A Garden of Skeletons

[This Google translation is from a Danish site. http://baggrund.com/skelethaven-paris/]

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JUSTIN EH SMITH

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MAY 31, 2015

Skeleton Haven in Paris

Skeleton Haven in Paris, Galeries de Paléontologie et d'Anatomie comparée. Photographs: Kasper Jacek.

FOCUS: MUSEUM 'EUROPE' - The European landscape is covered with museums. The European culture is a museum culture: We collect, categorize and exhibits in an effort to understand our past, ourselves and the world we live in. Background investigates European museums, history of the museum and the museum culture that has helped to shaping modern Europe.

The natural history collection of skeletons in Paris was born out of a particular spirit that sees nature as an aesthetic object in itself. Professor at the Sorbonne, Justin EH Smith shows around the skeleton garden in Paris.

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I stand in the Jardin des Plantes in the fifth arrondissement on the Left Bank of Paris.Here you will find one of the oldest zoologisker gardens ("Menagerie"), various greenhouses and rows of dahlia between statues of Jean Baptiste Lamarck and George Louis Leclerc Buffon. In addition to this you will also adskellige galleries and exhibitions that make up France's natural history imperial museum. Among these, not least 'Galeries de Paléontologie et d'Anatomie comparée', a two-story gallery built for the World Fair in 1900, where skeletons and preserved bone from thousands of species are on display. Among massive jawbone from sperm whales cross section of napoleon cake-like elefantmolarer (molars) and a myriad of miniature skulls from bats in small glass case.

In addition, among the many bones, I have felt drawn since I arrived in the city - as it was Paris' right center. I sometimes have trouble explaining or even understand why I moved there. I, who do not care about fashion, upscale restaurants and short workweeks - who love wine, but is happy as long as it's just red. I love art, but can barely handle 30 minutes in an art museum before my cafeteria-seeking instinct kicks in.

Why do I always come back to the bone the exhibition? What attraction cancer is the skeletons is that the artworks missing? What is it that gives them votes when live animals at the other end of the garden, despite their barking and howling, remain quiet for my ear? I always come back here at every opportunity. I offer tourists guided tours that after dozens of repetitions, approaching excellent quality.

I have also gone walks alone in the gallery, where I, a little embarrassed to be the only adult without children in tow, breaks the unwritten but undeniable rule - art for adults, of children. Around me are gifted, articulate seven year old children and teach their parents the difference between mammoths and mastodons or explain them that birds really are dinosaurs. Their pride in their share of scientific truths radiate out of them. This love of knowledge moves me not in the same way. I affirm the authority of science, but as such I come here not to learn. Rather, my reason for being here a kind of aesthetic experience - so I reject all the simple distinction between this place and eg Louvre at the other end of town.

The gallery, which has blossomed among the collections of the French naturalism, with works from, inter alia, Buffon, Georges Cuvier and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, is the result of a perspective on living nature, who see it as closely associated with art. Artists from the 1900s, such as Damien Hirst, with its world famous dead cows and sharks have with irony tried to ridicule the natural history exhibitions.However, this approach to the animals as objects in an aesthetic synthesis is by no means new or revolutionary. On the contrary, the "borrowed" from earlier aging actual attempts to understand nature by rebuilding the exhibitions that highlight its beautiful form.

1800s naturalist George Pouchet, who designed the exhibition for marine mammals, which is roughly half of the entire exhibition, claiming that the location of the little dolphin from the Ganges river next rethvalens massive baleen and opposite narwhal with its Mysterious overgrown tusk, was a carefully considered part of arranging whale species in an "aesthetic and systematic logic." This is also my logic.

The gallery maintains mostly the style of the 1800s, with beautiful wood cabinets and yellow stickers with names written in elegant calligraphy. There are few signs of new uninvited approaches, and I do my best not to discover them. The worst is touch-screens with educational quizzes. Often runs the children immediately to these, almost desperate, to interconnect with something familiar, so bones real world can be locked out. In recent decades naturmuséer been renewed in connection with the school system, in the hope of stimulating the interest of the academic, who in turn is conditioned by technological advances and an increasing human domination over nature's forces. But as late as the 1800s, the gallery's modern ideas were conceived, those who studied nature, do not forget that their goal of the studies was beauty. A beauty fit for a more relaxed structure rather than the pragmatic learning - beauty as it shows itself through nature's extravagant and complicated size.

Immediately after you enter, you meet a about 50 centimeter tall statue of a man wearing only a fig leaf to show how the muscles and tissue below the skin. The statue, created by Jean-Pancrace Chastel, is with the hedged step apparently the only sign of shame throughout the gallery. Then you see nature openly and uncovered, no matter how strange. To the left of the statue is a glass enclosure with various higher primarter (homo sapiens included) in line for development stage. Seen together with the gorilla and the other works of man skull monstrous and bloated, with teeth drastically reduced from previous stadiers honorable sizes. One wonders what went wrong.

