Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 307

November 3, 2015: Dead Presidents: William Henry Harrison

[In honor of Warren Harding’s 150th birthday on November 2nd, a series AmericanStudying the lives and deaths of presidents who passed away while in office. Leading up to a special weekend post on a very different anniversary—my blog’s fifth birthday!]On what may have been lost, and what definitely was, in the most striking presidential death.William Henry Harrison was many things: a military leader who won two famous Early Republic battles, Tippecanoe in 1811 and the War of 1812’s Battle of the Thames in 1813; one of the first political leaders from the Northwest Territories; a diplomat who advised Colombian revolutionary Simón Bolívar on the question of democracy for that South American nation; and a man who had been retired from politics for some years before being nominated for the presidency in 1836. He lost to Martin Van Buren in that election, but ran again in 1840 and this time defeated Van Buren. But what happened next is likely all that Harrison will ever be collectively remembered for: he delivered (hatless and coatless) the longest inaugural address in American history on a cold and rainy March day; and subsequently (and perhaps coincidentally, but it makes a much better story this way) came down with a bad cold that turned into the pneumonia from which he died only a month after taking office. (Although all those details are in some dispute—see that last hyperlinked article for more.)It’s probably impossible for the president who served only a month to ever be known for anything else, but it’s well worth considering the results of that tragedy, and specifically what may have been lost along with the possibility of a full Harrison presidency. For one thing, Harrison seemed poised to undue many of the excesses and problems of the Andrew Jackson administration (nearly all of which Jackson’s chosen successor Van Buren had continued), not only political (such as Harrison’s plans to eliminate the spoils system for government jobs and patronage and support the National Bank) but also ideological (despite being a Westerner and former General like Jackson, Harrison had far more experience in territorial governance and, to my mind, would have enacted far different policies than his predecessors or successor toward the frontier, expansion, and Native Americans). Perhaps I’m romanticizing this shortest-term president based on that absence of actual histories to analyze, but it seems quite possible to me that this moderate Northwestern Whig could have offered a very different administration from any of the more extreme and destructive ones (from both parties) with which his brief term was framed.We’ll never know what kind of president Harrison might have been—but we know exactly what kind of president John Tyler was, and the answer isn’t good. Upon Harrison’s death Tyler became the first Vice President to assume the presidency mid-term, and he came to be known as His Accidency, both because of that starting point and because he seemed ill-prepared to lead the nation (having been added to the ticket largely because he was a Virginia slaveholder who brought many such votes to the Northwesterner Harrison). After an initial two years in which he didn’t do much of anything, Tyler then spent his final two years focused on a potentially illegal and certainly problematic objective: annexing Texas into the United States, as a slave state of course. While it’s possible that Harrison would have pursued the same goal, I find it unlikely; in any case Harrison’s Western experiences would have lent him a far different perspective on the issue than did Tyler’s Southern ones. And lest there be any doubt about the primacy of that Southern perspective for Tyler, there’s this fact: shortly before his death, Tyler ran for and won election to the Confederate House of Representatives after the outset of the Civil War, becoming the only former president to commit treason against the nation he had led. If only William Henry Harrison had put on a hat and coat.Next dead president tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on Harrison (or Tyler)? Other presidents you’d particularly want to AmericanStudy?

