**
GOING TO AMERICA
But is it art? — that which survives —
this Fabergé egg pearled with spilled
lilies-of-the-valley, crowned
with an oval portrait of the Tzar
and two of his babes —
the Tzar of All Russias behung
with crosses, medals, ribbons,
smiling the smile
not of a Tzar, but of a man
who knows he is handsome.
Meanwhile Dostoyevski’s mind
meanders through the yellow-gray
St. Petersburg mud, drunks lying face down
on dirty wooden sidewalks.
And Svidrigailov, unhandsome, unloved,
who can’t even commit suicide
like a decent person, alone in a room,
but roams at dawn until he meets
a guard, a Jew, the sorrow of all
Jewish faces graven in his face.
“Good day, my friend,” Svidrigailov
greets the guard, who replies,
“This is not the place” —
But Svidrigailov, unbearably human,
needs someone, a stranger, a Jew,
to whom to say goodbye:
“Good-bye, my friend! I’m going
to America” — and pulls the trigger.
*
Which will remain immortal?
The Fabergé egg with the smiling
portraits of the doomed,
or that scene, my friend, my friend,
in Crime and Punishment —
How keenly we can feel
another’s brokenness; how hard
we try to warn, “This is not the place” —
but he, deaf from being unloved,
blind from being unhandsome,
can’t see us waving to him across
the Neva and chooses to go to
America, or a paradise with seventy-two
virgins, none of them named Dunya,
none able to say No, which alone
makes a woman terrible and divine.
~ Oriana
It’s interesting to see how even with my own poems, different passages stand out at different times. This time I was struck by the bad-guy Svidrigailov’s need to say good-bye to someone, any human, before he kills himself. Only now it reminded me of a dream I had very long ago: I’d resolved to commit suicide, but first felt a need to walk around a college campus, saying good-bye to strangers.
THE ENIGMA OF VERA NABOKOV
~ “The more you leave me out,” Véra Nabokov told Brian Boyd while he was researching his two-volume biography of her husband, Vladimir Nabokov, “the closer to the truth you’ll be.” Not that biographers could be trusted to follow her dictum: Véra destroyed all her letters to her husband; she blacked out her contributions to joint postcards to Vladimir’s mother. In Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), Stacey Schiff characterizes this destruction a question of “merit”: “His words, even his private ones, had a value for posterity. She felt strongly that hers did not.”
But when Schiff describes Véra’s reaction to Vladimir’s 1937 affair with Irina Guadanini—not his only infidelity, but the only one that threatened his marriage—another reason surfaces. “Until confronted with the fact that her husband’s 1937 letters to Irina had survived,” Schiff writes, “she was ready to deny that any such affair had taken place.” Schiff also remarks on Véra’s contributions to a published collection of Vladmir’s correspondence. The four letters Véra asked the volume’s editors to use were “adoring”; they had also been sent while Vladimir was courting Irina. It was, Schiff writes, “a bold, unblinking strike on all other versions of their story.”
In the pantheon of literary marriages, Véra Slonim’s to Vladimir Nabokov is remarkable for the consistency of its mutual devotion: his to her; her to his work. The Nabokovs were married for 52 years, and Boyd writes that “they seemed like young lovers even in their sixties and seventies.” No less astounding is the fact that, until 1968—that is, until Véra was 66 years old—Vladimir did not employ a regular secretary, leaving to his wife the bulk of the typing: not only his novels (which needed to be copied out in triplicate), but his correspondence—and this is to say nothing of the miles she drove, the contracts she negotiated, the meals she prepared.
In 1946, when Vladimir was suffering the stultifying effects of instructing undergraduates in “rudimentary [Russian] grammar” at Wellesley, Véra convinced her husband to propose a Russian Literature class he was eager to teach but unenthusiastic about prepping by “promising to write the lectures herself.”
At Cornell, when Vladimir caught a bug that triggered “an excoriating attack of intercostal neuralgia,” Véra took over his classes, even though she had bronchitis. When she wasn’t lecturing to the class, she was quietly ensuring it ran smoothly, “handing out papers, writing words and phrases on the blackboard.” To his students, Vladimir referred to his wife as “my assistant,” so that at least one Cornell undergraduate, later asked to identify her, averred, “That wasn’t his wife, that was his mother.” In 1967, when Véra traveled alone from their home in Montreux, Switzerland, to New York, Vladimir’s sister was summoned from Geneva to, among other things, make his morning coffee. “He simply did not even know,” Boyd notes, “how to make the coffee he drank every day.”
