Confederate pseudohistory

The flag game

The most vigorous defenders of the flag always bring up “heritage” and “Southern pride.” They cite the bravery of fallen ancestors, whom they imagine fighting till their last breath and last drop of blood for states' rights beneath the waving Confederate flag. Ah, but which flag? Ironically, many of those revered rebels probably never even saw the flag that their descendants regard as sacred to their memory. Unless they were part of General Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, which used the infamous banner as its battle flag, Confederate soldiers went to war under other colors—including even Lee's troops.

The official flag of the Confederate States of America was the Stars and Bars, first adopted and flown in the CSA's provisional capital city of Montgomery, Alabama. Its resemblance to the USA's Old Glory made its use in battle problematic, insufficiently distinguishing the two sides. The Stars and Bars acquired additional stars as the CSA incorporated (or pretended to incorporate) more renegade states and remained the Confederacy's official banner till it was set aside in 1863 in favor of a new design.

The so-called “Stainless Banner” was characterized by a now-familiar image embedded in a field of white. The white was described by the flag's designer as representing “the cause of a superior race.” Now a different problem arose. The generous use of white made the Stainless Banner appear in some circumstances to be a white flag of surrender. It was back to the drawing boards one more time, resulting in the third and final iteration of the CSA's national banner in 1865.

The “Blood-Stained Banner” never had a chance. Although the addition of a broad red stripe mitigated the problem of confusion with a flag of surrender, surrender was, in fact, at hand. The final CSA flag was adopted in March 1865 and General Lee conceded to General Grant in April. Most Confederate soldiers never saw the new national flag, which was defunct with the defeat and dissolution of the CSA.

Both the Stainless and Blood-Stained CSA banners featured a canton displaying the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, which had adopted the starred saltire cross in late 1861 in preference to the confusing Stars and Bars. Despite the battle flag's role as the banner under which General Lee surrendered, it had a vigorous post-war life. Decades after the war was over, the battle flag (often in rectangular rather than square form) was favored as the official emblem of various associations of Civil War veterans in the South. It outlasted the official flags in its identification with the Confederacy and its Lost Cause.

Later the battle flag found favor with the Ku Klux Klan and other organizations that promoted “white power” and suppression of the civil rights of black citizens. It can hardly be mere coincidence that Georgia chose to revive the battle flag and incorporate it in its state banner in resistance to the desegregation mandate of 1954's Brown v. Board of Education.  (The illustration depicts the change enacted in Georgia's flag in 1956.)

The racist component of Southern heritage was there at the outset, as detailed in the constitution of the seceding states and the declarations of the Confederacy's officers, but it was compounded and exacerbated by the era of Jim Crow and the South's segregationist state governments. The Confederate battle flag can no more be purged of that association than the swastika of Germany's National Socialist Party can be restored to its pre-Nazi status.

It's time for the battle flag to fade away, the sooner the better.

Baying at the moon

The “Get a life” edition

On July 24, 2014, Daily Kos observed the forty-fifth anniversary of the conclusion of the Apollo 11 moon mission with a photo taken shortly after the command module's splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. The photo was labeled with some text:

At 12:51 p.m. (EST) on July 24, 1969, the Apollo 11 module landed in the Pacific Ocean, southwest of Hawaii. This completed the first mission humanity ever made to another celestial body.

That statement is straightforward enough, but I thought it gave short shrift to two other missions that preceded the historic first moon landing. On Facebook I offered the following comment:

Clarification: The first manned mission to *land* and return. Both Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 went all the way to the moon and back, but they were lunar orbital missions only (the latter including a jaunt with the lunar module that came within ten miles of the surface).

Another FB user promptly offered a kind of rebuttal:

ABR I think the word humanity speaks to that.

Huh? I casually replied:

Humanity was aboard Apollos 8 and 10 as well.

Soon others got into the act:

BA Bet you are a real fun guy at parties.

DG There is no ambiguity in the graphic. The word "made" means "landed". Get a life.

Unchastened by the dictionary revisionism (and the slight against my party suitability), I replied:

I think the Apollo 8 astronauts felt like they had "made" a mission to the moon, which they orbited ten times before returning home. It takes nothing away from Apollo 11 to acknowledge that.

Finally, someone chimed in to defend my point:

CL Agreed. My outstanding memory of the Apollo missions was, at the age of 14, listening to Anders, Borman and Lovell aboard Apollo 8, orbiting the moon, giving a Christmas (1968) message to the people on earth. That was just awesome - and the furthest that men had ever been from earth. There is a tendency to simplify history to 'spot facts' and glib milestones. Apollo 8 was first to the moon. Apollo 11 was first to land. Equal achievements, I'd say.

Unfortunately, despite this positive reinforcement (although I never claimed that the orbital missions were equivalent to the landing missions), my original simple statement of clarification remained a sticking point for a Facebook user with the initials MN:

MN You can't go TO the Moon If you don't land on It. As defined during the 8 and 10 mission, they ORBITED the Moon, Just like John Glenn ORBITED the Earth. Chris, They are NOT equal achievements, by any stretch.

