Quotes of the Day (The Fall of Atlanta, Seen by Gen. Sherman and Scarlett O’Hara)

"The next morning [Confederate] General [William J.] Hardee was gone, and we all pushed forward along the railroad south, in close pursuit, till we ran up against his lines at a point just above Lovejoy's Station. While bringing forward troops and feeling the new position of our adversary, rumors came from the rear that the enemy had evacuated Atlanta, and that General [Henry W.] Slocum was in the city. Later in the day I received a note in Slocum's own handwriting, stating that he had heard during the night the very sounds that I have referred to [explosions]; that he had moved rapidly up from the bridge about daylight, and had entered Atlanta unopposed. His letter was dated inside the city, so there was no doubt of the fact. General [George] Thomas's bivouac was but a short distance from mine, and, before giving notice to the army in general orders, I sent one of my staff-officers to show him the note. In a few minutes the officer returned, soon followed by Thomas himself, who again examined the note, so as to be perfectly certain that it was genuine. The news seemed to him too good to be true. He snapped his fingers, whistled, and almost danced, and, as the news spread to the army, the shouts that arose from our men, the wild hallooing and glorious laughter, were to us a full recompense for the labor and toils and hardships through which we had passed in the previous three months.”— William Tecumseh Sherman, The Memoirs of General W.T. Sherman (1875)

“Then a strangely incongruous sight struck her [Scarlett O’Hara’s] eyes….Men, women and children, black and white, hurried, hurried with straining faces, lugging packages and sacks and boxes of food — more food than she had seen in a year. The crowd suddenly gave a lane for a careening carriage and through the lane came the frail and elegant Mrs. Elsing, standing up in the front of her victoria, reins in one hand, whip in the other. She was hatless and white faced and her long gray hair streamed down her back as she lashed the horse like a Fury. Jouncing on the back seat of the carriage was her black mammy, Melissy, clutching a greasy side of bacon to her with one hand, while with the other and both feet she attempted to hold the boxes and bags piled all about her….Scarlett screamed to her, but the tumult of the crowd drowned her voice and the carriage rocked madly by.

“For a moment she could not understand what it all meant and then, remembering that the commissary warehouses were down by the railroad tracks, she realized that the army had thrown them open to the people to salvage what they could before the Yankees came.”—Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind (1936)

The destiny of the United States changed utterly on this day in 1864 when the mayor of Atlanta surrendered his city to Union forces. Only 10 days before, Union armies had appeared so stalled on all fronts that Abraham Lincoln felt obliged to compose a message detailing how he intended to cooperate to preserve the Union with former General George B. McClellan if, as it seemed increasingly likely, “Little Mac” and the Democratic Party defeated Lincoln in the fall Presidential election.

The day after this transportation hub of the Confederacy capitulated, though, General William Tecumseh Sherman had written Gen. Henry Halleck, the de facto army chief of staff, “So Atlanta is ours and fairly won.”

So, it soon became apparent, was Lincoln’s victory. Writing this past weekend in The Wall Street Journal, historian Fergus Bordewich notes that Lincoln’s running mate, Andrew Johnson, botched Reconstruction when he succeeded to the Presidency after the Great Emancipator’s assassination, but that the consequences would have been “momentous” if their ticket had lost in November 1864:

“Although he expressed a willingness to continue the war if necessary, in practical terms McClellan's victory in the election would likely have led to European recognition of the Confederacy, Southern independence, and the forcible return to slavery of the hundreds of thousands of former slaves who had fled to the Union armies for safety.”

For all the many—and enormous—differences between the two passages above, they are united in one feeling: astonishment. Sherman is jubilant that the three-month siege of Atlanta is over, that it’s all ended now—both the foot-by-foot, thrust-and-parry campaign of maneuver against  wily, defensive-minded Confederate’s Joseph E. Johnston and the pitched battles of the latter’s offensive-minded but recklessly brave replacement, John Bell Hood .

Astonishment of a different sort underlies Scarlett O’Hara’s feelings about the fall of the city in the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gone With the Wind. With a news blackout existing in effect, most city residents had little idea of the progress (or lack of same) of Confederate arms. Now, it appears, for Scarlett and thousands of others, Armageddon is at hand.

Besides the different perspectives of victory and defeat (not to mention nonfiction and fiction), these passages are also marked by different perceptions of order. For Sherman, a peacetime banker whose world was profoundly darkened by the Panic of 1857—and whose wonderful subsequent appointment as superintendent of the Louisiana Military Academy had come to an end because of secession—the victory, he thought, meant the consolidation of the prewar order.

Scarlett, however, senses that disorder is at hand, in the cry repeated throughout this chapter: “The Yankees are coming!” A city that had, in a real sense, gained much of its influence throughout the war as the site where so many had fled from Union troops in Tennessee and Mississippi was now experiencing its own refugee crisis.

Neither the capital of Georgia nor even its largest city, Atlanta had leveraged its position as a railroad hub, so that by 1863 its population had reached 20,000, making it the 12^th-largest city in the Confederacy. As Sherman had pressed harder in the spring and summer of 1864, however, the population had fallen back to roughly 3,000. That was the state of affairs when Sherman issued one of the most controversial orders of the war.

The Union general believed that Confederate refugees had acted as a drag on the advancement of Union armies in Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez and New Orleans. Now, foreseeing that “sutlers and traders” were about to descend on Atlanta, too, he decided to take a step that even his dispassionate explanation a decade after the events in his memoirs failed to mitigate: “to remove the entire civil population, and to deny to all civilians from the rear the expected profits of civil trade.”

