BY Scott Neuman
NPR
26 June 2015
President Obama called the Supreme Court's decision affirming the constitutional right of same-sex couples to marry a "victory for America" that had "made our union a little more perfect."
In the 5-4 decision, Justice Kennedy wrote the opinion of the court, saying the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution requires states to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
"Our nation was founded on a bedrock principle — that we are all created equal," the president said at the White House Rose Garden following the announcement of the decision in Obergefell v. Hodges.
Obama said that, often, progress on the journey to equality "comes in small increments. Sometimes two steps forward, one step back."
"And then sometimes there are days like this, when that slow steady effort is rewarded with justice that arrives like a thunderbolt," the president said.
"When all Americans are treated as equal, we are all more free," he added, acknowledging that "Americans of good will continue to hold a wide range of views on this issue."
"For all our differences, we are one people — stronger together than we will ever be alone. That has always been our story," Obama said.
"Today, we can say in no uncertain terms that we made our union a little more perfect."
Friday, June 26, 2015
The Robert E. Lee "Problem"
The
debate about the Charleston Bible study shooting has morphed into a
debate about the Confederate battle flag and other symbols of the
Confederacy. This is not a trivial sideshow. Racism is not just a
personal prejudice and an evolutionary byproduct. It resurfaces year
after year because it’s been woven by historical events into the fabric
of American culture.
That
culture is transmitted through the generations by the things we honor
or don’t honor, by the symbols and names we celebrate and don’t
celebrate. If we want to reduce racism we have to elevate the symbols
that signify the struggle against racism and devalue the symbols that
signify its acceptance.
Lowering
the Confederate flag from public properties is thus an easy call. There
are plenty of ways to celebrate Southern heritage and Southern life
without choosing one so enmeshed in the fight to preserve slavery.
The
harder call concerns Robert E. Lee. Should schools and other facilities
be named after the great Confederate general, or should his name be
removed and replaced?
The case for Lee begins with his personal character. It is almost impossible to imagine a finer and more considerate gentleman.
As
a general and public figure, he was a man of impeccable honesty,
integrity and kindness. As a soldier, he displayed courage from the
beginning of his career straight through to the end. Despite his
blunders at Gettysburg and elsewhere he was by many accounts the most
effective general in the Civil War and maybe in American history. One
biographer, Michael Korda, writes, “His generosity of spirit,
undiminished by ideological or political differences, and even by the
divisive, bloody Civil War, shines through in every letter he writes,
and in every conversation of his that was reported or remembered.”
As
a family man, he was surprisingly relaxed and affectionate. We think of
him as a man of marble, but he loved having his kids jump into bed with
him and tickle his feet. With his wife’s loving cooperation, he could
write witty and even saucy letters to other women. He was devout in his
faith, a gifted watercolorist, a lover of animals and a charming
conversationalist.
In
theory, he opposed slavery, once calling it “a moral and political evil
in any country.” He opposed Southern secession, calling it “silly” and a
rash revolutionary act. Moreover we shouldn’t be overly guilty of the
sin of “presentism,” judging historical figures by contemporary
standards.
The case against
Lee begins with the fact that he betrayed his oath to serve the United
States. He didn’t need to do it. The late historian Elizabeth Brown
Pryor demonstrated that 40 percent of Virginia officers decided to
remain with the Union forces, including members of Lee’s family.
As
the historian Allen Guelzo emailed me, “He withdrew from the Army and
took up arms in a rebellion against the United States.” He could have at
least sat out the war. But, Guelzo continues, “he raised his hand
against the flag and government he had sworn to defend. This more than
fulfills the constitutional definition of treason.”
More
germane, while Lee may have opposed slavery in theory he did nothing to
eliminate or reduce it in practice. On the contrary, if he’d been
successful in the central task of his life, he would have preserved and
prolonged it.
Like
Lincoln he did not believe African-Americans were yet capable of
equality. Unlike Lincoln he accepted the bondage of other human beings
with bland complaisance. His wife inherited 196 slaves from her father.
Her father’s will (somewhat impractically) said they were to be freed,
but Lee didn’t free them.
Lee
didn’t enjoy owning slaves, but he was considered a hard taskmaster and
he did sell some, breaking up families. Moreover, he supported the
institution of slavery as a pillar of Confederate life. He defended the
right of Southerners to take their slaves to the Western territories. He
fundamentally believed the existence of slavery was, at least for a
time, God’s will.
