Jefferson

I am fascinated with Thomas Jefferson. I love him. He is my favorite of the Founders.

The first reason is the Declaration of Independence, which kicks off with two hundred words explaining liberal democracy with bracing clarity, then embodies those liberal-as-in-liberal-democracy values by submitting facts to a candid world so that he may justify an improvement to the political order. The Declaration is by my lights one of the greatest achievements in all of history. Jefferson was not truly its sole author — it is, after all, the shared statement of a committee — but his voice is integral to its greatness.

The second reason is the rest of his writing: clear, thoughtful, and inquisitive about every corner of the world. One might almost say the same of Franklin, but Franklin was earthy, practical, and grounded, while Jefferson was airy, intellectual, idealistic. The Library Of Congress began as Jefferson's personal library. In our mythology if not in fact, Jefferson is our First Nerd. And as I am an American nerd, Jefferson is my grandfather.

The third reason is that he was a monster. A profoundly and specifically American monster.

Jefferson was monstrous in owning slaves and profiting from their labor. We know he raped at least one of his slaves. (Any relationship we can imagine between Jefferson and Hemings does not make it rape any the less; she was a slave, bound to obedience by pain of death and worse.)

Jefferson was monstrous in advocating for and enacting genocide against American Indians.

And Jefferson was monstrous in hypocrisy, championing equality and liberty, calling American Indians his equals ... and yet still keeping slaves and pursuing genocide even as he wrote with conviction that these were evils.

So what is this love I have for Jefferson, the monstrous hypocritical genocidal slave rapist?

I hope my disgust at Jefferson is clear. I cultivate this disgust, deliberately summon it every time I speak his name. But I love him in his monstrosity, and I love him for being a reminder of the monstrosity to which I am heir, both in the way that all Americans inherit the consequences of those crimes and in the way that as another nerdy American White guy I inherit an ownership of those crimes.

To love truly is to embrace the whole of the beloved without delusion, to see clearly and love anyway, to know the worst and support the best. I would do that for my country, and for that there is no better symbol than Jefferson, who embodied so much of our very best and our very worst. We cannot understand the American condition or the human condition without recognizing that all of these things were the same person.

Jefferson — so much a skeptic that he took a scissors to his Bible to cut away every mention of miracles — said he trembled for his country when he reflected that God is just. As he should. As do I. Trembling in terror and in anguish and in awe and in awesome responsibility as I invoke his name.

Update: Smithsonian's The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson has an excellent deep dive into Jefferson's attitude toward slavery and the details of how slave labor maintained Monticello.

Somewhere in a short span of years during the 1780s and into the early 1790s, a transformation came over Jefferson.

The very existence of slavery in the era of the American Revolution presents a paradox, and we have largely been content to leave it at that, since a paradox can offer a comforting state of moral suspended animation. Jefferson animates the paradox. And by looking closely at Monticello, we can see the process by which he rationalized an abomination to the point where an absolute moral reversal was reached and he made slavery fit into America’s national enterprise.

The internet has always been this way

It appears that the most awesome thing on the entire Internet was created before it was even really the Internet. In 1976, the ARPANET people set up an online chat between the puppeteer Jim Henson, the artist Yoko Ono, the painter Sidney Nolan, and ... wait for it ... famous psychopath novelist Ayn Rand.

Apparently this is a real thing that really happened.

The resemblance to conversations you may have had yesterday on Facebook is not coïncidental.

JIM HENSON
I think Ms. Rand and my character Oscar the Grouch would have a lot to talk about actually. I am laughing out loud at this idea.

AYN RAND
Why would I want to talk to him. What has he achieved or trying to achieve.

JIM HENSON
He has achieved what I think is the ultimate goal of your way of thinking.

This may be true, but it's not factual, mind you.

Olbermann

I'm on my way to a you have to watch this, but I need to take the long way around.

I have spoken in praise of MSNBC's commentator Keith Olbermann before.

Now for a span there during the Bush administration, there were some lefties who looked at him like he was the second coming of Edward R. Murrow ... or like he was the crafty, witty, relentless liberal voice we now have in the form of the amazing Rachel Maddow. Having watched a bit of his show, I have to admit that this is the internet being kind to Olbermann—not in the sense that the people of Left Blogistan were too generous in their praise, but rather that the medium of the net played up his virtues. Folks circulated clips of Olbermann's best Special Comments, but it turns out watching the actual show, that most of the time it's very TV-ish in a bad way: gimmicky, full of cheap shots, and Mr Olbermann sometimes speaks in the voice of outrage at times that are forced and artificial. He plays up the outrage because he's good at it, and I mean that not as a backhanded compliment but a sincere one because expressing outrage well, like expressing anything well, requires talent, skill, and discipline. And so the internet made Olbermann look good because folks could circulate clips of him expressing brilliant outrage when it was called for, unhappily true all too often during the Bush administration.

Given a worthy target, Olbermann's outrage is awesome to behold: right, and necessary, and ... here is where his greatness lies ... delivered with subtlety and profundity to match its vigour.

I have a clip for y’all where Olbermann expresses outrage where it is warranted. That outrage is really only punctuation at an appropriate point in telling a larger story, and mighty as that outrage is, it is not even close to being the heart of his comments. You have to watch this.

It's almost fifteen minutes long, serious, searing, and not work safe—not because it will show anything offensive or embarrassing on your screen, but because it demands a kind of attention that you're not going to be able to muster at your desk at the office. Don't let that deter you. Make a date with yourself to watch it.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Good work, Mr Olbermann, and thank you.

(That I may keep it handy, here's a link to Crooks and Liars, where they have the clip, a partial transcript, and a link to Olbermann's dKos diary.)

Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.

For more than a decade, I've been spamming people with this note every year. Time marches on: this year the primary medium for that will be Facebook. If you were here this time last year, read it again anyway.

Really. Take a few minutes. I think it's important.

Most people have forgotten that at the civil rights march on Washington DC on 28 August 1963, Martin Luther King was not the featured speaker. He was not the icon of the movement that we think of today. He was a major player, yes, but there were others more famous, respected, and important at that time. The speech he gave — the one you know — changed that.

The importance of the speech is distinctively American. The United States, unique among nations, is a frankly artificial creation. France is the place in Europe where people speak French, but the US has no ethnic definition — this place is full of immigrants who decided to be Americans, and their children. Japan is an island, but there's nothing natural about the borders of the US — this place wound up a nation through a chaotic combination of war, purchase, legislative decisions, and (oh yeah) genocide. The US is an idea. Something we just made up.

This is why we have the peculiar veneration of documents that we do. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are the holiest of holies in our civic religion because they are made of words, made of ideas. Through acclamation over the years we have chosen a handful of other documents that tell us what the United States is, like Lincoln's Gettysburg address and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech. In that speech, the power of King's rhetoric and ideas was so great that hearing it transformed our understanding of what the nation was about. I know, I know, that's a White guy thing to say: it's not like plenty of folks didn't know about American racial injustice. But on the level of shared understanding of shared destiny, King gave voice to ideas implicit in the American national promise that had too long been denied. And still are denied today.

In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.

This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.

Go read it right now. It will only take five minutes of your time. With no exaggeration, I think it's your duty as an American. Yeah, this year we can celebrate it seeming almost unremarkable to have a Black President of the United States, but reading it you cannot help but realize that we have a lot of work left to do.

And while you're at it, take a little more time and read Letter from a Birmingham Jail. I know you did it back in school. It's worth doing again.

And if you really want extra credit, go read what he said on the last full day of his life.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you ...

Carter

I've spoken in praise of Jimmy Carter before. You'd think after finally winning the Nobel he'd be ready to ease up. But via Terry Karney I learn that Mr Carter is still bringing the awesome.

I have been a practising Christian all my life and a deacon and Bible teacher for many years. My faith is a source of strength and comfort to me, as religious beliefs are to hundreds of millions of people around the world.

