Never to forget; always to honor these words of Henri Amiel:
"Life is short, and we do not have much time
to gladden the hearts of those who make the journey with us.
So, be swift to love, and make haste to be kind.
And may the blessing of God who made us,
who loves us and travels with us
be with me and with you now and forever"
We hear its all importance celebrated simply and singularly from two different eras:
"Love, and do as you will"--Saint Augustine.
"All you need is love"--John Lennon and Paul McCartney
This from Tolstoy's "War and Peace"
That proverbial cliche comes to mind as I read the deluge of over-the top criticism of so called "elite universities" following the misbegotten testimony before congress by three presidents of Ivy League schools.
Yes, it is true that the faculty of most of these schools follows a liberal political bent.
Yes, it is true, that many students and faculty members holding "conservative" views may feel uncomfortable in expressing them.
Yes, it is true that group identify has taken on a greater significance than individual identity in recent years, in some cases excessively so in my opinion.
Yes, there are always reasons to ask if we have the balance right between seeking truth and respecting our most important personal convictions born of learning and one's life experiences.
But lets please keep this in perspective.
Peggy Noonan in her WSJ column of 12/16-17 captures the shrieking exaggeration we are seeing all too broadly. Universities "have gone from being centers of excellence to institutions pushing political agendas".
Noonan writes that the idea of a historian attempting to "find the honest truth seems inapplicable to the current moment". She asserts, with absolutely no evidence, that "the good faith of the scholar is sacrificed to political fashion".
Tell that to the Professor of History I have known at Yale for decades. Neither he nor I will know what you are talking about. He is seeking truth with all its complexity. So will the many other historian I have known.
The same drive to find the truth, mine new knowledge, motivates every professor I have known no matter what their field. I have agreed with some of them; I have disagreed with others. But I do not see their orientation to continue to learn in the search for truth to have changed.
Let's calm down. Improve where we should, keep an open mind, listen to and respect different points of view. But don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
For a couple of months now, it has become clear to me that unless President Biden is willing and able to change the way he is communicating with the American public and what he is actually proposing and accomplishing, he’s going to lose big-time to Donald Trump or to whomever takes his place in the unlikely event that the criminal cases become so appropriately overpowering someone else does take his place.
The latest poll numbers this morning shout even louder that this is the truth. He’s down in all the key states versus Trump; and if Haley would displace Trump (and she is the most likely candidate to do so) the gaps would be even higher.
It is clear that the 91 indictments against Trump and his outrageous self-revealing assertion that he’ll be a “dictator on Day One” aren’t moving the needle. They will to some degree when voters are confronted with this reality in the voting booth, but not enough.
Biden’s challenges are two-fold as I see it: 1) Personal. He is not seen as sharp enough; he is “too old for the job.” 2) There are the policy issues, above all immigration; he and the administration have to take a decisive stand on this now. The feeling that the economy is not going well is out there, too. Time is going to have to take care of that. I think the message that the economy is better will come through over the next year.
However, the age and policy issues, particularly around immigration, won’t go away unless Biden does something differently.
I don’t know if he’s up to it, but he has to change the way he presents himself to and communicates with the American public. I believe he needs to adopt informal fireside chats. Perhaps with an interviewer; perhaps with a small group. I’m not talking about town halls.
He needs to address head-on the issues that are on voters’ minds: his age, his quickness, why he feels he is uniquely able to carry out the role of the presidency at this point in time.
I for one believe he is, above all because of the global challenges we face in Israel and Palestine, in Ukraine and Russia and in many other places, too. We must hold NATO together. We must have good relationships with our allies. We must seek a relationship with China that doesn’t blink at the reality of competition but sees the opportunity and the need for collaboration.
Joe Biden is far more equipped by experience and temperament to carry out this critical function at this moment in history than any other candidate, Democrat or Republican.
He needs to make that clear. Concretely.
