IS HISTORY A TEACHER, PREACHER, OR A PORTAL?

By Edwin Cooney

First, a confession: I regard the popular admonition that if one ignores history, one is destined to repeat it as arguable at best. Despite popular presumptions, history isn't a judge. It is ultimately a record of people, places and events. Here's an example of what I mean. In the wake of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler in the late 1930s, our foreign policy leaders from John Foster Dulles through Henry Kissinger justified the war in Vietnam on the basis that history had taught us the lesson to never appease dictators whether fascist or communist. Because we listened to that version of history thereby ignoring other lessons, we subsequently frittered away the young and ultimately vulnerable lives of 58,000 plus Americans. The question today is what end did the Vietnamese War serve except to teach us a lesson we shouldn't have had to learn? (Note that we might have listened to another historical lesson — don't become entangled or allied with a foreign society you can't control — as Britain had in Palestine as well as in Greece, India, and Iran at the close of World War II.)

As a student of history, I've tried to follow the principle that to truly understand a prominent  event or an historic individual, one must keep in mind the mores of the time and determine how relevant the mores of a past era fit into today’s. Abraham Lincoln's attitudes toward blacks might well be considered close to reactionary in 2020, but in his own day he was regarded by many as being pretty close to an abolitionist!

It's perfectly legitimate to look back on the events of 1776 and celebrate Independence Day, thus celebrating and endorsing the urgency of that time by applying its meaning to our own era. However, there are a lot of practices and mores regarded as vital to that era that would be unacceptable in 2020. These would include slavery, indentured servitude, debtor’s prison, dueling, state sponsored churches and state sponsored prayers, as well as newspapers funded out of the cabinet by men named Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. (Jefferson paid money out of the State Department's budget to fund the National Gazette published by Philip Freneau while Hamilton used funds from the Treasury Department to fund The Gazette of the United States published by John Fenno. These were perfectly legal political practices at the time but would be regarded as close to being corrupt and criminal today.)

What can be constructive, if we'll let it be so, is what effect celebrating something like the Confederacy or even Columbus Day can have on the outlook and the fortunes of others.

It's my conclusion that what's causing so much trouble about so many people's celebration of the old Confederacy is that such celebrations distort a reality that has been too often ignored.  The establishment of the Confederate States of America was an act of treason, plain and simple. This is especially poignant in that so many Americans who express love for the Confederacy are so quick to label socialism and even liberalism as treasonous when both are merely ideologies. And, in case you've forgotten, capitalism isn't found in our constitution any more than any other political or economic “ism.”

Too often many of us have asserted what history will or won't proclaim about a particular event or individual. When Jimmy Carter lost the presidency to Ronald Reagan in 1980, I asserted that history would be much kinder to him than the present. I was wrong about that for two reasons. First, Jimmy Carter's post presidency has endeared him to many more people than his presidency, because the last time I checked, it’s the presidency and not the post presidency that is usually the topic of historic analysis.  Second, the study of each presidency lasts an eternity. Hence it is quite possible that a future generation's history student might alter its evaluation of him once again. Keep in mind that at the close of the 19th Century, Ulysses S. Grant was still regarded as a great general and as a near great president. General Grant is still rightly regarded today as a great general, but his presidency is rated as pretty average. Therefore, here is what I've learned about history:

History neither teaches nor preaches. History, like America, is discovered. History is a powerful portal through which we can view more information and more perspective than you and I can even begin to comprehend!

History will only teach you what you want to hear or know. History possesses neither conscience nor wisdom.

Accordingly, wisdom is strictly the obligation and responsibility of its students as they seek to apply the historical record to present circumstances and conditions. 

So, you ask, who are these students of history? That’s you and me.

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

THE MISSING INGREDIENT

By Edwin Cooney

A few days ago, I got a telephone call from a friend I'll call LD. At the time of his call, I was struggling with what to write about this week and it was his question that brought about what you see here. Here's the substance of our conversation.

LD: Ed, what do you know about our first ever left-handed president?

I replied: I know his name was James Abram Garfield, that he was a Republican Congressman from Ohio, that he was a teacher and a preacher as well as a college president.

LD (with considerable pride): Well then, I know something about him you don't know. President Garfield could write Greek with one hand, and Latin with the other hand simultaneously. Isn't that impressive?

