Feminism, Wages, and How Protest Movements Support "The Man"

I guess I'm kind of a feminist. I'm an educated woman living in the 21st century. I have a B.A., I'm enrolled in a Master's program, I've spent a year in Belgium on a Fulbright grant. I intend to have a career. I hate movies and books with weak, fainting heroines. I get angry when I hear about Muslim women being stoned to death at the mere accusation of "impurity," and I find it repulsive that until 1981 in Italy, a “crime of honor”—killing your wife for being unfaithful or your sister for having premarital sex—could be treated as a lesser offense than other murders (and that the attitudes allowing for that law seem to have been operative as late as 2007--though I don't know the details of the case).

But then again, maybe I'm not. Not a feminist, that is. It all depends, really, on what you want the term to mean, and as I've gotten older I've come to realize more and more that like most labels in contemporary life ("capitalist," "conservative," "liberal," "environmentalist"), the term is wildly ambiguous. That ambiguity is one of the more frustrating aspects of the contemporary experience; how can you expect to have a fruitful, rational discussion about, say, political positions, with anyone when the terms "conservative," "Tea Party," "liberal," "progressive," and so on all need to be painstakingly redefined before the conversation can even begin?

See, my gut instinct is to recoil from the term "feminist" as though it were the verbal equivalent of a big, hairy wolf spider (the worst kind, barring tarantulas). That's because when I hear the word, I immediately envision State Representatives at the Governor's mansion scribbling the words "Girl Power" in bubble letters on a white board within a border of bloated, magic-marker flowers. I recall sitting around in circles at Girl Scouts, weaving and painting flower pots while being encouraged to talk about "feelings"--because apparently "Girl Power" means casting off boyish things, such as actual fun (camping, hiking, canoeing -- isn't that what scouting should be about?). I also remember heartily despising it all. This sort of feminism (and its proponents) appeared rather stupid...even to a second or third grader. I also despise several positions that by many are considered staples of feminism:  most importantly pro-abortion-ism. (I disagree with the typical secular feminist positions on contraception and the "bias against women" evidenced by an all-male priesthood, but I don't despise them, because for those lacking the proper theological background they're not without a logic of their own.) I certainly despise the idea that to be a strong woman, in charge of your own body, you need to have a "right" to kill babies--half of whom are, of course, future women. (Whatever happened to Madeleine Albright's "I have always said, there is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women"? Ah the hypocrisy.)

But I'm not primarily writing to complain about bad childhood experiences with a Spice Girls-inspired girl power doctrine, nor to rant about our cultural blindness to "murders of convenience." I'm writing because of this article recently published in the Atlantic. The issue it treats, that of the oft-cited income disparity between men and women, is one about which I have mixed feelings.

Now, speaking from my experience alone, the idea that women are discriminated against appears more than a little ridiculous. I've definitely grown up in a time, place, and social circle that tends to a.) see women, especially young women, as much more dependable and therefore job-worthy than guys of the same age, and b.) explicitly privileges women in many of the ways that the author of the above piece mentions. I know that I've had greater access to scholarships than many of my male peers, and I've sensed in more than one college class (even at a school as conservative as the University of Dallas) a certain bias towards female students (in that my reasons for being late or missing a class were often given more credence than a guy's equally valid ones). To an achievement-oriented personality, this privileged position can actually chafe a bit. I want to achieve things because I achieve them, not because of my gender. It's vaguely humiliating to imagine that some of what I've accomplished has been enabled by the fact that I was born a woman, and the mere possibility lessens the amount of satisfaction I find in having accomplished "this much." I look at the demographics of the Fulbright grantees in Belgium (one guy, eight girls), for instance, and have to wonder whether, as a male student from UD, I would have won the position.

The article above also brings up the highly misleading quality of statistics. It's another pet peeve of mine that people tend to put so much faith in one of the most inexcusable instances of reason-from-instantiation of which I can conceive (I hold a grudge against Auguste Comte for essentially founding the social sciences on this basis. Adolphe Quetelet was at least as responsible though). I've already given a few examples in this blog--Ron Paul can be read as a pro-abortion radical if you take certain votes out of context, much as Rick Santorum can be read as a raving progressive. If you only poll in the bluest of the blue states, the "pro-life" movement appears to be a fringe crusade; if you look at the unemployment numbers in the states without realizing that they account for only a fraction of the actually unemployed, our economy doesn't look so bad. Seventy-seven cents to the dollar looks like a pretty bad statistic. Maybe it is. Maybe women really are still secretly being discriminated against in a way that I've never had an opportunity to see. I admit: that probably is the root of some portion of the disparity.

The real question though, is "is gender-based discrimination a sufficient causal explanation for the wage disparity between men and women?" While the answer may or may not be as cut and dry as Marty Nemko suggests, it seems to me that there are plenty of other possible explanations for this "hard evidence that women are still subject to widespread discrimination." One bit of information that I found particularly interesting is summarized in a table reporting wage disparity in relation to age (about a third of the way down on this page).  Essentially, we see here that the "77%" statistic is by no means a constant as people age. At my age and slightly older, women's earnings are very close to equivalent with men's: nearly 93%. The percentage drops at a fairly constant rate until it comes to women's earnings after age 65, at which point it rises slightly. To some, this would indicate one thing and one thing only: women's status in the workforce is improving, if slowly; the greater wage disparity between older men and older women indicates that when these women were entering the workforce, they faced greater discrimination and enjoyed less opportunity for advancement than did their male peers. This might indeed explain some of the gap. There's another rather important point to consider though. What about all the women who take time off to raise children between the ages of, say, twenty three and forty? What about all of those who prefer to hold a part-time position while their children are still young? Now, I'm not saying that the wage disparity is explained by averaging the earnings of working women with the lack thereof of non-working women (or the low ones of the part-time employees): these statistics are only looking at full time employees, obviously. No, what I'd like people to consider is the very very basic question "how do people get raises?" From what I understand, you tend to get bumped up to a higher pay rank after you've worked in a place for a long time. Higher levels of experience also count for a lot when you're applying to a higher-paying job. Think of what that does to wages: for the men (and women) who remain in their careers long-term, wages rise gradually, almost inevitably with time. If you're returning to the full-time workforce after several (or more)  years away from it, or of only part time involvement, of course you won't be making as much. It's a fairly simple observation, and one that certainly holds true at least to some extent. Whether it can account for the entirety of the wage gap is another story. It probably can't.

Another, oft-cited point is that women and men tend to make different choices regarding their type of employment. Women often choose to find work in the education profession (especially elementary school), in secretarial positions, as nurses rather than doctors and as dental hygienists rather than dentists. It's not that they can't handle the higher levels of education and experience required of say, college professors (though that's by no means a male dominated field), CEOs, doctors, or dentists. But if you are a woman who does want a family, you're facing essentially the same dilemma that many career women in their twenties face: a family or a high-powered job/extra education? When people point out that men tend to earn more in many of these traditionally female-dominated careers, I have to wonder how much of that is sexism and how much of it might be a.) encouragement (male elementary school teachers are unfortunately hard to come by), or b.) if a man is going to choose such a profession, it's probably because he's either unusually good at it or because it's a higher-paying position in the first place: you're more likely to find a man working as a secretary for a CEO than a man working as the secretary at your local dentist's office.

