Americans face history in all its messy complexity

     Walt Whitman was a nurse in the Civil War. His brother George was wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg. The poet rushed from Brooklyn to a Washington, D.C., hospital and found a "new world" of horror and hope.
     He wrote a very readable diary about it, "Memoranda During the War," that includes gut-turning descriptions of piles of amputated limbs and loving portraits of wounded soldiers.
     He'd give them chaws of tobacco and pocket money, write their letters home. And, being Walt, check them out in the process. "He looks so handsome as he sleeps."
     That last detail might be creepy. But it's also interesting and worth noting of the man who once wrote, "What is more beautiful than candor?"
     In his travels around Washington, D.C., Whitman sometimes saw Abraham Lincoln — they'd nod to each other in passing.
     I admit to noticing Lincoln in my own wanderings around the city — not in the flesh, thank goodness, not yet. But in places associated with him, particularly at Lake and Wacker, the original site of the Wigwam, where Lincoln was nominated for president in 1860.
     Though Lincoln wasn't there; his handlers kept him safely in Springfield so as not to screw up their crude deal-making. Another messy detail.

     And of course the building wouldn't have been there, at street level today, but about 30 feet straight down, the streetscape having risen considerably since 1860.
     Lincoln is always here, always relevant, because we're still fighting the Civil War. There's no other way to put it. Thousands of books have been written about the 16th president, but my favorite is "Dear Mr. Lincoln: Letters to the President," edited by Harold Holzer.
     Like online comments today, many of the letters are sharp, telegraphic bursts.
     "Equal rights & Justice to all white men in the United States forever," urges John McMahon of Hambrook, Pennsylvania on Aug. 5, 1864. "White men is in class number one & black men in class number two & must be governed by white men forever."
     That sounds like something found on X today. At least McMahon expresses his hateful thoughts directly, as opposed to our current passion for insinuation and cant, such as President Donald Trump's recent executive order to tamp down government portrayal of the struggle for equal rights in this country under the Orwellian title, "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History."
     Official websites are scrubbed, museum displays censored, books banned.
     All of it is done under the flawed notion that including the difficult, unpleasant aspects of history is dispiriting and must be suppressed. I suppose most of the Civil War could fall into that category, as does Lincoln being assassinated, April 14, 1865, 160 years ago Monday, by a fanatical Southerner — and this is the sort of detail cut out —incensed at the idea that Black people would gain the right to vote. Now their vote is being suppressed more cannily, though the motive is the same. "White men is in class number one."

     The past has to be prettied up because the intention is to drag our nation back there. They pretend to be applying intellectual rigor or healthy skepticism, when what they are actually doing is whitewashing anything that gives away the game they are playing. Holocaust deniers do the same thing: pluck at inconsistencies in the enormous mass of German record-keeping and pretend to raise legitimate doubts.

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Are we having fun yet?

     

The Apple store in Northbrook, which recently closed.

     So last week the president announces these insane tariffs. Which he immediately rescinds — no, puts on a 90-day hold. Before announcing other, equally insane, economy-killing tariffs on China, the source of most of our electronics, particularly iPhones. Which he also immediately scraps — well, makes exceptions for the phones and electronics.

     Which I guess is a relief. Reversing folly is good. The tanking stock market clawed back some of its losses. Though we're still in a situation of total uncertainty, and nobody wants to build a factory or invest when the market can be — will be, judging from the recent past — whipsawed again and again by the whims of an idiot. 

     This almost prompts me to wonder why anybody cares at all what he says or does, given how little weight those pronouncements and decisions carry? The man is a chronic, habitual liar. We can't we accept it, assume it? Should we not have reached that point a long time ago?

     But that too is an illusion, the belief that nothing is significant, nothing true. Mistakes are not being reversed. Real damage is being inflicted — lasting damage, to decades-old relationships, to the American reputation as a world leader. We're becoming a pariah nation, half-feared, half ridiculed. And even "becoming" is optimistic. We're there, right now, our closest allies talking among themselves about how to best carry on without us.
     Every 20th of the month is another anniversary of his administration. A week from today it will be three months. A quarter of a year. One-sixteenth of his second administration, assuming he doesn't maneuver himself into a third, which, like most suppositions that a particular tradition will somehow endure, is no longer a safe assumption. Fifteen-sixteenths left to go. A very long time. As a certain program says: one day at a time.

