Misread

Print magazines are no less susceptible to a bit of bait-and-switch to lure in readers than online news sources. After all, sometimes, they're the same publication. The cover headline of the February issue of The Atlantic proclaims Donald Trump Wants You To Forget This Happened, under a photograph of January 6th, 2021. Mr. Thompson's actual story is titled: Is this what patriotism looks like? And it's the story of one of the January 6th rioters; one who assaulted police officers, but was pardoned by President Trump.

But let me stick with the cover headline for a bit, because while I think that it will resonate with a lot of people (after all, these things are not chosen casually), I also happen to think that it isn't true. There's a difference between seeking to erase a narrative, and seeking to change one. Historical revisionism is just that... revisionism, and that's closer to what I think that President Trump is after.

For a lot of people, mostly, but not exclusively, Democrats or Democratic-leaning, January 6th 2021 is a story of partisans being sore losers. Deluded, or cynically dishonest, about the nation's opinion of Donald Trump and his performance in his first term in office, they sought to use violence to overturn a free and fair election and act out their grievances against Congress.

Trumpists, unsuprisingly, profess (honestly or otherwise) to see things differently. For them, the President's nationwide popularity is an article of faith; the idea that enough people would vote for the Biden-Harris ticket that Donald Trump would lose the popular vote, let alone the Electoral College, was unthinkable. Malfeasance was the only possible explanation. And so the events of January 6th weren't a crime; they were a principled, even heroic, stand against the forces of corruption and the people who enabled it.

And that's what Donald Trump wants the historical record to reflect. An angelic light on the people who support him. Yes, there are things that the President would prefer to have removed from the annals of history. The Trail of Tears, for instance, is not something that can be readily spun into a narrative of American moral superiority. But revolutions, even failed ones, can be turned into tales of national (and perhaps ethnic) greatness. And so that's the way that Donald Trump, his acolytes and supporters would prefer it to be remembered.

I offer no opinion on whether they will succeed, and, if they do, on what timeline. But that it is the goal, I'm reasonably certain of. 

Replacement Holiday

A lot of the stories that I recall about Christopher Columbus from when I was child were Hero stories. The brave and intelligent Columbus making a perilous journey, and in so doing, demonstrating how wrong about the world the benighted and backwards other Europeans were. After all, most of them thought the world was flat. And if someone pointed out that the Greeks had be able to demonstrate the Earth was round, Renaissance Europe looked even worse; they'd somehow managed to forget what had already been established about the planet.

This story is, of course, false. The reason many people felt that the Columbus expedition wouldn't work was they they knew the Earth was spherical, and they knew roughly how large a sphere it was. If the whole distance between the west coast of Europe and the east coast of China had been open ocean, no-one would have heard from Columbus or his men ever again. But "Columbus lucked out that there happened to continental land masses within range of his ships" isn't as inspiring a story.

In any event, Columbus Day was basically instantiated as a celebration of Italian Americans. (Although now there is a theory that says that Columbus was a Spanish Jew.)

But that's changing now, with the push to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day. Which, of course, has a Hero story of it own. The brave and upstanding Native Americans, dealing with oppressive colonialists from across the ocean, and in so doing, demonstrating how morally bankrupt the benighted and backwards Europeans were (I'm sensing a theme here). Having been enabled by Christopher Columbus (who didn't "discover" anything, since people already lived here), they brought diseases, forced migrations and involuntary religious conversion to the Americas.

In any event, Indigenous Peoples Day is basically being instantiated as a celebration of Native Americans.

As I've noted before I'm somewhat cynical about the whole push for Indigenous Peoples Day. It throws Cristoforo Colombo under the bus but doesn't otherwise do anything... as some Native American activists have pointed out.

But in the end, holidays like Saint Patrick's Day, Juneteenth, Cinco de Mayo and Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples Day don't come across as celebrations of the various peoples that make up the United States. They're days to go shopping and/or to have a party, but other than that, who cares? I don't see any of this as creating a nation that celebrates the different people that make it up. But maybe that's too much to have ever expected.

Kind of Gray

At an event on Wednesday, a voter asked Haley: "what was the cause of the United States Civil War?"

She replied that the cause "was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn't do."

"I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are," Haley continued. "And I will always stand by the fact that, I think, government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people."

After Haley gave her answer, the voter told her that it was "astonishing" that she gave an answer "without mentioning the word 'slavery.'"
Nikki Haley didn't say slavery caused the Civil War. Now she's facing major backlash

Personally, I'm not really sure why one would bother to ask Nikki Haley what she thinks of the Civil War. ("And I wanted to see what you think was the cause of the Civil War," does not strike me as a good reason.) The fact that it was going to result in an open pander to conservative Southerners who still want to hold on to the idea that the nation as a whole should consider their ancestors to have been good people in spite of the fact that slavery is now considered one of the worst evils of humankind (a rather predictable trap that occurs when one believes in absolute morality) should have been evident from the start. And maybe that was the point. After all, I'm pretty sure that whomever asked the question was expecting the response they received.

And that response does the following:

• It casts a good chunk of the Southern population as brittle and backwards. But this is just reinforcing the stereotype that a lot of people already have of White Southerners; closeted Klansmen who will, the moment the opportunity presents itself, re-litigate the Civil War in the hopes of reinstating at least Jim Crow, if not chattel slavery. Those same White Southerners are already well aware, and resentful, of this stereotype.
• It casts the Republican Party as dependent on "deplorables." Again, this is a stereotype that a lot of people who aren't Republicans (and some who are) already hold. In a republic where one person has one vote, the votes of bigots count for just as much as everyone else. And pointing out, again and again, that people see Republican voters as tolerating bigotry does little other than give (alleged) Republican office-seekers, like Nikki Haley a reason to stoke resentment of the contempt in which those voters are held.
• It boxes in those people who think that what Ms. Haley has said is garbage. Because anyone who stands up to say that Ms. Haley's statements make them look bad to the rest of the nation will be immediately tarred as being a shill for the Democrats.

And I don't see how any of that helps anything. I suppose that there are some number of people out there who were both considering voting for Nikki Haley and of the opinion that the South needs to own up to wrongdoing in the case of slavery, and those voters may now go somewhere else. But who cares? It's not as if Ms. Haley had, at any point in this process, a snowball's chance in a blast furnace of securing the Republican nomination to be their general election candidate.

All of that noted, it's worth pointing out that one of "the freedoms and what people could and couldn't do" that Ms. Haley feels that "government" had become involved in was the right to treat other human beings as a combination of personal property, machines and livestock. Given that, she could have come up with an answer that spoke the language of freedom and rights by saying that that the war was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of people that governments, local and federal, had openly neglected up to that point.

