Sometimes I hear the half-audible, disembodied voices of my neighbors across the pond, playing weirdly through the pines, seeming to float around the sloping walls of the kettle. It makes you think of Spirits -- "Sperrits" -- and this passage from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:
"When I got there it was all still and Sunday-like, and hot and sunshiny- the hands was gone to the fields; and there was them kind of faint dronings of bugs and flies in the air that makes it seem so lonesome and like everybody's dead and gone; and if a breeze fans along and quivers the leaves, it makes you feel mournful, because you feel like it's spirits whispering-spirits that's been dead ever so many years- and you always think they're talking about you. As a general thing it makes a body wish he was dead, too, and done with it all.
Phelps's was one of these little one-horse cotton plantations; and they all look alike....."
-- THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN, Ch. 32.
Saturday, July 5, 2014
Sunday, December 29, 2013
False Spring
Driving through the vast woods of the Myles Standish State Forest just now through a driving 40 degree Fahrenheit rain, I swerved to avoid a frog -- a frog, on December 29th! -- hopping across the road.
The poor guy; he thinks it's spring. It froze and he went into torpor or hibernation, and now he is going to the pond expecting to eat and mate. And, in 24 to 36 hours, the temperature will drop 35 degrees, and the pond will freeze solid as an arctic airmass comes to sit over New England. And, if he is lucky, this frog pal of ours will live. But if not -- if the stress of coming out of hibernation so early is too great, and his fat reserves expended, or the swamp where he burrows freezes before he can get back under the mud -- then, then he will die.
Goddamit, this frog thinks. This isn't supposed to happen until late March! This is a false Spring, a spring without hope.
The amphibians are the canaries in the coal mine (pun intended). And they are speaking to us in their wordless ways.
Them that have ears, let them hear.
The poor guy; he thinks it's spring. It froze and he went into torpor or hibernation, and now he is going to the pond expecting to eat and mate. And, in 24 to 36 hours, the temperature will drop 35 degrees, and the pond will freeze solid as an arctic airmass comes to sit over New England. And, if he is lucky, this frog pal of ours will live. But if not -- if the stress of coming out of hibernation so early is too great, and his fat reserves expended, or the swamp where he burrows freezes before he can get back under the mud -- then, then he will die.
Goddamit, this frog thinks. This isn't supposed to happen until late March! This is a false Spring, a spring without hope.
The amphibians are the canaries in the coal mine (pun intended). And they are speaking to us in their wordless ways.
Them that have ears, let them hear.
Orpheus's Journey to the Economic Underworld
"... and could hear the lips that kiss'd
Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet,
Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing,
While Ilion like a mist rose into towers."
-- "Tithonus, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Before me now the ice of Powder Horn Pond, dissolving in the cold grey rain, rises in a mist, wild and drear, floating ghostly in front of the pines.
In previous years, this would have been snow.
But though this is dreary, it is not one tenth so bleak as a certain place I am wont to repair, in the pitchness of night: the 24 hour Wal-Mart in Plymouth. Here, you can see, in all its grimness, the Underworld of the American economy. Here, you meet shades and spirits who refuse to meet your eyes, doing all night the packing and shelving and heaving and pulling and pushing that late Capitalism, hurtling the Earth -- or its species, at least -- towards disaster, requires to feed its bottomless, cancerous maw. All of them are tired. They have the zoned-out fatigue of long distance air travelers. This is their second or third job, if statistics are any guide. And they still aren't getting by. Many are old -- quite old, doing a young person's work when they should be sitting in the fullness of their life's own pasture. Many are immigrants, from Latin America, southeast Asia, Africa. Many work with headphones in their ears to more tolerably bear the interminable monotony of stacking Pringles, row upon row, in the small hours of the day. None of them want to talk, much less make eye contact. Even a genuinely strange character like myself goes unremarked.
These are this economy and society's undead. Once, they knew life, if even for a briefest moment, maybe as a child at a playground, or as a young mother in the firstness of mother-child love; and that urge to beauty and freedom does not go away. For though they labor so, out of their own and their family's necessity -- their direst need -- they do so with the grudging knowledge that they are being deprived of their hard-won and ancient liberties, liberties to a good, fair, and decent life in this country. We once fought a war for those freedoms -- many wars, in fact. We fight wars for other reasons these days.
And know all ye, with your cloud computing and your The Economist magazine and NPR's "Marketplace" -- know you, that these wakeful, haggard souls are what support all of you, what make your rarefied existence possible, what make the sushi and microbrewery "tastings" possible. And they may go one supporting your arrogant selves for a few years more.
But they aren't going to do it forever.
No. Some day, they are going to take back what is theirs. And you will rue that day, you Calculators and Sophists -- you will rue that day!
After all,
"When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?"
