The Honor of Our Country Is in Danger

7 Nov 2022 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , 3 Comments
The ghosts of Washington and Lincoln stand watch over the presidential chair that James G. Blaine is attempting to approach.

Given the dire politics of today, the notion that the United States is undergoing a steep and irreversible decline is easy to entertain. The lifespan of republics being notoriously short, and the signs of decay being abundant, American prospects are suddenly, unexpectedly bleak. The nation that’s risen to such heights, that’s given its people so much, now seems destined to decline and fall. The conflict between the parties has been going on for so long, and the tone of public life is so low, and the bad people among us so bold and numerous, that many of us have reluctantly given up the nation for lost.

We have resisted and objected to each new outrage, each new manifestation of mendacity and corruption, but with such mixed results and with such persistence of myriad malignant forces that many of us are demoralized and exhausted.

Americans who have fought for years to marginalize Trump and keep good people in power have yet to score a decisive victory. Even now, two years after American voters defeated Trump at the polls, they cannot yet rejoice. It’s still too soon to rejoice, too soon to say that the federal system is safe.

Take heart. Americans have seen their nation deteriorating before. To be honest, much of US history consists of backsliding times, when wholesome pride in this glorious nation, and righteous service to it, has been nearly snuffed out, thanks to the wily machinations of low-lifes and thieves.

Even in times of peace and prosperity, the United States has suffered setbacks and indignities, as corrupt and self-seeking charlatans (such as James G. Blaine, depicted above) have tried to rise, aiming to monopolize a great system of government they can only disgrace.

Long is the fight, but good Americans are too stalwart to cede victory to the dark forces still pressing in.

 

Image:
Bernhard Gillam, “The Honor of the Country in Danger,”
published in Puck magazine 29 October 1884,
 from this source.

IMAGE NOTE: In this masterful 1884 political cartoon by Bernhard Gillam, the ghosts of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln stand watch over a presidential chair that the unworthy James G. Blaine aspires to.  As the United States approached the centenary of its Founding in 1889, would the century that began with George Washington as president end in disgrace with the likes of Blaine?  (Opponents dubbed Senator Blaine, “the Continental Liar from the State of Maine.”)

In the 1884 election, Democrats sought to rout a Republican party that, since its glory days in the Civil War (1861-1865), had grown disreputable and corrupt.  The Republican Party’s rise to power in the 1850s on the strength of its principled opposition to slavery, coupled with its noble defense of the Union and victory over the rebel proslavery states, issued in an enduring political monopoly.  Beginning with Lincoln’s election in 1860, Republicans controlled the White House for twenty-four years.  The Democratic Party, having been tolerant of slavery before the war, was tainted and nationally anathema for all this time. 

During Reconstruction (1865-1876), Republican control of the federal government guaranteed that former slaveholders would not regain power and undo all that the Civil War had so painfully accomplished.  Excessive power in the hands on one party, however, allowed political mendacity and corruption to flourish.  In addition, support gradually waned for the monopolistic use of federal power (including military power) to protect minority rights in Southern states.  Open-ended coercion violated the principles of self-government and reserved state powers on which the Constitution is based.

In 1876, these contradictions and other, more ignoble considerations led the Republicans to abandon the Reconstruction policies that had kept the former Confederate states from reverting to the status quo ante bellum. Thereafter, commercial prosperity replaced racial equality as the Republican Party’s top priority. The Grand Old Party’s degenerate condition became unmistakably evident in 1884, when it chose the slippery James G. Blaine as its presidential nominee.

In the cartoon, Blaine is depicted as an imposter who is out of his league.  His scandal-ridden past is indelibly tattooed on his flesh.  The flimsy cloak he wears can’t hide his true nature as a servile tool.

He stands abased before the lofty legacy of past presidents.  His hat, labeled “Corruption,” is falling off, as, quaking, he begins his assault on the nation’s highest office.  Leaning against him and pushing him from behind is Jay Gould, who excelled in getting government concessions for the railroads he owned.  Gould has his sights set on stacking the bench.  The paper he holds reads “Four Supreme Court judges to be appointed by the next president.” 

Also behind Blaine is Stephen W. Dorsey, a former US Senator implicated in the “Star Routes Scandal,” whereby a circle of profiteers bilked the Treasury of millions of dollars by colluding on bids for carrying the mail.  Dorsey is depicted as a bootlicker.  Next to him on the floor is a paper that reads “Honesty No Requisite for the Presidency (Blaine’s Theory).”

