Posted on by rjonakait

Trump’s Uncanny Inheritance

Whenever I listen to a minute or two of one of his rallies (which is as long as I can tolerate), I admire Donald Trump’s speaking ability. This is not the speechifying of many public figures. It is not like the famous speeches we may remember. It is different from JFK’s pronouncing that the U.S. was going to the moon; different from MLK’s I Have a Dream speech; or Ronald Reagan’s, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” The oratory of those other figures was carefully scripted, and we knew that this was a performance for a massed audience. On occasion, Trump tries something similar, but we can always tell that he is reading words written by someone else.

Instead what I admire in Trump’s rallies is his “conversational” style. He does not seem to be talking to the massed audience all at once, but to an individual. (I say “conversational” because, of course, we don’t really think he would ever have a real conversation with anyone at his rallies or perhaps anywhere.) He has the ability to make it seem as if he is talking only to you, not just to a faceless crowd.

This makes me think about something I read decades ago about the development of popular music. Before microphones, singers sometimes used a megaphone to reach their audiences, but mostly they just projected their voice so that it could be widely heard. They were singing for a massed audience without any individuals being singled out. Think opera today. I may feel thrilled to hear the soprano, but I don’t feel that she is singing just to me. I am just one of many who is hearing her at the same time.

When amplification started, the popular culture historian I read said that at first singing styles did not change. The music was still for a massed audience. Then, according to that writer, Bing Crosby changed everything. He used the microphone in a new way that felt not that he was singing to a group, but was singing to every individual in that group. Close your eyes and listen to Crosby singing about that white Christmas. He is singing to you. It is a personal experience, not a mass one.

Trump’s strength in his rallies is that he does not talk to a crowd. He makes it seem as if he is talking to everyone personally, and that has turned out to be a powerful ability to attract and keep followers.

Trump has benefited from speaking to large public assemblages in this way. He reads the room seeking laughter and outrage from his listeners, and this serves to acknowledge them. It gives them an identity when they feel overlooked and some sort of hope that he can make their lives better.

In these rallies he is an heir to a much older America where people got education and entertainment by hearing speakers and lecturers. America’s golden age of oratory was from roughly 1870 to 1925, a time before the mass media of radio and television had permeated the nation. What there was instead was an extensive railroad network. Able to appear in towns of all sizes, speakers utilized this network to entertain and inform. People like Frederick Douglass, Emma Goldman, William Jennings Bryan, and Clarence Darrow may have had other careers, but they all were on the lecture circuit. For example, Frederick Douglass edited a newspaper and wrote much, but he was perhaps most widely known for his oratory, which not only spread his views but earned him sizeable sums.

These speaking tours must have been exhausting because the speakers were almost constantly on the move. Emma Goldman, for example, made 321 speeches in a year. In breaks from the Scopes trial in 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, Darrow road the rails to Chattanooga and elsewhere to speak, and Bryan also appeared at auditoriums whenever the trial was in recess. Wherever such speakers appeared, they gave audiences their money’s worth, speaking for more than an hour, eliciting laughter and outrage as they tried to get the audiences to adopt their views. Trump may not know who these people were (When president Trump said, “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.”), and he certainly does not espouse the racial views of Douglass or the pro-labor, anti-capitalist views of Goldman, the true populism or religious faith of Bryan, nor the populism or agnosticism of Darrow. Even so, at his rallies he in essence shares a legacy with these and similar people. I can’t imagine he knows who they are, but if he did, he would not see them as kindred spirits; He would only despise them.

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This, Too, Is America

         When some horrific act of hatred, intolerance, prejudice, exploitation, or violence occurs in this country, someone almost always says that the atrocity is “not American”; it’s not “who we are.” A friend of mine who has read deeply in American history rejoins that the Panglossians have a limited understanding of America and its history, for Americans have done atrocious things regularly throughout our history. My friend, however, is not truly surprised by the glib comments. He knows that standard American mythology seldom incorporates the bad from our history. For example, few of us were aware of the events depicted in David Grann’s riveting 2017 book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, which has now been made into a powerful film by Martin Scorsese. I won’t be a spoiler and go into many details of what happened for those who may see the movie or read the book (now back on the bestseller lists), but both the book and movie recount how Oklahoma Osage Indians in the 1920s became rich from oil discovered under their lands. However, a sickening conspiracy of murders (at least, twenty and perhaps hundreds) arose so that whites could control the wealth.

          Reviewers praised the book as a compelling narrative of forgotten American history, but that is misleading. If the history was forgotten, it was forgotten by few of us because few of us had ever learned of these acts in the first place. We don’t teach the bad things in our history much.

          At almost the same time as the Osage murders (which, of course, were meant to be hidden), a mass movement based on bigotry, fueled by greed and egotism, and inviting violence was also burgeoning in the country. Even though it was public, few know of it today.

The movement was the middle incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. Most of us are aware that the Klan arose after Reconstruction to suppress the constitutional rights and other freedoms of Blacks. And we know that KKK resurfaced in the Civil Rights Era after World War II. Fewer of us know, however, of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s.

