Uncivil Wars

Not long ago I borrowed from our local library a book, Punamustavalkea -- 1918 kuvat ("Red Black & White -- 1918 Pictures"), which documents the Finnish Civil War in a collection of photographs that are sometimes both banal and deeply unsettling.

One that particularly sticks in my mind was taken in my wife’s home town of Varkaus, a place I know well and, let’s be frank -- though it has its charms, I guess -- I’ve always found to be a bit dull. (This is my elitist cosmopolitan Helsinki sensibility showing through.)

In this nearly 100-year-old image, two men stand with their backs to a tall pile of cut timber, precisely the kind of stack of logs you can see anywhere in the Finnish countryside today. One of the men, the older one, has an old-fashion, Lech Walesa style moustache. Other than that and their dress, which I can’t help think of as being straight out of a production of “The Fiddler on the Roof”, the two look like any two Finnish men you would see today at a hockey game or in a office cubicle.

It must be springtime, judging by the scattered patches of snow in the background and the brightness of the day. One of the men has carelessly thrown his coat on the bare ground beside him, the other holds his cap in his hand. They both, with eyes downcast, stand expectantly facing a group of other men, fellow Finns, standing not four steps away with rifles leveled straight at these two hapless men. A moment later, after the photo was snapped, they would be dead.

What I find so moving and compelling about this image of an impromptu firing squad (“summary execution” in today’s media-speak) forever frozen in time, is not only the tragedy of two men standing there, dazed, grappling at that moment with the horrible knowledge of their imminent death.

It’s also the “ordinariness” of the setting, an early-spring day in a place I associate with drowsy summer vacations. And it’s the fact that any of those men with rifles could easily pass for one of my neighbors. It’s not impossible that some of the men about to pull the trigger were neighbors of the two poor souls standing impassively before them.

I can’t say I know much about the Finnish Civil War (Suomen sisällissota) beyond what little I’ve read, but I have understood that it was brutal. From late January to mid May of that year, 1918, right after Finnish independence, conservatives (the Whites) with the help of German troops fought and defeated the supporters of the Finnish Social Democratic Party (the Reds). In just over a hundred days, Finns on both sides slaughtered over 20,000 of their fellow countrymen, many in cold-blooded bouts of terror and retribution, a fact that somehow seems completely incompatible with the Finland I know today.

There are still small reminders of this cruel conflict, however, beyond mere photographs. I recall seeing in Lahti, a small city best known for ski jumping, a memorial commemorating the massacre of Reds that took place there. The National Museum in Helsinki has famously preserved a bullet hole left in its front door from the fighting. My wife remembers the impressive constellation of bullet holes still visible in the side of a shed at her childhood home in Varkaus, a paper-mill town and a stronghold of Red supporters, probably like the two condemned men in the photo.

Red Terror depicted in a socialist newspaper, 1918.

In the scheme of things, this shockingly violent internal conflict took place not that long ago, much more recently than the one fought in the US.

And that’s what strikes me – how, in only three generations, such a short-lived, but bitter confrontation has been so completely healed over. Or so it seems. Living here now, in this land of civil tranquility and political consensus, it’s hard to imagine the killing spree that went on 95 years ago, while in America echoes of an even bloodier civil war still seem to reverberate.

To outside observers like myself, any real acrimony from that part of Finnish history has long since vanished. I do know someone whose grandfather and great-grandfather were interned together in the harsh prison camp on Suomenlinna for their leftist activities during the war (the elder one was among the 10% who did not survive the camp), and even whose father was unable to find work in the early 1950s due to the “sins” of his fathers. But for the present-day generation of Finns, such former hard feelings seem well and truly buried.

Maybe Finns are expert at sweeping things under the rug, even the killing of an average of  200 citizens a day at the hands of their compatriots. Or maybe they truly have moved on.

The conventional wisdom is that the threat of Soviet takeover in 1939 united the country, burying any lingering grievances from twenty years before. Perhaps this is why every year on Independence Day (Dec. 6^th) the classic WWII movie Tuntematon sotilas ("The Unknown Soldier") is shown on TV, rather than any cinematic depiction of the civil war that erupted at the dawn of independence itself.

