Uncomfortable Facts

 A continuation of the discussion in You Say You Want A Revolution.  I've held on to these articles for over a year to see how they aged and how I felt about them.  They are still relevant as you can see in my July 2023 post Myth Making).

 "Russell didn't seek to make his audience comfortable, and here, it is possible to see a link to current efforts to sanitize American history and sand the edges off of inconvenient truths.  There remains a spurious notion that to teach - or even raise - uncomfortable facts of racism, slavery and other sins is somehow to condition people to despise themselves or their country".

    From "Bill Russell, The Man" by Jason Gay (Wall St Journal, August 2, 2022)

I enjoy reading Jason Gay's sports columns in the Journal.  I'm also an admirer of Bill Russell, the basketball player and the man (see Russell,).  But, in this passage, Gay is guilty of spreading his own spurious notion about uncomfortable facts - the myth that there are currently efforts to sanitize American history and to avoid teaching about slavery and racism.  I've encountered the same sentiments expressed by others, which is disappointing, but no surprise given the barrage of disinformation spread by the media on this matter.

The sentence references legislation enacted in Florida, Texas, and other states, and what it is widely reported to be its substance.  If you read these legislative acts instead of relying upon the reporting on it, you will see they (and the state education guidelines) specifically call for public school instruction on slavery, racism, and the civil rights movement.  What the legislation bans is racial stereotyping and scapegoating, the idea that certain behaviors and beliefs are inherent to people based on their race and ancestors, along with the conspiracy theory that whites and Jews have conspired to manipulate the structures and language of our society in order to maintain white supremacy.  

We've seen this over and over again in the past few years.  We hear about the supposed "Don't Say Gay" legislation, which doesn't actually say that and, in fact, has nothing to do with gays, instead being a law prohibiting instruction on sexual matters to children in kindergarten through third grade.

We saw it with President Trump's 2020 Executive Order on banning racial stereotyping and scapegoating in the training of federal employees which the media and Democrats, in a coordinated effort, always described as banning diversity training.  There was even a moderator question in one of the 2020 Presidential debates, asking about the ban on diversity training. However, if you read the EO (as I did and reported on in Righteous Acts) you will see that it:

"does not prevent agencies, the United States Uniformed Services, or contractors from promoting racial, cultural, or ethnic diversity or inclusiveness," 

In other words, a blatant lie, but one repeated over and over again, until people accept that it must be true.  That's understandable.  I'm a retired guy, I have time to read source documents.  Most people don't.  They have to rely on institutions they've come to trust.  The problem is those institutions have become untrustworthy.  In David Burge's formulation, the process is:

1.  Find a respected institution

2.  Kill it and gut it.

3.  Wear its skin as a suit.

4.  Demand respect.

We've seen this pattern now over and over again with institutions such as the ACLU, ADL, and the Southern Poverty Law Center which still draw contributions and support from people who simply do not realize the mission of these organizations has been completely transformed into efforts to suppress opposition and free speech in support of efforts to divide Americans by race and gender. 

Here's how it works in academia:

Source: N. Honeycutt and L. Jussim (2023), "Political Bias in the Social Sciences: A Critical, Theoretical, and Empirical Review"

The result is, as David & Jeanne Heidler observed in Henry Clay: The Essential American (2010)

Rather than the often repeated adage that the victors write the history of an event, the story of anything is actually determined by the unswerving adoption of one version of it, and the telling of that version by a determined cadre of writers.  In time, the version with the most persistent adherents becomes the 'truth' "

The lesson here is that the media and Democrats, determined to keep the public at a fever pitch of hysteria over racism, fascism, and the end of democracy, realized that through their control of the institutions they can simply make stuff up and repeat it endlessly.  I don't think Jason Gay is willfully deceiving his readers.  He's a sports columnist, I'm sure he's never read the legislation about which he's commenting, he's just passing on what he reads and hears in the newsroom and what's in the air in the bubble in which he lives and works.(1)

It also reminds me of Bill Simmons' analysis of HBO's OJ Simpson documentary a few years ago.

 

There are other methods to achieve the same goals.  In "My School's 'Antiracist' Agitprop",  (Wall St Journal, Sept 16, 2022), Sahar Tartak writes about her experience at Great Neck North High School on Long Island.  The school directed the student government to give $375 of student funds to a "racial equity" group to speak to the student body about "systemic racism".  Tartak refused to sign the check. A Zoom meeting was held to discuss the matter:

When I suggested that students might not need or want a lecture on systemic racism, my social-studies teacher asked whether I'd also oppose a Holocaust survivor's presentation.

