Right Wing Nut House

A Civil War re-enactor displays the Confederate Battle Flag which is different than the Official Flag of the Confederate States of America that you can see here.

It may have been the last time in history that such a sight was seen by mortal eyes.

Fifteen thousand men formed in 3 lines nearly 2 miles from end to end marching with lock step precision across 8/10 of a mile of open ground toward a barely discernible rise known locally as cemetery ridge - a name that forever after would be drenched in the blood of thousands of young men wearing both blue and gray. Snapping in the breeze were dozens of Confederate Battle Flags; the famous cross of St. Andrew on a red background with stars inset on the blue cross.

The majesty and color of the scene imparted a sense of awe and wonder to those watching. Robert E. Lee thought the scene “sublime.” Some of the boys in blue manning the stone wall at the top of the ridge actually cheered the Southerners good order. The visual must have been absolutely breathtaking.

Shortly thereafter came the shooting, the clubbing, and the stabbing as the nation’s most visible drama played out with an intensity not seen before or since.

The history of the Battle of Gettysburg says that the Union won. But the heritage of the battle belongs to the south.

Perhaps not so much today as the cloying grip of mass media has blurred the sectionalism so much responsible for that long ago conflict. But it’s also true that many southerners alive today are just one or two degrees of separation from that time in their history. After all, the last Civil War soldier lived until 1954. Many a southern grandfather can tell stories of long ago Fourth of July’s with some of those same boys that trudged up the ridge at Gettysburg, grown old and bent but still proud, marching in parades behind that most distinctive of American symbols.

Distinctive and yes, hurtful. For many Americans, the Confederate Battle Flag represents a hateful system that held human beings as chattel slaves. For them, there is no heritage only history; a shameful chronicle of rape, of whippings, of oppression that colors our politics and culture down to this very day.

The modern battle over the displaying and even the meaning of the Confederate Battle Flag has aroused emotions not seen since the darkest days of the struggle for civil rights in the 1960’s. The story of the people and emotions behind this struggle is told in a new book by John M. Coski “The Confederate Battle Flag : America’s Most Embattled Emblem .” Coski is library director for the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia.

In his excellent review of the book for The Weekly Standard, Edwin M. Yoder relates an anecdote about C. Vann Woodward, generally recognized as the greatest of all southern historians and the subject of the book’s dedication that reveals why southerners to this day are just a little bit different than the rest of us:

During the McCarthyist inquisition of the 1950s, he was once asked to certify that neither he nor his relatives had ever advocated the violent overthrow of the government of the United States. He was obliged to note that some of his ancestors had fought for the Confederacy and had contemplated exactly such mischief. Wit can defuse passionate differences.

Indeed, that’s usually the case. But in the matter of the Confederate Battle Flag those differences are too profound, too emotional to lend itself to anything but all out war.

Coski gives some post civil war history of the battle flag and in the process, destroys some cherished myths of its detractors:

It is not true, for instance, that we owe its negative symbolism to the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, Coski insists, the Kluxers made greater display of the Stars and Stripes, at least down into the KKK revival of the 1920s, when its ragtag and bobtail knights first seized on the Rebel banner as an emblem of racial and religious bigotry.

All along, such guardians as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans deplored this abuse. In 1948, when the hustings were loud with revivified Confederate rhetoric, and Dixiecrat rallies tended to be festooned with battle flags, the UDC pointedly condemned the flag’s use in “any political movement.”

Instead, the author points to the “flag fad” of the 1950’s when football fans and others used the emblem as a symbol of southern pride and school spirit leading one Atlanta editor to complain it had become “confetti in careless hands.”

Then came the civil rights struggles of the 1960’s and the battle flag took on a whole new meaning - that of southern resistance to both federal encroachment on states’ rights and the struggle to maintain Jim Crow segregation. In one way or another, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi incorporated the battle flag into their dissent. And that’s what has aroused the modern argument over the meaning and symbolism of the flag:

What has lately intensified the battle over the battle flag has been the struggle in four traditionalist southern states that had incorporated the battle flag in their state banners (Mississippi and Georgia), or flown it over their capitols (South Carolina and Alabama).

Mississippi had superimposed the battle flag on its state banner as far back as 1894. That gesture may have been connected with the so-called “redemption” of the state from federal control and black suffrage. But it obviously could have had nothing to do with the prolonged fight over school integration that prompted Georgia, in 1956, to make the battle flag part of its state flag as an explicit gesture of defiance.

Alabama Governor George Wallace famously flew the battle flag over the state capitol when Bobby Kennedy came down to discuss desegregating the University of Alabama. And South Carolina takes a perverse sort of pride in being the first state to secede from the Union following Lincoln’s election hence the flag has taken on iconic status as a symbol of the history of the state’s leadership.

This is what the NAACP and other opponents of the battle flag point to when demanding its eradication as a symbol of southern glory. But is that what the argument is really about? Coski doesn’t think so:

These latter-day battles, in any event, underscore one of Coski’s principal themes–namely, that flag flaps are actually surrogate conflicts over the meaning of the history allegedly symbolized, and in particular that of the Confederacy and the Civil War. This truism would seem to require no emphasis, except that the “history” invoked by the warriors for and against the battle flag is often of a quality so inferior as to make so-called “law office history” seem real.

One comes away from The Confederate Battle Flag with two signal reactions. One is that the warring parties need a cram course in semiology, the better to grasp the mundane truth that responses to signs and symbols vary with the beholder. I personally would enjoy dispatching to my remedial cram school some of the more volatile warriors–notably former senators Carol Moseley Braun and Jesse Helms, who conducted an emotional quarrel on the floor of the Senate in 1993 when Senator Moseley Braun persuaded her colleagues to deny the poor old UDC (United Daughters of the Confederacy) a continued courtesy patent on its flag logo.

Does this mean we’re still essentially fighting the Civil War? In a large way, yes. When Coski talks about “law office history” he’s speaking of the broad brush approach to history most people take when talking about the Civil War. The North fought for “freedom for the slaves” while the South fought to keep their “peculiar institution. In fact, the war was about neither and both. Most of the Northern boys (with the exception of a few New England regiments where abolitionism was strongest) would have been shocked to discover they were fighting to free the slaves. As an example, when Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, several Northern units deserted vowing not to fight to free the black man.