Americans sometimes don’t seem as adept at getting over the past. In the last few years, the US Civil War has surfaced as a surprisingly live issue for debate, with some folks refusing to accept that the true cause for the war was the odious institution of slavery. Such blinding denial so long after the fact is amazing. I hope it’s just a fringe thing.

At the same time, US politics seems to be flashing back some 150 years as old North-South divisions are re-emerging and the states that made up the Old Confederacy are increasingly coalescing into a solid reactionary bloc, thanks to the Tea Party. For example, all of the former CSA states, except Arkansas, have strongly resisted key provisions of Obamacare.  

The word “secession” has even been branded about, and not just by angry, crackpot letter-writers (or bloggers), but actual state officials. Of course, this is not to say any of these trends should be taken too seriously I expect the Tea Party will run out of steam well before  the point of open insurrection.

Still, it does feel that the scars from American’s own domestic bloodbath are surprisingly tenderer even now than those from the horrible-enough violence that Finns inflicted on each almost a century ago.

  ¶

National Bargaining Chips

One of the notions that is drilled into the head of every American practically from birth is that the United States, of all the countries on Planet Earth, is uniquely “exceptional”.

This is such as a firmly anchored article of faith that to question it in the least is to risk almost branding yourself as anti-American.

During Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, (I forget which one, since he won twice), one of the many accusations that his opponents hurled at him was that he didn’t believe in “American exceptionalism”. This is a serious charge.

American exceptionalism ranks right up there with a belief in God when it comes to the standard litany of heart-felt convictions that all American politicians must profess, loudly and often, if they hope to attain any office higher than that of dogcatcher.

As you might guess, I don’t completely buy into American exceptionalism, at least in the sense that many conservatives like to think of it. But I do agree that the US is exceptional in other ways that Americans should be proud of. One is its multicultural society. Another is its National Park System.

Now, the fact that the US is blessed with an unusual abundance of natural spots of amazing scenic beauty is something no national leader can take credit for. It’s just a lucky feature of the North American landscape.

Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon were spectacular long before any forefather, who might have been inclined to bring forth a new nation on any continent, ever set foot in the New World. And these places will remain spectacular long after the last vestige of the “United States” has faded away.

It’s not just that the US has an outstanding wealth of natural wonders, or even that it’s the only country so blessed (I’m thinking of places like Switzerland and New Zealand here). What really makes America exceptional is how, thanks to visionary men like John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt, the nation decided to protect these wonders, making open to the public immense swaths of the best scenery America has to offer.

I’m grateful and proud that the US has a National Park System that, in many ways, has set the gold standard for safekeeping natural treasures.

Growing up in North Georgia as I did, a natural treasure that we often gravitated to was the chunk of wilderness that makes up the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. As a teenager, my buddies and I spent many days exploring some of the more remote corners of the Smokies on extended hiking trips that I still remember fondly.

Over the years, National Parks have often played a big part of our family vacations from Finland. We’ve taken our kids to various parks whenever we’ve traveled somewhere in the States. This past summer, we briefly visited Mojave National Preserve in California, Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, and the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona (my third time there).

We are not unique in that regard. Every year, there are some 280 million visits to some part of the National Park System, and this out of a nation of 314 million Americans, plus of course foreign tourists who flock to sites as varied, and iconic, as the Grand Tetons and the Statue of Liberty.

It’s little wonder then that, for many average Americans, the national parks are a very visible and familiar part of the federal government, the federal government that many of those same average Americans seem to otherwise detest and think they could live much better without.

On the Bright Angel Trail, Grand Canyon National Park, 2013.

When the federal government partially shut down on October 1st, thanks to some unwise negotiating tactics by Tea Party Republicans, one of the most immediate and visible impacts was the closing of all national parks, sadly bringing places set aside for nature and recreation to the front and center of a nasty political debate.

Some conservative pundits and politicians, openly giddy over the prospect of a federal shutdown, tried their best to downplay any negative fallout from the sudden disappearance of most government services (98 percent of NASA, for example). “What? The sky didn’t fall?”

But, the closing of the parks hit a nerve and has the real potential of reminding voters that there’s one part of the national government that they actually appreciate.

