Pouring

 

  

The Horace Chronicles, #3

in which we see a teacher make an opening move

September 5

Dear Maya,

The first day of school was really long, because it was really hot. By the end of first period I could feel the sweat trickle down the back of the new Beatles vintage Abbey Road t-shirt my mother got me at Target. Mr. Alfonsin took mercy on us for gym, saying it was too humid to try and do much, and let those of us who wanted to throw a basketball around. At lunch Janito and I grabbed a piece of pizza and went outside to the upper field, where a breeze was beginning to blow. By eighth period some really thick clouds began to roll in and you could hear the rumble of thunder in the distance. When I went into room H-234 for Mr. Smith’s class big wet drops began sneaking in under the open windows. Storms like this usually came later in the day. 

When I got there a couple kids had already arrived, and Mr. Smith was sitting at his desk. He had He had on light brown pants, and a green shirt. His gray hair covered his head, but it was also kind of thin, like a halo rising off it. There was a bottle of water on the desk, a stack of textbooks, and a book he was reading really intently. It was battered and thick and had Post-It notes coming out the sides. I staked out my usual position on the near the front of the room but on the side, close enough to feel those drops.

This was my first time in H-234, which was known as Mr. Smith’s room. There was a lot of stuff tacked to the walls – a yellowed front page from the day after Obama got elected; a picture of Central Park in the snow; postcards from all over the United States. There was also a map of the North America in 1733, a poster of Silence of the Lambs, and another from Gone with the Wind, which surprised me because I thought that was a movie about how great slavery was. There were also lots of index cards with words on them that I couldn’t read from where I was sitting. I’d have a look at them later.

“Fifty two minutes and counting.” It was Carl Shamsky, whose books landed with a thud as he sat down next to me. I saw one of them was American Pageant, a book I was supposed to order online and forgot to. Shit. I saw a lot of kids already had it. And my Dad would be pissed. “How’s it hangin,’ Theo?”

“Hey Carl.” I never much liked Carl, Maya, but I can’t quite figure out why. Something about the way he always seems to want your attention. But I don’t know if that’s fair. Particularly since I was probably going to need to borrow his book. 

“Hey, isn’t Janito supposed to be in this class?” he asked.

“No, he had to switch into Clark because of the jazz band.”

“Oh, that sucks. My sister had Clark. I had Dyson. She was OK. So was Bergmann. Of course anybody is better than Pavlak. I had him for earth science and he was unbelievably . . .”

I tuned Carl out and surveyed the rest of the room. A few faces I recognized, but nobody I’d really consider a friend. Alan Greenberg was there in back, sitting next to Derek Thompson. They looked hot, tired, and wishing they were anywhere else. I also saw Deana Michaelis, Hannah Wise and Lee Agnelli – the Mean Girls of Hudson High – giggling over something, probably making fun of someone. Probably me. On the other side of the room was a girl I knew from English last year, Liz Ling. She said some interesting things in class, but I never talked with her outside class. You’d probably like her, Maya.

Just then a big flash of lightning lit up the sky outside. The Mean Girls shrieked – you could tell they just liked the sound of their own voices. I’m not sure whether it was the light or the noise that led Mr. Smith to look up from his book and look up at the clock at the wall behind me (I always sit with it behind me, Maya – I can’t stand watching it crawl.) He closed the book and stood up, taking us in. Just then a big crack of thunder led the Mean Girls to go off again. Mr. Smith pursed his lips waiting for both to pass without comment. I thought that was interesting, but I wondered it the girls would take it as weakness.

“Hi kids,” he said quietly, walking around to the front of his desk, folding his arms, and waiting for the chatter to subside, as it did. He used his head to gesture the board behind him. “I’m Horace Smith. Welcome to 11^th grade AP U.S. History. As you know, we have a test coming up at the end of the year, and we’re going to have to keep a good pace. In order for that to happen, I’m going to depend on you to do the reading, which we’ll talk about in class. One thing I’m going to avoid doing, as much as I can, is simply reviewing what’s in the book. That will bore the hell out of me, and, more important, that will bore the hell out of you.”

Can you remember a teacher using the word “hell” in class, Maya?

“Truth is,” he said, "we have a limited amount of maneuver here. I have a job to do, which is getting you ready for that test, and your job is to prepare for it too. Actually, I suppose you have multiple jobs to do – this course is one of many you’re taking, and you’ve got whatever else you might have going on. The team, the play, whatever. To some extent, our interests overlap – we both want you to do well – and to some degree they don’t. I’m probably going to want more work out of you than you feel is necessary, and at least some of you will figure out loopholes. I, for my part, am not supposed to give every one of you an A, so you’re not only competing against each other but against my professional standards and my memory of the kids who have come before you.”

I stole a glance around the room. Everybody was paying attention, even the Mean Girls. I don’t think they were used to be talked to this way. I bit my lip to hold back a smile I feared would turn into a laugh.

“Anyway.” He dropped his arms to his sides. “I know it’s hot – the rain should help, but I know you’re all tired. Your homework tonight is Chapter One, the whole thing. I figure you’ve had the whole summer off and might as well jump right in.” He looked a little awkward, even apologetic, his hands on his calves. Then, suddenly, he tapped them. “Just one thing I want to go over before I let you go.”

He turned, a little abruptly, and sat again at his desk. He reached over and grabbed his bottle of water. This was the first time he was drinking it – I could hear the cap click.

“I have here an authentic bottle of Poland Spring water,” he said, which sounded a little funny. “You see this?” He held up the cap. “This is one of the new ecologically correct caps that uses less plastic than the old ones. After school today I’m going to take this cap home and add it to my bottle cap collection.”

He paused, his eyes scanning the room for a reaction. Carl’s eyes were furrowed in a what-the-fuck kind of look.

“Tell me,” Mr. Smith said, looking down at a piece of paper that I guess what his class list. I think he forgot to take attendance. I saw him silently count the students in the room, make an annotation and look up again. “Deana Michaelis. Where are you?”

“Here?” I turned around to see Deana look startled, then frightened – why was Mr. Smith calling on her? “Tell me, Deana: where you keep your bottle cap collection?”

“My bottle cap collection?”

“Yeah,” Mr. Smith responded, with a touch of impatience. “Your bottle cap collection.” He stood up and started walking toward her.

“I don’t know what you mean.” Deana would have been angry if she wasn’t so scared.

“You don’t know what a bottle cap collection is?”

“No?”

He shifted his gaze. “You: what’s your name?”

“Hannah?”

“You sound about as confident as your pal Deana, Hannah. Want to check and make sure that’s your name?” A few people laughed. I did too, but felt a little guilty. It wasn’t really fair for a teacher to make fun of students like this. 

“Well, Hannah, or whatever your name is. Where do you keep your bottle cap collection? At your beside table, maybe?”

Hannah seemed to decide, without being entirely sure, that this whole thing was a joke. “Um, like, I don’t have a bottle cap collection.”

Mr. Smith looked stunned. “Wait a second,” he said, staring at her, sounding amazed but not entirely serious. “You’re telling me you don’t have a bottle collection?”

Hannah had her confidence back (I was kind of sorry). “Yeah, that’s right. Don’t have one.”

“Wow.” Mr. Smith seemed stunned, unsure what to say or do. Then he turned around suddenly. “What about you?” he said to Carl. “Surely you have a bottle cap collection.”

“Nope.”

“You?” He was looking at me. And, really, Maya, I don’t know where my answer came from. “I sold it on eBay,” I said.

“Whoa,” Mr. Smith said. “Harsh!” But his eyes were dancing.  I don’t think I’ve ever been happier about a teacher being happy with me. “Well, tell me something son,” he said. “What’s your name?" 

“I’m Theo.”

“Tell me this, Theo. Did your bottle cap collection have one of these eco-friendly Poland Spring caps?”

“Yeah, it did.”