Me (not to be out done!): He was the first president since John Quincy Adams who possessed sufficient knowledge to administrate every office in his cabinet.

LD was right of course about President Garfield even though I didn't mention it in my immediate response. I  did know it. Beyond that, I began thinking what we know about so many presidents coupled with the comparatively little that we know about President Trump.

Until the 1930s, what Americans knew about their president was what the president’s friends and enemies wrote about him. Radio and newsreels brought FDR's cheerful, optimistic personality and "first class temperament” to the people’s attention even if it didn't inform them that he needed to use a wheelchair most of the time. Both radio and television brought forth President Truman's plain straightforwardness and President Eisenhower's engaging simplicity. There also was the Kennedy charm. (President Kennedy became "Jack" to millions.) Even though not all that people saw in their presidents was positive, at least there was room for both positive as well as for negative impressions.

Even more to the point, over time political advisors became increasingly aware of what effect any president's mood may have on voters. Presidential advisors often counseled the chief executive on the best way, given the circumstances, to approach the public. Presidents ignored such advice sometimes to their detriment — such as the time that Carter wore a cardigan rather than the standard suit coat during his first ever national broadcast following his 1977 Inauguration.

As I see it, President Trump is exhausting the public with his chronic  anger. A presidential attitude such as grim determination in the wake of genuine crisis or endangerment is not only understandable by the public, but even welcomed as they reflect the national mood. After all, as cheerful and optimistic as FDR usually was, his staff occasionally would warn each other that "the boss's Dutch is up." Standing before Congress on Monday, December 8th, 1941, President Roosevelt expressed his anger, but everybody else within the 48 states and in all of the territories was also angry.

Chronic anger appears to be the most effective way the President believes that he can successfully communicate with the American people. Up until the Trump presidency, Americans knew something noncontroversial about every president whether it was Obama's professorial manner of explanation, George W. Bush's love of pork rinds, Clinton playing the saxophone, George Herbert Walker Bush's dislike of broccoli, Ronald Reagan's jars filled with jellybeans, and so on. The most that America knows about President Trump is that he resents all opposition or resistance to any suggestion or directive that he hasn't himself initiated or endorsed. We don't know his son Barron and we barely know our First Lady. We need to see Trump’s charm, his optimism, along with "the better angels” of his nature before too many of us conclude that within his persona there are no angels at all.

Beyond everything we know or don't know about President Trump is that missing ingredient. Simply stated the missing ingredient in President Trump's relationship with the American people is his total lack of magnanimity for our worries not on his agenda.

President Trump's "October surprise" this election season must powerfully and persuasively demonstrate his capacity for genuine magnanimity for a much broader group of Americans than he's shown so far or he may find himself permanently unemployed!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

OUR PAST IS GONE, OUR PRESENT HAS A FEVER, AND OUR FUTURE IS IN THE BALANCE!

By Edwin Cooney

If you were born during the forties, the fifties, or even the sixties, adoration for America wasn't a conclusion you reached, it was a state of mind that was expected of you! From the days of Plymouth Colony through the Colonial Period, the Revolutionary War, the Alamo, the Civil War, and well into the Twentieth Century, America was only about its achievements. Those achievements have been indoctrinated into us. Only since circa 1970 have American studies forced an increasingly resentful citizenry to look both the past and the present in the eye. It's that simple. In other words, we've been kidding ourselves into believing, somehow, that those whom we've enslaved, robbed, swindled, gone to war against and even murdered, should naturally forgive us because they have become us. Besides, if they haven't become one of us, then they are hopelessly stupid and, worst of all, unworthy of us! Only those of us who are 100% white Anglo-Saxon Americans have earned the right to try and identify with our ancestors because that is just plain good old patriotism!  

