The stakes in the American election

I'm resisting the urge to comment on the presidential election as best I can, but this post by Hunter at Daily Kos is sensible and eloquent:

You may note, readers, that I have little patience for the premise that both parties are equally crooked and that We Might As Well Stay Home, or however it is being phrased in any of its particular election incarnations, and so have little patience for Jill Stein's pitch to Sanders supporters this go-around. We have already put this theory to the test, after all: We were told it would make no difference whether we elected a not-progressive-enough lifelong politician or his counterpart, an overprivileged idiot man-child with a middling business record and no intellectual curiosity whatsoever. We tested the premise, and came away with smoking holes in the ground, wars, worldwide instability, nuclear proliferation, massive deficits, and a global recession.

So, apparently, there is at least a little difference in results depending on whether you elect a not-progressive-enough, too-corporate-connected lifelong politician or an overprivileged idiot man-child spouting gibberish. There are not many opportunities to test political theories in real life, but we have tested this precise one using the entire collected resources of the nation, and been uniquely privy to the results.

There may once have been a time when it was true that there was insufficient difference between the parties to vote for either. It has not been true in my lifetime, however. When one party is proudly implementing voting restrictions against minorities, you are obligated to not merely ignore them, but defeat them. When one party is proposing an ethnic minority be scrutinized, rounded up, and shipped from the country en masse due to the "danger" they pose, you are obligated not merely to snuffle your theoretical disapproval, but to stop them. If you value a supposed American tradition of freedom of religion but suppose that the asked-for closing of the border to members of one particular religion would be an acceptable risk, so long as your own conscience is not sullied by having to vote for someone you don’t like very much either, you clearly believe your conscience to be worth more than other people's children.

You are proudly declaring that you will move forward, you will ford that river to a more progressive future in which racism is condemned and Americans who look different from you or believe different things no longer live in fear—but not if it requires getting your shoes wet. Carry me, my fellow Americans! Carry me across this one more time, and I promise I'll be right there marching with you again when we've reached the next dry road.

If you cannot tell the difference between the rhetoric and policies espoused by the Republican Party during the Obama presidency and that of the Democratic Party during the same period, or between now-nominee Donald Trump and now-nominee Hillary Clinton in specific—and it seems Jill Stein is among those who cannot, or who is willing to at least pretend at it—then you are declaring that those differences are no big deal. The xenophobia, the racism, the angry nationalism, plus the declarations from a sitting House member on the accomplishments of the white race, the insistence that religious rights of employers trump those of their employees, the mocking of the very notion that the American worker might deserve a little more than mere poverty, papers please laws targeting minority drivers and voters—those are all so unimportant to you as to be mere background noise to your own complaints. That does not speak well of your political acumen. It suggests a person who is not, in fact, paying attention.

It is something that can be spouted only by people who feel that the worst abuses of the idiot man-child and his allies will not fall upon them. They are not, after all, the ones being targeted. So the risk can be taken. You can be assured that the people whose shoulders that risk is being heaped upon, however, will notice.

William Marshal

Some insight on the character of William Marshal. He is lying on his deathbed:
The Marshal called to John of Earley
and said "Shall I tell you surprising thing?"
"Yes my Lord, but do not tire yourself out."
"I don't know what it all means
But in truth I can tell you this,
That for the last three years or even longer,
As far as I know, I haven't had
Such a great lords to sing
As I've had these last three days;
I can truly say as much,
But I don't know that it will please God."
John replied: "My Lord, do sing
For the love of God, if you're capable
Of giving yourself to that. The heart would take comfort
In your body and that would be a good thing,
For your joy would be restored.
It please God, it would be helpful
For it might bring back your appetite."
"Be quiet, John," the earl said,
"Such a song would do me no good at all,
For the people here, I believe,
Would think I was a madman.
Most of them would think, hearing me sing
That I was out of my mind."
He would not sing, nor could he.
Then Henry Fitz Gerold said:
"My lord, in the name of our God of glory,
Send for your daughters,
And they will sing some piece
That will do you good and comfort you."
The daughters were sent for and they duly appeared,
For they were glad to obey his commands.
"Matilda, you be the first sing,"
He said. She had no wish to do so,
For her life at the time was a bitter cup,
But she had no wish to disobey
Her father's command.
She started to sing Since she wished to please her father,
And she sang exceedingly well
Giving a verse of a song
In a sweet, clear voice.
"Joan, sing on as best you can!"
She sang one verse from a routrouenge,
but timidly.
"Don't be bashful when you sing," said the earl,
"For, if you are, you will not perform well
And the words will not come across in the right way;
the words you've just sang certainly didn't."
So the marshal taught her
How to sing the words.
Once the song was finished, he said to them:
"My daughters, go in the name of Christ
Who guards and protects all those who believe in him;
I pray to him to grant you his protection."
As was fitting, they took their leave.
Once they had left his bedside,
He said: "There are five of my daughters,
I believe. If all of them hold together,
So it please God, it could well be
That great good could come of it."
-- From the S. Gregory translation of the History of William Marshal, Anglo- Norman Text Society