“And one of the older, full size caps?”

“Yes.”

“Any flip tops, like from Dr. Pepper or Pepsico products?”

“Of course.” I was getting into this.

“Yeah, well, my bottle cap collection has one of the old, full-pull off caps from a 1981 can of Budweiser. Don’t even try to tell me you have one of those. And I wouldn’t sell it for a million bucks.”

I didn’t know what to say about that. I did wonder later, though, if tabs were the same thing as caps.

“And what about you?” he asked Dave Trask, who probably smoked a joint at lunch. “Nah, man,” he replied. Don’t save bottle caps. I throw them in the trash.”

“In the trash? You throw them away?”

“Yeah.” Dave wasn’t looking at Mr. Smith. He didn’t seem to know, or care, if Mr. Smith was kidding.

“Don’t you know anything about history?”

Dave looked away, as if he was being hassled, which I guess he was. Mr. Smith walked to his desk and sat down again. There was a long silence. I thought this would bother him. I know I was getting restless.

“What does any of this have to do with history?” Hannah finally asked. I don’t know if she meant to sound jokey/annoyed, but she sounded more mad than funny. “I thought this was AP U.S. history. Why are we talking about bottle caps?”

“Well, now, Hannah, I’m glad you asked. You wonder what bottle caps have to do with history. If we’re going to talk about history what to you think we should talk about?” “I dunno. Books, maybe?" 

Mr. Smith didn’t take the bait. “Well, sure. You got one of those. Your homework tonight is reading from a book. I've got a couple extra if any hasn't got one yet. Anything else?”

“I dunno. Like documents?”

“Yes. Documents. Definitely. We’ll be talking about those. But let me ask you something. What if those documents aren’t in English?”

“You could, like, translate them.”

“Yes, though my Spanish isn’t that good. What if they’re in French? Or Chinese?”

Hannah shrugged.

“Or what if they’re in an ancient language that nobody actually speaks any longer? And what if those documents got lost in a fire, or got water damaged, or got used as toilet paper by invading armies?”

“That’s gross,” Deana said.

“Well, maybe. But what then?”

Liz Ling raised her hand. She was actually the first person in the class to do that. “And who are you?” Mr. Smith asked.

“I’m Elizabeth. You could look at their buildings. Or their artwork. You could learn about history that way.”

Mr. Smith nodded. “Yes, Elizabeth, that’s a very good answer. That’s exactly what a lot of historians do.” He paused. “But unfortunately lots of buildings and artwork also perish in fires or end up buried under water. So what do we do then?”

Liz didn’t try to answer that one. Neither did anyone else. Another long pause. This time Mr. Smith broke the silence.

“You over there. What’s your name?”

“Dave.” He answered as if he felt some sacred rule was once again being broken: You just don’t call on people if they don't raise their hand. “I said I don’t know.”

“Oh, but you do know, Dave. Don’t you remember?”

“Remember what?”

“Trash.”

“Trash?”

“Yes. Trash. That’s what you said you did with your bottle caps. And that’s exactly how some people – they tend to be anthropologists more than historians, but it’s the same idea – learn about what happened in the past. They look through the trash. They figure out what had or hadn’t happened by looking through piles they discovered of what people had thrown away. They figure out when a pile got there by looking at how wide or narrow the pipe stems were that people had used up or that had gotten broken, for example. Pipe stems vary in size. Like the length of girls’ skirts. Sort of a fashion thing. Actually, sometimes what other people thought of as trash we think of as artwork. And vice-versa. Like bottle caps. I think of them as treasure. But Dave here throws them away.” He paused. “And Theo over there, crassly tries to make a buck. Heartless bastard.”

Everybody laughed, even Dave, sort of. I did, too.

Mr. Smith stood up again. “In tonight’s reading you’re going to meet lots of people – a lot of them Native Americans – who lived hundreds of years ago. In a lot of ways, they’ll be like you: they worked and played, loved each other and hated each other. But they’ll also be different from you in the things they cared about, the things they saved and threw away. Now they’re gone. We try to remember them, but the record we have is incomplete. And the way we understand them isn’t exactly the way they understood themselves. Sort of like trying to understand you in terms of bottle caps. Not exactly a lie, but probably not the way you want to be remembered. Something worth keeping in mind as you do the reading. See you tomorrow.”

The rain was tapering. I turned around and looked at the clock. Mr. Smith was ending class a few minutes early. “See you tomorrow,” Hannah said as she walked out the door. Mr. Smith nodded. “A couple other kids said thanks as they left. 

I was among the last to go. "Could I borrow one of those books you mentioned? I forgot to order it."

"Sure," he said, picking one up off the stack on his desk.

"Do I need to sign it out or anything?"

"Nah. I got a bunch. I kinda collect them. You can keep it as long as you like."

"Really?"

 He looked at me for what I felt was the first time. "You want to borrow it for the whole year?"

"Could I? Really?"

"Well, there doesn't seem to be much demand, and I still have a few. So go head, Theo. I know you're good for it."

Thanks!"

"No problem, kid," he said, turning back to the book he was reading. "See you tomorrow."

A few days later Janito and me went to see Riddick at Ridge Hill. After the woman at the entrance to the theater tore my ticket in half, I saw a trash can and was going to throw it away. But then I changed my mind and shoved it in my pocket. When I got home I put in a mason jar on my desk where I keep paper clips and stuff like that. I don’t think my movie tickets are going to be part of any archeological site or anything. But I think I want to keep track of my own history.

Spiral

-->

 The Horace Chronicles, #2  

 

in which we see two people trying to balance their books

  

August 27 

Dear Maya,

When I got home after my last shift at the pool, I was surprised to find my dad sitting at the dining room table. He had his laptop open and a calculator at his side, and he was peering at his checkbook. These were not good signs.

“Hi Dad,” I said, dropping my backpack to the floor.

“Hello, Theodore,” he said, not looking up.

I headed into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, taking out an apple (there wasn’t much else in there). “You’re home early today,” I said.

“Yeah. Things were slow so I came home.”

I re-entered the dining room. I didn’t want to ask, but I felt I didn’t really have a choice. “Dad, I was talking with Janito today and he said his Mom was going to be taking him to Staples for school supplies. I was thinking maybe I’d go with them.”

“Go with them?” He looked up from his checkbook.

“Yeah. For school supplies.”

His face hardened. “Jesus, Theo, we’re having a rough time here. You think maybe you can find some stuff from last year? An unused notebook or two?”

“Well, not really. I – ”

“Cut it out Frank,” my Mom said, coming down the stairs. I didn’t realize she was home too. “He’s not asking for money to go partying, for God’s sake. We’re talking school supplies. Look at it this way: if he goes with Janito then we don’t have to take him.”

“Alice, you know perfectly well that –”

“Yeah, I know perfectly well. I left my bag upstairs. Give him some money.”

My Dad exhaled a long breath. “Fine.” He pulled his wallet out of the pocket of his navy khakis. He handed me a $20 bill. That wouldn’t go too far.

"C'mon Frank. The boy needs more than $20."

"Fine." He pulled out another and handed it to me. 

“Thanks, Dad.” 

"See if you can't find something that can give you something that will get you better math grades," he said as his phone rang. “Who the hell is this,” he said, looking its screen. He stood up and turned his back to me. “Sandy,” he said, not sounding to happy to hear from the guy. “How are ya.” He went upstairs. That’s kinda been my dad lately, Maya. Annoyed when he’s with me. Which doesn’t feel all that often.

“It’s been a bad month,” my mother said.

“Seems like we’ve had a lot of those lately.”

“Yeah, well . . . ” her voice trailed off.

“I’m sorry.” I half meant it, and was half-annoyed. But I don’t think she heard that, which I’m glad about.

“Nothing to apologize for,” she said. “I feel bad. Was hoping to get you more in the way of back-to-school clothes, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

“I don’t care.” But I did.

