Pedestrian Attempt

 [Dear 1971 Driftwood editor: Please consider the following for publication. Even though it is 50 years late, I think your readers might still enjoy it. It is an essay. "Essay" comes from the French word "try." I'm still trying, as hopefully most of your readers are. Also please note it includes a single but very judicious use of the "f" word, but hey: I made a button with the word on it that my diary tells me I wore to school on Nov. 4, 1970, which was very injudicious. Somehow I didn't get kicked out. So maybe judiciousness improves with age.]

It hurts to walk. It's my feet. Earlier in the summer an apparent combination of new footwear and high trail mileage caused burning knots on the balls of my feet. I've since found ways to deal with it, and it seems to be fading (I've had plantar fasciitis before; it went away). The condition has a name: metatarsalgia. The metatarsals are the bones in the feet behind the toes. "Algia" is the familiar medical suffix for "pain": neuralgia, fibromyalgia.

And nostalgia. Hm. What is painful about nostalgia? Until now, my understanding of nostalgia ran along the lines of contemporary definitions that cast it as a lightweight, whimsical yearning for some halcyon time in the past when things -- seen through the optics of the present -- appear to be happier, simpler, better. Trappings of the time past form the basis for fetishistic revivals (listening to In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, say, while wearing paisley bellbottoms, etc.) that amuse the reminiscing elders and puzzled youth alike. However, older definitions of nostalgia, like the one in the Oxford English Dictionary, consider it to be a severe form of homesickness that could cause total breakdowns and even suicide. It turned out that "you can't go home again" could have a steep downside. There was definitely real pain involved; nostalgia was not to be taken lightly.

Opening that door onto the word invites a reconsideration. Edward Francisco's poem "Christmas Eve 2017" invokes, by its title, the supreme example of contemporary, sugar-plum nostalgia. But you won't find that here, as Francisco recounts unblinkingly the private moment he shared with his dying grandson as the clock ticked toward the Christmas-bringing midnight. It is understood that it would be the last such moment for the young man. Francisco's grandson says "To him/being dead/is knowing this/is his last Christmas/with familiar strangers/who can't love him enough/to save him." If that doesn't cause your heart the deepest pain, you are heartless. It amazes me that Francisco summons the courage (which word comes from the French "coeur," meaning "heart") to confront this moment with words. I don't think I could.

Out of it, though, comes a kind of Christmas present from the grandson -- and I mean a Christmas present to me, an absolute, total stranger reading the words of his grandfather years later and miles away. It is this sentiment: "What he says he'll miss most," Francisco writes, "is the chance to make/mistakes he won't live/to regret." Here is another amazement: this self-mocking humor, wise not so much beyond his years as full of them, truncated as they must be, presented to you, unbidden, transformed into a box of dark nostalgia. "Here, have some mistakes you lived to regret!"

Regret: like nostalgia, a word whose meaning we've watered down. Originally Scots, it signified a much more acute emotion, something to be expressed through lamentation, meaning keening and wailing. Not much of that going on these days! Even lite, though, it's a pretty chewy thing, regret. It has an aftertaste that doesn't permit forgetfulness. Even forgiveness doesn't wash it away. It works a number on nostalgia, too, meaning it forces you to re-visit whole series of events you'd really like to avoid. Our response? We try to dodge it with a coping mechanism: applying the knowledge you now have to situations you can never have again.

Regrets? I have them in spades. So I'm going to dodge away. The knowledge I now have is "Fuck you, Yoda. There is too such a thing as try." There is such a thing as try, try again. There is such a thing as keeping on trying. There is such a thing as getting back up after you've been knocked down, in order to go on trying. Jack in the Jack Tales (as I'm reminded when I read to grand-daughters) does it all the time. If you want still more authority than Jack, Yoda, there's Deuteronomy 4:29, where there is "seeking with all they heart and with all thy soul," which sounds a lot like trying to me.

(BTW that box of dark nostalgia has other flavors as well. One of them is wrapped in gold foil and the diagram on the back of the box identifies it as "WTF." It's a right time/wrong place kind of memory: you did the best you could, and actually did something well, but boy was it a disaster. And it has since become the juiciest scab you would ever want to pick, and pick at it you do, because it has all the allure and charisma of disaster. In this case I was at Northside Jr. High; for an Easter week school assembly, my 8th-grade-still-boy-soprano-self sang a solo from Mendelssohn's Elijah that used for its text Deuteronomy 4:29; as soon as I opened my mouth and bestowed my dulcet tones upon the audience, said audience exploded in derisive laughter. My diary simply says the solo went "fairly well;" hindsight says The Sopranos could've gained a cut-rate hit man -- er, boy -- then and there.)  