I wish I knew how to share this message with someone who might be able to make a difference in how Biden approaches this. In fact, I don’t think what I’m saying here would be new to the inner circles of the White House or the Democratic Party. What I don’t understand is why it’s not getting through. Or, perhaps if it is, why Biden isn’t acting on it. I just hope he is up to it. I truly believe the country’s future depends on it. We are at a perilous moment. Liz Cheney understands this. Not enough other leaders do. The time to act differently is now. We can't just pretend that it will all work out. Life does not work that way.
Free is a great memoir. It takes its place for me next to those of my other two favorites: James Reston's "Deadline" and Katherine Graham's "Personal History". Each of these memoirs tells a unique human story in unforgettable, candid prose. But each does something else: they cause me to reflect on aspects of my own life.
Lea Ypi's horrific portrayal of the civil war going on in Albania in 1997 feeds in a macabre horrific all -too human way to the humanitarian disaster going on now in Ukraine, the cataclysmic turn to the past in Russia, and the infernal continuing deadly repression of the Palestinians quest for independence by Israel.
The author writes: “Nobody understands anything. It’s like a whole country committing suicide. Just when it looked like things were getting better, it all went downhill. Now that we are all falling from a precipice, there is no way back. It’s so much worse than 1990. At least there was hope and democracy then. Now there is nothing, just a curse.”
Yet Ypi does not leave us off the hook. She goes on to recall what she tells her students teaching Marxism at the London School of Economics. It is, she describes, “a theory of human freedom, of how to think about progress and history, of how we adapt to circumstances but also try to rise above them. Freedom is not sacrificed only when others tell us what to say, where to go, how to behave. A society that claims to enable people to realize their potential but fails to change the structures that prevent everyone from flourishing is also oppressive. And yet, despite all the constraints, we never lose our inner freedom: the freedom to do what is right.”A call to the ultimate duty: trying to do what is right. Giving all people the opportunity to succeed as best we can.She talks to friends at school about her growing up in Albania, first a communist, then a socialist country. They reject the socialism which she had. It wasn’t real. “There was only one thing to do,” they said. “Forget it.” She was reluctant to forget it, not out of nostalgia, not because the concepts she had grown up with were so deeply rooted that it was impossible to disentangle herself but because, “If there was one history, if there was one lesson to be taken from the history of my family, and of my country, it was that people never make history under circumstances they choose. It is easy to say ‘what you had was not the real thing,’ applying that to both socialism and liberalism, to any complex hybrid of ideas and reality. It releases us from the burden of responsibility. We are no longer complicit in moral tragedies created in the name of great ideas, and we don’t have to reflect, apologize and learn.”
So it is with the circumstances in which I have lived we all live. Life is not perfect; it’s never been perfect; it never will be perfect. We just have to make the most out of it that we can. I return as I often have to what I hope my grandchildren will be able to say about me and my wife, Francie. “They did the best they could under the circumstances.” To be clear, I’m not sure we always do; sometimes we’re too ready to give up, feel sorry for ourselves, retreat into gloom. But usually we do pull back, try to see our better selves and follow our better instincts.
In the book’s Epilogue, the author turns very personal. She reveals that her mother wondered, even if silently, how she (Lea) could be teaching socialism and Marxism. Only once did she draw attention to a cousin’s remark that my grandfather did not spend 15 years locked up in prison so that I would leave Albania to defend socialism. “I knew this is what she thought. I always wanted to clarify, didn’t know where to start. I thought it would take a book to answer. This is that book.
At first, it was going to be a philosophical book about the overlapping ideas of freedom and the Liberal and Socialist traditions, but when I started writing, ideas turned into people—the people who made me who I am. They loved and fought each other; they had different conceptions of themselves, and of their obligations. They were, as Marx writes, the product of social relations for which they were not responsible. Still, they tried to rise above them. They thought they had succeeded, but when their aspirations became reality, their dreams turned into my disillusionment.”
