"Sharp, quirky, and occasionally nettlesome", Walking the Berkshires is my personal blog, an eclectic weaving of human narrative, natural history, and other personal passions with the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills as both its backdrop and point of departure. I am interested in how land and people, past and present manifest in the broader landscape and social fabric of our communities. The opinions I express here are mine alone. Never had ads, never will.
Slingshots are for LOSERS. Goliath is going to make Philistines great again. David is going down, big-time.
If Jocasta weren’t my mother, perhaps I’d be dating her.
They say Homer wrote heroic epics. I like poets who aren’t blind.
Stonehenge, what a dump. Half the bluestones are just lying there. My temple will line up with the Sun every day, not just on the Solstice.
Moses parting the Red Sea. Fake News! Pharaoh’s army drained it to build the Suez Canal, and made the Israelites pay for it.
Jesus should release his real birth certificate. He was from Nazareth, not Bethlehem. And who’s the father?
Attila says very nice things about me. Having a good relationship with the Huns is a good thing, not a bad thing.
Offa wants to keep Mercia on the silver standard. My pennies will be gold. You can bite them and see. Or just bite me.
All those barons protesting for me to sign the Magna Carta need to get over it. I got 100% of the votes to be King. Sad.
The concept of the Black Death was created by and for the Chinese in order to make medieval European manufacturing non-competitive.
David got schlonged with that fake statue by Michelangelo. Look at his hands, big like mine, but such a tiny…whatever.
The only card Queen Elizabeth has is the Woman Card. If Queen Elizabeth were a man, I bet she wouldn’t sink 5% of my Armada.
John Winthrop can keep his city on a hill. We’re going to drain some swamp land in Florida and make an amazing golf course.
Thomas Jefferson said some very unkind things about me. You know, it really doesn’t matter what those rebels write, so long as they have a young, and beautiful, piece of ass.
Thomas Paine is very overrated. We’re gonna get rid of Common Sense and replace it with something terrific.
The 3/5 Compromise was a terrible deal. I would have made a much better one, 1/5 at least, right? I’d compromise it, bigly.
Catherine wasn’t so great. A lightweight, very low-energy. Not my type at all.
Louis XVI should totally appoint Robespierre his Real Estates-General. Trust me, I made billions that way.
The Louisiana Purchase never should have been negotiated. We get the worst of everything. I’m putting Napoleon on notice.
From now on it's America First. No Catholics, no Irish need apply. Know Nothings. I love the uneducated.
Roger B. Taney, great guy. That Dred Scott decision was major, super-classy.
You know why Pickett charged? He had good credit. And he got a nice tax write-off when he went bankrupt. Smart.
The Black Hills are a disaster, so much crime, folks. You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good. If Sitting Bull can’t deal with it, I’m sending in the 7th Cavalry. What have you got to lose?
Water closets, disgusting. Thomas Crapper is a moron. You’ll never find one of those in my hotels, that I can tell you.
The Titanic, beautiful ship, very classy. Unsinkable. Bad Hombres in steerage, though. This much I know.
I like unrestricted submarine warfare. I like it a lot. I don’t think it’s tough enough. You’ve got to fight fire with fire.
Helium is a JOKE. Number 2 on the Periodic Table. Hydrogen is Number 1. The Hindenburg will have the best element, believe me.
If Neville Chamberlain can't bring peace to Europe, nobody can. He’s going to be very, very strong on Hitler.
We shall fight on the beaches. Terrible brand. They were cheering in Jersey over Dunkirk, folks. Unbelievable.
Penicillin. Some very smart people say it’s just mold. Disgusting. I’m very germaphobic.
NATO isn’t paying its share to maintain the Iron Curtain. We’re gonna build a wall, a beautiful wall around West Berlin.
We should definitely go to war in Viet Nam. I don't know what will happen, but it will be interesting.
There have been some concerns raised in the land trust community that one of the impacts of climate change will be the displacement of some native species by others that are expanding their ranges. A recent article by Attorney James L Olmsted entitled: "The Butterfly Effect: Conservation Easement, Climate Change and Invasive Species"suggests a number of changes that land Trusts can make to their easement language to anticipate this problem, but the underlying premise that in-migrating North American species "will in many cases be invasive" is on questionable scientific ground.
It is wrong to think
of species and natural communities as static and restricted to where they are
today, or were at the time of European contact.
The term “Invasive” is
both relative in space and time and too
broadly applied to North American species that are expanding their
natural ranges in response to environmental factors and opportunities. Birds have been doing this for a very long
time. The black vultures now present in
large numbers in Connecticut were not found north of Maryland in the first part
of the 19th century (all those dead horses at Gettysburg gave them a
beachhead). Cardinals were not part of
my mother’s Massachusetts girlhood. Coyotes
are filling an available large predator niche after the extirpation of wolf and
cougar populations.
