Sunday, June 26, 2005
Polistra's godmother
Godmother isn't quite the right word, but it'll have to do.
The second time I lived in Kansas, in the early '80s, I enjoyed reading a column called 'Peggy of the Flint Hills' in the Topeka paper. Over the years I forgot the details but retained a vague memory of the feeling. Last year, when I started writing an online journal, I had a fleeting thought that it would be nice to follow Peggy's model, but forgot about it....
Was reminded again when reading the 1938 WPA book, which referred to Peggy's column several times. What? Must be one of those deals where the column is a brand name, written by many anonymous scriveners over the years. Nope, turns out that Peggy was Zula Bennington Greene, and she wrote all the way from 1933 to 1983. I checked Alibris.com, and (unsurprisingly, because Alibris always has what I want even when I don't know exactly what I want) found a collection of Peggy's columns. Spent yesterday in that book.
So, have I been following Peggy in any way? In terms of prose style, no. My best could never kneel at the hem of Peggy's daily average. But yes, in terms of subject choices and a Kansan tendency to peel things back to the biological basics.
Here's a bit from 1943, responding to the well-known incident when General Patton slapped a private.
Why not let the matter rest and get on with the war? Someone has said that he who is passionate and honest can be trusted. Perhaps even a general should be allowed a few mistakes. Everybody else is. It is even more regrettable that the army HQ put themselves in a hole by flatly and firmly denying the whole story, then later admitting it was true. It has hurt them with the people and shaken confidence in future dispatches. For the people to know whatever happens, even the unfortunate things, and discuss them freely, not sparing those in high places, is the precious privilege of a democracy.
Bureaucracies don't learn, do they?
Here's a longer piece from 1945 which I profoundly disagree with. Still, it shows a thought process that must have been common at the time: from the misery of WW2 and the shock of Hiroshima, a natural logic led to the moral equivalence embodied in the United Nations.
No matter who started the trouble, all who are concerned suffer the consequences. The rest of the world blames Germany and Japan for the war. We say virtuously that we did not fight till attacked -- but our own men died the same as the Germans and Japanese.
There will not be peace in the world until nations are more eager to prevent war than to place blame. Wars, like cyclones and rattlesnakes, give a little warning before they strike, and that is the time to fight a war. ...
Disaster is too costly for any smug assertion of innocence or any pointing of fingers. Trying war criminals does not bring the dead back to life. We will be getting along toward the millenium when our desire to clear ourselves of blame is replaced by a feeling of guilt if we have not tried to prevent a disaster.
This version of moral equivalence misses one basic fact. Not all humans want peace. Some are civilized, some are warriors (like Arabs and prewar Japs) and some civilized people will follow a crazy leader off a cliff (like Germans).
Along with the moral equivalence, we see the concept of pre-emptive war, which was specified in the UN Charter:
The Purposes of the United Nations are:
1. To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace....
So, would Peggy have approved of a pre-emptive war against Iraq in 1993 ("along toward the millenium") when we heard the rattle and knew its origin? I doubt it. The basic and unshakable mismatch is that civilized people, equipped with a representative system, just don't feel like fighting a war until they are devastatingly attacked.
Reagan's form of defense works better. Use the best parts of our nature to show the savages that they simply cannot succeed. Unfortunately, despite those many rattles and wall clouds "along toward the millenium", we didn't do anything. No pre-emptive war, no Reaganite fortification. ¶ 9:18 AM
The second time I lived in Kansas, in the early '80s, I enjoyed reading a column called 'Peggy of the Flint Hills' in the Topeka paper. Over the years I forgot the details but retained a vague memory of the feeling. Last year, when I started writing an online journal, I had a fleeting thought that it would be nice to follow Peggy's model, but forgot about it....
Was reminded again when reading the 1938 WPA book, which referred to Peggy's column several times. What? Must be one of those deals where the column is a brand name, written by many anonymous scriveners over the years. Nope, turns out that Peggy was Zula Bennington Greene, and she wrote all the way from 1933 to 1983. I checked Alibris.com, and (unsurprisingly, because Alibris always has what I want even when I don't know exactly what I want) found a collection of Peggy's columns. Spent yesterday in that book.
So, have I been following Peggy in any way? In terms of prose style, no. My best could never kneel at the hem of Peggy's daily average. But yes, in terms of subject choices and a Kansan tendency to peel things back to the biological basics.
Here's a bit from 1943, responding to the well-known incident when General Patton slapped a private.
Why not let the matter rest and get on with the war? Someone has said that he who is passionate and honest can be trusted. Perhaps even a general should be allowed a few mistakes. Everybody else is. It is even more regrettable that the army HQ put themselves in a hole by flatly and firmly denying the whole story, then later admitting it was true. It has hurt them with the people and shaken confidence in future dispatches. For the people to know whatever happens, even the unfortunate things, and discuss them freely, not sparing those in high places, is the precious privilege of a democracy.
Bureaucracies don't learn, do they?
Here's a longer piece from 1945 which I profoundly disagree with. Still, it shows a thought process that must have been common at the time: from the misery of WW2 and the shock of Hiroshima, a natural logic led to the moral equivalence embodied in the United Nations.
No matter who started the trouble, all who are concerned suffer the consequences. The rest of the world blames Germany and Japan for the war. We say virtuously that we did not fight till attacked -- but our own men died the same as the Germans and Japanese.
There will not be peace in the world until nations are more eager to prevent war than to place blame. Wars, like cyclones and rattlesnakes, give a little warning before they strike, and that is the time to fight a war. ...
Disaster is too costly for any smug assertion of innocence or any pointing of fingers. Trying war criminals does not bring the dead back to life. We will be getting along toward the millenium when our desire to clear ourselves of blame is replaced by a feeling of guilt if we have not tried to prevent a disaster.
This version of moral equivalence misses one basic fact. Not all humans want peace. Some are civilized, some are warriors (like Arabs and prewar Japs) and some civilized people will follow a crazy leader off a cliff (like Germans).
Along with the moral equivalence, we see the concept of pre-emptive war, which was specified in the UN Charter:
The Purposes of the United Nations are:
1. To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace....
So, would Peggy have approved of a pre-emptive war against Iraq in 1993 ("along toward the millenium") when we heard the rattle and knew its origin? I doubt it. The basic and unshakable mismatch is that civilized people, equipped with a representative system, just don't feel like fighting a war until they are devastatingly attacked.
Reagan's form of defense works better. Use the best parts of our nature to show the savages that they simply cannot succeed. Unfortunately, despite those many rattles and wall clouds "along toward the millenium", we didn't do anything. No pre-emptive war, no Reaganite fortification. ¶ 9:18 AM