I objected to that comparison, but she cut me off: "If you're not on board with systemic racism, I have trouble with that, girlfriend."

When I didn't back down, she made a bizarre accusation: "The fact that you think slavery is debatable . . ."

That's when I noticed how illiberal my liberal high school had become.  I once expressed disagreement with the narrative of the "1619 Project" and that same social studies teacher snapped that I was opposed to hearing other perspectives.  I had signed up for her class because it was described as "discussion-based", but certain discussions seemed forbidden.

Later a friend showed me a lesson from his English class - a Google Slides presentation urging that students pledge to work "relentlessly" to the "lifelong process" of "antiracism".  According to these slides, America is a place where racism is "no better today than it was 200 years ago".  I disagree but didn't mind the debate.  Yet this wasn't about debate: Immigrant children were being told to "pledge" to defend a view many of them don't hold.

I doubt students could have comfortably objected in class.  The lesson pre-empted criticism by imputing to them "white fragility", which means they "close off self-reflection", "trivialize the reality of racism" and "protect a limited worldview".  The adult presenting this accusatory material was a teacher who had the power to grade them and affect their prospects of getting into college. 

What Tartak describes being subjected to is specifically what the Texas and Florida laws that Jason Gay inaccurately described as avoiding talking about slavery and racism, were designed to prevent. 

Ms Tartak stood up to this and is doing fine.  She's now at Yale.  In fact, she'll now be used by the radicals to dismiss the idea that there really is a cancellation or censorship problem on the left.  But how many can stand up to this when indoctrination starts in elementary school?  Others with Ms Tartak's fortitude see what can happen and will remain silent.  JK Rowling has withstood cancellation attempts because her books still bring in so much money, but other UK feminist writers who are just starting their careers, spoke out in her support, and suddenly find they can't get published.

In The Philosophy of Modern Song, Bob Dylan writes:

Turns out, the best way to shut people up isn't to take away their forum - it's to give them all their own separate pulpits.  Ultimately most folks will listen to what they already know and read what they already agree with.  They will devour pale retreads of the familiar and perhaps never get to discover they might have a taste for Shakespeare or flamenco dancing.  It's the equivalent of letting an eighty-year-old pick their own diet.  Inevitably they'll choose chocolate for every meal and end up undernourished with rotted teeth and weighing five hundred pounds.

Dylan is right but there is a twist here.  Dissenting voices to the progressive orthodoxy on race and gender are being pushed into their separate "pulpits" but the new orthodoxy dominates the most important heights in our culture, often under false pretenses, but reaching a wider audience.

-------------------------------------------------

(1)  For reference, the news section of the Journal is almost as progressive as the New York Times.  The editorial pages remain conservative, but not Trumpist.  However, I expect that will change over time and eventually the news and editorial sections will align in providing synchronized narratives just like the Times.

Try Sleeping With The Dancers In Your Room

Hey can you follow,
Now that the trace is fainter
In the sand
Try turning your face to the wall
Can you still read me
Now that the chase is wilder
In your hand
Try losing your place in the sun 

 

All the praises of the dream
Turned to tangles in the trees
All yesterday's fine chariots
Turned to buses in the street 

 

Can you still hear me
Now that the songs are moving
Into night
Try sleeping with the dancers in your room

From Jack Bruce's third solo album Harmony Row.   Like most of Bruce's solo work, he composed the music while the lyrics are by poet Peter Brown (who also wrote the lyrics for many of Cream's songs like Sunshine Of Your Love).  Bruce is on vocals and piano on this track.

The melody is gorgeous while the lyrics are evocative but elusive in their meaning and ending in a musically unresolved fashion.  All in a little over a minute and a half.

There is a live version done decades later, near the end of Bruce's life, which is not on YouTube.  The song is still beautiful but Bruce's voice wears the years.  I found it even more evocative sung by the older man.

