Not my First Rodeo

An Unforgettable Ride at the Ringwald Rodeo

Anonymous — Thu, 16 Jul 2020 06:00:00 +0000

An Unforgettable Ride at the Ringwald Rodeo Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/16/2020 - 00:00

A Conversation as Treasured as It Was Confounded

Why couldn’t we just call a halt for a while – stop making those chlorofluorocarbons that are destroying the ozone layer, halt the auto assembly lines and see if we can’t come up with viable alternative transportation, halt the arms production and the arms sales, maybe even consider ending wars? A radical thought, of course, but who knows? It just might work. What’s the point of all this hurrying, after all, if we can’t stop to smell the roses?
George Ringwald, former reporter at the Riverside Press-Enterprise, writing in 1991

An Unusually Sophisticated Inquiry by a Cub Reporter

I once had the great privilege of asking a Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter a question that left him dumbfounded and speechless.

In 1968, I had an after-school job at the Press-Enterprise office in Banning, California. A reporter named George Ringwald had conducted a brave investigation of corruption in the administration and management of Indian lands in the Palm Springs area. His series won a Pulitzer Prize.

In those distant, analogue days of yore, Mr. Ringwald filed his stories by physically walking into our Banning office and placing his typed manuscripts in the big envelope that a courier picked up every day and drove to the main office in Riverside.

When Mr. Ringwald got the Pulitzer, I recognized him—rightly and accurately—as a rock star of accomplishment, a writer who had received national acclaim, who lived in my hometown, and who nonetheless walked among us mortals.

Even as we were congratulating Mr. Ringwald, the world was taking a turn toward calamity. Martin Luther King was assassinated. Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. Riots rocked many cities, and violent resistance to the Civil Rights Movement flared up. Commentators on national television news kept referring to these troubling events as “symptoms of a sick society.”

Sixteen-years-old, I was taking all this in, trying to get my bearings, and falling deeper and deeper into despair.

But I knew that our Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter was going to appear in our office at some point. And I would be ready for him, prepared to ask him a very sophisticated question that would invite him to tell me what on earth was going wrong with our country.

Remember, Mr. Ringwald was an enormously accomplished writer, who was recognized nationally but who had somehow been consigned to live in the humble town of Banning.

So I couldn’t just ask him a plain, direct question.

On the contrary, I knew I had to craft the question so that it would sound very sophisticated and would thereby engage his powerful mind.

By the time Mr. Ringwald walked innocently into our office to file a story, I had designed a question that met those specifications.

Without suspecting an ambush, Mr. Ringwald said “Hello” to the cub reporter.

The cub reporter then said to him, “Mr. Ringwald, do you subscribe to the sick society syndrome?”

I had every reason to think that this was the right wording to address a Pulitzer-Prize winner.

“Subscribe” I knew to be a very sophisticated verb that meant “agree with” or “believe.” And I knew that pundits and commentators aplenty had been asking whether the assassinations and the violence in cities provided evidence for the diagnosis that we lived in a sick society. And “syndrome,” I felt, was the exactly right noun for pulling together the various “symptoms” of sickness that all the commentators and pundits kept bringing to our attention.

“Mr. Ringwald, do you subscribe to the sick society syndrome?”

Mr. Ringwald seemed to be surprisingly slow to grasp the excellence of this question. He sat down, paused, and looked very puzzled.

And now, to reveal the trap that I had unthinkingly set for this poor man, I will retype my question as he heard it.

“Mr. Ringwald, do you subscribe to The Sick Society Syndrome?”

So this was his befuddled response: “I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of that.”

I was flabbergasted. How could this very accomplished and very connected man have missed all those solemn reflections about the illness afflicting our society? How could it be that I, a sixteen-year-old bumpkin, was turning out to be so far ahead of a Pulitzer Prize winner when it came to keeping up with the times?

Eventually, we figured it out.

For good reason, Mr. Ringwald thought that I had learned of a new publication, The Sick Society Syndrome, recently launched to compete with Ramparts and Mother Jones, and now on a quest for subscribers.

Once we got our wires untangled, neither Mr. Ringwald nor I had sufficient energy left for assessing the symptoms plaguing our society.

But what had I wanted from Mr. Ringwald?

Fifty-two years later, I have a pretty good guess, though I offer this guess with appropriate caution. If, as historians often say, the past is another country, our minds as teenagers surely qualify as another planet.

But here’s what I probably wanted.

I wanted Mr. Ringwald to reassure me. I wanted him to tell me that I didn’t need to be so worried. I wanted him to say that, yes, he understood how the violence in the nation might make me think that things were falling apart, but as my wise, Pulitzer-Prize-winning elder, he could assure me that this was a bad phase that would not last.

And now, in 2020, I cannot tell you how much I wish that Mr. Ringwald would appear in my remote working locale and give me one more chance to ask for his guidance, this time with my sophisticated phrasing deleted, and plain English put in its place.

Turn-��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� May Be Fair Play, But That Doesn’t Make It Anything to Look Forward To

Exposed to a precariously high dosage of irony, I am now sometimes asked—every now and then, by a reporter— the very questions I wanted to ask Mr. Ringwald.

Millions of Americans are trying to figure out how worried they should be about the nation’s current state of division, disorder, and misfortune. Deep currents of perplexity have fed a hope among some that historians will swing into action as the professional counterparts of physicians.

To put this another way, might there be a chance that historians could diagnose the afflictions of societies as doctors diagnose the afflictions of individuals?

People who struggle with illness ask doctors, “How bad is it?”

In 2020, a surprising number of people seem equally inclined to ask historians, “How bad is it? Is our current concatenation of calamity unprecedented? Has the nation been this divided before?” Or, to put this in more sophisticated phrasing, “Do you as a historian subscribe to the sick society syndrome?”

Here’s my guess as to what drives the hope that historians can help.

When people seek out a historian to ask if the tensions and conflicts of our time are unprecedented, they are hoping for an answer along these lines: “In fact, the troubles in 2020 are very familiar to us. This nation has periodically come close to falling apart, divided by fractures and factions that make resurgences now and then. But those times pass, and then the nation turns out to be OK again. Yes, the United States seems to be falling apart right now, but history tells us that we’ll be returning to an even keel soon.”

But history tells us no such thing.

Back to the question: “How bad is it? Has it ever been worse?”

Asked that question on many occasions, I assembled an answer which I delivered in a manner that bore a certain resemblance to a vending machine dispensing its holdings:

In the mid-nineteenth century, with tensions mounting over the expansion of slavery into the West, and then with the Civil War itself, division went way beyond differences of opinion, attitude, conviction, and principle, and became actual, armed disunion. Moreover, there were innumerable incidents in the American past, ranging from the invasion and conquest of Indian homelands to the lynchings of African Americans and Mexicans, when astonishing brutality and violence figured as dimensions of everyday life. No, the antagonisms and currents of hostility in our time are far from unprecedented. And, yes, you could make the case that things have been worse.

And, after many recitations of this answer, I have lost patience with it.

When I declared that American history comes well-supplied with episodes when every variety of hatred and hostility had free reign, what sort of comfort or consolation did I think I was offering? Was I guided by some witless idea that facing up to the miseries and calamities of the past would buy us a license to dismiss the seriousness of our troubles today?

Even though our nation’s history has been a kaleidoscope of tensions and divisions, our current constellation of problems today is nonetheless unparalleled and unprecedented.

We struggle against a virus that devastates and destroys individual lives, and we have no vaccine or treatment in our reach. We have reached a striking level of civil unrest, bringing into full view the lasting injuries and injustices that appear everywhere we look in the arena of American race relations. We have a tottering economy, with a massive number of unemployed workers—as well as owners of small businesses—in dire situations. And we could not, as a people, find our way out of a paper bag if such a modest undertaking required mutual respect and reasoned deliberation.

This posed a question that I cannot answer: how is the recognition of tragedy in the past supposed to make us feel better about the present?

Reminiscing about George Ringwald as a Way to Feel Better about the Past and the Present

Mr. Ringwald died in 2005 at age 81. Two years after his death, the Riverside Press-Enterprise ran a story about his character and his achievements. In the article, his friends settled on three words to describe him: “Dogged. Joyous. Curious.”

The influential series that Mr. Ringwald wrote (and filed in the courier’s envelope right next to my desk) “expos[ed] how judges and attorneys had been using their positions to levy exorbitant fees against the estates of the Agua Caliente Indians of Palm Springs.” Besides winning the Pulitzer Prize, Mr. Ringwald’s investigations “led to a change in the laws governing the administration of the Indian estates.”

The timing—of telling you about Mr. Ringwald, his achievements, and our confounded conversation about sick societies—is now looking utterly providential.

I started an outline for this essay just before the Supreme Court issued the decision (written by the Colorado-originating Justice Neil Gorsuch) in McGirt v. Oklahoma, affirming the promises made in the treaty with the Muscogee after their relocation from the Southeast. And now I am finishing this essay two days after the announcement that the Washington “Redskins” will change their name.

Dead for fifteen years, Mr. Ringwald, suddenly seems very present.

And now, ready for this?

Before serving in World War Two, Mr. Ringwald graduated from Colorado State University.

While I would have been proud to learn he was a Buff, I am completely content to share my association with Mr. Ringwald with my many beloved colleagues at CSU, and with Cam the Ram.

If we direct our thoughts to our legacy from our one-time fellow Coloradan George Ringwald and to the work he did on behalf of restoring justice to Indian people, our society starts showing some significant signs of health.

“Tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet.”

The words of Lucy Montgomery (whoever that is), appearing on a magnet on the Limerick household refrigerator.

If you find this blog contains ideas worth sharing with friends, please forward this link to them. If you are reading this for the first time, join our EMAIL LIST to receive the Not my First Rodeo blog every Friday.

Photo Credits: A prized day in P-E history photo courtesy of the Press-Enterprise.

Off

Traditional

White

Staying in the Saddle for Eight Seconds

Anonymous — Thu, 09 Jul 2020 06:00:00 +0000

Staying in the Saddle for Eight Seconds Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/09/2020 - 00:00

Where Limericks and Rodeo Coincide

The genre of comical verse

Inclines to the crude and perverse.

But in an era so ratty,

So messed-up and batty,

Could it possibly make anything worse?

In order to achieve a score that could lead to a win, a rodeo competitor must stay on a bucking animal for eight seconds.

As you keep that in mind, I invite you to contemplate a never-before-noted coincidence: eight seconds is exactly the time it takes to recite a trim and well-proportioned limerick.

And now for the real magic: used with precision and aim, eight seconds is precisely the unit of time needed to liberate historical knowledge from the tight spaces of conventional thinking.

You find that claim doubtful?

Hold on to your saddle.

Who Is that Old Guy on the Banner Above this Text?

Or

Which Lear Is That One?

Two memorable fellows named Lear

Held opposite positions on cheer.

Since the King one was scary,

And the Writer one, merry,

The difference between them was clear.

In the thousands of disputes that have raged over what should be taught in the public schools, no one has made a case for the urgent civic need for children to understand the difference between Edward Lear and King Lear. Nor has any advocate insisted on the extraordinary enhancement of capacity for self-expression that a mastery of the craft of writing limericks would give to the nation’s young people. No one else having taken up these causes, they seem to have fallen to me.

Among the characters who populated that historical zone called Western Civilization, King Lear ended up being much more famous than Edward Lear. Personally, I’m not sure that allocation of fame has proven to be entirely the best outcome for humanity.

King Lear was the Shakespearean character whose combination of rage and sorrow gave him the standing of the absolutely worst participant in generational transitions.

Edward Lear was on the other edge of that spectrum. He was an artist and writer who created funny poems and stories, accompanied by equally funny illustrations, that charmed children in his era and for decades to come. In 1846, he became widely known when he published The Book of Nonsense. If you are having a dreary day which you would like to brighten, here’s the ticket: start compiling your list of books, published since 1846, that should have been titled The Book of Nonsense, but were not.

Known as the originator of the genre called nonsense literature, Edward Lear is also recognized as the father of the art form we know as “the limerick.” Of course, literary paternity is quite different from the more physical and material form of paternity. Being the father of the limerick is less a matter of emulating Brigham Young or Rehoboam (who the Bible said had twenty-eight sons and sixty daughters), and more like being to a particular arrangement of words, what Johnny Appleseed was to fruit trees. Edward Lear never married and never had the literal kind of offspring, but he has done very well indeed with the literary kind.

If we return to the digital banner above this text, you will see that I appear there as the widow of Jeffrey W. Limerick, who would sometimes, at conferences and receptions, write on his nametag “The Other Limerick.”

Even though the father of the limerick, Edward Lear, died in 1889, and I was born in 1951, I still feel as if I know him and I even feel as if I might, someday, co-author with him. But I should say, very clearly, that I am not going to propose the construction of an Edward Lear Monument in Boulder, although that would be an unusually fun dedication ceremony. Westminster Abbey got the jump on this line of commemoration: the Abbey has an Edward Lear Memorial Stone in Poet’s Corner. Consistent with his advocacy of utter nonsense, the Edward Lear Memorial Stone is evidently right next to the D. H. Lawrence Memorial Stone. In a certain sense, Lady Chatterley’s Lover reposes next to The Pobble Who Has No Toes.

The Limerick as the Historian’s Best Accomplice

I will now demonstrate what I meant by my opening claim: eight seconds offers just enough time to liberate historical knowledge from the tight spaces of conventional thinking. I will perform this demonstration by a maneuver of translation: I will make a point by expressing it in the language of limericks, and then I will make the same point by expressing it in the language of regular old prose with a tinge of the academic. The limerick will be very brief; the prose version, not so brief.

You can decide which works better.

And yet, in truth, the question of which works better is not really at issue. As the historian’s accomplice, the limerick gets the door unlocked so that historian can come in.

Metric Moments:

The Limerick Comes into its Own as a Force of Liberation

When the number of years that have passed since a historical event reaches a multiple of five or ten, the chances of the public expressing interest in this event undergoes a proportionate multiplication. Aspiring to put the art form of the limerick to work in the cause of deepening historical understanding, the historian knows that it is smart to stay on constant alert for these metric moments.

The United States observed the Bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 2004-2006. A particularly lively orchestrator of Bicentennial programs was Clay Jenkinson, a valued collaborator of the Center of the American West. It was my good fortune to spend two very thought-provoking days in Portland, Oregon, at a conference Clay organized. By the time I went to the podium to give my own speech, I was far better educated by all the talks I had heard.

Plus, I had seized scattered moments to write some limericks.

And now to demonstrate my opening claim: Eight seconds, if they feature the right words in the right rhythm, can set history free of conventional thinking.