Over the years, only the cynical have been comfortable with the reality that history is written by the successful amongst us. It’s no wonder that we have just begun to understand that good people have been forced to endure the existing slings and arrows of  outrageous fortune.                                                                                                                                                   

The old Confederacy is the most obvious point. You and I have grown up to admire the strengths and virtues of Abraham Lincoln as indeed we should. We can afford to do so because 'Honest Abe" was...well...honest! Unlike Union soldiers, we never faced the results of the  treachery of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Jeb Stuart, or James (Stonewall) Jackson. Once they were defeated, we allowed monuments to be built, named forts, colleges and universities after them, and put statues of them into our National Hall of Fame treating them as reverently as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt! We've also glorified movies such as "Birth of a Nation" and "Gone With the Wind" and we've created such modern testimonies of our love for the Confederacy as "Dukes of Hazard" and more. (I admit that I am somewhat guilty of this as I have come to enjoy "Gone With the Wind" because I believe its characters adequately reflect the time with its delusional racial relationships. For instance, Rhett Butler openly ridicules "our glorious cause" to Scarlett O'Hara pointing out that if our leaders hadn't made the cause “glorious,” there would be no “cause” worth fighting for!)

What is almost, but not quite, criminal about this is best expressed with an example.

Since we glorify the Confederacy, what would our parents, teachers, preachers and policemen have thought after World War II if Truman or Eisenhower had allowed West Germany to erect statues and name colleges and universities after Hitler and other

Nazi leaders? In the wake of the Revolutionary War, there was no chance Philadelphians would have constructed a Benedict Arnold Boulevard! 

The next question to consider is which statues should come down and which should stay. I believe that any statue honoring a confederate's service in the 1861 rebellion should come down. Robert E. Lee's statue at West Point should stay as he served as Superintendent of that academy. George Washington and other slaveholding presidential statues should remain because they were more than mere slaveholders. As for one of my favorite controversial heroes, Sir Winston Churchill, he was way more than an imperialistic racist. However, note that Churchill’s racism is not celebrated. He is celebrated for preserving Britain from Adolf Hitler long enough to let Franklin Roosevelt complete the job.

At the very least, any soldier or statesman's statue erected in celebration of his or her fight to maintain slavery should be removed. Otherwise, if we’re going to celebrate those who insist on committing treachery, instituting slavery and even murder, we might as well drive down Al Capone Avenue instead of Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Equally disrespectful would be the naming of Timothy McVeigh Way in Oklahoma City, John Hinkley Avenue in downtown Santa Barbara, California or, even worse, driving by Mark David Chapman's statue in front of the Dakota in New York City. (That one would be gone before they got around to unveiling it!)

It is long time past the point when we can or even ought to afford to insist making heroes out of determined fools. As for fools in the Baseball Hall of Fame, they are not being celebrated as persons as much as for being outstanding performers on the baseball diamond! 

Even as we remove or destroy these monuments of our foolish past, let us remember

that it's always easier to destroy than to create. As President Harry Truman once observed: "Any fool can go out and start a war!”

It may well be that once we start celebrating people and institutions of value, we'll actually begin putting together a police force that knows how to wisely use force only when it can't be avoided.

As Americans we're more than justified when we feel pride in our legitimate institutions and achievements such as our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution as well as for the overwhelmingly good things we've created and shared with the rest of humanity.

As for our faults, it's way past the time we ought to acknowledge them. With regard to our history, it's time to take it more seriously!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

WHAT IS LIBERTY, FREEDOM OR LICENSE?

By Edwin Cooney

Let's begin by considering the most fundamental dimension of liberty — freedom, the first and most fundamental gift of liberty! Absolute freedom means unencumbered mobility of body, mind, and spirit, all individual wants, actions and opportunities. Absolute freedom is as individual as your capacity to draw a breath or to go stand on your head! Absolute freedom is heedless of almost any response or even gravitational law. The fact of the matter is that freedom is ultimately dependent on one's environment. (Not even mischievous little Johnny at the back of the classroom will quarrel with that!)

Once we release freedom from the abstract it becomes both highly problematical and even contagious. (I'll even argue, just for the hell of it, that the desire for freedom according to Christian doctrine was humankind's first sin!)

Try this idea on for size: when Adam took his first bite into little Eve's apple, that’s when Patrick Henry's idea of liberty was born! The very idea of liberty was so strong that even after being tossed out of the Garden of Eden, humankind began rating both liberty and freedom as God's sweetest nectar without even comprehending that Adam's declaration of his right to liberty was the cause of his ejection from that beautiful garden. Steadily, therefore, humankind began the struggle for its individual and collective freedoms. (Note: Is it not ironic that we Christians who so vigorously demand individual freedom pray to go to a Heaven where the will of our Supreme Being shall prevail? Ah, the Garden of Eden all over again!)

