Mark W Tiedemann

Author: Mark Tiedemann

  • On Time and Great Legs

    I’m pretty lucky.  No, I don’t believe in luck, unless it’s the ability to recognize the confluence of circumstances that result in specific outcomes, good or bad (hence bad luck), and thus act upon the result.  Luck is a description of things which occur or accrue to one without (seemingly) doing anything to effect them.  So, by that gauge, yeah, I’m pretty lucky.

    For example, my companion.  This coming spring will mark 30 years for us.  Unbelievable.  I lucked into this.  But I recognized it, acted upon the recognition, and, with the exception of a few periods of absolute boneheadedness on my part, the normal stresses of a long-term relationship, and all that other stuff, these three decades have been wonderful.

    I was going through some old photographs, looking for something to scan and post, and I found this.  It was on the occasion of Donna’s sister’s wedding.  This is about 1990, I think.  I don’t think I need to tell you that I think she is one sexy woman.  I still think so.  No, we don’t quite look like this anymore, but she still has great legs, and as I am, as they say, a Leg Man, that is just fine by me.

    donna-and-me-1990.jpg
    Like I said, I am a lucky man.  And pretty happy, too.

  • More Doors

    (Robin Trower is jamming on the stereo as I write this.  Just sayin’.)

    I feel the urge to write something, but no one topic presents itself with sufficient weight to dominate a whole entry.  What to talk about, that is the question.  That poor guy who got tied to a tree in Kentucky was on my mind last week.

    Census takers have, in certain parts of the country, been lumped in with so-called “revenooers” (to use Snuffy Smith jargon) and generally threatened, shot at, occasionally killed by folks exercising their right to be separate.  So they assume.  Appalachia, the Ozarks, parts of Tennessee and Kentucky, Texas…a lot of pockets, populated by people who have, for many reasons, acquired a sense of identity apart from the mainstream, and who feel imposed upon if the gov’ment so much as notices their existence.  They’d have a point if they truly did maintain a separate existence, but they don’t, and hypocrisy is the least amenable vice to reason.  At one time it was bootlegging, today it’s drugs, either marijuana or meth.  They don’t seem to get it that if they contribute to the erosion of the public weal then they forfeit the “right” to be left alone.  I really believe they don’t understand this simple equation.

    But do I believe that poor man was killed over some disagreement over politic hegemony?  No.  He knocked on the wrong door at the wrong time and asked the wrong question and some good ol’ boys killed him.  Scrawling “Fed” on his chest was probably an afterthought, and means about as much as had they written “Cop” or “Fag” or “Stranger.”  Whoever did it probably thought he was being cute.

    I would point to this and say that anyone who thinks America is free of its terrorists, its fundamentalist jihadists, its unreconstructed semi-literate hate-mongers, its pockets of intolerance where just walking down the street wearing the wrong clothes can get one hurt or killed, then a closer look is necessary.  Like such groups and people in foreign climes, the motivations for these folks are many and varied, from religion and political purity to money or sex or just bitter resentments.  The binding characteristic is that they hate—not with a red-hot, spikey, enraged hate, but with the harsher, tamped-ash, slow-burn deep hatred of constant gauging, you to them, ranking those who belong against those who don’t, an ever-present, seething, low-grade fever of hate that informs every single thought and action.  It’s not so much that something triggers it at the moment, causing an aberrant act of outrage as that they start from a coal-bed of resentment and rejection that they take as “normal.”  That makes them harder to understand for most people.  The default position for these folks is to despise you because you aren’t like them, and may the ‘verse help you if you have any education, erudition, any sense of a larger civic ecology, and grasp that reality is more than the pathetic network of familial connections that hoards sentiment and incubates the drowning phobias of in-group solidarity and guarantees a cyclic affirmation of hopelessness.

    From this, though, I would point out one thing that we tend to forget in America, in the West, that open-mindedness is always based on resources.  There must be enough, more than enough, to make people comfortable.  Apocalyptic fiction is frightening not so much because the physical world crumbles, but because everyone accepts in the absence of Enough that the small bits and pieces, an apple, a loaf of bread, a piece of sheeting to cover your from rain, a drink of water, is always sufficient reason to throw Plato on the fire and give up on solving problems.  People, it suggests, lose morality, even love, when they’re hungry and frightened enough.

    I have a house-full of books.  I just got a few more yesterday.  The pile of unread tomes grows, and it makes me feel rich.

    Many years ago, a cousin of mine had to live upstairs from us, with my grandparents, because his mother and father had moved to a county where this cousin did not meet the local school standards.  He would have entered their high school a grade behind instead of graduating that year.  So he lived upstairs and attended his alma mater so he could graduate.

    I ended up having to look out for him.  He was stupid.  Not in that he lacked intelligence, but he had no concept of how to apply it.  He reacted.  He did things without forethought.  He got in trouble.  Consequently, he got me into some trouble.  I was not stupid, so the degree of trouble for me was minimized, confined to the problem of what to do with this kid.  I quickly reached a point of wanting him out of the house.  Which meant that sometimes I did his homework.

    I hadn’t had much contact with my cousins for years.  There were many reasons for this I won’t go into, but basically they were strangers to me.  They were cousins.  Fine.  Big deal.  So what?  This is perhaps a blindspot with me, but frankly family as a concept doesn’t mean much to me.  I was raised to earn friendship, regardless, and I expected it to be earned in turn.  The conditions are immaterial and vary wildly, but just laying a claim on one’s affections simply because you happen to be related is not an idea I subscribe to.