The early twentieth century KKK was different from the post-Civil-War incarnation. It was not limited to the South, and it expanded its hate. The nineteenth century KKK acted primarily against Blacks, but the early twentieth-century Klan targeted Catholics, Jews, Asians on the Pacific Coast, Mexicans in the Southwest, and immigrants everywhere in addition to Blacks. With this expansiveness, the Klan, professing Americanism, pronounced hatred for one in three Americans. They loved America, as some today also proclaim, but only a segment of it. (Of course, even without a Klan behind them, Americans have often acted violently against minorities and immigrants. For example, in1891 eleven Italian immigrants were lynched in New Orleans.)

This 1920s Klan entered the political arena, and it had both state and nationwide power and influence.  It opposed the teaching of evolution because that science implies that all people have a common origin. This KKK movement supported eugenics and mandatory sterilizations that became law in many places. (The eugenics movement in the U.S. was widespread and influential, but it had some trouble reconciling religious faith and American heroes with eugenics. Daniel Okrent in The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generation of Jew, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America reports my favorite mental gymnastics from these supposedly principled people: A eugenicist concluded that Jesus was not Jewish, and that Columbus was Nordic.) The Klan sought to prevent immigration from “non-Nordic” countries, and it blessed the National Origins Act of 1924 which restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and elsewhere. The law, with its Klan support, passed overwhelmingly in the House and garnered only six dissenting votes in the Senate. The Klan’s national power was perhaps most visible on August 8, 1925, when the KKK held a parade in Washington with 50,000 marchers. An estimated 250,000 spectators watched.

This new Klan’s power was most evident not in the South but in the midwestern state of Indiana, as documented in Timothy Egan’s excellent book, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them. (The 1920s Klan also controlled Oregon, whose legislature passed laws to outlaw Catholic schools, a measure that was found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Eighty years earlier, when still a territory, Oregon forbade all Blacks within its lands.) Every level of the Indiana government was run by Klan members, and that history, although it may not be widely known, seems familiar.

The movement was encouraged and often led by evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant clergy. It should not surprise anyone that American religion and hate can go together.

The KKK members were wedded to guns and other weapons. An observer of Klan meetings reported “weapons were passed among Klansman as freely as illegal hooch. I have never met a Klan member who didn’t have a gun, a knife, or often a blackjack.”

The leader of the evangelically blessed, gun-loving, America-first Indiana KKK was D.C. Stephenson. Perhaps Stephenson truly believed in the causes he espoused, but he also saw a way to make money — and lots of it — from the Klan. He got a cut of each $10 fee that state Klan members paid, and he was the supplier of the sheets and conical (comical?) hats each Klan member bought. In a few years, Stephenson was rich, owning fabulous homes, cars, and boats.

What is most striking today is not just the grifting — that, of course, has modern parallels — but the methods he used to expand the Klan. Egan writes that D.C. Stephenson “had the touch and the charm, the dexterity with words and the drive. He understood people’s fear and their need to blame others for their failures. He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it. Small lies were for the timid. The key to telling a big lie was to do it with a conviction.” Stephenson could tell lies, lies, and more lies, and through the lies he attracted crowds, admirers, and followers thereby gaining power. In short order, the Klan under Stephenson controlled town after town and the Indiana state government.

Moreover, Stephenson expected that he, not the Klan, would control Indiana. Stephenson took credit for every KKK member who was elected and concluded that those officials owed him a personal loyalty that outweighed governmental duties, an oath to the Constitution, or even Klan “principles.” As a prosecutor later said, “Stephenson forced a super oath on public officials. This super oath was greater than the oath of constitutional authority.” Loyalty to an individual that supersedes fealty to sworn duties then as now is always a great threat to democracy. Egan states that Stephenson’s Indiana experience reveals that a truly representative government of the people and for the people cannot be taken for granted. Instead, it demonstrated that “democracy was a fragile thing, stable and steady until it was broken and trampled. A man who didn’t care about shattering every convention, and then found new ways to vandalize the contract that allowed free people to govern themselves, could do unthinkable damage.”

Stephenson’s downfall came from a criminal conviction, not one for corrupting government or unconstitutionally trying to retain power. Instead, he was convicted for murder and rape coming out of his sexual perversities, which were well known to many. Even so, in what also sounds familiar today, Stephenson’s followers “believed the trial was a hoax and witch hunt.” However, the heroes of the day, the twelve average men of the jury, knew otherwise, and Stephenson was sentenced to life in prison.

Stephenson may have been a charismatic person, but he could not have created a Klan that controlled a midwestern state unless he was tapping into a wellspring that already existed. Timothy Egan asks, “What if the leaders of the 1920s Klan didn’t drive public sentiment, but rode it? A vein of hatred was always there for the tapping. It’s still there, and explains much of the madness threatening American life a hundred years after Stephenson made a mockery of the moral principles of the Heartland.”

