Right Wing Nut House

In what will surely be seen as a defining moment for the 9/11 truther movement, the History Channel has delivered a blow for sanity and rationalism by airing a superior documentary entitled 9/11 Conspiracies: Fact or Fiction.

There’s no other way to say it; the truthers got reamed.

They got reamed to the point that the truthers who produced the internet video Loose Change are scrambling to alter the third version of their conspiracy mongering tripe, even going so far as to drop any reference to the twin towers being blown up by the government (they continue to insist WTC #7 was brought down by explosives).

The documentary took no prisoners as it destroyed almost all of the major conspiracy theories associated with 9/11 while revealing the real motivations of the truthers; that they are part of a political movement driven by raw, unreasoning hatred of George Bush, the American government, and to some extent, America itself.

Prominently featured were historians like David Brinkley, Editor in Chief of Popular Mechanics James Meigs, and structural engineers, explosives experts, and a host of scientists, military experts, and eyewitnesses to the disaster. The cumulative effect of the testimony of the anti-conspiracists was absolutely devastating. The show left little doubt of the unhinged nature of the truthers, showing many of them - including radio host Alex Jones who has given vast amounts of air time to every kook, crazy, and nutcase with a theory on 9/11 - looking like the anti-intellectual fruitcakes they truly are.

The format was perfect. A truther would lay out a conspiracy theory which was then immediately debunked by 2 or 3 experts. Over two hours, a couple of dozen myths associated with 9/11 were laid to rest permanently including the “missile” that hit the Pentagon, the shoot down of Flight 93, the “implosion” of the towers,” and other theories not based on fact.

The implosion theory was debunked several times over. First, by the best forensic structural engineer in the country who, with the help of some excellent graphics and animation, showed exactly how the planes caused the towers to fall. An explosives expert (a young guy who was flabbergasted at the ignorance of the truthers regarding demolition) pointed out it would have taken weeks to rig the buildings for implosion and would have involved stripping drywall and ripping out walls. The nail in the coffin was supplied by one of the engineers who prepared the final report (working for the independent American Society of Civil Engineers) who showed how the collapse of the towers accounted for such things as the puffs of smoke seen in lower floors as the collapse was occurring as well as the speed of the collapse.

By the end of their presentation, I was on my feet cheering.

The emotional highlight of the documentary occurred when they had members of the victims families responding to the truthers. A confrontation at Ground Zero on the anniversary of 9/11 with the truthers screaming at family members who disagreed with them was shocking. One family member said every time she heard one of the conspiracy nuts it was like “a stab in the heart.”

Not that these nutcases care much. As the documentary showed, the truthers real goal is to blame Bush. And the disturbing poll numbers showing that 46% of the country believing the whole truth about 9/11 is being hidden by the government shows why this documentary should be viewed by everyone.

You can tell how deeply this program hurt the truther movement by the fact that they didn’t try to answer any of the points made by the piece but rather attacked the source:

An upcoming documentary entitled The 9/11 Conspiracies, to be aired on the History Channel, may represent the biggest hit piece to date on the 9/11 truth movement and is rife with bias, cronyism and conflicts of interest

The so-called documentary promises not to look at the flaws in the official story from a neutral perspective but to start out by suggesting that any deviation from the official line is “outrageous”.

The program also features so called independent “experts” who are actually in the employ of the program makers themselves who in turn rely on scores of multi-million dollar contracts with the government and the military-industrial complex.

Hit piece? It is hard to see how much more fair minded the History Channel could have been. They allowed the truthers to spout their conspiracy theories to their hearts content and then rationally, reasonably, calmly poked so many holes in them they resembled a piece of swiss cheese.

Pat Curley of the excellent truther debunking site Screw Loose Change called the documentary “the dream debunking piece. It’s Hiroshima for the Truthers.” One might throw in Nagasaki as well.

Pat concludes:

Overall: Devastating blow for most of the kooks; ironically the CIT nuts get a little thrill as their theory at least gets a little boost. The cumulative effect is pretty overwhelming. The voicemorphed calls thing gets smashed in their faces. Awesome, absolutely the most satisfying moment in a very satisfying two hours!

He is referring to the jaw dropping theory that all the communications from passengers on the doomed planes were faked! Family members tearfully rebutted those outrageous charges. And the young editor of Popular Mechanics, who tried very hard not to laugh when he was debunking some of the more unbelievable theories, actually said he was personally disgusted by the implication that family members were somehow involved in the conspiracy by covering up the fact that the phone calls were not really from their loved ones.

The show will air again this weekend. Check your local listings but I have it in the Chicago area airing at 7:00 PM central Saturday night and 11:00 AM central on Sunday morning.

Don’t miss it.

UPDATE

Due to some outrageously obscene comments by the you-know-whos, comments are now being moderated.

The post could be book length, but it won’t be. That’s because in order to examine the notion of the US being an imperialist power, I don’t need more than a couple of paragraphs.

Glenn Greenwald (objecting to Drezner’s characterization of him as a “pacifist”) says case closed:

For those who actually understand what the term means, there is no reasonable ground for objecting to the term “imperial” to describe America’s role in the world. Even our Foreign Policy Community elites have begun acknowledging that we are acting as an empire and are openly debating the best forms of imperial management. And the seemingly endless string of military interventions over the last several decades under a whole slew of “justifications” leaves no doubt that we see ourselves as world rulers who violate sovereignty and use military force at will, whenever — as Drezner himself said — we perceive that it promotes our interests to do so. That is what an empire does, by definition.

As I have said in the past, the notion that the United States is a peaceloving nation is belied by the facts. Since Viet Nam, we have intervened in Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iraq again, and numerous air raids carried out against Ghaddafi, Saddam, and Slobodan Milošević.

Trouble just seems to follow us around, I guess.

Actually, the use of military power does not necessarily make a nation “imperialistic.” Rather, the reasons for those interventions are what determines whether a nation is building or defending an “empire” or not. And in each intervention I listed, US motives for using military power could be defended as a response to chaos, tyranny, or despotism.

Face it, people. We are “it.” History, geography, and the efforts of our forefathers have all combined to make the United States a superpower. For most of our existence, we ignored our potential to dominate world affairs - even though we could have done so easily from the turn of the 20th century on. Even after World War II when our victorious armies in Europe and Asia could have remained in place and dominated those continents as they had never been before, we chose to bring the boys home and - unprecedented in world history - actually disarm.

From an army of 8 million men we contracted to just over a million by 1949. From an astonishing 80,000 planes at the end of the war, we barely had 5,000 by the end of the decade. The same with our 50,000 tanks that were reduced to 2,000. An 800 warship navy was cut to around 300.

Now, it would be a silly imperial power who would do such a thing. Of course, we had the bomb but it wasn’t clear at that time what kind of a military weapon the bomb might actually be. Until the Soviets got their very own nukes, Truman didn’t know quite what to do with the gadget. He used it as a threat but it is not clear if he would have followed through and made good on those threats. Nuclear doctrine did not mature until the early 1950’s. And when it did, reliance on conventional forces for almost all conflicts - save the Big One with Russia in Europe - was the accepted strategy of the US.

I give this little history lesson in order to make the point that even today when we are the only superpower with an $11 trillion economy producing nearly a quarter of all the goods and services on the planet and a pop culture that people can’t get enough of, by virtue of our size alone, we dominate the planet.

There are those who are uncomfortable with that fact. Perhaps you can give us all the benefit of your wisdom and tell us how we could stop “dominating” the planet without tearing our economy to shreds, destroying our culture, causing a worldwide economic catastrophe, and give free rein to every cutthroat, thug, maniac, and butcher who would then seek to take advantage of the fact that the only thing between them and their sick goals is the United Nations.

Oh, you can work around the edges of the problem. The US must work more within the international framework. Fine. Tell it to the people of Darfur where we have consistently tried to the get the United Nations to refer to what is happening there as “genocide” only to be rebuffed. We may yet be forced to intervene there considering the ongoing slaughter and because of every ineffectual and counterproductive thing the UN has done.

Perhaps you think we should radically disarm. Okay, for the sake of argument let’s cut our military by 90%. Just a few jets for air defense, a couple of divisions for homeland security, and perhaps a couple of ships to evacuate our citizens when the world inevitablly blows up. Happy? Good. And the next Tsunami that hits Indonesia or some other natural disaster that the world needs to tend to, we’ll fly a couple of UN bureaucrats out there to help with morale. Since that’s all the help victims of those disasters are going to get for a couple of weeks, let’s hope too many people don’t die because of it.

Nor should we worry about the little wars where the bigger neighbor will invade the smaller nation just because there’s no one there to stop them. The idea that UN sanctions would scare off any of these cutthroats is laughable.

What else? Get Hollywood to stop making crappy movies? Or maybe make it impossible for other countries to purchase our music, our movies, TV programs, and other manifestations of the most wildly popular cultural exchange in human history.

Now we’re where the Greenwalds of the world want us to be. No more of this runaway globalization, no more militarism. No more cultural dominance. Just the US taking its rightful place as subservient to the UN and other international bodies. Let the Europeans run the world. They’ve been doing it a long time and experience has to count for something.

