An Annoying Letter from John Adams

I have too many damn tabs open, and there’s something of interest, positive or negative, in nearly all of them. Well, of interest to me, anyway, not necessarily to you or anybody else. I’ve been trying to bookmark them, which is not easy, as Google Chrome only lets me bookmark a page once, and many of my open pages frankly intersect various projects and interests. A case in point: I have in front of me a letter from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, written 4 November 1816, that stands at the crossroads of several things I’m working on.

For one thing, I have my idiot project of writing a commentary on “America’s Forsaken Roots,”—not the three-part thing I did earlier, but a more detailed refutation drawing on a larger variety of sources. One of the claims the document made is that John Adams was president of the American Bible Society. Well, in this letter he comments on the usefulness of such an institution:

We have now, it seems, a National Bible Society, to propagate King James’s Bible, through all Nations. Would it not be better to apply these pious subscriptions to purify Christendom from the Corruptions of Christianity, than to propagate those corruptions in Europe, Asia, Africa and America?

Ouch. Not so friendly as all that, it seems. So, logically, should I not bookmark this with the “Forsaken Roots” stuff?

Not so fast. He continues:

Suppose we should project a society to translate Dupuis into all Languages, and offer a Reward in Medals and Diamonds to any Man or Body of Men who would produce the best answer to it.

Okay, now we touch on another consideration—Charles François Dupuis was an astronomer and a proponent of Mythicism—the concept that Jesus never actually existed and that some kind of mythological figure (if I remember correctly Dupuis saw the Jesus story as a solar myth) has been given historical flesh and made to walk among men. Such things do happen—Robin Hood and Roswell come to mind here—but Jesus seems an unlikely candidate. In any case I’ve been toying with doing something with some of the old-line Mythicists at some point, and Dupuis is on my reading-list. File under Mythicism?

Or maybe not. Adams goes on:

It is more worth your while to read Dupuis than Grimm. Of all the romances and true histories I ever read, it is the most entertaining and instructive, though Priestley calls it “dull.”

Priestley, yeah, Joseph Priestley—I’m working my way through some of his stuff even now, mostly in connection with his observations on the necessity of disestablishment—and I’ve got a piece on a weird Christian meme that he has a connection with in the works. So maybe it should go under Joseph Priestley.

Or what about Adams’ religion, a subject dear to what passes for hearts among the Christian Nationite crowd? This letter has meat for that stew as well:

Conclude not from all this that I have renounced the Christian Religion, or that I agree with Dupuis in all his sentiments. Far from it. I see in every Page something to recommend Christianity in its Purity, and something to discredit its Corruptions. 

If I had Strength, I would give you my Opinion of it in a Fable of the Bees. 

The Ten Commandments and The Sermon on the Mount contain my Religion.

So that’s where it all kind of falls apart. So many places to file it—and I have to choose one. Maybe I’ll just write about it here instead. That way I can close the tab with a clear conscience, knowing that I’ll never have to look at the damn thing again, let alone make any sort of decision on how to use it. Blog and forget. It may not be the best policy, but at least it puts off the day of reckoning.

Quotation of the Day

I think it's debatable whether reminders of the past prevent us repeating our mistakes but at least they mean we can't say we didn't know.

Owen commenting at Historiographic Anarchy

Madness and Politics

You know—just a thought. Jobs. Let me say it again—jobs. That’s what the people of the United States are looking for right now. Nobody gives a damn about this debt-ceiling nonsense. Most people are prepared for a certain number of program cuts and tax increases, but what they’re really interested in is getting back to work. Seeing the economy running again. Bromides like only the market can create jobs aren’t going to cut it any longer. People are tired of praying to a Market God that never seems to listen. This is something that both Democrats and Republicans need to deal with, but it especially applies to the Mad Tea Partiers. Sabotaging the economy in the hopes of winning elections is probably not going to be a winning strategy. People tend to re-elect when their personal finances are going well; folk who surf the wave of economic discontent are likely to crash on the rocks of broken dreams.

Quotation of the Day

And let us not forget that the God hypothesis, which is, after all, the preferred alternative of Haught and Polkinghorne, also puts forth a speculative, unobservable entity without a trace of experimental support. The multiverse hypothesis at least arises as a natural consequence of certain theories that have a sound, evidential basis. The God hypothesis is just invented from whole cloth, and is supported solely by philosophical gobbledygook like the cosmological argument.

Jason Rosenhouse

Celebration of the Clueless

From one Mychal Massie comes the most colossal drivel I’ve read in a long time—well, I’m sure I could find worse, but it’s amazingly idiotic:

Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin all wrote that they had signed the Constitution July 4, 1776, but there are some historians who argue that they signed a month later. So the question becomes, whom are you going to believe—the men who were there and participated, or PBS and the History Channel?

Me, I’ll go with the historians who’ve actually examined the evidence, but I’d be really surprised to find that any of them said the Constitution was signed in 1776, in July, August, or any other month. And yet after this gaffe this Massie character has the colossal gall to lecture his readers about the true meaning of the Constitution. It appears the Founders “intended for God to be acknowledged and prayers to be offered in conjunction with good government and the observance of federal holidays and the ceremonies adjoining same.” (These are actually his words.) If the Founders had wanted “no state-sanctioned religion”, then they would have included the concept somewhere in the Constitution, Mychal Massie thinks. As proof they didn’t intend the no religious test and no establishment clauses to forbid government-mandated religion* he writes:

One of the clearest examples showing that the Founding Fathers never intended the First Amendment to be applied as it is today comes from John Adams. The day before he would sign the actual Constitution, Adams wrote a letter to his wife, Abigail. The very first paragraph on the third page of that letter, Adams wrote: “I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding generations, as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by the solemn acts of God Almighty.”

First of all I would observe of course that even in this very dishonest presentation of the famous Adams quotation Adams nowhere states that government is to require such acts. But the fact is that Adams only includes such devotions to God among various kinds of celebrations he anticipates for the second of July (and what were you saying, Mychal Massie, about the Founders and dates again?):

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

If this is “[o]ne of the clearest examples” showing that the Founders meant to establish religion when they wrote that they didn’t, the rest of his examples must be utter dreck.

(h/t Jon Rowe)

*Of course this restriction originally was only binding on the Federal Government, not the states. The states wrote their own versions of disestablishment both before and after this date.

Another Day Without Blogging

It’s overcast and the yuccas are blooming out front, and for whatever reason I’m feeling groggy and out of it. I slept most of the day. Sunday night my nephew and I made a night-excursion out to buy groceries thanks to a small but sudden influx of money; we headed out on the last train Sunday night, bought groceries, and returned on the first train Monday morning. Thanks to a variety of mostly uninteresting setbacks (getting out at the wrong stop, for one, and running into some kind of malfunction with the store’s card-reading system, for another) our time was largely eaten up with trivia, so the four-hour gap between trains was as nothing, and we got home safe and sound with our kill. The internet facilitated trip planning, and cell phone technology meant that we could get help lugging our supplies back to camp. And without light rail we would have been back in the dark ages of strange interconnecting busses. Life in the twenty-first century, I guess.

Holding Entry

Okay, I blew this entry. So instead, here's a picture of my great-grandfather using his homemade barber chair at his barbershop in Steamboat Springs, nearly a century ago now. With any luck blogging will resume shortly.

Things I'm Reading

Dazed and confused, my sleep in tatters from having helped to lug a recycled bathroom sink six or eight blocks so we can once again have at least one full bathroom in this deranged boarding house I once called home, I now find myself limping around my little corner of the blogosphere (and does a sphere have corners?) with nothing to say. Fortunately the rest of you haven’t given up.

I see Josh Rosenau has his piece up about the Miss USA contestants’ depressing responses to a question about teaching evolution in schools—depressing in that most of them clearly had no idea what science is, what a theory might be, or why presenting “both sides” of an issue (especially an issue where there really is only one side) may be absolutely idiotic. And Duane Smith is enthusiastic about “Akkadian tagged texts and translations from royal inscriptions from Esarhaddon [being] now online". It’s fantastic how much ancient material is now accessible without getting out of my chair; I don't think people appreciate this miracle of the age. Is the internet eroding memory? I wouldn’t be surprised; I’ve increasingly got in the habit of regoogling rather than retaining stuff in the storage heaps of my memory. I thought I was just getting old, but maybe mankind’s memory is now electronic. Jason Thibeault is appalled by a recent Greenpeace action against genetically modified crops: “The whole point of this genetically modified wheat is to provide more nutrition for humans, which one would think is a noble goal especially from an environmental standpoint—less crops feeding more people means more food for less damage to the planet in the form of pesticides.” It seems like Mary Shelley has a lot to answer for--the whole there-are-some-things-man-is-not-meant-to-tamper-with bit. Frankencrops at large. You know corn is a large part of our diet these days—ever tried corn that hasn’t been genetically modified? Humankind’s been at this game a long time, guys. And J. L. Bell muses about the identity of the remains of a British soldier found in Nova Scotia—was he a Private James Simpson, who died in 1784? Can we ever be certain with a case this cold?

Okay, I’m fresh out of inspiration. It’s a good thing you guys still have things to write about. It saves me the trouble of coming up with something of my own. Thanks.

