Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 223: J. Sterling Morton, About Trees (#223)

J. Sterling Morton, "About Trees" (1893) from American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau:

J. Sterling Morton was a latter-day Johnny Appleseed, an evangelist for trees as both beautiful and useful--which is the sort of position that comes to one on the empty plains of Nebraska. He's become known as the originator of America's Arbor Day; and while he started it in Nebraska in 1872, by the 1890s, it was widely spread in the US. The US Forestry Service put out a pamphlet of information and fun, child-friendly activities--tree propaganda, essentially--and Morton included this essay in that pamphlet.

It's a short essay, and it starts off with a pretty common paean to trees: they don't care if you're rich or not, they'll shade you anyway. But Morton goes on from there, noting how trees basically power our world:

There is no light coming from your wood, corncob, or coal fire which some vegetable Prometheus did not, in its days of growth, steal from the sun and secrete in the mysteries of a vegetable organism.

"Vegetable Prometheus" is pretty amazing, both as metaphor and truth, as he points out: trees really do take sunlight and make usable energy for us (if we're still in a wood-burning society, as opposed to a directly solar-powered society). But he goes on, noting how society needs trees, and how, without proper tree planting, a society will soon be treeless and doomed, much like in the Middle East. (If you're a climatologist or a historian of colonialism, here's your time to say, "What?") For Morton, the story of the Orient is that

where the olive and the pomegranate and the vine once held up their luscious fruit for the sun to kiss, all is now infertility, desolation, desert, and solitude. The orient is dead to civilization, dead to commerce, dead to intellectual development. The orient died of treelessness.

OK, so maybe his sense of history is a little narrow, but damn, that's some fine use of imagery to get his message across: trees are important, so plant one already!

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 215: William WellsBrown, Madison Washington (#215)

William Wells Brown, "Madison Washington" (1862) from William Wells Brown: Clotel & Other Writings:

William Wells Brown was an escaped slave who, after learning to read and write, embarked on a pretty successful (and ground-breaking) writing career: first African-American novel (about Jefferson's black children, so I guess that was never really a secret), first African-American travelogue, first African-American play.

And along the way he wrote a collection of short African-American biographies, including one about the escaped slave and revolt mastermind Madison Washington. (Which is the kind of name that seems to push one into greatness.)

Brown retells Washington's story with a mix of efficiency and feeling. We don't dwell on anything too long; we get told pretty quickly about Washington's escape from slavery, his return to rescue his wife, his plan to take over a ship full of slaves being shipped down south. And at the same time, Brown slows down the story enough to add his two-cents, most of which are appropriately melodramatic: Washington is a paragon of African beauty, his wife is the height of interracial beauty, his rescue of his wife shows his devotion, his rescue of the white slavers from the revenge of the escaped slaves raises him to Christ-like status, etc.

It's done well, and you can see how this book, published in the midst of the Civil War, might have resonated at a time when black soldiers were a topic of debate; and the humanity and equality of black people was also a topic of discussion.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 213: Seymour Krim, Making It! (#213)

Seymour Krim, "Making It!" (1961) from The Cool School: Writing from America’s Hip Underground:

I'm on record as disliking the Beats. Not so much the poetry or the style, but the political stance of detached purity that really ignores the reality of oppression that others  might experience. Like Thoreau buggering off to Walden Pond--knowing that his women relatives would take care of him--there's a certain blindness to Kerouac's On The Road, to his adventures with the poor and the minorities while still failing to see how those adventures were impossible for them.

And Seymour Krim shows very nicely one more lack the Beats have, which is an awareness of women as people. See, Krim's piece is a dialogue/rant between someone who has accepted the bourgeois measure of success--money, a job, status, women--and someone who holds on, tenuously, to the artistic and spiritual goals. Notice that "women" are one of the objects/goals of life, not subjects of their own lives.

That said, the LoA headnote makes much to-do out of Krim's marginal status: he started off as an establishment book reviewer, so his attempts to slip into Beat think-pieces never quite got the attention that (some people think) they deserved. Krim certainly seems to have the style down: at times, this piece feels like it would be better read aloud as slam poetry at a coffee shop.

Columbia professor, poet, painter, ex-Trotskyite, Partisan Review editor, G. E. engineer, Schenley salesman—they all live in the same world for a change and that world says, go!