Of course, originally warrior kings were the freest of all beings, but as time moved on, they were supported and opposed by powerful barons thus sanctifying the legitimacy of the richest men and women as deserving the most privileges. As the centuries passed, the more human beings felt freer, and the more desirable and, eventually, natural freedom felt.

Twenty-first century America is where freedom, the jewel of all human liberty, is supposed to reign. Even when it doesn't reign, almost everyone will insist that it ought to rule over suppression. Ah, but there exists within the the very desire for freedom a serious flaw if not a fatal contradiction. When one takes the time to think about it, the flaw is simple. Freedom is the legitimate goal of individuals and groups of people possessing inevitably conflicting ideals and circumstances. Even worse, too many people believe that they're entitled to liberty because they're rich or Christians or Jews or Moslems or perhaps because they've been injured in war or because they're suffering through a pandemic. The demands for freedom, liberty's most sacred and powerful jewel, are both ongoing and fiercely contentious. We too often act as though only our individual demand for freedom is both immediate and just. That demand for both liberty or freedom is too often selfish and even vengeful within the secret crevasses of jealous ambition.

Nevertheless, even with all of this cravenness, the true blessings of liberty remain as our ultimate gift if we would only stop struggling over it and allow freedom to engulf us.

The last 87 years of American history have seen the launching and temporary domination of two conflicting ideologies. They are liberalism exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt and conservatism as exemplified by Ronald Reagan. FDR's liberalism was the ultimate antidote to orthodox industrial and protestant-oriented conservative mores in vogue since right after the Civil War.  When the rules of industrial-oriented doctrine  proved incapable of adequately caring for the needs of the people, Roosevelt's New Deal became dominant utilizing government regulation with the support of labor unions and social service agencies at all levels of government. As vital as the gifts of FDR's liberalism were, they couldn't meet many of the demands of a changing constituency. Thus, by 1980, mid-twentieth century liberalism was exhausted by its own energy. Hence, enter President Ronald Wilson Reagan's brand of conservatism energized by enterprise and morality. Handsome, eloquent and elegant, President Reagan ushered in, as FDR had before him, a ideologically-oriented set of thinkers and doers whose mores and demands have finally exhausted the public just as the demands of liberalism did by the 1970s.

Thus the question prevails: whose liberty, whose freedom is at stake as we prepare to go to the polls? If everybody is entitled to liberty and thus freedom, liberty's most precious gift, what types of political, social and moral practices must we apply to ensure everybody a place in the sun?

Like liberalism's governmental regimentation of too many people forty years ago, conservatism's 2020 harsh judgement of others, I believe, has finally run its course.

The story of George Floyd is about far more than the circumstances of either his life or death, but his manner of death — murder — is something everyone understands. As hard as some conservatives try to minimize the significance of Mr. Floyd's murder, the more they protest its significance by condemning even the public's worst reaction to it, the deeper they become identified as abetting his murder. Even if time reveals Mr. Floyd to have been imperfect, his worst sins are far from worthy of a death sentence.

You may legitimately loathe a looter, especially if you are a peaceable protestor. Fortunately, free men and women, otherwise known as American voters, must, and I believe will, sustain you in November.

Remember, however, freedom is a blessing, not a license. It contains ongoing responsibilities and accountabilities by those who prize it most!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

SHOULD WE OPEN UP WIDE OR SMART?

By Edwin Cooney

"They're out back," said the lovely lady manager of our watering hole as I entered wearing my mask. Lunkhead was happily puffing on his lit cigar and Dunderhead seemed to be up to his ears in peanuts!  As I made my way to a seat at the table set six feet to the right of Lunkhead and six feet to the left of Dunderhead.

Lunkhead  was mask-less while Dunderhead wore a mask with a 1960’s peace symbol on it.

“Where'd you get that?" I asked him.

"My old lady," said Dunderhead. "She always knits while singing Beatles songs. She refuses to change!" he insisted as he popped a handful of peanuts into his mouth. "Where's your mask?" I asked Lunkhead. "President Trump says he'll loan me one of his when he starts wearing one," said Lunkhead taking a healthy sip of his scotch. 