Quotation of the Day

Flood geologists have rendered untenable the hypothesis that the Flood year spanned much of the relevant slice of time, by demonstrating that too much Mesozoic and Cenozoic sediment deposition was subaerial or was prolonged for years. The continued denial of the implications of their own findings is an example of what I call the gorilla mindset: the attitude that if something looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, but religious dogma says it is a gorilla, then it is a gorilla.

Phil Senter (h/t James F. McGrath)

Quotation of the Day

There is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.

Anton Menger (h/t Josh Rosenau)

Familiar Superstitions

So Friday the thirteenth comes on Wednesday this month, as Churchy La Femme used to observe, and the consequent madness surrounds us. (Only a full moon rivals the thirteenth for lunacy, and we’re not going to have one of those until, let’s see, uh, tomorrow….) At least two Republican candidates for the most powerful office in the world signed a pledge observing that African-Americans had been better off in some ways under slavery, in that at least slave-children were raised in two-parent families. I suppose that could be regarded as true, in a perverse dysfunctional sort of way, in that many enslaved children were the property of their biological fathers, who likewise owned their biological mothers. The historical idiocy is breathtaking, though at least the candidates had some sort of excuse—this language was part of the preamble, not actually part of the pledge itself.

I already expressed my opinion of any candidate who would sign this vile vow, and I’m glad to see that several Republican candidates are backing gingerly away from it—though I’d rather they denounced it as anti-American in no uncertain terms. I mean, this lunatic leaflet complains about “non-committal co-habitation”, refers to “innate traits like race [!]”, worries that people may think “against all empirical evidence, that homosexual behavior in particular, and sexual promiscuity in general” are not unhealthy, and claims that “robust … reproduction is beneficial to … health and security.” And this thing was presumably written by adults living in the twenty-first century. Does this nest of loons have other candidate oaths supporting leeches for healthcare, opposing interracial marriage, or promising to find the philosopher’s stone so we can solve our economic problems by turning lead into gold? When I first saw this I was half expecting it to turn out to be a piece from The Onion or the like, but apparently these guys are serious. It’s a little late for April Fools, anyway.

Fools and Criticism

Wikiquote—one of the Wikimedia side-projects dwarfed by its famous sister Wikipedia—has a policy that all quotation-collections ought to employ: sources must be given for all quotations used. Further, quotations are divided up into categories—quotations with sources, attributed quotations, and misattributions, typically. There are also often sections devoted to such things as famous observations about the subject of the page—for example. Alleged quotations without sources are placed on the discussion page, and Wikiquote editors (as time permits) gradually run them down.

I track certain pages and periodically check to see if anything new has come up there. Recently some anonymous editor produced an (alleged) Benjamin Franklin quotation I wasn’t aware of:

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain—and most fools do.

Several of the big quotation sites have this one, but, as correctly noted by the Wikiquote editor, it’s not by Franklin. It’s from Dale Carnegie’s famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. The passage there reads:

Bitter criticism caused the sensitive Thomas Hardy, one of the finest novelists ever to enrich English literature, to give up forever the writing of fiction. Criticism drove Thomas Chatterton, the English poet, to suicide.

Benjamin Franklin, tactless in his youth, became so diplomatic, so adroit at handling people, that he was made American Ambassador to France. The secret of his success? “I will speak ill of no man,” he said, “…and speak all the good I know of everybody.”

Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain—and most fools do.

But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.

So this—it appears—is another one where somebody has attributed an author’s words to a person he’d quoted just before it. The Wikiquote editor suggests that this may be due to a misprint in some edition of Carnegie’s work, and that’s always possible, but this sort of thing happens often enough without any misprint to aid the process that I at least see no need to postulate it.

So, this much is now clear—Dale Carnegie was quoting Ben Franklin, somebody mistakenly thought his words were Franklin’s, and the misquotation was born. But is that really the case? Was Carnegie quoting Franklin? Did Franklin actually say “I will speak ill of no man … and speak all the good I know of everybody”? That’s not so clear. Turning to good old Google Books (and how that massive index has speeded up this sort of work at least tenfold) we find the oldest source for it is a book from 1901, Little Journeys to the Homes of American Statesmen, where it appears as an introductory quotation to an account of Franklin’s life:

I will speak ill of no man, not even in matter of truth; but rather excuse the faults I hear charged upon others, and upon proper occasion speak all the good I know of everybody.

The author, Elbert Hubbard, attributes it to “Franklin’s journal”, which is not very helpful. It is almost certainly, however, not from Franklin’s journal, exactly, but rather from a lost paper quoted in an 1815 source, a “Life of Benjamin Franklin” by Robert Walsh, printed in Delaplaine’s Repository of the Lives and Portraits of Distinguished Americans, volume 2, pp. 51-52. It’s part of a self-improvement plan Franklin drew up as a young man in the year 1726. The relevant section reads:

4. I resolve to speak ill of no man whatever, not even in a matter of truth; but rather by some means excuse the faults I hear charged upon others, and upon proper occasions speak all the good I know of every body.

A few words have changed, but it appears to be the same item. Carnegie’s wording, however, strongly suggests that he didn’t get it from this source, but rather from Little Journeys or some close textual relative.

Quotation of the Day

By most writers the invention of gunpowder is ascribed to the Chinese, but not upon very convincing evidence. Milton says it was invented by the devil to dispel angels with, and this opinion seems to derive some support from the scarcity of angels.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Fireflies in the Night

L’affaire Elevator-Guy continues, Congress worries over defending us from the scourge of energy-efficient light bulbs, the King James Bible celebrates its 400th anniversary, and the people rehash the Casey Anthony verdict. I’m sure all these things are important, and I intend to throw in my two bits’ wroth on them all in the near future, but I don’t really feel motivated right now. Enervation takes over. It’s hot, not July summer hot, but hot enough to sap energy and will for all that. Fitful firefly weather—not that we get fireflies here in the pacific northwest. I’ve seen them, though, eerie and silent in the summer night.

Random thoughts flicker aimlessly through my night-dulled mind. An airplane crash in 1951 that took the life of a young West Point cadet who left behind a remarkable monument to his life—a thirty-page account of an Indian war that in some respects surpassed any serious work available at that time. A proposed duel between a future president and a political opponent that would have involved broadswords and a pit on a Mississippi island. A bizarre 1966 album by some guys from New Jersey that could have changed the course of rock ‘n’ roll (well, no, but it would have been an interesting collectable if it had been released). More sightings of Christian Nationite faux quotations. A strange Supreme Court case which Daniel Webster—who once beat the devil—lost in arguing that only Christians were capable of charity. But none of it jells. I need something for each of them—some further bit of information, some way of putting the inexplicable into perspective, to do any of them justice. If History isn’t to be just “a bunch of stuff that happened” (to quote the great Homer Simpson) or “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (as a British playwright once put it), there has to be something more to it. A place to stand that puts the whole into some sort of perspective. And right now my perspective is limited indeed. Events look like nothing more than fireflies flitting fitfully through a hot summer night.

Vinyl Memories: The Baroque Beatles Book

Many years ago, in some high-school class or other—World History, maybe—we had a guest presentation by an art teacher of four centuries or so of Western Art—slides and music, as I recall, depicting painting and sculpture while accompanied by examples of music from the various eras—Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and so on.

One bit that cracked me up was a piece selected for the Baroque section. Although it sounded as if it ought to be something by (say) Bach, it was actually a sort of orchestral fanfare version of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” I asked the guest presenter about it when the question-and-answer session came, and he said it was from something called The Baroque Beatles Book by Joshua Rifkin. I didn’t say this, but I thought it was kind of a clever idea, using a familiar tune to illustrate the peculiarities of the era’s music, but that illusion was immediately shattered when a girl in my class raised her hand to ask what on earth did that piece have to do with the Beatles or “I Want to Hold Your Hand”? as she at least saw no similarity between them. Several others appeared to agree with that assessment, and the class went on.

This is an example of what I would have called a “travesty” at the time—though my Latin teacher said there was no such literary genre, pointed out that travesty and transvestite were from the same roots, and traced the components back to reconstructed Proto-Indo-European. But I digress. “Travesty”—a change of clothes—dressing one subject in the style of another. It’s an old sport. It can be done for humorous effect, as with the eighteenth-century Hamlet Travestie (which took aim as much at contemporary Shakespeare scholarship as at Shakespeare himself), or seriously, as with the Duke Ellington versions of suites by Tchaikovsky and Grieg. Rifkin’s effort was somewhere in between, as indicated by his own notes: “We were absolutely crazy about this music,” he observed, meaning the Lennon-McCartney compositions. “Even if we had fun with it, it was fun with it in a way that was taking it seriously, giving it its due.”

I recently dug up my old copy of the record and listened to it again. My current system (essentially my computer) sucks, but it was still enjoyable. The liner notes, supposedly written by a Baroque musician looking for patronage, are at least mildly amusing:

I have also written, for your splendid court festivities—to which your unworthy servant hopes that he may be invited—a festive cantata, beginning with the words and melody of Please Please Me (your Lordship will remember how you sang it to me with a most melodious voice while we played croquet that afternoon, I still limp from the broken leg I suffered when you, justly displeased with my insolent correction of the way you sang the second half of the melody—how like an upstart of me to suggest to you that it was in the major mode—properly struck me).