So then, "trying" being a thing, among the things I wish I'd given more "try" to -- back then -- are piano, French, and running. I did eventually give plenty of "try" to harmonica, dulcimer, and bagpipes, and the results have been good enough to smear in Yoda's ears. But it also turns out that even lackluster trying and eventual failure can have a silver lining. And when I say "failure," I mean "failure."

It was my sophomore year in high school. Never having participated in organized sports, but wanting to try because I enjoyed playing most of them for fun, I took my fun-having self to the practice field a quarter mile down at the bottom of steep "Cardiac Hill" and "tried" out. The first time I tried to run the course -- the first leg of which meant running up Cardia Hill -- I walked more than half of it. Finally, at the end, I remember rounding the bend after Pine Breeze and seeing at the bottom of the hill the whole team stretched across the road at the finish line, waiting for me. I didn't know they would do that. I trotted in, awash in embarrassment. I kept this up for at least a couple more weeks. "Came in last again," moans my diary at one point. It does not record when I quit, but quit I did.

At some point, though (cue the hopeful music, just, please, nothing with a boy soprano) I asked my friend Benton Hood about breathing while running. I haven't seen Benton since high school. As 1971 Driftwood readers know, Benton was a particularly gifted and successful wrestler, but he also ran track and cross country. When I asked him how to breathe while running, Benton said the most important thing was to exhale sharply, to push out the air. After that the lungs just fill back up. You don't so much inhale as the lungs just re-inflate all on their own. When this exhale/re-inflation cycle hits a rhythm, you relax, and that's your "second wind." You just keep it up. You're no longer panting uncontrollably. His advice didn't do me any good in high school -- I gave up trying -- but later on I took up running for (wrestling) coach Morgan's conditioning class at UTC and since then, on as many days as possible, I've tried to get to a second wind and keep it going for a while.

At first I ran, but eventually chronic Achilles tendinitis convinced to shift to walking, well-rewarded by the profile of the ridge I live on. Now metatarsalgia makes my feet hurt, but hey, there's swimming or cycling. I'll work back into walking eventually. I'll keep trying.

Whatever it is, when I get winded, don't you know that my Yoda is Benton Hood, reminding me how to breathe. And I do it. Then, by some miracle, there is no try. I still can't go home again, exactly, but Cardiac Hill's close enough.

Book review: Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation, by David French

When 9/11 happened, I felt very much that it was as bad as Pearl Harbor. My father, who volunteered for the Navy soon after Pearl Harbor happened, told me with a knowing smile and shake of the head, "Nowhere close."

So when this book invokes a "secession threat" facing the United States, I feel like shaking my head in this way. And the odd thing is that author French is like me a child of the South. The even odder thing is that French is very well-educated, informed, and accomplished. Aware that the initial American Revolution was as much a secession as the breakaway that produced the Civil War, he somehow fails to see that on both occasions the underlying end was the substitution of a new union (or "confederacy," if you will) for the one that was deemed to have failed: the ironic goal of both American secessions was as much (if not more) joining together as it was breaking apart.

Secession tout court -- if it means going it alone -- seems not to be a very good deal. One doubts that even California wouldn't secede if it came to the kind of insurmountable federal-state conflict that French posits as a possible cause. Consider the case of Scotland: a "secession" from Great Britain is unlikely unless the European Union offers a better set of supports than the "union" that offered the advantage of cohesion in 1704. Consider also that one of the primary, principal arguments for the U.S. Constitution during the ratification season of 1788 was that the compact under question was necessarily stronger than any individual state would be.

Nor is there the kind of unity among today's discontents that there has to be in order to push through secession. The best example of this is French himself, a self-described "former Republican" so repulsed by Trumpcore that he his now looking for a third way (this book seems to be a result of that search). Trumpcore is in fact well-served by federalism. It's concentrated enough in my (and French's) state -- TN -- that it has legislative supermajorities and executive power. At present Trumpcore state houses are focusing on controlling voter turnout to their own advantage and denying healthcare to transgender people. Their power is not absolute, but it is considerable. Will they be limited by national legislation or by the federal courts? It's anybody's guess. Texas, always ready to talk up the secession game, is now a cautionary tale: their power grid seizes up and FEMA suddenly looks like a good thing. It's a long game, and a complicated one. My money is on the same union of discontents that we've alway had.

