I have to say I agree with MadJayHawk at least to the extent that under the circumstances, the "bring it on" comment doesn't seem worth all this attention after the fact. At the time I took it to be generic politician's bravado, with perhaps a touch of a feeble politician's attempt to show he's hep to how the kids are talking these days. These things aren't unique to Bush; Bush isn't very good at them, but we knew that before he was elected. I don't think this particular line would have elicited much comment if we weren't reading it against the background of everything else Bush and his officials have been saying the past couple of weeks, such as, for instance, cheerfully lying through their teeth about Nigerian yellowcake. Given that we have these real, damaging crimes against the truth and against the American people (including the troops in Iraq) to talk about, why waste our energy complaining about yet another example of lousy speechwriting?
MadJayHawk, your comments about rebuilding Iraq make sense in themselves, and I don't know enough about the pre-war situation there to comment. The thing is, though, that the Bush Administration is giving the impression of being considerably less informed on the subject than you are; at least, they keep changing their minds about how long our troops will have to be there, they (i.e., Rumsfeld) directly contradict the accounts of officers in Iraq as to the nature of the continuing conflicts there, and so forth. In general they're sending a message that they just didn't think their Iraq strategy through this far, and they're not totally sure what they're doing now. This is an unfortunate message to be sending subordinates who are getting shot at, as the reports of low troop morale in Iraq bear out. Your own descriptions of the situation are internally consistent, but compared to the public statements coming from the Bush administration, they seem more like post facto rationalizations of actions that are themselves unplanned and badly informed.
In response to Madjayhawk - I've worked on a couple of exhibitions for a museum with a considerably lower profile than the Whitney, and rights and legal accountability are always a primary consideration; there's often an assistant curator whose sole job for the exhibition is tracking down rights to various elements (this was in historical exhibitions, not art).
The point, though, is that the Whitney didn't have to ask permission, because this art skates in under fair use. As Patrick and others pointed out, Marvel (and others) tend to ignore fair use -- despite the shrinking comics market, they still have enough money to outsue upstanding but impoverished fans. But the Whitney is just too big for them to bully.
The issue here is not the Whitney's actions, but Marvel's selective passivity.
Being, on my father's side, a mixture of Welsh, Scots-Irish, and Anglo-Saxon, I get into fistfights with myself all the time. I keep telling myself that the Anglo-Saxons were oppressed too, by the dastardly Normans, just look at Robin Hood; Anglo-Saxons can be cool too, we're all on the same side here. But I just don't want to listen.
Actually, I must comment on myself:
I said: Scots-Irish
Or as the Irish would say, Scottish.
The Cherokee did get around at least a little bit: some went on the Trail of Tears, some stayed behind and hid. Since the left-behinds often wouldn't admit in public to being Cherokee, it's quite easy for modern folks of all descriptions to lay claim to a soupcon of Cherokee. More generally, though, my understanding follows Teresa's that "Cherokee" is a code word for racial mixing in general. Several families I know from North Carolina have some colors in their background they would prefer not to discuss, and some of them have made it clear in conversation that Cherokee is the non-white race they're prepared to admit to.
I second the motion that Kip Manley's post rocks. Jack Womack beat me to the google, but I'd add that not only did Hirohito escape, he remained Emperor; and we retained most of Japan's wartime infrastructure; and MacArthur worked closely with the existing government (minus a few members at the top) to effect a fast transition to the new constitution. If it's a comparable situation at all, it's an example in favor of a peaceful Reconstruction.
Graydon - you just haven't made a case yet that a massive cultural purge, in the form of thousands of deaths, would have qualitatively changed America's character for the better. Even if every single person who had ever colluded in slavery were expunged from the Union, what would be the effect of the purge itself? How would it even be enacted, given that each of those thousands of people must presumably be arrested, tried, found guilty and executed? Is there any historical precedent for a purge on such a scale that didn't eventually rely on assumption of guilt, forced confessions, informing of dubious accuracy, and the suspension or elision of judiciary process? I can't think of any. The process you seem to be suggesting would have required a powerful, unanswerable Federal authority of the same sort that, in the person of John Ashcroft, worries most of the posters on this blog today. Is that the direction you wish America had gone in?
I'm a bit daunted for my first post to either Nielsen Hayden blog to be in this excellent, intensive discussion, but you know, what the heck.
There seem to me to be two different arguments going on here (not counting the one about disco): should the Union have punished Lee, Davis et al. for their actions at the time, and should we presently be deifying, or even saying nice things about, those same people. These arguments are going on in parallel, occasionally crossing over.
On the first point, executing the traitors would have brought up many, many questions not just of morality but of immediate political necessity. A lot of those questions have already been brought up back up the page: Would mass executions have alienated the South, including those segments that had been anti-slavery but still considered themselves Southerners? In the worst-case scenario, was the Union logistically capable of treating the South as a hostile occupied territory in the much longer term - for instance, to borrow one of Graydon's examples, the nearly-300 years between Cromwell and Irish independence (and look how well that went)? Was that, or the idea of mass executions, consistent with the Union's conception of itself? It doesn't seem so to me.
Our present attitude towards those figures seems much more pressing to me, if only because it doesn't mean second-guessing the actions of dead people. Should we be "deifying" Lee? Certainly not, but it doesn't seem much more helpful to monstrify him, so to speak. (Devilize? Baalinate? Or maybe it's still deifying, but a bad kind of god.) Lee and Davis and others were humans, committing human actions based on human reasons - some good by their own lights, some bad by any measure, some apparently mutally contradictory. Rejecting out of hand the parts of Lee's character that might be called noble is as ahistorical as saying that slavery was an Alien Evil from another universe that somehow possessed our freedom-loving country for a while. It also adds fuel to the fire of Lee's most fervent admirers: look, they say, those Yankees just don't understand.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2003 | 7 |
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