The term “Invasive” has more validity when it is restricted to introduced species, and then only to those which have such characteristics as spreading across
spatial gaps, establishing virtual monocultures and multiple dispersal methods. Having these attributes, species
should be demonstrated to displace and
outcompete native species to be considered invasive. Under this
definition, House Sparrows are invasive, but Cattle Egrets which, bless their
hearts, got here by crossing the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean all on their
own, are not.
When I was part of the Massachusetts Invasive Plant Advisory Group that
developed criteria to determine which species should be considered invasive or
potentially invasive in the Commonwealth, we had a very hard debate about Black
Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia), a central Appalachian species which can be
problematic in pine barren systems in the Northeast. Had the glaciers receded a few thousand years
earlier, Robinia would likely have expanded its natural range a few hundred
miles further north, resulting in a different kind of natural community where
it overlapped with pitch pine and scrub oak.
Humans helped it make the jump, planting Black Locust for fence poles
(which sometimes resprouted!).
My advice for anyone drafting a conservation easement or management plan is to start by answering
the question; “What are we trying to conserve and managing for?”
The question of invasiveness relates directly to whether a species
impacts the viability of conservation targets. The best example I can remember from my TNC
days concerned a fen in NJ that was also a bog turtle site. The fen had a large and expanding incursion
of purple loosestrife (an exotic species non-native to North America). There were two possible conservation targets
to manage for at this site: the rare natural community represented by the fen,
and the federally threatened bog turtle species. The condition of the fen was severely
degraded and attempting to eradicate the loosestrife threatened worse
disturbance as well as the bog turtles that still were using it, so it was
determined not to try to manage the fen as fen, but as bog turtle habitat. The bog turtle basking areas were being shaded out by the loosestrife, so
the management prescription was to cut the loosestrife stalks by hand each year
before they set seed. This took several
days of cutting by hand, but was the best response available to conserve the primary
conservation target.
So, if we are managing for rare and restricted habitat types, some of
which will not be viable in their current configuration, or indeed in any form with
climate change, we are making a choice to prioritize them against the
prevailing forces of change. That may
indeed be the right thing to do, but even then the calcareous fens of Connecticut
will not have the same species composition and structure as those in Maryland
even when our climate changes to that of Maryland today.
There are special gaps that are unlikely to be crossed by native fen
species present today in Maryland but not in Connecticut. That is the beauty of natural variation. Diversity matters, but it plays out in many
different ways from site to site.
Especially with large, “functional” landscapes, the idea is not to
manage them to maintain exactly the species types and forest composition of
today, but so that they are robust and resilient enough to maintain
biodiversity, in whatever forms may be viable in the future. Invasive plants may well be a factor that
needs to be accounted for, but it does not begin or end with a list of species
that are “meant to be here” and others that are not.
With my 18th century interests and Connecticut residence, a tag line like "Still Revolutionary" certainly ought to appeal to me, but I am not the target audience of Connecticut's newly minted $27 million promotional campaign. Watch the initial video and then we'll read the tea leaves together.
So, does this speak to you? Does it reach out to your heart and disposable income and say come to Connecticut? Whose vision is this?
Well, it is Governor Malloy's, certainly, and the professional consulting firm hired to promote our state. It seems to be directed toward at affluent professionals, vacationing families with children, cultural and heritage tourism, and particularly at successful African Americans. I'll return to this last demographic shortly, and consider the curious choice to emphasize a storyline connecting an African American man to his Connecticut roots and an ancestor who served during the Revolution, rather than hitching a ride on the Civil War Sesquicentennial which is totally absent from this video.
Actually, there is a great deal that is not emphasized in this two minute and seven second-long "Connecticut: Still Revolutionary " brand launch. Western Connecticut is missing, for one thing, with its world class trout streams and outstanding outdoor recreation opportunities including national treasures like the Appalachian Trail. Aside from someone falling backward off a bridge on a zip wire in slow motion - overwhelmingly the preferred camera speed for this promotion - the only way people in this ad seem to enjoy the outdoors is from their vehicles.
Classic New England fall foliage and white steepled village greens just didn't make the cut. One would not get the impression from this video that Connecticut has any farms at all, except for wineries. So much for Agra-tourism. So much for bucolic landscapes and covered bridges. There is plenty in the video about the Connecticut River Valley and the Southeastern part of the state. We have Mystic Seaport and Aquarium and the two big casinos on full view. It was nice to see the Essex Steam Train and Hartford Symphony featured, but this still leaves a great deal of the state and what it has to offer out of view.
