am reasonably certain that I am not smart enough to develop one, so I am stuck with my hybrids.

I do worry that we, as a society are often mired in minutia and not seeing the big picture and we have to criticize everything about our most prominent members.  It is hazardous. 

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Seeing the Old Things

I made it to the Archeological Museum today – finally.  No strike today.  Lots of the things there I have seen many times in pictures.  It is interesting to see them in real life.  The museum is very well organized. Each of the exhibits has explanations and descriptions in Greek and English.  The English is very good, obviously written by an educated native speaker.  Many of the sculptures are grave monuments and they can be very poignant.  As the descriptions explain, they often show the deceased saying goodbye to his/her family and the joys of life.  The artists capture the expressions very well so that we can feel the grief across the millennia.

 I also saw the gold mask of Agamemnon from Mycenae. This is the real one. The one in Mycenae is just a copy.  There are also lots of pots.  Pots are some of the most important clues to archeologists because they are so common and cheap.  When they break, people don’t bother to retrieve the all pieces.  They just sweep them outside.  Ancient cities tended to rise in layers of dirt, refuse and pottery shards, with each layer representing a different time period, so everything lays around in distinct layers and archeologists can use pieces of pottery to identify and date cultures. 

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Cyclops’ Wall

The ancient Greeks thought that giant Cyclops built the walls of Mycenae, since they could not understand how such big rocks could be brought to the site and stacked.  When I looked at the place, I could see how they were astonished.  The rocks are big and the hill is high, but with simple tools and a lot of persistence the ancient Mycenaeans did not need the help of Cyclops. Nevertheless, despite all the monumental precautions their civilization was destroyed and Mycenae abandoned.  These Bronze Age warriors were no match for Iron Age weapons of invaders.

BTW – it is not true that a man armed with iron weapons was so much superior to one armed with bronze, but iron is more common and so more men could be well armed. Of course the most famous representatives of Mycenaean culture were Achilles, Agamemnon, Menelaus & Odysseus.  The Iliad makes it sound like these sorts of heroes were the only guys who counted on the battlefield and they were.  With bronze weapons and kit, only a few can have complete armor, horses and chariots AND even fewer have the talent and time to develop the skills of an expert fighting man.  The Homeric heroes were a lot like tanks on a battlefield.  They could mow down the opposing infantry until they ran into a hero from the other side, hence the importance of single combat.  Besides, it makes a better story.  The later Greeks developed the phalanx, where they all stood in lines with spears and shields and pushed the other side until somebody broke.  Individual valour was merged with the larger group. It was an excellent war machine, but not as cool as Achilles v Hector. 

The 19th Century amateur archeologist Heinrich Schliemann used the Iliad to find both Agamemnon’s Mycenae and Helen’s Troy.  When he found a body in a tomb and took off the death mask, he thought he had looked on the face of Agamemnon and the gold death mask is still often associated with the face of Agamemnon, but modern historians think that the king with the golden mask predated the Trojan War period by a couple centuries.

We still take much of our understanding of the period from Homer, who wrote centuries after the events based on oral tradition, which tends to be corrupted.  The Mycenaeans had a written language.  There was great excitement when it was deciphered, about 50 years ago now, but all they wrote about were lists of who owned what and where things were stored.  It did prove that they were indeed Greeks (or proto-Greeks) but there is no literature or sense of history.   Knowing that Agamemnon owned a dozen sheep &  three cows in a particular local valley was probably really important back then, but fails to capture our imaginations today.  Mycenaean civilization remains pre-historic in the practical sense of the term.

Nevertheless, Mycenae is impressive even today in its ruined state.  The Lion Gate you see in the picture is sort of a reverse arch, with the triangle in the middle bearing and spreading the load. 

The natural setting is beautiful.  Most of the scenery we saw as we drove past Corinth into the Peloponnesus was beautiful.  The mountains in Greece go right down into the sea giving the country an unusually indented coast and long coastline.  Greece has more miles of coastline than all of Africa and no place in Greece is very far from both the mountains and the sea.  Little fertile valleys sit next to barren rocks and all have access to the sea.  It is a unique combination and scenery is not the most important consequence.  Geography helps explain much of Greek history and achievement.  

The picuture is a fish farm, BTW. Sorry for the blurr. I took it from the moving bus.

It has been really great to see the geography of the places and people I studied since I was a kid.  I realize how little I understand.   It is possible to know lots of facts and understand little.   When you put your feet on the ground, it is easier to understand the history.

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Sanded Down by Red Sky.

“Red sky” just means you are not supposed to fly.  There is red, yellow and green like stoplights. In this case, the sky was a little pink.  The picture above is from my window.  It was taken around noon.  By 2 pm, I had to turn on my lights.  Beautiful backyard I have, don’t you think?