The overwhelming impression in hovedustillingen is a huge onslaught of animal skeletons. All pointing in the same direction, and hundreds of them on display so it looks like they come running. In the frontline of this formation is several megafauna as hippos, moose and Steller's sea cow, each of which would be impressive enough alone. As we observe the abundance of vertebrate animals, you see breathtaking and incontrovertible summary of the major taxonomic group. The skeletons illustrates something that the live animals in motion can not: All these animals is when all variations of a single theme, built around the same rygknogle.

Many of the skeletons belong to animal celebrities. There is, for example, rhinoceros from Versailles, who was murdered in 1793 by a bunch of angry Sans Culottes'er. Then there is also Stadhouder-giraffe imported from Holland to disprove Madame de Pompadour's claim to a huge femur she possessed from an animal of the same species, belonged to a human giant. And then there's Rock Sand, racing horse who won the British Triple Crown in the 1903rd

And there are more skeletons of mummified animals brought to France by Geoffroy in 1802 from the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt. Natura list had hoped to use the animals as confirmations of his version of evolution, according to which species can develop new morphological variations on an underlying consistency of form (s).(Geoffroy was an advocate of evolution, like many, it was in the century before Darwin. Darwin's addition was an insight about evolutionary mechanisms, most known is the mechanism called natural selection). Unfortunately for the French naturalist, and in favor of his anti-evolutionist opponent Cuvier, did the Egyptian skeletons (one Dorcas gazelle, one peregrine falcon and a beef) no different from their modern counterparts, despite being thousands of years old. It was obviously naive to look at animals in a lifetime relatively close to the naturalistic list own time instead of digging deeper in the sediments. However, it is this kind of naivety that in a sense throw indubitable signs of genius by itself.

Cuvier and Geoffroy so both have a clear economy of the animal kingdom structure, especially among vertebrates. Whatever it was that brought these creatures to life, it was not necessary to start from scratch every time. Extend the spine, reduce lower jaw or shorten forelegs and potentially you can get any kind of a second. Already in 1680, the English anatomist Edward Tyson shown that the fin of a porpoise is modified hooves, yet two decades later, in his anatomical study of a chimpanzee, he refused to conclude that the striking resemblance between the chimpanzee and human anatomy indicates a actually parentage.

Through the 1700s came the evolution of fashion, but the question of man's place in the evolutionary scheme was a problem. Animal studies made it possible to think our way into a relationship of kinship of all living species before we were quite ready to see ourselves as part of this context. Even whales had small basins with no connection to the rest of the skeleton, with what looked like traces of hind legs. What on earth did they do that? One was for sure: God, or nature, smith not because the sketches away and started from scratch with each species. Quaggaen Okapi and the various marsupial all testify to an elegant, aesthetic and systematic order.

This system is reflected around the walls of the exhibition, where more than a hundred glass cabinets showing skeletons of small creatures (Indri, pacaer and echidna among others) and countless jars containing softer parts of animals preserved in formaldehyde in now more than a hundred years. Tissues from animals can not be maintained for long. A windpipe from a seed stored in a jar with harsh liquids in a hundred years will be over time, while the jar sticker fade transformed into something quite unnatural, ash gray and nasty. This is the gallery's kind of aesthetic counterweight to the large mammals sharp osteology. Bones presents an elegant order that feels ageless, despite the fact that we know it develops. Tissue reminds us that the bones belonged to mortal beings who once jumped lively around the countryside with their muscles, organs and joints.

The farther you move around in a clockwise direction, the more macabre the glass Cabinets' content. In the back right corner is teratology section - dedicated to the science of what once was called "monsters", now "anomalies". Here are deformed fetuses of various people and animals ranked by the criteria that have been long forgotten. There is a pig fetus with an eye that are labeled: "Simple monster" and there are two goats that are linked at the chest.

Geoffroy had worked for a shift in the perception of teratologiens history. From the Renaissance conception of monsters as heralds of God's anger (self word "monster" means, after all, that something is being displayed - "de-monsters-right") to the normalization phase, which was already under way in his early collections of malformed fetuses , culminating in the great work "Traité de teratologie" (treatise on teratology), published by his son Isidore in 1837. Malformations seen today as opportunities to better understand organic development - as exceptions to the rule.However, the idea is easy to Geoffroy was equally inclined to wonder at the sight of these freaks, like any other village clerk looking for God's wrath would have been it.The so-called exceptions are amazing and outrageous for anyone who sees them. They make us admire the rule after all often hold true - that you, I and almost everyone else we know came shapely to the world.

We continue along the glass cabinets at the gallery's exterior wall and now even the hardiest delicate: Dried small arms from a gorilla, caeca from an alpaca and lungs from a Jaguarundi is loosely in jars. What oddity! What content world, however, has!And yet, as the content presented here in a single gallery's small universe, we see uvtivlsomt that all this marvelous belongs to a fantastic and great whole, of which the paltry contents in an art museum is at most a gray shade.

