When I think of the greatest Americans in history, I realize a certain affinity and common frame of mind between Mark Twain and myself. By that I mean that if Mark Twain put his mind to the same task, naming the greatest Americans, he would include no politicians or generals in his list. And neither would I.
But I would include Twain. Johnny Cash. Thomas Jefferson (who would make the list even if we entirely ignore his political career and focus on his scholarship and philosophy). Jefferson, Twain, and Cash captured the psyche, the ethos, and the pathos of an Americanism that I can relate to in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, respectively.
Twain reeks of a modest brilliance, of a profound sophistication that could not be co-opted by fads of false patriotism or hero-worship. Consider "The War Prayer":
"O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells, help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead. Help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain"
Help us to lay wasted to their humble homes with hurricanes of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief"
And so on.
Or consider Twain's account of old friends reminiscing. (Anyone familiar with Bob Dylan's 1963 "Bob Dylan's Dream" will instantly spot the influence):
"We sat down and talked. We steeped our thirsty souls in the reviving wine of the past, the pathetic past, the beautiful past, the dear and lamented past; we uttered the names that had been silent upon the our lips for fifty years, and it was as if they were made of music.
With reverent hands, we unburied our dead, the mates of our youth, and caressed them with our speech; we searched the dusty chambers of our memories"
Twain on the loss of loved ones:
"It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live. There is but one reasonable explanation of it. The intellect is stunned by the shock and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words.
The power to realize their full import is mercifully wanting. The mind has a dumb sense of vast loss--that is all."
And finally, Twain on those who are too smart for their own good:
"The gods value morals alone; they have paid no compliments to intellect, nor offered it a single reward. If intellect is welcome anywhere in the other world, it is in hell, not heaven."
The man speaks the truth. After all, only an erudite and educated intellect would propose remaking the world in his own image, as American imperialists are so adept at doing. A simpler, moral man might simply stay home and write.
It is a tiresome and tragic fact of life for 30-somethings in this country that we wake up every few years to find out that we are bombing a Muslim country to "protect" its people. And although we've seen this show so many times, our fearless leaders inevitably act as if there is no precedent from which they could learn.
What exactly do we hope to achieve in Libya? Nobody knows. What was the crime of the hundreds of Libyan soldiers who have already died under our bombs? None. Who are the people we are protecting, and what are their motives? Nobody knows.
It is profoundly distressing, and distressingly unsurprising, that Barack Obama would authorize this charade. He has stated that it is "our policy that Gaddafi must go". Really? On whose authority? On what authority does our president demand the departure of the leader of another country?
Bush did it, of course. "Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq...." But that was Bush. Obama is different. Well, Obama was different. But now he has fallen to the bloodthirsty megalomania that infects every single president we have while insidiously masquerading itself as piety and humanity. It's bullshit.
You don't kill people to protect them. You kill them to kill them. This is something that every child understands, a notion which all adults understand as well unless they have sufficient college degrees and sufficient power.
Libya has not threatened us. It has not attacked us. For most of us, that should end the debate. But we are not governed by most of us. We are governed by self-important messianic imperialists who think a bomb is a terrible thing to waste, regardless of their political stances at home.
Gadaffi has been in power since our president was 8 years old. If I were a Libyan, I'd probably want a change. I may even join the rebels and be willing to kill to see that change instituted. But I'm not a Libyan.
The fact that the UN authorized this should not make this seem any more just. The UN was founded on the principle that states couldn't invade other states. Period. But what happened within states was nobody's business, because if you opened that door a crack, states would keep invading other states and simply insist that they were doing so to "help" those states.
So the UN has betrayed itself. The US, of course, betrayed itself long ago. We regularly kill people who have never raised a hand against us, invade nations that never offended us, and do all this is the name of "peace" and "compassion".
Despite all the legal and moral trainwreck, there is the utter absence of common sense. Who are the people we are killing? We neither know nor care. Who are the people we are protecting? Same answer.
What possible assurance do we have that the American-sponsored rebels would be any better than Gadaffi? None. Richard Engel, the best foreign correspondent in the U.S., said that fully 20% of the rebels he interviewed said they were trying to overthrow Gaddafi "because he's a Jew". Of course.
Surely those people will set up a democratic paradise thanks to our bombs. After all, how many times has that happened before? Oh yeah. Zero.
It is in vogue these days, and for many days before these, to attack unions as money-grubbing commie-loving extortionists. It is a sad spectacle to see poor people turn on the very movement that has reduced the number of poor people more effectively than any other institution in this nation.
Union contracts are seen as greedy, grasping, and unworthy of sanctity, while the contracts of hedge-fund managers and stockbrokers are treated as utterly inviolable, as if they were written in the blood of the Christ.
As a person who has been a member of one union or another since I was 15, I can vouch for the fact that they are corrupt, overbearing, and special interests in the very truest and worst sense of the words. And in addition to all this, they are profoundly necessary.
The only reason to attack and undermine unions is if you make the perfect the enemy of the good, or if you weigh unions against the almighty rather than the alternative.
There are two groups that are organized and rich enough to influence national politics. These are the most special of our special interest groups. They are the unions and the corporations.
As unsavory as unions can be at times, let us not measure them against the almighty, but rather against the alternative. The alternative to unions are corporations. The most cursory assessment of how many people, and what kinds of people, each group represents should tell us that unions are the final firewall between us and a banana republic.
Unfortunately, there is no powerful special interest group that represents poor people. Instead, there are special interest groups that represent the middle class (unions) and there are special interest groups that represent the ultra-rich (corporations).
Since these are the only 2 choices available to us, we must pick one. And my choice is obvious. The unions are the only wealthy special interest that does not worship wealth as an end in and of itself. For unions, profits are produced by workers, so they should be shared by workers. For corporations, profits are produced by the owners and should therefore remain with them.
The choice is clear. Americans create wealth like no other people ever have. Our two major special interest groups each have a philosophy on who actually creates that wealth and on who deserves to share in that wealth.
Corporations feel that investors and entrepreneurs are the most important people in the world. Unions understand how important investors and entrepreneurs are, but they also understand that without the workers, all the money and ideas in the world would never get off the drawing board.
So consider what this country, and this country's politics, would look like if the unions are crushed. Right now, presidential elections are either bought by corporations or unions. The alternative is an election either bought by Bank of America or Citibank.
If you don't think unions are indispensable, think about the concept of the weekend. The weekend does not exist in nature, or in the "free market". It was made by men. Union men. What corporation would suggest that people should not have to work every day?
Corporations would never have invented the weekend. They serve a master that would not allow it. But unions serve us, even if we don't serve them.
When I think of the greatest Americans in history, I realize a certain affinity and common frame of mind between Mark Twain and myself. By that I mean that if Mark Twain put his mind to the same task, naming the greatest Americans, he would include no politicians or generals in his list. And neither would I.