    So this kid was, while I “knew” him, pretty much a stranger.  One evening we’re conversing about this and that and we got onto the topic of sacrifice.  He proudly declared that he’d risk his life for me.

    “Why?” I asked.

    “You’re my cousin.  You’re family.”

    “So?”  He looked puzzled so I elaborated.  “Okay, say you find out that I’m a drug dealer.  The police get onto me and it looks like I might be arrested or killed by a rival.  You’d fight both for me because we’re family?”

    “Yeah!”

    “You’d stand between me and the police.”

    “Yeah!”

    “You’re an idiot,” I said.

    He looked hurt.  After a couple minutes, he asked,  “You wouldn’t do it for me?”

    “If you were a drug dealer and I found out, I’d turn your ass in.”

    “But I’m family!”

    “And if I’d never met you before?  You grew up on the east coast and you’ve just come here and looked me up for the first time.  We don’t know each other from Adam.”

    “We’d be family.”

    “That’s nuts.  You don’t know me.  I could be the worst person on the planet and you’re telling me you’d risk your life for me.  Would you do it for____?”  I named someone we both knew, unrelated.

    “No.”

    “What if he was the one who’d become the scientist who cured cancer?”

    He shrugged.  This was getting beyond his personal calculus.

    No, I don’t actually think consanguinity is sufficient reason to extend any more consideration than you would to a casual acquaintance, certainly not to someone who has become a close friend.  One of the reasons, I suppose, I have no children.  Blood is probably an evolutionary trait to guarantee the success of a given DNA, but in society it is often turned to abuse, an excuse to overlook all sorts of shortfalls.  I might have felt different had I had brothers and sisters, but I hope not.

    I recently read a novel called Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell.  It’s a harsh, unpleasant story of Ozark backwoods familial tyranny.  I understand it’s about to be released as a film.  It portrays the kind of chains family imposes under the most obscene kind of filial blackmail, the way it is used as an excuse to not only forgive but defend criminality, brutality, ignorance, and the perpetuation of a siege mentality that cannot afford to embrace anything genuinely moral.  It is at core an argument against a concept of family that holds sway over so much of the human race.

    But it also shows what I mean when I say all moral behavior rests on resource.  Having enough.  Having, perhaps, more than enough.  The irony, of course, is that the mindset that such entrenched poverty and the oppressive familial code that seems to emerge in its depths pretty much guarantees that those so trapped will never step outside to find a way to cure their condition.  Entropy.  Energy always ebbs in a closed system.  For growth you need outside energy.

    Sometimes the best way to help a situation is to leave it.  Perhaps what the world needs are more doors.  Open.  We have, perhaps, enough rooms.  We need more doors.

  • The Keyboard I Didn’t Buy

    I came within a few synapses of buying a keyboard today.  An old Yamaha, double-manual, polyphonic ensemble—portable, with a stand.  No amplifier.  There was a time I would have fallen all over myself to get one of these for under five hundred bucks.  This one—sitting on the grass in someone’s back yard, part of the swag obtainable at the annual neighborhood yard sale we attend—was going for twenty-five bucks.

    And I passed.

    Couldn’t change my mind, either, a young fellow was right behind us and snatched it up.

    Now, I could say that I passed on it because I never buy a keyboard without trying it out, to see if all the notes and pots work, to see, basically, if it both sounds good and feels right.  Feel is very important in these matters.

    But that would be waffling, really.  I didn’t buy because…well, why?  I’m going to be 55 in a few weeks and my days of gigging are more than thirty years past.  I do not play well enough anymore to justify having more than the one piano I have—an instrument, by the way, the capacities of which I have yet to max out.

    I play at playing music.  Way, way back in the distant past, there was a period of a couple of years when I could sit in with other bands, could do a reasonably good evening of rock-n-roll with some classical stuff thrown in for the oohs and ahhs.  I played every day, usually for three hours, often more.  I wanted to be Keith Emerson.  I could do a couple of the less complex ELP tunes.

    But I did not have all the other requisite drives to make it as a professional musician.  I hate dealing with the business side, for one thing, something I confess to still dislike.   I am not constitutionally equipped to make money.  I wanted to play music.

    But I also wanted to play the music I wanted to play and the fact is that as in everything else one does to make a living, you don’t really often get to do what you want to do—you have to please the customer.  And I lost patience with the pathetic musical taste of my so-called audience back then.  I—and the guys playing with me—would break our backs learning some really cool piece of choice music (something by Genesis, say, or Yes or, one time I remember, something by Premiata Forneria Marconi—and if you do not know who they were, go check them out, for your musical education is lacking) and put it out there at a gig and receive lukewarm response and a request for something from the Doobie Brothers.  Not that I dislike the Doobies, mind you, but it just wasn’t up there, in my opinion.  Actually the audience just wasn’t up there.

    So I walked away.  I sold all my equipment and said to hell with it.  Didn’t play for several years.

    We bought a piano in 1989.  The last gig I’d done was about 1977 or 78.  I had forgotten damn near everything.

    But I hadn’t bought the thing to relive glory days or revisit tunes I could enjoy easily on the stereo—I’d bought it to do what I wanted to do.  So I wrote a few pieces, played in the mornings just to reset my mood for the day, jammed, really.  Over the years, I have occasionally picked up a piece of sheet music and worked at it, but basically I play a kind of pretend music.  In my mind it is.  It’s kind of like Keith Jarrett, who improvises everything he does.  Of course, Jarrett is marvelously skilled and educated so his improvisations are fascinating, intricate.  Mine are a bit redundant.  I’ve developed a suite of a couple dozen motifs that I can mix and match and then just sit down and rip on them.

    People listening, when I’m in a groove, think it’s amazing, and the structure is such that most of them think I’m playing something they just can’t quite recognize.  But it’s a rudimentary form of jazz freeform.  Middle-level musicians enjoy what I’m doing but know it’s more or less fake.

    Oddly enough, the few really good musicians I know love listening, because to them it’s just spontaneous composition and they’ve worked very hard to get to a point where they can do the same thing.  As long as I don’t play too long, they’re actually impressed.

    About once a month, if I’m not doing anything else, I play at a small church open mic from January to August.  The audience is small, they never have requests, and they think I’m pretty good.  At least, they clearly enjoy themselves when I play.

    And that’s enough.  I’m playing.  I’m playing from the heart.  I’m playing what I want.  I don’t really need much more, though sometimes I’d like more.

    So why did I pass on the yard sale keyboard?  Because two keyboards means more discipline.  It means I’m getting serious about doing music that I no longer do.  It means—to me, from inside my skull—that I have to knuckle down and practice and prove I deserve to be playing.  It means pressure.

    There might come a time I decide, because I really want to, that I need to get my chops back in a serious way.  But not now.  I’m concentrating on my writing.  That’s the work that needs the lion’s share of my attention.  If I start playing music three or four hours a day again, I’ll short-change the important stuff.  So I passed.  I don’t need it.  I’m okay with where I’m at with what I do with the music I make.

    Besides…where the hell would I put it?

  • Some Art

    Time for a little art.

    Once upon a time, in the distant past, I had ambitions to become a comic book artist.  I wrote and drew my own.  My models…well, I am very much a fan of extreme realism, so some of the less mimetic, more representational comic art leaves me unimpressed.  My idol when I was a kid, trying to do this, was Russ Manning.  He was the ne plus ultra of comics technicians, and not only because of his superb style, but for the substance of the comics he did.  Magnus Robot Fighter 4000 A.D. was just about everything I ever wanted in a comic book, along with its spin-off, The Aliens, which did not last very many issues.

    There were others I liked.  Dan Spiegle,  who did Lost In Space (before the lamebrained television series and long after it) among other things.  And of course the wonderful Alex Raymond of Flash Gordon fame.

    There was a time, when I was drawing every day, that I got fairly good.  But then photography came along, then I went back to writing, and the rest, as they say….

    But I still do art occasionally.  Now I think that rather than doing comics, if I’d stuck with it, I’d do illustrations.  That leads to a whole other pantheon of greats.  In the last couple decades, I sit down to doodle or sketch when I need a break.  It’s fun and relaxing and I feel no pressure to accomplish anything beyond satisfying my desire to create something cool.

    Below you’ll find a new drawing.  You may be able to tell from the technique that I’m a Virgil Finlay fan, though nowhere near his legendary abilities. Below the main, finished, illustration are thumbnails of the work-in-progress.  I posted these as they were done on my Facebook page, but I thought I’d put them all up here.  (Click on the thumbnail and you can get a larger view.)

    I’m going to hang several pieces this year in the Archon art show.  I don’t have room to keep everything, but I’ve scanned the pieces into the computer and I can print them out later if I want.

    Anyway, enjoy.

    stage-5-final.bmp

    Thumbnails of the process below.
    stage-4.jpgstage-3.jpgstage-2.jpgstage-1.jpg

  • Legacies

    Comparisons of the disaster of 9/11 to Pearl Harbor break down in the aftermath.  What I remember is getting a phone call from my wife to turn on the news, any news, and then seeing the images on CNN.  I then called several people, including some on the west coast, early as it was.

    It was a binding experience.

    Then the silence of the skies for next few days.  All planes grounded.  We don’t pay attention to all that background noise until it disappears.

    And I remember wanting to strike back.

    But at who?

    I am not a reflex pacifist.  I do not believe in turning the other cheek as an automatic gesture.  The world, in aggregate, does not yield to such gestures until much blood is spent, and disgust comes to the aid of the peaceful intent.  Strike at me,  hurt my family and friends, threaten my home, I have no compunction about the use of violence.

    But not thoughtless lashing out, flailing, blind retaliation.  That does less good than the habitual use of peaceful surrender.  If we were to find these people, we needed to be smart about it, and move carefully.  When caught, punishment must be determined accordingly.

    That was not to be.  I watched our so-called leaders turn this event into a justification for major abuse globally.  The sympathy we had from the entire world evaporated as the United States began stomping around acting like a pissed off child whose lunch money had been taken by a bully.  But we were not small and weak, so embracing the automatic response of schoolyard tactics resulted in calamity.  I was horrified by the unfolding nightmare of the Bush years, all done supposedly in my name as a citizen.

    The aftermath of Pearl Harbor was horrible but not cause for self-loathing and shame.  We rose to an occasion that demanded sacrifice and we came to the aid of a  world gone mad.  The enemy was clear, the stakes enormous, the calculations easy enough.  Ugly as WWII was, our response was as close to noble as war can bestow, and we have carried ourselves with pride born out of that period for going on 70 years now.

    Not so after 9/11.