Similarly, according to James McPherson nearly 95% of Lee’s army that fought at Gettysburg did not own a single slave.

Why all the shouting then? It comes down to perception and, in the end, an empathy with those who have suffered:

We hardly need to be reminded that we Americans squander much time, words, and emotion on phantom battles over vaguely defined symbolic issues, while avoiding dispassionate study of the past. I do agree with my old friend, the witty Chapel Hill sociologist John Shelton Reed, who usefully suggests that white southerners ought to learn from St. John Calhoun that his famous theory of the “concurrent majority” requires due consideration of minority views; that is, some consideration of the sense of black southerners that this flag is a symbol of servitude and oppression.

Personally, I can understand the symbolic power of the Battle Flag in that it remains to this day a potent talisman and touchstone of southern pride and patriotism. But in the clash of history versus heritage, the sheer ugliness associated with the chronicle of slavery must win out and the battle flag must be relegated to the dusty attics and dank cellars of southern homes perhaps to see the light of day again when its symbolism does not cause so much pain and anguish.

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,–
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm.”

The image has captured the imagination of American school children for almost 150 years. A lone rider, braving capture at the hands of the British, riding along the narrow country lanes and cobblestone streets of the picturesque towns and villages of New England, shouting out defiance to tyranny, raising the alarm “To every Middlesex village and farm,” his trusty horse carrying him on his ride into legend.

To bad it didn’t quite happen that way.

Longfellow’s poem immortalized Revere’s ride in a way that would never have occurred to the silversmith’s contemporaries. It wasn’t so much that the incident went unnoticed. It’s just that Longfellow took so many liberties with the facts surrounding the event as to obscure the real story of that night and by so doing, overshadow the real accomplishments of one of the more interesting characters in the entire revolution.

Let’s forgive Longfellow his myth making. The poet was, after all, using the ride to illustrate American themes - something almost unheard of in literature until that time. Along with his other great narrative poem Hiawatha, Longfellow has been credited with introducing the rest of the world to truly American motifs and myths. Paul Revere’s Ride, while historically inaccurate, nevertheless conveys the breathless spirit of resistance of the colonists to British rule.

Revere himself joined that resistance early on. Born in 1734, Revere has been described as a silversmith. This does him an injustice. He was much more the artist than the craftsman. His involvement in the earliest stages of the revolution was a consequence of his friendship with that scowling propagandist Sam Adams. He was a prominent member of the “Committee of Safety” that was formed to protect the rights of Massachusetts citizens against threats to liberty, both real and imagined, of the colonial government. And he was one of the grand jurors who, in 1774 refused to serve after the British Parliament made the justices independent of the people by having the colonial governor pay the salaries of the judges.

Sam Adams knew a good thing when he saw it and used Revere’s talents as an artist to further the cause of rebellion. He urged Revere to engrave several inflammatory caricatures of British politicians that Adams promptly had copied and distributed. Following the Boston Massacre in 1770, Revere engraved a seditious remembrance of that event that was also widely disseminated. This use of art in the cause of revolution wasn’t necessarily new, but it showed just how imaginative Adams could be.

Revere and Adams were also behind one of the most shocking events of the revolution, the Boston Tea Party. Adams was trying to provoke the British government and succeeded beyond his wildest imaginings. England closed the port of Boston and bivouacked troops in the city.

Which brings us to Revere’s ride. Or, more accurately, the part that Revere played on that momentous night. The redcoats decided that it was prudent to both capture the more radical elements of the Sons of Liberty, the group started by Adams and John Hancock as an adjunct to the colonial militia, as well as disarm the populace. To that end they sent two company’s of elite Grenadiers into the countryside to arrest Hancock, Adams, and Joseph Warren for treason as well as seize the cannon and powder of the local militia being stored at Concord.

Revere was a member of a group known as the North End Mechanics who patrolled the streets of Boston, keeping an eye on British military activity. When it became clear the British were ready to march, Revere borrowed a horse and rode off from Charleston to Lexington where Adams and Co. were staying. Duly warned, the trio of patriots made ready to flee. Before going, Warren sent both Revere and another friend of Adams’, William Dawes, on the ride that would echo down through the ages. They left Lexington around midnight and were joined by another patriot Samuel Prescott. Making their way to Concord, the three men alerted the farms and tiny villages along the way with the news that the red coats were on the march.

Around 1:00 AM, the little group ran into a road block manned by British regulars who had been told to stop the colonists from trying to communicate with one another. Revere was captured while Dawes and Prescott got away. Prescott eventually made it to Concord and alerted the militia there.

Revere was extremely cooperative with his captors. He told them that he had already warned Hancock and his friends and that 500 militia men were assembling at that moment to resist the British. That last part was pure bluff but the regulars didn’t know that. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, the British soldiers decided to return to barracks, releasing Revere around 3:00 AM.

But what about the lanterns in the North Church, the famous “One if by land, two if by sea?” Revere had actually asked a friend to be ready to do that to warn patriots on the other side of the river in Charlestown. By the time those lanterns were hung, Revere was gone. While he probably saw them, he didn’t need to know how the British were coming, just that they were on their way.

What all this goes to show is that, while the myth may be more dramatic than what actually happened, the reality of what was going on that fateful night is certainly interesting enough. Thanks to Revere, his friends avoided the gallows for they most certainly would have been convicted of treason. And given what happened the following day in Lexington and Concord, the work done by Revere, Dawson, and Prescott to arouse the countryside contributed in no small way to events that became known as “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World.”

Revere’s participation in the revolution was by no means over. He was commissioned a Major of infantry in the Massachusetts militia in April 1776; was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel of artillery in November; was stationed at Castle William, defending Boston harbor, and finally received command of this fort. He served in an expedition to Rhode Island in 1778, and in the following year participated in the disastrous Penobscot Expedition. Upon his return from that fiasco, he was court martialed for failing to obey orders. The charges were trumped up by his commanding officer, trying to absolve himself of blame for the military disaster that cost of the lives of 500 men and 43 ships. Revere was acquitted.