Rewatching Sorcerer

Last month I wrote about intending to rewatch William Friedkin's 1977 film Sorcerer.  I thought it was great at the time but hadn't seen it since, and some movies just don't wear well (Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid for instance, which I rewatched last year), but finally watched it recently and Sorcerer remains a great film.  Gritty, tense, thrilling, existential.  Four fugitives scraping out a bare existence in a jungle shanty town of an unnamed Latin American country.  Desperate to get enough money to obtain exit visas they accept a job driving two trucks loaded with cases of nitroglycerin more than 200 miles through brutal jungle and mountain terrain to be used to put out an oilfield fire.

The movie actually looks better than I remembered.  Not a lot of dialogue and some of the most nerve-wracking scenes on film.  It must have been a nightmare to make the movie, which went way over budget and was a flop when released.

Reconstruction

We just returned from a week long trip to Paris.  Since the fire of 2019, Notre Dame has been converted into a giant construction site with a goal of reopening by the time of next year's Olympic Games in Paris.  The site is surrounded by large temporary walls on which are photos and text describing the details of the reconstruction process.  At night, the site resembles a massive factory complex as you can see from the photos below, which also show the two 6-story office complexes temporarily installed on the site.

The front of the cathedral still looks much like it did before the fire.  We look forward to the completion of the restoration.

On our last night we had a pleasant dinner at Restaurant Paul on the Place Dauphine, located near the west end of the Ille de la Cite, the island on which Notre Dame is situated.  These photos show the view as we stood up after finishing our meal, and then crossing the Seine via Pont Neuf as we walked back to our apartment.

Still Confidential

L.A. Confidential is one of my favorite movies and possibly the best movie of the 90s.  I've viewed it several times, most recently last month, and it holds up well.

I've just finished reading the novel the movie is based on, L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy, one of a series of noir novels by the author set in Los Angeles during the 40s, 50s, and 60s.  The 500 page book makes for intense and compelling reading, I couldn't put it down.  It is also completely bonkers, an insane fever dream, and quite different from the movie, with many more characters, much more plot, taking place over most of the decade of the 50s instead of within the compressed time frame of the movie.

Reading the book, I was filled with admiration for the film's screenplay authors, Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson (who also directed the movie), for their skill in extracting a brilliant and filmable story from the sprawling novel.  In the process they jettisoned subplots while eliminating or minimizing some key characters in the book, and significantly changing the entire flow of the narrative and ending.  They did so by maintaining a laser like focus on the three main characters - Bud White, Ed Exley, and Jack Vincennes.  The result, a memorable and great looking film that introduced Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce to American audiences.

One thing did remain constant between the book and movie - reading the dialogue in every scene in the novel in which Sid Hudgens, publisher of Hush-Hush magazine appears, I heard Danny DeVito's voice in my head! 

Mother Popcorn

 A rhythmic contrast to our prior entry.  James Brown at his peak.  What a tight band!

Mad World

Written by Roland Orzabal of Tears For Fears, it was the band's first hit in 1982.  This version is by Sierra Hull and her group.  Hull is a very talented singer and mandolin player - listen to her solo at the end.

Resisting Reality

"Bruno thought of himself as a convinced European but knew he was at the same time a fierce critic of much of the way it was run: a fishing policy that had devastated the fisheries, an agricultural policy created by those with little knowledge of life in the countryside, an industrial policy that spouted words of solidarity but had undermined the skills and pride and jobs of the French workforce".

I'm currently reading Martin Walker's latest book in the Bruno, Chief of Police series, A Chateau Under Siege.  I greatly enjoy the series, set in the Dordogne region of France where we have vacationed many times, and its lead character Bruno and his friends.

Walker now lives in the Dordogne and with his background as a reporter with The Guardian and United Press International his worldview is that of a European liberal.  That viewpoint comes through in his novels, and he uses Bruno to express it, which is why I found the quote intriguing.

Bruno does not approve of European policies on fisheries, agriculture, and industry and elsewhere chafes against unreasonable bureaucratic intrusions into even minor details of French life.  But, as he always, reminds us, he is a "European".  But what does that mean?  Does it mean the European Union?  Throughout the books there is very little the EU does that Bruno approves of.  While he focuses on specific policies, the picture painted is that of an undemocratic faceless bureaucracy outside the control of the public.  Yet, it's clear from the books that being European means supporting the EU, but there is no convincing case for it, other than being better than some ghastly far right wing alternative.  While the EU may not be a success on substance, it has done a brilliant job convincing enough people that the only alternative is a descent into extremism.  That does not make for a healthy long-term prognosis for the peoples and nations of Europe as the fake alternatives posed by the EU will lead to further erosion of democracy and vesting even more decision making power into a bureaucracy whose top priority is its own preservation and growth.