Which leads to my chief complaint about this book: French's sneaky use of "federalist" and "federalism." He uses them essentially as shorthand for the advocacy of states' rights as against central power. This is obvious: the term doesn't appear except in counterpoint to "nationalization," which seems to have been a process the country had to go through in order to defeat racism and the Nazis, but which it no longer needs because we got through all that and everything's fine, except that it's not, because Ronald Reagan said the federal government had gotten too big.

Actually, French doesn't invoke Reagan at that point in his argument, but to anyone who lived through the Reagan revolution, he doesn't need to. As a curative to French's misuse and misappropriation of the "federalism," I recommend going back to The Federalist to get a sense of how things lay at the time the word came into circulation. There is no absolute, standardized, weighted definition of the distribution of power between the states and the national government. The national government should be adequate to the accomplishment of its purpose, which is in part to stand for the needs of all citizens, particularly when factions in state government stand in the way, now and forever, amen. Federalists are those who believe in the adequacy of that power, even if no one can agree in the absolute terms what they should be (as French implies). 

This seques nicely into the subtitular "how to restore our nation." Here French trots out Founder pabulum about virtue by such as John Adams: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people." Adams, of course, was not a writer of the Constitution. He was also as old school as George Washington when it came to believing in the necessity of virtue for the survival of the republic. However, this leaves out of the account James Madison, who has always served us as the principal explicator of the theory behind the Constitution. According to him, the Constitution was designed to discount the need for virtue by at once atomizing the power of state-level factions and also balancing them with the weight of a national government capable of sticking up for minorities. It's all right there -- in The Federalist.

Virtue would be nice. But don't count on it. Yes, our division is wide and painful -- as it has always been in a bathtub of faction. There is no Kumbaya. You might even say that division is what unifies us, so you might as well get used to it. Surprisingly, French comes pretty much to the same conclusion. He doesn't seem very happy about it. Nor should he. As French points out, toleration -- in order to be actual toleration, rather than acceptance -- is neither easy nor fun. Nobody shoots off fireworks in praise of toleration.

French's final call for civil courage, with biblical scripture to match, is at best a sermon to determined backsliders. You can feel his lack of confidence, his doubt, his awareness that this just isn't going to work, despite the hortatory rhetoric that it has to work because it's all we have. And that's where he leaves it.

Heaven forbid that we try anything institutional rather than merely volitional. French seems to feel that politics is always downstream of culture. That is certainly not the case during times of change and upheaval, Politics and institutions can help provide cohesiveness and a sense of direction that culture cannot. The lesson of war and economic depression is that organized, shared effort can provide a meaningful, enduring, and influential sense of commonality.

But why wait for war or economic depression? Many of our national needs, from infrastructure to defense, can and should be served by a shared, obligatory pittance of our time. Require national service. Make it a duty.

Believe it or not, the Founders did this very thing. That's what their militia was. It was universal and obligatory. No, it didn't last. The centrifugal forces of American culture -- in the obverse forms of avoidance and volunteer enthusiasm -- killed it, leaving it to the eventualities of war and economic depression to drive us back together again.

But why should we be so heedless and forgetful? Why wait for war and economic depression to force us to do what we can do already if we only put our political will to the task? The spirit of the Founders is to learn from the past and design an institution for the future. It's turned out to be a longer game for us than some of them expected. Re-introducing institutional teamwork has a much better chance of healing divisions (or making the toleration of them less painful) than any number of sermons.

Book review: Clanlands

I had a bad feeling about this book at first. Page after page, no mention of the Great Highland bagpipe. In a book about Scotland. In a book about two movie-star Scots (Sam and Graham) traveling around Scotland looking for the most Scottish things there are. Bad signs abounded: three mentions of "drone" in the first few pages that had to do with cameras, not bagpipes; a generic mention of "musicians" that were to be visited and heard; abundant mention of whisky, kilts, feuding, mountain rambling, and other things Scottish -- but no bagpipes! I am well aware that not everyone loves bagpipes the way I do; I am well aware that some people in fact hate the bagpipes. But could it be possible that I was reading a book about Scotland that would go to some lengths to avoid them?

You know what would've been nice? An index. Nothing in a nonfiction books says "I really don't care about myself as a book and have no respect for you, the reader" more than the lack of an index. There is a burgeoning genre of book that is the offshoot of a media production -- in this case Outlander -- one of many possible product lines, aka "merch," that involve assembling out-takes, converting them into written form, and massaging them into a final draft "with" a writer-masseuse not mentioned on the cover, in this case Charlotte Reather. She made a good book! She brought form to this "you take the high-road" trip and concealed (with some heavy hinting along the way) for as long as possible that the book finally does appear as a series of its own called [spoiler alert] Men in Kilts.