"The drama of that plastic act"

Home + Housewares Show, 2015

 
     Friday's column on Passover contained this sentence: "We pretend that religion is changeless and eternal, but the truth is it's plastic and mutable."
     Which prompted regular commentator Double B to object:

     "Upon first read, I was insulted at the idea that religion is plastic and malleable. Why not like wet clay? ... Surely its a better representation than plastic. Plastic is so... terrible. It is so modern and terrible for the environment. It takes big machines to heat and form it."

     I sighed, and told Double B — gently, I hope — that he was falling into a trap I call "The Two Definitions Problem." A word has a primary definition, and many assume that it is the only definition. When our language is so — I almost said "plastic" — variable, the same term can have one, two, or a dozen very different meanings and shades of meaning. If I throw down my hand and walk away, leaving it there, and a reader objects that this is impossible — it is possible, if that hand is a quintet of playing cards and not the fleshy appendage attached to the. end of  my wrist. One word, "hand" two definitions. 
     I immediately pulled down Samuel Johnson's dictionary of 1755:

 plastick adj. [πλαστική] Having the power to give form. Benign creator! let thy plastick hand/Dispose its own effect. Prior.

     In fact, "plastic" is especially appropriate when applied to religion, as the molding power of the Lord is inevitably cited in early definitions. Three quarters of a century later, Noah Webster's 1828 dictionary loses the final "k" but keeps the divinity:   

PLASTIC ... Having the power to give form or fashion to a mass of matter; as the plastic hand of the Creator; the plastic virtue of nature.   

     The word is the opposite of modern; it's ancient. From the Greek, πλαστική — plastiki —"that may be molded." There is a common variant, itself 700 years, that builds upon that base — "plaster" — though my Oxford English Dictionary traces "plaster" to a related Greek term meaning, "to be daubed on or over."
     Even a seemingly modern term such as "plastic surgery" far precedes the artificial substance — The Lancet first used it in 1837. "Plastic explosive" goes back to 1905, to a kind of putty.
      My 1978 Oxford English Dictionary spends two-thirds of a page on "plastic" and never gets to what the current online Oxford grudgingly calls, in definition 3b: "Any of a large and varied class of materials used widely in manufacturing, which are organic polymers of high molecular weight, now usually based on synthetic materials, and may be moulded, extruded, or cast when they are soft or liquid, and then set into a rigid or slightly elastic form."

     That's the trouble with online — with no space limitations, people do rattle on.
     The first usage suggesting "plastics" are a certain group of malleable materials was coined by Leo Baekeland himself, the inventor of what he called Bakelite in 1907. In 1909 he wrote: "As an insulator..it [sc. Bakelite] is far superior to hard rubber, casein, celluloid, shellac and in fact all plastics...It can be used for similar purposes, like knobs, buttons, knife handles, for which plastics are generally used."
     This was when plastics were a miracle whose arrival may have saved the elephant — billiard balls could be made of Bakelite and not from ivory. During World War II, such compounds tended to be known by brand names — Nylon, Lucite, Plexiglas. 

     "Plastic money," aka credit cards, was coined in 1974 and "referred to the material of which such cards are made, but also alluded to plastic's connotations of artificiality and meretriciousness," notes John Ayto in 20th Century Words. 

     The same year, "plastic" as a stand alone term for a credit card was used. "She had a whole purse full of plastic," Dan Jenkins writes in Dead Solid Perfect.

     "Plastic" held onto its link to creativity. "For me, that dramatic action takes precedence over all other consideration," Pablo Picasso is quoted saying in Gilot and Lake's  1964 Life with Picasso. "The pure plastic act is only secondary as far as I'm concerned. What counts is the drama of that plastic act."

     By then, the low cost of plastics led to their seizing the lead role among consumer goods. The default meaning became what the online OED calls, "Artificial, unnatural; superficial, insincere."  In the 1967 classic movie, "The Graduate," the crass materialistic world has just one word of advice for Benjamin Braddock: "Plastics."