Every
generation has a duty to root out the stubborn weed of prejudice from
the culture. We do that, in part, through expressions of admiration and
disdain. Given our history, it seems right to aggressively go the extra
mile to show that prejudice is simply unacceptable, no matter how fine a
person might otherwise be.
My
own view is that we should preserve most Confederate memorials out of
respect for the common soldiers. We should keep Lee’s name on
institutions that reflect postwar service, like Washington and Lee
University, where he was president. But we should remove Lee’s name from
most schools, roads and other institutions, where the name could be
seen as acceptance of what he did and stood for during the war.
This is not about rewriting history. It’s about shaping the culture going forward.
Thursday, June 25, 2015
Bibliotherapy
Can Reading Make You Happier?
By Ceridwen Dovey
Several
years ago, I was given as a gift a remote session with a
bibliotherapist at the London headquarters of the School of Life, which
offers innovative courses to help people deal with the daily emotional
challenges of existence. I have to admit that at first I didn’t really
like the idea of being given a reading “prescription.” I’ve generally
preferred to mimic Virginia Woolf’s passionate commitment to serendipity
in my personal reading discoveries, delighting not only in the books
themselves but in the randomly meaningful nature of how I came upon them
(on the bus after a breakup, in a backpackers’ hostel in Damascus, or
in the dark library stacks at graduate school, while browsing instead of
studying). I’ve long been wary of the peculiar evangelism of certain
readers: You must read this, they say, thrusting a book into your hands
with a beatific gleam in their eyes, with no allowance for the fact that
books mean different things to people—or different things to the same
person—at various points in our lives. I loved John Updike’s stories
about the Maples in my twenties, for example, and hate them in my
thirties, and I’m not even exactly sure why.
But
the session was a gift, and I found myself unexpectedly enjoying the
initial questionnaire about my reading habits that the bibliotherapist,
Ella Berthoud, sent me. Nobody had ever asked me these questions before,
even though reading fiction is and always has been essential to my
life. I love to gorge on books over long breaks—I’ll pack more books
than clothes, I told Berthoud. I confided my dirty little secret, which
is that I don’t like buying or owning books, and always prefer to get
them from the library (which, as I am a writer, does not bring me very
good book-sales karma). In response to the question “What is
preoccupying you at the moment?,” I was surprised by what I wanted to
confess: I am worried about having no spiritual resources to shore
myself up against the inevitable future grief of losing somebody I love,
I wrote. I’m not religious, and I don’t particularly want to be, but
I’d like to read more about other people’s reflections on coming to some
sort of early, weird form of faith in a “higher being” as an emotional
survival tactic. Simply answering the questions made me feel better,
lighter.We had some satisfying back-and-forths over e-mail, with Berthoud digging deeper, asking about my family’s history and my fear of grief, and when she sent the final reading prescription it was filled with gems, none of which I’d previously read. Among the recommendations was “The Guide,” by R. K. Narayan. Berthoud wrote that it was “a lovely story about a man who starts his working life as a tourist guide at a train station in Malgudi, India, but then goes through many other occupations before finding his unexpected destiny as a spiritual guide.” She had picked it because she hoped it might leave me feeling “strangely enlightened.” Another was “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,” by José Saramago: “Saramago doesn’t reveal his own spiritual stance here but portrays a vivid and compelling version of the story we know so well.” “Henderson the Rain King,” by Saul Bellow, and “Siddhartha,” by Hermann Hesse, were among other prescribed works of fiction, and she included some nonfiction, too, such as “The Case for God,” by Karen Armstrong, and “Sum,” by the neuroscientist David Eagleman, a “short and wonderful book about possible afterlives.”
I worked my way through the books on the list over the next couple of years, at my own pace—interspersed with my own “discoveries”—and while I am fortunate enough to have my ability to withstand terrible grief untested, thus far, some of the insights I gleaned from these books helped me through something entirely different, when, over several months, I endured acute physical pain. The insights themselves are still nebulous, as learning gained through reading fiction often is—but therein lies its power. In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks. Reading fiction makes me lose all sense of self, but at the same time makes me feel most uniquely myself. As Woolf, the most fervent of readers, wrote, a book “splits us into two parts as we read,” for “the state of reading consists in the complete elimination of the ego,” while promising “perpetual union” with another mind.