Sherman’s relocation order worsened an already perilous refugee crisis. Moreover, the steps taken by his troops to cripple the South’s war effort—machine shops, foundries, railroads, depots—blended in the mind of the region with the destruction left by Hood. (To ensure that the Union captured nothing of consequence from the city’s railroad stock, the latter blew up over 80 railroad cars filled with ammunition, in the process wrecking homes whose losses would later be ascribed to the Yankee and his men.)

There is another aspect of Margaret Mitchell’s evocation of havoc. The chaos seems at first to affect everyone the same, both black and white. But  Mrs. Elsing’s black mammy, Melissy, proves as utterly incompetent at protecting her mistress’s precious food supply as Scarlett’s maid Prissy is in assisting Melanie Wilkes’ childbirth. Melissy's failure also prefigures Mitchell’s (and the racist white South’s) belief that blacks will be even more irresponsible in running state governments during Reconstruction.

Mitchell’s gripping narrative of the fall of Atlanta laid the marker for perhaps the most vivid scene in the 1939 film adaptation. But, like Sherman, she never realized the pathos of the African-Americans who were also swept up in the maelstrom engulfing Atlanta in September 1864—and who would find themselves with even less protection from the storm when the federal government withdrew its troops from the South beginning in 1877. 

(For more on the movie Gone With the Wind and its treatment of blacks, the Irish, and Reconstruction, see this earlier post of mine. See this link for another post describing, in more detail than the current one, Sherman's unrelenting four-month campaign to take Atlanta.)

Quotes of the Day (Heraclitus and Richard Pryor, Offering Radically Different Epistemologies)

“Eyes are more accurate witnesses than ears.”—Heraclitus, Fragments

“Who you gonna believe? Me or your lyin’ eyes?”—Richard Pryor (in the image accompanying this post, of course!), recounting what he told his wife when she found him in flagrante delicto with another woman, in Live on the Sunset Strip (1982)

Quotes of the Day (Elvis, as Spiritual Center)

Jimmy Rabbitte Jr. (played by Robert Arkins): “Elvis is not soul.”

Jimmy Rabbitte, Sr. (played by Colm Meaney): [defensively] “Elvis is God.”

Jimmy Jr. : “I never pictured God with a fat gut and corset singing ‘My Way’ at Caesar's Palace.”—The Commitments (1991), screenplay by Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais, and Roddy Doyle, based on the novel by Roddy Doyle, directed by Alan Parker

"I haven't had a drink or done drugs for seven months. I feel good. It's quite hardcore knowing when you come off stage you won't get drunk. Before the gig we get in a huddle and pray to Elvis to look after us."—British singer-songwriter Robbie Williams, July 4, 2001, interview with Radio 1

In the old days growing up, we were taught to pray to St. Anthony, St. Jude, or whoever the occasion demanded. Nowadays, it looks as if it’s rock stars who are the new icons—no, deities.

Nietzsche might have thought that God is Dead, but is anyone seriously going to doubt news of Elvis sightings in K-Mart?

Quotes of the Day (Edwin Edwards and Peter Cammarano, Demonstrating Touching Confidence in The Electorate)

“The only way I can lose this election is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.”—Former Louisiana Governor (and current jailbird) Edwin Edwards, handicapping to reporters his chances of winning a 1983 election against GOP opponent Dave Treen, quoted by Jeremy Alford, “The Cajun Express,” The Independent Weekly (Lafayette, La.), September 28, 2008

“Right now, the Italians, the Hispanics, the seniors are locked down. Nothing can change that now. I could be, uh, indicted, and I’m still gonna win 85 to 95 percent of those populations.”—Just-resigned Hoboken Mayor Peter Cammarano III (the guy in the accompanying photo, doing the perp walk), discussing his prospects for winning a runoff election for his office last year, quoted in United States of America v. Peter Cammarano III and Michael Schaffer

Mr. Cammarano, you just have been, uh, indicted. Your unique political science theory is about to be put to the test in ways you couldn’t imagine in 2008.

Unlike ex-Gov. Edwards—who displayed such a raffish charm that his bid for a pardon by George W. Bush was supported by politicians in both parties, even old rival Dave Treen—Cammarano has displayed only monstrous hypocrisy. He campaigned as a reformer, if you can believe that—bringing to mind the adage by columnist James J. Kilpatrick that reform consists of throwing your rascals out and putting my rascals in.

Moreover, Cammarano served as state legal director of Sen. Bob Menendez’s campaign a few years ago. I’d love to hear about the kind of advice he served up then.

Edwards and Cammarano epitomize the two different styles of corruption perpetrated by politicians on the good citizens of Louisiana and New Jersey.

New Jersey politicians are as much fun as a highway full of oil refineries on fire. If they squeezed silver dollars even a smidgen harder than they do right now, the poor coins would scream for relief. They meet the people they shake down in the kind of diners that Tony Soprano and his wrecking crew used to frequent on the HBO series.

Moreover, it’s all part of what Acting U.S. Attorney called, referring to the environment in which Cammarano operated, “an ethics-free zone”—i.e., the entire Garden State. The culture of corruption permeates every level of state government and law, even traffic court—where, because of our gazillion municipalities’ need to make money, it can easily cost a citizen more than $400 to cop a plea to wipe out points on a license for a moving violation that could otherwise leave you paying a surcharge for several years on your car insurance.