We will proceed by contrasting the power of the limerick to the power of prose.

Attempted Liberation by Limerick

The order of names is just strange.

There’s no choice, no option, no range.

Clark is just cursed;

Lewis always comes first

In a sequence we can’t rearrange.

Attempted Liberation by Prose

The very words “Lewis and Clark” have become a formula independent of choice, an inflexible assumption, and a pre-programmed code of expectation. Human cognition has many powers; surely a scholar should be able to say to a layperson, “I hope you will join us in the humanities program we have arranged to observe the Bicentennial of Clark and Lewis,” without triggering the response, “Clark and who?” But our neurons and synapses get lodged and locked in patterns of predictability. Indeed, the same conditioning that requires us always to say “Lewis and Clark” (in an order that, unthinkingly, ratifies Thomas Jefferson’s unrelenting elevation of Lewis and dismissal of Clark) also mobilizes the phalanx of clichés and platitudes that will always try to take over our minds when about these two figures who “opened the West,” whatever that could possibly mean in a region of the planet that has been intensively occupied by human beings for centuries.

Commentary from the Undisguised Advocate of Limericks:

Attempt liberation by limerick, and you can enlist your listeners in the cause of opening the door to more expansive historical thought, challenging the assumptions that would otherwise constrain any true engagement with these historical figures. In contrast, attempted liberation by prose requires lecturing the listeners, administering a verbal equivalent of that technique of the old-fashioned schoolmarm: wielding a ruler for an old-style rap on the knuckles. (If I seem to be empowering a historical stereotype with that remark, be assured that Miss Ruth Myers in sixth grade in Banning, California, was no stranger to this technique.)

So, yes, it is my conviction that the limerick works better than the prose, but it’s a conviction based on a lot of field-testing.

Now we’ll settle in for one more round of this exercise of comparing the effectiveness of these two approaches to rescuing historical figures from assumptions that, intentionally or not, reduce their significance.

Attempted Liberation by Limerick

In matters of gender and race,

Lewis and Clark have lost face.

They needed more training

In sexual abstaining

And in acting with multicultural grace.

Attempted Liberation by Prose

The Lewis and Clark Expedition represented an intensely gendered network of social relations, heavily freighted with assumptions about the superiority of civilization to savagery. While we are, of course, aware that the world of the early nineteenth century was very different from our own, we cannot obscure the fact that there was a hierarchy of assumed power in every action that Lewis and Clark and their men took. To the degree that the men suffered from the effects of sexually transmitted diseases, these afflictions were unquestionably tied to exercises of power and privilege over Native peoples.

At this point, surely most readers are now ready to exclaim, “We got your point! Uncle! Give us a break!”

So I will.

Though not instantly.

I still have two more Lewis and Clark limericks for readers to deploy in a “Do Try This at Home” activity. In their unsubtle and ham-handed way, both of these limericks provide the occasion to ask ourselves a crucially important question: “As people who are not steering with great clarity when we wrestle with the ethical issues of the twenty-first century, how much authority do we hold when we attempt to judge Americans of two centuries ago?”

Clark and Lewis Forced to Endure Two More Limericks in Their “Honor”

These leaders have outlived their time.

As heroes, they’re far past their prime.

Their legacy is tattered;

Their reputation, battered,

Since exploring’s now judged to be crime.

If we condemn them as brute, boor, or geek,

Lewis and Clark cannot speak.

They can’t protest or riot;

They are forced to be quiet.

They can’t whisper, or mutter, or shriek.

OK, now answer the question: How much authority do we hold when we attempt to judge Americans of the past? Could it be time to accept a reduction in our claims on authority and to expand our portfolio in humility?

The Limerick Advances on Abraham Lincoln’s Unguarded Flank

In 2020, the question—how should we reckon with the complexity of great leaders in the nation’s past?— has become a subject of great division. Would a well-deployed limerick make this situation better or worse?

Might as well find out.

Abraham Lincoln led the Union to a triumph over the Confederacy, and, in a process that turned out to have more steps and stages than he could have imagined, Lincoln pushed for the end of American slavery.

Abraham Lincoln figured out a lot about governance and politics, but he didn’t figure out how to be perfect. To see just how “not-perfect” his presidency was, you have to pay attention to the American West.

In 2009, I spoke at a conference on “Abraham Lincoln and the West” at the Bill Lane Center at Stanford University. In a grim set of stories I will not retell here, the era of the Civil War was a calamitous time for Indian peoples in the West, with a range of catastrophes from the Bear River Massacre in Southern Idaho to the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado, from the agonizing divisions in the Five Civilized Tribes in Indian Territory to the Long Walk forcing the Navajo from their homeland to the distant Bosque Redondo.

Obviously, Lincoln’s attention was elsewhere. I myself am not inclined to get very judgmental on this count. To say that Lincoln had his hands full with the nation’s descent into disunion is surely an understatement. But we cannot fudge this reality: the wisdom appearing in many of his responses to national dilemmas did not show up much in the West.

To get the full picture of the weak flank that the West presented in Lincoln’s presidential performance, consider the crafty strategy adopted by Doris Kearns Goodwin in her celebrated book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. This is a book about Lincoln’s brilliance in choosing his cabinet, the heads of the executive branch’s departments.

I was far from the only person with a serious interest in Western history who picked up Team of Rivalsin a pre-existing state of puzzlement. If Goodwin believed that Lincoln’s appointments of cabinet officials demonstrated his genius, what would she have to say about the most important federal officeholders when it came to Western America—Caleb B. Smith and John Palmer Usher, Lincoln’s two thoroughly mediocre Secretaries of the Interior?

So how did Doris Kearns Goodwin, in Team of Rivals, reckon with the fact that Lincoln’ s selections as Secretaries of the Interior presided over agencies that were legendary for their corruption, before and after Lincoln’s presidency?

She barely mentioned Smith or Usher.

Problem solved.

This opens the door to a provocative question: in a forthright reckoning with the variable manifestations of Lincoln’s genius in governance, might a writer of limericks outperform Doris Kearns Goodwin?

How could we reckon with the difficulty Lincoln had—as any president would have had—in dealing effectively with the settler factions and feuds that fractured the Western territories? How could we be forthright in noting the intractable ethical challenge presented by the utterly predictable onslaught of political supporters (not unfairly called “political hacks”) who felt that Lincoln owed them patronage appointments to paid federal offices?

Here are two limericks, given force by the distinctive brevity of this art form, that address the troubles Lincoln faced with the West and the federal bureaucracy. Note that these limericks do not blame Lincoln; instead, they implicitly acknowledge that these problems pre-existed him and would outlast him.

Limericks that Are Braver than Doris Kearns Goodwin

When he dealt with the American West,

Lincoln was not at his best.

As endless distractions,

Western squabbles and factions

Made Lincoln feel glum and depressed.

When it was time to distribute the jobs,

Lincoln was besieged by mobs.

He had to pick among packs

Of small-minded hacks,

Partisan embezzlers and slobs.

Yes, Abraham Lincoln was short of perfection. And the right limericks provide the opportunity to explain why perfection was not in his reach, nor in the reach of anyone else who might have tried to lead this troubled nation in the 1860s.

Dating a Limerick

So how did I get into this line of work?

To begin to answer that question, examine the next limerick and try to guess the year when I wrote it.

How terribly hard to be President,

To be inept, confused, and hesitant.

To be cast off and busted

By the friends that you trusted,

To be laughed at beyond all precedent.

I bet nearly everyone guessed wrong.

And yet some may have made a first move toward the answer, “Very recently,” and then rethought that guess when they thought about the word “hesitant.” There are innumerable adjectives ready to go to work to describe the current occupant of the White House. Every now and then, it would be great to have the word “hesitant” come into play in that enormous psychological thesaurus, maybe especially when it comes to the impulsiveness of Tweeting.

But, so far, no such luck.

In fact, the limerick you have been pondering came into being in 1971. I composed it during my 20^th Century American History course at the University of California, Santa Cruz, on the day when my professor was lecturing on the presidency of Warren Harding.

If I had made another choice and if I had given you the second limerick that I composed on that day, you would have had so many clues that guessing wouldn’t have been any fun. (A quick reminder: Harding’s campaign slogan was “A Return to Normalcy,” a phrase to reassure voters as the nation retreated into isolationism after the first world war.)

The Second Warren Harding Limerick, Which Might Be the Peak of My Literary Career

There was an old man named Warren

Who hated all things foreign.

He liked to live normally,

Drunk and informally,

And spend his time gambling and whorin’.

As I believe this limerick demonstrates, in 1971, when all my other life skills were still in chrysalis, I was already a skilled practitioner of the craft of the limerick.

So a brief history of this accelerated achievement seems in order.

I was a senior in college when I happened onto a brilliant strategy for managing my restlessness in classrooms. I feel certain that this idea arose from a childhood spent sporadically in the company of Edward Lear. But I did not keep a diary or journal, and so there is no documentation to support this speculation.

But on to the brilliant strategy. While professors pursued their lesson plans with purpose and self-determination, I took up my own project in purpose and self-determination. The moment I got restless in class, I assigned myself to write a limerick. It would then appear to the professors that I was concentrating very hard—which I truly was. With my mind occupied by auditioning various words and rhymes, I found that I might as well direct my gaze in the direction of the professor. This added up to an entirely excellent arrangement: I looked with such focused concentration at the professor that I was unmistakably the closest listener in the room. When a line in my limerick suddenly cohered, I would seize my pen and witte with intensity, not scribbling notes chaotically, but apparently distilling the lecture in a carefully considered way.

Then, at the end of class, I left with incomplete lecture notes that have vanished from the world and with complete limericks that are still in my possession.

When I graduated from college, my plan to manage classroom restlessness had delivered a result that would prove central to my long-term success. At age twenty-one, I was bilingual: I could write in the manner of the academic monograph, and I could write in the manner of the limerick.

Only a day or two after I had arrived in New Haven for graduate school, a group of graduate students from different fields happened to converge in a courtyard.

In a flurry of names, I heard one person introduce himself as “Jeff Limerick.”

I think you can figure out where this is going.

At this point, the title of this subsection gains a striking new dimension. I was indeed soon “dating a Limerick.”

A life that was poised to stretch in many directions had acquired at least one thread of coherence.

An Enthusiastic Public Speaker, Who Finds Herself Writing a Blog,

Composes A Concluding Self-Indulgent Lament

If I could only go into a room

Where Covid-19 did not loom,

I’d inspire and I’d teach,

I’d banter and I’d preach,

Which I cannot do well when on Zoom.

If you find this blog contains ideas worth sharing with friends, please forward this link to them. If you are reading this for the first time, join our EMAIL LIST to receive the Not my First Rodeo blog every Friday.

Photo Credits:

The Pobble Who Has No Toes courtesy of: http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/ll/pobble.html

Abraham Lincoln photo courtesy of: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abraham_Lincoln_O-55,_1861-crop.jpg

Lewis & Clark photo courtesy of: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lewis_and_Clark,_side_by_side.jpg

Edward Lear photo courtesy of: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Edward_Lear#Portraits

The Lady Chatterleys Lover photo courtesy of: https://americanliterature.com/author/d-h-lawrence/book/lady-chatterleys-lover/summary

Off

Traditional

White

Rescued by the Past

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 06:00:00 +0000

Rescued by the Past Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 07/01/2020 - 00:00

The Promise of Historical Thinking on the Fourth of July

The laws of the Early Republic “made explicit provision to protect the lands reserved for the Indians from white encroachment, and from 1796 on the laws provided that the President of the United States could employ such military force as he saw necessary to remove illegal squatters on Indian lands . . . “

Francis Paul Prucha, The Sword of the Republic: The United States Army and the Frontier, 1783-1846 (1969)

“A significant number” of Army officers in the nineteenth-century West “struggled with the morality of fighting Indians to serve the purposes of greedy Americans. Some of them revealed hearts in conflict with their actions. . . . When it came to matters of Indians, Indian policy, and the morality of the Indian wars, they demonstrated an irrepressible individuality.”

Sherry L. Smith, The View from Officers’ Row: Army Perceptions of Western Indians (1990)

A Holiday Looms, in Troubled Times

How should we observe the Fourth of July in 2020, when the coronavirus is behaving like an inconceivably malevolent event planner, and when our chances of uniting to observe this anniversary seem several levels below dismal?

I have three ideas.

First, let’s take possession of a great national heritage hidden in plain sight: a lineage of independent-minded military officials notable for their forthright self-examination and unflinching appraisal of their nation’s conduct.

Second, let’s draw on the stories of these historic figures to get moving on a long-needed project: transporting a spirit-draining phrase, as vacuous as it is popular, to the graveyard where outmoded phrases are put to rest.

Third, let’s conjure up ways that we can build on these first two action items to replace dead-ended thinking about historical monuments and memorials with a vision filled with life.

Holiday Activity #1

Regaining Possession of a National Heritage

If you wanted to make the claim that people of the United States had been united in the cause of westward expansion, you would have to go very aerial. By the time you reached an elevation that would mislead you into seeing a nation that was of one mind in support of Manifest Destiny, you would realize that you had arrived in a zone where oxygen was getting scarce.

Brevet Major General John Wool is the historical figure who has made sure that I would never be able to take that flight to abstraction and over-generalization. He has never let me forget the wide range of opinions—and principles—that lived in the minds of the people of the nation’s past.

U.S. Army General. John Ellis Wool. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

My guess is that most readers—probably all readers—will need a little help in identifying this Wool fellow.

Despite my best efforts over nearly forty years, General Wool has failed to gain the status of a widely recognized historical figure. Even when I used to feature him in my Western American history classes, he never took hold in the students’ memories, even when he was paired with the magic phrase, “This could be on the exam.” When this warning proved prophetic and the request to identify him appeared on the text, the results were discouraging. “Wool played a major role in the struggles between sheep and cattle raisers,” or “Wool helped to launch the fur trade”: that was about the best I could hope for.

The actual John Wool was a lot more important than that. Having first made his mark in Western American history as an officer in the Mexican-American War, Wool was appointed as the commanding officer for the Pacific Northwest in the mid-1850s.

When he took this position, relationships between Indian people and white settlers were a mess, with the conflicts escalating into the Yakima War.

General Wool believed that he was compelled to deploy Army troops against the Indians. But he did not feel compelled to conceal his judgment of the cause of the troubles that required this deployment.

Before Wool could take action, Oregon settlers had organized companies of “Volunteers” who had taken it upon themselves to attack Indians with little in the way of deliberation and a lot in the way of brutality. As the accomplished military historian Robert Utley wrote, “Wool did not hesitate to express his conviction that the Oregon troops had pushed the tribes . . . into hostility.” Since the Volunteers had stirred up the trouble, constraining the power of white settlers was the essential step toward peace. Once “the volunteers ceased their depredations and savage barbarities on the Indians,” Wool wrote, “justice and the ordinary feelings of humanity” could come into play.