In the first volume of his biography, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, Boyd lists the roles Véra assumed for her husband: “wife, muse, and ideal reader; his secretary, typist, editor, proof-reader, translator, and bibliographer; his agent, business manager, legal counsel, and chauffeur; his research assistant, teaching assistant, and professorial understudy.” Schiff puts it slightly differently: “From the list of things Nabokov bragged about never having learned to do—type, drive, speak German, retrieve a lost object, fold an umbrella, answer the phone, cut a book’s pages, give the time of day to a philistine—it is easy to deduce what Véra was to spend her life doing.” Jenny Offill’s narrator in Dept. of Spectulation states the case more succinctly. “Art monsters,” she explains, “only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him.”
Véra Nabokov’s hair began to gray, by her own account, when she was 25. “By her mid-forties,” Schiff writes, “the opalescent bob [had] paled to a radiant white.” At Cornell, she cut a fierce figure—“many,” Boyd reports, “reported that they had never seen a more beautiful older woman”—in sharp contrast with the apparent subservience of her role in the classroom, the car, the home. Boyd, in his introduction to Letters to Véra, the collection of Vladmir’s correspondence with his wife he edited, makes clear that this apparent subservience was, intentionally or not, a façade. “She dedicated herself to serve Nabokov,” he writes of Véra, “but on her own terms.”
Véra, after all, was the one who approached Vladmir in 1923, at a charity ball, wooing him with recitations of his published poetry. When they lived Berlin she carried, he notes, a gun, and “drove like a man.” She was, he writes, “steely,” and it was around her “steely support” that Vladimir “built his life.”
Around her steely support—her ability to negotiate favorable publishing contracts; the fear she seemed to instantly instill in anyone foolish enough to criticize her husband in her presence — but atop her more quotidian buttresses as well. Taking dictation from Vladimir and driving him from coast to coast while he wrote in the backseat; keeping house for him and doing research for him and writing drafts of his lectures; in these ways she ensured that he, in Schiff’s words, “existed not in time, only in art.” ~
https://lithub.com/the-enduring-enigma-of-vera-nabokov/
Oriana:
These accounts remind me of Cyril in “The Phantom Thread” — the art-monster fashion-designer’s sister and his capable iron-lady business manager. Cyril is not a victim — she enjoys a sense of purpose and fulfillment. She makes her brother’s top-of-the-field career possible, and she knows it. She wields real power.
Cyril in Phantom Thread (Leslie Manville)Are women who live entirely for the man in their lives victims, prisoners — or powerful queens? Perhaps it’s both, wonderfully summarized by Transtromer:
I know the depth where one is both
prisoner and ruler, like Persephone.
Vera was certainly no doormat. A child of privilege — she grew up in a rich Jewish family and was raised to be “perfect” — she had her queenliness. ~ Véra’s character, Vladimir told her, was made of “tiny sharp arrows.” ~ (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/16/silent-partner-books-judith-thurman)
Vera knew that Nabokov could not be a writer — or even a college professor — without her. He might not be entirely faithful, but he’d never leave her. She stood by him during his lean years, took over his classes at Cornell when he was ill, typed, translated, took care of all the practical arrangements — and eventually got to lead a life of elegant luxury in Switzerland. She did not have public acknowledgement of her editorial and other essential contributions, but apparently did not crave personal fame. She was the archetypal “woman behind the man,” and apparently content in her role.
Does it ever happen the other way, i.e. the husband devotes himself to his wife’s creative career? Yes, of course, though after we mention Leonard Woolf’s selfless care of Virginia, we are likely to fall silent, groping for other examples.
But when it comes to minor writers or visual artists, sure, there are plenty of supportive husbands — perhaps not as many as there are devoted, supportive wives, but a sufficient number so that feminist laments seem unwarranted. And let’s not forget paid assistants, some of whom work beyond the call of duty and find their fulfillment in that.
One way or another, these helpers should not be forgotten figures. Let’s be more aware of their great contribution. Let’s remember that there would be no Lolita without Vera Nabokov — who, besides typing, editing, translating, and conducting all the business correspondence, not to mention taking care of practical daily life and putting up with an “art monster”, is said to have actually saved the manuscript from the flames, apparently more than once.