I put it to you; for all our faults, foibles, stumbles, good and bad motives thrown in for good measure, the world cannot do without us as we are now. You can have a president that grovels before the UN or the EU. But that won’t change the fact that when the EU’s chestnuts are in the fire, they won’t turn to the French to bail them out. Love us, hate us, spit at us - you can’t ignore us.

Are we an imperialist power? The only people who seem to care are those who wish to call us “imperialists.” For the rest of the world, the US is a fact of life, a force of nature. And, I might add, a welcome sight when the boogyman is knocking at the door or Mother nature goes on a bender.

Can we do it while acting more humbly? Must we be so “arrogant?” Next tyrant we overthrow, we should be sure to apologize before having our military rip his regime a new one. Maybe that will satisfy those who see anything relevant at all in this stupid argument.

Has it really been 30 years today since the death of Elvis Presley?

I was a year and some out of college and found his death sad but hardly a reason for the kind of outpouring of grief we witnessed around the world. After all, I was a Rolling Stones/Jimmy Hendrix/Led Zeppelin Rock ‘n Roll disciple who, along with most of my generation, viewed “The King” with a combination of contempt for selling out to Hollywood and bemusement at his on-stage antics in Las Vegas. I have since come to appreciate Elvis a little more, especially those Vegas shows where he proved himself a pretty good entertainer. But his music never did much for me, nor his voice, nor his early stage theatrics which even back in the ’70’s appeared stilted and forced.

I had a similar reaction to the death of Diana. Nice looking girl who fell in with the wrong crowd; the cutthroats who run the British monarchy - people who will do anything and go to any lengths to maintain their privileges and wealth. But what exactly had she done to warrant the massive, even hysterical manifestations of grief we saw not only in Great Britain but here in America as well? She was photographed holding AIDS babies. Very nice but beside the point. Standing next to her in the photographs were the real heroes - people who held and cared for those babies not just when a gazillion cameras were going off but every single day.

People who comforted those babies as the life oozed out of them. People whose contributions to humanity so far exceeded this mop topped blond rich girl that for me, it became an insult to those health care workers who held AIDS babies as well as others whose causes were adopted by Diana in an effort to either assuage her feelings of guilt at being born into privilege and wealth or out of a calculated effort to create a public personae that was guaranteed to keep her name in the media.

Elvis wasn’t quite the publicity hound that Diana became only because the media in the 1950’s and 60’s was just starting to suffocate us. The moguls hadn’t yet figured out that what the American people craved more than news from the world’s hot spots, more than information on the struggle for civil rights, more than coverage of American politics was dishing the dirt on the private lives of the world’s rich and famous.

I was barely 6 months old when Elvis recorded his first song for Sun records, That’s Alright, Mama, which was perhaps the first example of a viral recording making a huge impact on the cultural consciousness of America. Before the acetate was transferred to vinyl, it had been played on several radio stations in Memphis, generating a buzz that carried it to the top of the charts once the record was released (along with the other side of the single, an old bluegrass waltz called Blue Moon of Kentucky).

The Elvis phenomena in the 1950’s either reflected or began a cultural revolution, depending on your point of view. The cart and the horse in this case might be indistinguishable. For all the nostalgia for the 1950’s and its supposedly tranquil, somnolent nature, there were undercurrents of revolution boiling beneath the surface. Peyton Place, the novel of sex and secrets about small town America was published the same year - 1954 - that saw the emergence of Elvis Presley. The book was a cultural atomic bomb, 59 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list and eventually selling a phenomenal 8 million copies in hard cover. That book paved the way for other novels critical of American society and especially, its cultural mores like Sloan Wilson’s searing The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and later, Updike’s seminal Rabbit Run.

While TV shows like Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver were seen as more than the ideal of an American family but actually as a true representation of family life in America, the real American family was undergoing incredible changes. In the midst of the baby boom, Elvis burst upon a cultural landscape that was ready for an iconic ringmaster, someone who would parlay the fusion of black R & B riffs and rhythms with what was known at the time as “Hillbilly” music into a brand new art form geared to a young audience and using the new medium of television to sell it.

When Elvis appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1956, 60 million Americans tuned in to see him. His status as a marketing king and preeminent showman rose to new heights. The recording industry had never seen anything like him. Americans had never experienced the kind of music he played either. The influence of black R & B and blues performers was obvious. And while it was fairly common for white musicians to take songs written by black performers and record them, Elvis was the first to actually keep the raw rhythms of the blues performer, grafting it on to other forms of white music like Western Swing and bluegrass. No one had ever heard anything like it and young people devoured it.

They also swooned at the rank sexuality of his public performances. Watching Madonna or Michael Jackson grabbing their crotch during a concert today isn’t half as shocking as the gyrating, grinding, thrusting movement of Presley’s hips was to 1950’s audiences. Bringing sex overtly (if unintentionally if you believe Presley) into the public consciousness, taking it out of the bedroom and putting it on the TV screen proved too much for some.

Until the 1960’s, Presley’s appearances on TV were invariably shot from the waist up lest the youth of America be corrupted. What seems quaint to us today was truly frightening to parents in the 1950’s. They didn’t understand the sex. They didn’t understand the “race music” Presley was making. And they didn’t understand how powerful the message of rebellion Presley was communicating - a message that would be taken to heart less than a decade after that Ed Sullivan appearance with the arrival in the US of the Beatles. Then, with the baby boom generation bursting for change, the Beatles and others would happily oblige them by promoting music and a lifestyle that satisfied the pent up urges of what would become known as the Viet Nam generation.

Can we “blame” Presley for the negative aspects in all this - the whole 1960’s mish mash of dashed hopes and unrealized dreams? Can we blame him for the media’s obsession with celebrity, gotten so out of control that it has trivialized our culture and society to the point that even our politics is now driven by it?

Elvis Presley is proof that history’s forces are more powerful than any single individual (usually). If not Elvis, it would have been another who would have popularized rock music. Presley wasn’t the only one experimenting with such fused forms of musical expression and someone else was bound to have hit it big. And I suspect that those undercurrents of rebellion in American society would have found a voice elsewhere if Elvis had not lived, so powerful and meaningful they were.

For better or worse, Elvis was there to invent, exploit, and capture all of these threads of history and culture, turning them to his personal advantage while inspiring others who came after him to push the envelope even farther. Elvis may be blameless as far as being the father of many modern ills in our society. But his status as one of the originators of our pop culture shouldn’t be forgotten as we examine what is best and worst about the revolution he started.

My brother Jim, an accomplished folk musician and life long teacher, has emailed me with the sad news that Tommy Makem, the great Irish folk singer, has died of cancer at the age of 74.

The death of Makem is significant for a number of reasons. His passing leaves only Liam Clancy left alive of the original “Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem” folk group who took America by storm in the early ’60’s. At its height, the folk revival in America produced an astonishing outpouring of musical talent whose imprint on American culture, mores, and politics we feel to this day. The left wing activism of artists such as Pete Seeger, Mary Travers, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, and a young Bob Dylan roiled the streets and changed the face of America forever. And they did it through music.

Some changes, we might indeed look at in askance; other changes relating to civil rights were necessary and vital to bringing justice to those previously denied it. The great fomenting of ideas and a new way of looking at the world began with this hearkening back to our roots as a revolutionary society that the folk revival brought to the surface. It is hard to imagine the America of today without the influence of those folk artists and the songs they taught us all.

Tommy Makem and the Clancy brothers were a little different. Their traditional Irish ditties, patriotic songs, and wonderful stories set to music revealed both the Irish experience in America and, more importantly, what those immigrants were fleeing when they came here. For me, their music inspired a far more personal journey than the great issues being illuminated by the Pete Seegers or Peter, Paul, and Mary’s of the folk music scene. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem’s music opened the door to discovering my family’s Irish heritage and helped us all take enormous pride in who we were and where we came from.

A purely unscientific sociological observation follows. Recent immigrants wear their heritage on their sleeve, proud of their mother country, still feeling the tug on the heart from across the ocean.

Second generation immigrants are much more determined to be “American.” And while not always rejecting that heritage, it becomes a lot less important to them over time. This was especially true of Irish immigrants who saw what happened to their fathers whose Irish brogue would prevent them from getting good jobs or even working at all.

Third generation immigrants - fully assimilated and more likely to marry outside of their ethnic group - will actually seek out and attempt to rediscover their heritage, hungry to explore the past in ways that their fathers or mothers never did.

For the Moran family, The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem opened up an entirely new world, a means of discovering our past. Their music was not at all like the melodramatic “American” Irish music we were all familiar with. Their songs were of the real Ireland - a place of pain and suffering, of oppression, and a kind of fatalism that seems to me unique to the Irish people. In fact, the group’s first album - Irish Songs of the Rebellion - released in 1956, celebrated that fatalism in songs that told the story of several futile Irish uprisings against British rule. One of those songs, Roddy McCorely, is a staple of family reunions and is guaranteed to bring emotions about our heritage close to the surface:

O see the fleet-foot host of men, who march with faces drawn,
From farmstead and from fishers’ cot, along the banks of Ban;
They come with vengeance in their eyes. Too late! Too late are they,
For young Roddy McCorley goes to die on the bridge of Toome today.

Up the narrow street he stepped, so smiling, proud and young.
About the hemp-rope on his neck, the golden ringlets clung;
There’s ne’er a tear in his blue eyes, fearless and brave are they,
As young Roddy McCorley goes to die on the bridge of Toome today.

