Endings

The above image came from Arnaldo Dumindin's online history of the Philippine-American War, 1899-1902. I think of this conflict for several reasons, as the last granules of 2009 and the 21st Century Aughts slip away. The image at left is the unfortunate Chandra Levy.

First, I'm reading historian James Bradley's "The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire."

The book describes Teddy Roosevelt's effort through his Secretary of War William Howard Taft who was dispatched in 1905 on a Pacific cruise. The voyage resulted in secret and unconstitutional treaties that caused our engagement there and laid fuses for what ignited the Pacific Theatre of World War II, an almost every major conflict following, resulting in tens of millions dead.




It was the culmination of the "White Man's Burden" philosophy that guided the U.S. westward, "following the sun."

Quoting the U .S. military commander Gen. Arthur MacArthur (Douglas MacArthur's father), Bradley "pointedly describes a too familiar situation. “General MacArthur described a depressing quagmire where the U.S. Army controlled only 117 miles out of a total of 116,000 square miles, a hostile country where Americans could not venture out alone and a shell-shocked populace whose hatred for their oppressors grew each day,” he writes. “The Imperial Cruise” is all too persuasive in its visions of history repeating itself."

Well, as Mark Twain -- who opposed this imperialist gambit -- observed, history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

If you don't believe it, look the recent headlines. It's chilling.

There's a familiar scene at the end of Charlie Wilson's War in which Wilson tries to get Congressional appropriations for building schools in Afghanistan. It's a powerful glimpse into why we're there now -- because of the mess the Soviets left, and how our covert assistance helped dislodge them and ultimately cause the collapse of Communist rule. But an exasperated Wilson, when told he can't get the money, says this is what always happens. We go in and change the world and then we leave. 'We always leave."

That's a bit disingenuous. The U.S. today maintains bases in Germany, Japan and Korea, and we're still in Central Europe following the horrors of Serb-Croat atrocities and civil war.

In fact, and these are 2004 figures, the "Pentagon currently owns or rents 702 overseas bases in about 130 countries and HAS another 6,000 bases in the United States and its territories."

There's a bit more up-to-date information here.

We invaded the Phillippines for little cause, after buying the country for $20 million, and then unsatisfied with Filipino administration and courts, decided to go and slaughter them into our way of doing things.

Of course, we did the same thing to Native Americans, and a photograph reproduced by Bradley in Imperial Cruise of native dead in a trench at Wounded Knee, bears startling resemblance to the one shown above, that also appears in the book. Mark Twain complained of U.S. imperialism, but wouldn't admit that we did the same damn thing to the Indians. And then there's the whole slavery thing. But facing fault there would cause the nation to admit, like the Fonz, that it was w-w-w-r -wr-wrong. There's lately come various apologies for various crimes and errors on our part, but of course, this doesn't help the 600,000 Filipino war dead. Or the millions of Indians wiped away. That we weren't any better than other colonial powers of the period is a difficult view to take.

This is tough reading.

I think of all this, too, because we are at the end of the Aughts. They started with anxiety about The End of the World -- remember Y2K? Then came 9/11 and that wiped away the Chandra Levy Washington D.C. murder mystery and the threat of killer sharks.

Now, at the end of the Aughts, there's still anxiety about the end of the world, with real and imagined fears of nuclear potential in Iran and Korea, and terrorists. Following 9/11, there was supposed to be a new serious to the media, but instead, thanks to TMZ and millions of blogs, no, we're instead distracted by narcissistic party-crashers at the White House and Tiger Woods' peccadilloes.

There's been a whole slew of movies about the world ending in various ways from comets to zombie-causing plagues. Seems like every other program on the History Channel is about decoding Nostradamus or the Bible or some other hidden mystery that indicates the end is nigh.

Conspiracy theory has become a kind of civil religion. The political world is wildly divided and toxic. One side regards the other as some form of alien life form. (Indeed, some people believe they really are from out of space, or inside the Earth)

And the people who believe this stuff breed and vote.

Anyway, the Teens of the 21st century look more and more like the beginning of the 20th.

Happy New Year. I'm going to get a few stiff drinks.

We're All Obamans On This Bus
BHO comes to the Richmond Coliseum



Video via Heyzutube, YouTube.

On Wednesday afternoon I glimpsed some history in the making. Barack Obama came to Richmond, the former Confederate crucible, and brought his message to some 12,500 people at the Richmond Coliseum and an estimated 7,000 others who listened to his speech broadcast outside into the plaza.