“My family equated socialism with denial: the denial of who they wanted to be, the right to make mistakes and learn from them, to explore the world on one’s own terms. I equated liberalism with broken promises, the destruction of solidarity, the right to inherit privilege, selfish enrichment, cultivating illusions or turning a blind eye toward justice. In some ways, I have gone full circle. When you see a system change once, you start believing that it can change again. Fighting cynicism and political apathy turns into what some might call a moral duty; to me it is more of a debt that I feel I owe to all people of the past who sacrificed everything because they were not apathetic, they were not cynical, they did not believe that things fall into place if you just let them take their course. If I do nothing, their efforts will have been wasted, their lives will have been meaningless.”
Lea writes with deep feeling. “My world is as far from freedom as the one my parents tried to escape. Both fall short of that ideal. But their failures took distinctive forms, and without being able to understand them, we will remain divided. I wrote my story to explain, to reconcile and to continue the struggle.”Yes, continue the struggle. That is our responsibility. That is our opportunity.
I would conclude these excerpts and perspectives with a short endorsement for this luminous memoir another writer offered and which I echo: “A lyrical memoir of deep and affecting power, the sweet smell of humanity mingled with flesh, blood and hope.”
Geo-Political Hopes Dashed – Family Relationships Keep Hope Alive
As I reflect here today, Monday, November 20, with the world aflame around me in so many places, I lament the crushing of two of my greatest geo-political hopes of the last 30+ years: the recovery and rise of Russia integrated and at peace with the West and the continued growth and rise of China as a member of the world community with underlying positive, if sometimes competitive, relations with the U.S. and West.
I hardly need say that those visions have been dashed. I’m not going to take the time to rehearse the underlying irresistible historical and cultural elements that have led to this, nor the errors of human agency on all sides which contributed to it. All I can say is that if we have been surprised by these turn of events, we can be surprised again and probably will be as a result of changing circumstances and changed leadership, hopefully for the better, closer to my original vision, which I believe is essential for the peace and safety of China and Russia and the entire world.
If my hopes have been dashed on the geo-political front, they have been lifted and nurtured by the growth and wonder of my family: my children, their spouses and ten grandchildren. And I’ve been lifted, too, by the courage and aspiration of countless other individuals whom I’ve known, most recently nursing aides who have helped me through the night as I recovered from my knee surgery.
There is so much kindness in this world. My wife, Francie and I experienced it recently in the airport as people helped us trundle along in our two wheelchairs, looking after us personally, always with a caring smile.
There is much good in this world. It was manifested in a beautiful sermon I heard yesterday from Christ Church’s Owen Thompson. All any of us can do, what I can do, is make the most of every situation by trying to do something helpful for those around us. In short, to be kind.
I return to what I hope my grandchildren will say of Francie and me: they tried to do their best. They tried to make the most of what they had and do good for others.
I finished reading Ben Rhodes’ After the Fall, with increased respect for the author and for the insights he offers. Let me capture these overall perspectives:
1. Rhodes is extraordinarily honest in assessing his own perceptions of the role of the faults and some of the strengths of America. He is deeply introspective and transparent.
I believe he’s right, though it’s risky territory in saying that, “You have to look squarely at the darkest aspects of what America is in order to fully, truly love what America is supposed to be.” The challenge here is to make sure that we not lose sight of the many times and in many ways we have achieved new dimensions of “what America is supposed to be.”
2. I believe this: “Even if flawed, America still offers the world a unique opportunity, an example of citizens of now a multi-ethnic, multi-racial democracy can change things for the better.” At our best, we have done that many times, often drifting, but more often than not—and may this be one of those times—reorienting our course and doubling down on doing our best.
3. What is it in the end that makes “America special,” even if not uniquely privileged?
Personally, I believe it is our diversity. Our openness to innovation, our curiosity, our founding principles which, even if not achieved, provide a constant compass as to where we should head and where we need to improve.