“Sometimes, I feel like we’re in a race against time,” she said. “Trying to get you through school, get you to college, get the mortgage paid off, get to retirement. It just seems to keep getting harder. I think we’re going to be okay. I just wish it could be a little … easier.” She smiled. “So what time is Janito picking you up?”

He came about twenty minutes later. I had a list from the school website of things to buy. I skipped a lot. There was nothing on the list about what I’d need for History. I decided to buy a spiral blue notebook and a folder to go with it. Wasn’t sure I’d use either. But I wanted to have it just in case. My dad probably would be pissed off. But I wanted to have something new that was my own. Well, not exactly. I know that blue is your favorite color, too. After thinking you would be, you weren’t going to be in the class after all. But I somehow wanted you there with me. When I looked at that book, it reminded me of you, and I felt better. I think.

Starters (a new series at this blog)

The Horace Chronicles, #1

August 20

Dear Maya,

I guess the first time I remember thinking much about Mr. Smith was at the end of last summer when I ran into Sean Catalano at the pool. My shift at the front desk had just ended and I headed over to the snack bar for a cheeseburger when I saw him drinking a coke by himself at one of the tables. Even though we’d been on the baseball team together I wasn’t sure I should say hello – he was a senior and a star of the team, and I was just a benchwarmer second-base sophomore (I’m not going to play again next year). Actually, I wasn’t sure he even knew who I was until he said, “Hey, Theo,” in that kind of flat way he has – he knew who I was but he wasn’t exactly excited about it.

“Hey Sean,” I said, trying to match him. “What you doing here?”

“Waiting for Annie,” he said, motioning with his head over to the far end of the pool. I remembered then that Annie Nunez was his girlfriend. All summer long the guys at the pool had been talking how great she looked in her Speedo. Gotta admit, Maya, they were right. I said so once myself so I sounded like I fit it, but it sounded so fake I was surprised that nobody made fun of me. I avoided doing anything but saying yeah after that.

I looked up at the clock, even though I knew what time it was. “She should be done any minute,” I said. I walked over to the grill and ordered my burger from Max. But then I had to wait. Max was busy with other customers, so I couldn’t talk with him. I didn’t feel like I could just go sit next to Sean, but didn’t know where else to go, fearing that sitting at another table would be even more awkward. I just stood there, feeling stupid.

We were quiet for a minute, but it was getting weird. “So how’s it going?” he asked.

“It’s cool,” I said. “One more week, then I take a week off and then it’s back to school.”

“I leave on Thursday,” he said.

 “Oh yeah – right. You’re going off to school. Where, again?”           

“University of New Mexico.” Then I remembered: he got a scholarship. “You must be excited.  You playing left field?”

“Yeah. And yeah, I’m pumped. It’s primarily a spring sport but we do have fall ball. The starter fucked up his knee so I might get some playing time. I'm actually only here for a few days. My dad's birthday is tomorrow.”
 

I felt like I should ask a follow-up question, but I didn’t know what it should be. Actually, Maya, I always felt like an imposter on the baseball team. I feel like an imposter a lot of time about a lot of things. I don’t think Sean is any great conversationalist either, but he was better than me, and when the silence got awkward again he tried once more. I give him credit for that.

“So,” he asked, “Who do you have this year?”

 “Well, “I said, “I’ve got Celli for math. And Sipowicz for physics. And Guzman for English.”

“Good luck with Guzman,” he said. “What about history?”

 “Smith.”

 Sean nodded, as if I’d made a good choice. 

“You’ll do alright with Smith,” he said. “He isn’t a prick like Clark.”

Sean’s eyes focused over my shoulder and he smiled, so I turned around. Annie had a beach towel with some kind of aquatic pattern wrapped around her waist and was wearing plain red flip-flops and dark glasses. She had a backpack slung over her bare shoulder. Gorgeous. Like staring into the sun.

 “Hey,” she said to me, for what felt like the first time all summer. 

“Hey,” I said back.

“You ready?” Sean asked her.

 “Yup,” she responded at exactly the same moment Max said “Cheeseburger!”

“Hey, good seein’ ya,” Sean said as if that was his signal, sliding his arm around Annie’s back. “You’re going to do fine with Smith,” he said like he was giving me a blessing. “I mean, I never gave a shit about history, but that guy was all right.”

“Good luck at school,” I said.

 “Yeah, you too.”

“Bye,” Annie said, her voice rising a bit in a singsong kind of way. She was being nice. What’s it like for those girls, Maya?

While I put ketchup on my burger, I thought about Sean and Annie, wondering if they were going to have sex that night and wondering where. But as I headed out to the parking lot, I found myself thinking about Mr. Smith.  I knew when I got my schedule back in July that I’d lucked out because I heard he was a good teacher. But I had no real idea what the guy was like in the classroom. I’d see him around school – khakis, plain shirts in dark flat colors, the scuffed brown boots – and I kinda liked the look of him.

I remember walking down H wing one day when he was coming toward me from the other direction. As he walked past a group of seniors one of them asked him in a jokey way, “Mr. C, what’s with the uniform? You think maybe you could wear stripes one day? Polka dots, maybe? How about a new pair of shoes?”

  
“Naaa,” he said, without stopping. “Bought a new pair of boots once, but they felt awkward when I got  into bed. So I switched back.”

He caught my eye as we passed each other and he winked at me, as if I was in on the joke. I hoped I’d have him one day. Because, unlike Sean, I always liked history. Whatever that meant. 

           

           

Picking up 'Signal'

In The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail -- But Some Don't, statistician extraordinaire Nate Silver argues for the value of calculation

The following review has been posted on the Books page of the History News Network.  

This one that almost got away. Though I was a faithful reader of Nate Silver's 538 blog in The New York Times in the months running up to the presidential election -- like a lot of Democrats it gave me a serenity I otherwise would not have had -- the release of his first book fell through the cracks. I kept meaning to get around to it, partially put off by its length and my numbers phobia, though I bought a copy for my University of Chicago economics-majoring son (Silver is an alumnus of UC). When my son left it behind for me after a recent trip home, I finally got around to it. The Signal and the Noise was published and marketed as a book for the political season, which I'm sure made sense from a publicity standpoint. But it has a vitality and durability far beyond that. The paperback edition appears to be months away; when that moment arrives, I believe it will become a perennial.

As much as anything else, the book is a study of epistemology, and a brief for the necessity and reality of uncertainty in everyday life. That's not because humans are flawed (though of course they are), or because Big Data has limits (it certainly does, as the book is at some pains to explain), but because our world is one of probabilities rather than fixed laws awaiting discovery and decoding. And yet for all the mistakes of recent years -- the failures to predict the financial crisis and 9/11 principal among them -- Silver argues it is possible to think about, and calculate, predictions that have utility in everyday life (poker, weather, athletic events) as well as in broader realms (financial markets, earthquakes, climate change). One can get better at predicting the way that one can get better at playing baseball: great hitters only make it to base a minority of the time, and yet compile a productive of record of consistency that's difficult for others to duplicate. The comparison is not incidental: Silver started his professional career by developing a system of forecasting player performance.

The heart of Signal is an affirmation, and popularization, of the ideas of Thomas Bayes (1701-1761), an English minister and mathematician who developed a formula of prediction that proved highly influential after his death, and which appears to be enjoying a renaissance. The wrinkle in Bayesian reasoning, and a source of ongoing controversy, is factoring in the perceived probability of an event happening before it ever does, a calculation that's hard to make and which is subject to change. For Silver, that's precisely the point: ongoing revision is the essence of the prognosticator's art. Statistics are the tools. He's not so much arguing for a particular methodology as he is a way of seeing the world. Which, given his serial successes in making a living playing cards, scouting ballplayers, and calling elections, hardly seems dreamy in its abstraction.