Walker's refusal to face into reality reminded me of a piece I wrote in 2020 about similar viewpoints in the U.S.  Here is what I wrote about one of them:

George Packer is a writer for many prestigious liberal publications including The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine and a standard issue progressive so his October 2019 piece in The Atlantic, When The Culture War Comes For The Kids, must have startled some of his regular readers.  Living in New York City, Packer and his wife fell into the educational pressure cooker regarding their children but ultimately forsook private school for public education in city schools.

My wife and I are products of public schools. Whatever torments they inflicted on our younger selves, we believed in them. We wanted our kids to learn in classrooms that resembled the city where we lived. We didn’t want them to grow up entirely inside our bubble—mostly white, highly and expensively educated—where 4-year-olds who hear 21,000 words a day acquire the unearned confidence of insular advantage and feel, even unconsciously, that they’re better than other people’s kids.

He sees what is wrong with the focus on identity:

In politics, identity is an appeal to authority—the moral authority of the oppressed: I am what I am, which explains my view and makes it the truth. The politics of identity starts out with the universal principles of equality, dignity, and freedom, but in practice it becomes an end in itself—often a dead end, a trap from which there’s no easy escape and maybe no desire for escape. Instead of equality, it sets up a new hierarchy that inverts the old, discredited one—a new moral caste system that ranks people by the oppression of their group identity. It makes race, which is a dubious and sinister social construct, an essence that defines individuals regardless of agency or circumstance—as when Representative Ayanna Pressley said, “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice; we don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.”

At times the new progressivism, for all its up-to-the-minuteness, carries a whiff of the 17th century, with heresy hunts and denunciations of sin and displays of self-mortification. The atmosphere of mental constriction in progressive milieus, the self-censorship and fear of public shaming, the intolerance of dissent—these are qualities of an illiberal politics.

It took me a long time to see that the new progressivism didn’t just carry my own politics further than I liked. It was actually hostile to principles without which I don’t believe democracy can survive. Liberals are always slow to realize that there can be friendly, idealistic people who have little use for liberal values.

Packer regrets the civics is no longer taught:

By age 10 [his son] had studied the civilizations of ancient China, Africa, the early Dutch in New Amsterdam, and the Mayans. He learned about the genocide of Native Americans and slavery. But he was never taught about the founding of the republic.” 

And he understands that what is going on is indoctrination, not education.

The fifth-grade share, our son’s last, was different. That year’s curriculum included the Holocaust, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. The focus was on “upstanders”—individuals who had refused to be bystanders to evil and had raised their voices. It was an education in activism, and with no grounding in civics, activism just meant speaking out. At the year-end share, the fifth graders presented dioramas on all the hard issues of the moment—sexual harassment, LGBTQ rights, gun violence. Our son made a plastic-bag factory whose smokestack spouted endangered animals. Compared with previous years, the writing was minimal and the students, when questioned, had little to say. They hadn’t been encouraged to research their topics, make intellectual discoveries, answer potential counterarguments. The dioramas consisted of cardboard, clay, and slogans.

De Blasio’s schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, has answered critics of the diversity initiative by calling them out for racism and refusing to let them “silence” him. As part of the initiative, Carranza has mandated anti-bias training for every employee of the school system, at a cost of $23 million. One training slide was titled “White Supremacy Culture.” It included “Perfectionism,” “Individualism,” “Objectivity,” and “Worship of the Written Word” among the white-supremacist values that need to be disrupted. In the name of exposing racial bias, the training created its own kind.

Finally, Packer's son revolted against this mockery of an education:

“Isn’t school for learning math and science and reading,” he asked us one day, “not for teachers to tell us what to think about society?”  

His conclusion?

Watching your children grow up gives you a startlingly vivid image of the world you’re going to leave them. I can’t say I’m sanguine. Some days the image fills me with dread. That pragmatic genius for which Americans used to be known and admired, which included a talent for educating our young—how did it desert us? Now we’re stewing in anxiety and anger, feverish with bad ideas, too absorbed in our own failures to spare our children. But one day the fever will break, and by then they’ll be grown, and they will have to discover for themselves how to live together in a country that gives every child an equal chance.