November 2, 2015: Dead Presidents: Warren G. Harding

[In honor of Warren Harding’s 150th birthday on November 2nd, a series AmericanStudying the lives and deaths of presidents who passed away while in office. Leading up to a special weekend post on a very different anniversary—my blog’s fifth birthday!]On one thing we know about the 29th president, and the mysteries we’ll never know for sure.Warren G. Harding represents one of the longest shots ever to win the presidency, particularly since he was far down the roster of possible nominees at the outset of the 1920 Republic National Convention in Chicago. But through nine ballots, none of the party’s favorites (including General Leonard Wood, Illinois Governor Frank Lowden, California Senator Hiram Johnson, and Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge) had been able to win the necessarity majority of delegates to secure the nomination, and Ohio Senator Harding’s name was thrown into the ring by his friend and the state’s former Governor Frank Willis. The infamous “smoke-filled room” that eventually settled on Harding as the party’s nominee might well be apocryphal (and is almost certainly exaggerated), as might be the narrative that Harding was chosen because his good looks would appeal to female voters; but there’s no doubt that his nomination was a rare and genuine surprise in the usually predictable field of presidential campaigns, and thus his win and presidency even more so.Surprising and potentially mythic as Harding’s nomination and victory were, however, they pale in comparison to a couple other prominent mysteries attached to our 29thpresident. For one thing, Harding was the subject of persistent gossip and rumors, not only about such familiar themes as adultery (which, as those recently released love letters reveal, was much more than just a rumor) but also and much more strikingly about the possibility that he had African Americans among his ancestors. To American historians and anyone familiar with our cross-cultural community, mixed-race backgrounds are a common trope—but nevertheless, Harding is the only white president to my knowledge for whom historians have found any evidence of possible African American heritage, making this a striking element of a presidency otherwise tainted by scandal and failure. Indeed, as W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in a well-known piece, Harding’s potential African American connections made his failure to address the nation’s racial injustices, oppressions, and violence all the more frustrating to Du Bois and other African American political and social leaders.And then there’s Harding’s death, by far the greatest mystery attached to the man and his presidency. On the one hand, his death seems logical enough: he had long suffered from health problems, and they had increased markedly by the summer of 1923, when he decided to set out on a cross-country and multi-national train and boat trip and speaking tour; in the course of that tour, while in San Francisco, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died. Yet as traced at length in Robert Ferrell’s book The Strange Deaths of President Harding (1996), there are various abnormalities and gaps that have led to multiple, unprovable and unlikely but not impossible allegations: that Harding’s wife poisoned him; that he was incapacitated far earlier on the train journey than reported and that his wife was effectively running the country during that period; and so on. To be clear, Ferrell does not support any of these allegations, arguing instead for a more straightforward and even celebratory take on Harding and his presidency. But while interpretations may and will vary, to at least a degree they will always remain just that, responses to the historical mysteries about one of our more unlikely and unique presidents.Next dead president tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on Harding? Other presidents you’d particularly want to AmericanStudy?

October 31-November 1, 2015: October 2015 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]September 28: AMST Colloquiums: Presenting Our Work: A series following up our most recent NEASA Colloquium kicks off with the three presenters featured at our inaugural 2011 event.September 29: AMST Colloquiums: Studying Salem: The series continues with one more layer to our 2012 analyses of a crucial New England and American city.September 30: AMST Colloquiums: Defining the Field: Three big questions raised at our 2013 Colloquium, as the series rolls on.October 1: AMST Colloquiums: The Digital Turn: Two impressive forms of digital humanities scholarship shared at our 2014 Colloquium, and one more I’d add into that mix.October 2: AMST Colloquiums: Advice for AmericanStudiers: The series concludes with a few key pieces of advice for grad students from our latest Colloquium.October 3-4: AMST in 2015: A special weekend post highlighting three examples of the best of AmericanStudies in our 21st century moment.October 5: Before the Revolution: The French & Indian War: A series inspired by the anniversary of the Stamp Act Congress kicks off with contextualizing a globally significant conflict.October 6: Before the Revolution: Governor Hutchinson: The series continues with two complex and crucial ways to remember a tragic figure.October 7: Before the Revolution: The Stamp Act Congress: How the 1765 gathering anticipated the Continental Congress and how it didn’t, as the series rolls on.October 8: Before the Revolution: Wheatley to the Earl of Dartmouth: The poetic letter that both anticipates the Revolution and helps us remember a vital historical figure.October 9: Before the Revolution: Crispus Attucks: The series concludes with three telling details about one of the Revolution’s first casualties.October 10-11: (Pre-)Revolutionary Scholarship: A special post highlighting a handful of scholarly sources through which to continue the pre-Revolutionary conversation.October 12: Early American Writers: las Casas and de Vaca: A series on early American writing kicks off with two of the first truly American voices.October 13: Early American Writers: Bradstreet and Taylor: The series continues with two expert practitioners of the Puritan confessional poem.October 14: Early American Writers: Jonathan Edwards: The problem of associating a writer with only one work and how to get beyond it, as the series rolls on.October 15: Early American Writers: John Woolman: The autobiographer who traced his own wanderings and can help inspire and guide ours.October 16: Early American Writers: Annis Boudinot Stockton: The series concludes with three layers to the case for remembering the Revolutionary writer and poet.October 17-18: Siobhan Senier’s Guest Post on Dawnland Voices: My latest Guest Post, with the great Siobhan Senier on her anthology of New England Native American writing.October 19: UN Histories: The League of Nations: A series inspired by the UN’s anniversary starts with the failures and successes of the organization’s predessor.October 20: UN Histories: World War II: The series continues with why it’s important to remember the UN’s wartime origins.October 21: UN Histories: Muir Woods: A potent 1945 symbolic expression of memory and community, as the series rolls on.October 22: UN Histories: Secretary Generals: AmericanStudying the careers of three complex, telling Secretary Generals.October 23: UN Histories: Peacekeeping: The series concludes with what we can learn from the longest-running and newest UN peacekeeping missions.October 24-25: The US and the UN: A special weekend post on the broad spectrum that is the US-UN relationship, and where we go from here.October 26: 21st Century Villains: Jigsaw: A Halloween series on villains begins with the Saw series and differing visions of morality in horror films.October 27: 21st Century Villains: The Newest Hannibal: The series continues with what the most recent version of Hannibal Lecter adds to the iconic villain.October 28: 21st Century Villains: Richmond Valentine: The supervillain who combines a familiar British plot and a unique American performance, as the series rolls on.October 29: 21st Century Villains: Wilson Fisk: How Vincent D’Onofrio’s portrayal of the comic book villain takes the genre to complex new places.October 30: 21st Century Villains: Scarlet Overkill: The series concludes by AmericanStudying the Anglophilia of Minions’ central villain.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Topics or themes you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to write? Lemme know!

October 30, 2015: 21st Century Villains: Scarlet Overkill

[For this year’s installmentof my annual Halloween series, I’ll focus on 21st century pop culture villains. Share your favorite villains, new or classic, in comments!]On the random but telling Anglophilia of the summer’s new supervillain.After having created, in the despicable but gradually reformed supervillain Gru (Steve Carrell) at the heart of Despicable Me (2010) and Despicable Me 2 (2013), one of the more interesting and human film villains in recent years, the creative team behind those films struck out with their newest supervillain. Not much in this summer’s prequel Minions (2015) works well for anyone older than 10 (and this AmericanStudier knows whereof he speaks, having seen it with his 9 and 8 year old sons), but the film’s villain Scarlet Overkill (Sandra Bullock) is particularly lifeless and uninteresting. The character’s personality and motivations are entirely forgettable, her flirtations with her mimbo husband (Jon Hamm)entirely irrelevant, and Bullock’s line readings seem as disinterested as will be the film’s adult audiences. I don’t believe the film was longer than 90 minutes, but I assure you it was the longest hour and a half of my summer.There is one interesting thing about Scarlet’s perspective and personality, though, and while it’s as seemingly random as the rest of her character, it also opens up an analytical lens worth exploring. This decidedly American supervillain, introduced in her opening scene (that clip is in German, but you get the idea and are spared Bullock’s line readings) as a 1960s American feminist par excellence, is obsessed with England—she lives in a fortress in London, her husband (despite being voiced by American actor Hamm) is a collection of stereotypes from 1960s Beatles-era England pretending to be a character, and her sole villainous motivation is to steal Queen Elizabeth’s crown and (according to the film’s nonexistent logic) become the ruler of England as a result. This defining Anglophilia represents a very specific choice for the film, particularly since the three Minion protagonists meet Scarlet in the United States (which is the setting for both Despicable Me films) and thus the rest of the plot could easily have taken place there as well.So what are we to make of this Anglophilia? In a movie as poorly planned and executed as Minions, it’s tempting to dismiss this choice as just another random and, well, crappy one. But I would argue that it’s more meaningful than that, although I can’t say for sure whether the filmmakers intended these meanings or simply stumbled into them (much like their bumbling yellow protagonists do). For one thing, the film is set during the 1960s heyday of the British invasion, when handsome British men invaded our shores and were celebrated by adoring American female fans; and it interestingly flips that cultural script, portraying a thoroughly American, very attractive woman who invades England and seeks to conquer it (with the help of an adoring English male fan who happens to be her husband as well). At the same time, Scarlet’s own obsession with all things England, and specifically with the English monarchy, echoes America’s longstanding cultural obsession with the royals, one that would explode in the post-60s decades thanks to another attractive, self-sufficient woman who (you could say) invaded the royal family and for a time seemed destined for a crown of her own. Whether Minions intends these meanings or not, its central villain certainly engages with these American and English connections in ways far more interesting than the rest of the film.October Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other villains you’d highlight?