- John Ball, priest to the English Peasant's Revolt, sermon at Blackheath, Summer, 1381.
Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet,
Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing,
While Ilion like a mist rose into towers."
-- "Tithonus, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Before me now the ice of Powder Horn Pond, dissolving in the cold grey rain, rises in a mist, wild and drear, floating ghostly in front of the pines.
In previous years, this would have been snow.
But though this is dreary, it is not one tenth so bleak as a certain place I am wont to repair, in the pitchness of night: the 24 hour Wal-Mart in Plymouth. Here, you can see, in all its grimness, the Underworld of the American economy. Here, you meet shades and spirits who refuse to meet your eyes, doing all night the packing and shelving and heaving and pulling and pushing that late Capitalism, hurtling the Earth -- or its species, at least -- towards disaster, requires to feed its bottomless, cancerous maw. All of them are tired. They have the zoned-out fatigue of long distance air travelers. This is their second or third job, if statistics are any guide. And they still aren't getting by. Many are old -- quite old, doing a young person's work when they should be sitting in the fullness of their life's own pasture. Many are immigrants, from Latin America, southeast Asia, Africa. Many work with headphones in their ears to more tolerably bear the interminable monotony of stacking Pringles, row upon row, in the small hours of the day. None of them want to talk, much less make eye contact. Even a genuinely strange character like myself goes unremarked.
These are this economy and society's undead. Once, they knew life, if even for a briefest moment, maybe as a child at a playground, or as a young mother in the firstness of mother-child love; and that urge to beauty and freedom does not go away. For though they labor so, out of their own and their family's necessity -- their direst need -- they do so with the grudging knowledge that they are being deprived of their hard-won and ancient liberties, liberties to a good, fair, and decent life in this country. We once fought a war for those freedoms -- many wars, in fact. We fight wars for other reasons these days.
And know all ye, with your cloud computing and your The Economist magazine and NPR's "Marketplace" -- know you, that these wakeful, haggard souls are what support all of you, what make your rarefied existence possible, what make the sushi and microbrewery "tastings" possible. And they may go one supporting your arrogant selves for a few years more.
But they aren't going to do it forever.
No. Some day, they are going to take back what is theirs. And you will rue that day, you Calculators and Sophists -- you will rue that day!
After all,
"When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?"
- John Ball, priest to the English Peasant's Revolt, sermon at Blackheath, Summer, 1381.
Monday, October 14, 2013
Abuses and Misuses of History; Or, Farewell to the Colonel
On occasion I read this blog by a paleoconservative ex-Special Forces colonel who used to be an attache to various Arab militaries. I got started in the habit c. 2006 when he was opposing W's foreign policy from the right, which I thought was interesting, and he knows a lot about the Middle East. But lately he's been the perfect example of how a little bit of historical knowledge, wrongly applied, can be really dangerous.
His view is that the current civic arson in Washington is really just a continuation of 18th century British politics. He incorrectly identifies the Tories on the whole as the Court Party, and the Whigs in general as the Country Party, and asserts that the Tea Partiers are Country Party types in contemporary America. This is wrong on any number of levels.
In reality, what started in the late 1680s as a duopoly between Whigs (opposed to royal authority) and Tories (in support of it) becomes by the early Hanoverian era, a contest between variegated and diverse "Country" and "Court" factions. The Court faction, centered around PM Walpole's friends, contained both Tory landowner grandees and the Whig merchants and financiers of the City of London, advocates of empire and executive power. On the other hand, the Country faction, opposed to the consolidating attempts of the Court and associated with popular elements at home, contained what would later be called "Red Tories" of the small-holding squirearchy, as well as "Old Whig" intellectuals who felt the Whig merchants of the City had sold out the principles of the Glorious Revolution -- the first left-wing intellectuals in history, suggests historian J.G.A. Pocock. So, the Colonel is simply incorrect in his history.
The question, then, is how does that effect his take on contemporary U.S. politics? First, there were practically no descendants of the Court faction among the founders of the American republic; indeed, the Court Party types became Loyalists. Rather, there were varying shades of Country-descended political opinion, with Hamilton's advocates of the moderate Hanoverian Enlightenment on the right, and the Paineite democratic radicals on the left. So the Colonel's desire to paint contemporary Democrats as descendants of Hanoverian courtiers falls flat; such an application would not have even applied to Alexander Hamilton, the most Court-friendly of the Founders, let alone Harry Reid.
