Kai Bird. The Good Spy, the Life and Death of Robert
Ames. © 2014 Ames was certainly Impressive, and I enjoyed
reading about his early career and the hardships he and his family endured
during tours of duty in some of the most godforsaken places on earth. Eventually this evolved into a sort of
history of terrorism. I found it depressing,
and quit about halfway through. After my
experience trying to read Robert Gate’s autobiography, I guess I should stick
to earlier centuries. January 2015
.
Nelson Craig. Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and
the Birth of Modern Nations. © 2007
Lately I have been reading quite a bit Revolutionary War history, but
nowhere did I find notice of the importance of Thomas Paine as the man who
wrote and printed the ideas that provided the intellectual basis for the
American and French Revolutions. His
publications -- Common Sense (1776); The
American Crisis, a series of pamphlets (1776 - 1783); The Rights of Man I and II (1791 and 1792); The Age of Reason (1793–94); and Agrarian Justice (1795) were both a synthesis of
Enlightenment thinking and an original theory of political science. These works had incalculable influence when
he wrote them and remain a compendium of the basic ideas that guide liberal
democracy today. Having said all that on
the basis of Craig’s book, I guess my next job is to go and read Paine for
myself.
.
Paine enraged monarchists, aristocrats and the
wealthy and the pious, and I’m sure he would be no more popular with these
groups today if they actually read him.
Along with his advocacy of freedom and self government, he advocated deism, promoted reason and free thought, and argued against
institutionalized religion in general and Christian doctrine in particular. Paine
thought Christly teaching was good, but that churches were evil. He considered the Bible a record not of the
word of god but a history of wickedness that has served to brutalize mankind
and support the rich and powerful over the poor and dispossessed. His contemporaries would not have said things
this way, but in essence they seem to have agreed with him. Jefferson was a deist. John Adams became a lawyer because ministers
were tainted. The first five US
presidents never mentioned their own religions in public. Paine’s economic views were decidedly
liberal. In Agrarian Justice he discussed the origins of property,
and introduced the concept of a guaranteed minimum income. He seems as
relevant today as he was 200 years ago.
.
Along with the political theory, this book has an amazing
number of fascinating ideas and anecdotes.
According to Craig, it was literacy that enabled the Enlightenment and
the revolutions that followed which established parliamentary democracy. Luther and other protestant reformers had wanted
people to read the Bible for themselves.
Concurrently the printing press was invented which led to a general rise
in literacy, and, unfortunately for Luther, people started to read other things
as well. And then there was coffee. (Voltaire drank 50 cups of coffee a day). It was in the coffee houses that bankers
gathered and eventually evolved the stock exchange, and it was meetings there of
Dr. Johnson’s literary club that led to publication of The Spectator (1711-1714) of Addison and Steele, which contained
many of the ideas Paine would develop 50 years later. Craig notes that there is no evidence that
Paine read them or much of anything else and opines that perhaps he was a
political science idiot savant. Paine
was also interested in science and familiar with Newton’s theories. (While Newton was developing his theories
about light, he once pushed the tip of a bodkin behind his eyeball to see how
changing its shape would affect his vision.
Newton died of mercury poisoning).
.
In the late 18th C there were almost as many
reasons for revolution as there were people.
For the American colonies it was more than tea and taxes. The four main factors were (1) the English
history of civil unrest; (2) the Enlightenment inspired questioning of power; (3)
a popular analysis of incipient state corruption; and (4) an ever growing class
rage. This was reflected in Paine’s Rights of Man, which was written to
defend the French Revolution against Edmund Burke’s attack in Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790). Paine wrote that popular
political revolution is permissible when a government doesn’t safeguard the
natural rights of its people. What Paine
proposed in this work is what we now have in half the countries of the
world. In Part II he suggests that the
British aristocracy were a bunch of layabouts who did nothing by tax the things
that affected them the least. He
proposes something like a welfare state.
Paine served as a deputy in the French National Assembly, a difficult
task since he hardly spoke a word of French.
As a deputy, he tried to persuade the Assembly to spare Louis XVI’s life
and almost lost his own for his trouble.
.
The Rights of Man had a tremendous influence on labor movements in
Britain. Craig notes that the whole
welfare program of the British Labor Party had long been available in The Rights of Man and in better
English. Paine’s work was influential
throughout the 19th C and on into the 20th. Ronald Reagan quoted Paine’s words from Common Sense when he accepted the
nomination for president: “We have it in
our power to begin the world over again.”