Of course, we have the ritual denunciation of Trump but Packer can't put two and two together.  He can't understand why this horrible turn has happened in education.  He doesn't seem to understand that foundational and influential groups within the Democratic Party - teachers unions, school administrators, higher education, our country's largest foundations - are the very reason this disaster is unfolding.  He thinks the "fever" will magically break and all will be well.  It won't break on its own unless people like him face into what is necessary to break the fever. 

It's now 2023 and I see little sign that those like Packer recognize their own responsibility to take action; too many still see the only alternatives being a further descent into progressive racism turning their children into poorly educated and easily led activists or succumbing to extremists of the right.  Given that choice, they will choose the former.

This viewpoint is also reflected in a passage in a New Yorker article published a couple of years ago, Can Progressives Be Convinced That Genetics Matters?, a profile of behavioral geneticist and self-described progressive Kathryn Paige Harden.  The article centers on the long-running and very controversial dispute over the relative contributions of genes versus environment, including social conditions, to the intelligence of various groups.

It's a dispute that I have not followed closely and have no strong opinions about other than an intuitive sense that both things play a role.  My interest in the article is elsewhere.

On sabbatical for the 2015-16 academic year, Harden and Elliot Tucker-Drob, a colleague to whom she was married at the time, were invited to New York City with their two young children—a three-year-old boy and a nine-month-old girl—as visiting scholars-in-residence at the Russell Sage Foundation. Russell Sage, which occupies a handsome Philip Johnson building in Manhattan, primarily supports sociologists, journalists, and economists, but it had recently launched an initiative to integrate the biological sciences. Harden felt almost immediately unwelcome at the regular fellows’ lunches. Many of the left-leaning social scientists seemed certain that behavior-genetics research, no matter how well intentioned, was likely to lead us down the garden path to eugenics. The world would be better, Harden was told, if she quit. When their cohort went to see “Hamilton,” the others professed surprise that Harden and Tucker-Drob had enjoyed it, as if their work could be done only by people uncomfortable with an inclusive vision of American history.

Here we are talking about a progressive scientist whose work expressly promotes societal actions to address inequality, yet because she "dissents" to some extent from the blank slate belief system of progressive orthodoxy, she is automatically placed in the category of "racist". 

I have an inclusive vision of our society.  I was raised that way, and my parents set an example for me, not only by what they said but in how they lived their lives.  It's how I treat people both personally and in my professional life.  In the job I had for the decade + before my retirement, I was measured on my hiring and promotion practices and repeatedly told by HR that I had exemplary performance.  However, I never hired or promoted anyone because of their identity.  My hiring approach was simple; it's hard to find good people and, when you do, hire and promote them.  Yet, despite this, I know that because of what I've expressed over the years on this blog, I would be not be hired today by my former company or most other large corporations.  And yes, though I've not seen Hamilton, based on what I've heard about from friends who have, I am sure I would enjoy it.

If we, as a society, make it through this ugly epoch of intolerance, I expect we will see many analyses of why liberalism was able to reject anti-liberalism from the right, but was so easily upended by the anti-liberalism of the left.

On Broadway

Encountered a photo of Sammy Davis Jr which reminded me I'd seen him on Broadway as a child.  Thought I'd search my memory for the Broadway plays my parents took me to see as a child.  Living an hour train ride from Grand Central made it possible.  Here's what I've been able to come up with.

The first Broadway play I saw was The Music Man which ran from December 1957 to April 1961.  My guess is we saw it late in its run.  I thought the songs were great but have little specific memory of the show.

The next three were all in the 1964-5 time period.

I'm pretty sure Fiddler on the Roof was mandatory attendance for every Jewish family in the New York City metro area.  It was a thrilling, funny and moving show.  I remember some of the musical numbers but most of all the presence of Zero Mostel as Tevye.  We were pretty far back in the theater but he dominated the proceedings even from far away.  Here he is performing If I Were A Rich Man at the 1965 Tony Awards. The original production ran for nearly ten years.

Golden Boy was the show I saw Sammy Davis Jr. perform. A musical with a storyline about an angry young black man who responds to prejudice by becoming a boxer.  Don't remember much about it.

Hello, Dolly! was a show I attended with my mom.  Can't remember if Carol Channing was still playing the lead role (though the play debuted in 1964, this may have been later in its run in the 60s) but remember not caring for it.