Now, one may argue of course that women shouldn't have to choose between family and a great career. They should be able to have it all. Society should help them with childcare so that they can go ahead and get that education, so that they can grab that promotion. Maybe one would be correct. I know that, for myself I can't help at least sympathizing with the frustration, only because, as already mentioned, I'm achievement-oriented and want a career. And a family.

I also want to be the world's greatest mountaineer, a black belt in every variety of martial arts, a marathon runner, an expert in botany and a much better pianist.

Sometimes we have to choose between "wants."

Maybe there is still gender discrimination out there in the US. There certainly is in the rest of the world. But see, what really gets me riled up about the whole gender inequality debate is the way it privileges a certain definition of "success" and "worth" over any other. The same goes for most formulations of the race debate. And the social class debate. We've gotten so used to seeing success and worth in purely economic terms that even those who rail against "corporate America and its amorality" are still using the same definitions to give an account of what makes life worth living. (That's my biggest problem with Marxism too, incidentally.) How is it liberating to argue that what we need to do to destroy the monopoly of big business and the allure of excessive wealth is to ensure that those who by some standards don't have it, get it? Women are only really liberated if they are just as interested as men in high-powered careers (because if they're not, the only possible explanation is that the male-dominated hierarchy has been brainwashing them from infancy to be submissive). They're only liberated if they're willing to put academia and a paycheck above family and friends.

So, the best way to be a feminist is to encourage women to become the worst possible version of the (male) WASP stereotype? Remind me again why it's bad to want children? Oh, right, because they get in the way of education/career. Why is education/career better than children? Because it just is! Because we (feminists) say so. Because if you think otherwise, you must be conforming.

As I already said, and as is probably fairly evident from this blog, I'm the last person to start devaluing education. Or careers. And the satire in the above paragraph is, like all satire exaggerated. The feminist movement has, over the past hundred and fifty years or so, accomplished a lot of good, in my opinion. And most individual feminists are probably (especially now) willing to admit that children are not an inherently bad thing and may even be to some extent desirable. Nonetheless, even that mild version of feminism buys into the pervasive rhetoric of money-as-power, and degree-pursuant education as the primary worthy achievement. Insofar as it does that, feminism is useless. It's useless because it can't change anything fundamental; it can only turn the tables and make men the underdogs.

A truly counter-cultural feminism, one that would really stick it to the proverbial man, would be one that celebrated all of a woman's accomplishments as having their proper dignity. One that recognized the responsibility of caring for a human person as at least as challenging, exciting, and heroic a enterprise as that of starting a business or being granted a Ph.D.

And hey, let's not forget that that sort of cultural revolution would do an awful lot to get men on board with the child-raising. Right now we say "women should have what you have because it's worth more; get ye to the family and feed the kids." So the family remains the item of lesser importance and the men relegated to its care grow to resent it. Smart, smart move.


Note: After writing this, I remembered that I also wanted to relate our society's broken value system to our tendency to consider certain jobs as "more worthwhile" than others. What annoys me the most, for fairly obvious reasons, is the way we cast aspersions on those in the teaching profession, especially elementary and middle school educators. There are plenty of bad teachers out there, which is unfortunate. But there's nothing about the profession itself that warrants the denigration it receives. In point of fact, education is one of the most influential professions out there, and "underachieving" female teachers are in a position to shape the way the CEO's of tomorrow think. (Which is, of course, a fantastic reason to give the profession a little more respect and stop glutting it with people who can barely do basic math, but that's another point entirely.)

Capitalism vs. Corporatism, Again

I've expressed my disapproval of the current usage of the term "capitalism" several times before on this blog. My recent perusal of "Project Syndicate" updates led me to this article, which upholds my basic point, but elucidates it in much more economically savvy language than I would have been able to come up with. Capitalism vs. Corporatism. A rather important distinction to be able to make.

Freedom of Conscience in the USA

"With her long tradition of respect for the right relationship between faith and reason, the Church has a critical role to play in countering cultural currents which, on the basis of an extreme individualism, seek to promote notions of freedom detached from moral truth. Our tradition does not speak from blind faith, but from a rational perspective which links our commitment to building an authentically just, humane and prosperous society to our ultimate assurance that the cosmos is possessed of an inner logic accessible to human reasoning. The Church’s defense of a moral reasoning based on the natural law is grounded on her conviction that this law is not a threat to our freedom, but rather a “language” which enables us to understand ourselves and the truth of our being, and so to shape a more just and humane world. She thus proposes her moral teaching as a message not of constraint but of liberation, and as the basis for building a secure future."

 --From Pope Benedict's Address to the Bishops of the U.S., Jan. 2012

This paragraph really stood out in the midst of a generally excellent and very relevant speech on the role of Catholics in a society in which freedom of conscience is being increasingly infringed upon. Partly because the whole "natural law" concept is one of the most taboo ones you can bring up in academia, and academia is where I am right now, I particularly liked the italicized sentence:  a simple and eloquent way of putting it, even if that alone won't convince anyone adhering to (more or less) total relativism.

The whole speech is short, very worth a read, and available here. In case, by some chance, you are unaware of the circumstances surrounding the speech, here's an overview: http://www.catholic-convert.com/2012/01/21/obama-gives-catholics-one-year-to-learn-to-violate-their-consciences/

Ron Paul and National Security

Yes, yes, I'm quoting Ron Paul, but please don't assume I'm a mindless follower. I'm still reading carefully, sifting through actual quotes and actual voting records instead of reading heavily biased things like, uh, this, which uses the whole familiar yet enticing "cite facts but only some of them" method of argument (which explains why this article can make an equally convincing case for the opposite interpretation of Santorum). But hey, you don't have to be a mindless follower to agree with someone on some of the things he says, right? And on this small point, I rather think I agree, having written what I did on December 21.

Speaking on the National ID card:

"As long as a government can stir up fear, sometimes real and sometimes not real, the people are expected to do one thing: sacrifice their liberty. If you’re fearful, the government, the people who believe in big government--big-government conservatives or big-government liberals--they like fear to be out there. Sometimes fear is normal & natural & real, and we have to deal with it. At other times it’s concocted. In times of war, whether it was the Civil War, WWI, WWII--just think of the violations of civil liberties during the period of war when people are frightened. The one conclusion I have come to since 9/11 is that there is absolutely never a need to sacrifice any of your personal liberties to be safe! That means we do not have to accept the notion that we can have warrant-less searches, a total loss of our privacy. We don’t need a National ID card. You don’t have to register the American people to make us safe. You have to deal with the problem much more directly."

Security Angst

Nothing makes me want to sing the National Anthem at the top of my lungs more than being treated like a terrorist when I try to come into my own country. It may be over a decade since 9/11, but procedures for coming into the Police States of America (i.e. any place where the TSA is given authority to suspend any of our civil liberties it sees fit to ignore) have only gotten worse since I was in Rome in 2009. Back then, getting into Europe involved pretty much what it does now: you present your passport, present your visa, and they wave you on through. Getting into the United States, however, even for citizens, is even more of a headache than it was then.

Let's be honest here for a moment though; we Americans are lucky. If you're not Born in the USA, not only do you have to go through all the meticulous baggage controls, paperwork checks, etc; you have to be fingerprinted and get a mugshot. But that's okay, because you're not from the US, so you must be an Enemy (see movies like Taken for a great illustration of this attitude: if you're not American, you must be evil; not just evil, but an Evil Thing with a virulent hatred for all things American). Since, of course, there's no conceivably better way of securing our borders than taking fingerprints (last time I checked, all criminal acts were definitely committed by people with criminal histories...which makes me suspect that the criminal world must actually be an Underworld of Immortals, whose various rap sheets reach back to the beginning of time).

If you're American, other nifty things happen to you as you're attempting to return to your country. You go through security in Europe (which has the same requirements as the TSA, by the way), then you wait at the gate. But before you can board the plane, though you've had to show your passport about three times before even getting to this point, you need to show it again. Okay, so that's not so inconvenient, I admit. But what if the gate agents decide that you need another security check? While boarding my first Brussels-Atlanta flight, approximately every other person in line was pulled aside for a rifling-through of the baggage and an semi-assaulting of the personage (yeah, that thing that goes like this: . Fortunately I was not among them. But that didn't make me any calmer about seeing men with graying hair and women with white hair and high school students being treated like criminals and having to put up with it calmly for fear that the least complaint would be interpreted as aggression and suppressed. (Tell me again what's not police state about this?)

Of course, since the best way to protect our country from terrorism, illness, agricultural blights and a whole laundry list of other Curses of Adam is to make sure that we hermetically seal our borders, the ten hour flight following the first (two?) security checks is promptly followed by...I bet you can't guess...another security check. That is correct. With absolutely no window of opportunity available between the time you get off the plane (without exiting security), pick up your international baggage (without exiting security), bring a “imports affidavit” and your checked baggage pointlessly through another checkpoint where they actually check nothing before having you put it right back on a conveyor belt (without exiting security), there's still apparently sufficient danger that one of the frazzled passengers might have somehow picked up, I don't know, a bomb? a knife? something like that? under the watchful eyes of about five policemen per line. So guess what? You have to go through security again.

All of this makes so much sense to me. As I've said a million times before (fairly recently too, so I won't repeat in detail), possibly the most frustrating thing about it all is that it's so invasive while being so obviously ineffective. It might stop the most stupid of would-be terrorists. But a.) when you list all of the things you are going to check and all of the places you're going to search, it's kind of obvious that serious terrorists will seek other methods of attack. And b.) the checks as they are performed are so perfunctory, so shoddily done, that I really wonder what they accomplish at all. Take the huge “importation” check. They want to make sure that you don't have anything that could remotely pose a risk to public health or anything that could be “smuggled.” I suppose that's reasonable. So what's the most logical way to check for that? Obviously, have them give you a slip of paper saying “I don't have any X”, and then wave them through. Wow, look guys, I've saved the world! Why didn't I think of this before? We can ask people if they're doing anything bad and since lying is impossible, we'll definitely get an accurate answer.

The whole thing is such a mess, at least to the eye of common sense, that I end the hour-long process of getting off the plane “legally” hoping beyond all else that there's some behind-the-scenes justification for all this. That running gloved hands under the lip of an elderly man's jeans is somehow protecting us all from more 9/11's. And while I wish this so that at least the outrage of my common sense may be soothed, I can't ignore the fact that even if such tactics are achieving victories every now and then, victories that we somehow never hear about, we've kind of let the Bin Laden crowd win. Because if their goal was to “terrify” Americans (which is what terrorists do, no?), they've done that pretty well. Well enough that we're perfectly fine now with giving up more and more of our liberties just so that we can stay “safe”.

Last time I checked, America wasn't the Land of the Safe and Cowardly, at least not in theory. It was supposed to be “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.” One has to wonder how many people still care to make the distinction.

In Defense of Suffering

This is one of the best short articles I've read in months. The wealth of references (Dante, Eliot, Dostoevsky...yes please!) appeals to the classically-educated nerd within me, and the point he makes is one I agree with wholeheartedly. Are some of the claims sweeping and not to be fully supported (surely not all depression is merely psychological)? Of course. It's a short article. Should we do as much as we can to alleviate human suffering? Sure. Should we do so in particular as independent actors exercising our own freedom to choose our own and others' good? Yes. Should we manipulate governmental structures so as to minimize the extent to which free human choice (within normal limits) results in suffering, to the extent that we essentially abolish freedom? I think that would show that we have our priorities very, very wrong.

Contraception, Vatican II, and a few comments on Classic Capitalism

I spent a while the other day grousing to my boyfriend about this rather awful article by a self-proclaimed "Catholic." He referred me to an excellent rebuttal of Townsend's position (it predates her article, obviously) in the First Things magazine; I liked it so much I had to repost it. It's fantastic to see the empirical social evidence that supports the Church's position on birth control supported so well, since Catholics like Townsend will not respond to the theological argument. Why would you if you were firmly convinced that the role of religion is social, not spiritual? (Then again, why not just head over to the local Universalist church if you believe that?)

For the record, Malthus and Margaret Sanger, the "parents" of the birth/population control movement, were not particularly Nice People. The idea that humans would "breed" and "spawn" was fairly repulsive to their Victorian sensibilities ("Victorian" used here only as a descriptive adjective; Sanger came at the tail end of the Edwardian Era). People are "...human weeds,' 'reckless breeders,' 'spawning... human beings who never should have been born"--or so Sanger claims in Pivot of Civilization. Note that the "human weeds" she refers to are not the members of her own white upper middle class; they are. very specifically, poor people, immigrants, and blacks. (Here's an obviously biased website listing some of her choice quotations. Biased or not, the quotations are real, and one can easily find the works to which it refers.)

On a more positive note, here's a link to an amusing article I came across that (jestingly) reads Star Wars as an allegory for Vatican II. It's way over the top, and becomes more so as it goes along, but it does give a pretty good sketch of the situation post-VII. Hard to take oneself seriously quibbling with a blatantly joking article, but I do find the Tusken Raiders=Muslims thing to be kind of offensive and uneducated.

And the capitalism thing! Gah, allow me to get distracted for a moment by my long-standing frustration with the misunderstanding of capitalism that So Many People take for the Gospel Truth. As I have previously argued, both on this blog and countless times in person, Capitalism is not an "evil system." It's very simply a description of how markets work. Really, I begin to think that no one has even read Adam Smith. Or rather, they've read excerpts, which as I've argued plenty of times before regarding such classics as The Education of Henry Adams, is disastrous to one's understanding of the text. How many people realize that Smith's enormous tome The Wealth of Nations actually contains plenty of cautionary advice to governments acknowledging that if the market is left absolutely unrestrained, it'll kind of make for a Horrible Society?

Précisons: sure, self-interest drives the market, according to capitalism, and that's not entirely a bad thing from its perspective. As Smith observes,

 "By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other eases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good."

 Of course, this is only saying that sometimes self-interested pursuit of economic profit results in the best public good, and that direct pursuit of the same end is often disappointing. I admit that this possibility is not in itself sufficient reassurance to those who care about developing a just society. However, this is simply one observation extracted from the entirety of the book. What you're not getting in this paragraph is the fact that Smith is restricting his observations to purely economic interactions. "Self-interest" does not mean Being Greedy and Stomping on the Little Guy, and anyone who does those things claiming to be justified by capitalist principles would most likely be roundly censured by Smith (who, among other things, was also the author of the mostly-forgotten Theory of Moral Sentiments). "Self-interest" as understood here is as simple as Person A. selling a bushel of beans that he's grown spending about $2 on seeds and about $30 worth of labor to Person B. for a profit of $40. Of course, Person B. only enters into the transaction if it serves his interests as well. So he's willing to pay $40 for beans because the cost (opportunity cost, in econ terms) of producing the beans himself would have been higher than the cost of buying them. 


Again, this is only economic interactions we're talking about ("economic interactions" strictly understood, because one can understand everything in economic terms, assuming that a notion of values is agreed upon). It in no way limits a person's ability to step outside of the limitations of economic self-interest and act generously, and as I've observed above, Smith actually finds generosity fairly important if the system isn't going to crumble. And he even encourages the government to put some elementary limitations on the system so that it doesn't become dehumanizing. (Great quote from Noam Chomsky: "People read snippets of Adam Smith, the few phrases they teach in school. Everybody reads the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about how wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people get to the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of labor will destroy human beings and turn people into creatures as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be. And therefore in any civilized society the government is going to have to take some measures to prevent division of labor from proceeding to its limits."--from Class Warfare)

Of course, it's obvious that greedy people looking to maximize their own gains can find ways to manipulate the system, but it's a bit of a mystery to me why greedy people thus manipulating things discredits the very basic economic principles of capitalism. That's kind of like saying that corrupt politicians discredit American democratic republicanism or that corrupt "charitable" organizations discredit charity. Greed is not defined as "working to promote your own advantage." I'm pretty sure that last time I checked, the Church was fine with people earning money and bettering their social position. The problem is when people obsess about it to the expense of more serious matters (relationship with God and others), or, worse (and this almost always goes hand-in-hand with such obsession; it's a logical progression), do so unjustly. In other words, greed is manipulating a system or structure to promote one's own advantage at the expense of others. The "problem" Catholic writers are seeing with capitalism isn't a systemic problem, it's a moral problem. One that I'd attribute partly to fallen human nature, partly to materialism. Now that latter, that's something one can complain about. But I'm not about to get into a discussion of the effects of materialism on society at this point.

Les Règles des jeux

Take the singular of this post title and you've got the title of a very excellent Jean Renoir movie from 1939. It's consistently ranked within the top ten best movies of all time, and if you watch it (there's a French language--no subtitles--version on youtube, but probably others on Netflix, etc) you'll see why. I have little to say about it that is not already very well said in this astute and lengthy analysis by Arthur Goldhammer.  Jean Renoir is, incidentally, a director whom I highly recommend. La Grande illusion is also a phenomenal film; Elena et les hommes is well-made, but more fun than anything--and you get to see the ever-engaging Ingrid Bergman speaking French and wearing enormous Belle Époque hats. Another interesting one that's a bit outside the Renoir canon is This Land is Mine, an anti-Nazi propaganda film made in the US in 1943 to avoid German censoring and drum up American support for entering the war. If you can take the film's occasional descents into preachiness and the rather jarring sound of "Germans" and "Frenchmen" speaking with the most Americanized of accents, it's an interesting look at what it was actually like to be a Resistance fighter during the occupation. The movie centers around a moral dilemma that Americans, having never had to suffer through an occupation, tend to forget entirely: how does one justify resistance if the occupiers will target innocent civilians by way of retribution? As I said, interesting, despite the flaws inherent in being a propaganda film.

Turning to a different sort of game entirely, here are three recent RCW articles that incisively discuss the origins of the EU and why it's poised to break up now. The role of nationalism is a common focus, and it's indeed interesting to see the European Far Right (especially in France) gaining momentum as the economic crisis worsens. (I'm also very pleased at being vindicated at every turn in my claims that there is such a thing as European conservatism, and that not every European is on board with the idea of creating a United States of Europe.)

Europe's Nationalism Problem
The Crisis of Europe and European Nationalism
Europe's Opacity Problem

Oh, and here are two very short more-news-less-analysis articles, just for fun.

The New Face of Digital Populism
European Far Right on the Rise Online

American Intolerance

A former fellow-UD student posted this article earlier today.  The article itself says pretty much everything, and what's particularly interesting is that this is a Muslim perspective on the current controversy at CUA. As usual, it's members of the supposedly marginalized group who see little to complain about. No Muslim students have voiced any complaint about "intolerance" at CUA, and if crucifixes in prayer rooms offend anyone, they should jolly well realize that it's a Catholic school. If they don't like it, no one's forcing them to attend. Which the students seem quite open to understanding. Tellingly, Banzhaf has a record of suing over so-called "discrimination" issues. Which, as a lawyer, gains him a certain notoriety. I don't know about money, since I'm not familiar with such details about the workings of the legal system, but self-interest does seem to be playing a role here, since he's certainly not advocating on the behalf of any students.

One of the really disturbing characteristics of contemporary American litigiousness is its penchant for attacking free religious expression under the guise of supporting "separation of church and state". There are several problems with the situation. For one thing, there's the nagging question of how a private institution that is open about its religious orientation can legally be considered "the state". Last time I checked, Catholic U. was a privately-run university, and should have a right to express its religion freely; at least, it should if you're going to let the First Amendment mean much of anything. Generally the litigious types tend to get around this by confusing "state" with "public"...in other words, if it can be seen, it's tantamount to the state assenting to it, which does not mean that the state is merely tolerating it; it must mean that the state is actively forcing it on everyone else as the official religion. Risible logic.

Are we really willing to take the European route and opt for pure secularism? I.e. no, or at least very limited, public expression of religion? I have problems with that, but hey, at least they're consistent about it in Europe. The same standards apply to Christians, Jews, and Muslims when it comes to religious practices. The second big problem with the American situation is that it's always the Christians who have to pay. It makes sense. We like underdogs here, so minorities are pretty romantic things to have around. If you decide to make an easy buck suing someone over religious expression, it had better be Christians that you target, because they're the majority, and it's easy for everyone to forget that denying them freedom of religious expression is just as unconstitutional as denying it to minority religions. Just to clarify things for the record: I'm very happy to see a Happy Hanukkah sign in a store, but I think it's ridiculous that Merry Christmas has become a legitimate litigation target. Go ahead and wear the hijab or wear a cross to school: you should be treated the same either way.

Now, I don't think that there would ever be (not within a hundred years or so at least) a written law explicitly limiting public religious expression in America. The ideal of religious liberty is far too important to us even today, when more than half the population can recite two words of the Declaration.  What I'm more concerned about is the effect of litigation on the de facto law. If everyone knows that Christians can get into big financial trouble simply for putting a cross in a classroom because they have the misfortune to be a historical majority, then that's as much discrimination in practice as a written law would be.

Legalism in America and a few of its Ramifications

I'm not going to start ranting about the woes of the American legal system; I think it's pretty good, that the level of professionalism of those involved in genuine criminal cases is generally good and that things like what happened over in Italy to Amanda Knox (basically a case of police officers saying "we knew she did it...we didn't need any proof" and then fabricating some extremely bad "evidence" and a lurid, sensationalist story that captured the imaginations of the jury) don't happen too often here. Sure, there are injustices in US criminal cases, but people are human, right? Can't condemn the system for a few peoples' abuses.

That's criminal law though. I mean, for violent crimes and such--I don't know all the technical terminology. What gets to me in America, however, is the legalism of the system, a trait which allows people to be made into criminals for really doing nothing at all. The extremely problematic and well-known litigiousness of  many Americans can essentially be reduced to people exploiting the letter of the law in order to make huge profits for themselves. Possibly worse though is the way civic liberties can be violated (especially in public schools) simply because there's a legal loophole giving paranoid, antagonistic, or simply lazy officials or private individuals the opportunity to target individuals who have done nothing morally wrong at all--or in some cases something minorly wrong, but certainly not meriting the severity of the punishment.

Some examples from the past few years:

1. TSA: Everyone knows about this one. Not quite the same issue that I'm pointing to in this post, but annoying enough to merit a mention. Even if everyone out there has heard all the proof. Let's also point out that what it has in common with the above is the way it makes non-criminals appear criminal. Every person who chooses to travel by plane is a suspected terrorist. Right. What would the reaction be if the police force started treating everyone as a murder suspect? Searching, strip-searching and questioning and so forth just because "oh, well, you might be a criminal."? Sounds a little bit totalitarian, no? And what makes it worse is that TSA tactics really don't even work:
1. The no-fly list:  This wouldn't be a bad idea--it would actually be extremely efficient if Israel's record is anything to go by--if we had the intelligence to back it up. As it is, naming dead people, ex-Marines, and failing to distinguish between actual suspects and five-year-olds who have the same name is not going to get you very far. It notably failed to mention the "Underwear bomber," Abdulmutallab, whose father even contacted US intelligence officials twice to warn them about his son's extremism. Faisal Shahzad, who attempted the car bombing in NYC, was actually on the no-fly list, but no one at the airport bothered to check it. Lot of good that's going to do. 
2. Full body scanners: A.) they don't work; B.) they don't work; C.) according to Israeli security experts, they don't work; D.) while it is debatable how much harm the radiation you're exposed to in one of those machines does to the human person, I, and I assume many others as well, would like a little more reassurance that our health isn't one of the many things that can be sacrificed so that we don't die in a terrorist attack. Hmm...terrorism or cancer? Which one is more scary? Which is more likely? Regardless of whether it's unproven that the scanners do cause health problems, it's importantly unproven that they don't. Like with so many other things we've been exposing the American population to for years, we probably won't know until at least two decades from now. 
3. Alternative searches are just nasty. And if a terrorist can dupe the scanners, which of them is going to opt for one of those anyway?
2.   Schools--the "Zero Tolerance" policy: Sure, violence in schools is bad. Tragic. But is it really better to run your school in a state of such paranoia that students can be arrested and traumatized for carrying a plastic butter knife? And the police force will just go along with this? 
1. Some examples: Wow, yes, I definitely would be able to kill an entire school with a plastic butter knife. At least a steak knife is more plausible. Though what a ten-year-old girl could do with it, I'm not sure.  Carrying 11 pills of ibuprofen to school is also apparently a criminal offense. Americans also really like strip searching, it seems! This sample is small because I don't want to go overboard with links.  Search google news to get lots more interesting stories. 
2. Creative writing. This one deserves a sub-category of it's own. Yes, it sounds like a great idea to give your students a free-writing exercise, tell them to write about whatever they want, not to censor anything, and then have them arrested when their writing is "disturbing." Or wait...maybe the real purpose was to try to identify potential threats...in which case it makes a lot of sense. It's happened at least three times: one; two; three. 
3. Stupid laws: So, did you know that you can be arrested for owning a sharpie? Like this student and this man?  Ok, sure, the man was an ex-graffiti artist, and I don't like graffiti. But the key work is "ex". He had since become a professional artist. Using.... markers, stickers, wheatpaste posters, art prints, a copy of  the Los Angeles Times, and a computer. Which is apparently enough to get you raided. Or how about ridiculous royalties? Like when Ascap started demanding that the Girl Scouts pay for singing campfire songs...apparently that's considered a public performance. Given the quality of most campfire singing, you can be pretty sure that they're not worried about the public performance issue so much as missing out on a chance to squeeze a few more bucks out of people.  Watch out if you decide to sing Happy Birthday in public...that's copyrighted too, so technically you can only sing it in "small groups of family members".
4. This last one is tragic. I don't really understand what this Northern Virginia cop was trying to accomplish, but the way things went makes him sound either like a real-life, not-so-funny Dwight Schrute, or someone pursuing a personal vendetta. Basically, he heard this guy, Sal Culosi, betting with his friends on a college football game while at a bar. The stakes were relatively low; on the order of about $50 or so. What was the detective's response? Befriend Culosi, talk him over the course of time into raising the stakes to $2000, and then bring charges against him for running an "illegal gambling operation" (the stakes need to be at least $2000 for it to become illegal). So you have a detective seeing a guy doing something harmless and legal with his friends. The detective deliberately incites the man to cross the line and do something illegal (which the man most likely didn't even know was illegal--who knows stuff like that?), just so he can bring charges against him. Not already bad enough? He has the house raided by a Swat team. In the process of the raid he shoots Culosi. Culosi was completely unarmed by all accounts; what's saving the detective from prosecution is the claim that the shooting was an "accident"--plus the North Virginian blue wall, which is apparently as bad as I've been told it is in NY. Forensic investigation suggested that the account of the "accident" is untenable. But we don't listen to things like that, do we? Not when the guy who got shot was a dangerous criminal who liked betting on football games with his friends...Come on people, what is this? Are the blue laws back or something? And I still don't understand how the inciting thing is not a problem. Generally it would be pretty bad for a police officer or detective to go up to someone he suspected of violent tendencies and incite them to murder, just so he could have an excuse for arresting them. Or am I crazy?

Now, as much as incidents like these upset me, I have no idea how to respond to them, beyond observing that they have in common a certain legalism that makes random people into unintentional criminals. Identifying the roots and suggesting a solution is far beyond my capacities, since I have no professional knowledge of law at all. Is the root problem inherent in the legal system itself? Is it the fault of the way people manipulate the legal system? Is it due to the contemporary American weakness for "safety at all costs" (very destructive of freedom, to be sure), or more to our increasing tendency to substitute legality for morality, to live by the letter of the law and not by the spirit? And regarding that last suggestion, could one even turn the focus to the "spirit of the law" without ultimately destroying law and order unless society were almost impossibly virtuous?

On the other hand, I'm well aware that it's things like this, the "sensational" cases, that get reported, giving the general public a much bleaker view of the legal system than is probably appropriate. Moreover, these student arrests and Ascap demands don't usually hold up in court. Which is a comfort. The injustices that get perpetrated by the legal system in the long term tend to be the much more tolerable ones that exonerate someone who's obviously guilty ( O.J., Casey Anthony) rather than those which inter an innocent person for four years, like they can apparently do in Italy.

Between Empire and Anarchy: In Current Events

Not part of my original plan for this rather informal series, but I just came across this article from Foreign Policy magazine, and thought it deserved posting. It's disturbing, if not at all unexpected, to see violence against Christians and other non-Islamist minorities on the rise in the Middle East during all the recent turmoil. It's not like it hasn't been happening in Iraq for years. But what's interesting in the article with respect to the question of Empire vs. Anarchy is pretty obvious: Traub gives a bit of overview of the situation's historical background. The line of "progress" since the 1800s has essentially been from  the weakening of the Ottoman Empire to the rise of nationalism, and now to what is essentially anarchy (or at least very disorganized civil war) in much of the Middle East. Nationalism is still strong in the area, as one can see in countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, etc. But the problem, not the first of its kind in history, but particularly widespread today, is that "nationalism" becomes sectarianism and sects break up into smaller sects and suddenly you have a madhouse with everyone fighting for power.

I'm inclined to think that to some extent this is always a danger with nationalism. People unite into a "nation" and then begin to question whether they all really belong to it or if say, this branch of that ethnic group can really ever "belong". What I'm getting at is the idea that within the nationalist impulse, or rather, the nation-creating impulse (since nationalism in countries that already have a strong sense of national identity is, rather obviously, a different affair), can easily slip into the impulse to keep dividing and dividing along ever-finer political, ethnic, religious, etc lines. And eventually you have anarchy. Which, certainly, is not necessarily violent. But you have only to look at the Middle East (or Africa, or parts of Eastern Europe, or parts of South America, some further back in history than others) to see that violence is far too often both the means and the result of this infinite splintering.

A note on the Phenomenon of Civil War

As distinct from the American Civil War, but very much related to it. This is a short passage from one of the texts I'm reading for my Security Studies and Conflict Analysis class, and it's a nice theoretical expression of one of the points I've been trying to make regarding the American Civil War; essentially that war in general, here civil war, is a much more complicated affair than, say, an evil, greedy North trying to destroy the beautiful way of life that was the South.

In "The Ontology of Political Violence" Stathis Kalyvas argues:

"Civil wars are typically described as binary conflicts, classified and understood on the basis of what is perceived to be their overarching issue dimension or cleavage: we thus speak of ideological, ethnic, religious, or class wars. Likewise, we label political actors in ethnic civil wars as ethnic actors, the violence of ethnic wars as ethnic violence, and so on. Yet such characterization turns out to be trickier than anticipated, because civil wars usually entail a perplexing combination of identities and actions.

Consider the following description of the American War of Independence in South Carolina: “There came with the true patriots a host of false friends and plunderers. And this was true of both sides in this terrible struggle. The outlaw Whig and the outlaw Tory, or rather the outlaws who were pretended Whigs and Tories as the occasion served, were laying waste the country almost as much as those who were fighting for the one side or the other.” Years later, Abraham Lincoln described the Civil War in the American West as a situation in which “murders for old grudges, and murders for pelf, proceed under any cloak that will best cover for the occasion.”

The Chinese Civil War was often fought by diverse and shifting coalitions of bandits and local militias; for a long time, the Communists were for the bandits “only one of several possible allies or temporary patrons.” In Manchuria, for instance, it was extremely difficult to differentiate between members of the Anti-Japanese Resistance and bandits because moving from one to another was very common: it is estimated that 140,000 of a total 300,000 resistance members had a bandit background. Common criminals were also used extensively during the Cultural Revolution. The determinants of violence in the province of Antioquia during the Colombian Violencia were “far more complex than any innate, unavoidable differences between monolithic groups of Liberals and Conservatives—the traditional explanation for la Violencia—might suggest”; in fact, “the point of la Violencia, even in supposed areas of ‘traditional settlement’ where partisan objectives were the guiding force behind armed insurrection, is that it was multifaceted and ambiguous, that politics and economic considerations can never be considered as discrete forces."

In short, ambiguity is endemic to civil wars; this turns their characterization into a quest for an ever-deeper “real” nature, presumably hidden underneath misleading facades—an exercise akin to uncovering Russian dolls. Thus, it is often argued that religious wars are really about class, or class wars are really about ethnicity, or ethnic wars are only about greed and looting, and so on. The difficulty of characterizing civil wars is a conceptual problem rather than one of measurement. If anything, the more detailed the facts, the bigger the difficulty in establishing the “true” motives and issues on the ground, as Paul Brass has nicely shown in the case of ethnic riots in India. An alternative is to recognize, instead, that the motives underlying action in civil war are inherently complex and ambiguous."

On G.W. Bush

Not to sound like a broken record, but I like thoughtful, well-balanced articles like this. The writer is clearly not a fan of Bush policy, but that doesn't stop him from being able, unlike most of the media, to make a distinction between the person and the ideas. Despite disagreeing with Bush on the Iraq war and on the fundamental nature of American democracy (yes, it's a Republic, but of a peculiarly democratic character; hence I think the term appropriate) I always did think the poor fellow got a bad rap with those vitriolic "I hate Bush" and "Look How Stupid Bush Is" calendars.

Thanks to Joseph at Ironical Coincidings  for the link.

Scapegoating

 This article by Walter Russell Mead over at the American Interest is quite intriguing. One thing that I've increasingly begun to notice over the past few years (so consistently that I don't think it's a jump to conclusions at all) is that liberals and conservatives in the USA both come off as rather desperate. Read the conventional news sources instead of say, something a little less headline-oriented and more thoughtful (Real Clear Politics, some of the New York Times' better editorials, The American Interest, some of The Atlantic), and you'll get one of two impressions:

1. America is descending into a cesspool of communism, all Christians and libertarians are being catalogued by the nefarious Federal Government, to be actively hunted down and eliminated within the next few decades.
2. America is being taken over by intolerant bigots who want to crucify homosexuals and bring back lynching, which, you know, they must, because all Christians hate anyone who is not white and northern European (so confusing to me, given where Christianity began and the distinctly non-European character of more than one place--Ethiopia, parts of India, the Philippines--where it has remained the strongest for at least several centuries).

Well, you can understand why those are the headlines. News is a business. Which unfortunately means that in a society where pride in the quality of one's work exists basically as a figment of the romantic imagination of company slogans, newspapers and other mass media survives on headlines that sell. And if you hype people up into a state of thinking "we are at war with X", they're going to buy more. That's the way we work. Make us think there's a battle to be fought, and we'll fight hard for a few minutes--reading newspapers and ranting at the coffee shop or on blogs or at work about the evils of the other side. Then our interest will turn to something entirely unrelated and we really don't care (in practice) any more until the next inflammatory headline catches our attention.

Now I'm hardly one to condemn that human impulse to fight, despite the rather anemic character of modern, safe, comfortable Western Civilization's method of attack. After all, what everyone is "fighting for," in their various views is "the truth," "justice", "good", etc. --although oddly enough one side insists that they are not fighting for "truth", because there is no truth (then why the fight? Even if tolerance is your highest goal, really, that at least must be true...another example of what David Brooks was pointing out in the New York Times a few days ago). Anyway, I'm not against the impulse, because it only reveals one of the elementary characteristics that humans have in common: however we misunderstand it and attenuate our search for it, we want truth, we want everyone to have access to the truth, and we are intensely dissatisfied, enraged even, when other people believe what appear to us to be lies.

Of course, that impulse can be catastrophically misdirected, because we're notoriously bad at understanding what is "true". Give people the wrong idea and they'll usually go too far. When an entire society becomes infected with a misdirected idealism, that's precisely when the worst atrocities and injustices of history have been committed. Because an ideal, an "ism" as Chesterton puts it, is the most dangerous of things: a piece of the truth. No one is going to fall for an "ideal" that is entirely contrary to human nature. (At this point I'm not going to attempt to defend the idea that one can talk about "truth" or "human nature", though I know that's the most controversial part of what I'm saying--I'm already getting far more in depth than I'd intended, and anyone interested would be better off reading the Greeks or the Bible anyway.) The problem comes with the bits of falsehood inserted into the truth. Take the cliched-but-useful examples of Nazism and Stalinism. True: Germany shouldn't have been so harshly punished after WWI, and Germans starving in the streets is not good; any oppression of the poor by the rich is bad, and the socio-economic problems of Tsarist Russia were severe. False: Jews are responsible for Germany's misfortune and so they must all be killed; all of the rich are evil and should likewise be killed, and you must unwaveringly support the communist regime or else be eliminated as a co-conspirator with the rich.

Anyway, this is getting away from the original topic, but essentially my points thus far are that 1.) News headlines attract our interest by turning all political issues into matters of moral urgency, whether they admit doing so or not; 2.) people are very susceptible to this because of a laudable common impulse to establish a true, just and good society; 3.) despite the appropriateness of the impulse, misinformation--whether incidental or malicious--perverts the action resulting from the impulse.

Now, I'm not at all intending to equate either side in the current political debate, nor even the extreme versions presented by the media, with something really evil, like my two examples. The cases are similar only in the way that a perversion of a truth is able to appeal to a whole lot of really decent people; the degree of perversion is obviously vastly different (except in the abortion case, but that's another whole article waiting to be written). However, I do think, essentially, that both sides of the media have got things quite wrong, and that we have to be very careful about sifting through claims intelligently, rationally, carefully. That we have to remember that America is not controlled by radical feminist-socialist-pro-abortionites, though that's what you'll see in Hollywood fairly often. And it's certainly not (and I really don't see how anyone with the slimmest contact with actual people in America could think otherwise), a nascent fundamentalist-Christian-lynch-mob state. (Again, really, has anyone been to a Tea Party? Talked with a real Tea Party sympathizer?)

I don't think people are all in some felicitous state of equilibrium either though. For one thing, that's impossible. For another, there are plenty of very obvious problems with American society today. Foremost among these in my opinion is actually the tendency of people to just...not care. About much of anything. (Interestingly enough you could argue that the hype in the media is almost necessary in such a lazy, individualistic society--a gadfly prodding the lazy horse into action sort of thing.) Generally as long as problem X doesn't affect me immediately, I won't care enough to get up and do anything about it. Notice that the only thing that really tends to get certain sectors of the population interested in politics is a mention of limiting welfare programs. Individualism. Self-centerism. Just what Tocqueville predicted, actually. And interestingly enough, what Mead points to in the above article as the "real America" that is obscured by the media hype on both sides.

To avoid misdirecting our efforts towards fighting a communist conspiracy or a nascent lynch mob, I have a suspicion it might be worthwhile to look at simple selfishness as the core of the problem. To realize that Americans are losing the vocabulary of ethics as "I want X" becomes an increasingly acceptable reason for doing anything. That socialist policies are more plausibly the outcome of self-interested lawmakers' desire to give immediate gratification to lazy, greedy constituents. That the more extreme comments coming out of mega-churches in the south stem from the fundamentalist tendency to preach a prosperity gospel and consequently involve themselves inappropriately in political-economic matters--or to appeal to a sector of the population that feels its legitimate moral beliefs to be under attack in today's America, often with suspiciously large fiscal gains for the pastors of said churches.

Which is all a bit of a dark outlook, but it's at least part of the truth. And since when has selfishness been not a problem?

Putin

If nothing else can be said for the man, he's certainly one of the most interesting political leaders since the days of Thatcher and Reagan. This article that I found in the archives of The Atlantic, written in 2005, eschews the media hype that usually surrounds the political leader and looks at the man behind the tiger-shooter, whale-harpooner, and judo-expert. Very interesting. On a lighter note, here's a great series of pictures from the same magazine that highlights the sort of action-hero status that makes him such a fun politician to follow...even if he is, you know, a bit on the totalitarian side, potentially dangerous, all that.

Another good article, and more Civil War Economics

The reading about the Civil War continues. I'm finding the whole subject more and more interesting, and that interest rises as I discover excellent articles about aspects of the conflict that are generally ignored in the textbook accounts. This one, by Howard Jones at The American Interest, discusses the international ramifications of the war. It's particularly interesting to me in context of those chapters of Henry Adam's Education that dealt with the complex diplomatic situation over in London; a conflict that you really learn next to nothing about (it existed, that's pretty much it) in most accounts of the war.

Another interesting part of the article is the discussion of  Confederate efforts to woo Great Britain. Essentially, by making continued supply of cotton to Great Britain and France contingent upon those countries' recognition of the Confederate states, the Confederacy put another nail in their own coffin, economically speaking. Because the response in Europe was simply to look for cotton elsewhere. Hence the explosion of the cotton industry in Egypt, India, and Brazil. So by the end of the war, when the South was looking to get back on its feet economically,  they found that they'd deprived themselves of their own customers.

Also--and this is only tangentially related to the article--it's interesting that the more I read about this whole affair, the more clear it becomes that economics motivated the both the North and the South, despite that whole lovely mythologization of the South as fighting for some Romantic principle of Aristocratic Living and Good Old Roman Virtue. If you want to view the North's motivations solely  in economic terms, it's fair to do the same to the South; and it's necessary, in the face of the evidence. Given the south's preoccupation with the Slave trade (and who wants to believe nowadays that there was a huge push in the Confederate states to reestablish the African slave trade that the Founders had abolished in the early 1800s as a means of "strengthening"  the economy?) and the cotton trade, economic motives were certainly strong in the Confederate states. Thus while we can admit that the North may have been motivated to stop slavery because of the expansion of industry and the surplus of available immigrant labor, one must also admit that the South was also fighting for economic reasons:  for the preservation of a pseudo-aristocratic, slave-owning agrarian economy vs. an industrial, wage-earning, talent-based economy. Again, any Romanticization of such motives is valid only insofar as we are willing to give a moral benefit of the doubt to both sides, since self-interest was at least as much an issue in the South as in the North.

Mark Shea on the Civil War

Very reasonably, Mark Shea does not attempt to make any definitive declaration about which side was "justified" in the Civil War, though that is what the questioner here asks him to do. He points out problems with both sides that I'm very ready to admit. Remember that my staunch defense of the north in this blog is a reaction to my time at college in the south, where I was horrified by southern attempts to make their half of the country into a bunch of martyrs for "the Roman ideal" or "Western Civilization" some such nonsense (Well, I guess the Romans did base their aristocratic leisure on slavery...but with the Catholic denunciation of slavery dating from St. Patrick and earlier, it was hardly "Western Civilization" at it's height..unless by Western Civilization they mean "that state in which non-Europeans are oppressed"). The north was never perfect, because there is no such thing as a "perfect" side in war. We could even get into all that with WWII...Look at FDR's motivations for fighting Hitler, for instance, and the rose-tinted glasses Hollywood has provided us for generations will disappear.