The "Still Revolutionary" motto implies that The Land of Steady Habits is full of disruptive technology, a place where invention and independence are both highly valued. So where are the heirs to Samuel Colt, or P.T. Barnum, or David Bushnell (who was both a Revolutionary and an inventor)? Making wine, or making bets at Foxwoods, maybe, but they are not in evidence in this initial promotion. And why is that nice white couple that shows up in their car at 1:32 seconds into the video using a paper map to "follow the sky" like it says in the promotional song? Don't they have GPS?
If the creators of this campaign really wanted to make a strong connection between our state's Revolutionary past and our innovative present, all it required was a shot of the full-scale replica of Bushnell's American Turtle submarine at the Connecticut River Museum fading into a shot of a sub from General Dynamics putting out to sea. Stick Fort Griswold Battlefield State Park in the sequence and the African American man in the video could make a direct connection to his Revolutionary forebears by viewing its Jordan Freeman plaque commemorating the heroics of one of its black patriot defenders. It just feels like another missed opportunity.
Let's examine the story arc of the African American couple in the video who come to Connecticut. Their inspiration is apparently the discovery of an image in a book of a black soldier of the Revolution, with the inference that he is an ancestor. Given the popularity of genealogy programs like Henry Louis Gates' "Finding Your Roots", this is a pretty good hook. You can clearly see the soldier's cocked hat and hunting frock (and anachronistic mustache, too), though it is not clear whether the illustration is meant to be a photograph or a black and white reproduction of a painted or engraved portrait. Given that daguerreotypes were not available before 1839, one hopes it is not the former. Again, going with a contemporary photograph of a black soldier from the Civil War would have made the connection so much easier, but then there would be nothing in the film that directly references the American Revolution and the "Still Revolutionary" tag line.
The story continues as the couple get on their motorcycle (visually relaxing as they enjoy the freedom of Connecticut's roadways). Then the man dismounts, removes his helmet, and tries to orient himself. He glimpses a quiet stream. He sees the shade of his ancestor marching away through the forest (the only glimpse of outdoor recreation in the video that is truly Revolutionary). He then goes to dinner at a casino to toast his homecoming.
If he had had his moment of ancestral connection at Putnam Memorial Park, or Fort Griswold, I would have bought it. If the choice had been to highlight the service of African Americans in the Civil War and the State's considerable contributions to the cause of Abolition - after all, we have the birthplaces both of Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown right here in western CT - I would have been more satisfied. But then, it is not about me, or my interests. It is about that guy on his motorcycle and others like him and what will motivate them to come to relax and spend money in Connecticut.
I wonder whether the consultants and focus groups used for this promotion deliberately chose not to link to the Civil War for its target African American audience. Being reminded of slavery is not the same as being reminded of freedom. There were more than 300 men of color from Connecticut who fought during the Revolutionary War, the vast majority of them for long terms of service in the Continental Line. For most of the war, they were part of integrated regiments, and this is what the video shows in its brief depiction of the ancestral soldier, marching away in single file behind two fellow white soldiers. This is not part of the popular narrative of the Revolution, but neither is slavery.
The message here is; "You are successful, a self made man, and you can be proud of the part your Connecticut ancestor played in winning our freedom." It is not a Revolutionary message, though it does put people of color back into the story of our nation's founding. It does not put them in our extraordinary natural areas, but there may be a reason for that as well. I once shared a plane ride with the poet Nikky Finney, who remarked that when she was growing up in rural South Carolina, her grandparents had an intimate knowledge of their farm that stopped short at the uncultivated woods beyond their fields. Bad things could happen to you in there. There were trees with strange fruit.
I would like to think that when the African American man in the promotion gets off his motorcycle, he is struck by the stillness of the woods and the movement of the brook and something else awakens inside him when he sees the ghost of his revolutionary ancestor. A sense of belonging as well as continuity. A connection to place as well as history. An investment in what happens here going forward. That would be a great outcome, for him and for Connecticut.
The venerable History Carnival celebrates its 100th edition this month. It all began as a fortnightly affair back in January, 2005, and carried on that way through the first 50 editions. It then shifted to a monthly schedule in April, 2007 and so it continues to this day.
This state of affairs makes it challenging to apply an appropriate commemorative modifier to History Carnival 100. I suppose one might call it something along the lines of the "Demicentimensiversary Edition", but I'm no fan of the tendency in certain academic circles to invent needless, inelegant jargon instead of communicating in clear and lucid prose. All this manages to accomplish is to problematize structural totalities under the rubric of hegemonic hermeneutics, n'est-ce pas? Damn skippy. History Carnival 100 it is.