    Plastic as pejorative was already a few years old, such as this, from the Daily Telegraph in 1963: "The plan's promoters must not take it amiss if, winking an eye, some of our elder oysters inquire whether plastic houses might not connote plastic people." 

     "Our elder oysters"? What's that? British slang uses "oyster," logically enough, as a tight-lipped person, one who is perhaps silent to hide his ignorance.
     "I never knew anybody so close, you old oyster you!"J.B. Priestley writes in Angel Pavement in 1930. 
     And off we go on a tangent (and not a straight line or plane touching a curved line or surface, but a completely different line of thought or action). That's the joy — and drawback — of etymology. There is no end, until we roughly tear our attention away to more pressing, if less fascinating, matters. 

Don't let all the grim news keep you from a happy Passover

     Rabbi Meir Moscowitz stopped by the house Monday. On a traditional pre-Passover mission: to drop off shmura matzo — special hand-baked unleavened bread.
     Of course we talked — that's what Jews do. Moscowitz is regional director of Lubavitch Chabad of Illinois. The Chabad are traditional, old-school Jews — the ones you see in beards and black hats, walking from synagogue down Devon Avenue on Saturday afternoons — and joyous cheerleaders of the faith.
     We have history. He inquired after my sons — I brought him up to speed on the weddings, the pending birth. I reminded him that his father, Daniel, had been at my younger son's bris, at our condo in the city. I was working on the new book when he arrived and had a line in Hebrew I'd been puzzling over. I hurried upstairs and got a century-old postcard. He translated the passage for me.
     Passover starts Saturday evening, and Jews around the world are getting ready. Tuesday morning my wife picked up a half of cow's worth of brisket — OK, 11 pounds. I've been pondering readings and tracking down attendees. RSVP people! It's only polite. Just 15 this year, a light crowd. Some years we're nearly double that. My brother-in-law, Alan, typically leads the service, being older, wiser, and understanding Hebrew. But he's in Oregon, visiting his daughter Rachel, a young rabbi installed with a new congregation. So the responsibility falls to me.
     I'll do my best, aided by my brother-in-law Jay. Some families blast through the Seder in 15 minutes. We take ... let's see ... close to seven hours when Alan leads, more like five when I do. We bog ours down by piling on additional material. Last year, the pall of the Oct. 7 attacks hung over the Seder. We had a chair kept empty, with the photo of a hostage on it. A poem was read explaining why Elijah won't be coming this year — the tardy prophet busy tending to the truly bereft.
     It all got a bit much for me. Later, I wrote in the paper:

     "Mostly, I'm a go-along-to-get-along type of host, so I smiled and nodded at almost anything anybody brought to the table. Though the smile grew tight as the Seder progressed. At one point I felt compelled to point out that this is not our first rodeo, suffering-wise, that Jews held Seders in concentration camps, and that while I'm all for recognizing the crisis, I would hate for Passover, at heart a celebration of freedom, to lose its sense of joy, obscured by current events."

     Which is a deliberately protracted way of saying I was fertile ground when Rabbi Moscowitz shared a column by Rabbi Mendel Teldon, "Can we please stop talking about antisemitism?" In it, he argues that Jews think we're honoring past suffering and avoiding future pain, when in reality we're letting the people who hate Jews deform and define us.
     "Here’s the truer truth," Rabbi Teldon writes. "This narrative isn’t ours. It’s a story written for us by others. Clinging to it keeps us in their grip — always reacting, always haunted."
     Makes sense to me.
     "When I was growing up," I told Rabbi Moscowitz, "the Holocaust was so present, Judaism seemed like a death cult." And between that, war in Gaza and antisemitism, sometimes it still does.
     Antisemitism shouldn't be the main topic, for a variety of reasons. First, President Donald Trump is gaslighting it into a club to bludgeon free speech. Second, there are more important issues, like creeping totalitarianism. In our email inviting the flock to Seder, my wife and I wrote:
     "Given the national circumstances that greet this year's Seder, let's discuss how freedom is imperiled in America today and how we can face these challenges."
     That's a tall order, if you want to also sing "Chad Gad Yad" before 11 p.m. But if you can't fix things, at least you can discuss them.
     Small acts. When frantic readers ask me what to do, I tell them to do what they can.
     The passage I'd asked Rabbi Moscowitz to read was a play on Proverbs 27:10. "Better a friend nearby than a brother far away," meaning the people close to you are your family.
     We pretend that religion is changeless and eternal, but the truth is it's plastic and mutable. We mold it to our own purposes, picking and choosing what suits the moment. That's why faith can both hurt and heal, why the Seder can run an hour or seven or not at all.
     I told Rabbi Moscowitz that I would read the column he recommended. He had other weak tea Jews to visit, and departed with sincere wishes for a happy Passover.

