Play the Game

I am reading Adam Hochschild’s riveting story of World War I, To End All Wars. Born into a family that made a huge fortune in mining in the late 19^th century, Hochschild became a civil rights and anti-war activist early in life and co-founded Mother Jones magazine in the mid-1970s. As such, he is in a prime position to write about the war’s loyalists and dissenters, groups with wonderfully arcane British twists – such as the fact that Sir John French, the first commander of British forces, and Charlotte Despard, anti-war activist, future communist and IRA sympathizer, were brother and sister. Hochschild writes insightfully about the British penchant to see war as a game, to equate fighting with competition, and to honor sportsmanship on both the playing field and the battlefield. In particular, he notes the impact of Sir Henry Newbolt’s “Vitaï Lampada” (“The Torch of Life”) – a poem I still sometimes hear declaimed by grown men in school ties – which compares war to cricket and urges its young heroes on both fields to “Play up! Play up! And play the game!”

This was a creed that made the British general staff exceptionally unsuited to the devastation of industrial warfare, the ugly reality of the trenches and the mind-boggling casualties – military and civilian – of World War I.

In an unrelated matter, I lost at squash yesterday, and I’m still pissed.

Unrelated? Well, maybe it’s better to think of a game as war, rather than of war as a game.

Grant's Tomb

When I taught middle-school history, one question on my Christmas quiz was “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?” Almost everybody got it right. Ulysses S. Grant’s Tomb sits on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River a few blocks from where I write. Tomorrow is the 190^th anniversary of his birth.

Grant is one of three men to have been both commander of all U.S. armed forces and president of the United States. While we remember George Washington and Dwight D. Eisenhower as beacons of personal rectitude and public benevolence, Grant has fared far worse – recalled for heavy drinking, the scandalous behavior of his appointees, and the ruthlessness with which he pursued the Civil War. Robert E. Lee, Grant's adversary, has become a more sympathetic figure in history.

But Lee was as hard on his troops as Grant. After the disaster of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, Lee told Pickett to reform his division for a second suicidal attack. “General Lee,” replied Pickett “I have no division."

We revere our Revolution and talk of World War II as “the good war” – despite the 60+ million people who died. The Civil War is more problematic because it pitted “brother against brother” on American soil.

It also ended slavery in this country; and as president Grant enforced civil rights laws and backed African Americans’ constitutional rights.

All that changed after Grant’s presidency, when Klan violence brought racist retrenchment and the Jim Crow caste system – buttressed by a nostalgic view of the South right out of “Gone With the Wind” and “The Birth of a Nation.”

That revisionism made its way into generations of American history textbooks, and after that, Grant’s reputation never had a chance.

Warsaw

There is a small and quiet square in New York’s Riverside Park overlooking the Hudson River. The trees and flowers are now coming into full bloom, and the place evokes a sense of peace and contemplation. It is the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial Plaza, and in its middle is a simple stone plaque that commemorates “the heroes of the Warsaw ghetto battle, April-May 1943, and the six million Jews of Europe martyred in the cause of liberty.” Buried beneath are two boxes of soil from the Terezin and Scred concentration camps in Czechoslovakia and a scroll commemorating the uprising that erupted 63 years ago today. According to a description at the site, the Nazis forced the city's 400,000 Jews into the ghetto, which they sealed off from the rest of the city with a 10-foot wall. The living conditions were horrendous and as many as 6,000 people died of starvation each month. In 1942 the Nazis deported 300,000 residents to Treblinka and prepared to liquidate the ghetto entirely. The remaining Jews resisted, and on April 19, 1943, German troops entered the ghetto. The rebels held out until May 16, when the ghetto was burned to the ground. Fifteen thousand Jews died in the uprising, and the rest were transported to Treblinka where most of them died in the gas chambers.

Today I simply ask that we remember the evil that humans have inflicted on each other and, more importantly, the heroism to which we can rise in the face of that evil.

Growth?

Third in a (sort of) series     In a world in which one in seven people is undernourished, it seems unconscionable to talk about policies that slow economic growth. In a world in which we use the equivalent of 1.5 planets to provide our resources and absorb our waste, it seems unconscionable not to.

This, I think, is the great – and often unspoken – divide in progressive politics today. The United States has long equated the nation’s well-being with its median standard of living, and we use economic growth to measure human progress. For the last 70 or 80 years, the Gross Domestic Product has been the measuring stick of America’s prosperity . . . and even of its people’s personal happiness.

That whole notion is under attack – from Joseph Stiglitz’s Mismeasuring Our Lives to Woody Tasch’s Slow Money to Bill McKibben’s Eaarth. And yet, when a hard choice must be made, we continue to treat environmental issues as a luxury to be addressed after we have solved the more immediate economic problems.

Everyone’s mantra in this election is “jobs.” And while Republicans attack environmentalists as job killers, Democrats bring them to the table to discuss “green jobs” and to figure out how to build future growth on alternative energy and better management of ecosystem services.

That’s all fine. But the deeper question is whether the model of economic growth, in whatever form, is viable any more. That question – as we are already beginning to see in issues such as the Keystone pipeline and “fracking” – threatens to divide the current Democratic coalition.

A Goldwater Liberal

At a talk she gave last week, Gloria Steinem referred to Barry Goldwater as a moderate Republican. I almost fell out of my chair.

But consider this. Goldwater:

• Accused Pat Robertson of trying to turn the Republican Party into a religious organization (“If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye”).
• Supported gays in the military ("You don't have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight").
• Endorsed medical marijuana, defended Roe v. Wade, and believed in the separation of church and state.
• Delivered the word to Richard Nixon that he must resign.
• And lamented that a “bunch of kooks” had taken over the GOP, telling Bob Dole in 1996, "We're the new liberals of the Republican Party. Can you imagine that?"