(In the 44-person indictment just handed down by the Feds, even rabbis ended up indicted, for God’s sake. I’m still suffering from cognitive dissonance, as I try to square the concept of representatives of the religion of The Law—you know, Moses and the 10 Commandments—breaking all sorts of them. Will someone explain to me how they got involved in this sorry mess?)

All of this wouldn’t be so hard to take if our politicians were entertaining. But the only thing funny about our public officials are the Quasimodo-like humps they’ve grown in carting out ill-gotten booty. The booty they stole, especially aggravating in a bum economy, from us.

Louisiana, taking its cue from the New Orleans motto, “Let the good times roll,” has by far the more cheerfully colorful crew of crooks. I think that if I’m going to be had, I’d rather be done by them.

Governor Earl Long, Edwards’ predecessor, is a case in point. Younger brother of Huey Long, committed to a state mental hospital by his wife after coming out for black voting rights, ol’ Earl managed to check himself out of the institution and run for Congress, all the while flaunting his relationship with stripper Blaze Starr. (You might remember the Paul Newman movie about this, Blaze.)

Here’s one of the things I like best about the fellow A.J. Liebling called “The Earl of Louisiana.” In the 1950s, he decided to backtrack from a position he’d taken, upsetting some of his most loyal supporters. An anxious aide asked how to finesse voters displeased that he’d gone back on his pledge.

Long’s response—paradoxically breathtaking in its brazen honesty—is one that I wish my state’s small-time double-talkers would try once in a blue moon: “Just look them in the eye, and tell them I lied!”

Quotes of the Day (Norman Maclean and Wendell Berry, on Water and Earth)

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”—Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It (1976)

"The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all, our most
pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our
only legitimate hope."—Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1978)

I took the photo accompanying this post at Ramapo Mountain Reservation in Mahwah, N.J.

Quotes of the Day (Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, Demonstrating That Finance Stumps Even Geniuses)

"I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people."—Sir Isaac Newton, after losing a fortune in Great Britain’s South Sea Bubble of 1720, quoted in Christopher Reed, “The Damn’d South Sea,” Harvard Magazine, May-June 1999

“The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.”—Popularly attributed to Albert Einstein

Quotes of the Day (on the Necessity—or Lack of Same—for Film Tax Incentives)

“If this tax incentive disappears, so will New York City productions. Without state action to support this much-needed tax relief, many shows and movies, especially independent films, will consider locations outside New York.” -- Bill De Blasio and Steve Buscemi, “The State Needs to Protect New York's Marquee Value,” The New York Daily News, March 20, 2009

“Our interviews with film industry executives and state officials suggest that political dynamics which characterize interstate incentive competition for film production shoots are more than likely to intensify. This view parallels research undertaken on the topic of business location and tax incentives, in spite of the belief that the cumulative effects of such incentive benefits are open to question and frequently doubtful.”--Isaiah A. Litvak and Marilyn M. Litvak, “Economic Development and U.S. State Film Incentives,” Economic Development Journal (Vol. 8, No. 1), Winter 2009

The Daily News has more readers, by several orders of magnitude, than Economic Development Journal, a quarterly publication of the nonprofit organization International Economic Development Council, a group with a mere 4,500 members. Nevertheless, the Litvaks’ analysis of the effectiveness of state film tax incentives deserves to reach a readership as wide as that of the op-ed by DeBlasio and Buscemi (respectively, a New York City councilman representing Brooklyn and the actor-director perhaps best known as The Sopranos’ Tony Blundetto).

In fact, DeBlasio and Buscemi’s argument inadvertently ratifies the Litvaks': i.e., that film execs and lobbyists are playing state governments like an orchestra of virtuosi. That argument boils down to this: If we don’t get that tax incentive, we’ll shoot in Vancouver.

God knows that New York is not the most industry-friendly environment among the states. Nevertheless, to these ears, anyway, the film industry is sounding an awful lot like George Steinbrenner and other sports executives over the years who have continually made noises about relocating their franchises to other, presumably more attractive locales—often after state taxpayers have already given them sweetheart deals on stadiums they built, oh, only 20 years before.

In a time of rapidly massive government deficits, state officials are going to have to look very skeptically at the whole notion of tax incentives for film and other industries. Maybe the advocates are right, but they’re going to have to work much, much harder to prove it. Those deficit shortfalls loom larger than ever, and the American taxpayer will have many more questions about the best way for them to be made up.

Quotes of the Day (Barack Obama and Humphrey Bogart, on Being a Sap)

"You know, I am an eternal optimist. That doesn't mean I'm a sap."—President Barack Obama, on whether he’d be willing to reach out to Republicans again after their party-line vote to oppose his stimulus package, quoted by syndicated columnist Clarence Page

"I don't care who loves who. I won't play the sap for you! You killed Miles and you're going over for it.”—Sam Spade (played by Humphrey Bogart) to Brigid O’Shaughnessy (played by Mary Astor), in The Maltese Falcon, written and directed by John Huston, based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett (1941)

Our President has this whole cool thing down, all right, but just this once I think he can lay it aside and study his source a little more closely. As you can see from his recent comments, he’s diverged from his original inspiration, Abraham Lincoln, to borrow a script from Bogie.

But since the Civil War era lacked the modern inventions of motion pictures and the phonograph, we’re free to imagine how the Great Emancipator looked and sounded. Such is not the case for Humphrey Bogart, possessed of one of the most distinctive—even much-imitated—voices in the history of cinema.

For his next faceoff with Congress, I suggest that the President go back to the climactic scene of The Maltese Falcon and practice relentlessly the tone that Bogie got so perfectly: that sense of vehement resolution when private eye Spade assured his faithless lover, the murderess Brigid, that for breaking his code—i.e., her killing of his partner, Miles Archer—she had to accept the consequences. That same tone is going to be essential the next time Obama gets in a staredown contest with the Republicans.

Well, even though he could have done better, the President at least got the right script this time. Imagine if he’d chosen a different one. You know—the one from Play It Again, Sam, where Woody Allen’s Bogie advises his hero-worshipping, film-critic fan about how to play the love game: “Tell her she moves something in you that you can’t control.”

Imagine how that would go over with Mitch McConnell!

(Thanks to Brian for the suggestion.)

Quotes of the Day (Liebling and Wright, on Yesterday’s Contests and Today’s)

“You got to respect a boxer. He’ll pick you and peck you, peck you and pick you, until you don’t know where you are.”—Oldtime gym proprietor Harry Wiley on boxing, quoted in A.J. Liebling, “Poet and Pedagogue,” in Just Enough Liebling: Classic Work by the Legendary New Yorker Writer (2004)

“[Middleweight Dave] Menne executes a sneaky jujisu move and traps [Gil] Castillo in a choke hold called a ‘guillotine.’ Castillo struggles helplessly, blood from eye wounds streaming down his face. With each gasp Castillo’s eyeballs roll farther back in bloody eye sockets. His arms flop helplessly. He looks like a rat being strangled by a snake.”—Evan Wright, describing a typical example of “The Ultimate Fighting Championship,” in “Fight Night,” Men’s Journal, March 2002

We’ve come a long way from the “Sweet Science” of boxing hailed by Liebling—peopled by the likes of Archie Moore, Sugar Ray Robinson, the young Muhammad Ali, and others who survived on guile and courage—to a monstrosity called the UFC, or "Ultimate Fighting Championship."

Fans call the UFC a “mixed martial-arts” sports. I call it all organized mayhem. We have no business looking down our noses at gladiatorial contests as examples of the ancient Roman penchant for “bread and circuses” to distract the masses when matches in 21st century America are scarcely less bloodthirsty.

Five years ago, though it seems blessedly longer, I encountered on 48th Street in New York a line of nearly two dozen men in black tie and masks, walking away from the Fox studios. They were contestants on a thankfully short-lived Fox reality dating show called “Mr. Personality,” hosted by Monica Lewinsky.

Well, I guess that if I were on a show hosted by Ms. Lewinsky, I’d want to wear a mask, too, lest my friends and even lots of people I didn’t know discover my infamy. As I watched the long line of these men walk by, I thought I would never again behold a scene so bizarre or so exceeding the boundaries of bad taste. I mean, it was presented by Fox, right? But that was before I read Wright’s account of the UFC.

I had never even heard of the UFC before coming across it in the article by Wright—who, incidentally, in his freelance work for Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, LA Weekly, and other publications, has become a vivid chronicler of America’s underbelly. This time, he shows that the UFC is a sport where anything goes—not just the boxing championed by Liebling (perhaps more than deserved, given the rash of pugilists who’ve sustained significant brain damage in recent years and made old before their time), but also kicking and gouging. The whole spectacle only ends when one fighter is knocked unconscious or gives up.

While Republicans and conservatives flail around in confused nihilism today in Obama’s Washington, let’s give them credit for one thing they got right, if only for a short while, on Capitol Hill while they were in control: In the 1990s, Sen. John McCain and columnist George F. Will shamed cable TV from televising the UFC bloodmatches. It looked as if what McCain aptly called a modern form of “human cockfighting” was on the ropes.

But it was not to be. After a few years of peril, new owners of the UFC turned around and mandated “safety rules” and new equipment, such as lighter gloves, making it easier for cable to put on these slugfests all over again.

I’m sorry to say that these “safety regulations” are a myth. But don’t take my word for it. Listen to Dr. Steven Brown, a supervising physician for these matches from the Nevada State Athletic Commission. In Atlantic Monthly’s recent profile of former UFC champ Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, Brown does his best to make the “sport” sound within the bounds of civilization—it’s not especially brutal, he says—but inevitably what he says spins out of control. He says that he’ll have to leave his ringside seat and enter the ring, because the skill of the fighters is such that an injury is almost guaranteed. Moreover, head injuries are more frequent in mixed-martial-arts fights than in boxing, and there is more bleeding, with eight of 10 cuts that we see coming from the scalp.

Shame worked at least for awhile, so what do you say we try it again—only this time, let’s start on the celebrities who, for reasons because left to their psychoanalysts, have come to the UFC Las Vegas events to cheer on the contenders. Among those who’ve attended these bash-a-thons: Justin Timberlake, David Spade, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jenna Jameson ( just the type of tacky exhibition the porn superstar would attend) and Mandy Moore (just the type of show you’d never expect the sweet girl-next-door singer to watch).