About the same time I heard three Indian musicians do a version of “Greensleeves” featuring a sarod. That was memorable too, but it wasn’t recorded, and I can’t revisit it

Quotation of the Day

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.

Louis Brandeis as quoted by Raymond Lonergan (h/t)

Today's Crapfest

Being a Republican, I vote in the Republican primary. Please rest assured that no candidate that signs the idiotic “Candidate Vow” [PDF] put out by the group calling itself “The Family Leader” (and when exactly did “family” become code for bigotry?) is going to get my vote. This anti-science anti-humanity childishly-scribbled screed wants candidates to promise to support the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (which should never have been passed in the first place), to support a Constitutional Amendment redefining marriage as between one man and one woman (and why not add in “of the same race” while you’re at it?), to suppress “all forms of pornography and … abortion” (and to hell with the Bill of Rights, apparently), to reject “Sharia Islam” (which I include only because of the mind-numbing idiocy of the phrase), and to support overpopulation as beneficial to the American way of life.

Nobody who supports the continued over-population of the planet gets my vote. Nobody who calls scientific evidence “anti-science bias” or who uses a phrase like “complete absence of empirical proof” in that context gets my vote. And nobody who thinks that he (or society in general) gets to decide on what consenting adult I choose to marry will ever get my vote.

Fatherly Advice

Frustration continues, as I try to hack together one or two minor projects for placement somewhere in the vast interwebs of humankind’s collective wisdom/insanity. While trying to find anything new that might be going on on the Patrick Henry front, I stumbled into another one of those noxious collections of pseudo-Christian mock-patriotic quotations, this one of course including the Henry “religionists” and the Madison “ten commandments” frauds. Since where one hoax turns up there are likely to be others, I glanced through the set, hoping for some new gem of fake-oratory or the like, and stumbled on this item, attributed to John Jay:

The Bible is the best of all books, for it is the word of God and teaches us the way to be happy in this world and the next. Continue therefore to read it and to regulate your life by its precepts.

The first thing that bugged me about this one is that it appears to be directed to children, somewhat in the manner of one of Noah Webster’s primers. The second thing was that it didn’t seem much like John Jay—not the John Jay of the Federalist Papers anyway. And the third thing was that I couldn’t find it in any of online editions of Jay’s works.

And gradually, as I idly Googled it, looking for anybody quoting it who actually gave a source (and striking out), it crossed my mind that it seemed familiar. I had an increasingly strong mental image of a document, a scan of an actual manuscript page—not just a transcript of some sort. A father’s words to his son—that was it. But where had I seen it? And more important, when? If this was something I’d seen on microfilm at some far gone time in some distant library and maybe noted down in one of the many notes I lost in storage a couple of years back, my chances of relocating it by that route were slim to none. But it was far more likely that this was something I’d seem relatively recently, online, in one of those amazing digital repositories that are now proliferating. I scurried over to the Columbia University John Jay papers project—and struck out again. Damn.

By this point I was fairly sure that this quotation was legitimate, that I was looking at John Jay’s fatherly advice to his son Peter. The facts were coming back to me a little vaguely, but they were coming back—or so I thought. I decided to dig up my personal fake quotation index and look through it even so—and damned if it wasn’t there, flagged as “genuine”. There was even a link back to the John Jay papers project. So here’s what John Jay wrote to his eight-year-old son, Peter Augustus Jay, on 8 April 1784:

She [your aunt] also tells me that you love your Books, and take great pains to improve yourself. that you daily read in the Bible and have have learned by Heart some Hymns in the Book I sent you. These accounts give me great pleasure, and I love you the more for being such a good Boy.—The Bible is the best of all Books, for it is the word of God, and teaches us the way to be happy in this world and in the other {next}. Continue therefore to read it, and to regulate your Life by its precepts.

Patrick Henry “Religionists” FAQ

I see that for whatever reason myriads are storming the fort here and over at Fake History regarding something Patrick Henry allegedly said:

There is an insidious campaign of false propaganda being waged today, to the effect that our country is not a Christian country but a religious one—that it was not founded on Christianity but on freedom of religion. It cannot be emphasized too clearly and too often that this great nation was founded, not by “religionists”, but by Christians—not on religion, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.

Regular readers (both of them) are probably sick of this by now, but as questions persist, I’ve thrown together a sort of FAQ on the subject.

Q – When did Patrick Henry say this?

A – He didn’t.

Q – How do you know?

A – Well, first and most important, it isn’t found anywhere in Henry’s known letters, or in the fragments of recovered and reconstructed speeches.

Q – Couldn’t he have said it anyway? Not everything somebody says gets written down, after all. Maybe it was passed down by word of mouth or something.

A – Or maybe he was misquoted. Or maybe it was said by somebody else altogether. People often make mistakes about what other people have said, or attribute something to the wrong person. That’s why giving your source is so important.

Q – I have a source that says he said it. It’s in a book/in a magazine/on a website. Doesn’t that count?

A – Not unless Patrick Henry himself wrote the material in that book, or magazine, or website. That’s why it’s so important to be able to say where he wrote it, or when he said it.

Q – Okay. My mother/my pastor/a book/somebody on the internet says he said it in a speech to the House of Burgesses in May 1765. That ought to be good enough, right?

A – How do we know he said it then and there? Where was it recorded?

Q – Well, they must have kept records, right?

A – Actually, no. Not of the exact speeches, anyway. Remember, there were no recorders, no cameras, no stenographers taking things down as people said it. Sometimes the text of a speech made it into print—more often not. In Patrick Henry’s case, only one speech from May 1765 is on record, and only a fragment of that. And that’s the famous (reconstructed) “if this be treason” exchange.

Q – And this wasn’t part?

A – No.

Q – But I’ve seen the date 1774 for it—also 1776. Couldn’t one of those be right?

A – Again you have the same problem. Where was it recorded? How do we know it was Patrick Henry who said it, and not some other person?

Q – Well, but people have been saying Henry said it for generations. When something’s been passed down by tradition, different rules apply, right?

A – There are two things wrong with that. Traditional evidence is evaluated in the same way as other evidence—and the pseudo-Henry quotation has not been passed down by tradition. It was first attributed to Henry in the 1980s.

Q – What do you mean about evaluating traditions like other evidence? How is that possible?

A – First, there is the matter of external attestation. How old is the tradition? How likely were the transmitters to know what they were claiming? Things like that. Second, there is internal evidence. Does the tradition jibe with things we know about the period from which it is supposed to have come? The pseudo-Henry quotation fails on both fronts.

Q – Well, how old is this tradition?

A – The oldest claimed source for these words as Henry’s is a book called God’s Providence in American History published in 1988 by Steve C. Dawson. It’s a long time between Dawson and Henry, and there’s no obvious chain of custody to get it there.

Q – What about the internal evidence?

A – The words don’t belong to Patrick Henry’s time. The phrase “false propaganda” for example was common from the early twentieth century on, but was unknown in Henry’s time. The author refers to “this great nation”—a nation that in Henry’s time had yet to come into existence. And “peoples of other faiths” would not be “afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here” until much later. There was no “freedom of worship” for most of the country at the time Henry is alleged to have said this.

Q – Still, if you can’t say where it did come from, I’m still entitled to quote it as Henry’s, right?

A – Not unless you have a source for it.

Q – I have lots of sources for it—websites, politicians, evangelists—don’t they count for anything?

A – You only need one source for it—the book Henry wrote, the speech he made, the letter he sent where those words appear. Otherwise you got nothing.

Q – Well, but you’ve got nothing to back your claim either.

A – Uh, actually I do. In point of fact the words were originally written in the April 1956 issue of The Virginian in a brief item about—not by—Patrick Henry. Not that that matters. The burden of proof is always on the person making the positive claim.

Q – So if you didn’t need to show where it came from, why did you?

A – It amused me at the time, and I had nothing better to do.

Independence Day Oration

[by John Phoenix, 1865]

Brother soldiers and fellow citizens:—I feel honored by the call that I have received and accepted to deliver on this great occasion, the glorious anniversary of our nation’s independence, the customary oration. … It is the Fourth of July. This morning, at half-past two o’clock, every inhabitant of this great, free, and enlightened republic, amounting in number to several millions, was awakened from a sleep by the discharge of cannon, the explosion of fire-crackers, and the continued and reiterated shouts of little boys, and children of larger growth. From that time until four o’clock sleep has been rendered impossible, and every inhabitant of this republic has had an opportunity to reflect with gratitude and thankfulness on the wisdom of our progenitors, and the greatness of our institutions; until at that hour the bells of every church, meeting-house, factory, steam-boat, and boarding-house throughout the land, beginning to pour forth a merry and universal peal, joining in the glad anthem of our nation's independence, every citizen has got up, put on his pantaloons, taken a cock-tail, and commenced the celebration of the day in good earnest.