The final Broadway show was one I did not see with my parents, instead going with friends into the city - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Tom Stoppard's first play.  We all loved the absurd premise and dialogue: Hamlet told from the viewpoint of two minor characters.  According to Wikipedia its New York run began in January 1968 and continued for 420 performances.  This scene, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth, is from the movie.

Just realized I forgot the last Broadway show I saw during the 60s - Hair in late 68 or early 69.  I'm embarrassed to admit it but there it is.  Talk about a show that aged quickly and badly.

Interior Decorator

Ran across a discussion of the best phone scenes from movies or TV.   This one gets my vote.  From the Pine Barrens episode of The Sopranos in 2001, also known as The Russian In The Woods (directed by Steve Buscemi!).  Christopher and Paulie have taken a Russian mobster to the Jersey Pine Barrens to dispose of the body, but the Russian turns out to be alive, gets away from them, and they end up stranded.  It's the old bad cell phone connection days so Tony has trouble reaching them and when he does a hilarious misinterpreted conversation occurs.  Christopher's last line always cracks me up.

Warren

It was twenty years ago today that Warren Zevon died at the age of 56.  Thought it was appropriate to listen to a few of my favorites.  We'll skip the great ones from his breakthrough album Excitable Boy; Werewolves of London, Lawyers, Guns and Money and Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner.

My favorite, and an outstanding example of Warren's underrated talents as a musical composer, is Desperadoes Under The Eaves

I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel
I was staring in my empty coffee cup
I was thinking that the gypsy wasn't lyin'
All the salty margaritas in Los Angeles
I'm gonna drink 'em up

And if California slides into the ocean
Like the mystics and statistics say it will
I predict this motel will be standing until I pay my bill

 Accidentally Like A Martyr

The phone don't ring
And the sun refused to shine
Never thought I'd have to pay so dearly
For what was already mine
For such a long, long time

Bill Lee.  About one of my favorite ballplayer characters.

You're sposed to sit on you ass and nod at stupid things
Man that's hard to do
But if you don't they'll screw you
And if you do they'll screw you too
And I'm standing in the middle of the diamond all alone
I always play to win when it comes to skin and bone

I Was In the House When The House Burned Down

Boom Boom Mancini.  Its chorus is "Boom Boom Mancini's fighting Bobby Chacon" but the song is really about the brutality of boxing.  Ray "Boom-Boom" Mancini was the lightweight champion in 1982 when he fought Duk Koo Kim of South Korea (which is referenced in the lyric). Mancini won by TKO in 14 rounds but many thought the fight should have been stopped earlier because of the beating Kim was absorbing.  Kim collapsed after the fight ended, dying four days later.  Mancini attended the funeral in South Korea and went into a severe depression.  Kim's mother committed suicide three months later and the bout's referee killed himself five months after that.  Mancini returned to the ring, beating challenger Bobby Chacon in 1984.  The relentless beat of the song echoes that of the ring.

Mohammed's Radio

You know, the Sheriff's got his problems too
He will surely take them out on you
In walked the village idiot and his face was all aglow
He's been up all night listening to Mohammed's Radio

My Shit's Fucked Up.  Recorded for the album Life'll Kill You, shortly before his cancer diagnosis.  Somehow he knew, and you laugh despite yourself because it is all so true.

Keep Me In Your Heart.  From his final album, recorded when he knew the end was near.  Beautiful sentiment. 

Socotra

(From Dark Roasted Blend)

In the post The Farthest Outpost, about the penetration of the Roman Empire and its traders into the Red Sea, Arabia, and the lands around the Indian Ocean, I referenced a first century Greek mariners guide entitled Periplus of the Erythaean Sea (the name the Greeks and Romans used for the Indian Ocean).

The Periplus refers to an island off the coast of the Horn of Africa, calling it Dioskouridou "island of the  Dioscuri", a reference to Castor and Pollux, twin half-brothers in Greek mythology, though no one knows why the connection was made to this particular island. 

This island is today known as Socotra, located about 140 miles off the coast of Somalia and 230 miles south of the Arabian Peninsula and is currently administered, somewhat haphazardly, by Yemen.   However, because of Yemen's civil war it is considered unsafe to visit the island, which has 50,000 inhabitants and is about 30% larger than Rhode Island.

Although governed by Yemen, Socotra is geographically and geologically part of the African tectonic plate and is a very isolated landform.  As a result many species of plants and animals are unique to the island which has been called "the most alien-looking place on Earth".