Quotes of the Day (Samuel Butler and John Erskine, on Different Types of Females)

“All young ladies are either very pretty or very clever or very sweet; they may take their choice as to which category they will go in for, but go in for one of the three they must. It was hopeless to try and pass Charlotte off as either pretty or sweet. So she became clever as the only remaining alternative.”—Samuel Butler (1835-1902), The Way of All Flesh (1903)

“There's a difference between beauty and charm. A beautiful woman is one I notice. A charming woman is one who notices me.” —John Erskine, American author and educator (1879-1951).

Samuel Butler represents a dilemma for members of the “reality-based community”: How do you stereotype a writer as a religious mossback when all his life—even in the posthumously published novel that became his greatest work—he savages the clerical life at every turn? With his kind of perspective—not to mention the wit displayed in the above quote—you can’t.

After initial enthusiasm for The Origins of Species, Butler became increasingly disenchanted with Darwin’s take on it. Several of his mid-career tracts sought to reconcile will, intelligence and design to a world now under the sway of natural selection.

Judging from the sardonic passage above from The Way of All Flesh—one of many in the novel—I suspect that the novelist would have deduced Erskine’s quote as proof positive that Darwin was not infallible, in much the same way that Henry Adams pointed to the arc of American Presidents from George Washington to Ulysses S. Grant as evidence of the same phenomenon.

Butler, at least, allowed for the possibility that women could be classified into three types. In contrast, Erskine’s comment implies a narrowing of the adaptive strategies of the female of the species—in a word, devolution.

In researching Erskine, I learned that he was one of the founders of the “Great Books” movement in the U.S., largely because of his advocacy of it at my alma mater, Columbia University. Contemporary Civilization and Literary Humanities—the two courses that use the mode of Socratic teaching he championed—still represent the rock of Columbia’s curriculum, 90 years later.

But I’m afraid that if Erskine had women in his classes, they might not have taken so kindly to his comment above. "Sexist pig," they might have called him (an epithet that would certainly be hurled in my time, across Broadway from Barnard), with more than a little justice. "Get over yourself," today's confident Columbia coed might have said.

In any case, the “charming woman” for whom he yearned--the type of woman that all too many males, truth be told, want--might have done so for reasons having nothing to do with his good attributes.

The critic Dwight Macdonald got to the heart of the situation in describing one woman who would unquestionably have to be classified as “very clever,” Mary McCarthy: “'When most pretty girls smile at you, you feel terrific. When Mary smiles at you, you look to see if your fly is open.''

Quotes of the Day (James Russell Lowell, on Edgar Allan Poe)

“Mr. Poe has that indescribable something which men have agreed to call genius.”—James Russell Lowell, “Edgar Allan Poe,” Graham’s Magazine, February 1845

“There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,
Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.”—James Russell Lowell, “A Fable for Critics,” 1848

In celebrating the bicentennial of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe today, so much of his career seems curious yet peculiarly fitting. There is, to start with, his birth itself, in Boston—a city that provoked his annoyance in adulthood, for reasons we’ll get to in a minute—to parents who were actors—in keeping with an artist whose life was theatrical and slightly disreputable, and whose work has given employment to countless thespians and allied professions over the years.

Here’s what else is curious about Poe: the set of opposing quotes by Lowell. What had happened to lead the Massachusetts poet—a leading literary light of his time, though hardly of ours—to praise Poe so much, only to lampoon him so thoroughly two-and-a-half years later?

It all goes back, I’m afraid, to the streak of self-destruction that intrigues academics, fellow writers of our time, and—let’s face it—most readers. As the American counterpart to the French poet maudit (poet living outside the bounds of society), Charles Baudelaire, Poe’s dark side emerged not only in his prolific writing but also in his alcoholic binges. Most people who know a bit about his life are aware of that much, and a smaller percentage of these readers recall the murky Election Day circumstances that led to his mysterious death in Baltimore in 1849.

But Poe could be self-destructive in other ways, engaging in what biographers have termed “the Longfellow Wars.” Actually, since he threw wild charges around against at least a few people, including Lowell, I’d call this “The Poe Plagiarism Wars.”

Poe’s stature today with the academic community far surpasses that of the men he criticized, but it’s not because of the genre in which he wanted to be remembered: his poetry. Read “Annabel Lee,” “The Raven,” and his other poems. They’re cloying and so intent on repeating sounds that they come off overwrought and sing-song. Instead, his reputation rests on his pioneering contributions in three fictional genres: science fiction-adventure (his only novel, The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym), the detective story (“The Purloined Letter”), and, of course, the horror tale (too many to mention, or even to choose one or two from as favorites).

Literary criticism, however, earned Poe his daily bread in the 1840s. Though his activity in this area contains many elements of his genius, it also reflects the mental instability that led to the confused train of events in the last months of his life.

As a literary critic, Poe wrote with unusual perception, such as in his observation that the short story should aim toward a single overwhelming effect. But from his editorial perch he also aimed brickbats at the Boston literary community, which really didn’t deserve it. He became oddly obsessed with the question of plagiarism, with much of this preoccupation stemming from the odd belief that he himself was a victim of this.

Initial admiration for Longfellow turned to dubious claims about him, even the charge that he was pilfering the work of others.

As you might surmise from one of my prior posts, Longfellow lived in nothing like Poe’s financially pinched circumstances. Still, whatever sympathy you might have for an underdog dissipates when you consider how unfair Poe’s attack was. Given that, Longfellow’s forbearance was extraordinary, extending even to providing financial assistance after Poe’s death to the latter’s mother-in-law.