After the war, Revere proved himself a canny businessman and bold entrepreneur. He took advantage of the religious revival sweeping the country after the revolution by manufacturing church bells, a business that made him wealthy. He also pioneered the production of copper plating in America and supplied the young country’s navy with copper spikes for the planking. In effect, he became one of the first successful industrialists in American history.

Where do we place Revere in the pantheon of American heroes? While not a Founding Father in that he didn’t sign the Declaration of Independence or serve in Congress, Revere played a very large role in acting as “the sharp end of the stick” the Founders sought to beat the British with. While not a part of some of the more unruly elements that took part in the Boston Massacre and the Tea Party, he and his friend Sam Adams were not above using those elements to further the cause of revolution, a goal for which he worked more than a decade to achieve. In that respect, perhaps we can call him a “Founding Brother.”

As we celebrate the 230th anniversary of his ride into history (as well as the poem that immortalized it), it’s good to remember that Revere was the quintessential American soul; an artist whose talents and ardent support for the cause of American liberty defined a generation of patriots who, to this day, we stand back and look on in awe, marveling at their accomplishments.

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,—
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

UPDATE:

Welcome Michelle Malkin readers!

I’ve received two emails asking me to link to the entire Longfellow poem. Here it is.

If you like history, here’s a post I did on David McCullough’s recent lecture at Hillsdale college.

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. - H.G. Wells

Historian David McCullough has been a favorite of mine for well over twenty years. Born in 1933, McCullough found a calling in writing popular narrative histories and biographies about America and her leaders. With a combination of meticulous research and brilliant, heartfelt prose, McCullough’s books have topped the non-fiction charts for 30 years. His biography of Harry Truman won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1993.

My favorite book by McCullough is Mornings on Horseback, a portrait of young Theodore Roosevelt and his very unusual family. To read how this sickly boy overcame his physical drawbacks to grow up and become the energetic, robust man who rode up San Juan Hill, took on the gigantic and powerful corporate trusts that had poisoned American life and politics, and run around the world engaging in the most vigorous pursuits imaginable was an astonishing experience.

McCullough has made it his mission in life to try and bridge the gap between so-called “popular” historians and academics. By calling for history to be not only accurate, but also well-written and entertaining, he has stirred up a hornets nest in the academic community. Here are some thoughts from Jeffrey L. Pasley

Of course, McCullough’s biggest applause line was a swipe at us nasty academic historians for being such friggin’ brainiacs and writing books that journalists and popular authors don’t get: “He harped on a familiar theme, the necessity of history being entertaining and pleasurable, and he delivered one line that got particular applause: ‘No harm’s done to history by making it something someone would want to read.’” ( It’s so true, if I had a dollar for every time I said to myself, “Uh oh, self, someone might want to read that paragraph — better cut it.” That’s just the way we academical types are.)

McCullough has run into the same problem that other popularizers of history like Thomas Flemming, Richard Norton Smith, and Stephen Ambrose have experienced; a lack of respect for “telling stories” or using a coherent narrative technique to illuminate history. Academics have, for the most part, rejected narrative history because of it’s subjective chronology. Their point is that too many things are going on at the same time for a narrative to reveal what’s really happening.

It’s a point well taken and frankly, I’ll let McCullough and his detractors hash it out. In the meantime, Powerline’s Scott Johnson has linked to a talk McCullough gave at Hillsdale College entitled “Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are.” Many of the themes found in McCulloughs books are fleshed out in the lecture, including McCullough’s concern regarding the ignorance of young people about their own country’s history”

We are raising a generation of young Americans who are by-and-large historically illiterate. And it’s not their fault. There have been innumerable studies, and there’s no denying it. I’ve experienced it myself again and again. I had a young woman come up to me after a talk one morning at the University of Missouri to tell me that she was glad she came to hear me speak, and I said I was pleased she had shown up. She said, “Yes, I’m very pleased, because until now I never understood that all of the 13 colonies – the original 13 colonies – were on the east coast.” Now you hear that and you think: What in the world have we done? How could this young lady, this wonderful young American, become a student at a fine university and not know that? I taught a seminar at Dartmouth of seniors majoring in history, honor students, 25 of them. The first morning we sat down and I said, “How many of you know who George Marshall was?” Not one. There was a long silence and finally one young man asked, “Did he have, maybe, something to do with the Marshall Plan?” And I said yes, he certainly did, and that’s a good place to begin talking about George Marshall.

This is truly frightening but not surprising. It was Karl Marx who said ” History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.” This attitude permeates the entire academic community from top to bottom. History is taught from middle school on with an emphasis on the wrongdoings and shortcomings of historical figures to the exclusion of just about anything else. Couple that with a serious attempt to actually supress the remarkable story of America’s founding by placing it into a context of “class struggle” or, as some marxist historians have done, a counterrevlution brought about by large economic interests and the idea of “American Exceptionalism” becomes irrelevant.

McCullough and other narrative historians have sought to address this problem by revealing the men and women behind historical events as people caught up in forces they seek to control before those forces overwhelm them:

Nobody lived in the past, if you stop to think about it. Jefferson, Adams, Washington – they didn’t walk around saying, “Isn’t this fascinating, living in the past?” They lived in the present just as we do. The difference was it was their present, not ours. And just as we don’t know how things are going to turn out for us, they didn’t either. It’s very easy to stand on the mountaintop as an historian or biographer and find fault with people for why they did this or didn’t do that, because we’re not involved in it, we’re not inside it, we’re not confronting what we don’t know – as everyone who preceded us always was.