“Since you’re supposed to be wearing a mask when you enter, the only reason he's in here is because he sufficiently pulled up his turtle neck,” wisecracked Dunderhead. 

“So, guys,” I asked, “how much opening up should we do now that 100,000 Americans have died from COVID-19?”

"All the way!” exclaimed Lunkhead, pointing his cigar at Dunderhead. “It isn't any government's business to protect us against disease, so they can't and they won't. If we're to remain the land of the free, we must be the home of the brave!”

"Brave!" exclaimed Dunderhead. "What's so brave about insisting on the right to make a buck?"

"Look," said Lunkhead, “as Winston Churchill once told the Canadian Parliament on December 30th, 1941: ‘We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.’ Every sensible person realizes that there's no gain without risk. We're a nation of over 330,000,000. Even if we lose 2,000,000 people, that's only about seven tenths of one percent of our whole population. Besides," asserted Lunkhead, "anyone who's afraid to die doesn't deserve to live!"

“Nuts!" shouted Dunderhead. “Even during wartime we acknowledge people in our population who are ineligible for service in the armed forces. What you're doing, Lunkhead, is putting the entire population at risk. Neither George the Third nor Jefferson Davis, Hitler, or Stalin ever did that to their people!"

“Bull-puckey!” Lunkhead shot back. "It isn't about military service. It's about something that's everybody's business. It's about freedom! My freedom, Dunderhead, doesn't end where your fear begins!"

“Look, Lunkhead,” I said. “You don't possess any freedom once you're dead! Besides, the value of your freedom and mine means zilch unless and until the opportunity it creates is fulfilled. During wartime you might reasonably argue that the chances of the nation's freedom increases with the death of every enemy soldier, but we're fighting a disease rather than a government. Too often, you conservatives use freedom as a license to do what you damned well please, rather than for doing what you clearly ought to do!

“How can you use numbers to evaluate the legitimate price you're willing to pay when making a national decision, Lunkhead?” I asked.

"As I said before, government has no legitimate business when it comes to preventing or fighting disease. Fighting disease is the people's business not the government’s," Lunkhead insisted. “Government is constitutionally responsible for fighting wars — not pandemics!"

"Nuts," asserted Dunderhead, “we expect government to put out our fires, rescue us from floods and earthquakes, and set safety standards for everything from food to the design of homes, hotels, hospitals, and freeways. That's the way it has to be, because private builders and manufacturers would play fast and loose with goods and services if they weren't regulated. Besides, since our very founding, states and local communities have quarantined people against the spread of diseases like typhus, diphtheria, and, of course, the flu. Lunkhead is saying that unless we're prepared or unless we dare to die, we don't deserve to live — that's nuts!" Dunderhead said slamming down his beer glass (something he seldom does). "His patriotism seems to be more about him, his opportunities and, in one way or another, all about the state of people's pocketbooks rather than about their well-being. Notice, Lunkhead, I said ‘well-being’ not ‘welfare.’ I know what you'd do with welfare even though it's in the Preamble of the Constitution.”

"Can we live without Lunkhead's idea of a vibrant economy?" I asked Dunderhead.

"That's exactly the challenge," said Dunderhead. "Our job is to make life, as it temporarily is, functional. If people personally are willing to take that chance of not socially distancing, that's their prerogative so long as they can live their lives without affecting the lives of others. Remember, Mother Nature is neither liberal nor conservative. She's both nonpartisan and non-American. Her virus will take anyone who invites it into their system even if they've only done so by accidentally coming in contact with someone while exercising their precious liberty. People like Lunkhead believe they can guarantee their safety with their wealth and significance. They’re willing to let other’s lives amount to little more than a game of chance! Get it straight, Lunkhead. Neither you nor I are granted, by anybody's constitution or anybody's bible, the right to make other people sick!"

“That's Dunderhead," said Lunkhead, "he's always looking for someone to guarantee his carcass no matter how much it costs!"

Suddenly, both men were on their feet headed for their side by side bungalows.

Once more I was left with the check. This time, however, I was also left with the certainty that one of them was absolutely right.

Guess which one!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY