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.

Why We Lionize Our Lyin' Eyes

Seeing is believing. But, to employ one of my favorite analogies, seeing is like the truth but it is NOT the whole truth. Not even close.

We all know that dogs, for example, can smell and hear things that we humans can not. We are also intelligent enough to accept as fact that whenever a dog smells or hears something that we cannot, that thing does in fact exist. It must exist, or else the dog could not smell it. In this situation we do not take our failure to smell it as evidence of its nonexistence.

Yet when it comes to sight, we stray across this common-sense thresh hold and seem to believe that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. When we consider how little of the spectrum our eyes can see, we understand the error of that assumption.

By definition, we cannot see the huge majority of what is around us. UV rays, X-rays, microwaves, and sound waves are just a few examples of the universes that are right in front of our face yet utterly invisible.

This is do to the logic of evolution, which has so far dictated that we are most efficient with our current arrangement of senses. And it does seems reasonable that if we could actually see everything that there was to see, it would probably immediately result in a mental breakdown due to sensory overload.

I do not understand biology or evolution nearly well enough to make educated observations of how and why our senses evolved in the ways that they did, but I know history well enough to understand that this naturally-selected blindness does not stop at physical perception; it's the perfect metaphor for how we see and remember our lives, whether individually or collectively.

Have you ever seen film footage from the early 20th century? If you have, you can call to mind the way people move in those films. They are jerky and sporadic in their motions, as if people back then simply hadn't learned yet how to walk gracefully.

This illusion, of course, is not caused by our ancestors lack of grace; it is caused by the film. Back in the day, film had far fewer frames per second than it does now, so the end product actually looked a lot more like what all film actually is: a flipbook of individual photographs shown in quick enough succession to give the human eye the illusion of a continuous motion picture.

And an illusion is all it is, of course. There's no such thing as a "movie", per se; all movies are simply rapid fire photograph shows. But when the film is of sufficient quality to obscure all the blank spaces in between the photographs, we are left with the illusion of motion.

This dynamic serves as a useful metaphor for many things. But it is not only metaphor. The motion picture illusion, which is made possible by the evolutionary limits of the human eye, is actually the illusion that nature employs for all of "reality".

The smallest things we know of used to be atoms. Now the smallest things we know of are subatomic particles, of which several specific types have been identified. These elemental pieces will no doubt be further broken down by science, but they've already been studied sufficiently to learn one amazing thing: the universe itself is an illusion, just like a movie.

Science has learned that the smallest particles, of which everything that exists are by definition made, do not continually exist. Instead, they blink in and out of "existence" hundreds of time per second. This is obviously far too fast to be perceived by the human senses, just like a movie. But the result is the same.

If you ask a scientist where a certain particle was located at a certain moment in time, he or she will tell you that the question cannot be answered because the building blocks of everything are NEVER in one place or fixed in one time. Instead, they flutter in and out, like a movie at thousands of frames per second, creating a perfect illusion for our limited senses.

The most important thing that can be taken from this is that for every image, there must be an equal amount of empty space. If you have 100 frames of images per second in your movie of life, you must also have 100 frames of nothing. Our senses are not developed to perceive this emptyness, or even to understand what it is, but we know it is there.

While emptyness of often associated with loss or death, due mostly to our sensory limits, they need not be seen that way. In fact, since this "emptyness" makes up so much of the invisible universe around us, it is an integral part of our lives.

I suspect that if we could truly see everything around us, we would learn a few truths very quickly. Firstly, we would be able to see previously invisible forms of energy and light and to perceive how connected people are with each other, even by virtue of passing one another on the street.

If we could also slow down our universe so that our eyes could perceive its true nature, that of a light being flicked on and off a million times per second, we would have to being a whole new inquiry: what happens when the lights are off?

Our Favorite Murderer

Dinesh D'Souza recently wrote a book entitled "The Roots of Obama's Rage". It's actually slightly more level-headed and interesting than one might suppose by virtue of the title, but there was one anecdote about Winston Churchill that says some good things about Obama and some awful things about most of the rest of us.

We all know something about the Churchill cult in this culture, which is profoundly repulsive to myself and to anyone else with even a passing knowledge of history. Churchill is praised in this nation under the apparent assumption that he was born on September 1, 1939.

In other words, most of us associate Churchill only with his role in World War II. That role in itself is full of treachery and war crimes as well as inspiration and fortitude. But let's just skip World War II. Let's just assume (falsely) that Churchill was "the good guy".

What D'Souza lambastes Obama for is removing a bust of Churchill from the White House. Gasp! Why does Obama hate England?? For the same reason most of us should hate England: an accurate knowledge of their conduct over the past couple centuries.

Obama's father was a Kenyan, which means that Obama knows full well of Churchill's role in starving and killing his ancestors. I, on the other hand, am German and Irish, which means....oh, wait...I guess it means the same thing.

Churchill was a racist and imperialist of the fullest and crudest sense, clinging to these convictions even as he waged a war for "freedom" against the racist and imperialist Nazis. Indeed, even after that war for "freedom" Churchill refused freedom to Indians, Kenyans, Irishmen, or anyone else.

Every six months or so, I learn something new about Churchill that makes his true identity even more clear, and even more clearly repulsive. I've reached the point by now where I applaud Obama for removing his bust from the White House, just as I would applaud him for removing a bust of Tojo or Hitler.

Here's my latest discovery. World War II can only be accurately understood as a continuation of World War I. The question of how World War II began, therefore, must correctly be phrased "How did World War I begin?"

The story of World War I is overlooked in our culture because it is far harder to spin it into a "good" or "necessary" war.

Churchill was in charge of the English navy at that time, and as such he had 2 responsibilities: blockading Germany and getting America to jump in against Germany.

When one wonders what Germany was so angry about, this should shed a little light on it: Winston Churchill directed his navy to deny an entire nation of food. Germany was intentionally starved. Millions died.

In addition to starving a whole nation, Churchill was occupied with pulling our nation into the war. He did this by seeking to get Americans killed by Germany submarines. He gave orders for civilian ships carrying American passengers to be armed. This, he hoped, would cause Germany to fire on those ships, thereby killing Americans.

He also urged "civilian" ships to carry weapons in their holds, again giving Germany cause to fire on them. The more Americans on these ships, the better (for Churchill). The Lusitania is a case in point. A British passenger ship, Churchill ordered the ship to carry tons of weapons both on and below its decks.

No American passengers were told that the ship had been transformed into a warship. No American passengers were told that Churchill knew of German plans to sink this very ship. No, to Churchill, the death of American civilians was a desired outcome. And he got the outcome he sought.

It's hard to think back to a time when Americans did not reflexively side against the British. But such a time did exist. It began, obviously, with the Revolution. It did not end until World War I. And the person who convinced us that England was our friend was the same person who was intentionally getting American civilians killed so that we would stumble into his war.

Unfortunately, we obliged him. But we should not fool ourselves. The only reason we value Churchill's role in World War II is that he was our ally. But so was Stalin. And there is no bust of Stalin in the White House.

In fact, if you asked the average American whether it was Churchill or Stalin who intentionally let American innocents be killed in order to force the country into an unwanted war, we all know what the answer would be. And now we know that answer would be wrong.