 

Tenochtitlan

Thomas Kole recently released several 3-D reconstructions of Tenochtitlan and the lake on which it was situated.  The remarkable city, the home of the Mexica/Aztecs, which left Cortez and his conquistadors in awe, had been constructed over the two centuries prior to the arrival of the Spanish in 1519.  I've written about the city and its conquest before, see Ten Years After: 1519-29.  Kole's reconstruction captures the scale of the city and the terraforming required for its development and is well worth a look.  A couple of screen shots are below.  Because the lake was filled in after the fall of the Mexica it is difficult without such visual aids to capture what once existed.  That fill is unstable and is why today's Mexico City is so susceptible to earthquake damage.

 

The Missouri Question

I recently came across entries from the diary of John Quincy Adams made during the height of the 1820 crisis over the admission of Missouri as a slave state, the first time slavery arose as a controversial national issue, an issue that would persist and dominate domestic politics for the next forty years.  The immediate crisis was resolved by a legislative agreement to admit Missouri and Maine as states, one slave and one free, while restricting slavery in the territories of the Louisiana Purchase north of the current border of Oklahoma.  That agreement held until the aftermath of the Mexican War, with the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 which set the course for secession and Civil War.

There were two entries in particular that caught my eye, in which Adams, who served as Secretary of State under President James Monroe from 1817 to 1825, relates his conversations with John C Calhoun, Secretary of War during Monroe's two terms.  From the time of the Missouri Compromise until his death in 1850, Calhoun would be the leading political proponent of the defense of slavery, under which the peculiar institution was a positive good and an essential element in the preservation of the American Republic, while Adams became a vocal opponent of slavery.

Feb.24.—I had some conversation with Calhoun on the slave question pending in Congress. He said he did not think it would produce a dissolution of the Union, but, if it should, the South would be from necessity compelled to form an alliance, offensive and defensive, with Great Britain.

I said that would be returning to the colonial state.

He said, yes, pretty much, but it would be forced upon them. I asked him whether he thought, if by the effect of this alliance, offensive and defensive, the population of the North should be cut off from its natural outlet upon the ocean, it would fall back upon its rocks bound hand and foot, to starve, or whether it would not retain its powers of locomotion to move southward by land. Then, he said, they would find it necessary to make their communities all military.

I pressed the conversation no further: but if the dissolution of the Union should result from the slave question, it is as obvious as anything that can be foreseen of futurity, that it must shortly afterwards be followed by the universal emancipation of the slaves. A more remote but perhaps not less certain consequence would be the extirpation of the African race on this continent, by the gradually bleaching process of intermixture, where the white portion is already so predominant, and by the destructive progress of emancipation, which, like all great religious and political reformations, is terrible in its means though happy and glorious in its end. Slavery is the great and foul stain upon the North American Union, and it is a contemplation worthy of the most exalted soul whether its total abolition is or is not practicable: if practicable, by what it may be effected, and if a choice of means be within the scope of the object, what means would accomplish it at the smallest cost of human suffering.

A dissolution, at least temporary, of the Union, as now constituted, would be certainly necessary . . . [.] The Union might then be reorganized on the fundamental principle of emancipation. This object is vast in its compass, awful in its prospects, sublime and beautiful in its issue. 

March 3.—When I came this day to my office, I found there a note requesting me to call at one o'clock at the President's house. It was then one, and I immediately went over. He expected that the two bills, for the admission of Maine, and to enable Missouri to make a Constitution, would have been brought to him for his signature, and he had summoned all the members of the Administration to ask their opinions in writing, to be deposited in the Department of State, upon two questions: 1, Whether Congress had a Constitutional right to prohibit slavery in a Territory: and 2, Whether the eighth section of the Missouri bill (which interdicts slavery forever in the Territory north of thirty-six and a half latitude) was applicable only to the Territorial State, or could extend to it after it should become a State.

As to the first question, it was unanimously agreed that Congress have the power to prohibit slavery in the Territories . . . [.] I had no doubt of the right of Congress to interdict slavery in the Territories, and urged that the power contained in the term "dispose of" included the authority to do everything that could be done with it as mere property, and that the additional words, authorizing needful rules and regulations respecting it, must have reference to persons connected with it, or could have no meaning at all. As to the force of the term needful, I observed, it was relative, and must always be supposed to have reference to some end. Needful to what end? Needful in the Constitution of the United States to any of the ends for which that compact was formed. Those ends are declared in its preamble: to establish justice, for example. What can be more needful for the establishment of justice than the interdiction of slavery where it does not exist? . . [.]