          There was a strain of hatred then as there is now, but there have also been other American traits fueling dangerous mass movements. One is a search for a scapegoat. Although conservative groups may pronounce a belief in personal responsibility, that is often a personal responsibility for people other than themselves. Instead, as Dara Horn writes in People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present, “People will do absolutely anything to blame their problems on others.” Somehow blaming Blacks and immigrants, Jews and Mexicans makes many people feel able to explain the shortcomings in their own lives.

          These conservative movements tap into hatred and scapegoats, but they also ride on a particular fear, a fear of change. John M. Barry also writing about the 1920s in Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America says that the KKK’s target was not so much Blacks—no politician at the time was arguing for equality—but change. Barry points out that American populism has always had an “us” and “them”—not only an enemy above but also below. That dynamic remains.

          Interwoven with the fear of change is the myth that some earlier time was idyllic, and we must return to that period by eliminating aspects of present America. These Americans often deride global influences, but it’s ironic that they fit into an international conservative trend. As Peter Hessler writes in The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution, such a movement “is like the modern Islamists, whose revolutions in Iran, Afghanistan, and Egypt always envisioned a return to some distant, purer past.” Make America Great Again seeks a similar mythical path.

          Almost anything bad that happens in this country out of hate, envy, insecurity, or greed has had too many precedents in our history. We may say that they are as American as apple pie. We could also say they are as American as bigoted violence.

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Snippets

I once thought I understood proper tipping, but now I am confused. More and more the machines where I pay ask if I want to leave a tip at places where I seldom tipped before, such as a bagel shop or a coffee bean retailer. But I was very surprised when I went through a toll booth and I was asked if I wanted to tip.

The handwritten sign in the bar’s window said:

          Here’s to Strong Women

                    May we know them

                    May we be them

                    May we raise them

When inside, I said to a favorite server that the sign was offensive. She asked if that was because there was no reference to men, and I replied, “No. Because there should be another line: ‘May we love them.’ ” She gave me a thumbs up and a fist bump. When a bit later I saw the at-least-once-burned owner and said the same thing, she snapped back, “No one believes in love anymore.”

Until recently I was not aware that Stellantis was a major American car maker. Of course, until recently I did not even know that Stellantis existed.

I was only trying to spread hope, but the mother seemed upset when I peered into the stroller and said, “Some two-year-olds get better looking as they grow older.”

All those TV sports shows ought to interview college athletes about their favorite professors and then produce clips of those teachers both in the classroom and interacting with the athletes outside of classes.

A wise person said: “The fact that you cannot serve God and mammon does not seem to have hurt business any.”

The sidewalk sign for a neighborhood establishment said among other things that I could buy “esoteric products” on the second floor. Can you tell me what I could expect to find?

If a son is a “Junior,” is it psychologically harmful to him if his father is not “Senior?” Does this help explain Donald Trump, Jr.?

Trump Sr. boasts that gasoline prices were much lower when he was president than now. He is correct, but even when he is correct, he is wrong. He says that the prices back in his presidential days were much lower than now. They were, but he quotes prices that were much lower than they actually were when he was President and then quotes much higher prices than is true for today. Is there a name for this syndrome where a person tells falsehoods even when the truth favors him?

When Trump took office, the cost of gasoline (“Obama’s gas prices”) were lower than the averages during the next four years. I have never heard Trump mention this.

“The trouble with facts is that there are so many of them” Samuel McChord Crothers.

“The best liar is he who makes the smallest of lying go the longest way.” Samuel Butler.

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First Sentences

“It’s a favorite pastime of Americans, and American conservatives especially, to keep watch for various evildoers scheming to seize the public sphere and rob of us our historic liberties.” Sohrab Ahmari, Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do About It.

“Richard Cadogan raised his revolver, took careful aim and pulled the trigger.” Edmund Crispin, The Moving Toyshop.

“Can you remember meeting William Shakespeare for the first time?” Farah Karim-Cooper, The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking about Race.

“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog name Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of fine spring afternoon.” James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss.

“Olmsted’s letter from Texas about the romance of nomadism was tailored to its recipient: Anne Charlotte Lynch, a New York poet, globe-trotting traveler, and eminent convener of literary salons.” Tony Horwitz, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide.

“The bodies were discovered at eight forty-five on the morning of Wednesday 18 September by Miss Emily Wharton, a sixty-five-year-old spinster of the parish of St. Matthew’s in Paddington, London, and Darren Wilkes, aged ten, of no particular parish as far as he knew or cared.” P.D. James, A Taste for Death.

“Rain drums Chicago’s gridded streets on the early morning of June 9, 1880.” C.W. Goodyear, President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier.

“The Dean, as he lay awake in bed that memorable Sunday night, pondered the astonishing vagaries of the weather.” Michael Gilbert, Close Quarters.

“On May 2, 1938, three special trains, carrying hundreds of German diplomats, government officials, Nazi Party leaders, security agents, and journalists, left Berlin accompanying the Führer on his first—and what would turn out to be his last—visit to Rome.” David I. Kertzer, The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler.