Of course, however, it's understood that casting the South as being willing to wage war to deny "the rights and freedoms of people" they relied on for cheap labor would have Ms. Haley branded a traitor in the South. So she would have needed to be more "nuanced" than I was, above. But that's a poor reason for her to not be prepared to deal with the question. After all, she's a politician. Weasel wording one's way out of difficult questions is a requirement for the job.

Of a Mind

I was reading a blog post that set out to explain the dangers of groupthink, as seen through the lens of the beginning of the Satanic Panic in the early 1980s, specifically the connections that people made to Dungeons and Dragons. The author identifies four factors that they feel "contributed to the escalation of fear and the adoption of unfounded beliefs."

• Confirmation Bias
• Illusion of Invulnerability
• Pressure to Conform
• Outgroup Stereotypes

I can see the reasoning here, but these factors are present in a lot of different contexts, like organized religion, where one wouldn't say that the phenomenon as a whole is an example of groupthink.

I think that fear, rather than being a part of the groupthink phenomenon once it begins, is one of the major contributing factors to starting it. One of the important pieces of the Satanic Panic phenomenon is the idea that Satan was powerful, and sought human agents to act against the legitimate divine order. And it was fear of that which lead to people getting on board with the panic. And I suspect that this goes a long way towards explaining why it wasn't much of a thing were I lived at the time; the local religious landscape simply didn't take the idea of Satan, or Satanism, very seriously. I can't think of a single person I knew at the time who would have told you that the occult was real. So the sense of an external threat, or of being unsafe, that people needed to band together to fight wasn't there.

Similarly, I think another thing that drove the Satanic Panic (other than alliteration) was the fact that for many people, Dungeons and Dragons (and the occult), offered simple answers to otherwise complicated questions. When Patricia Pullen, founder of Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (B.A.D.D.), claimed that an in-game curse caused her son Irving to kill himself, she now had a direct answer to what many people find an intricate, and often unanswerable, question. One that moved her son's suicide from a mystery to a problem with a clear solution. And I think that when a group feels that they have answers to difficult questions, there is an incentive to simply go with those answers, rather than hold out for something else that may never come. And again, where I grew up, there was no difficult question that "evil supernatural forces" was a workable answer to. And so that specific incentive, to go along with the answer provided rather than put effort into a new one, wasn't present.

A lot of time has passed since that particular episode of the Satanic Panic. Enough so that it's easy to forget that it never entirely died out; the QAnon set of conspiracies, with its belief in the ritualistic abuse of children and Satanic overtones, keeps the moral panic alive, although at a much lower level than I remember it from my adolescence. Human nature, however, takes quite some time to change, and so the exercise of seeking to understand it in order to create a better present is a worthwhile one.

Dead Letters

The United States, like pretty much every nation on Earth, professes ideals that it has not, does not and/or will not actually live up to as a matter of day-to-day life. Part of this is that people often see themselves as being better about attaining their ideals than they really are, and part of it is that often, those ideals aren't about the people who set them down. Rather they're pot shots at other people. Take "In God We Trust." Rather than genuinely being an assertion of faith in some Christian idea of a divine plan that would create some or another outcome, it was intended as a means of differentiating the United States from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which was, as a matter of state policy, atheist (due to that whole "opiate of the masses" idea).

The same can be said of a lot of the Declaration of Independence. While it's generally considered, in American folklore, to be an assertion of the rights of free people, it's really a wrapper for a long bill of grievances against King George III. Grievances that have, for the most part, been completely forgotten by Americans at large. Most people are in the United States are aware of the sentence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," and that's really about it.

For a while, there was some interest in one of the grievances that didn't make it into the final document, namely:

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

The general complaint is that the signing of the Declaration was delayed by two days specifically to remove this mention of the transatlantic slave trade, this by way of explaining why John Adams had predicted that July 2nd would be the date that people would celebrate. While it's true that the South Carolina delegation had objected to anti-slavery language in the document, a number of other changes were made to the document.

In any event, the penultimate grievance in the document has become a new source of controversy:

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

(Note that this was also edited from Mr. Jefferson's original, in which it was two separate passages.)

Some Native American tribes and activists have latched into this statement as a way of pointing out that the "all men" who were "created equal" didn't include them, either.

The fact of the matter is that it didn't include a lot of people. The Declaration would likely have been a much more honest document had it read "all Englishmen," since that's pretty much what most of the people involved had in mind.

"There's this moment of shocking people to the realization of how racist the Declaration of Independence was toward Indigenous peoples," Joseph M. Pierce, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, tells Axios. He takes a selfie with the shirt every July Fourth.

But that shouldn't be shocking to anyone.

Part of the problem is the way history is taught in the United States. While students tend to learn history in primary and secondary school, those levels teach a fairly simple and superficial understanding of the subject. And part of that is teaching early American history in a way that implies that the Founding Fathers of the United States set up a system that more or less matches what we have now, rather than modern American government, and society, being something that they wouldn't recognize, and likely wouldn't consider either wise or legitimate.

But a lot of this comes down to an understanding that people who hold what we now understand to be racist viewpoints are bad people, rather than simply people. And that sets up a conflict with the heroism that is broadly ascribed to people like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson et cetera, especially among Conservatives, who tend to link their understanding that the United States is exceptional now, to the idea that the people who founded it were exceptional then, rather than being, for the most part, wealthy people who had material interests to look out for.

Native Americans, like Black people before them, are going to have a hard time making a dent in the heroic, romantic story that's in place concerning the founding and building of the United States, because most people, frankly, don't care. Some people are invested in the story, and what they believe it says about themselves, but for most people, it's simply an old story, about people long dead.

Rootedness

Today I Learned, as the kids these days like to say, about President Trump's 1776 Commission. I think that I'd heard of it before, but this was near the end of the Trump Administration, and I pretty much stopped paying attention to going's on in Washington, D.C., because keeping up with politics had become such an unpleasant way to spend free time.

The 1776 Commission had no real reason for existence than to perpetuate a particular front in the Culture Wars, namely long-simmering "Right vs Left" dispute over whether the founders of the United States were the best people ever, or simply people, with the good and bad that such a status entails.

Perhaps I should re-phrase that. While I will admit that I find the debate utterly trivial, the people on the Right who I know have engaged with it do actually see something important in all of this; namely, the idea that history is (or at least can be) important in the here and now. While the term "American Exceptionalism" is tossed around a lot, I don't know that it has a consistent usage. While there is the idea that specific circumstances of the nation's founding and its specific ideological impulses make the United States both a unique nation and a specifically positive force for overall human well-being and flourishing, there is also the understanding (and this is the one that many of the Conservatives I've talked about it with seem to favor) that the United States is superior to other nations... and that this superiority comes with privileges when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world.

