Trump's Own Words Will Condemn Him in History--Posted by My Son David
January 8, 2025
Manifest Destiny on Steroids--President Trump is Dangerous--Plain and Simple
Manifest Destiny on Steroids
President Trump’s press conference yesterday, January 5th, can only be described as dangerous, outlandish, and frightening. In less than an hour, he announced emphatically that he intended to:
• Apply economic pressure to annex Canada,
• Use force to take control of the Panama Canal if necessary, and
•Make Greenland part of the United States.
We’ve seen bold and unjustifiable actions under the banner of Manifest Destiny before, but never with such overt intent, openly breaking international law.
It’s hard to imagine a better excuse for President Xi of China to justify taking Taiwan under the mantra of national security—the reasoning Trump cited for acquiring Greenland, controlling the Panama Canal, and annexing Canada. And Vladimir Putin can claim the same rationale of National security as justifying his attempt to take over an Ukraine.
Why Bother to Commit Your Reflections and Memories to Paper?
January 1, 2025
Anna Quindlen’s slim notebook, Write for your Life, contains many pearls of wisdom which relate to my motivation in writing my journal over more than 40 years and, above all, in my hope that my wife, Francie will continue to commit her remarkable stories to writing so that future generations can see them. Perhaps, these words will encourage you to record your stories.
Here are some of the pearls which Anna Quindlen offers us:
In reflecting on her motives for writing her books, shew writes: “In these pages I hope my children would find me when I was gone. The fact is, the books are only collections of words; there is a familiar motto: ‘Actions, not words’ are what matter. The fallacy in that quote is that words are actions. They punch, tear, hurt, harm, soothe, amuse, educate, illuminate. They express ideas and feelings, and they make people feel better and they move them to tears and they enrage them, and they define them.”
“Think of it this way: if you could look down right now and see words on paper, from anyone on earth or anyone who has lifted, who would that be? And don’t you, as do I, wish that person had left such a thing behind? Doesn’t that argue for doing that yourself, no matter how terrifying or impossible writing may sometimes seem? It doesn’t really matter what you say. It matters that you said it. The gift of your presence forever.”
“So what if your story of a small, unremarkable life is read only by you, in some quiet corner, or by one or two people you love and trust understand? If those are people who can learn from and value it, isn’t that a notable achievement, a valuable audience?”
“When you write, you connect with yourself, past, present and future.”
“’Life is all memory,’ wrote Tennessee Williams. ‘Except for the one present moment that goes by so quickly you hardly catch it going.’ The point is that writing is a net, catching memory and pinning it to the board like people sometimes do with butterflies, like the ones we hatched. Writing is a hedge against forgetting, forgetting forever.”
“There are no journals written by my father. If I could go back in time, I would ask him to keep one, but maybe, like so many busy people, he would think it was a waste of the scant hours in his day. Why? you would ask. What would I write about? I would offer you the same answer I would have given him: Nothing. Everything. He could have written a recollection of college days gone by, or an account of the morning’s fishing, getting skunked out by the secret spot…”
Creating an Empowering Narrative for Our Natipn
December 31, 2024
The Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America, by Richard Slotkin
This is an important book that builds on beliefs of mine and have held for decades.
I have long called and hoped for a new narrative that can unite our nation as it has only rarely been united, usually in times of crisis. Slotkin’s book shows what we know: Our personal lives and our understanding of our nation’s life is built around narratives. Just as we as individual will tell each other only parts of our stories, so also do we tell those parts of our national stories that seem most relevant, compelling, useful, or consoling, at the same time. Most people do not particularly care about the “whole story” but, rather, those parts of the story that relate to our current culture and what we need to remember now.
This, while clearly not all inclusive, is also not intentionally deceiving. We hope other people will respond affirmatively to “our vision” and story about the United States. Equally important, we hope to inspire each other and our children with “our story” to give them hope for the future.
To have a well-functioning democracy, we need to have “our story” one that while never uniting all people, we unite a majority of people.
It is competing “myths” that explain much of the culture wars of our time.
Slotkin’s book makes it clear that our national culture and belief in ourselves has been founded on a variety of myths: “the frontier,” “the Civil War as a just war for liberation of Black peoples” or, conversely, as the “lost cause.” There is a “cowboy/gunfighter” myth that took its form importantly in westerns.