Why do we want to be the places we want to be is often inexplicable, incomprehensible. When I try to explain why I want to be in Paris, the only thing resembling a reason that I would like to be close to the Jardin des Plantes. Close to madoquaerne and ostrich in the garden, close to the greenhouses with prehistoric ferns and, most importantly, close to 'Galeries de Paléontologie et d'Anatomie comparée'. It's not that I'm going to live the rest of my days here. Nor is it because that dusty old exhibitions of natural history is something unique to this city. Rather, it is because this particular location contains a very special and elusive spirit that was once naturally connected and associated with Paris.

Buffon, Cuvier and the other showed not only curious details like Madame de Pompadour with her giant's femur. Similarly, they tried not to trump nature, like Hirst with his shark, via a claim that their art is worth more than the creatures that art takes shape after. Spirit who understand the true relationship between art and nature, aroused this gallery to life. This spirit is not afraid to see nature as an aesthetic object in itself.

In this spirit, it is one of the main purposes of a capital city that is a center of science, that it gives access to nature as a whole, access to a portal between high culture and nature that is around it. The skeletons are "living" evidence of this structure. It would be a huge mistake to think of them as dead.

Justin EH Smith is a professor of history and philosophy of science at the Sorbonne University in Paris and author of the latest "Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy". The text is a translation of "The Skeleton Garden of Paris".

Translated by Morten Gustenhoff.

Two Experts Look at the Syrian Civil War

Is Bashar al-Assad finished, for real, this time, again? http://t.co/dvvLj9vuPy Excellent analysis here by @joshua_landis and @FredericHof

— Karin Kosina (@kyrah) May 2, 2015

Is Bashar al-Assad Finished, for Real, This Time, Again?
A conversation with two of the country’s best Syria experts on what the rebel gains actually mean.
BY AARON DAVID MILLER
MAY 1, 2015

The rumors and assessments are flying. Analysts and experts are starting to wonder whether recent rebel gains in the north of Syria don’t constitute some potential tipping point that could signal a fundamental weakening of the regime. Is Bashar al-Assad on his way out?

Of course, this is the same question we’ve been asking ourselvesrepeatedly for the past five years now. Indeed, in 2011, the conventional wisdom on this matter had all but declared that Assad couldn’t possibly survive his Arab Spring and that he would eventually go the way of the dodo (see: Ben Ali, Mubarak, Saleh, and Qaddafi.)

So here we are almost five years on. Is it going to be different this time? Could it be that President Barack Obama’s August 2011declaration that Assad must step aside is actually going to be realized — largely as a result of a better organized Islamist opposition, fractures within the security establishment, and the difficulty of recruiting Alawites to fight? Could this really be the end?

The answer, of course, is that nobody knows. And it’s really hard to divine tipping points or moments when there really is a significant change in any situation, particularly in a case like Syria when you’re reduced to reading tea leaves and goat entrails for insights into the Assad regime. So, in search of answers and some clarity on what could be one of the most potentially consequential developments in regional politics in the past five years, 

I decided to ask the experts, the University of Oklahoma’s Joshua Landis and the Atlantic Council’s Fred Hof (formerly Obama’s special advisor for the Syrian transition), two of the finest analysts of Syrian politics I know. Here’s what they told me:

Aaron David Miller: Rebel gains in Idlib and Jisr al-Shagour suggest the insurgency is now stronger than ever. Have we reached some sort of tipping point that signals the beginning of the end for Bashar?

Fred Hof: The beginning of the end for Bashar commenced in March 2011, when he elected to respond to peaceful protest against police brutality with lethal violence. There is no doubt his army is now tired, depleted, and demoralized. The army’s backbone — Assad’s own Alawite community — is weary of sacrificing its children for the sake of a clan that (even before 2011) did precious little for the community or for Syria, more generally. Yet Alawites and others grudgingly stick with the regime because of the perceived absence of a recognizable, desirable alternative and because of existential fears stoked by the regime. As for the current tactical developments on the ground, they do not necessarily presage the fall of Damascus or the disappearance of the regime. There is ebb and flow in this conflict, and Iran may again (as it did in 2013) find ways to reverse regime losses with foreign fighters.

Joshua Landis: It is far from over. But the losses at Idlib and Jisr al-Shagour demonstrate much greater rebel organization and strength. It is definitely worrying Assad’s people. What accounts for this new rebel strength and coordination? Jabhat al-Nusra’s two main rebel competitors have been neutralized. The United States has significantly weakened the Islamic State. Nusra destroyed the “moderate” militias that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia supported. This forced the Islamic Front and other militias to accept Nusra as the dominant force and to coordinate with it.

[In Saudi Arabia], the new king has prioritized weakening Iran over weakening the Muslim Brotherhood, reversing the strategic goals of his predecessor. This means that Saudi Arabia is not on the same page as Turkey and Qatar, which promoted the Islamist militias to the chagrin of Riyadh and the United States. But Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham seem to have consolidated their leadership over the rebel forces [under the banner of the Army of Conquest] and have found a way to work effectively together. That is big. There could be a King Salman effect — increased Saudi aid and cooperation with Turkey and Qatar. That may be an important part of recent rebel strength.

Assad will have to improve his military and defenses. He still owns some 65 percent of the Syrian people. There are many reports of his men wanting to avoid military service, however, which will make it hard for him to reverse this blow to morale.

