• About
  • Photography

The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

The Bully Pulpit

Monthly Archives: January 2015

Mark Twain on the Jews

28 Wednesday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Essay, History

≈ Comments Off on Mark Twain on the Jews

Tags

Anti-Semitism, Concerning the Jews, Essay, history, Jews, Judaism, Mark Twain, Palestine, Philo-Semitism, racism, The Innocents Abroad

Mark Twain

“If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one quarter of one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk.

His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine and abstruse learning are also very out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world in all ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself and be excused for it. The Egyptians, the Babylonians and the Persians rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greeks and Romans followed and made a vast noise, and they were gone; other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, and have vanished.

The Jew saw them all, survived them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert but aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jews; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

__________

Mark Twain, writing in his short essay “Concerning the Jews” (1898).

Though his essay is almost entirely philo-Semitic, Twain did include within it his view that the Jewish people, “like the Christian Quaker,” were unwilling servicemen – that they had “an unpatriotic disinclination to stand by the flag as a soldier.” However, after the War Department figures showed Jewish overrepresentation in the U.S. military, Twain issued a retraction which he titled “The Jew as Soldier.”

In 1867, a mere eight decades before the state of Israel’s formal declaration, Twain traveled to Palestine and chronicled his trip in The Innocents Abroad. One particular quote sheds adequate light on his assessment of the place:

[It is a] desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds-a silent mournful expanse… A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action… We never saw a human being on the whole route… There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of the worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.

Go on:

  • Twain’s hilarious, furious letter in which he calls the recipient, “An idiot of the 33rd degree, and scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link”
  • Twain’s daily routine

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

They’re Supposed to Be Awful

28 Wednesday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

American History, American Politics, C-Span, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Gore Vidal, politicians, Q&A, State of the Union, State of the United States

Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley

Questioner: Was there more civility among politicians in the early years of the Republic?

Gore Vidal: Well that’s not what they’re there for. Civility among politicians is oxymoronic – they’re supposed to be awful. And that’s part of the fun of it; if they’re going to talk about real issues and they care about real issues, then they get to really hate each other and they talk rather savagely.

In past generations, they could actually talk. As opposed to politicians today, they could actually speak without reading – hesitantly – a speech somebody else had written for them.

As I once said of General Eisenhower: he always read his speeches with a sense of real discovery. He was terribly interested in some of things he was reading. There was a great moment during the campaign of ’52, when he said, ‘And, if elected President, I will go to… Korea!’ And he went. Nobody’d told him. And he had to go.

__________

From the question and answer section of Gore Vidal’s “State of the United States” speech, given in November 1994.

More from Vidal…

  • on what ‘pursuit of happiness’ means today
  • on drug legalization
  • on Ayn Rand
  • on Bush’s prophetic Second Inaugural
  • on the surveillance state and imperial presidency

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

America’s Threat from Within

26 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, Politics

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

America, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, democracy, Freedom, Joseph Story, Law, Order, The Constitution, The United States

Joseph Story

“Let the American youth never forget that they possess a noble inheritance, bought by the toils, and sufferings, and blood of their ancestors; and capable, if wisely improved, and faithfully guarded, of transmitting to their latest posterity all the substantial blessings of life, the peaceful enjoyment of liberty, property, religion, and independence.

The structure has been erected by architects of consummate skill and fidelity; its foundations are solid; its compartments are beautiful as well as useful; its arrangements are full of wisdom and order; and its defences are impregnable from without. It has been reared for immortality, if the work of man may justly aspire to such a title. It may, nevertheless, perish in an hour by the folly, or corruption, or negligence of its only keepers, THE PEOPLE.

Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people in order to betray them.”

__________

From the 2nd edition of Joseph Story’s Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1851).

More on the threat from without:

  • George Washington rips party politics
  • Andrew Jackson on why the the rule of law is primal
  • Tom Paine talks about how governmental tyranny is the worst tyranny

Joseph Story

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Teddy Roosevelt: How to Criticize the President

25 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

American History, Criticism, James Scherer, politics, Presidential Politics, Presidents, The Nation at War, The Presidency, Theodore Roosevelt, Washington

Teddy Roosevelt

“Free speech, exercised both individually and through a free press, is a necessity in any country where the people are themselves free. Our Government is the servant of the people, whereas in Germany it is the master of the people. This is because the American people are free and the German people are not free.

The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly as necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.”

__________

Written in May 1918, a letter from Teddy Roosevelt published in The Kansas City Star (as quoted in The Nation at War by James Scherer).

  • How Teddy overcame the most tragic day of his life
  • Teddy lays out the way to set the right example as a man
  • MLK tells us when and how to break the law

Teddy Roosevelt

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

“Hunger for Something” by Chase Twichell

22 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Chase Twichell, Hunger for Something, Poem, Poet, poetry

DSC00794

Sometimes I long to be the woodpile,
cut-apart trees soon to be smoke,
or even the smoke itself,

sinewy ghost of ash and air, going
wherever I want to, at least for a while.

Neither inside nor out,
neither lost nor home, no longer
a shape or a name, I’d pass through

all the broken windows of the world.
It’s not a wish for consciousness to end.

It’s not the appetite an army has
for its own emptying heart,
but a hunger to stand now and then

alone on the death-grounds,
where the dogs of the self are feeding.

__________

“Hunger for Something” by Chase Twichell, which can be found in his 2010 collection Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been.

The photo: shot in New Ulm, Texas

More favorites written in a similar tone and style:

  • “For My Brother” by friend of the site David Mcloughlin
  • “The Russian Greatcoat” by Theodore Deppe
  • “Every Day” by Tom Clark

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

As She Sends Her Son to College

22 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Claire Messud, Fiction, literature, novel, The Woman Upstairs

Claire Messud

“Over the years I’ve tried to understand my mother’s emotion at that moment — regret about an unconsummated love affair? Her own Lucy Jordan moment? Simple sadness at my brother’s departure, and thoughts of all the things that now would be forever unsaid? — but all I know is that I’ll never know. I decided, for a long time, that it had to do with the ending of a maternal role, with the painful knowledge of all she’d sacrificed to raise him, when now she was handing off her son to the world. But more recently, I’ve thought that maybe it was about an unconsummated love affair after all, maybe about a flirtatious exchange with a stranger in a train station, or an unanswered letter from a college sweetheart, one of those secret moments when you think that now your life will have to change, only it doesn’t. Something small but big that she regretted and that tormented her each day. With my children, I’ve discovered over the years that the simplest explanation is almost always the right one; and that hunger of one kind or another — desire, by another name — is the source of almost every sorrow.”

__________

Pulled from The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud.

This is a reflection from the main character, Nora Eldridge, as she remembers seeing her mother cry the night before sending her son, Nora’s brother Matthew, off to college at Notre Dame (who wouldn’t regret sending a kid off to South Bend?). The family was finishing their final meal at the neighborhood Chinese restaurant, when they opened their fortune cookies and each read their fortunes. Her mother’s elicited tears, though years later Nora still couldn’t understand what about — it read “It is what you haven’t done that will torment you.”

More good writing:

  • Donna Tartt writes in The Secret History, on the intoxicating power of a teacher who believes in you
  • Philip Roth in American Pastoral: Getting people wrong is what makes us human
  • Joseph Conrad writes in his century-old novel The Secret Agent about the two main traits of terrorists

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Stalin’s Son

20 Tuesday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Georgia, Ivan the Terrible, Joseph Stalin, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, Leningrad, Peter the Great, Russia, Soviet Union, USSR, Yakov Stalin