So my decision to sever my ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, after six decades, was painful and difficult. It was, however, an unavoidable decision when the convention's leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and claiming that Eve was created second to Adam and was responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be “subservient” to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service. This was in conflict with my belief — confirmed in the holy scriptures — that we are all equal in the eyes of God.

Smells like victory

Via Miriam at Feministing, I learn that the Los Angeles Times reports on Fairfax High's 2009 Prom Queen.

[Sergio] Garcia, 18, spent most of his years at Fairfax openly gay and wanted to be part of the Los Angeles school's prom court -- but not as prom king. He felt that vying for prom queen would better suit his personality, so he decided to seek that crown, running against a handful of female classmates.
....
On Saturday night at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, wearing a charcoal-gray tuxedo and a black bow tie, he was named prom queen.

“I felt invincible,” Garcia said.

Mr Garcia, this blog salutes you as a Great American.

Congratulations

Paul Krugman has won the Nobel Prize for Economics. I don't have an informed opinion of him as an economist, though what I can understand of his thinking seems extraordinarily sensible ... but my opinion of him as a public intellectual could not be higher.

Daniel Davies at Crooked Timber observes:

I can’t help thinking that this is actually Krugman’s reward for being the public voice of mainstream sensible Keynesianism for the last fifteen years, starting with the use of the liquidity trap to explain the Japanese slump, going through his prediction of the Asian crises and onward to today. In which case, well done the Nobel [see note 1 again] committee — Krugman’s NYT column has been more use to the public standing of economists than more or less anything published in the journals.

And, of course, congratulations to Prof. Krugman himself, who might very well have believed that he’d done his professional status irreparable harm by taking such an aggressive line against the government of the day; he now gets the double pleasure of receiving the highest reward in economics, just as all of his detractors see their repuations ruined. There is probably some pithy epithet from Keynes or JK Galbraith to be inserted here on the general subject of honesty being the best politics, but I can’t think of it just at this instant.

DeLong responds:

Time quotes me this morning as saying that Paul is “the best claimant to the mantle of John Maynard Keynes” that we have. And I think I am more right than I knew, for I think that the “pithy epithet” is rather long, and is the opening to the preface to Keynes's Essays in Persuasion:

HERE are collected the croakings of twelve years — the croakings of a Cassandra who could never influence the course of events in time. The volume might have been entitled “Essays in Prophecy and Persuasion”, for the Prophecy, unfortunately, has been more successful than the Persuasion. But it was in a spirit of persuasion that most of these essays were written, in an attempt to influence opinion. They were regarded at the time, many of them, as extreme and reckless utterances. But I think that the reader, looking through them to-day, will admit that this was because they often ran directly counter to the overwhelming weight of contemporary sentiment and opinion, and not because of their character in themselves. On the contrary, I feel — reading them again, though I am a prejudiced witness — that they contain more understatement than overstatement, as judged by after-events. That this should be their tendency, is a natural consequence of the circumstances in which they were written. For I wrote many of these essays painfully conscious that a cloud of witnesses would rise up against me and very few in my support, and that I must, therefore, be at great pains to say nothing which I could not substantiate. I was constantly on my guard — as I well remember, looking back — to be as moderate as my convictions and the argument would permit...

Edward L. Glaeser explains briefly what he actually won the prize for.

Mr. Krugman published two seminal papers in 1979 and 1980 that made sense of the fact that Toyota sells cars in Germany and Mercedes-Benz sells cars in Japan.
....
Mr. Krugman’s trade models became the standard in the economics profession both because they fit the world a bit better and because they were masterpieces of mathematical modeling. His models’ combination of realism, elegance and tractability meant that they could provide the underpinnings for thousands of subsequent papers on trade, economic growth, political economy and especially economic geography.

And let me also offer Dr Krugman's essay Incidents From My Career. Though much of it is opaque to civilians without serious training in economics, the tale it tells of the rhythms of an intellectual career is thoroughly engaging.