“In the time before steamships, or then more frequently than now, a stroller along the docks of any considerable seaport would occasionally have his attention arrested by a group of bronzed mariners, man-of-war’s men or merchant sailors in holiday attire, ashore on liberty.” Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor.

“It is hard to imagine working with books—writing an essay, a lecture, a report, a sermon—without the ability to find what you’re looking for quickly and easily: without, that is, the convenience of a good index.” Dennis Duncan, Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age.

“The most powerful man in Indiana stood next to the new governor at the Inaugural Ball, there to be thanked, applauded, and blessed for using the nation’s oldest domestic terror group to gain control of a uniquely American state.” Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan? Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them.

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A Memorial for Ruby (Guest Post by Nephew DM)

Thursday, October, 13, 2005 was Yom Kippur. I was off from school as is the case with all the Jewish holidays if they fall during the week. I remember the day vividly; I’ve mentioned several times before that I am blessed (however; sometimes I think it might be more of a curse) with a photographic memory. It was cloudy, gray, rather humid for October, definitely not jacket weather. I went for a run after breakfast, cleaned a bit, showered, then decided I would head out to Willow Grove Mall to see if anything struck my fancy for Greg’s birthday (he would be turning 28 on October 28).

We had discussed getting a dog for quite a while. We wanted a dog but I think both of us were afraid to take the plunge. Dogs are a big responsibility we quipped, if we had one, we couldn’t just take off to go somewhere for a weekend… this was something we spontaneously did now and then. If we had a dog those spur of the moment things were bound to end; for these reasons neither of us made a move.

As I was driving down Easton Road in Glenside that morning towards the mall, I remembered I would be passing a branch of the Montgomery County SPCA… what harm would a brief stop cause. I walked in and asked where I could see the dogs they had that were waiting to be adopted. A woman took me to the back where they were in cages. They were all beautiful in their own way…  I wanted to adopt all of them; however, there was this little Lhasa Apso named Simba that I was immediately drawn to. I thought Greg would adore him. Even though I wanted it to be a surprise I realized this would need a consultation from him.

I asked if they could hold Simba. The woman told me there was no holding; you had to adopt on the spot. If you weren’t ready, you’d run the risk of the dog being adopted when you came back. I went out to the car and called Greg on my flip phone (ah… technology). Thankfully he was at his desk and answered his phone. He agreed he’d leave the office a little early and we’d drive up together to see Simba, and perhaps adopt him.

I thanked the woman at the SPCA and picked up a couple of other small gifts for Greg at the mall confident that Simba would still be there when we returned in the early evening. We arrived at the SPCA around 6:30pm and I asked a different woman if we could see Simba. I told her we were interested in perhaps adopting him. She replied, “Simba was adopted this afternoon.”  I was crestfallen.

Greg asked to see the other dogs that were available. I wanted to leave. Greg insisted we look. I relented and went with him into the back. We looked around and he pointed at this little red furball who was staring at the floor. He said, “What do you think of that one?” All of the paws had some white in them, but the front, left paw was striking as it looked like a white glove. The woman who brought us back there said, “That’s Ruby, she was just dropped off this afternoon. The owner said she’s untrainable. She’s about one year old.” We asked to see her.

She was quiet, stared at the floor, shook a little bit. When another dog was brought out to be examined by some other potential pet parents, she let out a little woof.

As we were petting her, the woman said that she still needed to be spayed so if we wanted her, we couldn’t have her until Monday. We looked at each other and said, “We’ll take her… the extra couple of days gives us time to get the house ready for her.”

As we were filling out the paperwork the woman then said, “Oh wait, you can take her now, she’s already spayed. I made a mistake.” We both said, almost in unison, “Since this is your mistake can you at least give us until tomorrow? We have nothing at home for her and need to at least pick up some basic dog things.” Thankfully the woman gave in and said she could make an exception this time; we had until 4pm the next day (Friday) to pick Ruby up.

I picked her up on my home from work and the rest is history. The first couple of days I think she was unsure of whether we were going to keep her; she didn’t let me out of her sight. The little girl watched me shower, watched me grade papers, watched me do everything (Greg had to go away that weekend to visit his parents, so I was solo with the new fur baby). We tried to crate train her, but she cried a lot. On Sunday night (the day Greg came home), I was lying in bed… she hopped in, and Greg looked at her, then at me, and I remember saying, “Fuck it, let her sleep with us.”

So much for crate training.

She slept with us for the next fifteen years until it got too hard for her to jump onto, and then off of the bed. I still miss her weight bumping up against me…. God how I miss it. She would often wait for me to fall asleep and then shift to the other side of the bed. I felt like she knew I was anxious certain nights and wanted to help me sleep.

Ruby completed our little family… she became our child at a time when it was still very difficult for gay men to become parents. Ruby taught us patience, and how to appreciate the simple things again. We didn’t mind missing our spontaneous jaunts here and there on weekends. Our walks down on Forbidden Drive and the Wissahickon more than filled that void. She brought unspeakable joy to the both of us with her kind, playful, and beautiful spirit (furthermore, she was an island of sanity during the pandemic lockdown, Greg’s mother’s illness, my recovery from open heart surgery… I could go on…).

