Quote of the Day (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on Walking)

“I can only meditate when I am walking, when I stop I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.”—French political philosopher and memoirist Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), The Confessions (1782)

Quote of the Day (Adam Hochschild, on American Violence Viewed From Abroad)

"If reason played any part in the American love affair with guns, things would have been different a long time ago and we would not have so many mass shootings … Almost everywhere else in the world, if you proposed that virtually any adult not convicted of a felony should be allowed to carry a loaded pistol—openly or concealed—into a bar, a restaurant, or classroom, people would send you off for a psychiatric examination. Yet many states allow this, and in Iowa, a loaded firearm can be carried in public by someone who’s completely blind. Suggest, in response to the latest mass shooting, that still more of us should be armed, and people in most other countries would ask what you’re smoking."—American journalist, historian and lecturer Adam Hochschild, “Bang for the Buck,” originally printed in The New York Review of Books, Apr. 5, 2018, reprinted in Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays (2018)

School’s been open less than a week in most parts of the country and already, at Apalachee High School in Georgia, four people have died and another nine injured at the hands of a 14-year-old. Well, that didn’t take long, did it?

It’s been 6½ years since Adam Hochschild’s article appeared, but nothing fundamental has changed for the better in our American landscape darkened by guns.

If anything has altered, it’s the increased sense of same old, same old. You know: another schoolyard shooting; another mass shooting. It’s become so routine that the New York Times didn’t even make it the major story of the day.

Seven years ago, a former President referred in his inaugural address to “American carnage.” If this latest incident isn’t described as such, the phrase has no value.

As Hochschild noted, it doesn’t have to be this way. As noted in Jonathan Masters’ June 2022 global comparison of U.S. gun policy for the Council on Foreign Relations, other nations have similar high levels of gun ownership, but they have responded with appropriate measures after mass shootings. No cliches about “guns don’t kill people; people do,” no “thoughts and prayers” sent to families and friends of victims; no obscene claim from a Vice Presidential candidate that school shootings are “a fact of life.”

This erstwhile hillbilly elegist might want to remember that another form of American violence, lynching, was once considered “a fact of life,” and bills to outlaw it routinely died in committee on Capitol Hill.

It took more than a century and 200 failed attempts before the Senate passed and President Biden signed into law a bill that makes lynching a crime punishable by up to 30 years in prison. None of that helped the more than 4,000 lynching victims in Southern states from 1877 to 1950.

Years from now, people will ask the same question about gun violence that they do now about those past “necktie parties”: Why did it take so long to act to stop this?

Maybe it’ll only be the prospect of lost dollars that will bring our current irreconcilables to their senses about stalling passage of even the most elementary attempts at gun safety.

Forget about foreigners wanting to live in a country where their lives are at risk. What about even tourists from abroad who would rather stay home where they can be safe, and not spend here on foods, goods, lodging, and transportation?

(The image accompanying this post, of Adam Hochschild speaking with the Wikimedia Foundation, was taken June 16, 2017, as a screenshot from File:Adam_Hochschild, Co-Founder, Mother Jones.webm.)

TV Quote of the Day (‘M*A*S*H,’ With the Epitome of Bureaucracy)

Col. Henry Blake [played by McLean Stevenson] [yawning and bored]: “What are these forms for?"

Cpl. Walter “Radar” O'Reilly [played by Gary Burghoff]: "These are forms to get the forms that enable us to order more forms, sir."— M*A*S*H, Season 1, Episode 23, “Ceasefire,” original air date Mar 18, 1973, teleplay by Laurence Marks and Larry Gelbart, directed by Earl Bellamy

This Day in Colonial History (Disgruntled But Divided Patriots Open First Continental Congress)

Sept. 5, 1774—Angered by a deteriorating relationship with the mother country, representatives from 12 of the 13 British colonies in North America convened in the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, taking a long but still not inevitable step towards the American Revolution.

Georgia, the lone holdout among the colonies, sent no delegates to the Congress because it needed royal troops to defend against attacks by Native Americans—underscoring the vulnerability that partly motivated Parliament’s increasing resort to taxation over the prior decade.

