Blown Deadline

One of the great things about being retired is that fear of missing deadlines that haunts us through school exams to tax dates to job assigments and anniversaries is pretty much a thing of the past. Once you sign up for Social Security, Medicare and pass your 25th wedding anniversary, you’re fairly well home free. But I was reminded of the curse of deadlines this past week when my dear friend Ginny Bromage invited me to participate in a modest history-writing contest sponsored by her hometown newspaper The Suffield Observer.
Although I’ve never lived in Suffield myself, it was the town across the river from my hometown of Enfield, Connecticut; my mom’s family lived there for many years; and just about a year ago Suffield became the subject of one of the most mind-blowing historical facts I’d mysteriously never heard of before. By virtue of a grant from King Charles II, Colonial Connecticut extended in a narrow strip clear from the Atlantic to the Pacific, which if it had endured would’ve made tiny Connecticut if not the largest state in the union, surely the longest state most resembling a transcontinental anaconda. To settle its Revolutionary War debt the state ceded most of those lands to the newly formed nation, but held on to considerable pieces in Ohio in what became known as the Western Reserve. For some time those distant lands were controlled by six investors in Suffield through their company. They dispatched Moses Cleaveland (sic) and a team of surveyors to divide up the land into attractive sales lots, summarily canceled all Indian claims to the same lands, and as they say…the rest is history. There’s now a baseball team in Cleveland called the Indians and a whole lot of people who can’t understand what’s wrong with that.
Such historical stories always make me think that Thanksgiving is the best season of all to take stock of American history…mostly because, in spite of itself, Thanksgiving calls attention to the many paradoxes at the core of our national soul. We have the Pilgrims…refugees from religious persecution…immigrants from a land where adherence to a specific religion was law…transplanted to what they perceived as a gift outright from God where they could freely impose their own religious views despite the presence of previous occupants whose help they would need in surviving this paradise and whose cultures their descendents would systematically seek to destroy.
Speaking of those descendents…and speaking of Connecticut…that brings to mind Laura Ingraham, who in full disclosure I must admit ranks high at the top of my list of Most Loathsome Living Americans. Nonetheless Laura and I share Connecticut as our native state, which makes her recent claim that bringing down memorials to Confederate war heroes is a frontal assault on “our heritage”. Our heritage…curious that. I don’t have a Dartmouth education like Laura does, but I do recall from my high school American history that Connecticut fought on the Union side in the Civil War…and not only did it contribute a lot of blood to that conflict, but Powder Hollow in Hazardville, where I played a lot of baseball in my youth, was the main supplier of munitions for the Union Army. So how is it that a born and bred Connecticut Yankee like Laura Ingraham comes to claim the Confederacy as her heritage? She’s descended from Polish immigrants for crying out loud, who probably didn’t know cotton from kielbasa in 1861.  
Here’s how: Laura Ingraham’s moral tribe is the Confederacy…as well as all others who believe that what’s mine is mine no matter how I came by it or maintained it, even to the extent of selling off members of  human families you "own" for profit.  She first exhibited this moral allegiance as an undergrad at Dartmouth College when she, with her partner in political crime Dinesh D’Souza, waged an editorial war against Native American activists at Dartmouth College who were protesting over their historically shabby treatment by that esteemed monument to white male privilege. And while I'm at it, let me underscore the fact that this was a modern woman and a Bombay-born person of color taking to the barricades for white male privilege…thus proving, as an elementary understanding of conflicts throughout the globe plainly reveals, that tribal identity trumps racial and gender identity most every time. For Laura, siding with oppressor over oppressed is in her moral worldview only right because the oppressors would not be in their lofty position if they were not in so many ways superior to those who can’t take care of and defend themselves. It really is, in the worst possible sense, a Darwinian survival of the fittest morality.   
In The Undoing Project , Michael Lewis’s superb account of the relationship between Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (“a friendship that changed our minds”), Lewis tells us that one of the many things undone by these two master paradigm shifters is George Santayana’s hoary chestnut: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Indeed, Tversky and Kahneman go contrary to Santayana (with their usual degree of meticulous evidence) to argue that we are often doomed by adhering too closely and ardently to history’s lessons. We become so myopic about our history that we lose sight of the fact that circumstances that might have paved the way for any one monumental historical event may have profoundly changed over time. And that even the simplest of changes—the so-called butterfly effect—can alter the course of history.  
A “lesson” of history for some people, for example, may be that compromise is a bad thing. There was after all the string of compromises over slavery that failed to avert our bloody Civil War. Starting with the Constitution’s three-fifths compromise and then through the Compromise of 1850, the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the US Congress persisted in trying to finesse the issue to the satisfaction of no one. Ultimately there was a war…it was fought and won…terms of surrender were agreed upon. But here we are over a century later still arguing over the cause of the war, whether the symbol of the vanquished in that war should be flown in the face of the victors, and whether public money and lands should be set aside to honor the antagonists in that war. Perhaps history’s lesson is that war, not compromise, is the bad thing.

But that’s the thing with history…to use a newly minted cliché: It’s complicated. Santayana can be as right as he ever was. But Tversky and Khaneman can be right too. Because we cherry pick history to fit our favorite narratives…our moral worldview…there really is no one, neat axiom or aphorism to cover it all.  History at best can provide us with data points: unregulated markets lead to greed and corruption; invading Moscow in winter never goes well for invaders; oppression, colonialism, slavery, genocide are black marks on most any culture and will continue to haunt long after no matter how many statues are built in honor or how many turkeys are slaughtered in memory. 

Since this is the season for history and prayer, let us pray: Let us pray that we don't blow the deadline on the promise we made to ourselves long ago when we were a serious country determined to form a more perfect union.