I'll cheerfully confess that much of what Silver does in this graph-rich book went over my head. But the various excursions he took me on -- in epidemiology, seismology, the real estate bubble, and the intricacies of gambling on te Los Angeles Lakers -- were so skillfully rendered, with so many colorful characters, that I never gave up in despair. His mind is both powerful and marvelous.

Clean execution

In How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia Mohsin Hamid captures the green light -- again.

The following review has been posted on the Books page of the History News Network.  

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia solidifies Mohsin Hamid's claim as a major contemporary novelist. It showcases what have become a familiar set of gifts, among them a compelling voice, a keen feel for structure, and, given his literary sensibility, a surprisingly efficient narrative drive. Like his two previous books, Moth Smoke (2000) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), this one is brief. And yet in the space of less than 230 small pages he renders an entire life that seems simultaneously rich in detail and resonant as a fable.

Like The Reluctant Fundamentalist -- the film version, directed by Mira Nair, will be released domestically next month -- Hamid pulls off the difficult technique of second person narration. The last time around, it was deployed to implicate the reader, whose uneasiness with the narrator was very much the point (is he, or isn't he, a terrorist? Are you, or aren't you, a racist?). This time, the effect is more lyrical, if one can speak of lyricism in a book of sometimes brutal honesty. But Filthy Rich is also marked by moments of seeming omniscience, as the narrator describes events it is impossible for him to have observed first-hand, a violation of literary convention that works beautifully, contributing to that fable-like character.

Indeed, Hamid seems thoroughly conversant with literary theory -- particularly reader-centered literary theory -- and seems to implement it effortlessly. In what is clearly another meta-narrative device, the novel deconstructs a familiar prose genre: the self-help book, specifically the business self-help guide of the kind that apparently is quite popular in the developing world. He captures its rhythms in his chapter titles, some of which have a puckish air: "Move to the City"; "Get an Education"; "Be Prepared to Use Violence"; "Befriend a Bureaucrat." But the book's chatty air is also gracefully studded with sociological detail that convey vivid depictions of abject poverty and vertiginous modernization.

The plot of the novel can be summed up easily. A boy from an unnamed rural village is lucky in terms of birth order and his arrival in the late twentieth century. (In one more illustration of Hamid's deftness, we know this because in his youth he's a DVD delivery boy; since we're with him to old age, the story must proceed far well into the 21st century, something Hami manages to do credibly without resorting to tinny sci-fi devices). He attends university, leaves some youthful radicalism behind, and founds a bottled-water business empire. This of course requires moral compromises as well as the guile in evading those eager to take away what he has. It also requires a reckoning with the cost of success in terms of his relationships with those around him.

Like The Reluctant Feminist, too, Filthy Rich is also a love story. It centers on an unavailable female whose love (or lack thereof) is at least initially indeterminate. The last time around, the woman was a WASP American. This time she comes from the hometown of the narrator himself -- she's named "the pretty girl." She too finds fortune, but must do so by a different means: leveraging her beauty. Hamid is keenly attuned to the harsh limits imposed on women in his world -- the mother and sister of the narrator are among the more poignantly sketched characters -- and the vulnerability even of those women (including the narrator's wife, who chooses a very different path than the pretty girl) who somehow thread the needle and wrest a life for themselves. He also never fails to humanize even the most brutal of characters, like the assassin assigned to kill the narrator. His portrayal of old age -- something he evidently has not experienced himself -- is notable for its painful, yet generous, clarity.

Hamid's great theme in all his work is social mobility, downward as well as upward. His sense of place (south Asia, with a locus of Pakistan) is unmistakable, and yet there's an elemental drama and deceptive simplicity to his protagonists that evokes the London of Great Expectations or the New York of The Great Gatsby. The United States is never referred to directly in Filthy Rich, though it's perhaps more than ethnocentrism that leads one to suspect that the movies the narrator and the pretty girl love as children involve a vision of success with an American accent. In any case, the book closes with what appears to be an allusion to the conclusion of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself."

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia pulls no punches in its harsh portrayal of the material world, in the broadest sense of that term. But it is a deeply moving and satisfying tale. That's principally because of Hamid's sense of craft -- a penchant for subtraction in boiling the elements of narrative art down to their essence. His honesty can be hard to take. But you're glad to have him share it with you.

Jim is observing Spring break in the less-than-tropical climes of Massachusetts (where beaches of books beckon). In recent weeks he's been listening to more new popular music than usual, in part because pop music has taken a turn in his (more melodic) direction. So he's enjoyed My Head Is an Animal, the debut album of Of Monsters and Men, an Iceland-based band. The hit song from the album, "Little Talks," captures the playful but dark quality that's at the heart of the band's appeal. He's also been listening to the Lumineers, whose self-titled debut, also released last year, falls more squarely in the folk revival of recent years, typified by Mumford & Sons. The Lumineers manage to make a big sound out of accoustic instruments and spare arrangements.

Finally, in a third debut album from 2012 -- it seems like it takes longer for new acts to break in, though it certainly takes longer for old geezers to discover them -- there's Delta Rae. This North Carolina band with Duke University connections extends their folk roots in a wider -- which is to say blacker -- direction, leavening their rock-based sound with soul ("If I Loved You") and even slave-based ("Bottom of the River") accents. They also do an interesting cover version of Billy Joel's "Piano Man." These and other videos -- the band seems to be using video heavily to promote themselves, perhaps because they have powerful backing -- on their website. Though it's still early in the game, they may well be built to last. The "delta" of their name has a rich, muddy bottom, and the other half points to the sky.

Best to all for a relaxing and tuneful break.

Little Giant, Big Giant

In Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism: Lincoln, Douglas and Moral Conflict, a historic debate becomes a living analogy

I think of myself as an amateur Lincolnologist who tries to keep up on the latest literature in the field. But I really didn't want to read this book.  For months, it sat in a pile in my living room, its appealingly simple bright orange cover beckoning me. (It's a beautifully produced book generally, as one would expect of Harvard University Press.) But its sheer bulk -- 800 pages, a hundred in the form of a densely annotated editorial apparatus -- led me to steer around it. Only when that pile got small did I lift it for a single-session trial run: if the Preface and Introduction hooked me, I would see it through. It did, and I did. You should, too.

As a number of reviewers have noted, among them Steven Smith in the New York Times, Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism can be usefully viewed as a reply to Harry Jaffa's classic 1959 book Crisis of the House Divided in its exhaustive treatment of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Like Jaffa, Burt (by training a literature scholar; he teaches in the English department at Brandeis) views the debates through a philosophic lens. Indeed, for all the exhaustive contextual detail that laces his analysis, Burt, like Jaffa, rejects a strictly historicist reading of the debates, insisting on their ongoing relevance as a case study in ethics. But he departs from Jaffa in two important respects. The first are his touchstones; where Jaffa was likely to invoke Plato or Aristotle, Burt invokes (and to some degree defends) John Rawls. The second, related -- or, as Burt is wont to say, "imbricated" -- departure from Jaffa is a partial rehabilitation of Stephen Douglas, whom Jaffa (among many others, in 1858 and ever since) viewed as a crude political opportunist. Burt views Douglas as a worthy opponent, even if he feels that the balance of history, and morality, is on Lincoln's side.

The core question the book poses can be stated relatively simply: How can a liberal (which is to say politically pluralistic) society justly engage a non-negotiable moral position (in this case, that slavery is evil)? In one sense, Burt's answer is that a liberal society can't, not because of any defect in liberalism exactly, but rather because no society comprised of human beings ever can be entirely just. The temptation for individuals to think and act otherwise is almost irresistible, whether because of a collective addiction to intoxicating self-righteousness or out of fear that a sense of doubt would enervate the will to act. Lincoln's greatness, of course, stemmed from a very unusual capacity to prosecute an extremely bloody civil war while at the same managing to maintain a sense of his own moral and epistemological fallibility, captured most durably in his Second Inaugural. This is the essence of the tragic pragmatism invoked in the title of the book.