October 29, 2015: 21st Century Villains: Wilson Fisk

[For this year’s installmentof my annual Halloween series, I’ll focus on 21st century pop culture villains. Share your favorite villains, new or classic, in comments!]On the comic book villain who takes the genre to complex, compelling new places.There’s a lot to like about the recently released first season of Daredevil (2015), the Netflix TV show adaptation of the longrunning Marvel comic book. British actor Charlie Cox is perfectly cast as blind lawyer and vigilante in training Matt Murdock (as are all of the show’s other principal roles), the writing and direction are consistently top-notch, the action sequences are clear and effective but also consistently balanced by quiet and intimate dialogue-driven scenes, and the season builds to a wonderful climax that wraps up a great deal while leaving us very ready for season 2 (and beyond). But for my money, by far the best part of Daredevil season 1 is exactly what I expected it would be going in: hugely talented veteran actor Vincent D’Onofrio’sstunning performance as Wilson Fisk, the man who will become Daredevil’s supervillain antagonist Kingpin.Certainly a great deal of Fisk’s character in season 1 fits the familiar bill of a comic book supervillain, if executed to perfection: not just in his larger-than-life physical presence (the already big D’Onofrio apparently gained thirty pounds to play Fisk), but also in both his origin story (told mostly through a series of flashbacks in one mid-season episode) and his present agenda. For the former, Fisk is the product of a dark and violent childhood, one that culminated in a traumatic incident that (it seems) scarred and changed him forever, preparing him for the role he is now beginning to inhabit in earnest. As for his present agenda, he is already very wealthy and powerful by the time we meet him, but has plans for much more, and particularly for reshaping the city that he towers over into more of what he sees as his own idealized image. That agenda makes him into a more grounded, realistic comic book villain than some, but it certainly isn’t unique—take a Spiderman villain like Doctor Octopus, a brilliant researcher who was trying to develop revolutionary new scientific advances when it all went awry.Yet there’s something different about Daredevil’s Wilson Fisk than any other comic book adaptation villain I’ve encountered, and I don’t think it’s just in D’Onofrio’s amazing performance (he’s not the first great actor to play a comic book villain, after all). There’s a layered, multi-faceted humanity to the character, a combination of some of our darkest characteristics with some of our most hopeful and inspiring goals, not only for his city but also in his own life (as reflected by his season-long romantic storyline, also a first in my experience with comic book villains). Moreover, one of the central themes of season 1 is that Cox’s Murdock is confronting his own darkness as well as his heroic goals, and trying to figure out where the line is between those elements (if indeed such a line exists, and if it can be held even if it does); as a result, Fisk and Murdock mirror each other, not in the superficial way often present between heroes and villains, but in a much more nuanced and challenging way, one that makes it difficult at times to characterize Fisk as a villain (or Murdock as a hero) at all. And so when, in the season finale (SPOILER alert), we see Fisk fully embracing his villainy for the first time, in one of the great monologuesever put on film (DOUBLE SPOILER alert for that video), the moment is certainly villainous yet deeply and powerfully human at the same time.Last villain tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other villains you’d highlight?