Bibliotherapy is a very broad term for the ancient practice of encouraging reading for therapeutic effect. The first use of the term is usually dated to a jaunty 1916 article in The Atlantic Monthly, “A Literary Clinic.” In it, the author describes stumbling upon a “bibliopathic institute” run by an acquaintance, Bagster, in the basement of his church, from where he dispenses reading recommendations with healing value. “Bibliotherapy is…a new science,” Bagster explains. “A book may be a stimulant or a sedative or an irritant or a soporific. The point is that it must do something to you, and you ought to know what it is. A book may be of the nature of a soothing syrup or it may be of the nature of a mustard plaster.” To a middle-aged client with “opinions partially ossified,” Bagster gives the following prescription: “You must read more novels. Not pleasant stories that make you forget yourself. They must be searching, drastic, stinging, relentless novels.” (George Bernard Shaw is at the top of the list.) Bagster is finally called away to deal with a patient who has “taken an overdose of war literature,” leaving the author to think about the books that “put new life into us and then set the life pulse strong but slow.”
Today, bibliotherapy takes many different forms, from literature courses run for prison inmates to reading circles for elderly people suffering from dementia. Sometimes it can simply mean one-on-one or group sessions for “lapsed” readers who want to find their way back to an enjoyment of books. Berthoud and her longtime friend and fellow bibliotherapist Susan Elderkin mostly practice “affective” bibliotherapy, advocating the restorative power of reading fiction. The two met at Cambridge University as undergraduates, more than twenty years ago, and bonded immediately over the shared contents of their bookshelves, in particular Italo Calvino’s novel “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller,” which is itself about the nature of reading. As their friendship developed, they began prescribing novels to cure each other’s ailments, such as a broken heart or career uncertainty. “When Suse was having a crisis about her profession—she wanted to be a writer, but was wondering if she could cope with the inevitable rejection—I gave her Don Marquis’s ‘Archy and Mehitabel’ poems,” Berthoud told me. “If Archy the cockroach could be so dedicated to his art as to jump on the typewriter keys in order to write his free-verse poems every night in the New York offices of the Evening Sun, then surely she should be prepared to suffer for her art, too.” Years later, Elderkin gave Berthoud,who wanted to figure out how to balance being a painter and a mother, Patrick Gale’s novel “Notes from an Exhibition,” about a successful but troubled female artist.
They kept recommending novels to each other, and to friends and family, for many years, and, in 2007, when the philosopher Alain de Botton, a fellow Cambridge classmate, was thinking about starting the School of Life, they pitched to him the idea of running a bibliotherapy clinic. “As far as we knew, nobody was doing it in that form at the time,” Berthoud said. “Bibliotherapy, if it existed at all, tended to be based within a more medical context, with an emphasis on self-help books. But we were dedicated to fiction as the ultimate cure because it gives readers a transformational experience.”
Berthoud and Elderkin trace the method of bibliotherapy all the way back to the Ancient Greeks, “who inscribed above the entrance to a library in Thebes that this was a ‘healing place for the soul.’ ” The practice came into its own at the end of the nineteenth century, when Sigmund Freud began using literature during psychoanalysis sessions. After the First World War, traumatized soldiers returning home from the front were often prescribed a course of reading. “Librarians in the States were given training on how to give books to WWI vets, and there’s a nice story about Jane Austen’s novels being used for bibliotherapeutic purposes at the same time in the U.K.,” Elderkin says. Later in the century, bibliotherapy was used in varying ways in hospitals and libraries, and has more recently been taken up by psychologists, social and aged-care workers, and doctors as a viable mode of therapy.
There is now a network of bibliotherapists selected and trained by Berthoud and Elderkin, and affiliated with the School of Life, working around the world, from New York to Melbourne. The most common ailments people tend to bring to them are the life-juncture transitions, Berthoud says: being stuck in a rut in your career, feeling depressed in your relationship, or suffering bereavement. The bibliotherapists see a lot of retirees, too, who know that they have twenty years of reading ahead of them but perhaps have only previously read crime thrillers, and want to find something new to sustain them. Many seek help adjusting to becoming a parent. “I had a client in New York, a man who was having his first child, and was worried about being responsible for another tiny being,” Berthoud says. “I recommended ‘Room Temperature,’ by Nicholson Baker, which is about a man feeding his baby a bottle and having these meditative thoughts about being a father. And of course ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ because Atticus Finch is the ideal father in literature.”