I will admit to not having an understanding of the idea that "because the people who came before us were great and wonderful, we're worthy and valuable." I understand the human propensity to pursue feelings of worth and value; back in the day, being considered unworthy or valueless was a quick ticket to being abandoned by one's community. And humans are social animals because as individuals, it takes a lot of time and effort to get to a point where one has a realistic chance of surviving for any length of time. But that's at the individual level. Once one arrives at the scale of the nation-state, that sort of insecurity seems strange.

After all, much of the ways in which nations project power and show their value has little or nothing to do with the past. If each of the group of men we understand to be the "Founding Fathers" of the United States were proven to have been right jackassess tomorrow, the United States would still have the world's largest economy and the financial power that comes from having a ubiquitous reserve currency. Not to mention a military that can do a number of most of its contemporaries. And those are the things that make the United States the current big man on campus.

A status that, of course, will not last forever. And therein, I think, lies the rub. As I see it, American Exceptionalism is a special pleading the the United States, unique among nations, should be immune to the forces of geopolitical gravity. In part, I think, because if one sees history as what goes around comes around, once the United States starts to slip away from the top spot, there are going to be any number of people with scores to settle. (I notice the same thing in domestic politics. I think that part of the reason why "race relations" in the United States are so touchy, so often, is that there are more White Americans than one credits who are of the opinion that once they no longer have the whip hand, the whip is going to be used on them.) But if the United States is legitimately special, then such worries need not be entertained.

Personally, I think that there are any number of former powers that are doing all right for themselves, despite a certain disgust for their histories. And I think that the United States will one day be a member of that club, and it will become evident that the nation will survive being just like everyone else.

Cleanup on Track 8

Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, has kept his name at the top of papers by making an appearance on Alex Jones' Infowars show and making comments like "I like Hitler," and "They did good things, too. We've got to stop dissing Nazis all the time."

I won't belabor the point, given that I brought this up a month ago, but I think it's somewhat irrational to expect someone with known mental illness to be completely, well, rational; even when in front of an audience.

But the train wreck that Ye's life is becoming is going to generate a lot of clicks, and a lot of airtime for random people to denounce him, or hold forth about how harmful his words are. Because people are fascinated to watch him destroy his life in slow-motion and on full public display. It's the dark side of being a celebrity; it's not generally considered exploitative to watch someone go head-to-head with mental illness and have their head handed to them when that someone is already famous.

Of course, there is also the fear factor; the idea, hovering in the background that someone like Ye is, for all of his obvious problems, popular and respectable enough to bring the ethno-nationalist chauvinism of 1930s National Socialism back into vogue and kick off a round of modern pogroms against the Jewish population of the United States. I understand it; there is a similar suspicion in the Black community of the United States that all it takes are a few charismatic people in the right (or wrong) places to bring back Jim Crow, if not all-out slavery again. That said, it still doesn't strike me as a realistic possibility anytime soon. Treating everyone who expresses support (regardless of their mental health) for the atrocities of the past as an open invitation for those atrocities to repeat themselves overdoes it. Those times are gone. They can, of course, return. But it will take more than the flameout of an ill celebrity to restore them.

Flagged

There's a house, a couple of miles or so away from where I live, where the owners often display flags from nations around the world. These are accompanied by the name of the nation (or state) in question and the name of the capital. This has been going on for years, and I suspect that it's lasted through different owners of the home.

Today, however, was a slight exception to the normal pattern.

The flag on display was the "Stars and Bars" or the first national flag of the Confederate States of America. And it was identified as such, and the second line was "Civil War."

Now, I suspect that "the Confederacy" would have been a tight, or even impossible, fit for the sign on the banister. But if the flag is going to be displayed, I think that the historical context is useful, given that many Americans have a fairly tenuous grasp of the nation's history. For many people, the Confederate battle flag, with the stars on diagonal stripes (and also incorrectly referred to as the "Stars and Bars") is what comes to mind when they think of the defunct CSA, which is what makes it such a lightning rod.

Does it make a difference whether people actually understand what flag were flown by the Confederacy? Not really. But I think a better understanding of the Civil War, its players and their motivations would be helpful. Unfortunately, it's often considered a subject best avoided.

Assume a Can

There is an saying in philosophy that "ought implies can." It's ascribed to Immanuel Kant, who put it this way:

For if the moral law commands that we ought to be better human beings now, it inescapably follows that we must be capable of being better human beings.

Which is reasonable. After all, it doesn't make much sense for the moral law to command the impossible. (Actually, let me not make that last statement. Christianity, at least as far as I understand it from many people both commands people to always obey the will of the Abrahamic god, yet concedes that everyone will, sooner or later (usually sooner) will fall short of that. And I know a number of Christians for whom this makes perfect sense. Although, there are those who claim the moral law is to aspire to a life without sin; but now we're starting to get into the weeds.) In any event, the formulation of "ought implies can" is a common one because it avoids the trap of a moral imperative to do the impossible.

In practice, however, there is a problem, and that problem can be summed up with a slight change to the formula: "ought implies a belief that one can." Or, to paraphrase Immanuel Kant more completely: For if the moral law commands that we ought to be better human beings now, it inescapably follows that we must believe ourselves be capable of being better human beings. While people do surprise themselves with their ability to do what they'd believed impossible, the tendency of reality to mold itself to perceptions is not to be underestimated.

Which is why I tend to look askance at the stereotypical conservative exhortation to "hard work" as the answer to everything. To wit:

Nevertheless, there have always been Black conservatives who embrace an anti-racialist perspective. For example, when asked if Black Americans should work their way up without special favors the same way the Irish, Italians, and Jews did, a statement that would be considered beyond the pale in many elite media and academic institutions, the 2020 American National Election Survey found that about 20 percent of Black respondents agreed or strongly agreed with that statement; another 20 percent said they neither agreed nor disagreed.
Reihan Salam "America Needs Anti-Racialism"

Which is all fine and good, but what about the remaining 60 percent? It's one thing to tell them that "they should work their way up." (As an aside, this a statement that ignores the reality of social ordering, Not everyone can "work their way up" in a society that exhibits any sort of inequality, because any ranking of some number of people is, by necessity, zero-sum, in order for someone to rise from 100th place to 50th place, someone else {or several someones} must see their rankings decline.) It's another thing for them to believe that it's possible.