Another Boston-area poet, Lowell, had been an admirer of Poe. But an invitation that Lowell arranged to lecture at the Boston Lyceum turned into a catastrophe when Poe read his poem “Al Aaraaf” in a drunken stupor. Before long, Poe was taking after Lowell, too, as a plagiarist.

By this time, Poe had achieved a reputation as something of a “Tomahawk” critic, which he promptly secured with a series of articles on the “The Literati of New York.” One of the men profiled, Thomas Dunn English, didn’t take kindly to Poe’s published claims. Now the shoe was on the other foot, with English charging Poe with forgery.

The enraged poet struck back with a libel suit. Did he win? Well, define “win.” If Poe looked around his apartment after the jury’s conclusion and counted the number of chairs he’d been able to purchase because of their favorable verdict, he might have believed he had won. But the trial also turned up entirely believable episodes of Poe’s drunkenness, making it increasingly unlikely that he’d be able to find another job in New York. That, in fact, is what happened.

There are people who, no matter how relentless their labors or how high their achievements, are doomed to fail because of their own personalities. Poe was one of these. Even as we acknowledge his achievements, our distance from the quarrels of his time should not make us overlook that he was, as Lowell put it, “two-fifths sheer fudge.”

Quotes of the Day (“A Visit From St. Nicholas”—and A Small But Significant Variation)

"'Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro' the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse”—“A Visit From St. Nicholas,” published anonymously in the Troy (N.Y.) Sentinel on December 23, 1823, later attributed to the Rev. Clement Clark Moore

“'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring... nothin'... no action... dullsville!” —The soused Mrs. Margie MacDougall (played by Hope Holiday), speaking to a similarly polluted C.C. Baxter (played by Jack Lemmon), two lonely souls in a bar on Christmas Eve, in The Apartment (1960), written by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, directed by Wilder

“A Visit From St. Nicholas” has, of course, become one of the most beloved traditions of the holiday season. With Moore being a fellow Columbia College grad and all--and his father even being the President of the school--I’d love to think of this wonderfully imaginative poem as coming from his hand. But it just doesn’t sound a lot like the work he did through much of his life.

One version of the poem’s conception is that it came to him while out sleigh-riding with his children in 1822; another, that he was inspired by Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker History.

But think of it—Moore, a professor of Oriental and Greek literature at Columbia who also compiled a two-volume Hebrew dictionary, was not known for his sense of playfulness. 

In fact, if you subtract his productivity and his children, he sounds like a soulmate of the Rev. Edward Casaubon, the stodgy scholar of George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

In recent years, a more likely candidate has risen. Don Foster of Vassar College has proposed as the author Henry Livingston Jr., a gentleman-poet of Dutch descent. That sounds more like it, if you ask me.

In addition to popularizing a number of notions about St. Nicholas, "A Visit From St. Nicholas" has also inspired countless parodies. My favorite short one is what I just quoted above, from Billy Wilder’s Oscar-winning The Apartment. 

The center of its plot—the willingness of businessmen to fool around with female underlings in the office—would now invite sexual harassment lawsuits. But the film’s abundant wit and heart haven’t aged one iota.

If you’re tiring of It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Carol, or holiday films that pour on the sentimentality far more egregiously and far less skillfully, watch Wilder’s classic.

Quotes of the Day (Obama and Clinton)

From the last debate before the Democratic Iowa Caucus, Dec. 13, 2007:

Carolyn Washburn, Editor, Des Moines Register and Iowa debate moderator: “Senator Obama, you have former President Clinton’s former national security adviser, state department and navy secretary, among others, advising you. With relatively little foreign policy experience of your own, how will you rely on so many Clinton advisers and still deliver the kind of break from the past that you’ve been promising voters?”

Barack Obama: “Well, the—you know, I am...”

Hillary Clinton (cackling in the background, then): “I want to hear that.”

Obama (smiling and shuffling papers on the lectern, then): “Well, Hillary, I’m looking forward to you advising me, as well.” (Applause and laughter) “I want to gather up talent from everywhere.”

From Tom Brune, “Clinton Accepts Secretary of State Nomination,” Newsday, Dec. 2, 2008:

“Hillary Rodham Clinton said she's ready to leave New York and the Senate to return to the world stage after President-elect Barack Obama announced yesterday he would nominate his former political rival as his secretary of state.”

(What a difference a year makes! When the exchange in Iowa occurred, many of us thought it was just a matter of a really talented rookie in spring training dusting himself off after a high-and-inside fastball put him on his keister, then stepping back into the batter’s box to hit a homerun off the disdainful vet. Who ever knew he really meant what he said about “looking forward to you advising me, as well”?

The media are promoting this as a 21st-century example of the “Team of Rivals” concept that Doris Kearns Goodwin discussed in her book on the Lincoln Cabinet. But if you remember, THAT whole concept didn’t start out so well—William Henry Seward thought that he’d be exclusively running the foreign policy of the United States rather than the President-elect. A lucky thing that Lincoln put him in his place, albeit with tact, and that Seward shared something in common with the President: good grace and love of a good story.

But people, what if the prototype we’re getting is not Seward but a much later Secretary of State, another former primary opponent of a President-elect tapped to run Foggy Bottom? I’m talking, of course, about Al Haig. Remember the confusion following the Reagan assassination and the way he stepped up to the microphone to announce, “I’m in control here”? He didn’t even come into office with all the baggage of Senator Clinton. Yet Time Magazine’s summary of his tenure sounds like an eerie premonition of things to come: “In the eyes of his critics, Haig’s defeat was self-inflicted…he did not know when to stop fighting and seek conciliation; he was too obsessed with his enemies, however real; he spent too much time defending turf and proclaiming his prerogatives; and he was sometimes a poor conceptual thinker.”