October 28, 2015: 21st Century Villains: Richmond Valentine

[For this year’s installmentof my annual Halloween series, I’ll focus on 21st century pop culture villains. Share your favorite villains, new or classic, in comments!]On a supervillain who combines a unique American performance with a very familiar British plot.Richmond Valentine, the principal villain in the recent action film Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015; adapted from the six-issue Dave Gibbons and Mark Millar comic book entitled simply The Secret Service), is an eccentric genius billionaire who also happens to have a secret plan for world domination and a secret weapon with which to execute said plan. If that sounds like the plot of roughly half of the James Bond films (and nearly all of the Roger Moore ones), that’s precisely the point: the comic book was about MI6 (the British spy agency for which James Bond works, otherwise known as Her Majesty’s Secret Service); and while the film creates its own titular secret spy organization instead, it also namechecks James Bond films quite specifically, with a particular focus on those with the more extreme plots and villains.Yet if Richmond Valentine is in those ways intentionally familiar (and, it would seem, more suitable for a blog entitled BritishStudier), he’s also something very new, and that’s due entirely to the iconic American actor portraying him: Samuel L. Jackson. Despite his well-deserved reputation as a total badass, for this role Jackson makes a series of choices (and they were, apparently, his choices) that make the character into quite the opposite: besides the prominent lisp discussed in that hyperlinked article, Jackson also gives Valentine Coke-bottle glasses and a deathly fear of the sight of blood (his own or anyone else’s). While he’s right to note (also in that article) that most James Bond villains had their own peculiarities (Dr. No’s missing hands, to cite the foundational example), I would argue that Valentine’s are played far more fully for laughs than those were, putting them in an uneasy and even contradictory relationship with the character’s extreme, dangerous villainy.To quote the English professor’s favorite question, “So what?” It’s true that the uneasy balance of comedy and violence is not new to this action film (most of those same Roger Moore Bond films strove for both effects), but in this case I would argue that it’s far from coincidental that the film’s much more serious gentleman spies are English, while the more comic and extreme villain is American. Concurrently, the film’s most famous action sequencefeatures Colin Firth massacring a church full of American white supremacists, a scene that seems designed to produce both enjoyment (as these American extremists get what they deserve) and queasiness (as this refined English hero turns into a violent killer, thanks explicitly to Valentine’s secret super weapon). Which is to say, another uneasy and even contradictory balance, and one once again tied to the relationship between England and America, or more exactly stereotypical and extreme versions of both places. All of which makes Richmond Valentine and the film that features him very sociologically (if not aesthetically) interesting.Next villain tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other villains you’d highlight?

October 27, 2015: 21st Century Villains: The Newest Hannibal

[For this year’s installmentof my annual Halloween series, I’ll focus on 21st century pop culture villains. Share your favorite villains, new or classic, in comments!]On why the iconic villain has endured so successfully, and what’s new about the latest version.Since his first appearance, as a complicated, compelling combination of villain and sidekick in Thomas Harris’s bestselling suspense thriller Red Dragon (1981), refined forensic psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter has become one of American culture’s most enduring and popular villainous presences. As of 2015 Lecter has appeared in three additional Harris novels, five successful films (portrayed by three different actors, Brian Cox, Gaspard Ulliel, and, most famously and in three of those films, Anthony Hopkins), and one acclaimed and controversial TV show (on which more momentarily). The first Hopkins film, The Silence of the Lambs (1991), remains the last film to sweep the four major Academy Awards (Film, Director, Actor, and Actress). And in 2003, the American Film Institute chose Hopkins’ version of the character as the #1 movie villain of all time, cementing Hannibal’s status as a truly unique and iconic American bad guy.There would be various ways to analyze the reasons behind Hannibal’s enduring popularity, but I would boil it down (perhaps not the best metaphor for a Hannibal post!) to the two contradictions I highlighted in the prior sentence’s opening paragraph. In virtually every version and adaptation of Hannibal’s story, he serves as both antagonist and confidant to the protagonist, offering vital help at crucial moments yet presenting an unmistakable threat at all times; I don’t know of any other pop culture villain who straddles that line nearly as clearly or effectively. And Hannibal’s own personality is just as seemingly contradictory, comprised in equal measure of the refined, elitist intellectual who prefers the finest wines and even finer art and the depraved serial killer who destroys his victims in the most barbaric and horrific ways possible. That particular duality isn’t as unique to Hannibal (there’s a reason why Jack the Ripper has often been known by the nickname Gentleman Jack, and Ted Bundy’s charisma and charm were well documented), but, as played by Hopkins in particular, Hannibal offers perhaps the most successful representation of an elegant murderer in our pop culture.As portrayed by Danish actor Mads Mikkelsenin the NBC TV show Hannibal(currently airing its third season, with the status of its fourth very much up in the air as of this writing), Hannibal retains those enduring qualities: Mikkelsen’s Hannibal is very much a refined gentleman along with, y’know, the other side (depicted on the show with a level of graphic violence beyond any in the prior adaptations); and across the seasons he alternately teams up with and threatens Hugh Dancy’s FBI agent Will Graham. Yet as the show has evolved (SPOILER alert for the later seasons in particular), it has taken these characters to a new place, suggesting more and more overtly that Graham has the potential to become Lecter. Hannibal has always required his protagonist partners to tap into their darker sides, but I would argue that never before has a version of the character suggested that one of those protagonists (or anyone else, even other serial killers) could ever be truly like him. Whether that suggestion lessens Hannibal’s unique qualities or amplifies his horrific ones (or both) is just another intriguing question about this enduring, iconic villain.Next villain tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other villains you’d highlight?