    We were struck in 1941 by a nation that officially declared war upon us.  We knew who they were, what they stood for, and where to find them.  It was a conflict of clear adversaries fighting as nations.

    The 9/11 aggressors were a band of people more like the mafia, with no nation, no formal declaration of war, and no clear face.  We had a few names, a few associations.  We didn’t know how to deal with this, so we pretended it was just like any other war, shoved the awkward details into the box called War, and attacked as if nations could be blamed.

    After WWII we could expect and received formal surrenders from nations authorized to sign such instruments.  Rebuilding began, and it could be argued that THAT was the real victory.

    Who will sign a surrender in this conflict?  Who can?  What would it look like?  And how do you rebuild something these very same enemies keep knocking down and by so doing make us knock them down as well, along with all the innocent people who just get in the way?

    There was a time hatred could not act on its own in such a vast theater—it required nations to enable it and give it reach.  That’s changed.

    It seems to me we need to start figuring out how to rid ourselves of hate.  We can’t do that if we keep hurting the very people we need to help.

    Our job has been made infinitely harder because of the schoolyard bully mentality of the administration that dragged us into this fray in the aftermath of national tragedy.  We may never regain the credibility needed to address the real issues.  That is the loss I continue to mourn on this day.

    The dead cannot be blamed for the acts of the living, and revenge is a cold legacy for the sacrifice of the honorable.

  • Quote of the Day

    It cannot have escaped those who have attended with candor to the arguments employed against the extensive powers of the government, that the authors of them have very little considered how far these powers were necessary means of attaining a necessary end. They have chosen rather to dwell on the inconveniences which must be unavoidably blended with all political advantages; and on the possible abuses which must be incident to every power or trust, of which a beneficial use can be made. This method of handling the subject cannot impose on the good sense of the people of America. It may display the subtlety of the writer; it may open a boundless field for rhetoric and declamation; it may inflame the passions of the unthinking, and may confirm the prejudices of the misthinking: but cool and candid people will at once reflect, that the purest of human blessings must have a portion of alloy in them; that the choice must always be made, if not of the lesser evil, at least of the GREATER, not the PERFECT, good; and that in every political institution, a power to advance the public happiness involves a discretion which may be misapplied and abused. They will see, therefore, that in all cases where power is to be conferred, the point first to be decided is, whether such a power be necessary to the public good; as the next will be, in case of an affirmative decision, to guard as effectually as possible against a perversion of the power to the public detriment.

    from Federalist # 41, by James Madison

  • Poor Misunderstood Right Wing Nut Job

    Some people seem to dissolve into their worst attributes over time.  There is a seige mentality that develops, it seems, and from within the bastions and barricades the fever dreams of the misunderstood and disillusioned take root and grow into horrible, twisted things.

    I don’t care much for people who are constantly running around trying to scare the rest of us with apocalyptic prognostications.  The sky is falling, yes it is, and there’s nothing we can do about it.  Who can hold up the sky or keep the stars from falling?  Not me and it would appear a waste of what life might be left to spend my time fretting over it and ruining other people’s day telling them to not enjoy themselves because the impending catastrophe is of such significance that to ignore it in any way is to cheapen all human history.  Having a good time in the face of Doom is being, somehow, rude to the awesome relevance of said Doom.

    Everyone needs a hobby.

    Conspiracy theorists have found the X-Box of their desires within the serpentine confines of a world delimited by the constant back-stabbing one-up-manship of imagined black ops, coups, assassinations, and creeping ideological subversion.  I wish them good times playing with their toys.

    But occasionally they decide to rewrite history to justify their paranoia and depending on what it is they’re trying to sell by doing so, I get a bit less tolerant.

    A grand master of New Spin is Pat Buchanan.  He’s been misinterpreting reality since before his failed bid for the presidency.  In retrospect he is the ideal speech writer for Richard Nixon, for he must have shared Nixon’s conviction that the game is rigged and the Lefties are out to get us all from the beginning.  Do right by all those bleeding heart liberals and all they do is spit on you.  Open up China, establish the EPA, expand health care, and what do you get for all your efforts?  They pillory you for a little wire tap and the construction of a shadow government that could do end runs around Congress.  Ingrates!

    Pat has become more strident and marginalized since Reagan took office.  The tough American school of foreign diplomacy combined with the Minute Man ideal of self-sufficiency and rugged independence came to the fore, nurtured by an age that declared that all victims were just whiners and the only difference between a rich man and a poor man is plain hard work.  Pat blossomed.

    What fruit has this mutant liberty tree borne?  Well, he’s now ready to revisit Hitler and tell us how Adolph was just misunderstood after all, that he didn’t want world conquest (which is possible—he mainly wanted Europe and Russia) but peace and a strong Germany.  He makes his argument here.

    It is one of those things which one reads with  awe at the sheer balls of the premise. Clearly, Pat has taken Mein Kampf to heart as the heart-warming, desperate revelation of a tortured peacemaker who has been maligned and misunderstood by any and all.

    He claims in this article that Hitler sued for peace with Britain two years before the first trains rolled toward the concentration camps.  This is a deceptive claim.  But the specifics are less important than the overall argument.  Pat claims Germany invaded Poland in a dispute over Danzig.  One must then ask why one of the first acts after Poland fell was the construction of the camps.