That sort of breathless rant works best over a short piece and at eight pages, I definitely felt myself start to slip away. Krim's piece certainly speaks to an important issue about how we define success, both socio-culturally and personally, and how those definitions of success may not jibe. 

And while I'm sensitive to the idea that monetary success may be an endless trap of getting and spending, I'd love to see Krim make this case to some of the working poor who didn't have jobs as book reviewers.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 204: Lucretia Mott, No Greater Joy Than to See These Children Walking in the Anti-Slavery Path (#204)

Lucretia Mott, "No Greater Joy Than to See These Children Walking in the Anti-Slavery Path" (1864) from American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation:

This is Lucretia Mott's speech from an 1863 anti-slavery convention; and we lose a little context in not hearing the other speakers at that convention. At least once, Mott makes a direct reference to something that was said in a speech and the remarks made in answer to that speech. All that is not here. What we do have, however, is a short speech that happens to name-check some very early abolitionists and also extend a welcoming hand to new abolitionists; a speech that recognizes the main task of abolishing slavery, while also nodding at the future quests: equality for blacks and equality for women.

In fact, I thought Mott dealt with the issue of women very generously, noting

• Women may have some special understanding of those who are denied their natural rights
• "We might, as women, dwell somewhat upon our own restrictions, as connected with this Anti-Slavery movement.";
• That those rights are not replaceable with chivalrous attention, as when some abolitionist women went to an anti-slavery convention in London and learned that "persons" did not include women; and where they received "flattery in lieu of our rights";
• But that she would pass on without delving too deeply into the woman question.

Classic Mott, am I right?

But the overwhelming message here is that there's so much more still to do: "we should keep on our armor." Which also gives us part of the title of this piece: the old-time abolitionists have done some of the work, but the future struggles are for the new activists. And what about those johnny-come-latelys--the people who used to make fun of or not join in with the "radical" abolitionists, who have now come over? In 1863, with the Civil War on, this seems like a sightly hopeful question to ask. But Mott's answer is also very hopeful: we should "welcome them at this eleventh hour" and give them all the praise that's due to them--if they pitch in and do their work.

Now, the LoA page notes that Mott was a little too optimistic and that the abolitionist movement would splinter over many issues (including the issue of equality for women); but I don't know if I can fault Mott for her optimism, which seems measured against the enormity of the struggles to come.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 166: H. L. Mencken, The Nature of Liberty (#36)

H. L. Mencken, "The Nature of Liberty" (1920) from H. L. Mencken: Prejudices: The Complete Series:

It seems like every week or so, we get at least one story of some ridiculous, tragic, foul abuse of power by police (e.g., performing illegal body cavity searches on stopped cars in Texas), institutional administrators (e.g., covering up rape or other crimes, from Church to university), or other officials who we put trust in (e.g., shutting down the government in a temper tantrum over a law that was passed years ago and upheld by every branch of government--just for example).

So Mencken's attack on this trend in American culture reads unfortunately true even 90+ years later. When he says that the Bill of Rights was "inelastic" when it was adopted, but has now been "kneaded and mellowed into a far greater pliability and reasonableness," I hear echoes of people who say things like "After 9-11"--and then follow it with some draconian and unAmerican proposal.

(Which is not to say that I believe in any bullshit originalism when it comes to the Constitution. Obviously, some things change, as in the obvious example of technology; at the same time, some things change more slowly, if at all, as in the obvious example of our ideals and hopes: "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.")

Mencken exposes this ridiculous kowtowing to violence on the part of a certain segment of society by pretending to be for it, noting that, for instance, someone who was imprisoned falsely has the recourse... of taking his photo down from the public section of the police precinct. This is so much like the idea that surveillance isn't a big deal if you have nothing to hide (at the same time as various surveillers are caught snooping their exes), that I'm not sure whether to be heartened that things haven't changed or depressed about it. Mencken's pose of naive acceptance is somewhat humorous, but his anger is too close to the surface for him--and for me--for this to be a really hilarious satire.

Why do conservatives position themselves as victims?

Many commenters over the last few years have noted that conservative talking points are incoherent: Obama is a ruthless tyrant AND a spineless wimp AND an idiot who can't speak without a teleprompter AND an elite snob; climate change is a hoax AND it's a natural process; Obama is an atheist AND a radical Muslim AND belongs to a black supremacist church. Some of this might qualify as double-think, where the person holds two opposing ideas at the same time, but mostly I think this is just a smorgasbord approach to political belief: take whatever you need at a particular time.