Here at Walking the Berkshires, we serve up history the way we like our single malt: neat, with plenty of smoke and peat and a dry lingering tail. Some light agitation helps to bring out all the subtle notes and complexity: less a kick in the jaw than warm oil on the tongue...
Excuse me a moment...Mmmm....Ahhh. Caol Ila, 12 Years Old. Right, well, why not help yourself to the beverage of your choice, and we'll get on with the show!
Alternate History: The Good, the Bad, and the Downright Ignorant
I am extremely fond of counterfactual history when it is done well. So much of the actual history has to be right in order for the fabrication to hold together. There is also the possibility that 2nd order counterfactuals stemming from the first might well bring about the same historical outcome from a different direction. Sometimes, no matter where they begin, all roads must inexorably lead to Rome.
One of the first rules of counterfactual hypothesizing is to make as few changes as possible to the conditions leading up to the alternate reality. We are talking about the lack of horseshoe nails, here, not the gun that won't exist until 2419 - cool as that is - as described by the National Museum of American History Blog.
Speaking of events that may yet come to pass, the question of whether there should be a new monument to Virginia State troops at Antietam is the subject of a fascinating post at Kevin Levin's Civil War Memory. Brian Schoeneman, a candidate for elected office in the Virginia House of Delegates, gamely weighs in at several points during an extensive comment thread - every bit as interesting as the post itself - in support of his campaign pledge to make this happen.
An excellent example of alternate history done right is featured this month at Today in Alternate History, which speculates on what might have been, if only Austria's Archduke Franz Ferdinand had avoided assassination in 1914. Would you believe resurgent Hapsburgs, giving rise by 1930 to a "Triple Monarchy of Austria-Hungary-Slavonia, Turkey, and a docile but resource-rich Romanov Russia under the frail hemophiliac Tsar Alexander IV"?
Certainly that is more believable than some of the self-deceptive mangling of American history perpetrated recently by some of the most prominent faces of the Tea Party movement. I felt compelled to offer these candidates for the highest office in the land a helpful multiple choice quiz on our Revolutionary history, but J. L. Bell of Boston 1775 corrects the record on Sarah Palin's mistatements about the Midnight Rider with far more class and less snark than I could muster. Quoth he;
"So did Palin share a correct and uncommonly knowledgeable interpretation of Revere’s ride? Or was she correct only in the way that a stopped clock is correct if you look at it in exactly the right way and ignore it a second later? That argument might have raged forever, but then someone came along and made it impossible to maintain that Palin enjoys a detailed, accurate understanding of the start of the Revolutionary War. That person was Sarah Palin."
"...in his Houston speech to the Republican National Convention, Ronald Reagan fell for one of the great hoaxes of American history, surpassed in taking people in only by H.L. Mencken`s enchanting fable about Millard Fillmore’s installing the first bathtub in the White House,” Schlesinger wrote. “The author of the less than immortal words Lincoln never said was an ex-clergyman from Erie, Pa., named William J.H. Boetcker.”
Airminded examines British media claims during WWII that RAF precision bombing in reprisal for the Blitz was morally and technically superior to indiscriminate Luftwaffe bombing, and finds them wanting:
"Nearly everything in these articles is, at best, wishful thinking. Bomber Command's aircrew may as well have shed their bombs as aimed them, for all the difference it made: as the Butt Report revealed the following year, only one in four aircraft dropping bombs over Germany did so within five miles of their target point. The intention was 'accurate bombing', but the effect was indiscriminate (when the bombs didn't fall on open countryside, that is, which most of them did)...as things were, it's just not possible that what the RAF was doing to Germany in late 1940 was more effective (in any sense) than what the Luftwaffe was doing to Britain."
Still, for my money, if your history is going to be bad, it might as well be entertaining.
"This is a history that gets overlooked or ignored because of recent debates in the West over garments-as-oppression for other women–you know, Afghani women in burkhas, or other Muslim women covered by the hijab or la voile. As though Western women’s clothing has never been an issue in their citizenship or their feminism!"
And then we have certain minted pneumismatic artifacts of scholarly interest blogged about at Hypervocal. Be forewarned that these may be considered NSFW in some quarters. Are they ancient Roman brothel tokens, or possibly pornographic gaming pieces? At right, a proposed design for a modern token, suitable for use by disgraced US Congressmen in exchange for sexting services, appropriately priced at "sex asses", if I remember my High School Latin.
(I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that certain internet search terms taken out of context from the preceding paragraph are going to single handedly make History Carnival 100 the most heavily visited edition of all time. Just imagine if I had included extended pasages from The Satyricon...)
Blinding Me With Science
It seems appropriate at this point to bring up the subject of censorship. Take, for example, the history of the active suppression of various lines of scientific inquiry. There have been a number of mutually sustaining blog discussions this month on this topic, including one at Christopher M Luna that opines;
"the tendency to label pre-nineteenth century thinkers as scientists created the “possibility of a false impression that science is somehow eternal, separate from the people who practiced it, just waiting to be revealed” and that such an impression could lead to “a problematic faith in progress, a misunderstanding of the scientific method (as though it is static or eternal), and, perhaps most popular these days, a mischaracterization of the interaction between people investigating the natural world and religion."
"The heliocentric hypothesis says that heliocentricity offers a possible model to explain the observed motion of the planets; it says nothing about the truth-value of this model. The heliocentric theory says that the universe is in reality heliocentric. In 1616 the Church banned the heliocentric theory but not the hypothesis. This might at first seem like splitting hairs but in reality it is a very important distinction."
In a similar vein, Jeannie at Tripbaseblog offers her picks for the 8 Most Inspiring American Speeches of All Time and presents their settings as potential history tourism destinations. I confess I would not have thought to include Swami Vivekananda in this lineup, but I wouldn't mind a visit to Chicago (when the Cubbies are in town).
Thomas Dixon's The History of Emotion's blog delves into emotional animals in history and offers up a 1705 account of a weeping horse in Augsberg. I'll see your horse and raise you a Beagle - Schultz's, not Darwin's.
Reading and Misreading
Sandusky Library/Follett House Museum posts at Sandusky History about The Prisoner's Farewell by Irl Hicks, a confederate POW, who upon release at war's end was selected to give a Valedictory Address to the Young Men's Christian Association of Johnson's Island Ohio.
Anchora discusses the relationship between the use of inverted commas in early modern texts as commonplace markers and Kindle's "popular highlights" feature. Here's mine from hers;
"Once you become aware of the significance of inverted commas in early modern books, though, you will never read them the same way again -- it opens up an entirely new (if, perhaps, still familiar to us) way of reading in which texts are mined for pithy, quotable passages."
Mark Liberman at Language Log takes his shots at the media bias toward "sensationalism, conflict and laziness" and offers up this post entitled "A Reading Comprehension Test". Are you smarter than the designers of this American History test for 12th graders, the educational expert who assessed its results, and the news outlets that covered those findings?
"My recent engagement with the wonderful world of blogs and Twitter has certainly shown me both more interest in and more misused history of science than I had previously come across. (I do not feel, in some cases, that misuse is too strong a word. What the Tea Party do to 18th-century American history, supporters of ID do to Darwin and both sides in the arguments about what Christianity has and has not done for science tend to do to the whole history of Western science.) "
Once again, the comment thread is as thought provoking as the post itself.
Frank Jacobs is Mapping Bloomsday in his Strange Maps blog at Big Think.
"This map is not much help in reconstructing that walk, but it does capture the elementary narrative structure of Ulysses. And it does so in that perennial favourite of schematic itineraries, Harry Beck’s London Underground map."
Ralph Luker kindly passed along this highly visual post by Lili Loufborrow writing at the Hairpin concerning women with books they're not reading in art. Mind you, El Greco's Penitent Magdalen has one heck of a Golgotha paperweight blocking her view. I suspect that Christiane Inman's 2009 Forbidden Fruit: A History of Women and Books in Art , described as "a history of women's literacy, and the social forces that often opposed it", may offer a helpful corollary for those with interest in pursuing this topic further.
The History of England gets a fix on the Anglo Saxon World View. I was particularly struck by the following citation attributed to Louise C., participating in a discussion at Historum Forum;
'A mappa mundi is a depiction of the world as a place of experiences, of human history, of notions and knowledge. It's more like an encyclopedia. It's certainly not - and was never intended to be - a chart to be followed by travellers"
History and the Sock Merchant explores Dejima: the 'Deep Space Nine' of Feudal Japan that was "the single place of direct trade and exchange between Japan and the outside world during the Edo period (1603 - 1868)."
"The volunteers I was working with started turning up some startling items amid the field reports and correspondence—pulp magazines from the 1930s, newspaper clippings with headlines straight out of the era of yellow journalism, and gruesome photos of dead bodies...And what a story it turns out to be! It has everything you’d expect (and wouldn’t expect!) from a Smithsonian expedition to tropical seas—exotic islands, fascinating wild fauna, stout-hearted scientists, a love triangle, and, very likely, murder.."
Looks like excellent beach reading. In other mysterious museum news, Galt Museum & Archives blog has one concerning Miss Edith Kirk, an artist "who came from an influential family in Yorkshire, travelled to remote towns in western Canada and then settled in Lethbridge. We don’t know why she left England, nor how she would find herself in the far northern reaches of British Columbia. Trying to fill in the many gaps of her life is an interesting challenge."
ThinkShop explores Joris Ivens and the Legend of Indonesia Calling, a film about the struggle for Indonesian self determination after WII that few saw at the time but which had an impact that was felt by many.
"By the mid-1960s Indonesia Calling had become a film that had a growing following in Holland, long before it had an audience. This made it unique in the history of the cinema. In its symbolic form it intervened in the historical process, shaping memory and providing a site for the articulation of diametrically opposing approaches to the national, and indeed international, past. The facticity of the film become tangential to it most significant impact. The film as fact had been replaced by the film as signifier."
HSP's Hidden Histories takes us out on an uplifting note with selections from a useful but often underutilized historical resource: the 1850-1880 US Mortality Schedules. Alas for the likes of poor William Shuler, age 54 , who died in June of 1869 in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, Norriton Township, "while disinterring a dead body in {a} Cemetery, having a cut on his finger, had his blood poisoned, from which he died."
This concludes History Carnival 100, brought to you this month by the Roman numeral C, and respectfully submitted by your most humble and obedient servant, a sometimes Continental in the recreated 1st New Jersey Regiment who on occasion even manages to go Walking the Berkshires. The History Carnival returns in August and you could be the host! Trust me, Sharon makes it easy and it's much more fun than your viva or junior prom ever were.
The rest of you may submit nominations here or follow along on Twitter (@historycarnival). Now if you'll excuse me, I need to see a man about a ray gun. I'm leaving the Brown Bess at home for my next reenactment. Consider this my warning to the British, à la Palin's Revere; "You are not going to take our atomic pistols!"
As the election dust settles, at first blush Connecticut seems bluer than ever. The open race for Governor has tilted toward the Democrat by a slim 5,000 vote margin, which would give that party the executive branch for the first time since 1995. An open senate seat remains in Democratic control with the defeat of Linda McMahon by Richard Blumenthal. And all five Democrats in Congress kept their seats (as long as redistricting does not ultimately reduce the number of representatives we get to send to Washington).
But looks can be deceiving. Litchfield County, geographically if not in terms of population density the greater part of Chris Murphy's 5th Congressional District, went heavily for the Republican candidate for Senate, as did Fairfield County to a lessor extent. Likewise, by the widest margin in Connecticut, 58% of Litchfield County voters went with the Republican candidate for governor: Chris Murphy would not have been reelected if his district did not include the urban centers of Meriden, New Britain and Waterbury.
From where I am sitting, the western parts of Connecticut after this election looks more purple than blue: purple like a bruise. Just across the state line in New York, two congressional seats that had been recent gains for Democrats flipped back to the GOP. What accounts for this voting pattern?
One clue may come from a The Washington Post initiative to canvass the Tea Party movement nationwide. The Post has posted its findings here. Respondents said they were motivated most of all by concern about the economy (closely followed by mistrust of government in general and dislike of Obama and his policies in particular). Their top issue was not, however, the economy and unemployment - only 5% said this was their single most important issue. Instead, Tea Party supporters felt the most important issue was tackling government spending / the deficit and limiting the size of government.
Those Tea Party supporters polled in the Post survey self identify as fiscally conservative and libertarian more than as social values voters. That accurately describes qualities that were once typical of values held by rural New Englanders. There has been a significant demographic shift, however, in the rural communities of the Hudson Valley and Northwest Connecticut, heavily influenced by proximity to Manhattan, a conversion of the second homes of New Yorkers to primary residences, and an aging population. They are also, on average, wealthier.
Those who voted their economic self interest and those who voted their anger combined to bring Republicans back into control of the House of Representatives and increased the number of GOP governors across the country. In western Connecticut, though, these two groups of voters may have much less in common on the social agenda, and it was not enough of a groundswell to add their candidates to the Republican wave.
Like many observers interested in the Tea Party — though unlike many Harvard historians — Lepore sat in on meetings; attended rallies, including Sarah Palin’s visit to Boston; observed how local elementary teachers taught the Revolution; and explored the historical tourism industry, especially the Boston Tea Party Ship, a replica currently sitting in Gloucester and in serious disrepair. What the Tea Party was marshaling, she found, wasn’t patriotic spirit, and it certainly wasn’t history. It was, in her term, “antihistory.”
Two things separate antihistory from its prefix-less sibling. First, and most obvious, antihistory gets stuff wrong...The second — and, for Lepore, more serious — problem with antihistory is that it hijacks history’s raw materials. It takes a messy tumble of personalities and events and quotations and molds them into a static picture, a picture that happens to line up with current policy goals...