Yesterday was a down day.   Sandstorms grounded our helicopters aborting our visit to Al Qaim.  I was looking forward to the trip.   We were planning some battlefield circulation as well as appointments at the vocational school and microfinance office.  I have heard a lot about these things, but never actually seen them.  I almost got to the microfinance center, once, but some clowns starting shooting in the air (celebratory fire) and we had to flee, as I wrote in an earlier post.

So I went back to my office to find my computer had crashed.  (It is fixed and mostly restored today, BTW.)  There is not much I can do w/o a computer, no email, no files no nothing – go home.  Most days I could have taken advantage of this breakdown to either run or work from my home computer.  But I hit the breakdown trifecta.   My home computer didn’t work because we lost electrical power to the cans.  I can run the computer on the battery, but not for very long and the electrical breakdown stops the Internet connection.  What about running?  I would like to take a long run, but not today.   The same red sky sandstorm that grounded by helicopters made me unenthusiastic about running.  Actually it may not have been possible.  It was hard to breathe and the dust stung my eyes.  I think that if I tried to run I might well have filled my lungs with concrete and more of less turned to stone.   Not willing to risk the Medusa syndrome, I searched for  non-electrical, non-physical alternatives. 

I ended up cleaning up my desk and reading a book.  The desk cleaning was an exercise in futility.  I cleaned it really well & good last night.  This morning it was dusty enough again to qualify as Addams family office furniture.   

The reading was good.  I have a book called “1453” about the fall of Constantinople.  Alex gave me the book for Christmas.  It is a good complement to another book I just finished reading called “Sea of Faith” re Muslim & Christian interactions in the Mediterranean. 

The lost world of the Byzantines interests me. I have been to Istanbul twice and I would gladly spend a month there.  I think it is one of the most interesting cities in the world.   Edward Gibbon short changed the Byzantines and largely thanks to the two-century success of his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” the English speaking world thinks of the Byzantine Empire as merely a thousand-year decadent & effeminate postscript to the virility of the Romans.   (Of course the caveats that Gibbon never used the specific word Byzantine to refer to the Eastern Empire and to the extent that anybody thinks about it at all.  Kids these days don’t know nothin’ about the Byzantines.) 

Gibbon is beautiful as literature; less attractive as history.  I think it is fascinating how his formulations and prejudices shaped historical views even among people who never heard his name or know that Constantinople was the capital of the Roman world for a thousand years.  Gibbon’s assessment of the effect of Christianity and his obvious admiration for pagan philosophers like Julian the Apostate has crept into our comparisons of our own society to that of the late Roman Empire.  It demonstrates the power and persistence of “spin”. You don’t have to know the source to be in its power.

These are the kinds of things you think about when you are sanded down, your computer is crashed & your can is electricity free.

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Charlie Wilson’s War

It is a good movie and I suggest you all go to see it.  I was particularly interested in it for a couple of particular reasons.  First of all, I started my career at the end of the Cold War; I joined the FS to help fight world communism and one of the first causes I publicized as a public affairs officer was the fight against the communists in Afghanistan. 

The end of the movie features a cautionary tale that is more relevant to me in this here and now spot. After helping the brave Afghans defeat the evil empire, we more or less walked away and largely ignored the place throughout the 1990s.   This abandoned the field to people like Osama bin Laden – the so-called Arab Afghans & their extremist local allies –  allowing them to claim that it was THEY who had won the victory, when their actual role in the fight against the Soviets was marginal at best.  Connecting my two historical strains, it was analogous to what the Bolsheviks did, showing up after others had done the heavy & dangerous work of overthrowing the Czar, convincing the world that they had done the deed and imposing their own obscene system on a devastated country.  It is a tribute to the success of their nefarious propaganda that ninety years later most people still believe the Soviet version. The truth doesn’t always win out over the lies unless it has some powerful friends.  In any case, Afghanistan slipped back into chaos; the bad guys took over and made the country into a safe home base to terrorists with delusions of worldwide struggle, while we were lulled into a false sense of security and thought that the fall of the evil empire meant and end to history.

History doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes and that is what makes it worthwhile to study the patterns.  In Iraq we are not making the same mistakes. After winning the military conflict, we are staying long enough to secure the peace; at least I hope we do.  And I am proud of the contributing small role my PRT is playing in that unfolding process.

Sorry for the second in a row preachy posting.  Maybe I am just drinking the Kool-Aid, but surrounded as I am be people committed to finishing the job in Iraq, all of them volunteers, I think it would be hard not to want to be part of the team. Tomorrow and the next day I have some interesting things planned.  I promise to write something on the lighter side next time.  So please forgive my pomposity and don’t desert my blog.  Consider this as sort of the commercials in the regularly scheduled programming.

And do go to see “Charlie Wilson’s War.”