Throughout our whole vast extent of country, from Hancock Barracks, Houlton, Maine, where they pry the sun up in the morning, to Fort Yuma on the Colorado River, where the thermometer stands at 212° in the shade, and the hens lay hard hard-boiled eggs, this day will be a day of hilarity, of frolicking and rejoicing. Processions will be formed, churches will be thronged, orations will be delivered, (many of them, possibly, of a superior character to this of mine,) the gallant militia, that right arm of our national defence, will pervade the streets in astounding uniforms, whereof it may be said that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Small boys will fire pistols and burn their fingers; large boys will fire cannon and blow off their arms; men will guzzle inebriating liquors, and become much intoxicated thereby; and a mighty shout will go up from the land, which, if the wind happens to be in the right direction, will cause the Emperor Alexander to tremble in his boots, and the young Napoleon to howl in his silver cradle. For on this day the great American eagle flaps her wings, and soars aloft, until it makes your eyes sore to look at her, and looking down upon her myriads of free and enlightened children, with flaming eye, she screams, “E Pluribus Unum”, which may be freely interpreted, “Aint I some?” and myriads of freemen answer back with joyous shout: “You are punkins!”

…

Emigration from Great Britain and other countries then commenced, and continued to a tremendous extent, and all our fore-fathers, and eight grandfathers, came over and settled in the land.
They planted corn and built houses, they killed the Indians, hung the Quakers and Baptists, burned the witches alive, and were very happy and comfortable indeed. So matters went on very happily, the colonies thus formed owing allegiance to the government of Great Britain until the latter part of the eighteenth century, when a slight change took place in their arrangements. The king of Great Britain, a Dutchman of the name of George Guelph, No. 3, having arrived at that stage of life when Dutchmen generally, if at all inclined that way, naturally begin to give way to ill-temper and obstinacy, became of a sudden exceedingly overbearing and ill-disposed toward the colonies. He had offenders sent to England to be tried; he was down on a bank and a protective tariff, and began to be considered little better than an abolitionist. He also put in effect an ordinance called the Stamp Act, which prevented applause in places of public amusement, prevented the protection of cattle against flies, and interfered with the manufacture of butter; and he finally capped the climax of his audacious impositions by placing such a tremendous duty on tea, that our female ancestors could not afford to drink that exhilarating beverage. Our ancestors were patient and long-suffering, but they could not stand every thing.

…

By this time it suddenly occurred to some of the smartest of our respectable ancestors that it was a good long way to the little island of England, that there was a good many people in the provinces, and that perhaps they were quite as able to govern themselves as George Guelph No. 3 was to govern them. They accordingly appointed delegates from the various Provinces or States, who, meeting together in Philadelphia on the fourth day of July, 1776, decided to trouble the King of England no longer, and gave to the world that glorious Declaration of Independence, to the support of which they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. This was the birth-day of Freedom—the birth-day of the United States, now eighty years of age; and as there are few of us but feel some inclination to celebrate our own birth-day, there can be little wonder that we celebrate the birth-day of our country in so joyous, earnest, and enthusiastic a manner.

Love of country is strongly impressed on every mind; but, as Americans, we should and in fact do have this feeling more strongly developed than any other citizens of the world. For our country is a free country; its institutions are wise and liberal, and our advantages as its natives are greater than those of other citizens. …Upon the whole, I believe that a man has quite as much chance for a life of happiness if born under the glorious stars and stripes as if he happened to be born anywhere else, and perhaps a little more. We elect our own rulers, and make our own laws, and if they don’t turn out well, it’s very easy at the next election to make others in their place. … I do not wish to flatter this audience; I do not intend to be thought particularly complimentary; but I do assure you, that there is not a man present who, if he had votes enough, might not be elected president of the United States. And this important fact is the result not so much of any particular merit or virtue on your part, as of the nature of our glorious, liberal, republican institutions.

In this great and desirable country, any man may become rich, provided he will make money; and man may be well educated, if he will learn, and has money to pay for his board and schooling; and any man may become great, and of weight in the community, if he will take care of his health, and eat sufficiently of boiled salmon and potatoes.

Moreover, I assert it unblushingly, any man in this country may marry any woman he pleases—the only difficulty being for him to find any woman that he does please.

…

Washington has been called the “Father of his country;” … He was twice elected President of the United States by the combined Whig and Know-Nothing parties, the Democrats and Abolitionists voting against him; and served out his time with great credit to himself and the country—drawing his salary with a regularity and precision worthy all commendation.

Although, for the time in which he lived, a very distinguished man, the ignorance of Washington is something perfectly incredible. He never travelled on a steam-boat; never saw a railroad, or a locomotive engine; was perfectly ignorant of the principle of the magic of the magnetic telegraph; never had a daguerreotype, Colt’s pistol, Sharp’s rifle, or used a friction match. He eat his meals with an iron fork, never used postage-stamps on his letters, and knew nothing of the application of chloroform to alleviate suffering, or the use of gas for illumination. Such a man as this could hardly be elected president of the United States in these times, although, it must be confessed, we occasionally have a candidate who proves not much better informed about matters in general.

Washington died from exposure on the summit of Mount Vernon, in the year 1786, leaving behind him a name that will endure forever, if posterity persist in calling their children after him to the same extent that has been fashionable. He is mentioned in history as having been “first in peace, first in war, and first in the hearts of his countrymen;” in other words, he was No. 1 in every thing, and it was equally his interest and his pleasure to look out for that number, and he took precious good care to do so. … A monument has been commenced in the city of Washington to his memory, which is to be five hundred feet in height; and it should be the wish of every true-hearted American that his virtues and services may not be forgotten before it is completed; in which case, their remembrance will probably endure forever.

…

In future times, when by some impartial historian the present Oregon war is faithfully depicted, posterity, as it peruses the volume, will drop a tear o'er the picture of the sufferings of those noble volunteers that wallowed in the Walla Walla valley, and their intrepid march into that country, and their return, will excite a thrill of admiration as an adventure never equaled even by Napoleon H. Bonaparte, when he effected the passage of the Alps.

But the war will soon be ended; it is even now drawing to a close. The completion of the Pacific railroad, which may be looked upon as certain in the course of the next fifty years, increasing our facilities for transportation of arms and supplies, will undoubtedly have a most favorable effect; and I look upon it as a matter of little doubt that, three or four hundred years from this time, hostilities will have ceased entirely, and the Indians will have been liberally treated with, and become quiet and valuable members of our society. … Four hundred years from this time, the descendants of Kamiakin will be celebrating with our posterity the recurrences of this glorious day, with feelings of interest and delight. While to-day that great chief, moved by feelings of animosity toward us, sits and gnaws the gambrel-joint of a defunct Cayuga pony, little knowing on which side of his staff of life the oleaginous product of lactation is disseminated. But long after that time shall arrive, centuries and centuries after our difficulties shall have been settled, and the scrip, with accumulated interest, paid, may our glorious institutions continue to flourish, may the Union be perpetuated forever in perfect bonds of strength and fraternal affection, and the

Star-spangled banner continue to wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Constant Interruptions in a Sea of Crap

Every time I drift away from the mindscum principle I end up regretting it, and this July seems to be no exception. I had some thoughts—if that’s not too grandiose a term for a few disjointed and random reflections—about the birth of my nation, as seen from the perspective of its decline and fall, and I had them fitted into a scheme with themes for each of the first four days of July, but nothing is working out. The first day of July was filled with constant interruptions, and what I thought I would post early never got posted at all. The second day got aborted in an orgy of food and irrelevant festivities.

I’ve lost whatever impulse I’ve ever had to write this third day of July in the twelve thousand eleventh year of the Holocene Era. The question that keeps going through my head as I try to keep up with the noxious fumes that pass for news in the vast sea of crap that is the internet is—what the fuck? The writers I read are all obsessed with L’Affaire Elevator-Guy, my fellow-Republicans (and I hereby denounce you all) are intent on destroying the nation that supports them and allows them to thrive, and that nation is spending its blood and treasure on foreign wars of no obvious utility. And all of this is nothing but smoke-and-mirrors, meaningless sideshows to the main event—the suicide of the only species on earth capable of appreciating the universe, in any abstract sense, that is.

We’re flunking our first test as an intelligent matter-manipulating species—a species in control of its own destiny. I get that microbes will eat up their surroundings until there is nothing more to eat and then perish. They’re microbes, damn it, brainless, senseless, barely a notch above the fucking rocks. They don’t know any better. We do. We’ve always known better than our behavior. When Euro-Americans were slaughtering the indigenous peoples and piously pretending that it was God’s doing, not theirs, there were people like John Beeson to point out that their excuses were a load of shit, empty self-serving mutterings and shriekings used to keep common sense at bay. When the United States embarked on its imperial adventure in the Philippines under the guise of a noble quest to aid an oppressed people there were people like Mark Twain to call its bluff and show the enterprise for what it was. And we know now that our primary energy source—the one that allows us to exist in the billions on the surface of our planet—is running out. We know that one of the consequences of exploiting it recklessly is increasing heat here where we live. We have this amazing material, the residue of organisms that have lived and died in their millions before us, our stored capital as it were—and we can think of nothing better to do with it than burn it. We know that we cannot feed the people who are already here without some major new influx of energy—and yet we do nothing to solve our problems, nothing but hysterically deny the very existence of what is right in front of us. We are the actual embodiment of the fictional lemmings—the creatures who periodically destroy themselves by rushing into the sea and drowning themselves in large numbers. This is a test, damn it—God’s test for us, if you like—and we’re flunking it big time.