Throughout the West, local settlers often saw profit in conflict, anticipating a flow of federal money for volunteer troops and also for Army expenditures for food and supplies. Thus, the Yakima War, Wool asserted, “has been, from the commencement, one of plunder of Indians and of the treasury of the United States, prompted by political and pecuniary considerations.”

Writing in 1967, Robert Utley offered this shaky and uncomfortable appraisal of the general:

In the larger sense, of course, Wool was right, but in the context of the times, his inability to understand the other point of view as well cost him needed civilian support and deepened the bitterness already engendered by field commanders who now and then sided with the Indians.

What it would have meant for Wool to court “civilian support,” with the Oregon Volunteers on a rampage, is not easy to imagine. And, in retrospect, I am surprised that, when I first read this passage thirty years ago, my curiosity was not aroused by Utley’s reference to “field commanders who now and then sided with the Indians.” Still, even if holding back his admiration, Utley did acknowledge that Wool had made an impact: “Intemperate public utterances ensured wide circulation of the general’s views.”

And then, in 1990, historian Sherry L. Smith published The View from Officers’ Row: Army Perceptions of Western Indians. I learned from this book that General Wool had a sizable cohort of counterparts who shared his recognition of white settlers as provocateurs of conflict. As Smith observed, “The majority of officers, in fact, simply could not neglect the role the white presence played on the turbulent frontier.” In her research, she found an abundance of passages in which Army officers condemned the injuries inflicted on Indians by frontiersmen. One captain wrote that “natives could not be blamed” for violence because “’rascally whites’ frequently killed” Indian people “out of sport.” Another officer referred to one group of white settlers as “the most unmitigated, mean, rascally race I ever met with.” Lamenting the role of “wholly unscrupulous” white men in the onset of the Ute War of 1879, Major Alfred Lacey Hough unleashed a full round of fury: “It is an outrage that we of the Army who have all the hardships to encounter should be made such catspaws or mere tools of ambitious men who care only for their own interests and cater to the public for sympathy.”

Only one of the officers in Sherry Smith’s book called into question the superiority of “civilization.” None resigned their commissions. But a significant sampling of officers “deplored the abuses heaped upon native people by unsavory and unscrupulous frontiersmen and corrupt or inept government officials.” Thus, the national heritage we now hold: a tradition of nineteenth-century Army officers recording the crucial recognition of the complex and unforeseen consequences of the nation’s ambitions and of their own roles in producing those consequences.

Holiday Activity #2

Supporting the Blessed Disappearance of “Men of Their Times”

And now for a leading question: should we think of these officers as “men of their times”?

Given the dates of their births and of their deaths, the only answer would seem to be “Yes.”

But not so fast.

If we were to compete to identify the least helpful statement that we could make about the people of the past, we couldn’t do much better than “they were men of their times.” Those words have had the misfortune of turning into the go-to phrase of preference when an individual wants to assert that people today have no right to appraise the conduct of historic figures. He was just a “man of his times” serves as a shield to protect a historic figure from our curiosity and from our desire to take him seriously.

Intended to defend the people of the past from our critical examination, the phrase “men of their times” has had the unintended effect of dehumanizing them, denying their individuality and homogenizing them into one, unitary, likeminded clump.

(I cannot keep from noting that the one great virtue of the phrase is its distinctive twist on gender exclusivity. It is wonderful to be left out of this ridiculous phrase, and no imaginable reason to ask to be included in it!)

And now to knit together our first two Fourth of July holiday activities.

In the nineteenth-century American West, quite a number of officers with restless consciences served in the U.S. Army. In their writings, these officers knock the pins out from under the homogenizing, dehumanizing, standardizing, and ruthlessly stereotyping custom of categorizing historic figures as “just men of their times.”

Whatever your plans for the Fourth of July in 2020, consider making this the day that you join the movement to send this benighted phrase off to its long deserved disappearance, clearing the way for a full recognition of the vitality and diversity of the people who preceded us on the planet.

Holiday Activity #3

Designing a Monument for a Failed Ideal

As ceremonial objects designed to acquaint citizens with their shared heritage, monuments, memorials, and statues are performing very poorly these days. Among all the cultural customs that have begged and pleaded for a fresh start, this doubtful method for paying tribute to history is leading the pack.

Of all the indignities imposed on people after their death, the strategy of casting them in bronze and placing them on pedestals has been a particularly questionable “honor.” Since bronze corrodes easily, the historical figure so memorialized will soon come down with pits and streaks, unless provided intrusively constant maintenance. The pedestal furthers the dehumanizing, putting the figure far beyond the comfortable reach of the gaze of the living. And the statements on the plaques stand out as major achievements in tedious and formulaic prose.

We could do better than this.

So, on the Fourth of July in 2020, let’s come up with a vision of a fresh and innovative kind of memorial and monument.

Here’s what I have in mind: a test run at creating a tribute to a forgotten ideal that figured in the nation’s origins.

And yes, I have an ideal to suggest as our first candidate.

I propose a monument to an ideal that figured in the earliest days of the Republic: The recognition that the honor of the United States required the nation to be scrupulous and persistent in protecting Indian people from intrusions into the lands that had been designated as theirs.

This ideal figured in the high-minded rhetoric of political figures, and it also produced action. In 1796, Congress passed a law that, in the words of the noted historian Francis Paul Prucha, “specifically withdrew all support of any claims made [by white squatters] to lands” located within the boundaries of Indian Country, and “authorized the use of military force to remove the offending settlers.”

Repeatedly, in the years of the Early Republic, the Army sent troops in to remove white intruders into Indian land, burning their illegal homes and destroying their illegal improvements.

White settlers who ignored the restrictions and intruded into Indian land were, of course, intensely resentful of their removal. But every unit of that resentment was its own affirmation that federal officials tried to give the ideal—of requiring white settlers to respect the integrity of Indian territory—a claim on reality.

As Secretary of War Henry Knox wrote in 1793, in a commentary on the “violent and lawless inroads of several parties of whites” into Indian territory,

Unless such crimes shall be punished in an exemplary manner, it will be in vain for the government to make further attempts to establish any plan or system for the administration of Indian Affairs founded on the principles of moderation and justice—Treaties will be at an end and violence and injustice will be the Arbiters of all future disputes between the whites and neighbouring tribes of Indians; and of consequence, much innocent blood will be shed . . .

And then, as every reader realizes, the ideal disappeared, from memory and from enforcement.

Now the tough question: How do you build a memorial to an ideal, especially to an ideal that failed?

For this one, we need an array of quotations from the leaders of the Early Republic, asserting that national honor would be shaken if the nation did not respect the boundaries of Indian land. We need a series of quotations from tribal leaders, affirming that they had heard this promise and expected the United States to honor it. We need the cartographers (Indian and white) on our team, producing (as they already have) compelling maps of the prior claims of Indian people on the lands now crisscrossed by lines of private property and public agencies. And we need to note and applaud the good work already underway in the widespread custom of “Indigenous Land Acknowledgments.”

And, to display or embody this ideal, we will need something that is radically different from a stone or bronze memorial. We will need something closer to an animation, in which an ideal takes shape and moves boldly out into the world, but then collapses and vanishes from memory, until it is brought back to life.

And now to link all three Holiday Activities together: why not think of the nineteenth-century Army officers, who recorded their conflicts of conscience, as figures in a long series of people who tried to bring that ideal back to life? When they condemned the aggression perpetrated by white settlers who asserted their personal profit over the constraints of boundaries and laws and who scorned the claims of Indian tribes, these officers were not speaking as defectors or dissidents, renegades or mavericks.

On the contrary, they were patriots restating the ideal recorded in the laws of the early Republic.

With a fresh start, the purpose of memorials and monuments would be unmistakable: to invite us to get reacquainted with ideals that have failed, but still remain within our reach for revival and renewal.

Have a good Fourth of July.

A Surgical Gift for Self-Examination

Bernard James Byrne, Army Surgeon in Santa Fe, 1880

“As I walked along the street, I stopped several citizens to ask the way. No one could speak English; the answer to each question was ‘Quien sabe?’ I finally got indignant to think of walking a street in my own country and not being able to find a citizen who spoke the language, but I cooled off when I reflected that Indians and Mexicans had been here ages before I was; I was the interloper.”

Off

Traditional

White

Keeping Accountability in the Saddle

Anonymous — Thu, 25 Jun 2020 06:00:00 +0000

Keeping Accountability in the Saddle Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/25/2020 - 00:00

Serving and Protecting in the Arenas of the Domestic and the International

It is presumable that a nation solicitous of establishing its character on the
broad basis of justice, would not only hesitate, but reject every proposition to
benefit itself by the injury of any neighboring community . . .

Henry Knox, first United States Secretary of War,
to President George Washington, June 15, 1789

Zachary Guiliano

Introduced by Patty Limerick

Zachary Guiliano served five-and-a-half years in the United States Army as an Intelligence Analyst. After completing training, he was assigned to the 101st Airborne at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. In 2013 he was deployed to Afghanistan under Special Operations Command, and during this time he was promoted to the rank of Sergeant. Shortly after returning to the states, Sergeant Guiliano was assigned to the 4th Infantry Division at Fort Carson, Colorado where he finished his enlistment.

Thanks to my good fortune in meeting Stewart Elliott, retired Navy Seal and Director of the CU Office of Veterans and Military Affairs, I regularly appear on the “Professors’ Panel” in the Bridge Programs that welcome Student Veterans to campus. So I met Zach Guiliano just as he arrived at CU, and my good fortune has never let up. A double major in International Relations and Film Production, he is a participant in the Center’s Western American Studies Certificate program. In the Spring of 2019, Zach was a student in my course, CAMW 2001, The American West.

Let’s say I knew a couple of fellow professors who had had extremely poor luck in course enrollment. Let’s say these poor souls had gotten locked in melancholy, overcome by too much time spent in the company of unmotivated students who, presented with consequential and compelling ideas, could only peer fitfully at their phones. And let’s say that I was determined to help these benighted instructors recover their spirits.

What would I do?

Well, that’s easy.

I’d introduce them to Zach Guiliano.

Whatever you put in front of Zach, he will leap into figuring it out. You can choose a clip from a Western documentary, the story of a controversy over a building named after a controversial historical figure, images from an enormous mural created by a noted Western artist, scenarios for the future of Western outdoor recreation and the role of Indian tribes in that future, or the best book ever written on Western resource conflicts (John McPhee’s Encounters with the Archdruid, in case anyone was wondering). Whatever you present to him, he will go at it full-tilt, exploring, interpreting, and reflecting with amazing energy and with guaranteed originality.

In other words, Student Guiliano turned out to be just as impressive as Sergeant Guiliano.

And now, parting from the sorrowful, burned-out professors whom I created only so that Zach could redeem them, let’s imagine a world in which students and professors would meet in the framework of a “balance of instruction,” modeled on the “balance of trade” that nations are forever quantifying.

In the Guiliano/Limerick Balance of Instruction, Zach and I are breaking even.

The pandemic has shaken the foundations of higher education, and we are all guessing away, like contestants in a frenzied quiz show, trying to figure out what the future might hold. A few aged babyboomers may hold onto nostalgia for the old model of a lecture hall where a “sage on the stage” dispensed units of knowledge to the docile and absorbent young. While “good riddance” would be an unnecessarily hard-hearted rejoinder to that nostalgia, Mark Twain’s exhortation to humanity—”Dream other dreams, and better”—makes for a more persuasive response.

That’s where the Guiliano/Limerick Balance of Instruction comes in.

Keep reading this blog, and you will find a down-to-earth demonstration of a vision of higher education in which professors and students regularly engage in mutual and reciprocal instruction, a cross-generational initiative in dreaming other dreams, and better.

While I could not have written the essay you are about to read, I was privileged to participate in its creation. I listened as Zach instructed me on a topic of great relevance to the present: how a better understanding of accountability in the military might give clarity and direction to police reform. I asked him questions; given the fact that I knew so much less than he did, this was easy to do. Zach and I then pitched into envisioning ways that his knowledge and insights could evolve into an essay. I read and commented on several drafts of that essay. And now, putting this blog to its highest use in service to our troubled nation, I am showcasing Zach’s work so that others can join me in learning from him.

Dreaming other dreams, and better, Zach and I share the hope that his essay will open the door to a forthright conversation between two groups of Americans whose lives share a distinctive burden that few of the rest of us carry: their jobs require them to carry firearms and to live with the recognition that they can never be insulated from violence.

If anyone wonders how Zach’s essay fits with the Center’s focus on the American West, stay tuned for the next “Not My First Rodeo” blog, appearing just before the Fourth of July. That posting will trace the history of a significant sector of Army personnel, in the nineteenth-century West, who believed that their service included an honest appraisal of their nation’s conduct.

Complying with the protocols of remote working, Zach and I conducted our conversations on Zoom. This really quite tolerable medium allowed us to dart around to various topics that were not on our agenda for discussion. At one point, I mentioned that, since mid-March, I have taken to singing when I am walking on lightly populated streets. Zach, it turns out, is also a singing pedestrian and hiker in pandemic times. My repertoire, I told him, always included “America the Beautiful,” “Home on the Range,” and “Don’t Fence Me In.”

He urged me to add “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” I have done so.

At the end of his essay, you’ll find a link to the United States Army Field Band’s performance of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” We hope that you will follow that link, take pleasure in the artistry of gifted musicians, and, as you contemplate the words of the song, reflect on the insights that Sergeant Zach Guiliano offers to his fellow Americans.

And then, if you are so inclined, go for a walk and join the chorus.

Keeping Accountability in the Saddle:

Serving and Protecting in the Arenas of the Domestic and the International

Zachary Guiliano

Henry Knox, first United States Secretary of War,
to President George Washington, June 15, 1789

Zachary Guiliano in dress uniform—Fort Campbell, Kentucky, Spring of 2014.

My discomfort with the militarization of American police started in 2014, during the unrest following Michael Brown’s killing by police in Ferguson, Missouri. I had just returned from Afghanistan the December before, and I was unsettled to see police standing in front of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles and carrying and wearing gear I wore on deployment. I saw similar scenes play out as law enforcement agencies from six states tore down the protester encampment on sovereign Sioux land at the Standing Rock Reservation at the end of 2016.

Since 9/11, the use of military equipment by domestic law enforcement has been a continually upward trend. The use of that equipment in the unrest following the death of George Floyd has been a case-in-point for protesters rallying against police brutality. Providing military equipment to police in the US without regular, meaningful training has proven to be a recipe for disaster.