Again, whether there are some who try to manipulate these myths in order to sew discord in events for their own political, social and economic goals, most of us find ourselves caught up in competing myths about ourselves that combine elements of hard truth and historical facts with wishful thinking or wishful dis-remembering.
Slotkin’s book reminds me of the power and the variety of myth. Of course, they apply to other countries: the founding of Israel; the plight of Palestinians. Putin’s view of the history of Ukraine is a lot different than the Ukrainians.
Slotkin makes it clear that the MAGA movement is based on a combination of at least the “frontier myths” and the “lost cause myth” which focuses on grievance and little justice to the minority.
The importance of those myths in the MAGA movement could not be clearer.
The bigger challenge is how do we frame a line of thinking, vision, “myth,” if you will, that would the majority of people behind an agenda that both recognizes the thoughts of the nation and its strengths and which points to a brighter future. I have always returned to the Declaration of Independence, which is its own myth in a way. A call for equality of opportunity, recognition of the dignity of every single person, and the rule of law.
We need a narrative that faces up to the ugliness of our past (slavery, treatment of the indigenous people, sequestering the Japanese, “not so good” wars, but also the aspiration and the good which American people have done across the world.
I think a narrative along these lines can be put together credibly and with powerful resonance. It will point to a better future.
I happen to be reading a book right now on a totally different subject, while it is not totally different. It is written by Father Nouwen. The title: Life of the Beloved. My reading this followed the reading of the new biography of John Lewis by Raymond Arsenault. In it, Arsenault develops clear and passionately Lewis’s pursuit of the beloved community.
I believe we can formulate and should try to, and follow, a narrative, a myth, that would see us at our best: recognizing truth as best we know it, the good and the bad, while seeking to meet our highest ideals, as framed in the Declaration of Independence and other documents. It might be titled “The Reformation of America” or, perhaps, something more sexy than that.
I believe there would be substantial appeal in this if it were well-packaged. But the key will be to have it well led. It requires a spokesperson with great credibility, charisma and personal power. Without that, I do not believe it will happen.
I believe the moment for such a revised “myth” or narrative is ripe. There is so much disarray, so much polarization, so much meanness and cruelty in the world, a majority of people, I am convinced, are looking for something better, real, that can bring us together.
I would love to see some legitimate approaches taken in framing such a narrative. I may circulate this to a few people with the hope they will be able to bring their imaginations and insights to this.
As Slotkin says at the end of his book, “the making of national myths has proved to be essential to the creation of nation states to the maintenance of that sense of historically continuous community that allows them to function. The danger of mythological thinking is that it attempts to reify our nostalgia for a falsely idealized past, and to sacrifice our future to that illusion. But we are not bound to live in a fixed scenario bequeathed to us by tradition.”
No, we can create a new myth and new narrative.
Walter Russell Meade on Hamiltonian State Craft
October 14, 2024
Walter Russell Mead has written an excellent essay in the most recent Foreign Affairs. Its title: " Return of Hamiltonian State Craft: A Grand Strategy for a Turbulent World".
This essay challenges some of my most fundamental ideas, particularly the drive for global governance. Walter Russell Mead feels this is an illusory dream, other than limited governance agreements on specific issues that the participating nations see in their own self-interest.
Hamiltonian State Craft rests on three beliefs according to Mead:
1. The first business of government is to ensure the conditions that allow private business to flourish. A solid currency, a stable financial system and deep capital markets, together with the rule of law, are key parts of the infrastructure that sustains American life.
2. The second big Hamiltonian idea is the critical role of the nation in national feeling. Americans must embrace a duty of care toward one another. Nationalism or patriotism is a moral necessity, not a moral failing. Americans are not just citizens of the world, but also citizens of the American republic. I believe my service in the Navy has built a deep commitment to this idea. I also agree that we have obligations to our fellow citizens that do not extend in the same way to all of humankind.
All true, all this will be always true. But it does not negate the need for imagination and discipline to change the order of things, even if we know it won’t be perfect. How otherwise could the Common Market have come together? How otherwise could we finally come to recognize the legitimacy and rightness of marriage between two races?
There is great wisdom in what Mead writes. My one caution, my one warning, is that this “ultimately realistic view of the world and people” not constrain us from trying to do what more we can in our own way whether that’s in our family, community, nation or world, to provide circumstances that not only ensure the safety and prosperity of the American people but also the people of the world, knowing that to the extent we can do it, it will be limited and knowing we will be advancing our own national cause as well.