    But the actual problem here is a complete and utterly ridiculous misreading of Hitler himself.  Hitler made it clear in many speeches, and in Mein Kampf, that his aims were for a militantly ascendent Germany.  The Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935.  People were already leaving the country because they understood what Hitler was.  Berlin in 1936 had to be “made over” for the Olympics—antisemitic posters taken down, the presence of brown shirts and their ilk removed, and the camps placed off-limits for even official visits.  Oh, yes, there were camps them, around the major cities, but they had not quite yet become the exclusive depository of Jews—gypsies, homosexuals, Slavs of various ethnic backgrounds, and certainly politically questionable types filled them in stinking, horrid conditions that only foretold of what was to come.

    Hitler’s Reich in fact violated every single treaty it signed but one: its treaty with Japan that demanded it declare war on the United States in the event of war between the U.S. and Japan.

    I don’t follow the logic behind Buchanan’s reinterpretation.  I don’t know what he’s doing here unless there’s a latent holocaust denier lurking beneath all the other reactionary dross he’s acquired over the years.

    There is, however, an interesting point brought out in some of the comments appended to Buchanan’s post—that of Stalin’s somewhat “lighter” treatment at the hands of posterity.  As if by claiming that we don’t hold Stalin to the same standard of denunciation of revulsion, that somehow the opprobrium heaped upon Herr Hitler is, well, unfair.

    Well.  Stalin was as big a monster, perhaps bigger, than Hitler.  The only thing that makes them different is their nationalist aims.  Stalin seemed content to remain within the borders of the Soviet Union.  He slaughtered his own people, and he played no favorites in that regard—he was an equal opportunity murderer.  He did not invade Poland.  He did not start a world war.  Considering the wall of silence placed around his regime, without that war we might still not know what was going on inside the Soviet Union.  Stalin’s sociopathology was constrained, methodical, even in some sense rational insofar as he recognized limits.  Hitler was different.  Hitler was more than just a sociopath and as the war progressed it became more obvious.  It is appropriate that Hitler’s favorite composer was Wagner, for what do most of Wagner’s operas end with?  Gotterdammerung!  The end of everything.

    We’re catching up with regards to Uncle Joe, as Truman called him.  We’re finding out.  His atrocities were on such a scale, though, as to almost dwarf what the Nazis did.  But that’s a deceptive way to look at it as well.  What difference the numbers?  Eleven or eleven million?

    Even so, I don’t quite grasp the point of trying to rehabilitate Hitler.  Is Buchanan trying to lay blame on the Brits for jumping the gun?  Is he trying to point out the flaws in systems and networks of treaties that seem to draw us into disaster time and again?  Is he practicing moral relativism?  That would be a first for him.

    Whatever is going on, I think it behooves us to pay attention to the Nut Jobbery going on in our midst.

    We do live in interesting times.

  • John Adams and the Efforts of Time

    We just watched the last episode of John Adams.  I got the DVD from the library and we went through it in one week, all seven installments.  I have to admit, the last episode brought tears.  The partnership between John and Abigail was well-portrayed and deeply moving.  The older I get, the more I find the strongest story resonance with depictions of deep, deep friendships, especially those that exist between lovers, spouses, life partners.  I cannot imagine losing Donna, who has become exactly that for me, in spite of the fact that I have friends of longer acquaintance, good friends, too.

    The casting was incredible, the make-up superb, the writing first class.
    What struck me most about this as well was the marvelously-nuanced dramatization of the fundamental differences in political philosophy between Adams and Jefferson.  I can’t help but think that when Adams declared that “the true history of our revolution is lost” he must have been thinking of the initial partnership and later dissolution of like-mindedness between himself and Thomas Jefferson, whom Joseph Ellis depicts an an American Sphinx.

    Adams is here portrayed as an idealist who cannot separate his philosophy from his pragmatism.  In the first dozen years of the new republic, there was enormous public sentiment for France and when that country descended into the frenzy of its own revolution gone mad, that sentiment demanded that we support the revolutionaries.  The irony that France supported us when it was still a monarchy and now those very people that had backed us (granted, as a move in their own war with England) were the victims of the mob ascendant was lost on most people, and apparently even Jefferson, who wanted us to embroil ourselves immediately and deeply in support of the revolutionaries.  Washington—how lucky they were to have him—refused.  He was a militaryman by training and he understood how to assess the chances of success and how to go about surviving a conflict in which you are outmatched.  He had seen more than his share of defeat in a long career and knew well that ideology needed a strong hand to keep it in check, lest it carry you over the precipice.  He refused to side with France, believing that neutrality was the only way for the United States to survive.  Adams shared that belief.

    Jefferson, and those like him believed that the rightness of the cause would win out.

    Neither Jefferson or Adams had served in the military, but it appears that Adams at least had seen a bit of bloodshed.  He grasped an essential reality—that ideals do not win battles.  And yet, politically, he clung to his ideals in the face of an enemy who seemed capable of indulging any tactic in the cause of winning, namely Jefferson.  Almost a complete reversal of roles, at least in appearances.

    Or was it?

    Adams seems to have had a grasp of the long-term in a way that Jefferson, with his mercurial fixation on posterity, did not.  Adams grasped that the fields in which ideals must be left unsullied by pragmatism are different than those in which an immediate fight for survival is waged.  He would not interject himself where his loyalty to the Constitution said he ought not, even when it might win him another term as president.  Jefferson seemed willing to do work-arounds whenever his vision demanded.

