One of the ironclad rules of American historiography is that martyrdom bestows greatness. Americans aren't as obsessed with martyrdom as other parts of the world, of course, but the dynamic is the same.
In the American parlance, however, "martyrdom" has acquired an absurdly inaccurate meaning. In American, "martyrdom" means "when a famous person dies unexpectedly or tragically". The make or model of death does not matter.
To the rest of the world, "martyrdom" means "an obscure person who WILLINGLY gives his life for a deeply-held belief, for a CAUSE".
In the Middle East, for example, "martyrs" are anonymous teenagers who willingly give their lives in the act of killing others, an action which they would insist was motivated by love of their own more than hatred of the other.
But in our culture, a famous person dying before his or her time is considered an adequate threshold for martyrdom, even if the person did not willingly give his or her life and even if their death was not in the interest of any identifiable "cause".
There was a poll a few years ago in which Americans rated John Kennedy as the best president of the 20th century. It is clear to myself and to most people literate in presidential history that JFK's legacy is almost entirely an emotional reaction to his awful public murder, to the last 46 seconds of his life rather than the first 46 years.
In addition to his murder making him "great", JFK is also credited as having died for any of a number of "causes". People project their own dreams and desires onto his murder and conclude that he died for civil rights, or for peace in Vietnam, or for tax cuts, or for whatever other cause one might consider worthy of martyrdom.
The unfortunate yet still true truth, however, is that JFK was killed for no reason at all, other than the neurotic and murderous impulse of a 24-year old sociopath. And speaking of 24-year olds, the same dynamic applies to the legacy of the Notorious BIG, just 24 when he was cut down.
The presidency and hip-hop may seem to be aberrant bedfellows, but the dynamic of "martyrdom" is the same. Just as JFK is remembered as the greatest president only because of his murder, so is Notorious BIG remembered as the greatest rapper.
Both men dealt in the poisonous currency of glamorized violence in their own distinct ways. With each of their deaths, there was the undeniable undercurrent of chickens coming home to roost.
When Notorious BIG was murdered, he had released one album. His second album was released weeks after his death. And that was it. 2 albums. Less than 3 hours of recorded music, and he is remembered as the best.
Not to delve too deeply into the minutiae of hip-hop history, but in my mind Jay-Z's first 2 albums, for example, or Nas' first 2 albums, were just as good as Notorious BIG's first 2 albums. And due to the virtue of not having been murdered, Jay-Z and Nas have lived to each release 8 more albums which are just as good as anything BIG ever did.
Early death is something which is, has always been, and will always be romanticized and invested with disproportionate meaning by the survivors. But only in America do we make early death synonymous with greatness, while treating the survivors as somewhat less mystical. Perhaps Notorious BIG had it right after all, when he recorded the last song of his short life.
"You're Nobody 'Til Somebody Kills You".
Two twin convictions are common to every generation. First, that the world as we know it is coming to a crashing and ignominious end. Second, that kids today just don't get it. As Roger Sterling said with dismay on Mad Men, set in the early 60's, "I miss the 50's".
As a teacher I witness the phenomenon of literate students who can not read a page. They are literate in the sense that they are able to perform the function of reading. But when I say that they cannot read a page, I mean that they are physiologically incapable of focusing on reading for the sustained 90 seconds that it would take them to read a page.
It is a rather bizarre thing to behold. It's not that these students don't know how to read; it's just that they can't do it. Not that that makes any sense.
Part of this inability to focus on anything for more than 2 minutes can be attributed to, or blamed on, laziness, apathy, and a sense of being entitled to instant gratification without any investment of time or effort in the task at hand.
But there is a deeper shift at play. Studies have shown, and simple observation makes obvious, that the brains of these teenagers are physiologically different than mine. And I'm still young enough that I could blend in with these students if I sagged my pants sufficiently and used the N or F word twice per sentence.
This physiological shift cannot be undone any more than we can regain our opposable toes. And in both cases, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Of course it seems awful to the older generations, but such has it always been.
In my mind, texting, tweeting, cell phones, and web surfing are so inferior to the deliberate and solitary dissection of a well-written book that there is no comparison. It's not apples and oranges; it's apples and cement.
But we would do well to disenthrall ourselves from our own perspective occasionally, not in the interest of sacrificing our principles, but in the interest of empathy and rigorous self-analysis. If we do that, we see ourselves as the radicals rather than the conservatives.
Educated people my age and older read books. We are able to do so. Most younger people simply cannot. But let's think back to a few hundred years ago when books first became available to the masses. The older folks must have been horrified back then, too.
Before books arrived, knowledge, stories, and information was relayed orally. People would sit around the campfire. Some among them were able to recite the equivalent of thousands of pages of text from memory. The rest were able to sit and listen.
How many people today could memorize thousands of pages of text? Nobody. Our brains are physiologically different now because we have books. We don't need to be able to memorize reams of information because we can simply read it. So our brains have evolved correspondingly.
And we can be sure that when this shift took hold, the older generations were disgusted. They probably thought reading was antisocial, since the individual no longer had to sit around the campfire with their peers to obtain information. Now, they could simply slink of by themselves and read in solitude.
Not only did reading make people less social, it also withered away their ability to memorize huge amounts of data, just as digital media have eroded today's youth's ability to sit still and read from a book.
I don't know what the positive side to this recent shift could possibly be. In my mind, it makes children hyperactive, spoiled, and scatterbrained. The only comfort I can take is the conviction that the story-tellers of old would have though the exact same thing about me and my love of books.
Of all the things a history junkie like myself could be blessed enough to witness, the Egyptian Revolution just may take the cake. What we have just seen in the oldest nation on earth is a big deal. And it did not just end; it just began.
At a bare minimum, the Egyptian Revolution already stands with the other great revolutions of history. The Spartacus revolt against Rome. The American and French Revolutions. The Russian and Chinese Revolutions. The Iranian Revolution. And now Egypt.
But the Egyptian revolution stands apart. It is the only one of the above-mentioned pantheon that was non-violent. It was more Martin Luther King than Mao Tse Tung, more Mohatma Gandi than Maximillian Robespierre.
And not only was it non-violent; it was popular. There has never been anything like this. For 3 weeks, without pause, a huge percentage of an entire nation of people staged a protracted sit-in.
Most revolutions are conceived and executed by a small group of elite intellectuals. Our Founding Fathers may have believed in some sort of democracy, but they certainly did not let their countrymen vote on whether to violently secede from the British Empire. If they had held such a vote, they would have lost.
Likewise, the Russian Revolution, in many ways the most radical of all history, was carried out by a closed and secretive group of Bolsheviks. Many revolutions appear popular either at first or in retrospect, but in reality are co-opted by small cliques of ideologues and psychopaths. Russia and Iran come to mind.
Americans are such a young breed at 235 years of age that it is hard for us to put Egypt in perspective. It can be said that Egypt invented kingship. It can also be said that this is the first time in Egypt's 5000 plus years that it has not had a Pharaoh, whether in the form of King Tut, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, or some sclerotic army officer.
The real revolution, however, has not ended. It has only begun. A real revolution would require the positive aspirations of the people. We all now know what Egyptians don't want, but now they must organize their 80 millions into a rational and cohesive articulation of what they do want.
And as inspiring as revolutions can be, the reason they are so rare is because of the universal truth that it is far easier to destroy than to build.
The Cold War was fueled by Russian paranoia and American ignorance. Russia was rightly paranoid, having lost 30 million citizens in a war against a former western ally. America was inevitably ignorant, having the great gift of World War II being fought everywhere in the World except the Americas.
To put 30 million Russian dead in perspective, it is 100 times as many Americans that died fighting the same Nazi enemy. It is 30 times as many Americans than have died in all of America's wars from 1776-2011. Combined.
The Russians were paranoid because they knew that 30 million people could be killed in war; after all, it had already happened once. The Americans were ignorant to that possibility, never mind that reality, because they had thankfully never endured it.
Robert McNamara was the architect of many Cold War policies. Like most powerful Americans of his day, he serially misunderstood our rivals, to the point where potential allies instead became blood enemies. The Russians. The Chinese. The Cubans. The Vietnamese.
Each of these adversaries simply refused to behave "rationally" or "American", thereby confounding the "best and the brightest" among us.
The Fog of War is one of the best documentaries ever made, to put it simply. In it, the octogenarian McNamara looks back at his career and makes stunningly honest assessments of his own conduct. At the end of his life, McNamara made profound admissions of that universal truth that life is lived forwards and understood backwards.
Examples of McNamara's late-found honesty: "I behaved as a war criminal" "What makes something immoral if you lose, but not immoral if you win?" Both of those thoughts were spoken by McNamara regarding his role in planning the saturation bombing of Japanese cities in World War II.
Unfortunately, the humility and wisdom of these quotes came to McNamara in his 70's and 80's rather than in his 30's or 40's or 50's. For those interim decades, McNamara persisted in his inability to walk in any other man's moccasins.
I came across a beautifully written anecdote that articulates this blindness perfectly and is worth quoting at length:
McNamara has just been told by a subordinate that the Soviet Union was not following what McNamara considered the "logical" strategy regarding nuclear weapons.
"That was too much. McNamara ripped the pointer from Foster's hands and slammed it against the charts. 'No, no, no!' he shouted, coloring dangerously. 'As a Red marshal, I'm going to put them all on the cities!' "
"A stunned silence followed, in which no one said, 'Well, Mr. Secretary, but you're not a Red marshal.' To McNamara, nuclear war was the end of his world, to be treated with fitting millenarianism."
"To real Red marshals--Sokolovsky, Malinovsky, and others--who had fought from Stalingrad to Berlin against the best army in the world, twenty million to forty million dead was an experienced historical fact."
"This did not make them aggressive. It might indeed give them second thoughts. But it did make them grimly confident of enduring in ways that the civilized secretary was fortunate in not being able to imagine."
When powerful men lack imagination, the unimaginable is often just the push of a button away.