The military and the police do hold some qualities and dimensions in common. Both are halves of the government’s uniformed services. Both are charged by the government to serve and protect the state and its citizens. The glaring difference between them is the disparity of accountability in their use of force.

The police are beginning to look indistinguishable from a military force, but they do not have the same level of accountability brought on by decades of experience, institutional introspection, and organizational education as the military. In American society, military personnel and police are among a select few that face a very real prospect of using and experiencing extreme acts of violence. The military benefits from much more regular and rigorous training, as well as a clear hierarchy where everyone knows their role. Junior enlisted personnel carry out lawful orders, non-commissioned officers (NCOs: to the uninitiated, they are enlisted personnel whom an officer delegates to) uphold standards and discipline, and officers issue lawful orders. The term “lawful order” is something everyone understands to be an order within the confines of the law. Military personnel have a moral obligation to disobey or not follow illegal orders, although under military law they may have to defend this action in court to a military tribunal.

I will not claim that the military’s unique code of laws, the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), is perfect. The UCMJ can be, and has been, inadequate at holding responsible many American personnel accused of a myriad of violations. The UCMJ’s strength is demonstrated when wielded by NCOs and officers to maintain good order and discipline in the ranks. The UCMJ can be used to mete out punishment to those who step out of line. Punishments include reduction of rank (and thus pay and potentially other benefits), being forced out of the military, or imprisonment at Fort Leavenworth. This structural legal pressure helps maintain order, but can also cement organizational change.

The UCMJ was integral in shifting the military culture during the early years of the Global War on Terror. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the enemy was gaining support among the local populations, fueled by scandals like Abu Ghraib or the Haditha Massacre, as well as excessive use of force in interactions with civilians. In 2007, General David Petraeus led efforts to rewrite and reorient US Counterinsurgency doctrine. As the military shifted to a more restrained approach, excessive use of force began to be increasingly taboo, and the UCMJ empowered commanders to throw “bad apples” in the trash. By 2008 the more restrained approach provided promising results, as US and Iraqi casualties decreased, and Iraqi citizens seemed more willing to work with US forces and the Iraqi government.

Counterinsurgency, or COIN, and American law enforcement response to protests, should only be related in the sense that both involve providing security for civilians. COIN can simply be viewed as a doctrine covering the use of force in an insurgent environment. The US military has been engaged in COIN campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they assisted local military and law enforcement in maintaining order. COIN doctrine can be broken down into two different modes, “direct” and “indirect.” Direct COIN calls for neutralizing as many insurgents as possible (that is, killing, capturing, or otherwise removing them from the battlespace in a combatant capacity) in order to erode civilian support. Indirect COIN requires patience and restraint in the use of force, movement of fighting away from populated areas, and a focused effort on building infrastructure and local security forces in order to win the civilian populace’s trust. There is no such thing as a purely Direct or Indirect COIN effort, and, in any given event, both will borrow doctrine from one another. Direct COIN requires bringing the fight to the enemy in order to break their will through force, which discourages the civilian populace from supporting the insurgents (or, in domestic terms, criminals). The American approach to the war in Vietnam is an example of the US conducting direct COIN. Indirect COIN requires operations focused on community outreach. COIN and local government forces provide security, stability, and infrastructure to delegitimize the insurgency, as seen in Afghanistan and Iraq beginning in 2007.

When systems which shield bad behavior are in place, there is no incentive for organizations endowed with a monopoly of the legitimized use of violence to engage in a domestic version of “indirect COIN” by reaching out to the community or doing the hard work of self-regulation. Police officers in riot lines across the country know they have the cover of their superiors, unions, and the justice system, and accordingly act with impunity. Just as important, they do not know the proper guidelines for the use of the equipment in their reach. Fourteen-ton MRAPs are an unnecessary response to Americans who are protesting by raising their hands in surrender. Rubber bullets, which can be up to the size of an adult male’s palm, are meant to be fired into the ground, not directly at people. Tear gas is meant to be dispersed upwind of groups of people, not fired directly into a crowd. Flashbangs, a type of grenade which stuns targets with a massive burst of light and sound, are meant to assist in clearing rooms of armed combatants, not to scatter an unarmed crowd of Americans. If law enforcement personnel cannot hold their own accountable in the use of their military gear properly, they have no business being trusted with that gear.

When it comes to solutions, we face a vexing “which comes first” challenge: positive efforts from the rank-and-file or departmental cultural change? My belief is that both must happen concurrently, although we must also acknowledge that we are (tragically) unlikely to see a national or state level adoption of a Uniform Code of Police Justice. But penal codes are not the be-all, end-all of accountability, and there are domestic, as well as military examples of success. Programs like New Orleans’ EPIC (Ethical Policing Is Courageous) encourage officers to apply gentle peer pressure on their comrades before situations spiral out of hand. It explores training for new or junior officers to stand up to superiors in a way that is respectful and maintains order and discipline. In an interview with NPR, a career officer said a rookie applied EPIC to him following a physical altercation, preventing him from making a mistake he said he would have regretted for the rest of his life. Camden, New Jersey has seen massive decreases in violent crime after the city effectively defunded their police force and required structural reorganizing. In Afghanistan and Iraq, US forces had to run through an exhaustive escalation of force (EOF), and oftentimes could not use lethal force unless fired upon.

Police officers are not exactly the brothers and sisters of the military, but they are more our cousins, sharing some of the burdens, responsibilities, and privileges. I’d encourage my cousins in uniform to take this opportunity to examine their behavior and that of their comrades and departments, in order to initiate meaningful change among the rank and file.

When I think of my fellow veterans who have transitioned from military to police service, I see them in a distinctive position to benefit their fellow citizens, both in and out of uniform. With a hybrid experience, a police officer with military experience may be more like an in-law than a sibling or a cousin. As is typical of the challenges faced by in-laws when trying to be helpful, their task is almost certain to be awkward and uncomfortable. But these in-laws can serve their peers and their communities by pulling together the wisdom gained from their time in camouflage and bringing that wisdom to bear on their time in blue.

The majority of Americans have made clear that current methods used by police have been too forceful. Consensus, rare in this country, converges on the proposition that lack of accountability is the problem that needs correction. It is time to acknowledge the failure of “domestic Direct COIN,” wherein countless millions of dollars are poured into crime prevention via aggressive enforcement of policies, and thousands of lives are tragically cut short without true American justice being served. I encourage my cousins to ask themselves if a more indirect form of policing would work better. When US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq made the switch to indirect COIN (and for some time after), there was much grumbling from the military and veteran communities about how restraint would lead to a massive increase in military casualties. The opposite was proven true. Combat continued, violence continued, and civilians were still caught in the crossfire, but the locals appreciated that US forces didn’t view them as expendable. They still hated us, but the indirect approach showed we wouldn’t live up to the barbaric conqueror stereotype that the enemy had painted of us.

The duty—and the honorable calling— of American police to serve and protect the public has collided with the realities of policing culture and policy. In a time when the taxpayer says “enough,” will America’s finest do what is necessary to uphold their oaths and begin the hard task of introspection, rebuilding trust, and sustaining community outreach? Or will they opt to maintain the status quo, rejected by many of the citizens they police?

When I was in Afghanistan in 2013, there was almost a week of protests demanding the immediate removal and arrest of the provincial governor. Protesters alleged he was deeply corrupt, stealing money from aid funds meant for the people. For days I could hear thousands of Afghans, about a mile away in the city center, chanting over the din of the military airfield I lived on. The protesters were allowed to protest peacefully —and with great emotional intensity— in a country torn apart by civil war for decades, and without the centuries of institutional norms we inherit.

In the uprising after the killing of George Floyd, protesters in many cities across the United States were not even given one day of tolerance. In many locales, police departments quickly took up the violent suppression of protests. Officers have been documented on camera arresting, inflicting violence on, and inciting resistance from people who did nothing other than exercise their rights.

Keeping current on police actions in the last few weeks has been as tiring and emotionally draining as my time in Afghanistan, and I don’t have the heart or stomach to recount every act. Why could a deeply fractured, genuinely tribal society in one of the poorest countries in the world tolerate anti-corruption protests without a violent response from the police? Why wasn’t this possible in the supposedly greatest nation on Earth, even when the right to assembly and protest leads our list of rights?

For my part, I’m done being silent. And I’m deeply sorry for being silent for so long.

Banner Photo – Zachary Guiliano, Combat-ready in Afghanistan, 2013.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy6AOGRsR80&feature=emb_title]

Off

Traditional

White

On the Road to the Rodeo of Time

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 06:00:00 +0000

On the Road to the Rodeo of Time Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/18/2020 - 00:00

A Social Psychology Experiment Set to the Tune of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart”

“While they meet to talk about the problems of aging in America, Charles Kuralt has found a young woman in Santa Cruz, California, who is doing something.”

A paraphrase of a remark made by Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News in 1971

At Athens during a dramatic festival, an old man entered the theatre; there was a huge crowd, but not one of his fellow Athenians, anywhere, offered him a seat. He pushed on until he came to the Spartans, who by virtue of their status as ambassadors, had been seated in a reserved section; they—so the story goes—stood up as one man and made room for the old gentleman to sit down. At this, they were applauded long and hard by the whole crowd; thereupon, one of the Spartans remarked that the Athenians knew what was right but couldn’t be bothered to do it.

Cicero, “On Old Age”

A One-of-a-Kind Experience:

How Singing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” Derailed My Radical Activism

My career as a public intellectual began with a full-out failure.

And yet few successes have given me as much pleasure, satisfaction, and meaning as this failure.

It was the Spring of 1970, and the nation’s campuses rose in rebellion against President Richard Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam War. At UC Santa Cruz, many of us joined the national student strike, stopped going to classes, and plunged into a variety of initiatives to protest the invasion of Cambodia.

By the time I got moving, organizers of these initiatives had recruited a surplus of volunteers, and none of the phalanxes, cohorts, and affinity groups needed me.

What to do?

Noting that Santa Cruz had been largely a retirement town before the University opened, I came up with a fresh idea that no one else had claimed: I would mobilize the elderly people of Santa Cruz to stand shoulder to shoulder with the students in protesting the war!

Of course, this would require some strategy and diplomacy, but I had that figured out. I resurrected my faded knowledge of essential guitar chords, and I studied up on the words to “When Irish Eyes Are Shining,” “Let the Rest of the World Go By,” and, of course, “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” I would approach the social directors and activity coordinators at the nursing homes and senior residential facilities, and tell them that I would like to lead sing-alongs with the residents. Then, after two or three occasions of getting acquainted, I would be positioned to bring up Cambodia.

The singing proved very successful, and so did the storytelling afterward. In truth, I soon seemed to have reached my lifetime peak for popularity, becoming a catalyst for happiness the moment I walked in the door.

But the anti-war mobilization of the elderly lagged.

At the end of each session, the old folks would say, “We’ll see you next week, right?”

“Yes, you will,” I would reply, while thinking to myself, “next time, we’ll settle into getting the United States out of Southeast Asia.”

Long before the strategy called “adaptive management” gathered force in the world of land management, I had been forced to devise my own version of this practice: 1) I thought about my initial goal; 2) I saw that it was not working; and 3) I arrived at a far more sensible, but still ambitious goal: Keep showing up, and see if you can reduce some of the loneliness these people live with every day.

“Let Me Call You Sweetheart” had spawned an unsung and unspoken ballad called “Let Me Call You Fictive Kin.”

None of my new friends were my biological relatives, but, still, I had come into possession of the world’s most expansive network of adopted grandparents.

The 1970 national student strike ended, but I, along with friends who had teamed up with me, kept singing and listening to stories. While the war went on, we had apparently made peace with our ineffectiveness in shaping U.S. foreign policy.

The Cameras Rushed In

Suddenly, the old folks and I made a very brief, but very intense, appearance on the national stage. Apparently, the cascade of stories about college students flocking to protests had created a demand for “a good teenager” story in the local and national press. I was not very suitable for casting in this role: I had certainly attended plenty of protests and marches; I had cheered at many a rally; and I had a few incidents of what we will just refer to as “not the greatest judgment.”

But I got the part anyway.

Interviewed by an Associated Press reporter, I conjured up a name for my project: “The Spring and Autumn Alliance.” Counter to all probability and plausibility, the Associated Press story ran on the front pages of newspapers all over the country, featuring the photograph that you see on the banner for this blog. (That’s me and my friend Mrs. Bea Palmer, a British war bride from WWI who I never once beat in Scrabble). The article got me letters from all over the nation. Since I had never been further east than Utah, those return addresses gave me my first chance to believe that those other parts of the country actually existed.

And then I heard from CBS News. Charles Kuralt wanted to bring his “On the Road” team to visit for a couple of days. For two and a half days, I went everywhere with a very coordinated unit of the paparazzi. I walked on the beach with my friend Mr. Johnson who told me interesting facts about the birds we saw; I walked on the pier with Mr. McLeod who told me how he and his fellow soldiers in WWI had captured a bunker where the German troops had placed a piano. And my friend Ralph Houghton, born on the Fourth of July in 1876, and I sang some songs, with his foot in a wingtip shoe and my foot in a sandal keeping time together.

Youthful Certainty Receives its Comeuppance

Initially, I had joined my college housemates in happy anticipation of the fact that a famous CBS newsman and his film crew were going to have dinner with us. But by the time our guests arrived, my attitude had changed 180 degrees.

The moment he walked in our door, I began denouncing and excoriating the famous CBS newsman, telling him I should never have agreed to his visit. The old people who had become my friends were a vulnerable and fragile sector of society. With unthinking cruelty, I had set them up for misrepresentation by an invading squadron from broadcast journalism.

And then, with my roommates glaring at me, I finally quieted down.

The next morning, Kuralt and his team certainly sensed that I was charged up again, ready to defend and protect my elderly friends from this spectacle-driven affront to their dignity and intrusion into the privacy.

And then we walked into the big lobby of the Casa del Rey Retirement Hotel.

Every single seat in that big lobby was filled. Extra chairs had been deployed.

The vulnerable and fragile old people were all arrayed in their finery, waving at Kuralt and greeting him warmly.

Kuralt did not say a word about my fevered remarks the night before. This restraint, I think, permitted us to become friends.

But the inclination to defend the elderly never made a complete departure from my soul.

Reader, Be Warned.

I am about to shift from affectionate nostalgia to intemperate fury.

Hell Hath No Fury Like a Woman Desperate to Intervene When an Old Man Is Pushed, Injured, and Then Scorned

I spent two years making frequent visits to senior residence facilities, nursing homes, and hospital rooms. With that investment of time and attention, I earned the credentials to make the intemperate statements that you are about to read.