    I’m simplifying, of course.  Adams blundered in terms of ideals badly with the Alien and Sedition Act.  He knew he would be remembered more for that—and not well—than for having steered the country through the shoals of potential disaster by refusing to take sides in the squabble between England and France.  And the Alien and Sedition Act is a nasty, unAmerican piece of political offal.  Patently unConstitutional.

    And yet Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory was also patently unConstitutional, a violation of due process, and in many ways unleashed nastiness and ugliness by opening up all that land to American incursion, wiping out more Native American nations and people, bringing us into direct conflict with Spain and then Mexico, lent opportunity for future presidents to exercise the worst aspects of imperial ambition all in the name of the United States and in contradiction to the Founding Intent of the republic….and for that he is praised.

    The essential element of the American Revolution, as it was happening at the time, is simply a group of talented men scrambling around trying desperately to make something workable out of a deadly situation.  They didn’t want a king anymore, they wanted to run their own affairs, but they were also terrified of their neighbors, so some legal wall had to be built to keep New York or Pennsylvania or Virginia from dictating to the smaller states.  The southern colonies operated as agrarian economies based on slave labor, and they wanted to maintain that, so something had to be done to make sure the abolitionists in the north couldn’t strip them of millions of dollars worth of property and labor.  In the tumult of ongoing war, they were working at a fever pitch to make sure they came out the other side with what they wanted, even at the expense of the unity that was to guarantee a victory, and they had no idea how it was all going to look.  It was bedlam.  It was panic-stricken intellectual jerrymandering.

    And somehow out of this a framework evolved that, not then and not for a long time to come, but eventually emerged as a marvelous machine.

    But there was little solidarity of invention, little conformity of vision.  They all knew that they had to fight to be severed from Great Britain.  That afterward they needed to erect a coherent government that wouldn’t take from them what they saw Britain trying to take from them.  How they were going to do all this, on that there was little agreement.

    It was a mess.

    The myth prevails.

    But not so much that sound research and a little patient thought can’t recover what might actually have been going on, and sometimes the results are something wonderfully poignant, insightful, and honest as this miniseries.  It ought to be shown in grade school.  It ought to be part of any American history course.

    At a book festival a few years ago, I attended a discussion by a historian who had just published a biography of Aaron Burr.  She’d taken the trouble to go back to primary sources and look at the man through the lens of his times rather than our modern, prejudiced view of a murderer and traitor.  She talked about the humanness of these people, who were an amalgam—hero and villain, coward and genius, self-serving and patriotic, publicly strong and privately weak—when someone stood up to condemn her for her scholarship.  His argument was that it wasn’t right to denigrate these people who had given us so much.

    “I’m not denigrating anyone, sir,” the historian said.  “I’m simply showing them as they actually were.”

    “What good does that do?  I don’t want to know that they were assholes.  I don’t agree with what you’re doing.”

    I don’t want to know that they were assholes.

    Understandable sentiment, perhaps, but without realizing how utterly human they were we risk deifying them.  And we’ve seen that process at work through most of our history, to greater or lesser degrees.  The temptation to cast the revolutionary era in bronze and hold it up as some ideal age is great because it seems so simple and honest and straight-forward compared to our present age of almost fractal complexity.  We can see the desire for that kind of simplicity and, we believe, dependability in the constant purges against politicians who prove themselves frail or hypocritical or simply too human.  We want paragons, walking talking ideals who never stray from the Philosopher’s Gold of which we think the Founding Fathers were composed.  We sacrifice a lot of talent this way.  Brilliant economists, diplomats, orators, legislators get harried out of office because they slept with someone out of wedlock or smoked pot in college or eschew a religious point-of-view.  The examination of private lives in search of the unstained, pure of heart, consistently noble character drives the best and brightest away from even putting themselves forward to serve.  As if any of these factors relate to competence or civic virtue or ability to lead.

    Any examination of the Founding Fathers shows such a catalogue of human frailty that likely none of them today could get elected as small-town councilman much less to the highest offices of the land.  Among them were speculators, slave owners, philanderers, alcoholics, bigots, gamblers, and all manner of personal hypocrisy.

    But look at what they managed to build.

    I think more such dramatizations ought to be made.  We should know very well how human these people were.  We should know that, really, they weren’t so very different than we were, beyond those differences that time and circumstance inevitably produce.  It would do us good to get the idea that if these—uncertain, petty, churlish, hypocritical, frightened men—could do what they did when the opportunity presented itself, what can we not aspire to accomplish with all the benefits of their histories and our present abilities?  Knowing that we are more like them than not would be a good thing, I think.

  • Hating the Government: An American Tradition.

    G.O.P. Chairman Michael Steele made a few remarkably in-your-face comments recently about the health care debate.  Here, in his own words, is pretty much where he thinks the nation is going, why it shouldn’t go there, and what the Republican Party stands for.

    This morning on NPR  he tangled with Steve Inskeep, in particular over this.

    One quote in particular caught my eye:  ” Simply put, we believe that health-care reform must be centered on patients, not government.”

    When you listen to the NPR interview it’s clear that we’re hearing another in the now decades-long tirades against the government which has become the hallmark of Right Wing politics in this country.

    In this country, in theory, the government is supposed to be us, the people.  We elect our representatives, we tell them how we want them to vote, we change our minds, we are supposed to be in charge.  In theory.  Obviously, the reality is far from that.  For one, we are not a full-fledged democracy, we are a republic, and while we elect those who operate the machinery of the republic on our behalf, we do not have a direct say in the running.  Nor could we, really.  it is simply too complex.  We send our representatives to the various points of departure—state capitols, Washington D.C., county seats, city halls—to do that for us because it is a big, complex, often indecipherable melange of conflicting goals, viewpoints, and problems.  We do not have the time to pay the necessary attention to do that work ourselves, so we pay people to do it for us.