Our central challenge lies in giving everyone a greater chance for the opportunity to participate in the dynamics and life of the country, through the foundations of good health, education and the eradication of prejudice, including, but not solely, racism. These are what can stand in the way of an individual being all they can be.
4. We face a constant challenge of assessing how much weight should be given to addressing our failure to provide equal opportunity in the past to African-Americans and Native Americans, as a rationale for taking action to provide equal opportunity today. I believe that weight is a large one.
5. Rhodes identifies a central challenge we face today and that is the denial of what are true facts. People have always lived in separate realities but today, due to social media in particular I believe, and to fragmented media, it is greater than ever. Rhodes says it well: “Once people choose to exist in an entirely separate reality, it is no easy task to bring them back, especially when every turn of national events can be framed as a validation of their grievances. We will be living with the residue of the radicalization for a long time.”
Still, we must be sober about this. It’s not the first time we’ve faced this. The country lived for decades with very different understandings of what the Civil War was all about, states’ rights or the protection of slavery. We lived for a long time with different beliefs in the extent to which Communists had penetrated our government. Senator Joe McCarthy carried that flag.
What’s the answer here: Stay at it, recognize that progress takes time and overcome reversals along the way. Be as sure as we can that the education which young people receive reflects the truth as we can best define it. We have a challenge on that front right now in the battle going on over how we teach the history of this country.
6. Rhodes recounts a conversation with Obama. Obama observes that he has recently been asking his close friends a simple question: “What gives you a sense of joy and meaning in life and at what moments do you feel that?” Here is a truly and profoundly important question. The answer is one which I believe will have a great deal in common between the men and women in every country on earth.
When I think of that question, here is what comes to my mind:
· Being with my wife Francie or one or more of our children and their children in some quiet and beautiful place. On the deck of the cottage at Pointe au Baril, Canada. Or in a forest in North Carolina with my daaughter, Susan. Or talking to my son,. David at his farm. Or walking with my son, Douglas at Fort Funston or with him and his family at Half Moon Bay, California.
· Walking the beach in the early morning at Vero Beach, Florida with my son, John. Sitting on a chair at home, looking at the expanse of our backyard, trees in full bloom, leaves rustling in the breeze.
I found McWhirter's and Elinson's "American Gun: The Trues Story of the AR-15" to be a gripping, informing and mind-opening, mind-chilling study of the development of this killing machine in this country. It is enlivened by the authors’ embedding the statistics and facts of the many massacres (Sandy Hook; Parkland; Las Vegas casino; etc., etc.) in personal stories.
The authors provide meaningful international context for the out-of-bounds growth of guns and particularly the AR-15 in our country. It tracks the futile legislative efforts to control the damage being done.
Many new insights emerged:
· Every time there was even the threat of gun legislation being passed, sales of the AR-15 catapulted.
· The 1994 gun control legislation, which had been so strongly fought for, was supposed to stop all manufacture and sales of the AR-15s in the United States. Nineteen different guns were identified and magazines of over ten shells prohibited. It didn’t work. It was easy to get around the definition that had been provided of automatic weapons. The definition had been characterized by military features which manufacturers quickly changed. Instead of controlling gun sales, it created a sustained unprecedented demand for civilian versions of the rifle which had never caught on with the buying public before. More than 62,000 AR-15s were built for sale in the U.S. in 1993, double the previous year, and in the next year, that number climbed to 103,000.
· The sales of the AR-15 took another jump forward as private equity moved in, bought up a lot of manufacturers and figured out how to market it. They created a “Buckmaster Man Card.” Advertised it in Maxim, a very popular magazine for young males 18-34. This came at a time when the male physique had been deteriorating. The average weight of the male in 1960 was 166 lbs. By 2010, it had increased to 196 lbs. The “Mancard" became a badge of masculinity. They cynically described the AR-15 as a “modern sporting rifle.”
