Category Archives: History

Highlighted Passages From 40 Years Ago

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The Culling of the Books has begun again. It’s the process in which old friends and acquaintances (and a few new ones) are (1) put up for sale on eBay, (2) offered to used bookstores, (3) left at the city’s book exchange shed, (4) recycled or (5) even consigned to the trash. It happens as regularly as an atomic clock ticks, but not quite so often.

Some will survive the process, only to be assessed at the next CotB. No one will be safe forever!

This is why I picked up my 1975 paperback edition of Fields, Factories and Workshops this afternoon. First published in 1898, it’s a classic statement of anarchist principles written by Peter Kropotkin, more formally known as Prince Pyotor Alexeyevich Kropotkin.

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Kropotkin was a Russian aristocrat who favored the overthrow of both capitalism and the state. He envisioned a future in which small communities, linked together by modern technology, would grow much of their own food and do much of their own manufacturing. He championed cooperation over competition and rejected the authoritarian socialism of the Bolsheviks.

This is the kind of book I was reading in the 1970’s when I started wondering why our economic system leaves so many people idle when there is so much work to be done.

But now, before deciding on this old book’s future, I’m going to share two paragraphs I highlighted back then. First, here’s Kropotkin predicting a future that now seems unlikely:

Each nation – her own agriculturist and manufacturer; each individual working in the field and in some industrial art; each individual combining scientific knowledge with the knowledge of a handicraft – such is, we affirm, the present tendency of civilized nations.

And here’s Kropotkin on the purpose of education:

Be it handicraft, science or art, the chief aim of the school is not to make a specialist from a beginner, but to teach him the elements of knowledge and the good methods of work, and, above all, to give him that general inspiration that will induce him, later on, to put in whatever he does a sincere longing for truth, to like what is beautiful, both as to form and contents, to feel the necessity of being a useful unit amidst other human units, and thus to feel his heart at unison with the rest of humanity.

Finally, to quote from the editor’s introduction:

Fields, Factories and Workshops is one of those great prophetic works of the nineteenth century whose hour is yet to come…His book is really a thesis … on the economic consequences of the humanization of work.

How To Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell

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Michel de Montaigne was a 16th century French nobleman who was active in politics but mostly concerned with writing essays. He may have been the first blogger. Bakewell portrays Montaigne as having a modern sensibility, although he followed the Stoics and Epicureans in some ways. Montaigne wrote about all kinds of topics (including his kidney stones) and always tried to see both sides of an issue. He even tried to see life from his cat’s perspective. Much of his writing seems to have been thinking out loud as he mulled over his topics and went off on tangents. In that regard, she compares his essays to Tristram Shandy. I wonder if the actual essays are as good as advertised (all 1,000 pages of them).

Smarter Works Better Than Tougher – Stairway Postscript

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The French phrase “l’esprit de l’escalier” refers to that unpleasant moment when you realize what you should have said. According to the usual source, Denis Diderot originated the expression:

During a dinner at the home of the statesman Jacques Necker, a remark was made to Diderot which left him speechless at the time, because, he explains, “a sensitive man, such as myself, overwhelmed by the argument leveled against him, becomes confused and can only think clearly again [when he reaches] the bottom of the stairs” (“l’homme sensible, comme moi, tout entier Ă  ce qu’on lui objecte, perd la tĂŞte et ne se retrouve qu’au bas de l’escalier“).

Hence, the wit (not the spirit) of the stairs.

The phrase doesn’t quite apply to what happened this afternoon, but it’s close enough. I was driving to the grocery store when I realized what I should have included in my previous post. I should have mentioned Greece’s ongoing financial crisis. Sensible people understand that Greece will never be able to pay back everything it owes, partly because the economic austerity demanded by its creditors has slowed the Greek economy, making Greece poorer and even less able to pay off its debts. Even the International Monetary Fund, one of Greece’s creditors, understands this. The Greeks need debt relief, like the Germans received after World War 2.

The Germans, however, believe they and the other creditors need to get tougher with Greece. More austerity and more pain will eventually convince the Greeks to get their fiscal house in order or drive Greece out of the eurozone, leading to who knows what consequences for the Greeks, Europe and the rest of the world. In this case, the Germans, like the Republicans, prefer tougher over smarter.

But how was I going to get Germany’s bad behavior into a post about the Republicans? (Believe it or not, I’ve got literary standards.) Then it hit me, probably when I was making a right turn. Remember that rabid speech given by arch-right winger, modern-day fascist Pat Buchanan at the 1992 Republican National Convention? The late Molly Ivins said “it probably sounded better in the original German”.

See, it fits together after all. It’s what I should have said.

In Foreign Policy, Smarter Works Better Than Tougher

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The world will be a better place when normal relations are established between the United States and Cuba. But right-wing politicians disagree. They think we should treat Cuba even worse than we do now. If we tighten the screws on Cuba, the Cuban people will eventually rise up or their government will see the error of its ways.

Likewise, it will be a step forward when the United States and Iran establish better relations. Right-wing politicians disagree. They think we should treat Iran worse than we do now. We shouldn’t negotiate with Iran. We should tighten the screws even further and threaten military action. The Iranian people will rise up or their government will see the light.