    So why do we distrust it so much?

    Well, because we distrust each other.

    No, really, let’s be honest for a few minutes here.  We make certain assumptions going into a polling booth that the results will lead to some kind of cohesive approach to the enterprise we view as Our Country.  It’s rather surprising how often that turns out to be the case, but it’s not at all what we may actually intend.  This country is a collection of competing factions, down to the faction of the individual in confrontation with everyone else, and up to the factions of whole states in conflict with other states.  We vote for people who will represent our desire to be safe from our next door neighbor.

    If that’s stating it too strongly, consider the reality.  Zoning laws are in place to prevent our next door neighbor from building something we don’t want next to us, be a bar, an art studio, a bordello, or just an odd-looking house.  I know, it’s supposed to regulate the conflict between residential and business, but in practice it’s a way to keep people out of our neighborhoods.  Used to be it applied directly to people, but that was determined to be unConstitutional.  Nevertheless, there are ways of manipulating housing costs, taxes, and other things to more or less accomplish the same thing—if we can’t keep people of different ethnic varieties out, at least we can make sure they have money, right?

    Of course, it’s a contest, and these ordinances are challenged all the time—it’s a see-saw, or a tug-of-rope.  My point is, the basis of it is the very American value of being free from your neighbor’s values.

    Go on up the ladder of issues.  The entire edifice of American self-image is based on the notion that a true American can—and must—fend for himself and that, in order to do so, he must be free from encumbrances wherever possible.  If you carry this idea to its extreme, you begin to see why there is such profound distrust of government, especially since the Sixties.

    To put it as bluntly as possible, the fear of Socialism is a hatred of being forced to be responsible for your next door neighbor.  The anger fueling the antipathy for most single-payer or universal health care programs in this country comes from a sense that these ideas by-pass self-sufficiency and limit the individual’s ability to be separate from people he or she dislikes.

    Now, I hasten to add that Americans do show a tremendous capacity for generosity.  We are sociable, we more often than not will turn out to help people in need, we have a history of spontaneous charity and rescue work.  The money we spend yearly on aid and relief through various nongovernmental agencies and even as individuals is enormous and makes my previous statement seem paradoxical.

    It is not a paradox.  It has to do with what we perceive as choice.  See, if I decide to help the family down the street, who have fallen on hard times, I will do so.  I may even corral a number of my friends and neighbors into pitching in.  And if we succeed in helping them out of a tough spot and they get back on their feet, we—at least I—won’t even self-administer a back-pat of congratulations.  Success is its own reward.

    But if it turns out, in whatever estimation you care to use, that the family we’re helping is beyond help for whatever reason, that perhaps dad is an alcoholic or they have a different problem that cannot be met or any of a thousand circumstances that make it appear they will never get out of their tough spot, I—and my neighbors—have the option to drop them as a cause.

    If we are administering that aid via the government, we can’t do that.

    We now must all remember the chorus of welfare stereotypes we have heard all our lives.

    Perhaps a little more telling, we must bear in mind the misapplication of the public weal in exactly those circumstances which have resulted in people doing worse.  Many a state welfare agency—it varies—had, at one time or another, qualifications for aid that did often leave people in worse condition.  In New York throughout the Seventies and much of the Eighties, to qualify for assistance, you had to have lost everything.  There was no assistance for someone who just need a little help to keep them in their house or their decent apartment until they could find a job.  No, you come back when you’ve been foreclosed on or the sheriff has dumped all your belongings on the curb, then we’ll give you assistance.

    This didn’t happen with Federal aid, but state.  Other things, usually the minority of instances where a bureaucratic glitch ended up costing a citizen dearly, that grew in the telling until it was a horror story.

    But it wouldn’t matter.  Because we have a fundamental problem with being responsible for people for whom we have no affection, to whom we feel we owe nothing, we fight against public programs that even remotely seem like Socialism.

    We have also been fed a steady diet since Vietnam of governments that run black ops on their own citizens.  The government is the enemy.  We can’t walk away or opt out.  It’s the government, what can you do?

    And sometimes it’s true.  I lived through a period during which our phones were tapped and I was followed home from school for a time by FBI agents, all because it was 1969 and my dad owned a gun shop.  Nothing ever came of it, everything my dad did was legal and above board, but the presence of the government was palpable.

    Americans want none of that.  We’re independent, self-sufficient, we don’t need your damn help or your damn interference.

    Look at the difficulties with education.  Parents resent state requirements to teach subjects of which they disapprove.  Never mind that it might be for the longterm best interest of everyone that their kids know something about real history, real science, or even just about their own bodies, “we don’t want the government teaching our kids things we don’t like.”

    But if the government moves against people we don’t like, we’re all for it.  We want the government to do something about drug dealers, pornographers, Ponzi schemers, toxic waste dumpers…

    Unless that happens to be our business that’s involved in the investigation and the new requirements…

    But basically we just don’t want the government telling us we have to pay for people we don’t like.  And never mind the reality.  never mind that our perception of certain people is skewed.  Fine, if that’s true, then eventually we’ll figure it out and fix it, but we’ll do the figuring out, thank you, and we’ll do the fixing.