You would think that the disruption, or even ruin, of family vacations by the closure of parks would be enough to spark a backlash against those Republican politicians who, out of pique, so cavalierly caused this mess.

And maybe in some ways that’s the case. But in the eyes of some people, it has also somehow made the Park Service out to be the bad guy, the face of an arrogant and manipulative government.

Media images of WWII veterans being denied access to war memorials in Washington has been exploited by conservatives to fuel criticism of the Park Service and led to civil disobedience by conservative on the Mall this past weekend, presided over by the oh-so-ardent Tea Party celebrity Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz, the shadow leader of the GOP.

The closure of open-air monuments that don’t require entrance fees seems a bit over the top, even to me. It would be like the Finnish government putting barricades around the Sibelius monument (standing alone in a city park) due to austerity measures. Unless there are some arcade legal reasons behind such closures of open spaces that I’m not aware of, it doesn’t really make sense and plays into the hands of Republicans who are all too happy for any excuse to vilify Washington.

Despite the opportunities for schmaltzy photo ops within walking distance of the Capitol, the Republicans soon realized how closing popular parks can come back to bite them. Early into the shutdown, the GOP-dominated House scrabbled to partly backpedal by passing resolutions to fund only the Park Service (along with a few other shiny objects that gained media attention, like cancer treatment trials for children).

Magnificent view of Yosemite Valley.
Photo by Eeek.

The Senate wisely didn’t go along with the piece-meal approach to governing, so the parks remained closed.

Except, not entirely. Some parks have now reopened after five states, desperate to stem the loss of tourist dollars, agreed to provide the money to keep marquee parks operating. Arizona, the Grand Canyon State, has agreed to fork over state money, to the tune of $93,000 a day, to keep part of the Grand Canyon National Park open for a week. Utah is transferring $1.67 million to the US Treasury to reopen five parks in that state for ten days.

What is interesting is that these states, bastions of the Republican Party, are two of the 28 or so that typically receive more money from the national government than they pay in federal taxes. Or, to put it in the parlance of Ayn Rand, these are “moocher states”.

I hope that having to pay out of their own pocket for services normally funded by the taxpayers of more liberal states like California and New York provides an object lesson to the good people of Arizona:  sometimes it’s beneficial to be part of a larger union of diverse states.

I dearly hope Arizona and Utah are not reimbursed, so as to drive that lesson home.

However, some people may be taking away a different lesson. I’ve seen some Internet chatter from folks who, miffed at how shutting down the hated federal government has also shut down beloved parks, have jumped to the conclusion that maybe it’s time to devolve the national parks to the individual states and let them run places like Yosemite and Yellowstone.

On National Public Radio recently there was even someone from the libertarian Cato Institute suggesting that the national parks, to me a true treasure of public heritage, should all be privatized.

I hope all Americans would agree that this would be a bad idea, an exceptionally bad idea. ¶

Sweet, Sweet Irony

These days I spend a lot more time thinking or reading about politics in the US than I probably should, and certainly more than I used to. It’s become an obsession (benign, I hope) that was born when Barack Obama was elected president. No doubt, a few million Americans on either side of the political divide could say the same, so groundbreaking was Obama's election.

A Birther trying to make a point.
Photo: Bonzo McGrue

The obsession isn’t only due to my hopes and excitement over a Democrat and African-American winning the White House. It’s was intensified, in large part, by the ferocious backlash by many conservative Americans to Obama. If Republicans in the heartland had grudgingly accepted President Obama’s legitimacy, reined in their more obstructionist instincts, and allowed Washington to get down to business as usual, I suspect I would have become bored with politics as a spectator sport by now.

That didn’t happen, though. The total and strident opposition from the right, in the form of the Tea Party, turned the political scene into a slow-motion train wreck that I couldn’t turn away from.

I see the Tea Party as mostly older, mostly white, sometimes illogical folks lashing out over the fact that things aren’t what they used to be, that the US got hit with a gigantic financial crisis, and that – Heaven Forbid! – the Democrats won an election. (It has to be said that for some, though I hope not most, it is also all about the color of Barack Obama’s skin.)

As fanatical (or fanciful) as the Tea Party sometimes can be, there’s a subset that’s even fringier – the Birthers. These are the folks who believe (or pretend to believe) that Barack Obama is not eligible to be president because, as they claim, he was born in Kenya and therefore is not a “natural born” US citizen, as required by the Constitution.

