Carthago delenda est

I am avoiding the media today.

Ten years ago I was working at Jo-Ann Fabrics trying to get the Fall quarter visuals up to standard.  I had been up with my team all night setting and re-setting pumpkins and ghosts on the sales floor and decided I needed to put my head down for a bit.  Michelle came in about 8 in the morning (Chicago Time) telling me that a plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York.

I thought she was joking, told her it wasn’t funny what she was trying to do, and tried to put my head back down in my office.  She came over and bonked me on the head and told me to come into the break-room to look and see for myself.

{If I have the time and inclination, I’ll add the entry from my journal that day.}

I first started to study Classical Greek and Latin to counter my fundamentalist family members.  I wanted a way to talk about things that are important to them without debating their theology.  I WILL debate their theology when it is important that I make my point, but don’t make a habit of it.

What I didn’t realize was that studying Latin and Greek would give me as much political and historical insight as it has.  All of the sudden I start developing informed opinions based on historical sources instead of “Oh, it seems to me…” without knowing exactly why it seemed this way or that.

And that brings me to my early-morning September 11th musings as I avoid news feeds, newspapers, and get ready for my Sunday classes.

When the buildings collapsed I had this vague feeling of doom and gloom.  It wasn’t just that the buildings fell and the horror of what was going on in New York.  It was a sense of political dread.  It was like looking into a volcano. The nice thing is that the Patriot Act and its decommissioning of the Constitution didn’t surprise me.  The invasion of Afghanistan and  Iraq seemed like a foregone conclusion.

Enter: Carthage.

Except that George Bush is certainly NO Cato. You can see that in the streets of Kabul and Baghdad.  So either we are in some parallel First Punic War and are going to be pushed to the limit and see history out to the Third or we are floundering and poking Carthage in the eye ruining our reputations internationally.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est

Of course, this needs to be developed more, and I barely have the slightest idea what I’m talking about, but I really think there is something to it.

It Was More Than A Month Before Hallowe’en, George

I am avoiding the media today.

It is early and I have to get ready for classes, but September 11th always bites me in the ass.
For me it will always be the day that George W. Bush decided to start channeling a learning disabled version of Cato.

I will write more tonight after class, but I hate what this has become.

Be Careful What You Consider A Solution

I was reading about Easter Island and the monoliths (Moai) on Atlas Obscura.

I vaguely remembered from school that there were almost no trees on the island and that there were all of these mysteries that surrounded them.  Who built them? Why? How?

I didn’t realize that we know the answers to most of these questions, nor did I realize just how horrible the history of the island was.

I started to think about the island based just on the Atlas Obscura entry.  It got me thinking about use of resources and problem solving.  There was an idea forming in the back of my mind that was saying: “Be careful what you consider to be a solution to your problems” which then developed into: “Easter Island is what happens when you don’t pay attention to the environmental impact you have as a human being and rely too much on spiritualism and/or religion to solve your problems”.

The island is only 45 square miles total. In the 16th and 17th centuries, statue building accelerated, and the population grew, reaching around 40,000. Then, around the year 1160, the whole thing collapsed. Some 2,000 people live on the island now, and the landscape is barren. No trees grow here except for a few invasive and problematic eucalyptus groves.

The article describes how the island’s original inhabitants at one point used the lumber on the island to build fishing boats and move the giant moai.  It briefly describes how the monoliths were created and moved into place, but the most interesting thing is what they were:

These sculptures (often called heads, though they are in fact disproportionately sized full-body figures, often seen buried halfway in dirt) represent specific ancestors. These representations were erected between the village and chaos — the ocean — as a wall of protection. The two major tribes of Easter Island lived in a tropical rain-forest, a paradise of food and fishing, with plenty of time to put into the Great Work of the statues.

This was leading me to think of the island in comparison to the West in the 21st century.  How we think about our resources, how we rely on religion and spiritualism as a means of problem solving instead of really looking at the problems that surround us.

Are we going to be as stuck as the original island’s inhabitants were when the oil runs dry or becomes too expensive?  How will we deal with that?  Will we erect huge monoliths to help or protect us?  Will we use up the last of our resources in an attempt to delay the inevitable?

How could a people smart enough to navigate to tiny landfalls on thousands of miles of Pacific ocean and capable of vast engineering projects like the Moai statues be so unable to deal with the coming of a doom which must have been obvious on such a tiny island?

It may have been easier then we imagine. A few years ago, locals on Easter Island discovered they could catch and sell lobsters from around the island. They then caught and sold those lobsters until there were no more.

Though much is known about the Moais, there’s lots more archaeology to do on Easter Island than digging up stone sculptures. Researchers are just starting on the villages — and their story is one of the most compelling on Earth: Humans can make their own bad luck. In the case of Easter Island, ever larger and larger statues were not the right defense.

Of course nothing is ever easy or as simple. *

When you read the Wikipedia article linked at the beginning of this post, you get a much richer and more traumatic history of the island.
Slave raids, Catholic missionaries, intentional germ warfare (smallpox), and any number of horrible, monstrous things.  So it isn’t as clean and easy as the shorter article makes it out to be.  Few things are.

It did get me thinking, though, that perhaps if the island were closer to the rest of the colonial possessions it could have ended up more like Haiti – perhaps the reason that Haiti is still what it is is because it has proximity to both help and information?

Just thinking about stuff.

*In all fairness, to Atlas Obscura, they are an amazing website that isn’t meant to be comprehensive.  Their goal is to bring neat places to the attention of people who are interested in… neat places.  I am in no way criticizing their narrative, just adding to it and making some commentary that is outside of their scope.

 

 

What Should Be America’s Version of “Never Forget”*

When I was in Evansville, IN last month, I did a lot of walking.  I would walk from my mother’s house on Madison Avenue just East of Highway 41 to the library downtown.

These walks took me straight down Washington Avenue to Haynie’s Corner, where Washington goes left to S.E. 2nd Street and right to Parrett and Third Street.  This was not entirely unintentional.  Besides being the most direct way to the new Central Library** it took me past the corner of Third and Parrett Streets.

Third and Parrett Streets Evansville Indiana

Third & Parrett Streets, Evansville, Indiana. Where did the marker go?

The intersection is one of those strange cut-in intersections that is a result of the original Evansville plat being SE-NW and growing due East and North.

I was looking for something specific.  When I was in high school I brought my Grandma into town for lunch one day and we went walking.  She brought me to this weird little intersection to show me something.  A plaque.  I wanted to get a picture of it.

But there was nothing to be found.  I asked around and a few people say they remember it.  I know it was there when I moved to Chicago in 2000.  Now I am pissed.

The plaque commemorated a Civil War refugee camp that used to be there.  It doesn’t seem like much to some folks, maybe. To me it is part of my core.

I put away thinking about it when I came back to the city until I stumbled across this thread on Metafilter a couple of days later.  I made a comment, but my mind was cloudy and I wasn’t thinking as clearly as I could have been.  I NEEDED to respond, though, so I did. Now I feel like I need to flesh it out a bit.

The Metafilter thread was a link to The Civil War Isn’t Tragic, an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates.  Ta-Nehisi writes for the Atlantic and has written some of the best modern social and racial commentary in his time there.

I have the same reaction to the Civil War that he does.  It does not mean as much for me and where I am today as it does for him (I am white and he is black) but we are in agreement.

It drives me nuts when I hear or read about Southern Romanticism, Civil War battle reenactments, or how maybe slaves had decent masters and it wasn’t all that bad… It drives me absolutely bananas when I am in Southern Indiana and see a Confederate flag as a bumper sticker or flying from a truck or in a window.

The Civil War wasn’t tragic.  It was the first step in what should have been the real leveling of American society.  It was a bloody birth that gave us the opportunity to make things right.  And we squandered it.

Let’s start at the beginning…

This is my Aunt Sarah Elliott:

Sara Elliott

Sarah Elliott*** c. 1880

 Sarah was born in the late 1840s in Elliott, IN.  Her parents were Welsh-Irish immigrants who were farmers, devout Methodists, and proud American abolitionists.  She grew up with the idea that one man shouldn’t own another.  It was part of their interpretation of the American identity that everyone really IS equal. One of the family sayings was (and still is): “If you are good enough to work for me, then you are good enough to eat at my table”.  When there were too many workers to eat in the dining room properly, tables would be set up on the farm and everyone ate al fresco. We are in the United States!

Her brother, William Elliott, was quick to volunteer for Union service when the war broke out. He served in the 42nd Indiana Volunteer Infantry from October of 1861 until October of 1864.

William Elliott Tombstone, 42nd Indiana Infantry

William's tombstone at Bluegrass cemetery in Elliott, IN

She then spent time with family in Evansville during the conflict at that refugee camp helping people get settled and reinvent their lives while her brother fought. He was taken prisoner at Perryville, KY at one point and was discharged in October of 1864 in Rome, Georgia.

The cedar trees in our front yard on our property where I grew up were trees that he brought back in his suitcase from the battle of Lookout Mountain.

Cedar, Juniperus Virginiana, from battle of Lookout mountain.

Cedar, Juniperus Virginiana, from battle of Lookout Mountain in Elliott, IN.

After the war, the family tried to do what they could to help reconstruction along.  Sarah and her mother took in orphans that were wandering the countryside and sent them to school so that they wouldn’t be taken advantage of by farmers who were using the refugees as cheap (often horribly abused and mistreated) labor.  They worked in town to help women get work and Sarah taught freed slaves that were now in Indiana to read.