What you have instead is the diffraction of America's Country-based political thought into any number of factions, groupings, and tendencies: arch-Federalists like Hamilton or Ames, moderate Federalists like John Adams, intransigent Old Republicans like John Randolph, the pragmatic Republicanism of Jefferson's Administration in power, the National Republicanism of John Quincy Adams or Monroe after the collapse of Federalism after 1815, the rise of Jacksonian Democracy on the wreckage of the Era of Good Feeling, the subsequent rise of the Whig Party in opposition to Jackson, the Nullifiers under Calhoun, etc., etc., etc. The Tea Party most closely resemble Country-descended political groupings that fought against majority rule, primarily in order to defend the slave system and/or white supremacy (Calhoun, the Fire Eaters of the 1850s, the Civil Rights Era Nullifiers like Orval Faubus or George Wallace). Likewise, those most opposed to the Nullifiers et al. have been a motley, but equally Country-descended crew: not only men who had been Whigs in the 1830s, like Abraham Lincoln, but also, and perhaps above all, that very apotheosis of the Country tradition in America, Andrew Jackson -- a portrait of whom hung on Lincoln's Oval Office wall. Indeed, though Jackson added new elements to the Country tradition, such as a fierce defense of majority rule, his devotion to traditional Country doctrines -- limiting government, lest it be used to strengthen established commercial interests at the expense of small yeoman freeholders -- cannot be seriously questioned. Yet even so thoroughly Country a figure as Jackson threatened to use federal power to subjugate and hang the Nullifiers under Calhoun should they act on their threats. Thus, any neat attempt to delineate contemporary American politics based on a deeply flawed misreading of 18th century British politics fails almost immediately when confronted with the historical evidence. The Colonel's comparison, is charitably putting it, confused; a better term might be "incoherent." It is political history's equivalent of a null set or non sequitur -- it does not follow. The analogy simply doesn't apply; it's just not apposite.
My dissertation advisor, a student of American political history, once told me that political doctrines in American history move like multiple intersecting sine waves of varying frequencies and amplitudes. Policies, attitudes, and even personalities migrate from one political grouping to another and then back again. But it is certainly possible to establish the family relations of various ideologies, of the direct line of descent between Calhoun in the 1830s, Yancey and Davis in the 1850s, and Faubus and Wallace in the 1950s - '60s -- and Gohmert and Yoho and Cruz today. You could also trace a line among their opponents, say between Jackson and Lincoln and Eisenhower (who expressed traditional Country fears in his warnings about a military-industrial complex). What you can't do is express 1:1 historical relations based upon fundamentally misinformed misunderstandings of Anglo-American political history.
Indeed, if the Colonel wanted a good contemporary example of Country ideology in action, he could take a look at the recent rebellion in the House, led by Rep. Justin Amash (R - Michigan) and Rep. John Conyers (D - Michigan), against the Executive's lawless spying through the panopticon of the National Security Agency. That bill saw conservative Republicans -- representatives of the rural squirearchy, as it were -- and liberal Democrats -- today's answer to the Old Whig intellectuals -- unite to oppose what they viewed as the overweening power of the State. Like the Country Party of 18th Century Britain, members of both sides of the Two Party duopoly were included. And like the Court Party, their opponents were both Democrats (Pelosi) and Republicans (McCain) inclined to give the Executive near total free reign in the conduct of foreign affairs and war.
What is dangerous is that the Colonel's false genealogies buttress an entirely self-serving and un-self-aware view of the world and of the past, one that justifies the reactionary radicalism of the hard Right with ersatz patriotic bunting. But, in the end, I really should just stop reading the guy. Whatever the Colonel's insights on the Middle East, he loathes and abuses Lincoln, Northerners, urbanites, and any who differ with him. He said monstrous things about the murdered Trayvon Martin. He is a strange sort of Catholic who really doesn't care for people whose sexuality is different than his. He is just an unpleasant man who knows far less than he thinks he does. For all those reasons, I will bid the Colonel adieu, crying "For Lincoln and Liberty, too!", and singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" -- Truth, indeed, is marching on.
His view is that the current civic arson in Washington is really just a continuation of 18th century British politics. He incorrectly identifies the Tories on the whole as the Court Party, and the Whigs in general as the Country Party, and asserts that the Tea Partiers are Country Party types in contemporary America. This is wrong on any number of levels.
In reality, what started in the late 1680s as a duopoly between Whigs (opposed to royal authority) and Tories (in support of it) becomes by the early Hanoverian era, a contest between variegated and diverse "Country" and "Court" factions. The Court faction, centered around PM Walpole's friends, contained both Tory landowner grandees and the Whig merchants and financiers of the City of London, advocates of empire and executive power. On the other hand, the Country faction, opposed to the consolidating attempts of the Court and associated with popular elements at home, contained what would later be called "Red Tories" of the small-holding squirearchy, as well as "Old Whig" intellectuals who felt the Whig merchants of the City had sold out the principles of the Glorious Revolution -- the first left-wing intellectuals in history, suggests historian J.G.A. Pocock. So, the Colonel is simply incorrect in his history.