The Atlantic has an interesting little article called “Why the Iran Deal Makes Obama’s Critics So Angry” that helps explain the Republican obsession with “toughness” in foreign policy:

When critics focus incessantly on the gap between the present [Iran nuclear] deal and a perfect one, what they’re really doing is blaming Obama for the fact that the United States is not omnipotent. This isn’t surprising given that American omnipotence is the guiding assumption behind contemporary Republican foreign policy. Ask any GOP presidential candidate except Rand Paul what they propose doing about any global hotspot and their answer is the same: be tougher. America must take a harder line against Iran’s nuclear program, against ISIS, against Bashar al-Assad, against Russian intervention in Ukraine and against Chinese ambitions in the South China Sea….

….[Behind Obama’s] drive for an Iranian nuclear deal is the effort to make American foreign policy “solvent” again by bringing America’s ends into alignment with its means. That means recognizing that the United States cannot bludgeon Iran into total submission, either economically or militarily. The U.S. tried that in Iraq.

It is precisely this recognition that makes the Iran deal so infuriating to Obama’s critics. It codifies the limits of American power. And recognizing the limits of American power also means recognizing the limits of American exceptionalism. It means recognizing that no matter how deeply Americans believe in their country’s unique virtue, the United States is subject to the same restraints that have governed great powers in the past. For the Republican right, that’s a deeply unwelcome realization. For many other Americans, it’s a relief. It’s a sign that, finally, the Bush era in American foreign policy is over.

Selected Thoughts on Recent Events

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Once upon a time, it was common to see billboards and bumper stickers calling for Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, to be impeached. Right-wing organizations like the John Birch Society had two principal complaints against him, as set forth in a “wanted” poster from 1958:

Warren is a rabid agitator for compulsory racial mongrelization and has handed down various decisions compelling whites to mix with Negroes in the schools, public housing, in restaurants and in public bathing facilities. He is known to work closely with the N.A.A.C.P. [the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] and favors the use of force and coercian [sic] to compel white school children to mingle intimately with Negroes.

Warren has been accused of giving aid and comfort to the Communist Party on frequent occasions. He is guilty of inciting riot, disorder and anarchy in Little Rock and elsewhere in his attempts to impose judicial tyranny upon white Southerners. He has illegally transformed the Supreme Court into a Soviet-type politburo with power over the Congress and over the various state governments.

Fortunately, Chief Justice Warren was never in danger of being impeached (although he may have been in danger of being shot). In fact, only one Supreme Court Justice has ever been impeached. That was Samuel Chase back in 1804. The Wikipedia summary says he was impeached for “political bias and arbitrary rulings, promoting a partisan political agenda on the bench”. Sound familiar? The Senate acquitted Justice Chase and since then making ridiculous decisions based on one’s political ideology hasn’t been considered grounds for impeachment. Federal officials generally need to be accused of criminal activity before the House of Representatives will impeach them.

Nevertheless, if “political bias and arbitrary rulings” and “promoting a partisan political on the bench” were ever grounds for impeachment, Justices Scalia, Alito and Thomas would be prime candidates. The three of them were willing to cripple the Affordable Care Act in 34 states because of a single poorly-written phrase, even though it’s standard procedure for the Court to interpret the language in complex laws based on context and legislative intent. Sensible people understood all along that Congress meant to offer subsidies to low-income people in all fifty states. It was only right-wing ideologues like Scalia, Alito and Thomas who thought or claimed to think otherwise.They saw a way to weaken the law and were willing to disgrace themselves in order to purposefully misinterpret it.

If you want to understand the Court’s decision in the Affordable Care Act case, there is a helpful summary on the Court’s website. They call it a “syllabus” and it’s only five pages long. The majority opinion begins at page 6 of the same PDF document and Scalia’s bizarre dissent begins at page 27.

If Scalia were really as angry as his overheated language implies, he would have dropped dead a few pages into his opinion. Maybe next time.

Moving on to other recent events, I’m trying to understand why some people are opposed to gay marriage because they think it will infringe on their own religious liberties. That may be a future topic. Meanwhile, here are two excellent paragraphs from an article by Andrew O’Hehir called “America Is Changing, and Marriage Equality Is a Huge Victory — But We Need To Go So Much Further”:

An entire strain of right-wing commentators, exemplified by Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly, have built careers on casting the left as treasonous America-haters who piss on the flag at every opportunity. This is a moment for people who believe in social justice to accentuate the positive, for damn sure. Beyond that, it’s also a moment that makes clear who really hates America – who hates the democratic and egalitarian potential of America, the America that does not quite exist but is struggling to become real. The America that the Coulter-O’Reilly caste claims to love does not exist either, but it never did and never will; it’s not just 1954 but a thoroughly fictional version of 1954, in which women and African-Americans were content to live in subjugation and Latinos, Muslims and LGBT people were invisible….

It’s essentially tragic that so many people feel themselves under attack from the expanded application of basic principles of fairness and justice. It cannot be a good thing that millions of Americans are so imprisoned by toxic ideology that they are unable to share in this collective celebration of hope and happiness, that they seem so determined to wall themselves up in mental ghettoes of intolerance, and that they seem devoted to waging endless rearguard combat in defense of “traditional values” rooted in a constricted understanding of God and the Christian faith and America. As the congregants of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church told us a week ago in such moving and memorable fashion, love is stronger than hate. Many people in our country who call themselves Christians would do well to reflect on that.

More, but not a lot more, here.