The delegates gathered in Carpenters’ Hall, home of what today remains, 300 years after its establishment, the oldest craft guild in the United States.

The congress came together in solidarity with Boston, which for the last several months had been punished by the administration of British Prime Minister Lord North for the Boston Tea Party protest of taxation without representation. 

The Coercive Acts (called the Intolerable Acts in the colonies) had ignited further protest by closing Boston Harbor until restitution was made for the dumped tea; abrogating the colony’s longtime charter; allowing British officials charged with capital offenses to be tried in England instead; and gave all colonial governors the right to requisition unoccupied buildings to house troops.

Parliament’s crackdown not just on the colonists’ exports but also their attempts at manufacturing led the delegates to debate how to implement a boycott of British goods.

Two days after the congress opened, Rev. Jacob Duché delivered an invocation--beginning a tradition of prayer in Congress that continues to this day. The delegates must have felt the necessity of it continually, because For much of the time before adjourning on October 26, they debated endlessly without moving much business. 

They were hamstrung from the outset because, as the first time the colonies had gathered for common action, no rules existed even for governing the proceedings.

But the divisions among them were not just deep, but multiple, involving splits:

*between large and small colonies;

*among loyalists seeking an accommodation with Britain, radicals like the Adamses of Massachusetts and Richard Henry Lee of Virginia who were concluding that independence was inevitable, and a more cautious group that wanted to see how events transpired;

*among speakers who had operated within the political environments of their own colonies but were unused to cooperating with others outside them.

Pennsylvania conservative Joseph Galloway, attempting to ward off passage of a resolution calling for boycotting British goods, outlined a “Plan of Union” in which any legislation would require approval by both Parliament and an intercolonial assembly.

At first, it appeared that Galloway’s plan would carry. But opinion shifted when the congress received the Suffolk Resolves transported from Massachusetts by Paul Revere. Patriotic leaders, circumventing the royal governor’s recent ban on town meetings, had gathered in Suffolk County and passed a set of resolutions calling on colonists to ignore the Intolerable Acts, elect militia officers, and conduct weekly drills to defend themselves.

Reconsidering their position on Galloway’s plan, the Philadelphia delegates now rejected his belief that Parliament had the inherent right to tax and govern the colonies. Just before it adjourned, the Continental Congress created a Continental Association that called for a ban on all trade between America and Great Britain of all goods, wares or merchandise.

Nobody who has witnessed the self-interested dickering and nitpicking over proposals that has occurred in our Congress should be surprised to hear that something like the same situation obtained 250 years ago in Philadelphia.

While seemingly far-reaching—it involved not just a ban on importing British goods but also African slaves and tax-bearing commodities from elsewhere in the world—even this ended up watered down by individual colonies’ demands (e.g., Virginia received the right to sell its tobacco for one more year, and South Carolina was permitted to ship rice, one of its most important exports, to Britain).

More significant, though, the delegates left the door open for further action. They agreed to wait to see how Britain reacted, and if there was no improvement in Lord North’s dealings with the colonies, to reconvene the following year.

Ultimately, it was Lord North’s stubbornness in treating the colonies like errant children that forced them to band together.

Great Britain’s refusal to compromise led to armed resistance at Lexington and Concord the following April, and the resumption of delegate business at the Second Continental Congress, only this time with a more drastic—though still not irrevocable—task at hand: how to organize armed resistance to the harsh new measures imposed from across the Atlantic without their content.

The First Continental Congress was notable both for who attended and who did not. Among the latter who would serve on the committee assigned to draft the Declaration of Independence nearly two years later: Benjamin Franklin, making a last-ditch attempt for reconciliation between the Crown and the colonies, and Thomas Jefferson, who, though too sick to travel to Philadelphia late in the summer of 1774, managed to complete A Summary View of the Rights of British America, a tract so acclaimed for its eloquence that it would lead him to be chosen to write the Declaration.

Among those who did attend the Congress: two future military leaders, George Washington, commander of the Continental Army, and, from New Hampshire, John Sullivan, the son of Irish Catholic immigrants, who became a brigadier general in the army.