After living with Cushing’s Disease, being attacked by two big dogs, and countless other dust-ups here and there over the years (did I tell you she was a tough cookie as well?) she finally told us she was tired this past week. It may sound cliché, but a true lady always knows when it is time to say goodbye. Ruby is no exception to this, even though she was tough, she was still a true lady. Greg and I decided we needed to respect and honor this even though our hearts are beyond broken.

Thank you, our dear sweet little girl, for the 18 years you gave us… I so wish we could have stolen that first year of your life as well (yes, I am greedy). I can only hope we will see each other again in the future. Words cannot express how much we are going to miss you!

Please know Greg and I love you to the moon and back… always have, always will!

Rest easy our little darling Rubygirl.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

Only a couple weeks ago I was singing: “I am getting sutured in the morning./ Bing-bong machines are gonna chime./I still could party/but I must be hearty./So, get me to the OR on time.”

I had my left knee replaced. Because I had the right knee replaced a decade ago, I knew it was not a walk in the park. (Did you get the humor?) Because of the weakness and the opioids, I have missed some of my self-imposed posting deadlines.

I guess a friend was trying to make me feel better by sending me an internet page indicating that things could be worse. It said that a knee replacement was only the third most painful orthopedic procedure. I don’t know how such things are measured, but two spinal procedures topped the list. Fourth and fifth were ACL repairs and a shoulder replacement. This only reminded me that I have had two ACL operations and one shoulder replaced. I don’t really desire pain, but I am apparently composed of faulty and injured joints.

Two months ago, a friend had a hip replaced, and during his recovery he said that he was told a hip replacement was a relatively easy procedure compared to a knee replacement. After I mentioned the pain rankings, he asked where hips were on the list. I did not know. I only saw the top five, but I told him it was far below the others under the heading “Almost a Vacation.” The friend was not overly amused.

A medical technician told me that she was going to have a manicure later in the afternoon. It soon came out that the next day she was flying to Miami to be with her boyfriend.  She told me that he was from New York but now worked in Florida. I asked what he did, and she replied, “He’s a personal bodyguard. . . . He works for a private family.” I decided to stop my inquiries.

During my recovery, I have listened to a lot of radio. Unfortunately, my local NPR station was having its dreaded fundraising week. I am always fascinated by the matching grants. You know, the ones that say, “If we raise $10,000 by tonight, a donor will match it.” If that amount is not timely raised, does the supposed donor really withhold the money?

It hardly lightened my mood, however, to listen to any news. There was 24/7 coverage of the Mideast conflict. That was not surprising, but I was bewildered not to hear more about or from Jared Kushner. I thought that he and his pappy-in-law had solved the Mideast. On the other hand, the Mideast has apparently made Kushner successful since the Saudis have given him $2 billion to play around with.

And then, of course, there are the shootings that seem to happen even more than Mideast violence. The new House Speaker met the news of the Lewiston massacre with the old recipe—prayers for the evil to end. I assume he believes that God is eternal, and Johnson must know that people have been uttering prayers for as long as prayers have existed. He did not address why prayers should now stop the violence when they have not before.

Of course, in the time of Jesus, apparently evil existed, but there were no mass shootings. Perhaps we should all reflect on that.

At least one of the recent shooters seems to have been mentally ill. Is someone with a mental illness “evil”?

Can you turn the other cheek as Jesus commanded and also carry a gun?

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First Sentences

“They watched as a dead man was brought to the hospital: a fractured skull, blood everywhere, ligaments ripped loose from their mooring—medics had hauled him there ‘in three buckets,’ a bystander remarked.” Reid Mitenbuler, Wanderlust: An Eccentric Explorer, an Epic Journey, a Lost Age.

“There was an old Jew who lived at the site of the old synagogue up on Chicken Hill in the town of Pottstown, Pa., and when Pennsylvania State Troopers found the skeleton at the bottom of an old well off Hayes Street, the old Jew’s house was the first place they went.” James McBride, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store.

“Hold out your hands and let me lay upon them a sheaf of freshly picked sweetgrass, loose and flowing, like newly washed hair.” Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.

“Everyone in Lamperdown knew that Mr. Behrens, who lived with his aunt at the Old Rectory and kept bees, and Mr. Calder, who lived in a cottage on the hilltop outside the village and was the owner of a deerhound called Rasselas, were the closest of close friends.” Michael Gilbert, Game Without Rules.

“In August 1945, after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan surrendered, the soldiers, sailors, and airmen scheduled to participate in the invasion of Japan reacted as you might expect.” Evan Thomas, Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II.

“When people ask me what I do—taxi drivers, dental hygienists—I tell them I work in an office.” Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine.

“Approaching the museum, ready to hunt, Stéphane Breitwieser clasps hands with his girlfriend, Anne-Catherine Kleinklau, and together they stroll to the front desk and say hello, a cute couple.” Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession.

“Killing someone is easy.” Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club.

“For more than a decade, defenders of democracy have been issuing a stark warning: The world is in the midst of a ‘democratic recession,’ with sign of a turnaround on the horizon.” Sohrab Ahmari, Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do About It.