*
~ “The right-wingers are doing what psychologist Otto Rank called “partializing,” making their little something everything. It’s telling that the right choose to call being anti-abortion being pro-life as though protecting fertilized eggs is all it takes to protect life.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
**
Oriana:
Labyrinth design on garment; portrait of a man Bartolomeo Veneto, early 1500**
ONLY ONE WAY TO UNDERSTAND ANOTHER PERSON’S FEELINGS AND PREFERENCES
~ “We assume that another person thinks or feels about things as we do, when in fact they often do not. So we often use our own perspective to understand other people, but our perspective is often very different from the other person’s perspective.” This “egocentric bias” leads to inaccurate predictions about other people’s feelings and preferences. When we imagine how a friend feels after getting fired, or how they’ll react to an off-color joke or political position, we’re really just thinking of how we would feel in their situation, according to the study.
In 15 computer-based experiments, each with a minimum of 30 participants, the psychologists asked subjects to guess people’s emotions based on an image, their posture, or a facial expression, for example. Some subjects were instructed to “consult their own feelings,” while others were given no instructions, and some were told to “think hard” or mimic the expressions to better understand. People told to rely on their own feelings as a guide most often provided inaccurate responses. They were unable to guess the correct emotion being displayed.
The second set of experiments asked subjects to make predictions about the feelings of strangers, friends, and partners. (Strangers interacted briefly to get to know one another before hazarding guesses about the preferences of they had just person they met.) The researchers wanted to see if people who had some meaningful information about each other—like spouses—could make accurate judgments about the other’s reactions to jokes, opinions, videos, and more. It turned out that neither spouses nor strangers nor friends tended to make accurate judgments when “taking another’s perspective.”
“Our experiments found no evidence that the cognitive effort of imagining oneself in another person’s shoes, studied so widely in the psychological literature, increases a person’s ability to accurately understand another’s mind,” the researchers write. “If anything, perspective taking decreased accuracy overall while occasionally increasing confidence in judgment.” Basically, imagining another person’s perspective may give us the impression that we’re making more accurate judgments. But it doesn’t actually improve our ability to judge how another person thinks or feels.
There were no gender differences in the results. Across the board, men and women tended not to guess another’s perspective very accurately when putting themselves in the other’s position. But this did increase self-confidence in the accuracy of their predictions—even when their insights were off.
The good news, however, is that researchers found a simple, concrete way we can all confidently and correctly improve the accuracy of our insights into others’ lives. When people are given a chance to talk to the other person about their opinions before making predictions about them—Eyal calls this “perspective getting” as opposed to perspective taking—they are much more accurate in predicting how others might feel than those instructed to take another’s perspective or given no instructions.
In the final test, researchers asked subjects both to try putting themselves in another’s shoes, on the one hand, and to talk directly with test partners about their positions on a given topic. The final experiment confirmed that getting another person’s perspective directly, through conversation, increased the accuracy of subjects’ predictions, while simply “taking” another’s perspective did not. This was true for partners, friends, and strangers alike.
“Increasing interpersonal accuracy seems to require gaining new information rather than utilizing existing knowledge about another person,” the study concludes. “Understanding the mind of another person,” as the researchers put it, is only possible when we actually probe them about what they think, rather than assuming we already know.
The psychologists believe their study has applications in legal mediation, diplomacy, psychology, and our everyday lives. Whether we’re negotiating at a conference table, fighting with a spouse, or debating the political motivations of voters, we simply can’t rely on intuition for insight, according to Eyal. Only listening will do the trick.
“Perspective getting allows gaining new information rather than utilizing existing, sometimes biased, information about another person,” Eyal explains to Quartz. “In order to understand what your spouse prefers—don’t try to guess, ask.” ~
https://qz.com/1319441/theres-only-one-way-to-truly-understand-another-persons-mind/
**
A casual stroll through a lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
A striking collage — even if I myself could not say Yes to even one return of my life in every detail. With some revision, yes. With a lot of revision, in fact.
*
IS TRUMP MOST LIKE PRESIDENT MILLARD FILLMORE?
~ “Millard Fillmore is one of the most obscure US presidents, but there is plenty about him that may seem uncannily familiar.
Asylum seekers and economic migrants are flocking to the United States.
Xenophobes warn these foreigners will fuel crime, drive down wages and destroy the nation.
As nativism spreads like a prairie fire, an anti-immigrant president from New York rises to power. He has a proclivity for conspiracy theories and appoints his daughter to a key White House role.
But the year isn't 2016.
It's 1850.
It's not Donald Trump.
It's Millard Fillmore, whose sheer anonymity has made him an in-joke among presidential history fans.
Instead of Muslim or Central American refugees, it's Germans and Irish Catholics.
Mr Trump prefers to liken himself to Andrew Jackson, the seventh US president.
And there are similarities between the two.
Both were populist outsiders who were dismissed as unfit to govern by an out-of-touch Washington elite.