I had learned about monopolistic competition from a short course given by Bob Solow in 1976, and I guess the idea of applying the new models to trade had been percolating in my mind ever since. I have, however, a typical pattern in my work: I will have a foggy idea that I play with occasionally, sometimes for years; then some event will suddenly cause the fog to lift, revealing an almost fully developed model. In this case, in January 1978 I paid a visit to Rudi Dornbusch to talk about my work, and prepared a list of possible ideas, including as an afterthought the idea of a monopolistically competitive trade model. When he flagged the idea as interesting, I went home to work on it the next day — and knew within a few hours that I had the key to my whole career in hand. I distinctly remember staying up all night in excitement, feeling that I had just seen a vision on the road to Damascus.

Billy Pilgrim

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
1922-2007
American novelist

Like a lot of brainy, vaguely disaffected folks, I read a lot of Mr Vonnegut's writing when I was a teenager. As time went on, I got tired of the self-indulgent clowning that consumed much of novels like Breakfast of Champions, and was disappointed by the Cranky Old Guy rôle he took on late in life.

But Vonnegut did write Slaughterhouse 5 and Cat's Cradle, and either one of those would be more than enough to qualify him as a Great American.

My favourite of his novels was neither of these, but rather his lesser-known little book Mother Night. It's about the moral challenges one faces living in the face of political oppression—which being Vonnegut's work, is a good deal more entertaining than I make it sound. Its lesson is simple, and timely for our current age: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” I'm going to have to track down a copy to reread in honour of his passing.

You might want to check it out, too. It's short, lively, and will make you think, I promise. In the meantime, I just have my father's favourite passage from Slaughterhouse 5:

He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground., to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

(Image from a collection of other quotes from Slaughterhouse Five.)

Cracking good writing, and now we'll never hear any more from him.

Update: Warren Ellis says a few words, Gael Fashingbauer Cooper offers several more, the city of San Francisco remembers, Salon collects some famous folks' remembrances, and Content Love Knowles offers a quote from him appropriate for this moment.

I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, “Isaac is up in heaven now.” It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored.

And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, “Kurt is up in heaven now.” That's my favorite joke.

Kurt is up in Heaven now. So it goes.

Alas, when we need her most

Molly Ivins
1944-2007
Commentator

She was the first one to call him “Shrub.” She was the person who quipped that Pat Buchanan's 1992 culture war speech “probably sounded better in the original German.” She loved America but I suspect that she actually loved her home state more:

I dearly love the state of Texas, but I consider that a harmless perversion on my part, and discuss it only with consenting adults.

She was a great American and this blog mourns her passing.

Just for her, as a memorial, let's impeach the President.

Olbermann

Better than ever. And ever more necessary. He is truly a Great American.

Go watch.

Worst Americans

A while back, Alexandra von Maltzan at All Things Beautiful proposed an interesting blogging subject. Who would you say are the ten worst Americans in history?

Interestingly, I stumbled across this via Captain's Quarters, an evidently very right-leaning blog. The Captain's Quarters list goes:

1. J. Edgar Hoover
2. John Wilkes Booth
3. Benedict Arnold
4. Nathan Bedford Forrest
5. Stephen Douglas
6. Richard Nixon
7. Joe McCarthy
8. Aaron Burr
9. John Walker, Jr.
10. Jimmy Carter

What's interesting here is not that I choke on Jimmy Carter—who turns out to be a very popular choice among right-leaning bloggers. (Jimmy Carter?!?) Rather, it's that I can get behind at least half of these choices. Nathan Bedford Forrest, yep. Benedict Arnold is a respectable choice, sure. Tricky Dick and Tailgunner Joe, oh yeah. Hoover, hell yes.

I did some surfing around, and interestingly there's a lot of overlap in folks' choices, whether they're left, right, or sideways. Hoover almost always makes the list. Maybe they go for Jefferson Davis instead of Nathan Bedford Forrest, but it's it's obvious that they both represent the same basic target. And so on.

But there's one who seems conspicuous by his absence from most folks' lists: Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb.

If you're going there, you might ask why not Oppenheimer, father of the atom bomb? Oppenheimer acted out of fear that Hitler would get the Bomb first, came to regret his deadly invention, and fought the rest of his life for nuclear disarmament and sanity. Oppenheimer is a tragic figure, not a villain. And the H-Bomb really is categorically worse than the A-Bomb. The original A-Bomb is horrific, yes, but the H-Bomb literally has the power to kill the entire human species.

Teller was not only the mastermind of the development of the H-Bomb, he was a great advocate of its development. It truly might not have happened without him. He went on to advocate for countless examples of the worst arms race madness of the Cold War, from extensive nuclear testing to enormous weapons stockpiles to the Star Wars defense system. He helped destroy Oppenheimer's political influence by contributing to claims that he was a "security risk." He advocated using nuclear bombs as tools to strip-mine the American southwest. Each step of the way he played it for his own enrichment and aggrandizement, turning the original Faustian arrangement between scientists and the American military that happened at Los Alamos into a permanent fixture of American society.

He definitely makes the list.

Will

Some years ago I picked up a copy of What Is Enlightenment? magazine because the cover gave me a good laugh. It started with the provocative name of the magazine itself, which I think is pretty wry for asking the hard question so directly. But what really got me laughing—and thinking—was that it had a picture of Jack La Lanne and Mr X, another guy whom you'd recognize from TV as also having a kind of uncanny enthusiasm. The cover asked: Are they enlightened?

Jack La Lanne, enlightened?

He's not exactly what you think of when you think "enlightened," but he's sure got some kind of juice. He's someone whom I would call a Great American, a whimsical way of saying that he's living a good life, a life of integrity, and doing his own very unique something to make the world a little bit better. (I stole the expression from MKB, and it's often useful.)

But "enlightened"? Well, in every interview I've ever seen with him, he repeats this little rap about his life ...

Leaving a hot bed and a hot woman and going into a cold gym at five or six in the morning takes dedication. But I'd rather take a beating. You get out of the bed in the morning tired with aches and pains, but this body works for me. It's my slave. I take care of it. I just kick my butt and get it out of bed, and the next thing I know a couple of hours have passed, and I look in the mirror and say, "Jack, you've done it again!"

... which reflects a kind of relentless dedication mixed with relentless happiness that may not be "enlightenment," but is at least a cousin to it.

But actually I'm not so much interested in Jack La Lanne today as Mr X, the other guy on that magazine cover, who has some surprisingly interesting things to say. Please don't click the links just yet; I want to keep you in suspense about who Mr X is while I quote him at length.

Instead, follow this link to the quotes ....

So there's a thing that Mr X said in his interview with What is Enlightenment? that really struck me.

We have a unique situation in life. Here's how life works in my estimation. It's a very simple game. You do a poor job at something, what kinds of rewards do you get?

Interviewer: Very few.

You do a poor job, you get nothing. You get pain. When you do a really poor job consistently in life, your relationship leaves you. When you do a poor job at work consistently, unless you work for the government, your job is over. You get right-sized, you get downsized, right? You're out of here. You do a poor job on your kids, they end up in jail. Now, most people in life won't settle for "poor." Their standard is "good." If you imagine a set of stairs and you're at the base level, where one step down is maybe a poor job and "good" might be ten stairs up, that's a big jump to "good." So when you do a good job in life, what kind of rewards do you get?

Good rewards.

No, you get poor rewards. Every day people stop me on the street and they say, "[Mr X], I know you're an expert in this field and I just wondered if you could answer a question." They're usually very emotional. And they'll say, "I'm a good husband. How come my wife left me?" or, "I'm a good wife. How come my husband left me?" or, "I'm a good parent. How come my kid is on cocaine?" And the hardest thing in the world is explaining to them that this is how life works. You do a good job, you get poor rewards. That's how it really is. And the best study of life is the study of how it is, not how you think it should be. You could say, "Gravity makes no sense and I'm going to avoid it. I don't like it." But if you jump off a cliff, you're going to pay the price. There are certain laws that just can't be beat. They're part of the way we are formed, of what we are a part of, the system we're a part of.