Happy Independence Day.

Guns, Bells, and Bonfires

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

John Adams to Abigail Adams, 3 July 1776

Of course if John Adams had had his way we would have been celebrating with our Guns, Bells, and Bonfires in December or so. If independence had been declared seven months earlier, he bitched, we could already “have formed Alliances with foreign States.—We should have mastered Quebec and been in Possession of Canada”. Unfortunately “Hopes of Reconciliation, which were fondly entertained by Multitudes of honest and well meaning tho weak and mistaken People” needlessly delayed the declaration—well, not needlessly, as it gave time to “cement the Union, and avoid those Heats and perhaps Convulsions which might have been occasioned, by such a Declaration Six Months ago….” With this attitude it’s perhaps not surprising that British loyalist and military historian Charles Stedman described him (along with Benjamin Franklin and Edward Rutledge) as a man “whose principles were violent in the extreme, and who sought every opportunity of reducing the parent-state to humiliating and mortifying situations.”

Quotation of the Day

Suspending Halperin only reinforces a phony definition of “civility” in our discourse, in which it’s unacceptable to use foul language and be “uncivil,” but it’s perfectly acceptable for reporters and commentators to allow outright falsehoods to pass unrebutted; to traffic endlessly in false equivalences in the name of some bogus notion of objectivity; and to make confident assertions about public opinion without referring to polls which show them to be completely wrong.

Greg Sargent (h/t John Depuis)

Eighteenth Century Talking-Points

When, during the Wilson-Palmer saturnalia of oppressions, specialists in liberty began protesting that the Declaration plainly gave the people the right to alter the government under which they lived and even to abolish it altogether, they encountered the utmost incredulity. On more than one occasion, in fact, such an exegete was tarred and feathered by shocked members of the American Legion, even after the Declaration had been read to them. What ailed them was simply that they could not understand its Eighteenth century English.

H. L. Mencken, The American Language, 1921, p. 388

When the Committee of Five delegated the drafting of a declaration of the American colonies’ independence from Great Britain to Thomas Jefferson in June of 1776 they had no way of knowing that this “audacious paper” (as one critic called it) was going to become a foundational document for a new nation. And not just a new nation—a new kind of nation, a nation governed not by a executive answerable to a supernatural being seen by no-one, but rather a nation governed by the consent of its citizens as Hobbes or Locke or whoever had it, or in Mencken’s paraphrase, “people ought to choose the kind of government they want themselves, and nobody else ought to have no say in the matter.”

Theorists had talked up the concept for a long time, but nobody’d ever really put in into practice, as the American colonists were threatening. And it could easily have gone the other way. Robert Sobel’s brilliant For Want of a Nail looks at it from exactly that viewpoint—as a historian might look on it if the revolution had been lost.

A five man committee … was established to draw up a bill of charges against the King and a Declaration of Independence. The former resembled the one presented to King Charles I by the revolutionaries of his day; the latter was an eloquent restatement of contemporary French radical philosophy regarding the rights of man … a thinly disguised play to win further support from French intellectuals. In sum, the Declaration was more a political and propaganda vehicle than a serious attempt to state radical philosophy.

For its purposes, it didn’t really have to be anything more than “a political and propaganda vehicle”. The amazing thing is that this occasional document in fact does resonate (regardless of the distortion) down the corridors of time. No guarantees of course—look what happened to Menander, after all. Two centuries is nothing in the long view. But a great many documents haven’t had half the resonance.

Mind you, a big chunk of the document is taken up with comparative trivia—long-forgotten grievances it takes a history buff to explain. “He [King George] has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary, for public good.” “He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.” “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out our substance.” (In Mencken’s restatement these come out “He vetoed bills in the Legislature that everybody was in favor of, and hardly nobody was against,” “He made the Legislature meet at one-horse tank-towns, so that hardly nobody could get there and most of the leaders would stay home and let him go to work and do things like he wanted,” and “He made a lot of new jobs, and give them to loafers that nobody knowed nothing about, and the poor people had to pay the bill, whether they could or not.”)

John Lind, an English writer who took it on himself to reply to the statement, was scathing about swarms of officers.

To articles, thus generally worded, it is not always easy to give an answer. In the instance before us, however, we are under no difficulty. The “multitude of new offices created, and the swarms of officers sent over to America” under the present reign, consist, first, in a Board of Customs; and secondly, in additional Courts of Admiralty. … They forgot to tell us, that no new power is given to these officers; that the Board of Customs continues to exercise only the same power, that the English Commissioners had always exercised; that the new Courts of Admiralty continue to exercise only the same powers, as had been always attributed to the antient Courts. They forgot to tell us, that the salaries of the officers of the four new Courts of Admiralty are fixed; can never vary: that these salaries arise, in the first place, from the produce of the forfeitures; that if any deficiency remain, that deficiency is made good out of the produce of the old naval stores: they forgot to tell us, that this is a fund purely British: they forgot to point out to us how beneficial an improvement Was hereby made on the institution of the ancient Courts of Admiralty. They forgot to tell us, that the salaries of the officers of the ancient Courts were not limited: that they arose entirely from a certain rate assessed upon the forfeitures; were the forfeitures many and considerable? the salaries rose;—were they few and inconsiderable? the salaries fell.—See now the mighty injury done to the Colonies: Justice is brought home to them: the means of acquiring it are at hand, and cheap. The temptations to injustice removed from the officers. To the salary of the officers no honest citizen in America is to contribute. Of one class of people, and of one only, can they devour the subsistence. Will the Americans confess, that the class of smugglers is so numerous in that country, as to entitle them to be called—by way of eminence—the people?

Ah, but that’s not where the Declaration of Independence shines. No, it’s the opening statement of the revolutionary principle that the people have the right to determine what government is best for them, to tinker with it, to change it, or to abolish it if necessary, that is what stands out. Sure, it was a convenient principle for a gang of revolutionaries out to sever their relationship with the nation that brought them up. Okay, it was self-serving. But it was more than that. It gave a clear statement of the basic function of government, and thereby gave a way of evaluating whether and how well a given government was in fact carrying out its function. And it asserted that people could, in the event of failure, change that government.

Among the things that government was supposed to secure for its people were “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (or in Mencken’s translation “every man has got a right to live, to come and go as he pleases, and to have a good time whichever way he likes, so long as he don’t interfere with nobody else”). John Lind, predictably, scoffed at the entire concept:

The rights of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—by which, if they mean any thing, they must mean the right to enjoy life, to enjoy liberty, and to pursue happiness—they “hold to be unalienable” This they “hold to be among truths self-evident.” At the same time, to secure these rights, they are content that Governments should be instituted. They perceive not, or will not seem to perceive, that nothing which can be called Government ever was, or ever could be, in any instance, exercised, but at the expence of one or other of those rights.— That, consequently, in as many instances as Government is ever exercised, some one or other of these rights, pretended to be unalienable, is actually alienated.
…
In these tenets they have outdone the utmost extravagance of all former fanatics. The German Anabaptists indeed went so far as to speak of the right of enjoying life as a right unalienable. To take away life, even in the Magistrate, they held to be unlawful. But they went no farther, it was reserved for an American Congress, to add to the number of unalienable rights, that of enjoying liberty, and pursuing happiness;—that is,—if they mean any thing,—pursuing it wherever a man thinks he can see it, and by whatever means he thinks he can attain it:—That is, that all penal laws—those made by their selves among others—which affect life or liberty, are contrary to the law of God, and the unalienable rights of mankind:—That is, that thieves are not to be refrained from theft, murderers from murder, rebels from rebellion.

Yeah, talking-points. What would we do without them?

Quotation of the Day

When you look upon a global warming denialist, you are not seeing a person who is deluded, wrong, misinformed, or misguided. You are seeing a person who is intent on killing your grandchildren. You may want to treat them politely, you may want to be a dick to them. Do whatever works. But don't let them think for a second that you do not know what the consequences of their actions are. Don't let them get away with it.

Greg Laden

Quotation of the Day

We are suffering from flat earth economics because too many of us think macroeconomics is a morality play, not a way to solve problems and understand the world around us.

Mike the Mad Biologist

Is the Current Ringo Starr a fake?

No.

Hobbling Down Memory Lane

One artifact I own is an old walking-stick. When my knee abruptly gave out a year or so back and I was hobbling about my nephew found it somewhere and brought it to me to help me get around. I don’t ordinarily use it; there’s a crack running through it, and I can’t trust it to bear my weight, but it worked for that moment. It belonged to my great-grandfather G. F. Weaver who, in the 1930s, left it behind when he went for his final walk on the land where he’d found gold, just after signing over all his rights in it to his partners. His body was found a couple of days later at the bottom of a ravine where he’d apparently fallen, and his walking-stick was among the meager effects sent to his family.