Why the Middle Ages Are Important

Back when I was still teaching medieval history at Nipissing University, I was asked to introduce a display on the Middle Ages put on by the North Bay museum @Discovery North Bay. I wrote this script but did not deliver it. Only a handful of people showed up for the opening, so I was able to lead them through the display and make the same points in a more personal way, while discussing the artifacts and reconstructions. It was fun, doing it that way. Nevertheless, coming across this script on my harddrive today, I found that I liked it. So here it is. Note the first paragraph, which explains what I found rewarding about working at a small, obscure university.
Why the Middle Ages Are Important
May 24, 2008
@Discovery North Bay, opening of "Once upon a time..."
I would like to thank @Discovery North Bay for the invitation to speak at today's opening. Nipissing University was founded by citizens of North Bay and the surrounding region because they believed their home region could make an original and worthwhile intellectual and cultural contribution to Canadian life. When the university and the community meet here on occasions like this, we are fulfilling the dreams of those founders.
Why are the Middle Ages important? I don't have to argue today that they are important because the exhibit itself is proof enough. It was not created by professional academic medievalists, but by museum staff who work with the public all the time, and their judgment was that people in Ontario want to know more about the Middle Ages. If their own contacts with the public were not good enough, they could point to such recent films as the Lord of the Rings, or the three different recent movie versions of Beowulf, or the wild success of the Da Vinci Code, book and movie both. None of these modern cultural products show the Middle Ages as they really were. They are all consciously or unconsciously legendary or mythological reworkings of medieval material. Tolkien knew medieval literature better than almost anyone, and was a brilliant and original analyst of Beowulf, among other things, but when he wanted to talk to a contemporary public, he created a whole new world, similar to northern Europe in the Middle Ages but in many ways vastly different. And it's not just modern people who have reworked the Middle Ages to make a point. The anonymous Beowulf poet didn't show his hero as a normal person in normal country in a normal time, but put him in a landscape full of monsters and superhuman challenges. Thus when modern film directors mess around with Beowulf they've got good precedent.
But “Once upon a Time,” even though its title evokes the Middle Ages as a source of modern dreams, is not a mythological treatment. Like scholarship in other forms, it tries to get behind the myths and legends and appreciate the people the Middle Ages in this case the later Middle Ages as the home of real people with real problems and real aspirations, who came up with solutions and created social institutions that are still alive in our own world.
“Medieval” is often used to mean something like “unfathomable cruelty,” a phrase I stole from Carl Pyrdum, a graduate student at Yale, but much that we are familiar with and value in the modern world originated in the Middle Ages. The people who invented the phrases “dark ages” and “middle ages” meant to put down the postclassical era, and inspire people to build a better modern world to rival the great accomplishments of antiquity. Yet we can hardly do without the heritage of the Middle Ages. To take two examples relevant to Canada, both parliament and universities came out of the efforts of knights and warriors on one hand and clerics on another to improve their own society. The original members of the House of Commons were knights, seeking effective and fair government, the original university students and teachers were members of the clergy, seeking to understand theology and law, universal and human order. The Middle Ages created things so large that we hardly appreciate their medieval origins: in pre-medieval times there was no England, no France, no Poland, no Russia. The Romans had fantastic public bathhouses but no mechanical clocks, yet by the end of the Middle Ages every important town in Europe had a public clock. Think of Big Ben next to the British Houses of Parliament and not far from Westminster Abbey or the University of London and you think about our practical medieval heritage.
I hope you enjoy “Once Upon a Time…” which highlights some of the more striking and beautiful accomplishments of the Middle Ages. But I hope you will take a moment, when looking at the artifacts and reconstructions, think about the people behind them: the real medieval people who are the subject of the exhibition, and the real modern people who put it together for you. You'll get a taste of the fascination of the Middle Ages today, but just a taste. I hope it will inspire you to look closer. One thing about history is that no matter how good a given reconstruction is, there's always more. Life is big and complicated and hard to describe. “Once upon a time..." can be the end of your journey to the Middle Ages, but I rather hope there will be a beginning or perhaps a new beginning.

Joe Biden speaks for America

I heard that Joe Biden's speech to the Democratic National Convention was really good so I had a look at it. It surely was a classic American speech. Its very accurate and very straightforward attacks on Donald Trump were appreciated too. What I really noticed, however, was this how the speech revealed something I've noticed before in American rhetoric. Americans have no problem believing and saying that their country is unique and uniquely good, that it includes all the virtues of all of humanity, and always has led and is leading the way into the future, which America owns. (That last bit was pretty much exactly what Biden said at the end of the speech.) How many countries in the world can believe this about themselves? Most of us who do not live in the United States or say China perforce have to take a considerably more modest view of our place in the universe.

The war comes home

Saddam Hussein's Iraq was once known as the Republic of Fear

. There were at least two books with that title. Today I saw in a grocery store the cover of the Canadian newsmagazine Macleans. The cover story was -- you guessed it -- The Republic of Fear. And what country do you think Macleans was talking about?

Among other things, perhaps the nicest thing ever said about Canada?