I personally know many people back in Georgia who could be characterized as Tea Party supporters. I hope none of them is also a serious Birther.

For Birthers, it’s not enough that Obama is an American by right of being born to at least one American parent (in his case, his mother). In the astute legal opinion of your average Birther, laboring away over a keyboard in a doublewide somewhere in the wilds of West Virginia, Obama would also have to be born on US soil to be “natural born”. American soil!

Despite the fact that all evidence points to Obama being born in Hawaii barely three years after that state joined the Union, hard-core Birthers refuse to believe it.

For this reason, most Birthers seem delusional (meaning there really is something wrong with them), or else they are cynical pranksters trying to egg on those others who are delusion.

The worst offender, in my mind, is Donald Trump, who made the Birther issue the linchpin of his so-called presidential campaign. He supposedly went so far as to send a crack team of special investigators to Honolulu on a loudly publicized, but insubstantial, wild goose chase to uncover the “truth” behind Obama’s origins.

I’m sure Trump never really believed the Birther nonsense (he’s not that stupid), but he was happy to stoke the conspiracy flames for his own self-promotional, giving the movement a sheen (very oily sheen?) of respectability. Because of this, my opinion of the man went from him being mildly ridiculous and obnoxious to being outright despicable.

(Ask my wife how I feel about Trump. She has seen me practically leap over the sofa trying to find the off switch on the remote whenever his face appears on TV. Following the Birther business, I cannot stand the sight of the man.)

Most Birthers, however, are true believers convinced that Americans born on foreign soil (and, for them, that means Obama) cannot rightfully be president. So, imagine my glee when, a few weeks ago, there was an unexpected turn of events in the Birther saga. And it came from deep in the heart of Tea Party country.

A rising star in the Republican Party is Ted Cruz, the junior senator from Texas and a conservative with impeccable Tea Party credentials. 

Cruz is smart. He graduated Harvard Law School – just like Barack Obama. And he’s ambitious. There’s already talk of him running for president in 2016, even though he’s only a one-term Senator – just like Barack Obama. He has an American mother and non-US father – just like Barack Obama. And he was born on foreign soil – just like Barack, wait, no, not like Barack Obama.

Unlike Obama, Cruz is the real deal. He actually was born abroad, in Canada, a fact that people only seemed to realize recently, after months of him generating White House buzz among the Tea Party faithful. Mon Dieu! To quote an old Cheech and Chong routine: “You are Canadien, not you are?”

I love this. A charismatic conservative firebrand, the answer to the presidential dreams of Tea Partiers (and presumably Birthers), has the exact background that Birthers claim disqualifies the current, much despised Commander in Chief.

The good news (for Cruz) is that it seems most experts who don’t live in the fantasy world of Birtherism agree that being born in Calgary doesn’t make Cruz any less presidential material.

That would also be good news for my children, born American on the foreign soil of Finland, if they ever aspired to run for the highest office in the land, as long as they fulfill another constitutional requirement of living in the States for at least 14 years. In any case, becoming POTUS is nothing I would wish on any of my loved ones.

The bad news (for Birthers) is that the eligibility of foreign-born Cruz leaves them with a dilemma.

They have to either drop him faster than a disgraced Rick Perry or Herman Cain, or be forced to admit that they were wrong. They would have to face the fact that the singular "issue" that has outraged them over the past five years, the issue that they have worked themselves into a tizzy over, harped on, protested against, flooded the Internet with ALL CAP diatribes about, and even took Donald Trump seriously over, was, in fact, from the very beginning simply bogus.

Or they could bend logic and decide, as a supporter quoted on TV did, that “Canada’s not really foreign soil”. Either way, I am enjoying the irony of it all. ¶

Aftermath

Saturday morning brought the news that Barack Obama had won a majority of votes in the state of Florida. That might be the very definition of “anti-climatic”, coming as it does five days after Election Day. Still, for Obama supporters such as myself, it’s gratifying news. Icing on the cake, you might say. An important swing state swung again for Obama.