Put $25,000 in Kenneth Taylor's pocket

 

You can't click here, but click below and you'll be taken to this page.

     People ask me all the time: What can I do?

     How can I help the country get out from this horrible curse it has drawn on itself? 
     Because paying attention to a disaster doesn't slow its advent nor lessen its impact.
     Voting is key — obviously. But a little late for 2024, and a little early for 2026. If there is an election, that is, and if you don't think Donald Trump will try to thwart it, remember: he did it before. 
     So what can you do? Small things. Which isn't the right term, because they're not small to the people they benefit. Small acts coalesce into big ones. Remember, it appear as if the government is being dismantled randomly. But the bulk of destruction is against agencies that help the needy — young kids. New Mothers, Addicts. The poor. The disabled. People needing a leg up.  We are literally kicking Americans when they are down.
     Those people all still could use a hand.
     At the end of February, I took you to Mac's Kitchen, to meet some of the folks integrating back into society by serving really good hot dogs, hamburgers and sandwiches. You met Kenneth Taylor, an addict who spent years in prison, who got out, only to end up as near dead as a person can be and still revive. Who finally decided to turn his life around and is doing just that.
     Taylor shared his story with me, itself an act of courage. He was honest and real and made the difference between an ordinary column about a hot dog stand and a noteworthy column about a man who crawled out of hell and rejoined the living world.
     I was there for a few hours, and when I left, I gave my email to Taylor, and told him if he ever needed a friend in the media, he should feel free to reach out.
     Most people never follow up on an offer like that. But Kenneth did. The James Beard Foundation, which helps people like Kenneth form careers in the food industry, is doing its fundraiser, a popularity contest among chefs. The winner gets $25,000, which would put Taylor well on his way to starting that hot dog stand of his own he's been dreaming about.
      He's in second place right now. Tantalizingly close. You can vote for Kenneth for free, or kick in $10 and vote 10 times, or $25 and vote 25 times — that's what I did; it's easy and painless. (Before you give anything, consider this: although I did due diligence beforehand to determine that the contest is not a scam, some readers feel that the contest is still sketchy because most of the money goes to organizers, not an uncommon occurrence when it comes to charities — here is background regarding that).

    Join me by clicking here  — sooner than later, as I'm tardy getting this up. This stage of the contest ends at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 10. Please consider hopping over and doing it. 

     Voting  is a win, win, win. The first win, if you give a little money, it helps the James Beard Foundation do its good work. The second win is the votes help Kenneth Taylor rebuild his life and pursue his dream.

     And the third win is for you. You want to do something to help our fracturing nation, and now you have, for today. Tomorrow you'll find another good thing to do, another small step back to becoming the country we imagine ourselves to be. And if nothing presents itself tomorrow, and you do nothing but refuse to give up on the United States of America, that's doing something too, and not something small either. Something big. Something essential. As I used to tell my boys, you can't quit your way to the top.

'We can fight like the world depends on us.'