...These twinned ideas, Lepore writes, add up to a form of “historical fundamentalism, which is to history what astrology is to astronomy, what alchemy is to chemistry.” And that’s what makes antihistory more troubling than a simple partisan interpretation of history, which is something we’ve been indulging in for a long time.
The Boston Globe article cited above also includes a rebuttal of Lepore's charge of antihistory by some of those Tea party supporters she interviewed for her book, including President Christian Varley of the Greater Boston Tea Party:
They aren’t claiming to be historians and say they shouldn’t be held to that standard: Their focus is on political change. When they deploy the Founding Fathers, Varley says, they do so because “it’s a tool we can use — personalizing the ideas about the way government should be. I admit it’s a little contrived, but it’s no different than campaigning for a candidate or marketing a movie star.”
I care deeply about history, and in particular that period in America's past that has been appropriated by the Tea Party for its particular use. Nonetheless I do believe in my populist heart that history should not be the sole province of historians, any more than poetry or art or science are only intended for academics and specialists with the training to divine meaning and wield whatever power comes with such knowledge. I am with e.e. cummings to the extent that
since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you; wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world
To every thing there is a season, and the political season is not one that lends itself to good history. With the Tea Party phenomenon, however, we are not just speaking only of over the top campaign materials and statements by candidates who display a disturbing lack of historical understanding. We are talking about strongly held conservative beliefs about change, and power, and the role of government reenforced by clever manipulation of powerful symbols and the imagined past.
Such views are not sympathetic to academic discourse. Decontructing the flimsy historical underpinings of Tea Party propaganda may be good fun for the historian - heaven knows it comes easily enough for me - but it is not where the real argument is taking place. It is the wrong tool for the job. The quill gets obliterated by tar and feathers.
When fringe candidates like Carl Paladino or Christine O'donnell (or Sarah Palin) ride a backlash to primary victories, they tend to wither in the harsh light of scrutiny when their fitness to lead comes into question. Even so, there are plenty of Tea party candidates on ballots across the country today with better qualifications than these, if not a better grasp of history. Conventional wisdom has many of these winning election to statewide and national office this year.
The real impact on today's elections comes not from soldiers in the Tea Party movement but the massive financial resources from outside groups unleased by the Citizen's United ruling which in this political season has disproportionately favored Republican candidates. It is that version of history which bombards the electorate. And it is coming from very well established - if undisclosed - sources.
This, too, is nothing new. The colonial press was filled with anonymous screeds. General Washington was vilified in an anonymous letter written by his enemies in Congress on the eve of Valley Forge. In fact, the Washington parallel is striking, when one considers that the Tea Party is at its heart a reaction to Obama and what he represents, much akin to the criticism of Washington's personality cult during the dark hours of the Revolution.
The American Revolution was a war of words as well as blood. The sound bytes of Samuel Adams and his influence over the waterfront mobs were incendiary in revolutionary Boston. Yet he remained a destructive rather than constructive politician, better at riling a hornet's nest than at beekeeping (or brewing, for that matter).
Congresman Sam Rayburn famously observed after a Democratic defeat in 1953; "[Republicans] are going to learn the difference between construction and obstruction... Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it took a carpenter to build it." Good carpenters, like good historians, are in short supply this year.
My congressman is in a tough race this year in a district that is considered a toss up. As one who neither watches television nor listens to commercial radio, I do not receive the full brunt of campaign advertising (except for a mountain of junk mail from Senate candidate Linda McMahon's supporters targeting the unenrolled voter in my household).
Yesterday, I listened to my congressman on WNPR's Where We Live, a long format question and answer session in which he held forth on a wide range of topics. I appreciate his candor, but I suspect his staff wishes he would keep his answers brief and focused. His response to one question in particular and the follow up gave me pause. It starts at 21:22 in a response to the effects of negative ads on his effectiveness as a Congressman.
"Does it make me think about whether I want to do this in the long run as my kids get older and have to watch this drivel on television? Absolutely, but, for the here and now, it makes me more committed than ever to moving forward with reforms that benefit middle class Americans."
Follow up: "But you do want to do this for the long term, don't you? I mean, you got into this, and people have talked about you as a possible candidate for Senate at some point. You seem to be ambitious and driven to do something politically. Is this something you are going to do long term?"
"I don't know. I don't know, I mean, to be completely honest with you, John, the culture's gotta change in order for me to do this, you know, it is draining at some level to be constantly up against this barrage of partisanship, and I also see what this job does to families in the long run. I think, you know, I've got a two-year-old son, now, and that's my priority. My priority is my family, and I'm going to be monitoring this job, and the time it takes away from my family very closely in order to decide whether I do this in the long run or not..."