Before we get too carried away, Goldwater also opposed the Civil Right Act (as, by the way, did Al Gore Sr.), was one of eight senators to vote against the Equal Rights Amendment,declined to censure Joe McCarthy, discussed nuclear defoliation of Vietcong supply routes, and suggested the United Nations move to Moscow or Beijing.

Still, while we think of America as a more conservative society in the 1950s and 1960s than it is today, in some ways its politics were not. When he ran for president in 1964, Goldwater’s views on religion, gay rights and abortion were simply not issues, and the Republican party paid little attention to the cultural conservatives in its ranks. Now they have taken over the party, and they are gunning not just for Barack Obama but for Mitt Romney . . . who is standing there in his new blue jeans desperately hoping to get picked by their team.

Stay tuned. I’m trying to figure this out myself.

“My feets is tired . . .

. . . but my soul is rested.' So said Mother Pollard, a 72-year-old elder in Martin Luther King Jr.’s church, after several weeks of participating in the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. King quotes her in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which I reread in honor of Black History month. Written in 1963, the letter is addressed to white clergymen who were supporters of civil rights but put off by King’s tactics of non-violent direct action, civil disobedience and willingness to break what he believed “unjust laws” – for which he was fully prepared to go to jail.

It is interesting to read the letter now, in light of current upheavals around the world, particularly the uprisings in the Middle East almost all of which began as peaceful protests and ended with horrendous violence precipitated by the state. Many of us have forgotten the repressive violence from threatened governments that confronted our own civil rights movement two generations ago. The demands for freedom and justice seem little different in Libya than they were in Little Rock; and the worries about whether long-repressed Arab peoples are ready for self-government seem a lot like those voiced by the well-meaning white moderates who prefer, wrote King, “a negative peace, which is the absence of tension, to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice.”

And in a time when the word extremist is hurled about willy-nilly, it is worth remembering King’s response: “the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be.”

King

In the winter of 1963, at a small boarding school for boys in rural Massachusetts, a visitor came for the weekend. He gave a talk on Friday evening, spent Saturday in class and at meals with the students, and preached on Sunday in the majestic stone chapel that dominates the campus. He started slowly, almost quietly, before falling into the rhythms and phrasing of his own Baptist tradition. He ignored whatever notes he had and became a vessel for his rich stentorian voice, which reverberated off the chapel walls and summoned the 200 boys to help build a just society. His name was Martin Luther King, Jr., and I had never heard anything like that sermon. There had been a handful of black students at the school since the early 1950s, which was unusual in itself, for most of us had grown up in a world in which Stepin Fetchit and Rastus were not so much vicious stereotypes as insidiously benign jokes. They were how we were taught to view a people about whose lives we knew nothing. A lot happened in 1963. King led the March on Washington that summer. President Kennedy was assassinated in November. Some say that marked the end of the dream. But I don’t think so. You can tell a lot about where people stand today by how they remember the 1960s. To me it was a time of hope and courage, of stirring calls to join hands across deep divides. A lot of people have tried to kill the dream and those who espouse it. They may yet succeed. But I believe that King’s vision, which calls us back to Lincoln’s vision at Gettysburg and Jefferson’s in Philadelphia, is the American Dream we must revive.

The American Dream

It is harder for Americans to rise from poverty to prosperity than citizens of almost any other nation in the so-called first world, according to an article in today’s New York Times. Actually, scholars have debunked the “rags-to-riches” story for years, beginning with studies showing that Horatio Alger’s heroes rose not to great wealth but to middle-class respectability. The lesson of the stories was more about hewing to the corporate line than accumulating great wealth. Ragged Dick was not the last tycoon so much as the first organization man. And even though upward mobility might mean only a slightly better life for your children, the American Dream was that opportunity was there for all to seek. But now even that fluidity seems to be going in the wrong direction. Because the frailty of America’s safety net condemns the poor, and our current tax policies insulate the rich, we live in a society that looks ever more like a banana republic than the land of opportunity. America’s poor have become not just a separate class, but a distinct caste – especially in the cores of our cities, where crime, poverty and vast and chronic unemployment are both epidemic and ignored. And yet we continue to insist that our politicians demonstrate their reverence for an American Dream that has become a nightmare for so many.

Haiti

Haiti           In the lead book review in yesterday’s New York Times, Adam Hochschild reviewed Laurence Dubois’ Haiti: the Aftershocks of History. In 1804, after almost 15 years of horrific guerilla warfare against France, Britain, Spain and the new nation to its north, Haiti became the second republic in the New World – and the first black-led republic anywhere. Only the United States was older. Yet the comparisons end there. The U.S. embarked on a journey to become the richest and most powerful country in the world, while Haiti has remained the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, wracked by poverty and disease, ruled by a series of vicious dictators, victimized by its history of natural disasters. Hochschild’s reading of Dubois places the blame firmly on the conditions of Haiti’s birth: the long, terrible years of Caribbean slavery on the earth’s richest agricultural island, where thousands of slaves were worked literally to death; the destruction of an infrastructure on which to build a nation; and the continuous violence that prevented democracy from establishing itself on that fertile and bloody land. The review underscores the question of America’s role in the world, which has become a critical litmus test of today’s politics. Are we the beacon of freedom – our statue of liberty literally (or metaphorically for the growing number of nativists) welcoming those who seek a better life? Or is American imperialism a powerful force for evil – one that has supported Haiti’a most vicious dictators and put American corporate interests ahead of Haitian human rights? Increasingly, there seems no middle ground.