One name that stuck out for me, from New Jersey, sounded awfully familiar, and that indeed turned out to be the case: Stephen Crane, great-great grandfather of the great American novelist famous for The Red Badge of Courage.

Quote of the Day (Ian Frazier, on The Bronx When It Felt Like Paradise)

“In photographs of the Bronx from that period [the 1920s], the new pavements gleam, mostly car-free. So much in the borough was new and splendid and gleaming. In 1923, Jacob Ruppert, the brewer, and his partner, Cap Huston, built Yankee Stadium on 161st Street by the Harlem River. No other ballpark in America was called a stadium or rose to its nosebleed altitude of three tiers. About Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio, and their fellow-Yankees of that heroic era, the poets have already sung. And at the Kingsbridge Armory, then the largest indoor space in the city, you could see car shows or boat shows or rodeos—bucking broncos and steer ropers in the Bronx! Just a five-cent bus or streetcar ride away! Meanwhile, on any day, you had your local movie theatre. Everybody, practically without exception, went to the movies. You could bowl a few frames at the Paradise Lanes, on the Grand Concourse at East 188^th Street, and then cross the street to see a double feature at Loew’s Paradise Theatre, which seated four thousand dazzled moviegoers. After the evening's feature ended and the lights came up, a date night could adjourn to Krum's, the chocolate shop also known for its delicious sodas, which also was on the Concourse, just one block north.”— American essayist and humorist Ian Frazier, “Our Local Correspondents: Paradise Bronx,” The New Yorker, July 22, 2024

Periodically, my mother’s twin brother would pull out a book called The Beautiful Bronx and peer lovingly at its abundant photos, recalling the borough that meant so much to him and his family in their youth and early middle age.

The New Yorker, the magazine to which Ian Frazier has contributed for half a century, ran an excerpt from his just-published book, Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough. How my uncle and my mother would have loved that subtitle!

I wish that this excerpt might have talked about how, attracted by the extension of subway lines to the borough, immigrants and their children—mostly Germans, Italians, Jewish, and my mother’s family, Irish—made The Bronx their home. But perhaps the full book has more on that story.

Frazier has nicely complemented what he picked up from 15 years of walking a cumulative 1,000 miles around the borough with the kind of historical research highly in the above passage.

The Bronx might have been, as he emphasizes, originally shaped by its unique geography (“The Bronx is a hand reaching down to pull the other boroughs of New York City out of the harbor and the sea”). 

But it was mis-shaped by the erroneously titled “master builder,” Robert Moses, whose mad road-building project, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, ended up displacing thousands of families, at a cost of millions in compensation and far more in mourning for their short-lived urban Eden.

Quote of the Day (Woodrow Wilson, on Universities and ‘The Object of Learning’)

“It is the object of learning not only to satisfy the curiosity and perfect the spirits of individual men, but also to advance civilization; and if it be true that each nation plays its special part in furthering the common advancement, every people should use its universities to perfect it in its proper role. A university should be an organ of memory for the state for the transmission of its best traditions. Every man sent out from a university should be a man of his nation, as well as a man of his time.” —Woodrow Wilson, 28^th President of the United States and Princeton University President (1856-1924) , “University Training and Citizenship,” The Forum, September 1894, reprinted in The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson: College and State—Educational, Literary and Political Papers (1875-1913), edited by Ray Stannard Baker and William Dodd (1926)

TV Quote of the Day (‘WKRP in Cincinnati,’ With a Conspiracy-Minded Newsman)

Arthur Carlson [played by Gordon Jump]: “Look, Les. I know you got a great nose for news. But, uh, you're also a little conspiracy-minded, now aren't ya, huh?”

Les Nessman [played by Richard Sanders]: “I wouldn't say so.”

Carlson: “Come on, Les. Remember the way you broadcast Bing Crosby's death? ‘First Presley, now Crosby. Just a coincidence? I wonder.’"— WKRP in Cincinnati, Season 1, Episode 2, “Pilot: Part 2,” original air date Sept. 25, 1978, teleplay by Hugh Wilson, directed by Michael Zinberg

Truly, Les was a man before his time. Think what he could have done today on social media and cable news!