However, Jackson was a Democrat and a war hero who defeated the British at the Battle of New Orleans.
It's difficult to imagine Old Hickory, as he was known, excusing himself from military duty on the grounds that he could not march long distances, as Mr Trump did during the Vietnam War, citing bone spurs.
The parallels between the 45th president and the 13th — unlucky for some — are arguably more compelling.
Fillmore launched his career in the 1820s with the Anti-Masonic Party, hawking a paranoid rumor that ruling Freemasons were murdering whistleblowers.
Mr Trump paved the way for his White House bid by peddling a conspiracy theory, too — that President Barack Obama was not a US citizen.
Fillmore later joined the Whig Party at a time of mounting hostility to refugees from famine, rebellion and tyranny who were arriving by the shipload at the gates of the New World.
Democrats embraced these predominantly Catholic huddled masses as a new voting bloc.
But as his biographer Robert Rayback writes, Fillmore shared the fear of some other top Whigs that the incoming papist hordes would plot to subvert America's sovereignty.
When Millard lost his race for New York governor in 1844, he blamed "foreign Catholics".
Immigrant voters were "corrupting the ballot box - that great palladium of our liberty - into an unmeaning mockery", he fumed.
Compare this with Mr Trump's unfounded claim that millions of illegal immigrants cast votes in the last White House election.
There's also a familiar ring to Fillmore's gripe about American jobs being taken by "men of foreign birth to the exclusion of the native born".
Millard became vice-president to Zachary Taylor in 1849 and, following Old Rough and Ready's untimely demise a year later, an accidental president.
Fillmore biographer Paul Finkelman, who is president of Gratz College in Greater Philadelphia, says: "When Fillmore comes into office, the first thing he does is to literally fire his whole cabinet.
"Donald Trump has had more cabinet turnover than any other president probably since Millard Fillmore.
"The Fillmore administration was in constant turmoil because you didn't know who was running things from one day to the next, and that's precisely the same situation with Trump. It's government by chaos."
Millard's daughter, Abby, became White House hostess, a position as high-profile as Ivanka Trump's. First Lady Abigail Fillmore was an introvert who largely shunned social functions — not dissimilar to Melania Trump.
This president's undoing was his support for the Compromise of 1850, a pact between slave states and free states that was a signpost to the US Civil War. His stance on the toxic debate angered African-Americans.
Dr Finkelman's biography notes that one Ohio preacher said: “Would not the devil do well to rent out hell and move to the United States and rival if possible, President Fillmore and his political followers?”
In a humiliating snub, Fillmore was denied his party's nomination in 1852. He quit the Whigs to lead the virulently anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic American Party.
Dubbed the Know Nothings, they openly fomented ethnic and racial bigotry, culminating in 1855 with Bloody Monday, when Protestant mobs attacked German and Irish neighborhoods in Louisville, Kentucky, leaving at least 22 people dead.
At the elections a year later, the American Party carried just one state: Maryland — ironic, considering it had been founded as a sanctuary colony for English Catholics.
Politically, Fillmore was no more.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44688337
President Millard Fillmore, . apostle of ethnic bigotry. It's easy to imagine him marching with the Neo-Nazis, chanting "We will not be replaced." Oriana:
Possibly Fillmore was just as revolting as a human being, but one big difference is that the US wasn't yet a world power so not as much was at stake. The fate of humanity in no way depended on Pres. Fillmore. He’s forgotten now, and the stain he left on the presidency has faded with time. We may not be so lucky with the current incumbent.
**
Given all the talk about alpha males in relation to the presidency, in the animal world alpha males don’t lead by creating chaos.
~ “The main characteristic of an alpha male wolf,” Rick says, “is a quiet confidence, quiet self-assurance. You know what you want to do; you know what’s best for the pack. You’re very comfortable with that. You have a calming effect. Point is, alpha males are surprisingly nonaggressive, because they don’t need to be.” ~ Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel
THE MYTH OF THE NOBLE SOUTHERN “LOST CAUSE”
~ "The Confederate vice-president, Alexander H. Stephens, had said in a speech at Savannah on March 21, 1861, that slavery was “the immediate cause of the late rupture and the present revolution” of Southern independence. The United States, said Stephens, had been founded in 1776 on the false idea that all men are created equal. The Confederacy, by contrast,
is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based on this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
Unlike Lincoln, Davis and Stephens survived the war to write their memoirs. By then, slavery was gone with the wind. To salvage as much honor and respectability as they could from their lost cause, they set to work to purge it of any association with the now dead and discredited institution of human bondage. In their postwar views, both Davis and Stephens hewed to the same line: Southern states had seceded not to protect slavery, but to vindicate state sovereignty. This theme became the virgin birth theory of secession: the Confederacy was conceived not by any worldly cause, but by divine principle.