October 26, 2015: 21st Century Villains: Jigsaw

[For this year’s installmentof my annual Halloween series, I’ll focus on 21st century pop culture villains. Share your favorite villains, new or classic, in comments!]On different visions of morality in horror films, and whether they matter.There’s an easy and somewhat stereotypical, although certainly not inaccurate, way to read the morality or lessons of horror films: to emphasize how they seem consistently to punish characters, and especially female characters, who are too sexually promiscuous, drink or do drugs, or otherwise act in immoral ways; and how they seem to reward characters, especially the “final girl,” who are not only tough and resourceful but also virgins and otherwise resistant to such immoral temptations. Film scholar Carol Clover reiterates but also to a degree challenges those interpretations in her seminal Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992); Clover agrees with arguments about the “final girl,” but makes the case that by asking viewers to identify with this female character, the films are indeed pushing our communal perspectives on gender in provocative new directions.It’s important to add, however, that whether conventional slasher films are reiterating or challenging traditional moralities, they’re certainly not prioritizing those moral purposes—jump scares and gory deaths are much higher on the list of priorities. On the other hand, one of the most successful and influential horror series of the last decade, the Saw films (which began with 2004’s Saw and continued annually through the 7th and supposedly final installment, 2010’s Saw 3D), has made its world’s and killer’s moral philosophy and objectives central to the series’ purposes. The films’ villain, John Kramer, generally known only as Jigsaw, has been called a “deranged philanthropist,” as his puzzles and tortures are generally designed to test, alter, and ultimately strengthen his victims’ identities and beliefs (if they survive, of course). That is, not only is it possible to find moral messages in both the films and which characters do and do not survive in them, but deciphering and living up to that morality becomes the means by which those characters can survive their tortures.That’s the films and the characters—but what about the audience? It’s long been assumed (and I would generally agree) that audiences look to horror films not only to be scared (a universal human desire) but also to enjoy the unique and gory deaths (a more troubling argument, but again one I would generally support). So it’d be fair, and important, to ask whether that remains the case for Saw’s audiences—whether, that is, they’re in fact rooting not for characters to survive and grow, but instead to fail and be killed in Jigsaw’s inventive ways. And if most or even many of them are, whether that response—and its contribution to the series’ popularity and box office success and thus its ability to continue across seven years and movies—renders the films’ sense of morality irrelevant (it would certainly make it ironic at the very least). To put it bluntly: it seems to make a big difference whether we see the Saw films as distinct in the inventiveness of their tortures/deaths or the morality of their killer. As with any post and topic, I’d love to hear your thoughts!Next villain tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other villains you’d highlight?

October 24-25, 2015: The US and the UN

[October 24thmarks the 70th anniversary of the official establishment of the United Nations. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied five histories connect to the UN, leading up to this weekend post on the worst and best of the US’s relationship to the organization.]On the broad spectrum that is the US-UN relationship, and where we go from here.In my Tuesday and Wednesday posts this week I highlighted two of the most inspiring historical connections between the United States and the United Nations: the central role played by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in originating and developing the international organization after the American entrance into World War II, and the May 1945 ceremony in California’s Muir Woods in which UN representatives commemorated and celebrated Roosevelt and his vital influence. In a post from this past February, on the other hand, I highlighted one of the most extreme and negative American perspectives on the UN: the early 1990s rise of the “black helicopters” conspiracy theory, a paranoid fear of UN takeover and a global new world order that continues to influence our contemporary politics far more than we might think.Put that way, it might seem that the relationship between the US and the UN deteroriated over the half-century between the organization’s founding and the 1994 midterm elections (perhaps the high-water mark for the black helicopters conspiracy crowd). But it would be more accurate to note that the broad spectrum of US responses to and perspectives on the organization has been a part of the story all along: organizations like the John Birch society have long opposed US involvement in the UN, while a popular late 1950s and early 1960s bumper sticker read “You can’t spell communism without U.N.”; while in our own moment, and despite heated disagreements between the Bush administration and the UN over the Iraq War, polls consistently demonstrate that a majority of Americans continue to support both US cooperation with the UN and the existence of a standing UN peacekeeping force. Like the global peacekeeping efforts about which I wrote in yesterday’s post, that is, this US-UN relationship has always been and remains a mixed bag.Given the world’s enduring complexities and (especially) our inability here in the 21stcentury US to agree on anything about society or politics (or science, or basic facts), it doesn’t seem likely that American support for the UN will solidify any further or any more consistently in the years ahead. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not worth trying, and more exactly that there aren’t important ways that the US and the UN can work together regardless of public sentiments. To my mind, by far the most significant issue on which such cooperation will be crucial is climate change, the global crisis that in recent months has seen strong statements and proposals from both President Obama and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, along with other world leaders including Pope Francis himself. From the League of Nations in the 1920s through the United Nations here in 2015, these international organizations haven’t been able to achieve the goal of preventing war. Without eliding the importance of continuing to strive for peace, maybe it’s time for a new central objective, one that the US and all the world’s nations can share with the UN: of working together to combat climate change, before there’s no inhabitable globe left on which to unite us.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think?