He was an interesting guy, to judge from the contradictory accounts that have come down about him, a preacher, an inventor, a visionary, a horse-doctor, a man who abandoned his family (first absconding with the money from the sale of their crops) to seek a golden fortune out west, a man who traded the rights to an invention for land in Kentucky that didn’t exist, and according to his own story witnessed the assassination of the governor-elect there when trying to seek redress for his wrongs. To this day he has his partisans and detractors in the family. Me, I’m agnostic. Whatever he was, he was.

He was the youngest (and favorite) son of a farmer, James I. Weaver, a man whose entire life is encompassed in the fading script of the family Bible that sits in front of me as I write these words. Born in Kentucky in 1818, the son of a preacher, he married the daughter of a preacher in 1844 and died in Texas in 1888. If he had a life outside of farming, I’ve failed to find it. Tradition has it that he and his wife Rhoda wanted their son to be a preacher like their fathers, and G. F. was, at least briefly. He performed at least one marriage in Texas, before giving it up. Did I mention that G. F. was also a barber and a Bible-salesman?

Anyway, James’ father David (1791-1854) was a preacher, one of the mainstays of a Baptist church in the wilderness of Kentucky. “His labors extended over Laurel, Knox, Whitley and Clay counties,” Elder J. W. Moran wrote of him, “and few men have sacrificed more for the cause of Christ than he. He so ordered his life that the most hardened in wickedness could bring no charge against him. His voice was clear and musical, and his manner was very pleasing. He was greatly beloved by the people to whom he preached.” Blind in his latter years, he had to be carried to church to preach.

His father Samuel (1755-1842) was (thank God) not a preacher, Baptist or otherwise, though he was the progenitor of a large tribe of Weavers. He was a giant of a man—over seven feet tall according to family tradition—and lived at various times in his long life (he was almost 87 when he died) in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Kentucky. His name turns up in numerous land, tax, and census records, though as there were other Samuel Weavers abroad in the land it is difficult to be sure which belong to him, and which to others. As far as those records show his life was uneventful, spent in farming and raising a numerous brood of children with his wife—supposedly a descendent of Gutenberg, of printing-press fame.

In the 1830s he applied for a pension from the government on the basis of his participation in the Revolutionary War, and to that end narrated his experiences. About eighty at the time, his memory was none too good, and the accounts (there are two) filled with phrases like “he does not now recollect” and “neither does he remember”. Still, the story he tells runs something like this:

Somewhere around March in the year 1780, while living in Surry county, North Carolina, he was drafted to serve in the Continental Army. His company commander was Captain Jacob Camplin, who took the outfit south to Charleston, then under siege by the British. Before they got there “a call was made for men to stay and guard baggage wagons and he was one of these, he supposed about thirty, but for what cause the baggage was kept there at the time he can not say, but supposes it was in Consequence of the Siege…” For this reason he missed the siege of Charleston, which fell on 12 May of that year. Captain Camplin returned from the siege with a knee injury, according to Samuel Weaver, and he was delegated to look after him on his way back home, “which he did, tho under much difficulty and trouble, the wound being very severe.”

No sooner than he got home he was discharged, his three months being up, and he returned to his family home, where he walked into a domestic drama. It seems his father had just been drafted, and his mother was in considerable “distress of mind” at the idea of parting with him. So Samuel “resolved to go himself … if the officers would receive him, he told this to his father and Mother … but his father was preparing for the trip and said nothing in reply.” Carrying out this plan Samuel talked to the officer in charge, who “seemed to be much gratified” at the switch, and immediately discharged his father. Samuel soon found himself on his way back to Virginia where they joined troops also on their way south.

Samuel doesn’t say what troops they were, but the time and place suggests they could have been Maryland troops under De Kalb headed south to try to break the British stranglehold there. These troops were combined with others and the whole put under the command of Horatio Gates, who then led them to mass slaughter in a vain attempt to take Camden, South Carolina, on 16 August. Once again, however, Samuel Weaver missed the battle; he (along with others) joined Francis Marion. Presumably this was when the Swamp Fox and a few picked men were detached to cut off the expected retreat of the British after they were defeated at Camden.

In reality the British were not defeated, and Marion ended up lurking in the swamp, carrying out occasional raids against the Tories. Samuel Weaver vaguely remembered taking part in several night actions, and one day skirmish, but the one thing that stuck out in his mind about this chapter in his life was this:

During the time he was with Genl. Marion, a British Officer as he was told came into Camp, but for what he does not know, he was roasting & bakeing Sweet Potatoes on the Coles—Genl. Marion Steped up with the British Officer and remarked he believed he would take Breakfast, he felt proud at the request, puled out his potatoes, wiped the ashes off with a dirty handkerchief, placed them on a pine log (which was all the provision they had) and Genl. Marion and the British Officer partook of them. He has been told by some that this has been recorded in the life of the Genl. as a dinner, but this was a breakfast.

So, apparently, Samuel Weaver was the very soldier who took part in this famous episode, first revealed to the public by Mason Weems, of George Washington and the cherry tree fame. It’s a sobering thought.

After about a month with Marion Samuel Weaver ended up on hospital duty, was discharged, and returned home. This wasn’t the last of his adventures in the war—the next year he again volunteered and headed off to do battle at Guilford. Again he missed the battle; the volunteers stayed to help bury the dead and then went back home. And even then, according to his narrative, he enrolled as a minute man, and continued to be called up as needed for brief skirmishes.

Now, it’s Memorial Day, and I don’t want to cast aspersions on the memory of the old guy, but there are problems with this narrative. (I’m sure you already guessed that, if you’ve spent any time here.) First, Jacob Camplin, the captain whose knee was injured during the siege of Charleston? Okay, there really was a Jacob Camplin, seemingly, and he really did injure his knee—but not at the siege of Charleston. He injured it a year earlier, at the Battle of Stono Ferry, 20 June 1779. Near Charleston, true, but not at that time and place. Further, an account by a fellow named John Melugin (and this is not my research) seems quite similar to Samuel’s—Melugin left Surry County (like Samuel Weaver) under Captain Jacob Camplin headed for Charleston. During the events there he was assigned to drive a wagon and as a result missed the battle at Stono Ferry where Captain Camplin was injured. He then (like Samuel Weaver) went home.

Okay, so what? So the old guy was a year off, got the Siege of Charleston mixed up with the Battle of Stono Ferry—what of it? Well, the thing is, it’s not that simple. You see, Jacob Camplin didn’t come back from that battle to be helped home by Samuel Weaver or any other soldier—he was taken prisoner by the British, and not released for over a year. So that whole part of his story, the “difficulty and trouble” of getting the captain home with his severe injury, kind of drops out. And further, if the Stono Ferry redating be accepted, then there’s no way he could have been one of Marion’s guerillas, as Marion didn’t take up his career as the Swamp Fox until the next year. Samuel Weaver’s narrative is quite tight here—he gets home after nursemaiding Captain Camplin to find that his father has been drafted, and he sets out immediately to replace him, at this time joining up with Francis Marion. Poke at it anywhere and the story kind of unravels and falls apart.

One more thing—that sweet potato story. It was pretty well known in the 1830s, when Samuel Weaver was applying for his pension. Now I hadn’t originally planned on going into this, but as J. L. Bell is doing a nice job deconstructing this legend at Boston 1775, I’ve got to at least point people in his direction. There is considerable doubt as to whether this event even occurred, let alone that Samuel Weaver took the part he assigns to himself in it. I can’t help but wonder whether, perhaps, his own memories of events being shaky, he didn’t appropriate bits and pieces of stories around him to fill out an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

That he took some part in the Revolution doesn’t seem to be in question—too many people were willing to swear to it on his behalf. It doesn’t look like sheer fantasy, in the manner of William Drannan. But the specifics he recalls, when they can be checked on, are iffy. If he went out with Captain Camplin on the occasion when the captain’s knee was injured, it must have been in 1779, and the battle must have been Stono Ferry. If he escorted a wounded officer back from either Stono Ferry or the Siege of Charleston it can’t have been Captain Camplin, who was a prisoner of war at the time. If he was in the swamps with Francis Marion it is unlikely that he took part in a dinner (or breakfast as he insists) that nobody recalled until Mason Weems used it to pad out a heavily-fictionalized biography. It’s frustrating, but there it is. Like the crack running through my great-grandfather's walking-stick, there are cracks running through his great-grandfather's war stories. The old man’s memory can’t be trusted.

I doubt very much that he’s romancing; the stories are too mundane. (Again, take a look at William Drannan to see what happens when fantasy replaces memory.) But events have somehow become jumbled and are mixed with things that never were.

I’m reminded of another time, when a much more recent ancestor of mine—my father, actually—lay dying in a Portland hospital. A veteran of World War II, he kept returning to scenes long past, his once-sharp mind dulled with drugs and delusions. Convinced for some reason he was in a war zone, he would ask about the enemy—how close they were, and whether we were going to be evacuated. “How long was your father in Vietnam?” one of the attendants asked. It was a tough question. I didn’t know where the Vietnam thing was coming from. He’d been on a hospital ship in the Pacific, he’d been in occupied Japan, but Vietnam? He was in Portland that whole time, to my personal knowledge, working as an engineer at a radio station. I smiled weakly, and somebody said—I don’t remember who—“He must be having somebody else’s flashbacks.”

Maybe Samuel Weaver was having somebody else’s flashbacks.