The South, Davis insisted, fought solely for “the inalienable right of a people to change their government…to withdraw from a Union into which they had, as sovereign communities, voluntarily entered.” The “existence of African servitude,” he maintained, “was in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident.”
Davis and Stephens set the tone for the Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War during the next century and more: slavery was merely an incident; the real origin of the war that killed more than 620,000 people was a difference of opinion about the Constitution. Thus the Civil War was not a war to preserve the nation and, ultimately, to abolish slavery, but instead a war of Northern aggression against Southern constitutional rights. The superb anthology of essays, The Myth of the Lost Cause, edited by Gary Gallagher and Alan Nolan, explores all aspects of this myth. The editors intend the word “myth” to be understood not as “falsehood” but in its anthropological meaning: the collective memory of a people about their past, which sustains a belief system shaping their view of the world in which they live.
The Lost Cause myth helped Southern whites deal with the shattering reality of catastrophic defeat and impoverishment in a war they had been sure they would win. Southerners emerged from the war subdued but unrepentant; they had lost all save honor, and their unsullied honor became the foundation of the myth. Having outfought the enemy, they were eventually ground down by “overwhelming numbers and resources,” as Robert E. Lee told his grieving soldiers at Appomattox. This theme was echoed down the years in Southern memoirs, at reunions of Confederate veterans, and by heritage groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. “Genius and valor went down before brute force,” declared a Georgia veteran in 1890. The Confederacy “had surrendered but was never whipped.” Robert E. Lee was the war’s foremost general, indeed the greatest commander in American history, while Ulysses S. Grant was a mere bludgeoner whose army overcame his more skilled and courageous enemy only because of those overwhelming numbers and resources.
The theme of liberty, not slavery, as the cause for which the South fought became a mantra in the writings of old Confederates and has been taken up by neo-Confederates in our own time. The Confederacy contended for “Freedom’s cause,” a veteran told his comrades at an 1887 reunion, “a struggle for constitutional rights against aggression, oppression and wrong.” Other speakers at the same convention said they had “fought for the right of local self government,” for “the idea that liberty in a government like ours is best preserved by restraining central power and giving to the states…all the rights which are not distinctly and absolutely conferred upon the central power.”
These arguments remain alive. On a visit to a Confederate cemetery before she became President Bush’s secretary of the interior, Gale Norton expressed regret that with the Confederate defeat “we lost too much. We lost the idea that the states were to stand against the federal government gaining too much power over our lives.” Senator John Ashcroft, now attorney general, told the neo-Confederate magazine Southern Partisan that “traditionalists must do more” to defend the Southern heritage.
Any such compromise in 1861, of course, would have left slavery in place and would have reinforced the right of slave owners to take their property into the territories. But revisionists considered slavery unimportant; as Craven once stated, the institution of bondage “played a rather minor part in the life of the South and the Negro.” Slavery would have died peacefully of natural causes in another generation or two had not fanatics forced the issue to armed conflict. Republicans who harped on the evils of slavery and expressed a determination to rein in what they called “the Slave Power” goaded the South into a defensive response that finally caused Southern states to secede to get free of the incessant pressure of these self-righteous Yankee zealots. Revisionism thus tended to portray Southern whites as victims reacting to Northern attacks; it was truly a war of Northern aggression.
Since the 1950s most professional historians have come to agree with Lincoln’s assertion that slavery “was, somehow, the cause of the war.” Outside the universities, however, Lost Cause denial is still popular, especially among Southern heritage groups that insist the Confederate flag stands not for slavery but for a legacy of courage and honor in defense of principle. When Ken Burns’s PBS documentary on the Civil War portrayed slavery as the root cause of the conflict, the reaction among many Southern whites was hostile. “The cause of the war was secession,” declared a spokesman for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, “and the cause of secession could have been any number of things. This overemphasis on the slavery issue really rankles us.”Another Southerner, whose ancestor served in the 27th South Carolina Volunteer Infantry, insists that slavery was “only one issue among many that lead [sic] to secession,” and a minor one at that. Of equal or greater importance was the commitment of Confederate Southerners to “states rights, agrarianism,…aristocracy, and habits of mind including individualism, personalism toward God and man, provincialism, and romanticism.”