My days of cultivating innumerable friendships with old people left me with a conditioned reflex: when an old person takes a bad fall, I go straight to despair. Once, at the Casa del Rey Retirement Hotel, I stopped to hold the door for an elderly resident. He tripped on the threshold and fell forward. I was holding the door, standing behind him, and I could do nothing to catch him or break his fall.

It is the irreversibility of such a calamity that leaves a permanent mark in the memory of the bystander. (And, yes, if you are wondering about the strength of this conditioned reflex, I wept as I typed the preceding paragraph.)

So let’s say one of my elderly friends had taken a bad fall and was in the hospital in intensive care with a serious head injury. To give this scenario one more unit of intensity, let’s say that the injury came not from an accidental fall, but from the delivery of an intentional push.

And then let’s say that I then encountered a person who made a gratuitous, dismissive, cruel, and scornful remark about this badly injured old man.

Here’s what I know about who I was at nineteen.

I would have torn into the person who made that gratuitous, dismissive, cruel, and scornful remark with everything I had.

On June 4, 2020, at a protest in Buffalo, New York, Martin Gugino approached a line of police detailed to clear the area. As he stood in front of them, two policemen pushed him. He lay, unconscious on the ground, with blood flowing from his ear.

Seventy-five-years-old, Gugino is still in the hospital with a skull fracture, and may or may not regain the ability to walk.

On June 9, 2020 the President of the United States said that Gugino “could be an ANTIFA provocateur,” but there is no evidence to support this claim. “I watched,” President Donald Trump said, “he fell harder than was pushed.” The physics that would permit a person to deceptively add velocity or intensity to his descent—in mid-fall—is not easy to grasp. Still, the President found meaning in his characterization of Gugino’s unbearably hard landing: “could be a set up?”

Donald Trump is only one year younger than Martin Gugino. In my Santa Cruz days, I had plenty of occasions to see elderly people respond with intense compassion and empathy to the injury of a contemporary.

One final observation: neither the dignity of age nor the power of white privilege did a thing to protect Martin Gugino from a shove from the two Buffalo policemen or from the scorn of the President of the United States.

Hell Hath No Fury Like a Woman Having to Stand By and Watch While an Injured Old Man Is Scorned by Someone who Should Know Better.

The Road Not Taken, and the Expertise Still to Be Acquired

I enrolled at UC Santa Cruz in 1968, three years after its founding. No one could miss the tension between the retired people who had considered the town to be theirs, and the newly arrived students who were evolving from clean-cut into long-haired in real time.

When I chose my outreach project in 1970, I was thinking of this tension, and I was saying to myself, “I think I could help with that.”

For two years, I was a self-appointed emissary and ambassador, a shuttle diplomat between the retired people in town and the professors and students on campus. And yes, (for all you readers who are catching my drift here), the Center of the American West was coming into view on that distant coast.

As graduation approached, my plan was to pursue the formal study of the issues that had taken possession of me in my time travel between generations. In my applications to graduate schools, I declared that I wanted to study the history of aging in the United States, tracing the processes that led to the twentieth century’s segregation of the elderly.

Of course, I recognized that caring for frail invalids, especially when dementia was in the picture, was beyond the capacity of families, presenting an urgent need for help. And yet most of the people I had come to know were far from frail or mentally disordered. But somehow American society had decided that they should live apart from the rest of us.

And I knew that I could not take the conditions I had observed to be “just the way things are.”

In 2020, in the coronavirus pandemic, in many parts of the country, nursing homes are at the center of attention as the sites of the most concentrated affliction. Nearly every institution or facility where populations of the elderly are concentrated has been placed under rigid rules that prohibit visitors. And yet the reports of calamitous contagion continue.

If I had stuck with the intention that powered my applications to graduate school, I might now be a credentialed expert in gerontology and in a much better position to be helpful. And yet, for a half century, I have carried with me a different kind of expertise: a sharp sense of the sorrow and pain that social isolation and segregation by age can foster.

Here’s the historical framework that I did not glimpse fifty years ago, but which occupies my mind now.

Long before the coronavirus pandemic, with the creation of the institutions known as nursing homes, retirement hotels, senior residential complexes, assisted living facilities, and gated retirement communities, the United States embarked on a major experiment in and trial run of the arrangements we now call “social distancing.” In unintended and unforeseen ways, this experiment proved to be a breathtaking achievement in expanding the reach and power of loneliness.

Despite my preposterous ambition to seek out the elderly and bring out the “anti-war activist” hidden within, I actually adopted a far more compelling historical role. I was trying everything I could think of to serve as a counterforce, corrective, and remedy to the epidemic of loneliness that age segregation had unleashed.

When I and my young companions walked in the doors of those buildings, the warmth and the cheer, the merriment and the relief, that greeted us registered as a tidal wave.

The force of that wave was its own measure of the burden that this vast experiment with social distancing had placed on old people.

As we envision a post-pandemic world, the habits, customs, and conventions that have governed our societal response to aging deserve a thorough reassessment. The high death rate in nursing homes makes a clear statement that segregating the elderly has delivered uneven protection and may even have concentrated their population in ways that left them more vulnerable to a public health calamity. As we look at the future, we have a providential opportunity to ask ourselves, “Is this really how we want to live?”

Age-Appropriate Music

In 1970-1972, as the core of my sing-along repertoire, I chose the songs that the old folks of that time associated with their long-ago life phase of flirtation and courtship.

From time to time, singing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” my mind would wander to the songs of my life phase of flirtation and courtship, moving quickly from there to contemplate the mysterious passage of time.

If the future’s young people, generously volunteering their time to visit with aged babyboomers, followed my selection criterion and chose the songs associated with the peak of their audience’s youthful vitality, what on earth would they sing?

Would the good-hearted young folks of the 2020s find themselves leading sing-alongs of “Let’s Spend the Night Together” or “Come On, Baby, Light My Fire”?

These weird thoughts did deliver a benefit: they stretched my sense of time in a way that proved very helpful to a historian-in-chrysalis.

“These people now look very old, but their stories reveal that they were once young,” I would think to myself. “This is making me begin to suspect that I will not always be nineteen.”

It may not have been the deepest insight I ever had, but it certainly proved to be the most validated.

Banner Photo: Patty Limerick and friend Beatrice Palmer in Santa Cruz, in intense, hyper-engaged conversation. Photograph from the Associated Press that appeared on the front page of newspapers across the country in 1970. Photo credit: Pete Amos.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7QQNPsPhUU&feature=emb_title]

Off

Traditional

White

Pay it Forward

Anonymous — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 06:00:00 +0000

Pay it Forward Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/11/2020 - 00:00

TEACHING AS THE MAIN ATTRACTION AT THE TRUE GRITRODEO

Howard Roberts Lamar was my adviser in graduate school. Without the true grit he brought to bear on that role, I truly do not know what would have become of me.

As this opening statement indicates, with this episode of “Not My First Rodeo,” I am taking a break from the somber topics that prevail in the news. The very serious troubles of our time show no signs of going away, and I will return to them soon.

But not this time.

My chosen topic today is the joyful generational transition in which mentors and their proteges are privileged to participate. Among the many miraculous aspects of mentoring, the most miraculous is its power to create generational chains of relationships, chains that do not break under the strongest pull of time, or of death.

Rather than simply invoking the chains forged by mentoring, this essay shows one of those chains in action. It comes in three connected parts. I am the author of the first part, and my protégé Alice Baumgartner, with whom I had the great privilege of team-teaching in the Spring of 2018, is the author of the second part. And then there is a short third part, for which we team up.

Part One:

The Breathtaking Good Fortune of the Person Formerly Known as Patty Nelson

By Patty Limerick

Mattie Ross to Rooster Cogburn:

They tell me you’re a man with true grit.

When I was in graduate school, I set up camp for a spell at the fork in the road between success and failure. Throughout my time in residence at this juncture of persistence and defeat, Howard Lamar held steady in his role as the coach, guide, and mentor who made it possible for me, at long last, to get moving and to become a historian of the American West.

The great novelist Charles Portis gave the phrase true grit the standing of a star player in the American vocabulary. To many, it may sound like a term archetypally associated with the American West. But Portis’s home was Arkansas, which is usually not the first state to come to mind when we think “Western.”

Whatever the state of origin, anyone who was going to take on a tour of duty as my graduate school adviser was going to need a level of stamina, durability, and determination more often associated with mythic Greek heroes than with Yale history professors.

But Howard Lamar was from Alabama, which is apparently the true grit capital of the world.

As an entering graduate student at Yale in 1972, I was something to see. Overalls were my clothing of preference, and the distinctiveness of my attire only started there. Before I left California for the Northeast, a friend had presented me with an unusual item she had embroidered: a Pegasus/seahorse hybrid on a patch of material that I sewed onto the front of a pair of overalls. Many professors and graduate students at Yale invested their time in gazing on this colorful creature with puzzlement, though I do not recall anyone ever asking me what it meant or why I wore it so consistently. It is just as well that no one asked, since I still do not know the answer.

And then there was the improbable productivity of my tear ducts. I arrived at Yale weeping like a faucet. It was my particular gift to cry whenever anyone said anything nice to me, an unbreakable habit which left hundreds of people apologizing to me for what had actually been very gracious remarks.

Choosing to attend a hippie college had not done a thing to ameliorate this situation. In four years at UC Santa Cruz, even the paltry improvements I’d made in emotional control soon disappeared. Whenever I wept in the redwoods, people back then would sigh with envy and say, “Oh, how I wish I had your honesty in showing your feelings.”

That’s not what they said at Yale.

And yet, with the true grit of an Alabamian, Howard Lamar took all this in stride: the overalls, the prominent display of embroidered mythic creatures of a mysterious taxonomy, and cascades of tears, especially when complimented. He never wavered in his role as my coach, guide, and mentor, though his wonderful wife Shirley must have a heard a tale or two in the evenings, after a particularly strenuous session of coaching, guiding, and mentoring.

A distinguished and admired Western historian who also served as Yale’s acting president, Howard Lamar could not have mustered a moment of pomposity and pretension on a bet. He rarely missed the gatherings of our extremely informal Yale Corral of International Westerners, a gathering of undergraduates, graduate students, and professors where the usual boundaries and borders of status gave up and called it a night a few minutes into the evening. We held our monthly potluck dinners in various homes and apartments, often with a sparse supply of chairs. It made me very happy, and still makes me very happy, that Howard Lamar sat comfortably on the floor with us. This set a precedent that I have taken as a license to sit on the floor with my students whenever that opportunity has presented itself, without any foolish notion that this choice of comfortable seating would erode my authority. He and Shirley also invited sizable groups of students to their house for dinner, a tradition I have been honored to follow with the Center of the American West. (These dinners are under a temporary pandemic suspension, but they will resume as soon as they are again permissible, and I will once again sit on the floor with students who do seem to stand up a little more easily than I do.)

But now we make a sudden shift of venue in this narrative, from the warmth of students and faculty all chatting away at festive dinners, to the chill of a stern committee meeting.

Often unnoticed, there is essential hilarity in the very idea of requiring someone to write a prospectus describing a project that she has not finished and has, in fact, barely started. Maybe it was that intrinsic hilarity that got me off on the wrong foot. I wrote what I thought was a lively and engaging prospectus and presented it to my three designated advisers, including Howard Lamar. Perhaps pulled off course by my eccentric writing style, these three advisers reviewed it and passed it on to the program-wide faculty committee.

The onset of woe was both immediate and lasting.

The committee rejected the prospectus, declaring that it was too humorously and casually written, and demanded that I comply with custom and convey a solemn recognition of the serious issues that rest on responsible scholars.

I collapsed.

I put heart and soul into brooding and dreading. Months passed.

Howard Lamar did everything he could to be kind and encouraging, and that, of course, only made me cry.

And then came his moment of true grit in full operating mode.

He told me he could not get me any more teaching jobs unless I had an approved prospectus. He did not soften this statement, and he did not give the slightest indication that he would do anything but stick to it.

And then he made a statement that few who know this extremely gracious, gentle, and good-natured man would ever imagine him saying.

“If you will rewrite that prospectus and do what the committee told you to do,” he said, “and if they try to reject it again, there will be blood in my eye.”

Since this is no longer a familiar saying, I will borrow a helpful clarification from a commentator on a website. The phrase, “blood in your eye,” means that “people can see the anger in your eyes.”

The magic combination—of flatly informing me of the peril that I was in, and then flatly informing me of the peril that the committee members would be in, should they indulge in another round of enthusiasm for rejecting my prospectus—released me from paralysis. I rewrote the prospectus, an achievement that I would not offer as an inspiration to the young, since this accomplishment was made possible in part by the true grit contained in a bottle of Wild Turkey.

The committee signed off, and while no one could say that I raced on to the completion of the dissertation, there is no question that my failure to write an accepted prospectus would have brought my academic career to a full stop.

At this point, there is no avoiding a recitation of the Golden Rule.

Because Howard Roberts Lamar reliably brought true grit into action in mentoring me, I have been able to do onto others as he did onto me.

This permits me to introduce Alice Baumgartner, a gifted young scholar who went to Yale after Howard Lamar’s retirement, but who was the recipient of his kindness, transmitted from him to me to her. In 2017-2018, the Center of the American West was very fortunate to serve as her home institution during her last year in graduate school. During this visit, I had the great privilege of working with Alice as my team-teacher in the Center’s introductory course on the American West.

Part Two:

How a Greenhorn from the East Learned the Ropes in the West

By Alice Baumgartner

Last spring, I experienced my very own “onset of woe.”

For a full year, I had invested nearly every waking hour in revising my dissertation into a book. I knew that the manuscript needed more work, but I still bravely put an early draft into the hands of an accomplished older historian. When he wrote back, declaring his “frustration” over what impressed him as “the compressed and hard-to-follow ways” of my style of expression, I was crushed. If books receive “Advance Praise” before being published, my manuscript was receiving something more along the lines of “Advance Denigration.”

This did not stir up much of a thirst for more commentaries.

But I seemed to have set myself up for more suffering. I had agreed to share the manuscript with the Center of the American West Book Club, which meets every month over breakfast at Le Peep in Boulder. I had spent a very formative year at the Center while finishing my dissertation, and so I knew that the members of the Book Club were sharp enough to note flaws, but also kind enough to deliver criticism with grace.

This recognition did nothing to relieve my feelings of dread.

Expecting more evidence that all my work over the past year had made the manuscript worse, I looked forward to breakfast as I would have looked forward to an intense dental procedure, without benefit of novocaine. The waiter would deliver omelets, and the group would deliver bad news.

