Blog category: History
Like most Americans, I can instantly recall what I was doing, thinking and feeling on September 11, 2001. Within a year I was working for the national news media in a New York City still processing the attack, and the ongoing military response to that day has been at the center of my brother’s, brother-in-law’s and friends’ time in the service. It’s been a divisive decade for the United States, and we’re entering the 2010s arguing about how to reverse the demoralizing political and economic damage — much of it self-inflicted — that we still face today.
That ongoing trauma sparks two emotional reactions in our culture: reactive anger at all that’s happened and all the negativity we’ve had to endure, and grief for the trauma itself. Even at the early stages of the anniversary, these two emotions are guiding how we look back. Full-throated political commentary is plentiful about the events subsequent to Sept. 11th (Politico, Hitchens in Slate), but remembrances of the day itself are muted and emotional in a way that’s probably the only possible theme (NBC New York, the upcoming TIME special). It’s a delicate balancing act when approaching something visceral for all of us, and it’s what will guide this week online.
I was 21 on Sept. 11th, and my own past decade featured the myriad ups and downs that that time in life represents. As much negative emotion as Sept. 11th and the American experience since then has brought, and even with some of the tougher things that occurred in my own life in that time, there have been so many positive things that coincided. Humans can never eliminate the sadness that’s part of life and existence, and this commemoration is a powerful reminder of that. But I’m also quietly thankful that those positive things have still occurred despite the wider circumstances, and that keeps me going.
Just stated my list to my friend Brian:
- Abraham Lincoln. Probably a cliché, but that’s a good thing.
- Benjamin Franklin. Smart, practical, and clearly a cool dude for a party.
- Teddy Roosevelt. Easily the most bad-ass liberal President.
Other nominees?
My iPod started acting ill today, and now I’m in the middle of restoring the factory settings. Since I have to completely re-upload all of my music, photo and backed-up files, I got some time to write. First, the news:
• At first today, it really annoyed me that the entire media-swilling world spent the day rending its garments and pulling out its hair over Michael Jackson. (It’s 10 p.m. here, and the funeral is still the top story on CNN.com.) But then I thought, “Parts of the U.S. have been doing this for more than 30 years for Elvis, so this is really nothing new,” and I felt better about our modern era — or worse about past eras, I can’t decide.
• I’ve been asking people for a percentage: how many people watching Michael Jackson’s funeral know who Robert McNamara is, and they have to understand that he was far more historically important than MJ. The common response is less than 1 percent, but I would think it’s actually up around 4 percent. Call me an optimist.
In fairness to that other 96 percent, I did call him “George McNamara” at lunch today. But to burnish my own history-nerd credentials with an even bigger bit of nerdness, I was also thinking of McGeorge Bundy at the time.
• Key line from this good budget deficit rundown:
If policy now tilts too far toward deficit cutting, some argue, that would treat job creation as an option the nation somehow cannot afford, in contrast to “must haves” like tax cuts for wealthy Americans and unpopular foreign military entanglements.
True, but you also can’t ignore the fact that those tax cuts and unpopular entanglements were put in place, and now they are indeed making the job creation that much more financially difficult. I fall reluctantly in line with the spending advocates — I don’t think now is the time to pay down the deficit, because government spending at the moment really is a big portion of the money flowing into the economy. But if things do turn around, raise my taxes. It sucks, but it’s better than betting our economic livelihood on the whim of the Chinese government.
And on to frivolous stuff:
• I’m sorry to see the Penguins lose Rob Scuderi to the L.A. Kings, but they were right not to pay what the Kings paid. The dude is good, but not $13.6 million good.
• I got a Lollapalooza ticket for Sunday, August 9, hombres. Jane’s Addiction original lineup? I am hella there.
• This past Friday I went to see The Hangover. Verdict: four phats. Definitely some gross humor; definitely a weird Zach Galifinakis; and most likely worth seeing. (Though don’t take your parents.)
Even stranger, the movie featured both Heather Graham and Mike Tyson in prominent roles. Why is this strange? Those two were both guests at a 2004 arts-benefit party at the Guggenheim in NYC attended by yours truly, who by all rights should not have been there in the first place. (I’m pretty sure this Heather Graham photo is from that very night.) Mike Tyson is somehow even scarier when he wears fur, and I even made eye contact with Ms. Graham — or as I have no right to call her, Heather — for a full second.
The moral here? I really should have been offered at least a cameo appearance as the third part of that party trifecta, Hollywood.
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Happy 200th birthday to Honest Abe, the greatest President the United States has ever had and namesake for my ‘hood in Chicago. I probably shouldn’t use the term “hood” to describe arguably the most yuppified area in the country, but that’s how we do it in streetz of LP — Chads and Trixies fo’ life.
There’s been a lot written about how every generation reinvents Lincoln as an ideal President for today’s theories and challenges, and that often requires a pretty huge leap in logic. But as this Salon article points out, it’s really a stretch when the modern G.O.P. tries to claim that the tall lanky dude would fit in well with today’s Republicans:
How Would Lincoln Vote Today?