As Gary Gallagher notes in his introduction to The Myth of the Lost Cause, “White Southerners emerged from the Civil War thoroughly beaten but largely unrepentant.” Some proponents of the Lost Cause remained candid about the racial ideology that sustained the Confederacy. The unrepentant Edward Pollard, wartime editor of the Richmond Examiner, wrote the first history of the Confederacy, with the appropriate title The Lost Cause. The war had ended slavery, Pollard acknowledged, but it “did not decide negro equality…. This new cause—or rather the true question of the war revived—is the supremacy of the white race.” In a speech to Confederate veterans in 1890, a former captain in the 7th Georgia Volunteer Infantry echoed Pollard: “We fought for the supremacy of the white race in America.”
Such candor was exceptional in commemorations of the Lost Cause. More popular was Jefferson Davis’s postwar assertion that slavery was “in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident.” In considering this “incident,” it would be well to keep in mind Henry David Thoreau’s observation that circumstantial evidence is sometimes conclusive—for example, when you find a “trout in the milk.” All of the Confederate states were slave states and all of the free states remained in the Union. That is a rather large trout.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2001/04/12/southern-comfort/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Civil%20War%20fantasies%20Jefferson%20the%20brain&utm_content=NYR%20Civil%20War%20fantasies%20Jefferson%20the%20brain+CID_e6b1de6148a1bf590f71181cc0a2f1ed&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=Southern%20Comfort
A comment on Facebook:
~ “The civil war was actually a war of southern aggression. It was fought to prevent or moderate the spread of anti-slavery sentiments and laws such as Personal Liberty statutes that sought to exempt northerners from enforcement of fugitive slave laws that southern white men wanted to force on the north. The southern white population knew that unless slavery was permitted everywhere it could not survive anywhere.” ~
Oriana:
It may seem puzzling that certain people are prone to revere two great historical losers: the Confederate leaders and the Nazis. To me the most plausible answer is that the confederacy and the Nazi ideology stood for a very hierarchical, racist society. Unfortunately, this kind of society appeals to white supremacists. People with not much to be proud of can always attach themselves to “white pride.” But just being white is an insecure foundation; there is the fear of being “replaced” by other races.
THE VOCABULARY WE USE WHEN WE SPEAK ABOUT THE CIVIL WAR LEGITIMIZES THE SO-CALLED CONFEDERACY
~ “When news reports about the debate over monuments say “Today the City Council met to consider whether to remove a statue commemorating General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate Army,” what if they instead were written in this way: “Today the City Council debated removing a statue of slaveholder and former American army colonel Robert E. Lee, who took up arms in the rebellion against the United States by the so-called Confederacy?”
Historian Michael Landis suggests professional scholars should seek to change the language we use in interpreting and teaching history. He agrees with people like legal scholar Paul Finkelman and historian Edward Baptist when they suggest the Compromise of 1850 be more accurately referred to as an Appeasement. The latter word precisely reflects the sway that Southern slaveholders held in the bargain.
Landis goes on to suggest that we call plantations what they really were—slave labor camps; and drop the use of the term, “the Union.” A common usage in the 19th century to be sure, but now one we only use “the Union” in reference to the Civil War and on the day of the State of the Union address. A better way to speak of the nation during the war, he argues, is to use its name, the United States.
In the same way, we could change the way we refer to secessionist states. When we talk of the Union versus the Confederacy, or especially when we present the strife as the North versus the South, we set up a parallel dichotomy in which the United States is cast as equal to the Confederate States of America. But was the Confederacy really a nation and should we refer to it as such?
“If you think about it,” Hahn said, “nobody in the world recognized the Confederacy. The question is can you be a state if no one says you are a state?”
Of course, international recognition and support for the rebellion was intensely important to secessionist leaders, not just because Jefferson Davis desired the military backing of Great Britain and other European nations, but because they sought the legitimacy that came with it. Hahn says that President Abraham Lincoln and his administration believed that its leaders didn’t have the right to leave the United States or the authority to take their states with them. Looking at leaders like Lincoln during the war and Frederick Douglass in its aftermath, it is apparent that the concept of being careful about the terms we use to describe the period is not a new challenge. In his writings, Lincoln referred to the group he was fighting as the “so-called Confederacy” and Jefferson Davis never as president, only as the “insurgent leader.”
The highest rank Lee achieved in the United States Army was colonel, so given his role as general in service to a failed revolution by a group of rebels, how should we now refer to him?
It would be just as accurate to refer to Lee, who led an armed group against national sovereignty, as an insurgent or a warlord, if not a terrorist. Imagine how different it would be for a school-age child to learn about the War of the Rebellion if we altered the language we use.
