1. 1200 BC (or thereabouts): The Ten Commandments. The late great comedian George Carlin, known for his antipathy to organized religion spelled it out:
"I am The Lord, thy God. Thou shalt not have strange gods before me." "Thou shalt not take the name of The Lord, thy God, in vain." "Thou shalt keep holy the Sabbath." Right off the bat, the first three, pure bullshit: "Sabbath day," "Lord's name," "strange gods." Spooky language! Spooky language, designed to scare and control primitive people.
"It's a political document," he said earlier in the bit. He eventually boiled the Commandments he thought humanity needed down to 2: "Thou shalt always be honest and faithful" -- a positive, rather than negative, combination of the prohibitions against adultery, stealing and lying -- and, "Thou shalt try real hard not to kill anyone, unless, of course, they pray to a different invisible man than the one you pray to."
Then again, "Thou shalt not commit adultery" was originally a guard against one man stealing another man's property, because wives were considered property.
2. 1453-1564: The Renaissance. I chose the dates as follows: The former for the Fall of Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey), a convenient ending date for the Middle Ages, and also for the start of the Age of Exploration; and the latter for the death of Michelangelo Buonarotti, the last survivor of the big names of the Renaissance.
A lot of what the great artists did was pandering to their patrons, most of whom weren't dark-skinned Italians from Rome, Naples, Apulia (the "heel" in "the boot of Italy"), Calabria (the "toe" in the "boot"), or Sicily. Rather, they were from Northern Italy, places like Venice, Florence, Milan and Turin. They were "white," more Germanic than what we would now consider "Italian."
To put it into a modern perspective, which wouldn't have made sense then, but it does give you an idea: Central Milan, in Lombardy, is 34 miles from Italy's border with Switzerland; while Turin, in the Piedmont, the Italian Alps, is 60 miles from the border with France. Florence is a bit further south, in Tuscany, about halfway between Milan and Rome.
But that geography is why we have a light-skinned man with long blond hair as our defining image of Jesus, rather than a swarthy man with short hair and bushy eyebrows, as most Jewish men living in "The Holy Land" would have been in the 1st Century AD. And Michelangelo's statue of King David, now in the Gallery of the Academy of Florence (Galleria dell'Accademia di Firenze), sure doesn't look Jewish, even though David is the leading hero of the people of the modern State of Israel.
3. 1590-1613: The Plays of William Shakespeare. Presuming he actually existed, and his plays were not written by someone else (as many have alleged, with flimsy evidence), Willy Shakes could pander with the best of them.
From his 1st staged plays, his cycle about King Henry VI (reigned from 1422 to 1461), until the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603, his acting troupe was known as The Lord Chamberlain's Men, and his plays made Elizabeth's family, the House of Tudor, and their predecessors, the House of Lancaster, look like heroes, or at least well-meaning in their failures; and made their arch-rivals, the House of York, especially King Richard III (1483 to 1485), look like villains.
When Elizabeth died, making King James VI of Scotland also King James I of England, Shakespeare turned coat faster than you can say, "Benedict Arnold." He renamed his troupe The King's Men. And Macbeth (the real one, apparently not a villain, reigned over Scotland not for a few weeks as the play suggests, but from 1040 to 1057) suggested a more noble lineage for James' family, the House of Stuart, than anyone had yet publicly alleged.
4. December 16, 1773: The Boston Tea Party. Was the dumping of the tea in Boston Harbor a patriotic act? Yes. Was it also a protest against taxation without representation? Yes. But it was more than that.
Keep in mind the science of the era. Water could be easily tainted, by man or nature (or, through improper sewage treatment, both). There was no real way to refrigerate liquids. The advent of pasteurization was about 90 years away, so milk did not last long before spoiling. Fruit juice, as we know it now, was not advisable, either.