It's also another thing for people to believe that an apples-to-apples comparison is being made. I'm not sure when one would say that the Black population of the United States was in the same situation as the Irish, Italians or Jews. Mainly because any such date would be a fairly arbitrary comparison of two very different points in history. What point in Black history lines up with the situation of the Irish in 1850? Certainly not 1850; the Irish weren't legally subject to hereditary involuntary labor at that time, or considered less than a full human being for determining the voting population. There may be a time when there was an equivalent of Jim Crow for the Irish, but the lack of widespread coding into law means that there isn't a date of the repeal of those laws that one can point to.

The Black population of the United States tends to skew liberal because they understand themselves to be at a disadvantage relative to White Americans. Sure, the formal legal structures and widely-understood social mores that openly acted in them are largely gone, but that's not really the same thing as saying that the old preferences and prejudices have completely faded away.

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.

This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.
Lyndon Johnson, Howard University Commencement Address (1965)

Where I think that the conservative understanding of freedom of competition falls short is in the belief that a sufficiently motivated person has no need of coaches. Sure, there are many self-taught runners, some who are remarkably good at it. That doesn't make them the rule. They're simply more visible than those who gave up the sport due to injury or the simple realization that they'd never be able to win against people with more formal training.

And a good coach doesn't just push someone to perform to a certain level. They start with making sure that their charge has an understanding that they're capable of doing it. (Of course, this leaves aside those coaches who operate by daring their students to prove them wrong when they say they'll never amount to anything, but they are the exception.)

Coaching, mentoring and support should not be seen as a "special favor." It's what gives people the understanding that they can take risks. Which is important in a nation that has had such a visible history of punishing those who attempted to "rise above their station" and/or stealing the proceeds of those who succeeded.

Hard work, in and of itself, has never been a ticket to success. After all, the slaves worked very hard. There was very little in the way of a payoff for them. And this wasn't because of strangely racially-specific bad luck; it was nationwide policy. Policies that persisted even after emancipation. If conservatives really want to combat anti-racism with anti-racialism, they're going to have to demonstrate that they're invested in the success of everyone around them, not just those people whose exploits appeal to their sense of ideology. It's not enough to tell people that they "should work their way up." There has to be a message that they can, and that it's important to people that they do so.

Buried Deep

Somehow, I doubt that I am the only person who hears about concepts like "replacement theory" and White fears of being an oppressed minority and sees those as manifestations of fear that what European settlers and their American descendants visited upon the Native Americans and the Africans they imported as slave labor will be visited upon them. In the same way that "setting of accounts" is often used to refer to a working out of grudges and hostilities, there is a fear that a racial reckoning in the United States is going to be, first and foremost, about payback. And so there is a mindset that history can be prevented from repeating itself, only with the shoe being on the other foot.

I'd like to be surprised that we don't talk much about it, but I'm not. Airing the fear that non-White Americans are capable of holding intense grudges is seen as akin to an insult, since the holding of intense grudges is considered a culpable moral failing. The "ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained" (to recall part of my favorite Thomas Jefferson quote) are considered ten thousand failures of a Christian duty to forgive and forget. Ten thousand failures to be better people than those who injured them.

And I suspect that this is part, if not nearly all, of the problem. If you take much of American history, from the attempts to exterminate the Native Americans, to the restrictions on immigration for people who were not from Western and Northern Europe, to the internment of the Japanese (and the subsequent looting of many of their possessions), to Jim Crow, and think of these things as little more than unfortunate results of human nature; then the world can easily devolve into two broad camps. Those who are strong enough to victimize others, and those who are going to be victimized. In this model, enlightenment is a fantasy that withers in the face of people looking out for their own interests, regardless of the costs to others. It creates a world in which power, and the ability to use it to dominate others, is the only thing that passes for safety.

American history has created a society in which it is somewhere between difficult and simply inconceivable for many people to feel safe. And I don't mean safe in the utopian sense that nothing bad ever happens to a person. I mean safe in the sense that it's possible to lower one's guard without leaving oneself open to atrocities at the hands of one's supposed countrymen. And the political system, primed as it is to find fears that can be deployed in get-out-the-vote efforts, maintains that sense of constant threat. Because it's almost always campaign season somewhere. And they are abetted in this by a media ecosystem that seeks to cater to people with a combination of mercurial attention spans and miserly financial instincts. And conflicts, especially those where sympathetic people come to unfortunate ends, draw people in.

I don't know what exactly President Franklin Roosevelt had in mind when he said that Americans had nothing to fear but fear itself. Maybe it's the precise situation that the nation has today, where the fears and anxieties of different groups of people feed on one another in a vicious cycle. Fear is more than a simple emotion. It's also a matter of how one views the world, and the people, around oneself. That gives it deeper roots than one might be inclined to credit it with.

The 12th of Amnesia

I have the sneaking suspicion that anyone who thinks that this is what September 12th, 2001 was like missed the day itself, too.

I understand the idea of nostalgia for a time in which Americans didn't seem as petty and divided. But that's mostly a misrememberance of a fictional time. Because while Americans are fairly regularly divided, those divisions are rarely petty.

The class divides in the United States are fueled, in large part by a group of people, on the one hand, who feel that they have earned their advantages by their own virtue and being rewarded by a just universe, while on the other hand, people feel that the rightful wages of their hard work are stolen from them by people who are able to extort benefits through having been given the upper hand.

More than Christians simply believing that they are mistaken in their rejection of the divinity and messiahship of Yēšūaʿ of Nazareth, Jews have to contend with a sizable minority of Americans who believe that they are scheming, grasping cheats and thieves; again, taking the rightful wages of others hard work to enrich themselves, and clannishly locking other people out of positions that would allow them to better their material conditions, if not outright controlling hapless world leaders and preventing them from acting in the interests of the people they are supposed to be championing.

Likewise, Republicans and Democrats don't believe themselves to have different means towards achieving the same broadly-desired ends. Rather they have come to regard one another as Evil, and the intentional enemies of what is just and beneficial. For example, Republican voters often feel that Democratic efforts to control firearms is a cynical plot to render the public unable to fight back against tyrannical government, while Democratic voters are quick to believe that Republicans seek to install themselves as a permanent minority government in the service of further consolidating wealth in the hands of the business class.

Even the Chick-fil-A versus Nike comparison ignores deep differences in people's basic understandings of right and wrong. Chick-fil-A's corporate values are heavily influenced by the Baptist religiosity of its founder, which had lead the company to take direct stands against expanding the rights that society grants to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and other groups identified as "Queer", while Nike has publicly moved in the opposite direction, coming out in support of LGBT+ Pride activities and dropping endorsements of celebrity athletes that made disparaging remarks about queer people. Both sides have their defenders and those factions are sincerely convinced that the other is decidedly wrong, if not actively malicious.

