Category Archives: Americana

Wanting to be right

Americana, Politics, Psychological Musings
In writing about Andrew Breitbart’s death and life on his blog Ta-Nehisi Coates writes

….by neglecting to research Sherrod before putting up a clip of her talking, by electing to see her as little more than a shiv against the hated liberals, he deprived himself of knowledge, of experience, of insight, of enlightenment. That he might learn something from Sherrod, that he might access some power from her life, and pass that on to loved ones and friends, never occurred to him. Publicly, he lived to make himself right–a tradition that is fully empowered in our politics. Breitbart didn’t invent the art of making yourself right. But he embraced it, and then advanced it.

That is what took me to sadness. I have experienced curiosity as a primarily selfish endeavor. It originates in the understanding of the brevity of life, and the desire to see as much of it as possible, from as many angles as possible without doing too much damage to my morality. The opposite of that – incuriosity, dishonesty, the opportunistic deployment of information – is darkness. Breitbart died, like all of us will, in darkness. But as a media persona he chose to also live there, and in the process has impelled countless others to throttle themselves into the abyss.

There is much more to the blog post titled On Making Yourself Right and I encourage you to read it, but my take away was It is so easy to hang on to being right and it is so destructive. At least it is so easy for me: maybe I should say It is so easy to make somebody, who doesn’t agree with me, wrong. Maybe a week ago, I linked to a less than flattering article on Meryl Streep and then I wrote a blog post on Viola Davis a day or two later. Karen Amy took exception – mildly and politly – on my Facebook page and I could just feel myself  wanting to argue. Wanting to be right and wanting to make Karen wrong.

Around the turn of the century, Peter Kuhlman recommended an alternate history novel 1632 by Eric Flint. As I recall, he described it as amusing, but I ended reading and interpreting it as a dream with all the characters representing different facets of myself. To me, the book was all about taking down walls, letting in the outside world, listening to the other and be willing to see their point of view. All about being willing to be influenced by the world.

One of the reason that the characters in 1632 were able to let in the outside world, is because they were confidant in who they were at their core. For a long time, I kept thinking that it would make a good movie, but – now – I don’t think so. It is too last century, when we, as a nation, felt confident is who we are. It was before Bush the Younger and the disaster of Iraq, before the Great Recession, before the our national feeling of decline.

Ironically – and counter intuitively, I guess – when I am most confidant in who I am, it is easiest to hear the other person. My strong suspicion is that Andrew Breitbart and Rush Limbaugh – for that matter – are so loud because they are afraid. And they are afraid because – as Ta-Nehisi Coates so eloquently writes – they are living in darkness.


 

 

 

 

The Jeremy Lin story hiding the bigger story

Americana

 

Richard Taylor took exception to my post on Jeremy Lin and he made a really good point in the comments.

I’m concerned at the mass fascination and the way the story is being told. Feels a lot like a classic pull yourself up by the bootstraps story of the American dream. As the world falls apart around us, he is proof that we can, by dint of hard work, make it and be the stars of our own world. Colbert must love this guy. He is proving him right in every measure! Every time a real manifestation of a dream appears, we can distract ourselves from the much messier reality and tell ourselves that with just a bit more effort we can pull ourselves up without any help from our community. Maybe I’m cynical and defeatist….I – I being Steve – do want to point out that Richard does go on to say, I do applaud and celebrate Lin for his accomplishments.

I can quibble with Richard around the edges – I think Colbert’s persona would love this, not Colbert himself – but I completely agree with his main point. We read a story about Lin, or any number of other basketballers and it hides the fact that it is almost impossible to escape poverty by getting in the NBA. Lin was great in highschool – the MVP – but, when he tried to get into Stanford or UCLA via basketball, everybody he was competing against was also a MVP. He ended up at Harvard, I suspect, mostly on his grades.

When he tried to get into the NBA from Harvard, the winnowing was exponentially tougher. NBA players are all great players from basketball schools. When we read about great players – or just mid-level NBA players, who were great in college –  and read about how hard they worked1 and how lucky they are, it hides the very real fact that they are also very, very, rare. We don’t read read about the kids who worked just as hard, were just as good, and didn’t get that one lucky break. They end working at 7-11 or in prison.