Using narrative, McCullough is able to draw pictures with words - pictures that illustrate certain truths that a mere chronology could never do:

Keep in mind that when we were founded by those people in the late 18th century, none of them had had any prior experience in either revolutions or nation-making. They were, as we would say, winging it. And they were idealistic and they were young. We see their faces in the old paintings done later in their lives or looking at us from the money in our wallets, and we see the awkward teeth and the powdered hair, and we think of them as elder statesmen. But George Washington, when he took command of the continental army at Cambridge in 1775, was 43 years old, and he was the oldest of them. Jefferson was 33 when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. John Adams was 40. Benjamin Rush – one of the most interesting of them all and one of the founders of the antislavery movement in Philadelphia – was 30 years old when he signed the Declaration. They were young people. They were feeling their way, improvising, trying to do what would work. They had no money, no navy, no real army. There wasn’t a bank in the entire country. There wasn’t but one bridge between New York and Boston. It was a little country of 2,500,000 people, 500,000 of whom were held in slavery, a little fringe of settlement along the east coast

It would take an academic historian an entire monograph to get across the ideas that McCullough did in that one paragraph.

McCullough also tries to answer the question “Why learn history?” His answer goes to the heart of my own enjoyment:

History isn’t just something that ought to be taught or ought to be read or ought to be encouraged because it’s going to make us a better citizen. It will make us a better citizen; or because it will make us a more thoughtful and understanding human being, which it will; or because it will cause us to behave better, which it will. It should be taught for pleasure: The pleasure of history, like art or music or literature, consists of an expansion of the experience of being alive, which is what education is largely about.

Learning for the sake of learning. Acquiring knowledge just for the sheer joy of knowing. In some ways, it’s our own fault that this attitude has been lost as we’ve demanded that our academic institutiuons become “more relevant” to what will happen in the real world after our children’s formal education is complete. Unfortunately, this has dampened the enthusiasm of the young because instilling the thirst for knowledge in students is no longer the nurturing activity it once was.

McCullough bemoans this loss and illustrates the point with a fascinating story about a young John Quincy Adams, a man McCullough calls ” the most superbly educated and maybe the most brilliant human being who ever occupied the executive office.” Young John Q. was going to Europe with his father who’d been appointed by the Congress to help negotiate the treaty that would end the revolutionary war:

Little John Adams was taken to Europe by his father when his father sailed out of Massachusetts in the midst of winter, in the midst of war, to serve our country in France. Nobody went to sea in the wintertime, on the North Atlantic, if it could possibly be avoided. And nobody did it trying to cut through the British barricade outside of Boston Harbor because the British ships were sitting out there waiting to capture somebody like John Adams and take him to London and to the Tower, where he would have been hanged as a traitor. But they sent this little ten-year-old boy with his father, risking his life, his mother knowing that she wouldn’t see him for months, maybe years at best. Why? Because she and his father wanted John Quincy to be in association with Franklin and the great political philosophers of France, to learn to speak French, to travel in Europe, to be able to soak it all up. And they risked his life for that – for his education. We have no idea what people were willing to do for education in times past. It’s the one sustaining theme through our whole country – that the next generation will be better educated than we are. John Adams himself is a living example of the transforming miracle of education. His father was able to write his name, we know. His mother was almost certainly illiterate. And because he had a scholarship to Harvard, everything changed for him. He said, “I discovered books and read forever,” and he did. And they wanted this for their son.

It goes without saying that most parents would not go this far today to see that their child had the kind of education that Abigail and John Adams wanted for John Q.

What gives me hope for future generations is my own experience in learning history. In the almost 30 years since I graduated from college, I’ve read by my own calculation nearly 300 biographies and histories of Americans and America. This has had a profound effect on my politics as well as my general worldview. I’ve gone from being a liberal to a conservative. My entire outlook on America’s past has undergone a radical transformation as I’ve read the great biographies and narrative histories that illunimated the people who shaped this country. These books showed them to be not the saints portrayed in my youth or the devils portrayed in my young manhood, but rather imperfect beings who for a variety of complex reasons rose to the occasions history offered and made a difference. In short, the more I read, the more perspective I gained. Being able to put events and people into context, to travel back in time and put yourself in their shoes - that is why history is so fascinating and enjoyable to me.

It’s like jumping into a time machine. And having masters like David McCullough at the controls is what makes it fun.

Abraham Lincoln, when asked what were his plans to win the war, was quoted as saying “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”.

I thought of this quote when pondering what to write about the imminent death of Pope John Paul II. Was Lincoln correct? Are we condemned to simply ride the whirlwind of history, thrown here and there by capricious forces beyond our control? Or do men command this whirlwind through the force of their own personality and wisdom of their decisions?

For me personally, these are the questions that make reading history worthwhile. So when we reflect on the extraordinary life of Karol Wojtyla, a good and holy man, it is impossible to separate him from the times he lived in.

Oh, and what times they were! To have this man, this Pope elected to the Papacy at a time when two of the 20th Century’s most determined foes of tyranny and passionate advocates for liberty - Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher - also came to power in their respective countries would have seemed to the Greeks as nothing less than proof that fate ruled the affairs of men.

John Paul’s alliance with the Anglo-Americans was never set down on paper and coordination was superficial at best. But where Reagan and Thatcher’s hard-headed actions to defeat Soviet Communism stopped, the Pope’s moral authority took root and turned the tide toward people power by giving legitimacy to the aspirations for freedom so longed for by so many in that captive part of the world.

In short, Pope John Paul II gave a final answer to Josef Stalin’s contemptuous question when conflict with the Catholic Church in Russia seemed unavoidable. “How many divisions does the Pope have?” Stalin asked. This Pope could have told him he not only had the heavenly host of angels on his side but the millions of hearts and minds of people that yearned to breathe free, ready to march at his command.

The troika of Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul at first glance, made strange bedfellows indeed. Reagan, the small town Midwesterner, Hollywood actor, and ideologue, came to politics late in life but made up for it with a burning passion for making a difference and restoring America’s greatness. Thatcher was an almost lifelong politician whose free market ideas transformed socialist Britain and restored respect for British leadership on the continent of Europe and in the world.

But the Pope’s experience was very different. Young Karol Wojtyla came of age just as the Nazi’s started their murderous rampage across Europe. His plans to be an actor were scuttled during the Nazi occupation resulting in his hearing the call of service to the Church. Attending an underground seminary (the Nazi’s murdered 100,00 religious in Poland alone), young Karol also started an underground theater group whose performances were noteworthy for the revolutionary use of language and a spirit of defiance.