All the same, Assad’s strategy has been to maintain regime outposts in all corners of Syria, in the belief that he could reconquer all [of] Syria. The outpost in Idlib and the salient reaching up to it, which contained Jisr al-Shagour, was weak. It is not certain if the opposition conquest of this vulnerable region dog-legging up into enemy territory is the beginning of the end, or whether it will force Assad to change strategies — retreating from distant outposts to the part of Syria that he believes he can hold. This may force Assad to work for a de facto partition of the country, rather than maintaining his “all corners” strategy.

ADM: Do you buy the idea that there are acceptable Alawites in the military who are either part of the current regime or outside who could speak for their community and emerge as credible interlocutors in a political solution?

JL: I do not believe that a political solution will be found. The Islamist rebels are intent on retaking all of Syria. Assad, so far, is equally intent on taking all of Syria. Assad has demonstrated over four years that he is capable of contracting the land he rules, but not reforming politically. His regime and rule is dependent of the political structure of family rule and traditional loyalties that his father established 45 years ago.

FH: I believe that Alawites must be full partners in a Syria featuring self-rule by empowered citizens. Surely there are plenty of Alawites in the regime-directed military who have served with honor and who have refused to engage in war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Syrian opposition should make it clear that the term “Assad regime” refers to a clan and a relatively small circle of criminal enablers, and that all others will be welcome to participate in the politics and defense of a united, post-regime Syria.

ADM: If the Islamist insurgency actually took Damascus, what would unfold for the Alawites and Christian minorities?

FH: Damascus is a large city and the rebellion against Assad’s rule involves many different groups whose leaders represent a range of political opinions and sectarian attitudes. The Islamic State (IS) isnot part of the anti-Assad insurgency: it is an Iraq-derived phenomenon working often in tandem with the Assad regime to defeat Syrian nationalist alternatives to it and to the regime. Should IS change its target and go after the regime there would be a spirited and effective defense of Damascus — with or without Assad — because IS’ reputation for sectarian slaughter is well-established.

Should Damascus fall to an alignment of forces similar to that which recently took Idlib — an unlikely development in my view — surely there will be fear within the Damascene populace, and yes there will be incidents of violence. The war unleashed by the regime will not be easily contained or forgotten. But a general, systematic pogrom? Maybe not, but the threat itself ought to inspire Washington to get serious about supporting non-jihadist, nationalist regime opponents. The regime has, after all, gone out of its way over the past four years to implicate minorities and supportive Sunni Arabs in its own crime spree. Washington needs to exercise total control over who gets what from regional powers to the Syrian opposition.

JL: The “great sorting out” that I have argued is taking place in the region would continue. Christians have largely left Syria. They probably account for less than 3 percent of the population today. Alawites would be subject to revenge and their towns looted. There is no reason that the rebels would show mercy to them. Many Alawites would flee to Lebanon rather than find out what awaited them should Islamist militias take their towns. The Islamist leaders consider Alawites unbelievers and apostates. Even the more moderate Islamic Front leaders state that Shiites should be ethnically cleansed from Syria.

ADM: How important is Assad and Syria to Iran, and what are they prepared to do to save him?

JL: Alawite rule and Assad’s regime is very important to Iran. Tehran may spend more money [to support the regime], but I find it hard to believe that it would send brigades of Iranian soldiers to fight in Syria.

FH: During two years’ worth of track two discussions with influential, non-official Iranians, I’ve been consistently told that preserving Assad personally is a top Iranian national security priority. Iran sees him as utterly compliant in supporting Iranian efforts to keep Hezbollah’s anti-Israel missile and rocket force at a high state of combat readiness. Although the domination of Syria is, on its own merits, a hegemonic feather in Tehran’s cap, the Assad-Hezbollah connection is deemed by Iran to be vital in a practical sense. The Iranians fear — perhaps with good reason — that with Bashar Al-Assad gone the regime will collapse, and that no successor would subordinate Syria to Iran in the way Assad has.

ADM: If Assad fell, what would the impact be on Hezbollah?

FH: Unless Iran were able to replace Assad with a similarly compliant and effective funnel to Hezbollah, Iran’s Lebanese militia leader would become the equivalent of a well-armed military commander who knows he has no prospect of effective resupply. This could have an operationally inhibiting effect on Iran and its Lebanon-based strategic force. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and [Hezbollah chief] Hassan Nasrallah would both know that the employment of the rocket and missile force would be a one-time event. And the force itself would deteriorate over time without steady resupply and upgrading.

JL: Hezbollah would be cut off from its source of heavy weapon supply. Israel and the United States can police sea and air deliveries, but not the overland routes that Assad uses to deliver Iranian arms to Hezbollah.

ADM: Is there an Islamist insurgency capable of ruling the country?

JL: I presume the Islamist forces would find a way to rule Syria.

