Inactive Rebunk
Entries by Tom Bruscino
Tuesday, August 2, 2005
The Sunset
For a variety of reasons, none of which we will get into at this time or place, Rebunk is closing its doors. We have enjoyed working with each other and with HNN. We have especially liked engaging all of our readers, and can only hope that you feel the same.
Lest there be any confusion, all of us remain good friends, and would like it very much if you would visit us at our other sites online:
Derek Catsam at DCAT.
Stephen Tootle and Tom Bruscino at Big Tent.
Richard Holmes at Slice of Life.
(We'll be sure to let you know if and when Marc Bacharach gets his own blog.)
All our best,
Rebunk
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Memorials
We do not make great or grand memorials anymore. The Vietnam Memorial is right, but it is not great or grand. There is something sadly off about the Korean War Memorial, as if someone held up a fuzzy mirror to the Vietnam wall across the way. The Franklin Roosevelt Memorial is a train wreck of epic proportions—an architecturally inconsistent celebration of our crippled, environmentalist, pacifist president (who, the designers might have taken note, also happened to have given hope to a nation in despair and done the major work in winning the Second World War). If a country could not properly honor one of its greatest presidents, there was little hope for the World War II Memorial.
The World War II Memorial sits in a place of prominence in the National Mall, but it is not all that prominent. By the standards of most memorials in the capital, it lies low to the ground, not obscuring the sight-lines of the Mall. That’s not to say it isn’t big. It spreads out over a large area. Stone columns inscribed with the names of states and territories line the perimeter. Two larger columns flank the memorial. One side is dedicated to the Pacific theaters; the other to the Atlantic. A low-lying wall emblazoned with four thousand gold stars is meant to symbolize the ultimate sacrifice made by over 400,000 Americans.
Perhaps most striking about the memorial is all the water. In front of the wall of stars sits a still pool. On either side, small waterfalls flow from another pool. In front of both major columns sit identical small pools, with water running here and there. And a massive fountain and pool dominates the middle of the monument. Jets of water continuously spray upward and diagonally. Not exactly like a fountain in Las Vegas, but if you’re thinking Oceans 11 (the new one) you’re not too far off. On a hot day like this past Saturday—a hot summer day in Washington! Gasp!—people gather around the central pool and dip their feet in the water.
It’s all very noisy. All the flowing water is like one of those relaxation CDs with the volume turned way up. Then there’s the people. In order to be heard over the water, they have to talk louder. In order to be heard over one another, they have to talk louder still. And they are taking pictures. With so spread out a memorial, there are lots of pictures to take.
The result is that the World War II Memorial is more like a carnival than a memorial. It’s a regular clamor, a cacophony, a hullabaloo. There is none of the melancholy sense of loss that accompanies the Vietnam Memorial; none of the overwhelming grandeur of the Jefferson Memorial; none of the stark power of the Washington Monument; none of the throat-catching solemnity of the Lincoln Memorial.
People gab away. They get together for group pictures. They splash their feet in the water and chase children who want to go in deeper. They smile and talk and soak up the sun. Tourists and locals, citizens and visitors from abroad, organized groups and unorganized humanity, all stomping through a monument to those who fought and died in the world’s greatest war.
There is nothing grand or great about it. It’s perfect.
Saturday, July 16, 2005
Rebunk at Work
Our own Stephen Tootle has a thoughtful assessment of two new short biographies of Ulysses S. Grant in The Claremont Review of Books.
Congratulations Stephen, and well done.
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
The Word is Quotation
A new debate, similar to the last one:
AFI's 100 YEARS...100 MOVIE QUOTES.
Number one is "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," from Gone With the Wind. I think "I'll make him an offer he can't refuse" is better.
Notable exclusions (to be expanded in comments):
Happy Gilmore: "The price is wrong, Bitch."
Southpark: "Blame Canada," or any number of things too profane to print here.
Big Lebowski: Anything John Goodman utters, for example, "Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it was an ethos."
Braveheart: "Every man dies, not every man truly lives," or "Freedom!"
Amistad: "Give us us free," or the historian's favorite, "We are who we were."
Saving Private Ryan: "Earn this."
The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring: "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Keep On
What an interesting time in my life. My seventeen month old son shocks me everyday with what he learns, what he knows, and what he refuses to tell. My wife and I are expecting a little brother or sister for him at Thanksgiving, and honestly we just don’t know what that means. School is out—-No more pencils/No more books/No more teacher’s dirty looks—-after a very long time. We are getting ready to move—-destination unknown (kinda).
Everyone is trying to cram as much into these last few weeks as possible. We fire up the grill every Saturday night and open the doors. More and more people come. I think we all sense that any one of those ad hoc grill sessions might be the last. The trips to the bars, and the inevitable after hours, seem to have that same sense of urgency. Too much gets imbibed; we’re making up for time that hasn’t come yet.
This past weekend, my good friend from Kansas pulled out his homemade smoker—he and his dad made it in their blacksmith shop; it looks like an old train engine—and had what he called “The Last Cattle Drive.” His family came in from Kansas, his roommate’s family made their way from Indiana and Texas, some Iowans showed up (we ran them off with a broom), and most of the history department descended on his place. The weather was bad enough on Saturday that he moved the affair to Sunday—no small feat considering the smoking begins a good fifteen hours before the eating. The chicken, ribs, sausage, and pulled pork were all first rate, but he really outdid himself on the brisket. Best he’s ever done, in my opinion.
We’ve begun the preparations for the graduation party. My folks are flying in from Colorado, as are the in-laws. Friends and family are coming from all points on the compass, and staying in hotels as far away as an hour drive. This time, I don’t think Mom is going to bring a twenty-five pound frozen lasagna on the plane, but we’ll more than manage. The food will be only the beginning. The party promises to go at least two days. Things will be said and done that must never be repeated. What happens behind the garage stays behind the garage.
We won’t want it to end, because we will all know what that means. But we’ll know that it must. I’ll blame the emotional Italian in me. Derek will claim that it’s getting dusty. Everything will change. Everything always changes.
Then we’ll start packing in earnest. I’m dreading the move. Two thousand some odd books down two and a half flights of stairs—-not to mention too much damn furniture. All the while there is that sick excited feeling at the bottom of the gut. Will we like our new home? Will we have friends? Is it the right job? When are we going to have to do this again?
It has all been so prosaic. It has all been so great. It could have been otherwise.
Every day is Memorial Day.
Friday, May 20, 2005
He Did What ?!?
Like many people, I enjoy Larry David's HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm. For those who do not know, David is one of the creative geniuses behind Seinfeld, and now he has his own show that is loosely based on his own life. He plays himself, actors play his wife and closest friends, and a bevy of guest stars play themselves (usually as jackasses, to one degree or another). It really is brilliant, in part because it is hard to tell where reality stops and fiction begins.
Which brings me to the latest episode. We at Rebunk like to stay on the cutting edge, so I should point out that this episode first aired a scant fourteen months ago. Here's the basic idea: Mel Brooks has gotten so tired of all the hype about his play "The Producers" that he gets Larry to star in it (with David Schwimmer costarring). The plan is that Larry will be such a colossal failure that the show will fold and Brooks can get his life back. At the same time, Larry's wife gave him a special gift for their ten-year anniversary. Namely, he has a window of time during which he can have a guilt-free affair with any woman who would agree to participate. His efforts to take advantage of this deal while preparing for the premiere of his show take up the majority of the episode. In Larry David fashion, he fails. Spectacularly.
The best opportunity, and the one I want to talk about, is the last one, with one of his costars in the musical. To make a long story short, he and said costar begin to GET. IT. ON. (if you don’t know, that’s a Billy Madison reference. I told you) in her dressing room. Then Larry notices that she has a picture of George W. Bush on the table. He asks her if that is George W. Bush, and she says “Yeah, so what?” He asks her if she is a Republican, and she says “Yeah, so what?” He says, “I just can’t do this,” and leaves.
Funny. Very funny.
But I have to be honest, it also bothered me, but not for the political message. I’m not that far removed (so I tell myself) from doing keg stands at high-hormone meat-market college parties. I don’t exactly come from a wine and cheese background. Larry’s friend and agent on the show played by Jeff Garlin hints at my emotions when he yells at Larry, “I would have [ahem, made love to] her if she was wearing a George W. Bush mask!” Honestly, I think Jeff’s reaction pretty much sums up the reaction of most guys.
Where I come from, any guy who passed at such an opportunity would endure such merciless verbal abuse that he would probably need some serious counseling (which would involve going to high-hormone, meat-market bars). Who would subject himself to such ridicule? I mean, it is his own show, his own name. I understand that much of Larry David’s humor comes at his own expense, but this one was at a whole different level. Anyway, it bothered me. I had to wonder what kind of political sentiments would stop a guy from being a guy, and doing so for the world to see. The question kept me up nights, or at least I’m saying so now.
Then I remembered it was a television show, and I settled into a nice, dreamless sleep. My limited understanding of mankind—I use that term deliberately—was restored. But not because the show was fiction—in fact, quite the opposite. It was real. The real Larry David was announcing to the world that given the opportunity, with nothing else standing in the way, he would not sleep with a Republican just because she was a Republican.
You see, the real Larry David is married to Laurie David, Environmental Activist. Read around her site, I think it is fair to say that Ms. David is not a Republican. It might even be fair to say that Ms. David hates Republicans. Larry David’s public proclamation that he would not sleep with a Republican was a love letter to his wife. He hadn’t stopped being a guy at all. He had written that entirely implausible scene about not jumping in the sack in order to jump in the sack.
That, my friends, is brilliant.
The lesson: politics, schmolitics. In the end, like my Mama says, all men are pigs. That’s something on which we can all agree.
Thursday, April 21, 2005
Update in Three Parts - Part 3
3) Most important for world history, and somehow totally missed by the international media, our friend and colleague Jonathan Dresner proves once and for all on the message boards of Cliopatria that Catholicism cannot be taken seriously as God's law. He writes:
...if the Holy Spirit were an historical actor of any significance, there would only ever be one round of voting [in papal conclaves]. Maybe two, I suppose, accounting for the grevious sin to which even Cardinals as human beings are prone. I'm not trying to be flip, I'm trying to suggest that isn't an evidentiary theory that would allow us as historians to take the idea of Catholicism as God's Law seriously.
He notes elsewhere in the thread:
...as historians we have to evaluate the causal and evidentiary claims of the religious or semi-religious no less carefully than the claims of the secular or semi-secular.
The point is made more clear later:
On the specific question [of papal conclaves], though, if I'm supposed to take the Church's claims of being sole "possessor of the keys to the gates of heaven" seriously, then I would expect the highest-ranking (and presumably holiest and closest to God, at least administratively) members of the Church to be consistently and clearly divinely aided in their deliberations on leadership. Otherwise the Church ends up sounding like a British-style constitutional monarchy: Sure, God's the head of state, but she just shows up for ceremonial ocassions (and his children get into trouble sometimes) and the actual elections, etc, are decided from below in a republican fashion. Sure, Constitutional Monarchies work OK, but that doesn't make them the pinnacle of human government or anything like that.
Professor Dresner makes some solid points about evaluating claims of historical actors that faith or divine inspiration guided them. As historians, we have to look at such claims critically, and weigh them against other more observable and tangible factors. Let me suggest, however, that when we set upon that course, we do so with a little humility. In this case, for example, I suspect there is a little more going on here than evaluating the evidence on its face. Professor Dresner offered another comment in the thread that was perhaps telling. He noted that Cardinal Ratzinger was formerly head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and added:
I did not realize, until I heard the news this morning, that the Congregation is the institution formally known as the Holy Office of the Inquisition.... I know, it's not the same thing anymore. But as an historian and as a Jew, it still seems noteworthy, a fact to "take into account" though I admit that I don't myself know how to weight it. Nobody does, yet.
Assuming that Pope Benedict is not about to dispatch an army of robot Torquemadas on an unwitting world, I think this statement by Professor Dresner, taken with all of the other statements above, indicates a pretty clear personal hostility toward the Catholic Church. Fine. As George Carlin said as Cardinal Glick in Dogma, the Catholic Church does not make mistakes, but, okay, mistakes were made. (Love the passive voice.) To those outside the church, and many within, its exclusivity and universal claims to authority on all things divine obviously chafe. Nevertheless, I'm not sure the church's mistakes or arrogant attitude somehow grant its critics the power Professor Dresner assumes in his comments.
I get it. We are talking about evaluating evidence as historians. But as Oscar Chamberlain noted in the same thread, there is an inherent difficulty for historians of the secular world in evaluating the supernatural, especially when it comes to deeply held faith. But driven by his hostility, Professor Dresner ignored that difficulty, denied it even existed, and made the claim that indeed we can weigh the influence of the supernatural in the case of papal conclaves. And the fact that it takes more than one vote to choose a pope, especially because Catholics claim to be the sole legitimate religion and because the college of cardinals are a gathering of the most senior Catholics, proves that the Holy Spirit is not a historical actor of any significance. Furthermore, that stunning evidence means that as historians we cannot take the idea of Catholicism as God's law very seriously.
More importantly, since Catholics--and many Christians--believe that Mary became pregnant with Jesus "by the power of the Holy Spirit," and that the Holy Spirit is indeed one with God, and since the Holy Spirit has been proven not to be a historical actor of any significance, as historians that means we cannot take the core ideas of Christianity seriously.
Well, that settles that. We can't keep such big news just to historians. It is only a matter or time before the word gets out. Thank goodness for the internet.
As a historian, and a Catholic, I am going to go ahead and say that I do not pretend to understand how God works. I'm going to admit that there are some things I do not understand. I am not going to let my personal feelings lead me to dismiss the faith of a billion people based on the precept that as a historian I have unlimited insight into the nature of the universe. I humbly ask my friend Professor Dresner not to qualify, but to back away from such profoundly insulting statements. After all, say what you want about the Roman Catholic Church as an organization, the church is still made up of people. People who honestly believe. People who deserve more.
Update in Three Parts - Part 2
2) The hole hasn't been so deep that I couldn't at least partially enjoy my favorite time of the sports year. It should tell you something about the quality of my hometown teams that February-April have been the best times for Cleveland sports fans for too long. You see, the terrible Cavs have been only a minor distraction as we look to the coming seasons with great hope. The brisk sunshine and new life of Spring training makes us feel as if there may indeed be a chance for our lovable (and unrecognizable) Indians. The Browns lineup never looks better than when they are farthest from the field, and we wait with baited breath for yet another talented first round pick to be the final eight pieces of the puzzle. (I'm having a draft day cookout at my place on Saturday, if anyone is interested.)
This year is a bit different, because the Cavs have been much more than a minor distraction. Last night--I think I have this right--they became one of only two teams in the history of the NBA to be ten games over .500 fifty games in and not make the playoffs. They changed owners midseason, they fired their coach midseason, and they nearly fired their GM midseason. They did finish with a winning record. So we have that going for us. Which is nice.
The other thing we have going for us is that in twenty year old LeBron James we have possibly the greatest basketball player ever on our team. But we don't know how to handle it. We're flipping out. As one Cleveland fan recently commented to ESPN writer Scoop Jackson:
"Cavs fans, we can't handle the rumors ... LeBron leaving?! You don't get it; this never happens to us. Not for the Browns, not for the Indians. We never have something [LeBron] happen to us. For once, the cards all fell in place. But at this point, I don't have a clue to what's going on. No one in Cleveland does. We can't take another dose of mediocrity. I mean, we can handle not making the playoffs if there's a plan to fix it, but what is the plan? I need to know. Because if this doesn't happen, if something positive doesn't come out of this, I'm going to jump off a bridge."
This guy is partially wrong--this kind of thing does happen to us, only it happens to us once every fifty years or so, like when Jim Brown became a Cleveland Brown. In fact, imagine Jim Brown playing football along with the current lineup of the Cavs (sans LeBron, who I suspect would be one heck of a wide receiver), coached by Gilbert Gottfried, and you pretty much have our Cleveland Cavaliers. I am not exaggerating when I say that this is the single most important offseason in the history of the Cavaliers franchise. If they do not make a few major player moves and bring in a top-notch coach (i.e.: Phil Jackson), kiss LeBron bye-bye. If he goes, fold the franchise immediately, because there is no point. And that guy is going to have company on the bridge.
Dammit, I'm losing my the-Indians-and-Browns-might-have-a-chance-this-year-high.
Update in Three Parts - Part 1
1) *blink* *blink* The Hocking River only gurgles a little bit as it runs through Athens, Ohio. The blossoms on the trees along its banks are beginning to be replaced by new leaves. Raindrops create perfect black circles in the film of yellow-green pollen on my car. Forgive the little observations, the light is so much brighter outside the dissertation hole. (And thank all of you for the kind words.)
Wednesday, April 6, 2005
World War II Symposium
If any of you are in the Lawrence, Kansas area this weekend, please check out this symposium: Democracy in Arms: The American Soldier in World War II. (The link is a pdf, and it's a bit slow.)
I'm in session #5. Despite that, it should be an excellent chance to hear from some of the best scholars on the United States in World War II.
[Also posted on Big Tent.]
Monday, March 21, 2005
The Tact of Robert A. Taft
A quickie while I finish up the dissertation:
As I’m sure you all know, Dwight Eisenhower beat out Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft for the Republican nomination in 1952. Eisenhower and Taft had a tendentious relationship. Taft resented Eisenhower for taking the nomination from him; Eisenhower thought Taft embarrassingly ignorant on foreign affairs. They worked together in the 1952 campaign, but they were never buddies.