What Burt maintains, however, is that Lincoln's eventual synthesis of conviction and modesty would have been impossible without the forceful prodding he received at the hands of Douglas seven years earlier. He believes that the Abraham Lincoln who launched his U.S. Senate campaign against Douglas in 1858 with his famous "House Divided" speech in 1858 was more philosophically rigid, and thus politically vulnerable, than commonly allowed. Conversely, Douglas, while no moral philosopher, was on firmer footing than one might think. Burt is among the many observers who have viewed Lincoln's attacks that Douglas was in cahoots with Slave Power apologists like Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan as ridiculous. He is more unusual in finding merit in Douglas's "Freeport Doctrine" that states required by law to protect slavery need not be vigorous in enforcing it, drawing a distinction between allowing and facilitating certain kinds of economic activity that has clear parallels in contemporary life (consider gun ownership, for example, which we have no obligation to make easy).

Douglas famously asserted -- and his enemies on either side of the slavery issue endlessly repeated -- a claim that he didn't care whether slavery was voted up or down. What Douglas did say he cared about is that the citizens of a state or territory be allowed to choose for themselves, a notion that lay at the heart of the popular sovereignty premise codified in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which triggered Bloody Kansas, the Civil, War -- and, ironically, the destruction of Douglas's own presidential aspirations.

But the Kansas-Nebraska Act was more than just a failed political gambit. It posed a genuine philosophical dilemma. As Burt explains, "the issue between Lincoln and Douglas was not the difference between moral and amoral politics, but the difference between one set of prudential compromises about moral issues and another set." Neither man liked, but both men were willing to tolerate, slavery -- Lincoln was less tolerant than Douglas, because he was unwilling to allow it to enter the territories and Douglas was (though Southern suspicions of Douglas's professed indifference about slavery were justified). The real question was how far the two men were willing to go to end it. Douglas was not as willing to go as far as Lincoln because he feared that fanaticism -- not so much Lincoln's, but that of abolitionists with which was not quite implausibly associated, would wreck what Douglas considered the last best hope of The People (which of course did not mean black people, but then in no polity does "the people" include everybody).

Given the reality of what this meant in 1858, it's easy to view Douglas's position as slickly cynical at best. But in an important respect, it lands right in the middle of a straight line that runs from James Madison's Federalist #10 to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. It's the same vision of interest-group politics in which a liberal tells an antiabortion activist that if he doesn't like abortion, he shouldn't have one, a vision in which the only legitimate values are those you don't dare try to impose on somebody else. Burt, alluding to Max Weber (and, perhaps, Ron Takaki), describes it as "a world bound in the iron cage of purely instrumental rationality, in which means are calculated but ends are 'value judgments' about which reason has nothing to say. It is, in short, the modern world."

From this perspective, Lincoln becomes smug, even scary: he knows he's right, he says you know he's right, and even if he's willing to play by the (Constitutional) rules, he will stop at nothing short of that to take away what you hold most dear. Really, how far can you trust someone like that? A majority of voters in 1858 -- and a majority of voters in the presidential election of 1860 -- said: not far enough.  Douglas was right: Lincoln really was a sectional candidate. At best.

And yet Burt insists that Lincoln was right to insist on antislavery -- not abolition, but antislavery. That's because not all values are negotiable, even if no values should be absolutist. They should not be absolutist, because, as Burt pithily puts it, "in politics we are always Hawthorne's children, not Emerson's." Burt's literary background serves him well in other ways as well, notably his deployment of the Keatsian notion of negative capability, which Burt describes as an understanding that "we know our values by knowing that we can never exhaust them with our understanding, and that we never stand in a privileged position as regards them, that they remain in a position to put us, in some unanticipated way, in the wrong."

The miracle of Lincoln is that his final skepticism was skepticism about despair. One might think that it was Douglas who embodied a Rawlsian vision of fairness being defined in terms of willing to accept as fair the consequences of an unknown outcome, but Burt invokes Rawls's later work in which priorities are not understood solely in terms of economic or political self-interest. No political order can survive without a sense of sacred values, and part of what it means for values to be sacred -- to be living -- is a willingness follow where they lead, accepting the unforeseen consequences of a commitment rather than simply seeing them as expedient (Lincoln is in this sense Rawlsian, though he seems at least as much Kantian). Lincoln's God is not particularly attentive, kind, or forgiving. And yet he's still a repository of hope.

The burden of belief is not what it allows you to do to other people, but what you're willing to do to yourself in the name of your values. This leads Burt to assert that Lincoln really did not foresee emancipation and racial equality in 1858; one reason why he was able to do deal so effectively with the border states in the Civil War is that "his mind was another Maryland," which is to say he was a man of racial prejudices just as his fellow citizens were. But he was ultimately able to contemplate the "implictness" of his antislavery commitments, and to act on them when their force of their moral logic became clear --not Union versus freedom, or even Union through freedom, but Union as freedom -- and time was right. And, thanks to Douglas, to explain them unforgettably at Gettysburg and in the Second Inaugural.

Again, this is a big, sprawling book. And it's not entirely persuasive. (For one dissent, see Allen Guelzo's recent review in the Wall Street Journal.) I elected to skip over some of the minutiae, like that surrounding variant bills and amendments of the Kansas-Nebraska Act; for a non-historian, Burt goes pretty deep into the weeds. I'd have to read it again to figure out how to trim it, but a to me a book this size is almost always guilty unless proven innocent.

Ironically, there are also some surprising omissions. I found myself wondering, for example, how non-violence figures into all of this. Martin Luther King, Jr. shows up twice in passing. This is no anachronistic query for clarification, not only because of the range of modern voices that pepper Burt's discourse, but also because the roots of King's philosophy can of course be found in antebellum abolitionists like Henry David Thoreau and WilGarrison -- but without the self-righteousness that has always limited their appeal. I raise the question less as a complaint than a desire to understand if and how a moral giant like King, who also managed to combine unshakeable moral conviction with a sense of sin, compares with Lincoln.

Even more surprising in a book with the word "pragmatism" in it is the absence of William James. That's especially true because Burt's use of "implicitness" has a distinctly Jamesian ring: truth inhering in action. Surely there should have been room somewhere for Lincoln of American philosophy.

All this said, I'm making space on my overstuffed shelves for Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism. This is a book I expect to be picking up and thumbing through for years to come. That's not only because I may someday really want to know what was actually in the Toombs bill of 1857 or the various provisions of the Crittenden Compromise. It's also because I may need some help figuring out What Would Lincoln Do. His judgment may not have been divine. But I'm only human.

Treacherous choices

Benedict Arnold, great traitor

The following is the second of two posts on loyalists in the American Revolution (the first, "The Price of Loyalty," is below).

Perhaps no one shows how difficult it was to choose sides in the American Revolution, and the price to be paid for picking the wrong one, than Benedict Arnold. For the entire history of the United States, Arnold’s very name has been a byword for treason. But for most of the Revolution Arnold had been regarded as a hero—in some eyes second only to George Washington in his military accomplishments and the contribution they had made to the Patriot cause. In fact, before he tried to give away the base at West Point in 1780, you could make a pretty good case that Arnold had actually achieved more than Washington had in making material contributions to the cause of American independence.

Like Thomas Hutchinson, George Washington, and other Founding Fathers, Arnold had a blue-blooded colonial background. His great-grandfather, for whom he was named, was an early governor of Rhode Island. His grandfather and father, also named Benedict, were prominent in New England business and politics. But Arnold’s father was also an alcoholic, and family fortunes suffered during his childhood. Though he attended elite private schools, Arnold never went to Yale as expected, and an apprenticeship as a apothecary (pharmacist) with his uncles was interrupted by his decision to run away to the state militia, to which he later returned and served briefly in the French and Indian War. In the years that followed, Arnold built a successful business in eastern Connecticut, much of it based, like that of Massachusetts merchant John Hancock, on smuggling foreign goods illegally and avoiding imperial taxes.