Patty, as it turned out, knew a thing or two about what to do when graduate students descend into “brooding and dreading.” She started the discussion by talking about what she liked about the manuscript. As others made comments, she suggested solutions to every piece of constructive criticism that the group raised.

When the discussion was over and it was evident that I had survived, Patty handed me a thick green folder with a printout of the manuscript. When I opened the folder, I saw that she had placed detailed comments in the margins of just about every page. Many of the comments pointed out where the narrative or the argument needed clarification. But a number of them were check marks [code for “point worth noting”] or exclamation points [code for “who would have thought!”] or “Ha!” [signifying appreciative merriment, not scorn].

For the first time since I circulated the draft, I started to think that some parts of the manuscript were all right.

Still, the way forward was not at all clear. I felt hogtied by the number and variety of suggestions I had received from various readers. One person recommended that I reorganize the book so that it started in the middle of the action. Another recommended expanding the book into three volumes, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to do the topic justice.

I didn’t know how to fix the problems. I didn’t even know whether it was possible to fix them.

And I was under contract to turn the manuscript into my editor in two months. In the competitive world of academic publishing, having a contract should have been a source of joy. At this point, the joy did not always prevail.

A week or two after the Book Club discussion, Patty invited me over to her house to discuss my revisions. In the next hour, as I now recognize, Patty drew directly on the reservoir of kindness she had drawn on in Howard Lamar’s company, repurposing it for my benefit. I sat on her couch, petting her very nice cat Yofi (academic folklore indicates that Howard Lamar had a very nice, also very pettable dog named Scannon), and tearfully explaining that I did not know how to revise the manuscript. I did not even know whether it was even possible to revise it.

Patty suggested that I start at the beginning: rewrite the introduction so that it would forecast the power and originality of the chapters that would follow it. She knew (and even despair could not force me to disagree) that my research would give energy and interest to those chapters, if they only had an introduction to announce their arrival.

Worse, she gave me a deadline.

In a week, we would meet for dinner at a Boulder restaurant with a cuisine that went way beyond lattes and omelets, and we would go over the reworked and revitalized version of my introduction, and she and I would leave the restaurant with a sense of accomplishment.

And we did.

In the tradition of Howard Lamar, Patty had coaxed and cajoled me, like an expert driver working with a recalcitrant mule, into making progress again.

A beneficiary myself, I have also watched others benefit from the patience and grit that Patty picked up from Howard Lamar. During my year at the Center, she and I co-taught a course on the American West. In the back row, a number of young people expertly performed the part of “disengaged students,” slouching, not taking notes, episodically surrendering to a yearning for their forbidden phones.

This attitude was not going to work in Center of the American West 2001.

The course had four writing assignments. Three required revisions. All of them required taking notes in class.

Figuring out how to navigate at a public university with a wide range of motivation among its students, I thought that we would be wise to take delight in the work of the high-achieving students, but to direct our efforts at the “motivated middle”—the students who were not performing at a high level, but who had arrived in the course with an interest in the subject and with a ready-to-be-unleashed desire to achieve. There was little—well, really, there was nothing—to recommend any effort to engage the denizens of the back row. First, it would not work. Second, it would take time away from the other students, who might actually be in our reach.

But Patty wanted to experiment.

The students revised their first papers. When some of those ostensible “second drafts” showed no signs of change, much less improvement, we did not hand them back. Instead, we gave these students a letter, explaining that they would have to come to the Center of the American West offices to pick up their papers so that we could discuss with them how they would improve their performance in the course. These conversations did not produce transformations on the spot. But several rewrites down the road, a significant number of the papers showed improvements that registered close to miraculous.

Patty often brought a rubber chicken to class, and when students held back on participation, she would chuck it into the audience, and whoever caught it had to speak. When we dealt with students who filled up pages with words and sentences that seemed aimed at no imaginable reader, she encouraged them to write their papers as letters, starting “Dear Patty and Alice,” purposefully addressing two living human beings. Whenever students were upset about their grades, she gave them the opportunity to revise a second—or even a third—time. If students fell asleep in class, she would hand them a get-well card that included a generic printed sentiment like, “We miss you, and we hope you are feeling better soon!” along with a handwritten note on the order of, “Please let us know if there is anything we can do to bring you back into our world in this class.”

Over the semester, distant and disengaged students surrendered, revealing their talents to us, turning in papers that differed dramatically from their trudgings through required assignments with which they had initially tormented us.

Now, as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California, when I encounter undergraduates who seem to have, as their one aspiration, the hope of enduring until the end of the semester, I think, “Well, we’ll see if they can hold to that, or if they can be persuaded to unleash their minds and spirits.” I don’t always succeed. But whenever I feel frustrated, I ask myself what Patty would do—and then I do that. The more I teach, the more I realize that this approach pays dividends that far outstrip the initial effort to meet students where they are.

In higher education, woe turns out to be an elective, not a requirement.

Part Three:

Alice’s and Patty’s Co-Authored Invitation to Anyone and Everyone Who Values the Teaching and Writing of Western American History and Who Thereby Has Reason to Admire Howard Lamar and to Celebrate His Lifetime Demonstration of True Grit

Later in 2020, Howard Roberts Lamar will turn 97.

If you went to Yale and took his courses, or if you are yourself a Western American historian, you already know that you are indebted to him. But if you are a person, in any line of work, who aspires to understand the American West, then you are also in his debt, even if this is the first time you have realized this.

In other words, there are reasons aplenty to write him a note of thanks and appreciation.

Here is the address for cards and letters:

Professor Howard Lamar
Maplewood at Orange
245 Indian River Road
Orange, CT 06477

If you prefer email, you can send messages to George Miles, the Curator of the Western Americana Collection at Yale’s Beinecke Library, george.miles@yale.edu, who will make sure that these communications get to their intended recipient.

Off

Traditional

White

The Limits of Division and Polarization

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 06:00:00 +0000

The Limits of Division and Polarization Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/04/2020 - 00:00

EMPATHY RECLAIMS ITS POWER AND COMES TO OUR RESCUE

As God is my witness, I believe that the United States is in peril.

Since this is the first time in my life that I have asked a deity to lend me His credibility, I wanted to make sure that I knew the meaning of the words I just used. I learned that the phrase, “as God is my witness,” acts as “an invocation of God as confirmation of the truth of a statement.”

So I use those five words with the full recognition that I am committing an act of enormous presumption. If I am proven wrong, and the United States turns out to have only hit a speed bump or two, my first action item will be an apology to God for dragging Him into this whole misunderstanding, and my second action item will be an expression of enormous relief that the nation turned out to be not in peril.

But, as for now, I am not through making deity-invoking assertions.

As God is my witness, I believe that the majority of American law enforcement officers are as different from Derek Chauvin, the now notorious Minneapolis police officer, as Mr. Rogers is different from Donald J. Trump.

I have had the good fortune to know quite a few law enforcement officers, so I have no shortage of evidence to support that statement. But if I had needed another data point, Denver Police Chief Paul Paven stepped forward (literally!) to seal the case for me. On Monday, June 1, Chief Paven accepted an invitation from a citizen of vision and principle, Neil Yarbrough, to take part in a peaceful protest march. The Chief walked, arm-in-arm, with people who shared his dismay and outrage over Derek Chauvin’s treatment of George Floyd. “This is not an issue of us versus them,” Chief Paven said, “this is all of us versus . . . injustice.”

As God is my witness, I believe the majority of the participants in the demonstrations held to protest the killing of George Floyd are, like Neil Yarbrough, goodhearted people who want their nation to bring its practices into line with its ideals. While evidence is accumulating that unscrupulous figures are taking advantage of the goodhearted and sometimes directing these protests toward destructive ends, only a breathtakingly naïve person could claim to be shocked to discover that the unscrupulous stand ready to take advantage of the goodhearted.

When it comes to the option for remaining breathtakingly naïve, Western American historians got the short end of the stick. We chose a profession that demands that we face up to humanity’s propensity for deceit, treachery, and bad faith, not to mention cruelty, brutality, and violence.

No one in my line of work could have claimed to be caught by surprise upon learning that Derek Chauvin kept his knee pressed down on the neck of George Floyd for nearly nine minutes, even as Floyd kept saying, “Please, I can’t breathe.” No Western American historian could say, “Surely it is impossible for human beings to treat other human beings with such callousness!” Nor could we claim surprise when we learned that three other officers did nothing to persuade their coworker to let George Floyd exercise his fundamental human right to breathe.

Despite the West’s abundance of stories of people putting heart and soul into cutting each other’s lives short, some Western American historians still have tried to sidestep a full reckoning with the region’s history of violence. In fact, I was once a higher achiever in exactly that form of evasion.

In 1986, I finished the manuscript of a book called The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. When Steve Forman, an alert editor at W. W. Norton, reviewed the manuscript, he asked me an obvious question: if this book was about the invasion and conquest of the West, what was my reason for omitting any mention of massacres, battles, or wars?

I had a glib answer ready to roll.

In the struggle for the control of the continent, some tribes fought against the U.S. Army, and other tribes had strategic reasons to fight as the Army’s allies. But whatever choices the tribes made, they all reached the same destination: relocation and confinement to reservations. Therefore, I had chosen to skip the battles since the conquest of Indian people was accomplished by many means besides outright war.

This was an empty rationale, crafted in part to silence an editor and spare me another round of rewriting. But, at a deeper level, I chose to flatten the complexity of the past, and to write a nearly violence-free overview of the region’s history, in order to spare myself discomfort.

In the early 1990s, I called a halt to this awkward effort at self-protection and wrote an essay called “Haunted America” on violent conflicts between whites and Indians. This essay appeared in a book of photographs taken at places where calamities and tragedies had occurred. With rare exceptions, most of these sites had become places of forgetfulness, without any visible indication of the brutal events of the past.

For three months, I read nothing but stories of violent encounters between Indian people and Euro-American soldiers and settlers. When I woke in the middle of the night and when I got up in the morning, my mind found no refuge from bullets, knives, arrows, sabers, ropes for hanging, and torches for burning.

Soon, there was nothing left of the emotional distance I had tried to keep between me and the violence of the Western past.

There is no question of who provoked these wars and who invaded whom. Euro-American people were the invaders, and Indian people were the inhabitants of the lands the invaders wanted.

And yet, immersed in wrenching stories of violence, I lost the ability to choose sides.

I empathized with Indian people, who had been besieged, pursued, and attacked in episodes beyond counting.

I empathized with settlers, who were often genuinely oblivious to their status as disruptive invaders, but who became, for reasons that would be hard to miss, targets of attack.

When people suffered devastating attacks on their homes, I responded with equal anguish to the miseries inflicted on families of Indian people, families of white people, and, maybe most vulnerable of all, families of people of mixed heritage.

Refusing restraint, empathy defied and transgressed the most clearly marked lines of antagonism and opposition, and I found myself unable to discount the ordeals of the soldiers who had been placed squarely in the middle of situations where resentment, retaliation, and rage ruled.

Many of these soldiers were immigrants who arrived in the United States with little money and who saw signing up as soldiers as one of their few routes to opportunity. Others were African American men who were emancipated slaves, or refugees from the injustices of Southern tenant farming and sharecropping. Meanwhile, even if Army officers may have come from origins in what we would now call “white privilege,” there was nothing that could pass for comfort or ease in the life of soldiers from the white working class.

Indisputably an army of invasion, this was also an army of unreliable equipment and inadequate clothing, especially in seasons of heat and cold; meager and often inedible rations; and constant risk of accidents, exposure, illness, exhaustion, and injury and death in battle. Perhaps most important, the soldiers faced these risks because they were following the orders and executing the policies decreed by distant presidents, senators, congressmen, and appointed officials who had only a sketchy knowledge of the conditions in the West.

Yes, these soldiers participated in devastating military campaigns against Indian people. But nothing in their stories could convince me to lead the campaign for their demonization.

By the time I sat down to write the essay, I had empathized with nearly everyone. But a few individuals, who had moved through life with a savage and intentional cruelty, gave empathy a chance to take a break. In truth, it was a relief to come upon dreadful people who I could simply find contemptible.

Now, before I try to connect past and present, several important acknowledgments require attention: 1) the patterns of violence toward Indian people and the patterns of violence toward African American people have as many differences as they have similarities; 2) enormous changes separate the nineteenth century from the twenty-first century; and 3) the situations and experiences of soldiers caught in the bitter conflict of the wars of continental conquest cannot be conflated with the situations and experiences of police officers caught in the contests over justice in American towns and cities today.

With those points of difference acknowledged, I will still declare that the essay “Haunted America” has turned out to be a good training program for life in the late spring of 2020. Immersing myself in the history of violence in the West proved to be an effective exercise program for empathy.

In the United States today, empathy has not disappeared, but it has grown listless and lethargic.

Long before the coronavirus pandemic set in, American empathy had gotten stuck in a “stay-at-home” regime. Empathy could embrace people within the category of “us,” but rarely got to venture into the category of “them.” With its heart weakened from too much time spent in confined space, humanity’s finest emotion became a shadow of its former self.

Empathy needed to get out more. It needed to be told to get off the sofa and come back to life.

It needed to go for a walk, arm-in-arm, with Denver Police Chief Paul Pazen.

For all the grim news of the last days, there is abundant evidence that empathy is back in the world and regaining its power. If the trend continues, episodes when we permit empathy to hold still, become comfortable, settle in, rest in one place, and ease back into torpor will become remembered features of a departed past.

For anyone looking for an empathy refreshment course, here is a method that rarely fails: simply imagine how you would feel if you had a close relative or close friend who had died from excessive force exercised by a law enforcement officer, and who you will never get to see again.
Then refuse to let empathy say, “Am I through now?” and settle back into lethargy. Instead, move on to imagine how you would feel if you had a close relative or close friend who worked in law enforcement, who had been killed in the line of duty, and who you will never get to see again.

But now for the hardest and most consequential exercise of all: try empathizing with the bystanders who could have intervened but did not.

Three Minneapolis police officers–Tou Thao, Thomas Lane, and J Alexander Kueng—were standing by during those eight minutes and forty-five seconds while Derek Chauvin pressed his knee down on the neck of George Floyd and onlookers, and Floyd himself, begged Chauvin to stop. Two of the three evidently played a part in holding Floyd down.

Stand still and just look at a wall for eight minutes and forty-five seconds. It seems almost certain that you will experience those minutes as quite a long span of time for standing still and doing nothing.

So what was going on in the souls of those three police officers as time moved slowly along on the evening of Monday, May 25?

And how has time passed for them in the days since May 25?