On February 13, 1953, a few weeks after Eisenhower was inaugurated, the president hosted a Legislative Leadership Meeting with Taft, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and others. The issue of Veterans Administration reorganization came up, and the note taker for the meeting recorded:
Sen. Taft, in a discussion of the difficulty of finding a man to be Administrator of Veterans Affairs, let slip a comment to the effect that the man didn’t need to be a general, there were enough generals already*cough*
(referring to previous Administrators, but causing surprise, then laughter all around the table.)Man, what I wouldn’t give to have been a fly on the wall in that meeting.
Isn't history great?
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Review Essay
I hesitate to post this because we had to rush the heavily edited final product, but what the heck. The Claremont Review of Books has now made my review of John Lynn, Battle and Victor Davis Hanson, Ripples of Battle available online: Cultures of War. Take a look and let me know what you think.
Thursday, February 3, 2005
Remaking Memory or Getting It Right?: Saving Private Ryan and the World War II Generation
How’s that for a conference paper title?
At the end of this month I will be giving a paper at the Society for Military History conference in Charleston, South Carolina. The paper discusses how the changing memory of the motivations of soldiers in the Civil War and World War I led to the World War II generation growing up in a culture that dismissed and was even hostile to the idea of soldiers being motivated to fight by great causes. As a result, the Second World War was the good war to everyone but the soldiers. They insisted that they were not fighting for the four freedoms or democracy or patriotism or any other great cause. Instead they put their efforts in more banal terms—claiming that they just wanted to end the task or finish the job and come home. Hence the paper is titled “The Analogue of Work” (which is itself a blatant and deliberate rip-off of William (Derek’s buddy Bill) Leuchtenburg’s essay on the New Deal, “The Analogue of War.” See what I did there? I substituted “work” for “war.” Go me.).
That’s it in a nutshell. I’m sure you are all straining forearm muscles as you frantically click over to Orbitz or Expedia to look for tickets to Charleston. I’ll wait. Back? Good. (Keep in mind that I will sign your SMH program for a small fee.)
[A note: I usually don’t write about my research on blogs. What follows is an experiment with writing in broad strokes the first draft of an outline of some vague ideas that aren’t even thoughts and are unclear in their unclearitude that might become a conference paper, article, or book chapter someday far down the road in a distant and unforeseeable future that might never happen. Brave new world, this “internet.” Please comment, but have mercy.]
Thing is, I’ve been asking myself the “so what?” question ever since I finished the paper for the SMH. Why does it matter that American fighting men in World War II couldn’t or wouldn’t speak of their war in terms of great causes? I think there are lots of answers to that question, including a doozy: If those guys were not fighting for great causes in that war (which was about as clear as it gets when it comes to great causes) how was the next generation of American soldiers supposed to believe that they were fighting for the cause in a much more ambiguous war?
Let’s not get into that right now. Instead, there is another issue for the World War II generation of soldiers, that is, how they would remember the war they had fought. Almost to a man, those soldiers recognized that they were participating in a world-changing event, that they were probably doing the biggest and most important thing in their lives. But they could not or would not put that service into words to match the deeds.
They came home and got on with their lives. With some notable exceptions, their country learned its lesson from earlier wars, and by and large compensated them for their efforts. So they did not have to spend any time explaining why they should be compensated. They got married, went to work, bought houses, and had kids. The years went by—-they had an ambiguous relationship with their children and the Vietnam war. On the one hand, they had fought a war so their sons wouldn’t have to fight anymore. On the other hand, they had fought a war, so why shouldn’t their sons fight theirs, and do so willingly, like they had?
There a problem emerges. If they didn’t believe in something, why had the World War II generation been so willing (i.e.: they didn’t resist) to fight their war? Vietnam made many of the veterans of World War II start to ask themselves that question, quietly. The culture 1960s and 1970s in the United States did not exactly engender an atmosphere for open discussion of America’s past greatness.
The years went by—-there was a reaction against that Vietnam mentality, and, maybe more importantly, the World War II generation started to pass away. At the same time, the fiftieth anniversary of the war approached and brought with it a renewed interest in the Second World War. Military historians, practicing the new military history, started to put increased attention on the lives and experiences of the common fighting man. All of these trends came together in the 1980s and 1990s.
Years of reflection, experience, and history caused the World War II soldiers to begin to reexamine what it all had meant. They wanted to tell their stories—-I wish I could tell you how many of the hundreds of oral histories put together by Stephen Ambrose and his crew end with the vets thanking him for the opportunity to talk about their war—-and they wanted to understand how they fit in the great World War II. They would not manufacture memories, so they would not retroactively ascribe great causes to young minds that seemed incapable of thinking of the war in such terms. But they did begin to hint that they had always silently believed in what they were doing—-that their war was more than finishing a job and going home.
Enter Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998). It is famous for its gory realism in depicting the landings on Omaha Beach and some of the early fighting in Normandy. But it also shows soldiers struggling with their role in the war. The men debate whether ten lives are worth one. Tom Hanks’ character hints at some kind of divine payment (getting to go home to his wife) for saving Private Ryan. He later admonishes Ryan to “Earn this,” and then the aged Ryan begs his family to tell him he has, in the most personal way: ‘Tell me that I have been a good man.’ And the movie begins and ends with an American flag flying over a cemetery filled with dead Americans, juxtaposing the meaning with the cost.
Saving Private Ryan offers no easy answers, but it certainly hints that there was more to why and for what the soldiers fought, that there was some deeper meaning to their war. Was Saving Private Ryan remaking memory? Or was it reflection of World War II soldiers finally coming to some kind better understanding of their younger selves? I don’t know. I do know that it was a perfect reflection of its time. For that reason it is a far more subtle and interesting historical film than most people who were blown away by the first twenty minutes seem to realize.
Postscript: Saving Private Ryan and the popular reexamination of the motivations of World War II soldiers that it reflects seem to have reversed the trend. Journalists and others have ascribed to the soldiers and marines in the war on terror the same cause-free motivations as the fighting men in World War II. Yet to a degree unseen since at least the First World War, the fighting men and women today have used blogs and other new media to positively affirm that they are sustained by the belief that they are fighting for a good cause.
And memory’s wheel continues to turn.
Friday, January 28, 2005
Whose Parties?
It’s Friday night, I’m a hopeless nerd, and a link from a friend and a question from War Historian got me thinking so…
It is interesting right now, watching the jockeying going on in the two main American political parties. Actually, take that back, the jockeying going on in one political party, and the jockeying that should be going on in the other party, but isn’t. (Feel free to insert your own short people joke here. I nominate, “Is that Robert Reich?” but I’m open to suggestions.)
There is a pretty healthy series of debates going on among all the factions within the Republican party right now. Fiscal conservatives oppose President Bush’s spending and the ongoing budget deficits. A few foreign policy conservatives do not like the idealistic turn of American foreign policy. Moderates in the party like Christine Todd Whitman are saying "It's My Party Too!" out of fear that the religious right is taking over social policy. John Ashcroft is freed from office so he can return to clubbing baby seals. Everyone has an opinion, and some commentators think a fracturing might be coming.
On the other hand, there is a surprising lack of serious debate within the Democratic party, especially considering how poorly they have done in the last two election cycles. The New Republic's Peter Beinhart opened the door by calling for a more aggressive foreign policy among liberals, as has Kevin Mattson in a his new book harkening back to the “fighting faith of postwar liberalism.” But no one seems to be walking through yet. In fact, it seems like conservatives have taken more note of Beinhart’s piece than most liberals.
(The exception may be Hillary Clinton, but her reputation precedes her, and like her or not, she is a polarizing figure. Any attempts by her to tack to the center are going to be interpreted by those who dislike her as crass and obvious political maneuvering. All politicians do it, obviously, but Mrs. Clinton looks like she’s doing it. She will struggle to win converts.)
The rest of the Democrats of stature right now are sticking to the tried and untrue game of
“I oppose the Bush administration,”
“Yes, but I oppose the Bush administration,”
“Good point, but have you taken into consideration that I oppose the Bush administration?”
For example, it is the job of senators like Barbara Boxer and John Kerry to grill a nominee like Condoleezza Rice for Secretary of State. But, politically, voting against her appointment is a risky gamble at best. If she turns out to be a total train wreck, then maybe it works out. Otherwise, it just looks like sour grapes.
I hate to say it, but the same goes for President Bush’s other appointments. Democrats of conscience won’t look like it when they oppose President Bush’s nominees, even if they have serious and important reservations about the individual. The Democrats aren’t risking overplaying their hand—they overplayed it a long time ago. By now they’ve taken out a third mortgage on the house and sold their firstborn on eBay. They keep appealing to the same crowd of “anything but Bush” folks, when that has proven to be a losing strategy.
The debate in the Republican party is revitalizing. It forces national party leaders, most prominently President Bush, to tack among the various viewpoints to try to achieve some sort of balance. The American people like to see compromises on issues. Believe it or not, the Democrats are making it easy for President Bush to look like a compromiser. The lack of serious debate within the Democratic party makes it look like the Democrats have staked themselves to one position. President Bush does not have to work their way on any issue, he is already making deals with the broad and ever-growing groups within (and slightly without) his party.
As the Victor Davis Hanson and Christine Todd Whitman links make clear, President Bush’s coalition is precarious, and a third party candidate who focuses on a single conservative issue like balanced budgets or a contracted foreign policy might be able to pull a Perot and become the new totally insane guy who comes waaay too close to becoming president, but the Democrats should not bank on it. Far better for them to go all out with the president on some issues and try to stake out individual policies that provide solid alternatives in other areas. That takes serious internal debate. If the Democrats want to return to prominence, they need to be a party of issues, not just a party of opposition.
Monday, January 24, 2005
Memory Movies
And now for something completely different...
Sure, memory and history are linked. Sure, I could make some Rashoman point about perspectives and the failings of first-person accounts and how as historians we all need to be careful with sources. But instead I think I will disavow any pretentious claims that what follows is anything more than a review of a couple of movies, both of which deal with memory, or rather, lack thereof.
Just so you know: these movie reviews are out of date. I have a one year old, and I suppose I would give you some stupid stat about my wife and I not seeing a movie in a movie theater in blah blah, but it's just not true. My wife has a coworker who occasionally drives us out to movies at the end of a cattle prod just so she can watch the boy. In fact, I saw two movies in the theater just last weekend. For the moviegoing Rebunk readers, here is the quick version of those two: 1) The Aviator -- by the end my ass was alternating between pain and numbness. It (the movie, not my ass) was long and not particularly exciting, kind of like its subject. Let's face it, Howard Hughes was a quirky rich guy who built and flew planes and became a celebrity. Would you want to watch a three hour movie on Donald Trump just because he also happened to be a test pilot? That's The Aviator. Cate Blanchett does play a knockout Kate Hepburn, though. 2) House of Flying Daggers -- the Chinese martial arts drama. I liked this one slightly less than Hero, and a lot more than Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. A beautiful, interesting, Shakespearian adventure, and simply one of the best movies of the year.
Enough of this relatively new stuff. I'm a historian, toiling away on the edge of relevance. On a side note: is it just me or is it kind of sad when historical journals come out with their movie reviews of big market films that have been out for one to four years? The movie review we're all used to is intended to guide people on what to see, and by the time we historians get around to it entire high school sports teams have memorized all the best lines and the History Channel is selling the DVD of History vs. Hollywood for a discount on their website.
With that in mind, I finally saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind the other day. Focus Features, the rebel branch of Universal Studios, released it, and they are awfully proud of putting out unique, interesting movies aimed mostly at people who always insist on calling movies "films." They gave us "Gosford Park," "Traffic," and the vastly overrated "Lost in Translation." They often seem to think that their street cred with film students is tied to how independent their movies look. Eternal Sunshine is no exception. The problem in this case is that the movie deserved more. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufmann, the guy who thought up Being John Malkovich and Adaptation., wrote a nice script. Not to give too much away, but the main character played by Jim Carrey finds out that his girlfriend played by Kate Winslet has had him removed from her memory. He decides to get her removed from his memory, but as the memories disappear he realizes how much he really loves her, or maybe more precisely, he remembers how much he loved falling in love with her. Good stuff, and a couple twists and turns kept the story going. The actors--Carrey, Winslet, Tom Wilkinson, Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst, and Frodo--turn in excellent performances. The quirky editing worked for the material.
But the grainy film quality and insistence on not using hardly any special effects set the wrong tone for the movie. Instead of looking real, it looked cheap. I'm not saying they needed to turn the movie into Bad Boys II (as opposed to the more understated, cerebral, original Bad Boys), but sometimes it really helps a movie not to look like it was made in the director's back yard with the cameras they used on Green Acres. Along the same lines, the movie needed to be about fifteen minutes shorter. It isn't all that hard to figure out what needs to be figured out, and you end up spending quite a bit of time waiting for the movie to get on with it. As a result of these shortcomings in directing--I've nearly bit a hole in my lip trying not to mention that the director is a French guy... dammit--the movie looks independent and gets a bit boring at times. So Focus' reputation with the film crowd is fine, I guess. (Should we mention that these are the jokers who put out Deliver Us From Eva? Nah.)
One other thing: the reason the quality and pacing are an issue is because the story eventually comes to look past the key question of the staying power of the new (renew) love between the two main characters. The concept works, but would have worked a whole lot better had we not just spent a two hour movie looking right at that question.
Believe it or not, that same question is the subject of 50 First Dates, a romantic comedy starring Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore. An admission: I am an Adam Sandler fan. I like Billy Madison, I like Big Daddy and the Wedding Singer, and I love Happy Gilmore. For years my circle of friends have talked in a sort of pidgin English made up of quotations from these films (plus the Chris Farley classic, Tommy Boy)—this is why you might occasionally here me mumbling something about “Doing the Bull Dance,” “finding that f-ing dog,” “I gotta get me one of those,” or “checking the specs on the overhead…” In short, I like fart jokes. I laugh at them. I will admit that. So when Rob Schneider plays a nasty drug-addled Hawaiian who stores “marijuana cigarettes” in his butt crack, yeah, I chuckle. Likewise, when Barrymore’s character beats the hell out of Schneider with an aluminum baseball bat and screams like a lunatic, or when various characters make jokes about the genitalia of a male walrus, or when steroid abuse gives Sean Astin’s character wet dreams, etc.
There are plenty of such jokes in 50 First Dates, but they are not the focus of the movie. Due to a car accident, Barrymore’s character has a type of fictional brain damage that makes it so she cannot convert short term memory to long term memory in her sleep. She wakes up everyday thinking it is the day of the accident. Her mother is dead, and her father, brother, and friends play along with her believing that it is still that day (the movie is set in Hawaii, so seasons aren’t a problem), rather than retelling her everyday what she had gone and is going through. Then Sandler’s character comes along and falls for her one morning, with strictly honorable intentions. He really does fall in love with her—and most of the movie is made up dealing with the situation. How do you tell someone everyday that they have no memory since x days, months, and years ago? What kind of relationship can and should she have with the man who loves her (and who she thinks she loves)? Will she ever remember anything? Does it matter?
Believe it or not, it is pretty hefty material. And it worked. The movie balances all the serious questions with appropriate levels of inappropriate humor. The directing and editing create perfect timing for the material.
More importantly, unlike the folks who made Eternal Sunshine, Sandler and company didn’t back off of the central question of staying power of new (renew) love. It is not that 50 First Dates ties everything up in a neat bow, because it doesn’t, but there is a sense of closure to the story that Eternal Sunshine just couldn’t or wouldn’t achieve.
Maybe it’s because I sometimes call movies “movies,” but if I had to pick between the two, I’d happily recommend 50 First Dates over Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Monday, January 10, 2005
Important Announcement
My Rebunking colleagues have remained mysteriously quiet about the epic comeback staged by the team known as Bernie Bernie in the Rebunk Fantasy Football League (RFFL). That's right, my boys entered the the three game playoffs in fifth place out of eight, and then went on a run all the way to the RFFL championship.
So congratulations to Brett Farve, Torry Holt, Anquan Boldin, Shaun Alexander, Kevin Jones, Deuce McCallister, Antonio Gates, Nate Kaeding, and the Chicago Bears Defense. Sure, all of you but Holt are out of the playoffs (and Kaeding is a bonafide dog for that missed field goal) but you'll always have 2004 in Rebunkdom. And that's all that really matters, isn't it?
Monday, November 15, 2004
Hat in Hand
In a fit of great wisdom, my grandfather once told my brother-in-law and me, “I like beer. I like the taste of beer. Some people might not like that, but that’s the way it is.” Likewise, President Bush earned a mandate with his victory in the past election. Some people might not like that, but that’s the way it is. The questions are what that mandate means, and what the president should do with it.
Lots of smart people have tackled why President Bush won the election, and I am not going the theories here except to echo David Brooks and say that the “moral issues” exit poll was a poorly worded question that has been misread and blown out of proportion. My own feeling is that the war on terrorism was the big issue that separated the candidates and provided much of the difference for the president. If anything, Americans want a more vigorous war on terror than has been waged up to this point. Senator Kerry offered anything but a more vigorous war. More importantly, Americans seem to have an aversion to switching horses in midstream, to use President Lincoln’s phrase. For better or worse, September 11 happened on George W. Bush’s watch. He responded with his war on terror. Now he is going to get a chance to finish it (at least within his four more years). The American decided—correctly, in my opinion—that the war was the big issue. President Bush has a mandate to be a wartime president. It is high time he started acting like a wartime president.