“Jacob Finch Bonner, the once promising author of the ‘New & Noteworthy’ (The New York Times Book Review) novel The Invention of Wonder, let himself into the office he’d been assigned on the second floor of Richard Peng Hall, set his beat-up leather satchel on the barren desk, and looked around in something akin to despair.” Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot.

“In January 1829, Abram Garfield emerged from a shack in Orange, Ohio, swiveled west, and started toward what passed for civilization on this frontier.” C.W. Goodyear, President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier.

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Remember the Panama Canal Treaties

Knowledgeable people find the roots of the Republican Party’s dysfunction in the hyperpartisanship practiced by Newt Gingrich when he became Speaker of the House in 1995. Others find tentacles spreading from the Tea Party movement which emerged in 2009 and brought conspiracy theories into mainstream politics. But seeds were planted twenty years earlier with the now largely forgotten battle over the Panama Canal treaties, which I learned about when I read Drawing the Line at the Big Ditch: The Panama Canal Treaties and the Rise of the Right (2008) by Adam Clymer.

Clymer explains how the fight over the Panama Canal Treaties helped fuel the rise of the modern Right. Both treaties were signed in 1977. One treaty gave the United States the right to use force to assure that the canal would remain open to ships of all nations. The second treaty gave Panama control over the canal starting in 2000.

In order to take effect, the treaties not only had to be signed by the leaders of Panama and the United States, they also had to be ratified by appropriate bodies within those countries. After Panama did so in a plebiscite, a political battle ensued in the United States Senate over their ratifications. According to Clymer, this led to the emergence of Richard Viguerie, a founder of modern conservatism, the use of direct-mail marketing, and the rise of single-issue PACs designed to raise money and defeat moderate Republicans.

Although it was President Jimmy Carter who signed the pacts, the negotiations had started under President Nixon. The treaties were thought desirable because they gave America the right to assure the canal’s neutrality, and they removed a flashpoint for much of Latin America, and Panama in particular, by giving Panama control over the canal. Those supporting the treaties maintained that they would increase the security of the canal by helping to remove the threats of guerrilla attacks, which were almost impossible for America and Panama to defend against. 

The treaties were backed by some prominent conservatives, including Henry Kissinger and William Buckley, but they were also attacked by other conservatives in near-hysterical terms. Opponents maintained that this was a surrender of American sovereignty, and furthermore, the military leader of Panama was pro-Communist. Marxists would control the canal and Panama, and the harm to the U.S. as a result would be tremendous.

What is surprising to a modern surveyor of the political scene is that some Senators supported the treaty simply because they thought it was the right thing to do even though they knew that their ratification votes would harm them politically. The single-issue PACs targeted some of these Senators and through direct-mail marketing, inflamed a cadre of voters. Republicans who supported the treaties were defeated in primaries when they stood for reelection. Their overall record did not matter. Their vote on this one issue doomed their political careers. On the other hand, Ronald Reagan opposed the Treaty, and some, including Bill Buckley, maintained that the treaty controversy helped elect Reagan president.

 This is an issue that is now largely forgotten even though its aftermath still affects the United States. A lesson from the controversy has been absorbed, even if that lesson’s source is not remembered. Republican politicians are in fear that if they don’t toe some single-issue lines, a portion of conservatives will target them and defeat them in the primaries. The result is that the politicians cannot develop nuanced positions; compromises are verboten. Instead, the “wrong” stance on individual issues can result in a primary defeat even if the politician accepts the conservative line on other matters. If I don’t completely accept the NRA’s positions, I may be defeated in the primary. If I adopt a moderate stance on abortion, I may be defeated in the primaries. If I have concerns about tax cuts, I may be defeated in the primaries. And so on. The result is a lockstep, hard-right conservatism. Back in 1978, some conservative Senators studied a complex situation and decided that a ratification vote for the Panama Canal treaties was in the best interests of the country. What is remembered is not that their position was right, but that some lost their political careers as a result.

History, of course, has shown them to be right. The Canal functions just fine. Panama is not a hotbed of anti-American Communism. Those who were wrong, however, did not pay a price for their belief. They continued in office. And most of us have forgotten the debate.

In what now seems impossible, Democrats and Republicans joined together to ratify the treaties. Fifty-two Democrats and sixteen Republicans voted for ratification, while ten Democrats and twenty-two Republicans voted against. We have seen little of such bipartisanship since the Panama Canal treaties. On the other hand, since that 1977 controversy we have seen many conservatives benefit even when proved wrong.

The Republican party has been on a forty-year path to its present dysfunction.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

Hamas attacks Israel. Is this, as an American Jewish leader said, not only an attack on Israel but on Jews? If so, is the war on Hamas also a war on Islam and Muslims? A related question: Can one criticize or even question Israel without being labeled, or being, antisemitic?

A conservative candidate for president said that the incumbent president should urge, lean on, coerce Egypt into taking in those who are fleeing from Gaza. He did not, however, say that the United States should open its welcoming arms and take in more refugees.