Ordained after the war, Father Wojtyla had to learn to live with an entirely different form of tyranny. When the communists staged an “election” in 1948 and took control, Father Wojtyla at first, took little notice. He was consumed with the study of theology and philosophy. Blessed with a supple and inquisitive mind, he traveled to Rome where his mentor, the great Vatican theologian Father Reginald Garrigou-LaGrange, opened his mind to the intricacies and subtlety of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Returning to Poland, the young priest carried out several pastoral assignments at various churches in Krakow. But his continued thirst for knowledge drew him to the fine university in that city where he eventually became Chaplain of Students. (Given the Pope’s almost rock star status among the youth of the world, I wonder what it would have been like to have him as an adviser at that time?)

Completing his doctorate in Theology, Father Wojtyla became professor of moral theology and social ethics in the major seminary of Krakow and in the Faculty of Theology of Lublin. From there he was named Axillary Bishop of Krakow (1958), Archbishop (1964), and Cardinal (1967).

We’ll never know what possessed the College of Cardinals to name him to the papacy following the short reign of John Paul I. But here’s a revealing anecdote from a PBS Frontline report on a trip to Rome then Cardinal Wojtyla made in 1976 to give a lecture:

In 1976, Pope Paul VI invited Wojtyla to give the Lenten lectures in Rome. John Cornwell, biographer of Pius XII, wrote about the occasion vividly, describing how in one of Cardinal Wojtyla’s lectures he stunned his audience with his dark apocalyptic vision of the world “as a burial ground….a vast planet of tombs.” His heightened poetic language, filled with images of darkness and light, showed the influence of his early hero, St. John of the Cross. The remainder of these lectures explored themes foreshadowing all the major points of Wojtyla’s Pontificate: the centrality of Christ in the history of salvation; the inviolable dignity of every individual person; the proper relationship between the creator and creation; the dangerous error of living as if God did not exist; the value and salvific meaning of suffering.

During these lectures, Cardinal Wojtyla also surprised his audience by revealing an extremely personal story about his own ‘dark night.’ This story has rarely been remarked on, but clearly it has resonated deeply for Wojtyla and sheds light on intimate corners of his spiritual life. Years ago in Poland, on the Wednesday of Holy Week, Woytyla had a deep religious experience. As he talked about it many years later, Cardinal Wojtyla said, with some sadness, that he tried again and again to recreate this mystical moment but was never able to. His friend Monsignor Albacete finds this story poignant and moving: “This man is telling us that he, too, has had the experience of God’s absence and that when he prays he tries to relive that mystical moment of closeness. But it always goes away from him.” It is a familiar story of mystics who early on in their lives experience a powerful epiphanous moment that they yearn to experience again, but can’t, and must be sustained by the fragments of a memory for the rest of their lives.

Perhaps the Cardinals saw the towering intellect of the man as well as his simple humanity. Whatever they were looking for in a Pope, they apparently found in this man who had battled with authorities for years to build a cathedral in his beloved Krakow as well as ordain more priests than the communists would allow.

I will not attempt to analyze the dogmatic or spiritual nature of his pontificate. But Pope John Paul’s political skills - the ability to get people to act as the sharp end of the stick - were without question on par with both Reagan and Thatcher. He had a flair for the dramatic and could “work a crowd” as well or better than those two legendary figures. Just watching a tape of him recently during his second visit to Poland in 1983 with Communist strongman General Jaruzelski was striking in that it showed the people of his native Poland who was in charge. The Pope was calm, serene even as he stood with Jaruzelski in front of the press while the communist dictator was incredibly ill at ease, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and looking around the room as if seeking the assistance of someone. The Pope, realizing his host’s distress. smiled a mischievous smile and moved even closer to Jaruzelski.

The look of panic on the dictator’s face would have been comical if we didn’t now know that Soviet Premier Andropov had threatened to send in tanks unless Jaruzelski got a handle on the political instability roiling Poland as a result of the Pope’s visit. Poland was under martial law at the time and John Paul’s arrival signaled that it didn’t matter how many divisions of soldiers the Pope could put in the field, he could command the loyalty of the people and Jaruzelski couldn’t. Game. Set. Match.

Which brings me back to my original question. Would the events that transpired in the 1980’s occurred without one or all of the “freedom troika” of Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul? A determinist would say yes, that the undercurrents of history at work in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union would have caused the fall of communism anyway.

I totally reject that notion. Given the alternatives in the United States (Carter and Mondale) as well as Great Britain (James Callaghan and Neil Kinnock) it seems more likely that Soviet communism would have limped along as it had for more than 60 years at that point, being propped up by western defeatism and myopia. And an Italian Pope as an almost certain alternative to Cardinal Wojtyla would not have had the standing in eastern Europe to affect much change at all.

Most determinists reject this kind of counterfactualism for good reason. Such speculation can’t be quantified or measured. At the same time though, given the larger than life personalities of the three, can anyone really imagine the same thing happening at any other time with any other leaders?

Cross-Posted at Blogger News Network

Every once in a while the curtain of history is pulled back ever so slightly to reveal a moment that people can point to and say “here’s where things turned” or “things were never the same” after a particular event. And while I hesitate to call the Schiavo case just such a moment, the great cultural divide between those who wish to save Terri and those who think her life should be ended is eerily reminiscent of another moment in history where Americans were bitterly divided and couldn’t imagine how the other side could possibly rationalize the position they took.

Radical abolitionist John Brown was perhaps the most polarizing figure in American history. Born in 1800, he spent a good deal of his life in debt due to bad business decisions and horrible luck. He sired 18 children, 7 of whom died before the age of 10. His first wife died in 1833 when he married a woman half his age. His strict Calvinist upbringing gave him a resiliency and passion that was to both serve the cause he so cherished as well as lead to his death on the gallows.

In 1855, Brown decided to join his three oldest sons in Kansas. The decision turned out to be a fateful one for Brown, his sons, and the nation. Before departing for Kansas, Brown consulted with several noted abolitionists including Frederick Douglass who had this to say about the man he called “Captain Brown:”

Though a white gentleman, he is in sympathy a black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.”