McCorley was a hero of the rebellion of 1798…as opposed to the Easter Rebellion or any of the dozen or so other uprisings against the British that were put to song at one time or another by the Irish. The image of the young McCorely going to his death so stoically is one of the most powerful of my childhood. It’s an example of a song with a mournful subject that has the effect of uplifting the listener emotionally.

The Irish songbook is full of music like that and Tommy Makem helped bring it alive for all of us. Makem became acquainted with the Clancy’s in Ireland back in the ’50’s. Moving on to Canada and then New York city, the boys were originally interested in becoming actors (Tom Clancy eventually went on to appear in dozens of TV shows and movies). They began to sing in small pubs and taverns to help make ends meet. Eventually, inspired by the Kingston Trio, the boys decided to try making a living as musicians. They immersed themselves in the folk revival in New York city, meeting legends like Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. Dylan liked the song “Patriot Games” so much he wrote additional lyrics and released it as “With God on Our Side.”

An appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1961 made their careers. Since that time, the group released dozens of albums, had breakups, reunions, different family members taking part, and finally the death of Paddy and Tom Clancy and now Tommy Makem bringing what is surely an era of folk music to an end.

Beyond the impact the group had on the world at large, their affect on my family cannot be measured. We glory in singing many of the group’s songs (accompanied by my brother Jim and his trusty Martin guitar). The drinking songs, the Irish patriot songs, and the songs of protest, including this strange and wonderful tune about British oppression that fairly drips with satire:

When we were savage, fierce and wild
She came like a mother to her child.
She gently raised us from the slime
Kept our hands from hellish crime,
And sent us to Heaven in her own good time.

Now Irishmen, forget the past!
And think of the time that’s coming fast.
When we shall all be civilized,
Neat and clean and well-advised.
And won’t Mother England be surprised?

“Whack Fol A Diddle” perfectly expresses the mixture of hate and contempt the Irish feel toward the British to this day. There is something so defiant in those lyrics that brings out the pride I feel in being of Irish heritage.

Tommy Makem is gone. I wonder if they’ll put the lyrics to this last verse of “Jug of Punch” on his gravestone?

And when I’m dead and in my grave
No costly tombstone will I have,
Just lay me down in my native peat
With a jug of punch at my head and feet.

Does anyone care anymore?

In 10,000 years that garbage you’re taking out today after the little woman nags you about it long enough will become priceless artifacts. Future archaeologists will puzzle over that broken coffee mug with the picture of a naked woman on it and wonder if she was some kind of goddess or perhaps a representation of your wife.

Maybe you should leave a note.

It won’t matter because the paper your note is written on won’t survive. Nor will 50% of the rest of our bio-degradable garbage which will leave a lot of real nasty stuff those future scientists will have to go through in order to extract a few nuggets of history that will tell future humans all about us.

In 10,000 years, no one will remember Nancy Pelosi. No one will remember George Bush either. They may rate a line or two in some obscure scholar’s dissertation on primitive nation-state politics but I doubt it. History will lose track of them as she forgets so many others. Clio is really quite selective about what people and events are clasped to her bosom and carried through the centuries to be examined and debated by those in the future whose calling is to explain the past to their contemporaries.

The millions of words spoken and written in anger or passion or to persuade others over Iraq these last years will have completely disappeared, are already disappearing as the relentless march of time burns away all but the most influential or seminal of events and people. What’s left is in turn ground to powder and the remainder sifted through the ages until the essence of an entire century or more will be distilled for consumption.

This doesn’t make what’s happening today any less important. But it does give us a sobering perspective on how, in the long, tangled skein of people, events, and ideas that make up the history of the last 100 years - the wars, the ideology, the clashes of civilization and wills, - almost all of it will be seen as nothing more than sound and fury signifying nothing if it is remembered at all.

Except for the moon landing, of course.

You can’t find much in newspapers or on the news nets about the 38th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon which was actually yesterday, July 20th (The moonwalk occurred early on the 21st.). Bloggers desperate for something to write about contributed more than a thousand posts to the historical discussion with an unknown number reminding everyone that the landing was a hoax, that all the moon footage was shot on a Hollywood backlot.

I have no doubt that for the foreseeable future, this kind of ho-hum reaction will greet subsequent anniversaries marking the achievement of Apollo 11. It isn’t that the event has lost its importance as much as its distance in time allows for a diminishing in the importance of the actual memory of the occasion. So much has happened between then and now that even though the moon landing may be the only thing remembered about the times in which we live 10,000 years hence, Apollo 11 today has a lot of competition when it comes to available space in our brains for recalling the past.

Then there are those who don’t see what all the fuss is about, that the accomplishment was a waste of resources that could have been better spent or not spent at all. From a purely rationalist point of view, there may be something to that argument - especially given the fact that NASA failed miserably in following up on its achievement in landing on the moon to go on to bigger and better things. No permanent space station - unless you include that over priced, over sold, under performing piece of space junk called the “International Space Station” we have orbiting now.

No trip to Mars. Not even a trip back to the moon to set up some kind of base of operations for future exploration. Only a fairly dangerous, earth orbit bound space truck called the Shuttle whose life has been extended because the NASA bureaucracy can’t figure out how to dream big dreams anymore. Apparently, there is no manual or position paper on how to capture the essential hunger felt by most people for human exploration of the universe to be found in any of the offices of NASA’s top bureaucrats.

A pity. Their predecessors who cooked up the Apollo program in response to a challenge from our ideological opponents in the old Soviet Union were, if nothing else, dreamers. They were also inveterate gamblers. There may never have been nor will there ever be any project undertaken so fraught with danger and risk for the participants as the Apollo program.

Think of it. In 1962 when the program was just getting underway, America had put exactly 3 men into space, only one of them into earth orbit. By making the decision to land on the moon and return safely by the end of the decade, NASA had its work cut out for it. Not only new technologies would have to be developed but entire industries would have to be created in order to meet Kennedy’s ambitious goal. There has never been an effort in peacetime like it in history. More than $24 billion would be spent (about $120 billion in today’s dollars) to make that dream a reality.

Nearly 500,000 human beings would lay their hands on at least one of the millions of parts that made up the Apollo 11 spacecraft. This dwarfs the number of people who worked on the Manhattan Project to build the A-Bomb, the Panama Canal, and the Pyramids put together. A study done in 1972 revealed that more than 25% of all the man hours worked on the project were in the form of unpaid overtime. This is because by 1968, after the fire of Apollo 1 that killed 3 astronauts along with subsequent delays in the delivery of the Lunar Module (LM), Congress was threatening to cut the program off at the knees.

In effect, NASA was launching a 37 story building, aiming it at a moving target orbiting the earth at more than 2200 miles per hour, 240,000 miles away with a spacecraft travelling more than 19,000 MPH. Some engineers in the early days of Apollo privately believed that the feat would be impossible, that the astronauts were doomed. The technical challenges were enormous. The Saturn V booster would have to generate more than 7,000,000 pounds of thrust to get the behemoth off the ground. The Lunar Lander, the first vehicle designed to be used exclusively in space, was the size of a mini-van and contained two stages.

The second stage was supposed to lift the astronauts off the surface when they were ready to leave and on Apollo 11, it had never been tested in space before. If it failed to work, there was no back up, no rescue plan. President Nixon was told that given all the uncertainties, there was a one in five chance that the astronauts would be left stranded on the moon unable to return (Neil Armstrong gave himself a 50-50 chance of coming home). He even had Bill Safire write a speech in case the mission failed.

Why should this date in history lose its significance as the years pass? There has never been an achievement in the history of mankind that summed up all that is good and noble in the human soul as Apollo 11. Yes the reasons for going to the moon may have been petty and selfish. But the achievement itself represents the best of what we are - thinking, rational animals with an insatiable curiosity of what is beyond the next horizon. NASA may have forgotten this. But the dream itself is alive and well thanks to a small group of outriders on the very frontiers of science who have started their own private space ventures. In the next decade, the novelty of space tourism will dominate this industry. But eventually, the drive for profit will send people hurtling into the void to exploit the resources and raw materials found on other heavenly bodies in our solar system.

Like NASA of the 1960’s, their reasons may be selfish and petty. But the very act of exploration will once again confirm the fact that regardless of politics or economics, the destiny of man is out there somewhere and everywhere in the universe. And it won’t be the ossified bureaucrats in governments who will lead this quest. It will be the dreamers and the risk takers whose own small steps will turn into giant leaps for all of us in the not too distant future.

Faithful readers of The House will recall that in previous years, my “Liveblogging the Battle of Gettysburg” occupied this site at around this time. Sadly, I have taken that project about as far as possible and declined to involve myself with it this year.

You asked for it. You got it. Let’s go to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on July 4, 1776 and the background on how the final version of the Declaration of Independence came about. (I liveblogged the vote on independence here. And here is my post from yesterday.)

Scroll for updates below.

It’s 10:00 AM on Bloggers Row here in Carpenter Hall and for once, I find myself virtually alone. My blog friends have finally realized that just because Congress says that they will start deliberations at 10:00 AM every day doesn’t mean anything. Our Great Men enjoy long, leisurely breakfasts and have little interest in adhering to the dictates of good government by hurrying themselves along. The city could be on fire or worse, the British could be marching down Chestnut Street and I fear many members of Congress would tarry at their tables lest their digestion suffer.