In an election season filled with drama (or maybe more melodrama), the end itself couldn’t have been more theatrical. The Democrats didn’t just win, they won big. And the reaction from the opposition party was riveting, entertaining and sometimes even tragicomic.

With the tally from Florida finally completed, Obama won 332 electoral votes (62%), well beyond the 270 he needed to win. Speculation until the last minute was that - while Obama would win the Electoral College easily - he would lose the popular vote. He came out ahead there, too, beating Romney by almost three percentage points (50.5% to 47.9%).

In Georgia, naturally, it was a different story. It was Romney who won big in the Peach State (53%-45%), and really big in my home county (81%-18%). My vote was only one of the fewer than two thousand cast locally for Obama.

While the popular vote nationally might have been fairly close, the electoral vote was decisive. Or, in the nuanced, dispassionate terms probably favored by some Democrats, it was an “ass-whooping”.

You can forgive some Obama supporters for a little “ball-spiking”. (I tried my best to restrain myself.) Obama won by a landslide, if you go by the criteria of infamous GOP operative Dick Morris, who had predicted a 325-213 “landslide” for Romney. Not only did the Democrats win the presidency again, they wrecked any Republican hopes of regaining the Senate by defeating 23 GOP candidates and strengthening their control of the Senate by two seats. Tea Party favorites Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock were beaten handedly, presumably paying for their sins of gross rape insensitivity.

The sweetest victory was Elizabeth Warren’s in Massachusetts. When Warren, a strong advocate for consumer protection, was denied by the GOP the chance to run the new government agency set up for that purpose, she decided to run for Senate instead. Now, with Warren able to weld the much more imposing power of a US Senator, Republicans might wish they had allowed her to take up the job of a mere bureaucrat.

Besides Warren, eleven other women won their own Senate races (including one Republican), bringing the number of women in the Senate to an all-time record high of twenty, a fact that by itself speaks volumes about the shortage of women in Congress.

On the other side of the Capitol, the Dems won a net gain of eight seats in the House, though this does nothing to change the balance of power in that body. To be honest, the overall balance of power will be practically unchanged in Washington. Despite a welcome re-election, Obama still faces a tough next four years.

That prospect certainly didn’t dampen the ball spiking and waves upon waves of Schadenfreude washing over some rejoicing Democrats. A Tumblr site somewhat snarkily called “White People Mourning Romney” features pages of photos showing GOP supporters on election night looking absolutely glum, downcast, dispirited, weepy, sad, and simply shocked, dumbfounded by the reality that, against all their Heavenly ordained expectations, Romney did not win.

I admit, part of me felt a bit of glee looking at these images - after all, these are doubtless some of the same folks who have been relentlessly vilifying Obama since 2008, often in the worst possible way.

On the other hand, I do feel for them. The people in these photos are having a very bad day. It hurts to lose, and especially to lose badly when any outcome other than winning was simply inconceivable. Not all of them were Tea Party fanatics, and some had probably honestly been voting for Romney and his policies (as misguided and dishonest as they were) and not simply against Obama, or worse against a black man.  

It is a bit unseemly to ridicule such ordinary Romney supporters just because they were shell-shocked by Romney's utter defeat, even if they should have known better. Public opinion polls had been clearly showing Obama likely to win (the New York Time’s sage of statistics, Nate Silver, was giving Obama a more than 90% chance of re-election). But Romney’s supporters, like his campaign itself, dismissed those polls as “skewed”, and preferred the rosier predictions of their own polls.  Reality was a freight train they never saw coming.

While it’s one thing to ridicule some people’s simple heartfelt disappointment over the election, it's fair game to poke fun at the hyperbolic and comical reactions of some other really sore losers. (The hubris of Romney’s hapless campaign, however, and the GOP pundits (read: Karl Rove) who cheered it on deserves nothing but ridicule. Pile it on!)

The prospect of four more years under a Democratic president has provoked reactions that border on the silly and insane. A few widely publicized tweets show just how far around the bend some people have gone:

“A thousand years of darkness begins tonight.”

“I’m moving to Australia, because their president is a Christian and actually supports what he says.” 

(I assume that before this person, a Georgian by the way, actually went as far as booking her flight to Sydney she was told that Australia has a prime minister, not a president, that “he” is a “she”, and that she is well-known for being an atheist. Hope so. The tweeter was a teenager anyway, so maybe we should cut her some slack.)