October 23, 2015: UN Histories: Peacekeeping

[October 24thwill mark the 70th anniversary of the official establishment of the United Nations. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five histories connect to the UN, leading up to a weekend post on the worst and best of the US’s relationship to the organization.]What we can learn from the longest-running and the most recent UN peacekeeping missions.The first two missions on which UN peacekeepers embarked have also proven to be the organization’s longest-running international efforts. In 1948, the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation (UNTSO) sent peacekeepers to the Middle East to monitor a ceasefire in Palestine between Israel and the coalition of Arab states that had commenced hostilities against the new nation on the day after the May 14thproclamation of the Israeli state. In 1949, the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) was created and dispatched to the states of Jammu and Kashmir, in an effort to maintain a ceasefire between India and Pakistan over those contested regions. In both of these cases, multiple subsequent outbreaks of hostilities—and the uneasy peaces that exist even when conflicts have not broken out—have required the peacekeeping forces to remain in place; as we near the 70thanniversary of both missions, it’s fair to say that UN peacekeepers now comprise a permanent part of the community in these contested spaces.In April 2014, the UN authorized peacekeepers with the newly created United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA; the UN does love its acronyms) to travel to that African nation, hoping to alleviate some of the human rights crises unfolding in the aftermath of civil conflict and genocide and to help the nation transition back to stability. An African-led effort, the International Support Mission in the Central African Republic (MISCA), had already been in place, but in September that organization formally transferred its authority to the UN peacekeepers, ushering in the UN’s official role in the rebuilding nation. It’s far too early to assess the outcome or success of this latest UN peacekeeping mission, but as of the early August moment in which I’m writing this post, the news isn’t good: a Rwandan peacekeeper working for the UN mission has apparently shot and killed four of his colleagues and wounded four others. This act of murder and perhaps terrorism is of course far from unique to the UN or its peacekeepers, but it does reflect an uncomfortable truth about all of the UN’s missions: that they are undertaken by people and groups just as flawed and limited as in any other human endeavors, and yet are consistently asked to perform heroic duties in the world’s worst situations.It’s easy to see that contradiction as the root of, or at least a primary factor in, the inability of the Palestine and Kashmir peacekeeping missions to keep conflicts and hostilities from reoccurring in those contested spaces; the UN peacekeepers might not be responsible for the conflicts in the same way as the local parties, that is, but they’re just as human and so just as unable to prevent the conflicts as are even progressive leaders in those affected nations. A famous, coincidental photograph currently making the social media rounds expresses with particular clarity that cynical take on the peacekeepering missions and their failures to change the realities on the ground. Yet on the other hand, who’s to say that without the presence of the UN peacekeepers, conflicts in Palestine and Kashmir (both of which include the possibility of nuclear retaliation, let’s note) wouldn’t have intensified far further and more destructively? After all, UN peacekeepers have completed 55 missions over the organization’s 70 years of existence, leaving these affected nations and regions not perfect but unquestionably more stable and healthy than would otherwise have been the case. While we can’t be naïve about the realities, it’s nonetheless worth remembering and celebrating those successes on this anniversary.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think?