Stalin and daughter

“Stalin really hated him. It took me several days of subliminal work to accept this. The standard interpretation may seem ridiculous, but it is probably the right interpretation. We have seen something of Stalin’s violent insecurity about his provenance. This insecurity was now turned on Yakov. Stalin hated Yakov because Yakov was Georgian. Yakov was Georgian because his mother was Georgian; Yakov was Georgian because Stalin was Georgian; yet Stalin hated Yakov because Yakov was Georgian. The racial and regional tensions within the USSR constitute an enormous subject, but Stalin’s case was, as usual, outlandish. We have to imagine a primitive provincial who (by 1939 or so) had started to think of himself as a self-made Peter the Great: an Ivan the Terrible who had got where he was on merit. Thus Stalin was Russia personified; and Yakov was Georgian. Yakov is said also to have been of a mild and gentle disposition, to his father’s additional disgust.

Raised by his maternal grandparents, Yakov joined the Stalin household in the mid-1920s. He spoke little Russian, and did so with a thick accent (like Stalin). Nadezhda seems to have liked him and fully accepted him. But Stalin’s persecution was so systematic that toward the end of the decade Yakov attempted suicide. He succeeded only in wounding himself; and when Stalin heard about the attempt he said, ‘Ha! He couldn’t even shoot straight” (Volkogonov has him actually confronting his son with the greeting, ‘Ha! You missed!’) Soon afterward Yakov moved to Leningrad to live with Nadezhda’s family, the Alliluyevs.

Like Vasily, Yakov joined the armed forces, as a lieutenant (rather than a field marshal), reflecting his more peripheral status. He was the better soldier, and fought energetically until his unit was captured by the Reichswehr. This placed Stalin in a doubly embarrassing position. A law of August 1941 had declared that all captured officers were ‘malicious traitors’ whose families were ‘subject to arrest.’ Thus Yakov came under the first category – and Stalin came under the second. As a kind of compromise, Stalin arrested Yakov’s wife. When the Nazis tried to negotiate an exchange, Stalin refused (‘I have no son called Yakov’). He feared all the same that the supposedly feeble Yakov might be pressured into some propagandist exhibition of disloyalty. He need not have so feared. Yakov passed through three concentration camps – Hammelburg, Lubeck, Sachsenhausen – and resisted all intimidation. It was precisely to avoid succumbing (Volkogonov believes) that Yakov made his decisive move. In a German camp, as in a Russian, the surest route to suicide was a run at the barbed wire. Yakov ran. The guard did not miss.”

Stalin's son 2

__________

Pulled from Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million by Martin Amis.

Read on:

  • More from Koba: on how Lenin was childish
  • A. N. Wilson counts up how much the Soviets sacrificed to beat the Nazis
  • Anne Applebaum describes Putin’s connection to the ancien régime

Stalin's children

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Glory’s Moonshine

18 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, War

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Civil War, combat, Fighting, JAmes E. Yeatman, letter, War, William Tecumseh Sherman

William Tecumseh Sherman 2

“No one can deny I have done the State some service in the field, but I have always desired that strife should cease at the earliest possible moment.

I confess, without shame, I am sick and tired of fighting—its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers. You, too, have seen these things, and I know you also are tired of the war, and are willing to let the civil tribunals resume their place. And, so far as I know, all the fighting men of our army want peace; and it is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded and lacerated (friend or foe), that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation. I know the rebels are whipped to death, and I declare before God, as a man and a soldier, I will not strike a foe who stands unarmed and submissive before me, but would rather say—”‘Go, and sin no more.'”

__________

William Tecumseh Sherman, writing in a letter to James E. Yeatman, May 21, 1865.

William Tecumseh Sherman and staff

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Andrew Sullivan: What I Believe

18 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Essay, Freedom, Philosophy

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

America, Andrew Sullivan, Freedom, liberty, Life, morality, Patriotism, Philosophy, political philosophy, The Pursuit of Happiness

Andrew Sullivan 345

“I believe in liberty… I believe in a system of government that places that liberty at the center of its concerns, that enforces the law solely to protect that freedom, that sides with the individual against the claims of family and tribe and church and nation, that sees innocence before guilt and dignity before stigma. I believe in the right to own property, to maintain it against the benign suffocation of a government that would tax more and more of it away. I believe in freedom of speech and of contract, the right to offend and blaspheme, as well as the right to convert and bear witness. I believe that these freedoms are connected — the freedom of the fundamentalist and the atheist, the female and the male, the black and the Asian, the gay and the straight.

I believe in the pursuit of happiness. Not its attainment, nor its final definition, but its pursuit. I believe in the journey, not the arrival; in conversation, not monologues; in multiple questions rather than any single answer. I believe in the struggle to remake ourselves and challenge each other in the spirit of eternal forgiveness, in the awareness that none of us knows for sure what happiness truly is, but each of us knows the imperative to keep searching. I believe in the possibility of surprising joy, of serenity through pain, of homecoming through exile.

And I believe in a country that enshrines each of these three things, a country that promises nothing but the promise of being more fully human, and never guarantees its success. In that constant failure to arrive — implied at the very beginning — lies the possibility of a permanently fresh start, an old newness, a way of revitalizing ourselves and our civilization in ways few foresaw and one day many will forget. But the point is now. And the place is America.”

__________

From Andrew Sullivan’s article “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”.

  • Andrew answers: If you could live in one country, which would you choose?
  • Can we be optimistic about America’s future? (Krauthammer says yes)
  • Reinhold Niebuhr on the role of forgiveness in the good society

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Wallace Stegner: What I Believe

18 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Essay, Philosophy

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

America, belief, Christianity, Classical Virtues, Everything Potent Is Dangeorus, Freedom, Goodness, kindness, morality, Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner

“It is terribly difficult to say honestly, without posing or faking, what one truly and fundamentally believes…

However far I have missed achieving it, I know that moderation is one of the virtues I most believe in. But I believe as well in a whole catalogue of Christian and classical virtues: in kindness and generosity, in steadfastness and courage and much else. I believe further that good depends not on things but on the use we make of things. Everything potent, from human love to atomic energy, is dangerous; it produces ill about as readily as good; it becomes good only through the control, the discipline, the wisdom with which we use it. Much of this control is social, a thing which laws and institutions and uniforms enforce, but much of it must be personal, and I do not see how we can evade the obligation to take full responsibility for what we individually do. Our reward for self-control and the acceptance of private responsibility is not necessarily money or power. Self-respect and the respect of others are quite enough. […]

Man is a great enough creature and a great enough enigma to deserve both our pride and our compassion, and engage our fullest sense of mystery. I shall certainly never do as much with my life as I want to, and I shall sometimes fail miserably to live up to my conscience, whose word I do not distrust even when I can’t obey it. But I am terribly glad to be alive; and when I have wit enough to think about it, terribly proud to be a man and an American, with all the rights and privileges that those words connote; and most of all I am humble before the responsibilities that are also mine. For no right comes without a responsibility, and being born luckier than most of the world’s millions, I am also born more obligated.”

__________

Excerpted from Wallace Stegner’s essay “Everything Potent Is Dangerous”.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

John Updike: What I Believe

17 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, Philosophy

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

American Government, belief, Christianity, Freedom, John Updike, religion, Testing the Limits of What I Think and Feel

John Updike 2

“A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day. At the age of 73, I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing…

I also believe, instinctively, if not very cogently, in the American political experiment, which I take to be, at bottom, a matter of trusting the citizens to know their own minds and best interests. ‘To govern with the consent of the governed’: this spells the ideal. And though the implementation will inevitably be approximate and debatable, and though totalitarianism or technocratic government can obtain some swift successes, in the end, only a democracy can enlist a people’s energies on a sustained and renewable basis. To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures — if not happiness — its hopeful pursuit.

Cosmically, I seem to be of two minds. The power of materialist science to explain everything — from the behavior of the galaxies to that of molecules, atoms and their sub-microscopic components — seems to be inarguable and the principal glory of the modern mind. On the other hand, the reality of subjective sensations, desires and — may we even say — illusions, composes the basic substance of our existence, and religion alone, in its many forms, attempts to address, organize and placate these. I believe, then, that religious faith will continue to be an essential part of being human, as it has been for me.”

__________

Excerpted from John Updike’s short article “Testing the Limits of What I Think and Feel”.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...
← Older posts

Today’s Top Pages

  • Einstein's Daily Routine
    Einstein's Daily Routine
  • "Every Day" by Tom Clark
    "Every Day" by Tom Clark
  • "Provide, Provide" by Robert Frost
    "Provide, Provide" by Robert Frost
  • "Immortality Ode" by William Wordsworth
    "Immortality Ode" by William Wordsworth
  • "Coming" by Philip Larkin
    "Coming" by Philip Larkin

Enter your email address to follow The Bully Pulpit - you'll receive notifications of new posts sent directly to your inbox.

Recent Posts

  • The Other Side of Feynman
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald on Succeeding Early in Life
  • The Man Who Most Believed in Himself
  • What ’60s Colleges Did Right
  • Dostoyevsky’s Example of a Good Kid

Archives

  • April 2018 (2)
  • March 2018 (2)
  • February 2018 (3)
  • January 2018 (3)
  • December 2017 (1)
  • November 2017 (3)
  • October 2017 (2)
  • September 2017 (2)
  • August 2017 (1)
  • July 2017 (2)
  • June 2017 (2)
  • May 2017 (2)
  • April 2017 (2)
  • March 2017 (1)
  • February 2017 (1)
  • January 2017 (1)
  • December 2016 (2)
  • November 2016 (1)
  • October 2016 (1)
  • September 2016 (1)
  • August 2016 (4)
  • July 2016 (1)
  • June 2016 (2)
  • May 2016 (1)
  • April 2016 (1)
  • March 2016 (2)
  • February 2016 (1)
  • January 2016 (4)
  • December 2015 (4)
  • November 2015 (8)
  • October 2015 (7)
  • September 2015 (11)
  • August 2015 (10)
  • July 2015 (7)
  • June 2015 (12)
  • May 2015 (7)
  • April 2015 (17)
  • March 2015 (23)
  • February 2015 (17)
  • January 2015 (22)
  • December 2014 (5)
  • November 2014 (17)
  • October 2014 (13)
  • September 2014 (9)
  • August 2014 (2)
  • July 2014 (1)
  • June 2014 (20)
  • May 2014 (17)
  • April 2014 (24)
  • March 2014 (19)
  • February 2014 (12)
  • January 2014 (21)
  • December 2013 (13)
  • November 2013 (15)
  • October 2013 (9)
  • September 2013 (10)
  • August 2013 (17)
  • July 2013 (28)
  • June 2013 (28)
  • May 2013 (23)
  • April 2013 (22)
  • March 2013 (12)
  • February 2013 (21)
  • January 2013 (21)
  • December 2012 (9)
  • November 2012 (18)
  • October 2012 (22)
  • September 2012 (28)

Categories

  • Biography (51)
  • Current Events (47)
  • Debate (7)
  • Essay (10)
  • Film (10)
  • Freedom (40)
  • History (122)
  • Humor (15)
  • Interview (71)
  • Journalism (16)
  • Literature (82)
  • Music (1)
  • Original (1)
  • Personal (3)
  • Philosophy (87)
  • Photography (4)
  • Poetry (114)
  • Political Philosophy (41)
  • Politics (108)
  • Psychology (35)
  • Religion (74)
  • Science (27)
  • Speeches (52)
  • Sports (12)
  • War (57)
  • Writing (11)

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel

 
Loading Comments...
Comment
    ×
    loading Cancel
    Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
    Email check failed, please try again
    Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
    Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
    To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
    %d bloggers like this: