I Get It Now

I get it now. I finally really get it. The "it" in question being why certain intelligent people consider John Kennedy to have been a great man.

I've always considered Kennedy to have been great in some regards, especially concerning his crippling illnesses and injuries which did not dissuade him from assuming awesome responsibilities and assuming great personal risks in service of his country.

From another perspective, he was a lecherous and debauched dilettante, but human beings are complicated like that.

I've written many times before about how the death cult surrounding JFK skews any objective appraisal of him. But it's not his fault he was assassinated; surely he would rather have lived than to ensure his perpetual popularity via martyrdom.

But the things JFK did have control over are what ought to define his legacy. And I've just rediscovered his civil rights speech from June 11, 1963.

And I've just realized how revolutionary it was, how much it meant to people of all types, and how it would be just as righteous had he lived to be 95 years old. In which case he would still be alive.

Kennedy gave this speech with less than 24 hours notice to the TV networks; it was not planned. It was not even written. When Kennedy saw people being killed in broad daylight because a black man tried to enroll in a college, he finally got it.

This was a man who could not possibly relate to blacks, but on this night he showed himself to be a man with a healthy moral limit. He gave this speech in spontaneity and anger. Or perhaps righteous indignation would be a better term.

When I watch this speech, I get it. I get why Nas says, on the Nigger album, "what do niggers do? we just / hang up pictures of Martin, JFK, and Jesus."

I understand now why when, 5 months after this speech, Kennedy had his head blown off of his body while sitting next to his wife in broad daylight in the Confederacy, people naturally assumed it was because of this speech. I get it.

If we can disenthrall ourselves from his murder, and imagine that we are watching this speech live, we can appreciate this man's greatness. This speech lost him millions of votes. He knew this. But he still gave it. I urge you to watch by clicking the link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS4Qw4lIckg

The Curse

One of the enduring ironies of the Vietnam War is that the Vietnamese seem to be more "over it" than the Americans, despite having suffered immeasurably more. I had two experiences last week that illustrated yet again to me how deep and destructive and divisive this legacy remains.

In my job as a history teacher, my colleagues and I naturally gather at lunch time to rap about the job, current events, and history. Well, some of us do. Lunch among history teachers is segregated by politics. I eat with the more reactionary crowd, which is due solely to the fact that they're more entertaining than the liberals.

One of the teacher's father is a Vietnam Vet. One of the other teachers (who dines elsewhere) has a poster of Ho Chi Minh on the wall of her classroom. This unfortunate congruence of events is a perfect microcosm of our bipolar Vietnam disorder.

The man whose father fought there is unable to acknowledge that his father was sent on a fool's errand (to be charitable). This is understandable to some extent, for when you have skin in the game it makes it a soul-crushing burden to admit that the game was crooked.

The woman who has a poster of Ho Chi Minh on her wall is unable to acknowledge that Ho was, among other things, a murderous tyrant by any measure. This is less understandable, as it relies on the infantile assumption that every fight is pure good versus pure evil. (The Americans were wrong, therefore Ho must have been supremely virtuous.)

At the very least, we can understand how sensitive an issue this is. What is the virtue of putting Ho's picture on the wall of a classroom? Even though American soldiers should have never been in Vietnam, it is at the very least extremely distasteful to idolize a man with so much American blood on his hands, especially for historically naive teenagers.

Also last week, I went to a bachelor party and spent about an hour talking to a Vietnam vet, "Sarge". In the course of our conversations, Sarge said many things.

He said we killed indiscriminately, but also that we fought with one hand tied behind our backs.

He said that our allies were barbarians, and also that our enemies were barbarians.

He implied that he played a part in murdering an incompetent American officer. "Let's just say 14 of us went into that jungle, and 13 of us came back...."

He said that he was spat on when he came home.

Some of these stories were surely true. Some were surely false or exaggerated. And we cannot assume which was which by virtue of identifying the contradictions, because the entire pathetic and tragic enterprise was a contradiction.

The spitting allegation is especially intriguing and a perfect illustration of our Vietnam psychosis. Human psychology tells us that people are fully capable of "remembering" things that never happened and of believing a lie so deeply that it loses its identity as a lie; a lie is only a lie if the liar believes he is lying.

These stories about how people "spit on us" when vets returned from Vietnam really gained traction in the 1980's. Why did it take so long for vets to "remember" these traumatic events? Well, because most of them surely never happened.

So what made these vets imagine that these things had happened? Rambo. And Born on the 4th of July. These movies featured scenes and/or allusions to vets being spit on and, lo and behold, thousands of vets began "remembering" that they had been spit on when they "got off the plane".

The fact that soldiers returing from the war were flown into military airports is but one indication of how unlikely these "memories" are.

Vietnam is such a deep psychological scar that there is not even an agreed-upon set of facts is at play. The psychosis is so deep that there are millions of Americans who will tell you with a straight face that America won the Vietnam War.

When someone writes a history of America in 100 years, it will be even clearer than it is now that Vietnam was the beginning of the end. Before Vietnam, huge swaths of Americans shared a consensus about certain truths and assumptions. There was a general trend of broadening and deepening material affluence and moral inclusion.

But after Vietnam, America became the country it is today, polarized, distressed, aggressive, a place where people can barely agree on what day of the week it is. And when we trace back the root of this discontent, we find ourselves where we were 40 years ago, walking aimlessly through an impenetrable jungle waiting for our demise.

The Mortality Gap

Conventional wisdom has it that our 3 greatest Presidents are Washington, Lincoln, and FDR.

I have no particular quarrel with Washington (aside from his being an owner and seller of human beings).

My only quarrel with Lincoln is that he has more American blood on his hands than any other President in our history.

And my only quarrel with Roosevelt is that he was elected president twice after he knew he was dying of cancer.

Roosevelt was surely one of the most consequential men of human history. He led the United States through two crises, either one of which alone would have qualified him as a great leader. At the end of these crises, the United States was the most powerful nation in the history of the world by any and all measures.

He did great things and he did stupid and awful things (internment of Japanese-Americans, for example). But the thing that interests me most about Roosevelt is his morality concerning his mortality and his evident belief in his invulnerability.

The conventional wisdom when Roosevelt died was that he had, in the beautiful words of a Senator at the time (in a time when Senators occasionally spoke beautiful words) "literally worked himself to death in the service of the American people." And, as with all myths, there is a healthy does of truth to this.

But there is more. In 1940, Roosevelt had a decision to make. Back then, there were no term limits for presidents. So Roosevelt had to decide if he would be the first president to break the two-term precedent set by Washington.

There were many reasons to say yes. The first crisis (the Great Depression) was still unresolved. The second crisis (World War II) was only a matter of time. But there was a reason to say no as well: Roosevelt had cancer.

Roosevelt was a cripple. He could not walk or stand unaided. The fact that he was such a great man despite this is an amazing testament. But this was only possible because he willfully concealed (lied about) his true physical condition. And he had thousands of aiders and abettors. Perhaps you can defend hiding paralyzed legs from voters. But cancer?

But, of course, it's not so simple. Roosevelt obviously had a deep conviction that he was the best, perhaps the only, man for the job. And he may have been right.

The republican who ran against Roosevelt in 1940 died before his first term would have been over had he won. So did his running mate. So if Roosevelt had not run, or lost, in 1940, the president at the height of World War II would have been the senior member of the Senate, as the rules called for. That man was 87 years old.

So perhaps it is best that FDR covered up his cancer and served a 3rd term. But in 1944, he had the same decision to make again; would he run for an un-un-precedented 4th term?

Again, there were many reasons to say yes: The first crisis (Depression) was over, largely due to government spending and full employment caused by the second crisis (War). And the second crisis was almost over. No sense changing horses in midstream.

But, again, there were reasons to say no: specifically Roosevelt's cancer had metastasized to his brain. A quick glance at the 2nd photo above this post shows his deterioration. Roosevelt and his doctors knew he could not live another 4 years. He was not an old man (62) but he was a dying man.

Yet, he ran again. Knowing he would die, his choice for vice-president obviously carried monumental import. But he based his consideration entirely on domestic political concerns, picking a centrist senator from Missouri for reasons to boring and arcane to be relevant anymore. This was a decision made by a man who seemed to consider himself immortal.

And in some ways he was, and is, immortal. Any scenario of the 1930's and 40's in the U.S. without Roosevelt would have resulted in a much different, and probably far worse, outcome for us all. Roosevelt was the closest the U.S. has ever come to having a king. Lincoln was more of an Emperor.

And just like Lincoln, Roosevelt enjoys the virtue of martyrdom, which serves to posthumously excuse sin. But imagine if Lincoln had run for reelection in 1864 knowing he would die in 1865? Seems ridiculous.

But what if JFK had run in 1960 knowing he had debilitating illnesses? Or if Reagan had run in 1984 knowing that his mental faculties were abandoning him? Or if George W. Bush had run in 2000 knowing he was clueless? Imagine that.

Where Credit's Due (or, Where Credit Dies)

The two men pictured above have much in common. Until Bush the younger, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan were the only 2-term Republican presidents other than Ulysses S. Grant. And the fact that the guy's name was Ulysses indicates how long ago that was.

Other things they had in common: they were, and remain, the two oldest presidents ever elected. They both served in World War II: Eisenhower was a 5-star general, responsible for the American invasion of Nazi-occupied France; Reagan made propaganda films in Hollywood.

As president, each of these men were given credit for certain things. The problem is that they did not deserve that credit. And the larger problem is that by giving them credit, we impale ourselves on our own delusions.

President Eisenhower was largely credited with ending the Korean War. How did he do so? Most American historians insist that he made peace by threatening to use nuclear weapons. The North Koreans and Chinese, sufficiently intimidated, then chose to sign a truce.

How do we know this is absurd? It implies that President Truman, who preceded Eisenhower, never made a similar threat. President Truman, of course, remains the only person in history to actually use nuclear weapons, so it is absurd in the extreme to assert that the North Koreans or Chinese were more intimidated by Eisenhower than they were by Truman.

So why did the Korean War really end? (It would be far more accurate to ask why the Korean War was paused, as it still remains in suspended animation which could break at any moment) The Korean War really ended because Stalin died.

Stalin, as Godfather of the Communist world, was able to use his enormous force of personality to insist that the North Korean and Chinese continue bleeding the Americans. When he died, his force of personality died with him, and his Asian colleagues swiftly called a truce, something Stalin had forbid during his lifetime.

The danger in the misreading described above is the lesson we learn from it. That erroneous lesson reads thusly: if you're trapped in a quagmire, just threaten nuclear annihilation and your enemy will quit. But what if they don't? Ever heard of Vietnam?

As for Ronald Reagan, he is largely credited with ending the Cold War. Mainstream historians tell us he did this by increasingly military spending to a level that the Communists simply could not compete with.

How do we know this is absurd? Because in seeking to bankrupt the Soviet Union, Reagan damn near bankrupted the United States. And when the Soviet Union did collapse, the militaries involved played absolutely no role whatsoever; it was a political process rather than a military one.

So why did the Cold War really end? Two reasons. Firstly, communism didn't work. Secondly, the Communist bloc finally had a ruler (Gorbachev) who allowed people to state the obvious: communism didn't work. As soon as people were given political choice, most of them chose a different political system.

Again, the danger in misreading the lesson describe above is what we "learned" from it. We learned that when we are confronted by an opposing force, we simply spend that force into the ground. But what happens when that opposing force is not even trying to outspend us?

Further, what happens when there always seems to be an opposing force that pops up after the last one was spent into dust? Then we keep spending. And what happens when we keep spending? We end up with a country in debt up to its eyeballs, most of that debt incurred by building weapons we could never use.

The danger with history is that people will use it to justify what they do. So if they misread history, and draw the wrong lessons, they will inherently make the wrong decisions in the present.

When we look back at the foreign policy of this country in the last 60 years, it boils down to two tenets, both of which are based on misreadings of history: threaten to use nukes and build thousands of nukes you could never use. What's the worst that could happen?

The Merits of Kingship

The demise of Moamar Qadaffi reminds us that there are not many kings left on earth. A form of government which was so obviously right as to be unworthy of debate for most of human history is now largely considered to be an anachronistic absurdity.

Qadaffi did not call himself a "king", of course; his hatred for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia dictated that he refuse that title, as did the fact that he gained power at the ripe age of 27 by overthrowing King Idris of Lybia.

But a king he was, of course, made evident by his cult of personality and the planned succession of his sons. Most of the world today sees that model of government as unacceptable. This is a profound revolution in human thought and organization.

Kingship relies on two irreducible assumptions, whatever form it comes in. One assumption is that decisions are best made by one person, as debate tends to dilute and delay any effective action. The second assumption is that when the king dies, the only way to avoid bloodshed and chaos is to have an obvious successor predetermined.

These assumptions actually work sometimes, but when they don't chaos and war is almost assured.

The first assumption is that power is most effectively wielded by one person. And that is true. But the problem is that "power" is a value-neutral thing; it could be good, but it could just as easily be awful.

When one person has unlimited power, we are all at the mercy of that person. If that person has a good idea, we are in luck. But if that person has a bad idea, there is nothing to ward of that idea.

When power is shared, good ideas are watered down and delayed. And that is incredibly frustrating. But more importantly, awful ideas are watered down and delayed as well. And for that, we should all thank God.

The second assumption is that inherited power prevents chaos and war. Again, sometimes this works. But even when it does work, there is absolutely no reason to think that the best person for the job just happened to have been born to the King.

Henry VIII is an interesting example. His obvious heir was his son, who was only 9. The fact that making a 9-year old King was "obvious" is but one example of how absurd this system is, especially when we consider that the 9-year old boy had a 31-year old sister when he became king.

Henry's 9-year old son became the ruler instead of his 31-year old daughter. So in addition to the absurdity of the idea of inherent and divine right and might, we have the absurdity of sexism to the point where we choose a 9-year old instead of a 31-year old solely by virtue of what's in their pants.

Henry's 9-year old son was king for 5 years. Then he died. The daughter then took over for 5 years. She died, known as Bloody Mary. So who came next? Was there a search for educated and empathetic people? Of course not.

Next in line was Elizabeth. Elizabeth's mother, Anne Boleyn, had been declared (literally) an incestuous witch and had her head cut off, despite the fact that she was the Queen of England. Yet her daughter became queen and remained queen for half a century.

So the system failed in England. They had a female ruler for a half-century, born to a witch, no less. According to their worldview, that would be like us having a......well, having a 9-year old boy be our president. But their system allowed them no other choice.

There is still great nostalgia and romance associated with kingship. (Our obsession with the recent "royal" wedding in England serves as proof). But we have also witnessed kingship, as an idea, being utterly eviscerated for the past century.

There are very few kings left. Some are not called "king". (Fidel Castro, Kim Jong Il) Some are. The good news is that they are few and far between. The bad news is that they are occasionally necessary.

But the impossible part of it is that nobody can identify the necessary conditions for a king except for....a king. And a king always wants to be king.

Slime of the Century

As Americans, we were all raised on a steady diet of white hat-black hat, good guy-bad guy stories. But in real life, of course, morals and motives are always far more mixed than in our preferred fictional templates.

The Clinton scandals are representative of this truth. Yet pro-Clinton and anti-Clinton partisans muddied the water by insisting on a black and white approach. Pro-Clinton people often implied that there was nothing wrong with the President's conduct because it was "personal".

Anti-Clinton people implied that anyone not demanding the President's resignation was endorsing his personal behavior and that all means were justified towards the end of discovering personal sins.

The truth, however, is that there was no shortage of "wrong" on both sides of this fiasco. But the amazing thing is that President Clinton did less "wrong" than his attackers. This messy truth calls into questions many of our perceptions of law, morality, and privacy.

We all know that what Clinton did was wrong. And since it's so short and sweet, we'll stipulate that point first. Clinton engaged in sexual acts with a woman who was 1) not his wife 2) his subordinate in the workplace, and 3) half his age.

That's what Clinton did. What is important to note is that 1) I don't defend any of his behavior, and 2) NONE of the above behavior is illegal.

The President was impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors concerning an action that was not a crime. That should give us pause.

Here is what his enemies did wrong:

1) After investigating the Whitewater land investments that the Clintons made in Arkansas, no criminal conduct by the Clintons was ever found. When they realized they could not indict the Clintons in this matter, Clinton's enemies did not end their investigation; Instead, they expanded it into the President's sex life.

2) The excuse for the entree into Clinton's sex life was a sexual harassment suit filed by Paula Jones against the President. Since nobody ever alleged that the President's affair with Monica Lewinsky was not consensual, this conduct had no relation to the Jones suit other than that they both involved "sex" (even though there was no sexual conduct in the Jones case)

3) In investigating the President's affair with Lewinsky (remember, there was never any allegation that this affair was "illegal"), Clinton's enemies used illegally tape-recorded phone calls between Monica Lewinsky and her "friend", Linda Tripp.

4) In order to extract a confession from Ms. Lewinsky (a "confession" about something that was NOT a crime) the investigators detained her in a hotel room and refused to let her call her lawyers, instead threatening to send her to prison. When this did not sufficiently loosen Ms. Lewinsky's lips, the investigators then threatened to imprison her parents.

5) After determining, through illegal phone recordings and coerced statements from Ms. Lewinsky sans lawyer, that the President had an affair with Lewinsky, the investigators planned to ask the President if he had sexual contact with Lewinsky, hoping to trap him in a lie. They did so during the Paula Jones deposition.

6) While testifying in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case, investigators asked Clinton about Lewinsky even though Lewinsky had never alleged sexual harassment, making that line of questioning entirely irrelevant. And when they asked the President about this non-relevant non-crime, he lied.

That is the "crime" that Bill Clinton was impeached for, after being investigated non-stop for 6 years. The issue is not whether we defend Clinton's conduct with Lewinsky, but rather how anyone could justify the conduct of his accusers.

Clinton's pursuers spent $80 million to prove that he committed adultery and setting up a situation in which Clinton would lie about this affair while being deposed about an entirely unrelated issue.

The budget for the 9/11 commission was $5 million.

The persecution of William Jefferson Clinton was not a good vs. evil morality play; it was bad vs. evil. And just how evil does one need to be to make Bill Clinton look like a victim?

Time Cops

While I have enormous moral and ethical and economic arguments against many of the laws of our land, I am proudly a part of the huge majority of people who feel that laws are necessary. The subject of law is as old as civilization itself. The need for law is clear to most people.

But I do not wish to question the need for law. The issue here is not whether laws are needed. Instead, this is an exercise in identifying unasked questions. As soon as these questions are asked, their merit is obvious, and we chastise ourselves for being so foolish as to not raise them earlier.

So here's the question: The question is not "do we need laws?" because the answer to that is obvious. The question, rather, is "who WROTE the laws that we are all beholden to?" Long story short, we largely follow dead mens' laws.

Perhaps our most-quoted (and therefore our most misquoted) founding father was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson had an idea that there should be a revolution every generation. The more famous words in this quote have to do with the "tree of liberty being watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants".

But Jefferson was not calling for the perpetual violence that seems implied by the statement. He was not calling for war every 20 years, but rather a revisiting and revision of laws and assumptions, preferably through the democratic process.

A biography of Caesar which I am currently reading does a fantastic job of articulating this shackling to the past. Just as in the United States today, Rome had become dysfunctional due to this blind allegiance to the assumptions of men who had been dead for centuries.

"Their judgment was not necessarily powerful because it was right, but it was right because it was powerful."

In other words, might makes right. This has been a fixture of American domestic and foreign policy for decades.

"From the earliest times Rome had set great store by preserving and handing down the customs of the fathers. And as no one knew or could even imagine that the Roman order as a whole was no longer able to respond to the exigencies of the age, the only possible explanation for the present crises and emergencies was that the old customs were no longer properly practised. It was therefore necessary to be all the more punctilious in observing them"

This idea also increasingly dominates our politics. Since we cannot conceive of any flaw in our system, which we consider to be inherently ideal, the only explanation we can offer for our failures is that we are failing to properly mimic men who died a century before the invention of the automobile.

In other words, we refuse to consider that Jefferson's system may no longer be relevant, so we therefore assume that our problems result in us not properly imitating Jefferson.

"Respect for the old, formerly a rule, now become a binding law. Often it was no longer the rules of the ancestors that were raised to the status of dogma, but what was written about them, as it were, in the history books."

This is an important caveat, because in our desire to imitate the founders, we selectively edit their actual conduct according to our own preconceived biases. So, rather than following the founders (which is irrational enough in its own right) we instead follow our own self-projected and self-serving images of what the founders would do in our shoes.

"The Senate regime was anything but convincing, with its insistence on complaisance and consideration, its time-wasting and obsession with trifles, and above all its utter refusal to countenance anything new.

The political order was full of absurdities, which only made sense because society still believed in them. Yet what was so maddening was society's increasingly rigid attachment to the past."

All nations reject any other nation's right to occupy their territory or meddle in their politics. But sometimes, we are not occupied by foreign armies; sometimes we are occupied by dead ones.