It is even tougher and the winners from poor small towns or the ghetto are even rarer in the financial arena. I am an idealist and a optimist, so I don’t think that the system is rigged against poor black kids – or poor Asian kids or poor white kids for that matter – I just think that the people who are already rich, want to stay there. The very rich want low tax rates and lots of loop holes not to keep working people out, but to keep them and their descendants in. Shutting down social and financial mobility is a byproduct of the system, not the goal.

We used to be the land of opportunity and now we are not. Sure, some people make it, but a smaller percentage than in most countries in Europe. We have ended up with a system that is not the American dream, but the British gentry dream. As Richard pointed out, the Lin story hides that fact.

 

1. Lin worked very hard, according to Inside Bay Area http://www.insidebayarea.com/ci_20033515?IADID=Search-www.insidebayarea.com-www.insidebayarea.com Lin could barely squat 110 pounds last May, three months later, he was pushing up 231 pounds; improved his vertical leap by 3 inches; lowered his time in the pro agility run by 17 percent, to 4.4 seconds, which makes him comparable to an average NFL running back. The New York Times also has a great article on how hard he worked http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/sports/basketball/the-evolution-of-jeremy-lin-as-a-point-guard.html.

Why Romney can’t beat Obama

Americana, Politics

Everybody talks about the economy when they are discussing the election and I am sure that the economy is important, but running a good campaign is also important and the Romney campaign doesn’t seem to be able to do that. They booked Tiger stadium in Detroit and 1200 people showed up and from the seating arrangement they seemed to know that not many people would show up. Four years ago, Obama FILLED stadiums. Much smaller stadiums but they were full of energy.

Elections usually come down to GOTV – get out the vote – and that takes energy. Romney is not building it. The Romney rally must have been very depressing to anybody who did show up. Community organization – GOTV – is the Obama specialty.

150 years ago continued

Americana, General U.S. Grant, War

 

On February 16, 1862, Brigadier General Simon Buckner surrendered Fort Donaldson and about 13,500 men to Brigadier General Grant. Buckner and Grant had been friends in their previous and now different lives. The  military leaders of both the North and the South had often been in the old United States Army together and most had gone to West Point together. When the Civil War started, the majority of the seasoned officers were from the South and most of them deserted the Union. Simon Buckner was one of these.

Buckner had been born in Kentucky   but went north to go to West Point and graduated one year after Grant. He fought in the Mexican-American war and then Buckner returned to New York to teach at West Point but – and I love this part – he quit the teaching post as a protest of West Point’s policy of compulsory chapel attendance. About this time, he married a woman from Connecticut. When the war broke out, Buckner was offered a generalship in the Union army by President Lincoln himself, but he turned it down and, eventually ended up in the Confederate army. And then ended up at Fort Donaldson under a general who deserted his post, leaving Buckner to face Grant.

Ulysses S. Grant was born Hiram Ulysses Grant but his mother dropped the Hiram when he went to West Point. She realized his initials would be HUG when she was stenciling his footlocker and she was afraid that he would be teased which, at 5′-1″ and 117 pounds was probably right (the Congressman that sponsored Grant to West Point added the S for Grant’s mother’s maiden name of Simpson, but, in a clerical error, it was changed to S for Sam and he became Sam Grant at West Point). Like Buckner – and Robert Lee, for that matter – Grant fought in the Mexican-American war. He then hoped to teach math at West Point; instead, he ended up at the almost end of the world, Fort Vancouver in Oregon Territory.

Away from his wife and probably bored, Grant left the Army in disgrace for binge drinking. On his way home, broke and in disgrace, Grant ran into Buckner in New York and – probably very embarrassed – borrowed money from him while he was waiting for money to be sent from Ohio so that Grant could get back to his wife and his home. Buckner and Grant met again, almost eight years later, at Fort Donaldson.

The surrender of Fort Donaldson and an army of 13,500 men was the first major victory for the Union and the first of only three times during the Civil War when an entire army was captured – all by Grant. It was an equally major catastrophe for the South. The victory kept Kentucky in the Union and opened up the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers for the North to start driving south in a campaign to open the Mississippi River all the way to New Orleans.