The most jaw-dropping tweeting came from some the nation's most celebrated (and irrelevant) drama queens.

All-purpose clown Donald Trump: “He lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!” (He later deleted this tweet.)

“Saturday Night Live” has-been Victoria Jackson: “America died.” and “Thanks a lot Christians, for not showing up. You disgust me.”

Disturbed guitar player Ted Nugent: “Pimps whores & welfare brats & their soulless supporters hav [sic] a president to destroy America”

Plus, you had Glen Beck urging his viewers to start accumulating farmland and ammunition for, well I guess, for surviving the“thousand years of darkness” that’s coming.

Or maybe the ammo's for something else. In some 30 states, petitions are underway for secession from the United States. Secession! Seriously, how many people can there really be who’ve been inflamed by anti-Obama whining to the point of rebellion? In Georgia, that would be the 25,000 people who've signed one such petition so far.

All this because a Democrat was re-elected to the presidency? Even a president who instituted a so-called “socialized” health care program? I have to say, such dramatic overreaction, even if it’s only rhetorical, really is stupid, if not a little frightening.

Some folks, apparently so aggrieved that Romney will now not have the chance to repeal government-run “Obamacare” have threaten to leave the country and move to that Ayn Rand paradise to the north we call Canada. I wonder what kind of health care system they have up there. I hear it’s good.

At least those hordes of Republicans forever disillusioned with America are not planning to  escape to Finland. As far as I know. 

Notice posted by a Tea Party group with a flare for the melodramatic.

The Biblical Arizona

A few weeks ago, the governor of Arizona Jan Brewer signed into law a bill that seems to attempt an end-run around the separation of church and state. Though Arizona prohibits the teaching of any religion in public schools, this new law, crafted by Tea Party champion Terri Proud, now makes an exception in the case of the Christian Bible. The law allows high schools to offer an elective course on “The Bible and its Influence on Western Culture”.

"Defender" of the Faith, Jan Brewer.
Photo by Gage Skidmore

The law was prompted by a fear among some conservatives that Christianity is losing its grip in American life, and is apparently similar to laws already on the books in five other states, including my native Georgia. To explain the rationale behind the law, Terri Proud was cited as saying that Arizona students will be missing out if they aren’t aware of the Biblical roots of such expressions as “an eye for an eye” or “on the road to Damascus.”

To counter this unhappy prospect, the Arizona law would require classes on the Bible to cover the “characters, poetry and narratives that are prerequisites to understanding society and culture, including literature, art, music, mores, oratory and public policy”, as well as the “influence of the Old and New Testament on laws, history, government, literature, art, music, customs, morals, values and culture.”  Whew.

Sounds kind of redundant to me, and unnecessary.

First of all, the idea that Christianity is rapidly fading away in America, perhaps the most religion-obsessed advanced country in the world, seems completely ridiculous. There are hundreds of thousands of places where children can learn about the Bible. They are called churches. And they don’t seem to lack for business.

Georgia, the first state to implement Arizona-style Bible courses in public schools five years ago, is already scaling back the classes due to low levels of interest. In the beginning, the classes were offered in 48 of Georgia’s 180 school districts, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. This year, that number has fallen to only 16 school districts. Obviously, there’s no huge pent-up demand out there for scripture studies that’s not already being met in, say, Sunday School.

Second of all, I would love to sit in on a course like the one Rep. Proud is promoting. I’ve got nothing against exploring the influence of the Bible, objectively that is. I wouldn’t say such studies would be very useful for "understanding society", but there’s no harm in knowing that da Vinci’s “Last Supper” was inspired by, wait for it, the Last Supper. Or, as a less obvious example, knowing that when Bob Dylan sings “in a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes” he’s talking about Calvary. It won’t help you get a job, but it might come in handy in a game of Trivial Pursuit.

What bothers me, however, is the notion that the Bible is, or needs to be, at the center of American life. It’s a fevered dream that certain conservatives like to force on the public.

Biblical themes, of course, are found throughout the arts (the Pope, after all, didn’t pay Michelangelo to cover the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with scenes from Aesop’s Fables). And you can’t argue that the Bible, or at least Christianity, didn’t forever deflect the course of human history.