So why not reward her with an index? How much can an indexer be? Look, the drone is saving you on a helicopter with a pilot. Frees up some money. Plus, hey, robotic indexing software is dirt cheap; speeds up the process; heck, I would spec it for them with a budget that would figure to be less than minimum wage.

As it happened: I was not reading a bagpipe-less book. ("Ha!" snort the producers, clinking another round of whiskies, "That's right!  No short cuts for the likes of you! Had to read the whole thing! Hahaha!) Finally, on page 78, a bagpipe appears, and it is in the context of the very first event -- other than whisky -- that Sam and Graham track down: the massacre at Glencoe.

And then: more! Much more! Many more mentions of bagpipes! So many that I began to imagine an index with an entry "Bagpipe, Great Highland." This is what it would have looked like:

Bagpipe, Great Highland: blood-curdling, at the Battle of Culloden, 115; deafening, at Simon Fraser (Lord Lovat)'s rapacious marriage of Lady Murray, 173;  declared to be weapon of war by British after Culloden, 250; not quite as elating as getting TV show with Starz, 290; haunting notes played at Glencoe Massacre felt by Graham, 80; mournful notes filled with foreboding, 262; part of sensory overload at the Battle of Culloden, 235; raising mood levels to murderous intent, 235; Rob Roy dies before end of dirge, 269; Scotland the Brave blasting, 235; screaming and maddening notes at the "Battle of North Inch," 111; shrill cry hacking marrow and muscles, 253; skirl as part of the romance of Jacobitism, 251.

(Let me just say that these seem not to be people who associate the sound of bagpipes with such aural concepts as "majesty," "beauty," "soaring," "inspiring," or "uplifting.")

And another then: I watched a couple episodes of the actual show, just for comparison's sake. While it is satisfyingly (to me) bagpipe-forward from the outset, the patter between movie stars Sam and Graham becomes annoying (to me) filler, with the latter -- who is so knowledgeable of Scottish history in the book -- resorting at times to such "are we there yet?" randomness as imitations of the U.S. southern accent and an enthusiastic rendering of the Flintstones theme song. The scenes in which the movie stars engage human repositories of Scottish skill as often as not focus on the ineptness of the movie stars rather than the "eptness" of the skilled. The episode on music ("song and dance") features a single bagpiper, from whom we do learn (as we did not in the book) that pre-Culloden piping was the province of a single piper; it became a band thing after the battle, when the Brits absorbed it into the military of the empire. 

Sure, the drone shots are beautiful, and one does *hear* bagpipes. I bet on the whole it's red meat for the Outlander fan. But to me, as usual, the book is better than its filmic rendering. And this surprises me, somehow. Maybe this burgeoning genre of book-offshoot-from-media-production is worth something after all: the hours you might otherwise spend watching it. 

More history, not less: Ty Seidule and R. E. Lee

Ty Seidule's bona fides as a Son of the Southern Secession are without question: a childhood spent in Alexandria, VA, and Monroe, GA. where his high school was a private, white-flight academy; a college degree from Washington and Lee U. in Lexington, VA, the Mecca of the Confederacy (both R. E. Lee and "Stonewall" Jackson are buried there); a father with a college degree from "the University of the South" in Sewanee, TN. Author Seidule self-identified with the Old South to the extent that he chose to go to college at W&L to be educated as a southern gentleman.

His career path led him into the U.S. Army (via ROTC) and eventually to the faculty of West Point, where he recently retired as a brigadier general and professor emeritus of history. He is co-editor of The West Point History of the Civil War and other similar West Point histories (Warfare, American Revolution, World War II). The Civil War course is available to the public free via iTunes.

The present book describes the way in which his upbringing collided with his profession. The surprise to this reader is that it took so long, and yet that is one of the compelling aspects of the book.

From the outset it is clear where Seidule now stands: "[W]hite southern myths created my identity. The problem is that the myths I learned were just flat-out, fundamentally wrong. And not just wrong in a moral sense, as if that weren't significant enough, but wrong factually, whether through deception, denial, or willful ignorance. The myths and lies I learned promoted a from of racial hierarchy and white supremacy." (p. 7) As for R. E. Lee, a reckoning with whom is the proving ground of the book, here is Seidule's conclusion from the introduction (p. 9): "As a retired U. S. Army officer and as a historian, I consider the issue simple: My former hero, Robert E. Lee, committed treason to preserve slavery."

How was Seidule flipped? The example of his conversion serves as testimony to the power of Lost Cause mythology to lull the White mind into hypnotized acceptance of its cardinal tenets: that the U.S. Civil War was "about" states' rights, and that R. E. Lee was an exemplar of martial virtue and noble self-sacrifice.

By his own testimony Seidule, himself a historian, never looked behind the screen (as it were) until relatively late in his career, in 2004, when after deployments to the Mojave Desert, Italy, the Balkans, and Fort Knox, he was given a permanent faculty position at West Point. His new U.S. Army house "was on Lee Road in Lee Housing Area by Lee Gate." Then, a couple of years later, he describes his epiphany, which came to him while he was walking across campus:

As I strode past Eisenhower and Pershing Barracks, past Grant Hall, I stopped, staring at a sign that said "Lee Barracks." Then I looked east about twenty yards at a new memorial built while I was gone called Reconciliation Plaza. It featured three-foot-high relief monuments of Lee and Grant. I stood in front of the Lee statue for more than a minute. Finally, after too many years, I had my "aha!" moment. I understood the question but not the answer. I started running around campus looking for every monument, every memorial, to Lee and finding them everywhere. West PoInt might have more monuments to Lee than my alma mater, Washington and Lee University. How did this happen? I asked, but no one knew or cared. As a historian, I knew how to solve this problem. I went to the archives, and there I spent the next several years trying to understand when and why West Point honored Lee. And that process changed me. The history changed me. The archives changed me. The facts changed me.

What Seidule learned was what any number of historians are trying to tell us these days: the purpose of monuments is to glorify, not to reveal. Insofar as they blind us to a complex reality, they hide history, most often for political reasons.

This is especially true of Confederate monuments. It is a commonplace among their defenders to say that removing them is "destroying history" when the fact is that their very reason for existence is to destroy history for political ends. The monuments themselves are of no great antiquity and cannot claim value on those grounds -- they are less "antique" than my grandmother's Pontiac Tempest. Then, when someone starts looking into the circumstances of their creation, one finds the "history" behind them to be nothing more than the fervent desire to maintain the power structures of a racist society.

This, Seidule says, is the opposite of destroying history. In fact, it provides more of it, and this is what he sets out to do, providing example after example with West Point as his history lab. The USMA -- with its transition from postwar aversion to all things Confederate to its latter-day, less-than-virtuous acceptance of the energetic lobbying (and $$$) of the United Daughters of the Confederacy -- turns out to be a surprisingly accurate microcosm of America writ large.

The starkest and clearest template of the how and why of Confederate memorialization is revealed by the example of one of the few times the military academy was awakened from the spell of White Brotherhood. It was the early 70s, when then-president Richard Nixon badly needed to shore up his new Southern Strategy against the electoral college threat of George Wallace. Nixon wanted a big, Confederate statue in a prominent place, and what the commander-in-chief wanted, the commander-in-chief got. Usually. In this case the military academy superintendent -- then in the middle of an effort to increase the number of Black cadets -- decided to run the idea past the senior ranking Black cadet at the time. The senior cadet, Percy Squire, mobilized an organized response of his fellow Black cadets that took the form of a list of grievances against the academy -- which included that they should not be made to honor USMA graduates who had violated their oath -- and threatened to leave formation if ordered to march in any dedication ceremony for such a statue. The superintendent informed the White House that the proposed Confederate monument would, as Seidule writes, "hurt minority recruiting efforts and cause a publicity nightmare. The White House dropped the issue immediately."

The Black cadets' clincher -- that violation of the oath is perpetually disqualifying -- then becomes the keystone of the entire book, as Seidule brings it to bear on R. E. Lee himself and blows apart the argument that "Lee went with his state because that's what people did" was an acceptable response to a revolutionary situation. Unlike "people," Lee was a colonel in the regular U.S. Army. Counting Lee, there were eight Virginians who were colonels in the regular U.S. Army at the time the South seceded. Writes Seidule, "Only one colonel resigned to fight against the United States. Robert E. Lee." By placing the oath front and center, as had the Black cadets, and by examining its hold on brother Southern officers, Seidule concludes that Lee was "an outlier" as well as a traitor.

It is to be regretted that Seidule's argument will fall on deaf ears. Already on Goodreads a brief review from one reader sputters the "Lee went with his state" argument that Seidule just got through destroying. Look away, Dixieland. You always did.