About two decades ago I went to Israel on an unusual junket—all expenses paid to study terrorism from an Israeli perspective. An interlude in the trip was a guided walk around Jerusalem. We started at a place that overlooked Jerusalem. Our exceptional guide pointed out things in the old city; where Bethlehem was and is in the hills near Jerusalem; the Palestinian-controlled territory; the wall marking the boundary (although Israelis called it a fence, not a wall); and a mural-painted wall (this was called a wall) behind us, which prevented Palestinians down below from shooting into Israeli apartments up above.

Our location was a parking lot, and a nearby food van was, like many other Israeli places, playing old American rock and roll. The third song I noticed was Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive. I almost laughed at the remarkable fortuity. I know that the song is about a woman’s strength in rejecting a lover who walked out, but what better chorus could there be as I looked out over Israel and Jerusalem than I WILL SURVIVE.

During this trip, because of the sensitive places we visited—military and intelligence facilities—we were accompanied by heavily-armed young men, and in Jerusalem I fell into step with one such escort. A few moments later, some men rounded a corner shouting and elbowing others aside. I asked the escort, born and raised in Israel, what that was about, and he replied, “Just some Arabs showing off.” He and I exited the old city together, and I was visually assaulted by a row of tacky tourist shops. American rock and roll came from them, too, and the first song I heard outside the old city was R.E.M.’s Losing My Religion. I smiled and said to the escort, “That doesn’t seem right for Jerusalem.” He stopped, paused a beat, and thoughtfully said, “I think that is the only way.”

Is he right? Can there only be peace if we lose our religion?

“There are only two gods worth worshipping. Chance and electricity.” Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

“We’ve all been blessed with God-given talents. Mine just happens to be beating up people.” Sugar Ray Leonard. (Why is it always Sugar Ray? Why not Sugar Jim or Sugar Marie?)

Each year, the U.S. gives nearly $4 billion to Israel in military aid, which since the founding of Israel has totaled hundreds of billions of dollars. Only occasionally has this been controversial. On the other hand, some in Congress don’t want any more aid for Ukraine. They contend that sending this money abroad is a drain on our economy. But when I read about Ukraine aid, the story often says that Ukraine is using major portions of the money to buy American-made arms and other military supplies. How much of the Ukraine aid is actually spent in the United States?

“Admiration for ourselves and our institutions is too often measured by our contempt and dislike for foreigners.” William Ralph Inge.

Posted on by rjonakait

The Shot Heard ‘Round the World (concluded)

          The writings by Doris Kearns Goodwin and Red Smith about Bobby Thomson’s dramatic home run turned my thoughts to Don DeLillo’s remarkable novel, Underworld, which I had read twenty years earlier. It is not an easy book, or at least it was not for me. I started the book and gave up. A few years later, I picked it up again, this time finishing it, realizing that I had just read something extraordinary.

Don DeLillo’s Underworld starts with a set piece about that mythic baseball playoff game won by Bobby Thomson’s home run in the bottom of the ninth, and echoes of it recur throughout the novel. A few years ago, I thought of DeLillo’s portrayal of that day again in an unlikely place—waiting in line at Kennedy airport for a flight to Rome. I found myself in conversation with the man behind me who was a professor at a university in Naples. He told me that his specialty was Italian-American literature. I had heard of many academic concentrations, but never of this one. I asked what authors interested him and he mentioned Richard Russo. I was somewhat taken aback. When I have read Russo, I only thought that I was reading an American novel, not an Italian-American one. His list did not include Mario Puzo, but he praised John Fante, an author I had never heard of. (Because of this conversation, I have since read Fante’s Bandini Quartet­, which I had trouble finding. My copy was shipped from England. These novels are quite good, and I should thank him for putting me on to them.) He went on to talk about DeLillo, and I asked him about his reaction to Underworld. He was effusive. I asked if he had trouble understanding that baseball game at the beginning of the book, and he gave a charming smile and chortled that he did not have a clue about what was going on. I did not try to explain. There is something so peculiarly American about that baseball game that I did not think a few minute’s conversation on the topic could accomplish much with a foreigner, and, furthermore, while I did feel that the game had some sort of significance besides its mere outcome, I was not sure why.

          Finally, after reading about the game by Doris Kearns Goodwin and Red Smith, I read for the third time DeLillo’s take on it, and I began to understand at least some of the reasons why that playoff lives in American consciousness. Perhaps every moment in American history is some sort of watershed, but this game encapsulated aspects of American history and past culture and foretold changes that were to come.

          In 1951, baseball provided a peaceful connection to the past. “You do what they did before you,” DeLillo says. The Bobby Thomson game was played at a time when America was thinking it could put the sacrifice and horrors of World War II behind it and carry forward a peaceful world. Baseball reminded us of that past. DeLillo has Gil Hodges, a Brooklyn player in that game, say the Polo Ground is “a name he loves, a precious echo of things and times before the century went to war.”