I don’t really mind the delay that much. It gives me a chance to reflect on what has been accomplished these last momentous weeks here in Philadelphia and try and make sense of what the future might bring.

I had a long conversation with Tom Paine last night at City Tavern - well, in truth, Mr. Paine did most of the talking, lubricated as he was by several glasses of ale. Anyone who has read Common Sense knows the measure of this brilliant, erratic man. For in truth, I found that his speaking is much the same as his writing.

He touched on familiar themes; the inevitability of our separation from England as well as the certainty of our triumph. I tried to argue the Tory side but he cut me off peremptorily and quoted from his treatise, destroying my arguments in the process:

I have heard it asserted by some, that as America has flourished under her former connection with Great Britain, the same connection is necessary towards her future happiness, and will always have the same effect. Nothing can be more fallacious than this kind of argument. We may as well assert that because a child has thrived upon milk, that it is never to have meat, or that the first twenty years of our lives is to become a precedent for the next twenty. But even this is admitting more than is true; for I answer roundly that America would have flourished as much, and probably much more, had no European power taken any notice of her. The commerce by which she hath enriched herself are the necessaries of life, and will always have a market while eating is the custom of Europe.

Mr. Paine makes an interesting point, one that I’ve heard some patriot merchants make on several occasions. Our connection to Great Britain with her restrictive trade practices and heavy duties on necessities has stifled the American commercial character. Might independence loose a torrent of business activity that will enrich our citizens from all levels of society? Paine is adamant that this is so. The man is too much a “leveler” for my taste but it’s hard to argue with his logic. Besides, it’s a little intimidating for this lowly blogger to be interviewing the man credited by many with moving the entire nation toward independence!

I received some disturbing news from my landlady this morning about a disturbance at the Shippen House late last evening. Evidently some drunken dock workers were shouting insults at the Tory family and went so far as to throw a few rocks at the windows.

No one was hurt but it raises some troubling questions; what to do with the loyalists?

Philadelphia has thousands of Tories. As I mentioned yesterday, I saw several loyalist families making preparations to abandon the city now that independence has been declared. But many more will no doubt stay - especially the families that own the great commercial houses that carry on with most of the business in the city. Should we place them under arrest? Should we force them to leave? What is to be done?

I never thought of this before but, in a way, this conflict will also take on the character of a civil war because there are so many among us who are still loyal to England. I have no doubt that my loyalist friend Thomas would fight for England if given the chance. Might we meet on a distant battlefield in the future, two friends who have known each other all our lives trying to kill each other?

A sobering thought, that. And that’s not the half of it. Thomas’s brother Joseph is a patriot and has already joined the Continental Army. Might the two brothers…?

Perish the thought. Some things we cannot dwell on lest the uncertainty of the future affect our present deliberations. And what we must concentrate on now is shouting from the mountaintops our determination to resist tyranny so that other nations can join us in our quest for liberty and independence.

But that won’t happen until we get Mr. Jefferson’s declaration passed in reasonably good order. I am told that Congress is determined to finish the task today so stay tuned for an update around 2:00 PM. We’ll see how far they’ve gotten.

UPDATE: 3:30 PM

The Congress is winding up its perusal of Mr. Jefferson’s declaration and from what I understand, the Virginian has been moping around the State House bemoaning the fact that his masterpiece of writing has been butchered.

As a writer myself, I can certainly understand Jefferson’s lament but frankly, he’s a little off base here. First of all, my take on his draft was that he was verbose and emotionally overwrought in some places. And if the Congress wants to exclude passages that are critical of the English people or that highlight the slave trade, that is their right as representatives of the people. I happen to think their judgment is sound on both points.

For instance, just a few minutes ago, Congress changed this passage from Jefferson’s draft:

A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a people who mean to be free. Future ages will scarce believe that the hardiness of one man, adventured within the short compass of twelve years only, on so many acts of tyranny without a mask, over a people fostered & fixed in principles of liberty.

To this cleaner, clearer, less emotionally charged sentence:

A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

I’m sure you can see where Congress, by condensing and clarifying Jefferson’s thoughts on King George, have improved the character of the piece. So Jefferson’s complaints, while understandable, are nevertheless not germane to the object of the matter.

Right now, there is an interesting discussion about the curious lack of references to “God” in Mr. Jefferson’s draft. Congress is looking at the closing paragraph to the declaration. Here is Jefferson’s version:

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America in General Congress assembled do, in the name and by authority of the good people of these states, reject and renounce all allegiance and subjection to the kings of Great Britain and all others who may hereafter claim by, through, or under them; we utterly dissolve and break off all political connection which may have heretofore subsisted between us and the people or parliament of Great Britain; and finally we do assert and declare these colonies to be free and independent states they shall hereafter have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honour.

Here is the altered final paragraph Congress wishes to insert:

We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare. That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

The first major change Congress wants to make would substitute “in the name and by authority of the good people of these states”… and place in its stead “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions”…

The issue of religion has not been raised in discussion of the draft but there is apparently a feeling that by calling upon The Almighty to bless the endeavor, it would have a salutary affect on our own people who are quite the religious lot. For myself, my mother’s family are Quakers where my father’s side don’t believe much of anything. I went to the Meeting House when I was younger but my mother (much to my grandmother’s horror) allowed me to make my own decisions about religion once I reached the age of 18.

Most of these Great Men make a show of attending religious services but as far as their personal beliefs, I’m not sure. I find it interesting that they don’t mention “God” per se in the draft but rather refer to “The Supreme Judge” or, as in this other change from Jefferson’s draft, “Divine Providence.”

Jefferson’s draft:

And for the support of this declaration we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honour.

Revision by Congress:

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

Still no mention of God but everyone knows who they are referring to. Or do they? There is a current of thought abroad in Europe that sees not some Supreme Being watching over our lives but rather a great force of nature that rules the universe. “Providence” refers to this idea that our lives are governed by this force and that America is destined to succeed as a result of what has been set in motion already.

It’s a little beyond my understanding. But most people will see “Providence” as a code word for “God” which is the whole point of the exercise, I gather.

All told, by my count it appears that Congress has made 39 changes to Jefferson’s draft including striking out the passage on slavery. They are preparing for the vote on adopting the declaration - a pro forma action. And then the deed will be done.

I will have one more update shortly.

UPDATE: 4:30 PM

The declaration of American independence was approved unanimously in Congress just a few minutes ago.

All in all, a cracking good piece of writing and thinking. While Mr. Jefferson should get the lion’s share of the credit, there were many hands that improved upon his work who should also receive the favor of history. Adams and Franklin, definitely. And several members of Congress - including the President of Congress John Hancock who was supposed to have muttered while signing his name in huge script to authenticate the document, “I guess King George should be able to read that well enough!” (I have it on excellent authority - a Mr. Charles Thomson, Secretary of Congress, that this story is utter nonsense. Congress had already adjourned and, after making a few minor changes to the draft, Hancock signed it in the presence of Mr. Thomson without saying a word.) Now it’s off to the printer where we assume, Congress assembled will sign it at a later date.

“The favor of history” - that, ultimately, is what this document’s about. Jefferson obviously wrote this declaration with one eye on history and one eye across the ocean. If it ever becomes unclear in the distant future why we colonists rose up to throw off the yoke of British tyranny, all our great-great-grandchildren will have to do is dust off Mr. Jefferson’s handiwork and read it.

But will we be able to transmit to those distant generations what was in our hearts, our minds? Will we be able to make them understand how precious our freedoms are to us, how many of us would willingly die rather than lose them? The British didn’t just want to tax us. They wanted to take our property without our consent - a clear definition of tyranny and arbitrary government. What will those future Americans - and I feel certain there will be Americans in the future - think of our taking up arms and fighting for a new nation? Will they understand how we see ourselves as “new men” set down here by God in a new place, enjoying a bounty from the land gleaned by the sweat of our own brows on our own land? Will that be important to them? I hope so.

I have no idea what the future will hold. But I know we will never stop fighting until this new nation can take its place among the old ones as an equal. Empires come and go, nations rise and fall, but America - an idea more than a place - will always be with us.

Bloggers row is empty now. They are striking the tables and chairs and the workers are giving me “the eye,” telling me it is time to go. I’m off to enlist in the Continental Army, to share the dangers and privations of this war with my friends and neighbors. And one more reason to go off to war…

I have my own country to fight for.

Faithful readers of The House will recall that in previous years, my “Liveblogging the Battle of Gettysburg” occupied this site at around this time. Sadly, I have taken that project about as far as possible and declined to involve myself with it this year.

You asked for it. You got it. Let’s go to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on July 3, 1776 and the background on how the final version of the Declaration of Independence came about. (I liveblogged the vote on independence here.)

SCROLL FOR UPDATES

Bloggers row here at Carpenter’s Hall is beginning to resemble the Congress. Even though it’s 10:00 AM - the time appointed for Congress to open deliberations - most bloggers and delegates are nowhere to be found. I’m sure some bloggers (and no doubt some delegates) are recovering from having tasted a wee bit too much of “the creature” as my grandmother would say. There was a big celebration at City Tavern last night in honor of Mr. Adams and independence. I was there for a while but bowed out early to walk the streets and try and gauge the reaction among the population to the news that the American colonies had cut the apron strings and were no longer part of England.