The most convincing criticism of the president I heard during the campaign did not come from Senator Kerry’s campaign or the DNC (and certainly not from MoveOn.org or Michael Moore). It came from a friend of mine, a staunch Democrat, who thought that President Bush had done well with his speeches after September 11 in recognizing the threat and preparing the country for war. Like most Americans, this friend supported the war in Afghanistan and understood the war in Iraq to be part of the larger campaign against terror. What he could not stomach was the partisan nature of the war effort. First, President Bush made no effort to build a bipartisan war cabinet (remember that Franklin Roosevelt appointed Republican Henry Stimson to be Secretary of War during World War II). Then, and even more horrifying to my friend, the president actively campaigned in the midterm elections against senators who had supported him on the war on terror.
My friend is right. The first action—not appointing a bipartisan war cabinet—is defensible for the president. September 11 happened early in his first term; he thought he had a solid group of folks already in place. The second—campaigning against Democrats who had by and large supported his war on terror—is indefensible. Not to set up too much of a straw man, but I suppose that the Republican response would be that these senators had helped obstruct the president’s domestic agenda, especially judicial appointees. I--like Demi Moore in A Few Good Men, only fat, male, and ugly--strenuously object. Obstructing an opponent’s domestic political agenda is what politicians do. That’s their job. It is why they get into political parties built around certain ideologies and then vote on stuff based on those ideologies (Civics for, er, by Dummies, pg. 1). Even if Republicans think that filibustering judicial appointees in dirty pool, it still does not justify what the president did in 2002.
In the normal course of events it is perfectly fine for the president to get down in the muck and play partisan politics. But, as the American people recognized and declared November 2, the country wasn’t in the normal course of events. We were at war. George W. Bush is a wartime president. All of the other domestic issues that took a backseat in the election must also take a backseat when it comes to partisan politics. A wartime president must embrace opposition party members who support his war policies, even if that president despises everything else for which those folks stand. In politics, war must always be trump.
The coming reorganization of his cabinet, especially at State, gives President Bush a real opportunity to make up for some of the mistakes of his first term. The appointment of a hawkish Democrat as Secretary of State (the obvious choice would be Joe Lieberman) would go a long way toward showing that President Bush understands and takes seriously the nature of his mandate. And it goes without saying that a true statesman at war would never repeat the performance of the election of 2002. George W. Bush’s effectiveness in his second term, and indeed his legacy as a president in difficult times, depend in large part on his ability to reach out to the other side. We will all be watching.
Thursday, November 11, 2004
Veterans Day
Happy Veterans Day. Below are some books on American veterans for historians. The list is by no means exhaustive--it leans to World War II vets and away from the early republic. Hey, it's what I do. Anyway, in no particular order, I recommend:
Richard Severo and Lewis Milford, The Wages of War: When America's Soldiers Came Home : From Valley Forge to Vietnam.
Michael J. Bennett, When Dreams Came True: The GI Bill and the Making of Modern America.
Davis R. B. Ross, Preparing for Ulysses: Politics and Veterans during World War II.
Paul Cimbala and Randall Miller, Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences, Postwar Adjustments (The North's Civil War, No. 18).
Jennifer E. Brooks, Defining the Peace: World War II Veterans, Race, and the Remaking of Southern Political Tradition.
Keith W. Olson, The G.I. bill, the veterans, and the colleges.
B.G. Burkett, Stolen Valor : How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History (be very careful with this one).
Update, 4:50 pm:
By request, here are some titles by historians on Americans serving in the military (again, not exhaustive, just some of my favorites):
On the Seven Years War:
Fred Anderson, A People's Army
On the Revolution:
Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War
John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed
On the peacetime Army to 1898:
Edward M. Coffman, The Old Army
On the Civil War:
Gerald Linderman, Embattled Courage
James McPherson, For Cause and Comrades
Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank and The Life of Johnny Reb
On the twentieth century:
Peter Kindsvatter, American Soldiers
Edward M. Coffman, The Regulars
On World War I:
Jennifer Keene, Doughboys.
Edward M. Coffman, The War to End All Wars.
On World War II:
Gerald Linderman, The World Within War
Stephen Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers
Lee Kennett, GI
John Dower, War Without Mercy
On Vietnam:
Christian Appy, Working Class War
Ronald Spector, After Tet.
Enjoy.
Tuesday, November 9, 2004
A Quick Post-Election Dungeons and Dragons Story
Dungeons and Dragons has turned thirty. Jonathan Dresner has some interesting comments at HNN. So does John J. Miller at National Review.
I only played DND a little bit, mostly during indoor recesses at my Catholic school in sixth grade. One of those sessions produced one of my favorite Catholic school stories. I can't remember the specific details, but four or five of us were playing, and we were going to gather to try to defeat something, and one of us said, "Let's kick some ass."
We start rolling and just then Sister Catherine comes up to us and said, "What are you boys doing?"
My friend Ano replied, "We're kicking some ass, Sister."
Sister Catherine said--I'm not making this up--"Oh, that's nice." Then she walked away.
Needless to say, the game lost its focus after that.
Tuesday, October 5, 2004
Smelling History
It is a perfect fall day here in Athens. It is not cold but there is a little bite in the air. The treetops have just started to turn red and yellow. And everything is perfectly crisp and clear--the way everything can only be crisp and clear on a sunny fall day.
That combination hit me as I was walking across campus to my car this afternoon. But it wasn't the temperature or the trees or the clear air that got my attention. It was a smell. Not that wonderfully musty smell of dead leaves, strewn on sidewalks and in yards, crunching under your feet and just screaming to be piled up and jumped in (if we weren't all adults now and that nagging little adult voice didn't tell us that we'd get all dirty and anyway we are too heavy for piles of leaves to hold us anymore and anyway we have somewhere/thing/one to go/do/see and are too busy for such nonsense). No, my smell today was a diesel engine.
I had just finished walking down Jeff Hill--the legendary hill that Paul Newman, uh, legendarily rolled a keg down into the then president's car, earning the future Oscar winner an invitation to explore his educational opportunities elsewhere--and I was taking a left between two dorm buildings to head across a field to a parking lot and my car. And it hit me. Just like that, the out-of-shape balding academic dad-type in a shirt and tie with a book bag slung over his shoulder was gone. There I was--knee, thigh, and hip pads sticking every which way, slightly cold in just a t-shirt, carrying shoulder pads by the facemask of the helmet tucked inside them, a drumline playing somewhere in the distance, cleats clicking on concrete as I made my way to board the school bus and go play a road j.v. game. The unworn game pants dug into the backs of my knees. Damn, I even had pregame butterflies in my stomach. Just a smell--one whiff of diesel on a cool, clear fall day--and all that came back in a flood.
Even someone else’s description of powerful smell can stick in a way visual, auditory, or tactile accounts do not. Not to change seasons too abruptly here, but in the immortal words of the then Fresh Prince (in what just may be my favorite rap song):
Sitting with your friends cause y'all reminisce/
About the days growing up and the first person you kiss/
And as I think back makes me wonder how the/
Smell from a grill could spark up nostalgia…
Along similar, if more disgusting, lines--a cop came to my middle school once to describe the job to us kids. Being middle schoolers, we asked about murders and dead bodies. The cop described the horrible putrescence of corpses that had been left in water. He got used to it a bit, he said, but the only thing that helped was rubbing Vicks under his nose when he knew he had to deal with a corpse. A decade and a half later and I can’t watch any cop show or movie and see a dead body without thinking about why the t.v. cops aren’t rubbing Vicks under their noses and gagging in revulsion.
I’m not breaking new ground here, everyone knows how powerful and evocative the sense of smell can be. In fact, that topic just won the Nobel Prize. As historians and teachers we often discuss methods to make our work resonate with our readers and students. Smell, it seems to me, has got to be one of the better ways. As a military historian I have stood on the battlefields at Gettysburg and Antietam and come to the realization that I know thousands and thousands of men bled the ground red there, but I cannot accept it. Part of the reason is that those places smell so nice. The smell of battle--dust, sweat, blood, burning clothes, hot metal, cordite, and ozone--has long since gone.
In that sense we have the storyteller’s advantage. The human mind, sitting in a classroom or curled up with a book, can take a description and give it life through imagination. The sources are there if we remember to look for them. When we tell the story of the past, we should try to remember that we can smell history, too.
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
My Dark Tower Journey
It is done. The Dark Tower, I mean. Finished. The surprising thing to me as a person who has waited roughly twenty years for this day is how few people seem to have taken the trip. Despite the thrashings about of pols and partisans about our educational system, and Jay Leno’s street interview hunts for the carpet-lickingiest of the carpet-licking dumb, the United States is a nation of many readers. Hardly any Americans are illiterate anymore, but it is more than that.
ALERT! here comes the anecdote as flimsy evidence: as often as possible I make a trip to the remainder book stores in Columbus, Ohio. I visit three or four of them per trip, scattered around the city. Every store, every time, at any time--people of all sorts wander the aisles and fill up the lines. I don’t know what they are buying-—though as a sighing reminder of where my profession stands in the hierarchy of what interests people, I often have the history sections all to myself. I do know they are buying, and presumably they are reading. And a surprising number of folks seem to make a living writing books. If not, there wouldn’t be so damn many, right?
One of those people scratching by as a writer is Stephen King. He’s up around thirty-five years of publishing books and short stories now, and I suspect that most people who read, whether they would like to admit it or not, have taken a gander at a book or two from the collection. His career has overlapped with most or all of the lives of many of his readers. Myself, I read Pet Sematary (published 1983) first, sometime in the mid-eighties. After that book, which in retrospect is probably my least favorite of his works, I read pretty much everything else he has written-—mostly in junior high and high school. It became pretty evident early on that to call Stephen King a writer of horror novels is, to say the least, misleading. Only a few of his books are truly scary—-Salem’s Lot (1975) had me locking windows and doors, for example—-and in fact, most revolve around the supernatural in the everyday world. (I’m sure lit-crit types describe such fiction with some horrendous jargon term that could suck the energy out of a jackrabbit on speed in about a nanosecond.) Then, I discovered with Eyes of the Dragon (1984), there are his writings that do not deal with the everyday world at all—-writings that could best be described as fantasy.
The Gunslinger, The Dark Tower I (1982) bridged the gap between his fantasy world and real world. It was an ambitious work, the beginning of an epic—-Stephen King’s admitted answer to the Lord of the Rings, begun as a young man in the early 1970s. It came out first in a limited hardbound printing, but the demands of fans led to its mass publication in paperback. It was a hit. When I picked it up sometime in the late 1980s, I could see why. It started a journey by a compelling but distant hero, Roland Deschain, a gunslinger, a sort of knight with two guns. The journey’s end, the Dark Tower itself, promised nothing less then the explanation of everything. Heady stuff, and its follow-up, The Drawing of the Three (1987) added more characters from our world to join the quest, and drew us all in, deeper.
New books in the series could not come out fast enough for us diehard fans. In a small preview booklet for one of the upcoming books, King told of the thousands upon thousands of letters he received asking for the next Dark Tower book. His favorite included a Polaroid of a teddy bear with chains around it. The note read something like, “Release the next Dark Tower book, or the bear gets it.” I understood the sentiment. The Waste Lands (1991) was the first of the series that I read right when it came out. The book completed Roland’s circle of compatriots, and ended in a nearly unbearable cliffhanger.
Then, for six years, nothing. In the meantime, more and more of Stephen King’s non-Dark Tower books seemed to revolve around the Dark Tower--none more than Insomnia (1995)—-without furthering the central story or solving the cliffhanger. Along the way, it became apparent that the tale wasn’t so much about Roland as Stephen King’s life as a writer. He hinted, then said, the Dark Tower was his magnum opus, the story that would define his legacy. As a reader, I agreed. But you could sense that the weight of that responsibility wore on him. He had to tell the story, but he couldn’t, lest he tell it wrong.
I suppose a story is often as much about the listener as the teller, so allow me this conceit: I understood perfectly, if passively, what Stephen King was going through in writing the Dark Tower. Maybe this always happens with a series that takes years to come out, but I went on a journey of my own, living my life from one day to the next. My interest in King’s tale waxed and waned—-and for a long time there, it just waned. I didn’t want him to continue to tell the tale, lest he tell it wrong.
By the time Wizard and Glass came out in 1997 I was well into my college years. I had met my wife. I was still playing football, but there were indications that history was about to become my first love career-wise. The book solved the cliffhanger. (I didn’t know at the time how much that whole episode in particular relied on Tolkien, I hadn’t read The Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings yet.) Then the story went backward. Roland and his circle sat around a campfire and he told them a tale from his youth. By the end, Wizard and Glass did little more than send the characters on their way once again. Despite King’s assurances in a postscript author’s note that the last three books of the cycle were on the way, I set the book aside convinced in my heart of hearts that the tale had no end. And despite his own words, I think Stephen King feared that he felt, deep down, exactly the same way.
Then my life took me away from his work. I was already inclined to go, and graduate school only sped up the process. As I looked away, the story nagged at Stephen King still, but he couldn’t confront it directly. He distracted himself with serial novels (The Green Mile, 1996), books by his long dead pseudonym Richard Bachman (The Regulators, 1996), strange baseball books (The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon;, 1999), and nonfiction (On Writing, 2000). And he wrote novel after novel that related in some small and almost insignificant way to the Dark Tower. The most involved--and the only one I read, because, you see, the Dark Tower nagged at me, too--came with the first section of Hearts in Atlantis (1999). It was another tantalizing bit of the larger tale that did nothing to advance the gunslinger and his friends-—incidentally followed by a semi-autobiographical short story called “Hearts in Atlantis” that anyone interested in college life at the end of the 1960s would do well to read (and maybe assign to a class).
Still, life and work made it easy to ignore the Dark Tower and Stephen King. I became uninterested in a lazy sort of way, aware only in the back of my mind of how important the quest once was to me. So much so that it hardly registered when in June 1999 a van came speeding over a hill and hit King as he walked near his Maine home. He nearly died that day. I vaguely remember thinking that he damn near didn’t get a chance to finish the Dark Tower. A few years earlier and such an idea would have had me near panic, but I had become so detached that now it was, I’m ashamed to say, an amused sort of thought. I have to say, though, that it is pretty clear that Stephen King thought the same thing, and maybe even the same way.
The accident changed everything for King and the Dark Tower, and, as I came to find out in the summer of 2003, me as the reader. At that time, the first four books of the cycle were re-released in hardcover, The Gunslinger; with some revisions. A new preface from King made the point clear: the accident made him realize that he did not want to die without finishing the Dark Tower. So he had finished it--all at once. As I stood in that mall bookstore reading those words, the final three volumes were done. Volume V, Wolves of the Calla, would come out in November 2003, volume VI, Song of Susannah in June 2004, and the final volume, The Dark Tower, in September 2004.
I’ll not spoil what happens except to say this: Stephen King became an integral part of the tale, one of the key characters in the book. If it seemed as if the accident with the van was some kind of attempt to keep him from finishing the Dark Tower, that’s because it was. And the cost of not finishing that thing was the end of all things. See what he did? His laziness and indifference—-a laziness and indifference that I wholly understood because, as fate would have it, I had suffered from it at the same time he did—-had become part of the story, the great obstacle to overcome. Finishing it, finding the Dark Tower, became a duty instead of a revelation. Everything depended upon us soldiering through together, finishing what we had started those many long years before. Getting there became far more important than what we found or how it happened. Five or ten years ago I think I would have howled in protest at some of the twists and turns of the final three volumes, but not now. Now things like the nearly page by page admissions of his influences and inspirations—-from Star Wars to Harry Potter to the Lord of the Rings to T.S. Eliot to The Magnificent Seven to, of course, Robert Browning-—made sense to me the historian as I observed Stephen King self-consciously writing the story by which he would have history judge him.
Here’s the kicker, and don’t ask me to explain it: I think Stephen King knew that I had been with him all that way. I think he knew that by some quirk of time and space I had gotten lazy and indifferent exactly when he did. I think he knew that when and how he came back to the Dark Tower is exactly when and how I would want to read it. He wrote the Dark Tower for me, reading the books as they came out, when they came out. I think there are thousands more just like me—-faithful readers with that exact same connection at that exact same time. But our numbers are most definitely finite, and our journey to the Dark Tower unique. I do not, cannot, know how the Dark Tower will be received in the future, by those who can now pick up The Gunslinger and know with confidence that their path will end at The Dark Tower.
I only know that there is one final connection—-one last link between me and the story that has so paralleled my life: like so many good and old friends this great and terrible year, the Dark Tower and its characters have moved on. I cannot help but feel sad that one part of my life has ended.
All these years and it is done. For me, anyway, it is done.
Tuesday, September 14, 2004
Privileging Families
Americans have a real problem with privileging families in storytelling and politics. Take September 11. Thousands of Americans (and others, but I'm talking about the U.S.) lost family members that day. I nearly joined those thousands. Was it not for a late ride that awful morning, my sister would be a widow, my niece and God daughter would have lost her father, and nephew and another niece would not exist. It makes my stomach turn just to think of it--it is powerful emotional stuff. Their pain is their own, but we feel for those who lost family members at a very gut level because it is not hard to imagine being them and losing someone we love. The same goes for the family members of American service men and women who have died performing their duties.