FH: “Islamist” is a very broad term. Can Syria be ruled legitimately by people who think that sectarian minorities have a lower grade of citizenship than the majority? No. Is it admissible for there to be a political trend in a constitutional republic advocating the position that law should be derived from the moral teachings of the Quran and the Hadith? Yes. But Syria is an ethnic and sectarian mosaic, one that can enjoy the consent of the governed — required for true legitimacy and stability — only if citizenship trumps everything else politically. Is there in the opposition a ready-for-prime-time government? No. Yet neither is the Assad regime fit to govern, unless one is comfortable with mass murder, industrial strength corruption, and tacit cooperation with the Islamic State.

ADM: What would Assad’s fall mean for IS?

FH: IS wants to be one of two parties left standing in Syria. It wants the other to be the Assad regime. IS fears Assad being replaced by an alternative attractive to the Syrians it currently tries to rule. With Assad still in the saddle, IS has the face of sectarian-driven war crimes and crimes against humanity for a powerful recruiting poster as it seeks to draw to Syria the damaged, disaffected, and deranged of the Sunni Muslim world. There is a solid, practical reason why IS points its weapons at alternatives to it and the Assad regime, not at the regime itself.

JL: If Nusra and the Islamic Front were to weaken Assad’s control of Syria’s major cities, IS would have to make a concerted effort to take them. It could lead to significant defections from IS to Nusra, just as initial IS victories led to Nusra and Islamist military defections to IS.

ADM: If you had to guess, where will Syria be a year from now?

JL: Assad will still remain in control of Damascus and the coastal regions, but the city of Hama will either have fallen or be engulfed in war. This, of course, is wild speculation. Much depends on whether Iran and Iraq up the ante to meet greater Turkish and Saudi aid to Syria’s Sunni rebels, as it depends on how much the region’s Sunni powers want to defeat Iran and Assad in Syria.

FH: If Washington maintains an arm’s-length approach to protection of civilians and political-military support of Syrian nationalists, one year from now the humanitarian abomination will have deepened significantly and the country will be uneasily and unofficially partitioned between IS and the regime as it hemorrhages people. There would, I think, continue to be an unstable live-and-let live relationship between the two parties left standing: Iran will not waste its Lebanese assets on recapturing an eastern Syria it deems largely worthless; and IS will want to concentrate on consolidating its presence in eastern Syria to facilitate operations in Iraq.

The key variable, however, will be American policy. If the United States elects to protect civilians, to replace an anemic train-and-equip initiative with the building of an all-Syrian National Stabilization Force, and recruits regional powers to provide ground forces to sweep IS from Syria so that a governmental alternative to the Assad clan can be established, then the pessimist scenario can be avoided. And then Syrians can have a shot at a negotiated settlement leading ultimately to legitimate governance.

Notes and Reflections -- 2008

My first assignment as a senior care-giver was as a "live-in" instead of the typical hourly shift. Except for eight-hour daytime Monday breaks, I lived two months with a client recovering from a broken ankle. I would not have accepted living with with someone in declining health and the ravages of old age, but this was an otherwise healthy man in his seventies recovering from a broken bone to resume living independently. He and his extended family made me feel like one of them, and all I had to do was fix meals, get the mail and help him with daily living activities until he recovered.

Quite by accident, those were also the days and weeks at the end of the 2008 election and the financial crisis of 2008.  I spent many hours following the news on both network reporting and C-SPAN. Like many others I had never heard of Nouriel Roubini, but after that crisis he became an investment rock star, having warned everyone well ahead of the crisis to move financial assets from equities to cash, a smart move for those who followed his advice.

I did not have access to my computer, so what follows was scribbled the old fashioned way in long hand, later transcribed to my blog. I'm copying it here verbatim, mostly for my own record, but also for anyone who might be interested.

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SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2008

Fall reflections, 2008

This shaggy-dog rambling was written a week before the election of Barack Obama. As the event grew near the outcome seemed obvious, but for some of us it seemed too good to be true. I only had forty-five years to wait to see a black American president. I cannot imagine what it is like for someone born black. And as the day approached I simply had to sit on my expectations. So often over the years I experienced dashed hopes and disappointments. Great progress has taken us far beyond the days of segregated schools, restrooms, and water fountains. But the facts of racial discrimination have remained stubbornly embedded, even in the black community itself, in the social fabric of America.

This "reflection" is more than it appears to be on the surface. It rehearses for me the origins and growth of how one high school kid got radicalized even before the Sixties became a benchmark decade. By the time I graduated in 1962 I was well on the way to being a life-long Liberal, even though I had no idea at the time what that was going to involve.

§§§§§§§

My sixty-fifth birthday is still half a year away but I can still recall my youth clearly enough to know that sometimes you simply have to squeeze a zit. "Back in the day," as the newer locution of "in the good old days" would have it, we saidpimple, not zit. But the morphing of language is a reflection of how views and values also tend to change. And I have been forced to watch helplessly since my political infancy as words and trends took on a life of their own over which I had little or no control. If the world says "zit" and I say "pimple" everyone will know how retrograde my thinking is. Whatever other ideas I hold come into question, like the polite but indelible racism of people who still refer to "colored people" when they should be referring simply to "people." So this morning I feel the need to squeeze a pimple, so to speak, to get a few things off my chest.