And these are only four of the ways that Americans have come to regard one another as not only wrong, but either unintelligent, credulous or deliberately immoral. The entire list is remarkably long.

So even without those specific factors, for September 12th, 2001 to have been a day where "what matter more was what united us, than what divided us," it would have needed to be utterly unique in the whole of American history. Because "what 'divides' us" is a very, very, deep well. Not even the Second World War was able to completely suppress the American tendency to see those noticeably different from themselves as "the other," and use that "other-ness" as a justification for taking advantage or withholding what people wanted for themselves. It was, and still is, going to take much, much more than a small bunch of religious fanatics to bridge those gaps. Sure, they managed to stake up some of center stage on the Fear and Loathing chart, but they never owned all of it, and they didn't hold their position for very long.

But, let's say, just for a moment, that this halcyon view of September 12th, 2001 actually did reflect the truth of that day. Let's say, just for a moment, that Americans were willing to wave flags, be Americans and hug together, despite their differences. A brief papering over of the myriad fault lines of American society is not, and will never be, a substitute for learning how to disagree without devolving into prejudice, disdain and hatred. A one-day pause in the habit of regarding others with a combination of rage, anxiety, ignorance and distrust, born shock and terror is nothing to be longed for.

People can miss what they believed September 12th, 2001 to be, because even while it was supposedly happening, it wasn't valued. And its currency has only dwindled since then.

The Odds

Two Decades After 9/11, Are We Safer?

I don't know. Define "safe."

I will admit to a certain level of "safety fatigue." Any number of events that have occurred over the past twenty years have prompted people to question how safe they are and government and business officials to scramble to make people safe. But what does "safe" actually mean?

A lot of the time, I am left with the feeling that safe is taken to be a state of affairs where nothing bad happens to anyone, ever. No matter what the threat, someone swoops in with something that renders it, at most, a mild inconvenience. I understand that, were I to ask people for their understanding of safety, that this isn't what they would tell me, but when I observe people, and the way that "the powers that be" respond to people, that's the impression that I'm left with.

For myself, my life tends to feel "unsafe" as a matter of course. This morning, I narrowly missed having the front end of my car removed by a Tesla driver who didn't appear to think that red lights applied to her, and I've seen enough overturned vehicles and multi-vehicle smash-ups to realize that every time I casually run down to the mall or to the bookstore, I'm taking my life into my hands. The sneaking suspicion that one day, I'm going to take one too many unnecessary jaunts never really goes away.

Having made it to middle age, I'm no longer in the group of Black men for whom homicide is the number one cause of death; other things have taken its place. Technically, I was never in much danger of becoming a statistic in that manner; I've spent almost all of my adult life living in neighborhoods that one might accurately describe as "lily White." Of course, that comes with its own set of problems, but they are somewhat (if not entirely) less likely to be lethal.

But, all things considered, I'm likely to live until natural causes, like cancer or heart disease, catch up to me. In that sense, my life is "safe," and nothing about the past twenty years, neither terrorism, heat waves nor worldwide pandemic, has changed that. And maybe that's the thing. The attacks on the World Trade Center were flashy, but in the set of risks that existed in my life, it barely registered. I was, quite literally, on the other side of the continent. For all that it dominated the news cycle for a time, my life went on as usual. I hadn't felt to rate my life on some sort of "safety index" prior to that point, and I feel even less incentive to do so now. Tomorrow is unpredictable, and so I don't put any effort into worrying about what it might bring. At least, not if I plan to sleep in the intervals between todays and tomorrows.

The likelihood that I will die one day is, more or less by definition, 100%. Many questions of safety become caught up in attempting to understand what the chances are for any given day, between now and that indefinite point in the future. (Of course, not all threats to one's safety end in death, but since this came up in the context of the al-Qaeda attack on New York City, death tends to figure in people's assessments of safety as concerns a repeat.) For me, that chance has been the same for quite some time, vanishingly small, but not zero. How many decimal places are in that percentage isn't of interest to me.

Uncritical

One of the books [Robin Steenman, head of the Williamson County chapter of Moms for Liberty] specifically referred to was "Ruby Bridges Goes to School," written by Ruby Bridges herself. Bridges, when she was age 6, was one of the first African American students to integrate New Orleans' all-white public school system.

Steenman said that the mention of a "large crowd of angry white people who didn't want Black children in a white school" too harshly delineated between Black and white people, and that the book didn't offer "redemption" at its end.

[...]

She said she disapproves of guidance for teachers to teach words like "injustice," "unequal," "inequality," "protest," "marching" and "segregation" in grammar lessons.
Here's what to know about the debate over 'Wit & Wisdom' curriculum in Williamson schools

This gets to what, for many Black people in the United States, the conservative anger over "Critical Race Theory" is all about; the idea that White Americans are okay with children understanding that slavery, Jim Crow and segregation were a thing (even if the details are off-limits), but that the United States should must still be presented in the way that many conservatives want the nation (or, more specifically, the White population of the nation) to be seen, as a country that had done bad things in the past, but had fully atoned for them, been redeemed and was now an objectively just and fair place, whose current inhabitants have nothing to ask forgiveness for. And "Critical Race Theory" has become a catch-all term for a way of looking at the United States that doesn't admit to this "correct" way of viewing history.

Ruby Bridges Goes to School fails, in the eyes of Ms. Steenman, because it is specifically the story of Ms. Bridges and her individual experience, rather making room for, or even being the story of, the United States and its progress towards (or achievement of) equality. And if one views Ruby Bridges Goes to School as being the sort of historical narrative that's commonly taught to grade-school children, one with clear heroes and clear villains, it's understandable how White segregationists who aren't shown as embracing Ms. Bridges at the end of story should be the villains, and that this casts "good" and "evil" along racial lines.

It's an interesting situation, because it does represent progress in its own way. After all, there was a time when the insistence would have been that the United States had never done anything warranting atonement; that slavery was an affirmative good because it took primitive people out of Africa and brought them to a first-world nation where, even as second-class citizens, they were better off than they would be otherwise. And that segregation, which kept "like with like," was a benefit to everyone.

In any event, the need for redemption points to a problem in the way people see the world. Redemption arcs are elements of fiction, not recurring themes in history. Viewing history as the stories of heroes and villains, as if they were fables or adventure stories, hides the fact that history is about normal, even if important, people. And people don't always conform to the moral roles that observers might like to place them in.