Incompetent Buffoon Bites the Dust

Having faded into irrelevance, locked in the dustbin of our memories, Osama Bin Laden today was executed by CIA operatives at a mansion near Islamabad, Pakistan, in which country he has been a welcome guest for some years. In real life a wealthy playboy heir to a construction fortune, Osama liked to dress-up as a super-heroic Qur’an scholar and defender of the faith with a secret identity that fooled no one. Puffed-up by his triumph in a walk-on rôle in the Soviet-Afghan war of the 1980s he returned to Saudi Arabia the towering hero of his fantasies, though unheard of outside of the tiny Arabian kingdom.

When Saddam Hussein sent troops to invade Kuwait, potentially threatening the kingdom, Osama made a comic-opera proposal to personally defend the borders with his troop of merry men who would fight the invaders with faith—and was stung when the king rejected him in favor of the most powerful military force in the world. What did the United States have that he and his little gang of misfits didn’t, he wondered. He made such a nuisance of himself that he was invited to leave the kingdom in no uncertain terms, and he stomped off in a huff to nurse his hurt feelings in Sudan, where, to add injury to insult, his family cut off his multi-million-dollar allowance.

Soon even the Sudanese grew tired of him, and he found it expedient to return to the scene of his fancied triumphs in Afghanistan. From there he helped finance a series of failed attempts to stir up trouble in Algeria, Egypt, and elsewhere. Still rankling over his rejection by the Arabian authorities, he blamed the United States for all his problems. Calling himself the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders he announced his intention of killing Americans throughout the world. The 1998 attack on US embassies in Africa, however, resulted mainly in the deaths of Africans, and his inept plot to attack millennium celebrations in the United States was easily foiled.

Fortunately for him, however, this blundering boob met his match when George W. Bush entered the White House through an unlocked back door. Donning the mantle of the U. S. President, Bush declared Bin Laden and his friends to be no threat to the country, and called off the dogs. The result: nineteen conspirators, armed with box-cutters, hijacked four airliners and flew three of them into various buildings. (The fourth was easily taken down by the passengers, who unfortunately lost their lives in consequence.) The result was history, of a sort. Several thousand people died in the mayhem, but nothing of any military consequence was achieved, and this pipsqueak (and the world) now had an enraged idiot colossus on his hands.

Like a blind giant the United States started flailing about. An early blow took out one of Osama’s most hated opponents, Saddam Hussein, no doubt to his delight, but the destruction of his hosts in Afghanistan forced him to relocate abruptly. His network in ruins, he was reduced to crouching in the rubble of his dreams and issuing occasional rambling diatribes that the media dutifully carried, and operatives of the world’s intelligence services pored over for clues to his whereabouts. Fortunately friends in neighboring Pakistan took him in, and looked after him—until United States operatives under Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, stormed his hideout and executed him. It was an inglorious end to a futile and wasted life. Nobody is likely to miss him much—certainly not the Indonesians, Egyptians, Kenyans, and others whose family-members he had murdered to fuel his sadistic fantasies. The team that executed him dragged back his corpse as a ghastly souvenir. I suppose it will be returned to his family for burial or something equally civilized. Personally I hope they have his skull hollowed out for use as a visitor’s ashtray at the White House.

In the meantime, his spirit lingers on. News comes of an explosion in Afghanistan that killed four people, in addition to the human bomb. Somebody had strapped explosives to a twelve-year-old and sent him to his death. For politics.

Quotation of the Day

There are plenty of people who consider themselves Tea Partiers solely because they want to pay fewer taxes, just as there are fiscal conservatives who will always vote Republican even though they have no use for religion and climate-change denialism. Too bad—everyone wants to pay fewer taxes the last time I checked, and regardless of whatever the people behind the “real” teabagger movement supposedly wanted when they kicked the whole circus into action, it’s nothing but a teeming refuge of ugly hypocrites and the worst shitbags the United States has to offer.

Kemibe

The Unicode and Other Mythical Beasts

I want to write something but nothing comes. A sense of impending doom overwhelms me—like the “Eli’s Coming” episode of Sports Night. Does it mean something? It never does. Random synapses firing or something (and I’m sure the smartass college students who room here would set me straight on what a synapse is). My days are eaten up with trivia as I try to get moved in to my new computer; I’m back to obsessively searching for my perfect font. The Latin characters (used for English and French) should look reasonably decent, since they’re what I normally write in. But I have to have all the Greek characters (accents and breathings, right?), the Coptic characters, and the goddamn standard symbols for the days of the week—the symbol for today being ♀. It’s surprising how few fonts have all the Greek characters, given that classical scholarship is hardly dead yet. And fewer still have the Coptic, which is perhaps not surprising, but, you know, the language is in liturgical use. A number of fonts have the astrological symbols—of which the ones I need are a subset—but those never seem to have the complete Greek collection. So once again I end up switching from font to font, using one for Greek, one for English and French, and still another for the various symbols. Does this make sense?

And why on earth does the Unicode have room for chess symbols, and dominos, but not for the standard weather symbols used by meteorologists? Do these reflect real priorities? If space can be allotted for Shavian script, why not for Tengwar? I bet more people write the latter than the former (though for me it’s the other way around). And why are the Coptic symbols split up, while Greek gets not one, but two sets of letters with acute accents? Do we really need so many spaces reserved for stars and snowflakes?

And why is it that the more complete a font is, the more likely it is to have inelegant-looking Latin characters? Is this some kind of political statement?

The Dance is Over (Well, Maybe)

As a result of the gods know what arcane political calculations President Obama smoothed the path of his Republican opponents by releasing a certified copy of his long-form birth certificate, obtained through a special waiver granted by Hawaiian officials in deference to his position. Well, that, and they were tired of fielding the endless requests for it by every Tom, Dick, and Harriet with an axe to grind. Bankruptcy enthusiast and real-estate mogul Donald Trump claims credit for this development—will Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal be far behind?

Will this make any difference to hard-core birthers? It’s doubtful. First, Hawaii doesn’t count as American soil. Second, the Founders required that both parents be US citizens. (It does too say that in the Constitution! Use your magnifying glass, damn it!) Third, Barry What’s-his-name gave up his citizenship as a child when he chose to grow up in Indonesia. And fourth, he’s black. (Did I just say that aloud?) Anyway, however you stack it up, he has no business being president.

Personally, I was enjoying watching the birth-certificate shuffle the major Republican candidates were stuck with. Too bad somebody had to ruin the fun.

Quotation of the Day

I said I didn’t know him. That was true—
I knew a man with answers, someone who
Pulled fish out of the air, handed out bread
From empty sleeves until the thousands fed,
Healed blindness, mocked the money-men—and I
Believed Him when he said we wouldn’t die.

R. F. Harrison, from “Holy Saturday. The Place of the Skull” ©2001

Quotation of the Day

You can’t believe everything you read on the Internet. Obama has produced his birth certificate. There were announcements that ran in two contemporaneous Hawaiian newspapers at the time. The head of the Hawaiian medical records has announced, “I have seen the long form you all want.” I don’t know why the long form is considered more credible than the short form. They’re both from the same office. The State Department accepts the short form or as we call it, the birth certificate.

Ann Coulter

Ignorance and Arrogance: a quasi-repost

[The following was written 3 December 1990 under the title “Three short notes” and belongs to the prehistory of this weblog. The George Bush mentioned is of course the father; I doubt that I’d ever heard of the son at that time.]

Two instances of surprising ignorance in my weekend’s reading: Bruce Michelson in an essay on The Mysterious Stranger mentions that Mark Twain already had the idea for the book before The Innocents Abroad; he goes on to say “In the Alta California letters from which Twain’s first real book developed, there is a sketch for an ‘Apocryphal New Testament,’ in which Jesus returns to earth as a playful boy:”—and the passage that follows is Twain’s description of two incidents (the clay birds and the dyer’s shop) from the Infancy Gospels. It sure looks as if Michelson thought Twain was inventing a plot, instead of repeating a well-known story, and even if Michelson somehow was unfamiliar with the Infancy Gospels, he must have read The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts, and this matter is dealt with in the introduction. (Another oddity is the fact that Michelson speaks of the second manuscript (Young Satan) as if it were the first, and overlooks the first (“Mr. Black” etc.) altogether.)

In Tell Me Why Tim Riley seems to think that George Harrison wrote the words of “The Inner Light” (from the Tao Te Ching), instead of merely setting them to music. “George’s philosophical musings are less condescending than those of ‘Within You Without You,’…” And yet, even if we grant Riley’s ignorance of one of the greatest religious works of all time, he has read I, Me, Mine, and that should have straightened him out. Worse yet, in his description of The Beatles Forever he quote Schaffner as saying, “The lyrics to Harrison’s ‘The Inner Light’ were ‘pinched almost verbatim from a Japanese poem by Roshi, translated by R. H. Bluth’”.