The author sums it up best himself in this paragraph:
Can anyone believe that a contemporary Republican politician who refused to join a Christian church, who was described by friends as “an avowed and open infidel,” who had written a book mocking the miracles in the Bible, who described evangelical voters as “priest-ridden,” and was a “warm advocate” of evolutionary theory, could be nominated for president by today’s Republican Party?
I’m gonna go ahead and answer “no” to that question.
And one more Lincoln link: This 2005 Atlantic profile of Lincoln and depression was really powerful and stuck with me.
This morning I was on the subway thinking about the Korean War, just on the DL as usual, when it occurred to me that President Bush could learn a lesson from his professed exemplar, Harry S Truman. (No period after the S.)
People in the Administration and the military have regularly accused Iran of aiding Iraqi Shi’ite militias in their attacks on Americans. I don’t know if Iran is actually building the IEDs, but they certainly have a sympathetic Shi’ite proxy in Iraq, and it’s unlikely that they aren’t somehow involved. Whatever the nature of Iran’s help in the mayhem, this assistance is one of the leading casus belli (plural of that?) for a potential strike on Iran. (For a level-headed assessment of what would likely happen in that event, you can read this.) Here’s where history offers some perspective.
In October 1950 the U.S. and its United Nations allies were, by all measures, winning the Korean War, having pushed to the Yalu River and taken the majority of what is now North Korea. It was then that Mao Tse-Tung sent an army of Chinese regulars into Korea and pushed the United Nations halfway back into South Korea. Eventually the front lines stabilized around the 38th Parallel and stayed roughly there until the ceasefire in 1953, which obviously is still the border today.
What does this have to do with Iran today? Well, General MacArthur was loudly calling for a nuclear attack on China to punish them for getting involved in Korea, and with an entire Chinese army fighting directly against the Americans, China’s involvement was far more overt and deadly than anything Iran has done in Iraq. It also had a more direct cost, as North Korea would likely have gone down in utter defeat without Chinese help.
Truman, however, knew that the U.S. public–not to mention the military and America’s allies fighting in Korea–would not support a widened conflict that could easily turn into World War III only five years after the end of the biggest war yet, and an attack on China would likely have widened things a great deal. So rather than attack China directly, Truman fired MacArthur (hugely unpopular at the time) and kept the conflict limited to Korea, which eventually led to his leaving office at record low approval ratings. Was his decision unfair to American forces fighting in Korea? I don’t know, but I do know that he was smart to avoid a broader war that would have turned nuclear. (MacArthur could have even volunteered an attack on the USSR: Soviet pilots were flying North Korea’s jet fighters against the U.S. and UN. Imagine how an American attack on Vladivostok would have played out for the world.)
The Korean War was a mixed bag: the U.S. avoided a wider conflict and halted communism’s advance on the peninsula, but we’ve been stuck with Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il for 50+ years, and there was the fact that South Korea only became a real democracy in the 1980s after several awful dictators. The lesson here for President Bush is that his predecessor knew that he was playing with fire if he widened the war, fire that could quickly burn out of control and sweep the war-exhausted U.S. into a tremendous fight it didn’t want. Attacking Iran would be a similar regional tinderbox, no matter how grumbly Dick Cheney states otherwise.
I hope this is all overblown and the President’s team is just doing a “Look how crazy we are that we’d make it look like we want another war; you better not mess with us because woo! Crazy!” act to scare potential critics and enemies into keeping their mouths shut. (Kind of a stretch if true.) But, either way, the President can learn from all those historical biographies he’s supposedly reading and gain some valuable insight.
This piece by Juan Cole ends on a perfect note: it’s one thing to make a disastrous mistake for the first time, but when the opportunity to predict the mistake’s consequences exists and one still undertakes the same disaster, then it goes beyond tragedy and into something worse.
I’m sitting here watching episode No. 2 in a row of Human Weapon, the History Channel’s show where two guys go around the globe and do martial-arts training native to various locations. I’d say they do maybe five minutes of actual history in these shows — all of which seems to center around the Pacific Theater of World War II, though I suppose the Japanese really did cause a lot of martial upheaval in East Asia. Meanwhile we’ve just been to a commercial break, where the three promos were for another episode of Human Weapon (although set in France – what are they going to do without all that Eastern-mysticism filler material used by all martial-arts media in America?), an episode of The Universe detailing gaseous nebulas, and an episode of Ice Truckers, which is a show where guys drive trucks across ice. Great history lessons, all.
What happened here? The History Channel is going through the same thing that happened to the Discovery Channel, where they get really popular by exploiting a niche, find that they’ve filled the niche, spin off new networks into even smaller niches (think The Military History Channel or Discovery Times), cast a wider net with the flagship channel to keep growing the audience, then sit back and notice that the parent channel has become nothing like its original self.
It’s a process towards the same middle, in which the channel’s programming becomes a matter of throwing lots of stuff on the air and hoping some of it sticks, topical niche be damned. That’s probably good from a business standpoint, because it means your channel can compete with lots of other channels (including the old-school networks) for the same larger audience. But for someone like me who just wants to tune in now and then for some black and white D-Day footage with fact-laden narration—the name is “The History Channel”, after all—well hey, not as cool.
P.S. – They do lots of computer animations on this show of particular fighting moves, and each time they overlay the move with lots of chalk-drawn equations. What’s the percentage of the audience that actually knows whether those equations are accurate? If you transported a TV audience from the 1950s, would they still fall for the “Wow math, this is smart stuff!” trick? It could be appropriate physics, or the show could be writing out a simple derivative; I know I can’t tell.
The lesson is this: if you want to be an intellectual authority on TV, either a. have your info narrated by an upper-class British guy or b. show lots of formulas. Easy!
Back from the Slate retreat at Mohonk House, readaz. It was a good time: lots of smart-writer conversation, lake swimming and board games. Why is it that every time someone proposes board or parlor games, I think, “This is mad lame,” only to end up having mad fun instead?
At least this stereotype is enjoyable
Anyway, my friend Steve and I were getting our IM on today and talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as we seem to often do. A number of people see things over there and compare them to what’s happened in Northern Ireland. (In fact, there’s allegorical evidence that the PLO and the IRA have worked together in the past.) I think people who make that analogy aren’t going far enough back in their comparison, because the Palestinian situation today is a lot more relatable to that of the Irish directly after World War I.
Back then, you had a similar situation to what’s going on in the occupied territories today: there was a general consensus among rational people on both sides that the British shouldn’t be occupying land where they were a tiny minority, and that required a system which discriminated against the ethnically-different majority. Despite this, the charged atmosphere and radicals on both sides made a negotiated settlement essentially impossible. There was a serious attempt by the British to give Home Rule to the Irish in 1913-14, but the Protestant British settlers in Ulster were so fanatical that they were openly threatening violence against their countrymen if forced to relinquish control over the land they had “settled”. If not for WWI, this could very well have happened: The population back home in Britain was split on whether to give a state to the Irish and undercut their more violent countrymen, or to crack down harder on those savage and stupid Irish, who only understood force and demagoguery.
After WWI, the negotiations were essentially dead. The IRA, knowing it couldn’t stand up directly to Britain’s military, started a guerrilla war against the established order. The British sent in tough veterans (the Black and Tans) to put down the guerrillas, but the Tans’ constant interference in the community and their discriminatory tactics only succeeded in turning more and more of the population against the British and in favor of the IRA. After a few years of this, the British finally reached for an end to the long headache of occupying Ireland and offered the Irish a deal: a Free State for the 26 counties of the south, but six Protestant-dominated counties of Ulster would remain part of the UK.
He does kinda look like Liam Neeson
Many Irish were furious that the British would carve up their ancestral homeland to protect the interests of a fanatical, religiously paranoid settler minority, and these Irish demanded the continuation of anti-British violence: all 32 counties or none at all. (I’m sensing a historical pattern here.) Clearly this ignored the mighty British military reality, and more practical elements of the Irish nation thought differently: taking the deal would be a path to full independence and a potential chance to gain the other six counties through later diplomacy and governmental negotiation, instead of violence. Leading the Free Staters was Michael Collins, an IRA commander from extra-rebellious western Ireland who led the guerrilla campaign. Ultimately the conflict led to a civil war between the Republicans and the Free Staters, with the Free Staters eventually victorious. Michael Collins, however, was assassinated by Republican snipers, perhaps the war’s most prominent victim. (For a good movie, check out the obviously named Michael Collins sometime, even if Julia Roberts’ Irish accent is worse than that of the Lucky Charms spokesprechaun.)
The Collins dude is where the parallel has its biggest hole: who’s the Palestinian equivalent? I guess the closest they’ve had is Arafat, but dude was more than willing to keep up the violence to score political points, rather than making the tough choices to give his people a shot at their own rule. With him gone, though, forget it. In the past few days we’ve seen 1922 Irish-style civil-war action between the Palestinian Free-Staters (Fatah) and Republicans (Hamas), but this time the “keep up the struggle” Republicans are winning and are in control of the government, while the Free Stater not-equivalents in Gaza and the West Bank are corrupt, weak and hardly viewed by their people as a worthy leadership. Also, you can’t ignore the fact that it took another 75 years and many deaths before the North of Ireland calmed down. Not encouraging for the Israeli settlement areas, even in the nigh-impossible scenario that everything else does play out similar to Ireland.
Still, while it likely will never happen, at least the Irish experience offers the Palestinians a model with some hope for the future. It may have taken 800 years for the Irish to reach a settlement, and the Palestinians have been in their predicament since 1948, but if recent history repeats itself, maybe we’ll be lucky enough to see a sensible reduction of violence sometime soon.
Probably not, though.
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