The coming of the Revolution was good for Arnold. He was at the forefront of colonial resistance all through the increasingly escalating fights over tax and economic policy in the 1760s and ’70s, and was elected captain in the Connecticut militia in 1775. He marched his newly formed company to Massachusetts, whereupon he proposed an expedition up the Connecticut River to seize the weakly defended Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York, whose artillery could be a valuable asset in the coming struggle. Though he squabbled with Ethan Allen, leader of the famed Green Mountain Boys—one of many disputes that marked Arnold’s military career—the expedition was successful. The artillery at the fort was later moved to Boston, and played an important role in the British army’s decision to withdraw from the city in the aftermath of the Battle of Bunker Hill, a narrow British victory that nevertheless convinced the victorious General Thomas Gage that his besieged position in the city was no longer defensible.

In the early years of the Revolution, even Arnold’s defeats were impressive. When an initial plan to lead an attack on Quebec was rejected and the campaign given to someone else, he formulated an alternative route and was put in charge of it as a second prong of the operation. Though the effort to take the Canadian city in late 1775 ultimately failed—a smallpox outbreak, among other mishaps, hobbled the effort—most observers then and since credit Arnold for his ingenuity and persistence in keeping the operation going. (He was promoted to general for his efforts.) Arnold has also been credited as a founding father of the United States navy. His smuggling experience came in handy when orchestrating American operations on Lake Champlain in 1776. While he fought to a draw at best, his maneuvers were a factor in the British command’s fateful decision to delay further offensive operations until the following year.

Which brings us to Arnold’s finest hour. British grand strategy for 1777 involved a pincer movement whereby one British army would move up the Hudson River from New York, while another moved down from Montreal, cutting New England off from the rest of the colonies. But a lack of coordination among British commanders resulted in the New York contingent heading to Philadelphia instead. Meanwhile the northern British army, its supply lines spread dangerously thin, moved down the Hudson, where it was met by Americans converging from three sides. At the decisive moment of what became known as the Battle of Saratoga, Arnold led an American attack on a fiercely defended British position that turned the tide.

Saratoga is widely considered the turning point of the American Revolution. Not only did the battle take a big British piece off the chessboard, it also convinced a previously skeptical French government that aiding the Americans could be a worthwhile investment in taking their hated enemy, the British, down a peg. French financial and naval support would ultimately be decisive in the outcome of the struggle.

So Arnold had a lot to feel good about. And yet every step of the way he encountered resistance and indifference: promotions that never came; subordinates who were promoted over him; a Congress that failed to recognize his achievements. And, always, there were personal conflicts: Arnold seemed to be perpetually arguing with his fellow officers. At the time of Saratoga he was on such bitter terms with his commanding officer, General Horatio Gates, that he was actually relieved of command before the battle. Arnold’s leading the decisive attack was actually an act of insubordination, and an furious Gates unsuccessfully sent an aide after him to keep his rogue junior officer from reaching the front.

And while Arnold earned himself some glory at Saratoga, it came at a price: he took a bullet in the leg at the battle, and the horse he was riding fell on top of the same leg and broke it, an injury from which he never fully recovered. Nor did he get all the glory he deserved: Gates pointedly omitted mention of Arnold’s achievements in his official account of the battle. (Though his reputation never took the hit Arnold’s did, Gates’s career was persistently marked by a whiff of scandal; he was apparently involved in a plot to replace General Washington early in the war, and may have played a role in the shadowy near-mutiny that took place in Newburgh, New York at the end of it.)

 Arnold was no perfect victim. Stories of his arrogance and shady dealings dogged him his entire life, and while it’s safe to say such stories were more likely to be embellished and repeated in the decades after the war, the record is clear that he was a controversial figure even when he was considered one of the military stars of the Revolution. There were persistent rumors that he personally profited from his management of army resources, and was officially reprimanded by General Washington in December of 1779 over his lax approach toward handing out passes and his use of public wagons to save private property. Aggravated by what he regarded as petty haranguing, Arnold considered retiring from the army.

By this point he had been posted to Philadelphia. Arnold had been widowed early in the war; it was there that he met Margaret (“Peggy”) Shippen, who became his second wife. Shippen came from a prominent mercantile family with strong Loyalist ties. She was also was friendly with John Andre, a British officer she introduced to Arnold. Needless to say, the details of what followed are at least partly shrouded in mystery. But Andre and Arnold worked out a plan whereby Arnold, who was to be given command of American operations at West Point in early 1780, would sabotage operations at the base as a prelude to turning it over to British control. As it turned out, Andre was intercepted with incriminating evidence while he was on his way to meet Arnold, and he was eventually executed as a spy. Arnold, tipped off to Andre’s arrest just before he was to meet with Washington, managed to get away, aided by Peggy, who stalled a move against her husband by professing ignorance, shock and outrage when Washington interrogated her at West Point. Washington let her go, and she ultimately joined her husband in London. The couple raised five children and spent much of their subsequent life in Canada.

Why did Arnold betray the American cause? Did he do it for love? Money? A character defect? Probably all three were involved, among other reasons. Actually, Arnold himself offered a bunch himself: “Neglected by Congress below, distressed with the small-pox; want of Generals and discipline in our Army, which may be rather called a great rabble, our credit and reputation lost, and great part of the country; and a powerful foreign enemy advancing upon us, are so many difficulties we cannot surmount them,” he explained of his decision.

Go ahead and call that rationalizing on Arnold’s part. It surely was. But while you can credibly call him slimy or cowardly, one thing you can’t really say about him is that he was stupid. Actually, George Washington could have said exactly the same things Arnold did in 1780, when a major British offensive in the southern colonies showed every sign of succeeding, at least at first. In fact, Washington did say many of the same things in his steady stream of letters cajoling, complaining and lamenting the lack of support the American effort was getting. Like the men who had signed the Declaration of Independence, Washington had pledged his life and honor on the American cause. Noble or not, these people knew they were as good as dead if that cause failed. Arnold knew it too, but he made a different calculation, one that had a certain plausibility to it whether or not he happened to be a nice man, or whether or not you happened to agree with him. Washington made his bet on the outcome of the Revolution and won, thanks to the Battle of Yorktown in 1781, where, as at Saratoga, the Americans bagged an entire British army, convincing the government in London that the war simply wasn’t worth it anymore.

Arnold, by contrast, made his bet and lost. Actually, the outcome Revolution wasn’t a total disaster for him. Unlike Andre, Arnold escaped with his life, and while he never got the big payday he was hoping for in turning over West Point—since he didn’t actually do it, he didn’t get the money—the British government did compensate him for at least some of his pains. He assumed a command in the British army, and fought in Virginia late in the war, capturing Richmond in December of 1780. After the war, he was received by King George the III and resumed his business. He was embroiled in any number of personal disputes, but that had always been the case with him. Still, Arnold who died in 1801, spent the last twenty years of his life with his name as a byword for treachery, and he wasn’t much more liked in Britain than he was in the United States. He clearly regretted his choice, and once said it would have been better had he been shot in the chest rather than the leg at Saratoga. In that scenario, he would have died a hero.

Let’s be clear: the goal here is not to rehabilitate Benedict Arnold. George Washington was more than a lucky gambler—among other things, he was a man who was notably good at working with and mentoring people, like Alexander Hamilton, an arrogant genius who served as Washington personal aide and who Washington as president would shrewdly delegate the job of inventing a modern capitalist economy. (Another man who worked under Washington was Aaron Burr, who would later kill Hamilton.) Washington was exceptionally careful in managing his personal affairs as well as in running an army for which he refused to accept a salary. Of course, he could afford to. Could, and did. 

But being a good or nice man is beside the point. Which is this: that major social upheavals like revolutions are not simply difficult experiences because of the death and destruction they rain down on those on those who choose to participate in them.  Or that they rain down death and destruction on those who do not choose to participate in them, but nevertheless get caught in the crossfire. It’s also that they create situations where people perceive that they might actually have a choice in the matter, and that their choice may have consequences far beyond their ability to calculate. As Americans we cherish our freedom. But this is a kind of freedom most of us would cheerfully forgo.

As a military event, at least, the American Revolution ended 230 years ago. If you’re like most Americans, you regard yourself as a happy beneficiary of that outcome, which you commemorate with a barbeque, fireworks display, or some other form of celebration every July 4. If pressed, you’d probably concede that the Patriot cause was not entirely noble, and that as with most disputes, there are at least two sides to every story. You might even feel like American victory wasn’t all that deserving, like a team that wins a game on a disputed call or technicality. But you’re still glad your side won.

You should be even more glad that you didn’t have to pick the winning side. Maybe it’s that more than anything that makes being an American so precious: the freedom to not choose. Americans weren’t always that fortunate (life wasn’t much fun in this regard when the Civil War broke out in 1861, or at the height of the Vietnam War). And they won’t be forever. But overall, our history has been one of stability. It may well be that the very definition of a successful society is one that spares its citizens the most painful polarities of politics.

The price of loyalty

The founding of the United States was an ordeal for those unsure of which side to choose

The following is the first of two posts on loyalists in the American Revolution

So: You happy about the way the American Revolution turned out?

This probably strikes you as an odd question. You’re here, aren’t you? Sure, it’s possible that if Great Britain prevailed in its struggle with its unruly colonies, you might be living a better life, whether in continental North America or wherever in the world your people originated. Possible, but not especially likely. Even if you happen to be the heir of slaves, you now enjoy a better standard of living than they ever did. That’s because of a series of possibilities—pursuits of happiness—set in motion by a Declaration of Independence. The Declaration was marked by any number of loopholes, to be sure, some of which remain open. But lots of those loopholes of got closed, and part of what it means to be an American is to live with the hope that others will be.

Of course, where you stood on the American Revolution was a very different story in the 1770s and 1780s, when the fate of a would-be nation hung in the balance and some people were forced to choose sides precisely because there was no outcome to take for granted. We sometimes forget that the American Revolution was really our first Civil War, in which relatively large minorities of people—the estimates run from fifteen to thirty percent, depending on where you were living—were known as Loyalists who sided with England. Then there were places like New York City, which spent most of the war under British occupation. Nearby Westchester County was like modern-day Afghanistan, a kind of no-man’s land fought over guerilla-style by warring families and factions.

At the level of individual lives, choosing sides could be excruciating. In the 1770s Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson had family roots in the colony going back a century and a half. His great-great grandmother, Anne Hutchinson, arrived with the first generation of settlers in 1634. She was a rebel, a woman who believed that since the fate of any individual soul was unknown to all except for God, any form of earthly authority should be treated skeptically—a point of view that the Massachusetts government understandably viewed with some alarm. Whether or not they overreacted in expelling her from the colony in 1637 has been debated ever since. But a branch of her family survived and prospered in Massachusetts, and one of her heirs achieved the notable distinction of governing it himself (under royal supervision, that is).

Unlike Anne Hutchinson, Thomas Hutchinson was not a rebel. In fact, he secretly advised the British government that it should crack down on those who were, like the troublemakers who executed the outrageous “Tea Party” of December 1773 that resulted in large-scale destruction of government property. When Benjamin Franklin, who was based in London at the time, managed to acquire documentation of that advice, he leaked it to a Boston newspaper, which created a firestorm of controversy. Franklin was dragged before Parliament for his role in the dispute and subjected to a barrage of humiliation that turned a mild-mannered 68-year old grandfather into a radical for the rest of his life. But Thomas Hutchinson had it worse. His personal and political situation became unbearable, and he and his family had to abandon the only home he had ever known and went into exile in England, where he completed his three-volume history of the colony before his death in 1780, with the Revolution still raging.

So Thomas Hutchinson was not happy with the way the American Revolution turned out for him. But he knew what he believed, and there’s little indication he ever doubted what he should do. There were plenty of people who did doubt, however. For some, like Franklin’s friend Joseph Galloway, who served in the First Continental Congress, this was a matter of competing loyalties, of being genuinely torn about where he belonged. Though he started out as a Patriot protesting British policy, Galloway ultimately chose to be a Loyalist, and like Hutchinson lived the remainder of his life in England, advising the imperial government on how to put down the rebellion.

In other cases, though, the uncertainty was less a matter of divided loyalty than simply trying to guess about how to avoid trouble. High-minded claims of liberty aside, a clear-eyed observer could see that the rebels were hardly saints in pushing for their independence. In famous words of British essayist Samuel Johnson, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?” Those negroes, of course, were not likely to be impressed by an assertion that “all men were created equal” made by a man who owned close to 200 slaves. The royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, recognizing the vulnerability of the rebels on this point, issued a famous proclamation in 1775 promising freedom to all slaves who abandoned their masters and joined royal forces seeking to put down what had become an armed insurrection. (For many rebel Virginians, this was the lowest blow, the last straw, in bringing them around to the cause of independence.)

For a lot of slaves, Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation had to be a mighty tempting offer. And yet there were all kinds of reasons to hesitate before accepting it: loved ones who couldn’t, or wouldn’t leave their homes; dangerous logistical obstacles in reaching British lines; and so forth. But high on that list would likely be a question of trust: would the British be true to their word? If so, what would that really mean?

In fact, the British were true to their word. They created a small regiment of African American soldiers—this almost a century before the famed Massachusetts 54^th of Glory fame in the American Civil War—that fought against the Patriots. On the whole, however, Lord Dunmore’s Declaration proved to be a disappointing deal. Many of those who took it perished from disease in war camps or on British vessels. Of the estimated 100,000 slaves who attempt to cross over, only about 3,000 were eventually resettled in Nova Scotia. For those who made it, such an outcome had to be bittersweet at best. It would hardly be the first or last time that racism forced difficult calculations on people who typically had to make the best of bad situations to the best of their finite abilities.

On bitching

The following remarks were delivered at an assembly at my school last week which dealt with the word "bitch" and what place it has, if any, in common discourse.

 

Though I’ve been known to use such terms for pedagogical purposes – usually to try and capture another person’s point of view – I can’t recall ever calling anyone a bitch. (I call my two dogs bitches all the time, but I don’t think they mind.) It’s an ugly word, almost always used for ugly purposes. But I instinctively resist explicit attempts to limit such terms, in part because trying to silence them sometimes only adds to their totemic power. This is why I dislike the euphemism “n-word,” for example.

I also resist attempts to limit profane language because in some cases, the call comes from people in positions of relative privilege who may not understand its visceral appeal for those who experience themselves as disempowered. Lacking other resources, language – more specifically, the language to offend people who set, if not dictate, standards of appropriate behavior – is one of the ways working-class communities define themselves and establish their own boundaries. I believe anyone familiar with the history of hip-hop knows what I mean.

That doesn’t mean you or I should celebrate those boundaries or observe them in our own lives. But it might mean we should have a sense of humility about how much dignity we demand, and an understanding that outrage, while sometimes a necessity on behalf of others, can also be a luxury for ourselves. I realize that as a middle-aged white man, this is a little too easy for me to say. And I wouldn’t be saying it all if I didn’t believe that a robust critique of the word “bitch” was underway in this assembly. But if I’m more than simply a collection of demographic categories, perhaps there’s merit in the notion that we can tolerate some bitchiness here at Fieldston. Sticks and stones may break our bones; names really can hurt us. But maybe sometimes we’re strong enough to neither give, nor take, offense.