St. Paul on road to Damascus in a
15th-century French illumination. 

But when it comes to American government and law, I suspect the Holy Book doesn’t have nearly as much real impact as Rep. Proud would like to think.

Where in the Bible do you find anything about representative democracy? Freedom of speech? Trial by jury? If the Old Testament has been such an influence on our laws and government, why aren’t the Ten Commandments woven into the US legal system? Why isn’t coveting your neighbor’s wife and/or house a punishable offense in any US state? Where are the federal laws against taking God’s name in vain?

Let’s take Rep. Proud’s examples of phrases kids should know in order to better participate in American society. I’ve never seen “on the road to Damascus” used outside the context of St. Paul’s conversion, so it’s not as if it’s going to pop up in some office e-mail, leaving you wondering what the hell your boss is talking about. It’s more useful to know the meaning of such antique phrases as “the die is cast”, though you would typically run across this only in e-mails from your most melodramatic colleagues.

Also, it’s fine knowing the origin of “an eye for an eye”, but what does that have to do with modern American life? It may be a principle of jurisprudence in Saudi Arabia, but definitely doesn’t belong in the US.

Perhaps bringing to light such a point would make a high school Bible class worthwhile after all. An Arizona sophomore might learn that Jesus’ view of “an eye for an eye” was:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’. But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” (Matthew 5:38-39)

An excellent start, if there ever was one, for a classroom discussion on whether there really should be a greater role for the Bible in American public life. Just think, what if George Bush had followed Biblical principles in response to what happen on Sept. 11, 2001, and actually had turned the other cheek to al-Qaeda? Some of those righteous folks in Arizona would surely have wanted to crucify him. Literally.  

Man of War Romney

I’m struck by the kind of small coincidences (and by “small” I mean trivial) that you run across every once and a while. This past week, while two US states and the District of Columbia were holding Republican primaries on Tuesday, I was making slow progress reading Chapter Eight of “The Glorious Cause”, a classic tome on the American Revolution by Robert Middlekauff. (“Tome” is exactly the right word – you could stop a freight train with this massive book.) 

As voters in Wisconsin, Maryland and DC were giving Mitt Romney a clean sweep in the polls, essentially guaranteeing him the Republican nomination and proving that in the end the GOP would not be jumping down the rabbit hole dug for them by the Tea Party, I was reading about the events in Boston in May 1768.

At that time, almost 250 springs ago, the British subjects in North America were in an uproar over taxation (sound familiar?), in particular the recent attempts by Parliament to make them pay duties on some items they had to import from Britain, such as paper, paint, glass and, not least of all, tea. To help enforce these extremely unpopular measures, the Royal Navy sent to Massachusetts a 50-gun man-of-war, HMS Romney. Her presence in Boston Harbor was not appreciated, and soon after arriving, the Romney sparked further outrage by commandeering a ship belonging to the richest man in America.

John Hancock, best known to modern Americans because his name is synonymous with a person's signature, was an extremely wealthy businessman, not unlike future Bostonian Mitt Romney (the man, not the man-of-war). Hancock also may, or may not, have engaged in a practice used by many of his fellow merchants to avoid paying duties, namely smuggling. 

A month before the Romney (the ship) dropped anchor in Boston Harbor, one of John Hancock’s sloops arrived from across the Atlantic with a cargo of Madeira wine. Royal customs officials suspected that Hancock had slipped most of the cargo off the boat without declaring it and paying the required duty. With the arrival of the Romney, they now had the muscle to act on their suspicions. The officials ordered the man-of-war to seize Hancock’s sloop – which was fittingly named Liberty. A riot, as they say, ensued, with the tax officials beaten bloody, but escaping with their lives. One more step on the path to revolution. 

If you are a Tea Party supporter (circa 2012) who, after this week’s primaries, is feeling some resentment over your movement being hijacked by an establish Republican like Mitt Romney, you might see a cruel metaphor in the fact that, back in the original Tea Party era, a ship called Liberty was confiscated by one named Romney. Me, I just find it all an ironic coincidence.  

"The Lost of the Romney", depicting the ship's demise after running aground in 1804.