And Bill Clinton – why do you think he was made to fill out that that humongous vetting form about his donors? Right now, Obama has to be hoping that the Clinton soap opera—one, I might add, that played out on a smaller scale in the primary season, when Bill was more intent on talking about his own successes than Hillary’s accomplishments—somehow won’t get noticed so much in these turbulent times.

I mean, we’re talking about “No Drama Obama” here—the coolest cat in town, the candidate whose sang froid even won the grudging admiration of Republican handlers. No leaks, no prima donna consultants allowed to undercut his campaign.

Now who does he have reporting to him? The Margo Channing of D.C. You recall her, don’t you—the aging theatrical diva played by Bette Davis in All About Eve, resentful about her place being taken by a young upstart? Remember the great line the drunken Margo tosses off at a cocktail party: “Fasten your seat belts—it’s going to be a bumpy ride!”

With crises at home and abroad, Obama doesn’t need any distractions. But a “bumpy ride” might be what he’s in for now.)

Quotes of the Day (on Developments in the Vice-Presidency)

“But as for that V.P. talk all the time, I’ll tell you, I still can’t answer that question until someone answers for me what is it, exactly, that the V.P. does every day?”—Alaska Gov. (and future Vice-Presidential candidate) Sarah Palin, appearing on CNBC’s “Kudlow & Company”, July 31, 2008

“I’m sure that there will be discrete assignments over time. But I think his fundamental role is as a trusted counselor. I think that when Obama selected him, he selected him to be a counselor and an adviser on a broad range of issues.--David Axelrod, a senior adviser to President-elect Barack Obama, on Joe Biden’s projected role as Vice-President, quoted by Helene Cooper, “For Biden, No Portfolio But the Role of a Counselor,” The New York Times, Nov. 25, 2008

"Once there were two brothers. One ran away to sea; the other was elected vice president. And nothing was ever heard of either of them again."—Thomas Marshall, Vice-President under Woodrow Wilson, on his office

Palin’s inexperience, in and of itself, was enough to make me cast my vote against John McCain and for Barack Obama. But I think The New Republic erred in listing the quote above from her as part of its “Case Against Sarah Palin.” In her artlessly phrased way, she brought to the surface a real question that every administration faces—what to do with the Vice-President?

She came in for a fair amount of criticism during the campaign for her televised response to a third-quarter’s question about what Vice-Presidents do: “[T]hey’re in charge of the U.S. Senate so if they want to they can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes that will make life better for Brandon and his family and his classroom.”

Okay, this is a turkey of a statement, since the Constitution’s sole sentence on the responsibilities of the Vice-President is the following: “The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.”

But you know what? The way I figure it is this: Every politician, no matter how seemingly sharp, says or does at least one thing in his career so astoundingly idiotic that it takes the breath away. Russell Baker, for instance, recalled seeing Adlai Stevenson shake hands with a department store mannequin. The way I figure it, politicians are entitled to at least one mulligan to cover such contingencies.

Not to mention that this is the holiday season. So in the season’s spirit of charity, I’m going to take a page from President Bush’s book (the closest book he’s come to in awhile, I’ll reckon!) and pardon this turkey.

In fact, in the best bipartisan tradition I’m going to pardon a second turkey: Governor Palin’s opponent for the Vice-Presidency, Joe Biden, who came out with this whopper in an interview with Katie Couric in September: "When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'"

(I’m sure Joe’s handlers—not to mention hundreds of my fellow bloggers—reminded him of the following after this statement: a) It was Herbert Hoover, not FDR, who was around at the time of the stock market crash—a fact of which the Democratic Party successfully reminded the electorate for the following 20 years; b) FDR did not appear on TV until 1939, for the World’s Fair that year; c) Because TV did not develop as a mass medium for nearly another decade after that, the medium the President mastered was radio.)

Look, we know what Joe meant. We know what Sarah meant. Still, this past election might have been the first in which whoever became Vice-President would have duct tape placed over their mouths to prevent further gaffes.

You don’t have to believe me, though. Take a look at Axelrod’s quote above, and especially that word “counselor.” It sounds, to these ears, an awful lot like another “C” word used often in the business world: “consultant.” It’s the term that a number of companies use for executives unceremoniously “transitioned” out the door. These former execs have little to do except twiddle their thumbs while picking up a paycheck.

Axelrod’s “counselor” role sounds like at least a partial reversion to the old role played by Vice-Presidents. Again, we come back to Vice-President Marshall, who, in the frustrating months after Woodrow Wilson’s devastating stroke, noted that “the only business of the vice-president is to ring the White House bell every morning and ask what is the state of health of the president."

Beginning with the greater role that Jimmy Carter gave Walter Mondale, the increasing Presidential practice has been to award Vice-Presidents significant responsibility.

Dick Cheney’s Voldemortian abuse of his wide-ranging portfolio in the departing administration, however, inspired widespread, you might even say bipartisan, revulsion. Even John McCain noted that he was inclined to scale sharply back on the responsibilities of his V-P—without, of course, making the office a nullity once again.

Given this recent history, along with the “team of rivals” envisioned by President-elect Obama for his Cabinet, including Hilary Clinton and Bill Richardson, do you think there’s going to be a significant role for Biden?