I was among those who didn't get into the Coliseum; I was at work, and overwhelmed there; but I'm also a student of history and the pure symbolism of Obama's appearance here isn't lost on me. (A couple days ago, a Chesterfield minister who had a large Obama yard sign found it removed and replaced with a Confederate flag).

But a colleague wanted to give it a try, around 1:15. I needed to pay a bill at city hall, so I figured I'd ride along. After searching out a place to park and berthing amid a mass jumble of cars in an honor lot somewhere behind the Coliseum, we wandered toward the massive UFO/Roman Imperium structure and I was struck at first by the lack of traffic and the apparent quiet. This looked to me almost like an ordinary late afternoon in downtown Richmond. We saw two guys in Obama T-shirts heading away from the site, and that didn't seem to be a good indication of our Obama-viewing prospects.

But as we came round the building, passing doors shut to entry, we fell into throngs; a convocation of media trucks, and sellers of election paraphernalia. Then we heard an ear-shattering mass scream, which I equated to the Beatles appearing outside the plane, or Elvis. And tripping in chock holes as we stumbled around behind the studios-on-wheels and dodged yellow police tape -- there the candidate was. Tall, straight, bareheaded, waving from the porch of the 6th Street Entrance.

He said inside was filled up, but wanted to speak to us out here, and emphasize the importance of Virginia and the challenge of the remaining two weeks. Take a friend to vote, take five, he said. But by then, his words didn't matter. His presence hit the audience like a huge wind. People swayed, wept, one woman went to her knees. "I saw him..I saw him..I saw him," she cried.

My coworker and I just stood there, amazed by our luck, and not quite believing our eyes or ears. There he really stood in his element, not as an image on television.

I tried to equate this to another political event, and my mind went to the 1910 visit of Republican William Howard Taft to Richmond. Then, the city shut down and thousands of school children lined the streets with little U.S. flags. The Valentine Richmond History Center's Bill Martin was next to me and I remarked on that and he said, "Well, then it was for the respect of the President and the office," he said. "The party didn't matter."

And there is a lesson of history, to be sure.

I thought, too, and not for the first time during this long campaign, of Billy Mahone (that's him in the image) and the Readjusters of Virginia, which -- as a third party -- ran the state for a good part of the 1880s on a mandate of readjusting the state's pre-Civil War debt and providing public education and legal reforms the likes of which the state wouldn't experience again until the civil rights era.

Mahone, a former Confederate general and not what one would describe today as a civil libertarian, but more of an opportunist, seized the potential of black working class votes and those of disaffected whites and ran circles around the established Virginia "Bourbon" politicians by actually going out and campaigning.

Mahone unfortunately annoyed people who were allied in his cause by making bad choices, and when the Readjusters were winning, he couldn't actually step further into real progressivism. Basically, the Readjusters controlled the statehouse and the Executive Mansion, they gave some low level patronage jobs to blacks and in fact enacted sweeping reforms the likes of which Virginia had never seen, and sent Mahone to Congress -- and then couldn't figure what to do next.

Then a Democrat-rigged riot in Danville on the eve of a state-wide election shattered the party's chances. Mahone was reviled in Virginia for years afterwards, and building coalitions with blacks was derided as "Mahoneism." (You can read of my fascination with this period here.) What followed was Jim Crow and ultimately Massive Resistance -- neither of which needed to be inevitable, as Mahone shows us.

I had business to attend to; I'd gotten my Punxsutawney County Pete view of the candidate, and needed to get along.

Afterward, I got a bus back to the office and as we lumbered up Broad Street, the event's attenders streamed along the sidewalks and filled the bus. The only comparison I have to the sensation was riding in a New York subway after an anti-Iraq and Bush rally some three years ago. There, the buttons and banners proclaiming opposition to both seemed somewhat desperate and hopeless, and the mood of the riders united by their adversity, but vexed and angry.

Here, on this Richmond city bus, I couldn't help but be affected by the exhilaration and outright joy among the riders. Most had taken a long lunch from work, and many hadn't seen him speak while others in excited voices spoke about his appearance to those standing outside. A clever political move, by BHO, and actually kind of decent.

Now I don't know how this is going to turn out. I know the defeat of one or the other is going to cause gnashing of teeth and wrenting of garments among the extremists of either side. And that more and more this feels like 1860, and how then, as Dr. Ed Ayres pointed out in a talk given some days ago, few foresaw that within a year the nation would be plunged into civil war.

Or how, when a well-known Virginia political analyst at a recent talk announced to a West End Richmond woman's club that they'd need to get used to a black president, he was booed, and at the end of his talk, the chair woman said to him curtly, "You can find the door."