· The Parkland shootings did result in meaningful state legislation, thanks to aggressive work by young people and organizations like "Moms Against Guns". Twenty-four states across the country enacted new gun control laws. Many passed red-flag laws. New Jersey and Vermont passed restrictions on high-capacity magazines.
· Research conducted by several reputed professors have found two policies in particular showed promise. First, laws requiring a permit to purchase or possess a gun could reduce the number of mass shootings. The second policy that showed promise was restricting large-capacity magazines. That didn’t reduce the number of mass shootings, but it reduced the number of people killed.
There are obvious solutions to this continued carnage that sadly won’t be touched with a ten-foot pole. For example, regulations for years have required anyone acquiring a machine gun to register it, be fingerprinted, etc. There have been no mass shootings with machine guns. In Japan, anyone getting a gun must have a doctor certificate and register it. Similar controls are in place in Australia and New Zealand. They acted at the same time as we were passing the ineffectual gun control legislation in the mid-1990s.
There is no question we are a country of guns. It is estimated that there are now close to 25 million AR-15's in circulation. We have to be practical in seeking control and there are practical answers. Fingerprints to activate the gun only primed by the owner (just like a cell phone). Registration of all automatic weapons. Limit to magazine sizes. Full background checks, including gun shows. The majority of American people would agree to all of these provisions. What’s lacking is the political will to make them happen. Those organizations like Moms against Guns must keep up the fight. And they will. We’re not going to limit the disasters that exist simply because of the already omni-presence of guns. But we can limit the disaster for the future for our grandchildren and their grandchildren if we act on what is right and we know to be true. That is our responsibility.
A chilling, eye-opening reminder:
The speech of Francis P. Blair, Jr. (a congressman and Senator of the United States and graduate of Princeton and Yale) to the Mercantile Library in Missouri in January 1859, presents a telling picture of the attitude of many well-educated men and women of the time toward African-Americans.
His lengthy talk boiled down to the strong pronouncement that the enslaved people should be set free and re-located to a tropical climate suited to their nature. His opposition to slavery rested in part in the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that all men are created equal, but also on the belief that slavery threatened the expansion of free White labor, an expansion which Blair felt essential to the health of this still developing country.
His position was based on an uncompromising conviction that the White race was superior to all other races, including Native American and African. He writes that, “The White man is stronger in endurance than the African. Our country is in the temperate, not the torrid, zone; and we find that, even in…Texas, the emigrant Germans produced the best and highest-priced cotton, and more of it to the acre, than unslaved plantations. When the cloud (of slavery) passes over Virginia, and its renovation is proscribed in the adjoining Carolinas, it will pass, too, from their worn-out lands and White freeholders will renew them, and make more cotton from their 100-acre fields than will be obtained from plantations of 1,000 devastated by slave culture.”
He concludes, “How grandly our nation would loom up, in the eyes of the world, if abandoning the policy which makes it the taskmaster of slaves, it should lay its hands to the work, not only of our freedom to the race which has so long and so faithfully served us and our fathers, but to recompense them for their long servitude, by giving them all homes in regions congenial to their natures, and guaranteeing to them a free government of their own in which, without ceasing to be a part of this country, they should be to themselves and escape the presence of that social subordination and inferiority inseparable from the contact of different races in the same community. The moral power and grandeur of the act would challenge the admiration of the world, and make our later fame surpass the glory of the great struggle which gives us a place among nations.”
I find it surprising that a man as well-educated as Blair, and so well-connected politically, could in 1859 harbor the notion that Blacks could be “exported” to a tropical land. This had been pursued by the American Colonization Society for decades. It had been resisted, vociferously, by Black leaders and, from my perspective, had lost traction with political leadership.
The overriding conviction by Blair that there were qualities of the African-American race that led them to forever be inferior to Whites is, sadly, a sentiment that still exists among too many 150 years after Blair recorded this unvarnished conviction.