Do you think that, given Biden’s penchant for gaffes—or what The New York Times, in the same charitable spirit that the CEO of this blog is displaying, “his voluble past”—that the Obama administration is going to allow him out for much more than the occasional funeral for a head of state?

Do you think that, given how little the Constitution specifically says about the Veep’s duties, that they are going to extend further than Obama’s (still abundant, let’s grant) who-knows-how-long affection and patience for the Senate warhorse who’s now a heartbeat away from him?

Stay tuned, as Gov. Palin’s query about what a Vice-President does all day becomes newly relevant.

Quotes of the Day (James Baldwin and Christiane Taubira, on race in Europe and America, 1951 and 2008)

“The European image of the black man rests finally, one must say, on ignorance, and however expedient this ignorance may be, it is sustained by the objective conditions; whereas the American image of the Negro has been created out of our terrible experience, and it is sustained by an anguished inability to come to terms with that experience, or to conquer the guilty fear and shame which have been its quite inevitable and self-perpetuating legacy. This heritage deprives us entirely of the kind of racial innocence which one finds in Europe. Europeans can blacken their faces with cork because the black man as a human being has no reality in their lives. He is not one of them. But he is one of us—and from this reality there is no escape.”—James Baldwin, “The Negro at Home and Abroad,” The Reporter, November 27, 1951, in his Collected Essays (Library of America, 1998)

“France needs to learn from what is happening with Obama. The U.S. population has grown with Obama, they have overcome their prejudices….Such an experience is impossible in France.”—Black politician Christiane Taubira, former Presidential candidate of the Left Radical Party, quoted in Max Colchester, “France Rethinks Relations With Minorities,” The Wall Street Journal, November 6, 2008

(On November 11, 1948, using what was left of a Rosenwald fellowship, the 24-year-old Baldwin departed for Europe with a one-way ticket, eventually settling in France. The aspiring novelist-essayist had to get out of the United States, he felt, or else racism would not only crush his development as a writer but also strangle him with self-hatred.

It’s safe to say that the author of the urgent 1963 meditation on America’s civil rights crisis, The Fire Next Time, could not even have conceived of Barack Obama winning the Presidency. Judging from the running commentary throughout the last election, neither could most of the European intelligentsia. The victory of the Illinois senator, however, is now forcing serious rethinking of whether Europe is as open as so many have always claimed.

Consider the following facts outlined in Colchester’s article:

* Only three of the 36,000 elected mayors in mainland France are black;
* Only one member of France’s National Assembly is black;
* There are no black chief executives at major French companies;
* There are no black ambassadors.

All of this, lest we forget, in a population with 10% African or Arab roots, courtesy of its own longtime significant colonial presence, and in a nation that did not, finally, extinguish slavery for good until 1848—only 15 years before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

We’ve had a Tocqueville, a French observer examining Democracy in America (or two Tocquevilles, if you count Bernard Henri-Levy’s self-conscious recreation of the earlier Frenchman’s trek in American Vertigo). Now, how about a Tocqueville in reverse—an American analyzing the structure of French society to see how well, in an age of rising minority population, the latter nation that prides itself on “liberty, equality, and fraternity” has been living up to its revolutionary ideals?)

Quotes of the Day (Ferguson and Allen, on Crises Past, Present and Eternal)

“The Great Repression is upon us. On one side can be seen the chain reaction of deleveraging as banks, other companies and households all battle to stabilise balance sheets that became much too highly geared in the days of easy money; as the resulting credit contraction and forced asset sales create a vicious downward spiral; as the slowdown spreads to Main Street and from Main Street to the world. On the other side are the Fed and the Treasury, desperately manning the monetary and fiscal pumps while trying to decide who is too big to fail and who is not.”—Niall Ferguson, “A Long Shadow,” Financial Times, September 22, 2008

“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”—Woody Allen, “My Speech to the Graduates,” Side Effects (1980)

Quotes of the Day (Gospel of John, and St. John Vianney)

“I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you.”—John 14:18

“It is always springtime in the heart that loves God.”—St. John Vianney

(This year marks the centennial of the founding of the Catholic Guardian Society, which was formed to care for those leaving foster care and re-entering communities. A year and a half ago, that agency merged with the even older Catholic Home Bureau, America’s first foster home agency, to form the Catholic Guardian Society and Home Bureau (CGSHB).

It’s worthwhile to recall these non-profit groups and what they have done over the years to help at-risk young people, among the “least among you” that Christ urged his followers to help. The need is even greater in this age for such groups than ever before, as families come under assault from every direction. Please reminder, then, that aiding these groups will bring the kind of “springtime” that Vianney spoke about to a young person that desperately needs it.)

Quote of the Day

“It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?” – Henry David Thoreau, letter to his friend H.G.O. Blake, November 16, 1857

Quotes of the Day

“Being an independent means that we can argue issues in good faith instead of vilifying opponents as agents of evil. It means scoring poorly on rating scales of ideological purity. It means accepting as axiomatic the idea that no political party or ideology has a monopoly on truth or an immunity to hogwash.”—Steven Tiger, posting in response to Stanley Fish’s “Against Independent Voters,” reprinted in The New York Times, January 27, 2008

“A plague o’ both your houses!”—A dying Mercutio, to the feuding Montagues and Capulets, in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

(Amen to Mr. Tiger and Mr. Bill)