Empathy suggests that they have endured innumerable episodes of thinking to themselves, “Why didn’t I speak? Why didn’t I tell Derek to let that man breathe?” It seems very likely that those moments of internal regret accelerated at mid-week, when charges were filed against these three men for aiding and abetting second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.

For much of the recent past, the belief that large forces and vast patterns govern human life has served as a major source of demoralization and intimidation, leading millions of individual Americans to persuade themselves that they cannot change the world.

But Derek Chauvin changed the world, and his treatment of George Floyd has already reshaped history.

Chauvin’s cruelty has reacquainted us with the fact that a single individual can change the world and reshape history. And there is no mistaking the fact that the three officers who kept silent and did not intervene also played their part in changing the world and reshaping history.

No profession has an exemption from the fact that policing our peers and speaking out when their conduct alarms us can be very difficult. If police departments have “a blue wall of silence,” it is important to recognize that higher education has its own ivy-covered wall of silence, and medical practice has its wall of silence cloaked in white lab coats.

I cannot think of a profession or occupation that does not have a wall of silence with a color or coating of its own.

As every experienced whistleblower knows, if you break the wall of silence and call attention to a problem, you will quickly find yourself singled out as the real problem. Maybe Tou Thao, Thomas Lane, and J. Alexander Kueng had seen enough of the world and its operations to think that silence was their wisest choice.

A few days after the death of George Floyd, the astrologer who writes the horoscopes for newspapers tried to remind me of my powerlessness as an individual. “Events you have no power over,” some gloomy configuration of the stars purportedly wanted me to know, “will guide your day.”

At first, I could only think, “How would this be different from any other day?”

And then my second response arrived in full force: “What if one of those three in Minneapolis—Tou Thao, Thomas Lane, or J. Alexnder Kueng—had defied fatalism, refused to be powerless, told Derek Chauvin to let the poor man breathe, and given empathy a new lease on life?”

As God is my witness, I believe that individuals can still make a difference.

f you find this blog contains ideas worth sharing with friends, please forward this link to them. If you are reading this for the first time, join our EMAIL LIST to receive the Not my First Rodeo blog every Friday.

Banner Photo: Denver Police Chief Paul Paven takes part in a peaceful protest on Monday June 1, 2020. Photo courtesy of @realcaptainmorg.

Off

Traditional

White

Fact and Fiction Face Off to Forge A Friendship

Anonymous — Thu, 28 May 2020 06:00:00 +0000

Fact and Fiction Face Off to Forge A Friendship Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/28/2020 - 00:00

TIME TRAVEL AT THE BOSTON RADIO RODEO

Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
The bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

^{John Donne, “No Man Is an Island”}

Exactly forty years ago this summer, a very famous advocate of a romantic version of the Western past, and a very unfamous advocate of a realistic version of the Western past, convened for a conversation at a Boston radio station.

Contrary to what would have been a reasonable prediction that the fur would fly, they got along famously.

The idea of bringing together the seasoned Western novelist Louis L’Amour with the just-finished-with-the-Ph.D. Western historian Patty Nelson Limerick was surely situated at the furthest edge of plausibility. But the idea fell well within the range of the imaginable for David Brudnoy, a gifted interviewer at WBZ Radio in Boston. In its characterization of Mr. Brudnoy, Wikipedia hits one of its high points for clarity: he “was known for espousing his libertarian views on a wide range of political issues, in a manner that was courteous.”

At this point, some readers are sure to be thinking, “Where is this David Brudnoy guy when we need him?” We’ll get back to that.

Even though Mr. Brudnoy introduced both of his guests with his characteristic courtesy, he could not fudge the fact that the difference in elevation, between our two reputations, resembled the grand scale of the West’s peaks and canyons. If I remember this accurately, Mr. L’Amour at that time had sold 130 million copies of his books. Since my publication record at that time consisted primarily of the obituaries I had written for the Riverside Press-Enterprise when I was a senior at Banning High School, Mr. Brudnoy’s introduction of me had to be a model of brevity, noting that I had recently received a Ph.D. from Yale and had just become an assistant professor of history at Harvard.

Those two career achievements were not going to win over the fans who had tuned in to hear their favorite author, Louis L’Amour.

To prepare for this rodeo, I had read three or four of Mr. L’Amour’s novels. Despite the fact that this was my maiden run in talk-show appearances with a celebrity, I was soon rocketing around the arena, challenging the factual accuracy of various assertions I had found in his books.

Very much in the manner of an older cat amused by the ridiculously ineffective pouncings executed by a kitten, Mr. L’Amour found my challenges far more entertaining than alarming. During one commercial break, he gave me an affable whack on the shoulder and said, “This is fun. Keep it up.”

So I kept it up.

The L’Amour devotees did not initially match their hero in affability. “Louis,” declared one fan, “I would like to know where to find that professor who keeps criticizing you.”

Mr. L’Amour forcefully told him to de-escalate and stand down.

After several rounds of disputing the chronology of Mormon settlements in the further reaches of Deseret, as well as the likelihood of silver manifesting itself in the form of nuggets in Nevada’s Comstock Lode, our contest between fact and fiction arrived at the overland trail.

I said that many of the Americans who followed those trails in the mid-nineteenth century were poorly prepared for the journey. A good share of them had never slept outdoors, and a significant number brought firearms they did not know how to use, putting themselves and others at risk of accidents.

Mr. L’Amour said that wasn’t true.

I said it was.

This set off an unhelpful episode in which I vigorously recited bibliographic references (e.g. John D. Unruh’s The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-1860, a book for which I would still like to offer, as we say now but did not say back then, a “shout-out”). As my fever for citations rose, Mr. L’Amour diverted us to an even more ridiculous dispute over which of us owned more books and thereby could claim greater authority as experts. Publishers of books in Western American history, we soon established, had a good thing going with both of us.

At last, Mr. L’Amour arranged for an intermission in our “fact-versus-fiction” rodeo by making an assertion that left me speechless.

“My books,” he declared, “are 100% accurate, except for the plot and the main characters.”

They had taught me a lot in graduate school, but they hadn’t taught me how to respond to that.

Now, in late May of 2020, as I reckon with the fate of the participants who figured in that WBZ Radio Rodeo, I am brought to a halt by another breakdown in my capacity to respond.

Our courteous libertarian radio host David Brudnoy died at age 64 from skin cancer that metastasized to his lungs and kidneys. John D.Unruh, the historian whose book on the overland trail I had cited, died at age 38 from a brain tumor, before his book could be published. Louis L’Amour died at age 80 from lung cancer. My husband Jeff Limerick, who accompanied me to that interview in 1980 and engaged in a lively chat with Mr. L’Amour in the waiting room and elevator, died at age 56 from a stroke.

To borrow from the Bible’s Book of Job: “I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”

So I ask for your tolerance as I set out on an impossible trip in time travel.

Let’s imagine that Mr. L’Amour and I could mount up for one more ride at David Brudnoy’s radio rodeo. But now it’s the Spring of 2020 and a pandemic is on everyone’s mind.

This time, during a commercial break, I get to say to him, “Mr. L’Amour, when we’re back on air, let’s work together to do the right thing by those now-long-departed travelers on the overland trails. Let’s see if we can enlist them to bring a little perspective to bear on our troubled times.”

Mr. Brudnoy gets us launched: “Let’s have the two of you tell us about the risks emigrants faced on the overland trail.”

We start with cholera, the terrifying disease that came down hard on the emigrants just as their journey began. Sometimes it actually hit before their journey began while they outfitted for the trip in the “jumping-off towns” of the Missouri River Valley, where failures of sanitation set up perfect circumstances for a disease spread by fecal-to-oral transmission. Infection with cholera brought on a ruthless dysentery that killed with dehydration. This disease hit the westward movement with painfully ironic timing: the “germ theory,” the recognition of the role of bacteria and viruses in human affliction, had barely begun to emerge, and people of that time could only blame “miasma” for the illness.

“Disease,” the historian John D. Unruh concluded, “was far and away the number one killer” on the trail, “accounting for nearly nine of every ten deaths.” Historians’ “estimates of trail mortality have varied widely,” Unruh acknowledged. While some estimates ranged as high as 6 percent, he believed that “a 4 percent rate of trail mortality comports more closely with the available evidence.” Here is a historical perspective without much power to console: even with the novel coronavirus on the rampage, you are not in anywhere near as much danger of premature death as you would have been on the overland trail.

Deaths from disease among Indian people did not register in written records, but Dr. Unruh paid attention to them: “Most catastrophic were the severely contagious diseases spread among the Indian tribes by the emigrant passage.”

In this multi-front encounter with affliction, neither natives nor newcomers had the option of the denial of death. Quite the contrary: many of the emigrants who kept diaries and journals compulsively counted graves along the route.

To venture on the overland trail was to make a wager with death, to place a far-from-certain bet on the prospect that the traveler would survive—to acquire land in Oregon, to prosper in the community of Latter-day Saints in Utah, to find gold in California.

In 2020, wherever we direct our attention in the midst of the pandemic, we collide with an intractable question: how are we to devise strategies for the pursuit of economic well-being, while at the same time making a full reckoning with the risks of illness and death?

Since time travel has permitted me to hold an imagined discussion of the overland trail with Louis L’Amour, I see no reason to refrain from summoning a party or two of mid-nineteenth-century emigrants for a brief visit.

Let’s say that we tell these visitors, “Decades after your time on earth, we are trying to figure out how to pursue economic gain without jeopardizing human life.”

Taking that in, our visitors might well exchange knowing glances among themselves, shift their gaze back to us, and then say to us, “Welcome to our world.”

Does the history of the overland trail carry relevance for our time?

Probably more relevance than we would like. Certainly, more relevance than either Louis L’Amour or I could possibly have foreseen when we met in 1980.

Perfectly suited for Americans to contemplate today, a story recorded by Alonzo Delano, a participant in the Gold Rush in 1849, sheds a merciless light on our trade-offs.

Thomas Waddington, a member of Delano’s party, had barely set out on the trail when he fell ill of cholera. He died on the morning of the day after he was stricken. His traveling companions dug his grave and held a brief service for him.

“How little we foresee our own destiny!” Alonzo Delano wrote. “Instead of turning up the golden sands of the Sacramento [River], the spade of the adventurer was first used to bury the remains of a companion.”

Does it make an ounce of sense to grieve for a person who would now be long dead, whatever his age when he perished?

Even though some may wonder if social distancing has me left me seriously off-balance, reading Alonzo Delano’s words has always made me mourn for Thomas Waddington. Though he was buried beyond the reach of church bell towers, the bell for him has never stopped tolling.

How little we foresee our own destiny!

We are nowhere near the end of this particular trail.

Off

Traditional

White

The Better Border Collies of Our Nation

Anonymous — Thu, 21 May 2020 06:00:00 +0000

The Better Border Collies of Our Nation Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/21/2020 - 00:00

RODEO’S INSTITUTIONAL KIN—THE SHEEPDOG TRIALS

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break the bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

^{President Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861}

We are committed to “the creation of forums for the respectful exchange of ideas and perspectives in the pursuit of solutions to the region’s difficulties.”

Center of the American West Mission Statement

One week ago, in the May 15 entry (“Holding On to Faith”) in the “Not My First Rodeo” blog, I presented to the world my honest opinion of President Donald J. Trump. Refusing to participate in a popular custom of our time, I did not demonize him. On the contrary, I invited him to take a simple step toward consistency, by recognizing that since he is a self-declared Christian, he is positioned to take the Book of Matthew (especially Chapter Five) as “a strategic plan” for becoming a better leader for his nation.

One longtime friend of the Center felt that my remarks were “sad to see”: “This commentary,” he wrote, “moves you away from the political neutrality that you have evidenced for many years.”

That’s worth thinking about.

Indeed, as Faculty Director of the Center, I have for years prohibited myself from making political endorsements of candidates or initiatives. I have understood this to be an important feature in maintaining the Center’s credibility in a time of polarization.

But go one level deeper, and my commitment reveals a bedrock trait: my ambition, or commitment or, really, compulsion, to serve as a moderator who works to ensure that people who deserve to be heard will have access to a respectful and tolerant audience.

Given the leftward tilt of political allegiances on college campuses, that ambition has led, in some seasons, to offering proportionately more invitations to conservatives than to liberals. I stand by the choices I have made. But I do recognize that people on the left could reasonably argue that I have undermined any claim to political neutrality with a disproportionate attention to including conservative perspectives.

My compulsion to ensure that the silenced are heard emerged early in life. One memorable and instructive episode took place in my seventh-grade social studies class at Susan B. Coombs Junior High School in Banning, California.

While our teacher, Mr. Carter, was speaking to us, Danny Maxwell got up, walked to the wastebasket, and threw away a piece of paper. Evidently feeling that Danny had disrupted the class, Mr. Carter wrote his name down for detention.

Minutes before, I had committed exactly the same act of misbehavior. Danny, I felt, had been subject to injustice.

Danny stayed quiet, but I could not be a silent bystander to this injustice.

“Mr. Carter,” I said, “I just did the very same thing Danny did, and he got detention, and I did not.”

Called to action, Mr. Carter quickly remedied this injustice by adding my name to the detention list.

When I told my parents that I had to stay after school because I had taken a very high-ground stand for principle, I received a life lesson: I would have to work much harder to explain why principle sometimes required me to ask to be reprimanded.

But sitting for an hour in detention with the other bad behavers, I arrived at an even more consequential recognition: when I saw a situation where someone who should speak stayed silent, feeling certain he wouldn’t be heard, things might go better if I were in charge.

In the last quarter-century, I have had a cascade of opportunities to be in charge. In one particularly memorable adventure, I hosted Ronald Reagan’s first Secretary of the Interior James Watt, a historic figure who arouses strong feelings in Boulder. Just a month or two before Secretary Watt’s visit, a protester had thrown a cream pie at the Chancellor, a manner of conveying disagreement that is worth discussion at another time. So we could not be complacent or inattentive in planning for our upcoming visitor. Secretary Watt, if you should read this and learn this backstory for the first time, at every moment during your visit, I was ready to move fast and take the pie.

Readers might now be wondering: How did I acquire a determination to intercept a pie that could be (but blessedly was not) aimed at a nationally known conservative? How did “the creation of forums for the respectful exchange of ideas and perspectives” come to hold priority in the mission statement of the Center?

One crucial step in that process occurred in the Fall of 1969, when my professor (the historian and Tenth Mountain Division veteran, Page Smith) placed Lester Cappon’s edited collection of the Adams/Jefferson correspondence on his American history course syllabus.