Conservative media outlets like Fox News and political bigwigs like President Trump have all hit upon the realization that the framing of American history as a narrative prompts people to view it as just another sort of fiction, and subject to many of the same tropes. And while people may like to cosplay as the evil Galactic Empire, because the bad guys are always cooler, they don't like to see themselves as actually evil. And if history is going to be a contest of Good versus Evil, if people can't start out on the right side of history, they want to be shown as having seen the error of their ways, repudiating it and ending up where they ought to be. It's one thing to want this; it's another to feel that one is entitled to it. And in the anti-"CRT" mindset, Critical Race Theory violates that entitlement to be seen as just and righteous, as living up to the promises made in the Declaration of Independence.

Where things went wrong with the Declaration, however, was not that it was a cynical statement, penned by men who had no intention of living up to its provisions. It's that living up to those provisions required more resources than they felt they had access to. And so the compromises started even before it was formally signed. But there was never a commitment to saying "here is what we will need to fulfill this promise and here is the plan to get it." Instead, the can was kicked down the road, again and again, because the costs of picking up were understood. As late as 200 years after the signing of the Declaration, there still hadn't been a genuine accounting of the price that was demanded. And it's not clear that the accounting has happened yet. People like Ms. Steenman may object to even small parts of the bill coming due, but they don't lay out a path for showing how to pay it later.

A Good Cause

I was part of a casual conversation about the social control measures that have been implemented in the fight against the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic as an alternative to a comprehensive testing infrastructure and regime. Well, as casual as this sort of conversation can reasonably be, anyway. To oversimplify, under discussion was the fact that support for things like mask mandates, enforced distancing and "shutting down the economy" tend to have greater support among Democratic politicians and voters than among their Republican counterparts.

The American Right more broadly has cultivated a distrust of and dislike (hatred?) for "Big Government," and often openly resists what they understand to be government "overreach" or impositions on their freedoms. And since nothing in life is free, this often comes at a cost. During the conversation, the point was made that there have been some high-profile deaths among Republican politicians, activists and the families thereof, generating a certain amount of schadenfreude among the group. This is, I suspect, only to be expected in an age of negative partisanship. But then the subject of regrets came up, and the schadenfreude went up a notch.

I pointed out that it was more likely that these people would be seen as heroes, people who gave their lives in order to live freely in the way that they would have wished to. Not the most popular thing that I could have said. Someone else responded that throwing one's (or someone else's) life away in the name of freedom was a fairly pointless exercise. While the whole thing was being debated, another thought came to me. Do people look at Canada, and decide that the American Revolution was a tragic, and senseless, waste of human lives? Okay, so Canada is still a part of the Commonwealth, and didn't formally adopt its own constitution until 1982 or thereabouts, but it's not like the descendants of the European settlers that founded the place found the British Crown to be this harsh overseas taskmaster for the entire time that the United Kingdom had more direct control over the place. With a population roughly the size of California, it ranks 17th in the world in terms of the size of its economy. Perhaps not amazing, but nothing to sneeze at, either. Would the United States really have been so poorly off had it followed Canada's trajectory? Sure, the United States would be different, were it more like Canada, but would it be so different?

The difference between someone who dies a hero in the cause of freedom and the person who is a fool or a chump is a very subjective thing. I don't pretend to understand how people make that distinction for themselves. But there does appear to be a distinction. And I suspect that part of it has a lot to do with whether or not someone agrees with (or has a use for) the freedoms being sacrificed for.

Generally speaking, the American Left has been more in favor of broad measures of social control than the Right, and this plays out in how people see those who have died of respiratory infections during the pandemic. Republicans view themselves (or at least claim to) as fighting for freedoms and liberties that Democrats generally have little use, and even less empathy, for. But I wonder how this same debate would have played out back in the 1700s. It's generally understood now that all of the American colonists were united in thinking that the Crown was tyrannical, but this conveniently glosses over the fact that there were large numbers of Loyalists around. Did they see the war differently than their Revolutionary neighbors? In some ways, they must have, but I wonder if conversations of the time had the same sense of schadenfreude at the other side's misfortunes.

For the Tribe

The danger of this [tribal] mindset—in which the means, however unethical, justify the ends of survival—is obvious.
Peter Wehner. "Why Trump Supporters Can’t Admit Who He Really Is"

So what is an unethical means to survive, I wonder? There are some "obvious" answers; many people would, I suspect, say that it's unethical to set fire to an orphanage to save one's own life, but that's one of those cases that outside of most people's lived experiences. I don't know of anyone who has ever had to make such a choice. As I remember it, Roman Catholic doctrine says that parents should be ready to give their lives for their children, and this is part of the reason why "health of the mother" isn't considered a legitimate reason for aborting a fetus. I also recall a college criminal-justice class where it was stated that a person threatened with homicide unless they commit a homicide themselves would still be guilty of murder if they went through with it. Those are the only "real world" situations that come to mind.

But it's a question that I'm not sure that American society is really well-equipped to answer. Especially when it comes to politics, rather than the actual act of ending a life (either born or unborn). The idea of a Just War certainly would allow for the deaths of others in self-defense, since, well, deaths are pretty much unavoidable in declared wars. And if a group of people who legitimately feel themselves threatened may go to war over that, surely otherwise shady political maneuvering is allowed.

And so I think that what Mr. Wehner is actually getting at is the idea that one's fellow countrymen are such a threat that any means of self-defense are justified is more cynical then genuine. We are still left with the question, however, of what is the ethical limit for someone who understands their survival is at stake. Commonly, power decides. The Native American population of the United States avoided extinction as much by luck as anything else, because it seems fairly clear that the federal government and citizens alike considered their attempts to defend themselves and what they had to be crimes.

And perhaps this is what drives the tribalism that Mr. Wehner references; the understanding that what has been done unto others in the past can be done unto people in the present. If the native people were displaced from their lands by a superior force, demographic change can create a superior force that would expropriate that same property from it's current owners in turn. And if the dead and displaced have no recourse to ethics, maybe there's nothing unexpected about people taking them to be an unaffordable luxury.

Disguised?

I was in an online conversation about the disparaging comments about African delegates to the United Nations that then-Governor of California Ronald Reagan made to President Nixon. One of the interesting pieces of the conversation touched on the fact that, so far as has been revealed, Mr. Reagan never repeated those sorts of comments. There are no other recordings of him making them to anyone else, and no such comments in his personal papers.

So... Was Governor Reagan making these comments to President Nixon because he understood that the President would approve of them?

I suspect that this defense is going to be employed sooner or later, and, given what we know right now, it's plausible. Assuming, that is, that anyone who wasn't genuinely a bigot, but might reasonably be one, would ever knowingly falsely signal that they were one. Or, perhaps to be more precise, would they do this in the late 1960s?