Berthoud and Elderkin are also the authors of “The Novel Cure: An A-Z of Literary Remedies,” which is written in the style of a medical dictionary and matches ailments (“failure, feeling like a”) with suggested reading cures (“The History of Mr. Polly,” by H. G. Wells). First released in the U.K. in 2013, it is now being published in eighteen countries, and, in an interesting twist, the contract allows for a local editor and reading specialist to adapt up to twenty-five per cent of the ailments and reading recommendations to fit each particular country’s readership and include more native writers. The new, adapted ailments are culturally revealing. In the Dutch edition, one of the adapted ailments is “having too high an opinion of your own child”; in the Indian edition, “public urination” and “cricket, obsession with” are included; the Italians introduced “impotence,” “fear of motorways,” and “desire to embalm”; and the Germans added “hating the world” and “hating parties.” Berthoud and Elderkin are now working on a children’s-literature version, “A Spoonful of Stories,” due out in 2016.
For all avid readers who have been self-medicating with great books their entire lives, it comes as no surprise that reading books can be good for your mental health and your relationships with others, but exactly why and how is now becoming clearer, thanks to new research on reading’s effects on the brain. Since the discovery, in the mid-nineties, of “mirror neurons”—neurons that fire in our brains both when we perform an action ourselves and when we see an action performed by someone else—the neuroscience of empathy has become clearer. A 2011 study published in the Annual Review of Psychology, based on analysis of fMRI brain scans of participants, showed that, when people read about an experience, they display stimulation within the same neurological regions as when they go through that experience themselves. We draw on the same brain networks when we’re reading stories and when we’re trying to guess at another person’s feelings.
Other studies published in 2006 and 2009 showed something similar—that people who read a lot of fiction tend to be better at empathizing with others (even after the researchers had accounted for the potential bias that people with greater empathetic tendencies may prefer to read novels). And, in 2013, an influential study published in Science found that reading literary fiction (rather than popular fiction or literary nonfiction) improved participants’ results on tests that measured social perception and empathy, which are crucial to “theory of mind”: the ability to guess with accuracy what another human being might be thinking or feeling, a skill humans only start to develop around the age of four.
Keith Oatley, a novelist and emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, has for many years run a research group interested in the psychology of fiction. “We have started to show how identification with fictional characters occurs, how literary art can improve social abilities, how it can move us emotionally, and can prompt changes of selfhood,” he wrote in his 2011 book, “Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction.” “Fiction is a kind of simulation, one that runs not on computers but on minds: a simulation of selves in their interactions with others in the social world…based in experience, and involving being able to think of possible futures.” This idea echoes a long-held belief among both writers and readers that books are the best kinds of friends; they give us a chance to rehearse for interactions with others in the world, without doing any lasting damage. In his 1905 essay “On Reading,” Marcel Proust puts it nicely: “With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: ‘What did they think of us?’—‘Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?’—‘Did they like us?’—nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by someone else.”
George Eliot, who is rumored to have overcome her grief at losing her life partner through a program of guided reading with a young man who went on to become her husband, believed that “art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.” But not everybody agrees with this characterization of fiction reading as having the ability to make us behave better in real life. In her 2007 book, “Empathy and the Novel,” Suzanne Keen takes issue with this “empathy-altruism hypothesis,” and is skeptical about whether empathetic connections made while reading fiction really translate into altruistic, prosocial behavior in the world. She also points out how hard it is to really prove such a hypothesis. “Books can’t make change by themselves—and not everyone feels certain that they ought to,” Keen writes. “As any bookworm knows, readers can also seem antisocial and indolent. Novel reading is not a team sport.” Instead, she urges, we should enjoy what fiction does give us, which is a release from the moral obligation to feel something for invented characters—as you would for a real, live human being in pain or suffering—which paradoxically means readers sometimes “respond with greater empathy to an unreal situation and characters because of the protective fictionality.” And she wholeheartedly supports the personal health benefits of an immersive experience like reading, which “allows a refreshing escape from ordinary, everyday pressures.”
So even if you don’t agree that reading fiction makes us treat others better, it is a way of treating ourselves better. Reading has been shown to put our brains into a pleasurable trance-like state, similar to meditation, and it brings the same health benefits of deep relaxation and inner calm. Regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than non-readers. “Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines,” the author Jeanette Winterson has written. “What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.”
One of Berthoud’s clients described to me how the group and individual sessions she has had with Berthoud have helped her cope with the fallout from a series of calamities, including losing her husband, the end of a five-year engagement, and a heart attack. “I felt my life was without purpose,” she says. “I felt a failure as a woman.” Among the books Berthoud initially prescribed was John Irving’s novel “The Hotel New Hampshire.” “He was a favorite writer of my husband, [whom] I had felt unable to attempt for sentimental reasons.” She was “astounded and very moved” to see it on the list, and though she had avoided reading her husband’s books up until then, she found reading it to be “a very rewarding emotional experience, both in the literature itself and ridding myself of demons.” She also greatly appreciated Berthoud guiding her to Tom Robbins’s novel “Jitterbug Perfume,” which was “a real learning curve for me about prejudice and experimentation.”
One of the ailments listed in “The Novel Cure” is “overwhelmed by the number of books in the world,” and it’s one I suffer from frequently. Elderkin says this is one of the most common woes of modern readers, and that it remains a major motivation for her and Berthoud’s work as bibliotherapists. “We feel that though more books are being published than ever before, people are in fact selecting from a smaller and smaller pool. Look at the reading lists of most book clubs, and you’ll see all the same books, the ones that have been shouted about in the press. If you actually calculate how many books you read in a year—and how many that means you’re likely to read before you die—you’ll start to realize that you need to be highly selective in order to make the most of your reading time.” And the best way to do that? See a bibliotherapist, as soon as you can, and take them up on their invitation, to borrow some lines from Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus”: “Come, and take choice of all my library/And so beguile thy sorrow…”
Doomsday for Scalia
Doom for a Cynical Assault on Obamacare
By Jeffrey Toobin
Supporters
of the Affordable Care Act, starting with President Barack Obama, have
generally taken the high road in response to Thursday’s decision by the
Supreme Court to uphold the heart of the law. Graciousness in victory
is, perhaps, its own reward. But it may also be appropriate, on the
occasion of the 6–3 decision in King v. Burwell, to observe that this
lawsuit was from its inception a shameful and cynical exercise, which
illustrated the debasement of the contemporary conservative legal
movement.
The facts of the case are by now well
known. The core goal of the Affordable Care Act was to provide health
insurance to as many Americans as possible. States were encouraged to
set up exchanges, or marketplaces, where individuals could buy
insurance, and there would be subsidies from the federal government for
people who needed them. Before it passed, in 2010, the A.C.A. was
subject to one of the longest and most contentious congressional debates
in recent history. The law was attacked and analyzed from every
conceivable perspective. The law may have been wise, or it may have been
foolish, but it was universally understood.Months after the law went into effect, a group of conservative lawyers discovered what was, at most, a drafting error in the law. A section of the law suggested that the subsidies should only go to individuals who bought insurance on exchanges “established by the State.” This discovery prompted the lawyers to argue that the subsidies would not be available to people who bought insurance on the federal exchange, which is the only exchange in thirty-four states. Notably—crucially—not one member of Congress who debated the law suggested that subsidies were to be denied to purchasers on the federal exchange. Still, these lawyers recruited plaintiffs and argued that more than six million people who bought insurance on the federal exchange should be denied their subsidies.
What principle was at stake in this lawsuit? The correct answer is none. This is a contrast to National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, which was the first challenge to the A.C.A. In that case, the plaintiffs argued that Congress lacked the constitutional authority to pass the law in the first place. The case made a respectable (if ultimately unsuccessful) argument for a narrow conception of the government’s ability to regulate health care under the Constitution. King v. Burwell did not implicate the Constitution at all. It was, rather, based on a claim that the Obama Administration violated the A.C.A. itself by offering subsidies to purchasers on the federal exchange. The case was, in other words, a sophisticated game of gotcha, based on what was, again, essentially a typographical error. The case was only about trying to destroy the law by denying insurance to millions and setting in motion a death spiral of raised premiums, cancelled policies, and more rate hikes until the system collapsed. (The sheer callousness of the plaintiffs’ lawyers in King was something to behold. Millions tossed off health insurance? Hey, deal with it.)
For writing the opinion upholding the law, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., is being hailed (and denounced) as a latter-day Earl Warren—a Republican appointee who turns out to be a secret liberal. This is hardly accurate. Roberts is still the author of the Shelby County case, which gutted the Voting Rights Act, and an eager member of the court majority in Citizens United and all the other cases that undermined our system of regulating political campaigns. But as his restrained and cogent opinion in King demonstrated, he is not a partisan ideologue. Quoting liberally from opinions by Justice Antonin Scalia, Roberts made the commonsensical observation that a law must be interpreted as a whole, not by the analysis of a few stray words here and there. And the context of the full A.C.A. compelled the obvious conclusion that the subsidies were intended to go to individuals on both the federal as well as state exchanges. The law would otherwise make no sense. As Roberts wrote, “The statutory scheme compels us to reject [the plaintiffs’] interpretation because it would destabilize the individual insurance market in any State with a Federal Exchange, and likely create the very ‘death spirals’ that Congress designed the Act to avoid.” Recognition of this obvious fact does not make Roberts a liberal; it makes him a judge.
In dissent, Scalia cranked up his increasingly tired act as the Court’s sound-bite generator. According to Scalia, the Court engaged in “interpretive jiggery-pokery,” spouted “pure applesauce,” and should prompt Obamacare to be renamed “SCOTUScare.” The problem with Scalia’s dissent is the problem with the lawsuit as a whole. It’s a transparent attempt to undermine the law by whatever means happen to be available rather than by any consistent jurisprudential principle. Back in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, judicial conservatives believed in restraint—in deference to the elected branches of government. That led them to oppose such decisions as Roe v. Wade, which overturned state laws banning abortion, and to support broad exercises of executive power. The King case shows that some conservatives have abandoned their old idea of deference to the executive branch and are simply filing lawsuits against the laws they don’t like—and coming up with whatever reasons they can to support them.
Obamacare remains controversial, and its future will be an important issue in the 2016 elections. That’s as it should be. If Republicans can win the Presidency and extend their control of Congress, they may well have the chance to undo the law, and they will have every right to do so. But today the Court said that the future of the law should be decided in that political process and not in response to litigation stunts like King v. Burwell.
Obama: "The Affordable Care Act is here to stay."
The Supreme Court has again ruled in favor of Obamacare. Thank goodness. I am pleased that the right-wing lunatics have again failed in their attempts to pull this country backwards and to rob Americans of health insurance and medical care.
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
The New American Patriotism
The Confederate-Flag Backlash and the New American Patriotism
Some quarters of the right have greeted the sudden retreat with indignation and fear. Weekly Standard editor William Kristol decried liberals for “expunging every trace of respect, recognition or acknowledgment of Americans who fought for the Confederacy,” a spectacle he called “our own mini-French Revolution, expunging history in a frenzy of self-righteousness.” Rush Limbaugh predicts, “The next flag that will come under assault, and it will not be long, is the American flag.”
It might seem bizarre to equate patriotism with treason, and to conclude that turning against the symbols of an army that went to war against the United States must lead to turning against the symbols of the United States itself. There is, however, a certain logic to this fear — a twisted logic, to be sure, but twisted by decades of propaganda.
The story of the Civil War is that the United States won the war but lost the occupation. Union soldiers occupied the South and attempted to rebuild a colorblind democracy, an effort called Reconstruction. The Confederate forces eventually reconstituted themselves as an non-uniformed guerilla army that could melt invisibly into the civilian population and launch strikes to defeat the occupying army and terrorize its allies — freed blacks and sympathetic white Republicans. Eventually, the white North gave up and allowed white Southerners to disenfranchise African-Americans and reimpose white supremacy while stopping short of full enslavement. The reconciliation between whites of the North and South formed the basis for the country’s self-conception. The veneration of treason did, in its strange way, support a patriotic idea — an idea of a country after a brief and tragic misunderstanding.
The winners write the history books, and — having defeated the postwar occupation — the newly victorious South set about falsifying the history of the period. It defined Reconstruction as the “misrule” by “carpetbaggers.” The entire country emphasized reconciliation between whites of the North and South, presenting the conflict as regrettable and perhaps unnecessary. The leaders of the Confederacy have been memorialized as heroes, their names adorning roads and schools throughout the South. The thousands of victims of white domestic terrorism, by contrast, have gone almost completely unacknowledged.
One small example stands for the larger phenomenon. In Colfax, Louisiana, white terrorists massacred dozens of freed African-Americans, deposed their democratically elected town government, and reimposed a whites-only government. The site of the massacre is currently memorialized by this sign:
Those conservatives alarmed at the current backlash against the Confederate flag are probably correct that it will not stop at the flag itself. What’s wrong is their interpretation of what this means. South Carolina State Senator Lee Bright, the state co-chair for Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign, has called the flag backlash a “Stalinist purge,” telling Politico, “They want to take down the Confederate monuments; I’ve gotten emails from people who want to rename streets. … Anytime you want to basically remove the symbols of history from a state, that’s something that just is very bad.” The closest approximation of a Stalinist purge — the brazen rewriting of history to suit modern political ends — took place decades ago. The current movement is, if anything, a de-Stalinization.