Having been away from blogging for two months now (except for a few softball posts) I realize how little I am needed at this keyboard except for my own edification. Traffic, to my satisfaction, has not dropped off as the result of my neglect, thanks to four years of material that still feeds into Google searches. I am expecting after next week to lose about half the number of hits because that one post that I put up almost two years ago, regarding Obama's religion, continues to get half or more of all visits. Surely that question will be moot after next week's election. We'll see.

In the meantime I am struggling to keep a lid on my excitement as next Tuesday approaches. I can hardly believe that after all these years a political candidate whom I endorse is actually getting this close to the finish line. Moreover, Obama's historic campaign is changing the dynamic of American presidential elections in a way that I never thought possible, bringing with it what for me is a long lost spirit of the past that was taken out by the killing of John F. Kennedy in 1963. If I allow myself to think too long about it it still makes tears come to my eyes.

Last week I was listening with half an ear as someone on a local Atlanta TV panel made reference to something she had read in Human Events magazine. I never thought someone reading Human Events would admit to it in public. In my mind it has about as much credibility as The National Enquirer. It has been a long time since I heard anyone refer to that publication and the mention of it triggered a flashback to my high school days. I am by no means a red-diaper baby but I was aimed in that direction as an adolescent as the result of circumstances in my life. My first exposure to Human Events Magazine was an important part of that development.

Here is the story.

Sometime during my high school days at Columbus High School in Columbus, Georgia, the school sponsored an event in the auditorium that was intended to emphasize the notion of brotherhood. I don't recall the official reason for the occasion, but there were three representative speakers from the three main faiths of the day, Protestant, Roman Catholic and Jewish. This is almost like a setup for a joke, but it really happened that way. As I remember, each had about fifteen minutes to talk about tolerance and brotherhood, with the preacher going first. His message was a generic Christian appeal to what Lincoln referred to as the "better angels of our nature" but years of habit would not allow him to let it go at that. He was compelled by the Great Commission to include at least one or two gentle but unmistakable references to Jesus Christ, stopping short of an altar call on the spot. The priest was somewhat less pointed, but there was no mistake about it, the Christian part of our Judeo-Christian heritage was clearly the more important of the two roots, and those with Christian ears would hear edifying words of encouragement.

It was Rabbi Goodman whose message stuck in my memory, partly because of the image and story he chose, and partly because of the contrast it left in the context of the three presentations. He said that when he was a youngster someone did something to him that hurt him deeply. Some insult or mean-spirited remark gesture had sent him to his mother, seeking her advice as to how he could best get even with those who had been so ugly to him. Her advice to him was this: "Go out and find a mud puddle with sticky mud. Then put some of it into your mouth and go spit it on them! That will teach them not to mess with you." His point (as well as his mother's) was that there is no way to "get even" with someone else without getting a taste of ugliness yourself. "Getting even" is contrary to the spirit of brotherhood, even when someone has it coming.

As I left the auditorium I thought about the story and how obvious it was. But I also thought about how unintentionally careless the other two clergy had been by overlooking the fact that at Columbus High School there were a lot of Jewish students who might not hear their Christian message in the way they had intended. It was a well -known fact at that time in Columbus, Georgia, that practically every Jewish family in town sent their children to Columbus High School. Of the other two white high schools Baker was way to the other side of town, more transitory, in the shadow of Fort Benning, and no one from established families sent their kids there. The other school, somewhat snootily referred to as a "trade school," was actually called Jordan Vocational High School and everyone knew that Jews always sent their kids to college prep high schools if they couldn't afford a private school. (Outside the school community I sometimes heard nick-names like "Jew-Blue High School" or references to "Jew-lovers" aimed at CHS, but I learned to overlook those remarks as the indications of ignorance that they were. It was true, by the way. I recall that so many Jews were absent on a couple of Jewish holidays that we couldn't have a good band rehearsal because to many were out. Seems like half the brass and a third of clarinets went missing one time, but I can't say for sure.)

These early exposures to antisemitism were part of my growing up. Although I was not Jewish, I had many friends who were, and a few time I went to Friday night services at the synagogue just to see for myself how they worshiped. I was much impressed that following the service there was always a sumptuous reception in the social hall below the sanctuary spread with treats I had seen only a few fancy occasions in my own limited experience. Later, when I felt that my Southern Baptist peers were not on the side of the angels at the start of the civil rights movement I found a college home at Hillel, the Jewish students organization, as the only non-Jew in their midst. it was there that I learned to enjoy lox, bagels, cream cheese and danish, and later, potato latkes and applesauce.

(Can you believe all these memories were stirred by the mention of Human Events Magazine?)

About the same time, two local controversies were raging in Columbus, Georgia that got my attention. One was a very acrimonious debate about whether the local water supply should be treated with fluoride because it was found that in parts of the country where fluoride occurred naturally in the local water there was a marked decrease in the incidence of tooth decay. Something about fluoride seems to protect against cavities, hence those references on toothpaste labels. The other debate had to do with whether or not the city and county governments should be combined into a single administrative entity for the sake of consistency and economy. I think it was called "consolidated government."