My personal favorite incoherency is their self-view: Republicans/conservatives are the only tough guys who can deal with America's enemies BUT they are also victims suffering mainstream calumny who can't fight back against the Democratic machine.

I originally thought that the self-positioning of conservatives as victims had to do with America's love of the underdog, of the myth of the average man pushed too far (constantly on display during Tea Party conversations). They see themselves as intrepid rebels who are courageously speaking truth to power, saying what other people are too scared to say (even though everyone else is saying it).

But recently, Scott Eric Kaufman nicely pointed out something that helps flesh out this rhetorical positioning (even if he misreads for comedic effect). That is, the rhetorical positioning of conservatives as victims places them as defending the natural.

When I studied the 19th century, I would find these sort of things all the time, for instance, in the Ron Paul-esque debate on gold vs. paper money: Gold is the only natural money, therefore we have to enact laws saying that Gold is the only natural money. Or in discussions of race: Blacks are clearly inferior by nature, so we have to enact laws saying that Blacks are clearly inferior.

So with our current debate about gay marriage: Marriage is always between one man and one woman, therefore we need a law. There is something sweetly sad about the way they give up the game as they try to win it; after all, if X was truly X, we wouldn't need a law about it.

The other benefit to this rhetorical positioning (we are defending what should need no defense) is that the enemies of conservatism are always outsiders: they are Northern abolitionists stirring up the happy black slaves, or they are Jewish financiers undermining the economy, or they are simply demonic violators of natural law.

US Post Office: Threat or Menace?

You know how

1. Andrew Sullivan sometimes says something real dumb and then 
2. takes it back after weeks of having his mistakes pointed out to him and then
3. he tries to defend himself by noting that the blog is a record of him "thinking in real time" and then
4. you scream at your computer that you were thinking in real time also but, magically, you got to the right answer weeks ago and he's an old privilege-kisser who can't see past his benighted biases?

Well I have biases of my own, and one of my big ones is the US Post Office: I'm for it. The USPS is second only to the DMV in terms of getting shit on by stand-up comedians and sitcoms. You can picture the set-up from almost any TV show: lazy postal employees shooting the breeze while hard-working people on their lunch-break wait in line. When was the last time we had a heroic postal worker--outside of David Brin's The Postman? (And with defenders like that!)


Part of my bias is that, when people talk about the post office, to me, it sounds like conservatives talking about the evils of government. So that's one reason why I'm biased and it's a bad reason: I like the Post Office because the rhetoric against it is boilerplate "drown the government in a bathtub" nonsense.

But here's my secret: I've almost never had a bad experience with the post office. People I know have lots of classic stories--the unmoving lines, the surly help, the lost packages, the opened envelopes... Actually, now that I think of it, no one I know has an "opened envelope" story. And just today, we got packages that were supposedly lost by the mail--but it turns out that the sender had our address wrong. So that's another victory for the post office.

We have lots of data about how the post office reaches more people more of the time than FedEx or UPS or the other private carriers that conservatives get so hot about, but maybe we need some more happy anecdotes and heroic representations.

Or what's this bias for?

Whose success? (on team sports and Tim Tebow)

This will be very short because I know nothing about football or the football equivalent of baseball's sabremetrics; but it seems to me that people have the same problem discussing Tim Tebow that Andrew Sullivan does talking about successful and wealthy people.

That is, many people say that Tebow is a great quarterback because his team is winning; and others say that he's a terrible quarterback whose team wins only through their hard work and luck. So which is it--personal success or teamwork and luck? Or a little of both? There are numbers involved, so can't we just crunch them and get beyond opinionated arguments that keep veering into political/religious issues? Get on it, Nate Silver!

Why Andrew Sullivan isn't a good source for economic morality

We've inherited a bastardized version of Adam Smith in America, a version which remembers "the invisible hand" but forgets everything that Smith ever wrote about moral sentiments and moral capitalism. And I think we need to get back to discussing the potential morality of capitalism since we seem to be stuck with capitalism for now.

So let's talk morality and capitalism, focusing on one particular person and his morally incoherent ideas about taxes: Andrew Sullivan.