So what did people drink back then? Liquids that did not need to be refrigerated. Tea. Coffee. Beer. Wine. Hard liquor. That's why they were so angry about the tax on tea: It wasn't just that it was done without their having a voting representative in the Parliament in London to weigh in on it, it made the stuff too expensive for them, and essentially took one of their few options away.
But who led the Boston Tea Party? Samuel Adams, the leading brewer of beer in British America at the time. And who was his best friend? John Hancock, the richest man in the colony of Massachusetts at the time. And how did Hancock get so rich? Shipping. Specifically, transporting liquor.
In other words, Adams was helping himself, and his pal Hancock, strike at their competition. The Boston Tea Party wasn't just good patriotism, it was good business. At least, until the British Army arrived. In that case, war was not good for business.
5. 1860-1865: Abe Lincoln and Slavery. Elected President in 1860, leading to the secession of 11 Southern States from the Union, Abraham Lincoln's goal in the American Civil War -- which the Confederacy, the South, started -- was to save the Union. The man's own words, in a letter to Horace Greeley, publisher of the New York Tribune and one of the nation's leading advocates for the abolition of slavery, dated August 22, 1862:
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.
Sounds like "Honest Abe" should have kept the truth to himself.
A month later, on September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, to take effect on January 1, 1863:
On the first day of January in the year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.
There was just one problem: At the time, the Confederate States of America was, however despicable its reason for existence and its operation may have been, a sovereign nation. Lincoln had no legal authority to free the slaves in those States.
In those States that still had slavery, but remained in the Union -- Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri -- Lincoln left it alone.
Now, he did lobby for Congress to pass the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which it did, and then passed on to the States for ratification, which they did -- the restored Georgia being the necessary 27th State to do so, on December 6, 1865, leading to Secretary of State William H. Seward declaring on December 18 that three-quarters of the States had done so, making the Amendment part of the Constitution, and it was on that date that slavery in America was abolished.
But Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, dying the next day. In other words, 8 months after he died, slavery was still not officially banned by the federal government. It can be argued that "the Great Emancipator," Abe Lincoln, never freed a single slave -- that it was the U.S. Army and Navy, and the Congress, and the States, that did so.
But they wouldn't have done so without him. Not without the words of his Inaugural Addresses in 1861 and 1865. Not without his Emancipation Proclamation of 1862. Not without his Gettysburg Address of 1863. Not without his re-election in 1864. And not without his lobbying for the Amendment.
6. 1933-1941: The New Deal. Accepting the Democratic nomination for President at Chicago Stadium on July 2, 1932, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York told the delegates, the spectators, and a nationwide radio audience, "I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people."
"A new deal." It was a great phrase, embracing the reforms of his cousin, the late Republican President of a previous generation, Theodore Roosevelt; but also those of his own political mentor, the late Democratic President of a previous generation, Woodrow Wilson.
TR had called his platform the Square Deal, and his programs were still popular. Wilson had called his the New Freedom, and, while America's membership in his League of Nations was soundly rejected, his domestic reforms remained successful and accepted.
In fact, when FDR wrote down the words "New Deal," he had no idea of what specifics it would entail. He just knew he had to do something, and to be seen as willing to do something, because his Republican opponent, the incumbent, Herbert Hoover, was largely seen as having done nothing.
When he was sworn into office on March 4, 1933, he and his advisors, the so-called Brain Trust, essentially made things up as they went along. Some of what they did was, in fact, based on the achievements of TR and Wilson. Some of it was based on what FDR, and before him Alfred E. Smith, had done as Governor of New York.
And some of it was even based on the reforms of Hoover. Anyone who says Hoover did nothing to alleviate the Great Depression is wrong, although it is completely fair to say he didn't do enough. FDR recognized that some of what Hoover did had worked a little bit, and that, if Hoover had done more of it, the Depression would have eased and possibly ended sooner, and FDR himself wouldn't have had a chance in 1932.
Furthermore, a lot of what FDR did required compromises with the Southern Democrats who ran key committees in both houses of Congress. This required him to back off on civil rights measures that might really have helped. FDR might have had the political clout to move civil rights forward, but he didn't think he could, because he needed those Southern barons too much. He didn't even try to move civil rights forward that much during World War II, when he had more political clout than any president has had, possibly ever.
7. 1945-1947: The Signing of Jackie Robinson. Branch Rickey, then president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, knew by 1945 that racially reintegrating Major League Baseball was now possible, with the death of racist Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, and his replacement by the more amenable, though Southern, Albert "Happy" Chandler. Rickey knew it was the morally right thing to do. He also realized that it was the competitively right thing to do: Get the best possible players, regardless of race, and you'll win more games.
He also realized that it was the financially right thing to do: Do the preceding, win more games, and you'll get more fans. But even before the winning gets rolling, black fans will want to come out and see black players. It was good citizenship. It was good baseball. And it was good capitalism. Or, as Rickey himself, about whom it was once said, "He had money and he had players, and he did not like to see the two mix," might have called it, a Triple Crown.
8. September 24, 1957: Dwight D. Eisenhower and Civil Rights. When "Ike" sent the 101st Airborne, one of the most elite units of the U.S. Army, for whom he had once been Chief of Staff, to protect the 9 black teenagers attempting to enroll in, and thus racially integrate, Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, everyone who wasn't a bigot agreed that it was the right thing to do.
But Ike didn't do it because it was moral. He actually disagreed with the U.S. Supreme Court's unanimous decision, 3 years earlier, striking down all State and local laws segregating public school students. But, as President, he had taken an oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Ike considered himself a man of his word, and he would protect the law, even though, in this case, he disagreed with it.
9. 1961-1963: John F. Kennedy and Civil Rights. JFK sent U.S. Marshals to Oxford, Mississippi to integrate the University of Mississippi in September 1962. When Governor Ross Barnett sent the Mississippi National Guard to stop them, JFK used his powers as Commander-in-Chief to federalize the National Guard, and there wasn't a damned thing Barnett could legally do.
In June 1963, another Southern Governor stood in the way, and he decided to make it literal: Governor George Wallace of Alabama made his "stand in the schoolhouse door," blocking the entrance to Foster Auditorium, the University of Alabama's basketball arena and registration building in Tuscaloosa, to prevent 2 black students from officially enrolling, which, under federal law, they had the right to do.
JFK's Attorney General, also his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, sent his Deputy, Nicholas Katzenbach, and some U.S. Marshals, down there, and Katzenbach told Wallace to get out or he would be arrested. Everyone remembers that Wallace stood there, but they tend to forget that, rather than be seen as a criminal, taken away in handcuffs, he backed down.
By this point, the Kennedy brothers had realized that assisting the progress of civil rights was the right thing to do in its own right. But they didn't always see it that way. They were Cold Warriors. JFK once said, "If we offer the developing world freedom, and the Communists offer them food, who are they going to turn to?"
It's worth going back to a speech that RFK made at the University of Georgia on May 6, 1961. That school's racial integration wasn't nearly as heated as would be "Ole Miss" the next year and "'Bama" the next. It was Law Day on the Athens, Georgia campus, and "UGa" wanted the nation's highest law enforcement official to speak. They got him, but they got something they hadn't bargained for: He framed integration as being not the product of interference from Communists abroad, as American racists had alleged, but as a weapon against such interference:
The time has long since arrived when loyal Americans must measure the impact of their actions beyond the limits of their own towns or States. For instance, we must be quite aware of the fact that 50 percent of the countries in the United Nations are not white; that, around the world in Africa, South America, and Asia, peoples whose skins are a different color than ours are on the move to gain their measure of freedom and of liberty.
From the Congo to Cuba, from South Vietnam to Algiers, in India, Brazil and Iran, men, women, and children are straightening their backs, and listening to the evil promises of Communist tyranny, and the honorable promises of Anglo-American liberty. And those people will decide not only their own future, but ours; how the cause of freedom fares around the world. That will be their decision.