Constituting truth

In Constitutional Myths: What Wet Get Wrong and How to Get It Right, Ray Raphael hollows hallowed Conservative doctrine

The following review has been posted on the Books page of the History News Network.  

Once upon a time, the Constitution was seen by historians as the property of the right. That's because Charles Beard told us so -- exactly one century ago. In his influential 1913 book An Economic Theory of the Constitution of the United States, Beard explained the document was the work of a wealthy elite seeking to restrain the egalitarian tendencies of the American Revolution. But Beard provoked a reaction; by midcentury a new generation of scholars like Clinton Rossiter of the Consensus School argued for a less ideological approach to understanding the framing and approval of the Constitution. The rise of neoconservatism in the last half of the twentieth century, typified by organizations like the Federalist Society, effectively lionized precisely what Beard complained about. Diffused versions of such thought drifted into the Tea Party, where the Tenth Amendment, which emphasizes the limits of what the national government can do, has become sacred scripture.

Now here comes Ray Raphael to take the Constitution back for the left. Actually, Raphael has been contesting conservative interpretations of American history for some time. His 2001 book A People's History of the American Revolution, part of a series under the editorship of the late Howard Zinn, renders a bottom-up version of the story in the now-classic Zinn traditon. Founding Myths: Stories that Hide Our Patriotic Past (2004), is a collection of counter-narratives that challenge heroic tales that disempower ordinary Americans by emphasizing the gap between the Founding Fathers and themselves. Such concerns are rooted in Raphael's own personal history; he was a participant in the Civil Rights movement a half-century ago as a community organizer and voting rights activist.

Loosely speaking, Constitutional Myths is a sequel to Founding Myths, in that its locus is about a decade later and is similarly devoted to contesting prevailing conservative notions. But while the former focused on people and anecdotes that had become literally legendary (e.g. Paul Revere's ride, Molly Pitcher's battlefield prowess, etc.), his concerns this time are more purely ideological. A series of eight chapters systematically dismantles notions that the framers of the Constitution were anti-government, anti-taxes, or even anti-politics. In each case, he begins by conceding the "kernel of truth" to such views, before a "but" section outlining the alternate view and a longer "full story" that suggests the complexities and ambiguities involved. Still, Raphael's own views are clear. Of course the framers believed in a strong central government; "if all they cared about was restraining power they would have stuck with the Articles of Confederation." James Madison was not the father of the Constitution; if he was the government would have actually been a good deal more centralized than it was (that's because conservatives tend to focus on the Madison of the 1790s who hated Alexander Hamilton rather than the Madison who worked alongside him in the 1780s). Instead of an emphatic assertion of limited government, the Bill of Rights was actually a piece of political legerdemain designed to forestall a second Constitutional Convention that might have fatally weakened federal power.

Raphael writes with a deft touch and a lifetime of learning that he wears lightly. His immersion in the primary sources is as evident as it is for less pointed peers like Pauline Maier and Jack Rakove (who provide blurbs for the book). One feels to compelled to challenge his assertion that one can tell anything resembling "the full story" from any perspective in chapters that average about 20 pages. And as Raphael himself would probably concede, it would be possible to construct an alternative version that turns his assertions inside out with chapters that concede federal power but emphasize its limits, a Madison who may not have authored the Constitution but provided plenty of its DNA, and so forth. But this is very much a history and for its moment -- originalists be damned.

Again, what keeps it grounded is Raphael's evident authority. Constitutional Myths is buttressed with a substantial collection of primary source documents that form a counterpoint to the standard issue sources students typically encounter. Indeed, the book makes for an ideal text for a high school or college civics course, one that revitalizes an old-fashioned but necessary subject.  Raphael's youthful vitality makes him a welcome traveling companion for beginner and seasoned veteran alike. Long may he wave.

Not for Christ's sake

In The Testament of Mary, Colm Toibin gives us a disconcertingly modern Madonna

The following review has been posted on the Books page of the History News Network.  

This book is billed as the testament of Mary, not the gospel of Mary. "Gospel" means "good news," but protagonist of this novella (adapted into a play that will come to Broadway this month) has little to offer in the way of glad tidings. For thousands of years, the mother of Jesus of Nazareth has come down to us as a woman who unquestionably accepted God's instruction that she be the instrument of a virgin birth, lived to see her son executed, and then vanished from the pages of history. But in Irishman Colm Toibin's version of her life, we see an anguished old Mary who finds more comfort from the solitude of a pagan temple than she does communing her son's associates, who are blithely constructing a myth in her midst.

The book opens with Mary in exile in the coastal Roman city of Ephesus, supported by followers of Jesus who somehow attend to her and query her, without ever really paying attention to her. She has never recovered from her son's crucifixion, which she describes as a curse "that pumped darkness through me at the same rate as it pumped blood." She lives listlessly, awaiting death, alternating happier memories of her intact family -- she angrily demands that her son's followers not sit in the chair of her forgotten husband Joseph -- with the unsettling period of Jesus's ministry and his eventual arrest and execution.

Mary's recollections correspond unevenly with the the accounts we have come to know as the synoptic gospels. The story of Lazarus precedes the wedding at Cana, which is typically considered the start of the Jesus's ministry. Unlike the Gospel of John, Mary does not ask Jesus to turn water into wine; here she's too anxious about the spies and informants that endanger her and her son. According to that same gospel, the dying Jesus addressed Mary by saying, "Behold your son" (and the apostles by saying, "behold your mother"). But in this version of the story, Mary and the apostles keep a safe distance, and, in a decision for which she can never forgive herself, Mary flees to save her own life rather than remain with the body of Jesus.

These scriptural discrepancies go to the heart of what Toibin is trying to do here, which is to demythologize Christianity -- here it may be no accident that his allusions rest on the Gospel of John, that most mystical scripture -- by showing its origins as a set of accounts that are not simply of questionable accuracy, but explicitly scorned by one who was there at the creation. "They want to make what happened live forever, they told me," she reports. "What is being written down, they say, will change the world." When Mary tells these evangelists she doesn't understand what they mean, they reply, "He was indeed the Son of God."

But for this Mary, Jesus was not the Christ. And the presumed future salvation of others brings her no comfort. "I was there," she replies. "I fled before it was all over, but if you want witnesses then I am one and I can tell you now, when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say it was not worth it. It was not worth it." But these apostles don't care. One is reminded here of the Jesus of Nikos Kazantzakis's 1953 novel The Last Temptation of Christ, who meets a St. Paul who regards what Jesus himself thinks or knows as less important than an emerging world of believers for whom faith is more important than truth.

By this point, insistence -- the need? -- for the modern imagination to place God in a mortal frame has almost become a cliche that stretches across an ideological spectrum from Martin Scorsese (who made a film version of The Last Temptation of the Christ with Brooklynesque patois in 1988) to Mel Gibson (who directed the painfully graphic, and anti-Semitic, Passion of the Christ in 2004). This modern form of Arianism is meant to make Jesus more realistic, and thus believable. But it also makes him a little safe, sidestepping the question of divinity by making him more acceptable to a secular imagination. I understand that impulse. But I'm growing a little suspicious of it.

What Toibin is doing here, however, is a little different. He's not rounding the spiritual edges of Jesus with flesh and blood; instead, he's constructing a heretical Mary who challenges rather than accommodates. I gasped out loud (actually, what I said was "Jesus," taking the Lord's name in vain) when I got to the penultimate paragraph of this book. In a weird way, though, I find myself wondering if Toibin is, in his oblique way, more faithful than most in the way he portrays religious experience with an unsentimental toughness that eschews easy answers. (Actually, there's something supernaturally creepy in the way Mary experiences the resurrected Lazarus and the disconcerting glow of her son at the wedding.) The life and death of Jesus is a mysterious business. It's probably best to understand it as something you can never really understand.