There were many who appeared extremely pleased at the news. There was also a considerable number of people who appeared uncertain or even fearful. And there were some Tories who were already packing and preparing to leave the city. Judging by the rumblings I’ve heard from some patriots, it may not be safe for those whose loyalties still lie with King George.

For those who were happy at the prospect of independence, a giddy sort of confidence seemed to capture them and the thought of what lies ahead didn’t seem to faze them. This was not, I hasten to add, some kind of raw hysteria but rather a belief in themselves and their abilities to overcome the numerous obstacles that lie in our path.

I have noticed this trait in many of my fellow colonists Americans (!). When faced with a daunting challenge, they seem to have a supreme sense of being able to face the trial with a stout heart and clear eye. I suppose some of that comes from the fact that just a few short decades ago, this city was a dense wilderness full of savage beasts and even more savage men. Having hacked civilization from the primeval forests, perhaps we Americans feel that we can accomplish anything we set our minds to.

A Frenchman of my acquaintance commented on this very thing - and not very favorably I might add. He thought this confidence was insufferable arrogance. I suppose that’s one way to look at it. But I feel that if this is indeed, an “American” way of looking at the world, it will hold us in good stead during the tests we will have to face in the next few years.

My sojourn among the people of Philadelphia last night impressed upon me the unique character of the American race and convinced me even more of the worthiness of our cause. And that cause will be shouted to the world when Congress gets finished with rifling through Mr. Jefferson’s declaration proclaiming our independence. As I mentioned yesterday, I was able to get a brief glimpse of the secret document and from what I saw, it seemed a fair piece of writing and thinking by the Virginian.

You may recall that Mr. Jefferson was charged with drafting the document by the so-called “Committee of Five” - Mssrs. Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Livingston (NY) and Sherman (CT) even though all were supposed to have a hand in creating the document. My understanding (and I’ll have more on this later in an update) was that Jefferson’s draft has already undergone some minor revisions by Franklin and Adams so that a “fair” copy was now in the hands of Congress. I may have some specifics later on the kinds of edits made by the Committee but that depends on whether I can get my hands on a copy or not.

Make sure you check back for updates later.

UPDATE: 12:45 PM

Congress is now in session and going over Mr. Jefferson’s declaration with a fine tooth comb. I was able to secure a copy of the Virginian’s original draft before the Committee of Five reworked it. I understand they made 49 mostly minor alterations. And in my opinion, improved on it.

For instance, here’s the introduction written by Mr. Jefferson:

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to advance from that subordination in which they have hitherto remained, & to assume among the powers of the earth the equal & independant station to which the laws of nature & of nature’s god entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the change.

We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independant, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these ends, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government shall become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, & to institute new government, laying it’s foundation on such principles & organising it’s powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety & happiness…

And here’s the altered text after the Committee of Five made some interesting changes:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Note the subtle change in tone. And I especially approve of the change from the original of the passage “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable…” written by Jefferson to the much more demonstrative and confident “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”

It appears that Jefferson could be long winded at times and I believe the Committee of Five wisely cut back on the verbiage, substituting short, declarative statements - perhaps sacrificing a little style but this isn’t a writing contest we’re in here. We’re trying to convince the world of the righteousness of our cause. Anything that helps in that regard should be embraced, although I hear that Jefferson is already grumbling about fiddling with his masterwork.

We’re getting an audio only feed from the State House regarding the changes being made to the Declaration. At the moment, the delegates seem stuck on some of the reasons Jefferson has given for the seperation. Many of them don’t like the way the document blames the English people for what they clearly consider a fight with Parliament and the King. Anything that seems to criticize our English cousins is being removed. A not unwise move but considering all the flak we’ve taken from the “English people” about the justice of our cause, I really could care less if we offend them or not.

I recall Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great man of letters, telling a correspondent a few years ago “Why is it we hear the loudest yelps for freedom from the drivers of Negro slaves?” That kind of offensive statement is exactly why most of us feel that the English people, while blameless to a certain extent, nevertheless should be chastized for their support of this parliament and their tyrannical actions.

And Dr. Johnson may get his comeuppance with Jefferson’s screed. There’s this passage about our “Negro slaves” that Johnson can take and stick where the sun don’t shine:

…he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

It is, after all, the Crown’s fault that there’s slavery here in the first place. And it has been British ships that brought the poor unfortunates to our shores. Why not blame England for this ” execrable commerce” as Jefferson calls it?

I know Ben Franklin has started up this “Abolitionist Society” which wil agitate to free the Negroes but to my mind, that’s crazy. Three million ignorant savages suddenly freed to fend for themselves? It would be madness!

No - better that they remain slaves. At least until we can educate them to be upstanding Christians and not animal worshippers.

Mr. Ruttledge of South Carolina has already told his delegation that he will pull South Carolina out of the Congress if this passage makes it into the final draft so watch out later for some fireworks.

I’ll have one more update close to supper time.

UPDATE: 5:30 PM

Great excitement! Mr. Ruttledge and Mr. Adams had a knock down, drag out shouting match over the slavery section I quoted above. Ruttledge feels personally insulted by the passage and threatens the unity of the Congress unless it is stricken from the declaration. Adams believes that we can’t ignore the issue of slavery. To do so makes us hypocrites in the eyes of the world.

What to do? Both men have a point. By condemning the slave trade, do you not also condemn those who buy the slaves? And how is it possible to claim our own country on the basis of freedom while keeping millions in bondage?

My own feeling is that the issue isn’t worth tearing ourselves apart. The slavery issue will probably solve itself if we leave it alone and let the states that allow it to deal with it in their own time. After all, I wouldn’t want some Georgia planter telling me how to live my life. I’m not about to tell him what he can do with what is, after all, his own property.

But Adams is adamant about keeping the passage in the declaration and Ruttledge is steaming mad. Keeping one ear on the proceedings, I see where even some northerners are siding with Ruttledge so it seems inevitable that the passage will be struck from the final draft.

This is one argument we can’t afford right now - not with the British Navy darkening the horizon in New York Harbor. Colonel Milford of the Continental Army told me this morning it is likely that General Howe has more than 25,000 battle hardened troops to throw against our little army of 15,000, mostly made up of poorly trained militia. I fear for New York and Washington’s little army but there’s nothing for it - Congress has deemed it necessary for the General to stand and fight and fight he will of that I’m certain.

A word here about Washington. I saw him last year when he arrived for the beginning of this Second Continental Congress. He would stride purposefully into the State House every day, a grave, serious look on his face and a martial bearing accentuated no doubt by the fact that he wore his Virginia militia uniform. Some said at the time that he was angling for the command of the army. I have no doubt that is true but it is also true that there isn’t another man in the colonies who could have accomplished what he has done in such a short period of time. He outmanuevered the British in Boston, levering them out of the city by fortifying Dorchester Heights right under their noses. And of course, during the Seven Years War his otherworldly courage displayed at the Battle of the Monongahela where he almost singlehandedly saved the British army from total disaster with a skillful retreat, had his name on the lips of everyone in America.

I like General Washington. He inspires confidence - a quality that doesn’t appear in either General Gates or that ridiculous fop of a General, Charles Lee. Whether that will be enough against a superior British force bearing down on him in New York remains to be seen.

Congress has adjourned for the day. There will be another session tomorrow so make sure you check back. I’ll probably have an update around 10:00 AM.

Faithful readers of The House will recall that in previous years, my “Liveblogging the Battle of Gettysburg” occupied this site at around this time. Sadly, I have taken that project about as far as possible and declined to involve myself with it this year.

You asked for it. You got it. Let’s go to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on July 2, 1776 - the day that American Independence was literally willed into existence by the people of the United States through their representatives in the Continental Congress.

UPDATES WILL APPEAR ALL DAY LONG - SCROLL DOWN FOR THE LATEST FROM PHILADELPHIA.

It’s 10:00 AM here in Philadelphia on what is shaping up to be a pretty significant day. I’m sitting in Carpenters Hall down the street from the State House where the delegates to the Second Continental Congress are meeting to debate and, we hope, finally vote on whether the colonies should declare themselves free of Great Britain’s oppression and create our own country.

Bloggers row here is all hustle and bustle. As usual, my friend Clayton from South Carolina is late. His manservant Henry is setting up his laptop station while Clayton is holding forth as usual, declaiming to one and all that “I will not trade living under one tyrant 3,000 miles away for living under 3,000 tyrants one mile away.” I see Henry give his master a strange look upon hearing that statement (I read it in a Boston newspaper some months ago) - a look quickly wiped off his face as Clayton moves to his seat.

Clayton is only expressing the doubts that many of us have about this venture. In fact, most of the people I’ve talked to are more or less resigned to the fact that the rupture between our father, King George, and his children here in America cannot be repaired and that independence is therefore the only road open to us. When I heard in May that the King was negotiating with some German states to hire mercenary soldiers to fight here in America, I knew that a great chasm had opened between mother England and the colonies that could never be bridged. Damned Hessians! I hear they are savages when in battle, going so far as to murder the wounded. And what they have done to civilians is unspeakable. If this is what King George now thinks of us, he will get all the war he can handle.