I was not aware of politics at the time, so I had no way of knowing that Columbus, Georgia was (and probably still is) what we would call an extremely conservative place. There are a lot of reasons for this which others can explain, but at the start of the Sixties there was already an active local chapter of the John Birch Society, a group I didn't have any knowledge of, except that they seemed to be four-square opposed to both water fluoridation and consolidated government. Naive me, both proposals seemed to be eminently sensible and practical and I didn't see any problem with either. But this was the time when "Impeach Earl Warren" signs were all over the Southern countryside, George Wallace was soon to be standing in an Alabama schoolhouse door just a few miles away on the basis of "states rights," and there was a widespread and credible threat that Communists were just waiting to get control of everything we held dear.

It was in this milieu that none other that Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, came to Columbus to speak to local supporters at the old Royal theatre. There was no charge for admission, and it was at that time that I, along with two other high school students, sat politely through the man's speech and then passed out leaflets to people as they left warning them that the John Birch Society was not what they thought it was. It was a simple, four-page typed flyer run off on a church mimeograph machine, that said, in part...

Just how so many Americans have been tricked into such Communist ruses as democracy, foreign aid, UNICEF, the United Nations, NATO, and national defense defies reason.

We, the Teen-Age Democratic Club are not indifferent to the John Birch Society; We are willing to take a positive stand. 

We fear the Birch as a demagogic (gaining political influence through social discontent) and fantastic (a program of strong centralization, severe nationalism, and suppression of opposition) group. In this opinion, we accept the following wild-eyed "commie" supporters: "Time" and "Life" magazines, and the Los Angeles Times; The New York Times, J.Edgar Hoover, and Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

A local flap ensued during which a local columnist suggested that the three of us had been manipulated by some unknown but sinister outside agitator. Who knows? I didn't write the leaflet and the guy who brought it was a preacher's kid who had used the copying machine at a local Methodist church to execute his subversive plan. But that's not the point. The point is that I agreed with what it said and I was willing, even at that young age, to take a stand for what I thought.

(I know. Human Events. We're getting there.)

A couple of years later I was in Tallahassee, Florida getting involved with a student group calling itself, believe it or not, the "Liberal Forum." Can you imagine? The word liberal was not yet the completely reviled label that it has lately become, forcing today's liberals into apologizing for the word by calling themselves "progressive." A few people still refer to the word but they are careful to be prissy about it, specifying themselves as "classic" liberals, but I remain the un-reconstructed Sixties liberal that I was at that time, ashamed of the moral turpitude of the time but mostly pleased about how we stood on politics social issues.

Walking downtown one afternoon I went into a bookstore called "American Opinion," an outlet for conservative printed materials in general and John Birch Society publications in particular. I know well where I was, but I didn't leave. I wanted to stay and find out first hand what those people were saying, how they were saying it, and if there was anything there that might still appeal to me. Remember, I was still young and malleable. I was leaning into what would later become a Liberal direction, but I remained open to other ideas. I was still attending the Baptist Church there in Tallahassee, but by then I was informed that my home church in Columbus already had a deacons' meeting to discuss a contingency plan should any Negroes show up some Sunday to stir up trouble. They knew there was no way that Negroes coming to a white church would really be there to worship, so it was planned in advance how best not to admit them.

I remember the moment like it was yesterday. I was leafing through a copy of Human Events Magazine and it appeared to be a pretty well-done piece of work. No in-your-face extremism that I could find and articles that seemed to be of general interest. But I came across a piece by Westbrook Pegler making reference to Elanor Roosevelt that got my attention. In my innocence I knew that Elanor Roosevelt was an important political character and had a lot to do with black people. For all I knew she might have helped form the NAACP, but in those days when more extremist groups like CORE, SNCC and the SDS were all over the place, the NAACP was about as old-fashioned and harmless as a Black Baptist church. Besides, Columbus was right down the road from Warm Springs, FDR's Little White House, and the name of Roosevelt was well thought of in those parts. Pegler's description of Elanor Roosevelt was about as vile an expression of ad hominemattack as I had ever seen in print, making reference, I recall, to her "hooked nose" and other physical attributes having nothing to do with politics or principles. I put down the magazine and left the store. Many experiences of my college years have been lost in my memory, but that exposure to that issue of Human Events remained burned in my memory for the rest of my life.

I have been sitting at this keyboard now over two hours squeezing this pimple and I was about to put together a closing paragraph. Here we are over forty years after the fact and I decided to try a Google search to find if the exact article that I may have been reading in 1962 might be found on line. To my surprise I did a search just now for Westbrook Pegler Eleanor Roosevelt and got over fifteen hundred hits. [Now, in 2015, the number is fifteen thousand.]

But I found an even bigger surprise, appearing in the Wikipedia article about Pegler.

Interest in Pegler was revived when a line originally written by him appeared in Republican Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin's acceptance speech at the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. "We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity", she said, attributing it to "a writer."The speech was written by Matthew Scully, a senior speech writer for George W. Bush.