The question, then, is how does that effect his take on contemporary U.S. politics? First, there were practically no descendants of the Court faction among the founders of the American republic; indeed, the Court Party types became Loyalists. Rather, there were varying shades of Country-descended political opinion, with Hamilton's advocates of the moderate Hanoverian Enlightenment on the right, and the Paineite democratic radicals on the left. So the Colonel's desire to paint contemporary Democrats as descendants of Hanoverian courtiers falls flat; such an application would not have even applied to Alexander Hamilton, the most Court-friendly of the Founders, let alone Harry Reid.
What you have instead is the diffraction of America's Country-based political thought into any number of factions, groupings, and tendencies: arch-Federalists like Hamilton or Ames, moderate Federalists like John Adams, intransigent Old Republicans like John Randolph, the pragmatic Republicanism of Jefferson's Administration in power, the National Republicanism of John Quincy Adams or Monroe after the collapse of Federalism after 1815, the rise of Jacksonian Democracy on the wreckage of the Era of Good Feeling, the subsequent rise of the Whig Party in opposition to Jackson, the Nullifiers under Calhoun, etc., etc., etc. The Tea Party most closely resemble Country-descended political groupings that fought against majority rule, primarily in order to defend the slave system and/or white supremacy (Calhoun, the Fire Eaters of the 1850s, the Civil Rights Era Nullifiers like Orval Faubus or George Wallace). Likewise, those most opposed to the Nullifiers et al. have been a motley, but equally Country-descended crew: not only men who had been Whigs in the 1830s, like Abraham Lincoln, but also, and perhaps above all, that very apotheosis of the Country tradition in America, Andrew Jackson -- a portrait of whom hung on Lincoln's Oval Office wall. Indeed, though Jackson added new elements to the Country tradition, such as a fierce defense of majority rule, his devotion to traditional Country doctrines -- limiting government, lest it be used to strengthen established commercial interests at the expense of small yeoman freeholders -- cannot be seriously questioned. Yet even so thoroughly Country a figure as Jackson threatened to use federal power to subjugate and hang the Nullifiers under Calhoun should they act on their threats. Thus, any neat attempt to delineate contemporary American politics based on a deeply flawed misreading of 18th century British politics fails almost immediately when confronted with the historical evidence. The Colonel's comparison, is charitably putting it, confused; a better term might be "incoherent." It is political history's equivalent of a null set or non sequitur -- it does not follow. The analogy simply doesn't apply; it's just not apposite.
My dissertation advisor, a student of American political history, once told me that political doctrines in American history move like multiple intersecting sine waves of varying frequencies and amplitudes. Policies, attitudes, and even personalities migrate from one political grouping to another and then back again. But it is certainly possible to establish the family relations of various ideologies, of the direct line of descent between Calhoun in the 1830s, Yancey and Davis in the 1850s, and Faubus and Wallace in the 1950s - '60s -- and Gohmert and Yoho and Cruz today. You could also trace a line among their opponents, say between Jackson and Lincoln and Eisenhower (who expressed traditional Country fears in his warnings about a military-industrial complex). What you can't do is express 1:1 historical relations based upon fundamentally misinformed misunderstandings of Anglo-American political history.
Indeed, if the Colonel wanted a good contemporary example of Country ideology in action, he could take a look at the recent rebellion in the House, led by Rep. Justin Amash (R - Michigan) and Rep. John Conyers (D - Michigan), against the Executive's lawless spying through the panopticon of the National Security Agency. That bill saw conservative Republicans -- representatives of the rural squirearchy, as it were -- and liberal Democrats -- today's answer to the Old Whig intellectuals -- unite to oppose what they viewed as the overweening power of the State. Like the Country Party of 18th Century Britain, members of both sides of the Two Party duopoly were included. And like the Court Party, their opponents were both Democrats (Pelosi) and Republicans (McCain) inclined to give the Executive near total free reign in the conduct of foreign affairs and war.
What is dangerous is that the Colonel's false genealogies buttress an entirely self-serving and un-self-aware view of the world and of the past, one that justifies the reactionary radicalism of the hard Right with ersatz patriotic bunting. But, in the end, I really should just stop reading the guy. Whatever the Colonel's insights on the Middle East, he loathes and abuses Lincoln, Northerners, urbanites, and any who differ with him. He said monstrous things about the murdered Trayvon Martin. He is a strange sort of Catholic who really doesn't care for people whose sexuality is different than his. He is just an unpleasant man who knows far less than he thinks he does. For all those reasons, I will bid the Colonel adieu, crying "For Lincoln and Liberty, too!", and singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" -- Truth, indeed, is marching on.
Saturday, July 27, 2013
Saturday, July 13, 2013
4:27 a.m.
Now is the hour when all godly men ought to be abed, or perhaps just rising -- the hour when the fox cries her lonesome bark, across the green marsh: summer is struggling.
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