Just a few years after the war, Frederick Douglass had already begun to see that the losers of the war were winning the peace because he felt that the American people were “destitute of political memory.” Douglass often referred to the war as a “rebellion” and was careful not to speak of the rebels in any honorific way, and pledged himself to never forgive the South and to never forget the meaning of the war.
On Memorial Day in 1871 at the Civil War Unknown Monument at Arlington National Cemetery, Douglass’ speech was resolute:
We are sometimes asked in the name of patriotism to forget the merits of this fearful struggle, and to remember with equal admiration those who struck at the nation’s life, and those who struck to save it—those who fought for slavery and those who fought for liberty and justice. I am no minister of malice . . . I would not repel the repentant, but . . . may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I forget the difference between the parties to that . . . bloody conflict . . . I may say if this war is to be forgotten, I ask in the name of all things sacred what shall men remember?
As Douglass was already concerned that the victors were losing the war of historical memory to the supposedly vanquished, I am not sure that he would have been surprised that not far from where he stood at the national cemetery—often considered the nation’s most hallowed ground—a Confederate memorial would be built in the early 20th century to the insurgents he felt “struck at the nation’s life.”
Douglass knew, day-by-day, after the shooting stopped, a history war was playing out. It is clearly not over yet. Words, though they do not stand as marble and bronze memorials in parks and in front of buildings or fly on flagpoles, are perhaps even more powerful and pernicious. The monuments we've built with language may, in fact, be even more difficult to tear down.” ~
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/we-legitimize-so-called-confederacy-vocabulary-thats-problem-180964830/#6bM74IWg0G7vea1G.99
Oriana:
Vocabulary is powerful. Note the recent use of “infest” to describe immigration, reminiscent of Nazi efforts to present Jews as vermin (rats, cockroaches) infesting Germany. But we need not reach for such a stark example: it’s startling to realize that simply saying a “former American army colonel Robert E. Lee” takes the traitor down several pegs, while saying “General Robert E. Lee” unduly dignifies him. Such a simple change — and already such impact.
There is indeed a partial but undeniable parallel here between Germany and the US: Germany having to deal with its Nazi past, and the US having to deal with the painful historical wound of slavery. It’s astonishing to consider that Germany outlawed the display of the swastika — so the Neo-Nazis adopted the Confederate flag as the nearest thing, a symbol of white supremacy.
Just as the display of the swastika is illegal, there are no monuments to Hitler or other Nazi leaders in Germany — and no “but this is our history!” argument in favor of them — while there are over 700 statues of Confederate leaders scattered all over the country — up to 1,000 by one estimate.
The second great wave of erecting those monuments happened during the struggle for Civil Rights. These monuments to white supremacy were going up in protest against the effort to abolish racist discrimination. Talk about trying not just to reverse an actual reckoning with the infamous past, but to glorify it.
Why were discriminatory laws passed in the wake of the Southern defeat? A big economic factor was at work in the post-Civil War era — the huge importance of the cotton industry in the country’s economy. Both the South and to a degree the North feared the collapse of the cotton industry without the coerced labor.
There is of course also the genocide of the Native Americans to be dealt with — in Hitler’s eyes, America’s great accomplishment, perhaps the greatest. But here we need to remember that just as Germany has made many positive contributions to civilization, so has the United States — any country’s history is a mix of the good and the bad, though only some countries rose to have a global impact — again, both for the good and the bad. There is enough of the good so that the fear of “being paralyzed with guilt” is just another excuse for silence.
Lee's statue being removed in New OrleansGENERAL EISENHOWER’S VISIONARY ACTION TO PRESERVE THE EVIDENCE OF THE HOLOCAUST
~ “In 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, anticipated that someday an attempt would be made to re-characterize the documentation of Nazi crimes as propaganda and took steps against it:
~The same day I saw my first horror camp. It was near the town of Gotha. I have never been able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources. I am certain however, that I have never at any time experienced an equal sense of shock.
I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that "the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda". Some members of the visiting party were unable to go through with the ordeal. I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton's headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and the British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt. ~
Eisenhower, upon finding the victims of the death camps, ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury the dead.” ~ (Wikipedia)
~ Eisenhower [said] "I want all the correspondents and cameramen in here. I want this documented, because someday some sonofabitch is going to say this didn't happen." My father's Unit was part of the group that liberated Dachau in 1945. ~ Al Letner, comment on this photo.
WILL RACIAL OR ETHNIC BIGOTRY EVER END?