On the whole, I see the war not as a triumph, but a tragedy, in which the respective flaws of both parts of the country infected the conflict and turned the honest efforts and sacrifices of ordinary Americans into a mockery of idealistic intents. Particularly tragic is what the war turned into after it was fought. With Lincoln, despite his flaws, you have a man desperate to uphold the core of the constitution, whether he made mistakes in doing so or not. You have an honest desire to mend the divisions of the war and to welcome the south back after the war was ended. Instead, Lincoln died, the power-mongers of the Senate jumped into the gap, and the  powers that the Federal government can be argued to have constitutionally in time of war into the powers it has in time of peace as well. Reconstruction was botched. Opportunists from both parts of the country were allowed free reign. The ideals which were being fought for disintegrated as the slaves were freed but denied the opportunity to make an independent life for themselves and the southerners contributed to their own impoverishment by refusing to actually work in pursuit of their own self-improvement, preferring to live in a constant state of resentment of history that persists to this day and is comparable only to the African American resentment of their ancestors' enslavement--ironically, a complaint that said southerners tend to decry as "liberal" self-martyrization while they themselves do precisely the same thing.

Whatever the injustices of the war, however, it is absolutely crucial to recognize that imperfections in the way the war was carried out and mixed motives on the part of many northerners do not invalidate the heroism of the thousands of northerners in the field during the war who believed they were fighting for the just application of the Declaration to all men.

Two excerpts from Shea's blog nicely articulate what I've been arguing thus far; plus, it's always nice to realize one's not the only one crazy enough to suggest that the Civil War might actually have had something to do with slavery and that Romanticizing the south is inherently problematic:

Like it or not, in the South, the reality is that slavery had everything to do with the shots fired on Fort Sumter and the whole domino fall of secession. The South fought for “State’s Rights” because the South was fighting for the right to keep an agrarian economy based on slavery. That’s what the war was about. It was the simmering resentment of a northern economy that was squeezing the life from the South *and* looking down on the South with increasing contempt for their “peculiar institution.” No slavery, and there might very well never have been a Civil War.

. . .what the Civil Rights Movement forcefully reminded us of with the images of good white Christian folk screaming at kids for the crime of going to school in a black skin, or Bull Connor and his dogs and fire hoses, was that the Romanticism of the South (much like our culture’s present Romanticism about the rise of the Women’s movement) acted not only to celebrate what was good, but to obfuscate some real evils. Just as the story of feminism includes not only the righting of real wrongs against women, but also the sacramentalization of abortion as a core value, so the romanticism of the Southern role in the Recent Unpleasantness systematically overlooked the continuation of the slave culture under other names until the Civil Rights movement reminded us that the war may, after all, have been a necessary first step in purging America of the original sin of its founding.

Emancipation

Though I have long defended the Emancipation Proclamation as a sincere piece of legislation rather than mere political manipulation on Lincoln's part (one is, after all, allowed to grow in one's beliefs, no? cf. Ronald Reagan's changing views on abortion for instance?), I did not know this. Namely, that great pressure was actually being put on the president in 1863 to use the Proclamation as a bargaining chip to end the war quickly. The idea being that the South would agree to rejoin the Union if the North would forget about publishing the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln's response?

 “I should be damned in time and in eternity were I to do that.  I will keep faith with the gallant black soldiers who have fought and died for this nation at Port Hudson and Olustee. The Proclamation sticks.”

A Few Quotes

Frederick Douglass: 

"The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery."


"Viewing the man from the genuine abolitionist ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed cold, tardy, weak and unequal to the task. But, viewing him from the sentiments of his people, which as a statesman he was bound to respect, then his actions were swift, bold, radical and decisive. Taking the man in the whole, balancing the tremendous magnitude of the situation, and the necessary means to ends, Infinite Wisdom has rarely sent a man into the world more perfectly suited to his mission than Abraham Lincoln."



Sam Houston:

“To secede from the Union and set up another government would cause war. If you go to war with the United States, you will never conquer her, as she has the money and the men. If she does not whip you by guns, powder, and steel, she will starve you to death. It will take the flower of the country-the young men.”

 
"Let me tell you what is coming. After the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives you may win Southern independence, but I doubt it. The North is determined to preserve this Union. They are not a fiery, impulsive people as you are, for they live in colder climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction, they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche."

Stonewall Jackson:

(In response to a comment that it was a shame to shoot so many brave men): "'No, shoot them all, I do not wish them to be brave."

William Tecumseh Sherman:

 “You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it.

Henry Adams:

"I think that Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man and a fine character and acted conscientiously. It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world."


(Haven't I always said it's the impractical idealists who do the most harm? Bear in mind also that this was said in context of the South's pigheaded refusal to come to a compromise when Lincoln offered them a generous chance after Fort Sumter.) 




Joshua Chamberlain: 

"But out of that silence rose new sounds more appalling still; a strange ventriloquism, of which you could not locate the source, a smothered moan, as if a thousand discords were flowing together into a key-note weird, unearthly, terrible to hear and bear, yet startling with its nearness; the writhing concord broken by cries for help, some begging for a drop of water, some calling on God for pity; and some on friendly hands to finish what the enemy had so horribly begun; some with delirious, dreamy voices murmuring loved names, as if the dearest were bending over them; and underneath, all the time, the deep bass note from closed lips too hopeless, or too heroic, to articulate their agony...It seemed best to bestow myself between two dead men among the many left there by earlier assaults, and to draw another crosswise for a pillow out of the trampled, blood-soaked sod, pulling the flap of his coat over my face to fend off the chilling winds, and still more chilling, the deep, many voiced moan that overspread the field." 


 (On the surrender at Appomatox: "...On they come, with the old swinging route step and swaying battle flags. In the van, the proud Confederate ensign. Before us in proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood; men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death could bend from their resolve; standing before us now, thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond; was not such manhood to be welcomed back into a Union so tested and assured? On our part not a sound of trumpet more, nor roll of drum; not a cheer, nor word, nor whisper or vain-glorying, nor motion of man, but an awed stillness rather, and breath-holding, as if it were the passing of the dead!" 


(I can hardly help being proud that this fellow from Maine was also one of the best writers of the war.)



Abraham Lincoln:

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

  
Pope Gregory XVI:

"We warn and adjure earnestly in the Lord faithful Christians of every condition that no one in the future dare to vex anyone, despoil him of his possessions, reduce to servitude, or lend aid and favour to those who give themselves up to these practices, or exercise that inhuman traffic by which the Blacks, as if they were not men but rather animals, having been brought into servitude, in no matter what way, are, without any distinction, in contempt of the rights of justice and humanity, bought, sold, and devoted sometimes to the hardest labour. Further, in the hope of gain, propositions of purchase being made to the first owners of the Blacks, dissensions and almost perpetual conflicts are aroused in these regions. 

We reprove, then, by virtue of Our Apostolic Authority, all the practices above-mentioned as absolutely unworthy of the Christian name. By the same Authority We prohibit and strictly forbid any Ecclesiastic or lay person from presuming to defend as permissible this traffic in Blacks under no matter what pretext or excuse, or from publishing or teaching in any manner whatsoever, in public or privately, opinions contrary to what We have set forth in this Apostolic Letter."

 

Politics!

Really, one need read no more of this article than the title. Sugar-coated Satan sandwich, eh? Glad to see rhetoric survived the 70s.