And war it is. With the most powerful army in the world. General George is at the moment, finding out just how difficult a task defeating this army is going to be. He’s hip deep in Redcoats up in New York with rumors that the British will land very soon, probably at Staten Island.. I spoke briefly with General Gates a few days ago and he assured me that Washington would fail, that “the amateur” as Gates refers to our General is in over his head. I might add that Gates is angling for General George’s job so take his statements however you wish. But few military experts I’ve talked to give Washington much of a chance. In fact, I hear that Congress literally ordered Washington to try and hold New York despite it untenability. The “gentlemen” believe that it would be bad form to give up a major city without a fight.

I’ll have more thoughts in a bit once the delegates start arriving. Keep coming back to this site for updates all day.

UPDATE: 11:00 AM

The delegates are beginning to wander in. Several have come from City Tavern where I understand from a fellow blogger that there was a spirited debate over Mr. Jefferson’s draft declaration on independence which will be addressed later today. John Adams let me have a peek at Jefferson’s handiwork and I have to say it’s not half bad. The man has a way with words, no doubt about it. (Rumor has it that Jefferson blogs at the site Publius using the handle “Everyman” but no one has confirmed it.) But I suspect the delegates will all put their two cents in, mangling the piece until even Jefferson won’t recognize it.

Good news from Adams, by the way. As expected, Cesar Rodney from Delaware has made the torturous 80 mile ride to Philadelphia in order to assure Delaware’s vote for Independence. Tom McKean, the other pro-Independence delegate, assured me yesterday that Rodney, who has been in poor health due to his cancer, would be here for the big vote.

Is there a lazier specimen of humanity than these delegates to Congress? Here we are, nearly half past eleven and barely half of them have bothered to show up. The fact that they were supposed to convene at 10:00 AM tells you all you need to know about the work habits of our “Great Men.”

Looks like the vote will happen in the next hour or so. Keep checking back for further updates.

UPDATE: 1:30 PM

Trouble. Apparently both Pennsylvania and South Carolina are dealing with divided delegations and Mr. Adams is unsure how the obstacles can be overcome to bring those states into the independence column.

In Pennsylvania, it’s the brilliant John Dickinson who may singlehandedly derail the drive for independence. You may remember Dickinson’s Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms that he penned last year in response to British provocations. But he’s never been able to make the leap of logic and faith required to abandon the mother country and support America striking out on her own. He has argued passionately this last fortnight against Mr. Richard Henry Lee’s resolution of Independence, fearing a disasterous defeat at the hands of the British Army will be a huge blow to our freedoms. The specter of British troops garrisoned here for a generation along with more high handedness from Parliament has generated some sympathy outside of the State House but not much interest among those who have already cast their lot for freedom from tyranny.

At any rate, Dickinson isn’t budging and unless they can at least get him to abstain, the party may be cancelled.

South Carolina is a different kettle of fish alltogether. Arthur Middleton, an avowed patriot, is sitting in for his ailing father - a Tory of some influence in his colony. My friend Clayton assures me that South Carolina is “in the bag for independence” because Middleton is going to tip the delegation in favor of it regardless of his father’s wishes. I’m not so sure. Young Edward Ruttledge - a most able and accomplished man at 27 years old - believes that Mr. Middleton is having a hard time making a decision and he may recommend to Mr. Adams that the vote be put off for one more day. This would be a mistake in my opinion as it appears to me that independence is sitting on the knife’s edge already what with the trouble in Pennsylvania. We’ll know soon about both delegations so stay tuned.

UPDATE: 2:15 PM

Word from down the street is that a compromise in the Pennylvania delegation has been achieved. Both pro-independence member Robert Morris and Dickinson will abstain from the final vote on the Lee Resolution for Independence. This means that Pennsylvania is in the “yes” column.

And I’ve been able to confirm Clayton’s news about Mr. Middleton. He’s essentially telling his father to be damned and will vote for independence anyway. Make South Carolina a “yes” also.

So there you have it. New York has already indicated that they will abstain, having received no instructions from their legislature. However, I’m told by Phil Livingston that the entire delegation is personally for independence so that there will be no recriminations as a result of their abstention.

I don’t think it’s quite sunk in yet, this idea of declaring ourselves independent and facing the wrath of the mighiest empire the world has ever seen. One thing for sure; we’re going to need some friends and quickly. The Dutch have already been quite helpful. And I hear Ben Franklin is making travel plans for France. If anyone can charm the French into openly declaring for our side, it’s Franklin. He could charm the bloomers off a spinster - something I’m sure he’s done before.

I’ll have the official results of the vote when it occurs.

UPDATE: 4:00 PM

The Continental Congress has passed the resolution for independence by a vote of 12-0 with New York abstaining.

John Adams is all smiles - a rarity, that. Independence wasn’t his idea but it had no greater champion nor ardent supporter than the gentleman from Massachussetts. I overheard him dictating a letter to his wife:

“The Second Day of July 1776 will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. . . . It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shows, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”

I suspect that may be true. I can hear a bells in the background ringing joyously. It appears that word has spread quickly that the United Colonies are now the United States of America.

But just what does that mean? I talk to bloggers from the other states and frankly, I can’t see that we have a lot in common. Oh, we speak the same language - except I can barely understand James from New York. And we seem to have the same ideas about liberty and freedom.

Is that enough to form a nation? I’m going to have a hard time coming to grips with this idea that someone from Virginia is part of the same country as me. Virginia is so far away and so…alien. They’re nothing like folks from Pennsylvania. I guess I’m going to have to get used to it.

One thing is sure; we need a new nation even if it’s hard to see how all the pieces will fit together. We are a different people than those in England. I saw that as far back as The Stamp Act when Parliament tried to ram those taxes down our throats. My cousin in England wrote me wondering why we couldn’t just accept the taxes as a price to be paid for English protection. I told her that accepting tyranny for safety was a bad bargain. She never wrote back.

A new people living in a new nation. It remains to be seen whether these “United States” can stay united in the face of what surely will be some difficult years ahead.

Join me tomorrow when Mr. Jefferson’s declaration comes up for debate. It will probably be pretty dull but perhaps not. I’ll have updates beginning at 10:00 AM tomorrow.

Albert Camus wrote “The innocent is the person who explains nothing.” This rather opaque observation describes the left’s increasing stridency when alluding to their guiltlessness in undermining the morale of the American people for carrying on the War in Iraq. In fact, liberals are employing a strategy that attempts to obscure their stated desire that the United States lose the war while at the same time, deflecting attention from a 4 year effort to convince the American people that trying to bring democracy to Iraq was a hopeless exercise in wishful thinking and that the war has been a lost cause from the start.

They deny it, of course. In fact, they get downright nasty if you even try and point it out. They will whine that their criticisms of the war effort have been misconstrued. They were simply trying to help win the war by pointing out the incompetence and wrongheadedness of the Bush Administration. They really had the US interests at heart all along.

Yes, I have an eight foot invisible rabbit as a friend too.

Never wanting for originality and creativity in seeking to defend themselves, the left is employing a tactic that in another time and other circumstances, they profess to abhor. They have adopted the doctrine of preemption while at the same time, using a tried and true favorite analogy that ties the right’s criticism of their curious sense of patriotism to the Nazis.

They claim the right is sharpening their knives in anticipation of employing a “stabbed in the back” defense for our inevitable defeat in Iraq.

It is gratifying that the left has adopted this meme preemptively. Perhaps they can be persuaded to apply pre-emption to other, more important areas of debate such as the well being and survival of the United States. Then again, I haven’t seen any pigs flying lately so I would guess we’ll have to do without any change of heart in that quarter.

This won’t be the first time the left has employed preemption as a tactic in order to go on the offensive against the Bush Administration and the right. You will recall in the immediate - and I mean immediate - aftermath of Katrina, the left was in full throated howl regarding the incompetence and uncaring nature of the relief effort less than 24 hours after hurricane force winds had died down in the stricken city of New Orleans. At a time when the overwhelming majority of Americans were paying attention to the victims of this natural disaster, the left chose to open a vicious personal attack on the President that was unprecedented in modern history in the aftermath of a calamity. Relying on media reports that later turned out to be bogus as well as trotting out the racial angle, and an anti-war meme about the National Guard to boot, the Katrina Narrative was born. The left was able to define the parameters of the debate over the relief effort simply by getting there first with the most ammunition - whether that ammo was based on facts or not.

But this latest attempt at preemption is designed to fulfill the dual purpose of defending the indefensible and changing the dynamic of any postwar debate by raising the specter of conservatives as Nazis. I must say it is a brilliant strategy in that it seeks to completely absolve liberals from any kind of responsibility for undermining the confidence of the American people in the President and the war as well as making themselves appear as the victim of conservative storm troopers.

As far as I can tell, this meme first saw the light of day a year ago in an article by Kevin Baker in Harpers. After helpfully giving the reader some background on the origin of the “stabbed in the back” legend - a legend not started by the National Socialists but rather by the German High Command’s Luddendorf and Von Hindenberg to excuse their defeat by blaming “socialists” in the new Weimer government - Baker connects the theme to modern conservatives and the idea that the very first use of the stabbed in the back (dolchstosslegende) attack on the left was the result of the right’s paranoid fantasies about a “betrayal” at Yalta by FDR:

The right wing’s dolchstosslegende was a small but fateful conspiracy, engineered through “secret diplomacy” at Yalta. Its linchpin was Hiss, a junior State Department aide at Yalta who was now described as a major architect of the pact. Hiss was a perfect villain for the right’s purposes. He was not only a communist and a spy; he was also an effete Eastern intellectual right down to his name—and, by implication, possibly a homosexual. He had been publicly exposed by that relentlessly regular guy, Dick Nixon, as an unnatural, un-American element who had used his wiles to sway all of his superiors in the Crimea.