In Kansas, Brown joined other free staters in trying to counter the efforts of “Border Ruffians” from Missouri who were flooding the territory with pro-slavery forces in anticipation of a vote to determine whether Kansas would be a slave state or a free state. When the town of Lawrence, Kansas was sacked resulting in the death of two free state supporters, Brown’s son Owen said his father “went wild” and said “we’ll show those slavers they can’t take away our rights!”

A few days later at Pottawatomie Creek, Brown, his sons, and two others killed 5 pro-slavery settlers by hacking them to death with broadswords. Thanks to this gory deed and others, people all across the nation began referring to “Bleeding Kansas.”

Not content with stirring up trouble in Kansas, Brown hatched a plot to start a slave revolt in the South. With the assistance of several prominent Northern abolitionists, Brown and a cadre of a few dozen men descended on Harpers Ferry, Virginia where a lightly defended federal arsenal of muskets, shot, and powder could be had for the taking.

Brown’s plan was simple: Capture the arsenal and town, hold off any forces that could be brought against him by taking hostages and rallying nearby slaves to his cause, and then set off on a march through Virginia freeing slaves as he went until his “army” was able to cause a general revolt among the slaves throughout the South.

While most historians agree that Brown’s “plot” never had a ghost of a chance of succeeding, in the end he achieved more than he could possibly have imagined. Following the federal government’s suppression of Brown at Harpers Ferry, an extraordinary chasm opened up between North and South and for the first time, American’s began to look at each other across a sectional divide where each side saw a foreign country rather than brothers who shared a common history and culture.

It wasn’t the raid itself that generated this feeling, it was the reaction to it on each side that caused the South especially to rethink its role in the Union. The South saw Brown as a murderous brigand who wanted to encourage the slaves to murder their masters in their beds. The North saw Brown as something of a lunatic but whose “heart was in the right place.” Some even went so far as to make him out to be a martyr. This from the Springfield Republican:

“We can concieve of no event that could so deepen the moral hostility of the people of the free states to slavery as this execution. This is not because the acts of Brown are approved for they are not. It is because the nature and spirit of the man are seen to be great and noble…”

The last straw for the South may have been on the day John Brown was hanged. It was a day of mourning in churches all across the north as bells tolled solemnly and people went to church and prayed for the repose of Brown’s soul. The Southern attitude was one of astonishment. Here was a man who wanted to arm the slaves so that they could take their masters lives and he was being lionized by both the northern press and politicians. Jefferson Davis best summed up this attitude by saying Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry represented an attempt “by extensive combinations among the non slave holding states to levy war against Virginia and stigmatized the Republican party as one “organized on the basis of making war” against the South.

The gulf that has opened up today between Americans who believe that starving Terri Schiavo to death is wrong and those who believe it to be a tragic but necessary act has some parallels with the aftermath of the John Brown raid on Harper’s Ferry. Both sides believe they are in the right. Both are astonished at the other side’s lack of a moral compass. “Hypocrisy” cry those who wish Terri dead. “Callousness”scream the pro-Terri forces.

And more than that, it is the recognition that this huge divide exists not as some fancy political expression but as a living, breathing thing that has fueled the debate and turned it into into an “us versus them” cultural Armageddon. Both sides see the forces of darkness at work; people in favor of life seeing the “culture of death” in the ascendancy while the supporters who believe it was Terri’s wish to end her life see their opposition as “The American Taliban.”

The two sides couldn’t be farther apart. And looking across the divide at one another, each see strangers where they should see brothers and sisters.

It is a rift manufactured by forces that have been at work for more than 20 years. The religious right, marginalized for years by an ever increasing stridency in the leftist press and their ideological brethren in Hollywood, are feeling their oats after the reelection of George Bush and are making this case a litmus test for politicians. The left, after nearly 20 years of decline are desperate for power and see the case as a way to energize their base and scare middle of the road Americans (and libertarian Republicans) by proselytizing about the dangers of religious extremism.

It’s a recipe for disaster. At a time when external threats to our security are bigger than they’ve been in more than a generation, America is about ready to come apart at the seams. Can anything be done to waylay this threat to the very essence of our unity?

My hope is that the one tiny bright spot in this debate-the support of a few brave liberals who have spoken out in favor of life for Terri-will be the beginning of a search for common ground on many issues that divide right and left so bitterly. It’s up to us on the right to open this dialog by reaching out and finding some common themes that both sides can hang their hat on.

Otherwise, the cultural chasm that has opened before us could become a permanent fixture of the American political landscape.

Twenty-five years is a long time in someone’s life. I realize that many who read this aren’t yet 25 years old or are too young to remember 25 years ago.

But I remember. I was there. I lived it.

I was very much alive when the United States Olympic Hockey Team defied bigger odds than any other sports team in history to defeat the Soviet Union in the semi-finals of the Olympic Hockey tournament 25 years ago yesterday.

As a sports story, the victory would have been big enough. Anyone who’s seen the excellent re-enactment of the game in the movie Miracle knows of the grit and pluck exhibited by a bunch of college kids against the mighty hockey machine that was the old Soviet Union. The Soviets had won the last four Olympic Golds and were unbeaten in 15 years of international competition.

But this was much, much more than a sports story. And for that, we have to examine what kind of country the United States was in 1980 before the Olympic Hockey Team captured our imaginations.

It seems unbelievable looking back on it. The entire nation was held hostage by a group of religious fanatics in Iran who had kidnapped American State Department personnel and were holding them in violation of all tenets of international law and tradition and all norms of civilized behavoir. And while we were supported in a half-hearted way by most of the rest of the world, it seemed that the United States was an impotent giant, a laughable Gulliver being held down by the lillipution-like Iranian Mullahs.

Jimmy Carter was President. Last week, I was taken to task by some who thought I was too rough on Mr. Carter on the occasion of the Navy naming an attack sub after him. If anything, I let the guy off too easily.