Nancy MacLean

     "I got DOGE'd today," said an academic sitting next to me last week at the opening session of the Organization of American Historians. Meaning, the National Endowment for the Humanities NEH grant funding her job had been axed by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, part of the general dismantling of our government, like a house being torn down with the family still living inside.
     With higher education and honest American history also under siege, I decided to attend the OAH's plenary session, "Historians and the Attacks on Education."
     David W. Blight, of Yale, president of OAH, opened the evening.
     "We as historians perhaps never have faced this kind of assault that we are facing now," he said. "We are a have to figure out: How do we defend ourselves? Do we know how? We're not terrific at leading social movements. We're terrific at research about social movements."
     Four panelists expressed themselves well enough. Then Nancy MacLean, of Duke University, author of "Democracy in Chains," got up and briefly explained how we got here. I don't often hand my column over to someone else, but will do so now, editing her remarks for space.
     MacLean said:
     "The carnival of cruelty enabled by 47’s reelection has very deep roots. Three key groups have been: 1) predatory capitalists; 2) white supremacists; and 3) religious conservatives, led by conservative Protestants oblivious to the actual ethics of Jesus.
     "Their combined political power has waxed and waned over more than two centuries. It surged in the run-up to the Civil War, as enslavers and their allies aimed to hold power at any cost, including treason. It was subdued for a time by Reconstruction, then rose again after its members violently defeated America’s first taste of multiracial democracy.
     "During the Great Depression, that coalition’s partners were routed by mass working-class movements and new federal policy, only to resurge with the Red Scare after World War II, then be beaten back by the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and 1970s, despite what was proudly called 'massive resistance.'
     "Out of that 'massive resistance' came much more intentional coalition building over the last 50 years, building toward today’s bloody-minded determination and unified national power not seen since the 1850s.
     "Why so venomous and hell-bent now on revolutionizing America, no matter the toll? Because all three coalition partners are desperate. They see this as their last chance to impose their agenda. They know they won’t have another. Hence, the frenzy to act fast and break things.
     "Since the 1990s, predatory capitalists — above all from the fossil fuel sector — have seen their trillions in investments and expected future profits imperiled by social movements and international government action. So they have cultivated partners.
     "White supremacists who had never accepted civil rights victories then panicked at the election of Barack Obama in 2008, because they rightly saw the imminent end of white numerical and cultural dominance in a multiracial democracy.

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An apology

   So ... you may know I wrote a book about my dad. "Don't Give Up the Ship." Twenty years ago. I thought it was a loving book, but after it was published, he didn't talk to me for six months. Maybe closer to a year.
     It was not my intent to hurt my dad. I love my dad, and was glad we went on our adventure together.
     But hurt he was.
     And I had begged him, "Don't be too dumb to be proud, dad. Can't you say 'My son wrote a book about me. He took me to Venice. He put me up in the Gritti Palace'? Do you have to focus on me calling you a prick on page 203?"
    And the answer was yes, in fact, he did.
     That is the downside of being a writer who isn't simply rhapsodizing birds or explaining the Treaty of Ghent, but regularly shares his own interior life, such as it is. Sometimes you string your wet laundry out to dry and other people run into it and get tangled. You dampen their spirits, even deliver injuries, when you don't mean to.
     I thought Sunday's blog post was about an obscure, neurotic writer, aka me, at the American Organization of Historians conference, reeling from booth to booth, publisher to publisher, trying to be noticed. I did not consider what I wrote a misogynistic screed mocking powerless publishing employees, nor a sincere complaint about any particular organization.
     Particularly hurtful, I am told, were some reader comments which, honestly, I hadn't read, but waved in because they were from regular contributors. Had I read them — and I should have — I would never have posted them. 

      I don't have many writing rules, but one important rule is: don't shit where you live. Which I have done here, big time. So I have deleted the offending comments, and. trimmed the original post to excise elements that the prudent man — not me, obviously —would have never included in the first place.     

     Plus, I'd like to apologize to all university press employees everywhere who were hurt by my words. This is a difficult business in the best of years, and now, with ignorance triumphant and a carnival of cruelty being played out globally, it is even more so. We who care about words and meanings and facts and knowledge ought to stick together, not claw at one another. I know how painful life can be on the sunniest day, and don't want to be the cause of anyone feeling badly about themselves or what we do. Academic publishing has been good to me, and I did not mean to seem either critical or ungrateful. I always thought I was too careful to stumble into one of these pits. Clearly I was mistaken.