Just how he had accomplished this was never detailed, but it didn’t matter; specificity is anathema to any myth. Bullitt and an equally flamboyant opportunist of the period, Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, offered a more general explanation. The Democrats, Mrs. Luce had already charged, “will not, or dare not, tell us the commitments that were overtly or secretly made in moments of war’s extermination by a mortally ill President, and perhaps mortally scared State Department advisers.”

The idea of the “dying President” at Yalta was plausible to much of the public, who had seen photographs of Roosevelt looking suddenly, shockingly gaunt and exhausted throughout much of the last year of his life. To the right wing—which had conducted a whispering campaign against Roosevelt throughout his term in office, claiming that his real affliction was not polio but syphilis, and that he, his wife, and various advisers, including Hopkins, were “secret Jews” and Soviet agents—it all made perfect sense. To the many Americans who still loved Roosevelt and whose votes the Republicans needed, FDR himself could now become the Siegfried figure, a dying hero betrayed by the shady, unnatural Hiss.

Note that Baker skillfully mixes legitimate criticisms of Yalta with the paranoid right’s insistence of a conspiracy. For instance, Baker relies on FDR admirers to debunk the notion that Roosevelt was in any way hampered by his declining health. But historians are not of one mind on the issue, most notably Michael Beschloss

Roosevelt’s illnesses toward the end of the war were well known to his inner circle, and Stimson and Secretary of State Cordell Hull were openly defying the president by late 1944. And though Beschloss says in his book that Roosevelt wasn’t as easygoing with Stalin as some have suggested, he acknowledges that FDR’s health couldn’t help but affect talks at the 1945 Yalta Conference and afterwards.

“At the very end, Roosevelt was not what he was,” he said. “But he felt he should delay [making certain policy decisions] until the last possible minute.” The catch was, when FDR died in April 1945, nobody knew exactly what he had planned to do, which forced Truman into a quick learning curve.

Baker’s point about Yalta - that it was the best deal that could be gotten at the time - was true up to a point. Should FDR have known that Stalin had no intention of abiding by certain terms of the agreement relating to free elections in Eastern Europe? Roosevelt was no starry eyed worshipper of Stalin and knew perfectly well what the Soviet dictator was capable of. Since we can rule out naivete we are left with cynicism - signing a document that FDR knew would be honored in the breach. This, in fact, was the responsible criticism of the agreement coming from the right. I happen to agree (others don’t) that FDR got the best deal possible at Yalta and that it is over the top to suggest we “sacrificed” Eastern Europe. But there is little doubt that the agreement itself gave Stalin a free hand to meddle in post war elections - especially in Poland and Czechoslovakia.

We could go on about Yalta as an historical event but Baker used it to highlight what he saw as the original version of the stabbed in the back theme used by the right. No doubt the Birchers, the isolationists, and even some mainstream Republicans signed on to this paranoia. But to compare the right at the time of Robert Taft to the right of today is extraordinarily stupid. With the exception of a few mossbacks, conservatism has evolved far beyond the narrow strictures of the 1950’s with its deadening conformist orthodoxy to become a dynamic intellectual force for change. Even today, with the movement in disarray and the Republican party without a clue, there is incredible dynamism to be found in conservative thought. How that will translate into change and reform is still an unknown but to compare today’s conservatives with the “Who Lost China?” crowd is repulsive and ignorant to boot.

Baker could care less if his exaggerated myth making about conservatives is accurate because he’s not out to prove anything about Yalta, or Viet Nam, or any other historical event except as they can be used to buttress his thesis that the coming post-war debate on Iraq will try and pin the blame for any defeat on the left. But there is a subtle yet significant difference that Baker and others on the left are failing to make clear when preemptively accusing conservatives of contemplating perfidious accusations regarding the left’s loyalty. And that is quite simply, no responsible conservative I know is blaming the left for the monumental blunders, mistakes in judgment, errors of omission and commission made by the Bush Administration in the prosecution of the military aspects of the war in Iraq. The blame there rests solely and exclusively with the President and his people.

What I and I hope other conservatives will blame the left for is a deliberate, coordinated effort to undermine the confidence of the American people in the war by carrying out a campaign of personal destruction against President Bush while positing several crazy, paranoid conspiracy theories of their own.

(Note: I am not going to accuse the media of the same tactics because I believe reporting from Iraq - which has been abominable - can be explained by the fact that this conflict has proven to be impossible to cover in any traditional sense. With 74 journalists killed in Iraq since 2003, the western press has not only been forced to rely on stringers of unknown ability and whose loyalties can only be guessed at but also, they have been extremely limited in their ability to supply background and context to the story of the war. This is a story begging to be told and I suspect it will be soon enough.)

Dinesh D’Souza (I know he’s a bomb thrower but I’m only quoting his research into leftist thoughts on Iraq) supplies some of the evidence to make my case:

It seems that there are many on the left who want Bush to lose in Iraq. “The United States needs to lose the war in Iraq as soon as possible,” Gwyne Dyer writes in a recent book. Michael Moore claims that “the Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘the enemy.’ They are the Revolution, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow—and they will win.”

Moore may be right, but what’s striking is that he appears to be cheering them on. He is not unique in his sentiments. “I have a confession,” Gary Kamiya wrote on salon.com after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “I have at times secretly wished for things to go wrong, wished for the Iraqis to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage.”

Indeed there are many on the left who seem to hope and work for the war in Iraq to end in dismal failure. Susan Watkins, editor of the New Left Review, affirms that “U.S.-led forces have no business in Iraq” and “the Iraqi people have every right to drive them out.” Political scientist Robert Jensen argues that the U.S. is losing the war in Iraq “and that’s a good thing. I welcome the U.S. defeat.” Sentiments such as this have been expressed by leftists like Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and Markos Moulitsas.

I agree with Glenn Reynolds that much of this defeatist wish making - a theme that has endured since the war even started - is really all about Bush and the left’s utter and complete hatred of anything and everything he has ever done.

They have posited conspiracy theories involving the wildest, most ridiculous charges of vote stealing in both 2000 and 2004. In fact, one could say that the number one goal of the left these past 6 years has been to delegitimize the President of the United States as the rightfully elected leader of the country. The exaggerated and bogus narratives liberals have used to “explain” why we went into Iraq - from enriching Bush and his cronies to revenge for Saddam’s attempt on his father’s life - would have been laughed out of existence a decade ago but have been given credence by both rabid dog bloggers and mainstream Democrats alike. (The paranoid nature of these conspiracy theories mirror the same nonsense brought out by Baker above.)

And it has worked like a charm. The integrity of the President, his motives, and everything that a Chief Executive depends on to carry out the duties of his office, has been systematically undermined by the most hysterically overwrought charges of “fascism” on the home front and “misleading us into war” overseas. It is an easy step to make from there to preemptively defend yourself using what is basically a Nazi analogy while denying something that no one is actually accusing you of doing. If the war is to be “lost” (and liberals will make damn sure that no matter what happens, they will find themselves in agreement with the enemy and a loss it will be), the strategies of the Bush Administration will be to blame. But please don’t play the innocent when it comes to trying your damndest to destroy the American people’s confidence in the integrity of the Administration.

I’m not ignoring the correlation between everything that has gone wrong in Iraq and a loss of will of the people to continue what by all accounts has been a botched effort to win the peace. But one is forced to wonder if the people would have been more forgiving of the blunders and would be sticking with the Administration today in much larger numbers if the left hadn’t been insidiously chopping the President off at the knees by falsely accusing him of every perfidy known to man.

Jonah Goldberg wonders if the stabbed in the back meme isn’t just a lot of puffery. He responds to a Ross Douhat post where the Atlantic Online blogger uses the Nazi analogy approvingly:

Now, it’s nothing new for liberals to draw invidious comparisons between American conservatives and Nazis, but I’m not clear why Ross so gamely goes along with it. If you read his post today, he uses the “stabbed in the back” phrase uncritically. Why? Why not just talk about the Vietnam syndrome? Or media bashing? Which, after all, is what he’s really talking about anyway. I’m not reflexively opposed to the comparison to the end of WWI Germany, but nobody’s really tried to make it in any serious way. The assertion has simply caught on. In that sense it really is a meme, an idea that spreads around because of its superficial seductiveness alone. (Oh and please spare me the emails from people who seem to know what I write in my book better than I do. You don’t).

And speaking of the Vietnam syndrome, I think Ross is basically wrong when he says that the Vietnam syndrome didn’t help conservatives. Vietnam saturated American politics in myriad ways that helped the Reaganite Right, particularly after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, become the party of American confidence. “Morning in America” makes little sense without Vietnam. This is not to say that I think blaming the liberal media is a particularly persuasive explanation on the merits for failure in Iraq (if we fail), but it’s far from clear that an American defeat in Iraq helps those Democrats who seemed, fair or not, determined to make failure a self-fulfilling prophecy. He may be right that if we fail in Iraq, conservatives will shrink their appeal if they blame anyone but themselves. But my guess is that the psychological and geostraategic fallout from failure will be sufficiently enormous and complex that nobody can predict who comes out a winner or a loser from it.