The idea that the Founders of our democratic republic were a harmonic and unified group has recruited some believers, evidently people who have been scrupulous about never reading biographies of those Founders. The fracturing of the friendship of Federalist John Adams and Republican Thomas Jefferson is one of the best examples of the intensity of partisan disagreement in the early years of the nation. For a little more than a decade, they would not and did not communicate.

And then their mutual friend, Dr. Benjamin Rush, found this fracture beyond his bearing. Carrying messages of good will between the two men, he pled with them to reconcile. In his memorable words, “Fellow laborers in erecting the great fabric of American independence! . . . embrace—embrace each other!”

It worked.

“You and I ought not to die before We have explained ourselves to each other,” Adams wrote Jefferson soon after they returned to correspondence. Jefferson responded in wholehearted agreement.

Never meeting again in person, the two men corresponded for fourteen years, an exchange brought to a halt by the unfathomable synchronicity of their deaths on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

This correspondence, and the restoration of the friendship, would not have happened without Dr. Benjamin Rush taking the role of moderator and mediator.

And now for the question that has surely been on everyone’s mind: what on earth could I have meant by that weird phrase, “The Better Border Collies of Our Nation?”

For a couple of years in the 1990s, the Center’s Board had a custom of traveling to Meeker, Colorado, to attend the annual sheepdog trials. (Kathleen Sullivan and Reed Kelley, you have my unending gratitude for making that happen, and, of course, also for naming one of your calves after me.)

At the sheepdog trials, the handler signals the border collie to race to the far edge of the meadow and to return with a small flock of sheep, who have spent the summer on the open range, and who thereby have a very clear “Don’t Tread on Me!” attitude. The handler and the dog then work together to get the sheep to move through a set course, around fences and through gates.

Observing their defiance and persnickety-ness, a person cannot begin to figure out how sheep ever acquired a reputation as docile and compliant creatures. But sheepdogs do not have “give up” in their emotional toolkit, and canine determination eventually prevails.

Here is what I learned at Meeker and repeatedly confirmed at the National Western Stock Show. When individuals—who hold jobs that require them to persuade human beings to do something in a coordinated and collaborative way—watch a sheepdog at work, every single one of those individuals will soon exclaim, “I know exactly how that dog feels!” And then reminiscing takes over: “This reminds me of a class I had,” every teacher will say, “where I couldn’t get them even to show up having read the same book, much less having prepared for the discussion they knew I was planning.”

And now for the riddle: How is a sheepdog like a latter-day Benjamin Rush, the holder of a social role more commonly called moderator, or perhaps mediator?

Both the sheepdog and the moderator are trying to get defiant and recalcitrant creatures to do something together.

It is now important to state clearly that humans are not sheep, and sheep are not humans.

That is why the job of the sheepdog is so much harder than the job of the moderator.

The moderator has a wonderfully simple goal and measure of success: to get the people to come together and to pitch into “explaining themselves to each other.” Once that is achieved, even though the moderator must stay ready to intervene, more often than not, she is off-duty and free to enjoy the conversation.

But the sheepdog is never off-duty. There is always another fence or gate that the sheep must be directed to go around or through. There is always one sheep ready to make a sudden shift to the stance, “I am sick and tired of going around fences and through gates, and you can just count me out as a member of this stupid flock!”

Speaking of creatures who do not always go along with the flock, we return to the issue raised at the start of this essay: do I really think that it is my right to plead with President Donald J. Trump to live up to his declared faith in Christianity?

Yes, I do.

Why?

Because I am very worried about the governance of the nation that Adams, Jefferson, and their fellow citizens brought into being. And because I want to be able to continue to assure my students that ordinary citizens have a right to act, in my words, as “the better border collies of our nation,” and to encourage our leaders to stand with, in Abraham Lincoln’s considerably more resonant words, “the better angels of our nature.”

To understand my current forthrightness, everyone who has trusted the Center over the years has the right to hear a tale that I have not told to many people. Until now.

On the evening of Sunday February 9, I was on my way to attend a post-conference reception at the Byron R. White Club on campus. It had snowed during the day, and it was a cold night. Walking to the party, I hit—very literally!—the passageway between the stadium and the Folsom Fields Events Center. Since the passageway is roofed over, I assumed that it was ice-free, which was not a good assumption. Snow had melted, flowed over the concrete, and then frozen into a perfectly smooth sheet of ice.

I hit hard. I landed on my back, and my head hit the concrete. The chances of serious injury seemed vast: a fracture of the spine? Of a leg? A concussion, or a worse form of closed-head injury? Or at least a badly twisted ankle, or a deeply bruised hip?

None of the above.

I was fine.

Why?

I am an exercise nut, and my capacity to respond with resilience to a mishap is probably pretty good. But more important, I always carry a backpack, and the backpack absorbed some of the impact. Most important, the backpack moderated the intensity with which my head hit the concrete.

So I got up and went to the party.

In the time since February 9, I have been unable to think of my escape from injury as just lucky. I am increasingly at peace with the notion that a kind providence came to my rescue. Never exactly dormant, my sense of moral responsibility is even more invigorated.

Do I think that providence spared me injury so that I could invite President Donald J. Trump to become a better leader? I would be very hesitant to declare such a peculiar belief. Still, that proposition makes a lot more sense than a feeling of reverential and worshipful gratitude to my backpack for breaking my fall.

So here’s to more “forums for the respectful exchange of ideas and perspectives,” maybe even including one with a president who will be reached by a Benjamin-Rush equivalent, and decide that civility might be a better confirmation of his faith.

Photo Credit – Benjamin Rush photo courtesy of Wikipedia

Border Collie/Sheep photo courtesy of – U.S. Air Force photo (public domain) / R.J. Oriez)

Off

Traditional

White

Holding on to Faith

Anonymous — Thu, 14 May 2020 18:32:55 +0000

Holding on to Faith Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/14/2020 - 12:32

The Book of Matthew Stays in the Saddle at the White House Rodeo

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

Matthew 5: 5-6

THE WORLD’S ONLY RODEO WITHOUT VARIATION

When people watch a rodeo, they expect that the experience will provide plenty of surprises.

By contrast, President Donald J. Trump’s presidency has been a rodeo in which the same course of events repeats and repeats and repeats. Principle rides into the arena, hoping to prevail over self-interest. Instead, self-interest quickly bucks off principle, and principle flies out of the saddle and into the dirt.

Every event is a foregone conclusion: self-interest will pitch the principles of the President’s declared Christian faith into the dust.

There are no Gold Buckle rides in the White House Rodeo.

Yet.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: BY THE WAY, YOUR NATION NEEDS YOU

In the summer of 1991, a public official asked me to speak at a very visible forum on a controversial issue in Washington DC.

I said I couldn’t fit it into my schedule.

“You have to come,” the official said. “Your nation needs you.”

No one had ever said that to me before.

In the spring of 2020, I keep hearing that same statement, but with one big difference: this time, I am saying it to myself.

My nation needs me.

This week, I am giving myself an unusual birthday present: unconstrained permission to express my honest judgment of President Donald J. Trump. I am doing this because I believe it would be wrong to conceal my dismay over his conduct. And I believe it would be equally wrong to admit that dismay without offering an element of hope.

Following this mission, I am departing from orthodox opinion on both the right and the left. I believe the President could change his course, and I believe he could succeed in ways that would benefit him, not just for the term of his presidency, but for eternity.

MY MAIDEN RUN AT A FORTHRIGHT JUDGMENT OF THE PRESIDENT

As President of the United States, Donald J. Trump is a failure. In an international crisis on a scale beyond estimation, he has been both unwilling and unable to persuade the majority of his constituents to join in a common cause on behalf of our nation’s well-being. Quite the opposite: he has deepened our divisions. This is no small achievement, given that our divisions were already very deep before his election. Most damaging, he has surrendered and forfeited the core power of the presidency: the power to preside over difficult deliberations on life-and-death issues.

And yet, as a human being with a soul, President Trump is not trapped by inevitability, fate, or destiny. He has the privilege and the burden of free will.

This leads to the question that has claimed a place at the center of my attention: How closely—and how recently—has the President read the Bible?

To put this another way, I dream of redemption.

A SCENARIO OF REDEMPTION

The President has a restless night. Unable to sleep, he sees a Bible nearby and says to himself, “Since I have declared that I am a Christian, I suppose I should take a look at the Bible now and then.”

By an intervention of providence, he opens the Bible to the Book of Matthew, Chapter Five. He begins to read.

“Ye have heard that it hath been said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

With his long record of vindictiveness and retaliation, the President is pleased by what he reads which he sees as a validation of his conduct.

But, this time, he reads on.

“But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other side.”

At this point, the President examines the book he is holding. Could someone have tampered with this sacred text?

But he still reads on.

“Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you, and persecute you.”

At this point, the President is a man in crisis, challenged to his core by reading the words of a book which, he has publicly declared, holds his faith.

He sleeps fitfully, and at daybreak, he is a new man. The benefits to the nation begin with his recognition that the transition he has undergone is hard to fit within the limits of Twitter. But he settles on these eighteen words as his widely celebrated final round of Tweeting: “I exist to elevate the glory of God. God does not exist to elevate the glory of me.”

THE OBSTACLE OF THE MOMENT

I continue now with my commitment to honesty in stating my current judgment of the President. Here is a position I adopted months ago but have never presented publicly.

If President Donald J. Trump expressed an interest in speaking at an event sponsored by the Center of the American West, I would not host him. Throughout its institutional life, the Center has enshrined the practice of civil and respectful exchange. On a number of occasions over the years, I have interrupted participants in Center events when they have substituted personal attack and character assassination for the serious exchange of ideas.

If President Trump can persuade me that he would abide by the Center’s customs and refrain from ad hominem attacks, stay on substance, and maintain the qualities of civility and respect without interruption, I would reverse course and agree to host him.

How likely is this to happen?

I make no claim on the ability to predict the future.

I do not know that these changes are possible, nor do I know that they are impossible.

MY DREAM OF AN ALLIANCE WITH THE FELLOWSHIP OF CHRISTIAN COWBOYS

I have not yet made an overture to the leaders or members of the Fellowship of Christian Cowboys, and I refer to this organization here only to say that I would be honored if providence made it possible for me to meet them. I am not sure that they would want a university-based Western American historian as a friend and an ally, but this is, after all, an essay about hope.

To the core of my soul (in the spirit of full disclosure, a soul at present without church affiliation), I believe that the Fellowship of Christian Cowboys, and other groups of similar spirit, could move fast into the national arena and rescue this rider who is also our President. Yes, there’s risk for us in this effort, but cowboys—and maybe especially rodeo clowns—are used to that.

The co-founder of the Fellowship of Christian Cowboys, rodeo clown Wilbur Plaugher, died in 2018 at age ninety-five. His wife of sixty-nine years said this about him: “He never fought or argued with anyone . . . He absolutely would not respond—only in kindness. That’s the kind of heart he had.”

President Trump, providence is coming to your aid. The inspiration of Mr. Plaugher’s values and faith could save you.

Off

Traditional

White

Not my First Rodeo

An Unforgettable Ride at the Ringwald Rodeo

A Conversation as Treasured as It Was Confounded

An Unusually Sophisticated Inquiry by a Cub Reporter

Turn-���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ May Be Fair Play, But That Doesn’t Make It Anything to Look Forward To

Reminiscing about George Ringwald as a Way to Feel Better about the Past and the Present

Off

Staying in the Saddle for Eight Seconds

Where Limericks and Rodeo Coincide

Who Is that Old Guy on the Banner Above this Text?

Or

Which Lear Is That One?

The Limerick as the Historian’s Best Accomplice

Metric Moments:

The Limerick Comes into its Own as a Force of Liberation

The Limerick Advances on Abraham Lincoln’s Unguarded Flank

Dating a Limerick

An Enthusiastic Public Speaker, Who Finds Herself Writing a Blog,

Composes A Concluding Self-Indulgent Lament

Off

Rescued by the Past

The Promise of Historical Thinking on the Fourth of July

A Holiday Looms, in Troubled Times

Holiday Activity #1

Regaining Possession of a National Heritage

Holiday Activity #2

Supporting the Blessed Disappearance of “Men of Their Times”

Holiday Activity #3

Designing a Monument for a Failed Ideal

A Surgical Gift for Self-Examination

Off

Keeping Accountability in the Saddle

Serving and Protecting in the Arenas of the Domestic and the International

Zachary Guiliano

Serving and Protecting in the Arenas of the Domestic and the International

Off

On the Road to the Rodeo of Time

A Social Psychology Experiment Set to the Tune of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart”

A One-of-a-Kind Experience:

How Singing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” Derailed My Radical Activism

The Cameras Rushed In

Youthful Certainty Receives its Comeuppance

Hell Hath No Fury Like a Woman Desperate to Intervene When an Old Man Is Pushed, Injured, and Then Scorned

The Road Not Taken, and the Expertise Still to Be Acquired

Age-Appropriate Music

Off

Pay it Forward

TEACHING AS THE MAIN ATTRACTION AT THE TRUE GRITRODEO

Part One:

The Breathtaking Good Fortune of the Person Formerly Known as Patty Nelson

Mattie Ross to Rooster Cogburn:

They tell me you’re a man with true grit.

Part Two:

How a Greenhorn from the East Learned the Ropes in the West

Part Three:

Alice’s and Patty’s Co-Authored Invitation to Anyone and Everyone Who Values the Teaching and Writing of Western American History and Who Thereby Has Reason to Admire Howard Lamar and to Celebrate His Lifetime Demonstration of True Grit

Off

The Limits of Division and Polarization

EMPATHY RECLAIMS ITS POWER AND COMES TO OUR RESCUE

SUGGESTED READINGS

Off

Fact and Fiction Face Off to Forge A Friendship

TIME TRAVEL AT THE BOSTON RADIO RODEO

Any man’s death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom The bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Off

The Better Border Collies of Our Nation

RODEO’S INSTITUTIONAL KIN—THE SHEEPDOG TRIALS

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break the bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Off

Holding on to Faith

The Book of Matthew Stays in the Saddle at the White House Rodeo

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

Matthew 5: 5-6

THE WORLD’S ONLY RODEO WITHOUT VARIATION

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: BY THE WAY, YOUR NATION NEEDS YOU

MY MAIDEN RUN AT A FORTHRIGHT JUDGMENT OF THE PRESIDENT

A SCENARIO OF REDEMPTION

THE OBSTACLE OF THE MOMENT

MY DREAM OF AN ALLIANCE WITH THE FELLOWSHIP OF CHRISTIAN COWBOYS

Turn-��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� May Be Fair Play, But That Doesn’t Make It Anything to Look Forward To

Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
The bell tolls; it tolls for thee.