Finally, to the right of the stairs stands Benjamin F. Butler, dressed up as a court jester possessing a “Bargain with Blaine.”  Butler’s controversial actions as the military governor of wartime New Orleans, coupled with his opportunistic political maneuverings, made him a weathervane of the Gilded Age.  Vastly wealthy as a result of both honest and questionable business dealings during the Civil War, Butler was arguably providing cover for Blaine in 1884, for he was on the ticket as a third-party presidential candidate for the People’s Party.  Rumor held that Butler’s candidacy was a Republican-backed sham, to draw off votes from Blaine’s opponent, Democrat Grover Cleveland.

It was no use.  On Election Day in November 1884, Americans went to the polls and saved the nation from James G. Blaine.  They rejected the stink of Republican corruption and, for the first time since 1856, elected a Democratic president.  

A Touch of Covid Immobilizes

14 Oct 2022 By in Autobiographical Tags: , , , , , , 3 Comments

It’s my turn to have a covid infection.  I developed a cough on the eve of an appointment to get the bivalent vaccine.  Just a little cough.  So I took a home test and was surprised when it showed a faint positive line.  No bivalent vaccine for me.

So, the immobility.  I retreated to the guest bedroom Wednesday, where I’ve been since, except for venturing briefly (in a mask) to other rooms for necessities.  No TV.  If I stay here for five days, the minimum period of self-isolation that the CDC recommends to anyone who tests positive or has covid symptoms, it will represent an immobility utterly new to me.  Never have I been confined to one room for days at a time.

The utter absence of bedside companionship makes it strange.  No one to come in with chicken broth or sit in the corner to pass the time.  My going out to lie on the sofa in the living room is out of the question, too.  If I had an ordinary flu or cold, such would be my choice for seeing it through.

The isolation covid requires is elaborate and severe.  It’s no wonder that household infection rates are so high (50% or more).  Most families lack the room that the authorities say a self-isolating covid patient requires.  Not every household has a bed and bathroom to devote to self-isolation. Also, the goal of keeping the covid patient isolated from others at meals is attainable only if eating schedules can be staggered or someone else can wait on the covid patient in his or her room.  This is impossible if a household is cramped or its members have other obligations.

No wonder many Americans dismiss or ignore the official guidelines.  For thousands, these guidelines are impracticable, outlandishly so.  Space considerations aside, many workers can ill afford to stay home for so many days; those without sick leave forfeit their pay.

Global forces have found their way into my guest room via my lungs.  Large events, such as covid, the January 6th insurrection, and the war in Ukraine, define our times historically.  These vast, complex dramas, which are too large for any ordinary person to influence or control, have powerfully and lastingly transformed the tenor of our milieu.  Yet, even as covid sweeps over society and every one of us individually, its effects on us are isolating.  Just as covid’s dangers have jeopardized the institutions and customs that define society, so masking divorces us from one another.  Being sick with covid not only removes us from society; it disrupts our households and families.  Official policies regarding covid estrange people from one another and challenge individuals to live according to scientific standards at the expense of their own time-honored ways.

The nation’s response to covid is not necessarily objectionable.  It can be defended on humanitarian grounds.  At the same time, I get why segments of the population view the fight against covid as quixotic and ineffectual.  Even as I adhere to prevailing guidance (which I need my doctor to interpret for me), I’m aware of its byzantine, hieratic qualities, which make compliance a kind of luxury.

I Am Bound

12 Sep 2022 By in The Inner Ocean Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

A bend in the Concord River

I realized only today that the word “religion” means being bound.  That’s startling, because I associate religion with boundlessness, with access to transcendent experience and possibilities.  Instead religion is a limit, a binding of oneself, mainly in a spirit of reverence, although in many cultures religion is a coercive belief system that one has little choice but to conform to.

Furthermore, there is a curious double meaning in the word religion, for “being bound” means “being tied,” whether literally or figuratively (as a slave is bound to a master). But “being bound” also means heading in a certain direction, advancing toward a specific destination (as in “bound for Rio” or “bound for the Olympics”).  Taken altogether, religion is a thing that both limits and orients and propels.