It wasn’t the way Mr. Carter handled the hostage crisis. I actually thought that he did about as well with it as any President could. It’s the fact that the hostage crisis with Iran was symbolic of what Mr. Carter had done to the United States of America in less than 4 years of his incompetent, bumbling, sanctimonious, and extraordinarily dangerous presidency.

Carter came to office following the Viet Nam war and the Watergate scandal that resulted in Nixon’s disgrace. Inflation was high-almost 5%-and unemployment was rising. The policies that Carter initiated with the help of the largest Democratic majority in Congress since the time of FDR proved absolutely and totally disasterous. Inflation skyrocketed as did interest rates. And unemployment rose steadily until it reached above 6%, near post-depression highs.

If you haven’t lived through a period of double digit inflation its hard to explain what it was like. Imagine every time you went to the grocery store, the food you buy all the time-milk, cheese, hamburger, fruit-went up in price. And not just a little. Sometimes, hamburger would go up 10 or 15 cents a pound in a week. Sometimes fruit would be unavailable because the store owner knew that nobody would pay the retail price that had doubled in a week.

Imagine watching the money in your savings account (this is before mutual funds and other financial instruments we take for granted today were in widespread use) lose 10% of its value every year!. As a young person, you realize it’s stupid to save money because in a few years, it wouldn’t be worth anything.

Imagine trying to buy a house…with interest rates at nearly 20%! Credit card interest rates topped 35% on unpaid balances. You couldn’t buy a house, or furniture, or a car, or anything else that required interest of any kind without realizing that the value of your money was shrinking almost daily.

When the moonbats try to tell you that the economy we live in now is the worst since the great depression, those of us of a certain age laugh in derision. Either they have selective memories or weren’t alive during the late 1970’s.

Then there was the spiritual decline of America under Carter. I’m not talking about a fall off in religiosity but rather a feeling that, as a nation, we’d reached our peak. That from here on out the United States would be in decline. This feeling was enhanced by the seeming unstoppable march of Communism that Carter allowed to occur on his watch. The list of countries is astonishing; Somalia, Yemen, Nicaragua, Angola, Afghanistan, and Ethiopia all fell into communist dictatorships either because Carter refused to act or, as he did in Nicaragua, actively worked to bring a communist dictatorship to power.

This feeling of helplessness was fed by Carter himself who, in April of 1978, gave what is considered the strangest Presidential speech in history where he blamed the American people for the problems he was too incompetent to solve. Leftists the world over picked up on this loss of faith in America and the west. From the so-called “Council of Rome” whose experts predicted the world would run out of oil by 1995 to the “Zero Population” movement that predicted mass starvation in the 1980’s on the Indian subcontinent and China because of overpopulation, moonbattery was in full bloom-and all at the expense of America.

The final straw occured in December of 1979 when, after telling us for four years that we Americans had an “inordinate fear of Communism,” the Russians invaded Afghanistan. Americans watched in horror as the Soviets began butchering the Afghan people while Carters tepid response told a sad tale of American decline.

This was the background on February 22, 1980 when the US Olympic Hockey Team took to the ice. And when those American kids beat the Soviets, the entire country erputed into a spasm of joy that, looking back on today, still brings tears to my eyes.

Curiously, the victory didn’t rub off on Carter. By the time election day rolled around, the hostages had been held a year and other Carter blunders had sealed the fate of this, the most incompetent President in a hundred years.

That election featured the landslide victory of Ronald Reagan. And the rest, as they say, is history.

UPDATE: MORE NOSTALGIA

Pat over at Brainsters weighs in with his thoughts.

I don’t know whether the event was historic in the sense that it changed the world, but the Miracle on Ice is something of a dividing line in my life. I was still a bitter and angry young leftist when the USA hockey team took to their skates that night in Lake Placid; by the time they celebrated I was cheering “USA, USA!” It wasn’t the end of my personal cynicism, but it was a major crack in the wall.

Hard to imagine one of the Founders of one of the most influential election blogs- Kerryhaterss- a “bitter and angry young leftist.” Is it any harder to imagine someone who runs a site known as Rightwing Nuthouse being in a similar frame of mind?

The year was 1783. While formal hostilities had virtually ceased between the Crown and the American colonies, peace talks continued to drag on in London. The Congress was broke and in serious debt even though the Articles of Confederation, which required individual states to contribute funds to the Congress, had been approved two years earlier.

The Continental Army was restless. Many of its officers hadn’t been paid in months. Promises made by Congress at the time of their enlistment regarding reimbursement for food and clothing, pensions, and a pledge to give the officers half pay for life were either not being honored or were rumored to be withdrawn. Petitions by groups of officers to Congress asking them to redress these and other grievances either went unanswered or were brushed aside.

As a result of these indignities, a cabal of officers headed up by Colonel Walter Stewart and Major John Armstrong, an aide to George Washington’s chief rival Horatio Gates, were making plans to march to Philadelphia at the head of their men to force Congress to deal with their demands. The implication was clear; if Congress would not address their concerns, the men would enforce their will at the point of a bayonet.

The plotters believed that General Washington would be forced by their actions to become a reluctant participant in a military coup against the government. They believed that by presenting a united front composed of the senior officers in the army, Washington would have no choice but to back them.

To that end, they scheduled a meeting on March 10 of all general and field officers. With the invitation to the meeting, a fiery letter was circulated calling on the soldiers not to disarm in peace and, if the war were to continue, to disband and leave the country to the tender mercies of the British Army.

Washington got wind of the meeting and was deeply troubled. He issued a General Order canceling the gathering and instead, called for another meeting on March 15 ” of representatives of all the regiments to decide how to attain the just and important object in view.” The next day, another letter was circulated by the plotters that implied by issuing the General Order, Washington agreed with their position.

With the army teetering on the edge of revolt and the future of the United States as a republic in the balance, Washington stood before the assembled officers and began to speak. He started by saying he sympathized with their plight, that he had written countless letters to Congress reminding them of their responsibilities to the soldiers, and begged the officers not to take any action that would “lessen the dignity and sully the glory you have hitherto maintained.”