    Never mind that it doesn’t usually work that way—if left to collective individual sentiment, we might still have slavery, the vote still wouldn’t be universal, segregation would still be legal, and you still wouldn’t be able to buy certain books in a book store.

    The danger here is that in arguing against a mindset that is in many ways systemically pathological, we overlook genuine concerns and embrace an all or nothing posture that will as readily dismiss workable solutions because they seem to appease a point of view we find ridiculous.  As in many such issues, the rational may be abandoned by both sides in the heat of ideological confrontations.  There is no question that many major institutions, erected at various times to meet problems that seemed about to overwhelm us, might have been done differently, more even-handedly, more sensibly if only the confrontation with the solution’s critics had not taken on an all-or-nothing extremism.

    Somehow, along the spectrum of The People to The Government, a disconnect has happened that will not yield to simple common sense.  Yet the same skepticism doesn’t seem to apply to corporations.  People hate individual corporations, cast them as evil, but somehow fail to see the corporate system as a problem.  The idea seems to be that if only XYZ Corporation were run more ethically everything would be all right—we never quite make the leap to seeing that the way corporations are is at the heart of the problem and that XYZ Corporation can’t run any differently by the very nature of its make-up.  Yet that is the suspicion we carry bone-deep about the government—that it doesn’t matter who is in office now, the government by its very make-up is evil.

    The result ends up being an abandonment of rational problem solving.  We’re presented with a false choice—a government solution or freedom.

    Back in the Sixties, Ronald Reagan made his political bones running for governor of California, and he took on a proposed national health care bill then being debated.  He called it Socialism and that if we allowed it then “one day you’ll be telling your grandchildren about the time when we were free.”

    The only thing you would lose, it seems to me, by using government as pathway to addressing certain social problems, is the freedom to turn your back on someone just because he or she doesn’t appeal to you.  You won’t be able to walk away from your neighbor.

    But then, your neighbor won’t be able to turn his back on you.

    Yeah, I’m idealizing.  But isn’t that what the G.O.P. is doing?  Stating cases that by their extreme ideological tone are caricatures of reality?

    I’ll leave you with this thought:  it may be perfectly natural to want to separate yourself and your family from poverty, even if that means pretending it’s not your problem.  Maybe it’s not, directly.  But we don’t live in a world where we have the luxury of letting the poor remain unaddressed.  Poverty and disease are linked.  Tuberculosis is making a comeback, and it’s the poor neighborhoods where it’s taking hold first, and some strains are now drug resistent.  TB itself recognizes no class.  Money won’t stop it.  Withold services from them and the kids in rich counties are increasingly liable to come into contact with it.  Poverty is an incubator.

    I don’t want universal health care because I’m such a great humanitarian.  I want it to protect myself and my family and friends from the epidemics history shows us germinate through the poor first.  Untreated diseases don’t just go away because they live in bad neighborhoods and effect people we don’t hang with.  Let that get started, then we’ll all find out just how self-sufficient we really are.

  • A Question…or Two…or More…

    Just a couple of what seem to me like obvious questions.  (I know, I’ve been writing a bit on the health care debate, and I’ll try to do some other things after this, don’t want to bore anyone, especially myself.)

    I see a lot of protesters waving signs that contain something like this:  HEALTHCARE REFORM YES, GOVERNMENT TAKEOVER NO.  TORT REFORM NOW!

    Something about that doesn’t quite add up.  If health care is to be reformed, who is going to do it?  The industry isn’t without that there is a threat.  Which means there will have to be something outside the industry doing the threatening.  What might that be?

    Hmm.  The government?

    And the nature of the reform, if it isn’t to be entirely self-serving on the part of the industry, will have to be devised by a somewhat disinterested party.  Who might that be?

    The government?

    And tort law…well, that’s, as it says, Law.  Which is legislation.  Which is—wait for it!— the government!

    So what is being asked for here?

    That the government enact reforms that do not involve the government, do not make use of government authority, do not engage government offices, and will not grant the government any power to enforce.

    So how will that work exactly?

    Or is there some third party out there we haven’t been told about capable of doing all this reforming?

    Oh, the market!  Which basically is consumers, which is, well, all of us.  The people.

    But wait…isn’t the government supposed to be the duly elected voice of the people?  So if the people are demanding reform, how are the people supposed to both express such a desire and then implement said reforms?

    I guess, through their duly elected voice—the government.

    But if the government is not to be trusted, I guess that means the people aren’t to be trusted.  The people don’t know what they want, what is good for them, or how to go about managing the reforms they’ve demanded and, somehow, achieved.  So there will have to be an appointed body of presumed experts who do know how to manage all this to act on the people’s behalf…

    Who might that be?

    The industry?  Hmm.  Well, since it’s the industry that needs reforming and the people who have demanded reform, handing management of the reform over to the very thing that needs the reform would seem, well, not to put to fine a point on it, stupid.

    So I guess we’d have to elect a representative body to manage the reforms.

    Oh, wait, don’t we already have such a body?

    Yeah, it’s the government.  So by demanding reform of an industry, it would seem reasonable that we not trust the industry (that already doesn’t do what we want it to do) to reform itself.  It would be silly to create a whole other body to oversee all this when one already exists that has over two centuries of expertise in doing exactly this sort of thing.

    So how is anything is going to change otherwise?

    Just wondering, you know, because some of the demands sort of don’t make any sense.