All of this is to say that I grew up being PROUD of what these people did.  I grew up hearing about how OUR PEOPLE (meaning my family, not white people generally) did our part for the American struggle for equality.  I grew up with my Grandma lamenting that Southerners and Copperheads prevented a proper reconstruction and brought on the racial woes that we as a country had to face for decades after what should have been the beginning of the end of it. I grew up with the idea that April 9, 1865 is when the American dream of real independence truly began.

What does this have to do with anything?  A whole damn lot.

Being from original Lincoln Republican stock, it makes me sick that there has been a shift in the way we look at the Civil War and what it meant to the people fighting.  You hear about the tragedy of brother-against-brother and you read about how it wasn’t really about slavery but about “State’s Rights” you hear any number of things that may have some grain of truth, but (and let’s use the crazy-people caps lock for this):

I AM HERE TO TELL YOU AS A DESCENDANT OF PEOPLE WHO ENLISTED AND FOUGHT, WHO WORKED TO MAKE THIS NATION AND THIS WORLD A BETTER PLACE… FOR THEM IT HAD EVERYTHING TO DO WITH SLAVERY.

RIGHT FROM THE BEGINNING.

They didn’t care about whether South Carolina printed their own money or Tennessee could  give women the vote.  They were concerned with their own souls in the eyes of their god and they were willing to fight and shed their own blood so that the taint of slavery would not be on them.

Period.

In fact, they weren’t particularly thrilled with the consolidation of Federal power that the war brought with it, but freedom trumped it all.  Freedom trumped everything.

As far as Lincoln changing direction into it and making it about slavery:
“The greatest thing about the President isn’t that he is one of History’s great leaders.  The greatest thing is that he admitted to being wrong and did what was right.” That was what my Grandma said about her mother’s take on his stance on slavery and why he is a hero.

So please, the next time you hear some idiot tell you that the Civil War was about State’s Rights and that slavery was secondary at best or perhaps even an accidental point in the whole affair, please remember my Aunt Sarah and her bother William.

Remember what they did and how they thought about it.  The problem is that time is slipping by and people like me – people who still have these kinds of stories to tell – are going away without writing them down. Cedars in the front yard become “those trees that have been there forever” and Uncle Will becomes an unmarked black and white photograph fading in a box in the attic.  I am lucky because I am so young for someone who has this much of a physical, historical,  and emotional connection to it. Eventually we will lose everyone who has a connection. That is how History gets re-written, and it isn’t good.

*Tangentially related: I was having a conversation with a Rabbi friend of mine.  We were talking about the origin of the Reform Jewish movement in Germany and America in the 19th century and it struck me that there is something similar in America as it relates to general race relations, how we understand each other… It got me thinking something… something about assimilation… Something about the idea that if people just put aside and tuck away what makes them different culturally things will be OK… If we just try to fit in well enough and blend blend blend everything will be fine… Like a battered woman who, if she just makes the dinner without burning it, will go one more day without being hit…

**Kudos to Evansville on the Library, by the way.  It is probably the nicest and most useful thing to have gone up in a long time.

***Her married name was actually Sarah Elliott Smith, but through a particularly gothic turn of events**** we don’t use Smith.

****She was the first wife of her future sister-in-law’s first husband and died of TB around 1888 at 40. Got it? It takes a second and isn’t really easy to grok without more background.  You will just have to wait for my genealogy blog to come out.

Indulgent Redemption

I am going to try to be blunt but not offensive here. It will be hard for me, but in the interests of not seeming too ignorant, I have a nascent thought about what I have always privately called “indulged redemption”.

I was reading Metafilter today and came across this post.

In my mind, indulgent redemption is when one squanders a good deal of time and energy in things that don’t matter and then (TA-DA) finds their redemption in something outside of themselves.  Usually it involves lots of judgment and sometimes it even gives birth to screeds or political movements.  In my mind, it is almost always a negative thing.

I started thinking about it when I was a kid.  My dad, when he first met my mother in the early 1970s, was a fraternity party-boy.  My mother grew up with alcoholics and so wasn’t thrilled with being around it.

So in order to court her, he made a HUGE deal of not drinking anymore.  He was from a teetotaling family anyway, so it was fairly easy for him to do it.  So I grew up with one side of the family raging alcoholics and the other side prim teetotaling Methodists.  It was interesting, to say the least.

And that was my first introduction to indulgent redemption.  It comes close to martyrdom, but not quite.  It is more like wearing a judge’s gavel around your neck 24/7 because you deserve it.

This is just the beginning of an idea… Maybe I’ll get more into it later.

Spartacus, Jesus, And The Lack of a Fourth Servile War

I would like to read about this, so if this is your line of work and you want to steal this for a paper of some kind, please do.

I was thinking that there is some tie between Christianity and the lack of a fourth Servile War in Rome.

I don’t have any more for you than that, but you are welcome to it.

Thanks.