" So, most achievers in life, whether they be spiritual achievers, business achievers, parent achievers, people who really are going for the best, they say, "I want to be excellent. I don't want to settle for good. I've got a much higher standard." But if the standard is excellence, here's what happens. You get good rewards. You're going to say, "Wait a second. I went from ten stories up to twenty stories up! I'm one of the very best men. I pray every day. I read the Bible. I read the Koran. I meditate. I'm doing my mantra, I'm doing my kriyas [yogic practices], I'm speaking in tongues, I'm eating the perfect diet. I'm doing this stuff. How come I don't have enlightenment yet, damn it?" It's because you're excellent. And I've got news for you. You're never going to get it as long as you're excellent. You know what you're going to get? Good rewards. You'll have a great life. You'll feel a great sense of spiritual connection. You'll probably have a great sense of gratitude. That's what you get when your standard is excellence. But the ultimate level is outstanding. And the thing about that is that although it's only a quarter-inch above excellence, very few people ever go there. When you are outstanding, when you stand out from all the rest in your standards for yourself, not by competing with others but in your standards for yourself, you get all the rewards, all the love, all the impact, all the everything, not just from society but from yourself, because you know you've never settled for less than you can be.

Huh.

I got to thinking about Mr X because, via Monkeyboy's linkblog, I learned this other story about him.

At one point, he asked everyone in the audience to raise their hand if they had failed to achieve a major goal at some point in their life. All hands go up. Why did you fail? Answers come from the audience:

• Time
• Money
• Lack of Resources
• The Supreme Court (it was Al Gore in the front row!)

The room bursts into a roar of laughter, and then [Mr X] continues. "People blame their failure on a lack of resources, but really, it's a lack of resourcefulness."

He then walks over and looks Al Gore squarely in the eyes. "If you showed the same passion and energy as we saw last night during the Presidential debates, you would have beaten that guy."

The room roared even louder with applause, Gore included. It was a thought that many people had, but may not have dared to express directly. When Al Gore spoke about his true passion, global warming and the environment, he came alive at TED, and seemed like a totally different person.

After the talk, Al Gore gave him a big hug.

Who is Mr X, this wise and witty guru of Rotary Club Neitzheism? Now follow those links to find out. You'll laugh.

Enlightened? Again, he's got something, no doubt. I suspect that my readers who think about spiritual work, will, and Will—you know who you are—were probably chuckling a bit over what he had to say. I'm not so sure I'd go for "enlightened," but I think I'm ready to say he's a Great American. Who'da thunk?

Willie

As if we needed further evidence that Willie Nelson is an American national treasure.

Dig this new track "Cowboys are Frequently Secretly (Fond of Each Other)." Yes, that's really him.

It seems that a fella named Ned Sublette wrote the song in the '80s. I recently heard Sublette interviewed on the radio, and he said that he heard Willie Nelson's voice singing it in his head when he wrote it, and that Nelson had liked it for years and had been talking about recording it ... and with the success of Nelson's work on the soundtrack for Brokeback Mountain, it seemed like the propitious moment to finally record and release it.

Independence Day

Informed by things that have happened since I wrote this, I have what I hope is a more astringent version of this rap.

---

Today is Independence Day in the United States.

Independence Day is the High Holy Day of American political identity. If you think about it, the Fourth of July is a strange choice of date. Consider the French equivalent, Bastille Day, which commemorates the storming of the Bastille and thus the event which demonstrated that the French monarchy was over. By similar reasoning, we should be celebrating when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown on 19 October, the battle of Lexington & Concord on 19 April, or (my favorite as an occasional lefty activist) the Boston Tea Party on 13 December.

But we don't. We celebrate the day that a bunch of guys signed a piece of paper.

I’ve posted before about how the American veneration of documents in our political culture reflects our Enlightenment conception of the nation as a human creation, composed of ideas, rather than any essential volkish link from country to nation. Nowhere do we see this more strongly than in our choice of the Fourth of July, the day men signed the Declaration of Independence.

It's easy to forget what an achievement the Declaration really is. But 1776 was a world of kings, and finding a way to think and talk about a political order without kings was very, very hard.

A look at Jefferson’s intellectual sources shows how just hard the problem was at that time. Here’s David Hume trying to find a moral theory for equality in world that only knew the divine right of kings:

Whatever actually happens is comprehended in the general plan or intention of Providence; nor has the greatest and most lawful prince any more reason, upon that account, to plead a peculiar sacredness or inviolable authority, than an inferior magistrate, or even an usurper, or even a robber and a pirate.

Here's John Locke trying to talk about individual human rights.

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.

Now here’s Jefferson summing it up perfectly in the Declaration.

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. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.

Those are the principles of liberal democracy, laid out cleanly in two hundred and three words.

I’d like to say that you couldn’t improve it by changing a single one of those words. It’s very, very close. But those two uses of the word “Men” really stick out. I’m prepared to forgive Jefferson that one. (Not everything.) He was a man of his time. He knew that the principles he describes meant that America was engaged in a terrible evil in the form of slavery. (Check out his rough draft of the Declaration: it’s right there.) And so also, deep in the Declaration is the principle that all people are equal, and I suspect that Jefferson knew it without knowing it, but didn't know how to fit it into the language. Maybe not, but I prefer to believe in the Declaration as it should have read.

I gave you the best part, but hey, you really ought to take a few minutes in honor of the day and read the whole thing — it’s really good stuff.

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Bonus posts:

Hollywood movie stars and me ranting about liberal patriotism!

Brad DeLong and Don Herzog on Jefferson, rights, and Nature’s God!

Celebrity encounter

The lovely and articulate Indri at Waterbones has a post that I found particularly entertaining, even though she had already told me about the core incident in person. She asked me to guess who she worked for at her most recent catering gig. I failed. She told me.

“You've met the greatest man of the twentieth century!?” I exclaimed.

“Met him?” she said. “He flirted with me.”

Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.

For more than a decade, I've been spamming people with this note every year. Time marches on: this year the primary medium for that will be Facebook. If you were here this time last year, read it again anyway.

Really. Take a few minutes. I think it's important.

Most people have forgotten that at the civil rights march on Washington DC on 28 August 1963, Martin Luther King was not the featured speaker. He was not the icon of the movement that we think of today. He was a major player, yes, but there were others more famous, respected, and important at that time. The speech he gave — the one you know — changed that.

The importance of the speech is distinctively American. The United States, unique among nations, is a frankly artificial creation. France is the place in Europe where people speak French, but the US has no ethnic definition — this place is full of immigrants who decided to be Americans, and their children. Japan is an island, but there's nothing natural about the borders of the US — this place wound up a nation through a chaotic combination of war, purchase, legislative decisions, and (oh yeah) genocide. The US is an idea. Something we just made up.

This is why we have the peculiar veneration of documents that we do. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are the holiest of holies in our civic religion because they are made of words, made of ideas. Through acclamation over the years we have chosen a handful of other documents that tell us what the United States is, like Lincoln's Gettysburg address and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech. In that speech, the power of King's rhetoric and ideas was so great that hearing it transformed our understanding of what the nation was about. I know, I know, that's a White guy thing to say: it's not like plenty of folks didn't know about American racial injustice. But on the level of shared understanding of shared destiny, King gave voice to ideas implicit in the American national promise that had too long been denied. And still are denied today.

In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.

This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.

Go read it right now. It will only take five minutes of your time. With no exaggeration, I think it's your duty as an American. Yeah, this year we can celebrate it seeming almost unremarkable to have a Black President of the United States, but reading it you cannot help but realize that we have a lot of work left to do.

And while you're at it, take a little more time and read Letter from a Birmingham Jail. I know you did it back in school. It's worth doing again.

And if you really want extra credit, go read what he said on the last full day of his life and T. Thorn Coyle's sample of King's writing against war, or listen to an NPR piece on the “Dream” speech itself.