Craig says that all of Paine’s Enlightenment colleagues died in despair
in the belief that Hamilton and Adams had won out. Considering where we are now with a Congress
that is a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America, one might think they
were right, but they are wrong. Everyone
in modern nations knows Paine’s beliefs by heart without even knowing it. He is a part of us.
.
Odds and ends: a memorable
quote: “These are the times that try men’s souls,” American Crisis I. A
memorable coinage: “The United States of America,” American Crisis II. Elements
of the Iroquois Great Law of Peace
appear in the American Constitution. An observation by Franklyn: Rather than Howe taking Philadelphia,
Philadelphia has taken Howe. With
Beaumarchais, Arthur Lee persuaded the French that America would win. This resulted in French loans which were
laundered through Beaumarchais’s company.
.
Paine wanted to be buried in the Quaker cemetery in New York,
but the Quakers declined to accept him and so he was buried on his farm in New
Rochelle. Later his bones were stolen
and taken to England, where they were mostly scattered and lost as they were
bought and sold and inherited. In 1905
some ended up in a memorial to Paine in New Rochelle. January 2015
.
Larry McMurtry. The Last Picture Show. © 1966 A number of McMurtry’s books are easy to
download in recorded form from the library, so I thought I would go through a
few of them while I brush my teeth. I
had seen the movie of The Last Picture
Show many years ago. I don’t
remember much about it, but I can say I liked the coach’s wife in the book a
lot more than I liked Chloris Leachman in the movie. Thalia, Texas is a place where nothing happens. In their senior year in high school Sonny
Crawford and his friend Duane live together in a rooming house and support
themselves with jobs at night. Duane is
in love with Jacy, who is the prettiest girl in town, rich and a tease. Sonny loves her too, but she’s Duane’s
girl --
for a while. There’s nothing much to do in Thalia but work, sleep
through class, play sports in season, go to the movies, make out if a willing
girl is available, and think about real sex.
There’s one really unpleasant scene – a group of high school boys decide
to have sex with a heifer and drag the town imbecile along with them, but for
the most part it’s just a story of boredom and emptiness. If you’re interested, the best thing to do is
to read the NYT review:
.
Larry McMurtry. Literary Life: A Second Memoir. © 2009 January 2015 McMurtry considers himself a sort of second
tier novelist who happened to get lucky when some of his books were picked up
for movies and TV, most notably The Last
Picture Show, Terms of endearment
and Lonesome Dove. This was his entry into screen writing, a
sort of third career to add to his novels and essays and his used book
business. Perhaps writers are simply
born, but most seem to pass through a lot of writing workshops and teaching
jobs on the way to success. It’s a good
read. January 2015
.
Larry McMurtry. Hollywood: A Third Memoir. © 2010 In this one McMurtry obviously concentrates
on his work as a screenwriter. He seems
to know everyone and has a particular friendship with Diane Keaton. He is pretty irreverent about Hollywood and
all that glitter, but confesses that travelling in private jets is the only way
to go, preferably on the studio’s dime.
This is an inside look at the business from someone who tries to remain
an outsider. It makes interesting
reading. January 2015
.
James Tobin. The Man He Became, How FDR Defied Polio to
Win the Presidency. © 2014 I
almost set this aside because initially the author deluges the reader with
details about polio and about FDR’s particular case. I’m glad I kept going, because it seems like
coping with the disease is what created the FDR persona that most of us have
come to admire. He was an upper class
guy, who didn’t start out with the common touch that his Uncle Teddy had. Perhaps it was FDR’s experience working with
other polio victims from every walk of life at the resort he developed at Warm
Springs, Georgia that put him in touch with the rest of us. As for party politics, he wanted to walk and
he wanted to be President, and he needed to walk to become President. This created a dilemma. No one imagined that a cripple could be
elected, but the amount of time and effort that it would require to attain
something close to a full recovery would not leave time for the politicking
necessary to get the nomination and conduct a campaign. The solution was to turn his handicap into an
asset. It is our impression now that FDR
concealed his disability, but that definitely was not true in the 1920s. Instead he let it be known that despite his
handicap, he was physically and mentally fit and active and running several
large businesses and organizations. He
resisted accepting the nomination for governor of New York in 1928, because he
thought he wasn't ready physically and couldn't afford to take on such a
demanding job if he were to continue his exercises. When it became clear that 1928 was “now or
never,” he accepted the nomination, campaigned vigorously, won the election and
turned the governorship into proof that he was ready for the presidency -- and
lost his chance of ever walking normally.
The book filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge of politics in the
1920s. January 2015
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