Perhaps the ultimate quest among historians, much as it is among physicists, is the quest for the grand unifying theory. What one thing is common to all that has happened? What drives history?
Is is the migration of tribes? The simple accidents of germs and natural resources? Man's quest for freedom? A battle between religions? All of those theories have elements of truth, as do nearly all theories. But the truth is perhaps simpler. And sweeter.
Two of the turning points of modern history were caused by man's lust for......condiments. Spices. The expedition of Columbus and the Cuban Missile Crisis were both driven by the urge for more tasteful food.
Of course Columbus did not "discover" the Americas. But his journey to America represented the point of no return in the great human rediscovery of an elemental truth: there was one Earth of finite size and all mankind came from the same place upon it. This rediscovery is still a work in progress.
But Columbus' journey was not driven by this epic and primordial quest; it was driven by the urge for spices. Cinnamon. Pepper. Simple as that. We call Native Americans "Indians" because Columbus thought he was in the Indies, today Indonesia, which was also known as the spice islands.
Before Columbus discovered that the Natives had gold, he was horrified by their lack of nutmeg, terrified of returning to his royal sponsors with no crushed red pepper.
Just as Columbus was a turning point in the story of mankind, the Cuban Missile Crisis, played out upon one of the very islands Columbus "discovered" was the most dangerous moment in the history of man.
And this conflict, despite Kennedy's flighty rhetoric and murderous impulses, despite Castro's megalomania, and despite Khrushchev's bluster, was about sugar.
The reason mankind almost committed suicide over Cuba (or rather the reason John Fitzgerald Kennedy thought this to be a worthy gamble) was that Fidel Castro seized American sugar plantations in Cuba.
American businesses had bought up the best land in Cuba for pennies on the dollar and had profited mightily from the labor and land and natural resources of Cuba. Fidel Castro dictatorially (and rightly) claimed this to be unacceptable and "stole" this land from the American "owners".
This was the turning point in America's attitudes towards Cuba, and it nearly became the beginning of the end of the world. And for what? For sugar. How sweet it is.
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.
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.