Andrew Sullivan is a) not an economics expert; and b) not a terrible person (as far as I can tell). And yet, he can take terrible positions on economic issues (including economic rhetoric) because they seem the morally correct ones--and he needs to translate economics into morality in order to feel a certain mastery of the topic. Case in point, Sullivan's sticky-fingered hold on the concept of "the successful," which he cannot let go.

For quite a while, whenever Sullivan wanted to talk about the upper-class, he talked about "the successful" rather than the wealthy, the rich, the upper class, the %1 percent, etc. That was a rhetorical choice that expressed his worldview: people with money had worked hard to get it, so taxing them would be punishing them for their success. Even now, when he's altered his thinking enough to say "the wealthy and the successful," he won't let go of "the successful" and the rhetorical defense of low taxes on the wealthy that it implies.

He recently posted a video explaining his thinking for why he's holding onto "successful."

And here are the problems with his thinking on the subject:

1) No one is a self-made success
Sullivan's main complaint is that class war in America focuses on the immoral, lazy inheritors of wealth and not those bold, creative self-made men, like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

Now, let's accept Sullivan's argument that Jobs and Gates did something cool--but they didn't do it in a vacuum. Malcolm Gladwell makes this point in Outliers: for example, Gates was clearly dedicated to computers, but he had access to a computer only thanks to the work--and the taxes--of the people who came before him. Or we could go to Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward:

Was it not wholly on account of the heritage of the past knowledge and achievements of the race, the machinery of society, thousands of years in contriving, found by you ready-made to your hand? How did you come to be possessors of this knowledge and this machinery, which represent nine parts to one contributed by yourself in the value of your product? You inherited it, did you not?

Emphasis mine because the book is from the 1880s, but Sullivan still hasn't absorbed this. Let's call this problem "the apple pie from scratch problem," after Asimov's joke that, in order to create an apple pie from scratch, one first has to create the universe. In other words, no one is a self-made success. So one would think that those who succeeded (thanks to the previous work of others) might have a moral obligation to give back.

2) Can you tell the successful from the wealthy?
If the government were able to tell the successful from the wealthy, Sullivan might begrudgingly support a higher taxation on those who merely inherited their wealth. (If only there were some form of... inheritance tax.) See, in Sullivan's mind, the successful have a greater moral right to their wealth, whereas the wealthy probably do not. So maybe if we could separate them, we could treat their money differently.

But let's take Jon Huntsman, Jr. as an example of how hard it is to tell those two things apart. Huntsman is probably a smart, hard-working guy. But as Colbert pointed out, Huntsman had a meteoric rise to Chair of the Huntsman Group from the lowly position of... Vice President. Was it Huntsman's success that helped him be born into that family?

Or take Sullivan, a first world success story both as a blogger and as an HIV survivor. How much of his success is due to his talents and how much is due to the luck of being born at a particular time and place? If, after all, luck plays such a huge role in his success, can he claim to have a moral right to the fruits of his success?

3) Incoherence much?
Sullivan moans about how higher taxes are a punishment (because money is good); and then he wants to elicit sympathy for the hardships of being rich (because too much money is bad): "that kind of money is a horrible curse in a way to a life of ordinary living and to real living." Leave aside the weirdness of "real living" and just note the incoherence of that: You can choose one or the other--money is a reward for hard work that we can't morally tax or money is a curse that we should feel sorry about--not both. If too much money is a curse, then taxation isn't punishment  but relief.

Also, notice that Sullivan talks about work as if money is the only or primary reward. There's no remembrance of Adam Smith's moral questions about economics, about how capitalism was meant to improve the world.

4) Objectively pro-wealthy
Sullivan comes from a different culture, and he pisses and moans about the British left, so he might feel that "class war" is the worst thing in the world. But to paraphrase Sullivan (who paraphrased Orwell when he said that people who objected to the war with Iraq were "objectively pro-Saddam"), if you wash your hands of the class war, then you're objectively pro-wealthy. If there's a car and a dog on a collision course, and you don't take a side, then you're ensuring a dog-free world.

5) Feelings--nothing more than feelings!
Sullivan includes that old line (much mocked over at Balloon Juice) about how we need to celebrate the wealthy because they are... what? Job creators? Morally superior to the rest of us? This line helps move the conversation from numbers and economics (which Sullivan doesn't understand) to questions about affect and feeling. And this line exposes Sullivan's confusion between charity (giving something that you have no obligation to give) and taxation (paying back for the things that you have benefitted from or that you want to benefit your children).