That said, the stories of family members are a very limited thing. A widow or widower can tell us how it felt to her or him to lose a spouse in a terrorist attack. A grieving mother can share her unique experience with losing a son in battle. These are important stories to tell--they remind us of the human side of the collapsing building; they remind us of the human cost of every war. We should, and I think mostly do, embrace those lessons. But when it comes to understanding events historically or forming policy, those stories can ultimately tell us little more than what it was like for specific individuals to lose loved ones. This is nothing new--it is the difficulty of social studies and social history, and the reason social scientists and historians so often turn to statistics to make sense of their subject(s). As someone who is a fan of overwhelming anecdotal evidence as part of diverse sources, I nevertheless recognize this serious weakness and limited utility of individual accounts of any event.
Yet journalists and politicians consistently give the stories and opinions of grieving families far more weight than they merit in politics and telling stories. The families of those killed on 9/11, as individuals who lost family members on 9/11, have no special insight into why it happened. Their killers did not target their loved ones as individuals, they targeted them as Americans. As such, it is not callous to say that any American had as much of a reason to testify before the 9/11 Commission as any of the individual 9/11 family members. As an American I took the attacks personally. And I have very strong opinions about why and how it happened and what we should do in response. Yet here I am, blogging in my pajamas, and no one asked me to testify at or even sit in on the 9/11 Commission hearings. Nor does anyone seem to care who I am endorsing in the presidential campaign.
Likewise, while I think the parents, spouses, and children who lose loved ones in battle should often have their story told and deserve our sympathy, they are extremely limited sources in telling the story of a war. Yet journalists have made a habit out of asking parents what their son or daughter was fighting for. The answers are hearsay, and can only be deemed credible if they are supported by plenty of other evidence like letters, diaries, the accounts of fellow service men or women, and so on. Pat Tillman is a prime example of this. When he was killed in Afghanistan, he left no personal account of why he had passed on a big NFL contract to join the military and fight in the war. Journalists and reporters interviewed anyone they could find who knew him. Everyone had an opinion, but Tillman wanted his decision to be his own, and that ultimately is exactly what it is. Obviously, he felt in some way that he had to join the military in wartime, but why—his country? his family? the flag? the cause? to see the spectacle of war? to kill? curiosity at how he would react? family tradition?—went with him to his grave.
It doesn’t take genius to know that people do not always tell the truth or the whole truth to their parents, children, and spouses. But reporters and politicians can get folks crying and score political points, so they privilege the opinions of family members far too much. The result is that we are drawn into the story of poor Samantha who lost her husband Jimmy in the war. “I loved my Jimmy,” she tells us, “and he loved his fishing boat. He joined the Army to pay for his fishing boat.” The serious reporter asks, “Do you think Jimmy would be pleased with Fred Politician’s efforts to close Local Lake for fishing? Is that what he was fighting for?” It’s a stupid example, I know, but circle one of the versions to the statements below to see what I’m getting at:
“Jimmy joined because he needed the money to pay for college/loved his country and felt it was his duty.”
“Jimmy never/always thought he would fight.”
“Jimmy never/always supported the president and liked/disliked the president’s policies.”
It seems to never occur to journalists that these questions may have meant far less to twenty year old Jimmy than how many beers he could take at a time from a beer bong, and the answers they are getting are solely the opinions of the parents, wives, or children. If a historian or biographer relied just on the word of loved ones to tell a story, it would mean that they wrote a very, ahem, limited history or biography. This should be common sense. Can you imagine what kind of biography Ron Reagan would write about his father? It would be as, ahem, limited as Margaret Truman’s book on her dad.
The scary part is that it seems reporters are starting to believe their own nonsense—that family members really are good sources on what other people think. Last night I saw Newsweek’s Howard Fineman on Joe Scarborough’s show on MSNBC—yes, I’m the one who was watching—and they were discussing the CBS, Dan Rather, forged documents issue. Fineman thought that all the scientific proof that the documents were forged was interesting. But to him the most devastating evidence against the documents were the opinions of the purported author’s wife and son. Apparently, both say it was out of character for him to write memos to himself, that he never typed, and he had a high opinion of Lt. George W. Bush. Fineman thought it was unforgivable that CBS had overlooked this powerful evidence. Huh? I can think of about a thousand scenarios right off the top of my head where that Lt. Colonel’s wife and kid would have no idea what he was doing at work, or what his opinions of George W. Bush were thirty years ago. Put it this way, if the documents could pass muster as authentic, would we even take seriously the word of the wife and kid? No way. At best, their accounts support a wide variety of other evidence. That is it. Update, Sept 16, 10:25 AM: The same goes for the new story from the Lt. Col.'s office's secretary.
It should tell us all something that the chief political correspondent for one of the major news weeklies believes that solid evidence is what one person says about what another person thinks.
Maybe I’m being harsh, but I think I’m right about this one. My wife thinks the same thing, and my dad, and cousin, and former college teammate who is a Marine in Iraq, and the lady playing the banjo I passed on the street today, and the guy who yells “We Must Protect This House!” in the UnderArmor commercials, and my dog….*
* I’m endorsing the UnderArmor Guy for president.**
** I’m joking.
Monday, September 6, 2004
Teaching Teachers
The conventions are over, but the overblown rhetoric and accusations are just getting started. For my part, I'm getting bored with the panicky partisanship, the vast Halliburton conspiracy, self-inflicted wounds, misleading into this..., unfit to do that...., Dennis Kucinich's beady little eyes, etc. Don't get me wrong, there has been some great entertainment in this campaign. The JibJab cartoon with the parody of "This Land is Your Land" is simply brilliant. Zell Miller's post-speech debate with Chris Matthews when he challenged Matthews to a duel deserves its own HBO special. And I've decided that if I had the money, I would make a commercial that just repeated John Kerry saying "Genghis Khan" in his Senate testimony over and over again for thirty seconds: "Jain-jis Khan...Jain-jis Khan...Jain-jis Khan...Jain-jis Khan...Jain-jis Khan...Jain-jis Khan...Jain-jis Khan...Jain-jis Khan...Jain-jis Khan...Jain-jis Khan...Jain-jis Khan...Jain-jis Khan...Jain-jis Khan...Jain-jis Khan...Jain-jis Khan...Jain-jis Khan...Jain-jis Khan...Jain-jis Khan... Jain-jis Khan...Jain-jis Khan...Jain-jis Khan...Jain-jis Khan...Jain-jis Khan...Jain-jis Khan.... This ad has been paid for by Tom Bruscino." What would it mean? I don't know. But I'd think it was funny.
Anyway, classes start tomorrow here in sunny Appalachia, so I've got teaching on the brain. And once again, both parties have ignored a major part of the problem with the educational system in the United States: teaching teachers. Sorry to violate the honor of that most sacred of life callings, but lots and lots of teachers in this country just aren't very good at their job, and the reason is that they do not have the training to be very good at their job. The problem lies in the colleges and universities and the Education programs that train college students to be teachers. It is pretty simple really: our teachers vaguely know how to teach, but they know little or nothing about what to teach.
I started off in my undergraduate career at Adams State College, a liberal arts school known primarily for training teachers, as a secondary education/social studies major--on track to teach middle or high school history, coach sports, and eat lots of sunflower seeds. Then I started filling my requirements: adolescent psychology, basics of education, exceptional student in a regular classroom, planning for teaching, teaching curriculum, planning for curriculum, curriculum for planning, planning for the curriculum of basic planning for exceptional classrooms, and so on. In my little spare time, I took one of our college's relatively few history or political science courses and learned smatterings about the French Revolution, Henry VIII and his wives, Plato's philosophy, the Civil War, water rights in Colorado, principles of government, American foreign policy, and a variety of other topics. Don't get me wrong, many of these history classes were fantastic, but with only a few exceptions, I felt like I was just getting the bare essentials of history--the subject I supposedly was going to teach to young people.
One of the positives of going to a smaller school like Adams State is that we wrote 10-15 page papers in almost every history class we took, so when one of my education class would require we teach a short lesson on some topic in our area, I could scrabble together some of the superficial research I had done and talk about the War of 1812 for a little while, for example. And, like Hugo Schwyzer talked about recently over at Cliopatria, I felt like a fraud. The only difference is that I knew that when I would soon have to teach in an area that I hadn't happened to write a paper on in one of my courses, my fraudulency would have gone beyond a healthy feeling of self-doubt. I really would have been a fraud--forced by my ignorance to teach out of the textbook, show videos to kill time, and make students to do canned assignments out of a workbook. And this was in American history, where I kind of knew some of the material. Some of my graduated friends were teaching ancient civilizations in high schools. The only class at ASC that covered ancient civilizations was the freshman level survey. It was crazy. So I got out, became a straight History major, and decided to go to graduate school and actually learn my subject.
I left behind the problem, but the problem is still there. College and university education departments force their students to take an ever-increasing number of how-to classes for teaching. This focus makes sense in some areas, especially special education and primary education, for obvious reasons. But many of the education courses are redundant, and become a colossal waste of time and energy for secondary education teachers who should be learning their subject. Now various states are requiring that teachers get Master's degrees after a few years of teaching in order to maintain their accreditation. Great idea... until they get Master's in education or administration, and take new and exciting classes in advanced adolescent psychology, advanced exceptional student in a regular classroom, advanced planning for teaching, advanced teaching curriculum, advanced planning for curriculum, advanced curriculum for planning, advanced planning for the curriculum of basic planning for exceptional classrooms, and so on. That is all well and good, but it seems to me that the best way to avoid many of the problems that can crop up in a middle school or high school classroom is to make your class interesting and challenging. And so many teachers try, but they are hamstrung by their own incomplete educations.
Other college departments, like history, have a role to play in this problem. Most surveys and upper division course I have taken or taught do a fine job of covering the major (and some minor) events of the topic. Within that topic, the future teachers have the structure of how to teach in their classrooms. But they generally do not have one of the key blocks in the foundation: historiography. I don't mean historiography in the graduate school sense, that would be impossible. As a college educator with pretty limited experience, I have nevertheless been stunned by the fact that most of my upper level students do not know how to track secondary sources through bibliographies, to find the authoritative source or two on any given topic, or even to judge superficially the quality and authority of a history book. I have been blown away by how many of them do not realize that on any given topic there is most likely a historical debate in print that they can follow. The thing is that in my experience they get a kick out of this stuff. People love an argument, especially a cranky or snarky one, and damn but historians are good at cranky and snarky arguments.
As a country, we have the ability to equip our teachers with the knowledge they need to teach, but we need to start doing it. I'd like to hear our political leaders talk about reforming the teachers' education system to tie accreditation to greater knowledge in the subject field (for secondary education especially) by having education majors take less education classes and more subject classes and requiring that graduate work be done in that subject field. There are lots of areas in which we can improve our educational system, obviously, but it doesn't matter much whether teachers have fifty students or fifteen if they don't know what they are supposed to be teaching. When we have our national debates about vouchers and accountability and funding, we must not forget to talk about the teachers.
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
Olympian Correspondence – Part 3
[Note: the following is the third part of a series of correspondence supposedly on the Olympics between Derek and me. Scroll down for the first two parts.]
8/24/04 – 11:28 AM
DCAT:
I'm with you on decathletes, they are a special breed of athlete. It would be cool if one of them made the transition to baseball, basketball, or football. Of course my experience with decathletes is that they have a bit of a bizarre temperament--our best decathlete at Adams State was a guy named "Buzz" who also played football and used to wear suits everyday, even during two-a-days. The strange temperament makes sense when you consider what they put themselves through, but it does not suit them sell for sports like football. On Pappas: is always tough to watch a guy with big expectations not come close to those expectations. He struggled yesterday and dropped out today with a foot injury. It's too bad, all those Greeks who adopted him as one of their own will now have to find comfort in the sweet embrace of their sheep. Bad times for all parties.
I can't tell you how many jokers, from guys in bars to the satellite installation guy, have told me they could have played Division I football. What annoys me about it is that they almost always make the claim when they find out I played Division II football, as if their getting one of the thousands of letters a D-I program sends out means they were automatically better ball players than the D-II guys. Give me a break. Almost all of my teammates at Adams State had dozens of letters from D-I schools, which meant precisely nothing when they got on the field at any level of competition. I used to resent that I did not get recruited by hardly anyone, but I'm not the typical guy who looks back at his ball playing days and remembers how wonderful he was. In fact, quite the opposite: I think I was pretty damn mediocre. In any case, you will never find me running into some guy who played for a year or two in the NFL and telling him, "Yeah, I got invited to a combine once, but blah, blah, blah, so blah, blah, blah." I know my limitations, and let me tell you, I would know brutally and ruthlessly where I stand in the world of football about twelve seconds into an NFL training camp when I got hit like the Michigan towel boy in "The Waterboy."
Costas has a lot of trivia packed into his 3' 7" frame, but it is the kind of trivia that is available to all of us now with the internet. And of course you know that I will hate him forever for jinxing the Indians in the 1997 World Series. I don't mind Stuart Scott, except I get distracted by the droopy eye thing. What's up with that? Did I miss something? Did he get hit in the forehead with a shovel when he was eight and then overcame a five-alarm stutter and I'm now offending everyone in sight? Please let me know. Berman's nicknames jumped the shark before the Fonz, but whatever, they are part of his schtick. Like most people, I just dig that he is such a fan of football and that he has so much fun with his job. I wrote this over on Big Tent, but I thought the article on Berman in SI this week was horrible, and Keith Olbermann came off as a total jerk. Of course Olbermann has reason to be angry, he's holding down that coveted Phil Donahue-Alan Keyes slot on MSNBC, a known spring board to success. Speaking of bad talk shows, have you tried to watch McEnroe's show? Wow. I love Johnny Mac, but his show is like a mix of the Kid who got brought up too early to be on SportsCenter: "Jimmy Key? How old is that guy? I could hit him,"; Chris Mohr doing the Christopher Walken and Friends bit on Saturday Night Live, with all of the strange pauses and pleading with the audience: "Why don't you call Billy? He could be your friend,"; and the Chris Farley Show: "You know that part in the movie when you shoot the bad guy? That was cool." It is so bad it is worth watching.
I think I heard Darren Pang announcing badminton the other day. It was inspired. Sign me up right now to me an announcer for one of those obscure sports. That would be so great. I swear to God I would just start making up terms, it wouldn't matter which sport it was. "Did you see the headspin she got on that turtlecrotch? I'll tell you what, if the other competitors want to have a chance, they are going to have to carpal-dung on the third buzznut--
--or at least rebunk."
TB
***
8/24/04 – 2:05 PM
Thomas –
I giggled out loud at least three times during that email – inspiring! What is equally great is that they get a fifth-rate anchor and team him with someone, anyone, who they could get from the sport in question. I guess it’s the same thing they do with Then again, it’s the same situation with Randy cross on the NFL telecasts. What’s as good as you making up terms is that you know that the sport itself makes up terms. Maybe my favorite minor sport has to be curling, though. Curling is actually semi-popular in Minnesota, but what’s funny is the best players go to drink and play this silly, silly game, and drink, and then the joke’s on us every Olympics when they sober up and get the same medals that the poor bastard doing the 10,000 meter speedskating semis, trials, and finals gets.
One thing I was thinking last night, and this is obvious but worth mentioning, is how at the Olympics you can pretty much tell the grueling-versus-reward ratio for a sport. In other words, some sports are just freaking hard. But many of them reward that difficulty – it may not be easy to be a world-class decathlete, but track is a high profile sport across the world, and if you win track meets, you are a well-compensated professional. But think about wrestling, or some of the grueling events that exist off in a vacuum that no one knows much about and where the only compensation is a year’s supply of protein bars. Then you get to the Olympics, screw the pooch, finish up out of the medals, and the first thing on your mind is that it is another four years before anyone gives a damn.
That’s a lot of hours in the pool, say, because I don’t think the professional options for swimmers are as good as those for track. Then, of course, there are the sports that just are not the marathon or triathlon. I mean, why wouldn’t you play Olympic softball until they stopped letting you know where practice was held? Softball at that level, and baseball at the major league level, are demanding in their way, and take incredible talent and skill, but none of us who were college athletes ever looked over at the baseball players and thought “Those poor bastards.” The track at Williams was adjacent to the baseball facility, and I remember years of resentment piling up while we were running repeat 200s and they were engaged in long-tossing.
I have not seen the Johnny Mac show. It’s amazing how those things profligate, though, and it is largely because they are so hit and miss. What gifts does it take to be a great talk show host? I love Conan O’Brien, but I am not certain he really possesses any of them. Time slots surely play a role, as does likeability and being funny. I still think the best Sportscenter tandem, hands down, was Patrick-Olbermann, and my guess is that whatever his gripes with both ESPN and Bristol, he really, really wishes he’d just learned to drive and gotten a license, which at least on the surface was one of his main impediments when he did the Big Show. He may have been the last one who peppered his shows with just the right number of catchphrases without having them take over his telecasts. (By the way – Stuart Scott had to miss something like six months because something seriously bad happened to his eye – for a while he was blind in that eye, and he may still be. I do not recall if it was an injury or some sort of nasty infection.)
I’ll tell you one thing – I cannot possibly think of a greater moment than being on the top of that medal stand and hearing the National Anthem. I’d absolutely lose it and would cry like Dick Vermeil. Of course now that women’s triple jumpers are going 50 feet, I’m even more aware of where I stood in the hierarchy. Though maybe I have a knack for curling and I do not even know it.
This has been fun. Self-indulgent, and decidedly not historical, but fun, and it’s our blog. I’m thinking seriously of going to Beijing in 2008. Hey – let’s start an American team handball team. It looks a lot like a real sport, and my chances of long jumping in those games are limited. Or hell – you and I could be the foundation of a better men’s field hockey team than what the US currently offers. Give it some thought. In the meantime, back to the books.
dcat
Rebunk Fantasy League
For those of you who did not see, we have a fantasy league at Yahoo called "Rebunk." We are league #484791, our password is "history" and the first ten folks to sign up get to be in the league. We have five right now, and it sure would be helpful to pick up a few more.
Here is the site: http://football.fantasysports.yahoo.com/f1
The online draft date and time is Thursday, August 26 at 4:30 PM Pacific time, 7:30 PM Eastern time. If you cannot be there at that time you can pretty easily pre-rank the players you want to draft, or let the league do it for you.
Sign on up.
Monday, August 23, 2004
Olympian Correspondence - Part 2
[Note: here is the second part of an ongoing correspondence between Derek and me on the Olympics. Scroll down for Part 1.]
8/23/04 – 4:59 PM
Mr. Numbers:
I think we've exhausted the whole gymnastics/diving/figure skating/any event in the X-Games that doesn't involve a tape measure or stop watch/synchronized swimming thing. But how dare you bring boxing into to this discussion? Boxing? The cleanest, fairest, least fixed sport out there? For shame. At least theoretically in boxing a judge can count punches. And when a guy gets knocked down you have a pretty good feel for the effectiveness of punching. In case it hasn't been made clear before, I love boxing. But... man, has it fallen off. Has some political scientist come up with a poverty model based on boxing yet? They should. You have to be fairly desperate, or kind of sick (if you know what I mean), to get punched in the face for a living. I think the fact that less and less Americans seem to be boxing--our Olympic teams now seem to be either really young guys or 30 year olds who just got out of the pen--says something about how desperate our poor are nowadays. It reminds me of the old Chris Rock joke (long, long before he got his teeth fixed and made the wretched "Head of State") about how only the poorest people boxed: first it was the Irish, then the Italians, then black boxers, then Hispanics. You just know there are some Indians out there ready to whup somebody's ass.
Phelps was absolutely amazing. The swimming was generally a lot of fun to watch. I'm sure track will suck me in too. The Olympics always make me wonder why I don't really watch those sports any other time. It's not because those sports aren't good for spectators--people really get into swimming and track during the Olympics. I'd have to guess that it is the Olympics themselves that sabotage those sports. Such a big stage, once every four years, do or die in so many cases. Every other swimming or track meet just seems so diminished by comparison. That said, I look forward to seeing what Phelps can do in four years. Anything less than 45 medals will be a disappointment. (My wife just chimed in and said something about how next time maybe all the swimmers could find some suits that actually cover the entirety of their butt cracks. She has a point-—more than once I’ve wondered if some of these guys work in the plumbing department at Home Depot.)
As far as USA Basketball goes, I agree completely about the Dream Team thing. Look, the 1992 team brought together Magic, Bird, and Jordan, that's what made it a dream. That the other guys on that team were some of the greatest players ever, and they were still a sideshow to the big three should tell folks something about how great Magic, Bird, and Jordan really were. They were fun to watch together. Just amazing. How the mighty have fallen. I'm not going to pile on this team, like everyone else I think the selection process was screwed up and left off any outside shooters. Lithuania just backed into the lane and dared the Americans to shoot over them, and they couldn't. Ugly. Obviously there are shooters in the United States, but those shooters are not among the best players in the NBA now because the league is built almost entirely around a style of play that emphasizes one on one play and dunking the basketball. I love that style of offensive ball, but it works best in the team game when it is mixed with outside shooting and great passing. Think about some of the great college basketball teams of the past fifteen years. The Fab Five had all the one on one game, but were only okay passers and could not shoot--they didn't win it all. Those insane UNLV teams could do all the athletic stuff, but people forget that they had a legitimate point guard in Greg Anthony running the show and Anderson Hunt knocking down everything from outside. Those two guys mixed with the athleticism of Stacy Augman and Larry Johnson, Coach Jerry Tarkanian making them play tenacious defense, and that team was nearly unstoppable. Duke beating them was one of the greatest upsets of the last half century. I'm not kidding. The point is that that mix of styles is largely gone from American basketball. We are learning that the hard way. It will be interesting to see if we can get more Americans seriously playing basketball and bringing back shooting, passing, and defense into the game.
Not surprisingly from this Cleveland fan, my great hope for basketball is that LeBron James leads its resurrection. These Olympics might be the watershed moment. It is going to be really, really interesting to see how LeBron responds to Larry Brown after Games are over. Brown has done nothing but insult the kid since the whole process has started. First he said LeBron couldn't guard anyone when he got to training a few weeks ago. Then he didn't play him much even as the U.S. wasn't playing very well. Then he finally put him in the game for some real PT against Greece, LeBron dove on the floor for balls and sparked the team to victory, and Brown said something like "He's 19, he should be diving for balls." Still, LeBron played the whole fourth quarter in the next game against Australia and basically led the team in a comeback win. Then Brown only played him a couple of minutes against Lithuania, and not at all in the second half, supposedly because LeBron is not a great outside shooter (on a team that is shooting a combined 15% from behind the shorter international three point line). I'm all for giving a coach the benefit of the doubt, but it just seems like Larry Brown is going out of his way to disrespect LeBron James. It is not as if LeBron is a rookie on the Dream Team, just happy to be there and soak it all in. It might not be saying much, but right now he is the third best player on that team behind Duncan and Iverson.
How do you think Bird, Magic, or Jordan would have responded to such behavior from a coach? Those guys used to make up or inflate slights from other players and coaches just to motivate themselves. Now LeBron James has a legitimate gripe against Larry Brown, and how he responds to it will tell us a lot about the future of American basketball. We need LeBron, with his unique style of play, to be the next superstar. We need him to win championships to have credibility. Superstars who win championships need a little bit of an edge. I hope LeBron stays quiet in public for the rest of the games. I also hope that he comes home from Athens and starts circling dates on his calendar. And when the Cavs play the Pistons, I hope his statline reads 40 points, 15 assists, and 12 rebounds, six steals, two blocked shots, and a technical foul for playing Chauncey Billups so tight on defense that Chauncey has to go into therapy. We need more kids styling their games after Magic and Bird instead of doing bad imitations of Michael Jordan in his first three years. LeBron can open eyes to another style of basketball. But he has to deal with Larry Brown first.
TB
***
8/23/04 – 6:55 PM
Slappy –
I actually think that what will make LeBron legitimately great is that he came in with Carmello and Dwyane Wade and that these three will feed each other in much the way that Bird and Magic did and is something that Jordan simply never had. The fact is, looking at the numbers and what they did for their positions – Magic being able to play all five positions on the court, Larry being clearly the greatest passing forward of all time – those two are not behind Jordan by too far, but Jordan was so much better than his contemporaries that it elevated him all the more. Lebron and Carmello and Dwyane (and please, take a look at those names for a second and ask yourself how that confluence happened – within a year or so of one another mothers of this generation’s future superstars said “‘Carmello’ – now that’s a boy’s name!” or “’Dwyane’ – now that’s a name you can set a clock by!”)
Track and swimming are both just legitimately great to watch. And as much as I love football and baseball and basketball, I still think that there is something to the decathlon champion (America’s hope being Tom Pappas, of Greek origin) being the greatest athlete in the world. And most people just have no idea how fast a ten second 100 is, or how far a 27-foot long jump is, or just how high seven feet eight inches really is. There is definitely something to the fact that anything other than the Olympics and, every other year the World championships, it’s all a letdown. But USA Track and Field has always had marketing problems, and the drug stuff did not help at all this year. The timing was so bad, and the rest of the world just loves to see us have our comeuppance. But the one thing I love about track and swimming is the purity of it. You know this even better than I, but how many guys have you run into in bars who have said “I could have played college football but (my high school coach didn’t like me/I got a hangnail/I chose another path)” and how mad does it make you? And as you know, I have buried deep with me my own self-loathing because the one regret I have is not at least trying to play football in college after being recruited by a bunch of DIII schools (and laughed heartily at by anyone higher). But we don’t get that in track, except for the guys who simply lie about times and distances.
But whereas back in my hometown guys proclaim that they could have played college football “if only,” it’s hard to take a guy who ran an 11.4 100 seriously when he talks like he was just a good coach away from going to the Olympics. I know brutally, ruthlessly just where I stood in the world of track and field all along. Ditto swimmers. There is something pure about that, and that is why so many people love track, even if every four years. If only they could work to capitalize on it, because with all of the events and all of the room for different athletes and body types, it is just a mesmerizing sport.
One thing that never ceases to entertain me is these tiny little sports that are out there that, have their own hierarchies and status pissing matches, and probably guys who get more tail than the rest. I’m sure they are phenomenal athletes, and I watched some matches, and they are surely quick, but badminton? This is where my old hierarchy of sports arguments comes in.
I remember well in college we were at a meet at Umass and one of our assistant coaches, former head track coach who moved on to assistant when he got the head football job at Williams (Dick farley just retired with one of the best winning percentages in all of college history) was watching as the 10,000 meter runners were loping around the track looking miserable. And he said without any guile whatsoever, ”Do you think a single one of these guys would be doing this if he could run the 100?” That just about sums it up for me. Every kid runs dashes and tries to throw things a long way and jumps over or through stuff. I’m not convinced a whole lot of them decide to find springboards that are side-by-side and do the same exact dive with as much artistry as possible. At least I wouldn’t advise it to a kid in my hometown.
(Bonus Farleyisms – and keep in mind that we have had hands-down the best athletic program in Division III at Williams for a decade plus – he always used to say to us “The only reason you guys are here is because there is no Division Four,” and at the beginning of every football season he’d say to the guys “I got you guys into this place. That’s the last thing I’m going to do for you.” I loved that guy. His son, who started off at Villanova but transferred to Williams his sophomore year and was all-everything for them is on the Pats roster this year – fourth Williams guy since my time there to go to the NFL, and as you know my friend and former teammate Ethan is still with the Ravens and is doing well.)
I know you said we’re done with it, but here’s the other thing about judged sports: You were talking about how you become an expert every four, or two, years. But the thing is, American biases aside, in most of these sports, if I bother to watch long enough to make predictions, my score usually falls within the extremes. That cannot be good for any sport. And I’d probably come cheaper than most of the French judges.
I absolutely agree that the delay is killing me, largely because I am incapable of peeking in so the element of surprise is gone. So unless I read something like “Modern Pentathlete turns gun on French judge, demands tighter leotards,” I am unlikely to go to Bravo at 1:00 am to figure out what’s going on in the rounds of the zany modern pentathlon. It even takes some of the zing out of the track.
You know what, I realize that “jumped the shark” is SO 2002, but for me Bob Costas jumped the shark sometime ago. Part of it is that those stories he always tells that makes him sound so savvy are actually at the disposal of any sports fans who reads the three or four main magazines and websites plus a couple of good sports sections online or otherwise. For another he seems to get just slightly more smug with each passing year. Stuart Scott drives me nuts most of the time too (I really do half expect to hear him say “Sweet Sassy Molassy” one of these times – which would fully redeem him, by the
way) and I am pretty convinced that while he is a great guy who truly loves what he does, cares for his colleagues and all that, Chris Berman drives me insane. But what is most amazing is listening to these secondary sports and the quality of the announcing. It ranges from the insipid to the merely incompetent, and I have to wonder – is it possible to make a living announcing team handball, women’s ping pong (sorry, table tennis – and by the way, I knew some guys at Williams who, if you put a cup full of beer on each corner, would stand a pretty solid chance just based on placement and finesse) and beach volleyball? And while this is not really the place, I really cannot hear anymore of Tim McCarver and his pretty clear sexual attraction for Derek Jeter. Not that there would be anything wrong with it, but Timmy, baby, he’s got your number and he’s not calling. All of the on-air fawning is making you look a little bit desperate.
Finally, the US swept the 400 again. Pretty soon they are going to make our one-lappers strap gymnasts to their back just to make it fair. Then at least gymnasts would be part of a legitimate sport. They’d be like coxswains in crew. (I still think that coxswains being “athletes” has to be the greatest scam in the long, proud history of charlatanism.)
That’s the word from here.
dc
Olympian Correspondence - Part 1
[Note: In the interest of constantly keeping Rebunk fresh and original, Derek and I decided to steal from Sports Guy on ESPN.com the idea of posting our email correspondence. Over the next day or so, we will share our thought to each other about the Olympics. Here is the first exchange.]
8/23/04 – 12:45 PM
DC:
Never have I gone into a Summer Olympics less interested as a fan. The Cold War made things more interesting, not allowing pros into sports like basketball made things more interesting, not having six thousand channels with entrancing new shows like “Entourage” (maybe more on that later) kept my eye on the prize, and the internet and ESPN News mean I know the results before NBC shows the events on tape delay. But so what? Everyone says this stuff. The truth is that I’m still hooked. I’m still watching. Best non-Michael Corleone-sounding Al Pacino voice: Just when I thought I was out, the Olympics pulled me back in.
I know where you stand on this, so let’s share with everyone else: the Olympics have reminded me once again that athletic events that are won and lost based on judging are not sports. Gymnasts are athletes, no doubt whatsoever about that, but Gymnastics is not a sport. Just look at this Paul Hamm gold medal kerfuffle (I love that word). I mean come on, all of the judging when the gymnasts don’t swing into the stands and kill women wearing funny hats is based on whether or not some judge liked the routine or the color of the outfit or the snappiness of the music. Even in the Hamm case, the whole kerfuffle (I can help myself) is over the starting value of the routine—subjective judgments about how theoretically hard it is to do certain maneuvers. As an aside: how inept are the South Koreans? I think it’s all hoakum anyway, but am I the only one who thinks that people who spend their whole lives doing this stuff, who planned the routine, and who practiced it for months ought to have a pretty good idea what the starting value is? It’s not like these guys make up the routine on the spot. Nice work on that one, coach.
All of that said, once again, as I have every four years for as long as I can remember, I have become for two weeks an expert on judging gymnastics. I have no hesitation from yelling at my TV screen when a foolish judge who has spent his or her entire life doing this stuff gives a score I deem too low to one of my newly beloved American athletes. My criteria for a high score are pretty simple: swing or tumble fast, bounce or release high, don’t wobble or fall, and stick the landing—or be an American and I will forgive you for failing in one or all of the above. Likewise, in two years Tom-the-totally-biased-figure-skating-expert will no doubt emerge to bring down his wrath on the figure skating judges in the Winter Olympics. Because when D.B. Sweeney skims Moira Kelly’s head along the ice and then tosses her thirty five feet straight up in the air and then catches her, I want to see “10”s, dammit. And, yes, that was “Cutting Edge” reference. How’s that for being comfortable in my manhood? The big point is that as long as the athletes don’t really screw up, the outcome of judged athletic events are all based on ephemera like the tides, the phases of Venus, whether or not the judge had gas during the routine—anything but what the athlete did. So they are not sports.
TB
***
8/23/04 – 1:03 PM
Tom --
I figured I'd start off with a few random points, numbered in the way that a political scientist might do so to imply order and discipline where there is none.
1) I hate judged sports. In fact I am willing to go so far as to say that if there needs to be an intermediary to make the decision as to who won or lost, you are not a real sport. Now there is boxing, but unless we want people dead, you do sort of need judges, lest we have 26 round fights. And even then, when it goes to a judge’s decision in boxing in the pros, I've always thought it should mean automatic rematch. But let's face it -- how many figure skating and gymnastics scandals do we need before those sports lose all credibility? Granted, it will never happen, because every two years, once in winter, once in summer, women who would not know a three iron from a three point shot from a three run home run give NBC a ratings bonanza, but that doesn't make it a real sport. In fact if anything that proves its lack of credibility. Paul Hamm just won the Olympic all- around title based on an arithmetic error. And when this arithmetic error was discovered, of course they changed the results, right? Not quite. So now some Korean kid spends the rest of his life wondering how the hell this sort of thing can happen, and Hamm has the nagging knowledge that he didn't actually, you know, win. Same goes for diving, and obviously it needs not be mentioned that it goes for things like rhythmic gymnastics and synchronized swimming. Oh -- and the biggest flaw here? The "artistic" component. Don't even get me started.
2) I was really annoyed with the media over the Michael Phelps situation. Here is a kid -- and he is just a kid -- who through no fault of his own was anointed the next Marc Spitz. So what happens? Of course he does not win 7 or 8 golds. In 1972 Spitz was basically guaranteed three relay golds. Today's swimming world is far more competitive, and there was little chance he'd sniff Spitz's glory. And so the media built him up to be something of a disappointment even though the guy walked away with a hatful of medals and a slew of golds. This is the same thing that happened to Marion Jones in 1996. The only athletes in my lifetime who have had these expectations imposed upon him and come through were Michael Johnson in 1996 in what was an awesome, awesome display, and Carl Lewis in 1984. And remember how Lewis was treated by idiots who expected him to long jump six times even though he sealed the win with a 28 foot leap on his first attempt and he wisely chose not to jump again. Of course part of this problem is that most people have only a superficial grasp on track and field and less than that on swimming. But it is great for a track guy like me to see the sport be unquestionably the anchor for the Olympics every four years.
3) You know me as well as just about anyone, so you know that I am a USA! USA! type in the Olympics. And we may disagree adamantly on this, but not only do I not care if the men's basketball team wins, I don't care if they even play, and part of me would be happy if we lost. First, I hate pros in the Olympics other than in 1992 because it gets so much attention, and this is when I want track and field to shine. Second, I hate the use of "Dream Team." There was one Dream Team. They steamrolled the world in 1992. They had, to steal Sports Guy's moniker for him, the Basketball Jesus in Larry Joe Bird, they had Barkley at the top of his wisecracking, elbow throwing ways, and they had Magic, Jordan, and Christian Laetner before he became a basketball vagabond and when he was (rightly) in awe just to be there. Is it really shocking to anyone, least of all to Larry Brown, who should have known better, that a team led by Allen Iverson might not quite have the leadership it takes to win? Sports Guy and others have harped on the crappy selection process, so I will not go into that except to say that it's one thing to lose and say "ahh, we played like crap," but what is more alarming is when we lose even though we played pretty well, which is what happened against Lithuania. That's right -- we've lost to Lithuania, Puerto Rico, and Italy in the last month in men's basketball.
4) I am shocked and amazed that the winner of the women's shot put was on the juice. Shocked and amazed.
Derek
Monday, August 16, 2004
Pretending to be Serious
It is a Rebunk sort of week at HNN. The frontpage has articles by me, "Does America Usually Win the War but Lose the Peace?" and Dr. Tootle, "In the Shadow of William McKinley." For my part, I threw a lot of ideas out there in that article, I'm real interested in seeing what sticks, what gets tossed around, and what gets whizzed back at me by angry and clearly unreasonable, hateful people (like Derek).
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Pop Reading Circles
We all need to reload. Every once in a while, probably too often, I like to do a little leisure reading. I won't call it reading for fun because, nerd that I am, I have fun reading history books. Look around HNN, clearly I am not the only one who enjoys curling up with a little 800 page biography of someone like John Quincy Adams. But when I do some leisure reading, I want it to be as unrelated to my work as possible. Science fiction, thrillers, mysteries, anything that will keep me from thinking, "Hey, there's an interesting point I can fit into a lecture/article/book/rant on HNN (wait... dammit)." Also, I usually avoid books that are considered literature for my leisure reading. Literature generally means nuance (or worse, confusion), and I do not want to have to work to figure out what is going on. I'm not picky, and I'm not a real snob about writing. Just give me a story that reads quickly, I can forget as soon as I'm done, and I'll be on my way back to Old Man Eloquent (that's one of JQA's nicknames--dear God, I need help).
So recently I went to a used book store and picked up "The Apocalypse Watch" by Robert Ludlum. Both of the recent Borne movies were based on Ludlum books, and both were enjoyable in that spy novel/movie sort of way. Ludlum, the dust jacket assured me, had by 1996 sold over 200 million copies worldwide in thirty-two languages and forty countries. Fantastic, 200 million is, like, a lot. His books are everywhere, all those people can't be totally wrong (yes Derek, before you say it, I know: Backstreet Boys and Hootie and the Blowfish, whatever. You’re just angry because you secretly love “I Want it That Way”). Anyway, Ludlum seemed like perfect leisure reading. Then, on page thirty-five of 645, the hero of the story, Drew Latham, found himself in a car driven by a man he thought was an American Marine, but actually was a member of the book's bad guy (obviously) neo-Nazi movement who had pulled a gun on Drew as he drove:
"Christ, you're one of them. You son of a bitch, you're one of them!"
"You will meet others, and then you will be gone!"
"It's all true, isn't it? You're all over Paris--"
"Und England, und die Vereinigten Staaten, und Europa!... Sieg Heil!"
"Sieg up your ass," said Drew quietly, leveling his left hand in the rushing shadows beneath the weapon, his left foot inching across the Citroen's floorboard. "How about a big surprise, blitzkrieg style?"
Seriously, that is what it says. I could never, never, make that up. (Quick aside: Will it be plagiarism when I have "He Lived Life Like a Big Surprise, Blitzkrieg Style!" etched on my tombstone? Just asking.) The story was fine, as far as that goes, but as my little representative example shows, the dialogue was amazingly, distractingly, bad.
My question is: Is this normal for Robert Ludlum? Is his terrible dialogue common knowledge among those who read his books? Why wasn't I warned about this? In high school and as an undergraduate my friends with all different interests read different pop fiction books and we passed them around or recommended titles or authors to each other. I remember reading "The Andromeda Strain" on the recommendation of a friend in junior high, which started me on reading Crichton’s up and down work. In college, my buddy R.J. rightly told me to read on in the Vampire Chronicles after I came away from "Interview with a Vampire" mighty disappointed. Some of this sharing even extended into grad school. I'm ashamed to say I had not read "The Lord of the Rings" until my friends Robert and JD harassed me into it. Robert also got me to read the Dune books, which I thought were a little disappointing, but not for the writing. It is interesting to note that the titles suggested by my grad school friends are by now classics. They had read them years ago.
We all seem to run in a professional circle that doesn't offer much guidance on popular fiction. I know where to look to find the best history books and important literature, but beyond the bestseller lists, I have no idea what popular fiction to read nowadays. And those lists are so often based on a reputation made with one very good book that those authors can glide their way through a career writing pretty crappy books. For example, "The Firm" was a great read (but a godawful movie), "A Time to Kill" was a rip-off of "To Kill a Mockingbird," and the next five of Grisham's bestselling novels I read were 600 page books that had enough story for a 150 page novellas at best. I see names like Ken Follett, Richard North Patterson, Peter Straub, Mary Higgins Clark, and so on all the time, but I know nothing about their books. And the Ludlum experience did not inspire me to find out on my own.
Within the field of history we do those "What we are reading" lists all the time. I'm wondering what kind of pop fiction people have read and enjoyed. Maybe that is a stupid question and I am the only one who has this problem. Maybe there is some kind of Ludlum help line I can call. Maybe I've revealed myself to be hopelessly shallow and unsophisticated--the Jessica Simpson Soul Glo thing probably should have tipped some people off to that one. But I need some help before John Quincy Adams finds his way into my dissertation on World War II.
Thursday, August 5, 2004
Jessica and Darryl
(Disclaimer: Do not read this post. It has nothing to do with history or politics and is only marginally related to culture. Then again, it does have nothing to do with history or politics and is only marginally related to culture.)
Okay, this one has been bothering me for a while, so now I'm going to bother you with it, too. You know that kind of new Jessica Simpson song "Angels"? Don't pretend I'm the only one who listens to Top 40 regular stations you pretentious music snobs. I listen to the radio for about half an hour a week, and I hear it almost every day. Heck it's number twenty-nine on Rick Dees' chart this week, so you know it's the goods. You know the song--it is absolutely terrible. Now, I'm pretty forgiving of terrible pop songs, by which I mean I do not care enough to spend the time or energy saying that they are terrible, but this one is special. She goes totally overboard trying to take the song to the next level during the chorus. Again, that is not why I'm spending the time on this song--if it was I would be writing weekly rants about Christina Aguilera wailing like a seal in heat in all of her songs.
(As an aside, Simpson's television show with her husband Nick Lachey, "Nick and Jessica," is mesmerizing. She plays the dumbass part perfectly, he plays the normal guy living the dream life perfectly, and the producers manage to find just the right music and editing to make it all work. Wait, did I just type that? Uhhh...not that I watch that trash unless my wife changes the channel when I'm not looking. Grunt.) No, the genius of "Angels" is its long chorus which makes up most of the song: "And through it all/
He offers me protection/A lot of love and affection/Whether I'm right or wrong/And down the waterfall/Wherever it may take me/I know that life won't break me/When I come to call/He won't forsake me/I'm loving angels instead." Never mind the lyrics, which are funny enough, it is how she sings them. The first time I heard "Angels," something bothered me. It sounded so familiar. If you haven't heard the song, please take a moment to listen to this sample. Just the last part is what is important. It has strange timing or something that makes it stand out. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
Well, it does if you are an Eddie Murphy fan. Two words: "Soul Glo." Oh yeah, Soul Glo--from "Coming to America"--remember? Eddie is an African prince who comes to Queens to find his wife, and the woman he falls for is engaged to one Darryl Jenks, heir to the "Soul Glo" hair products fortune. (Of course Darryl was played by pre-ER Eriq LaSalle, but that is not important right now.) The ongoing joke is that Darryl and his family all have these really shiny and greasy jheri curls. But the best part is the jingle for the product, which plays while Darryl is pulling his car into the parking lot at McDowell's, Eddie's love interest's Dad's restaurant. The lyrics are something like "Just let your SOUL GLO Baby/Feeling oh-so Silky Smooth/Just let it shine through, yeah.../Just let your SOOOOOOOOOUL GLO-oohhh," but again, it is how whoever sang it, sang it. Totally over the top, with that ridiculous high note at the end. I cannot find a link to the tune online, but if you've seen the movie you remember. If you haven't seen the movie, um, uh, whatever thought I was just having was so absurd I forgot where I was going with it.
Maybe that tune just sticks out to me because I've seen Coming to America approximately four thousand times--"If a man wants to call himself Muhammad Ali, Goddammit this is a free country, we should respect his wishes and call him Muhammad Ali." "His Momma call him Clay, I'm gonna call him Clay" and so on, ad infinitum--maybe the tune sticks because in seventh grade Matt Arias's voice hadn't changed yet and he used to sing it perfectly, high notes and all, in science class until we were all rolling.
Whatever the reason, every single time I hear Jessica Simpson screaming away at that song of hers, I have to pull my car over to the side of the road because I'm back in seventh grade and Matt Arias is hitting all the high notes and I'm about to pee my pants. There is just something brilliant about Jessica Simpson singing the Soul Glo song.
Friday, July 30, 2004
Goosebumps?
[Self Editor's note: Derek has done a great job of summarizing the Democratic convention and the various speeches, so read his posts. This post is just my take on Senator Kerry's acceptance speech last night.]
How can I say this? Hmmm... Let's go with: I was disappointed. I seem to be in the minority on this one--lots of smart, interested people from all over the spectrum thought it was a solid effort. I think I know why, too: lots of smart, interested people, being smart and interested, watched the whole evening's festivities. I did not. The wife and I watched the "Last Comic Standing" wild card revealed show--the insufferably not funny one-noter Jay London made it into the final six, and I suppose that could be a symbol of the foolishness of the American voter, blah, blah, blah. Then we turned on C-SPAN at 10:00 to see Senator Kerry give his speech. We missed the kiddies talking, we missed the video, we only saw part of Cleland's introduction. From what I understand, the video especially was excellent. Maybe, then, we weren't properly prepped for the speech. We turned it on cold.
The acceptance speech at a convention should be home run time. The crowd is lively. They want to love their candidate. They want sweeping rhetoric. They want to be pumped up. You can get away with a lot of stuff that would normally be considered hokey because the crowd will carry you through, and because conventions by their nature are almost always wildly optimistic. I love that stuff. I love wild optimism and sweeping rhetoric, even outside of conventions. I enjoy what most people consider hokey, and without the snooty sense of irony: "Harrumph, Margaret, look how those poor dumb sheep are buying all this claptrap about freedom and democracy and patriotism. Plebeians." Not me. Yell out "Freedom" as those bastards torture you. Pick up the flag of a nation that had enslaved you, and die waving it, as you storm Fort Wagner. Tell Private Ryan, and us all, to earn this. I'll be covered in goosebumps.
The point is that--even beyond these movie examples that should move anyone with a heart--I'm pretty easy, and I'm not ashamed to say it. I can and have gotten pumped up by people who I generally think are wrong giving great lines in speeches with which I generally disagree. Bill Clinton is a great example, Al Sharpton does it all the time, and even Al Gore's acceptance speech in 2000 had a few goosebump parts. Not last night.
The "John Kerry, reporting for duty," and salute were a good start. He had a few nice lines in the middle and at the end. I liked, "The future doesn't belong to fear; it belongs to freedom." (Columnist James Lileks has a better version, but during the speech I thought Senator Kerry's worked pretty well.) At the beginning, instead of picking up on the duty theme, which would have been great, he went into this strange discussion about his mom teaching him that trees were cathedrals and how that means women should have full equality. I know that is not what he said, but it seemed like it because the sentences dragged out, the phrasing was awkward, the ideas jumbled together, and pacing was rushed. And the same problems continued throughout. It was like there was an invisible jockey riding the senator's back beating the snot out of him with a riding crop.
As far as what he said, people can and will squabble over whether he should have tried to appeal more to the center. Of course there was the ubiquitous problem of vagueness, no doubt to make another appearance in New York next month. Whatever. The content was there, but with no coherent theme or organization, like he was just throwing out ideas to see what would stick. Patriotism! Splat! Honesty! Splat! Vietnam! Splat! Taxes! Splat! Constitution! Splat! Healthcare! Splat! The Flag! Splat! Help is on the way! Splat! Honestly, it was confusing, and he was talking so fast that the listener did not have any time to figure out where he was going and where he had just been.
Then it just stopped. I could not believe it. No goosebumps. Nothing.
Now in a month we get to face a nominee who has delivered precisely one great line in his presidential career, off the cuff while standing on the rubble that was the World Trade Center. President Bush will be over-coached as usual, and muddling through lines that are not his own. The goosebump odds are pretty low. Maybe I'm just being shallow using this criteria, but maybe the ability to inspire has something to do with the ability to lead. In a time of war we could use a little inspiration from our leaders. That does not seem forthcoming.
Sigh. I'm going to go watch Lord of the Rings.
Friday, July 23, 2004
Real Worlds
I like New York Times columnist David Brooks. I really do. He is one of the most astute and interesting commentators on American society writing today. Which is why it is so disappointing that he repeated a common trope in one of his most recent columns. For those of you not inclined to read the link or go through the obnoxious registration process, here is the short version of the article: At Yale three professors--John Lewis Gaddis, Paul Kennedy, and Charles Hill--teach a popular class called Grand Strategy. In the class, they look at contemporary foreign policy through the ideas of prominent grand strategy theorists in the past. The idea, as Brooks explains it, is to see "connections between big ideas and big events." Great. Big ideas, rock and roll, my kind of stuff.
Then the article turns into a paean to Hill, a career diplomat who has worked all over the place, including spending time as a speech-writer for Henry Kissinger and on the staff of George Shultz. Brooks describes a "cult of Hill," made up of students who sought out his straightforward advice on all manner of issues, public and private. Professor Hill, it seems, is a magnificent teacher, adored by his students, who take his lessons and become mature, independent thinkers on their own. And why? Because Hill is an experienced person who can offer life's lessons. Fine, I'll betray my own ignorance and admit I do not really know Hill or his work, so I'll take Brooks' word for it.
But then he continues (and I get to my point, finally):
Why can't this happen more often? It is no accident that [Hill's students] are drawn to a teacher who is not a lifelong academic, but who was active in the real world. Yet our universities operate too much like a guild system, throwing plenty of people with dissertations at students, not enough with practical knowledge.
Why aren't there more scholars, like Hill, Gaddis and Kennedy, who teach students to be generalists, to see the great connections? Instead, the academy encourages squirrel-like specialization.
Too many universities have become professionalized information-transmission systems, when teaching should instead be this sort of relationship between the experienced Hill and [his young students], on whom little now is lost.
Ugh. Well first off, there is the obvious problem with logic. We need more teachers like Hill with practical experience, because teachers with practical experience are better generalists. Except, of course, in this case. I'm not a math guy, but I am pretty sure that two is more than one. Of the three teachers he names, two (Gaddis and Kennedy) are pretty much lifelong academics. How is that even possible? John Lewis Gaddis and Paul Kennedy must have superhuman vision to see past the spires of the ivory tower.
Again, I'm inclined to agree with much that Brooks says. I am all about big ideas and big events. I love helping get my students past the tyrannical moral relativism that starts with good intentions (everyone has a perspective) but too often leads to horrifying ends (all perspectives are equal, there is no good or bad, even on issues like slavery or the Nazis). And here I am ensconced in the academy, too. Wait, then there are the academic authors of The Heritage of World Civilizations, a world history textbook that in its first part focuses on the big foundational ideas of various world civilizations.
Obviously, this could go on all day, but the point is that I take exception to is Brooks' sweeping generalization about academics. Especially the foundation of that generalization: the idea that somehow Hill is such a better teacher with such a broader perspective because he was "active in the real world." This idea that the academy is not the real world pervades popular culture, classrooms at all levels, journalism, politics, and the workplace (not to mention the message boards of the History News Network). And it is utter nonsense.
With a nod to my colleagues (especially Derek), with whom I've had this discussion on multiple occasions, when and where does the real world stop on college campuses? Employees of colleges and universities get paid in real money, they pay real taxes, they have real expenses, they have real families, those real families get real illnesses, some go to real churches, some play in real bands, some cheer on their favorite sports teams, they watch the same fake and real television shows, and some play in real local sports leagues that play real sports, and they all face real problems. Maybe I'm missing something. When you get tenure do you also learn a secret handshake and password that gets you into a magic place where the bonds of reality no longer apply? Is it a happy place where grandma wins at the slots, little people ride fake horses, and your scantily-clad dream date serves you pitchers of beer? (And yes, that's a Happy Gilmore reference--someone smuggled a bootleg copy onto campus so I could drink ambrosia and watch it on a magic VCR.)
The academy-is-not-the-real-world lie is stupid on so many different levels it is staggering. It implies that the nonacademic experience is universally different from the academic life. It for no reason privileges those nonacademic experiences over the academic life. As if a career inside the beltway, on a farm, in factory, in an office building, on a construction crew, in a foreign embassy, in the home, or even (gasp!) as an opinion journalist automatically gives someone a better feel for the big picture than someone who spends their life studying criminal behavior from a college campus. More perniciously, the lie implies that the academic life is universally the same. It takes no account of the very real differences among all of the different schools, big and small, across the country. It takes no account of the difference among all the areas of study in the academy. (In some of the experimental hard sciences that have yet to be proven money makers, the academy not only the real world, it is the only world.) Even outside of the sciences, and even granting that academics outside of economics departments generally lean pretty hard to the left, the stereotype that all academics are ideologically the same is false. And even if academics all had the same ideology and all believed in "squirrel-like specialization" in their research, the idea that they all teach the same is ridiculously false. I have brought up this point before in other places, but it bears repeating: if the admittedly left-leaning professoriate is really trying to propagandize their students into a bunch of socialist zombies, they are doing a terrible job. The majority of college graduates are Republicans. Give most professors their due for not bringing too much ideology into the classroom.
Which brings me to the most important point. The lie does something that should make every American conservative and liberal cringe, it strips the individuals who make up the academy of their individuality. The academy is not like some Borg cube full of automatons serving the collective. (That's right, Star Trek and Happy Gilmore in the same post. I'm a nerd.) Lots and lots of individuals with individual ideas and personalities and talent levels and personal experiences work in the academy. I am, and hope to continue to be, in the academy. And I refuse to have my experiences, my personality, and my ideas taken away from me by fools who insist on arguing that I live in some fantasy world of privilege where there are no consequences for actions, and where individuality does not matter.
Friday, July 9, 2004
A Rhode Island Fourth
It is my good fortune that my wife's family, on her mom's side, is from Bristol, Rhode Island. As a result, I spent the holiday weekend enjoying Bristol Rhode Island's Annual Fourth of July Celebration. At 219, it is the oldest continuous Fourth of July celebration in the United States. And they are proud of it. Big time.
If you haven't been there it is kind of hard to describe the enthusiasm the residents of Bristol bring to the celebration. Houses, schools, and businesses are covered in red, white, and blue flags, bunting, and various other paraphernalia. Everyone wears red, white, and blue shirts, socks, giant hats. The weeks leading up to the fourth are filled with public shows and private parties. The Navy sends a ship and crew to participate in the festivities. And a carnival is always in town that week, too.
The celebrations culminate in the parade. Bands come from all over the state--I know, I know, Rhode Island is tiny, actually shockingly small, as in I've seen almost the entire place in three short visits, but still. National Guardsmen, firefighters, police units, Revolution reenactors, bands for various ethnic groups, beauty pageant contestants, college students on elaborate floats they built, politicians, and veterans all march or ride in the parade. How enthusiastic are the residents of Bristol for their parade? If you want a good spot along the parade route--marked year-round, of course, by a red white and blue stripe down the middle of the road--you can't just lay out a blanket the night before on your chosen place. No, the city confiscates any blankets or chairs or anything else placed along the parade route before 5:00am the day of the parade. So people go out at 2:00am and walk around on their spots. And they stay there all night. No back row seats allowed for any self-respecting Bristolians.
This year the parade was on July 5 because a city ordinance prohibits holding a parade on a Sunday, and it absolutely poured down rain. But that hardly dampened the enthusiasm. As my wife's aunt pointed out to me across the street, even pro golfer and Bristol native Billy Andrade stood in the rain to watch the festivities. People lined the streets literally by the thousands. They laughed and cheered on friends in funny costumes. They cheered award-winning drum lines as they marched and played. They cheered when guys and gals dressed in Revolutionary War uniforms fired blanks into the air. They cheered the loudest for the veterans, no matter where and when they served. And boy was I glad it was raining when they stood up from their lawn chairs and soaked blankets and cheered for the troops just back from Iraq.
The family highlight of this year's parade had to be when my wife's aunt was yelling to a kid she knew with Down Syndrome who was walking with Rhode Island Congressman Patrick Kennedy. The yelling got the attention of Representative Kennedy, who walked over--I'm not kidding, I can't make this stuff up--and planted a big fat kiss on my wife's grandmother. My first inclination was to find a disinfectant. He is, after all, a Kennedy, and who knows where those lips have been? But Grandma seemed happy, and on the parade went.
Later on that night when all the festivities had died down and the exhausted residents prepared to go to work the next day, and after my six-month old who had braved the rain with the rest of us (and with nary a peep of protest) had gone to sleep for the night, my wife and I went for a walk around the town. Bristol is an old American town. Nearly every house carries a plaque dating when it was built, and by whom. Capt. William Caldwell, 1794. Samuel Jones, 1823. Most of these homes are from after the Revolution. In part, I think, because the town had a bit of a rough go of it during that war. Some of the churches were in their second, third, or even fourth incarnations; the historical markers told of burnings at the hands of British troops and the accidents that always seem to come with time. It was foggy and quiet down by the harbor, the boats were tied up at the piers, and we could hear a solitary bell on a buoy out in the dark. Even in the dark and quiet it was clear that the waterfront was in the process of being rebuilt to cater to the summer crowds that have begun to flow north from Newport. Even that night, a few of the renovated bars rattled with sailors enjoying a little shore leave with some of the town's cleaner-cut twenty-somethings. Things had changed. It wasn't too long ago, my mother-in-law later told us, that most of the folks in Bristol didn't wander down there by the water after dark.
Bristol had been a minor industrial town at the turn of the last century. In came the immigrants, people like my wife's family. The Caldwell's and Jones's moved out, replaced by Andrade's, Silvia's, and Crespi’s. Bristol became an Italian American and Portuguese American town. And so it has stayed. At Mass on Sunday morning the new priest, a Father Gaffney, joked that he was well-equipped to serve Grandma’s Italian American parish. You see he grew up in an Italian neighborhood, and when his mom would call in an order to the local bakery he knew which bag to pick up: the one that said Gaffni. So at the Fourth of July parties in Bristol the people have hamburgers and hot dogs. Much to my great joy, they do the famous New England clam bakes (or boils, it depends who you ask). But they also eat calamari, Italian-style conch salad, and pasta sauce with rock crabs.
What struck me that night as my wife and I wandered the streets, was that Bristol seemed a strange sort of early American town. A very different group of people from those who built Bristol are now actively living the town’s history. The genealogical ties to the folks who laid the first cornerstones on the churches and homes are all but gone. The organizers of the first hundred or so Fourth of July celebrations have moved on. For their part, the descendents of the Italians and Portuguese who have come over since the end of the nineteenth century wear their immigrant heritage proudly. They never forget who they are and from where they came. But it is these same people who lined the streets in the pouring rain to celebrate their Independence Day. These same people who are fiercely proud of Bristol’s heritage and history. For them, there is no disconnect, no line demarcating old from new. Each and every one of the 219 years of Fourth of July celebrations belongs to all of the residents of Bristol, no matter when their ancestors made it to these shores.
In their hearts they know a truth: in the most important ways, the Caldwell’s and Jones’s who organized those first parades are no different from the Andrade’s, Silvia’s, and Crespi’s who organized the last. A powerful idea runs through all of America--a living, breathing chord linking past to present. It defines who we are; it defines why we are. Most of the time, it lies hidden beneath the noise and confusion of our everyday lives, a quiet pulse that almost unconsciously drives us forward to this day and the next. But if you ever want to see its power, hear its pulse, feel its might, then head to Bristol, Rhode Island on the Fourth of July. You can’t miss it. It marches down Hope Street.
Just make sure to be there early.
Friday, July 2, 2004
Ex-Presidents as Statesmen
Something a little more fun and contentious...
Every time Independence Day rolls around I get to thinking about that bit of historical providence that had Thomas Jefferson and John Adams dying within hours of each other on July 4, 1826. I also take the opportunity to remind everyone in earshot, much to their chagrin, that Revolutionary War veteran James Monroe also died on July 4, five years later. (I’m sure there is an Oliver Stone movie in there somewhere.)
This year we also have William Jefferson Clinton releasing his obligatory memoirs right in time for the holiday weekend. So with ex-presidents on the mind, I got to thinking it would be interesting to see what people think of the lives of presidents after the presidency. The American presidency really is a pretty unique office; it is not all that often in world history that an individual goes from such power into a sort of retirement. Plenty of presidents either died quickly or were so incapacitated as to make their lives after the presidency tough to judge. But post presidency careers of many of the rest make for some interesting discussions.
Rather than do the work to describe methodology (something we can talk about), or come up with an artificial list, I figure I might as well just jump in with a few comments on the lives and careers of some ex-presidents. This has been done before, but it is quite interesting how some of the most ineffective presidents made great ex-presidents, and vice versa.
Of course one notable exception to that little rule is always first, George Washington. He walked away from the presidency when he could have stayed for life, and he gave the office a dignity it otherwise never could have had. He hated to see partisanship dividing the country, but he stayed above it both in office and out. The United States couldn’t have asked for a better first president and first ex-president.
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson seem to have taken a little while to grow into the role of elder statesman. They both got in the muck for a little while after their presidencies, and neither became especially likable again until they renewed their friendship. Then they accepted positions of more detached dignity from the politics of the country they helped create.
Probably the second greatest ex-president (after Washington) was John Quincy Adams. His presidency and personal reputation were so marred by the unrelenting attacks from Andrew Jackson’s supports that he did not have much of a status as a statesman to live on after he left office. So he returned to the Congress and had a remarkable career working against slavery (and getting the Smithsonian together). For similar reasons Martin Van Buren deserves some credit as a better than average in his life after the presidency.
John Tyler has to rank at the bottom since he took an active role in helping lead the South into rebellion. Unforgivable. Millard Fillmore was another stinker, running for president for the nativist American Party in 1856 and opposing Lincoln’s efforts throughout the Civil War. The Whigs should have been a bit more careful picking their vice-presidential candidates.
Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency was not the corrupt failure his opponents and later observers claimed it to be, and he left the office still enormously popular in the United States and around the world. He toured the world, representing his country well to huge throngs everywhere. And of course at the end he bravely wrote his briliant memoirs while dying from throat cancer.
It pains me to say it, but Theodore Roosevelt was a terrible, if entertaining, ex-president. He constantly sniped at his hand-picked successor in Taft and then tried to subvert diplomacy by clamoring for war during the Wilson administration. He just generally did not act very statesman-like after a presidency that afforded him opportunity to be a great statesman. For crying out loud, one of the reasons President Wilson adopted the draft was to prevent Roosevelt from raising another volunteer regiment he could lead into some kind of suicidal charge on the Western Front.
Ironically, his successor did a much better job. William Howard Taft is at least an above average ex-president, and probably just below John Quincy Adams overall. He found a job that suited his temperament as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and continued to serve his country in that role. There are plenty of specific decisions to disagree with, but few ex-presidents could hope to be as productive as Taft was in such an important position.
Since World War II there has been a full range. Truman acted much as Theodore Roosevelt did, engaging in political battles that were better left to up and comers. That type of activity just isn’t very becoming in an elder statesman. Nixon had nowhere to go but up, and he did, slightly. Ford has been a nonentity. James Carter has been much celebrated for life after leaving the office, and his humanitarian work has been first rate. Still, sometimes he risks that TR/Truman shrill partisanship that should be beneath someone of his stature.
That lesson seems to be understood by both George H.W. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton. They both have a confidence in their public careers that allows them to stay above the everyday partisan battles. Sure, they’ll stump for their party, but the message almost always stays above the angry talking points of the rank and file Republicans and Democrats. In an era of intense partisanship, it is nice to see two ex-presidents acting like statesmen. We need healthy debates, but we also need that reminder that what holds us together is more important than what keeps us apart. Presidents George H.W. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton are right now a visible reminder of that truth. Good for them.
Wednesday, June 30, 2004
The weak link...
...is me.
Stephen returned from his honeymoon yesterday and is moving to Colorado starting tonight.
And oh yeah, he successfully defended his dissertation today, too.
Big congratulations to Dr. Tootle. I'm sure he'll be back posting on Rebunk when he gets settled a bit in his new home.
Update (1 July, 2:30 pm): I am talking to Derek right now and he is also moving to his new home, deep in the heart of Texas. Sheesh, Rebunkers heading all over the country.
Friday, June 25, 2004
Military History and the Academy
Recently, a blogger at Cliopatria who is interested in the everyday lives of people in the past wrote a post calling for some historical work on menstruation. No problem there. How people in the past have dealt with menstruation is an interesting topic that can probably tell us a great deal about gender relationships in the past. But, not to pick on the blogger David Lion Salmanson for a bit of hyperbole, the post included some thoughts on summer reading: "There are some summer reading lists for history floating around at other websites, but I'm not going to link to them because I think they are very boring, more wars, and presidents, and that kind of thing. Really, how many books on the Civil War can people read before they say, "Hey, maybe something else happened in American History?""
I responded at Big Tent (then at Cliopatria). A small discussion ensued (see the comments), one that largely turned to issues of contingency and military history. As almost always happens in such cases, all of a sudden everyone had a strong opinion on decisive battles, George Washington as a military commander, and how the Civil War turned out the way it did, etc. I know comments on a weblog are a very limited format, and obviously the debaters were writing off the cuff, so I will not get into details about the myriad problems with the views expressed in the debate. Although the commenters (commentators?) made solid points, from the perspective of an academically trained military historian the discussion was shocking for its simplicity. I'm picking on these guys a bit unfairly, they are perfectly capable and intelligent people who have the right and ability to comment on a wide variety of topics, but that discussion and where it began are representative of a larger problem in the historical profession. For other examples see historian of populism and progressivism (and a damn good one) Michael Kazin's recent piece on American exceptionalism and war. Or one that particularly grates me: the insistence of cultural and film historians to dismiss haughtily the multi-ethnic platoon in World War II movies as a cliché or propaganda or both. Try again. Even a superficial reading of the work by military historians on the World War II fighting man, or a perusal of a few memoirs from the era, would reveal that in this case, at least, Hollywood got it right.
The problem is that there simply are not enough military historians working in the American academy. Caveat: I am a military historian who will be on the job market this year, so I have just the tiniest bias. That said, the point stands. Military affairs, including wars, are a key component to the history of humankind. At some point every historian has to (or at the very least should) deal with some component of military history in their research, writing, and teaching. In teaching, especially, it is unavoidable. I suspect that is the reason why so many historians who otherwise avoid military affairs always seem to chime in with partially informed opinions when issues of war come up. Any sizable history department worth its salt should have a military historian around just to help keep his or her colleagues more informed on such a central issue.
That has not been the case. In fact, much to the horror of academic military historians, as some of the most eminent scholars in the field have retired over the last twenty-five years, some of the most eminent universities in the country have seen fit not to replace them with military historians at all. The University of Michigan has not had a permanent military historian on staff since John Shy retired. Nor did the University of Wisconsin replace Edward "Mac" Coffman when he left Madison, and it has taken a sizable contribution from Stephen Ambrose to lead to an as yet unfilled chair in military history there. More recently, the issue came up at Yale with some of its junior faculty. Temple, Kansas State, Texas A&M, North Carolina/Duke (they have a joint program), and Ohio State (the evil empire, grrrr) are notable exceptions in the profession, but too many of the top schools have no one who deals primarily with military history.
I'm going to try not to rehash the arguments already out there on this issue--like, for example, this one from Cliopatria's KC Johnson--partially because I think political bias is only part of the story. Something else is going on with military history. It is pretty clear that the success of many military history books with popular audiences has worked against academic military historians. David Salmanson's original post hinted as much. Popular reading lists and the shelves at popular book stores are filled with tomes on war. But I'll let everyone in on a little secret, some academic military historians might write some books for popular audiences (or books that become popular) but those types of works are only a tiny fraction of what academic military historians do. Take a look at this reading list from Duke and this one from Ohio State (grrrr)--not too many best sellers there. And that is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the specialized and obscure works that every academic military historian has to grapple with in order to master the field.
Of course in part it is our own fault. Military historians have at times been far too caught up in the traditional end of our field--discussions of battles from the perspective of generals. We have not done the best job in explaining how the importance of military affairs extends far beyond the battlefield. But the effort is underway, and has been for twenty-five years, to broaden military history to include all manner of discussions on race, class, gender, social life, cultural issues, memory, and politics. (Still, since when has the standard for fields addressing issues in the past in an academic setting been how well the practitioners of one field explain the importance of that field to all other fields? That is a pretty high standard to which to hold military historians, especially considering that it is patently obvious how important wars have been to history without even broadening the field.) But in any case, we have broadened our work, even while much of the rest of the profession has narrowed theirs. The result of this trend? A separation of historians into narrow tracks that has caused all of us to miss some of the most important aspects of American history in the last 150 years.
Think about this for a second: David Salmanson made a great case for the importance of slow change over time based on the everyday lives of people in the past, and I agree, yet it took a sociologist in Theda Skocpol to finally discuss the importance of veteran’s pensions after the Civil War. Worse, there are no, zero, published comprehensive academic studies on the G.I. Bill. (Michael Bennett is a journalist, Keith Olson's book deals with the schools, and there has been a recent dissertation on the topic at the University of Chicago but I do not know its publication status.) There are no academic studies that deal specifically with the question of the role African-American veterans of World War II and the Korean War played in the civil rights movement. No one has seen fit to explain why it was that the veterans of World War II raised the generation of whom so many opposed the Vietnam War, the results of which we face all the time. Talk about everyday lives.