Tampa, FL, July 8, 2018
“You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened,” the segregationist George Wallace once said of his rise to power. “And then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/05/there-is-only-one-trump-scandal/560825/?utm_source=fbb
Oriana:
The need for scapegoats, and someone to feel superior to. Not sure that can ever end. People with no opportunity for creativity and love easily turn to hate in order not to hate themselves.
**
THOMAS MORE ON “TRIANGLES”
~ “It shouldn’t be a surprise that soon after people get married some new thing comes threatening the status quo. Hillman and Pedraza talk about a triangle as a dynamic force that would be both challenging and life-giving. The triangle might be the typical pattern of a married couple challenged by a third person who may be a lover, a friend, or even a business associate. The third intruding factor might not be a person but a job, a hobby, or an intellectual interest. I’ve known a few married couples dealing with a new religious or spiritual fascination that captured one of the people.
Hillman’s comments on marriage may sound extreme. He says that the fantasies married people have at the beginning, fantasies of togetherness symbolized by an unbroken ring, are delusional and defensive. They keep eros out. They’re rooted in anxiety about the stability of the marriage being threatened. Such an arrangement can’t hold, because life wants to break in on that deathly demand for absolute stability.
Hillman offers a rule of thumb: “The more we rigidly insist upon unity the more diversity will constellate.” He was always in favor of diversity, or psychological polytheism, making it one of the foundational planks in his archetypal psychology. For myself, whenever I hear someone insisting on unity, in whatever context, I worry about the suppression of the soul, which is many-sided and full of the richness and the tension of multiple urges.
So the third factor, whatever it is — the desire for another person, a new job, interest in another country, a new art — will probably disturb the status quo. For me this insight about the delusion of unity and the necessity of a triangle has been a breakthrough idea.
A similar pattern may arise in a person’s religious life. You may grow up in a family in which a certain religious understanding and practice are taken for granted. Then you go to college and discover a larger world. You come home with new ideas, and your family worries about you. In their anxiety, in their delusion of unity and assumption that there is only way to be religious, they find it difficult to embrace their wayward child.
The secret is not to be too literal about a new passion. A triangle is an opportunity for a new vision of life and not necessarily about a new relationship or love interest.” ~
~ Thomas More, A Religion of One’s Own
A meteorite found in Argentina*
A PARAMEDIC SPEAKS ABOUT RANDOMNESS AND SURVIVAL
~ “Since time began we have been story telling, pattern seeking, meaning making animals. But RELIGIOUS DOTS, LIKE HISTORY, ARE CONNECTED ONLY BY SURVIVORS.
Chris Kammal, a Florida paramedic:
“I work as a medic fireman. I see death and mayhem routinely. I have run thousands of calls over the last 23 years and so many of them were people in extreme crisis, or already dead when we got there.
I was asked the other day if I've ever seen miracles or things that can't be explained. My response was that I see many things beyond explanation but never anything miraculous. The miraculous implies that forces outside this world intervened, defying the basic principles of nature. But there's no evidence that the laws of physics have ever been suspended to save someone who was standing in the way.
A tree falling on a child doesn't reverse course because a mom cries out to God. There's no evidence that the universe has ever been manipulated by outside forces — in spite of ancient mythology or miraculous bible stories.
I've seen cars recognizable only by their tires, yet everyone came out alive with light injuries. I've seen a college freshman waiting at school for his mom to pick him up, but before she got there another driver had a heart attack, jumped the curb and killed the kid. Random is the rule.
The universe does not care who you are, where you come from, how religious you are, or how much money you have. We are all potential victims. Of course, good information and alert thinking help avoid problems before they happen. But you can't always avoid a drunk barreling the wrong way in your lane, or a tsunami that washes 430,000 innocent people to their deaths.
When you are at wits end, or your life is on the line, or you're down in the foxhole of war, you might or might not pray. It helps people transcend the circumstances they're trapped in. When people pray, it can ease the stress in their minds. They need hope, even if it's fantastical. Personally, I think it's no different than doing a line of coke, or smoking a joint.
It's my belief that if more of the world embraced the truth of randomness, we would spend less time being afraid of imaginary, omnipotent gods in the sky, and spend more time helping our fellow human beings.”
https://www.facebook.com/einsteinsgod/posts/1140743799280488?
Photo: Eliott Erwitt**
ending on language poetry:
“The letter! The litter! And the soother the bitther! Borrowing a word and begging the question and stealing tinder and slipping like soap.” ~ James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
Chagall: Flowers in the window, 1959
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