After this meeting, I walked home with Calhoun, who said that the principles which I had avowed were just and noble: but that in the Southern country, whenever they were mentioned, they were always understood as applying only to white men. Domestic labor was confined to the blacks, and such was the prejudice, that if he, who was the most popular man in his district, were to keep a white servant in his house, his character and reputation would be irretrievably ruined.

I said that this confounding of the ideas of servitude and labor was one of the bad effects of slavery: but he thought it attended with many excellent consequences. It did not apply to all kinds of labor—not, for example, to farming. He himself had often held the plough: so had his father. Manufacturing and mechanical labor was not degrading. It was only manual labor—the proper work of slaves. No white person could descend to that. And it was the best guarantee to equality among the whites. It produced an unvarying level among them. It not only did not excite, but did not even admit of inequalities, by which one white man could domineer over another.

I told Calhoun I could not see things in the same light. It is, in truth, all perverted sentiment—mistaking labor for slavery and dominion for freedom. The discussion of this Missouri question has betrayed the secret of their souls. In the abstract they admit that slavery is an evil, they disclaim all participation in the introduction of it, and cast it all upon the shoulders of our old Grandam Britain. But when probed to the quick upon it, they show at the bottom of their souls pride and vainglory in their condition of masterdom. They fancy themselves more generous and noble-hearted than the plain freemen who labor for subsistence. They look down upon the simplicity of a Yankee's manners, because he has no habits of overbearing like theirs and cannot treat negroes like dogs. It is among the evils of slavery that it taints the very sources of moral principle. It establishes false estimates of virtue and vice: for what can be more false and heartless than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin? . . [.]

I have favored this Missouri compromise, believing it to be all that could be effected under the present Constitution, and from extreme unwillingness to put the Union at hazard. But perhaps it would have been a wiser as well as a bolder course to have persisted in the restriction upon Missouri, till it should have terminated in a convention of the States to revise and amend the Constitution. This would have produced a new Union of thirteen or fourteen States unpolluted with slavery, with a great and glorious object to effect, namely, that of rallying to their standard the other States by the universal emancipation of their slaves. If the Union must be dissolved, slavery is precisely the question upon which it ought to break. For the present, however, this contest it laid asleep.

Their relative positions set out the stakes of the national discussion over the next forty years.  This is one of the earliest expressions of Calhoun's view that the Constitution was based on slavery and the American Republic only made possible by its existence, a view not held by southern state representatives at the Constitutional Convention, but a view that would become widely accepted in the south leading up to the Civil War.

Adams expresses his support for the compromise while wondering whether it would have been better to force the issue to a conclusion, even if it meant the dissolution of the Union.

The persistence of the slavery question and those positions can be seen in Senator Reverdy Johnson's April 5, 1864 speech in favor of the proposed 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, during the course of which he repudiated Calhoun's views:

"That distinguished statesman at that time [1847] endeavored to satisfy the Senate, having, I have no doubt, satisfied himself by his own sophistry, that republican freedom could not exist without African slavery, and proclaimed his attachment to the Union and to the Constitution upon the ground, chiefly, that the later recognized the existence of slavery."

". . . I differ with the honorable Senator from South Carolina as to the conservative influence of slavery upon our free political institutions.  I do not hold with him that they depend in any degree upon the existence of slavery.  If I did, I should value them infinitely less than I do.  In my judgment, they rest upon the virtue and intelligence of the people, and have their firmest support in the blessings which they impart."

He also, with the advantage of knowing the results of what the failure to resolve the question of slavery since 1820, ruminated that if the Founders had anticipated the current condition of the country, "they would have provided by constitutional enactment that the evil and that sin should at a comparatively unremote day be removed" and that, while the members of the Constitutional Convention, though the majority opposed slavery, made the judgment that without recognizing its current status the Union could not be formed:

"Whether this opinion was right or not, it is now useless to inquire; . . . But, if it was otherwise, if the Union could have been formed without the recognition of the institution, if its gradual extirpation could, on the contrary, have been provided for, no one who is a spectator of the scenes around us and is a friend of humanity and freedom, can fail to regret that it was not done."