I called it a "surprise," but after thinking about it for a moment, I may be disturbed, amazed, wowed or evendisappointed. But surprised? I think not. And I can think of no better ending to this reflection.

Later....April 17, 2009

I notice someone from Michigan has been reading this post. I had not thought about it since I wrote it and never imagined anyone else would be interested. Reading it now, half a year later, it reads pretty good. Messy and without much of a point, but okay reading.

I drilled further in to the Pegler/Palin links and came up with the article mentioned. (WSJ op-ed) This fleshes out the story somewhat. Thomas Frank's The GOP Loves the Heartland To Death is a treasure. I'm grabbing the whole thing because too many times archived links go nowhere.

It tells us something about Sarah Palin's homage to small-town America, delivered to an enthusiastic GOP convention last week, that she chose to fire it up with an unsourced quotation from the all-time champion of fake populism, the belligerent right-wing columnist Westbrook Pegler. 

"We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity," the vice-presidential candidate said, quoting an anonymous "writer," which is to say, Pegler, who must have penned that mellifluous line when not writing his more controversial stuff. As the New York Times pointed out in its obituary of him in 1969, Pegler once lamented that a would-be assassin "hit the wrong man" when gunning for Franklin Roosevelt. 

There's no evidence that Mrs. Palin shares the trademark Pegler bloodlust -- except maybe when it comes to moose and wolves. Nevertheless, the red-state myth that Mrs. Palin reiterated for her adoring audience owes far more to the venomous spirit of Pegler than it does to Norman Rockwell. 

Small town people, Mrs. Palin went on, are "the ones who do some of the hardest work in America, who grow our food and run our factories and fight our wars." They are authentic; they are noble, and they are her own: "I grew up with those people."
But what really defines them in Mrs. Palin's telling is their enemies, the people who supposedly "look down" on them. The opposite of the heartland is the loathsome array of snobs and fakers, "reporters and commentators," lobbyists and others who make up "the Washington elite." 

Presumably the various elite Washington lobbyists who have guided John McCain's presidential campaign were exempt from Mrs. Palin's criticism. As would be former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, now a "senior adviser" to the Dickstein Shapiro lobby firm, who hymned the "Sarah Palin part of the party" thus: "Their kids aren't going to go to Ivy League schools. Their sons leave high school and join the military to serve our country. Their husbands and wives work two jobs to make sure the family is sustained." 

Generally speaking, though, when husbands and wives work two jobs each it is not merely because they are virtuous but because working one job doesn't earn them enough to get by. The two-job workers in Middle America aren't spurning the Ivy League and joining the military straight out of high school just because they're people of principle, although many of them are. It is because they can't afford to do otherwise. 

Leave the fantasy land of convention rhetoric, and you will find that small-town America, this legendary place of honesty and sincerity and dignity, is not doing very well. If you drive west from Kansas City, Mo., you will find towns where Main Street is largely boarded up. You will see closed schools and hospitals. You will hear about depleted groundwater and massive depopulation. 

And eventually you will ask yourself, how did this happen? Did Hollywood do this? Was it those "reporters and commentators" with their fancy college degrees who wrecked Main Street, U.S.A.? 

No. For decades now we have been electing people like Sarah Palin who claimed to love and respect the folksy conservatism of small towns, and yet who have unfailingly enacted laws to aid the small town's mortal enemies. 

Without raising an antitrust finger they have permitted fantastic concentration in the various industries that buy the farmer's crops. They have undone the New Deal system of agricultural price supports in favor of schemes called "Freedom to Farm" and loan deficiency payments -- each reform apparently designed to secure just one thing out of small town America: cheap commodities for the big food processors. Richard Nixon's Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz put the conservative attitude toward small farmers most bluntly back in the 1970s when he warned, "Get big or get out." 

A few days ago I talked politics with Donn Teske, the president of the Kansas Farmers Union and a former Republican. Barack Obama may come from a big city, he admits, but the Farmers Union gives him a 100% rating for his votes in Congress. John McCain gets a 0%. "If any farmer in the Plains States looked at McCain's voting record on ag issues," Mr. Teske says, "no one would vote for him." 

Now, Mr. McCain is known for his straight talk with industrial workers, telling them their jobs are never coming back, that the almighty market took them away for good, and that retraining is their only hope. 

But he seems to think that small-town people can be easily played. Just choose a running mate who knows how to skin a moose and all will be forgiven. Drive them off the land, shutter their towns, toss their life chances into the grinders of big agriculture . . . and praise their values. The TV eminences will coo in appreciation of your in-touch authenticity, and the carnival will move on.

===============

My mind got infected at an early age. Too bad. Now, forty-odd years later when I see or hear reference to Sarah Palin it invokes memories of Westbrook Pegler, Human Events Magazine, The John Birch Society, Robert Welch (who I saw and didn't like) and now journalist Thomas Frank (whom I've never seen or heard of but like very much). I hope she finds enough happiness and fulfillment in Alaska to make her want to remain there. But I fear that sometime between now and 2012 she's gonna get the urge to relocate to the lower forty-eight.