Jefferson and the Bible

29 Friday May 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Politics, Religion

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Agnosticism, American Founding, American History, American Revolution, Biography, Christianity, church, doubt, Faith, founding fathers, memoir, religion, Reminiscences of Distinguished Men, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson's Religion, Was Thomas Jefferson a Christian?, William Slaughter

“Mr. Jefferson was a public professor of his belief in the Christian religion. In all his most important early State papers… there are more or less pointed recognitions of God and Providence. In his two inaugural addresses as president of the United States, and in many of his annual messages, he makes the same recognitions… declares his belief in the efficacy of prayer, and the duty of ascriptions of praise of the Author of all mercies; and speaks of the Christian religion as professed in his country as a benign religion, evincing the favor of Heaven. Had his wishes been consulted, the symbol borne on our national seal would have contained our public profession of Christianity as a nation. There is nothing in his writings or in the history of his life to show that his public declarations were insincere, or thrown out for mere effect. On the contrary, his most confidential writings sustain his public professions, and advance beyond them into the avowal of a belief in a future state of rewards and punishments…

From his second Inaugural Message, December 15th, 1802: ‘When we assemble together, fellow citizens, to consider the state of our beloved country, our just attentions are first drawn to those pleasing circumstances which mark the goodness of that Being from whose favor they flow, and the large measure of thankfulness we owe for His bounty. Another year has come around and finds us still blessed with peace and friendship abroad; law, order, and religion, at home.’

From his third annual message, October 17th, 1803: ‘While we regret the miseries in which we see others involved, let us bow with gratitude to that kind Providence, which, inspiring with wisdom and moderation our late legislative counsels while placed under the urgency of the greatest wrongs, guarded us from hastily entering into the sanguinary contest, and left us only to look on and to pity its ravages.’

He contributed freely to the erection of Christian churches, gave money to Bible Societies and other religious objects, and was a liberal and regular contributor to the support of the clergy. Letters of his are extant which show him urging, with respectful delicacy, the acceptance of extra and unsolicited contributions on the pastor of his parish, on occasions of extra expense to the latter, such as the building of a house, the meeting of an ecclesiastical convention at Charlottesville, etc. He attended church with as much regularity as most of the members of the congregation — sometimes going alone on horseback, when his family remained at home. He generally attended the Episcopal Church, and when he did so, always carried his prayer book and joined in the responses and prayers of the congregation. He was baptized into the Episcopal Church in his infancy; he was married by one of its clergymen; his wife lived and died a member of it; his children were baptized into it, and when married were
married according to its rites; its burial services were read over those of them who preceded him to the grave, over his wife, and finally over himself. No person ever heard him utter a word of profanity, and those who met him most familiarly through periods of acquaintance that they never heard a word of impiety, or any scoff at extending from two or three to twenty or thirty years, declare religion from his lips. Among his numerous familiar acquaintances, we have not found one whose testimony is different, or who entertained any doubts of the strict justice, sincerity, truthfulness and exemplariness of his personal character.”

__________

Pulled from the Jefferson chapter of William Slaughter’s 1878 book Reminiscences of Distinguished Men.

I’m sorry for the recent hiatus. I’ve been really busy with real business.

In a letter to his eldest daughter, Jefferson cited his personal declaration of faith, which he made in the following letter to his friend, Benjamin Rush, on April 21st, 1803:

Dear Sir:

In some of the delightful conversations with you, in the evenings of 1798-99, and which served as an anodyne to the afflictions of the crisis through which our country was then laboring, the Christian religion was sometimes our topic; and I then promised you, that one day or other, I would give you my views of it. They are the result of a life of inquiry and reflection, and very different from that anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions. To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus Himself. I am a Christian in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others.

To this rather elastic, New Testament self-definition of Christian, it’s worth adding that Jefferson — who spent a good chunk of his retirement splicing his own, naturalistic version of the Gospels — was found to have hand-written the entirety of Psalm 15 on the inside cover of the prayer book mentioned by Slaughter.

As a small additional note: in 1776, at the Second Continental Congress, Jefferson was appointed along with Franklin and Adams to the committee to design a national seal. Adams suggested Hercules as the seal’s central figure. Franklin recommended Moses standing atop the Red Sea. Jefferson sided with Franklin, but also wanted it to include Pharaoh and Hengist and Horsa, the Germanic brothers who led the Anglo-Saxons in their fifth-century conquest of Britain.

Read on:

Mr. Jefferson, Would You Live Your Life over Again?

20 Saturday Dec 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

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grief, hope, John Adams, letter, Optimism, Thomas Jefferson

“You ask if I would agree to live my 70, or rather 73, years over again? To which I say Yea. I think with you that it is a good world on the whole, that it has been framed on a principle of benevolence, and more pleasure than pain dealt out to us.

There are indeed (who might say Nay) gloomy and hypochondriac minds, inhabitants of diseased bodies, disgusted with the present, and despairing of the future; always counting that the worst will happen, because it may happen. To these I say: How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened?

My temperament is sanguine. I steer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern. My hopes indeed sometimes fail; but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy. There are, I acknowledge, even in the happiest life, some terrible convulsions, heavy set-offs against the opposite page of the account. I have often wondered for what good end the sensations of Grief could be intended. All our other passions, within proper bounds, have a useful object… I wish the pathologists then would tell us what is the use of grief in the economy, and of what good it is the cause, proximate or remote.”

__________

Thomas Jefferson, writing in a letter to John Adams on April 8th, 1816, which you’ll find along with other gems in The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence.

Meet Thomas Jefferson
David Brooks and Jon Meacham discuss Jefferson, Hamilton, and the art of politics
Jefferson and Hamilton duke it out over the national debt

Jefferson on Taking Life as It Comes

05 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

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fate, General Philosophy, grief, Jefferson, John Page, letter, Life, Thomas Jefferson

“The most fortunate of us, in our journey through life, frequently meet with calamities and misfortunes which may greatly afflict us; and, to fortify our minds against the attacks of these calamities and misfortunes, should be one of the principal studies and endeavours of our lives. The only method of doing this is to assume a perfect resignation to the Divine will, to consider that whatever does happen, must happen; and that by our uneasiness, we cannot prevent the blow before it does fall, but we may add to its force after it has fallen.

These considerations, and others such as these, may enable us in some measure to surmount the difficulties thrown in our way; to bear up with a tolerable degree of patience under this burthen of life; and to proceed with a pious and unshaken resignation, till we arrive at our journey’s end, when we may deliver up our trust into the hands of him who gave it, and receive such reward as to him shall seem proportioned to our merit. Such, dear Page, will be the language of the man who considers his situation in this life, and such should be the language of every man who would wish to render that situation as easy as the nature of it will admit. Few things will disturb him at all: nothing will disturb him much.”

__________

Thomas Jefferson, writing in a letter to his friend John Page on July 15th, 1763.

Jefferson would’ve been twenty when he jotted this down.

What to be Wary of in Your Government

04 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Politics

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American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American History, American Philosophical Society, American Revolution, Christopher Hitchens, founding, founding fathers, Government, James Bowdoin, James Warren, John Adams, John Hancock, letter, politics, Thomas Jefferson

“The management of so complicated and mighty a machine, as the United Colonies, requires the meekness of Moses, the patience of Job and the wisdom of Solomon, added to the valour of Daniel…

We may feel sanguine confidence of our strength: yet in a few years it may be put to the tryal.

We may please ourselves with the prospect of free and popular governments. But there is great danger, that those governments will not make us happy. God grant they may. But I fear, that in every assembly, members will obtain an influence, by noise not sense. By meanness, not greatness. By ignorance not learning. By contracted hearts not large souls. I fear too, that it will be impossible to convince and perswade People to establish wise regulations.

There is one thing, my dear sir, that must be attempted and most sacredly observed or we are all undone. There must be a decency, and respect… introduced for persons in authority, of every rank, or we are undone. In a popular Government, this is the only way of supporting order—and in our circumstances, as our People have been so long without any Government at all, it is more necessary than, in any other.”

__________

John Adams, writing to his friend and Paymaster General of the Continental Army, James Warren, on April 22nd, 1776.

It’s critical to keep in mind exactly what Adams and the founders meant by “happy” in the context of writing about government and law. As Robert P. George recently clarified:

The term “happiness” in the 18th century—and, in fact, until quite recently—did not refer simply to a pleasing or desirable psychological state—one that might be induced by virtue, vice, or, for that matter, some pharmacological product. It included the idea of flourishing or all round well-being, which necessarily was understood to involve virtue. (As in “happy the man who walks the path of justice.”) In other words, it was a morally inflected locution.

Exactly two decades following the delivery of this letter, Adams himself would be elected to the Presidency. Commenting on that event, Christopher Hitchens noted, “It is perhaps both heartening and sobering to reflect that, in the contest between Jefferson and Adams in 1796, the electors were offered a choice between the President of the American Philosophical Society and the founder of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and chose both of them.” Jefferson was President of the APS in 1780 (Benjamin Franklin had founded the society in 1743), and John Adams founded the AAAS with John Hancock and James Bowdoin during the American Revolution. In the election of 1796, Adams carried 71 electoral votes to become President, barely edging Jefferson’s 68.

More Adams:

Meet John Adams
My favorite Adams letter: to his wife, on his self-esteem
Adams’s spot on prediction of how we’d celebrate the Fourth of July

Gore Vidal: What ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ Means Today

19 Monday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, Politics, Speeches

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American Founding, American History, Bill of Rights, Conservativism, Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Federalist Papers, Freedom, Gore Vidal, Government, Law, liberty, Life, Patriarchy, political philosophy, politics, Pursuit of Happiness, Speeches, State of the Union, The Nation, Thomas Jefferson, tyranny

“We would together constitute a new nation, founded upon ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ The first two foundation stones were familiar, if vague… ‘The pursuit of happiness’ is the real Joker in the deck. To this day, no one is sure just what Jefferson meant. But I suppose what he had in mind was that government will leave each citizen alone, to develop as best he can in a tranquil climate, to achieve whatever it is that his heart desires, with a minimum of distress to the other pursuers of happiness. This was a revolutionary concept in 1776, and it still is…

Although the Founding Fathers were, to a man, natural conservatives, there were enough Jeffersonian-minded pursuers of happiness among them to realize that so lawyerly a Republic would probably act as a straight jacket to those of an energetic nature. So to ensure the rights of each to pursue happiness, the Bill of Rights was attached to the Constitution. In theory, henceforward, no one need fear the tyranny of either the state or of the majority. Certain of our rights, like the freedom of speech, were said to be inalienable.

But some like to remind us that the right to privacy cannot be found anywhere in the pages of the Constitution, or even in the Federalist Papers… We are told that since the Constitution nowhere says that a citizen has the right to have sex with another citizen, or to take drugs, or to OD on cigarettes — or, as the nation is now doing, on sugar — that the Founders therefore did not license them to do any of these things that may be proscribed by the prejudices of a local majority. But this is an invitation to tyranny…

Was the United States meant to be a patriarchal society? I think the answer is no. Was the United States meant to be a monotheistic society, Christian or otherwise? The answer is no. Religion may be freely practiced here, but religion was deliberately excluded from the political arrangements of our republic…

Each year it is discovered with some alarm that American high school students, when confronted anonymously by the Bill of Rights, neither like it nor approve of it. Our society has made them into true patriots — but not of the idea of a free society, but of a stern patriarchy, where the police have every right to arrest you for just about anything that the state disapproves of. To me the tragedy of the United States in this century is not the crack up of an empire we never knew what to do with in the first place; but the collapse of the idea of the citizen as someone autonomous, whose private life is not subject to orders from above.”

__________

From Gore Vidal’s speech at The Nation’s 125th Anniversary in 1990.

As typically is the case with Vidal, the combination of his intelligence and charm — conveyed as they are in his patrician, cisatlantic tones — masks a scattering of sins of hyperbole and historical judgement. I nevertheless recommend the speech below, and have listened to it twice now — not because of it’s heavy scholarship, but because it’s as heady and sardonic a piece of political theater as you’ll find.

Read on:

Vidal’s hilarious, prophetic rebuttal to Bush’s second inaugural
Reader of this site Dr. Robert P. George debates Krauthammer on the founders’ views of human nature
The greatest debate of all time: Hitchens grapples with Galloway on Iraq

The Incredible Rise of Alexander Hamilton

29 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

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Alexander Hamilton, American History, American Revolution, Biography, Childhood, David Brooks, Elizabeth Schuyler, founding fathers, history, James Hamilton, Jon Meacham, Jr., politics, Ron Chernow, Thomas Jefferson, United States History

“Let us pause briefly to tally the grim catalog of disasters that had befallen these two boys between 1765 and 1769: their father had vanished, their mother had died, their cousin and supposed protector had committed bloody suicide, and their aunt, uncle, and grandmother had all died. James, sixteen, and Alexander, fourteen, were now left alone, largely friendless and penniless. At every step in their rootless, topsy-turvy existence, they had been surrounded by failed, broken, embittered people. Their short lives had been shadowed by a stupefying sequence of bankruptcies, marital separations, deaths, scandals, and disinheritance. Such repeated shocks must have stripped Alexander Hamilton of any sense that life was fair, that he existed in a benign universe, or that he could ever count on help from anyone. That this abominable childhood produced such a strong, productive, self-reliant human being — that this fatherless adolescent could have ended up a founding father of a country he had not yet even seen — seems little short of miraculous. Because he maintained perfect silence about his unspeakable past, never exploiting it to puff his later success, it was impossible for his contemporaries to comprehend the exceptional nature of his personal triumph. What we know of Hamilton’s childhood has been learned almost entirely during the past century.”

__________

From Ron Chernow’s biography Alexander Hamilton.

To make matters worse, and add yet another card to a deck already stacked against him, young Alexander was simultaneously struck with the same fever which eventually took his mother, and was therefore too delirious to even say farewell. Because the family had only a single bed, Chernow notes, Alexander was “probably writhing inches from his mother when she expired.”

The fact that Hamilton overcame these enormous setbacks to quickly rise to political prominence — not to mention emotional normalcy — is a testament to the singularity of both his intelligence and his resilience. What’s more, as one often senses in accounts of the Founders, not only was he a luminous statesman, but he also emerges from the page as, well, a pretty cool guy, with a personality somehow more endearingly human and three-dimensional than many in Washington today. I’ve already posted some about Hamilton the bachelor, to which Chernow adds a priceless anecdote:

Hamilton, twenty-five, was instantly smitten with Schuyler, twenty-two. Fellow aide Tench Tilghman reported: ‘Hamilton is a gone man.’ Pretty soon, Hamilton was a constant visitor at the two-story Campfield residence, spending every evening there. Everyone noticed that the young colonel was starry-eyed and distracted. Although a touch absentminded, Hamilton ordinarily had a faultless memory, but, returning from Schuyler one night, he forgot the password and was barred by the sentinel…

For those interested in reading more about Hamilton, I recommend Chernow’s book (which is lengthy yet well paced), but not before you watch the fantastic exchange between Jon Meacham and David Brooks about the competing political visions and personalities of Hamilton and his rival Thomas Jefferson. In this discussion, Meacham takes the side of the subject of his biography, as Brooks, a traditional conservative, defends Hamilton. The following remarks from Brooks are highlights of the discussion and supplement the words above:

I’m going to get the dates wrong, but you’ll get the idea.

So when Hamilton was thirteen, his mom died in the bed next to him. He was adopted by his uncle who died — who committed suicide — then he was adopted by his grandparents who died within a year. So by fourteen he’d lost everybody he ever loved except for his brother. A court came in and took away his property. So at fourteen he essentially had nothing. By twenty-five he is George Washington’s Chief of Staff and a war hero. By thirty-five he’s been the author of The Federalist Papers and is one of the top lawyers in New York. By forty or forty-five he has retired as the most successful treasury secretary in U.S. history.

And so he is a story of intense upward mobility. And his philosophy was to create a system of government which would allow poor boys and girls like him to succeed.

Read on:

Alexander Hamilton the bachelor identifies what he likes in a girl
David Brooks and Jon Meacham discuss Jefferson, Hamilton, and the ‘art of power’
Jefferson and Hamilton duke it out over the national debt

Jefferson’s Ten Rules

14 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

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Advice, American History, Counsel, Epictetus, grandfather, grandson, happiness, Jefferson's Ten Rules, John Spear Smith, Julian Boyd, letter, Monticello, Patience, Philosophy, Ten Commandments, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson Smith, Thrift, Wisdom, Work

To Thomas Jefferson Smith.
Monticello, February 21, 1825.

This letter will, to you, be as one from the dead. The writer will be in the grave before you can weigh its counsels. Your affectionate and excellent father has requested that I would address to you something which might possibly have a favorable influence on the course of life you have to run, and I too, as a namesake, feel an interest in that course. Few words will be necessary, with good dispositions on your part. Adore God. Reverence and cherish your parents. Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself. Be just. Be true. Murmur not at the ways of Providence. So shall the life into which you have entered, be the portal to one of eternal and ineffable bliss. And if to the dead it is permitted to care for the things of this world, every action of your life will be under my regard. Farewell. […]

A Decalogue of Canons for observation in practical life.

1. Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day.

2. Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.

3. Never spend your money before you have it.

4. Never buy what you do not want, because it is cheap; it will be dear to you.

5. Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst and cold.

6. We never repent of having eaten too little.

7. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly.

8. How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened.

9. Take things always by their smooth handle.

10. When angry, count ten, before you speak; if very angry, an hundred.

__________

A Letter written by Thomas Jefferson to his friend John Spear Smith, on behalf of Smith’s son and namesake, Thomas Jefferson Smith. Jefferson, who was born 271 years ago yesterday, was 81 when he wrote this letter.

The Monticello website has an extended discussion of the meaning of rule #9, about which there has been considerable speculation. It ties into last week’s post concerning the Ayaan Hirsi Ali-Brandeis affair:

Jefferson’s intended meaning is the subject of some debate. Julian Boyd wrote an article on this in 1957, “The Smooth Handle: A Challenge to the Organization Man.” Boyd believed that this statement embodied how Jefferson thought citizens of a republic should behave, and was descended from a similar saying by Epictetus, “Everything has two handles, one by which it can be borne; another by which it cannot.” While debate was essential to a healthy republic, Boyd argued, Jefferson believed strongly that the exchange of ideas must always be civil, and he expressed this belief in his advice to “take things always by their smooth handle.”

This is only one interpretation, however, and without an explicit explanation from Jefferson himself, each reader is free to interpret it as they will.

More Jefferson:

Meet Thomas Jefferson
Meet Thomas Jefferson’s father
David Brooks and Jon Meacham have an entertaining discussion about Jefferson and his brilliant political rival Alexander Hamilton

Three Words Ben Franklin Crossed out of the Declaration of Independence

08 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Political Philosophy, Politics

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American History, Ben Franklin, David Hume, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Government, Hume's Fork, John Locke, politics, The Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, Walter Isaacson

“Franklin made only a few changes, some of which can be viewed written in his own hand on what Jefferson referred to as the ‘rough draft’ of the Declaration. (This remarkable document is at the Library of Congress and on its Web site.) The most important of his edits was small but resounding. He crossed out, using the heavy backslashes that he often employed, the last three words of Jefferson’s phrase ‘We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable’ and changed them to the words now enshrined in history: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident.’

The idea of ‘self-evident’ truths was one that drew less on John Locke, who was Jefferson’s favored philosopher, than on the scientific determinism espoused by Isaac Newton and on the analytic empiricism of Franklin’s close friend David Hume. In what became known as ‘Hume’s fork,’ the great Scottish philosopher, along with Leibniz and others, had developed a theory that distinguished between synthetic truths that describe matters of fact (such as ‘London is bigger than Philadelphia’) and analytic truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition (‘The angles of a triangle equal 180 degrees’; ‘All bachelors are unmarried’). By using the word ‘sacred,’ Jefferson had asserted, intentionally or not, that the principle in question—the equality of men and their endowment by their creator with inalienable rights—was an assertion of religion. Franklin’s edit turned it instead into an assertion of rationality.”

__________

From Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson.

In a later point in the book, Isaacson recounts a moment when, during the Constitutional Convention, the elder statesman Franklin established a metaphor for political compromise which our current Congress would do well to keep in mind:

Then he gently emphasized, in a homespun analogy that drew on his affection for craftsmen and construction, the importance of compromise: ‘When a broad table is to be made, and the edges of planks do not fit, the artist takes a little from both, and makes a good joint. In like manner here, both sides must part with some of their demands.’

Below: the rough draft of the Declaration

The Sovereign Subject: Adams, Jefferson, and Krauthammer on Why They Studied Politics

03 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Politics

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Abigail Adams, and Politics, Charles Krauthammer, Collected Wisdom, Government, history, John Adams, Jon Meacham, letter, Pastimes, politics, Public Service, Things that Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“The science of government it is my duty to study… I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”

John Adams, writing to his wife, Abigail Adams, in a letter sent from Paris on May 12th, 1780.

“Jefferson hungered for greatness, and the drama of his age provided him a stage which he never really left. Writing his William and Mary schoolmate and Revolutionary colleague John Page in 1803 — Page was governor of Virginia, Jefferson president of the United States — Jefferson said: ‘We have both been drawn from our natural passion for study and tranquility, by times which took from us the freedom of choice: times however which, planting a new world with the seeds of just government, will produce a remarkable era in the history of mankind. It was incumbent on those therefore who fell into them, to give up every favorite pursuit, and lay their shoulder to the work of the day.’

In his retirement at Monticello, he looked back over the years, through the haze of war and struggle and peril, and knew that he had done his duty…”

Jon Meacham, describing Thomas Jefferson in the introduction of his new biography Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power.

“[P]erhaps most eccentric of all, I left a life in medicine for a life in journalism devoted mostly to politics, while firmly believing that what really matters, what moves the spirit, what elevates the mind, what fires the imagination, what makes us fully human are all of these endeavors, disciplines, confusions and amusements that lie outside politics…

While science, medicine, art, poetry, architecture, chess, space, sports, number theory and all things hard and beautiful promise purity, elegance and sometimes even transcendence, they are fundamentally subordinate. In the end, they must bow to the sovereignty of politics.

Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything—high and low and, most especially, high—lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933.”

Charles Krauthammer, reflecting on the relevance of his career choice in the introduction of his new collection, Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics.

__________

I’ve thrown together similar collections of words from a variety of luminaries on a single topic. (As always, if you’ve got any additional references that would fit into these posts, don’t hesitate to send them in.)

Marching (with Steinbeck, Orwell, and Einstein)

2+2 (with Camus, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Rand, and Göring)

Science as Child’s Play (with Einstein, Newton, and Sagan)

The Existence of God (with Updike, Flew, Lewis, and Wittgenstein)

Gore Vidal’s Hilarious, Prophetic Rebuttal to Bush’s Second Inaugural

28 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Interview, Politics, War

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Afghanistan war, American History, Amy Goodman, Athens, Babylon, democracy, Democracy Now, DemocracyNow, Dick Cheney, Dreaming War: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia, foreign policy, founding fathers, George W. Bush, George W. Bush's Second Inaugural Address, George Washington, Gore Vidal, Imperialism, Iraq War, James Madison, John Quincey Adams, Occupation, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Sparta, The Constitution, Thomas Jefferson, tyranny, War

President George W. Bush, speaking at his second inauguration: “America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal, instead, is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way. The great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations. The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it. America’s influence is not unlimited; but fortunately for the oppressed, America’s influence is considerable, and we will use it confidently in freedom’s cause…”

Interviewer: Gore Vidal, your response to these words?

Gore Vidal: Well, I hardly know where to end, much less begin. There’s not a word of truth in anything that he said. Our founding fathers did not set us on a course to liberate the world from tyranny. Jefferson just said, “all men are created equal, and should be free,” et cetera, but it was not the task of the United States to “go abroad to slay dragons,” as John Quincy Adams so wisely put it; because if the United States does go abroad to slay dragons in the name of freedom, liberty, and so on, she could become “dictatress of the world,” and in the process “She would lose her soul.” That is the lesson we should be learning now, instead of this declaration of war against the entire globe.

He doesn’t define what tyranny is. I’d say what we have now in the United States is working up a nice tyrannical persona for itself and for us. As we lose liberties he’s, I guess, handing them out to other countries which have not asked for them. That’s the reaction in Europe — and I know we mustn’t mention them because they’re immoral and they have all those different kinds of cheese — but, simultaneously, they’re much better educated than we are, and they’re richer. Get that out there: The Europeans per capita are richer than Americans, per capita. And by the time this administration is finished, there won’t be any money left of any kind…

And none of this we heard about in the last election. We were too busy with homosexual marriage and abortion: two really riveting subjects. War and peace, of course, are not worth talking about. And civilization, God forbid that we ever commit ourselves to that…

__________

A selection from Gore Vidal’s critiques of President Bush’s Second Inaugural Address, which were recorded this week in 2005.

I’ve uploaded a recording of the rest of Vidal’s brilliant, biting response below. It’s relevant and worth a watch even today.

As we now watch President Obama deliver this year’s State of the Union, almost 9 long years to the day since Bush uttered those words, it’s worth reflecting on how little has changed.

The War in Afghanistan, with it’s unprecedented 82% disapproval rate, is almost as unpopular as the Congress which kind of, sort of, almost authorized it. Still, we’re spending about $400 million there each day. Meanwhile, as I walk a block from my downtown apartment in America’s beautiful capital city, I see schools moldering and potholes flecking every street. (That 400,000,000, by the way, does not include the additional $130 million which we are daily funneling into Iraq, nor does it account for the $5.5 to $8.4 billion which we will spend annually to care for our veterans from both wars over the next three, four, five decades.)

Our Constitutional liberties remain largely ignored (much less restored) by a burgeoning surveillance state which, a decade later, is yet to make a single arrest that has prevented a terrorist attack. There are now over a million names on our terrorist watch list: a hay stack that, as it distends, obscures the few needles hiding inside it. Correspondingly, a million people now hold “top secret clearance” to access classified government information — a label fit for the gruesome world of Winston Smith and farcical enough for Peter Sellers or the President of Faber College. It took one in a million — Mr. Edward Snowden — to finally reveal what this unelected, unmonitored, and undomesticated appendage of the federal government was doing with our money and to us and our allies (in Brazil, in Germany, in South Korea), but he, like other whistle-blowers under this administration, was hardly honored for that act of conscience. While his stand has produced some valuable backlash against these security developments, the direction of their momentum remains unchanged; as the surveillance state becomes more opaque to us, we become more transparent to it.

Of course tonight’s pageantry is amounting to little more than a string of platitudes, but nevertheless, it is worth hoping that the coming days will reflect a glimmer of the promise that we are turning away from the imperial and the tyrannical, and turning towards Constitutionality at home and diplomacy abroad.

Meet Thomas Jefferson’s Father

22 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, History

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American History, Biography, Dan Zevin, family, fatherhood, history, Jon Meacham, Mark Twain, Patriarch, Peter Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“He was the kind of man people noticed. An imposing, prosperous, well-liked farmer known for his feats of strength and his capacity for endurance in the wilderness, Peter Jefferson had amassed large tracts of land and scores of slaves in and around what became Albemarle County, Virginia. There, along the Rivanna, he built Shadwell, named after the London parish where his wife, Jane, had been baptized.

The first half of the eighteenth century was a thrilling time to be young, white, male, wealthy, and Virginian. Money was to be made, property to be claimed, tobacco to be planted and sold…

As a surveyor and a planter, Peter Jefferson thrived there, and his eldest son, Thomas, born on April 13, 1743, understood his father was a man other men admired. Celebrated for his courage, Peter Jefferson excelled at riding and hunting. His son recalled that the father once singlehandedly pulled down a wooden shed that had stood impervious to the exertions of three slaves who had been ordered to destroy the building… The father’s standing mattered greatly to the son, who remembered him in a superlative and sentimental light…

Jefferson was taught by his father and mother, and later by his teachers and mentors, that a gentleman owed service to his family, to his neighborhood, to his county, to his colony, and to his king. An eldest son in the Virginia of his time grew up expecting to lead—and to be followed. Thomas Jefferson came of age with the confidence that controlling the destinies of others was the most natural thing in the world. He was born for command. He never knew anything else.

Thomas Jefferson grew up with an image—and, until Peter Jefferson’s death when his son was fourteen, the reality—of a father who was powerful, who could do things other men could not, and who, through the force of his will or of his muscles or of both at once, could tangibly transform the world around him. Surveyors defined new worlds; explorers conquered the unknown; mapmakers brought form to the formless. Peter Jefferson was all three and thus claimed a central place in the imagination of his son, who admired his father’s strength and spent a lifetime recounting tales of the older man’s daring. Thomas Jefferson, a great-granddaughter said, ‘never wearied of dwelling with all the pride of filial devotion and admiration on the noble traits’ of his father’s character. The father had shaped the ways other men lived. The son did all he could to play the same role in the lives of others.”

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From Jon Meacham’s Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power.

Today marks the birthday of my dad, a reader of this blog and the guy I thought about as I first flipped through these pages.

Now on the quotes page:

“Lately all my friends are worried that they’re turning into their fathers. I’m worried that I’m not.” – Dan Zevin

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” – Mark Twain

In case you don’t come here often, there’s more Jefferson-related stuff to see.