This remark is a perfect headdesk opportunity, especially in its creative use of the word “defined.” Is MN prepared to tell Borman, Lovell, Anders, Stafford, Young, and Cernan that they did not go “TO” the moon because they neglected to land on it? Lovell was also the commander of the Apollo 13 mission which aborted its moon landing because of an explosion in its service module. Should we tell Lovell that, nope, he did not go to the moon twice because neither of his missions landed? Sure, he never got to set foot on the lunar surface, but Jim Lovell definitely made two missions to the moon.

Let's not forget the epic moon missions that preceded Apollo 11 in the excitement over the anniversary of the first landing. Some of us remember those thrilling days and rue their passing.

One thing Texas does right

Although Perry can't count to three

The seven-college Dallas County Community College District is one of the biggest post-secondary education institutions in the world. The legendary Bill J. Priest was present at the creation in 1965, serving as DCCCD's first president. His starting salary was $35,000, more than the governor of Texas. According to Bill Jason Priest: Community College Pioneer, a hagiography by Kathleen Krebbs Whitson, “an editorial appeared in one of the major daily newspapers in Dallas extolling the integrity of the Dallas County Junior College Board for being willing to spend the money to bring in the very best leadership for the new junior college system.”

That information piqued my curiosity, so I looked up the current salaries of the DCCCD chief executive (a “chancellor” now instead of a “president”) and the Texas governor. It turns out that Chancellor Wright Lassiter earns $271,126 and Governor Rick Perry gets $150,000 (I didn't feel right using “earns” again). Good for Texas! Educators are still out-pointing politicians.

Priest enjoyed twitting his former colleagues back in California about the support for education that he was finding in Texas. “You're working in the wrong place,” he told them. Of course, not everything about Texas was to Priest's liking, but he deftly took care of that with some judicious prevarication. His extremely generous biographer deftly soft-pedals the deception:

Texas was a new experience for him. He knew Texas culture by reputation only. He had never lived in any part of the Bible Belt before. It was an anomaly to him that as a routine part of the get acquainted conversation came the question, “What church do you go to?” He soon discovered that agnosticism was equated with atheism in the Dallas area. In his mind, agnostic meant he believed in a supreme being and that the universe was far too complicated a creation for there not to be a God over all. His negative experiences with fanaticism and those taking advantage of others in the name of organized religion caused him to disassociate with formal denominations that seemingly gave human characteristics to God. This explanation was far too complex to explore in casual chit chat. Since he had been reared in the home of his grandfather, an elder in the First Christian Church, Priest had attended those services with him. Based on that history, First Christian became his answer.

One might have expected a better definition of agnosticism from an educator, as well as less willingness to lie to his new neighbors, but Priest appears to have been undisturbed by it. I guess that's just what a person has to do to survive in Texas.

Rewrite!

Where is an editor when you need one?

Perusing the San Francisco Chronicle over breakfast this morning, I lit upon an article on the insistence of Tea Partiers that they had no intention of going away, reports of their death supposedly greatly exaggerated. It was amusing to see that astroturf specialist Sal Russo was quoted: “Of course, the brand has been hammered, but the ideas haven't been hammered—and that's why they will always come back.”

The unrepentant Russo is described by the Chronicle reporter as “the Sacramento GOP political consultant who founded Tea Party Express, a network that since it began in early 2009 has connected millions of conservative activists, raised millions of dollars, and used its clout to back once-unknown political figures such as Sarah Palin.” That's half right. Russo is indeed one of the political promoters who reaped a rich reward by running out in front of a horde of disgruntled anti-Obama right-wingers and became a “grassroots leader” willing to collect names and spam those people with incessant appeals for money to fight against the Kenyan-Marxist-Socialist threat in the White House. Whether you account him successful or not depends on your choice of metric. Fleecing the flock? Brilliant success! Defeating Obama? Miserable failure!

But I come neither to bury Russo nor to praise him. He is what he is and his political operation will undoubtedly continue to seek willing victims to feed its appetites. My theme is taken from journalist Alan Barth, who in a 1943 book review penned the phrase, “News is only the rough first draft of history.” (The catchy line was later taken up by Philip L. Graham and others.) If the San Francisco Chronicle's news article on the so-called Tea Party is a “rough first draft” of history, I think the emphasis must be on “rough.” Did you spot the same anachronism that I did?

Yeah. It's the bit about Sarah Palin: “used its clout to back once-unknown political figures such as Sarah Palin.” While Palinistas abound in the ranks of the various Tea Parties, carts and horses are getting pretty badly mixed up in the Chronicle reporter's notebook. Palin was a political unknown only until John McCain disqualified himself from the presidency by tapping her as his running mate in the summer of 2008. That's several months before Rick Santelli blew his stack and called on live television in February 2009 for a “Chicago Tea Party” from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Right-wing interests were quick to exploit the opportunity to create various Tea Party organizations (like Russo's Tea Party Express), aided and abetted by constant promotional exposure on Fox News.

Today the Tea Party ranks are full of broken-hearted activists who grudgingly backed Mitt Romney as the only viable vehicle to oppose Antichrist Obama. Many of them pine for Sarah Palin to return from her frozen exile to lead them on a crusade (where “crusade” is indeed le mot juste) to save the nation from various ill-defined fates worse than death. But the Tea Party, as such, postdates Palin's over-extended fifteen minutes of fame. It had nothing to do with turning her from a “once-unknown political figure” into the wet dream of deranged right-wingers.

The dollar-sign alternate universe

Not always for sale

Remember California's Governor William Matson Roth? You probably don't. How about U.S. Senator Norton Simon? (I know: you're thinking, “Isn't there a museum named after him in Pasadena?”)

Here's a pair of easier ones: Governor Al Checchi? U.S. Senator Mike Huffington?

You're catching on, aren't you? Let's clinch it:

Governor Meg Whitman?

Yeah, right.

While Ms. Whitman still has an outside chance of beating former governor Jerry Brown on Tuesday, most people are now aware that her attempt to purchase California's governor's mansion is falling short. (The joke is on her! Jerry rejected the governor's mansion during his first term in the 1970s and the Reagan-designed mediocrity in Carmichael was sold as a white elephant.)

All of the people cited above were (or are) multi-millionaires who decided the best route to elective office was a self-funded campaign. While Whitman is taking the cake with over $140 million having been dug out of her deep, deep pockets, her predecessors were pikers only by comparison.

Norton Simon accurately appraised U.S. Senator George Murphy as a light-weight party hack out of touch with the California electorate and decided to challenge him in the 1970 Republican primary. Murphy was a former Hollywood song-and-dance man who had won the seat in a kind of fluke in the Johnson landslide year of 1964, breasting the Democratic tide by beating Pierre Salinger, the short-term placeholder senator who had been appointed when the elected senator died in office.

Simon's dollars, however, could not dislodge the “senator from Technicolor.” Sen. Murphy won the GOP nomination (although he lost in the general election).

In 1974, former University of California regent William Matson Roth decided on a similar good-government tack. Once again, a millionaire spent freely to gain political office. As a self-funded candidate, Roth would of course be beholden to no one, since there would be no financial strings on him. (Sound familiar?) As it turned out, he would not be beholden to many voters, either, since they cast their ballots for other candidates. He came in fourth in the Democratic primary. The winner? Jerry Brown.

For a while, it looked like U.S. Rep. Mike Huffington, a Republican from a California coastal district, might be the exception to the rule that rich candidates can't buy political office. He had displaced his predecessor, a long-serving Republican congressman from Santa Barbara, by washing him away in a tidal wave of money in the 1992 GOP primary. All told, Huffington spent $5.4 million dollars for a congressional seat (but at least he got it). Naturally political consultants and media outlets rejoiced and salivated when Rep. Huffington began to gear up in 1994 for a U.S. senate race against incumbent Dianne Feinstein.

Again, money flowed like water—$28 million this time. But Mike never became a U.S. senator. In rapid succession, Huffington lost to Feinstein, announced he was gay (or at least bisexual), and divorced his wife Arianna. (She probably didn't mind, though, since it was now clear that Mike was not her ticket to becoming First Lady.)

These lessons were lost on former airline executive Al Checchi, who thought it would be nice to be California's governor. He never made it to the general election. In 1998 he dropped $39 million into the Democratic primary, but lost to Gray Davis, who spent “only” $9 million.

Enter Meg Whitman, today's self-funded, no-strings-attached candidate. If nothing else, she is a walking and talking (but not very much) one-woman stimulus for California's political economy. She could have gotten a lot more bang out of her $140 million if she had spent half of it on charity instead of those incessant, aggravating, and mind-numbing advertisements. (Meg, ever heard of diminishing returns? How about diminishing election returns?)

Is it ironic or merely amusing that Whitman's opponent in Tuesday's election—the once and future governor Jerry Brown—made his political career back in the 1970s by sponsoring the Fair Political Practices Act, which created the reporting mechanism that tracks all of this wacky campaign spending and established the state's disclosure rules (which the federal government would do well to emulate)? The Fair Political Practices Commission recently released a report that makes for some sadly entertaining reading: Breaking the Bank: Primary Campaign Spending for Governor since 1978. Shake your head and cluck your tongue while scanning the cost-per-vote data for the losers, who clearly had more dollars than sense (or votes).

Let's give Jerry Brown the last word. From an article by Bill Boyarsky in the Los Angeles Times, December 28, 1973, when Brown was California's secretary of state and gearing up for his first successful gubernatorial run:

Democratic Secretary of State Edmund G. Brown Jr. proposed Thursday that he and the other prospective candidates for governor spend no more than $750,000 each in the 1974 primary election.

Based on a true story

A befuddled eyewitness account

Weird things happen sometimes. A year ago at this time I was immersed in a weird thing myself. You'd think I would have a clue why it occurred, but you'd be wrong. Perhaps it was like the pressure building up inside a containment vessel until at some point the vessel ruptures and the contents spew out in a sudden, uncontrolled pulse. Maybe it was like that.

Whatever the explanation, the result was that I spewed out 110,000 words of text in 20 days.

It was pretty awesome.

I have witnesses, too. They watched in bemusement as the pages poured out of my computer. One of my victims was my friend GW:

You've got a lot of nerve, Zeno, sending me pages from your upcoming novel, thereby totally knocking out a good half-hour of my day. How dare you!

I can see the family flames beginning to ignite.

Yeah, GW was instantly aware that I was writing a roman à clef based on my family's history. He started the guessing game. Was this particular character based on my grandfather or my uncle? Is this person based on your dad?

It was immediately obvious that the boy desperate to run away to college was me.

It seems like the character Paul might be playing your role in the story, being a puzzle and a weird mix of genes, and liking Wagner and books. Yeah, in a story about dairymen in Tulare county, that starts to sound like you.

Busted.

So tell me, did the real trial over your grandmother's will involve a handwriting “expert” and, if so, did you simply pull the dialog from the court transcript? I know, that would be cheating and unnecessary for Zeno, but it's so crisp and logical that it made me think, well, that you copied out of the transcript!

No transcript. It was all cobbled up from memory and make-believe, although it might have been nice to have a transcript for reference purposes.

You see, my family really did rend itself into warring camps when my grandmother died and deprived us of the great peace-making matriarch whose disapproving glance could turn the blood in our veins into ice water. We flew to flinders in the absence of the binding force of that formidable center.

That great cataclysm occurred nearly thirty years ago. Some family relationships were gradually repaired. Others never recovered. (My godfather and I never spoke another word to each other.)

Most of my family has yet to see the manuscript. I quietly shared it with my sister. She called me up to say she had had difficulty putting it down. “It brought back a lot of memories,” she said. Even though I wrote it as fiction, the outline of the story is faithful to our family disaster. My sister was also very concerned that I was going to stir up old resentments and spark recriminations. Her son perused the manuscript, but was less concerned:

“The good thing for you is that the characters who would be most insulted by an accurate depiction of what they really are like are dead, incompetent, or almost illiterate,” he said.

I can't imagine where my nephew got his sharp tongue. Such a rascal.

He's heard several of the family stories before. The weird and tragicomic anecdotes are staples at family gatherings. (Some of them have trickled onto this blog.) My sister would often comment after the nth retelling of a family fable, “Someone should really write these down, but it would have to be as fiction. No one could believe they actually happened in real life.”

Every time I heard her say that, I would think, I could do that. But I never did. At least, not until last year. That's when the stories that had been percolating through my brain for decades burst loose and spilled onto the pages of a book-length manuscript. In a way, I had been rehearsing the saga for all those years, so perhaps it's not so surprising how the episodes poured out at a rate of 5500 words per day.

I was rather stunned when it all came together like that, with the fictional mortar binding together the real-life incidents. Thanks to the comments of GW and a few other readers, I revised and expanded the manuscript in a more leisurely fashion over the subsequent months, reaching a “final” product last spring. It tilts the scale at nearly 125,000 words now and that's what is in the hands of a publisher's team of reviewers.

GW was pensive at the end of last August's exercise in prolixity:

Phew, so we're done? I actually read a whole book in a bit less than three weeks, must be some sort of record. I'm really glad I got to participate in this bit of madness. I enjoyed it for the reading, but also to see you crank this stuff out, day after day. I'd say Where does it come from, but we mere mortals don't really want to know.

I shared the manuscript with my college president, under the heading of “What I did during my summer vacation.” He was dutifully amused (one must give moral support to one's faculty members), but then—who saw that coming?—he read the whole damned thing. He sent me a message:

“I got goosebumps, a tug in my heart, and chuckled out loud with the close of your book.”

Damn. That's going in the cover blurb.

The Eagle has landed

History from a front-row seat

July 20, 1969, was a Sunday. Therefore we went to 8:30 mass in our parish church. Our fire-and-brimstone monsignor was no longer pastor and our new parish priest had yet to hit his stride. While Monsignor could whip through a mass in 35 minutes, Father clocked in at about 50. (We were supposed to offer up our sufferings as penance.) I was fidgety through the whole ceremony and got a couple of nasty looks from Dad and a elbow-nudge or two from Mom. Finally the mass was ended and we could go in peace to love and serve the Lord—and to get the hell out of there.

It just so happens that our home and our parish church form a nearly perfect east-west line, several miles in length, but there is no through road there. We would normally travel north from home till we hit the major east-west thoroughfare (such as it was, given the standards of county roads), and then jog back to the south once in the neighborhood of the church. The north route was the better road and the faster route, but on July 20, 1969, Dad decided to return home along the south route.

Fear gripped my heart. Was he planning to drop in on his sister? Dad's brother-in-law had a dairy farm on that road. We could be stuck there for hours. Would the television be on? Probably, but I couldn't be certain. Our car headed south and made the turn onto Dad's chosen route. A man in a pickup truck waved at us and Dad pulled over. He clambered out, strolled over to the pickup, and engaged a fellow farmer in conversation.

I was practically vibrating in my seat. Mom turned around and gave me a look. My siblings simpered.

It was only a few minutes, but it seemed like eternity. Dad finally walked back, climbed into the car, and we were off again. The next danger point was my uncle and aunt's dairy farm, but we blew past it without slowing down. I didn't start breathing regularly, though, till we turned the corner of our street and home was directly ahead.

Under normal circumstances, the standard practice in our home was to ask a parent whether or not it was all right to turn on the TV. (Imagine that.) But it was July 20, 1969. I was in high school and history was unfolding. I rushed into the family room and turned on the television on my own authority. Sure enough, Walter Cronkite and Wally Schirra were there to comfort me. I breathed a sigh of relief.

It was not yet 10:00 in the morning, Pacific Daylight Time. The moon landing was scheduled for approximately 1:00 that afternoon. We had plenty of time to spare. However, I grudged every minute of live news coverage that I had missed due to Father's slowpoke mass and Dad's leisurely return home. I wanted to be tuned in to Walter Cronkite as much as sports fanatics insist on watching every minute of Super Bowl pre-game programming.

At 1:17 PDT, I wasn't moving a muscle as Armstrong and Aldrin touched down on the moon in the Eagle lunar module. “Houston. Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

I remember Cronkite's reaction, but I don't remember mine. My best guess is a slightly slack-jawed “Wowwwwww!” There was a babble from other family members, along with a yell from my kid brother. We were really on the moon!

That night, I scribbled some brief notes in the five-year diary I was keeping at the time. You have only a few lines to record the notable events of the day, and this is what I wrote:

Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin landed the “Eagle” in the Sea of Tranquility; moonwalk: 2 hours, 13 min.

I see from other sources that the first moonwalk was later logged as lasting 2 hours, 36 minutes, and 40 seconds. I don't know what accounts for the discrepancy. Perhaps I was tired. (Perhaps the official timekeepers decided to include the time that Armstrong and Aldrin spent on the lunar module's porch and ladder.) The diary also notes that I didn't get to bed till 1:45 in the morning. You're allowed to stay up late on Moon Day.

I did mention that it was a five-year diary in which I took note of the epochal Apollo 11 moon landing. Having dug up this ancient document, I could not resist perusing it for a while. I was amused, in particular, to see what I had been reading on previous 20ths of July. In 1965, I wrote that I was reading The Deep Range (one of Arthur C. Clarke's non-sf novels). In 1966 my reading material was “Sunjammer,” Clarke's much-admired short story of an inconclusive light-sail race. Perhaps I had run out of Clarke's books by 1967, when I read John Brunner's Secret Agent of Terra. Considering that Brunner also wrote Stand on Zanzibar and Shockwave Rider, I think we must concede that Secret Agent is one of his lesser works. In 1968, I was in the midst of Samuel R. Delany's Einstein Intersection.

And what was I reading during the time of the moon landing in 1969? I didn't mention anything specific on July 20, but later that week I made an entry that I was working through The Riddle of Gravitation by P. G. Bergmann. Just a bit of nonfiction for variety.

Funny thing, though. For all the reading I did—and I did a lot of it—not even one of the sf stories or novels about space exploration ever suggested that the first moon landing would be a live broadcast event. That's a curious failure of the imagination. In 1969, the revolution was televised.

❑

I was (am!) a child of the Space Age. As a teenager during the Apollo program, I fully expected that it would be completely reasonable to book a lunar vacation for my fiftieth birthday, which would not occur until the 21st century. Silly me. I forgot to take into account that Richard Nixon was president and was eager to dismantle the program that had become a monument to the memory of his late rival, the man who defeated him for the presidency in 1960. Nixon had insisted on having his name included in the plaque that remained on the surface of the moon as part of the lunar module landing stage, but he had squeezed as much p.r. as he could out of the event and was ready to wash his hands of the whole thing. Apollo missions 18, 19, and 20 were cut and only one actual scientist (Harrison Schmitt) made it to the moon before the program was cancelled.

And we still haven't gone back.

Well, I don't like to travel that much, but I do rather wish we were a truly spacefaring race by now. It's taking longer than I thought.

Perhaps I should not complain too much. I remember watching coverage of subsequent missions with my grandmother. She was bemused by the entire experience. Wilbur and Orville Wright had yet to make their first flight at Kitty Hawk when my grandmother was born in the Azores. She lived to see jumbo jets, moon landings, and the start of the space shuttle program. When she was a young girl, next year could be relied upon to be very similar to last year. You would probably end up doing what your mother or father did, and probably in the same place. Her expectations were quite contrary to the resulting reality, which transplanted her thousands of miles from home and presented her with a dizzying acceleration of history.

It was that dizzying acceleration that had become my default expectation when I was a youngster, but I still don't have my flying car, rocket belt, or lunar vacation. After the 0 to 60 pedal-to-the-metal spike of acceleration, I guess it's cruise time.

The rose-colored sixties

Improving your memory

Does nostalgia improve with age? It must. My father has grown ever more adept at revising his recollections of the past. It's now reached the point that Dad is pining away for the sixties. Remember the sixties? I do. The JFK, King, and RFK assassinations. Vietnam. Nixon. Miseries and disasters. The only thing I liked about the sixties was the space program, which climaxed in 1969 with the Apollo 11 moon landing. But Dad sees it differently:

I remember the good old days and that is not just a saying, They really were the good old days.

This brought back a lot of memories and I enjoyed it. I hope you enjoy it too.

Dad

---

The “good old days”? I certainly hope my kid brother is keeping an eye on our father, because dear old Dad is losing it.

Attached to his message was a link to a video. The title is Back to the Sixties. I watched it in perplexity. This was what sparked Dad's nostalgia?

The video opens with “A Summer Place” as its soundtrack. Lines of text appear on the screen, informing us that the sixties were a time when a McDonald's hamburger was only 15 cents. Unemployment was 5.5% and the minimum wage was $1.00 (per hour, I presume). So far, so good, I suppose. The video also pointed out that a teacher's annual salary was $5,174. Ouch! The dollar was worth a lot more back then, but I'm still not impressed. But maybe Dad liked the idea of low-paid teachers. (He should look at my sister's salary. It's still true.)

The soundtrack switched to Elvis singing “It's Now or Never” as The King's discharge from the U.S. Army was celebrated. Was Dad an Elvis fan? Actually, Dad's reaction to Elvis on the television was more along the lines of “Goddam hick! Shaking his hips like some kind of sissy!”

Okay, so there was one little glitch in the comforting retrospective. But why should anyone continue to resent the long-dead Elvis? Perhaps the video has other delights in store for us.

Indeed, it begins to roll out a cavalcade of sports greats from the sixties. Baseball players. Football heroes. And:

“Muhammad Ali was The Greatest!”

Oops! To quote my father from that two-fisted era: “That goddam Cassius Clay is a draft-dodger who hates this country! And white people!”

But now the video has moved on to Chubby Checker singing “The Twist” while teenagers jump about on American Bandstand.

“They call that dancing? What the hell is that? They look like spastics!”

It's the British Invasion of 1964 as The Beatles sing “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” I remember my father's reaction to The Beatles when they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show:

“Goddam beatniks! Look at their hair! Do they think they're girls?”

“The House of the Rising Sun” plays while the video producer's favorite TV shows of the sixties are displayed. Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In? There must be some mistake.

“‘Sock it to me’? What the hell does that mean? It's probably some goddam obscene suggestion is what that is.”

The Zombies are singing “She's not There” as favorite entertainments from the sixties continue to be displayed. Movies! Camelot! West Side Story! (Sorry, no movie musicals for Dad, please!) The Dave Clark Five takes over with “Glad All Over.” Then it's the Surfaris with “Wipeout.” The video is paying tribute to the great surfing fad of that decade.

“Goddam beach bums!”

The video switches to Chantay's “Pipeline” and now we're finally confronting Vietnam. And, OMG, there he is! Nguyen Ngoc Loan is using his handgun to summarily execute a captured Viet Cong prisoner. It's the infamous news photo that encapsulated the brutality of the war. (Only the naked little girl running from a napalm strike is more famous.) Ah, the good old sixties! Perhaps the video has lost the thread of its own argument. At least its list of assassinations includes Malcolm X along with Dr. King and the Kennedy brothers. Dad was actually pleased back when Malcolm got hit. And he wasn't certain it was a bad thing with King, either. A pity about the Kennedy boys, though.

The Supremes are singing “Stop! In the Name of Love” while the video takes note of the bizarre unisex fashions of the era. Unisex?

“Goddam queers!”

The Lovin' Spoonful sings “Summer in the City” while the screen displays the happy thought that back then “Foreigners learned and spoke English.” That's right, by golly! (Well, except for my grandmother. I don't recall Dad complaining about his mother's failure to learn English. And now it's much too late to oppress and insult her in the way that patriotic Americans should!)

When I hear Buffalo Springfield singing “For What It's Worth,” I'm thinking: This is a protest song! Dad hates protest songs! (“Goddam protesters! They need a bath and a haircut!”)

And it doesn't get any better when The Fifth Dimension launches into “Aquarius” during the tribute to Woodstock and “Hair” and the psychedelic era.

“Goddam hippies!”

For someone like me, who was a teenager in the sixties, the video was weirdly evocative. But I was conscious of it being a nasty time and wondering what was going wrong. I'd never want to go back there. In his old age, though, Dad has mellowed out and thinks he's singing along with the sixties. Maybe he should watch it again and this time actually pay attention.

Or maybe not.

Happy birthday, Carl

Only 232 years old and doing fine

Today is the anniversary of the birth of Carl Friedrich Gauss in 1777. Although we claim him for the mathematicians, lots of people share in Gauss's legacy. He did pioneering work in celestial mechanics, geodesy, and physics as well as mathematics. Fortunately for many mathematicians (but perhaps not for mathematics), Gauss did not publish all his results, allowing them to get credit for discoveries he had long since made on his own.

By the way, some people insist on writing Gauss's first name as “Karl.” That's the German way, right? Don't be fooled. The man himself favored “Carl” when he signed his name and I render his name as he preferred. The only catch: He wrote his last name as Gauß, of course, but we Anglophones have difficulty following him there.

Happy Gauss's Birthday, everyone!

Teddy and torture

When Republicans hated waterboarding

During the past month my nightstand reading has been Edmund Morris's magisterial two-volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt. The second book is titled Theodore Rex and covers the (nearly) eight years that TR was in the White House. Early in his presidency, Roosevelt had to deal with a scandal involving American troops in the Philippines. The United States had acquired the islands four years earlier in the wake of the Spanish-American war and was involved in a battle to pacify local insurrectos and to establish an American protectorate (which remained the status of the Philippines until independence was granted in 1946 during the Truman administration).

The war in the Philippines was a nasty affair. American soldiers who were captured or surrendered to the insurrectos were roasted alive, dismembered, stoned, or otherwise tortured. U.S. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge had a long bill of particulars which he read out to his colleagues, sickening the members of the upper house. Lodge, however, had recourse to this extraordinary device because he was trying to quiet the nation's outrage at decisions by U.S. Army officers to respond to torture with torture. A hundred years ago, it was still considered improper for Americans to lower themselves to the least common denominator.

The following excerpt begins on p. 99 of the paperback edition of Theodore Rex and ends on p. 101:

[Senator Henry Cabot] Lodge's committee on the Philippines reluctantly published the Gardener Report on 11 April [1902]. It caused instant national outrage. Two days later, the Anti-Imperialist League released the even more shocking confession of a Major C. M. Waller, on trial for genocide in Samar:

Q Had you any orders from General [Jacob H.] Smith to kill and burn? If so, state all that he said.
A “I wish you to kill and burn. The more you kill and the more you burn, the better you will please me.” Not once only, but several times...
Q Did you ever ask General Smith whom he wished you to kill?
A Yes. He said he wanted all persons killed who were capable of bearing arms, and I asked if he would define the age limit.
Q What did General Smith say?
A “Ten years.”

Waller also quoted a written order from the general: “The interior of Samar must be made a howling wilderness.”

No sooner had the phrases kill and burn and howling wilderness registered on the American conscience than a third, water cure, came out of the Committee hearings. Witness after witness testified to widespread use by American soldiers of this traditional torture, developed by Spanish priests as a means of instilling reverence for the Holy Ghost:

A man is thrown down on his back and three or four men sit on his arms and legs and hold him down and either a gun barrel or a rifle barrel or a carbine barrel or a stick as big as a belaying pin ... is simply thrust into his jaws ... and then water is poured onto his face, down his throat and nose ... until the man gives some sign of giving in or becomes unconscious.... His suffering must be that of a man who is drowning, but who cannot drown.

Other reports spoke of natives being flogged, toasted, strung up by their thumbs, and tattoed “facially” for identification.

Amid mounting cries of revulsion, the President swung into action. He met with his Cabinet on 15 April, and demanded a full briefing on the Philippine situation. [Secretary of War Elihu] Root said defensively that one officer accused of water torture had been ordered to report for trial. Roosevelt was not satisfied. His entire insular policy was in danger, not to mention his reputation for decent governance. He directed Root to flash a cable to Major General Adna Chaffee, Commander of the Philippines Army:

THE PRESIDENT DESIRES TO KNOW IN THE FULLEST AND MOST CIRCUMSTANTIAL MANNER ALL THE FACTS.... FOR THE VERY REASON THAT THE PRESIDENT INTENDS TO BACK UP THE ARMY IN THE HEARTIEST FASHION IN EVERY LAWFUL AND LEGITIMATE METHOD OF DOING ITS WORK. HE ALSO INTENDS TO SEE THAT THE MOST VIGOROUS CARE IS EXERCISED TO DETECT AND PREVENT ANY CRUELTY OR BRUTALITY, AND THAT MEN WHO ARE GUILTY THEREOF ARE PUNISHED. GREAT AS THE PROVOCATION HAS BEEN IN DEALING WITH FOES WHO HABITUALLY RESORT TO TREACHERY MURDER AND TORTURE AGAINST OUR MEN, NOTHING CAN JUSTIFY OR WILL BE HELD TO JUSTIFY THE USE OF TORTURE OR INHUMAN CONDUCT OF ANY KIND ON THE PART OF THE AMERICAN ARMY.

Roosevelt also ordered the court-martial of General Smith, “under conditions which will give me the right of review.” These gestures, which coincided with the surrender of Miguel Malvar, the last uncaptured Filipino guerrilla leader, relieved pressure on the White House, if not the War Department. Tired and depressed, the Secretary sailed for a working vacation in Cuba.