It’s noteworthy that reverence is the impulse central to religious practice and identity.  A reverential spirit leads us forward in exploring spiritual mysteries, but reverence also entails obeisance, an acknowledgement or conviction that there exists something greater and more enduring and ineffable than ourselves.  That conviction or faith corresponds to the evidence everywhere that reason can’t cover all cases: that in our souls and voices, and in the created world, we discern wonders and mysteries that no amount of intellection and tinkering can mimic or explain.  Thus, even a seeker after religion is religious already.

Organized religion is just one manifestation of religion, but it is important as a reservoir of value and thought, bringing together communities of believers and giving their instinctive faith and wonder a vocabulary and form.  As mass society eclipses older cultures built upon the rock of creative individuality, so too modernism is eclipsing many once-flourishing religious venues that existed for feeding spiritual fires and strengthening souls.  We may still be votaries, more likely to travel alone because our bonds are loose.

 

The Eleventh Hour

1 Sep 2022 By in A Becoming Green Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

A bright moon and stars illuminating night clouds and oak crowns.

Who would have imagined watching the collapse of human culture on television, the unreal news–the footage, the statistics of devastation and human suffering–flowing past on a small-scale screen, while, in another corner of the living room, our American household has paused for that welcome ritual known as “happy hour”?

As we ingest cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, our eyes follow the raging brown waters as we hear about the submersion of over one third of Pakistan, overwhelmed with floods.  Yes, as we sit there, a part of us considers what it would be like to stand in a landscape where everything is lost to muddy water.  How long would we last?

After a thorough segment on Pakistani suffering, the news shifts to Sudan, the African nation whose people have lost their crops to “climate whiplash,” in this case a combination of floods followed by droughts.  The crops they have planted are dying for want of water, whereas immense tracts of normally arable land are useless, a dead loss, because they are still submerged or saturated with water from last year’s floods.  The families have no farm animals or machinery to begin with, and, over the past year or so, they have had to watch their crops rot, to ration out what little remaining food they have to their hungry children.

A representative of Unicef is interviewed, who pleads on behalf of the suffering children of Pakistan.  The nation’s minister of climate change, a beautiful knowledgable woman, tells us that the cost of climate remediation is staggering.  Also that Pakistani sorrows proceed directly from the modern customs that people in our part of the world invented, built up, and at this point are hopelessly addicted to.

Every day at home and abroad, Americans witness and experience similar catastrophes.  Many of us accept the drastic shift that the developed world must undertake and reorganize around if our habitat, our families and societies are to survive.  Like so much else we have experienced since 2020, the accelerating pace of lethal natural disasters seems unreal.  Circumstances demand that all humanity pivot, and in short order contrive a more modest and sustainable relation to nature.

Yet, now, in the eleventh hour, it is easier to continue on in our habits than to grapple with a radical resolution, to acknowledge our inescapable dependence on Earth, and to stop engaging in all that we know is degrading the planet and intensifying the suffering multiplying everywhere around.

Presidential Material

6 Jul 2022 By in Photography Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

Of the many photographs taken of Theodore Roosevelt reading, this one is perhaps the most beguiling.  It was taken in 1905, when the president was on vacation.  He used his time off to go bear hunting in Colorado on horseback with a small group of friends.  While there, he stayed in the “West Divide Creek ranch house,” a simple log cabin.

Roosevelt was famous as a man of action. Few presidents had his love of ‘roughing it,’ though many were endowed, as he was, with physical courage and military zeal.  Roosevelt’s love of adventure sprang from wanting to prove himself by facing elemental challenges.  This passion fueled his love of sport (such as boxing) as well as his famous excursion toward the end of his life to find the headwaters of the Amazon.  As president, he was resolute, tackling the prickliest dilemmas in a forthright, all-out way.

At the same time, Roosevelt’s effectiveness derived from his great intellectual capacities.  He was a  voracious reader, devouring information and knowledge like a large fish feeding with mouth open wide.  He read and wrote compulsively, regardless of his official duties.  Being intellectual was intrinsic to his identity.  Knowledge clarified the problems he confronted, undergirding Roosevelt’s confidence and leadership skills.

Photographers accompanied Roosevelt on his Wild West vacation.  This allowed the public to see another side of the president, barren of conventional symbols of prestige.  Yet beneath the ratty clothes and ridiculous hat, Roosevelt’s big-heartedness, joie de vivre, and seriousness remained much in evidence.  The dog on his lap joined the Roosevelt household, when Teddy took him back to the White House to stay.   

Image: from this source.