The trembling conservatives are also not irrational in their fear that the backlash against the Confederate flag could metastasize into a backlash against America. Neo-confederate revisionism is a form of patriotism. And many atrocities have indeed been committed under the colors of the American flag. As Limbaugh says, “Can you just hear it now? I can hear it now. ‘The United States flag has flown over slavery and symbolized racism, discrimination, bigotry, homophobia for hundreds of years; the Confederate flag flew only four years, and we're getting rid of the Confederate flag.’”
That may be an apt description of the analysis on some parts of the left, the parts that treat oppression as intrinsic to America. But it runs distinctly contrary to the analysis proposed by President Obama, who is the main spokesman for American liberalism today.
Obama has proposed a different kind of patriotic story. He has refined versions of that story throughout his career, perhaps most famously at his star-making 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote speech. As Greg Jaffe recently reported, Obama considers his March speech in Selma, Alabama, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge its most articulate and fully developed version. In that speech, Obama called the march “a contest to determine the true meaning of America,” and declared that “the idea of a just America and a fair America, an inclusive America, and a generous America — that idea ultimately triumphed.”
The message of Obama’s Selma address was not complacency. Rather, he placed the struggle to expand freedom and opportunity to all at the center of American history. Unlike the post–Civil War revisionism, which writes the Confederates into the narrative of American greatness, Obama writes them out, or casts them as obstacles inevitably defeated (the civil-rights movement having won a century later what the occupying Union army had lost). Obama instead placed the African-American struggle for equality as the center of the struggle for social justice, and the struggle for social justice at the center of what America means:
That’s why Selma is not some outlier in the American experience. That’s why it’s not a museum or a static monument to behold from a distance. It is instead the manifestation of a creed written into our founding documents: “We the People…in order to form a more perfect union.” “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”This is a form of patriotism, but a very different kind than that with which many Americans have been reared.
Tuesday, June 23, 2015
Vestavia Hills Rebel Mascot a Vestige of Racism, a Smear on the City
As if we need another reason to dislike Vestavia...
BY John Archibald
23 June 2015
al.com
Vestavia Hills resident and mom Rhonda Steele Nabors cheers for her town's sports teams.
She'll scream Go Red!
She'll holler Go Vestavia!
But she can't bring herself to yell Go Rebels, to stand and cheer for a school mascot that, as she puts it, "marginalizes 7-to-10 percent of the students."
Long before Charleston, Nabors wanted her children to consider the messages they send to others. She was uncomfortable with the Rebel because she wants those children to understand how their own actions affect the way others feel.
This week, in the reflection of that South Carolina horror, Nabors went on a Vestavia Hills Facebook group and questioned – far more politely than I would -- whether the time of the Rebel mascot has passed.
"In light of the race-based Charleston murders, now seems like a good time to have another discussion on this topic," she wrote.
And it began. Dozens of comments rolled in and the discussion she sought began. Reasonably and agreeably and pleasantly and ... not.
Many of the commenters agreed. It is time, at the very least, to talk. Others believe the Rebel is a respected part of history, that getting rid of it is like banning pirate mascots because, well, pirates robbed people and raped women. But it was a start.
"I can't not push this issue after nine people were gunned down in Charleston because of their race," she said. "It's just not right."
And it's not.
The truth is that Vestavia Hills' Rebel has nothing to do with Civil War history, and everything to do with Civil Rights history.
Alabama's fight against integration took most of the 1960s, as stands in the schoolhouse door gave way to lawsuits. By the end of the decade, schools around Alabama began to open the doors to all people. And the flight began.
In 1970 – as a direct result of that desegregation – Vestavia Hills created its own system. It had the gall to name its mascot the Rebels.
Vestavia didn't just pick it's mascot out of a hat – like a Thundering Herd or a Blue Devil. It picked a Confederate Flag-waving Civil War Rebel because it saw itself as rebellious.
We dare defend our way of life.
We dare defend our way of white.
Of course Vestavia Hills was not alone.
"Rebels" is the eighth most common nickname in Alabama schools -- just ahead of "Patriots." It is used in public schools such as Thorsby High and at private schools like Bessemer Academy, which also formed in 1970 in response to fear of ... the Black Menace.
It was a common mascot at the so-called "Segregation Academies," where more than 50,000 white students swarmed – or seceded to -- between 1965 and the early '70s.
The Rebels.
Of course it is no longer 1970. And Vestavia Hills is not the Vestavia of 1970. And that is precisely what Nabors is trying to say.