Calls for Root's resignation followed him across the water. When General Smith admitted, on 25 April, to having authorized the slaughter of Filipino boys, even loyal Republicans were revolted. “It is almost incredible,” the Philadelphia Press commented, “that an American officer of any rank could have issued an order so shameful, inhuman, and barbarous.” Root was accused of a cover-up, or at least a reluctance to prosecute Army cruelty. “If we are to ‘benevolently assimilate’ Filipinos by such methods,” remarked the New Orleans Times-Democrat, “we should frankly so state, and drop our canting hypocrisy about having to wage war on these people for their own betterment.”

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“[E]ven loyal Republicans were revolted”? Well, it was a long time ago!

General “Howling Jake” Smith's court-martial, by the way, ended with a slap on the wrist and an admonishment. The president regarded the results as insufficient and ordered the general's dismissal from the military. (It was a long, long time ago.)

The preachers are revolting

Politics from the pulpit

California's arid Central Valley is awash in religious right-wing radio. During trips down to visit the family farm, I sometimes wander the AM band, marveling at the alternative universe into which I've fallen. (No wonder so much of my family is steeped in this conservative cant.) Earlier this month I stumbled across the mundanely named Issues in Education. The hosts are Bob and Geri Boyd, a fervent Christian couple whose guest was fiction writer David Barton.

Barton would disagree with that description, of course. He fancies himself a historian, working diligently to restore the supposed truth of America's profoundly Christian origins. (Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson would be so surprised.) The Boyds announced that the title of the program was Vital Election Issues, part 2. (You can find it—and the expected part 1—on the Program Log page of their website.)

Barton's awkward relationship with historical truth is well illustrated by his comments concerning recent events. At 3:22 into the program, he exposes a shocking truth about Judge Jones and the Kitzmiller case:

If you look at the case we had, the Dover case in Pennsylvania, in that case where we're just looking at can you mention intelligent [design]—can you even mention the phrase?—the judge there overwhelmingly came back and said how dare you try to say what's in the Declaration of Independence! And what was brought out was that his judgment from the court was almost verbatim the brief filed by the ACLU. He didn't even get around to writing his own opinion. He just took their brief and posted it as his opinion.

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These remarks expose Barton as a fool or a propagandist. Perhaps both. Of course the Kitzmiller decision reflects the arguments of the winning side! The contenders file their briefs, offer their arguments, and the judge makes his ruling—which will agree with the side who he thinks had the better of the debate. The briefs are proffered as potential draft decisions, from which the judge may freely draw, as Jones did with his findings of fact. Duh!

But Barton wanted to talk about the future, too. Some brave Christian pastors are girding their loins for political battle. Having devoted most of their time to render to God the things that are God's, this year they want to get into Caesar's domain. In his peculiar diction, Barton excitedly reports on this development (at 7:34 into the program):

[T]here is a day stood up in September where you're going to have thousands of pastors stand up across America and preach a sermon that is considered political, including on candidates, out of the pulpit and they're challenging the IRS to come after them.

Geri: Oh, I love this!

The reason is they have prepared a lawsuit and they are convinced—the Alliance Defense Fund has set this up—and they are convinced that they can easily strike down that code that was installed in 1954 telling churches what they can and cannot say out of the pulpit. So you literally have thousands of pastors who will stand up on that day and challenge the government to arrest them or take them to court or try to jerk their tax exemption. You're going to see this thing fought in courts and very likely you're going to see this prohibition against churches speaking dumped, which is going to open up the market even more. So there's a lot of positive stuff going on right now.

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I listened to the end of the program (without any apparent residual neurological damage, fortunately), but Barton did not spill the beans on the date when the nation's most right-wing pastors endorse J. Sidney McCain III. (Well, you didn't think they were going to endorse any Democrats, did you?) For this particular scoop, you need to check out the site of the Alliance Defense Fund. There you discover that this project is called The Pulpit Initiative and is scheduled for September 28.

The Pulpit Initiative
Reclaiming pastors’ constitutional right to speak Truth from the pulpit

On Sunday, September 28, 2008, we are seeking pastors who will preach from the pulpit a sermon that addresses the candidates for government office in light of the truth of Scripture. The sermon is intended to challenge the Internal Revenue Code’s restrictions by specifically opposing candidates for office that do not align themselves and their positions with the Scriptural truth. By standing together and speaking with one voice, it is our hope to recapture the rightful place of pastors and churches in American life.

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The Alliance Defense Fund offers an executive summary that points out the sterling record of America's churches in their political involvement before 1954:

Historically, churches had frequently and fervently spoken for and against candidates for government office. Such sermons date from the founding of America, including sermons against Thomas Jefferson for being a deist; sermons opposing William Howard Taft as a Unitarian; and sermons opposing Al Smith in the 1928 presidential election. Churches have also been at the forefront of most of the significant societal and governmental changes in our history including ending segregation and child labor and advancing civil rights.

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Good argument! The nation would never have recovered if Al Smith, a Catholic, had been elected president in 1928. (Too bad about that Kennedy guy in 1960.) And it's true that some churches fought against slavery—just as many others defended it.

In four weeks The Pulpit Initiative will come to its exciting climax as pastors explain how God wants Christians to vote against Barack Obama, public education, abortion rights, and same-sex marriage. And will they still have their tax exemptions next year? I pray not.