Does the constant drumbeat from the left predicting failure or saying outright we’ve already failed have an effect on the people’s morale and consequently their support for continuing the effort in Iraq? Are they seriously trying to deny that this hasn’t been a deliberate effort to sap the confidence and will of the American people? I think they are. And the way they are doing it is by changing the subject to one where they posit themselves as victims of the right wing smear machine not as perpetrators of actions that by any standard has given aid and comfort to the enemy - who, after all actually counted on the left to perform in this manner since it was the only possible way they could be victorious.

Nice try but it won’t wash.

Every action taken by al-Qaeda, the insurgents, and the militias has been with one eye glued to western media to see how their useful idiots on the left have been reacting to the heartless brutality in killing so many of the innocent thus making Iraq an extraordinarily difficult place to govern. Their strategy has worked to perfection. The left has predictably played their role as destroyer of the people’s will while the Bush Administration has obliged them by committing one mistake after another in trying to defeat them. The combination has been unbeatable - for the enemy.

So yes, blame Bush and his people for what they should be blamed for; the incompetent prosecution of an ill-planned war. But if blaming the left for deliberately seeking to break the will of the American people to carry on the struggle to at least the point we could leave behind some semblance of a viable Iraqi state means that I will be called a back stabber, allow me to coin a phrase: Bring It On.

Oh my. This should rock the boat a bit:

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, is very nervous about releasing his new research, and understandably so. His five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the surprisingly negative effects of diversity will become part of the immigration debate, even though he finds that in the long run, people do forge new communities and new ties.

Putnam’s study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. Trust, even for members of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer. The problem isn’t ethnic conflict or troubled racial relations, but withdrawal and isolation. Putnam writes: “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.”

I don’t know what’s more interesting: Putnam’s findings or his fear in releasing them. Certainly his study fails to show diversity and multi-culturalism breeding happy, smiley-faced Americans walking down their neighborhood street hugging their ethnically or racially divergent brother and everyone dancing around the maypole in solidarity with the world revolution.

But we knew that. Any ten year old knows this from his experience on the real life playgrounds of the world. At a very young age, children are able to recognize differences and without being told or taught, tend to congregate in their own ethnically and racially similar groups. They will make alliances and initiate friendly relations with other groups made up of children from different backgrounds. But the ethnicity and race of their circle of friends will reflect what they see in the mirror every day.

Now don’t get me wrong. Being exposed to people of different cultures and races is a good thing. It breeds a tolerance and a respect for others that was probably missing from my rather sheltered childhood. In my time, one’s parents set the tone for how you treated others from different cultures, backgrounds, and races. If you had tolerant parents, the chances were very good that you would end up a fairly tolerant adult.

But the significance of Putnam’s study - a study he refuses to release because he’s afraid of either us evil right wingers making political hay of his findings (thanks, professor; we will) or he’s terrified of being skewered by the left for daring to publish anything against the multicultural orthodoxy - is that the old fashioned assimilation model for new arrivals might - just might - be a superior socialization strategy compared to the promotion of separate and distinct racial and ethnic groups in America.

Rather than look at the study, I am more intrigued with the Professor’s hand wringing over the fact that his work tends to knock the chocks from underneath a pillar of leftist thinking; that by pigeonholing Americans and recent arrivals into their own special group while encouraging a separateness based on culture and language, tolerance and acceptance will automatically follow in the country at large. This has been an article of faith on left for 30 years. It has affected school curricula for children as young as pre-schoolers on up through the speech codes and diversity mandates found in the finest institutions of higher learning in the land.

And rather than accomplish anything, it has made things worse.

Diversity does not produce “bad race relations,” Putnam says. Rather, people in diverse communities tend “to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.” Putnam adds a crushing footnote: his findings “may underestimate the real effect of diversity on social withdrawal.”

Neither age nor disparities of wealth explain this result. “Americans raised in the 1970s,” he writes, “seem fully as unnerved by diversity as those raised in the 1920s.” And the “hunkering down” occurred no matter whether the communities were relatively egalitarian or showed great differences in personal income. Even when communities are equally poor or rich, equally safe or crime-ridden, diversity correlates with less trust of neighbors, lower confidence in local politicians and news media, less charitable giving and volunteering, fewer close friends, and less happiness.

What’s a conscientious liberal to do? The professor not only has political dynamite in his hands but .50 caliber ammunition for the enemies of multi-cultural thought. The professor’s solution is, shall we say, unique:

Putnam has long been aware that his findings could have a big effect on the immigration debate. Last October, he told the Financial Times that “he had delayed publishing his research until he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity.” He said it “would have been irresponsible to publish without that,” a quote that should raise eyebrows. Academics aren’t supposed to withhold negative data until they can suggest antidotes to their findings.

No, they’re not. And if Putnam was a conservative he’d be lashed to the mouth of a very large cannon featuring a very short fuse. But I suspect the professor will be praised for his altruistic impulses in putting the needs of multiculturalism over his own academic reputation.

And the professor’s stated reasons for the delay in publishing raises some interesting questions; just what “proposals” could “counter” the negative effects of diversity? Let’s give that one some thought. Perhaps we could change the entire intellectual framework by which we approach the problem? How about treating people as individuals rather than lumping them into defined, monolithic groups and encouraging what Goldstein refers to as “the other” - a mindset that breeds a separateness from society and positing its superiority over the dominant culture?

But that would be relatively easy. The problem is we’d have to throw out The Diversity and Multi-Cultural Handbook in order to mitigate these effects on society. The fact that the professor has now taken 9 months to come up with other “solutions” probably means he doesn’t have a clue how to rescue the diversity baby without destroying at least parts of it. And if there is anything that would tick off the left more than producing a study giving the lie to one of their cherished beliefs it would be publishing solutions that would bury that belief for good.

To be fair, the professor’s study showed some improvement in these attitudes in the long term:

Putnam’s study does make two positive points: in the long run, increased immigration and diversity are inevitable and desirable, and successful immigrant societies “dampen the negative effects of diversity” by constructing new identities. Social psychologists have long favored the optimistic hypothesis that contact between different ethnic and racial groups increases tolerance and social solidarity. For instance, white soldiers assigned to units with black soldiers after World War II were more relaxed about desegregation of the army than were soldiers in all-white units. But Putnam acknowledges that most empirical studies do not support the “contact hypothesis.” In general, they find that the more people are brought into contact with those of another race or ethnicity, the more they stick to their own, and the less they trust others. Putnam writes: “Across local areas in the United States, Australia, Sweden Canada and Britain, greater ethnic diversity is associated with lower social trust and, at least in some cases, lower investment in public goods.”

Though Putnam is wary of what right-wing politicians might do with his findings, the data might give pause to those on the left, and in the center as well. If he’s right, heavy immigration will inflict social deterioration for decades to come, harming immigrants as well as the native-born. Putnam is hopeful that eventually America will forge a new solidarity based on a “new, broader sense of we.” The problem is how to do that in an era of multiculturalism and disdain for assimilation.

Does this sound familiar? “…[S]uccessful immigrant societies “dampen the negative effects of diversity” by constructing new identities…”

We used to call them “hyphenated Americans,” these immigrants with “new identities.” It was special to be an “Irish-American” or “Italian-American.” The terms themselves defined a way of looking at America and the world as well as how you interacted with your “Polish-American” or “Russian-American” neighbors. Diversity then wasn’t some artificial construct. It was given life by assimilating oneself into the larger American culture through a wide variety of portals. Churches, social clubs, sports leagues, even local watering holes. And finally, a school system that cared more about children as human beings than dots on a graph.

It wasn’t perfect by any means. But in its creaky, uneven way, it served its purpose well. America successfully assimilated more than 150 million immigrants in less than 150 years - a feat unmatched by any other society in the history of human civilization. Whatever we did, however it was accomplished, it worked.

The fact that the multi-cultural model has turned out less well won’t matter to its advocates and high priests. Blame for its failure will fall elsewhere; oppressive white society, undiversified media, bad parenting, even evil right wing influences.

But perhaps following Hamlet’s Cassius’ advice in Julius Caesar would speed understanding by the left into what is truly a seminal moment in the history of our culture; “”The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves…”

UPDATE

James Joyner and I are on pretty much the same wavelength. He also rounds up some other reaction, including this from Rod Dreher:

I predict this research will have absolutely zero impact on the immigration debate. Why? Because Diversity is a dogmatic secular religion. To dissent from its dogmas is to declare oneself to be a heathen. Seriously, to question its premises is to be thought of as a closet hater by the Establishment. You would get about as far questioning Creationism at a backwoods Bible college as you would questioning Diversity at a US university, corporation or whatnot.

While the reference to “backwoods Bible college” is a pretty gratuitous slap of Christians - especially since not all Bible colleges teach creationism or even intelligent design - the point is valid. There’s too much emotional investment (not to mention financial windfalls for some campus groups) in diversity for the academic community to do anything with these conclusions except dismiss them out of hand or ignore them.