I admire his courage for saying this. Work / Life balance is a struggle for all working people, and politicians are at the beck and call of the public more than any of us. I admire him greatly as a person and will vote for him in November. But if a candidate gave this answer to me at a job interview, I would thank him for his time and look elsewhere. This does not sound like someone who is confident and is going to stay and deliver in this position. This is not what the voting public wants to hear from a politician in a dead heat for reelection. Hope I'm wrong.
The Tea Party movement is not my cup of tea. All that bad history and hysteria is a real turn off. Still, I do find it amusing that its Senate primary upset in Delaware has presented the Republican party with a Christian fundamentalist who was once a practicing pagan, or dabbling witch, if you prefer. It harkens back to the wrong century for the Tea Party, but instructive nonetheless.
Some of my best friends are neo-pagan witches. I wonder whether Christine O'Donnell ever hung with Niszsa Zeron and the Waters of the Brandywine Grove of Reformed Druids in Newark back in the late 1980s. Maybe we shared a horn cup of single malt (hell of a good sacrament) at the Solstice fire back in the day when I dabbled in druidism. [Damn. How did that slip out? Now I will never get to be a Tea Party candidate for national office. Bummer.]
I would think better of her if she had been dancing at Lughnasa in her teens, rather than playing Stairway to Heaven backwards on her turntable, her subsequent conversion to right wing conservative Christian notwithstanding. There is an ancient tradition of pagans turning to the Cross (although not always willingly). This is nothing for her less tolerant fundamentalist backers to get their hair shirts in a bunch over.
I say, "An' it harm none, do as thou wilt." Don't call it a youthful indiscretion. Who among us is without sin or skulls on our bookcases skeletons in our closets?
And pass the single malt, witch. Much better than tea. Should have called it the Whiskey Rebellion. I could get behind that.
In Western countries, statistics like these are more readily available than in the developing world, yet even here estimates of abuse are grossly under reported. It is undoubtedly worse in places where women and vulnerable children have even less protection, but to our lasting shame and great discredit, there are something on the order of 39 million survivors of child sexual abuse living in America.
I do not exaggerate when I say that virtually every woman I have ever been close to has had something horrible happen to her along these lines. I have come to expect that when someone I love starts sharing her past with me, sexual assault has been part of her experience as a child or young woman. This is true of close family members as well as lovers and dear friends. In my experience, such trauma constitutes a much greater percentage than those terrible numbers listed above.
I have two very powerful and contrasting responses to this reality. One is rage: a primal, murderous anger that has roots far deeper than just some hardwired response of the protective male. Those who prey on the vulnerable and have deeply hurt the ones I love, even if many decades ago, get no pity or compassion from me. I am not a pacifist. I understand, and fear, what it would be like to seek vengeance and retribution coming from a place of such righteous rage. I understand that I could do violence in return, and savagely, if driven by this blind, unchecked passion.
The other is humility. These injuries were not suffered by me, and in many cases happened long in the past (in one case well before my birth). The strong, vulnerable women in my life who have endured sexual assault continue to live their lives, define themselves in terms that do not imprison them in the perpetual reliving of these traumas. In Namibia, I learned a fundamental truth about from a woman who opened herself and her past to me about reconciliation, which was the official policy post-apartheid in that nation, and meant that torturers and rapists lived in the same vicinity as their victims. She told me that one does not forget, but must live, and the only way to live is to reconcile and move forward. Vengeance and victim-hood do not set you free. I continue to learn this lesson from women I love, though I find it hard to reconcile for myself.
It is not for me to be the avenger. It is not for me to stir up the old pain when it is revealed to me and I experience fresh emotions. I vowed long ago to be a good man, to be a counterpoint to the sexual violence that too many men inflict. I am a tender and compassionate lover. I am a good listener. I struggle because I want to fix what may have already healed, or may not be in my power to set right. I still feel anger on their behalf, and I strive to channel it into better behavior.
And I am also the father of a 10-year-old daughter, not yet damaged. Heaven help the one who makes her another statistic. And heaven help us all, because even if the law of averages puts her in the path of someone who does something unforgivable, she will need the strength that comes from her own, dear self, and nothing but compassion and love from her father and family and friends. There is no place in that equation for extra-legal retribution, though I know the place where that would come from, in me, if I ever let it free. There is no "honor" to avenge here, or in vengeance. There is healing to be done. And we must, unequivocally, as a cultural imperative, refuse to tolerate a culture of rape, for how else can one explain the brutal numbers of good people violated, of strong people made vulnerable, and especially those who should never be left in a place of sexual vulnerability?
"Few are guilty, but all are responsible." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
