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Monday, June 24, 2019

On the Presence (or lack thereof) of the Present

I am on an apparently futile campaign to reduce the silly use of the historical present when describing events that took place in the past. One hears this especially on NPR and C-Span by authors of history books describing their work. I suspect this was the trap that Trump fell into when talking about Frederick Douglass in the present tense, for which he was ridiculed. When you hear history professors talk about their subjects in the present tense (not that Trump ever would but that's beside the point) I suppose it becomes ingrained and the supposition formed that's the way one should talk about events that might have occurred hundreds of years ago.

Ben Yagoda has a cogent rant in the pages of Lingua Franca from several years back with numerous examples. Used sparingly, the historical present can supply a vividness to a description, but used consistently it diminishes the effect and makes the speaker sound moronic, like Trump. While Yagoda implies this is an affectation reserved to NPR visitors, I suspect it's prevalent elsewhere, but not obvious since NPR is the only station with any content at all.

When writing about the content of a book, on the other hand, it would seem the historical present is far more appropriate as the book is extant and not dead so retelling the story in the present makes more sense. Describing events that took place years ago in the present does not. To butcher Yagoda only slightly, "in discussing the past, the historical present lacks the authority, the range, the depth, and the power of the past tense. . .it’s essentially a novelty item. It’s tacky. Give it a rest."

Saturday, June 22, 2019

Excellent analysis of Bladensburg (American Legion v American Humanist Association)

My Goodreads friend Alan Johnson, author of a biography of Roger Williams, icon of religious freedom, posted this analysis of the recent American Legion v American Humanist Association:

THE BLADENSBURG CROSS CASE: American Legion v. American Humanist Association, U.S. Supreme Court, June 20, 2019

The official U.S. Supreme Court slip opinions for this decision are posted here.

This case involves the constitutionality, under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, of the ownership of the Bladensburg Peace Cross ("Cross") and the land on which it is situated by a state governmental entity (since 1961, the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission). The Establishment Clause states: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ." In the twentieth century, the Supreme Court held that the Establishment Clause applies to state and local government by way of the Fourteenth Amendment. Everson v. Bd. of Educ., 330 U.S. 1 (1947). Eight of the nine current justices appear to accept this "incorporation" principle. However, Justice Thomas, in his opinion concurring in the judgment in the present case, reiterated a point he has made in earlier cases: the Establishment Clause is designed to prevent the federal government from interfering with state establishments of religion, not to protect individuals from state religious establishments. In Thomas's view, state establishments of religion are perfectly constitutional and legitimate. For a refutation of Thomas's position on this question, see pages 515-16n30 (Kindle loc. 8536-50) of my book The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience (Philosophia, 2015).

A photograph of the Cross is included in the appendix to Justice Ginsburg's dissenting opinion. The Cross is located in Prince George's County, Maryland. It is thirty-two feet high and sits on a large pedestal. Construction of the cross was completed in 1925 as a tribute to forty-nine soldiers from the area who died in World War I.

There are nine justices on the Supreme Court. Seven of them filed separate opinions in this case. Justice Alito's opinion was joined in full by three other justices (Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Breyer and Kavanagh). However, a majority requires at least five of the nine justices, and thus only the portions of Justice Alito's opinion that were also joined by Justice Kagan constitute the official Opinion of the Court with mandatory precedential authority on subsequent cases. Justice Kagan declined to join Parts II-A and II-D of Justice Alito's opinion, and those parts constitute only a plurality opinion (four of the nine justices), which, as such, do not constitute mandatory authority.

In significant and controversial cases, we are accustomed to seeing a 5-4 split between the so-called "conservative" wing (Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanagh) and the so-called "liberal" wing (Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor) of the Court. What is strange about this case is that Justices Thomas and Gorsuch refused to join in Justice Alito's opinion; instead, they filed opinions concurring in the judgment only. What is perhaps even stranger is that two of the supposedly "liberal" justices—Breyer and Kagan—joined Alito's opinion in whole or in part, thus making most of Alito's opinion the official Opinion of the Court. The following discussion of Justice Alito's opinion addresses only those portions in which both Justices Breyer and Kagan joined, thus making those sections the Opinion of the Court.

Justice Alito and the four justices who joined in the Opinion of the Court held that the Cross does not violate the Establishment Clause. They argued, against two millennia of religious history, that the Cross had and/or has a secular meaning. Additionally, "[a]s our society becomes more and more religiously diverse, a community may preserve such monuments, symbols, and practices for the sake of their historical significance or their place in a common cultural heritage." Indeed, "[f]amiliarity itself can become a reason for preservation." Moreover,

when time’s passage imbues a religiously expressive monument, symbol, or practice with this kind of familiarity and historical significance, removing it may no longer appear neutral, especially to the local community for which it has taken on particular meaning. A government that roams the land, tearing down monuments with religious symbolism and scrubbing away any reference to the divine will strike many as aggressively hostile to religion. Militantly secular regimes have carried out such projects in the past, [footnote omitted] and for those with a knowledge of history, the image of monuments being taken down will be evocative, disturbing, and divisive.

At the same time, "retaining established, religiously expressive monuments, symbols, and practices is quite different from erecting or adopting new ones. The passage of time gives rise to a strong presumption of constitutionality." With this statement, the Court appeared to be indicating that it might have held the Cross to be unconstitutional if it had been constructed in the recent past.

Justice Ginsburg, joined only by Justice Sotomayor, dissented vigorously. She cited classic Supreme Court cases from the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in opposition to the emerging conservative orthodoxy. Icons of church-state separation such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Justice John Paul Stevens, as well as moderates such as Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, make explicit appearances in Ginsburg's quietly passionate prose. Ginsburg eviscerates the majority's unhistorical notion that a Latin cross such as the Bladensburg Cross could ever be understood to be a common, secular symbol: such a view insults not only non-Christians but also devout Christians, who for almost 2,000 years have considered the cross to be a holy symbol of their faith.

As against Alito's parade of horribles (inspired by developments in the French and Russian revolutions), Ginsburg observes that the Cross need not be torn down. The government could deed back ownership of the land and property to a private entity, or the Cross could be moved to private land. Quoting Justice Stevens, she states that "like the determination of the violation itself," the "proper remedy is necessarily context specific."

Justice Ginsburg concludes her well-reasoned and well-corroborated eighteen-page dissenting opinion with the following statement of her position:

The Establishment Clause, which preserves the integrity of both church and state, guarantees that “however . . . individuals worship, they will count as full and equal American citizens.” Town of Greece, 572 U. S., at 615 (Kagan, J., dissenting). “If the aim of the Establishment Clause is genuinely to uncouple government from church,” the Clause does “not permit . . . a display of th[e] character” of Bladensburg’s Peace Cross. Capitol Square Review and Advisory Bd. v. Pinette, 515 U. S. 753, 817 (1995) (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).

by Alan Johnson

Reposted with permission of Alan Johnson.

Sunday, June 16, 2019

On Trump and Norway

I think supporters are selling Trump short when they call his remarks a joke.. He knew exactly what he was doing. It fits with the pattern of walking back on numerous statements (criticism of intelligence officers, Giuliani and his facts, etc., etc.) Trump is a master at controlling media and what better way that to make outrageous statements (do you really want foreign countries to influence American elections? His use of Norway was calculated and not stupid.) He gets publicity both ways: by the original silly statement and then the walk-back which his supporters always just say the original was a joke. That a president would make these kinds of jokey statements when his words are scrutinized thoroughly as policy is not good practice. If a CEO were to make such comments regarding his company, the impact on the stock would be considerable, and the SEC would start investigating (see Musk as an example,) and he would lose his position as CEO.

He brilliantly labeled the Mueller investigation as a witch hunt, focusing attention on himself when the charge to the investigation was to investigate whether there was Russian influence and attempts to sabotage the election. More than a dozen indictments resulted. The charge (remember it was started by a Congress dominated by Trump’s party) originally had nothing to do with investigating Trump; the investigation did find some links that several people in his administration lied about, plead guilty to, and now face jail time.

It’s clear from Trump’s own actions that he is terrified of investigations into his business practices which resulted in the bankruptcy of everything he touches. Hence all the obfuscations and spin and steering of the media from looking at that. Why else insist on not revealing his tax returns and refusing to turn over any documents to a lawful request by Congress. That the Mueller investigation morphed into an examination of links between the Trump campaign and Russia was because there *were* those links.
Trump cleverly redefined the purpose of the investigation, spinning it to be about “collusion” which everyone knows is not a crime. Foreign interference with US elections is, and by using Norway, a US ally as an example of a source, he cleverly focused attention away from the real bad actor, Russia, which Mueller conclusively showed had indeed interfered with the election, making the whole thing seem harmless, and the “walking back” more jocular.

Monday, June 10, 2019

Review: The Greatest Enemy by Douglas Reeman

The Terrapin is a worn out ship. Her crew is a motley group with the exec having survived his own naval trauma. She is assigned a new skipper who is anxious to prove his worth and who believes the higher ups don't appreciate the gravity of the communist threat. To show them his worth, he disobeys orders and puts his ship in harm's way.

There have been lots of books dealing with Captain Queeg-like commanders and the relationships that develop between a crew who thinks the captain is crazy, the Executive Officer, charged with supporting the captain and enforcing his will on the ship. The Caine Mutiny (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/37814568?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1) is one of those classics and should be read by everyone who enjoys a good naval yarn or even a first-rate legal battle.

I read the Arnheiter Affair (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/764693235) several years ago, a book to which Reeman refers in his introduction. He suggests that Arnheiter was right and should not have been relieved. I recommend reading both books and drawing your own conclusions. The idea that any commander can willfully disobey orders is anathema to any military service, regardless of how righteous they may think they are. Thank goodness Curtis LeMay didn't just charge off and send the bombers over Moscow with atomic weapons. He wanted to.

Reeman is clever sympathetic to Dalziel, the captain, who refuses to stay within the guidelines of his orders and, in the end, achieves a measure of validation. The book will without doubt appeal more to nautical afficionados than the average reader, but it does obliquely raise some interesting issues.

Wednesday, June 05, 2019

Review; Doing Battle: the Making of a Skeptic by Paul Fussell

Fussell's preparation for war was limited. ROTC was “a wonderland” of marching and snappy uniforms. Nothing was mentioned of “tree bursts and Graves Registration” or trench foot, nor that first-aid kits were adequate for bullet holes but hardly for a “foot blown off by a Schumine.” They soon realized that they were being trained as lieutenants to replace dead ones. In France, their first operation was to perform a night relief of another battalion. Hopelessly lost, they were ordered to lie down and sleep. At dawn they discovered they were lying in a field of dead Germans. A sobering sight. “My boyish illusions, largely intact to that moment of awakening, fell away at once, and suddenly I knew that I was not and would never be in a world that was reasonable or just.” It wasn’t just the sight of the dead. Many were mere children. Two, no older than 14, had been shot in the head, one with brains dripping from his nostrils. The realization sets in that he has been trained to commit like murders. Nor had training prepared him for other indignities: the gut-twisting cramps of instant diarrhea, ruining layers of clothing, and having no place to wash. Often half the platoon might disappear frantically into the woods.

He learned what a marine sergeant told Philip Caputo many years later during the Vietnam War: “Before you leave here, Sir, you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.” The “Great Turkey Shoot” bore mute witness to that. The men in F Company came upon a trench holding two squads of German infantry wishing to surrender. The Americans gleefully shot all of them dead.

Fussell soon realized that most army documents were intricately prepared falsehoods, that cowards are maimed and injured with the same regularity as heroes, that heroes are often invented post-death to make the survivors feel good, that “the Good War,” when it ended, did not lead to riotous celebrations by the troops, rather a feeling of bitterness at the appalling destruction and death. As Kay Summersby (Eisenhower’s British mistress) said, “No one laughed., No one smiled. It was all over. We had won, but the victory was not anything like what I thought it would be. . . So many deaths. So much destruction. And everybody was very, very tired.”

A bitter Fussell, having been shunted around after the war to various camps doing all sorts of make-work, mind-numbing activities, came face-to-face with the terrible reality of the way we conduct war. He realized the truth behind military historian Russell Weigley’s comment: “The American army of World War II habitually filled the ranks of its combat infantry with its least promising recruits, the uneducated, the unskilled, the unenthusiastic.” Fussell speculated as to why no one seemed to care terribly that those remaining after the marines, air corps and navy got their pick, were expected to bear the brunt of sustained battle: “Perhaps the reason is that the bulk of those killed by bullets and shells were the ones normally killed in peacetime in mine disasters, industrial and construction accidents, lumbering, and fire and police work. . . . Wasn’t the ground war, for the United States, a form of eugenics, clearing the population of the dumbest, the least skilled, the least promising of all young American males? Killed in the tens of thousands, their disappearance from the pool of future fathers had the effect, welcome or not, of improving the breed. Their fate constituted an unintended but inescapable holocaust.” (Deborah Shapeley in her biography of Robert McNamara [book:Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara|677540] records his program to enlist thousands of men who formerly had not been able to pass the minimal entrance tests for the army. They were allowed to enter on his assumption the army would raise their skill levels. Most were killed in Vietnam.)

Review: Displaced but Not Lost by Tony Taagen

One of the great things about the disruption in publishing technology is that we get a flood of personal memoirs, recollections that are an important part of history but which would never have become known, had it not been so easy to publish them through print-on-demand. That is not to say they are all perfect, nor all relevant, but they are important nevertheless. Sometimes, little simple things, like the price of something can set a historian's heart a flutter.

What we have here is less of a view of the war (in that, his family was very fortunate), but more the experience of displaced persons following the war. (Here, again, they were very lucky in being sponsored by a man in Texas who set them up on a small farm. That didn't last long, as the man, who must have had grandiose plans for the arrangement, gave up on it barely a year later. Happy to escape the tornadoes, snakes and scorpions, they made contact with some other Estonians in Wisconsin where they moved and settled permanently.

Born in Estonia, Taagen was also very fortunate in having grandparents who lived on a farm where he could spend summers and be watched over by loving grandparents. His father was often in hiding from the Russians who at first controlled Estonia, and wanted every adult male in the army, followed by the Nazis, and then again the Russians. But Taagen was really barely touched by the war other than to have what he thought was lightning in the east explained by his grandmother to be "the front." There is little evidence that what that meant ever sunk into the eight-year-old.

A little research revealed that after WW II there were approximately 11 million displaced persons, mostly eastern europeans and refugees and those lucky enough to msurvive German concentration camps. The new UN was charged with dealing with the enormous number of DPs. Some were moved back to their country of origin, but often the political boundaries had changed or they feared political retribution. They were first categorized and sorted. The British and Americans would no longer accept any DPs after mid-1947 and anyone left had to fend for themselves. DP camps were set up to provide shelter, food, and health care. There was also a need for reuniting families wherever possible and dealing with the psychological trauma many faced. Over one million could not be repatriated and a significant number of those were from eastern bloc countries who feared living under the Soviets. In the Yalta agreement, Stalin had insisted that Soviet citizens, i.e. anyone who after the war lived under Soviet control, be returned to Soviet control. The western allies reluctantly complied except for Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians arguing that those had never been Soviet countries.

Jews were in a real bind and many fled to Palestine where the British discovered a new war. European countries set up programs to admit DPs followed by Australia and Canada. The United States was reluctant to admit DPs from slavic countries, especially intellectuals and Jews. Eventually, we did, but only following public outcry and the process was notoriously bureaucratic. The Displaced persons Act permitted 200,000 DPs to enter the country over a period of two years. That was extended for another two years. Eventually 900,000 entered but each had to have a relative or a sponsor to get a visa and they had to come from an internment camp like the one described in this book.

I know that memoirs can be tricky, but I was disappointed by the lack of detail in the boy's experiences. I lived in a foreign country between the ages of 8 and 10, about his age and I would have been able to supply a great deal more detail. He also seemed obsessed with school and algebra which, given the circumstances, seemed trivial to me. I was a bit put off by the present tense, but after a while, it ceased to be annoying. There were a couple of unsolved mysteries that remained unexplained: the contents of the ubiquitous briefcase his father never let out of his sight, and the picture of an Australian entry permit for the family. I don't remember reading anything about the possibility of emmigrating to Australia as an alternative to the United States, so that is a puzzle.

Ultimately, they were very lucky, being wealthy -- his father was a banker in Estonia -- they were able to survive on the Russian gold coins, his mother smuggled with her everywhere and helped buy food, and having grand-parents who lived on a farm away from most of the fighting that dominated the urban areas. It certainly didn't hurt that they were very Aryan looking and not Jewish.

It's an interesting story told from a child's perspective.


Saturday, June 01, 2019

Unintended Consequences, or, Perhaps Another Example of Chaos Theory

Been reading "Say Nothing" by Patrick Keefe and ran across this related tidbit. Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork was imprisoned by the British in 1920 for sedition (replacing the former mayor who had been shot dead by British police in his bed.) MacSwiney died following a 74-day hunger strike. He wrote just before his death that "It is not those who can inflict the most, but those who can suffer the most, who shall win"

"According to MacSwiney’s biographer*, Dave Hannigan, a young Vietnamese man named Nguyen Tat Thanhn was working in the kitchen of a central London hotel at the time. Upon hearing the news of MacSwiney’s death, he burst into tears, saying “a country with a citizen like this will never surrender”. He returned to Vietnam, changed his name to Ho Chi Minh, and led the Vietnamese resistance movement for three decades, fighting Japanese and French imperialists and later the United States." https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/brixton-remembers-one-of-ireland-s-most-famous-hunger-strikers-1.3674378

*Terence MacSwiney: The Hunger Strike that Rocked an Empire

In yet another irony, "
Brixton Prison is still operational with about 800 prisoners behind its walls. But the days of hunger strikes are far behind Britain’s oldest jail. Ironically, the prison has become known for its food. Since 2014, a charity called The Clink has been operating inside its walls. It trains inmates in culinary arts to equip them for life on the outside. Prisoners prepare and cook fresh, local ingredients which are also served by prisoners to diners looking for something a little different."