We are missing a huge chunk of our past because the specific and important skill-sets of academic military historians do not have enough of a voice in the academy. It is a trend that must stop. Hire military historians (like, you know, me). Then we'll talk about where and how the United States won the Civil War.
Monday, June 14, 2004
The Return of O.J.
How well does popular culture reflect the times? ESPN Page2 columnist Bill "Sports Guy" Simmons wrote an article called O.J., 10 years later. Thanks to a heads-up from Derek years ago, I'm a big fan of Simmons. But in the course of this article he said O.J.'s acquittal was "Generation X's defining "I remember exactly where I was when it happened" moment, our version of JFK's assassination." Look, it was a big event--and I remember where I was: Psychology class in college when some yahoo opened the door and yelled, "The Juice is loose!"--but my friends and I always figured the Challenger explosion was our "Where were you when?" moment.
Until September 11. Then all that earlier stuff just seemed to mean so little.
On September 11, 2001, terrorists launched the single most devastating attack on the physical United States of America in its history. Bigger, even, than the attack on Pearl Harbor that drove the nation into the most devastating war in the history of humankind. That not even three years later an intelligent guy like Bill Simmons could get so caught up in this story that he could actually forget 9/11 for the O.J. Simpson trial is perhaps testament to how mild our reaction to this attack has become. The United States is at war--radical Islamic fundamentalists are still trying to kill us--yet we act as if that were not the case. We pretend that what happened on 9/11 and what has happened since are all just tragic mistakes, something akin to a car accident. Sure, the guy who hit our car was drunk and speeding, but we sold him the alcohol, and we were a little tipsy ourselves, and... but... or....
Maybe a little historical perspective is in order. At this point in the Second World War the United States had troops fighting the Germans in Italy and France and was just about to launch the invasion of the Philippines. The hardest fighting was still to come, yet the Americans of the era had no intention of giving up the war until they had won. The analogy can go too far, but on the issue of focus, there can be no argument that we have even come close to meeting the standard of those who fought World War II.
There are several reasons for this lack of focus, beginning at the top. Our president chose to make war on an abstraction, a tactic, not a real enemy (as Jon Stewart said in a recent commencement address, terror isn't even a noun: next we are going to fight ennui). I believe that in his head President Bush has a pretty clear idea of the goals and objectives of this war. But we live in a democracy, and his inability to communicate clearly those goals and objectives have made the American people feel rudderless. How hard would it be to explain that the sacrifices he is asking the American people and military to make pale by comparison to those made in rationing at home, on the beaches of Normandy, and in the seas around Leyte Gulf in 1944? And again, the sacrifices made then were in response to a smaller attack than September 11.
But not all of the blame should fall on the president. A president should not have to convince the American people of what should be blatantly obvious. Even a much better communicator in President Clinton was unable to convince the American people of the very real threats all around them in a dangerous world. Too many Americans left, right, and center would rather sip grande lattes while watching American Idol than deal with the reality of a world at war. When we do focus on politics, we lose the big picture for small but emotionally exciting partisan battles. (At the moment, the left whines about being snubbed from President Reagan's funeral while the right prepares the ridiculous campaign to pick apart President Clinton's memoir.)
All the while, the far too one-sided war continues. And the enemies of the United States focus on killing Americans--no matter their skin color or what they think of the O.J. Simpson case.
Tuesday, June 8, 2004
Stomping on Ambrose’s Grave
With Memorial Day and the 60th Anniversary of D-Day over the last two weekends, attention has once again turned toward military history. The rush of book reviews of World War II has once again brought to the fore an issue that deserves closer scrutiny: the ongoing and offhand evisceration of the work of Stephen Ambrose by some professional book reviewers.
In Washington Post Book World, book reviewer Jonathan Yardley, begins his review of Matthew Parker’s new study of the Battle of Monte Cassino with this line: "Those who have been persuaded by Tom Brokaw, Stephen Ambrose, Hollywood screenwriters and other facile popularizers to a romantic, sentimental view of World War II as the "good war" fought by "the greatest generation" are advised to spend a few hours with Matthew Parker's grim depiction of the six-month battle in 1943-44 to gain control of Monte Cassino in central Italy." Yardley is not alone. Atlantic Monthly book review editor Benjamin Schwarz began his October 2003 review of Paul Fussell’s The Boys’ Crusade with, "In this superb, tough-minded, and impressionistic introduction to the experiences of the U.S. infantry in northwest Europe from D-Day to Germany's surrender, Paul Fussell confronts the sanctimonious "military romanticism" of Messrs. Ambrose, Brokaw, and Spielberg, "which, if not implying that war is really good for you, does suggest that it contains desirable elements--pride, companionship, and the consciousness of virtue enforced by deadly weapons.""
Mercifully, both Yardley and Schwarz avoid Ambrose’s plagiarism, so we can perhaps save that debate for another time. We can also debate the merits of the book The Greatest Generation (although I don’t know why) and the movie Saving Private Ryan (much more useful) later. But grouping broadly the work of a distinguished scholar and first-rate historian like Ambrose with the books of journalist Tom Brokaw and movies of filmmaker Steven Spielberg is ridiculous on its face. Although Ambrose served as a consultant on Private Ryan and a producer of the miniseries based on his book Band of Brothers, there is no comparison of his lifetime of research, training, and experience in the historical profession with the work of Brokaw and Spielberg. Such comparisons are done solely to dismiss his arguments as amateurish and superficial. Yardley's and Schwarz's real issue with Ambrose is when they call him a facile popularizer and sanctimonious military romantic. So let's look at those charges.
Here 2001 review by Schwarz of Ambrose's World War II book for children The Good Fight is interesting. Schwarz criticizes Ambrose for "retroactively impos[ing] an elevated meaning on the American side of the war." Like almost anyone, Schwarz has little problem with praising American infantrymen for being tough and brave. But he takes especial issue with Ambrose "insisting on a sentimental and high-minded explanation of what those men believed they were fighting for." Schwarz writes:
“Ambrose, if not Brokaw, has read too much military history not to acknowledge plainly--as he wrote in a passage in Citizen Soldiers which contradicts the thrust of the rest of the book--that, according to the vast literature that assesses the motivation of U.S. fighters in World War II, “there is agreement that patriotism or any other form of idealism had little if anything to do with it.” “The GIs fought because they had to,” he continued. “What held them together was not country and flag, but unit cohesion.” In the same book Ambrose papered over this difficulty by informing his readers that although the GIs fought for “decency and democracy,” “they just didn't talk or write about it”. How, then, does he know? Rather than rely on what these men did write and say repeatedly during the war (which boils down to the reasonable, even courageously clear-eyed, but hardly righteous formula of kill or be killed, fight the war to end it so that we can go home), Ambrose draws on reminiscences and interviews and at least one “beer-drinking bull session” with a small number of veterans forty-five years after the fact--hardly the most reliable testimony."A fair enough criticism on its face. But let's assume for just a minute that in the myriad books he studied on combat motivation, the untold number of memoirs, oral histories, and interviews he read, and the thousands of interviews he himself conducted with veterans, that Stephen Ambrose might have come to a better understanding of what drove World War II soldiers than a very erudite book review editor who nevertheless is not a scholar of American soldiers in World War II. Especially when that book review editor seems to have drawn most of his knowledge about the combat infantry experience from the work of Paul Fussell. For those who do not know, Fussell was an infantry lieutenant in Europe who later became a English professor. Professor Fussell is a wonderful writer who has offered some important insights into war in the twentieth century in his books and memoirs. Nevertheless, he is a flawed source for any kind of general understanding of the infantry experience. His personal disillusionment with his wartime experience has colored all of his work, with the result that his memoirs and studies of World War II differ significantly in tone and general conclusions from the majority of his contemporaries. I’ll not list specifics, but the most striking example comes from a published oral history collection of Fussell's WWII battalion edited by Richard Stannard called Infantry. Fussell’s interviews stand out in stark relief from the rest of the men in his platoon, company, and battalion--a reasonable scholar should thus question how well he speaks for the experiences of men army-wide. (Stannard’s book is in the bibliography for Citizen Soldiers.)
Furthermore, Citizen Soldiers was a study of the combat experience in Europe from the perspective of soldiers and junior officers, not an argumentative book about enlistment or combat motivation. Ambrose was just providing his informed impression that though the men did not talk about it, they had a deep-down belief that they were fighting for a just cause. As someone who has also read thousands of World War II interviews, oral histories, questionnaires, and memoirs I happen to think Ambrose was correct. See Peter Kindsvatter’s 2003 study of soldiers in the twentieth century American Soldiers on this question. All that said, Schwarz is still right to question Ambrose’s impressionistic conclusion for not providing evidence. The problem is making the jump from that criticism to dismissing him for sanctimoniously romanticizing war.
I suspect Yardley’s and Schwarz’s problem with Ambrose stems from elsewhere. One line from Yardley’s review is instructive: "Certainly World War II was necessary, and the cause for which the Allies fought was just, but there was nothing pretty about it." I’m not sure Ambrose would disagree with that sentence, but he might ask Yardley to define “pretty.” Fighting a necessary war for a just cause seems to me to be one of the more beautiful things humans can do. But if he means that the actual fighting was bloody and messy and terrible, then I suggest that reading Citizen Soldiers or D-Day or Band of Brothers, or even this interview will lead to exactly the same conclusion.
In the eyes of Yardley and Schwarz, Ambrose’s great sin was in concluding that the necessity of the war and the justness of America’s cause was far more important than the ugliness of the fighting. How dare he call it “the good war” without the irony of someone like Studs Terkel (in the title to his disorganized and overrated oral history of the war). Schwarz says as much in the concluding sentences to his review: "...the great problem with Ambrose's books--especially this one--is that they fail to treat history as tragic, ironic, paradoxical, and ambiguous. If readers are old enough to study an event that involved the deaths of more than 60 million people, they are old enough to learn that one studies history not to simplify issues but to illuminate their complexities."
Yet oftentimes 'illuminating complexities' is just a cover for muddled thinking. For all its complexities, there are some simple issues we should keep in mind about World War II. In the grandest sense, the tragedy would have been the United States and its Allies losing the war. There is nothing ironic, paradoxical, or ambiguous about the fact that the world would have been a far worse place had the Allies lost. All of the details of the war must be dealt with in light of that truth, as Stephen Ambrose came to understand over the course of his career. If in the eyes of Jonathan Yardley and Benjamin Schwarz or any others that view makes him a facile popularizer or sanctimonious military romantic, then I humbly suggest they need to reexamine their own understanding of irony, paradox, and ambiguity when it comes to the Second World War.
Friday, May 28, 2004
For the Love of Humanities
Over at Big Tent, Stephen posted a link to this poll on the results of a question asking "Which Branch of the Armed Forces Is Most Important?" For the first time since similar polls began in 1949, the Army and Marine Corps have broken the Air Force’s stranglehold on the number one spot. These results are fascinating, and might portend a brighter future for the humanities, history in particular.
Always, but especially since and because of World War II, Americans have been enamored of the power of technology and science to win wars. Air power seemed to offer a way to use technology and science to destroy the enemy without the tremendous cost in American lives (in the American context) it took to defeat the Nazis and Japanese. So it is not surprising that the Air Force has enjoyed such a long stay at the top of the most important list. That trend is also symbolic of another key issue beyond the military. After the war, Americans saw technology and science as the solution to all the world's ills--atomic energy especially could move ships, power cities, and even clear out pesky mountains that stood in the way of new roads (thanks to my friend Ren for this example).
This reliance on technology and science extended to explaining human behavior. As a result, the postwar period saw a huge rise in the importance and prevalence of the social sciences all over American society. Politics, military, and the American intelligence agencies all became inundated with individuals steeped in the theories and methodologies of the social sciences. In the schools, a "flight from the humanities" began, and generations of students became familiar through general education classes with the basic tenets of sociology, political science, anthropology, and the various types of psychology. These 'sciences,' which were already hindered by the futile attempt to apply scientific models to pesky, unpredictable humans, became so entrenched in institutional structures that they developed a bad case of hubris and subsequent tunnel vision. Just one example: on the decline in ethnic and racial negative stereotypes among Princeton students from 1932 to 1950 one psychologist explained, "it would seem plausible that the greater popularity of the social sciences in our colleges is having some effect in producing a little more sophistication about social stereotypes and prejudices." I'm not kidding.
The dominance of social scientists and technocrats in military affairs led to myriad problems in Vietnam, most famously the use of body counts as a measure of success, but also a lack of tactical flexibility that came from relying too heavily on technologies like the helicopter. And David Brooks did a nice job laying out how well social scientists have done in the CIA in this Atlantic Monthly article. I will leave open for debate the effects the social sciences have had on higher education--besides, of course, providing us all a little more sophistication.
In any case, the obvious failures of the military and intelligence communities apparently did little to effect the American over reliance on science, technology, technocrats, and social scientists. But maybe this war on terror finally has. The Americans polled at least see that in this war, technology and statistics matter far less than the soldier or Marine on the ground. Individual living breathing human beings make the difference between victory and defeat. Humans are the force that drives history. The practitioners of the humanities have a chance to make the case that they can explain, predict, and understand who we are, how we got here, and where we are going far better than some model or overarching theory. We should seize the opportunity.
Tuesday, May 25, 2004
Why I’ve never done drugs.
A simple reason, really: my dad never did. Since I was a small child there was no person I respected and wanted to emulate as much as my father. When fifth or sixth grade in Catholic school rolled around, and the nuns brought in some sinning lay people to teach us about sex and drugs, I asked my dad about it. I didn't grow up in a hole--well, it was a suburb of Cleveland (fill in joke here)--so like just about everyone else who didn't live through the 1960s and early 1970s and learned all they knew about the era from popular culture, I figured just about everyone was wandering around in a drug-induced haze for the better part of a decade. So I just assumed my father, who in my understanding had come of age amidst a sea of hippies and bell bottoms, had also partaken in his fair share of drugs. Then I asked. He said, "No, I never took any drugs." I was skeptical--he had partaken in bell bottoms, I had seen pictures--but he insisted, "I didn’t need drugs. I got my highs from playing sports, from fixing electronics." That sentiment might seem cheesy to some (most?), but it made sense to me.
Still, the logic of my father's reasoning was not what compelled me to "pass on the grass" (go Ben Stiller). For me, it was all about following in my father's footsteps. It was the appeal of a tradition that he (and my mother, I came to find out) had set. I didn't want to break that tradition for my own selfish reasons.
Before this post turns into a public service announcement, I want to make clear that I'm not really talking about drugs. I am talking about traditions. Traditions, the actions of people in the past, have great power to inspire and guide us. But only if, like me in the case of my father, we believe those people to be good and decent. My father is not perfect, but as much or more than any person I know, he is good and decent. So, to me, most of his actions are good and decent and worth learning and repeating.
The same goes for history--there was bound to be a point somewhere in here--people all over the political spectrum in the United States make appeals to the historical traditions of the U.S. to try to inspire actions from Americans. Of course there are those who overdo it, making ridiculous statements about the perfection of the United States, but those folks are becoming increasingly rare. The bigger concern is the growing number of people, led by a superficial understanding of the work of historians, who make appeals to tradition, and then deride the people who created those traditions. They claim, and I think honestly believe, that they love and cherish all that the United States stands for... but, Washington owned slaves... but, Jefferson slept with/raped Sally Hemings... but, Lincoln was a racist... but, Americans committed genocide against the Native Americans... but, Truman dropped the second atomic bomb, and so on. All of those "but's" might be true, I can say with confidence that no American has ever been perfect, but when all we seem to focus on are the failings of our historic figures, appeals to the good and decent traditions they set, lose, well, their appeal.
When someone--left, right, or center--argues that the war, for example, is wrong because it violates all of the principles that made our country great, I think most American historians are compelled to listen, because they understand that for all the failings of those Americans came before us, they were still generally good and decent, and many of the ideas they came up with were and are amazing for their goodness and decency. However, I wonder how compelling such an argument is to the alarmingly high (36% according to one poll) proportion of Americans who do not see their country as generally fair and decent. How inclined are those people to act to live up to the great traditions of historical figures who they seem to believe historians have labeled as hypocrites?
It behooves us as historians to make clear that for all the failings of those good and decent people who came before us, the ideas and actions that made them great were far more important than the weaknesses that made them human. Otherwise, we lose the great power of appeals to tradition--and maybe the relevance of our profession.
Recent Entries
- The Sunset
- Iraq and American History
- Uzbekistan
- Could this be the first ideological victory in the war on terror?
- The Iranian Threat
- Excellent editorial, as usual, from Mr. Friedman
- In this administration, some things will never change
- Psychological Armor?
- Some random judicial thoughts
- Memorials
Recent Comments
- David Allan McGinnis on The VP Debate
- YJ Lee on Hotel Rwanda
- Mitch E. Milo on Honor
- Ashley Young on The Supreme Court and Judicial Activism
- Charles V. Mutschler on The Sunset
- E. Simon on The Sunset
- Marc "Adam Moshe" Bacharach on The Sunset
- Oscar Chamberlain on The Sunset
- Marc "Adam Moshe" Bacharach on Iraq and American History
- Oscar Chamberlain on Iraq and American History
Archives
August 2005July 2005
June 2005
May 2005
April 2005
March 2005
February 2005
January 2005
December 2004
November 2004
October 2004
September 2004
August 2004
July 2004
June 2004
May 2004