Those women were never going to vote for Obama, or if so, they'd not admit of their choice to anybody they knew. But as my friend Bill explained to me, they've always had a comfortable Democrat or a comfortable Republican for whom to vote. Now, their world is on a verge of a possible shift and they can't get their heads around that concept.

I don't think the potential alteration of the status quo going to be as radical as anybody thinks -- BHO is a politician, he came out of a rough and tumble big city political machine; he has ambitions, he has made compromises. But should he be elected, Obama will cause a shift in the nation's political currents, and that's the minimum I can expect: a seasonal change in the weather.

For other accounts of the Visitation, you can read Amy Biegelsen of Style Weekly recounting the event and the political strange-bedfellowsness of those standing near the speaker's platform here; blogger Jason Guard biked to the rally and got inside, and experienced the power of the moment, here; a Washington Post perspective here; for what he actually said, the Obama-Biden campaign provides here.

A postscript: on CSPAN this a.m. I caught a brief part of a segment devoted to the viability of Third Party candidates -- there is a debate at 9 p.m. tonight between Ralph Nader and Chuck Baldwin of the Constitution Party. Don't know why the Libertarians aren't participating, with Bob Barr, except that characteristic of Libertarians who expend a great deal of energy fighting among themselves, there are numbers of them who just don't like Barr.

Anyway, the callers I heard were typical. One woman from Tennessee sounded so stereotypical and right wing, quoting scripture, and just shy of calling Obama the anti-Christ said two choices were her preference as though a third party wouldn't really be a alternative; another caller wondered a third party would help or hurt Obama, and another complained of trying to register with the Reform Party in Maryland and getting told the Reformists weren't legal -- a problem common to third parties. And so it goes. In a nation of 300 millions, perhaps more diverse now than ever in our history, we are down to these dual opportunities for not much to really change. To me, this is a shabby way to run a republic.

People will hold their nose with one hand and touch a screen with the other, in states where Third Parties are represented they may get a vote or two thrown their way, and still millions of potential voters just won't cast a vote because of resignation, disgustm apathy, or just out of plain cussedness, as my Goochland County relatives might say. So it comes down to a narrowing margin, and rhetoric, and emotionalism, and the potential for things to go awry.

For me, what it comes down to is three little words: Supreme Court justices. The next president may get to select three justices. And I know whom I'd trust to make those appointments.

These are historic times; which means they are easier to read about in the comfort of some window nook seat, than they are to live through.

The Never-Ending Term Paper
I'm writing a book by Monday, if I don't collapse first


[Image: This is my office during the project. No, but, in truth it is photographer Walead Beshty composition, Dismal Science Reading Room, from June 7, 2006, Wit of the Staircase]



Billion-eyed audience, come on in my friends, to the term paper that never ends, come inside, come inside...

I'm not posting because I don't love yall, or that my neurotic need to inflict my...whatever...experience on anybody who happens to pass by here. But I'm trying to finish a book: Ragtime In Richmond: Socialists, Suffragists, Sex and Murder (1910-1911) for the History Press. It's past due. For the past several months, I've been looking at pages that look quite a bit like this:


This is an excerpt from the December 26, 1910 issue of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, with an account of the fire that destroyed the north wing of the imposing Italianate pile called Ryland Hall, between Ryland and Lombardy streets. Most of the students were away, but 24 were still on campus, and 13 in the dorm rooms in that wing. Four fraternities had rooms on the fourth floor of the building, and something seems to have happened that ignited a fire around 4 a.m. Engine Company #10, just a block away, responded. (This is now the Firehouse Theater). But they had difficult setting up their ladder truck. There was general alarm. And a mummy. But you'll have to read about that in the book, or one account, here.

While I'm at it, I need to give a shout out to the Library of Congress Chronicling America project. This grand effort unites digital preservation efforts nation wide of newspapers during the the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Times-Dispatch of 1909-1910 is there, though not the News Leader or Evening-Journal. But let me tell you, it has so aided my undertaking that I can't even tell you because my brain has turned into guacamole. This is an expenditure of tax dollars I salute, and its absolutely free. God bless the Archivists....


[Image: June 19, 2006, "Bingeing On Books In L.A," Wit of the Staircase.]

There she is, my Deadline. She waits for me; restive and annoyed and eager to get on wit it, wondering why the hell I haven't gotten this done a month ago. And I want to make her happy, yet I fear her.

Now, I must run. President William Howard Taft is reviewing VMI cadets in front of the Lee Monument. Really.