At that point, Washington reached into his pocket and withdrew a letter from a Congressman outlining what the government would do to address the soldiers grievances. But something was wrong. Washington started reading the letter but stopped abruptly. Then, with a sense of the moment and flair for the dramatic not equaled until Ronald Reagan became President, Washington slowly reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a pair of spectacles. There were gasps in the room as most of the officers had never seen their beloved General display such a sign of physical weakness in public. As he put the glasses on, Washington said “Gentlemen, you’ll permit me to put on my spectacles, as I have grown not only old but almost blind in the service of my country.”

Witnesses say that the officers almost to a man began to weep. This powerful reminder of the nearly eight years of service together and their shared sacrifices and hardships won the day. The revolt died then and there.

It could be argued that this was the greatest day of the greatest American who ever lived. And the fact that we no longer officially celebrate Washington’s birthday on February 22 as a national holiday is a travesty that makes this and other deeds of George Washington seem like mere footnotes on the pages of history.

In fact, the third Monday in February is still designated as Washington’s Birthday, not “President’s Day” as it has come to be known. As Matthew Spaulding of the Heritage Foundation points out, several times, legislators have introduced legislation to direct all federal government entities to refer to the holiday as George Washington’s Birthday but to no avail. President Bush could issue an executive order to that effect but has failed to do so.

This doesn’t address the issue of celebrating February 22-no matter what day of the week it falls on-as a national holiday. The argument that no other American is so honored just doesn’t hold water. The fact is, there wouldn’t be any other Americans to honor if it weren’t for the character, the purposefulness, and the determination of George Washington.

For long stretches during the Revolution, Washington was the government; the only recognizable entity for people to rally around. Couple that with Washington’s superhuman efforts in molding and shaping the Presidency and then exhibiting the sublime understanding to step down after two terms to cement the foundation of the new republic to the rule of law and not of men, and you have a strong case to make an exception to the rule of honoring individual Americans.

Currently, Martin Luther King is the only individual American who is honored with his own holiday. And the Fourth of July and Veterans Day are the only federal holidays covered under the Monday Holiday Law passed in 1968 that are celebrated on the day of the week regardless of whether or not it falls on a Monday (Thanksgiving’s date changes yearly. Christmas and New Years day may be celebrated on either Friday or Monday depending on what day of the week they fall on in a given year). Designating February 22 as a national holiday to celebrate the life of someone called “the indispensable man” of the American founding by his outstanding biographer James Thomas Flexner would seem to be fitting and proper.

We owe so much to Washington that it seems almost trivial to deny him this singular honor.

This article originally appeared in The American Thinker.

The revelation today by the New York Times that an old family friend taped dozens of conversations with the future President between 1998 and the Republican Convention in 2000 reveal the private George Bush to be pretty much the same as the man Americans have come to know over the last 4 years.

So this is news?

Doug Wead, a friend and former aide to the President’s father taped the conversations for several reasons:

Mr. Wead said he recorded the conversations because he viewed Mr. Bush as a historic figure, but he said he knew that the president might regard his actions as a betrayal. As the author of a new book about presidential childhoods, Mr. Wead could benefit from any publicity, but he said that was not a motive in disclosing the tapes.

The White House did not dispute the authenticity of the tapes or respond to their contents. Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, said, “The governor was having casual conversations with someone he believed was his friend.” Asked about drug use, Mr. Duffy said, “That has been asked and answered so many times there is nothing more to add.

The drug use refers to candidate Bush’s obsession with public reaction to his admitted wild ways prior to his becoming clean and sober in 1986. The only “revelation” on the tapes is the President’s apparent confession that he tried marijuana in the past. Talking to Wead about questions of drug use:

He refused to answer reporters’ questions about his past behavior, he said, even though it might cost him the election. Defending his approach, Mr. Bush said: “I wouldn’t answer the marijuana questions. You know why? Because I don’t want some little kid doing what I tried.”

And that’s it. Out of a dozen or so tapes Wead made available to the New York Times reporter, that statement is the only “newsworthy” bit to emerge. Even the Times admits that the conversations show that with Bush, what you see is what you get:

The private Mr. Bush sounds remarkably similar in many ways to the public President Bush. Many of the taped comments foreshadow aspects of his presidency, including his opposition to both anti-gay language and recognizing same-sex marriage, his skepticism about the United Nations, his sense of moral purpose and his focus on cultivating conservative Christian voters.

An amazing admission from an avowed enemy of the President and his policies.

So why publish transcripts in the first place? Clearly, these tapes are invaluable historical artifacts as they reveal the man behind the public facade of the Presidency. In that sense, the existence of the tapes is news. But considering that just about all of the information contained in the tapes has been reported on elsewhere, including Bush’s well known desire to foster a relationship with evangelical christians and his antipathy towards the press, one has to conclude that any impact the recorded conversations have on the President’s popularity will be favorable.

The most interesting thing I found in the conversations was Bush’s refusal to engage in gay-bashing not only because he believed it would hurt him politically but also because he thought it to be wrong:

But Mr. Bush said he did not intend to change his position. He said he told Mr. Robison: “Look, James, I got to tell you two things right off the bat. One, I’m not going to kick gays, because I’m a sinner. How can I differentiate sin?”

Later, he read aloud an aide’s report from a convention of the Christian Coalition, a conservative political group: “This crowd uses gays as the enemy. It’s hard to distinguish between fear of the homosexual political agenda and fear of homosexuality, however.”

This is something the libnuts will never acknowledge and don’t understand; that homosexuals as an interest group are a threat to values and traditions, not homosexuals as people. While there may not be a “gay agenda” set in stone or written down on paper, there is clearly a move afoot within the more radical elements of the gay community to stifle dissent from the religious right to their lifestyle. Not only that, but to actively promote that lifestyle and try to sell it like soda pop to impressionable, lonely, confused teenagers is outrageous.

What the conversations show is a rarity in politics; a man whose public persona matches up rather well with who he is in private. This is just about what we’ve come to expect from George Bush. So in that sense, the tapes aren’t news at all but a confirmation of something most people know: That with George Bush, what you see is what you get.