I know a number of people for whom the answer is "no." I, for my part, am not so sure, because it seems that there could be a worthwhile advantage in convincing someone, especially in a presumably private conversation, that one agrees with them, regardless of what one actually thinks of their position.

Not, I believe, that it will make much of a difference. The battle lines in this are likely to be ideological, rather than factual, as is often the case.

Soots Me Just Fine

The basic point behind ‘Mary Poppins,’ and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting With Blackface is a simple one: the Mary Poppins movies, past and present, don’t do enough to distance themselves from the racial attitudes of the 1930s and 40s, when the Mary Poppins books were written and set and when early Disney movies and animated shorts openly played on the tropes minstrel shows.

Unless we learn something radically different about quantum mechanics and/or relativity at some point, the past is the past, and it will always be as it was. The only thing that we can do about it now is either recall, forget or misremember it, and it’s pretty much a given that any one of us must do some combination of those three. But pretty much anything else we chose to do with the past is optional; such as constantly worry that it's due to make a comeback.

While ‘Mary Poppins,’ and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting With Blackface purports to be a brief lesson in the history of the novels that birthed the movies and the media company that created them, it reads as a sort of ghost story, conjuring up supposedly frightening images from the distant past to indict a movie of the present, not for trafficking in those images, but for not making a clean enough break with them.

By the end of the piece, I wondered what I was intended to get out of it. Unlike activists who loudly decry things that they see as harmful, there was no statement that there was anything really wrong with it. Even the idea that the bad old days may make a return was only lightly touched upon; the final sentence references “Nothing’s gone forever, only out of place,” and leaves it at that. Which left the whole piece seeming bland and watered down.Which perhaps is what drove the impression that it was meant the be a takedown of Mary Poppins Returns.

But it wasn’t really even strong enough for that. If there were any real, substantive themes that ran through the piece, they were that Mary Poppins author P. L. Travers never recanted, only buried, the racism present in the books and that the Walt Disney Company had no qualms about presenting the biases of the day as entertainment. Which is fine as far as it goes. But Ms. Travers has been dead for the past two decades, and there are few, if any, indications that the Walt Disney Company has been working to poison the minds of America’s youth with imagery older than their grandparents.

And so the whole thing comes across as yet another exercise in the idea that in order to transcend the past, it must not be forgotten but expunged through active denunciations. That words like “pickaninny” and “Hottentot” must never be allowed to slip from the collective memory, lest they somehow become fashionable again. (As an aside, I’m somewhat fascinated with the apparent idea that there is some secretive cabal of people who are waiting for the racially-charged terms of the past to fade from society’s memory, simply so that they can be recycled into slurs that allow the bigoted to communicate in public without being caught at it.)

The only way that much of the past can ever live up to the standard of the present is via forgetfulness or forgiveness. Neither of which some people seem particularly inclined to give. But remembering and holding a grudge does what, exactly? The dead don’t care what we think of them, and can’t bring themselves into line with our ideals, even if they do. And while there may be virtue in vigilance, it comes at a cost; few look forward to never being able to rest.

Despite the fact that the World Wide Web is vast to the border of infinity, ‘Mary Poppins,’ and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting With Blackface seems like a waste. There is nothing in it to act upon and the facts it conveys don't leave one enriched for having learned them. The notoriety it garnered its author is unlikely to last as long as the images it claims are only out of place.

Conception

NPR interviewed Miami Times columnist Carl Hiaasen about his decision to write about the killings of five women in a SunTrust bank in Sebring Florida. Mr. Hiaasen's brother, Robert, was one of those killed in the shootings at the Capital Gazette.

At one point, Mr. Hiaasen notes:

And what Rob would have wanted - and I knew he felt because we talked about it after Parkland. We talked about it after Sandy Hook. We talked about it after the Pulse shootings - was that every one of these is a tragedy on almost an inconceivable scale. And you can't rate them or put them in order.

To borrow a line from Star Wars, I don't know... I can conceive quite a bit worse.

And my point isn't to be flippant. I can conceive of tragedies much larger in scale than any given mass shooting in the United States that you care to name. Like the Rwandan Genocide. The estimates of the death toll range from 500,000 to over a million people. And this is in a nation that only had a population of a little over 7 million people in 1990 (and it was steadily declining by the time the genocide actually took place in 1994). So even at the lowest number, the death toll was about 1 in 14 residents of the nation. At the upper end, it's one in seven. That's well above the percentage of Black or White Hispanic people in the United States. So imagine that in the space of now, until the end of May, every Latin person in the United States with a White racial background was murdered. It's a horrific thought. But I, at least can conceive of it. After all, it's happened before.

Now, for the record, this isn't to say that President Trump is likely to ever play the role that Théoneste Bagosora did in Rwanda, or that anti-immigrant sentiment will boil over in a level of bloodshed that would dwarf the Holocaust. Only that a population determined to wipe out a significant portion of itself can do so, and rather quickly. When one considers what the carnage that was inflicted in significant part with "machetes, clubs, blunt objects, and other weapons" it doesn't take much to imagine how much worse things could be in the United States, where guns would likely be a much larger part of the equation. And the United States has had genocides in the past, even if we've largely forgotten about them.

For any of Parland, Sandy Hook, the Pulse nightclub, Thousand Oaks or even Las Vegas to be "a tragedy on almost an inconceivable scale" means not thinking about what people have shown themselves capable of time and again. It's one thing for "another angry, white, male loser who had access to a weapon" to vent their frustrations on even hundreds of people at a time. And yes, those instances are tragic. But are they tragedies on a scale with the willingness of a population to stand by, or even participate, when entire families of their fellow citizens are wiped out for the crime of not having the correct distant ancestors? Maybe they are. Maybe the difference between 5 dead, 50 dead or 500,000 dead is simply some number of zeroes. After all, there are plenty more where those came from, no matter how many die violently. Maybe the deaths of 12 people should lie as far outside of our imaginations as the deaths of 12 million. Maybe the fact that I can so easily picture a large segment of people of United States setting out to murder people they see as unlike themselves is evidence of a darkness that has overtaken me.

Mr. Hiaasen calls on the media to "shine a light on it and write about it and react with some humanity and horror every time it happens." This is, in his view the only way for us to "get better as a society." I don't know that I agree with him on that. In part, because I look askance at the implied questioning of the "humanity" of people who don't respond in the way that he would like. As many times as dehumanizing others, questioning their "humanity" has lead to the very worst of human tragedy, giving people reasons to judge seems counterproductive. And I'm sure of the helpfulness of constantly staring into the abyss, either. There's already a certain normative quality to violence (whether guns are involved or not) in the United States. The news needing to make room for some thirty or so stories of people who have died violently every day would eventually become simply a grim background hum.

Creating a world where a man executing five women in a bank would be universally, genuinely shocking to people is going to take something other than constantly reminding them that violence is part of our everyday lives. It's going to take removing much of the violence from our everyday lives. That's not going to be a function of the media. It's going to take all of us deciding that we have better choices, and choosing to reward one another when people avail themselves of those better choices.

The Nostalgia Trap

Fifty-eight percent of college-educated whites this year say that America has gotten better since 1950, while 57 percent of non-college-educated whites say that it’s gotten worse. When President Trump says “Make America great again,” the again is instructive. He’s capitalizing on the nostalgia that non-college-educated white voters have for America’s past. “That harkening back to a supposed golden age where things were better has a really, really strong appeal for whites without a college degree,” Jones said.

That nostalgia, however, is for a time when black Americans and other minority groups had significantly fewer civil rights. And a Republican rhetoric that centers a longing for an era of white prosperity, rife with racist violence against black people, is why it’s impossible to understand the diploma divide without accounting for racial resentment. Needless to say, black Americans and other minority groups aren’t as keen on returning to the past.
Adam Harris. "America Is Divided by Education" The Atlantic. Wednesday, 7 November, 2018.

There is a question here, and it's one that I'm surprised isn't really spoken of. Was the lack of civil rights, racist violence and racial resentment that characterized the the time around 1950 a cause of this supposed golden age for less-educated Whites, or was it merely an unfortunate side effect of an overall lower level of enlightenment?

Or, perhaps more simply, can you have one without the other? I suspect that many non-White people in America believe that the two go hand in hand. There were many well-paying low or unskilled labor positions for White Americans because other people were locked out of them; and the resulting labor shortage, artificial though it may have been allowed White workers to command higher wages. And the truly dirty, low-paying jobs fell to the people who were locked out of the more lucrative sectors of the economy. While people who evince the nostalgia Mr. Harris chronicles, on the other hand, tend to be convinced that the new version of the past will lack all of the bad features of the original, and that there will be more than enough blue-collar jobs to go around, so that everyone who wants to work will be able to find a family-wage job will nothing more than a high-school education. Or at least the ones that I have spoken to seem to think so.

To a certain degree, it's an academic debate. The chances of the American economy going back to the state it was in 70 years ago in within, well, the next 70 years, seems slim. The world is a different, and smaller, place now. While it's possible that the poorer nations of the world who have been using newfound positions in global supply chains to better their standard of living could be forced back into abject poverty while their first and second-world counterparts reclaim those jobs (and pay higher price for goods and services in the bargain), it's unlikely that they would go without a fight. And it's equally unlikely that the rest of the developed world would decide that paying the higher wages of American workers for goods that they could buy more cheaply from poorer nations would be a good idea, blunting the impact of American economic isolationism and protecting the markets of poorer nations.

At the same time, closer to home, it's unlikely that without some sort of concrete evidence that a return to the economy of the pre-civil rights era wouldn't bring Jim Crow employment policies back with it, that many Americans would go along with the scheme. People would be unlikely to simply take it on faith that they'd be allowed a greater share of the prosperity in a scheme that strikes many as a reaction to the idea that they're now doing better than they were before.

To make the point that the economy of 1950 is a better choice for all and sundry than that of 2020 requires an understanding that everyone is worse off now than they were then, regardless of race, creed or ethnicity. And while that may seem self-evidently true to a "White working-class" that thinks back on a time when a high-school education meant a solidly middle-class life with a house, a family, a dog and a white picket fence, for many other people what happened was, at worst, a transfer of wealth and income to a broader swath of the public than had been allowed to hold it before.

The world of 1950 is before my time. Even my parents would only have been young children. But my father used to deploy tales of his childhood in the decade that followed as cautionary tales for me; stories of hardship and deprivation to illustrate what might await me if I didn't do well in school. He wouldn't have been convinced that he, and people like him, would have been better off returning to that time. I don't think that many other people would be any easier to sway.

The Lesson

A few years ago, I picked up an Aesop's Fables book from Costco. The book was inexpensive, and I was bored. It turns out that it's a reprint of a version that came out in 1912. I came across it again at the start of the weekend, and read it here and there when I had some time.

One thing that I noticed is that some of the stories had their moral made explicit, and others did not. Those that did had a short aphorism at the end of the tale, such as the classic "SLOW AND STEADY WINS THE RACE." Reading these stories as an adult, I was struck by the degree to which the aphorisms tended to not match the text of the story they were mated to. In some cases. you could see the resemblance. Although if I were going to boil down the story of The Tortoise and the Hare to a single sentence, it wouldn't be "Slow and steady wins the race," I can see how you arrive at it from there.

There was another story, The Farmer and the Stork, in which a farmer, setting traps for the cranes that raided his fields, also catches a stork. The stork pleads for his life, but the farmer says, in effect, that since the stork was in the field with the cranes, it will die like the cranes. "Birds of a feather flock together" seems like an odd choice for the moral to that tale, although I can understand the superficial similarity. The Blacksmith and His Dog, in which a blacksmith pseudo-scolds his dog for sleeping while he works, but always being there for mealtimes is given the moral: "Those who will not work deserve to starve," despite the fact that the story is quite clear that the smith only pretended to be put out by his dog's behavior.

In a way the whole thing comes off as if a person had a small store of random aphorisms in need of homes when someone dropped a load of old fables and folktales into their lap to marry together as best they could. The disconnect between the stories and the aphorisms that serve as the morals to some is interesting, because eventually, one starts to see the hand of class. Things like "There is always someone worse off than yourself," and "There is no eye like the master's" point to this. "It matters little of those who are inferior to us in merit should be like us in outside appearances," and "It is absurd to ape our betters," make the class judgements more explicit; although, perhaps, "It sometimes happens that one man has all the toil, and another all the profit," and "Might makes right," take the award for that.

It comes across as a very Victorian (for lack of a better word) enterprise. I suspect that the attaching of aphorisms to the stories is an artifact of even earlier times, when the fables were turned first into sermons and miniature morality plays. In the end, it seems unnecessary, the stories are simple and straightforward enough that even most children could be expected to understand the lessons each is meant to convey. And so it become a sort of window into the past, courtesy of lapsed copyrights. It's kind of a shame that the morals to fables have apparently become fixed. I wonder which of our own aphorisms we would place on them today, and how they would be received in a century's time.