Two days ago the Globe and Mail published "Finding a home, away from home," perhaps one of the best articles that it has ever published in my nearly 40 years of reading the paper. It was by Ian Brown, who also showed himself in championship form, and it concerned Syrian refugees in Canada, and the Canadians who have helped them settle here. It struck me as a very balanced account. About halfway through the article this passage appeared, and it struck me as perhaps the most complimentary thing ever said about the country.

When Omer and Aliye register for their health cards, the clerk asks if they want to be organ donors. Islamic scholars are divided on the permissibility of organ transplants, although compassion and saving a life trump doctrine. For that reason live transplants tend to be more common in Islamic societies than the use of organs that have been harvested from dead bodies. It’s a rich and complicated subject. In any event, Aliye declines.
But Omer says yes. Aliye speaks to him in Arabic, and explains the situation, as she sometimes does. The translator checks twice, as well, to make sure Omer knows what is being asked of him. But Omer says yes again.
“This is what they do here, in Canada,” Omer replies. “I am in Canada.”

Of course there is room for a lot of ambiguity in interpreting this episode, but read the whole article, which is among other things about generosity.

Talking Erie Canal: Jack Kelly's Heaven's Ditch

Jack Kelly's Heaven's Ditch has the enticing subtitle "God, Gold and Murder on the Erie Canal." When I first saw it, I assumed that the important part of that phrase was "Erie Canal." I was wrong: the key word is "God."
The western arm of New York State was the stage for some of the most dramatic developments in the United States in the early 19th century. It was large and fertile and potentially one of the best routes connecting the Atlantic Coast to the new Midwestern states. The geographic advantages led ambitious engineers and politicians to dream of a huge artificial waterway, the largest in North America. The same kind of ambition, directed to a different goal, inspired a different kind of dreamer to build godly societies. Western New York became the incubator of many different religious and social movements. People poured into the region in high hopes of striking it rich. Some succeeded, others were disappointed, sometimes times again and again. But winners and losers alike refuse to be discouraged. Western New York, its economy energized by the building of the canal, nourished wild dreams. And among those dreams were dreams of salvation and the creation of a Christian society.
Elsewhere, I have seen this region called the Burnt-over district, a reference to the many religious revivals that sprang up here or came through. The young United States had had a fair number of skeptical irreligious people, with both ordinary people and people of ambition following the founding fathers in rejecting the established religions of the early American colonies. But in the wilderness areas being settled after 1800, there was a revival of enthusiastic Christianity.
Heaven's Ditch is rich in personality sketches and anecdotes that illustrate the religious flavour of social change that took place in the wilderness. No doubt this comes from contemporary newspapers, which the literate if not highly educated American public enthusiastically read. We learn about many self-appointed leaders who went from settlement to settlement preaching conversion to a born-again, Biblical Christianity. More often than not they taught ideas quite different from the mainstream Protestantism which had been dominant for so long. William Miller for instance became famous for predicting that the end of the world would take place sometime around 1843. His prophecies reached far beyond the districts around the Erie Canal. A famous and significant failure-turned-leader was Joseph Smith, the prophet of Mormonism. And there are many more. In the brand-new society by the canal there was a free market in preaching and teaching. It was possible to write a huge new biblical testament such as the book of Mormon, one revealed to you by angelic and magical means, and be seen not as a probable fraud, given your lack of biblical languages such as Hebrew, but as a wonder of the new do-it-yourself society.
Of course it was not all smooth sailing. Richer and more established members of society were very sceptical of the new religious leaders, who they saw as marginal characters with little legitimate qualification to teach or reconstruct society.
One of the most interesting conflicts of the 1820s and 30s was between the Masons and their opponents. The Masons were an old-fashioned movement, devoted to an Enlightenment-style skepticism. In the Revolutionary period many of the Founding Fathers and other patriots were Masons, and as time went on, many of the local leaders of society joined the organization. But as time went on, Masons came to be resented for their domination of local society. Their cult of secrecy was seen as a threat to republican liberty. And when the new revivalist Christianity began to grow, the religious movement of course opposed the Enlightenment Masons.
In September 1826, an apostate Mason named William Morgan was kidnapped by some of his former friends, who were angry with Morgan because he had published a book revealing many Masonic cult secrets. Morgan was never seen again, and no one who actually knew what had happened to him was willing to go public. Morgan's fate became a widespread popular mystery, and more. For critics of the Masons, it proved that the secret society saw itself as above the law. Outrage turned into a movement, and a new political party, the Anti-Masonic Party. The Morgan scandal was the beginning of a great decline of Masonry; as years went on Masons were seen not as an American Enlightenment movement, but as a dangerous conspiracy of vigilantes. The Anti-Masons went on to be a national party that contributed to the formation of the Whigs.
This is just a single example of how the new country on either side of the Erie Canal generated wild, enthusiastic projects which seemingly came out of nowhere but went on to contribute to the mainstream. (Even the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints have to be regarded as such, given their nearly 200-year-long history and their prominence in the Mountain States.) And if American life and culture and politics seem wild and enthusiastic today, Jack Kelly's book reminds us that America comes by this kind of stuff honestly.
This is a very entertaining book, but I do miss a final discussion of how the Burnt-Over District settled down to be an unremarkable part of New York State.