Below – the Holocaust Museum is designed to make inside space seem like outside space. You are not allowed to take pictures within the exhibits themselves.
The Holocaust Museum featured a well-done exhibit on Nazi propaganda. I had seen many of the things in books, but I learned from walking through it. It is comforting to consign Nazis to the past, call them a discontinuity or an aberration, but that kind of thinking doesn’t help us understand. In those days most of the world was run by some stripe of dictator. Whether they called themselves communists, fascists, nationalists or something else, none of them believed that individuals could or should be allowed to make choices. They manipulated the masses with powerful and pervasive propaganda. Regrettably, propaganda, braced by state coercive power, did the job.
The old fashioned propaganda grates on our modern ears and eyes. We have become largely immune to that presentation style. Besides, Nazi propaganda was a vast web of deception inseparable from the coercive power of state and its time. Posters, music and media were just the outward manifestations and today are just artifacts. But remember the immense damage they did and take them seriously.
Nazism was based on big lies. The one we often overlook is their claim of victimhood. Maybe the paradox of being simultaneously a victim and a perpetrator is too much for us to handle. They claimed they were victims of Jews, the democratic great powers, plutocratic capitalists, traitorous socialists, just bad luck and the Treaty of Versailles.
There was some truth. The Treaty of Versailles ending WWI was unjust and unworkable. John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1919 that it would result in economic collapse. Ten years later he was right. Germany in general and Hitler in particular played on latent feelings of guilt in the allied populations. Leaders who appeased Hitler in the 1930s did so both out of fecklessness and their own lack of confidence that they were right. Hitler covered his aggression with the cloak of the victim. It was a subtle but effective propaganda victory. The idea that they were just “getting back” what was theirs was strong and influenced decisions until 1939. Truly effective propaganda sets the frame so that the players are not consciously aware of the manipulation. This is a lesson we can keep.
Germany had valid complaints about the Versailles Treaty, but it was a non-sequitur to say that only they had a right to dictate the solution.
The exhibition ends in the present with a picture of Iranian president Ahmadinejad. It is pretty hard to figure out what that guy is trying to say … or maybe not. Hitler was clear about his plans, but ordinary people couldn’t believe that he really meant it. They rationalized and made excuses. Propaganda has modernized since then, but some things don’t change too much.
Some things are just beyond understanding but we still have to try because these things didn’t end in 1945. Exhibits like this are good for focusing thought.
Below is a statue of Admiral David Farragut. He captured New Orleans in 1862, which split the Confederacy and virtually stopped the export of southern cotton. His famous quote, “damn the torpedoes, go ahead full speed ahead” comes from the battle of Mobile Bay in 1864. In those days, they called naval mines torpedoes. The harbor was mined but Farragut ordered it forward anyway.
It is only embarrassing if you don’t talk about it. I had my first colonoscopy today and I am happy to say that I don’t need another one for ten years. The actual procedure is very easy. They use general anesthesia and it is no more uncomfortable than an afternoon nap.
The preparation is the hard part. You have to drink about three liters of some chalky stuff. It is really hard to drink that much of anything and this stuff is harder than most. You also cannot eat anything the day before. This was not as hard as I thought.
Modern medicine is wonderful. Things that used to be hard are now easy. They are very careful legally, however. I had to sign lots of forms and they told me lots of things about privacy. They worry too much. I think we should expect reasonable – not absolute – privacy.
Absolute privacy, the privacy where you were really unknown, is a thing of the past. Hanging onto this old fashioned privacy illusion is silly and counterproductive. While some people are busily reinforcing the front gate with ridiculously stringent laws and regulations, they are eagerly tearing down the back walls, by putting all sorts of really personal information on Facebook or their cell phones. Internet has got you anyway. The only way you can hide from Google is to have a really common name. Chrissy (Christine Johnson) is immune to Google search. Most people are not.
It doesn’t bother me if somebody can find out my buying or travel habits. I voluntarily share information with Amazon, Safeway, CVS or Marriott, among others. I don’t mind if this helps them tailor their offerings to my tastes, although I am mildly annoyed that some computer program can fairly predict my behavior by extrapolating from my previous choices. As a Federal employee, I give the government the right to monitor my office computer use. Frankly, I find this a type of protection from scammers etc. Privacy? All I want is that people cannot compel me to do things or buy things. They can offer all they want.