          Baseball also then resonated with a wide swath of Americans, or at least American males. Red Smith, writing a few years after the game, noted that almost every American male had played some version of baseball, whether it was baseball itself, or softball, stickball, five hundred, punch ball, kickball, or myriad other games. In 1951, it was America’s sport and somehow represented a perpetually youthful America. DeLillo writes about Thomson that “he is forever Bobby now, a romping boy lost to time. . . .”

Baseball is just a game, but it could feel more momentous. DeLillo writes, “The game doesn’t change the way you sleep or wash your face or chew your food. It changes nothing but your life.” And a particular game could feel as if it fit into the tide of American history. Russ Hodges’s producer says about Thomson’s home run, “Mark the spot. Like where Lee surrendered to Grant or something.”

          We readers of Underworld know, however, what its characters did not: that the dominance of baseball was going to fade. A column by Red Smith makes that point. He had driven to Florida for baseball’s spring training, where many major league baseball teams prepared for the regular season. He said that once on these drives he had seen baseball and all those other games being played by men and boys in the various towns along his route, but now he no longer did. DeLillo foreshadows this change by having the broadcasters ask how one is to explain the 20,000 empty seats in the stadium. The sport’s hold on America was still strong, but it was waning.

The 1950s was the beginning of many changes to America, and the famous playoff stood on that cusp. Looking back at that game, there seems to be a time up until Thomson’s home run and a different time afterwards, and DeLillo creates scenes in the grandstands that indicate changes soon to come. No one knows, as far as I know, what happened to the baseball Thomson hit once it landed in the left field seats, but in DeLillo’s telling one Cotter Martin wrests it away from others scrambling for the ball and leaves the park with it. Cotter, an African American youth, has sneaked into the ballpark and is seemingly befriended by a white man seating nearby. Of course, almost all Americans in 1951 knew that a major change in our race relations had occurred only a few years before when the major leagues’ color barrier was broken when the Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson, who played in the famous game. A few know that the next scheduled batter after Thomson was Willie Mays, who would not have been playing if that color bar had not been bashed. In 1951, it may have seemed that we were finally making great peaceful strides towards resolving our racial problems. Bill Waterson, the white man talking with the black kid in the novel, seems to capture that, but we readers know that racial peace and resolution faced many violent episodes after 1951 and still has not been reached.

Emmitt Till and the Birmingham church bombings, snapping dogs and firehoses, bus boycotts and many killings were soon to come. And DeLillo has Waterson turn creepy towards Cotter. The white man wants the baseball that the boy has fought for. Bill yells at Cotter that he is going to get the ball and threatens violence. He chases Cotter out of the stadium and through the surrounding streets, and Cotter is only safe with his new possession when he makes it into the black Harlem that was not far from the Polo Grounds.

The game also stood on the cusp of a great change in American mass culture: the rise of network TV. The coast-to-coast broadcast of the game was itself a harbinger of that, but DeLillo signals it in another way. He has Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, Toots Shor, and J. Edgar Hoover together in attendance. (I do not know if Sinatra, Gleason, and Shor were at the game, but I know Hoover was there.) They joke and drink, but Gleason keeps saying that he should be at rehearsal for “The Honeymooners,” an icon of 1950s television that was to air for the first time in two days.

But something else happened on the very day of Thomson’s home run that would greatly change America. Until 1951, Americans had been little bothered by the thought that they might be killed at home by a foreign government, but on October 3, 1951, the same day as the famous playoff game, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb. We learn that fact when a message is delivered to Hoover informing him of that blast. After that October day, Americans could never again safely tuck themselves into bed the way they had before. The always present strain of paranoia in American now had a much firmer basis, and that paranoia was going to dominate the U.S. in coming years.

An apocalypse was now palpably possible, and DeLillo, a master of portraying American paranoia, has sheets of Life magazine float down from the upper deck onto Hoover. Those pages contain a reproduction of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s panoramic painting of apocalyptic slaughter. Hoover becomes mesmerized by the images of incredible agony, and the painting and its horrific portrayals recur again and again in the novel.

We want that baseball game to be a kind of unifying experience. DeLillo has Russ Hodges, the Giants announcer, think “this is another kind of history. He thinks [the fans] will carry something out of here that joins them all in a rare way, that binds them to a memory with a protective power. . . . Isn’t it possible that this midcentury moment enters the skin more lastingly than the vast shaping of strategies of eminent leaders, generals steely in their sunglasses—the mapped visions that pierce our dreams?” The game may have been memorable, but almost instantly it was only a memory. This prologue concludes with a drunk in a raincoat running the bases who leaves his feet to slide into second base: “All the fragments of the afternoon collect around his airborne form. Shouts, bat-cracks, full bladders and stray yawns, the sand-grain manyness of things to come. . . . It is all falling indelibly into the past.”

DeLillo had first published his depiction of the baseball game as a magazine piece before the book was written. He titled the piece “Pafko at the Wall.” (Andy Pafko was the Dodgers left fielder who watched the ball sail over his head into the stands.) When DeLillo placed this piece as the beginning portion of Underworld, he re-titled it as “The Triumph of Death.”