In the United States, we are striving to establish a rule of law instead of a rule of force. In that forum, and elsewhere around the world, our deeds will speak for us.
In the worldwide struggle, the graduation at this university of Charlene Hunter and Hamilton Holmes will, without question, aid and assist the fight against Communist political infiltration, and even guerilla warfare.
When parents send their children to school this fall in Atlanta, peaceably and in accordance with the rule of law, barefoot Burmese and Congolese will see before their eyes Americans living by the rule of law.
It is possible to be noble and cynical at the same time. The Medicis proved it. So did Shakespeare. So did Samuel Adams, Lincoln, FDR, Branch Rickey and Eisenhower. Now, the Kennedys had proved it as well.
And John F. Kennedy would prove it one more time, although he would not live to see the final product, 50 years ago today:
10. July 20, 1969: The Moon Landing. On May 25, 1961, 43 days after Soviet pilot Yuri Gagarin became the 1st human in space, and 20 days after Alan Shepard became the 1st American in space, JFK delivered an address to a Joint Session of Congress -- officially, not a State of the Union Address:
I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon, and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.
On September 12, 1962, he went to Rice University in Houston, Texas, the hometown of the space center that directed America's manned space missions, which took off at Cape Canaveral on the Atlantic Coast of Florida:
Why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, Why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard! Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills. Because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
In other words, "If we, as a nation, as a people, can do this, then we can do anything." Or, as we so often said after doing it, "If we can put a man on the Moon, why can't we (do something comparatively simple)?"
On July 20, 1969, at 4:17 PM U.S. Eastern Time, as part of the Apollo 11 mission, the lunar module Eagle landed on the lunar surface, on a part of the Moon that humans had named the Sea of Tranquility. Mission commander Neil Armstrong said, "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." At 10:56 PM Eastern Time, Armstrong climbed out, went down the Eagle's ladder, and put his left foot on the Moon's surface, saying, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."
Over the next 3 and a half years, a total of 6 missions would land on the Moon, and many scientific advancements would result. But on December 14, 1972, Apollo 17 left the Moon, and no human has been back since. We've talked about it, but we haven't done it.
Why? Because, as big as it seemed, landing on the Moon wasn't just an achievement. To Kennedy, it was a message. Not so much to us, as to them. As the greatest astronomer of the 20th Century, Carl Sagan, put it in a CBS documentary on the event's 25th Anniversary in 1994, "The whole point of landing on the Moon was to beat the Russians. Once we beat the Russians, there was no point to it."
Of course, Sagan, one of the most imaginative men of his time, disagreed with that principle. But he had to accept it as fact. The American space program stalled, because Richard Nixon was now President, and he didn't seem to care about the next step, whatever that might have been. His successors seemed to care little, too. By the time we got another genuine science guy in the White House, Bill Clinton, the program had already been set so far back that all momentum had been lost.
Of course, Sagan, one of the most imaginative men of his time, disagreed with that principle. But he had to accept it as fact. The American space program stalled, because Richard Nixon was now President, and he didn't seem to care about the next step, whatever that might have been. His successors seemed to care little, too. By the time we got another genuine science guy in the White House, Bill Clinton, the program had already been set so far back that all momentum had been lost.
Maybe if JFK had lived, he could have put the next step in place. Or, if Nixon had pursued space exploration as much as he had pursued, say, Détente with the Soviet Union and China, then, by the time he died in 1994, we could have had a permanent base on the Moon (as seen on the TV show Space: 1999, hopefully without the tragic result of that show's pilot), and we might even have landed on Mars.
But it didn't happen. And we may well be considerably poorer, in resources and in morale, for it.
But it didn't happen. And we may well be considerably poorer, in resources and in morale, for it.
UPDATE: In 2022, I read an article that said that the slogan, "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day" was designed by the farm industry to sell more eggs. The slogan is true, especially in regard to protein, with which eggs are loaded. So the slogan is both good health and good capitalism.
No comments:
Post a Comment