George Bush, it is reported, has appointed Robert Martinez of Florida to the post of drug czar here in the land of the free—another illustration of how phony this “war” on drugs really is. During Martinez’s reign in Florida drug use has increased. What is the secret of his success? He emphasizes punishment over education, jail over treatment. How does Bush justify his choice? He points out that 61 (or some such number) men have been executed in Florida during Martinez’s rule—a revealing admission. It’s blatant now—he doesn’t even bother to hide the fact that the “war on drugs” is a phony war to conceal the real war on the Bill of Rights. One thing’s for sure—whether we have Conservatives or Moderates in office, the government gets more and more power over the citizen.

[Note and Update: The Bruce Michelson essay referred to above was “Deus Ludens: The Shaping of Mark Twain’s ‘Mysterious Stranger’” in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Autumn, 1980), pp. 44-56.]

Quotation of the Day

A teabagger trying to get cuts that have absolutely no chance of getting through simply to raise his credit with voters is just kosher pork-barreling.

DingoJack about Paul Ryan's proposed budget

Quotation of the Day

There is ignorance that is merely a lack of knowledge or study; we are all ignorant of far more subjects than we are knowledgeable about. And then there is ignorance that is acquired as false knowledge, a set of myths and falsehoods that one ingests that give the illusion of understanding a subject when one does not.

Ed Brayton

The Impotent Rage of the Clueless

Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?

Psalms 2:1

As robots insist on spamming my posts I’ve made it a policy to close comments down after a couple of weeks, so I only have to tend to a few recent entries. If a friend of the blog stops by an older post, as sometimes happens, or somebody else contributes something valuable and I happen to notice it, then I’ll okay it. If somebody decides to unload a bucketful of bile at an old post, it will probably go down the toilet without being read. I’m sorry, but my time is reasonably valuable, and I have better things to do as I prepare to be finally pigeonholed in that great archive in the sky.

But the squawk of a complacent gull when he realizes he’s been had by some fast-talking con-artist is music for my soul. One of this breed—a character going by the handle TSVDP—saw fit to spam an earlier post with his inane jibber-jabber. Apparently his feelings were hurt on learning that his favorite Patrick Henry quotation—the one about “this great nation” being founded on Christianity, not religious freedom—is a piece of modern tripe, concocted in living memory and disseminated by sleazy hucksters out to fleece such gullible lambs as he. “You don’t make a point at all,” he squeals, “If not it confirms what Henry said and that he was a Christian.” Well, yeah, not that anybody has ever denied that Henry was a Christian, or a slave-owner, or a father, a lawyer, a legislator, an orator. None of that’s at issue here. The only question before us is the author of that “this great nation” and “religionists” quotation—and fortunately that’s a fact easily determined.

Let’s review, shall we, the bizarre history of this quotation. It begins, in a way, with something Patrick Henry actually did write. On 20 November 1798 the once-fiery orator and successful lawyer sat down to write his last will and testament. After carefully dividing up his lands, money, and slaves amongst his wife and children, he added a pious afterthought:

This is all the Inheritance I can give to my dear family, The religion of Christ can give them one which will make them rich indeed[.]

The founder passed away in June of the next year, leaving damn little behind him as a legacy to the nation. His words, that had inspired a revolution, were for the most part lost. When William Wirt attempted to collect them for his sketch of Patrick Henry’s life (issued 1816) he had to do for the most part with recollections, fragments, and speeches patched together from the fading memories of those who had been present.

Around 1823 somebody thought it worthwhile to excerpt the “religion of Christ” passage from Henry’s will, and it went the rounds of various periodicals. It wasn’t quite the way Henry had written it, however. Somehow it had undergone a strange metamorphosis:

I have now disposed of all my property to my family; there is one thing more I wish I could give them, and that is the Christian Religion. If they had that, and I had not given them one shilling, they would be rich; and if they had not that, and I had given them all the world, they would be poor.

This version was reprinted in numerous sources up to the present time, but not without challenge. Some time in the early 1840s James W. Alexander, a Presbyterian minister, went to Charlotte county, Virginia, and obtained the actual words direct from the will. He published them in 1847 as part of a volume called Thoughts on Family Worship. The two versions have remained in competition ever since.

In 1956 a historical revisionist writer for The Virginian used the passage—the fake version—as a springboard for his own thoughts on religion in America. This author wrote:

There is an insidious campaign of false propaganda being waged today, to the effect that our country is not a Christian country but a religious one—that it was not founded on Christianity but on freedom of religion.

It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded not by “religionists” but by Christians—not on religion but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity and freedom of worship here.

In the spoken and written words of our noble founders and forefathers, we find symbolic expressions of their Christian faith. The above quotation from the will of Patrick Henry is a notable example.

Several people thought this piece of revised history was worth quoting on its own, but it wasn’t until 1988 that somebody had the bright idea of crediting part of the 1956 comment to Patrick Henry himself. It appeared as his (according to David Barton) in a book called God’s Providence in American History by Steve C. Dawson, and was almost immediately picked up and popularized by Barton himself in his Myth of Separation. From there it spread far and wide. Somebody even added that it was from a speech to the Virginia House of Burgesses in May 1765, despite the fact that Henry was first seated there late that month and no speeches of his are recorded for that time except the famous one in support of his Stamp Act resolutions, reconstructed from memory years after his death. The incongruity of Henry’s speaking of “this great nation” before it even came into existence, and his foreknowledge that “peoples of other faiths” would be “afforded asylum, prosperity and freedom of worship here” at a time when religious freedom was nonexistent in most of the colonies apparently shot by the oblivious transmitters of Barton’s fantasies. The thing is, like Chief Seattle lamenting the demise of the buffalo, Henry just plain knows too much. It’s a dead giveaway.

But Christian nation fantaisists apparently have no sense of history whatever. Like their idiot founder, history is whatever suits their fancy. You like the Fifth Monarchy slogan, no king but king Jesus? Why not give it to John Hancock and John Adams and have them say it at the beginning of the battle of Lexington? Does it matter that they weren’t there? Does it matter that there is no record of it’s being said? Not in the least. History by this logic can be whatever you want it to be. If it feels right, then it’s history. Much easier to go by your gut than to do, oh, say, actual research.

Evidence? The Christian Nationites don’t need no stinking evidence when they set out to invent new legends about the past. Or as TSVDP puts it, “No one has to prove anything that has been around and in books for hundreds of years to Atheist Scum trying to rewrite history.” I love the way he turns the world upside down. It’s not Rushdoony and Barton and that gang out to rewrite history—no, it’s the generations of historians that came before them who are doing the rewriting—via time machine, I suppose. And by the way 1988—the date this “religionists” nonsense first appeared as Henry’s in any book—is hardly “hundreds of years” ago, though maybe it seems that way to Ahistoricist Scum like TSVDP. Neither is 1956, the date it was first written, for that matter. Yeah, okay, I know it’s the twenty-first century now, and 1988 is so twentieth century, but that hardly adds up to “hundreds of years”. Or maybe TSVDP has a numerancy problem. Maybe all big numbers look alike to him. Maybe he meant to say “dozens” instead of “hundreds”. He might as well have said “millions”—it would have been just as accurate.

There is one point I do agree with our clueless comment-slinger about, though. “…your boogey man David Barton is a joke,’ he writes, “most people don’t even know who he is…” I don’t know about that last comment, seeing as he’s giving lessons on constitutional law (believe it or not) to congressmen and being featured on popular shows in the mainstream media and advising the Texas Board of Education on history (despite his complete lack of any qualification for the task), but he definitely “is a joke”. Which makes it all the more puzzling, if TSVDP feels that way, that he feels obliged to go way out on a limb to support one of Barton’s, uh, errors—to put it charitably. Nobody ever heard of this Patrick Henry “quotation” before Barton put it in a book—and if it weren’t for his footnote, nobody would even know that he wasn’t the one who first came up with it.

As a parting shot our feckless friend returned a third time to add, “Your comment FAILS in all possible ways that Henry did not say this. The burden of proof is for you to prove he did not say this.” Well, no. Mind you, even if it were I have amply shown that this alleged observation cannot belong to Henry’s time, that it is not found in his writings, and that it was written by somebody else more than a century and a half after Henry’s death. That’s pretty conclusive, really. But it’s all window-dressing, and entirely unnecessary—done only for my own satisfaction. It is always up to the person making a positive assertion to show evidence that what he says is true. In the case of a quotation, fortunately, that burden of proof is easily met. All it takes is a citation to a primary source. Martin Porter’s first principle of quotation is a good rule to follow here: “Whenever you see a quotation given with an author but no source assume that it is probably bogus.” If no source is given, or a nonsense source like “May 1765 Speech to the House of Burgesses”, then—lacking other evidence, or the time or inclination to follow up on it by doing actual research—a reader is entirely justified in assuming that the alleged quotation is fake.

Notes
A transcription of Patrick Henry’s will is found at the Red Hill Patrick Henry National Memorial website. An earlier transcription appears in George Morgan, The True Patrick Henry (Philadelphia, 1907), pp. 455-7.

The oldest example of the fake version of the quotation from Patrick Henry’s will I could find was in the 29 November 1823 issue of The Manchester Iris, a Weekly Literary and Scientific Miscellany, vol. II, p. 387.

Quotation of the Day

Maybe things in America would be better if the “Beast” that the GOP wanted to “starve” was the Military-Industrial Complex, rather than than the old, the poor and the civil service.

DaveAwayFromHome