Buckner expected his old friend, Sam Grant, to be sympathetic to his position and asked for special consideration in his and his army’s loss, but for Grant, war was war and it trumped friendship.  He replied to his old friend and one time benefactor, in a letter that included the famous quotation, “No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.” A pissed off Buckner replied “Sir:—The distribution of the forces under my command, incident to an unexpected change of commanders, and the overwhelming force under your command, compel me, notwithstanding the brilliant success of the Confederate arms yesterday, to accept the ungenerous and unchivalrous terms which you propose.”

Grant offered to loan Buckner money and to help him with his imminent imprisonment, but a still pissed Buckner declined and was sent to prison in Boston. Five months later, he was exchanged for another general.  Grant became instantly famous and was promoted to Major General U. S. – “Unconditional Surrender” – Grant.

While Grant only had about 500 killed, he did have another 2,000 wounded and the battle was not as easy as it later looked.  Grant made several major mistakes – like leaving the battlefield to meet with the Navy but not leaving anybody in command – that he was able to overcome and Grant being Grant, they were mistakes that he never made again.

 

150 years ago

Americana, General U.S. Grant, War

Today, 150 years ago, one year into our Civil War, Union –  the Union being the United States of America -troops were finished moving into position to attack Fort Donelson on the  Cumberland River. Five days and a 150 years ago, on February 6, 1862,  the Union  had won its first major victory against the secessionists – the Confederate States of America – in the battle for Fort Henry on the Tennessee River.  The Union forces were led by a little known, a newly promoted Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant.

I do not know all the reasons for the pull that U. S. Grant has on me: part of it probably has to do with the resurrection of a failed man, part with his lack of pretension, a lot with his change from a non-political – non involved – man to being the greatest, white, champion of civil rights the United States has seen until LBJ a hundred years later. For that, for trying to give Negros their rights, Grant’s reputation suffered during  a post Civil War remembrance that was colored by the Lost Cause of southern valor. As the Negros became happier in their chains, the man who kicked every southern general’s ass including Lee’s became an inept drunk and a butcher.

On the 100th anniversary of the Civil War, 50 years ago, we were starting to get bogged down in Vietnam and allegedly smart people were saying things like Military intelligence is an oxymoron and Grant was a drunk and a butcher and stupid. Now, one of the things about this anniversary is that Grant is being rehabilitated as scholars are re-looking at the war and his presidency. The English have thought of Grant as a great general for a long time, probably starting with British historian General John Fuller  who wrote extensively about Grant and wrote one of my favorite quotes that is both about Grant and our America as it should be:

In the year 1858, in the streets of the city of St. Louis might sometimes be seen a man leading a horse and cart – a seller of faggots. The man was no longer young, about five feet eight inches in height, though he looked shorter, for he stooped slightly, and when he drew up to off-load his wood his limbs trembled, for he suffered from ague. He was a thick-set, muscular man whose dark-brown hair and beard showed no trace of grey.

To the passer-by he was one of many thousands who had failed to make good  – that is, he was a poor, honest, hardworking fellow whose end seemed preordained – to do odd jobs until his days were numbered: to die, and to be forgotten. Yet in the United States of America, then as now, it would have taken a bold man to predict the end of a fellow citizen. The Thousand and One Nights is a romance founded on slender facts, on Eastern dreams which seldom come true without a knife, a bow string, or a cup of poisoned coffee. But here in this vast tumultuous continent facts find rooms wherein to wind and unwind themselves into tremendous romances. No man can tell the destiny of another; for there is magic in this land of vast possibilities, vast as its spaces, in which talent more so than birth sorts through the sieve of opportunity the human grist from the human chaff. This man, humble, work-worn, and disappointed, as he off-loaded his faggots, stood on the brink of his destiny as surely as the prince in the fairy tale when he lifted up the old peasant woman and her bundle of wood, and wading the river found on the far bank that in his arms rested a smiling princess.

The name of this humble seller of wood was Ulysses S. Grant, who within a few years, was destined to command vast armies, to win great battles, and to be twice chosen by his countrymen as their President. If this is not romance – what is?


Grant, who commanded two divisions of Army, was a young man at 39 and still untested. He was accompanied by a Union Navy force commanded by Flag officer Andrew Foote, and, at Fort Henry, the Navy had beaten the enemy before his troops were even able to attack the fort. Now, for the first time, 150 years ago, he would be tested.