Vestavia Hills is one of the best academic systems around, with great teachers and facilities and scores and sports and support. Vestavia Hills does so many things right. It makes no sense that it would besmirch all that with an offensive mascot.
It's like slapping a skull-and-crossbones on a bottle of penicillin, like tattooing a middle finger on Sandra Bullock's nose.
Vestavia Hills is better than that. It knows better than that.
It was 15 years ago when system leaders decided it was a bad idea for students to wave their Confederate flags at away games. Because:
a) They didn't want their students constantly getting punched in the face. Or...
b) They realized it was an embarrassment.
Either way they recognized it was wrong. They just lacked courage to do anything real about it.
Today, however, is another day. Another chance.
Nabors was right. It is time – even in the face of protest and tradition and die-hard Rebellion – to start and finish this conversation without excuse.
This mascot, this brand that stands for the city of Vestavia Hills, was founded in fear and defiance of equal rights.
It is time Vestavia Hills yelled another cheer: "We are better than that."
BY John Archibald
23 June 2015
al.com
Vestavia Hills resident and mom Rhonda Steele Nabors cheers for her town's sports teams.
She'll scream Go Red!
She'll holler Go Vestavia!
But she can't bring herself to yell Go Rebels, to stand and cheer for a school mascot that, as she puts it, "marginalizes 7-to-10 percent of the students."
Long before Charleston, Nabors wanted her children to consider the messages they send to others. She was uncomfortable with the Rebel because she wants those children to understand how their own actions affect the way others feel.
This week, in the reflection of that South Carolina horror, Nabors went on a Vestavia Hills Facebook group and questioned – far more politely than I would -- whether the time of the Rebel mascot has passed.
"In light of the race-based Charleston murders, now seems like a good time to have another discussion on this topic," she wrote.
And it began. Dozens of comments rolled in and the discussion she sought began. Reasonably and agreeably and pleasantly and ... not.
Many of the commenters agreed. It is time, at the very least, to talk. Others believe the Rebel is a respected part of history, that getting rid of it is like banning pirate mascots because, well, pirates robbed people and raped women. But it was a start.
"I can't not push this issue after nine people were gunned down in Charleston because of their race," she said. "It's just not right."
And it's not.
The truth is that Vestavia Hills' Rebel has nothing to do with Civil War history, and everything to do with Civil Rights history.
Alabama's fight against integration took most of the 1960s, as stands in the schoolhouse door gave way to lawsuits. By the end of the decade, schools around Alabama began to open the doors to all people. And the flight began.
In 1970 – as a direct result of that desegregation – Vestavia Hills created its own system. It had the gall to name its mascot the Rebels.
Vestavia didn't just pick it's mascot out of a hat – like a Thundering Herd or a Blue Devil. It picked a Confederate Flag-waving Civil War Rebel because it saw itself as rebellious.
We dare defend our way of life.
We dare defend our way of white.
Of course Vestavia Hills was not alone.
"Rebels" is the eighth most common nickname in Alabama schools -- just ahead of "Patriots." It is used in public schools such as Thorsby High and at private schools like Bessemer Academy, which also formed in 1970 in response to fear of ... the Black Menace.
It was a common mascot at the so-called "Segregation Academies," where more than 50,000 white students swarmed – or seceded to -- between 1965 and the early '70s.
The Rebels.
Of course it is no longer 1970. And Vestavia Hills is not the Vestavia of 1970. And that is precisely what Nabors is trying to say.
Vestavia Hills is one of the best academic systems around, with great teachers and facilities and scores and sports and support. Vestavia Hills does so many things right. It makes no sense that it would besmirch all that with an offensive mascot.
It's like slapping a skull-and-crossbones on a bottle of penicillin, like tattooing a middle finger on Sandra Bullock's nose.
Vestavia Hills is better than that. It knows better than that.
It was 15 years ago when system leaders decided it was a bad idea for students to wave their Confederate flags at away games. Because:
a) They didn't want their students constantly getting punched in the face. Or...
b) They realized it was an embarrassment.
Either way they recognized it was wrong. They just lacked courage to do anything real about it.
Today, however, is another day. Another chance.
Nabors was right. It is time – even in the face of protest and tradition and die-hard Rebellion – to start and finish this conversation without excuse.
This mascot, this brand that stands for the city of Vestavia Hills, was founded in fear and defiance of equal rights.
It is time Vestavia Hills yelled another cheer: "We are better than that."
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