Below is the National Portrait Gallery, one of the most interesting museums in Washington.
Generally, I figure anybody who wants to find out about me can do so but they will soon get bored and go away. I do, however, like to be unconnected. I don’t own cell phone and I don’t use the one the government gives me if not on duty. When I go down to the woods it is very hard to find me. We can still get lost. This is the kind of privacy we can still choose, but it is the kind of privacy most people don’t want. They want to be connected all the time. I hate it when those clowns talk on the phone when they are driving. Few things are so urgent that you really need to take a call when driving … or doing most other things for that matter.
But you don’t need details about everything. That is why I included only the unrelated pictures in this privacy article.
The good news is that cable television has resulted in a proliferation of good programs about science, history and politics. If a picture is worth a thousand words, lots of moving pictures must be worth millions of words, but the pictures may be out of context and if you count up the total number of actual words in an hour on History Channel, you could probably fill only a couple of pages. (Re pictures – I watched “the Real Abraham Lincoln.” It featured a reenactment of the young Abe. But the guy has a beard. Lincoln didn’t grow the beard until 1860.) TV spends a lot of time repeating scenes of collapsing buildings, burning fires or horsemen galloping, w/o explaining the significance. The shallowness of the medium is the bad news.
This extends beyond the series of gripping but unenlightening images. I also notice a general decline in rigor. Maybe it is a general phenomenon, but you notice it clearly on TV. Instead of trying to evaluate evidence and sources, the programs sort of throw it all out there with equal credibility. This would be okay with a written source or among scholars, but the television images don’t provide enough background or references for the viewers to evaluate veracity, even assuming most audience members had the background or inclination to do so.
It is bad enough when we have dueling “experts” but it gets worse when many programs seem to put oral histories on par with real ones. All histories are subject to interpretation and just because something is written down does not mean that it is true. But oral history must be even more carefully evaluated because it is literally subject to change w/o notice.
The strength of written sources is that they freeze impressions and the facts at the point of writing. Facts don’t improve with age. An earlier recollection is more factual than a later one and a primary account is better than a secondary one. An investigator can compare a written record against subsequent ones to detect enhancements or omissions. It makes it harder to change the story. It is also possible to nail down the assertion, so that you can check them against other evidence.
Oral histories do not suffer these constraints. When confronted with disconfirming evidence, an oral history can just change. The danger to the integrity of the story comes not only from deception, but also from innocent rationalization. People tend to want to fit their stories into current realities. They smooth the edges to make them conform to the present needs.
This story changing is most often a social process. Stories change in the telling and retelling and in a short time they come to reflect the aspirations, interests, prejudices & desires of the group more than reality. Oral history has great value because it tells you a lot about the people telling the story; it tells you less about the actual historical events on which is it ostensibly based. It has to be handled carefully.
Of course all history starts off as oral. It is the raw material. Beer starts off as barley and hops, but it requires some processing before you drink it. The same goes for oral history. If you take oral history from those who actually experienced an event, you can check facts. It is helpful to compare stories of individuals who have not communicated with each other much since the events in question. It gets harder when you get into the second or third generation of the story. At that point it has probably become myth. It may be based on the truth but it is not truth.
Myth is usually more interesting and plausible than actual historical events. Heroes are stronger and braver. Villains are scarier. Causes are more just. Events make more sense and often presage big developments of the future. They make better narratives precisely because they have been edited and enhanced by the people who have told and retold the stories.
The compelling nature of oral history and the resulting myths makes them especially dangerous on history television. They are almost always more interesting and more easily recreated in dramatic reenactments. It gets worse in our PC world. Many historical programs these days portray the confrontation between literate and pre-literate societies. The literate societies have historical records that can be critically evaluated and parsed. You get the warts and all portraits. Given the critical nature of this inquiry, we often end up with a mostly warts portrait. On the other side, we have the myths property altered in light of subsequent events.
Below are Alex and Chrissy at “America’s Stonehenge” in New Hampshire. We visited it when we lived nearby in Londonderry. It is worth seeing but not worth going to see. The History Channel featured it as a “mystery”. It is a mystery – a mystery why some clown would pile those rocks, but otherwise it is clearly not ancient. But a TV show with lots of cool angles and suppositions can make it seem so.
Modern historians are understandably frustrated. They want to write about pre-literate societies and they want to write about conditions of the common people in all past worlds. Unfortunately, pre-literate people don’t write at all and the common people didn’t write much until recently. I don’t know a precise number, but I doubt that more than 5% of all the ancient Roman texts still exist, so we start out with a small sample. None of the authors are representative of their societies, in that most people couldn’t write, so you already have an elite enterprise. There are no significant female historians from the Roman period and the Romans were unenthusiastic about letting their subject people write critical accounts of their rule. Beyond all that, most the writers were not interested in the doings of the common people, male or female, Roman or not. When the sturdy yeomen are featured, it is usually just a didactic example. Victor Davis Hanson wrote a good book on people working the land, who always made up the vast majority of the population, called “The Other Greeks,” but there just are not many good sources. You can learn a lot about physical conditions from archeology, but you still don’t have the narrative. The stones and bones don’t tell you much about the people’s motivations, imagination or aspiration. That is unsatisfying. Imagine if a future archeologist could reconstruct your television set but had no record of any of the programs. So historians extrapolate and move the historical narrative into the realm of conjecture, as with other forms of oral history telling us as much about the extrapolator than about the subject itself.
All the specialty cable channels (history, discovery, military, science etc) are spreading information wider than ever before. That is good … I guess.
Particular parts of the programming that I think is very good are some of the “current” history features. I have seen several good programs on Iraq. They tell the story and interview the people involved. My belief is that the U.S. public currently has a very biased view of the events in Iraq and the news media is unlikely to clear it up, since they have largely moved on. Fortunately, a lot of lessons learned type programs are being made now. These are essentially primary sources and when historians get around to addressing events in Iraq more dispassionately, I believe these will be the key sources.
Washington Post featured a report from a guy who toured the world of Herodotus. This is the link.
Herodotus was the world’s first historian. Of course people wrote about historical events before his time, but they didn’t think in the historical sense of trying to connect disparate events into a meaningful whole. For the ancient pre-Greek civilizations, history was just a series of bragging press releases, with pharaohs, kings and warlords exaggerating and sometimes completely fabrication triumphs. There was no understanding of greater causality. They also looked for supernatural explanations to all human affairs and/or are accounts of the work of God on earth. That is, BTW, is what differentiates Herodotus’ work from the Book of Samuel, which some scholars have called the first history, or from something like the Iliad, which has a narrative and talks re historical events.
Herodotus was often not accurate. That is not why he was the “first historian” He accepted all sorts of hear-say and outright myths. His was also a very intensely personal work and he makes little or no attempt to screen for his own bias. This is one reason it is so much fun to read his work. But he did seek to understand the context of his events in his inquiry, which is the more precise translation of his word history.
Herodotus is great literature, but my favorite ancient historian is Thucydides. His Melian Dialogues and the book about the Syracuse campaign should be required reading for anyone trying to understand world affairs. It is interesting how you can see progress in the writing of history. I like Thucydides better, but Polybius is a better historian, because he had the advantage of the experience. (Polybius put the rise of Rome in the greater context.) Today, standing on the shoulders of these giants and others who came after, the average graduate student is a better historian than any of them. We have the gift of being able to take the best of the past. We should never squander that gift.
Improvements in how historians could assess events are examples of technologies of the mind or technologies of thought.
We easily recognize technologies of the physical world. Using technology, a weakling driving a bulldozer can do more than the strongest man working by hand. We all remember the story of John Henry and the steam drill. But we overlook the more important technologies of thought & mind. The most obvious are in hard sciences and subjects like math. The greatest mathematicians of any time before around 1600 could not pass an introductory statistics and quantitative methods class. The tools we use today just were not yet invented. But this goes for others things as well.
It is also true for cultures. Culture is a form of technology in the broad sense. It gives people the package of techniques and skills they need to adapt to the world and its challenges. Some packages work better than others. I am talking about “small c” culture too. Firms have cultures. That is why some companies can consistently outperform others.
Below is Jarash in what is now Jordan. The Romans knew how to bring in water. The skills were lost and it went from thriving city to impressive ruins in a couple of generations.
Culture is the mystery ingredient that frustrates the predictions of the data-obsessed analysts. It is usually the explanation why the same sorts of investments in plants and equipment prosper in one place and flounders in another. And an unwillingness to address the problem culture lies at the bottom of most failures to institute meaningful change. You can supply all the physical technologies you want; they are worthless and even harmful without the technologies of the mind to integrate them into the cultures. I talked in an earlier post re the various sorts of barbarians unable to figure out the Roman technologies that made it possible for cities to prosper in arid or hostile environments. This is a lesson of history we should learn. The great thing about taking lessons from ancient history is that much of the politics and passion has dissipated so we can be a little more objective.
Anyway, Herodotus is truly entertaining. I would love to do study tour like the one described in the report. I used to read Herodotus to the kids as bedtime stories. There are lots of good lesson that go with the good fun.
There is trouble in Gaza again. Like so many other places around the Middle East, the longest time of sustained peace and prosperity came courtesy of the Romans. Under the Roman Empire, Gaza enjoyed six centuries of peace and prosperity.
Above – This is in Amman. In Roman times it was called Philadelphia. This is the marketplace where merchants met and scholars discussed.
At that time, the inhabitants spoke Greek and the city was a center of culture, known for its sophistication and love of the ancient customs. Probably for that reason, Gaza remained pagan longer than many other cities. It didn’t become Christian until the middle of the fourth Century.
Anyway, the point is that Gaza is not naturally a terrible place. If Hamas would wise up, it could be a nice place to live, as it was when it was under better management for six centuries during the Roman times. Too bad the Romans are no longer in the business. Please see this link for our visit to the Roman city of Jarash.
It reminds me of Monty Python, when the militants ask “What have the Romans ever done for us?”
From “Monty Python’s Life of Brian”
Reg: They’ve bled us white, the bastards. They’ve taken everything we had, not just from us, from our fathers and from our fathers’ fathers. Stan: And from our fathers’ fathers’ fathers. Reg: Yes. Stan: And from our fathers’ fathers’ fathers’ fathers. Reg: All right, Stan. Don’t labour the point. And what have they ever given us in return? Xerxes: The aqueduct. Reg: Oh yeah, yeah they gave us that. Yeah. That’s true. Masked Activist: And the sanitation! Stan: Oh yes… sanitation, Reg, you remember what the city used to be like. Reg: All right, I’ll grant you that the aqueduct and the sanitation are two things that the Romans have done… Matthias: And the roads… Reg: (sharply) Well yes obviously the roads… the roads go without saying. But apart from the aqueduct, the sanitation and the roads… Another Masked Activist: Irrigation… Other Masked Voices: Medicine… Education… Health… Reg: Yes… all right, fair enough… Activist Near Front: And the wine… Omnes: Oh yes! True! Francis: Yeah. That’s something we’d really miss if the Romans left, Reg. Masked Activist at Back: Public baths! Stan: And it’s safe to walk in the streets at night now. Francis: Yes, they certainly know how to keep order… (general nodding)… let’s face it, they’re the only ones who could in a place like this. (more general murmurs of agreement) Reg: All right… all right… but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order… what have the Romans done for us? Xerxes: Brought peace! Reg: (very angry, he’s not having a good meeting at all) What!? Oh… (scornfully) Peace, yes… shut up!
BTW – The ancient Middle East was nothing like the modern one. First off, there were almost no Arabs. Around the coast, most people were Greek, at least in language and outlook. In Egypt the upper classes spoke Greek and had a Hellenistic culture, while the common people lived a lot like they had under the pharaohs. Inland in much of what is now Israel, Jordan and Iraq, people spoke Aramaic. This was the language had been a common language of the Persian Empire. There were many nationalities in the region, but Arabs were not prominent among them at this time. Arabs arrived in the 7th Century, when they conquered those places from the Roman (Byzantine) rulers.
The Arab conquest is one of the great historical anomalies. They came just at the right time. The Byzantine Empire had just finished a long and mutually exhausting war with the Persians. Either of these great Empires could have dispatched the Arab raiders at almost any other time, but in these particular decades they were weakened. The Byzantines also had a schism problem. The Christians of Egypt and Syria had a doctrinal dispute with the Christians in Constantinople. In other words, the armies of the prophet came upon a weakened and divided empire. Such is the role of chance in history.
No matter how it happened, it is truly astonishing to anybody who studied ancient history to contemplate the complete transformation and in many cases destruction of the ancient cultures of the region. A thousand years of Greek culture was submerged in a couple of decades. It was a much more complete change than happened in the West, where the lands of the Western Roman Empire still speak languages descended from Latin and still have cultures that can be traced to their ancient heritage. Northern Africa, which is now Libya, Algeria and Tunisia, were very Roman, but that heritage is gone.
I think some of it has to do with the natural environment. Barbarian invasions in places like France or Italy destroyed much of the infrastructure of civilization, but the environment was more forgiving. Ancient cities could grow back as times improved. Roman and Greek cities in the arid places like the Middle East or North Africa were more dependent on the engineering infrastructure. The Arabs invaders in the south and the Germans in the north were all interested in taking the riches of the Roman Empire, but didn’t really understand the complexities of making it work.
When the Roman engineers died off or left their work, and no new ones were trained, the great aqueducts broke down. This didn’t happen all at once, but in the course of some years, the knowledge was lost. In the areas of the German conquests, natural rainfall allowed a fall back. Not so in the more arid regions. That is why you see those Roman cities in the middle of the deserts. The Romans knew how to make these places productive.
Below is the personal story from one of the blog readers about his great grandfather who came from the city of Anah. It is an interesting and tragic family history. With his permission I am posting it here. I will let professional historians sort out the connections and timelines. I just think it is worth reading and have placed it as it is.
I am going to tell you the story about my great grandfather Isaak El Eini. As I mentioned El Eini means in Arabic from Anah. The picture I am attaching is not a good picture taken in the 1930s in Khartoum, Sudan. He is the elderly man in the back alone. He was thin, tall, dark. The lady in the front was his niece whose parents had moved from Anah to Khartoum around 1900.
He was born in the 1860s. He came from a Jewish family. Anah had been a part of the ancient Babylonian Empire. The Jews had been brought over from Judea by King Nebuchadnezzar in 586BC.
Jews, Christians and Moslems lived in the town in harmony with no problems. Each in their own neighborhoods. The family were in the Caravan business. They took care of the camels, merchandise etc. Anah was an important station on the Damascus to Baghdad caravan route (it took 33 days). The caravans comprising of as many as 1,200 camels carrying textiles from Britain, sugar, tobacco, drugs etc would stop in Anah for 3 days as it was here where they would cross the Euphrates river. From Baghdad there were caravans to Basra where merchandise would continue to India and Asia by ship.
After 1888 when the Suez Canal was opened for all shipping it was quicker to transport goods by ship. This devastated the family business. So Isaak left Anah and moved to Egypt, which was prospering from the construction of the Canal. In those days there was no Iraq. It was known as Mesopotamia and like Egypt was part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire.
He moved to Aswan in southern Egypt and began trading with the tribes in the Sudan. In the late 1890s the British decided to take over the Sudan which was ruled by the Mahdi. Lord Kitchener headed the Anglo Egyptian Army. Isaak followed the army as a civilian trading with the Sudanese all the time. When they arrived in Omdurman (Khartoum) they put a siege on the city. However the siege was not working and the Mahdi was holding out.
Lord Kitchener chose Isaak to act as a spy, enter Omdurman and to pretend he was a trader who had crossed the Red Sea from Arabia. He brought many gifts to the Mahdi. In return the Mahdi gave Isaak a young boy and girl as a gift to be raised as slaves. Isaak had no choice but to accept the gift.
While in Omdurman Isaak found out that the Mahdi was holding off the siege because some Egyptian Officers were giving / selling arms to him. He left the city and gave all the information to Lord Kitchener.
Kitchener won the battle and became a hero in Britain. As a reward he gave Isaak a lot of fertile land in Omdurman. Soon later he told all his brothers and sisters to leave Anah and come live in Omdurman / Khartoum. They lived there till 1967 and became Sudanese citizens. But in 1967 when Israel and the Arabs went to war, Sudan expelled all the Jews. The family then moved to Britain and Switzerland.
Now Isaak stopped working. He lived off the land holdings and every few years he would sell some acres to live on. He was a terrible husband. and playboy. His wife lived in Cairo all the time with his only daughter Massouda, my grandmother. He would travel to Cairo about once a year to see them. It was basically like being divorced.
In his 70s he had spent all his money. In the early 1940s my father living in Cairo, heard a knock on the door and it was Isaak. He was sick and died soon afterwards.
As to the two children who were given as gifts by the Mahdi: one was a boy and the other a girl. Isaak’s wife and my grandmother raised them and sent them to school. At 16 the girl got pregnant. Because they wore long wide dresses my grandmother did not realise that she was pregnant. She tried to give birth to the baby and kill it. My grandmother rushed her to the hospital. The needle was infected and she died in the hospital; so did the baby.
The boy later got a job at a bank. His son became a very important official at the same bank.
We will never again be as united as we were in 1965. It was a time of an unusual confluence of factors. The older generations had the unifying experiences of the Great Depression, New Deal and World War II. Think of what those things did. Millions of young men and women came together in a common cause such as the CCC in the 1930s and the military in the 1940s. Never before and never since have so many people shared such intimate similar life-changing experiences.
They and the younger generation were further tied together (homogenized) by the miracle of television. The limited choice among TV channels ensured that large percentages of the population watched the same things at the same times. (Not many baby boomers know words to the “Star Spangled Banner” but most can sing the theme song to “Gilligan’s Island.”) America had also had successfully digested the waves of immigrations that hit our shores in the early 20th Century. Immigration restrictions and the Great Depression had limited new immigration and so America has a smaller percentage of immigrants among its population than at any other time in its history. Other “unity” things were also strong. Church attendance was very high. Most adult males had connections to the VFW. Membership in industrial and trade unions has never been higher. It seemed a golden age for the “ordinary guy.”American dominance of the world was unique. We bounced out of the Depression after WWII at a time when most of the other world economies were in ruins. At some points, the U.S. produced around half of ALL the world’s production. Nothing like like that had ever been possible before and is unlikely to ever happen again anywhere. It resulted from the perfect storm of industrialization, depression and war. Communist domination of large parts of the world ensured that many places remained uncompetitive and backward for longer than necessary. Speaking of communism, we cannot forget the Cold War. The threat of nuclear annihilation focused the minds of those generations and facing a benighted, yet dangerous enemy together leads to shared identify.
When we look back at the two decades after WWII, we sometimes see stifling conformity and we unavoidably cast our glance forward to the divisive and challenging times to come. But we still look l back to the lost feelings of comfort and community and imagine how we could recreate it along with today’s diversity and options for individual expression. This is an impossible dream.
Above is Union Station in Washington DC. Such self-conscious permanence in public building is less common now.
First of all, the conditions that created the post-war unity were unique. They cannot be recreated and nobody would advocate going through the suffering of depression, war and totalitarian threats to try to foster the preconditions. Periods of growth following challenging ordeals are often pleasant, but you might not want to throw yourself into a pool of ice water just to feel the pleasure of warming up again.
But most important is that we don’t want it. Unity and diversity are both good things, but they are in tension. As in those economics curves, there is a point where you can maximize both, but you do have to trade them off against each other. We have chosen less unity than we used to want back in 1965. This has implications.
More choice creates more innovation and economic growth. But making reasonable predictions about the future becomes harder. It also complicates provision of insurance & welfare benefits, as diversity lessens trust. In a homogeneous community, people understand each other. Homogeneous communities are also usually relatively small, so people can monitor and balance abuses. They are reasonably certain that their social outlays are, if not well spent, at least decently targeted. It is no coincidence that the most successful welfare states are/were in homogeneous Scandinavian countries and that they have begun to breakdown in the face of globalization and immigration of new and different people.
Talking about a “caring” (i.e. one that takes care of you as an individual) government in a place as big and diverse as the U.S. is an oxymoron. We gave that possibility up long ago and we should stop pretending that is what we want. Our choices have made that impossible. What we have demonstrated we want through the choices we have made is a government that ensures reasonable justice and the rule of law, provides for the common defense and provides options. If you want to put this into more beautiful language you might say, “… in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity …” it is astonishing how long that formula has remained viable.
So in this new year when it looks like we will be asking a lot from our government, we should pause to remember that we should not ask too much, and it is not only because we should ask not what our country can do for us, but ask what we can do for our country. Let’s not grab for that remembered unity that we never can recreate or ask for guarantees of prosperity that nobody can provide. If you give government the power to grant all your wishes, you also give it the power to take them away. It is tempting to trade liberty for security, but w/o liberty sustained security is impossible.
I have a minor stomach bug and didn’t feel well enough to run on this beautiful day, so I went for a walk instead during lunchtime. I went down to the Roosevelt Memorial. It is a pretty big and impressive thing, as you can see in the picture, and there is a lot of flowing water.
This size and complexity of the memorial goes against Roosevelt ’s wishes. He told Felix Frankfurter that he wanted a memorial no bigger than his desk and there is a memorial about the size of a desk near the National Archives. But the Roosevelt legacy outgrew the man.
All monuments are really as much about the time when they are constructed as about the people or events depicted. You can see the 1990s (when the Memorial was built) in the Memorial itself. For example, although Roosevelt was crippled with polio, he didn’t allow himself to be pictured in a wheelchair. I think there is only one such photo. Many people at the time were not aware of the extent of his infirmity. By the 1990s, such attitudes were unpopular. The compromise, in my picture, shows him seated with his cape covering the wheelchair. This evidently offended some people, so there is also a statue of Roosevelt in his wheelchair.
I think we have an interesting question. Roosevelt expressed clearly in his words and actions that he would not have approved of the monument or of his depiction in the wheelchair. The question is, at what point does a man’s legacy become more important than he is and how much license should we have to fit a man of the past into contemporary morals and sensibilities?
In pictures from the times, Roosevelt is always shown with a cigarette. It was a big part of his personality. We won’t see that. This part of his image is gone. There was a controversy about a stamp featuring the artist Jackson Pollock, who evidently smoked all the time. The postal service made the stamp from a photo of Pollock. They airbrushed out the characteristic cigarette.
Modern technology makes this kind of ex-post-facto censorship much easier. I think it is better to leave such things in and explain that times were different. We cannot apply today’s standards to the people of the past.
This applies to Thomas Jefferson more than most. I also went to his memorial. Jefferson was knocked off his high pedestal by his slave owning. It is true that slavery was a terrible blight, but it had been around as long as human society. The pyramids were built with slave labor. Jefferson had the misfortune to be on the societal cusp that separated the 5000 years of human history when slavery was accepted from the last couple centuries when it was anathema to civilized people. It wasn’t until around the time of Jefferson that large numbers of people began to see slavery as an evil to be extirpated and that outrage was limited generally to the Western world at that time. There are still parts of Africa and Asia where forms of slavery are practiced.
It is hard not to judge Jefferson by today’s standards and harder still to understand how someone who could think so elegantly about freedom could have such a blind spot about the freedom of people he saw every day. But we really cannot judge him too harshly for not making a clean break with a tradition that stretched back to the dawn of history.
BTW – I met a former slave when I was in Poland . He and his family were captured by the Soviets in 1939 and sent to labor camps where only those who worked got food rations. The Soviets, enlightened as they were, would not officially allow children to work, so this guy’s underage brothers and sisters were not allowed to work and got no food. It was the perfectly logical workings of a diabolical bureaucracy. The family tried to share, but they all died except for the man I met. He survived the Russian death camps and returned to Poland where he became a wood worker and was making decorations for churches in Zakopane. He was a surprisingly cheerful man, with a still abiding faith in the goodness of God despite his ordeal, and not bitter at all against the Russians. “It was a different time and place,” he advised me. This is the only actual slave I ever met. In America , after nearly 150 years, there is no living memory of slavery. My friend’s conditions were much worse than those in Virginia during Jefferson ’s time. Perhaps we should take his advice.
Jefferson was a great man, although a flawed human being – like all of us. The genius of America is that we can take humans as they are, w/o demanding perfection, and through all these imperfect people create a more perfect country.
I like to watch the Sunday morning news programs. My morning routine includes “This Week,” “Chris Matthews,” “Fox News Sunday” & “Meet the Press.” I have to switch around among them, since they overlap. That is interesting because you often see the same “opinion makers” being interviewed on a couple of them. It might be easier just to get the talking points. These shows are ABOUT politics, so I shouldn’t complain, but I think they are too much about politics.
Below is Augustus Caesar, Rome’s first Emperor.
They see everything through a political lens. I understand that Washington is a political town and politics pervades everything, however I don’t think everything is reducible to politics alone, at least politics in the sense of the competitive game. On “Chris Matthews” eight out of the twelve pundits thought “the right” would give President Obama the benefit of a long honeymoon. I agree with the majority. But I disagree with Matthews and the panel when they characterized this as simple politics. They will have to give it because they cannot be seen to oppose him. Matthews et al are smart people and I recall the two old sayings: “it takes a smart person to be cynical, but a wise man to get beyond that” and “A man’s view of the world is a confession of his own character.”
Not everybody is motivated by politics – not even politicians – and especially not ordinary people. I have particular and strongly held political views, but between elections I want my President to succeed no matter what party and I want our Congress to work under the best possible conditions. In between elections, I don’t want to think about politics very much. Most people are like that except during tough political campaigns or when making a calls to talk radio or C-Span. Being politically aware all the time is just too exhausting.
Our system makes good or at least okay decisions most of the time. More important is our capacity to experiment and reinvent while maintaining the fundamental integrity of our structure. The fact that we enjoy the oldest living Constitution in the world and are second oldest continuous government in the world (after the Brits) is ample evidence of our stability. It is noteworthy that the British heritage has influenced so many stable democracies (Besides the U.S. and UK, Australian, New Zealand, Canada, among others, and arguably even India). To a significant extent, the countries with this heritage allow their citizens more freedom FROM politics than most others. In America, it is possible to be prosperous, secure and successful w/o strong political connections. If you think about that for more than a minute and put it into historical context, that is truly amazing. Freedom FROM arbitrary government action and the capriciousness of petty officials is rare in history. We complain about our lack of freedom and opportunity, but we have (to paraphrase) the worst possible system … except for everything else.
I worry that we may ask too much from government and I get nervous each election season. History shows that people voluntary give up freedom in return for the promise of stability and prosperity but they end up usually getting none of the above. It is useful to read the stories of Republics, ancient and modern, as our Founding Fathers did. This could happen to us too, but the good sense of the American people and the soundness of our institutions win out in the end. Most of us are not really interested in letting politics intrude too much into our daily lives and private affairs – especially not “theirs” but even our own. We get a little hysterical from time to time, but to the disappointment of radicals on all sides, moderation and good sense prevail.
The best things in life are free … especially if you live in Washington DC, where you can go to all the museums and enjoy all the public space, think tanks and events at no or little cost. Europeans justifiably boast of their cultural achievements, but everything costs money there. You have to buy tickets to the museums in Rome, Paris or London and much of the public space is not really open to the public.
Above is Sackler Gallery. There are vast underground facilities. The Mall gets to look untrampled.
The irony – and this goes for lots of things besides museums – is that in America we have access to things in practice but not in theory, while in most other places you have access to things in theory but not in practice. People are often beguiled by the promises. They want to be granted the right to something in principle. They forget what Otto von Bismarck, who originated the first social security program said, “When a man says he approves of something in principle, it means he hasn’t the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice.
We get a lot in practice, even if we are not doing so well in theory. Way back in 1827, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great German man of letters, wrote it in a poem. “Amerika, Du hast es besser” (America, you have it better), he said – and he was right. Life is good.
The National Gallery of Art & Pompeii
I enjoy being in Washington. It offers so much. On my lunch break today I walked over the National Gallery of Art to see “Pompeii and the Roman Villa.” I couldn’t take pictures inside, but you can see what it looks like at this link. It is great just to drop in. Because there is so much and it is freely available, you don’t feel like you have the chore of staying all day and making an ordeal out of the appreciation of art. I stayed only around a half hour. I did not “see everything” but I can come back. IMO that is how culture should be, a part of life integrated into daily activities.
Below – community garden near Capitol. I think this is left over from the 1960s.
I heard about the exhibit before, but I was motivated to go today by my Roman history lecture on my I-Pod. They were talking about the Roman cities and used Pompeii as an example. Pompeii was not the greatest of Roman cities, it was not even very important, but we have the unique frozen in time aspect. Tragic as it was to the people at the time, the eruption of Vesuvius has made them the messengers of their culture to future generations.
Below is depression era artwork on a government building near the National Gallery.
The area around Naples for the Romans was something like the California coast is to us. Life was pleasant and easy. The rich and famous went there to live and vacation. They build expensive houses and lived large. According to what I learned at the exhibit, the very rich people lived in coastal villas. Pompeii was sort of middle rich. The district was called Campania. It had a good climate and great soil, provided in part by the volcanic activity that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum in AD 79. Volcanic soil is very productive. It is sort of a bargain. You get live the good life on the volcanic minerals, but it is unpleasant to be there when the volcano spreads a little more ash.
